This series has three easy 5 minute installments.
Introduction
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.
This selection is by Dr. Edgar J. Banks.
Time: 3800 BC
Place: Island of Crete
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 clay 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 excava tion 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. Al though 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 plat form 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 Hon 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!
We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history
Some History Moments selections posted before 2012 need to be updated to meet HM’s quality standards. These relate to: (1) links to outside sources for modern, additional information; (2) graphics; (3) navigation links; and (4) other presentation issues. The reader is assured that the author’s materiel is faithfully reproduced in all History Moments posts.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.