In The Sumerians (1963) Samuel Noah Kramer cites the “unusually creative intellect and a venturesome, resolute spirit” of the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. These attributes allowed them to be the first people ever to build a complex society as we would recognize it today, to dwell in cities, to turn arid land into lush, productive farmland, and as a result successfully to store excess grain. And most sweeping and transformational of all, they developed writing. At roughly the middle of the third millennium BCE, the Sumerians first stepped across the threshold between prehistory and history, and the entire human race followed.
No other known culture of the time, or prior to it, left a record, including the Egyptians. Much of what archeologists have dug up are administrative and account-keeping minutiae, which is very logical, given the surplus grain and agricultural produce which was held in trust by the authorities in the world’s first cities. But Kramer also covers the heroic epics, the lyric poetry, the disputations (for the Sumerians were a pushy, adversarial lot, and individuals strived to be the first among their peers), the proverbs, and the votive verses which they produced.
They developed the practice over time of codifying their laws in written compendia, a practice copied by the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, and all societies to this day. The Sumerians also very apparently influenced the Hebrews, who a thousand years after the height of the Sumerian civilization, busied themselves compiling the early books of the Bible. Consider: — Both cultures envision strikingly similar processes of creation, with land being separated from the sea by divine agency; — Both traditions viewed the creation of the human race as clay being given the “breath of life”; — Both foundation myths include paradise motifs, the Hebrews citing it explicitly as the original home of Adam and Eve. Many Sumerian characteristics and descriptions find their echoes in Genesis; — Both legends contain a devastating Flood, and they contain numerous striking parallels; — The Cain and Abel motif in the Bible is a much-abridged version of a frequently repeated favorite theme of many Sumerian writers and poets.
There are other echoes and apparent influences as well: the personal god, ethical and moral standards, the divine retribution theme, where an angry god annihilates the nation of his people, usually by an outside conquering force, and the Job motif of suffering and submission. The two sources even begin with the same introductory plot.
Not all comprehensive surveys engage the reader as effectively as this one, nor do they paint so vivid a picture of their subject. For an academic treatise, this is as enjoyable as it is comprehensive.
Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows an unorthodox structure to explore at a personal level two social/political paroxysms suffered by China in the 20th Century: the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard scourge of the mid 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. These two iron-fisted crackdowns battered and splintered a family of musicians and poets, members of which had to flee to the desert of Kyrgyzstan, were driven to suicide, or were murdered by the People’s Liberation Army at Tiananmen. At its core, then, the novel exposes mob rule and official paranoia for the horrors that they are, and shines a spotlight on Chinese character, with its youthful impatience for change and its view of justice, and the blind, intolerant authoritarian reactions to such impulses.
The novel gains its power by unfolding this intractable and unfortunate conflict from the inside out: Ba (daddy) Lute and Big Mother Knife head a tight-knit family of musicians and itinerant storytellers which becomes ground into the dirt — hounded as fugitives, driven to suicide, or simply murdered by troops. The blind, impersonal machinery of the authoritarian gods functions in strokes broad and minuscule, and crushes creativity that would never harm a rational regime.
Thien introduces each chapter with a few pages portraying events in the immediate past — the novel was published in 2016 in Canada — and from the viewpoint of Mali, a young woman of Chinese birth who immigrated to Vancouver with her mother in the 1990s. This device grounds the narrative in the present and gives it weight. The framing of the main story this way gives it an exalted, poetic feel, and the characters a heroic tenor. These are the strengths of this very accomplished piece.
This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and this reminded me of the type of fiction honored by the Nobel Committee: its politics clearly reflected those of the Committee, while the writing, though effective, doesn’t always soar to the artistic — character, plot, image, structure, diction — heights of other deserving novels. It’s a powerful, plaintive, memorable novel, make no mistake. As a first-hand narrative of paranoid, cynical, out-of-ideas leadership fomenting groupthink, theft and murder on the part of mindless, lawless mobs, I’ve never read its equal. And probably never will again.
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