The importance which one attaches to these signs of a possible continuity remains a matter of personal judgment. But, in any case, the Al Ubaid culture which we have described was the first to have occupied Mesopotamia as a whole. It seems to have spread along the rivers from the south.[86] And it was in the south that, after an interval, the profound change was brought about which made first Sumer, and then Babylon, the cultural centre of Western Asia for three thousand years.

III. THE CITIES OF MESOPOTAMIA

The scene we have so far surveyed has been somewhat monotonous. The differences between the various groups of prehistoric farmers are insignificant beside the overriding similarity of their mode of life, relatively isolated as they were and almost entirely self-sufficient in their small villages. But by the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. this picture changed, first in Mesopotamia and a little later in Egypt; and the change may be described in terms of archaeological evidence. In Mesopotamia we find a considerable increase in the size of settlements and buildings such as temples. For the first time we can properly speak of monumental architecture as a dominant feature of sizable cities. In Egypt, too, monumental architecture appeared; and in both countries writing was introduced, new techniques were mastered, and representational art—as distinct from the mainly decorative art of the preceding period—made its first appearance.

It is important to realize that the change was not a quantitative one. If one stresses the increased food supply or the expansion of human skill and enterprise; or if one combines both elements by proclaiming irrigation a triumph of skill which produced abundance; even if one emphasizes the contrast between the circumscribed existence of the prehistoric villagers and the richer, more varied, and more complex life in the cities—one misses the point. All these quantitative evaluations lead to generalizations which obscure the very problem with which we are concerned. For a comparison between Egypt and Mesopotamia discloses, not only that writing, representational art, monumental architecture, and a new kind of political coherence were introduced in the two countries; it also reveals the striking fact that the purpose of their writing, the contents of their representations, the functions of their monumental buildings, and the structure of their new societies differed completely. What we observe is not merely the establishment of civilized life, but the emergence, concretely, of the distinctive “forms” of Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization.

It is necessary to anticipate here and to substantiate the contrast. The earliest written documents of Mesopotamia served a severely practical purpose; they facilitated the administration of large economic units, the temple communities. The earliest Egyptian inscriptions were legends on royal monuments or seal engravings identifying the king’s officials. The earliest representations in Mesopotamian art are preponderantly religious; in Egyptian art they celebrate royal achievements and consist of historical subjects. Monumental architecture consists, in Mesopotamia, of temples, in Egypt of royal tombs. The earliest civilized society of Mesopotamia crystallized in separate nuclei, a number of distinct, autonomous cities—clear-cut, self-assertive polities—with the surrounding lands to sustain each one. Egyptian society assumed the form of the single, united, but rural, domain of an absolute monarch.

The evidence from Egypt, which is the more extensive, indicates the transition was neither slow nor gradual. It is true that towards the end of the prehistoric period certain innovations heralded the coming age. But when the change occurred it had the character of a crisis, affecting every aspect of life at once but passing within the space of a few generations. Then followed—from the middle of the First until the end of the Third Dynasty—a period of consolidation and experiment, and with this the formative phase of Egyptian civilization was concluded. Few things that mattered in Pharaonic Egypt were without roots in that first great age of creativity.

In Mesopotamia a parallel development possessed a somewhat different character. It likewise affected every field of cultural activity at once, but it lacked the finality of its Egyptian counterpart. It cannot be said of Mesopotamia that its civilization evolved in all its significant aspects from the achievements of one short period, decisive as that had been. Mesopotamian history shows a succession of upheavals, at intervals of but a few centuries, which did more than modify its political complexion. For instance, the Sumerian language,[87] which was dominant throughout the formative phase of Mesopotamian civilization, was replaced by Semitic Akkadian during the second half of the third millennium. And the shift of the centre of power, in the third millennium, from Sumer in the extreme south to Babylonia in the centre, in the second millennium to Assyria, in the extreme north, brought with it important cultural changes. Yet notwithstanding all the changes, Mesopotamian civilization never lost its identity; its “form” was modified by its turbulent history, but it was never destroyed.

