1 - Defining Time and Space

Summary

The student who tries to penetrate the essence of Assyro-Babylonian literature will have to put aside all conventional methods of examination.

– Edward Chierra, They Wrote on Clay, 1965, 44

It was a dry place back from the river, pockmarked by the recent rains and with weeds luxuriating in the basins. When there was a wind, it could be positively pleasant, even in the very hot afternoons of summer. It was not at all the blowing sand of other deserts that he had expected. It was not the American Southwest but more like the fruitful plains of the Midwest, which could in a bad year turn inhospitable, especially if the wind kicked up the dirt.

Later he would stand in such a dirt storm, and his mouth would fill with grit – and laughter, too, because he and his crew could accomplish nothing while the wind howled and the grit blew beneath the perfectly blue skies. Treated properly, watered properly, this place could be a paradise, he thought. Then he remembered that in the very early stories, including some from the Bible, it actually had been depicted that way:

A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon, meaning Frisky, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, meaning Sandy, where the gold is. The gold of that land is good; bdellium, a gum for incense, is there, and lapis lazuli, the prized stone of deep blue. The name of the second river is Gihon, meaning Bubbly, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush in Africa. The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Assur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (Genesis 2:10–14, after the Jewish Publication Society)

This was my own first impression of the part of Syria on the Euphrates, where I first encountered what was long ago called Mesopotamia. I was working as a dirt archaeologist, with emphasis on dirt, and I was hoping the team would discover some cuneiform tablets that I could read. That eventually happened. But meanwhile, I got very dirty and very tired. The parts of the Middle East where most people live and have lived for millennia are not really deserts, or at least not always deserts. They can flourish and frequently have.