Fields of Blood (8 page)

On the fifth day of the festival, the presiding priest would ceremonially humiliate the king in Marduk’s shrine, evoking the terrifying specter of social anarchy by confiscating the royal regalia, striking the king on the cheek, and throwing him roughly onto the ground.
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The bruised and abject king would plead with Marduk that he had not behaved like an evil ruler:

The priest then slapped the king again, so hard that tears rose to his eyes—a sign of repentance that satisfied Marduk. Thus reinstated, the king now clasped the hands of Marduk’s effigy, the regalia were returned, and his rule was secure for the coming year. The statues of all the patronal gods and goddesses of all the cities in Mesopotamia had to be brought to Babylon for the festival as an expression of cultic and political loyalty. If they were not all present, the Akitu could not be celebrated and the realm would be endangered. The liturgy, therefore, was as crucial for a city’s security as its fortifications, and it had reminded the people, only the day before, of the city’s fragility.

On the fourth day of the festival, priests and choristers filed into Marduk’s shrine for the recitation of
Enuma Elish,
the creation hymn that recounted Marduk’s victory over cosmic and political chaos. The first gods to emerge from the slimy primal matter (similar to Mesopotamia’s alluvial soil) were “nameless, natureless, futureless,”
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virtually inseparable from the natural world and seen as enemies of progress. The next gods to emerge from the sludge became progressively more distinct until the divine
evolution culminated in Marduk, the most splendid of the
Anunnaki. In the same way, Mesopotamian culture had developed from rural communities immersed in the natural rhythms of the countryside that were now regarded as sluggish, static, and inert. But the old times could return: this hymn expressed the fear of civilization lapsing back into abysmal nothingness. The most dangerous of the primitive gods was
Tiamat, whose name means “Void”; she was the salty sea, which, in the
Middle East, symbolized not only primeval chaos but the social anarchy that could bring starvation, disease, and death to the entire population. She represented an ever-present threat that every civilization, no matter how powerful, had to be ready to confront.

The hymn also gave sacred sanction to the structural violence of Babylonian society. Tiamat creates a horde of monsters to fight the
Anunnaki, a “growling roaring rout, ready for battle,” suggestive of the danger the lower classes presented to the state. Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder. Their leader is Tiamat’s spouse Kingu, a “clumsy laborer,” one of the Igigi, whose name means “Toil.” The narrative of the hymn is repeatedly punctuated with this pounding refrain: “She has made the Worm, the Dragon, the Female Monster, the Great Lion, the Mad Dog, the Mad Scorpion and the Howling Storm, the Fish-Man, the Centaur.”
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But Marduk defeats them all, casting them into prison and creating an ordered universe by splitting Tiamat’s corpse in two and separating heaven and earth. He then commands the gods to build the city of
bab-ilani,
“gate of the gods,” as their earthly home and creates the first man by mixing Kingu’s blood with a handful of dust to perform the labor on which civilization depends. “Sons of toil,” the masses are sentenced for life to menial labor and are held in subjection. Liberated from work, the gods sing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. The myth and its accompanying rituals reminded the Sumerian aristocracy of the reality on which their civilization and privilege depended; they must be perpetually primed for war to keep down rebellious peasants, ambitious aristocrats, and foreign enemies who threatened civilized society. Religion was therefore deeply implicated in this
imperial violence and could not be separated from the economic and political realities that sustained any
agrarian state.

The fragility of civilization became clear during the seventeenth century BCE, when
Indo-European hordes repeatedly attacked the cities of Mesopotamia. Even
Egypt now became militarized, when
Bedouin tribesmen, whom the Egyptians called
Hyksos (“chieftains from foreign lands”), managed to establish their own dynasty in the delta area during the sixteenth century.
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The Egyptians expelled them in 1567, but ever
afterward the ruling pharaoh was depicted as a warrior at the head of a powerful army. Empire seemed the best defense, so Egypt secured its frontier by subjugating
Nubia in the south and coastal
Palestine in the north. But by the middle of the second millennium, the ancient Near East was dominated by foreign conquerors;
Kassite tribes from the
Caucasus took over the Babylonian Empire (c. 1600–1155); an
Indo-European aristocracy created the Hittite Empire in
Anatolia (1420–1200); and the
Mitanni, another
Aryan tribe, controlled Greater Mesopotamia from about 1500 until they were conquered by the
Hittites in the mid-fourteenth century.
Ashur-uballit I, ruler of the city of Ashur in the eastern Tigris region, who was able to exploit the turbulence that followed the collapse of the Mitanni, made Assyria a new power in the Middle East.

