2.2. Literate Bicameral Theocracies
What is writing? Writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events. And that is an amazing transformation! Writing of the latter type, as on the present page, is meant to tell a reader something he does not know. But, the closer writing is to the former, the more it is primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader already has. The protoliterate pictograms of Uruk, the iconography in the early depictions of gods, the glyphics of the Maya, the picture codices of the Aztecs, and, indeed, our own heraldry are all of this sort. The informations they are meant to release in those who look upon them may be forever lost and the writing therefore forever untranslatable.
The two kinds of writing which fall between these two extremes, half picture and half symbol, are those on which this chapter is based. They are Egyptian hieroglyphics with its abridged and somewhat cursive form, hieratic, the terms meaning “writing of the gods,” and the more widely used writing which later scholars called cuneiform from its wedge-shaped characters.
The latter is for us the most important, and the remains we have of it, far more extensive. Thousands of tablets wait to be translated and more thousands to be unburied. It was used for at least four languages, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and later the Hittite. Instead of an alphabet of twenty-six letters, as in ours, or of twenty-two letters, as in the Aramaic (which except for religious texts replaced cuneiform around 200 B.C.) , it is a clumsy and ambiguous communication system of over 600 signs. Many of these are ideographic, in which the same sign can be a syllable, an idea, a name, or a word with more than one meaning, according to the class it belonged to, this class irregularly being shown by a special mark. Only by the context are we able to unravel which it is. For example, the sign different things: when pronounced as samsu it means sun; when pronounced ?mu, it means day; when pisu it means white; and it also stands for the syllables ud, tu, tam, pir, lah, and his. The difficulties of being crystal clear in such a contextual mess were great enough in its own day. But when we are exiled from the culture that the language describes by 4000 years, translation is an enormous and fascinating problem. The same is true in general for hieroglyphic and hieratic writing.
When the terms are concrete, as they usually are, for most of the cuneiform literature is receipts or inventories or offerings for gods, there is little doubt of the correctness of translation. But as the terms tend to the abstract, and particularly when a psychological interpretation is possible, then we find well-meaning translators imposing modern categories to make their translations comprehensible. The popular and even the scholarly literatures are full of such sugared emendations and palatablized glosses to make ancient men seem like us, or at least talk like the King James Bible. A translator often reads in more than he reads out. Many of those texts that seem to be about decision-making, or so-called proverbs, or epics, or teachings, should be reinterpreted with concrete behavioral precision if we are to trust them as data for the psycho-archaeology of man. And I am warning the reader that the effect of this chapter is not in accord with popular books on the subject.
With these cautions in mind, then, let us proceed.
When, in the third millennium B.C., writing, like a theater curtain going up on these dazzling civilizations, lets us stare directly if imperfectly at them, it is clear that for some time there have been two main forms of theocracy: (1) the steward-king theocracy in which the chief or king is the first deputy of the gods, or, more usually, a particular city’s god, the manager and caretaker of his lands. This was the most important and widespread form of theocracy among bicameral kingdoms. It was the pattern in the many Mesopotamian bicameral city-states, of Mycenae as we saw in I.3, and, so far as we know, in India, China, and probably Mesoamerica. (2) the god-king theocracy in which the king himself is a god. The clearest examples of this form existed in Egypt and at least some of the kingdoms of the Andes, and probably the earliest kingdom of Japan. I have earlier suggested in I.6 that both types developed out of the more primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king.
I shall take these up in turn in the two greatest ancient civilizations.
MESOPOTAMIA: THE GODS AS OWNERS
Throughout Mesopotamia, from the earliest times of Sumer and Akkad, all lands were owned by gods and men were their slaves. Of this, the cuneiform texts leave no doubt whatever.1 Each citystate had its own principal god, and the king was described in the very earliest written documents that we have as “the tenant farmer of the god.”
