by Peter Watson
One of the duties of the king in Mesopotamia was the administration of justice. (In the early cities, injustice was considered an offence against the gods.99) For centuries, it was thought that the most ancient laws in the world were those of the Old Testament, concerning Moses. At the start of the twentieth century, however, this idea was overturned, when French archaeologists excavating at Susa in south-west Iran in 1901 and 1902 unearthed a black basalt stele over eight feet high (now in the Louvre), which proved to be inscribed with the law code of the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, who ruled early in the second millennium. The upper section showed the king praying to a god, either Marduk, the sun-god, or Shamash, the god of justice, seated on a throne. The rest of the stone, front and back, was carved with horizontal columns of the most beautiful cuneiform.100 Since the French discovery, the origins of law have been pushed back a number of times but it suits us to consider this sequence in reverse order because the evolution of legal concepts becomes clearer.
Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC) was an adventurous and successful king. His capital was at Babylon, where he centralised the local cults in the worship of Marduk.101 As part of this he simplified and unified the bureaucracy throughout his realm, including the legal system. Altogether, nearly three hundred laws are now known from Hammurabi’s code, sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. They are arranged in this way: offences against property (twenty sections), trade and commercial transactions (nearly forty sections), the family (sixty-eight sections, covering adultery, concubinage, desertion, divorce, incest, adoption, inheritance), wages and rates of hire (ten sections), ownership of slaves (five sections). Hammurabi’s laws, as H. W. Saggs tells us, take one of two forms, apodictic and casuistic. Apodictic laws are absolute prohibitions, such as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Casuistic laws are of the type: ‘If a man delivers to his neighbour money or goods to keep, and it is stolen out of the man’s house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay double.’ The prologue makes it plain that Hammurabi’s laws were intended to be exhibited in public, where citizens could read them, or have them read out.102 They are not what we would understand as statutes: they are royal decisions, a range of typical examples rather than a formal statement of principles. Hammurabi meant the code to apply across all of Babylonia, replacing earlier local laws that differed from area to area.
From the code we can see that, legally speaking, Babylonian society was split into three classes: free men (awelu), mushkenu, and slaves (wardu). The mushkenum were privileged, in that some military or civilian duty was performed in exchange for certain advantages. For instance, the fee for a life-saving operation was set at ten shekels of silver for an awelum, five for a mushkenum and two for a slave (§§ 215–217). Similarly, ‘if a man has pierced the eye of an awelum, they shall pierce his eye’, but ‘if he has pierced the eye or broken the bone of a mushkenum, he shall pay one mina of silver’ (§§ 196–198). Punishments were cruel by our standards but the objectives were not so different. Family law was designed to protect women and children from arbitrary treatment and to prevent poverty and neglect. Thus, although a wife’s adultery was punishable by death, her husband could always pardon her and the king could pardon her lover. This saved them ‘from being bound together and thrown into the river’ (§ 129).103 Just as many Sumerian and Babylonian literary narratives prefigured those in the Bible, so did Hammurabi’s laws anticipate Moses’. For example: Hammurabi’s Laws, § 117 reads: ‘If a debt has brought about the seizure of a man and he has delivered his wife or his son or his daughter for silver, or has delivered them as persons distrained for debt, for three years they shall serve in the house of the buyer or distrainer; in the fourth year their freedom shall be established.’ Compare that with Deuteronomy 15:12, 18: ‘If your brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go from you.’
In places the Hammurabi code refers to judges and discusses the conditions under which they could be disqualified. This sounds as though they were professionals, who were paid by the state. They worked either in the temples or at the gates, in particular those dedicated to the god of justice, Shamash. However, the king was always the court of appeal, and intervened whenever he wanted to. The Babylonians were less concerned with an abstract theory of justice, and more with finding an acceptable solution that did not disrupt society. For example, the two parties in a case were required to swear they were satisfied with the verdicts and would not pursue vendetta.104 When a case came before the judges, there was no advocacy, and no cross-examination. The court first examined any relevant documents and then heard statements by the accuser, the accused and any witnesses. Anyone giving evidence took an oath by the gods and if a conflict of testimony arose, it was settled by recourse to the ordeal–that is, the rival witnesses were forced to jump into the river, the idea being that the fear of divine wrath would pressure the lying party to confess. It seems to have worked, since the practice of ordeal was still in use in biblical times where it is mentioned in Numbers.105
This all sounds very well organised and carefully thought out. It is important to add, therefore, that there is no direct evidence that Hammurabi’s code was ever adopted, and that no extant legal rulings of the period refer to his system.
