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  The Two Faces of Bronze Age ‘Trade’

  It was through contact with their gods that the societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia expressed their sense of ancestry and belonging, their particular modes of attachment to land, locality, and place. Yet the earthly bodies of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian gods were made of similar materials—exotic to both regions—and were nourished in common ways. Commerce and cosmology, the interregional conduct of ‘trade’ and the local performance of ‘ritual’, cannot then be logically separated. Matters of origin and matters of exchange were interwoven, both literally and metaphorically. One brought the other into existence, such that ritual celebration of the local moral order contained within it a veiled reference to forces and processes that transcended it in time and space, that subverted it and exposed it to failure at its very point of performance. Only in myth, in the imagination of a world populated solely by gods, could this paradox be overcome. It is the gods alone who, we are told, created life out of raw clay, blood, semen, and saliva—base materials of limitless quantity—without first adding to them those rare and purifying substances that bridged the distance between heaven and earth. Mortals, and sacred kings who dwelled temporarily upon the earth, faced a more fraught and circuitous journey to the divine.

  8

  THE LABOURS OF KINGSHIP

  When the gods instead of man

  Did the work, bore the loads,

  The gods’ load was too great,

  The work too hard, the trouble too much.

  Opening lines of Atrahasis, the Mesopotamian Flood Myth (second millennium BC, translated by S. Dalley)

  Among the less well-known studies of Sumerian kingship is that written by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last Emperor of Germany between 1888 and 1918. Deposed from the baroque palaces of Prussia upon the declaration of the Weimar Republic, the Kaiser spent his final years in the small manor house of Doorn, in the Dutch province of Utrecht. There he divided his time between writing and felling great trees, kingly labours which he could, and did, trace back to the legendary Gilgamesh of Uruk. In Das Königtum im alten Mesopotamien (1938) he wrote with pathos of the unbroken line reaching back across the millennia from the German emperors to the first kings of Sumer, a line of sacral kingship demonstrated—or so he imagined—by the cosmic symbols on the Kaiser’s robe of office. Stripped of political and economic power, the last German emperor had come to an important realization. The true power of kingship, and his only hope of a return to glory, lay buried deep in the prehistory of kingship itself and, more particularly, in recapturing the monarch’s original role as mediator between a frail and fragmented humanity and the mysterious totality of the supernatural. But ascendant forces of liberalism overshadowed the Kaiser’s hopes for a neo-Sumerian revival in central Europe, and the fascist form of imperialism that followed the Republic extended the old dynastic obsession with bloodlines and heredity to the body politic at large. The last Kaiser died a modest death at Doorn, with soldiers of the Third Reich standing guard at his gates.

  In the concluding chapters of this book, I return to the curious relationship between the end of the Old Regime in Europe and the Western rediscovery of the ancient Near East. Here, however, I remain focused upon the birth of what Benedict Anderson, in his Imagined Communities (1983), calls ‘the dynastic realm’:

  These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable ‘political’ system. For in fundamental ways ‘serious’ monarchy lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life. Kingship orders everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens.

  In its essentials, Anderson’s broad definition might apply equally well to dynastic societies of the Early Bronze Age or the early twentieth century AD. It captures the extraordinary longevity of monarchic institutions in world history, the ‘persistence of the old regime’, as Arno Mayer impatiently puts it. But beneath the surface similarities, we find constant variation in the forms taken by kingship, and by the relationships between kings, gods, and subjects.

  The Dynastic Realm

  As Henri Frankfort observed in his Kingship and the Gods (1948) sacral kingship was, from its very beginnings, Janus-faced. Mesopotamian rulers—contrary to the idealism of the Sumerian King List—were typically one among many, distributed across a divided political landscape comprising independent city-states, which vied for land and resources but nonetheless recognized a common religious bond. They rarely exercised power without divine sanction, but—as Irene Winter (2008: 80) observes—they were not ‘ontologically defined as divine’. Their proximity to the gods was always a fleeting and tenuous affair. The Egyptian king was a different matter. Not only was he the sole protector of the Two Lands. He was himself a visible god, an embodiment of Horus, although his ability to interact on an equal footing with the other gods was only fully realized after his death and departure from the earthly realm.

