10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis

Winter: The Archaic Order in Motion and Its Collapse

The Creation of Order

11. Periodicities of Property and Debt

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Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson has devoted his career to the study of debt.

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• Frontmatter
• Preface
• Prologue: What Are the Roots of Civilization?
• Chronology and Maps
• Spring: Establishing Society’s Structural Proportions
• 1. How the Archaic Kosmos Integrated Nature and Society
• 2. The Shift From Lunar to Solar Calendars and Counting
• 3. Measures, Rules, and Prices
• Summer: Balancing Self-Expression With Group Order
• 4. Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos
• 5. Music, Temperament, and Social Concord
• 6. The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets
• Autumn: The Division of Labor and Economic Justice
• 7. Social Division Into Calendrical Tribes and Ranks
• 8. From the Temple Corporation to the Family Oikos (Household)
• 9. The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth
• Winter: The Archaic Order in Motion and Its Collapse
• 10. Social Justice Sanctified, From Inanna and Nanshe to Nemesis
• 11. Periodicities of Property and Debt
• 12. The Cosmology of War
• Epilogue: Modern Civilization as the Destruction of Archaic Order
• Backmatter
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Lecture: How Temples and Religion Played a Central Role in Creating the Ancient Economic Order That Has Become Secularized Today
• Help Us Edit and Join This Collaborative Research Project
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• Style Guide for This Book

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Introduction

“The boundaries between the classes are maintained by the unwritten laws sustaining the order of society. The disregard of these is insolence (hubris) and calls down indignation (nemesis). … The thirst for fame and an unlimited self-esteem urge the man of the nobility forwards, and when misfortune overtakes him it is described as the envy of the gods; the gods regard his success as beyond what human powers should achieve.” — Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion (1964, p. 158f.)

“The Persian kings waged brutal wars, exacted heavy taxes from reluctant subjects, and harbored fears of palace revolutions spawned by ambitious courtiers. But… the Achaemenids commissioned the creation of a consistently idealized vision of kingship and empire—a vision which stressed images of piety, control, and harmonious order.” — Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979, p. 2)

Philologists still disagree about the linguistic roots of the word “religion.” A widespread view derives it from Latin “ligere,” meaning to tie or unite (as in “ligament” or “ligature”). This would make religion represent society’s binding ethical philosophy. Archaic religion certainly was developed to sanctify social ligamentation. Only in economically decadent periods did it become more individualistic and merely “personal” in character.

Religion coordinated all aspects of social intercourse, including the earliest documented formal commerce and credit. The idea evidently was to ground the sanctity of society’s laws and practices deeply within the spiritual values of its members. Religious rituals and traditions preserved values literally by sanctifying weights and measures, laws, and social values. Temples provided a forum to hand down judgments, bolstered by the practice of litigants and witnesses taking sacred oaths. They also stored society’s grain and public savings. By casting these savings into sacred statues, golden garments of the gods, and related paraphernalia, temples rendered silver and gold inviolable against local military attack. In sum, they coordinated all aspects of social intercourse, including the earliest documented formal commerce and credit. The idea evidently was to ground the sanctity of society’s laws and practices—and the spirit of the commonweal—deeply within the spiritual values of its members. Popular oral traditions kept alive the sense of retributive and redistributive justice in the form of Nemesis, the avenging goddess punishing individuals who succumbed to the hubris of grandiosity.

Archaic law sought to preserve general self-sufficiency for society’s families and clans. To “proclaim justice” meant to restore this self-sufficiency by canceling agrarian debts and freeing individuals who had fallen into debt-slavery. This restored a free and land-tenured peasant-army by reversing the enslavement of debtors and eviction of peasants from their lands.

Aristocracies overthrew this archaic spirit of the law by stopping debt cancellations. Henceforth, freedom proclamations were enacted only in economic emergencies such as that which confronted Solon in Athens in 594 BC, and Sparta in the third century BC. By the time of the Roman Empire, economic polarization became so extreme that society was driven to enact the greatest Clean Slate of all time: Usury and chattel slavery were permanently banned.

I put this in as a caveat that we are dealing with the public representation of reality, not with the day-to-day nitty-gritty. It stands as an ideal—and religion and god itself always have been an ideal—an eternal ideal contrasted with the transitory life and also the moral fallibility of humankind.

In a single chapter I hardly can survey the broad sweep of human religion. Rather than attempting to pontificate on the spiritual and inner psychological aspects of religion through the ages—ideas about death, life and the afterlife, the human spirit, and higher powers—this chapter limits itself to the worldly aspects of religion. I concentrate on its role in shaping social values regarding society’s economic activities. For sacred or ceremonial rituals indeed played a major economic role.

Archaic religion was not as otherworldly or ecstatic, subjective or individualistic as we tend to think of it today. Sins were not primarily personal (a matter between sinners and god); they were crimes against the community. More specifically, they were something that cost the community, and for which restitution in the form of fines was levied on the offenders. In my reading it was social ethics, and it is in this respect that it is treated in the present chapter. Morality itself was social before becoming privatized and personal.

And by the same token, without understanding the economic and social relations of archaic societies, we cannot understand the functions which religion fulfilled.

The earliest social sin was that of not paying one’s way. Only later did personal redemption develop on an individualistic basis. (The individual was redeemed, just as were slaves.)

Temples also were asylums for the mistreated, for fugitives of all sorts.

Religion was a civilizing force even before there were cities; and in turn it became a major factor defining the sacred areas that would evolve into civilization’s first towns.

Certainly religion was a major factor in the emergence of royalty. It laid down the social and ethical obligations of rulers.

Religion served to reinforce systems of mutual obligations and maintenance of a well-ordered kosmos, including status and ranks.

