Abstract
This paper
examines the ontology current in royal and priestly circles in ancient Assyria
and in related cultures, with particular reference to the period from the 13th
to the 7th century B.C.E. It draws on work by Simo Parpola, who has
shown important parallels between medieval Jewish mysticism and the culture of
ancient Assyria. In particular, parallels between the Sefiroth of medieval
Jewish mysticism and the Assyrian Sacred Tree suggest that the former is
descended from the latter, and that therefore the idea of Being enshrined in
Jewish Kabbalah has a longer ancestry than formerly suspected, stretching back
beyond the earliest discussion of Being in Classical Greece. The relationship
is examined between the myth and the discipline of Adapa, and the teleological nature of Assyrian royal
ontology. The paper concludes with a short examination of whether or not the
Assyrians can be said to have philosophized.
In 1992 the Assyriologist Simo Parpola gave an extraordinary paper at an international Assyriological meeting in Heidelberg. After subsequent discussion with other Assyriologists, a version of this paper was published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies (JNES) the following year.*[1] It suggested strongly that both Jewish Monotheism and Greek philosophy might have a common origin in the intellectual culture of ancient Assyria, through analysis of the relationship between the Assyrian Tree of Life symbol, found in the iconography of the Assyrian state over a period of about seven hundred years, and the Jewish Kabbalistic tree of the later middle ages.
The Assyrian Sacred Tree
Stylised trees were part of the iconography of religion in ancient Mesopotamia, as far back as the fourth millennium. By the second millennium B.C.E., ‘it is found everywhere within the orbit of the ancient Near Eastern oikumene, including Egypt, Greece, and the Indus civilisation’. While its precise religious significance has been unclear, Parpola suggests that ‘its overall composition strikingly recalls the Tree of Life of later Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist art.’ The implication being that there is some kind of cultural comtinuity behind the progress of this symbol.*[2]
The symbol, as it interests us here, dates from around the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. At about that time there is a new development of the symbol of the tree. The Late Assyrian form of the Tree appeared during the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, of the thirteenth century B.C.E. The rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the first millennium spread the symbol throughout the Near East, and it survived until the end of the millennium.
This form of the tree is the one most familiar to students of Assyriology and those who have visited the Assyrian galleries in the British Museum, with its garland of cones, pomegranates, or palmates surrounding either the crown of the tree, or its trunk. The importance of this symbol is made clear by the fact that it appears on royal garments, jewelry, official seals, as well as the royal wall paintings and sculptures found in the royal palaces. Indeed in the famous throne-room of Ashurnasirpal II (now in the British Museum), it is the central motif, standing directly behind the throne.*[3] There are literally hundreds of examples of the Late Assyrian Tree motif, and they exhibit a wide degree of variation.*[4] However Parpola argues that ‘Its characteristic features stand out even in the crudest examples and make it generally easy to distinguish it from its predecessors’. He describes it as follows:
Essentially it consists of a trunk with a palmette crown standing on the stone base and surrounded by a network of horizontal or intersecting lines fringed with palmettes, pinecones, or pomegranates. In more elaborate renditions, the trunk regularly has joints or nodes at its top, middle, and base and a corresponding number of small circles to the right and left of the trunk. Antithetically posed animal, human, or supernatural figures usually flank the tree, while a winged disk hovers over the whole.
Until the publication of Parpola’s paper, despite painstaking analyses of this symbol, very little was found to explain its meaning and function, largely due to the fact that there is an almost total lack of textual evidence concerning the tree.*[5] Some work by the Assyriologist Irene Winter however has shown that the Tree represents the divine world order, and that the Assyrian king maintained this order on earth as the vice-regent of the god Aššur.*[6] Parpola points out that the observation was made some time ago that the king may take the place of the Tree between the winged genies, and that ‘whatever the precise implications of this fact, it is evident that in such scenes the king is portrayed as the human personification of the Tree.*[7] As personification of the Tree, then the king represented the ‘realization of that order in man… a true image of God, and the ‘Perfect Man’.*[8]
Parpola argues that the Tree symbol in Assyria had a dual function in Assyrian imperial art. As well as symbolizing the divine world order which the Assyrian king maintained, it could also relate to the king, resulting in his portrayal as the Perfect Man. This would account for the prominence of the Tree as an imperial symbol, providing legitimation for the rule of Assyria, and justification of the king as absolute ruler.*[9]
Since there are no references to such an important symbol in contemporary written sources, this ‘can only mean that the doctrines relating to the Tree were never committed to writing by the scholarly elite who forged the imperial ideology but were circulated orally’. *[10] Parpola also suggests this implies a stratification of knowledge in Assyria, and that ‘only the basic symbolism of the Tree was common knowledge, while the more sophisticated details of its interpretation were accessible to a few select initiates only.*[11]
The Tree has a central trunk and horizontal branches spreading to the right and left on which the Sefirot are arranged in the symmetrical fashion: three to the left, four on the trunk, and three to the right. The vertical alignments of the Sefirot on the right and left represent the polar opposites of masculine and feminine, positive and negative, active and passive, dark and light, etc. The balance of the Tree is maintained by the trunk, also called the Pillar of Equilibrium.
Interpreted in this way, it becomes a way of salvation for the mystic seeking deliverance from the bonds of flesh through the soul’s union with God. The arrangement of the Sefirot from the bottom to the top of the diagram marks the path which he has to follow in order to attain the ultimate goal, the crown of heaven represented by the Sefirah number one, Keter.
So, given the striking resemblance between the Assyrian Tree and the Sefirotic Tree, both in terms of appearance and its symbolic content, is there in fact a lineal connection? Parpola argues that this is likely. The Kabbalah seems to have originated on Babylonian soil in renowned rabbinical schools, and these were later ‘the major centres from which the Kabbalistic doctrines spread to Europe during the high Middle Ages’.*[15] He points to known Jewish borrowings from Mesopotamia during and after the Exile to Babylon, including the fact that the Jewish calendar remained based on the Neo-Babylonian system of intercalation.*[16] Further evidence points to the ‘foundation stone’ of Kabbalism, the Sefer Yezirah, having been composed sometime between the third and sixth centuries, and the emergence of the Kabbalah as a doctrinal structure can now be traced ‘fairly reliably’ to the first century A.D *[17] Some Kabbalistic doctrines, such as the location of the Throne of God in the Middle Heaven, ‘are explicitly attested in Mesopotamian esoteric texts.’*[18]
the connections of Kabbalah with Jewish apocalyptic esotericism and mysticism of the post-exilic period have never been questioned, and its affinities with Platonism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Sufism were noted long ago and stressed by many scholars; the crucial question of the evolution of Kabbalistic doctrines, specifically their dependence on external influence(s), however, has remained a matter of controversy. While Kabbalists themselves have consistently stressed the antiquity of their tradition and vehemently denied the existence of any kind of historical development in Kabbalah… modern scholarship has tended to see the emergence of historical Kabbalah as a gradual process heavily influenced by Neoplatonic and especially Gnostic thought.
However this is no longer the case: Parpola notes that this picture has been changed significantly by recent research, and that it is now ‘generally recognized that there is considerable Jewish influence on the emerging Gnostic literature, not the other way around,’ and that ‘several doctrinal features of Kabbalah previously attributed to Gnosticism in fact belong to a genuine Jewish tradition reaching… down to the first century A.D., if not earlier.*[19]
for years considered the identity of the Assyrian and Sefirotic Trees an attractive but probably unprovable hypothesis, until it finally occurred to me that there is a way of proving or rejecting it. For if the Sefirotic Tree really is but an adaptation of a Mesopotamian model, the adaptation process should be reversible, that is, it should be possible to reconstruct the original model without difficulty.
This probably counts as an insight of genius. Parpola continues his account of how he demonstrated the identity of the Assyrian and Sefirotic Trees, by noting that the names and definitions of the Sefirot ‘strongly recall the attributes and symbols of Mesopotamian gods, and their prominent association with numbers calls to mind the mystic numbers of the Mesopotamian gods.’ The Sefirot are in fact ‘represented as angelic beings in some Sefirotic schemes, which is consistent with their definition as divine powers.’*[21] In the Mesopotamian scheme of course, the divine powers would have been gods, ‘with functions and attributes coinciding with those of the Sefirot’.
Consequently, I replaced the Sefirot with Mesopotamian gods sharing their functions and /or attributes. Most gods fell into their place immediately and unequivocally. Assyriologists will need no justification for associating Ea with Wisdom, Sin with Understanding, Marduk with Mercy, Samas with Judgement, Istar with Beauty, and Nabu and Ninurta with Victory (Nezah). Crown (Keter) was the emblem of both Anu and Enlil, but since in the first millennium Enlil was commonly equated with Marduk (just as his son Ninurta was equated with Nabu), the topmost Sefirah most naturally corresponds to Anu, the god of Heaven.*[22]
Gods remaining to be placed on the tree with epithets which fit the Sefirah Hod (Splendour or Majesty) are Adad and Girru, who share the same sacred number. Adad is the storm god, and Girru is the firegod. Parpola notes that in the Bible the word hod refers to Jahweh as a thundering and flashing storm. Adad had a major role as an oracular god, ‘announcing by his roar, divine judgements and decisions to mankind’, and was known as King of decisions, august judge’, etc.
