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well as copper and silver compounds—into useful or pleasing shapes, sometime about 6000 B.C. The first hammered-metal artifacts were found in the highlands of the Zagros and Taurus mountains. However, as R. J. Forbes
(The Birthplace of Old World Metallurgy)
pointed out, "in the ancient Near East, the supply of native copper was quickly exhausted, and the miner had to turn to ores." This required the knowledge and ability to find and extract the ores, crush them, then smelt and refine them—processes that could not have been carried out without kiln-type furnaces and a generally advanced technology.
     
    The art of metallurgy soon encompassed the ability to alloy copper with other metals, resulting in a castable, hard, but malleable metal we call bronze. The Bronze Age, our first metallurgical age, was also a Mesopotamian contribution to modern civilization. Much of ancient commerce was devoted to the metals trade; it also formed the basis for the development in Mesopotamia of banking and the first money—the silver
shekel
("weighed ingot").
     
    The many varieties of metals and alloys for which Sumerian and Akkadian names have been found and the extensive technological terminology attest to the high level of metallurgy in ancient Mesopotamia. For a while this puzzled the scholars because Sumer, as such, was devoid of metal ores, yet metallurgy most definitely began there.
     
    The answer is energy. Smelting, refining, and alloying, as well as casting, could not be done without ample supplies of fuels to fire the kilns, crucibles, and furnaces. Mesopotamia may have lacked ores, but it had fuels in abundance. So the ores were brought to the fuels, which explains many early inscriptions describing the bringing of metal ores from afar.
     
    The fuels that made Sumer technologically supreme were bitumens and asphalts, petroleum products that naturally seeped up to the surface in many places in Mesopotamia. R. J. Forbes
(Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity)
shows that the surface deposits of Mesopotamia were the ancient world's prime source of fuels from the earliest times to the Roman era. His conclusion is that the technological use of these petroleum products began in Sumer circa 3500 B.C. ; indeed, he shows that the use and knowledge of the fuels and their properties were greater in Sumerian times than in later civilizations.
     

     
    Fig. 12
     

     
    Fig. 13
     
    So extensive was the Sumerian use of these petroleum products—not only as fuel but also as road-building materials, for waterproofing, caulking, painting, cementing, and molding—that when archaeologists searched for ancient Dr they found it buried in a mound that the local Arabs called "Mound of Bitumen." Forbes shows that the Sumerian language had terms for every genus and variant of the bituminous substances found in Mesopotamia. Indeed, the names of bituminous and petroleum materials in other languages—Akkadian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit—can clearly be traced to the Sumerian origins; for example, the most common word for petroleum—
naphta
—
derives
from
napatu
("stones that flare up").
     
    The Sumerian use of petroleum products was also basic to an advanced chemistry. We can judge the high level of Sumerian knowledge not only by the variety of paints and pigments used and such processes as glazing but also by the remarkable artificial production of semiprecious stones, including a substitute for lapis lazuli.
     
    •
     
    Bitumens were also used in Sumerian medicine, another field where the standards were impressively high. The hundreds of Akkadian texts that have been found employ Sumerian medical terms and phrases extensively, pointing to the Sumerian origin of all Mesopotamian medicine.
     
    The library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh included a medical section. The texts were divided into three
groups
—
bultitu
("therapy"),
shipir bel imti
("surgery") and
urti mashmashshe
("commands and incantations"). Early law codes