Punishments

The first sanction was that of the blood-feud to punish a murderer of one’s family—that is, to remove the community’s murder-pollution. Religion and exile were thus linked (and hence the city of refuge found in biblical times).

Also sanctioned was the obligation to redeem the lands of a family member.

Omitted TextThere were originally two stub paragraphs here that we omitted due to their incomplete nature. Can you help us flesh them out and work them back into the chapter here?OpenSee All Queries

Here, I focus largely on Mesopotamian religion. The region’s two great contributions to civilization have been called writing and law. (Alphanumeric Notation and the Calendrical-Musical Kosmos has described writing.) The role of law was to reflect cosmic order, or more accurately, to create it on earth to encompass the increasingly complicated economic relations of commercial Mesopotamia, its trade and colonization, its debts and slavery, its trade, its weights and measures, and its public and private sectors.

The creation of cosmic order was to subordinate commerce to law, and also the rulers who gained increasing power as economic life became more centralized. Rulers were obliged to obey the law of the cosmos, for they drew their authority from their local sun-gods of justice. (See Hawkes.)Specify CitationCan you help us identify this text so we can add a full citation, footnote, and Bibliography entry?OpenSee All Queries

As social life became more specialized and hence articulated, lawsuits arose. Religion played a major role in the taking of oaths, as is still done in modern courts of law (by swearing on the Bible).

In neither Babylonia nor Egypt have translators found terms or words for the generalized concepts such as “religion,” “priest,” “piety,” and “belief,” at least not in the modern sense of these terms. Precisely because of the worldliness of archaic religion, temple administrators were known by their specialized function.

In short, we find a convergence between sacred and legal functions, and an overlapping with what today would be considered to be commercial functions and offices.

Omitted TextSee Road Map to Understanding This Chapter on the General Queries page for this chapter.OpenSee All Queries[See omitted section Road Map to Understanding This Chapter in this query on the General Queries page for this chapter.]

The Philology of Order

Modern order-related words derive from Latin “ordo,” meaning originally a line (of men), hence sequence, as in numerical or alphabetic order. The words “order” and “rank” are semantically akin to the rungs of a ladder, and imply subordination: A superior gives orders in a chain of command.

The “total” throughcomposed habit of social structuring made the creation of order an aesthetic act calling for poetic effort. Some philologists (e.g., Shipley 1984: pp. 16ff.) derive “ordo” from Greek “arthron,” meaning “joint” (whence the word “arthritis”), the same root as for “art” and “arrangement,” “articulate” and “arithmetic.” This idea of joining or fitting is related to that of “ligature” (“connection”) and “religion” (from Latin “ligare,” “to bind”) in that both have the meaning “to connect,” or tie.

If the root of “religion” is “ligament” (from the Latin root “ligare”), binding society together, it is also related to the Roman “lictor,” “binder” (as Plutarch pointed out in his Roman Questions #67), and hence to human “bondage,” most characteristically for debt. But Benveniste (1973: pp. 516ff.) disagreed with this derivation, and said it was a Christian misreading by Lactantius: “While it is false historically, the interpretation of the word by ‘religare,’ ‘to tie, bind,’ which was invented by the Christians, is significant for the renewal of the notion: religio becomes ‘obligation,’ an objective bond between the believer and his God.” Thus Lactantius defined “religio” as a “‘bond’ of piety” binding the Christian to god. But “Originally religio did not mean ‘religion’; that at least is sure.” Benveniste found it rather to be “a term of the augural language… [It] denotes a ‘scruple relating to the omina,’ that is to say a subjective frame of mind. … It is no accident that it is only in Christian writers that we find the explanation of religio by religare. … For a Christian, what characterizes the new faith in opposition to the pagan religions was the bond of piety, this dependence of the faithful on God, this obligation in the true sense of the word. The concept of religio was remodeled…” Still, the fact is that key obligations were indeed sanctioned by religious power in its concrete, worldly sense of making the fine (“punishment”) fit the crime in making proper restitution to the injured party.

What Benveniste (1973: p. 499) was able to show was the link between Greek “litḗ,” “lissomai,” meaning “prayer, to pray,” and Latin “litare, ‘to obtain a favorable omen, to appease the divinity.” He cited the Latin vocabulary for signs and omens. One such sign was “monstrum,” “‘a creature whose abnormality constitutes a warning’ (moneo, ‘to warn’).” Ironically, this is linked to the word “money”—via Juno Moneta. Yet the origins of many kinds of payments—and especially sanctions governing their collection—were indeed sacred.

This point was made by Georges Dumézil in his study of Mitra-Varuna (1988), seeking some common bonds between the Vedic and Roman deities.

Varuna was the “binder,” both in the sense of binding to correct behavior, and punishing those who have failed in their duties. The Roman ruler was accompanied by his lictores, “‘men with staves, keeping off the populace, and they were girt with thongs with which to bind at once those he ordered to be bound.’”

Antithetical however was the flamen dialis, whom Dumézil held represented “anti-binding,” able to free persons who had been bound.

Dumézil found that Mitra signified “personified contract.” Mitra and Varuna were linked with the idea of debt, being called (Rig Veda II, 27.4) “those who collect, gather in, exact repayment of, debts.” The idea was that just as a defaulting Roman debtor could be bound to their creditor in debt-servitude (the nexum institution), so in Vedic times insolvent debtors were bound in the same way as persons lax in sacrifice (Dumézil 1988: p. 98 and his bibliography).

The Latin word “nexum” comes from “node” (as in “knot”). However, Dumézil added, “Latin is the only Indo-European language in which the vocabulary of debt is constituted by such clear-cut terms.”

