30. For a full account of the story, see Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 116-121.
31. Ibid., 117.
32. Except for the retainer burials in Early Dynasty Ur, this kind of mythical reference is as close as we get to human sacrifice in ancient Mesopotamia, although war captives were frequently slaughtered on the field of battle.
33. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 121. The foreshadowing in the Story ofAtrahasis of both the creation story and the Noah story in Genesis has long been observed.
34. Ibid., 95, 98.
35. Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” 157. Here the wild Enlil reminds us of the Hawaiian wild Ku. The figure of the third-millennium Sumerian Enlil, with all his ambiguity, is in the early second millennium transformed into the Babylonian Marduk, and in the late second millennium and first millennium into the Assyrian Assur.
36. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, 1:39.
37. Nissen, Early History, 186.
38. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, 1:77.
39. Bottero, Mesopotamia, 168. It should be noted that the “shepherd” motif was a commonplace for kings in both Mesopotamia and Egypt. Samuel Noah Kramer translated a Sumerian hymn to the high god Enlil in which the god is addressed as “shepherd.” Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984 [1956]), 91-92.
40. Bottero, Mesopotamia, 183. Italics in original.
41. Ibid., 182.
42. Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 220.
43. Kuhrt, Ancient Near East, 1:105. According to Oppenheim, prophets were found mainly in the north (Assyria) and northwest. Ecstatic and shamanistic concepts were largely missing in the Mesopotamian heartland. Ancient Mesopotamia, 221-222.
44. “The Babylonian Theodicy,” in The Ancient Near East: A New Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. James B. Pritchard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 162.
45. Jacobsen, Treasures of Darkness, 162.
46. The Gilgamesh epic entered world literature quite early. It was by far the most widely circulated piece of Mesopotamian literature, being known all over the ancient Near Eastfragments of translations into Hurrian and Hittite have been found. It arguably influenced both the Iliad and the Odyssey. See M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65, 336-347, 403-417.
47. Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” 137.
48. The strangeness of Mesopotamian religion led Oppenheim, famously, to argue “why a `Mesopotamian Religion’ should not be written.” Thus: “Western man seems to be both unable and, ultimately, unwilling to understand such [higher polytheistic] religions except from the distorting angle of antiquarian interest and apologetic pretenses. For nearly a century he has tried to fathom these alien dimensions with the yardsticks of animistic theories, nature worship, stellar mythologies, vegetation cycles, pre-logical thought, and kindred panaceas, to conjure them by means of the abracadabra of mana, taboo, and orenda. And the results have been, at best, lifeless and bookish syntheses and smoothly written systematizations decked out in a mass of all-too-ingenious comparisons and parallels obtained by zigzagging over the globe and through the known history of man.” Ancient Mesopotamia, 172, 183. Leaving aside the fact that Oppenheim, even in the book from which this passage comes, himself made major contributions to the understanding of Mesopotamian religion, it is still a question whether the present effort has avoided his strictures.
49. Nissen, Early History, 3.
50. Oppenheim notes that the taking of interest on loans became common practice in Mesopotamia, though “usury” was viewed with horror by most other Near Eastern societies. See Ancient Mesopotamia, 88ff.
51. “Mesopotamia … represents perhaps the most stubbornly bureaucratic use of writing known from any ancient civilization. For 600 years after the introduction of true writing it was used exclusively by administrators. And from one period of some 75 years at the very end of the third millennium, the so-called `Ur III period’, we have hundreds of thousands of such administrative procedures. Single documents could regulate transactions involving tens of thousand of persons, and at the same time the loss of half a pound (0.25 kg) of wool from a warehouse would be discovered and accounted for with a frightening inevitability. So it seems fair to say that the potential of this technology for its use as a controlling device was realized to the full in Mesopotamia.” Mogens Trolle Larsen, “Introduction: Literacy and Social Complexity,” in State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization, ed. John Gledhill et al. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 173-191.
52. Oppenheim, on the basis of some written sources, says “there exists meager, but unquestionable, evidence of a rich and productive oral literary tradition in Mesopotamia.” Ancient Mesopotamia, 22.
53. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
54. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
55. Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (London: Routledge, 1989), 3.
56. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 14.
57. William H. McNeill, Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).
58. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 14-15.
59. Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 251. Italics in the original.
60. For northerners like Europeans and North Americans, it seems odd that “upper” means “southern” from the point of view of Egypt, because the Nile flows from south to north. Conversely, the Egyptians found Mesopotamia odd because from their point of view the Tigris and the Euphrates flow “backward.”
61. Kemp, Ancient Egypt, 34-44.
62. Toby A. H. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt (London: Routledge, 1999). Wilkinson argues that from as early as 3500 BCE at least three Upper Egyptian “kingdoms” had come into existence, as indicated by the towns and adjacent burial grounds of Hierakonpolis, Nakada, and This. He describes the use of the term “Dynasty 0” as applying to several kings not long before 3000 BCE, one or more of whom may have ruled over a united Egypt. See 52-58.
63. Michael A. Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric Foundations of Egyptian Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1979), 336.
