It’s only a small island – some 200 kilometres long and between 12 and 58 kilometres wide – but Crete, in the Aegean Sea, lies at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe. There, in 1900, British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans began excavating some ancient ruins near the island’s present capital of Heraklion. What he found, and what has been discovered in subsequent excavations, has given shape to what we know today as the Minoan civilization.
Tribes of hunter-gatherers may have found their way to Crete as early as 125,000 years ago when, at the end of the Illinoian Ice Age, they left North Africa for the first time – only to be killed off or forced back to Africa by a subsequent ice age some 50,000 years later. Genetic evidence (i.e. the Y-chromosome groupings that define patrilineal descent), however, clearly indicates that contemporary inhabitants of Crete, like those of mainland Greece, came c. 7000 BCE from Anatolia (or what today is Turkey) and settled in fishing villages along the coast and farming villages on the fertile Mesara Plain.
Like all the great Bronze Age civilizations, the Minoan civilization emerged in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE through a process of urbanization of these early Neolithic communities. By 2700 BCE it had become an important centre of Aegean civilization that flourished for well over a thousand years. During their hey-day, they evolved a highly organised society, developed a distinctive written language, religion, and culture, and maintained an extensive mercantile trade with their Mediterranean neighbours. The skill of Minoan artists and metalworkers was renowned in the ancient world. Durable objects of Minoan manufacture – beautifully painted ceramics and exquisite jewellery made from copper, bronze, silver, and gold – have been found on mainland Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and as far west as the coast of Spain.
The growth of several cities into major centres of commerce tended to accentuate class differences, eventually giving rise (c. 2000 BCE) to the emergence of kings, a dynastic power structure, and the construction of palaces throughout the island. Despite this, the Minoans seem to have maintained an equitable distribution of wealth. Multi-room homes, many two or three stories high, constructed of stone, wood, and mud-brick, are in evidence even in the “poor” sections of town. The cities themselves were connected by roads paved with stone slabs cut from large blocks, and a system of clay pipes provided water and sewer facilities to the upper class.
Unlike other Bronze Age civilizations, Minoan society was matrilineal (i.e. descent was traced through the female line) and women retained at least as much power as men. Bare-breasted, they dressed in a short-sleeved robe open to the navel, while the men wore loincloths and kilts. Farmers raised cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, domesticated bees, and grew an assortment of grains as well as grapes, figs, and olives. Like the Sumerian and Egyptian temples, the Minoan palaces were more than centres of government and worship; they were storage facilities for the harvested produce. Augmented with the meat of wild deer and boar roaming the island, it all added up to a very healthy diet, a comfortable lifestyle, and a growing population.
Two distinctive features of Minoan life are especially noteworthy. The first is their apparent peacefulness. In his early excavations, Sir Arthur Evans found little evidence of ancient fortifications and coined the phrase pax Minoica or “Minoan peace.” Although subsequent scholars have challenged that idea, a recent (1998) conference of Minoan archaeologists in Belgium concluded that any evidence of armed conflict remains scanty. The superbly crafted Minoan swords seem more associated with fashion and ritual than with aggression. No evidence exists for a Minoan army, and few signs of warfare appear in their art. The inter-city strife and later expansionist aggression that characterised other contemporary civilizations seems entirely absent on the island of Crete.
A second and perhaps related feature that distinguishes Minoan culture is the persistence of the Mother Goddess at the heart of their religious worldview. In all other civilizations, the process of urbanization brought with it dramatic changes in social relations and in the supporting mythology. Urban cultures are typically organised around class rather than kinship. The excess of produce in agricultural societies leads inevitably to economic disparity and an accompanying social inequality. It also issues in a burgeoning population that requires an increasing level of governmental control. Because the agricultural wealth is both generated and defended primarily by male muscle power, the class distinctions are accompanied by a growing gender inequality, with men assigning to themselves the public roles of priests, kings, administrators, and military leaders who together control the society’s wealth. Such dramatic social changes are then reflected in, and supported by, changes in the society’s accompanying mythology and religious beliefs. The new male dominance requires a shift away from a nature-based matriarchal religion focused on the Mother Goddess towards a male-centred universe, governed by a testosterone-laced hierarchy of increasingly male deities ruled by one transcendent Father God.
Just why, of all the civilization, the Minoans should have bucked this trend remains a mystery. Although they certainly evolved a class-based society, there seems to have been little economic disparity between the classes and no inequality between men and women. The palace kings were always male, but women occupied all other important roles in public life and had a virtual monopoly on the priesthood. They even participated as equal participants in the popular sports of boxing and bull jumping. The latter was a highly dangerous sport in which a bull would charge headlong into a line of jumpers who, in order to survive, would grab the bull by the horns, somersault over it, and land on their feet behind the bull. Clearly, Minoan women had not been reduced to the status of the weaker sex.
Since we have only excavated remnants from Minoan culture, we can only guess at the beliefs and practices that comprised their rich religious life. What we can be sure of is that it was matriarchal – i.e. a goddess religion presided over by priestesses – and probably polytheistic. Three goddesses in particular have been identified, but whether they are separate deities or different aspects of a single Mother Goddess remains unclear. The first of these, known as “Mistress of the Animals,” later became the “Mountain Mother”. Accompanied by a saluting male, she was depicted as standing astride a high hill, protecting the animals and natural world. Another was the “Snake Goddess”, depicted with snakes entwined around her arms and body and worshiped in private homes as a kind of domestic mother goddess. A third form, found on a number of seals, appears to be a “Goddess of Vegetation.” A few more diminutive figures have been found that may or may not depict male deities. If so, they hold positions of little significance alongside their female counterparts.
The Minoan goddesses seem to represent a deification of the natural world with which humans could live in harmony. The entire world for the Minoans was suffused with the divine. And like most mother-child relationships, the connection of the Mother Goddess to the natural and human worlds was closer and more biological than that of the more distant male deities of other cultures. Like the Minoan women themselves, however, the Mother Goddess was far from a purely benign presence. Worshiped in an often exuberant fashion with music and dance in outdoor shrines – some in sacred caves, others in hill-top sanctuaries – the Goddess also demanded sacrifice. Judging from bones found at their religious sites, these were mostly of deer, oxen, and goats. A bull, of great importance in Minoan culture, would also be sacrificed at special festivals.
Still more sinister finds suggest that human sacrifice was also practiced. One sanctuary gave up the skeleton of an 18-year-old male, trussed in a fashion similar to that of a sacrificial bull, who had apparently been slain with a nearby bronze dagger and allowed to bleed to death. At another site, the remains of four children, aged between 8 and 12, and apparently in perfect health at the time of their death, have been found. The evidence indicates that they were butchered, cooked together with other edible substances, and cannibalised. Is it possible that such ritualised aggression is the price that must be paid to maintain the peace in other sectors?
However prosperous and peaceful, if sometimes bizarre, Minoan life may have been under the motherly providence of the Goddess, it was not entirely a bed of roses. About 1700 BCE, the palaces that had been built throughout the island were abruptly and utterly destroyed – probably by a powerful earthquake, though possibly by invaders from Anatolia. With astonishing resilience, however, the Minoans quickly rebuilt them into even more spectacular structures – the so-called “great palaces” at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and Zakros, alongside many smaller palaces that ranged across the Cretan landscape.
Then, during this same period, in 1645 BCE, there was a colossal volcanic eruption on the Aegean island of Thera or Santorini. Whether or not Minoan crops and animals were suffocated by volcanic ash is unknown, but the tsunamis and earthquakes associated with the eruption would almost certainly have caused extensive damage to the Minoan mercantile fleet and infrastructure. Some 200 years later, the Minoan civilization began its final decline towards extinction. About 1450 BCE, due perhaps to another earthquake or eruption of the Thera volcano, all the important palaces except Knossos were again destroyed. Finally, in 1420 BCE, it was “game over”. A Mycenaean army from mainland Greece invaded Crete, occupied the palace sites, and subjugated the Minoan people.
The male deities that everywhere were transforming these great Bronze Age civilizations into warmongering empires had finally won the day.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Ancient Egyptian Worldview
Because of our highly evolved capacity for self-awareness, we human beings are uniquely destined to ask “the big questions”. What’s happening in the universe at large? What’s our place in it? How should we live our lives? We have a profound need to orient ourselves within the larger scheme of things in a way that gives meaning and direction to our lives. So we create a worldview – an evolving set of answers to these questions that operates in us as a kind of orientation system.
For the ancient Egyptians, that orientation system or worldview was mythical. Lacking anything resembling a scientific method of inquiry or our concept of natural laws, what happens in this world, they believed, is governed by a pantheon of gods and goddesses whose activity was described in mythical stories. To ensure our survival and well-being, it is important that we align ourselves with these deities and avoid their displeasure in prescribed ways.
The most important myth undergirding their worldview was an account of how the world came into being. In the beginning there was only Nun – the dark lifeless waters of chaos. Out of this emerged a pyramid-shaped mound of land, still surrounded by the waters of chaos, on top of which stood Atum, the first god. Atum coughed and spat out Shu (god of the air) and Tefnut (goddess of moisture), who in turn had two children – Geb (god of the earth) and Nut (goddess of the sky). These in turn had four children – Osiris (king of the earth), Isis (his queen), Seth (the god of chaos), and Nephthys (a protective goddess of the dead). As the myth tells it, Seth, envious of his brother, one day murdered and dismembered him and declared himself to be king. Not to be overcome by chaos, however, Isis reassembled Osiris’ body, resurrected him, and proceeded to give birth to their only son, Horus, who became rightful heir to his father’s throne. The re-establishment of order over chaos is complete when Horus defeats Seth, regains the throne, and Osiris himself descends to the underworld to become king of the dead.
The death and resurrection of Osiris became linked both to the Egyptian agricultural cycle and to their belief in the resurrection of human souls after death, while the succession of Horus to the throne and his restoration of order provided the mythical basis for the succession of dynastic pharaohs and their role as upholders of order. Indeed, the importance of maintaining order over chaos was fundamental to the Egyptians. It was enshrined in their concept of ma’at - the divine force which, at the time of creation, brought order out of chaos and on which the continued existence of the world depended. Because of ma’at, Egyptians could have confidence in the order and stability of their world – the daily progression of the sun across the sky, the annual flooding of the Nile, the cyclical seasons of seedtime and harvest, the rhythmic pattern of birth and death and rebirth. All this was guided by the gods. But it required human cooperation too. Ma’at was never guaranteed. The creation of the universe – this bringing order out of chaos – is ongoing and must constantly be renewed. To avert catastrophe, humans must align themselves with the cosmic order and govern their behaviour accordingly.
Key to upholding ma’at was the pharaoh. Though human and subject to human frailties, he embodied “kingship” – a divine power associated with the god Horus with whom the pharaoh was identified. Indeed, the pharaoh was known as “the living Horus”. So he ruled both for the gods and as a god to maintain order in human society (through good governance) and sustain ma’at on a cosmic level (by ensuring that the gods were served with temple rituals and offerings). As over the centuries the Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses became more elaborate, ma’at itself became deified as a goddess, daughter of the sun god Ra.
Important though the maintenance of order was, both in the nation and the cosmos, the Egyptians were less concerned with order or consistency in their own cosmology. The divine residents of their pantheon were constantly changing, with some key deities repeatedly rearranged in a variety of combinations. The sun god Ra is a case in point. Although nowhere mentioned in the original creation myth, he emerged as the major deity in a popular cult centred in Heliopolis – the same city where Atum (who had previously been the #1 god in the creation myth) was also a local sun god. According to the cult, it was Ra, not Atum, who had created himself from a primeval mound and then created all the other gods. At some point the two were combined into Atum-Ra and worshiped as the original being and creator. Later Ra, who was clearly a survivor, became merged with Horus and was seen to rule all parts of the created world. Still later, the god Amun, who rose to prominence as the most powerful god during the New Kingdom, became fused with Ra and known as Amun-Ra. After pharaoh Akhenaten`s abortive effort to elevate Aten (another sun god) to the position of sole deity, Ra was restored to his place of pre-eminence and subsequently worshiped as the creator of all forms of life, including mankind.
The rise and fall of a particular deity depended in part on the region or city of which he was the patron. So Ptah (the god of craftsmen) gained power when his city of Memphis became the capital of Egypt. He was later eclipsed by Ra of Heliopolis, and then by Amun of Thebes. As a rule, whenever a new capital was founded, a new supreme deity was proclaimed. But even a god’s association with a particular locality could change. So Montu, originally a sun god associated with the city of Hermonthis, was exported to Thebes where for a while he gained the rank of state god, only to be subordinated later by Atum as “king of gods.” Still later, during the New Kingdom, Montu was venerated as a god of war, closely identified with the imperial reign of Rameses II, and borne as a strident spear-wielding figure aboard the warships of that time. Strangely, this same god of war was also cited in marriage documents as a protector of the happy home. Such were the vicissitudes of life for an Egyptian deity.
When Ra became merged with Horus, the combo was seen as father of the pharaoh, while several goddesses served as the pharaoh’s mother. Upon his death, the pharaoh became fully identified with Ra and worshiped as a deity in the many mortuary temples dedicated to him. During the day, Ra travelled across the sky in a barque, and during the night through the underworld where he was required to defeat a serpentine god of chaos named Apep. Having dispatched Apep, Ra could then meet with Osiris who, as god of resurrection, ensured his return at sunrise to the morning sky. Thus, day after day, night after night, the victory of order over chaos and the drama of rebirth were re-enacted. It is the theme that emerges repeatedly in Egyptian mythology. It matters little who the players are. They come and go. But the drama itself remains the same.
