Five Articles about Everyday Life in the Ancient World from

The Ancient Near East Today

A PUBLICATION OF FRIENDS OF ASOR

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1

2

“Trash and Toilets in Mesopotamia: Sanitation and Early Urbanism” By Augusta McMahon

3

“Cursing in the Ancient Near East” By Anne Marie Kitz

4

“TGetting Old in Ancient Egypt” By Grigorios I. Kontopoulos

“Sunlight and Shade in the First Cities – A Sensory Archaeology of Early Iraq” By Mary Shepperson

5 “Children in Ancient Sumer: How Much Do We Know?” By Vitali Bartash

Chapter One

Trash and Toilets in Mesopotamia: Sanitation and

Early Urbanism

Trash and Toilets in Mesopotamia: Sanitation and Early Urbanism

By Augusta McMahon

Sanitation is something we in the West take for granted. We shouldn’t.

The recent celebration of World Toilet Day in November 2015 shone a spotlight on the variety of modern sanitation systems. Some 35% of the world’s population has no access to clean, safe toilet facilities; 14% simply defecates in the open. In addition, garbage is an increasingly intractable problem; trash volume expands with the growth of consumer culture, landfills generate greenhouse gases, while open dumps are sources of disease and water pollution. Around 60% of the world’s trash ends up in landfills.

Given Mesopotamia’s history of inventions (the first irrigation canals, cities and writing), its toilets are unsurprisingly among the earliest known. But how common was access to toilet facilities in Mesopotamia? What did Mesopotamians do with their trash? Were sewers and garbage removal provided by city governments? Current evidence suggests that waste management challenges–among the greatest problems for modern mega-cities–existed at smaller scale in the world’s first cities but were addressed mainly at the household level.

Trash

Trash was everywhere in Mesopotamian settlements, accumulating gradually in streets and houses or piled in courtyards or abandoned building plots. Mesopotamian site stratigraphy is largely garbage, and a snapshot of any settlement would be characterised by “sheet trash”. This is widely acknowledged, so does Mesopotamian trash deserve further scrutiny?

At issue is the difference between village and city trash. Village middens are useful sources of fertiliser and fuel, but trash has no value for most city residents. Urban life and urban economies lead to greater volume of trash per capita than in villages. City trash thus needs space, and within cities, space was limited. Streets and courtyards were inadequate, meaning that some trash and waste had to be moved significant distances to city-edge middens. And middens may attract vermin and scavengers; not surprisingly, evil spirits are associated with urban middens in Mesopotamian texts.

Ur, Abu Salabikh and Tell Brak, among other sites, have trash dumps of significant size. Tell Majnuna, a 3-hectare, 7-meter-high sub-mound at the edge of Brak, is composed entirely of rubbish. This sub-mound, ca. 180,000 cubic meters, was a strong feature in the city’s landscape, yet it accumulated gradually during ca. 300 years in the mid-4th millennium BCE. Its variable stratigraphy suggests a process of occasional large-scale dumping of institutional and industrial trash, mixed with frequent small-scale discard of domestic trash. The Ur rubbish dump shows comparable alternation between large and small dumping episodes from varying sources.

Area WF excavation at Nippur, Iraq, 12 meters depth of 3rd-1st millennium BC occupation, largely comprised of accumulated

domestic trash. Photo courtesy of Augusta McMahon.

In each case, the large dumping episodes were probably created by temporary work parties commissioned by city authorities to address a specific public problem. However, the domestic trash may have arrived through several different routes: regular, frequent discard by individuals from each household or regular discard by specialist trash gatherers. But ‘trash gatherer’ is not among the official Mesopotamian professions known from texts of the 3rdmillennium BCE onward. ‘Porter’ or carrier is a profession, but their possible role in trash removal is unspecified; ‘sweepers’ were apparently restricted to temple or palace courtyards; generic ‘workers’ might have included trash collection among their tasks. The existence of large middens suggests that there was an agreed discard location in these cities, but we cannot say that garbage collection was among municipal services offered. Much domestic disposal may have been managed at the household level.

