Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (17 page)

 

T

he next time you walk into a bar on a Friday night, order up a cold brew, and ask someone what his or her “sign” is, pause a moment and thank the ancient Mesopotamians.

At the dawn of history, these people invented the seven-day week, beer, and astrology. (How they overlooked cocktail nuts is a mystery yet to be solved.) If you nurse your drink for an hour and then scribble down someone’s name and number before driving home, consider that the ancient Mesopotamians also deserve credit for the sixty-minute hour, the world’s first writing system, and the wheel. The list goes on. Ancient Mesopotamia was an extraordinary place that pioneered pottery, poetry, sailboats, and schools. The Mesopotamians came up with the 360-degree circle, a poem considered the first piece of written literature, formulas to predict eclipses of the sun and moon, and the mathematical concepts of fractions, squares, and square roots that still torment high school kids.

But there is something else we should not leave off this impressive list of legacies. In this so-called “dead civilization,” the Mesopotamians created a richly imaginative mythic tradition crowded with warring gods, dragon-slayers, the first superhero, and an enticingly libidinous love goddess. These Mesopotamian myths not only played a central role in the daily lives and history of the people in the “cradle of civilization,” but their stories and legends also placed an indelible stamp on the literature and history of the Bible.

The six-day Creation in Genesis, for instance, is widely thought to have been influenced by Mesopotamia’s Creation epic, first translated a little more than a century ago and rattling religious teacups ever since with the suggestion that parts of the Bible were—gasp!—cribbed from another source. The genealogies of Adam and Eve’s descendants suspiciously resemble the lists of early Mesopotamian kings, unearthed in a royal library in the ruins of Nineveh, a fabled city once buried under centuries of sand and featured in the story of Jonah and the whale. (Actually, it was a “large fish.” But that’s another story.) Mesopotamia’s towering, pyramid-like temples, called ziggurats, made a lasting impression as the inspiration for the Tower of Babel. Perhaps most intriguing of all are their flood stories. Composed more than four thousand years ago and told in
Gilgamesh
—an epic poem written centuries before the Bible was set down—these tales may have influenced the Hebrew storytellers who produced their own flood account featuring a godly man named Noah. All of these ancient Mesopotamian legends would have been familiar to the Hebrews, whose patriarch Abraham came from Mesopotamia, and who often came under the thumb of a collection of aggressive Mesopotamian kings counted among the Bible’s “bad guys.”

Located mostly in what is modern-day Iraq, Mesopotamia was a desirable patch of real estate that became home to some of the world’s first human settlements about ten thousand years ago. Watered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—the word “Mesopotamia” is Greek for “between the rivers”—this otherwise arid, flat plain blossomed as people learned how to control these somewhat erratic rivers with irrigation dikes and canals. Like beads on a necklace strung along the two rivers, small farming settlements grew into the world’s first cities, flourishing as their surplus food production allowed for expanding trade opportunities. As they developed in wealth and size, these farming and herding communities eventually became “city-states,” with merchants, skilled craftsmen, prostitutes, priests, and tax collectors, and armies of scribes who recorded everything from negotiations over the price of figs to real estate deals, law codes, epic poetry, and the military records and amorous adventures of conquering kings.

Unfortunately, the prosperity of these city-states also attracted attention. Unprotected by the vast stretches of desert that kept Egypt safe from most outsiders, the flat plains of Mesopotamia were like an open chess-board, across which armies moved freely. Mesopotamia became a land of repeated invasions and conquests, and history in the Tigris-Euphrates valley tended to be stormy and full of violent upheavals. Unlike the constant Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates were also less reliable sources of water for crops, and changed their course over many centuries, sometimes turning thriving cities into ghost towns. The unpredictable and uneven flow of the two great rivers combined with local political conflicts to shape a mythology and religion that was as much about strife as it was about universal order.

Over thousands of years, Mesopotamia was occupied and ruled by a succession of small kingdoms—some fairly belligerent—that grew to include some of the world’s first empires: the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Persians. As these empires rose and fell, power shifted and civilizations grew. Each time power changed hands, the myths of this very old land changed, too. Each new empire borrowed traditions from the one before, and Mesopotamia’s myths evolved and were rewritten and reshaped to reflect new political realities. But always, there was one constant. From the earliest times, the worship of Mesopotamia’s many gods—who ruled sun, wind, and water, the weather, earth’s fertility, and every aspect of the natural world—played a crucial role in dictating life and society in the world “between the rivers.”

What role did myths play in ancient Mesopotamia?

Think of Mesopotamia as the Rodney Dangerfield of the ancient Near East—it has never gotten the respect or star billing accorded to Egypt and Greece. Maybe it was because the people there were considered the villains of the Bible, having sacked Jerusalem, carted thousands of Jews off to captivity or oblivion, and introduced so many of the Bible’s pernicious “false gods.” Or maybe it was because their ancient attractions were not viewed with the same awe as those that sent worshipful tourists flocking to Egypt and Greece. (One historian describes the achievements in Mesopotamia as “less spectacular art and crumbling mudbrick ruins.”) Keats didn’t write an “Ode on a Mesopotamian Urn.” And New Age trendsetters have not adopted the Mesopotamian ziggurat as a totem of mysterious psychic powers. Also, during much of the twentieth century, what was once Mesopotamia has largely been shut off to the Western world, due to culture, history, and politics. In case you hadn’t noticed, Iraq hasn’t been topping anybody’s list of ten best tourist destinations for most of the past fifty years.
*

Whatever the reasons, Mesopotamia took a back seat to Egypt and Greece, an oversight worth correcting, because the oversimplified—or overlooked—past of this ancient land, which has become so significant in modern times, is a fascinating piece in the jigsaw puzzle of ancient civilization. Religion, history, and myth all mingled together there, and the story of Mesopotamia’s city-states and the empires that grew from them offers another vivid example of that fascinating crossroads where legend and ancient life intersect.

Like Egypt, the successive empires of Mesopotamia were theocracies—societies in which government and religion were inseparably fused. The gods of Mesopotamia didn’t just make the rain fall or crops grow. These gods chose the earthly kings—or, at least, that’s what the kings and temple priests told their subjects. The people existed to serve the gods—through their earthly representatives, the kings and priests. In each city-state, the local god became the symbol of the city’s strength and source of its prestige, wealth, and power. To put it simply—” My god is bigger than your god.”

As Mesopotamia’s cities eventually expanded to become small empires, the power of their gods increased as well, and the most powerful empire, obviously, had the most powerful god.
Marduk
, the central deity of Babylon, took charge when Babylon became the region’s preeminent city-state. Local myths were revised so that his status as a Zeus-like king of the gods was celebrated and made sacred in Mesopotamia’s central Creation story. Just as Re became Egypt’s state god, or Yahweh later became Israel’s national god, Marduk, once an agricultural deity, emerged to lord over the pantheon of Mesopotamian deities, superseding the earlier chief god of the Sumerians, An, and taking control of the weather, the moon, rain, justice, wisdom, and war. (See below, “
Who’s Who of Mesopotamian Myths
.”)

The other key concept from Mesopotamian myth was the
me
(pronounced “may”), a somewhat abstract collection of divine laws, rules, and regulations that governed the universe from its creation and kept it operating. Unlike the Egyptian concept of
maat,
which was order, truth, and justice, the Mesopotamian
me
was a far more complex list of institutions, people, rituals, and other elements of a culture that included more than one hundred separate characteristic items forming the basis of Sumerian society. In some respects, it was comparable to the intricate laws of ancient Judaism that went far beyond the basic Ten Commandments, and defined the role of priests and the manner of worship.

