The calendar represents the first cognitive sequence found in surviving artifacts. Ice Age calendar-keepers marked off the days of each month to find ordered principles of regularity indicating when to hold the sacrifices and festivals that integrated their communities. A sky-chief probably was in charge of keeping the calendar that structured the community’s rhythms—its hunts and harvests, sacrificing, and feast-giving.
The flow of time was viewed as a sequence of cycles whose renewal needed active direction. Periodic reordering was necessary to adjust the number of lunar months in the solar year, by intercalating an extra month every three years or so. Social reordering also was needed to preserve the populations of low-surplus communities free and intact, and thus to deter families from simply leaving or falling into a state of dependency. Normal social relations were restored by commuting exile (letting lawbreakers return under a general amnesty), forgiving other punishments, fines, and debts, including fines due for personal injury. After these Clean Slates the families of archaic communities started afresh on a self-sufficient basis; at least this was the ideal.
Social balance was maintained in ways that emulated the celestial periodicities of the heavens. This archaic sanctification was a pragmatic element of religion, catalyzing the widespread acceptance of public laws that promoted a social balance simultaneously calendrical and eternal, cosmic and worldly.
The hallmark of what our modern era calls progress is to replace periodic reorderings with an irreversible flow of time. Since antiquity, social polarization has been permitted to accumulate rather than being periodically reversed. A quarter or more of the Roman imperial population lived in slavery or other unfree status, with debt-servitude playing a major role. Such results were much more than just a change in the “idea of time.” The notion of linear time and its corollary, secular progress, represents a social rejection of the need for occasional or regular periodic renewal to restore self-sufficiency to populations fallen into insolvency and economic dependency. In this respect the classical idea of progress was antithetical to more archaic ideas of order.
In classical antiquity the irreversibility of economic polarization between oligarchies and the rest of the population led to popular pressures to cancel personal debts, free the debt-slaves, and redistribute the land. Oligarchic spokesmen denounced such demands as representing “disorder” and “noise.” Yet in the Bronze Age, periodic Clean Slates had regularly restored social harmony. Antiquity’s economic polarization and ultimate collapse were aggravated by abandoning these traditions of periodic renewal which hitherto had restored popular self-support on the land and freedom from debt-servitude.
To the classical Greeks the word kosmos signified a finite structured world, a model of measured order and harmony. At its broadest, a kosmos served as a pattern for social life—a paradigm.
“The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,” proclaims Genesis. The ensuing Creation was established above all by the calendrical demarcation of time—the rhythms traced out by the sun, moon, and planets.
We modern observers may admire the starry heavens, but they bear little visible relation to how we structure our earthly society. Partly this is because of how our culture views the cosmos: To most people the word calls to mind the limitless abyss of outer space—billions and billions of stars, lightyears away. The impression is one of infinity.
This association of the cosmos with the formlessness of outer space is closer to the ancient idea of chaos, meaning literally chasm or void. The modern abyss of outer space is thus antithetical to the classical image of the starry heavens patterned into constellations whose celestial mechanics and sequences were reflected in the ordering of earthly activities.
A regularized calendrical kosmos was created in the Bronze Age by abandoning the old lunar cycles dating from the Ice Age and stone age. One problem with lunar months is that they vary in length from 28 to 30 days. Furthermore, lunar and solar rhythms are incommensurable: Lunar months averaging 29 1/2 days cannot be made to dovetail into the 365 1/4-day solar year. Replacing lunar with solar calendars thus called for new cosmologies.
The victory of solar over lunar deities was dramatized in the Babylonian Creation epic, recited twice at the New Year coronation festival and ritually reenacted in a drama that provided the prototype for Phoenician, Hittite, Greek, and Roman myth and ritual. In the late Babylonian version the lunar chaos-dragon Tiamat (“The Deep,” referring to the salty sea ruled by the moon) was dismembered by the sun-god Marduk. Many subsequent myths of heroes vanquishing dragons seem to derive from this archaic imagery (Smith 1919[1] and Gaster 1950[2]).
The contrast between kosmos and chaos was not merely a problem of calendar-making; it was central to Bronze Age social policy and even to ideas of freedom. Celebrating the earth’s creation out of primordial chaos was an occasion for reordering economic relations. The ruler’s sacred marriage to the fertility goddess or more precisely, his hierogamy with her worldly standing was supposed to ensure bountiful harvests by renewing the vigor of physical nature. Then, at the New Year festival’s climax, rulers handed down judgments and periodically restored order and economic justice by decreeing amnesties that freed exiles and Clean Slates that canceled agrarian debts and freed debt-slaves.
Before the rhythms of planting and harvesting flowered after about 9000 BC, communities marked seasons by the melting of snow, the coming of rains, the rising of rivers, and the migrations of fish, birds, and animals. The sun was associated with the arrival of springtime warmth, the sprouting of vegetation, animal migrations and matings, moultings, and birthings.
In a series of articles and books extending over two decades, the Ice Age archaeologist Alexander Marshack has shown that water imagery played a prominent role in cave art from 20,000 BC to 10,000 BC. The wavy serpentine and “macaroni” patterns scrawled or painted in ritual caves (Illustration 1.1)Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries suggest that water played an important role in springtime rituals, for this was the season in which the melting snows swelled the rivers. Marshack found a continuity of water symbolism from these early water images to neolithic pottery decorated with the zigzag or serpentine lines which modern maps still use to denote water (Illustration 1.2).Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries The Sumerian wisdom god Enki was depicted as holding two jars from which water flowed. The prototype of Aquarius the water-bringer (van Buren 1933[3]; see Illustration 1.3),Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries Enki, also was found wearing a fish-skin, or as a man with a fish’s lower body and tail (Illustration 1.4).Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries Some of his characteristics were found in the Egyptian Osiris and Near Eastern Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis. (The Mayan Codex Troano similarly depicted the god Chac as pouring rain out of a water jar.)
Marshack (1981: pp. 37ff.)[4] believed that some Near Eastern mesolithic and neolithic practices may have derived from the European Ice Age. By the late Ice Age (12,000–10,000 BC) a more or less common body of iconography, lithic types, and even regional trade networks can be traced from the Atlantic to the Urals. This suggests a diffusion that probably spread via a long, segmented series of local exchanges. In any event, these traditions, “with a 25,000–30,000 year continuous, unbroken archaeological record of development in Europe, may have been precursive cultural influences that entered the Near East with the end of the Ice Age.”
Any epoch is to some extent a modification of the past. New practices are created within the framework of the old and familiar. Vestiges of Ice Age calendrical iconography and ritual and symbol systems accordingly survived into the neolithic and Bronze Age as ritual sites developed into proto-towns. Marshack[5] (1981: pp. 9ff.) pointed to the persistence of “serpentine, zigzag, and band accumulations… through the full Magdalenian [the last few thousand years of the Ice Age] and were dispersed as far as… Poland.” Inscribed, comet-like designs represented “the flow of water from a source, that is, a beginning flow” (Illustration 1.5).Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries Long interpreted as being merely decorative, these zigzags and related water symbols of paleolithic European art turned out on closer examination to be “a proto-writing use of notation, signs, symbols, and forms.” From these patterns evolved mesolithic styles that “derive[d] so clearly from Magdalenian prototypes that one cannot assume that they are late, accidental, or random developments.”