Toilets

Sanitation is a two-way system, involving access to clean water and removal of waste. Wells are occasionally found, such as at 3rd millennium BCE Tell Hamoukar or 2nd

Section through Tell Majnuna, a sub-mound at the edge of Tell Brak, Syria, comprised entirely of discarded trash of the Late Chalcolithic 3 Period, ca. 3900-3600 BC. Photo courtesy of the Tell Brak Project.

millennium BCE Tell Asmar. And there are a few extensive drainage systems known, for example, Habuba Kabira’s interlocking horizontal clay pipes and Tell Asmar’s Northern Palace brick drains that removed rainwater from courtyards and wastewater from bathrooms and toilets. But these examples of water provisioning and wastewater removal are limited to individual buildings and did not provide for settlements or even neighborhoods. Acquisition of clean water and waste removal, even more than trash disposal, were apparently the responsibility of individual households.

Mesopotamia’s earliest built toilets incorporated cylindrical drainage pits with columns of interlocking perforated ceramic rings and external sherd packing. These toilets are known from at least the early 3rd millennium BCE and are well-represented at Ur, Abu Salabikh, Nippur and the Diyala sites. Rooms above the drains may have combined the function of toilets and bathrooms and were dirt-floored, plastered, covered with

Plan of Tell Asmar, Northern Palace, with drainage system highlighted in blue. Oriental Institute,

University of Chicago, Diyala Archaeological Database, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Ibalpiel well in P30:1, Tell Asmar, Diyala, Iraq. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Diyala Archaeological

Database, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

bitumen, or paved with baked bricks; the drain opening may be a simple hole or a built seat.

Mesopotamian toilet technology was uncomplicated, but adoption of toilets was relatively low. Where there has been significant exposure of Mesopotamian neighbourhoods, such as 2nd millennium BCE Nippur or Ur, fewer than half of the

houses had toilets. Modern studies by the US Agency for International Development suggest that 75% of a settlement needs clean sanitation to achieve a positive impact on human health; no known Mesopotamian neighbourhood reached that intensity of coverage. Further, toilet drainage must remove waste to a distance and preferably hide it below ground. Some Mesopotamian toilet pits were only a few meters deep; another variety of toilets had sloped pipe drains that ran through walls and emptied outside.

If waste from a house simply flows into an adjacent street, this may improve aesthetics within the house but will do

Exposed and pedestalled toilet drain at Khafajah, Diyala, Iraq. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Diyala

Archaeological Database, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Tell Asmar, Northern Palace drainage system, arched brick drain below street in F15. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Diyala Archaeological

Database, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

little for the health of its inhabitants or neighbors. Standing wastewater enables fecal-oral disease transmission, a major factor in infant mortality in particular. Modern–and largely archaeologically invisible–alternatives to fixed toilets include bucket latrines (which need frequent emptying) and open-air defecation; it is probable that these options were also embraced in the past. Some scavengers (pigs, some vulture species) consume human feces, but they are not reliable waste removal systems.

Ancient Urban Waste Management Implications

Archaeologists often focus on pottery typologies or past diets, without due emphasis on the ultimate deposition of these materials: discard or defecation. Without including waste management practices, gaps exist in our reconstructions of past urban lived experiences: time spent carrying trash and waste to dumps was not spent on

Brick toilet, Tell Asmar, Akkadian Period. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Diyala Archaeological

Database, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Outflow of pipe drain into street, Tell Asmar, House XXXIII, Stratum III, H18. Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Diyala Archaeological Database, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0

Unported License.

agriculture or craft production, while avoidance of pollution may have affected city traffic routes and activity areas. The many piecemeal, individual household solutions to hiding and removing waste were inefficient but necessary.

Cities are so successful as settlement forms in past and present that we often assume they provided generally positive living conditions in the past. But we should acknowledge that individuals embracing ancient cities’ economic efficiencies, safety, and socio-political networks also consciously settled for and adapted to sub-optimal living conditions, particularly with regard to the most basic of body functions. The same may be said about today, where a growing percentage of the world’s population resides in cities. The sanitation concerns that first emerged in antiquity are ever more pressing.

Augusta McMahon is University Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

Chapter Two

Cursing in the Ancient Near East

By Anne Marie Kitz

All families fight and sometimes what sound like harsh words are used. But what is really meant when someone asks their deity to “inflict a curse and evil”?

In the ancient Near East curses and blessings were a fundamental aspect of the relationship between human beings and their deities. These interactions were lively and dynamic, and mirrored human relationships among family members, between business partners, as well as subjects and their monarchs.

