Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Some early oracles have left records of their pronouncements. In China, for instance, hundreds of thousands of documents survive from the second millennium bce in the silt of the great bend in the Yellow River: fragments of bone and shell heated to the breaking point at which they revealed their secrets, like messages scrawled in invisible ink. Forecasts made or memories confided by the ancestral spirits were legible in the shape of the cracks. Interpreters or their assistants often scratched interpretations alongside the fissures, as if in translation. Solutions of crimes appear, along with disclosures of hidden treasure, and the names of individuals whom the gods chose for office.

  Most of these readings, like the celestial oracles of Mesopotamia, are official messages, evidently contrived to legitimate state policies. Such oracles were invaluable to contending parties in societies where rising state power challenged priestly elites for influence over subjects’ lives. By breaking shamans’ monopoly as spirit messengers, oracles diversified the sources of power and multiplied political competition. They were legible to specialist priests or secular rulers, who could find in oracles recommendations different from those the shamans claimed from the gods. Political authorities could control shrines and manipulate the messages. Just as Palaeolithic shamans danced and drummed their way to positions of command by virtue of their access to the spirit world, so kings in agrarian states appropriated the shamans’ authority by usurping their functions. The rise of oracles could be considered one of the world’s first great political revolutions. Empowered by oracles, states gradually withdrew patronage from spirit mediums, and subjected them to control or persecution. Shamans endured – and in China they continued to intervene in political decision making at the whims of particular emperors for as long as the empire lasted – but they increasingly withdrew or were excluded from politics. They became mediators or ministers of popular magic and the prophets of the poor.40

  ‌Divine Kings and Ideas of Empire

  ‘The lips of the king’, says one of the Old Testament Proverbs, ‘speak as an oracle.’ Rulers who acquired oracular roles occupied a pivotal position between men and gods. The relationship prompted a further claim: that a ruler is a god. Anthropologists and ancient historians have gathered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of examples. The device is a handy way of legitimating power and outlawing opposition. How did it come about?

  Common sense suggests a likely sequence: gods came first; kings followed; kings then reclassified themselves as gods to shore up their power. Clearly, however, events do not always conform to common sense. Some historians think that rulers invented gods to dull and disarm opposition. That is what Voltaire hinted and Karl Marx believed. In some cases they seem to have been right. ‘Listen to my words’, says a typical pharaonic inscription, capturing, as do most early written ruler-statements, the timbre of speech, evoking the presence of the king. ‘I speak to you. I tell you that I am the son of Re who issued from his own body. I sit upon his throne rejoicing. For he made me king.’41 It is hard to make sense of what Egyptians meant when they said their king was a god. Because a pharaoh could bear the names and exercise the functions of many gods, there was no exact identity overlap with any one deity. A possible aid to understanding is the ancient Egyptian habit of making images and erecting shrines as places where gods, if they wished, could make themselves manifest. The image ‘was’ the god when the god chose to show himself by inhabiting the image. The supreme god, Isis, was, in some characterizations – perhaps including some of the oldest – his own deified throne. Pharaoh could be a god in the same sense: perhaps the writers of Genesis meant something similar when they called man the image of God.

  The idea of the god-king genuinely made royal power more effective. In the ancient diplomatic correspondence known as the Amarna letters, the abject language of Egypt’s tributaries is almost audible. ‘To the king my lord and my Sun-god’, wrote a ruler of Shechem in Canaan in the mid-fourteenth century bce, ‘I am Lab’ayu thy servant and the dirt whereon thou dost tread. At the feet of my king and my Sun-god seven times and seven times I fall.’42 In about 1800 bce, the treasurer Sehetep-ib-Re wrote ‘a counsel of eternity and a manner of living aright’ for his children. The king, he asserted, was the sun-god Re, only better. ‘He illumines Egypt more than the sun, he makes the land greener than does the Nile.’43