Marshack concluded that mesolithic Near Eastern geometric-style pottery derived from a “widespread and basic water-related, near-iconographic tradition of ritual marking… probably related to social and economic seasonal activities concerned with the frost, the thaw, the flood, the rains, the renewal of life in the spring, the migratory appearance of fish in the rivers, the spring awakening of the bear from hibernation, and all the many changes in human social-economic activities related to water. Almost all Upper Paleolithic and mesolithic sites are… located near water, whether rivers, springs, lakes, coasts, bogs, or marsh. The seasonal changes in water-related phenomena would represent crucial events in the life and thoughts of a hunter-gatherer.” In this respect water was a structuring concept, not the chaos symbol it later became.
Through its association with the oceanic tides, the moon was linked to the primeval water principle. Also lunar was the monthly flow of menstrual blood. Accordingly, the moon was linked to the female principle in becoming civilization’s first measurer of time.
There were two kinds of water, salty and fresh. Only salty ocean water had tides, and hence only it reflected lunar rhythms. On the other hand, the weather rhythms of rain and snow, rivers, and storm waters were annual. A logical set of associations can be traced from the Bronze Age onward. In the oldest versions of the Sumerian Creation myth, wrote the British cuneiformist Wilfred Lambert[6] (1968: p. 33), the moon goddess Nammu came first. “She is here called ‘the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth,’” and also was “the mother of Enki and all the gods.” The Babylonian Creation began with the male Apsu mixing his fresh water with Tiamat’s salty ocean water. Lambert also pointed out[7] (pp. 198–126ff.) that “The idea that in the beginning only water existed is found in Homer (‘Ocean’), ancient Egypt (Nun at Hermopolis), in the Babylonian Enuma Elish (the male Apsu and female Tiamat), and in ancient India (the Rig Veda).”
In his classic study of The Evolution of the Dragon (1919: p. 33),[8] G. Elliot Smith pointed out that in antiquity water “became an essential part of any act of ritual rebirth. As a baptism it also symbolized the giving of life. The initiate was reborn into a new communion of faith.” Water’s life-giving properties inspired its use as a libation to inaugurate new enterprises in general. This tradition survives in our own time for christening ships, as well as for baptisms. And inasmuch as most archaic creations were considered to be births, it was normal for the carving and presenting of statues to involve baptism ceremonies. (In Egyptian, “to make” such an object was represented by the word mash, meaning birth or “a newborn,” as a kid or calf.)
Reviewing symbolism from around the world, Smith[9] (1919: pp. 79ff., 190, and 231) showed how the ideas of water, the moon, and the rhythms of time have been combined in the dragon image. From Bronze Age Sumer and Egypt through classical antiquity, and from India with its great Naga to China, Japan, and North and South America, the sky-dragon was an emblem of earthly rain and clouds, thunder and lightning, the orderly cosmos and the storm. “The fundamental element in the dragon’s powers is the control of water. … Wherever the dragon is found, it displays a special partiality for water. It controls the rivers or seas, dwells in pools or wells, or in the clouds on the tops of mountains, regulates the tides, the flow of streams, or the rainfall, and is associated with thunder and lightning. Its home is a mansion at the bottom of the sea, where it guards vast treasures, usually pearls, but also gold and precious stones. In other instances the dwelling is upon the top of a high mountain; and the dragon’s breath forms the rain-clouds. It emits thunder and lightning.” The Egyptians held that “the sun-god was born of the celestial cow Mehetwēret” (“Great Flood”), thereby identifying the moon with the cow and ocean.
Outside of Mesopotamia the dragon often took on male characteristics as calendars shifted from a lunar to a solar basis. In such cases the female aspect usually remained as a secondary complement. Smith[10] (pp. 209f.) found a residue of lunar worship in the Greek Aphrodite, who “not only initiated the measurement of the year, but she (or her representative) lent her name to the opening of the year in various countries.” Similar goddesses include Diana and Ariadne (sister or half-sister of the labyrinth’s Minotaur).
The dragon encircled the world, as did the starry sky. And just as the stars were divided into segments—the 27 or 28 star-groupings of the lunar zodiac through which the moon passed on its monthly course, later consolidated into the 12 constellations of the solar zodiac—so the dragon’s body was a composite of these zodiacal animals. It had a head and tail, the head beginning the month or year, the tail ending it. Time being circular, the head often was portrayed biting its tail—the ouroboros symbol (Illustration 1.6).Missing IllustrationCan you help us find this illustration?OpenSee All Queries The transition point was celebrated by a lunar or solar feast, a Saturnalia-type festival which was a kind of chaos preceding the creation of a new periodic order.
Smith pointed out that New Year’s Day “was necessarily the earliest celebration of an anniversary, and the prototype of all the incidents associated with some special day in the year which have been so many milestones in the historical progress of civilization.”[11] Saturnalia festivals preserve age-old characteristics of such feasts, including the drinking of alcoholic beverages or perhaps even taking drugs, as the term “aphrodisiac” recalls (and also the term “lunacy,” which probably refers to behavior at lunar-type festivals as much as to the full moon’s influence in itself).
Later, such occasions became solar-oriented Saturnalia. The word is significant, for the outermost planet, Saturn, is the outermost and slowest-moving planet visible to the naked eye. It takes 29 or 30 years to revolve around the sun, recalling the 29 1/2 days of the monthly lunation cycle. The next most distant planet, Jupiter, takes 12 years to make this revolution through the signs of the zodiac. Numerologically, this recalls the 12 months of the year, and hence the sun. Yet by the time we can pick up Saturn in the archaic record, it has become “the planet of justice” (Babylonian Nabu) and hence is associated with the sun-gods of justice (Jastrow 1909).[12] This apparently represents the solarization of an originally lunar principle.
What was occurring at these New Year festivals was a restoration of order out of chaos. Saturnalia were times of release. They released pent-up emotions, and also literally prisoners, exiles, and social obligations, above all debts, either by settling them or forgiving them.
In the Babylonian Creation ritual the ruler acted the part of the sun-god Marduk in subduing a stand-in for the lunar-dragon Tiamat (who, by the second millennium, had become a chaos-dragon). In a long tradition, Mesopotamian rulers used the occasion to hold court to cancel agrarian debts (primarily back taxes and related obligations), and often criminal penalties as well as public dues. (Modern Christian priests forgive personal sins on more frequent occasions, but the idea of purgation is similar.)
Water made its ritual appearance in the form of “washing” the debt tablets, literally dissolving them as part of the proclamation of economic freedom—that is, freedom from debt—that was part and parcel of re-creating order in financially complex societies. The foreheads of Mesopotamian debt-slaves were “washed,” that is, cleansed of their stigma of debt-servitude. This washing away of the accumulated imbalances that had built up over time was the worldly dimension of Bronze Age New Year and its social renewal. The re-created world appeared iconographically as emerging from a Flood.
