Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, Canaan, Asia Minor, Persia, Arabia
The antiquity of Egypt deeply impressed the Ancient World. Visitors to the immense temple of Karnak did not need to calculate the country's past from the number of statues there of high priests, though the Greek traveller and historian Herodotus used this method in the fifth century BC They could observe everywhere the relics of a once mighty empire—colossal statues, temples, shrines, tombs, pyramids, and cities. They could also sense their intrusion into a religious and social system that stretched back time out of mind to the first settlers of the Nile valley. ‘As the Egyptians have a climate peculiar to themselves, and their river is different in its nature from all other rivers,’ Herodotus remarked, ‘so have they made all their laws and customs of a kind contrary for the most part to those of all other men. Among them, the women buy and sell, the men stay at home and weave; and alone the Egyptians push the woof downwards. Men carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders. Women relieve themselves standing, men sitting. This they do indoors, and take their food in the streets, giving the reason, that unpleasant things should be hidden from sight, but pleasant things open to the view of all. Whereas no woman is dedicated to the service of any god or goddess, men serve all deities, male or female. Sons are not obliged to support parents but daughters must always do so.’
For many centuries the Egyptians remained undisturbed in their river valley, since the surrounding deserts presented barriers formidable enough to deter foreign invaders. The perception of this natural security is apparent in the distinction they drew between ‘the black land and the red land.’ Egypt was the black land; other countries were the mountainous, red-earth lands. From the annual inundation of the Nile came the dark silt upon which their agricultural prosperity was founded. ‘When the river overflows the countryside,’ noted Herodotus, ‘the whole of Egypt becomes a sea, and only the towns stick out above the surface of the water, rather like the islands of the Aegean. When this happens, people take boats across the land and not just along the waterways. … No men anywhere else gain so much from the soil with so little labour: farmers escape the toil of breaking up the soil with a plough or a hoe; the river rises unaided, irrigates the fields, and then drains away; seeds are broadcast and trodden in by pigs; these animals even thresh the harvested grain.’ The Nile dominated the way of life as much as it determined the configuration of the land. The Egyptians thought of the world as being a bank of earth divided in the middle by the Nile and surrounded by water, the Great Circular Ocean. This water was personified by Nun, the first of the gods, the source of the river and rain. Above the earth was the sky, held aloft by four pillars at the corners of the world.
Differences between Upper and Lower Egypt–the narrow valley running nearly 600 miles from the first cataract to Cairo, the site of ancient Memphis, as opposed to the braided streams of the delta, 400 miles wide at the Mediterranean—found expression in the mythological struggle of Osiris and Horus against Seth as well as the constitution of the state. The pharaoh was the god who united the two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt: while he lived he was Horus, and when dead he was Osiris, king of the departed. Mummification and the cult of the dead were entwined with the Horus-Osiris myths. Unusual, too, in West Asia was the Egyptian preoccupation with the sun. Re, the sun god, according to one tradition, was the first pharaoh, and as Atum was creator of the world. It was said that Atum, either a self-created deity or the child of Nun, emerged from the primeval waters in the form of a hill. Solar worship reached its apotheosis during the short reign of Amenophis IV (1387–1366 BC). This pharaoh, better known as Akhenaton, seems to have rejected the innumerable deities which had been invoked by previous rulers, and concentrated his piety to one god, Aton, or the solar disc.
Possibly of foreign origin in very remote times, Osiris became so Egyptianized as to appear not only a truly native deity but even more the archetypal god of the dead, an aspect of human existence which preoccupied the ancient Egyptians. His own repeated death and resurrection were thought to be mirrored in the annual inundation of the Nile and the yearly growth and decline of vegetation. It was in the underworld, however, the place revealed to us in the Book of the Dead, that Osiris was supreme as king of eternity, ruler of everlastingness. There he sat on the throne and judged each dead person, led before him in turn by jackalheaded Anubis. Powerful though he was in the Egyptian imagination, Osiris only transferred into the Greek and Roman world in association with the cults of other gods and goddesses. It was through the elaborate mysteries of Isis, his sister and wife, that the peoples of the Roman Empire knew him. Like Serapis, whom the Ptolemies adopted as their state god during their rule of Egypt (305–30 BC), Osiris remained one of the lesser actors in her mythological cycle.
