Unfortunately, just as spring and summer ultimately die, so did Dumuzi. According to one Mesopotamian text, Dumuzi “was set upon by highwaymen,” killed, and taken to the afterworld from which nobody, not even a god, was allowed to permanently escape. Inanna searched for and found her husband, guarded by Ereshkigal, goddess of the afterworld. Inanna negotiated an agreement whereby Dumuzi would be allowed to leave the afterworld for six months each year, during which time the grain would grow and be stored, but Dumuzi then had to return to the afterworld for the other six months. The Dumuzi story was thus intended to explain that cycle of the seasons and was the prototype on which similar stories were founded, such as that of Tammuz in Babylonia, Osiris in Egypt, and Persephone in Greece.9
The fact that death figured prominently in the story of Dumuzi is consistent with the importance of death in early Mesopotamian religion. The afterworld was conceived of as a “huge cosmic space below the earth” beyond a river crossed by a ferry and guarded by seven gatekeepers. Ereshkigal was thought to live in a temple made of lapis lazuli, and the denizens of the afterworld were all naked. The deceased were believed to undergo a judgment by Utu, the sun god, and Nanna, the moon god, who decreed the fate of the dead, depending on the life they had led. The gods favored those “who were good parents, good sons, good neighbors, good citizens, and who practiced virtues” such as the following: “To the feeble show kindness, do charitable deeds, render service all your days.… Do not say evil things, speak well of people.” Mesopotamians buried their dead either beneath the floor of the house or in cemeteries. Most burials included grave goods consisting of personal effects such as jewelry and daggers. Many burials also included a cup, bowl, and jar, which held food and beer for the trip to the afterworld. In the city of Lagash, one burial included “7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2 measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.”10
Another indication of the Mesopotamian concern about death and the afterworld is the narrative poem The Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the best known of several Mesopotamian poems that have been passed down and is generally regarded as “the earliest classic of world literature.” Gilgamesh was the king of the city of Uruk about 4,700 years ago. When Enkidu, his dearest friend and fellow adventurer died, Gilgamesh realized that he too would die and he became terrified. “Enkidu my brother, whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept for him seven days and nights till the worm fastened on him. Because of my brother I am afraid of death.… Do not let me see the face of death which I dread so much.… How can I be silent, how can I rest, when Enkidu whom I love is dust, and I too shall die and be laid in the earth.”11 Gilgamesh then embarked on a quest to find the secret of immortality. His journey took him to the ends of the earth, where a woman told him: “You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.” Undeterred, Gilgamesh pressed on and went to the afterworld to find Utnapishtim, the only human to whom the gods had granted immortality. They did so because Utnapishtim, thought to have been the model for the later biblical story of Noah, had built a boat and saved mankind at the time of the Great Flood. Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh: “There is no permanence.… From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like painted death.” Gilgamesh finally realized that he could not reverse the decree of the gods and, like Enkidu, he too would die. “Already the thief in the night has hold of my limbs, death inhabits my room; wherever my foot rests, there I find death.” He returned to Uruk and resumed his duties as king, older but wiser. Eventually Gilgamesh did indeed die and, as described in the poem, “like a hooked fish he lies stretched on the bed, like a gazelle that is caught in a noose.”12
THE GODS ACQUIRE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES
According to Thorkild Jacobsen’s study of the Mesopotamian gods, those associated with nature, life, and death were the “oldest and most original” of the gods. This was the first phase of Mesopotamian religion consisting of “the selection and cultivation for worship of those powers which were important for human survival—powers central to the early economies—and their progressive humanization arising out of a human need for a meaningful relationship with them.” These gods dominated Mesopotamian religious thinking from 6,500 years ago until about 5,200 years ago, a period called by historians the Uruk period.13
In the Dynastic period that followed, from 5,200 years ago until 4,350 years ago, the nature of Mesopotamian society and the nature of the gods changed. The secular rulers or kings of each city-state became more powerful, usurping some of the power of the temple gods. As the kings were assuming some of the authority of the gods, the gods also assumed some secular authority. Thus, Utu, who had previously been exclusively the sun god, also became the god of justice. Nanna, the moon god, acquired responsibility for cattle. And Ningirsu, the god of thunderstorms and floods, acquired responsibility “as protector and military leader.”14
In this second phase of Mesopotamian religion, it became increasingly common for kings to assume divine prerogatives. Naram-Sin, who came to the throne approximately 4,200 years ago, even declared himself to be a god. Shulgi, who ruled two centuries later, “was worshipped as a god during and after his lifetime.” Confusion about the divine status of Mesopotamian kings has led to confusion about the spectacular royal burials at Ur. The 16 tombs contained an extraordinary array of treasures for use in the afterworld. In one tomb, the deceased had a gold helmet, a silver belt, and a gold dagger in a silver sheath, and was holding a gold bowl. Surrounding him were gold and silver lamps, gold and silver axe heads, and “a substantial collection of jewelry,” which may have been “a gift to be presented to underworld deities.” In other tombs they found gold, silver, and copper vessels, musical instruments, weapons such as spears, daggers, and harpoons, game boards, and “jewelry made of gold, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate and shell.”15
