Time to Move On (Writing to Josephine Quinn)

A response to the article 'Time to Move On', published in the TLS in September 2018.

Dear Dr. Quinn,

Eleanor Robson referenced your TLS article of 18 September on her Twitter feed. I couldn't agree more with your argument, though I might quibble (minorly) with some of the details. The term 'classics' is long past its sell-by date.

 I studied classics myself, but because I was studying in London in the early 90s it was possible for me to study the languages, history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia at the same time. As a result I saw a different picture of the relationship between ancient Greece and Mesopotamian civilization than the one I was being taught. I've been studying that relationship ever since.

I self-published a book about that relationship in 2015 ('The Sacred History of Being'). Some classicists have read it, but most are disinclined, possibly because the argument seems to them to be too fantastic to be given serious consideration. Even the very idea of such an argument seems often to be beyond the pale.

It upends a number of constructs in our understanding of cultural development in antiquity, both east and west, which is a hard thing to swallow. But the evidence is there. The core argument of the book is that the same key ideas appear in the context of religion in Greece, Assyria, Babylonia, and also in Israel.

It is possible that Pythagoras brought these ideas back to Greece, after military service with the Persians (there is an account of this in existence). Which suggests that both abstract ideas and philosophical thought were not first developed by the Greeks. For most classicists of course, it is axiomatic that philosophical thought first began in Greece. The fact that Plato contradicted this, and said that philosophy was of a very great age, seems to cut no ice at all. Scholars (to generalise) are stuck in an episteme, which simply will not allow the idea into conversation, even if it is there in the text.

I've argued for a long time that the Greek Enlightenment of the 5th century B.C.E., is to a large extent a product of the European Enlightenment. And as you say, that is where 'classics' saw the light of day in the form we recognise. But the construct of classical civilization, as something aloof from other cultures around the Mediterranean, has been seen through a number of times during the past seventy years. Richard Broxton Onians saw through it, and knew the connections with Mesopotamia were there, and possessed a good understanding of their significance. I first read his book about thirty years ago, and I still think of it as one of the great unexploded bombs in scholarship.

Thanks very much for writing the article, and for your clarity of thought.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

The original article, published in the TLS on September 18, 2018. A set of reviewer notes for The Sacred History of Being (with chapter listings) is available.

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East

Symmetry and Asymmetry

I first noticed a regularity (and accompanying irregularities) in images from the ANE a long time ago, and mentioned the phenomenon in 'The Sacred History of Being'. I described a number of images in detail because at the time I had no money to have the images copied (in the early eighties).  This extra labour turned out to have consequences. In compiling these descriptions I noticed that, where images possessed a symmetry, the same images often (but not always) contained some kind of breakage of the symmetry. It is easy to write this sort of detail off as carelessness on the part of the maker, but that attitude to what we are seeing just excuses us from trying to figure out the significance.

This kind of imagery is a legacy from the Neolithic. I've seen the same sort of pattern in iconography from Catal Hoyuk. So it seems to reflect a way of thinking which has had a long history. This does not mean that it is a continuous history as something which was always understood. But that this kind of image keeps turning up, means we should try to fathom what is going on with symmetrical images broken by asymmetries. At least before we decide the details of the images are unimportant.

I studied the ANE in London (89-92), not just because I was interested in ancient civilizations. My principal interest is the history of ideas (as my twitter feed illustrates). By the time I got there I'd come to the conclusion that the idea that philosophical thought was a creation of the Greeks, was in fact a scholarly construct. Much of my work since has focussed on demolishing this construct. The construct serves the function of removing the need for close attention to the details of rational thought before the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., because we know it isn't there: the Greeks were the first.



The Plenum

The idea that there is nothing worth discussing is obviously a major problem. Another major problem is that, in the west at least, an important concept has dropped out of our ways of thinking. This idea is the plenum. It is important for us to understand it because it was important in antiquity. If we discuss civilizations in the ANE without the knowledge that this was so, we are just studying  representations of the civilisations, convenient to our own way of thinking, rather than what is there to be understood.

What is the plenum? It is the idea that the physical reality in which we live is not reality itself. Reality itself is a primal fulness, beyond physical existence. The world of physical existence is therefore a kind of selective representation of what is possible, beyond space and time. The primal fulness has no physical existence, but it gives rise - in some way we do not understand - to the existent world. It is the other place. It is eternity. And it was a key idea in Mesopotamian civilization.



The Plenum in Mesopotamia

This idea underpins Mesopotamian religion, and the role of the King. The idea that reality itself lies beneath the world in which we have our existence is the reason why there are two creations in the Enuma Elish - the first an irrational one, before Marduk imposed order. This is why the first created beings are an irrational jumble of possible forms. All of the forms are present (at least in potential) in the plenum, but not everything which is possible is either desirable, or rational. So there is a second and rational creation, in which Marduk establishes order. That rational order is also described in the Enuma Elish,  in the form of his fifty names, and the description of his attributes.

This same idea of the plenum is the root of the Mesopotamian idea that destinies can be fixed. All possible destinies already have a reality in the plenum. But the gods, and their representatives on earth, have the power to fix the destinies, because of their close contact with the entity which contains the possible destinies. The plenum is most often referenced in terms of the Abzu. It is at the bottom of the sea, because the sea (as discussed in The Sacred History of Being) is an image of the primal fulness of the plenum - it appears limitless, it has no form, no shape, no colour.

