In this installment I’ll be presenting parts two and three, since both are rather short.



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The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate



Part Two: By the Shores of the Bitter Sea



The refugees from the land of Dilum settled by the shores of the new salt water sea. There they rebuilt their homes and their lives. It was here they tamed the goat and the wild sheep. Here that a number of their villages grew into towns, and a few of those into cities. It was here in Central Azir (our Tajikistan) that writing had its beginnings.



But for all their hard work, all their earnest prayers, this was not Dilmun. It was a colder land, a drier land, a harsher land. Here the rains were sparse. Here the winds blew colder. And as the generations passed the rains became fewer and the crops began to fail.



They learned the arts of war in this land, raiding amongst themselves for cattle and crops. Their gods became jealous of each other, and each took to favoring his own village over that of another. Over the millennia it became obvious that either they found a new home, or their way of live would die.



Not all would see this truth. They had been forced from an ancient homeland and would not seek another. These would stay behind, becoming drovers and goatherds. In the fullness of time they would disappear, swallowed up by a new people coming down from the north.



But most of the people did not want the hardscrabble life of the pastoralist. Theirs was the life of flock and field. They liked the village life, the life of town and city, and dreamed of a land where the crops would flourish and the herds could graze on thick grasses and grow fat. So the people of the Land of Sweet Water packed up again. Took up their jugs, their hoes and their spears. Took up their gods, and with the guidance of a vision went south.

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The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate



Part Three: And There in the Mountains was Born a People



The migrants who entered the Iranian Plateau were not the people they would be when they moved into the land of Mesopotamia, the valley of the two rivers. They were a settled people, a soft people. They knew the arts of agriculture, and were learning the arts of literature. They thought they knew the arts of war. They thought, in addition, they knew the land they entered, and the peoples therein. Their education was bloody.



It would be millennia more before their descendents came down from the mountains to the great alluvial plains of Mesopotamia. Milliennia of struggle had shaped them. Hardened them into a people their ancestors would not have recognized. Instead of settlements they were now organized into clans and tribes. Instead of farmers they were now drovers and herders. The art of writing they had lost. They were still the short, stock, black-haired people of old, but a harder, crueler people with gods much as them.



Around 8,000 AAF, after centuries of struggle, centuries of constant war, the Sumerians found themselves in the foothills of the Iranian Plateau overlooking the land that the Hellenes would one day call Mesopotamia. A lush and fertile land, inhabited by a people who were just then starting to develop towns of their own. Before the coming of the Sumerians the mountain folk had engaged in cattle raids and a spot of trading with their neighbors in the land below. Never before had a settled people been invaded by outsiders. Now things were going to change.

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Coming Up: Part four of The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate. I haven’t decided on a title yet. For all of you wondering what the heck this has to do with Babylon, it’s called, “background”. Fret not, the Babylonians will be showing up, in time. See you later.



Alan