Fields of Blood (6 page)

Gilgamesh’s mother blames his “restless heart” for this harebrained project.
⁴⁶
A leisured class has a lot of time on its hands; collecting rents and supervising the irrigation system is tame work for a species bred to be intrepid hunters. The poem indicates that already young men were chafing against the triviality of civilian life that, as
Chris Hedges explained, would lead so many of them to seek meaning on the battlefield.
⁴⁷

The outcome was tragic. There is always a moment in warfare when the horrifying reality breaks through the glamour. Humbaba turns out to be a very reasonable monster, who pleads for his life and offers Gilgamesh and Enkidu all the wood they want, but still they hack him brutally to pieces. Afterward a gentle rain falls from heaven, as though nature itself grieves for this pointless death.
⁴⁸
The gods show their displeasure with the expedition by striking Enkidu down with a fatal illness, and Gilgamesh is forced to come to terms with his own mortality. Unable to assimilate the consequences of warfare, he turns his back on civilization,
roaming unshaven through the wilderness and even descending into the underworld to find an antidote to death. Finally, weary but resigned, he is forced to accept the limitations of his humanity and return to
Uruk. On reaching the suburbs, he draws his companion’s attention to the great wall surrounding the city: “Observe the land it encloses, the palm trees, the gardens, the orchards, the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and market-places, the houses, the public squares.”
⁴⁹
He personally will die, but he will achieve an immortality of sorts by cultivating the civilized arts and pleasures that are enabling humans to explore new dimensions of existence.

Gilgamesh’s famous wall was now essential for the survival of Uruk, though, because after centuries of peaceful cooperation, the
Sumerian city-states had begun to fight one another. What caused this tragic development?

Not everybody in the
Middle East aspired to civilization: nomadic
herdsmen preferred to roam freely in the mountains with their livestock. They had once been part of the agricultural community, living at the edge of the farmland so that their sheep and cattle did not damage the crops. But gradually they moved farther and farther away until they finally abandoned the constraints of settled life and took to the open road.
⁵⁰
The pastoralists of the Middle East had probably become an entirely separate community as early as 6000 BCE, though they continued to
trade their hides and milk products with the cities in return for grain.
⁵¹
They soon discovered that the easiest way to replace lost animals was to steal the cattle of nearby villages and rival tribes. Fighting, therefore, became essential to the pastoralist economy. Once they domesticated the horse and acquired wheeled vehicles, these herdsmen spread all over the Inner Asian Plateau, and by the early third millennium, some had reached
China.
⁵²
By this time they were formidable warriors, equipped with bronze weaponry, war chariots, and the deadly composite bow, which could shoot with devastating accuracy at long range.
⁵³

The pastoralists who settled in the
Caucasian steppes of southern
Russia in about 4500 BCE shared a common culture. They called themselves Arya (“noble; honorable”), but we know them as
Indo-Europeans because their language became the basis of several Asiatic and European tongues.
⁵⁴
In about 2500 BCE some of the
Aryans left the steppes and
conquered large areas of Asia and Europe, becoming the ancestors of the
Hittites,
Celts,
Greeks,
Romans, Germans,
Scandinavians, and
Anglo-Saxons we shall meet later in our story. Meanwhile, those tribes who had remained in the Caucasus drifted apart. They continued to live side by side—not always amicably—speaking different dialects of the proto-Indo-European tongue until about 1500 BCE, when they too migrated from the steppes, the
Avestan speakers settling in what is now
Iran and the
Sanskrit speakers colonizing the
Indian subcontinent.

Aryans saw the warrior’s life as infinitely superior to the tedium and steady industry of agrarian existence. The Roman historian
Tacitus (c. 55–120 CE) would later note that the German tribes he encountered far preferred “to challenge the enemy and earn the honour of wounds” to the drudgery of ploughing and the tedium of waiting for the crops to appear: “Nay, they actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”
⁵⁵
Like urban aristocrats, they too despised labor, saw it as a mark of inferiority, and incompatible with the “noble” life.
⁵⁶
Moreover, they knew that the cosmic order (
rita
) was possible only because chaos was kept in check by the great gods (
devas
)
^a
—
Mithra,
Varuna, and
Mazda—who compelled the seasons to rotate regularly, kept the heavenly bodies in their proper places, and made the earth habitable. Human beings too could live together in an orderly, productive way only if they were forced to sacrifice their own interests to those of the group.