Benveniste (1973: p. 442) wrote: “Why were the gods invoked? This is because the punishment of perjury is not a human concern. No ancient Indo-European code provides a sanction for the perjurer. The punishment is regarded as coming from the gods since they are guarantors of the oath. Perjury is an offence against the gods.”

Benveniste (1973: pp. 389ff.) in fact related Latin “ius” (from which we got the English “justice”), usually translated as “law,” to the verb “iurare,” “to swear,” i.e., an oath. “A number of texts show that in Rome ‘to swear’ (iurare) is to pronounce a formula, the ius iurandum ‘oath,’ literally ‘a formula to be formulated’… In fact the person swearing must repeat word by word the formula imposed on him.”

We are brought back to the concept of regularity inherent in archaic order by the fact that “The Indo-European word *yous meant ‘state of regularity, of the normality required by the rules of ritual.’… Here “ius denotes the ‘formula of normality,’ prescribing what must be conformed to. Such is the foundation of the idea of ‘law’ in Rome.” But only in Latin is the idea of “law” identified so closely with that of “the oath” (Benveniste 1973: pp. 391f.).

It is in this respect that the originally sacred idea of social regulation is found surviving in the Roman “rex,” as anticipated briefly in Measures, Rules, and Prices. “[I]n the most ancient sense of the word the name iudex was given to every authoritative person charged with passing judgment in a disputed case. In principle it was the king, the consul, the holder of all powers.” Semantically, it is related to “Homeric medéōn,” “the chief,” literally “the measurer” (Benveniste 1973: pp. 397, 400).Omitted TextThere was a note here we omitted; can you help us flesh it out and work it back into the chapter text?OpenSee All Queries

Nowhere is the economic role of religion more pronounced than in the case of debts, including conspicuously those for personal injury. In this respect religion lent divine authority to healing breaches among the community’s members.

Benveniste (1973: p. 63) noted that our word “damn” derives from Latin “damnare,” which means “to afflict a damnum [damages] on somebody, a curtailment of his resources; from this stems the legal notion of damnare ‘to condemn.’” But it had a specific financial connotation: One redeemed himself by paying the damages and thus restoring peace among the guilty and injured parties.

Transition NoteCan you help us work this into the body text of the chapter with transition and fleshing out?OpenSee All QueriesIn other words:

Obligations = shoulds.

Punishments = “shoulds” = fines.

Benveniste (1973: pp. 152f.) noted that the Gothic verb “skulan” means “‘to owe, to be obliged to’… either as a material or a moral obligation.” The noun “skula,” “debtor,” “designates the one who ‘owes’ money, is liable to some obligation, possibly some punishment, from which comes: culpable or accursed of in a criminal matter, etc. (cf. German schuldig ‘guilty’).”

The first debts to be sacred were those most binding to society: wergild obligations and their payments. The alternative to making such payments, exile, also was sacred—which is why the exiles were lifted upon the inauguration of a new high priest (e.g., in Hebrew law), as for a new ruler in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Here, in the realm of criminal amnesty, this Clean Slate was found for Egypt’s sed festival as well as in the Mesopotamian economic freedom acts traditionally proclaimed by new rulers upon their first New Year coronation ceremony/festival.

The philology of “credit” comes from “belief.” Antoine Meillet, in Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, Vol. 22 (1922), pp. 213ff., as quoted/cited in Dumézil 1988: p. 57, showed “that the word fides (root *bheidh-: Greek pheido, and so on) serves as a verbal substantive to credo,” that is, sharing the realm of religion and law. Magic and religion were linked, and the “faith” or “trust” had a ritualistic connotation.

The etymology for some important Indo-European “credit” terminology points to a derivation from the religious sphere. Our word “credit” derives from Latin “credo,” “I believe.” Specifically, modern creditors believe that the debtor will repay the loan. However, the first belief in a quid pro quo relationship apparently was grounded in the sacred sphere: According to Benveniste (1973: pp. 138–144), Sanskrit “śrāddha” (“belief, trust,” an offering at a shrine) implies an “act of confidence (in a god), implying restitution (in the form of a divine favor according to the faithful.” Only later were the ideas of “belief” and “trust” extended into the commercial sphere. Indeed, they were what helped establish this dimension of social relations. Brown (1947: p. 26, speaking of Homeric Greek society) rightly remarked that “political institutions at this rudimentary stage needed the support of religious sanctions, and were organized as religious ceremonies.”

Omitted TextSee the General Queries page for this chapter to see the omitted text.OpenSee All Queries

As Karl Polanyi and his collaborators tried so hard to establish in the 1950s, it took thousands of years for the pecuniary ideas of standard prices, fines, and taxes to create a general market mentality. Bulk commodity trade at customary prices replaced gift exchange and rudimentary barter by a circuitous route, drawing on many social sources. Among the noncommercial catalysts to pecuniary reckoning were legal fines, military organization, the organization of sacrifices, and no doubt communal contributions to the public feasts discussed in The Distributive Justice of Group Feasts and Banquets. From the Near East diffused an elaboration of temple activities into the commercial sphere. By the third millennium BC a common standard of value developed throughout the Near East.

Economic and Commercial Aspects of Mesopotamian Religion

Mesopotamian religion conceived of rulers as implementing a properly ordered society. What subsequently would become secularized originated in functions that were as worldly as they were sacred. Not until c. 2750 BC did Sumerian rulers emerge out of the temple priesthood as administrators (en) to become increasingly secular palace rulers, at first the ensi and then, upon conquering other towns as an army leader, a lugal. In either case the ruler governed as steward for the local justice-god (or goddess).

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.

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.)

The most important payments were for fees (not yet really taxes) and debts, particularly at harvest-time. Inasmuch as families on the land were for the most part self-supporting, there was not much silver apart from that generated by merchants, mainly through commerce.