The Babylonian Creation myth Enuma Elish describes how the solar deity Marduk imposed order onto watery-lunar chaos. This idea reappears in transmuted form in Genesis and Job, in the victory of Osiris over his enemy Set, and in numerous Greek variations including Apollo’s destruction of Python at Delphi. All these myths describe the vanquishing of lunar-related disorder, whose image is the dragon or Python, the old symbol of the lunar zodiac and order goddesses.
The only surviving full version of the Mesopotamian New Year ritual was compiled in the Neo-Babylonian empire of the seventh century BC, but its roots go back to third-millennium BC Sumer, where it is found in Gudea’s description of the festival in his city-state Lagash.[13] In all these versions the Creation is essentially an imposing of solar regularity on lunar irregularity. “In the beginning” the universe consisted of a chaotic mass of darkness and water. As noted above, water’s seasonal movements—rainfall, the melting snows, and the swelling of rivers—had long symbolized the principles of regularity, fructification, and calendrical knowledge. But by the Bronze Age the association of water with the moon likened it to calendrical formlessness. The new imagery depicted water in its unruly manifestation as storms. The symbolism of water/storm/dissolution recurs in the Egyptian, Phoenician, and Vedic creation myths, in the Ugaritic sea-deity Yam, and in the classical monsters Rahab, Tannin, and Leviathan.
In the Babylonian myth it is the primeval sweet-water body Apsu that signifies the principle of measured order, while the oceanic Tiamat represents unbounded disorder. This protean pair of water-beings, Apsu and Tiamat, gave birth to two pairs of children, who in turn engendered the sky-god Anu, the highest god in the Sumerian pantheon. Anu begot his likeness Enki, who corresponds to Babylonian Ea and Neo-Babylonian Oannes, as well as to the Greek Hermes, Roman Mercury, and Egyptian Thoth. All are patron deities of astronomy, wisdom, music, and writing. In the Sumerian myth, Enki appears as a god of wisdom and magic—and also of trickery, like Hermes, Mercury, and also Loki in Teutonic mythology. It no doubt was through the development of astronomical and calendrical notation that these gods became patrons of writing, and also of magical symbols, often calendrical in character.
The offspring of these first gods brought disharmony (noise) into the cosmos. Apsu demanded that their creation be undone so that quiet could be restored and the gods could rest. But Enki/Ea made a magic circle and recited an incantation over Apsu’s sweet water to put him to sleep. He removed Apsu’s royal crown and radiance, and then slew him and established a new abode, which he named after Apsu and into which he and his wife moved. There they begot the sun-god Marduk, who was suckled and nurtured by all the goddesses and gods so as to imbibe their divine powers.
All this was before the earth and mankind had been brought into being. Their creation is explained by the story of how the resentful Tiamat sought to overthrow Marduk for having killed her husband Apsu. To help her in this battle she gave birth to monsters. But Marduk defeated her in a great combat and formed the world out of her corpse.[14] Half her body became the sky while the other half made up the earth. Thus, like most other creation epics, the Enuma Elish divided the primordial formlessness in two: The earth was separated from the sky, and solid land rose out of the watery mass.
“The concept of the splitting and separating of Heaven and Earth as a prime act of creation is known from the Orphics in Greece, the oldest preserved Sumerian myths and later Mesopotamian texts, from Gen. i, and from ancient India,” noted Lambert[15] (1968: pp. 126f.; see also 1968: p. 33). At Ashur, “a hill (like Zion)… was a sacred spot in prehistoric times.”Verify CitationCan someone with access to this text verify the page number(s) and that the text in the quotation is accurate to the original source?OpenSee All Queries Outside of Mesopotamia, myths depict mountaintops rising above the flood waters as the first land, to become dwellings of the new gods. Zeus lives on Olympus, Ugaritic Baal on Sapanu, and in a modified form we find Yahweh of Sinai or Horeb. But in Mesopotamia’s flat, riverine landscape the “mountain” had to be built laboriously with hundreds of thousands of baked bricks—the famed ziggurats.
Step pyramids were the ritual center of every Sumerian city and were a virtual cosmos in themselves. They were bridges between heaven and earth, embodying calendrical mathematics and related architectural iconography. In Egypt the steps became smooth walls, but the basic principle remained that of a four-sided, manmade mountain aligned to the cardinal directions, rising up from the flat riverine plain toward the heavens.
Calendrical order was created by the lord of the heavens causing the moon and sun to shine and trace out regular time patterns. Marduk created stations in the sky for the great celestial deities—the zodiacal constellations through which the sun, moon, and planets passed. The rising and setting of these bodies divided the years into months and days. In fact, these temporal movements also established the earth’s east–west directionality inasmuch as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, while sliding along the horizon from north to south and back as it rises between the solstices. This S-shaped fluctuation occurs in lengthening arcs as one moves north or south of the equator. The resulting linkage between time and directionality helped inspire the ziggurat’s astronomical symbolism.
In a manner reminiscent of the Babylonian epic, the biblical Genesis depicts the creation as proceeding from a state of chaos. On the first day the Lord separates light from darkness by proclaiming, “Let there be light.” On the second day He separates the sky from the waters. He creates land on the third day, and provides it with vegetation. However, the creation of animals and mankind must await that of order in the starry heavens. This takes place on the fourth day, when the Lord says (much like Marduk in the fifth tablet of Enuma Elish): “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them serve as signs to mark the seasons and days and years.”
With the creation of the sun, the moon, and their calendrical relationships in the Babylonian epic, the gods who had joined the rebellious ranks of Tiamat were taken prisoner and made to work as servants of Marduk and his allies. Their disobedience to authority represents the Babylonian version of original sin. When they protested against their onerous labor, Marduk consulted with Ea and decided to kill their ringleader and create mankind with the latter’s blood. The task of these new men was to serve the gods—a genealogy that explained the hard plight of temple and palace dependents, if not indeed most of the population.
This myth, explaining the human condition under agriculture and urban industry, made sense to Mesopotamia’s centralized society, but in the Levant and Mediterranean the Lord did not create mankind to serve the gods. The Lord of Genesis provided a bountiful nature to serve the descendants of Adam and Eve. He created fish and birds on the fifth day, and then created land animals, including man in His own image to rule over the rest of earthly creation. He then sent mankind forth to multiply and subdue the Earth and its living creatures, without any explicit subordination to temples or palaces.
