General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
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Could you help us expand Chapter 8 to include much more of what has been teased by the title of this chapter and by,
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Once the Chapter 8 body is expanded, we also need your help adding sections to Chapter 8 to be consistent with other chapters: an
Introduction,
Key Concepts, and a
Bibliography.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Add a Section: Introduction
The contents of the
Introduction section and other sections of
Chapter 8 are missing. Can you help us fill them in?
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Add a Section: Key Concepts
Can you help us fill in the
Key Concepts section of Chapter 8 once the
Chapter 8 body is filled in (or based on the
mentions of Chapter 8 from other chapters of The Creation of Order) to be consistent with other chapters?
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keywords:
Key images:
Lunar symbol:
Solar symbol:
Principle of regularity:
Periodic renewal ceremony:
Integration with the calendrical kosmos:
International interface:
Public character:
Religious sanctification:
Ultimate dissolution:General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Add a Section: Bibliography
The contents of the
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General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query
Did we miss any mentions of Chapter 8 content in other chapters of The Creation of Order besides the notes on the General Queries page for Chapter 8, where you can find the known mentions of Chapter 8 that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits)? Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to Chapter 8, with your help.
Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 1
In
Chapter 1: There are no mentions of
Chapter 8.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 2
In Chapter 2: There is 1 mention of Chapter 8, below.
Note: This is one of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 2
1. In these respects calendrical time was “spatialized,” culminating in mandala-type figures that will be discussed in Chapter 8. The directionality of time was translated not only into spatial relations but to moral functions as well as the paired duality right and left, evolved into that of right and wrong. The latter is ultimately a problem of orientation to the sun.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 3
In Chapter 3: There is 1 mention of Chapter 8, below.
Note: This is one of the known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links). This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.
Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 3
1. Chapter 8 describes how Sumerian temples were created as civilization’s first entrepreneurial corporations on record. The present chapter [Chapter 3] will limit itself to discussing their role in elaborating weights and measures into an overall managerial system. For it was first in Mesopotamia’s temples—and after 2600 BC the palaces—that the earliest accounting systems and their associated measures and weights were developed, as well as the first writing, the formalities of contracts, land-rent, and interest-bearing debt.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 4
In Chapter 4: There is 1 mention of Chapter 8, below.
Note: This text was cut from Chapter 4 and put in the Chapter 4 General Queries page in this query.
Note: This is one of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 4
1. Such lists show, for one thing, the system of categorizing phenomena. Thus, dictionaries and categorization were linked to basic organizational principles. (Chapter 8, dealing with the archaic division of labor, will investigate just what these lists tell us.)
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 5
In Chapter 5: There are 3 mentions of Chapter 8, below.
Note: These are three of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.First Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 5
1. Most artists were public servants (Greek demiourgoi, literally “workers for the demos”), and as such dependent on the civil state, palace, or temple for their livelihood. Some were outright slaves.[1] [The mention of Chapter 8 is in the footnote here; click the superscript numeral in this paragraph, or view the footnote text directly below:]
[Footnote text: The blind musician is a familiar character from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity (see Chapter 8). See Samuel Noah Kramer and John Maier’s Myths of Enki, The Crafty God, for Sumerian practice. This spread to classical Greece.]
Second Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 5
2. Supervising them were various officials such as the choregos (originally in charge of the chorus, later the person who financed it), and the aesymnetes who beat the time for the choral dances. (I will discuss these officials in greater detail below, and in Chapter 8.)
They were Greek demiourgoi, from the many blind men who were trained as musicians to the metic foreign “guest workers.”
Third Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 5
3. How they built up their position as ideological and propagandistic advisers is instructive. Minar[2] (1942: pp. 23ff.) described how the Pythagoreans functioned much like political cult organizations (Greek “hetaireia”), a word which also meant conspiracy largely because of the Pythagorean use of such civic cults. They were secret organizations, with their own common meals and other cult practices (as discussed below in Chapter 8). An allied type of association, the thiasos, was a mystical and secret cult “which quite soon falls into political activity and functions quite efficiently as the ruler of a large domain.” During the rule of the 400 in Athens (and again under the even more dictatorial 30 tyrants), these clubs joined together to seize power.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 6
In Chapter 6: There are 2 mentions of Chapter 8, below.
