Near Eastern Mythology [antikvár]

Mesopotamia:Historical Geography'History', it has been said, 'begins at Sumer'. This is perhaps a somewhat misleading statement in view of the contemporary and independent civilisations in Egypt and the Indus Valley, to say nothing of the basic achievements of earlier agricultural communities three or four millennia before the Sumerian setdement in south Mesopotamia. But it rightly emphasises the main impetus to man's understanding of his environment and co-operation for its control in Mesopotamia.The SumeriansThere, where the capricious floods of the Tigris and Euphrates deposited their enormous load of silt owing to the natural filter of the extensive marshes, the rich alluvial plain lay at the mercy of baking sun and flood waters. It awaited masters with the political organisation to irrigate and to drain, to bring Order out of watery Chaos. This antithesis can still be seen today in the curious amphibious world of the marshes of southern Mesopotamia, where man still wins land from water, often with his naked hands. This immemorial struggle, we shall find, is the theme of the liturgy of the New Year festival in Babylonia and Assyria. The periodic great flood is as real a tradition in modern times as among the ancient Sumerians, who regarded the legendary flood as the 'great divide' between history and pre-history. For them the earliest period was punctuated not by individual reigns, but by dynasties, their founders and their most conspicuous rulers. As a result, the Sumerian king-lists give the impression of patriarchs in comparison with whom Methuselah was a mere youth.Here in the south we find the first articulate evidence of man's relation with his environment in Sumerian mythology. Towards the middle of the fourth millennium b.c. men evolved writing with a sharp stylus on damp clay. They used simple pictorial signs, which were at first stylised to express words and then developed to spell out the combinations of consonants and primary vowels as syllables. This development was a by-product of the growth of communities round temples, divine estates in fact, where accounts were meticulously kept. In such communities, where both the inhabitants and the natural resources of the divine estate were organised to form city states, men first strove towards a systematic understanding of their environment.It is too early even in the third millennium b.c. to expect detached philosophy. The ancient Mesopota-mian was too much involved in his environment. Eventually in a more humanistic age, which is beyond the scope of this study, he was capable of observing and classifying natural phenomena, although he never displayed complete objectivity, because in his classification he had the practical purpose of adjusting society more harmoniously to the larger environment in which it was involved. In the myths that we shall study there is some tendency towards a scientific approach, but the dramaric representation betrays emotional involvement which is not scientific. In Near Eastern mythology there are many elements which contradict logic, particularly where the myths reflect time-honoured cult practices which were not always understood in the myths as they eventually crystalised