The Separation of East and West
Sargon of Akkad, Wikimedia Commons
The Cities of Men
Mythic Dissociation
In the almost perfectly protected, readily defended valley of the Nile, with the sea to the north and deserts to the east, west, and south, the ruling dynasties remained in power, for the most part, over long periods and with no interference from without – save in the century of Hyksos rule, when a mixed horde of Asiatic aliens, equipped with the war chariot and compound bow, shattered the northeast frontier and took possession, in the period 1670 – 1570 B.C. “They ruled without Re and did not act by divine command,” declared Queen Hatshepsut (1486 – 1468 B.C.), when those whom the gods abominate had been made distant and the earth had carried off their footprints. New protective imperial outposts for Egypt then were established deep within Asia, as far north as Syria. While the people of the Nile returned to their own old ways of toil, peace, and prosperity under maat, the influence of their thought and civilization spread abroad.
Throughout the Southwest Asian Near East, on the other hand, fluctuating swarms of races and traditions of altogether differing backgrounds were continually colliding. A pell-mell of battle, massacre, general disorder, and mutual vituperation produced an atmosphere little conducive to belief or confidence in the wholesomeness of God’s world. In addition, the two holy rivers Euphrates and Tigris were undependable, as was the weather. In contrast, the annual, desirable inundations of the Nile were in perfect accord with the normal hopes and expectations of the populace. Occuring at the time of the annual appearances of Sothis (Sirius), the star of Isis, on the dawn horizon, they afforded a relatively dependable sign and schedule of the right order of the goddess-mistress of the cosmos.
The flash floods and even sudden shiftings of course of the Euphrates and Tigris were as undependable, unmanageable, and terrible as everything else in that harsh terrain. Hence, in Mesopotamia the priestly art of knowing the will and order of creation required a much more constant watch given to immediate phenomena than its counterpart in Egypt. A development of numerous, very seriously studied techniques of divination was a consequence of this necessity. Hepatoscopy (examining the livers of sacrificed beasts), oleography (judging the configurations of oil poured into water), astroscopy (an observation of the visible appearances of the stars, planets, moon, and sun; not yet, as in astrology proper, a judgment of their relative placements in the zodiac), a judgment of meteorological conditions (cloud formations, varieties of thunder and lightning, rains, winds, earthquakes, etc.), and observations of the behavior of animals (flight of birds, births of prodigies, etc.). Just as the tumult of the social and political scene in time led to a development throughout Southwest Asia of increasingly powerful governments and orders of civil law, so the necessity to keep a strict watch on nature conduced – especially in astronomy – to the beginnings of a systematic science.
Hence, whereas in Africa, in the protected oasis of the Nile valley, an archaic civilization retained its form in essential purity from about 2850 B.C. until the dawn of the Christian era, Southwest Asia – where the earliest high Neolithic culture forms had appeared earlier than 4500 B.C., with the earliest considerable city states a millennium later – retained not its form, but its leadership as the chief growing point of all civilization whatsoever. This lasted until 331 B.C., when Alexander the Great (356 – 323 B.C.) broke the army of the King of Kings, Darius III (reigned 336 – 330 B.C.).
The earliest known temple compounds in the world are those at Brak, Khafajah, Uqair, Obeid, Uruk, and Eridu in Mesopotamia. These are dated at about 4000 – 3500 B.C. There are older finds of important religious centers at the north of this region, in Turkey, but they are closer to sites like Stonehenge in nature, and not temple compounds of the same order. Each of the Mesopotamian city states was in this period conceived to be the earthly manor of one of the world-controlling gods: Ur, of the moon-god Nannar; Obeid, of the dairy-goddess Ninhursag; Eridu, of the water-god Enki or Ea; Nippur, of the air-god Enlil (who, throughout the high period of ancient Sumer (about 3500 – 2050 B.C.) was, like later on Zeus of the Greek Olympians, primus inter pares of the pantheon). (There is a myth of rebirth through water which is of interest in the context of the discussion diffusion of mythology. The god Enki functioned as a god of purification in the water rituals of the “house of baptism” or “of washing”. It is surely more than a coincidence to be seen in the fact that in the work of a late Babylonian priest Berossos, who wrote in Greek (about 280 B.C.) the name given to Enki was Oannes (Greek Ioannes, Latin Johannes, Hebrew Yohanan, English John.)