This is why the constellation Libra came to rule the barley harvest month, which in Mesopotamia fell in May/June (Simanu, the third month of the Babylonian year which began on the spring solstice in mid-March, when the barley was just beginning to ripen).Fact CheckCan you help us verify this and/or add a source link here to cite in a footnote?OpenSee All Queries The most important things being weighed out were, first, the harvested crops, and second tenant shares, taxes, and debt-claims on this harvest. Some sales occurred (mainly to the temples and palace), but usually at fixed prices set by the state, at least under normal non-famine conditions.

Bernhard Laum placed great importance on the Greek aisymnetos, who was first found in the Odyssey as a judge at a match overseeing the wager, and the judge of communities in crisis situations. The word derived from the roots “symnos,” meaning “marker” as a musician marks time, and “aisios,” meaning the division of things. Thus the aisymnetos was the apportioner or divider.Translation CheckCan someone who understands Greek check the philology here? And can someone with access to the Bernhard Laum texts who can understand German check this point made for us?OpenSee All Queries “The gods rule and regulate the division. Zeus apportions to men their fate.”Translation CheckCan someone with access to the Bernhard Laum texts who can understand German check this quotation for us?OpenSee All Queries The idea was linked to that of “moira.” (Laum 1929: pp. 37f. believed it referred to parts of the animals consumed at the meal. Laum took as the basis for his view here that the division of the sacrifice was the most important archaic political act.) He cited Eduard Meyer’s translation of the term as “befitting,” that is, to give the appropriate portions. The goddesses Aisa and Moira are key here, akin to Latin “aequus” (identified with Juno).Translation CheckCan someone with access to Bernhard Laum who can understand German check the points made and the citation for us?OpenSee All Queries

Astronomy, Goddesses, and Justice

Our modern astrological sun-sign Libra (September 22–October 21)Fact CheckCan someone please check this fact? Have the dates of Libra in astrology changed throughout history?OpenSee All Queries follows Virgo, the fertility-goddess holding a sheaf of wheat (Spica). The next sign, Scorpio (scorpion/eagle), is taken to represent the highest ideals of justice and morality, thereby capping the autumnal triplicity of signs.

In the beginning there seem to have been four major astrological signs, one for each season‚ our classical “fixed” signs comprising Taurus (spring), Leo (summer), Scorpio/eagle (autumn), and Aquarius (winter).

Omitted TextThere was more text here about the “law-giving sky,” but it was a stub, so we omitted it. Can you help us expand it and work it into the text?OpenSee All Queries[Excursus on the ‘Law-Giving Sky’]

Omitted TextThere was more text here about false weights and measures, but it was a stub, so we omitted it. Can you help us expand it and work it into the text?OpenSee All Queries[False Weights and Measures]

Nilsson (1964: p. 189) stated that “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 alter the positive laws, Zeus sees that justice takes her proper course. For all primitive peoples law has divine sanction and authority.”

The Law-Giving Sky

Omitted TextThere was more text here about astronomy and the Egyptian sed festival, but it was a stub, so we omitted it. Can you help us expand it and work it into the text?OpenSee All Queries[Astronomy and the Egyptian Sed Festival]

Sun-gods almost universally were associated with overseeing honest weights and measures, fair prices, fines and punishments, the supervision of commerce, and, on the highest plane, social justice and equity. After all, it was the sun’s movement through the seasonal solstices and equinoxes—and later the 12-month zodiac—that divided the year into fractional periods, which were reflected in ration-weights and measures, tribal divisions, and so forth as described in the preceding chapters. The sun-god’s abstract social function was depicted as being that of measurer, apportioner, and lawgiver, that is, ruler in both senses of the term.

A Babylonian hymn to Shamash called on him to punish:

“the merchant [damgar] who (practices) trickery as he holds the balances,

who uses two sets of weights…

The merchant who practices trickery as he holds the corn measure,

who weighs out loans (or corn) by the minimum standard, but requires a larger quantity in repayment.” (Lambert 1967Specify CitationWhat text is referred to by “Lambert 1967”? There are Maurice Lambert texts with other years cited in other chapters; see the full book Bibliography for these candidates in case the year here was wrong or it was another edition of one of those texts.OpenSee All Queries: p. 133)

By rendering weights and measures sacred, the temples and their justice-deities sought to prevent administrators—and merchants, creditors, and tax collectors—from using false scales to defraud their customers. This is why the classical iconography for the goddess of law came to depict her as holding the scales of justice. By the second millennium BC such standardization contributed to social equity by freeing citizens from unfairly administered taxes, unfairly assessed repayment of barley or silver loans, or unfavorably measured retail purchases.

Egypt’s funerary symbolism of the soulMissing IllustrationCan you help us figure out what is missing here? Originally this was written with two parentheses with nothing inside, as “Egypt’s funerary symbolism of the soul () and good deeds”OpenSee All Queries and good deeds being weighed would seem to derive logically from the weighing out of commodities, rations, taxes, contributions, sales, or other payments or transfers.

In biblical society around the seventh century BC the task of condemning dishonest merchants had passed out of the hands of goddesses and administrative priestesses into those of the social prophets. Thus Amos (8:5) has the Lord denounce the wealthy Israelites “who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land” by scheming:

“‘When will the New Moon be over,

that we may sell grain,

and the Sabbath be ended,

that we may market wheat?’

skimping the measure (making the ephah small),

boosting the price (making the shekel great),

and cheating with dishonest scales?”

For such abuses, according to Amos, the Lord threatened to punish all Israel with famine. Likewise the prophet Micah (6:9) depicts the Lord lodging his charges against Israel:

“Heed the rod and the One who appointed it.

