THE BOOK LOCKER: Beyond Sumer It is, well, eerie and disturbing-and
ultimately challenging. Think of it: a sea people who came by boat to found this Tigris-Euphrates civilization! The little clay model sailboat we'd found, dating to about 31 00 BC, did not evolve on those meandering muddy rivers which we had thought embraced the cradle of civilization. It was made by people who came in under sail, from another civilization whose identity we do not know . The city of Ur, a thousand years old when Abraham left it to start the stillcontinuing story of Israel, was not the origin point of civilized, aware, timebinding man. Beyond Ur and its parent civilization Sumer (a civilization so old that the ancient Greeks and Romans had forgotten its existence) lies another civilization: a civilization that came ashore with a crash around 3100 BC, with wheeled carts, with bronze tools, weapons and ornaments (the raw materials for bronze did not exist in Sumer, so not only the materials, but the concept of bronze had to be imported from elsewhere) and with the agricultural and other disciplines necessary for urbanization. This is what Thor Heyerdahl, that invaluable world citizen, tells us, with the authoritative support of scholarly colleagues, in his Tigris book, which recounts his venture at deepsea voyaging in the kind of reed boat he believes these people might have sailed in. His book is thoughtfully reviewed by the able and learned Dr. Kreutz in the immediately adjacent column. She notes of Heyerdahl that he may have over-formalized some of his immediate conclusions, particularly in her elegant statement: ''The traffic between regions was perhaps more incremental, and less efficient and swift, than he assumes.'' And she dismisses, I think correctly, some of Heyerdahl's
second-remove speculations as to the nature of the founding civilization that came in from the sea. I think we may now accept what the legend of Gilgamesh told us, that his home, as prototypical Sumerian similar to Theseus who taught the Greeks (much later) to furrow the land with plows and the sea with oars, was overseas-in an island where he went to renew his youth toward the end of his life. A respectable body of opinion now holds that island to be Bahrein, off the Omani coast. And Bahrein clearly was a way station and probable entrepot for a seaborn commerce whose reach and power archaeologists are only now beginning to appreciate fully. How odd: I as a demicentagenarian can remember a high school pal who was all taken up with Gilgamesh-why did we not then believe what the legend so plainly told us? I lay that failure of perception to a general Western discounting of poetic truth which reached its height perhaps in the over-pragmatic Deweyesque first half of this century and is now (God be thanked) on the wane, for there are many truths about man besides this of his actual origins-which are to be come at best through poetic means. Certainly this is true of all the purposive questions of man's existence, and it is essential in seeking out the meanings of his experience as well as, to a surprising degree, the facts. Dr. Kreutz rightly calls Heyerdahl a romantic. I am reminded of Dr. George Bass's similar description in these pages of his colleague, our Curator-at-Large the Elizabethan Peter Throckmorton (SH 10:36). By wise and generous instinct both reviewers are quick to add that they would not have this otherwise: we gain too much from the quests of such romantics. PS
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BOOKS The Tigris Expedition, by Thor Heyerdahl (Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1981, 349 pp., illus., $17.95). Thor Heyerdahl' s Tigris expedition was in some ways a new departure for him. His earlier voyages, with the Kon-Tiki and the Ra II, were meant to demonstrate that man could have drifted across the oceans, using only the simplest sort of craft. The Tigris expedition was planned to prove that at least some reed boats were less primitive and more efficient than one might think, and could have provided the means to carry on extensive maritime commerce as early as 3000 BC. This experimental voyage with the Tigris, in 1978-79, could not have taken place at a better time. Scholars are increasingly prepared to accept ever earlier dates for human achievements of all sorts, as archaeological finds continue to push various forms of civilization further and further back. The cave paintings of France and Spain are perhaps 20,000 years old; we now know that skilled metallurgy was taking place in the Danube valley 6000 or more years ago, and in between those two periods hand tools became increasingly efficient. It is not hard to believe that reasonably efficient watercraft also came into use at some very remote period, and indeed Paul Johnstone, in his excellent Sea-Craft of Pre-History (Harvard University Press, 1980), assumes this to have been a paleolithic development. The only real issue, then, is how early one can date genuine sea-going voyages, over some considerable stretch of open water. Recent Mediterranean finds have provided evidence of sea commerce between Cyprus and Crete and the eastern Mediterranean mainland around 6000 BC, and this trade is assumed to have involved reed boats. Heyerdahl hoped to demonstrate the feasibility of more far-reaching sea-borne traffic around 3000 BC, between the Sumerian civilization of the Tigris and Euphrates basin and other contemporary civilizations, at the southern end of the Persian Gulf and even beyond, along the shores of the Indian Ocean. In this case, too, archaeological discoveries within the past twenty or thirty years have made it clear that interchanges were taking place, but one could not be sure by what means. Did the voyage of the Tigris prove once and for all that all of these peoples, and perhaps the contemporary Egyptians as well, were regularly and systematically in touch with each other by sea? To this question one can still give only a qualified "yes." Heyerdahl has certainly demonstrated that one can today build a reed boat capable of sailing from the Persian Gulf to SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1982