The ziggurat, the main edifice of the temple compounds, on the one hand supplied the deity with a means of descent to his city on earth and, on the other hand, provided the inhabitants of that city with a means of approach and petition to their god. The Mesopotamian kings were at that time no longer gods in themselves. The critical dissociation between the spheres of God and man which in time was to separate decisively the religious systems of the Occident from those of the Orient, had already taken place. The king was no longer a god-king, or even properly a king, but only the vicar of the true King, who was the god above.
In the earlier mythology of the neolithic order, the female was above the male, the cosmic mother above the father. At some date in the neolithic order in Mesopotamia this order was reversed. The progressive devaluation of the mother-goddess in favor of the father, which everywhere accompanied the maturation of the dynastic state and patriarchy but was carried further in Southwest Asia than anywhere else (culminating in the mythology of the Old Testament, where there is no mother-goddess whatsoever). The ziggurats were the earliest signals of this spiritual break.
Mythic Virtue
In archaic mythology there is no idea of evolution either of society or of species. The forms produced in the beginning were to endure until the end of time. The virtue of each class of things, each manner of man, thereafter, was to represent the god-given natural patterning of its kind – which in Egypt was known as maat, in India as dharma, in the Far East as tao, and in Sumer as me. Among the virtues that constitute the archetypes of being and experience, the emphasis on music is of particular interest. The inaudible “music of the spheres”, which is the hum of the cosmos in being, becomes audible through music; it is the harmony, the meaning, of the social order; and the harmony of the soul itself discovers therein its accord. This idea is basic to Confucian music, to Indian music as well; it was, of course, the Pythagorean belief; and it was a fundamental thought, also of the Middle Ages in Europe: as seen in the chanting of the monks, who were diligently practicing in accord with the choir of the angels. Not only music, all art partakes of this mystique.
Mythic Time
From all that we know of ancient Mesopotamia, it is evident that certain numbers were supposed to give access to a knowledge of the cosmic order. As early as 3200 B.C., with the first appearance of written tablets, two systems of numeration were employed, the decimal and the sexigesimal. The latter was based on the soss (60), by which unit we still measure circles and calculate time. The Mesopotamian year was reckoned as 360 days, so that the circles of time and space were in accord, as two prospects of the same principle of number. And in the center of the circle of space were the 5 points of the sacred ziggurat – four angles to the quarters and summit to the sky – by way of which divinity was brought into the world; while in the circle of time, likewise, besides the secular 360 days, there was an added festival week of 5 days, during the course of which the old year died, the new was born, and the principle of divinity in the world was restored. Furthermore, as the day in proportion to the year, so was the year in proportion to the great year; and at the close of each such eon or great year there was a deluge, a cosmic dissolution and return.
A list of ten mythological kings who ruled in the period from the first descent of kingship from the courts of heaven upon the cities of men to the coming of the Flood, composed by the Babylonian priest Berossos in 280 B.C., gives the total of 432 000 years for this ruling period. This figure is significant, when compared to other mythologies. In the Icelandic Poetic Edda, it is told that in Odin’s heavenly warrior hall (Valhall) there were 540 doors. 800 fighters went out from each door when going to war with the Wolf Fenris (500 times 800 is 432 000). The “war with the Wolf” in that mythology was the recurrent cosmic battle of the gods and antigods at the end of each cosmic round. In the Indian Mahabharata and numerous other texts of the Puranic period (about 400 A.D. and thereafter), the cosmic cycle of four world ages numbers 12 000 “divine years” of 360 “human years” each, which is 4 320 000 human years; and our particular portion of that cycle – the last and worst – the so-called Kali Yuga, is exactly one tenth of that sum, i.e. 432 000 years. There is an exact relationship between the number of years assigned by Berossos to the cycle of his ten antediluvian kings and the actual sum of years of one equinoctial cycle of the zodiac. It may be concluded that a major concern of the mythologies in which these numbers figure, is to place the relationship of man and the rhythms of his life on earth in a context of larger cycles: the great years. In this mythological context, the Deluge is not conceived as something sent to punish man, but something occurring within the cosmic rhythm – marking death and resurrection. In the Mesopotamian sexigesimal system, we have: 60 (the soss); 600 (the ner); 3600 (the sar); 216 000 (the great sar: 60 x 3600); and Berossos’ eon: two great sars (432 000).
