Ancient Babylonia: A Case Study

Preface

This was intended to be an introduction to a book on sustainable computing. The hope was to dedicate a certain portion of the book to a sort of exegesis of historical materialism without calling it such. As of right now (February 2024) the book has not progressed in any meaningful direction.

        A girl born in America at the turn of the 21st century could hardly imagine a world without the computer. Her entire life would be met with an uncountable number of interactions with digital technologies powered by distant electric power plants. Her world is a binary one, with fully-formed analog signals pushed through Fourier transformations and flattened to a lower dimensionality. This world is both distinctly measurable and wonderfully knowable. The many mysteries of the world which reveal themselves to children—“why is the sky blue?”, “what really is a star?”, “how big is the ocean?”—have answers that can be retrieved instantaneously.

It may strike her that life must have always been like this. That a person’s knowledge of the world was only bounded by their willingness to search for the answer. That an answer could always be had.

Any adult knows, of course, that such a notion is naive. The digital computer is only a very recent thing, and the Internet much more recent than that. Yet it is not hard to find those who will claim that things have always been the way that they are now, at least in some form or another; that human beings have an innate nature, one that forever dictates the way we look at the world. But, perhaps there were times in the past when people thought differently about the world—when what was available to them then was different from what is now available to us.

One could rewrite the introductory paragraphs as follows:
        A girl born in Mesopotamia at the turn of the 22nd century BCE, in, say, the Sumerian city of Nippur, could hardly imagine a world without the massive temple of Enlil. Her life would be met with an uncountable number of interactions with the irrigated channels of the Euphrates. Her world is an analogue one, she comes in contact with nature with little mediation. This world is both distinctly measurable and wonderfully knowable. The many mysteries of the world which reveal themselves to children—“why is the sky blue?”, “what really is a star?”, “how big is the ocean?”—have answers that can be retrieved through conversations with local town elders and members of the priesthood.
        It may strike her that life must have always been like this. The gods spoke to their children through omens and kings had always ruled the lands^[1]. She could not conceive of it any other way.

This exercise is not a literary one, but a crude attempt to show that our mental conceptions are very much tied to the material reality that we inhabit. Our world is not the same world as the ancients’; however, this is not to say that they have nothing to teach us. In fact, history can be rather illuminating in showing how one’s circumstances shape the ways in which one thinks.

        This chapter will focus on the lives and structure of the ancient Mesopotamians in an effort to convey the method that this book will utilize in further chapters. We will stress how personal and popular beliefs derive from the means through which people produce the necessities of life and use those products to reproduce themselves. We will show the peculiar nature of ancient Mesopotamian mathematics and how it developed from a simple, practical need for accounting—ultimately making the connection that the digital computer comes from the same base, concrete realities (albeit more modern ones).

The Formation of Surplus

        The story of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, is over 100,000 years old.  Much of this story has been lost to time, as recorded history does not properly start until long after the formation of cities in Ancient Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, and what we can gather from archeological excavations can only provide hazy impressions of what went on before human beings wrote about their new formations. For tens of thousands of years our ancestors survived through the act of foraging: grabbing various cereal grains, nuts, berries, and whatever else was in their reach. These distant peoples lived in bands consisting of dozens (and sometimes even hundreds) of individuals. They lived their lives without any well structured hierarchies; life was a cooperative affair. Major decisions were made in tandem and disagreements were settled not with war, but with the “departure of one of the parties to the dispute.”^[2] It would be far too difficult to survive if all members of these band societies were in constant competition with one another^[3].

        Things did not stay this way, however. Roughly 10,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia these not-so-early humans began cultivating crops and connecting themselves to specific sections of soil. This came as a result of natural shifts in climate, cooling the region and making it more arid; “there was a decline in the availability of naturally occurring wild grains and a fall in the size of the antelope and deer herds”^[4]. A significant change in climate necessitated a significant change in the techniques used to acquire sustenance. Our many thousand year old bands wished to maintain their position in the “Fertile Crescent” without sacrificing the foraging communities they had lived in their whole lives. Thus agriculture was born.

        By approximately 6000 BCE most crops were cultivated, basic herd animals were domesticated, and irrigation systems were established. Humanity had achieved a complete revolution in the way life was reproduced. No longer did they have to rely on what was ready-at-hand through the simple convenience of nature, but they could now transform nature to provide a veritable bounty. Simple subsistence foraging was no longer the way of the world. Agriculture yielded an amount of food beyond which the clans could consume, a surplus product.

        With the advent of surplus crops came the simple question of “how exactly should we handle all this extra stuff?”. The answer to that was just as simple: build a house to store it in. With the development of agriculture came the first true instance of what we call the “division of labour” (the splitting up of jobs between different people). That being the case, it seemed only natural that there should be a person dedicated to the maintenance of storehouses, a new invention of incredible importance. A storehouse was not simply a place to store excess grain, it was a safe haven which supplied succor in times of famine. Those that guarded the storehouse soon became the arbiters of life itself. It was they who decided who lived and who died when there was scarcely anything to eat. “The storehouses were the first temples, their superintendents the first priests.”^[5]

        The accumulation of agricultural surplus must have left a distinctive imprint on the mental conceptions of the Mesopotamians. We find that “from about 6000 BCE, long before writing, Neolithic villagers used simple geometric counters in clay and stone to record exchange transactions, funded by agricultural surpluses.”^[6] These “receipts” were not uniformly constructed in any particular way that can be easily deciphered, meaning their exact use or the quantities they represented are unknown. What they do tell us is that ancient man recognized the usefulness of keeping checks on the quantity of grain available at a given time, even before the advent of a formal writing system. This leads credence to the idea expressed by Norman Yoffee that the “linguistic prehistory of number systems, that is, the commonality of terms for numbers across many related languages, must long precede the appearance of any writing system.”^[7]

        The agricultural revolution brought with it just as many changes to the natural world as it did to the social world. Originally, the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia survived on what is known as “dry farming”, the most primitive form of farming which relies purely on rainfall, typically done in a dry climate. Although dry farming is more than capable of producing a liveable crop yield during normal environmental conditions, it has one striking point of failure: the case of a drought. It is possible that droughts, and the famines they must have caused, spurred the ancient Mesopotamians to seek out further lands, eventually leading them to the lagoon-like marshlands of southern Mesopotamia. Our travelers would soon find that these lands were perfect for cultivation and animal husbandry. The waters were teeming with fish and the soil was more fertile than the mountainous regions they arrived from. Settlers built their reed and mud huts on these wetlands, and quickly learned methods to drain the excess water surrounding them; some suggest that it’s possible that this is what caused the inspiration for irrigation^[8].

