1961, 10: ij James Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), Ch. 2; Clark and Piggott, p. 15 off.
140
The Mind of Man
primitive and only a supplement to the wide variety of animal fauna — wild goats, gazelles, boars, fox, hare, rodents, birds, fish, tortoises, crustaceans, mussels, and snails — which, as carbon-dated remains show, were the significant part of the diet.
The Hallucinogenic King
A town! Of course it is not impossible that one chief could dominate a few hundred people. But it would be a consuming task if such domination had to be through face-to-face encounters repeated every so often with each individual, as occurs in those primate groups that maintain strict hierarchies.
I beg you to recall, as we try to picture the social life of Eynan, that these Natufians were not conscious. They could not narratize and had no analog selves to 'see' themselves in relation to others. They were what we could call signal-bound, that is, responding each minute to cues in a stimulus-response manner, and controlled by those cues.
And what were the cues for a social organization this large?
What signals were the social control over its two or three hundred inhabitants?
I have suggested that auditory hallucinations may have evolved as a side effect of language and operated to keep individuals persisting at the longer tasks of tribal life. Such hallucinations began in the individual's hearing a command from himself or from his chief. There is thus a very simple continuity between such a condition and the more complex auditory hallucinations which I suggest were the cues of social control in Eynan and which originated in the commands and speech of the king.
Now we must not make the error here of supposing that these auditory hallucinations were like tape recordings of what the king had commanded. Perhaps they began as such. But after a time there is no reason not to suppose that such voices could 'think'
and solve problems, albeit, of course, unconsciously. The 'voices'
T H E O R I G I N O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N
141
heard by contemporary schizophrenics ‘think’ as much and often more than they do. And thus the ‘voices’ which I am supposing were heard by the Natufians could with time improvise and ‘say’
things that the king himself had never said. Always, however, we may suppose that all such novel hallucinations were strictly tied in consistency to the person of the king himself. This is not different from ourselves when we inherently know what a friend is likely to say. Thus each worker, gathering shellfish or trapping small game or in a quarrel with a rival or planting seed where the wild grain had previously been harvested, had within him the voice of his king to assist the continuity and utility to the group of his labors.
The God-King
We have decided that the occasion of an hallucination was stress, as it is in our contemporaries. And if our reasonings have been correct, we may be sure that the stress caused by a person’s death was far more than sufficient to trigger his hallucinated voice. Perhaps this is why, in so many early cultures, the heads of the dead were often severed from the body, or why the legs of the dead were broken or tied up, why food is so often in the graves, or why there is evidence so often of a double burial of the same corpse, the second being in a common grave after the voices have stopped.
If this were so for an ordinary individual, how much more so for a king whose voice even while living ruled by hallucination.
We might therefore expect a very special accordance given to the house of this unmoving man whose voice is still the cohesion of the entire group.
At Eynan, still dating about 9000 B.C., the king’s tomb — the first such ever found (so far) — is a quite remarkable affair.
The tomb itself, like all the houses, was circular, about 16 feet in diameter. Inside, two complete skeletons lay in the center ex-
142
The Mind of Man
tended on their backs, with legs detached after death and bent out of position. One wore a headdress of dentalia shells and was presumed to have been the king's wife. The other, an adult male, presumably the king, was partly covered with stones and partly propped up on stones, his upright head cradled in more stones, facing the snowy peaks of Mount Hermon, thirty miles away.
At some later time, soon after or years later, we do not know, the entire tomb was surrounded by a red-ochered wall or parapet. Then, without disturbing its two motionless inhabitants, large flat stones were paved over the top, roofing them in. Then, on the roof a hearth was built. Another low circular wall of stones was built still later around the roof-hearth, with more paving stones on top of that, and three large stones surrounded by smaller ones set in the center.
I am suggesting that the dead king, thus propped up on his pillow of stones, was in the hallucinations of his people still giving forth his commands, and that the red-painted parapet and T h e first god: the dead king of
Eynan propped up on a pillow of
stones in about 9000 B.C., as dis-
covered by excavations in 1 9 5 9 .
143
T H E O R I G I N O F C I V I L I Z A T I O N
its top tier of a hearth were a response to the decomposition of the body, and that, for a time at least, the very place, even the smoke from its holy fire, rising into visibility from furlongs around, was, like the gray mists of the Aegean for Achilles, a source of hallucinations and of the commands that controlled the Mesolithic world of Eynan.
This was a paradigm of what was to happen in the next eight millennia. The king dead is a living god. The king's tomb is the god's house, the beginning of the elaborate god-house or temples which we shall look at in the next chapter. Even the two-tiered formation of its structure is prescient of the multitiered ziggurats, of the temples built on temples, as at Eridu, or the gigantic pyramids by the Nile that time in its majesty will in several thousand years unfold.
We should not leave Eynan without at least mentioning the difficult problem of succession. Of course, we have next to nothing to go on in Eynan. But the fact that the royal tomb contained previous burials that had been pushed aside for the dead king and his wife suggests that its former occupants may have been earlier kings. And the further fact that beside the hearth on the second tier above the propped-up king was still another skull suggests that it may have belonged to the first king's successor, and that gradually the hallucinated voice of the old king became fused with that of the new. The Osiris myth that was the power behind the majestic dynasties of Egypt had perhaps begun.
The king's tomb as the god's house continues through the millennia as a feature of many civilizations, particularly in Egypt.
But, more often, the king's-tomb part of the designation withers away. This occurs as soon as a successor to a king continues to hear the hallucinated voice of his predecessor during his reign, and designates himself as the dead king's priest or servant, a pattern that is followed throughout Mesopotamia. In place of the tomb is simply a temple. And in place of the corpse is a statue, enjoying even more service and reverence, since it does not decompose.
144
The Mind of Man