What Makes Civilization Page 9

  Sumerian Storehouses of the Gods

  Only a tiny proportion of the metallic wealth that circulated between urban centres of the Early Bronze Age has been preserved in the archaeological record. Insights into the appearance of finished metalwork can be gained only from exceptional contexts, such as royal burials. (With the emergence of palaces and dynastic elites, the elite dead—long banished from urban spaces—resumed their old places of power within Mesopotamian households.) Currency forms of metal, such as standard ingots, have hardly survived at all. The reason for this is that, relative to the vast quantities attested in contemporary written sources, very little metal wealth was permanently withdrawn from circulation by urban elites.

  There were of course great centres of accumulation, notably temples and palaces, where large quantities of metal were held in temporary storage. As with modern banking, the accumulation of capital involved—not just bureaucracy—but also a strong element of faith and trust, reinforced by ritual. The stability of temples as foci of trade and investment was grounded in the working fiction that their true assets would never be fully realized and were (theoretically) without limit. Each Mesopotamian temple was a storehouse of the gods, ‘eternally possessing silver and lapis lazuli’, as a Sumerian hymn to the Temple of Bau at Lagash puts it. This fiction was sustained through their additional role as Houses of the Gods, whose statues were located there and received regular gifts of food, clothing, and valuables. Such observances were intended to ensure the god’s presence within the temple, and to demonstrate its institutional well being. The stockpiling of assets was thereby represented as an extension of the moral obligation to feed the gods (Chapter 7), whose sacred dwellings dominated the landscape of lowland urban centres and were poetically likened to mountains, the natural—and seemingly inexhaustible—sources of metals and minerals (among the ceremonial names given to Mesopotamian temples we find ‘House, Skilfully Built Mountain’ and ‘House, Pure Mountain’). But accumulation was always temporary. Stored metallic wealth, when not mobilized as currency for trading ventures, was an important source of patronage and symbolic capital, especially when reintroduced to society in the form of prestigious display items such as weapons and jewellery, crafted by temple or palace artisans.

  The looting of temples was an increasingly common feature of intercity rivalry in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, and forms a recurring trope in the Sumerian literary genre of lamentation texts:

  The leader of Umma … sacked the Bagara temple and looted its precious metals and lapis lazuli; he set fire to the Dugru temple and looted its precious metals and lapis lazuli; he sacked the Abzu’eg; he set fire to the temple of Gatumdug, looted its precious metals and lapis lazuli, and destroyed its statuary; he set fire to the shrine Eanna of Inanna, looted its precious metals and lapis lazuli and destroyed its statuary.

  (Excerpt from the lament for the temples of Lagash; after Cooper 1986)

  In another lament the goddess Ningal is made to weep over what remains of her devastated house in the city of Ur, and again the loss of silver and precious stone is identified as a particular source of trauma:

  My possessions, like a flock of rooks rising up, have risen in flight—I shall cry ‘O my possessions’. He who came from the south has carried my possessions off to the south—I shall cry ‘O my possessions’. He who came from the highlands has carried my possessions off to the highlands—I shall cry ‘O my possessions’. My silver, gems and lapis lazuli have been scattered about—I shall cry ‘O my possessions’. The swamp has swallowed my treasures—I shall cry ‘O my possessions’. Men ignorant of silver have filled their hands with my silver. Men ignorant of gems have fastened my gems around their necks.

  (Excerpt from the lament for Ur; after Black et al. 2006)

  Here the agents of destruction do not come from a rival city-state, but from the swamps and highlands beyond the alluvium, where the true value of silver and exotic stone is said to be unknown. In portraying these distant societies as ignorant barbarians and despoilers of wealth, the literary lament over Ur undoubtedly reflects the cultural perspective of an aggrieved, city-dwelling elite. But other forms of evidence, archaeological rather than textual, suggest that the disparities between urban and non-urban notions of value were more subtle and varied in character, particularly as regards the consumption of metallic wealth.

  On the Margins of the System: Revisiting the ‘Barbarian Periphery’

  Tales of treasure buried in remote locations, and guarded by possessive monsters, are deeply embedded within the folklore of Eurasia. Unearthing such treasures, from kingly swords to life-giving chalices, brings both power and misfortune to ordinary mortals, for they were originally intended as gifts to the gods, or to the spirits of the earth. Archaeologists have often wondered about the sources for such customary narratives, transmitted from past to present by oral rather than written communication. The polymath R. G. Collingwood, for example, viewed folk tales as recollections of earlier forms of social life, disconnected from the material worlds in which they took shape, but nevertheless merging into the historical consciousness of more recent societies.

  Such arguments may remain hostage to accusations of romance and speculation. But it is a fact that around the margins of urban trade networks, which took form during the Bronze Age, lies a loosely connected chain of territories in which spectacular hoards of sophisticated metalwork are found, buried mysteriously in the earth, far from major centres of population. We are no longer dealing here with isolated treasure troves, or with exceptional episodes of ceremonial interment, such as those attested in the Royal Tombs at Ur. This is a quite different phenomenon: large quantities of deliberately discarded wealth, distributed across great areas over long periods of time, spanning multiple generations. It was once believed that such concentrations of ‘buried treasure’ represent the stock-in-trade of itinerant smiths, hidden in times of trouble and never recovered. But the scale and consistency of the phenomenon is too impressive to sustain such ad hoc explanations, and the presence of much finished (and often very fine) metalwork within these deposits also suggests a more complex interpretation.