The Mythic Flood
There is a great desert westward of Mesopotamia, reaching from Syria and Turkey in the north to the southern extremities of Arabia, which from as remote a period as the end of the paleolithic, has been the matrix from which all the numerous Semitic tribes of history have emerged, notably:
1. The Akkadians, who conquered the land of Sumer and took the kingship to their city of Agade (Sargon of Agade) about 2350 B.C. (The restoration period of Ur III followed, 2050 – 1950B.C.)
2. The Amoritic Babylonians, who gave the “coup de grace” to both Sumer and Akkad, about 1850 B.C. (Hammurabi, about 1700 B.C.).
3. The later Amorites, who conquered the ancient city of Jericho, about 1450 B.C., and left it in ruins.
4. The Canaanites, who followed them in Syria and Palestine.
5. The closely related Phoenicians of the coast.
6. The Hebrews (Saul, about 1010 B.C.)
7. The Assyrians, who conquered Babylon about 1100 B.C. and at the height of their power, in the period of Ashurbanipal (668 – 626 B.C.) dominated the whole Southwest Asia.
8. The Chaldeans, who were briefly the masters, from 625 to 550 B.C.
9. The Aramaeans – obscurely defined – whose speech was general from Sinai to Syria, and – as a language of trade – as far as to India, in the centuries just before and after Christ.
10. Finally, the Arabs, who, with the victories of Islam (about 650 - 1400 A.D.) became the masters of the most broadly flung cultural domain in the history of the archaic world.
Even before the victories of Sargon, nomadic Semitic warrior tribes were already raiding and occasionally plundering Sumer. The mathematically inspired priestly vision of a Flood as an integral part of cosmic death and resurrection at the end of an eon, existed as part of the mythologies of city states which were flowering before the numerous Semitic tribes emerged. The Flood as the work of a god of wrath seems to be an effect of later mythology. The arithmetic that was developed in Sumer as early as 3200 B.C., whether by coincidence or by intuitive induction, so matched the celestial order as to amount in itself to a revelation. Mathematics in that crucial moment of cultural mutation met the earlier-known mystery of biological death and generation, and the two joined. The lunar rhythm of the womb had already given notice of a correspondence between celestial and terrestrial circumstance. The mathematical law now united both. In all these mythologies, the principle of maat, me, dharma, and tao, which in the Greek tradition became moira, was felt and represented as female: the mysterious Great Mother. The law of her generative rhythm was represented for the entire ancient world in those units and multiples of 60 of the old Sumerian sexagesimal arithmetic, which had caught the measure at once of time and space.
Mythic Guilt
A paradox now becomes apparent, which is to remain throughout the history of our subject, to set the Orient and Occident apart. As the cosmic vision fades into the background and gods are no longer mere administrators of a mathematical order, but themselves omnipotent freely willing creators of a comparatively arbitrary order, a certain mystical sophistication characterized by dignity and maturity, majesty of prospect and spiritual assurance, disappears. On the other hand, a personal, ethical, humanizing factor comes to view that is absolutely missing on the other side of the wall. Over there one finds non-duality, peace of soul – and inhumanity; here, tension, duality, and a sense of exile – yet the face of the freely willing, autonomous individual, competent to change destiny, and so responsible to himself, humanity, and the future, not to the cosmos, metaphysics, and the past. That is the wall that cuts the two hemispheres apart, East and West.
