A TALE OF TWO VALLEYS:

A TOTALLY NEW SUMERIAN ORIGIN MYTH

by Alfred D. Byrd

Once, thousands of years ago, there were two valleys where civilization was about to arise. The first valley, in the north of Africa, contained a wonderful river that flowed from mountains in the south through a desert in the north. Every year, just before time for planting, the river would flood its banks in the desert with rain that it had carried from the mountains; then, subsiding, the river would leave on its banks a fresh layer of soil on which the people of the valley could raise two or even three crops a year. The people of the valley were so fond of their wonderful river, which gave them life in the desert, that they built the entrances of all of their houses facing the river so that it would be the first thing that they saw when they rose every morning. In fact, it is not too much to say that the people thought of their river as their boyfriend or husband, for at certain times every year they would dance beside it and sing songs of love to it. We might think of the valley of this river as Happy Valley, or we might think of it as Hapi Valley, for Hapi was the people's name for their river, which we call the Nile. The people of the Nile, the Egyptians, are fascinating, well worth our studying them, but we will leave them for now, for they were not the first to found a civilization.

The first civilization arose in the second valley, to the north and east of the Nile, in a land that we now call Iraq. In contrast to the Happy Valley of the Egyptians, we have to call the second valley Sad Valley. Here there were two rivers that flowed from mountains in the north through a desert in the south. The Ancient Greeks, who made many of the names that we still use, called the valley of these two rivers Mesopotamia, The Land Between the Rivers. This name is not quite correct, because important events took place on both banks of both rivers, not just between the rivers. The Greeks really should have called the valley Bipotamia, The Land of the Two Rivers, but it is too late to correct their mistake now. The rivers carried rain from the mountains to the desert, but did so too late in the year to help crops planted in the spring and too early to help crops planted in the fall.

The bad timing of the rivers' flooding was not their only shortcoming. The river in the east, the Tigris, flowed straight south from the mountains and at first ran like a well-behaved stream through a rainy country where a people called the Assyrians would someday arise and terrify the world. When the Tigris reached the desert, however, where its water was actually needed, the river spread out over the desert, which was as nearly perfectly flat as land can be, in huge marshes where nothing grew but reeds, and where humans could live only by fishing from tiny reed boats. Despite its marshes, the Tigris was no trouble at all next to the river in the west, the Euphrates. This rose in the northern mountains only a few miles from the source of the Tigris, but wandered all over northern Mesopotamia before it finally turned south to run beside the Tigris. The Euphrates picked up massive amounts of soil in the lands through which it ran, and deposited this soil as huge mud flats in the desert, west of the marshes beside the Tigris. Like all other rivers that run over mud flats, the Euphrates would build up its banks with mud till it actually flowed above the surrounding plain, then would burst it banks in a flood, cover the plain with muddy water from horizon to horizon, and build up an entirely new set of banks, miles from the first, when the flood was over.

It was in the mud beside the Euphrates that the first civilization arose. This seems an unlikely place for such an event to happen, for, besides being in a rainless desert, the mud by the Euphrates contained no stone or metal, and produced only a few willows and palms along its banks for timber. To make matters worse, the desert was hot; in the summer it is not uncommon for the temperature to reach one hundred and twenty degrees there. If someone were to suggest to you, "Let's build our house on mud flats where it's unbearably hot, there's no rain, stone, or metal, and a flood's going to destroy everything every few years," you would probably tell such a person, "No, thanks, I can do better than that." In our way of thinking, no intelligent people would choose to live on the mud flats by the Euphrates. Since the ancestors of the heroes of our story, the Sumerians, were just as intelligent as we are, they probably did not choose to live there either. It is likely that they lived there simply because other peoples had already taken all of the other land in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, it was on the mud flats that the ancestors of the Sumerians settled, and on the mud flats that the Sumerians built the first civilization.

Life on the mud flats was hard for the people who settled there. Making hoes from reeds and baked clay, and sickles from baked clay, the people tried to raise barley and wheat by the banks of the Euphrates. Because the mud was fertile, the people of the mud flats could, by working from sunrise to sunset eight months out of the year, raise one good crop in a good year. Every few years, however, the rain in the northern mountains would be especially heavy, and the Euphrates, carrying the rain into the desert, would burst its banks in a flood and cover the land with muddy water from horizon to horizon. The flood would destroy in a day everything that the people of the mud flats had built for years, but the people had no time to mourn their losses, for they were busy trying to learn to swim or breathe mud. When those who survived the flood had a chance to rebuild their homes and farms, they would find that the river had moved miles away from where it last flowed. Even when no flood came, every few years the peoples of the northern mountains would come to the mud flats and steal what little the people who lived there had accumulated for themselves.

Living in such a terrible land as that of the mud flats tends to warp a people's mind. In Eastern Kentucky, where my people live, when a person says that he or she plans to do something, that person is likely to add the line, "God willing, and the creek doesn't rise." The people beside the Euphrates would have understood this line perfectly. Because of the hardness of their life, they became fatalists: that is, they believed that, no matter how hard a person works, everything that he or she does can be destroyed at any moment by events beyond his or her control.

Many fatalists just give up on life; they put on white robes, go to a mountaintop, and wait for the world to end. To the early Sumerians, however, giving up on life was not an option for them because of another depressing belief that they held. They believed that their gods had created them only to be the gods' slaves. According to the Sumerians, powerful beings in the form of humans had come from the sky to the mud flats beside the Euphrates. There these powerful beings molded mud into figures of humans and shouted at them, "Come to life, figures of mud!" When the figures of mud blinked their eyes and saw that they were lying on the ground, the gods shouted at them, "Why are you just lying there? Don't you know we want houses and clothing and food? Get to work and make us these things!"

Understanding that it is dangerous to argue with beings who can bring mud to life, the Sumerians got to work. They built large houses of mud for the gods, and small houses of mud for themselves, and large walls of mud around the houses in hope that the walls would keep the water of the next flood from sweeping the houses away. The walls also turned out to be useful for keeping the peoples of the northern mountains from stealing what little the Sumerians had accumulated for themselves. In hope of preventing the next flood altogether, the Sumerians built up the banks of the Euphrates; they also dug canals from it to carry its waters to resevoirs so that the waters would be available to the Sumerians all the year around. With these waters they could grow crops, not just by the banks of the river, but as far out in the mud flats as the canals could carry the waters.

Because the mud was fertile, the Sumerians, by working from sunrise to sunset eight months out of the year, could grow more barley and wheat than even the gods had any use for. Some of the grain the Sumerians used for baking bread and brewing beer for the gods, some of the grain they used for baking bread and brewing beer for themselves, and the rest of the grain they traded to the peoples of the lands around the mud flats for timber, stone, and metal. When the Sumerians received these, they thought, "Maybe, if we turn these into useful and beautiful objects, the gods will be pleased with us." Some of the useful and beautiful objects the Sumerians used for making the houses of the gods magnificent, some of the useful and beautiful objects the Sumerians used for making their own houses comfortable, and the rest of the useful and beautiful objects they traded to peoples of distant lands for spices, silk, ivory, precious stones, and gold.

In time the peoples of the lands around the mud flats looked at the land of the Sumerians and saw, rising from the mud, shining cities like nothing else that they had seen. The peoples of other lands were amazed at the Sumerians, who were richer, wiser, more powerful, and more influential than any other people of the earth. The Sumerians raised their eyes to the sky and said, "We owe it all to the gods, whose slaves we are"; then they turned their eyes to the peoples of other lands and said, "But we're better slaves than you are."

Moral: If life casts you onto a mud flat, start digging for gold.

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