THE TAO OF BABEL·

The peoples who lived in the lands between the

rivers Tigris and Euphrates from 6,000 years ago were

many, Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians; Assyrians,

Hittites, and Hurrians from the north; Amorites,

Elamites, Arameans, and many others. They

constructed a picture of the world in which religious

worship was very important. We don’t know much

about ancient cultures or religions; so here is an

attempt to imagine what it might have been like. For

all these ancient peoples the gods were ‘out there’,

outside the world those gods had created. That

world was liable to be destroyed by the foolishness

of mankind, and the gods had to be implored to

answer human prayer and to help and advise the

worshipper who followed the rites devoutly. The land

was largely flat, and subject to inundation and other

disasters. By contrast, god could be seen in the

lightning flash on mountain tops. God was obviously

above.

It was the mysterious people from the land of Sumer,

of unknown origin and whose language has no

obvious roots with any others, who were first to

build cities from stone and baked clay bricks, first to

claim the desert for fertilised and irrigated areas for

crops, first to write down their lore on clay tablets

that have been preserved, where many stories later

told by Hebrew writers in the bible had their origin. It

was the people of Sumer who built the first ziggurat,

a stairway to heaven by which the gods could come

to earth and answer the prayers of their devotees. At

Mohenjo-Daro, 3,500 km due east in modern

Pakistan, another people were making the same

discoveries at almost the same time, but we know

almost nothing about them. To the south the

Egyptians were evolving a very different picture of

the world, one where the gods were nurturing.

1

The best known ziggurat is that referred to in the

bible, in the Book of Genesis. When the final author

of that book was writing or editing his account,

Babylon, or Babel, had been conquered by Alexander

the Great, and the ziggurat long been in ruins. One of

the concepts unique to the final Genesis author was

that of a jealous god, fearful of humans becoming

too powerful, and so a threat to god. This was why

god was said to have expelled Adam and Eve from

the Garden east of Eden. The Genesis writer also

makes god responsible for the destruction of the

ziggurat in Shinar, or Babylon, which in Genesis is a

tower built so that men can climb to heaven.

In reality the traffic was going the other way. Not

men upwards, but the gods downwards. What is

expressed in Genesis is a powerful sense of guilt, of

mankind being punished for transgressions against

god.

The Genesis author also has a back to front theory

about languages. The many languages spoken in

Babylon, the hub of a great empire, were also said to

be a punishment. Before the tower was built, says

the Genesis author, men all spoke one language, but

god prevented them from uniting and building

another tower by giving them different languages.

This is the opposite of the New Testament concept

of inspiration enabling the disciples of Jesus to speak

in tongues. The opposite too of a known

development in language from many dialects to a

dominant one, or the imposition of a common

language throughout an empire. The bible author

conveniently ignores the fact that other polyglot

cities existed, including Jerusalem, and that many

other ziggurats were built, before and after that of

Babylon. It’s a good story, and we remember it. But

to understand ancient religions, we have to forget it.

2

The ziggurat was a temple. It formed part of a group

of buildings dedicated to the worship of a god. The

ziggurat complex of buildings was not unlike the

pyramids in Egypt, but in Egypt the platform for the

gods to come to their worshippers, the pyramid, had

become separate from the temple complex itself. At

the top of the ziggurat was the temple proper, where

the priests would pray the city god to come down

and answer prayers, and perform acts of power.

This step pyramid structure was thought to imitate

the way the world itself was made by the gods. They

constructed a solid base upon the primeval waters

which existed before the world began, and so began

heaven and earth, at first made from the bodies of

the very first gods. The world was also seen as a tree,

its branches forming the heavens, the trunk earth,

and its roots the underground powers of the forces

of life and death. The ziggurat was thus aligned to the

creation of life and harmony, of the tao.

In ancient times the gods were larger than life, often

depicted as such in sculptures. They were powerful,

and dangerous, and could be destructive. When

implored to come down to earth to effect a change

or answer a prayer it was therefore essential the

correct rites were followed by priests who knew the

ritual to follow. Otherwise the gods could cause harm

instead of good.

