by Adam Frank
The megaliths rebuilt culture and time through the very process of their labour and time-consuming construction. And time was always an essential aspect of the megaliths on both a physical and symbolic level. On the one hand, men would be called away from the farms to scramble over tilting stone slabs or bend low in sodden holes dug into the earth. On the other hand, concerns with time in a mythic, cosmological context was undoubtedly a core motivation for building many of these megaliths in the first place.
FIGURE 1.3. The Neolithic megalith at Stonehenge. (Top) Each upright stone weighs seventy-two tonnes. Stonehenge’s construction required millions of hours of labour and, in the process, created new cultural encounters with time. (Bottom) Astronomical orientations of Stonehenge. Each arrow shows an alignment between stone placements and a repeating celestial pattern. The long arrow (A) shows alignment with the northernmost extension of the sun’s position on the horizon.
There is ample evidence that Newgrange and Stonehenge were built to correspond to astronomical events such as the winter and summer solstices. Without a torch, the central chamber of Newgrange is darker than death. But for a few days each year near the winter solstice, the rising sun is perfectly aligned with the ancient passageway, allowing a shaft of sunlight to pierce the darkness. For these few minutes, the central chamber glows in warm ochre—a promise of the light and life to come with the approaching spring. Newgrange’s builders constructed their monument with its solstice-illuminated chamber for cosmic rituals whose meanings may now be lost to us but whose astronomical orientation cannot be missed. Thus this solar alignment of Newgrange’s entrance is one potent example of a concern with the raw facts of the sky and its movements.
The megaliths were, however, more than prehistoric calculators. In addition to its many astronomical orientations, Stonehenge may also have been a burial site for chiefs and tribal elders.47 In this way ritual and religion must have been central to the symbolic demands of megalith construction. Their builders were clearly aware of cosmic time and willing to dedicate effort and riches in creating monuments that called to the vaulted sky and its repeating patterns.
TIME AND AGAIN: ETERNAL RETURN AND THE NEOLITHIC COSMOLOGY
The cosmology of a farmer did not look like that of a hunter-gatherer. The material engagement of hunter-gatherers was so fundamentally different from what people in an agrarian culture experienced that the very concept of a cosmos, and the symbols used to represent it, had to change in a fundamental way. The mobile hunter-gatherer lived out in the open amid the forest and plain, populated by free-roaming animals considered equals and cousins. The farmer accepted a tamed, sedentary life with the closed stability of a homestead roof replacing the infinite, dynamic arch of the night sky; for the farmer, beasts of burden were possessions and worked as slaves to the human master. Where the hunter-gatherer lived through time as an unbroken whole, the farmer lived within a time marked by the daily rounds of animal husbandry, home maintenance and village life. Thus time and the cosmos had to change because the ways in which people encountered the material world had changed.
Looking at the change from Palaeolithic to Neolithic societies, Karen Armstrong notes that myths that cease to be useful will have to be abandoned. Thus, with the development of farming, new cosmologies and new conceptions of cosmic time would have to be invented.
Agriculture was the product of analytic thought, an early kind of science. But unlike our technological revolutions, the agriculture of the Neolithic farmers was never “a purely secular enterprise”.48 The mythic universe of the Neolithic was a mix of new activities and a changed understanding of the wider universe that surrounded them. Farming was as much a sacred act in the Neolithic as hunting had been in the Palaeolithic. Crops, emerging from careful seeding and cultivation, were a new form of symbol and a new representation of time. Cultivated plants grew through material engagement with the Earth and its unfolding powers in time. Thus, crops were both food and divine power. Time acted as an intermediary between the concrete world of farming and the symbolic world of the gods. Unseen energies, manipulated through time, were the focus of new mythic narratives, as the tilled Earth became a fertile womb for the community.
The rites, rituals and myths of the Neolithic peoples responded to the requirements of this new agricultural cosmos. The whole community came to the fields, standing together as farmers ritually discarded the first seeds of the year’s sowing as an offering to the divine powers that would animate the new crop’s growth. Cosmic time was manifested in the fields for these men and women months later when the first fruits were left to drop, recharging the hidden forces animating the agrarian cycle. Ritual sexual union sometimes preceded the planting in order to signify the sacred marriage of soil, seed and rain.49 In all these rituals people were tapping into vast cosmic creative powers that, like the seasons, were clearly periodic in time. The close observation of the world that made agriculture possible had its internal complement in the new sacred narratives of mythology.
Awe and wonder before the sky had led humans to cosmic myths of sky gods in the previous Palaeolithic era. In the Neolithic, the Earth became central in the form of a mother goddess. Myths throughout the Fertile Crescent tell stories of goddesses and their connection to farming. The heroic hunter’s journey, which is so widespread in the Palaeolithic, gave way to the dangerous travel of the mother goddess descending into the underworld of death and returning to bring new life. These myths expressed both the recurring terrestrial bounty an agricultural people experienced and its devastating alternatives such as drought, famine and flood. Mythology was never a form of escape. It was an honest expression of people’s personal knowledge, and it forced them to face up to the reality of life in the midst of death and transition, a life given meaning in new contexts of agricultural time.