  Divine kingship on the Egyptian model became commonplace later. In its day, however, other forms of government prevailed in other civilizations. There is no surviving evidence of kings in the Indus valley, where collaborative groups, housed in dormitory-like palaces, ran the states. In China and Mesopotamia monarchs were not gods (though gods legitimated them and justified their wars). Rulers’ skyward ascent helped them maintain enlarged horizons, as they mediated with heaven, maintained divine favour, and responded to such signs of the future as the gods were willing to confide. Gods adopted kings, elevating them not necessarily to divine rank but to representative status and the opportunity or obligation to assert divine rights in the world. Chosen rulers received not only their own inheritances but title to dominion over the world. In Mesopotamia, Sargon, king of Akkad around 2350 bce, is commonly credited with the first empire universal in aspiration. From his upland fastnesses his armies poured downriver towards the Persian Gulf. ‘Mighty mountains with axes of bronze I conquered’,44 he declared in a surviving chronicle fragment. He dared kings who come after him to do the same. In China during the second millennium bce, the growth of the state outward from heartlands on the middle Yellow River stimulated political ambitions to become boundless.

  Religion and philosophy conspired. The sky was a compelling deity: vast, apparently incorporeal, yet bulging with gifts of light and warmth and rain, and bristling with threats of storm and fire and flood. The limits of the sky were visible at the horizon, beckoning states to reach out to them and fulfil a kind of ‘manifest destiny’ – a reflection of divine order. Imperialism suited monism. A unified world would match the unity of the cosmos. By the time of the Middle Kingdom, Egyptians thought their state already encompassed all the world that mattered: there were only subhuman savages beyond their borders. In China, around the beginning of the first millennium bce, the phrase ‘mandate of heaven’ came into use. In central Asia, the broad horizons, immense steppes, and wide skies encouraged similar thinking. Genghis Khan recalled an ancient tradition when he proclaimed, ‘As the sky is one realm, so must the earth be one empire.’45

  For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, Eurasia’s empires all aspired to universalism. Every conqueror who reunited a substantial part of China, India, or Europe after every dissolution, espoused the same programme. Some, such as Alexander the Great in the fourth century bce or Attila in the fifth century ce, succeeded in achieving it, or at least in establishing empires that briefly overspilled traditional limits. Even after Rome and Persia collapsed, medieval Christendom and Islam inherited the ambition to encompass the world. In China, rulers accepted that there were ‘barbarian’ realms beyond their reach, but still asserted theoretical supremacy over them. Even today, when the bitter experience of the failed universalisms has left a politically plural planet as the only viable reality, idealists keep reviving ‘world government’ as part of a vision for the future. Its first proponents were rulers in antiquity, who intended to achieve it by conquest.

  ‌Enter the Professionals: Intellectuals and Legists in Early Agrarian States

  States need intellectuals to run administrations, maximize resources, persuade subjects, negotiate with rival states, and bargain with rival sources of authority. We do not know the names of any political thinkers before the first millennium bce (unless rulers did their own original thinking, which is not impossible, but would be unusual). We can detect some of their thoughts, thanks to a technology developed by professionals: systematic symbolic notation, or what we now call writing. It could inscribe royal commands and experiences on monuments, communicate them in missives, and make them immortal. It could extend a ruler’s reach be
yond the range of his physical presence. All other ideas that matter, ever since, have been expressed in writing.

  Beyond the political sphere, most people subscribe to a romance of writing as one of the most inspiring and liberating ideas ever. Writing ignited the first information explosion. It conferred new powers of communication and self-expression. It extended communication. It started every subsequent revolution in thought. It could make memories unprecedentedly long (though not necessarily accurate). It helped knowledge accumulate. Without it progress would be stagnant or slow. Even amid emojis and telecom, we have found no better code. Writing was so powerful that most peoples’ recorded myths of their origin ascribe it to the gods. Modern theories suggest that it originated with political or religious hierarchies, who needed secret codes to keep their hold on power and record their magic, their divinations, and their supposed communications with their gods.

  The real origins of writing, however, were surprisingly humdrum.

