Sumer The Scene is Set: Ubaid The Sumerians Eridu to Uruk      From Horticulture to Agriculture Wealth, Status and War      The Goddess in Transition Nammu: The Sumerian Great Mother Transcendent to Anthropomorphic The Underworld: Ereshkigal All photos, maps and other images can be clicked on to take you to the site where we found the image. If you own the copyright to any such image and do not want us to publicise it for you in this way, please contact the webmaster and it will be removed.

Wealth, Status and War Review "Wealth, Status and War". Not all results of Agriculture are positieve. "Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses." from The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race By Jared Diamond, University of California at Los Angeles Medical School Read the entire article Love, Sex and Marriage in Ancient Mesopotamia, by Joshua J. Marke, May 2014, in Ancient History Encyclopaedia. In the segment entitled The Business of Marriage, we found this image of a Babylonian marriage market, and the following quote from Herodotus: "Once a year in each village the young women eligible to marry were collected all together in one place; while the men stood around them in a circle. Then a herald called up the young women one by one and offered them for sale. He began with the most beautiful. When she was sold for a high price, he offered for sale the one who ranked next in beauty.... This was the best of all their customs but it has now fallen into disuse." (Histories I: 196) Read the entire article. One is moved to wonder if this is the source of our modern beauty pageants. Chilling thought.

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