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October 24, 2019

Cicada Files: Marcus Wanners & “Halfassed Journalism”

Prologue

Mr. Marcus Wanners is the sole proprietor of Primus Holdings, LLC, and the lone custodian of the Cicada 3301 Trademark.

I publish here details about the Cicada 3301 Trademark and its history, as well as statements by Mr. Wanners concerning the Cicada elder known publicly by the alias Z 3301. I introduce Mr. Wanners’ own Cicada 3301 page, and I discuss some implications of his custody of the Trademark that occur to me, though I am sure that others will emerge over time. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 2, 2016

On the Ineffable

This 18th century depiction of Yamantaka, a violent expression of the Bodhisattva Manjushri, defeats Yama, god of death, and demolishes the cycle of samsara on the path to enlightenment. This painting, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was purchased in 1969 courtesy of a bequest by Florence Waterbury. Its Accession Number is 69.71. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years.

This is my review of Nick Stockton’s “Time Might Only Exist in Your Head. And Everyone Else’s.” From Wired, 26 September, 2016. Published at 0600 hrs. I later modified this piece on 17 October, 2016. It keeps bothering me like a splinter in my mind. In its current revision, it comprises 2,537 words.

“Some physicists blame gravity for time. Others blame observers. Time, the arrow of time, the linearity of time flowing from the infinite past through the present into the indefinite future, cannot exist unless an intelligence, something sentient, exists to observe it, they say.

The moment when particle physics and classical mechanics merge is called “decoherence,” and it also happens to be the moment when time’s direction becomes mathematically important.

Mr. Stockton’s article points out that superposition in quantum mechanics means that an electron can exist in either of two places, a property called probability, but it is impossible to say where an electron is until that electron is actually observed.

Some physicists also say that what matters is not whether time exists, but what direction that time flows. (Claus Kiefer, “Can the Arrow of Time Be Understood From Quantum Cosmology?” in L. Mersini-Houghton and R. Vaas, The Arrow of Time, Springer, Berlin, 2010.) Read the rest of this entry »

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July 9, 2016

Eco: Francis Lodwick, 2

John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character, p. 311

John Wilkins (1614-1672), An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London, John Martin, 1668, p. 311. Reproduced as Figure 13.2 in Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, “Francis Lodwick,” 1995, p. 264. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“This idea of a non-hierarchical organization seems, at one point, to have occurred to Wilkins as well. Figure 13.2 reproduces a table found on p. 311 of his Essay. The table describes the workings of prepositions of motion by relating the possible positions (and possible actions) of a human body in a three-dimensional space.

It is a table in which there is no principle of hierarchy whatsoever. Yet this is an isolated example, and Wilkins seems to have lacked the courage to extend this principle to his entire system of content.

Unfortunately, even Lodwick’s primitives for actions were not really primitive at all. It would undoubtedly be possible to identify a series of positions assumed by the human body in space–such as getting up or lying down–and argue that these were intuitively and universally comprehensible; yet the sixteen radicals proposed by Lodwick can be criticized in the same way as Degérando would later do for Wilkins: even such a simple notion as to walk must be defined in terms of movement, the notion of movement requires as its components those of place, of existence in a given place, of a moving substance which in different instants passes from one place to another.

All this presupposes the notions of departure, passage and arrival, as well as that of a principle of action which imparts motion to a substance, and of members which support and convey a body in motion in a specific way (“car glisser, ramper, etc., ne sont pas la même chose que marcher;” “since sliding, climbing, etc., are not the same as walking;” Des signes, IV, 395).

Moreover, it is also necessary to conceive of a terrestrial surface upon which movement was to take place–otherwise one could think of other actions like swimming or flying. However, at this point one should also subject the ideas of surface or members to the same sort of regressive componential analysis.

One solution would be to imagine that such action primitives are selected ad hoc as metalinguistic constructs to serve as parameters for automatic translation. An example of this is the computer language designed by Schank and Abelson (1977), based on action primitives such as PROPEL, MOVER, INGEST, ATRANS OR EXPEL, by which it is possible to analyze more complex actions like to eat (however, when analyzing the sentence “John is eating a frog,” Schank and Abelson–like Lodwick–cannot further analyze frog).

Other contemporary semantic systems do not start by seeking a definition of a buyer in order to arrive eventually at the definition of the action of buying, but start rather by constructing a type-sequence of actions in which a subject A gives money to a subject B and receives an object in exchange.

Clearly the same type-sequence can be employed to define not only the buyer, but also the seller, as well as the notions of to buy, to sell, price, merchandise, and so forth. In the language of artificial intelligence, such a sequence of actions is called a “frame.”

A frame allows a computer to draw inferences from preliminary information: if A is a buyer, then he may perform this and that action; if A performs this or that action, then he may be a buyer; if A obtains merchandise from B but does not pay him, then A is not a guyer, etc., etc.

In still other contemporary semantics, the verb to kill, for example, might be represented as “Xs causes (Xd changes to (- live Xd)) + (animate Xd) & (violent Xs):” if a subject (s) acts, with violent means or instruments, in a way that causes another subject (d), an animate being, to change from a state of living to a state of death, then s has killed d. If we wished, instead, to represent the verb to assassinate, we should add the further specification that d is not only an animate being, but also a political person.

It is worth noting that Wilkins‘ dictionary also includes assassin, glossing it by its synonym murther (erroneously designating it as the fourth species of the third difference in the genera of judicial relations: in fact, it is the fifth species), but limiting the semantic range of the term by “especially, under pretence of Religion.”

It is difficult for a philosophic a priori language to follow the twists and turns of meaning of a natural language.

Properly worked out, Lodwick’s project might represent to assassinate by including a character for to kill and adding to it a note specifying purpose and circumstances.

Lodwick’s language is reminiscent of the one described by Borges in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (in Ficciones), which works by agglutinations of radicals representing not substances but rather temporary fluxes. It is a language in which there would be no word for the noun moon but only the verb to moon or to moondle.

Although it is certain that Borges knew, if only at second hand, the work of Wilkins, he probably had never heard of Lodwick. What is certain, however, is that Borges had in mind the Cratylus, 396b–and it is by no means impossible that Lodwick knew this passage as well.

Here Plato, arguing that names are not arbitrary but motivated, gives examples of the way in which, rather than directly representing the things that they designate, words may represent the origin or the result of an action.

For instance, the strange difference (in Greek) between the nominative Zeus and the genitive Dios arose because the original name of Jupiter was a syntagm that expressed the habitual activity associated with the king of the gods: di’hoòn zen, “He through whom life is given.”

Other contemporary authors have tried to avoid the contortions that result from dictionary definitions by specifying the meaning of a term by a set of instructions, that is, a procedure which can decide whether or not a certain word can be applied.

This idea had already appeared in Charles Sanders Pierce (Collected Papers, 2.330): here is provided a long and complex explanation of the term lithium, in which this chemical element was defined not only in relation to its place in the periodic table of elements and by its atomic weight, but also by the operations necessary to produce a specimen of it.

Lodwick never went as far as this; still, his own intuition led him to run counter to an idea that, even in the centuries to follow, proved difficult to overcome. This was the idea that nouns came first; that is, in the process in which language had emerged, terms for things had preceded terms for actions.

Besides, the whole of Aristotelian and Scholastic discussion privileged substances (expressed by common nouns) as the subjects of a statement, in which the terms for actions played the role of predicates.

We saw in chapter 5 that, before the advent of modern linguistics, theorists tended to base their research on nomenclature. Even in the eighteenth century, Vico could still assume that nouns arose before verbs (Scienza nuova seconda, II, 2.4). He found this to be demonstrated not only by the structure of a proposition, but by the fact that children expressed themselves first in names and interjections, and only later in verbs.

Condillac (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 82) also affirmed that “for a long time language remained with no words other than nouns.” Stankiewicz (1974) has traced the emergence of a different trend starting with the Hermes of Harris (1751: III), followed by Monboddo (Of the Origins and Progress of Language, 1773-92) and Herder, who, in his Vom Geist der hebräischen Poesie (1787), noted that a noun referred to things as if they were dead while a verb conferred movement upon them, thus stimulating sensation.

Without following Stankiewicz’s reconstruction step by step, it is worth noting that the reevaluation of the role of the verb was assumed in the comparative grammars by the theorists of the Indo-European hypothesis, and that in doing so they followed the old tradition of Sanskrit grammarians, who derived any word from a verbal root (1974: 176).

We can close with the protest of De Sanctis, who, discussing the pretensions of philosophic grammars, criticized the tradition of reducing verbs to nouns and adjectives, observing that: “I love is simply not the same as I am a lover [ . . . ] The authors of philosophical grammars, reducing grammar to logic, have failed to perceive the volitional aspect of thought” (F. De Sanctis, Teoria e storia della litteratura, ed. B. Croce, Bari: Laterza, 1926: 39-40).

In this way, in Lodwick’s dream for a perfect language there appears the first, timid and, at the time, unheeded hint of the problems that were to become the center of successive linguistics.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 264-8.

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July 9, 2016

Eco: Francis Lodwick

Francis Lodwick (1619-1694), eight verses from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John in Francis Lodwick’s common writing, next to the numerical key composed for it. A Common Writing, London, 1647. Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“Lodwick wrote before either Dalgarno or Wilkins, both of whom had thus the opportunity to know his work. Salmon (1972: 3) defines him as the author of the first attempt to construct a language in universal character. His first work, A Common Writing, appeared in 1647; The Groundwork or Foundation Laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing dates from 1652.

Lodwick was not a learned man–no more than a merchant, as he humbly confessed. Though, in his Ars signorum, Dalgarno praised Lodwick for his endeavors, he was unable to hold back the supercilious observation that he did not possess the force adequate so such an undertaking, being a man of the arts, born outside of the Schools (p. 79).

In his writings, Lodwick advanced a number of proposals, some more fruitful than others, on how to delineate a language that would both facilitate commercial exchange and permit the easy acquisition of English.

His ideas, moreover, changed over time, and he never managed to design a complete system. None the less, certain of what appears in the most original of his works (A Common Writing, hardly thirty pages long) reveals him as striking off in a direction very different from other authors of his time, making him a precursor of certain trends of contemporary lexical semantics.

In theory, Lodwick’s project envisioned the creation of a series of three numbered indexes; the purpose of these was to refer English words to the character and these to its words. What distinguished Lodwick’s conception from those of the polygraphers, however, was the nature of its lexicon.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 13.1, p. 261.

Lodwick’s idea was to reduce the number of terms contained in the indexes by deriving as many of them as possible from a finite number of primitives which express actions. Figure 13.1 shows how Lodwick chooses a conventional character (a sort of Greek delta) to express the action of drinking; then, by adding to this radix different grammatical marks, makes the different composite characters express ideas such as the actor (he who drinks), the act, the object (that which is drunk), the inclination (the drunkard), the abstraction, and the place (the drinking house, or tavern).

From the time of Aristotle up until Lodwick’s own day, names of substances had invariably been the basis upon which a structure of classification had been erected. Lodwick’s original contribution, however, was to commence not with substantives but with verbs, or schemes of actions, and to populate these schemes with roles–what we would now call actants–such as agent, object, place and so on.

Lodwick designed his characters to be easily recognized and remembered: as we have seen, to drink was specified by a sort of Greek delta, while to love was a sort of L. The punctuation and added notes are vaguely reminiscent of Hebrew. Finally, as Salmon suggests, Lodwick probably took from contemporary algebra the idea of substituting letters for numbers.

In order to set up his finite packet of radicals Lodwick devised a philosophical grammar in which even grammatical categories expressed semantic relations. Derivatives and morphemes could thus become, at the same time, criteria of efficiency to reduce each grammatical category further to a component of action.

By such means the number of characters became far small than the words of a natural language found in a dictionary, and Lodwick endeavored to reduce this list further by deriving his adjectives and adverbs from the verbs.

From the character to love, for example, he derived not only the object of the action (the beloved) but also its mode (lovingly); by adding a declarative sign to the character to cleanse, he asserted that the action of cleansing has been performed upon the object–thereby deriving the adjective clean.

Lodwick realized, however, that many adverbs, prepositions, interjections and conjunctions were simply not amenable to this sort of derivation; he proposed representing these as notes appended to the radicals. He decided to write proper names in natural languages.

He was embarrassed by the problem of “natural kinds” (let us say, names of substances like cat, dog, tree), and resigned himself to the fact that, here, he would have to resort to a separate list. But since this decision put the original idea of a severely limited lexicon in jeopardy, he tried to reduce the list of natural kinds as much as possible, deciding that terms like hand, foot or land could be derived from actions like to handle, to foot or to land.

In other cases, he resorted to etymology, deriving, for instance, king from the archaic radical to kan, claiming that it meant both to know and to have power to act. He pointed out that Latin rex was related to the verb regere, and suggested that both the English king and the German emperor might be designated by a simple K followed by the name of the country.

Where he was not able to find appropriate verbal roots, he tried at least to reduce as many different sounds as possible to a single root. He thus reduced the names for the young of animals–child, calfe, puppy, chikin–to a single root.

Moreover, Lodwick thought that the reduction of many lexical items to a unique radical could also be performed by using analogies (seeing as analogous to knowing), synonymy (to lament as a synonym of to bemoane), opposition (to curse as the opposite of to bless), or similarities in substance (to moisten, to wet, to wash and even to baptize are all reduced to moisture).

All these derivations were to be signaled by special signs. Wilkins had had a similar idea when proposing the method of transcendental particles, but it seems that Lodwick’s procedure was less ambiguous.

Lodwick barely sketched out his project; his system of notation was cumbersome; nevertheless (with a bare list of sixteen radicals–to be, to make, to speake, to drinke, to love, to cleanse, to come, to begin, to create, to light, to shine, to live, to darken, to comprehend, to send and to name), he managed to transcribe the opening of the gospel of St. John (“In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God . . .”).

Beginning was derived of course from to begin, God from to be, Word from to speake, and so on (the idea of all things is derived from to create).

Just as the polygraphers had taken Latin grammar as a universal model, so Lodwick did the same for English–though his English grammatical categories still reflected the Latin model. Nevertheless he succeeded in avoiding certain limits of the Aristotelian classification of substances, because no previous tradition obliged him to order an array of actions according to the rigid hierarchical schema requested by a representation of genera and species.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 260-3.

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July 8, 2016

Eco:The Limits of Classification, 2

John Wilkins, An Essay, the Lords Prayer, Ch.II, p. 8

John Wilkins (1614-1672), An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London, John Martin, 1668. Chapter II, p. 8, a discussion of the changes in the Lord’s Prayer. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“Let us try to understand a little better what is happening here. Suppose we wanted to use the real character to understand the difference between a dog and a wolf. We discover only that the dog, Zitα, is the first member of the first specific pair of the fifth difference of the genus Beasts, and that the wolf Zitαs, is the opposing member of this pair (s being the character for specific opposition).

But in this way the character says what is the position of a dog in a universal classification of beasts (which, like Fish and Bird are animate sensitive sanguineous substances), without providing information either on the physical characteristics of dogs or on the difference between a dog and a wolf.

To learn more about dogs and wolves we must read further in the tables. Here we can learn (1) that clawed viviparous animals have toes at the end of their feet; (2) that rapacious viviparous animals have generally “six short pointed incisors, or cutting teeth, and two long fangs to hold their prey;” (3) that the head of dog-kind beasts is oblong, while the head of cat-kind animals is roundish; (4) that the larger of the dog-kind fall into two further groups–“either that which is noted for tameness and docility; or for wildness and enmity to sheep.”

With this, we finally know the difference between a dog and a wolf.

Thus genera, differences and species only serve to “taxonomize” entities rather than to define the properties by which we recognize them. To make these properties evident it is necessary to attach a running commentary to the classification.

Within Aristotelian classification, defining man as a rational animal was perfectly adequate. But this is not adequate for Wilkins, for he lived in an age that wished to discover the physical and biological nature of things.

He thus needed to know what were the morphological and behavioral characteristics of dogs as well. Yet his tables only allowed him to express this information in the form of additional properties and circumstances, and this additional information had to be expressed in natural language because the characteristic language lacked the formulae to render it evident.

This consecrates the failure of Wilkins‘ project, considering that, according to his project, “we should, by learning the Character and the Names of things, be instructed likewise in their Natures” (p. 21).

One might wish at least to call Wilkins a pioneer of modern, scientific taxonomy (like the taxonomy shown in figure 10.3). Yet, as Slaughter has noted, he has lumped together the pre-scientific taxonomies and folk taxonomy.

To classify, as we usually do, onions and garlic as foodstuffs and lilies as flowers is an instance of folk taxonomy: from a botanical point of view, onions, garlic and lilies are all members of the Liliaceae family.

See how Wilkins, when he classifies dogs, starts out using morphological criteria, then goes on mixing functional and even geographical criteria.

What, then, is that character Zitα that tells us so little about dogs, forcing us to learn more by inspecting the tables? One might compare it with a pointer which permits access to information stored in the computer’s memory–and which is not provided by the form of the character itself.

The speakers who wished to use the characteristic language as their natural idiom should have already memorized all that information in order to understand the character. But that is exactly the same type of competence requested of speakers who, instead of Zitα, say cane, dog, per or Hund.

For this reason, the encyclopedic information that underlies the list of primitives negates the compositional principle of Wilkins‘ language. Wilkins‘ primitives are not primitives at all. His species do not emerge from the composition of genera and differences alone; they are also names used as pegs to hang up encyclopedic descriptions.

Moreover, not even genera and differences are primitive, since they can be defined only through encyclopedic definitions. They neither are innate notions, nor can be immediately grasped by intuition: if one could still say so of the ideas of “God” or “world,” one would hardly do so for, let us say, “naval and ecclesiastical relations.”

Genera and differences are not primitive notions because–if they were–they should be definable by nature, while the tables are conceived just in order to define them by means of a natural language, Wilkins‘ English.

If Wilkins‘ classification were logical consistent, it should be possible to assume that it is analytically true that the genus of Beasts entails Animate Substance, which in its turn entails Creatures Considered Distributively.

Even this, in fact, is not always the case. The opposition vegetative / sensitive, for example, in the table of genera serves to distinguish Stone and Tree (and has an uncertain status); but the same opposition reappears (not once but twice) in the table of the World (see figure 12.6, where repeated terms are in bold).

Thus, on the basis of figure 12.1, one should admit that everything vegetative is necessarily an animate creature, while according to figure 12.6, one should (rather contradictorily) admit that everything vegetative is necessarily an element of both the spiritual and the corporeal world.

It is obvious that these various entities (be they genera, species or whatever) are considered under a different point of view every time they appear in the tables. Yet, in this case, we are no longer confronting a classification whose purpose is to construct a tree of organized terms in which every entity is unequivocally defined by the place it holds within the classification; we are, instead, confronting a great encyclopedia in which it is only expected that the same topics will be treated from more than one point of view in different articles.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.6, p. 257.

Consulting the table for Economic Relations, we find, among its species, the pair Defending versus Deserting. If we turn to the table for Military Relations we still find Defense; though this time it is opposed to Offense.

It is true that when defense is considered as an economic relation and the opposite of desertion, it is written Coco, while considered as a type of military action, the opposite of offense, it is written Sibα.

Thus two different characters denote two different notions. Yet are they really different notions rather than one notion considered from two viewpoints? As a matter of fact, the ideas of economic defence and military defence seem to have something in common.

In both cases we are facing an act of war, which is seen the first time as a patriotic duty and the second time as a response to the enemy. The fact that the two notions are conceptually related, however, implies that within the structure of pseudo-dichotomies there also exist transversal connections, linking the nodal points in different sections of the tree.

Yet is such connections exist, then the tree is no more a hierarchical tree; it is rather a network of interrelated ideas.

In his work De signes, written in 1800, Joseph-Marie Degérando accused Wilkins of continually confusing classification with division:

“Division differs from classification in that the latter bases itself upon the intimate properties of the objects it wishes to distribute, while the former follows a rule to a certain end to which these objects are destined.

Classification apportions ideas into genera, species, and families; division allocates them into regions of greater or lesser extent. Classification is the method of botanists; division is the method by which geography is taught.

If one wishes for an even clearer example, when an Army is drawn up in battle formation, each brigade under its general, each battalion under its commander, each company under its captain, this is an image of division; when, however, the state of this army is presented on a role, which principally consists of en enumeration of the officers of each rank, then of the subalterns, and finally of the soldiers, this is an image of classification (IV, 399-400).”

Degérando is doubtlessly thinking here of Leibniz’s notion of the ideal library and of the structure of the Encyclopédie of which we will later speak), that is, of a criterion for subdividing matter according to the importance that it has for us.

Yet a practical classification follows criteria different from those which should rule a system of primitives based on metaphysical assumptions.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 254-8.

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July 7, 2016

Eco: The Limits of Classification

John Wilkins, An Essay, the Lords Prayer, Ch.II, p. 7

John Wilkins (1614-1672), An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London, John Martin, 1668. Chapter II, p. 7, a discussion of the changes in the Lord’s Prayer. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“Using 40 genera and 251 differences, Wilkins‘ tables manage to define 2,030 species. If, however, the division were dichotomic, as happens with the Aristotelian system of classification, in which each genus was assigned two decisive differences which constituted to new species below, and in which each of these new species then played the role of genera at the lower level in the process of dichotomization, there should have been at least 2,048 species (as well as 1,025 intermediary genera plus the category at the apex) and an equal number of differences.

If the figures do not add up in the way that they should, it is clear that, in reconstructing a single general tree from the 41 particular trees represented in the tables, one would not find a constant dichotomic structure.

The structure is not dichotomic because Wilkins mixes substances and accidents together; but since, as Dalgarno had recognized, the number of accidents is infinite, there is no way that they can be hierarchically ordered.

In fact, Wilkins must classify fundamental and Platonic conceptions, like God, world or tree, together with drinks, like beer, political offices, military and ecclesiastical ranks–in short, the whole notional world of a seventeenth century Englishman.

It suffices to look at figure 12.1 to see that the accidents are subdivided into five categories each yielding from three to five genera. There are three subdivisions of the genus Herb as well as of the genus Transcendental things.

With a dichotomic structure it would be easy, once having established the number of embedded levels, to control the total number of entities in the system; once the pattern has been broken, however, and more than two subdivisions allowed to appear at each nodal point, the whole system begins to spin out of control.

The system is open to new discoveries, but, at the same time, surrenders its control over the number of primitives.

When he reaches the last differences, Wilkins arranges them in pairs. Yet, as he is the first to recognize, he has made his arrangement “for the better helming of the memory” (p. 22), not according to a rigorous criterion of opposition.

He informs us that pairs are based sometimes on opposition and sometimes on affinity. He admits to having coupled his differences in an arguable way, but says that he did so “because I knew not to provide for them better” (p. 22).

For instance, in the first genus, General Transcendental, the third difference, Diversity, generates as the second of its species Goodness and its opposite, Evil; but the second difference, Cause, generates as its third species Example and Type.

These two categories are not opposed; in fact it is not clear what their relation to each other is. We can imagine some sort of relation of affinity or similarity; yet, in whatever case, the criterion seems weak and ad hoc.

Among the accidents of Private Relations, under the species Economical Relations, we find both Relations of Consanguinity (like Progenitor / Descendant, Brother / Half-Brother, Coelebs / Virgin–but Coelebs has among its synonyms both Bachelour and Damosel, while Virgin only Maid) and Relations of Superiority (Direct / Seduce, Defending / Deserting).

It is clear that all of these oppositions lack a constant criterion. Among the same Private Relations there are also the Provisions, which includes pairs such as Butter / Cheese, but also actions such as Butchering / Cooking and Box / Basket.

Frank has observed that Wilkins considered as semantically equivalent different kinds of pseudo-opposition as they appear in natural languages, which can work by antonymy (good / evil), by complementarity (husband / wife), by conversely (buy / sell), by relativity (over / under, bigger / smaller), by temporal gradation (Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday), by quantitative gradation (centimeter / meter / kilometer), by antipodality (north / south), by orthogonality (north-east / south-east), or by vectorial conversely (depart / arrive).

It is hardly by chance that Wilkins is repeatedly forced to justify his language on mnemonic grounds. In fact, Wilkins takes some of his procedures from the traditional arts of memory.

His criterion for establishing pairs is based on the most common mnemonic habits. Rossi (1960: 252) notes that Wilkins‘ botanist, John Ray, complained that he was not permitted to follow the commandments of nature, but rather the exigencies of regularity, almost as if he were forced to adapt his classification more to requirements of the traditional theaters of memory than to the canons of modern taxonomies.

Nor is it even clear what, in the tree of genera (figure 12.1), the subdivisions in lower case actually mean. They cannot be differences, because the differences appear later, in successive tables, and determine how, in each of the 40 major genera, the dependent species are to be generated.

Some of these lower-case entities seem to serve as super-genera; yet others appear in an adjectival form. Certain of these latter look like differences in the Aristotelian tradition–like animate / inanimate, for example. We might regard them as pseudo-differences.

However, if the generative path “substances + inanimate = ELEMENTS” seems to follow an Aristotelian criterion, the disjunctions after animate are established in a quite different fashion.

Animate substances are divided into parts and species, the species are divided into vegetative and sensitive, the vegetative species into imperfect and perfect, and it is only at the end of these disjunctions that it is possible to isolate genera like Stone or Metal.

This is not the only instance of this sort of confusion. Moreover, given a pair of opposed categories, such as Creator / creature, the first term of the division is a genus, but the second appears as a pseudo-difference through which, after other disjunctions, it is possible to isolate other genera.

Likewise, in the group Herb, Shrub and Tree, the last two are genera; the first is a sort of super-genus (or pseudo-difference) subdivided into three further genera.

It would be nice, Wilkins confessed (p. 289), if each of his differences had its own transcendental denomination; yet there did not seem to be sufficient terms in the language for this.

He admitted as well that while, in theory, a well-enough individuated difference would immediately reveal the form which gave the essence to each thing, these forms remained largely unknown.

So he had to content himself by defining things through properties and circumstances.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 251-4.

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July 7, 2016

Eco: An Open Classification?

John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, 1668, p. a from the Epistle

John Wilkins (1614-1672), An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, page a from the Epistle. London, John Martin, 1668. GoogleBooks offers a digital version of the complete text. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“In reality, Wilkins’ classification ought to be regarded as an open one. Following a suggestion of Comenius‘ (in the Via lucis), Wilkins argued that the task of constructing an adequate classification could only be undertaken by a group of scientists working over a considerable period of time, and to this end he solicited the collaboration of the Royal Society.

The Essay was thus considered no more than a first draft, subject to extensive revision. Wilkins never claimed that the system, as he presented it, was finished.

Looking back at figures 12.3 and 12.4, it is evident that there are only nine signs or letters to indicate either differences or species. Does this mean that each genus may have no more than nice species? It seems that the number nine had no ontological significance for Wilkins, and that he chose it simply because he thought nine was the maximum number of entities that might easily be remembered.

He realized that the actual number of species for each genus could not be limited. In fact, certain of the genera in the tables only have six species, but there are ten species for the Umbelliferous and seventeen for the Verticillates Non Fruticose.

To accommodate genera with over nine species Wilkins invented a number of graphic artifices. For simplicity’s sake, let us say that, in the spoken language, to specify a second group of nine species an l is added after the first consonant of the name, and that to specify a third group an r is added.

Therefore if Gαpe is normally Tulip (third species of the fourth difference of the genus Herbs according to their leaves), then Glαpe will be Ramsom, because the addition of the l means that the final e no longer indicates the third species in the genus but the twelfth.

Yet is precisely at this point that we come across a curious error. In the example we just gave, we had to correct Wilkins‘ text (p. 415). The text uses the normal English terms Tulip and Ramsom, but designates them in characters by Gαde and Glαde rather than Gαpe and Glαpe (as it should be).

