Page 152 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah

dromos which lead down into the grave; against the end of the
tomb chamber arc nine ladies of the court with elaborate golden
head-dresses; in front of the entrance arc drawn up two heavy
four-wheeled carts with three bullocks harnessed to each, and the
driver’s bones lie in the carts and the grooms are by the heads of
the animals; in another grave, that of Queen Shub-ad, the court
ladies arc in two parallel rows, at the end of which is the harpist
with a harp of inlay work decorated with a calf’s head in lapis and
gold, and the player’s arm-bones were found lying across the
wreckage of the instrument; even inside the tomb chamber two
bodies were found crouched, one at the head and the other at the
foot of the wooden bier on which the queen lay. In no known text
is there anything that hints at human sacrifice of this sort, nor
had archaeology discovered any trace of such a custom or any
survival of it in a later age; if, as I have suggested above, it is to be
explained by the deification of the early kings, we can say that in
the historic period even the greater gods demanded no such
rite . . .6

One point that should not be passed over lightly is what the same
scholar emphasised; the wealth of Lower Mesopotamia is purely
agricultural: ‘there is no metal here and no stone, and not the least
interesting point about the treasures recovered from the site of Ur is
that the raw material of nearly all of them is imported from abroad’.
How can the first civilisation known to us, antedating the first
known dynasties in both Sumer and Egypt, be based entirely on
imported materials? Extensive unrecorded travels must somehow
have antedated the known beginnings.
Unless we recognise that the god-men described and depicted on
the earliest Sumerian tablets and seals were people like those buried
in the earliest royal tombs of Ur, we shall never have an explanation
of the riches in those tombs. Enki, the ‘god’ who came from
Dilmun and found Ur still washed by water and shaded by hashur-
forest, reflects the memory of one of these mighty kings whose fleet
of ma-gurs must already have carried capable craftsmen and mer­
chants to many distant lands. How else could they have been
acquainted with the great variety of precious metals and stones they
needed to create the royal treasures? Nowhere in the vicinity of
their own kingdom would they find gold, silver, electrum, copper,
lapis lazuli, carnelian, alabaster, diorite, soapstone, or flint. Before
coming to Ur experienced members of the king’s party must
already have thoroughly explored many distant lands to acquire an
131