Babylon E-Book

Paul Kriwaczek

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 597

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of ancient Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements around 5400 BC, to the eclipse of Babylon by the Persians in the sixth century BC. He chronicles the rise and fall of dynastic power during this period; he examines its numerous material, social and cultural innovations and inventions: The wheel, civil, engineering, building bricks, the centralized state, the division of labour, organised religion, sculpture, education, mathematics, law and monumental building. At the heart of Kriwaczek's magisterial account, though, is the glory of Babylon - 'gateway to the gods' - which rose to glorious prominence under the Amorite king Hammurabi, who unified Babylonia between 1800 and 1750 BC. While Babylonian power would rise and fall over the ensuing centuries, it retained its importance as a cultural, religious and political centre until its fall to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC.

Leseprobe

BABYLON

Paul Kriwaczek (1937–2011) was born in Vienna. In 1970 he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for twenty-five years. A former head of Central Asian Affairs at the BBC World Service, he was fluent in eight languages, including Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi and Nepalese.

First published in 2010 in Great britain by Atlantic books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Paul Kriwaczek, 2010

The moral right of Paul Kriwaczekto be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission both of the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

ISBN 9781848871571 eISBN 9781782395676

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Atlantic Books Ltd.

Ormond House

26—27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

1

Lessons from the Past: An Introduction

2

Kingship Descends from Heaven: The Urban Revolution Before 4000

BCE

3

The City of Gilgamesh: Temple Rule Between

c

. 4000 and 3000

BCE

4

The Flood: A Caesura in History

5

Big Men and Kings: The City-States c.3000 to 2300

BCE

6

Rulers of the Four Quarters: The Bronze Heroic Age

c

. 2300 to 2200

BCE

7

Sumer Resurgent: The

Dirigiste

State

c

. 2100 to 2000

BCE

8

Old Babylon: The Culmination

c

. 1900 to 1600

BCE

9

Empire of Ashur: Colossus of the First Millennium c.1800

BCE

to 700

BCE

10

Passing the Baton: An End and a Beginning After 700

BCE

Further Reading

Bibliographic Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks are due to my brother, Frank Kriwaczek, for his help in accessing documents and journals that would otherwise have been unavailable to me, and as ever to my literary agent and good friend Mandy Little, for her invaluable support and wise guidance.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Maps

1

.

Ancient Mesopotamia

2

.

The Fertile Crescent

3

.

The Sumerian City-States

4

.

The Empire of Akkad

5

.

Third Dynasty of Ur

6

.

The Old Babylonian Empire

7

.

The Assyrian Empire

8

.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire

These maps are purely indicative and omit many lines and landmarks for the sake of clarity.

List of Photographic Illustrations

1.

Capricornus, the Sea-Goat, one of the very earliest named signs of the zodiac. It was anciently associated with Enki, also known as Ea, the god of civilization. The constellation is best seen on a northern autumn evening, when it lies above the southern horizon.

2.

The emergence of writing: a simple

aide mémoire

from about 3100

BCE

, one of the texts found in the archaic levels of the Eanna temple district of ancient Uruk. The clay tablet is shown on the left and its translation on the right.

3.

Akkadian seal impression showing horse rider, from Kish, 2350–2200

BCE

.

4.

Cylinder seal impression showing horse rider, 2100–1800

BCE

.

5.

The Tower of Babel (Great Ziggurat of Babylon), plan and elevation, from the eroded stele.

6.

As the Great Ziggurat of Babylon may have originally looked.

7.

City map of Babylon in the seventh century

BCE

.

8.

Neo-Babylonian map of the world.

9.

Early Cuneiform Signs

10.

Sign Combinations

11.

Combinations of the Symbol for Head

12.

As writing developed further and a pointed drawing stylus was replaced by a reed of triangular cross section, the signs became more schematic:

13.

Over the centuries the signs were further simplified until it was no longer easily possible to recognize what they originally represented:

14

.

Frieze from Al ‘Ubaid, c. 4000

BCE

/ British Museum

15

.

Sumerian pull-along toy from the fourth millennium

BCE

/ Oriental institute, University of Chicago

16

.

Sumerian Cylinder seal from around 3000

BCE

/ British Museum

17

.

Uruk era stamp seal and its impression, fourth millennium

BCE

/ British Museum

18

.

Bevelled-rim bowl fourth millennium

BCE

/ British Museum

19

.

The first known signature / Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London

20

.

The Lady of Uruk, c. 3100

BCE

/ Bridgeman Art Library

21

.

Upper tier of the Warka Vase, c. 3100

BCE

/ Bridgeman Art Library

22

.

Royal cemetery at Great Death Pit at of Ur, c. 2500

BCE

/

Illustrated London News

, Mary Evans Picture Library

23

.

Servant’s cemetery at Great Death Pit at of Ur, c. 2500

BCE

/

Illustrated London News

, Mary Evans Picture Library

24

.

King Sargon of Akkad, c. 2300

BCE

/ Bridgeman Art Library

25

.

Gudea of Lagash, c. 2120

BCE

/ British Museum

26

.

The Weld-Blundell Prism, c. 1800

BCE

/ The Ashmolean Museum

27

.

King Naram-Sin’s Victory Stele, c. 2200

BC

/ Musée du Louvre

28

.

The Stele of the Vultures, c.2500 / Musée du Louvre

29

.

Monument showing Shamash the Sun God, c. 1700

BCE

/ Musée du Louvre

30

.

Wall panel from the North Palace at Nineveh, c. 345

BCE

, British Museum

31

.

Wall panel in Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, 701

BCE

/ British Museum

32

.

The Lion Hunt from a wall panel in Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, seventh century

BCE

/ British Museum

33

.

Detail of above

History which does not inform present-day concerns amounts to little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism

Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History

at Cambridge University, Inaugural Lecture, 1997

1

Lessons from the Past: An Introduction

They hanged Saddam Hussein on the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice, ’Eid ul-Adha, 30 December 2006. It was not a dignified execution. Reading the newspaper reports of that grisly – and botched – act of barbarism, more revenge than justice, and seeing the mobile-phone video images distributed immediately afterwards, I cannot have been the only one to feel that the language of daily journalism was inadequate to encompass such extravagant, larger-than-life events.

