THE CITIES OF BABYLONIA

Abstract

THE SECOND AND THIRD EARLY DYNASTIC PERIODS Materially, the changes between the first Early Dynastic period and the succeeding generations which made up the second and third were not great. The most marked was a development in the style of the cylinder-seals, which turned from patterns to a more representational set of designs and began to bear inscriptions; these last are the leading characteristic of the age. For with it we enter the realm of history, of record set down by men with the conscious aim of perpetuating their acts to posterity, and very soon is added the thought of imposing upon the present by reference to the past. Writing, invented in an earlier epoch, and employed since then constantly (even if appearing sporadically) for the purpose of memorandum concerning material things, was now adopted by kings and applied to religious and political ends. Here therefore begins in Babylonia a process which was under way at about the same time in Egypt. The earliest appearance of writing in the alluvial plain of southern Iraq belongs to a period considerably earlier than the subject of this chapter, though the distance can hardly be measured in years. Owing to the scattered nature of the evidence, its development can be watched only in separate groups, and the first two of these, the tablets found at Uruk and at the site called Jamdat Nasr, belong to the subject-matter of the preceding chapter. These are followed in chronological order by the archaic tablets of Ur, which lay in two strata already existing when the celebrated ‘royal tombs’ were sunk in the ground, and since these visibly belonged to the full maturity of the Early Dynastic civilization the archaic tablets have been assigned to the beginning of this period.

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