Two Stone-Age Societies: Egypt and Sumer

There were two major societies in the Mediterranean that remained in the stone
age much longer than other Mediterranean societies. These were not primitive
societies, in fact they were much admired for their cultural sophistication, but
they each had their reasons for lingering in the stone age.

Sumer

Illustration 1 Sumer and region (Kramer p. 2)

The map above shows the location of Sumer (as it is properly called). Note that it
is in a broad valley between two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Note
also that it does not include the upper reaches or the area outside the valley. So
it is all lowland, at most modestly above the valley floor but not far.
Down near the confluence of the two rivers is a marshy region. Today it is the
habitat of the Marsh Arabs. (Saddam Hussein tried to get rid of the Marsh Arabs
by draining all but 15% of the marsh, but now under the new government and
with UN assistance the marsh has been restored and the flora and fauna have
quickly come back.) The Marsh Arabs live on houses built above the marsh and
use boats to get about. They support themselves by fishing and other activities
harvesting the natural resources of the marsh – fish, reeds, and so on. Their
lifestyle must be very similar to that of the first Sumerians.
The Sumerians eventually spread further up the river valley, into non-marshy
areas. They learned to use irrigation to grow their crops. And the valley is quite
fertile.
But because Sumer only covered the lowland, the Sumerians had very little
access to mineral resources. They had lots of gravel and mud and clay, but not
much else. They did not even have a lot of good stone, never mind metals. They
remind me of Dilbert's Elbonians, living up to their knees in mud. That's not so
great an exaggeration. One of the things you can make from clay is pottery. The
Sumerians used pottery for all sorts of things. One of things they made from
pottery was the cutting blade for a scythe. You have to be pretty desperate to
make a blade out of pottery.
Writing was independently developed in at least the following places: Egypt,
Mesopotamia, China, India, and Central America.1 It seems to be inevitable once
you have a sedentary (non-nomadic) society of a certain complexity.
Western civilization happens to have inherited writing from the Mesopotamians,
and for Mesopotamia we have a very good record of how it was developed
(because of the climate and technology used). So I will recount the story of how
writing, both of numbers and of words, was invented in Mesopotamia.
At the time there were two kingdoms in Mesopotamia, Elam and Sumeria. What
follows is a fusion of the two because the record is not complete for either.
However all steps are known from the archaeological record. The dates are given
for Elam, where the dating is most certain; Sumeria is known to have been a
generation or two ahead of Elam.

3500 BC
Numbers were recorded as clay tokens inside clay envelopes. Different shaped
tokens were used to represent different quantities. In Sumeria the shapes
were a cylinder for 1, a sphere for 10, a cone for 60, a cone with a hole
punched in it for 600, and a disk for 3600. The envelope was marked with a
cylindrical seal which served both as a signature and to indicate the type of
object being counted. This system was used for business transactions. For
example, in animal husbandry, I pay you and give you 63 sheep for you to tend
for a year and then return to me. The envelope contains a cone and three
cylinders indicating the number of sheep. The envelope is marked with an
impression of my business seal (a carved stone) which includes a picture of
sheep to identify the context.
Note that a seal is hard to forge. If you access to the seal you can duplicate it,
but if you only have access to an impression of the seal it is very hard to make
another seal that will leave exactly the same impression. It has to have exactly
1 Genevieve von Petzinger at the University of Victoria has recently proposed, based on
statistical analysis, that the cave paintings at Chauvet and elsewhere in Europe contain a form
of writing. (Reported in New Scientist, 20 Feb 2010, p. 30.)
 the same diameter and details such as tool marks. So this is quite a good
system for a complex society where you have to deal with strangers.

3300 BC
The outside of the envelope was marked to show its contents. This was done
simply by pressing the tokens into the wet clay.

3250 BC
Envelopes containing tokens were replaced with flat tablets marked with the
impressions of tokens. The tokens were pressed into the clay on top of the
impression left by the seal.

