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Berkeley ENE,RES C200 - THE CLIMATE OF MAN

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8/25/07 11:47 PMDocument ViewPage 1 of 9http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?sid=1&vinst=PROD&fmt=3&startpag…ype=PQD&rqt=309&TS=1188110824&clientId=1566&cc=1&TS=1188110824Databases selected: Multiple databases...THE CLIMATE OF MAN--II; ANNALS OF SCIENCEELIZABETH KOLBERT. The New Yorker. New York: May 2, 2005. Vol. 81, Iss. 11; pg. 064Abstract (Summary)The Curse of Akkad was written within a century of the empire's fall. It attributes Akkad's demise to an outrage againstthe gods. For many years, the events described in The Curse of Akkad were thought to be purely fictional.Full Text (7097 words)(Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2005 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All RightsReserved.)The world's first empire was established forty-three hundred years ago, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Thedetails of its founding, by Sargon of Akkad, have come down to us in a form somewhere between history and myth.Sargon--Sharru-kin, in the language of Akkadian--means "true king"; almost certainly, though, he was a usurper. As ababy, Sargon was said to have been discovered, Moses-like, floating in a basket. Later, he became cupbearer to theruler of Kish, one of ancient Babylonia's most powerful cities. Sargon dreamed that his master, Ur-Zababa, was aboutto be drowned by the goddess Inanna in a river of blood. Hearing about the dream, Ur-Zababa decided to have Sargoneliminated. How this plan failed is unknown; no text relating the end of the story has ever been found.Until Sargon's reign, Babylonian cities like Kish, and also Ur and Uruk and Umma, functioned as independent city-states. Sometimes they formed brief alliances--cuneiform tablets attest to strategic marriages celebrated and diplomaticgifts exchanged--but mostly they seem to have been at war with one another. Sargon first subdued Babylonia'sfractious cities, then went on to conquer, or at least sack, lands like Elam, in present-day Iran. He presided over hisempire from the city of Akkad, the ruins of which are believed to lie south of Baghdad. It was written that "daily fivethousand four hundred men ate at his presence," meaning, presumably, that he maintained a huge standing army.Eventually, Akkadian hegemony extended as far as the Khabur plains, in northeastern Syria, an area prized for its grainproduction. Sargon came to be known as "king of the world"; later, one of his descendants enlarged this title to "king ofthe four corners of the universe."Akkadian rule was highly centralized, and in this way anticipated the administrative logic of empires to come. TheAkkadians levied taxes, then used the proceeds to support a vast network of local bureaucrats. They introducedstandardized weights and measures--the gur equalled roughly three hundred litres--and imposed a uniform datingsystem, under which each year was assigned the name of a major event that had recently occurred: for instance, "theyear that Sargon destroyed the city of Mari." Such was the level of systematization that even the shape and the layoutof accounting tablets were imperially prescribed. Akkad's wealth was reflected in, among other things, its art work, therefinement and naturalism of which were unprecedented.Sargon ruled, supposedly, for fifty-six years. He was succeeded by his two sons, who reigned for a total of twenty-fouryears, and then by a grandson, Naram-sin, who declared himself a god. Naram-sin was, in turn, succeeded by his son.Then, suddenly, Akkad collapsed. During one three-year period, four men each, briefly, claimed the throne. "Who wasking? Who was not king?" the register known as the Sumerian King List asks, in what may be the first recordedinstance of political irony.The lamentation "The Curse of Akkad" was written within a century of the empire's fall. It attributes Akkad's demise toan outrage against the gods. Angered by a pair of inauspicious oracles, Naram-sin plunders the temple of Enlil, thegod of wind and storms, who, in retaliation, decides to destroy both him and his people:For the first time since cities were built and founded,The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,The inundatedtracts produced no fish, The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,The gathered clouds did not rain, themasgurum did not grow.At that time, one shekel's worth of oil was only one-half quart,One shekel's worth of grain wasonly one-half quart. . . .These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities!He who slept on the roof, died on the8/25/07 11:47 PMDocument ViewPage 2 of 9http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?sid=1&vinst=PROD&fmt=3&startpag…ype=PQD&rqt=309&TS=1188110824&clientId=1566&cc=1&TS=1188110824roof,He who slept in the house, had no burial,People were flailing at themselves from hunger.For many years, the events described in "The Curse of Akkad" were thought, like the details of Sargon's birth, to bepurely fictional.In 1978, after scanning a set of maps at Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, a university archeologist named HarveyWeiss spotted a promising-looking mound at the confluence of two dry riverbeds in the Khabur plains, near the Iraqiborder. He approached the Syrian government for permission to excavate the mound, and, somewhat to his surprise, itwas almost immediately granted. Soon, he had uncovered a lost city, which in ancient times was known as Shekhnaand today is called Tell Leilan.Over the next ten years, Weiss, working with a team of students and local laborers, proceeded to uncover an acropolis,a crowded residential neighborhood reached by a paved road, and a large block of grain-storage rooms. He found thatthe residents of Tell Leilan had raised barley and several varieties of wheat, that they had used carts to transport theircrops, and that in their writing they had imitated the style of their more sophisticated neighbors to the south. Like mostcities in the region at the time, Tell Leilan had a rigidly organized, state-run economy: people received rations--somany litres of barley and so many of oil--based on how old they were and what kind of work they performed. From thetime of the Akkadian empire, thousands of similar potsherds were discovered, indicating that residents had receivedtheir rations in mass-produced, one-litre vessels. After examining these and other artifacts, Weiss constructed a timeline of the city's history, from its origins as a small farming village (around 5000 B.C.), to its growth into an independentcity of some thirty thousand people (2600 B.C.), and


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Berkeley ENE,RES C200 - THE CLIMATE OF MAN

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