The divinity of the king was not professed in Mesopotamia, whose river valleys formed the other ancient cradle of civilization in West Asia. The Sumerian monarchs received their authority from the gods, a formula accepted equally by the later Babylonian and Assyrian kings. Kingship ‘came down from heaven’ and inscriptions maintain that the assembly of the gods chose and invested a monarch. In the third millennium BC, the age of Sumer, the city deity was conceived of as the actual owner of the city, and the temple possessed and worked most of the irrigated land, so that the temporal ruler was rather like a steward managing the god's estates. The temple was the house in which the deity lived, was fed and clothed, and received worshippers. The religious basis of the Sumerian institution of kingship was made explicit at the time of New Year Festival when the people celebrated a holy marriage between the king and the goddess of the city, represented by a priestess. The hymns which accompanied this sacral coupling bear an amazing resemblance to the poetry of the biblical Song of Songs. It appears that the king impersonated Dumuzi, the god of fertility, and the priestess became the goddess Inanna: for the city their union ensured prosperity, strength, and concord. During the ascendancy of Babylon under an Amorite dynasty, the most famous ruler of which was the great legislator Hammurabi (1728–1686 BC), a change took place in the relationship of temple and throne. Although kingship was still regarded as a divine institution and the person of the ruler different from ordinary mortals, the earlier domination of the temple cult in city life began to diminish sharply, a curtailment of the priesthood that led to the unchallenged terrestrial authority of the Assyrian kings.
The origin of the ‘black-headed,’ as the Sumerians called themselves, is uncertain. Arriving possibly from the East, they settled immediately before 3000 BC a flat desert area, with marshes, adjacent to the Persian Gulf. Their non-Semitic tongue was at first recorded in primitive pictographs, from which using clay as a writing material and a reed stylus to impress wedge-shaped signs they developed cuneiform, thereafter the script of both Sumerian and Semitic languages. In time the ‘black-headed’ people were swamped by Semites, who moved down the Euphrates valley in successive waves, but their contribution to ancient Mesopotamian culture was profound, especially in mythology and religion. Even after the rise of Babylon the transmission of ideas was uninterrupted as it was the practice to have Sumerian religious texts with an interlinear Akkadian translation that would be understood by the Semitic conquerors.
The cosmology of Sumer reflected the independence of this urban civilization from rainfall. Agriculture flourished on river water, spread by irrigation, and this sweet water was believed to come from a huge subterranean reservoir named Abzu. This environmental factor may have been responsible for the largely chthonic character of Sumerian religion, which placed emphasis on the natural forces of the earth rather than the celestial powers of heaven, the sky, moon, and stars, so evident in Semitic belief. The land was the domain of Enlil, city god of Nippur, and the most powerful deity of the Sumerian pantheon. In striking contrast to Egyptian mythology, the creation of mankind was seen as a deliberate act of the gods, harassed by the necessity of obtaining their daily bread. Likewise the foundation of cities was the result of divine decree: they were built round the ziggurrats, gigantic artificial mounds of sun-dried bricks, on whose terraces dwelt the resident deities. The Babylonian creation epic, known from its first words ‘When on high’ as Enuma Elish, made service of the gods the reason for the appearance of mankind, too. In return the gods ensured the renewal of the world each day. As in Egypt, where the goddess Maat personified the correct balance of equilibrium of the universe, the early settlers of Mesopotamia were preoccupied with the ordering of the world. Another theme, however, darkens the mythology of Sumer and Babylon, and this is the notion of a titanic struggle against evil powers. Inanna has to struggle against the mountain god Ebeh, Gilgamesh was pitted against the monster Huwawa in the cedar wood, and Marduk made the universe out of the body of Tiamat, the appalling she-dragon of the watery chaos.
In the Assyrio-Babylonian pantheon the Sumerian god Enlil, known either by the same name or as Ellil, underwent a rather sinister transformation. The terrifying aspect of this god's authority over the atmosphere received emphasis; he was ‘the wild ox’, the hurricane, and the author of the flood sent to destroy mankind. Unlike the isolated Nile civilization, the historical experience of the inhabitants of Tigris-Euphrates valley was stormy and full of changes. Foreign invasions and internal conflicts combined with the uneven flow of its great rivers to mould a mythological outlook that found significance in cosmic struggle as much as the divine ordering of the universe. Yet the conception of a cosmic battle against maleficent forces or monstrous beings in Assyrio-Babylonian legend paled before the contemporary Persian belief in the strict dualism of good and evil, light and dark, angels and devils. In the Iranian uplands the prophet Zarathustra, or Zoroaster (c. 628–551 BC), was casting aside the more usual mythological interpretation of good and evil as effects proceeding from a unique source of being that transcends and reconciles all opposites. This singular rethinking of myth affected not only the Persians, but also the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Canaan. When in 539 BC Babylon fell to Cyrus, West Asia was incorporated into the Persian Empire.
