Cultural Activity Report 2

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THINKING AHEAD

2.1 Describe the relationship between the gods and the peoples of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria.

2.2 Explain how the Epic of Gilgamesh reflects the relationship between the gods and the people.

2.3 Distinguish between the culture of the Hebrews and the other cultures of the ancient Near East.

2.4 Discuss how the art and architecture of Neo-Babylonia and Persia reflect the ambitions of their leaders.

In September 1922, British archeologist C. Leonard Wool-ley boarded a steamer, beginning a journey that would take him to southern Iraq. There, Woolley and his team would discover one of the richest treasure troves in the history of archeology in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur. Woolley concentrated his energies on the burial grounds surround- ing the city’s central ziggurat, a pyramidal temple structure consisting of successive platforms with outside staircases and a shrine at the top (Fig. 2.1). Digging there in the winter of 1927, he unearthed a series of tombs with several rooms, many bodies, and masses of golden objects (Fig. 2.2)—ves- sels, crowns, necklaces, statues, and weapons—as well as jewelry and lyres made of electrum and the deep-blue stone lapis lazuli. With the same sense of excitement that was felt by Jean-Marie Chauvet and his companions when they first saw the paintings on the wall of Chauvet Cave, Woolley was careful to keep what he called the “royal tombs” secret. On January 4, 1928, Woolley telegrammed his colleagues in Latin. Translated to English, it read:

I found the intact tomb, stone built, and vaulted over with bricks of queen Shubad [later known as Puabi] adorned with a dress in which gems, flower crowns and animal figures are woven. Tomb magnificent with jewels and golden cups.

—Woolley

The Ancient Near East Power and Social Order 2

Fig. 2.2 Vessel in the shape of an ostrich egg, from the Royal Cemetery of Ur. ca. 2550 bce. Gold, lapis lazuli, red limestone, shell, and bitumen, hammered from a single sheet of gold and with geometric mosaics at the top and bottom of the egg. Height 53⁄4”, diameter 51⁄8”. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. Museum object #152071. The array of materials came from trade with neighbors in Afghanistan, Iran, Anatolia, and perhaps Egypt and Nubia.

Fig. 2.1 The ziggurat at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2100 bce. The best preserved and most fully restored of the ancient Sumerian temples, this ziggurat was the center of the city of Ur, in the lower plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

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When Woolley’s discovery was made public, it was world- wide news for years.

Archeologists and historians were especially excited by Woolley’s discoveries, because they opened a window onto the larger region we call Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Ur was one of 30 or 40 cities that arose in Sumer, the southern portion of Meso- potamia (Map 2.1). In fact, its people abandoned the city more than 2,000 years ago, when the Euphrates changed its course away from the city.

Over the centuries other cultures would vie for control of the region, chief among them the Akkadians, Babyloni- ans, and Assyrians. By 612 bce, the Assyrian Empire would fall to Nabopolassar, first king of Babylonia, and a second Neo-Babylonian culture would arise, only to fall, in turn, to the Persians. Throughout almost the entire era, a very different culture, that of the Hebrews, coexisted with the major Mesopotamian powers, sometimes peacefully, often not. This chapter outlines the social and political forces that came to define these Mesopotamian cultures.

THE CULTURES OF MESOPOTAMIA, 3200–612 bce

What was the nature of the relationship between the gods and the peoples of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria?

The peoples of Mesopotamia were almost totally dependent on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for their livelihoods. By irrigating the lands just outside the marshes on the river- banks, the conditions necessary for extensive and elaborate communities such as Ur began to arise: People dug canals and ditches and cooperated in regulating the flow of water in them, which eventually resulted in crops that exceeded the needs of the population. These could be transformed into foodstuffs of a more elaborate kind, including beer. Evidence indicates that over half of each grain harvest went into producing beer. Excess crops were also traded by boat with nearby communities or up the great rivers

250 km

250 miles

Fertile area of early agriculture

modern-day coastline

Susa

Ur Eridu

LagashGirsu

Uruk

Babylon

Nineveh Kalhu

Tell Asmar

Assur

Sippar

Jerusalem SUMER

A N A T O L I A

T U R K E Y

S Y R I A

I R A Q

I R A N

JORDAN

ASSYRIA

S A U D I

A R A B I A

C A

N A A N

BABYLONIA

CHALDEA

AKKAD L E

B A

N O

N

N ile

P e r s i a n Gu l f

Euphrates

Tigris

M e d i t e r r a n e a n

S e a

Z a

g r o

s M

o u n t a

i n s

Dead Sea

C a s p i a n

S e a

Red Sea

M E

S O

P O

T A

M I

A

Map 2.1 Major Mesopotamian capitals, ca. 2600–500 bce.

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4000 bce

Sumer

Akkad

Babylon

Persia

Assyria

2350 bce

2200 bce

1800 bce

1595 bce

600 bce 520 bce

Neo-Babylonia

330 bce

to the north, where stone, wood, and metals were avail- able in exchange. As people congregated in central loca- tions to exchange goods, cities began to form. Cities such as Ur became hubs of great trading networks. With trade came ideas, which were incorporated into local custom and spawned newer and greater ideas in turn. Out of the exchange of goods and ideas, then, the conditions were in place for great cultures to arise.

After agriculture, first among these was metallurgy, the science of separating metals from their ores and then working or treating them to create objects. The technol- ogy probably originated in the Fertile Crescent to the north about 4000 bce, but as it spread southward, the peoples of Mesopotamia adopted it as well.

This new technology would change the region’s social organization, inaugurating what we have come to call the Bronze Age. Metallurgy required the mining of ores, special- ized technological training, and skilled artisans. Although the metallurgical properties of copper were widely under- stood, technicians discovered that by alloying it with tin they could create bronze, a material of enormous strength and durability. Bronze weapons would transform the mili- tary and the nature of warfare. Power consolidated around the control and mastery of weaponry, and thus bronze created a new military elite of soldiers dedicated to protect- ing the Sumerian city-states from one another as they vied for control of produce and trade. The city-states, in turn,

spawned governments ruled by priest-kings, who exercised power as intermediaries between the gods and the people. In their secular role, the priest-kings established laws that contributed to the social order necessary for maintaining successful agricultural societies. The arts developed largely as celebrations of the priest-kings’ powers. In order to keep track of the production and distribution of goods, the costs of equipping the military, and records relating to enforcing laws and regulations, writing—perhaps the greatest inno- vation of the Bronze Age—developed. If agricultural pro- duction served to stimulate the creation of urban centers, metallurgy made possible the new military cultures of the city-states. The arts served to celebrate these new centers of power, and writing, which arose out of the necessity of tracking the workings of the state, would come to celebrate the state in a literature of its own.

Sumerian Ur Ur is not the oldest city to occupy the southern plains of Mesopotamia, the region known as Sumer. That distinction belongs to Uruk, just to the north, which by around 3200 bce was probably the largest settlement in the world. But the temple structure at Ur is of particular note because it is the most fully preserved and restored. It was most likely designed to evoke the mountains surrounding the river val- ley, which were the source of the water that flowed through

CONTEXT Timeline of Ancient Near Eastern Empires and Cultures

The Hebrews

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Fig. 2.3 Reconstruction drawing of the ziggurat at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2100 bce. British archeologist Sir Leonard Woolley undertook reconstruction of the ziggurat in the 1930s (see Fig. 2.1). In his reconstruction, a temple on top, which was the home of the patron deity of the city, crowned the three-tiered platform, the base of which measures 140 by 200 feet. The entire structure rose to a height of 85 feet. Woolley’s reconstruction was halted before the second and third platforms had been completed.

Fig. 2.4 Dedicatory statues, from the Abu Temple, Tell Asmar, Iraq. ca. 2900–2700 bce. Marble, alabaster, and gypsum, height of tallest figure, approx. 30". Excavated by the Iraq Expedition of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, February 13, 1934. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The wide-eyed appearance of these figures is probably meant to suggest they are gazing in perpetual awe at the deity.

the two rivers and, so, the source of life. Topped by a sanc- tuary, the ziggurat might also have symbolized a bridge between heaven and earth. Woolley, who supervised the reconstruction of the first platform and stairway of the zig- gurat at Ur (Fig. 2.3), speculated that the platforms of the temple were originally not paved but covered with soil and planted with trees, an idea that modern archeologists no longer accept.

Visitors—almost certainly limited to members of the priesthood—would climb up the stairs to the temple on top. They might bring an offering of food or an animal to be sac- rificed to the resident god—at Ur, it was Nanna or Sin, god of the moon. Visitors often placed in the temple a statue that represented themselves in an attitude of perpetual prayer. We know this from the inscriptions on many of the statues. One, dedicated to the goddess Tarsirsir, protector of Girsu, a city-state across the Tigris and not far upstream from Ur, reads:

To Bau, gracious lady, daughter of An, queen of the holy city, her mistress, for the life of Nammahani … has dedi- cated as an offering this statue of the protective goddess of Tarsirsir which she has introduced to the courtyard of Bau. May the statue, to which let my mistress turn her ear, speak my prayers.

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A group of such statues, found in 1934 in the shrine room of a temple at Tell Asmar, near present-day Baghdad, includes seven men and two women (Fig. 2.4). The men wear belted, fringed skirts. They have huge eyes, inlaid with lapis lazuli (a blue semiprecious stone) or shell set in bitu- men. The single arching eyebrow and crimped beard (only the figure at the right is beardless) are typical of Sumerian sculpture. The two women wear robes. All figures clasp their hands in front of them, suggestive of prayer when empty and of making an offering when holding a cup. Some schol- ars believe that the tallest man represents Abu, god of vegetation, due to his especially large eyes, but all of the figures are probably worshipers.

Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia Although power strug- gles among the various city-states dominate Mesopota- mian history, with one civilization succeeding another, and with each city-state or empire claiming its own par- ticular divinity as chief among the Mesopotamian gods, the nature of Mesopotamian religion remained relatively constant across the centuries. With the exception of the Hebrews, the religion of the Mesopotamian peoples was polytheistic, consisting of multiple gods and goddesses con- nected to the forces of nature—sun and sky, water and storm, earth and its fertility (see Context, page 36). We know many of them by two names, one in Sumerian and the other in the Semitic language of the later, more powerful Akkadians. A famous Akkadian cylinder seal (Fig. 2.5), an engraved cylinder used as a signature by rolling it into a wet clay tablet in order to confirm receipt of goods or to identify ownership, represents many of the gods. The figures are recognizably gods because they wear pointed headdresses with multiple horns, though the figure on the left, beside the lion and holding a bow, has not been definitively iden- tified. The figure with two wings standing atop the scaly mountain is Ishtar, goddess of love and war. Weapons rise from her shoulders, and she holds a bunch of dates in her

hand, a symbol of fertility. Beneath her, cutting his way through the mountain so that he can rise at dawn, is the sun god, Shamash. Standing with his foot on the mountain at the right, streams of water with fish in them flowing from his shoulders, is Ea, god of water, wisdom, magic, and art. Behind him is his vizier, or “burden-carrier.”

To the Mesopotamians, human society was merely part of the larger society of the universe governed by these gods and a reflection of it. Anu, father of the gods, represents the authority, which the ruler emulates as lawmaker and -giver. Enlil, god of the air—the calming breeze as well as the vio- lent storm—is equally powerful, but he represents force, which the ruler emulates in his role as military leader. The active principles of fertility, birth, and agricultural plenty are those of the goddess Belitili, while water, the life force itself, the creative element, is embodied in the god Ea, or Enki, who is also god of the arts. Both Belitili and Ea are subject to the authority of Anu. Ishtar is subject to Enlil, ruled by his breezes (in the case of love) and by his storm (in the case of war). A host of lesser gods represented nat- ural phenomena, or, in some cases, abstract ideas, such as truth and justice.

The Mesopotamian ruler, often represented as a priest- king, and often believed to possess divine attributes, acts as the intermediary between the gods and humankind. His ultimate responsibility is the behavior of the gods—whether Ea blesses the crop with rains, Ishtar his armies with vic- tory, and so on.