The god himself was a statue. The statue was not of a god (as we would say) but the god himself. He had his own house, called by the Sumerians the “great house.” It formed the center of a complex of temple buildings, varying in size according to the importance of the god and the wealth of the city. The god was probably made of wood to be light enough to be carried about on the shoulders of priests. His face was inlaid with precious metals and jewels. He was clothed in dazzling raiment, and usually resided on a pedestal in a niche in a central chamber of his house. The larger and more important god-houses had lesser courts surrounded by rooms for the use of the steward-kings and subsidiary priests.
In most of the great city sites excavated in Mesopotamia, the house of a chief god was the ziggurat, a great rectangular tower, rising by diminishing stages to a shining summit on which there was a chapel. In the center of the ziggurat was the gigunu, a large chamber in which most scholars believe the statue of the chief god resided, but which others believe was used only for ritual purposes. Such ziggurats or similar towering temple structures are common to most of the bicameral kingdoms in some period.
Since the divine statue was the owner of the land and the people were his tenants, the first duty of the steward-king was to serve the god not only in the administration of the god’s estates but also in more personal ways. The gods, according to cuneiform texts, liked eating and drinking, music and dancing; they required beds to sleep in and for enjoying sex with other godstatues on connubial visits from time to time; they had to be washed and dressed, and appeased with pleasant odors; they had to be taken out for drives on state occasions; and all these things were done with increasing ceremony and ritual as time went on.
The daily ritual of the temple included the washing, dressing, and feeding of the statues. The washing was probably done through the sprinkling of pure water by attendant priests, the origin, perhaps, of our christening and anointing ceremonies. The dressing was by enrobing the figure in various ways. In front of the god were tables, the origin of our altars, on one of which flowers were placed, and on the other food and drink for the divine hunger. Such food consisted of bread and cakes, the flesh of bulls, sheep, goats, deer, fish, and poultry. According to some interpretations of the cuneiform, the food was brought in and then the statue-god was left to enjoy his meal alone. Then, after a suitable period of time, the steward-king entered the shrine room from a side entrance and ate what the god had left.
The divine statues also had to be kept in good temper. This was called “appeasing the liver” of the gods, and consisted in offerings of butter, fat, honey, sweetmeats placed on the tables as with regular food. Presumably, a person whose bicameral voice was condemnatory and angry would come bringing such offerings to the god’s house.
How is all this possible, continuing as it did in some form for thousands of years as the central focus of life, unless we posit that the human beings heard the statues speak to them even as the heroes of the Iliad heard their gods or Joan of Arc heard hers? And indeed had to hear them speak to know what to do.
We can read this directly in the texts themselves. The great Cylinder B of Gudea (about 2100 B.C.) describes how in a new temple for his god Ningirsu, the priestesses placed
. . . the goddesses Zazaru, Impae, Urentaea, Khegirnunna, Kheshagga, Guurmu, Zaarmu, who are the seven children of the brood of Bau that were begotten by the lord Ningirsu, to utter favorable decisions by the side of the lord Ningirsu.2
The particular decisions to be uttered here were about various aspects of agriculture that the grain might “cover the banks of the holy field” and “all the rich graineries of Lagash to make to overflow.” And a clay cone from the dynasty of Larsa about 1700 B.C. praises the goddess Ninegal as
. . . counsellor, exceeding wise commander, princess of all the great gods, exalted speaker, whose utterance is unrivaled.3
Everywhere in these texts, it is the speech of gods who decide what is to be done. A cone from Lagash reads:
Mesilin king of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the plantation of that field set up a stele in that place. Ush, patesi of Umma, incantations to seize it formed; that stele he broke in pieces; into the plain of Lagash he advanced. Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil, by his righteous command, upon Umma war made. At the command of Enlil his great net ensnared. Their burial mound on the plain in that place he erected.4
It is not the human beings who are the rulers, but the hallucinated voices of the gods Kadi, Ningirsu, and Enlil. Note that this passage is about a stele, or stone column, engraved with a god’s words in cuneiform and set up in a field to tell how that field was to be farmed. That such stelae themselves were epiphanous is suggested by the way they were attacked and defended and smashed or carried away. And that they were sources of auditory hallucinations is suggested in other texts. One particularly pertinent passage from a different context describes reading a stele at night:
The polished surface of its side his hearing makes known; its writing which is engraved his hearing makes known; the light of the torch assists his hearing?
Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
The word for ‘hearing’ here is a Sumerian sign that transliterates GIŠ-TUG-PI. Many other royal inscriptions state how the king or other personage is endowed by some god with this GI?-TUG-PI hearing which enables him to great things. Even as late as 1825 B.C., Warad-Sin, king of Larsa, claims in an inscription on a clay cone that he rebuilt the city with GIŠ-TUG-PI DAGAL, or “hearing everywhere” his god Enki.6
The Mouth-Washing Ceremonies
Further evidence that such statues were aids to the hallucinated voices is found in other ceremonies all described precisely and concretely on cuneiform tablets. The statue-gods were made in the bit-mummu, a special divine craftsman’s house. Even the craftsmen were directed in their work by a craftsman-god, Mummuy who ‘dictated’ how to make the statue. Before being installed in their shrines, the statues underwent mis-pi which means mouth-washing, and the ritual of pit-pi or “opening of the mouth.”
Not only when the statue was being made, but also periodically, particularly in the later bicameral era when the hallucinated voices may have become less frequent, an elaborate washing-of-the-mouth ceremony could renew the god’s speech. The god with its face of inlaid jewels was carried by dripping torchlight to the riverbank, and there, imbedded in ceremonies and incantation, his wood mouth washed several times as the god was faced east, west, north, and then south. The holy water with which the mouth was washed out was a solution of a multitude of exotic ingredients: tamarisks, reeds of various kinds, sulphur, various gums, salts, and oils, date honey, with various precious stones. Then after more incantations, the god was “led by the hand” back into the street with the priest incanting “foot that advanceth, foot that advanceth . . At the gate of the temple, another ceremony was performed. The priest then took “the hand” of the god and led him in to his throne in the niche, where a golden canopy was set up and the statue’s mouth washed again.7
Bicameral kingdoms should not be thought of as everywhere the same or as not undergoing considerable development through time. The texts from which the above information has come are from approximately the late third millennium B.C. They may therefore represent a late development of bicamerality in which the very complexity of the culture could have been making the hallucinated voices less clear and frequent, thus giving rise to such a cleansing ritual in hope of rejuvenating the voice of the god.
The Personal God
But it is not to be supposed that the ordinary citizen heard directly the voices of the great gods who owned the cities; such hallucinatory diversity would have weakened the political fabric. He served the owner gods, worked their estates, took part in their festivals. But he appealed to them only in some great crisis, and then only through intermediaries. This is shown on countless cylinder seals. A large proportion of the inventory type of cuneiform tablets have impressions on the reverse side rolled from such seals; commonly, they show a seated god and another minor divinity, usually a goddess, conducting the owner of the tablet by the right hand into the divine presence.
Such intermediaries were the personal gods. Each individual, king or serf, had his own personal god whose voice he heard and obeyed.8 In almost every house excavated, there existed a shrineroom that probably contained idols or figurines as the inhabitant’s personal gods. Several late cuneiform texts describe rituals for them similar to the mouth-washing ceremonies for the great gods.9
These personal gods could be importuned to visit other gods higher up in the divine hierarchy for some particular boon. Or, in the other direction, strange as it seems to us: when the owner gods had chosen a prince to be a steward-king, the city-god informed the appointee’s personal god of the decision first, and only then the individual himself. According to my discussion in I. 5, all this layering was going on in the right hemisphere and I am well aware of the problem of authenticity and group acceptance of such selection. As elsewhere in antiquity, it was the personal god who was responsible for what the king did, as it was for the commoner.
Other cuneiform texts state that a man lived in the shadow of his personal god, his Hi. So inextricably were a man and his personal god bound together that the composition of his personal name usually included the name of the personal god, thus making obvious the bicameral nature of the man. It is of considerable interest when the name of the king is indicated as the personal god: Rim-Sin-Ili, which means “Rim-Sin is my god,” Rim-Sin being a king of Larsa, or, more simply, Sharru-Ili, “the king is my god.”10 These instances suggest that the steward-king himself could sometimes be hallucinated.