Intellectual History and Assyriology

doi 10.1515/janeh-2013-0006 JANEH 2014; 1(1): 21–36 Niek Veldhuis* Intellectual History and Assyriology Abstract: The present article proposes to understand knowledge and knowledge traditions of ancient Mesopotamia as assets, deployed by actors in the social contexts in which they found themselves. This approach is illustrated with three examples from different periods of Mesopotamian history. Keywords: intellectual history, ancient Mesopotamia, sociology of knowledge *Corresponding author: Niek Veldhuis, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, E-mail: [email protected] The idea of an intellectual history, a history of knowledge, or a history of scholarship bears the mark of the Enlightenment. The optimism of scholars and scientists of the time that the world could be known, that it obeyed impersonal laws, which could be discovered, one by one, created many aspects of the concept of knowledge that we take for granted today: knowledge grows perpetually by the discoveries of scholars and scientists who are acknowledged in awards, citations, and footnotes. The object of their research is typically, nature – that is, anything not made by men and that behaves in a regular, almost mechanistic way and that is objectively available to perception. Since this knowledge is like a rolling train that inevitably runs its course to uncover more and more truths, the question of the history of this knowledge becomes inevitable. Where did it come from, whom should we acknowledge for all those things that have been known for a long time, how did the train get here, and where are we now? Such questions may easily be extended to ancient Mesopotamia, tracing the development of astronomy out of divination, linguistics out of lexicography, or (rational) medicine out of magic. In this contribution, I will argue that it may be more fruitful to think about knowledge as a commodity that is used by actors in navigating their particular social context. Knowledge is not a more or less independent thing that moves through history and evolves from one stage to the next. Knowledge is a tool for defining one’s place in society; its validity and usefulness are inextricably linked to social structure and to the place within that structure where knowledge is produced. 22 N. Veldhuis It is important to contextualize ourselves and to situate the questions that we ask, because, as one may notice, none of the characteristics by which I described modern scientific knowledge are applicable to ancient Mesopotamia. The knowledge of the ancient Mesopotamian scholar was, once and for all, revealed to humans by the gods. Knowledge was not expected to grow, and new discoveries were not attributed to named scholars.1 The task of the scholar was to guard, transmit, and explicate the knowledge that he received and to preserve it for a next generation.2 There was no concept of “nature” in the sense of a predictable universe that follows an impersonal regularity. If there was any history to knowledge, it was a history of decay, indexed by the dreaded he-pí (broken), indicating damage in the original manuscript that the scholar had in front of him. Such an approach to knowledge is by no means extraordinary. In the European Middle Ages and well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was quite common to see the decay of human knowledge as a result of the original sin of Adam and Eve. The task of the scholar of the time was to recover or restore original knowledge and to explain it properly. Both understandings of knowledge, the modern one and the ancient one, are mythologies that serve to support a certain way of producing and maintain- ing valid knowledge. As mythologies go, they simultaneously reveal and hide the actual historical forces behind the transmission, production, dissemination, and display of knowledge. Thinking about knowledge and progress has not stopped with the Enlightenment, and more recent discussions, in particular by such French sociologists and philosophers as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruno Latour, have been much less optimistic and triumphalist, emphasiz- ing the embeddedness of knowledge production in the structure of society and in the needs and interests of the individuals and institutions that take part in the process.3 The knowledge that is developed at our universities, multinational companies, and military establishments follows rules and adheres to plausibility structures that answer to the concerns of our times. When our society changes history changes, too. Our task, today, when it comes to the intellectual history of Babylonia and Assyria, is to understand the social, economic, and ideological contexts in which it was possible for ancient 1 The volume of recent discussions around the figure of the Middle Babylonian scholar Esagil- kin-apli and the question of the historical reality of the achievements ascribed to him in much later texts may be analyzed as one example of the projection of a modern scholarly concern (namely credit) onto ancient history. See Heeßel (2010, 2011); Frahm (2011: 324–32); and Rutz (2011); all with previous literature. 