Kingship in Ancient Assyria

[This is a chapter from Echoes of Eternity. Of interest to those interested in the origins of the discussion of ethics and morality. Did Socrates initiate interest in these questions? Did Aristotle build his discussion of ethics on ideas in his own head? A close look at the ideas of kingship and divinity in the Near East, in the centuries before classical Greece, suggests otherwise.]

The Excellence of the King

Throughout the texts and inscriptions and iconography we are presented with images of the king as a kind of perfection. He is at the apex of the social structure of Assyria and is its principal priest (in terms of his participation in the key rituals). Thus he is the most excellent of human beings and holds his position because of his theoretical excellence in all aspects of Assyrian life: exercising the virtues of kingship, justice, statecraft, warfare, divination, administration, etc.

It would be easy to argue that the king was understood to have the privilege of contact with the divine on account of his pre-eminence in human society; almost that the king arrogated this privilege to himself on account of his power to do so. However this would be to retroject a secularism into Assyrian society which the evidence does not warrant.

The office of priest, for example, is not distinguished by a term which we can easily equate with "priest". The kalu-priest is designated simply "kalu". In other words, the function of these officials is not seen as apart from the function of the rest of the Assyrian social structure: religion and society are inextricably intertwined, having never been conceived as separate ways of looking at the world (Compare for example the elaborate intertwining of everyday life and the understanding of the structure of the world illustrated by Marcel Griaule's study of Dogon belief: Conversations with Ogotemeli). The term "apkallum" (used to describe Adapa's priesthood of Ea at Eridu) was understood by the Assyrians to be a term indicating a mortal sage, though in connection with Adapa I think the term to have a technical meaning.

In any case, there is little evidence that people thought in antiquity this way up. Even if someone did steal privileges by virtue of his power to do so, the act would be understood and explained within a moral framework, and the success of the act would depend on the will of the gods. When Esarhaddon entered Nineveh and sat on the throne of his father, he describes how

"favourable powers drew close in heaven and earth... messages of gods and goddesses they sent me continuously and gave me courage"[Borger, R. Die Inschriften Asarhaddons (AfO Beiheft 9), 1959, Nin. A-F Ep. 2] (Translation supplied by A.T.L. Kuhrt).

Instead, much of the evidence is explained if we infer that the king understood that he owed his privileges of contact with the gods and his rulership over mankind to his excellence and perfection. In other words, that his wisdom and power came to him by virtue of his perfection, not only in eminence among men, but among all men.

The king is described as "king of kings", which concept may have been understood as essential to the function of his kingship, and not merely as a vainglorious styling. From the Assyrian point of view, the reason why there is a point of contact between the king and the gods at all is because they have something in common, and that the point of contact is precisely the pre-eminence, the excellence, and the perfection of the king in all his roles. It is this commonality which establishes the harmony between the world of man and that of the gods. Cf. Plato, Timaeus 31c-32c; also Aristotle, Politics 1277a, and Nicomachean Ethics Bk. X, chap. 8.

In antiquity in general, perfection is understood as a kind of completion: the perfect is that which is complete, and that which is complete is perfect. Thus the king is also complete, in his attainments, his power, his wisdom and his capacity. In this the king emulates the divine, all aspects of which must be complete in their own natures.

That completion was understood as a virtue in itself is illustrated by the fact in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, sin was often countered not by attempting to undo the sin directly, but by the perfect performance of rituals and incantations. Each of these, properly performed, counted towards the expiation of the sin, irrespective of the nature of the sin. Thus, to undo the damage done by the sin, it is not necessary to repair the damage, to make good the imperfection, directly (often impossible – see the "Sin of Sargon" text in SAA vol. IV, Starr): to undertake repair without regard to context but complete attention to purpose is the requirement. See SLA 323 [= Harper 629], lines 13-17, which illustrates that completions in the abstract are efficacious. Thus, in acting as "apkallum" (standing in for the god Ea) in rituals necessary for the continuation of the Assyrian state (as illustrated in the throne room relief where the king is shown apparently engaged in the business of fertilizing the date palm represented as a sacred tree) the ritual is brought closer to the divine creation, and the consonance of the act with the divine will is emphasised.

The king was "chosen" by the gods because of his special excellence and his virtue, and he was the person responsible for performing very special actions. Everything associated with the act being performed was of equal and critical importance: upon the timing of the ritual depended its success - see SLA 342 [= Harper 406], where the auspicious day for a sacrifice is discussed; see also SLA 344 [= Harper 365], and SLA 328 [= Harper 356]. Oaths were a matter for auspicious days also, and the king was available to be visited likewise only when the day was right - see SLA 341 [= Harper 384].

The king is the agent of the divine in the fight against chaos and the maintenance of order in his realm (which struggle might be characterized as war with the imperfect and the incomplete: compare for example the "Enuma Elish" and the strange creatures which were made in the first creation). Heidel The Babylonian Genesis. pp. 23-4 [Tablet I, lines 132-45]. See also pp. 75-81 for the surviving Greek accounts by Berossus and Alexander Polyhistor.  The struggle against chaos is vividly illustrated in the palace reliefs according to the metaphor of the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. The lion hunt sculptures from the palace of Ashurbanipal echo this struggle. The king is also the final judge, meaning that his insight into the true nature of matters is second to none - see SLA 322 [= Harper 1006].

The divine is understood as some place on the other side of the limit of the world which the king rules, from which he is excluded except in terms of priestly contact.* SLA 327 [= Harper 565], which illustrates the fact that we are excluded from the celestial world except via observation. He is near to the divine, but not so proximate to qualify as divine himself. Though a letter suggests that part of the aura of the king was the power to do exactly as he wished - see SLA 324 [= Harper 137]. To those lower down the social scale in Assyria this might count as divinity; but to those able to juggle with the pattern of ideas within which Assyrian royalty functioned, it would connote no more than proximity with the divine - see SLA 137 [= Harper 992].