Even though the divine/human rapport was immensely unequal, it did not prevent mere mortals from bargaining with their deities or negotiating deals by arguing positions with

Cursing in the Ancient Near East

Treaty between Ashur-nerari V and Mati’ilu

the fervor of a legal advocate. In the process, promises, and threats, were made, in the form of blessings and curses.

The ancient attitude toward curses

It is not surprising to find that curses and blessings formed an important component in all ancient Near Eastern societies including ancient Israel. Curses directed against enemies were well known, for example in Egyptian Execration Texts that labeled foreign cities, and which were ritually destroyed to ensure victory.

But curses also found their earliest context in judicial settings. Legal proceedings were rooted in oaths that formalized contracts of all types, from sale documents, estate settlements to property disputes, and even the Covenant between Yahweh and his

Egyptian Execration figurine Code of Hammurabi

people (Deuteronomy 28:15–45): “But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee…”

Oaths required petitioners to call upon the deities to punish them should they lie or be unfaithful to the terms of a contract. Such conditional self curses were not taken lightly. This was especially the case because people were typically made to swear on a weapon that purportedly belonged to the deity. Should an individual violate the oath, the weapon would be used to execute the penalty, usually death, as an expression of divine judgment. A curse from the Old Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1792 to 1750 BCE) illustrates this custom: “May the god Nergal… have him beaten with his mighty weapon and shatter his limbs like those of a clay figure.” Clearly such outcomes made oaths both solemn and extremely frightening.

The expression of curses

Curses and blessings are nothing other than prayers uttered by mortals to the divinities. They are neither commands nor demands and there is certainly no assumption on the part of the speaker that either will have instantaneous effect. In the end they are little more than strongly articulated wishes. Deities, on the other hand, articulated curses differently. As supreme beings they did need not invoke a higher power to enact a malediction. Their curses were commands that mortals believed had immediate consequences.

Human beings expressed curses in three ways: through words, acts, and/or a combination of both. The treaty between the Neo-Assyrian king Aššur-nerari V with his vassal, Mati’ilu, king of Arpad, (ca. 755 to 745 BCE) preserves a horrifying curse that unites word with act to articulate the penalty of decapitation without actually saying it. “This head is not the head of a spring-lamb it is the head of Mati’ilu… If Mati’ilu should sin against this treaty, just as the head of this spring- lamb is cut off… so may the head of Mati’ilu be cut off.”

In addition, the above malediction clearly suggests that the animal was slaughtered in Mati’ilu’s presence. Since such acts were often a feature of curses, we may consider them ‘performed.’ This, of course, acknowledges the ritual character of maledictions.

The point of these types of curses was to instill such terror in the underling that it would restrain him from violating any part of the treaty. Some treaties and other types of contracts expand the number of curses to relentlessly reinforce the inevitable outcome as a consequence for disobedience. The Code of Hammurabi concludes with over thirty curses, while the Neo-Assyrian king, Esarhaddon (ca. 681–669 BCE), closes his succession treaty with over one hundred.

Some of these curses included rather personal threats to life and limb: “May Šamaš, the light of heaven and earth, not judge you justly. May he remove your eyesight. Walk about in darkness!” and “May Kubaba, the god[dess of] Carchemish, put a serious venereal disease within you; may your [urine] drip to the ground like raindrops.

A scholarly misunderstanding

Perhaps the greatest impediment to the accurate understanding of curses in the ancient Near East was their unfortunate association with magic. This emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when some of the most important archaeological discoveries, such as the city Nineveh, were made.

Since all scholars at the time, regardless of their discipline, were first trained in the Bible, the religions of the ancient Near Easterners were often treated as false and inferior because they worshiped many deities, unlike the Israelites who worshiped only one. Consequently, many early Assyriologists evaluated texts with the presumption that the Babylonians and Assyrians practiced magic while the writers of the Hebrew Bible practiced religion.

This position became more difficult to defend when Biblical scholars began scrutinizing the oft-repeated phrase found in the Hebrew Bible: “Cursed are you!” (Deuteronomy 27:15–26). How was its use to be understood when human beings uttered it? Was the

speaker commanding Yahweh to do something? Certainly that would not be very respectful. Or did the speaker utter the curse with the assumption that the words would take effect immediately? If so, would that not betray an Israelite belief in magic?

