Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Page 33
In an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us. Mesopotamian culture certainly had an influence on its neighbors, notably Persia, Israel, and Greece. Some, including some notable Assyriologists such as Jean Bottero, have wanted to see it as the first act of “Western Civilization.” Others, notably Leo Oppenheim, who gave his book Ancient Mesopotamia the significant subtitle Portrait of a Dead Civilization, have wanted to emphasize the strangeness, the difference, of Mesopotamian civilization from ours.48 An argument could be made for either position, but it would seem that Mesopotamian civilization as a comprehensive way of life did come to an end, and the last cuneiform text may be a convenient point to mark its demise, just as the last hieroglyphic text can be seen to mark the death of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Though writing is a convenient marker for a given civilization and has often been seen as an essential element in the definition of a civilization, we must be cautious in using it as such. We must be especially cautions in imagining that the invention of writing instantaneously created a “literacy revolution.” If that term has any validity-if it implies a change in mentalite-and we will consider that possibility in a later chapter, it hardly applies to ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Shang China. For one thing, early writing had quite limited usage. The archaeologist Hans Nissen goes so far as to say, “the invention of writing [in Sumer] did not mark any particularly historical turning-point.“49 In Mesopotamia, writing, together with a developing number system, was originally used primarily in registering the contributions to temples and palaces and the rations paid out by them. Still, the use of writing and numbers in accounting practices was no mean achievement, whether or not it was a “historical turning-point,” and may be related to the fact that of all early civilizations, Mesopotamia had the most far-flung trade and the most developed market economy.50 Early writing was also useful in the development of bureaucracy: orders could be transmitted to distant regions with some security that the exact instructions would reach the intended destination.” However, given that cuneiform (and hieroglyphic) writing was a very difficult practice, requiring years of special training, there had to be scribes in the palace or temple who could write the instructions, and scribes at the other end who could decode them. Even priests and kings might not be able to read.
Once more literary texts began to be written, often myths or hymns, segments of important rituals, they remained very close to spoken language. Their constant repetitions with minor variations show that they were frequently verbatim transcriptions of oral texts. In short, ancient civilizations, even when difficult writing systems had appeared, remained largely oral cultures throughout their history.52 Writing did not mean the end of oral tradition; not even printing did more than make a dent in it. Although today oral tradition in most developed societies is pushed to the margins by the ubiquity of print and electronic media, it survives in many nooks and crannies in all existing societies. Because the gods-mostly benevolent, sometimes in their “wild” moods terrifying, always in the end inscrutable-were the center of concern for Mesopotamians throughout their history, perhaps the end of Mesopotamian Civilization was marked, not by the last cuneiform document to be produced, but by the last prayer to be uttered to Marduk or Assur, but of that we have no record.
Ancient Egypt
Jean Bottero claimed ancient Mesopotamia as the “first act” of Western Civilization, but how much more often has Egypt been cast in that role? Jan Assmann in Moses the Egyptians” has traced the image of Egypt held by the ancient Hebrews and Greeks, through many centuries when knowledge of Egyptian writing was lost but fascination with Egypt continued, up until recent times when such distinguished non-Egyptologists as Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud found Egypt foundational for the understanding of Western culture. It has been my intention in this book to try to understand each religion in its own cultural context, so far as possible as its adherents understood it. This admittedly utopian enterprise itself, however, is culturally situated, made possible only by cultural developments, including massive scholarly advances, in recent times.
Nonetheless, when it comes to Egypt the baggage of preconceptions, even of prejudice, is heavy. A strongly negative picture pervades the opening books of the Hebrew Bible, particularly Exodus (the Joseph story in Genesis is a bit more nuanced), with Egypt as the very archetype of idolatry, the primary sin that the children of Israel must avoid at all cost, but also the archetype of oppression and slavery. Even a recent book that I admire, Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution,54 makes ancient Egypt the very symbol of everything we want to get away from, even to this day. On the opposite sidefrom Plato to the present-Egypt has been seen as the source of ancient wisdom, the origin of human culture. I will try to avoid the tendency either to demonize ancient Egypt or to idealize it, and to approach it as much as possible not from what followed but from what came before, from the point of view, say, of Tikopia, Hawaii, or ancient Mesopotamia.
Barry Kemp, the distinguished archaeologist of ancient Egypt, states well the situation in which anyone who undertakes what I have undertaken finds himself, however well intentioned: “I am aware as I write this book that I am creating in my own mind images that I hope correspond to the way things were in ancient Egypt. I also know that the more I try to make sense of the facts, the more what I write is speculative and begins to merge with the world of historical fiction, a modern form of myth. My ancient Egypt is very much an imagined world, though I hope that it cannot too readily be shown to be untrue to the original ancient sources.“55 I would only add that history is our myth-as Jan Assmann puts it: “History turns into myth as soon as it is remembered, narrated, and used, that is, woven into the fabric of the present. The mythical qualities of history have nothing to do with its truth values.“56 To put it in one word, as William McNeill does, what we are doing is “mythistory.“57 Looking at our project in these terms should bring us into closer sympathy with cultures such as ancient Egypt in which myth is a primary cultural form. To the extent that we are also creatures of myth in that “we are what we remember,“58 we are in the same boat as the ancient Egyptians.