When, in Mesopotamia, the king was no longer the Great God, but the Tenant Farmer of the God, the mythological rupture was introduced, setting the orders of nature and humanity apart – without converting man fully, however, to the courage of his own rational judgments. A pathos of anxiety developed in which all the nursery agonies of a child striving to gain parental favor were transformed into a cosmological nightmare of mythic dependency – leading to a sense of intrinsic human guilt. There is an important epic of a certain King Etana of the city of Kish, in which the import of this transit from the earlier mythology of man’s (or at least the king’s) intrinsic divinity to the later mythology of absolute dissociation, dependency, and guilt, comes vividly to view.
In an early version of the epic, Etana (who appears among the kings of the first dynasty following the Flood) is termed “a shepherd, the one who ascended to heaven, the one who consolidated all the lands, became king, and reigned for 1560 years.” This early version of the legend may have served to validate the king’s divine mandate. In the versions of Etana’s heavenly flights that have survived – from late Semitic vintages (Ashurbanipal’s library) – the entire theme has been turned into guilt, not aspiration. Two distinct tales are combined: the first, of a king and his city abandoned by its gods; the second, of an eagle and serpent allied. The two tales combined were made to teach two lessons: a) the laws of the gods cannot be transgressed without entailing grievous punishment, and b) that man cannot be immortal like the gods. It is this lesson which the Babylonian theologians made the essence of the Gilgamesh epic.
The idea of man’s absolute separation from the gods belongs not to Sumer, but to the later Semitic mind from Akkad and onwards. However, it also belongs to the Greeks, in their idea of hybris, and is the inhabiting principle of tragedy. It underlies the Christian myth, also, of the Fall and Redemption. Indeed, throughout the literature of the Occident defeat is typical of superhuman adventures; whereas it is not so in the Orient. The western concept of the hero is of the actual, particular individual, who indeed is mortal and so doomed. Whereas in the Orient the true hero of all mythology is not the vainly striving, empirical personality, but that reincarnating one and only transmigrant, who is never born, nor never dies. Unborn, eternal, changeless and of great age; is not slain when the body is slain.
The Knowledge of Sorrow
The earliest Egyptian tomb murals and reliefs do not stress burial and mortuary services. They stress the pleasure in an abounding harvest, delight in nature, enjoyment of the hunt, and the excitement of feasts and games. The total impression is confident, lively and gay, with self-assurance, optimism, and a lust for life. However, in the first centuries of the second millennium B.C., a new note of dissonance becomes apparent in the writings of Egypt and Mesopotamia – as shown in a celebrated papyrus of about 2000 B.C.: “Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Soul.”. The spirit of this dissonance that came in this period could well be the prelude to the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: “All life is sorrowful.”
Joseph Campbell terms this new development The Great Reversal, whereby death was no longer viewed as a continuance of the wonder of life, but as a rescue from its pain. What can have caused this inversion of values? In Egypt, apparently, a period of social disintegration following the fall of Dynasty VI about 2190 B.C., and in Mesopotamia the frightfulness of an age during which the warcraft, first of city against city, but then, with mounting force, of desert and steppe tribesmen (Semites and Aryans) against the hearths of civilization itself, strewed ruins on every hand. Moreover, there were also the inevitable disappointments of those pious souls who, like Job, had fulfilled even beyond the call of duty all the duties of religion, only to find themselves struck down horribly, as was the case of an aged, pious king, Tabi-utul-Enlil, who is known as the Babylonian Job. His laments and testimony from about 1750 B.C., are also witness to this.
From this time, the moral problem of suffering moved to the center of the stage, where it has remained ever since. The highest concern of mythology, ritual, and human wisdom shifted from the old magical interests of the nature cult, to the more intimately psychological task of achieving peace, harmony, and depth of soul in this vale of tears.