Assyria was not a traditional
agrarian state.
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Situated in an area that was not agriculturally productive, since the nineteenth century BCE, Ashur had relied more than other cities on
commerce, setting up trading colonies in
Cappadocia and planting mercantile representatives in several Babylonian cities. For about a century Ashur was a trading hub, importing tin (crucial for the manufacture of bronze) from
Afghanistan and exporting it together with Mesopotamian textiles to Anatolia and the Black Sea. The historical record is so slight, however, that we do not know how this affected the farmers of Ashur or whether commerce mitigated the structural violence of the state. Nor do we know much about Ashur’s religious practices. Its kings built impressive temples to the gods, but we know nothing about the personality and exploits of Ashur, its patronal deity, whose mythology has not survived.

The
Assyrians began to dominate the region when their king
Adadnirari I (1307–1275) conquered the old Mitanni territories from the Hittites as well as land in southern Babylonia. The economic incentive was always prominent in Assyrian warfare. The inscriptions of
Shalmaneser I (1274–45) stressed his martial prowess: he was a “valiant hero, capable of battle with his enemies, whose aggressive battle flashes like a flame and whose weapons attack like a merciless death-trap.”
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It was he who began the Assyrian practice of forcibly moving people around his empire not simply, as was once thought, to demoralize the conquered peoples but principally to stimulate the agricultural economy by replenishing underpopulated regions.
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The reign of his son
Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244–1208), who made Assyria
the most formidable military and economic power of the day, is better documented. He turned Ashur into the ritual capital of his empire and instituted the
Akitu festival there, with the god Ashur in the starring role; it appears that the As
syrians introduced a mock battle reenacting Ashur’s war with
Tiamat. In his inscriptions, Tukulti-Ninurta was careful to credit his victories to the gods: “Trusting in Ashur and the great gods, my lord, I struck and brought about their defeat.” But he also makes it clear that warfare was never simply an act of piety:

Assyrian kings too were plagued by internal dissent, intrigue, and rebellion, yet
Tiglath-pileser I (c. 1115–1093) managed to expand the empire, maintaining his domination of the region by perpetual campaigning and large-scale deportations, so that his reign was in effect one continuous war. Punctilious as he was in his devotion to the gods and an energetic builder of temples, his strategy was always dictated by economic imperatives. His chief motive for expanding northward into
Iran, for instance, was the acquisition of booty, metal, and animals, which he sent home to boost productivity in Syria at a time of chronic crop failure.
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Warfare had become a fact of human life, central to the political, social, and economic dynamics of the agrarian empire, and like every other human activity, it always had a religious dimension. These states would not have survived without constant military effort, and the gods, the alter egos of the ruling class, represented a yearning for a strength that could transcend human instability. Yet the Mesopotamians were not credulous fanatics. Religious mythology may have endorsed their structural and martial violence, but it also regularly called it into question. There was a strong vein of
skepticism in Mesopotamian literature. One aristocrat complains that he has always been righteous, joyfully followed the gods’ processions, taught all the people on his estate to worship the
Mother Goddess, and instructed his soldiers to revere the king as the gods’ representative. Yet he has been afflicted with disease, insomnia, and terror, and “no god came to my aid or grasped my hand.”
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Gilgamesh
too gets no help from the gods as he struggles to accept Enkidu’s death. When he meets
Ishtar, the Mother Goddess, he denounces her savagely for her inability to protect men from the grim realities of life: she is like a water-skin that soaks its carrier, a shoe that pinches its wearer, and a door that fails to keep out the wind. In the end, as we have seen,
Gilgamesh finds resignation, but the
Epic
as a whole suggests that mortals have no choice but to rely on themselves rather than the gods. Urban living was beginning to change the way people thought about the divine, but one of the most momentous religious developments of the period occurred at about the same time as
Sin-leqi wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s life. It did not happen in a sophisticated city, however, but was a response to the escalation of violence in an
Aryan
pastoral community.