Such intermediaries were the personal gods. Each individual, king or serf, had his own personal god whose voice he heard and 7 See the translation of this text by Sidney Smith in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January 1925, as quoted by S. H. Hooke, Babylonian and Assyrian Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), pp. 118-121.
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obeyed.8 In almost every house excavated, there existed a shrine-room that probably contained idols or figurines as the inhabitant's personal gods. Several late cuneiform texts describe rituals for them similar to the mouth-washing ceremonies for the great gods.9
These personal gods could be importuned to visit other gods higher up in the divine hierarchy for some particular boon. Or, in the other direction, strange as it seems to us: when the owner gods had chosen a prince to be a steward-king, the city-god informed the appointee's personal god of the decision first, and only then the individual himself. According to my discussion in I. 5, all this layering was going on in the right hemisphere and I am well aware of the problem of authenticity and group acceptance of such selection. As elsewhere in antiquity, it was the personal god who was responsible for what the king did, as it was for the commoner.
Other cuneiform texts state that a man lived in the shadow of his personal god, his Hi. So inextricably were a man and his personal god bound together that the composition of his personal name usually included the name of the personal god, thus making obvious the bicameral nature of the man. It is of considerable interest when the name of the king is indicated as the personal god: Rim-Sin-Ili, which means "Rim-Sin is my god," Rim-Sin being a king of Larsa, or, more simply, Sharru-Ili, "the king is my god."10 These instances suggest that the steward-king himself could sometimes be hallucinated.
When the King Becomes a God
This possibility shows that the distinction I have made between the steward-king type of theocracy and the god-king is not an 8 Thorkild Jacobsen has felt that the personal god "appears as the personification of a man's luck and success." I am insisting that this is an unwarranted modern imposition. See his "Mesopotamia," in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, H. Frankfort, et al., eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 203.
9 Saggs, p. 301f.
10 Frankfort et al., p. 306.
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absolute one. Moreover, on several cuneiform tablets, a number of the earlier Mesopotamian kings have beside their names the eight-pointed star which is the determinative sign indicating deity. In one early text, eleven out of a larger number of kings of Ur and Isin are given this or another divine determinative. A number of theories have been proposed as to what this means, none of them very gripping.
The clues to look at are, I think, that the divine determinative is often given to these kings only late in their reigns, and then only in certain of their cities. This may mean that the voice of a particularly powerful king may have been heard in hallucination but only by a certain proportion of his people, only after he had reigned for some time, and only in certain places.
Yet even in these instances, there seems throughout Mesopotamia a significant and continuing distinction between such divine kings and the gods proper.11 But this is not at all true of Egypt, to which we now turn.
E G Y P T : T H E K I N G S A S G O D S
The great basin of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers looses its identity, feature by feature, into the limitless deserts of Arabia and the gradual foothills of the mountain chains of Persia and Armenia. But Egypt, except in the south, is clearly defined by bilaterally symmetrical immutable frontiers. A pharaoh extending his authority in the Nile Valley soon reached what he might raid but never conquer. And thus Egypt was always more uniform both geographically and ethnologically, both in space and in time. Its people through the ages were also of a remarkably similar physique, as has been shown from studies of remaining skulls.12 It is this protected homogeneity, I suggest, which al-11 Saggs, p. 343f.
12 G. M. Morant, "Study of Egyptian craniology from prehistoric to Roman times,"
Biometrika, 1925, 17: 1-52.
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lowed the perpetuation of that more archaic form of theocracy, the god-king.
The Memphite Theology
Let us begin with the famous "Memphite Theology."13 This is an eighth-century B.C. granite block on which a previous work (presumably a rotting leather roll of around 3000 B.C.) was copied. It begins with a reference to a "creator" god Ptah, proceeds through the quarrels of the gods Horus and Seth and their arbitration by Geb, describes the construction of the royal god-house at Memphis, and then, in a famous final section, states that the various gods are variations of Ptah's voice or "tongue."
Now when "tongue" here is translated as something like the
"objectified conceptions of his mind," as it so often is, this is surely an imposing of modern categories upon the texts.14 Ideas such as objectified conceptions of a mind, or even the notion of something spiritual being manifested, are of much later development. It is generally agreed that the ancient Egyptian language, like the Sumerian, was concrete from first to last. To maintain that it is expressing abstract thoughts would seem to me an intrusion of the modern idea that men have always been the same. Also, when the Memphite Theology speaks of the tongue or voices as that from which everything was created, I suspect that the very word "created" may also be a modern imposition, and the more proper translation might be commanded. This theology, then, is essentially a myth about language, and what Ptah is really commanding is indeed the bicameral voices which began, controlled, and directed Egyptian civilization.
13 In addition to texts otherwise cited, I have used for this part of the chapter John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Cyril Aldred, Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965); W. W. Hallo and W. K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).
14 Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 28.
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Osiris} the Dead King's Voice
There has been some astonishment that mythology and reality should be so mixed that the heavenly contention of Horus and Seth is over real land, and that the figure of Osiris in the last section has a real grave in Memphis, and also that each king at death becomes Osiris, just as each king in life is Horus. If it is assumed that all of these figures are particular voice hallucinations heard by kings and their next in rank, and that the voice of a king could continue after his death and 'be' the guiding voice of the next, and that the myths about various contentions and relationships with other gods are attempted rationalizations of conflicting admonitory authoritative voices mingled with the authoritative structure in the actuality of the society, at least we are given a new way to look at the subject.
Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a
"dying god," not "life caught in the spell of death," or "a dead god," as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight.