DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

WRITING SAMPLE

THESIS

LANDSCAPES OF FEAR AND THE LANGUAGE OF LITURGY:

CLIMATE CHANGE AND DIVINE SUCCESSION IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements of the Degree of

Master of Arts in Religion

Cultural Settings Concentration

Stephen Harris

Spring 2014

ABSTRACT

LANDSCAPES OF FEAR AND THE LANGUAGE OF LITURGY:

CLIMATE CHANGE AND DIVINE SUCCESSION IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE

This thesis argues that the religious reforms of the eastern Mediterranean during the Late

Bronze Age that resulted in the emergence of the Succession Myth are best explained as the

result of a dynamic relationship between regional climate change, its impact on local ecology,

and in turn the subsequent geopolitical, economic, societal, and, ultimately, religious

opportunities and challenges that it generated. The result of these challenges was the breakdown

of culturally localized problem solving systems that eventually led to the collective discovery of

a new mythic idea, the evidence of which is preserved and reflected in the written sources of the

period, namely in the form of treaties, myths, deity lists, rituals, and prayers. The primary result

of the reforms analyzed here was that the gods worshipped by previous generations were

succeeded by younger deities, most commonly sky-, or storm-gods. Since religious and political

ideologies in the region were often substantially different, this means that proximate cultural,

ideological, and political factors alone are insufficient to explain the coterminous appearance of

these reforms across geographic and cultural boundaries; therefore it follows that external forces,

such as environmental factors, rather than internal factors alone, must have been the ultimate

causes of these reforms.

Keywords: Climate Change, Paleoclimatology, Social Memory Theory, Succession Myth, Baal

Cycle, Kumarbi Cycle, Enuma Elish, Hymn to the Aten, Tempest Stele, Hesiod’s Theogony,

Crete, Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, Canaan, Mesopotamia, Amun, Zeus, Baal, Storm-God of

Lightning, Teššub, Marduk, Ahmose, Akhenaten, Muwattalli II, Ḫattušili III, Nebuchadrezzar I.

i

CONTENTS

Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………........ i

Table of Figures ………………………………………………………………………… iii

I. Introduction and Overview: Issues and Sources …………………………………... 1

A. Sources for Climate and Religion …………………………………………… 2

B. The Reason for This Study: A Lack of Scholarly Synthesis ………………… 5

C. Towards a Methodology ……………………………………………………… 8

II. Theory and Methodology: Climate, Social Memory, and the

Dynamics of Cultural Change ……….…………………………………………..... 10

A. Climate, Society, and Social Memory ……………………………………... 12

B. Social Memory, Cosmology, and Religion ………………………………… 17

C. Summary of Methodology: Social Memory and Sacral Legitimation …….. 22

III. Ancient “Ecotheologies” and Their Pressure Points ……………………………… 25

A. Egyptian Cosmology ……………………………………………………….. 27

B. Anatolian Cosmology ………………………………………………………. 29

C. Syro-Palestinian Cosmology ……………………………………………….. 31

D. Mesopotamian Cosmology ………………………………………………… 33

E. Summary: Nature, Society, and the Gods…………………………………... 36

IV. Cosmology in Crisis: There Was No Response; No One Answered;

No One Paid Attention …………………………………………..……………….. 38

ii

A. The Rise of Amun and the New Kingdom (1750-1595) …………………… 40

B. An Egyptian Encore: Akhenaten and Solar Extremism (1350-1330) ……… 43

C. Hatti: Boils and Sores, Gods and More Gods (1330-1250) ……………….. 46

D. Ugarit: Land of the Vassals, Home of the Brave (1250-1100)……………... 52

E. Marduk: King of the People, King of the Gods (1125-1100) ………………. 56

F. Excursus: The Enigma of Hesiod, Homer, and Mycenaean Religion …..…... 58

V. Summary and Conclusions: New Dogs Learning Old Tricks ………………..……. 61

A. Proximate and Ultimate Causation in History and Religion………...……… 61

B. Landscapes of Fear: Religious Reform as a Response

to a Changing World ……………………………………………………….. 63

C. The Language of Liturgy: Mythic Ideas and their

Cross-Cultural Realization …………………………………………………. 65

D. Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Study …………………………..... 66

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………… 68

iii

FIGURES

Figure 1: Annual Precipitation in Millimeters in Years Before the Present (yr BP) ……. 3

Figure 2: Comparative Fortunes of Egypt and Mesopotamia ………………………….. 14

Figure 3: Social Memory, Symbolic Reservoir, and Schemata ………………………... 20

Figure 4: The Eastern Mediterranean World-System and Culture Cores

(1600-1200 BCE) ……………………………………………………………. 26

Figure 5: Fluctuations in the Near Eastern ‘Regional System’ of

the Late Bronze Age . ……………………………………………………….. 39

Figure 6: Proxy-Based Paleoclimate Series for the Last 5000 Years ………………….. 48

Figure 7: The Climatic Roots of the ca. 1250–1100 BCE Late Bronze Collapse ……... 54

Figure 8: Generations of Gods in the Greek and Near Eastern Sources ……………….. 59

1

I. Introduction and Overview: Issues and Sources

During the Late Bronze Age the eastern Mediterranean saw a plethora of religious

reforms in Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, Canaan, southern Mesopotamia, as well as Mycenaean

Crete and mainland Greece. These reforms have been preserved primarily in the form of

Succession Myths, in which the gods worshipped by previous generations were

succeeded by younger deities, most commonly sky-, or storm-gods. This thesis will argue

that these reforms are best explained as the result of a dynamic relationship between

regional climate change, its impact on local ecologies, and the subsequent geopolitical,

economic, societal, and, ultimately, religious opportunities and challenges that it

generated. The result of these challenges and the religious reforms that followed was the

gradual collective discovery of a new mythic idea, each manifestation of which

functioned as unique cultural attempts to reconcile an increasingly chaotic world with

their existing cosmological categories, and in turn their cultural problem solving systems.

In the final analysis, it will be concluded that proximate cultural, ideological, and

political factors alone are insufficient to explain the synchronous development of these

reforms across geographic and cultural boundaries. Since their religious and political

ideologies were often substantially different, it follows that external (in this case climatic)

rather than internal factors must have been the ultimate causes of these reforms.

2 A. Sources for Climate and Religion

Several forms of data are required to make the case for this argument. First, there

is the climatic data necessary for illuminating the ecological realities specific to each

Mediterranean locale under consideration. Second, this study also requires the

consideration of diplomatic correspondence, treaties, myths, rituals, and prayers1 in order

to assess how these ecological factors influenced political, social, and economic relations.

Due to the multifarious nature of the data, however, I do not here intend to provide

comprehensive, detailed summaries of the numerous studies that contributed to the

formulation of this argument, as they are deep, painstaking, and refined. Rather, what is

intended here is a synthesis that hopes to interpret the relationship between late second

millennium climate deterioration and the myriad of religious reforms that characterized

the period.

There are several methods used to measure ancient climatic conditions by

paleoclimatologists. Although there are other climate indicators besides these, among the

most important kinds of studies that undergird this paper, there are palynological (pollen)

studies, ice core, and marine core analysis. Palynological studies are those which extract

pollen samples, usually from lake or river shores, in order to measure the presence and/or

absence of terrestrial vegetation with the end of determining both past climate

variability, and also human impacts on the local landscape. Ice core studies, in this case

taken from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2), are used for reconstructing past

atmospheric warming and cooling trends (Alley 2004). Finally, marine core studies are

those which measure stable isotope data from deep-sea sediment cores, in order to

1 Following the scheme in Smith 2010: 37-90.

3

Figure 1: Annual Precipitation in Millimeters in Years Before the Present (yr BP) Adapted from Kaniewski, et al. (2013b: 3, Fig. 1).

determine the presence and/or absence of past marine life, or levels of dust which would

indicate continental aridity.

The result of these studies is that historical and biophysical scientists alike have

observed an “abrupt, high-magnitude, sustained Holocene climate change” beginning

circa 1350 BCE (see Fig. 1) that resulted in a more seasonal, arid, and cooler climate for

the entire Basin (Kaniewski et al. 2010: 214). One of the primary causes of this was

likely an “influx of cold freshwater” from ice melt-off in Greenland that made its way

from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. These phenomena are called “anti-phase

events,” in which initial warming trends are ultimately responsible for declines in sea

surface temperatures (Langgut, Finkelstein, and Litt 2013: 162.). Since land precipitation

comes chiefly from the evaporation of sea water, when sea surface temperatures drop, not

4 as much water evaporates when the “cold and dry westerlies sweep in” (Drake 2012: 3)

during the winter months to pick up moisture. As a result weather systems do not produce

as much precipitation. Regional conditions were not homogenous,2 but the magnitude of

the change was significant enough to aggravate regional agropastoral economies that

were already constantly adjusting to the threat of drought (Drake 2012: 5-6).

Scholars of religion have noted that during this window of time pantheons across

the region elevated younger deities, typically storm- or sky-gods, to the top of their

pantheons, succeeding older deities that had been worshipped since time immemorial

(López-Ruiz 2010: 84-129). In Egypt, following the expulsion of the Hyksos, the worship

of Amun-Re became so pervasive and totalizing that it theocratized the nation in a way

that nearly approached monotheism; indeed all other Egyptian gods became mere

symbols or manifestations of him (Redford 2002: 20). In Anatolia and northern

Mesopotamia, the Hitties, Luwians, and Hurrians of Mitanni elevated their storm-gods,

such as Teshub and Tarhunt, above all others. Canaan and Syria, similarly, saw a

transition in power from El to his son, the thunder-wielding Baal-Hadad. By the end of

the Late Bronze Age the young and agile storm-god Marduk rose to the top of the

southern Mesopotamian pantheon under Nebuchadrezzar I. In Crete and Mycenae the

longstanding devotion to the Mother Goddess and Kronos was gradually replaced by the

storm-god Zeus.

2 A number of regional studies have recently contributed greatly to our understanding of the climatic conditions of the Late Bronze Age. For Greece, see Drake (2012); for Turkey, see Litt, et al. (2009); for northern Syria, see Kaniewski et al. (2010); for the southern Levant, see Langgut, Finkelstein, and Litt (2013), as well as Neumann, et al. (2007), Litt, et al. (2012); for Cyprus, see Kaniewski, et al. (2013b); for Egypt, see Bernhardt, Horton, and Stanley (2012). For general syntheses, refer to Issar and Zohar (2007), as well as Roberts, et al. (2011), and, most recently, Cline (2014).

5 B. The Reason for This Study: A Lack of Scholarly Synthesis

Presently, despite the wealth of research that has been done in both the natural

and historical sciences on the late second millennium, no synthesis has been attempted in

which the religious reforms described above have been contextualized within the

coterminous climatic variability that affected their respective landscapes. At its best, the

much needed work done by paleoclimatologists has only been applied to political aspects

of history, such as the collapse of the palatial economy around 1200 BCE, rather than

religious expression as well.3

Furthermore, specialists in ancient Mediterranean religion, while acknowledging

the political underpinnings of several canonical compositions from the period,4 generally

make no attempt to incorporate climate as a contextual factor influencing the theological

formulations of the scribes.5 Rather, the artistic retellings of the Succession Myth by

these scribes are typically viewed through the lens of analogous political developments

that were connected to the stability of their own institutions. Simply put, the stability of

their god’s position as king of the gods has been seen to be reflective of the political

stability of their earthly king (López-Ruiz 2014: 7-8), whatever his relationship to the

gods may have been. While it is certainly true that “cosmological speculations hold

3 See note 3 above. All of the current climate-based historical syntheses are more preoccupied with the “Great Collapse” than with any other phenomena. Even some of the more insightful, such as Rosen (2007), Kaniewski, et al. (2010, 2013a), Langgut, Finkelstein, and Litt (2013), or even, most recently, Cline (2014) limit their discussions to the implications of climate change upon the agricultural sector of the economy, and in turn on the political destabilization it would entail.

