In about 4000 BCE, human beings took another major step forward when they began to build cities, first in Mesopotamia and Egypt in about 4000 BCE, and later in China, India and Crete. Some of these early civilisations disappeared almost without trace, but in the Fertile Crescent, in what is now Iraq, we see an early response to the challenge of urbanisation in the mythology that celebrated city life. Human life was becoming more self-conscious. People could now give permanent expression to their aspirations in the civilised arts, and the invention of writing meant that they could give enduring literary expression to their mythology. They had now entered the historical age: in the cities, the rate of change accelerated, and people became more aware of the chain of cause and effect. The new technology gave city-dwellers a more complete control over their environment, and they were becoming increasingly more distinct from the natural world. It was a time of excitement, liberation and pride.
But major change on this scale also inspires great fear. It has been said that history is a process of annihilation, since each new development requires the destruction of what has gone before. This was clearly the case in the Mesopotamian cities, where the mudbrick buildings needed constant maintenance and periodic reconstruction. New structures were erected on top of the levelled ruins of their predecessors, and the process of decay and renewal was thus built into the new art of town planning. Civilisation was experienced as magnificent but fragile; a city shot up and flourished dramatically, but then all too quickly went into decline. When one city-state rose to pre-eminence, it preyed upon its rivals. There were wars, massacres, revolutions and deportations. The destruction meant that the culture that had been so painfully achieved needed to be rebuilt and established again and again. There was constant fear that life would revert to the old barbarism. With mingled apprehension and hope, the new urban myths meditated on the endless struggle between order and chaos.
Not surprisingly, some saw civilisation as a disaster. The biblical writers saw it as a sign of the separation from God that had followed the expulsion from Eden. Urban life seemed inherently violent, involving killing and exploitation. The first man to build a city was Cain, the first murderer, his descendants invented the civilised arts: Jubal was ‘the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and the pipes’, and Tubal-cain ‘made all kinds of bronze and iron tools’. The great ziggurat or temple-tower of Babylon made a profound and unfavourable impression on the ancient Israelites. It seemed the epitome of pagan hubris, motivated solely by a desire for self-aggrandisement. They called it the Tower of Bavel or Babble, because, to punish the builders, God had ‘baffled the language of all the earth-folk, and from there scattered them over the face of all the earth’.
But the people of Mesopotamia themselves saw the city as a place where they could encounter the divine. It was – almost – a recreation of the lost paradise. The ziggurat replaced the mountain at the centre of the world, which had enabled the first human beings to climb up to the world of the gods. The gods lived in the cities, side by side with men and women in temples that were replicas of their palaces in the divine world. In the ancient world, every city was a holy city. As their ancestors had regarded hunting and farming as sacred and sacramental activities, these early city-dwellers saw their cultural attainments as essentially divine. In Mesopotamia, the gods had taught men how to build the ziggurats, and Enki, god of wisdom, was the patron of leather-workers, metal-smiths, barbers, builders, potters, irrigation technicians, physicians, musicians and scribes. They knew that they had embarked on a wondrous enterprise that would transform human life forever; their cities were transcendent, because they went beyond anything known before. They partook of the divine creativity of the gods, who had somehow brought order out of the confusion of chaos.
But the Israelites were wrong to imagine that the people of Mesopotamia were guilty of hubris. They knew that human life – even in their imposing cities – was flawed and transitory, in comparison with the world of the gods, which still formed the backdrop of their daily lives. Their cities were only a pale shadow of the lost paradise of Dilmun, inhabited now only by gods and a few exceptional human beings. They were acutely aware that, like human life itself, civilisation was fragile and impermanent. In Egypt, a compact country, isolated and protected from hostile forces by mountains, and fertilised by the regular flooding of the Nile, there was greater confidence in human achievement. But in Mesopotamia, where the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates was unpredictable and often destructive, where torrential rain could turn the soil into a quagmire, or scorching winds reduce it to dust, and where there was constant threat of invasion, life was far less secure. The maintenance of civilisation seemed to require a heroic effort against the wilful and destructive powers of nature. These fears are especially evident in their flood myths. Rivers in Mesopotamia are prone to sudden shifts of direction because there are no natural obstacles, so flooding was frequent and often disastrous. A flood was not a blessing, as in Egypt, but became a metaphor for political and social dissolution.
Whenever they enter a new era of history, people change their ideas of both humanity and divinity. In these early civilisations, men and women were becoming more like us moderns, more aware than ever before that they were the masters of their own destiny. Consequently, they could no longer see the gods in the same way as their ancestors had. Because human actions were now centre-stage, the gods seemed more remote; they were no longer a reality that was self-evident and only just out of reach. The new urban mythology saw the Flood as marking a crisis in divine–human relations. In Atrahasis, the longest of the Mesopotamian Flood poems, the gods, like men, are town planners. The lesser deities go on strike, exhausted by the endless labour of digging irrigation canals to make the countryside habitable, so the Mother Goddess creates human beings to perform these menial tasks instead. But they become too numerous and so noisy that Enlil, the storm god, who is kept awake by the din, decides to inundate the world as a brutal method of population control. But Enki wants to save Atrahasis, the ‘exceedingly wise man’ of the city of Shuruppak. The two enjoy a special friendship, so Enki tells Atrahasis to build a boat, instructing him about the technology that would keep it watertight and, because of this divine intervention, Atrahasis, like Noah, is able to save his family and the seeds of all living things. But after the waters subside, the gods are horrified by the devastation. In Mesopotamian myth, the Flood marks the beginning of the gods’ withdrawal from the world. Enki takes Atrahasis and his wife to Dilmun. They would be the only humans to enjoy immortality and the old intimacy with the gods. But the story also celebrates the divinely inspired technology that had saved the human race from extinction. Increasingly in Mesopotamia, as in our own modernity, civilisation and culture would become the focus of myth and aspiration.
~~A Short History Of Myth -by- Karen Armstrong
No comments:
Post a Comment