We shall now desist from comparisons and consider the formative age of Mesopotamia, which is called the Protoliterate period since it witnessed the invention of writing. To this period the earliest ruins of cities belong. Now one may say that the birth of Mesopotamian civilization, like its subsequent growth, occurred under the sign of the city. To understand the importance of the city as a factor in the shaping of society, one must not think of it as a mere conglomeration of people. Most modern cities have lost the peculiar characteristic of individuality which we can observe in cities of Renaissance Italy, of Medieval Europe, of Greece, and of Mesopotamia. In these counties the physical existence of the city is but an outward sign of close communal affinities which dominate the life of every dweller within the walls. The city sets its citizens apart from the other inhabitants of the land. It determines their relations with the outside world. It produces an intensified self-consciousness in its burghers, to whom the collective achievements are a source of pride. The communal life of prehistoric times became civic life.

The change, however, was not without its disadvantages, especially in a country like Mesopotamia. The modest life of the prehistoric villager had fitted well enough into the natural surroundings, but the city was a questionable institution, at variance, rather than in keeping, with the natural order. This fact was brought home by the frequent floods and storms, droughts and marsh-fires with which the gods destroyed man’s work. For in Mesopotamia, in contrast with Egypt, natural conditions did not favour the development of civilization. Sudden changes could bring about conditions beyond man’s control.[88] Spring tides in the Persian Gulf may rise to a height of eight to nine feet; prolonged southerly gales may bank up the rivers for as much as two feet or more. Abnormal snowfalls in Armenia, or abnormal rainfall farther to the south, may cause a sudden rise of level in the rivers; a landslide in the narrow gorges of the two Zabs or of the Khabur may first hold up, then suddenly release, an immense volume of water. Any one of these circumstances, or the simultaneous occurrence of two or more of them, may create a flow which the earth embankments in the southern plain are not able to contain. In prehistoric times when primitive farmers sowed a catch crop after the inundation, it was possible to adapt human settlement to the ever-changing distribution of land and water, even though the villages were frequently destroyed. But large permanent towns, dependent upon drainage and irrigation, require unchanging watercourses. This can be achieved only through relentless vigilance and toil; for the quickly running Tigris carries so coarse a silt that canals easily get blocked. Even when cleaned annually, they rise gradually above the plain as a result of precipitation; and the risk that they, or the rivers themselves, may burst through their banks is never excluded. In 1831 the Tigris, rising suddenly, broke its embankment and destroyed 7000 houses in Baghdad in a single night.[89]

Small wonder, then, that the boldness of those early people who undertook to found permanent settlements in the shifting plain had its obverse in anxiety; that the self-assertion which the city—its organization, its institutions, citizenship itself—implied was overshadowed by apprehension. The tension between courage and the awareness of man’s dependence on superhuman power found a precarious equilibrium in a peculiarly Mesopotamian conception. It was a conception which was elaborated in theology but which likewise informed the practical organization of society: the city was conceived to be ruled by a god.

Theocracy, of course, was not peculiar to Mesopotamia: Egypt, too, was ruled by a god. But this god was incarnate in Pharaoh; and whatever may be paradoxical in a belief in the divinity of kings, it at least leaves no doubt as to the ultimate authority in the state and subjects the people unreservedly to the ruler’s command. In Mesopotamia no god was identified with the mortal head of the state. The world of the gods and the world of men were incommensurate. Nevertheless, a god was supposed to own the city and its people. The temple was called the god’s house; and it functioned actually as the manor-house on an estate, with the community labouring in its service. We shall describe the organization of the temple community at the end of this chapter. It is necessary first to survey the actual remains of the Protoliterate cities—the earliest cities in Mesopotamia.