In the almost perfectly protected, readily defended valley of the Nile, with the sea to the north and deserts to the east, west, and south, the ruling dynasties remained in power, for the most part, over long periods and with no interference from without – save in the century of Hyksos rule, when a mixed horde of Asiatic aliens, equipped with the war chariot and compound bow, shattered the northeast frontier and took possession, in the period 1670 – 1570 B.C. “They ruled without Re and did not act by divine command,” declared Queen Hatshepsut (1486 – 1468 B.C.), when those whom the gods abominate had been made distant and the earth had carried off their footprints. New protective imperial outposts for Egypt then were established deep within Asia, as far north as Syria. While the people of the Nile returned to their own old ways of toil, peace, and prosperity under maat, the influence of their thought and civilization spread abroad.
Throughout the Southwest Asian Near East, on the other hand, fluctuating swarms of races and traditions of altogether differing backgrounds were continually colliding. A pell-mell of battle, massacre, general disorder, and mutual vituperation produced an atmosphere little conducive to belief or confidence in the wholesomeness of God’s world. In addition, the two holy rivers Euphrates and Tigris were undependable, as was the weather. In contrast, the annual, desirable inundations of the Nile were in perfect accord with the normal hopes and expectations of the populace. Occuring at the time of the annual appearances of Sothis (Sirius), the star of Isis, on the dawn horizon, they afforded a relatively dependable sign and schedule of the right order of the goddess-mistress of the cosmos.
The flash floods and even sudden shiftings of course of the Euphrates and Tigris were as undependable, unmanageable, and terrible as everything else in that harsh terrain. Hence, in Mesopotamia the priestly art of knowing the will and order of creation required a much more constant watch given to immediate phenomena than its counterpart in Egypt. A development of numerous, very seriously studied techniques of divination was a consequence of this necessity. Hepatoscopy (examining the livers of sacrificed beasts), oleography (judging the configurations of oil poured into water), astroscopy (an observation of the visible appearances of the stars, planets, moon, and sun; not yet, as in astrology proper, a judgment of their relative placements in the zodiac), a judgment of meteorological conditions (cloud formations, varieties of thunder and lightning, rains, winds, earthquakes, etc.), and observations of the behavior of animals (flight of birds, births of prodigies, etc.). Just as the tumult of the social and political scene in time led to a development throughout Southwest Asia of increasingly powerful governments and orders of civil law, so the necessity to keep a strict watch on nature conduced – especially in astronomy – to the beginnings of a systematic science.
Hence, whereas in Africa, in the protected oasis of the Nile valley, an archaic civilization retained its form in essential purity from about 2850 B.C. until the dawn of the Christian era, Southwest Asia – where the earliest high Neolithic culture forms had appeared earlier than 4500 B.C., with the earliest considerable city states a millennium later – retained not its form, but its leadership as the chief growing point of all civilization whatsoever. This lasted until 331 B.C., when Alexander the Great (356 – 323 B.C.) broke the army of the King of Kings, Darius III (reigned 336 – 330 B.C.).
The earliest known temple compounds in the world are those at Brak, Khafajah, Uqair, Obeid, Uruk, and Eridu in Mesopotamia. These are dated at about 4000 – 3500 B.C. There are older finds of important religious centers at the north of this region, in Turkey, but they are closer to sites like Stonehenge in nature, and not temple compounds of the same order. Each of the Mesopotamian city states was in this period conceived to be the earthly manor of one of the world-controlling gods: Ur, of the moon-god Nannar; Obeid, of the dairy-goddess Ninhursag; Eridu, of the water-god Enki or Ea; Nippur, of the air-god Enlil (who, throughout the high period of ancient Sumer (about 3500 – 2050 B.C.) was, like later on Zeus of the Greek Olympians, primus inter pares of the pantheon). (There is a myth of rebirth through water which is of interest in the context of the discussion diffusion of mythology. The god Enki functioned as a god of purification in the water rituals of the “house of baptism” or “of washing”. It is surely more than a coincidence to be seen in the fact that in the work of a late Babylonian priest Berossos, who wrote in Greek (about 280 B.C.) the name given to Enki was Oannes (Greek Ioannes, Latin Johannes, Hebrew Yohanan, English John.)