The remaining Sefirah to be associated with a Mesopotamian divinity is Malkhut, or ‘Kingdom’. In the Kabbalah this Sefirah is defined as ‘the receptive potency which distributes the Divine stream to the lower worlds’. Parpola argues that in the context of Mesopotamia this ‘can only apply to the king as the link between God and Man’, and points out that the king as distributor of the Divine stream is a motif which is often found on Assyrian seals. The king is often shown holding a streamer emanating from the winged disk above the sacred tree.*[24] Parpola regards this sefirah as secondary, and has excluded it from the reconstructed model because it breaks the compositional harmony of the Tree, and ‘because the king, though impersonating the Tree, clearly does not form part of it in Assyrian art’.*[25]
This act of reconstruction took Parpola ‘no longer than half an hour’. The corresponding divine numbers were then filled in, using as a guide the article on ‘Gotterzahlen’ in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie, which was for the most part ‘a purely mechanical operation’, since in general the Mesopotamians associated only one number with a god, and only one god per number. Gods with the same number were understood to occupy the same place on the Tree and to be equivalent. In the course of his JNES article, where there is scholarly dispute about the divine numbers associated with the Mesopotamian gods, Parpola provides evidence for his choice of number for the Sefirah of the reconstructed Tree. Each of these numbers is as they were used in the spelling of divine names in the Middle and Neo-Assyrian standard orthography, and all are securely attested. These numbers are 1 (Anu), 30 (Sin), 60 (Ea), 20 (Samas), 50 (Marduk), 15 (Istar), 40 (Nabu), 10 (Adad), and 14 (Nergal). Mummu, situated between Anu and Istar, has the value of 0.
The reconstructed Tree contains nearly all the major gods of the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon. Only one major god is missing: Assur. No divine number for Assur is attested in the literature. Parpola suggests that Assur is to be identified with the winged disk which hovers over the Assyrian Tree, the source of the Divine streams, and accordingly is to be understood as equivalent to the transcendent God of Kabbalah, the En Sof. In support of this, Parpola tells us that in fact the various spellings of the name of Assur can be interpreted as expressing the idea of the ‘One, Only, or Universal God, as well as the various qualities of En Sof’*[26].
We should pause here and consider where this argument has taken us. Jewish mysticism of the middle Ages has never been more than an interesting problem for historians of philosophy, for the simple reason that formerly it seemed to appear out of nowhere, as a superstitial religious doctrine built on late rabbinical discussion of biblical texts, dating certainly from after the meeting of Greek and Jewish thought in Alexandria. It was always seen as a byway in Jewish mystical thought, as something strange and arcane with no direct origin in biblical materials, and the thought found in the Old Testament. Yet here Parpola is joining together the thought of Jewish scholars of the middle ages, with an ontology dating to the late 2nd millennium B.C.E.
In Kabbalistic theosophy, the En Sof (literally ‘the limitless’) is defined as ‘total unity beyond comprehension.’ This of course is an explicitly philosophical concept:: an idea abstracted from any particular instance. Since Zeller’s monumental history of Greek Philosophy was published in the late nineteenth century, it has become axiomatic to look at Greece as the home of genuinely abstract and philosophical thought, in contrast to ‘concrete’ patterns of thought found in other cultures. Yet, if Parpola is right in making a connection between the Assyrian Tree and the Sefirotic Tree, and can identify the chief God of Assyria Assur as having had a philosophical character[27] to the adherents of the cult of the Assyrian king, the primacy of Greece in the development of abstract and philosophical thought comes into question. In fact the whole relationship of philosophy to ancient religion would suddenly look to be without its customary bearings and aspect.
Does Parpola bring forward evidence which supports the analysis that Assyrian Gods represent aspects of a philosophical concept of the divine – a divinity whose character and aspects arise from a philosophical consideration of its nature as an abstraction beyond particular instance?
The same source Parpola uses for the definition of En Sof, also says that the phrase En Sof Or, ‘The Endless Light’, stands for the Will of the divine to manifest himself, which lies behind all existence, and is envisioned as a boundless ocean of light engulfing and pervading the physical world.*[28] Representations of the god Assur covered by a garment of water he argues is a metaphor identifying him as ‘the ocean of divine light, to whom all returns’. Dressed in water, which is associated with the Apsu or Abyss, he is said to have ‘come into being before heaven and earth existed’*[29] Another interesting connection between the En Sof and Assur is that the solar disk in Assur’s icon is sometimes replaced by two concentric circles with a point in the centre, which is identical ‘with the Kabbalistic diagram illustrating the manifestation of En Sof as the Universal Monad’.*[30]
In Assyrian cultic texts Assur is commonly referred to as ‘the God’.*[31] Assur is called ‘king of the totality of gods, creator of himself; father of the gods, who grew up in the Abyss; king of heaven and earth, lord of all gods, who emanated (lit. ‘poured out’) the supernal and infernal gods and fashioned the vaults of heaven and earth.’[32]
The King, by emulating the divine Assur, puts himself in the natural place of Assur, which is the Abyss, the place which existed before heaven and earth existed. The whole life of the king, as we know from the extensive records which survive, particularly from the time of the later Sargonid Kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, was understood (within court circles) to be shaped by the need to achieve the emulation of the characteristics and nature of Assur, and to be once more in that place which has the potency to create heaven and earth, and to give rise to the supernal and infernal gods, and the boundless ocean of divine light. A place which contains (in the Kabbalistic model) ‘all that was, is and will be, the place of first emanation and ultimate return’. The place of foundation, and the totality of gods.
A cult which understands its divinity in terms of Being is likely to revolve around both an ontology and a theory of knowledge, particularly if there is some notion of participation in the divine.*[33] In the case of Assyria, its theology is identifiable as an ontology in that it contains an underlying notion of the nature of reality, and its characteristics. This ontology is very sophisticated, in that is not simply an enlargement or extrapolation of an existing power, such as human kingship.
The characteristics of the foundation of reality are spoken of in terms which make it clear that the nature of this foundation transcends the capacity of ordinary mortals to understand or to describe it:: a place which comprehends the whole of understanding, which embraces all physical reality, and had existence before heaven and earth were created.
This idea of the ultimate reality behind physical appearance clearly has been arrived at through inference; is framed as something which has no direct earthly counterpart, and which is spoken of in terms of myth and image.
This ontology also contains the parameters of a theory of knowledge, in that, if the nature of the ultimate reality is by definition beyond the capacity of human understanding, then one aspect of the necessary return to the place of the foundation of the world is the development of a capacity to comprehend sufficient to allow participation in the divine.
The theory of knowledge which results is, in a certain restricted sense, the ontology reversed. Reality is the result of the divine will and understanding, and acquisition of an understanding of the divine requires both the will and the capacity to comprehend the divine.*[34] This is achieved principally through scholarship, since scholarship was understood to promote right judgement and wisdom.*[35]
In speaking of the creation of divine images, the Assyrian king Esarhaddon says:
Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where humans dare not trespass?… Is it the right of deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives? The making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right, it is in your hands.*[36]
Thus in Sargonid Assyria, the great gods (who are aspects of the true divine) have understanding, and this understanding gives them the right to create the gods and the heavens and the earth. Man as unperfected man does not have this right. Human beings are ‘deaf and blind’ and ‘ignorant of themselves …throughout their lives’.[37] The passage in the same text which, referring to Esarhaddon as:
the beloved of the great gods, with the great intelligence and vast understanding, which the great Nudimmud, the wise man of the gods, bestowed on me, with the wisdom which Assur and Marduk entrusted to me when they made me aware of the renewal of (the statue of) the great gods…
yokes together the idea of knowledge with kingship, and also with divinity, since the gods Assur and Marduk made him aware of the need for the renewal of the great gods. He has the ‘great intelligence and vast understanding’ of ‘the great Nudimmud’, who is in fact the god Ea, often identified with Enki the trickster god, but also the god of craftsmen. ‘Nu.dim.mud’ is one of Ea’s epithets, meaning ‘fashioner of images’.*[38] It is a royal task, communicated to Esarhaddon by divine command, and naturally within this royal ontology, not easy to perform. Hence the skill and wide understanding (comprehension) which is required is stressed: “This task of refurbishing (the statues), … is difficult!”
The significance of the tree as an indicator of the uttermost part of the world is suggested by the appearance of the pine cones or pomegranates at the limits and crossing points in royal buildings, such as the palaces. Numerous of these entrances feature large slabs decorated with carpet-like designs, and an unwound version of the cones or pomegranates, linked by volutes, often appears around the edge. This design can also be used to mark off the extent of one thing from another – there is a slab in the British Museum which shows a winged eagle-headed genie with a pine cone in one hand and a sacred bucket in the other (these elements are often found in the context of the Sacred Tree) which is separated from another image by an unwound line of cones/pomegranates. The winged genie in its original context was facing one of the winged-bull guardians which stood either side of a palace gate. The representation of the bull brings together 4 qualities associated with kingship, since it is made up of the characteristics of man, bull, eagle and sheep. The figure therefore symbolically represents the totality of kingly qualities, and represents them at the threshold of the limits of the king’s palace.*[41]
The intellectual world in which the king and his courtiers lived, now very remote for us, was one in which the nature of a transcendent reality was of crucial importance, not only in terms of the potency and judgement conferred by the identity of the king with Being itself, but also in terms of the fact that the whole life of the king was shaped by the need to achieve that status and the constant striving to maintain that connection with it. The king was a bridge between the world of the divine and the great gods, and the world of man. Part of that constant striving was intellectual, as well as moral, in that the definition of the divine involved ‘wide-understanding’.*[42] Thus the role of learning, wisdom and scholarship plays an important part in the life of the court.
