Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  When we confront the violence of our time, it is natural to harden our hearts to the global pain and deprivation that makes us feel uncomfortable, depressed, and frustrated. Yet we must find ways of contemplating these distressing facts of modern life, or we will lose the best part of our humanity. Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion—at its best—has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and “equanimity” for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world. We are all, religious and secularist alike, responsible for the current predicament of the world. There is no state, however idealistic and however great its achievements, that has not incurred the taint of the warrior. It is a stain on the international community that Mamana Bibi’s son can say: “Quite simply, nobody seems to care.” The scapegoat ritual was an attempt to sever the community’s relationship with its misdeeds; it cannot be a solution for us today.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated to Jane Garrett, my friend as well as my editor at Knopf for twenty years. From the very beginning, your encouragement and enthusiasm gave me the strength to persevere with the daily jihad of writing; it was a privilege and a joy to work with you.

  I am also blessed with my editors George Andreou and Jorg Hensgen, whose stringent, meticulous work on the manuscript helped me to push the book into another dimension, for which I am sincerely grateful. My thanks also to all the people who have worked on the book with such skill and expertise—at The Bodley Head: Stuart Williams (editor), Beth Humphries (copy editor), Joe Pickering (publicist), James Jones (jacket designer), Mary Chamberlain (proofreader), and Katherine Ailes (assistant editor); at Knopf: Roméo Enriquez (production manager), Ellen Feldman (production editor), Kim Thornton (publicist), Oliver Munday (jacket designer), Cassandra Pappas (text designer), Janet Biehl (copy editor), and Terezia Cicelova (editorial assistant); and at Knopf Canada: Louise Dennys (editor) and Sheila Kaye (publicist). Many of you I have never met, but be assured I appreciate all you do for me.

  As always, I must thank my agents Felicity Bryan, Peter Ginsberg, and Andrew Nurnberg for their tireless support, loyalty, and, above all, their continued faith in me; this time, I really could not have managed without you. Thanks too to Michele Topham, Jackie Head, and Carole Robinson in Felicity Bryan’s office for helping me so cheerfully through the day-to-day crises of a writer’s life, from bookkeeping to computer meltdowns. And my sincere gratitude to Nancy Roberts, my assistant, for dealing so patiently with my correspondence and for her adamantine firmness in ensuring that I have time and space to write.

  A big thank-you to Sally Cockburn, whose paintings helped me to understand what my book was, in part, about. And, finally, thanks to Eve, Gary, Stacey, and Amy Mott, and Michelle Stevenson at My Ideal Dog, for looking after Poppy so devotedly during her last years and enabling me to do my work. This book is also in loving memory of Gary, who always saw to the heart of things and would, I think, have approved its contents.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Leviticus 16:21–22. Unless otherwise stated, all biblical quotations—in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—are from The Jerusalem Bible (London, 1966).

  2. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), p. 251.

  3. Stanislav Andreski, Military Organization in Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1968); Robert L. O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War (New York and Oxford, 1995), pp. 6–13, 106–10, 128–29; O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons and Aggression (New York and Oxford, 1989), pp. 22–25; John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London and New York, 1993), pp. 223–29; Bruce Lincoln, “War and Warriors: An Overview,” in Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago and London, 1991), pp. 138–40; Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1955 ed.), pp. 89–104; Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2001), p. 90; Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (London, 2002), p. 101; James A. Aho, Religious Mythology and the Art of War: Comparative Religious Symbolisms of Military Violence (Westport, CT, 1981), pp. xi—xiii, 4–35; Richard English, Terrorism: How to Respond (Oxford and New York, 2009), pp. 27–55.

  4. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson, eds., What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations (Leiden, 1998); Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York, 1962); Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London, 1993); Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof, eds., The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2002); Timothy Fitzgerald, ed., Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (London and Oakville, CT, 2007); Arthur L. Greil and David G. Bromley, eds., Defining Religion: Investigating the Boundaries Between the Sacred and Secular (Oxford, 2003); Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, 2003); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford, 2009).

  5. Dubuisson, Western Construction of Religion, p. 168.

  6. H. J. Rose, “Religion, Terms Relating to,” in M. Carey, ed., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1949).

  7. Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, pp. 50–68.

  8. Louis Jacobs, ed., The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford, 1995), p. 418.

  9. Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, pp. 23–25, 29–31, 33.

  10. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 72–85.

  11. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ, 1991), pp. 1–34.

  12. Ibid., pp. 32–34; Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (London, 1953), p. 40.

  13. Paul Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life’s Challenges (London, 2009).

  14. P. Broca, “Anatomie comparée des circonvolutions cérébrales: le grand lobe limbique,” Revue d’anthropologie 1 (1868).

  15. Gilbert, Compassionate Mind, pp. 170–71.

  16. Mencius, The Book of Mencius, 2A:6.

  17. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Greek Sacrificial Ritual, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1983), pp. 16–22.

