Rediscovery of Earth’s Oldest City

A.D. 1904

DR. EDGAR J. BANKS¹

Recent years have made remarkable discoveries of the remains of ancient cities in Babylonia, the Asiatic land in the valley of the Euphrates River. So far as we have any definite evidence, this region was the earliest home of civilized man. It is here indeed that the Bible places the Garden of Eden, the seat of the creation. The entire valley is dotted with mounds or hills which are the tombs of long-buried cities Germany, France, England, and the United States have all sent scientific expeditions to delve into these mounds, and many of the hills have been carefully explored, though the Turkish Government, which nominally rules the now half-desert valley, has done everything to obstruct the work of the excavators. In this way, Babylon and Nineveh, the two chief ancient cities of the region, have been thoroughly explored, and are proved to have been capitals of comparatively late growth. Babylon, the older of the two, was probably founded by the conqueror, Sargon, who lived about 3800 B.C.

Far older cities than these have recently been discovered; and what seems to have been the very oldest of all, "earth’s earliest city," was unearthed in 1904 by an expedition headed by Dr. Edgar J. Banks. Dr. Banks has written an interesting book describing his expedition, and we here give in briefer form a summary of his work from his own pen. He believes the name of this ancient city to have been Udnun, though the mound of ruins is known to the present inhabitants of the region as Bismya.

IN a sand-swept belt of Central Babylonia, that country of ancient ruins, in a region dangerous and deserted because far from water, and on the border of the territory of several hostile Arab tribes, lies the low ruin of Bismya. Few explorers have ever visited it, and those few did so at the peril of their lives. Dr. Peters of New York, while excavating at Nippur, discovered at Bismya a day tablet of an ancient date. German explorers are reported to have said that the ruins originated with the civilization of the Arabs. However, not only the age of the ruins, but the name and history of the ancient city of which they are composed, continued a mystery until recently.

In the autumn of 1900, application for permission to excavate the ancient Babylonian city of Ur was submitted to the Sublime Porte. A year spent at the Turkish capital in pushing the application from one department to another resulted only in a refusal. Permission to excavate at other points was then requested, with the same result, and it was not until the autumn of 1903 that an American fleet, then in Turkish waters, forced from the Turks an irade, permitting the excavation of Bismya.

A long journey of a month across the Arabian desert to Bagdad, and another week southward into Babylonia, brought me to Bismya in company with an intriguing Turkish commissioner who had been instructed to place every possible obstacle in my way, and with a few hardly less loyal native servants.

With the workmen employed from the nearest tribe at the rate of twelve cents a day, wells were dug through the hard crust of the surface and the loose sand beneath, but with repeated failure. Finally on Christmas day, 1903, water was reached at a depth of thirty-five feet; though bitter, it was drinkable, and one of the difficulties which had kept previous excavators from Bismya was removed. The work of excavation was begun on that Christmas day.

The first view of Bismya was disappointing. The fear that the ruins might not date from a great antiquity was increased by their slight elevation above the surface, for nowhere do they exceed forty feet in height. They consist of a series of parallel ridges, about a mile long and half as wide. Intersecting them near the center, and dividing the ancient city into two parts, is the bed of a former canal.

An examination of the surface of a Babylonian mound may reveal the nature and the age of what one may expect to find beneath. Most ruins are covered with the fragments of broken pottery, and at Bismya the potsherds were so numerous that the ground beneath was in places invisible. If among the potsherds are glazed fragments, the surface of the ruin at least does not date from Babylonian times, but if fragments of polished stone vases, an occasional flint implement, and small, rounded bricks appear, the ruin is of the greatest antiquity. Such were the objects upon the surface of Bismya, and the fear that the ruins were modern was dispelled.

At the excavations the workmen are divided into gangs consisting of the foreman with a pick, two assistants with triangular hoes, and several men with baskets to carry the dirt to the dump. The gang begins the work half way up the slope of the mound by digging a trench toward its center. Whenever a wall is discovered, the trench follows it to a doorway and into the interior of the structure. At Bismya gangs were placed at the four sides of the square mound which rose from the bed of the ancient canal; its shape suggested the ruins of a staged temple tower.

The result was the discovery of the oldest temple in the world. The walls of the tower soon appeared; the summit was cleared, and the first inscription discovered upon the surface was a brick stamped with the name of Dungi of 2750 B.C. Just beneath it were other bricks bearing the name of UrGur of 2800 B.C.; a little lower appeared a crumpled piece of gold with the name of Naram Sin of 3750 B.C., and just below that level were the large, square bricks peculiar to Sargon of 3800 B.C., probably the first of the Semitic kings of Babylonia. Although we had dug but a meter and a half below the bricks of Dungi, we had revealed several strata extending over the period from 2750 B.C. to 3800 B.C., or more than a thousand years, and still eleven meters of earlier ruins lay beneath us. We dug lower; unknown types of bricks appeared, and two and a half meters from the surface we came upon a large platform constructed of the peculiar plano-convex bricks which were the building material of 4500 B.C. Shafts were sunk through this platform and through stratum after stratum of the mud, brick, dirt, ashes, and potsherds below. Five and a half meters beneath the surface we discovered a large bronze lion terminating in a spike. At a depth of eight and a half meters were two large urns filled with ashes; two meters below them was a smaller urn, and away down upon the desert level, fourteen meters from the surface, the ground was strewn with fragments of baked, thrown pottery of graceful design. We were then down among the beginnings of things.