64. Kemp, Ancient Egypt, 37.
65. Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study ofAncient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration ofSociety andNature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
66. Georges Posener, De la divinite du pharaon (Paris: Cahiers de la Societe Asiatique, 1960).
67. Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001 [1984]), 49. Italics in original.
68. Ibid., 89.
69. Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs, trans. Andrew Jenkins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003 [1996]), 300.
70. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 5 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1987).
71. Hornung, Conceptions of God, 172-185.
72. Ibid., 180.
73. Ibid., 181.
74. Ibid., 182.
75. John Baines, “Society, Morality, and Religious Practice,” in Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 132.
76. Hoffman calls retainer burial sati in Egypt before the Pharaohs, 275-279. Wilkinson, in Early Dynastic, describes retainer sacrifice but also other forms of ritual human sacrifice in late predynastic and early dynastic times (265-267).
77. Assmann, The Mind ofEgypt, 62. Barry Kemp phrases the process only slightly differently: “The 4th Dynasty and later pyramids convey a new image of kingship. Gone is the raw power of the supreme territorial ruler. The king is now sublimated into a manifestation of the sun-god. Architecture conveyed this fundament
al reappraisal to the greatest possible effect.” Ancient Egypt, 62.
78. Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 125, 127.
79. Ibid., 84.
80. Egypt was divided into some twenty odd “nomes” or provinces, so that a ruler of a nome was called a nomarch. Ankhtifi had united three nomes under his rule.
81. Miriam Lichtheim, The Old and Middle Kingdoms, vol. 1 of Ancient Egyptian Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 86.
82. Assmann, The Mind ofEgypt, 100.
83. Ibid., 103.
84. Ibid., 104.
85. Ibid., 127.
86. Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 79.
87. Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 127-128.
88. Ibid., 184.
89. Ibid., 193.
90. Ibid., 131.
91. Assmann, The Search for God, 9.
92. In The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), Voegelin speaks of “mytho-speculation,” which becomes in vol. 5, In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), “mythospeculation,” without the hyphen. What he means by the term, in his own phraseology, is as follows: “The dimension of reason in the symbolism [of mythospeculation] does not reflect the light of a fully differentiated noetic consciousness; as far as their relevance is concerned, the pragmatic materials are illuminated rather by a speculation that remains subordinate to the cosmological myth. Mythopoesis and noesis combine into a formative unit that holds an intermediate position between cosmological compactness and noetic differentiation. It will suitably be called mytho-speculation, i.e., a speculation within the medium of the myth.” The Ecumenic Age, 64.
93. Assmann, The Search for God, 152.
94. Ibid., 149.
95. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 45.
96. On the centrality of kingship in Egyptian culture and belief, see David O’Connor and David P. Silverman, eds., Ancient Egyptian Kingship (Leiden: Brill, 1995), especially the two essays by John Baines: “Kingship, Definition of Culture, and Legitimation” and “Origins of Egyptian Kingship.”
97. Assmann, The Search for God, 17.
98. Ibid., 159.
99. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, in Moralia V, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 1-191.
100. Hornung, Conceptions of God. The very term “monotheism” is highly problematic, as will be apparent as we go along.
101. “The Instruction Addressed to King Merikare,” in Lichtheim, Old and Middle Kingdoms, 106. For another translation and commentary, see Assmann, The Mind ofEgypt, 189191. See also Assmann, The Search for God, 171-174.
102. Assmann, The Search for God, 171. For a complete translation, see Lichtheim, Old and Middle Kingdoms, 149-163.
103. Assmann, The Search for God, 174-175; and commentary, 174-177. For a complete translation of the text, see Lichtheim, Old and Middle Kingdoms, 131-133.
104. See Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).
105. See especially Jan Assmann, Egyptian Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism (London: Kegan Paul International, 1995 [1983]). The “crisis of polytheism” points especially to the Amarna religion, to be discussed below.
106. Ptah is the creator god in the so-called Memphite Theology, known from a basalt block inscribed during the reign of King Shabaka in the eighth century BCE. The inscription claims to be a copy of an Old Kingdom text, but scholars have come to believe it was actually composed in the eighth century, though written in an archaic style. In any case it undoubtedly draws on material from the New Kingdom and even possibly the Middle Kingdom. Ptah is the god of Memphis, and Shabaka was trying to reassert the primacy of Memphis as the capital of Egypt. It should be remembered that even gods for whom universal claims were made had a local habitation. Thus Re is the god of Heliopolis, an ancient cult center near Memphis, Amun the god of Thebes, and Ptah the god of Memphis. It is the Memphite Theology that contains the famous doctrine of creation by the Word (of Ptah), though Assmann argues that it is the written word, the hieroglyph, not the spoken word, that has creative power. For a complete translation, see Lichtheim, Old and Middle Kingdoms, 51-57. For a commentary, see Assmann, The Mind of Egypt, 345-358.
107. Assmann, The Search for God, 223.
108. Ibid., 225.
109. Ibid., 235
110. Jan Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amon and the Crisis of Polytheism (London: Kegan Paul International, 1995), 75.