But Hammurabi’s famous code is no longer the oldest set of laws we have. In the 1940s an earlier code, written in Sumerian, was discovered.106 This had been set down by Lipit-Ishtar (1934–1924 BC) of Isin, a city which was prominent in southern Mesopotamia after the fall of Ur. It too contains a prologue which speaks of the gods raising Lipit-Ishtar to power ‘to establish justice in the land…to bring well-being to the people of Sumer and Akkad’. The two dozen or so laws are more limited in scope than Hammurabi’s, covering ownership of land, including theft from or damage to an orchard, runaway slaves, inheritance, betrothal and marriage, injury to hired animals. Land ownership brought privileges but also responsibilities. For example, § 11 reads: ‘If next to a man’s estate, another man’s uncultivated land lies waste and the householder has told the owner of the uncultivated land, “Because your land lies waste someone may break into my estate; safeguard your estate”, and this agreement is confirmed by him, the owner of the uncultivated land shall make good to the owner of the estate any of his property that is lost.’107
In the 1950s and 1960s even earlier laws were discovered, deriving from Ur-Nammu, who founded the Third Dynasty of Ur at about 2100 BC. The fragment discovered deals with abuses in taxation and setting up standard weights and measures, but it also has a strong statement of principle, in this case to block the exploitation of the economically weak by the strong: ‘The orphan was not given over to the rich man; the widow not given over to the powerful man; the man of one shekel was not given over to the man of one mina.’108 The laws of Ur-Nammu make no attempt at being a systematic code, governed by abstract legal principles. They are based on actual cases. Also, unlike the laws of Hammurabi and the Bible, there is no idea of the lex talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, as punishment for causing bodily injury.109 Talion seems to have been a more primitive form of law, despite its presence in the Bible (a relatively late document, legally speaking). In the Hittite laws (c. 1700–1600 BC), for example, the penalty for stealing a beehive was ‘exposure to a bee sting’, but this was replaced later by a fine.110
But again, all this may make ancient justice sound more organised, and more modern, than it really was. The earliest ‘code’ we now have is that of Uruinimgina of Lagash but he, like the others, may simply have attempted to alleviate the traditional injustices of ancient society, which were always threatening to get out of hand. Uruinimgina’s reforms, like the others, may have been as much royal propaganda as real. Kingships emerged in societies that were changing rapidly and were very competitive. Kings themselves liked to interfere in the administration of justice–it was one of the ways they showed their power. Justice was probably nowhere near as clearly orga
nised as the idealised codes make it appear.
There is evidence of a development in abstract thought in the Mesopotamian cities. To begin with, for example, early counting systems applied only to specific commodities–i.e., the symbol for ‘three sheep’ applied only to sheep and was different from that for ‘three cows’. There was no symbol for ‘3’ in and of itself (in Umberto Eco’s well-known phrase, ‘There were no nude names in Uruk times’).111 The same was true of measuring. Later, however, words for abstract qualities–such as number, the measurement of volume in abstract units (hollow spaces), and geometrical shapes (such as triangularity)–emerged. So too did the use of the word LU, to mean ‘human being, individual of the human species’.112 Hardly less momentous was the development of the concept of private property, as evidenced by extra-mural cemeteries which, it seems, were confined to individuals from particular communities.113 Yet another important ‘first’ of the Babylonians.
It was thus in these first cities that LU, human beings, discovered a genius for art, literature, trade, law–and many other new things. We call it civilisation and we are apt to think of it as reflected in the physical remains of temples, castles and palaces that we see about us. But it was far more than that. It was a great experiment in living together, which sparked a whole new psychological experience, one that, even today, continues to excite many more of us than the alternatives. Cities have been the forcing houses of ideas, of thought, of innovation, in almost all the ways that have pushed life forward.