Another German Egyptologist reminds us that we are even one step closer to the ancient Egyptians. Not only do we still have our own myths, we cannot escape theirs:
Any sort of contact with the world of the Egyptians silences one question, that of the reality and existence of these gods. Egyptian religion lived on the fact that gods exist. If we remove the gods from the Egyptians’ world, all that remains is a dark, uninhabited shell that would not repay study … In order to understand the forces that circumscribe the very closed and homogeneous world of the Egyptians, we must inquire after their gods and employ all our conceptual armory in order to seek out the reality of these gods-a reality that was not invented by human beings but experienced by them.59
Given that “we” are the product of all previous human culture, we have, at some level “already” experienced those gods, as we have “already” experienced the powerful beings of tribal peoples. If we are truly to understand ancient Egyptian religion (or any religion), it will be part of our task to “remember” what we have forgotten, but which in some sense we already know.
If Mesopotamia in many ways looked like the antithesis of Hawaii, predynastic Egypt provides more than a few parallels, improbable though that may seem. Egypt was certainly not as isolated as an island in the mid-Pacific, but compared to Mesopotamia it looks isolated. Egypt is effectively the Nile Valley from the First Cataract to the Mediterranean. Due to the yearly inundations of the Nile bringing new alluvial soil and avoiding both the need for irrigation and the problem of salinization, the valley was one of the most fertile strips of land in the world. It was bounded, however, on both sides by virtually impassable desert, and was thus much less vulnerable to incursions from without than was Mesopotamia. It was, however, vulnerable in several spots: from the upper Nile region known as Nubia, from Libya to the
northwest, and from the northeast region, that is Palestine and beyond, inhabited by what the Egyptians called “Asiatics.” It was also vulnerable to the sea along the coast of the Nile Delta. For the first 2,000 years of its dynastic history the vulnerable frontiers were breached only once, by Asiatics known as the Hyksos, who managed to rule the delta for a hundred years in the midsecond millennium BCE. Egypt’s partial isolation was only definitively breached in the first millennium BCE when the surrounding world had become more “developed.” Not only were there Nubian and Libyan rulers, but disorienting conquests by Asiatics-the Assyrians, and for a longer period the Persians-by the Greeks, that is, Alexander the Great and the Ptolemaic Empire that followed, and finally by the Romans. The first millennium BCE in Egypt was a period of considerable creativity and innovation even though the country was under unprecedented outside pressure and influence, but before that Egyptian civilization had developed for 2,000 years with little outside influence and with continuity of language and population. This among other reasons makes ancient Egypt remarkable. It was the longest lasting, most continuous, and best documented of the archaic civilizations and as such has to be Exhibit A when considering them. It also illustrates the considerable capacity for transformation within such civilizations as well as the limits beyond which those transformations apparently could not go.
Although dynastic Egyptian civilization seems to burst on the scene with stunning brilliance at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, it was not without centuries of preparation. An agricultural population of rather homogeneous culture grew gradually from about 5500 BCE to the end of the fourth millennium. During the last centuries of that millennium, and more clearly in Upper Egypt60 than in the delta, there were growing signs of hierarchy and stratification, mainly indicated by the appearance of elite graves with luxury grave goods. Graves and tombs, as we will see, were matters of great importance to the Egyptians from the earliest times.
In the immediate predynastic period, that is, circa 3100 BCE, several paramount chiefdoms or early states appear to have emerged in Upper Egypt, the most important of which were Hierakonpolis and Nagada.61 There is every indication that warfare between these polities was intense and that the unified state was the result of the military victory of one of the competing polities. Ideology was significant from the beginning: Naqada was associated with the god Seth and Hierakonpolis with the god Horus. When Hierakonpolis conquered Naqada to form what Kemp calls the Proto-Kingdom of Upper Egypt, the union was symbolized by the association of Horus and Seth as the expression of the unity of the “two lands” (later extended to mean Upper and Lower Egypt), followed by the conquest of the whole country and the founding of the First Dynasty, with its new capital at Memphis, not far from present-day Cairo, where the delta begins to diverge from the main stream of the river.
The whole process of transition is obscure. There was some writing, in particular names of kings and deities, but continuous texts do not appear for several centuries, so no textual account of the founding exists until long after the historical fact. The first several dynasties saw a remarkable flowering of culture and the creation of cultural forms in several realms that would continue, not without some change, until the end of Egyptian civilization in the early centuries CE. The details, however, are far from clear: there is argument about the names and order of the early kings. Toby Wilkinson, among others, postulates a Dynasty 0, from about 3100 to 3000 BCE.62 The first three dynasties, generally called protodynastic or early dynastic, lasted until 2600 BCE, when, with the Fourth Dynasty, the Old Kingdom begins.
