We can know a great deal about events which occurred a hundred years or two
hundred years ago, because we still live in the same cultural orbit. But to
understand significant detail after the passage of two or more thousand years
is a much more complex issue. Even where there is a great deal of
documentation, it is hard to understand what that documentation means. Even
simple documents such as lists (and there are lots of those surviving from
antiquity) lose almost everything through the loss of their contexts.
I gained a sense of the strangeness of the remote past while at school,
where I studied classics, and history, alongside the modern curriculum. Our
focus in classics was Roman language and literature, which I found (at that
time) very dull. By contrast our history master (an ex-Spitfire pilot) was
interested in the more exotic worlds of ancient Greece, the Minoans, and the
Byzantine empire. He travelled widely to famous archaeological sites, and many
of his classes featured his own slides of these sites, which was not a common
feature of history teaching at that time (1967). Art history also was taught
mainly with lectures based on slides, so the school was a progressive one. I
still remember seeing the strangely shaped Minoan columns for the first time,
and the highly decorated interior of the king’s throne room at the palace of
Knossos (I now know that this was an imaginative reconstruction by the
excavator Sir Arthur Evans, and not the real thing). I also remember the
strangeness of the abstracted horns which formed part of the architecture. I
also remember seeing slides of ancient altars, with sequences of rectangles on
the sides, almost as if representing a sequence of receding doorways, the
meaning of which was unfathomable. The question of why you would design an
altar in such a way remained with me for decades, without there being any
possibility of resolving it.
I became interested in philosophy a bit later on in school, after having
realized that the sciences were unable to address certain questions, and I knew
that I was interested in exploring these questions. I began to focus more on
ancient philosophy, partly because ancient philosophy, produced within the
structure of ancient civilization, dealt with some of these questions. And it
ought to provide a way in to understanding what was otherwise strange and
unfathomable about that world. Connecting the two in this way however, was
difficult. The two did not seem to match up terribly well, and some puzzling
aspects of the ancient world, including the worship of statues, the practice of
sacrifice and divination, omens, magic, and so on, seemed (at the time) to have
been hardly discussed by anyone.
I did not neglect modern philosophy however, and I was interested in the
interface between physics and philosophy, since I was studying sciences at
school. I read old stuff and new stuff. I knew James Jeans’ and Arthur
Eddington’s work, as well as books by Fred Hoyle and George Gamow. I knew about
quantum uncertainty and Schrodinger’s Cat.
I knew about Einstein, Bohr, Max Planck, Fermi, Heisenberg and Dirac,
and so on. So there was a familiarity with the modern notion that the
underlying reality of the world was not necessarily what it had seemed to be.
In the mid nineteen-seventies I became interested in attempts to show
relationships between modern sub-atomic physics and ideas at the core of
eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Taoism. Though I remained unconvinced
by these attempts. The nature of Eastern religions interested me however, in
particular on account of the fact that these explicitly embraced ideas of unknowability and the uncertainness of
things, by contrast with the western tendency to pursue a monolithic
understanding of the world; and, in the case of Buddhism, they successfully
dispensed with the idea of god altogether.
A chance discovery in a bookshop in the late seventies brought me into
contact with George Melhuish’s The
Paradoxical Nature of Reality, originally published in 1973. This book
argued that many of the problems of philosophy are artefacts of the fact that philosophers
are attempting to constrain the nature of reality, and that some of the
principal tools of philosophy are at fault, including Aristotle’s laws of
thought. He argues that instead of the nature of reality being something which
must be subject to these laws, its nature must breach these laws.
I continued my interest in ancient philosophy. I was deeply puzzled by the
fact that many of the arguments in Plato’s dialogues end in some kind of
failure. The protagonists sometimes move on as if the argument has been
successful, by agreeing the fact which was to be demonstrated must be the case,
even if it cannot be shown to be true through argument. It almost seemed that
the failure of the argument was the point. If they were merely arguments which
needed to be improved on (i.e., arguments in the process of development, as if
the Academy was somehow a research institution), how was it that in the course
of two thousand years, these arguments were still irresolvable?
By 1981, I had discovered Bell’s theorem, which is one based on physical
experiments in quantum mechanics. The argument was aired in a famous paper in
1964; the paper suggested strongly that however useful the Aristotelian laws of
thought might be for us in understanding our world, nature itself was happy to
dispense with them. [i] As an article in Scientific
American put it in 2009, [ii]
Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say,
a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or
give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man
with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition,
more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are
right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then
the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be
something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each
event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the
distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to
this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but
then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio
broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it
turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in
our everyday experience of the world.
We term this intuition 'locality.'
Bell’s theorem suggests that locality breaks down, at least at the quantum
level, for entangled objects. This has serious implications for our understanding
of the world. Things which are far apart can behave as if they are in contact.
This theorem made a huge impact on my perception of the nature of the world.
I continued to read a great deal. I read a number of books in the History
of Ideas, including Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being, which was the
first to establish the field. This book established the importance of the
concept of Being in western civilisation, in philosophy, religion, art and
literature, all the way forward from classical Greece in the middle of the
fifth century B.C.E. This book made it possible once more to discuss in a
serious way the philosophers of the Renaissance, who discussed magic and
Kabbalah alongside the Platonists. Later philosophers found these discussions
deeply embarrassing for the credibility of their subject, and tended to pass
over them in silence through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So there
was a large gap interrupting the continuity of philosophical thought in the
west, and an understanding of its trajectory. I read later writers on the
History of Ideas, in particular Frances Yates, and learned much from them. I
learned in particular that it was possible to have an understanding of magic as
a phenomenon which was dependent on the idea of Being. In all his extensive
discussion of magical ideas in antiquity and the Middle Ages, J. G. Frazer did
not even toy with this idea.
