7 Translate d by Saggs , p. 291 .
8 If later copies of the well-know n Enuma Eli sh, the Neo-Babylonia n name fo r the epic of creation, are to be taken on their face value, this celestialization of the
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The Witness of History
The use of the word for sky or heaven in conjunction with gods becomes more and more common in Assyrian-literature. And when the story of the great flood (the origin of the Biblical story) is added into the Gilgamesh stories in the seventh century B.C., it is used as a rationalization for the departure of the gods from earth:
Even the gods were terror-stricken at the deluge.
T h e y fled and ascended to the heaven of Anu.9
This celestialization of the once-earthly gods is confirmed by an important change in the building of ziggurats. As we saw in 11.2, the original ziggurats of Mesopotamian history were built around a central great hall called the gigunu where the statue of the god 'lived' in the rituals of his human slaves. But by the end of the second millennium B.C., the entire concept of the ziggurat seems to have become altered. It now has no central room whatever and the statues of the major gods are less and less the centers of elaborate ritual. For the sacred tower of the ziggurat was now a landing stage to facilitate the gods' descent to earth from the heaven to which they had vanished. This is definitely known from texts of the first millennium B.C., which even make references to the "boat of heaven." The exact date at which this change took place is a difficult matter, for the extant ziggurats have been badly damaged and, even worse, sometimes 'restored'.
But I suggest that all of the many ziggurats which the Assyrians built beginning with the reign of Tulkulti-Ninurta were of this major gods began as early as the latter half of the second millennium b.c. See the translation by E. A. Speiser in Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, J. B. Pritchard, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). Its title is its first two words and means "When on high . . Like so much else, it was discovered in the great library of Ashurbanipal of the seventh century b.c. It is a copy, and the originals may have dated back to the second millennium b.c.
9 Gilgamesh, Tablet II, lines 113-114, in Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Efic and Old Testament Parallels, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
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sort, huge pedestals for the return of the gods from heaven and not houses for earthly gods as before.
The ziggurat built by Sargon in the eighth century B.C. for his huge new city of Khorsabad is calculated from recent excavations to have surged up in seven stages 140 feet above the surrounding city, its summit shining with a temple dedicated to Ashur, still the owning, if unheard, god of Assyria. There is no other temple to Ashur at Khorsabad. Descending from the temple was no ordinary stairway as in previous ziggurats, but a long spiral ramp winding around the core of the tower down which Ashur could walk, when or if he ever landed and did return to the city.
Similarly, the Ziggurat of Neo-Babylon, the Biblical Tower of Babel, was no god’s house as in the truly bicameral age, but a heavenly landing for the now celestialized gods. Built in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., it soared 300 feet high, again with seven stages, pinnacling in a brilliant blue-glazed temple for Marduk. Its very name indicates this use: E-temen-an-ki, temple ( E ) of the receiving platform ( temen) between heaven (an) and earth ( ki).10 The otherwise senseless passage of Genesis (11:2-9) is certainly a rewrite of some Neo-Babylonian legend of just such a landing by Yahweh who in the company of other gods
“come down to see the city and the tower,” and thereupon “confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.” The latter may be a narratization of the garbling of hallucinated voices in their decline.
The tirelessly curious Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.
trudged up the steep stairs and spiraling ramps of Etemenanki to see if there was a god or idol at the top: as in the altar-face of Tukulti, there was nothing but an empty throne.11
* * *
10 For my translation of
temen
and possible alternatives, see James B. Nies’ glos-sary in
Ur Dynasty Tablets
(Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920), p. 171.
11 Histories, 1: 181. Another empty throne scene is shown on Stela 91027 in the British Museum with Esarhaddon in a pose similar to Tukulti’s.
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The Witness of History
D I V I N A T I O N
So far, we have just looked at the evidence for the breakdown of the bicameral mind. This evidence is, I feel, fairly substantial.
The absence of gods in bas-reliefs and cylinder seals, the cries about lost gods that wail out of the silent cuneiforms, the emphasis on prayer, the introduction of new kinds of silent divinities, angels and demons, the new idea of heaven, all strongly indicate that the hallucinated voices called gods are no longer the guiding companions of men.
What then takes over their function? How is action initiated?
If hallucinated voices are no longer adequate to the escalating complexities of behavior, how can decisions be made?
Subjective consciousness, that is, the development on the basis of linguistic metaphors of an operation space in which an ‘I’ could narratize out alternative actions to their consequences, was of course the-great world result of this dilemma. But a more primitive solution, and one that antedates consciousness as well as paralleling it through history, is that complex of behaviors known as divination.
These attempts to divine the speech of the now silent gods work out into an astonishing variety and complexity. But I suggest that this variety is best understood as four main types, which can be ordered in terms of their historical beginning and which can be interpreted as successive approaches toward consciousness. These four are omens, sortilege, augury, and spontaneous divination.
Omen and Omen Texts
The most primitive, clumsy, but enduring method of discovering the will of silent gods is the simple recording of sequences of unusual or important events. In contrast to all other types of divination, it is entirely passive. It is simply an extension of
A C H A N G E O F M I N D I N M E S O P O T A M I A 237
something common to all mammalian nervous systems, namely, that if an organism experiences B after A, he will have a tendency to expect B the next time that A occurs. Since omens are really a particular example of this when expressed in language, we can say that the origin of omens is simply in animal nature rather than in civilized culture per se.
Omens or sequences of events that might be expected to recur were probably present in a trivial way throughout bicameral times. But they had little importance. Nor was there any necessity to study such sequences, since the hallucinated voices of gods made all the decisions in novel situations. There are, for example, no Sumerian omen texts whatever. While the first traces of omens occur among the Semitic Akkadians, it is really only after the loss of the bicameral mind toward the end of the second millennium B.C. that such omen texts proliferate everywhere and swell out to touch almost every aspect of life imaginable. By the first millennium B.C., huge collections of them are made. In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many classes of omens, terrestrial omens dealing with everyday life: If a town is set on a hill, it will not