Everyday life in Sumer and Babylonia CURRIC | aeaeGadd 935 eae ee gl G336 |Contents Sumer; about 3,000 BC to 2,000 BC Babylonia; after 2,000 BC Dress 3 Ornaments 11 Buildings 16 Furniture 23 Household utensils 26 Cover photograph st permission of the Trustees of the British Museum © KMGadd 1957 602 212901 Printed in CanadaEveryday Life in Sumer and Babylonia Today many people who travel to the East go by air. At one stage of the journey they fy over miles of treeless sandy desert. Then in the distance they see the glint of sunshine on a river. As they get nearer they can see cultivated ground on its banks and the green foliage of date-palms. ey may also see a large mound rising out of the desert near where it meets the cultivated ground. This mound is one of many the traveller would see if he followed the river from its source to its mouth. The river is called the Euphrates. The mounds cover the remains of cities in which people lived five thousand years ago. Some of these mounds have been dug into by men who are interested in how people lived in those far-off days. Among the remains of houses, palaces and temples they have found many things which show us what the daily life of the people was like. How a cow was milked in Sumer Sumer :and Babylonia 1 ‘These things have been cleaned and repaired and placed in mus- eums. Some of them are in the British Museum in London. The best way to know about them is to go and look at them. The next best thing is to look at pictures a. Ob taera: The earliest people who used these things were the Sumerians. The land in which they lived was called Sumer. Centuries later, the same area round the lower course of the Euph- rates came to be called Babylonia, and the peo- ple were known as Babylonians. But whether they were Sumerians or Babylonians, they lived in the same sort of houses, wore the same kind of clothes, ate the same kind of food and worshipped their gods in the same temples. Look at the two bricks on page 20. One is a Sumerian brick; the other is Babylonian. The first is fifteen hundred years older than the second. Yet how alike they are! Among the things that are most important in our everyday life are our homes, our food and our dress. They were just as important 2 =ato the Sumerians and Babylonians. Perhaps they thought more about them than we do, for the people of ancient times had none of the outside interests that we have, such as games, the cinema or television. Their homes, their work, and the worship of the gods in their temples filled their daily lives. DRESS Look at the picture opposite of a Sumerian chariot driver. He is standing behind the chariot, holding the reins of the ass that is drawing it. He looks as if he is just going to mount it. He is wear- ing the skirt which Sumerian men wore in the earliest times. It is a sheepskin, worn with the fleece outside and fastened round the waist with a leather thong. You will see he has neither hat nor shoes, nor any covering for the upper part of his body. If a man wanted more covering, as, for instance, a soldier might when he was out on a campaign. he would wear a cloak of leather or of thick material woven from coarse wool or goat’s hair. The picture above shows a soldier 3wearing such a cloak over his sheepskin skirt. He has a helmet too, probably made of the same material as his cloak. In early times all Sumerian men, both poor farmers and men of high rank, wore the sheepskin. The king sitting at a feast wears the same dress as the servant who is waiting on him. It is a finer fleece, but it is a fleece just the same. If you use From Ur to Rome at school, you will find on the front page a picture of a priest wearing a sheep- skin which comes right down to his ankles. After a time people improved on this dress. They wove the sheep’s wool into a cloth which could be used as a robe covering most of the body. Not-everybody wore a This Sumerian king does not take long to dress 4This governor of a city wears a woollen dress. He lived seven hundred years later than the king on p. 4 robe of this kind. The ordinary man would still wear a skirt, though it might be of woollen material instead of a sheepskin. It is easy to see why; the long robe would be very heavy and clumsy for working in. But kings and governors of cities and people who had not to do manual work wore the robe. 5Hammurabi, King of Baby- lon, wears a woollen robe, like that of the Governor of Lagash (p. 5). Compare the two pictures. The king’s cap and beard are a sign of his rank It is interesting to see how this robe was worn. It was not cut out and sewn together like a modern dress. It was just a large, 6oblong piece of cloth, with a fringe along one edge. One corner was thrown over the left shoulder. Then the material was brought in folds across the chest, passed under