Irrigation is the simple act of manipulating the flow of the natural streams of water which cut through a piece of land. What would naturally be a chunk of land devoid of any means of growing grain, could transform into a golden fertile bounty. The crops themselves would also be transformed. Two row barley indigenous to mountainous regions of northern Mesopotamia was brought to the newly irrigated fertile plains of the south. The indigenous strains then morphed into the higher yield variety known as six row barley^[9]. The new lifegiving technique of irrigation not only multiplied humanity, but also the crops themselves!

The implications of this radical change in the production of life is almost unfathomable. Mesopotamians cut through the earth to sow seeds, fallow the land, and reroute water as a means to reproduce themselves and stay alive in a hostile environment. What they may not have realized, however, is that they were cutting through the very fabric of societal organization while doing so.

The Creation of Cities

        The term “Mesopotamia” means “land between the rivers” in Greek. We’ve been speaking of this land as a single entity, as if all those who lived within the Fertile Crescent believed themselves to be of one people, united together in friendship. This could not be further from the truth. Mesopotamia consisted of a variety of different groups of people and wide swathes of cities and city-states in which those groups of people dwelled. To the north were the Akkadians, a semitic people who immigrated to Mesopotamia around 2900 BCE, who called cities like Agade, Sippar, and Babylon home. To the south were the Sumerians, a people whose origins are not well known but who adopted many traditions from the Ubaid people that came before them, who built many great cities including Kish, Uruk, Ur, and Lagesh. Much of ancient Mesopotamian history involves the intermingling of these two peoples and the shifts of power that occurred between them. It should be made clear that Sumerians and Akkadians did not keep to their own, neither did one have great hatred for the other, or great love for their own. In fact, a people identified itself not within the racial or national lines that we might see today, but primarily with the city they lived in.

        One should not hold the impression that ancient cities were devoid of inhabitants or ghost towns filled with sand. Cities in the south could hold populations of approximately a hundred people per hectare. The Sumerian city of Uruk was approximately 541 hectares (~2 square miles)^[10], meaning that it could have possibly held fifty thousand inhabitants within the city walls! The cities themselves were not necessarily relegated to what was within its walls, as the outskirts were where most people lived in order to cultivate the land. This leads some Assyriologists to believe that approximately a hundred thousand people could be within the jurisdiction of a given city (although a number that high would only be reached during a particularly prosperous era)^[11].

        In the above section, we detailed one way in which human beings adapted to new climates and obtained never before seen surpluses: revolutions in productive techniques. We neglected to mention another way through which surplus could be attained: war. Although a storehouse begins as the perfect solution to the issues of surplus production, it soon reveals an entirely new problem, the problem of its protection. What was initially a soothing beacon of life for when things turn sour now becomes a shrieking call to all hungry neighbors who need to feed themselves. The construction of the city then comes partially as a need to protect a group’s surplus from the jealous eyes of others, and partially as a way to centralize production around the easy loading and unloading of said surplus.

        The towns themselves were built of mud, as clay was the most abundant natural resource available to the Mesopotamians. Houses were piled up as mud (pisé), or as masses of clay pressed together (adobe), or as sun-dried bricks mixed with organic material held together by gypsum mortar. The winter storm seasons would see homes in constant repair by the inhabitants. Buildings were sturdy, but that did not mean that the odd collapse would never happen^[12]. This is to say that the home was constructed of the local land itself, very little of what was used was imported.

        Cities were not always ruled by individual monarchs who held total power. Only by the third millennium BCE was kingship on the rise, a result of increased warring in the region. Even then the king had no power during peacetime and his position was subject to popular opinion. Only when warring became chronic did kingship solidify (largely a result of the kings having both an army and a labour force in the form of conquered slaves). Sargon the Great (2334-2279 BCE), the first ruler to unite Mesopotamia under one king, was also the first king to have a standing army; prior to him all other rulers had to conscript troops as needed^[13].

        The rise in kingship, as well as the formation of city-states, saw a change in the operational functionings of the countryside. No longer did one give what they could afford to the communal surplus storehouse, but now they were forced to give based on the whims of the current monarch. The countryside also became a fertile battleground for rival city-states; a decisive subsumption of one patch of land from an enemy could mean the difference between famine and satisfaction. This does not mean that communally owned land ceased to exist in ancient Mesopotamia after the formation of cities; there’s evidence^[14] to suggest that it survived, but manifested itself in different ways. What it does mean, however, is that politically the countryside became subservient to the city even though the city was dependent on the grain produced by the countryside.

        What remained somewhat constant throughout the early formation of surplus and the creation of cities was the role that the temple played. The temple functioned as the spiritual and economic lynchpin to the entire Mesopotamian city economy. There was little distinction between the economic roles that the priests played and their religious roles.^[15] Perhaps the economic aspect was sublimated under the religious, but what is certain is that the Mesopotamians drew no line in the sand in regards to determining the powers given to the early priests. Their lot was the management of surplus and the administration of religious ceremonies. Both of these two tasks were no small undertakings as each would require a shrewd system of considered planning to function properly. Much how the change in climate and material reality necessitated the development of agricultural practices, so too does this new organizational structure require a fresh technology to operate smoothly.