The next part of this paper examines the role of the Assyrian sage for kingship, particularly in the context of the myth of Adapa, which defined many of the aspects of Sargonid kingship.
Knowledge, the King, and the Adapa Discipline
The myth is known to us principally from a document found in two locations: the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, and an earlier text from the Amarna archive in Egypt*[43] We know about the discipline associated wth the myth from the Annals of Ashurbanipal, in which he recounts his own experience of the discipline, which formed part of his training for the kingship while crown prince*[44]The myth of the Adapa is currently understood to have provided a contemporary explanation of the convention that Assyrian kings were not divine, and also a justification of their right to rule.*[45] The matter is in fact somewhat more complicated. The account given by Ashurbanipal of his training gives us something of the context in which the myth functioned, and the way Assyrian kings understood their role. His description breaks down naturally into three categories of instruction: Scholarship and inquiry; Military Skills; Emulation of the King's administrative function. The importance of this pattern of training for the later functioning of the king may be illustrated by analytical comparison with the surviving royal correspondence. This correspondence may be broken down into roughly parallel groupings:
1. Religion, Magic and Medicine, Astronomy, Astrology and Divination
2. War
3. Provincial administration, Agriculture and Commerce, Court and Officials, Property and Revenue of the Temples*[46]
Adapa is instructed in the ways of heaven by Ea, the "broad eared one" (signifying wisdom)*[47] Dalley remarks thatAdapa was also known as Uan, which is the name given as Oannes by Berossus to the first sage; the name Uan also forms a pun on the Sumero-Akkadian word for a craftsman..., Adapa-Oannes introduced the correct rites of religious observance to mankind, and was the priest of Ea in his temple in Eridu *[48]
The precise meaning of the story is unclear, but it is usually understood to explain why Adapa was not granted immortality and remained as a mortal sage (apkallum).
the artistic script of Sumer (and) the dark (obscure) Akkadian, which is hard to master, (now) taking pleasure in the reading of the stones (i.e., steles) (coming) from before the flood, (now) being angered (because I was) stupid (and) addled (?) by the beautiful script *[52]
The foregoing requirements of the discipline of the Adapa fall under the heading of scholarship and enquiry. Next follow details of military skills. He tells us that he rode a horse, went hunting, was skilled as an archer and as the thrower of heavy lances. He could handle the aritu and kababu shields; in addition to these skills he could drive a chariot (he is depicted as a chariot driver in the palace reliefs)*[53] All these appear to have been understood as crafts, for he concludes these remarks by saying that "I wished to be the great lord (?) of all the craftsmen" (i.e., to be the best of them all).*[54] Given the nature of the coronation ceremony, for which we have an invaluable text, it would seem that he required the acclamation of his inferiors, to be perceived to merit the honour of occupying a transcendent office*[55] Indeed, in speaking of his skills as an archer, he specifically says that he "shot (lit., let fly) the arrow, the sign of my valour"
This installation is represented as causing peace in the land:
the four regions (of the world) were in perfect order, like the finest oil *[58]
He also says that in his first year of rule
I laid hold of the hem of the garment of his great godhead, I gave my attention to his sanctuaries *[59]
That is, the chain of connection between the world of the gods and that of man was his first priority.
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 symbolic 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.
The concept of totality is a recurring feature of Assyrian theology, and a logical corollary of the idea of perfection through completed and excellent action. It was understood that these characteristics of the divine could be emulated through representation within the limitations imposed by the nature of earthly reality. To understand this clearly we have to enter into the view that participation in the divine is possible because the characteristics of the divine can, in some shape or form, be manifest in the world of the here and now, whatever the actual nature of the whole of the divine might be. This makes effective moral action possible, both on the part of the king and other men.
The universe is framed in terms of knowledge and its absence; the divine has as one of its characteristics the greatest degree of knowledge. The Mesopotamian universe is thus structured according to degrees of participation in the ultimate completion (the realm of the divine), with ordinary men living in ignorance with little or no commerce with the divine, and the king at the top, the earthly image of the divine and the perfect man.
As the source of the world the knowledge of the divine is complete. Everything about the divine is complete, and all other completion and excellences are images of aspects of the divine. Though not literally divine, these completions and excellences are, as images and representations of the divine which possess some of the qualities of the divine, points of contact with its nature which permit the possibility of participation in the divine.
This ultimate completion - the sum, the totality of completions - is the necessarily transcendent telos, in that we can have no commerce with it except via certain special individuals in auspicious circumstances and significant locations. It is, as we have seen, impossible for mortal men to grasp its full nature, by virtue of its definition. It can be (and was) understood symbolically as a heaping up in one place of all possible completions and excellences in the world. Hence we find the king training with the artisans and the archers, the scholars, the bakers, and the diviners, etc., in order to master all important skills and crafts, and later we find that he is engaged in conquest and empire building, attempting to take hold of the known universe and to subject it to his lordship, which is naturally an emulation of the lordship of the divine.*[72] Totality is therefore a representation of the telos, and of the divine order. Kingship of totality therefore represents an intensification of the proximity of the king to the divine.
There are two classic formulations of the teleological perspective from classical Greece – Plato reminded a disputant that he was made for the telos, not the telos for him. In contrast, Aristotle’s illustration of teleological relationship was by means of the image of a house, in which the meaning of bricks was intelligible in relation to its construction. The bricks exist to build a house, or some similar structure for which bricks are designed. The telos thus defines the purpose of its parts.
The teleological perspective finds expression in many places in ancient literature before the classical period, and it is not confined to east or west. In the modern world however, the archaic sense of teleology is not well understood, even among historians of philosophy. The association of the concept with the notions ‘purpose’ and ‘design’ has, over the past two centuries, caused teleology to be viewed with suspicion as an explanatory mechanism, and usually it is summarily dismissed as an explanatory mechanism for anything, since it appears to beg those questions which it presumes to answer – what is the cause of existence? What is the goal of existence? From our point of view, in which we rely on the efficient cause for the explanation of relationships between one thing and another, this is a perfectly reasonable outlook. But we are not dealing with our own world, or even one which has to make rational sense except within its own terms.
Here we have to grasp an idea which seems to be quite alien to the modern mind: an ontology in which the divine is actively involved in the maintenance of earthly reality. The ontological argument for the reality of God is one which is familiar to modern students of philosophy and theology: essentially this attempts to argue on the basis of the nature of the world and its properties that the divine must exist, otherwise the world would not have its properties and nature. Descartes famous ‘proof’ of his existence was in fact a corollary of his earlier ‘proof’ of the existence of the divine, which was essentially an ontological one. And for Descartes his personal existence could have no reality without the prior existence of God. Ontological arguments for the existence of God are also found in the pages of the scholastics. *[73] However what we are looking at in ancient Assyria is quite different, since Descartes comprehensively banished God from a role in the day to day workings of the world, and the Assyrians did not. *[74]
We do not know precisely how the Assyrians came to frame the properties of the divine which we can determine from the evidence, for the reason that much of the thought concerning the divine was secret owing both to its proximity to the royal cult, and also because the Assyrian ontological model defined truth and participation in reality as something necessarily only for the select few. However, on the basis of the properties and characteristics which they associated with their gods, and the intellectual structure in which they were placed, so far discussed, it is likely that the nature of the divine understood by the Assyrian court during the Neo-Assyrian period was established by means of an ontological argument. That is to say that the reality of the divine during this period was the outcome of what we would understand as philosophical discussions initiated no later than the suggested date given by Parpola, which is the 13th century B.C.E.
The intense ritual involvement of the king (as representative of Assur) in the life of the state makes clear that the Assyrians employed the concept that the divine has the power to intervene at every moment of existence in order to maintain the fabric of the world, and its proper order. This is the corollary of the idea that it is possible for mankind to participate in the divine by moral and ritual action, and to climb towards divine understanding through scholarship. Contact with the divine is a two-way street.
The king, striving toward perfection, stands at the limit of existence, and also at the outer limit of the reality beyond. The king actually represents the limit of existence, and was emblematic (at the least) of the divine perfection. As we have already discussed, containing within himself all the excellences of mankind (following the drift of Assyrian royal ideology to its logical conclusion), he represents the telos of reality, and its capacity for action in the mundane world. .
Men in general have connection with the divine through the kingship of Adapa, and latterly through the kingship of those who have studied the discipline of the Adapa.
Adapa breaks the wing of the southwind (a wind favourable for kingship) while at sea fishing for the temple of Ea at Eridu.*[75] He is on the wide sea, described as "like a mirror"; Ea's wisdom is explicitly compared with the wide sea, and Adapa is both in the place of Ea and clearly identified with it at the time when kingship is destroyed.*[76]
Wide understanding was associated with the power to make decrees, and both were characteristics of kingship. The first fragment tells us that Adapa possessed wisdom and that "his command was like the command of [Anu] [...] (line 2); "with wide understanding he had perfected him to expound (?) the decrees of the land" (line 3). His power to give decrees comes from his perfection, his completion, which is like that of the gods; but, naturally, it is not the same completion. His connection with the divine is to be understood as functioning through his completion.*[77] But, though he had been given wisdom by Ea, he had not granted Adapa eternal life (line 4). Ea had however created him as a leader among mankind (line 6) and: "no one treated his command lightly" (line 7). *[78]
Thus Adapa is in the place of kingship, in that he has been placed in the realm of his father; because he is in that place he has the power to make decrees and he breaks the wing of the South wind with the utterance of his command. He in effect has usurped kingship, because he was cast deep into the realm of his father.
