Page 17 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
sand. For in this dead and buried world human words live on like
ghosts, ready to speak again whenever recovered from the grip of
the soil. Among the excavated palaces and dwellings scientists have
uncovered real ‘libraries’, with tens of thousands of baked clay
tablets incised with the earliest script known. The original
Sumerian script was composed of hieroglyphic symbols, but these
were soon replaced by cuneiform characters easier to cut into clay.
In tombs and temples the archaeologists have also come across
incredible art treasures of gold and silver, witnessing to a standard
of taste and a level of civilisation so outstanding that simpler minds
of our own day have been led to suspect that these long vanished
people must have come from outer space. The learned publications
of the archaeologists rarely reach the common reader and the
market has been free for stories about extra-terrestrial visitors
landing to build pyramids and bring civilisation to the barbarians
on our planet. Such entertaining books and films have spread like
wildfire all over the world in recent decades while men from Earth
have set foot on the moon. Intellectuals smile and shrug their
shoulders, but millions believe in them. They satisfy modern man’s
growing desire for an immediate answer to a question science has
only slowly and meticulously begun to disentangle: How did it all
begin?
What could the first Sumerians have told us if they had returned
to life? They were supposedly there to receive the civilised space­
men, if they did not directly descend from them.
The Sumerians do not have to come back to witness to their
origins. Their words are still with us. They left their written
testimony. Their tablets record how they came and from where. It
was not by spacecraft. They came by ship. They came sailing in
through the gulf, and in their earliest works of art they illustrated
the kind of watercraft that brought them. They came as mariners to
the coast of the twin river valley where they founded the civilisation
which during the ensuing millennia was to affect in one way or
another every corner of our world.
Their written testimony seems at first to open the door to another
mystery. Where is the eastern land of ‘Dilmun’ from which the
seafaring Sumerians said they came?
It was to get acquainted with these original testimonies and to
obtain practical lessons from people still living in the marshes that I
returned to Iraq time and again in my search for a tiny piece missing
from a great puzzle. The real puzzle was that human history has no
known beginning. As it stands it begins with civilised mariners
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