The Oxford History of the Biblical World Read Free Page B

which they flowed; like Egypt’s Nile, they provided water for irrigation and major avenues of transport. The Euphratesand the Tigris, roughly 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) and 1,850 kilometers (1,150 miles) long, respectively, both originate in the mountains of Armenia. From there they wend their separate, slowly converging ways in a generally south-southeasterly direction through the hilly terrain of northeastern Syria and northern Iraq into the great plain of southern Iraq, until they finally meet some 160 kilometers (100 miles) northeast of the Persian Gulf at Basra.
    Southern Mesopotamia was essentially a floodplain. In distant geological prehistory the two rivers flowed separately into the Persian Gulf, but alluvial deposits gradually extended the floodplain, as the ancients themselves recognized. In the very beginning,
     
When skies above were not yet named,
Nor earth below pronounced by name,
Apsu, the first one, their begetter
And maker Tiamat, who bore them all,
Had mixed their waters together.
(Dalley, 233)
     
    Thus the beginning of
Enuma Elish,
the “Babylonian Creation Epic,” describes how the world began with the mingling of the waters of the rivers (the god Apsu) with those of the sea (the goddess Tiamat). From their union land emerged, and so the horizon and the sky itself, among the first of a series of births that in the epic culminates with the birth of the storm-god Marduk and his emergence as king of the gods and creator of human beings
    The rivers of Mesopotamia were not, however, as benign as the Nile. They flooded unpredictably, sometimes even violently. The Euphrates especially seems to have shifted its bed repeatedly over the course of the millennia, one indication of recurrent severe flooding. Mesopotamia also had less than abundant rainfall, often insufficient for sustaining agriculture. Together these factors led to the development of irrigation by ditches and canals, which is attested before historic times.
    For much of its history, Mesopotamia has been split by antagonism between the north, in later antiquity generally controlled by Assyria, and the south, or Babylonia. In the third millennium, the southern part itself was fragmented. The lower part, Sumer, gave its name to the culture of the Sumerians. The upper region of southern Mesopotamia was Akkad, originally the name of the city from which its Semitic rulers spread their control. (The general term
Akkadian
for the Semitic languages of Assyria and Babylonia derives from this name.) But despite sometimes intense rivalry, the differences between north and south were much less significant than their shared culture. Allowing for local variations, by 2000 BCE they had the same language, the same pantheon, the same views of themselves and their place in the world. Blocked on the east by the Zagros Mountains, on the south by the Persian Gulf, and on the west by the northern expanses of the Arabian Desert, and watered by the same two rivers, they formed a natural unity whose imperialistic impulse was northward and westward—to Asia Minor and the Levant, and even at times into Egypt itself.

     
    The Ancient Near East
     
The Rise of Civilization
     
    The slow evolution of the human species and its gradual adaptation to and control of the environment is beyond the scope of this volume. The earliest vestiges of hominid activity in the Levant date to the early Paleolithic era well over a million years ago and, as elsewhere, consist principally of worked stone tools. Over the aeons technological sophistication very gradually increased, and sites where artifacts and occasionally human bones occur become more numerous, suggesting a growth in the number and size of the usually isolated small groups. Eventually the sites can be recognized as seasonal camps, characteristically with scatters of stone artifacts and occasionally faunal and floral remains, the tantalizingly sparse traces of small bands of hunters and gatherers. But as the climate warmed