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  Statues of the divine cult, in both Egypt and Mesopotamia, embodied a common set of cultural oppositions. They were sophisticated craft products, the pinnacle of skilled labour conducted in temple and palace workshops. But they could not be represented as merely the outcome of human technology. As countless inscriptions attest, they were composed of ‘pure’ matter, treated as qualitatively distinct from that of which ordinary commodities were made. Yet the materials required for their manufacture were also precisely those which sustained, and were the ardent focus of, commercial transactions: metals, used as currency in international commerce; precious stones and timber traded over great distances via multiple (human) intermediaries.

  As Godelier observes, in the citation that opens this chapter, such apparent contradictions reflect universal tendencies governing the relationship between commodities and sacred objects: things made to circulate, and things made to be withheld from circulation. The contrast between these two categories of object is not defined by the use of distinct materials in trade and ritual. Rather it is maintained through contrasting sets of moral and behavioural norms that cause the same materials—usually drawn from outside society itself—to move within different spheres of exchange. It is in the process of controlling the flow of these particular materials (metals being a prime example) that the parallel worlds of sacred and profane transactions are constituted and kept apart:

  Once again, let us note that, if a currency is to circulate as a medium of payment or as wealth, it must be authorized, as it were, by its ties with some reality which does not circulate, which is kept out of the exchange sphere and which appears as the true source of their exchange-value.

  Both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia the ritual feeding of the gods via their statue bodies also demanded the admixture—to roasted animal parts and other food offerings—of fragrant incense, derived from tree resins brought from distant lands, such as southern Arabia and the high forests of Syria and Lebanon. The wood and sap of odoriferous trees—myrrh, frankincense, pine, cedar, juniper, terebinth—were essential in attracting the gods to take up residence of their local shrines. But these substances too could be procured only through long-range commerce with the world beyond the alluvial plains of the Nile and Tigris–Euphrates. For all of these reasons, cult statues and the rituals surrounding them provide a privileged point of entry to the main theme of this chapter: the fragile relationship between commodities and the sacred.

  Flesh of the Gods

  With Oppenheim’s words in mind, it is instructive to consider which specific attributes of ancient Near Eastern cult statues attracted the scorn of the Old Testament prophets:

  For the customs of the people are false. He cuts a tree from the forest, the work of the hands of a craftsman, with a chisel. He decorates it with silver and gold; with nails and hammers they set them firmly in place so they don’t topple over. Their idols are beaten gold, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Be not afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good … . (After all) it is only wood. Hammered silver is imported from Tarshish, and gold from Ophir. They are the work of the craftsman and of the hands of the goldsmith; their clothing is violet and purple; they are all the work of skilled men … there is no breath in them. (Jeremiah 10: 3–15)

  The emphasis of this parody is revealing. Throughout, there is an implied contrast with the unity of mind and deed that characterizes the creative acts of Yahweh: pure in nature, swift and unwavering of execution. Instead, the disunity of the group whose labours contribute to the fashioning of a divine cult image is stressed. The laboriousness and uncertainty of the process is highlighted, as is the constant reliance on artifice and man-made tools to produce special effects. The mundane provenance of the precious materials used is also emphasized. Their sources can be precisely named: Tarshish (in Iberia) and Ophir (in Arabia). These regions lay within the compass of worldly commerce during the Iron Age. They were part of profane, not sacred topography.

  Now let us contrast this passage with a much earlier one, taken from the Sumerian poem known as Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, a distant precursor to the Greek myth telling of Persephone’s abduction by Hades. Drawn unwisely to enter the gates of the Underworld, where the dead dwell, Inanna—represented as a cult statue throughout the composition—is herself condemned to death. Her descent from the realm of immortals into that of mortals is symbolized by a transformation in the nature of her flesh, from an array of precious stones and metals (the flesh of the gods) into a rotting haunch of meat (the flesh of mortals), which the rulers of the Underworld hang on a peg in the wall. Her handmaiden Ninshubur pleads for assistance to Enlil, the divine father of Inanna, in whose own words she addresses him:

  Father Enlil, let not your daughter be put to death in the Netherworld,

  Let not your good metal be covered with the dust of the Netherworld,

  Let not your good lapis lazuli be broken up into the stone of the stoneworker.

  Let not your boxwood be cut up into the wood of the woodworker.

  (After Kramer 1961)

  Here the death of Inanna’s divine body is poetically described as a process of commoditization. Ninshubur conveys the corruption of her divine flesh, its loss of ‘goodness’ (i.e. purity), through exposure to the hands of ordinary craftsmen. Once integral to her identity, the components of Inanna’s cult statue now face the dismal prospect of being reduced to the status of anonymous goods. The metaphor is chosen to reflect the fact that commodities belong to the world of humans who, unlike gods, must suffer death and destruction. They carry with them the polluting influence of mortality, signified by the decaying meat into which Inanna is transformed in the subterranean world of the dead. Upon her eventual release from the Underworld, the meat is revivified by the application of sacred, cleansing substances: ‘the grass of life’ and ‘the water of life’.

