SEARCHING FOR EDEN

BY BRIAN FAGAN

(Taken Time Dedectives, Simon and Schuster 1996; pages 147-165)

"And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden . . ." Genesis 2:8-10 tells the story of the Garden of Eden, the primordial home of man and woman, a paradise on earth. Then our earliest ancestors ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. God cast them out of Eden, placing to the east of the Garden a flaming sword, "which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life."

Eden, a paradise on earth. For centuries Westerners have lived with a sense of fallen grace. Since the Fall, the doors of Eden have remained shut, its location a complete mystery. For centuries, people have looked back over the tumultuous millennia of history, longing nostalgically for a Golden Age when the earth gave of its plenty and everyone lived lives of ease and luxury. Paradise on earth has taken many forms. Genesis tells us of Eden, Homer of "Olympus, where they say there is an abode of the gods, ever unchanging: it is neither shaken by winds nor ever wet with rain, nor does snow come near it, but clear weather spreads cloudless about it, and a white radiance stretches above it." No one was ever hungry, ever sick, ever beset by poverty in the biblical Eden or any paradise on earth.

Where was Eden? Did it ever exist? Nineteenth-century Christian dogma claimed Eden once lay in distant Mesopotamia. The "land between the rivers" was far off the beaten track, in the heart of the corrupt and decaying Ottoman Empire, ruled from Constantinople. Only a handful of European travelers crossed the Syrian Desert to the Euphrates, to the ramshackle town of Mosul on the Tigris, remarkable only for the dusty mounds of biblical Nineveh on the other side of the river. When French archeologist Emile Botta and Englishman Austen Henry Layard unearthed Assyrian civilization at Khorsabad and Nineveh in the 1840s, the devout remembered their prophet Zephaniah (2:13): "And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and he will make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste like the desert." Layard became a celebrity because people thought he had proved the Scriptures to be literal historical truth.

Layard was a man in a hurry, anxious for spectacular finds, ambitious for fame and fortune. In 1850, he came across a Nineveh palace chamber full of stacked clay tablets and cylinders. Each bore wedge-shaped cuneiform script so small it could be read only with a magnifying glass. Impatiently, he shoveled them into wicker baskets and shipped six crates of them home to the British Museum. He had unearthed the royal library of Assyrian King Ashurbanipal.

He also had created years of work for the mere handful of people who had mastered the Assyrian script. They labored over the royal library for more than a generation. George Smith was among the experts, a serious-minded banknote engraver with an obsession with cuneiform. Smith and his friends worked in a stuffy room just above the British Museum's steam-heating plant, poring over weathered script hour after hour in dignified silence. One day in 1872, Smith stood up abruptly and tore off his jacket. He waved a tablet in the air and pranced around the room in wild excitement. With some difficulty, his studious colleagues persuaded him to calm down and explain himself. Smith had come across a tablet that contained a reference to a large ship aground on a mountain. Immediately, he realized he had found an account of a flood that bore a remarkable resemblance to the story of the Flood in Genesis.

Some weeks later, a now properly attired George Smith translated his tablets before a large and distinguished audience that included a platoon of clerics, the scientific establishment, even England's prime minister. He told of a virtuous prophet named Hasisadra. Warned by the god Enlil of his intention to destroy all sinful humankind, Hasisadra built a large ship caulked with bitumen. He loaded his family aboard, also "the beast of the field, the animal of the field," every living thing on earth. Hasisadra's ark floated through the chaos of the flood, then ran aground on a mountain. He sent out a dove, which returned, then a raven, which did not. So Hasisadra released the other animals, became a god, and lived happily forever after.

Smith's revelations caused a sensation. Many believed he had found the ultimate proof the biblical account of the Flood, of the Creation, was indeed true. Seventeen lines of the story were missing, so the London Daily Telegraph paid for Smith to go to Nineveh to locate the vital fragments. Incredible as it may seem, Smith found them within five days. They can be seen to this day in the British Museum, duly marked "DT" (Daily Telegraph) in black ink.

George Smith himself suspected his "Chaldean account of the Deluge" was a late version of an ancient legend. Today we know for certain the "Flood Tablets" were a Babylonian copy of a far earlier folktale, one first written down by an earlier civilization that flourished not in Assyria but far downstream, in the low-lying plains between the Tigris and Euphrates, commonly called Mesopotamia. Some years before, in 1869, French epigrapher Jules Oppert had discovered this earlier urban society of the south from references on cuneiform tablets. He named them the Sumerians, people of the Land of Sumer (Mesopotamia).

