Imagining the End: Visions of
Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Pdf görüntüsü
|
| locus classicus
is a passage in the Roman writer Seneca, claiming to quote Berossus, a Babylonian scholar who wrote a book in Greek about Babylonian astrology, history and culture in the early third century . This work is lost except for quotations, allusions and summaries in various classical and early medieval writers, some based directly on his work, most, like Seneca’s, indirect citations to summaries or quotations by others. Seneca describes Berossus’s teaching as follows: ‘All that the earth inherits will, he assures us, be consigned to flame when the planets, which now move in different orbits, all assemble in Cancer, so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres. When the same gathering takes place in Capricorn, then we are in danger of the deluge.’ 14 Since no reference to such a belief has been identified in any Mesopotamian source, and since the doctrine of planetary spheres was not part of Mesopotamian astronomy, most scholars of Mesopotamian cultures would consider this passage insufficient evidence for the existence of a Babylonian idea of the end of the world. 15 It is not, therefore, presented in conventional discussions of Mesopotamian religion, which seldom even mention eschatology. 16 Considerably more attention has been given to a small group of late documents usually called ‘prophecies’ or ‘apocalypses’. These refer to future events in veiled language, some of which seem to have to do with Achaemenid and Hellenistic rulers. A passage from one of these reads as follows: ‘Another king will arise, but this time in [the city] Uruk. He will bring justice to the land and restore the gods, sanctuaries, fortifications, and prosperity of Uruk.
26 Origins
The preceding king’s son will arise in Uruk and the empire. His reign will be established forever. [The kings?] of Uruk will exercise dominion like the gods.’ 17
that it foretells an era of triumph for the city Uruk, which had not known an independent dynasty for at least ten centuries when this text was written. The phrase ‘established forever’ is a cliché of Mesopotamian royalty so should not be construed as a prediction of eternal life. This passage, as well as the group of texts it belongs to, suggests that there was in fact a Mesopotamian background to Jewish apocalyptic, originating perhaps in Babylonia under Achaemenid rule, even as a protest to it, and continuing into the Hellenistic period.
18 Enough is known of the cultural life of this fascinating period of Mesopotamian history to show that it is a serious blunder to consider it a feeble afterglow of the Mesopotamian civilization of a millennium earlier. It is also a priori unlikely that people believed the same things in Babylon in the sixth century as they had in the sixteenth. But we may still adhere to our position that eschatology was a late development in Mesopotamia, possibly a consequence of foreign rule, and then ask a more difficult question: why not earlier? What dynamic of earlier phases of Mesopotamian culture tended to exclude eschatology? What might a Mesopotamian scholar of the late second millennium
, for example, have said if someone asked him if the world would end and, if so, how and when? His answer might surprise a modern student: the world had already ended in the remote past and that marked the beginning of the present. Meso- potamian thought and tradition knew of an all-embracing catastrophe, the deluge.
19 The discovery of a Mesopotamian deluge story, with unmistakable similarities to the biblical flood story, was, in fact, the beginning of European preoccupation with ancient Mesopotamia. Various versions of the story are now known in the Akkadian language, the earliest from about the seventeenth century
, the latest from manuscripts of the seventh century , which
probably preserve a text from late in the second millennium. 20 According to the earliest full version, 21 the deluge was sent by the gods to obliterate the human race. Thanks to the intervention of a sympathetic deity, a flood hero and his wife survived by building a large boat and taking aboard various animals (a later version includes craftsmen to keep alive knowledge of the arts). The deluge wiped out the entire human race and all traces of civilization. In the terror and confusion of the deluge, the gods recognized that this measure had been too drastic. In its aftermath, when they found themselves hungry and thirsty, the gods regretted that their human subjects were gone, as there was no one to provide for their needs, to feed, clothe, house, and entertain them. Therefore the human race was allowed to re- populate the earth, but death was ordained for all humans, as well as periodic 27 Mesopotamia and the End of Time measures to reduce population on a larger scale, such as famine, plague and ravening beasts. In addition, the birth rate was reduced by ordaining human infertility and establishing social prohibition of child-bearing to certain classes of women, such as priestesses. The Mesopotamians viewed human life before the deluge as different. The correlation of biological with calendrical time was vastly slower. Human beings lived to enormous ages, not with conventional childhoods and adulthoods and long old ages, but rather with all stages of life more leisurely – a baby might be in nappies for a century, for example. 22 Life was better then because it lasted longer. In their literature Babylonians sometimes suggested that life went by too quickly. The idea that remote antiquity embraced long periods without important cultural changes is familiar to the modern historian, who tends to think of more than per cent of human history as relatively stable in terms of population, material culture and subsistence patterns. To the Babylonian historian, the rhythm of time and life were different, and seemed faster, with the recession of the deluge. Another characteristic of the Mesopotamian view of most ancient life was that there was once less conflict of interest between humans and beasts than in the present, or, in some versions, there were no baneful beasts in the world at all: In those days, there being no snakes, no scorpions, No hyenas, no lions, no dogs, no wolves, Neither fear nor terror: Humanity had no enemy! 23 Less conflict may have taken place among human beings, as in most ancient times the human race was less diverse: people had been mostly like the Mesopotamians but had later branched out with their own languages and gods. The author of the early version of the deluge story, presenting it as the early history of the human race, proposed an original solution to the question as to why the world changed with a sudden catastrophe. Life was in fact too long and too productive. The teeming masses of the human race raised such a clamour that the gods could not sleep. This robust and ironic literary treatment of the deluge scarcely accords with the narrow definitions of millennial thought offered above. First, the final consummation took place in the past. Second, the human race barely survived, but without justification or moral improvement, just recognition of its utilitarian importance to the gods. Third, the flood is clearly understood, at least in the later version, to be a one-time event, never to recur. There was no waiting for a second flood and computing the time until it would occur. Fourth, no era of bliss followed.