What drew international attention to these finds when they were originally uncovered in the 1920s, however, was the fact that some tombs held as many as 73 human sacrifices. In one tomb a queen’s “upper body was covered with beads of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and agate—the remains of a beaded cape.” She was accompanied in death by 10 women with lyres and harps facing one another in two rows, 11 men, a chariot, two oxen, and “an enormous array of goods.” In another tomb a king was accompanied in death by six soldiers, 57 other men and women, two wagons, six oxen, many weapons, and a large number of animal bones that had probably been food offerings. It appeared that the humans being sacrificed had drunk poison, since most had a small cup next to them. Were these the burials of mortals, divine representatives, or gods themselves? As French archeologist George Roux wrote in Ancient Iraq, “the drama of the Cemetery of Ur remains a mystery.”16
The Mesopotamian gods and their temples represented “the communal identity of each city.” One of the gods’ most striking characteristics is that, despite having supernatural powers and immortality, they were conceived of as being “entirely anthropomorphic.” Like humans, “they plan and act, eat and drink, marry and raise families, support large households, and are addicted to human passions and weaknesses.” Because each god was anthropomorphic, the statue of the god in the temple required food twice daily, as well as clothing and entertainment. The food included bread, fish cakes, and fresh fruit. And drinks included beer and wine, left on the offering table. The gods were dressed “in the best finery the community could afford,” and over the years “they accumulated more robes, jewelry and other paraphernalia than they could wear at one time.” On religious holidays, of which there were many, the statue was taken out and paraded through the streets and, on special festivals, even taken to other cities to visit other gods. Like human families, many of the gods were thought to be related; thus, the statue of Enlil in Nippur was taken to visit the statue of Enki, who was thought to be his brother, in Eridu.
According to George Roux: “It was the duty of every citizen to send offerings to the temple, to attend the main religious ceremonies, to care for the dead, to pray and make penance, and to observe the innumerable rules and taboos that marked nearly every moment of his life.” Samuel Kramer, a University of Pennsylvania linguist and expert on Mesopotamia, similarly wrote that the people “were firmly convinced that man was fashioned of clay and created for one purpose only: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink, and shelter so that they might have full leisure for their divine activities.” The gods thus dominated life in Mesopotamia.17
In addition to dominating the social life of Mesopotamia, the gods and temples also dominated the economic life of the city. The temple owned approximately one-third of the land surrounding the city, where temple personnel cultivated cereals, vegetables, and fruit trees, controlled irrigation, and maintained flocks of sheep and goats and herds of cows. Some temple compounds grew to be enormous in size and included workshops that manufactured textiles, metalwork, leather, and wooden items; one temple in Guabba employed 6,000 workers, mostly women and children. The temple staff coordinated trade with other Mesopotamian cities as well as with other countries. The temple also functioned as a community bank, offering loans to merchants at 33 percent interest rates. According to one text, “It seems as though the merchants formally dedicated some of their profits to the temple in order to re-use them as a kind of inviolable capital.” Some temples also assumed responsibility for children “when their families were unable to support them,” reflecting “a long-standing tradition whereby the temples gathered under their wing the rejects and misfits of society—orphans, illegitimate children, and perhaps the freaks.”18
This wide array of social and economic activities necessitated a large temple staff, and Mesopotamian records reflect this. A listing of staff for the temple at Nippur includes a high- priest, lamentation-priest, purification-priest, high priestess, treasurer, accountant, scribe, weaver, stone carver, mat-maker, steward, barber, butler, cowherd, boatman, oil-presser, miller, diviner, and snake-charmer. The last was part of the entertainment function of the temple, some of which had “a whole corps of singers and musicians.” The Mesopotamian society was extremely well organized, so that “members of the same profession were divided into highly specialized groups”; for example, fishermen were divided according to whether they fished in fresh water or seawater, and “even the snake-charmers formed a ‘corporation’ which had its own chief.”19
THE GODS GO TO WAR
During the second phase of the Mesopotamian state, between 5,200 and 4,350 years ago, fighting among the city-states became increasingly common. During the first phase occasional wars had taken place, but the cities had not been fortified and disputes were usually settled peacefully. In the second phase, however, “enormous city walls … ringed every city.… The larger cities of the region grew as the village populations sought protection behind their walls.”