Resolution

A solution to this problem can be readily found in the way we express a blessing when someone sneezes. Our response is typically just two words: “Bless you.” In reality these words developed from a longer phrase “May God bless you” > “God bless you” > “Bless you.” The gradual shortening of the blessing produces certain unwanted effects. When “May” is eliminated the petitionary character of the request is lost. Now it sounds as though we are ordering God to do something, regardless of how he may stand on the issue. When “God” is removed, the agent of the blessing disappears. “Bless you” then becomes a command and unintentionally gives the impression that we confer the state of blessedness as soon as we utter the words. If this were the intention, then we would be practicing magic.

It is likely that the ancient form “Cursed are you!” also developed from a longer phrase. In this case, the fuller expression was shortened out of reverence for the Divine Name

Esarhaddon Succession Treaty

so as to prevent its inappropriate use.

People of the Ancient Near East were very respectful of their deities and saw their relationship as one based on reciprocity. In most cases the average person used curses to gain divine justice in an otherwise unjust world. This is not magic. It is their religion.

Anne Marie Kitz received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Cursed are you! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts.

Chapter Three

Getting Old in Ancient Egypt

By Grigorios I. Kontopoulos

The Lifespan of the Ancient Egyptians

Old age was a situation that included only a very small portion of the Egyptian population. The study of the anthropological evidence from several cemeteries as well as the census declarations from Roman Egypt defined the average life expectancy for males at 22.5-25 years and for females at 35-37 years. Under these considerations, an individual in his mid-thirties was considered an old person in ancient Egypt.

The Ideal Lifetime

Although the evidence suggests a quite low life expectancy, there were exceptions of individuals who reached substantial old age. These fortunate ones were usually members of the Egyptian elite. Several cases of individuals who reached – or who wished to reach – a long lifespan were attested in ancient Egyptian literature. Although the majority of texts reflected the experiences of the literate male elite, several examples dated during the Dynastic period (such as the famous Papyrus Westcar from the Middle Kingdom, ca. 2000 BCE) indicate that 110 years seemed to be the ideal lifespan.

Getting Old in Ancient Egypt

Head of a statue of an older man, ca. 2550–2460 BCE (The Met Museum)

Perceptions of the Older Generation

While the perception of who is old is certainly changeable, today due to the constant rise of our standard of living, ‘old age’ is a stage in human life that declared by the symptoms of aging. The ancient Egyptian perception for the process of aging was not very different than the picture we have today. In texts from the Dynastic period, a pessimistic picture of the process was given:In texts from the Dynastic period, a pessimistic picture of the process was given:

“O king, my Lord! Age is here, old age arrived, Feebleness came, weakness grows, [childlike] one sleeps all day. Eyes are dim, ears deaf, strength is waning through weariness (Instructions of Ptahotep).

“Would that my body were young again! For old age has come; feebleness has overtaken me. My eyes are heavy, my arms weak; my legs fail to follow. The heart is weary; death is near” (The Story of Sinuhe).

But pessimism regarding physical decline was not the only description of the aged individuals. In the story of the “Three Tales of Wonder” from Papyrus Westcar, Prince Hardedef describes the magician Djedi as someone who:

“Is of a 110 years, who eats hundred loaves of bread, half an ox for meat and drinks one hundred jugs of beer to this very date.”

Papyrus Westcar (Wikimedia Commons)

As the story continues, the young Prince greets the magician, and his words strongly contrast with the descriptions of old age given in other texts:

“Your condition is like that of one who lives above age-for old age is the time of death, enwrapping, and burial- one who sleeps till daytime, free of illness, without a hacking cough.”

On the one hand being old perceived as the last stage of life, as a time of agony and misery, but on the other hand it could be perceived as a watershed between adolescence and maturity, especially for the wealthier portions of population. Differences in social strata defined the way that the elderly was regarded.