the right arm which was left bare, and then carried across the back. The loose end was thrown over the left shoulder and allowed to hang down in front, covering the left arm like a cloak. The drawing on page 5, which is of part of a statue in the British Museum, shows how the material was arranged over the upper part of the body. Anybody who looks at the back of the statue as well as the front can see the line which the sculptor has carved to show where the robe crosses the man’s back. The robe was kept in place by a large pin on the shoulder which fastened the under point to the material covering it. You could try to arrange such a robe for yourself with a small sheet or a large towel. If you turn to the picture in the middle of the book, you will see a Sumerian king mak- ing an offering before his god. Then look at the picture of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, also standing before a god. Hammurabi lived over three hundred years later than Ur-Nammu, the Sumerian king, but their robes are very much alike. You will also see that both kings wear a close-fitting cap; this was probably a sign of their rank, not an ordinary article of dress. 7Girls may be wondering how women dressed. This is a picture of a woman singer standing behind a harpist at a king’s feast. She wears the sheepskin just like the men, but we know it is a woman because she has long hair, whereas the heads of all the men were closely shaved. Women of a higher class wore a dress of woollen cloth. The picture opposite is of a marble statuette in the British Museum. This little lady’s dress is arranged like a man’s. You can see her bare right arm, and the line showing where the end of the long piece of cloth comes over her left shoulder and hangs down in front. You can see too that it has a deep fringe round the bottom. 8Men and women wore the same kind of dress In the Louvre, the big museum in Paris, there is part of a statue which shows yet another kind of dress. This might have been worn by a lady of high rank. It looks as if she wears an under-dress, over which is a cloak ornamented with bands of embroidery. This ‘cloak’ seems to have been two narrow 9pieces of cloth, one probably fastened on the right side and taken round her back to fall over the left shoulder, and the other starting on the left side, crossing the first one at the This may be a lady of high rank. Look at her dress back and falling over the right shoulder. She must have needed quite a lot of pins! There is nothing to show us what children wore. Most likely a little skirt of the same kind as their parents. Perhaps the little ones wore nothing at all, for Sumer was a land of warmth and sunshine 19You may wonder why the Sumerians and Babylonians had so little variety in their dress. It was always of the same material and always the natural colour of the sheep’s wool. The reason is simple. They had no material for clothing but the wool of the sheep which they bred. They did not grow cotton or flax, and they knew nothing about silk or rayon. They did not make dyes, so they had no way of colouring their material. They did not buy in shops. They cured the sheep’s fleece at home and the women wove the cloth on simple looms. But what they lacked in colour in their dress, they made up for by the use of ornaments. ORNAMENTS Both men and women wore beads. The poorest would perhaps have only one or two strings, which they made for themselves. They picked up bits of red sandstone, white shell and coloured pebbles, rubbed them smooth with coarse sand and strung them on threads of palm fibre. Richer people might mix with their stones and shell some beads of blue lapis-lazuli and red carnelian, brought from other lands by traders. For kings and queens there was gold as well. The necklace in the picture on page 15 was worn by a queen nearly five thousand years ago. The triangular pieces, which fitted closely round her neck, are of gold and ilThe stag amulet is made of gold; the tortoise is stone lapis-lazuli. The strings of carnelian and gold beads falling below this ‘choker’ covered her chest. You can see how the red, blue and gold of this necklace would give colour to the queen’s dress. Besides necklaces, men and women of high rank wore armlets of gold and precious stones, and bracelets round their wrists. If you look at the picture of Hammurabi, you will see he has a bracelet, probably of gold,on his right wrist. Pins were needed by everybody. Simple ones could be made of bone; copper, silver and gold were used for more expensive ones. The big one in the picture has a gold and lapis-lazuli knob. The one with its head shaped like a hand is a silver one. The head of the little one is a tiny gold monkey. The goldsmith who made it must have been a skilled craftsman. Amulets were worn by