The time had come, round about this twenty-fourth century before Christ, for the world of men to take on its present familiar aspect of war and strife, greed and injustice, idolatry and godlessness, which have been its characteristics ever since. For nearly a thousand years since the Flood mankind had been tolerably free from these evils, and Sumerian poets of six or seven centuries later wove into their poems and legends stories of that long-past "Golden Age". There is no doubt that there was such a Golden Age and it was the onset of idolatry and of war between communities which brought it to an end. The world from now on was destined to witness great changes.

These two centuries, noteworthy for the birth of Nahor and Terah, grandfather and father of Abraham, saw the peak of the civilisation that had been built up from the days of Nimrod something like six centuries earlier. Now, with the death of the military dictator Sargon of Agade and the rise of the famous Third Dynasty of Ur, with its energetic and able ruler Ur-Nammu, the balance of power swung again from the Semitic Akkadians in the North to the Sumerians in the South. Ur, Lagash, and Uruk, with two new city-states, Isin and Larsa, were the dominant centres of political power and all of them active in the still increasing hubbub of trade and industry consequent upon expanding knowledge of the wider world which the continuing increase of the human race was bringing into view. By this time the sons of Japhet had penetrated most of Siberia and reached the borders of China: those of Cush had set up a second Sumerian civilisation in north-western India and were pressing down that land's western coast, and in the west were spreading over equatorial Africa. Most of central Europe was occupied by Japhetic tribes. The peoples of the Middle East were at the centre of a complex system of world trade that extended over most of Europe and a considerable part of Asia and Africa.

It was probably at this time that the reference to the sons of Joktan in Gen.10.30 applies. It seems such an irrelevant little remark that one wonders why it was inserted at all. The reason for the genealogy leading from Shem to Peleg is obvious enough; it is to point out the line from which Abraham, the father of the people of Israel, was derived. But having arrived at Peleg, five generations before Abraham, the narrator breaks off to tell us that Peleg's brother Joktan had thirteen sons who dwelt, according to the AV, "from Mesha as you go to Sephar a mount of the east". Why such an apparently unnecessary piece of information should be included in the Genesis account is at first sight not at all clear; yet there must have been a purpose. The AV rendering is inaccurate ‑ Middle East geography was not the 17^th century translators' strong point ‑ and a closer examination of the text reveals what may have been purpose in the plan. The RSV has it "the territory in which they lived extended from Mesha in the direction of Sephar to the hill country of the east" which is more lucid but still does not tell us where these places were situated. A literal rendering of the Hebrew is more like "from Mesha, toward Ephar, to the Mount of the East". One of these locations is definitely known ‑ the "Mount of the East". As previously said, this was the mountain on which the Ark landed and was sacred to the Sumerians and Semites and is now shown on maps as Kuh-i-Anaran, in the Zagros mountains a hundred and fifty miles east of Babylon. Sephar could be either the Semitic city of Sippar in the north or the Sumerian one of Sifru in the south not far from Ur of the Chaldees. Sippar, so far as is known, was not in existence at so early a period and the balance of probability is that Sifru is meant. The location of Mesha is not known. Place-names in the Middle East have a habit of surviving through the ages and there is an area between Ur and the "Mount of the East", still largely marshland, where a number of localities bear names which could well derive from Mesha. If this deduction is justified, this would then define a broad band of territory stretching from Ur and Sifru in the west, across the marsh lands to the "Mount of the East". This, with the progressive drying up of the Gulf, that had been going on since the Flood, would only have become available for settlement about this time. It might well be that these numerous tribes, descended from Joktan, as the years passed and they multiplied, found that the only territory available to them was this Marshland revealed by the receding waters. In after times they spread into Arabia and their tribal names have persisted in history as those of Arab peoples to this day.