The cruel tyrant’s army crumbles away. He himself escapes, disappears from sight for a time, but is eventually discovered, filthy and heavily bearded, cowering like an animal in a hole in the ground. He is taken captive, publicly humiliated, held in solitary confinement for a thousand days and put on trial before a tribunal whose verdict is a foregone conclusion. Hanging him, his exultant executioners almost tear off his head.

As in biblical times, God took to speaking to men again, instructing the makers of history. At a secret meeting between senior army officers in Kuwait during the run-up to the First Gulf War, Saddam had explained that he had invaded Kuwait on heaven’s express instructions: ‘May God be my witness, that it is the Lord who wanted what happened to happen. This decision we received almost ready-made from God… Our role in the decision was almost zero.’

In a BBC documentary, broadcast in October 2005, Nabil Sha’ath, Foreign Minister of the Palestinian authority recalled that ‘President Bush said to all of us: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did; and then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq…’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me.”’

It would have come as no real surprise had the conflict begun with a voice booming out from heaven, crying ‘O President Saddam,’ and continuing, as in the Book of Daniel, 4:31: ‘to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field.’ It takes the language of the Old Testament, the Book of Kings perhaps, to depict the details of Saddam Hussein’s end in their full, almost mythic, dimensions. Thus:

It was the morning of the Sabbath, before the sun rose. And they brought him into the city, even unto the place of execution.

And they bound his hands and his feet as was the custom among them in the way of execution. And they reviled him saying, how are the mighty fallen, and may you be cursed by the Lord.

And they placed the rope about his neck and they reviled him again, praising the names and titles of his enemies, and saying, may God curse you, may you go down to hell.

And he replied, saying, Is this your manhood? This is a gallows of shame.

And again they spoke unto him, saying, prepare to meet God. And he prayed to God, saying, there is no God but the Lord.

And so they hanged him. And a great shout went up in the place of execution and in the streets and in the markets. It was the morning of the Sabbath, as the sun rose over the walls of Babylon.

Seeing George W. Bush’s Iraq War through biblical eyes is not just a writer’s conceit, the reaction of someone like me, introduced as a child to Middle- Eastern history by the Bible. Saddam too saw himself as a successor to the rulers of antiquity. He particularly modelled himself on Nebuchadnezzar II (605–562 BCE), conqueror and destroyer of Jerusalem and its temple, describing him, in a multiple anachronism, as ‘an Arab from Iraq’, who fought, like Saddam himself, against Persians and Jews. (Nebuchadnezzar was not an Arab but a Chaldean, there would be no Iraq for another two and a half millennia, and Judaism as we know it did not yet exist.) The emblem of the 1988 Babylon International Festival showed Saddam’s profile superimposed on Nebuchadnezzar’s; according to a New York Times journalist, the outline of his nose was lengthened to make him resemble the Mesopotamian king more closely. Saddam also honoured Hammurabi (c.1795–1750 BCE), the ruler of the Old Babylonian Empire renowned for his eye-for-an-eye legal code, and named the most powerful strike-force in the Iraqi army the Hammurabi Republican Guard Armoured Division; another unit was the Nebuchadnezzar Infantry Division.

The Iraqi leader was, said the BBC’s John Simpson, ‘an inveterate builder of monuments to himself’, undertaking great construction projects in conscious emulation of his illustrious predecessors. Giant images of the Iraqi leader showed him, like an ancient Sumerian monarch, carrying a building-worker’s basket on his shoulder, although the ancients would have been pictured bearing the first load of clay for brickmaking, while Saddam was represented bearing a bowl of cement. He began a massive reconstruction of the site of ancient Babylon, although his rebuilding, said one architectural historian, was ‘poor quality pastiche and frequently wrong in scale and detail… ’ Like the monarchs of antiquity, Saddam had the bricks inscribed with his name; thousands bore the rubric: ‘The Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein’. Never one to display unnecessary good taste, he had the text written in modern Arabic rather than Babylonian cuneiform.

The political reasons for Saddam Hussein’s concern to connect with the far distant, pre-Muslim, past of his country are plain. As in the case of the Shah of next-door Iran, who in 1971 famously declared his kinship with Cyrus the Great, founder of the first, Achaemenid, Persian Empire, any pitch for leadership of the Middle East demands that the pretender first neutralize the claims of holy Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, the cities of the Prophet, to be the sole ultimate source of Islamic legitimacy.

There is much irony in the fact that Anglo-American Middle East policy, from Operation Ajax, the deposing of democratically elected, socialist, secularist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953, to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the overthrow of secular nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, has served in fact, if not intention, to ensure the continuing hold of Islam over nearly all the countries of the region. Thus inevitably boosting the claim of Salafi Islam, which looks to the immediate successors of the Prophet for its political models, to provide the only authentic principles on which to build a legitimate political system.

Perhaps Saddam – whatever else he might have been, he was neither stupid nor unperceptive – also recognized another, even greater, truth of Middle-Eastern power-politics. Our way of life and understanding of the world may have changed utterly since ancient times, but we flatter ourselves unduly if we think that our behaviour is in any way different, or that human nature has altered much over the millennia.

History tells us that the region the Greeks called Mesopotamia, because it lay ‘between the rivers’ Tigris and Euphrates, was fought over by Romans and Parthians, by Byzantines and Sassanians, by Muslims and Magians, until rank outsiders, Mongols and Turks, conquerors from distant Central Asia and beyond, created a desert and called it peace. Nobody with even a passing acquaintance with the history of the land could have been surprised at its reversion to confusion after the heavy Ottoman yoke was lifted from Iraq’s neck in the 1920s, or the collapse into chaos after the deposition of the modern Ba’ath tyranny that held together the three former Ottoman provinces, mutually antagonistic and seemingly united only by the League of Nations to allow the great powers to extract oil.

