A courtesy of Mesopotamian letter writing style demanded that the correspondent of inferior social position communicated information to his superior as if his superior already knew it. So too, a polite disclaimer among experts of equal rank was that what one did not know, the other did, while whatever the one knew the other knew as well. Presumption of superior knowledge in proportion to social status implied a theory that useful knowledge was transmitted vertically, from above to below; for example, from the powerful to the weak, the erudite to the unlettered, the elderly to the young. Evidence for such a Mesopotamian theory of the transmission of knowledge abounds, but consideration of knowledge must begin with writing itself and the specialized knowledge that the literate arts entailed.
The invention of writing in southern Mesopotamia, toward the end of the fourth millennium BCE, shows that human beings were by then contending with the problem of how to communicate over space and time (Glassner 2003). The near simultaneous appearance with writing of representational and monumental art shows that rulers and elites were, in the same process, learning how to mold and control subjects’ belief and action, using imagery, just as communication theorists were refining techniques to represent language in symbols (Michalowski 1990). The creation of a set ofcodes or symbols at once differentiated those who manipulated and understood them from those who did not. Small wonder, then, that one Mesopotamian theory of knowledge saw it as transmitted from centers of management and authority, redistributed, so to speak, in controlled doses to a passive audience. Yet by the early second millennium, knowledge of writing had spread from administrators to private possession, making possible new patterns of acquisition and dissemination of literate culture, using a reduced number of simplified symbols and expression closer to the spoken vernacular. By the second half of the first millennium, though, this process may have been reversed so that writing beyond basic literacy and scholarship was once more dominated by a small ruling elite and a few extended families (Larsen 1987a). Thus the relationship among literacy, knowledge, and authority fluctuated through the three millennia of Mesopotamian written tradition beyond the capacity of a brief essay to describe it authentically, but Mesopotamian written tradition, to which modern knowledge of Mesopotamian intellectual endeavor is largely owed, always placed literacy first as the gateway to knowledge.
Highest knowledge, according to Mesopotamian literate tradition, was transmitted by the gods. In exceptional cases, gods might choose favored human beings to communicate directly with, through speech, dreams, or visions. Tradition told of certain sages, such as Adapa or the flood hero Atrahasis (also called Ut-napishtim), who enjoyed sublime wisdom through direct divine favor, and their sublime wisdom might in some cases be claimed by scholars as the basis for their profession (Gammie and Perdue 1990; Michalowski 1980). Certain rulers or dynasties show a predilection for supernatural communication: Gudea, ruler of Lagash in the late third millennium BCE, tells of a motivating dream from his city god: ‘‘Gudea saw the lord, divine Ningirsu, in a vision of the night, He ordered him to build his house’’ (Edzard 1997: 69). Assyrian kings of the late eighth and early seventh centuries bce often referred to supernatural events as sources of understanding, and a millennium and a half after Gudea the Babylonian ruler Nabonidus (sixth century bce) also claimed privileged access to the gods through dreams: ‘‘At the outset of my perduring reign, the gods Marduk and Sin ( = the moon) caused me to have a dream: Marduk, the great lord, and Sin, luminary of heaven and of the world below, stood side by side. Marduk said to me, ‘Nabonidus, king of Babylon, bring bricks on your own steed, build the temple Ehulhul and set up the abode of Sin, the great lord, within it’ ’’ (Beaulieu 1989: 108; Oppenheim 1966). Those who do not admire rulers may impugn such revelations, as might critics of Constantine, Luther, or Joseph Smith, but Mesopotamian society accepted divine communication as normative, so no clear instance of expressed cynicism about the veracity of such communications survives (Pongratz-Leisten 1999a). On the other hand, prophecy, which seems to be at home outside of Mesopotamia proper, though a well-attested feature of the Amorite culture of the early second millennium bce, could involve kings taking seriously ecstatic utterances even from the riffraff of society (Charpin 2001). The revelations so communicated were not large, systematic bodies of doctrine or policy, however, but brief, colorful comments and warnings on royal projects and well-being.