In Protoliterate ruins the temples are the most striking feature. We have seen how, in the Al Ubaid period, temples were erected at Eridu in the south and at Tepe Gawra in the north. But the edifices of the Protoliterate period at Erech are much more impressive. The temple of the god Anu (Figs. 8, 45) was placed upon an artificial mound forty feet high and covering an area of about 420,000 square feet. It dominated the plain for many miles around. Near its base lay another great shrine, dedicated to the goddess Inanna. Several times changed and rebuilt, it measured, at one stage, 240 by 110 feet; at another it possessed a colonnade in which each column measured 9 feet in diameter (Figs. 9, 10). Each of these, and also the adjoining walls and the sides of the platform supporting them, was covered with a weatherproof “skin” consisting of tens of thousands of clay cones, separately made, baked, and coloured. These formed patterns of lozenges, zigzags, and triangles, and so on, in black and red on a buff ground. The cones were stuck into a thick mud plaster which covered the brickwork. The patterning in colour enlivened a façade already richly articulated by complex systems of buttresses, recesses, and semi-engaged columns, and thus achieved an effect far beyond anything which the exclusive use of mud as building material would suggest as attainable.

The most characteristic feature of Mesopotamian temple architecture was the artificial mound, called a ziggurat or temple tower (Figs. 8, 11), the tower of Babel being the best known, that of Ur the best preserved, example. However, ziggurats were not found in connection with all temples. The Protoliterate temple at Tell Uqair, which has the same plan and even the same dimensions as the contemporary temple on the ziggurat at Erech, stands on a platform only a few metres high.[90] I am inclined to see in this an abbreviated rendering of the ziggurat, but the possibility that the two differed in significance cannot be excluded. We cannot explain why some temples should lack ziggurats; but we can understand why so many great shrines were equipped with them, and why the staggering communal effort which their construction entailed was undertaken.

The significance of the ziggurats is revealed by the names which many of them bear, names which identify them as mountains. That of the god Enlil at Nippur, for example, was called “House of the Mountain, Mountain of the Storm, Bond between Heaven and Earth.” Now “mountain,” as used in Mesopotamia, is a term so heavily charged with religious significance that a simple translation does it as little justice as it would to the word “Cross” in Christian, or the words “West” or “Nun” (Primeval Ocean) in Egyptian, usage.[91] In Mesopotamia the “mountain” is the place where the mysterious potency of the earth, and hence of all natural life, is concentrated. This is perhaps best understood if we look at a rather rough relief of terra cotta (Fig. 12) which was found at Assur in a temple of the second millennium B.C., although similar representations are known on seals of a much earlier date. The deity represented is clearly a personification of chthonic forces. His body grows out of a mountain (the scale pattern is the conventional rendering of a mountainside), and the plants grow from the mountainsides as well as from the god’s hands. Goats feed on these plants; and water, indispensable to all life, is represented by two minor deities flanking the god. Deities like the main figure on this relief were worshipped in all Mesopotamian cities, although their names differed. Tammuz is the best known of them. As personifications of natural life they were thought to be incapacitated during the Mesopotamian summer, which is a scourge destroying vegetation utterly and exhausting man and beast. The myths express this by saying that the god “dies” or that he is kept captive in the “mountain.” From the mountain he comes forth at the New Year when nature revives. Hence, the mountain is also the land of the dead; and when the sun god is depicted rising daily upon the mountains of the East, the scene is not merely a reminder of the geography of the country. The vivifying rain is also brought from the mountain by the weather god. Thus the mountain is essentially the mysterious sphere of activity of the superhuman powers. The Sumerians created the conditions under which communication with the gods became possible when they erected the artificial mountains for their temples.

In doing so they also strengthened their political cohesion. The huge building, raised to establish a bond with the power upon which the city depended, proclaimed not only the ineffable majesty of the gods but also the might of the community which had been capable of such an effort. The great temples were witnesses to piety, but also objects of civic pride. Built to ensure divine protection for the city, they also enhanced the significance of citizenship. Outlasting the generation of their builders, they were true monuments of the cities’ greatness.

