Transcendental Thought in Ancient Assyria

Transcendental thought in Assyria? The conventional view is that there is no transcendental or rational thought worthy of the name before the rise of Greek philosophy. That is the settled view of western scholars. A new anthology of transcendentalist thought *1, compiled by David LaRocca, published in February 2017, begins only with the writings of the Greeks, and without a trace of embarrassment about having nothing to say about earlier times.   

This view, which is dependent on the notion of intellectual and cultural progress, has been growing ever firmer since the European Enlightenment. The philosopher Karl Jaspers saw the Greeks in terms of a transition from one way of thinking, mostly alien to us, to another, which is the root of the way we understand our reality now. He termed the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. as 'the axial age'. His 'axial age' marks the transition from what is essentially irrational thinking, to rational thought. 

So now this period has a name. And because it has a name, it serves a function. That function is, in practice, to close off detailed consideration of what went before it, since it is not worth looking at as part of the history of of rational thought. Before the axial age, there was no rational thought. People lived and died in a miasma of irrational ideas, in a world peopled with gods and demons, and who had strange ideas concerning causality and meaning.

In practice ancient Assyria (and the whole Mesopotamian oikumene) is largely studied in terms of the things we think we know and understand, such as power, propaganda, and ideology. These things we assume to be universals in history, applicable to ancient societies, as much as to our own. We treat power, propaganda and ideology as the only intelligible rational drivers in the culture of Assyria. Assyria therefore is held prisoner within the presumptions of a historical and sociological school of scholarship which is a little more than a century and a half old. Very little effort is made to enter into the intellectual world of ancient Assyria, and  that intellectual world is treated (more or less) as an irrelevance to our understanding. 

The new exhibition, 'I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria', it appears, does not challenge the scholarly approach to ancient Assyria which was developed during the twentieth century, and which persists today. That is not what the exhibition is for. It celebrates the British Museum and its extensive Assyrian collections, put together since the beginning of the excavations in the near East, halfway through the nineteenth century. It is also a way of cementing the established view of ancient Assyria in the public imagination. It is, to a significant extent, an exercise in propaganda.The British Museum is guarding the status quo. 

To look at Assyria in any other way is essentially an act of cultural subversion. Nevertheless, the established view is untenable. It has been untenable for years. 

Sometimes academic disciplines get stuck in a particular place, or become trapped in a set of approaches which once seemed to make sense, but no longer serve to advance the discipline. Assyriology is unfortunately in that position today. This is despite the work of a small number of scholars who have published on the transcendentalism which can be detected in the religion, art and literature of ancient Assyria. 

Assyriology is a discipline which is very dependent on a number of other subjects (Classics, Anthropology, Sociology, and Philosophy in particular). It does not stand on its own. An Assyriologist does not need to ask a classicist or a philosopher whether the Greeks pioneered philosophy and abstract thought in the middle of the 1st Millennium B.C.E., since he already knows their answer, and defers to it. As a result, a serious challenge to the validity of the concept of an 'axial age' is unlikely to start in Assyriological circles.

For a period of a hundred and fifty years, the Assyrian Empire is the best documented ancient civilization available for study, as the Ashurbanipal exhibition shows. If we are ever going to gain a real insight into the nature and sophistication of ancient thought in the Near East, that insight will emerge from the close study of all aspects of ancient Assyria, and not just those aspects of their culture which can be used to support modern theories about how the human story unfolded. 

Here is a selection of fourteen articles (mostly book chapters and chapter extracts) which explore an alternative Assyria to the the one promoted by the Assyriological profession, and by the current exhibition. A few of these articles draw on Babylonian records, which also illuminate Assyria thought and culture. Those who have studied Mesopotamia in any depth know that Assyria and Babylonia belonged to a Mesopotamian cultural oikumene.There were many significant differences, but also many similarities, right down to their respective gods, and languages (mutually intelligible dialects of Akkadian, as well as common use of Sumerian).  

1. 'Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire' (full article) 

Keywords: Assyria, Greece, Cyrus, Pythagoras, Sennacherib, Babylon

It has been argued for some considerable time that there was a significant Assyrian impact on the culture of Greece, and the development of philosophy.*2 Simo Parpola published a paper in 2004 *3 (buried in a Festschrift), which argued that Assyria influenced Ionia, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, through its interactions with the kingdom of Lydia. This argument was made on the basis of Assyrian administrative documents. At about the same time, with no knowledge of Parpola's paper, I compiled the following document, largely on the basis of Greek accounts, mostly buried and unregarded in the writings of Eusebius. Our papers arrived at broadly the same conclusion, but the Greek references to Assyria are the more startling in their implications for the cultural history of Greece and the beginnings of western philosophy.*4