From the perspective of Mesopotamian higher learning, divine knowledge was transmitted indirectly through an infinite range of events and phenomena, observed or elicited, in the heavens and on earth, at home and abroad, decodable through divination, Mesopotamia’s premier science after the turn of the second millennium (Bottero 1974). The origins and development of the Mesopotamian mantic world-view are obscure; the modern reader knows it best through late prodigious Mesopotamian scholarly reference compendia of observations and consequences, as well as formal queries and reports of observations, passages in narratives referring to its principles and practice, and even diviners’ prayers for professional competence in their metier. In theory, the diviner’s sourcebook was the entire visible universe.
Terrestrial phenomena apprehendable to a casual observer, sights, sounds, events in the home, workplace, street, community, or countryside, perhaps a bit of rubbish in the street, birds flying overhead, or ants on the wall, portended something for the observer: ‘‘If water is spilled in the doorway of a man’s house and it has the shape of a man with an arm outstretched, (this portends) that the man will himself stretch out his arm (to beg) in the street of his city’’ (Freedman 1998: 233). Cosmic events, such as eclipses, portended good or ill for the nation or its leadership, as did the birth of monstrous animals.
A guild of professionals stood ready to interpret portentous phenomena and to suggest often complicated means of avoiding a negative outcome, presumably for a fee, and the costs of materials used in divination were sometimes high: ‘‘With respect to the ritual that goes with the spell ‘You are a Monstrous Evil,’ about which the king my lord wrote to me, it is performed to drive away an evil demon or a disease. As soon as something has afflicted someone, the exorcist comes and hangs a mouse and a stalk from a thorn bush above the person’s door. The exorcist gets dressed up in red clothing and puts on over it a red cloak. He holds a raven in his right hand, a falcon in his left hand... (finally) he makes a second exorcist walk around the sufferer’s bed with a censer and torch, reciting the spell ‘Evil Demon, Go Away!’, then up to the door, and next conjures the door. He does this every morning and evening until the affliction goes away. With respect to the moon and sun appearing in opposition on the thirteenth instant, there is a ritual to be performed against (the portent of) that ...’’ (Parpola 1993b no. 238). Experts naturally sought to justify their intellectual interests and skills to the ruling establishment in return for support and patronage and for the opportunity to consult on political, diplomatic, and military undertakings (Oppenheim 1975).
Higher knowledge was therefore a kind of sublime uncanny power open to the elite, as much as a body of human skills to be acquired and expanded. Hence there was no teacher in the divine pantheon nor school in heaven. Nor did anyone, when bragging of his proficiencies, refer to his teachers. Special knowledge came neither from study nor even mentoring but from revelation or unique experience. According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the alpha and omega of knowledge was understanding what transpired before the flood, which was seen as the beginning of empirical time, and what happens to a person after he dies, obviously the end of it. The epic hero Gilgamesh brings an account of both of these to the human race, one from the narrative of the flood hero, whose abode Gilgamesh reaches in his valor, and the other through a vision of his dying friend Enkidu, reworked from a Sumerian poem in which Enkidu rashly goes to the Netherworld to retrieve Gilgamesh’s athletic equipment, consigned there by divine action (Foster 2001).
For most educated people, however, a body of knowledge was given to them at school, and scarcely came from the gods. This knowledge was both practical and theoretical and had the sanction of long tradition behind it. Their objective was to master a body of lore that set the educated apart from the uneducated. From the early second millennium, various narratives tell about school and its subjects and how they were acquired, with the usual rhetoric about rigors of school life (Civil 1985):
‘‘This is the roster of days I spent at school:
‘‘I had three days off a month,
‘‘There were three holidays a month,
‘‘That makes twenty-four days a month
‘‘That I spent at school, oh no, that wasn’t so long!’’