4 See, for instance, Singer (2011a and 2011b), Tugendhaft (2012a and 2012b), and López-Ruiz (2014).

5 Green (2003) is perhaps the exception, since he does connect ecological realities to the mythical realities reflected in Baal’s continued resurrections. To Green El, Yam, and Baal “represented ecological forces involved with the fertility process” (Green 2003: 196, 208-214, and especially 217-18 and 281-292). Rosen (2007) also comes close. She at least acknowledges the relationship between responses to climatic problems and the worldviews that produce those responses.

6 political ramifications” (Tugendhaft 2012b: 367), the fact remains that religious reforms

appear to be so endemic to the Late Bronze Age that they cannot be accounted for by

cultural, ideological, or political reasons alone.

The primary fear behind this hesitance by scholars in both natural and historical

disciplines is the risk of being accused of committing environmental or geographic

determinism. Tactfully summarized by Jared Diamond, explanations for historical

phenomena that rely upon environmental geography and biogeography are typically

viewed by historians as suggesting that “human creativity counts for nothing, or that we

humans are passive robots helplessly programmed by climate, fauna, and flora”

(Diamond 1997: 408). However, the linear, naïve, post hoc, “climate-creates-problems”

kind of explanation is far from view here. Since the issue of climate degradation is

ultimately a social problem, it is not so much climate change itself that is the culprit, but

a breakdown in human problem-solving systems (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000:

35). At the same time, problem-solving systems have their own political and

administrative capacities for what they can endure, and they can be overwhelmed.

William R. Thompson, although primarily concerned with economic and societal

problems that stem from climate, offers perhaps one of the more sober and robust

explanations of climate as a contextual factor. He writes,

In the ancient world, climate was a contextual factor that arguably influenced a large

number of other important processes such as agricultural prosperity, state-making,

governmental legitimacy, population size, size of urban labor force, religion, trade,

warfare, and so forth. Climate was particularly critical to the dynamics of carrying

capacities in the ancient world (Thompson 2007: 164).

7

Fortunately, a number of cultural ecologists, environmental anthropologists, and

archaeologists have embraced climate in this way, and enhanced our understanding of the

relationships between human communities and their biophysical environments. In

addition to William Thompson and Jared Diamond (above), scholars like Andrew

Sherratt, Karl Butzer, Carole Crumley, Brian Fagan, Roderick McIntosh, Joseph Tainter,

and Susan McIntosh, Arlene Rosen, among many others have lead several conversations

within their fields about the direct and indirect relationships between ecology and culture

over the last thirty years. Historians have arguably been the most resistant against this

larger movement within the academy towards a truly interdisciplinary approach that

incorporates long-term explanations to past events, rather than just political.

Since 1949, however, a growing number of historians have been indebted to the

work of Fernand Braudel. His La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'époque de

Philippe II (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) was

the first work of its kind to write a synthetic history that employed a form of

methodological structuralism that was able to create a sensible narrative that brought

together rhythms of history at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. He termed these the

longue durée (describing geographical, and/or environmental time), conjuncture

(describing social time), and histoire événementielle, or the courte durée (describing

individual time). Since his generation, scholars such as Peregrine Horden and Nicholas

Purcell (2000), and most recently Cyprian Broodbank (2013) have adopted the approach

that Braudel introduced and demonstrated the relevance of long-term (even

environmental) forces on developments in political history.

8

With the exception of Horden and Purcell (2000), however, none of these

historians have brought Braudel’s longue durée approach to bear on developments in the

history of ancient religion.6 There have, however, been very recent movements in this

direction by European scholars,7 though none of them have focused their gaze on Bronze

Age religious history. Although there is still a great deal to be desired among the study of

the relationship between ecology and cosmology for the ancient world, a number of case

studies have been done among professionals in the social scientific community

investigating the relationship between the two for modern religious movements.8 For

these studies, it has been demonstrated beyond a doubt just how directly (and quickly!) a

culture’s cosmology can be affected by changes in climate.

C. Towards a Methodology

What do these other scholars (mostly) outside of the historical disciplines

understand (and have documented evidence to support their research) that historians seem

reluctant to accept? To use the words of Jared Diamond, historical causation needs to be

understood in both proximate and ultimate terms (Diamond 1997). In other words, from

the perspective of regression analysis when scholars have discussed the causes of

religious reforms in the Late Bronze Age they typically focus on more causally proximate

factors such as the contemporary political instability that accompanied it, and so on.

While not technically incorrect, they would do better to instead set that instability in

6 Even Glacken’s (1967) classic work only went as far back as the Hellenistic period. 7 See Sonnabend’s essay in Gerten and Bergmann (2012). Among the essays included in their

book, however, only he focuses his attention on the ancient world, though his focus is on the Iron Age through the Roman period. It is this author’s opinion, however, that his contribution was not particularly insightful, and that it embodies the kind of oversimplistic views of causation that I resist in this paper.

8 See Veldman, Szasz, and Haluza-DeLay (2014). Their conclusion chapter will be relied upon for the methodology section of this essay.

9 dialogue with other factors that causally precede it,9 such as environmental forces that are

able to provide more systematic, rather than episodic explanations of phenomena. Hence,

they miss a critical opportunity to explain a regional phenomena that, while proximately

couched in “intra-elite and center-hinterland conflict,” (Thompson 2007: 164) is

ultimately the result of threatened carrying capacities generated by environmental

pressures.

In the pages to follow, I will present a methodology for describing the relationship

between climate and cosmology that is based on social memory theory. Cosmology is a

culture’s overall perception of the cosmos and its modi operandi, and there are several

“informants” of that perception that are rooted in the past. These are inherited from

previous generations that had their own insights and experiences with nature, positions in

society, and technology that informed their perceptions of the severity of environmental

change in their day. It will be shown that position in society, technological resources, and

cosmological inheritance all affect a person or group’s response to climate –or for that

matter, any other challenge or opportunity. It will be argued that the state records,

correspondence, and religious literature preserved for us contain small “snapshots” of the

cosmologies that are a part of this investigation.

9 Causal priority does not necessarily imply that a causal factor occurred chronologically before its effect. Causes and effects can in fact be coexistent with the effect simply existing in a contingent relationship with its cause.

10

II. Theory and Methodology: Climate, Social Memory, and the

Dynamics of Cultural Change

In order to make the case for any relationship between climate and the

development of the succession myths, both the environment and religion need to be

contextualized within the nexus of a larger, complex system consisting of several

interactive and overlapping processes (Thompson 2007: 165). Though this thesis makes

use of empirical data, its method will be primarily theoretical, and qualitative rather than

focusing on quantitative forms of analysis. In social systems, environmental, social,

economic, political, cultural forces, and the like are characterized by coevolutionary

interaction (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 15); that is, all elements of the

system not only mutually influence each other over time, but they can be felt both

directly and by proxy at several different scales (local, regional, etc.), in multiple

directions (hierarchically or heterarchically), and in different ways (economically,

politically, socially, religiously, etc). Wherever people are located within this network of

processes, their conscious interactions with these forces are all shaped by material factors

such as technology, resources, and social structure, but also, as it will be shown, most

importantly by their perception of these forces (Rosen 2007: 10-12;179-180).10

10 Rosen’s approach, as well that of McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh’s (2000) by way of social memory, to the influence of climate on social response will be relied upon heavily for this chapter, and the rest of this paper.

11

It will be argued in greater detail soon that perception is a selectively permeable

function of social memory that, among other ways, expresses itself through religion in

general, and ritual and myth in particular. If this is the case, then it is really social

memory that needs to be situated among the processes described above, and then

religion’s place and function within it. It almost goes without saying, however, that

religion and social life were tightly interwoven in the ancient world, and hence that

neither society nor religion can be rightly grasped without understanding the mutual

influence that they had upon one another.

Before becoming too overburdened with all these moving parts, however, first

things first; the pages to follow will begin with a discussion that firmly establishes

climate’s role amid other social forces, and in turn what relationship that these have to

social memory. Next, social memory’s sacral and legitimating role in society will be

explored as it is seen in both palace and temple contexts, and especially in the production

of mythic literature. In all, there are five non-linear hypotheses describing contextual

dynamics, rather than linear causal relationships that are derived from social memory

model described below that are tested throughout the remainder of this investigation.

H1:External, objective climatic forces can have tangible effects upon local and

regional ecosystems, creating either opportunities or challenges for the human

systems that inhabit them.

H2: The geographic opportunities or challenges that manifest within human

ecosystems have the ability to affect a number of social dynamics and processes,

12

especially those relating to carrying capacities and royal legitimacy on a sacral

level.

H3: Human responses to these challenges or opportunities are informed by their

problem-solving systems, the analytical and cosmological criteria, “envelopes” of

perceptibility, procedures, and protocols for which are all rooted in their social

memory.

H4: A culture’s social memory exists in an ongoing, organic, dialogical relationship

that is characterized by the process of orientation-disorientation-reorientation

between both its existing social memory and the ever-changing, constantly

demanding forces of its present social world.

H5: Religious and political institutions, as institutional embodiments of social

memory, also experience these processes of orientation-disorientation-

reorientation, the chronological strata of which can be discerned over time from a

culture’s political and religious literature, art, iconography, temple and palace

architecture, and cultic rituals and festivals.

A. Climate, Society, and Social Memory

As already noted in the previous chapter, cultural, ideological, and political

factors alone are insufficient to account for “political-economic rhythms” (Thompson

2007: 163-164) that are shared by cultures with different political and social structures,

ideologies, and geographic opportunities and challenges. This is not to suggest that these

factors play no role in their well-being and prosperity. Rather, these factors can shed a

great deal of light upon the individual decisions made by different people groups in the

13 ancient world, but they cannot in and of themselves account for larger trends that

transcend matters of histoire événementielle. To be sure, “the devil is always in the

details” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 17), however, these larger

environmental, longue durée details have been generally ignored (until recently) in

historical reconstructions of the past and the religious histories therein. Taking Egypt and

Mesopotamia as examples, despite their differences in political structure (unicentricity vs.

polycentricity), speeds of urbanization (slow vs. early), political-religious ideology (the

pharaoh as a god vs. the king as a representative of the gods), and levels of success in

resisting outside or hinterland invasion (relative success vs. successive failure), they

nonetheless shared remarkably comparable rhythms of prosperity and decline (Thompson

2007: 163-164; Issar and Zohar 2007: 112) (see Fig. 2 below).

No matter how similar the environmental conditions were that Egypt and

Mesopotamia faced (as in the case above), neither their responses, nor the outcomes of

their experiences were the same. The unilateral, linear predictability that one might desire

simply does not work in complex systems. For example, the early urbanization and state

organization experienced by both Egypt and Mesopotamia occurred in periods of aridity

and/or low flooding,( Hassan 2000: 135) while their mutual collapses at the end of the

third millennium (ca. 2300-2200) are attributed to similar environmental problems

(Rosen 2007: 128-149; Issar and Zohar 2007: 103-157). While this could first appear to

mean that climate seems to play a minimal role in historical events, what really caused

these collapses were breakdowns in problem-solving systems. Complex social systems

are more likely to collapse when major challenges, such as abrupt climate shifts or

14

Figure 2: Comparative Fortunes of Egypt and Mesopotamia From Braudel (2001: 107, Table 1).

15 foreign invasions, coincide with “prolonged period[s] of diminishing returns to problem

solving” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 35).

In the case of the rise of Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies, climatic

deterioration was a culturally generative and socially mobilizing force that required social

cooperation, resource coordination, and workforce supervision (Thompson 2007: 166-

167), whereas in their collapses at the end of the third millennium climate was a force

that simply overwhelmed a system that was already fraught with problems. Hence do

McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh suggest that it is really “the social and economic

context [that] determines whether environmental change is truly a challenge” (McIntosh,

Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 35).