  18. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, trans. Willard R. Trask, 3 vols. (Chicago and London, 1978, 1982, 1985), 1:7–8, 24; Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythologies, 2 vols. (New York, 1988), 1:48–49; Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York, 1988), pp. 70–72, 85–87.

  19. André LeRoi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York, 1967), p. 112.

  20. Jill Cook, The Swimming Reindeer (London, 2010).

  21. Neil MacGregor, A History of the Word in 100 Objects (London and New York, 2001), pp. 22, 24.

  22. J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting (New York, 1985), p. 3.

  23. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1980), pp. 54–56; Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 42–45.

  24. O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, p. 33.

  25. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York, 2003), p. 10.

  26. Theodore Nadelson, Trained to Kill: Soldiers at War (Baltimore, 2005), pp. 64, 68–69.

  27. Hedges, War Is a Force, p. 3.

  28. Irenöus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology (New York, 1989), p. 405.

  29. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, rev. ed. (New York, 2009), pp. 3–4.

  30. Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (New York, 1999), p.
67.

  31. Peter Jay, Road to Riches, or The Wealth of Man (London, 2000), pp. 35–36.

  32. K. J. Wenke, Patterns of Prehistory: Humankind’s First Three Million Years (New York, 1961), p. 130; Keegan, History of Warfare, pp. 120–21; O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, p. 35.

  33. M. H. Fried, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology (New York, 1967), pp. 101–2; Clark McCauley, “Conference Overview,” in Jonathan Haas, ed., The Anthropology of War (Cambridge, UK, 1990), p. 11.

  34. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1966), pp. 189–90.

  35. O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, pp. 57–58.

  36. J. L. Angel, “Paleoecology, Pleodeography and Health,” in S. Polgar, ed., Population, Ecology, and Social Evolution (The Hague, 1975); David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (Orlando, FL, 1984), pp. 186–87.

  37. E. O. James, The Ancient Gods: The History and Diffusion of Religion in the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean (London, 1960), p. 89; S. H. Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology: From the Assyrians to the Hebrews (Harmondsworth, UK, 1963), p. 83.

  38. Kathleen Kenyon, Digging Up Jericho: The Results of the Jericho Excavations, 1953—1956 (New York, 1957).

  39. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston, 1973), pp. 86–88; James Mellaart, “Early Urban Communities in the Near East, 9000 to 3400 BCE,” in P. R. S. Moorey, ed., The Origins of Civilisation (Oxford, 1979), pp. 22–25; P. Dorell, “The Uniqueness of Jericho,” in P. R. S. Moorey and P. J. Parr, eds., Archaeology in the Levant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyon (Warminster, UK, 1978).

  40. Robert Eisen, The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to Modern Zionism (Oxford, 2011), p. 12.

  41. World Council of Churches, Violence, Nonviolence and the Struggle for Social Justice (Geneva, 1972), p. 6.

  42. Lenski, Power and Privilege, pp. 105–14; O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, p. 28; E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA, 1978), p. 140; Margaret Ehrenberg, Women in Prehistory (London, 1989), p. 38.

  43. A. R. Radcliffe, The Andaman Islanders (New York, 1948), pp. 43, 177.

  44. John H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 1997), pp. 374, 177.

  45. Keegan, History of Warfare, pp. 384–86; John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204 (London and New York, 2005), pp. 10–11.

  46. Bruce Lincoln, “The Role of Religion in Achaemenian Imperialism,” in Nicole Brisch, ed., Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond (Chicago, 2008).

  47. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence.

  1 ♦ FARMERS AND HERDSMEN

  1. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 1:38. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from Gilgamesh: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney, 2004).

  2. Gilgamesh 1:18–20.

  3. Gilgamesh 1:29–34, Mitchell’s emphasis.

  4. The earliest extant texts date from the late third millennium; the Old Babylonian Epic combined these in a single work (c. 1700 BCE). Sin-Leqi’s poem (c. 1200 BCE) is the standard version on which most modern translations are based.

  5. Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 1:67–69; The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem in Akkadian and Sumerian, trans. Andrew George (London, 1999).

  6. Epic of Gilgamesh, George translation, p. xlvi.

  7. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London and New York, 1993), pp. 126–30; Robert L. O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War (New York and Oxford, 1995), pp. 88–89.

  8. R. M. Adams, Heartlands of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlements and Land Use on the Central Floodplains of the Euphrates (Chicago, 1981), pp. 60, 244; William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (London, 1994), p. 47.

  9. McNeill, Plagues and People, pp. 54–55.

  10. Gerhard E. Lenski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1966), p. 228.

  11. A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago, 1977), pp. 82–83; O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, pp. 93–95.

  12. Samuel N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology: A Study of the Spiritual and Literary Achievement of the Third Millennium BC (Philadelphia, 1944), pp. 118, 119.

  13. Norman K. Gottwald, The Politics of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY, 2001), pp. 118–19.

  14. O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, pp. 91–92.

  15.Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel (Chicago and London, 1969), p. 3.

  16. Thorkild Jacobsen, “The Cosmos as State,” in H. and H. A. Frankfort, eds., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago, 1946), pp. 148–51.

  17. Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 1:48.

  18. I have discussed this more fully in A Short History of Myth (London, 2005).

  19. Jacobsen, “Cosmos as State,” pp. 145–48, 186–97; Epic of Gilgamesh, George translation, pp. xxxvii—xxxviii.

  20. Jacobsen, “Cosmos as State,” pp. 186–91; Tammi J. Schneider, An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK, 2011), pp. 66–79; George, Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. xxxviii—xxxix.

  21. Schneider, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion, p. 5; Jacobsen, “Cosmos as State,” p. 203.

  22. John H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 1997), pp. 15–16, 107.

  23. Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence (Notre Dame, IN, 1968), pp. 7–8.

  24. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1999), p. 248.

  25. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York, 1947), pp. 341–48.

  26. Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 1:80, 82–90.

  27. Atrahasis 1:i, in Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, trans. Stephanie Dalley (Oxford and New York, 1989), p. 10.

  28. Atrahasis 1:iii, p. 12.

  29. Atrahasis 1:iii, p. 14.

  30. Atrahasis 2:iii, p. 23.

  31. Atrahasis 3:vii, p. 28.

  32. W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-Hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Oxford, 1969), pp. 31–39.

  33. Schneider, Ancient Mesopotamian Religion, p. 45.

  34. Keegan, History of Warfare, p. 128.

  35. Epic of Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 2:109–110, George translation.

  36. Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 1:220–23, George translation.

  37. Ibid., Yale Tablet, 18, George translation.

  38. O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, pp. 96–97.

  39. A. L. Oppenheim, “Trade in the Ancient Near East,” International Congress of Economic History 5 (1976).

  40. Kautsky, Politics of Aristocratic Empires, p. 178.

  41. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Boston, 1973), pp. 41, 45, 30; my emphasis.

  42. Gilgamesh, Yale Tablet, 97; Standard Version, tablet 3:54.

  43. Kautsky, Politics of Aristocratic Empires, pp. 170–72, 346.

  44. Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 2:233, Yale Tablet, 149–50.

  45. Gilgamesh, 185–87; Mitchell’s emphasis.

  46. Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 3:44.

  47. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Give Us Meaning (New York, 2003), p. 21.

  48. Gilgamesh, Yale Tablet, line 269.

  49. Gilgamesh, Standard Version, tablet 11:322–26.

  50. R. L. D. Cribb, Nomads and Archaeology (Cambridge, UK, 1999), pp. 18, 136, 215.

  51. O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, pp. 67–68.

  52.K. C. Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China (New Haven, CT, 1968), pp. 152–54.

  53. O’Connell, Rid
e of Second Horseman, pp. 77–78.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Tacitus, Germania, 14, quoted in Kautsky, Politics of Aristocratic Empires, p. 178.

  56. Veblen, Theory of Leisure Class, p. 45.

  57. Bruce Lincoln, “Indo-European Religions: An Introduction,” in Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago and London, 1991), pp. 1–10.

  58. Mary Boyce, “Priests, Cattle and Men,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 3 (1998).

  59. For example, Yasna 30.7c, 32, 49:4b, 50:7a, 30:106, 44:4d, 51:96; Bruce Lincoln, “Warriors and Non-Herdsmen; A Response to Mary Boyce,” Death, War, and Sacrifice, pp. 147–60.

  60. Lincoln, “Indo-European Religions,” pp. 10–13.

  61. Ibid., p. 12.

  62. Bruce Lincoln, “War and Warriors: An Overview,” in Death, War, and Sacrifice, pp. 138–40.

  63. Homer, Iliad, 12:310–15, in The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago and London, 1951). All quotes from the Iliad are from this translation.

  64. Lincoln, “War and Warriors,” p. 143.

  65. Georges Dumézil, The Destiny of the Warrior, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel (Chicago and London, 1969), pp. 64–74.

  66. Iliad, 20:490–94.

  67. Iliad, 20:495–503; Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1984), pp. 145–46.

  68. Lincoln, “Indo-European Religions,” p. 4.

  69. Dumézil, Destiny of Warrior, pp. 106–7.

  70. Iliad, 4:492–88.

  71. Homer, Odyssey, 11:500 in Homer: The Odyssey, trans. Walter Shewring (Oxford and New York, 1980).

  72. James Mellaart, Neolithic of the Near East (New York, 1976), pp. 119, 167, 206–7; O’Connell, Ride of Second Horseman, pp. 74–81.