The Royal Tombs of Ur Religion was central to the people of Ur, and the cemetery discovered by Woolley tells us a great deal about the nature of their beliefs. Woolley unearthed some 1,840 graves, most dating from between 2600 and 2000 bce. The greatest number of graves were individual burials of rich and poor alike. However, some included a built burial chamber rather than just a coffin and con- tained more than one body, in some cases as many as 80.

Fig. 2.5 Cylinder seal impression and the Seal of Adda. Akkadian. ca. 2200–2159 bce. Greenstone, height 11⁄2". © The Trustees of the British Museum. The two-line inscription at the left identifies the seal’s owner as Adda, a scribe.

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An/Anu

Father of the gods, god of the sky

Enlil God of the air and storm; later replaces Anu as father of the gods

Utu/Shamash Sun god, lord of truth and justice

Inanna/Ishtar Goddess of love and war

Ninhursag /Belitili Mother Earth

Enki/Ea God of water, lord of wisdom, magic, art

Marduk Chief god of Babylon

These multiple burials, and the evidence of elaborate bur- ial rituals, suggest that members of a king or queen’s court accompanied the ruler to the grave. The two richest bur- ial sites, built one behind the other, are now identified as royal tombs, one belonging to Queen Puabi, the other to an unknown king (but it is not that of her husband, King Meskalamdug, who is buried in a different grave).

In the grave of either the unknown king or Queen Puabi (records are confusing on this point) were two lyres, one of which today is housed in Philadelphia (Fig. 2.6), the other in London (Fig. 2.7). Both are decorated with bull’s heads and are fronted by a panel of narrative scenes—that is, scenes representing a story or event. Although originally made of wood, which rots over time, these objects were able

Fig. 2.6 Soundbox panel front of the lyre from Tomb 789 (alternatively identified as the unknown king’s or Puabi’s tomb), from the cemetery at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2600 bce. Wood with inlaid gold, lapis lazuli, and shell, height approx. 121⁄4". University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. Museum object #B17694 (image #150848). The meaning of the scenes on the front of this lyre has always puzzled scholars. On the bottom, a goat holding two cups attends a man with a scorpion’s body. Above that, a donkey plays a bull-headed lyre held by a bear, while a seated jackal plays a small percussion instrument. On the third level, animals walking on their hind legs carry food and drink for a feast. In the top panel, a man with long hair and beard, naked but for his belt, holds two human-headed bulls by the shoulders.

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

CONTEXT Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses

horned cap

solar disk

star

‘omega’ symbol

goat- sh

spade

Name Symbol Role

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to be saved in their original form due to an innovation of Woolley’s during the excavation. He ordered his workers to tell him whenever they came upon an area that sounded hollow. He would fill such hollows (where the original wood had long since rotted away) with wax or plaster, thus preserving, in place, the decorative effects on the object’s outside. It seems likely that the mix of animal and human

forms that decorate these lyres repre- sents a funerary banquet in the realm of the dead. They are related, at least thematically, to events in the Sumer- ian Epic of Gilgamesh, which we will discuss later in the chapter. This sug- gests that virtually every element of the culture—from its music and lit- erature to its religion and politics— was tied in some way to every other. The women whose bodies were found under the two lyres may have been singers and musicians, and the place- ment of the lyres over them would indicate that the lyres were put there after the celebrants died.

Such magnificent musical instru- ments indicate that music was important in Mesopotamian society. Surviving documents tell us that music and song were part of the funeral rit- ual, and music played a role in worship at the temple, as well as in banquets and festivals. Indeed, a fragment of a poem from the middle of the third mil- lennium bce found at Lagash indicates

that Sumerian music was anything but funereal. It is music’s duty, the poet says,

To fill with joy the Temple court And chase the city’s gloom away The heart to still, the passions calm, Of weeping eyes the tears to stay.

Fig. 2.7 Lyre from Tomb 789 (alternatively identified as the unknown king’s or Puabi’s tomb), from the cemetery at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2600 bce. Gold leaf and lapis lazuli over a wood core, height 441⁄2". Restored 1971–72. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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One of Woolley’s most important discoveries in the Royal Cemetery was the so-called Royal Standard of Ur (Fig. 2.8). Music plays a large part here, too. The main panels of this rectangular box of unknown function are called “War” and “Peace,” because they illustrate, on one side, a military vic- tory and, on the other, the subsequent banquet celebrating the event, or perhaps a cult ritual. Each panel is composed of three registers, or self-contained horizontal bands, within which the figures stand on a ground line, or baseline.

At the right side of the top register of the “Peace” panel (the lower half of Fig. 2.8), a musician plays a lyre, and behind him another, apparently female, sings. The king, at the left end, is recognizable because he is taller than the others and wears a tufted skirt, his head breaking the reg- ister line on top. In this convention, known as social per- spective, or hieratic scale, the most important figures are represented as larger than the others. In other registers on the “Peace” side of the Standard, servants bring cattle, goats,

Fig. 2.8 Royal Standard of Ur, front (“War”) and back (“Peace”) sides, from Tomb 779, cemetery at Ur (present-day Muqaiyir, Iraq). ca. 2600 bce. Shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone, originally on a wooden framework, height 8", length 19". © The Trustees of the British Museum. For all its complexity of design, this object is not much bigger than a sheet of legal paper. Its function remains a mystery, though it may have served as a pillow or headrest. Woolley’s designation of it as a standard was purely conjectural.

View the Closer Look for the Royal Standard of Ur on MyArtsLab

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sheep, and fish to the celebration. These represent the bounty of the land and perhaps even delicacies from lands to the north. (Notice that the costumes and hairstyles of the figures carrying sacks in the lowest register are differ- ent from those in the other two.) This display of consump- tion and the distribution of food may have been intended to dramatize the power of the king by showing his ability to control trade routes.

On the “War” side of the Standard, the king stands in the middle of the top register. War chariots trample the enemy on the bottom register. (Note that the chariots have solid wheels; spoked wheels were not invented until approxi- mately 1800 bce.) In the middle register, soldiers wearing leather cloaks and bronze helmets lead naked, bound pris- oners to the king in the top register, who will presumably decide their fate. Many of the bodies found in the royal tombs were wearing similar military garments. The impor- tance of the Royal Standard of Ur is not simply as documen- tary evidence of Sumerian life but as one of the earliest examples we have of historical narrative.

Akkad At the height of the Sumerians’ power in southern Meso- potamia, a people known as the Akkadians arrived from the north and settled in the area around present-day Baghdad. Their capital city, Akkad, has never been discovered and in all likelihood lies under Baghdad itself. Under Sargon I (r. ca. 2332–2279 bce), the Akkadians conquered virtually all other cities in Mesopotamia, including those in Sumer, to become the region’s most powerful city-state. Sargon named himself “King of the Four Quarters of the World” and equated himself with the gods, a status bestowed upon Akkadian rulers from Sargon’s time forward. Legends about Sargon’s might and power survived in the region for thousands of years. Indeed, the legend of his birth gave rise to what amounts to a narrative genre (a class or category of story with a universal theme) that survives to the present day: the boy from humble origins who rises to a position of might and power, the so-called “rags-to-riches” story.

As depicted on surviving clay tablets, Sargon was an illegitimate child whose mother deposited him in the Euphrates River in a basket. There, a man named Akki (after whom Akkad itself is named) found him while draw- ing water from the river and raised him as his own son. Such stories of abandonment, orphanhood, and being a foundling raised by foster parents were to become a stand- ard feature in the narratives of mythic heroes.

Although the Akkadian language was very different from Sumerian, through most of the third millennium bce—that is, until Sargon’s dynastic ambitions altered the balance of power in the region—the two cultures coexisted peacefully. The Akkadians adopted Sumerian culture and customs (see Fig. 2.5) and their style of cuneiform writ- ing, a script made of wedge-shaped characters (see Closer Look, pages 40–41), although not their language. In fact,

many bilingual dictionaries and Sumerian texts with Akka- dian translations survive. The Akkadian language was Semitic in origin, having more in common with other languages of the region, particularly Hebrew, Phoenician, and Arabic. It quickly became the common language of Mesopotamia, and peoples of the region spoke Akkadian, or dialects of it, throughout the second millennium bce and well into the first.

Akkadian Sculpture Although Akkad was arguably the most influential of the Mesopotamian cultures, few Akka- dian artifacts survive, perhaps because Akkad and other nearby Akkadian cities have disappeared under Baghdad and the alluvial soils of the Euphrates plain. Two impres- sive sculptural works do remain, however. The first is the bronze head of an Akkadian man (Fig. 2.9), found at Nin- eveh. It was once believed to be Sargon the Great himself, but many modern scholars now think it was part of a statue

Fig. 2.9 Head of an Akkadian Man, from Nineveh (present-day Kuyunjik, Iraq). ca. 2300–2200 bce. Copper alloy, height 141⁄8". Iraq Museum, Baghdad.

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CLOSER LOOK

Writing first appeared in the middle of the fourth millennium bce in agricultural records as picto-grams—pictures that represent things or con- cepts—etched into clay tablets. For instance, the sign for “woman” is a pubic triangle, and the more complicated idea of “slave” is the sign for “woman” plus the sign for “moun- tains”—literally, a “woman from over the mountains”:

woman mountains slave

friendshiphatred

woman mountains slave

friendshiphatred

Pictograms could also represent concepts. For instance, the signs for “hatred” and “friendship” are, respectively, an “X” and a set of parallel lines:

Beginning about 2900 bce, most writing began to look more linear, for it was difficult to draw curves in wet clay. So scribes adopted a straight-line script made with a wedge- shaped stylus, or writing tool, cut from reeds. The result- ing impressions looked like wedges. Cuneiform writing was named from the Latin cuneus, “wedge.”

By 2000 bce, another significant development in the progress of writing had appeared: Signs began to represent not things but sounds. This phonetic writing liberated the sign from its picture. Previously, they had been linked, as if, in English, we represented the word belief with pictograms for “bee” and “leaf.”

View the Closer Look for cuneiform writing in Sumer on MyArtsLab

stylus

Later cuneiform pictogram of donkey

Early pictogram for donkey In the cuneiform tablet opposite, the sign for “donkey” (below) is apparent everywhere. It represents a later, abstracted version of the earlier pictogram (literally “picture-writing”) above. Such abstracted signs came into use not long after 2400 bce and replaced the earlier pictograms.

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Cuneiform Writing in Sumer

Sumerian clay tablet from Lagash (present-day Tello, Iraq). ca. 2360 bce. Musée du Louvre, Paris. This tablet is an economic document detailing the loan of donkeys to, among others, a farmer, a smith, and a courier.

These stars are the Sumerian sign for “god.” They sometimes have many more points than the eight seen here.

Something to Think About … What is it about this “document” that underscores the necessity of writing in the development of a civilization?

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1 2 3 4 5 6

Materials & Techniques Lost-Wax Casting

At about the same time that cuneiform script was adopted, Meso- potamian culture also began to practice metallurgy, the process of mining and smelting ores. At first, copper was used almost exclu- sively; later, an alloy of copper and tin was melted and combined to make bronze. The resulting material was much stronger and more durable than anything previously known.

Because sources of copper and tin were mined in very different regions of the Middle East, the development of trade routes was a

of Sargon’s grandson, Naramsin (ca. 2254–2218 bce). It may be neither, but it is certainly the bust of a king. Highly realistic, it depicts a man who appears both powerful and majestic. In its damaged condition, the head is all that sur- vives of a life-size statue that was destroyed in antiquity. Its original gemstone eyes were removed, perhaps by plunder- ing soldiers, or possibly by a political enemy who recognized the sculpture as an emblem of absolute majesty. In the fine detail surrounding the face—in the beard and elaborate coiffure, with its braid circling the head—it testifies to the Akkadian mastery of the lost-wax casting technique, which originated in Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium bce (see Materials & Techniques, above). It is the earliest monumental work made by that technique that we have.