Note: These are two of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.First Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 6
1. The population was left with the games and carnivals climaxing in the late Roman orgies, which turned the word “Saturnalia” into a synonym for loss of social balance. By the end of antiquity, what began as sacred traditions became secularized and militarized. Most of these traces have been lost in the commercial fairs, civic parades, and games of recent centuries. The archaic festival agenda was passed on to the modern era mainly via the Christian communion and the periodic meals held annually by corporate bodies down through the early centuries of our epoch (see Chapter 8).
Second Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 6
2. This chapter [Chapter 6] and the previous two chapters [Chapters 4 and 5] have focused on the cosmological grounding of personal expression—writing, music and dance, the arts, and the design of table manners and communal festivals. At their inception these modes of expression were highly formalized. They were formalized in such a way as to subordinate personal individualism to the communal context. Doing this in a cosmological manner provided an “objective” basis for the ethic being communicated. The ideal was not to benefit (or appear to benefit) any one group more than others. The next part of The Creation of Order will continue this theme of equitable distribution. Chapter 7 discusses how ancient communities divided themselves into tribal fractions. Chapter 8 reviews how individuals who could not fit into these family-based structures—because of infirmity, loss of parents, poverty, or simply because of their alien birth—were set aside as public workers. Chapter 9 then traces how urban sites were first elaborated as sacred cosmological areas with ritual standardization procedures, city layouts, and communal hearths. I show how all these examples of social structuring reflected archaic ideas of rectitude and righteousness.
[See
this related query in Chapter 6.]
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 7
In Chapter 7: There are 1–2 mention(s) of Chapter 8.
Note: These are some of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.First and Second Mentions of Chapter 8 in Chapter 7
1 and 2: [PUT THIS AS TRANSITION FROM CHAPTER 7 TO CHAPTER 8:]
But Benveniste[1] (1973: pp. 249–253) pointed out that the most archaic ideas of “oikos” (like the Latin “domus”) referred not to the individual household but to a larger social grouping. It meant the “house” in an extended sense to a single family, a broader related grouping rather than just a collection of houses. The nominal stem for “oikos,” “weik” or “weiko,” denoted a group formed from several families. Benveniste wrote: “[Greek] (w)oîkos occupies an intermediate position: first ‘(large) house,’ in which all the descendants of the head of the family lived, then a word substituted for dómos… and finally ‘house, building’ in oiko-dómos ‘builder, architect’ with its numerous derivatives and compounds. Thus the word for a social unit has been transferred to the material sphere which delimits that unit.”[2]
The pattern of evolution seems to reflect “the break-up of the ‘Grossfamilie’ into separate families.”[3]
By Aristotle’s time the oikos (Roman domus) had become “the smallest division and the first form of society which existed, and he defines it as a community of husband and wife, of master and slaves: this is a notion like in Roman familia.”[4]
Benveniste[5] concluded (p. 253) that “Today we see things differently; such a reconstruction, which starts from a social cell and proceeds by successive accretions, is false. What existed from the start was the society as a whole and not the family, then the clan, then the city. Society from its origin was divided into units which it comprised. The families are necessarily grouped within a unit, and so on. But Aristotle [Politics] makes into a universal phenomenon and a philosophic necessity what was represented in his own society: he makes an absolute of a particular social state of affairs.”
Benveniste added that in Greek prehistory “the ‘house’ was not a building,” but a “social grouping.”
In dividing any society, there are two basic decisions to be made: citizens and their families, versus outsiders. There are many individuals who do not fit into the citizenry and its subgroupings. These include on the one hand outright foreigners or resident aliens such as the Athenian metics, and on the other hand public workers (the Greek demiourgoi, servants of the demos). It was typical for archaic society to establish a kind of parallel body or set of bodies, to set certain functions apart from the individual clans to serve the “higher” communal purpose. Typically this was done through the temples or related sanctified groupings. These corporate bodies are the subject of the next chapter [Chapter 8].