Am I still to forget, O wicked house,

your ill-gotten treasures

and the short ephah, which is accursed?

Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales,

with a bag of false weights?”

Leviticus (19:35f.) describes the Lord admonishing Moses to tell his followers: “Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight, or quantity. Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin” (a dry and liquid measure, respectively).

Perhaps the best-known biblical admonishment to employ honest weights and measures occurs in Deuteronomy 25:13–15: “Thou shalt not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. Thou shalt not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures… For the Lord your God detests… anyone who deals dishonestly.” (Kula 1986: pp. 9f. gave more examples from the New Testament and the Koran, with a brief discussion.)

The practice was for merchants to employ a light weight when lending out money or selling goods, and a heavy one when buying or when collecting debts so as to oblige a larger receipt of silver or other commodities.Omitted TextThe author had a note at the end of this paragraph that seems meant to prompt further expansion: “Fines as Important Archaic Prices.” Can you help us expand this stub?OpenSee All Queries

Ancient Kingship, Gods, and Justice

Of related importance to fixing the prices of barley and silver with respect to each other, the Neo-Sumerian laws of Shulgi (hitherto attributed to Ur-Nammu) prescribed a schedule of fines for various offenses: a mina for breaking someone’s nose with a knife, and 10 shekels for cutting off his foot. This standardization of fines seems to have been conceived as a logical extension of standardizing measures, weights, and prices. The price of barley was fixed at one silver shekel per gur (“liter”), and this parity remained fairly stable except in famine conditions.

The link between weights and measures on the one hand and the administration of justice on the other came to be reflected in classical times by the fact that the Greek term for measure, nomos, signified not only rules (in the sense of custom or usage, as well as market measures) but, on the highest plane, law itself.Translation CheckWe did not see evidence that nomos meant “measure” in Greek. It did indeed mean “law” or “rules” (source: Wikipedia). Can an ancient Greek language expert please weigh in?OpenSee All Queries

A broad genesis of interlinked ideas is apparent. Nanshe and Shamash (and in classical Greece, Nemesis and Zeus) reflected an imagery of the natural kosmos and its celestial cycles. Society’s economic relationships were regulated and regularized under a central organizing principle based on equity of distribution, whether of food and other means of livelihood, or of the laws of social obligations and proto-market functions.

The terms “king” and “sacred kingship” are often bandied about in an anachronistic manner. They call to mind European royal families, tsars, and emperors governing unilaterally through the force of their personalities, worshipped as divinities (as indeed the Roman emperors had themselves been worshipped). No such unilateral authority was found in most Bronze Age societies, save for military invaders such as Sargon (and we actually know little of the internal politics of Akkad). The term “divine kingship” suggests an automatic theological endorsement of royal power—an image of rulers worshipped as gods in human form, without any real countervailing power to their egoism. This kind of autocratic rule may describe Egypt’s pharaohs as deities on earth, but it certainly was not the case for Sumerian and Babylonian “rulers in justice” (shar misharum).Translation CheckCan you help us find a source or source link to cite for the ancient Babylonian phrase shar misharum?OpenSee All Queries Mesopotamian temples and their priests acted throughout the Bronze Age as constraints on (and often as direct rivals and unseaters of) royal power.

What ultimately was sacred were the law and its equitable judgment, not the person of the ruler. This is why judgeship was one of the original seeds of royal authority. Certainly the sanctification of rulers was designed to sanctify their law.Interchapter QueryThe author originally added here: “(In the next chapter I will discuss the case of Deioces of Ecbatana.)” Can you help us add this concept to Chapter 11?OpenSee All Queries

Illustration 10.1: “Stele of Hammurabi,” black basalt and engraving, 88.5 in x 31.1 in x 18.5 in, Louvre Museum’s collection, discovered in Susa between c. 1901 and c. 1902. In the famous stela (Illustration 10.1) the Babylonian sun-god Shamash is depicted seated on his throne, holding in his right hand the attributes of power: the scepter (rod) and “ring” or circular coiled-up rope. Hammurapi faces him to receive either these symbols or the laws themselves, or to submit his laws for Shamash’s approval. Photo by Mbzt under an Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

In the famous stela (Illustration 10.1) the Babylonian sun-god Shamash is depicted seated on his throne, holding in his right hand the attributes of power: the scepter (rod) and “ring” or circular coiled-up rope. Hammurapi faces him to receive either these symbols or the laws themselves, or to submit his laws for Shamash’s approval. Interpretations vary, but the subordination of Hammurapi and other Mesopotamian rulers to their city-gods was symbolized at the New Year ritual, when (at least in the Neo-Babylonian version) the ruler “came to the door of Marduk’s temple where he was met by the high priest, who took from him his ring, scepter, toothed sickle, and crown, and laid them before Marduk [Babylon’s city-god in the first millennium BC]. Then the priest came out again, struck the king on the cheek, and pushed him into the presence of the god; there he pulled him by the ears and made him kneel before the god and utter a confession, or rather a protestation of innocence.”Citation NeededCan you help us find a source for this quotation?OpenSee All Queries As recalled by the prologues to various legal compilations, Mesopotamian rulers affirmed that they had overseen orderly and equitable relations throughout the land and had fostered its prosperity. “Then, after pronouncing the absolution, the priest returned the royal insignia to the king and struck him again on the cheek. If the king shed tears the omen was favorable; if not, the prospects for the New Year were distinctly bad.”Citation NeededCan you help us find a source for this quotation?OpenSee All Queries (Hooke 1933Specify CitationCan you help us find the text meant by Hooke 1928 (as it was originally written; we changed the year to 1933) so we can add a citation, footnote, and Bibliography entry?OpenSee All Queries: pp. 47ff. The narrative is simply a translation from Francois Thureau-Dangin’s 1921 Rituels Accadiens, a French translation of a Neo-Babylonian New Year ritual.)