The second Akkadian sculpture we will look at is the Stele of Naramsin (Fig. 2.10). A stele is an upright stone slab carved with a commemorative design or inscription. (The word is derived from the Greek for “standing block.”) This particular stele celebrates the victory of Sargon’s grandson over the Lullubi in the Zagros Mountains of eastern Meso- potamia sometime between 2252 and 2218 bce. The king, as usual, is larger than anyone else (another example of social perspective or hierarchy of scale). The Akkadians, in fact, believed that Naramsin became divine during the course of his reign. In the stele, his divinity is represented by his horned helmet and by the physical perfection of his body. Bow and arrow in hand, he stands atop a moun- tain pass, dead and wounded Lullubians beneath his feet.

Another Lullubian falls before him, a spear in his neck. Yet another seems to plead for mercy as he flees to the right. Behind Naramsin, his soldiers climb the wooded slopes of the mountain—here represented by actual trees native to the region.

The sculptor abandoned the traditional register system that we saw in the Royal Standard of Ur and set the bat- tle scene on a unified landscape. The lack of registers and the use of trees underscore the reality of the scene—and by implication, the reality of Naramsin’s divinity. The divine and human worlds are, in fact, united here, for above Nar- amsin three stars (cuneiform symbols for the gods) look on, protecting both Naramsin, their representative on earth, and his troops. Both the copper head of the Akkadian king and the Stele of Naramsin testify to the role of the king in Mesopotamian culture, in general, as both hero and divin- ity. If the king is not exactly a supreme god, he behaves very much like one, wielding the same awe-inspiring power.

Babylon The Akkadians dominated Mesopotamia for just 150 years, their rule collapsing not long after 2200 bce. For the next 400 years, various city-states thrived locally. No one in Mesopotamia matched the Akka- dians’ power until the first decades of the eighteenth century bce, when Hammurabi of Babylon (r. 1792– 1750 bce) gained control of most of the region.

necessary prerequisite to the technology. While solid bronze pieces were made in simple molds as early as 4000 bce, hollow bronze casts could produce larger pieces and were both more economi- cal and lightweight. The technology for making hollow bronze casts was developed by the time of the Akkadians, in the second mil- lennium bce. Called lost-wax casting, the steps involved in this technique are illustrated below.

A positive model (1), often created with clay, is used to make a negative mold (2). The mold is coated with wax, the wax shell is filled with a cool fireclay, and the mold is removed (3). Metal rods, to hold the shell in place, and wax rods, to vent the mold, are then added (4). The whole is placed in sand, and the wax is burned out. Molten bronze is poured in where the wax used to be (5). When the bronze has hardened, the whole is removed from the sand and the rods and vents are removed (6).

Watch a video about the technique of lost-wax bronze casting on MyArtsLab

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Fig. 2.10 Stele of Naramsin, from Susa (present-day Shush, Iran). ca. 2254–2218 bce. Pink sandstone, height approx. 6'6". Chuzeville/Musée du Louvre, Paris. This work, which was stolen by invading Elamites around 1157 bce, as an inscription on the mountain indicates, was for centuries one of the most influential of all artworks, copied by many rulers to celebrate their own military feats.

The Law Code of Hammurabi Hammurabi imposed order on Babylon where laxness and disorder, if not chaos, reigned. A giant stele survives, upon which is inscribed the so-called Law Code of Hammurabi (Fig. 2.11). By no means the first of its kind, though by far the most complete, the stele is a record of decisions and decrees made by Hammurabi over the course of some 40 years of his reign. Its purpose was to celebrate his sense of justice and the wisdom of his rule. Atop the stele, in sculptural relief, Hammurabi receives the blessing of Shamash, the sun god; notice the rays of light

coming from his shoulders. The god is much larger than Hammurabi; in fact, he is to Hammurabi as Hammurabi, the patriarch, is to his people. If Hammurabi is divine, he is still subservient to the greater gods. At the same time, the phallic design of the stele, like such other Mesopotamian steles as the Stele of Naramsin, asserts the masculine prowess of the king.

Fig. 2.11 Stele of Hammurabi, from Susa (present-day Shush, Iran). ca. 1760 bce. Diorite, height of stele, approx. 7', height of relief, 28". Musée du Louvre, Paris. Like the Stele of Naramsin, this stele was stolen by invading Elamites and removed to Susa, where, together with the Stele of Naramsin, it was excavated by the French in 1898.

View the Closer Look for the Stele of Naramsin on MyArtsLab

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Below the relief, 282 separate “articles” cover both sides of the basalt monument. One of the great debates of legal history is the question of whether these articles actually constitute a code of law. If by code we mean a comprehen- sive, systematic, and methodical compilation of all aspects of Mesopotamian law, then they do not. This code is instead selective, even eccentric, in the issues it addresses. Many of its articles seem to be “reforms” of already existing law, and as such they define new principles of justice.

Chief among these is the principle of talion—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—which Hammurabi introduced to Mesopotamian law. (Sections of earlier codes from Ur compensate victims of crimes with money.) This principle punished the violence or injustice perpetuated by one free person upon another, but violence by an upper-class person on a lower-class person was penalized much less severely. Slaves (who might be either war captives or debtors) enjoyed no legal protection at all—only the protection of their owner.

The code tells us much about the daily lives of Meso- potamian peoples, including conflicts great and small. In rules governing family relations and class divisions in Meso- potamian society, inequalities are sharply drawn. Women are inferior to men, and wives, like slaves, are the personal property of their husbands (although protected from the abuse of neglectful or unjust husbands). Incest is strictly forbidden. Fathers cannot arbitrarily disinherit their sons— a son must have committed some “heavy crime” to justify such treatment. The code’s strongest concern is the mainte- nance and protection of the family, though trade practices and property rights are also of major importance.

The following excerpts from the code, beginning with Hammurabi’s assertion of his descent from the gods and his status as their favorite (Reading 2.1), give a sense of the code’s scope. But the code is, finally, and perhaps above all, the gift of a king to his people, as Hammurabi’s epilogue, at the end of the excerpt, makes clear:

1. If a man accuses another man and charges him with homicide but cannot bring proof against him, his accuser shall be killed. … 8. If a man steals an ox, a sheep, a donkey, a pig, or a boat—if it belongs either to the god or to the palace, he shall give thirtyfold; if it belongs to a commoner, he shall replace it tenfold; if the thief does not have anything to give, he shall be killed. … 32. If there is either a soldier or a fisherman who is taken captive while on a royal campaign, a merchant redeems him, and helps him get back to his city—if there are sufficient in his own estate for the redeeming, he himself shall redeem himself: if there are not sufficient means in his estate to redeem him he shall be redeemed by his city’s temple; if there are not sufficient means in his city’s temple to redeem him, the palace shall redeem him; but his field, orchard, or house shall not be given for his redemption. … 143. If [a woman] is not circumspect, but is wayward, squanders her household possessions, and disparages her husband, they shall cast that woman into the water. … 195. If a child should strike his father, they shall cut off his hand. 196. If an awilu [in general, a person subject to law] should blind the eye of another awilu, they shall blind his eye. … 197. If he should break the bone of another awilu, they shall break his bone. … 229. If a builder constructs a house for a man but does not make his work sound, and the house he constructs collapses and causes the death of the householder, that builder shall be killed. … 282. If a slave should declare to his master, “You are not my master,” he (the master) shall bring charge and proof against him that he is indeed his slave, and his master shall cut off his ear. …

These are the decisions which Hammurabi, the able king, has established, and thereby has directed the land along the course of truth and the correct way of life.

I am Hammurabi, noble king … May any king who will appear in the land in the future, at

any time, observe the pronouncements of justice that I have inscribed upon my stele. May he not alter the judgments that I rendered and verdicts that I gave, nor remove my engraved image. If that man has discernment, and is capable of providing just ways for his land may he heed the pronouncements I have inscribed upon my stele, may the stele reveal for him the traditions, the proper conduct, the judgments of the land that I rendered, the verdicts of the land that I gave and may he, too, provide just ways for all humankind in his care. …

I am Hammurabi, king of justice. …

Consequences of the Code Even if Hammurabi meant only to assert the idea of justice as the basis for his own divine rule, the stele established what amounts to a uniform code throughout Mesopotamia. It was repeatedly copied for over a thousand years, long after it was r emoved to Susa in 1157

READING 2.1

from the Law Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 bce)

When the august god Anu, king of the Anunnaku deities, and the god Enlil, lord of heaven and earth, who determines the destinies of the land, allotted supreme power over all peoples to the god Marduk, the firstborn son of the god Ea, exalted him among the Igigu deities, named the city of Babylon with its august name and made it supreme exalted within the regions of the world, and established for him within it eternal kingship whose foundations are as fixed as heaven and earth, at that time, the gods Anu and Bel, for the enhancement of the well- being of the people, named me by my name, Hammurabi, the pious prince, who venerates the gods, to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to rise like the Sun-god Shamash over all humankind, to illuminate the land. …

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bce with the Naramsin stele, and it established the rule of law in Mesopotamia for a millennium. From this point on, the authority and power of the ruler could no longer be capricious, subject to the whim, fancy, and subjective interpretation of his singular personality. The law was now, at least ostensibly, more objective and impartial. The ruler was required to follow certain prescribed procedures. But the law, so prescribed in writing, was now also much less flexible, hard to change, and much more impersonal. Exceptions to the rule were few and difficult to justify. Eventually, written law would remove justice from the dis- cretion of the ruler and replace it with a legal establishment of learned judges charged with enacting the king’s statutes.

The Assyrian Empire With the fall of Babylon in 1595 bce to a sudden invasion of Hittites from Turkey, the entire Middle East appears to have undergone a period of disruption and instability. Only the Assyrians, who lived around the city of Assur in the north, managed to maintain a continuing cultural iden- tity. Over the centuries, they became increasingly power- ful until, beginning with the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 bce), they dominated the entire region.

Ashurnasirpal II built a magnificent capital at Kalhu (present-day Nimrud), on the Tigris River, surrounded by nearly 5 miles of walls, 120 feet thick and 42 feet high. A surviving inscription tells us that Ashurnasirpal invited 69,574 people to celebrate the city’s dedication. The entire population of the region, of all classes, probably did not exceed 100,000, and thus many guests from throughout Mesopotamia and farther away must have been invited.

Assyrian Art Alabaster reliefs decorated many of the walls of Ashurnasirpal’s palace complex, including a depiction of Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions (Fig. 2.12). The scene uses many of the conventions of Assyrian pictorial represen- tation. For instance, to create a sense of deep space, the sculptor used the device of overlapping, which we first encountered in prehistoric cave paintings (see Fig. 1.1 in Chapter 1). This is done convincingly where the king stands in his chariot in front of its driver, but less so in the case of the horses drawing the chariot. For instance, there are three horse heads but only six visible legs—three in front and three in back. Furthermore, Assyrian artists never hid the face of an archer (in this case, the king himself) by realistically having him aim down the shaft of the arrow, which would have the effect of covering his eye with his hand. Instead, they drop the arrow to shoulder level and completely omit the bowstring so that it appears to pass (impossibly) behind the archer’s head and back.

The scene is also a synoptic view, that is, it depicts sev- eral consecutive actions at once: As soldiers drive the lion toward the king from the left, he shoots it; to the right, the same lion lies dying beneath the horses’ hooves. If Assyr- ian artists seem unconcerned about accurately portraying the animals, that is because the focus of the work is on the king himself, whose prowess in combating the lion, tradi- tional symbol of power, underscores his own invincibil- ity. And it is in the artists’ careful balance of forms—the relationship between the positive shapes of the relief fig- ures and the negative space between them—that we sense the importance placed on an orderly arrangement of parts. This orderliness reflects, in all probability, their sense of the orderly character of their society.

Fig. 2.12 Ashurnasirpal II Killing Lions, from the palace complex of Ashurnasirpal II, Kalhu (present-day Nimrud, Iraq). ca. 850 bce. Alabaster, height approx. 39". © The Trustees of the British Museum. The repetition of forms throughout this relief helps create a stunning design. Notice especially how the two shields carried by the soldiers are echoed by the chariot wheel and the king’s arched bow.

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Cultural Propaganda Rulers in every culture and age have used the visual arts to broadcast their power. These reliefs were designed to celebrate and underscore for all visitors to Ashurnasirpal’s palace the military prowess of the Assyr- ian army and their king. They are thus a form of cultural propaganda, celebrating the kingdom’s achievements even as they intimidate its potential adversaries. In fact, the Assyrians were probably the most militant civilization of ancient Mesopotamia, benefactors of the invention of iron weaponry. By 721 bce, the Assyrians had used their iron weapons to conquer Israel, and by the middle of the sev- enth century bce, they controlled most of Asia Minor from the Nile Valley to the Persian Gulf.

The Assyrians also used their power to preserve Mesopo- tamian culture. Two hundred years after the reign of Ashur- nasirpal, Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 bce) created the great library where, centuries later, the clay tablets containing the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, discussed later in this chap- ter, were stored. Its still partially intact collection today consists of 20,000 to 30,000 cuneiform tablets containing

approximately 1,200 distinct texts, including a nearly complete list of ancient Mesopotamian rulers. Each of its many rooms was dedicated to individual subjects—history and government, religion and magic, geography, science, poetry, and important government materials.

As late as Ashurbanipal’s reign, reliefs of the lion hunt were still a favored form of palace decoration, but those depicted in his palace at Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, reveal that the lions were caged and released for the king’s hunt, which was now more ritual than real, taking place in an enclosed arena. The lions were sacrificed as an offering to the gods. In one section of the relief, Ashurba- nipal, surrounded by musicians, pours a libation, a liquid offering to the gods, over the dead animals as servants bring more bodies to the offering table. This ritual was implicit in all kingly hunts, even Ashurnasirpal’s hunt of 200 years earlier, for in his pursuit and defeat of the wild beast, the ruler masters the most elemental force of nature—the cycle of life and death itself.

The Assyrian kings represented their might and power not only through the immense size of their palaces and the decorative programs within, but also through massive gate- ways that greeted the visitor. Especially impressive are the gateways with giant stone monuments, such as those in Iraq at the Khorsabad palace of Sargon II (r. 721–705 bce), who named himself after Sargon of Akkad. These monuments (Fig. 2.13) are composites, part man, part bull, and part eagle, the bull signifying the king’s strength and the eagle his vigilance. The king himself wears the traditional horned crown of Akkad and the beard of Sumer, thus containing within himself all Mesopotamian history. Such composites, especially in monumental size, were probably intended to amaze and terrify the visitor and to underscore the ruler’s embodiment of all the forces of nature, which is to say, his embodiment of the very gods.

MESOPOTAMIAN LITERATURE

How does the Epic of Gilgamesh portray the relationship between the gods and the people?

Sumerian literature survives on nearly 100,000 clay tablets and fragments. Many deal with religious themes in the form of poems, blessings, and incantations to the gods.

The Blessing of Inanna One particularly interesting Sumerian religious work is The Blessing of Inanna (Reading 2.2). It recounts the myth of the goddess Inanna, here depicted as a young girl from Uruk who decides to visit Enki, the god of wisdom. Inanna travels south to Eridu, the chief seaport of Sumer, where Enki lives. Apparently taken with Inanna, Enki offers a series of toasts, each time bestowing upon her one of his special powers, including the highest powers of all:

Fig. 2.13 Human-Headed Winged Bull, one of a pair from the entrance to the palace of Sargon II, Khorsabad, Iraq. ca. 720 bce. Limestone, height approx. 13'10". Musée du Louvre, Paris. Seen from a three-quarter view, as here, this hybrid beast that guarded the palace entrance has five legs. He stands firmly before you when seen from the front, and seems to stride by you when seen from the side.

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The Epic of Gilgamesh One of the great surviving manuscripts of Mesopotamian culture and the oldest story ever recorded is the Epic of Gilgamesh. It consists of some 2,900 lines written in Akka- dian cuneiform script on 11 clay tablets, none of them completely whole (Fig. 2.14). It was composed sometime before Ashurbanipal’s reign, possibly as early as 1200 bce, by Sinleqqiunninni, a scholar-priest of Uruk. This would make Sinleqqiunninni the oldest known author. We know that Gilgamesh was the fourth king of Uruk, ruling some- time between 2700 and 2500 bce. (The dates of his rule were recorded on a clay tablet, the Sumerian King List.) Recovered fragments of his story date back nearly to his actual reign, and the story we have, known as the Standard Version, is a compilation of these earlier versions.

The work is the first example we have of an epic, a long, narrative poem in elevated language that follows charac- ters of a high position through a series of adventures, often including a visit to the world of the dead. For many liter- ary scholars, the epic is the most exalted poetic form. The

Having gathered all 80 of Enki’s mighty powers, Inanna piles them all into her boat and sails back upriver. The drunken Enki realizes what he has done and tries to recover his blessings, but Inanna fends him off. She returns to Uruk, blessed as a god, and enters the city triumphantly, bestow- ing now her own gifts on her people, who subsequently worship her. Enki and the people of Eridu are forced to acknowledge the glory of Inanna and her city of Uruk, assuring peace and harmony between the two competing city-states.

The Sumerians worshiped Inanna as the goddess of fertility and heaven. In this tale, she and Enki probably represent the spirits of their respective cit- ies and the victory of Uruk over Eridu. That Inanna appears in the work first as a mere mortal is a classic example of anthropomorphism, endowing the gods and the forces of nature that they represent with humanlike traits. The story has some basis in fact, since Uruk and Eridu are the two oldest Mesopotamian cities, and surviving literary fragments suggest that the two cities were at war sometime after 3400 bce.

Fig. 2.14 Fragment of Tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, containing the Flood Story. From the Library of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh (present-day Kuyunjik, Iraq). 2nd millennium bce. © The Trustees of the British Museum. This example, which is relatively complete, shows how difficult it is to reconstruct the Gilgamesh epic in its entirety.

READING 2.2

The Blessing of Inanna (ca. 2300 bce)

Enki and Inanna drank beer together. They drank more beer together. They drank more and more beer together. With their bronze vessels filled to overflowing, With the vessels of Urash, Mother of the Earth They toasted each other; they challenged each other. Enki, swaying with drink,

toasted Inanna: “In the name of my power! In the name of my holy shrine! To my daughter Inanna I shall give The high priesthood! Godship! The noble, enduring crown! The throne of kingship!” Inanna replied: “I take them!”

Read the document The Epic of Gilgamesh on MyArtsLab

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central figure is a legendary or historical figure of heroic proportion, in this case the Sumerian king Gilgamesh. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (see Chapter 4) had been con- sidered the earliest epics, until late in the nineteenth cen- tury, when Gilgamesh was discovered in the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, believed to be the first library of texts in history systematically collected and organized.

The scope of an epic is large. The supernatural world of gods and goddesses usually plays a role in the story, as do battles in which the hero demonstrates his strength and courage. The poem’s language is suitably dignified, often consisting of many long, formal speeches. Lists of various heroes or catalogs of their achievements are frequent.

Epics are often compilations of preexisting myths and tales handed down generation to generation, often orally, and finally unified into a whole by the epic poet. Indeed, the main outline of the story is usually known to its audi- ence. The poet’s contribution is the artistry brought to the subject, demonstrated through the use of epithets, metaphors, and similes. Epithets are words or phrases that characterize a person (for example, “Enkidu, the protec- tor of herdsmen,” or “Enkidu, the son of the mountain”). Metaphors are words or phrases used in place of another to suggest a similarity between the two, as when Gilgamesh is described as a “raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone.” Similes compare two unlike things by the use of the word “like” or “as” (for example, “the land shattered like a pot”).

Perhaps most important, the epic illuminates the devel- opment of a nation or race. It is a national poem, describ- ing a people’s common heritage and celebrating its cultural identity. It is hardly surprising, then, that Ashurbanipal preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh. Just as Sargon II depicted himself at the gates of Khorsabad in the traditional horned crown of Akkad and the beard of Sumer, containing within himself all Mesopotamian history, the Epic of Gilgamesh pre- serves the historical lineage of all Mesopotamian kings— Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian. The tale embodies their own heroic grandeur, and thus the grandeur of their peoples.

The poem opens with a narrator guiding a visitor (the reader) around Uruk. The narrator explains that the epic was written by Gilgamesh himself and was deposited in the city’s walls, where visitors can read it for themselves. Then the narrator introduces Gilgamesh as an epic hero, two parts god and one part human. The style of the following list of his deeds is the same as in hymns to the gods (Read- ing 2.3a):

He walks out in front, the leader, and walks at the rear, trusted by his companions. Mighty net, protector of his people, raging flood-wave who destroys even walls of stone! … It was he who opened the mountain passes, who dug wells on the flank of the mountain. It was he who crossed ocean, the vast seas, to the rising

sun, who explored the world regions, seeking life. It was he who reached by his own sheer strength the

Utnapishtim, the Faraway, who restored the cities that the Flood had destroyed! … Who can compare to him in kingliness? Who can say like Gilgamesh: “I am King!”?

After a short break in the text, Gilgamesh is described as having originally oppressed his people. Hearing the pleas of the people for relief, the gods create a rival, Enkidu, to challenge Gilgamesh (Reading 2.3b):

READING 2.3b

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I (late 2nd millennium bce)

Enkidu born of Silence, endowed with the strength of Ninurta. His whole body was shaggy with hair, he had a full head of hair like a woman. … He knew neither people nor settled living. … He ate grasses with the gazelles, and jostled at the watering hole with the animals.

Enkidu is, in short, Gilgamesh’s opposite, and their con- frontation is an example of the classic struggle between nature, represented by Enkidu, and civilization, represented by Gilgamesh. Seduced by a harlot (see Reading 2.3, page 63), Enkidu loses his ability to commune with the animals (i.e., he literally loses his innocence), and when he finally wrestles Gilgamesh, the contest ends in a draw. The two become best friends.

Gilgamesh proposes that he and Enkidu undertake a great adventure, a journey to the Cedar Forest (either in present-day southern Iran or Lebanon), where they will kill its guardian, Humbaba the Terrible, and cut down all the forest’s trees. Each night on the six-day journey to the for- est, Gilgamesh has a terrible dream, which Enkidu manages to interpret in a positive light. As the friends approach the forest, the god Shamash informs Gilgamesh that Humbaba is wearing only one of his seven coats of armor and is thus extremely vulnerable. When Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter the forest and begin cutting down trees, Humbaba comes roaring up to warn them off. An epic battle ensues, and Shamash intervenes to help the two heroes defeat the great

READING 2.3a

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I (late 2nd millennium bce)

Supreme over other kings, lordly in appearance, he is the hero, born of Uruk, the goring wild bull.

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READING 2.3c

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI (late 2nd millennium bce)

A Woman Scorned

… When Gilgamesh placed his crown on his head, Princess Ishtar raised her eyes to the beauty of Gilgamesh.

“Come along, Gilgamesh, be you my husband, to me grant your lusciousness.1

Be you my husband, and I will be your wife. I will have harnessed for you a chariot of lapis

lazuli and gold, with wheels of gold … Bowed down beneath you will be kings, lords,

and princes. The Lullubu people2 will bring you the produce of the

mountains and countryside as tribute. Your she-goats will bear triplets, your ewes twins, your donkey under burden will overtake the mule, your steed at the chariot will be bristling to gallop, your ox at the yoke will have no match.”

Gilgamesh addressed Princess Ishtar saying: “Do you need oil or garments for your body? Do you lack anything for food or drink? I would gladly feed you food fit for a god, I would gladly give you wine fit for a king … [You are] a half-door that keeps out neither breeze nor

blast, a palace that crushes down valiant warriors, an elephant who devours its own covering, pitch that blackens the hands of its bearer, a waterskin that soaks its bearer through, limestone that buckles out the stone wall, a battering ram that attracts the enemy land, a shoe that bites its owner’s feet! Where are your bridegrooms that you keep forever? … You loved the supremely mighty lion, yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits. You loved the stallion, famed in battle, yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad,

and the lash,

ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven hours, ordained for him drinking from muddied waters,3

you ordained for his mother Silili to wail continually. You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder, who continually presented you with bread

baked in embers, and who daily slaughtered for you a kid. Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf, so his own shepherds now chase him and his own dogs snap at his shins. You loved Ishullanu, your father’s date gardener, who continually brought you baskets of dates, and brightened your table daily. You raised your eyes to him, and you went to him:

‘Oh my Ishullanu, let us taste of your strength, stretch out your hand to me, and touch our “vulva.”’4

Ishullanu said to you: ‘Me? What is it you want from me? …’

As you listened to these his words you struck him, turning him into a dwarf(?),5 … And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain for

me as for them!”

Her Fury

When Ishtar heard this in a fury she went up to the heavens, going to Anu, her father, and crying, going to Antum, her mother, and weeping:

“Father, Gilgamesh has insulted me over and over, Gilgamesh has recounted despicable deeds

about me, despicable deeds and curses!”

Anu addressed Princess Ishtar, saying: “What is the matter? Was it not you who provoked King

Gilgamesh? So Gilgamesh recounted despicable deeds about you, despicable deeds and curses!”

Ishtar spoke to her father, Anu, saying: “Father, give me the Bull of Heaven, so he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling. If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven, I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat

down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!”

Anu addressed Princess Ishtar, saying: “If you demand the Bull of Heaven from me, there will be seven years of empty husks for the land

of Uruk. Have you collected grain for the people? Have you made grasses grow for the animals?”

Ishtar addressed Anu, her father, saying: “I have heaped grain in the granaries for the people, I made grasses grow for the animals,

1 Literally “fruit.” 2 The Lullubu were a wild mountain people living in the area of present-day western Iran. The meaning is that even the wildest, least controllable of peoples will recognize Gilgamesh’s rule and bring tribute.

3 Horses put their front feet in the water when drinking, churning up mud. 4 This line probably contains a word play on hurdatu as “vulva” and “date palm,” the latter being said (in another unrelated text) to be “like the vulva.” 5 Or “frog”?

guardian. Just before Gilgamesh cuts off Humbaba’s head, Humbaba curses Enkidu, promising that he will find no peace in the world and will die before his friend Gilgamesh. In a gesture that clearly evokes the triumph of civilization over nature, Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down the tallest of the cedar trees to make a great cedar gate for the city of Uruk.

At the center of the poem, in Tablet VI, Ishtar, goddess of both love and war, offers to marry Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh refuses, which unleashes Ishtar’s wrath. She sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy them, but Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay it instead (Reading 2.3c):

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in order that they might eat in the seven years of empty husks.

I have collected grain for the people, I have made grasses grow for the animals. …”

When Anu heard her words, he placed the nose-rope of the Bull of Heaven in her hand. Ishtar led the Bull of Heaven down to the earth. When it reached Uruk … It climbed down to the Euphrates … At the snort of the Bull of Heaven a huge pit opened up, and 100 Young Men of Uruk fell in. At his second snort a huge pit opened up, and 200 Young Men of Uruk fell in. At his third snort a huge pit opened up, and Enkidu fell in up to his waist. Then Enkidu jumped out and seized the Bull of Heaven by

its horns. The Bull spewed his spittle in front of him, with his thick tail he flung his dung behind him (?). Enkidu addressed Gilgamesh, saying:

“My friend, we can be bold(?) … Between the nape, the horns, and … thrust your

sword.” Enkidu stalked and hunted down the Bull of Heaven. He grasped it by the thick of its tail and held onto it with both his hands (?), while Gilgamesh, like an expert butcher, boldly and surely approached the Bull of Heaven. Between the nape, the horns, and … he thrust his sword.

… Ishtar went up onto the top of the Wall of Uruk-Haven, cast herself into the pose of mourning, and hurled her

woeful curse: “Woe unto Gilgamesh who slandered me and killed the

Bull of Heaven!” When Enkidu heard this pronouncement of Ishtar, he wrenched off the Bull’s hindquarter and flung it in her

face: “If I could only get at you I would do the same to you! I would drape his innards over your arms!” …

Gilgamesh said to the palace retainers: “Who is the bravest of the men? Who is the boldest of the males? —Gilgamesh is the bravest of the men, the boldest of the males! She at whom we flung the hindquarter of the Bull of

Heaven in anger, Ishtar has no one that pleases her …”

Dismayed at the prospect of his own mortality, Gil- gamesh embarks on a journey to find the secret of eternal life from the only mortal known to have attained it, Utnap- ishtim, who tells him the story of the Great Flood. Several elements of Utnapishtim’s story deserve explanation. First of all, this is the earliest known version of the flood story that occurs also in the Hebrew Bible, with Utnapishtim in the role of the biblical Noah. The motif of a single man and wife surviving a worldwide flood brought about by the gods occurs in several Middle Eastern cultures, suggesting a single origin or shared tradition. In the Sumerian version, Ea (Enki) warns Utnapishtim of the flood by speaking to the wall, thereby technically keeping the agreement among the gods not to warn mortals of their upcoming disaster. The passage in which Ea tells Utnapishtim how to explain his actions to his people without revealing the secret of the gods is one of extraordinary complexity and wit (Reading 2.3e). The word for “bread” is kukku, a pun on the word for “darkness,” kukkû. Similarly, the word for “wheat,” kibtu, also means “misfortune.” Thus, when Ea says, “He will let loaves of bread shower down, / and in the evening a rain of wheat,” he is also telling the truth: “He will let loaves of darkness shower down, and in the evening a rain of misfortune.”

But Gilgamesh and Enkidu cannot avoid the wrath of the gods altogether. One of them, the gods decide, must die, and so Enkidu suffers a long, painful death, attended by his friend, Gilgamesh, who is terrified (Reading 2.3d):

READING 2.3e

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (late 2nd millennium bce)

Utnapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying: “I will reveal to you, Gilgamesh, a thing that is hidden, a secret of the gods I will tell you! Shuruppak, a city that you surely know, situated on the banks of the Euphrates, that city was very old, and there were gods inside it. The hearts of the Great Gods moved them to inflict the

Flood. …

READING 2.3d

from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet X (late 2nd millennium bce)

My friend … Enkidu, whom I love deeply, who went through every hardship with me,

the fate of mankind has overtaken him. Six days and seven nights I mourned over him and would not allow him to be buried until a maggot fell out of his nose. I was terrified by his appearance, I began to fear death, and so roam the wilderness. The issue of Enkidu, my friend, oppresses me, so I have been roaming long trails through the wilderness. How can I stay silent, how can I be still? My friend whom I love has turned to clay. Am I not like him? Will I lie down, never to get up again?

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Ea, the Clever Prince, was under oath with them so he repeated their talk to the reed house: ‘Reed house, reed house! Wall, wall! Hear, O reed house! Understand, O wall! O man of Shuruppak, son of Ubartutu: Tear down the house and build a boat! Abandon wealth and seek living beings! Spurn possessions and keep alive human beings! Make all living beings go up into the boat. The boat which you are to build, its dimensions must measure equal to each other: its length must correspond to its width, Roof it over like the Apsu.’ I understood and spoke to my lord, Ea: ‘My lord, thus is your command. I will heed and will do it. But what shall I answer the city, the populace, and the

Elders?’

Ea spoke, commanding me, his servant: ‘… this is what you must say to them: “It appears that Enlil is rejecting me so I cannot reside in your city, nor set foot on Enlil’s earth. I will go … to live with my lord, Ea, and upon you he will rain down abundance, a profusion of fowls, myriad fishes. He will bring you a harvest of wealth, in the morning he will let loaves of bread shower down, and in the evening a rain of wheat.”’ …

I butchered oxen for the meat(?), and day upon day I slaughtered sheep. I gave the workmen(?) ale, beer, oil, and wine, as if it were

river water, so they could make a party like the New Year’s Festival. … The boat was finished. … Whatever I had I loaded on it: whatever silver I had I loaded on it, whatever gold I had I loaded on it. All the living beings that I had I loaded on it, I had all my kith and kin go up into the boat, all the beasts and animals of the field and the craftsmen I

had go up. …

I watched the appearance of the weather— the weather was frightful to behold! I went into the boat and sealed the entry. … Just as dawn began to glow there arose on the horizon a black cloud. Adad rumbled inside it. … Stunned shock over Adad’s deeds overtook the heavens, and turned to blackness all that had been light. The … land shattered like a … pot. All day long the South Wind blew …, blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water, overwhelming the people like an attack. No one could see his fellow, they could not recognize each other in the torrent. The gods were frightened by the Flood, and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu. The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer

wall.

When the gods discover Utnapishtim alive, smelling his incense offering, they are outraged. They did not want a single living being to escape. But since he has, they grant him immortality and allow him to live forever in the Faraway. As a reward for Gilgamesh’s own efforts, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh of a secret plant that will give him perpetual youth. “I will eat it,” he tells the boatman who is returning him home, “and I will return to what I was in my youth.” But when they stop for the night, Gil- gamesh decides to bathe in a cool pool, where the scent of the plant attracts a snake who steals it away, an echo of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, whose own immor- tality is stolen away by the wiles of a serpent—and their own carelessness. Broken-hearted, Gilgamesh returns home empty-handed.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first known literary work to confront the idea of death, which is, in many ways, the very embodiment of the unknown. Although the hero goes to the very ends of the earth in his quest, he ulti- mately leaves with nothing to show for his efforts except an understanding of his own, very human, limitations. He is the first hero in Western literature to yearn for what he can never attain, to seek to understand what must always remain a mystery. And, of course, until the death of his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh had seemed, in his self-confident confrontation with Ishtar and in the defeat of the Bull of Heaven, as near to a god as a mortal might be. In short, he embodied the Mesopotamian hero-king. Even as the poem asserts the hero-king’s divinity—Gilgamesh is, remember, two parts god—it emphasizes his humanity and the mortal- ity that accompanies it. By making literal the first words of the Sumerian King List—“After the kingship had descended from heaven”—the Epic of Gilgamesh acknowledges what many Mesopotamian kings were unwilling to admit, at least publicly: their own, very human, limitations, and their own powerlessness in the face of the ultimate unknown—death.

Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth. … Six days and seven nights came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land. When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding, the flood was a war—struggling with itself like a woman

writhing (in labor). The sea calmed, fell still, the whirlwind (and) flood stopped

up. I looked around all day long—quiet had set in and all the human beings had turned to clay! The terrain was flat as a roof. I opened a vent and fresh air (daylight?) fell upon the side

of my nose. I fell to my knees and sat weeping, tears streaming down the side of my nose. I looked around for coastlines in the expanse of the sea, and at twelve leagues there emerged a region (of land). On Mt. Nimush the boat lodged firm, Mt. Nimush held the boat, allowing no sway.”

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THE HEBREWS

What cultural traits distinguish the Hebrews from other cultures in the ancient Near East?

The Hebrews (from Habiru, “outcast” or “nomad”) were a people forced out of their homeland in the Mesopota- mian basin in about 2000 bce. According to their tradi- tion, it was in the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was there that Noah survived the same great flood that Utnapishtim survived in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And it was out of there that Abraham of Ur led his people into Canaan, in order to escape the warlike Akkadians and the increasingly powerful Babylonians. There is no actual his- torical evidence to support these stories. We know them only from the Hebrew Bible—a word that derives from the Greek, biblia, “books”—a compilation of hymns, prophe- cies, and laws transcribed by its authors between 800 and 400 bce, some 1,000 years after the events the Hebrew Bible describes. Although the archeological record in the Near East confirms some of what these scribes and priests wrote, especially about more contemporaneous events, the stories themselves were edited and collated into the sto- ries we know today. They recount the Assyrian conquest of Israel, the Jews’ later exile to Babylon after the destruc- tion of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 bce, and their eventual return to Jerusalem after the Persians conquered the Babylonians in 538 bce. The stories represent the Hebrews’ attempt to maintain their sense of their own history and destiny. But it would be a mistake to succumb to the temptation to read the Hebrew Bible as an accurate account of the historical record. Like all ancient histories, passed down orally through generation upon gen- eration, it contains its fair share of mythologizing.