Botta, Layard, and their successors found easy pickings at Khorsabad and Nineveh in the north. Layard was totally unprepared for the rigors of the south, where dust storms blew for days on end and visiting travelers were considered fair game for warring nomads. In 1850, he spent some weeks digging into the desolate mounds of Nippur in the heart of Mesopotamia. He employed large numbers of men to open up the dusty tells, or mounds. They unearthed massive mudbrick foundations and cuneiform-inscribed bricks, but nothing like the spectacular bas-reliefs and other finds at Nineveh. Layard gave up after a few weeks. "I am very much inclined to question whether extensive excavations carried on at Nippur would produce any very important or interesting results," he wrote.

How wrong he was! In truth, Layard's excavation methods were so crude he could not differentiate sun-dried Sumerian mudbrick from the surrounding soil. As modern excavators have discovered to their cost, the distinctions in soil texture are so subtle they require the most careful trowel and brush work. A quarter century later, French diplomat Ernest de Sarzec learned from local antiquities dealers that rich deposits of cuneiform tablets lay deep in 4 miles (6.4 km) of mounds at a place named Telloh, in the heart of the lowland delta. Sarzec spent two long seasons in 1877-78 digging large trenches into the principal mounds. He unearthed not only tablets and mudbrick temple platforms but diorite statues of a Sumerian ruler named Gudea, king of the city of Lagash.

Sarzec's excavations were unscientific at best, for he merely instructed his men to follow obvious mudbrick walls. He did all he could to save Lagash from total destruction. But every time he stopped digging, dealers from miles around moved in on the site. Thirty-five to forty thousand cuneiform tablets from Lagash's royal archives disappeared onto the antiquities market at Baghdad, to be sold to museums all over the world. Sarzec was powerless to stop the looting, but he was the first archeologist to excavate a Sumerian city, to push the roots of Mesopotamian civilization back to at least 3000 B.C. All subsequent excavations, at great Sumerian cities like Eridu, Nippur, Ur, and Uruk, built on Sarzec's pioneering work. By the time English archeologist Leonard Woolley closed down his Ur excavations in the mid-1930s, few people doubted that Mesopotamia was once the cradle of civilization, a once-fertile landscape nurturing the earliest cities on earth.

"Every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food..." Sumerian scribes leave us in no doubt their fields were bountiful, soils fertile. Their claims are hard to believe. Today, Sumer is desert, its ancient cities set in the midst of wilderness and utter desolation. I remember climbing the ziggurat at Ur on a brutally hot day and gazing out over the utterly arid landscape. "The Garden of Eden? You've got to be kidding!" exclaimed my companion. Where were the lush water meadows and marshes teeming with fish and fowl, the green, irrigated lands, the water-riffled canals, the placid waters of the Euphrates lapping the city walls? Today, not one of Sumer's great cities is within sight of the Tigris or Euphrates Rivers. Ur lies in the midst of a sandy wasteland. Eridu and Uruk, once the world's greatest cities, look out over torrid wilderness. Yet this was the land where the god Enlil, god of the lands, "made the people lie down in peaceful pastures like cattle and supplied Sumer with water bringing joyful abundance."

As the heat reflected from the mudbricks like a hammer blow, I wondered how the Sumerians had turned such a brutal wilderness into fertile farmland. Or had ancient Sumer been better watered and so developed into a better place to live? Concerned primarily with large-scale excavations, with the recovery of cuneiform tablets and seals, and details of Sumerian architecture, archeologists of Leonard Woolley's day were not looking at the Sumerian environment. One cannot blame them, for the Sumerians were still largely a sealed archeological book. Nonetheless, Woolley and his contemporaries laid the foundations for the much more detailed perspectives on southern Mesopotamia we have today. Today's Sumerologists rely on archeological excavations, sadly curtailed owing to the political events of recent years. They also consult an enormous corpus of cuneiform texts, far more than were available in Woolley's day. Experts at the University of Pennsylvania's cuneiform laboratory have developed comprehensive computer databases of individual tablets, of Sumerian grammar and word usages. Most important, the archeologist and epigrapher can study Sumerian civilization against a new and sophisticated backdrop of multidisciplinary research into the dramatic climatic changes that affected the Persian Gulf after the Ice Age. Any journey back to ancient Sumer must begin with the land itself.