Zoroaster's doctrine of rewards and punishments, of heavenly bliss and infernal woe allotted to good and evil men in another life beyond the grave had a direct influence on Judeo-Christian eschatology. The exiled Hebrews in Babylon found a kindred monotheistic creed in Persian religion, and one of their own prophets, Isaiah, declared openly that Cyrus as their liberator was Yahweh's anointed. The old idea of the nether world, Sheol, a shadowy abode for all the dead, gave place to a system of dividing the sheep from the goats. ‘Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth’, said Daniel, ‘shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’ Of the Zoroastrian struggle between good and evil, personified by the twin-pirits Spenta Mainya and Angra Mainya, later transformed into Ormuzd and Ahriman, an exact parallel has been discovered in the Dead Sea scrolls too. According to the Manual of Discipline, Yahweh ‘created man to have dominion over the world and made for him two spirits, that he might walk by them until the appointed time of his visitation; they are spirits of truth and of error.’
Persia was the name used by the Greeks. The followers of Zoroaster were Aryans, and the word Iran, formed from an earlier root, simply means ‘the home of the Aryans’. The Persians, therefore, had much in common with the Aryan invaders of India–close linguistic ties as well as a similar pantheon–but history took them into the Euphrates valley and the teachings of their prophet, who probably lived in Chorasmia, were destined to impact upon West Asian mythology. The Zoroastrian faith hardly exists today. Its last period of ascendancy in Persia occurred during the Sassanian Empire (226–652), which went down before Moslem arms. Only the Parsees, a tiny group of exiles living around Bombay, preserve what was once a great religious tradition.
About the mythology of Canaan, the land situated between the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, there were only a few references in classical authors to eke out the partisan account given in the Old Testament prior to the discovery of clay tablets in 1929 at Ras Shamra, the ancient city of Ugarit. The Arab peasant who stumbled upon its necropolis indirectly caused a revolution in our thinking about the West Semites. The tablets subsequently unearthed by archaeologists were impressed with a previously unknown cuneiform script of an archaic Canaanite language, and when deciphered they gave a picture of the religion of prosperous Ugarit about 1400 BC. Although this represents a very important addition to our knowledge of ancient Canaan, much more than a mere background to the better recorded Hebrew tradition, it remains the case that we have little detail of the myths belonging to the Aramaean peoples of Syria and the Nabataeans to the east of the Dead Sea.
The name Canaan derived from a shellfish famous for the dye it produced. The Phoenicians living in the coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, or in their colonies dotted around the eastern Mediterranean, called themselves Canaanites. It was the Romans who introduced Poeni to distinguish the colonists at Carthage from the inhabitants of the motherland. Few sharp cultural divisions existed in Canaan. Even Israel, the supremely religious nation of West Asia, had a composite population, and the Hebrews were certainly not the only ones in the exodus from Egypt. Those who followed Joshua in his conquest of Palestine some-time after 1300 BC were assorted tribesmen bound together by their wanderings in Sinai–the strong influence of the Arabian desert could be discerned in their social solidarity.
The Canaanite myths, known through the Ras Shamra tablets, are characterized by their interest in fertility and the theme of the disappearing fertility god. Ultimately from this source the Greeks borrowed the love goddess Aphrodite, a Cypriot version of Astarte, and her consort Adonis. But the myths also reveal, in the nature of the highest deity, EL, a close parallel to Yahweh, the god of Israel. El was the god before all others. He ruled as king ‘at the source of the rivers’, which recalls the biblical Eden where a river went out ‘to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads’, the rivers that watered the world. El had decisive authority regarding both men and gods; he exercised a kind of detached omnipotence. According to one text, he ‘is great and wise, and his grey hairs instruct him’. It was the singular achievement of the Hebrews to perfect the West Asian tendency towards monotheism. ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ While various arguments have been put forward to explain this development, the different stages of Hebrew consciousness are hard to distinguish. Was Abraham a monotheist? He hailed from Ur, whose city god Sin was credited with the determination of destiny. Was the experience of Moses crucial? In Egypt he would have been aware of Akhenaton''s attempt at religious reform. Or were the Prophets, faced by the brute force of Assyria, the inventors of a divine plan for Israel? Whatever the answer, and a consensus is hardly to be expected, there is no doubt that we encounter a distinct mode of thought when the Hebrews address themselves to the question of divine omnipotence and omniscience. Take the complaint of Jonah. Having travelled to Nineveh at divine behest, via the stomach of a whale, and bravely raised his voice against the evil done there, Jonah was angered that the repentant were to be forgiven. Thus spoke Yahweh: ‘And should I not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand from their left hand; and also much cattle?’ Though Israel had a special relation with Yahweh, notice was being given that the chosen people could neither monopolize him as a national deity nor could they expect to comprehend how he swung the scythe of destiny. After all, it was but part of his plan for all mankind.