The ziggurat, the main edifice of the temple compounds, on the one hand supplied the deity with a means of descent to his city on earth and, on the other hand, provided the inhabitants of that city with a means of approach and petition to their god. The Mesopotamian kings were at that time no longer gods in themselves. The critical dissociation between the spheres of God and man which in time was to separate decisively the religious systems of the Occident from those of the Orient, had already taken place. The king was no longer a god-king, or even properly a king, but only the vicar of the true King, who was the god above.
In the earlier mythology of the neolithic order, the female was above the male, the cosmic mother above the father. At some date in the neolithic order in Mesopotamia this order was reversed. The progressive devaluation of the mother-goddess in favor of the father, which everywhere accompanied the maturation of the dynastic state and patriarchy but was carried further in Southwest Asia than anywhere else (culminating in the mythology of the Old Testament, where there is no mother-goddess whatsoever). The ziggurats were the earliest signals of this spiritual break.
Mythic Virtue
In archaic mythology there is no idea of evolution either of society or of species. The forms produced in the beginning were to endure until the end of time. The virtue of each class of things, each manner of man, thereafter, was to represent the god-given natural patterning of its kind – which in Egypt was known as maat, in India as dharma, in the Far East as tao, and in Sumer as me. Among the virtues that constitute the archetypes of being and experience, the emphasis on music is of particular interest. The inaudible “music of the spheres”, which is the hum of the cosmos in being, becomes audible through music; it is the harmony, the meaning, of the social order; and the harmony of the soul itself discovers therein its accord. This idea is basic to Confucian music, to Indian music as well; it was, of course, the Pythagorean belief; and it was a fundamental thought, also of the Middle Ages in Europe: as seen in the chanting of the monks, who were diligently practicing in accord with the choir of the angels. Not only music, all art partakes of this mystique.
Mythic Time
From all that we know of ancient Mesopotamia, it is evident that certain numbers were supposed to give access to a knowledge of the cosmic order. As early as 3200 B.C., with the first appearance of written tablets, two systems of numeration were employed, the decimal and the sexigesimal. The latter was based on the soss (60), by which unit we still measure circles and calculate time. The Mesopotamian year was reckoned as 360 days, so that the circles of time and space were in accord, as two prospects of the same principle of number. And in the center of the circle of space were the 5 points of the sacred ziggurat – four angles to the quarters and summit to the sky – by way of which divinity was brought into the world; while in the circle of time, likewise, besides the secular 360 days, there was an added festival week of 5 days, during the course of which the old year died, the new was born, and the principle of divinity in the world was restored. Furthermore, as the day in proportion to the year, so was the year in proportion to the great year; and at the close of each such eon or great year there was a deluge, a cosmic dissolution and return.
A list of ten mythological kings who ruled in the period from the first descent of kingship from the courts of heaven upon the cities of men to the coming of the Flood, composed by the Babylonian priest Berossos in 280 B.C., gives the total of 432 000 years for this ruling period. This figure is significant, when compared to other mythologies. In the Icelandic Poetic Edda, it is told that in Odin’s heavenly warrior hall (Valhall) there were 540 doors. 800 fighters went out from each door when going to war with the Wolf Fenris (500 times 800 is 432 000). The “war with the Wolf” in that mythology was the recurrent cosmic battle of the gods and antigods at the end of each cosmic round. In the Indian Mahabharata and numerous other texts of the Puranic period (about 400 A.D. and thereafter), the cosmic cycle of four world ages numbers 12 000 “divine years” of 360 “human years” each, which is 4 320 000 human years; and our particular portion of that cycle – the last and worst – the so-called Kali Yuga, is exactly one tenth of that sum, i.e. 432 000 years. There is an exact relationship between the number of years assigned by Berossos to the cycle of his ten antediluvian kings and the actual sum of years of one equinoctial cycle of the zodiac. It may be concluded that a major concern of the mythologies in which these numbers figure, is to place the relationship of man and the rhythms of his life on earth in a context of larger cycles: the great years. In this mythological context, the Deluge is not conceived as something sent to punish man, but something occurring within the cosmic rhythm – marking death and resurrection. In the Mesopotamian sexigesimal system, we have: 60 (the soss); 600 (the ner); 3600 (the sar); 216 000 (the great sar: 60 x 3600); and Berossos’ eon: two great sars (432 000).