With a rapidly increasing population and expanding world trade, life began to be more hectic; as with the modern world during the last half-century, there was a great increase in knowledge and invention, in industry and commerce, and everything had to be done more quickly than before. The old pictograph writing that had served the needs of less sophisticated generations in the past gave way to cuneiform (arrow-headed) which simplified the picture-symbols into wedge-shaped signs. These could more easily and quickly be impressed on the soft clay tablets which was the writing material of the times. This meant among other things, that the stories of Eden, the Flood and of the Tower of Babel, which had already existed in the written form for several centuries, had to be translated into the new form, probably the first Bible translation ever made. Cuneiform was the script in which Abraham, later on, first read the Genesis narratives and incidentally the script from which Moses and his fellows translated the early part of Genesis into the Hebrew language, for this cuneiform writing remained the medium of all written records up to the time of the Exodus and the emergence of the Hebrew language. Despite its apparently complicated nature, a surprising amount of information could be compressed into a very small space. A tablet found at Nippur, written in the time of Abraham, measuring only four by six centimetres, proved to be a library catalogue containing the titles of no less than sixty-two literary works. From this time onward the legends and history of past generations began to be written down ‑ with embellishments ‑ and these "epics" are now one of the sources of our information regarding those days.

Beside the historical tablets, which form only a small proportion of the tens of thousands of clay tablets discovered, there are others which deal with industry, medicine, science and mathematics ‑ for the people of Heber's and Abraham's day were superb mathematicians and diligent astronomers. They had calculated the distance from the earth to the sun with accuracy not equalled until the year 1920. At a somewhat later date they had recorded observations of the four largest moons of the planet Jupiter, invisible today to the naked eye. No one since then knew that Jupiter had any moons until Galileo invented the telescope in AD 1610. Was the eyesight of the ancients so much better than that of modern man or did they invent the telescope first? Correctly made glass magnifying lenses have been found in the ruins of ancient Nineveh. In the field of medicine there is a tablet listing the methods of preparation of five hundred herbal remedies. Sumerian surgeons carried out surgical operations with copper instruments. In the province of industry there is in the British Museum a tablet giving a process for glazing earthenware inscribed in cipher so that no competitor could understand it. When the Sumerian language died out a few centuries later the secret was lost until Assyrian craftsmen "cracked" the code in the 7^th century BC but with the fall of the Assyrian empire the secret was lost again until in the 19^th century the tablet was found, translated and submitted to British cipher experts who "cracked" the code once more and so enabled modern industrialists to try out the process, and find it successful. In Ur of the Chaldees coppersmiths had discovered how to temper copper to yield a cutting edge like steel ‑ another secret lost until modern times. Time was measured by means of a water-clock in which one talent of water (about six gallons) ran out of an enclosed vessel and the diminishing water level operated a pointer which registered the complete day, divided into hours and minutes. In the Museum of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities in Baghdad there are earthenware jars with copper rods and traces of chemicals nearly five thousand years old. Technical experts today consider these could only have been some form of electric battery, which if true would raise the question what kind of electrical device did the battery operate? A century or so after Abraham had migrated to Canaan the whole of this complex and advanced civilisation disintegrated into what their own historians called "the times of confusion" in which they were overrun by invading peoples of lesser culture. Had this not happened the explosion of knowledge and scientific achievement which characterised the 20^th century might have come there and then, and history would have been very different. But that was not to be; the Divine Plan included many features of great moment for mankind and not until God's own due time could knowledge be allowed to be increased to the extent it has done today. By this time there were colonies in distant parts, set up by Sumerian merchants who traded local products with the homeland. Dilmun, four hundred miles down the Gulf where Bahrein is now, was an important staging port for ocean-going merchant vessels. Magan, which is now Oman at the mouth of the Gulf, was a busy copper mining area. Most important of all was Melukkha, on the river Indus in modern Pakistan, a territory larger in extent than the homeland of Sumer itself. It stretched from the vicinity of Bombay to the headwaters of the Indus, an area eight hundred by three hundred miles, furnished with cities strangely resembling modern ones in facilities and amenities. Built in the style of Ur and Uruk and Babylon, they had straight streets, forty-five feet wide with main drains having branches into every house, separate underground culverts five feet high for carrying off rainwater, evidences of a virile industry in the manufacture of pottery and textiles ‑ the earliest cotton in the world's history was grown and woven here ‑ and brisk trade in all kinds of tropical products carried on by means of ships which unloaded their wares at Ur of the Chaldees. In the other direction Syria and Canaan boasted the cities of Alalykh and Ebla and Catal Huyuk, and Tyre and Sidon on the sea coast, all links in the network of trading centres which by now had knit the far-flung sons of Noah together. Trade was booming, and the world was a very busy place. But behind all this passion for progress and discovery and achievement there did repose, in the hearts of these early descendants from Shem and Ham, a love of righteousness and justice and the higher values of life. Says Kramer ('From the tablets of Sumer') "they cherished goodness and truth, love and order, justice and freedom, righteousness and straightforwardness, mercy and compassion. The gods were extolled as good and just". After all, they had only recently abandoned the true God of their fathers and commenced to make for themselves false gods, alien gods who were now leading them into war and violence and every kind of villainy. For the moment there was still the recollection of the Golden Age they had rejected only a couple of centuries ago to keep their standards relatively high. It is probable that when Abraham came on the scene a little later, although he must have shrunk from the idolatry and moon-worship of Ur and its citizens, there was still much in their characters and their lives that he would applaud. It might not have been altogether without reluctance that he parted from them in obedience to the Lord's injunction.