The Abzu is also the place where all knowledge is to be had, and Ea/Enki is the lord of the Abzu. The earthly king strives to embody the attributes of Ea/Enki, and to be as wise as he is.

The plenum in Mesopotamia is also sometimes referenced as totality. That is what it is. Not the totality of the physical world, which is merely an earthly representation of it, but the totality of everything that is real. Hence Shamshi Adad I using the epithet 'King of Totality' (Shar Kishati) as part of the description of himself. According to Neoplatonist sources (more than one) a doctrine of totalities was taught in Babylon, and was supposedly brought back to Europe by Pythagoras. The doctrine is referenced (indirectly) by Plato.

Why do kings and genies hold a basket or pail, particularly in the vicinity of the Assyrian Sacred Tree? The banduddu is another symbol of the plenum - of all that is possible. One of the representations of the banduddu in the British Museum shows doves at each side. They are there because that primal reality, beyond space and time, requires to be laid out in a rational order, if life is to be possible. The doves symbolise the laying out of the fabric of the world and its dimensions, stretched out of the transcendent reality in which there is no space and time.

So the banduddu represents the all of reality itself, out of which the physical world is created. The other object is the mysterious pine cone. It represents (I think) an opposite to the banduddu, which is multiplicity. There is no multiplicity in the plenum. It is what it is. It does not move and it does not think. But the rationally created world is full of multiplicity and difference. The primal fulness is held in one hand, and the multiplicity of creation is held in the other. The king (or other divine power) is between the two extremes - between reality itself, and its physical representation. He has the power to shape the created world - to fix the destinies, and to create good order on earth. 

The king (or another divine power) is represented twice around the tree. The image is symmetrical. But the symmetry of the image is superficial, since it is broken by simple details. One being is shown bringing the pine cone close to the tree; on the other side of the tree, the opposing being is making contact with the tree. What is being represented here is the power of decision which both the king and divine beings possess. Which is the power of rational creation, and the establishment of good order in the physical world.

What is being represented is two separate states. The first represents the potency of the king, where it is the king being represented; the second represents the actualisation of the power which he has. So the image represents both the power of kingship, and the function of the king. Which is why there was such a representation behind the throne in Ashurbanipal's palace.

This implies that the king has a connection with reality itself. The tree is another image of that reality (reduplication of themes is a major part of ancient iconography). We can tell a lot about what it means on the basis of the way it is used in other contexts. Elements of the tree (alternating lotus buds, open and closed, etc.) can be used in pavements and porches, or used to mark the boundary between wall reliefs. So it represents a form of limit. The king accesses that limit, and because he has access to it, he has divine power. The limit is the plenum, because it is at the edge of physical reality. What is at the edge of physical reality is coterminous with divine reality.

"Enki's beloved Eridug, E-engura whose inside is full of abundance! Abzu, life of the Land, beloved of Enki! Temple built on the edge, befitting the artful divine powers!"  From 'Enki's journey to Nibru.' Black, Cunningham, Robson, Z lyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004, p330

This is why sacrifices used to take place mainly at sunrise and sunset, because at that moment representations of the divine crossed from one reality to another (crossing the horizon between earth and heaven). It was the most propitious time for connecting the earth with the world of the divine.

The installation of divine images in Babylon and Assyria involved limits also - part of the ritual took place in a garden next to a river bank, where the long reeds were conceived to reach all the way down to the Abzu itself. And the rivers were themselves divine (DINGIR.ID), because water was an image of the divine reality.

The first sage,  Oannes, emerges from the sea to impart knowledge to mankind, for the same reason.


Transcendentalism in Mesopotamia

All of this makes sense only if Mesopotamian religion (or more accurately, Mesopotamian divine cult), was transcendentalist in nature. Meaning that the Mesopotamians (or at least some among the scholars, the 'priestly' class, and certain privileged members of the artisan class) understood there to be at least two levels of reality, one of them transcendent of physical reality, which gave rise to the world of physical existence. And that is what is described in their rituals and liturgies. Once the idea is grasped of the initial plenum, which forever lies behind the physical world, much of the rest of Mesopotamian literature makes sense, or at least offers clues to what is going on. Without a grasp of that idea, we have no clue.

A classicist would be likely to object to the above on the grounds that a transcendentalist nature to Mesopotamian religion would imply a contemporary grasp of philosophical concepts, and the ability to frame complex arguments about abstract questions and the nature of reality. But the Greeks invented all of that in the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E., so it is obviously wrong. They would follow up by saying that transcendentalist thought around the world does not predate the Greeks either. A history of transcendentalist thought has to start with the Greeks.

So we are back with the fiction. Transcendental thought is however the lynchpin of religious thought and practice in the ancient Near East. The denial of the presence of transcendental thought in the ANE has very little to do with the evidence which we have, and much more to do with the way the evidence is approached by us.

Further details concerning transcendentalism in the ANE can be found by following the links in the article Babylon the Great. There is also an article describing detail of the Babylonian creation which suggests a transcendentalist outlook: The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon. The importance of the idea of limit in Assyria is discussed in: The Threshold in Ancient Assyria. Links to articles on the importance of limit in general can be found in: At the very Edge: Marking Transition and Transformation in Antiquity. The properties and atributes of  Mesopotamian kingship are discussed in The Fifty Names of Marduk.

A book, The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion, was originally slated for publication in 2019, but will now appear either late in 2020, or early 2021.


TY, September 11, 2018, and January 9, 2020.