Something interesting was coming together by this time. If Being was a
paradoxical entity, which transcended both the nature and the properties of the
existent world, an entity which was essentially unknowable and beyond precise
definition, what were the implications of this?
But it was something else that provided the trigger. I’d learned the
importance of being able to read iconography within the appropriate context
from Frances Yates. As well as reading much ancient near eastern literature I
was also looking at seals and sculpture, wall-reliefs and stele. This reading
took place in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and photographic
copying at the time was (as everywhere) an expensive item. So I described those
images which interested me, whether or not I had any clue to their significance
beyond what the captions said about them. I described them in meticulous detail
– sufficient detail to include what might have been simply carelessnesses on
the part of the craftsman who made the item. After a while I realised I was
seeing a pattern in the images. Not in every image, but often enough for it to
be worth considering as possibly a repeated and deliberate precision in the
workmanship. This preciseness appeared
particularly in images which featured opposed figures, standing around altars,
thrones, trees, and other transformative objects. I had not at the time the
slightest idea of what this detail - asymmetry - might actually mean, but I
recognised that it was intended to convey something. After a while it became
obvious that one of the purposes of the asymmetry was to draw attention to the
fact that the image indicated that something was happening at the limit of
something – whether a supplicant was being introduced to a god by a priest, or
an offering of sacrifice was being made to the gods.
Very quickly after this I recognised that there was a range of connected
concepts running through Greek and near eastern cultures, all of which depended
on the idea of limit. There are parallel concepts around the Mediterranean,
most of which were then and still are little discussed in academia. These
concepts include, in addition to the idea of limit (and the unlimited), the
ideas of completion, perfection, totality, the threshold, the end, the telos
(the final cause), and so on. Once you start looking at the way these concepts
are used in Greece and the near East, the whole question of the cultural
differences between the cultures begins to shift; at first gently, and in the
end, dramatically. By 1987 I had begun to understand something of the grammar
of these ideas in their cultural contexts, and realised that they were a
principal focus of Plato’s interest. It also became possible to see how other
aspects of Greek and near Eastern cultures were also driven by an interest in
this range of associated concepts.
After studying ancient Greek and philosophy for a year in Edinburgh, I
became a student at UCL in early October 1989, studying Ancient History. I
studied Near Eastern history in general (Egypt, the Levant, Assyria and
Babylonia, Urartu, etc), plus the Akkadian and Sumerian languages, as well as
Greek culture and language, and Roman history. My final year dissertation was
on the relationship between the Adapa myth and Neo-Assyrian ideas of
kingship.
Part of the reason I was there was to have the opportunity to further
explore the cultural context of these ideas, in addition to gaining a
disciplined understanding of history as a subject. Another important part of
the agenda was the desire to know whether or not I was barking up the wrong
tree, which I realised was a possibility. If what I thought was detecting was
really there, it might seem puzzling, at least on the face of things, that it
had remained a matter of no interest to historians. Martin Bernal’s ‘Black
Athena’ published a couple of years beforehand, suggested to me that the
operational frame for historians and classicists, built up particularly since
the 1840s, might be responsible for their lack of engagement with these
elements of the evidence, together with the importation of aspects of the
sociological approach at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
which determined a focus on less cerebral aspects of the ancient world.
As a leading department of history, the staff were well aware of the
possibility that their subject had been blown off course by nineteenth century
tendencies, and organised a series of nine seminars devoted to exploring the
validity of Bernal’s thesis while I was a student at UCL. I attended eight of
them. While at UCL I also attended a postgraduate seminar on the possibility
that the Egyptians had some grasp of philosophy, organised by Mark Collier. It
was possible to propose this discussion, and get a reasonable audience (of
about twenty) to come along. I understood from this seminar, which concentrated
mainly on a well-known Egyptian stele, just how far we needed to travel to
properly address the question of an idea of Being in the ancient world.
After UCL, I was faced with finding an occupation which would effectively
fund further development of the inquiry. I found myself gravitating towards
issues of scholarly communication, and ended up living in Bath. A beautiful
city, with excellent people, but not a place well furnished with libraries
containing texts from the ancient near east. Indeed it was hard to find Greek
texts in that city. This was a time when
many important books were published, mostly in the US, which I collected by
mail as funds allowed. It was at this time (2004) that I acquired, from the
estate of a deceased Dutch scholar, at some expense, the published texts of the State Archives of Assyria series
(eighteen volumes), as well as numerous related items.
In late 2004 I began a conversation with Simo Parpola, perhaps the most
important of the Assyriological scholars, based in Helsinki, and asked if he
could supply me with an offprint of his 1993 paper on the Assyrian sacred tree.
He was kind enough to send this to me. I realised very quickly that he had
provided a proof of the antiquity of the Jewish Kabbalah, and consequently of
the antiquity of the idea of Being. It was perfectly clear that the idea was
well formed, and lay at the heart of the Assyrian idea of reality.
I suggested writing a paper aimed at exposing this information to those
interested in the history of philosophy. Parpola was kind enough to make
suggestions, and to supply a new translation of a significant passage on
Assyrian kingship, first (and last) translated in the closing years of the
nineteenth century. I redrafted. Parpola made some suggestions about how I
might re-focus the paper. I submitted the article to an American journal in
2005, and it was accepted. But I realised in myself, in the course of the
conversation with the journal, that some aspects of the article were terminally
problematic. I did not follow through with requested citation modifications,
and a reduction in length, and abandoned the paper.
In early October 2005 I returned to Edinburgh, after a hiatus of sixteen
years. Between 2006 and 2009 I did
little to push the project forward. I thought about it often, but did not
write. In January 2010 there was an abortive attempt to draft this book. A
draft of the contents was all that was achieved. I began again in January 2011,
which effort resulted in the text which is before you now.
