THETAOOFBABEL

The peoples who lived in the lands between the

rivers Tigris and Euphrates from6,000 years ago were
many, Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians; Assyrians,
Hittites, and Hurrians from the north; Amorites,
Elamites, Arameans, and many others. They
constructed a picture of the world in which religious
worship was very important. We dont know much
about ancient cultures or religions; so here is an
attempt to imagine what it might have been like. For
all these ancient peoples the gods were out there,
outside the world those gods had created. That
world was liable to be destroyed by the foolishness
of mankind, and the gods had to be implored to
answer human prayer and to help and advise the
worshipper who followed the rites devoutly. The land
was largely flat, and subject to inundation and other
disasters. By contrast, god could be seen in the
lightning flash on mountain tops. God was obviously
above.
It was the mysterious people fromthe land of Sumer,
of unknown origin and whose language has no
obvious roots with any others, who were first to
build cities from stone and baked clay bricks, first to
claim the desert for fertilised and irrigated areas for
crops, first to write down their lore on clay tablets
that have been preserved, where many stories later
told by Hebrew writers in the bible had their origin. It
was the people of Sumer who built the first ziggurat,
a stairway to heaven by which the gods could come
to earth and answer the prayers of their devotees. At
Mohenjo-Daro, 3,500 km due east in modern
Pakistan, another people were making the same
discoveries at almost the same time, but we know
almost nothing about them. To the south the
Egyptians were evolving a very different picture of
the world, one where the gods were nurturing.
1
The best known ziggurat is that referred to in the
bible, in the Book of Genesis. When the final author
of that book was writing or editing his account,
Babylon, or Babel, had been conquered by Alexander
the Great, and the ziggurat long been in ruins. One of
the concepts unique to the final Genesis author was
that of a jealous god, fearful of humans becoming
too powerful, and so a threat to god. This was why
god was said to have expelled Adam and Eve from
the Garden east of Eden. The Genesis writer also
makes god responsible for the destruction of the
ziggurat in Shinar, or Babylon, which in Genesis is a
tower built so that men can climb to heaven.
In reality the traffic was going the other way. Not
men upwards, but the gods downwards. What is
expressed in Genesis is a powerful sense of guilt, of
mankind being punished for transgressions against
god.
The Genesis author also has a back to front theory
about languages. The many languages spoken in
Babylon, the hub of a great empire, were also said to
be a punishment. Before the tower was built, says
the Genesis author, men all spoke one language, but
god prevented them from uniting and building
another tower by giving them different languages.
This is the opposite of the New Testament concept
of inspiration enabling the disciples of Jesus to speak
in tongues. The opposite too of a known
development in language from many dialects to a
dominant one, or the imposition of a common
language throughout an empire. The bible author
conveniently ignores the fact that other polyglot
cities existed, including Jerusalem, and that many
other ziggurats were built, before and after that of
Babylon. Its a good story, and we remember it. But
to understand ancient religions, we have to forget it.
2
The ziggurat was a temple. It formed part of a group
of buildings dedicated to the worship of a god. The
ziggurat complex of buildings was not unlike the
pyramids in Egypt, but in Egypt the platform for the
gods to come to their worshippers, the pyramid, had
become separate from the temple complex itself. At
the top of the ziggurat was the temple proper, where
the priests would pray the city god to come down
and answer prayers, and perform acts of power.
This step pyramid structure was thought to imitate
the way the world itself was made by the gods. They
constructed a solid base upon the primeval waters
which existed before the world began, and so began
heaven and earth, at first made from the bodies of
the very first gods. The world was also seen as a tree,
its branches forming the heavens, the trunk earth,
and its roots the underground powers of the forces
of life and death. The ziggurat was thus aligned to the
creation of life and harmony, of the tao.
In ancient times the gods were larger than life, often
depicted as such in sculptures. They were powerful,
and dangerous, and could be destructive. When
implored to come down to earth to effect a change
or answer a prayer it was therefore essential the
correct rites were followed by priests who knew the
ritual to follow. Otherwise the gods could cause harm
instead of good.
