Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  It is also generally agreed that besides the temple and the palace there was a vigorous “private sector,” perhaps led by lineage elders who also had a say in city government, though the idea of what Thorkild Jacobsen called “Primitive Democracy”19 has not been widely accepted. In any case, relative to most other early states, early Mesopotamia does seem to be a case of “heterarchy,” that is, a nonegalitarian society with several competing centers of power, rather than one with a single dominance hierarchy.20 The fact that Mesopotamia was the least isolated of any of the early civilizations, and the most dependent on long-distance trade due to its lack of local resources, is perhaps related to the existence of multiple power centers within its many cities. Although leadership in the Sumerian period is not as clear as it would later become, in quite early Sumerian mythology it is said that “kingship came down from heaven,” even though the king himself did not claim to be a god.21

  The absence of divine kingship in the earliest history does not mean that this ubiquitous archaic idea was entirely absent. It appears, not surprisingly, in dynasties attempting to unite the city-states and create territorial empires. As Oppenheim puts it:

  In Babylonia from the time of Sargon ofAkkad [ca. 2350 BCE] until the time of Hammurapi22 [1792-1750 BCE], the name of the king was often written with the determinative DINGIR (“god”), used normally for gods and objects intended for worship. We also know, from Ur III texts and, sporadically, from later documents, that statues of deceased kings received shares of the offerings in the temples. The sanctity of the royal person is often, especially in Assyrian texts, said to be revealed by a supernatural and awe-inspiring radiance or aura which, according to the literature, is characteristic of deities and of all things

  And the claim by a number of Assyrian kings to be “king of the universe” would seem to imply a power more than human.24

  But even when, as was more often the case, the king was characterized as the “servant” or “slave” of the god (a usage that, in an entirely different context, will reappear in Christianity and even more extensively, in Islam) rather than as divine himself, it was his closeness to divinity, not his “secularity,” that was emphasized. In his inscriptions the king endlessly recounted all he had done for the gods-building or rebuilding temples, presenting lavish offerings, holding festivals, and so on-and attributed the prosperity of the land and even his military victories to the benevolence of the gods, particularly the patron deity of his city. Here, as in all early civilizations, the religious and the political are not different spheres, but aspects of a total understanding of cosmos and society, which does not mean that we cannot observe variations in how these aspects were phrased.

  As in Hawaii, the Mesopotamian pantheon was enormous, but a few gods were particularly important: Anu, the father of the gods; Enlil, his son and actual ruler of the gods; Ninhursaga, the goddess of birth; Enki, the god of fresh water, but above all the god of intellect and cunning, and of all the productive arts.25 Each city had its own patron god: Uruk was devoted to Anu; Eridu to Enki; Ur to Nanna; and so on. The patron god of Lagash was Ninurta, son of Enlil, warrior god, but also god of the plow. Although each god was related to particular aspects of nature (Anu to the sky, Enki to fresh water, and so on) and to aspects of human life, all of them had a great concern with economic prosperity, so that what Firth said of Tikopia, “the religious system was openly and strongly oriented towards economic ends,” is also true of Mesopotamia, as the following hymn to Ninurta from the end of third millennium Sumer, indicates:

  I don’t want to imply that the gods were always benevolent far from it. They were not infrequently the cause of what Jacobsen calls “paralyzing As in Hawaii, they were not so far from the powerful beings of tribal peoples. They were the source of great abundance, but also the cause of storm, flood, and pestilence. They could bring victory or defeat in war. Above all, the gods were kings and queens, and the temples were their courts. The “service to the gods”-demanding, difficult, but joyous and rewarding-was at the center of life in Mesopotamia.28 A large sector of the economy was organized to serve the gods and goddesses presiding in major temples, their relatives and retainers, all of whose images had to be lavishly “fed,” clothed, adorned with jewelry, and, occasionally, during festivals, paraded through the streets or taken on boat trips to neighboring temples.29 Because the economic and political prosperity of the city depended on the benevolence of the gods, their generous service was the first obligation of both kings and people.