  Both Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources concur in their description of cult statues as being born rather than made. Just like newborns they were washed and surrounded with cleansing liquids and fragrances, before taking up residence in their shrines. Substances comprising their skin, flesh, bones, and hair arise directly into their bodies from sources beyond the reach of mortals. These materials are described as virgin matter, pure because they are unworked by human hands, sacred because they transcend those properties of number that make profane goods subject to ordinary principles of quantification. The metals, stones, and timber in question are exalted as the creations of mountains whose peaks pierce the heavens, and of trees whose roots penetrate the crust of the earth. They are counted only in mystical units of number, charged with esoteric meanings, or in volumes that exceed the range of the possible. In similar measure they surpass the temporal scope of human affairs. Just as their space is the magnified space of divine action, so their time is the deep time of cosmic creation evoked through ritual incantations and performances. The statue, as Victor Hurowitz (2006: 13) observes, is ‘a concentrate of a god which fills the universe, packaged in a form which can be conveniently introduced and worshipped in a temple’. To treat it as a subject of human technology, or reduce its materials to the status of commodities, is quite simply to end its ‘life’.

  Such ‘putting to death’ under hammer, chisel, and fire cannot have been uncommon. Written and pictorial sources from Egypt and Mesopotamia testify to the continuous manufacture of divine cult statues over a period of millennia. Yet almost none are preserved from either region. This can be attributed in part to their materials of construction. Aside from precious stones, these were typically perishable (fine woods and textile garments) or recyclable (metals). A rare survivor, recovered from the foundations of the temple of Horus at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, confirms the impression given by written sources. Its wooden core—evoking the temple’s principal deity as a crowned falcon—has rotted away. But its shape is preserved in negative by the sheets of gold and pure (unalloyed) copper that once enclosed it; and i
ts eyes, formed by a rod of obsidian passing through hollows in the head, retain their jet black stare. This lonely exception serves only to prove the rule that the ‘lives’ of cult statues generally ended in dismemberment and recycling, rather than wholesale consecration to the ground.

  Matters of Origin

  To further grasp the relationship between cult statues and the world of commodities, we first need to understand more about the nature of the distance between mortals and the gods, as ordained at the beginning of time, and the special role of exotic substances in manifesting and overcoming that distance. Mesopotamian narratives of how the world came into being are preserved mainly in cuneiform compositions dating to the early second millennium BC, or later. But they share certain consistent premises regarding the nature of human and divine bodies, premises that undoubtedly rest upon older foundations. A number of these myths, including Atrahasis—the familiar story of a wise man who survives a great flood by building an ark—commence in similar fashion, with the primeval gods who personify elemental forces: sky, air, fresh water, salt water, and fluvial mud. It is they, we are told, who dug out the beds of the Tigris and Euphrates at the dawn of time, and who maintained canals (the ‘lifelines of the land’) to irrigate the great marshes and provide themselves with food. To lighten this terrible burden, the great gods procreate and make lesser gods to labour in their place. But the new generation of gods rebels, and their noisy objections form the pretext for the creation of humans, whose destiny is to ‘bear the load of the gods’ and supply them with offerings of food and drink.

  According to Mesopotamian mythology, the first humans were shaped from a specific mixture of substances. The gods slew one of their own number and, by mixing his flesh and blood with clay, created the raw material out of which mortal bodies were fashioned. It is the mixing of these substances that initiates both the provisioning of the gods by humans and the construction of their first earthly dwellings, which are made from the same distinctive blend of materials. In Atrahasis this episode occurs near the beginning of the story. In the house of the ‘womb deities’ the mixture of clay and blood is softened by treading. Then it is given the forms of seven males and seven females. Between them is placed a mud-brick rendered from the same mix of materials, which brings divine blessings and protection upon the house of their gestation and birth. Armed with picks and spades, the newly created humans set to work, producing a surplus of food to sustain both themselves and the gods, and multiplying at such a rate that the latter—disturbed by their clamour—send down natural disasters from heaven to curb their numbers.

  The provision of food to the gods is thereby placed at the centre of human existence, as its literal raison d’être. In the later narrative known as the Epic of Creation, the place of the king in this process is addressed through the heroic figure of Marduk, a god who assumes the titles and responsibilities of rulership. Having quelled an uprising against the higher gods, Marduk uses the blood of his slain foe Qingu (no admixture of clay is mentioned this time) to make humans, so that his fellow gods will have leisure. In gratitude the gods set to work for a year, forming mud-bricks to build Marduk’s royal city of Babylon as a shrine in which they may dwell.