Sumer covered about 10,000 square miles (25,900 sq km) of flat, river-made land with no minerals, almost no stone, and no trees. In summer, temperatures soar to between 110 and 130 degrees F (43•-54•C) in the shade. No rain falls for eight months of the year, as the sun shines pitilessly from a pale, dusty sky. Even large rivers become sluggish and muddy. Winter nights are cold, the strong north winds bringing violent rainstorms. In spring, the rivers rise in unpredictable flood, carrying the melting snowpack of the distant Taurus and Zagros Mountains. Every Sumerian community large and small dreaded the floods, which, in bad years, swept everything before them.

This was a land of violent, erratic forces, one where the rain fell in adequate quantities at the wrong time, where the floods came after the harvest and raised river levels to unmanageable heights. Those who farmed the plain had to possess a genius for irrigation, organization, and technological innovation to harness its soils. Cultivated by the right hands, the soils were incredibly fertile, capable of producing enormous crop surpluses. Long before 3000 B.C., Sumerian farmers rose to the challenge in a very different lowland world.

From desert to a land of plenty: The Sumerians themselves gave credit to the gods. In one Sumerian creation legend, the storm god Ninurta dams up the primeval waters of the netherworld, which always flooded the land. Then he guides the floodwaters of the Tigris over the dry fields:

Behold, now, everything on earth,

Rejoiced afar at Ninurta, the king of the land,

The fields produced abundant grain,

The vineyards and orchard bore theirfruit,

The harvest was heaped up in granaries and hills . . .

To nineteenth-century Western scholars, Sumer, like Eden, lay to the east. And, as more and more tablets boasted of fine crops and fruitladen trees, what had been desolation became a land of plenty, a Garden of Eden in Sumerian literature, a kind of ancient Holland crisscrossed by irrigation canals. From there it was but a short scholarly step to the biblical Eden and to popular belief.

Sumerian legends dwell on the miracle of abundant crops reclaimed from harsh desert before cities appeared by the Euphrates. But what does archeology tell us about the beginnings of this earliest of civilizations? Back in 1929, Leonard Woolley dug a deep test pit down to the base of Ur, one of the great city-states of Sumer. He dug through the early levels of the city, then through 8 feet (2.4 m) of sterile river silt left by a massive inundation, then unearthed a scatter of greenish clay potsherds adorned with black painted designs. Back in 1872, George Smith had deciphered a Babylonian account of a flood like that in Genesis on one of Layard's tablets from Nineveh. Now Leonard Woolley proclaimed that his silt layers at Ur represented the biblical Flood, that archeology had confirmed the existence of a cataclysm that had wiped out all human life across Mesopotamia long before Ur was founded. No wonder the survivors "saw in this disaster the gods' punishment of a sinful generation and described it as such in a religious poem," Woolley wrote in an account carefully calculated to attract potential donors. While he did, indeed, discover a flood, we now know it was much later than any primordial flood commemorated in Genesis. Of much greater importance were the greenish potsherds he found, for they were identical to vessels recovered from a small village only a few miles away.

Eight years before, archeologist H. R. Hall had discovered a tiny hamlet of reed and mud huts that once stood on a low mound named al-'Ubaid, close to a major channel of the Euphrates. It was a humble settlement, a mere village compared with the great city that was to rise nearby. Identical black-painted vessels in greenish clay came from both the base of Ur and al-'Ubaid. Their makers were the first Mesopotamians, said Woolley, farmers who settled by permanent rivers and dug the first irrigation canals to water their fields. Woolley dated al-'Ubaid and the bottom level of Ur to about 5000 B.C., some 2,000 years before Sumerian civilization began. Before then, Sumer was arid, uninhabited wilderness.

Leonard Woolley, and for that matter, Gordon Childe, who invented the theory of the agricultural revolution, assumed Sumer had not changed since the end of the Ice Age. They believed it was a harsh land of great environmental contrasts, a place uninhabitable without human intervention: Until people living on the nearby higher ground had mastered irrigation agriculture and pottery making, they could not settle in the stoneless delta. Even their sickles were made of clay.