The Emergence of Writing

        It should come as no surprise to the reader that writing emerged at much the same time as cities, and the temples contained therein, began growing to sizes greatly beyond their original meager scope. We find the first instances of writing around the late fourth millennium BCE (~3100 BCE) in Sumeria. These writings take the form of clay tablets used almost exclusively as methods of accounting. The tablets would essentially amount to long lists of commodity transactions written in ancient Sumerian pictographs (which later developed into the cuneiform style that many might already be somewhat familiar with). Nearly 85% of recovered tablets from that period of time depict commodity transactions, with the remaining 15% containing lexical lists of officials, commodities, and animals^[16]. Literature and religious inscriptions are not found until after this “Protoliterate” era around the beginning of the twenty ninth century BCE.

        As stated earlier, writing did not provide the first system of accounting. Early accounting devices included wooden sticks, the loom, and the abacus. What writing did provide for the first time was the ability to store permanent records and officiate transactions. Most tablets functioned as clay contracts: Alice gives Bob X amount of a commodity in exchange for Y amount of another commodity (with however many conditions that may be added on to the transaction). These hardened clay blobs would then be “signed” by a variety of witnesses to verify its authenticity. A written contract eases the pressures on local council members to dispense justice for claims of illegality. One could now simply point to a given contract as proof that a party was supposed to have acted in a certain way.

        Before the advent of writing, transactions would be a bit more muddled. There was no formal way to record the necessities of a particular trade agreement^[17]. Two parties would engage in trade and then share with each other a clay token for some sort of transactionary piece of mind. The precious goods traded would not only be given an associated token, but also itself be wrapped in an envelope of clay, perhaps to indicate a lack of tampering. Eleanor Robson, in her book Mathematics in Ancient Iraq, suggests that protoliterate peoples must have recognized the redundant nature of that act, as they soon began giving goods wrapped in clay with only the impressions of the tokens indented on their supple facades. It is likely that these impressions gave birth to the initial imaginative thought of systematic writing.

        The skill of writing was not shared by all who lived in Mesopotamia as only a select few of the population ever attained literacy. Most people, including priests, kings^[18], governors, and judges, were illiterate. Education was a luxury that the poor could not afford, but it was one that kings were more than willing to patronize. Writing officiated legal decrees of rulers and allowed for them to communicate with others outside of the city boundaries. As we might find it unfathomable to dream up a bureaucracy devoid of an infinite array of paper forms, the ancients might have been unable to imagine a temple system without a vast collection of clay tablets.

        The desire to keep accounts was most likely spurred by the enormous amounts of food given to the temple administrators. One text listed the daily total as: over five hundred kilograms of bread, forty sheep, two bulls, one bullock, eight lambs, seventy birds and ducks, four wild boars, three ostrich eggs, dates, figs, raisins, and 54 containers of beer and wine.^[19] Initially, temples were managed exclusively by the priests themselves, but as time went on temples found themselves “professionalized”. This meant that local rulers would appoint accountants to handle the administration of the temple economy.

        Temples were almost always placed at the center of a city and were always built on raised platforms. No matter where a person was in any given city, they would be able to see the towering religious structure. Although no temple has survived the passage of time intact, it is estimated that some were hundreds of feet tall. Within these massive buildings were rooms wherein the priests would attend to their various religious duties in an effort to maintain the good temperaments of the gods. Those most important to the functioning of society were not just the priests themselves, but their temple workers.

        Temple workers contributed to the economy more than anyone else within the city walls. They were individuals ranging from those sold into slavery to pay off temple debts, to those conscripted into work from the palace (in the era of “professionalization”), to those who volunteered to work for their city’s chosen god. Most temple labourers were under the classification of guruš, or semi-free workers. The classification of “semi-free worker” comprised all individuals who were not slaves, but were not necessarily “free”. This meant that they were not “owned” by the temple, as the slaves were, but they also had little to their own name. Each semi-free worker received a monthly ration as payment for the work performed.^[20] Not only did administrators have to keep abreast of the multitudes of offerings brought to them on a daily basis, but they also had to keep track of an immense labour force and the payments they incurred.

        Temples did what they could to expand their land holdings, after all they were responsible for maintaining an agricultural surplus in the event of a famine. Frequently, a temple would find itself with far too much land for the priesthood and its workers to till themselves. This gave rise to the advent of tenant farming: a tenant would receive seed, animals, and tools, for which he paid a set percentage of his harvest in return. The proportions varied given a particular contract and a particular city’s mores, but on average it would work out to about a third of the crop going to the landlord and two thirds going to the tenant. If a given plot of land proved to be infertile, the burden fell on the tenant and he would be forced to make up the debt in some way or another. This could result in the tenant selling himself or a member of his family into temple slavery.

        Loans were not only dished out by the temple bureaucracy, but also by private peoples and those who administered lands for the king. In fact, the temples were rather lenient with their loans. In times of famine the temples would often loan barley out free of interest—this may not seem like such a benevolent act, but barley was normally loaned at an interest rate of 33% in the Old Babylonian period (2000-1800 BCE)^[21]; however, the temples would still demand repayment, as what was taken was not a gift but a loan in the truest sense. The overwhelming majority of loans came in the form of personal consumptive loans, meaning loans that were for the direct use of individual debtors; consumptive loans are the opposite of productive loans, which are loans taken with the intention of reinvesting what was borrowed and transforming it into capital.

        Debt hovered over ancient Mesopotamia like a great stench for millenia. Royal edicts of debt relief, called mīšarum, were decreed in efforts to quell the ever mounting debt crises that developed throughout Mesopotamia. Mīšarum contained a variety of policies: the cancellation of the settlement of the arrears owed to the palace by its dependents, the cancellation of private debts issued for consumption, manumission of citizens enslaved through indebtedness, cancellation of the payment of lease on royal lands, etc. These royal regulations were not automatically fulfilled, an individual would have to make a claim in front of the local council judges (a further incentive for the proliferation of the written word). Although helpful to many who found themselves ensnared within a web of their own misfortune, these antediluvian “debt relief packages” would not undo all of the damage caused by the debt-driven economy.

