Transcendental Thought in Assyria and Babylonia

Transcendental thought in Assyria? The convention is that there is no transcendental or rational thought worthy of the name before the rise of Greek philosophy, and that is the settled view of most western scholars of antiquity. A new and rather good anthology of transcendentalist thought, compiled by David LaRocca and published in February 2017, begins only with the writings of the Greeks, and there is no trace of embarrassment about having nothing to say about earlier times.   

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

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

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

The exhibition, 'I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria', which was mounted at the British Museum in late 2018 and the spring of 2019, did not challenge the scholarly approach to ancient Assyria which was developed during the twentieth century, and which persists today. That is not what the exhibition was for. It celebrated the British Museum and its extensive Assyrian collections, put together since the beginning of the excavations in the near East, halfway through the nineteenth century. It is also a way of cementing the established view of ancient Assyria in the public imagination. It is, to a significant extent, an exercise in propaganda.The British Museum is guarding the status quo. 

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

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

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

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

This book explores an alternative Assyria to the construct promoted by the Assyriological profession. Several of these chapters draw on Assyrian and Babylonian records, which illuminate Mesopotamian thought and culture. Those who have studied Mesopotamia in any depth know that Assyria and Babylonia belonged to a cultural oikumene.There were many significant differences, but also many similarities, right down to their respective gods, and languages (mutually intelligible dialects of Akkadian, as well as common use of Sumerian).  

This is the chapter list, as of June 23, 2019. I've assembled in this book much of what I've written about Mesopotamian civilization, and also a number of chapters about Plato, since he articulates  questions and puzzles (aporia) which stand behind thought and practice in both Greece and in Mesopotamia. Some chapters are entirely new. 

The book should appear in December 2019.  

Transcendental Thought in Assyria and Babylonia 3
Greece and the cultural impact of the Assyrian Empire 5
Assyria’s Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries BCE 15
Logical Modality in Classical Athens 16
Sameness and Difference in Plato 22
The Transcendental Understanding of Reality 25
Inside Plato’s Academy 28
The Platonic Theory of Being 33
The Battle of the Gods and Giants 49
Plato’s Theory of Vision 53
The Paradox of Knowledge 58
What is Sacred, and what is Profane? 59
How the Sacred and the Profane Worlds were Joined 62
The Concept of the Plenum in Babylon 68
Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the ANE 70
Knowledge and Belief in Israel 75
The Idea of Being in Israel 78
The Threshold in Ancient Assyria 94
The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria 101
The Ritual sequence for the Making of Gods 109
Installing the Gods in Heaven: the Nineveh Mis Pi Ritual 110
Installing the Gods in Heaven: the Babylonian ritual 120
A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology 126
Divination in Antiquity 129
Who Will Appear Before the City? (Divination in Sargonid Assyria) 133
‘Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity 156
Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree 166
Understanding Creation as a Sacred Tree 178
Context and Representation of the Sacred Tree 180
Finding the Name of the Sacred Tree 189
The Fifty Names of Marduk 191
The Babylonian Creation 199
Ocean and the Limit of Existence 204
Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind 210
Pythagoras and Totality 211
Cosmotheism and Totality 217
Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria 227

[Contents updated July 4, 3019].