By contrast, in the early years of this century, most geologists believed the Persian Gulf coast had once lain considerably north of its present configuration, inexorable silting from the great rivers gradually pushing it farther southward. Then prevailing geological opinion changed, in the belief that earth movements under the gulf had compensated more than adequately for silting. The coast had moved but little since the Ice Age, went the new thinking. Sumer had always been a harsh wasteland, altered not by nature but by human intervention, namely irrigation and agriculture. As archeologist Seton Lloyd wrote in 1978, "Where the climate of Mesopotamia is concerned, it is well to remember that, according to the findings of geologists, there has been no perceptible change since very early times."

But Sumerian writings hinted at a very different world. Once, both humans and gods traveled between Sumer's cities along a deep, long-vanished channel of the Euphrates. Checkerboards of narrow irrigation canals crisscrossed the fertile soil on either side of the river, creating an artificial landscape of green patches. Everyone traveled by water, river craft being the only means of communication in the lowlands. Sumerians knew everything about wresting crops from irrigated land. Leonard Woolley unearthed part of a farmer's almanac at Ur, in which an ancient farmer instructs his son to "keep a sharp eye on the opening of the dikes, ditches, and mounds [so that] when you flood the field the water will not rise too high in it." With meticulous care the instructions continue: "Let the pickax wielder eradicate the ox hooves for you [after weeding and] smooth them out . . . [These are] the instructions of Ninurta, the son of Enlil," the almanac ends. Farming was not easy in this harsh but sometimes tamed landscape. Sumerians propitiated the gods at every turn. The gods represented the forces of a violent, unpredictable environment, where river waters could rise without warning, or life-giving river water be prevented from reaching the fields. A Sumerian myth tells us, "Famine was severe, nothing was produced . . . The waters rose not high . . .The fields are not watered . . . In all the lands there was no vegetation, Only weeds grew."

Sumerian tablets say little of rivers and seacoasts. They are not geographical treatises, yet they hint at a radically different landscape. Third millennium tablets describe Lagash and Ur as coastal cities. In 2350 B.C., King Sargon of Agade boasted that seagoing ships from distant India docked at his capital. Today the head of the Persian Gulf is far downstream, and Lagash and Ur lie far inland. What was the geography of Sumer like 5,000 years ago? Thanks to widespread oil exploration, and to field research by scientists from many disciplines, we can now amplify the sketchy impressions gleaned from Sumerian tablets.

The shallowest, and most thoroughly mapped, inland sea on earth, the Persian Gulf goes no deeper than 328 feet (100 m). Subsurface maps show the seabed levels out at about 131 feet (40 m), forming a gentle basin. Since late Ice Age sea levels averaged 397 feet (121 m) below modern levels, the gulf would have been dry land 20,000 years ago. In 12,000 B.C., global sea levels were still so low that rising seawaters were only just entering the shallow basin. At the time, the ancestral river system of the Tigris and Euphrates flowed through the deepest part of the gulf, down what geologists call the Ur-Schatt River, a deep canyon caused by the river waters cutting down to the low sea level of the Indian Ocean. Today's Mesopotamian delta did not exist. Drowned sand dunes under the northern gulf and oxygen isotope readings from deep-sea cores (like those for the Santa Barbara Channel, described in chapter 3) offer testimony to extreme aridity in the region back then.

We know from geomorphological studies throughout the world that between 13,000 and 4000 B.C. the world's sea levels rose rapidly, by about half an inch a year, at times, as ice sheets melted. The rising Indian Ocean flowed into the shallow Persian Gulf basin so rapidly by geological standards that the water level rose at a rate of about 36 feet (11 m) a year, forming a deep indentation far into the desert. The botanists tell us that as the sea advanced, rainfall increased somewhat throughout the Near East. They have studied pollen diagrams from Lake Zeribar, Iran, and elsewhere (described in chapter 4) that point to higher rainfall throughout the Near East during these millennia.