If one checks carefully on the tables, one discovered that Gαde denotes Barley, not Tulip. Wilkins‘ mistake can be easily explained: regardless of whatever botanical affinities the plants might possess, in common English, the words Tulip and Barley are phonetically dissimilar, and thus unlikely to ever be confused with each other.

In a philosophical language, however, members of the same species are easy to muddle either phonetically or graphically. Without constant double-checking against the tables, it is difficult to avoid misprints and misunderstandings.

The problem is that in a characteristic language, for every unit of an expression one is obliged to find a corresponding content-unit. A characteristic language is thus not founded–as happens with natural languages–on the principle of double articulation, by virtue of which meaningless sounds, or phonemes, are combined to produce meaningful syntagms.

This means that in a language of “real” characters any alteration of a character (or of the corresponding sound) entails a change of sense.

This is a disadvantage that arises from what was intended as the great strength of the system, that is, its criterion of composition by atomic features, in order to ensure a complete isomorphism between expression and content.

Flame is Debα, because here the α designates a species of the element Fire. If we replace the α with an a we obtain a new composition, Deba, that means Comet. When designing his system, Wilkins‘ choice of α and a was arbitrary; once they are inserted into a syntagm, however, the syntagmatic composition is supposed to mirror the very composition of the denoted thing, so that “we should, by learning the Character and the Names of things, be instructed likewise in their Natures” (p. 21).

This creates the problem of how to find the name for yet unknown things. According to Frank (1979: 80), Wilkins‘ language, dominated by the notion of a definitively pre-established Great Chain of Being, cannot be creative. The language can name unknown things, but only within the framework of the system itself.

Naturally, one can modify the tables by inserting into them a new species, but this presupposes the existence of some sort of linguistic authority with the power to permit us to think of a new thing. In Wilkins’s language neologisms are not impossible, but harder to form than in natural languages (Knowlson 1975: 101).

One might defend Wilkins‘ language by arguing that it really encompasses a rational methodology of scientific research. If, for example, we were to transform the character Detα (rainbow) into Denα we would obtain a character that we could analyze as denoting the first species of the ninth difference of the genus Element.

Yet there is no such species in the tables. We cannot take the character metaphorically, because only characters followed by transcendental particles may be so interpreted. We can only conclude that the character unequivocally designates an as yet to be discovered content, and that even if the content remains undiscovered, the character has at least told us the precise point where it is to be found.

But what and where is that “point?” If the tables were analogous to the periodic table in chemistry, then we really would know what to look for. The periodic table contains boxes which, though momentarily empty, might, one day, be filled.

Yet the language of chemistry is rigorously quantitative; the table gives the atomic number and weight of each missing element. An empty space in Wilkins‘ classification, however, merely tells us that there is a hole at that point; it does not tell us what we need to fill it up, or why the hole appears in one space rather than another.

Since Wilkins‘ language is not based on a rigorous classification, it cannot be used as a procedure of scientific discovery.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 248-51.

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July 5, 2016

Eco: The real Characters

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.3, p. 243

John Wilkins (1614-1672), Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London, John Martin, 1668, p. 387. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less. From Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 243.

“Figure 12.3 gives Wilkins‘ own illustration of the signs characterizing the 40 major genera as well as the signs used to indicate differences and species.

The fundamental sign is a simple dash with a modification at its center to indicate genus. Differences and species are indicated by little hooks and bars attached to the two extremities of the dash: those attached to the left extremity signify differences; those to the right signify species.

A different series of signs, extremely difficult to read, is provided to indicate opposition, grammatical forms, copula, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc., as we have already seen for analogous writing systems.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.4, p. 244.

As I have said, the system also specifies the way in which the characters are to be pronounced. In figure 12.4 we see that each of the genera is assigned its own two-letter symbol, while the differences are expressed by the consonants B, D, G, P, T, C, Z, S, N and the species by the addition of seven vowels and two diphthongs. Here is one of Wilkins‘ own examples:

For instance if (De) signifie Element, then (Deb) must signifie the first difference; which (according to the Tables) is Fire: and (Debα) will denote the first Species, which is Flame. (Det) will be the fifth difference under that Genus, which is, Appearing meteor; (Detα) the first Species, viz. Rainbow; (Deta) the second, viz. Halo. (p. 415).

Figure 12.5 gives the first line of the Lord’s Prayer in characters.

The first sign indicates the first person plural of the possessive pronoun; the second is the sign of Economic Relations modified by a hook on the left, which indicates the first difference (relations of consanguinity), and another on the right which indicates the second species, Direct Ascendent.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.5, p. 245.

The first two signs therefore mean “Our Father” and are pronounced Hai coba. As a matter of fact, the phonetic language is clearer also as a form of writing, and our following examples will mainly rely on it.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 242-5.

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July 5, 2016

Eco: John Wilkins

John Wilkins (1614-1672), An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London, John Martin, 1668. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“Already in Mercury, a book principally devoted to secret writing, published in 1641, Wilkins had begun to design a project for universal language. It was not until 1668, however, that he was ready to unveil his Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language–the most complete project for a universal and artificial philosophical language that the seventeenth century was ever to produce.

Since “the variety of Letters is an appendix to the Curse of Babel” (p. 13), after a dutiful bow in the direction of the Hebrew language and a sketch of the evolution of languages from Babel onwards (including an examination of the Celto-Scythian hypothesis that we considered in ch. 5), and after an acknowledgment of his precursors and his collaborators in the compilation of classifications and of the final dictionary, Wilkins turned to his major task–the construction of a language founded on real characters “legible by any Nation in their own Tongue” (p. 13).

Wilkins observed that most earlier projects derived their list of characters from the dictionary of one particular language rather than drawing directly on the nature of things, and from that stock of notions held in common by all humanity.

Wilkins‘ approach required, as a preliminary step, a vast review of all knowledge to establish what these notions held in common by all rational beings really were.

Wilkins never considered that these fundamental notions might be Platonic ideas like Lull’s dignities. His list was rather based upon empirical criteria and he sought those notions to which all rational beings might either attest or, reasonably, be expected to attest: thus, if everybody agrees on the idea of a God, everybody would likewise agree on the botanical classification supplied to him by his colleague John Ray.

In reality, the image of the universe that Wilkins proposed was the one designed by the Oxonian culture of his time. Wilkins never seriously wondered whether other cultures might have organized the world after a different fashion, even though his universal language was designed for the whole of humanity.

The Tables and the Grammar

In appearance the classification procedure chosen by Wilkins was akin to the method of the Porphyrian Tree of Aristotelian tradition. Wilkins constructed a table of 40 major genera (see figure 12.1) subdivided into 251 characteristic differences.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.1, p. 240.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.1-2, p. 241.

From these he derived 2,030 species, which appear in pairs. Figure 12.2 provides a simplified example of the procedure: starting from the major genus of Beasts, after having divided them into viviparous and oviparous, and after having subdivided the viviparous ones into whole footed, cloven footed and clawed, Wilkins arrives at the species Dog / Wolf.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 12.2, p. 242.

I might add parenthetically that Wilkins‘ tables occupy a full 270 pages of his ponderous folio, and hope that the reader will excuse the summary nature of the examples which follow.

After presenting the tables, which supposedly design the whole knowable universe, Wilkins turned his attention to his natural (or philosophical) grammar in order to establish morphemes and the markers for derived terms, which can permit the generation, from the primitives, of declensions, conjugations, suffixes and so on.

Such a simplified grammatical machinery should thus allow the speaker to articulate discourses, as well as to produce the periphrases through which terms from a natural language might be defined entirely through the primitives of the artificial one.

Having reached this stage, Wilkins was able to present his language of real characters. In fact, it splits into two different languages: (1) the first is an ideogrammatic form of writing, vaguely Chinese in aspect, destined to appear in print but never to be pronounced; (2) the second is expressed by alphabetic characters and is intended to be pronounced.

It is possible to speak properly of two separate languages because, even though the pronounceable characters were constructed according to the same compositional principle as the ideograms, and obey the same syntax, they are so different that they need to be learned apart.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 238-42.

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July 4, 2016

Eco: George Dalgarno

George Dalgarno (1626-1687), title page of Ars Signorum, printed by J. Hayes, London, 1661. Published 20 years before Didascalocophus, Ars signorum preceded Bishop Wilkin‘s speculations on a “real character and a philosophical language.” This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“It is difficult to make a precise evaluation of George Dalgarno’s Ars signorum, published in 1661. In contrast to Wilkin’s Essay, Dalgarno’s tables are summary and the text, in its expository sections, is written in a language that is extremely cryptic, sometimes contradictory, and almost always strikingly allusive.

The book is filled with printer’s errors, especially where Dalgarno provides examples of real characters–not an inconsiderable problem in reading a language where the misprint of one letter changes the whole sense of the character.

We might note that the difficulty in printing a text free of errors shows how cumbersome the philosophic languages were, even for their own creators.

Dalgarno was a Scottish schoolmaster who passed most of his life at Oxford, where he taught grammar at a private school. He was in touch with all the contemporary scholars at the university, and in the list of acknowledgements at the beginning of his book he mentions men such as Ward, Lodwick, Boyle and even Wilkins.

It is certain that, as he was preparing his Essay (published seven years later), Wilkins contacted Dalgarno and showed him his own tables. Dalgarno regarded them as too detailed, and chose to follow what seemed to him an easier path.

When Wilkins finally made his project public, however, Dalgarno felt himself to be the victim of plagiarism. The suspicion was unjust: Wilkins had accomplished what Dalgarno had only promised to do.

Besides, various other authors had already anticipated many of the elements appearing in the project of Dalgarno. Still, Wilkins resented the insinuation of wrong-doing. In the acknowledgements that prefaced his Essay, Wilkins was prodigal with his thanks to inspirers and collaborators alike, but the name of Dalgarno does not appear–except in an oblique reference to “another person.” (b2r).

In any case, it was the project of Wilkins that Oxford took seriously. In 1668 the Royal Society instituted a commission to study the possible applications of the project; its members included Robert Hook, Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and John Wallis.

Although we are not informed of the conclusions that they finally reached, subsequent tradition, from Locke to the Encyclopédie, invariably treated Wilkins as the author of the most important project.

Perhaps the only scholar who considered Dalgarno respectfully was Leibniz, who, in a rough draft for his own encyclopedia, reproduced Dalgarno’s list of entities almost literally (see Rossi 1960: 272).

Wilkins, of course, was perfectly at home at the Royal Society. He served as its secretary, and could freely avail himself of the help, advice, patronage and attention of his fellow members. Dalgarno, by contrast, was not even a member of the university.

Dalgarno saw that a universal language needed to comprehend two distinct aspects: first, a content-plane, that is, a classification of all knowledge, and that was a task for a philosopher; second, an expression-level, that is, a grammar that organized the characters so that they can properly denote the content elements–and this was a task for a grammarian.

Dalgarno regarded himself as a grammarian rather than a philosopher; hence he merely outlined the principles of classification upon which his language would be based, hoping that others might carry this task to fruition.

As a grammarian, Dalgarno was sensitive to the problem that his language would need to be spoken and not just written. He was aware of the reserves Descartes had expressed about the difficulty of devising a philosophic language that might be pronounced by speakers of differing tongues; thus he introduced his project with a phonetic analysis which sought to identify those sounds which were most easily compatible with the human organs of speech.

The letters from which he later composed his character were not, as they might seem, chosen arbitrarily; he chose instead those which he considered most easy to utter. Even when he came to elaborate the syntagmatic order of his character, he remained concerned with ease of pronunciation.

To this end, he made sure that consonants were always followed by vowels, inserting in his character a number of diphthongs whose function is purely euphonious. This concern certainly ensured ease of pronunciation; unfortunately, it also rendered his character increasingly difficult to identify.

After phonetics, Dalgarno passed to the problem, of the semantic primitives. He believed that these could all be derived solely in terms of genus, species and difference, arguing that such a system of embedded dichotomies was the easiest to remember (p. 29).

For a series of logico-philosophical reasons (explained pp. 30ff), he excluded negative differences from his system, retaining only those which were positive.

The most ambitious feature of Dalgarno’s project (and Wilkin’s as well) was that his classification was to include not only natural genera and species (comprehending the most precise variations in animals and plants) but also artifacts and accidents–a task never attempted by the Aristotelian tradition (see Shumaker 1982: 149).

In fact, Dalgarno based his system of classification on the rather bold assumption that all individual substances could be reduced to an aggregate of accidents (p. 44). This is an assumption which, as I have tried to show elsewhere (Eco 1984: 2.4.3), arises as an almost mechanical consequence of using Porphyry’s Tree as a basis for classification; it is a consequence, moreover, that the entire Aristotelian tradition has desperately tried to ignore.

Dalgarno confronted the problem, even though recognizing that the number of accidents was probably infinite. He was also aware that the number of species at the lowest order was unmanageably large–he calculated that they would number between 4,000 and 10,000.

This is probably one of the reasons why he rejected the help of Wilkins, who was to persevere until he had classified 2,030 species. Dalgarno feared that such a detailed classification ran the risk of a surgeon who, having dissected his cadavers into minute pieces, could no longer tell which piece belonged to Peter and which to John (p. 33).

In his endeavor to contain the number of primitives, Dalgarno decided to introduce tables in which he took into consideration only fundamental genera (which he numbered at 17), together with the intermediary genera and the species.

Yet, in order to gather up all the species in this tripartite division, Dalgarno was forced to introduce into his tables a number of intermediate disjunctions. These even received names in the language: warm-blooded animals, for example, are called NeiPTeik; quadrupeds are named Neik.

Yet in the names only the letters for genera, intermediary genera, and species are taken into account. (Mathematical entities are considered as concrete bodies on the assumption that entities like points and lines are really forms).”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 228-31.

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June 28, 2016

Eco: Comenius

Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, the initial version was completed in 1623, while the first edition was published in 1631. The entire work is posted in an electronic edition. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“The British quest was also influenced by the presence of Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky). In fact Comenius was a member of the Bohemian Brotherhood, a mystic branch of Hussite reformers, and he played a role–albeit a polemical one–in the Rosicrucian story (cf. his Labyrinth of the World, 1623, in Czech).

Thus he was inspired by religious ideals which were alien to the scientific purposes of the English milieu. On this complex cultural geography see Yates (1972, 1979): one is really facing a web of different projects, at once similar and antithetical, in which the search for a perfect language was but a single aspect (see Rossi 1960; Bonerba 1992; Pellerey 1992a: 41-9).

Comenius‘ aspirations must be seen in the framework of the tradition of pansophia, yet his pansophic aims were influenced by educational preoccupations. In his Didactica magna of 1657, he proposed a scheme for reforming teaching methods; for, as he observed, a reform in the education of the young formed the basis upon which any subsequent political, social and religious reform must be built.

It was essential that the teacher furnish the learners with a set of images that would stamp themselves indelibly on their imaginations. This meant placing what is visible before the eyes, what is audible before the ears, what is olfactory before the nose, gustatory before the tongue, and tactical before the touch.

In an earlier manual for the teaching of Latin, Janua linguarum, written in 1631, Comenius was first of all concerned that the learner should have an immediate visual apprehension of what was being spoken of.

Equally he was concerned that the images and notions that the learner was studying in the Latin lexicon be arranged in a certain logical order.

Thus lessons progressed from the creation of the world to the elements, to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, etc.

By the time of the Didactica magna Comenius had begun to rearrange his notions according to the suggestions of Bacon. In 1658 there appeared the Orbis sensualium pictus quadrilinguis, which represented his attempt to present a figured nomenclature which would include the fundamental things of the world together with human actions.

So important were the images that Comenius delayed publication until he was able to obtain satisfactory engravings that were not mere ornaments, but bore an iconic relation with the things represented, for which the verbal names appeared as nothing but titles, explanations and complements.

This manual was prefaced by an alphabet in which every letter was associated with the image of a particular animal whose voice recalled the sound of the letter–so that the result resembles Harsdörffer’s onomatopoetic fantasies concerning the sounds of German.

Therefore the image of a crow is commented by “Die Krähe krächzet, cornix cornicatur, la cornacchia gracchia, la corneille gazoüille,” or, for a snake, “Die Schlange zischtet, Serpens sibilat, il Serpe fsschia [sic], le Serpent siffle.”

Comenius was a severe critic of the defects of natural languages. In his Pansophiae Christianae liber III (1639-40), he advocated a reform that would eliminate the rhetorical and figurative use of words, which he regarded as a source of ambiguity.

The meaning of words should be fixed, he demanded, with one name for each thing, thus restoring words to their original meanings.

In 1668, in the Via lucis, Comenius offered prescriptions for the creation of an artificial universal language. By now, pansophy was more than an educational method; it was a utopian vision in which a world council was supposed to create the perfect state along with its perfect philosophical language, the Panglossia.

It is interesting to consider that Comenius had in fact written this work before 1641, when, after wandering through the whole of Europe in the course of the Thirty Years War, he had taken refuge in London.

Via lucis certainly circulated, in manuscript form, in the English milieu at that time (see, for example, Cram 1989).

Although Comenius was never to construct his new language in extenso, he had broached the idea of a universal tongue which had to overcome the political and structural limitations of Latin.

The lexicon of the new language would reflect the composition of reality and in it every word should have a definite and univocal meaning, every content should be represented by one and only one expression, and the contents were not supposed to be products of fancy, but should represent only every really existing thing, no more and no less (see Pellerey 1992a: 48).

Thus, on one side we have a utopian thinker, inspired by Rosicrucian ideals, whose goal was to discover a pansophy which aimed at picturing the unmoving and harmonical connection of every element of the creation, so as to lead the human mind to an unceasing quest for God; on the other side, rejecting the possibility of rediscovering the original perfect language, and looking, for educational purposes, for an easy artificial method, Comenius became the forerunner of that search for an a priori philosophical language that would later be implemented by English utopian thinkers whose inspiration was more scientific than theological or mystical.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 214-6.

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June 25, 2016

Eco: Beck and Becher

Cave Beck, The Universal Character, London, 1657

Cave Beck (1623-1702), The Universal Character, London, 1657. An eBook available on GoogleBooks, The Universal Character proposes a universal language based on a numerical system consisting of the ten Arabic numerals up to 10,000 combinations long, which was considered sufficient to include all words in common usage. As each word was assigned a unique number and the number was the same regardless of language, words ended up unmanageably long. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“In 1657 Cave Beck had published The Universal Character, by which All the Nations of the World may Understand One Another’s Conceptions, Reading out of one Common Writing their Own Mother Tongues, presenting a project which was not so different from Kircher’s. Here is an example from his system:

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 201.png

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995, p. 201.

The numbers specified nouns and verbs, p stood for the personal pronoun, second person, with pf as the feminine form (which permits one to use the same term, 2477 = “parent,” in both cases); leb indicated imperative plural.

Beck tried to turn his pasigraphy into a pasilaly as well, that is a system of universal pronunciation. Thus the above sentence was to be pronounced leb totreónfo pee tofosénsen and pif tofosénsen.

The only difficulty was that, in order to pronounce the sentence, one had to memorize the whole dictionary, remembering the right number for every word.

In 1661, two years before Kircher’s Polygraphia (but some of Kircher’s ideas had circulated in manuscript form since 1660), Joachim Becher published his Character pro notitia linguarum universalis (sometimes known under its frontispiece title of Clavis convenientiae linguarum).

Becher’s project was not unlike Kircher’s; the major difference was that Becher constructed a Latin dictionary that was almost ten times more vast (10,000 items). Yet he did not include synonyms from other languages, expecting the accommodating reader to make them up for him.

As in Kircher, nouns, verbs and adjectives composed the main list, with a supplementary list of proper names of people and places making up an appendix.

For each item in Becher’s dictionary there is an Arabic number: the city of Zürich, for example, is designated by the number 10283. A second Arabic number refers the user to grammatical tables which supply verbal endings, the endings for the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, or adverbial endings.

A third number refers to case endings. The dedication “Inventum Eminentissimo Principi” is written 4442. 2770:169:3. 6753:3, that is, “(My) Invention (to the) Eminent + superlative + dative singular, Prince + dative singular.”

Unfortunately Becher was afraid that his system might prove difficult for peoples who did not know the Arabic numbers; he therefore thought up a system of his own for the direct visual representation of numbers.

The system is atrociously complicated and almost totally illegible. Some authors have imagined that it is somehow akin to Chinese. This is hardly true. What we have, in fact, is a basic graphical structure where little lines and dots at various points on the figure represent different numbers.

Lines and points affixed to the right and center of the figure refer to grammatical categories. Figure 9.1 provides only an excerpt of a list that keeps going for four tables.

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 9.1, p. 202

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995, Figure 9.1, p. 202.

In the chapter “Mirabilia graphica” in his Technica curiosa (1664), Gaspar Schott tried to improve on Becher’s project.

He simplified the system for the representation of numbers and added partial lexicons for other languages. Schott proposed using small grids of eight cases each, where the lower horizontal line represents units, the next one up tens, the next hundreds, and the top thousands.

Units were represented by dots; fives were represented by strokes. Numbers on the left referred to lexical units, while those on the right to grammatical morphemes. Thus figure 9.2 must be read as 23:1, 15:15, 35:4, and can be translated as “The horse eats the fodder.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Figure 9.2, p. 203

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995, Figure 9.2, p. 203.

Becher’s and Schott’s systems appear totally impracticable for normal human use, but have been seen as tentative models for future practices of computer translation (cf. Heilman 1963; De Mauro 1963).

In fact, it is sufficient to think of Becher’s pseudo-ideograms as instructions for electronic circuits, prescribing to a machine which path to follow through the memory in order to retrieve a given linguistic term, and we have a procedure for a word-for-word translation (with all the obvious inconveniences of such a merely mechanical program).”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 201-3.

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June 20, 2016

Eco: Magic Language

Teophilus Schweighardt Constantiens, aka Daniel Mögling (1596-1635), Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum (The Mirror of the Wisdom of the Rosy Cross), 1618. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“In a climate of extraordinary spiritual tension, the seventeenth century awaited change–a general reform of knowledge and morals, a reawakening of religions sensibility.

The period was dominated by a belief that a new, golden century was dawning; Postel had already used the term “golden century” in the title of one of his works. This was, moreover, an expectation shared by Catholics and Protestants alike, though each in different forms.

Authors from Campanella to Andreae had drawn up projects for an ideal republic. Not only Postel but other thinkers in different countries had designed schemes for a universal monarchy.

The Thirty Years War acted as a catalyst: conflict had flared in one region after another, creating, on the one hand, confessional hatreds and nationalist rivalries, engendering the modern notion of the raison d’état, on the other producing a pleiad of mystic spirits dreaming of universal peace (cf. De Mas 1982).

It was in this climate, then, that in 1614, there appeared an anonymous tract written in German: Allgemeine und general Reformation der gantzen weiten Welt. Though this was only discovered later, the first part was largely a re-elaboration of a satire written by Traiano Boccalini and published in 1612-3, called Ragguagli di Parnaso.

The second part, however, took the form of a manifesto, entitled Fama fraternitatis R.C. In this, the mysterious confraternity of the Rosicrucians openly declared its existence, supplying details concerning its own history as well as that of its mythical founder, Christian Rosencreutz.

In the following year, 1615, the German manifesto was republished together with a second manifesto, written this time in Latin, with the title Confessio fraternitatis Roseae crucis. Ad eruditos Europae (we shall use the first English translation, The Fame and the Confession of the Fraternity of R.C., London, 1652).

The first manifesto proclaimed its wish that there should be “a Society in Europe [ . . . ] with which such as be Governors might be brought up, for to learn all that which God hath suffered Man to know” (p. 9).

Both the manifestos emphasized the secret character of the confraternity and the fact that their members were not permitted to reveal its true aims and nature. It was a call, addressed to the learned of Europe, beseeching them to make contact with the writers of the manifesto; this made the final appeal of the Fama even more ambiguous:

“And although at this time we make no mention either of our names, or meetings, yet nevertheless every ones opinion shal assuredly come to our hands, in what language so ever it be, nor any body shal fail. who so gives but his name to speak with some of us, either by word of mouth, or else if there be some lett in writing [ . . . ] Also our building (although one hundred thousand people had very near seen and beheld the same) shal for ever remain untouched, undestroyed, and hidden to the wicked world.” (pp. 31-2).

Immediately, from almost every corner of Europe, responses to the Rosicrucian appeal were written. No one claimed to be a Rosicrucian. Almost no one claimed even to know who the Rosicrucians were. Yet almost everyone tried to claim that his own programme was synonymous with that of the Rosicrucian brotherhood.

Some authors professed an extreme humility. In his Themis aurea (1618), for example, Michael Maier insisted that though the brotherhood really existed, he was too humble an individual to be admitted as a member.

Yet, as Yates observed, this was typical of the behavior of Rosicrucian authors: not only did they deny being Rosicrucians, they claimed never to have encountered a single member of the confraternity.

Thus when, in 1623, a set of –naturally anonymous–manifestos appeared in Paris, announcing the arrival of the Rosicrucians, a furious polemic ensued in which the common opinion emerged that the Rosicrucians were worshippers of Satan.

It was said of Descartes that, in the course of a trip to Germany, he had tried (unsuccessfully of course) to make contact with the brotherhood. On his return to Paris, he even fell under suspicion of being a member.

He readily found a logical argument to exculpate himself, however; since it was well known that the Rosicrucians were invisible, Descartes showed up (making himself visible) in public places and on public occasions (see A. Baillet, Vie de Monsieur Descartes, 1693).

In 1623, a certain Neuhaus published, first in German and then in French, an Advertissiment pieux et utile des frères de la Rosee-Croix, in which he asked whether or not they existed, and if so, who they were and what was the origin of their name.

Neuhaus proved their existence by means of a rather startling argument: “By the very fact that they change and alter their name and that they mask their age, and that, by their own confession, they come and go without making themselves known, there is no Logician that could deny the necessity that they exist” (p. 5).

It would be tedious to recount here the entire story of books and tracts contradicting each other in an endeavor to reveal the truth about the Rosicrucians (it has sometimes been claimed, for instance, that the same author, using two different pseudonyms, was responsible for two or more tracts pro- and anti-Rosicrucians: see Arnold 1955; Edighoffer 1982).

It means that, when conditions are ripe, it takes but one spark–be it an obscure and ambiguous appeal for the spiritual reform of all humanity–to set off unexpected reactions. It almost seemed that everyone had been waiting for the Rosicrucian manifesto to appear as the missing piece in a polemic in which all sides–Catholic and Protestant–were waiting to join.

Thus, although the Jesuits were soon in the forefront of the battle against the Rosicrucians, there were not lacking those who insinuated that behind the Rosicrucians was the Society of Jesus itself, seeking to smuggle Catholic dogma into the Protestant world (see Rosa jesuitica, 1620).

The most intriguing aspect of the whole story was that the people immediately suspected of being the authors of the manifestos–Johann Valentin Andreae and his circle of friends in Tubingen–spent the rest of their lives either denying their involvement, or minimizing it as nothing more than a literary exercise.

As one might expect, given the spirit of the time, it was impossible to offer to the people of all lands a new philosophy without also offering them a perfect language in which to express it.

The manifestos, of course, spoke of this language; yet its perfection was mirrored by its secrecy (Fama, 287). According to the Confessio, the four founders of the brotherhood had “created the magic language and writing:”

“…and thenceforth our Trumpet shall publiquely sound with a loud sound, and great noise, when namely the fame (which at this present is shewed by few, and is secretly, as thing to come, declared in Figures and Pictures) shall be free, and publiquely proclaimed, and the whole World be filled withall [ . . . ]

So, the secret hid Writings and Characters are most necessary for all such things which are found out by Men: Although that great Book of Nature stand open to all Men, yet there are but few that can read and understand the same [ . . . ]

The Characters and Letters, as God hath here and there incorporated them in the Holy Scripture the Bible, so hath he imprinted them most apparently into the wonderful Creation of Heaven and Earth, yea in all Beasts [ . . . ]

From the which Characters and Letters we have borrowed our Magick writing, and have found out, and made a new Language for our selves, in the which withall is expressed and declared the Nature of all Things; so that it is no wonder that we are not so eloquent in other Languages, the which we know that they are altogether disagreeing to the Language of our forefathers, Adam and Enoch, and were through the Babylonical Confusion wholly hidden.” (pp. 43, 47, 48).