Nearly half a millennium earlier, in 2100 BC, southern Mesopotamia was ruled by the Third Dynasty of Ur. Its founder, Ur-Nammu, presented his laws on behalf of his city’s patron deity, the moon-god Nanna. Like Hammurapi’s patron-god Shamash, Nanna was a deity of commerce as well as of justice. These associations recall that Sumerian trade was long catalyzed by temple production. Mesopotamia’s trading outposts in other lands were organized as temple corporations, and merchants sealed their bargains by swearing oaths to the local god of justice and commerce (or to each other’s appropriate gods if the transaction was between members of different communities). Merchants and other travelers received sacred legal protection against harm in most of the lands through which they ventured. The result was a general sanctification of the equitable conduct of commerce, linking sacred and ethical functions on the one hand to legal and commercial activities on the other.

Sumerian cities stored their grain in the temples. This remained a basic role of temples down through Greek times, when the grain-storage room was called the “thesaurus.” This rendered the grain sacred and hence taboo from destruction or seizure by armies from cities which shared the same religious pantheon. (It was sacrilege when the Sumerian empire-builder Lugalzaggesi of Umma and Uruk sacked Lagash’s temples in the 25th century BC, and when the northerner Naram-Sin of Akkad looted Nippur’s Ekur temple a century later.) From Sumerian through classical Greek times most of the state’s precious metal was cast into temple statues and related objects such as removable golden garments for the deities (Oppenheim 1977). This is in large part why the temples became the major coiners (especially for gold).

The Language of Kingship

The key to the spirit of the Neo-Sumerian laws of Shulgi and Ur-Nammu was the ruler’s pledge to “establish equity (nig.sisa) and justice (nig.gina) in the land.”Citation NeededWhat is the source of this quotation? We did not find it in the footnote-cited Speiser 1963, which was our suspected citation but had a different year than what Hudson wrote in the chapter body (1953).OpenSee All Queries These Sumerian terms were rendered as “kittum” and “misharum” in Babylonian. Ephraim Speiser (1953: p. 874)Verify CitationWhat publication should be cited here? The only Speiser bibliographic citation in this chapter was a 1963 paper (rather than 1953 as is currently in the footnote as a best guess).OpenSee All Queries described how “kittum” represented “that which is firm, established, true”Citation NeededWhat is the source of this quotation? We did not find it in the footnote-cited Speiser 1963, which was our suspected citation but had a different year than what Hudson wrote in the chapter body (1953).OpenSee All Queries at the highest and most abstract level, while “misharum” meant “equity, justice” in the sense of timely reforms to meet specific civil circumstances. “The two terms are mutually complementary. … An immutable aspect of cosmic order, kittum is semantically the same as Biblical ‘emet (from *’amint), the original force of which still survives in the common loanword ‘Amen.’ The independent function of a ruler, whether divine or human, is confined to misharum, that is, just and equitable implementation.”Citation NeededWhat is the source of this quotation? We did not find it in the footnote-cited Speiser 1963, which was our suspected citation but had a different year than what Hudson wrote in the chapter body (1953).OpenSee All Queries Just as Marduk (or Babylonian Shamash or their sun-god counterparts in other societies) annually vanquished cosmic chaos at the New Year akitu festival by slaying the sea dragon Tiamat and dividing her body into parts (which seem to have had calendrical references), so Hammurapi and other Babylonian rulers acted as Marduk’s champions in re-enacting this victory over Tiamat/chaos, creating anew an orderly social kosmos for the coming year.

But Benveniste (1973: p. 406) stated that it took a long time for the idea of law to become identified with what is just. As has been discussed in previous chapters, “‘[L]aw’ (droit) is what is ‘straight’… as opposed to what is ‘crooked’ or ‘perverse’ (pervers). It is in this way that directum, like the German Recht, has taken the place of ius as an institutional term, whereas in English the ‘right’ is identified with the ‘law.’ In English we do not study ‘right’ (German Recht studieren); we study ‘law.’”

In discussing the relationship between archaic Indo-European terms relating to religion and law, he noted (p. 305), “The connection of Latin rego with Greek orégō ‘extend in a straight line’… the examination of the old uses of reg- in Latin (e.g., in regere fines, e regione, rectus, rex sacrorum) suggests that the rex, properly more of a priest than a king in the modern sense, was the man who had to trace out the sites of towns and to determine the rules of law.”

The link to ideas of measurement already has been discussed in Measures, Rules, and Prices. Benveniste (p. 311) pointed out that one might perhaps link “rex” to Greek “orégō” (“fathom” or “span”), but it means more specifically to “stretch out in a straight line,” or even more explicitly, “from the point where one stands [to draw forward] in a straight line.” Benveniste added, “This sense is also present in Latin. The important word regio did not originally mean ‘region’ but ‘the point reached in a straight line.’… In the language of augury regio indicates ‘the point reached by a straight line traced out on the ground or in the sky,’ and ‘the space enclosed between such straight lines drawn in different directions.’” The rex thus seems to have been the city-planner or city-founder, or at least the augur laying out an auspicious orientation for archaic towns and, initially, their sacred precincts.