Although the true nature of the gods and goddesses always remained mysterious and unknown, they were often depicted as an animal – a ram, a hawk, a lion or lioness – to symbolize their role in nature. They were indeed not so much supernatural beings as the deification of natural forces. Each element of nature – the sun, the air, the earth, the Nile – was itself a divine force represented by one or several deities. Nature was not an inanimate “it”, but had a life and will of its own. And not only nature. The same was true of human functions such as writing, measurement, and embalming, and abstractions such as kingship, order, and justice. All of these had a vitality of their own, represented by one or other deity.
Because the forces of nature were capricious and the encroachment of chaos always a threat, it was critically important to appease the gods with offerings and prayers. Ordinary citizens worshiped private statues in their household shrines, but the priests alone had access to the temples where they performed prescribed rituals on the pharaoh’s behalf. The temple was the domain of a deity whose statue was housed in a shrine at the temple’s centre. Only on special feast days was it carried outside for public worship. As the pharaoh’s power diminished in the latter centuries of the civilization, however, his role as spiritual intermediary was correspondingly de-emphasized, and religious practice shifted towards a more direct worship of the gods.
Another shift also took place over the centuries from an originally polytheistic to a more monotheistic worldview. Different gods or combinations of gods could, as we have noted, rise within the pantheon to become the greatest of all. During the New Kingdom, this position was occupied by Amun whose power filled the universe. His true identity, however, was thought to be concealed from the world, while the other gods, still with their individual identities, came to be seen as aspects of this single hidden force. It was as if an essential unity was becoming recognised behind what, on the surface, still looked like a polytheistic system. Somewhat later, Amun-Ra and then Ra held this position until, during the reign of Amenhotep IV (1353-1336 BCE), Ra came to be invoked as Aten – god of the Great Solar Disc that illuminated all beings. In homage to Aten, the pharaoh changed his name to Akhenaten (Glorious Spirit of the Aten), built and moved his capital to Akhetaten, abolished the worship of all other gods, smashed their images, emptied their temples, and impounded their revenues. Then, in a move regarded by many as the first-ever introduction of monotheism, he suppressed any usage of the plural word for god.
Alas, worldviews do not change so easily, and Akhenaten’s monotheism (if that’s what it was) did not survive his death – at least not in Egypt. Indeed, his measures served only to enrage the populace who were not about to abandon their favourite deities so easily. In an effort to restore morale, his successor, Tutankhamen, appeased the offended gods, restored their temples, appointed new priests, had new images sculpted, and the people breathed a sigh of relief. They loved the old-time religion.
The legacy of Akhenaten, however, may not have died with him. Monotheism was in the air – and, through his presumed connection with Semitic peoples living in Egypt, Akhenaten may have influenced Moses and the emergence of Judaic monotheism. Sigmund Freud popularised the idea in his book Moses and Monotheism, arguing that Moses had been a priest of Aten who was forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten’s death. And a contemporary Egyptian-born linguist, Ahmed Osman, contends that Moses was none other than Akhenaten himself. According to Osman, Akhenaten’s monotheism was so unpopular that he was forced to abdicate and flee Egypt, taking his followers with him in a grand exodus. While scarcely any scholars give credence to this theory, there is some evidence that the roots of Judaism are to be found in the Egypt of this time. What is thought to be the royal seal of the 8th century Judean Kingdom resembles the earlier image of Aten as a winged solar disc. And, while there is no established link between them, the Great Hymn to Aten, attributed to Akhenaten, bears a remarkable similarity to Psalm 104 in the Hebrew Bible.
A distinctive feature of Egyptian religion was that anyone could share in an afterlife. Humans posses a ka (or life force) and a ba (or personality) which, after death, went to the Kingdom of the Dead. There the deceased’s heart was weighed against the feather of truth and justice taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma’at. If the heart was heavier than the feather, the deceased was devoured by the demon Ammut. But if it was lighter, and providing other conditions were met – (the body must be properly mummified, food and drink must continue to be offered to the ka by those left behind, and the deceased must be able to recite appropriate spells from the Book of the Dead) – then immortality could be enjoyed in the Fields of Yalu, with the added bonus of accompanying the Sun on its daily journey across the sky.
And if all this sounds, as it does to me, like a big ask, then perhaps the heretical Akhenaten’s immortality is the only immortality that is assured. In truth it can be said that Akhenaten lives – in the monotheistic worldview that he inspired and that has prevailed in all the major Western religions to this day.
For the ancient Egyptians, that orientation system or worldview was mythical. Lacking anything resembling a scientific method of inquiry or our concept of natural laws, what happens in this world, they believed, is governed by a pantheon of gods and goddesses whose activity was described in mythical stories. To ensure our survival and well-being, it is important that we align ourselves with these deities and avoid their displeasure in prescribed ways.
The most important myth undergirding their worldview was an account of how the world came into being. In the beginning there was only Nun – the dark lifeless waters of chaos. Out of this emerged a pyramid-shaped mound of land, still surrounded by the waters of chaos, on top of which stood Atum, the first god. Atum coughed and spat out Shu (god of the air) and Tefnut (goddess of moisture), who in turn had two children – Geb (god of the earth) and Nut (goddess of the sky). These in turn had four children – Osiris (king of the earth), Isis (his queen), Seth (the god of chaos), and Nephthys (a protective goddess of the dead). As the myth tells it, Seth, envious of his brother, one day murdered and dismembered him and declared himself to be king. Not to be overcome by chaos, however, Isis reassembled Osiris’ body, resurrected him, and proceeded to give birth to their only son, Horus, who became rightful heir to his father’s throne. The re-establishment of order over chaos is complete when Horus defeats Seth, regains the throne, and Osiris himself descends to the underworld to become king of the dead.
The death and resurrection of Osiris became linked both to the Egyptian agricultural cycle and to their belief in the resurrection of human souls after death, while the succession of Horus to the throne and his restoration of order provided the mythical basis for the succession of dynastic pharaohs and their role as upholders of order. Indeed, the importance of maintaining order over chaos was fundamental to the Egyptians. It was enshrined in their concept of ma’at - the divine force which, at the time of creation, brought order out of chaos and on which the continued existence of the world depended. Because of ma’at, Egyptians could have confidence in the order and stability of their world – the daily progression of the sun across the sky, the annual flooding of the Nile, the cyclical seasons of seedtime and harvest, the rhythmic pattern of birth and death and rebirth. All this was guided by the gods. But it required human cooperation too. Ma’at was never guaranteed. The creation of the universe – this bringing order out of chaos – is ongoing and must constantly be renewed. To avert catastrophe, humans must align themselves with the cosmic order and govern their behaviour accordingly.
Key to upholding ma’at was the pharaoh. Though human and subject to human frailties, he embodied “kingship” – a divine power associated with the god Horus with whom the pharaoh was identified. Indeed, the pharaoh was known as “the living Horus”. So he ruled both for the gods and as a god to maintain order in human society (through good governance) and sustain ma’at on a cosmic level (by ensuring that the gods were served with temple rituals and offerings). As over the centuries the Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses became more elaborate, ma’at itself became deified as a goddess, daughter of the sun god Ra.
Important though the maintenance of order was, both in the nation and the cosmos, the Egyptians were less concerned with order or consistency in their own cosmology. The divine residents of their pantheon were constantly changing, with some key deities repeatedly rearranged in a variety of combinations. The sun god Ra is a case in point. Although nowhere mentioned in the original creation myth, he emerged as the major deity in a popular cult centred in Heliopolis – the same city where Atum (who had previously been the #1 god in the creation myth) was also a local sun god. According to the cult, it was Ra, not Atum, who had created himself from a primeval mound and then created all the other gods. At some point the two were combined into Atum-Ra and worshiped as the original being and creator. Later Ra, who was clearly a survivor, became merged with Horus and was seen to rule all parts of the created world. Still later, the god Amun, who rose to prominence as the most powerful god during the New Kingdom, became fused with Ra and known as Amun-Ra. After pharaoh Akhenaten`s abortive effort to elevate Aten (another sun god) to the position of sole deity, Ra was restored to his place of pre-eminence and subsequently worshiped as the creator of all forms of life, including mankind.
The rise and fall of a particular deity depended in part on the region or city of which he was the patron. So Ptah (the god of craftsmen) gained power when his city of Memphis became the capital of Egypt. He was later eclipsed by Ra of Heliopolis, and then by Amun of Thebes. As a rule, whenever a new capital was founded, a new supreme deity was proclaimed. But even a god’s association with a particular locality could change. So Montu, originally a sun god associated with the city of Hermonthis, was exported to Thebes where for a while he gained the rank of state god, only to be subordinated later by Atum as “king of gods.” Still later, during the New Kingdom, Montu was venerated as a god of war, closely identified with the imperial reign of Rameses II, and borne as a strident spear-wielding figure aboard the warships of that time. Strangely, this same god of war was also cited in marriage documents as a protector of the happy home. Such were the vicissitudes of life for an Egyptian deity.
When Ra became merged with Horus, the combo was seen as father of the pharaoh, while several goddesses served as the pharaoh’s mother. Upon his death, the pharaoh became fully identified with Ra and worshiped as a deity in the many mortuary temples dedicated to him. During the day, Ra travelled across the sky in a barque, and during the night through the underworld where he was required to defeat a serpentine god of chaos named Apep. Having dispatched Apep, Ra could then meet with Osiris who, as god of resurrection, ensured his return at sunrise to the morning sky. Thus, day after day, night after night, the victory of order over chaos and the drama of rebirth were re-enacted. It is the theme that emerges repeatedly in Egyptian mythology. It matters little who the players are. They come and go. But the drama itself remains the same.
Although the true nature of the gods and goddesses always remained mysterious and unknown, they were often depicted as an animal – a ram, a hawk, a lion or lioness – to symbolize their role in nature. They were indeed not so much supernatural beings as the deification of natural forces. Each element of nature – the sun, the air, the earth, the Nile – was itself a divine force represented by one or several deities. Nature was not an inanimate “it”, but had a life and will of its own. And not only nature. The same was true of human functions such as writing, measurement, and embalming, and abstractions such as kingship, order, and justice. All of these had a vitality of their own, represented by one or other deity.
Because the forces of nature were capricious and the encroachment of chaos always a threat, it was critically important to appease the gods with offerings and prayers. Ordinary citizens worshiped private statues in their household shrines, but the priests alone had access to the temples where they performed prescribed rituals on the pharaoh’s behalf. The temple was the domain of a deity whose statue was housed in a shrine at the temple’s centre. Only on special feast days was it carried outside for public worship. As the pharaoh’s power diminished in the latter centuries of the civilization, however, his role as spiritual intermediary was correspondingly de-emphasized, and religious practice shifted towards a more direct worship of the gods.
Another shift also took place over the centuries from an originally polytheistic to a more monotheistic worldview. Different gods or combinations of gods could, as we have noted, rise within the pantheon to become the greatest of all. During the New Kingdom, this position was occupied by Amun whose power filled the universe. His true identity, however, was thought to be concealed from the world, while the other gods, still with their individual identities, came to be seen as aspects of this single hidden force. It was as if an essential unity was becoming recognised behind what, on the surface, still looked like a polytheistic system. Somewhat later, Amun-Ra and then Ra held this position until, during the reign of Amenhotep IV (1353-1336 BCE), Ra came to be invoked as Aten – god of the Great Solar Disc that illuminated all beings. In homage to Aten, the pharaoh changed his name to Akhenaten (Glorious Spirit of the Aten), built and moved his capital to Akhetaten, abolished the worship of all other gods, smashed their images, emptied their temples, and impounded their revenues. Then, in a move regarded by many as the first-ever introduction of monotheism, he suppressed any usage of the plural word for god.
Alas, worldviews do not change so easily, and Akhenaten’s monotheism (if that’s what it was) did not survive his death – at least not in Egypt. Indeed, his measures served only to enrage the populace who were not about to abandon their favourite deities so easily. In an effort to restore morale, his successor, Tutankhamen, appeased the offended gods, restored their temples, appointed new priests, had new images sculpted, and the people breathed a sigh of relief. They loved the old-time religion.
The legacy of Akhenaten, however, may not have died with him. Monotheism was in the air – and, through his presumed connection with Semitic peoples living in Egypt, Akhenaten may have influenced Moses and the emergence of Judaic monotheism. Sigmund Freud popularised the idea in his book Moses and Monotheism, arguing that Moses had been a priest of Aten who was forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten’s death. And a contemporary Egyptian-born linguist, Ahmed Osman, contends that Moses was none other than Akhenaten himself. According to Osman, Akhenaten’s monotheism was so unpopular that he was forced to abdicate and flee Egypt, taking his followers with him in a grand exodus. While scarcely any scholars give credence to this theory, there is some evidence that the roots of Judaism are to be found in the Egypt of this time. What is thought to be the royal seal of the 8th century Judean Kingdom resembles the earlier image of Aten as a winged solar disc. And, while there is no established link between them, the Great Hymn to Aten, attributed to Akhenaten, bears a remarkable similarity to Psalm 104 in the Hebrew Bible.