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 178-82.

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May 30, 2016

Eco: The Egyptian Alphabet, 3

PE40_H78_F84_Horapollo_p128-9_Hieroglyphica

Horapollo (c. 5th century CE), Hori Apollinis selecta hieroglyphica, Romae: sumtibus Iulij Francescschini, ex typographia Aloysij Zanetti, 1599, pp. 128-9. Brooklyn Museum Libraries, Wilbur Library of Egyptology, Special Collections, call number PE40 H78 F84. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“Alciati’s commentary refers to the passage describing the stork in the Hieroglyphica. Yet we have just seen that there is no reference either to the feeding of the young or to the transport of the parents. These features are, however, mentioned in a fourth century AD text, the Hexaemeron of Basil (VIII, 5).

In other words, the information contained in the Hieroglyphica was already at the disposal of European culture. A search for traces of the stork from the Renaissance backwards is filled with pleasant surprises.

In the Cambridge Bestiary (twelfth century CE), we read that storks nourish their young with exemplary affection, and that “they incubate the nests so tirelessly that they lose their own feathers. What is more, when they have moulted in this way, they in turn are looked after by the babies, for a time corresponding in length to the time which they themselves have spent in bringing up and cherishing their offspring.” (The Bestiary, T.H. White, ed., New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1960: pp. 117-8).

The accompanying image shows a stork that carries a frog in its beak, obviously a dainty morsel for its young.

The Cambridge Bestiary has taken this idea from Isidore of Seville, who, in the Etymologiarum (XII, vii), says more or less the same. Who then are Isidore’s sources? St. Basil we have already seen; there was St. Ambrose as well (Hexaemeron, V, 16, 53), and possibly also Celsus (cited in Origen, Contra Celsum, IV, 98) and Porphyry (De abstinentia, III, 23, 1). These, in their turn, used Pliny’s Naturalis historia (X, 32) as their source.

Pliny, of course, could have been drawing on an Egyptian tradition, if Aelian, in the second to third century AD, could claim (though without citing Pliny by name) that “Storks are venerated among the Egyptians because they nourish and honor their parents when they grow old” (De animalium natura, X, 16).

But the idea can be traced back even further. The same notion is to be found in Plutarch (De solertia animalium, 4), Cicero (De finibus bonorum et malorum, II, 110), Aristotle (Historia animalium, IX, 7, 612b, 35), Plato (Alcibiades, 135 E), Aristophanes (The Birds, 1355), and finally in Sophocles (Electra, 1058).

There is nothing to prevent us from imagining that Sophocles himself was drawing on ancient Egyptian tradition; but, even if he were, it is evident that the story of the stork has been part of occidental culture for as long as we care to trace it.

It follows that Horapollo did not reveal anything hot. Moreover, the origin of this symbol seems to have been Semitic, given that, in Hebrew, the word for stork means “the one who has filial piety.”

Read by anyone familiar with medieval and classical culture, Horapollo’s booklet seems to differ very little from the bestiaries current in the preceding centuries. It merely adds some information about specifically Egyptian animals, such as the ibis and the scarab and neglects make certain of the standard moralizing comments or biblical references.

This was clear even to the Renaissance. In his Hieroglyphica sive de sacris Aegyptorum aliarumque gentium literis of 1556, Pierio Valeriano never tired of employing his vast stock of knowledge of classical and Christian sources to note the occasions where the assertions of Horapollo might be confirmed.

Yet instead of reading Horapollo in the light of a previous tradition, he revisits this whole tradition in the light of Horapollo.

With a barrage of citations from Latin and Greek authors, Giulio Cesare Capaccio displayed, in his Delle imprese of 1592, his perfect mastery of older traditions. Yet fashion now demanded that he interpreted this tradition in a Egyptian key.

“Without hieroglyphic observation,” and without having recourse to the Monas hieroglyphica “quel Giovanni Dee da Londino,” it was impossible, he said, to endow these images (coming from centuries of western culture) with their proper recondite meanings.

We are speaking of the “rereading” of a text (or of a network of texts) which had not been changed during the centuries. So what has changed? We are here witnessing a semiotic incident which, as paradoxical as some of its effects may have been, was, in terms of its own dynamic, quite easy to explain.

Horapollo’s text (qua text) differs but little from other similar writings, which were previously known. None the less, the humanists read it as a series of unprecedented statements. The reason is simply that the readers of the fifteenth century saw is as coming from a different author.

The text had not changed, but the “voice” supposed to utter it was endowed with a different charisma. This changed the way in which the text was received and the way in which it was consequently interpreted.

Thus, as old and familiar as these images were, the moment they appeared as transmitted not by the familiar Christian and pagan sources, but by the ancient Egyptian divinities themselves, they took on a fresh, and radically different, meaning.

For the missing scriptural commentaries there were substituted allusions to vague religions mysteries. The success of the book was due to its polysemy. Hieroglyphs were regarded as initiatory symbols.

They were symbols, that is, expressions that referred to an occult, unknown and ambivalent content. In contradistinction to conjecture, in which we take a visible symptom and infer from it its cause, Kircher defined a symbol as:

“a nota significativa of mysteries, that is to say, that it is the nature of a symbol to lead our minds, by means of certain similarities, to the understanding of things vastly different from the things that are offered to our external senses, and whose property it is to appear hidden under the veil of an obscure expression. [ . . . ] Symbols cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters, and figures. (Obeliscus Pamphilius, II, 5, 114-20).”

These symbols were initiatory, because the allure of Egyptian culture was given by the promise of a knowledge that was wrapped in an impenetrable and indecipherable enigma so as to protect it from the idle curiosity of the vulgar multitudes.

The hieroglyph, Kircher reminds us, was the symbol of a sacred truth (thus, though all hieroglyphs are symbols, it does not follow that all symbols are hieroglyphs) whose force derived from its impenetrability to the eyes of the profane.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 151-4.

(Editorial Note: I must mention Mr. William Thayer, whose LacusCurtius site at the University of Chicago links to a whopping 51 complete texts by ancient authors and more. I stumbled across Mr. Thayer’s page as I linked to classical writers, and I find it to be both indispensable and a staggering contribution to online scholarship.

Thank you for this work, Mr. Thayer. I am one of the crazy ones out here in internet-land who realizes what you have done. With my best regards.)

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May 27, 2016

Eco: The Egyptian Alphabet

The Rosetta Stone, inscribed with a decree by Pharaoh Ptolemy V at Memphis, is dated to 196 BCE. Featuring three scripts, ancient Egyptian, Demotic and ancient Greek, the stele was discovered in 1799 by French soldier Pierre-Françoise Bouchard of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt. Transferred to British control after the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801, the stele has been on continual exhibition at the British Museum since 1802. The script was finally transliterated by Jean-Françoise Champollion in 1822, decrypting the mysteries of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This photo © Hans Hillewaert in 2007, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“The hieroglyphic script is undoubtedly composed, in part, of iconic signs: some are easily recognizable–vulture, owl, bull, snake, eye, foot, man seated with a cup in hand; others are stylized–the hoisted sail, the almond-like shape for a mouth, the serrated line for water.

Some other signs, at least to the untrained eye, seem to bear only the remotest resemblance to the things that they are supposed to represent–the little square that stands for a seat, the sign of folded cloth, or the semicircle that represents bread.

All these signs are not icons (representing a thing by direct similarity) but rather ideograms, which work by a sort of rhetorical substitution. Thus an inflated sail serves to represent the wind; a man seated with a cup means to drink; a cow’s ear means to understand; the head of a cynocephalus stands for the god Thoth and for all his various attributes, such as writing and counting.

Not everything, however, can be represented ideographically. One way that the ancient Egyptians had found to circumvent this difficult was to turn their ideograms into simple phonograms.

In order to represent a certain sound they put the image of a thing whose name sounded similar. To take an example from Jean-Françoise Champollion‘s first decipherment (Lettre à Dacier, 17 September 1822, 11-12), the mouth, in Egyptian ro, was chosen to represent the Greek consonant P (rho).

It is ironic to think that while, for Renaissance Hermeticists, sounds had to represent the nature of things, for the Egyptians, things (or their corresponding images) were representing sounds (see, for a similar procedure, my remarks in chapter 6 on Bruno’s mnemonics).

By the time interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics had revived in Europe, however, knowledge of the hieroglyphic alphabet had been lost for over a thousand years. The necessary premise for the decipherment of hieroglyphs was a stroke of pure fortune, like the discovery of a bilingual dictionary.

In fact, as is well known, decipherment was made possible by the discovery not of a dictionary, but of a trilingual text, the famous Rosetta Stone, named after the city of Rashid where it was found by a French soldier in 1799, and, as a result of Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Nelson, soon transferred to London.

The stone bore an inscription in hieroglyphic, in demotic (a cursive, administrative script elaborated about 1,000 BCE), and in Greek.

Working from reproductions, Champollion, in his Lettre à Dacier, laid the foundation for the decipherment of hieroglyphs. He compared two cartouches which, from their position in the text, he guessed must refer to the names of Ptolemy (ΠΤΟΛΟΜΑΙΟΣ) and Cleopatra (ΚΛΟΠΑΤΡΑ).

He identified the five letters that both names have in common (Π, Τ, Ο, Λ, Α), and found that the two cartouches had five hieroglyphs in common as well. By supposing that each other instance of the same sign represented the same sound, Champollion could easily infer the phonetic value of the remaining text.

Champollion’s decipherment does not, however, explain a series of phenomena which can justify the interpretation of Horapollo. Greek and Roman colonizers had imposed on Egypt their commerce, their technology and their gods.

By the time of the spread of Christianity, Egypt had already abandoned many of its ancient traditions. Knowledge of sacred writing was still preserved and practiced only by priests living within the sacred enclosures of the ancient temples.

These were a dwindling breed: in those last repositories of a lost knowledge, cut off from the rest of the world, they cultivated the monuments of their ancient culture.

Since the sacred writing no longer served any practical use, but only initiatory purposes, these last priests began to introduce complexities into it, playing with the ambiguities inherent in a form of writing that could be differently read either phonetically or ideographically.

To write the name of the god Ptah, for example, the P was expressed phonetically and placed at the top of the name with the ideogram for sky (p[t]), the H was placed in the middle and represented by the image of the god Heh with his arms raised, and the T was expressed by the ideogram for the earth (ta).

It was an image that not only expressed Ptah phonetically, but also carried the visual suggestion that the god Ptah had originally separated the earth from the sky.

The discovery that, by combining different hieroglyphs, evocative visual emblems might be created inspired these last scribes to experiment with increasingly complicated and abstruse combinations.

In short, these scribes began to formulate a sort of kabbalistic play, based, however, on images rather than on letters.

Around the term represented by a sign (which was given an initial phonetic reading) there formed a halo of visual connotations and secondary senses, a sort of chord of associated meanings which served to amplify the original semantic range of the term.

The more the sacred text was enhanced by its exegetes, the more the conviction grew that they expressed buried truths and lost secrets (Sauneron 1957: 123-7).

Thus, to the last priests of a civilization sinking into oblivion, hieroglyphs appeared as a perfect language. Yet their perfection could only be understood by visually reading them; if by chance still pronounced, they would have lost any magic (Sauneron 1982: 55-6).”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 146-9.

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May 15, 2016

Eco: The Indo-European Hypothesis

Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), Kircher’s museum at the Collegio Romano, frontispiece of Giorgio de Sepibus, Romani Collegii Musaeum Celeberrimum, Rome, 1678. Courtesy of Stanford University and the Zymoglyphic Museum. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“Between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries a new perspective opened. The battle for Hebrew had been definitively lost. It now seemed clear that, even had it existed, linguistic change and corruption would have rendered the primitive language irrecuperable.

What was needed instead was a typology in which information about known languages might be codified, family connections established, and relations of descent traced. We are here at the beginning of a story which has nothing to do with our own.

In 1786, in the Journal of the Asiatick Society of Bombay, Sir William Jones announced that

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the root of verbs and in the forms of grammar [ . . . ]

No philosopher could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” (“On the Hindus,” The Works of Sir William Jones, III, London 1807, 34-5).

Jones advanced the hypothesis that Celtic, Gothic and even ancient Persian were all related to Sanskrit. Note that he spoke not only of similar verb roots, but also of similar grammatical structures. We have left behind the study of lexical analogies, and are beginning a research on syntactic similarities and phonetic affinities.

Already in 1653, John Wallis (Grammatica linguae anglicae) had posed the problem of how one might establish the relation between a series of French words–guerre, garant, gard, gardien, garderobe, guise–and the English series–war, warrant, ward, warden, wardrobe, wise–by proving the existence of a constant shift from g to w.

Later in the nineteenth century, German scholars, such as Friedrich and Wilhelm von Schlegel and Franz Bopp, deepened the understanding of the relation between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and German.

They discovered a set of correspondences in the conjugation of the verb to be in all these languages.

Gradually they came to the conclusion that not only was Sanskrit the original language of the group, its Ursprache, but that there must have existed, for this entire family, an even more primitive proto-language from which they all, Sanskrit included, had derived. This was the birth of the Indo-European hypothesis.

Through the work of Jakob Grimm (Deutsche Grammatik, 1818) these insights became organized in a scientific fashion. Research was based on the study of sound shifts (Lautverschiebungen) which traced how from the Sanskrit p were generated pous-podos in Greek, pes-pedes in Latin, fotus in Gothic, and foot in English.

What had changed between the utopian dream of an Adamic language and the new perspective? Three things. Above all, scholars had elaborated a set of scientific criteria.

In the second place, the original language no longer seemed like an archeological artifact that, one day, might actually be dug up. Indo-European was an ideal point of scholarly reference only.

Finally, Indo-European made no claim to being the original language of all humanity; it merely represented the linguistic root for just one family–the Aryan.”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 103-5.

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May 9, 2016

Eco: Conventionalism, Epicureanism and Polygenesis, 2

Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), from Turris Babel, Sive Archontologia Qua Primo Priscorum post diluvium hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo, Secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque exstructio, confusio linguarum, & inde gentium transmigrationis, cum principalium inde enatorum idiomatum historia, multiplici eruditione describuntur & explicantur. Amsterdam, Jansson-Waesberge, 1679. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.

“During these same years, thinkers also returned to reflect upon an older suggestion by Epicurus, who, in a letter to Herodotus, gave his opinion that the names of things were not originally due to convention; human beings themselves had rather created them from their own natures.

Those of differing tribes, “under the impulse of special feelings and special presentations of sense,” uttered “special cries.” The air thus emitted was moulded by their different feelings or sense perceptions (letter to Herodotus, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, X, 75-6).

Epicurus went on to add that, to eliminate confusion and for reasons of economy, the various peoples subsequently came to an agreement over what name they should give things.

He had no fixed opinion on whether this agreement had been made from instinct or “by rational thought” (cf. Formigari 1970: 17-28; Gensini 1991: 92; Manetti 1987: 176-7).

That was the first part of Epicurus‘ thesis, which emphasized the natural rather than conventional origin of languages; however, this idea was taken up by Lucretius: nature prompted human beings to emit the sounds of language; necessity gave birth to the names of things.

Therefore to suppose that someone then distributed names among things, and from him that men learnt their first words, is folly. For why should he have been able to mark all things with titles and to utter the various sounds of the tongue, and at the same time others not be thought able to have done it? . . .

Therefore if it is the various sensations that they feel which drive animals to emit differing sounds, even though they remain mute, how much more just is it to say that sensations induce mortals to indicate different things with different sounds. (De rerum natura, W.H.D. Rouse, tr., London: Heinemann, 1975: V, 1041-90).

This was a new view, one which we may call the materialist-biological theory of the origin of language. Language arose out of a natural inclination to transform sensations into ideas, which, for the sake of civil convenience, were then translated into sounds.

If it were true, as Epicurus had suggested, that this process of transformation might vary in different races, climates and places, it was hardly too much to imagine that, in diverse times and ways, the different races had originated different families of languages.

This was the intuition behind the theory that evolved in the eighteenth century: each language had its own genius.

Epicurus‘ thesis could not help but seem seductive in the “libertine” milieu of seventeenth-century France, in an atmosphere of skepticism ranging from sarcastic agnosticism to confessed atheism.

In 1655 there appeared the Systema theologicum ex prae-Adamitarum hypothesi, written by a Calvinist named Isaac de La Peyrère. Starting from an extremely original reading of the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, La Peyrère argued for the polygenesis of races and peoples.

Reports of missionaries and explorers had represented non-European civilizations, such as the Chinese, as so ancient that their histories were incommensurable with biblical chronology, especially in regard to their accounts of the origin of the world.

La Peyrère inferred from this that there existed a pre-Adamite human race, untouched by original sin. He concluded that the stories both of the original sin and of the Flood concerned only Adam and his descendants in the land of the Hebrews (cf. Zoli 1991: 70).

This was a hypothesis that had already appeared in Islamic culture. Drawing on the Koran (2:31), al-Maqdisi, in the tenth century, had alluded to the existence of different races prior to Adam (cf. Borst 1957-63: I, II, 9).

Quite apart from the obvious theological implications of such an assumption (and the works of La Peyrère were condemned to be burnt), it was clear that, by now, Hebrew civilization–along with its holy language–was falling from its throne.

If one accepted that species had developed differentially in differing conditions, and that their linguistic capacity reflected their degree of evolution and of adaptation to the environment, it was easy to accept the polygenetic hypothesis.

A particular brand of polygeneticism–certainly not of libertine inspiration–can be ascribed to Giambattista Vico. Vico was a thinker who naturally proceeded against the grain of his times.

Instead of searching for actual chronological origins, he set out to delineate an ideal and eternal history. Paradoxically, by jumping outside the bounds of history, Vico was to become one of the founders of modern historicism.

What Vico wished to tell was not, or–depending on how one wishes to take the chronological table at the beginning of his Scienza nuova seconda (1744)–not only, a historical course, but rather the ever recurring conditions in which languages are born and develop in every time and in every place.

Vico described an ideal line of descent which traced the development of language from the language of the gods to that of heroes and, finally, to that of human beings. The first language had to be hieroglyphic (“sacred or divine”), the second symbolic (“by heroic signs and devices”), and the third epistolary (“for men at a distance to communicate to each other the current needs of their lives,” para. 432).

According to Vico, language, at its ideal point of origin, was directly motivated by, and metaphorically congruent with, the human experience of nature. Only at a later state did language become organized in a more conventional form.

Vico affirms, however, that “as gods, heroes, and men began at the same time (for they were, after all, men who imagined the gods and who believed their own heroic nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three languages began at the same time” (466).

Thus, circumventing the seventeenth-century question of whether or not a natural linguistic stage was succeeded by a conventional one, Vico directly addressed the question of why there existed as many different languages as there were different peoples.

He responded by asserting “this great truth . . . that, as the peoples have certainly by the diversity of climates acquired different natures, from which have sprung as many different customs, so from their different natures and customs as many different languages have arisen” (445).

As to the story of the primacy of Hebrew, Vico disposes of it in a series of observations tending to prove that, if anything, the Hebrews had derived their alphabet from the Greeks and not vice versa.

Nor was Vico susceptible to the Hermetic fantasies of the Renaissance, according to which all wisdom came from the Egyptians.

From his description there emerges instead a complex network of cultural and commercial trafficking, in which the Phoenicians–prompted by mercantile necessity–exported their characters to both the Egyptians and the Greeks, while, at the same time, spreading throughout the Mediterranean basin the set of hieroglyphic characters that they had borrowed from the Chaldeans and had adapted to fit their need for a numerical system to keep track of their stocks of merchandise (441-3).”

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Blackwell. Oxford, 1995, pp. 88-91.

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November 23, 2015

Smoke Signals: Borges, Tzahi Weiss, Kabbalah

I apologize for the length of this piece (5,187 words), but bear with me: An article leapt out at me from my academia.edu feed: Tzahi Weiss, “On the Matter of Language: The Creation of the World from Letters and Jacques Lacan’s Perception of Letters as Real,” 2009.

I read it. But I did not just stumble across it. Something is sending me smoke signals. The multiverse. Perhaps God. Or my subconscious. I was stuck on chapter 22 of my Grenada book for the past week. Then divine intervention struck. Surprised and alarmed, I combined sleep and coffee and alchemy ensued.

I am obsessed by the idea that we project reality through a mass delusion, shared consciousness, a form of hypnotic dreaming that generates everything in our multiverse. Genesis asserts that God spoke the world into existence: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

The idea that the mind, or consciousness, creates reality through language merely changes the protagonists and specifies the method. We do it, dreaming as a species, or as conscious entities, which would permit even trees and insects, anything conscious, to participate.

Perhaps God does it, in His imponderable slumber. But whom hypnotizes whom? Did God set us all to dreaming, are we all, humans, animals, insects, plants, in a collective waking trance? Or did we lull Him to eternal sleep? And is it truly eternal? What happens when God wakes up?

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530-1569 CE), The Tower of Babel. Brueghel painted three versions of the Tower of Babel. One is kept in the Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the second, this one, is held in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna, while the disposition of the third version, a miniature on ivory, is unknown. Faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain.

But what of the Tower of Babel, you say? Languages are just software. DNA programming for the wetware of species on one planet, a miraculous mote in the immensity of creation.

Dogs and cats have language, so do dolphins and whales. Do you not hear the screaming of the trees? Insects communicate. My wife reminded me that humans use just ten percent of our brain capacity. What is the other ninety percent doing?

Tzahi Weiss dates the “myth” of the creation of the world from alphabetic letters to the 1st Millennium CE. I think that working on my pet project, Samizdat, shook my brain loose. I uploaded a new post last night.

Then Jorge Luis Borge’s 1964 story about Léon Bloy, “The Mirror of Enigmas,” crossed my path, and I knew that something was nudging me in a particular direction.

I now know how to organize the chapter headings of my book. The multiverse told me. I dreamt about it all night long.

Citing de Quincey, Borges writes:

“Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that all have their corresponding keys — have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.”

Which reminded me of Blake’s immortal Auguries of Innocence:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour”

Then Borges quotes Cipriano de Valra, translating Saint Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte: tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum.

I prefer the Authorized King James Version (AKJV) of 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

What? I know. Bear with me.

It is important to recall the entirety of 1 Corinthians 13, if only for context:

“13 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

5 doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6 rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7 beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”

For 1 Corinthians 13:12 is infamous, the temptation to cite it without its accompanying sentences to mean whatever you like is manifestly irresistible.

Apropos of nothing, I remember that only forty seven of the fifty four translators designated by King James I actually worked on the AKJV, which issued in 1611 CE.

Continuing, Borges translates Léon Bloy, who shockingly mused:

“The statement by St Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man.

The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived “in a mirror.”

We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die…

If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.”

I remember first encountering Borges as a teenager in high school almost 40 years ago. Somebody handed me a copy of Labyrinths, changing my life. Borge’s erudition astonished me. I was staggered by his subject matter and his mastery of short story and essay formats, writing no novels. I was an amateur metaphysician in those days, and some will think that I still am. I am now, however, more witting about the messages that the multiverse sends to me.

Leaping ahead, Borges cites a letter written by Bloy in December, 1894 CE:

“Everything is a symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our sleep. We do not know whether the things afflicting us are the secret beginning of our ulterior happiness or not.

We now see, St. Paul maintains, per speculum in aenigmate, literally: “in an enigma by means of a mirror” and we shall not see in any other way until the coming of the One who is all in flames and who must teach us all things.”

The imagery of dreamers shouting in nightmares, enigmas, mirrors, and a Teacher in flames flares in my imagination. Finally, Borges attests that Bloy wrote a book in 1912 CE titled L’Âme de Napoléon, citing just two final passages. The first:

“Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God.”

The second is used by Borges in at least two stories:

“There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the register of Light …

History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the periods are worth no less than the entire versicles or chapters, but the importance of one or the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.”

This is Kabbalah, but there is no indication that Bloy knew. Borges, though, has read all books. In an echoing piece written in 1951, “On the Cult of Books,” Borges confirms:

“The world, according to Mallarmé exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world: more exactly, it is the world.”

Borges concludes:

Bloy related to “the whole of Creation the method which the Jewish Cabalists applied to the Scriptures. They thought that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit was an absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance was calculable as zero.”

This portentous premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes … moved them to exegetical rigors … Their excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind.

Léon Bloy postulates this hieroglyphical character — this character of a divine writing, an angelic cryptography —at all moments and in all beings on earth.”

This preposterous thesis rings true to me, which makes Borge’s summation of Bloy brutal:

“No man knows who he is, affirmed Léon Bloy. No one could illustrate the intimate ignorance better than he. He believed himself a rigorous Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs.”

Indeed. Bloy is every man, and we are all Bloy. Secret brothers of Swedenborg, Shelley, and Blake, who unforgettably noted that John Milton was on the side of the fallen angels. Heresiarchs.

(Jorge Luis Borges, “The Mirror of Enigmas,” Labyrinths, Penguin, 1964. Translated by James E. Irby. For “On the Cult of Books,” see Selected Non-Fictions, Penguin, 1999.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790 CE, object 6 (Bentley 6, Erdman 6, Keynes 6). The Blake Archive’s note on this etching states that Blake’s name as the publisher is “nowhere stated in the work, but the attribution is certain.” Acquired from Francis Douce in 1834 by the Bodleian Library, this etching is held in the Rare Books Department in the Douce Collection under Accession Number: Arch. G d.53. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copyinfo.xq?copyid=mhh.b

William Blake observed, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

Again, it is vital to read the surrounding text, as Blake has more to say to us. For example, in line 123 of the Bartleby 1908 edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake wrote:

“There they were received by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books and were arranged in libraries.”

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790 CE).

William Blake (1757-1827 CE), God Judging Adam, 1795. Presented by W. Graham Robertson to the Tate Gallery in 1939. This work is in the public domain in the United States, and in those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less.

Contemplating these ideas leads to chicken and egg conundrums, but this is a background process for me.

I am always thinking about myself thinking, transfixed by the paradox, so when I trip across something that resonates like this, I wonder. I do not believe in coincidence. I sense synchronicity everywhere.

While reading Weiss, I wrote the following comments.

Jewish writers addressing the creation of reality from language do so in Hebrew, because the topic is best addressed in that language, or because they seek to reserve the subject for themselves. I do not blame them, though I must note that Weiss is one of the worst offenders, with virtually all pertinent papers on his academia.edu page posted in Hebrew.

Joseph Dan (On the Sanctity) and Ithamar Gruenwald (“Letters, Writing, and the Ineffable Name”) are obvious exemplars, though Tzahi Weiss lavishes a long footnote on Elliot R. Wolfson, reproduced below, and acknowledges Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995.

Genesis 1 asserts that God used speech to create the world because of the holiness of the Hebrew language.

Weiss demurs, stating that Judaism holds no monopoly on the sacred, citing Franz Dornseiff’s Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie.

This is, in fact, an old idea, illustrated by the Greek term stoicheion, στοιχείον, which refers to both letters and the physical foundations of the world. Guy Stroumsa, whom I will momentarily cite at length, informs us that stoicheia is, “since Plato at least, the word for “elements,” i.e. ….water, earth, fire and air.”

