The decoding of the cuneiform script revealed much about the advancements of the ancient Mesopotamians, their beliefs, and their inventions. The following is the fourth and final installment in the four part series “Etched in Stone. The first, second, and third are also available.
Because the messenger’s mouth was heavy and he couldn’t repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay.
— Sumerian epic poem Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. c. 1800 BC
An ancient enigmatic script, adorning magnificent monuments with its transcriptions, mystifying all who encounter it, its true purpose unknown, the potential secrets it held simply a matter of conjecture, cuneiform was a mysterious puzzle asking to be solved. It was not until the 19th century, however, through the work of a number of dedicated scholars, that cuneiform was revealed to be not only an actual script, but the earliest writing system in the world. With the script now deciphered, the secrets it held could finally be uncovered. Cuneiform texts would soon unveil accomplishments that would revolutionize our understanding of the development of human civilization. Fields such as literacy, economics, science, astrology, and medicine, among many others, could now be seen in an altogether different light.
The Sumerians– creators of the script–were now recognized as being responsible for many religious and cultural aspects often taken for granted in the modern age. Contributions to civilization such as the creation of a rudimentary invention of time with the 24-hour day, a system of numbers, the 360-degree circle, geometry, the first wheeled vehicles, the sail, children’s toys, writing, writing implements, harnessing the wind, the domestication of animals, irrigation, medical advances, dentistry, architectural developments, civil rights, legal codes, wine-making, and beer-brewing, could all be attributed to ancient Mesopotamian civilizations.
In his book History Begins at Sumer, renowned scholar Samuel Kramer lists no less than 39 “firsts” in human civilization and culture originating in Sumer. His list includes:
The First Schools, The First Case of `Apple Polishing’, The First Case of Juvenile Delinquency, The ‘First War of Nerves’, The First Bicameral Congress, The First Historian, The First Case of Tax Reduction, The First `Moses’, The First Legal Precedent, The First Pharmacopoeia, The First `Farmer’s Almanac’, The First Experiment in Shade-Tree Gardening, Man’s First Cosmogony and Cosmology, The First Moral Ideals, The First `Job’, The First Proverbs and Sayings, The First Animal Fables, The First Literary Debates, The First Biblical Parallels, The First `Noah’, The First Tale of Resurrection, The First `St. George’, The First Case of Literary Borrowing, Man’s First Heroic Age, The First Love Song, The First Library Catalogue, Man’s First Golden Age, The First `Sick’ Society, The First Liturgic Laments, The First Messiahs, The First Long-Distance Champion, The First Literary Imagery, The First Sex Symbolism, The First Mater Dolorosa, The First Lullaby, The First Literary Portrait, The First Elegies, Labor’s First Victory, The First Aquarium.
In business dealings and correspondence, for example, a cuneiform tablet was identified with a “signature” made with a person’s cylindrical seal. When dried, these tablets were often placed in a clay “envelope” and sealed again, thereby ensuring that only the recipient would read its contents.
Furthermore, perhaps stemming from Mesopotamia’s predominantly agrarian nature placing equal demands on both men and women to work the fields, women were afforded near equal rights: they could own land, their own businesses, write trade contracts, and even file for divorce.
The most stunning of the “Mesopotamian revelations”, however, were in the field of religion. Previously, it was believed that the Bible was the first book ever written, and the Song of Solomon the oldest love poem. Religious texts and parables, moreover, were held to be original historical facts, dictated directly by God to mankind. Ironically, many of the 19th century scholars and archaeologists went with the hope of providing physical evidence to substantiate these Biblical assumptions. The results they found, however, would prove otherwise; in fact, the deciphering of cuneiform would soon threaten to unravel many of those beliefs. When compared to previously held “truths”, the extent and breadth of these new discoveries were in many ways quite astonishing. The first love poem, for example, was now recognized as The Love Song of Shu-Sin dated to 2000 BCE. Some scholars, beginning with Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (deemed the “Father of Assyriology”) and later experts such as Samuel Noah Kramer, argued that concepts such as “The Fall of Man” and the “Great Flood” in Genesis, long believed to be literal events in human history, could now be seen as embellishments on Mesopotamian myths from The Myth of Etana and the Atrahasis. The Book of Job, was viewed not a historical account of one man’s patience and suffering, but rather derived from an earlier Mesopotamian tradition from the Ludlul-Bel-Nimeqi text; the “Garden of Eden”, a myth derived from The Enuma Elish.