As the most perfect individual in his state the king nearly emulates the divine in containing all things: he is complete. The completion of his nature and that of Assur can be made concrete by its literal realization. The king is "king of kings", and this can be made real by conquest and the subjection of surrounding states from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea. Hence also his description as "king of countries" and "king of the four quarters (lit., edges) of the world".

It is possible that his "official" moods were in imitation of the gods, understood to be manifest in the motions of the planets: the Crown Prince was excluded from the presence of the King when Mars was in opposition to the Sun and hence subject to retrograde motions (which exclusion is an interesting reflection of the Adapa myth,of central importance to Sargonid kingship: Ea knew that Adapa was not fit to appear in the presence of Anu without some schooling in what to say) SLA 328 [= Harper 356]; see also SLA 342 [= Harper 356]; SLA 344 [= Harper 365]; SLA 345 [= Harper 652]. The same sort of equation was made between the geography of the Mesopotamian world and the surface of the moon at the time of lunar eclipse – see SLA 322 [= Harper 1006]. Roaf in his Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia illustrates this letter, but gives no citation (22 May 678 B.C.). See also SLA 324 [= Harper 137]. See also Parpola's Doctoral Thesis, Letters of Assyrian Scholars to Ashurbanipal and Esarhaddon 1971, Appendix 3B.

It is difficult to specify exactly what is going on here, but it would appear that there is some kind of transactive relationship understood to exist between the abstract (gods) and the concrete (the earthly responsibilities of the king): the character of some of the acts for which we have evidence is best explained by presuming that the principal point of the acts was to create a harmony between heaven and earth; to act as agents, the viziers of the divine, not to supplant its position, or to exploit it for personal ends. Prestige and propaganda are naturally of significance in a world dominated by metaphors (the king being a metaphor for the divine), but the state machine is driven by, both the internal logic of its theology, and the theology functioning as a tool of state. In any case, the distinction between the character of the state and the will of the gods has not yet been made.

The Assyrian concept of nobility

In Assyria justice was not based upon equity, but upon who you were. Thus, the kind of treatment one might expect depended upon what kind of position one occupied in the social structure. In other words the arrangement of society was hierarchical, and the honour and moral worth of an individual depended upon his social position (which, given the complexity of the court and society, might not be reflected by means of the possession of a title). Hence the poor and the helpless by definition were morally worthless, deserving pity; and the rich and the powerful, also by definition, were naturally of high moral character SLA 329 [= Harper 1237], which illustrates that only the divine can exist in harmony. Thus, the more noble the individual (reflected by social position), the greater the proximity to the divine.

The basis of such a social system is teleological: each social position being understood as a rung on the ladder with the divine at the very top; the king stood in close proximity to the divine. The divinity represented a perfect completion, each social position being a more or less imperfect emulation (though perhaps achieving its own special completion of no significant worth). It would seem however that sometimes the hierarchical order could be reversed, for reasons which are difficult to understand: see SLA 329 [= Harper 1237].â Since completion and perfection were the criteria by which the excellence of acts, things and people were judged, fact and value interpenetrate. Everything in such a world speaks of its meaning.

This of course means that the moral structure of the Assyrian state ought to be intelligible, at least to some extent, in terms of Aristotle's understanding of the way human beings ought to function, since in both the Politics and the Ethics he discusses actions and structures in  terms of honour and completion. Herodotus too constructed his Histories on the basis of a teleological model, interestingly associating space and direction with moral qualities [see also Aristotle, Politics 1327b-1328a].

Both of these writers lived some time after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which means that caution is important. Herodotus however lived close enough in time to at least contemplate writing a history of Assyria. Though Greek and Assyrian cultures are clearly quite different entities, a comparison between the two might shed considerable light on the latter.

The King and Totality

The concept of totality as a feature of both the Adapa (myth and discipline) and Assyrian theology, arises as the logical corollary of the association of the king with perfection, and thus completion: it is another way of framing the idea that the universe is structured according to degrees of participation in the ultimate completion (the realm of the divine). This ultimate completion is transcendent, in that we can have no commerce with it except via individuals with a special quality in common (temporary or permanent). However, the essential characteristic of the divine, if it cannot exist in the world, can be emulated within the limitations imposed by the nature of earthly reality. Hence we find the king engaged in conquest and empire building, attempting to take hold of the known universe and to subject it to his will (which is naturally the will of the divine). This ambition (if not necessarily the reality) is reflected in the style of the king’s inscriptions, whether addressed to a human or divine audience. Client kings make sense within this emulatory system: he need not rule directly, just as Marduk need not. A proxy representative (bound by oaths to the Assyrian king, justas the king is bound by oath to the god) is not only satisfactory, but fits harmoniously into the Assyrian model of the world.

Aristotle was insistent that, while a man might be regarded as a god among men, a man could not be divine while still living, because the divine has a strict definition. Man is connected with the divine in a participatory sense through the accomplishment of ends and completion. While man has existence on earth he cannot be truly divine (though he might be truly human only by virtue of something of the divine within him).

That Aristotle's definition of the divine is traditional is supported by the fact that no clear evidence exists for the paying of divine honours to a Greek (while still alive) before and including Alexander the Great (Heroic honours being a quite different matter: the different species of honours require to be clearly distinguished).

That the teleological world view was important in the fourth century B.C. is illustrated vividly by the proskynesis debate at the Persian court of Alexander. The best account is by Arrian, and it presents the debate as a struggle between theteleological view of divinity (of which he must have been aware, having been Aristotle's pupil) and the Democritean view of theological matters (in which nothing happens according to fortune, for there is nothing beyond the meaningless concourse of atoms). The debate is a miniature of the struggle between Plato's Gods and Giants (the Sophist): ironically Anaxarchus tempted Alexander to side with the giants in order that he be regarded as a god. Thus it is a fourth century miniature of the struggle between the ancient teleology (in which actual divinity is incompatible with complete physical existence), and the moderns (who restrict themselves to dealing with the idea that divinity is a metaphor, with only the meaning with which it is invested by its devotees).

Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)

Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for another time.

I’m now approaching this [project] as something like a grammar of human intelligence. This is because I backed away (around two or three years ago) from starting from where I started – which was from a study of ancient philosophy. [It is hard to establish parallels using materials which appear to have no exemplars in other cultures. Which is one of the reasons this comparative and anthropological work has, so far at least, not been undertaken with any degree of seriousness].  Instead I decided to approach the question of how people used to think in antiquity on the basis of a phenomenological study. As if I didn’t know any of the things I already knew about the ancient world – both historical and prehistoric. [I.e., there are many obvious parallels between the culture phenomena of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levantine civilizations, but these are, as yet, largely un-anchored in an underlying substrate of what might be sophisticated patterns of thought.] 

This way of tackling the problem has turned out to be very successful. Unfortunately I’ve written very little down about this, beyond a couple of lists of phenomena which repay closer study because they illustrate the characteristic grammar of the human intelligence [if the scholar looks hard enough]. Essentially these lists form the backbone of the study – it was and is my intention to use these lists as the basis of the books structure.[There was a series of lists entitled 'Topics', added to over time. One of these has been posted - Topics 5. The point was not to assume that all of the post-Enlightenment constructs which we use to interpret the ancient world, and which are less than three hundred years old, are correct. I know what I have been taught, and know what the assumptions are. But I chose to proceed as if these constructs were invisible, for the purposes of separating the actual evidence from what might be convenient presumptions,  including ideological and political judgements]. 

I backed away from the original approach for a number of reasons – partly because it was a very technical approach – but mainly because I didn’t think that attempting to infer common ways of thought on the basis of philosophical writings was a good idea, despite the fact that there are lots of clues in ancient texts to support such inferences. Better I thought to establish a good case on the basis of all available evidence for patterns of thought in antiquity outside philosophical texts, and then show how these texts build on these patterns, since, to some extent at least, this is likely to be what actually happened. The technical apparatus then becomes the principal corroboration of the thesis, rather than the point of entry into the argument.

In effect I’ve established [a process for dealing with] the case[s] twice, from different points of view, which represents some kind of check on the use of the evidence to support the hypothesis. This is as important to me in developing this case as it is in making the case to a more casually interested reader. I’m not interested in creating a weak and scarcely wearable fiction. I want a more coherent armature for the evidence that we currently have, which does less violence to that evidence.

In many ways the book is no longer about ancient history, though that remains the place where I started, and the home of the question I wished to solve.

It is now (as a book) a phenomenological study of human culture, and more particularly of its various levels of articulation. Essentially it is about establishing a coherence and continuity in human cultural production. Not by cutting down the evidence to fit, but by looking for the levels which make this cultural production hang together.

Of course this means that the book is a 21st century stab at the “key to all mysteries” [in that it proceeds on the basis that there is the possibility that there is a coherence in the body of ancient thought, expressed in art, literature, poetry, liturgy and ritual, which we have missed. With the intention of establishing whether or not a coherence of that sort exists, or once existed in some form.] On that account alone the thesis of the argument will be dismissed by those for whom synthetic arguments are not possible. Where they are found they are ipso facto false (itself a synthetic proposition, which doesn’t seem to be an objection to those who hold such an opinion). However I don’t see that a coherence in the cultural production of the human mind is a priori not to be found, and I do not find it to be very scientific (if that is to be valued) to presume that it cannot be found because it is [simply assumed that it is] not there to be found. 

If anything, the case which the book will make is that there is a coherent synthetic argument which binds all the inconsistencies of human cultural production. [As well as arguments which render consistency in interpretation. In other words, we need to understand why things are apparently inconsistent, as much as those which appear to be consistent to us. That throws back the problem of interpretation on to the sometimes problematic nature of the paradigms, constructs, and mental processes of scholars from the Enlightenment onwards]. 

The key to the mysteries is not an intellectually satisfying single core of human genius, but, that none of it adds up to that – the key is that human cultural production is deeply contingent and consistent with nothing save its own context [both intellectually and in terms of expression], except when the phenomenon is examined for the signs of an underlying grammar – which may or may not be part of a body of intellectual ideas.

Is this structuralism? Certainly it is a form of structuralist analysis, but it isn’t the structuralism of Levi-Strauss – it is not connected with the architecture of human narrative, but rather all human constructs, in space and in time. And it certainly isn’t an attempt to bind together cultural production on the basis of similar content; rather the opposite – to find out how quite dissimilar things participate in the same underlying grammar of human understanding [I was thinking of Plato's discussion of the' Same and the Different' at this point, since it follows from Plato's ontology, as well as the ontologies of other cultures around the Mediterranean, that, if the experienced world actually resides in a place which is neither located in space or in time, the ontological model which is being employed is that of reality as a plenum].

I would not wish to give this kind of philosophical analysis a name of that kind. The argument is both analytic and synthetic, in that way that good historians proceed. Questions are asked, and data is ordered. And questions are then asked of the ordered data. That isn’t structuralism (at least not to me). 

[Those familiar with  the work of Husserl may recognise the process of bracketing in my description of the attempt to analyse evidence and data outside the paradigms which we normally use to understand the past]. It is the act of creating wearable fiction, as the poet Alastair Reid suggested recently, at a public lecture in the Playfair Library, in the University of Edinburgh. Or at least, more wearable fiction than those we are currently forced to wear. [Alastair Reid was a friend and associate of Robert Graves. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because I once worked as a research assistant for the Robert Graves Trust in Oxford, and spent much time before and after that trying to come to grips with Graves' White Goddess, which is not an easy text. I wrote an analysis of the White Goddess Sigil (in 1999) which appears on the cover of the book. The sigil can be understood in terms of various parts of the text, and in terms of information which can be found in his Greek Myths]. 