Weiss identifies three traditions, the first deriving from “rabbinic sources, Heikhalot literature and the Samaritan homiletic tractate Memar Marqah,” which claims that God created the world using the letters of the ineffable Name, the Tetragrammaton יהרה.

Weiss states that the second tradition derives from the Sefer Yetsirah, and an obscure tract titled The Mystery of the Greek Letters, attributed to a 6th century Christian monk named Saba or Sabas.

Guy Stroumsa, in “The Mystery of the Greek Letters: A Byzantine Kabbalah?” cites Cordula Bandt, in Der Traktat, who concluded that the attribution to Sabas is pseudepigraphic: “it must have been written by a follower of Sabas, a Melkite (and anti-Origenist) monk in sixth century Palestine.” (Pg. 36).

The second tradition is also reflected in the Memar Marqah, and states that all 22 letters of the Hebrew (or Aramaic) alphabet are required.

The second chapter of Sefer Yetsirah unforgettably begins:

“Twenty-two letters: he carved them out … and formed with them the life of all creation and the life of all that would be formed.” (§20).

The third tradition derives from Gnostic myths that 24 letters created the upper world, also comprising “celestial entities.”

I must again cite Guy Stroumsa:

“The mysterion hidden in the letters (stoicheia) was revealed to Sabas by a Power (kratos) “as in ecstasy.” It is with the Greek letters (or characters) that our text deals. These letters were given (by God) “before idolatry” in order to bring humankind to the true cult of God. There are, however, only twenty-two letters in this alphabet, rather than twenty-four of the Greek alphabet!

Χ and Ψ were added later, by…the Hellenic pagan thinkers. The mystery of these letters, we are told, is “hidden since the beginning of the world.” There are twenty-two letters, like the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, just as there are twenty-two books of the Bible “according to the Jews,” twenty-two works of God in the creation of the world, and twenty-two “marvelous works in the economy of Christ.”

…The seven vocal letters represent the seven hypostaseis of creation: heaven, water, firmament, air, earth, water between the two earths, and inferior earth. Elsewhere in the text, they also represent the seven creatures in possession of a voice. I have dealt elsewhere with the number of seven essential elements, or hypostaseis of creation, arguing that it reflects the seven Iranian Amesha Spenta, later reflected in the first seven Kabbalistic Sefirot.”

After addressing the shapes of the letters themselves, carefully observing that “The four elements, air, fire, earth and water are seen in parallel to the four cardinal points of the universe, the four directions of the wind, the four seasons, and the four great rivers: the Pishon, the Gehon, the Tigris and the Euphrates….” Stroumsa continues:

“Various signs in our text point to Jewish traditions. The most important of these signs, of course, is the number of the letters, which points to the Hebrew –or to the Syriac– alphabet…

This rather clearly points to a Hebrew context of at least the Urtext, or the origin of the exegetical traditions of the letters as they are preserved in our text.

To be sure, the text retains a clearly polemical tone against the Jews, who belong to Satan from the beginning and are called Deicide. Syriac was Adam’s language.

The Syriac letters God himself engraved on a stone tablet, like the Law, with His hand and finger. This tablet, upon which the theosophy was inscribed, was found after the flood by Cadmus, “the Greek philosopher,” and was at the source of science in Palestine and Phoenicia, before the letters reached Greece.” (Pp. 36-7).

These three traditions differ only in the number of letters used in the creation of the universe, though Sefer Yetsirah emphasizes gematria as a paradigm for the 22 Hebrew letters.

This is a colorized version of Camille Flammarion’s woodcut, L’Atmosphere–Météorologie Populaire, Paris, 1888. Colorization was executed by Hugo Heikenwaelder, 1998. I prefer its Spanish name, “imagen de la teoría de la eternidad.” This enigmatic woodcut was not done by Flammarion, he allegedly just commissioned and published it. A missionary peers through the curtained firmament of the earth to perceive the mechanisms of the spheres and the phantasmagoria of the universe. The original caption, “A medieval missionary finds the point where heaven and earth meet,” is attributed to Voltaire. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Universum.jpg

This reminds me of the perplexing revelation that Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, reported that computer experiments discovered that the letters that form the word “Torah” appear throughout Genesis, “one by one, in strict order, at regular intervals of 49 letters, perfectly integrated into the words that compose the text.” This secret clue was said to be “too complicated to have been thought of by human beings.”

This “secret clue” awaited the conjunction of humans, programs and computers sufficiently sophisticated to expose it, making me wonder what other secrets remain to be discerned, and most of all, it is a clue to what?

(Guy Stroumsa, “The Mystery of the Greek Letters: A Byzantine Kabbalah?” History Religionum, Numero 6, pp. 35-43.

Guy Stroumsa, A Zoroastrian Origin to the Sefirot? in Irano-Judaica 3, 1994, pp. 17-33.

Cordula Bandt, Der Traktat, “Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben.” Kritischer Text mit Einführung, Übersetzung und Anmerkungen, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2007, and “The Alphabet as “Henotikon.” The Tract “On the Mystery of the Letters” Against the Background of the Origenist Controversies of the Fourth and Sixth Centuries,” Historia Religionum, Numero 6, 2014, pp. 45-57.

Jorge Luis Borges and Richard Burgin, Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi, 1998, p. 244.

I am also reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s apotheosis in “The Nine Billion Names of God,” a 1953 story in a collection of the same name, 1967, page 9:

“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”)

III

Then Weiss omits to mention an incredible controversy within Kabbalah, which obliges a long excerpt from Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah:

“… Several passages suggest that in the current shemittah one of the letters of the Torah is missing. This lack can be understood in two ways. It could signify that one of the letters has a defective form, contrary to its past perfection, that would of course be restored in a future shemittah.

[ … ]

According to this view, one such “defective” or incomplete letter of the alphabet is shin, which in its perfect form should have four heads, but which is written at present with three: ש.

But the statement also could signify that today one of the letters of the alphabet is missing completely: it has become invisible in our aeon but will reappear and become legible once again in the future aeon.

[ … ]

According to another and no less audacious idea, the complete Torah contained in reality seven books, corresponding to the seven sefiroth and shemittoth. It is only in the current shemittah that, through the restrictive power of Stern Judgment, two of these books have shrunk to the point that only a bare hint of their existence remains.

The proof text of this assertion was a passage in the Talmud (Shabbath 116a), according to which the book of Numbers actually consists of three books.

A tradition from the school of Nahmanides specifies that the power inherent in the Torah will manifest itself in the future aeon in such manner that we shall again perceive seven books.

The Book Temunah itself (fol. 31a) avers that the first chapter of Genesis is merely the vestige of a fuller Torah revealed to the shemittah of Grace, but which has become invisible in our shemittah, as the light of this earlier book has disappeared.”

Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 1962, pp. 471-3.

Hebrew letters lost to history, infernal grammars, Adamic language, antediluvian tablets, lost pronunciations, “secret clues,” missing books of Numbers, all stagger me. Such are my obsessions.

Continuing, Dornseiff explains that στοιχείον had multiple meanings: as a component of a series, the shadow of a sundial, an astronomical unit, a physical element, or, as a letter of the alphabet.

Mystics discern correspondences, but for me, a word with multiple meanings glistens in a woven narrative, echoing messages from the Muse, smoke signals, cosmic semaphore, the whisperings of our forefathers, racial memories from our collective human unconscious.

Jewish and Greek texts differ, Weiss says, because στοιχεΐα does not refer to a certain row or order, as in στοΐχον, but reflects archetypes and elements, or στοιχείων of the created world.

Weiss then introduces Jacques Lacan, whom I had never heard of, highlighting his 20th seminar, “Encore,” (1973), which explains that the letter A, for the “Autre,” or unconscious, was omitted from the incipit of the Bible, which begins with the letter B:

“…la Bible ne commence qu’à la lettre B, elle a laissé la lettre A—pour que je m’en charge.”

Genesis Rabbah 1:10 explains that the first word in the Bible, bereshit (בראש׳ת), begins with the letter B (ב), the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, rather than with the first letter, A (א).

Now Weiss has me enthralled, and I must adapt the opening sentence of my manuscript to mirror this. He continues with Lacan:

“Why was it created with a beth (ב) … and not with an aleph (א)? Because it connotes cursing (ארךר).

Another interpretation: Why not with an aleph (א), in order not to provide a justification for heretics to plead, “How can the world endure, seeing that it was created with the language of cursing?”

Then Lacan alludes to the ineffable Name, (Hebrew ha-Shem) יהרה and the relation between the Name and the changeable letters that comprise it.

For those who may not know, the pronunciation of yhwh as Yahweh is no more than a guess, as the pronunciation of the secret Name in the tradition of Kabbalah was transmitted orally, whispered with trembling lips, from mouth to ear.

The Tetragrammaton יהרה was never spoken aloud, with the word adonay substituted in its place. The Kabbalists so assiduously obeyed this proscription that the pronunciation died with the last real Kabbalist.

Did that rabbi deem his successors unworthy of the patrimony of their race? In an unspeakable tragedy, the line of oral transmission was interrupted, and the correct pronunciation was lost.

Lacan wrote:

“The name of this God is only The Name, what is called Shem (שם). With regard to the Name that is meant by Shem, I would never have pronounced it during this year’s seminar for reasons which I could have explained to you, although some know its pronunciation.

In fact, regarding pronunciation, there is not only one, we know of many, for example those provided by the Ma’assiot (מעשיךת), and they have varied during the centuries. Moreover the property of this term is rather better pointed at by letters entering the composition of the Name, which are always letters chosen from among the consonants.”

The historical use of consonants in Hebrew is a whole other subject which must be addressed elsewhere. I will note that Gershom Scholem wrote:

“Also related to the magic of language mysticism is the author’s view that the six dimensions of heaven are “sealed” (1:13) by the six permutations of “His great name Yaho” (Hebrew YHW). These three consonants, utilized in Hebrew as matres lectionis for the vowels i, a, and o, which are not written, make up the divine name Yaho, which contains the three consonants of the four-letter name of God, YHWH, as well as the form Yao, which penetrated into the documents of Hellenistic syncretism where its permutations likewise play a role. The signs that were subsequently developed to designate vowels were still unknown to the author.”

Ah, hah. Scholem continues:

“This idea concerning the function of the name Yaho or Yao suggests important parallels. In the system of the Gnostic Valentinus, Iao is the secret name with which the Horos (literally: the limit, the limitation!) frightens away from the world of the pleroma the Sophia-Akhamoth who is in pursuit of Christ.

Does not the cosmos (as distinct from the pleroma), sealed by means of the six permutations of Yao in the Book Yesirah, constitute a sort of monotheistic parallel, perhaps even inspired by polemical intentions, to this Valentinian myth?

In another text of manifestly Jewish-syncretistic character, we similarly find the name Iao, as an invocation that consolidates the world in its limits, a perfect analogy to the sealing in Yesirah: in the cosmogony of the Leiden magical papyrus the earth writhed when the Pythian serpent appeared “and reared up powerfully. But the pole of heaven remained firm, even though it risked being struck by her.”

“Then the god spoke: Iao! And everything was established and a great god appeared, the greatest, who arranged that which was formerly in the world and that which will be, and nothing in the realm of the Height was without order any more.”

This is a long excerpt, but bear with me. Scholem concludes:

“The name Iao appears again among the secret names of this greatest god himself. It is difficult not to suspect a relation here between Jewish conceptions and those of Gnosticism and syncretism.”

Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 1987, pp. 31-3.

I am not sure that more can be said.

To wrap up, after 1953, Lacan distilled human communication into three registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.

The Imaginary register is reflective, like a mirror, and therefore confined to the self.

The Symbolic defines and forms a subject, and precedes the Imaginary, though the two are interwoven in actual discourse.

The Real, on the other hand, cannot be expressed. It is left unsaid.

Numerous sources forbid discussion of the secrets of creation, including b. Hagigah 11:2, y. Hagigah 73:3, Genesis Rabbah 1:10 and 8:9, the Memar Marqah, and Philo of Alexandria (Yehuda Liebes, “Maase Bereshit and Maase Merkava as Secret Lore in Philo of Alexandria”).

The Mishnah and the Tosefta prescribe caution when addressing secrets of the Godhead, the secrets of creation, and incest.

In a terse conclusion archetypical of academic literature, Weiss suggests that these forbidden subjects share a “conceptual affinity” to the ineffable Name of the Father, even a Name of the Name.

Estéban Trujillo de Gutiérrez

Smoke Signals: Comments on Borges, Tzahi Weiss, Kabbalah, “On the Matter of Language: The Creation of the World From Letters and Jacques Lacan’s Perception of Letters As Real,” JJTP 17.1, Brill, 2009.

The London Magical Papyrus, British Museum number EA10070,2. On the recto are a series of spells and recipes arranged in 29 columns, including spells for divination, love spells, poisons, and healing. On the verso are “apparently discontinuous memoranda, prescriptions and short invocations.” Column 4 famously features a spell for a revelation, including a recitation in Greek that is intended to be read in the opposite direction as the demotic (4/9-19). The British Museum entry notes that the papyrus was sold in two parts in Thebes, with the first part going to London and the second to Leiden. Griffith and Thompson state that the 3d century CE manuscript is closely connected with the Greek magical papyri from Egypt of the same era, but is heavy in Egyptian mythology. Discovered at Thebes, it was purchased by Anastasi, then Swedish consul at Alexandria. It is believed that it was already torn when he acquired it, as the two halves were later sold separately, with the Leiden MS going to the Dutch government in 1828, and the London MS to the British Museum in 1857, as Number 1072 in Lenormant’s Catalogue. The Leiden half was first introduced to the world in 1830 by C.J.C. Reuvens (Lettres à M. Letronne sur les papyrus bilingues et grecs, Leide, 1830), with a lithograph appearing courtesy of Conrad Leemans in 1839. The London papyrus languished in the British Museum until 1892, when JJ Hess reproduced it in Freiburg. Professor Reuvens focused on the gnostic nature of the MS, which includes names of spirits, gods and demons from Egyptian, Syrian and Jewish traditions, but closer scrutiny revealed that it was not so thoroughly gnostic as initially perceived. The combined MS is consequently termed The Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden, or Pap. mag. LL. London MS: Papyrus Number 10070, formerly Anastasi 1072. Leiden MS: I.383, or Anastasi MSS A.65. © The Trustees of the British Museum. http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=933551001&objectId=114184&partId=1#more-views http://www.etana.org/sites/default/files/coretexts/15139.pdf F.LL. Griffith and Herbert Thompson, The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden, 1904. http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/dmp/

=========Selected Footnotes from the Original=========

“See, for example, Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (London: Fontana Press, 1995), p. 31;

Joseph Dan, On the Sanctity (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1994), p. 113;

Ithamar Gruenwald, “Letters, Writing, and the Ineffable Name: Magic, Spirituality and Mysticism” (Hebrew), in Massu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. Ephraim Gottlieb, ed. Michal Oron and Amos Goldreich ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute Press, 1994), p. 75.”

I did search for linked versions of these works on the net, and I came up empty. If you have electronic versions, please send them along. I will post them here.

Here is the entire footnote on Wolfson.

“In recent years, Elliot R. Wolfson has made extensive use of Lacan’s concepts in the study of Jewish mysticism, by utilizing, for instance, Lacan’s concept of jouissance and his distinction between the penis as a biological organ and the phallus as a symbolic signifier to explain basic issues in Jewish mysticism.

See, e.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 128–36, 278–79;

Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 135–36;

Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 339–40).

See also Wolfson’s articles on the symbolism of letters:

Elliot R. Wolfson, “Letter Symbolism and Merkavah Imagery in the Zohar,” Alei Shefer: Studies in the Literature of Jewish Thought Presented to Rabbi Dr. Alexandre Safran, ed. Moshe Hallamish (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990), 195–236;

Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Anthropomorphic and Symbolic Image of the Letters in the Zohar” (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 8 (1989): 147–82.

On the influence of Judaism on Lacan’s thought, see Gerard Haddad, “Judaism in the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan: A Preliminary Study,” trans. Noah Guynn, Yale French Studies 85 (1994): 201–15.

On Lacan’s use of Kabbalistic sources, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 482 n. 119.”

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October 18, 2015

Gane: Composite Beings in Neo-Babylonian Art

“An examination of all the extant, provenanced depictions of composite beings, Mischwesen, in Neo-Babylonian (NB) iconography sheds important new light on the worldview of the last great Mesopotamian civilization.

Wall relief depicting a winged and eagle-headed Apkallu (Sage). This protective spirit holds a cone and a bucket for religious ceremonial purposes.
From the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud (Biblical Calah; ancient Kalhu), modern day Ninawa Governorate, Iraq (Mesopotamia). Neo-Assyrian period, 865-850 BCE.
The British Museum, London.
Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_relief_depicting_an_eagle-headed_and_winged_man,_Apkallu,_from_Nimrud..JPG

The types of hybrids that are portrayed include such disparate forms as the apkallu and the genius in human form, as well as creatures based on bulls, lions, canines, winged quadrupeds, fish, birds, scorpions, and snakes.

Demons, monsters, and minor apotropaic deities, from Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Demons & Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, 1992, p. 64.
https://books.google.co.th/books?id=pr8-i1iFnIQC&redir_esc=y

Each composite being is analyzed in terms of its physical components, its context within scenes, its historical development, and its interpretation in NB texts.

Within the hierarchical cosmic community, some lower deities and sub-divine beings appear in composite form. These play a key role in the cosmos by interacting with gods, with each other, with humans, and with natural animals.

Their behavior parallels dynamics found in natural life, such as in competition, conflict, predation, protection, and in the service of others who are more powerful.

In hybrids the capabilities of natural animals and humans are heightened by the selective addition of features derived from other species. There is no consistent correlation, however, between the strength of a natural creature and the relative power of the superhuman being that it symbolizes, or between its physical complexity and its placement in the cosmic hierarchy.

Pazuzu: a demon-god of the underworld, sometimes invoked for beneficial ends. The inscription covering the back of his wings states: “I am Pazuzu, son of Hanpa, king of the evil spirits of the air which issue violently from mountains, causing much havoc.”
Pazuzu was particularly associated with the west wind which brought the plague. Under certain circumstances Pazuzu was a protective spirit, particularly to drive his wife Lamashtu back to the underworld. Lamashtu was a demoness who infected men with various diseases.
Pazuzu first appeared in the 1st millennium BC with the body of a man and the head of a scowling dragon-snake, with two pairs of wings and talons of a bird of prey. He has a scorpion’s tail and his body is covered in scales.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20090628125910/
http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail_notice.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225951&CURRENT_LLV_NOTICE%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673225951&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500800&baseIndex=56&bmLocale=en
Bronze statuette of Pazuzu, circa 800 BC –- circa 700 BC, Louvre Museum.

In fact, the transcendence of high gods is often emphasized by their simple representation through attribute animals in natural form.

Ishtar receives the worship of an Amazon. Ishtar stands on a lion, holding a bow with arrows at her back. Her eight-pointed star is atop her head.
Lusty antelopes rear on the right side, perhaps signifying the god Ea.
The portrayal of the tree is somewhat problematic, as it differs from the iconic depictions of the sacred tree common in Neo-Assyrian art. Drawing © 2008 S. Beaulieu, after Leick, 1998: Plate 38. Used by kind permission.

Portrayals of composite beings often express the need for protection from malevolent powers by beneficent beings, some of whom can be accessed only through human mediators, such as ritual functionaries.

BM 118918, courtesy of the British Museum, plate XId.
Green identifies the ugallu at the center, the “lion-man,” and lahmu at left. He speculates that the “House god” appears at far right.
Limestone relief, one of a pair flanking a doorway in the N. Palace at Nineveh.
Previously published: H.R. Hall, Babylonian and Assyrian Sculptures in the British Museum, Pls. VI-IX; Cf. also Gadd, The Stones of Assyria, 191.

Special relationships between supernatural beings and elite humans, especially the king, make such humans indispensable and therefore support their roles in the existing social order.

It appears that the choice of a particular being portrayed on a given object could be influenced by factors such as its owner’s profession, religious and/or political affiliations, and especially by the apotropaic function(s) of specific composite beings.”

Constance Ellen Gane, Composite Beings in Neo-Babylonian Art, Doctoral Dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 2012, p. 1.

4 Comments

October 12, 2015

Selz: Plant of Birth or Plant of Life in the Etana Legend?

“The story of Etana, one of the oldest tales in a Semitic language, was, as I have argued elsewhere, modeled after the then extant Sumerian tales of the Gilgamesh Epic.

Gilgamesh’s search for “the plant of life,” the ú-nam-ti-la (šammu ša balāti) was, however, replaced by Etana’s search for the plant of birth-giving (šammu ša alādi). The entire story runs as follows:

British Museum K. 19530, Library of Ashurbanipal (reigned 669-631 BCE), excavated from Kouyunjik by Austen Henry Layard. Neo-Assyrian 7th Century BCE, Nineveh.
This cuneiform tablet details the legend of Etana, a mythological king of Kish.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=287204&partId=1&searchText=WCT28297&page=1
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/c/cuneiform_the_legend_of_etana.aspx
This image is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

The gods build the first city Kish, but kingship is still in heaven. A ruler is wanted (and found). Due to an illness, Etana’s wife is unable to conceive. The plant of birth is wanted.

In the ensuing episode eagle and snake swore an oath of friendship. Suddenly the eagle plans to eat up the snake’s children; a baby eagle, with the name of Atrahasīs opposes this plan, but eagle executes it.

Now, the weeping snake seeks justice from the sun-god. With the god’s help the eagle is trapped in a burrow, and now the eagle turns to the sun-god for help. He receives the answer that, because of the taboo-violation he cannot help, but will send someone else.

Etana prays daily for the plant of birth and in a dream the sun-god tells Etana to approach the eagle. In order to get the eagle’s support Etana helps him out of his trap.

BM 89767, Limestone cylinder seal illustrating the myth of Etana, shepherd and legendary king of Kish, who was translated to heaven by an eagle to obtain the plant of life.
This seal portrays Etana’s ascent, witnessed by a shepherd, a dog, goats and sheep. Dated 2250 BCE, this seal was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam, and came from an old, previously unregistered collection acquired before 1884.
Dominique Collon, Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum: Cylinder Seals II: Akkadian, Post-Akkadian, Ur III Periods, II, London, British Museum Press, 1982.
R.M. Boehner, Die Entwicklung der Glyptic wahrend der Akkad-Zeit, 4, Berlin, 1965.
Alfred Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients: Handbuch zur biblisch-orientalischen Altertumskunde, Leipzig, JC Hinrichs, 1906.
Also AN128085001, 1983, 0101.299.
This image is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=128085001&objectid=368707

Now the eagle, carrying Etana on his back, ascends to the heavens. On the uppermost level of the heavens Etana becomes afraid and the eagle takes him back to the earth.

The end of the story is missing, but that Etana finally got hold of the plant of birth is very likely, since other sources mention his son.

To summarize: I have tried to show that some features of the Enoch tradition are a re-writing of very ancient concepts. I do not claim that they all can be explained assuming dependencies, as earlier scholarship has done.

I do not intend to idolize “origins,” but what might eventually come out of such a research—if the topics mentioned here are thoroughly worked out and elaborated in detail—is, that our texts implicate many more meanings than tradition may have supposed.

In my opinion there can be little doubt that the official transmission of texts in Mesopotamia was supplemented by a wealth of oral tradition. Indeed, the situation may be comparable to the one attested in the (still) living oral tradition on Enoch in the Balkanian vernaculars.”

This Akkadian clay tablet, dated to circa 1900-1600 BCE, preserves a partial version of the Sumerian Legend of Etana.
Held by the Morgan Library.
http://www.codex99.com/typography/1.html

(See G.J. Selz, “Die Etana-Erzählung: Ursprung und Tradition eines der ältesten epischen Texte in einer semitischen Sprache,” Acta Sumerologica (Japan) 20 (1998): pp. 135-79.

A different opinion is expressed by P. Steinkeller, “Early Semitic Literature and Third Millennium Seals with Mythological Motifs,” in Literature and Literary Language at Ebla (ed. P. Fronzaroli; Quaderni di Semitistica 18; Florence: Dipartimento di linguistica Università di Firenze, 1992), pp. 243-75 and pls. 1-8.

Further remarks on the ruler’s ascension to heaven are discussed by G.J. Selz, “Der sogenannte ‘geflügelte Tempel’ und die ‘Himmelfahrt’ der Herrscher: Spekulationen über ein ungelöstes Problem der altakkadischen Glyptik und dessen möglichen rituellen Hintergrund,” in Studi sul Vicino Oriente Antico dedicati alla memoria di Luigi Cagni (ed. S. Graziani; Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 2000, pp. 961-83.)

Gebhard J. Selz, “Of Heroes and Sages–Considerations of the Early Mesopotamian Background of Some Enochic Traditions,” in Armin Lange, et al, The Dead Sea Scrolls in Context, v. 2, Brill, 2011, pp. 799-800.

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October 5, 2015

Selz: No Connection Between the Biblical Patriarchs and the Babylonian Antediluvian Kings

“After an increasing wealth of Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets was excavated and translated in the middle of the nineteenth century, critical evaluation of the biblical traditions gained great momentum.

In 1872 George Smith delivered a paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, announcing the discovery of a Babylonian version of the biblical flood story, hereby renewing the interest in the extra-biblical traditions of Antiquity and eventually supporting the account of Berossos’ Babyloniaca.

A few years later, in 1876, Smith published his book The Chaldean Account of Genesis, in which he included translations of excerpts from fragments of Atrahasīs, a text which, together with the so-called “Creation Epic Enūma Elīsh,” soon became a corner stone for all comparisons between the biblical and Mesopotamian accounts of the “history” of primeval times.

Winter or Flood, by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665 CE), executed between 1660 and 1664. This oil on canvas work is in the permanent collection of the Louvre, hanging in room 16, Richelieu, 2d floor. Accession number INV 7306. Courtesy of The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Seasons_(Poussin)#The_Deluge

Winter or Flood, by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665 CE), painted between 1660 and 1664 CE. This oil on canvas work is in the permanent collection of the Louvre Museum, hanging in room 16, Richelieu, 2d floor.
Accession number INV 7306.
Courtesy of The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.
The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Seasons_(Poussin)#The_Deluge

(See W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atrahasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 3.)

(The comparison of the Mesopotamian flood story with its Noah-related figure of Ziusudra/Utnapishtim and the Babylonian Epic of Creation in conjunction with Berossos’ account of Babylonian History fostered many hypotheses and any originality of the biblical stories became disputed.

In 1902 H. Zimmern published his influential article “Urkönige und Uroffenbarung,” in E. Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament (ed. H. Zimmern and H. Winckler; 3rd ed.; 2 vols.; Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1902-1903), 2:530-543, in which he attempted to parallel the names of the biblical primeval patriarchs and similar figures from extra-biblical traditions.

Great influence gained F. Delitzsch who with his lectures on “Babel und Bibel” (1902-1905) provoked the so-called “Babel-Bibel Streit”; see F. Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1921).

Later he took an even more open hostile stand against the traditional theologians in his work Die große Täuschung: Kritische Betrachtungen zu den alttestamentlichen Berichten über Israels Eindringen in Kanaan, die Gottesoffenbarung vom Sinai und die Wirksamkeit der Propheten (2 vols.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1920-1921.)

Among the extant exemplars of the Sumerian King List, the Weld-Blundell prism in the Ashmolean Museum cuneiform collection represents the most extensive version as well as the most complete copy of the King List.
Listing rulers from the antediluvian dynasties to Suen-magir, the fourteenth ruler of the Isin dynasty (ca. 1763–1753 B.C.), the prism has four sides with two columns on each side.
The prism is perforated, and it originally stood on a wooden spindle going through its centre so that it could be rotated and read on all four sides.
http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=the_sumerian_king_list_sklid=the_sumerian_king_list_skl

To cut a long story short, when S. Langdon published the Weld-Blundell (WB) copy of the Sumerian King List in 1923, a thorough revision of earlier opinions became necessary.