The Semitic name Adam means literally red earth (Diakonoff 1982).[16] Four thousand years ago this may have had a special meaning: It perhaps referred to the earth reddened by sacrificial blood in archaic renewal festivals where the lifeblood of bulls was poured out to imbue the sacred ground with vital fertilizing power for the coming year. The underlying idea may extend back to the neolithic or even the Ice Age.
| Some Leading Dualities of Archaic Cosmological Thought | |
|---|---|
| Primordial Nature | The Kosmos as Shaped by Deities |
| Chaos | Order |
| Formlessness | Form (often geometric shapes, up to the dodecahedron) |
| Night (dark) | Day (light) |
| Moon (lunar year) | Sun (solar administrative year) |
| Cow (specifically, bison) (28 ribs)[17] | Horse (36 ribs) |
| Water | Sky and earth |
| Salt water (Tiamat, Set, Vitra) | Sweet water (Apsu, Marduk, Horus) |
| Noise (dissonance) | Harmony and concord (or silence) |
| (Female) | (Male) |
| Various “good/bad” oppositions were fit into origin cosmologies in ways that varied from one region to another, as did the symbolism of colors and other local phenomena. | |
| Classical Moral Oppositions | |
| Bad/Ugly (kakos) | Good/Beautiful (kalos, aristos) |
| Loony, moonstruck | Balanced and ordered |
| Hubris and selfishness | Even temperament and altruism |
| Confusion of ranks | Clear hierarchies of authority (“law and order”) |
| Inequity | Justice and righteousness |
| Economic anarchy (accumulation of debts and property inequities) | Periodic renewal and Clean Slate (redistributions and amnesties) |
| The old outgoing year | The New Year |
A common feature of all these origin epics is their categorizing the world in terms of paired opposites, contrasting order and chaos (Table 1.1). And one of the most striking characteristics of the archaic search for order is its ability to find calendrical parallels or, in the case of social institutions, to construct analogs to calendrical structures. (The Stoics called these parallels sympatheia, “sympathies.”) The creator of a kosmos was an inspired artist structuring society as the model of nature in a tightly composed web of parallels which permeated all aspects of life. Diverse phenomena were correlated across the spectrum, including human society as well as physical nature. As much aesthetic energy went into the ordering of these mythic and administrative constructs as into material artworks. Social planning, public architecture, music and dance, poetry and pictorial art, and even costume and dress, medicine and table manners, were elevated by their integration with the calendrically ordered kosmos.
Bronze Age myths viewed deities as embodying formal principles or essences. As the French anthropologist Louis Gernet[18] (1981: p. 4) has observed with regard to the classical Greek kosmos: “It is especially in the perception of an ordered universe that human thought makes contact with the divine. Here ‘Zeus’ becomes merely a symbol of what is perceived as an impersonal structure. When the Greeks speak of divine causality, they deliberately make use of a collective or neutral expression such as ‘the divinity’ or ‘the gods.’” To be sure, myths clothed abstract principles in lively anthropomorphic terms. But seemingly incidental numerological information often hints at an underlying cosmological structuring, as is found in the Sumerian King List and biblical Patriarch List. This abstract numerological and astronomical matrix meant that the gods grounded their rule of the earthly kosmos in principles of timeless and objective celestial justice.
The creation of order had an ethical dimension that elevated communalist principles of social balance over those of individual personality. The objective was to subordinate personal egoism to formal constraints of distributive justice. The New Year renewal of nature accordingly was accompanied by rulers re-creating social justice and a well-balanced earthly kosmos. This re-creation of order was a “total” across-the-board phenomenon. The kosmos-building that underlies these archaic myths provided a “general field” view of nature and society, linking distributive justice to the periodic rhythms and cosmological proportions of nature.
Mesopotamian temples employed dependent labor taken out of its traditional family context. Widows and orphans, the weak and infirm, and the crippled and blind were individuals without family support. These individuals were not enslaved, but neither were they economically free. Historians classify them as “unfree labor,” an in-between category with many shadings. Debt-servants could be redeemed by paying off their obligations, while war captives could be ransomed by merchants acting on behalf of their home-city temples. (However, once debt-servants or captives were sold to distant regions, they usually became de facto slaves.)
Dependent labor had to be provided with food, oil, and other rations on a regular basis. This required the development of uniform measures, and also months of equal duration (for otherwise, one set of rations would have had to be measured out for, say, a 29-day month and another for a 30-day month). The solution was to create an administrative calendar composed of modular 30-day months and a 360-day civil year, with a festival added “outside” the civil calendar to fill out the actual solar year. This convenient 12/30/360 proportionality enabled temples and palaces to distribute rations regularly each month. This simplified account-keeping and forward-planning.
The perception that the untempered natural calendar was out of tune astronomically and musically (the year being an inconvenient 5 1/4 days longer than a “round” 360) formed an analogy for society’s general need for reordering. Adjusting the calendar thus became an analog for the active readjustment of social balances generally. As Bronze Age society became more complex, so did the scope of the required re-creations of order, which took on an increasingly financial dimension.
As public utilities, the temples played a central role in providing seed grain, tools, and plow animals. By buying crops or acting as umbrella organizations for commercial trade ventures, the temples provided the community’s landed families with silver, which then was used to buy imported goods or to reinvest in the foreign trade conducted under temple sponsorship.
To coordinate these activities, temple accountants established “normal” prices for barley and other basic commodities, stipulated the fees for performing marriage and burial ceremonies, and standardized ration levels and interest rates, plot sizes, and seed allocations. Mesopotamia’s most important prices, rations, and interest rates were administered in round 1:1 or 2:1 ratios, as were land-rents and seed-grain allocations. One of the most important equivalencies was that of a shekel-weight of silver being worth a bushel (gur) of barley. This was the price at which the temples and palace normally bought barley from the community’s landed families, although prices might rise in times of drought or crop failure. The resulting set of proportions made record-keeping relatively easy for the temples and palaces.
As an outgrowth of coordinating commercial production, Mesopotamian temples extended quantitative relations into most aspects of their activities as they innovated civilization’s first large-scale handicraft industry and trade, profit-oriented capital and property, lending at interest, accounting systems, and writing. Given this broad range of functions, it was natural for temple planners to take a holistic, “total” approach to social structuring. And their centralized social order was sanctified by being built into the kosmos, its seasonal changes and monthly rituals and New Year coronation ceremonies with their “proclamations of justice.”
In our time, there is little public discussion about the core ordering of our social system, including the calendar’s monthly divisions along with our weights and measures, the musical scale, alphabet, coinage, and currency denominations. There seems no basis for admiring the cosmological interconnections of these phenomena. Calendrical divisions of time no longer provide a model for the weight and currency system, or for apportioning voting districts or the number of delegates to political assemblies. Modern calendrical, metrological, musical, monetary, and political systems have become self-contained products of custom, not worth examining to find an original inner pattern.
The resulting cosmological disintegration contrasts sharply with archaic norms of world order and social structuring. In antiquity, major social changes were reflected across the board, involving parallel restructurings of all the basic patterns of everyday life.
A classic example of kosmos-building is the great reform of the Athenian political system in 508 BC under Cleisthenes, the scion of one of the richest and oldest families, the Alcmaeonids. Following a period of political turmoil he managed to gain power and unseat the entrenched aristocracy. (Herodotus Book V, Chapters 66ff.[19] gives many of the details, and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society[20] treats this as the protean watershed of ancient city-building.)
Prior to this reform the Athenian citizenry was divided into four “tribes” (phyles), each of which was divided into three tryttes. This made 12 parts in all. Cleisthenes reduced the number to 10, as much for the sake of change as for anything else. He also shifted the basis of political life away from the aristocratic genos (noble bloodline) to the local geographic ward or deme, in which the urban demos-citizenry held the decisive voting power. Cleisthenes’s reform thereby established the fifth-century BC democracy which ushered in the great flowering of Hellenic civilization. He made the political ward rather than the clan the Athenian democracy’s most important political, voting, and fighting unit. Each deme had its own administrative organs, religious buildings, and tax obligations.