3
More can be said of this existence, outside the world,
of Middle Eastern gods. Although the gods formed
the primeval stuff of the world from their bodies,
their children were outside the world, and came
from above. Some dread entities came from below.
To see what this distance means, compare the
direction that the gods were experienced in the
Middle East with those of ancient Greece. In Greece,
with its clarity of light, its many mountain ranges and
islands, the gods were part of nature. They didnt
come from outside, but through, natural forces.
Their manifestation was horizontal, not vertical. God
could be found at any time. He was suddenly there.
Especially at his temple, which was always built at a
site where holiness could be felt. Visitors can still feel
it at places like Delphi today if they dont buy too
many souvenirs.
The way we experience the divine affects our political
views. This is not as strange as it might at first
appear, for we after all are one mind. That god
comes through nature creates an intense awareness
of nature, and a willingness to explore it, evident in
many ancient Greek poems and scientific or
philosophical works. God through nature makes us
liable to respect natural creations, to conserve, to
care for, a material world which in many ways is
divine. The Greeks were aware of the gods as part of
life, and their religions were an intrinsic part of their
lives, and not confined to a separate sphere. It was
something anyone, and all, could experience, and it
was no accident that democracy evolved first in
ancient Greece.
In the Middle East, by contrast, god was outside the
world, above it. The world was an inferior creation,
doomed to eventual destruction. To know god, the
first step was to forget the world. The world, in some
extreme cases, became sinful, a snare and a delusion.
So the natural world could be exploited, used to
accumulate personal wealth, a sign of gods grace.
Exploitation of all kinds, empires, subjugation of
races, destruction of environments, economic
slavery, corruption in politics, all were permissible,
because all concerned a sinful, negligible world
destined for eventual destruction. If the excess was
too unbalanced, god would come from above and
strike down the evil ones. The end of the world was
always at hand. Society took the formof the ziggurat,
a pyramid with an emperor at the top, priests and
officials below him, and these dominating the mass
of the people.
It is interesting to see that Christianity, paying a debt
to the hierarchical systemof Judaism, was founded in
Greece by Paul of Tarsus as a new mystery religion
similar to the rites of Eleusis, and evolved at first a
communal, egalitarian system, which was soon
replaced by the European hierarchical system of
feudalism. God became Lord, the feudal leader.
4
Basic to the life of ancient Mesopotamia was the
canal system, which provided food for a large
population, and whose leaders organised its
continued care. It was an art of compromise: without
a myriad of locks and the officials to see to their
maintenance, there would be floods. Without an
efficient central administration the canals would
vanish, to be replaced by the original desert, and with
them would go the cities and the peoples they
supported. The key figures in this society were the
priests. Although there were many gods, priests in
every locality eventually raised one god above the
others, who became a patron of each city.
Although the gods performed many natural functions
to make the world work, as in other religions of the
world, they soon became, as well, patrons of
different cities, and involved in these cities wars for
dominance. The Sumerians for instance believed in
Nammu, or Tiamet, who was the water which
preceded the creation of the world. From her came
An, the heaven, and Ninhursang, the earth. Between
these two functioned the powerful ones whose
worship was necessary, for whom the ziggurats were
built. Inanna, goddess of sexuality and war, who
later, in other cultures, became Ishtar, then
Aphrodite; her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the
underworld, some of whose functions were
undertaken by Greek Demeter; Ninurtu, god of war
and agriculture; Enlil and Ninlil, gods of the air;
Nanna and Ningal, god and goddess of the moon;
and Enki, god of male fertility and knowledge, whose
functions were inherited by Greek Hermes. So
powerful and influential was the culture of Sumeria
on subsequent peoples in the area that these gods
endured for many centuries, their names little
different in languages later spoken in the region. The
Sumerian language itself survived long after the
people who spoke it had vanished, preserved in
official rites and documents of later cultures such as
that of Babylon and Assyria. All these gods were in
some sense An, the heavens, who was god in his
monotheistic form. But to worship god efficiently, to
enable him to give help to his devotee, it was
thought necessary to worship specific aspects of god,
which were also specific aspects of human nature.
