Landscapes of Fear

6. Natural Calamities and Famines

6. Natural Calamities and Famines Although organization is power, power over the natural environment does not automatically produce a sense of security: subsistence farmers do not usually feel more secure than do primitive hunter-gatherers. Likewise, the movefrom village to state, from culture to civilization, does not necessarily result in any significant abatement of fear. What may indeed change is the character and frequency of dread. Villagers, for example, are haunted by local nature spirits who require frequent propitiation; bycontrast , the subjects and rulers of a state fear the breakdown of cosmic order and the unleashing of violent natural forces that can devastate whole regions. A notable fact about archaic civilizations is that they evince a persistent lack of confidence in the cosmos as a going concern. The movement of the sun, the cycle of the seasons, and the orderly procedure of society itself cannot be taken for granted. Why did the ancients feel so vulnerable when, wherever they looked, they saw cities, monuments, and irrigation works that testified to human achievement and control? One reason may have been that the threat of famine remained ever present and had especially devastating implications for city dwellers who neither caught nor raised their own food. Transportation wastoo primitive tobring relief from distant provinces, and the evacuation of masses of hungry people was rarely feasible. Even in the countryside, dependence on only one or two staple crops meant that when the harvests failed, people lacked other foods with which tofeed themselves. Moreover, farmers in archaic civilizations had lost the skills to live comfortably off wild nature. Let us look at a few cases. Egypt was blessed with a dependable natural environment: 57 Natural Calamitiesand Famines the sun made its predictable trajectory across the sky, and the Nile, thanks to its broad net of headwaters in sub-Saharan Africa, flooded regularly. Hence the sun and the Nile were the two supreme deities of ancient Egypt. Dependability is, however , a relative term. The sun gives life but its intense heat can kill. It can also destroy life by withdrawing and sending chill and darkness over the land. Moreover,as the Egyptians saw it, light and warmth were not guaranteed, for every night the sun on his journey through the underworld had to do battle with Apophis, the snake ofdarkness. This struggle became especially intense on the first morningof the new year, when human ritual had tosupplement the sun's powerwere the sun torise again.As for that other great source of life, the Nile, its dependability was also relative. The Nile was more reliable than the Mesopotamian rivers and the Huang Ho, but water levels did fluctuate over both short and longperiods, and either extreme— too little or too much water—could bring disaster to Egypt. A primary duty of a pharaoh or a nomarch to his people was to mitigate the effects ofa natural disaster. He had an obligation to relieve famine. Thus Ameni, the nomarch of Oryx-Nome, boasted: "Whenthe years of famine came I plowedall the fields of Oryx-Nome, preserving its people alive. Then followed great Niles, rich in grain and all things, but I did not collect the arrears of the field."1 Cosmic order seemed more tenuous in Mesopotamia than it did in Egypt. Compared with the Nile valley,nature in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates was capricious indeed. There were, of course, the great diurnal and seasonal periodicities; but unpredictable violences such as thunderstorms (described by the Mesopotamians as "dreadful flares of light") and floods disrupted them. The rampant flood which no man can oppose Which shakes the heavens and causes earth to tremble, In an appalling blanket folds mother and child, Beats down the canebrake's full luxuriant greenery, And drowns the harvest in its time of ripeness.2 All peoples yearn for life, but the Sumerians' longing had a special pathosbecause theydid notbelieve in a paradisiac afterworld . Security even in this world provedelusive. Fear, said the Orientalist S.N. Kramer,darklystained the life ofthe Sumerian. "From birth to death he had cause at times to fear his parents, his teachers, his friends and fellow citizens, his superiors and rulers, the foreign enemy, the violence of nature, wild animals, Landscapes of Fear 58 vicious monsters and demons, sickness, death, and oblivion."3 To the archaic mind, a major fear was that the cosmos itself might momentarily collapse. Even the great cycles of nature...