Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East

Symmetry and Asymmetry

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

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

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



The Plenum

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

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



The Plenum in Mesopotamia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Transcendentalism in Mesopotamia

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

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

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

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

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


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

Reading Thomas Yaeger

Recently I removed a number of papers which were freely available on the website Academia.edu. I did this because the site has become less and less useful, as it transitions to something offering 'premium' services. I also took down the description and metadata for other papers, many of which are chapters in the books listed below.

I saved the descriptions of my first three books, however, and together with a description of the fourth (Man and the Divine) these form a concise overview of what I have written and published so far on historical and philosophical questions.

One thing I might suggest, is that J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being  should be read before the other two (if you are considering reading all of them). The argument is fairly technical, but shouldn't be off-putting to someone interested in philosophy. Though it was first published as an eBook in 2016, it was in fact written in London in 1993, the year after I finished my studies at UCL. It illustrates a  great deal about how and why I came to be interested in writing about the significance of the idea of Being in antiquity.


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Commercially available books:

 The Sacred History of Being (2015) 

 The discipline of philosophy was not invented by the Greeks, but was in existence elsewhere, and as far back as the middle of the second millennium BCE. It has its origin in ancient divine cult. The detail of its presence can be traced in the civilizations around the ancient Near East, and particularly in Assyria and Babylonia. The Sacred History of Being collects the key evidence together, and examines the idea of the divine as a philosophical concept in Greece, Israel, and ancient Assyria. Published as an eBook by the Anshar Press,. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Published: Nov. 02, 2015. Available in ePub format. Words: 113,510. ISBN: 9781311760678
More information available at: https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html


 J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016)

 When he was only twenty-four years old, James Frazer won a Cambridge fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos). In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of the development of his thought. He also argued that the very idea of Being is a barren notion, in that nothing can be predicated of Being. As a result Plato made a mistake, effectively conflating an epistemology with an ontology. Though the essay was written in 1879, it was not published until 1930, after much of his later work was done. Frazer became famous for his monumental study The Golden Bough, which explored a vast range of ancient and primitive myth and ritual. Here too he found intellectual processes founded in error. What was Frazer's intention in re-interpreting Plato against what Plato himself said, and his wholesale restructuring of ancient thought by reducing much of it to a pattern of error? Over 23 thousand words, a preface, select bibliography, and extensive notes. Published by the Anshar Press. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Published: April 04, 2016. Available in ePub format. Words: 22,930 ISBN: 9781310105470
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/j.html


 Understanding Ancient Thought (2017) 

 'Understanding Ancient Thought' is the third in a series of books which examines how we assess evidence from antiquity, and frame models to make sense of that evidence. The book consists of eighteen essays, which cover a number of subject areas which are in thrall to what Foucault described as an ‘episteme’. In other words, the way the subject areas are understood within the academy is in terms of what our cultural models, language and assumptions will allow us to understand. The actual evidence may suggest an alternative view, but it is not possible to see it, or to think it. At least until the paradigmatic frame shifts to another ‘episteme’ The main thrust of the book is that two hundred years of modern scholarship concerning the past has, for the most part, assembled a fictive and tendentious version of the ancient world. 51 thousand words. Published by the Anshar Press, August 20, 2017. Available via Smashwords, Itunes, Barnes and Noble, Blio, Kobo, etc.

Published: Aug. 20, 2017. Available in ePub format. Words: 51,070. ISBN: 9781370378012
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/nineteen-meditations.html


Man and the Divine (2018)

This is my second collection of essays on philosophy and ancient history. Like my first collection, Understanding Ancient Thought, it expands further on the arguments of The Sacred History of Being, which appeared in November 2015.  Man and the Divine was published on August 12, 2018. 

Many of the essays deal with the question of esoteric knowledge in antiquity, often from slightly different angles. ‘The Death of Socrates’ is one of those, a solicited response to one of a series of dramatized readings of famous speeches from history, staged by the Almeida Theatre in London in 2017. This reading was performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. ‘Distinguishing Belief and Faith’ began as a meditation on some text by Alan Watts, but which expanded into a chapter about who believed what, and why, in ancient Mesopotamia. ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten’, explores Akhenaten’s religious innovations in the Egypt of the 14^th century B.C.E. 

Modern scholarship generally steers away from the idea that there may be an esoteric level to the nature of reality, but approaches questions surrounding esotericism in terms of a division between those who argue that there is such an esoteric level of reality, and those who maintain that just because they can think of such a thing and give it names and descriptions, does not mean that there is such a thing as genuine esoteric knowledge. The first group are sometimes described as ‘Essentialists’, and the second, as ‘Nominalists’. I first dealt with this question  (and related questions) in my book J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being. Frazer simply denied the idea that it was possible to say anything meaningful at all about a transcendent reality (Being), and consequently argued that Plato’s work was built on a fundamental error, through the conversion of an epistemology into an ontology.

Some of the essays discuss something of the background to the writing of The Sacred History of Being. It was important to produce a concise and focussed argument, and many interesting discussions had to be put to one side in order to achieve that. The Sacred History of Being represents the core argument. What I have written elsewhere is best understood in terms of a sequence of extended footnotes to that book.

The final essay, ’Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’, is necessarily more speculative than the others, and deals with the British Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, when the building of megalithic structures was at its height. It makes comparisons with Greek and Mesopotamian notions of the importance of the sky in ancient religious thought. Published by the Anshar Press. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Approximately 57,000 words. Available in ePub format. ISBN 9780463665473.
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/man-and-divine-2018.html


The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion (forthcoming, 2019)

Transcendentalism is present in a number of ancient religions, located to the west of India. 

It is assumed by scholars however, that there is very little in the way of transcendentalist thought associated with these ancient religions, and that the evidence we are looking at is mainly built out of concrete imagery, fanciful myth, poetry, irrational associations, all of which are in the service of religion and the state. In other words, religion serves a series of social and ideological functions, and it is to those functions that we should look for the explanation of the cultural remains, rather than the minds of the ancients themselves.

One of the arguments of this book is that we have been sold short by enlightenment presumptions and certainties, and that what we think we know and understand about ancient religion is so far from its real basis that, for the most part, it is nearly impossible for modern scholars to make intelligible sense of it. The cultural supremacy of ancient Greece in modern western thought depends on other civilisations not having an engagement with abstraction and the idea of Being before the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. 

This book is relatively short, not because the questions it addresses are simple, and have easy answers. It is short because I have written four other books before this one, and, to a significant extent, it references argument and discussion which can be found in those books. It was not possible to write a short and credible introduction to an understanding of the transcendentalism which can be found in ancient religions, without first covering an enormous amount of ground.

More details will follow in due course.  

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The short bio at Academia.edu:

I'm an independent researcher and a specialist in scholarly communications, who studied the Ancient Near East and the Neo-Assyrian Empire at University College London. I'm particularly interested in the History of Ideas in the context of the ancient world, and in the importance of religion and art in understanding ancient cultures.

 My four ebooks are commercially available from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo Books, Blio, Smashwords, Inktera, etc. They are also available to read (on request) in each of the legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland. The Sacred History of Being is mostly available free to libraries around the globe, depending on the distributor the libraries use. Libraries respond to requests from users: if copies are free, they have little reason not to acquire one.

My blog at http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com contains essays related to my books, discussions with readers, book chapters and chapter extracts, an RSS feed, and other discussion on philosophical, archaeological and historical subjects. I'm active on Twitter.


TY, February 17 2018; updated September 02, 2018.