3000-2900 BC
The first words were written as pictographs showing the object of the
transaction (e.g. sheep). These replaced seal impressions. Pictographs were
made by pressing a stylus into a clay tablet. You can't really drag something
through clay, the clay will fall apart, so you have to just press something
against it. They used a stylus shaped on both ends so they could make different
shapes in the clay, and they combined those shapes to make glyphs. To our
eyes it looks like chicken scratches. The following image comes from Cornell
University's collection, and is available at
http://cuneiform.library.cornell.edu/collections/archaic/cusas-1-045-cunes-51-
01-097. The symbols that look like a symbol split into four, with a diamond split
in two on its right, represent sheep.
2900-2800 BC
A full written language developed. This still used pictographs, as Chinese does
today. By 2800 BC they weren't just recording transactions, they were writing
down stories.
Eventually the Sumerians were conquered by their neighbours, the Akkadians.
The Akkadians did not have as sophisticated a society and they were not literate.
So the Sumerians, when writing down the orders of their new masters, used
pictographs for Sumerians words that sounded like the syllables in the Akkadian
words. We have children's puzzles that work the same way, using a picture of a
bee for the syllable "be" and so on. This system, which is called a syllabary, is
much easier to learn. Instead of thousands of symbols, one per word, you only
need a few hundred symbols, one per syllable. This simplified system was then
adopted by other languages which didn't have writing of their own.
Eventually the syllabary was simplified further into an alphabet. An alphabet
uses one symbol per sound rather than one per syllable. One of the groups to
adopt this system lived in what is now called Lebanon and their descendants live
there today. The Greeks called these people Phoenicians, but they called
themselves Cannanites. And they were very influential because they were
merchants who sailed over the whole Mediterranean. So from them the use of an
alphabet spread to many other people.
Among Semitic peoples the alphabet is only used to write consonants, not
vowels. It is up to the reader to interpolate the vowels. This is harder than you
might think because they didn't mark boundaries between words, either. It only
works at all because in Semitic languages vowels aren't as important as they are
in some other languages; you don't as often have two words differing by only one
vowel. However in ancient Greek the vowels were very important, so when they
adopted writing they assigned symbols to both consonants and vowels.
The Sumerians are famous for one type of structure, the Ziggurat. Here is a
picture of a Ziggurat as it is today.

Illustration 2 Ziggurat at Eridu, today.