2. 'The Threshold in Ancient Assyria' (full article) 

Keywords: Assyria, Threshold, Border, Liminal, Carpets, Cones, Garlands, Sacred Tree 

Pauline Albenda studied (in detail) the threshold designs in Assyrian places from a phenomenological point of view, and published her important account in 1978 in the Journal of the Ancient Near East.*5 I reviewed her work in the following article, but from the point of view of the ritual and cultic significance of the threshold and the associated designs in Assyria. The designs are associated with the Assyrian sacred tree, which is itself associated with the idea of an ultimate limit. *6

3. 'The Idea of Being in Israel' (full article)

Keywords: Bible, Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Israel, Assyria 

Close examination of passages in the Old Testament show an intimate understanding of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity, and a great deal of borrowing of these ideas. Divinity was associated with the concept of the limit. The passages also show that these descriptions of divinity have a philosophical aspect. In the book of Malachi for example, God is made to say 'I do not change', which is an explicitly philosophical conception of what the divine is. YHWH also declares his identity with Being: ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.' This article draws heavily on a discussion published by Michael Dick and Christopher Walker.  *7

4. 'The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria' (full article)

Keywords: Making Gods, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Divine Images, Sumer, Shamash, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal, Plato, Astronomy 

There are some extraordinary documents present in the library of Ashurbanipal, which give us great detail about the ideas lying behind the creation of gods, and their refurbishment. To do their work, the craftsmen are allotted a temporary divinity themselves, which was removed once the work is done. How and why was this conceived to be possible? Temporary divinity was possible only if ritual action was conceived to establish connection with transcendent divinity itself *8. . 

5. 'Installing the Gods in Heaven: the Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual' 
(extract from article) 

Keywords: Babylon, Divinity, Installation,  Mis Pi, Palm, Quay, Ritual, Rivers, Statues, 
Tamarisk 

And we have the ritual. The ritual for the installation of the Gods in Heaven survives in more than one copy. One of the best is Babylonian, but it reflects Assyrian thought and practice also. The idea of men being able to create gods runs counter to what we think we understand about ancient cult. But it is quite clear that they had reasons for thinking that they had the power to create gods.*9 

6. 'Who Will Appear Before the City? (Divination in Sargonid Assyria)' 

Keywords: Assyria, Divination, SunGod, Haruspicy 

The sages of the kings of Assyria conceived that it was possible to divine the mind of the gods, and therefore to know about the future. They thought this because they conceived of reality (that is, a reality which transcends physical reality) as something which already contained all things which were possible, though not already revealed to the mind of man. The information could be accessed if a commonality was established between the inquirer and the god (in this case Shamash, the Sun god). That commonality could be established by completing the life of a sacrificial animal, and examining its entrails, which were understood to reflect divine knowledge at the point of the completion of its life. This is a compilation of twenty such enquiries about the future, presented here without commentary. The texts are taken from The State Archives of Assyria, vol. 4..*10

7. 'Standing in the Place of Ea: The Adapa Discipline and Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire' (full article)

Keywords: Ashurbanipal, Assyria, Adapa, Mesopotamia, Mythology, Enki, Abzu, Kingship, Neo-Assyrian Empire, Sargonids

An overview of the role of the king in the Assyrian Court and State, and an analysis of the Adapa myth in Ashurbanipal's education. The King is responsible for upholding not just the state, but the universe itself.*11

8. 'Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity' (full article) 

 Keywords: Mesopotamia, Philosophy, Abstraction, Cult  

What is the intellectual core idea which energised the Assyrian state? It is the idea of eternity, of reality itself, which stands behind physical reality. The king's role is to connect both worlds, through his excellence in this world. It is essentially the same concept which allowed the divine (coterminous with reality itself) to be questioned about the future in 'Who Will Appear Before the City?' *12

9. 'Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree' (extract from article) 

Keywords: Assyria, Kabbalah, Perfection, Sacred Tree, Abstraction, Mesopotamia 

The Jewish Kabbalah has been understood by historians to be a body of ideas and practices which were developed from the early middle Ages onwards, and which perhaps owe something to the influence of Gnosticism. There is the concept of an absolute without limit in Kabbalism (the 'En Sof'), which is not a problem if Kabbalism was developed in the middle Ages. However, there is a striking resemblance to the Assyrian Sacred Tree, if the Mesopotamian God numbers are inserted into the structure. If this identification is accurate, then the 'En Sof' may have been a living concept as far back as the middle of the 2nd Millennium B.C.E. *13

10. 'The Fifty Names of Marduk' (extract from article)  