  Map 6. Metal-hoarding zones around the fringes of urban life in western Eurasia, c.2500 to 1800 BC

  Two major hoarding zones lie respectively along the Danube, in central Europe, and in the valley of the Ganges in northern India. In Europe the distribution of metal hoards follows the course of major river systems between the Black and Baltic Seas, forming a more or less continuous chain that linked the trade routes along which copper and amber flowed in opposite directions. The hoards often cluster around key points of transit between land- and water-based arteries of movement, and also around restricted paths of access leading to highland sources of metal. Their southernmost distribution lies around the shores of the Black Sea, approaching the northern frontier of the Anatolian trading network (described above) with its commercial sealing devices and standard systems of weight and measure. These European hoards contain both copper and bronze items, including finished tools and weapons, ornamented toggle pins for fastening woollen cloaks, and standard currency bars in the form of neck torques with distinctive looped ends.

  In India some hundreds of metal hoards cluster within the once-forested plains between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers (an area known as the doab), whose headwaters rise in the western Himalayas, close to the southernmost sources of the Indus. Among those objects consigned to the earth we find extravagantly large versions of weapons such as harpoons and axes, cast in unalloyed copper, including a distinctive type of sword (with an antennae-shaped hilt) also found in such distant regions as northern Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and the Persian Gulf. The northern extremities of the doab hoarding zone lie almost precisely at the point where a distinct set of cultural influences begins, looking towards the urban centres of the Indus Valley with their rigidly standardized material cultures, fixed metrological systems, and extensive use of seals to regulate transactions. As in Europe, hoards have usual
ly come to light in the immediate vicinity of important transport routes, such as those leading to the copper sources of Rajasthan via the foothills of the Aravalli Mountains.

  In both the European and Indian cases, deposits of metallic wealth are concentrated along river routes leading away from centres of capital accumulation and bulk commerce, but also commanding access to upland zones (along the ‘Eurasian metallogenic belt’) where minerals of strategic importance to urban economies were concentrated. If we now adjust our focus and zoom in closer towards the nucleus, or rather nuclei, of urban development, we find this pattern replicated with striking regularity. Areas in which metal goods were systematically withdrawn from circulation (more often, now, in collective tombs than hoards) are distributed in a roughly circular formation across the steppe and semiarid fringes of the Fertile Crescent, usually in close proximity to highland sources of copper and other mineral deposits. They form an inner ring of metal deposition located between the forested hoarding zones of India and Europe, but outside the core areas of urban growth and seal use; a kind of negative imprint around the major centres of population.

  We find such metal-rich burials along the highland copper belt of Oman (in the hinterland of Dilmun), across the mountains of northern Afghanistan (high above the fortified towns of Turkmenistan), along the steep uplands of the Caucasus and the southern shores of the Black Sea (beyond the urbanized settlements of the Upper Euphrates), in the Pusht-i Kuh Mountains of Luristan (between the urban lowlands of the Diyala Valley and the Susiana plain), and along the coastal plains and adjoining hinterlands of Cilicia, northern Cyprus, and Syria-Lebanon (on the fringes of the Anatolian trade network and the kingdom of Ebla). Each of these areas exhibits distinct burial customs, from the stone tombs of Oman and Luristan to the great earthen mounds (kurgans) of the Caucasus, where solid-wheeled wagons pulled by oxen accompanied the dead and their grave goods into the burial chamber. On the Levantine coast bronze axes, daggers, shields, and other warrior gear were dedicated to the gods of the sea, whose temples stood at Byblos and Ugarit. Sacrificial offerings made there also included many decorated toggle pins and bronze neck torques with distinctive looped endings. As has long been recognized, these forms of personal ornamentation find direct parallels in metal hoards along the Danube, far to the north on the other side of the Anatolian Plateau.

  ‘Potlatch’ Societies in the History of Eurasia

  Contrasts between highland hoarding zones and lowland urban centres have often been seized upon as evidence for deeply rooted cultural, linguistic, or even racial difference. Among the categorical oppositions framed around these contrasts we find ‘nomad versus settled’, ‘tribal versus urban’, ‘barbarian versus civilized’. Since the late nineteenth century, spectacular burials of metalwork (‘hoards’) have also been frequently linked to postulated migrations of Indo-European-speaking groups (‘hordes’). But such contrasting and symmetrical patterns of wealth consumption are not limited to the Bronze Age. Later examples include the rich tumulus burials of the Scythians, aligned across the margins of the Hellenic world and vividly described by Herodotus; the distribution of Roman coin hoards along the eastern coastline of the Indian subcontinent (distantly echoed on the Empire’s north-west European frontier); and the vast numbers of central Asian dirhams recovered from Viking hoards and burials in Scandinavia and northern Russia, where they mark the termini of riverine supply routes that fed slaves and furs to the markets of the Middle East. We are dealing, then, with a phenomenon of extremely long duration in the history of Eurasia.