Returning briefly to the issue of problem-solving, what variables affect the

resilience of a social system in the face of challenges? What are some of the factors that

affect the success or failure of a society in maintaining its structure, and also in absorbing

or utilizing change to its benefit (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 13)? As it turns

out, there are several human and ecological variables that are implicated in human

responses to environmental and other challenges. In addition to factors such as

“subsistence mode and resource diversity, [the] scale and organizational structure of

society, and the nature of cultural strategies for gathering, storing, evaluating, and acting

on information about environmental variability,” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000:

13, italics added)11 human responses are also dependent upon who is doing the

responding, and what position they hold in society.

11 The social memory section below discusses just how implicated these cultural strategies are in human responses to environmental issues.

16

The goals and motivations of individual persons or groups within society will

differ depending upon what they have to gain or lose (for example, consider Joseph’s

gains from the seven-year famine in Pharaoh’s court). To wealthy landowners, for

example, periodic short-term drought could bring great opportunities for economic (and

even political) gain in the form of increased food prices and decreased labor costs (Rosen

2007: 9). Farmers, on the other hand, demonstrate their concern for minimizing risk

through the development of food and water storage systems, developing more agricultural

technology, and so on rather than maximizing profit as wealthy landowners are wont to

do (Rosen 2007: 9). This brings up the issue of hierarchical efficacy in responding to

societal issues at different levels of the social strata –an issue which will be returned to

shortly.

Too frequently, humans have been analyzed as though they were separate from

the environments that they inhabit when, in reality, “the human presence (including

hierarchies of settlements and regional control bureaucracies) is not simply overlaid onto

the ecosystem but integral to it” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 14). Human

beings are an “ecotonal species” (Crumley 2001: 28) that have a very real impact upon

the flora, fauna, and physical terrain of their environment (through mining, deforestation,

terracing, irrigation, or, in modern times, with carbon dioxide emission, and so on). This

makes them an environmental variable that many have suggested rivals even the power of

long-term geological forces (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007: 614). The inclusion of

human beings as part of the landscape, however, rather than simply overlaid onto it in

many ways obscures the definition of a “landscape” in the first place.

17

However, human imagination is not bound in the same way that hills or streams

are; once put into action, cognitive forces such as these have the power to “dam rivers,

seed clouds, denude forests, and place lush green golf courses on Arabian sands” (Hassan

2000: 128). Nonetheless, having already brought together humans and their ecosystems,

it should be said that “snapshots” in time of human societies can never really capture the

“landscape” as they are a part of it if for no other reason than that human beings

constantly build upon and preserve their past in technology, architecture, and resource

maximization strategies. The past is, so to speak, quite literally mixed up with the

present, constantly informing and constraining the domains of its decisions by way of

multigenerational conventions, traditions, and memories. The landscape, then, is like a

“structured cosmos” (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 356). A much more helpful

definition has been offered by McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh. They write,

A landscape comprises all physical, biological, and cultural phenomena interacting within

a region. Some portions of a landscape will manifest themselves as physical residues of

antecedent landscapes within a local developmental trajectory, residues that include

evidence of human action on the physical environment (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh

2000: 14-15).

B. Social Memory, Cosmology, and Religion

In spite of the material realities that restrict the domain of possible responses to

climate change, in reality, social reactions to phenomena are anteceded by their initial

perception and subsequent interpretation and recognition of their importance and

urgency, as well as the resources they require. The cosmological criteria that undergird

that process, however, are all embedded within a culture’s social memory. Indeed, it has

18 been argued that “because the social memory of each group is contingent upon a

particular constellation of beliefs, values, and sociopolitical structure, not all human

responses in the past have been based on an objective assessment of climate variability”

(McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 17).12 Therefore, whether human responses to

environmental issues manifest themselves in the form of the anthropogenic manipulation

of the landscape (i.e. terracing or irrigation), trade negotiations, or increased ritual

activity, the responses that a society generates need to make sense within their

cosmological framework (Rosen 2007: 10). The power of social memory as a definite,

interactive force within its ecosystem cannot be underestimated; indeed, as has already

been mentioned, it has the power when put into action to “dam rivers, seed clouds,

denude forests, and place lush green golf courses on Arabian sands” (Hassan 2000: 128).

In the ancient world, history and environmental issues and their memory were

seen and preserved in teleological terms, meaning people were concerned not just that

nature changed, but why nature changed (Walton 2006: 225-227). In this way their

memory had a predictive function; it allowed the community to probe its past and in turn

determine appropriate responses while (ideally) avoiding past mistakes (McIntosh,

Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 21). Social memory then, in a broad sense, is the result of

the process in which a society “acquires information about its environment and its own

interaction with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing

those regularities into a kind of ‘schema’ or model, and acting in the real world on the

basis of that schema” (Gell-Mann 1994: 17). As suggested by this description, social

12 As for Rosen’s (2007) inclusion of perception as an important variable, McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh’s (2000) insightful conversation about social memory will here be adopted into what constitute the “informants” of perception, and therefore what inform responses to social phenomena.

19 memory has several interacting parts, which are expanded below. There is, for example,

the body of multigenerational knowledge about the world and the “biocultural dynamics”

within it (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 24-26). It also includes the authoritative

repertoire of “symbols, metaphors, and myths” that capture the implicit, a priori,

cosmological principles that guide the community’s “formation of perception”

(McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 26-27). Lastly, there is the operating interface

that provides actual “maps for action” in responding to real-world phenomena (McIntosh,

Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 27-28).

As previewed above, the long-term understanding of a community about its

world, and its particular beliefs constitute social memory, or memories proper. It is more

than simply a quantitative assemblage of data though; it also includes qualitative

knowledge about the biophysical world in terms of its “variability, modes and mode

shifts,” and so on that go into informing what constitutes the “normal envelope” of

experience (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 14-15). By virtue of these memories,

societies can function within their environments with an understanding of the “standard

deviations” of experience within which they can expect the world to behave. Phenomena

must have a magnitude and amplitude that exceed the threshold of normal experience

long enough for a society to notice it (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 18). It is

these experiential “envelopes” that give social perception its unconscious selective

permeability. Social memory not only includes the memory of past responses to climate

variability in terms of “economic and sociopolitical strategies,” but also includes a sort of

“sacral calculus,” or database of ritual strategies for responding to phenomena. As such it

20

Figure 3: Social Memory, Symbolic Reservoir, and Schemata McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh (2000:26, Fig. 1.2), (Illustration by Richard Periman)

is the “source of the metaphors, symbols, legends, and attitudes that crystallize social

action,” and consequently it also encompasses religious identity and culture (McIntosh,

Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 24).

The underlying cosmological principles or a priori assumptions inherent within a

culture’s social memory are referred to as the “symbolic reservoir” (see Fig. 3). In

practice, these operate at a mostly unconscious level that “structure a society’s perception

of its environment” and govern the “analytical procedures (but not the specific

protocols)” that inform actual decision-making (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000:

26). The symbolic reservoir contains not only the quantitative collection of metaphors

and iconic imagery that provide aesthetic coherence to cultural expression and art, but

also the qualitative principles that the community understands to be governing historical

21 events such as “equilibrium in the cosmic order, cyclicity and the impermanence of any

extreme and the role of morality in maintaining balance” (McIntosh, Tainter, and

McIntosh 2000: 27).13 The significance of this for cultural identity is that these symbols

provide a working vocabulary and, in the case of holy sites, real-world “furniture” with

which they can express their a priori principles in tangible ways. The function of these

cosmological postulates is ultimately to lend teleological coherence, or a comprehensible

historical trajectory to events (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 26).

The operating interface that contains the social protocols or “maps for action” for

reacting to events is called the “schemata” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 27-

28). If the symbolic reservoir is the most unconscious level of social memory rooted in

the ancestral past, the schemata would be the conscious, prescriptive set of protocols that

interacts with the environment in the memory of a living community (McIntosh, Tainter,

and McIntosh 2000: 27). As the place of interface with the world, it is in the context of

the schemata that the “sacral calculus” of social memory is actually performed

(McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 25). From an Annales perspective, this is the

element of social memory that operates at the level of histoire événementielle. For the

purposes of this study, the schemata is the most significant part of social memory because

it is the location of dialogical interaction between the changing “objective” world, and the

cultural, theological knowledge that facilitates social action, cultural exchange, and even

religious reform. Borrowing the language of Walter Brueggemann, it is the place in

which the individual and corporate processes of orientation, disorientation, and new

13 An example of these in Egyptian thought would be the order and chaos principles of Maat and Isfet.

22 orientation occur (2002).14 Societies are not blind machines that simply react to

environmental phenomena, as some environmental determinists are quick to treat them;

rather, they “actively sort through” incoming, “objective” information by weighing it

against past experiences, and then modeling their own solutions after the traditional

culturally and theologically appropriate responses of their ancestors (McIntosh, Tainter,

and McIntosh 2000: 25). It is for “filtering” reasons such as these that major cultural or

theological change is (usually) not a fast process (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000:

27).15

C. Summary of Methodology: Social Memory and Sacral Legitimation

Religion and politics are difficult to separate in the Near East, since politicians –in

keeping with their roles as intermediaries between the gods and men– understood that

“what was political was still ultimately theological” (Walton 2006: 226).16 This is why

any conversation about complex literary activity in the Near East concerns the “scribal

elite and the monarchical circles that they served” (Smith 2010: 45). Having already

discussed the factors that affect the goals and motivations of social decision-makers, the

Succession Myths and the religious reforms associated with them are representative of

the interests of the most wealthy, educated, and powerful in the eastern Mediterranean

and therefore have a legitimating function on a theological level (Walton 2006: 67, 268,

14 One can see the struggle between traditional, received theology and the changing objective world preserved in the prayers of the Psalter as well as those of other Near Eastern religious traditions. The dissonance between human expectations, hopes, and social realities have no doubt played a large part in the problem of theodicy in the ancient world. Interestingly, some of the first literary works on the Problem of Evil emerged in the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean in Egyptian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Ugaritic sources.

15 For a recently argued exception of major, fast religious change, see Fuhrman (2012). In cases like these, uncommon as they are, the entire fabric of a culture’s cosmology can be irremediably compromised by a single event, and demand immediate reform.

16 For a more detailed treatment, see Liverani (2004).

23 294, and 297). Accordingly, politics and religion are two of the most potent embodiments

of social memory in ancient or modern societies.

Assuming the above hypotheses, a step-by-step, orientation-disorientation-

reorientation process17 of reform at the religious level (i.e. the elite level) would begin

with a change in the natural, cosmological order as that culture sees it (either

geographically or socially), thereby exceeding the “normal envelope” of experience

enabling its perception at a social level (orientation). At that point, religious and political

“information gatekeepers” employ their cultural memory by “actively sorting through”

the change in the natural order and deliberating about its possible causes (McIntosh,

Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 14, 25). Having arrived at a conclusion, they then offer

discursive, theological and/or political explanations and interpretations of the event, and

then propose a culturally appropriate social, political, and/or ritual prescription for what

should be done in response to it. After put into place, the efficacies of the prescriptions

are weighed, and it is determined whether any follow-up is needed. Depending upon the

level or mode of the prescription’s efficacy, the process will repeat, serving a diagnostic

function until the problem is solved to their satisfaction.

If, however, no existing solutions solve the problem (disorientation), the process

repeats itself in a modified form. Once it has been perceived that no solution has been

efficacious, then religious and political “information gatekeepers” again employ their

cultural memory and “actively sort through” the possible reasons for the failure of

existing methods. During this process of deliberation, decision-makers may even search

17 The inspiration for this process came from the four questions in Veldman, Szasz, and Haluza-DeLay (2014: 297-298).

24 for new data by drawing upon the responses of other cultures to similar problems. Once

they have arrived at a conclusion, they will offer a new discursive explanation and

interpretation of the event (reorientation), and the resultant new social, political, and/or

ritual prescription for what should be done. As this process continues, small changes can

add up, and these may become the grist for a historical reconstruction of religious

developments throughout history.