  The nature of the relationship between gods and men is epitomized in the mythical “Story of Atrahasis.“30 Although the text dates from Old Babylonian times (first half of the second millennium BCE), Jacobsen believes it represents ideas that go back at least to the third millennium. In the initial division of the world, Anu was allotted the heavens, Enlil the earth, and Enki the waters under the earth. As the gods had to be fed, Enlil put his many children, the lesser gods, to work carrying out the hard tasks of irrigation agriculture. The poem begins:

  The gods had to dig out the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as well as the irrigation canals, and they found it all too much. They decided to revolt against Enlil, and having burned their work tools they surrounded his house. Enlil, frightened and barricaded at home, called on Anu and Enki for advice as to what to do. He felt like abandoning earth altogether and joining his father in the sky. But Enki, always the clever one, had a suggestion: why not create men to do the work the lesser gods found so tiresome? He killed one of the lesser gods, We-e, perhaps the ringleader of the rebellion (could we call it a strike?), and, mixing his blood with clay, fashioned the first human beings.32

  Enki’s plan worked almost too well: men took over the work of the gods, but greatly prospered in doing so. Their growing population became so noisy (“the land bellowed like a bull”), that Enlil could get no sleep. He sent a plague to wipe the people out, but the wise man Atrahasis consulted Enki who told him to keep the people quieter and give more offerings to the gods, and the plague ceased. Again the people increased and the noise level rose. This time Enlil sent a drought, but again Atrahasis persuaded Enki to intervene. The third time was really too much and Enlil sent a great flood to kill every human being. Enki, however, was one step ahead of him and had Atrahasis construct an unsinkable boat, load it with every kind of animal, and last out the flood. When Enlil discovered what Enki had done he was furious, but meantime the decimation of the people had left the gods with no offerings, and they were beginning to starve. Enlil finally realized that humans were indispensable to the gods, and, having arranged several methods of birth control, allowed Atrahasis and his people to resettle the earth.

  One might think, says Jacobsen, that Enlil cut a rather poor figure with his fear, impulsiveness, and insensitivity, but to the ancients the story illustrates Enlil’s ultimate power, his stunning capacity to create a flood that could potentially destroy every living thing. Jacobsen concludes: “All the same it is clear that the myth views absolute power as selfish, ruthless, and unsubtle. But what is is. Man’s existence is precarious, his usefulness to the gods will not protect him unless he takes care not to be a nuisance to them, however innocently. There are, he should know, limits set for his self-expression.“33

  In ancient Mesopotamia the idea of the state organized the life of both gods and humans and the relation between them. After the creation of human beings, it was they, not the lesser gods, who “lugged the workbaskets.” Or rather, it was the lot of most men to do so; some humans led a godlike existence-they were “served” as the gods were served. Even so, kings were portrayed as working on the great building projects, though we may doubt how much time they actually spent doing so, and they, like everyone else, were servants of the gods, except for those relatively rare moments when they identified themselves as gods. Dominance was a major theme; mostly it was dominance cloaked in the mantle of legitimate hierarchy; but both gods and kings were capable of irrational anger against “undeserving” targets. Jacobsen i
dentifies Anu with “authority” but Enlil with “force,” and it was Enlil who in fact ruled the world.34 It is true that Enlil’s force was supposed to be “legitimate force,”

  Yet, because Enlil is force, there lie hidden in the dark depths of his soul both violence and wildness. The normal Enlil upholds the cosmos, guarantees order against chaos; but suddenly and unpredictably the hidden wildness in him may break forth. This side of Enlil is truly and terribly the abnormal, a scattering of all life and life’s meaning. Therefore, man can never be fully at ease with Enlil but feels a lurking fear which finds expression frequently in the hymns which have come down to us.35