28 Origins
Thereafter, as the Babylonian author saw it, people had to die in an orderly and prompt manner or be periodically wiped out in large numbers; there were also whole groups of people who could not or were not allowed to reproduce themselves. Humanity worked to maintain the gods, who lived for ever in idleness and petty intrigues. The blissful elect had already died long ago. One must avoid, however, any paradigm in which Mesopotamians looked towards the past, without hope, while Christians look towards the future, with hope. In fact, the Mesopotamians were intensely interested in the future and turned their finest scholarly and scientific talents towards understanding and even manipulating it. 24 But they proceeded from an understanding of the present that modern readers have struggled to come to terms with. Human civilization was not a product of human history or even occasional divine interventions. Rather, major human institutions, such as agriculture, urban life, arts and crafts, scholarship, religious practice, or authoritarian rule, were given to the human race before the deluge and remained essentially stable through time. To the Sumerians, this meant that human institutions were defined by individual, abstract, differentiated powers controlled by the gods. To the Babylonians, human institutions were designed or planned by the gods and laid down for the human race in fully developed form. 25 People could ignore or forget them but they were there to be rediscovered. Therefore, the discontinuities between gods and humans were those of mortality and inferior human powers and intelligence in opposition to immor- tality, unlimited powers and superior wisdom and understanding belonging to the gods. 26 The life patterns, needs, policies and material culture of the divine and mortal spheres were comparable. Since the physical world was part of a cosmos constructed, arranged and controlled by the gods, its order could but seldom be at fundamental variance with their purposes, and so destruction of the world was not envisaged. 27 Nor should we expect the flood to be a universal boundary in Mesopotamian thought. The Babylonian Epic of Creation, for example, ends before the flood, considering the organization of the universe and the construction of Babylon the main events of history. 28 In any case, the present was a product of stable, god-given institutions and short-lived human endeavours. Turning to the future, we find that Mesopotamian texts addressed to human beings of ages to come assume a cultural horizon similar to that of the time the text was written: Babylonian kings will still repair temples and public buildings and remember with honour their predecessors. There will be good and bad times and different cities and dynasties will rule the land. 29 But there will always be a land and cities and dynasties, without significant social or technological changes, far into the future. 29 Mesopotamia and the End of Time Mesopotamian culture makes ample reference to a belief in destiny, deter- mined by the gods at birth, even written on a sublime tablet. 30 The gods vouchsafed glimpses of destiny in both everyday and extraordinary occurrences and in response to queries and technical procedures carried out by professional scholars. 31 Aspects of destiny could be averted or manipulated through rituals, though the ultimate destiny, death, could not be avoided. In a culture that placed strong emphasis on destiny, the past, in which destiny was decided, will be the same as the future, in which destiny is acted out. A person will live towards his past, hence the future is what lies behind him, or one could say that his future has already happened. 32 If one accepts this idea, or a variation of it, then one can hope to discover the future from the present and past, as they form a seamless whole. Mesopotamian hope for the future, therefore, centred on the possibilities of manipulating or swaying destiny, by changing behaviour and carrying out apotropaic procedures sold by experts. We cannot create a false symmetry by asserting that the Mesopotamians had millennialism reversed, that people were seeking an era of bliss by burrowing into the past. Informed imitation of the past was a virtue, but this is so widespread in human communities that it would not make the Babylonians into millenarians. Furthermore, the crucial line between past and present, the deluge, could not be crossed. When the Mesopotamian hero-king Gilgamesh decided that he was man enough to try to cross this boundary and find the secret of immortal life, the flood hero scoffs at his venture, ‘Who then will call the gods to assembly for your sake, that you may find the eternal life you seek?’
33 He does, however, allow Gilgamesh to bring back to the human race the story of the flood, which otherwise would have remained unknown, since there was no one else to recount it. There is no hope for anyone beyond the normal life-span (even if courtesy required wishing kings an everlasting reign, as in the prophecy concerning Uruk quoted above). Having considered what happened in the remote past, we may turn to Mesopotamian speculations about the far future, which to Mesopotamians meant what happens after death. This too has a bearing on the possibilities for eschatological beliefs. Death held no promise of a better world, rather, a worse one, permanent incarceration in a dark, dusty place, languishing in eternal hunger and thirst unless one’s descendants remembered to make food offerings. Such joys as were to be attained were decidedly of this life. Death was the end of everything about a human being that was attractive or worth experiencing. 34 Here too the Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|