As the Sumerians developed civilisation, the first
surviving signs of it we know about, changes took
place within the ruling priesthood. The god of war
was invoked by his priest, but war was carried out by
a general, and war leaders became powerful. Power
was at first shared between king/general and priest.
But as the societies living in the cities became more
numerous and developed more complex structures,
so did the kingship. In particular, diplomacy between
cities called for supreme power to be vested in a
king/general. The gods and their priests were still an
intrinsic part of this. Certain cities claimed a god as a
patron deity. In fact what survives of Sumerian
writings about the gods is often apparently
government propaganda as much as worship. The
more powerful the god was asserted to be, the more
powerful the city under his protection. So Nippur
adopted Enlil; Eridu adopted Enki; Uruk, Inanna; Ur,
Nanna.
5
This politicalisation of religion occurred throughout
the Middle East, and seems normal to many people
living today. Whereas a Greek travelling to Babylon
might have said, Ah, Inanna is our Aphrodite! and
cheerfully participated in rites to honour that
goddess, convinced he had said the last word on the
subject, a Babylonian visiting Corinth would have
thought the rites of Aphrodite an abomination.
Although the concept of heresy had not yet been
invented, to acknowledge other cities gods was to
be disloyal to ones own city god, to weaken that
god, and hence the city he patronised. Just as cities
conquered one another, gods in the Middle East
conquered one another. This is why Yahweh, or El, in
the Hebrew bible, is a jealous god, one who will not
tolerate any rival.
The only sure proof of the rightness of your beliefs is
to conquer the people who worship other gods. This
philosophy is central to Judaism, Islam and
Christianity, the remarkable thing about Judaism
being that, although founded during a period of
empire, and while Judah and Israel were polytheistic,
it evolved its concept of a supreme and only god
during periods of political subjugation, during which
eventual political domination was devotedly looked
forward to, under the rule of the future messiah.
Human beings are part of the natural creation. Our
ideas of the world and the gods are formed by the
interaction of our senses with the physical geography
of the part of the world we inhabit. Culture, that
part of human civilisation we are still ambiguous
about, is a late invention. It was founded in the
evolution of religious rites observed in order to
protect a group of people. It was preserved through
the invention of writing, and spread by political
invasion of other peoples. Flat lands suggests the
dominance of heights, as any good general can see.
So the gods, imagined as dominating us all, must be
above, as conceived by inhabitants of the plains. By
contrast, inhabitants of the mountain ranges
experience gods all around. Even the lightning comes
from nearby. The gods appear immanent, within, not
transcendent, above. All this, it is important to note,
concern the way human beings experience the
divine, and in no way describes the nature of the
divine, which is unknowable.
6
The worship of gods is undertaken for very practical
reasons, for self preservation. The gods are
preservers of human life and well being. It is not
surprising to find underlying rituals common to many
different religions. In Ur, that same Ur of the
Chaldees said in the bible to be the home of Abram
or Abraham, the first world power we know of, and
dominating the Persian Gulf in the second millenium
BC, the dominant god was Nanna, god of the moon.
Nanna was revered throughout the whole of
Mesopotamia during the dominance of the kings of
Ur, and later under dynasties of Assyria and Babylon.
A rite to honour him celebrates his birth. His parents
Enlil and Ninlil, like Inanna, descend to the
underworld, and are imprisoned there. In a great
ceremony lasting many hours, performed probably
on a night with no moon, of a lunar eclipse,
Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, is implored to
release Enlil and Ninlil. During this time the two give
birth to Nanna, and, coincidentally to the rise of the
new moon: Ereshkigal relents and releases the gods
in her power. We dont know if the rise of Nanna
symbolised new life for his devotees, but as many
later rituals in the Middle East did so, it is possible.
Human beings are a product of their environment.
Religion is a device to ensure their harmony with that
environment and within themselves. From these
cultural forces has arisen politics, the art of
dominance, and, most recently, technology, the art
of efficiency. But we are still the same people,
underneath the surface changes. Perhaps its time to
go back to Ur and climb the steps of the ziggurat. Me,
Im saving up for a trip to Delphi.