Cleisthenes’s political genius lay in knowing not to destroy the old order without creating a new one. Exemplifying the “total” character of his new social kosmos, he also changed the public calendar from a 12-month to a 10-month basis. Each administrative month or prytany was assigned 36 days, making a 360-day administrative year (although the Athenians continued to use their traditional lunisolar calendar for everyday activities). This enabled each of the 10 newly created tribal divisions to take its turn each year in administering the city-state’s political center, the prytaneion, on a rotating basis.
When additions to the Athenian tribes were made in the two centuries following Cleisthenes’s reform, they too were accompanied by parallel adjustments in the public calendar. The more tribes were added, the more months had to be factored into the civil year, so that each prytany-month had to be shortened. Such ongoing calendrical/tribal parallelism even in the face of radical restructuring helped maintain the principle of cosmological correspondences and sympatheia. Mundane life might not exactly be celestial, but at least earthly society remained a scale model of calendrical order.
Cleisthenes’s reform exemplifies a number of characteristics of archaic cosmologies. To begin with, new kosmoi tended to be introduced in periods of social disruption. As was the case at the conclusion of the Saturnalia, society literally was re-created. In the usual annual periodicities of ritual disorder, Bronze Age rulers restored social balance by handing down judgments and proclamations, sometimes laying out a new temple or other major public work, and perhaps conducting a census to divide the community into functional units.
Precisely because Cleisthenes’s reform was so far-reaching a break from the past, it had to be consolidated by parallel changes across the board. Yet his reform also shows how broad a leeway existed for flexibility in creating new social kosmoi. Changes often were made simply to distinguish new regimes from their neighbors or predecessors. Even changing a community’s mythical or eponymic ancestors was not uncommon. When Cleisthenes of Sicyon—the grandfather of the Athenian reformer—replaced Sicyon’s aristocracy with a more democratic regime, he changed the names of the local tribes. Calling his own the Archelai or “Rulers of the people,” he dubbed the other tribes “Pigmen,” “Donkeymen” and “Swinemen.” These names were retained for 60 years after his death (Herodotus Book V, Chapter 68[21]).
Such flexibility, and even the dimension of humor in kosmos-building, is age-old. Creation epics were freely rewritten so that genealogies of local gods and heroes featured the new leader’s own ancestral family. Some time around 2100 BC, the rulers of Ur’s Third Dynasty rewrote the Sumerian King List to expurgate the role played by their major rival city, Lagash. The latter published a parody featuring its own rulers, with conspicuously impossible exaggerations as to their dates. As a result of this kind of flexibility, few creation myths are alike. Each usually has its own twist, suggesting that individual kosmos-builders liked to invent their own elaborations.
No doubt most surviving myths are relatively late versions of earlier prototypes. The neo-Babylonian version of the Creation epic, for instance, replaced Sumerian Enlil with the city’s local sun-god Marduk. However, there can be no hope of discovering an original ur-kosmos from which all others derived. Too many variables are possible for any single construct to be deemed uniquely “natural.” Much room was available for local idiosyncrasy.
Despite the many calendrical and social changes in kosmoi from one region to the next, what was maintained was the idea of coordinating social and natural order across the spectrum. A change in any given element of the natural-social kosmos, such as the number of tribal divisions or voting districts, called for others also to be changed accordingly, above all the calendar as general analog of the overall system. Each hierarchy of order—calendrical, metrological, and social—remained an analog for every other.
The process of empire-building subordinated local deities to those of the victorious powers, compressing and synthesizing diverse kosmoi into a single system. This spurred monotheistic tendencies. In general, the direction of evolution ran from a complex diversity to a standardized simplicity. A common body of law was elaborated into general codes and uniformly applied to an increasingly integrated world. The result was a broad culture, sometimes imperial and sometimes more cosmopolitan and decentralized.
The modern epoch has a single worldwide calendar and metric system, but the idea of an overarching cosmology to interrelate them has been lost. The closest attempt in modern times to a thorough reorganization of the social-metrological kosmos occurred after France’s 1789 Revolution. As in Cleisthenes’s day, there was a broad scope for inventiveness in reordering everyday life. The French decimalized their calendar, as had Cleisthenes—and also decimalized their weights and measures into kilograms and meters. Recalling archaic Mesopotamian, Indian, and Asian practices, France changed the names of the months to reflect their characteristic economic activities. Each month was decimalized into three 10-day décades. The day was divided into 10 hours of 100 minutes each, and each minute had 100 seconds. As in ancient Egypt, the extra five days (six in leap year) were made into special festival days, intended to replace the Church’s saint’s days and other holidays. French documents and publications were dated from the year of the Revolution.
Napoleon returned France to the Gregorian calendar, but other revolutionary reforms have lasted longer. The French adopted a system of weights and measures based on the meter, one ten-millionth of a quadrant of the earth (drawn through Paris, of course). Kilograms and their decimalized divisions also were based on the metric system, while temperature units were based on volumes of water measured in Celsius degrees. These new measures symbolized the Enlightenment’s social values, ostensibly the rule of universal nature superseding the personal authority and measures of monarchs. A new currency system also was decreed. The old public debt was repudiated and much of the nobility’s property was redistributed. These reforms made the French Revolution the closest modern counterpart to Bronze Age reorderings and proclamations of justice. (The Soviet Union’s restructuring of its calendar and workweek, politics, religion, and economic system following its 1917 Revolution is the major example in the 20th century.)
Today, more than two centuries after the French Revolution, no restructuring of calendrical and physical measures accompanies new political changes. The inertia of custom makes such restructurings impractical, and there has been no recent revolutionary social change to spur radical transformation. When America incorporated Alaska and Hawaii as its 49th and 50th states in 1959, for instance, it would have been anachronistic to have changed the nation’s calendar, currency, and other subsystems from, say, a 48 (or 12) base to a 50 (or 100) base. The currency and calendar were not adjusted because there is no longer the concept of an underlying calendrical/metrological/monetary/political order to be disturbed. The United States has grown accustomed to altering (indeed, gerrymandering) electoral divisions at the national, state, and local levels without this affecting any perceived symmetry in the rest of its social structures.
Each aspect of modern life goes its own way in response to its own drives. Given today’s pace of change and the need for flexibility, matters hardly could be otherwise. It is the essence of the pragmatic scientific spirit of our times. Modern life would be anarchy if each new state that was incorporated into the union required a parallel shift in the matrix of our everyday life, its calendrical and currency systems. In short, each subsystem has become autonomous. The very idea of integrating social structures with those of physical nature flies in the face of contemporary thinking. Apart from the inertia of often idiosyncratic convention, there seems no particular reason for doing many things in the way we do. Children are taught to divide the hour into 60 minutes simply because that is what everyone has done for ages, not because there is a particular reason to base time-keeping on the number 60 rather than, say, 100. Little trace survives today of archaic attempts to integrate time-keeping with overall social ordering.
