It was the Sumerians who played the key role in this
emergence. They
lived in a political framework quite unlike that of ancient Egypt.
Instead of forming a unified kingdom, they were divided into some
thirty city-states. After a millennium or so the Sumerians themselves
faded away. They were no doubt assimilated by their neighbours. But by
then their civilization had been adopted by other peoples, notably the
Akkadians to their northwest. The Sumarian traditions were to determine
the culture of Mesopotamia down to the second half of the first
millennium B.C.
Since Mesopotamian civilization, like that of Egypt,
was fated to die
out, none of its literary remains have been transmitted to us directly.
As with ancient Egypt, we derive most of what we know from chance finds
or archaeology.
In the Egyptian case our main debt is to the desert
conditions that
have preserved large quantities of ancient papyrus. In the Mesopotamia
the prime material used by cuneiform scribes was clay. Once fired,
whether deliberately or by accident, clay tablets can survive as well
as pottery can. The result is to give us a fragmentary, but very
diverse, body of ancient Mesopotamian sources. Much of it is the
product of more or less meticulous administration, but there is also
material of many other kinds, including the Gilgamesh epic a textual
tradition of considerable literary merit.
In political terms this civilization never did develop
a tradition of a
unitary Mesopotamian state. There was, however, a tendency for the
scale of political organization to increase over time. In the third
millennium B.C. city-states were the norm, while an imperial episode in
the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries was the exception. By the
first millennium B.C. the city-states were gone, and empires like those
of the Assyrians and Babylonians had replaced them.
Mesopotamian civilization was more influential than
that of ancient
Egypt. Indeed, it is likely that Mesopotamian influences played some
part in the formation of the nearby civilizations of Egypt and the
Indus Valley. But a more general influence was the adoption by other
peoples of the literary culture created by the Sumerians. Already in
the third millennium the neighboring Akkadians had done this, as had
the people of Ebla in northern Syria. The Hittites of Anatolia adopted
Sumarian culture from the second millennium. They adopted the Sumerian
literary tradition, with the result that Sumerian became the world's
first classical language, which was still used by the educated long
after it had died out as a language of everyday life. And at the same
time they adapted the cuneiform script to the writing of their own
languages, thus giving us our earliest direct knowledge of the Semitic
and Indo-European language families-Akkadian for Semitic, and Hittite
for Indo- European.