Why did the south wind bring Adapa into the realm of his father? To answer this we should ask why it is that the south wind should be associated with kingship in the first place. It is partly because in Mesopotamia the south wind is associated with storms and unpredictability. Thus the south wind connotes power, and power which transcends our capacity to predict its behaviour. As the gods are powerful and transcendently unpredictable, so the kings as their representatives (and emulators) are likewise powerful and unpredictable.
There is a two way process involved here: standing in the place of wide understanding promotes the power to make decrees and kingship, and kingship itself promotes wide understanding, expressed by Adapa's immersion in Ea's kingdom, the Apsu. Thus the southwind, emblematic of kingship, is responsible for conferring the power on another entity to break its wing (its power to be what it is).*[79]
This aspect of the myth is probably significant for the understanding of how the Sargonids understood royal succession. The kings had institutionalised the transfer of power from the king to the crown prince (possibly as the result of numerous occurrences of factional infighting in the royal court). The education of the crown prince prepared him to stand in the place of his father. While his education continued, he was not allowed to live in the same place as his father (the royal palace), but instead lived in a separate establishment which mirrored its character and functions. The crown prince was given an entourage like that of the king, drawn from the sons of the nobles forming his own court. Thus, as the king is the image of the god, so the crown prince is the image of the king. The crown prince was chosen by the king from amongst his sons and the decision was confirmed by omens and divination. That is, the kingship of the crown prince was legitimate only if confirmed by the gods.
Note that Adapa was engaged in fishing out of sight of the sun god (i.e., at night) at the time he encountered the south wind, and that therefore the sun god (Shamash) could not see what was happening and give his sanction.*[80] Therefore the arrogation of kingship, even divinity, by Adapa, is illegitimate.
Adapa is hauled before the gods to answer for his crime. He is instructed by Ea as to what to say. He expresses dismay that two gods are missing from the land, Dumuzi and Gizzida. The meaning of the first name is 'faithful son', and the second (translated by Dalley as 'trusty timber') may be translated also as 'legitimizing throne' (GIS.ZI.DA).*[81] We might choose to interpret this passage as meaning that Adapa, as destroyer of the kingship belonging to his father, has failed to be a faithful son, and has usurped the throne.
His father however, being wiser than Adapa, knowing the plans of the gods, instructs him to refuse the food and water offered to him, saying that he will be offered the food and water of death:
...... As thou standest before Anu,They will offer thee the food of death;Do not eat (it). The water of death they will offer thee;Do not drink (it). A garment they will offer thee;Clothe thyself (with it). Oil they will offer thee; anoint thyself (with it).The instruction which I have given thee do not forget; the wordsWhich I have spoken unto thee, hold fast...."
He is instructed only to accept the mourning garment and the anointing oil. But in fact Anu instructs that he be offered the food and water of eternal life (which is in effect Adapa's due, since he has emulated the gods). He refuses, perhaps because he trusts his father, which is a mistake according to the Mesopotamian ontology which we are exploring, since the ways of the gods are forever beyond our capacity to understand. The words used in the text to denote the food and water of life involve wordplay which renders the sense confusing and ambiguous, which is appropriate for the circumstances in which Adapa finds himself.* [82]
It is worth comparing the following text from the Neo-Babylonian period for the purposes of illustration of the Mesopotamian perplexity at the nature of the gods:
I taught my land to observe the divine ordinances,To honour the name of the goddess I instructed my people.The king's majesty I equated to that of a god,And reverence for the royal palace I inculcated in the troops.Oh that I only knew that these things are well pleasing to a god!What is good in one's sight is evil for a god.what is bad in one's own mind is good for his god.Who can understand the counsel of the gods in the midst of heaven?The plan of a god is deep waters, who can comprehend it?Where has befuddled mankind ever learned what a god's conduct is?
When they are hungry they resemble corpses,
When they are sated they rival their god;
In good luck they speak of ascending to heaven,
When they are afflicted they grumble about going down to the underworld. *[83]
Wisdom and the Sea
Hence the representation of the battle between Ashur (or Marduk) and Tiamat in the Akitu festival. As W.G. Lambert points out, Sennacherib instituted an Assyrian Akitu festival as part of his attempt to substitute Ashur for Marduk "the 'High God' of the land.."*[85] The festival took place in the Akitu house of the city, and:
A well known inscription describes the door of this house
on which was portrayed Ashur advancing to do battle with Tiamat, escorted by
ten gods in front and fifteen behind. A slightly broken list of the same ten
gods occurs on a Late Assyrian ritual fragment... which describes them as
"preceding [Ashur] to the Akitu house"... A combination of these two
items of information suggests, if it does not prove, that the procession of
gods from the city to the Akitu house was construed as a setting out for battle
with Tiamat.
This refers to Bel who sits in the middle of the Sea (Tiamat) in the Akitu. *[86]
The second piece of evidence comes from the text called "the topography of Babylon" which gives us information about small cultic structures in the city:Tiamat (Sea) is the seat of Bel on which Bel sits.
He set his feet on the rolling sea (Tiamat).*[87]
Note that the sea is described as "rolling" - that is, the sea is not calm and is in the condition in which it most resembles chaos, paralleling the struggle between Adapa and the south wind. Lambert argues that "the Sea (Tiamat) was no doubt a small cultic structure in the Akitu house (probably a dais) and when the statue of Marduk was taken there, it was set on the dais to symbolise victory over Tiamat."*[88] Further, "the presence of the gods there and their heaping up of gifts for Marduk is entirely consistent with the idea that Marduk delivered them from danger by taking their part in fighting with Tiamat."*[89]Clearly the myth of Adapa explains a great deal about the character of Sargonid kingship. The myth embraces a number of themes, including the importance of wisdom for kingship, the order and power of the gods (and the corollary: their inscrutability to mere mortals); the significance of rational arrangement, shown by the fact that Adapa is also the name of a musical instrument; the conquest of chaos by the forces of order; the transfer of power from one legitimate authority to another (i.e., the succession); that all aspects of Assyrian society were understood to be embraced in the meaning of kingship, from artisan to soldier, from scribe to priest. Much of the nature of Sargonid kingship can be related to the myth of Adapa: this is already known to us because Ashurbanipal informs us of the discipline of kingship which bears his name (Adapa). Close examination of the myth (alluded to by the other Sargonid kings) shows that aspects of the Neo-Assyrian Empire not referred to in royal documents and inscriptions in connection with the myth, can be explained on the basis of the themes which it contains.
In drawing these themes together, the myth reflects the Assyrian concept of the symbolic function of the king, which was to embody the various aspects of the Assyrian state, and to be, emblematically at least, the totality of the world, the embodiment of all earthly power, wisdom, learning, justice, valour, skill, etc. Assyria itself likewise should contain within itself the best of what the rest of the universe had to offer: hence the botanical gardens, the zoological collection, and, from our point of view most significant of all, the library at Nineveh, collected by Ashurbanipal and intended to embrace important documents and texts from all over Mesopotamia, and from all periods of its history.
Since occupation of the throne of Ashur implies an emulation of the divine, (the king embodying some of the characteristics of the gods, in particular their unpredictability), the king is standing in the place of the divine. By being like the gods, the gods are present in the land. In sitting on a throne mounted on a dais representing the "rolling" sea, the king acquires the character of the abyss (which is unpredictable and unknowable). This way of looking at things is, at first sight, consistent with J.G. Frazer's analysis of the principle of sympathetic magic, and ties the image of the king into the pattern of ideas which made the exaltation of statues and the sacrifice of animals "rational" acts.*[90]
If the character of the divine can be acquired by the performance of the appropriate actions and the collection of its attributes, then it might be reasonable to expect to find some kind of iconographic representation which depicts aspects of the Adapa myth gathered together in one place. Such a representation may exist: a sculpture found lining the processional route to the Ishtar temple at Nineveh shows a shaven figure (a priest). The garments of the priest are of a design which suggests water, and he is playing a musical instrument (not an "adapa" however, but a form of dulcimer, with strings stretched from a wooden post in the form of a hand).
If these details are intelligible as part of an attempt to draw together aspects of the divine by means of their likenesses, what has the iconography of the myth of Adapa got to do with a procession to the temple of Ishtar? There is no reference to the goddess in the myth itself, but we can perhaps detect a connection with the ideas in the myth in the Akkadian version of "The Descent of Ishtar to the Nether world". As Ishtar stands at the entrance to the Netherworld, the gatekeeper announces her to her sister, the queen of the Netherworld (Ereshkigal), describing her with the words: "She who upholds the festivals, Who stirs up the deep before Ea, the k[ing]" (my emphasis).*[91] Thus it is possible that what we see in this sculpture is a 'priest' of Adapa, perhaps based at Eridu, participating in a procession to the Ishtar temple, acting symbolically and cultically as Adapa; bringing to the temple a complex of notions regarded as essential for the completion of the ritual; drawing together the pattern of ideas in the myth, and making present the required divine powers. If so, then he is standing in for the king; standing in his stead, in his place; just as the king stands in the place of Adapa, and Adapa, (temporarily, like the Assyrian Kings) in the place of Ea.