Head of an old man, ca. 200-1 BCE (The Met Museum)

Portion of Sinuhe (Wikimedia Commons)

The Care for the Elderly

The textual evidence regarding care for the elderly in ancient Egypt makes it becomes obvious that this was a matter for the family, especially for the lower and middle classes of society. Various census lists from Kahun and Deir-el-Medina suggested that the elderly, especially women, remained significant participants in their domestic group until death. Apart from being members of their children’s households, the elderly also received a regular stipend from their offspring, as an ostracon from the working class village of Deir el-Medina revealed:

“And I gave to him emmer amounting to 2 ½ sacks as rations every month from year 1 until year 2, second month of the inundation season to third month of the summer season, making 10 months, each 2 ½ sacks. Total 27 ½ sacks.”

In the same spirit, one of the four documents related to the property of Lady Naunakhte records an agreement between Khaemnun and his son Kenherkhepeshef:

“After the workman Khenherkhepeshef said, ‘I will give him 2 ¾ sacks’, and while he will swear an oath of the Lord, saying, ‘As Amon endures, as the ruler endures, if I take away this grain ration of my father, my reward (the washing bowl) shall be taken away.’

The agreement reveals another aspect of the relationship between parents and children, the enforcement of the care for the elderly through inheritance. The inheritance was used to ensure children would look after their elderly parents. The will of Naunakhte is representative:

“But see, I am grown old, and see, they are not looking after me in my turn. Whoever of them has aided me, to him I will give (of) my property, (but) he who has not given to me, to him I will not give of my property.”

Although care for the elderly inside the family context seemed to be the only solution for the lower and middle classes of the Egyptian society, the situation was quite different for the elderly members of the Egyptian elite. The elderly who belonged in the upper class were allowed to keep their titles and their official income until the end of their lifetime. This is demonstrated in the institution of the “staff of old age” in documents such as the Instructions of Ptahotep, autobiographies such as that of

Amenemhat, or the text that describes the installation of the vizier Weser-Amun. From these it becomes prominent that the “staff of old age” was an assistant to officials who belonged to the highest levels of the Egyptian administration. That duty was usually given by Pharaoh to one of the sons of the official. Under the appointment of his son, the father remained financially independent and at the same time the succession of the son was guaranteed.

Apart from the institution of the “staff of old age”, elderly members of the Egyptian elite had extra sources of income to secure their financial independency after retirement. Founding a statue cult through a donation to a temple allowed officials to drawn a supplementary income after retirement. By donating property, including slaves, to a royal statue, a citizen, with the King’s permission, could found a cult and become its prophet. With this appointment as a prophet, he could then receive a share of the cult income, untaxed and protected from state demands.

Similarly, the donation of an individual’s property to a temple allowed him to receive an annual income from the harvest. By donating his property to a temple, the individual secured protection from state demands and avoided family disagreements. The inscriptions from the tomb of the Theban scribe Sanmut describe that practice:

“I give all my property together with all my acquisitions to Mut, into the temple of Mut,

Senwosret III (ca. 1874 – 1855 BCE) (Civilization.org)

The Great Mistress of Ishru. Behold, I am establishing it as a stipend from my old age because of my contract.

The Egyptian approach to old age is thus closer to our own than we might have expected. The poor and the middle class took in their elderly and struggled, while the wealthiest schemed to avoid taxes.

Grigorios I. Kontopoulos is a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at the University of the Aegean.

For further reading

Rosalind & J.J. Janssen, Getting old in ancient Egypt (London, The Rubicon Press, 1996)Stol & S. Vleeming, The care of the elderly in the ancient Near East (Leiden, Brill, 1998)A.G. McDowell, Village life in ancient Egypt: Laundry lists and love songs (Oxford , Oxford University Press, 1999)

Chapter Four

Sunlight and Shade in the First Cities – A Sensory Archaeology

of Early Iraq

Sunlight and Shade in the First Cities – A Sensory Archaeology of Early Iraq

By Mary Shepperson

There are two periods of about five days each, one in the Spring and one in the Autumn, when the weather in southern Iraq is quite nice. Outside of those brief pleasant interludes, it’s either cold, windy and rainy, or roasting, windy and dusty. In the past, before electric heaters and air conditioning, the only thing standing between human beings and great physical discomfort was architecture.

Sunlight and Shade in the First Cities explores the interaction of sunlight and architecture in the urban landscapes of Bronze Age Mesopotamian cities. Starting from architectural principles of climate adaptation and the specific sunlight conditions of the Mesopotamian plain, this volume

The sun setting over the Ziggurat of Ur

Shepperson Cover

shows that the urban architecture of ancient Mesopotamia relied on carefully applied principles of design to create buildings and settlements which were liveable and protected their inhabitants from the extremes of climate outside.