A distinctive feature of Egyptian religion was that anyone could share in an afterlife. Humans posses a ka (or life force) and a ba (or personality) which, after death, went to the Kingdom of the Dead. There the deceased’s heart was weighed against the feather of truth and justice taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma’at. If the heart was heavier than the feather, the deceased was devoured by the demon Ammut. But if it was lighter, and providing other conditions were met – (the body must be properly mummified, food and drink must continue to be offered to the ka by those left behind, and the deceased must be able to recite appropriate spells from the Book of the Dead) – then immortality could be enjoyed in the Fields of Yalu, with the added bonus of accompanying the Sun on its daily journey across the sky.
And if all this sounds, as it does to me, like a big ask, then perhaps the heretical Akhenaten’s immortality is the only immortality that is assured. In truth it can be said that Akhenaten lives – in the monotheistic worldview that he inspired and that has prevailed in all the major Western religions to this day.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Life in Ancient Egypt
The peace, power, and prosperity of ancient Egypt depended primarily on two things – the annual flooding of the Nile and a well-ordered centralised government under the absolute authority of the pharaoh. The first of these recurrently replenished the Nile’s fertile river banks and yielded an abundance of food. The second maintained the unity of the country under a system of labour and land management that maximised both human and natural resources. And these two were interlinked. When drought diminished the flooding of the Nile, as it did periodically, famine quickly followed, leading to civil unrest, a weakening of the pharaoh’s control, a splintering of the country’s unity, and a heightened exposure to foreign attack.
The Egyptians recognised three seasons that also depended on the Nile. During the flooding season (June – September), the river deposited on its banks a layer of mineral-rich silt ideal for growing crops. When the floodwaters receded, farmers ploughed, planted, and irrigated the land during the growing season (October – February). Finally, the harvest season (March – May) was the time to gather, winnow, grind into flour, and store the abundance that the river had yielded.
The agricultural produce belonged not to the farmers but to the state, temple, or noble family that owned the land. The farmers, who made up most of the population, were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and expected not only to work the land but to work on the massive state-run irrigation and construction projects as well. Of slightly higher status were the artists and craftsmen. But they too were under state control, worked in shops attached to the temples, and were paid directly from the state treasury. Then came the priests, physicians, and engineers with specialised training in their fields. And at the top of the heap were the scribes and officials. They comprised the nobility who wore bleached white linen garments as a mark of their status. Scribes were those who had learned to read and write hieroglyphs – the system of some 500 symbols that had been invented c. 3200 BCE at the dawn of Egyptian civilization. They inscribed the temples and tombs, kept government records, and wrote letters for the pharaoh. Other nobles included members of the pharaoh’s court, the Grand Vizier (the pharaoh’s second-in-command), and the governors of the 42 regional nomes who were accountable to him.
As Egypt grew into a more expansive empire, the role of the military became correspondingly more important. In earlier centuries, soldiers were recruited from the general population on an as-needed basis. When the campaign ended, the army would disperse and the men return to their previous jobs. By the time of the New Kingdom, however, the advantages of maintaining a standing army were apparent. There were more battles to be fought, more trade routes to be protected, and always some massive construction project to be staffed. So the career of the professional soldier was created. By the time of Rameses II (1279-1213 BCE), the standing army numbered 20,000 men. While some were still conscripted, most joined voluntarily – some signing up as young as 5 years of age to serve in the army for their entire life. The attraction lay in the prestige and benefits attached to being a soldier. Except for the priests, they were the only Egyptians to have special privileges. They were widely respected. They enjoyed formal awards for heroism as well as opportunities to plunder. And they were among the lucky few to receive a state pension. Some even gained sufficient power to become pharaohs.
Money in the form of coinage was not introduced until the 5th century BCE. Until then, workers were paid either with the standard sack (about 35 kgs) of grain or with the deben (about 3 ounces) of copper or silver. Like everything else, the economy was centrally controlled. A simple labourer might earn 5 sacks of grain per month, a foreman 7 sacks. Sacks of grain could be traded for other goods according to a list of state-decreed prices that were fixed throughout the country. The price of a shirt was set at 5 deben, a cow at 140 deben.
Whatever their social status, all Egyptians except slaves were equal under the law. Even the lowliest peasant was entitled to petition the vizier and his court for redress. Women too had a greater range of opportunity than exists in many countries even today. While they rarely held significant positions in the administration or temples and usually occupied child-care rather than income-generating roles, they had the right to own and sell property and were financially protected under the law in the event of divorce. Some (Hatshepsut and Cleopatra) even became pharaohs, and others were honoured as Divine Wives of the supreme deity Amun.
Ancient Egyptians lived with members of their immediate family in mud-brick homes furnished with wooden stools, tables, and beds. The floors were covered with reed mats and the white walls with dyed linen wall hangings. The two food staples, bread and beer, were made from cereal grains that were milled and baked in the open-roof kitchen. Fruits and vegetables were grown in nearby garden plots.
The Egyptians may have been the only people of that time to keep pets in their homes – usually dogs, cats, or monkeys. Lions and other more exotic animals were reserved for royalty. Animals were such an important part of Egyptian life that they were often identified with specific gods and goddesses. Cattle were the most important. The size of the herd reflected the prestige of the temple or estate that owned it, and they were taxed accordingly. Sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry were also raised. Oxen and donkeys were used for ploughing and as beasts of burden. Horses, introduced by the Hyksos c. 1700 BCE, were retained almost exclusively by the military to draw their chariots.
Hygiene and apparel were important. Most Egyptians bathed in the Nile, using soap made from animal fat. Men shaved their entire bodies, and boys, at age 12, were circumcised and similarly shaved. Boys and girls alike went without clothing until puberty. Clothing was cut from linen sheets woven of thread made from flax fibres. Both men and women in the upper classes wore wigs, jewellery, cosmetics, and perfumes.
Regarding leisure, some things never change. Girls played with home-made dolls, and boys with miniature toy weapons. Adults played board games – especially senet (the forerunner of backgammon) and mehen (similar to Snakes and Ladders) – which were sometimes buried with them for their amusement in the afterlife. The nobility enjoyed sports – especially boxing, wrestling, and javelin throwing, as well as hunting and boating. Accompanied by their families, they would cruise the Nile in flat-bottomed papyrus boats, hunt ducks and geese in the marshes, or go farther afield to hunt foxes, hare, and antelope. And, as always, the rich enjoyed lavish banquets, accompanied by dancers and musicians who entertained them with songs of love.
Overseeing all of this was a bureaucracy of scribes, religious leaders, and administrators under the control of a pharaoh whose authority was embedded in an elaborate system of religious beliefs. He was the political and religious leader of the nation. As “Lord of the Two Lands”, he made the laws, collected taxes, dispensed justice, acted as supreme military commander, and ensured Egypt’s dominance throughout the Near East. As “High Priest of Every Temple”, he performed rituals, represented the gods on Earth, and built temples to honour them. So interlinked were governance and religion that the temples were not only places of worship but granaries and treasuries where the nation’s wealth was stored and then redistributed. Coordinating this was the vizier who reported directly to the pharaoh and held to account the 42 governors or nomarchs who were responsible for their regional jurisdictions.
The remarkable success of Ancient Egypt is recorded in its lasting legacy – its invention of writing, its art, its mathematics, its practical system of medicine, its legal system, its introduction of monotheism, the first known ships, the earliest known peace treaty, and of course the quest for immortality expressed in its monumental architecture. There are some 80 pyramids known today from ancient Egypt. The earliest were simple mud-brick structures built over the burial pits of nobles to protect the bodies from exposure and provide a secure place for the deceased’s personal belongings. Then came the massive stone pyramids to house the mummies of the pharaohs and their queens. Of these, none can compare with those in the Valley of Giza. And there amongst them, on the west bank of the Nile, the largest monolith statue and oldest known monumental sculpture in the world – the Great Sphinx of Giza – stands as homage to the beauty and strength of this great civilization and her pharaohs.
The Egyptians recognised three seasons that also depended on the Nile. During the flooding season (June – September), the river deposited on its banks a layer of mineral-rich silt ideal for growing crops. When the floodwaters receded, farmers ploughed, planted, and irrigated the land during the growing season (October – February). Finally, the harvest season (March – May) was the time to gather, winnow, grind into flour, and store the abundance that the river had yielded.
The agricultural produce belonged not to the farmers but to the state, temple, or noble family that owned the land. The farmers, who made up most of the population, were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and expected not only to work the land but to work on the massive state-run irrigation and construction projects as well. Of slightly higher status were the artists and craftsmen. But they too were under state control, worked in shops attached to the temples, and were paid directly from the state treasury. Then came the priests, physicians, and engineers with specialised training in their fields. And at the top of the heap were the scribes and officials. They comprised the nobility who wore bleached white linen garments as a mark of their status. Scribes were those who had learned to read and write hieroglyphs – the system of some 500 symbols that had been invented c. 3200 BCE at the dawn of Egyptian civilization. They inscribed the temples and tombs, kept government records, and wrote letters for the pharaoh. Other nobles included members of the pharaoh’s court, the Grand Vizier (the pharaoh’s second-in-command), and the governors of the 42 regional nomes who were accountable to him.
As Egypt grew into a more expansive empire, the role of the military became correspondingly more important. In earlier centuries, soldiers were recruited from the general population on an as-needed basis. When the campaign ended, the army would disperse and the men return to their previous jobs. By the time of the New Kingdom, however, the advantages of maintaining a standing army were apparent. There were more battles to be fought, more trade routes to be protected, and always some massive construction project to be staffed. So the career of the professional soldier was created. By the time of Rameses II (1279-1213 BCE), the standing army numbered 20,000 men. While some were still conscripted, most joined voluntarily – some signing up as young as 5 years of age to serve in the army for their entire life. The attraction lay in the prestige and benefits attached to being a soldier. Except for the priests, they were the only Egyptians to have special privileges. They were widely respected. They enjoyed formal awards for heroism as well as opportunities to plunder. And they were among the lucky few to receive a state pension. Some even gained sufficient power to become pharaohs.
Money in the form of coinage was not introduced until the 5th century BCE. Until then, workers were paid either with the standard sack (about 35 kgs) of grain or with the deben (about 3 ounces) of copper or silver. Like everything else, the economy was centrally controlled. A simple labourer might earn 5 sacks of grain per month, a foreman 7 sacks. Sacks of grain could be traded for other goods according to a list of state-decreed prices that were fixed throughout the country. The price of a shirt was set at 5 deben, a cow at 140 deben.
Whatever their social status, all Egyptians except slaves were equal under the law. Even the lowliest peasant was entitled to petition the vizier and his court for redress. Women too had a greater range of opportunity than exists in many countries even today. While they rarely held significant positions in the administration or temples and usually occupied child-care rather than income-generating roles, they had the right to own and sell property and were financially protected under the law in the event of divorce. Some (Hatshepsut and Cleopatra) even became pharaohs, and others were honoured as Divine Wives of the supreme deity Amun.
Ancient Egyptians lived with members of their immediate family in mud-brick homes furnished with wooden stools, tables, and beds. The floors were covered with reed mats and the white walls with dyed linen wall hangings. The two food staples, bread and beer, were made from cereal grains that were milled and baked in the open-roof kitchen. Fruits and vegetables were grown in nearby garden plots.
The Egyptians may have been the only people of that time to keep pets in their homes – usually dogs, cats, or monkeys. Lions and other more exotic animals were reserved for royalty. Animals were such an important part of Egyptian life that they were often identified with specific gods and goddesses. Cattle were the most important. The size of the herd reflected the prestige of the temple or estate that owned it, and they were taxed accordingly. Sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry were also raised. Oxen and donkeys were used for ploughing and as beasts of burden. Horses, introduced by the Hyksos c. 1700 BCE, were retained almost exclusively by the military to draw their chariots.
Hygiene and apparel were important. Most Egyptians bathed in the Nile, using soap made from animal fat. Men shaved their entire bodies, and boys, at age 12, were circumcised and similarly shaved. Boys and girls alike went without clothing until puberty. Clothing was cut from linen sheets woven of thread made from flax fibres. Both men and women in the upper classes wore wigs, jewellery, cosmetics, and perfumes.
Regarding leisure, some things never change. Girls played with home-made dolls, and boys with miniature toy weapons. Adults played board games – especially senet (the forerunner of backgammon) and mehen (similar to Snakes and Ladders) – which were sometimes buried with them for their amusement in the afterlife. The nobility enjoyed sports – especially boxing, wrestling, and javelin throwing, as well as hunting and boating. Accompanied by their families, they would cruise the Nile in flat-bottomed papyrus boats, hunt ducks and geese in the marshes, or go farther afield to hunt foxes, hare, and antelope. And, as always, the rich enjoyed lavish banquets, accompanied by dancers and musicians who entertained them with songs of love.
Overseeing all of this was a bureaucracy of scribes, religious leaders, and administrators under the control of a pharaoh whose authority was embedded in an elaborate system of religious beliefs. He was the political and religious leader of the nation. As “Lord of the Two Lands”, he made the laws, collected taxes, dispensed justice, acted as supreme military commander, and ensured Egypt’s dominance throughout the Near East. As “High Priest of Every Temple”, he performed rituals, represented the gods on Earth, and built temples to honour them. So interlinked were governance and religion that the temples were not only places of worship but granaries and treasuries where the nation’s wealth was stored and then redistributed. Coordinating this was the vizier who reported directly to the pharaoh and held to account the 42 governors or nomarchs who were responsible for their regional jurisdictions.