Did the Assyrians Philosophize?
The Assyrian model of reality considered in such terms has little claim to enshrine anything which might be called ‘philosophy’. By the time Zeller came to write his famous history of Greek philosophy in the late nineteenth century, most students of philosophy understood the valid area for philosophical speculation to be in connection with the practical arts, and principally in the areas of logical analysis and scientific inquiry. The highly influential classicist and scholar J.G. Frazer shared this view, and it coloured both his understanding of the history of philosophy, and his estimation of the worth of Greek speculation.*[92] Discussions of the idea of Being he thought barren, because Being could have nothing certainly predicated of it, and therefore such discussions could not result in new knowledge. Simply put, statements concerning Being were not subject to falsification in the ‘real’ world, and on that account were meaningless.
For most of the history of the discipline ,philosophy did consider the larger questions of the nature of reality, and the nature of Being, as well as the matter of how we could know things, and the limits of that knowledge. Such discussions were conducted on the basis of logical inference, and logical deduction, rather than the iterative process of experiment and hypothesis. All such discussions took place on the basis that our world was in some way connected with a higher form of reality, and that therefore this world could not be understood solely in terms of the relationship of its parts to each other. There was no question of accepting the material world as a given, which had to be understood only in terms of physical and mechanical processes. Understanding the world meant discussion of its origin, its reason, and its creator.
The sense in which ‘philosophical’ is used here is the archaic one, which both Plato and Parmenides understood, in which the relationship of the world and its parts to the divine is the principal question, informing all other subjects of discussion.
There are several reasons why philosophy is understood to have begun with the Greeks, rather than elsewhere, not all of which require discussion here. One of these reasons is a purely formal one, in that we have no evidence from an earlier time of the kind of sustained and forensic discussion of philosophical questions undertaken by Plato and Aristotle. That is, it appears that we have no direct textual evidence of philosophical dialogue or the discussion of philosophical matters from any other cultural context in the first millennium.
This of course is evidence from an absence of similar intellectual production in the cultural record, rather than incontrovertible proof that these questions were not discussed anywhere else at an earlier time.
However, beyond the formal argument for the absence of earlier philosophizing, there is the question of our interpretation of the scope and limits of the Greek understanding of philosophy. This question now looms larger than at any earlier period.
For most of the time in which Plato has been a subject of study for modern scholars (a surprisingly short period of around two hundred years), there has been a tendency to treat his work as a programme of research, and indeed to treat the institution of the Academy as a spiritual forerunner of the modern university. In other words, Plato is treated as though he was functioning at the cutting edge of research into the epistemological and ontological questions which are discussed in the Platonic canon. *[93] This implies that these concerns and their discussion were new. The evidence however does not support the notion that the Academy was a research institution, as Harold Cherniss argued persuasively many decades ago.*[94]
The historical context of Plato’s production is a prolonged period of serious cultural collapse in Greece, produced by the serial attempts by the Persians to gain control. This was a long standing problem: Persian and Median political machinations were a concern to Pythagoras, which takes us back to the time of the conquest of Babylon in the middle of the sixth century. Athens was physically destroyed by the Persian army in 490 B.C.E., and the threat of Persian conquest continued until the counter-conquest of Alexander in the late 4th century B.C.E. This was not a time in which purely disinterested research into abstract questions was encouraged.*[95]
If we proceed on the basis that Plato was not writing up research, the question arises as to his actual intentions in writing the dialogues. That there is more of the priest than the philosopher in his writings is a modern commonplace, but this commonplace reflects a real problem in engaging with his work. Perhaps the content of the Platonic canon is in fact principally material of concern to a priest in an ancient Greece beset by social, political and military difficulties, where the past is being swept away for the convenience of the present. So far, Plato’s work has not been subject to systematic examination from this point of view.
As there is an esoteric nature to the Assyrian cult of the Sacred Tree, there is an esoteric aspect to Plato’s ontology of the world. He is quite explicit that there is something which cannot be communicated to men in general, but only to a select few, and this he describes as the ‘Father of All’, and at other times, ‘The Good’. He is also strangely disinterested in the development of democracy in Greece, which for us is a principal focus of interest. Instead he seems to have an archaic concern with the inculcation of virtue in rulers. It is clear that he looks to what was in Greece by that time a superseded aristocratic view of the world. There is also a strong sense that the abstract philosophical questions discussed in his dialogues have a bearing on the nature and properties of the ‘Father of All’ and ‘The Good’. And ‘The Good’, like Assur for the Assyrians, has a transcendent reality. Like Assur for his sage, ‘The Good’ is accessed by the philosopher through the contemplation of formal representations of aspects of its nature.
For us to read these passages as of purely secular interest exposes us to the hazard of missing Plato’s intent. There are many clues in his work which indicate that he is writing about a received body of religious and theological thought considered by many of his contemporaries to be unsuitable for general public consumption.
We can now detect significant family resemblances between aspects of Assyrian and Hebrew thought, as well as with the interests and attitudes of the Greeks. In particular, each of these cultures appears to possess a tradition of understanding its divinities in terms of an abstract ontological model. There is much which remains to be understood, but, if, as this paper suggests, questions concerning the metaphysics of representation, of creation, of the nature of Being, and the author of the world, are co-existent with the phenomenal aspects of the ancient religions which have come down to us, then we can no longer look at philosophy as something which is to be understood simply as successor to religious explanations of the world, emerging into history at a time when religion and mythology were found wanting as explanatory mechanisms.
[1] Simo Parpola, ‘The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism
and Greek Philosophy’, JNES 52/3 (1993). Pub. University of Chicago. The
first version of his paper was read at the XXXIX Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale, on the 8th of July 1992.
[2] Parpola acknowledges that the question of the existence of the concept of the
Tree of Life in Mesopotamia has been disputed, resulting in the use of the
‘more neutral term’ ‘sacred tree’ when referring to the Mesopotamian symbol.
See JNES 52/3 (1993) p 161 n.4. He draws attention to examples both ancient and
modern which appear in Roger Cook’s The Tree of Life: Image for the Cosmos,
London 1978. The typology and distribution of the image of the sacred tree in
the Near East has been studied by H. York in his ‘Heiliger Baum’ in RIA. Vol.4,
pp 269-80, with a bibliography of earlier studies, and also in C. Kepinski’s L’Arbre stylisé en Asie
occidentale au 2e millénaire avant J.-C.
(Paris, 1982). See JNES 52/3
(1993) p 161, n.1
[3] Details of instances of the appearance of the sacred tree are given by Parpola
in footnotes 9-13, p163, JNES 52/3 (1993)
[4] Parpola has included a typological appendix to his paper [Appendix A, p200-01,
JNES 52/3 (1993)], illustrating the range of variation in the depiction of the
tree.
[5] See JNES 52/3 (1993) p 165. The symbolism of the Tree is not discussed in any
of the cuneiform sources, and ‘the few references to sacred trees or plants in
Mesopotamian literature have proved too vague or obscure to be productive’. See
note 25, op.cit. However much more Mesopotamian evidence relating to the symbolism
of the sacred tree has become available (or recognized) since the appearance of
the JNES 52/3 article. See Michael Roaf and Annette Zgoll, “Assyrian
Astroglyphs: Lord Aberdeen’s Black Stone and the Prisms of Esarhaddon,” Zeitschrift
für Assyriologie 91/2 (2001), 264-295, esp. pp. 276 and 286; Amar Annus, The
God Ninurta in the Mythology and Royal Ideology of Ancient Mesopotamia (State
Archives of Assyria Studies = SAAS 14, Helsinki 2002), pp. 156-162; Pirjo
Lapinkivi, The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative Evidence
(SAAS 15, Helsinki 2004), pp. 112-118; Angelica Berlejung, “Die Macht der
Insignien,” Ugarit-Forschungen 28 (1996), 1-35, esp. pp. 21-23; also
Attilio Mastrocinque, From Jewish Magic to Gnosticism (Mohr Siebeck
2005), especially pp. 96-101, “Reconstructing the Ophite Diagram,” and pp.
101-107, “The tree of life”; J. Andrew McDonald, “Botanical Determination of
the Middle Eastern Tree of Life,” Economic Botany 56/2 (2002), 113–129.
On Assyrian esotericism see now in detail Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Herrschaftswissen in Mesopotamien. Formen
der Kommunikation zwischen Gott und König im 2. und 1. Jahrtausend
v.Chr. (SAAS 10, Helsinki 2000), esp. pp. 286-320, and the forthcoming
important PhD dissertation of Alan Lenzi (lenzi@brandeis.edu), The
Secrets of Gods and Society: Studies in the Origins, Guarding, and Disclosure
of Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel, Brandeis
University), due in February, 2006.
[6] Winter published on this subject in ‘Program n. 13, pp. 26ff. M.T. Larsen pointed out in The Old
Assyrian City State and its Colonies (Copenhagen, 1976), p119, that the
‘vice-regent (Akkadian ‘iššakku’} of Aššur’ was a traditional epithet
specifically referring to the king as ‘intermediary between the god and the
community’. See JNES 52/3 (1993) p 167, also n.28 & 30.
[7] The King is representative of the god Aššur, who is indicated by the winged
disk which hovers above the Tree. Parpola suggests that it might also be argued
that ‘the Tree takes the place of the king in the scenes where it is being
purified by the apkallu genies’. See JNES 52/3 (1993) p 167, & n.31.