It is in these temples that we find the first signs of a new invention without which the undertaking of works of this magnitude, or, indeed, of communal organization on a considerable scale, would not have been feasible, that is, writing.[92] From the first it appears in the form of impressions made by a reed on clay tablets. The earliest of the tablets, found in the temple at Erech, were memoranda—aids for the running of the temple as the production centre, warehouse, and workshop of the community. The simplest were no more than tallies with a few numerals. Others bear, besides the numerals, impressions of cylinder seals to identify the parties or witnesses to the transactions recorded. Still others indicate the object of the transaction. For instance, a simple inscription may consist of the entry: so many sheep, so many goats. There even occurs a more complex type, namely, a wage-list with a series of entries—presumably personal names—followed by the indication “beer and bread for one day.” There is no reason to assume (as has usually been done) that these earliest tablets represent the last stage of a long development; the script appears from the first as a system of conventional signs—partly arbitrary tokens, partly pictograms—such as might well have been introduced all at once (Fig. 13). We are confronted with a true invention, not with an adaptation of pictorial art.[93]

As regards the art of the Protoliterate period, the vast majority of the extant works deals with religious matters. Sometimes ritual acts were depicted, sometimes an ornamental pattern was built up of religious symbols; and occasionally it is impossible to be certain whether the one or the other was intended. But the reference is, in all cases, to the gods. Among the symbols—on seals[94] and in the mural decoration of temples—plants and animals, especially those upon which man depends for his livelihood, were by far the most frequent. These were the emblems of the great goddess worshipped at Erech and throughout the land. They occur singly or in combination (for instance an ear of barley and a bull [Fig. 14; cf. Fig. 44]), the vegetable kingdom often being represented by rosettes. Friezes of sheep or cattle covered the walls of the Protoliterate temples—painted at Uqair, inlaid or carved in stone at Erech (Figs. 17, 18).[95] Implements used in the cult, such as stands for offerings, were likewise decorated with animals, as were also sacred vessels: a trough (Fig. 5), from which the temple flock was presumably fed, shows sheep near their fold—a reed structure (srefe) like those still built by the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq (Fig. 6); and the building is crowned by two curiously bound reed bundles which correspond to the oldest form of the sign with which the name of the mother-goddess was written. Vases and seal designs showing the performance of ritual acts (Figs. 15, 44) are also common. Like the symbols used in decorative art, these acts point consistently to the worship of deities manifest in nature.

The gods were also symbols of a collective identity. Each city projected its sovereignty into the deity which it conceived as its owner. There seems to be a contradiction here: the nature gods whom the Protoliterate monuments celebrate would seem more suitable for worship by countrymen and farmers than by townsmen as we know them. But our contrast “town versus country” is misleading.[96] While it is true that the city in Mesopotamia was an outstanding innovation of the Protoliterate period, the great divergence between city and countryside, between rural and urban life, is, in the form in which we are familiar with it, a product of the “industrial revolution,” and emphasis on this contrast mars our perspective when we view earlier situations.

About 400 B.C. roughly three-quarters of the Athenian burghers owned some land in Attica,[97] and as recently as the European Middle Ages our contrast “urban-rural” was unknown. At that time the city was as distinct a social institution as it has ever been, but it was intimately related with the land. Trevelyan writes:

In the Fourteenth Century the English town was still a rural and agricultural community as well as a centre of industry and commerce ... outside lay the “townfields,” unenclosed by hedges, where each citizen-farmer cultivated his own strips of cornland; and each grazed his cattle and sheep on the common pasture of the town.... In 1388 it was laid down by Parliamentary Statute that in harvest-time journeymen and apprentices should be called on to lay aside their crafts and should be compelled “to cut, gather and bring in the corn”; mayors, bailiffs and constables of towns were to see this done.[98]

In Mesopotamia, then, many of the townspeople worked their own fields. And the life of all was regulated by a calendar which harmonized society’s progress through the year with the succession of the seasons. A recurring sequence of religious festivals interrupted all business and routine at frequent intervals; several days in each month were set aside for the celebration of the completion by the moon of one of its phases, and of other natural occurrences. The greatest annual event in each city, which might last as long as twelve days, was the New Year’s festival, celebrated at the critical point of the farmer’s year when nature’s vitality was at a low ebb and everything depended upon a turn of the tide. Society, involved to the extent of its very life, could not passively await the outcome of the conflict between the powers of death and revival. With great emotional intensity it participated by ritual acts in the vicissitudes of the gods in whom were personified the generative forces of nature. The mood of these urban celebrations, as late as Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian times, shows that the main issue was still the maintenance of the bond with nature.