  Royal power, then, assumed strikingly different forms in Egypt and Mesopotamia, giving rise to further hybrids and mixtures on their margins, where societies of smaller scale were drawn to produce their own, local variants of the dynastic realm. By 2500 BC kingdoms of varying shapes and sizes extended from the Nile Valley to the maritime cities of Lebanon, across the Syrian Saddle (dominated by the palace of Ebla), and down through the city-states of the Mesopotamian alluvium towards the highland monarchies of western Iran (Elam and Awan). The political make-up of urban societies to the south and east—those of the Iranian Plateau, the Persian Gulf, the Indus Valley, and Central Asia—remains unclear, owing partly to a lack of written sources. Egypt and Byblos were partners at the highest level of diplomatic contact, and gifts from the Egyptian court (filtered through coastal intermediaries) reached as far inland as Ebla, whose rulers conducted diplomacy with smaller polities along the northern Mesopotamian steppe. The latter’s sphere of contact merged, in turn, with that of city-states to the south, on the Sumerian plain. We are confronted, then, by loosely integrated circuits of interdynastic exchange, rather than a fully integrated and self-conscious system spanning the distance from Egypt to Mesopotamia, of the kind attested much later in the ‘Amarna Letters of the fourteenth century BC. The commercial underpinnings of these relationships are immediately apparent in the spatial distribution of palace-centred societies. Pharaoh’s court at Memphis (the meeting point of the Nile Valley and delta), the reception halls and ancestral tombs of the Syrian caravan kings, and the great urban households of the Sumerian dynasts: all sat possessively astride the main overland and maritime routes of their day.

  How should we explain the differences between Egyptian and Mesopotamian concepts of sacral kingship? Neither region has left us a written tradition of constitutional law. As Bruce Wells (2005) observes, their texts were ‘not the repositories of law, merely the reflections of it’. The duties and limitations of royal power, as I go on to describe, were encoded and enforced in other ways, ‘inscribed’ within the ritual activities undertaken by kings to ensure communication between the visible world and the hidden domain of the gods. The so-called Mesopotamian ‘law codes’—including the famous Code of Hammurabi (c.1750 BC), now in the Louvre Museum of Paris—are best understood as rhetorical expressions of these duties. As has often been noted, these inscriptions seem divorced from the realities of legislation, and—despite their listing of specific crimes and punishments—are almost never cited in contemporaneous records of actual legal proceedings. Rather they appear to be formalized presentations of royal virtue to the literate elite, to posterity, and above all to the gods. It was after all the gods, and not the proximate world of human affairs, that provided blessings and offered the ultimate sanction on the exercise of power. The right of kings to judge and administer human affairs on earth was grounded in the duties they performed, and the services they rendered to the gods.

  Jan Assmann (2001) has identifie
d three principal levels of contact with the divine in the ancient Near East. These he terms cultic (acts performed for or on behalf of the gods), cosmic (an awareness of the gods as distant and unbounded forces), and mythical (an attempt to know and approach them through narrative). Each holds implications for our understanding of the relationship between local forms of power and trans-local patterns of exchange. Of the three levels identified by Assmann, however, it is the cultic dimension of religious experience that I focus on in the remainder of this chapter; i.e. evidence for and representations of the physical points of contact through which communication with the gods occurred, and by means of which binding relationships were forged with them. A comparison of Egypt and Mesopotamia, in this regard, reveals consistent differences between the types of activities customarily used to express communion between kings and gods, differences which reach back to the prehistoric past (Chapter 3), and are most clearly apprehended when we place the evidence from one region in the perspective of the other. I will deal first with the ritual labours demanded of Mesopotamian kings, before going on to consider the wider background to the emergence of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and the distinct place of Pharaoh as a mediator between the living, the dead, and the gods.