Often, a landowner would be forced to sell his land to a creditor to make good on a consumptive loan of barley in times of famine. Since he sold his land under duress, the political bureaucracy of the Old Babylonian era would maintain that the original landowner still lays a claim to the land sold. Once a mīšarum was put into effect, the original landowner would be able to retrieve the land he sold to the creditor, but only up to the value of the original loan. It was not likely that the original landowner owned exactly as much land as was equivalent to the original loan taken, which meant that the creditor got to keep all of the extra land sold to him that was not covered by the original price of the loan! We see here a deeply complex system which could not function without a robust system of accounting and a means through which to perform detailed calculations.

        As the tax codes and financial laws of Mesopotamian society increased in complexity with the further development of cities, so too did the laws of inheritance. Once the patriarchal family unit took hold some time in prehistory it was established that the eldest son inherited the land of the deceased patriarch. This case holds true for the early years of ancient Mesopotamia. As times changed, rival brothers sought to change the old ways. By the Old Babylonian period inheritance became a somewhat complicated affair. Although the exact proportions vary from case to case, on average the Babylonian household was split in such a way that the eldest son wrought the largest chunk of the estate and the remaining brothers evenly split up what was left. Inheritance was sometimes a double-edged sword; brothers split up not just the credit balance of the dead, but also all of their debt^[22]. Many of Hammurabi’s laws pertain to issues of inheritance^[23], indicating that the topic was far from a clear cut extralegal affair.

        Unlike nowadays, where inheritance takes on the appearance of deed swapping and asset management, ancient Mesopotamian inheritance was a decidedly messy affair which led to, what might now be considered, unorthodox solutions. For instance, when a house was inherited by a family with multiple brothers, it was not given wholesale to just one brother. The house itself was split amongst the brothers! This would lead to the closing of hallways, the construction of new doors and doorways, and the general reworkings of the structure of the house. This slice-and-dice approach was carried over into the familial lands as well. And, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of the contradictions embedded in feudal land inheritance might infer, this disposition to cutting up land proved to be a sure-fire way to plunge a family into debt. Most small landowning families only existed at a subsistence level, meaning that they had little in the way of excess crops. Upon the death of the patriarch, the land would be split up amongst the brothers, and with it the total crop yield for the newly separated family units. Assuming the families survive and continue to reproduce, as time passes the lands begin to split into smaller and smaller portions. These smaller portions of land will eventually become too slight to support even a meager household, which would lead these desperate landowners to take out consumptive loans, sell themselves or their children into slavery, or sell their small plots of land and become tenant farmers. Here too we find a need to maintain complicated accounts and perform difficult calculations.

The Birth of Mathematics

        In the prior section we laid out a few reasons why the advent of a method of accounting and a rigorous system for calculation would be necessary to carry out the function of material life in ancient Mesopotamia. It behooves us then to discuss exactly what ancient Babylonian mathematics contained and how it was utilized.^[24] 

        Ancient Babylonian mathematics, as a formal system, essentially starts when the written word does, around 3100 BCE. Mathematics, for the Babylonians, was at the outset a practical pursuit. Administrative tasks became far too complex to carry out purely within the heads of those responsible for enforcing them. It boggles the mind how one might keep an accurate stock of the immense influx of information pouring into the temple without recording some sort of count chiseled in written memory. A number was precisely that: an instrument of counting.

        Robson writes that “Numbers, then [in the mid third millennium], were attributes of sets of countable objects (4 beer jugs, 600 sheep, middle-size grain storage jars) or properties of measurable objects (a field boundary of 10 rods—which can itself be thought of as a set of standard-length measuring rules).”^[25] Number did not take on a metaphysical content. Where the Greeks made a distinction between “Number” (the integers) and “ratios” (fractions, or the relations between numbers), the Babylonians did no such thing. One could very easily imagine having one and one sixth minas of silver, as it represented a countable quantity of weight.

        At first, the ancient Babylonians did not have a standardized system to represent numbers. Number emerged as the countable quantities of perceivable objects. It was not until the Old Babylonian period that the base sixty, or sexagesimal, system was crystallized; prior to then it wavered between both decimal (our base ten system) and sexagesimal systems.^[26] Landing on the sexagesimal system was most likely a result of metrology: sixty can easily be split into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, fifteenths, twentieths, and thirtieths (ten possible subdivisions!). If this system still feels like an archaic choice, the reader should remember that our current methods of measuring both time (sixty seconds per one minute) and angles (three hundred and sixty degrees in a full angle) are direct imports of the Babylonian system.

        Robson refers to the Babylonian system as the Sexagesimal Place Value System (SPVS), and we will use her notation when referring to it from hereon. The SPVS used positional notation, much the same as our very own decimal system. A contrast with Egypt, Babylonia’s distant neighbor to the West, should make the distinction clear. If an ancient Egyptian wanted to represent the number 7,382 in their number system they would write 𓆼𓆼𓆼𓆼𓆼𓆼𓆼𓍢𓍢𓍢𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓏺𓏺 where 𓆼 equals 1,000, 𓍢 equals 100, 𓎆 equals 10, and 𓏺 equals 1. One could also write 7,322 as 𓆼𓍢𓆼𓏺𓎆𓆼𓎆𓆼𓍢𓍢𓎆𓆼𓆼𓆼𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓎆𓏺 if one wanted to as the position of each cypher does not matter in the least bit. Each cipher is given a specific value and that value is tallied up with the next cipher’s value, which continues until all of the ciphers have been exhausted. If a Babylonian wanted to represent the number 7,382 they would write    𒁹𒁹 𒁹𒁹𒁹 𒁹𒁹, where the symbol 𒁹𒁹 equals 2 and 𒁹𒁹𒁹 equals 3. If an Egyptian, new to the Babylonian system, thinks that they can then write 7,322 as 𒁹𒁹𒁹 𒁹𒁹 𒁹𒁹, they are mistaken because the order does matter (here the number constructed by the Egyptian would be equivalent to 10,922). Carl Boyer, a historian of mathematics, supposed that the Babylonian adoption of a positional system came from the practical reality that the clay tablets they performed their calculations on were rather small and could only accommodate a compact system.^[27]

        What some fail to mention when discussing the SPVS is that the system was only used for calculation. It provided an abstraction from some of the clunkier metrological units which the Babylonians inherited from their own ancestors. “The SPVS temporarily changed the status of numbers from properties of real-world objects to independent entities that could be manipulated without regard to absolute value or metrological system.”^[28] One could consider it akin to the way some today might convert sexagesimal time units into its decimal representation in order to perform quick mental calculations and, once finished, convert it right back to the old units of measurement. Many scribes would smudge the sections of clay used in SPVS calculations, as it was considered bad form to show one’s work; a proper scribe would only have the final answer written in the proper units for the given item.