3

More can be said of this existence, outside the world,

of Middle Eastern gods. Although the gods formed

the primeval stuff of the world from their bodies,

their children were outside the world, and came

from above. Some dread entities came from below.

To see what this distance means, compare the

direction that the gods were experienced in the

Middle East with those of ancient Greece. In Greece,

with its clarity of light, its many mountain ranges and

islands, the gods were part of nature. They didn’t

come from outside, but through, natural forces.

Their manifestation was horizontal, not vertical. God

could be found at any time. He was suddenly there.

Especially at his temple, which was always built at a

site where holiness could be felt. Visitors can still feel

it at places like Delphi today if they don’t buy too

many souvenirs.

The way we experience the divine affects our political

views. This is not as strange as it might at first

appear, for we after all are one mind. That god

comes through nature creates an intense awareness

of nature, and a willingness to explore it, evident in

many ancient Greek poems and scientific or

philosophical works. God through nature makes us

liable to respect natural creations, to conserve, to

care for, a material world which in many ways is

divine. The Greeks were aware of the gods as part of

life, and their religions were an intrinsic part of their

lives, and not confined to a separate sphere. It was

something anyone, and all, could experience, and it

was no accident that democracy evolved first in

ancient Greece.

In the Middle East, by contrast, god was outside the

world, above it. The world was an inferior creation,

doomed to eventual destruction. To know god, the

first step was to forget the world. The world, in some

extreme cases, became sinful, a snare and a delusion.

So the natural world could be exploited, used to

accumulate personal wealth, a sign of god’s grace.

Exploitation of all kinds, empires, subjugation of

races, destruction of environments, economic

slavery, corruption in politics, all were permissible,

because all concerned a sinful, negligible world

destined for eventual destruction. If the excess was

too unbalanced, god would come from above and

strike down the evil ones. The end of the world was

always at hand. Society took the form of the ziggurat,

a pyramid with an emperor at the top, priests and

officials below him, and these dominating the mass

of the people.

It is interesting to see that Christianity, paying a debt

to the hierarchical system of Judaism, was founded in

Greece by Paul of Tarsus as a new mystery religion

similar to the rites of Eleusis, and evolved at first a

communal, egalitarian system, which was soon

replaced by the European hierarchical system of

feudalism. God became ‘Lord’, the feudal leader.

4

Basic to the life of ancient Mesopotamia was the

canal system, which provided food for a large

population, and whose leaders organised its

continued care. It was an art of compromise: without

a myriad of locks and the officials to see to their

maintenance, there would be floods. Without an

efficient central administration the canals would

vanish, to be replaced by the original desert, and with

them would go the cities and the peoples they

supported. The key figures in this society were the

priests. Although there were many gods, priests in

every locality eventually raised one god above the

others, who became a patron of each city.

Although the gods performed many natural functions

to make the world work, as in other religions of the

world, they soon became, as well, patrons of

different cities, and involved in these cities’ wars for

dominance. The Sumerians for instance believed in

Nammu, or Tiamet, who was the water which

preceded the creation of the world. From her came

An, the heaven, and Ninhursang, the earth. Between

these two functioned the powerful ones whose

worship was necessary, for whom the ziggurats were

built. Inanna, goddess of sexuality and war, who

later, in other cultures, became Ishtar, then

Aphrodite; her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the

underworld, some of whose functions were

undertaken by Greek Demeter; Ninurtu, god of war

and agriculture; Enlil and Ninlil, gods of the air;

Nanna and Ningal, god and goddess of the moon;

and Enki, god of male fertility and knowledge, whose

functions were inherited by Greek Hermes. So

powerful and influential was the culture of Sumeria

on subsequent peoples in the area that these gods

endured for many centuries, their names little

different in languages later spoken in the region. The

Sumerian language itself survived long after the

people who spoke it had vanished, preserved in

official rites and documents of later cultures such as

that of Babylon and Assyria. All these gods were in

some sense An, the heavens, who was god in his

monotheistic form. But to worship god efficiently, to

enable him to give help to his devotee, it was

thought necessary to worship specific aspects of god,

which were also specific aspects of human nature.

