Page 150 - The Tigris Expedition

To Diltnun, the Land of Noah

attained its zenith already before the First Dynasty was founded:
‘By the First Dynasty of Ur if there is any change it is in the nature
of decadence, and from later ages we have nothing to parallel the
treasures of the prehistoric tombs.’
The incredible art treasures left by these, our spiritual forebears,
in pre-dynastic time, have more to tell us than a story of unsur­
passed craftsmanship and a most refined taste. The mere materials
chosen for use by the artists may tell us something about their
former homeland or routine range of foreign contacts. Contacts of
no superficial or casual nature. For in the land they came to settle,
southern Iraq, they would neither find nor learn about metals or
precious stones. There was not even common rock to quarry. Their
only riches were fertile soil and navigable waters: vast expanses of
alluvial plains for growing their crops and grazing their herds, and a
perfect location for commercial activities by sea and river. Indeed,
the Sumer they found had a richer vegetation, as appears from a
tablet describing the arrival at Ur of the first god-king from
Dilmun: ‘To Ur he came, Enki king of the abyss, decrees the fate:
“O city, well supplied, washed by much water, . . . green like the
mountain, Hashur-forest, wide shade, . . . »> >5
This was the Sumerian description of a place today without a
drop of water, buried in sand, deprived of every green leaf and
without shade. But the beauty of the landscape did not yield what a
goldsmith or a jeweller needed for planning and producing the
magnificent treasures interred with the earliest royal families. With
this in mind, Woolley’s vivid descriptions of such tombs are
thought-provoking:

At Ur has been found a cemetery of which the earlier graves
would seem to date to about 3500 bc and the latest to come down
to the beginning of the First Dynasty of Ur; amongst them are
the tombs of local kings not recorded in the king-lists. ... It is
astonishing to find that at this early period the Sumerians were
acquainted with and commonly employed not only the column
but the arch, the vault, and ... the dome, architectural forms
which were not to find their way into the western world for
thousands of years.
That the general level of civilization accorded with the high
development of architecture is shown by the richness of the
graves. Objects of gold and silver are abundant, not only personal
ornaments but vessels, weapons, and even tools being made of
the precious metals; copper is the metal of everyday use. Stone

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