Adaptation to regional sunlight can be directly linked to most of the characteristic features of Mesopotamian settlements, from the distribution of courtyards and the positioning of doorways, to the density of housing and the orientation of roads. At a larger scale, sunlight can be linked to tell development and even the direction in which cities expanded.

The interaction of sunlight and architecture also has considerable influence over how people lived in these cities. The timing and location of activities is shown to be strongly related to how buildings provide shade to urban space through the day and at different times of year, providing insight into the schedules of daily life. The provision or exclusion of light is also deeply connected with visual privacy because it determines what can be seen and by whom. Lighting thus plays a part in defining the social character of architectural space and influencing how it’s used.

People make buildings, but buildings also make people, to trot out an architectural

Excavated Isin-Larsa period housing at Ur

cliché. Climatically adapted buildings and cities created distinctive social and sensory environments which affected how people interacted with each other and their surroundings.

For instance, a house which is sealed against heat and dust by having few external openings will unavoidably limit both light access and human access, making it a very private space, with a rigid boundary between the house and the city outside. The adaptation of ancient architecture to climate can in this way be related to key characteristics of ancient Mesopotamian society, such as the importance and cohesiveness of households as society’s primary organizational unit. <IMAGE 4>

Similarly, the high-density, close-packed housing of ancient Mesopotamian cities, which stimulated the need for sophisticated new legal systems and unprecedented levels of social complexity, also happens to be the ideal settlement form for Iraq’s hot-arid climate. A city in which the houses are clustered closely together reduces the total surface area exposed to the sun, and allows the buildings to provide mutual shading.

Sunlight itself was not simply a physical phenomenon in ancient Mesopotamia but was a substance filled with meaning. Textual sources indicate that sunlight was considered

Aerial view of the dense courtyard housing of old Marrakesh

to be both a negative, destructive force and a manifestation of sacred power. Most celestial light sources were also major Mesopotamian deities, the sun being high among them as Šamaš, the god of justice and judgement. Brilliance and radiance were associated with the divine and sunlight was employed in ancient Mesopotamian architecture in highly symbolic ways.

In the sphere of sacred architecture, sunlight was used in both general and very specific symbolic ways. Sacred space was visually and sensorially very distinct from the domestic sphere. While domestic architecture aimed to reduce sunlight to a cool, comfortable dimness, sacred architecture dealt in the extremes.

Temple exteriors were bathed in light and heat; a physical embodiment of the shining and radiant temples described in sacred texts. In stark contrast, the sanctuaries of temples were kept in near total darkness, often insulated from outside light with double sets of doors. These contrasts of brilliance and darkness were used as a complex theatre designed to invoke the presence of the gods.

Lighting seems to have been a major factor in a wider reorientation of temples that happened around the Ur III period at the end of the third millennium BCE. Most temples of the Early Dynastic period faced northwest, the orientation that receives the least solar radiation. But from the Ur III period on temples are overwhelmingly oriented towards the southeast, facing the morning sun.

As well as bathing temple façades in sunlight, this reorientation seems to have had at least one element of specific sunlit significance. Temple gateways were the location for legal judgements to be made, and by orienting these gateways towards the morning sun it allowed Šamaš, the god of judgement, to be physically present to oversee each case.

Seal impression showing the goddess Ištar surrounded by radiance.

The architecture of palaces, just like that of temples, shaped a carefully contrived sunlit theatre. The aim was to manage the way in which the king or his representative was presented to visitors through manipulating visibility, symbolism and sensory experience.

Orientation of Early Dynastic Temples. Blue sectors receive the least sunlight, orange sectors receive more.

Orientation of Ur III and second millennium BC temples

The sun setting behind the ziggurat of Ur

In outlining some of the key issues considered in Sunlight and Shade in the First Cities, I hope to give an idea of the multi-layered significance of climate and sunlight in shaping ancient Mesopotamian architecture, society and ideology. Sunlight is both a physical phenomenon that enables and restricts human activity, and a highly symbolic phenomenon rich in social and religious meaning. These divergent aspects of sunlight in human life are fundamentally interwoven in the ancient city, their relationship mediated through architecture.