Since the scribal and royal sectors of society had a very close relationship with the

ritual activities of the state, the social memories of which they were “gatekeepers”

usually managed the versions of “reality” that members of lower social classes saw

reflected in state sponsored rituals and festivals (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000:

14). In addition to myths and rituals, prayers especially provide insight into the sacral

calculus of ancient societies. Keeping these ideas about “information gatekeepers,” their

versions of “reality,” and cosmology in mind, the next chapter will be a brief summary of

the cosmologies of the different culture “cores” of this investigation (Beaujard 2011).

25

III. Ancient “Ecotheologies” and Their Pressure Points

If “social and economic context determines whether environmental change is truly

a challenge” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 35), then this chapter focuses

specifically upon the social context of environmental change, and particularly its

relationship to social memory. In the previous chapter, I teased out some of these

concepts on a more abstract level, however, this chapter is focused on the cosmological

outlooks of each of the eastern Mediterranean cultures that took part in the religious

reforms of the Late Bronze Age, and also upon which social factors that they understood

to be integral to maintaining the cosmic order. From an Annales perspective18 then, this

chapter focuses on longue durée and conjuncture level structures in social memory and

cosmology. The next chapter will then tease out how these deeper structures of memory

interacted with political and social developments in the eastern Mediterranean world-

system towards the end of the second millennium.

Concerning organization, in Chapter 1 I briefly summarized the divine

successions in the pantheons across the region. Although there were several peoples and

places represented in that list (Crete, Mycenae, Canaan, Syria, the Hittites, Luwians,

Hurrians, Babylonia, and Egypt), this is because several territories over the course of the

last half of the second millennium not only contained multiple people groups, but

18 That is, referring to the school of historiography referred to in Chapter 1 popularized by Fernand Braudel.

26

Figure 4: The Eastern Mediterranean World-System and Culture Cores (1600-1200 BCE) Beajard (2009:16, Fig. 3.8).

sometimes they changed hands more than once. The main cultural groups, however, were

largely the same throughout; what changed was simply who occupied the ruling class. As

such, in this chapter the following “culture cores” (see Fig. 4) are represented: Egypt,

Anatolia, the peripheral Syro-Palestine, and Mesopotamia. As for the Aegean, since the

literary sources that we have for them are from the Archaic Period, rather than the Late

Bronze Age, a conversation about them will be saved until an excursus at the end of the

next chapter.

One final note about cosmology: though there is a generic Near Eastern

cosmology that one could speak of, it is of course a generalized one that consolidates a

number of common cosmological postulates that seem implicit in the literature

throughout the region (Walton 2006: 165-200). However, due to local differences in

27 landscape, economy, political status, policies, memories, and ideology, each of the

culture cores above will be surveyed to determine not just their views of the cosmos in

general, but also what their “ecotheological” views were, socially and politically

contextualized within their cosmologies, and in turn what made them tick.

A. Egyptian Cosmology

Egyptian social memory and cosmology is governed by the ongoing drama within

the cosmos between the forces of Maat and Isfet. In terms of social memory, the ongoing

struggle between order and chaos are two of the a priori, cosmological postulates that

frame the categories of reality that order Egyptian experience of the world. In the

Egyptian symbolic reservoir the concept of order manifests itself as Maat, which broadly

refers to the “meaningful, all-pervasive order that embraces the world of humankind,

objects and nature,” or perhaps more simply the “form in which it was intended by the

creator God” (Assmann 2001: 3). Isfet, on the other hand, signifies the “disorder through

loss of its original plenitude of meaning,” as it can be seen in “sickness, death, scarcity,

injustice, falsehood, theft, violence, war, enmity” and so on (Assmann 2001: 3).

The king was responsible for preserving both social and cosmic order, which can

be seen in the following text, “Re has placed the king in the land of the living forever and

ever, judging humankind and satisfying the gods, realizing Maat and destroying Isfet”

(Assmann 2001: 3). Maat is also conceived as a deity in Egypt, described as the

“daughter of Re” making her the sister of the pharaoh, who is seen as the “son of Re”

(Hornung 1992: 132). Additionally, the divine origins of kingship in Egyptian memory

can be traced through the stories about the death of Osiris, and the contest between Horus

28 and Seth, as the ideal of the royal vocation was to live in a way that imitated the king’s

divine predecessors. In the broad sense, the story about Horus and Seth that the king

takes as his inspiration for understanding the identity of his royal office portrays in

mythic terms the “familiar battle between order and disorder, or more specifically,

between the virtues of autocratic kingly authority and the threat of social unrest”

(Holland 2009: 49).

There can be little doubt that the fertile strip of land created by the Nile in an

otherwise hostile desert environment heavily influenced their cosmology (Doxey 2013:

181). In the Nile Valley, low inundation levels could have dire, even cosmic

consequences for the stability of the Egyptian society and in turn on the sacral efficacy

and legitimacy of the king. This is why from July to November the Egyptians carefully

measured its level year after year, trying to detect its flooding patterns (Grimal 1992: 266,

273). In addition to potentially leaving seventy five percent of arable land too dry for

agriculture, for instance, low Nile flooding can also decrease catches in fish, (Hassan

2000: 135) and reduce grazing areas for pastoral nomads which, if severe enough, can

lead to migration and center-hinterland conflict (Thompson 2007: 168-170). Furthermore,

low soil moisture can interfere with phenological (growth) states of plants at every stage,

including their ripening stages, and even lead to soil salinization (Hassan 2000: 135). To

make matters worse, even if farmers managed to successfully sew grain during low flood

levels, dust storms are more common in periods of aridity and can cause grain to fall

before ripening (Hassan 2000: 136). It can also become an issue of public works, because

29 without regular flooding dykes could become undercut and irrigation works could be

disrupted (Hassan 2000: 136).

As these problems force their way further up the social hierarchy, poor harvests

can result in the depletion of royal grain stores or in farmers consuming grain normally

intended for planting the following year, leaving the pharaoh without the revenue

normally generated by the crop yields brought by the annual inundation. As the pharaoh’s

stores deplete he is then left unable to pay artisans for their work, or even to bargain for

food with foreign nations if they are too afraid that they would not receive a return on

their investment. Finally, if the bloodline of grain taxation is cut off from the palace for

too long, the pharaoh’s power can eventually diminish as local governors withhold even

their revenues from him as they recognize that he might not be able to force them to do so

anyways (Hassan 2000: 136). Prolonged periods of low inundation, therefore, could lead

to his legitimacy being thrown into question (Hassan 2000: 136-137). Moreover, if

Pharaoh should falter in his responsibility within the cosmic drama of maintaining Maat

and removing Isfet, the consequences could be of apocalyptic proportions. In Egyptian

thought, then, these are the kinds of ways in which environmental issues can become a

“religious matter” (Veldman, Szasz, and Haluza-DeLay 2014: 297).

B. Anatolian Cosmology

Compared to the Egyptians that were “religious to excess, beyond any nation in

the world,” as Herodotus says, the picture in Anatolia was much less theologically

speculative or contemplative, and totally focused on the “practical, the pragmatic, the

functional, [and] the expedient” (Bryce 2002: 145). This difference between them and the

30 Egyptians could very well have been due to the different degrees of stability of the Nile

Valley and the Anatolian plateau; while the Nile would predictably inundate every year

like clockwork (as though it were a direct act of blessing from the gods), Anatolian

populations had in their social memories “a range of natural disasters –devastating

storms, drought, plague, famine– occurring at unpredictable intervals and attributable to

malevolent supernatural powers” (Bryce 2002: 214). As such, the most prominent gods

among Anatolian populations were the ones that had the most practical, expedient, and

relevant to the welfare of the landscape and the regional economy: “storm-gods, who

delivered the rains crucial to the dry-farming economy of central Anatolia and in addition

ensured the flow of rivers and springs; sun-deities, whose light was recognized as the

basis of all life; and goddesses of the fertile earth” (Beckman 2013: 88).

One could say that the Hittite rituals, as well as the prayers and myths that

correspond to them, offered a cosmological counternarrative to the unpredictability of

their geopolitical landscape. The cosmos was not, in their minds, a vague impersonal

force that causes the “rain [to fall] on the righteous and the unrighteous” (as in Matt 5:

45), but rather these occurrences were seen as the direct result of divine displeasure with

an individual, whether or not it was the king (Beckman 2013: 96). The cosmos was

thereby endowed with intelligibility in that whatever may come, the solution was for the

king to identify the deity responsible and then offer the appropriate prayers and sacrifices

(Bryce 2002: 214). This is also why most of Hittite history resisted divine syncretism. For

the practically-minded Hittite, it was not worth the risk of wrongly assuming that “all

31 Storm Gods were really one and the same,” for in doing so they could gravely offend “a

local deity whose favour and good will might be urgently needed” (Bryce 2002: 145).

In Anatolia, just as in Egypt, kingship was rooted in myths that modeled the ideal

king in divine terms, “pugnacious and triumphant, surrounded by a court of gods,” that

were then to be imitated by the mortal, earthly king (Lebrun 2004: 588). Just as Teššub

showed himself to be a hero among the gods and maintaining the cosmic order, so too

was the king seen as a hero by the ruling class through his demonstration of parā

handandātar, or “justice” as it is accomplished through divine power that “commanded

the respect of ethical, religious and legal principles” (Liverani 2014: 318-319). The

divine world, in this respect, was revealed to mirror human social structures in that it was

hierarchical and ruled by a king (Beckman 2013: 89). The king’s role, also with parallel

in Egypt, took on ritual significance as he was the mediator between the gods and his

subjects. This is even more emphasized by the seriousness with which the Hittites

approached his purity; after all, if the king were to become defiled, the entire country

could suffer because of it (van den Hout 2004: 553-554; Collins 2013: 108).

C. Syro-Palestinian Cosmology

The primary source of data for Syrian, Levantine, and Canaanite religion in

general are the alphabetic cuneiform tablets of Ras Šamra. Located on the Phoenician

coastline, Ugarit’s location brought two main concerns. First, its location on the eastern

edge of the Mediterranean placed it at higher risk for variability in precipitation, leading

to a heightened sense of awareness about its agricultural welfare and the importance of

rain. Second, its prosperity depended upon its position at the crossroads of major Near

32 Eastern trading routes. Situated on one of the main highways between the superpowers in

Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, their position may have been “a good bet in

peacetime but dangerous in [a] time of war. And war was becoming endemic in the

Middle East” (Braudel 2001: 161). These two geographic realities are reflected in the

roles of their chief deity, (Baal) Hadad, and their earthly king.

As in Hittite cosmology, the chief deity and the king of Ugarit exist in an

analogical relationship with one another (Wright 2013: 132, 148). Just as Baal was

responsible for subduing external chaotic forces, and ensuring agricultural fertility by

providing rain, so too did the king have the role of defending the kingdom from external

threats, and to see to the fertility of his lands (Liverani 2014: 345). A more unique quality

of Ugaritian cosmology, however, was that unlike their Hittite, Egyptian, or

Mesopotamian neighbors, they saw the present order of the cosmos in impermanent

terms; just as Baal was able to rise to kingship by defeating Yam and Mot and in turn

succeed his father El, so too could he be overthrown. Even in Baal’s battles against Mot,

in order to have victory he needs to enlist the help of other deities (like his sister Anat),

and have his father El use Shapshu (the sun) as a mediator before Mot resigns his position

to Baal (López-Ruiz 2014: 3). Baal, powerful as he was, still had moments of

vulnerability, and it was only through the help of the rest of the divine family that his

success was made possible. The king, being an earthly imitator of Baal, was also

responsible for enlisting the help of Baal’s divine siblings through ritual should he (Baal)

be killed and need to be resurrected. Baal’s continual death, even, was seen as a natural

33 part of the cosmos in that it represented the coming and going of the seasons (Liverani

2014: 345).

Accordingly, the king of Ugarit was seen as powerful, but not invincible and

required the help of other, more powerful vassal powers to help it to defend against its

enemies (Smith 2009: 18). Their cosmology then, was one that understood the world as

one in which external forces of chaos were always looming and requiring constant

attention. Rather than being at the mercy of a world full of forces totally beyond their

control, however, the Ugaritians understood that if they worked together and enlisted the

support of others, even foreigners, that they could survive and even thrive in their ever-

changing world. The anthropomorphized depiction of the gods made them much easier to

manage compared to the inscrutable character of the gods to their east in Mesopotamia.