  Mesopotamia: The Cohabitation of Gods and Mortals

  In his The Tower of Babel (1563), Pieter Breughel the Elder portrayed the building activities of a Babylonian king. In the foreground of his painting, craftsmen have left their labours to grovel at the feet of the monarch, who proceeds through the bustling scene in full regalia, wielding a rod of command. There are no gods in the bright blue skies above Breughel’s tower; only clouds. This image of royal hubris from the European Renaissance forms an instructive contrast with those (unknown of course to Breughel) produced in ancient Mesopotamia to commemorate royal building projects. Among the earliest known are a series of stone plaques carved for Ur-Nanshe, king of Lagash and founder of its first dynasty (c.2500 BC), which combine picture and text to present him as the ideal builder of temples for the gods. On two of these monuments it is recorded that he sent out ‘ships of Dilmun’ to acquire timber from ‘foreign lands’. The pictorial scenes juxtapose images of Ur-Nanshe seated, with a cup, before his wife and children (a scribe and snake-charmer are also named), and carrying a basket on his head.

  In later written sources, the carrying of the basket is associated with the king’s ceremonial role in forming and laying the first mud-brick of a new temple. He is characteristically represented, not as a lofty overseer, but as an active participant in the building process, carrying tools, and holding aloft the basket of clay from which bricks are fashioned. The physicality of the king’s participation is constantly stressed through detailed and ponderous references to the techniques of construction: the mixing of mortar—to which he adds special substances such as the cuttings of aromatic plants, cedar resin, perfumed oils, unguents, honey, and ghee—and the careful forming of the first mud-brick in a mould made from exotic wood. A carved stone monument (or ‘stele’) uncovered within the sacred precinct of Ur shows the gods walking directly before the figure of one such labouring king (probably Ur-Namma, founder of the city’s third dynasty, c.2100 BC), guiding his activities and receiving his offerings of libations. On the reverse side we find celebratory scenes of music, wrestling, and animal sacrifice, to mark the consecration of the god’s new dwelling.

  The temple-building activities of Mesopotamian kings were commemorated, not merely as spectacular technical achievements, but also as solemn rites of passage, during which a mere mortal became, for a brief period of time, an instrument of divine intelligence. A hymn composed for Gudea, a ruler of Lagash in the late third millennium BC, narrates his renovation of Eninnu, the House of Ningirsu, patron deity of the city. It begins with a nocturnal encounter between king and god, in which—as Richard Averbeck (2003) puts it—the king must ‘virtually prise the specific desires and plans for the temple out of the heart of the deity for whom the temple was to be built’. Only once in possession of this knowledge:

  He raised the brand-new carrying basket and set it

  before the mould.

  Gudea put the clay in the mould, acted precisely as

  prescribed, and he

  Succeeded in making a most beautiful brick for the

  House.

  (Excerpt from the Temple Hymn of Gudea,

  Cylinder A; after Edzard 1997)

  Each subsequent phase of construction draws king and god closer together, culminating in a feast—literally a ‘housewarming party’—to welcome Ningirsu and his divine consort Bau into their new home. A significant portion of the text describes, at greater length than can be conveyed here, the gathering in of building materials from beyond the alluvium. The king’s construction of the temple has the effect of a mighty whirlwind, compelling resources—extracted by gods and carried by the peoples of foreign lands—towards its centre:

  The Elamites came to him from Elam, the Susians came to him from Susa. Magan and Meluha loaded wood from their mountains upon their shoulders for him, and to build the house of Ningirsu, they gathered for Gudea at his city Girsu.

  We read how Ningirsu directs Gudea to the ‘impenetrable mountains’ of cedar and stone, and of the arrival of ships loaded with gravel, gypsum, and bitumen. ‘Translucent carnelian’ is summoned to him from Meluha, and precious metals—gold, silver, and copper—descend from their highland sources as offerings to ‘the man in charge of building his master’s house’.