*All photographs courtesy of Mary Shepperson

Mary Shepperson is a professional archaeologist currently working in Iraq.

Chapter Five

Children in Ancient Sumer: How Much Do We Know?

Children in Ancient Sumer: How Much Do We Know?

By Vitali Bartash

Children constitute a large portion of any society. But the meaning of childhood varies from one society to another. This results in specific habits of child caring and raising, their legal status and overall life conditions. Childhood is more than just a biological stage in human development, it is also a social and political concept. Ancient Sumer was no exception.

Children and childhood remain largely understudied within cuneiform studies. The reason for this is not scarcity of data. On the contrary, according to my preliminary estimations, about 1500 cuneiform texts within the corpus of approximately 100,000 written records from Southern Mesopotamia dating to ca. 3300 – 2000 BCE offer insights into lives of children. But information about them is unevenly distributed across different text genres and epochs of Mesopotamian history, and made more difficult by the complexities of Sumerian and early Akkadian. Moreover, despite the abundance of written and archaeological data, we still do not understand many details of how the urban societies of Southern Mesopotamia were organized.

The majority of cuneiform tablets from Ancient Sumer are economic and legal accounts, unfairly regarded by some as “dull.” They originate from archives of institutions known as “temples” and “palaces,” but these were not just places of worship or kings’ abodes. They were complex land estates, production and redistribution centers run by bureaucrats excellently schooled in writing and accounting.

The fact that the bulk of our data comes from the “public sector” shapes the information on children we can extract. Archival texts tell us how temple and palace officials managed human resources, land, animals and other goods. Due to this, we see children and everything else officials were concerned with through their eyes. In contrast, Old Babylonian school texts of the first half of the second millennium BCE draw a colorful picture of “college life” for upper class children. We do not have comparable narrative sources in earlier periods. Our challenge is to thus reconstruct

social phenomena by relying on scraps of biased information, spread thinly across a large quantity of grocery-list like texts.

My ongoing research investigates a remarkable social phenomenon alluded to in archival records from early Mesopotamia. It appears that Sumerian temples and palaces supported and subsequently employed children from underprivileged social strata. My aim is to tell where this practice originates, its forms and consequences for the larger society. I suggest that the support of children had a clear socioeconomic purpose. On the one hand, socially unprotected children were not left to the mercy of fate, to roam the streets begging. On the other hand, both as children and eventual adults they were supported as an important source of cheap labor for the temple and palace economies.

Who were these children in legal, social and ethnic terms? Texts show they were children of slaves, semi-free workers, prisoners of war, and deportees from far-off lands, children of debtors, children dedicated to temples, as well as orphans and foundlings. Public institutions fed them, dressed them and provided with shelter. Although mostly legally free, these individuals fully depended economically on their master-households. As the result, their social mobility was severely restricted. Moreover, it appears that they started working at the age of five to seven. This is probably the earliest evidence for child labor. Their living conditions resulted sometimes in flight. Documents also record high numbers of deceased children, implying high mortality rates.

I concentrate on studying three aspects: terms for children attested in texts and their demography, influx of

Document W 20274,2 from Uruk, ca. 3000 BCE. Photo courtesy Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

children into households, and their support vs. labor employment.

Texts provide a rich set of terms for children. Coupling these data with numbers of children mentioned in texts allows to reconstruct the demographic structure of child population, how many boys vs. girls and of what age groups, and of what ethnicities, lived under the control of temples and palaces. Since these data come from successive periods, it is possible also to draw a diachronic view of how child population developed.

The earliest cuneiform texts attest the presence of children in communal institutions. This account of personnel originates from the city of Uruk and dates to about 3000 BC. It categorizes individuals according to their age classes and lists “adult”, “developed child”, “babies of 1” and “elderly”. It is comical that one of the babies bears the name “Big Man”. It is remarkable also that we know names and age of people who lived more than 5000 years ago.

There are Late Uruk documents that employ the same terms to count people, who were likely simple workers or even slaves, and their children. If we put the number of people of each age class in a chart, we can get a rough image of their age structure.

Age structure of people mentioned in Late Uruk III human accounts (ca. 3000 BC). Courtesy Vitali Bartash.