But the attempts to grab control over the fertile Mesopotamian plain go back much further even than Roman times. Twice as far, in fact. And while the ancient powers who vied for sovereignty have long since crumbled to dust, their clashes still ring faintly in the air.

The bustling, thriving town now called Shush in south-west Iran, where the foothills of the Zagros Mountains run down on to the Mesopotamian Plain, is no more than 55 kilometres from the Iraqi border, another 70 from the Tigris. The streets are strung out either side of a slackly flowing branch of the Karkheh River, the air tinged grey-blue by the exhausts of the poorly maintained cars, which fight for space with crowds of pedestrians, bicycles, and men pushing heavily laden carts. Shush, ancient Susa, is the setting for the biblical Books of Nehemiah, Esther and Daniel: ‘I was in Shushan the palace,’ states the account of his visions in Daniel 8:2, ‘… and I saw in the vision that I was by the river Ulai.’ Stand today on the main street that runs parallel to the river and you cannot escape reminders of the place’s great antiquity.

In front of you, between the road and the river-bank stands the reputedly ancient tomb of Daniel himself – nothing Hebraic about it, but an unremarkably Islamic building topped out with an unusual spiral cone rendered in white plaster. (Daniel’s story was supposed to take place some time in the sixth century BCE, and this sepulchre dates from 1871.) The shrine is greatly honoured by local Shi’a Muslims; visitors enter the building in a steady stream, to fall on their knees, recite prayers and kiss the elaborate gilded metal grille that protects the sarcophagus.

Across the street rises the gigantic mound that is the site of the ancient city, bearing at its top the fragmented stone remains of the Persian Achaemenid kings’ winter capital. Walk around the ruins and you crunch over fragments of brick and pottery that may be as much as 5,000 years old, for Susa is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements anywhere in the world, probably founded not much later than 5000 BCE. From the middle of the second millennium BCE it was the capital of a state called Elam, master of this part of Iran long before the advent of the Persians, and founded by a people who may just possibly, from the linguistic evidence, have been related to the speakers of Dravidian languages like Kannada and Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu, languages now found almost exclusively in southern India.

Right beside you, were you visiting as I did in 2001, you would have found erected along the pavement at the foot of the mound a long single-storied temporary building. This housed a gruesome exhibition detailing the sufferings of the town in the course of the Iran–Iraq War, the long struggle that started with an assault on Iran launched by Saddam Hussein in 1980, and ended when the Ayatollah Khomeini reluctantly accepted a cease-fire in 1988, an act which he equated to ‘drinking poison’. The New York Times reported that the final exchange of prisoners of war took place only on 17 March 2003 – a mere six days before the next catastrophe: the assault by the ‘coalition of the willing’ on Saddam Hussein. Imagine the experience of the ex-prisoners, free after so many years of bitter incarceration, only immediately to have to face US ‘shock and awe’.

Shush, although never taken by Iraqi forces, was at one time a little over three kilometres from the front line in the brutal conflict, which seemed to repeat the worst and cruellest excesses of the 1914–18 European war: trench warfare, bayonet charges, suicidal assaults, and the indiscriminate use by one side of chemical weapons. To which new grotesque specialities were added Iran’s human-wave attacks, and her use of young volunteer martyrs as living minesweepers. There were well over a million military casualties; tens of thousands of civilians were wounded or killed.

Iranian culture has a gift for celebrating a sense of sacred martyrdom. The exhibition on Shush’s main street preserved one of the defensive trenches dug when it was feared that the city would fall to Saddam’s forces. In 2001 it was still littered with the detritus abandoned when it was struck by the direct hit of an artillery shell: a grotesquely dented steel helmet, a shredded, bloodstained boot, and a crushed and twisted assault rifle. A show of unspeakably shocking photographs of Shushite casualties reminded western visitors of cultural differences in what horrors are acceptable for public presentation. The displays aiming to recreate the realities of the First World War in London’s Imperial War Museum are dreadful enough; they cannot compare with the grisliness of this temporary exhibition, with its depictions of the gruesome bloodletting that had taken place here little more than ten years earlier. By the exit was an account of the conflict, explaining how Saddam had attempted to conquer the provinces of Khuzestan, Ilam and Kermanshah to incorporate as part of his blasphemous Ba’ath empire; how Iran had bravely resisted, and then turned the tables by striking with great military success into Iraq, until graciously accepting, for humanitarian reasons, a UN ceasefire.

Had you just come down, as I had, from the site of the ancient city atop the great mound, you could not help but recall the equally long account of its history painted on a large peeling sign near the entrance ticket office, detailing the attempts by the kings of Elamite Susa to dominate the city-states and empires of Mesopotamia. There was even a list of artefacts carried off as loot by Elamite raiders, including the famous stele inscribed with the law code of Hammurabi, eventually to be unearthed in Susa by modern European archaeologists. The struggle for power was brought to an end in the most dramatic way when Susa was destroyed by the Assyrian Emperor Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE.

*

Much later, having thought to explore Mesopotamia’s history in greater detail, I would read the conqueror’s own description of that action, written on a clay tablet dug up from the ruins of Nineveh by Sir Austen Henry Layard:

Susa, the great holy city, abode of their Gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces, I opened their treasuries where silver and gold, goods and wealth were amassed… I destroyed the ziggurat of Susa. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught; their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds. The tombs of their ancient and recent kings I devastated, I exposed to the sun, and I carried away their bones toward the land of Ashur. I devastated the provinces of Elam and on their lands I sowed salt.

And in the British Museum I would examine the alabaster bas-relief illustrating the conquest: Assyrian sappers demolishing the walls with crowbars and pickaxes as flames flicker from the main gate and over the tall city towers, a stream of captives and soldiers carrying their rich booty through the surrounding forest.

Here was evidence that the Iran–Iraq War was no isolated clash, initiated by a vicious modern dictator running amok, and contingent on local, personal and temporary factors. Instead it was the most recent act in a millennia-long violent dispute played out over centuries – and one which will no doubt continue long into the future – over the control of Mesopotamia. That is, should the Tigris–Euphrates Valley be mastered from the west or from the east.