From Latin “civitas,” meaning “the whole body of citizens,” seems to have derived from the old Indo-European word for “citadel.”[6]
Likewise the Greek “polis” stemmed from the fortified Athenian “acropolis” (high city) behind the walls from a high defensive position. Benveniste[7] (1973: pp. 295ff.) pointed out that Thucydides (II.15) stated explicitly that “the akrópolis (citadel) is still today called pólis by the Athenians.”[8]
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), pp. 249–253.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), p. 251.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), p. 252.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), p. 253.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), p. 253.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), p. 295.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), pp. 295ff.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), p. 298.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 9
In Chapter 9: There are 2 mentions of Chapter 8, below.
Note: These are two of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.First Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 9
1. As Chapter 8 has described, these commercial embassies were more in the character of quasi-official cults, organized as temple guilds with their own feast-days and sacred officials. The autonomy of these areas, often with their own temples, housed merchants.
Second Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 9
2. Many cities had a dual character, sacred and civil, such as the great Sumerian city of Uruk with its Eanna district. Nippur apparently was a “normal” city alongside its sacred precinct housing the Ekur (“mountain house,” i.e., the ziggurat-pyramid) that lent its influence to the city as a whole. Benefiting from its sacred status, Nippur never asserted itself as the seat of an imperial dynasty, but drew resources and gave prestige to whatever cities held the leadership of southern Mesopotamia, e.g., Lagash, Umma, Uruk, or Ur. Much like the amphictyonic-type capitals discussed in the preceding chapter [Chapter 8], such centers would not have had to be fortified as long as they remained strictly sacred and public in function, performing generally desired functions.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 10
In Chapter 10: There are 3 mentions of Chapter 8, below.
Note: These are three of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.First Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 10
Note: This mention was
later omitted from Chapter 10’s body and moved into
a query, at this link.
1. This is of course hardly surprising in view of the fact that, as the preceding Chapter 8 has described, temples were civilization’s first corporate institutions, at least in the Bronze Age Near East. But these public corporate entities were only part of the interface between the deities and economic life.
Second Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 10
2. [PUT THIS IN CORPORATION CH.8?] The term “hierarchy” derives from Greek “hieros,” meaning sacred. It certainly is a better term than “priesthood,” whose theological implications distract attention from the primarily secular functions of most temple officials. [In Corporation Ch.8, perhaps as transition to Ch.9:]
What initially were weighed out were not for the most part market goods, but in-house commodity allocations. As Measures, Rules, and Prices has described, Mesopotamia’s temple or palace dependents received rations instead of money-wages to be spent on purchasing their livelihood in the open market, and temple administrators took their prebend income in barley. (It is not clear whether this was only for their own food needs or afforded also a marketable surplus—that in turn might be converted into silver.)
Third Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 10
Note: This (Chapter 10 mentions, item 3)
was deleted from
Chapter 10. We’re not sure if this was meant to be about
Chapter 8,
Chapter 10, or a different chapter altogether.
3. [Creation of Order Religious Chapter]
Introduction: The Worldly Relevance of Early Religion [Heading Level: 1]
The Etymology and Semantics of ‘Religion’ [Heading Level: 2]
But above all, religion went hand in hand with order. It was necessary for civil order. As the great classical historian Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff observed a century ago: “Not good or bad, but injurious or useful are the differences” emphasized by early Greek religion.
Archaic justice was primarily distributive justice. It was as such that this set out to protect the poor, above all from the depredations of usury by society’s creditors.
Religion and Authority [Heading Level: 2]
Religion and the Specialization of Labor and Division of Society Into Classes [Heading Level: 3]
1. Religion always has sought to sanctify the status quo. But initially, the idea was to restore an idealized status quo ante.
2. But the epoch of “divine kingship” gave way in the first millennium BC to military emperors and an epoch of rulers who were administrators for the increasingly powerful oligarchies that ended in control of society throughout the Roman Empire.
The downfall came when religion sanctified emperors and creditors. [Root]
3. Authority became increasingly inequitable. Rome’s property-based law.
Conclusion: The economic historian can trace the dissolution of religion into individualistic personal salvation rather than a preservation of social order.
It was this modern stage of religion that has become otherworldly and decayed into mere superstition.