A principal way in which this study differs from a modern historical approach is that it does not build on the assumption that economic forces dictate cultural production. Or even that economic forces shape men’s thoughts. Rather economic forces are seen as a level of constraint, defining a space in which cultural production is possible. The difference is that whereas historians tend to see economics as a cultural driver, I see them as a brake, principally on the human imagination. Once, as a student studying the career of the Gracchi, I expressed the view that I could not work out what was in the mind of the surviving Gracchi brother. The eminent historian in charge of the tutorial suggested ‘does it matter?’ Well yes it does, unless you think that what is in someone’s mind is of no account, and that the inner life of the mind is no more than a reflection of the economic pressures bearing down on the owner of that mind.

Which is not to say that the economic landscape is of no little account – just that it acts as both a facilitator and a brake on human action. What causes human action is more interesting than that, as we shall see. Understanding the phenomenology of human history and culture without taking account of the mind, and perhaps more particularly the human will, seems to me to be a very strange approach. An approach so strange in fact, that it may be possible to explain it only by reference to the same grammar of human thought which some historians purport not to need to know anything about.

The Ka and Totality in Ancient Egypt

This is a speculative essay on the meaning of the Ka in ancient Egypt from May 1988. I'd forgotten that I'd written this, and I'm surprised to find that I'd written on this subject so long ago. The essay is written on the simple premiss that the Egyptians asked themselves the same fundamental questions about the nature of reality that the Greeks did (i.e., 'why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'is reality one, and if it is one, why are there many?' And so on).The most fundamental questions that can be asked of the world are likely to be universal.

My interest was in the possibility that these questions might lie at the root of religious thought and practice. A good way to find out if the Egyptians thought like this is to assume (for the purposes of argument) that they did. By the time I wrote this piece, I'd already read On the Mysteries by Iamblichus, which book suggests that the religious mysteries of both Egypt and Assyria are rooted in the same kind of intellectual territory discussed much later by Plato. Unlike modern specialists in Platonism, Iamblichus regarded Plato as a theological writer, who was discussing important theological questions in dialogue form. 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Egyptians were proto-Platonists. But the distinctions between the outward forms of theological and religious ideas does not preclude the possibility that the differences have a common root in the same fundamental questions which can be asked about the nature of reality. We already know that there were many common practices in the ancient world which suggest the presence of a common intellectual substrate, more or less lost to us. Sacrifice, worship of divine images, and so on. We write off these obvious similarities as the products of a more or less universal form of primitive stupidity. But the opposite may be true. And we won't find this out if we don't consider the possibility.  

The pages were scanned at 300dpi, and they are in JPG format. They can be saved and opened full size in an image browser. All the pages were typed using an IBM golfball typewriter. 

All eight pages have been assembled together as a PDF file, and uploaded to Zenodo. It can be accessed and downloaded at: https://zenodo.org/record/3383059#.XWuoZS5Ki02

TY, August 31 and September 1, 2019.

Cosmotheism, Totality, and the Transcendental (Complete)

[This text originally appeared on my blog in four parts, as: 'Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia' I-IV, during the winter of 2018-9. The parts are now stitched together. A fifth part has been added (December 2019), which brings  the essay to a conclusion]  

There were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through narrative. It can be read like that, but the structure is actually fugal: echoes of the same ideas come up throughout the text in different guises.

One of these ideas is the significance of what is ’whole’ in ancient thought, and the role it seems to have played in the development of ancient religion (the connection between physical and transcendent reality, a matter of great importance to the ancients, was understood to be made possible through the nature of wholes and totalities). Another is the idea that the nature of reality can only be one, otherwise the integrity of reality would be fatally compromised. A third idea which plays a part in this fugue is the irrational nature of the ur-reality. We see this fundamental irrationality expressed in physical reality through the irrational nature of mathematical constants. The closer we look at the building blocks of physical reality – geometry, mathematics and physics – The more we understand that these actually point back to an ur-reality which is deeply irrational. However large parts of physical reality can be described and modelled in terms of geometry and mathematics. A fourth question is discussed – if reality is necessarily one, otherwise the fundamental nature and integrity of that reality is rendered impossible, how is it that the universe in which we live is full of multiplicities and things which are different from each other? How can this be if reality is one?

The fourth question is closely allied to one of the most profound questions which can be asked, which is ‘how is it that there is something rather than nothing?’ This question was asked in antiquity, as it is still sometimes asked. But the answer to that question received a more intelligent response in antiquity than it does now. We know about its importance not so much from direct references, but from the fact that that ancient writers become very coy when discussing matters of creation, and often do not give satisfactory answers. Most historians simply assume that this is a reticence surrounding the particular doctrine of particular cults, and that the phenomenon does not point to a way of thinking about the generation of the physical world which is rooted in philosophical questions about what reality is. Instead they dismiss the importance of reasoning in connection with the creation of the physical world as having nothing to do with universals, because (‘as any fule know’) that kind of abstract thought was absent from the human race until the advent of the Greeks.

One of the ways to test this assumption is to assume, for the purposes of argument, that the opposite might be true: that bodies of thought before the Greeks are actually built on abstract and universal propositions derived in the course of philosophical inquiry. And mostly on a basis of logical thought. The results which emerge from this approach are often quite startling: a great deal of thought from before the time of the Greeks starts to make sense. And strong parallels emerge (another one of the themes of The Sacred History of Being) in the Babylonian liturgy of the New Year Festival (the Enuma Elish), between early Greek and Babylonian/Assyrian thought.

Another thing which historians of ancient thought do is to assume the simplest interpretation of the details of ancient religion is likely to be the correct one. So, the gods have a variety of origins – deified individuals, local totemic deities, and the personification of the powers of the natural world. Storm gods and Sun gods are a gift for this kind of interpretation. But again, the assumption can be tested by assuming the opposite: that there is some kind of philosophical basis to ancient gods within particular cultural groupings. The parallels across several cultural groups in the ancient world are often striking. Close examination of the rituals for installing gods (where we have them) are particularly revealing. Are these rituals designed to install gods on the earth, or in some transcendental realm, such as Heaven itself? Very few specialists deal with these materials, because the answer to that question is quite clearly the latter.  Yes, there is a carefully crafted image of the god on earth, in his temple, but it was understood by the Mesopotamians to be a particular image of the god on earth, who has his essential reality in Heaven.