Benveniste continued:

“The adjective rectus can be interpreted in a similar way; ‘straight as this line which one draws.’ This is a concept at once concrete and moral: the ‘straight line’ represents the norm, while the regula is ‘the instrument used to trace the straight line,’ which fixed the ‘rule.’ Opposed to the ‘straight’ (droit) in the moral order is what is twisted, bent. Hence ‘straight’… is equivalent to ‘just,’ ‘honest,’ while its antonyms ‘twisted, bent’ (tordu, courbé)… [are] identified with ‘perfidious,’ ‘mendacious,’ etc. This set of ideas is already Indo-European. To Latin rectus corresponds the Gothic adjective raihts, which translates Greek euthús ‘straight’; further the Old Persian rāsta, which qualifies the noun ‘the way’ in this injunction: ‘Do not desert the straight way.’”

Benveniste concluded that “The Indo-European rex was much more a religious than a political figure. His mission was not to command, to exercise power, but to draw up rules, to determine what was in the proper sense ‘right’ (‘straight’ droit). It follows that the rex, as thus defined, was more akin to a priest than a sovereign. It is this type of kingship which was preserved by the Celts and Italic peoples on the one hand and the Indic on the other.”

Of course, as Measures, Rules, and Prices has pointed out, already in Sumerian inscriptions we find the ruler urged to pass “straight laws” and oppose the crooked. Are we dealing here with a universally natural metaphor, or with the diffusion of semantic analogy?

Benveniste (1973: p. 305) made much of the fact that the term “rex” is found only at the edges of the Indo-European world, in India in the east and the Italians and Celts in the west. I think that one must at least entertain the hypothesis that this is explained by Mesopotamian contact with each of these regions, hence a diffusion from non-Indo-European sources. On the one hand there was Mesopotamian commerce with the Indus civilization. (We can find this from cylinder seals, and also by the fact that the island trading entrepôt of Dilmun/Bahrain, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, used Indus weights and measures! See Potts 198_.)Missing Bibliographic DetailsCan you help us identify the full citation for this work, including the missing digit of the year, so we can add a citation?OpenSee All Queries Meanwhile, in the other direction, the Mesopotamians traded with the Levant and Asia Minor and hence the eastern Mediterranean shore. From Ugarit there was trade with Cyprus and Mycenaean Greece during 1400–1200 BC, and in the early first millennium BC (ninth and eighth centuries BC) the Phoenicians (in conjunction with the Greeks) established the entrepôt of Pithekoussai to trade with the Etruscans. (And the Celts came in contact with Mesopotamians in Asia Minor, just as Akkadian credit terminology is found in the now northern Sàmi languages.)Citation NeededHelp us add a citation for this fact, ideally including source link(s) if possible.OpenSee All QueriesFact CheckPlease check the terms here.OpenSee All Queries

Thus, the seeming breadth of Indo-European languages and institutional practices is explainable by contacts with the Mesopotamian core.

To the extent that economic practices were grounded in religion, we should not be surprised at the extent to which mythology also is shared, above all that associated with the New Year coronation festival as discussed by Hocart in his 1927 study Kingship.

However, the concept of “kingship” as known from modern times is anachronistic when applied to archaic society. The modern king is one who is “well born,” from the root “gen,” “to be born” (cognate to “gyn” meaning woman; see Benveniste 1973: pp. 368f.).

It is a hereditary position. But in Sumer, where the institution was first documented, we find rulers carefully not speaking of their parental lineage. They were selected by the god “picking them out of the crowd”Citation NeededCan you help us find the source of this quotation?OpenSee All Queries (e.g., Urukagina, Gudea, etc.). And they were picked for their sacred abilities, not for their military or egoistic administrative policies. Policy was not yet open to question; that would take the first millennium BC Axial Age of second-order reflection.StubThe phrase “Axial Age of second-order reflection” appears to be a stub. Can you expand on it and perhaps add a(n ideally linked) book citation to this effect?OpenSee All Queries

The first rulers probably emerged as judges. See the Greek ideas of themis and dike.

Benveniste (1973: pp. 379f.) concluded that “The root common to Sanskrit rta, Iranian arta, Latin ars, artus, ritus, which designates ‘order’ as a harmonious arrangement of the parts of the whole, did not provide any juridical term in Indo-European.” Law already had shifted to concepts of rule. Each Indo-European language has a different term for law, and often there will be numerous terms in the same language for different aspects of what we call the law. However, per Benveniste, what can indeed be posited “for common Indo-European [is] an extremely important concept, that of ‘order.’ It is represented by Vedic rta, Iranian arta,” a concept of order that “governs also the orderliness of the universe, the movement of the stars, the regularity of the seasons and the years; [and] further, the relations of gods and men; and finally, the relations of men to one another. Nothing which concerns man or the world falls outside the realm of ‘Order.’ It is thus the foundation, both religious and moral, of every society. Without this principle everything would revert to chaos.”

Benveniste continued (1973: pp. 380f.): “All these forms are referable to the root ar-, which is well-known because of numerous formations outside Indo-Iranian… the root is that of Greek ararískō ‘fit, adapt, harmonize’ (Armenian arnel ‘make’), which is connected with a number of nominal derivatives. Some with the suffix -ti-, e.g., Latin ars, artis, ‘natural disposition, qualification, talent’; others with -tu-, e.g., Latin artus ‘joint’ and also, with a different form of the root, ritus ‘rite’; Greek artús (Armenian ard, genitive ardu ‘order’), as well as the present tense artúnō ‘arrange, equip’; with *-dhmo-, Greek arthmos ‘bond, league, friendship’; and finally with *-dhro-, Greek árthron ‘joint, limb.’… We thus have for Indo-European a general concept which embraces, by numerous lexical variants, the religious, legal, and technical aspects of ‘order.’ But within each domain distinctive terms were found necessary.”

Add a SectionCan you help us add a Conclusion section to this chapter?OpenSee All Queries

Key Concepts

This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.