So we are brought back to the anti-science crowd, which turns out also to be the anti-religious crowd as the term historically has been understood.
So, modern economic and religious thought reacts against two abuses stemming from within religion itself. In Germany, Luther reacted against the decay of religion into an autonomous, self-serving bureaucracy. In Scotland, Adam Smith’s Protestant views protected the individual against government intrusion into the economy by ambitious rulers. The State as well as the Church had become self-serving classes for themselves, seeking power rather than social order.
One might hope that the State would provide a check against Church bureaucracies, while the Church provided a reciprocal check on abuses of government. Instead, they joined hands against the rest of the population. Already by the high medieval period Church and State supported each other’s bad behavior. Both sectors became all the more “worldly” in the sense of supporting secular wealth, even as finance was taking over governments, physical capital, and with them repressing labor and its living standards in a mutual expression of worldly opportunism.
It was in this setting that individualism emerged.
The royal andurārum acts cast light not only on early Judaism, but also the Christianity that emerged out of it, while being a protest against the Sadducees and Pharisees—the vested interests that had taken over Jewish religion and made it worldly in quite a different sense than was originally meant.
By contrast, a surviving Dead Sea scroll shows how immediate was the concern with debt at the time Christianity emerged. It was a world in which rural usury was reducing over a quarter of the population to bondage. In this world the preaching of the early social prophets such as Isaiah and Amos struck a vital chord.
[Creation of Order:] Heaven was the sky, hence up. It was the source of order on earth. And so, symmetrically, hell became “down there,” below, the underworld.
The religious advocacy of the “straight” and its condemnation of the “crooked” reflected its primary role as creating order and preventing disorder from disrupting society’s continuity.
“In the beginning” religion was coterminous with the law. And the law also was straight—German “Recht.” As the historian of religion Martin Nilsson[1] has noted: “Profane law (as well as religious law) had been placed from time immemorial under divine protection. Zeus watches over law and justice, and even after men had begun consciously to shape and after the positive laws, Zeus sees that justice takes her proper course. For all primitive peoples law has divine sanction and authority.” This of course was long before there were lawyers.
The law was an early form of social planning, by laying down rules grounded in moral ethics.
Public rather than private credit would avoid much modern polarization, along with administered prices for monopoly goods and services.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 11
In Chapter 11: There is possibly 1 mention of Chapter 8, below.
Note: This is one of the
known mentions of Chapter 8 (see this general query) that are (or were) in other chapters (as they were written in earlier edits). Some of these mentions were edited or were cut completely from other chapters but still provide a hint of what was intended to be added to
Chapter 8, with your help. Mentions are indicated with code formatting (gray background with pink-color font on regular text, and normal blue-color font with gray background on links).
This is an example of a mention of Chapter 8.Mention of Chapter 8 in Chapter 11
1. [Pick up from Chapter 9, on religion, and also Chapter 10, cities:] [Observatory Editor’s Note: the chapter numbers are probably off, and this seems to be about Chapter 8, on temples.]
As Rodney Needham pointed out in his introduction to the 1970 reprint of Arthur M. Hocart’s Kings and Councillors[2] (1970: p. xxx–xxxi), the key was not that temples and cities were raised to a mystical plane. Rather, they were related to a mathematically “clean” and perfectly proportioned cosmos, module, or template. A temple was not only the abode of the god, but also a replica of the kosmos, “the world.” However, it was an idealized image of this world, one which was shaped and ordered in conformity with the macrocosm.
No a priori scheme will work, for there are too many possibilities of variation and idiosyncrasy. (See Needham/Hocart[3] 1970: p. xxxix.)
But some keys are in nature: the five symmetrical geometric (“Platonic”) solids. The Dorian mode is a symmetrical (palindromic) musical scale, and there are mathematical proportions among the tones.
Consider also the mathematics of right-angled (“Pythagorean”) triangles, known since the neolithic.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Chapter 12
In
Chapter 12: There are no mentions of
Chapter 8.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Epilogue
In the
Epilogue: There are no mentions of
Chapter 8.
General Query: 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
Interchapter Query: Bibliography
In the
Bibliography chapter: There are no mentions of
Chapter 8.
