Free A History of the World by Andrew Marr Page A

and lineage, and marks the next important moment in human development after farming itself. Rivalry between cities and peoples will start to accelerate change, unless and until full-scale war brings catastrophe; which from time to time it does. The rise of trained bureaucrats, with their cuneiform writing implements, permits different people with different languages to communicate; Sumerian becomes the linguafranca for Mesopotamia, and scribes become bilingual. A momentum is under way, which may be lost here or there but which has never stopped since.
    The first cities also nurtured a flowering of abstract thought. The ruling class of kings and priests had time to speculate, not least about the mysterious world of winking lights and movements overhead that had also obsessed the builders of Stonehenge. So it is no surprise that Mesopotamia gave us mathematics, both the simple sums to tally trade and taxes and the more complicated ones used to try to track the stars. Looking up, the Sumerians and Babylonians wondered about this nightly message, with its shapes and regular patterns. If the gods were able to send messages back to them, were these the divine writing? Was there a pattern, which could then be imposed on the hazier rhythms of human life?
    Reading the stars required measurement of angles. The Sumerians plotted the movements of the five planets they could see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and named a day after each. They then named one day after the Moon and another after the Sun, giving them a seven-day week. Seven was regarded as a perfect number; and the Sumerian week is of course our week, its days still named in the Sumerian fashion, though with Roman or Old English words. Saturn becomes Saturday, Sol (‘the sun’ in Latin) becomes Sunday. Luna, the moon, becomes
lundi
in French, or our Monday (Moon-day). Mars is
mardi
, though in English, thanks to a Norse god, Tuesday. Similarly, Wednesday is Wodin’s day, but Wodin was the god associated with the planet Mercury. Jupiter is
jeudi
; or in English, Thursday, Thor being the northern god associated with Jupiter. Venus is
vendredi
, or Friday. The Sumerians also developed a counting system based on the number sixty, which is divisible by eleven other numbers and so particularly handy for Bronze Age accountancy. From this we get our 60-second minutes, 60-minute hours, 360-day years and 360-degree circles. By Babylonian times, scribes had to be fast and accurate: one examination tablet from their city of Nippur asks, ‘Do you know multiplication, reciprocals, coefficients, balancing of accounts, administrative accounting, how to make all kinds of pay allotments, divide property and delimit shares of fields?’ 18
    All of this is remarkable enough, but the first cities also bring a flowering of art and design, with gorgeously made alabaster carvingsand mosaics and graceful (as well as useful) stamp-seals for parcels of goods from Uruk, plus inlaid gaming-boards, musical instruments and delicate gold jewellery from Ur – even before we get to the amazing carved reliefs of the Assyrians and Babylonians. Today, thanks to the habits of nineteenth-century archaeologists, the loveliest of these things can be found in Berlin and (to a lesser extent) London, not in Iraq. Each Mesopotamian city had its own gods, culture and reputation. Uruk was famous not only for its huge ziggurat and sky-god but for its sexy female deity Inanna, who was associated with all kinds of fertility and whose rites shocked one Babylonian writer: ‘Uruk . . . city of prostitutes, courtesans and call-girls . . . the party-boys and festival people who changed masculinity to femininity’. 19 (And it took a lot to shock a Babylonian.)
    So these first cities are among the most important sites in the human story. Successive floods have reduced many of them to gritty stumps, and obliterated others. Neglect, war and the lack of interest of later cultures followed by aggressive,