  On completion of his task, the king works together with the gods to prepare the house for Ningirsu’s arrival, fumigating it with incense, purifying its foundations by sprinkling them with precious oil, and marking the corners with a paste into which he first mixes carnelian and lapis lazuli. These portions of the text find corroboration in the excavated remains of Mesopotamian temples. As Henri Frankfort (1942) discovered during his fieldwork in the Diyala Valley of eastern Iraq, temple foundations were laid upon raised platforms filled with clean sand: ‘to accentuate the structure, to mark out its sacred site as distinct from the profane soil which is subject to the accidents of daily life, being tilled at one time, made to accommodate a dwelling at another, transformed into a cemetery at yet another period’. Buried within the corners of these platforms were small, functionless pieces of gold, copper, carnelian, lapis lazuli, and other materials originating far outside the alluvium. Copper pegs, topped by images of deities, have been similarly recovered from temple foundations, echoing Gudea’s divine injunction to drive the foundation pegs of the city god into the sanctified ground, so that the fields and flocks of Lagash may flourish.

  Excavation has also revealed the remains of mud-brick altars on which offerings were spilled or burned before the cult images of the gods. By contrast with Egypt, where incense was offered from portable containers or on mobile stands, Mesopotamian altars were fixed points of communication with the divine, built into the inner sanctum of the temple or located in its central courtyard. A thick coat of plaster sealed their surfaces, preventing the absorption of fluids into the brickwork. And watertight grooves (lined with bitumen) were installed to guide any surplus liquids down into vessels, placed below the altar to capture their flow. Libations passing over the altar, but not consumed by the gods, were thus recycled for other purposes. As consecrated substances they could be mixed with base materials such as clay and fashioned into portable cult figures, or fed to the ancestors via terracotta pipes, specially installed in their tombs to carry such fluids down to the Underworld.

  Divine attention could also be attracted from above, by the roasting of meat on outdoor altars. Jean Bottéro (2004) has commented on the intriguing absence of roasted and grilled meats from profane cooking recipes, preserved among the royal archives of later periods. He further notes the frequent occurrence of these foods in liturgical texts, which describe the presentation of roasted animal parts to the gods on dishes of precious metal. Literary sources describe how the gods converge ‘like flies’ around
the aromatic fumes of burning meats as they rise high into the air, flavoured with the smoke of incense. Bottéro’s explanation of this practice as an ‘archaic’ survival from prehistoric times contains an important kernel of truth (Chapter 3). But in dismissing its retention as an example of religious conservatism he misses the particular significance of meat-roasting as a technical act, reserved for those special occasions when mortals sought to overcome the distance between their own plane of existence and that of the gods.

  The effectiveness ascribed to this act of communion is revealed, albeit obliquely, in a passage towards the end of Gudea’s temple hymn, which celebrates the banquet presented to the gods in their new home: ‘Syrup, ghee, wine, sour milk, ĝipar fruit, fig-cakes topped with cheese, dates, … and small grapes, things untouched by fire, were the foods for the gods which he prepared with syrup and ghee.’ Why, on this most auspicious of occasions, are the foods in question singled out as being ‘untouched by fire’, if not to acknowledge that for a short time, circumscribed by the consecration of their earthly dwellings, the gods and their mortal servant shared a common plane of commensality?

  Old Kingdom Egypt: Mesopotamia’s Neighbour in Africa

  Towards the end of the fourth millennium BC, the communities of the Nile Valley and Delta coalesced to form a single royal domain. The process of political fusion unfolded under the stimulus of close interaction with neighbouring societies along the Levantine seaboard. For the first time, donkey caravans plied the land bridge across the Mediterranean shoreline of the Sinai Peninsula. And the inception of sail-powered navigation in the eastern Mediterranean increased the scope of maritime trade between the Nile Delta and the ports of Canaan. Intriguingly, however, the earliest reliably dated depiction of a sailing vessel in this part of the world originates to the south of Egypt, in the burial of a local chieftain at Qustul, in northern Sudan. Both its southerly location and its execution on a stone vessel used for burning incense point towards maritime trade in the Red Sea basin, further demonstrated by the presence in Egyptian burials of obsidian from sources around the Horn of Africa. Much still remains to be discovered about this early Red Sea trade, and its wider implications for the movement of goods and ideas between Egypt and Sumer.