Most important, the new myths were sensitive to the cycles of the agrarian year and its implications for conceptions of time. The yearly cycles of life and death appear, for example, in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, which dates back to the Neolithic era. Demeter controls the fertility of the Earth. When Hades, god of the underworld, abducts her daughter, Persephone, in her grief Demeter starves humankind by shutting down the growing season. Zeus is forced to rescue Persephone. But once the God-King learns that Persephone has tasted the fruit of the underworld, the girl cannot be allowed to return fully and must spend several months of each year with Hades. It is Demeter’s grieving during these months that is meant to explain the bareness of winter. Time, bound up in the seasons, is essential to this sacred narrative’s plot.50
The great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade articulated this development in his work The Myth of Eternal Return. As social arrangements were built around agriculture, time itself was regenerated with each round of the year. “On the occasion of the division of time into independent units, ‘years’, we witness not only the effectual cessation of a certain temporal interval and the beginning of another, but also the abolition of the past year and of past time.”51
The extended festivals of new harvests and first plantings were more than just an enactment of creation; they were, literally, the recreation of time. Costumed actors would embody the myths as a kind of sacred theatre in which the entire community participated. “Every new year is a resumption of time from the beginning”, said Eliade. Thus at every new year, the community repeated, in ritual form, the origins of the cosmos. In many agrarian cultures these rituals of time regeneration required active human participation via the death of the king. The rituals would require the “king” to be felled either symbolically or in actuality. Spilling the king’s blood and returning his creative energies to the Earth enabled time and the cosmos to be born again.
The revolution that put the earth to the plough reshaped human consciousness and pulled us out of a time defined by now, by whatever was happening in the present. Cyclical time and cyclical universes, reborn anew each year, met the needs of our new ways of life and held a powerful grip on the human
imagination across these long millennia. Thus in the Neolithic we see, for the first time, the switching of one cosmology for another. With the advent of agriculture a different cosmological time emerged, one mediated by our new material engagement with the world. This story of cosmos and culture enigmatically entangled through material engagement will be repeated again and again to the current day. It is still at work now as we face the end of the Big Bang and our own cosmological revolution.
Chapter 2
THE CITY, THE CYCLE AND THE EPICYCLE
From the Urban Revolution to a Rational Universe
BABYLON • 1560 BCE1
He would have to hurry or all would be lost. The afternoon shadows had grown long and he was still unprepared to make observations or record them on the tablets. The sight of a high priest in flowing robes running through crowded city streets was bound to draw attention but he could not worry about that now.
He was young for his advanced position, rising quickly in the order because of his skills sighting the wandering planets and his startling capacity for calculation. Many of the older priests had made their jealousy apparent. The king, however, favoured him. His readings of the planets had given King Ammisaduqa firm guidance in the suppression of the valley revolts. So far his place in the high court was secure.
But now all was at risk. It was the king alone who had tasked him with completing the Venus tables. Records of the fair planet’s risings, relative to the sun, were the key. Those records, held in stone, had begun almost twenty-one years ago. But when he had reviewed the sightings of previous high priests he found ambiguities and inconsistencies that threw his astrological calculations into chaos, making it difficult to interpret the long-term path of Venus and what it meant for the king’s future. Without accurate observations, he could not predict the king’s future or the fate of his plans—such as the proposed marriage of the king’s daughter to that oaf of a Sumerian prince, which was risky in spite of the grand alliance it would bring.2 But if he obtained a precise sighting of the planet as it set today, he was sure it would be the key to a proper reconstruction. Then he could correct all mistakes in the records and prepare an accurate reading.
He hurried past stalls and shop fronts. The market was packed with throngs of tradesmen, merchants and farmers from the valley. He struggled to push through the bustling dusty streets. Up ahead, he could see the imposing steps of the ziggurat rising high above the one- and two-storey mud brick buildings of the city. Quickly, quickly now. He must be in position when the white planet emerged above the horizon.
FALLING INTO HISTORICAL TIME: INVENTING THE URBAN EMPIRE
It happened at different times in different places. In the Fertile Crescent the transition to city-based empires began at least five thousand years ago.3 China made the shift some time later, as did the cultures of the Indus River valley on the Indian subcontinent.4 Though the timing was different, the results were always the same.
Moving from the small farming settlements that characterized the Neolithic era, human beings began creating great cities and the extensive empires that supported them. This was the urban revolution and it marked a second great reorganization of human culture and human time. As power shifted to densely inhabited cities, the time that ruled human concerns and cosmic architecture would, once again, be re-created and re-imagined.