We do not know for what reasons certain of the nature gods became connected with a given city. We only know that the city, as soon as it became recognizable, appears as the property of one god, although other deities were worshipped there as well. The city god was sometimes viewed as an absentee landlord, always difficult of approach and apt to express himself somewhat casually in signs and portents, dreams and omens of dubious meaning. Yet a misunderstanding of the commands thus conveyed was likely to provoke the calamity of divine anger.

It is in keeping with the tenor of Mesopotamian religiosity at all times that the relationship between the city and its divine owner could be conceived only as one of complete dependence.[99] Throughout we meet with the sombre conviction that man is impotently exposed to the impact of a turbulent and unpredictable universe. This feeling was rationalized in theology, which taught that man was created especially to serve the convenience of the gods. In the Epic of Creation man was brought into being after Marduk, the creator, had remarked casually:

Let him be burdened with the toil of the gods that they may freely breathe.

The same view is implied in an older, Sumerian, myth in which Enlil breaks the earth’s crust with a pickaxe so that men may sprout forth like plants. And the other gods surround Enlil and beg him to allot to them serfs from among the Sumerians who are breaking forth from the earth.[100]

The belief that man fulfilled the purpose of his being by serving the gods had very remarkable consequences for the structure of early Sumerian society. Since the citizens projected the sovereignty of their community into their god, they were all equal in his service. In practice this service took the form of a co-operative effort which was minutely organized. The result was a planned society, and the remains of the Protoliterate period show that it existed then, although it is better known from Early Dynastic times.[101]

We must start by distinguishing two interlocking but distinct social institutions. The political unit was the city; the economic-religious unit the temple community. Each temple owned lands which formed the estate of its divine owners. Each citizen belonged to one of the temples, and the whole of a temple community—the officials and priests, herdsmen and fishermen, gardeners, craftsmen, stone cutters, merchants, and even slaves—was referred to as “the people of the god X.” Ideally one can imagine one temple community to have formed the original kernel of each city; but whether this situation ever prevailed we do not know, since the Early Dynastic tablets acquaint us with cities comprising several temples with their estates.[102]

Columns:

A Original pictograph

B Pictograph in position of later cuneiform

C Early Babylonian

D Assyrian

E Original or derived meaning

Rows:

1 bird

2 fish

3 donkey

4 ox

5 sun, day

6 grain

7 orchard

8 to plow, to till

9 boomerang, to throw, to throw down

10 to stand, to go

Part of the temple land was actually worked by all for all, or again, to put it in the terms of the ancients, by all in the service of the god. This part of the land—not more than one-fourth of the whole in a case we can check—was called nigenna-land, a term which may be translated “Common,” since the land involved was cultivated by the community as a whole. A second part, called kur-land, was divided into allotments which were assigned to members of the community for their support. A third part, called Uru-lal-land, was let out to tenants at a rent amounting to from one-third to one-sixth of the yield. Most of this rent could be paid in grain, but a small part had to be paid in silver.

The temple supplied the seed-corn, draft animals, and implements for the cultivation of the Common; and high and low worked every year in the “fields of the god,” repairing the dikes and canals as a corvée. The sangu, or priest, who stood at the head of the temple community assigned the shares in the communal tasks. He appeared as bailiff of the god and was assisted by a nubanda, or steward, who supervised labour, magazines, and administration. Stores of grain which had accumulated were not merely used for seed-corn, nor were they exclusively at the disposal of the priest, to be used for sacrifices and for the sustenance of the temple personnel. The priests, like everyone else, had their allotments to support themselves, and the fruits of communal labour returned in part to the citizens in the form of rations of barley and wool, which were distributed regularly, and extra rations, supplied on feast days.

