The beginning of history

Temps de lecture : 9 minutes

When looking for a historical origin, we always find sketches or precursors long before. This is undoubtedly different with Sumer, which is by definition the origin of history, being the origin of writing and therefore of the first written documents. Even if writing itself had precursors (seals, “numbers”), the creation of written archives makes it undeniable that “history began in Sumer.” This should not lead us to believe that EVERYTHING began in Sumer, which is tempting to think when faced with this incredible civilization that seems to have invented everything (“From that day on, nothing else was invented,” said Berossus) and a mysterious people who appeared out of nowhere, whose language was so different from those of the region that they could have been mistaken for aliens!

Yet just before that, there was the Obeid culture, which is still poorly understood despite having initiated a fairly advanced urbanization that included irrigation, temples, and palaces, particularly in Eridu and Uruk, with a development of wealth, craftsmanship, and inequality, to the point that there seems to be no need to look for a superior people from elsewhere (let alone say where). This is confirmed by genetic analyses of burials in the region, which show a great diversity of origins, a melting pot of populations more or less distant from each other, rather than a new race that fell from the sky. We are therefore dealing with a mixture of all kinds of immigrants, of all colors, a colorful population combining all kinds of talents. The mystery of the language remains [This made me imagine that the Sumerian language, an isolated agglutinative language, very primitive at first, even phonetic and favoring vowels, could be a “pidgin,” an improvised immigrant language used to understand each other between different populations (including those from the Indus Valley) with very different languages—a gratuitous hypothesis, as I have no expertise in this area]. We should not idealize this original civilization too much, but it is a lesson that will be repeated throughout history: that the most powerful and progressive countries are the most open and mixed.

Remember that the first monumental temple we know of, at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, dates from the end of the last ice age (Würm glaciation), around 10,000 BCE (the towers of Tell Qaramel and the surrounding dwellings are thought to be even older). There are already small underground houses, which we find again in the first villages. These temples were annual gathering places for semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who consumed cereals and were even able to sow the best grains long before they settled down and switched to a new system of agricultural production. More than two millennia later, at Çatal Hüyük (also in Turkey), one of the oldest known cities, built around 7500 BC, consisted of small houses joined together, which were entered through the roof. Its inhabitants still lived largely from gathering and hunting before it came to house up to 8,000 people thanks to the increasing cultivation of domestic plants (wheat, oats). This transition to a less diverse diet, which did not provide enough vitamin D, resulted in skin bleaching, as would be the case much later for other European farmers, but made the Anatolians the first white sapiens, surrounded by black-skinned populations for several millennia (at least until the Indo-European invasions).

During this period of warming, the Persian Gulf, which was a vast fertile plain crossed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers during the last glaciation, began to be flooded as the sea rose to its current level between 7500 and 6000 BC, This forced the Gulf populations connected to the Indus Valley to migrate northward to Eridu, becoming climate refugees. In addition, this rise in sea levels is thought to have caused the Bosphorus to break around 5600 BC, causing a sudden flooding of the Black Sea (the Great Flood?) which rose by 150 meters in just a few years. This disaster led to the displacement of agricultural populations that were quite dense along the shores of the Black Sea, creating a new wave of immigration to southern Mesopotamia, where the villages characteristic of the Ubaid culture gradually developed.

This was the setting for the Obeid period in Mesopotamia (6500-3750 BC), a time of multiple migrations of new populations, which began with the Holocene climatic optimum, bringing a humid climate to these former desert regions and encouraging the agricultural colonization of these lands, which had become marshy. However, just as important, around 5000-4000 BC, a new arid period began, prompting the development of more sophisticated irrigation techniques, whose efficiency led to a real population explosion. The management and maintenance of the canals required a centralized hierarchical power structure, and the increase in agricultural production and the growth of trade also led to the emergence of different social classes (priests, artisans, farmers, local elites).

Urban centers could then have several thousand inhabitants, with temples, brick buildings, and paved roads. From the pivotal period of Uruk (4000-3100 BC), the city of Gilgamesh, which had a population of over 30,000, all the conditions were in place for the rise of the Sumerian city-states ruled by a deified priest-king. The legacy of Obeid was considerable, whether in irrigation, urban planning, or social and religious structures. Many craft techniques had been developed there previously (copper, ceramics) and intensive trade relations were maintained with distant regions. It was during this period that city walls and representations of battles appeared, with real armies replacing local militias. However, from 3100 BC, the city disappeared for more than a century, probably flooded, with tablets listing the kings before the flood followed by those who took up the torch after it.

While it is true that everything was already in place, what is nevertheless surprising about the subsequent rise of Sumerian civilization is that from that moment on, there was a considerable acceleration in technology, leading to gigantic works, with rigorous spatial organization for the maintenance of canals, the construction of ziggurats (stepped pyramids), thick walls, and immense palaces. The wealth of society, with its exaggerated hierarchy, actually preceded the development of accounting, which became necessary for trade, but whose widespread use subsequently gave a decisive new impetus to economic and historical development.

However, it seems that the economic and cultural dynamism of this early period of history (of writing) can be attributed at least in part to the incessant wars between cities that had become capable of financing armies—a competition that fostered innovation, as between the Greek cities later on, or closer to home, between the Italian cities of the Renaissance or in the European wars. Wars have always been accelerators of progress and seem to be an inevitable consequence of the (uneven) development of wealth and economic power, inevitably leading to empires (based on the law of the strongest).

Beyond this military pressure, the other lesson that can undoubtedly be drawn from the beginning of history, and which can be found in other progressive eras, is the characteristic of imperial capitals as cosmopolitan cities, cities of immigration, of “black heads” as the Sumerians called them, new Babylons each time. Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Baghdad, Constantinople, New York: all these megacities, hotbeds of creativity and progress, have been places of cultural mixing. And of course, despite the advantages it brings, cosmopolitanism has always been unpopular with locals and believers of all stripes, nostalgic for a unified, communal society, i.e., totalitarian and theocratic, which an empire bringing together multiple peoples and religions can no longer be. Technical power prevails over divine or community laws, which must bow to it. The dynamic of empire is that of globalization—accompanied this time by digital globalization—erasing local identities that have become folkloric.

It is just as interesting to note that each city was obliged to differentiate itself from its neighbors by its tutelary god (a kind of totem), even though their populations were not at all homogeneous, a pure convention of identity, belonging, and submission to the priest-king, not at all an expression of the soul of a people, their culture or their original beliefs but, as Lévi-Strauss showed, simply taking up neighboring myths or religions and inverting at least one term that stood for political opposition (narcissism of the small difference).

This shows that there is no essence or original identity; it is always the pressure of the environment (ecological, economic, technical, military, institutional) that determines us, determines our essence, our practices or beliefs, and guides evolution, which has become technical evolution as material power. We are not so much bound by blood ties and our past as by the challenges of our current situation, the imperatives of survival, and the preservation of the future. The past is over and will not return.