The location of the land, squeezed between Arabia and Asia, between the desert and the mountains, between Semites and Iranians, inheriting from and owing allegiance to both, has shaped the region’s destiny from the very beginnings of its recorded history.

It turned out to be no easy task to delve deeper into the details of the distant past. I soon discovered that anyone wishing to improve their understanding of contemporary geopolitics by reading up on ancient times is immediately faced with the sheer profligacy of Mesopotamian scholarship. Since 1815, when Claudius Rich, the young British Resident in Baghdad, published his Memoir on the Ruins of Babylon, an instant best-seller which triggered a burgeoning interest across Europe in the remains of the vanished world, academic as well as popular books, monographs, pamphlets, articles, and scholarly papers written for peer-reviewed journals have streamed off the presses, and new titles are being added nearly every day. For in spite of everything that is already known about life on the ancient Tigris–Euphrates plain, in actual fact far more still remains unknown. Only a minor proportion of long-recognized archaeological sites has been explored; only limited sections of these have been excavated; only a fraction of the million or so documents, now distributed among museums and private collections all over the world, has been fully studied, deciphered and translated; many times that number must be waiting to be brought up into the light. In 2008, an inscribed clay cone that had languished, forgotten since the 1970s, in a shoebox on a shelf at the University of Minnesota, was found to record the reign of a previously unknown king of ancient Uruk.

This is a field of knowledge that is constantly changing. Not so long ago almost all cultural change was attributed to invasion and conquest. Now we are far less sure. Four decades ago it was still assumed that the first attempt at empire, by Sargon of Akkad, who flourished some time around 2300 BCE, represented the conquest by Semitic people of the indigenous Sumerians. Most evidence now proposes that the two communities had lived together peacefully in the region from time immemorial. Names may be given different readings. A well-known Sumerian king c.2000 BCE was first read as Dungi, more recently as Shulgi; the one Sumerian name popularly recognized today, Gilgamesh, first appeared in 1891 misread as Izdubar. Texts may come to be translated quite differently, even reversing their meaning. The verdict in a murder trial before the Assembly of Nippur in the twentieth century BCE, has been read by one scholar as condemning one of the defendants to death, while by another as absolving her of all guilt.

Dates are constantly being revised. The ancient Mesopotamians had their own dating systems – although their accounts cannot necessarily be believed, for example the impossibly long reigns ascribed to some of their kings – but it is still very hard to work out the equivalent in our own calendar. It helps that the accurate observation of the heavens was one of the first sciences established in ancient times, and that a strong belief in omens and portents ensured that unusual celestial phenomena were carefully recorded. Since our own Newtonian astronomy allows us to state exactly when, according to our calendar, such predictable events as solar and lunar eclipses occurred, it should be possible to put an accurate date on ancient reports.

And yet the texts are often so enigmatic, and our ability to understand their language – even after a century and a half of study – so incomplete, that it can be difficult to make out exactly what is being described. Thus the report apparently detailing a solar eclipse, on a tablet unearthed in Ras Shamra, Syria, in 1948: ‘The day of the Moon of Hiyaru was put to shame. The Sun went in with her gatekeeper, Rashap.’ (Rashap may be a name for the planet Mars.) One pair of scholars has linked this account to a solar eclipse known to have occurred on 3 May 1375 BCE; another, later, academic duo re-dated the occurrence to 5 March 1223. More recently, the text has been associated with the solar eclipses of the 21 January 1192 and 9 May 1012. Yet other, equally reputable, researchers have cast doubt on whether the tablet actually refers to an eclipse at all.

As a result of such disagreements, the reign of the famous law-giver Hammurabi, King of Babylon, has been variously dated to 1848–1806 BCE (long chronology), 1792–1750 BCE (middle chronology), 1728–1686 BCE (short chronology) and 1696–1654 BCE (ultra-short chronology).

This is not just a recent issue. Already in 1923, the editor of Punch magazine, Sir Owen Seaman, was protesting loudly, in verse, that his mental equanimity had been disturbed when the British Museum’s cuneiform expert Cyril Gadd shifted the date of the final fall of Assyrian Nineveh back – by as far as six years!

But still I counted on the Past,

Deeming it steady as a rock;

History, I said, stands fast;

And it has been a horrid shock,

A bitter, bitter blow to me

To hear this news of Nineveh.

They taught us how in six-o-six

(B.C.) that godless town fell flat;

And now the new-found records fix

A date anterior to that;

It fell, in fact, six-one-two,

So what they taught us wasn’t true.

The gentleman who worked it out,

He got it from a slab of clay,

And it has seared my soul with doubt

To see the old truths pass away;

Such disillusionment (by GADD)

Might surely drive a fellow mad.

If we smile with Sir Owen at those, like Cyril Gadd, to whom noting a difference of six years in more than 2,500 is important, who devote their entire working lives to amassing precise details, abstruse minutiae, of a world long since disappeared, researchers pursuing with the dedication of Soviet Stakhanovite quota-busters an activity that many would find irrelevant to any modern interest, we must also recognize that without data, there can be no knowledge and without knowledge there can be no understanding. And any understanding of how human beings have lived together in the past must bear in some way on both the present and the future.

Getting to grips with the sweep of history is proverbially a matter of balancing one’s perception of the trees against gaining a view of the whole wood. In the case of ancient Mesopotamia, although details may change, and change radically, although knowledge may yet have far to grow, a pattern is still recognisable. The trees may constantly be shifting, but you can still make out the wood. At first only faint and shadowed, none the less a shape, an outline representing a self-contained story of the ancient Middle East, does emerge out of what has been assembled by the indefatigable intellectual labour, inextinguishable enthusiasm and irrepressible industry of a century and a half of scholars and students of Assyriology – misnamed, really, because Assyria is but one of the protagonists of the narrative.

I find the form that takes shape surprising, remarkable, extraordinary and astonishing.

I find it surprising for its longevity. If history, as by most definitions, begins with writing, then the birth, rise and fall of ancient Mesopotamia occupies a full half of all history. What would evolve into the script called cuneiform, wedge-shaped signs impressed by reed stylus into clay tablet, first appeared in the last centuries before 3000 BCE. That was the start, the terminus a quo. Independent Mesopotamia vanished from history upon the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BCE. That was the end, the terminus ad quem. In round numbers, its duration was 2,500 years. From 500 BCE to the present is the same distance in time. From today’s perspective the Persian emperor’s victory is as far back in our past as was Cyrus from the origin of the civilization he both vanquished and inherited.

I find it remarkable for its continuity. Throughout all that time – the same span as takes us from the classical age of Greece, through the rise and fall of Rome, of Byzantium, of the Islamic Khalifate, of the Renaissance, of the European empires, to the present day – Mesopotamia preserved a single civilization, using one unique system of writing, cuneiform, from beginning to end; and with a single, continuously evolving literary, artistic, iconographic, mathematical, scientific, and religious tradition. To be sure, there were cultural differences between different places and different times. A Sumerian from 3000 BCE transplanted to the Assyria of the seventh century would of course have experienced profound bewilderment and culture shock. None the less, although one of the civilization’s two languages, Sumerian, ceased early to be spoken on the streets and the other, Akkadian, divided into different dialectical varieties before finally giving way to the speech of incoming Arameans, yet both continued to be written and understood to the very end. The last great Assyrian emperor, Ashurbanipal (685–627 BCE), took pride in being able to read ‘the cunning tablets of Sumer, and the dark Akkadian language which is difficult rightly to use; I took my pleasure in reading stones inscribed before the flood’.

I find it extraordinary for its creativity. In the course of its two and a half millennia, the cuneiform-based tradition invented or discovered almost everything we associate with the civilized life. Beginning in a world of Neolithic villages, largely self sufficient and self-sustaining subsistence farming communities, and ending with a world, not only of cities, and empires, and technology, and science, and law, and literary wisdom, but even more: with what has been called a world system, a linked web of nations, communicating and trading and fighting with each other, spread across a large part of the globe. Such was the achievement of the writers of cuneiform.

I find it astonishing for its non-ethnicity. The bearers of this groundbreaking tradition were not one nation or one people. From the start at least two communities, Semitic and non-Semitic, inhabited the land, one originally from the deserts of the west and the other just possibly from the mountains of the north. To these ethnic foundations were added the genetic contribution of many invaders and conquerors, Gutians, Kassites, Amorites and Arameans among them, who, in almost every case, assimilated to Sumerian–Akkadian language and culture, and in most instances contributed with gusto to the further advance of their adopted way of life. Those who did not were always remembered with scorn. Both of Saddam Hussein’s heroes, Hammurabi, an Amorite, and Nebuchadnezzar, a Chaldean, as well as many other commanding figures in Mesopotamian history, came from outsider families, from immigrant stock.

Thus the civilization that was born, flourished and died in the land between the rivers was not the achievement of any particular people, but the result of the coming together and persistence through time of a unique combination of ideas, styles, beliefs and behaviours. The Mesopotamian story is that of a single continuous cultural tradition, even though its human bearers and propagators were different at different times.

One further unexpected feature strikes me powerfully. Because that story is so long over, and because we can observe it from a sufficient distance, one cannot help but note how much ancient Mesopotamian civilization behaved both like a living organism and as if it were governed by natural laws. It is rather like watching one of those speeded-up timelapse film sequences you sometimes see in nature programmes on TV: a seed germinates, the shoot becomes a seedling, the plant grows, bushes up, flowers, sets seed, propagates itself, withers and dies – all in the space of half a minute or so.

But are not societies, empires and civilizations human constructs, the products of arbitrary, contingent and essentially unpredictable decisions by independent intelligent actors, and far from the result of some kind of mathematical determinism? Perhaps less so than we may think. It is not hard to see that if one found a way to plot Mesopotamian civilization’s energy, creativity and productivity as a graph, it would look like a long bell-shaped curve, rising at first imperceptibly from the baseline, growing exponentially to a high point, maintaining its vigour and vitality over considerable time – though with fluctuations – and then without warning declining swiftly, before finally flattening out to approach ever more slowly the zero base line. Thus: birth, growth, maturity, decline, senescence and final disappearance.

Starting about 10,000 BCE, very soon after the final melting of the continental glaciers, though quite slowly at first, people began to adopt a more settled way of life, grouping together in village communities, and, rather than merely exploiting the opportunities offered by nature, they started to control the plants and animals on which they subsisted. Crops were planted, herds were corralled, the flora and fauna essential to people’s survival were genetically modified by selective breeding, the better to serve their human purposes.

Into this relatively uniform, mostly undifferentiated, largely homogeneous world of subsistence farmers and peasant hamlets, the idea of civilization was born: in a single place, at a single time. From there and from then the concept spread at remarkable speed to conquer the world.

Yet not all communities took up the opportunity. What held the refusers back may have been the very comfort and effectiveness of their village life with its well-established routines and well-honed survival skills. As in many other fields of human endeavour, it seems to have taken the recalcitrance of the awkward reality of the Mesopotamian alluvial plain, the resistance of these unwelcoming surroundings, the difficulty of making a living in this unpropitious place, to provide the grit in the oyster, the nucleus around which the great leap forward of humanity crystallized.

Farming the new land of the Mesopotamian plain, potentially fertile but actually desolate and barren because of very low annual rainfall, required that people get together to organize systems of irrigation. The German–American writer and thinker Karl Wittfogel coined the term ‘hydraulic civilizations’ for societies in which the need to control water demanded collective action, so stimulating the development of an organizing bureaucracy, which led inevitably, in his view, to typical oriental despotic rule. This idea, though highly influential in the earlier twentieth century, is no longer much respected by scholars, who accuse Wittfogel of not allowing the facts to stand in the way of an attractive theory. Yet it cannot be denied that the riverine environment around the two great Middle Eastern streams did demand collaboration in irrigation works to ensure its settlers’ survival. And that somehow this led to the invention of city life.

The rest is history, as the cliché has it. From its mysterious, shadowy beginnings until its final, well-documented end, ancient Mesopotamia acted as a kind of experimental laboratory for civilization, testing, often to destruction, many kinds of religion, from early personifications of natural forces to full-blown temple priesthood and even the first stirrings of monotheism; a wide variety of economic and production systems, from (their own version of) state planning and centralized direction to (their own style of) neo-liberal privatization, as well as an assortment of government systems, from primitive democracy and consultative monarchy to ruthless tyranny and expansive imperialism. Almost every one of these can be paralleled with similar features found in our own more recent history. It sometimes seems as if the whole ancient story served as a dry-run, a dress rehearsal, for the succeeding civilization, our own, which would originate in the Greece of Periclean Athens after the demise of the last Mesopotamian empire in the sixth century BCE, and which has brought us to where we stand today.

Though the experimenters of antiquity are long dead, their names largely forgotten, their homes buried, their possessions scattered, their fields barren, their temple towers ruined, their cities interred under mounds of dust, their empires remembered, if at all, by name only, their story still promises to teach us much about how we arrived at the way we live now. History may not repeat itself but, as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme.

2

Kingship Descends from Heaven: The Urban Revolution

Before 4000 BCE

Eridu

Leave the modern traffic, the bicycles, the cars and delivery lorries fuming along St Giles’ and Beaumont Street in Oxford, and pass through the Ashmolean Museum’s rather overblown neoclassical façade. In a glass case in one of the galleries you will find a baked clay object, square in cross-section, dull in colour, partly broken, and covered in what at first sight look like birds’ footprints. You may have to look hard to find it, because it is only about 20 cm high and 9 cm wide.

It doesn’t look like an object of any great importance, yet it is. Look at it closely, and it will draw you back through time to the origins of civilization. It is called the Weld-Blundell Prism, after the benefactor who bought it during a visit to Mesopotamia in the spring of 1921. Victorian architects like C. R. Cockerell, who in 1841 based the Ashmolean’s design on the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, thought that they were celebrating the ultimate roots of our culture. But the prism directs us much further back, long before the Greeks, long before King Solomon, long before Moses, long before Abraham the Patriarch, even before Noah and his flood, to the time when cities were first imagined.

The bird-scratchings are writing: two columns of closely written text on each of its four faces, encoding an early version of the Sumerian King List, a long and exhaustive enumeration of the dynasties of different Mesopotamian cities, and the regnal years of their rulers. Some are wildly improbable, like Alulim who reigned for 28,800 years and Alalgar for 36,000, but the list tracks the kingship from Eridu to Bad-tibira, to Larsa, to Sippar, to Shuruppak, ‘and then the flood swept over.’ The written marks were impressed on to the prism by an unnamed scribe in the city of Larsa in Babylonia in about 1800 BCE.

Cuneiform texts may look colourless and unexciting, but there is actually something wonderfully intimate about them. These marks, I cannot help thinking, were made by a person, probably with a family, a wife (scholars think that scribes were mostly male) and children, whose experience of life – stroppy teenagers, arguments with the boss – cannot have been so very different from our own, even in such a different society at such a different time. If we were familiar enough with cuneiform, as much at home with it as the ancient scribes were, we should surely be able to recognize individual styles of handwriting. Sadly, that degree of familiarity is far beyond most of us. Cuneiform is extremely hard to read. But at least scholars have been able to work out what this tablet says. It begins: ‘After kingship was lowered down from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu.’

The Larsa scribe did not invent this. The oldest known version of the King List was almost certainly compiled rather earlier, from oral traditions, by a senior official in the court of the self-styled ‘Lord of the Four Quarters of the Earth’, King Utu-hegal of Uruk, in Sumer, southernmost Mesopotamia, the first true city in the world, some time not very much before 2100 BCE. Its point was, presumably, political. King Utu-hegal of Uruk had led the campaign to expel the Gutians, barbarian occupiers from the Iranian mountains to the east with no understanding of, or appreciation for, civilization, who had plunged southern Mesopotamia into a century-long dark age. Utu-hegal was now anxious to establish that there had only ever been one legitimate ruling city in all Sumer, and that he and Uruk were the rightful inheritors of kingship over the entire region. It was a fiction, of course, but one that contained a grain of truth. For all ancient Mesopotamians knew that civilization had begun at Eridu in the deep south, on the shores of the Southern Sea (to us the Persian or Arabian Gulf) at a place today called Abu Shahrein, and now some 190 kilometres from the water.

Two thousand years after Utu-hegal’s time his civilization died. Eridu was forgotten, its location lost, until, in 1854, John Taylor, the Hon. East India Company’s agent and British vice-consul in Basra, began fossicking among what he called the Chaldean Marshes on behalf of the British Museum. There he found a collection of mounds and ‘a ruined fort, surrounded by high walls with a keep or tower at one end,’ topping a hillock near the centre of a dried-out lake. The place was half-hidden in a valley about 25 kilometres wide, which opened, at its northern end, on to the Euphrates River. Much of it, he wrote, was ‘covered with a nitrous incrustation, but with here and there a few patches of alluvium, scantily clothed with the shrubs and plants peculiar to the desert.’ Taylor also found nearby faint traces of an ancient canal, 5.5 metres wide, to the northwest. He knew that he had come across important remains because, as a later excavator described it, ‘a peculiar characteristic of Shahrein is the ‘fan’ of detritus that extends around the mounds, and has carried with it, out on to the desert, thousands of objects belonging to the lower strata of the mounds themselves …The loose sandy mounds are torn every winter by rain-floods … carrying with them remains of all ages.’

A career diplomat, untrained in archaeological technique, Taylor dug a few desultory pits, but was disappointed not to find the sort of spectacular artefacts he had hoped to send home to the Museum. And one find – a ‘handsome carved lion in black granite’ – was left behind for want of transport. But he did find several bricks inscribed with cuneiform writing. It had become possible to read some of these signs only a few years previously, but enough was already understood to know that Taylor had rediscovered the famous and ancient sacred city of Eridu, the place where Utu-hegal’s King-List Compiler, like all ancient Mesopotamians, knew that civilization had begun.