  Yet nurturance, expressed as a concern for a certain kind of justice, was increasingly evident in the third millennium and the first half of the second, reaching a kind of climax in the so-called “code” of Hammurabi. Already in the middle of the third millennium we have a king of Lagash who proclaims himself “as the righter of social wrongs and defender of the weak”: “Uruinimgina [the king] solemnly promised Ningirsu [the god] that he would never subject the waif and the widow to the powerful.“36 A poem written after the fall of the Akkadian dynasty of Sargon criticizes its kings for allowing “injustice and violence to set foot in the land.“37 In the Ur III dynasty there was periodic remission of debt: “The tablets that enshrined the debtors’ obligations to their creditors were then collected and broken, thereby dissolving the debt.“38

  The “code,” which Jean Bottero argues is not a set of laws but a summary of Hammurabi’s verdicts, and thus not really a code, is justly famous. Botero points out that it is the prologue and epilogue that give us the clearest insight into the meaning of justice in ancient Mesopotamia. In the prologue Hammurabi writes:

  When (my god) Marduk [who had for the Babylonians replaced Enlil as ruler of the gods] had given me the mission to keep my people in order and to make my country take the right road, I installed in this country justice and fairness in order to bring well-being to my people.

  And in the epilogue:

  The great gods have called me, and I am indeed the good shepherd who brings peace, with the just scepter. My benevolent shade covered my city. I have carried in my bosom the people of Sumer and Akkad. Thanks to my good fortune (literally: the divine protection of which I am the object) they have prospered. I have not ceased to administer them in peace. By my wisdom I have harbored them. In order to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak, in order to give justice to the orphans and the widows.39

  The rhetoric of nurturance here is powerful: the image of the good shepherd will occur again in the history of religion. Needless to say, kings were seldom as benevolent as they claimed to be-the exorcism texts give examples of grave injustices coming from the palace. But neither was this “just rhetoric.” A standard was set that would have consequences.

  We can speak of the idea of justice in ancient Mesopotamia, but we must be careful to understand that our word is not entirely cognate with their thought. For one thing, justice was personified, was a god. Justice was the sun god, Utu in Sumerian, Shamash in Akkadian, who, by lighting up, making visible, all actions, could discover which were just and which unjust. As Bottero points out, there was no real idea of law in ancient Mesopotamia, but rather of decision, the decision of gods or kings: justice was not abstract, it was visible only in the particular case. The Akkadian term for justice, mesaru, was closely associated with kingship: “The gods have commissioned him [the king] to make appear (to make shine) in the land mesaru, i.e. order at the same time as justice.“40 Mesaru derives from the word eseru, which means “to go straight, in the right way; to be in order.“41 Because justice was embedded in a whole way of life, an elaborate set of obligations and prohibitions including spheres we would consider having little to do with morality, we cannot equate it simply with our understanding of the term.

  We know from the vast number of exorcism texts and penitential hymns that justice was often discerned retroactively: that is, if one suffered from some physical complaint or moral injustice, it must be because one had done something wrong. Divination was resorted to in an attempt to discover the “sin” one had committed, the mistake one had made, the tabu one had violated, and specialists could prescribe the right rituals and petitions that might reverse the suffered wrong. But the way of thinking about life was indelibly hierarchical. As Bottero put it:

  Not only by virtue of the affirmed ontological superiority of their gods, whose inscrutability no one could overcome, but also by virtue of the gods’ role as masters and governors of the world, they recognized the gods’ sovereign privilege of complete freedom of decision and action. All the expressions and all the demonstrations of the gods’ will were thus accepted within the same “civic” spirit, as it were, like the orders of the kings by their subjects: without discussion, without protest, without criticism, in a perfect and fatalistic submission, with the clear consciousness that one does not resist that which is stronger. The gods were considered too clever, too equitable, and too irreproachable for them ever to be called arbitrary or for their decision ever to be questioned. In that land, even in words, no one ever really rebelled against the most pitiless of all decisions: our universal condemnation to

