The Nomadic Alternative – Page 67

water together in harmony, while the outsiders scurried "like
unknown birds". The treasury was stuffed with gold, the houses
gleamed with silver sheathing, the silos and granaries bulged
pregnantly. Lyre music and the wailing of reed pipes hovered over
the dockyards, where the people bargained and bartered and fought
amiably over merchandise. Trade flowed into the gates of the city.
Foreigners, "who know not grain", herded their perfect oxen and
perfect sheep into the civic abbatoirs. The people of the Black
Lands brought their wares.

Then in a flash the goddess attacked her own city. She committed
suicide. Numberless hordes from nameless lands "whose understanding
is human but whose form and garbled words are those of a dog"
swarmed over the land, like plagues of locusts. Prices rose. The
people drooped with famine. Girls flailed themselves with grief in
their chambers. Layer on layer of human skulls overflowed the well-
heads. The towpaths of the irrigation canals were meshed with
cutting grasses. Salt water streamed where sweet water had once
flowed, and the man, who imagined he might rest in a city, found
no city to rest in.

The great city of Ur, the "wild ox that stepped out with
confidence", fared no better when the men of the mountains came
down to raid. "The people of the city, not potsherds fill the
streets ... on all the surplus accumulated in the land, a defiling
hand was placed ... bodies dissolved like fat left in the sun."

The invaders were some bestial incarnation, who ate raw flesh,
owned no houses in their lifetime, and did even bury members of
their own family. The invaders hacked up the vitreous surfaces,
the bronze and marble images and tesselated pavements of lapis
lazuli. "They cut to pieces the divine statues that filled the
shrines - cows, oxen and golden calves - cut to pieces and shattered."

Aqueducts crumbled and their waters were sucked into the earth.
"My possessions fly away from me", groaned one official, "like
locusts they are on the wing -flying."