The first and perhaps most famous of these discoveries began in November 1872, when George Smith, an assistant at the British Museum with practically no formal education beyond age 14, happened upon a fragment among the many cuneiform tablets brought back to London over the decades. Having a knack for piecing together coherent passages of cuneiform, he had discovered a segment of a flood story which, when later put together, would become known as the oldest story in the world: the Epic of Gilgamesh. Astonishing both scholars and the general public, the flood story was eerily similar to that of Noah in the Bible, yet preceding it by over a thousand years.
In the story, the gods resolve to destroy the whole world (and all living things therein) with a great flood. One of the chief gods, however, decides to warn one man of this impending doom, and urges him to prevent the mass extinction:
“Demolish the house, build a boat! Abandon riches and seek survival! Spurn property and save life! Put on board the boat the seed of all living creatures!”
A few weeks later, Smith presented his translation at the Society of Biblical Archaeology to a packed audience, attended not only by members of the press, but more notably, the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Irving Finkel, a cuneiform expert at the British Museum states: “When Smith announced that one of these unappetizing-looking tablets from the barbaric, strange world of the Middle East contained a parallel text to Holy Writ, people were astonished.”
On a lighter note, some cuneiform tablets purchased by Yale University in 1911 on the assumption that they were medical remedies, had stumped scholars for decades. Historian Jean Bottéro would re-translate the tablets decades later, only to discover that they were 4000-year-old culinary recipes– Mesopotamian haute-cuisine—the oldest in the world. He nevertheless concluded that, being light on salt and heavy in fat: “I would not advise trying to incorporate their culinary tradition, just as it stands, into our own.”
Dating from the Babylonian period, one of these tablets featured no less than 25 recipes for both meat and vegetarian soups and stews. Appearing quite simple, these recipes provided only minimal instructions with no measurements or cooking time. It was therefore surmised that only the most experienced chefs would have been able to follow them.
One such recipe was for an amursanu-pigeon stew:
Split the pigeon in half—add other meat.
Prepare the water, add fat and salt to taste;
Breadcrumbs, onion, samidu, leeks, and garlic
(first soak the herbs in milk).
When it is cooked, it is ready to serve.
While amuranu (possibly a type of pigeon) and samidu (possibly a spice) are not recognizable, the rest of the ingredients appear to be readily available says Benjamin Foster, curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, still the dish would be impossible to replicate. He states:
People often think that because they can cook Arab or Persian food that they can make this stuff, but they don’t know how much regional cooking was changed by the Muslim conquests. If you cook these up using modern Near Eastern ingredients, it is pure fantasy—but often delicious.
The challenge was taken up by Iraqi scholar and cookbook author Nawal Nasrallah, who, despite the ambiguity of some ingredients, sought to adapt these ancient recipes for the modern kitchen. She concludes:
Some of the ingredients are unidentified, which is frustrating, but I do see similarities to what is being used in Iraq nowadays, such as in the case of the herb erishtu, which I believe to be what we call today rashshād, pepper grass.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the cuneiform tablets would reveal the first customer complaint ever recorded. Written in Akkadian circa 1750 BCE, the complaint was sent to Ur—a city state during the Akkadian period—by a customer named Nanni expressing his dissatisfaction to a trader named Ea-Naser. In it, Nanni states that the latter had sold him substandard copper and complained about the poor service he had received—not to mention the mistreatment of his servant. Held in the British Museum, the tablet has been cited as the “Oldest Customer Complaint” by the Guinness World Records.
Further Reading:
Bertman, Stephen, Handbook to life in ancient Mesopotamia, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Bottéro, Jean, Everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Bottéro, Jean, The oldest cuisine in the world: cooking in Mesopotamia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c2004.
Finkel, Irving L., The ark before Noah: decoding the story of the flood, New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, [2014]
Foster, Benjamin R., The Age of Agade: inventing empire in ancient Mesopotamia, London; New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Foster, Karen Polinger; translations by Benjamin R. Foster, A Mesopotamian miscellany, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020.
Kramer, Samuel Noah, 1897-1990, From the tablets of Sumer; twenty-five firsts in man’s recorded history, Indian Hills, Colo., Falcon’s Wing Press [1956]
Kramer, Samuel Noah, 1897-1990, History begins at Sumer, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959
Nasrallah, Nawal, Delights from the Garden of Eden: a cookbook and history of the Iraqi cuisine, Oakville, CT: Equinox Pub., c2013.