        The SPVS provided for incredibly precise calculations. The ancient Babylonians were able to calculate the square root of two with an error of less than .000001.^[29] They also were familiar with basic algebraic concepts, like solving for roots of an equation; using a technique known as the “method of false position” (a technique also known to the ancient Egyptians), they could solve many basic linear equations. Suppose, using our modern notation, one wanted to solve the equation x + x/3 = 16. One would then substitute 3 for x, yielding 3 + 3/3 = 16, or 4 = 16. Clearly 4 does not equal 16, but we do know that the ratio of 4 to 16 is 4, meaning that all we have to do is multiply 3 by 4 to get the true answer for x: 12. The scribe would then check his answer by plugging 12 into the original equation and find out that he did, in fact, get the right answer. It is important to note that mathematical exercises infrequently took such an abstract quality (what we have today is a historical development of thousands of years). Karen Nemet-Nejat provides an example problem taken from a cuneiform tablet:

“A cistern was 10 rods square, 10 rods deep.

I emptied out its water; (using) its water, how much of the field did I irrigate to a depth of 1 finger?

Put aside 10 and 10 which formed the square.

Put aside 10, the depth of the cistern.”^[30]

Keeping in mind that the text itself is nothing more than a bit of scribal schoolwork, we can still see that the ancient Mesopotamians had a rather practical eye when constructing mathematical problems.

        It is impossible to separate the political and economic context from the development of ancient Babylonian mathematics. Starting from approximately the year 2800 BCE, and continuing on for the entire duration of ancient Mesopotamian life, fields were surveyed with pegs and ropes. These ropes were carefully stretched around given sections of land in order to determine the precise (or not so precise) area contained within, primarily for the purpose of taxation. At first, only crude approximations were taken of the land surveyed. Surveyors would wrap a simple semi-rectangular parallelogram around the plot of land, record only two sides, and take the average by a simple multiplication of those sides.^[31] Eventually, as land claims became increasingly more fractured and the temple and palace bureaucracies increased in complexity, surveyors (around the 18th century BCE) began to record all sides of a given plot of land in field reports for a more accurate accounting of the area present.^[32] For the Babylonians, there was no distinction between the “theory” of mathematics and the realities of “practical” approximations. It is only with the arrival of the Greeks that we see a change in attitudes towards necessities of “proving” theorems and making distinctions between theoretical and applied mathematics in antiquity. This “deficiency”, however, did not stop the Babylonians from discovering the rules of the “Pythagorean theorem” centuries before Pythagoras was even born.

        There is much speculation associated with what separated the Babylonians’ great minds for calculation with the Greeks’ unparalleled capabilities of abstraction. The most fundamental difference between these two societies comes in their economies. The Babylonians did not have a “slave economy” in the sense that the Greeks did. Athenian households were nearly guaranteed to have at least one slave present, and the demographics of the population was thought to be one slave for every three freemen. Most productive workers in ancient Greece were slaves. The ancient Mesopotamians certainly owned slaves, but often that ownership was restricted to the palace and the temple; most productive workers were semi-free men, and few private individuals owned slaves^[33]. Scribes, like most within the city walls, had to work to earn a living; although they were often provided with land grants from kings upon accepting roles in city administration, they were still forced to engage in the drudgeries that such a job entails. Only in the Old Babylonian period (nearly a thousand years after the semi-formalizing of a mathematical system), where the life of an administrator became a bit cushier, do we find instances of tablets that contain clear signs of scholars playing around with numbers. Perhaps it would not be such a stretch to claim that Babylonian mathematics took the form that was allowed by the material conditions surrounding its creation.^[34]

Since writing was a luxury only learned by the wealthy elite, so too was the knowledge of mathematics. It was not uncommon for shrewder members of the upper class to employ mathematical calculations for sowing rates in order to invest in the optimal possible harvest for their landholdings. Some even ascribed a spiritual power to numbers.^[35] Occasionally numbers would be used for cryptographic purposes: the names of the major gods were eventually written with numbers, with Anu, the head of the pantheon, being assigned the number sixty.^[36]

The Natural Religion

Even the high-minded abstractions of mathematics can be seen to emerge from the practical considerations of everyday life. This is not, however, a pleasure enjoyed only by the mystifying art of calculation; it is shared by the awe-inspiring act of mythmaking. The ancient Mesopotamian religion reveals itself as the practical activities of men spun into grand abstractions.

The beginnings of the Mesopotamian religion are hard to track properly, as writing came thousands of years after the basic animism of the region had to have taken root. Early man frequently found himself attributing a certain intangible essence to the world around him. Cursory glances into anthropological discoveries of early totemism will see the people of antiquity ascribing magical powers to the things in which they would readily come in contact with, particularly the animals they would live alongside and contend with for control of the natural landscape. Once these nomadic people begin settling down into particular regions and taking up larger agricultural products we see their animism focus on the major elements of nature.

“Sun, moon, vegetation, storms and bodies of water constitute the forces with which man is brought into frequent, if not constant, contact.”^[37] After many seasons of planting and experimenting with agricultural techniques it becomes clear that much of early man’s success and failure in the sowing of seeds depends on the natural world: the sun, the rains, the stormy winter seasons, etc. These forces of nature then start to take on greater meaning. They “decide” whether a village thrives or starves. And thus the gods are born.