[8] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 167-8, & n. 34, where Parpola tells us that ‘Perfect Man’ is well attested as an Assyrian Royal epithet [eţlu gitmālu]. Similar phrases are known, such as ‘perfect king’ [šarru gitmālu], and the phrase ’what the king said is as perfect as the word of god’ [in the text LAS 144 r. 4f. (Letters of Assyrian Scholars)]. Parpola points out that the concept of the ‘perfect king’ goes back to the early second millennium. In n. 33 it is pointed out that the king was often referred to as the image (şalmu) of God. Phrases such as: ‘the father of the king my lord was the very image of Bel, and the king my lord is likewise the very image of Bel,’ [LAS 125:18f., and ‘You, O king of the world, are an image of Marduk.’ [RMA 170=SAA 8 n333 r.2]. Also: LAS 145: ‘The king, my lord, is the chosen of the great gods; the shadow of the king, my lord, is beneficial to all…. The king, my lord, is the perfect likeness of the god'.
[9] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 168.
[10] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 168.
[11] Parpola indicates that the evidence for ‘an extensive esoteric lore in first- and second-millennium Mesopotamia is amply documented’, and the ‘few extant written specimens of such lore prove that mystical exegesis of religious symbolism played a prominent part in it.’ JNES 52/3 (1993) p 169. In note 40 Parpola cites (among other sources) A. Livingstone’s Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, Oxford 1986, which provides evidence for the esoteric nature of some texts. Usually this is indicated by the colophon of the texts, which say: ‘secret lore of the great gods/heaven and earth/sages/scholars/; an initiate may show it to another initiate, the uninitiated may not see it; taboo of the great gods’.
[12] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 169. See also n. 41
[13] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 171, n45. ‘The first step in Kabbalah is to become familiar with the Sefirotic Tree. Without this key, little can be comprehended’ – Z. Halevi: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge (London, 1979).
[14] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 171-2
[15] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 174
[16] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 174, note 64. R. Parker and W. Dubberstein, Babylonian Chronology 625 B.C.-A.D. 75 [Providence 1956]
[17] The earliest Kabbalistic manuscripts date from the 10th century
C.E., and were found in the famous Cairo Genizah, a repository for ancient
Jewish manuscripts worn out with age and use. These manuscripts date from
955-56. The earliest manuscript of the Sefer Yezirah dates from no earlier than
the eleventh century. JNES 52/3 (1993) p 173-4, n59
[18] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 176, n 66. Parpola also notes the ‘prominent use of
interpretive techniques such as gematria (use of the numerical value of the
letters of a word) and notarikon (taking certain words as abbreviations for
complete phrases or letters or syllables as abbreviations for words) in both
Kabbalah and Mesopotamian scholarly texts, citing Poncé, Kabbalah, pp.
168 ff., and Lieberman ‘A Mesopotamian Background,’ pp. 157-225; and Tigay,
‘Early Technique’ pp. 176-81, (all in the same volume), which ‘adduces numerous
examples of the two techniques from the Babylonian Talmud’.
[19] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 174, n 61. Parpola cites here Idel, Kabbalah, pp30ff for details of the impact of Kabbalah on Gnosticism . He also mentions an ‘unmistakeable reference’ to the Tree of Life diagram found in Hekhalot Rabbati, dating possibly from as early as the third century C.E., referencing Dan, The Revelation of the Secret of the World: The Beginning of Jewish Mysticism in Late Antiquity, Brown University Program in Judaic Studies, Occasional Papers, no 2 (Providence 1992), pp. 30ff.
[20] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 176
[21] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 177. Citing Halevi, Kabbalah, p. 74, where Sefirah 1 appears as Metatron, 2 as Raziel, 3 as Zaphkiel, 4 as Zadkiel, 5 as Samael, 6 as Michael, 7 as Hamiel, 8 as Raphael, and 9 as Gabriel.
[22] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 177-80
[23] see SAA 3. no. 11 r.5
[24] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 181.
[25] There are however seals from the Neo-Babylonian period which show figures seated on thrones with the branches of the tree apparently emerging from the back of the throne, or sometimes with the pomegranates forming the throneback itself. This is the result of the artist’s attempt to strike together equivalent or closely related ideas. See Dominique Collon’s Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum, Cylinder Seals (V) of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Periods. Pub. British Museum Press, 2001, Plate XI, numbers 135 (105120), Layard; 136 (89409); 137 (89380); 138 (120957); 139 (89815); 141 89597 Layard; and 142, (89346) from Babylon. See also Plate XIX, which shows a figure standing before a tree of which only one side is represented, again implying an equivalence or close relation of ideas: 235 (89630) ‘Assyrian Ruins’; 236 (89523); 237 (89260); and 238 (89846) Layard. The tree underwent many stylistic developments, including being rendered in circular form. Again the king or a divine figure is sometimes represented in close conjunction; see for example Plate XX, 253 (89810); 254 (129542); Plate XXII 270 (105113) Layard; 271 (89489); 272 (89350); 273 (89363); 274 (89632) ‘Assyrian Ruins’; and 275 (105117) Layard.
[26] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 187
[27]That is, actually being ‘the limitless’, as opposed to something which is merely rhetorically ‘without limit’.
[28] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 185, n 94 Halevi, Kabbalah, p.5, and Tree of Life, p28f.
[29] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 185, n 94 see SAA 3 no 34:53 ff. and 35:44 ff.
[30] This symbol can also be found on more abstract representations of the Tree on cylinder seals, where the cones are replaced by these double circles with central points.
[31] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 185, n 94, citing KAR 215 r. ii 9; van Driel, Cult of Assur, pp88:36 and 136:16 ff; and Ebeling, ‘Kultische Texte aus Assur’ Or. n.s. 22(1953): 36 r. 5 ff. and 39 r. 4.
[32] JNES 52/3 (1993) p 185, n 94, from Craig, ABRT I, 83. Parpola suggests (private communication 4 January 2006) that ‘the verb in question (šapāku) basically means “to pour out” (e.g., grain) but could also mean “to create” (see the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary [= CAD], vol. 12/1 [Š/1], p. 414)’.
[33] Plato’s account of the world of visible and material reality also contains an ontology which is braided together with a theory of knowledge. The Good gives rise to the plurality of forms which underpin material reality and the world of opinion. The contemplation of the Good is achieved by attention to the forms, which lead the attention of the philosopher back to the Good. Both the world of forms and the opinions of men are in flux.
[34] It is important to emphasise that the theory of knowledge can be understood as a reversal of the ontology and not the other way around. The world was viewed as an outpouring of a transcendent reality. We can have through examination of the world and its parts only a partial understanding of the totality of the divine. Thus real understanding of the world comes through contact with the divine and the acquisition of divine knowledge.
[35] Parpola comments that ‘this mode of thinking is clearly reflected in the myth of Ištar’s descent to the netherworld, where (as also in Gnosis) reunion with god and salvation is achieved only through gradual ‘reacquisition’ of lost divine powers’ (personal communication of 4th January 2006).
.[36] Published originally (in German) in Die Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien. AfO Beiheft. 9. Graz. Quoted in The Mis Pi Ritual: the Installation of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia by Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, SAALT vol. 1, Helsinki, 2001.
[37] It follows that the divine has the opposite characteristics, and that the artisans who build the statues must, at least temporarily in the cultic context, possess the attributes of the divine. Thus there must be a roughly parallel process in the creation of a temporary divinity in the artisan, and the installation of a divine statue. Esarhaddon says:’Endow the skilled craftsmen whom you ordered to complete this task with as high an understanding as Ea, their creator. (19.). Teach them skills by your exalted word; (20.) make all their handiwork succeed through the craft of Ninshiku’.He also says: ‘Esarhaddon, king of the universe, king of the Land of Assur, the apple of Assur’s eye, the beloved of the great gods, with the great intelligence and vast understanding, which the great Nudimmud, the wise man of the gods, bestowed on me, with the wisdom which Assur and Marduk entrusted to me’. See Die Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien. AfO Beiheft. 9. Graz. Quoted in The Mis Pi Ritual: the Installation of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia by Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, SAALT vol. 1, Helsinki, 2001.
[38] See C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001.p25, n80. Sumerian ‘Nu’ or ‘alam’ signify ‘image’, and the Akkadian (Assyrian) term is ‘salmu’. Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, tell us [p59] that ‘salmu’ can refer to any piece of representative art, whether figurative or not. By ‘image’ might be meant a representation or something representative of something, without being a likeness of that thing, which implies a symbolic sense. It is used to refer to statues, stelae and figurines, and can also indicate ‘constellation’. The image of the king is denoted by the word ‘salmu-sarri’. Herodotus’ strange use of the Greek term’ zoon’ to indicate both animate and inanimate form, is the result of its primary sense being ‘image’.
[39] All things have a relation (however distant or tenuous) with the divine, since all things owe their existence to the divine or its aspects and intermediary forms, the gods. If the success of the king depends on his emulation of the divine through ritual and understanding, then the degree of identity between the king and the divine necessarily (in the mind of the participants in the royal cult) brings the objects and events in the world into a causal relation with the king.
[40] In Assyria ‘going forwards’ meant a return to the beginning. This can, in the absence of an understanding of the Assyrian perception of the ontology of the world, easily be misinterpreted as an indicator of cultural conservatism. In fact this perception of orientation is the result of the most desirable state of existence being understood to be located at the beginning of the world.