Although the amounts of rations were not equal, nor the tasks assigned to all men equally burdensome, we observe here a fact unparalleled in the ancient world, namely, that in principle all members of the community were equal. All received rations as well as allotments to support themselves; all worked on the Common and on the canals and dikes. There was no leisure class. Likewise there were no native serfs. Some foreigners and prisoners of war were kept as slaves, but private people possessed very few, if any. Slaves worked in the temple alongside free-men as porters and gardeners. Slave girls were kept in considerable numbers as spinners, and they helped in the kitchens, the brewery, and the sties where pigs were fattened.

The allotments differed in size, even when assigned to men of the same profession, and we cannot explain the differences. There is no evidence of large estates in the hands of single members of the temple community, but we may suppose that the existence of several temple communities in one city may have made it possible for some men to dispose of allotments in more than one of them. We know of a nubanda who had about 120 acres and a supervisor of the herb magazines who owned about 80 acres.[103] But such conditions represent deviations from the original system. More significant is the fact that even the smallest allotment entered in the temple lists—a gan, or seven-eighths of an acre—would suffice to keep a man. Monogamy and the scarcity of slaves would, in any case, limit the area which one family could cultivate.

Women are also listed as holders of allotments, and this means that they served the community in some function or other. For the basic rule of the temple community was that a person received land for his sustenance because he put his specialized skill at the service of all: the shepherd and the fisherman, the carpenter and the smith provided the temple magazines with certain quantities of their produce or simply devoted all their time to work on temple property.

The magazines (Fig. 19)[104] contained an immense variety of articles: grain, sesame seed as the raw material for oil, onions and other vegetables, beer, dates, wine (which was rare), fish (dried or salted), fat, wool, skins, huge quantities of reeds and rushes used for ceilings and for torches, temporary structures, mats for floor coverings and hangings, wood of many kinds, asphalt (used wherever anything had to be waterproof), valuable stones like marble and diorite, to be made into statues and cult objects such as offering-stands, ritual vessels, and the maceheads of the temple guards. The stone, and some of the wood, was imported by merchants, who also brought from Elam aromatics which, in the “oil house,” were made into ointments with a base of animal fat. Tools were owned by the temple in great quantities and given out on loan.

All these articles and materials were checked and booked upon arrival and either stored or worked up within the temple precincts. Carpenters made ploughs and other implements, kept them in repair, and built chariots, and probably ships. Tanners prepared skins for harnesses and for leather bottles in which milk and oil were kept. Wool was prepared, and part of it spun, by slave girls; the Baba temple at Lagash employed 127 of these, with 30 of their children. But only 18 were spinners. The others cleaned and prepared the wool, of which large quantities were used in the export trade. A good deal was also distributed as rations to the members of the community. The shearing of the numerous sheep—or rather, the plucking of their wool—was done in a special compound outside the temple precincts, as was, likewise, the milling of the grain.

Barley constituted the main crop, but spelt and emmer wheat were also grown. Monthly rations of barley went from the granaries to the brewery and kitchen of the temple. The brewers also took charge of sheep and cattle to be fattened. But cattle were scarce, for there was little rich meadow land for grazing. The steppe in Iraq will sustain sheep in spring, but the sun burns the grass early in the summer; and even in antiquity the flocks had to be tided over the worst period with grain. In some local calendars there is a month “in which barley is given to the sheep.”

The common protein food was fish rather than meat. We have records of private fishponds, and fifty different kinds of fishes are named in the texts. These also distinguish river fishermen, canal fishermen, coast fishermen, and fishermen of the high seas. Sheep and goats were kept for milk and wool. Oxen were used for ploughing, as were also asses. Both oxen and asses were used in teams of four head and fed on barley. The native breeds, deteriorating in the exhausting climate of the plain, were periodically invigorated by crossing with animals imported from Persia. Pigs were kept in the marshes and were also fattened.

