T h e god was depressed by their uproar
Enlil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
T h e noise of mankind has become burdensome . . .21
as if the voices were having difficulty. The epic goes on to describe how the great gods send plagues, famines, and finally a great flood (the origin of the story of the Biblical flood) to get rid of some of the "black headed ones" as the Mesopotamian gods disparagingly referred to their human slaves.
21 Quoted by Saggs, Greatness That Was Babylon, pp. 384-385.
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The apparatus of divinity was becoming strained. In the early millennia of the bicameral age, life had been simpler, confined to a small area, with a simpler political organization, and the needed gods were then few. But as we approach and continue through to the end of the third millennium B.C., the tempo and complexity of social organization demand a far greater number of decisions in a far greater number of contexts in any week or month. And hence, the enormous proliferation of deities which could be invoked in whatever situation a man might find himself.
From the great god-houses of the Sumerian and Babylonian cities of the major gods, to the personal gods enchapeled in each household, the world must have literally swarmed with sources of hallucination, and hence the increasing need for priests to order them into strict hierarchies. There were gods for everything one might do. One finds, for example, the coming into existence of obviously popular wayside shrines, such as the Pa-Sag Chapel where the statue-god Pa-Sag helped in making decisions about journeys through the desert.22
The response of these Near Eastern theocracies to this increasing complexity is both different and extremely illuminating. In Egypt, the older god-king form of government is less resilient, less developing of human potential, less allowing of innovation, of individuality among subordinate domains. Yet it stretched out for huge distances along the Nile. Regardless of what theory of civil cohesion one may hold, there is no doubt that in the last century of the third millennium B.C., all authority in Egypt broke down. There may have been a triggering cause in some geological catastrophe: some ancient texts referring back to the period of 2100 B.C. seem to speak of the Nile becoming dry, of men crossing it on foot, of the sun being hidden, of crops being diminished. Whatever the immediate cause, the pyramid of authority headed by the god-king at Memphis simply collapsed at about 22 According to cuneiform tablets found by Sir Leonard Woolley in association with Pa-Sag's rather poorly carved limestone effigy. See C. L. Woolley, Excavations at Ur: A Record of Twelve Years Work (London: Benn, 1954), pp. 190-192.
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that time. Literary sources describe people fleeing towns, noble-men grubbing for food in the fields, brothers fighting, men killing their parents, pyramids and tombs ransacked. Scholars are insistent that this total disappearance of authority was due to no outside force but to some unfathomable internal weakness. And I suggest that this is indeed the weakness of the bicameral mind, its fragility in the face of increasing complexity, and that the collapse of authority in so absolute a manner can only be so understood. Egypt at the time had extremely important separated districts stretching from the delta to the upper Nile that could have been self-sustaining. But the very fact that in the midst of this anarchy there was no rebellion, no striving of these sections for independence is, I think, indicative of a very different mentality from our own.
This breakdown of the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles. And just as the Maya cities became inhabited again or new ones formed after a period of breakdown, so Egypt after less then a century of breakdown has unified itself at the beginning of the second millennium under a new god-king, beginning what is called the Middle Kingdom. The same breakdown occurred elsewhere in the Near East from time to time, as in Assur about 1700
B.C., as we shall see in the next chapter.
The Idea of Law
But nothing of this extent ever happens in southern Mesopotamia. Of course there are wars. City-states fought each other over whose god and therefore which steward was to rule over which fields. But there was never any total collapse of authority as occurred in Mesoamerica and in Egypt at the end of the Old Kingdom.
One of the reasons, I think, was the greater resiliency of the
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steward-king type of theocracy. And another, not unconnected reason was the use to which writing was put. Unlike in Egypt, writing in Mesopotamia was early put to civil use. By 2100 B.C.
in Ur, the judgments of gods through their steward mediums began to be recorded. This is the beginning of the idea of law.
Such written judgments could be in several places and be continuous through time, thus allowing the cohesiveness of a larger society. We know of nothing similar in Egypt until almost a millennium later.
In 1792 B.C., the civil use of writing in this way breaks open an almost new kind of government in that commanding figure of Mesopotamian history, the greatest of all steward kings, Hammurabi, steward of Marduk, the city god of Babylon. His long stewardship, lasting to 1750 B.C., is a pulling together of most of the city-states of Mesopotamia into an hegemony under his god Marduk in Babylon. This process of conquest and influence is made possible by letters and tablets and stelae in an abundance that had never been known before. It is even thought that he was the first literate king who did not need a scribe, since all his cuneiform letters are apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand. Writing was a new method of civil direction, indeed the model that begins our own memo-communicating government.
Without it such a unification of Mesopotamia could not have been accomplished. It is a method of social control which by hindsight we know will soon supplant the bicameral mind.
His most famous remains are the somewhat overinterpreted and perhaps misnamed Code of Hammurabi.23 Originally, it was an eight-foot-high black basalt stele erected at the end of his reign beside a statue or possibly idol of himself. So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from another would come to the steward's statue, to "hear my words" (as the stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the previ-23 For a translation I have used Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904).
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Hammurabi hallucinating judgments from his god Marduk (or possibly Shamash) as carved on the top of a stele listing those judgments. About 1750 B.C.
ous judgments of the steward's god are recorded. His god, as I have said, was Marduk, and the top of the stele is sculptured to depict the scene of judgment-giving. The god is seated on a raised mound which in Mesopotamian graphics symbolizes a mountain. An aura of flames flashes up from his shoulders as he speaks (which has made some scholars think it is Shamash, the sun-god). Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him ("under-stands"). The god holds in his right hand the attributes of power, the rod and circle very common to such divine depictions. With these symbols, the god is just touching the left elbow of his steward, Hammurabi. One of the magnificent things about this scene is the hypnotic assurance with which both god and steward-king intently stare at each other, impassively majestic, the steward-king's right hand held up between us, the observers, and the plane of communication. Here is no humility, no begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later. Ham-