 So what is going on here? The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the craftsmen undertaking the work are granted a temporary divinity, without which they could not create a god. And afterwards, their divine status is removed through another part of the ritual, and they make public denial of their involvement in the creation of the god. Historians (with one or two exceptions) have no idea of what the basis of such a notion of granting temporary divinity might be. And so these rituals are generally passed over in any discussion of Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, in favour of the more conventional view that the gods are personifications of natural powers, and so on.

Nothing is explained by avoiding the uncomfortable nature of the evidence. Addressing the evidence is the only way to understand what is involved. There are several clues, such as the description of Marduk as the totality of the gods, in the Enuma Elish (in the section known as ‘The Fifty Names of Marduk’). Each of the descriptions of the fifty gods is a humanly crafted definition of what they represent, and their importance for the good order of the world. As the totality of the fifty, Marduk is the head of the pantheon of gods. He represents the whole of Mesopotamian divinity.

Is Marduk therefore reality itself? The answer is both yes and no. The Enuma Elish contains descriptions of two creations – the second rational, the first irrational. And Marduk is not present during this first creation. The first creation is described as a hail of composite creatures, with the bodies of animals and the heads of men. It is destroyed because it is irrational. Marduk then creates good order in the world so that man may live, stretching out the surface of the earth and creating the places of refuge (implying that he was responsible for the creation of ordered space and the physical dimensions as we know them).

So, as in other ancient descriptions of creation, there is a stage in the process which is difficult to fathom, and which participated in irrationality, and in chaos.

The Greeks were cautious in their discussions of the arche, at least in public, probably for this very reason. They sometimes passed over this stage altogether in silence, in their divine genealogies. But this evasion tells us that their conception of reality was that reality was a plenum, and that it was not, in itself, good. A well ordered world emerged from that initial state of reality, through the presence and action of the gods. In Mesopotamia, the gods had the power to secure the good order of the world through the ‘fixing of the destinies’. The Greeks had a similar concept, in the three fates.

The Sacred History of Being contains an extract from a discussion of the complexity of our understanding of the One by the Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was a contemporary of Shelley and William Blake. Taylor's text outlines the difficulty which surrounded the discussion of this subject in antiquity. After quoting the text, I wrote that Taylor’s comments show:

…how far Platonic argument about Being and the One can be pushed, and also [shows] how far Plato understood the limitations of argument about Being, and knowledge itself. This is a thousand miles beyond the level of sophistication of discussion of the nature of reality by Anselm and by Descartes. In practice their discussions of the subject lack clarity, and actually never proceed beyond ideas and notions associated with Being. So the ideas of 'Greatness' and 'Perfection', which figure in Plato's dialogues as attributes of Being, are the core of their arguments, and the limits of their conception of the Divine.

Another reason for including this text is that it shows just how dangerous this doctrine is, and that its dangerousness was fully understood in antiquity. If an ultimate ineffability is wrapped around the idea of Being, and it cannot be fathomed or known, it is easy for the 'idiotical ears' to assume that their religion is a pious fraud based on a doctrine which has at its core no divinity at all. 

The primal chaos at the heart of Being of course makes perfect sense within a model of the world in which the difference between the subjective and objective is ultimately an illusion. We participate in Being, and in creation. Reality is what we make of it. Without such an understanding of this model of reality, the description of Being and reality served and discussed in the ancient temple school could only mean to 'the idiotical ears' that the priesthood held that there is no god.

[TY, December 21, 2018]

The conventional wisdom, at least since the European enlightenment in the eighteenth century C.E., is that the phenomenon of monotheism is an idea which emerged from a preceding general inclination to polytheism among the human race. It is also conventional wisdom that we know of no instance of a monotheistic religion before the instances which are regularly cited to support this narrative. This emergence is short on evidence, and the evidence we have is less than clear in terms of context and implications, but is nevertheless a key assumption for historians of thought, and for theologians. It is assumed that the appearance of monotheism represents a negative and critical reaction to aspects of polytheism, and marks a great leap forward in human thought.

The evidence comes entirely from religious contexts, but this does not seem to matter. It is a great leap forward whether or not you are religiously minded, a professional theologian, a historian of cultural ideas, or even an outright atheist, because it marks the arrival of the ability to think in abstract rather than concrete terms. After this, it was possible for human beings to think in terms of universals rather than in assemblages of essentially unconnected particulars. It does not matter how the change is dressed: the human race was emancipated from an irrational concern for personification of natural forces, and the other ways in which a religious pantheon, or a sequence of genealogies, might have been built.

The two instances which are taken to show the emergence of monotheistic patterns of thought are:

 1):  the Hebrew insistence that Yahweh stands alone, and that ‘there is no other god beside me’. This insistence dates – in textual terms - back to the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E., since we know, largely from internal evidence,  that the text of the Old Testament was heavily redacted in the fifth century B.C.E., and reflects the views of what appears to be the victorious ‘Yahweh only’ faction in a long-running theological and political struggle concerning the nature of the Hebrew religion.

And:

2): The religious revolution which is supposed to have been wrought by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14^th century B.C.E., in which the plethora of divinities and the religious cults attached to them were replaced with the worship of the god ‘Aten’ alone.

I wrote extensively about Hebrew monotheism in the chapter ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, in The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the influence of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity (principally Babylonian) on Hebrew thought. There are many clear references to Babylonian concepts in the Old Testament, often in the form of parodies. The Hebrews certainly encountered Babylonian religious thought and practice during their exile in Babylon. The extent to which this was a significant influence on their thought and practice before the period of exile is hard to determine however, since there is very little evidence to illustrate the nature of Hebrew religious thought before that time, both in terms of datable textual references, and archaeological remains. We do not know whether polytheism was a Hebrew practice in the first half of the 1^st millennium BCE, because there is no unequivocal evidence remaining for that period.  Other individuated Hebrew gods are unknown to us in the textual and archaeological records, though there are references in Hebrew texts to the worship of both foreign and Canaanite gods (Baal being one of the most conspicuous). Yahweh is however sometimes referred to as ‘El’, and occasionally with the plural form ‘Elohim’. Which might be taken to imply a multiplicity of gods.

There is a great deal of evidence however which shows that argument about the nature of the divine took place, and some of that may have been prompted by the importation of foreign deities and foreign cult practices. These arguments, and their potential implications for the nature of Hebrew thought about the divine, were also discussed in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.

This argument about the nature of the divine is rarely read by scholars in terms of a philosophical debate. There is no connected discussion available to us relating to these conjectural debates, if that is what they were, and scholars are disinclined to address the detail which does exist in terms of a philosophical understanding of the divine.

As for Akhenaten’s religious revolution, some biblical scholars have argued (over many years) that Moses brought monotheism to the Levant at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and that there is a lineal connection (of some sort) between the supposed monotheism of Akhenaten, and the Hebrew conception of Yahweh. We are told in the Pentateuch that Yahweh is the one true god, but, as already mentioned, these are texts which were redacted in the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. These texts reflect the interests and beliefs of the victors – the ‘Yahweh only’ group.  The truth may be quite different. Since we have no reliable evidence for Hebrew conceptions of the divine in the first half of the 1^st millennium, what can be said of their conceptions of the divine in the second half of the second millennium B.C.E.?

In any case, are we clear about the difference between monotheism and polytheism? To adherents of the idea that the passage from polytheism to monotheism represents a cultural evolution, the answer is obvious: monotheism is a move away from local and tribal gods, and a move towards a grander and more abstract conception of the divine. However imperfectly understood. This eventually led to the development of articulate discussion of the philosophical nature of the divine among the Greeks.

But this narrative is entirely based on the two examples discussed above, and our understanding of what was going on in both cases is very thin. It is possible to impose the narrative of a cultural evolution on these examples, and this is what is done. But there is no conclusive evidence that this narrative represents the actual cultural dynamics at play in the second and first millennia  B.C.E. 

I’ve already shown in my essay ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten’ *1 that Akhenaten did not set out to obliterate the cults of the traditional gods of Egypt, and that there is no evidence that Akhenaten’s worship of the Aten attracted early hostility from the traditional cults. This does not mean that there was no tension between the new cult and the other priestly establishments. We do know that in the end, both Akhenaten’s supporters, and the priests of Amun, were enthusiastically hacking out references to their respective divinities from the monuments. But we have very little unambiguous information about how this situation came to pass.

In fact there is another narrative available concerning Akhenaten’s religion of the Aten which has not so far received much attention. Why is this? The existing narrative supports the simple idea of the development of monotheism as a form of reaction to what had become unacceptable aspects of polytheistic belief.  This narrative has a great hold on scholars, even if not all the available evidence provides clear support for it. The other narrative about Akhenaten’s religious revolution suggests something quite different – that the worship of the Aten was not just a newly minted preoccupation of Akhenaten, and to lesser extent his father, but that his revolution was an attempt to restore a very old body of thought in Egypt.*2

If that is the case, then the modern narrative we have constructed, on the basis of a very partial understanding of the evidence, will necessarily collapse. For one thing, monotheism will have been shown to be very old, and indeed be an Egyptian way of thinking about reality which stretches back to the earliest dynasties. For another, the idea of a cultural evolution from polytheism to monotheism will no longer be tenable, if monotheism is an idea which is thousands of years old. And in addition, if monotheism has an extensive history in Egypt, alongside an equally extensive history of polytheism, we would need to ask, ‘how could this be?’

1 Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten' (forthcoming). 

[TY, December 26, 2018.]

We can never know exactly when the idea of Being, or, as we may characterise it, the most abstract possible conception of the nature of reality, first entered human consciousness. It may have been an idea which was conjectured as long ago as the Palaeolithic period, or as late as the early Neolithic. 

However, for those who accept the western convention that the abstract conception of Being as the foundation of reality itself was first broached by the Greeks in the middle of the 1^st millennium BCE., the very idea of its earlier presence in human consciousness is an absurdity. The Western convention explains very little, is not supported by the available evidence, but it serves the purpose of closing off from our consideration even the possibility of a much longer history of the idea of Being. And for the gigantic, sprawling edifices of Western philosophy and religion, this is, for the most part, a comfort.

Yet the evidence for a much earlier presence of the idea of Being in civilization is far from invisible, except to those for whom (prima facie) the idea of an earlier existence for the concept can have no reality. Historians are disabled in their critical understanding of antiquity by the fact that the contemporary episteme – the intellectual frame in which ideas can be thought and discussed - excludes the possibility that the idea of Being is truly ancient.

It was suggested in the late 19^th century that the idea of Being was of no importance, since it was not possible to say anything about the nature of Being with any certainty: it was beyond having anything predicated of it. That alone made it possible for scholars to ignore the question of Being, whatever role it might have had in ancient cultures. The modern west had reached the point where ancient ideas made so little sense in terms of a modern understanding, that the idea of Being was simply passed by.

In antiquity the conception of Being was understood to be coterminous with reality itself. Hence the suggestion in the Babylonian ‘Enuma Elish’ that the dimensions of physical reality were stretched out of this primal and transcendent reality. In such terms, it is impossible to dismiss Being as an idea which does not need to be addressed. However, the idea of a reality beyond physical and sensory reality was effectively dismissed in the 19^th century. What we could see, measure and weigh was the only reality we could engage with. What might lie beyond the scalar and vector values was not something which could be rationally addressed. In fact the conception of a transcendent reality disappeared altogether from the range of things which might be known and understood, at least in terms of real knowledge. If divines and mystics still wanted to talk about these things, they were free to do so. But their discussions were treated as so many varieties of nonsense, and were not worthy of consideration.