2 Various aspects of this guardianship are discussed by Lenzi (2008); and Cavigneaux and Jaques (2010), both with further literature. 3 Foucault (1982); Bourdieu (1977); Latour (1987). Intellectual History and Assyriology 23 scholars to do their work. This perspective on intellectual history is freeing us from many of the unfruitful questions and anachronistic assumptions that are required by more genealogical or evolutionist approaches to the subject and it opens up much more interesting questions than a “history of ideas” approach could ever do. We no longer need to distinguish between science and pseudo- science, between medicine and magic (or medicine and religion, for that matter). We can describe diviners as scholars, without feeling the urge to ascribe to them an empiricism that requires some concept of nature. We can understand Old Babylonian mathematics as being based on cut-and-paste geometry, without the need to reconstruct a number theory – and thus we can do away with the very anachronistic and uncomfortable idea of a Pythagorean Theorem.4 And we can broaden our inquiry into realms of writing, alchemy, and linguistic speculation that would hardly fit any modern category of valid knowledge. I will discuss here three examples of what such an approach to intellectual culture might look like. The three examples refer to the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium) in southern Mesopotamia, the scribes of Hattušainthe Anatolian Late Bronze Age (late second millennium), and the prebendary priests of the Late Babylonian period in southern Mesopotamia again (late first millennium). I will discuss these in reverse order, and thus I will start with the prebendary priests. 1 The prebendary priests of late Babylonian Uruk The surge in Neo-Babylonian studies that started somewhere in the early 1990s has yielded a remarkably detailed picture of the place and function of prebendary priests in southern Mesopotamian cities like Babylon, Borsippa, and Uruk in the final centuries of ancient Mesopotamian history, that is, from the sixth century BC to the first century AD. These priests took part in the daily care of the city god by preparing his or her food, drink, and clothing and by performing the rituals and the entertainment that the god needed. In return they received remuneration from the temple coffers. The task of the prebendary priest was located between religion5 and politics and we may see the families of prebendary priests at a pivotal place between the city, the god (and the cosmic order that the deity represented), and the king. The king, after all, was the ultimate provider for the gods and no prebendary priest was appointed without the 4 See Robson (2001) with previous literature. 5 The concept religion is not less problematic and anachronistic than that of Pythagoras’ Theorem. That discussion is beyond the scope of this article; the reader is referred to the succinct treatment of the matter in Nongbri (2013). 24 N. Veldhuis king’s consent. By running the city temple with its large holdings of land, slaves, and animals, the prebendary priests played an important role in the economy of the time. They were bound to rules of purity: purity of descent, physical purity, purity of marriage, purity of moral behavior, and purity of the products that they prepared for the god. Those rules of purity allowed them to keep a tight lid on their ranks. Only certain elite families were allowed to enter the priesthood.6 Michael Jursa (2013) has argued recently that the prebendary priests were not the top-earners of the period. They belonged to the elite, but their wealth paled in comparison to that of merchant families such as the Egibis. They derived their power and influence not so much from wealth, but rather from their connections to god, city, and king. As Caroline Waerzeggers has shown (2003), the fate of prebendary families was inextricably connected to larger political developments and those families that fell out of favor may suddenly disappear from the archival record. It is in this tightly knit social environment that the maintenance of the cuneiform tradition is found. We know of brewers of Enlil at the Ekur temple in Nippur who wrote very complex commentaries to medical texts and to the learned sign list Aa.7 Families of so-called temple enterers and lamentation singers at Uruk assembled large collections of cuneiform scholarly material.8 The traditional cuneiform texts of the period, the divination compendia, the lexical lists, the Gilgameš epic, and the medical texts thus served to support the claims of these elite families to their central position in society. Some of these same families engaged in the new mathematical astronomy.9 All studies of cuneiform intellectual history have to contend with the issue of preservation.

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