Page 148 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah
ships, and privately-owned as well as chartered merchant vessels.
‘Life-saving boats’ arc also mentioned, indicating that larger ships
carried lifeboats in case of emergency. The ships even had personal
names, like ours today, after towns, countries, kings and heroes.
Some even had more romantic names, like ‘The Morning’, ‘The
Life-protectress’, or ‘Heart’s Delight’. Many carried names refer­
ring to their special cargo. To judge from these names the transport
was by no means restricted to timber, copper, ivory and textiles,
but included such trade goods as wool, canes, reed-mats, shoe-
leather, bricks, quarried stone, asphalt, cattle, small live-stock, hay,
grain, flour, bread, dates, milk-products, onions, herbs, flax, malt,
fish, fish-oil, vegetable oil and wine. One tablet refers to sixteen
men needing two days to pull their ship into port and unload it on
the docks and another day to move all the unloaded cargo into the
warehouse.3
Our conclusion from Salonen’s analysis was that Tigris clearly
would have to be classed as a ma-gur, a ‘god-ship’ of early model.
This made sense to everybody on board, especially as I had stressed
that we were in search of the very beginning, and Sumerian history
began with navigating gods, not with merchant seamen.
And I was not joking. It was sometimes easy for us, who have
inherited Abraham’s monotheistic religion from Ur, to forget
that the term ‘god’ had a different meaning for the ancestor-
worshippers who had another religion. Semitic tribes blended at an
early date with Sumerian intruders in what is today southern Iraq,
and there must have been a blending of old religions as well. Like
Abraham, the Sumerians traced their list of kings back to the
boat-builder who saved mankind from the flood, but whereas the
Hebrews believed that kings and men alike descended from Adam,
the Sumerians made a clear distinction between commoners and
kings. Like the Egyptians and the early culture peoples in Mexico
and Peru, they believed that their royal families were the divine
descendants of the sun. They were sun-worshippers combined with
ancestor-worshippers. The King was venerated as a human god
even while still alive, and his rank among the deities was higher the
further he was counted back in the royal genealogies. The sacred
kings who first came to the Sumerian coast, and whose descendants
founded the First Dynasty of Ur, would necessarily be classified as
gods by the scribes who recorded ancestral events on tablets in the
centuries before Abraham’s departure. If we dismiss the Sumerian
gods as mere mythical creatures, we should have also to dismiss all
their royal families from first to last. The real problem is to
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