(A. Deimel, “Die babylonische und biblische Überlieferung bezüglich der vorsintflutlichen Urväter,” Orientalia (Rome) 17 (1925): pp. 33-47; cf. further H. Zimmern, “Die altbabylonischen vor-(und nach-) sintflutlichen Könige nach neuen Quellen,” ZDMG 78 (1924): pp. 19-35.

W.G. Lambert, “A New Fragment from a List of Antediluvian Kings and Marduk’s Chariot,” in Symbolae Biblicae et Mesopotamicae: Francisco Mario Theodoro de Liagre Böhl dedicatae (ed. M.A. Beek et al.; Studia Francisci Scholten memoriae dicata 4; Leiden, Brill, 1973), pp. 271-80, 271, pointed out that the connection of the patriarchs to the tradition of the Sumerian King List was first established by Josephus who again depended on Berossos.)

It became clear, in particular, that the names of (most) of Berossos’ early Babylonian rulers were of Sumerian origin. Zimmern himself revised his earlier theories and Pater Anton Deimel even disputed any connection of the cuneiform tradition to the biblical patriarchs.”

(A. Deimel, “Urväter,” p. 43 states: “(Es) dürfte besser ehrlich einzugestehen sein, dass bis jetzt kein Zusammenhang irgendwelcher Art zwischen der babylonischen und der biblischen Überlieferung bezüglich der vorsintflutlichen Urväter erwiesen ist.”

(“It is likely better to honestly admit that so far no connection whatsoever between the Babylonian and the biblical tradition is established with respect to the antediluvian patriarchs.”)

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September 24, 2015

Selz: Enoch Derives from 3d Millennium BCE Mesopotamia

” … [He who saw the deep, the] foundation of the country, who knew [the secrets], was wise in everything! …

he saw the secret and uncovered the hidden,

he brought back a message from the antediluvian age.”

From the introduction to the Gilgamesh Epic, A.R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1:539.

“The general framework of the “Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure” is quite well established.

Since the initial comparison of Berossos’ account of Mesopotamian antediluvian kings and heroes to the biblical patriarchs a vast literature has evolved that discusses the possible transfer and adaptation of such Mesopotamian topics as ascent to heaven, the flood story, primeval wisdom, dream-vision, divination and astronomy.

I argue in this paper that the respective traditions reach back to a third millennium “origin.”

Enoch, described in Genesis 5:22-25 as great-grandson of Adam, father of Methuselah and great-grand-father of Noah, lived 365 years and “he walked with God: and he was not, for God took him.”

William Blake, Enoch, lithograph, 1807 (four known copies).
William Blake’s only known lithograph illustrating Genesis 5:24, “Enoch walked with God; then was no more, because God took him away.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereshit_(parsha)#/media/File:William_Blake_Enoch_Lithograph_1807.jpg

Enoch became a central figure in early Jewish mystical speculations; 1 Enoch, or the Ethiopic Enoch, is one of the earliest non-biblical texts from the Second Temple period and, at least in part, was originally written in Aramaic as demonstrated by the fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

(See H.S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and the Son of Man (WMANT 61, Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner, 1988), p. 35: “Astronomy, cosmology, mythical geography, divination . . . are subjects which in a Jewish setting appear for the first time in the Enochic sources, at least in a so extensive form.”)

(J.C. VanderKam, An Introduction to Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 88-94; see also J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (New York: Crossroad, 1992), esp. the chapter on “The Early Enoch Literature,”pp. 43-84.)

(On 1 Enoch see J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) and cf. the review by J.C. Greenfield and M.E. Stone, “The Books of Enoch and the Traditions of Enoch,” Numen 26 (1979): pp. 89-103.

A modern translation of the text is now published by G.W.E. Nickelsburg and J.C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).

For the religious-historical framework of the book see J.C. VanderKam and P. Flint, The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their Significance for Understanding the Bible, Judaism, Jesus, and Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002); cf. also VanderKam, Introduction.

William Blake, Jacob's Dream, c. 1805 AD. Currently held at the British Museum, London. Commissioned and acquired from William Blake by Thomas Butts. Also available at the William Blake Archive. This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blake_jacobsladder.jpg

William Blake, Jacob’s Dream, c. 1805 CE. Currently held at the British Museum, London. Commissioned and acquired from William Blake by Thomas Butts.
Also available at the William Blake Archive.
This work is in the public domain in the United States, and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 100 years or less.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blake_jacobsladder.jpg

A thorough study of the Enochic literature should, of course, also take into consideration the many references to Enoch in the so-called apocryphal literature. There are presently two recommendable translations: OTP and AOT.)

They prove that the Astronomical Enoch and the Book of the Watchers are among the earliest texts collected in 1 Enoch.

2 Enoch belongs to the Old Slavonic biblical tradition—a tradition that is still very much alive in the popular religion of the Balkans.

(At the time when I finished this article I was not yet able to check The Old Testament Apocrypha in the Slavonic Tradition: Continuity and Diversity (ed. L. DiTommaso and C. Böttrich with the assistance of M. Swoboda; TSAJ 140; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming 2011).

Indeed, as F. Badalanova Geller was able to demonstrate, there is an oral tradition still alive in contemporary Bulgaria, incorporating various pieces from the Jewish and apocryphal traditions, which has also considerable impact on orthodox iconography.

(F. Badalanova Geller, “Cultural Transfer and Text Transmission: The Case of the Enoch Apocryphic Tradition” (lecture delivered at the Conference “Multilingualism in Central Asia, Near and Middle East from Antiquity to Early Modern Times” at the Center for Studies in Asian Cultures and Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, 2 March 2010). I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Badalanova Geller for fruitful discussions and additional references.)

She further calls the underlying (oral) stories “the Epic of Enoch,” arguing methodologically along the lines of V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale.

(V. Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale (trans. L. Scott; 2nd ed.; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).

This “epic” was certainly also related to the tradition of the kabbalistic-rabbinic 3 Enoch which, like other hermetic literature, describes Enoch as Metatron, featuring him as the “Great Scribe” (safra rabba: Tg. Yer.).

(Tg. Yer. to Genesis 5:24; see also b. Hag. 15a; see further A.A. Orlov, The Enoch-Metatron Tradition (TSAJ 107; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), pp. 50-9, esp. 51.)

It cannot be the purpose of this paper to take the entire Enochic tradition into consideration; the references to Enoch are manifold in the so-called apocryphal tradition.

(Concerning the book of Jubilees, Kvanvig, Roots, p. 146, writes e.g.: “Jubilees deals with a tradition about the origin of Babylonian science. This science was revealed to men in primordial time. The revelators were angels who descended from heaven and acted as sages among men. Enoch as the first sage is found in Pseudo-Eupolemus.”)

We only mention here that “the instructor” Enoch, Idris in Arabic, is attested in the Qur’an (19:56–57; 21:85–86) as a prophet, and that in Muslim lore, like in Judaism, he is also connected with the invention of astronomy.

We may further mention persisting traditions in Classical Antiquity, especially Claudius Aelianus, who mentions the miraculous birth of Gilgamesh.”

(Claudius Aelianus, De Natura Animalium 12.21: “At any rate an Eagle fostered a baby. And I want to tell the whole story, so that I may have evidence of my proposition. When Seuechoros was king of Babylon the Chaldeans foretold that the son born of his daughter would wrest the kingdom from his grandfather.

Frontispiece of Claudius Aelianus, dated 1556. Born circa 175 CE and died circa 235 CE, he was born at Praeneste. A Roman author and teacher of rhetoric, his two chief works are cherished for their quotations from earlier authors, whose works are lost to history. He wrote De Natura Animalium and Varia Historia, though significant fragments of other works, On Providence and Divine Manifestations, are also preserved in the early medieval encyclopedia, The Suda. http://www.summagallicana.it/lessico/e/Eliano%20o%20Claudio%20Eliano.htm

Frontispiece of Claudius Aelianus, dated 1556 CE. Born circa 175 CE and died circa 235 CE, he was born at Praeneste. A Roman author and teacher of rhetoric, his two chief works are cherished for their quotations from earlier authors, whose works are lost to history. He wrote De Natura Animalium and Varia Historia, though significant fragments of other works, On Providence and Divine Manifestations, are also preserved in the early medieval encyclopedia, The Suda.
http://www.summagallicana.it/lessico/e/Eliano%20o%20Claudio%20Eliano.htm

This made him afraid and (if I may be allowed the small jest) he played Acrisius to his daughter: he put the strictest of watches upon her. For all that, since fate was cleverer than the king of Babylon, the girl became a mother, being pregnant by some obscure man.

So the guards from fear of the king hurled the infant from the citadel, for that was where the aforesaid girl was imprisoned. Now an Eagle which saw with its piercing eye the child while still falling, before it was dashed on the earth, flew beneath it, flung its back under it, and conveyed it to some garden and set it down with the utmost care.

But when the keeper of the place saw the pretty baby he fell in love with it and nursed it; and it was called Gilgamos and became king of Babylon.”)

(Claudius Aelianus, On the Characteristics of Animals [trans. A.F. Schofield; 3 vols.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958-1959], 3:39–41). We may further note that in the subsequent text Aelianus explicitly refers to Achaemenes, the legendary founder of the first Persian dynasty, who is also said “to be raised by an eagle.”)

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September 16, 2015

Melvin: On the Role of Divine Counsel

“Elements of civilization are also attributed to the semi-divine hero, Gilgamesh. The opening lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh celebrate his great wisdom:

“He who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation, [who] knew…, was wise in all matters! [Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country’s foundation, [who] knew…, was wise in all matters! [He …] everywhere […] and [learnt] of everything the sum of wisdom. He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden, he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.”

(The Epic of Gilgamesh, SBV I.1–8 (Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation [London: Penguin, 2000], p.1).

The text goes on to describe Gilgamesh’s achievements in building the edifices of the city of Uruk, especially its wall. Here the text highlights the great wisdom required for such construction by ascribing the foundations of the city wall to the wisdom of the “Seven Sages” (apkallus).

Cuneiform tablet with the Atrahasis Epic.
Babylonian, about 17th century BCE.
From Sippar, southern Iraq.
A version of the Flood story.
The story outlines the structure of the universe according to Babylonian beliefs. Heaven is ruled by the god Anu, the earth by Enlil and the subterranean sweet water by Enki. The text then explains how the minor gods work in the fields but then rebel. As a result, humans are made from clay, saliva and divine blood to act as servants of the gods.
This does not prove a perfect solution, as the humans reproduce and their noise disturbs Enlil’s sleep. He decides to destroy them with plague, famine, drought and finally a flood.
However, each time Enki instructs one of the humans, Atrahasis, to survive the disasters. The god gives Atrahasis seven days warning of the flood, and he builds a boat, loads it with his possessions, animals and birds. He is subsequently saved while the rest of humankind is destroyed.
However, the gods are unhappy as they no longer receive the offerings they used to.
There is a gap in the text at this point but it does end with Atrahasis making an offering and Enlil accepting the existence and usefulness of humans.
Copies of this story have survived from the seventeenth to the seventh century BCE showing that it was copied and re-copied over the centuries. This is the most complete version. There are clear similarities between this Flood story and others known in Mesopotamian literature, for example, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
T.C. Mitchell, The Bible in the British Museum (London, The British Museum Press, 1988)
S. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford University Press, 1991)
W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atra-hasis (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969)
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/c/cuneiform_the_atrahasis_epic.aspx

Moreover, within the epic, the greatest achievements of Gilgamesh are the building of the wall of Uruk and the wisdom he obtained and passed on to subsequent generations.

(Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp.142–49; 213.)

The source of this wisdom is his encounter with the divinized Flood hero, as the Sumerian text The Death of Bilgames indicates:

“…you reached Ziusudra in his abode! The rites of Sumer, forgotten there since distant days of old, the rituals and customs—it was you brought them down to the land. The rites of hand-washing and mouth-washing you put in good order, [after the] Deluge it was you made known all the tasks of the land […].”

(The Death of Bilgames, M 57–62 (George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, pp.198– 99).

Thus, Gilgamesh acts as a mediating figure between the divine source of the knowledge necessary for aspects of civilization and the people of Sumer. The source of his divine knowledge is the divinized Flood hero, who had in turn received his knowledge from Enki / Ea, as well as perhaps his divine mother, Ninsun.

Library of Ashurbanipal / The Flood Tablet / The Gilgamesh Tablet
Date 15 July 2010
Current location: British Museum wikidata:Q6373
Source/Photographer Fæ (Own work)
Other versions File:British Museum Flood Tablet 1.jpg
British Museum reference K.3375
Detailed description:
Part of a clay tablet, upper right corner, 2 columns of inscription on either side, 49 and 51 lines + 45 and 49 lines, Neo-Assyrian, Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 11, story of the Flood. ~- Description extract from BM record.
Location Room 55  
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Library_of_Ashurbanipal_The_Flood_Tablet.jpg

(See Atrahasis OBV I.364–67; III.11–35 (Benjamin R. Foster, Before 􏰂􏰕􏰇􏰃􏰄􏰖􏰆􏰇􏰆􏰛􏰃􏰙􏰋􏰃􏰙􏰋􏰂􏰕􏰌􏰒􏰌􏰞􏰚􏰃􏰌􏰘􏰃􏰙􏰝􏰝the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature [3rd ed.; Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2005], pp. 329, 247–48).

(In The Death of Bilgames, Enki, following the recounting of Gilgamesh’s great achievements and wisdom, states, “And now we look on Bilgames: despite his mother we cannot show him mercy!” (M 78–79 [George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, 199 (sic)]).

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Ninsun counsels Gilgamesh by her divine wisdom following his dreams portending Enkidu’s arrival, and, like the apkallus, Gilgamesh is said to have been granted “broad understanding” by the gods (SBV I.242–98 [George, The Epic of Gilgamesh, pp. 9–11]).

In similar fashion, Enmerkar acts as a mediator of divine knowledge which benefits humanity by aiding in the rise of civilization. In the Sumerian myth Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Enmerkar competes with the Lord of Aratta for supremacy in the region.

They engage in a battle of wits in which the Lord of Aratta issues various seemingly impossible challenges for Enmerkar, and in each case, Enmerkar succeeds by receiving divine inspiration from a deity.

Thus, for example, when the Lord of Aratta challenges Enmerkar to carry grain from Uruk to Aratta in a net, he receives the solution from the grain goddess, Nidaba, who “open[s] for him her ‘Nidaba’s holy house of understanding.’”

(Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, lines 324–26 (Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once…: Sumerian Poetry in Translation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], p. 301).

By his reception of divine knowledge, Enmerkar is able not only to meet the Lord of Aratta’s challenges, he also invents several new technologies (e.g., writing) along the way.

Because of the crucial role divine counsel plays in Enmerkar’s cultural achievements, his accomplishments become, indirectly, the work of the gods in bringing about human civilization.”

David P. Melvin, “Divine Mediation and the Rise of Civilization in Mesopotamian Literature and in Genesis 1-11,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 2010, pp. 4-5.

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September 15, 2015

Melvin: Divine or Semi-Divine Intermediaries

The Divine Source of Civilization in Mesopotamian Myths

“The motif of the divine origin of civilization is common in the ancient Near East, especially in Mesopotamia, and it stands in stark contrast to the portrayal of the rise of civilization in Genesis 1– 11.

(Although many of my observations with regard to the view of the rise of civilization presented in Mesopotamian mythology could also be made within the mythic traditions of other ancient cultures (e.g., Egypt, Greece, Canaan), Bernard Batto notes, “[f]or reasons not entirely clear to us the opening chapters of Genesis are typologically and content-wise more akin to the mythic traditions of Mesopotamia than of territorially closer Canaan—the reverse of the normal situation in the Hebrew Bible.”

(Bernard Batto, “Creation Theology in Genesis,” R. J. Clifford and J. J. Collins [eds.], Creation in the Biblical Traditions [CBQMS, 24; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1992], 16).

For this reason, as well as the general consensus that the compilation of Genesis 1–11 occurred in the exilic or early post-exilic period, in large measure as a polemic against the Babylonian cosmological worldview in which the Jewish community found itself immersed, I have limited my comparisons of the biblical material to a number of Mesopotamian myths.)

In a number of mythological texts, civilization is portrayed as a gift bestowed upon humanity by the gods, and human advancement is generally a positive development. Often the arts of civilization come to humanity through divine or semi-divine intermediaries, such as the apkallus or heroes who are either semi-divine (e.g., Gilgamesh) or divinized humans (e.g., Lugalbanda, Utnapishtim).

This depiction of a fish-apkallū of the purādu-fish type guarded the entrance to the temple of Ninurta at Nimrud.
A fish’s head can be seen on the Apkallu’s head, and its skin hangs down over the back of his body.
It is important to recall that the so-called Seven Sages of Sumeria were apkallū of this type.
Neo-Assyrian era, 865-860 BCE.
From the Temple of Ninurta, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu; Biblical Calah), northern Mesopotamia, Iraq. (The British Museum, London).
Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg)
http://www.ancient.eu/image/2708/

According to the apkallu tradition, which comes to us from a wide array of sources ranging from the bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian), “Etiological Myth of the Seven Sages” in the Bīt Mēseri 􏰀􏰁􏰂􏰃􏰄􏰅􏰆􏰇􏰈texts to the much later writings of Berossus (4th century BCE) and the Uruk Sage List (c. 165 BCE), as well as the Adapa myth and the epic myth􏰔􏰈􏰈􏰎􏰃􏰎􏰋􏰐􏰃􏰓􏰆 Erra and Ishum, semi-divine beings sent by Enki / Ea instructed antediluvian humans in the arts of civilization. The apkallus were teachers of early humanity whom Ea had endowed with “broad understanding” (uzna rapašta).

(Erica Reiner, “The Etiological Myth of the ‘Seven Sages,’” Orientalia 30 (1960), 4. See also Alan Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel (SAAS, 19; Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2008), 106–20. A similar description of the apkallus appears in the myth Erra and Ishum (COS 1.113:408).

(See the detailed description of the apkallus in Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods (trans. Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 246–49. For a discussion of the Uruk Sage List, see Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods, 106–09.)

(See Helge S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and the Son of Man (WMANT, 61; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag), 295–318; Paul D. Hanson, “Rebellion in Heaven, Azazel, and Euhemeristic Heroes in 1 Enoch 6–11,” JBL 96 (1977), 226– 29.)

According to Berossus, they taught the people of Sumer “writing, science, and technology of all types, the foundation of cities, the building of temples, jurisprudence and geometry,” as well as such necessities as agriculture. In lists, they usually appear paired with the king whom they purportedly advised as a sort of vizier.”

David P. Melvin, “Divine Mediation and the Rise of Civilization in Mesopotamian Literature and in Genesis 1-11,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 2010, pp. 3-4.

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September 15, 2015

Melvin: Origins of Human Civilization–Divine Mediation or Human Endeavor?

“In the study of Genesis 1–11, it is common for scholars to make comparisons between the biblical material and ancient Near Eastern myths. The discovery of large numbers of texts from Mesopotamia and Ugarit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created a veritable deluge of comparative studies of the primeval history.

While the observation of the many continuities between Genesis 1–11 and Mesopotamian myths has contributed greatly to our understanding of this portion of the biblical text, it is also important to note the discontinuities between the biblical and extra-biblical material.

One such discontinuity relates to the origin of human civilization. In Mesopotamian myths, civilization arises via the intervention of gods or other divine beings. It is portrayed variously as a gift bestowed directly upon humanity, an institution preceding the creation of humanity (via the creation of patron deities of various technologies), or the bestowal of knowledge upon humans by gods, sometimes through intermediary beings.

In Genesis 1–11, on the other hand, there are no divine mediators, and there does not appear to be any divine assistance in the rise of civilization.

(Late Second Temple period expansions of the tradition preserved in Genesis 6:1–4, such as 1 Enoch 6–11 and Jubilees 4:15, 21–23a 8:1–4, do include angelic revelation of secret knowledge which contributes to human civilization.

Although a few scholars, most notably J. T. Milik and Margaret Barker, have argued that these works preserve elements of an earlier, more extensive tradition which Genesis 6:1–4 has abridged, their proposals have not met with much acceptance.

See J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 30–32a; Margaret Barker, The Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1987), 18–19a; see especially the review of Barker by Nickelsburg in JBL 109 (1990), 335–37. See below for a further discussion of this possibility.)

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530-1569), The Tower of Babel (circa 1563-1565, oil on panel, Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, Room 06, Rotterdam. Accession number 2443 (OK). Bequeathed to the Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen by Daniël George van Beuningen. Brueghel painted three versions of the Tower of Babel. This one is in the collection of the Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A second version is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. A third version, a miniature on ivory, is apparently held by a private collector. Its disposition is unknown. The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain”. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Rotterdam)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Click to zoom. Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530-1569), The Tower of Babel (circa 1563-1565, oil on panel, Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, Room 06, Rotterdam. Accession number 2443 (OK). Bequeathed to the Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen by Daniël George van Beuningen.
Brueghel painted three versions of the Tower of Babel. This one is in the collection of the Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A second version is in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. A third version, a miniature on ivory, is apparently held by a private collector. Its disposition is unknown.
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that “faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain”.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Rotterdam)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

Rather, civilization is the product of human endeavor. In Genesis 4:17–22, humans discover or invent various aspects of civilized life: city-building, animal husbandry, music, and metallurgy. The human source of city-building is further underscored in Genesis 10–11 with the construction of cities by Nimrod (10:8–12) and the building of the city and tower of Babylon (11:1–9).

I propose that the absence of divine mediation from Genesis 1–11 shifts the responsibility for civilization and the evils which accompany it onto humanity, particularly through the Eden narrative’s portrayal of civilizing knowledge as illicitly acquired divine knowledge.

In order to make this case, I will first examine the Mesopotamian literature to establish the mythological background which Genesis 1–11 rejects. Then, I will analyze the relevant biblical texts in order to demonstrate the absence of the instruction motif. Finally, I will argue that the Eden story in Genesis 3 is the key to understanding how and why the mythological motif of divine instruction was excluded from Genesis 1–11.”

David P. Melvin, “Divine Mediation and the Rise of Civilization in Mesopotamian Literature and in Genesis 1-11,” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 2010, pp. 1-3.

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September 14, 2015

Izre’el: Listing the Fragments

Previous Studies and the Present Study

“The scholarly world first became aware of the myth of Adapa and the South Wind when its largest fragment was discovered among the scholarly tablets of the El-Amarna archive in 1887 (Harper 1891; Scheil 1891; cf. Zimmern 1892; Sayce 1892; Izre’el 1997: 1-13, 43-50).

A fragment of the myth (now known as Fragment D) had, in fact, already been published before that time by one of the pioneers of Mesopotamian studies, George Smith (Smith 1876:125-6).

Smith, however, did not have at his disposal enough data to identify this fragment as part of the myth to which it belonged and attributed it to the Ea narrative (for which see Cagni 1969, 1977). While discussing the Berossus account of Oannes, Smith stated that “it is a curious fact the legend of Oannes, which must have been one of the Babylonian stories of the Creation, has not yet been discovered” (Smith 1876: 306).

Sayce, who said he had copied this fragment, “related to an otherwise unknown individual named Adapa,” “many years ago,” was able to attribute this fragment to the Adapa myth only after the discovery of the Amarna fragment (Sayce 1892; cf. Sayce in Morgan 1893: 183-4; Bezold 1894a: 114 n. 1, 1894b: 405 n. 1; Strong 1894; 1895).

We now have at our disposal six fragments of the myth. The largest and most important fragment is the one discovered at Amarna (“Fragment B”) and thus dated to the 14th century BCE (see further pp. 47-9).

Five other fragments (A, A1, C, D, and E) were part of the Ashurbanipal library and are representative of this myth as it was known in Assyria about seven centuries later. Only two of the extant fragments (A and A1) are variants of the same text. Fragments C and D come from different sections of the text.

Fragment E represents another recension of the myth, which also seems to be similar to the known versions.

K 15072, British Museum. Another extremely sparse entry for this Akkadian cuneiform tablet, provenance Nineveh, modern Kuyunjik.<br /> http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search_beta/search_results.php?SearchMode=Text&ObjectID=401152

K 15072, British Museum. Another extremely sparse entry for this Akkadian cuneiform tablet, provenance Nineveh, modern Kuyunjik.
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search_beta/search_results.php?SearchMode=Text&ObjectID=401152

The following is a list of the extant fragments edited in this volume, with their museum numbers and main previous editions.

Fragment A: MLC 1296 (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York);
Scheil 1898: 124-33;
Clay 1922: 39-41, pls IV, VI (cf. Clay 1923: 10-11);
Picchioni 1981: 112-5, 127-31 (figure 1), tav. 1.
Fragment A1: K 15072 (British Museum, London).
Parallel to the last extant section Fragment A. Schramm 1974;
Picchioni 1981: 114-5, 131, tav. IV-V.
Fragment B: VAT 348 (Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin);
Winkler and Abel 1889-90: 240;
Schroeder 1915: #194;
Harper 1894: 418-25;
Jensen 1900: 94-9, with comments on pp. 411-3;
Knudtzon 1915: 964-9 (= EA 356);
Picchioni 1981: 114-21, 131-6, 162-3 (figures 2-3 = Schroeder 1915: #194, tav. II-III;
Izre’el 1997: 43-50, copy (= Schroeder 1915: #194 with collations = pp. 177, 179 below), photographs.
Fragment C: K 8743 (British Museum, London). Expanded parallel to part of Fragment B.
Langdon 1915: pl. IV, #3, and p. 42 n. 2;
Thompson 1930: pl. 31;
Jensen 1900: xvii-xviii;
Picchioni 1981: 120-1, 136-7, 164 (figure 4), tav. IV-V.
Photograph also in Böhl 1959: Taf. 12.
Fragment D: K 8214 (British Museum, London). Virtual parallel to the end of Fragment B with additions.
Strong 1894;
Furlani 1929: 132;
Picchioni 1981: 122-3, 137-41, 165 (figure 5), tav. VI.
Photograph also in Böhl 1959: Taf. 12.
Fragment E: K 9994 (British Museum, London). A small fragment probably representing a different recension of the myth.
Von Soden 1976: 429-30;
Picchioni 1981: 95-6, tav. IV-V.

A cuneiform copy is published here for the first time, courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

The notation “Fragment E” is introduced here.

In addition to these fragments, one may note a possible title to the myth. The catalogue of literary texts Rm 618 (Bezold 1889-99: 4.1627) lists a title of a work on Adapa (line 3):

Adapa into heaven ( . . . )

Picchioni (1981: 87 n. 244) suggested that this might be an incipit of the first verse of the myth; Talon (1990: 44, 54) agrees (see further Hallo 1963: 176; cf. Lambert 1962: 73-4).

It is difficult to see how this line could have been the opening verse of any of the versions known to us, since both Fragment A and Fragment B seem to have opened differently (cf., for Fragment B, p. 108, and, for a literary analysis of Fragment A, pp. 112-3).

It may perhaps be suggested that this was a title rather than an incipit (thus also Röllig 1987: 50), because we know that Adapa’s ascent to heaven is also referred to elsewhere (p. 4).

British Museum K 10147. Notes on this fragment are sparse. It was sourced at Nineveh, modern Kuyunjik, and marked Neo-Assyrian (ca. 911-612 BC).<br /> http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search_beta/archival_view.php?ObjectID=P398516

British Museum K 10147. Notes on this fragment are sparse. It was sourced at Nineveh, modern Kuyunjik, and marked Neo-Assyrian (ca. 911-612 BC).
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search_beta/archival_view.php?ObjectID=P398516

Von Soden, while suggesting the attribution of K 9994 (= Fragment E) to this myth (cf. also Borger 1975: 62, following Lambert), also made some observations concerning K 10147, saying that although the attribution of this fragment to the myth is doubtful, it may have formed part of the beginning of the text, before the extant Fragment A (von Soden 1976: 431; already Bezold 1894b: 405 n. 1).

