CHAPTER SIX

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE EBABBAR OF SIPPAR

The Construction of the Past in the First Millennium

1. Stories from Before the "Flood"

In the first chapter it was shown how, in the first millennium, the As­ syrians and Babylonians determined the extent of their contemporary world by using older geographical information. The texts they used for this seemed to describe their own geographical notions with re­ ference to Sargon of Akkad. The time when the geographical "route" description came into being was also that of continuous deportations of all the other groups of population in the Middle East. The world at the edges of their own world was being systematically uprooted. The world beyond these borders was in commotion. In the middle of the southern territory, Sargon II looked for points of contact with the "Akkad" tradition in order to give his own tradition form and conti­ nuity. The underlying plan of Sargon's "journey through the dark" formed the legitimizing instrument by which, at one and the same time, "foreigners" could be approached and held apart from one's own reality. The Babylonian map of the world is one of a number of copies made in the seventh century from an older, ninth-century text from Sippar. Here too is a reference to Sargon which emphasizes the "foreignness" of the world outside established borders. Both texts mirror those rare moments when the southern community of Babylon freed itself from foreign rule and sought to strengthen its own iden­ tity. In the preceding chapters, an investigation has been made into how the landscape of the past was filled in piece by piece with communal images, the origins of which were traced to the legacy of Akkad. This 154 CHAPTER SIX communal picture of the past was constructed by population groups who originally possessed no communal base. The construction was possible because of the presence of a cadre materiel, the traces of which had attached themselves to the landscape and could still be seen everywhere in the Old Babylonian period. There were the cities themselves with their ancient surrounding walls, the temple buildings which dominated the cities and which were always in the process of being renovated, and the inscribed effigies and other offerings which would be placed in the courtyards of the temples and in the sanctu­ aries. The surprising fact is that a thousand years later, the Assyrian and Babylonian rulers were still drawing their images from the same source. It may be assumed that the original cadre materiel from which the Old Babylonian period derived its dynamic had almost completely disappeared in the intervening years. Some old cities had gone from the map and new centres of population had appeared in their stead. Temples from the past lay buried under piles of sand or had fallen into ruin once the cult had ceased to function. As time pro­ gressed the centre of civic culture was gradually pushed northwards. New roads and new waterways began to cross the land and the natural course of the rivers was changed. The topography, which had given the most significant stimulus to the memory, had been overlaid by new tracks covering the old. The later rulers of the first millennium, who wanted to make a direct connection between themselves and Sar­ gon I, were obliged to bridge a time span of some 1,500 years. The power of attraction exerted by the "Akkad" orientation" could never be equalled by later events which had left their own tracks behind in the landscape. In first-millennium Babylonia, people were still very conscious of the antiquity of their own origins, as is apparent from the discoveries they themselves made in their own cultural centres of Sippar, Ur, Kutha and Akkad. These were no chance discoveries, but came to light after purposeful investigative excavation. The idea of the antiq­ uity of their discoveries is clear from the colophons which they ap­ pended to the copies of their finds. Their realization of the passage of time forms the most important difference from the work of the "memory constructors" at the beginning of the second millennium. The past with which, in the middle of the first millennium, an asso-