Fields of Blood (4 page)
Authors: Karen Armstrong
When we come to the modern period, in Part Three, we will, of course, explore the wave of violence claiming religious justification that erupted during the 1980s and culminated in the atrocity of
September 11, 2001. But we will also examine the nature of
secularism, which, despite its manifold benefits, has not always offered a wholly irenic alternative to a religious state ideology. The early modern philosophies that tried to pacify Europe after the
Thirty Years’ War in fact had a ruthless streak
of their own, particularly when dealing with casualties of secular
modernity who found it alienating rather than empowering and liberating. This is because secularism did not so much displace religion as create new religious enthusiasms. So ingrained is our desire for ultimate meaning that our secular institutions, most especially the nation-state, almost immediately acquired a “religious” aura, though they have been less adept than the ancient mythologies at helping people face up to the grimmer realities of human existence for which there are no easy answers. Yet secularism has by no means been the end of the story. In some societies attempting to find their way to modernity, it has succeeded only in damaging religion and wounding psyches of people unprepared to be wrenched from ways of living and understanding that had always supported them. Licking its wounds in the desert, the scapegoat, with its festering resentment, has rebounded on the city that drove it out.
Part One
1
G
ilgamesh, named in the ancient king lists as the fifth ruler of
Uruk, was remembered as “the strongest of men—huge, handsome, radiant, perfect.”
1
He may well have existed but soon acquired a legendary aura. It was said that he had seen everything, traveled to the ends of the earth, visited the underworld, and achieved great wisdom. By the early third millennium BCE, Uruk, in what is now southern
Iraq, was the largest city-state in the federation of Sumer, the world’s first civilization. The poet
Sin-leqi-unninni, who wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s remarkable life in about 1200 BCE, was still bursting with pride in its temples, palaces, gardens, and shops. He began and ended his epic with an exuberant description of the magnificent city wall, six miles long, that Gilgamesh had restored for his people. “Walk on the wall of Uruk!” he urged his readers excitedly. “Follow its course around the city, inspect its mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built!”
2
This splendid fortification showed that warfare had become a fact of human life. Yet this had not been an inevitable development. For hundreds of years, Sumer had felt no need to protect its cities from outside attack. Gilgamesh, however, who probably ruled around 2750 BCE, was a new kind of
Sumerian king, “a wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader, hero on the front lines, beloved by his soldiers—
fortress
they called him,
protector of the people, raging flood that destroys all defenses.
”
3
Despite his passion for Uruk, Sin-leqi had to admit that civilization
had its discontents. Poets had begun to tell Gilgamesh’s story soon after his death because it is an archetypal tale, one of the first literate accounts of the hero’s journey.
4
But it also wrestles with the inescapable
structural violence of civilized life. Oppressed, impoverished, and miserable, the people of Uruk begged the gods to grant them some relief from Gilgamesh’s tyranny:
The city is his possession, he struts
Through it, arrogant, his head raised high,
Trampling its citizens like a wild bull.
He is king, he does whatever he wants
The young men of Uruk he harries without a warrant,
Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father.
5
These young men may have been conscripted into the labor bands that rebuilt the city wall.
6
Urban living would not have been possible without the unscrupulous exploitation of the vast majority of the population. Gilgamesh and the Sumerian
aristocracy lived in unprecedented splendor, but for the peasant masses civilization brought only misery and subjugation.
The Sumerians seem to have been the first people to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community and create a privileged ruling class. This could only have been achieved by force. Enterprising settlers had first been drawn to the fertile plain between the
Tigris and the Euphrates in about 5000 BCE.
7
It was too dry for farming, so they designed an irrigation system to control and distribute the snowmelt from the mountains that flooded the plain each year. This was an extraordinary achievement. Canals and ditches had to be planned, designed, and maintained in a cooperative effort and the water allocated fairly between competing communities. The new system probably began on a small scale, but would have soon led to a dramatic increase in agricultural yield and thus to a population explosion.
8
By 3500, Sumer numbered a hitherto unachievable half-million souls. Strong leadership would have been essential, but what actually transformed these simple farmers into city dwellers is a topic of endless debate. Probably a number of interlocking and mutually reinforcing factors were involved: population growth, unprecedented agricultural fecundity, and the intensive labor required by
irrigation—not to mention sheer human ambition—all contributed to a new kind of society.
9
All that we know for certain is that by 3000 BCE there were twelve cities in the
Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. Theirs was subsistence-level living. Each village had to bring its entire crop to the city it served; officials allocated a portion to feed the local peasants, and the rest was stored for the aristocracy in the city temples. In this way, a few great families with the help of a class of retainers—bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and household servants—appropriated between half and two-thirds of the revenue.
10
They used this surplus to live a different sort of life altogether, freed for various pursuits that depend on leisure and wealth. In return, they maintained the irrigation system and preserved a degree of law and order. All premodern states feared anarchy: a single crop failure caused by drought or social unrest could lead to thousands of deaths, so the
elite could tell themselves that this system benefited the population as a whole. But robbed of the fruits of their labors, the peasants were little better than slaves: plowing, harvesting, digging irrigation canals, being forced into degradation and penury, their hard labor in the fields draining their lifeblood. If they failed to satisfy their overseers, their oxen were kneecapped and their olive trees chopped down.