  In seeking alternative explanations, some historians have appealed to comparisons with the Potlatch ceremonies conducted by indigenous societies along the Pacific coastline of America and Canada. Potlatch was a ritual tournament. Its aim was to secure legal access to intangible rights and privileges such as ranks, titles, and land tenure. The public destruction of particular kinds of wealth, notably woven blankets and sheets of copper, formed an important part of the ritual process. As Marcel Mauss (2002 (1923–4): 47) wrote in The Gift:

  In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown into the water, in order to put down and ‘flatten’ one’s rival. In this way one not only promotes oneself, but also one’s family, up the social scale.

  Native American rituals of this kind were observed in recent centuries by European colonists, missionaries, and scholars, and were eventually prohibited under colonial law as wasteful, uncivilized customs. In reality, their expansion—and the incorporation into them of Western trade goods, including money—had a strategic function for local communities confronted by the growing influence of industrial commerce. The economics of sacrifice, to borrow a phrase from Susanne Kuechler (1997), often served the interests of preserving traditional cultural values. Sacrificial rituals involving the destruction of wealth focused upon sensitive resource areas (e.g. mines, forests) and major routes of contact, embedding the movement of people and goods within dense symbolic infrastructures, and forestalling the transformation of these areas into passive supply zones for distant centres of urban consumption. Outside commercial interests were also directly represented and symbolically subverted through the destruction of imported commodities, along with more established symbols of rank.

  We might then ask whether similar strategies of resistance were adopted in other parts of the world, in earlier periods of history, and in less overwhelming circumstances than those created by recent European expansion (backed up by large-scale military force and the catastrophic effects of diseases introduced upon local populations)? Mauss in fact assigned ritual systems of the Potlatch type a distinct and important place in his comparative history of social contracts. He felt they must once have been ‘shared by a very large part of humanity during a very long transitional phase’. Intriguingly, he defined this transitional phase as lying midway between Neolithic forms of contract, based upon the reciprocal obligations shared by members of a kin group, and the modern world of impersonal contract: ‘of the market where money circulates, of sale proper, and above all of the notion of price reckoned in coinage weighed and stamped with its value’ (original emphasis).

  In fact, the circulation of metal in standard units and the use of authorizing stamps to mark commodities were already closely related features of urban economies in Bronze Age Eurasia, long before the invention of formal currencies during the first millennium BC. Coinage simply represents the subdivision of stamped ingots into progressively smaller units, a point often omitted by economic historians who wish to identify the appearance of ‘money’ (in its familiar material forms) as a major historical turning point. Moreover, the relationship between sacrificial economies (of Potlatch type) and the development of economies based on the use of ingot currencies does not conform to Mauss’s vision of social evolution. The former did not develop into the latter, as he envisioned. Theirs was a relation in space rather than time; one of contiguity rather than succession. Intriguingly, this contiguous growth of sacrificial and urban economies—so integral to the early history of Eurasia—appears quite alien to that of much of the African continent, including the early kingdoms of the Nile Valley. There, instead, we find the ritual management of wealth sacrifice—that is the collective, deliberate, and permanent withdrawing of material goods from circulation—at the very foundation of the urban economy.

  7

  COSMOLOGY AND COMMERCE

  It should come as no surprise that, in many societies and cultures, gold and silver have been used as money. These are metals which, over the centuries, have been used to adorn the bodies of the gods and the men (and women) in positions of power, and which were of no use in daily life … A money must harbor the presence of the gods.

  Maurice Godelier, The Enigm
a of the Gift (1999)

  Let the gods eat roasted meat, roasted meat, roasted meat!

  Excerpt from a Mesopotamian ritual text (translated by J. Bottèro)

  In his Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (1964), A. Leo Oppenheim delivered a scathing condemnation of the state of research into divine images and their place in the economic and social life of the ancient Near East. Despite the subsequent appearance of a number of significant studies, his comments remain instructive today:

  It is typical of the Assyriologist’s culture-conditioned approach to Mesopotamian religion that the role and the function of the divine image in that civilization have never been considered important enough to merit a systematic scholarly investigation. Only as far as the few known statues of gods or goddesses and other representations of the deity have been the concern of the Mesopotamian archaeologist or the historian of art have they received a modicum of the attention they deserve.

  Evoking the reflections of Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’, upon seeing the sculptures in the Vatican, Oppenheim went on to attribute this neglect to an ‘influence of subconscious associations on the selection of research topics’:

  The aversion to accepting images as genuine and adequate realisations of the divine presence, manifested in a traditional human form (‘the Sun in human limbs array’d’) has played an important role in the religious development of the Western world. The roots of the attitude of rejection stem not only from the Judeo-Christian heritage but existed, earlier and independently, in Greek thought. In fact, pro- and anti-iconic tendencies have often been instrumental in shaping trends and releasing events in the history of our culture. And they are far from dead now. They still linger in the scholar’s ambivalent attitude toward ‘idols’ and taint his approach to all alien religions.