As the Sumerians developed civilisation, the first

surviving signs of it we know about, changes took

place within the ruling priesthood. The god of war

was invoked by his priest, but war was carried out by

a general, and war leaders became powerful. Power

was at first shared between king/general and priest.

But as the societies living in the cities became more

numerous and developed more complex structures,

so did the kingship. In particular, diplomacy between

cities called for supreme power to be vested in a

king/general. The gods and their priests were still an

intrinsic part of this. Certain cities claimed a god as a

patron deity. In fact what survives of Sumerian

writings about the gods is often apparently

government propaganda as much as worship. The

more powerful the god was asserted to be, the more

powerful the city under his protection. So Nippur

adopted Enlil; Eridu adopted Enki; Uruk, Inanna; Ur,

Nanna.

5

This politicalisation of religion occurred throughout

the Middle East, and seems normal to many people

living today. Whereas a Greek travelling to Babylon

might have said, “Ah, Inanna is our Aphrodite!” and

cheerfully participated in rites to honour that

goddess, convinced he had said the last word on the

subject, a Babylonian visiting Corinth would have

thought the rites of Aphrodite an abomination.

Although the concept of ‘heresy’ had not yet been

invented, to acknowledge other cities’ gods was to

be disloyal to one’s own city god, to weaken that

god, and hence the city he patronised. Just as cities

conquered one another, gods in the Middle East

conquered one another. This is why Yahweh, or El, in

the Hebrew bible, is a jealous god, one who will not

tolerate any rival.

The only sure proof of the rightness of your beliefs is

to conquer the people who worship other gods. This

philosophy is central to Judaism, Islam and

Christianity, the remarkable thing about Judaism

being that, although founded during a period of

empire, and while Judah and Israel were polytheistic,

it evolved its concept of a supreme and only god

during periods of political subjugation, during which

eventual political domination was devotedly looked

forward to, under the rule of the future messiah.

Human beings are part of the natural creation. Our

ideas of the world and the gods are formed by the

interaction of our senses with the physical geography

of the part of the world we inhabit. ‘Culture’, that

part of human civilisation we are still ambiguous

about, is a late invention. It was founded in the

evolution of religious rites observed in order to

protect a group of people. It was preserved through

the invention of writing, and spread by political

invasion of other peoples. Flat lands suggests the

dominance of heights, as any good general can see.

So the gods, imagined as dominating us all, must be

above, as conceived by inhabitants of the plains. By

contrast, inhabitants of the mountain ranges

experience gods all around. Even the lightning comes

from nearby. The gods appear immanent, within, not

transcendent, above. All this, it is important to note,

concern the way human beings experience the

divine, and in no way describes the nature of the

divine, which is unknowable.

6

The worship of gods is undertaken for very practical

reasons, for self preservation. The gods are

preservers of human life and well being. It is not

surprising to find underlying rituals common to many

different religions. In Ur, that same Ur of the

Chaldees said in the bible to be the home of Abram

or Abraham, the first ‘world power’ we know of, and

dominating the Persian Gulf in the second millenium

BC, the dominant god was Nanna, god of the moon.

Nanna was revered throughout the whole of

Mesopotamia during the dominance of the kings of

Ur, and later under dynasties of Assyria and Babylon.

A rite to honour him celebrates his birth. His parents

Enlil and Ninlil, like Inanna, descend to the

underworld, and are imprisoned there. In a great

ceremony lasting many hours, performed probably

on a night with no moon, of a lunar eclipse,

Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, is implored to

release Enlil and Ninlil. During this time the two give

birth to Nanna, and, coincidentally to the rise of the

new moon: Ereshkigal relents and releases the gods

in her power. We don’t know if the rise of Nanna

symbolised new life for his devotees, but as many

later rituals in the Middle East did so, it is possible.

Human beings are a product of their environment.

Religion is a device to ensure their harmony with that

environment and within themselves. From these

cultural forces has arisen politics, the art of

dominance, and, most recently, technology, the art

of efficiency. But we are still the same people,

underneath the surface changes. Perhaps it’s time to

go back to Ur and climb the steps of the ziggurat. Me,

I’m saving up for a trip to Delphi.