D. Mesopotamian Cosmology

Far different than the cooperative team-players of Ugarit, or the divine and

powerful pharaonic ideology of Egypt, Mesopotamians saw themselves as quite mortal,

very vulnerable, and at the mercy of incomprehensible and whimsical gods. In the Poem

of the Righteous Sufferer, a man wails over the power and intelligence of the gods by

crying, “Who could learn the reasoning of the gods in heaven? Who understands the

intelligence of the gods of the underworld? Where have human beings learned the way of

a god?” (Nemet-Nejat 1998: 175). Instead, a rampant militarism with deeply urban and

nationalistic overtones dominated the Mesopotamian view of the cosmos. Prior to the

Late Bronze Age it is impossible to speak of a single religion in the whole of the Tigris-

Euphrates Valley. Nonetheless, the localized, city-cults of upper and lower Mesopotamia

34 shared the understanding that divine agency was everywhere active in the cosmic order

(Pongratz-Leisten 2013: 34). In a late third millennium text, the gods are credited with

several environmental and social problems facing lower Mesopotamia. It reads, “Enlil

brought a bitter storm; silence was established in the city. Nintu blocked off the womb of

the land. Enki stopped up the water in the Tigris and Euphrates.” Concerning Ur it reads,

“In Ur no one went for food, no one went for water. Its people wandered like water

poured into a well. Having no strength, they do not even travel. Enlil installed a pestilent

famine in the city” (Averbeck, Studevent-Hickman, and Michalowski 2006: 69-70).

Mesopotamia’s geographic, and geopolitical location “had a deep impact on the

mental maps and worldviews of the Mesopotamians,” and in turn on their social memory

(Pongratz-Leisten 2013: 39). The Zagros Mountains hemming them in from the east,

along with the Arabian Desert to their southwest, the Persian Gulf to their south, and the

mountains of Ararat to their north, not to mention their location on a major east-west

trade route made them a “house open to the winds” of drought and famine-induced

migrations from the hinterlands, shifting watercourses, and deportations. The fear and

insecurity with which they were forced to live essentially bullied them into becoming

bullies; the only way for populations in the valleys to have peace was by “threatening

others and intimidating them in turn” (Braudel 2001: 161; Pongratz-Leisten 2013: 35).

Their persistent paranoia about outsiders is reflected in the superiority that they saw in

city-life as opposed to country-living (Pongratz-Leisten 2013: 39), and also in the fact

that their pantheons reflected a center-periphery dichotomy; the anthropomorphic gods

35 lived within the city walls, while demons occupied the peripheral hinterlands (Pongratz-

Leisten 2013: 39).

The social organization, resource management, and military defense necessary to

ride the waves of an unpredictable cosmos generated the permanent institution of the

king. Its office, as in other parts of the Near East was understood to have been designed

by the gods, and moreover that the gods even chose the king by “taking his hand”

(Nemet-Nejat 1998: 218). Because of the social vulnerability of the Mesopotamian city-

states, the king was given the divine mandate to pursue social justice by caring for his

subjects, especially the poor and the weak (Nemet-Nejat 1998: 221). Similar to Egyptian

cosmology, the socio-economic prosperity of the state and times of peace were seen as a

reflection of divine favor upon the king (Nemet-Nejat 1998: 221). In Egypt the king was

still expected to defend his people, but he was not primarily a war leader likely due to the

relative success of Egypt throughout history in warding off hinterland invasion. The

opposite is true in Mesopotamia; because of the constant fear of forces at the periphery

wreaking havoc on the city-states, the kings of Mesopotamia were seen as much as

military leaders as political and religious leaders (Holland 2009: 135).

As such, if Mesopotamians (in the north or the south) experienced a breakdown in

their social or economic welfare (including agricultural productivity), or national

security, it was a sign that the gods were greatly displeased with their king. Whether he

had neglected to maintain or build new temples, or execute justice for the poor, the gods

needed both to have their needs met through sacrifices and rituals. They needed to see

that the king that they had “taken the hand of” was still worthy of his office by taking

36 care of his people. Indeed, since natural forces themselves were conceived of as divine

beings, “people existed to serve the gods so they in turn could manage the cosmos”

(Nijhowne 1999: 37). Therefore, the sacral legitimation of the king was always at stake

since “the evaluation of the ruler is based on the ruler’s ability to shepherd his people to

best fulfill their role on earth: service to the gods” (Schneider 2011: 125).

E. Summary: Nature, Society, and the Gods

A common theme that emerges in all of these societies is the sacral significance of

the king as an intermediary between the gods and his subjects. Through the stories of

each of these societies, teleological significance was given to socio-political and

environmental phenomena. While the coherence that they imposed onto events took on

more specific meanings within each of their theological systems, their cosmological

outlooks all demanded similar “earthly” responses by their political and religious leaders.

Whether in terms of sacrifices, rituals, prayers, pursuing social justice, or expelling

foreigners that were “polluting the land,” state and cult can hardly be separated in the

ancient world. Political ideology, domestic and foreign policy, and more were all

intertwined and operated in a reciprocal relationship with the religious, and in turn

cosmological outlook of their societies.

The regularities that each of these societies identified within their own landscapes

were condensed into intelligible cosmologies with localized vocabularies and symbols to

describe them (Gell-Mann 1994: 17). In terms of their symbolic reservoirs, their

“cosmological postulates” and symbols are preserved and encoded within the “foundation

legends, beliefs, and material cues” of their societies, especially since it was after these

37 very stories that kings modeled their own kingship. In addition to the literary residues of

their symbolic reservoirs, their landscapes were even imprinted with sacral significance

(McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh 2000: 26). For Egyptians, the Nile itself was central to

many of their best-known stories while the Greeks and Ugaritians saw points of divine

contact with the material world in places such as Mount Olympus and Mount Zaphon,

today known as Jebel al-Aqra in northern Syria (López-Ruiz 2010: 111).

In terms of social memory, the concept of the “normal envelope” carries over into

ritual responses as well. Since prayers were not always expected to be effective in the

ancient world, they could nonetheless serve a diagnostic function in order to determine

the source of environmental problems. If the petitions of the community were not being

answered, it could be a sign that they were not approaching the correct deity. Another

possibility is that the god to whom they were petitioning had been vanquished,19 or that

the king himself through moral or ritual impurity was the problem. It is when prayers or

sacrifices were persistently ineffective that the normal envelope of these societies was

violated, and new solutions had to be sought, up to and even including the theological

reorientation of their religious literature, as will be argued in the next chapter.

19 As in the Baal Cycle and 1 Kings 17-18.

38

IV. Cosmology in Crisis: There Was No Response; No One Answered;

No One Paid Attention

The latter half of the second millennium was quite possibly one of the most epic,

theatrical, and interesting periods of Near Eastern history. In addition to the climate

variability and religious reform that are the focus of this study, it was also a period of

alliances and betrayals, of war and peace, of feast and famine. During this time, the

expansion of the Mesopotamian scribal curriculum into Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt,

enabled the international diplomacy so famously preserved in the Amarna

correspondence. As such, and because of how many points of comparison that it holds to

modern diplomatic relations, it has attracted comparatively more scholarly attention than

any other part of the Bronze Age. Steven R. David has said of the period, “it is precisely

because the Amarna Age was so different from our own that its similarities are all the

more striking” (Cohen and Westbrook 2000: 67).

The complexity of the Late Bronze Age, nonetheless, had a discernible pulse of

episodic wellness and crisis. The religious reforms of the era share a common rhythm

with the opportunities and challenges that came from fluctuating environmental

conditions in one part of the region or another. The interfaces between social memory’s

cosmological “allergens” and the contemporary environmental and political affairs that

caused them to “flare” will be addressed in chronological order, though still topically as

in the previous chapter if for no other reason that some of these cultures experienced

39

Figure 5: Fluctuations in the Near Eastern ‘Regional System’ of the Late Bronze Age. Above, left: The formation period, ca. 1600 BC; Below, left: The hegemony of Egypt and Mitanni, ca. 1450

BC; Above, right: The hegemony of Egypt and Hatti, ca. 1350 BC; Below, right: The final stage, ca. 1220 BC. Liverani (2014: 279, Fig. 16.2).

religious reform more than once.

The shifting sands of political hegemony throughout the Bronze Age (see Fig. 5),

in fact, are intimately tied to the religious reforms that unfolded over the course of these

six or so centuries. As far as climate variability is concerned, the first half or so of this

period enjoyed a relatively warm and favorable climate. It was not until between 1350

and 1250 that the climate noticeably began to take a turn for the colder, and drier.

Because of this, rather than providing a systematic treatment of the whole period, the

“episodes of reform” are the primary focus of this chapter.20 Finally, due to the

20 For more complete treatments of social, political, and economic history of the whole period, see Kuhrt (1995), Liverani (2002), Kristiansen and Larsson (2005), Van De Mieroop (2006), Podany (2012), Broodbank (2013), Cline (2014), and Liverani (2014).

40 internationalizing tendency that progressed from the beginning towards the end of the

period, some of the theological revisions that took place were tied to the political welfare

of key cities such as Thebes, Ugarit, Babylon, and so on.

A. The Rise of Amun and the New Kingdom (1750-1595)

In the aftermath of Hammurabi’s death, the Middle Euphrates, Upper

Mesopotamia, and the Syrian and Transjordan plateaus entered a steady period of decline

that resulted in the depopulation of urban centers, and also the isolation of Babylon from

its former long-distance contacts (Liverani 2014: 278). The balance of power in the

Middle Bronze Age that heavily focused on Egypt and Mesopotamia had waned and

become more evenly distributed throughout the Near East, leaving behind seeds for the

growth of the next superpowers of the Late Bronze Age. In spite of the demographic

declines of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, there were population growths in Assyria, the

Aegean, and Egypt (Liverani 2014: 278-279) that displaced Semitic groups along the

Syro-Palestinian coast, leading to the subsequent incursion of “Asiatic” groups into the

Delta region of Egypt towards the end of the Middle Kingdom (Van De Mieroop 2011:

149).

As the Semitic population rose in the Delta region during the final decades of the

eighteenth century,21 an epidemic ravaged the native Egyptian population at Avaris,

though most of the “Asiatic” groups were unharmed. It has been argued on the basis of

the Hearst Papyrus (ca. 1550 BCE) and the London Medical Papyrus (ca. 1350 BCE)

that tularemia, similar to bubonic plague or typhus, was likely the culprit because they

21 Some even date it precisely to 1715 BCE, which would accord well with the date suggested by Ramses II’s stele.

41 both refer to the outbreak as “t3nt ‘3mw (literally, the one of Asiatics), i.e., a disease

linked to foreigners from the Syria–Canaan–Transjordan area” (Trevisanato 2004: 905).

No matter the cause, however, it is clear that after the epidemic took place there was a

population drop in Avaris, and though it recovered the Egyptians no longer had control of

the Delta (Van De Mieroop 2011: 129), paving the way for the wealth of the Hyksos, that

is, the heqa khasut, or “rulers of foreign lands” during the Second Intermediate Period

(Broodbank 2013: 383-386).

After this incident, there was a strong distaste for the Hyksos among the Egyptian

royal class, and in keeping with their cosmology there was no way that a non-native

Egyptian was fit for the divine office of Egyptian king, for as Queen Hatshepsut said,

“they ruled in ignorance of Ra,” (Podany 2012: 139). The sense that the gods ought to do

something about this was realized just over three quarters of a century later in 1628/7

BCE with the explosive eruption of the Thera volcano. After the Santorini explosion, the

debris that was ejected into the atmosphere via the tephra cloud (Ritner and Moeller

2014: 18) deposited ash throughout the Aegean and Turkey (Broodbank 2013: 372), and

ravaged both Lower and Upper Egypt with upwards of a week, or even a month’s worth

constant heavy rain (Ritner and Moeller 2014: 7). The Tempest Stela of Ahmose has

recently come under attention again by scholars over the probability that the event

Ahmose is purported to have witnessed was in fact the aftermath of the Thera eruption,

which could lead to a massive revision of New Kingdom chronology.