Violence and coercion therefore lay at the heart of social existence, and in most ancient cultures this truth was expressed in the ritualized bloodshed of animal sacrifice. Like the prehistoric hunters, Aryans had absorbed the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other beings. They expressed this conviction in the mythical story of a king who altruistically allows himself to be slain by his brother, a priest, and thus brings the ordered world into being.
⁵⁷
A myth is never simply the story of an historical event; rather, it expresses a timeless truth underlying a people’s daily existence. A myth is always about
now.
The Aryans reenacted the tale of the sacrificed king every day by ritually slaying an animal to remind themselves of the sacrifice demanded of every single warrior, who daily put his life at risk for his people.

It has been argued that Aryan society was originally peaceful and did
not resort to aggressive raiding until the end of the second millennium.
⁵⁸
But other scholars note that weapons and warriors figure in the very earliest texts.
⁵⁹
The mythical stories of the Aryan war gods—
Indra in India,
Verethragna in
Persia,
Hercules in Greece, and
Thor in
Scandinavia—follow a similar pattern, so this martial ideal must have developed in the steppes before the tribes went their different ways. It was based on the hero
Trito, who conducts the very first cattle raid against the three-headed Serpent, one of the indigenous inhabitants of a land recently conquered by the Aryans. Serpent had the temerity to steal the Aryans’ cattle. Not only does Trito kill him and recover the livestock, but this raid becomes a cosmic battle that, like the death of the sacrificed king, restores the cosmic order.
⁶⁰

Aryan religion, therefore, gave supreme sanction to what was essentially organized violence and theft. Every time they set out on a raid, warriors drank a ritual draft of the intoxicating liquor pressed from soma, a sacred plant that filled them with frenzied rapture, just as Trito did before pursuing Serpent; they thus felt at one with their hero. The Trito myth implied that all cattle, the measure of wealth in
pastoral society, belonged to the Aryans and that other peoples had no right to these resources. The Trito story has been called “the
imperialist’s myth par excellence” because it provided sacred justification for the
Indo-European military campaigns in Europe and Asia.
⁶¹
The figure of Serpent presented those native peoples who dared to resist the Aryan onslaught as inhuman, misshapen monsters. But cattle and wealth were not the only prizes worth fighting for: like
Gilgamesh, Aryans would always also seek honor, glory, prestige, and posthumous fame in battle.
⁶²
People rarely go to war for one reason only; rather, they are driven by interlocking motivations—material, social, and ideological. In
Homer’s
Iliad,
when the
Trojan warrior
Sarpedon urges his friend
Glaukos to make a highly dangerous assault on the Greek camp, he quite unselfconsciously lists all the material perks of a heroic reputation—special seating, the best cuts of meat, booty, and “a great piece of land”—as an integral part of a warrior’s nobility.
⁶³
It is significant that the English words
value
and
valor
both have a common Indo-European root, as do
virtue
and
virility.

But while Aryan religion glorified warfare, it also acknowledged that this violence was problematic. Any military campaign involves activities that would be abhorrent and unethical in civilian life.
⁶⁴
In Aryan mythology, therefore, the war god is often called a “sinner” because a soldier is
forced to act in a way that calls his integrity into question. The warrior always carries a taint.
⁶⁵
Even
Achilles, one of the greatest Aryan warriors, does not escape this stain. Here is Homer’s description of the
aristeia
(“triumphal rampage”) in which Achilles frenziedly slaughters one Trojan soldier after another:

Achilles has become an inhuman force of purely destructive power. Homer compares him to a thresher crushing barley on the threshing floor, but instead of producing nourishing food, he is “trampling alike dead men and shields” as if the two were indistinguishable, his “invincible hands … spattered with bloody filth.”
⁶⁷
Warriors would never attain the first rank in
Indo-European society.
⁶⁸
They always had to struggle “to be the best” (Greek:
aristos
); yet they were still relegated below the priests to the second class. Herdsmen could not survive without raiding; their violence was essential to the pastoralist economy, but the hero’s aggression often repelled the very people who revered him.
⁶⁹

The
Iliad
is certainly not an antiwar poem, but at the same time as it celebrates the feats of its heroes, it reminds us of the tragedy of war. As in the
Epic of
Gilgamesh,
the sorrow of mortality sometimes breaks through the excitement and idealism. The third person to be killed in the poem is the Trojan
Simoeisios, a beautiful young man who, Homer says, should have known the tenderness of family life but is beaten down by the Greek warrior
Ajax:

In the
Odyssey,
Homer goes even further, undermining the entire aristocratic ideal. When Odysseus visits the underworld, he is horrified by the swarming crowds of gibbering dead, whose humanity has so obscenely degenerated. Coming upon the disconsolate shade of
Achilles, he tries to console him: Was he not honored like a god before he died, and does he not now rule the dead? But Achilles will have none of it. “Don’t gloss over death to me in order to console me,” he replies. “I would rather be above the ground still and labouring for some poor peasant man than be the lord over the lifeless dead.”
⁷¹