Much is known about the second millennium school curriculum and how writing, reading, and arithmetic were taught (Sjoberg 1976). The student began with simple signs and numerals, progressed to short sayings, excerpts, and calculation exercises, then moved on eventually to full-scale literary works and more involved problems. He was supposed to master Sumerian, which was only a learned cultural language by the time the school days narratives were composed, hence of the same status as Latin or Greek in European education of the nineteenth century (Vanstiphout 1979). To this end, long lists of signs and traditional equivalences were learned, a surprising amount of no practical value: ‘‘I can give 600 ( = numerous) lines beginning with the LlJ-sign,’’ a young scholar brags (Civil 1985; Glassner 1999). Accounting, reckoning, and the standard form for every type of contract, learned by heart, filled his days. In addition to daily recitations, there was homework. For would-be historians, epigraphic training required deciphering old tablets picked up in ruins (Visicato and Westenholz 2000: 1123) or copying historic inscriptions in temples (Kraus 1963). For advanced scholarship, such as divination and astronomy, there was presumably some form of apprenticeship to a master (McEwan 1981: 17-21); some learned professions were transmitted through successive generations of one family, where the father taught the son his lore and the son copied his father’s scholarly works (Cohen 1988: 1: 24-5).
Education was sometimes carried on in private academies set up in the homes of literate men who sought to increase their income by taking on students (Charpin 1986). The successful student could hope for a post in government or at a large establishment, such as a temple; the less successful could sit near the city gate waiting to draw up contracts for a fee or to make records of court cases. Some scholars became the confidants of kings and were entrusted with the task of writing out royal correspondence and drawing up historical narratives of the king’s deeds (Parpola 1987b: 257). As one would-be court scribe expressed this, ‘‘I can draw up in good form my lord’s commands, I can remind my lord of what he has forgotten’’ (Durand 1997: 1: 103-10). Thus a person with a good control of traditional and practical knowledge enjoyed high expectations, whereas unemployed and underpaid scholars painted their lot in the gloomiest terms (Parpola 1987b; Foster 1993c, 1996: 884-5): ‘‘I cannot afford a pair of sandals or the cost of a tailor, I have no change of clothes and carry a debt of six minas of silver plus interest...’’ (Parpola 1993b no. 294); ‘‘I shiver with cold in an out-of-the-way place, I go my way empty-handed, a scholarly squint afflicts me’’ (Durand 1997: 1: 103-10).
Beyond mastery of the formal content of a discipline, Mesopotamian literate scholarship esteemed skill in bipolar thought: appreciation of pairs and correspondences, matching and contrasting phenomena, balancing multiplicity of interpretations derived from manipulating signs and symbols. The more potential one saw, the richer one’s store of knowledge, in preference to a single response or ‘‘right’’ answer. Only shadowy outlines of this aspect of Mesopotamian thought are discernible today in the scattered ruins of its scholarly achievement, and little seems compatible with contemporary reasoning strategies (Jeyes 1980; Cavigneaux 1987; Glassner 1995; Pearce 1998; Seminara 2001: 420-4).
To the literate, then, knowledge, be its source in revelation, observation, or reasoning, was to be found in written records. Recourse to the past was common parlance (Charpin 1998). So it was that the obligation to leave written records for the future became a literary device, and in a literary autobiography purportedly carved on a stela, a chastened monarch blames a remote predecessor for not warning him of what to expect (Foster 1996: 264):
(King Enmerkar) did not write upon a stela, nor leave it for me,
Nor did he publish his name, so I did not bless him.