(Kramer, unnumbered plate.)
The ziggurat is what looks like a hill in the background, but it is not a hill. It is
completely artificial. Originally it was a series of platforms, with each platform
supporting a smaller platform. Each step was about 10 metres high. From the
photograph it appears this Ziggurat had about 8 or 10 steps. The steps were
made of mud brick.
Mud brick was once a popular building material. It is still used in some parts of
the world. Nowadays in North America it has been replaced by rammed earth,
which is soil that has been compressed. But mud bricks in the ancient style were
not compressed. They were mixed from wet clay plus some sand as filler plus
straw. Straw helps bind each mud brick together and keeps it from cracking as it
dried out in the sun. Mud bricks are soft and extremely weak in tension, but they
can withstand a lot of compression.
Mud brick falls apart if it gets wet. Any mud-brick structure has to be covered
with a waterproof layer to protect it from rain. In antiquity this was normally a
layer of lime plaster. Lime plaster is made from quicklime, which is ordinary lime
rock that has been heated to a high temperature. Heating drives of water and
carbon dioxide. Lime plaster is quicklime, dampened to make a paste, applied
usually with a trowel or stiff brush. The lime reacts with carbon dioxide and
moisture from the air. The grains expand as they react and the plaster hardens
into a waterproof layer. Unfortunately the hardened plaster is quite brittle. It
gets cracked from being bumped into and you have to keep replastering to
protect the mud brick.
When Ziggurats were in use the lowest levels were irrigated so that trees could
grow on them and the roots of the trees helped to bind the mud brick together. If
the Ziggurat was close to water the tree roots would also have taken up any
extra water that entered the mud brick from the underlying soil, so the trees
were dual-purpose.
The structure in the foreground of the above photograph is a temple that was at
ground level, not on the Ziggurat itself. But there was always at least one temple
at the summit. Among other things, the temple at the summit was used for
astronomical observations. The Sumerians believed that it was their religious
duty to record observations of the heavens, because the heavens were filled with
gods and portents. The higher up the temple the better the observations because
it is above the turbulence caused by heat from the soil. But was that the sole
reason Ziggurats were built?
Ziggurats might have been used as refuges when floods occurred. The Tigris and
Euphrates flood occasionally, but unlike the Nile their floods are unpredictable.
So you want someplace nearby where you can run when it floods. You can't run
up to the hills because they are controlled by enemies. Besides the hills may not
be close enough; in places the valley is quite wide. Furthermore the earliest
Ziggurats only had a single platform, and the height of a step, 10 metres, is
about the height of the worst flood that the Sumerians every experienced. A
single-step Ziggurat would be a good flood refuge but not high enough to
improve astronomy.
Let me tell you about the Great Flood. It occurred around 1800 BC. It was so bad
that it left 10 metres of deposits – mud, clay and gravel – over the whole flood
plain. (You can still see it today.) 10 metres is about the height of the rooftops in
an ordinary residential neighbourhood today. Imagine all that buried to the
rooftops, not just by water but by the debris left behind by the water. Most of the
cities of Sumer were completely destroyed and the people wiped out. A few lucky
cities were on higher ground and survived. One pokey little city of minor
commercial importance survived intact and became the new capital city.
The story of the Great Flood is preserved in Sumerian mythology. According to
the story the gods decided human beings were too evil to live. But there was one
good man, so the gods told him to build an ark and preserve the animals two by
two. He did what he was told and his descendants and descendants of the
animals he rescued repopulated the world. This is identical to the story of Noah's
Ark in the Bible, except that the names are changed. It is in fact the same story;
the Bible tells us that Abraham, founder of the Israelites, was himself a Sumerian
from the city of Ur. He and his wife left Ur around 1400 BC, four centuries after
the Great Flood. So it is not surprising they passed on Sumerian lore to their
children and it found its way into the Bible. What is surprising is that people
keep looking for the remains of the ark in Turkey and other places when we have
known since the 1930s exactly when the flood happened and where, and that it
was limited to the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
[One final note about Ziggurats: there was an exceptionally tall, narrow one in
Babylon called the “Tower of Babylon”. Just recently archaeologists identified a
plaque erected by a Babylonian emperor boasting that he had repaired damage
to the tower.
 Illustration 3: The Tower of Babylon Stele

The story of the Tower of Babylon is a sad one. It was built to last. The inside was
made of mud brick, but the outside was covered with baked bricks in order to
prevent the rain from penetrating. However, a military occupier of Babylon tore
down the steps leading up to the bottom level in order to prevent it being used as
a fortress. By doing so he exposed the mud-brick core to the elements. The mud
eroded and the tower collapsed inward. By the time of Alexander the Great the
tower was badly damaged. Alexander ordered it repaired, but repairs proved
impossible. So Alexander ordered it torn down in order to make way for
rebuilding it. It was torn down, but Alexander died before rebuilding it. It was
never rebuilt.
Babylon was not a Sumerian city, in fact Sumerians were banned there. It was
built as a capital city by a conqueror who did not wish his people to be
assimilated by the Sumerians as so many others had. He was so afraid of
assimilation that he didn't even want Sumerians as slaves or servants – instead
he took slaves from the remote corners of his empire. Among these people was a
large a group of Judeans who were held in slavery in Babylon for about 50 years,
an experience known as the “Babylonian captivity”. The tower of Babylon is
mentioned in the Bible, where it is called the “tower of Babel”. It seems from the
Biblical narrative that the Judeans were impressed as much by the polyglot
population of Babylon as by the height of the tower.]

