ittû

Natural petroleum seeps called 'tar pits' or 'asphalt pits' occur throughout the ancient Near East, most famously at Hit (ancient Tuttul or Id) on the Euphrates in what is now central Iraq, where bituminous petroleum has oozed to the surface for millennia. The Akkadian word ittû (also written as iddu or ittu) designated this natural asphalt — the semi-solid, black, petroleum-derived substance distinct from the more volatile naphtha. Akkadian cuneiform tablets from the third millennium BCE record ittû as a major commodity: it was used to waterproof boats, baskets, and water containers; as a mortar binding sun-dried mudbricks in construction; as a caulking agent; as a preservative for wooden objects; and in medicine as a treatment for skin conditions and joint pain. The great ziggurats of Mesopotamia — their cores of unfired mudbrick — were laid with ittû as mortar. When the Bible describes the construction of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:3, it notes that 'they used bitumen for mortar' (Hebrew ḥēmār): this is a direct observation of Mesopotamian building practice, the ittû that was available in the region.

The Akkadian word entered Semitic languages broadly: Hebrew ḥēmār (חֵמָר, bitumen, mortar) and zepheth (זֶפֶת, pitch), Aramaic ḥemaṛ, all designate the same substance. The etymology of the Latin word bitumen — which is the direct source of English bitumen — is less certain: some scholars connect it to a pre-Latin Mediterranean word absorbed into Latin from a substrate language, while others trace a Semitic origin through Phoenician trade contact. Pliny the Elder's Natural History (1st century CE) uses bitumen extensively, describing deposits in Judea (the Dead Sea was known in antiquity as the Asphalt Lake, Lacus Asphaltites), in Babylon, and in Sicily — the Mediterranean distribution of natural asphalt mapped by a Roman encyclopedist using a Latin word whose root may ultimately be Akkadian.

The great asphalt lake of the Dead Sea — which produces floating masses of natural bitumen that ancient mariners collected — supplied Egypt and the Levant with bituminous material for embalming, caulking, and waterproofing for thousands of years. Egyptian mummies preserved with bitumen are among the most famous applications: the Arabic word for the substance was mūmiyā (from Persian mūm, wax), which gave English its word 'mummy' — a bitumen-preserved body. The same substance that the Akkadian builders used as mortar became, through the Egyptian embalming tradition, the English word for the wrapped dead.

Modern bitumen is the heavy residue remaining after lighter fractions have been removed from crude oil by atmospheric and vacuum distillation. Global bitumen production exceeds 100 million tonnes annually, used almost entirely for road paving and roofing. The tar-macadam road surface — tarmac — is bitumen-coated aggregate. Every paved road, every flat roof, every airport runway in the world is surfaced with a material whose name is Akkadian in origin, derived from the word for the natural petroleum seeps that Mesopotamian builders exploited four thousand years before petroleum refining was invented. The ancient Babylonian building material and the modern highway material are chemically identical: the same long-chain hydrocarbons, the same viscous black adhesive. Only the source has changed.