For the western world—Europe, the Mediterranean and eventually the Americas—all roads in the urban revolution lead back to the Fertile Crescent and the civilizations that would grow in the broad plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was in Mesopotamia that the first great cities, such as Uruk, would emerge.5 At about the same time, to the west, the vibrant Egyptian kingdoms sprang to life.6 With these complex urban societies, daily life would become structured in ways impossible to imagine in the smaller, more widely distributed villages of the Neolithic. Babylonian cities, for example, maintained populations ranging from ten thousand to fifty thousand inhabitants. To support so many people not directly involved in growing their own food, the pattern of human society would have to be rebuilt. Agriculture became subservient to the demands of the city, and work within the city become subservient to the demands of specialization. Trades for everything from leatherwork to fabric production emerged, each with its own specialized training, economic needs and political interests.
FIGURE 2.1. Life and time in the urban revolution: the Standard of Ur’s “Peace Side.” While the purpose of the Standard of Ur is unknown, it offers a beautifully stylized depiction of ancient Babylonian life.
These changes in consciousness created by the urban revolution moved material engagement to its next level. People began to think in more sophisticated symbols. The growth of cultural complexity (and the cosmological complexity it would allow) depended on the ability of people to store information externally as well as internally in individual memory. Thus began the development of written language and written records. In the evolution of human culture and its approach to time, writing was the most critical result of the urban revolution.
The history of written language is closely woven into the history of time and economic necessity. Around 4000 BCE, in the ancient cities of Sumer, people began to use tokens in economic transactions.7 These tokens were small, flattened clay forms (around the size of coins) and at first were used to represent something like a day’s work or a basket of wheat.8 Sumerians soon realized, however, that the tokens could represent any kind of time or material. Archaeologists have found hoards of the tokens in Sumerian grain houses. As Sumerian civilization became more complex and sophisticated, the number and type of tokens grew.
Keeping track of these tokens—all of different forms—became a burden for Sumerian merchants, and they were eventually bundled and stored in clay wrappers. Markings pressed into the wrappers before they were fired and hardened allowed the Sumerians to keep track of the number and type of tokens enclosed. As generations progressed, however, the system evolved, and the imprinted markings came to replace the tokens as symbols of time and quantity. Why use cumbersome tokens to remember how many bushels of wheat or days of labour you were owed when you could just look at the markings on the clay wrapper? In this way, the wrappers became the prototype for the clay tablets on which cuneiform—the first true writing system—would emerge.9
From these origins it appears that writing and the use of time for economic gain were intimately connected in the new city-states of Mesopotamia. In Egypt (and thousands of years later in Mesoamerica), a similar story would play out as the origins of writing were linked directly to time via the political necessities of recording dynastic lineages or historical events.10
While the invention of true systems of writing was a gradual process, their emergence represented the increasingly sophisticated relationship between the realm of the material and the realm of the symbolic. This rising complexity would have direct consequences for the forms of both human and cosmic time. Once again material engagement with the world would serve as the source of cultural and cognitive innovation. One critical domain illustrates this innovation during the urban revolution: the creation of measurement standards.
Developing a system of measurement requires a highly focused form of material engagement. Physical objects must be abstracted. They must rise above their individual identities and serve as an objective standard of their own properties. If that sounds slightly confusing, it should. To turn a particular stone into a universal unit of measure requires an abstraction that is remarkably subtle. So nuanced is the idea of a “unit of measure” that its development alone signified a radical shift in human thinking.
A particularly vivid example of this higher form of material engagement comes from archaeological studies of Indus Valley Harappan cultures.11 From the Harappan city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Sindh region of Pakistan, scientists have found polished stone cubes that vary in size in a uniform progression. The cubes are thought to be an early system of weight measurement, and their importance cannot be overstated.
12 Each cube symbolizes an inherent property that had not been quantified before in and of itself. By developing the stone cubes as a measure of weight, weight itself became “isolated for study and measured for the first time”.13
The cognitive transformation that turns the weight we experience into a weight we can conceptualize occurs through the need to engage with weight in a new way. The same process must have occurred with time. Just as weight was re-imagined in the development of stone cube standards for economic needs, time would be re-imagined during this same period for much the same reason. Time emerged as a separate property of the world during the urban revolution, forever altering the topography of culture and cosmos.
Physical embodiment is the pivot point on which this kind of cognitive transition turns. The symbolic thinking required to develop a system of weights begins with the actual, embodied handling of heavy objects. The next step goes beyond the individual to the shared needs of the emerging culture. The labelled stone cubes that serve as symbols of weight were the result of more than a process of “playing with words”. Its vital force was the ability of the human imagination to isolate specific properties in material. While standardized weights are symbolic of themselves—a weight as a symbol of weight—this symbolism would be meaningless without the cognitive and cultural changes on which the urban revolution depended. It was a new kind of conceptual thinking that grew out of real world concerns when, for example, merchants needed some standard against which the cost of goods could be agreed upon.