[Sumerian culture
We can learn a few other things about the Sumerians from their technology. They
brewed beer in large jugs and, rather than pouring the beer out to filter it, they
drank it through straws so the straws did the filtering. All the images we have
show at least two straws in the jug, so we can conclude that they did not drink
alone. We also can decipher the pictogram for the opium poppy plant; it is a
combination of the symbols for “plant” and “joy”, on other words “the plant of
joy”. (Not the “plant of painkilling”, which would suggest medical use.) It seems
that the Sumerians were what we would call hippies. ]

Bibliography
Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians. Their history, culture, and character. U. of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963.

Schøyen, Martin. The Tower of Babel stele. Babylon, 604 – 562 BC. (Illustration.)
Originally from http://www.schoyencollection.com/babylonian_files/ms2063b.jpg
but no longer available at that URL.

Egypt
Egypt has a very long history as a single continuous political and cultural entity.
To understand it we have to go right back to the last Ice Age.2
Immediately after the last last Ice Age, about 12 thousand years ago, the Sahara
was not a desert. It was open grassland. There were rivers and lakes. Many
people lived there.
The climate of the Sahara began to dry out. About 9 thousand years ago there
was an episode of accelerated drying, and again about 5 to 6 thousand years ago.
The result at first was that people had to move closer to the rivers and lakes. But
eventually the rivers and lakes dried out - all but one river, the Nile. The result
was that a large number of people were forced to move into the Nile Valley to
survive.
But the Nile Valley was already occupied. The Delta in particular was already
home to a number of tribes. The result was a long period of warfare. Some of the
tribespeople from the Delta packed up and sailed away to the island of Crete

2 The material in this lecture is based largely on I. E. S. Edwards (1961), The Pyramids of
Egypt. Rev. ed. Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, England and Barry J. Kemp (1989),
Ancient Egypt. Anatomy of a Civilization. Routledge, London.
where they seem to have been instrumental in founding the Minoan civilization.
Other tribespeople stayed where they were.
Eventually one of the warlords or chieftains who lived on the upper part of the
Nile managed to conquer his neighbours and then the whole river. His name was
Menes. He was the first king of Egypt and his rule of the whole of Egypt is dated
from the year 3100 BC.
Egypt continued as a state, a kingdom, for more than 3000 years after that.
There were periods of turmoil and at least one occasion when Egypt was almost
conquered, but Egypt persisted. And during that long period being Egyptian
became an ethnicity as well as a nationality. Ancient Egypt had its own language
and culture distinct from the Semitic peoples around it.

[Eras in Ancient Egypt

Dates Dynasties Name
before 3100 BC Predynastic
3100 - 2686 BC 1, 2 Early Dyntastic
2686 - 2181 BC 3-6 Old Kingdom
2181 - 2133 BC 7 - 10 1st Intermediate
2133 - 1786 BC 11, 12 Middle Kingdom
1786 - 1567 BC 13 - 17 2nd Intermediate
1567 - 1080 BC 18 - 20 New Kingdom
1080 - 664 BC 21 - 25 Late New Kingdom
664 - 525 BC 26 Saite
525 - 332 BC 27 - 31 Late
332 - 30 BC Ptolemaic
after 30 BC Roman
This section is supplemental.]