We can track the development of the god Enlil to provide further evidence for this belief. Enlil is first known to the ancient Mesopotamians as the “lord of the mountains”, taking on no more responsibilities than that. A reader informed on the topology of Mesopotamia may have their eyebrows perk up at that title as there are no mountains in the area. Morris Jastrow claims that “there being no mountains in the Euphrates Valley, the further conclusion is warranted that Enlil was the god of a people whose home was in a mountainous region, and who brought their god with them when they came to the Euphrates Valley…”^[38]. We know from our discussion of two and six row barley that it is very likely that the original settlers of the Fertile Crescent were such mountain folk. Throughout time Enlil then takes on the titles of “lord of vegetation” and “lord of storms”.^[39] As the world of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia changes, so too does their religion.

Enlil is not the only god subject to change throughout the rich life of Mesopotamian society. Marduk, the war god of Babylon, started off as nothing more than the patron deity of the great city of Babylon. This was not uncommon at the time; in fact, every major city would have a god associated with it: Nippur had Enlil, Ur had Ninna (the moon god), and Uruk had An (the sky god). Citizens did not just identify themselves with the city they lived in, but also with the god they worshiped. Prior to the rise of Hammurabi in the 18th century BCE, Enlil was the de facto ruler of the pantheon and was accompanied by a consort named Ninlil (a deity of destiny); but, once Hammurabi rose to prominence and thus placed Babylon at the center of Mesopotamia, Enlil was usurped in popular belief by Marduk.^[40] It is no surprise then that Marduk found himself a new consort in the mythological pantheon: Ninlil, the former lover of Enlil. One could say that this was a cynical move on the part of the Babylonian priesthood to legitimize their claim on the lands of Mesopotamia, but this would be a gross simplification of the logic of the day. As there was no separation between palace economics and religious sentiment, so too was there no separation between political happenings and religious theodicy. Marduk must now be the head of the pantheon because Babylon was now the head of Mesopotamia. The actions on the heavens were mirrored on earth.

Although no king in Mesopotamia was considered a deity while alive, the institution of kingship itself was considered one devised by the gods to conduct human life. An old Akkadian proverb illustrates the opinion of the time: “man is the shadow of a god, and a slave is the shadow of a man; but, the king is the mirror of a god.”^[41] Some kings, like the fabled Sumerian king Gilgamesh, found themselves canonized after death. “Early kings boast of their economic activities, of cutting canals, of building temples, of importing timber from Syria, and copper and granite from Oman. They are sometimes depicted on monuments in the garb of bricklayers or masons and of architects receiving the plan of the temple from the gods.”^[42] In his introduction to his legendary codex, Hammurabi claims that Anu and Bell called him by name “to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over…and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.”^[43]All good and bad fortune that a king found was always a result of the favour, or disfavour, of the gods.

The Babylonian creation myth takes on two distinct forms: humans sprouted from the ground like plants, or mankind was created from clay mixed with divine blood. The first intimately entwined with the emergence of agriculture—humanity saved (or “born”) by the soil. The second connected to the single most abundant resource in all of Mesopotamia: mud. Man is surrounded by mud, he makes tools of mud, and he builds houses of mud; it requires no sophistry to demonstrate the importance of mud to the peoples of antiquity, and thus its outsized importance in the theology of human creation. We can see this infusion of divine blood in the creation myth of the Enuma Elish:^[44]

“My blood will I take and bone will I (fashion),

I will make man, that man may … (...).

I will create man who shall inhabit (the earth),

That the service of the gods may be established, and that (their) shrines (may be built).”

Not only do we see gods infused with blood, the life giving force of humanity, but we see that they created humanity so they could establish temples of worship. The circle of abstraction close in on itself: man sees spirit in nature, man turns nature-spirit into god, man worships god, god makes man to worship god. It is the practical activity of worship the gods are after. The gods wanted humans to labour for them: “[they] were regarded as an aristocracy of great landowners, the country’s powerful upper class.”^[45] The material world became one great tenant farm, reflecting the tenant farming performed daily by the semi-free Mesopotamian peasants.

        Although occasionally met with abstractions, many of the practices of Mesopotamian religious belief fall within the distinctly concrete. One such example can be seen in the legacy of totemism. Many believed that the gods themselves resided in their totems. This meant that if a totem was stolen by a rival city, their god was stolen too. The priests in the temple of Uruk during the Seleucid period went so far as to make sure that their divine statues were served two square meals a day; each meal was preceded by a bowl of water so that the god could wash up prior to eating. Before engaging in holy war, the gods of the Enuma Elish also sat down at a heavenly table to feast:^[46]

                “They made ready for the feast, at the banquet (they sat);

They ate bread, they mixed (sesame-wine).

The sweet drink, the mead, confused their (...),

They were drunk with drinking, their bodies were filled.”

        Philosophers throughout time have wondered when exactly food is transmogrified into flesh; the Babylonians felt it happened almost instantaneously. The killing of a sacrificial animal joined it and the god above into a spiritual unity: “the god in accepting the animal became, as it were, united to it, in much the same way as those who actually eat it.”^[47] What remained could be inspected, a residue of one’s divine commander. Often it was the liver that was paid special attention to by the bârû (literally “inspector”) priests. Barring the skin, the liver is the heaviest organ in the human body and contains ⅙ of a human’s blood; both traits likely causes for men of antiquity to ascribe the liver as the seat of the spirit.^[48] Since the liver was the seat of the emotions, and the gods left a sort of afterimage of themselves in the animals^[49] to consume, it would only be natural to conclude that an inspection of the liver would tell the scholarly magician how the god was feeling. A typical liver omen from Assurbanipal’s library shows the power of divination:^[50]

                “If the cystic duct is long, the days of the ruler will be long.