The few upper strata of the ruins could be dated from the inscriptions which they contained, but below them was nothing to guide us but the depth of the debris in which the Various objects were buried. The upper two and a half meters represented the period 2750-4500 B.C. Then how long a time is represented by the remaining eleven meters of the ruins beneath? No one can say. One may only surmise that the early Mesopotamians who first settled in the plain, and who formed upon the wheel the graceful pottery still found there, lived fully ten thousand years ago, and perhaps earlier. So great was the antiquity of the ruin which we had feared might be modern!

As the earth was removed from the edge of the platform of plano-convex bricks, there appeared the ancient refuse-heap of the temple. Most of the objects which adorn the archeological museums of Europe were once discarded by the ancients as worthless, and this old temple dump proved to be a veritable treasure-house. Dozens of baskets of marble, alabaster, onyx, and porphyry vases, fragmentary and entire, were recovered. Some of the bases bore inscriptions in a most archaic character; others were engraved with strange designs or inlaid with ivory and stone. Representing almost every conceivable shape, they present a valuable contribution to the study of the earliest art.

Among the most interesting objects of a lower stratum at Bismya was a conch shell from which a section had been cut, so that it formed a perfect oil-lamp, while the valve of the shell served as a groove for the support of the wick. The sea-shell was the lamp of primitive man. In the temple dump appeared several alabaster blocks cut into the form suggested by the early shell lamp. Later, the lamps of stone were decorated with reticulated lines; the groove for the wick was ornamented, and in one example it terminates in the head of a ram. Thus the sea-shell is now known to have been the ancestor of the lamp which later was adopted by the Hebrews and the Greeks and then by modern nations.

Trenches were dug about the base of the temple tower, where there seemed to have been secret passages for the priests. While excavating beneath the west corner of the tower, a bright-eyed Arab excitedly called me to the trench, and pointed to a piece of white marble projecting from the clay. Transferring the agitated Arabs to another part of the ruin, I waited until the work of the day was over, and then, with my own hands, dug out the oldest statue in the world. It was lying upon its back as it had fallen from the platform above. In cutting away the hard clay at its feet, I found that the toes were missing, but they were recovered in fragments at the base. Then I dug toward the head, but at the neck the marble came to an end. The head was gone! We bore the heavy statue upon our shoulders to the camp, and there, placing it in a bathtub, we scrubbed away the earth which clung to it. Upon the right upper shoulder appeared an archaic inscription of three lines. Just a month later, while excavating at the farther end of the trench, a hundred feet away, two marble heads were found lying upon the floor in the corner of the chamber; one of them, when placed upon the headless neck, fitted it, and the statue was complete!

The statue is remarkable. Not only is it the oldest statue in the world, but it is the only perfect Babylonian statue yet discovered. The style of its art, its costume, its arms which at the elbows are free from the body, its location when found, and the archaic character of its inscription all point to a date not far from 4500 B.C., and justify the assertion that at that remote age Babylonian civilization was at its highest point. The brief inscription, containing a mass of the information for which we had been seeking, gave "Emach" as the name of the temple, "Udnun" as the city in which we were excavating, and "Daud" or David as the Sumerian king whom the statue represents. The names of the temple and city had appeared on the recently discovered Hammurabi Code, but the name of the king was unknown excepting as that of the Hebrew David who lived 3500 years later. The statue, although its discovery was a sufficient recompense for the excavations, finally resulted in closing the work at Bismya. During a revolution among the Arabs of the surrounding desert, our camp was raided, and among other things the statue disappeared. Later it appeared in Bagdad, and although it was chiefly through my own efforts that it was restored to the Turkish Government, the excuse for which the authorities had long been searching was at hand, and the excavations were suspended.

Excavations in the upper strata of the temple hill resulted in the unique discovery of the evolution of the brick. The earliest of all bricks found in the lowest strata were merely sun-dried lumps of clay, and it appears that bricks were not burned until about 4500 B.C., the date given to those of a plano-convex shape. Such bricks are flat on the bottom, where they were placed upon the ground to dry, and rounded upon the top, and instead of being laid flat they were set upon edge, herring-bone fashion, and cemented with clay or bitumen. The inscription which characterized the bricks of a later period had not yet appeared, but the kings who employed the plano-covex bricks conceived the idea of giving them a distinguishing mark by pressing the thumb into the clay before it was baked. That thumb-mark was the origin of the brick inscription. The bricks of later rulers were larger and less convex, and lines varying in direction and in number were drawn by the fingers to serve as marks. In 3800 B.C., Sargon adopted the large, square brick, the form of which continued to the end of the Babylonian Empire, and he appears to have been the first to employ an inscription. Bismya yielded three brick stamps of Naram Sin, the son of Sargon. Each was inscribed "Naram Sin, the builder of the temple of the goddess Ishtar." This long series of bricks discovered at Bismya, forty-five in number, not only shows the evolution of the brick, but presents the archeologist with a clue to the chronology of the earliest Babylonian ruins, enabling him to tell at a glance their relative dates.