everybody, for they were thought to keep evil spirits away.They were small pendants, often in the form of an animal. Simple ones were made of stone or clay; others were of silver and gold. Large earrings and fillets (head bands) were other ornaments worn by women. The Sumerian lady shown in the picture at the bottom of page 13 wore a broad band to keep her hair in place. The picture at the top of the page shows another kind of fillet, a thin gold oval worn on the forehead, from which ran narrow gold ribbons which tied at the back. Women of high rank, like the ladies who attended on the queen, wore many more ornaments on their heads. The queen had a wonderful head-dress. From bands made of beads hung pendants of gold rings and little gold leaves. These bands covered most of her hair, and fixed behind them was a large upstanding comb with points ending in gold flowers. The picture opposite shows how it would be arranged on the queen’s head. We must not, however, think that a grand head-dress of this kind would be worn by many women. It was only ‘everyday’ for great ladies. Most men carried a knife or dagger, which might serve for ornament as well as for use. A simple knife might have a carved bone handle, and be kept in a sheath of grass woven into a pattern. A dagger in the British Museum has a silver hilt, studded %This Sumerian queen’s head-dress is placed on a plaster head specially made to show how it was worn. 5Ur-Nammu, King of Ur, is going to build him the rod, ring and measuring line which drink offering. The other end of the carv to Ningal, the god’s wife. An attendant, { with balls of gold and lapis-lazuli, and its sheath would match the richness of the hilt. BUILDINGS Among the things that are ‘everyday’ for us are the buildings that surround us; houses, churches and chapels, shops, fac- tories and public halls. The people of Sumer and Babylonia had neither of the last two, nor shops with large windows like ours. But they had houses of varying sizes and in every village and town there was a temple, which played a great part in the people’s lives, 16i a temple for the god Nannar. The god gives h builders used, while Ur-Nammu pours ovt a ving shows the king making a simular offering playing a flute, stands behind the king. The Sumerians had two materials for building. In the southern part of Sumer where there was much marshy land, they used the reeds that grew there to make their houses. Farther north they made bricks from the clay of the river banks. There was | no stone in Sumer, and the only trees were date-palms. So their buildings were of | brick, even the high temple-towers which stood up above the houses surrounding them in all the big cities. The earliest homes of the Sumerians were one-roomed reed huts. We know how they 7! a reed hut a This is the framework of the reed huts still built in Iraq. The Sumerians used bundles of reeds in the same way 18 Manstoren aa ee aa MB ee EB mrt EE a were made, for even today they are the houses of poor people in parts of Iraq, which is the modern name for the land occupied long ago by Sumerians and Babylonians. Bundles of reeds were tied together to form posts, which were set up in two rows opposite one another. Then the tops were bent over and lashed together to form an arch. On this framework more bundles were tied horizontally, and any holes there might be were blocked up by reed mats hung on the inside. Similar reed huts were used to shelter cattle. Opposite is a picture of a byre, carved on a stone trough; in the carving there are cows beside it. We have no actual picture of a hut that people lived in, but it would look much the same as this byre. The bricks the Sumerians used as their other building material were not the neat red oblongs that we see today piled up on a building site. They were grey in colour and rough in shape. Sometimes they were not even burnt in a kiln; they were simply dried in the sun. In the British Museum there is a shelf of bricks of different shapes and sizes, from a small one that looks rather like a baker’s loaf to large flat ones like those in the picture on page 20. When these large bricks were used in the building of temples, they were inscribed with the name of the king who built the temple and that of the god for whose service it was built. The top brick in the 19ye ape records how Ur-Nammu, King of Ur, uilt the temple of Nannar, the god wor- shipped by the people of Ur. The bottom brick is inscribed with the name and fitles of Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon. This is the king who is called Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible. An inscribed brick of this kind is something like the foundation stone of a modern build- ing. But today we only inscribe one stone and build it into the wall where everyone 20can