The Hebrews differed from other Near Eastern cul- tures in that their religion was monotheistic—they wor- shiped a single god, whereas others in the region tended to have gods for their clans and cities, among other things. According to Hebrew tradition, God made an agreement with the Hebrews, first with Noah after the flood, later renewed with Abraham and each of the subsequent patri- archs (scriptural fathers of the Hebrew people): “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a com- pany of nations shall come from you. The land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your descendants after you” (Genesis 35: 11–12). In return for this promise, the Hebrews, the “cho- sen people,” agreed to obey God’s will. “Chosen people” means that the Jews were chosen to set an example of a higher moral standard (a light unto the nations), not cho- sen in the sense of favored, which is a common misunder- standing of the term.

Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, tells the story of the creation of the world out of a “formless void.”

It describes God’s creation of the world and all its creatures, and his continuing interest in the workings of the world, an interest that would lead, in the story of Noah, to God’s near-destruction of all things. It also posits humankind as easily tempted by evil. It documents the moment of the introduction of sin (and shame) into the cosmos, associat- ing these with the single characteristic separating humans from animals—knowledge. And it shows, in the example of Noah, the reward for having “walked with God,” the basis of the covenant. (See Reading 2.4, pages 63–65, for two selections from Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah.)

Moses and the Ten Commandments The biblical story of Moses and the Ten Commandments embodies the centrality of the written word to Jewish cul- ture. The Hebrew Bible claims that in about 1600 bce, drought forced the Hebrew people to leave Canaan for Egypt, where they prospered until the Egyptians enslaved them in about 1300 bce. Defying the rule of the pharaohs, the Jewish patriarch Moses led his people out of Egypt. According to tradition, Moses led the Jews across the Red Sea (which miraculously parted to facilitate the escape) and into the desert of the Sinai peninsula. (The story became the basis for the book of Exodus.) Most likely, they crossed a large tidal flat, called the Sea of Reeds; subsequently, that body of water was misidentified as the Red Sea. Unable to return to Canaan, which was now occupied by local tribes of considerable military strength, the Jews settled in an arid region of the Sinai desert near the Dead Sea for a period of 40 years, which archeologists date to sometime between 1300 and 1150 bce.

In the Sinai desert, the Hebrews forged the principal tenets of a new religion that would eventually be based on the worship of a single god. There, too, the Hebrew god sup- posedly revealed a new name for himself—YHWH, a name so sacred that it could neither be spoken nor written. The name is not known and YHWH is a cipher for it. There are, however, many other names for God in the Hebrew Bible, among them Elohim, which is plural in Hebrew, meaning “gods, deities”; Adonai (“Lord”); and El Shaddai, literally “God of the fields” but usually translated “God Almighty.” Some scholars believe that this demonstrates the multiple authorship of the Bible. Others argue that the Hebrews originally worshiped many gods, like other Near Eastern peoples. Still other scholars suggest that God has been given different names to reflect different aspects of his divinity, or the different roles that he might assume—the guardian of the flocks in the fields, or the powerful mas- ter of all. Translated into Latin as “Jehovah” in the Middle Ages, the name is now rendered in English as “Yahweh.” This God also gave Moses the Ten Commandments, carved onto stone tablets, as recorded in Deuteronomy 5:6–21. Subsequently, the Hebrews carried the commandments in a sacred chest, called the Ark of the Covenant (Fig. 2.15), which was lit by seven-branched candelabras known as

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Whenever the Hebrews talked, wherever they looked, wherever they went, they focused on the commandments of their God. Their monotheistic religion was thus also an ethical and moral system derived from an omnipotent God. The Ten Commandments were the centerpiece of the Torah, or Law (literally “instructions”), consist- ing of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. (Christians would later incorporate these books into their Bible as the first five books of the Old Testament.) The Hebrews considered these five books divinely inspired and attributed their original authorship to

Moses himself, although, as we have noted, the texts as we know them were written much later.

The body of laws outlined in the Torah is quite differ- ent from the code of Hammurabi. The code was essentially a list of punishments for offenses; it is not an ethical code (see Fig. 2.11 and Reading 2.1). Hebraic and Mesopota- mian laws are distinctly different. Perhaps because the Hebrews were once themselves aliens and slaves, their law treats the lowest members of society as human beings. As Yahweh declares in Exodus 23:6: “You will not cheat the poor among you of their rights at law.” At least under the law, class distinctions, with the exceptions of slaves, did not exist in Hebrew society, and punishment was levied equally. Above all else, rich and poor alike were united for the common good in a common enterprise, to follow the instructions for living as God provided.

After 40 years in the Sinai had passed, it is believed that the patriarch Joshua led the Jews back to Canaan, the Prom- ised Land, as Yahweh had pledged in the covenant. Over the next 200 years, they gradually gained control of the region through a protracted series of wars described in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings in the Bible, which together make up a theological history of the early Jewish peoples. The Jews named themselves the Israelites, after Israel, the name that was given by God to Jacob. The nation consisted of 12 tribes, each descending from one of Jacob’s 12 sons. By about 1000 bce, Saul had established himself as King of Israel, followed by David, who as a boy rescued the Israelites from the Philistines by killing the giant Goli- ath with a stone thrown from a sling, as des cribed in First Samuel, and later united Israel and Judah into a single state.

Fig. 2.15 Menorahs and Ark of the Covenant, wall painting in a Jewish catacomb, Villa Torlonia, Rome. 3rd century ce. 3'11" × 5'9". Two menorahs (seven-branched candelabras) flank each side of the Ark. The menorah is considered a symbol of the nation of Israel and its mission to be “a light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). Instructions for making it are outlined in Exodus 25:31–40. Relatively little ancient Jewish art remains. Most of it was destroyed as the Jewish people were conquered, persecuted, and exiled.

READING 2.4a

from the Hebrew Bible, Deuteronomy 6:6–9

6 Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7 Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8 Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, 9 and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

menorahs. The centrality to Hebrew culture of these written words is even more apparent in the words of God that fol- low the commandments (Reading 2.4a):

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Map 2.2 The United Monarchy of Israel under David and Solomon, ca. 1100 bce.

100 km

100 miles

ISRAEL

JUDAH

EGYPT

SYRIA

EDOM

MOAB

PHILISTIA

AMMON

P H

O E

N I C

I A

AR AM

-ZO HAB

ARAM- DAM

ASC US

The United Monarchy under David and Solomon, c.1100 BCE

DamascusSidon

Tyre

Jerusalem

Beer Sheeba

Samaria

Jericho

Gaza

Dead Sea

Sea of Galilee

Jo rd

an

Mediterranean

Sea

Kings David and Solomon, and Hebrew Society King David reigned until 961 bce. It was he who captured Jerusalem from the Canaanites and made it the capital of Israel (Map 2.2). As represented in the books of Samuel, David is one of the most complex and interesting individu- als in ancient literature. A poet and musician, he is author of some of the Psalms. Although he was capable of the most deceitful treachery—sending one of his soldiers, Uriah, to certain death in battle so that he could marry his widow, Bathsheba—he also suffered the greatest sorrow, being forced to endure the betrayal and death of his son Absalom. David was succeeded by his other son, Solomon, famous for his fairness in meting out justice, who ruled until 933 bce.

Solomon undertook to complete the building campaign begun by his father, and by the end of his reign, Jerusalem was, by all reports, one of the most beautiful cities in the Near East. A magnificent palace and, most especially, a splendid temple dominated the city. First Kings claims that Yahweh himself saw the temple and approved of it.

The rule of the Hebrew kings was based on the model of the scriptural covenant between God and the Hebrews. This covenant was the model for the relationship between the king and his people. Each provided protection in return for obedience and fidelity. The same relationship existed between the family patriarch and his household. His wife and children were his possessions, whom he protected in return for their unerring faith in him.

READING 2.4b

from the Hebrew Bible, Song of Solomon 4:1–6, 7:13–14

The Song of Songs (translated by Ariel and Chana Bloch)

How beautiful you are, my love, My friend! The doves of your eyes looking out from the thicket of your hair.

Your hair like a flock of goats bounding down Mount Gilead. …

Your breasts are two fauns twins of a gazelle, grazing in a field of lilies.

An enclosed garden is my sister, my bride, A hidden well, a sealed spring. …

Awake, north wind! O south wind, come, breathe upon my garden, let its spices stream out. Let my lover come into his garden and taste its delicious fruit. …

Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vine has budded, if the blossoms have opened and the pomegranate is in flower.

There I will give you my love … rare fruit of every kind, my love, I have stored away for you.

So vivid are the poem’s sexual metaphors that many people have wondered how the poem found its way into the Scriptures. But the Bible is frank enough about the attractions of sex. Consider Psalms 30:18–19: “Three things I marvel at, four I cannot fathom: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship in the heart of the sea, the way of a man with a woman.” The

Although women were their husbands’ possessions, the Hebrew Scriptures provide evidence that women may have had greater influence in Hebrew society than this patriar- chal structure would suggest. In one of the many texts later incorporated into the Hebrew Bible and written during Solomon’s reign, the “The Song of Songs, which is Solo- mon’s” (as Chapter 1, Verse 1 of this short book reads), the woman’s voice is particularly strong. It is now agreed that the book is not the work of Solomon himself, but rather a work of secular poetry, probably written during his reign. It is a love poem, a dialogue between a man (whose words are reproduced here in regular type) and a younger female lover, a Shulamite, or “daughter of Jerusalem” (whose voice is in italics) (Reading 2.4b). This poem of sexual awaken- ing takes place in a garden atmosphere reminiscent of Eden, but there is no Original Sin here, only fulfillment:

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Song of Songs is full of double-entendres, expressions that can be understood in two ways, one of them often sexual or risqué. Although the implications of such language are almost un avoidable, embarrassed Christian interpreters of the Bible for centuries worked hard to avoid the obvious and assert a higher purpose for the poem, reading it, espe- cially, as a description of the relation between Christ and his “Bride,” the Church.

Generations of translators also sought to obscure the powerful voice of the female protagonist in the poem by presenting the young woman as chaste and submissive, but of the two voices, hers is the more active and authorita- tive. In a world in which history is traced through the patri- archs, and genealogies are generally written in the form of the father “begetting” his sons, the young woman asserts herself here in a way that suggests that if in Hebrew soci- ety the records of lineage were in the hands of its men, the traditions of love-making—and by extension, the ability to propagate the lineage itself—were controlled by its women. It is even possible that a woman composed all or large parts of the poem, since women traditionally sang songs of vic- tory and mourning in the Bible, and the daughters of Jeru- salem actually function as a chorus in the poem, asking questions of the Shulamite.

The Prophets and the Diaspora After Solomon’s death, the United Monarchy of Israel split into two separate states. To the north was Israel, with its

capital in Samaria, and to the south, Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem. In this era of the two kingdoms, Hebrew cul- ture was dominated by prophets, men who were prophetic not in the sense of foretelling the future, but rather in the sense of serving as mouthpieces and interpreters of Yah- weh’s purposes, which they claimed to understand through visions. The prophets instructed the people in the ways of living according to the laws of the Torah, and they more or less freely confronted anyone guilty of wrongful actions, even the Hebrew kings. They attacked, particularly, the wealthy Hebrews whose commercial ventures had brought them unprecedented material comfort and who were inclined to stray from monotheism and worship Canaan- ite fertility gods and goddesses. The moral laxity of these wealthy Hebrews troubled the prophets, who urged the Hebrew nation to reform spiritually.