In antiquity, the infinite, or Being itself, was not seen as inaccessible. That is clear from the texts we have. But it does not mean that connection with the Infinite and Being was regarded as unproblematic. The difficulty was the result of a collision between the logic of the immanence of the divine, and earthly logic. According to the latter, it is impossible for the divine to intersect with physical reality, since something cannot be other than it is. At least according to Aristotelian logic. Plato can not be interpreted the same way.

As we cannot know the origins of monotheism, we cannot know the origins of polytheism. We have to accept that. It is too far in the past. And indeed, there may have been no single origin for polytheism; no identiable path by which the human mind and human experience shaped man’s encounter with a plurality of gods. Generally we imagine how polytheism came to be: as the result of political and social struggles in antiquity, with the creation of pantheons of gods, whose existence mirrors in large part, earthly experience of powers, exalted into entities who have their existences somewhere quite remote from human experience. They are in some way in notional control of all aspects of ancient life, and are often deeply unfathomable in both  their natures and in their behaviour. Therefore they give rise to a sense of awe and sometimes terror in the human mind.

This way of looking at the origins of polytheism assumes that there is no transcendental aspect to polytheism, and that polytheism is a phenomenon which precedes both the first discussions of the idea of Being, and the idea that there is a transcendental reality which was understood to stand behind the world of appearance.

These two propositions stand behind the modern interpretation of the meaning and function of the gods in antiquity, and both propositions were occasionally entertained in antiquity itself, particularly from Hellenistic times onwards. We assume that this way of seeing and understanding the gods, which is our modern understanding, was as correct then as it is now, even if other ideas were current about the gods, and how the human race might engage with them, as though they were truly real. For the anthropologist and classicist James Frazer, the idea of discussing Being, now as well as in antiquity, is nonsensical. It is an abstraction about which it is not possible to say anything. For Frazer, Being is an unattainable abstraction, and for all practical purposes, it does not profit us to discuss it in any way.

And yet… Frazer himself noted that the idea of Being was clearly regarded as a proper subject for discussion by some of the earliest Greek philosophers – Anaximander, Hesiod, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras, for example, as well as for later figures, such as Parmenides and Plato. If the discussion of Being is a corollary of the emancipation of the human mind from irrational patterns of thought, normally imagined to be a major landmark in Greek civilization, the fact that there is a continuity of discussion around the idea of Being long before the development of the Athenian intellectual hegemony - via Plato’s Academy, and Aristotle’s Lyceum – is something which requires an explanation.

  

There is no such explanation available to be considered as long as we persist in the presumption that there is no conception of the ultimate abstraction of Being before the 5^th century BCE, which even the Greek evidence contradicts. Greek genius? I cannot write that without a sense of irony. It is an explanation which explains nothing, but draws attention to the fact that either we have nothing useful to say about the intellectual achievement of the Greeks, or that we choose to remain within our modern episteme.

We also need to escape the notion that the intellectual achievement of the Greeks owed nothing to contact with other cultures – again a view based on the presumption that there was no concept of the ultimate abstraction of Being anywhere else before the Greeks. Isocrates credited the Egyptians with the discipline of philosophy. Aristotle indirectly referenced the Egyptians by suggesting that philosophy may have begun with a professional class with time to think, by which he clearly had in mind the Egyptian priesthoods. And we know something of the cultural contacts (both intellectual and commercial) that the Greeks had with Egypt. Solon visited Egypt and talked with the priests. Pythagoras did the same, and also spent time in Babylon. The historian Herodotus wrote extensively (if often inaccurately) about Egypt, and went so far as to claim that the names of some of the Greek gods came from Egyptian sources.

We also know now of the cultural impact of the empire of Assyria on Greece, partly through the close proximity of Ionia with the kingdom of Lydia, a client state of the Assyrians, and through the direct capture of Athens by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, some time around 700 BCE. There was a temple to Assyrian gods built in Athens, according to the Greek writer Abydenus, and so there would have been Assyrian temple personnel present for a significant period of time, during which there was the possibility of a significant exchange of ideas. We have long known that many notions of the presocratic philosophers echo similar Mesopotamian ideas. 

[TY, January 10, 2019]

How can we have polytheistic and monotheistic ideas apparently existing side by side, within the same cultural contexts? This seems to have been the case in ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and perhaps also in ancient Greece. Plato often referred to ‘ho theos’ (God), rather than ‘the gods’, yet the cultural context was polytheistic. This is a mystery if we are yoked to the idea of a cultural transition from polytheism to monotheism within historical time.  That the evidence from these cultures, does not, on the face of things, provide support for this idea, suggests strongly that this modern and simplistic model of ancient cultural development is deficient in explanatory power, and is more than likely plain false.

It is far from straightforward to disentangle the elements of this issue, so that we might come to a practical resolution as to what is actually going on.  It is however useful to discuss some of the issues which stand between us and an understanding.

One of these of course is our modern preconception of what it was possible to think before Jaspers ‘Axial Age’. The very concept of an axial age speaks of a desire to close off detailed study of thought before classical Greece.

Why would we want to close off the analysis of earlier patterns of thought? The answer is that we consider that such patterns are irretrievably irrational in nature, and offer no rational insights into patterns of thought in antiquity. They may be intelligible in terms of the language of mythology, and in terms of the logic of poetry, but their literature is essentially pre-rational, and so is best approached in terms of disordered, and even pathological thought.

Another is the idea that it is only with the capacity to engage in rational thought, is it possible to  contemplate abstractions such as ‘Being’ and the ‘Infinite’. Before the classical period, we conceive that man did not contemplate Being or the Infinite, at least in rational terms, whatever inchoate inklings they may have had.