This and other small fragments mentioning Adapa or relating to this figure have been collected by Picchioni (1981).”

(Ed. note: Links on this page are far from perfect. I have done my best to at least show a direction if you are seeking a specific citation or a particular work. Many of the cited works are not on the web. If you want them, you will have to complete your citations and then request them through an interlibrary loan at a physical library. If you have updated links to citations or to complete works, or images of the fragments themselves, please share them with me through the comments feature below. It would be a selfless contribution to scholarship if you could scan them and upload them to the internet. I will integrate them into this page. Please remember to mention if you would like to be credited.)

Schlomo Izre’el, Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death, Eisenbrauns, 2001, pp. 5-7.

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September 13, 2015

Izre’el: Origins of the Adapa Myth

“Adapa the Sage

Adapa was known in Ancient Mesopotamia as The Sage. The original etymology of the name Adapa may not have reached us. A lexical text lists a term adapu as meaning “wise” (Igituh I: 107), an attribute that is further attested in another late text (Lambert 1962: 74). This adjectival noun is undoubtedly derived from the name of the mythological figure Adapa (CAD A/I 102 s.v. adapu B; AHw 1542 s.v. adapu III).

This lexical text has ù.tu.a.ab.ba “born in the sea” as the Sumerian equivalent of adapu, an equation that may have resulted from folk etymology (Lambert 1962: 73-4). In any case, whether primary or secondary, this possible etymology shows the mythological characteristics attributed to Adapa by the Mesopotamians, since he, as one of the first antediluvian sages, was thought to have emerged from the sea.

At some point, the name Adapa was interpreted as an epithet rather than as a proper noun, and as such it co-occurs with the name Uan(na), “the light of An” (see below).

Whether the word was originally an epithet or a name is hard to tell, especially since one cannot draw any sound conclusions regarding the origin of the myth or of any individual mytheme from the chronology of its occasional textual finds.

K 5519, British Museum.
E.A. Wallis Budge, ed., Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, part XXX, British Museum, London, 1911. Plate 8.
http://www.etana.org/sites/default/files/coretexts/17079.pdf

In a Sumero-Akkadian bilingual account of the first sages, a priest of Eridu is mentioned as one who ascended to heaven:

“[PN,] the purification priest of Eridu

[. . .] who ascended to heaven.

They are the seven brilliant apkallus, purãdu-fish of the sea,

[sev]en apkallus “grown” in the river,

who insure the correct functioning of the ordinance of heaven and earth.”

(K 5519: I’ – 9’ after Reiner 1961: 2, 4).

Reiner (1961: 6-7) suggested that the subject here was Adapa. However, taken in its context as part of the bīt mēseri ritual, the name of the apkallu mentioned is Utuabzu (“born in the Apsu”), who comes seventh in a list of apkallus (Borger 1974: 192-4).

A fish-apkallu drawn by A.H. Layard from a stone relief, one of a pair flanking a doorway in the Temple of Ninurta at Kalhu.
This example is identical to illustration 55 in Dalley’s article on the apkallu, which she cites for the dual daggers in his waistband.
British Museum.   Reproduced in Schlomo Izre’el, Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death, Eisenbrauns, 2001.  
https://books.google.co.th/books?id=MbwwROVGl7UC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

In another place in the same text, the last of seven sages is Utua-abba, mentioned as one who descended from heaven (Borger 1974: 193-4; see also Borger 1994: 231 and p. 232 n. 37).

The name Uan is listed as the first apkallu, who served during the time of the king Ayyalu (van Dijk 1962: 44). It is he who is mentioned as the one who “completed the ordinance of heaven and earth.”

The Greek variant of the name Uan, namely Oannes, is known from the account of Babylonian history by Berossus, The Babyloniaca, where it is said that before civilization was introduced to the people of Mesopotamia,

“…there was a great crowd of men in Babylonia and they lived without laws as wild animals. In the first year (i.e., of the reign of Alorus) a beast named Oannes appeared from the Erythrean Sea in a place adjacent to Babylonia. Its entire body was that of a fish, but a human head had grown beneath the head of the fish and human feet likewise had grown from the fish’s tail. It also had a human voice. A picture of it is still preserved today.”

(Burstein 1978: 13-4).

The evidence in our possession thus seems to point to at least two different original traditions (cf. Wiggermann 1986: 153) that have become a single unified tradition in the most prominent remaining texts (cf. the remarks by Denning-Bolle 1992: 44-5).

I believe that in the myth of Adapa and the South Wind, as it was interpreted in the traditions that have reached us, there is a strong case for such a unified tradition. Variation, it must be noted, is a part of the very nature of mythological traditions (cf. pp. 108-10 below).”

Schlomo Izre’el, Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death, Eisenbrauns, 2001, pp. 1-2.

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September 9, 2015

Kvanvig: Initiation is a Restriction of Marduk

“We think van der Toorn is right in taking this as a comment to the tendency present in the Catalogue. This is still no absolute chronology, since apkallus are listed as authors in III, 7; IV, 11; and VI, 11.

Nevertheless, the commentary seems to underscore three stages in the transmission of highly recognized written knowledge: it starts in the divine realm with the god of wisdom Ea; at the intersection point between the divine and the human stands Uanadapa; and as the third link in this chain stands (we must presuppose) an ummanu, “scholar.”

Tablet of Uruk. The ritual of daily sacrifices in the temple of the god Anu in Uruk.
Seleucid period, 3rd-2nd Centuries BCE, Hellenistic, from Uruk.
Baked clay, 22,3 x 10,4 cm
Louvre, AO 6451.

A. Lenzi has called attention to a colophon to a medical text which reveals a similar kind of transmission:

“Salves (and) bandages: tested (and) checked, which are ready at hand, composed by the ancient apkallus from before the flood, which in Šuruppak in the second year of Enlil-bani, king of Isin, Enlil-muballit, apkallu of Nippur, bequeathed. A non-expert may show an expert. An expert may not show a non-expert. A restriction of Marduk.”

(Medical Text, AMT 105, 1, 21-5. Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods, p. 117.)

The models of transmission in the commentary of the Catalogue and in this colophon are not exactly the same, but the tendency is. In this text, an expert, possibly an āšipu, has in his hands a tablet of high dignity: it belongs to the secrets of the gods (cf. below).

AM-102 ; No. #1 (K4023)
British Museum of London   Tablet K.4023
COL. I
[Starting on Line 38] . . .
Root of caper which (is) on a grave, root of thorn (acacia) which (is) on a grave, right horn of an ox, left horn of a kid, seed of tamarisk, seed of laurel, Cannabis, seven drugs for a bandage against the Hand of a Ghost thou shalt bind on his temples.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] – The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 54, No. 1/4 (Oct., 1937), pp. 12-40; Assyrian Prescriptions for the Head By R. Campbell Thompson   
http://antiquecannabisbook.com/chap2B/Assyria/K4023.htm

Therefore, if somebody not belonging to the initiated by accident should have such a tablet, he may show it to the expert, but the expert should never show it to an uninitiated person. The content of the tablet was secret; it went back to the ancient apkallus from before the flood.

Afterwards a distinguished sage, an apkallu in Nippur, inherited it, and from this line of transmission it arrived to the scholar writing this colophon. The division between the apkallus before the flood and the postdiluvian apkallu in Nippur may here be similar to the division of the first group of apkallus of divine descent and the next group of four apkallus of human descent in Bīt Mēseri.

As we have seen, the Late Babylonian Uruk tablet also had a division between a group of seven “before the flood” and a group of ten afterwards, but here the first seven were apkallus, and the next group (with one or two exceptions) were ummanus.

What we observe here is confirmed by two independent contributions with different scope that we already have called attention to, K. van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, and A. Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods.

They are both concerned with the transition from oral transmission of divine messages to written revelations, and they both use Mesopotamian sources from the first millennium as an analogy to what took place in Israel in the formation of the Hebrew Bible.

(van der Toorn, Scribal Culture, pp. 205-21; Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods, pp. 67-122.)

Enuma Elish means “when above”, the two first words of the epic.
This Babylonian creation story was discovered among the 26,000 clay tablets found by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840’s at the ruins of Nineveh.
Enuma Elish was made known to the public in 1875 by the Assyriologist George Adam Smith (1840-76) of the British Museum, who was also the discoverer of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. He made several of his findings on excavations in Nineveh.
http://www.creationmyths.org/enumaelish-babylonian-creation/enumaelish-babylonian-creation-3.htm

Van der Toorn is concerned about the broad tendency in Mesopotamian scholarly series from the end of the second millennium to classify these as nisirti šamê u erseti, “a secret of heaven and earth.” This expression, occurring in colophons and elsewhere, does two things to the written scholarly lore: on the one hand, it claims that this goes back to a divine revelation; on the other hand, it restricts this revelation to a defined group of scholars.

This tendency goes along with the tendency to date the written wisdom back to primeval time, or to the time before the flood. This also concerns the most well-known compositions from the end of the second millennium, Enuma Elish and the standard version of Gilgamesh.”

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 149-51.

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September 8, 2015

Kvanvig: Transmission of Antediluvian Revelation

“The apkallus provided the human race with the fundamental wisdom necessary to develop human civilization. They did so through their teaching, and according to Mesopotamian tradition, developed in the first millennium, they did so also through their writing activity.

A tablet containing parts of the Etana Myth.
British Museum, ME K 19530, AN 33047001.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/c/cuneiform_the_legend_of_etana.aspx

The apkallus are listed several places as authors of literary works in the Catalogue of Texts and Authors; colophons and other references to their authorship add to this list.

“Catalogue I, 5-7: Uanadapa is listed with an unknown work.

Catalogue III, 7: apkallu listed as author of compositions.

Catalogue IV, 11: third apkallu, Enmedugga, listed as author of several works.

Catalogue VI, 11: last apkallu in Bīt Mēseri, Lu-Nanna: Author of the Etana Myth.

Catalogue VI, 16: work which “Adapa wrote at his dictation.”

Colophon to medical text: “a secret of Lu-Nanna, apkallu of Ur.”

Colophon: “according to the old apkallus from before the flood.”

Verse Account of Nabonidus, col. v, 12: u sakar (SAR) d A-num d A-num d En.líl.lá ša ik-su-ru A-da-p[a]. The name of the series “which Adapa has compiled” appears to be an odd way to write the name of Enuma Anu Enlil.

Cylinder of Nabonidus, Temple of Shamash at Larsa. This terra-cotta cylinder records the renovations by king Nabonidus of the Temple of the Sun god Shamash at Larsa.
Neo-Babylonian Period, 555 BCE – 539 BCE.
Held at the British Museum, London.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cylinder_of_Nabonidus_from_the_temple_of_Shamash_at_Larsa,_Mesopotamia..JPG

Hellenistic text from Babylon: Uan listed as the author of an unknown literary work, most likely astronomical.

Hellenistic text from Babylon: Uan listed as author of unknown work.

Berossos: Oannes is the author of Enuma Elish.”

(Cf. Lambert, “A Catalogue,” pp. 59-77. Also see K. 8080, cf. W.G. Lambert, “Ancestors, Authors and Canonicity,” JCS 11, 1957, pp. 1-14, 1-4, 7, and K. 4023, Ibid., p. 8. Machinist and Tadmor, “Heavenly Wisdom,” pp. 146-8. CLBT AB 249, cf. J. Oelsner, Materialien zur babylonischen Gesellschaft und Kultur in hellenistischer Zeit, Budapest, 1986, 207f and 239. Cf. Streck, “Oannes,” p. 2.)

We see that among the apkallus Uan or Adapa is most often referred to as an author, which is also reflected by the prominent place this first sage has in Berossos.

According to the scribes of the Verse Account, Adapa was the compiler of the widely known and most authoritative astronomical series Enuma Anu Enlil. Berossos’ claim that Oannes should have written Enuma Elish may simply reflect his own literary composition, where Enuma Elish plays a major role as background for his record of creation.

Enuma Anu Enlil is a series of about 70 tablets dealing with Babylonian astrology. These accounts were found in the early 19th century by excavation in Nineveh, near present day Bagdad. The bulk of the work is a substantial collection of omens, estimated to number between 6500 and 7000, which interpret a wide variety of celestial and atmospheric phenomena in terms relevant to the king and state. The tablets presumably date back to about 650 BC, but several of the omens may be as old as 1646 BC. Many of the reports found on the tablets represent “astrometeorological” forecasts (Rasmussen 2010).
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndHistory%205000-0%20BC.htm

In a few places in the Catalogue we get information about how a composition came into being. We find one notice connected to Kabti-ilāni-Marduk (III, 1-2). The Catalogue here first quotes the first line of the Poem of Erra, then comes a lacunae, followed by two verbs.

The two verbs correspond to the postscript about how the composition came into being in the Poem of Erra itself. Lambert therefore restores the passage according to the Poem of Erra.

“[annû ša Kabti-ilāni Marduk mār Dabibi] ušabrišuma idbubû.

[This is what] (the god) revealed to [Kabti-ilāni-Marduk, son of Dabibi] and which he recited.”

(Catalogue of Texts and Authors III, 2.)

We find the full report of how the revelation took place in the Poem of Erra:

“The compiler of his tablets was Kabti-ilāni-Marduk, son of Dabibi.

The god revealed it to him during the night time,

and when he in the morning slumber recited (it), he did not omit anything,

nor did he add a single line to it.”

(Poem of Erra V, 42-4.)

The signs preserved to the account of how Uanadapa composed his first work in the Catalogue making a restoration along the same line likely.

“[These are what] (the god) [revealed]

to Uanadapa and which he spoke.”

(Catalogue of Texts and Authors I, 6-7. Cf. Lambert, “A Catalogue,” p. 73.)

Thus, Uanadapa, like Kabti-ilāni-Marduk, was the second link in the chain of transmission; the composition was revealed to him by a god. The Š stem of barû, “see,” šubrû, is causative, “reveal,” and is often used with the meaning “reveal in a vision.”

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 146-8.

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September 6, 2015

Kvanvig: Surpassing the Wisdom of the Abyss–Or Not

“In the Verse Account of Nabonidus the king is represented as claiming:

“He would stand in the assembly (and) exalt him[self] (as follows):

“I am wise, I am learned, I have seen what is hidden.

I do not understand the impressions made by a stylus, (but) I have seen se[cret things].

Ilteri has shown me; he has [made known to me] everything.

As for (the series) Moon Crescent of Anu (and) Enlil, which Adapa has compiled,

I surpass it in all wisdo[m].”

(Verse Account of Nabonidus v, 8′-13′, P. Machinist and H. Tadmor, eds., “Heavenly Wisdom,” in The Tablet and the Scroll. Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo.)

Seemingly Nabonidus is here described in the same manner as the Assyrian kings. But the scholars who wrote this in the Persian age have created a portrait with a lot of irony.

Nabonidus Cylinder, Sippar, The British Museum.<br /> Photo by Marco Prins and Jona Lendering, Livius.org.<br /> Currently held in the British Museum.<br /> Released into the public domain (by the author). <br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinders_of_Nabonidus#/media/File:Nabonidus_cylinder_sippar_bm1.jpg

Nabonidus Cylinder, Sippar, The British Museum.
Photo by Marco Prins and Jona Lendering, Livius.org.
Currently held in the British Museum.
Released into the public domain (by the author).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinders_of_Nabonidus#/media/File:Nabonidus_cylinder_sippar_bm1.jpg

First, there is an obvious irony in Nabonidus‘ boasting of being so wise when he is not able to write. The scribal art was the entrance to all kinds of wisdom for Babylonian scholars.

Second, there is an irony in relation to the god who gave Nabonidus these revelations. Ilteri is the name of the moon-god; this is no surprise since Nabonidus in the Verse Account is blamed for favoring the moon-god, Sin, instead of Marduk. Ilteri is, however, an Aramaic designation for a Syrian lunar deity.

(Cf. P.A. Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556-539 BCE. New Haven, 1989, pp. 218-9.)

Accordingly Nabonidus is not only blamed because of the neglect of Marduk, he is mocked because he thought he had received revelations from a foreign god.

At the end, there is an odd writing of the astronomical series Enuma Anu Enlil. In the name of the series, in front of Anu and Enlil, is placed a sign used to designate the moon-god.

The cuneiform on this clay cylinder mentions the renovations of the Temple of the Moon god Sin undertaken at Ur by King Nabonidus.<br /> It includes a prayer for the king and for his son, Belshazzar.<br /> From Ur, southern Mesopotamia, Neo-Babylonian Period, 555 BCE - 539 BCE.<br /> Held at the British Museum, London.<br /> Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, released into the public domain by the author. <br /> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinders_of_Nabonidus#/media/File:Cylinder_of_Nabonidus_from_the_temple_of_Shamash_at_Larsa,_Mesopotamia..JPG

The cuneiform on this clay cylinder mentions the renovations of the Temple of the Moon god Sin undertaken at Ur by King Nabonidus.
It includes a prayer for the king and for his son, Belshazzar.
From Ur, southern Mesopotamia, Neo-Babylonian Period, 555 BCE – 539 BCE.
Held at the British Museum, London.
Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, released into the public domain by the author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinders_of_Nabonidus#/media/File:Cylinder_of_Nabonidus_from_the_temple_of_Shamash_at_Larsa,_Mesopotamia..JPG

This has two effects: on the one hand, it is blasphemy, since the moon-god is credited a place higher than Anu and Enlil; on the other hand it is pure nonsense–Nabonidus claims to have a wisdom surpassing a series that does not exist!

In several letters, sent from scholars to the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, the kings are compared with an apkallu or Adapa:

“[The king, my lord], is made [li]ke an apkallu …

… on account of that you will speak [a w]ord [that] is as perfect as that of an apkallu; a word that has been spoken just as it is meant by its nature …

Aššur, in a dream, called the grandfather of the king, my lord, an apkallu; the king, lord of kings, is an offspring of an apkallu and Adapa: you have surpassed the wisdom of the Abyss and all scholarship.

Now th[en], the deeds of the king, [my lord], are like those of Adapa.”

(S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, vol. 10, SAA, Helsinki, 1993, letter 29, rev. 2, p. 22.)

We have selected these references because they not only show that the kings are depicted as wise, but also that this wisdom has a special relationship to the wisdom of Adapa or the apkallus in general. There are numerous other testimonies where kings boast of their supreme wisdom, seeing a relationship between their wisdom and the wisdom of various gods, especially Ea.

But the apkallus are the only figures, except the gods, who have this dominant place in the royal ideology. This is not the case in early statements; it comes in the first millennium.”

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 139-41.

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September 4, 2015

Kvanvig: The ilū mušīti Are the Stars of the Night

“How the actual connection between the earthly exorcist and his heavenly counterpart was imagined is vividly portrayed on an Assyrian bronze tablet from the first millennium.

A depiction of the underworld, or alternatively, a portrayal of an exorcism.<br /> Wiggermann identifies Pazuzu appearing at the top, leering over a top register which contains the eight-pointed star of Ishtar, the inverted half-moon crescent of the Moon God Sin, and the lamp of Nusku. The seven celestial objects of Babylonian cosmogony are at far right, above Nusku's lamp. Earlier analysts identified the leering monster as Nergal. Virtually all subsequent scholars now follow Wiggermann. <br /> In the second register, seven exemplars of the Mesopotamian pandemonium appear to support the heavens. These composite creatures include ugallu, lion headed monsters with an apotropaic function, among others.<br /> The middle register could portray burial rites for new arrivals in the underworld, presided over by two fish-apkallū, or the scene could be a typical exorcism for apkallu, who played a role in banishing demons from the ill.<br /> In this register Wiggermann identifies the lion headed monsters as ugallu and the human-appearing entity as Lulal, a “minor apotropaic god.”<br /> The lower register was formerly considered to depict the goddess Allat, or Ereshkigal, sister of Ishtar, who reigns in the underworld. Wiggermann prefers Lamaštu, and he is persuasive.<br /> Lamaštu kneels upon a horse or a donkey, which appears to be oppressed by her burden, throttling snakes in each hand, in a boat which floats upon the waters of life.<br /> Note the lion pups suckling at her breast.<br /> Wiggermann considers this 1st millennium amulet a portrayal of a Lamaštu exorcism.<br /> Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bronze plaque of which an engraving was published by Clermont-Ganneau.<br /> The original, which belonged to M. Péretié, is now in the collection of M. de Clercq.<br /> http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17323/17323-h/17323-h.htm#linkBimage-0039

A depiction of the underworld, or alternatively, a portrayal of an exorcism.
Wiggermann identifies Pazuzu appearing at the top, leering over a top register which contains the eight-pointed star of Ishtar, the inverted half-moon crescent of the Moon God Sin, and the lamp of Nusku. The seven celestial objects of Babylonian cosmogony are at far right, above Nusku’s lamp. Earlier analysts identified the leering monster as Nergal. Virtually all subsequent scholars now follow Wiggermann.
In the second register, seven exemplars of the Mesopotamian pandemonium appear to support the heavens. These composite creatures include ugallu, lion headed monsters with an apotropaic function, among others.
The middle register could portray burial rites for new arrivals in the underworld, presided over by two fish-apkallū, or the scene could be a typical exorcism for apkallu, who played a role in banishing demons from the ill.
In this register Wiggermann identifies the lion headed monsters as ugallu and the human-appearing entity as Lulal, a “minor apotropaic god.”
The lower register was formerly considered to depict the goddess Allat, or Ereshkigal, sister of Ishtar, who reigns in the underworld. Wiggermann prefers Lamaštu, and he is persuasive.
Lamaštu kneels upon a horse or a donkey, which appears to be oppressed by her burden, throttling snakes in each hand, in a boat which floats upon the waters of life.
Note the lion pups suckling at her breast.
Wiggermann considers this 1st millennium amulet a portrayal of a Lamaštu exorcism.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bronze plaque of which an engraving was published by Clermont-Ganneau.
The original, which belonged to M. Péretié, is now in the collection of M. de Clercq.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17323/17323-h/17323-h.htm#linkBimage-0039

The image depicts the universe of an ill man. In the basement lurks the demon Lamaštu, ready to attack; in the upper room are divine figures supporting the heavens, filled with the symbols of the highest gods; in between lies the sick man on his bed with his arm stretched out toward heaven.

At his head and at his feet two figures with human bodies and fish cloaks are placed, performing a ritual. (Cf. O. Keel, Die Welt der altorientalischen Bildsymbolik und das Alte Testament, 3 ed. Darmstadt, 1984, 68f.)

One could think that these figures actually were āšipū, dressed in ritual clothes as fish-apkallus. This is hardly the case; we do not have any evidence that the āšipū used fish-cloaks as ritual dress. The depiction rather shows the presence of the transcendent apkallus in the ritual, as “guardian angels” of the sick man.

This is the actual bronze frieze of the illustration above, held in the collection of the Louvre as AO 22205.

The apkallus appear in the rituals of the day. Twice in our material they are paired with what generally can be designated as ilū mušīti, “the gods of the night.” Both in Bīt Mēseri and in the Mīs pî ritual we will deal with below, the ritual extends over night and day.

The ilū mušīti are the stars of the night; they sometimes represent a deification of celestial constellations and planets, other times a deification of the great deities who in this case are addressed as stars. (Cf. Erica Reiner, Astral Magic in Babylonia, vol. 85, TAPhs. Philadelphia 1995, 5-6.)

“Stand by me, O Gods of the Night!

Heed my words, O gods of destinies,

Anu, Enlil, and all the great gods!

I call to you, Delebat (i.e. Venus), Lady of battles (variant has: Lady of the silence [of the night]),

I call to you, O Night, bride (veiled by?) Anu.

Pleiades, stand on my right, Kidney star, stand on my left.”

(Apotropaic Ritual, KAR 38: 12f).

The stars represent the heavenly counterpart to the earth. Just as the night among humans is divided into three watches, the stars are called massarātu ša mūši, “the watches of the night:”

“May the star itself take to you (goddess) my misery;

let the ecstatic tell you, the dream interpreter repeat to you,

let the (three) watches of the night speak to you . . .

(Apotropaic Ritual, KAR 38 rev. 24f).

May the watches of the night tell you

That I did not sleep, I did not lie down, did not groan, did not arise,

But that my tears were made my food.”

(Psalm of Penitence, Assur II, 2-4)

G. Lambert, “The Sultantepe Tablets, a Review Article,” RA 80 1959, 119-38, 127.

The stars keep watch over both those awake and those sleeping in the night. In the following prayer to the stars there is play on the connotations of “watching,” massartu / nasāru, and êru, “be awake:”

“(you) three watches of the night

you are the wakeful, watchful, sleepless, never sleeping ones–

as you are awake, watchful, sleepless, never sleeping,

you decide the fate of those awake and sleeping (alike).”

(Prayer to the Stars, KAR 58 rev. 12f.)

In several cases the stars are invoked together with two typical night deities in late Assyrian and Late Babylonian times, Girra, the god of fire, and Nusku, the god of lamp and fire.”

(Cf. J. Black and A. Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, London: 1992, 88, 145. For Nusku, cf. also D. Schwemer, Abwehrzauber und Behexung, Wiesbaden: 2007, 38, 54-5, 146, 206-7.)

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 133-4.

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September 4, 2015

Kvanvig: On Šēp lemutti, Averting Evil

“The apkallus were also an essential part of the composition Šēp lemutti. The composition starts by defining the purpose of the ritual as to avert evil from the house.

Then the text prescribes the types of figures to be fashioned and buried at set locations in the house. This section contains a long passage describing wooden figures of seven apkallus, from seven Babylonian cities. Since these figures should be made of wood, no remains of them are found, of course.

Bird Apkallū and Fish Apkallū, the so-called purādu-fish, side by side. Apkallū statuettes of this design were buried in appropriate places in the home of a Babylonian exorcist. They were believed to have prophylactic qualities, guarding the home from evil.

The next passages describe apkallus with well-known features; seven figures with faces and wings of birds and seven figures cloaked in the skin of a fish. (Cf. Green, “Neo-Assyrian Apotropaic Figures,” 87-96, 87-90.)

In total the apkallus as groups of seven are described five times according to where they should be buried: at the head of the bed, in the foundation of the house, at the threshold to the chapel, in front of the door behind the chair and in the middle of the house in front of the chair (the chair may here be the throne of the palace).

As noted by Professor Dalley, “The type occurs as a group of six or more clay figurines placed in brick boxes in foundations at Assur, Nimrud, and Nineveh,” citing Dessa Rittig as her source (Assyrisch-babylonische Kleinplastik magischer Bedeutung vom 13.-6. Jh. v. Chr. München, 1977).

The first invocation addresses the arrival of the apkallus: “the apkallus have arrived at the first location.” (Cf. P. Hibbert in Kolbe, Die Reliefprogramme, 200-1.) Then follows an invocation that is similar in all the other four instances: šiptu attunu salmānu apkallu massarī, “Incantation: “you are the statues of the apkallus, the watchers.” (Wiggermann, Mesopotamian Protective Spirits, 48.)

The designation massaru follows the intention of the whole ritual closely: the apkallus are invoked to protect the palace or the house. Accordingly, there is a close correspondence between the invocation of the apkallus as watchers and how they were represented materially.

The statues of them were initiated through proper rituals and either placed in the room of the ill person to free him from evil demons, or they were buried in a house, to guard the house against demonic attack.

As monumental reliefs at the entrances to palaces they remind people and demons that the palace, the king, and the inhabitants of the palace lived in a house which was protected against evil intruders through the proper rituals.