The remarkable success of Ancient Egypt is recorded in its lasting legacy – its invention of writing, its art, its mathematics, its practical system of medicine, its legal system, its introduction of monotheism, the first known ships, the earliest known peace treaty, and of course the quest for immortality expressed in its monumental architecture. There are some 80 pyramids known today from ancient Egypt. The earliest were simple mud-brick structures built over the burial pits of nobles to protect the bodies from exposure and provide a secure place for the deceased’s personal belongings. Then came the massive stone pyramids to house the mummies of the pharaohs and their queens. Of these, none can compare with those in the Valley of Giza. And there amongst them, on the west bank of the Nile, the largest monolith statue and oldest known monumental sculpture in the world – the Great Sphinx of Giza – stands as homage to the beauty and strength of this great civilization and her pharaohs.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
A Brief History of Egyptian Civilization
Given the extent to which climate has influenced our human habitation over the millennia, it is not surprising that talk about the weather should still top the list of our casual conversation. Certainly this must have been true for our ancestors who first ventured into northern Africa. For tens of thousands of years, the Sahara was so devoid of plant and animal life that the Nile Valley was the only habitable place to live. But then, about 8500 BCE, or just at the beginning of the Neolithic era, that situation changed dramatically. Within a few hundred years, a shift in the pattern of monsoon rains caused the desert to bloom. Shrubs and trees and grasses enticed elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and crocodiles into the area, accompanied by the humans who hunted them and who, like humans everywhere at this time, were learning the skills of agriculture and animal husbandry. By the end of the 6th millennia BCE, well-established human settlements were scattered throughout what is now the Sahara Desert and, according to the rock art of the time, people were frolicking in rain pools and freshwater lakes. Alas, the good times always come to an end. From 5300 BCE the rains began to retreat, and by 3500 BCE they had ended. No more frolicking. The Sahara was returned again to desert, and humans to the Nile Valley. There, with skills well honed by climatic challenges and in burgeoning settlements that grew rapidly into city-states, they proceeded to create the greatest civilization of ancient history.
Backed by a remarkable talent for centralised administration, the civilization took shape quickly. Autonomous city-states became administrative districts called nomes, each headed by a nomarch. These tended to cluster around tribal loyalties and a shared culture. In the north, the Badari culture was notable for its use of copper and high quality ceramics. In the south, the Naqada culture became itself a kind of proto-civilization that traded with Nubia to the south, the desert oases to the west, and the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. By the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, the cultural differences between north and south were embodied in two distinct kingdoms – Upper and Lower Egypt – each with its own capital city and patron deity. Upper Egypt, known as Ta Shemau (“the land of reeds”), consisted of 22 nomes that were numbered progressively downriver from the Nubian border to just south of modern-day Cairo. Lower Egypt, known as Ta Mehu (“land of papyrus”), consisted of 20 nomes, again numbered in orderly fashion from just south of Cairo to the Mediterranean Sea. Amazingly, these 42 nomes remained in place as Egypt’s fundamental administrative structure for some 3500 years before finally being dismantled in 297 CE by the Roman Emperor Diocletian.
In 3150 BCE, the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt were united under Narmer – the first pharaoh. Known as “king of the two lands”, he was the first of many to wear the Double Crown (the White Crown of Upper Egypt and the Red Crown of Lower Egypt) symbolising the pharaoh’s power over a unified Egypt. The unification was the most significant event in all of Egypt’s history. It allowed a now-centralised government to organise peasant labour, undertake massive irrigation projects, oversee the large-scale distribution of food, establish a justice system, collect taxes, and regulate trade. As a result, Egypt’s food surplus increased exponentially, as did the wealth of the now-deified pharaohs who proceeded to commission the colossal monuments, massive tombs, and exceptional works of art for which Egypt is famous.
From the time of its unification until it fell to foreign domination in the 1st millennium BCE, the history of this great civilization is divided into a series of three Kingdoms (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms), separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods.
The Old Kingdom (c. 3150 – 2150 BCE) ushered in 1000 years of relative peace and prosperity – (not bad for a new-born civilization) – marked by huge increases in agricultural productivity, the growing power and wealth of the pharaohs, the rise of an elite class of educated scribes and administrative officials, and stunning advances in architecture, art, and technology. Hieroglyphic writing became established during this time. And most of the major pyramids, built as tombs for the pharaohs and their consorts, were built during the height of absolute pharoanic rule (2630 – 2400 BCE).
The 1st Intermediate Period (c. 2150 – 1975 BCE). Towards the end of the Old Kingdom, the extravagance of the pharaohs eroded their economic power and weakened their central administration. Fifty years of drought further exacerbated their economic woes, prompting individual nomes to assert themselves. Once in control of their own resources and free from their loyalties to the pharaoh, local governors (nomarchs) began competing with one another for territorial and political power, leading to civil war between rival cities. Only when the forces of Thebes in Upper Egypt decisively defeated those of Herakleopolis in Lower Egypt were the Two Lands united again.
The Middle Kingdom (1975 – 1785 BCE). The reunification of Egypt under a centralised government led again to the restoration of stability and prosperity, a resumption of pyramid building, and a renaissance in art and literature. It also saw an increase in military activity. Egyptian forces conquered Nubian territory rich in quarries and gold mines, and the “Walls of the Ruler” were built in the Eastern Delta to defend against foreign attack. But once again such projects, combined with insufficient flooding of the Nile, weakened the economy and precipitated a slow decline into the 2nd Intermediate Period.
The 2nd Intermediate Period (c. 1785 – 1550 BCE). During the latter years of the Middle Kingdom, Semitic peoples from western Asia, perhaps driven by famine, settled in the Delta region and provided needed labour for the regime’s ambitious mining and building projects. Known for their military prowess as charioteers and archers, they eventually seized control of the region and came to power as the Hyksos (“foreign rulers”). Forced to retreat to Thebes, the pharaohs found themselves trapped between the Hyksos to the north and their Nubian allies to the south. It was payback time. The pharaohs were treated as vassals and required to pay tribute.
The New Kingdom (c. 1550 – 1155 BCE) is sometimes referred to as the Egyptian Empire because of a new emphasis on territorial expansion initiated by pharaoh Ahmose I. After some 200 years of Hyksos rule, he gathered sufficient strength to eradicate the Hyksos, reunite Upper and Lower Egypt, push Egypt’s borders south into Nubia, and eventually expand eastward as far as the Euphrates. It was an imperial stance that continued for the next 400 years, with one notable exception. Amenhotep IV, being more interested in religion than in foreign affairs, changed his name (which meant “Amun is pleased”) to Akhenaten, in honour of a lesser god named Aten whom he promoted to replace Amun as “king of the gods.” In what is often misinterpreted as the first-ever introduction of monotheism, he proceeded to suppress the worship of all other deities and attack the power of the priestly establishment. Amun, as it turned out, was less than pleased, as were his devotees who, following Akhenaten’s death in 1336 BCE, destroyed his monuments, removed his name from wall reliefs and statues, and erased all mention of his heresy.
More representative of the New Kingdom’s militaristic and imperial stance were Rameses II and III. The former, who reigned for 67 years (1279 – 1212 BCE) and is thought to be the pharaoh with whom Moses negotiated prior to the Exodus, occupied territories in what is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, fought the Hittite empire to a standstill at the Battle of Qadesh, and went on to build more temples, erect more monuments, and sire more children than any other pharaoh in Egypt’s history. Egypt’s wealth, however, was making it an increasingly tempting target of invasion. Several decades later, the last of the “great” pharaohs, Rameses III (1186 – 1155 BCE), was forced to defend the empire, first against Libyan tribesmen in the Western Delta, and then against the invading Sea People (whose identity has never been established) in two great land and sea battles.
As has so often been the case throughout history, a combination of military, economic, and environmental factors contributed to the beginning of the end of this once-great civilization. Heavy military costs exhausted the treasury, and a dimming of the sun’s light (probably caused by a massive eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland) for two decades following the death of Rameses III led to a series of droughts, below-normal flooding of the Nile, and famine. Such economic woes led in turn to civil unrest, an increase in official corruption, and a serious weakening of the pharaohs’ power – all of which issued in yet another splintering of Upper and Lower Egypt. From c. 1100 BCE, a series of weak pharaohs ruled Lower Egypt and the high priests of the temple of Amun at Thebes became the de facto rulers of Upper Egypt.
From there it was downhill all the way. Libyan princes held control for more than 200 years (from 945 BCE), followed by Nubian kings (from 728 BCE), who were defeated by the Assyrians in 664 BCE, who yielded to the Persians in 525 BCE, who were conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, who was succeeded by the Ptolemies, until Egypt was finally annexed as a Roman colony in 30 BCE. It was “game over” – a sure and certain reminder that even the greatest of civilizations and empires must one day come to an end. From the middle of the 1st century CE, Christianity took root in Alexandria and, within a few hundred years, the great temples of Egypt had either become churches or were abandoned to the desert. A new era had begun.
Backed by a remarkable talent for centralised administration, the civilization took shape quickly. Autonomous city-states became administrative districts called nomes, each headed by a nomarch. These tended to cluster around tribal loyalties and a shared culture. In the north, the Badari culture was notable for its use of copper and high quality ceramics. In the south, the Naqada culture became itself a kind of proto-civilization that traded with Nubia to the south, the desert oases to the west, and the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. By the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, the cultural differences between north and south were embodied in two distinct kingdoms – Upper and Lower Egypt – each with its own capital city and patron deity. Upper Egypt, known as Ta Shemau (“the land of reeds”), consisted of 22 nomes that were numbered progressively downriver from the Nubian border to just south of modern-day Cairo. Lower Egypt, known as Ta Mehu (“land of papyrus”), consisted of 20 nomes, again numbered in orderly fashion from just south of Cairo to the Mediterranean Sea. Amazingly, these 42 nomes remained in place as Egypt’s fundamental administrative structure for some 3500 years before finally being dismantled in 297 CE by the Roman Emperor Diocletian.
In 3150 BCE, the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt were united under Narmer – the first pharaoh. Known as “king of the two lands”, he was the first of many to wear the Double Crown (the White Crown of Upper Egypt and the Red Crown of Lower Egypt) symbolising the pharaoh’s power over a unified Egypt. The unification was the most significant event in all of Egypt’s history. It allowed a now-centralised government to organise peasant labour, undertake massive irrigation projects, oversee the large-scale distribution of food, establish a justice system, collect taxes, and regulate trade. As a result, Egypt’s food surplus increased exponentially, as did the wealth of the now-deified pharaohs who proceeded to commission the colossal monuments, massive tombs, and exceptional works of art for which Egypt is famous.
From the time of its unification until it fell to foreign domination in the 1st millennium BCE, the history of this great civilization is divided into a series of three Kingdoms (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms), separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods.
The Old Kingdom (c. 3150 – 2150 BCE) ushered in 1000 years of relative peace and prosperity – (not bad for a new-born civilization) – marked by huge increases in agricultural productivity, the growing power and wealth of the pharaohs, the rise of an elite class of educated scribes and administrative officials, and stunning advances in architecture, art, and technology. Hieroglyphic writing became established during this time. And most of the major pyramids, built as tombs for the pharaohs and their consorts, were built during the height of absolute pharoanic rule (2630 – 2400 BCE).
The 1st Intermediate Period (c. 2150 – 1975 BCE). Towards the end of the Old Kingdom, the extravagance of the pharaohs eroded their economic power and weakened their central administration. Fifty years of drought further exacerbated their economic woes, prompting individual nomes to assert themselves. Once in control of their own resources and free from their loyalties to the pharaoh, local governors (nomarchs) began competing with one another for territorial and political power, leading to civil war between rival cities. Only when the forces of Thebes in Upper Egypt decisively defeated those of Herakleopolis in Lower Egypt were the Two Lands united again.
The Middle Kingdom (1975 – 1785 BCE). The reunification of Egypt under a centralised government led again to the restoration of stability and prosperity, a resumption of pyramid building, and a renaissance in art and literature. It also saw an increase in military activity. Egyptian forces conquered Nubian territory rich in quarries and gold mines, and the “Walls of the Ruler” were built in the Eastern Delta to defend against foreign attack. But once again such projects, combined with insufficient flooding of the Nile, weakened the economy and precipitated a slow decline into the 2nd Intermediate Period.
The 2nd Intermediate Period (c. 1785 – 1550 BCE). During the latter years of the Middle Kingdom, Semitic peoples from western Asia, perhaps driven by famine, settled in the Delta region and provided needed labour for the regime’s ambitious mining and building projects. Known for their military prowess as charioteers and archers, they eventually seized control of the region and came to power as the Hyksos (“foreign rulers”). Forced to retreat to Thebes, the pharaohs found themselves trapped between the Hyksos to the north and their Nubian allies to the south. It was payback time. The pharaohs were treated as vassals and required to pay tribute.