By 6500 B.C., rising waters had flooded the Ur-Schatt river valley and reached the present-day northern gulf. A large marine estuary formed where the Euphrates River exists today. As the sea level rise slowed in about 5000 B.C., the river estuaries reached their northernmost limits. We know something of this long-vanished landscape from oil prospectors' core borings and geological deposits in Mesopotamia. The geologists have identified estuary deposits along the Euphrates as far north as Ur. Fisheries biologists have established that marine fishes flourished in the present Lake Hammar region, in the heart of what is now the delta. As the vast estuary filled in with silt, the water table remained high. Conditions gradually became more arid, especially between 5000 and 3000 B.C. Windblown dust drifted in from the Arabian peninsula. As sea levels stabilized, silt choked the estuaries, impeding the natural drainage and forming large swampy areas.

Few areas of the Ice Age world, except the Bering land bridge between Alaska and Siberia, and Scandinavia, experienced such dramatic geographical changes during such a short period of time. These changes took place during the very period when the first farming communities appeared in the Near East and culminated at the moment when the world's earliest cities flourished in Sumer. How, then, did these startling environmental changes influence the appearance of cities and civilization?

A father and son team, James and Douglas Kennett, geologist and archeologist, have assembled the pieces of the climatic and archeological puzzle from many sources. They faced the same problem Egyptologists in the Nile Valley encountered; many of the most likely locations for early farming camps and villages lie along inundated coastlines or beneath thick layers of river silt brought down from far upstream. Thus we will never recover traces of late Ice Age or early farming occupation in southern Mesopotamia, especially the contemporaries of people living far to the west at Jericho, Abu Hureyra, and other farming settlements to the north. Given the major shoreline changes since 12,000 B.C., we may never be able to prove whether the al-'Ubaid people were, in fact, the first inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Whatever their origins, these humble village farmers achieved remarkable success. Within a thousand years or so, their villages became towns, then cosmopolitan cities. By 3500 B.C., Mesopotamian cities enjoyed enormous economic clout and they traded with cities in what is present-day Iran, Saudi Arabia, even the distant Levant, which forms the eastern Mediterranean coastline. How can we explain this dramatic economic change? The Kennetts believe dynamic environmental shifts played a major role.

After 7000 B.C., and for 1,500 years, pollen diagrams from the Near East show southern Mesopotamia enjoyed an unusually favorable climate, with greater and more reliable rainfall. This may have been the period during which seminomadic peoples hunted and foraged along the Ur-Schatt River and the rapidly changing seacoast of the gulf. Both riverbanks and seacoasts offered a broad range of food resources. Life was not necessarily comfortable, though. Each band was constantly on the move, adapting to ever-changing local conditions. Permanent settlement would have been difficult in most places, but it may have been during this period of constant climatic change and higher rainfall that some communities began cereal farming and herding.

As estuaries formed ever farther inland and the floodplain expanded after 5500 B.C., conditions became steadily drier. So al-'Ubaid communities began small-scale irrigation farming. They obtained high crop yields. Population densities rose proportionately to the yields, increasing competition for agricultural land and other food resources just when the sea was moving inland at an extraordinary pace, something like 0.6 mile (1 km) every ten years. Under such circumstances, the communities living near water's edge moved several times in a generation. Even a minor move could alter territorial boundaries, spreading political, economic, and social ripples across jealously guarded communities.

With higher crop yields, well defined territories bounded by desert and estuary, many small communities coalesced into larger villages. An immediate economic hierarchy arose, as any form of irrigation agriculture requires cooperation of neighbors, the organization of entire communities to get everyone to work together. This conscious, communal act caused the river waters to be dammed and allowed "Ninurta, the king of the land" to produce abundant harvests, fruit trees to grow heavy with ripeness. As each al-'Ubaid community became ever more dependent on its neighbors, near and far, so trade flourished over a wide area.

James and Douglas Kennett show sea levels had stabilized by 3500 B.C. Now floodplains expanded. River silt infilled large estuaries, while the climate became ever drier. A combination of more well-watered land and high water tables created favorable conditions for larger scale irrigation agriculture. Now the farmers had much better access to river water, for they could farm much closer to the banks, allowing them to inundate larger canal networks. By this time, too, another community, Eridu, had turned from a village into a burgeoning city.