Keywords: An, Babylon, Enuma Elish, Marduk, Mesopotamia, New Year,Festival

The idea of an axial age in the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. divides historical, cultural and archaeological time into two epochs: the first is (for us) an epoch which is deeply irrational in nature. Rationality only emerges after the rise of philosophy among the Greeks. This is a deeply problematic notion, because the Assyrians and Babylonians defined themselves as rational beings. The idea is quite clearly expressed in the section of the Babylonian New Year festival, where the supreme god (Marduk in Babylon) is described as the totality of the characteristics of the other gods, who provide for good order in the world. These gods came into existence at Marduk's call, and replaced the disorder of the first and irrational creation.*14 

11. 'The Concept of the Plenum in Babylon' (full article) 

Keywords: Babylon, Ancient History, Plenum, Creation

The concept of a transcendent and unlimited reality containing all possibility, standing behind the creation, and all generation and manifestation in the physical world, was an absolutely key idea to both the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The following article discusses the two creations which form part of the New Year Festival liturgy, and how the double nature of the creation points to to the presence of such a conception (an undifferentiated 'plenum' containing all possible things as potencies).*15
   

12 'Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria' (full article)  

Keywords: Forms, Idolatry, Philosophy

Several of the foregoing articles are chapters in the book The Sacred History of Being (2015), which discusses a shared (or borrowed) substratum of ideas, both in Greece, and in Assyria. This article reviews some of the major parallels, and the implications of such a shared cultural substrate.*16 


13.'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind' (full article) 

Keywords: Berossus, Telos, Origins, Civilization, Apkallu

The nature of the Mesopotamian understanding of reality is reinforced by the story of the first sage, who instructed mankind in knowledge of cultivation, and knowledge of seeds and plants. We have the account from the Babylonian writer Berossus, who describes an amphibious creature (capable of living in two worlds) with the head of a fish, which emerged from the sea and imparted his knowledge in the daytime, before returning to the deep at night. The symbolism of this is clear: water is one of a number of images which can symbolise the plenum, in that it is formless, without colour, and which exists in abundance. Living in the sea, Oannes has access to the knowledge which the plenum holds. *17

14. 'Ocean and the Limit of Existence' (full article) 

Keywords: Generation, Abundance, Myth, Creation

The symbolism of water and ocean is a feature of poetry and literature around the Mediterranean and the Near East. It is widely associated with ideas of creation, generation, and abundance.*18

Notes:

*1 The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought, edited by David LaRocca, Bloomsbury, 2017.
*2 Parpola, S., 1993c “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy”: Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52, 161-208. See also: Parpola, S., 2000a “Monotheism in Ancient Assyria,” in Barbara Nevling Porter, ed., One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World (Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute 1, Casco Bay), 165-209. 
*3 Parpola, S., 2003b “Assyria’s Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries BCE and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West,” in W. G. Dever and S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palestine. Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 99-111.
*4 Yaeger, T., 'Greece and the Cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire', in The Origins of Transcendentalist Thought in Ancient Religion, Anshar Press, 2019.  
*5 Albenda, P., ‘Assyrian Carpets in Stone’, in JANES [the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University], vol 10, 1978
*6 Yaeger, T. 'The Threshold in Ancient Assyria' in The Origins of Transcendentalist Thought in Ancient Religion, Anshar Press, 2019.
*7 Yaeger, T., 'The Idea of Being in Israel' in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015. The rituals for the installation of gods are discussed in two books: 
Dick, M, Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East,  Eisenbrauns, (Winona Lake, Indiana), 1999, and 
Walker, C, and Dick, M., The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mis Pi Ritual, State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts vol. 1, The Neo Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001. 
*8 Yaeger, T., 'The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria' in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*9 Yaeger, T.,'The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual' in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
* 10 Starr, Ivan, Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria, SAA (State Archives of Assyria) vol 4, Helsinki University Press, 1990. Ritual life reveals a great deal about the minds of the royal court, and many of the rituals survive and are collected together in Parpola's Assyrian Royal Rituals and Cultic Texts, SAA vol 20, The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2017
*11 Yaeger, T., 'Standing in the Place of Ea: The Adapa Discipline and Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire', in Understanding Ancient Thought, Anshar Press, 2017,
*12 Yaeger, T., ''Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity', in Understanding Ancient Thought, Anshar Press, 2017,
*13 Yaeger, T., 'Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*14 Yaeger, T.,  'The Fifty Names of Marduk', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*15 Yaeger, T., 'The Concept of the Plenum in Babylon' in Understanding Ancient Thought, Anshar Press, 2017, 
*16 Yaeger, T., 'Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*17 Yaeger, T., 'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*18 Yaeger, T.,'Ocean and the Limit of Existence', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015

Thomas Yaeger, November 11, 2018