PART TWO
ISAIAH TO ZHU XI
The Romance of the Soul
5
Sacrifice, Soul, Saviour:
‘the Spiritual Breakthrough’
To Chapter 5 Notes and References
In 1975 the British archaeologist Peter Warren excavated a small building that formed part of the Knossos complex in Crete. Knossos was the main site of the Minoan, bull-worshipping civilisation, dating to 2000 BC, which was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. The building excavated by Warren had at some stage been the victim of an earthquake, making it more difficult than usual to ‘read’ the rubble. Despite this, he soon came across the scattered bones of four children aged between eight and twelve. Many of the bone fragments bore the tell-tale knife marks that resulted from de-fleshing of the bones. More children’s bones were found in an adjoining room, ‘one of them a vertebra bearing a knife-cut pathologists associate with slitting of the throat’.1 Warren concluded that the remains were those of children who had been sacrificed to avert a great disaster–perhaps the very earthquake that was so soon upon them.
Of all the beliefs and practices in ancient religion, sacrifice–both animal and human, and even of kings–is the most striking, certainly from a modern standpoint. In our examination of the origins of religion, among the Palaeolithic painted caves and Venus figurines, and around the time that worship of the Great Goddess and the Bull began, we find no traces of sacrifice. However, by the time of the first great civilisations–in Sumer, Egypt, Mohenjo-Daro and China–it was widely practised and proved very durable: human sacrifice was abolished in parts of India only in the nineteenth century AD.*2 Surveys of ancient texts, decorations on temple and palace walls, on pottery and mosaics, together with anthropological surveys among nineteenth- and twentieth-century tribes across the world, have confirmed the widespread variety of sacrificial practices (the difference between religious sacrifice and magical sacrifice is discussed in the notes). In Mexico children were sacrificed so that their tears would encourage rain.3 In other cultures people with physical abnormalities were selected for sacrifice. A not-uncommon form of sacrifice is for a pig to be slaughtered. This sends a message to the gods, who are deemed to have replied according to the state of the pig’s liver. (The liver is the bloodiest organ and blood was often identified with the life force.)
If we can say that the ideas of the Great Goddess, the Bull and sacred stones are the earliest core ideas of many religions, they were followed by a second constellation of beliefs that were all in place before the great faiths that are still dominant today were conceived. Sacrifice was the most striking of this second set of ideas.
A sacrifice is, at its most basic, two things. It is a gift and it is the link between man and the spiritual world. It is an attempt either to coerce the gods, so they will behave as we wish them to behave, or to propitiate them, to defuse their anger, to get, get rid of, to atone. This much is easy to understand. What requires a fuller explanation is the actual form that sacrifice takes, and has taken in the past. Why must animals or humans be killed? Why is it that blood must be shed? How did such an ostensibly cruel practice take root and become widespread? Did ancient people see sacrifice as cruel?
Sacrifice originated at a time when ancient man regarded all that he experienced–even the rocks, rivers and mountains as a form of life. In India hair was sacred because it continued to grow after a person’s death and so was judged to have a life of its own.4 Vedic Aryans regarded the actual leaping fire as a living thing, swallowing oblations.5 Most important, perhaps, sacrifice dates from an era when the rhythms of the world were observed but not understood. It was these rhythms, the very notion of periodicity, that were the basis of religion: such patterns were the expression of mysterious forces.
As the first great civilisations developed in various parts of the world, in Sumer, Egypt and India, for example, the core symbolism–of the Great Goddess, the Bull, and sacred stones–developed and proliferated, taking on many different forms. Among early Indian gods, for example, Indra was constantly compared to a bull.6 In Iran the sacrifice of bulls was frequent.7 Bull gods were also worshipped in parts of Africa and Asia. In the Akkadian religion in early Mesopotamia the bull was a symbol of power and at Tel Khafaje (near modern Baghdad) the image of a bull was found next to that of the ‘Goddess Mother’.8 The main god of the early Phoenician religion was known as shor (‘bull’) and as El (‘merciful bull’). According to Mircea Eliade ‘the bull and Great Goddess was one of the elements that united all the proto-historic religions of Europe, Africa and Asia.’9 Among the Dravidian tribes of central India, there developed a custom whereby the heir of a man who had just died had to place by his tomb, within four days, a vast stone, nine or ten feet high. The stone was intended to ‘fasten down’ the dead man’s soul.10 In many cultures of the Pacific, stones represent either gods, heroes or ‘the petrified spirits of ancestors’. The Khasis of Assam believed that cromlechs, circular alignments, were ‘female’ stones, representing the Great Mother of the clan and that the menhirs, standing stones, were the ‘male’ variety.
