Prejudices

Sumerian scholars, soldiers, and merchants knew that there were peoples whose way oflife was different from their own, but they usually did not express value judgments about these people. They made distinctions between themselves and the others and occasionally were opposed to them. For instance, they felt contempt for the Amorites, a nomadic people living on the western plateau and constituting, along with Elam and Guti, a continuous threat of war. In one text the Guti were called ‘‘the fanged serpent of the mountain, who acted with violence against the gods.’’ Later they were called ‘‘barbarous people’’ (Hallo 1957-71: 717a).

Justified or not, the image of the nomadic Amorites in the minds of the inhabitants of Southern Mesopotamia included the following:

1.  They dwelled in tents in wind and rain, they did not know what a city or a house was, and they lived in the mountains;

2.  They did not cultivate grain, but they dug mushrooms.

3.  They ate uncooked meat; they behaved like wild beasts and wolves.

4.  They did not bury the dead; they were invaders and plunderers. (Buccellati 1966: 330-1)

Of the Gutians it was said that they ‘‘know no inhibitions, with human instincts, but have canine intelligence and monkey’s features’’ (Cooper 1983: lines 154-5). Monkeys perhaps came from the east and were considered evil. In the year name of King Ibbi-Sin’s twenty-third year, one hears of ‘‘the monkeys coming from the mountains,’’ though the interpretation is questionable.

This is the message the texts express, and these were the ideas usually held by society in those times. Texts show what the rulers and authorities wanted the people to think about the Amorites and the Gutians. Wars against the Amorite tribes were justified by such statements. These Amorites were depicted as a disruptive element in the region.

Amorites coming from the west were aware of belonging to an ethnic group, and they were identified in the documents with tribal names, Sutean, and Benjaminite. In the early centuries of the second millennium the kings of Larsa remembered their own nomadic roots among their titles, although they claimed themselves to be ‘‘kings of Sumer and Akkad.’’ Zabaya, for example, claimed he was the sheik of the m a r t u ‘‘Amorites’’ or ‘‘westerners.’’ Abi-sare was king of Ur and sheik (a word that elsewhere sometimes means ‘‘mayor’’) of the Martu. Kudur-Mabuk, whose own name seems Elamite like that of his father, was the father of Warad-Sin and of Rim-Sin, claiming also to be the ‘‘father of Emutbal,’’ and ‘‘father of the land of Martu.’’

The Greeks showed the same attitude and reaction as the Sumerians did toward strange peoples. Thucydides in the late 400s bce wrote, ‘‘The Aetolians [a backward people in west central Greece]... dwelt in unwalled villages which were widely scattered. . . they speak a dialect more unintelligible than any of their neighbors, and are believed to eat raw flesh’’ (1960: 206, III 94). The ancient Greeks had rejected nomadism; that is why Alexander and his successors who knew of it in the Near East reintroduced the institution of the city and founded so many towns. Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote in the late first century bce, ‘‘I would distinguish Greeks from barbarians, not by their name nor on the basis of their speech, but by their intelligence and their predilection for decent behavior, and particularly by their indulging in no inhuman treatment of one another’’ (14.6 1950: 267). It was, of course, his personal opinion as a Greek and a totally unjustified assumption, though it was the generally accepted view among the Greeks. He repeated the negative views of the Celts in France: they were like wild beasts in fighting, crazy, and very fond of wine; they ate and drank to excess, and therefore they were indolent (14.8 1950: 269).

Opinions of this kind are seen in the Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the opposition of ‘‘his flesh’’ to ‘‘alien offspring’’ (Landsberger 1937 3 iii 23-7). An Akkadian proverb says, ‘‘Flesh is flesh, blood is blood, alien is alien, foreigner is indeed foreigner’’ (Lambert 1960: 271). The Sumerian word that means foreigner, depending on the context, may also mean ‘‘enemy.’’