Since the apkallus appear in apotropaic rituals, they are closely connected to the practice of the āšipū, the exorcists. In an ancient Babylonian myth the sixth sage An-enlilda made poultices for medical means. They would be brought to the upper world of humans as protection against diseases. (Lambert, “The Twenty-One “Poultices,” obv. 11-4, 78.)

A bas relief in the Louvre.
In this case the bird-apkallū tends to a sacred tree. Considering the mullilu in his right hand and the banduddu in his left, (tree cone and water bucket), he is engaged in a water ritual intended to sanctify the sacred tree. This is a common motif in Sumerian and Neo-Assyrian idols.
This bas relief is in the Louvre.
Primary publication Nimrud NW Palace I-24 = RIMA 2.0.101.023, ex. 189 (f)
Collection Nimrud, Iraq (a); British Museum, London, UK (b); Louvre Museum, Paris, France (c); Nimrud, Iraq (d); Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, USA (e); British Museum, London, UK; Louvre Museum, Paris, France
Museum no. Nimrud fragment no. 42 (a); BM 098061 (b); AO 22198 (c); Nimrud fragment no. 43 and 45 (d); DIA 47.181 (e) (photo: DIA); AO 19849
Accession no. 1903-10-10, 0002 (b)
Provenience Kalhu (mod. Nimrud)
Period Neo-Assyrian (ca. 911-612 BC)

We know that experts in medicine and incantations against disease demons could either designate themselves as apkallu, or place themselves as a descendant of an apkallu, in this case used as honorary title for an expert of highest rank. (Cf. A. Tuskimoto, “By the Hand of Madi-Dagan, the Scribe and Apkallu-Priest,” in Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East, K. Watanabe, ed., Heidelberg, 1999, pp. 187-200. Also Finkel, “Adad-apla-iddina,” 144f.)

In the commentary to diagnostic omens that explains the word pirig that occurs in the names of the postdiluvian apkallus meaning “light,” it is also stated that ka.pirig means āšipu.”

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 132-3.

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September 3, 2015

Curnow: Ziusudra Divides Invented Myth from Mythologized Fact

“After this, the story begins to become more confused. According to the legend preserved in a surviving fragmentary text (Dalley 2000, pp. 184-7), Adapa was the priest of Ea in his temple at Eridu. Eridu was regarded as one of the most ancient cities of Mesopotamia and the place where kingship first appeared as a gift from the gods.

Although the narrative is not without its lacunae and ambiguities, it seems that Ea chose to make Adapa omniscient and wise, but not immortal. As such, he is an heroic figure, but nothing more.

The Scheil dynastic tablet or “Kish Tablet” is an ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform text containing a variant form of the Sumerian King List.
The Assyriologist Jean-Vincent Scheil purchased the Kish Tablet from a private collection in France in 1911. The tablet is dated to the early 2d millennium BCE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheil_dynastic_tablet

However, another very different story is told of Uan by Berossus (Hodges 1876, p. 57). According to this one, Uan emerged from the sea with the body of a fish, although added to this were a human head and human feet.

At night, this amphibious creature returned to the sea to rest. All the apkallu took this form. As they were created and / or sent by Ea, who was closely associated with the fresh water of his great-great-grandfather Apsu, there is a certain logic in the apkallu having something in common with freshwater fish.

Iconographical evidence indicates the apkallu could also be portrayed with the heads of birds, or with wings, or both. The one thing they were certainly not, according to this version of the myth, is human beings who were made wise. They were supernatural creatures, not gods, but bearing gifts from the gods.

So far only Adapa / Uan has been mentioned by name. For the sake of completeness, something can be said about the other apkallu, although little can be said with any certainty. They are known by various names, and different lists are not entirely consistent with each other.

Berossus, writing in Greek in the third century BCE, calls them Annedotus, Euedocus, Eneugamus, Eneubolus, Anementus and Anodaphus (Hodges 1876, pp. 53-4), while a much older Sumerian king list calls them Uanduga, Enmeduga, Enmegalamma, Anenlilda, Enmebulugga and Utuabzu (Wilson 1977, p. 150).

Although the myth relating to Adapa might generously be described as sketchy, virtually nothing is known of the others at all apart from their names, the names of the kings they served as counsellors, and the city-states in which they discharged this function.

Collectively it is said that they angered the gods and were banished back to the waters whence they came (Dalley 2000, p. 182). And other sources relating to the myth suggest that it was not Ea who sent them but Marduk, or Nabu or Ishtar.

There is a further myth that bears on the subject of wisdom, and this one concerns the individual variously known as Atrahasis, Utnapishtim and Ziusudra. With him we perhaps begin to approach the ill-defined threshold that divides invented myth from mythologized fact.

If the name of Atrahasis (meaning “extra-wise”) is unfamiliar, his story is less so. The surviving text (Dalley 2000, pp. 9-35), which includes its own creation myth, tells of the gods sending a great flood to destroy humanity, but thanks to a warning from Ea, Atrahasis builds a boat and so is saved.

It is this flood that ends the period when the apkallu walked upon the earth, and the distinction between the antediluvian and the postdiluvian seems to have remained firmly established in the Mesopotamian mindset. That parts of Mesopotamia suffered serious flooding from time to time is hardly implausible, but what, if any basis, the story of a great flood bears to real events remains a matter for speculation.”

Trevor Curnow, Wisdom in the Ancient World, Bloomsbury, 2010, pp. 40-1.

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September 3, 2015

Dalley: Apkallu-7, IDD 2011

Iconography of Deities and Demons (IDD).

Apkallu (continued).

Sources. Chronological Range.

“All three types begin to appear in the late 2nd millennium. Some possible antecedents are noted by GREEN (1993-97: 252; see also nos. 66-70 belonging to the early Atlantid series, which MATTHEWS 1990: 109 dates to the 14th century).

They could, however, have had a different connotation before being adopted into the sages tradition. Although late texts attribute the tradition of sages to early historical times, no iconographic evidence supports such antiquity for the tradition.

“Sometimes animal hybrids … appear to take part in rituals….some types are clearly minor deities, since they wear the horned cap as a mark of their divinity…others may be human. A …winged god, standing or kneeling, holds a bucket and cone … in the scenes of “ritual” centered on the stylized tree. A similar female figure holds a chaplet of beads….A third figure carries a flowering branch, sometimes also a sacrificial (?) goat. Sometimes he wears the horned cap, and even when does not he often has wings. Presumably, therefore, such figures are also non-mortal; they may represent the Seven Sages in human guise.”
From Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, 1992, pp. 86-8.

Early dated examples of type 2 on sculpture come from the Terqa (Tell Ashara) stela of Tukulti-Ninurta II (890-884 BCE) (67) and the entrance to the Ninurta temple at Nimrud, probably installed by Assurnasirpal II (883- 859 BCE) (55*).

Huge sculptures of the fish-cloak Apkallu were used likewise in the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib (704-681 BCE) (53 – 54 ).

This depiction of a fish-apkallū of the parādu-fish type guarded the entrance to the temple of Ninurta at Nimrud.
A fish’s head can be seen on the Apkallu’s head, and its skin hangs down over the back of his body.
It is important to recall that the so-called Seven Sages of Sumeria were apkallū of this type.
Neo-Assyrian era, 865-860 BCE.
From the Temple of Ninurta, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu; Biblical Calah), northern Mesopotamia, Iraq. (The British Museum, London).
Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg)
http://www.ancient.eu/image/2708/

Type 3 first appears on Middle Assyrian seals, and becomes popular in the 9th-7th centuries both in Assyria and Urartu, often in combination with the sacred tree.

Type 2, on the other hand, appears around the same time in Babylonia, and is taken over in Assyria in the 9th-7th centuries.

Type 1 may have begun early in Assyria of the 1st millennium.

Type 2 is found in Achaemenid (66) and Seleucid (MCEWAN 1982: nos. 30, 40) times.

Geographical Distribution.

As shown above, Assyria is the region where Types 1 and 2 were first found, with extension of Type 1 to Carchemish, and of Types 1 and 3 to West Semitic stamp seals (if they are genuine) and to Urartu, probably all under Assyrian influence.

From Ronald Wallenfels, Apkallu-Sealings from Hellenistic Uruk, 1993.
Seal number 3. A fish-apkallu, a paradu-fish apkallu, depicted on a personal seal.
https://www.academia.edu/1368825/Apkallu-Sealings_from_Hellenistic_Uruk

The Babylonian Type 2 is more restricted, moving from Babylonia into Assyria, but from there to Pasargadae in West Iran, and thence into Seleucid art (MCEWAN 1982: nos. 30, 40).

Types 1 and 3 occur in Neo-Hittite/Aramaean sculpture at Carchemish (30), Sakce-gözü (80), and Malatya (31–32)

Object Types.

The three types mainly occur on Assyrian palace sculpture (1*–2, 6*–7, 17–18, 20, 22, 26, 53–55*, 67, including representations on buckets held by sages [e.g., PALEY 1976: pls. 16, 20, 28a-b] and on garments PALEY 1976: pl. 24a), on Assyrian wall-painting (16, 19), on seals (8*–9*, 11–14*, 33*–34*, 38, 41*–47, 52*, 63, 68*– 75*) or seal impressions (3–5, 49–51), carved ivory (10*, 21, 76*–79) found in Assyria, as groups of apotropaic clay figurines (56–62*), on amuletic plaques (35), on various Urartian objects (15*, 24–25, 27–29, 36*, 77) of stone and metal (pendants, horse frontlets, etc.), and as clay foundation figurines (65).

In Neo-Assyrian art these bird-headed “genies,” as they were long described, are now known to be apkallū, “bird-apkallū,” in this case, mixed-feature exorcists and creatures of protection created by the god Ea. They traditionally served as advisors to kings. Their association with sacred trees, as they are often portrayed, remains somewhat perplexing.
This apkallū makes the iconic gesture of exorcism and liberation of sin with the mullilu cone in his raised right hand, and the banduddu water bucket in his left hand.
There are three known types of apkallū: the human, with wings; the avian-headed, with wings, and the fish-apkallū, with carp skin draped over their heads.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lanpernas2/8606000868/

None are found on boundary stones of the Kassite and post-Kassite periods, nor on sealings from Emar tablets of the 12th century, nor among mid-7th century sculptures from Assurbanipal’s North Palace at Nineveh.

Conclusion.

The discrepancy between the written tradition in which the sages represent early antiquity, and the much later chronology of the iconographic evidence is striking. Babylonian and Assyrian traditions seem to have arisen separately. The diffusion of the probably Assyrian types 1 and 3 is different from that of the essentially Babylonian type 2.

The three types of apkallū are portrayed, with the human ummânū at far left, the Nisroc bird-apkallū type in the middle, and the antediluvian purādu-fish type at far right.
The human ummânū is attested in the Uruk List of Kings and Sages, while other references to bird-apkallū are legion, as documented in Wiggermann and other authorities.
The purādu-fish apkallū is principally attested in Berossus, though other authorities confirm them, as well.
The anthropomorphic qualities of the purādu-fish and the Nisroc apkallu remain unexplained, though the eagle is sacred to Enki / Ea.

Types 1 and 3 are closely associated with royal ritual in their scenes with the sacred tree and winged disc, and type 2 is especially associated with sickness, presumably as a healer. These associations make it likely that the bucket and cone, a hallmark of all three types, represent purification and blessing.”

Stephanie Dalley, “Apkallu,” Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East (IDD), Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Zurich, 2011 (text updated 2011 and illustrations updated 2007), p. 4-5/7.

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August 29, 2015

Dalley: Apkallu-6, IDD 2011

Iconography of Deities and Demons (IDD).

Apkallu (continued).

Type 3 Bird-of-Prey-Headed Apkallu, Problematic Identifications.

“The three types are identified from ritual texts and labels on figurines, but because the evidence is uncommon and sometimes ambiguous there are uncertainties. Change over time may also account for some difficulties. Some overlap in the iconography with Tiamat’s composite monsters from the theme of the Epic of Creation is possible, as mentioned above.

Single objects such as bucket or sprig may be held by figures who do not share other characteristics with definite sages. WIGGERMANN (1992: 75) identifies Apkallus in scenes in which figures resembling types 1 and 3 carry weapons and attack animals and monsters.

The Anzu bird.

This is not certain, as the bird-headed Apkallu may overlap in form with the Anzu bird in its 1st millennium appearance, and various winged or wingless man-figures may be hero-gods rather than Apkallus.

Lahmu, “Hairy,” is a protective and beneficent deity, a first-born son of Apsu and Tiamat.
He and his sister Laḫamu are the parents of Anshar and Kishar, the sky father and earth mother, who birthed the gods of the Mesopotamian Pantheon.
Laḫmu is depicted as a bearded man with a red sash–usually with three strands–and four to six curls on his head. He is often associated with the Kusarikku or “Bull-Man.”
In Sumerian times Laḫmu may have meant “the muddy one”. Lahmu guarded the gates of the Abzu temple of Enki at Eridu.
He and his sister Laḫamu are primordial deities in the Babylonian Epic of Creation-–Enuma Elis.
http://foundfact.com/portfolio-view/lahmu/#!prettyPhoto
http://foundfact.com/library/beings-people-and-gods/page/6/#!prettyPhoto

WIGGERMANN’s identifications are largely accepted (WIGGERMANN/GREEN 1993-97) and are followed here, but disagreement, and a proposal to identify the Lahmu-hero with three pairs of curls as a further type, are suggested by RUSSELL (1991: 312 n. 27; also ORNAN 1993: 60).

Amulet with a figure of Lamashtu, Mesopotamia, around 800 BC.<br /> A demonic divinity who preys on mothers and children.<br /> This protective image of Lamashtu, a fearsome female divinity of the underworld, was intended to keep evil at bay.<br /> Although she is usually described in modern works as a demon, the writing of her name in cuneiform suggests that in Babylonia and Assyria she was regarded as a kind of goddess.<br /> Unlike the majority of demons, who acted only on the commands of the gods, Lamashtu practised evil apparently for its own sake and on her own initiative. There is a cuneiform incantation on the reverse side of this amulet to frighten her away.<br /> Lamashtu's principal victims were unborn and new-born babies.<br /> Slipping into the house of a pregnant woman, she tries to touch the woman's stomach seven times to kill the unborn baby, or she kidnaps the child.<br /> Magical measures against Lamashtu included wearing a bronze head of Pazuzu. Some plaques show a bedridden man rather than a pregnant woman, so in some contexts Lamashtu is considered a bringer of disease.<br /> Lamashtu is described in texts as having the head of a lion, the teeth of a donkey, naked breasts, a hairy body, stained hands, long fingers, long finger nails, and the talons of a bird.<br /> Plaques also show her suckling a piglet and a whelp while she holds snakes in her hands, as in this case.<br /> She stands on her sacred animal, the donkey, which is sometimes shown in a boat, riding through the underworld.<br /> H.W.F. Saggs, Babylonians (London, The British Museum Press, 1995)<br /> J. Black and A. Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (London, The British Museum Press, 1992)<br /> http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/blagop#sthash.psbzCU3E.dpuf<br /> http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/a/amulet_with_figure_of_lamashtu.aspx

Amulet with a figure of Lamashtu, Mesopotamia, around 800 BC.
A demonic divinity who preys on mothers and children.
This protective image of Lamashtu, a fearsome female divinity of the underworld, was intended to keep evil at bay.
Although she is usually described in modern works as a demon, the writing of her name in cuneiform suggests that in Babylonia and Assyria she was regarded as a kind of goddess.
Unlike the majority of demons, who acted only on the commands of the gods, Lamashtu practised evil apparently for its own sake and on her own initiative. There is a cuneiform incantation on the reverse side of this amulet to frighten her away.
Lamashtu’s principal victims were unborn and new-born babies.
Slipping into the house of a pregnant woman, she tries to touch the woman’s stomach seven times to kill the unborn baby, or she kidnaps the child.
Magical measures against Lamashtu included wearing a bronze head of Pazuzu. Some plaques show a bedridden man rather than a pregnant woman, so in some contexts Lamashtu is considered a bringer of disease.
Lamashtu is described in texts as having the head of a lion, the teeth of a donkey, naked breasts, a hairy body, stained hands, long fingers, long finger nails, and the talons of a bird.
Plaques also show her suckling a piglet and a whelp while she holds snakes in her hands, as in this case.
She stands on her sacred animal, the donkey, which is sometimes shown in a boat, riding through the underworld.
H.W.F. Saggs, Babylonians (London, The British Museum Press, 1995)
J. Black and A. Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (London, The British Museum Press, 1992)
http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/blagop#sthash.psbzCU3E.dpuf
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/me/a/amulet_with_figure_of_lamashtu.aspx

This wingless type is thought by WIGGERMANN (1992: 74f) to be sages before the flood, an identification based on a possible but unfounded connection with the Sumerian names of those early sages. Their human appearance might be more appropriate for mortal sages who lived after the flood, or they may not be sages at all.

Several possible identifications on West Semitic seals cannot be regarded as certain; ORNAN 1993: 60, figs. 11-12 show a kneeling atlantid figure not generally considered to be an Apkallu, and figs. 15, 17, and 18 are dubious because the seal cutting is so skimpy.

The number of wings shown may sometimes be misleading; perspective or spacing may reduce them, and some scholars think a pair of wings shown in side profile represent four. When a single wing is shown (71*, 76* ) a pair can be presumed.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 76, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Stephanie Dalley cites illustration 76 as an exemplar “with a long, high crest … with two ringlets falling to the shoulder,” which it indeed does portray.
She also writes, “For jewelry the figure may wear a necklace with seven strands (76*), which may also only be single-stranded with pendants. With my apologies to the professor, I detect no necklace or pendants on this illustration.
This illustration does depict a type 3 Nisroc apkallu in the apparent act of uttering a cry, with a visible tongue, though Professor Dalley does not cite it as an example of that.
Finally, she asserts the “so-called “fish-tail fringe” dangling from the kilt (76*) is not a fish part, and so does not indicate that the type is a fish composite.” With this statement, I am in utter agreement.
This particular illustration, its find site unknown to me, is atypical in other respects. The portrayal of the avian head is perhaps unique, and at variance with the typical versions from the palace walls of Ashurnasirpal II, for example.
The lone curl at the top of the head is unique, I think, as are the curls which Professor Dalley identified above.
In no other example does a nisroc-bird apkallu stand in front of a sacred tree, occluding it from view.
The armlet on this apkallu is unusual, as well, with a design that I have not seen elsewhere.
In all other respects, this depiction of a type 3 bird-headed apkallu is typical, with mullilu cone and banduddu bucket in their customary places.

Similarly, the number of horns shown on crowns of divinity may have been reduced due to considerations of space; they do not appear to distinguish different ranks of sage.

Color may have been used to differentiate between types and eliminate ambiguities, but is not preserved except as occasional traces of paint on foundation figurines.

On Urartian bronzes and on other media, e.g., MERHAV 1991: 144 and 309, a pair of winged, human-headed lions with cone and bucket on each side of a tree of life has a context and attributes identical to that of the Apkallus, but cannot be identified as such without textual support.

Figure 2.2 (from Nakamura). Apotropaic figures with associated features.
1. Drawing after Richards in Black and Green (1992:65).
2. The identification of the lahmu figure is controversial; it names both a cosmogonic deity and one of Tiamat’s creatures (Wiggermann 1992:155–156), and may also represent an apkallu sage (Ellis 1995:165; Russell 1991:184, fn. 27).
3. In register 2, ugallu, kusarikku and kulullu are portrayed.

The scorpion-man (Girtablullu), the Kusarikku-bison, and the Ugallu-demon, who all fight in the army of Tiamat in the Epic of Creation, were attributed to the category of Apkallu by ORNAN (1993: 56) on a misunderstanding of GREEN (1984: 83).

The confusion may have validity in some contexts, since sages are said to guard the Tablet of Destinies for Nabu, a modification of a theme from the Epic of Creation. Possible links are mentioned under individual phenotypes above.

Umu-apkallu are portrayed in the top register, tending to a sacred tree.
In the lower register avian-headed apkallu use mullilu cones and banduddu buckets to bless the sacred tree.
John Malcolm Russell, The Writing on the Wall: Studies in the Architectural Context of Late Assyrian Palace Inscriptions, Eisenbrauns, 1999.

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August 28, 2015

Dalley: Apkallu-5, IDD 2011

Iconography of Deities and Demons (IDD).

Apkallu (continued).

Type 3 Bird-of-Prey-Headed Apkallu, Phenotypes.

“This hybrid sage (7, 21, 36*, 39*, 67–80), also called griffin-demon, Nisroch, or simply genie, is a human body with the head of a bird of prey (perhaps an eagle or a vulture).

Apkallu type 3, illustration 36, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> The bird-headed type 3 Nisroc apkallu is on the right, with banduddu bucket in the left hand and an indistinct item in his raised right hand.<br /> The figure on the left lacks wings, though it mimics the blessing gesture and the banduddu bucket of the right-side apkallu. The left side figure may not be an apkallu at all. Perhaps it is a priest. Or a human umu-apkallu. It lacks all symbols of divinity or semi-divinity.<br /> The central figure is problematic for me, wearing a crown which reminds me of a depiction of the god Anu. The problem is that Assyriologists aver that no representations of Anu exist.<br /> Like a bronze artifact depicted on other pages, this one wears a large ring around the torso. This figure also holds a ring in his left hand, or several loops of beads that resemble prayer beads, raising his right hand in the classical gesture of greeting. I will discuss the question of the identity of this deity below.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 36, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
The bird-headed type 3 Nisroc apkallu is on the right, with banduddu bucket in the left hand and an indistinct item in his raised right hand.
The figure on the left lacks wings, though it mimics the blessing gesture and the banduddu bucket of the right-side apkallu. The left side figure may not be an apkallu at all. Perhaps it is a priest. Or a human umu-apkallu. It lacks all symbols of divinity or semi-divinity.
The central figure is problematic for me, wearing a crown which reminds me of a depiction of the god Anu. The problem is that Assyriologists aver that no representations of Anu exist.
Like a bronze artifact depicted on other pages, this one wears a large ring around the torso. This figure also holds a ring in his left hand, or several loops of beads that resemble prayer beads, raising his right hand in the classical gesture of greeting. I will discuss the question of the identity of this deity below.

It usually appears with one or two wings, each perhaps representing a pair of wings; but also with four (80). Like type 1, a pair of mirror-image figures is frequently shown, e.g., on 39*.

Apkallu type 1, illustration 39, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Dalley cites this illustration as an example of mirror imaging.<br /> More interesting to me is the fact that the small apkallu depicted in the upper right side of this illustration is wearing a headband rather than the horned tiara seen on the others. This umu-apkallu also holds a sprig of what appear to be poppy bulbs.<br /> In all other respects, the apkallu portrayed on this large wall frieze are typical of the type, except that the detailing of their tassels is exceptionally fine.<br /> As usual, they bless or exorcise the sacred tree at the center of the design with the mullilu cone, banduddu buckets in their left hands.<br /> I must note that unless the real life models depicted in these illustrations and friezes wore a total of four daggers and two whetstones tucked into their waistbands, with two daggers and one whetstone on each side, the original illustrators considered it crucial to portray them. Daggers and whetstones are represented whether the figures are facing left or right.

Apkallu type 1, illustration 39, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Dalley cites this illustration as an example of mirror imaging.
More interesting to me is the fact that the small apkallu depicted in the upper right side of this illustration is wearing a headband rather than the horned tiara seen on the others. This umu-apkallu also holds a sprig of what appear to be poppy bulbs.
In all other respects, the apkallu portrayed on this large wall frieze are typical of the type, except that the detailing of their tassels is exceptionally fine.
As usual, they bless or exorcise the sacred tree at the center of the design with the mullilu cone, banduddu buckets in their left hands.
I must note that unless the real life models depicted in these illustrations and friezes wore a total of four daggers and two whetstones tucked into their waistbands, with two daggers and one whetstone on each side, the original illustrators considered it crucial to portray them. Daggers and whetstones are represented whether the figures are facing left or right.

Some examples show the bird-of-prey-headed Apkallu with a long, high crest as on 76*, which has two ringlets falling on to the shoulder.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 76, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Stephanie Dalley cites illustration 76 as an exemplar

Apkallu type 3, illustration 76, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Stephanie Dalley cites illustration 76 as an exemplar “with a long, high crest … with two ringlets falling to the shoulder,” which it indeed does portray.
She also writes, “For jewelry the figure may wear a necklace with seven strands (76*), which may also only be single-stranded with pendants. With my apologies to the professor, I detect no necklace or pendants on this illustration.
This illustration does depict a type 3 Nisroc apkallu in the apparent act of uttering a cry, with a visible tongue, though Professor Dalley does not cite it as an example of that.
Finally, she asserts the “so-called “fish-tail fringe” dangling from the kilt (76*) is not a fish part, and so does not indicate that the type is a fish composite.” With this statement, I am in utter agreement.
This particular illustration, its find site unknown to me, is atypical in other respects. The portrayal of the avian head is perhaps unique, and at variance with the typical versions from the palace walls of the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, for example.
The lone curl at the top of the head is unique, I think, as are the curls which Professor Dalley identified above.
In no other example does a nisroc-bird apkallu stand in front of a sacred tree, occluding it from view.
The armlet on this apkallu is unusual, as well, with a design that I have not seen elsewhere.
In all other respects, this depiction of a type 3 bird-headed apkallu is typical, with mullilu cone and banduddu bucket in their customary places.

On other examples there are three curls on top of the head (71*–72, 74, 78*–79).

Apkallu type 3, illustration 71, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Professor Dalley cites illustration 71 as an example where a nisroc bird-headed apkallu holds a sprig in the raised right hand.<br /> I believe that she also cites it as an example with three curls atop its head. This assertion is problematic, as the middle

Apkallu type 3, illustration 71, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Professor Dalley cites illustration 71 as an example where a nisroc bird-headed apkallu holds a sprig in the raised right hand.
I believe that she also cites it as an example with three curls atop its head. This assertion is problematic, as the middle “curl,” is surmounted by a circle.
Other anomalies abound with this illustration, which depicts a type 3 avian-headed apkallu atypically nude, with an absence of detail on the body.
The banduddu bucket, however, is in its typical place, in the lowered left hand.
The other elements of this illustration will be discussed another time. Several deserve explication, from the identities of the portrayed figures, to the atypical depiction of the sacred tree.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 78, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Professor Dalley states that this illustration portrays a bird-headed type 3 apkallu with a plant, which I regretfully do not see. The hand on this illustration is broken off, so whatever was held in the hand is unknown. The hand in fact appears to be in the prototypical gesture of blessing with a mullilu cone in hand, though we cannot be certain. Professor Dalley also states that the

Apkallu type 3, illustration 78, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Professor Dalley states that this illustration portrays a bird-headed type 3 apkallu with a plant, which I regretfully do not see. The hand on this illustration is broken off, so whatever was held in the hand is unknown. The hand in fact appears to be in the prototypical gesture of blessing with a mullilu cone in hand, though we cannot be certain. Professor Dalley also states that the “figure appears to pluck a bud or sprig from the sacred tree.” Perhaps.
This illustration, number 78 from IDD, is remarkable for other reasons. For one, the ringlets terminating in a curl at the side of its head are unusual, and the neck area appears to reflect the lone attempt to portray a beard on a bird-headed apkallu in all Assyrian iconography.
This apkallu wears a fringed kilt, but in all other respects it is indicative of the two-winged bird-headed apkallu, with banduddu bucket in the lowered left hand.

For jewelry the figure may wear a necklace with seven strands (76*), which may also only be single-stranded with pendants (7). Rosette bracelets are sometimes shown on each wrist (67).