Abu Shahrein (it means Father of Twin Moons, perhaps from ancient bricks found there stamped with crescents, symbols of a moon god) looks a very unlikely location for humanity to have taken such a momentous step. Dry, dusty and deserted, the tan-coloured mounds look as rumpled as a slept-in bed. Around them, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. There is nothing within sight that speaks of life, of humanity, of progress, of achievement. Even the river that once made Eridu habitable is now distant and out of sight.

To understand the history of this place you have to imagine a very different scene. You have to turn back the clock nearly 7,000 years, until you see the salt swell of the Gulf just to the south, bringing sea-going vessels from (today’s) Bahrain, Qatar and Oman, the ocean waters infiltrating the land to form extensive sea-marshes teeming with enough fish, flesh and fowl to support a thriving human population. Back until the desert sands of modern Iraq’s al-Muthanna province revert to a grassy and shrubby steppe supporting tribes of sheep- and goat-herders who travel a migratory path to and from the sparkling lakes of what is today the great an-Nafud sand sea of Saudi Arabia. Back until the well-beaten track that carried trade goods to southern Mesopotamia from the highlands of Iran in the east even at this early date, is once again patiently trodden by men bearing huge loads on their backs, clustered together in groups for protection against wild animals and human marauders. (The domestication of beasts of burden, even the donkey, let alone the camel and the horse, is still in the future.) Back until the hillock in the centre of the 6-metre depression below the surrounding river silt, alluvium, looking like the focal point of a meteorite-impact crater, rises again above the sweet waters of a great swampy lake, full of fish and freshwater mussels, attracting humans and animals from all around. This the Sumerians called the Apsu, and thought it an upwelling of the freshwater ocean on which the very earth itself floats. Back until the great river Euphrates, which constantly shifts its sinuous course across the plain, depositing its heavy load of silt over a terrain that slopes less than 6 cm in every kilometre, runs close by once again, bringing down with it, perhaps by boat, pioneers from the north, already experienced in building dykes and canals to control the waters.

Their skills were much needed. The Euphrates is no mild and friendly river like the Nile, with a late summer inundation, regular as clockwork, that prepares the ground for planting winter wheat. The Sumerians called the Euphrates the Buranun (a folk-etymology, attractive but unsupported, suggests the name derives from Sumerian words meaning ‘Great Rushing Flood’). It breaks its banks erratically and unpredictably in the spring, when the seed, already in the ground, must first be protected from drowning beneath the floodwaters, and then later from drying out under a blazing sun that evaporates more than half the river’s flow before it reaches the sea.

So the people who first set up home here, who built their reed huts by the water’s edge, who created fields to grow their wheat and barley, and gardens to plant their vegetables and date palms, taking their animals out to graze on the steppe, were not choosing the path of least resistance. If they had wanted an easy life, they would have established their settlements where sufficient annual rainfall makes farming simple, behind the invisible line which demarcates the area where more than 200 mm of rain falls each year – called by geographers the 200 mm isohyet. This line curves in a great semicircle from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in the east, past the Taurus mountains in the north, and on to the Mediterranean coast in the west, a shape that prompted the American archaeologist James Henry Breasted to name it the Fertile Crescent. In southern Mesopotamia, well inside the curve, hardly any rain falls for most of the year. Here the newcomers had only the rivers to water their crops, and to do even that they had first to reshape the very land itself, with levees, dykes, ditches, reservoirs and canals.

Elsewhere in the world, for several thousand years men and women had happily led lives of subsistence agriculture, finely attuned to their needs and desires, a lifestyle that would hardly change in its essentials until nearly our own times. Indeed in many places it continues right up to the present day. That was not enough for the pioneers of the Mesopotamian plain. They had not run out of land suitable for traditional farming. Human populations were tiny and widely dispersed, leaving ample room for new agricultural settlements. But those who came here were apparently not interested in doing as their ancestors had done, adapting their manner of living to fit into the natural world as they found it. Instead they were determined to adapt their environment to suit their way of life.

This was a revolutionary moment in human history. The incomers were consciously aiming at nothing less than changing the world. They were the very first to adopt the principle that has driven progress and advancement throughout history, and still motivates most of us in modern times: the conviction that it is humanity’s right, its mission and its destiny to transform and improve on nature and become her master.

From before 4,000 BCE, over the next ten to fifteen centuries, the people of Eridu and their neighbours laid the foundations for almost everything that we know as civilization. It has been called the Urban Revolution, though the invention of cities was actually the least of it. With the city came the centralized state, the hierarchy of social classes, the division of labour, organized religion, monumental building, civil engineering, writing, literature, sculpture, art, music, education, mathematics and law, not to mention a vast array of new inventions and discoveries, from items as basic as wheeled vehicles and sailing boats to the potter’s kiln, metallurgy and the creation of synthetic materials. And on top of all that was the huge collection of notions and ideas so fundamental to our way of looking at the world, like the concept of numbers, or weight, quite independent of actual items counted or weighed – the number ten, or one kilo – that we have long forgotten that they had to be discovered or invented. Southern Mesopotamia was the place where all that was first achieved.

The scribe who wrote the text on the Ashmolean’s prism, like the palace official in King Utu-hegal’s court, knew how this great leap forward had come about: kingship had been lowered to earth from heaven. That is not far from the proposals of wildly wayward modern commentators, like Erich von Däniken and Zechariah Sitchin, who put it all down to aliens from outer space. Others concluded, with the prejudices of their own times, that the upheaval was caused by the coming together of different races, each with its own character and abilities. The Marxist tradition has unsurprisingly emphasized social and economic factors. I. M. Diakonoff, one of the greatest Soviet Assyriologists, subtitled one of his books, ‘the birth of the most ancient class societies and the first centres of slave-owning civilization’. Currently the environmental idea is fashionable: that climate change, epochs of hotter and drier weather alternating with wetter and cooler periods, prompted humans to adapt their way of living. Still others see the emergence of civilization as an inevitable consequence of evolutionary changes in human mentality since the end of the last ice age.