This might not precisely mirror social reality, owing to the uncertain sample of the tablets or even their state of preservation, but we still can see major trends. The majority of the personnel were “adults” while only few individuals lived long enough to become “elderly.” We do not really know where the boundaries were between childhood and adulthood and adulthood and elderly in terms of biological age. Since we know from later sources of Ur III period (21st century BC), that children began to participate in work at the age of about five to seven, it seems likely that Late Uruk “adults” might have been our “early teens.”

This demonstrates the need for comparative data from other disciplines, in this case social anthropology, to interpret our data. Why, for example, is there a designation in the texts between a “baby of three” but none for “baby of four”? Studies of traditional societies show that women tend to breastfeed babies for two or three years. From this we may infer that children designated “developed” in the Late Uruk accounts were likely weaned infants older than age three.

Archival texts allow us to answer other questions, such as how children came to be dependents of public institutions. As mentioned, there were numerous possibilities. The account of personnel below exemplifies one. This text is about 2300 BC and comes

Document MS 3813 from the city of Adab, ca. 2300 BCE. Photo courtesy The Schøyen Collection..

from the city of Adab.

The document is remarkable in many respects. It records Subarean women and children. Subir – Akkadian Subartum – was the ancient name for the Habur triangle in Northern Mesopotamia with its famous cites Tell Mozan, Leilan, and Beydar, and neighboring territories. Hurrians inhabited this area and rulers from Southern Mesopotamia often aimed this land in their military campaigns. It is very probable that women and children listed in this text were deportees from Northern Mesopotamia. The absence of adult men also alludes to this. The usual practice was to kill adult male captives and take their women and offspring as workers in public economy of Southern Mesopotamia.

Even more striking is that according to the text children of both sexes are “branded” or “not branded.” It shows that captors imparted the state of slavery upon unfortunate children by branding their faces or other body parts with branding irons, a practice well attested elsewhere in different periods and cultures. For unknown reasons a small number of infants remained “not branded.”

The text ends with the statement that these persons find themselves in an “Enclosed House” or “stronghold”. We do not know their fate. Relying on similar texts, we can

Late Uruk seal showing seated women workers http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/327067

guess that they were eventually employed as weavers, millers or did other manual work for the remainder of their lives.

Finally, we know in detail, what children ate, how much, and what they wore. The amounts of food, mostly barley, depended on age, gender and involvement in labor. The next example is from about 2250 BC:

84 female workers (each receiving) 60 sila (of barley)3 male workers (each receiving) 80 sila (of barley)3+x boys (each receiving) 60 sila (of barley)4 boys (each receiving) 20 sila (of barley)2 girls (each receiving) 20 sila (of barley)7 baby boys (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)6 baby girls (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)They are (people listed in) former (accounts)42 boys (each receiving) 60 sila (of barley)5 baby boys (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)4 baby girls (each receiving) 10 sila (of barley)They are new boys and girls (in this account)2 fullers (each receiving) 80 sila (of barley)7 branded blinded (workers each receiving) 80 sila (of barley) (and) 1 janitor2 fullers (and) 10 blinded (workers each receiving) 80 sila (of barley)

All these people are under the supervision of) the chief fuller)

The text shows that smaller children regardless of gender received 20 sila barley (1 sila is about 1 liter) monthly while older children had 60. Even breastfed infants got their share of 10 sila. Their parents or caregivers probably found use for these rations. It is interesting that the older children received as much barley as adult women. This leads to the conclusion that these boys (of unknown age) were already laborers process with the same work capacity as adult women. At any rate, we see clearly there were child laborers in early Mesopotamia and that even the bureaucrats exploiting them acknowledged they were “children”.

These are only a few examples that show how much new we can learn about children who lived four to five thousand years before us. Though much information is still difficult to interpret, collaborating with colleagues from archaeology, anthropology, sociology and other disciplines, I hope to offer a coherent image of child life in public households of early urban centers in Southern Mesopotamia. This will add to, refine and possibly redefine our understanding of childhood as a universal social phenomenon.

Vitali Bartash is Associated Member of the Research Training Group “Value and Equivalence” at the University of Frankfurt/Main

Document CL 125 from the city of Adab, ca. 2250 BCE. Photo courtesy Real Academia de Historia; translation with minor

changes: Manuel Molina, CSIC, Madrid.

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