This detail of an umu-apkallu from Panel 12, Room G, Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud focuses on the rosette design of his bracelets.
Note that in this example the bracelets are not matching. In the upper version, the rosette is mounted on a bracelet with no border.
On the example below, the rosette design is circled by a border. The number of petals on the design varies, as well, with eleven petals above and 13 below, by my count.
Armlets at the elbow are clearly visible, as is the fine detailing on the whetstone and the dual daggers in the waistband.
London, British Museum, ANE 124568.
From Mehmet-Ali Atac, The Mythology of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 109. Photograph by Professor Atac.

The beak is usually closed, but occasionally open to show the tongue (74, 78*–79), as if emitting a cry (80 ). On Late Bronze/Early Iron Age seals the figure is often shown naked (33* – 34*, 47 – 48, 72, 74); at later periods the dress is similar to that of the anthropomorphic sage and the fish-cloak Apkallu on most examples, although the knees are entirely covered by the over-garment on 77.

The so-called “fish-tail fringe” dangling from the kilt (76* above) is not a fish part, and so does not indicate that the type is a fish composite. WIGGERMANN (1992: 75) considers that this type belongs to an Assyrian tradition, and regards all late 2nd millennium examples as Middle Assyrian.

Other deviations from the standard representation include the replacement of the cone in the right hand with a sprig as on 71*. The pose of having both hands raised without holding any object (77) is also unusual. The figure appears to pluck a bud or sprig from the sacred tree on 75*, 78*, and 79.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 75, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> This illustration, number 75, is unique in portraying a type 3 avian-headed apkallu harvesting a leaf or a cone from the sacred tree.<br /> The apkallu goes so far as to plant his left leg against the tree for leverage.<br /> This bird-apkallu is significant for his lone curl at the forehead, and for the emphasis placed on the tassels of his garment.<br /> It should also be observed that this portrayal of the sacred tree depicts leaves, which is unusual.<br /> I also cannot escape the nagging impression that the tree appears to blossom from a vase, with symbology evocative of the fleur-de-lis.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 75, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
This illustration, number 75, is unique in portraying a type 3 avian-headed apkallu harvesting a leaf or a cone from the sacred tree.
The apkallu goes so far as to plant his left leg against the tree for leverage.
This bird-apkallu is significant for his lone curl at the forehead, and for the emphasis placed on the tassels of his garment.
It should also be observed that this portrayal of the sacred tree depicts leaves, which is unusual.
I also cannot escape the nagging impression that the tree appears to blossom from a vase, with symbology evocative of the fleur-de-lis.

Associations.

A pair of bird-of-prey-headed Apkallus often stands on each side of a sacred tree (7 ) or a royal figure (69 ), or with a plant (78*–79) or a deity (36*, 70 , 74 ), with six-curl heroes holding the sacred tree (71* ).

Apkallu type 3, illustration 36, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Professor Dalley cites this illustration, number 36, for the type 1 and type 3 apkallu standing at the flanks of a deity. In the first case, it is far from certain that the figure on the left of the central deity is an apkallu at all, as it lacks all indicators of divinity and most crucially, wings. This figure does raise what appears to be a mullilu cone in its right hand, and it does hold the usual banduddu bucket in his left hand, though it must be admitted that depictions of cones with leaves still attached are irregular.<br /> Unfortunately Professor Dalley does not identify the deity in the center of the illustration, though I am encouraged that she does consider it to be a deity, rather than an apkallu of high rank, which deity I will provisionally attempt to name.<br /> I have discussed elsewhere in captions to these illustrations the possibility that the deity at the center of this composition, which appears to adorn a necklace or breastplate, is the god Anu, who is allegedly never depicted in Mesopotamian iconography.<br /> The circular device at the apex of his crown, which is appropriately horned, is apparent in only one other example that I can call to mind, a bronze face protector or frontal helmet depicted on other pages.<br /> In that example, the circular device or disc is so worn that the lower portion of its mount mimics the inverted crescent of the Moon god Sin.<br /> The context is inappropriate for Sin, however, and in no other case have I ever seen anything positioned between the upturned horns of Sin's inverted crescent. It is more likely that the disc mount is simply worn from great age, with the circular portion along the top gone.<br /> In any case, a bird-headed type 3 Nisroc apkallu is on the right, with banduddu bucket in the left hand and an indistinct item in his raised right hand. It appears to be a mullilu cone, but with leaves or sprouting, as noted.<br /> As mentioned, the figure on the left side of the deity lacks wings, though it mimics the blessing gesture, cone and banduddu bucket of the right-side apkallu. The left side figure may not be an apkallu at all. Perhaps it is a priest. Or a human umu-apkallu. It lacks all symbols of divinity or semi-divinity.<br /> The central figure remains problematic for me, wearing a crown which reminds me of a depiction of the god Anu. The problem is that Assyriologists aver that no representations of Anu exist.<br /> Also significant for me, this figure, whether it is a deity or an apkallu, wears a large ring around the torso. In the other example which I believe portrays the god Anu, a large ring or circle of this type also wraps the torso of the deity. As is indisputable in the other case, my suspicion is that this ring would also be decorated with rosettes, were sufficient detail feasible for the original illustrator.<br /> This figure also holds a ring or looped prayer beads in his left hand, an item typically reserved for deities, while raising his right hand in the classical gesture of greeting. The griffin demon on the left, and the human-headed sphinx on the right, will have to be explicated elsewhere in a later work.

Apkallu type 3, illustration 36, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Professor Dalley cites this illustration, number 36, for the type 1 and type 3 apkallu standing at the flanks of a deity. In the first case, it is far from certain that the figure on the left of the central deity is an apkallu at all, as it lacks all indicators of divinity and most crucially, wings. This figure does raise what appears to be a mullilu cone in its right hand, and it does hold the usual banduddu bucket in his left hand, though it must be admitted that depictions of cones with leaves still attached are irregular.
Unfortunately Professor Dalley does not identify the deity in the center of the illustration, though I am encouraged that she does consider it to be a deity, rather than an apkallu of high rank, which deity I will provisionally attempt to name.
I have discussed elsewhere in captions to these illustrations the possibility that the deity at the center of this composition, which appears to adorn a necklace or breastplate, is the god Anu, who is allegedly never depicted in Mesopotamian iconography.
The circular device at the apex of his crown, which is appropriately horned, is apparent in only one other example that I can call to mind, a bronze face protector or frontal helmet depicted on other pages.
In that example, the circular device or disc is so worn that the lower portion of its mount mimics the inverted crescent of the Moon god Sin.
The context is inappropriate for Sin, however, and in no other case have I ever seen anything positioned between the upturned horns of Sin’s inverted crescent. It is more likely that the disc mount is simply worn from great age, with the circular portion along the top gone.
In any case, a bird-headed type 3 Nisroc apkallu is on the right, with banduddu bucket in the left hand and an indistinct item in his raised right hand. It appears to be a mullilu cone, but with leaves or sprouting, as noted.
As mentioned, the figure on the left side of the deity lacks wings, though it mimics the blessing gesture, cone and banduddu bucket of the right-side apkallu. The left side figure may not be an apkallu at all. Perhaps it is a priest. Or a human umu-apkallu. It lacks all symbols of divinity or semi-divinity.
The central figure remains problematic for me, wearing a crown which reminds me of a depiction of the god Anu. The problem is that Assyriologists aver that no representations of Anu exist.
Also significant for me, this figure, whether it is a deity or an apkallu, wears a large ring around the torso. In the other example which I believe portrays the god Anu, a large ring or circle of this type also wraps the torso of the deity. As is indisputable in the other case, my suspicion is that this ring would also be decorated with rosettes, were sufficient detail feasible for the original illustrator.
This figure also holds a ring or looped prayer beads in his left hand, an item typically reserved for deities, while raising his right hand in the classical gesture of greeting. The griffin demon on the left, and the human-headed sphinx on the right, will have to be explicated elsewhere in a later work.

The figure occurs with type 1 on sequences with three registers at doorways (6*).

Apkallu type 1, illustration 6, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
This classical depiction of an umu-apkallu includes the mullilu in the raised right hand in the gesture of blessing or exorcism and the banduddu bucket in the left hand.
The horned tiara indicative of divinity may reflect the semi-divine status of the apkallu.
Armlets at the elbow are present, as are wristbands with the typical rosette pattern.

On 72 and 73 an altar is held up by a pair of naked Apkallus (in a very similar scene [MATTHEWS 1990: no. 452] a pair of mermen perform a similar function).

Assyrian ritual texts describe clay figurines of this type (WIGGERMANN 1992: passim) as foundation figurines buried in groups of seven or more, with black paint, traces of which have occasionally been observed on such clay figurines, including one with black and red stripes painted on the back.”

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August 27, 2015

Dalley: Apkallu-3, IDD 2011

Iconography of Deities and Demons (IDD).

Apkallu (continued).

Type 1 Human-figured Apkallu, Phenotypes.

“The human-figured sage (1* – 39*), sometimes called winged genie, should probably be identified with Akkadian ūmu–apkallu. If so, it is the only sage-figure that has a distinguishing term. Alternatively, ūmu-apkallu may be an extension of apkallu in which ūmu refers to Oannes, the first sage, as an ummiānum.

The human-figured Apkallu is always shown in profile, and is normally bearded. He often wears a headband decorated with rosettes, or a horned crown with one, two, or three pairs of horns; he wears light sandals or is barefoot.

Occasionally he is kneeling (7 , 19, 24–25, 33*–34). He usually has two wings on palace sculptures of Assurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) (6*), two (37) or four (23) wings in the palace of Sargon II (721-705 BCE), and four wings in the time of Sennacherib (704-681 BCE) (22).

This ummiânū kneels before the sacred tree, apparently depicted in the act of tending to it.<br /> This bas relief is perhaps unique in its fine detail which survived a long passage of time.<br /> Note the care focused on the fingernails and toenails.<br /> The rosette design is mirrored on the bracelets, while this ummiânū wears a dual-horned tiara of divinity.<br /> The tassels from the apparel are finely detailed, and another tassel appears behind the ummiânū's neck, beneath his braided hair.<br /> The earrings are of an unknown design.

This ummiânū kneels before the sacred tree, apparently depicted in the act of tending to it.
This bas relief is perhaps unique in its fine detail which survived a long passage of time.
Note the care focused on the fingernails and toenails.
The rosette design is mirrored on the bracelets, while this ummiânū wears a dual-horned tiara of divinity.
The tassels from the apparel are finely detailed, and another tassel appears behind the ummiânū’s neck, beneath his braided hair.
The earrings are of an unknown design.

However, exceptions such as on 2 can be found, and there is probably flexibility in peripheral iconography or due to deliberate archaism.

This umu-apkallu wears a three-horned headdress indicative of divinity, raises poppy bulbs in his right hand, and holds a mace in his left. He has four wings.
Daggers and ornate whetstone are tucked into his waistband, he wears armlets, and the fine detail preserved in this bas relief is highlighted by the right-armed sleeve of his upper garment.
Ada Cohen & Steven E. Kangas, eds., Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography, UPNE, 2010, p. 6.
https://books.google.co.th/books?id=uRKU0YXBWtgC&pg=PA252&lpg=PA252&dq=D.+Kolbe+Die+Reliefprogramme+full+text&source=bl&ots=c4EZtivZGc&sig=2MJlM039UK3pZ0ituhzBzLBys4M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCoQ6AEwBWoVChMIipCB8K–xwIVDlqOCh2O_wYD#v=onepage&q&f=false

On Khorsabad sculptures of the late 8th century (23), the four-winged man, holding a bucket and cone and wearing a crown with three pairs of horns, is probably a form of the same figure.

A beardless, perhaps female, two-winged form with bucket and cone is found on 8th century Carchemish sculpture fragments (30). It may be comparable to the two- or four-winged, perhaps female, figure in the palace of Assurnasirpal II, who holds a jeweled ring in the left hand, and wears a necklace and a crown with two pairs of horns (1* – 2).

Stephanie Dalley’s “beardless” type 1 apkallu. Aside from being beardless, these feminized apkallu wear atypical necklaces and hold what appear to be looped stones or prayer beads in their left hands.
They appear to wear long skirts, and details of their upper garments are lacking. They have four wings.
Typical rosette bracelets adorn their wrists, and they wear armlets at the elbow as is common.
Both umu-apkallu wear a dual-horned tiara indicative of divinity, as they salute a sacred tree in its prototypical configuration.

Although the figure is almost certainly female, it has two daggers and a whetstone tucked into the waist on 1* – 2, implying perhaps ambiguity of gender (ALBENDA 1996). Beardless examples are quite common in 7th century Urartian art (24, 27–29).

Associations.

The human-figured Apkallu is rarely associated with a deity (27).

Apkallu type 1, Illustration 8, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Dalley notes that this "Hebrew seal" may not be genuine, as it features a winged, man-faced bull "Aladlammu" serving as a "pedestal animal for a divine figure."<br /> What intrigues me is the crown worn by the man-faced bull, which resembles the crown portrayed on previous depictions alleged to be the god Anu. I do not propose that this man-faced bull is Anu, but his dual-horned headdress is surmounted by a disc-shaped device which is more ornate than the headdress on any other figure on this seal. The crown in this context is problematic, and it raises questions. <br /> Dalley compares illustration 8 to illustration 9, below, as "another West Semitic or (or rather South Semitic) seal with this type of apkallu standing alone."

Apkallu type 1, Illustration 8, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Dalley notes that this “Hebrew seal” may not be genuine, as it features a winged, man-faced bull “Aladlammu” serving as a “pedestal animal for a divine figure.”
What intrigues me is the crown worn by the man-faced bull, which resembles the crown portrayed on previous depictions alleged to be the god Anu. I do not propose that this man-faced bull is Anu, but his dual-horned headdress is surmounted by a disc-shaped device which is more ornate than the headdress on any other figure on this seal. The crown in this context is problematic, and it raises questions.
Dalley compares illustration 8 to illustration 9, below, as “another West Semitic or (or rather South Semitic) seal with this type of apkallu standing alone.”

In a few cases the human-figured Apkallu is associated with hybrid animals (24), as on the Hebrew seal 8* (if genuine), where a winged, man-faced bull Aladlammu (Human-headed winged bull) serves as a pedestal animal for a divine figure; and on 11, where an unbearded, human-faced winged lion sphinx supports the mirror-image pair of Apkallu.

Apkallu type 1, Illustration 9, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Dalley compares this seal portrayed as illustration 9 with illustration 8 above, as “another West Semitic (or rather South Semitic) seal with this type of apkallu standing alone.”
For me, the indistinct head gear stands out, as does the portrayal of the poppy bulbs in the left hand.

If genuine, 9* is another West Semitic (or rather South Semitic) seal with this type of Apkallu standing alone.

Mirror-image pairs stand on each side of a stylized sacred tree (1*, 7, 13, 24, 29, 39* ), the tree sometimes surmounted by a winged disc (11–12*).

Apkallu type 1 and type 2, Illustration 12, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.<br /> Dalley emphasizes the "winged disc" in this exemplar.<br /> This may be a case where we are programmed to expect a winged disc, but in this case, the "winged disc" appears to portray a stylized eye.<br /> To me, the winged conveyance resembles an Eye of Horus, complete with an eyebrow. I do not propose that this illustration is an Eye of Horus. I merely observe that this portrayal of the winged conveyance in this case resembles one.

Apkallu type 1 and type 2, Illustration 12, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
Dalley emphasizes the “winged disc” in this exemplar.
This may be a case where we are programmed to expect a winged disc, but in this case, the “winged disc” appears to portray a stylized eye.
To me, the winged conveyance resembles an Eye of Horus, complete with an eyebrow. I do not propose that this illustration is an Eye of Horus. I merely observe that this portrayal of the winged conveyance in this case resembles one.

This scene is frequently attested on palace sculptures from the Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II (883-859 BCE) at Nimrud (6*; PALEY/SOBOLEWSKI 1987; 1991 passim). The scene is found in a location of high prestige, on a panel set behind the throne dais in the main throne room, where the king stands in mirror-image at the tree, and the winged disc is also shown.

Occasionally the winged disc is supported by a kneeling atlantid figure (14* ). Other variations include streams of water coming from the winged disc (14 *).

Apkallu type 1, illustration 14, Stephanie Dalley, IDD.
As Dalley notes, these type 1 apkallu have banduddu buckets in their left hands and appear to be gesturing with empty right hands. They are remarkable for crowns or tiaras with three horns, an indicator of divinity, or in the case of the umu-apkallu, of semi-divinity.
The central figure appears to be suspended beneath a winged disk. Unlike the apkallu, the central figure is beardless and without wings.
The wiggly lines probably portray water, flowing between what appear to be jugs.

Mirror-image figures may also stand on either side of a doorway without a central motif such as a sacred tree. On the rare occasions when this type does not belong to a mirror-image arrangement, he may stand, for example, behind a man with a fly-whisk and bowl, facing the enthroned king (26).

Detail on the whisk and the cup in the hands of a priest. This bas relief is singular in its fine detail and superb preservation. The individual strands of the fly whisk are readily apparent, as is the detail of the lion headed handle beneath the hand of a beardless priest. The fingernails are clearly visible.
A snake-headed handle from what appears to be a ladle is apparent in the lower hand.
From Panels 2-3, Room G, Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud.
London, British Museum ANE 124564-124565.
Photo: Mehmet-Ali Atac, The Mythology of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art, 2010, p. 99.

The type occurs as a group of six or more clay figurines placed in brick boxes in foundations at Assur, Nimrud, and Nineveh (RITTIG 1977: passim).

Nakamura: “By burying figurines of powerful beings, the āšipu preserves an expressed belief in a present reality of supernatural power, mythological origin and divine order.”
As noted by Stephanie Dalley, “The type occurs as a group of six or more clay figurines placed in brick boxes in foundations at Assur, Nimrud, and Nineveh,” citing Dessa Rittig as her source (Assyrisch-babylonische Kleinplastik magischer Bedeutung vom 13.-6. Jh. v. Chr. München, 1977).

Ritual texts show that figurines of this type were often made of e’ru wood (WIGGERMANN 1992: 65), and thus have not survived.”

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August 23, 2015

Kvanvig: The Apkallus as Protective Spirits

“The apkallus are especially known from two incantation rituals: the one is Bīt Mēseri, as already stated; the other is called: šēp lemutti ina bit amēli parāsu, “to block the foot of evil into a man’s house” (KAR 298).

The two incantation series have a different scope. Bīt Mēseri prescribes the procedures to be performed when someone is ill, i.e. has come under demonic attack. Šēp Lemutti (“The Foot of Evil”) describes the procedures to be performed when a house should be protected from demonic attack. Consequently the rituals described have some common denominators, but also clear differences.

The rituals describe in great detail how figurines should be made of the seven apkallus. These figurines should then be addressed in an invocation to make them represent the apkallus themselves. In the case of Bīt Mēseri, where an ill person is concerned, the figurines should be arranged in the ill person’s room, close to his bed; in the case of Šēp Lemutti the figurines should be deposited in the foundation of the house.

Apotropaic figurine deposit found in room S57 of Fort Shalmaneser at Nimrud. Adapted from Curtis and Read (1995:112). (From Nakamura).

We are here at a point where textual and archeological evidence support one another. An abundance of such small figurines are found in boxes buried in the foundations of houses and palaces from the Neo-Assyrian and the Neo-Babylonian period.

Nakamura: “By burying figurines of powerful beings, the āšipu preserves an expressed belief in a present reality of supernatural power, mythological origin and divine order.”

Because of the detailed description of their appearance in the rituals, it is not difficult to identify the excavated figurines as the same entities described in the rituals. The excavated figurines are representations of the seven apkallus.

(Cf. F.A.M. Wiggermann, “Mischwesen A,” Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (RLA) 8, Berlin, 1993-7, pp. 222-25, 222, 224.)

Moreover, having identified the small figurines, it is also possible to identify many of the large reliefs that flanked the entrances to the palaces of the Neo-Assyrian kings. Here the small figurines were blown up in large scale representations of figures with the same appearance as the small figurines, corresponding to the descriptions in the rituals.

(Cf. For a detailed examination of the evidence, Dieter Kolbe, Die Reliefprogramme religiös-mythologischen Characters in neu-assyrischen Palästen, EH, Reihe 38, Frankfurt am Main, 1981, III-VII, 14-30.)

There are three kinds of apkallus: fish-apkallus, bird-apkallus, and human apkallus. The fish-apkallu is represented as a fish-garbed figure, with a human body and a carp cloak (cf. the description in Berossos).

The bird-apkallu is represented as a griffin; he has a human body, wings and a bird’s head.

(Cf. Anthony Green, “Mischwesen B,” Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (RLA) 8, Berlin, 1993-7, pp. 246-64, 252; Anthony Green, “Neo-Assyrian Apotropaic Figures,” Iraq 45, 1983, pp. 87-96.)

The representation of the human apkallu is more uncertain. A. Green suggests that these apkallus were imagined as genii, figures with human bodies and wings, holding a bucket in the one hand and a cone in the other.

Now compare this Nimrud bas relief from the Louvre: an ummânū sprinkles water with a mullilu cone in his right hand, holding his banduddu bucket in his left.
This ummânū wears bracelets with a concentric circular design, and rosettes are not apparent.
This ummânū also wears the common horned headdress of Anu, but with three stacked layers of horns.
As noted elsewhere, this headdress is surmounted by an object that resembles a partial fleur de lis.
From Nimrud, capital of king Ashurnarzipal.
Louvre, AO 19845

Figures of fish-apkallus and bird-apkallus are found in Babylonian Ur and in several of the major Assyrian cities, Nimrud, Aššur and Nineveh. They are found in royal palaces and in houses assumed to belong to the guild of the āšipū, “exorcists.”

This depiction of a fish-apkallū of the purādu-fish type guarded the entrance to the temple of Ninurta at Nimrud.<br /> A fish's head can be seen on the Apkallu's head, and its skin hangs down over the back of his body.<br /> It is important to recall that the so-called Seven Sages of Sumeria were apkallū of this type.<br /> Neo-Assyrian era, 865-860 BCE.<br /> From the Temple of Ninurta, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu; Biblical Calah), northern Mesopotamia, Iraq. (The British Museum, London).<br /> Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg)<br /> http://www.ancient.eu/image/2708/

(Cf. Dessa Rittig, Assyrisch-babylonische Kleinplastik magischer Bedeutung vom 13.-6. Jh. v. Chr., MVS. München, 1977, pp. 70-85, and pictures 20-31.)

The apkallus were, as stated, not only manufactured as prophylactic figurines. It is possible to find them in numerous examples of monumental art in Assyrian palaces. The fish-apkallu is also found in Persian Persagadae, placed at the entrance to the Audience Hall.

(Cf. Trudy S. Kawami, “A Possible Source for the Sculptures of the Audience Hall, Pasargadae,” Iran 10, 1972, pp. 146-8.)

In this bas relief from Nimrud, human apkallū, the ummánū, kneel and tend to a sacred tree.
Both ummânū wear horned tiaras and display rosette bracelets on their wrists. Bracelets are also apparent on their upper arms.
In the lower register, bird-apkallū raise mulillu cones to sprinkle water in a gesture of exorcism and liberation of sin.
As is typical, the banduddu buckets are in their left hands.
Interestingly in this case, the bracelets of the bird-apkallū are atypical. No rosettes are apparent.

In the Assyrian palaces the apkallus are guarding the sacred tree, the king, and deities. Thus the apkallus were not only invisible present in rituals (sic); they were manufactured as figures and represented in impressive monumental art.”

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 129-31.

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August 22, 2015

Kvanvig: Limitations of Human Wisdom and the Loss of Eternal Life

“As we have seen, the fragments B and D then continue the story in different ways, although there is one common trait before they diverge: in both places Adapa is offered, and accepts “garment and oil” (Amarna fragment B rev. 60-5; Nineveh fragment D rev. 1-3).

We think Izre’el is right here pointing out that there is a difference between the “food and water” that Ea denied Adapa, and the “garment and oil” that he allowed Adapa in his instruction before Adapa went to heaven.

“Food and water” symbolize eternal life, while “garment and oil” symbolize wisdom.

(Izre’el refers here to clothes as the distinctive marker of human civilization, as seen for instance in the myth about the creation of Enkidu, Schlomo Izre’el, Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death, Eisenbrauns, 2001, pp. 122-3.)

Thus, according to both versions, the wisdom Adapa already has is confirmed in heaven. Then Adapa, according to fragment B, returns to the earth and his wisdom is confirmed, but he has lost the possibility for eternal life.

Fragment D continues:

Adapa, from the foundation of heaven to the summit of heaven,

looked at it all and saw his (Anu’s) awesomeness.

At that time Anu estab[lished] Adapa as watcher.

He established his freedom from Ea.

[An]u se[t] a decree to make glorious his lordship forever:

[ … ] Adapa, seed of humankind,

[ … ] he broke the South Wind’s wing triumphantly,

(and) ascended to heaven, —so be it forever!

(Nineveh fragment D rev. 7-14).

The scene is a scene of inauguration. Immediately before, as we have seen, Adapa is given a new garment and is anointed. In light of what comes next, this is in D not only a confirmation of the wisdom Adapa already has; it is the preparation for introducing Adapa to the highest office any human was given.

Adapa, belonging to primeval time, and being the chosen one of Ea, already had a wisdom that superseded ordinary human wisdom, according to Fragment A. His broad understanding did, however, not include insight in the heavenly domain.

In our text Adapa is first equipped with the proper attire for the inauguration and then comes a description of the new insight he is given. Now his eyes are opened to the whole spectrum of divine understanding. If he previously only had insight into earthly matters, he now got what he was missing, full insight into the whole of Anu’s domain: “Adapa, from the foundation of heaven to the summit of heaven, looked at it all and saw his (Anu’s) awesomeness.”

Against the background of this new perception of the whole coherence, the proclamation of Adapa’s new status is given. He is inaugurated into massartu, “the office of being a watcher.” The expression has two contexts. On the one hand it refers to the cosmic order, which he now has received full insight into; on the other hand it refers to his magical competence, which is clear from the references dealing with illness that follow the inauguration.

There is no contradiction between these two competences; the one who has insight into the hidden divine realm is also the one who is capable of fighting the evil demons causing misery on earth.

The sentence, “[An]u se[t] a decree to make glorious his lordship forever,” can be interpreted in two ways. The bēlūssu, “his lordship,” can refer to Anu; through this act Anu establishes his lordship. This seems a bit odd, since nowhere in the myth is Anu’s lordship challenged. It seems more likely that the pronoun refers to Adapa. The lordship refers to Adapa’s role as watcher, since he broke the South Wind’s wing so triumphantly.

This is the version of the myth lying behind the first apkallu in Bīt Mēseri. The name of this apkallu is U-an, “the light of An.” This is simply a naming according to what takes place in the inauguration.

He was the one who could complete “the plans of heaven and earth,” because he was the heavenly watcher who had seen everything, from the foundation to the summit of heaven. On the other hand, the seven apkallus occur in a special setting in Bīt Mēseri; the apkallus were invoked to protect human beings from diseases caused by demons.

In a similar context, the incantation series “to block the foot of evil into a man’s house” (cf. below), the apkallus are repeatedly called massarū; they are the watchers of health and life. As already stated, there is no contradiction here, because the insight in the divine real is the precondition for fighting demons.

Thus we have reached the conclusion that the different versions of the Adapa Myth are reflected in two ways in Bīt Mēseri. The apkallu who went up to and down from heaven is the Adapa from fragment B; the apkallu who had the name “Light of An” was the Adapa from fragment D. This explains the curious twin roles between the first and seventh apkallu. It also explains the double name Uandapa, simply expressing this is the first Adapa, named Uan.

And it is to be noted that even though we must assume that this quibbling with versions, roles, and names was Assyrian, it is through the name Uan that the first apkallu is known both in Berossos and in the Uruk list in the Babylonian environment.”

Helge Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic: An Intertextual Reading, Brill, 2011, pp. 126-9.

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