In 722 bce, Assyrians attacked the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered its people, who were thereafter known as the Lost Tribes of Israel. The southern kingdom of Judah survived another 140 years, until Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians overwhelmed it in 587 bce, destroy- ing the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and deporting the Hebrews to Babylon (Fig. 2.16). Not only had the Hebrews lost their homeland and their temple, but the Ark of the Covenant itself had also disappeared. For nearly 60 years, the Hebrews endured what is known as the Babylo- nian Captivity. As recorded in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remem- bered Zion.”

Fig. 2.16 Exile of the Israelites, detail of a limestone relief from the palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh, Assyria. Late 8th century bce. This relief shows a family of Israelites, their cattle yoked to a cart carrying their household into exile after being defeated by the Assyrians in 722 bce. The relief seems to depict three generations of a family: the father in front with the cattle, the son behind carrying baggage, the wife of the father seated on the front of the cart, the son’s wife and children seated behind her.

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Finally, invading Persians, whom they believed had been sent by Yahweh, freed them from the Babylonians in 520 bce. They returned to Judah, known now, for the first time, as the Jews (after the name of their homeland). They rebuilt a Second Temple of Jerusalem, with an empty chamber at its center, meant for the Ark of the Covenant should it ever return. And they welcomed back other Jews from around the Mediterranean, including many whose families had left the northern kingdom almost 200 years earlier. Many others, however, were by now permanently settled else- where, and they became known as the Jews of the Diaspora, or the “dispersion.”

Hebrew culture would have a profound impact on West- ern civilization. The Jews provided the essential ethical and moral foundation for religion in the West, including Chris- tianity and Islam, both of which incorporate Jewish teach- ings into their own thought and practice. In the Torah, we find the basis of the law as we understand and practice it today. So moving and universal are the stories recorded in the Torah that over the centuries they have inspired—and continue to inspire—countless works of art, music, and lit- erature. Most important, the Hebrews introduced to the world the concept of ethical monotheism, the idea that there is only one God, and that God demands that humans behave in a certain way, and rewards and punishes accord- ingly. Few, if any, concepts have had a more far-reaching effect on history and culture.

THE LATE EMPIRES: NEO-BABYLONIA AND PERSIA

How do the art and architecture of Neo- Babylonia and Persia reflect the aspirations of the two cultures?

As noted earlier in this chapter, the Assyrians had begun to conquer neighboring peoples in about 1000 bce, and they controlled most of Mesopotamia by the end of the ninth century bce, eventually extending their dominance as far west as the Nile Valley by the seventh century bce. The Assyrians modeled a kind of military and cultural prowess that others envied and aspired to attain. The most success- ful of these new imperial adventurers were the Babylonians and the Persians.

Neo-Babylonia From the eighth through the seventh century bce, Baby- lon fell in and out of Assyrian rule, until Nabopolassar (r. 626–604 bce), the first king of Babylonia, defeated the Assyrians, sacking Nineveh in 612 bce. The Assyrian Empire collapsed completely in 609 bce. Nabopolassar was followed by his son and heir, Nebuchadnezzar (r. 604–562 bce), who continued on with his father’s plan to restore Babylon’s palace as the center of Mesopotamian civiliza- tion. It was here that the Hebrews lived in exile for nearly

50 years (586–538 bce) after Nebuchadnezzar captured the people of Jerusalem.

Nebuchadnezzar wished to remake Babylon as the most remarkable and beautiful city in the world. It was laid out on both sides of the Euphrates River, joined together by a single bridge. Through the middle of the older, eastern sec- tor, ran the Processional Way, an avenue also called “May the Enemy Not Have Victory” (Fig. 2.17). It ran from the Euphrates bridge eastward through the temple district, past the Marduk ziggurat. (Many believe this ziggurat was the legendary Tower of Babel, described in Genesis 11 as the place where God, confronted with the prospect of “one people … one language,” chose instead to “confuse the language of all the earth,” and scatter people “abroad over the face of the earth.”) Then it turned north, ending at the Ishtar Gate (Fig. 2.18), the northern entrance to the city. Processions honoring Marduk, the god celebrated above all others in Babylonian lore and considered the founder of Babylon itself, regularly filled the street, which was as much as 65 feet wide at some points and paved with large stone slabs. Marduk’s might is celebrated in the Hymn to Marduk (Reading 2.5), found in Ashurbanipal’s library:

Fig. 2.17 Reconstruction drawing of Babylon with the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate as it might have appeared in the 6th century bce. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. In the distance is the Marduk ziggurat, and between the ziggurat and the Ishtar Gate are the famous Hanging Gardens in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II.

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Fig. 2.18 Ishtar Gate (restored), from Babylon. ca. 575 bce. Glazed brick. Staatliche Museen, Berlin. The dark blue bricks are glazed—that is, covered with a film of glass—and they would have shone brilliantly in the sun.

No trace survives of the city’s famous Hanging Gar- dens, once considered among the Seven Wonders of the World, and only the base and parts of the lower stairs of the Marduk ziggurat still remain. But in the fifth century bce, the Greek historian Herodotus (ca. 484–430/420 bce) described the ziggurat as follows:

There was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, on which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. … On the topmost tower, there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned with a golden table by its side. … They also declare that the

READING 2.5

from the Hymn to Marduk (1000–700 bce)

Lord Marduk, Supreme god, with unsurpassed wisdom. …

When you leave for battle the Heavens shake, when you raise your voice, the Sea is wild!

When you brandish your sword, the gods turn back.

There is none who can resist your furious blow! Terrifying lord, in the Assembly of the gods no

one equals you! … Your weapons flare in the tempest! Your flame annihilates the steepest mountain.

View the Closer Look for the Ishtar Gate on MyArtsLab

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god comes down in person into this chamber, and sleeps on the couch, but I do not believe it.

Although the ziggurat has disappeared, we can glean some sense of the city’s magnificence from the Ishtar Gate, named after the Babylonian goddess of fertility. Today, the gate is restored and reconstructed inside one of the Berlin State Museums. It was made of glazed and unglazed bricks, and decorated with animal forms. The entire length of the Processional Way was similarly decorated on both sides, so the ensemble must have been a wondrous sight. The gate’s striding lions are particularly interesting. They are traditional symbols of Ishtar herself. Alternating with rows of bulls with blue horns and tails, associated with deities such as Adad, god of the weather, are fantastic dragons with long necks, the forelegs of a lion, and the rear legs of a bird of prey, an animal form sacred to the god Marduk. Like so much other Mesopotamian art, it is at once a monu- ment to the power of Nebuchadnezzar, an affirmation of his close relation to the gods, and a testament to his kingdom’s wealth and well-being.

The Persian Empire In 520 bce, the Persians, formerly a minor nomadic tribe that occupied the plateau of Iran, defeated the Babylonians and freed the Jews. Their imperial adventuring had begun in 559 bce with the ascension of Cyrus II (called the Great, r. 559–530 bce), the first ruler of the Achaemenid dynasty, named after Achaemenes, a warrior-king whom Persian

legend says ruled on the Iranian plateau around 700 bce. By the time of Cyrus’s death, the Persians had taken control of the Greek cities in Ionia on the west coast of Anatolia. Under King Darius (r. 522–486 bce), they soon ruled a vast empire that stretched from Egypt in the south, around Asia Minor, to the Ukraine in the north. The capital of the Empire was Parsa, which the Greeks called Persepolis, or city of the Persians, located in the Zagros highlands of present-day Iran (Fig. 2.19). Built by arti- sans and workers from all over the Persian Empire, includ- ing Greeks from Ionia, it reflected Darius’s multicultural ambitions. If he was, as he said, “King of Kings, King of countries, King of the earth,” his palace should reflect the diversity of his peoples.

The columns reflect Egyptian influence, and, espe- cially in their fluting, the vertical channels that exagger- ate their height and lend them a feeling of lightness, they reflect the influence of the Greeks (see Chapter 4). Rulers are depicted in relief sculptures with Assyrian beards and headdresses (Fig. 2.20). In typical Mesopotamian fashion, they are larger than other people in the works. These deco- rations further reflect the Persians’ sense that all the peo- ples of the region owed them allegiance. The relief from the stairway to the audience hall, where Darius and his son Xerxes received visitors, is covered with images of their subjects bringing gifts to the palace—23 subject nations in all, including Ionian, Babylonian, Syrian, and Susian, each culture recognizable by its beards and costumes. Darius can be seen receiving tribute as Xerxes stands

Fig. 2.19 Palace of Darius and Xerxes, Persepolis, Iran. 518–ca. 460 bce. The palace stands on a rock terrace 545 yards deep and 330 yards wide. Its centerpiece was the Hall of One Hundred Columns, a forest of stone comprised of ten rows of ten columns, each rising to a height of 40 feet. The Hall was approached by a broad staircase decorated with reliefs of men carrying gifts (see Fig. 2.20).

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CHAPTER 2 The Ancient Near East 59

Fig. 2.20 Darius and Xerxes Receiving Tribute, detail of a relief from a stairway leading to the Hall of One Hundred Columns, ceremonial complex, Persepolis, Iran. 491–486 bce. Limestone, height 8'4". Iranbastan Museum, Teheran. This panel was originally painted in blue, scarlet, green, purple, and turquoise. Objects such as Darius’s necklace and crown were covered in gold.

behind him, as if waiting to take his place as the Persian ruler. Huge winged bulls with the heads of bearded kings, reminiscent of the human- headed winged bulls that guard the Khorsabad palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II (see Fig. 2.13), domi- nated the approach to the south gate- way. Thus, Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek styles all inter- mingle in the palace’s architecture and decoration.

The Persians also perfected the art of metalwork. The rhyton, or ritual cup, illustrated here (Fig. 2.21), is related to the many mytho- logical creatures that can be found throughout Mesopotamian art—the hybrid human and bull creature that guarded the palace gate at Parsa, for instance, or the dragon with lion’s feet decorating the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. This gold rhyton has been fashioned into a simurgh, a mythical creature with the body of a lion, the head of a dog, the wings of a griffin, and a peacock’s tail.

The rhyton would have been used in rituals connected to the Zoroas- trian religion practiced by the Per- sians. Zoroaster (the Greek name for the Iranian Zarathustra) was a Persian prophet who according to tradition

Fig. 2.21 Rhyton. Achaemenid, 5th–3rd centuries bce. Gold. Archaeological Museum, Teheran, Iran. This elaborate gold vessel would have probably served as both a drinking cup and a wine decanter.

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60 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

lived in the sixth century bce. However, linguistic analy- sis of the writings that are attributed to him places him around 1000 bce. Whatever the case, his writings and other ritual hymns, prayers, and laws associated with the religion were collected in the sixth century into the Zend-Avesta, or Book of Knowledge, the holy book of the Zoroastrian faith. Ahura Mazda, “the Wise Lord,” is its supreme deity, creator of heaven and earth, and in almost all inscriptions, the one and only god. It was he, Darius would proclaim, who lent Darius his very power: “A great God is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king, one king over many, one lord over many.” Zoroas- trianism is only semi-monotheistic: there are lesser gods— many of them remnants of earlier religious practices—but all of them were created by Ahura Mazda himself. He rules over these gods as Darius rules over his people. The Zend- Avesta sets up a dualistic universe in which asha (literally, “truth”) is opposed to druj (“lie” or “deceit”). The physical order of the universe is the chief manifestation of asha and is wholly the work of Ahura Mazda. Druj manifests itself as anything that is opposed to this physical order—chaos, natural decay, evil deeds. Perhaps Zoroaster’s greatest con- tribution to religious thought is his emphasis on free will. As the Zend-Avesta says, Ahura Mazda “has left it to men’s wills” to choose for themselves whether to lead a life of “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” Those who do— thus helping Ahura Mazda to maintain the order of the uni- verse—will be admitted to heaven. Those who choose to follow the path of evil will be condemned to hell.