There is an example of what have been called the "penitential psalms" which demonstrate the sentiments of the devout Sumerian, whether worshipper of one God or many. Because their paganism always preserved the worship of the Most High God of heaven, superior to all the other gods, there is a kinship of sentiment which reveals that these men and women of four or five thousand years ago were not so very different from we ourselves in our reverence for the Lord.

"O my god, my transgressions are very great, very great my sins. I transgress and know it not. I sin, and I know it not. I wander on wrong paths, and I know it not. I feed on transgressions and know it not. The Lord, in the wrath of his heart, has overwhelmed me with confusion. I lie on the ground and none reaches a hand to me. I am silent and in tears and none takes me by the hand. I cry out, and there is none that hears me. I am exhausted, oppressed and none releases me. My God who knows the unknown, be merciful Lord, thou wilt not repulse thy servant. In the midst of the stormy waters, come to my assistance, take me by the hand. I commit sins ‑ turn them into blessedness. I commit transgressions ‑ let the wind sweep them away. My blasphemies are very many ‑ rend them like a garment, God, who knows I knew not, my sins are seven times seven ‑ forgive my sins!"

"God knewest I knew not!" Whether the prayer went up to An the Most High God, or to Enlil or Enki the lesser gods, who could doubt that the cry reached the courts of Heaven and was heard by the One who truly gave life to all men. It may be that the time was not yet ripe for the answer to come. The once for all offering of our Lord Jesus Christ for the sin of man was still three thousand years in the future, and until that offering was consummated on the cross, there was nothing that could be done. But Jesus did say that the men of Sodom and Gomorrah were to stand in the resurrection to find an opportunity for repentance and everlasting life. That is sufficient assurance that these reverent and penitential Sumerians, living at the same time, five hundred miles from Sodom, will enjoy the same favourable opportunity. If there was any sincerity at all in those prayers, then surely it can be expected that they will be answered in that coming day.

One man, at least, emerged from that welter of true worship and false worship, of one God and many, of light and darkness. The time was at hand for the Lord to take a hand in the affairs of men and commence the outworking of His purpose. A man was soon to be born in the city of Ur in preparation for the Divine call. Time was ripe, the world was ready; it remained now for the Lord to set the stage for a chain of events which must centre upon one new city in one new land. This should then and for all time become the land and the city upon which the Lord would set His Name. A land as yet unpolluted by idolatry, by war, by commercialism; a land as yet without cities, inhabited only by a few simple pastoral folk, fitting home for the people for his purpose which God planned to call into being. One such land existed, surrounded on all sides by the civilisations which had grown up through the centuries, Egypt to the south, commercial Canaan to the north, Sumer and Elam to the east; one such land lying by some mysterious Divine foresight in the exact geographical centre of the earth. There the Lord determined to build his Holy City.

(To be continued)

AOH