The New Kingdom (c. 1550 – 1155 BCE) is sometimes referred to as the Egyptian Empire because of a new emphasis on territorial expansion initiated by pharaoh Ahmose I. After some 200 years of Hyksos rule, he gathered sufficient strength to eradicate the Hyksos, reunite Upper and Lower Egypt, push Egypt’s borders south into Nubia, and eventually expand eastward as far as the Euphrates. It was an imperial stance that continued for the next 400 years, with one notable exception. Amenhotep IV, being more interested in religion than in foreign affairs, changed his name (which meant “Amun is pleased”) to Akhenaten, in honour of a lesser god named Aten whom he promoted to replace Amun as “king of the gods.” In what is often misinterpreted as the first-ever introduction of monotheism, he proceeded to suppress the worship of all other deities and attack the power of the priestly establishment. Amun, as it turned out, was less than pleased, as were his devotees who, following Akhenaten’s death in 1336 BCE, destroyed his monuments, removed his name from wall reliefs and statues, and erased all mention of his heresy.
More representative of the New Kingdom’s militaristic and imperial stance were Rameses II and III. The former, who reigned for 67 years (1279 – 1212 BCE) and is thought to be the pharaoh with whom Moses negotiated prior to the Exodus, occupied territories in what is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, fought the Hittite empire to a standstill at the Battle of Qadesh, and went on to build more temples, erect more monuments, and sire more children than any other pharaoh in Egypt’s history. Egypt’s wealth, however, was making it an increasingly tempting target of invasion. Several decades later, the last of the “great” pharaohs, Rameses III (1186 – 1155 BCE), was forced to defend the empire, first against Libyan tribesmen in the Western Delta, and then against the invading Sea People (whose identity has never been established) in two great land and sea battles.
As has so often been the case throughout history, a combination of military, economic, and environmental factors contributed to the beginning of the end of this once-great civilization. Heavy military costs exhausted the treasury, and a dimming of the sun’s light (probably caused by a massive eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland) for two decades following the death of Rameses III led to a series of droughts, below-normal flooding of the Nile, and famine. Such economic woes led in turn to civil unrest, an increase in official corruption, and a serious weakening of the pharaohs’ power – all of which issued in yet another splintering of Upper and Lower Egypt. From c. 1100 BCE, a series of weak pharaohs ruled Lower Egypt and the high priests of the temple of Amun at Thebes became the de facto rulers of Upper Egypt.
From there it was downhill all the way. Libyan princes held control for more than 200 years (from 945 BCE), followed by Nubian kings (from 728 BCE), who were defeated by the Assyrians in 664 BCE, who yielded to the Persians in 525 BCE, who were conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, who was succeeded by the Ptolemies, until Egypt was finally annexed as a Roman colony in 30 BCE. It was “game over” – a sure and certain reminder that even the greatest of civilizations and empires must one day come to an end. From the middle of the 1st century CE, Christianity took root in Alexandria and, within a few hundred years, the great temples of Egypt had either become churches or were abandoned to the desert. A new era had begun.
Monday, January 3, 2011
The Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilization
For almost two thousand years (3300 – 1700 BCE), the Indus Valley civilization occupied the fertile valleys of the Indus River and its many tributaries in the western part of the Indian subcontinent. Sometimes called the Harappan civilization (named after the first of its cities to be unearthed in the 1920s), it covered some 300,000 square miles (the size of present-day Turkey) in what is now Pakistan, north-west India, and south-east Afghanistan. More than 1400 settlements have so far been found, including large cities such as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro that housed populations of up to 40,000 people.
The Indus Valley cities were the most advanced of their time. Laid out in well-planned grids, with neighbourhoods defined by their residents’ occupations, they reflect what may be the world’s first town planning and incorporate what is almost certainly the world’s first urban sanitation system. The one and sometimes two-storied, flat-roofed houses were built of standardised high-quality bricks, each opening onto its own inner courtyard. Each had access to clean drinking water and had its own private bathroom. Clay pipes led from the bathroom to sewers located under the streets that drained into nearby rivers. Although some houses were larger than others, even the smallest had access to water and were linked to the central drainage system – suggesting that this was a largely egalitarian society without high concentrations of wealth belonging to a ruling elite. The whole arrangement, indeed, appears to have been more efficient, sanitary, and egalitarian than that found in some areas of modern-day Pakistan and India. In India today, for example, one of every three urban households has no private bathroom facility.
Unlike other civilizations of that era, there is no conclusive evidence of palaces or temples, kings or priests, or any of the pomp and ceremony usually associated with such institutions. Each city had its own grain storage facilities, religious centres, and presumably a very efficient administration. But there appears to have been no central administration for the civilization as a whole. Unlike contemporary Sumerians, Egyptians, and Minoans with their ziggurats, pyramids, and palaces, the Harappans built no monumental structures. Although they had the engineering skills, as the architecture of their dockyards and granaries attests, they left behind no towering monuments or epic ruins. The only thing massive about the Indus Valley cities was their walls, the purpose of which remains unclear. With no evidence of any military class or armed conflict, the walls may have been built more to divert flood waters than to dissuade potential enemies.
In the surrounding farmlands, a variety of grains, fruits, and vegetables were cultivated, and a number of animals, including water buffalo, were domesticated. The city dwellers were mostly artisans and traders. Skilled in pottery, weaving, and metal work, they left a profusion of sculpture, pottery, jewellery, metal seals, and detailed figurines in bronze and terracotta that remained buried until our time.
The economy depended significantly on trade, utilizing camels, elephants, and bullock carts for overland transport, and flat-bottomed boats for transport on their rivers and canals. More distant trade was conducted in plank-built vessels with a single mast supporting a sail of woven rushes or cloth. From a sophisticated docking facility at their city of Lothal, they navigated the Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, and Red Sea as far as the cities of Sumer and ancient Egypt. The importance of such trade is underlined by their development of a highly standardised decimal system of weights and measures, giving them great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time.
What is undoubtedly most distinctive about Harappan culture is their use of engraved copper seals as religious amulets and perhaps for identifying property and shipments of goods. A treasure trove of these seals has been found at 80 different sites, including almost every room in the city of Mohenjo-daro. Most are square, no larger than a postage stamp, ranging in size from ½ - 2½ inches, and depict one or other of the Harappan deities as an animal, together with an inscribed message addressed to that god. The few that are rectangular in shape contain only an inscription.
The Harappan script inscribed on these seals, as well as that found on tablets, ceramic pots, and other materials, contains over 400 distinct and exquisitely tiny symbols – the earliest examples of which date from c. 3000 BCE. But because no one has yet been able to decipher these symbols – (more than 100 attempts have been made over recent decades) – it is difficult to draw conclusions about the Indus Valley worldview. Given the great many female figurines that have been found, it is widely thought that they worshipped a Mother Goddess symbolizing fertility. Some seals, however, show swastikas that are found in later religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, suggesting that elements of Hinduism were already present at this time. One famous seal shows a figure seated in a posture reminiscent of the Lotus position.
The little we do know about Harappan religious belief and practice is this:
• Religious traditions differed from one city to another, with worship of the Mother Goddess evident in many, but not in all. Many small statues have been unearthed that are thought by some archaeologists to be female goddesses.
• Many different deities, often represented by an animal, have been identified. Citizens of Lothal, for instance, seem to have worshipped both a sea goddess and a fire god – the latter represented on seals by a horned deity and evidenced by private and public fire-altars for animal sacrifice. Major deities include those represented by the water buffalo, short-horned bull, elephant, and ram. The Mother Goddess (perhaps called Kali) may have been represented by the ox, and the principal Harappan deity (Mal ?) by a unicorn.
• In early phases of the civilization, the Harappans buried their dead. Later, the dead were cremated and their ashes buried in urns in a manner alluded to in the Rigveda – the earliest Hindu scriptures, composed in this same region of northwest India between 1700 and 1100 BCE, following the disappearance of the Indus Valley civilization.
The decline of this great civilization remains as enigmatic as its script. By 1700 BCE, most of its cities were abandoned. Were they ravaged by conquest, washed away by floods, destroyed by drought, eroded by a declining trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, or all of the above? Or did its people just blend into other migrations that were settling the subcontinent? No one seems to know. In 1953, Sir Mortimer Wheeler proposed that it was destroyed by invading warriors from Central Asia called “Àryans”. Many scholars today believe that its collapse was associated with a drought linked to climate change. It seems that the Indus Valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier after 1800 BCE.
Whatever the reasons, and despite the damage done to these ancient sites by British colonials who used the cities’ bricks to build their railways, enough of this civilization still remains as testimony to its greatness. And its influence on later religious thought – Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain – is still felt in our world today.
The Indus Valley cities were the most advanced of their time. Laid out in well-planned grids, with neighbourhoods defined by their residents’ occupations, they reflect what may be the world’s first town planning and incorporate what is almost certainly the world’s first urban sanitation system. The one and sometimes two-storied, flat-roofed houses were built of standardised high-quality bricks, each opening onto its own inner courtyard. Each had access to clean drinking water and had its own private bathroom. Clay pipes led from the bathroom to sewers located under the streets that drained into nearby rivers. Although some houses were larger than others, even the smallest had access to water and were linked to the central drainage system – suggesting that this was a largely egalitarian society without high concentrations of wealth belonging to a ruling elite. The whole arrangement, indeed, appears to have been more efficient, sanitary, and egalitarian than that found in some areas of modern-day Pakistan and India. In India today, for example, one of every three urban households has no private bathroom facility.
Unlike other civilizations of that era, there is no conclusive evidence of palaces or temples, kings or priests, or any of the pomp and ceremony usually associated with such institutions. Each city had its own grain storage facilities, religious centres, and presumably a very efficient administration. But there appears to have been no central administration for the civilization as a whole. Unlike contemporary Sumerians, Egyptians, and Minoans with their ziggurats, pyramids, and palaces, the Harappans built no monumental structures. Although they had the engineering skills, as the architecture of their dockyards and granaries attests, they left behind no towering monuments or epic ruins. The only thing massive about the Indus Valley cities was their walls, the purpose of which remains unclear. With no evidence of any military class or armed conflict, the walls may have been built more to divert flood waters than to dissuade potential enemies.
In the surrounding farmlands, a variety of grains, fruits, and vegetables were cultivated, and a number of animals, including water buffalo, were domesticated. The city dwellers were mostly artisans and traders. Skilled in pottery, weaving, and metal work, they left a profusion of sculpture, pottery, jewellery, metal seals, and detailed figurines in bronze and terracotta that remained buried until our time.
The economy depended significantly on trade, utilizing camels, elephants, and bullock carts for overland transport, and flat-bottomed boats for transport on their rivers and canals. More distant trade was conducted in plank-built vessels with a single mast supporting a sail of woven rushes or cloth. From a sophisticated docking facility at their city of Lothal, they navigated the Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, and Red Sea as far as the cities of Sumer and ancient Egypt. The importance of such trade is underlined by their development of a highly standardised decimal system of weights and measures, giving them great accuracy in measuring length, mass, and time.
What is undoubtedly most distinctive about Harappan culture is their use of engraved copper seals as religious amulets and perhaps for identifying property and shipments of goods. A treasure trove of these seals has been found at 80 different sites, including almost every room in the city of Mohenjo-daro. Most are square, no larger than a postage stamp, ranging in size from ½ - 2½ inches, and depict one or other of the Harappan deities as an animal, together with an inscribed message addressed to that god. The few that are rectangular in shape contain only an inscription.
The Harappan script inscribed on these seals, as well as that found on tablets, ceramic pots, and other materials, contains over 400 distinct and exquisitely tiny symbols – the earliest examples of which date from c. 3000 BCE. But because no one has yet been able to decipher these symbols – (more than 100 attempts have been made over recent decades) – it is difficult to draw conclusions about the Indus Valley worldview. Given the great many female figurines that have been found, it is widely thought that they worshipped a Mother Goddess symbolizing fertility. Some seals, however, show swastikas that are found in later religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, suggesting that elements of Hinduism were already present at this time. One famous seal shows a figure seated in a posture reminiscent of the Lotus position.
The little we do know about Harappan religious belief and practice is this:
• Religious traditions differed from one city to another, with worship of the Mother Goddess evident in many, but not in all. Many small statues have been unearthed that are thought by some archaeologists to be female goddesses.
• Many different deities, often represented by an animal, have been identified. Citizens of Lothal, for instance, seem to have worshipped both a sea goddess and a fire god – the latter represented on seals by a horned deity and evidenced by private and public fire-altars for animal sacrifice. Major deities include those represented by the water buffalo, short-horned bull, elephant, and ram. The Mother Goddess (perhaps called Kali) may have been represented by the ox, and the principal Harappan deity (Mal ?) by a unicorn.
• In early phases of the civilization, the Harappans buried their dead. Later, the dead were cremated and their ashes buried in urns in a manner alluded to in the Rigveda – the earliest Hindu scriptures, composed in this same region of northwest India between 1700 and 1100 BCE, following the disappearance of the Indus Valley civilization.
The decline of this great civilization remains as enigmatic as its script. By 1700 BCE, most of its cities were abandoned. Were they ravaged by conquest, washed away by floods, destroyed by drought, eroded by a declining trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, or all of the above? Or did its people just blend into other migrations that were settling the subcontinent? No one seems to know. In 1953, Sir Mortimer Wheeler proposed that it was destroyed by invading warriors from Central Asia called “Àryans”. Many scholars today believe that its collapse was associated with a drought linked to climate change. It seems that the Indus Valley climate grew significantly cooler and drier after 1800 BCE.