But was writing enough? Some see a pivotal role for ‘‘masters’’ whose teaching, now lost to us, had a decisive effect on certain bodies of written tradition. Their putative teaching relied on the spoken word and perhaps compilation of authoritative text editions, both referred to by the Babylonian expression ‘‘that of the mouth of...,’’ or, ‘‘according to the wording of... ’’ The form and content of such teaching could be referred to centuries later (Lambert 1959). Explanations of passages, words, and concepts, presumably derived from such teaching, seem to the modern reader esoteric or even freely associative in character, but only a beginning has been made in understanding the fragments that survive (Livingstone 1986: 219): ‘‘The shoe which they take (in the ceremony) to the temple of the Lady of Babylon - this is a token, the god sends it because they will not release him nor can he come out.’’ Some purportedly esoteric knowledge was transmitted with injunctions of secrecy, enjoining that only the initiate be shown the material (Westenholz 1998): ‘‘Let one who understands disclose this to one who understands, the one who does not understand must not see it!’’ The motivations for keeping such lore secret are not further explained. Esoteric lore may have been associated with religious knowledge.
Physical preservation of knowledge took the form of accumulations of tablets in homes and institutions, which could be treasured like fine books in modern personal or institutional collections. Scattered information concerning study and preservation of manuscripts, retrieval of documents, and collecting and consulting written materials shows that the written word enjoyed high prestige, just as in Mesopotamian law a written record was an essential component of a contractual relationship or the conclusion of a court case. The very act of writing a tablet could be a religiously meritorious deed (Pearce 1993).
Transmission of knowledge outside of formal education relied on the spoken word: references to public speeches, use of heralds, reading aloud, exchange of messengers, and systematic interrogation abound (Oppenheim 1960). From this process came ‘‘understanding,’’ the basic metaphors for the acquisition of which in Akkadian derived from hearing and tasting. The understanding person had ‘‘heard widely,’’ or ‘‘had the taste of’’ (temu) something, in his ear and mouth respectively (Glassner 1995). Through these two portals, the Mesopotamians believed, knowledge was absorbed by the human mind. Knowledge was ‘‘deep’’ or ‘‘profound.’’ There was no independent concept of ‘‘well read,'' so this idea was probably implied in having ‘‘heard widely,’’ as ‘‘reading’’ was expressed by using a verb to speak aloud.
For many branches of knowledge, such as midwifery or military tactics, no written tradition existed; hence they had no resonance or prestige in surviving Mesopotamian scholarship, despite their importance in everyday life. Crafts, for example, were learned by apprenticeship. Contracts of apprenticeship are best known from the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods, in which free workers undertook to educate apprentices, especially slaves, in such tasks as weaving, bleaching, cooking, seal engraving, leather work, even rat-catching, for a fixed period, often several years. The master promised to teach the entire art of his profession, for a fee and the services of the apprentice during the years of apprenticeship, the slave owner providing basic clothing and sustenance (Bongenaar and Jursa 1993).
Sometimes, on the other hand, scribes wrote out what purport to be procedures for manufacturing certain products, such as aromatics or pyrotechnic goods like faience and glass (Oppenheim et al. 1970), not to mention what resemble recipes for haute cuisine (Bottero 1995). Efforts to reproduce these commodities according to the instructions have not been successful because incomplete information was given, so such manuals apparently had at best only mnemonic value. Perhaps some of these were drawn up in the spirit of encyclopedists, so scribes could boast that they knew the technical vocabulary of every profession. Some may have seen knowing the vocabulary as mastery of the essence of the profession, but a Babylonian spoof in which a ‘‘learned’’ man lectures a cleaner in scientific, detailed technical terminology on how to clean his garment, and is told by the cleaner to wash it himself, warns against taking such a view too seriously (Foster 1996: 92-3).
The largest part of the Mesopotamian learning process took place, then, beyond the narrow horizon of literacy, and so must be deduced from chance references. Fathers were supposed to instruct their sons not to loiter in the streets, to avoid conflicts and congregating places of lowlifes, such as taverns and brothels, and to offer them other good advice of the same ilk. Mothers’ advice to daughters is inaudible to us, behind the closed doors where proper young ladies were supposed to reside. Special knowledge of women is sometimes alluded to in passing: child bearing and rearing and the interpretation of dream symbolism, for example (Foster 1996: 756; Asher-Greve 1987; Harris 2000).