City-states fielded armies of 1,000 to 10,000 men, and wars were waged with spears, shields, battering rams, and siege towers, “some of which would be pre-assembled and floated downstream.” The victorious army would often plunder and destroy the defeated city-state, killing the inhabitants or taking them as slaves, and sometimes even destroying the temple of its major god.20
The apparent causes of these wars included attempts by city-states to expand their hegemony, land disputes, and the control of irrigations canals or trade routes. Mesopotamian records, however, rarely mention such causes but rather present the wars as conflicts among the gods. For example, a war between Lagash and Umma, for which good records exist, was apparently caused by a dispute over land that lay between them. Umma invaded the disputed land, thereby inciting Lagash to do battle. Lagash prevailed, resulting in “heaped up piles of … bodies in the plain”; the victory was commemorated by a carved stele showing vultures devouring the bodies. The Mesopotamian records described it as a “victory of Ningirsu, the god of Lagash, over Shara, the god of Umma.”21
Thus, the Mesopotamian gods appear to have been intimately involved in the first wars for which we have written records. According to one account, “armies were accompanied, sometimes even led, by a diviner who submitted the plan of campaign to the scrutiny of the gods.” The victorious cities donated some of the spoils of war to their temples; “not to make a dedication to the appropriate temple would doubtless have constituted hubris.” The gods were described as inciting wars and “not infrequently displayed hatred and wrath.” For example, the god Enlil “ ‘with frowning forehead’ puts ‘the people of Kish to death’ and crushes ‘the houses of Erech into dust.’ ” The consequences of such wars were well described, as when the city of Ur was sacked:
In all the streets and roadways bodies lay,
In open fields that used to fill with dancers,
the people lay in heaps.
The country’s blood now filled its holes,
like metal in a mold:
bodies dissolved—like butter left in the sun.22
In summary, what can be concluded concerning the gods in Mesopotamia, the world’s first civilization, between 6,500 and 4,000 years ago? First, it is evident that the earliest gods had responsibility for the fundamental issues of life and death—ensuring an adequate food supply and the fate of people after death. As the civilization became more complex, the gods acquired political, judicial, and social responsibilities such as enforcing laws and providing shelter for orphan children. The temple of the gods became a center for social services. In addition, the gods were used to justify going to war against other cities with other gods. The Mesopotamian wars between city-states were thus the first-known contests between the gods. At the same time that the gods were becoming partially secularized, the secular authorities—kings in this case—were assuming some divine authority for themselves. Thus did religion and politics, the sacred and the secular, become intertwined from the very beginning.
Finally, it is also of interest to note that the Mesopotamians envisioned the first gods as looking and acting just like themselves, with “the appearances, qualities, defects, and passions of human beings.” The ancient Greek Xenophanes also noted the human tendency to anthropomorphize their deities and predicted that if horses and oxen could paint their gods, the “horses would paint the forms of their gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.” Baron Montesquieu in eighteenth-century France put it more succinctly: “If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.”23
It is thus clear that the world’s first civilization was firmly built upon a religious foundation. As George Roux noted, the gods and ideas concerning them “played an extraordinary part in the public and private life of the Mesopotamians, modeling their institutions, coloring their works of art and literature, pervading every form of activity from the highest functions of the kings to the day-to-day occupations of their subjects.”24
GODS IN OTHER EARLY CIVILIZATIONS
The Mesopotamian civilization came to maturity between 6,500 and 4,200 years ago. During those same years, civilizations were developing in at least six other areas of the world. Some of these civilizations were influenced by ideas that came from Mesopotamia, while others developed independently. Unfortunately, written records are available only for the Egyptian civilization and, recorded in later years, a civilization in northern China. Nevertheless, it is useful to briefly examine these civilizations to ascertain whether gods also emerged in them as they did in Mesopotamia. The civilizations are those that developed in Egypt, Pakistan, southeastern Europe, western Europe, China, and Peru.
EGYPT
Because it has extensive written records and imposing monumental architecture, Egypt is regarded as the second most important early civilization after Mesopotamia, from which it acquired writing and many of its ideas. By 7,500 years ago, agriculture was well established in the Nile Valley; the annual flooding of the river resulted in rich farmlands, a surplus of food, and a rising population. By 5,
500 years ago, towns such as Naqada and Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt had populations of 10,000 or more.
Administratively, Egypt was divided into 42 regions, unified under the first pharaoh by 5,100 years ago. Its society was stratified, with slaves, farmers, craftsmen, artists, engineers, administrators, scribes, physicians, priests, and a nobility that included a pharaoh. The economy was centralized, with fixed prices, and the temples were the focus of economic activities. Trade was a major source of its wealth, with the export of grain, linen, papyrus, and finished products and the import of gold from the Sudan, ebony, ivory, and wild animals from Ethiopia, timber from Lebanon, olive oil from Greece, copper and tin from Turkey, and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The Egyptians built the first true ships and were proficient in mathematics and medicine.
By the time Egypt was unified 5,100 years ago, temples had been built to honor the gods. Such temples were “not a place of meditation … but, instead, a home of the god.” As in Mesopotamia, the first gods represented natural forces and were concerned with issues of life and death. These included the sun gods Horus and, later, Ra; a moon god, Thoth; the sky god, Nut; an air god, Shu; and a storm god, Seth. Also like Mesopotamia, many gods acquired secondary secular tasks. For example, the moon god, Thoth, was also responsible for writing, knowledge, calculation, and timekeeping. And, as was the situation in Mesopotamia, the gods in Egypt were regarded anthropomorphically.25
Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods Page 19