If the Kennetts are correct, then the first Mesopotamian farmers had to adapt to an increasingly harsh and demanding environment. They lived in a low-lying landscape that offered a mosaic of desert, semiarid plains, and lush estuaries and riverbanks. Sumer was no land of milk and honey, no Eden, but a land where intelligent use of water supplies and irrigation canals yielded rich dividends. At first, small communities, closely knit families, dug their own watercourses, diverting river meanders and side streams, watering their fields as the opportunity arose. Like village societies everywhere, the kin leaders who organized canal digging, the maintenance of waterworks and dams, were often seen to possess unusual supernatural powers, to be capable of interceding with the gods. The deities controlled the hostile forces of nature: the chilling winter north winds; spring floods, which carried everything before them; summer heat waves, which withered crops in the fields. And, in time, these kin leaders, men and women, became the spiritual and political leaders of a farming society in transition, a community of far greater complexity. Kin leaders performed their rituals, gave offerings to the gods at small village shrines erected on sacred ground. At first insignificant, they became elaborate temples, decorated with bright mosaics, with beaten copper and silver: "The temple—its decrees like heaven cannot be overturned,—Its pure rites like the earth cannot be shattered," pronounces a Sumerian hymn of a later millennium.

Shrines of powerful gods became compelling magnets. Soon temples and administrative offices, palaces and dwellings for a new class of priest-rulers and nobility were required. Small villages became towns, then bustling cities, central places with political and economic tentacles extending into communities near and far. Thus was born the city, and, ultimately, literate civilization.

We can discern traces of these changes in ancient settlement patterns. Robert Adams, until recently secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is an expert on the changing southern Mesopotamian landscape. Using aerial photographs, walking long distances over the ground, making surface collections, he conducted a now-classic survey of the landscape around Uruk, one of the earliest of Sumerian cities. He found al-'Ubaid communities centered around marshes and watercourses in the south, in places where fish and waterfowl were plentiful. Adams came across fewer and fewer sedentary settlements as he moved away from the head of the Persian Gulf. But change was afoot. By 4800 B.C., early villages like al-'Ubaid and Eridu covered nearly 5 acres (2 ha), double their earliest size. Eight hundred years later, the southern plains supported both large and small farming settlements served by short canals of a size that could be maintained by kin groups. Perhaps between 2,500 and 4,000 people lived in the favored enclaves of the south at the time. However, the number was growing fast, as more and more people crowded into Eridu, not, apparently, for purely economic reasons but for spiritual and political ones as well.

Sumerian legend honored Eridu as the earliest city, the dwelling place of Enki, God of the Abyss, the fountain of human wisdom. "All lands were the sea, then Eridu was made," proclaims a much later creation legend. Enki dwelt in his shrine on the shores of the primordial sea, which preceded creation. Sumerians considered Enki's word to have created order from chaos, the chaos of the primeval waters, and the mosaic landscape of desert and marshland around his temple.

Fourteen miles (23 km) south of Ur lies ancient Eridu, a platformlike mound about 300 yards (274 m) square set in an utterly desolate landscape. Its ruined ziggurat stands at one end of the largest tell, an eroded pinnacle weathered to a point by wind and rain. For weeks on end, thick clouds of dust blow across the tell, a flat, low mass of clay and sand with a dune forming to leeward of the crumbling city. Centuries of rain and wind have melted tinfired mudbrick and turned it into formless clay. It would be hard to imagine a less attractive archeological site. When Richard Campbell Thompson dug into Eridu in 1918, he complained he found nothing but loose sand. When Iraqi archeologist Fuad Safar and his British colleague Seton Lloyd returned in the 1940s, they also found drifting sand. Fortunately, they had a narrow-gauge railway on site, which enabled them to remove enough sand to expose a small complex of mudbrick public buildings still standing about 8 feet (2.4 m) high. Their discovery encouraged them to embark on an ambitious project, a search for Enki's shrine, the very heart of Eridu since its earliest days.

They knew it existed below the sand, for the surface of the mound was littered with fragments of brightly colored temple facades, baked clay mosaic "cones," their ends dipped in multicolored paint, also other pieces of rich inlay ornament. Safar and Lloyd dug into the northwestern corner of the mound, at a spot where Campbell-Thompson complained of "So much puddled clay. . . that it was early abandoned." Unlike their predecessor, they had a thorough knowledge of the properties of what Seton Lloyd called "dissolved mud," of the subtle texture differences that distinguish sun-dried brick from compressed sand and natural filling. German archeologists pioneered such excavation at ancient Assur and Babylon in the early years of this century. They trained teams of skilled workers to "feel" the soil with their picks, to identify virtually invisible walls missed by earlier diggers. By the time Woolley dug Ur, mudbrick archeology was a much-refined art, relying not only on picks and shovels but on brushes and dental picks to uncover tinfired brick and even plaster friezes. Some excavators even used compressed air hoses with telling effect. In one instance, French archeologist Pierre Delougaz reconstructed a priest's house near the Sumerian temple at Khafaje, not from the collapsed wooden roof beams themselves but from their impressions in an ancient wasps' nest built among the rafters.