In any event, the Stela preserves Ahmose’s perception of the event. Within

Egyptian cosmology, who else but the gods could cause the “deafening explosion…

42 earthquake-like shaking of the ground… darkness over the region covered by the tephra

cloud… thunderstorm-like weather conditions… and severe destruction of the coastal

regions in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Sea from several tsunamis” (Ritner and

Moeller 2014: 18)? The Stela reads,

[. . . Now then,] this great god desired [. . .] His Majesty [. . .] while the gods complained

of their discontent. [Then] the gods [caused] that the sky come in a tempest of r[ain], with

[dark]ness in the condition of the West,22 and the sky being in storm without [cessation,

louder than] the cries [lit., “voices”] of the masses, more powerful [than . . .], [while the

rain howled] on the mountains louder than the sound of the underground source of the

Nile that is in Elephantine. (Ritner and Moeller 2014: 5-7).

Returning briefly to the issue of religious reform, the key city of Thebes, home to

Amun, rose to prominence under Ahmose perhaps as the direct result of the calling that

he perceived on behalf of Amun to “reestablish the Two Lands,” possibly in the

aftermath of the Santorini explosion (Ritner and Moeller 2014: 9). Moreover, the

tsunamis that resulted from the seismic activity ravaged the Hyksos sea ports and

weakened their hold on Lower Egypt as they recovered from their losses. This not only

provided Ahmose with the sacral legitimation that he needed, but also the opportunity to

strike while the Hyksos were weak and reclaim what was lost at the end of the Middle

Kingdom. Even if this reading of the Tempest Stela is incorrect, and Ahmose was not a

witness to the aftermath of the Santorini eruption he still perceived, or at least attributed,

environmental phenomenon, however great or small, as a commission by the gods to

stage an attack on Avaris.

22 “…darkness in the condition of the West,” meaning, the Underworld (Ritner and Moeller 2014: 5, n. 39).

43

In this case, some environmental catastrophe is invoked to explain Amun and

Ahmose’s rise to power over Upper and Lower Egypt. This moment of triumph with the

help of the gods was cemented into Egyptian social memory, and from this time forward

anything but “traditional religion” (as Ahmose saw it, anyways) and native, male

kingship would be viewed with suspicion, given how severely the gods reacted against

the Hyksos. Put another way, anything that reminded the Egyptians of the Hyksos, or

threatened to return the cosmos to a state of Isfet was outside of the acceptable “normal

envelope” of actions that realize Maat. Moreover, the prominence of Amun that was

thereafter nationalized set a theological dialogue in motion within Egypt between the

traditional religion of the Middle Kingdom that was, in Assmann’s words, “constellative”

and decidedly polythesistic, and the theology of the New Kingdom that had “additive,”

“anticonstellative,” and monotheizing tendencies (2001: 191, 199-200).

B. An Egyptian Encore: Akhenaten and Solar Extremism (1350-1330)

In Egypt the seeds of a second religious reform came to fruition under the reign of

Amenhotep IV (1353-1336). Better known to posterity as Akhenaten, this “heretic king,”

moved the national capital, attempted to change the standardized artistic representations

of the pharaohs, and turned a deaf ear to his allies when they needed him the most. The

theological dialogue that started under Ahmose between the traditional religion of the

Middle Kingdom and the implicitly antithetical, solarized monotheism of Amun-Re

(Assmann 2001: 191, 199-200) set the stage for Akhenaten’s own theology of solar

extremism. Aten was already known from Middle Kingdom texts, and was worshipped

44 both by Hatshepsut and Akhenaten’s father, Amunhotep III as “the disk that created all

being” (Teeter 2011: 184-185).

What made Akhenaten’s reforms so vulgar and reproachable to his

contemporaries (and to us), aside from its abruptness, were two factors: the theological

implications of Atenism, and then their application to society at large. Theologically, the

problem was his explicit intensification of the contradiction between the implicit

assumptions of theological discourse in the New Kingdom with those of the Middle

Kingdom. He did this by carrying the “solarization” of the divine, as in the “additive”

theology of Amun-Re, to its logical, demythologizing end (Assmann 2001: 204). His

radicalization of the solarizing tendency demonstrated the true irreconcilability of the

“constellative polytheism,” or “cosmotheism” of the Middle Kingdom and the

“anticonstellative monotheism” of the New Kingdom –an irreconcilability that the

priestly class on the whole was unwilling to admit or embrace on account of the problems

that it would spell out for their own social and professional legitimacy.

Aknetaten’s theological application of Atenism to Egyptian art, iconography,

temple architecture, cultic rituals and festivals, language, and even the mode of

accessibility to the divine, namely in the person of the pharaoh alone, rather than the

priestly class was the second cause for outrage among his contemporaries (Assmann

2001: 209). Perhaps the most provocative revision caused by the application of his

theology was the reconception of the role and position of the pharaoh himself.

Akhenaten, for instance, claimed that he was able to determine “what was in his [the

Aten’s] heart,” and that “there is none who knows you [the god] except your son

45 [Akhenaten] for you make him aware of your plans and your strength” (Teeter 2011:

187). On top of the brutality used to enforce the acceptance of this new theology, king

Akhenaten even predicated safe passage to the afterlife on whether or not his subjects

followed him. The changes that his application called for would amount to a virtual

revision of Egyptian culture going as deep as their symbolic reservoir.

Worship the king, unique like Aten, without another who is great except for him, and he

will give you a lifetime of tranquility with food and provisions which are his to give…

(Teeter 2011: 191).

Although Akhenaten’s theological “experiment” was, at least in his mind,

logically coherent within the theological discourse of the New Kingdom, the fierceness

with which he opposed the cult of Amun-Re, even chiseling away his appearance in

almost every monument throughout the country (Assmann 2001: 199), transgressed the

“normal envelope” of theological acceptability in the minds of most Egyptians. Neither

he nor his contemporaries understood themselves as being in a legitimately dialogical

debate (Assmann 2001: 201); rather they were both defenders of absolute truth, and

“realizers” of Maat. When Akhenaten ignored the cries of his allies, for example

Tushratta of Mitanni (Podany 2012: 236-242, 265-271), other Egyptians perceived his

actions as intrusions of Isfet into the land. Indeed, it appears as though there was some

kind of a rebellion, albeit poorly documented or understood by historians (Teeter 2011:

196). Even his son Tutankhaten, better known as Tutankamun (1336-1327), distanced

himself from the theology of his father by changing his name to reflect the traditional

worship of Amun-Re, abandoning the city that his father built, and even trying to remove

46 all memory of his father from Egyptian monuments by chiseling away his name (Van De

Mieroop 2011: 207).

Although Akhenaten’s reform was one of the loudest and most peculiar of the

period, since Nile inundation averages had only just begun to drop during the middle of

the fourteenth century, the only role that environmental forces seems to have played in

Egyptian religious history was the indirect role that they played in the rise to prominence

of Amun under Ahmose in the aftermath of the Thera eruption. It would be an intriguing

possibility, however, if Akhenaten’s rivals interpreted the progressive decrease of Nile

inundation levels in a manner similar to that of Ahmose’s reaction to the natural disasters

to which he refers; however, such a possibility would need to be proven rather than

assumed. At any rate, without the “solarization” of theological dialogue set in motion by

his predecessors, as well as the peaceful state of foreign relations that Egypt enjoyed

through the treaties brought about by his grandfather, “Akhenaten’s founding of a new

religion would scarcely have been possible” (Assmann 2001: 200).

C. Hatti: Boils and Sores, Gods and More Gods (1330-1250)

Before the reign of Šuppiluliuma I of Hatti (1344-1322), Hittite religion, royal

ideology, and cultic practices were more or less continuous with that of the Old Hittite

Kingdom (Taracha 2009: 88). However, during the reigns of Muwattalli II (1295-1272)

and Ḫattušili III (1267-1237), we see back-to-back deviations from Hittite religious

orthodoxy and orthopraxy. In 1327 Šuppiluliuma received cries for help from a young,

widowed queen in Egypt named Ankhesenamun, the half-sister and wife of

Tutankhamun, requesting a Hittite prince to marry her and become pharaoh, since the

47 former general Ay (1327-1323, also known as Kheperkheperura), recently stole the

throne by murdering her young husband (Bryce 2005: 182). Her chilling words tellingly

preserve the tremors in her plea, “My husband has died and I have no son. They say

about you that you have many sons. You might give me one of your sons to become my

husband. I would not wish to take one of my subjects as a husband... I am afraid.”

This bizarre situation could mean one of the greatest opportunities for his dynasty,

or any other in history –the throne of Egypt on a silver platter. After investigating the

matter and determining that this was no trick, he sent his son, prince Zannanza, who was

killed en route to Egypt, possibly by Horemheb’s (1323-1295) loyalists in southern Syria

(Van Dijk 2000: 292). The anguish with which Šuppiluliuma was filled sent him on a

campaign into southern Syria against Egypt to avenge his son, resulting in the

transportation of thousands of Egyptian P.O.W.’s back to Hatti (Bryce 2005: 183).

Unfortunately for Šuppiluliuma, his sons, and his subjects, the prisoners that he captured

brought a plague with them that devastated the population of the country for the next

twenty years (Bryce 2005: 183).

Around the time that Šuppiluliuma came to power (1350), the regional climate

had just begun to change (see Fig. 6 below). Precipitation rates began to plummet and the

landscape of the Anatolian plateau was ill-prepared for the change. The famine that

ensued made the Hittites realize, probably from the time of Ḫattušili III (1267-1237)

onwards, that they could not survive without heavily importing grain from Egypt, and

Canaan (Bryce 2005: 322). A parallel example of this scenario comes from Medieval

Europe from the Medieval Warm Period into the Little Ice Age, circa. 950-1350 C.E.

48

Figure 6: Proxy-Based Paleoclimate Series for the Last 5000 Years Kaniewski, et al., (2013a: 7, Fig. 5).

49 (Mann, et al. 2009: 1256–1260).23 In the case of both of these civilizations, the initially

favorable climate led to increases in crop yields and in turn to an unsustainable

population boom that was too great to sustain itself once the climate shifted.

In approximately 1350 B.C.E. for the Hittites, and 1250 C.E. for Medieval

Europeans, the climate began changing from a warm and wet one into a cool and dry one.

After that it did not take long for a great famine to loom large over both civilizations,

resulting in malnutrition and accordingly to increased susceptibility to disease.24 For the

Hittites, the plague infiltrated the country through Egyptian prisoners of war carrying the

virus (Bryce 2005: 183; Podany 2012: 301), whereas in Medieval Europe it was rodents

and fleas (Klapisch-Zuber 2000: 131). Just as in the face of death the Medieval

Europeans looked to the Church for relief, so too did the Hittites look to their king, who

together with their priests, were the intermediaries between them and the gods. In both

cases the social consequences were catastrophic, and long-lasting.

These were the conditions inherited by Muršili II (1321-1295). As noted in the

previous chapter, Anatolian kingship was legitimated by the king’s demonstration of parā

handandātar, or “divine justice” (Liverani 2014: 318-319). Additionally, the legitimacy

of the king was weighed against the more practical expressions of divine blessing, as they

perceived it: peace, or success in war, good precipitation levels for agriculture, and so on.

In the case of Muršili II, he not only struggled with the plague and the devastation it

caused to his subjects, but also the perception about the legitimacy of his dynasty. Before

23 The 1350 date given here extends the 100 years past the end of the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 1250 C.E.), and into the Little Ice Age to approximately the date of the outbreak of “Black Death” in Europe.