One result is that the child’s instinctive search for order is not encouraged. Textbooks flatly present arithmetic, geometry, the rudiments of astronomy, and music without pointing out their common denominators. Yet how much easier it would be to understand and remember facts by placing them in an integrated frame of reference! How much more interesting geometry would be if pupils were taught that the circle’s 360 degrees stem from the idealized image of a 360-day civil year.
Bronze Age cosmologies began with a faith that patterns of regularity could be deduced from the periodicities of nature. Astronomical, mathematical, geometric, and musical relationships were synthesized into an ordered symmetry. Diverse areas of knowledge were related in a comprehensive natural law. The result was a process of composing myths and cosmologies that could be understood on numerous levels.
In antiquity the structuring of everyday life was not represented as something arbitrary. Just as the Babylonians and Egyptians divided the administrative year into 12 months, so they divided the day into 12 “hours” (comprising two modern hours each). Each administrative month had 30 days. The day was thus a miniature year, containing 360 four-minute “minutes” in its 12 double-hours. This system is still preserved in drawing horoscopes: Each of the 12 zodiacal signs takes two hours to ascend over the horizon, and each of the zodiac’s 360 degrees lasts four minutes.
This kind of correlation is not explained to today’s schoolchildren. They are not initiated into the cosmological pedigree underlying our calendar, weights and measures, musical scale, and even the alphabet. The modern habit of decontextualizing knowledge into disciplines has left a gap. Lacking an across-the-board kosmos as an organizing principle, modern pedagogy becomes flat and uncreative. It has lost sight of the degree to which archaic kosmos-builders were social planners inventing civil formalities in the context of trying to create an overall natural order.
The “total” through-composed habit of social structuring made the archaic creation of order an aesthetic act calling for poetic effort. Ancient myths used these cosmological parallels to compress a relatively large volume of reference into a compact and intense space. Creation epics detailing a struggle among a dozen deities may be read on one level as reflecting how the lunar months were out of tune with the solar year, or on another plane as how the intervals of the musical scale needed to be tempered so as not to clash dissonantly. Archaic minds must have found a quintessential meaning in such parallelisms. In these respects the archaic kosmos served a powerful pedagogical function. It explained the nature of things in a concise and highly memorable way. This was especially important in preliterate societies transmitting knowledge via oral modes relying on memorization, which was aided by categorizing information in terms of numerical and calendrical patterns. And in addition to their ability to be read on more than one plane, myths, laws, and other ritual statements typically were composed in meter (and later in rhyme), using alliteration, punning, and double meaning as well as metaphor and multilevel allusions.
What Marshall McLuhan has observed with regard to modern communication applies equally well to that of the Bronze Age: The medium is the message, or at least helps shape it. Cosmologies were used as mnemonic systems to help organize knowledge. This practice in turn tended to bolster the doctrine of sympathies and correspondences. From archaic times through the medieval memory systems of Ramon Llull and Giordano Bruno, facts were recollected in terms of parallel formations within a broad, comprehensive structure.
Inevitably, this worked to imbue a faith in the world’s underlying order, structuring society as well as nature. For precisely because of its tight composition, kosmos-building was prone to serving the status quo. Cosmologizing was an elitist activity done “from above.” Rulers and their priesthoods projected earthly social relations of all types onto the heavens. The idea of social order based on the metaphor of a joint or fitting (arthron) led not only to the ideal of social harmony (armonia) but to the moral connotations reflected in the term aristos (“fittest, best”). This title was self-proclaimed by the cavalry-aristocracies that conquered Greece and Italy and parceled out the land among their own relatively narrow ranks.
To defend aristocratic self-interest, the Pythagorean version of the musical-social kosmos developed a “geometric” rationale endorsing existing inequities of wealth. In such apologetics the mundane political tail may be seen wagging the cosmological dog. Even when worldly life was quite unheavenly the calendrical order and its associated cosmological proportions were used as analogs for earthly hierarchies administered by inequitable oligarchies.
Yet at least nominally the cosmologies with which most Hellenistic aristocrats were indoctrinated remained idealistic. Although Stoic moralists happened to be among the richest men of their day, their stated objective was to deter personal selfishness, grandiosity, and hubris. (Seneca is a good example.) One may wonder just how seriously they took Aristotle’s maxim[22] (Politics Book I, Chapter ix) that personal wealth, especially in the form of monetary fortunes, tended to spur drives for unlimited material gains. In any event the classical aristocracies, unchecked by palaces or temples, changed radically from the customary openhanded behavior and mutuality of obligations of chiefs in low-surplus tribal communities.
In sum, the strength of kosmos-oriented information systems was their ability to interrelate and synthesize diverse fields of knowledge and aspects of life. But by the same token, a highly ordered world seemed to be an inevitable one. This paved the way for cosmologies to become propagandistic, and in the end to support the status quo’s inequities as well as its order.
Rather than expressing what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, the archaic social kosmos might well be called the collective consciousness. Stories of the underworld deities Inanna and Dumuzi, Ereshkigal and Orpheus, and of Aphrodite and the Minotaur certainly have a strong psychological dimension. But underlying this free imagination lies a carefully composed cosmological order. To analyze the zodiac-dragon or ouroboros swallowing its tail simply as representing an ophidian fear of snakes (as was done, e.g., by Mundkur 1983[23] in an article well controverted by Marshack 1984[24]) is to miss the astronomical imagery of an eternal return by the sun to its zodiacal point of origin, or of the moon to its new monthly beginning. The snake’s shedding its tail with the new year or month thus emerges as a key calendrical image, not merely a striking libidinous effect.
The archaic order was based in large part on numerology. The number 12 formed a common denominator linking the 12-month solar calendar to the dozen tones of the musical scale and the five “regular” geometric solids capped by the 12-faced dodecahedron. Large cities often had 12 gates symbolizing the months of the year, and amphictyonic leagues usually formed themselves into groups of 12 towns, each of which took turns administering the common ritual center. Thus, societies typically divided themselves into 12 tribes, from the Hebrew lands to Athens and the Etruscan federations. The Roman pound was divided into 12 unciae (troy ounces), and the rate of interest was one 12th (8 1/3 percent) per annum.
The numbers four and seven also were important modular keys. The typically four main gates and quarters of cities were aligned to the cardinal directions, which also signified the four seasons of the year. There were four elements, earth, fire, water, and air, which still survive in the astrological fixed signs of the zodiac: Taurus the bull, Leo the lion, Scorpio (earlier depicted as an eagle), and Aquarius the water-bringer. Likewise there were four humors, and four seven-day weeks in the 28 days of lunar visibility during each lunation cycle.
The seven days of our week are still named after the seven planetary deities representing the sun, moon, and five planets visible to the naked eye. Each of these bodies was correlated with one of the seven classical metals: gold, silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, and lead. Until the eve of modern times these elements were symbolized by the astrological symbols for their corresponding heavenly bodies. The Sumerian harps and classical lyres had seven strings each, and there are seven notes in normal musical scales (the modes, akin to the piano’s “white keys,” A through G). Seven stars are in the Pleiades constellation visible throughout the northern hemisphere. The cosmic-dragon had seven heads, and there were seven deadly sins and numerous other sevenfold gamuts.