Keyword: “Religion” has the same root as “ligature,” “ligament,” and “legislation” (and also the Roman “lictor,” one “who binds”). See also “bond” (whence also “bondage”), German “Verbindlichkeit,”Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?OpenSee All Queries and “credit” (from Latin “credo,” “I believe” [that I will be repaid]).

Lunar symbol: The harvest (earlier fertility) goddess Virgo, followed astrologically by Libra, symbolizing the weighing out of grain obligations owed initially to the temples and then to their designated mercantile agents and collectors. Inanna’s symbols were the rolled-up reed mats forming the doorpost of Uruk’s temple storehouse. Her analogs Nanshe, Nemesis, and other former order-goddesses were subsequently incorporated into the solar pantheon as vindictive punishers of the hubris associated with power and wealth wrongfully gained.

Solar symbol: The civil ruler receiving his laws from the sun-god of justice vanquishing disorder, or submitting them for approval.

Principle of regularity: Every cult member was an equal, and laws were to be applied equitably. Hence, justice was depicted as blind,Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?OpenSee All Queries that is, without prejudice.

Periodic renewal ceremony: New rulers proclaimed economic freedom and handed down rulings and the law at the New Year festival.

Integration with other dimensions of the archaic kosmos: Sacred oversight of weights and measures, contracts and boundaries.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?OpenSee All Queries

International interface: Amphictyonic centers: Dilmun, Delphi, and Delos (also Heligoland, Ischia,Fact CheckCan you help us check this spelling, fact-check, and work the Key Concept into the chapter body?OpenSee All Queries and other offshore commercial enclaves which were simultaneously sacred centers).

Public character: Public-sector laws and “freedom proclamations” achieved ascendancy over oral common law as centralized economic activity became increasingly important in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

Religious sanctification: Laws were depicted as being handed down by gods. Legal testimony and contracts were sanctified by swearing oaths, and contracts were stored in the temples.Key Concept Missing in Chapter BodyThis Key Concept is not discussed in this chapter’s body. Can you help us add it?OpenSee All Queries Rome’s first gold coinage was struck in the temple of Juno Moneta toward the end of the Punic Wars in the third century BC.

Ultimate dissolution: Religion turned within and became otherworldly and “personal” rather than social. Already by the early second millennium BC solutions were sought at the individual level rather than by promoting general social renewal. What the Roman Empire ultimately sanctified was the inequitable status quo.

Bibliography

For Bibliography ConsiderationConsider adding these two texts from the General Queries page section Mini-Bibliography for Stub Paragraphs on Etymology to the Chapter 10 Bibliography, if they are worked into the Chapter 10 body or determined to have been used in current Chapter 10 body text.OpenSee All Queries

Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973).

C.J. Bleeker, Egyptian Festivals (Leiden: 1967).Interrelated QueryThis bibliographic item is part of this query about astronomy and Egyptian sed festivals and not part of the Chapter 10 body currently. Should we keep it?OpenSee All Queries

Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: 1990 [1947]).

A.R. Burns, Money and Monetary Policy in Early Times (London: 1927).

William H. Desmonde, Magic, Myth, and Money: The Origin of Money in Religious Ritual (New York: 1962).

Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, (Paris: 1966).

Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna (New York: 1988).

Wilhelm Eilers, “Reflexions sur les Origines du Droit en Mesopotamie,” Revue Historique de Droit Français et Étranger, 4^e série, Vol. 51, No. 2 (1973), pp. 195–216.

Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford: 1896).

J.J. Finkelstein, “The Edict of Ammisaduqa: A New Text,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale, Vol. 63, No. 1 (1969), pp. 45–64.

F. Friedensburg, Die Münze in der Kulturgeschichte, 2nd ed. (1926).

Percy Gardner, A History of Ancient Coinage: 700–300 BC (Oxford: 1918).

I.J. Gelb, Earliest Land Tenure Systems in the Near East: Ancient Kudurrus (Chicago: 1989).

F. Gwyn Griffiths, “The Costume and Insignia of the King in the Sed Festival,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 41 (1955), pp. 127–128.Interrelated QueryThis bibliographic item is part of this query about astronomy and Egyptian sed festivals and not part of the Chapter 10 body currently. Should we keep it?OpenSee All Queries

Arthur M. Hocart, Kingship (London: 1927).

S.H. Hooke, Myth and Ritual (London: 1933).

Arthur M. Hocart, The Life-Giving Myth, and Other Essays (London: 1952).

Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism: Its Sources, Meaning, and Influence on Thought and Expression (New York: 1938).

Victor Korocek, Hethitische Staatsverträge (Leipzig: 1931).

Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld: Eine historische Untersuchung Uber den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen: 1924).

Bernhard Laum, Über das Wesen des Münzgeldes: Eine sach und begriffsgeschichtliche Studie (Halle: 1929).

Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: 1908).

Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (New York: 1964).

A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: 1977 [1964]).

Plutarch, Roman Questions, Frank Cole Babbitt (tr.), published in Vol. IV of the Loeb Classical Library Edition of the Moralia (1936), via Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius (University of Chicago).

Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Munich: 1959).

William Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1892).

Margaret Cool Root, The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire. Acta Iranica, 3rd series, Vol. 19 (Leiden: 1979).

Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Baltimore: 1984).

Ephraim A. Speiser, “Cuneiform Law and the History of Civilization,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 107, No. 6 (December 1963), pp. 536–541.Missing Bibliographic DetailsThere’s a missing 1953 item by this author cited in Chapter 10 that we need help identifying and adding to the Bibliography.OpenSee All Queries

E.H. Sturtevant, “A Hittite Text on the Duties of Priests and Temple Servants,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 54 (1934), pp. 363–406.

Francois Thureau-Dangin, Rituels Accadiens (Paris: 1921).