All this cumulative experience came into play at Eridu. Safar and Lloyd found a solid brickwork platform extending from the base of the much later ziggurat. They then spent two weeks fitting each brick back in its original position. A small rectangular building lay surrounded by concentric brickwork rectangles. After days of puzzlement, the two men realized they were looking at a temple platform that had been enlarged again and again by the simple expedient of building another layer of brickwork around the outside to accommodate ever-larger, brilliantly decorated shrines. One temple survived. All the others had been leveled when the great ziggurat was built in later times. To the archeologists' delight and surprise, the surviving temple contained characteristic black-painted al-'Ubaid pottery of about 4500 B.C. Hundreds of fish bones lay around a rectangular offering table, reminding the excavators Eridu once lay near swamps. A complete skeleton of a sea perch was among the offerings, a species known to inhabit brackish estuaries, which, we now know, lay near the city.

Safar and Lloyd removed brick by brick what they called Temple VI (allowing for five subsequent rebuildings shown by the concentric rectangles), then uncovered no less than ten earlier shrines, each built atop its predecessor, right down to Temple XVI, which lay on clean sand. Measuring 45 feet (14 m) square, this humble mudbrick shrine had one entrance, an altar, and an offering table. Just to make sure this was the earliest, the archeologists dug a further 15 feet (4.5 m) into the sand without finding any more structures. So as early as 4900 B.C., at a time when southern Mesopotamia was a land of estuaries and marshlands, of seacoasts far inland from today's, Eridu was a sacred place, perhaps a place of pilgrimage.

Mudbrick archeology does not rely on high technology but on basic excavation skills, on the ability of specially trained workers to distinguish mudbrick from the surrounding soil by the "feel" of the earth against their tools. In recent years, these simple techniques have been refined with the help of compressed air hoses, which enable the digger to blow away fine sand from sun-dried brick. At the same time, the ubiquitous computer will soon allow the archeologist to develop three-dimensional computer-generated maps of ruined buildings, using highly fragmentary foundation walls to reconstruct entire dwellings, pyramids, and temples. These new digital methods will help reduce the enormous cost of clearing mudbrick structures, for excavations like that of the Eridu ziggurat are both technically challenging and very slow moving.

By 4000 B.C., Eridu covered about 30 acres ( 12 ha), its earliest occupation now the nucleus of a much larger temple platform surrounded by a sacred enclosure at least 200 yards (183 m) square protected by a retaining wall and crammed with residential and other buildings. Eridu was growing rapidly, soon to become a great city, headed by powerful priest-rulers who controlled trade over a wide area. More and more people moved into what was now a bustling community of perhaps as many as six thousand inhabitants. They were farmers and fisherfolk, seamen and part-time artisans, jammed into crowded neighborhoods of small mudbrick houses connected by narrow, winding alleys. Many of them were priests, officials, traders, and other nonfarmers, supported by vast food surpluses from irrigated lands. Then, as now, cities like Eridu were magnets for the surrounding countryside, to the point that Robert Adams finds signs of depopulation in northern Mesopotamia. Thousands of villagers abandoned their small settlements and moved southward to the Eridu and Uruk region, to the burgeoning cities of the south. By 3500 B.C. about half the population of Sumer lived in rapidly growing cities.

We know much of Eridu's temple: The magnificent stepped ziggurat pyramid rose in the center of the city. We know little of Eridu's humbler dwellings, of the congested bazaars and small houses that sprawled outward from the central precincts, largely because most Sumerian excavations focus on imposing public buildings and temple platforms. Thanks to Leonard Woolley, we know most about Ur. In later times, around 2300 B.C., when the city covered about 250 acres (100 ha), it had two harbors, one on the Euphrates, the other on a major canal nearby. A fortified acropolis protected the ziggurat, major temples, and palaces. Various quarters of the city sprawled around the central precincts, huddled communities of closely packed houses and narrow alleys, each with its own occupation mound, separated one from another by canals and roads. Everything lay within a much larger outer defense wall, which protected the city against both floods and attackers. Earlier Mesopotamian cities were much the same: crowded, constantly expanding and contracting as political and economic circumstances changed.