Whatever the reasons, and despite the damage done to these ancient sites by British colonials who used the cities’ bricks to build their railways, enough of this civilization still remains as testimony to its greatness. And its influence on later religious thought – Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain – is still felt in our world today.
Monday, December 27, 2010
The Sumerian Worldview
The Sumerian civilization was comprised of some twenty temple-centred city-states that arose during the 4th millennium BCE in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of present-day Baghdad. Although increasingly linked over the centuries by trade that took place along the canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia, each city was independently ruled by a priest-king and council of elders. By the end of the 4th millennium, several had populations exceeding 10,000, and the city of Uruk became the first in the world to surpass 50,000 inhabitants. Together they gave birth to the wheel, written language, mathematics (including geometry and algebra), astronomy, kiln-fired pottery, large-scale irrigation, monumental architecture, urban planning, the first codified legal system, epic literature, and the first schools that flourished under the auspices of the city-state’s primary temple.
These city-states, which had evolved from earlier Neolithic villages, continued to evolve over the 2000 years of Sumerian history. Each was surrounded by a belt of agricultural land that contained many small hamlets connected by a network of roads, canals, and irrigation ditches. Typically situated on a major waterway, each city was linked by a main canal to its own harbour. Divided into commercial, civic, and residential spaces, the residential areas were further divided according to the occupants’ work specialties and social status. Houses – about 90 square metres or 950 square feet in size – were designed so that rooms opened only onto a private inner courtyard, thereby maintaining a clear separation of public and private spaces.
At the centre of each city was a high temple around which the city had grown, and which itself had grown from a small one-room structure in Neolithic times into a successively larger and more elaborate complex that might occupy several acres. As cathedrals today give architectural expression to key components of the Christian worldview, with their high altars, cross-shaped nave and transepts, and steeples pointing heavenward, so these ancient temples gave expression to the Sumerian cosmology. The world was seen as a disc of land surrounded by a salt-water ocean which in turn floated on a primeval sea of fresh water. Above was a giant dome-shaped firmament within which the fixed motions of the heavenly bodies regulated time. Uniting this three-layered cosmos was the Cosmic Mountain or axis mundi, represented by the temple which was home to the patron god of the city and the place of meeting between gods and men. Doors along the long axis of the rectangular temple were entry points for the gods; doors along the short axis provided entry points for men. At the intersection of the two axes, at the centre of the temple, was a table for receiving offerings. Here one could turn 90 degrees to face a statue of the city’s patron god at the far end of the central hall.
The temple was initially built on a raised terrace of rammed earth, later on a higher platform of adobe brick, and still later on a much higher stepped pyramid or ziggurat (which may have inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel). This raised platform represented the primordial land that, in creation, had emerged from the underlying sea. On it the temple was oriented such that its four corners pointed in the cardinal directions of the compass, from whence four rivers flowed from the Cosmic Mountain to water the earth. The roof of the temple served as the observatory from which priestly astronomers kept track of the time. And, as the temple grew ever larger during the Dynastic Period (2900 – 2270 BCE), it became as well a storage and distribution centre for surplus food and the primary residence of the priests.
Not far away, the priestly governor (ensi) or king (lugal), together with his council of elders, kept court at the palace. Like the temple, it had grown during the Dynastic Period from modest beginnings into what became known as “the Big House”. At the same time, and not coincidentally, the cities themselves became walled. During earlier centuries, there had been no military class, little or no armed conflict, and no reason for a city to be walled. But from the start of the 3rd millennium BCE, the growing power of the temple-palace alliance brought with it increasing violence. Cities became walled, undefended villages disappeared, rulers vied with one another for power, and cities began to engage in siege warfare with each other as they sought to expand their territories. The city of Lagash annexed almost all of Sumer and introduced the use of terror as a means of reducing other city-states to tribute. The first historically recorded war took place between the cities of Lagash and Umma c. 2525 BCE. Lagash was later conquered by the priest-king of Umma who went on to claim an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He in turn was overthrown by Sargon of Akkad who absorbed all of Sumer and proceeded to establish the far-flung Akkadian Empire. Violence was now institutionalised. What began as a cooperative constellation of city-states had, in just a few centuries, surrendered to the imperial ambitions of one dynasty after another.
Accompanying this escalating violence was a worldview that supported it. While the relatively benign presence of the Great Mother was still a focus of Sumerian worship, the nature spirits of the earlier Paleolithic and Neolithic eras had now become more godlike forces of nature. By the 4th millennium BCE, they had morphed into individual deities within a pantheon of gods and goddesses. Although still associated with the forces of nature and immensely powerful, they were now human in form, had human qualities and foibles, and among themselves were unequal in status. Some of them became patron deities of particular cities that they ruled through their earthly representative – the priest-king of that city. It followed that the increasingly frequent and violent power struggles between cities should be seen as a contest between their associated deities.
Nammu, goddess of the primeval sea, may have been the earliest deity. Sometimes described as the mother of all gods, she gave birth to heaven and earth – specifically to her first-born, An, the god of heaven, and then to Ki (later known as Ninhursag), the goddess of earth. From their union in turn came Enlil, god of the air, who separated heaven and earth. An carried off heaven, while Enlil carried off his mother, earth, and with her proceeded to create man and the entire world of plants and animals. An ,the first male sky-god to appear in human history, was seriously concerned with power and served as supreme ruler and alpha-male of the pantheon, as well as the patron god of the city of Uruk – at least until Uruk was defeated by the city of Nippur, whereupon its own patron god, Enlil, replaced him as the supreme object of worship.
Each of these main players had specific functions. An was the power that gave being to all nature. Ninhursag governed wildlife and gave birth to kings. Enlil was god of the winds and of crop-growing weather. Of lesser rank, but significant nonetheless, were the sun god (Utu), the moon goddess (Nanna), and a host of male sky-gods who belonged to a kind of heavenly club known as the Anuna. There were deities for almost everything – for the other celestial bodies, for geographical features such as mountains and steppes, for important tools such as brick-moulds and ploughs, and for each of the crafts, as well as very personal gods who were served by individuals and households.
This pantheon of deities answered life’s most basic questions, How did we and the universe come into being? What is our place in the larger scheme of things? What drives the forces of nature, and what can we do to control them? It was the gods who brought all things into being and created humans from clay in order to serve them. “Worship your god every day,” reads the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom, “with prayer and sacrifice, accompanied by incense. Present your free-will offering to your god, for this is proper. Offer him prayer, supplication, and prostration daily, and you will get your reward. Then you will have full communion with your god. Reverence begets favour; sacrifice prolongs life; and prayer atones for guilt.” Beyond the demand that we serve them, however, the Sumerian gods seem not to have specified any code of behaviour such as we find later in the Jewish Torah. Nor was behaviour motivated by any promise of heavenly reward or eternal damnation. Men and women were on their own to decide issues of right and wrong, good and evil. And regardless of how they had lived, all were destined to descend after death into a gloomy Underworld where they could expect to spend eternity as a ghost.
The Underworld was ruled, at least from 2400 BCE, by Gilgamesh. Earlier in that millennium he had been king of the city of Uruk, around whom such legends had grown that he was later elevated to the status of a god and king of the Underworld. The myths and legends surrounding him are related in The Epic of Gilgamesh, told and retold by the Sumerians, and later by the Assyrians and Babylonians, over at least two thousand years. Although details of the story differ from one version to another, the main theme – coming to terms with the fact of our mortality – remains the same. Knowing that all men must die, a youthful and irrepressible Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu set out on a journey to accomplish a heroic deed (slay a mythical monster) and thereby achieve a kind of immortality. In the process, however, they insult the Great Mother who decrees Enkidu’s death and reduces Gilgamesh to resignation regarding his own mortality. Henceforth, because of his heroism in confronting death, he is made ruler of the Underworld and his blessing is invoked in Sumerian burial rites.
The same Gilgamesh narrative includes the story of the Flood and is almost certainly the source of the later Biblical account. According to the Sumerian version, the gods decided on a whim to destroy humankind with a flood. But Enki, patron god of the city of Eridu, was less than happy with the decision and told a man named Utnapishtim to build a very large boat in which to preserve himself, his family, and a host of animals. After six days and nights of riding out the flood, the boat grounded on Mount Nisir (in modern-day Iraq). After another seven days, three birds were released in succession. When the third one did not return, Utnapishtim knew the flood was over.
Alongside the growing pantheon of gods and goddesses, the Great Mother retained a central role in Sumerian mythology – worshipped as the goddess Inanna (“queen of heaven”) until the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, and thereafter as the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. An epic poem, The Exaltation of Inanna, described her as all-powerful and reigning in heaven. Associated with the life-giving powers of fertility and abundance, and hence not as war-mongering as many of her male counterparts, she was still far from domesticated. Sexual attraction is aroused in her presence, and she herself is described as sexually aggressive. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, her sexuality is excessive and downright dangerous when spurned.
In order to arouse sexual vigour and ensure the fertility of crops and animals within a city-state, the priest-king was ritually united with Inanna in a royal marriage ceremony. Over the course of two millennia, the marriage was celebrated at least once by the ruler of each major city. A vase found at Uruk illustrates the occasion there c. 3000 BCE. An inscription found at Lagash refers to the marriage being performed there c. 2250 BCE. And in ancient Babylon (c. 1700 BCE), the ritual was performed annually in association with a New Year festival. More than simply promoting fertility, it may have served as well to legitimise the king’s rule by placing him in a productive relationship with the Great Mother.
Gradually over the ensuing centuries, as Sumerian civilization disappeared under the onslaught of successive empires, the Great Mother was reinvented by the warring Father God worshippers. In some instances, the Mother Goddess became the wife or daughter of their chief god. Sometimes they got rid of the goddess altogether or demoted her to the status of a disobedient and trouble-making mortal woman. Pandora, whose name means “giver of all gifts,” was demoted into a mortal woman who brings only trouble into the world. And the Hebrews turned the Mother Goddess into Eve who, because of her disobedience and questioning of male authority, ended forever humanity’s place in Paradise. Needless to say, this masculinisation of the Mesopotamian worldview was the accompaniment not only of increasing violence and warfare, but of the subjugation of women over all ensuing millennia until the present time.
These city-states, which had evolved from earlier Neolithic villages, continued to evolve over the 2000 years of Sumerian history. Each was surrounded by a belt of agricultural land that contained many small hamlets connected by a network of roads, canals, and irrigation ditches. Typically situated on a major waterway, each city was linked by a main canal to its own harbour. Divided into commercial, civic, and residential spaces, the residential areas were further divided according to the occupants’ work specialties and social status. Houses – about 90 square metres or 950 square feet in size – were designed so that rooms opened only onto a private inner courtyard, thereby maintaining a clear separation of public and private spaces.
At the centre of each city was a high temple around which the city had grown, and which itself had grown from a small one-room structure in Neolithic times into a successively larger and more elaborate complex that might occupy several acres. As cathedrals today give architectural expression to key components of the Christian worldview, with their high altars, cross-shaped nave and transepts, and steeples pointing heavenward, so these ancient temples gave expression to the Sumerian cosmology. The world was seen as a disc of land surrounded by a salt-water ocean which in turn floated on a primeval sea of fresh water. Above was a giant dome-shaped firmament within which the fixed motions of the heavenly bodies regulated time. Uniting this three-layered cosmos was the Cosmic Mountain or axis mundi, represented by the temple which was home to the patron god of the city and the place of meeting between gods and men. Doors along the long axis of the rectangular temple were entry points for the gods; doors along the short axis provided entry points for men. At the intersection of the two axes, at the centre of the temple, was a table for receiving offerings. Here one could turn 90 degrees to face a statue of the city’s patron god at the far end of the central hall.
The temple was initially built on a raised terrace of rammed earth, later on a higher platform of adobe brick, and still later on a much higher stepped pyramid or ziggurat (which may have inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel). This raised platform represented the primordial land that, in creation, had emerged from the underlying sea. On it the temple was oriented such that its four corners pointed in the cardinal directions of the compass, from whence four rivers flowed from the Cosmic Mountain to water the earth. The roof of the temple served as the observatory from which priestly astronomers kept track of the time. And, as the temple grew ever larger during the Dynastic Period (2900 – 2270 BCE), it became as well a storage and distribution centre for surplus food and the primary residence of the priests.
Not far away, the priestly governor (ensi) or king (lugal), together with his council of elders, kept court at the palace. Like the temple, it had grown during the Dynastic Period from modest beginnings into what became known as “the Big House”. At the same time, and not coincidentally, the cities themselves became walled. During earlier centuries, there had been no military class, little or no armed conflict, and no reason for a city to be walled. But from the start of the 3rd millennium BCE, the growing power of the temple-palace alliance brought with it increasing violence. Cities became walled, undefended villages disappeared, rulers vied with one another for power, and cities began to engage in siege warfare with each other as they sought to expand their territories. The city of Lagash annexed almost all of Sumer and introduced the use of terror as a means of reducing other city-states to tribute. The first historically recorded war took place between the cities of Lagash and Umma c. 2525 BCE. Lagash was later conquered by the priest-king of Umma who went on to claim an empire stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He in turn was overthrown by Sargon of Akkad who absorbed all of Sumer and proceeded to establish the far-flung Akkadian Empire. Violence was now institutionalised. What began as a cooperative constellation of city-states had, in just a few centuries, surrendered to the imperial ambitions of one dynasty after another.