  Well, not quite “no one,” as we will see in a moment. There were a few prophets who foretold the fall of And there were intellectuals, such as the writer of the so-called “Babylonian Theodicy,” who did raise questions about the justice of the gods:

  Although the Mesopotamian equivalents of job’s friends do seem to get the upper hand in this dialogue, there are texts in which the mystery of reward and punishment is declared beyond human understanding:

  In one important respect, ancient Mesopotamia is like all the societies we have observed so far, in the last two chapters and in this one: there are notions about some kind of survival after death, but there is no idea of rewards and punishments in the afterlife, and, on the whole, such existence as there is, is uninviting. For the ancient Mesopotamians, the “netherworld,” where all spirits go, varies between bad-gloomy somnolence-and worse-a realm of fierce demons. Though Bottero is indeed right that most people took death as unquestionable, the greatest of Mesopotamian poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is about a legendary king who literally goes to the ends of the earth to escape death, a reality brought home to him by the premature death of his dear friend Enkidu (both Gilgamesh and Enkidu are classic upstarts). Gilgamesh, the only ancient Mesopotamian writing to have made it into the canon of world literature, and that uncertainly, is far too complex a narrative to summarize For all the vigor of his protest and the enormous risks he takes to overcome death, Gilgamesh is at last faced with the reality that his quest is impossible, and that he has no alternative but to submit: “mere man-his days are numbered; whatever he may do, he is but wind.“47

  The term “civilization” is difficult to define, as it has been used in many ways. I am not using it as a contrast term to “uncivilized,” any more than I am using the term “culture” as a contrast to “uncultured.” As used descriptively, civilization is usually confined to societies that have states. The comparable term for nonstate societies is “culture area.” Polynesia is a culture area, though Hawaii might in time have given rise to Hawaiian civilization. Just as there are diverse societies speaking unrelated languages in a culture area, the American Southwest for example, so there may be many states speaking different languages within a single civilization, and, of course, none of these entities is static-all change over time.

  Mesopotamian civilization was from the beginning a multi-city-state civilization. There was a common language, Sumerian, a common pantheon, and a common writing system. Early on, perhaps even from the beginning, there was a different language spoken in some of the northern cities, Akkadian, an early Semitic language (Sumerian is related to no known language group). Not only did the Akkadians share the same culture, they used the same writing system, the cuneiform system that by 2500 BCE had developed out of the original pictographs. Sum
erian and Akkadian, written in cuneiform, were the classic languages of Mesopotamian culture, and tablets written in both languages were copied and studied until the end.

  Efforts to create a unified state in Mesopotamia emerged in Sumer first, and then among the Akkadians: Sargon founded a new city, Agade (or Akkad), to the north of Sumer, as his capital. Later, Babylon, not far from Akkad, unified Mesopotamia, and identified its patron deity Marduk with Sumerian Enlil. The Babylonian language was a dialect of Akkadian, and Babylon claimed to be the primary exponent of classic Mesopotamian culture. Assyria, beginning in the city of Assur, well to the north of the old Mesopotamian heartland, had a more ambivalent relation to the tradition, but by identifying its patron god, Assur, with Marduk, and by amassing a great royal library of classic cuneiform literature, it, too, claimed the cultural heritage of Sumerian/Akkadian culture.

  Even when, by 2000 BCE at least, Sumerian had been replaced by Akkadian everywhere in Mesopotamia as the spoken language, Sumerian texts continued to be handed down, copied, and recopied, even in Assyrian times. In the first millennium, Aramaic gradually replaced Akkadian as the spoken language, but it was written in the new alphabetic script and the guardians of the traditional culture did not use it. After the Mesopotamians lost their political independence, first to the Persians (538) then to the Greeks (330) and then to the Parthians (247 BCE), scribes continued the cuneiform tradition. The last known text written in cuneiform script dates from 75 CE, and is taken to mark the end of Mesopotamian civilization.