The Mythic Flood
There is a great desert westward of Mesopotamia, reaching from Syria and Turkey in the north to the southern extremities of Arabia, which from as remote a period as the end of the paleolithic, has been the matrix from which all the numerous Semitic tribes of history have emerged, notably:
1. The Akkadians, who conquered the land of Sumer and took the kingship to their city of Agade (Sargon of Agade) about 2350 B.C. (The restoration period of Ur III followed, 2050 – 1950B.C.)
2. The Amoritic Babylonians, who gave the “coup de grace” to both Sumer and Akkad, about 1850 B.C. (Hammurabi, about 1700 B.C.).
3. The later Amorites, who conquered the ancient city of Jericho, about 1450 B.C., and left it in ruins.
4. The Canaanites, who followed them in Syria and Palestine.
5. The closely related Phoenicians of the coast.
6. The Hebrews (Saul, about 1010 B.C.)
7. The Assyrians, who conquered Babylon about 1100 B.C. and at the height of their power, in the period of Ashurbanipal (668 – 626 B.C.) dominated the whole Southwest Asia.
8. The Chaldeans, who were briefly the masters, from 625 to 550 B.C.
9. The Aramaeans – obscurely defined – whose speech was general from Sinai to Syria, and – as a language of trade – as far as to India, in the centuries just before and after Christ.
10. Finally, the Arabs, who, with the victories of Islam (about 650 - 1400 A.D.) became the masters of the most broadly flung cultural domain in the history of the archaic world.
Even before the victories of Sargon, nomadic Semitic warrior tribes were already raiding and occasionally plundering Sumer. The mathematically inspired priestly vision of a Flood as an integral part of cosmic death and resurrection at the end of an eon, existed as part of the mythologies of city states which were flowering before the numerous Semitic tribes emerged. The Flood as the work of a god of wrath seems to be an effect of later mythology. The arithmetic that was developed in Sumer as early as 3200 B.C., whether by coincidence or by intuitive induction, so matched the celestial order as to amount in itself to a revelation. Mathematics in that crucial moment of cultural mutation met the earlier-known mystery of biological death and generation, and the two joined. The lunar rhythm of the womb had already given notice of a correspondence between celestial and terrestrial circumstance. The mathematical law now united both. In all these mythologies, the principle of maat, me, dharma, and tao, which in the Greek tradition became moira, was felt and represented as female: the mysterious Great Mother. The law of her generative rhythm was represented for the entire ancient world in those units and multiples of 60 of the old Sumerian sexagesimal arithmetic, which had caught the measure at once of time and space.
Mythic Guilt
A paradox now becomes apparent, which is to remain throughout the history of our subject, to set the Orient and Occident apart. As the cosmic vision fades into the background and gods are no longer mere administrators of a mathematical order, but themselves omnipotent freely willing creators of a comparatively arbitrary order, a certain mystical sophistication characterized by dignity and maturity, majesty of prospect and spiritual assurance, disappears. On the other hand, a personal, ethical, humanizing factor comes to view that is absolutely missing on the other side of the wall. Over there one finds non-duality, peace of soul – and inhumanity; here, tension, duality, and a sense of exile – yet the face of the freely willing, autonomous individual, competent to change destiny, and so responsible to himself, humanity, and the future, not to the cosmos, metaphysics, and the past. That is the wall that cuts the two hemispheres apart, East and West.