It has long been a theory that the early dwellers of Mesopotamia burned their dead, for though Babylonian graves have been found in abundance, they date from toward the close of the Empire. At the south corner of the Bismya temple tower we came upon an oval chamber which had originally been covered with a dome. At one of its ends was a circular platform, about six feet in diameter, with a pit beneath it four feet deep. As the pit was cleared, it was found to contain two feet of ashes mixed with the sand which had sifted in. The smoke marks upon the adjoining wall, and the terrific heat to which the bricks of the platform had been subjected marked it as a crematory. The body to be cremated was placed upon a platform; flames from a furnace in an adjoining room, passing through a flue, consumed the bodies, and the smoke passed out through a vent above. The ashes, unmixed with the ashes of the furnace, were either gathered for burial in urns or swept into the pit below. This crematory, which was duplicated in a second chamber near by, explains the absence of early Babylonian graves.

The excavations at Bismya have given us our first picture of the life of the Babylonian of 6000 years ago. The statue of David tells us that his head and face were shaved, that his garment was a skirt hanging to the knees, and that his feet were bare. The temple tells us that his highly ritualistic religion required offerings to the gods and goddesses, that the dead kings were venerated and perhaps deified, and that the cremation of the dead in the temple was possibly regarded as a religious rite.

In the eastern parts of the ruins, which mark the residential portion of the city, little remained save the foundations of houses, and scattered implements. As in every age in Mesopotamia, few houses possessed more than a single room. The thick walls of mud brick admitted the light only through the doorway. The height did not exceed a single story, and the roof was probably flat. Earth served as flooring, and the only remaining furniture is an occasional divan of mud bricks built along the wall in the larger houses a cistern of clay was built into the floor, and then as now it was the duty of the daughters of the family to fill the earthen jars with the water of the canal in the plain below, and bring it to the cistern. Frequently, too, a house was provided with a system of drainage, which speaks well for the sanitary ideas of that age. Although 6000 years old, the city was built upon the ruins of others far older; the sewage was not allowed to run down the sloping sides of the mound, as in modern Oriental towns, but vertical drains constructed of tile rings were bunk through the earlier ruins to the desert sand below-sometimes a distance of thirty feet-

Now and then we came upon an old oven in which the housewife of sixty centuries ago baked her bread. It was built up of clay, like a huge jug, with an opening at the top, and a small hole at the bottom for draft. Were these ovens not found among ruins of undoubted antiquity, they might be mistaken for the remains of a modern Bedouin encampment. Of the household utensils, few remain. Pots were found in abundance; stone saws, axes, and mortars were less common; bronze needles and knives came to light, but were so corroded that they were preserved with difficulty. The occasional discovery of small terra-cotta bas-reliefs suggested a desire to beautify the walls of the houses, and small clay images, probably the household gods, spoke of the occupants’ piety.

More interesting than all else are the toys with which the child of 6000 years ago played. In one house was a baby’s rattle of clay; it still produces a noise worthy of entertaining a modern child. Sheep, horses, elephants, and pigs of clay, and of a form unlike anything conceived by the modern child, were the toys of that day.

We do not yet know whether every Babylonian of that age could write, but in many of the houses were found tablets of clay upon which were recorded the private contracts of the owner. In parts of the ruins were clay letters still in the original clay envelopes in which they had been sent.

The Babylonian was essentially a warrior, for most of the bronze objects which the ruins of his home have yielded are spearheads (both flat and round) and arrow-heads. About the thick walls with which he fortified his city were found traces of the fierce battles which he had fought. At its outer edge, just where the moat may have been, were thousands of the sling-balls employed in the wars of those days. Their location shows that they were hurled from without the city at the inhabitants upon the wall, but many of them, striking below their mark, fell into the trench-Though the date of this prehistoric battle is uncertain, its result is apparent.

It seems that the city fell into the hands of the besiegers. Its temple was plundered; the statues were beheaded and thrown from their pedestals, and the chambers of the priests were razed. The fate of the people and their homes could not have differed from that which usually befell Oriental cities in time of war. The prosperity of Udnun departed, its civilization came to an end. It was not until 3800 B.C. that Sargon, perhaps one of the first of the Semitic kings in Mesopotamia, built another city upon its ruins.

¹Reproduced from Putnam’s Magazine by permission of G. F. Putnam’s Sons, of New York and London.