The Age of the Gods

VI. The City State and the Development of the Sumerian Culture

81 vi The City State and the Development of the Sumerian Culture i. the rise of the sacred city (i) The Religious Origins of the City according to the view put forward in the last chapter, the earliest agriculture must have grown up round the shrines of the Mother goddess , which thus became social and economic centres, as well as holy places, and were the germs of the future cities.1 Now we know from the sumerian evidence that in later times the temples were great landowning corporations. Moreover, the god or the goddess was in a sense the owner of the whole city territory. The actual cultivators were tenants of the divine landlord, and paid part of the produce of the land into the temple storehouses. These were, of course, in historic times situated in the cities and had all the marks of a highly organised urban economy, but the earliest temple that we know, the recently excavated shrine of the Mother goddess of Ur, Nin Kharsag, stood some miles outside the city in the midst of the cultivated lands. It is decorated by a frieze in copper relief, and it is thoroughly characteristic of the culture that we have been describing , that this earliest monument of sumerian religious art—dating from about 3000 b.c.—consists not of mythological figures or scenes of warfare, but of pastoral occupations—a cattle shed and lines of oxen, 1. even in modern times in the Caucasus, among the Mountain georgians, the holy Place or Chat’i exercised a theocratic rule over the whole community, and the georgian is the slave (mona) of his local sanctuary. 82 The Age of the Gods milking scenes and perhaps butter-making, while below the main frieze stood statues of oxen, made of copper with golden horns. In asia Minor even in later times, the social unit was not the city state, but the temple state, and the vast temple estates of Cappadocia and Phrygia, ruled by the representatives of the goddess or the god, lasted right down to Roman times. The temple with the temple estate is in fact the foundation of the whole archaic culture of Western asia. It was the germ of the city, which was essentially a sacred city, the dwelling-place and throne of a god. It was the germ of the state, and this explains the sacred and theocratic character of political authority , for the king was a priest king, the vicegerent of the city god, with whom he ultimately came to be identified, so that his power rested not on the right of conquest or the choice of the people, but on divine right or the choice of the god, a conception which is of enormous importance for subsequent history. further, the temple was the basis of economic development, it alone possessed the resources and the authority that are necessary for a highly developed economic organisation. The great works of irrigation, which above all rendered possible the increase of population and the growth of cities in Babylonia, involved a vast control of labour and a unity of direction to which a population of peasants could never have attained by themselves. It was the superhuman authority and the express mandate of the god that alone rendered these great communal enterprises possible. and hence we note the importance of the divinities of canals and irrigation in the early sumerian religion. finally, the temple with its staffs of priests and servants permitted the growth of a peaceful leisure class, by whom knowledge could be cultivated, and the beginnings of science achieved. The origin of writing was, as the name hieroglyphics implied, a kind of sacred symbolism , and was connected with the use of seals and amulets engraved with sacred symbols. similarly the elaboration of a liturgical calendar, which was bound up with the changes of the agricultural years, first led to an exact observance of the seasons, and their correlation with the movements of the heavenly bodies. for example, the elamites evolved a year of 584 days, based on the apparent revolutions of the planet Ve- The Sumerian Culture 83 nus, and the priests of heliopolis in Lower egypt had at an early period attained to a solar year of 365 days, which was correlated with the heliacal rising of the dog star, so as to give a cycle of 1,460 years by which the calendar was regulated.2...