see it. Most of Ur-Nammu’s bricks were inscribed, and often the writing did not show, as it was covered by other bricks. The courtyards of large houses would be paved with bricks of a similar kind, though without any inscription. In From Ur to Rome there is a picture of the remains of a house dug out of the great mound of Ur; it shows clearly the large paving bricks of the court- yard and the somewhat smaller bricks which formed the walls. Most of the wood used in houses or temples would be brought from a distance, for the slender trunks of the. date-palms would not provide large planks of wood, and as dates were one of the chief articles of food, the trees could not be cut down for timber in large quantities. An inscribed brick tells us how a Governor of Lagash, a Sumerian city, brought cedar trees from Lebanon to make the roof of a building. This was the same ‘timber of cedar’ from Lebanon which Solomon used when he was building the temple at Jerusalem. This inscription tells us one of the things for which timber was needed in building, to make the beams over which were laid the reeds that covered the roof. Wood was also used for the gates of temples and the doors of the larger houses. Here would be found also the only pieces of stone used in a building. arDoor and gate sockets were in- § scribed as well as Cs i bricks B B, Boe nistiigu ia eens as the door was opened C, the socket, sunk into the (5 ——c_ground, into which the post fted You may wonder how stone could be used in making a door. Doors in Sumer and Babylon did not open in the same way as ours. The door and its post were in one 22piece; the post was pointed at the bottom, and the point was covered with a piece of copper. This is where the stone comes in. The copper-covered point fitted into a saucer-shaped depression in a block of stone, which was sunk in the ground. When the door was opened, the post revolved in the stone socket at the bottom and in a ring fixed in the doorway at the top. Numbers of these sockets have been found, big ones, often with an inscription, which formed part of the gates of a temple and smaller ones, which belonged to the doorways of people’s houses. F The houses of ancient days would seem very bare to us. There was very little furniture in them. The people did not need wardrobes or cupboards for clothes, for they had only the sheepskin or robe they were wearing. When it was worn out they threw it away and had a new one. They did not need tables and chairs, for they sat on reed mats on the earthen floor, and the food dishes were placed on another mat in front of them. Important people might use a stool made of reeds. The picture in the middle of the book shows Nannar, the god of Ur, sitting on such a stool. If you look back to page 4, you will see that the king is sit- ting on a stool with a low back. It looks as 23if it had a wooden framework, and the seat would be of interlaced reeds. A little clay model of a chair in the British Museum shows how the reeds were worked in and out 24 econin very much the same way as cane-seated chairs are made today. Below the chair is a model of a bed. It is not a very \good one, and it has been damaged in the long time that has passed since it was made. But it shows that Sumerian beds were not unlike our divan beds in shape. The frame was of wood, and a network of reeds supported the sleeper. The furnishing of even a small house would not be complete without a lamp, made of clay or metal. The picture shows a silver one. The shallow dish held the oil in which the wick was soaked, and the channel-like lip held the end of the wick which was to be lighted. Such a lamp could be carried by the end opposite the lip or it could be placed in a niche in the wall to give light in a room. You are probably thinking what a dim light it would be. These simple articles of furniture were all one would see in a Sumerian house. There were no pictures on the whitewashed walls, and no books or ornaments. Even a king’s 25 ——_——palace would have little more in it. But the furniture would be better made, and might have some kind of ornament. For example, pieces of carved shell or ivory like these might be let into the woodwork of a throne. HOUSEHOLD UTENSILS Even if the Sumerians wanted little furni- ture, they needed pots and pans for cooking, jars to hold water, and vessels for serving food and drink. In the earliest times all these were made of clay by hand, and were painted with a simple pattern of lines before they were fired. Later, when stone and metal took the place of clay for bowls and tumblers in richer people’s houses, the potters stopped painting their wares and the clay vessels they made for ordinary use became as plain as our pudding basins. Vessels of this kind included large jars for holding water for household use. A slave 26A, an early painted bowl; B, a food bowl; C, a tumbler; D, a jug Sor wine or beer; E, a water jar would use such a jar when he poured water over his master having his bath. Some would stand in the kitchen ready for the cook’s use. Other jars might hold grain for grinding into flour between two large stones. 