One of the issues with the scholarship which addresses thought from time before the Greek contributions, is that it is generally assumed, rather than evidentially determined, that there is no transcendentalist aspect present in ancient religions. What is missing is not defined in the context of ancient thought however, because there is nothing to be defined. Transcendentalist patterns of thought belong to later - and western - intellectual traditions.

It does not however take much effort to show that this is a false assumption, and that the interpretation does not account for the range of evidence which is available. For example, the Assyrian god Ashur was understood in a number of ways, including simply as the local god of the city of Ashur – recognised as powerful because his city was powerful.  However Ashur was also defined as the totality of the other gods. In which case he could be understood in terms of a grand aggregation of the properties and attributes associated with the other Assyrian divinities. This idea has been entertained, in this simple form, also for Egyptian polytheism, using the term ‘cosmotheism’ to mark out this species of thought concerning the ‘pre-axial gods’. In other words, the definition of the supreme deity in the official pantheon of gods is a plain summation of everything associated with the divine pantheon.

This also is how Marduk appears to be presented in the Babylonian New Year Festival – Marduk is the principal god in the Babylonian pantheon, and a section of the liturgy of the festival assigns him fifty names. These names are the other gods: they are listed for recitation, and the main characteristics are described and their principal functions are defined. Together, these gods, their descriptions and their functions delineate all the proper characteristics of divine kingship. As the supreme god, Marduk is also the perfect model for kingship in the Babylonian state.

This is how the literary and ritual texts can be, and are, read by the majority of scholars interested in the subject of ancient divinity. The starting point is that there is no transcendentalist aspect to the ancient understanding of the divinities in the pantheons of Assyria, Babylonia, or Egypt. If there is something approximating to a transcendentalist conception of the supreme deity, we cannot fathom it – and in any case, it will not be a wholly rational conception which would stand up to scrutiny. The idea will necessarily be vague, inchoate and imprecise, and will have no significant range of function associated with it. Such a loosely defined transcendentalism will perhaps signify only an exaltation of the status of the god, in the same way that in ancient Greece, divine status could be accorded to human individuals, without it being understood that the individuals had actually become divine.

However, we should look closely at what is being described in texts relating to the divine. In the case of the Enuma Elish, each of the gods in the pantheon which are embraced in the nature of Marduk, king of the Gods, represents an excellence, whether in the construction of quays and harbours, the detection and restoration of lost gods, the making of divine images, of farming and cultivation, of cattle husbandry, etc. Each of these gods represents the good things which are necessary for the good order and prosperity of the Babylonian state. And they are the most excellent exemplars of these necessary things.

[Final part added, December 29, 2019]

Excellence in Mesopotamia was understood to be a virtue, just as it was in ancient Greece. We can see this clearly in the autobiographical remarks made by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, when he recounts his training as crown prince, in preparation for becoming the successor to his father, Esarhaddon. He tells us of his skill as a spear thrower, and of his skill at oil divination. He tells us of his skill in mathematics, and that he is able to read the obscure cuneiform of tablets ‘from before the flood’.

By demonstrating his excellence at these things, Ashurbanipal showed that he merited the status accorded to him by his father Esarhaddon, who was the representative of the god Ashur on earth.

In a sense Ashurbanipal’s collection of excellences mirror’s Marduk’s embodiment of the lesser gods, as described in the liturgy of the Enuma Elish, all of whom are exemplars of things essential for the good conduct of the state and the upholding of the universe by the king.

It is possible to look at this kind of listing of embodiments of excellence purely as a description of what is desirable in both the gods and in earthly kings. That is the essence of the cosmotheist argument – the various excellences are descriptive, and provide a reminder once a year (in the case of the performance of the liturgy of the Enuma Elish) of what the necessary excellences are.

However we need to remember that liturgy and ritual in antiquity were understood to be performative, rather than simply descriptive. In other words the performance of ritual served a function  In the case of the Enuma Elish, performing the text was understood to contribute to the upholding of the good order of both the earthly world, and the state of the cosmos. Modern scholars of course do not believe such a thing, and have difficulty fathoming the ancient understanding of the efficacy of ritual.  But it is clear that in antiquity, for the courtly and scholarly classes at least, they held that ritual was performative and effective. We are told by the Greeks (and not just by Aristotle), that the pursuit of excellence is something which should be done for its own sake. Meaning that such a pursuit was understood to serve an important function.

We get clues about this when Plato talks about the harmony of the soul, and relates the idea to the good order of the polis, and the structure of the state. All of which is achieved through the pursuit of excellence, even at the level of craft activity. The soul and the society reflect each other, and each is, if things are in order, an assemblage of excellences. By extension, both reflect the good order of the cosmos, and the perfection of the gods.

This is not a cosmotheistic assemblage. Cosmotheism essentially argues that the idea of assemblage which a divine pantheon contains, is a fiction, since the assemblage does nothing in itself, but merely serves the purpose of creating a superficial sense of totality and completeness in the divine world.

In fact the function of the assemblage of the divine excellences embodied in both the gods, and in society, serves the function of binding the divine and human worlds together, and establishes a continuity between them. In addition to that, the assemblage of excellences opens the possibility of commerce between the human and divine worlds. 

This issue was of fundamental importance in both ancient Greece and in Mesopotamia. Plato focussed on the importance of a commerce between worlds in the Sophist, because otherwise all of the rituals and observances, the creation of images of the gods and their installation in Heaven, the sacrifices to them, and the divination of divine will, would be both completely meaningless, and impossible, if the two worlds lacked a connection, and a commonality. 

In the Sophist, in the presence of the Eleatic Stranger, Plato did not provide the detail of the argument for the connection between the worlds, but merely said that they must agree with each other that it must be so. But the detail of the argument can be found elsewhere in the Sophist, particularly when Plato is discussing the battle of the Gods and Giants . That section repays close study.