  Unromantically, it was a mundane invention, which started, as far as we can tell, among merchants between about five thousand and seven thousand years ago. If we set aside the systems of symbols we find in Palaeolithic art (see here), the first examples appear on three clay discs buried over some seven thousand years ago in Romania, with no indication of what they were for. In most civilizations, the earliest known examples are unquestionably merchants’ tags or tallies, or records kept by gatherers of taxes or tributes to record types, quantities, and prices of goods. In China, where the earliest known examples were recently discovered, the marks were made on pots; in Mesopotamia, formerly acclaimed as the birthplace of writing, wedge-like symbols were pressed into thin clay slabs; in the Indus valley, they were inscribed on stamps that were used to mark bales of produce. In short, writing started for trivial purposes. It recorded dull stuff that was not worth confiding to memory.

  Great literature and important historical records were valuable enough to learn by heart and transmit by word of mouth. The masterpieces of bards and the wisdom of sages start as oral traditions; centuries pass, typically, before admirers consign them to writing, as if the very act of penmanship were profanation. The Tuareg of the Sahara, who have their own script, still leave their best poems unwritten. When writing started, hierophants treated it with suspicion or contempt. In Plato’s jokey account of the invention of writing, ‘Here is an accomplishment, my King’, said the priest Theuth, ‘which will improve both the memory and wisdom of Egyptians.’ ‘No, Theuth’, replied Thamus. ‘… Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and will be forgetful. You have discovered a recipe for recollection, not memory.’46 The reply anticipated complaints one often hears nowadays about computers and the Internet. Yet writing has been a universally irresistible technology. Most people who know how to write do so for every thought, feeling, or fact they want to conserve or communicate.47

  The professionals who adapted writing to the needs of the state devised the idea of codifying law. The first codes have not survived. But they were probably generalizations from exemplary cases, transformed into precepts applicable to whole classes of cases. In Egypt, because the law remained in the mouth of the divine pharaoh, codification was unnecessary. The earliest known codes come from Mesopotamia, where, as we have seen, the king was not a god. Of the codes of Ur from the third millennium bce only fragmentary lists of fines survive. But the code of King Lipit-Ishtar of Sumer and Akkad, of the early nineteenth century bce, is an attempt at the comprehensive regulation of society. It expounds laws inspired and ordained ‘in accordance with the word of’ the god Enlil, in order to make ‘children support the father and the father children … abolish enmity and rebellion, cast out weeping and lamentation … bring righteousness and truth and give well-being to Sumer and Akkad’.48

  An accident has made Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon in the first half of the eighteenth century bce, unduly celebrated: because his code was carried off as a war trophy to Persia, it survives intact, engraved in stone, surmounted by a relief showing the king receiving the text from the hands of a god. The epilogue makes clear the reason for writing it all down. ‘Let any oppressed man who has a cause come into the presence of the statue of me, the king of justice, and then read carefully my inscribed stone, and give heed to my precious words. May my stone make his case clear to him.’49 The code was there to substitute for the physical presence and utterance of the ruler.

  The notion of a divine covenant was obviously present in these early law codes. The ‘Laws of Moses’, however – Hebrew codes of the first millennium bce – had a novel feature: they were cast as a treaty that a human legislator negotiated with God. Even as Moses mediated it, law still depended on divine sanction for legitimacy. God wrote some commandments, at least, ‘with his own finger’, even deigning to issue, as it were, a second edition after Moses broke the original tablets. In chapter 24 of the Book of Exodus, in what may be an alternative version, or perhaps an account of the means of transmission of some other laws, God’s amanuensis jotted down the rest at divine dictation. Elsewhere, the identification of law with divine will prevailed, everywhere we know about, until secular theories of jurisprudence emerged in China and Greece toward the middle of the first millennium bce.