Accompanying this escalating violence was a worldview that supported it. While the relatively benign presence of the Great Mother was still a focus of Sumerian worship, the nature spirits of the earlier Paleolithic and Neolithic eras had now become more godlike forces of nature. By the 4th millennium BCE, they had morphed into individual deities within a pantheon of gods and goddesses. Although still associated with the forces of nature and immensely powerful, they were now human in form, had human qualities and foibles, and among themselves were unequal in status. Some of them became patron deities of particular cities that they ruled through their earthly representative – the priest-king of that city. It followed that the increasingly frequent and violent power struggles between cities should be seen as a contest between their associated deities.
Nammu, goddess of the primeval sea, may have been the earliest deity. Sometimes described as the mother of all gods, she gave birth to heaven and earth – specifically to her first-born, An, the god of heaven, and then to Ki (later known as Ninhursag), the goddess of earth. From their union in turn came Enlil, god of the air, who separated heaven and earth. An carried off heaven, while Enlil carried off his mother, earth, and with her proceeded to create man and the entire world of plants and animals. An ,the first male sky-god to appear in human history, was seriously concerned with power and served as supreme ruler and alpha-male of the pantheon, as well as the patron god of the city of Uruk – at least until Uruk was defeated by the city of Nippur, whereupon its own patron god, Enlil, replaced him as the supreme object of worship.
Each of these main players had specific functions. An was the power that gave being to all nature. Ninhursag governed wildlife and gave birth to kings. Enlil was god of the winds and of crop-growing weather. Of lesser rank, but significant nonetheless, were the sun god (Utu), the moon goddess (Nanna), and a host of male sky-gods who belonged to a kind of heavenly club known as the Anuna. There were deities for almost everything – for the other celestial bodies, for geographical features such as mountains and steppes, for important tools such as brick-moulds and ploughs, and for each of the crafts, as well as very personal gods who were served by individuals and households.
This pantheon of deities answered life’s most basic questions, How did we and the universe come into being? What is our place in the larger scheme of things? What drives the forces of nature, and what can we do to control them? It was the gods who brought all things into being and created humans from clay in order to serve them. “Worship your god every day,” reads the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom, “with prayer and sacrifice, accompanied by incense. Present your free-will offering to your god, for this is proper. Offer him prayer, supplication, and prostration daily, and you will get your reward. Then you will have full communion with your god. Reverence begets favour; sacrifice prolongs life; and prayer atones for guilt.” Beyond the demand that we serve them, however, the Sumerian gods seem not to have specified any code of behaviour such as we find later in the Jewish Torah. Nor was behaviour motivated by any promise of heavenly reward or eternal damnation. Men and women were on their own to decide issues of right and wrong, good and evil. And regardless of how they had lived, all were destined to descend after death into a gloomy Underworld where they could expect to spend eternity as a ghost.
The Underworld was ruled, at least from 2400 BCE, by Gilgamesh. Earlier in that millennium he had been king of the city of Uruk, around whom such legends had grown that he was later elevated to the status of a god and king of the Underworld. The myths and legends surrounding him are related in The Epic of Gilgamesh, told and retold by the Sumerians, and later by the Assyrians and Babylonians, over at least two thousand years. Although details of the story differ from one version to another, the main theme – coming to terms with the fact of our mortality – remains the same. Knowing that all men must die, a youthful and irrepressible Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu set out on a journey to accomplish a heroic deed (slay a mythical monster) and thereby achieve a kind of immortality. In the process, however, they insult the Great Mother who decrees Enkidu’s death and reduces Gilgamesh to resignation regarding his own mortality. Henceforth, because of his heroism in confronting death, he is made ruler of the Underworld and his blessing is invoked in Sumerian burial rites.
The same Gilgamesh narrative includes the story of the Flood and is almost certainly the source of the later Biblical account. According to the Sumerian version, the gods decided on a whim to destroy humankind with a flood. But Enki, patron god of the city of Eridu, was less than happy with the decision and told a man named Utnapishtim to build a very large boat in which to preserve himself, his family, and a host of animals. After six days and nights of riding out the flood, the boat grounded on Mount Nisir (in modern-day Iraq). After another seven days, three birds were released in succession. When the third one did not return, Utnapishtim knew the flood was over.
Alongside the growing pantheon of gods and goddesses, the Great Mother retained a central role in Sumerian mythology – worshipped as the goddess Inanna (“queen of heaven”) until the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, and thereafter as the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. An epic poem, The Exaltation of Inanna, described her as all-powerful and reigning in heaven. Associated with the life-giving powers of fertility and abundance, and hence not as war-mongering as many of her male counterparts, she was still far from domesticated. Sexual attraction is aroused in her presence, and she herself is described as sexually aggressive. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, her sexuality is excessive and downright dangerous when spurned.
In order to arouse sexual vigour and ensure the fertility of crops and animals within a city-state, the priest-king was ritually united with Inanna in a royal marriage ceremony. Over the course of two millennia, the marriage was celebrated at least once by the ruler of each major city. A vase found at Uruk illustrates the occasion there c. 3000 BCE. An inscription found at Lagash refers to the marriage being performed there c. 2250 BCE. And in ancient Babylon (c. 1700 BCE), the ritual was performed annually in association with a New Year festival. More than simply promoting fertility, it may have served as well to legitimise the king’s rule by placing him in a productive relationship with the Great Mother.
Gradually over the ensuing centuries, as Sumerian civilization disappeared under the onslaught of successive empires, the Great Mother was reinvented by the warring Father God worshippers. In some instances, the Mother Goddess became the wife or daughter of their chief god. Sometimes they got rid of the goddess altogether or demoted her to the status of a disobedient and trouble-making mortal woman. Pandora, whose name means “giver of all gifts,” was demoted into a mortal woman who brings only trouble into the world. And the Hebrews turned the Mother Goddess into Eve who, because of her disobedience and questioning of male authority, ended forever humanity’s place in Paradise. Needless to say, this masculinisation of the Mesopotamian worldview was the accompaniment not only of increasing violence and warfare, but of the subjugation of women over all ensuing millennia until the present time.
Monday, December 13, 2010
The Age of Civilizations and Empires
Civilization began with the emergence of cities and city-states. The word itself comes from the Latin civis, which means one who lives in a city. So a civilization is a constellation of cities that occupy a given geographical area, share a common language and culture, engage cooperatively in the production and importation of food and other life necessities, and create organisational structures that ensure a continuity of government and social order.
Around the start of the 4th millennium BCE, the city-states of Mesopotamia, located in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, began coming together to form the first of the great Bronze Age civilizations. Many of these cities, such as Eridu (perhaps the oldest city in the world) and Ur (just 12 kilometres northeast of Eridu), each of which housed as many as 10,000 residents, grew up almost in sight of one another. Populated by the same Sumerian people, sharing the same language and culture, and increasingly linked by trade, it was virtually inevitable that these cities should come together as the Sumerian civilization.
The same process soon followed in other regions of what was now becoming the civilised world. Cities in the Indus River Valley came together in the mid-4th millennium BCE to form the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. It flourished until c. 1800 BCE in what is now Pakistan, north-western India, and south-eastern Afghanistan. At about the same time, from c. 3600 BCE, settlements along the Nile River began to grow and advance rapidly towards civilization. What had previously been autonomous towns and villages were united first into the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and then (c. 3150 BCE) unified under the great dynasties of the Egyptian civilization. Meanwhile, on the nearby Mediterranean island of Crete, migrants from Anatolia and/or the Levant had settled in agricultural villages from c. 7000 BCE. As elsewhere, some of these grew into palatial cities that later (from c. 2700 BCE) comprised the Minoan civilization. This in turn was eclipsed by yet another civilization, the Mycenaean, which had emerged from city-states on the mainland of Greece c. 1600 BCE.
These five – the Sumerian, Harappan, Egyptian, Minoan, and Mycenaean – were the great Bronze Age civilizations that marked the beginning of our collective adolescence. They were born in the 4th millennium and had all expired before the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. As is typical of early adolescence, it was a period marked by a new flowering of the human mind and the first purely mental productions of the human race (e.g. writing, the alphabet, the calendar, mathematics, astronomy, etc.). It was also a time of escalating adolescent hubris during which these civilizations and succeeding empires became intoxicated with their expansionist dreams and whatever mayhem was required to realise them. Indeed, it was precisely this escalating violence and mayhem that contributed to the demise of each of these civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, in what historians call the Bronze Age Collapse.
There is no neat dividing line between a civilization and am empire. The former, as we have noted, is a complex agricultural and urban culture comprised of a regionally-defined constellation of city-states that share a common language, governmental structure, and sense of identity. An empire, on the other hand, is a geographically extensive group of states, united and ruled by a king or emperor who exercises military and political dominion over populations that are culturally and ethnically distinct from that of the ruling state. In their later stages, each of the Bronze Age civilizations either morphed into a more expansive empire itself or was conquered by some other expanding empire.
The city-states that had flourished as the Sumerian civilization from the start of the 4th millennium BCE were conquered by Sargon of Akkad (now the city of Fallujah in Iraq), c. 2250 BCE, to form the combined empire of Akkad and Sumer – often regarded as the first-ever empire. Having whetted his imperial appetite, Sargon went on to extend his empire as far west as modern-day Syria, Israel, and Turkey, and as far south as Oman. Within 100 years, however, the Akkadian empire itself had collapsed, to be succeeded by a brief Sumerian renaissance before the city of Ur was finally sacked and Sumer came under Amorite rule. That was the end of Sumerian civilization. From the start of the 2nd millennium BCE, Mesopotamia was dominated by successive empires – Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian. The latter was the largest in ancient history and spanned three continents – Asia, Africa, and Europe – before it too fell to yet another Conquering Hero: Alexander the Great.
Meanwhile, the Indus Valley civilization was similarly coming unstuck. By 1700 BCE, most of its great cities – (more than 1000 have so far been excavated) – had been abandoned. The reasons are unclear. Climate change seems to have triggered a severe decades-long drought at about that time. A decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia may have been another factor. But invading hordes of barbarian horsemen from the north – Indo-European tribes from Central Asia known as Aryans – almost certainly put the final nail in this civilization’s coffin.
The heyday of Egyptian civilization was also succumbing to its own and others’ imperial ambitions. The stability that had characterised this great civilization since the middle of the 4th millennium BCE began to unravel when its own expansionist dreams brought it into conflict with the Hittite Empire for control of Syria and Palestine. The largest chariot battle ever fought reached an indecisive but costly conclusion when, in 1274 BCE, the Hittites caught the forces of Ramesses II at Kadesh in Syria in history’s first recorded military ambush. Some 50 years later, his successor, Ramesses III, managed to defeat an invading confederacy of sea raiders (known as the “Sea Peoples”) in two great land-and-sea battles. But the heavy cost of such battles exhausted Egypt’s treasury. The death of Ramesses III in 1155 BCE marked the beginning of the end for Egypt. Some unknown environmental disaster (perhaps the eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland) dimmed the sun’s light and seriously arrested the growth of global vegetation for almost two decades. Then a combination of droughts, famine, civil unrest, official corruption, and endless bickering among Ramesses III’s heirs precipitated a more total collapse. In subsequent centuries a now-humbled Egypt was intermittently harassed and controlled by Libyans, Assyrians, Greeks, and Persians, before its ultimate conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and its annexation as a Roman colony in 30 BCE.
Unlike its sister civilizations, the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete never succumbed to imperial temptations. Primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade, they seemed content to lead a peaceful life with no expansionist ambitions. There is no evidence for a Minoan army or for their domination of any peoples outside Crete. In sharp contrast to their warmongering contemporaries, warfare does not appear in their art – and when weapons are depicted, it is only in ritual contexts. Significantly, the Minoan cosmology was never invaded by the warring male sky-gods, and the Mother Goddess remained at the centre of their essentially matriarchal religion. Such a pacific way of life, however, was no guarantee against calamity and war. The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history took place c. 1600 BCE on the Mediterranean island of Thera (now Santorini), devastating Minoan coastal settlements and inspiring Plato’s story of the lost island of Atlantis. Still another natural catastrophe, perhaps an earthquake or another eruption of Thera, further weakened Minoa and made it ripe for invasion. In any case, c. 1400 BCE, the Mycenaean Greeks did just that. They destroyed much of the island, occupied the Minoan palaces, and effectively brought Minoan civilization to an end.
Of all the Bronze Age civilizations, the Mycenaean was by far the most militant and short-lived. Emerging c. 1600 BCE among the cities of mainland Greece, it quickly became more an empire than a civilization, extending its reach to Crete, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy. Its swords and other artefacts have been found as far away as Germany and the Caucasus. Unlike the Minoans, Mycenaean society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy who advanced their interests through conquest. It is the setting of much ancient Greek literature, including the epics of Homer who, in the Iliad, recounts the probably legendary tale of the Mycenaean defeat of Troy in the Trojan War. No single explanation fits the archaeological evidence for the collapse of this warring civilization. Climate change, environmental catastrophe, invasion by the Dorians or the Sea Peoples, or the more widespread availability of iron weapons – all these may have contributed to its demise. The fact is that, from 1200 BCE, its palace centres and outlying settlements were being abandoned or destroyed, and within a hundred years any recognisable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared.
So ended the 3000-year Age of Civilizations! By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, all of these great Bronze Age civilizations had fallen prey, either to natural calamities, invading barbarians, or conquest by expansionist empires. Their legacy, however, continues to the present day, as certain of their defining characteristics continue to shape the civilised world.