Egyptian technology
We say Egyptian was “stone age” but there is an important qualification to that.
It was what is called “chalcolithic” which means “copper-stone”. Copper was
used to make tools which were used to make ordinary goods out of stone. So
most goods were made of stone but copper was essential to the process.
 Illustration 4Edwards Plate
32a
The above illustration doesn't look like much but it illustrates the conservatism
of the Egyptians. These stone-cutting tools are made of copper. When bronze
became available, the Egyptians refused to use it. They kept on using copper –
but not pure copper.
Bronze is an alloy of tin and copper. It is both harder and tougher than copper.
But the Egyptians used an alloy of copper and arsenic. This has physical
properties very similar to bronze (so much so that it is sometimes called “arsenic
bronze”). However it has a huge drawback. Arsenic has a low boiling point.
When you add it to molten copper, some of it boils off and then solidifies into a
cloud of arsenic dust. Unfortunately arsenic, even its pure elemental form, is a
nasty poison. So the refinery workers – who were skilled workers and necessarily
in short supply – tended to have short and unpleasant lives.
You could argue the Egyptians stuck with arsenic copper because they did not
have a source of tin. But the same thing happened eight centuries later when the
iron age arrived in the Mediterranean. The Egyptians kept on using their old-
fashioned weapons and armor against the new iron swords and iron armor. So
they lost battle after battle until they lost their empire and stood in danger of
losing their heartland. Only then did they finally embrace the new material, iron.
And they still used it only for armour and weapons, not for ordinary things.

The Pyramids
The most famous symbol of Egypt is the pyramid. Looking at this long interval,
this extended history, you would probably expect that pyramids were associated
with many of these eras. You would be wrong. There are only 80 known
pyramids. Pyramids were first built during the Old Kingdom. And within a
century of their introduction the biggest and now most famous ones had already
been built. After that the newer pyramids became smaller and less elaborate. By
the end of the Old Kingdom nobody was building pyramids any more. Later a few
more were built but they were much smaller and did not have the same spiritual
significance.
The Old Kingdom pyramids were ancient even in antiquity. When Julius Caesar
was alive the Great Pyramid at Giza was farther back from his time than he is
from our time. If Julius Caesar is ancient, the Great Pyramid is more than doubly
ancient.
Yet despite their antiquity we know a great deal about the pyramids. Not only
from archaeology but from written records. Egypt was already a literate society
(if only among scribes) when the pyramids were built. When dealing with other
societies of such antiquity we argue about centuries and kingdoms. When
dealing with the Egyptians we argue about years and individuals.
We know exactly why the pyramids were built in the Old Kingdom. They were
mausoleums, burial places. And not just for anyone, but for pharaohs who
claimed to be gods incarnate. So they were temples as well as memorials.
Egyptian graves could be rather elaborate. It is clear that the original style of
grave was just a shallow pit with a stone cairn piled over the body. But at some
point they began enclosing the grave in a rectangular wall. This might have been
just to keep out animals which might dig up the cairn. Later it seems they began
to fill the wall with earth. It is not clear (at least to me) whether this imitated a
wall that had filled up with wind-blown sand or whether it was intended as an
innovation. Regardless, this type of grave became common. The name for a grave
of this type is a mastaba. Note that the Egyptians were very conservative.
Underneath the soil of the mastaba the body was still interred in a shallow pit
with a cairn over top of it. Even though the pit and the cairn were completely
invisible.
Somewhere along the line they introduced the practice of building multi-level