24 For the Hittites, see Kuhrt (1995: 254); For Medieval Europe, see Klapisch-Zuber (2000: 130).

50 his accession, his brother Arnuwanda assumed kingship for a very short time (1322-

1321), but he also succumbed to the plague and faced an early death (Bryce 2005: 190-

191). The back-to-back death of two Hittite kings was arguably the worst sign of divine

contempt possible in their worldview. The questions that the presence of these factors

raised about the strength and legitimacy of the dynasty spread far and wide leading to

“widespread enemy attacks” and internal rebellions as well (Bryce 2005: 191, 205).

During his first ten years in power, however, Muršili went to great lengths to

counter these negative perceptions by proving his worth as a king. His overall success in

passing on an orderly kingdom to his son Muwattalli II (1295-1272) is all the more

impressive considering not only the rebellions that he faced, but also the twenty year

plague that killed his father, brother, and thousands of his subjects (Bryce 2005: 205,

221). During his reign he prayed some of the most famous prayers in Hittite history

concerning everything from the plague and enemies that threatened the very existence of

the kingdom, to prayers for his wives and stepmother (see Singer 2002: 47-79). More

significantly, they preserve the seriousness with which the Hittite kings approached their

gods. Their level of acknowledgment concerning divine agency in events reveals that the

Hittites had no sense of flippancy concerning their theology (Bryce 2002: 145). This is

part of what made the reigns of Muwattalli II (1295-1272) and Ḫattušili III (1267-1237)

so remarkable.

Muršili II’s successor, Muwattalli II (1295-1272), is perhaps one of the best

known kings of Hatti for two reasons: 1) it was he that faced Ramses II (1279-1213) at

the Battle of Kadesh in 1274, and 2) he attempted to permanently relocate the Hittite

51 capital to Tarḫuntašša in Cilicia, effectively splitting the kingdom into northern and

southern partitions divided by the Taurus mountain range (Bryce 2005: 230-241; Liverani

2014: 307). He is also significant for the purposes of this study because of the deity that

he introduced, the Storm-God of Lightning –hitherto unknown in Hittite religious history.

His 290 line prayer is the longest and best preserved prayer from the period that scholars

possess (Singer 2002: 85-95), and the example that he set for theological promiscuity

carried into the reign of his son, Muršili III (Hawkins 2003: 169-175), known more

commonly as Urhi-Teššub (1272-1267), and also to his brother, uncle to Urhi-Teššub,

Ḫattušili III (1267-1237).

Following the death of his brother, Ḫattušili III (1267-1237) staged a coup d'état

against his nephew Urhi-Teššub in order to seize the throne (Bryce 2005: 265). Despite

the controversial circumstances of his accession, Ḫattušili had more interest in

dissociating his royal identity from that of his brother and nephew, and reestablishing

peace in the Near East rather than becoming involved in foreign conflict (Bryce 2005:

274). Among the distinctions that he made was the religious syncretism that he brought to

Hatti after his marriage to the Kizzuwatnean princess, Puduhepa. He assimilated the

Hurrian gods of his wife into the Hittite pantheon leading to what some call the

“Hurrianization” of Hittite religion. What followed included the adoption and

preservation of the Kumarbi Cycle (Liverani 2014: 324) that we know from its

constituent parts that have been recovered bit by bit since the initial publication of The

Song of Kumarbi, and the Song of Ullikummi in 1936 (Hoffner 1998: 40). The group of

myths that make up the Kumarbi Cycle include the Song of Kumarbi, the Song of the

52 God LAMMA, the Song of Silver, the Song of Hedammu, and the Song of Ullikummi in

that order (Hoffner 1998: 40-65). This cycle of myths describes how Teššub deposed the

grain deity Kumarbi and became king of the pantheon. Ḫattušili’s equation of the Hurrian

Teššub with the Hittite Storm-God (Karasu 2003: 225-227) lent cohesion to the religious

diversity of his country, and also departed from the theological sensibilities of his

ancestors against syncretism.25

From a broader perspective, the political benefits to Ḫattušili’s cultic syncretism

were engendered by the growing multiculturalism within the empire by both internal and

external forces. Depopulation of the native Hattic peoples from the central plateau

because of the plague and drought, and its subsequent repopulation by other groups like

the Luwians resulted in the further cultural diversification of the landscape. The

inclusivity with which Ḫattušili approached these persistent local cultural groups, as well

as the foreign cultures brought under his vassalage resulted in the “Thousand Gods of

Hatti” (Karasu 2003). The aggravating and persistent incursions of the Kaška from the

north, the growing influence of the Luwians “from Arzawa to Kizzuwatna, and of the

Hurrians from Kizzuwatna to Hanigalbat” and also Ḫattušili’s marriage to Puduhepa

more or less forced the Hittites to formalize their cultural unification on a state level,

although local populations were still allowed to worship their local deities (Liverani

2014: 324).

D. Ugarit: Land of the Vassals, Home of the Brave (1250-1100)

In coastal Syria, Baal’s accession to divine kingship was preserved in the Ugaritic

Baal Cycle and the deity lists of Ras Šamra. The authorship and dating of the tablets

25 See p. 30.

53 preserving the account is currently hotly debated among Semitic philologists, though the

current preferred date of composition among scholars is the late thirteenth century date

under Niqmadu III (Tugendhaft 2012b: 368, n. 8). In the narrative, Baal’s actions toward

Yam in the Baal Cycle echo the mid-fourteenth century historical encounter between

Niqmaddu II of Kadesh and king Aitakkama of Kadesh (Tugendhaft 2012a: 155).

Though already king of Ugarit, after the death of Šuppiluliuma I and his son Arnuwanda

in Hatti to the plague, the revolts and unrest that Muršili II faced provided Niqmaddu II

with an opportunity to kill off his rival and father, Aitakkama of Kadesh (Bryce 2005:

204). However, since the territory was under Hittite suzerainty, Niqmaddu needed to be

granted that office by Muršili II. In the Baal Cycle, just as Niqmaddu needed the

permission of Muršili II, so too did Baal need El’s permission to be king of the gods

(Tugendhaft 2012a: 155).

The questionable nature of Baal’s accession makes good sense in the geopolitical

world of the Syrian vassal kingdoms during the Late Bronze Age. This general

philosophy of “unsettling sovereignty” (from Tugendhaft 2012b) coheres well with the

emergence of Ugarit in the fourteenth century to its fall in the twelfth (López-Ruiz 2014:

7). Regardless of the date of its composition, however, the Baal Cycle contains

vocabulary and themes that are reflective of its vassal-suzerain relationship with Hatti

(Tugendhaft 2012a: 368). Specifically, though El explicates the official relationship

between Baal and Yam in hierarchical terms “Your vassal is Baal, O Yamm, Your vassal

is Baal, O Nahar,” the supposed “servant” in the vassal-suzerain relationship is said to

“stand up to (or possibly against?) El” (Tugendhaft 2012a: 373). Considering that Yam

54

Figure 7: The Climatic Roots of the ca. 1250–1100 BCE Late Bronze Collapse. Langgut, Finkelstein, and Litt (2013: 167, Fig. 5).

55

was actually the god chosen and installed by El to be king of the gods, the poet of the

Baal Cycle offers a counternarrative of the established order as Baal does not accept the

authority of Yam as the other gods do.

It can be of little coincidence that the climax of the three primary episodes in the

Baal Cycle (his battle with Yam, the theophany from Baal’s palace, and finally his battle

against Mot) is the arrival of his rains (Smith 2009: 57). Between approximately 1215–

1190 BCE, pollen-based proxies from Gibala-Tell Tweini (Ugarit’s southwestern border)

show signs of crop-failure in connection with the precipitation averages that started to

drop about one hundred years earlier (Kaniewski, et al., 2013a: 8-9). If the current dating

preference for the Ras Šamra tablets is correct (late 13th c. BCE), then Ilimalku the scribe

was incising the Baal Cycle as precipitation levels were falling, and crops were failing in

Syria (see Fig. 7 above). The Sea People would be on the march spelling trouble for

anyone in their path, and a message of impermanence of the present order, as in the Baal

Cycle, would resonate with the inhabitants of these landscapes of fear as the present order

of things threatened to draw to a close.

The implicit message of the Baal Cycle is that the stability, legitimacy, and

sovereignty of the vassal-suzerain relationship cannot simply be taken for granted.

Moreover, unlike other tales such as Enûma Eliš that proclaim the absolute security and

legitimacy of the new divine monarch, the Ugaritian poet “compels engagement with a

universe that lacks the comforts of order” (Tugendhaft 2012a: 383). Far from being just

another cookie-cutter, “diachronic” cosmogony chronicling “the transition from one

temporal epoch to another” like Enûma Eliš (Tugendhaft 2013: 196), the Baal Cycle is a

56 “synchronic” account offering a “critical reflection on the foundational claims of Late

Bronze Age political institutions by calling into question the hierarchical principle that

justifies them” (Tugendhaft 2013: 196; 2012a: 368-369). Hence could Baal oppose El’s

appointment of Yam and make a claim to the throne for himself.

E. Marduk: King of the People, King of the Gods (1125-1100)

When the Kassites stepped into power over Babylonia after the raid of Babylon

by Muršili I in 1595, they settled themselves in a problematic, demographically critical

situation in the southern plains. The administrative and economic differences between

their homeland in the Zagros mountains and the alluvial plains of Babylonia made one of

their primary focuses the maintenance of the theological status quo (Liverani 2014: 367).

Rather than risk revolt form their subjects by adding religious reform on top of their

foreign, corporate forms of production, they carefully acted as “kings of Babylonia, not

kings of Babylon” and preserved the local traditions (Nijhowne 1999: 37). Marduk,

though he would be the head of the pantheon by the end of the period, had already made

deep roots during the time of Hammurabi, and secured his place in the hearts of the

people during the rise of “personal religion” in Babylonia (Jacobsen 1976; Nijhowne

1999: 67-70).

On account of the general decline of irrigation systems and soil fertility in

southern Mesopotamia during the Late Bronze Age, as well as Babylon’s enduring legacy

from the Middle Bronze Age, it was the “only city hosting the royal court and

accommodating the flux of goods and activities linked to the palace” for the Kassite

dynasty (Liverani 2014: 366). Following the collapse of the palatial system in 1177

57 (Cline 2014), the dust had not yet settled in Mesopotamia. Babylon was still a hotly

contested jewel in the crown for any would-be Assyrian or Elamite monarch. The twelfth

century, then, was marked by intense competition over Babylonia by Middle-Assyrians,

Elamites and native Babylonians. Marduk’s roots are, of course, in Babylon and it was

the welfare and centrality of Babylon that was the deciding factor in his accession over

Enlil.

Marduk’s divine autonomy in Babylonian theology, however, made his departure

into Elam bearable because they saw it as an act of his own sovereign will. That Marduk

allowed the Elamites to take him out of his temple and into Susa indicated “displeasure

with his land” (Lambert 2013: 274). Moreover, during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar I

(1125-1104), the Marduk Prophecy provides a window into the living conditions within

southern Mesopotamia prior to his reign; it tells of the famine and political unrest

endured by the people that he (Nebuchadrezzar) believed was the result of Marduk and

the other gods having left Babylonia and gone into Elam (Oshima 2007: 351).

Additionally, the prophecy makes it clear that a prince is to arise that will flourish

Babylon as it once was in the deep memory of Mesopotamian tradition.

The watercourses will bring fish. Field and acreage will be full of yield. The winter crop

will last to the summer harvest, the summer crop till the winter. The harvest of the land

will be bountiful, market prices will be favorable (Foster 2005: 390-391).