27Such stones have been found in the kitchens of houses which have been excavated. Some- times these jars had a flat base, like our big vases; sometimes they tapered to a point at the bottom, and the point was pressed into the earthen floor to keep the jar upright. Pots and pans used in cookery were also of clay, though in a rich man’s kitchen there would be copper vessels as well. Here is a cook’s ‘gadget’. Resting on the looped pieces, was a bowl containing flour; water was placed in the big bowl. When the cook wanted to make the dough for his flat bread- cakes, he tipped the small basin so that the flour fell into the water and was mixed with it. He went on adding flour from his basin till the dough was stiff enough. Clay bowls and tumblers for eating and drinking, and jugs with handles and spouts 28Only rich people had gold vessels like these. Ais a spouted cup. We do not know how it was used. B shows the usual shape of a drinking vessel. C is a food bowl, with its owner's name engraved on it. for holding beer have been found among the ruins of houses. Besides this useful but rather dull ware, beautiful vessels of gold and silver have been found in the graves of kings and queens of Ur. These were made by skilled goldsmiths and silversmiths; they were shaped by hand and engraved with small bronze tools. The fluted gold tumbler and the cup with a spout were used by a queen. The plain gold bowl belonged to a 29Prince; it is engraved with his name. In another show-case in the British Museum, there is a set of silver tumblers, packed one inside the other, together with a silver jug for wine. This set is not so lovely to look at as the gold vessels, for it has not been cleaned; it is shown just as it was found. But it is interesting because it shows us how much cleaning and repairing has to be done before we can see waft the vessels looked like when they were in daily use. These are some of the things that can beseen in museums. If there were space, we could have pictures of many others which are as familiar to us as they were to the Sumerians and Babylonians. We could put in drawings of the animals they tended and used; oxen for ploughing, cows and goats to give them milk, sheep with their thick fleeces, dogs for hunting, ducks and geese (but not hens). The wild ass of the desert was broken in and 30eee A jug like this might be used with the tumblers opposite used to draw the chariots of the king and his nobles in battle. Then there are sickles and hoes for tilling the ground, saw-blades and knives of flint, copper axe-heads and little bronze tools used by craftsmen. There are also the harpoons and hooks which men in the marshy lands used to catch fish, one of their chief articles of food. All these things were familiar to ordinary people as part of their workaday lives. There are also things in our museums used by people who had more leisure. There is a harp which was played for Queen Shub-ad by her ladies, and a board on which a king played a game with one of his courtiers. It grseems as if the game might be something like our game of draughts. We can see too, the toilet articles of the ladies, cockle shells which still hold some of the pink and green paint they used for their cheeks and eyes, and a gold case, only about two inches long, which held three little gold instruments hung on arring. One of these is a pair of tweezers for plucking their eyebrows. It is not easy to picture the life of pease who lived in a far-off land go long ago. But seeing the things they used helps to make them real to us. A visit to a museum is one way of learning history.sees UNION MM arc cratefd 3 2775011 617 031 mission to repr Everyday life in Sumer and Babylonia / are by K F Row] he 935 6336 , ates or- ch di SUPERSEDED, TEXT. CURRIC 935 G336 UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA Library VICTORIA, B.C. \|LOOKING AT THE PAST 1 ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS The stone age AF Titterten The bronze and earlyironages AF Titterton Everyday life in Sumerand Babylonia KM Gadd Work and play in ancient Egypt KM Gadd Warfare and hunting KM Gadd Artists of Greece K M Gadd. ~ MIDDLE CENTURIES 600-16U0 AD ““veryday metals E Nunn Leather JW Waterer Stone E Nunn Threads Of composite Sut e Wood Fde Mauny Gold silver and precious stones E O'Donnel! °: MOTERN CENTURIES 1600-1940 AD jovess EO’Donnell Furniture EO’Donnell Glass F O’Donnell Xiouses EO’Donneli Pottery and porcelaix © O’Donnell Silver EO’Donnell