[41] The teleological perception of the nature of the world and its processes has a number of corollaries and consequences, which would be understood by those schooled in the learning of the cult. For example, if the Sacred Tree is at the uttermost limit of mundane reality, then the reality of the Tree must be of a different order, and different nature to what might be expected of a mundane object. Since the uttermost limit of the telos represents the world of the divine, it must be what is truly real, whereas the mundane world must be only a representation of that reality. It has been noted that no two representations of the sacred tree are alike, and that this variability in its representation must have been conceived deliberately as part of its representation.
In Assyria the divine world was clearly understood as an inverse of mundane reality, though the divine first created the characteristics of the latter, and is altogether more complex. We understand this from the text of Esarhaddon which makes it clear that there is: ‘a place where humans dare not trespass…’. The world of the divine is in Esarhaddon’s text deliberately contrasted with the world of the here and now as a place of knowledge beyond human access. It is understood as an opposite of the human world, where normal human judgements do not apply.By extension of this idea, if the mundane world has direction, dimension, duration, colour, and shape, then the divine world, being antecedent to the mundane, has none of these qualities (the Kabbalah explicitly associates the creation of the dimensions of mundane reality with the Sefirotic Tree). The qualities exist only as part of the divine potency. Since the analytical categories of extension, direction, duration, colour and shape do not exist, it follows that the divine is a place in which all categories of mundane reality (as well as all categories of human understanding) are effectively collapsed together, and the will of the divine is necessary to give rise to the creation by the separation of the categories [The Akkadian term for ‘decision’ literally means ‘separating the separations’]. So the matter of judgement and justice is tied closely to the ontological understanding of the cult. Judgement is the creative act. [it is worth pointing out that the founding and construction of a palace or temple is spoken of in terms which deliberately echo the account of the creation].
[42] Aristotle sees virtue as achieved through action, and in two branches, intellectual and moral. Virtuous moral action is a matter of habit or custom, whereas intellectual virtue is a matter of judgement and decision. Both forms of virtuous action are clearly understood in Mesopotamia. For Aristotle, the intellectual virtues are of superior importance for the individual, but the moral virtues are important for the well-being of the polis. Obviously only those who have intellectual virtue can determine the nature of virtuous action, since only they can make right judgement.
[43] In her book Myths from Mesopotamia Stephanie Dalley states incorrectly [p. 183] that the Assyrian tablets come from Assur, and seems to think that they belong to the late second millenium, which would make them nearly contemporary with the Egyptian tablet, rather than belonging to the 7th century B.C. Further, Dalley's version is not a complete translation of all the fragments - compare for example the version in Heidel's The Babylonian Genesis [pp. 147-53]. The texts were edited in 1915 by Knudtzon: Die El Amarna Tafeln, 964-8; and Picchioni in 1981: Il poemetto di Adapa. The poem is discussed in English in Shlomo Izre’el’s Adapa and the South Wind, Eisenbrauns, 2001.
[44] ARAB, vol. II s.985ff. Luckenbill.
[45] see SLA 137, Pfeiffer [= [Harper 992]: "The king is my god and the king is (to me) as the morning light"
[Rev. line 17]. Thus the relationship of the Assyrian citizen to the king is as the king to a god. Concerning the second part of the metaphor, compare the fact that in Egypt "the king's accession was timed for sunrise, and the same verb denoted the sun's daily appearance and the appearance of the Pharaoh at public functions" [Kingship and the Gods, ch. 13, p148, Frankfort].
[46] This arrangement is drawn from Pfeiffer's SLA.
[47] Enki-Ea: "the broad eared one who knows all that has a name... budgets the accounts..." [Roux, G. Ancient Iraq, p95].
[48] Myths from Mesopotamia, p182. Parallels with Greek mythology are obvious (Prometheus, for example); also, in Plato's Timaeus the Demiourgos is sometimes referred to as a craftsman, and both the Demiourgos and Adapa are closely connected with music as well as the order of the cosmos: Plato's craftsman constructs the universe according to a scheme of Pythagorean harmony, and a musical instrument (a drum) used in Assyrian cultic contexts was termed an "Adapa" (similar to the tegu). Discipline and order are inevitably associated with music, and vice versa.
[49] ARAB, vol. II, s986
[50] It is important to emphasise that a culture of secrecy follows quite naturally from the Assyrian ontology. Anu, the god of heaven, says in the Myth of the Adapa: "why did Ea disclose to wretched mankind the ways of heaven and earth...?" Dalley, op. cit., p187. The difficulty of acquiring knowledge of the divine arises from the nature of reality itself. As we shall see, the meaning of the Adapa myth revolves around the difficulty of divine knowledge.
[51] Possibly Ashurbanipal received oracular instructions from Ea and other gods via an assembly of diviners, along the lines suggested in Esarhaddon’s text, ‘The renewal of the gods’, published in Borger’s Die Inschriften Asarhaddons. In this text Esarhaddon says that he ‘arranged diviners in groups in order to obtain a favourable oracular pronouncement’ in connection with the renewal of the cult images. Ea as we have seen was the god of craftsmen. It should be remembered that there was no hard and fast separation between the sacred and the profane in Assyrian society: all activity might have sacred connotations.
[52] We might take Ashurbanipal's claims with a pinch of salt. It is likely that the desire to master the scribal skills was perfectly genuine, precisely because it was understood as a sign that the king had been granted proximity to the ways of the divine and marked him out for his special role in the Assyrian political and religious structure. However, because it was a requirement of the position, it is natural to expect the claim to be made that he mastered the skills - and with relative ease in comparison with other mortals: his skill at mathematics must reflect the fact that he belongs to a different category of human being.
[53] ARAB, vol. II, s.986. See also Reade, J, Assyrian Sculpture, pl. 98, showing Ashurbanipal inspecting the booty of Babylon from the vantage point of a chariot [British Museum, Room 89]; also pl.83; pl. 80 [both British Museum, Room 17], showing Ashurbanipal in the course of a lion hunt; and pl. 79 [British Museum, Room 17] shows him in preparation for the same. Pl. 69 & 79 show Sennacherib at Lachish in a ninth century style of chariot [both Room 17].
[54] See the letter to the king from Marduk-shum-usur, in which he says that Assur had spoken to the king's grandfather in a dream saying: “O wise one... you,the king, the lord of kings, are the grandson of the wise one and Adapa... the extent of your knowledge surpasses that... of all the craftsmen” - SLA 248 [= Harper 923]. According to the "Enuma Elish" [Heidel, op. cit. p148, frag. no 1, lines 6 & 10.] “Ea had created him (Adapa) as a leader among mankind... with the bakers he does the baking...”
[55] Ashurbanipal's Coronation Hymn illustrates some of the qualities he was expected to manifest: "may eloquence, understanding, truth and justice be given to him as a gift" (line 8) [SAA vol. III, pp26-7]
[56] The nearest we have to a contemporary discussion of kingship and magnanimity is in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: the monarch can possess virtues, the "crown" of which is magnanimity, because he can act most freely. For Aristotle virtue could only be achieved through action, therefore those whose choices and actions were limited were necessarily less virtuous. If the king is the most virtuous and just in the land, it follows (according to Aristotle's prescription) that a king must act in certain ways if he is to be seen to be just and virtuous, to be a legitimate king. He says that: he “since he deserves most, must be good, in the highest degree; for the better man always deserves more, and the best man most. Therefore the truly magnanimous man must be good. And greatness in every virtue would seem to be characteristic of the magnanimous man” [Nicomachean Ethics 1123b]. The Aristotelian prescription holds broadly for the moral universe of the Assyrian kings in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., since both systems are honour based. The Assyrian king deserves his wealth and power because he has virtue, and must act in order to possess his virtue.
[57] ARAB, vol. II, s.986
[58] ARAB, vol. II, s.987. Compare lines 5-7 of Ashurbanipal's Coronation Hymn which lists items understood as good in themselves as metaphors for kingship: ‘just as grain and silver, oil [the catt]le of Shakkan and the salt of Bariku are good, so may Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, be agreeable to the gods [of his] land!’ [SAA vol. III, pp26-7].
[59] Compare line 13 of the Coronation Hymn: ‘He who in his heart utters improprieties against the king - his foundation is (but) wind, the hem of his garment is (but) litter’.The hem of a garment was frequently used in swearing oaths and also as a seal in legal and financial contexts [SAA vol. III, p27]. There is a close association in Assyria between the concepts of ‘foundation’ and ‘limit’, ‘edge’ or ‘border’ (which the hem of the royal garment represents).
[60] 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 something 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 Ogotemmeli). To read "kalu" simply as a name for a position in the context of a highly ritualised culture is a mistake, yet it remains the common practice of scholars to transliterate such words in their translations, as if the meaning has little or no bearing on the overall sense of the passage. The term "apkallum" (used to describe Adapa's priesthood of Ea at Eridu) is an Assyrian term indicating a "mortal sage", though in connection with Adapa I think the term has a more precise technical meaning not well served by such a translation.
In any case, there is little evidence that people thought in this way . 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 (it is important to understand that we are not dealing with a familiar moral universe: it is an honour based system, with its own characteristic values). 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, Rykle Die Inschriften Asarhaddons (AfO Beiheft 9) 1959, Nin. A-F Ep. 2] (translation supplied by A.T.L. Kuhrt).