Beside extensive cane brakes the temple owned “woods”; these consisted largely of date groves, and there, between the palms, other plants were cultivated, such as grapes, figs, pomegranates, and mulberries.[105] Other groves consisted of timber trees, and there were apple orchards where, it seems, the blind were put to work.[106]

The citizens, when working for the temple, were organized in groups or guilds under their own foremen. These divided the tasks among the members of the group, were responsible for the delivery of the produce, and received the rations for the group. Other lists, enumerating the citizens liable for military service, suggest that the men served guildwise with their foremen as cadre. But there were also professional soldiers, distinguished in two groups, spearmen and shield-bearers. In peace time they worked on the Common, harvested reeds in the cane brakes and assisted in building operations.

The specialization and detailed division of labour of the temple community, and especially the grouping of all kinds of labourers under foremen responsible for deliveries and receipt of rations, offered many opportunities for oppression. But too much can be made of the weaknesses of the system. To speak of the “surplus” of food which must be produced in order to maintain officials as well as merchants and craftsmen, and to imply that the officials must have been a parasitic class which kept the farmers in subjection,[107] leaves out of account several circumstances, of which the most important is the climate of the country. Wherever there is power there is, inevitably, abuse of power. But the rich soil of Mesopotamia, if well watered, produces food in abundance without excessive or continuous toil. Labour in the fields was largely seasonal. At seed time and harvest time every able-bodied person was no doubt on the land, as was the case in medieval England. But the farmers were not a separate class or caste. Every citizen, whether priest, merchant, or craftsman, was a practical farmer who worked his allotment to support himself and his dependents. Once the seed was sown and the harvest gathered, plenty of time remained in which special skills could be developed, taught, and exploited. There are interesting analogies in villages of our own time, where often enough a farmer or a labourer is a specialist in some branch of craftsmanship. In Europe this condition is rapidly disappearing and was never regularized; but we may quote two modern African instances which will make it easier for us to imagine how practical husbandry and the exercise of crafts and home industry can go together. The modern instances differ, of course, in important details but are instructive nevertheless. It is said about the Nuer:

There are no specialized and hereditary trades though certain persons may acquire a local reputation for skill in making such things as pipes, collars for bulls, canoes or ivory bracelets. These people are not craftsmen by trade, and their activities centre round their cattle, like every other Nuer. Their services are normally accepted by others as part of the integral system of mutual aid which is the basis of every Nuer community, and they are repaid by assistance in pastoral or agricultural activities or by reciprocal gifts.[108]

For another instance, with a rather peculiar character:

In West Africa the Pangwe do not make a business of carving and weaving; all such work is done on the side, in the intervals of fishing and farming. But in so far as a man does carve he is the narrowest of experts. He will manufacture tools but will leave bows to his neighbour, and a spoon carver would never attempt a ladle.[109]

We are reminded of the many names to designate fishermen in Sumerian, even though specialization was certainly less narrow in the Mesopotamian cities. But the point I want to make is that, for all the guilds and professional skills which we find there, the population as a whole was concerned with the primary business of tillage and cannot be compared with any modern body of city dwellers.

Since a considerable proportion of agricultural and other produce passed through the temple magazines, an elaborate system of administration was set up. To illustrate the kind of careful accounts kept of the expenses, we shall quote a record of the grain used in a certain operation. To understand it, it is necessary to know that the fields were ploughed twice, first to break up the ground, then to sow and cover the seed. For the second ploughing a seed funnel was attached to the plough to ensure an even distribution along the furrow. Since the second ploughing was less heavy than the breaking of the ground, the oxen used for it got only half the fodder allotted to the teams used in the first. (The Sumerian measures can be converted by taking the gan at just under an acre and the gur at about 3⅓ bushels.)