/lit/ - Literature

>>13804677
"[as for] the rest of the people: guided by the guardian spirits . . . I now . . . ploughed those people under alive. Their flesh I fed to the dogs, pigs, vultures, eagles-the birds of heaven and the fishes of the deep. I took the corpses of the people . . . who had laid down their lives through hunger and famine and the remains of the dog and pig feed, which blocked the streets and filled the broad avenues; those bones [I took] out of Babylon, Kutha, and Sippar and threw them on heaps. "

This mythology of power fed upon itself, its achievements, and the margins thus created between men and their environment. What we witness then is an early and crucial instance of the technological impulse becoming an affective substitute for the mythological, supplying some of the questions and some of the answers that had once been referred to the authority of myth. Significantly, Mumford and V. Gordon Childe see the explosion of technics at this stage as the greatest until our own time. The walled city is itself the cumulative artifact, lying, as an ancient tablet tells us, like a storm cloud on the horizon. The wall, as Mumford so rightly observes, is not merely a physical entity but a "spiritual boundary of even greater significance, for it preserved those within from the chaos and formless evil that encompassed them." What lay beyond the walls became by emerging definition something other and less than civilization; peoples who lived outside the walls became by that placement less than civilized, objects of hatred, fear, and derision. And so a fragment of a Sumerian myth describing in contemptuous terms some nomadic Semites who wandered beyond the city of Sumer portends future civilized attitudes toward other wilderness peoples. Martu, a god of these nomads, wishes to marry a goddess of the city, but her handmaidens attempt to dissuade her thus:

"He lives in tents, buffeted by wind and rain,
Eats uncooked meat,
Has no house while he lives,
Is not brought to burial when he dies."

>>13793624
In his appropriate surroundings the god chooses to make known his essential character, emerging out there from the shadowy voice that prompted the patriarchs, and now revealed as a capricious war god (despite unending efforts at theodicy) whose weapons are those of natural disasters. He has already sent a flood that all but blotted out his entire creation, plagues of locusts and snakes, a famine, and an epidemic, and his hot breath has brought the dreaded desert wind, the khamsin, that blackened Egyptian skies with clouds of sand and dust. His words are volcanic eruptions, thunderstorms, and earthquakes. The cumulative effect of all this is to emphasize the destructive aspects of nature and to reinforce the anthropocentric, adversary attitude toward the natural world announced in the paradise myth. This is what we should expect, given the origin of the tribes and the temper of the lands through which they moved. Behind it lies the entire experience of the Near Eastern peoples in their long struggle with a marginal environment.

This antinature bias, as Baron, Weber, and Johannes Pedersen have pointed out, is reflected in the grand covenantal experience at Sinai, both in the specifically historical character of the religion there spelled out and in the monotheism that sets it apart from the nature-based polytheisms of all other peoples - indeed, not only apart but against them in a war to the death.