If the cystic duct is long, and in the middle there is an extended subsidiary duct, the days of the ruler will soon end.”

Simple material realities become warped and magnified.

        The underworld, too, is unable to escape the mundane trappings of everyday life. It was said that all souls found their way to the netherworld, a gloomy dark place that one could never leave. The underworld, same as the heavens, was ruled by a rich pantheon of gods. There was a complex bureaucratic government which mimicked the palace and temple systems of ancient Mesopotamia headed by King Nergal and Queen Ereshkigal. In the netherworld, there was no distinction between sinners and saints, only those who had been buried^[51] (who were granted the ability to drink water on couches) and those who were not (who were forced to shovel dirt into their mouths)—one exception being lepers who were segregated into their own part of the afterlife for fear of spreading their disease.^[52] Although the gods of the heavens rule over the material rewards of their human subjects down below, they never reward them with infinite pleasures, nor eternal damnation in the afterlife. Morality is saved as a pursuit of the living.

The contradictions present in the bounded moral religion of the Babylonians comes to a head in an ancient Mesopotamian precursor to the Book of Job called The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer. The Babylonian Job struggles with the fact that he lives his life as piously as possible, and yet is rewarded with nothing but misfortune. He laments:^[53]

“I prayed to my goddess, she did not raise her head.

The diviner with his inspection did not get the bottom of it,

Nor did the dream interpreter with his incense clear up my case

I beseeched a dream spirit, but it did not enlighten me,

The exorcist with his ritual did not appease divine wrath.

What bizarre actions everywhere!”

Not soon after he continues:

                “Who could grasp the intentions of the gods of the depths?

Where might human beings have learned the ways of a god?”

The gods are not knowable, mystical forces which come from inside one’s capacity to believe, but rather they are petulant, indignant children who must be pampered and appeased at all times. If the gods were incapable of providing eternal reward, and also were spotty even with the rewards they were capable of distributing, the only resort for the pious Babylonian would be to take pleasure out of the here and now, to enjoy what was currently in front of them. When Gilgamesh asks Siduri, the barmaid of the salvific shores in the myth, if she knows the path to eternal life she wisely replies:^[54]

                “Remember always, mighty king,

that gods decreed that fates of all

many years ago. They alone are let

to be eternal, while we frail humans die

as you yourself must someday do.

What is best for us to do

is now to sing and dance.

Relish warm food and cool drinks.

Cherish children to whom your love gives life.

Bathe easily in sweet refreshing waters.

Play joyfully with your chosen wife.”

A good life was one capable of being enjoyed in physical, concrete reality.

What Might Have Sustainability Meant to the Babylonians?

        As Jeremy Caradonna points out in his book Sustainability: A History “sustainability” is a distinctly modern concept that can be traced back only to as far as the eighteenth century. Even then it has only reached popular discourse within the past fifty or so years. If we take the contemporary, long-winded definitions of sustainability as some sort of locus point between “environment”, “economics”, and “equity” it would be difficult to say that the ancient Mesopotamians hold up to snuff. Any gesture towards “equity” would be dead on arrival considering the existence of a slave class. The same could be said for the categories of both “environment” and “economics” as it was not the ideals of the Mesopotamians which prevented them from stripping the earth, but rather a limitation in technology. It would be hard to imagine Sargon the Great and his lot willfully ending their imperial campaigns if they were capable of keeping their administrations running smoothly. Each and every large empire in Mesopotamia crumbled within a hundred years; the natural result of trying to expand far beyond the capabilities of their primitive means of production.

What the Mesopotamians did have, however, was a deep familiarity with the land and the world they inhabited. Although they might not have been equipped with the highly abstract idea of “sustainability”, they certainly thought about the best ways they could interact with their surroundings. We will now take some time to investigate how the ancient Mesopotamians interacted with their environment, and how their environment shaped their interactions.

The Rivers

One would be remiss to discuss the ecology of ancient Mesopotamia without mentioning the mighty rivers which cut through the region: the Tigris and the Euphrates. Both rivers begin in the mountains of eastern Turkey, rush their way through the modern day states of Syria and Iraq, and discharge into the Persian Gulf. The rivers would serve as godsends to the early settlers, who roamed their way southward from more mountainous regions for one reason or another.

Unlike the Egyptian Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates would not flood in time for the growing season. The Tigris would flood in April and the Euphrates in May; both right before the harvest. This meant that the flooding of each river was met with lamentation rather than rejoicement as it could spell doom for the unprepared farmer. This necessitated the creation of various means to protect against the annual natural disasters, such as the construction of dams. The maintenance of dams was particularly important as can be seen in the punishment for failing to do so in Hammurabi’s system:^[55]

“If any one be too lazy to keep his dam in proper condition, and does not so keep it; if then the dam break and all the fields be flooded, then shall he in whose dam the break occurred be sold for money, and the money shall replace the corn which he has caused to be ruined.”

Water from the rivers also had the tendency to create avulsions which could redirect the flow of an irrigation source, thus decimating a town.^[56] Oftentimes the damage to the town infrastructure would be too great to repair, forcing a total migration of the populace.

        Not only did the rivers bestow brilliantly life-sustaining waters, they also provided a natural means of transportation. Transportation of goods largely occurred on the Tigris and Euphrates. Roadside transportation was poor; even roads that might have been considered to be in good condition were unable to support wheeled vehicles, limiting the ability to transport large quantities of goods. Boats were constructed to haul massive shipments of grain between city states. Being upstream of a neighboring city-state brought with it great advantages. It was much faster to transport goods with the backing of the river's current than without it.^[57] Trade activity was localized on harbors built at the city-state’s connection to whichever of the two rivers they bordered. These harbors contained offices which controlled trade and regulated rates of exchange.

