The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. It used cortical areas more closely connected to the auditory parts of the brain. And once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god's commands or the king's directives could be turned to or avoided by one's own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. The word of a god had a controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate obedience. This is extremely important.
The Failure of the Gods
This loosening of the god-man partnership perhaps by trade and certainly by writing was the background of what happened.
But the immediate and precipitate cause of the breakdown of the 3 Romain F. Butin, "The Sarabit Expedition of 1930: IV, The Protosinaitic Inscriptions." Harvard Theological Review, 1932, 25, pp. 130-204.
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bicameral mind, of the wedge of consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what to do. Or if they did, they led to death, or at the intimate least to an increase in the stress that physiologically occasioned the voice in the first place, until voices came in an unsolvable Babel of confusion.
The historical context of all this was enormous. The second millennium B.C. was heavy laden with profound and irreversible changes. Vast geological catastrophes occurred. Civilizations perished. Half the world’s population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunched itself sickly into its dark and bloody close.
It is a complex picture, the variables evoking these changes multileveled, the facts as we have them now not at all certain.
Almost yearly they are revised as each new generation of archaeologists and ancient historians finds fault with its predecessors.
As an approximation to these complexities, let us look at the two major elements of these upheavals. One was the mass migrations and invasions of peoples all around the eastern Mediterranean due to the volcanic eruption of Thera, and the other was the rise of Assyria, in three great phases, warring its way reign by reign westward to Egypt, northward to the Caspian, incorporat-ing all of Mesopotamia, forming a very different kind of empire from any that the world had known before.
The Assyrian Spring
Let us first look at the situation in northern Mesopotamia around the city that belongs to the god Ashur, as the second millennium B.C. opens.4 Originally a part of Akkad, and then of Old Babylonia two hundred miles south, by 1950 B.C., this peace-4 For the overall contours of Assyrian history I have relied on various authorities, but particularly H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (New York: Mentor Books, 1962) ; and various articles by William F. Albright.
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ful bicameral city on an upper reach of the gentle Tigris has been left pretty much to itself. Under the guidance of Ashur's chief human servant, Puzen-Ashur I, its benign influence and wealth begin to expand. More than in any nation before it, the feature of that expansion is exchange of goods with other theocracies.
About two hundred years later, the city owned by Ashur becomes Assyria, with exchange posts as much as seven hundred miles by road away to the northeast in Anatolia or present-day Turkey.
Exchange of goods between cities had been going on for some time. But it is doubtful if it was as extensive as that practiced by the Assyrians. Recent excavations have revealed karums or, in smaller towns, ubartums, the exchange posts just outside several Anatolian cities in which the trading took place. Particularly interesting excavations have been made of the karum just outside Kiiltepe: small buildings whose walls have no windows, stone and wooden shelves on which are cuneiform tablets yet to be translated, and sometimes jars with what appear to be counters within them.5 The writing, indeed, is old Assyrian, and, presumably brought there by these traders, is the first writing known in Anatolia.
Such trade was not, however, a true market. There were no prices under the pressures of supply and demand, no buying and selling, and no money. It was trade in the sense of equivalences established by divine decree. There is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets that have so far been translated. There are occasional exceptions, even a suggestion of 'inflation,' perhaps during a famine year when the exchanges became different, but they do not seriously impair Polanyi's view, which I am following here.6
Let us consider these Assyrian merchants for a moment. They 5 Nimet Osguc, "Assyrian trade colonies in Anatolia," Archeology, 1965, 4: 250-255.
6 Karl Polanyi, Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe: Free Press, I957).
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were, we may presume, merely agents, holding their position by descent and apprenticeship, and carrying out exchanges much as their fathers had done for centuries. But there are so many questions that face the psychohistorian at this point. What would happen to the bicameral voices of these merchants as much as seven hundred miles from the source of their city-god’s voice, and in daily contact and probably (though not necessarily) speaking the language of bicameral men ruled by a different pantheon of voices? Is it possible that something like a protosubjective consciousness occurred in these traders at the boundaries of different civilizations? Did they, returning periodically to Ashur, bring with them a weakened bicamerality that perhaps spread to a new generation? So that the bicameral tie between gods and men was loosened?
The causes of consciousness are multiple, but at least I do not think it is a coincidence that the key nation in this development should also have been that nation most involved in exchanges of goods with others. If it is true that the power of the gods and particularly of Ashur were being weakened at this time, it could account for the absolute collapse of his city in 1700 B.C., beginning the dark ages of Assyrian anarchy that lasted two hundred years. For this event there is no explanation whatever. No historian understands it. And there is little hope of ever doing so, for not a single Assyrian cuneiform inscription from this period has ever been found.
The reorganization of Assyria after its collapse had to wait upon other events. In 1450 B.C., Egypt pushed the Mitanni out of Syria right across the Euphrates into lands between the two great rivers that had once been Assyrian. But a century later the Mitanni were conquered by the Hittites from the north, thus making possible the rebuilding of an Assyrian empire in 1380
B.C. after two centuries of anarchic darkness.
And what an empire it is! No nation had been so militaristic before. Unlike any previous inscriptions anywhere, those of mid-
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die Assyria now bristle with brutal campaigns. The change is dramatic. But the success of the Assyrian invasions as they relentlessly savage their way toward world domination is like a ratchet catching at the whorl of catastrophes of another kind.
Eruption, Migration, Conquest
The collapse of the bicameral mind was certainly accelerated by the collapse under the ocean of a good part of the Aegean people's land. This followed an eruption or series of eruptions of the volcano on the island of Thera, also called Santorini, now an Aegean tourist attraction, barely sixty-two miles north of Crete.7