Sacrifice may also have begun in a less cruel way, beginning at a time when grain was the main diet, and meat-eating still relatively rare. Animals may have been worshipped, and eating one was a way of incorporating the god’s powers. This is inferred from the Greek word thusia, which has three overlapping meanings: violent, excited motion; smoke; and sacrifice.11 But sowing and reaping are the focal points of the agricultural drama, and these are invariably associated with ritual.12 In many cultures, for example, the first seeds are not sown but thrown down alongside the furrow as an offering to the gods.13 By the same token, the last few fruits were never taken from the tree, a few tufts of wool were always left on the sheep and the farmer, when drawing water from a well, would always put back a few drops ‘so that it will not dry up’.14
Already, we have here the concept of self-denial, of sacrificing part of one’s share, in order to nourish, or propitiate, the gods. Elsewhere (and this is a practice that stretches from Norway to the Balkans) the last ears of wheat were fashioned into a human figure: sometimes this would be thrown into the next field to be harvested, sometimes it would be kept until the following year, when it would be burned and the ashes thrown on the ground before sowing, to ensure fertility.15 Records show that human sacrifice was offered for the harvest by certain peoples of central and north America, some parts of Africa, a few Pacific islands, and a number of Dravidian tribe
s of India.16 Apart from the Khonds, the Aztecs of Mexico showed the process most clearly, for a young girl was beheaded at the temple of the maize god in a ceremony performed when the crop was just ripe. Only after the ceremony was performed could the maize be reaped and eaten–before that it was sacred and couldn’t be touched. One can imagine why sacrifice, which began in holding back a few ears of corn, should grow increasingly elaborate, and seemingly cruel. Each time the harvest failed, and famine ensued, primitive peoples would have imagined the gods were displeased, unpropitiated, and so they would have redoubled their efforts, adding to their customs, increasing the amount of self-denial, in an attempt to redress the balance.17
After sacrifice, the next important addition to core beliefs, the most widespread new idea which had emerged since early Neolithic times, was the concept of the ‘sky god’. This is not hard to understand either, though many modern scholars now rather downplay this aspect. By day, the apparent movement of the sun, its constant ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’, and its role in helping shape the seasons and make things grow, would have been as self-evident as it was mysterious to everyone. By night, the sheer multitude of stars, and the even more curious behaviour of the moon, waxing and waning, disappearing and reappearing, its link with the tides and the female cycle, would have been possibly more mysterious. In Mesopotamia (where there were 3,300 names for gods), the Sumerian word for divinity, dingir, meant ‘bright, shining’; the same was true in Akkadian. Dieus, god of the light sky, was common to all Aryan tribes.18 The Indian god Dyaus, the Roman Jupiter and the Greek Zeus all evolved from a primitive sky divinity, and in several languages the word for light was also the word for divinity (as the English word ‘day’ is related to the Latin word deus). In India in Vedic times, the most important sky god was Varuna, and in Greece Uranus was the sky.19 His place was eventually taken by Zeus, which is probably the same word as Dieus and Dyaus, meaning both ‘brightness’, ‘shine’, and ‘day’. The existence of sky gods is responsible for the concept of ‘ascension’. In several ancient languages the verb ‘to die’ involved associations with climbing mountains, or taking a road into the hills.20 Ethnological studies show that all across the world, heaven is a place ‘above’, reached by means of a rope, tree or ladder, and there are many ascension rites in, for example, ancient Vedic, Mithraic, and Thracian religions.21 Ascension plays an important part in Christianity.