Yahweh, awful in holiness, terrible in righteousness, was an exclusive figure, his cult unconducive to epic stories including other gods. The edict outlawing graven images was a specific rejection of the temple ceremonies of other West Asian religions. ‘For the Lord thy God is a jealous God.’ While the Hebrews absorbed elements from the mythology of their neighbours, they used the symbols for their own vision. The strong perception of a single deity, an intimation doubtless strengthened in the centuries they wandered the northern borders of the Arabian desert, already flourished. Out of this tradition came Christianity and Islam, the other great monotheistic religions of the world.
In Revelation and the apocryphal gospels there is evident a continuity with the non-canonical books of late Hebrew writers, the pseudonymous Enoch or Baruch. Apocalypse for Christian converts was encouraged by the idea of the Second Coming, while the disastrous revolts against Roman authority in Palestine seemed to confirm the running down of the world. Exasperated beyond measure, the Emperor Hadrian in 135 built on the site of ruined Jerusalem the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, in which only non-Jews were allowed to live. Yet the heroes of early Christian legend are the saints or their personal antagonists: St Antony ousted the Devil from his desert abode, and St Peter cut short the aerial acrobatics of Simon Magus, ‘the father of heretics’. The elaboration of hagiography was to be a phenomenon of the Middle Ages and belonged to the European tradition of mythology, which after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 became progressively Christian.
Three centuries later the belief of Jews and Christians in a Last Judgement struck a chord in Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. About 610 this Arab merchant began to see visions during his walks among the forbidding hill-tops north of Mecca. He was visited by Gabriel, ‘the spirit of holiness’, and commanded to proclaim that ‘there is no God but Allah’. Legend also tells us that on a certain night the Prophet was conducted through the air, riding on the back of the winged steed Burak, first to Jerusalem and then up through the seven heavens, in which he met the patriarchs, Adam and Jesus, to the throne of Allah, where the mysteries of the divinity were revealed to him. Although Mohammed drew on other West Asian traditions, the god upon whom he called was unmistakably an Arabian one, whose scriptures were both direct and straightforward. They sought to replace divisive tribal loyalties with inclusive membership of a universal way of life. There was little room for myth. Within twenty years, Mohammed established himself as the leading chieftain of Arabia, but to his followers was given the task of world conquest. Not only did the peoples of West Asia pass under Islamic control, thereby ending a cultural heritage reaching back to the ancient Sumerians, but even more it seemed that Arab armies pushed outwards in every direction. While Europe gained in 732 a respite through the victory of Frankish cavalry at the Battle of Tours, an engagement with soldiers of the powerful T'ang Empire on the Talas river in 751 wrestled Central Asia from the Chinese sphere of influence. The region ceased to be Buddhist and was added to the Moslem world.
Finally, a word needs to be said about Asia Minor. The Hittites, a people of Indo-European descent, settled on the high tableland north of the Taurus mountains before the eighteenth century BC. Magnetized by the affluent civilizations to the south, their kings pushed expeditionary forces over this formidable range, with mixed success in the field. At Kadesh in 1300 BC Hittite chariotry under the direction of King Muwatallis almost routed the Egyptian army of Ramesses II. The Pharaoh claimed a victory, but the Hittite ascendancy in Syria was maintained. The result of southern expansion was the import of religious ideas, though the Hurrian state of Mitanni probably acted as an intermediary. To the weather god of ‘the Land of Hatti’, the name for the Hittite homeland, were added Hurrian deities so that a distinct panth eon evolved. Related to the inhabitants of the Caucasus mountains, the Hurrians had adopted Mesopotamian beliefs and exercised a powerful, if short-lived, influence over Syria and the upper reaches of the Euphrates. In 1370 BC the Hittites sacked Wassukkani, the capital of Mitanni, but King Suppilulimas, who led this successful campaign, may have been himself part Hurrian. The mythology of Asia Minor, whether Hurrian, Hittite, or Phrygian, turned on the missing fertility god. And once again, it was this aspect of West Asian belief which strongly appealed first to the Greeks, then to the Romans. The westward journey from Pessinus of Cybele, the Lydian mother goddess, was an absolute triumph. She and her unmarried son Attis took Rome by storm, the frenzied adherents of their ‘mystery’ cult on more than one occasion causing those in authority grave concern. The last Roman emperor to celebrate Cybeles rites was Julian, who failed to stem the rise of Christianity in the late fourth century.