  Down to our own times rival ideas have jostled with codified law: that law is a body of tradition, inherited from the ancestors, which codification might reduce and rigidify; or that law is an expression of justice, which can be applied and reapplied independently in every case, by reference to principles. In practice, codification has proved insuperable: it makes judges’ decisions objectively verifiable, by means of comparison with the code; as circumstances require, it can be reviewed and revised; it suits democracies, because it shifts power from judges – who, in most societies are, in varying degrees, a self-electing elite – to legislators, who supposedly represent the people. Gradually, almost all laws have been codified. Even where principles of jurisprudence conflict – as in England and other places where, thanks to the way the British Empire shaped traditions of jurisprudence, equity and custom still have an entrenched place in judges’ decision making – statutes tend to prevail over custom and principles in forming judicial decisions.

  ‌The Flock and the Shepherd: Social Thought

  Law is a link between politics and society: the means by which rulers try to influence the way people behave towards each other. Among the same protean bureaucracies that wrote laws down, and produced new, sometimes terrifying justifications of state power, we can catch glimpses of new social thinking, too. By and large, the doctrines in question reflect the benign goals of many of the early law codes. Most concerned the problems of regulating relationships between classes, sexes, and generations.

  The idea of the equality of all people is a case in point. We think of it as a modern ideal. Serious efforts to achieve it have been made in a sustained fashion only for the last two hundred years or so; but it crops up in every age. When did it start?

  A doctrine of equality was first recorded in a famous Egyptian text from the mouth of Amun-Re: the god says he created ‘every man like his fellow’ and sent the winds ‘that every man might breathe like his fellow’ and floods ‘that the poor man might have rights in them like the rich’;50 but evildoing had produced inequalities that were a purely human responsibility. The text appeared regularly on Egyptian coffins in the second millennium bce. But it may have had a long prehistory. Some thinkers have argued that it was a sort of collective memory from an early phase, a ‘golden age’ of primitive innocence, when inequalities were slighter than in recorded times, or a pre-social past, such as Rousseau imagined, or a supposedly communitarian forager past. The notion has some impressive minds on its side. As a good Christian and a good Marxist, Joseph Needham, the unsurpassed historian of Chinese science, shared the hatred of landlords common in Chinese songs of the seventh century bce. As one songster said of landlords, ‘You do not sow. You do not reap. So where do you get the produce of those three hundred fa
rms?’51 Needham saw the songs as echoes from ‘a stage of early society before … bronze-age proto-feudalism and the institution of private property’.52

  There never was such an age to remember. But it can have been imagined. Most cultures invoke a myth of good old days to denounce the vices of the present: ‘the times that came after the gods’, as ancient Egyptian proverbial wisdom called them, when ‘books of wisdom were their pyramids: is there anyone here like [them]?’53 In Mesopotamia in the second millennium bce, Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving epic, sketched a time before canals, overseers, liars, sickness, and senectitude. The Mahabharata, reputedly the world’s longest poem, condensed ancient Indian traditions on the same subject in the fourth or fifth century bce: a world undivided between rich and poor, in which all were equally blessed.54 Not long afterwards the Chinese book known as Zhuangzi depicted an ancient ‘state of pure simplicity’, when all men and all creatures were one, before sages, officials, and artists corrupted virtue and natural liberty.55 In Ovid’s summary of the corresponding Greek and Roman tradition, the first humans spent their lives in ease with only reason – the law encoded in their hearts – to rule them: hierarchy would have been pointless.56

  The idea of equality originated in myth, extolled by many, believed by few. When, occasionally, idealists have taken it seriously, it has usually provoked violent rebellions of the underprivileged against the prevailing order. Equality is impracticable; but it is easier to massacre the rich and powerful than to elevate the poor and oppressed. We call successful rebellions ‘revolutions’: they have often proclaimed equality, especially in modern times, as we shall see at intervals in the rest of this book. But they have never achieved it for long.57

  Egalitarians therefore usually strive only to diminish inequality or tackle it selectively. Women are among the people they seem commonly to exempt. Theories purporting to explain or justify female inferiority crop up often in sources that survive from the third and second millennia bce in apparent tension with evidence, or at least frequent claims, that worship of a mother goddess was the – or a – primordial universal religion. Many feminists would like those claims to be true, but are they?