In preliterate societies knowledge typically was learned by memorizing such gamuts of sevens, 12s, and so forth. To Bronze Age and classical observers these numerological correspondences seemed to embody a message that natural universals existed—universals that held the key to how society should be structured.
Calendrical proportions formed the basis for ration-measures and weights, as well as inspiring the way in which communities divided themselves into tribal units. Bronze Age temples and palaces distributed rations on a monthly basis. To use regular monthly measures for this purpose required standardized months of equal length. A symmetrical civil calendar also was needed to administer public offices and amphictyonic ritual centers on a rotating basis, so as not to favor one group over others as a result of the varying lengths of lunar months. Calendrical proportions likewise were embodied in public architecture in an attempt to legitimize their ruler-administrators. The idea was to make cities into microcosms of an idealized celestial order by organizing them according to the same principles as the heavens.
As academic learning has fragmented into autonomous disciplines, our educational system presents a labyrinth of everyday practices to be learned by rote rather than as plastic variables that may be restructured on major occasions as parts of a new unified order. Changes in any given part of this world can be made much more readily, thanks to their discrete and autonomous character. Thus, our world can change more easily and rapidly. But we are losing the holistic sense of social kosmos even as we penetrate the cosmos of outer space.
The calendar, so important for modeling antiquity’s social symmetry, has relinquished this role of providing a scheme for general kosmos-building. Modern calendars preserve various aspects of archaic order, but in ways that have been distorted by intervening epochs, above all that of imperial Rome. The result is that even many adults find it difficult to remember the monthly patterns at work. As schoolchildren we are taught the number of days in each month by such ditties as:
But no attempt is made to explain just how this came to be the case, and the inner pattern originally at work.
Ancient communities had a good reason to alternate one “full” and one short month, lasting 30 and 29 days, respectively. The lunar month averages slightly over 29 1/2 days. (Its exact length varies in response to secondary gravitational pulls.) Lunar calendars rounded off each month to the nearest number of full days on the basis of ad hoc observation. Each two-month period of about 59 days typically contained one long month of 30 days and a residual “empty” 29-day lunation.
As with so many other dimensions of ancient life, the disordering of the social-calendrical kosmos came primarily at the hands of Rome. For many centuries Rome’s lunar calendar contained a discretionary leeway for political manipulations or other adjustments (described by Michels 1967[25] and Richmond 1956[26]). The pontiffs announced how long each month should be, but they were as bad calendar-keepers as they were social stewards. By the end of the Roman Republic, deviations from the proper seasons had accumulated to such an extent that the nominal spring equinox had slipped some 80 days from where it supposedly had stood at the beginning of the Republic half a millennium earlier. This set the stage for a general calendrical reform, awaiting only a social crisis as catalyst, which finally came in the form of Rome’s Social War in the middle of the first century BC.
Just as earlier social restructurings usually were marked by new calendars—those of Solon of Athens at the beginning of the sixth century BC and Cleisthenes at its end, and also by Rome’s “Numa”—so Julius Caesar reformed the calendar after he reorganized the Roman state in 48 BC. When he visited Egypt in 47 BC he brought back with him an Egyptian astronomer, Sosigenes, to help refashion the Roman calendar on the basis of the 365 1/4-day solar year. The idea was to improve on the Egyptian calendar by adding to the 365-day Egyptian year an extra leap year day every fourth year.
To return the calendar to the place where it allegedly had stood under the legendary Numa, Caesar made 46 BC a 445-day year, setting the vernal equinox for March 25. This preserved a link with the Roman Republic going back to the sixth century BC. Although it ostensibly moved Rome away from its lunar traditions, a fatal vestige of the lunar heritage was preserved. For most archaic communities New Year fell on the solstice, viewing this as the year’s inception point, just as the new moon was “born” as a small crescent which then grows full. However, the Romans found the new moon—the calend—to be a good omen, and Caesar was seeking all the popular support he could muster. It seems that the nearest full moon in the year of his calendrical reform fell 10 days after the actual solstice on which the new year “logically” should have been born (so that it would grow from its smallest seed, the year’s shortest and darkest day). Caesar therefore set the date of the New Year, January 1, more than a week later. This left the solstice to fall untimely on December 21—not a very convenient solar date.Fact CheckIs the year actually begun 11 days late, not 10 days late?OpenSee All Queries
Other idiosyncratic Roman superstitions also shaped the new calendar. Egypt standardized its months at 30 days each, with a five-day New Year festival rounding out the year. But Rome had no such tradition, mainly because it never had large temple or palace estates requiring centralized forward-planning, monthly rations, and other such standardization as was needed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Caesar added not five but six extra days, lengthening every odd-numbered month—January, March, May, Quintilis/July, September, and November—to 31 days. This required a supernumerary day to be removed somewhere. It was taken from February, leaving that month with only 29 days except in leap year (still one more than is the case today). In making this pattern of months Caesar pandered to the Roman belief that odd numbers were lucky. His calendar had seven months with an odd number of days and five with an even number.
Even this imperfect reform was distorted almost from the outset. The month hitherto called Quintilis—literally “Fifth” in a year which originally had begun in March—was renamed July to honor Julius Caesar. This in itself did not cause a problem, for Quintilis/July was a full 31-day month. But when Caesar’s adopted son Octavian ascended to the imperium in 27 BC as Augustus (and became Pontifex Maximus in 12 BC) he felt he could not be slighted. In 7 BC he directed the Roman senate to rename the month Sextilis (“Sixth”) in his honor as August, and it too was assigned 31 days. This meant that yet another day had to be taken from February.
The lengthening of August further complicated matters by making two long months in a row. Instead of having a symmetrical six long and six short months, there was a pileup of long summer months. September lost a day, October gained one. The alternation between short and long months continued through November and December, resulting in a year composed of seven long months and five short ones. A combination of Roman superstition with the personal vainglory of its rulers thus deranged the calendar which Rome bequeathed to posterity.
| Original Julian Calendar | The Augustan Reform | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Long months of 31 days | Short months of 30 (and 29) days | Long months of 31 days | Short months of 30 (and 28/29) days |
| January | January | ||
| February | February | ||
| March | March | ||
| April | April | ||
| May | May | ||
| June | June | ||
| Quintilis | July | ||
| Sextilis | August | ||
| September | September | ||
| October | October | ||
| November | November | ||
| December | December | ||
Augustus’s successor Tiberius ruled from AD 14 to 37. Suetonius reported that the senate, eager to play up to his egotism, offered him his own month, but he refused it on the ground that “There are only 12 months. What will you do when there are 13 Caesars?”
As matters turned out, there were just 12 Caesars by the time Rome’s Praetorian Guard took matters into its own hands by murdering Domitian in AD 96. Thanks to Tiberius’s self-restraint we do not call September “Tiber,” October “Claudius,” November “Nero,” and so forth to create 12 31-day months—or alternatively, 11 such months with a truncated 24-day February called, perhaps, Domitia on the logic that a short month is appropriate for the final Roman emperor, who did not live out his full span of years.
