Page 146 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilntun, the Land of Noah
Syria and Lebanon. The harbours as well as the network of inland
canals were dredged and well maintained under the supervision of
high officials directly responsible to the king. The harbour
authorities imposed taxes on importing ships, and the captains
carried sealed documents concerning vessel and cargo. Oppenhcim
quoted part of a legal document in the form of a clay tablet from Ur,
in which the captain’s responsibility is spelt out in cuneiform
characters: . . the well-preserved ship and its fittings he will
return to its owner in the harbor of Ur intact . . .*
Ships were so much part of the daily life of the Sumerians that
they even entered into their proverbs: ‘The ship bent on honest
pursuits sails off with the wind, Utu [the Sun-god] finds honest
ports for it. The ship bent on evil sails off with the wind, he will run
it aground on the beaches.’2
Gherman jokingly commented that with this proverb true we
were damned close to getting ourselves a bad reputation by our
manoeuvres in the river and off Failaka. Detlef wanted to know
more about Sumerian ships and their cargo. I looked for another
notebook: one with extracts from the writings of Armas Salonen.
Nobody had done more research into these topics than he had. I
admired his intellect although we were probably going to prove his
verdict on the buoyancy of berdi wrong. But I knew nobody who
could present his findings in a way less likely to become a bestseller.
In a most academic and almost unintelligible treatise intended only
for his fellow readers of Studia Orientalia Edidit Societas Orientalis
Fennica this erudite Finnish scholar presents more than two hundred
pages in a mixture of German, Greek, Hebraic, Latin, Arabic,
French, English, Sumerian, Babylonian and Akkadian languages,
amassing all that the learned world has recorded of fragmentary
references to ancient Mesopotamian ships and cargo since the days
of Alexander the Great. Most of his sources were precious extracts
from cuneiform Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets.
Salonen stressed that the first ships in the twin river country were
reed-ships, and that, with them as models, the earliest wooden ships
were built later. He begins his treatise by pointing out that the
evolution of shipbuilding in Mesopotamia is the same as that of
ancient Egypt, where reed-ships also formed the prototypes for
later wooden boats. He shows that until historic time all the original
types of Mesopotamian watercraft, in one form or the other,
continued to survive side by side: the reed-boat, the goat-skin
pontoon-raft, the basket-boat of coracle type, and the plank-built
wooden ship.
125