And so on.
I have not come upon this type of divining in a Mesopotamian text. Yet I feel sure that it must have become a common practice, if only because spontaneous divination is both common and important in the Old Testament, as we shall see in a future chapter.
And it remains a common method among many types of seers well into the Middle Ages.25
These then are the four main types of divination, omens, sortilege, augury, and spontaneous divination. And I would draw to your attention that they can be considered as exopsychic methods of thought or decision-making, and that they are successively closer and closer proximations to the structure of consciousness.
The fact that all of them have roots that go back far into the bicameral period should not detract from the force of the general-25 Spontaneous divination was commonly used by Bedouin prognosticators around A.D. 1ooo, for example. See Alfred Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination Among the Hebrews and Other Semites (New York: Harper, 1938), p. 127. It is indeed an ingredient of everyday thought processes as well as prominent in intellectual discovery.
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ization that they became the important media of decision only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind as described in the first part of this chapter.
T H E E D G E O F S U B J E C T I V I T Y
So far in this heterogeneous chapter, we have been dealing with the breakdown of the bicameral mind in Mesopotamia, and the responses to this alteration in human mentality, the effort to find out what to do by other means when voices are no longer heard in hallucination. That a further method for finding out what to do was consciousness, and that it first occurs in the history of this planet here in Mesopotamia toward the end of the second millennium B.C. is a much more difficult proposition. The reasons are chiefly in our inability to translate cuneiform with the same exactness with which we can translate Greek or Hebrew, and to proceed with the kind of analysis which I attempt in the next chapter. The very words in cuneiform that might be relevant to tracing the metaphorical buildup of consciousness and mind-space are precisely those that are extremely difficult to translate with precision. Let me state categorically that a truly definitive study of changes in Mesopotamian mentality over this second millenium B.C. will have to wait for another level of scholarship in cuneiform studies. Such a task will include tracing out the changes in referent and frequency of words that later come to describe events which we call conscious. One, for example, is Sha (also transliterated as Shah or Shag), a word in Akkadian, whose basic meaning seems to be "in" or "inside." Prefixed to the name of a city, it means "in the city." Prefixed to the name of a man, it means "in the man," possibly a beginning of the interiorization of attribution.
I hope to be forgiven for saying rather tritely that these questions and so many others must remain for further research. So
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swiftly are new sites being discovered and new texts translated, that even ten years frarn now we shall have a much clearer picture, particularly if the data are looked at from the point of view of this chapter. The most I feel I can establish here at this time is simply a few comparisons of a literary kind which suggest that such a psychological change as consciousness actually took place.
These comparisons will be among letters, building inscriptions, and versions of Gilgamesh.
Assyrian and Old Babylonian betters Compared My first comparison to suggest this change from bicamerality to subjectivity is between the cuneiform tablet letters of the seventh century B.C., Assyria, and those of the old Babylonian kings a millennium earlier. The letters of Hammurabi and his era are factual, concrete, behavioristic, formalistic, commanding, and without greeting. They are not addressed to the recipient, but actually to the tablet itself, and always begin: unto A say, thus says B. And then follows what B has to say to A. We should remember here what I have suggested elsewhere, that reading, having developed from hallucinating from idols and then from pictographs, had become during later bicameral times a matter of hearing the cuneiform. And hence the addressee of the tablets.
The subjects of Old Babylonian letters are always objective.
Hammurabi's letters, for example (all possibly written by Hammurabi himself since they are cut by the same hand), are written for vassal kings and officers in his hegemony about sending such a person to him, or directing so much lumber to Babylon, specify-ing in one instance, "only vigorous trunks shall they cut down," or regulating the exchanges of corn for cattle, or where workmen should be sent. Rarely are reasons given. Purposes never.
Unto Sin-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi. I wrote you telling you to send Enubi-Marduk to me. W h y , then, haven't
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you sent him? W h e n you see this tablet, send Enubi-Marduk into my presence. See that he travels night and day, that he may arrive swiftly.26
And the letters rarely go beyond this in complication of 'thought'
or relationship.
A more interesting letter is a command to bring several conquered idols to Babylon:
Unto Sin-idinnam say: thus says Hammurabi. I am sending now Zikir-ilisu the officer, and Hammarabi-bani the Dugab-officer to bring the goddesses of Emutbalum. Let the goddesses travel in a processional boat as in a shrine as they come to Babylon. And the temple-women shall follow after them. For the food of the goddesses, you shall provide sheep . . . Let them not delay, but swiftly reach Babylon.27
This letter is interesting in showing the everyday nature of the relationship of god and man in Old Babylon, as well as the fact that the deities are somehow expected to eat on their trip.
Going from Hammurabi's letters to the state letters of Assyria of the seventh century B.C. is like leaving a thoughtless tedium of undisobeyable directives and entering a rich sensitive frightened grasping recalcitrant aware world not all that different from our own. The letters are addressed to people, not tablets, and probably were not heard, but had to be read aloud. The subjects discussed have changed in a thousand years to a far more extensive list of human activities. But they are also imbedded in a texture of deceit and divination, speaking of police investigations, complaints of lapsing ritual, paranoid fears, bribery, and pathetic appeals of imprisoned officers, all things unknown, unmentioned, and impossible in the world of Hammurabi. Even sarcasm, as in 26 Transliterated and translated by L. W. King in Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi (London: Luzac, 1900), Vol. 3, Letter 46, p. 9+f.
27 Ibid., Vol. 3, Letter 2 p. 6f.
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a letter from an Assyrian king to his restive acculturated deputies in conquered Babylon about 670 B.C. :
W o r d of the king to the pseudo-Babylonians. I am well . . .
So you, so help you heaven, have turned yourselves into Babylonians! And you keep bringing up against my servants charges