For some parts of western civilization still more idiosyncratic reforms were yet to come. In founding Islam in the seventh century BC, Muhammad sought symbolic ways to distinguish his religion from its predecessors. Abandoning the solar calendar, he opted for a lunar 354- or 355-day year composed of 12 months of alternating 29 or 30 days. This is why the crescent moon appears on the flags of all Muslim countries, and why Ramadan (the month of fasting) slips ahead some 11 days each year in terms of the solar calendar. Over a span of just 16 years its celebration shifts from summer to winter. Thus, the Islamic calendrical reform is less stable from a calculation standpoint than the lunisolar Ice Age time-keeping principles more than 10,000 years ago.
This is the case with many other social institutions as well, above all those associated with periodically renewing social order. The most archaic societies developed trade and exchange, credit and interest, justice and freedom in keeping with their idea of natural order. Bronze Age debts were periodically canceled and property was redistributed when the social kosmos became financially unbalanced. But by the first millennium BC aristocracies replaced the archaic monarchies and their temples, and stopped these reorderings. The Bronze Age order was idealized as having been part of a lost Golden Age. This utopian idealization of a Golden Age when people had been free of avarice was attributed to stronger character formation of individuals by a less acquisitive type of society. The solution to Roman economic polarization was held to be a Stoic revival of altruistic character-building, not a general debt cancellation or reordering of the social kosmos.
The upshot is that although our own epoch still celebrates the New Year and other Saturnalia-type holidays, these have been removed from their original cosmological context. Their ceremonial symbolism has become merely vestigial, no longer vital.
While there seems little practical reason to undo the imperial Roman calendar now that it has become accepted worldwide, there may indeed be a virtue in proclaiming an economic Clean Slate to cancel society’s overburden of debts and other imbalances that have accumulated in recent times. I hope that the rest of this text may show that such social reorderings were, at one time, built into the cosmos itself as safety valves to release tensions, restore “straightness,” and thereby promote social development across the board, not leaving out the laggards and the poor but putting them on a self-sustaining footing.
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keyword: Kosmos, a symmetrical modular system to coordinate worldly rhythms and proportions.
Key image: Water as an ordering principle of regularity: the rising of rivers with the springtime melting of winter snows, and seasonal rains. It is traced in many Ice Age caves and inscribed on neolithic pottery in Mesopotamia, and flows from the jars held by the zodiacal Aquarius, the water-carrier (Sumerian Enki, Babylonian Ea).
Lunar symbol: The archaic order-goddess, who came to be depicted as a fertility goddess in the neolithic and then, as solar calendars replaced lunar ones, as a chaos-dragon of the salty sea (ruled by the moon).
Solar symbol: The creation (separation, demarcation) of earth from the formless sea, of shape from shapelessness, of solid land (characteristically in the form of a pyramid or temple) rising out of the primordial and formless waters. At the New Year festival the sun-god of justice (often impersonated by rulers) vanquished disorder in the universe and restored economic order in worldly social relations.
Principle of regularity: As standardized 30-day months replaced lunar ones, all dimensions of the archaic kosmos embodied symmetries based on the 360-day administrative solar calendar.
Periodic renewal ceremony: At the Babylonian New Year festival the Creation myth was sung twice and dramatically reenacted. Rulers proclaimed economic justice and equity upon ascending the throne and on other occasions as warranted.
International interface: Amphictyonic centers coordinated a higher comprehensive structure, integrating member communities and representing them collectively vis-à-vis foreigners.
Public character: Being based ultimately on the administrative calendar, all dimensions of the archaic kosmos were “reset” at the New Year festival by the ruler or, in tribal communities throughout the world, by the sky-chief.
Religious sanctification: Cosmology afforded a rationale for the status quo, restoring traditional order and social ligaments.
Ultimate dissolution: Hellenistic Mediterranean civilization fell into chronic slavery as social balance fell out of tune. Centralized temples and palaces, having played their catalytic role, no longer were needed in the new world of economic self-interest, laissez-faire, and market pricing. The calendar and other aspects of natural cosmology were decoupled from the comprehensive natural law of society.
Anthony F. Aveni, “Tropical Archaeoastronomy,” Science, Vol. 213 (July 10, 1981), pp. 161–171.
Photeine P. Bourboulis, “Ancient Festivals of ‘Saturnalia’ Type,” Hellenika Periodikon Suggramma Hetaireias Makedonikon Spoudon Parartema, Vol. 16 (Thessaloniki: 1964).
Igor M. Diakonoff, “Father Adam,” Archiv für Orientforschung, Vol. 19 (1982), pp. 16–20.
G.R. Driver, Semitic Writing From Pictograph to Alphabet (Oxford: 1948), pp. 157–158.Verify CitationOriginally in Chapter 1, this was cited as “G.R. Driver, Semitic Writing, From Pictograph to Alphabet (3rd ed., London: 1976).” The year and title punctuation were different from what we found. Can you help us verify the citation?OpenSee All Queries
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: 1959 [1954]).
Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: 1963).
Theodor Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the Ancient Near East (New York: 1950).
Louis Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Baltimore: 1981).
Morris Jastrow, “Sun and Saturn,” Revue d’Assyriologie, Vol. 7 (1909), pp. 163–178.
W.G. Lambert, “Origins in Ancient Mesopotamian Society,” 26th International Congress of Orientalists, 1964, Proceedings, II (New Delhi: 1968), pp. 33ff.
Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York: 1922).
Alexander Marshack, “Epipaleolithic, Early Neolithic Iconography” (1981), International Symposium on “The Culture of Lepenski Vir and the Problems of the Formation of Neolithic Cultures in Southeastern Europe.”
Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: 1972).
Alexander Marshack, “On the Dangers of Serpents in the Mind,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 26 (1985): pp. 139–152.
Alexander Marshack, “North American Indian Lunar-Year Calendar Stick,” 1984 mimeo.
Agnes Kirsopp Michels, The Calendar of the Roman Republic (Princeton: 1967).
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (New York: 1871).
Balaji Mundkur, The Cult of the Serpent: An Interdisciplinary Survey of its Manifestations and Origins (Albany: 1983).
Braughton Richmond, Time Measurement and Calendar Construction (Leiden: 1956).
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “The Envelopes That Bear the First Writing,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 21 (1980), pp. 357–385.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “From Tokens to Tablets: A Reevaluation of the So-Called ‘Numerical Tablets,’” Visible Language, Vol. 15 (1981), pp. 321–344.
G. Elliot Smith, The Evolution of the Dragon (Manchester: 1919).
Elizabeth Douglas van Buren, The Flowing Vase and the God with Streams (Berlin: 1933).
Carlo Zaccagnini, “Aspects of Ceremonial Exchange in the Near East during the late second millennium BC,” in Michael Rowlands, Mogens Larsen, and Kristian Kristiansen (eds.), Center and Periphery in the Ancient World (Cambridge: 1987), pp. 57–65.
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