But the
me
was, in many ways, even more complex, covering nearly every dimension of Sumerian society. Among the varied aspects of the
me
were a catalog of official institutions, like kingship and the priesthood; certain ritualistic practices, including holy purification; desirable qualities of human character and moral laws; and even lists of occupations that included scribes and blacksmiths. Highly conceptual, the list of what constituted the
me
also included such acts as lamentation, rejoicing, sexual intercourse, and prostitution. Various parts of the
me
could also exist in physical objects, such as the throne—in which kingship resided—or drums that contained rhythm. Like building blocks of an orderly society, all of these basic ideas, institutions, and practices had to be maintained intact to ensure the cosmic order. Possession of the
me
meant to hold supreme power, and
Enki
, the chief god of Sumer, was the keeper of the
me
.

Where did Mesopotamia’s gods live?

If the poet Robert Frost was right that “good fences make good neighbors,” walls may be even better. To fortify their cities against invasions, the Mesopotamians built high-gated walls around their cities, with temples, palaces, and royal houses enclosed within another set of walls in their centers. Around them were “suburbs,” encompassing the fields and orchards. Every city also had a riverfront harbor area, which was the center of commerce.

But the temples provided the focal point of Mesopotamian life and society. Housed within the prominent ziggurat towers that loomed high above the relatively flat plains of Mesopotamia, the temples were more than just symbolic or ritual buildings, or tombs for dead kings. Built for the cult worship of a particular god who was responsible for both the city and the people, the temples were thought to be the actual home of the gods, where they lived with their families and servants. The gods of Mesopotamia’s cities might be fearsome and powerful, but they were homebodies, completely tied to their cult city and its temple, and they needed the daily attention of priests and priestesses. Each day, the rituals of feeding, clothing, and washing the god were carried out within the sanctuary. As anthropologist Gwendolyn Leick put it, “Heaven was no further than the temple roof. By providing the gods with lodgings and sustenance, the city partook of the essence of divinity.”

Employing large numbers of workers, these city temples drove daily life. They were run by a priestly hierarchy and controlled enormous wealth collected through taxes and offerings, held large tracts of fields and orchards, and even functioned as “banks,” making loans. Though the daily worship of the gods was a priestly duty, religion played a great part in the lives of ordinary people. Everyday worshippers attached themselves to a particular god or goddess—just as modern Christians might be especially devoted to a favorite saint—and they offered prayers and sacrifices in return for blessings and protection from evil spirits. Even though they were unable to access the inner sanctums of the temples, ordinary people participated in the great religious processions in which statues representing the gods were paraded through the streets.

Many people also heeded exorcists and diviners for prophecies and advice. In Mesopotamia, divination was a highly specialized art. The Mesopotamians believed that the whole universe was filled with coded messages about the future, and these people sought advice from expert diviners, trained for years in the art of reading the signs in animal entrails and organs, such as the liver of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Dream oracles were also popular, and the practice of astrological readings began in Mesopotamia as soothsayers attempted to find portents in the changing heavens—the beginning of carefully recorded astronomical records. As Daniel Boorstin wrote in
The Discoverers
, “If the rising and setting of the sun made so much difference on earth, why not also the movement of the other heavenly bodies? The [Mesopotamian] Babylonians made the whole sky a stage for their mythological imagination. Like the rest of nature, the heavens were a scene of living drama.”

Originally intended to demonstrate that the king’s decisions and laws had divine approval, these elaborate ancient Mesopotamian systems of reading signs, omens, and oracles were probably as ubiquitous in ancient Ur and Babylon as the “psychic reader” business is on the streets of many big cities today.

But the chief mythic event in this world came during their New Year, when a great public festival was held. This eleven-day religious observance was not just a spiritual event or festive holiday, but a national drama, a form of political theater meant to solidify the king’s role as protector and provider. During the pivotal New Year celebration (which fell in April), when the ancient Creation stories were sung at great public gatherings, the king actually reenacted the role of the great fertility god in a ritual marriage to a priestess representing the goddess
Inanna
(aka Ishtar). This marriage ceremony—which would have been publicly consummated—was meant to ensure prosperity, strength, and order.