One of these is the necessity of trade. Civilizations depend on the export-import of food and other essentials between their cities and other more distant regions. This requires long-distance trade relationships and the development of transportation systems to service them. So ox-drawn, and later horse-drawn carts, are found from early in the 4th millennium BCE. The world’s oldest known roadway, the Sweet Track in England, dates from the same time, as does the construction of more sophisticated sailing vessels. Trade also required the invention of money to replace the previous barter system – (the Sumerians began using silver bars and the Egyptians gold bars as a medium of exchange almost from the beginning) – and the invention of writing (Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics) c. 3200 BCE in order to keep accounts. The accumulation of money soon became synonymous with power, and eventually necessitated the introduction of legal codes (e.g. the Sumerian Code of Ur in 2050 BCE and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi in 1760 BCE) to regulate business practices and the ownership of private property. All of which of course have been enormously elaborated over the centuries ever since.
Another defining characteristic involves an increasingly complex division of labour, the accumulation of wealth, private property, and class stratification based on ownership and control of production. These, together with the centralising of government in the person and court of a priest-king, led quickly to the emergence of a privileged ruling class and a complementary religious or priestly class. Overlapping networks of political, religious, economic, and military power differentially benefited these privileged groups by exploiting the mass of peasant producers, via taxation and slavery, and funneling resources and power from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy. The common thread is control. A small group of people, the ruling and priestly class, controls the mass of people through the institutions of civilization.
In this respect, not a great deal has changed over the centuries. A wealthy and powerful elite continues to control production, buy elections, manipulate governments, run the military-industrial complex, and manage the media. In this they are sanctioned by the religious establishment, supported by an educational system that selects who will and will not have access to high-status jobs, and protected against the threat of rebellion by contemporary versions of the ancient Coliseum that keep the masses entertained.
Two other defining characteristics are worth noting. One is institutionalized warfare and the magnification of military power. The other is the building of monumental tombs and ceremonial centres. The former, born in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE and growing in its killing power ever since, has, within the last 100 years, gone virtually out of control. Any restraints are gone. Wars are fought over ideas as much as over territory and resources, and the wholesale destruction of entire populations has become commonplace. The latter, whether the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the pyramids of Egypt or the monumental palaces of Minoa, like the contemporary skyscrapers of New York or Dubai or Toronto, seem to express a kind of adolescent “I’m-the-biggest-I’m-the-best” defiance of death and a reaching for immortality.
The Age of Civilizations and Empires is scarcely over, and its legacy is evident everywhere around us. The great empires that dominated Europe until recently – the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian – finally collapsed only in the chaos of World War I. The Empire of Japan’s divine mission to rule the world ended only in the radioactive fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the last great empire – the British – was ultimately subdued only as recently as 1947 by the diminutive figure of Mohandas Ghandi.
Is it possible that we might finally be emerging from our collective adolescence? As we move towards a global community, could humanity be moving to a new level of maturity? If so, can we make that transition before some catastrophic clash of ideologies and worldviews brings the entire human experiment to an end? I think so. At least, that remains my hope and my contention.
Around the start of the 4th millennium BCE, the city-states of Mesopotamia, located in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, began coming together to form the first of the great Bronze Age civilizations. Many of these cities, such as Eridu (perhaps the oldest city in the world) and Ur (just 12 kilometres northeast of Eridu), each of which housed as many as 10,000 residents, grew up almost in sight of one another. Populated by the same Sumerian people, sharing the same language and culture, and increasingly linked by trade, it was virtually inevitable that these cities should come together as the Sumerian civilization.
The same process soon followed in other regions of what was now becoming the civilised world. Cities in the Indus River Valley came together in the mid-4th millennium BCE to form the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. It flourished until c. 1800 BCE in what is now Pakistan, north-western India, and south-eastern Afghanistan. At about the same time, from c. 3600 BCE, settlements along the Nile River began to grow and advance rapidly towards civilization. What had previously been autonomous towns and villages were united first into the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and then (c. 3150 BCE) unified under the great dynasties of the Egyptian civilization. Meanwhile, on the nearby Mediterranean island of Crete, migrants from Anatolia and/or the Levant had settled in agricultural villages from c. 7000 BCE. As elsewhere, some of these grew into palatial cities that later (from c. 2700 BCE) comprised the Minoan civilization. This in turn was eclipsed by yet another civilization, the Mycenaean, which had emerged from city-states on the mainland of Greece c. 1600 BCE.
These five – the Sumerian, Harappan, Egyptian, Minoan, and Mycenaean – were the great Bronze Age civilizations that marked the beginning of our collective adolescence. They were born in the 4th millennium and had all expired before the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. As is typical of early adolescence, it was a period marked by a new flowering of the human mind and the first purely mental productions of the human race (e.g. writing, the alphabet, the calendar, mathematics, astronomy, etc.). It was also a time of escalating adolescent hubris during which these civilizations and succeeding empires became intoxicated with their expansionist dreams and whatever mayhem was required to realise them. Indeed, it was precisely this escalating violence and mayhem that contributed to the demise of each of these civilizations, all within a few centuries of each other, in what historians call the Bronze Age Collapse.
There is no neat dividing line between a civilization and am empire. The former, as we have noted, is a complex agricultural and urban culture comprised of a regionally-defined constellation of city-states that share a common language, governmental structure, and sense of identity. An empire, on the other hand, is a geographically extensive group of states, united and ruled by a king or emperor who exercises military and political dominion over populations that are culturally and ethnically distinct from that of the ruling state. In their later stages, each of the Bronze Age civilizations either morphed into a more expansive empire itself or was conquered by some other expanding empire.
The city-states that had flourished as the Sumerian civilization from the start of the 4th millennium BCE were conquered by Sargon of Akkad (now the city of Fallujah in Iraq), c. 2250 BCE, to form the combined empire of Akkad and Sumer – often regarded as the first-ever empire. Having whetted his imperial appetite, Sargon went on to extend his empire as far west as modern-day Syria, Israel, and Turkey, and as far south as Oman. Within 100 years, however, the Akkadian empire itself had collapsed, to be succeeded by a brief Sumerian renaissance before the city of Ur was finally sacked and Sumer came under Amorite rule. That was the end of Sumerian civilization. From the start of the 2nd millennium BCE, Mesopotamia was dominated by successive empires – Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian. The latter was the largest in ancient history and spanned three continents – Asia, Africa, and Europe – before it too fell to yet another Conquering Hero: Alexander the Great.
Meanwhile, the Indus Valley civilization was similarly coming unstuck. By 1700 BCE, most of its great cities – (more than 1000 have so far been excavated) – had been abandoned. The reasons are unclear. Climate change seems to have triggered a severe decades-long drought at about that time. A decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia may have been another factor. But invading hordes of barbarian horsemen from the north – Indo-European tribes from Central Asia known as Aryans – almost certainly put the final nail in this civilization’s coffin.
The heyday of Egyptian civilization was also succumbing to its own and others’ imperial ambitions. The stability that had characterised this great civilization since the middle of the 4th millennium BCE began to unravel when its own expansionist dreams brought it into conflict with the Hittite Empire for control of Syria and Palestine. The largest chariot battle ever fought reached an indecisive but costly conclusion when, in 1274 BCE, the Hittites caught the forces of Ramesses II at Kadesh in Syria in history’s first recorded military ambush. Some 50 years later, his successor, Ramesses III, managed to defeat an invading confederacy of sea raiders (known as the “Sea Peoples”) in two great land-and-sea battles. But the heavy cost of such battles exhausted Egypt’s treasury. The death of Ramesses III in 1155 BCE marked the beginning of the end for Egypt. Some unknown environmental disaster (perhaps the eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland) dimmed the sun’s light and seriously arrested the growth of global vegetation for almost two decades. Then a combination of droughts, famine, civil unrest, official corruption, and endless bickering among Ramesses III’s heirs precipitated a more total collapse. In subsequent centuries a now-humbled Egypt was intermittently harassed and controlled by Libyans, Assyrians, Greeks, and Persians, before its ultimate conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and its annexation as a Roman colony in 30 BCE.
Unlike its sister civilizations, the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete never succumbed to imperial temptations. Primarily a mercantile people engaged in overseas trade, they seemed content to lead a peaceful life with no expansionist ambitions. There is no evidence for a Minoan army or for their domination of any peoples outside Crete. In sharp contrast to their warmongering contemporaries, warfare does not appear in their art – and when weapons are depicted, it is only in ritual contexts. Significantly, the Minoan cosmology was never invaded by the warring male sky-gods, and the Mother Goddess remained at the centre of their essentially matriarchal religion. Such a pacific way of life, however, was no guarantee against calamity and war. The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history took place c. 1600 BCE on the Mediterranean island of Thera (now Santorini), devastating Minoan coastal settlements and inspiring Plato’s story of the lost island of Atlantis. Still another natural catastrophe, perhaps an earthquake or another eruption of Thera, further weakened Minoa and made it ripe for invasion. In any case, c. 1400 BCE, the Mycenaean Greeks did just that. They destroyed much of the island, occupied the Minoan palaces, and effectively brought Minoan civilization to an end.
Of all the Bronze Age civilizations, the Mycenaean was by far the most militant and short-lived. Emerging c. 1600 BCE among the cities of mainland Greece, it quickly became more an empire than a civilization, extending its reach to Crete, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy. Its swords and other artefacts have been found as far away as Germany and the Caucasus. Unlike the Minoans, Mycenaean society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy who advanced their interests through conquest. It is the setting of much ancient Greek literature, including the epics of Homer who, in the Iliad, recounts the probably legendary tale of the Mycenaean defeat of Troy in the Trojan War. No single explanation fits the archaeological evidence for the collapse of this warring civilization. Climate change, environmental catastrophe, invasion by the Dorians or the Sea Peoples, or the more widespread availability of iron weapons – all these may have contributed to its demise. The fact is that, from 1200 BCE, its palace centres and outlying settlements were being abandoned or destroyed, and within a hundred years any recognisable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared.
So ended the 3000-year Age of Civilizations! By the end of the 2nd millennium BCE, all of these great Bronze Age civilizations had fallen prey, either to natural calamities, invading barbarians, or conquest by expansionist empires. Their legacy, however, continues to the present day, as certain of their defining characteristics continue to shape the civilised world.
One of these is the necessity of trade. Civilizations depend on the export-import of food and other essentials between their cities and other more distant regions. This requires long-distance trade relationships and the development of transportation systems to service them. So ox-drawn, and later horse-drawn carts, are found from early in the 4th millennium BCE. The world’s oldest known roadway, the Sweet Track in England, dates from the same time, as does the construction of more sophisticated sailing vessels. Trade also required the invention of money to replace the previous barter system – (the Sumerians began using silver bars and the Egyptians gold bars as a medium of exchange almost from the beginning) – and the invention of writing (Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics) c. 3200 BCE in order to keep accounts. The accumulation of money soon became synonymous with power, and eventually necessitated the introduction of legal codes (e.g. the Sumerian Code of Ur in 2050 BCE and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi in 1760 BCE) to regulate business practices and the ownership of private property. All of which of course have been enormously elaborated over the centuries ever since.
Another defining characteristic involves an increasingly complex division of labour, the accumulation of wealth, private property, and class stratification based on ownership and control of production. These, together with the centralising of government in the person and court of a priest-king, led quickly to the emergence of a privileged ruling class and a complementary religious or priestly class. Overlapping networks of political, religious, economic, and military power differentially benefited these privileged groups by exploiting the mass of peasant producers, via taxation and slavery, and funneling resources and power from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy. The common thread is control. A small group of people, the ruling and priestly class, controls the mass of people through the institutions of civilization.
In this respect, not a great deal has changed over the centuries. A wealthy and powerful elite continues to control production, buy elections, manipulate governments, run the military-industrial complex, and manage the media. In this they are sanctioned by the religious establishment, supported by an educational system that selects who will and will not have access to high-status jobs, and protected against the threat of rebellion by contemporary versions of the ancient Coliseum that keep the masses entertained.
Two other defining characteristics are worth noting. One is institutionalized warfare and the magnification of military power. The other is the building of monumental tombs and ceremonial centres. The former, born in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BCE and growing in its killing power ever since, has, within the last 100 years, gone virtually out of control. Any restraints are gone. Wars are fought over ideas as much as over territory and resources, and the wholesale destruction of entire populations has become commonplace. The latter, whether the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or the pyramids of Egypt or the monumental palaces of Minoa, like the contemporary skyscrapers of New York or Dubai or Toronto, seem to express a kind of adolescent “I’m-the-biggest-I’m-the-best” defiance of death and a reaching for immortality.
The Age of Civilizations and Empires is scarcely over, and its legacy is evident everywhere around us. The great empires that dominated Europe until recently – the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian – finally collapsed only in the chaos of World War I. The Empire of Japan’s divine mission to rule the world ended only in the radioactive fires of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the last great empire – the British – was ultimately subdued only as recently as 1947 by the diminutive figure of Mohandas Ghandi.
Is it possible that we might finally be emerging from our collective adolescence? As we move towards a global community, could humanity be moving to a new level of maturity? If so, can we make that transition before some catastrophic clash of ideologies and worldviews brings the entire human experiment to an end? I think so. At least, that remains my hope and my contention.
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