The daily ritual of the temple included the washing, dressing, and feeding of the statues. The washing was probably done through the sprinkling of pure water by attendant priests, the origin, perhaps, of our christening and anointing ceremonies.
The dressing was by enrobing the figure in various ways. In front of the god were tables, the origin of our altars, on one of
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which flowers were placed, and on the other food and drink for the divine hunger. Such food consisted of bread and cakes, the flesh of bulls, sheep, goats, deer, fish, and poultry. According to some interpretations of the cuneiform, the food was brought in and then the statue-god was left to enjoy his meal alone. Then, after a suitable period of time, the steward-king entered the shrine room from a side entrance and ate what the god had left.
The divine statues also had to be kept in good temper. This was called "appeasing the liver" of the gods, and consisted in offerings of butter, fat, honey, sweetmeats placed on the tables as with regular food. Presumably, a person whose bicameral voice was condemnatory and angry would come bringing such offerings to the god's house.
How is all this possible, continuing as it did in some form for thousands of years as the central focus of life, unless we posit that the human beings heard the statues speak to them even as the heroes of the Iliad heard their gods or Joan of Arc heard hers? And indeed had to hear them speak to know what to do.
We can read this directly in the texts themselves. The great Cylinder B of Gudea (about 2100 B.C.) describes how in a new temple for his god Ningirsu, the priestesses placed
. . . the goddesses Zazaru, Impae, Urentaea, Khegirnunna, Kheshagga, Guurmu, Zaarmu, who are the seven children of the brood of Bau that were begotten by the lord Ningirsu, to utter favorable decisions by the side of the lord Ningirsu.2
The particular decisions to be uttered here were about various aspects of agriculture that the grain might "cover the banks of the holy field5' and "all the rich graineries of Lagash to make to 2 Column 11, lines 4-14, as in George A. Barton, The Royal Inscriptions of burner and Akkad (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1929). Italics mine as in quotations following.
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overflow." And a clay cone from the dynasty of Larsa about 1700
B.C. praises the goddess Ninegal as
. . . counsellor, exceeding wise commander, princess of all the great gods, exalted s p eaker, whose utterance is unrivaled.3
Everywhere in these texts, it is the speech of gods who decide what is to be done. A cone from Lagash reads:
Mesilin king of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the plantation of that field set up a stele in that place. Ush, patesi of Umma, incantations to seize it formed; that stele he broke in pieces; into the plain of Lagash he advanced.
Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil, by his righteous command, upon Umma war made. At the command of Enlil his great net en-snared. Their burial mound on the plain in that place he erected.4
It is not the human beings who are the rulers, but the hallucinated voices of the gods Kadi, Ningirsu, and Enlil. Note that this passage is about a stele, or stone column, engraved with a god's words in cuneiform and set up in a field to tell how that field was to be farmed. That such stelae themselves were epiphanous is suggested by the way they were attacked and defended and smashed or carried away. And that they were sources of auditory hallucinations is suggested in other texts. One particularly perti-nent passage from a different context describes reading a stele at night:
T h e polished surface of its side his hearing makes known; its writing which is engraved his hearing makes known; the light of the torch assists his hearing?
3 Ibid., p. 327.
4 Ibid p. 61. Inim-ma is here translated as "incantations."
5 Ibid., p. 47.
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Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.
The word for ‘hearing’ here is a Sumerian sign that transliterates GIŠ-TUG-PI. Many other royal inscriptions state how the king or other personage is endowed by some god with this GIŠ-TUG-PI hearing which enables him to great things. Even as late as 1825
B.C., Warad-Sin, king of Larsa, claims in an inscription on a clay cone that he rebuilt the city with GIŠ-TUG-PI DAGAL, or “hearing everywhere” his god Enki.6
The Mouth-Washing Ceremonies
Further evidence that such statues were aids to the hallucinated voices is found in other ceremonies all described precisely and concretely on cuneiform tablets. The statue-gods were made in the bit-mummu, a special divine craftsman’s house. Even the craftsmen were directed in their work by a craftsman-god, Mummuy who ‘dictated’ how to make the statue. Before being installed in their shrines, the statues underwent mis-pi which means mouth-washing, and the ritual of pit-pi or “opening of the mouth.”
Not only when the statue was being made, but also periodically, particularly in the later bicameral era when the hallucinated voices may have become less frequent, an elaborate washing-of-the-mouth ceremony could renew the god's speech.
The god with its face of inlaid jewels was carried by dripping torchlight to the riverbank, and there, imbedded in ceremonies and incantation, his wood mouth washed several times as the god was faced east, west, north, and then south. The holy water with which the mouth was washed out was a solution of a multitude of exotic ingredients: tamarisks, reeds of various kinds, sulphur, 6 Ibid., p. 320.
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various gums, salts, and oils, date honey, with various precious stones. Then after more incantations, the god was "led by the hand" back into the street with the priest incanting "foot that advanceth, foot that advanceth . . At the gate of the temple, another ceremony was performed. The priest then took "the hand" of the god and led him in to his throne in the niche, where a golden canopy was set up and the statue's mouth washed again.7
Bicameral kingdoms should not be thought of as everywhere the same or as not undergoing considerable development through time. The texts from which the above information has come are from approximately the late third millennium B.C. They may therefore represent a late development of bicamerality in which the very complexity of the culture could have been making the hallucinated voices less clear and frequent, thus giving rise to such a cleansing ritual in hope of rejuvenating the voice of the god.
The Personal God
But it is not to be supposed that the ordinary citizen heard directly the voices of the great gods who owned the cities; such hallucinatory diversity would have weakened the political fabric.
He served the owner gods, worked their estates, took part in their festivals. But he appealed to them only in some great crisis, and then only through intermediaries. This is shown on countless cylinder seals. A large proportion of the inventory type of cuneiform tablets have impressions on the reverse side rolled from such seals; commonly, they show a seated god and another minor divinity, usually a goddess, conducting the owner of the tablet by the right hand into the divine presence.