        The rivers were also used for the dispensation of justice. If the local council was charged with mediating a dispute of grave proportions (claims of perjury, sorcery, adultery, homicide, etc.) it could be settled through what was called the “River Ordeal”. If the council was undecided it could request that the accused party jump into the river. If the accused survived he would be considered innocent and be rewarded for his piousness; however, if the accused drowned, it was proof that the accuser was right all along.^[58]

Farming

        Life for the average Mesopotamian was a dedication to working the land. Grown plants accounted for ninety percent of the Mesopotamian diet, the remaining ten percent from eggs, cheese, milk and meat. Common vegetables included: onions, garlic, leeks, turnips, lettuce, and cucumbers; while common fruits included pomegranates and dates. All paled in comparison to the overwhelming importance of barley. “The production of barley [was] the most important component of Mesopotamian economy.”^[59] Barley was the perfect crop for the arid region as it needed less water than wheat, and was capable of standing up to higher levels of salinity. Barley was not just the soup du jour of the Mesopotamian diet, it also functioned as the universally accepted means of exchange. Although silver shows up on ration tablets, and as a unit of account in trade contracts, it was rarely used to facilitate exchange; it was barley that lubricated the engines of commerce. Those who wished to deal only in silver were punished.^[60] 

As towns grew into cities farmlands grew alongside them. Massive irrigation projects were undertaken, many were funded by kings and powered by slaves and conscripted labourers. Irrigation was perhaps the single most important advancement made for the maintenance and explosion of population in early antiquity, but it did not come without a cost. With the increased centralization came an increased localization of irrigation tracts which significantly increased salinity levels in the soil.^[61] Salts which naturally flowed through the Tigris and Euphrates would be deposited into the already naturally salty soils of the Fertile Crescent. The digging of canals only exacerbated this problem by dredging out all of the salts trapped deep within the soil.

Salinization became a major scourge in some sections of Mesopotamia. Lands would have to be fallowed in order to restore the soil to a state of plantable salinity.^[62] Although great for restoring crop yields, fallowing requires the land to remain dormant for the current growing season which would place stress on small landowners. Surveyors would classify fields as “good, hard to work, irrigated, at the inundation level, too high for irrigation, enclosed, and containing clay or salt.”^[63] In what could be termed a “sustainable” farming incentive, Hammurabi’s sixty third law states, “If he transform wasteland into arable fields and return it to its owner, the latter shall pay him for one year ten gur for ten gan,”^[64] meaning that a tenant farmer who improves the land of his landlord shall be rewarded. The ancient Mesopotamians were more than aware that their farming techniques were partially responsible for the transformation of the soil. The rest was up to the gods.^[65]

Renewable Resources and Recycling

        At no point in human history do we find a people who have solved the problem of waste; once a commodity has been used up it must either be done away with or reused for other purposes. The ancient Mesopotamians had no garbage disposal system to speak of, they simply tossed garbage onto the streets. Pigs and stray dogs played a pivotal role in the disposal of street garbage, gobbling up whatever they could. It was not uncommon for families to toss unwanted newborns in the street to be eaten by the dogs. Garbage would pile high enough to seep into the foundations of people’s homes, forcing them to create another foundation on top of the old one. What was so convenient about clay housing was that the materials could be sourced instantaneously and construction could be performed rather quickly. Wealthier homeowners who had accounting tablets would reuse them as floor packing rather than sourcing out new clay.

        The management of waste was not reserved exclusively for that of organic consumed materials. It was equally important for cities to create systems to help dispose of human waste as well. “The health of a community was directly connected to its ability to eliminate human waste without contaminating the water supply.”^[66] It was imperative that waste did not mix with the wells and reserves of clean water maintained by the palace estate. Palaces often had some semblance of an “indoor plumbing” system, with rudimentary toilets that let waste into channels not used for drinking water. Individual households had to manage waste removal on their own and were punished if they were caught endangering anyone else with foolhardy techniques.^[67]

        For larger building projects clay bricks were the material of choice. Bricks would be fashioned out of densely packed clay and would be left to bake in the red hot sun—there was no need to waste precious fuels when the sun did an equally fine job. Date trees were plentiful in Mesopotamia and responded well to the soil. Not only were their fruits consumed regularly, but they were also useful as a source of timber, which was rare in the region. Wood was so scarce that it was often mentioned in inheritance and purchase documents; kings boasted of the high quality timber they would source from foreign trade (or plunder). Nothing went to waste when a date tree was felled, its palm-wood and fronds “were used in the construction of furniture, roofs, and doors, whereas the fibers of the leaves could be used to make ropes, mats, and baskets.”^[68]

        The large workshops of the palaces and temples would do whatever they could to regularly recycle materials used in commodity production. “Furnaces were designated specifically for the recycling of metal into assayed ingots which would be redistributed as needed.”^[69] Pottery ovens were fueled with bountiful renewable resources like brush, straw, or dung cakes. It is unlikely that any of these practices were undertaken with explicit knowledge that they were “sustainable” in any sense of the word, all followed naturally from the limited productive capabilities of the time.

Summary

        The purpose of this chapter was to provide an overview of the ancient Mesopotamian way of life and show that their mental conceptions were bounded by their concrete, material realities. We discussed how the formation of surpluses led to the centralization of cities, the rise of kingdoms, and the formations of hierarchical systems of governance. It was then shown that writing was a tool which needed to be developed in order to plan these newly expanded societies. With writing came a formalized system of mathematics, essential to account for the immense quantities of surplus piling up at the temple gates. Loftier ideas of religion and spirituality were also contextualized into their place in history as reactions to, and instigators of, real phenomena. Finally, we showed how sustainability cannot necessarily be naively projected back into the minds of those in the past, but, nonetheless, the ancients performed certain actions that would certainly receive the enthusiastic stamp of sustainability today.

        This chapter functions as a microcosm of the method we will be applying the more recent history of the creation and development of the digital computer. The ancient Mesopotamians created SPVS out of a necessity to react to a rapidly changing world, and we will find that the Americans of the mid 20th century were under a very similar pressure. We will also find that the mode of production weighs just as heavily on a group’s decision making process and outlook on the natural world in the 20th and 21st centuries CE as it did in the 30th and 31st centuries BCE.

References

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