Michael Hoffman offers a number of reasons for the cultural florescence that accompanied the rise of a unified Egyptian state at the beginning of dynastic history. He cites the long period of population growth leading up to significant demographic concentrations in several parts of Upper Egypt; the extraordinary productivity of the land and the possibility of aggregating resources through taxation and storage; the rapid development of sophisticated craft production and architecture; and perhaps above all the centrality of the mortuary cult already in the first two dynasties, that will remain, through many vicissitudes, such an identifying characteristic of Egyptian culture:
As Egypt consolidated from local chieftainships into regional kingdoms, into the world’s first national state, it developed the royal tomb as its flag: a symbol of political integration under god … From our brief exposure to the study of known mortuary practices and monuments, we can conclude that the development and function of the royal mortuary cult in late prehistoric and early historic Egypt (between about 3300 and 2700 BCE) was one of the most socially, economically, and politically sensitive indicators of the rise of the state and was one of the most important reasons why Egyptian civilization emerged when it did and in the fashion that it did.63
In the absence of continuous texts until well into the Old Kingdom, that is, toward the end of the Fifth Dynasty, around 2400 BCE, it is difficult to reconstruct religious belief and practice. Many local gods are known, and the centrality of some of the gods, such as Horus and Seth, as mentioned above, is clear, but we know little of the context of myth in which these gods may have been embedded. For instance, the name of Osiris, known as the father of Horus in later times, is missing in the early dynastic period and even his existence then can only be inferred indirectly. On the other hand the relation between Horus and the king is clearly central. The naming of Egyptian kings is complex and became more so over time, but from the very beginning Horus figured prominently in the name of every king. Horus’s emblem is the falcon, but it would be a mistake to call him a “falcon god.” The name Horus means “the one on high.” The falcon then, rather than an exclusive identity, associates him with the sky, perhaps even with the sun. In any case, as Kemp puts it, “Horus is the one deity whose figure appears unambiguously in association with Early Dynastic kings. The figure of the falcon … stands alone above a heraldic device containing the principal name of the
A critical question for us in trying to understand archaic religion is the question whether the king is Horus in a strong sense-that is, is he divine, an instantiation of the god himself? This question has been answered variously. Henri Frankfort has argued for divine kingship,65 whereas Georges Posener has held that the king is only metaphorically a god.66 Jan Assmann in a number of works has argued for a changing understanding of the king’s divinity, from god to son of god, to chosen by god, to servant of god. Perhaps the key is a changing understanding of divinity itself. In the Old Kingdom (third millennium BCE), ritual was not an interaction between gods and human beings, but an interaction between “gods” themselves. As Assmann puts it, ritual “was not conceived ofas a communication between the human and the divine, but rather as an interaction between What this means in practice is that ritual language is “uttered as divine speeches by priests who play the roles of the deities in question as they carry out the respective cultic acts. The words uttered while performing the cultic acts are thus the words of the deities, sacred words whose radiant power makes it possible to illuminate the otherworldly meaning of what is happening in this-worldly events.“68
This begins to make sense if we see that the “gods” of early dynastic Egypt are only incipiently differentiated from the “powerful beings” of tribal people, and that they are more identified with than worshipped, so that Assmann’s “otherworldly” and “this-worldly” are only aspects of a largely undifferentiated cosmos. In this context it makes sense to say that the king is Horus, in that he enacts Horus rather than worships him. Thus we could perhaps say that the early Egyptian king is Horus in the sense that the Hawaiian king is Ku. With the sun god Re of the Middle Kingdom things were undoubtedly different, as they perhaps were even in the later Old Kingdom when Re had become central and the king was said to be “the son of Re” rather than Re himself. But even though the relation between king and god evolved over time, Assmann also reminds us that the idea of the divinity of the king persisted. In the first four dynasties, �
��The ruler is not an image of god, he is god,” but in later times things are not entirety different: “Even in its classical, representative form, pharaonic kingship never entirely relinquished the idea that the pharaoh, son of god, was the incarnation of god. The god embodied by the pharaoh, however, was typically demoted to a filial rank: the pharaoh did not embody Amun, Re, or Ptah, but Horus, the son of Osiris, and as such the Son..“69 But of course Horus was the god of kings before Amun, Re, or Ptah came on the scene and probably before Osiris was clearly established as his father.
The fusion of the divine and the human in the person of the king is perhaps the central expression of the “compact symbolism” which Erich Voegelin sees as characterizing tribal religion and only gradually differentiating in the history of archaic societies, not to be radically broken through until the axial age.70 The king, whether as incarnation, son, or servant of the gods, is the key link between humans and the cosmos such that the weakness or absence of the king is a sign of profound cosmic and social disorder; the proper functioning of the king is the primary guarantee of life and peace.
Just as the powerful beings of tribal peoples were violent as well as benevolent, and in ancient Mesopotamia one never knew what Enlil might do, so chaos and disorder were never far from the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians. Erik Hornung describes an Egyptian understanding of reality going back as far as the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom in which chaos, defined as limitless waters and total darkness, preceded the coming into being of the first god, surrounds the finite universe, and will ultimately prevail when the cosmos grows old and is reabsorbed into it. Further, chaos not only surrounds the cosmos but penetrates it continuously, requiring equally continual human action to deal with