Perhaps the earliest cities were agglomerations of individual villages, of separate quarters inhabited by different kin groups who had once lived in smaller village communities. Now they nestled close to the high temple, protected by an outer defense wall from neighbors eager to usurp their precious farmland and irrigation works. Soon each city became more closely integrated, better organized, under centralized administrative control. While carrying out his digs, Leonard Woolley would lead visitors on a tour of the humbler quarters of Ur, guiding them through houses opening onto small courtyards, each with its own oven. He could identify some of the owners from inscribed bricks found in their dwellings, while the contents of individual residences gave clues as to the occupations of the people who had lived there. Woolley believed different segments of society may have occupied their own quarters, that priests, scribes, even gold workers and bakers, each had their own markets, shrines, and community facilities.

Sumerian cities bustled with life, with caravans of black donkeys carrying copper bars from the distant north. Quays jostled with sailing ships bearing timber and precious stones from far upstream. A Sumerian city's lifeblood was trade, the exchange of grain and other basic commodities for essentials and luxuries of all kinds. By 3000 B.C., Sumerians had established urban colonies not only in the Iranian highlands but far up the Euphrates into Syria. Sheer necessity had turned isolated cities into interdependent partners. Growing urban populations and insatiable economic demands had drawn a growing ancient world together, in Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, and the Levant, with ever closer webs of economic and political interconnectedness. Economic needs created simple picture writing: Symbols that inventory objects, even gods and professions, appear at Uruk around 3100 B.C., the era when archeologists consider that urban civilization began. Sumerians not only created literate civilization but developed the first global economy. They also developed ideologies and religious ideas that survived for millennia.

Mesopotamian cuneiform became the lingua franca of trade and international diplomacy, a written language so complex learned teachers and scribes from the land between the rivers traveled widely through the third-millennium world, taking their literature and learning with them. Sumerian cosmology, ethics, theology, even educational methods, passed into other societies throughout the ancient Near East. Sumerian writings passed down the centuries to leave an indelible impression on the modern world, on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on the first chapters of Genesis.

The idea of a paradise, a garden of the gods, began with the Sumerians. As far as we know, they did not tell stories of a Garden of Eden or of a Fall of Man, but they did write of a paradise land, pure and bright, "a land of the living" that knows no sickness nor death.

They called it Dilmun, a land to the east, where the immortals dwelt. But paradise lacked water until Enki ordered Utu, the Sun God, to fill it with fresh water from the depths of the earth. The Sumerian paradise became a lush garden with rich meadows and fruit-laden trees. Here the god Enki ate precious, forbidden fruit. He fell ill, cursed to death by the mother-goddess, Ninhursag, but was saved by a fox who persuaded her to bring Enki back to life and health. Sumerologist Samuel Kramer even goes so far as to suggest that the story of Adam's rib, used to fashion Eve, the "mother of all living," owes something to one of Enki's ailing organs, ti, the rib: Nin-ti, the "Lady of the rib," often referred to in Sumerian literature as "the Lady who makes live," was created by Ninhursag to cure Enki. Perhaps, argues Kramer, Nin-ti represents an ancient pun, faithfully carried over into the Hebrew story of Adam and Eve, where it loses its validity with the change of language.

Paradise on earth, a Garden of Eden: Dreams and myths of heaven on earth are ways of placing a hostile, sometimes confusing world in order. Dilmun, a mythical land of origin, part of a story that defined Sumerian society, told people who they were, where they came from, how they came into being. Like Eden, Dilmun helped lay out the boundaries of the world, the order within it, the benign and hostile forces that governed human existence. Dilmun and Eden designate spiritual journeys, where journeys of the soul begin. Eden exists, for many, in a mythic place "to the east." Dilmun was part of the symbolic fabric of Sumerian society, of the world's first urban civilization, which came into being in an environment more varied and bountiful than one might expect from today's arid landscapes. It resonates today in the myth of Eden.