In Zoroastrian tradition, the simurgh whose image is invoked on the rhyton lives on Mount Alburz, the high- est mountain in the world, around which circled the sun, moon, and stars. From the summit of the mountain, the legendary Chinwad bridge, the “bridge of judgment,” extended to heaven. There, the souls of the good men and women are greeted by a beautiful maiden and led across an ever-widening pathway to pairidaeza, from which the Eng- lish word “paradise” derives, and the souls of the bad are greeted by an ugly old hag and led across an ever-narrowing bridge until they fall into hell. The bridge is described at some length in the Zend-Avesta (Reading 2.6):

In this context, it is worth recalling that the Zend-Avesta was compiled at about the same time as the Hebrew Bible. Its teachings would, in fact, influence all three of the great religions of the Western world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

READING 2.6

from the Zend-Avesta (ca. 600 bce)

27. O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Where are the rewards given? Where does the rewarding take place? Where is the rewarding fulfilled? Whereto do men come to take the reward that, during their life in the material world, they have won for their souls?

28. Ahura Mazda answered: “When the man is dead, when his time is over, then the wicked, evil-doing Daevas1 cut off his eyesight. On the third night, when the dawn appears and brightens up, when Mithra, the god with beautiful weapons, reaches the all-happy mountains, and the sun is rising.

29. “Then the fiend, named Vizaresha2, O Spitama3 Zoroaster, carries off in bonds the souls of the wicked Daeva-worshippers who live in sin. The soul enters the way made by Time, and open both to the wicked and to the righteous. At the head of the Chinwad bridge, the holy bridge made by Mazda, they ask for their spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which they gave away here below.

30. “Then comes the beautiful, well-shapen, strong and well-formed maid, with the dogs at her sides, one who can distinguish, who has many children, happy, and of high understanding. She makes the soul of the righteous one go up above … the Chinwad bridge; she places it in the presence of the heavenly gods themselves.”

1 Daevas: supernatural entities with variously disagreeable characteristics; in the oldest Zoroastrian works they are “wrong” or “false” gods that are to be rejected in favor of the worship of the one God, Ahura Mazda. 2 Vizaresha: a demon who, during that struggle of three days and three nights with the souls of the departed, wages terror on them and beats them. He sits at the gate of hell. 3 Spitama: the original name of Zoroaster, who as a prince gave up his royal du- ties to meditate, spending 15 years searching for enlightenment before a vision of Ahura Mazda gave him the answers to his many questions.

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Paris, a gift to the French from the Egyptian government in the nineteenth century. The inscription, carved in hieroglyphs, says it all: “Son of Ra [the sun god]: Ramses- Meryamun [“Beloved of Amun”]. As long as the skies exist, your monuments shall exist, your name shall exist, firm as the skies.” ■

Civilization in Mesopotamia developed across the last three millennia bce almost simultaneously with civilization in Egypt, a region on the northeastern corner of the African continent in close proximity to Meso- potamian and Mediterranean cultures. The civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia had much in common. Both formed around river systems—the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia; the Nile in Egypt. Both were agrarian socie- ties that depended on irrigation, and their economies were hostage to the sometimes fickle, sometimes violent flow of their respective river systems. As in Mesopotamia, Egyp- tians learned to control the river’s flow by con struct ing dams and irrigation canals, and it was probably the need to cooperate with one another in such endeavors that helped Mesopotamia to thrive and Egypt to create the civilization that would eventually arise in the Nile Valley.

The Mesopotamians and the Egyptians built massive architectural structures dedicated to their gods—the ziggu- rat in Mesopotamia and the pyramid in Egypt (see Fig. 2.1, and Fig. 3.6 in Chapter 3). Both unite the earth and the heavens in a single architec tural form, although the Meso- potamian ziggurat is topped by a temple and is considered the house of the city-state’s god, and the Egyptian pyramid is funerary in nature with a royal burial within. Both cul- tures developed forms of writing, although the cuneiform script of Mesopotamian culture and the hieroglyphic script of Egyptian society were very different. There is ample evi- dence that the two civilizations traded with one another, and to a certain degree influenced one another.

What most distinguishes Mesopotamian from Egyp- tian culture, however, is the relative stability of the lat- ter. Mesopotamia was rarely, if ever, united as a single entity. Whenever it was united, it was through force, the power of an army, not the free will of a people striv- ing for the common good. In contrast, political transi- tion in Egypt was dynastic—that is, rule was inherited by members of the same family, sometimes for generations. As in Mesopotamia, however, the ruler’s authority was cemented by his association with divine authority. He was, indeed, the mani fes tation of the gods on earth. As a result, the dynastic rulers of Egypt sought to immortalize them- selves through art and architecture. In fact, there is clear reason to believe that the sculptural image of a ruler was believed to be, in some sense, the ruler himself.

Embodying the ruler’s sense of his own permanence is an obelisk—a four-sided stone shaft topped by a pyramid- shaped block—which once marked the entrance to the Amun Temple at Luxor during the reigns of the pharaohs Ramses II and Ramses III (Fig. 2.22). Some 3,300 years old, it stands today at the center of the Place de la Concorde in

Fig. 2.22 Obelisk of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde, Paris. Dynasty 19, Egypt, ca. 1279–1213 bce. Height 75'. The obelisk was a gift of the Egyptian government to the French, presented to them in 1829 by the Egyptian viceroy, Mehemet Ali. Gilded images on the pedestal portray the monumental task of transporting the monolith to Paris and erecting it in the city’s most central square.

& CONTINU ITY CHANGE Mesopotamia and Egypt: A Comparison

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THINKING BACK

2.1 Describe the relationship between the gods and the peoples of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria.

The royal tombs at the Sumerian city of Ur reveal a highly developed Bronze Age culture, based on the social order of the city-state, which was ruled by a priest-king acting as the intermediary between the gods and the people. The rulers also established laws and encouraged record-keeping, which in turn required the development of a system of writing—cuneiform script. In Sumer and subsequent Mesopotamian cultures, monumental archi- tecture such as ziggurats were dedicated to the gods, and in each city-state, one of the gods rose to prominence as the city’s protector. Under the rule of Hammurabi of Babylon, Mesopotamian law was codified, specifically in the stele that records the Law Code of Hammurabi. How would you characterize the general relationship between Mesopotamian rulers and the gods?

2.2 Explain how the Epic of Gilgamesh reflects the relationship between the gods and the people.

Preserved in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurba- nipal, the Epic of Gilgamesh remains one of the greatest expressions of world literature. The sense of cultural con- tinuity in Mesopotamia is underscored by the fact that the Epic of Gilgamesh preserves the historical lineage of all Mesopotamian kings—Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian. While asserting the king’s divinity, the story also admits the king’s human mortality. What are the characteristics of its epic form? What are its princi- pal themes? In particular, how do Gilgamesh and Enkidu relate to the gods?

2.3 Distinguish between the culture of the Hebrews and the other cultures of the ancient Near East.

The Hebrews practiced a monotheistic religion. They considered themselves the “chosen people” of God, for whom they used the cipher YHWH (“Yahweh” in mod- ern English). The written word is central to their culture, and it is embodied in a body of law, the Torah, and more specifically in the Ten Commandments. What does the Torah have in common with the Law Code of Hammu- rabi? How does it differ? How do the stories in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, compare to the Epic of Gilgamesh?

2.4 Discuss how the art and architecture of Neo-Babylonia and Persia reflect the ambitions of their leaders.

The last of the great Mesopotamian empires appeared after the fall of the Assyrians in 612 bce. First in Neo- Babylonia, then in Persia, city-states arose that aspired to control the entire eastern Mediterranean and Meso- potamia. Each built magnificent capitals, Nebuchadnez- zar remaking Babylon into the most magnificent city in the world, and then, after the Persians defeated the Baby- lonians in 520 bce, Darius constructing his new capital of Parsa, or Persepolis, in the highlands of western Iran. What features of these cities suggest the imperial aspira- tions of their leaders?

The Persian kings practiced the Zoroastrian religion. Like the Jews, the Persians’ beliefs were collected in a sin- gle holy book, compiled at about the same time as the Hebrew Bible. However, the Persian religion was only semi-monotheistic. Their supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, was the creator of many lesser gods. How did the Zoroas- trian religion lend authority to the Persian kings? In what way was Zoroastrian religion dualistic?

62 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

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READINGS READING 2.3 from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I (late 2nd millennium bce) (translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs)

The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the exploits of the Sumerian ruler Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. The following pas- sage, from the first of the epic’s 12 tablets, recounts how Enkidu, the primal man raised beyond the reach of civilization and fully at home with wild animals, loses his animal powers, and with them his innocence, when a trapper, tired of Enkidu freeing animals from his traps, arranges for a harlot from Uruk to seduce him. The story resonates in interesting ways with the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and their loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden.

Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.

She was not restrained, but took his energy. She spread out her robe and he lay upon her, she performed for the primitive the task of womankind. His lust groaned over her; for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused, and had intercourse with the harlot until he was sated with her charms. But when he turned his attention to his animals, the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off, the wild animals distanced themselves from his body. Enkidu … his utterly depleted (?) body, his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid; Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before. But then he drew himself up, for his understanding had

broadened.

READING CRITICALLY

In giving in to the temptation of the harlot Shamhat, Enkidu loses much here, but he also gains something. What is it that he comes to understand? How does it differ from the physi- cal prowess that he has evidently lost?

TABLET I

The Harlot

The trapper went, bringing the harlot, Shamhat, with him, they set off on the journey, making direct way. On the third day they arrived at the appointed place, and the trapper and the harlot sat down at their posts(?). A first day and a second they sat opposite the watering hole. The animals arrived and drank at the watering hole, the wild beasts arrived and slaked their thirst with water. Then he, Enkidu, offspring of the mountains, who eats grasses with the gazelles, came to drink at the watering hole with the animals, with the wild beasts he slaked his thirst with water. Then Shamhat saw him—a primitive, a savage fellow from the depths of the wilderness!

“That is he, Shamhat! Release your clenched arms, expose your sex so he can take in your voluptuousness. Do not be restrained—take his energy! When he sees you he will draw near to you. Spread out your robe so he can lie upon you, and perform for this primitive the task of womanhood! His animals, who grew up in his wilderness, will become

alien to him, and his lust will groan over you.”

READING 2.4 from the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, Chapters 2–3, 6–7

The following excerpts from the first book of both the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Old Testament describe the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah. Together they demonstrate some of the characteristics of Hebrew mono- theism—belief in the direct agency of their God in the workings of the world and his creation of a universe that is systematically planned and imbued with a moral order that derives from him. The passages also demonstrate the power and authority the Hebrews invested in their God.

CHAPTER 2

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.

2 And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.

3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation …

7 then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

9 Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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10 A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.

11 The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;

12 and the gold of that land is good; odellium and onyx stone are there.

13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush.

14 The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;

17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”

19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and what- ever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

20 The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.

21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

24 Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

25 And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

THE TEMPTATION AND EXPULSION

CHAPTER 3

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;

3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.‘”

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;

5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree

was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

9 But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?”

10 He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”

13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”

14 The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

17 And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

20 The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

21 And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.

22 Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—

23 therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.

24 He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

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THE STORY OF NOAH

CHAPTER 6

5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.

6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

7 So the LORD said, “I will blot out from the earth the hu- man beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD. …

13 And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.

14 Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. …

17 For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.

18 But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.

19 And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.

20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive.

21 Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.”

22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.

CHAPTER 7

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth.

7 And Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

8 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground,

9 two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah.

10 And after seven days the waters of the flood came on the earth. …

11 … on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.

12 The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights. …

18 The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters.

19 The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; …

21 And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domes- tic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings;

22 everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.

23 He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. …

READING CRITICALLY

The story of Noah is, in some sense, a parable of the value of choosing to “walk with God.” How does it reflect, then, the idea of the covenant, God’s agreement with the Hebrews?

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