Page 149 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
disentangle the transition between Sumerian history and Sumerian
myth way back where terrestrial god-men arc blended with bird-
men and celestial bodies.
I had on board also a little book called The Sumerians, written by
another noted authority on Middle Eastern archaeology, Professor
i C. L. Woolley. In his first chapter, termed The Beginnings, he goes
straight to the point:

Sumerian legends which explain the beginnings of civilization
in Mesopotamia seem to imply an influx of people from the sea,
which people can scarcely be other than the Sumerians them­
\ selves, and the fact that the historic Sumerians are at home in the
south country and that Eridu, the city reputed by them to be the
oldest in the land, is the southernmost of all, supports that
implication.

The same scholar ends his book by stating how difficult it is to
estimate the debt which the modern world owes to the Sumerians, a
branch of mankind so recently rescued from complete oblivion.
The Sumerians, he says, merit a very honourable place for their
attainment, and a still higher rank for their effect on human history.
Their civilisation lit up a world still plunged in primitive barbarism.
We have outgrown the phase when all the arts were traced to Greece
and the Olympian Zeus, he says, and continues:

... we have learnt how that flower of genius drew its sap from
Lydians and Hittites, from Phoenicia and Crete, from Babylon
and Egypt. But the roots go farther back: behind all these lies
Sumer. The military conquest of the Sumerians, the arts and
crafts which they raised to so high a level, their social organiza­
tion and their conceptions of morality, even of religion, are not an
isolated phenomenon, an archaeological curiosity; it is as part of
our own substance that they claim our study, and in so far as they
win our admiration we praise our spiritual forebears.4

When we praise the Sumerians as our spiritual forebears we
praise a people with no known beginnings, a people who came by
ma-gur from the sea.
Summarising present knowledge gained from excavations,
Woolley points out that Sumerian civilisation made no progress in
the period from the First Dynasty of Ur to the last. On the contrary,
all archaeological evidence shows that Sumerian civilisation had

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