11
They left fragmentary records of their distress. “The poor man is better dead than alive,” one peasant lamented. “I am a thoroughbred steed,” complained another, “but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry weeds and stubble.”
12
Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single
agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.
13
Its rigid hierarchy was symbolized by the ziggurats, the giant stepped temple-towers that were the hallmark of Mesopotamian civilization: Sumerian society too was stacked in narrowing layers culminating in an exalted aristocratic pinnacle, each individual locked inexorably into place.
14
Yet, historians argue, without this cruel arrangement that did violence to the vast majority of the population, humans would not have developed the arts and sciences that made progress possible. Civilization itself required a leisured class to cultivate it, and so our finest achievements were for thousands of years built on the backs of an exploited peasantry. By no coincidence,
when the
Sumerians invented writing, it was for the purpose of social control.
What role did religion play in this damaging oppression? All political communities develop ideologies that ground their institutions in the natural order as they perceive it.
15
The Sumerians knew how fragile their groundbreaking urban experiment was. Their mud-brick buildings needed constant maintenance; the
Tigris and Euphrates frequently broke their banks and ruined the crops; torrential rains turned the soil into a sea of mud; and terrifying storms damaged property and killed livestock. But the aristocrats had begun to study astronomy and discovered regular patterns in the movements of the heavenly bodies. They marveled at the way the different elements of the natural world worked together to create a stable universe, and they concluded that the cosmos itself must be a kind of state in which everything had its allotted function. They decided that if they modeled their cities on this celestial order, their experimental society would be in tune with the way the world worked and would therefore thrive and endure.
16
The cosmic state, they believed, was managed by gods who were inseparable from the natural forces and nothing like the “God” worshipped by Jews,
Christians, and Muslims today. These deities could not control events but were bound by the same laws as humans, animals, and plants. There was also no vast ontological gap between human and divine;
Gilgamesh, for example, was one-third human, two-thirds divine.
17
The
Anunnaki, the higher gods, were the aristocrats’ celestial alter egos, their most complete and effective selves, differing from humans only in that they were immortal. The Sumerians imagined these gods as preoccupied with town planning, irrigation, and government, just as they were. Anu, the Sky, ruled this archetypal state from his palace in the heavens, but his presence was also felt in all earthly authority. Enlil, Lord Storm, was revealed not only in the cataclysmic thunderstorms of Mesopotamia but also in any kind of human force and violence. He was Anu’s chief counselor in the
Divine Council (on which the Sumerian Assembly was modeled), and Enki, who had imparted the arts of civilization to human beings, was its minister of agriculture.
Every polity—even our secular nation-state—relies on a mythology that defines its special character and mission. The word
myth
has lost its force in modern times and tends to mean something that is not true, that never happened. But in the
premodern world, mythology expressed
a timeless rather than a historical reality and provided a blueprint for action in the present.
18
At this very early point in history, when the archaeological and historical record is so scanty, the mythology that the Sumerians preserved in writing is the only way we can enter their minds. For these pioneers of civilization, the myth of the cosmic state was an exercise in political science. The Sumerians knew that their stratified society was a shocking departure from the egalitarian norm that had prevailed from time immemorial, but they were convinced that it was somehow enshrined in the very nature of things and that even the gods were bound by it. Long before humans existed, it was said, the gods had lived in the
Mesopotamian cities, growing their own food and managing the irrigation system.
19
After the
Great Flood, they had withdrawn from earth to heaven and appointed the Sumerian aristocracy to govern the cities in their stead. Answerable to their divine masters, the ruling class had had no choice in the matter.
Following the logic of the
perennial philosophy, the Sumerians’ political arrangements imitated those of their gods; this, they believed, enabled their fragile cities to participate in the strength of the divine realm. Each city had its own patronal deity and was run as this god’s personal estate.
20
Represented by a life-sized statue, the ruling god lived in the chief temple with his family and household of divine retainers and servants, each one of whom was also depicted in effigy and dwelled in a suite of rooms. The gods were fed, clothed, and entertained in elaborate rituals, and each temple owned huge holdings of farmland and herds of livestock in their name. Everybody in the city-state, no matter how menial his or her task, was engaged in divine service—officiating at the deities’ rites; working in their breweries, factories, and workshops; sweeping their shrines; pasturing and butchering their animals; baking their bread; and clothing their statues. There was nothing secular about the Mesopotamian state and nothing personal about their religion. This was a theocracy in which everybody—from the highest aristocrat to the lowliest artisan—performed a sacred activity.
Mesopotamian religion was essentially communal; men and women did not seek to encounter the divine only in the privacy of their hearts but primarily in a godly community. Premodern religion had no separate institutional existence; it was embedded in the political, social, and domestic arrangements of a society, providing it with an overarching system of meaning. Its goals, language, and rituals were conditioned by
these mundane considerations. Providing the template for society, Mesopotamian religious practice seems to have been the direct opposite of our modern notion of “religion” as a private spiritual experience: it was essentially a political pursuit, and we have no record of any personal devotions.
21
The gods’ temples were not simply places of worship but were central to the economy, because the agricultural surplus was stored there. The Sumerians had no word for
priest:
aristocrats who were also the city’s bureaucrats, poets, and astronomers officiated at the city cult. This was only fitting, since for them all activity—and especially politics—was holy.