Nebuchadrezzar is the “prince” foretold in this prophecy, and was allegedly

commanded by Marduk to both bring the cult statue back from Elam and become the

divinely appointed king of Babylon. More relevant to the present matter, however, the

environmental and demographic crisis that had overtaken Babylonia was understood by

58 Nebuchadrezzar to have been caused by Marduk when he “commanded that the gods of

the land forsake it” as recounted in The Seed of Kingship (Foster 2005: 378). It was

because of Marduk’s dissatisfaction in this case that even “remorseless plague penetrated

the cult centers” (Foster 2005: 378). In a similar way that some five hundred years

earlier Ahmose I of Egypt interpreted the negative environmental catastrophe that he

witnessed as a positive act of his own personal divine election, so too did Nebuchadrezzar

interpret the environmental and demographic crisis in Babylonia as the result of

Marduk’s will. Nebuchadrezzar, then, becomes the earthly consul of Marduk’s will just

as Ahmose was the representative of the will of Amun. Perhaps one of the main

differences between the two is that Ahmose’s descendants enjoyed a politically

unicentric and prosperous state after his death, while Nebuchadrezzar’s successors

continued to fight against regional destabilization and political polycentricity (Thompson

2007: 163).

F. Excursus: The Enigma of Hesiod, Homer, and Mycenaean Religion

Aegean sources for the Late Bronze Age are limited to the Linear A and B tablets

of Pylos, Thebes, Knossos, Mycenae, Tiryns and Khania, though only Linear B has been

deciphered (Rutherford, 2013: 257). Of the existing corpus, none of it can be classified as

truly mythological and hence able to be used to reconstruct their cultural cosmology.

Rather, what we have are inventories that document trade, or figurines at local shrines.

These inventories when paired with the artwork of the palace murals of Crete can

nonetheless provide some sense of the function of the king within the cultic system of

their societies. The oddity of the Homeric and Hesiodic sources from the Archaic Period,

59

Figure 8: Generations of Gods in the Greek and Near Eastern Sources López -Ruiz (2010: 88, Fig. 1).

circa 800 BC, however, is the continuity that they share with their Near Eastern

predecessors (López –Ruiz 2010: 84). The basic plot of Hesiod’s story follows that of

the Kumarbi Cycle, Enûma Eliš, and the Baal traditions (see Fig. 8 above). Hesiod and

his Hittite predecessors share the castration motif, while the Ugaritic and Babylonian

sources do not (López-Ruiz 2014: 2).

Since it is now known from mitochondrial DNA analysis that the Minoans were

in fact of Indo-European origin, (Hughey, Paschou, Drineas, et al., 2013), their cultural

similarities to other Indo-European groups of the Near East –especially the Greeks and

the Hittites– are more secure than previously thought. The Aḫḫiyawan (i.e. Achaean)

contacts with western Anatolia, including the presence of a “deity of the Aḫḫiyawa” and

a “deity of Lazpa” (or Lesbos) in the Hittite court (Rutherford 2013: 263, 270) also

60 establish the distinct possibility of contact with the Near Eastern scribal curriculum that

started in Mesopotamia and made its way to Hatti, where it then dispersed throughout the

rest of the region (Smith 2010: 44). This could also have been a possible mode of

transmission for Levantine succession motifs (López-Ruiz 2010: 128) to Greek speaking

Mycenaeans, though as far as can be told they would have stayed in the oral tradition

until their literary preservation during the Archaic Period.

What is not known, however, is to what extent the Greek myths that were

recorded in the eighth century (i.e. Homer and Hesiod) represent the theological and

cosmological outlooks of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Although there are certainly

good reasons to think so, such continuity “must be proven rather than assumed”

(Marinatos 2013: 241). All that aside, despite the apparent continuity in language and

deity worship into the Archaic Period (as seen in Homer and Hesiod), differences in

political structure and sanctuary architecture from the Late Helladic and the Archaic

Periods have made many scholars unwilling (for now?) to suggest that the religious

systems of the Mycenaeans and the classical Greeks were closely related (Rutherford

2013: 272 as opposed to Kearns 2013: 280).

61

V. Summary and Conclusion: New Dogs Learning Old Tricks

At the beginning of this study it was argued that the emergence of the reforms that

were the focus of this study were best explained as the result of a dynamic relationship

between regional climate change and the subsequent political, societal, and, ultimately,

religious opportunities and challenges that it generated. As demonstrated in the previous

chapter, the reformers themselves were all in different social or political concerns in

different places with different worldviews at different times. That so many theological

revisions took place in several parts of the Near East, especially after the climatic

downturn beginning circa 1350, it cannot be the case that cultural, ideological, and

political factors alone are sufficient to explain these changes, especially given their

similar outcomes. It cannot be a coincidence that as precipitation levels plummeted, new

storm-, and sky-deities became the head of every pantheon in the Near East. In places

that already had storm-, or sky-deities in their pantheons, why did they have to change?

What was so irremediably disconcerting about their continual reign among the gods that

resulted in them being deposed, and succeeded by younger deities? This author believes

that the ultimate culprits were factors external to each of the cultures and actors involved.

A. Proximate and Ultimate Causation in History and Religion

Based on the analysis in the previous chapter of how climate played no small role

in these societies and the dynamics at work behind their reforms, it could hardly be

argued that this was simple environmental determinism, and that “human creativity

62 counts for nothing, or that we humans are passive robots helplessly programmed by

climate, fauna, and flora” (Diamond 1997: 408). Rather, as teased out in chapter two,

perception of phenomenon plays a huge role in human responses to them. As we have

seen, to suggest that environmental forces create opportunities or challenges for human

ecosystems, or that they can affect social dynamics and processes, is not the same thing

as saying that environmental forces dictate the outcomes of historical events.

What was shown, however, was that as carrying capacities become threatened by

environmental constraints and challenges, royal legitimacy was often questioned since

these threats were interpreted as a an act of judgment for offenses to the gods. In addition

to the “physical residues of antecedent landscapes” (McIntosh, Tainter, and McIntosh

2000: 14) that are bequeathed to later generations, there are also cognitive residues that

they inherit as well, namely, from the culture’s social memory. In the case of Akhenaten,

for example, if the theological dialogue that he inherited had not already been “solarized”

in the accession of Amun under Ahmose, the reforms that he set into motion “would

scarcely have been possible” (Assmann 2001: 200). Rather, human action is informed by

human problem-solving systems, all of which are rooted in social memory.

As shown in the case of the Hittite reforms, their ecotheological categories of

thought existed in an ongoing, organic, and dialogical relationship with their environment

that eventually led to theological revision. The process of orientation-disorientation-

reorientation (Brueggemann 2002) that they experienced was, to be sure, experimental

and ultimately unsuccessful because for all their prayers, new cultic centers, and new

pantheons, the impending climate and geopolitical crisis was never averted. In the case

63 of all of these societies, the “chronological strata” of their reforms are detectable

primarily through their literature, but also through their seal impressions, artwork,

iconography, building projects and their architecture, as well as their evolving ritual

systems and festivals.

As we saw, most of the perceived imperatives for change were not

environmentally focused, and so most that have written about this topic have focused on

more proximate explanations for their occurrence. If these cases were isolated and

episodic, then proximate factors like culture, ideology, and political motivation would be

adequate to explain them. However, since they were not isolated, but instead systematic,

and even endemic to the Late Bronze Age across both geographic and cultural

boundaries, then there must have been external, causally prior, ultimate, longue durée

forces that contributed to their development. If the previous chapter is in any indication,

this is not a post hoc, linear, the-environment-determines-everything type of causation.

The contextual value of political and economic climate, as well as antecedent theological

developments provides excellent conjuncture- and histoire événementielle-levels of

explanation. They are just not, simply put, the full picture.

B. Landscapes of Fear: Religious Reform as a Response to a Changing World

Throughout this survey of religious reform at the end of the second millennium,

there were times when theological revision was not the result of environmental forces

affecting the reformers so much as one of their enemies, as in the case of Ahmose. This is

a helpful reminder that positive or negative environmental effects do not have to be

experienced by a reformer –that is, close to home– so much as they, or their effects, have

64 to be perceived by the reformer as a force that demands change. Religious reform can be,

in other words, the response to a perceived invitation to a brighter future (Ahmose,

possibly Šuppiluliuma I, and naïvely by Akhenaten and Nebuchadrezzar I), a reaction

prompted by fear (Muwattalli II or Hattushili III), or one of sober reflection on one’s

position in the world-order (as in Ugarit). In most of these cases, however, the reformers

believed that they were writing to acknowledge a new divine or even cosmic order of the

world, as reflected in the succession myths that were generated in the second half of the

period with the Hurrian versions likely appearing first.

Rather than appearing ex nihilo, these reforms had deeper cultural roots that

enabled the imagination for such daring acts of theological proclamation in the first place.

In the case of Nebuchadrezzar I (1125-1104) the declaration of Marduk’s supremacy over

Enlil in the Babylonian pantheon was already underway for hundreds of years at a

grassroots level in domain of personal religion (Jacobsen 1976; Nijhowne 1999: 67-70).

In the final years of the Hittite Empire, after Hattushili III’s (1267-1237) marriage to the

Kizzuwatnean princess, Puduhepa and the subsequent “Hurrianization” of Hittite

religion, he met little resistance to his reforms. The deeply practical, pragmatic,

functional, and expedient nature of Hittite theology would scarcely have allowed a major

theological act of revision without serious considerations before doing so (Bryce 2002:

145). Given the example of Muršili II’s (1321-1295) plague prayers, the Hittites certainly

took the prospect of offending the gods very seriously due to the agricultural fragility of

the Anatolian landscape.

65 The common thread of these reforms and their artistic representations in the

Succession Myths, particularly the ones following 1350 BCE and the consequent fall of

precipitation and Nile inundation levels that came with it, was the character of the deities

that became the focal point of state worship. In the cases of Muwattalli II’s Storm-God of

Lightning, Ḫattušili III’s Teššub, Ilimalku’s Baal-Hadad, Nebuchadrezzar I’s Marduk,

and Zeus for the Greeks, they all were told to have the power over rain, confronting the

issue of resource scarcity. Additionally, that they also were fierce warriors in the

heavenly realm bode well in their adherents for their earthly problems of national

defense. Moreover, it was not just that they had power over these forces; there were gods

that were prayed to prior to these for the same things. What made them different was that,

in the literature, they were the younger gods begotten by the great gods of old, from the

days of yore. All of these cultures feared the very real consequences of offending the

gods with false worship, so why take the risk?

C. The Language of Liturgy: Mythic Ideas and their Cross-Cultural Realization

Because language in the ritual sector is loaded with symbolic meaning that is

distinct from one culture to another, “the comparison of a particular myth with an

analogue in another mythological system cannot replace the interpretation of that myth

within its own system” (Mondi 1990: 144). It is of little significance that two or more

stories share common literary elements or storyboards, unless it is proven that the

parallels are significant both internally and externally to the stories themselves. If an

explanation of this type answers the “how” question, then the question of “why” would

66 only need to be answered. Why storm-, and sky-gods? Why this storyboard? Why these

elements? Why these motifs? The list could go on (see Fig. 8 above on p. 59).

I propose that the answer to the “why” questions are rooted in the common

realization of a “mythic idea” (Mondi 1990: 144; López-Ruiz 2014: 4) that had its roots

in the new modes of theological discourse wrought in the internationalism of the period.

Theological systems throughout the eastern Mediterranean were not confronted with the

legitimacy of other gods over and against their own until this period. Indeed, both

Egyptians and Mesopotamians regarded outsiders as suspicious –the inhabitants on the

fringes of cosmic chaos. Once environmental conditions worsened beginning circa 1350,

and things did not appear as though they were going to get better, it would appear as

though they believed that their previous gods were “old hat” and that their progeny were,

in effect, new dogs learning old tricks. That is, what their old gods once had power over

their successors now controlled. For example, Amun-Re absorbed the powers of most

other gods, and Marduk displayed many of Enlil’s warrior characteristics and powers

over storm.

D. Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Study

As mentioned in the first chapter of this study, the amount of research concerning

nearly every aspect of this thesis has already taken place in other studies that are deep,

painstaking, and refined. The brevity given these topics in this thesis, as such, can only be

regarded as preliminary as they could all be expanded in much greater detail. The

distinguishing feature of this study was the application of longue durée forces of

environmental change to conjuncture level theological speculation and social dynamics,

67 and their subsequent expressions in the literary strata of social memory. Ideally, future

studies of this topic will further develop, nuance, and expand the initial work that has

been done in this study.

68

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