Cradles of Civ 1.6: Ziggurat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTsSJ-3rf4Q
0:01
Dr. David Neiman: The Samarians and the Egyptians were in contact with each other and I’ll show you a few of the features. First of all, how interesting this might be, in Sumerian and in Egyptian, and in addition to thousands of other writings on politics and everything else, you also have very interesting writing such as the recipe for making beer. Okay, very important. Making beer, we have recipes in Sumerian, we have recipes in Egyptian, they’re the same. It’s always the same. By the way, anybody can make beer, as we know. So, they share the same recipe but there’s something even more interesting. Let’s get to this feature of Sumerian civilization which is constant in Sumerian and Babylonian civilization down through the ages. And that is the building of the temple towers called Ziggurats. The Sumerians come into this flat valley. I mean the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates is a flat area as Kansas. Flat, that’s it. [Pause] But they couldn’t live with that. They had to have a mountain on which to put their temple, but there are no mountains there. So they built artificial mountains. And they built what they call Ziggurats. It’s basically a step mound.
[Sound of drawing on blackboard with chalk]
Dr. David Neiman It’s what we call a step pyramid. [Inaudible] Alright, you have a level, there is a foundation made of dirt, this is soil. Remember that soil. Then it’s surrounded with bricks, so they have a wall of bricks around it. And then on the second level they build another one, then another one, and then another one. And they have a ramp going up, so you can climb up by going up the ramp going around and so on to the top. And on the top they have the building that they call the Great Building, E-Gal, which means a Great Building. And that is the temple, but there is also more there, the temple, the community hall, the public place, the court of the town and so on. They built these because in the language, in the writing system of Sumerian, the word for land is written this way. [Draws on blackboard] What’s that remind you of?
3:01
Student: Mountains.
3:02
Dr. David Neiman Oh, Sierra, Nevada, Himalaya. When the Sumerians wrote the word land this is how they wrote it. Land has the big mountains, so this is where they came from. They came from the Karakoram, they came from Mongolia. Now, they couldn’t—they, they needed a height on which to place the temple so they began to build these artificial mounds, which they called Ziggurat.
[Sound of writing on chalkboard]
3:33
Dr. David Neiman And then in every Sumerian city and then in every Babylonian city there was a Ziggurat. And in the case of Babylon itself, when it became great in the capitol of the empire, they had two of these, one in one end of the town and one in the other end of the town. And they had very interesting names, these mounds or mountains. A favorite name was É, which means the house, Etemenanki, which means the house that is the foundation of heaven and earth. I have this idea and then of course if you read the eleventh chapter of Genesis, they were building a tower which would lead you up to Heaven. You get the implication that this is the tower they’re talking about. These are the Babylonian towers which they existed in every city. Now, what’s interesting is this – the earliest pyramid in Egypt is the Pyramid of Saqqara. They say it was for Pharaoh Djoser. And the Pyramid of Saqqara is not a true pyramid, as the great pyramids of Giza. It’s built this way, almost an imitation of the Ziggurat of Sumer. And then there’s something else peculiar about the Pyramid of Saqqara. What’s interesting about the Pyramid of Saqqara is this; Egypt is a land full of stone. You have stones on both sides of the Nile. The Nile is in the valley, cliffs on this side, cliffs on this side. There’s no lack of stone in Egypt. The Pyramid of Saqqara is built of pieces of stone which are cut to that size, hundreds of thousands of them, and then put together to build the Pyramid of Saqqara. What does that mean? That the Egyptians went – they saw these Ziggurats in Babylonia. They saw they were built of brick. They came back and they said well we have to cut down the stones to brick size and build it. Until someone came and said, “Hey, what are you doing that for?” Let’s take big stones to build them.
[Laughing in the background]
5:46
Dr. David Neiman But the point is that the earliest pyramids is built of stones that were cut down to brick size and then built. That’s interesting. Egypt begins its writing system about that time, around 3000 BC. And what the Egyptians did was they saw writing, they understood the meaning of it and in Egypt they decided to start recording their language in symbols, again, which represent real things but they began to use them phonetically. So therefore, Egyptian hieroglyphic is a series of pictures and you can really recognize what they are. A vulture, an eagle, a chickadee, a different bird, a snake, grass, palm leaves, and so on. Real things but they represent phonetic elements. And so Egyptian writing begins.
6:50
Dr. David Neiman By the way, there is very interesting story in American history in the nineteenth century. Did you ever hear of the Sequoyah writing system? The Cherokees lived in the eastern part of the United States and later they were shoved out west. There was a Cherokee by the name of Sequoyah. He came to a city, I believe it was Atlanta. And he saw a newspaper. And he said, “What’s that?” So, the fella picked it up and said “Well, it’s writing, what do you mean?” He began to read it. He said, “What I say is there”. Well Sequoyah looked at it and said, “That’s very interesting”. He took it home. He didn’t know exactly how to handle it. But what he knew is that a symbol is a sound. So he took the symbols of the English alphabet and made a system of writing of the Cherokee language, but he didn’t appreciate the notion of the alphabet. So he treated the symbols as syllables. And therefore, in his system of writing, [Writes capital A on blackboard] that represents something and you know he gave it a sound. Didn’t represent A to him, it represented a sound to him, pa or ma. And then he used up the 26 letters of the alphabet but there were still a lot of sounds left. So then he took this and wrote it this way [Writes upside-down capital A on blackboard]. And then he did this [Writes capital A on blackboard with top pointing to the right], and then he did this [Writes capital A on blackboard with top pointing to the left]. In other words, he used the 26 letters of the alphabet and created 104 symbols by twisting each one, so that he got another symbol. And he created his system of writing and they actually printed books in that system. But you can see what the idea, struck him immediately, but he didn’t quite know how to handle it one way. He handled it another way. Essentially, that was the influence of the Sumerian system of writing. Those who imitated Sumerian used the same system to write their own languages. Those who understood the idea used the idea to create their own system.
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