However, on one thing both ancients and moderns agree. They all treat people as passive objects, recipients of outside influences, targets of the workings of external forces, compliant tools of outside agencies. But we humans aren’t really like that; we don’t react so unthinkingly.

The actual story would have to allow for the everlasting conflict between progressives and conservatives, between the forward and backward looking, between those who propose ‘let’s do something new’ and those who think ‘the old ways are best’, those who say ‘let’s improve this’ and those who think ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. No great shift in culture ever took place without such a contest.

This had already happened at least once before.

The Neolithic Revolution that took our ancestors from hunting and gathering in small kinship-based bands to a settled, communal village life of subsistence agriculture was the greatest ever mass-destroyer of skills, cultures and languages in human history. Tens of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and elaborate tradition were swept aside. Recent studies of this pivotal period of human history concur: no band of hunter-gatherers can have simply given up all they knew and settled down to sedentary farming without engaging in a giant battle of ideas.

Hunting and gathering had provided a relatively easy living. The new ways were, on the face of it, much harder and less rewarding than those that had served humanity so well for so long.

To the author of Genesis, the Neolithic Revolution signified the fall of man: ‘Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat of the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ The same message was recently updated by science-writer Colin Tudge: ‘Farming in Neolithic times was obviously harsh: the first farming peoples were less robust than the hunter-gatherers who had preceded them, and suffered nutritional, traumatic and infectious disorders that their forebears had been spared.’ In this light it seems that the momentous change to agriculture as the basis of life can only have been driven by the spread of a powerful new ideology, necessarily in those days expressed in the form of a new religion, propagated with, as the distinguished prehistorian Jacques Cauvin put it in his book The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, ‘messianic self-confidence’.

The next great shift of values and ideals was the one that ultimately led from village farming to our own city civilization. The urban revolution was not quite as destructive of the old ways as the change from hunting and gathering to farming had been. But those who chose this path still had to give up a great deal, including their autonomy, their freedom and their very identity as self-reliant and independent actors. It must have been a very powerful belief that persuaded them to follow a dream whose full working-out was both unforeseeable and unforeseeably far ahead, a belief that could persuade men and women that the sacrifice was worth making: that city living offered the possibility of a better future, indeed that there was such a thing as the Future, which could be made different from what had gone before. This was, above all, an ideological choice.

The beginnings of that ideology are buried under the sands at Eridu. Here, if anywhere, we might be able to observe the processes that brought the ancient city into being.

The God of Progress

With the end of World War II, preparations were made for British control of Iraq to come to an end. This was to be a momentous event for the region. After being ruled by Achaemeneans, Greeks, Romans, the Muslim Khalifs, the Mongols, the Iranian Safavids, the Ottomans and the British, Mesopotamia was to become truly free and independent for the first time in some two and a half millennia – since the conquest of Babylon by the Persian Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE.

More than 4,000 years ago, after the expulsion of the Gutians, King Utu-hegal of Uruk had reasserted Sumerian independence and the legitimacy of his own rule by ordering the Sumerian King List to be compiled, starting with the heaven-decreed kingship of Eridu. In the twentieth century the Directorate General of Antiquities in Iraq chose to mark the country’s forthcoming independence by ordering a scientific excavation of Abu Shahrein, to demonstrate ‘the strong thread of continuity that runs throughout the past of Iraq.’

As the archaeologists dug into John Taylor’s gigantic ‘ruined fort’, which they were now able to date to the twenty-first century BCE, they uncovered a much earlier and smaller building under one corner, dating from nearly 2,000 years before that. Beneath this they found yet another sixteen levels of habitation, going right back to the beginning of the fifth millennium BCE, when they finally reached ‘a dune of clean sand’ on which had first been erected ‘a primitive chapel’, a little over ten feet square, constructed of sun-dried brick, with a votive pedestal facing the entrance and a recessed niche, perhaps for a sculptured image.

The layering fascinated the archaeologists who could now follow the history of the site in detail through the several thousand years of its history. But it also tells us something important about the people who built here. Sun-dried brick demands constant maintenance if it is not to recycle itself back into the ground – it was lack of repair, not destruction, that crumbled most of the ancient cities of Sumer into mounds of dust. Yet the architects of ancient Eridu were never satisfied with restoring or refurbishing. Every building they erected on top of the reverently preserved remains of the previous one was bigger and more elaborate. Starting with the simple ‘chapel’, 3.5 by 4.5 metres, they ended, a millennium later, with a temple of monumental proportions: its innermost chamber, the cella, was 15 metres long. These people were, unlike the others of their time, never slaves to tradition, never satisfied with what had gone before, but aiming for constant improvement. In the course of some ten centuries, they tore down and rebuilt these constructions eleven times, an average of once every ninety years or so, displaying an impatience with the old and a welcome of the new on an almost modern American scale.

The Eridu temple was the symbol of a community who believed in – perhaps one might even say invented – the ideology of progress: the belief that it was both possible and desirable continually to improve on what had gone before, that the future could and should be better – and bigger – than the past. The divine power celebrated and honoured here was the expression, embodiment and personification of that idea: no less than the God or Goddess of Civilization.

How did the deity of progress who helped lay the foundations of the modern world come to be first envisaged here, in this now desolate place? It happened before the invention of writing – necessarily so, for writing was itself one of the later products of the progressive ideology. All we have is the mute evidence dug up by archaeologists.

They found all too little. There was pottery, naturally, both broken and whole: the elegant, thin-walled, beautifully decorated ware found over much of Mesopotamia in this era. This was not everyday crockery, but fragile and expensive, presumably crafted for an elite. A few inconsequential beads, trinkets, amulets and terracotta figurines were also found. But mostly they found fish-bones and ashes, ashes and fish-bones, in vast quantities: under the floors, behind the walls, on the altars, even collected in rooms of their own. Examination of the bones showed that the fish had been eaten. It would seem that sacred fish suppers played an important role in whatever religious rites were performed here.

The first worshippers would have come from many miles around to the edge of the Apsu, the lagoon of Eridu. There must have been something that attracted travellers, something recognized as a kind of spiritual force, a supernatural influence, what the Greeks called numen