  Egyptian notions of life and its genesis, expressed in ritual texts of the Old Kingdom, make no explicit reference to the creation of human beings (although the lived experience of the human body is their ontological point of departure). Nor, in Egyptian cosmology, does newly formed life require a house (mud-brick or otherwise) to dwell in. Te inception of the cosmos is imagined rather as a flow of substances between divine bodies. Creation begins with a formless mass, into which Atum—the initiator of the cosmos—injects new materials from his own body by masturbating, sneezing, or spitting. All of these materials are fluids (semen, mucus, saliva), by-products of bodily processes that are only partially controllable (the need to achieve sexual climax, or to expel pollutants). Their escape from the body takes the form of an undirected projection or ejaculation. The generation of the Egyptian cosmos thus involves two interrelated processes: the semi-voluntary injection of diverse substances into the homogeneity of primordial matter, and a corresponding loss of potency from the Creator’s body. This potency flows into a series of sub-bodies, which take form from his various emissions. And these sub-bodies are hierarchically ranked, from the lesser gods of the Ennead down through their offspring (including Isis and Osiris) to Horus, the deity whose earthly body is inhabited by living kings.

  The creative acts of the Egyptian gods differ from those of humans in a variety of ways. Ritual texts repeatedly emphasize that the gods fashion their own bodies and generate their own life force. In his godlike aspect, the king similarly ‘begets himself on his own mother’. Unlike the procreative acts of Mesopotamian gods, which involved an exchange of semen, this self-fashioning is not the result of a transfer of substances between separate, bounded individuals. Rather it is a fluid merging of boundless forces, which are in constant flux, like the shifting motion of rivers or stars which share the same properties of movement, and in which mortals can dimly perceive the gods’ presence. Egypt’s gods were thereby distinguished from mortals, who must exchange in order to procreate, and also from the dead, whose survival beyond the grave was contingent upon a constant flow of sacrificial gifts.

  Contact between humanity and the gods was nevertheless possible, because one of them had miraculously descended to earth in the form of the king. His bodily presence made manifest the primordial rupture in the fabric of the universe, the original escape of divine substances from the higher to the lower orders of existence. In Egyptian mythology this vertical flow of sacred power is not represented as a chronological succession. It does not constitute the replacement of one kind of world (the sacred one) by another (the profane one). Rather the primal unity of creation survives alongside the newly made cosmos, in a fragmented or potential form: a state of continuous coming-into-being. It is the designated role of the king to sustain this fragile balance of forces, by controlling the movement of pure and polluting substances from one order of existence to another. It is he who must offer sacrifices to tempt the gods, attracting them to feed via their statue bodies, so that some residue of sacred power can be trapped on earth and redistributed among his subjects, both the living and the exalted dead.

  The Mechanics of Sacrifice

  While the perpetual hunger of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods arose from quite different causes, we can nevertheless point to significant similarities in their manner of feeding. As a vital prelude to the commencement of food offerings, cult statues had to undergo a rite of initiation that was known by the same name in both countries: the ‘Opening of the Mouth’. Its execution was far from identical, and each developed a distinct body of literary and ritual exegesis around it. Yet underlying commonalities remain in the physical procedures used to bring the gods closer to humanity: the choice of exotic materials for the body of the statue, including specific details of physiognomy (Chapter 2); the selection of substances to be heated or poured in its vicinity; and the magical techniques used to animate its flesh and purify its surroundings. Among those techniques we find the burning of incense, the use of spouted vessels to shoot a stream of libations over the statue, and the sacrificial slaughter of animals to the accompaniment of music, dance, and acrobatics.

  The gods of both countries fed upon the smoke rising from braziers, on which were roasted a mixture of meat, cereal, and vegetable dishes, infused with the scent of incense. Their ingestion of these foods, which may have been initiated by passing them before the eyes of the cult statue, was most likely indicated by organic transformations in the food itself, which took place during the process of cooking: the dissipation of liquids and the escape of fumes from the roast. Both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods rejected the meaty parts of animal offerings, which were boiled, stewed, or dried in a secondary process that readied them for human commerceand consumption (hence it is not uncommon for archaeologists to recover cattle
horns, hooves, and de-fleshed bones in the vicinity of places where sacred offerings were made). Bread and beer, warmed by the sacrificial meat and impregnated with its juices and smells, were also recycled among the living community, and temples in both regions were equipped with extensive facilities for the processing, brewing, and baking of cereal products. The bureaucratic classification and ranking of comestibles—which can be traced back to the beginnings of urban life (Chapter 5)—is best understood as an extension of these exclusionary rituals, in which the highest tier of produce was always set aside for the nourishment of the gods, and for the select community of ritual actors who consumed the consecrated residues of sacred offerings.

  Offering rituals implied a change of state not only for the statue, but also for the group engaged in feeding it. Here our pictorial and written sources are undoubtedly misleading. They are stylized representations, in which the sacrificial process is reduced to static gestures and formulaic recitations. In reality, the secluded environment around the cult statue must have been saturated with exotic aromas, sounds, and fluids. Surviving depictions convey little of this visceral messiness, or of the contagious excitement of ritual killing that accompanied the sacrifice of animals. Shared ingestion of a cumulative flow of consecrated substances—blood, water, beer, unguents, but also solids such as meat and bread, all of them enveloped by the spread of scented fumes—must nevertheless have been essential in binding together a ritual community around the statue, which would thereafter share in the responsibility of its care. In other contexts, the same procedures were followed for the ritual inauguration of statues devoted to kings and ancestors, with similarly cohesive effects for the group involved.