When, in Mesopotamia, the king was no longer the Great God, but the Tenant Farmer of the God, the mythological rupture was introduced, setting the orders of nature and humanity apart – without converting man fully, however, to the courage of his own rational judgments. A pathos of anxiety developed in which all the nursery agonies of a child striving to gain parental favor were transformed into a cosmological nightmare of mythic dependency – leading to a sense of intrinsic human guilt. There is an important epic of a certain King Etana of the city of Kish, in which the import of this transit from the earlier mythology of man’s (or at least the king’s) intrinsic divinity to the later mythology of absolute dissociation, dependency, and guilt, comes vividly to view.
In an early version of the epic, Etana (who appears among the kings of the first dynasty following the Flood) is termed “a shepherd, the one who ascended to heaven, the one who consolidated all the lands, became king, and reigned for 1560 years.” This early version of the legend may have served to validate the king’s divine mandate. In the versions of Etana’s heavenly flights that have survived – from late Semitic vintages (Ashurbanipal’s library) – the entire theme has been turned into guilt, not aspiration. Two distinct tales are combined: the first, of a king and his city abandoned by its gods; the second, of an eagle and serpent allied. The two tales combined were made to teach two lessons: a) the laws of the gods cannot be transgressed without entailing grievous punishment, and b) that man cannot be immortal like the gods. It is this lesson which the Babylonian theologians made the essence of the Gilgamesh epic.
The idea of man’s absolute separation from the gods belongs not to Sumer, but to the later Semitic mind from Akkad and onwards. However, it also belongs to the Greeks, in their idea of hybris, and is the inhabiting principle of tragedy. It underlies the Christian myth, also, of the Fall and Redemption. Indeed, throughout the literature of the Occident defeat is typical of superhuman adventures; whereas it is not so in the Orient. The western concept of the hero is of the actual, particular individual, who indeed is mortal and so doomed. Whereas in the Orient the true hero of all mythology is not the vainly striving, empirical personality, but that reincarnating one and only transmigrant, who is never born, nor never dies. Unborn, eternal, changeless and of great age; is not slain when the body is slain.
The Knowledge of Sorrow
The earliest Egyptian tomb murals and reliefs do not stress burial and mortuary services. They stress the pleasure in an abounding harvest, delight in nature, enjoyment of the hunt, and the excitement of feasts and games. The total impression is confident, lively and gay, with self-assurance, optimism, and a lust for life. However, in the first centuries of the second millennium B.C., a new note of dissonance becomes apparent in the writings of Egypt and Mesopotamia – as shown in a celebrated papyrus of about 2000 B.C.: “Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Soul.”. The spirit of this dissonance that came in this period could well be the prelude to the Buddha’s First Noble Truth: “All life is sorrowful.”
Joseph Campbell terms this new development The Great Reversal, whereby death was no longer viewed as a continuance of the wonder of life, but as a rescue from its pain. What can have caused this inversion of values? In Egypt, apparently, a period of social disintegration following the fall of Dynasty VI about 2190 B.C., and in Mesopotamia the frightfulness of an age during which the warcraft, first of city against city, but then, with mounting force, of desert and steppe tribesmen (Semites and Aryans) against the hearths of civilization itself, strewed ruins on every hand. Moreover, there were also the inevitable disappointments of those pious souls who, like Job, had fulfilled even beyond the call of duty all the duties of religion, only to find themselves struck down horribly, as was the case of an aged, pious king, Tabi-utul-Enlil, who is known as the Babylonian Job. His laments and testimony from about 1750 B.C., are also witness to this.
From this time, the moral problem of suffering moved to the center of the stage, where it has remained ever since. The highest concern of mythology, ritual, and human wisdom shifted from the old magical interests of the nature cult, to the more intimately psychological task of achieving peace, harmony, and depth of soul in this vale of tears.