A Mesopotamian Trilogy

Abstract

I. La Civilisation d’Assur et de Babylone. By Dr G. Contenau, Conservateur des Antiquités Orientales au Musée du Louvre. Paris: Payot, 1937. 30francs.Fouilles de Telloh: sous la direction de H. de Genouillac. Vol. II, Époques d’Ur IIIe Dynastie et de Larsa. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1937. Vols. I and II. 400francs.The Music of the Sumerians. By F. W. Galpin. Cambridge University Press, 1937. 18s.These three works, all published in the same year, form a trilogy with the Tigris and Euphrates as a background. The Land of the Two Rivers, as historians have aptly called it, was from the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. a focus on which man converged from the cardinal points of western Asia. The earliest settlements were composed of farmers and hunters: in the south their pottery and the art of painting suggest that they were predominant with the Syrian hinterland and eastern Anatolia. Sometime before 3000 B.C. the invention of the wheel, of metal-working and writing produced an industrial revolution, which brought the young civilization of these early farmers to maturity. The beautiful painted pottery of A1 ‘Ubaid and Tall Halaf died out, partly because, as de Genouillac says, the invention of cuneiform writing made the pictorial writing of clay vases obsolete, and no doubt caused the skilful artisans of painted ceramic to apply themselves to the more paying craft of metallurgy, much as in western Europe in the first quarter of this century a horde of stable hands left the paddock for the garage and forsook the horse for the motor car.