Chapter 2 — The Ancient Near East
The academic definition of The Ancient Near East (ANE) includes a portion of the earth’s surface which runs from the Caucasus on the northeast, across modern Turkey and out to Crete, down to Egypt up through Palestine and around to include all of Mesopotamia out to the Zagros Mountains. It is considered the home of humanity’s earliest civilizations.
The first problem we run into is the paucity of readable material on ANE culture and mythology below the graduate level. It is generally not regarded a subject for any serious examination without a highly specialized need. How much would someone use such a study outside the narrow pursuits of academia? Again, that is the Western bias. The entire subject of the ANE is regarded as esoteric with only a few tiny bits of any use to others. The student in this course is left hanging, trusting the material as presented unless he or she wants to really invest serious effort. This course makes no pretense of being the final answer, the one best or correct understanding of the obscure material behind it all; that would be a Western pretense. The assumption here is: If you need more, you’ll know enough to seek it out and come to your own conclusions. One can only present, and live by, what one has experienced.
Were it not for the heavy presence of Bible scholars seeking to verify basic geographical and historical facts related in Scripture, there would probably be a lot less interest in the first place.
An interest in finding the locations of cities mentioned in the Bible (such as Nineveh and Babylon) inspired the original English and French 19th century archaeological expeditions to the Near East. These sites were discovered and their excavations revealed to the world a style of art which had been lost.
[Senta German, “Ancient Near East”; Smart History, Khan Academy; accessed 21 July 2013.]
If you go on to read the following pages linked to the article quoted above, you’ll discover that the earliest human writing we have dug up so far was nothing more than food inventories on clay tablets (3200 BC). The next nearest item was Hammurabi’s Stele quite a bit later. While we might suppose similar tablets would have been used for other purposes, we just don’t have much that goes back that far except ample proof the Egyptians weren’t the only ones using pictograph records.
Yet another problem to reading directly from the ANE sources is the current cacophony of alternative theories that have appeared in recent decades. There is no way to characterize them all, and certainly no way to summarize how seriously we should take them. The course will stick with the older materials simply because they are freely available on the Net. The previously referenced Khan Academy material is very simple and worth a quick read for orientation. If the reader wants more in depth materials, the Sacred Texts website offers several free books out of copyright both online and CD/DVD orders. Their section on ANE is representative of older scholarship. A great many universities have online materials, as well — a good search engine using the key terms should bring more than anyone has time to read.
The Gilgamesh Epic is difficult at best. That is, in the very act of translation, we are given a dose of the Western bias in deciding what words best depict something from an alien world long buried in the sands of time and the literal sands of the Mesopotamian Valley. Without a certain preparatory study, you are just as well off reading a summary or someone’s analysis of it. Even though they vary some in what they conclude about the meaning of the story, this in itself helps us realize that genuine mysticism is not about commonly agreed facts but how they can be used, about the meaning of things within your own soul and the journey only you can take. The very real historical person behind the name Gilgamesh and his exploits becomes a symbol of something that touches us, but leaves varying fingerprints on each.
Stories do not need to inform us of anything. They do inform us of things. From The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, we know something of the people who lived in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second and third millenniums BCE. We know they celebrated a king named Gilgamesh; we know they believed in many gods; we know they were self-conscious of their own cultivation of the natural world; and we know they were literate. These things we can fix — or establish definitely. But stories also remind us of things we cannot fix — of what it means to be human. They reflect our will to understand what we cannot understand, and reconcile us to mortality.
[Arthur A. Brown, “Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh“; part of Exploring Ancient World Cultures, The Near East section, sponsored by University of Evansville. This is one of the better discussions of Gilgamesh.]
The main reason any of this matters to us is that Abraham came out of that world. To understand any portion of Abraham’s actions and words requires we know something of his cultural and intellectual background. The identity of the Hebrew people is rooted in Abraham’s world, not simply whence he came, but what he later became after his time in Palestine. The other pivotal character is Moses, who was educated in Egypt, the other cradle of ANE civilization. Again, the difficulty is the murky meaning of the surviving texts when passed through the filter of time, language, culture and intellectual orientation. Yes, we have the Rosetta Stone, but how do we ascertain its accuracy? We also have other bilingual Egyptian texts, but the debate continues now two centuries later over what to make of them.
The one thing we need as we move forward is not merely the questions of translating obscure languages long out of use, but how they used language as a means of transmitting something worth the trouble, and why it was worth the trouble. When language was used to record legends and myths, it would seem superficially similar to Greek or Roman legends, for example. That is, we get the same feel about gods, humanity and the universe. Yet the resulting social mythology is radically different between West and ANE. So far as we can determine, the governments, artists and social behavior of the people diverges greatly, and in recognizable patterns of difference. That is, Western societies, even the primitive German tribes, all had some things in common, while the ANE nations all had a different set of commonalties.
One of the things we cannot escape is that wherever we can discern anything of ANE cosmology, it is radically different from anything in the West. We saw previously how the unitary universe was inherent in Western assumptions about reality, whereas the entire ANE believed in at least one other entirely separate realm of existence. So while there seems a degree of similarity in how the myths sound to our ears, if similar tales support an entirely different social mythology, we can only conclude there was a radical difference in how language itself was used.
While Western tongues are rather literal, even in their most lyrical use, by contrast the ANE tongues allowed for a range of parabolic meaning not present in the West. Of course there were plenty of mundane communication requiring a more or less literal meaning, just as there are plenty of places in ANE Mysticism for linear reasoning about physical realities. However, just as mysticism includes an element rooted outside the mundane realm of existence, so the language had to somehow indicate something not restricted to literal expression. The same words and images had to perform a double duty.
Thus, we describe ANE languages as less descriptive and more indicative, and the logic was more often symbolic as opposed the the Western analytical approach.
Recommended Readings: Citations in the text above should prove sufficient background reading for this chapter.