Illustration 5 A multi-level mastaba. (Edwards

Plate 2.)
mastabas. (Illustration 5) This kind of mastaba seems to have designated great
wealth and/or high rank. In order to erect one tier on top of another the whole
structure was normally built out of mud brick. Over time the mud brick dissolves
into soil.
There was a pharaoh named Zoser. He wanted a mastaba that was grander and
more permanent. His chief engineer built him a large stepped mastaba out of
stone. That first stone mastaba was the first structure that the Egyptians are
known to have build out of stone. And we call it the Step Pyramid. The only
difference between a mastaba and a pyramid is that a pyramid is made out of
stone. That is by definition.
We know a lot about the Step Pyramid. We even know the name of the chief
engineer - Imhotep. This is the first recorded name of an engineer in history. His
name was also found on a statute near the Step Pyramid but the statue may have
been erected later.
The Step Pyramid is located adjacent to an older graveyard where previous
pharaoahs were buried in mastabas made of mud brick. The material for the Step
Pyramid is local stone except for the cladding (now mostly gone) which was
limestone from a quarry up the river.
When built the Step Pyramid was 61 metres high, 123 metres east to west and
107 metres north to south. It was not originally intended to be this big. Close
examination shows that it was built in stages.
 Illustration 6 Construction of the Step Pyramid. (Edwards Fig. 6.)
At first it looked like a regular single-level mastaba, except made of stone, 8
metres high. It was extended several times in width and length before finally
being heightened into a pyramid. Then the pyramid itself was extended on one
side and above to make a larger pyramid.
There was still a cairn underneath the pyramid, but the body was not interred in
a shallow grave. Instead there was at the bottom of a shaft filled with rock. There
was also a whole system of tunnels which were made to be used for burials.
 Illustration 7 Substructure and attached temple of the Step
Pyramid. (Edwards Fig. 7.)
Apparently it was a special favour to be buried in the royal catacomb.
Egyptians believed in an afterlife. And they believed, as the Greeks did, that in
that afterlife one had needs. One needed to be fed. One needed to be
entertained. So when the Egyptians buried their dead they accompanied the
body with grave goods designed to entertain and gratify the deceased.
Sometimes they buried favourite pieces of jewelry. Sometimes they buried
miniatures of favourite objects such as houses and furniture. Sometimes a
wealthy Egyptian was interred with a whole village of miniature houses. But all
these grave goods encouraged robbery. And it does seem that one of the main
reasons for building a pyramid was to make robbery more difficult. Indeed there
was a fake mastaba for Zoser built nearby, that is to say it has the superstructure
of a mastaba but not the grave or cairn underneath. Clearly it is there to mislead
grave robbers.
Because Zoser was the Pharaoh his burial site included official shrines, one for
each of the provinces of Egypt. In the illustration below the shrines are the row
of boxes extending out from the bottom-left corner of the pyramid. The pyramid
is about as high as a 15-storey building and the compound is about as long as a
long city block and as wide as a short city block.

Illustration 8 The Step Pyramid and its compound. (Edwards, Fig.

5)
 Illustration 9 View of the provincial shrines at the Step Pyramid.
(Kemp Plate 4.)
These stone structures with arched roofs are the remains of a couple of those
shrines. The shrines were made to reproduce the appearance of a traditional
Egyptian shrine which had a votive object standing on a raised platform and
covered with a sunshade made from a frame of bent wood covered with cloth.
But here, all that was made out of stone. The quality of this stonework is quite
impressive. In this slide you can see the limestone still preserved in the stairs
and platforms in the foreground. This whole area must have been covered with
sand which protected it from erosion and from quarrying. A lot of the pyramids
have been damaged by later generations taking stone from them for their own
buildings. (Note that the pyramid in the background looks much smaller and
nearer than it really is. This is an illusion caused by the very clear desert air.)
In the following generations there were some more pyramids built in the stepped
form. However the pyramid of Meidum started as a step pyramid built the same
way, but in the end they filled in the steps, leaving a smooth surface all the way
down. It started off as a smaller pyramid and was then extended. The extensions
were added by piling stones at an angle so that each stone was perpendicular to
the original slope of the pyramid. This had the advantage that the rectangular
stones did not have to be trimmed at the exposed end to get the right shape.
However the last time they extended it they piled the stones horizontally (so they
were more stable) and just chiseled off the ends of the stones to make a smooth
outer surface.

Illustration 10 Construction of the Pyramid at Meidum.

(Edwards Fig. 26.)
This pyramid set the pattern for all subsequent pyramids. Subsequent pyramids
all had smooth faces (without going through the stepped stage).
Another development was to avoid overly-steep sides. One of the earlier
pyramids with steep sides collapsed in an earthquake. At the time a new pyramid
was under construction, and it had steep sides. They changed the angle right
where they were, making it less steep the rest of the way up. The resulting
pyramid is known as the Bent Pyramid.
(To be continued.)