111. Ibid., 87. Assmann notes that it was through Plotinus and ultimately Plato that Goethe got this “Egyptian” idea.
112. Erik Hornung, Akhenaten and the Religion ofLight (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999 [1995]).
113. On the indigenous development of the early state in China, see especially Li Liu, “Settlement Patterns, Chiefdom Variability, and the Development of Early States in North China,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 15 (1996): 237-288. Also relevant are the many publications of Kwang-chih Chang, most conveniently his summary of the Chinese Neolithic in “China on the Eve of the Historical Period,” in The Cambridge History ofAncient China, ed. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 37-73.
114. It is, of course, true that the Shang oracle bones were lost until unearthed by modern excavations. Still, if Chinese scholars had discovered them in imperial times, they would have perhaps had some difficulty deciphering them, but they would have needed no Rosetta stone, for they would have been able to discover many links to later graphs and words.
115. Chang, “China on the Eve,” 59.
116. David N. Keightley, “The Shang: China’s First Historical Dynasty,” in Loewe and Shaughnessy, Ancient China, 232.
117. Edward L. Shaughnessy, “Western Zhou History,” in Loewe and Shaughnessy, Ancient China, 351.
118. David N. Keightley, “The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture,” History of Religions 17, nos. 3-4 (1978): 212. I am deeply indebted to David Keightley, one of the world’s leading experts on the Shang, not only for his writings but for his advice in the writing of this section.
119. A convenient summary, with judicious comments about dating, can be found in Derk Bodde, “Myths of Ancient China,” in Mythologies of the Ancient World, ed. Samuel Noah Kramer (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), 367-408. Also helpful is Sarah Allan, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).
120. David N. Keightley, “The Making of the Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy,” in Chinese Religion and Society: The Transformation of a Field, vol. 1, ed. John Lagerwey (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2004), 13-14.
121. Perhaps we are unwise to use the term “capital.” Anyang was surely a significant ritual center, but the king was not necessarily a permanent resident. Arthur Waley has the following to say of possible capitals in the early Zhou dynasty, considerations that would surely apply to the Shang: “We do not know at what date the later conception of a `capital’ began. When we discuss where the earliest kings had their `capital,’ we are perhaps committing an anachronism. Possibly in early times the center of government was where the king was at the moment.” The Book of Songs, trans. Arthur Waley, ed. Joseph R. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 210. We have noted for other archaic territorial empires that rulers were peripatetic.
122. Paul Wheatley, The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins of theAncient Chinese City (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), 52-61. Wheatley’s application of the idea of patrimonialism to the Shang case is particularly nuanced.
123. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations, 421-426.
124. Technically speaking, divination did not involve questions, but charges-that is, assertions that
could be affirmed or denied. Thus, “[the Shang diviners] did not ask, `Today, will it rain?’ They stated, `Today, it /may//will not/rain.’ Divination was a way of telling the Powers what man wanted, and of seeking reassurance from the fact that the Powers had been informed.” David N. Keightley, “Divination and Kingship in Late Shang China” (unpublished, 1991), 368.
125. Wheatley, Pivot, 55-56.
126. Keightley, “Making of the Ancestors,” 34.
127. Ibid., 203-204.
128. Ibid., 208.
129. Ibid., 209.
130. David N. Keightley, “Spirituality in China: the Neolithic Origins” (unpublished).
131. David N. Keightley, “Shamanism, Death, and the Ancestors: Religious Mediation in Neolithic and Shang China (ca. 5000-1000 EcE),” Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques 52, no. 3 (1998): 795.
132. Herrlee G. Creel, The Origins of Statecraft in China, vol. 1, The Western Chou Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 495-500. David Keightley (personal communication) indicates that subsequent research confirms Creel’s view that there is no Shang evidence for the use of Tian in the Zhou sense.
133. Book of Songs, trans. Waley, nos. 255, 261. The Allen edition of Waley’s translation uses the traditional Mao numbers and, by providing new translations of the few entries untranslated by Waley, gives a complete translation of the traditional book.
134. Wheatley, Pivot, 118-122.
135. Creel, Origins of Statecraft, 320.
136. Ibid., 168-170, 381-382, 387-416. I have not been able to find any discussion by either Creel or Wheatley of the other’s views. Creel’s book was published in 1970 and Wheatley’s in 1971, so it is quite possible that neither was aware of the other’s argument.
137. Ibid., 419.
138. As does Edward L. Shaughnessy for his own purposes in his Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).
139. Shaughnessy, in Before Confucius, reviews the arguments for the dating of the earliest chapters of the Shu, indicating that Herlee Creel believed that some of them date from the time of the Duke of Zhou himself, whereas David Keightley held that they were probably composed toward the end of the Western Zhou period. Shaughnessy himself holds that although the critical chapters cannot be exactly dated, “there can be no doubt that they long predate the hagiographical traditions that, by about the time of Confucius, developed around the Duke of Zhou; they thus almost certainly reflect historiographical concerns of the Western Zhou period” (130-131). Shaughnessy also discusses the dating of various chapters of the Shu in his “Shang shu,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 377-380.
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