[61] The king is described as "king of kings", which concept was understood as an essential component in the function of his kingship, and not merely as a vainglorious styling. That is, the totality of his kingship is in itself of functional importance .
[62] Cf. Plato, Timaeus 31c-32c; also Aristotle, Politics 1277a; Nicomachean Ethics Bk X, chap. 8, concerning connection with the gods through completion.
[63] That completion was understood as a virtue in itself is illustrated by the fact that, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, sin was often countered not by an attempt 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 original act. Thus, to undo the damage done by 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 1317, for an illustration of the perceived value of abstract ritual completions . (13-17?
[64] The king was "chosen" by the gods because of his excellence and his virtue, and he was the person responsible for performing actions of key importance. Everything associated with the ritual being performed was of equal and critical importance: upon the timing of the ritual depended its success - see for example 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 judged right - see SLA 341 [= Harper 384]. The throne room relief is in the Nimrud gallery [19] of the British Museum., from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II.
[65] Heidel, op. cit. 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: see room 26 in the British Museum. (the Assyrian Transept). The king is also the final judge (on earth), meaning that his insight into the true nature of matters is second to none - see SLA 322 [= Harper 1006]
[66] SLA 327 [= Harper 565], illustrates the contemporary view that no contact with the celestial world is possible except through observation.
[67] 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].
[68] Ashur is designated "King of Kings" in the so-called "Ashur Charter" of Sargon II: see Saggs, H.W.F. "Historical Texts and Fragments of Sargon II of Assyria", I. "The Assur Charter" IRAQ 37, 1975.
[69] lit., ‘edges’ or ‘rims’. In this case the literal expression of the original phrase is more helpful in making sense of the meaning.
[70] SLA 328 [= Harper 356]; see also SLA 342 [= Harper 356]; SLA 344 [= Harper 365]; SLA 345 [= Harper 652]. The same kind 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 appears to illustrate this letter, but gives no citation (22 May 678 B.C.). See also SLA 324 [= Harper 137]. See also Parpola's doctoral thesis, LAS, 1971, Appendix 3B, from which this information is drawn.
[71] 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 that theology functioning as a tool of state.
[72] Sharru, the Akkadian term for king, may have been understood in the Neo-Assyrian period to carry some of the connotations of the Sumerian SAR, which has the meanings: to multiply, to gather, to let gather, and to drive together. Hence perhaps the association of Neo-Assyrian kings with shepherdship, which has no parallel in the earlier periods of Assyrian history. Sharru is not specific to any kind of ruler and can be applied to petty kings and local rulers (the term was applied to rulers in the Zagros region and also to the kinglets in the Egyptian Delta). The term appears to imply sole power, rather than international scale of operation. The term, "king of the totality" (Shar Kishati), was used as far back as the Agade period, but it is generally held that Shamshi-Adad I used it as a newly coined term. Its use often reflects a situation where control is total, though its precise meaning is debated (See Larsen's Power and Propaganda). In fact it is a term which indicates the philosophical and theological context of the Mesopotamian idea of kingship, which depended on an ontological model. The abstraction of totality is the potency indicated, not what the instance of totality is over which the king presides.
[73] Descartes is sometimes described as the last of the schoolmen
[74] Comprehensively banished from consideration by philosophers, that is. Descartes did not argue this on the basis of a philosophical or theological argument – he simply said that it was not necessary to consider the action of the divine in understanding the world. Theologians were forced in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our era to reckon with the purely mathematical descriptions of the world which were a consequence of Descartes decree; principally that of Newton. Hence there were many who wrote works which argued that the mechanistic regularity of the movements of the heavenly bodies was evidence of the divine. Essentially the uniform behaviour of the heavenly bodies was taken to be proof of the divine hand, whether or not that hand was in perpetual contact with its creation. Since then the idea that the divine acts at all on the world has been further diminished: David Hume argued against what was left: the intervention by the divine in the case of miracles. The Catholic Church still entertains the possibility of miracles, but miracles are by definition phenomena unintelligible to man, and so do not of themselves contribute to a rational understanding of the action of the divine.
[75] "In Addaru, a favourable month, on... a festival day of Nabu, I joyfully entered Nineveh, city of my lordship, and seated myself gladly on the throne of my father. The southwind blew, the breath of Ea, a wind whose blowing is favourable to the practice of kingship..." [Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons]
[76] note that since the occurrence takes place at night the sea must be like a black mirror, with the same characteristics as the liver at the moment it is removed from the body of a sheep. This parallel is probably deliberate, since the point of divination is to know the mind of the gods.
[77] See for comparison Plato's Phaedo, 100, "greatness is the participation in the great"
[78] In line 8 Adapa is described, curiously, as "the skilful, the exceedingly wise among the Anunnaki..." This implies divinity as does the fact that he is Ea's son. Why therefore does the myth treat Adapa as mortal?
[79] It is also spoken of as the "breath of Ea" by Esarhaddon, which confirms the essential identity of the different elements in the myth [Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons].
[80] "May Shamash, king of heaven and earth, elevate you to shepherdship over the four [region]s!" [line 1 of the Coronation Hymn, SAA vol. III].
[81] It might also be translated as ‘Good Tree’ or ‘Eternal Tree’, in which case it may be that we have here part of the answer to the mysterious absence of references in Assyrian literary texts to the Sacred Tree. Ningizida would therefore be the ‘Lord of the Good Tree’. Since the king is the lord of Assyria, the collocation of the king, the Tree, and throne in Ashurbanipal’s throne room brings together in a small space the Sumerian components of the god name ‘Ningizida.’ [NIN.GIŠ.ZIDA], translatable as ‘Lord of the Good Tree’. As attributes of kingship, it is significant that Dumuzi (‘shepherd’ or ‘faithful son’)and Gizzida (‘Good Tree’) are absent from the earth: the absence implies that legitimate kingship on earth is not possible during their absence. Adapa finds them as gatekeepers in heaven. In the myth Adapa has contact with the divine, but does not possess the attributes of the divine, and consequently kingship.
[82] Dalley comments that the verb chosen to alliterate with the words for "food" and "eat" is unusual [akalu, kalu, and akalu (different stress)]. Also that "an unusual plural form of the word "heaven" produces a pun, "bread of heaven/bread of death" [shamuti/sha muti]
[83] Pritchard, ANET, from: "I will praise the lord of wisdom" p. 435, trans. R.H. Pfeiffer.
[84] In its purest form it has no shape, no colour, no taste. But nevertheless it is absolutely vital to living existence.
[85] Lambert, W.G. "The great battle of the Mesopotamian religious year: the conflict in the Akitu House" in IRAQ 25, 1963, pp. 189-90.
[86] AfO XVII, p.315 F4. Lambert refers also to AfO XIX, p.118.
[87] E. Ebling, Parfumrezepte, pl.26, 13.
[88] Saggs, H.W.F. "Historical Texts and Fragments of Sargon II of Assyria", I. The Assur Charter, IRAQ 37, 1975, line 36a, in which Sargon equates the making firm of his dynasty and the giving of a "sure foundation to the throne base" (in connection with the restoration of freedom from taxes for the citizens of Ashur): the annual defeat of Tiamat and the installation of Marduk (and his ishiak) is part of the same complex of ideas. In order that the creation of order out of chaos is maximal the condition of the throne base or dais before the contest is unfixed and "rolling"; afterwards it is fixed and provides a sure foundation to the throne base (elsewhere in the text Assur is equated with Enlil, "without whom they cannot give final judgement" (line 4), and Enlil is described in the same place as GISH - which is the determinative for throne). Equating Assur and Enlil yokes the king to the mythology in another way: the king becomes the agent of the Sumerian god and thus responsible for the re-enactment of the primal battles enshrined in the tradition. Hence the description of Ashur as "the seat of the dynasty, the most ancient of settlements" (line 12): it is the same place, and the same actions occur. Assur is also spoken of as "the city of privilege" (line 12), which recalls the exemption of Eridu in the myth of Adapa.
[89] IRAQ V, p.61,14 = PSBA XXII, p.367,1. See Reade, J, Assyrian Sculpture, pl.73, which shows Sennacherib inspecting the booty from Lachish, mounted upon a throne. The royal party, led by the crown prince, seems to be congratulating him upon his victory. The iconography of the sculptures works on the basis of the recapitulation and variation on identifiable themes: the victory over chaos stands behind many of the images.
[90] The ritual of the substitute king, discussed by Lambert, makes sense only if the likeness of the king and his actions was understood to be sufficient to draw the malefic influences onto the substitute [see also Parpola's doct. thesis: LAS pt. 2]. Note also that in the texts of the queries to the sungod, the ritual requests that the god "be present" in the sacrificial animal [SAA vol. IV].
[91] Pritchard, ANET pp106--9. It is possible that he process of coming into mundane existence, the descent into ignorance and chaos, is reflected in the story of Ishtar’s descent to the Netherworld, in which case we have an explanation of her epithet as ‘she who stirs up the deep before Ea’.
[92] This emerges quite clearly in both his paper on ‘The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory’ and ‘The Golden Bough’.
[93] It is no accident that the scholarship which produced this view of Plato was rooted in the newly founded modern research university of Göttingen.
[94] For example we have evidence for one lecture only – a mathematical treatment of the Good.
[95] The Sophists prospered in this environment, and devoted their efforts (as Plato says) to ‘making the worse cause appear to be the better’.
[First published New Year's Day, 2021].
No comments:
Post a Comment