A comprehensive Mesopotamian theory of knowledge is developed in the Epic of Gilgamesh (Foster 1987a). This implies that the first step in adult knowledge was sexual self-awareness. This was followed by knowledge of another human being on an equal basis, by exploring another mind and spirit, accepting and offering personal sacrifices to the needs and desires of another. Beyond this came knowledge of one’s own self, transcending gratification, roles assigned by society, and unexamined assumptions. The more one defined one’s self, paradoxically, the less distinct from the rest of the human race one became. Finally, according to the poem, the highest form of knowledge was recognition that the only significant knowledge was that transmitted to the future in written form - only this could transcend the self, which was doomed to die and disappear. The obvious bias of this scheme is that it privileges the very Epic as a source of highest knowledge. Even if most people probably did not believe this or had not even heard of it, the poet’s thesis stands as a well thought out Mesopotamian perspective on the transmission of knowledge.
Although some rulers, such as the Sumerian king Sulgi and the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (Foster 1996: 714), boasted of their superior knowledge, they were exceptional, as most rulers did not. Siulgi claimed to be, among other achievements, an expert diviner, a superb musician on both string and wind instruments in theory and performance, as well as a composer, an architect, jurist, diplomat, linguist, athlete, scribe, administrator, and author (Castellino 1972). These extravagant pretensions can hardly be read as a meaningful survey of useful knowledge, for, as one would expect, they seem for the most part to be courtly accomplishments.
Praise for gods and rulers usually focused on their power and authority, and with these the ability to punish or forgive. Ignorance was occasionally ridiculed, as when scholars chortled over the efforts of the Babylonian king Nabonidus to participate in a technical discussion of omens (Machinist and Tadmor 1993), or when a physician did not know even elementary Sumerian (Foster 1996: 819-20), but, outside of school, learning and intelligence were in general esteemed less highly than skill and strength. Perhaps it was because of this that the later Gilgamesh Epic reinvented Gilgamesh as a man of knowledge rather than a man of strength. In this instance learned men sought to place knowledge ahead of strength as something permanent, taking revenge on the powerful, whose favor they needed to survive, for they knew that time was on their side.
Yet emphasis on passive reception of knowledge should not obscure that Mesopotamians had as well a doctrine of revelation or breakthrough, when new and important knowledge suddenly flashed into a person’s consciousness (Foster 1991). A flowery but light-hearted description of such a moment, when a seemingly wonderful idea forms in the mind, is found in a Sumerian epic poem of the late third millennium bce. Here the Sumerian king, Enmerkar, king of Uruk, has been presented with a trial in the form of a riddle by his rival, the lord of Aratta: he is to bring him grain in net sacks and no other form ofcontainer. Enmerkar makes elaborate preparations for the usual sacrifices made to obtain divine assistance, when, in the midst ofit, a brilliant idea comes to his mind, thanks to the goddess ofgrain, who, not coincidentally, is also the goddess of scholarly attainment, the tablet her ‘‘field,’’ the stylus like a stalk of grain standing in it (S. Cohen 1973: lines 318-324, freely rendered):
Enmerkar, son of Utu, was proceeding apace.
At that moment, she who is the ready writing field of a tablet, the standing stylus about to inscribe,
That golden image sprung to life at the right moment,
Beautiful Inspiration, maturing like the grain goddess herself in tareless yield,
Divine Nisaba of the grain field, mistress of garnered wisdom,
Opened to him her treasure house of insight!
He, ushered in to that heavenly temple, listened to her words.
Enmerkar lets old grain sprout, making it easy to carry in the net sacks. ‘‘Brilliant idea’’ was a ‘‘golden image’’ sprouting in the mind; potentiality realized was portrayed as the pregnant moment a stylus was about to plunge into the ready clay. Thus a Mesopotamian poet expressed the joy of adding new knowledge to the accumulated store.
World History
