Archeological Excavation of Crete – 3

Today’s installment concludes Archeological Excavation of Crete,
our selection by Dr. Edgar J. Banks.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of three thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in Archeological Excavation of Crete.

Time: 3800 BC
Place: Island of Crete

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 nearby, 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 drain age, 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 sunk 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 6,000 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 spear-heads (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.

This ends our series of passages on Archeological Excavation of Crete by Dr. Edgar J. Banks. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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