Fields of Blood (5 page)

This elaborate system was not simply a disingenuous justification of the structural violence of the state but was primarily an attempt to invest this audacious and problematic human experiment with meaning. The city was humanity’s greatest artifact: artificial, vulnerable, and dependent on institutionalized coercion. Civilization demands sacrifice, and the Sumerians had to convince themselves that the price they were exacting from the peasantry was necessary and ultimately worth it. In claiming that their inequitable system was in tune with the fundamental laws of the cosmos, the Sumerians were therefore expressing an inexorable political reality in mythical terms.

It seemed like an iron law because no society ever found an alternative. By the end of the fifteenth century CE,
agrarian civilizations would be established in the
Middle East, South and East Asia,
North Africa, and Europe, and in every one—whether in
India,
Russia,
Turkey,
Mongolia, the
Levant,
China, Greece, or
Scandinavia—aristocrats would exploit their peasants as the Sumerians did. Without the coercion of the ruling class, it would have been impossible to force peasants to produce an economic surplus, because population growth would have kept pace with advances in productivity. Unpalatable as this may seem, by forcing the masses to live at subsistence level, the
aristocracy kept population growth in check and made human progress feasible. Had their surplus not been taken from the peasants, there would have been no economic resource to support the technicians, scientists, inventors, artists, and philosophers who eventually brought our modern civilization into being.
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As the American
Trappist monk
Thomas Merton pointed out, all of us who have benefited from this systemic violence are implicated in the suffering inflicted for over five thousand years on the vast majority of men
and women.
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Or as the philosopher
Walter Benjamin put it: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
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Agrarian rulers saw the state as their private property and felt free to exploit it for their own enrichment. There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that they felt any responsibility for their peasants.
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As
Gilgamesh’s people complain in the
Epic:
“The city is his possession.… He is king, he does whatever he wants.” Yet Sumerian religion did not entirely endorse this inequity. When the gods hear these anguished complaints, they exclaim to Anu: “Gilgamesh, noble as he is, splendid as he is, has exceeded all bounds. The people suffer from his tyranny.… Is this how you want your king to rule? Should a shepherd savage his own flock?”
²⁶
Anu shakes his head but cannot change the system.

The narrative poem
Atrahasis
(c. 1700 BCE) is set in the mythical period when the deities were still living in
Mesopotamia and “gods instead of man did the work” on which civilization depends. The poet explains that the
Anunnaki, the divine aristocracy, have forced the Igigi, the lower gods, to carry too great a load: for three thousand years they have plowed and harvested the fields and dug the irrigation canals—they even had to excavate the riverbeds of the Tigris and Euphrates. “Night and day, they groaned and blamed each other,” but the Anunnaki take no heed.
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Finally an angry mob gathers outside Enlil’s palace. “Every single one of us gods has declared war. We have put a stop to the digging!” they cry. “The load is excessive. It is killing us!”
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Enki, minister of agriculture, agrees. The system is cruel and unsustainable, and the Anunnaki are wrong to ignore the
Igigis’ plight: “Their work was too hard, their trouble too much! Every day the earth resounded. The warning signal was loud enough!”
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But if nobody does any productive work, civilization will collapse, so Enki orders the
Mother Goddess to create human beings to take the Igigis’ place. For the plight of their human laborers too, the gods feel no responsibility. The toiling masses are not allowed to impinge on their privileged existence, so when humans become so numerous that their noise keeps their divine masters awake, the gods simply decide to cull the population with a plague. The poet graphically depicts their suffering:

Yet again aristocratic cruelty does not go uncriticized. Enki, whom the poet calls “far sighted,” bravely defies his fellow gods, reminding them that their lives depend on their human
slaves.
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The
Anunnaki grudgingly agree to spare them and withdraw to the peace and quiet of heaven. This was a mythical expression of a harsh social reality: the gulf separating the nobility from the peasants had become so great that they effectively occupied different worlds.

The
Atrahasis
may have been intended for public recitation, and the story seems also to have been preserved orally.
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Fragments of the text have been found spanning a thousand years, so it seems that this tale was widely known.
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Thus writing, originally invented to serve the structural violence of Sumer, began to record the disquiet of the more thoughtful members of the ruling class, who could find no solution to civilization’s dilemma but tried at least to look squarely at the problem. We shall see that others—prophets, sages, and mystics—would also raise their voices in protest and try to devise a more equitable way for human beings to live together.

The
Epic of Gilgamesh,
set toward the mid-third millennium, when Sumer was militarizing, presents martial violence as the hallmark of civilization.
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When the people beg the gods for help, Anu attempts to alleviate their suffering by giving Gilgamesh someone of his own size to fight with and siphon off some of his excessive aggression. So the
Mother Goddess creates Enkidu, primeval man. He is huge, hairy, and has prodigious strength but is a gentle, kindly soul, wandering happily with the herbivores and protecting them from predators. But to fulfill Anu’s plan, Enkidu has to make the transition from peaceable
barbarian to aggressive civilized man. The priestess
Shamhat is given the task of educating him, and under her tutelage, Enkidu learns to reason, understand speech, and eat human food; his hair is cut, sweet oil is rubbed into his skin, and finally “he turned into a man. He put on a garment, became like a warrior.
”
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Civilized man was essentially a man of war, full of testosterone. When Shamhat mentions Gilgamesh’s military prowess, Enkidu becomes pale with anger. “Take me to Gilgamesh!” he cries, pounding his chest. “I will shout in his face: I am the mightiest! I am the man who can make the world tremble! I am supreme!”
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No sooner do these two alpha males set eyes on each other than they begin wrestling, careening through the streets of
Uruk, thrashing limbs entwined in a near-erotic embrace, until finally, satiated, they “kissed each other and formed a friendship.”
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By this period, the Mesopotamian aristocracy had begun to supplement its income with warfare, so in the very next episode Gilgamesh announces that he is about to lead a military expedition of fifty men to the Cedar Forest, guarded by the fearsome dragon
Humbaba, to bring this precious wood back to Sumer. It was probably by such acquisition raids that the Mesopotamian cities came to dominate the northern highlands, which were rich in the luxury goods favored by the aristocracy.
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Merchants had long been dispatched to
Afghanistan, the
Indus Valley, and
Turkey to bring back timber, rare and base metals, and precious and semiprecious stones.
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But for an aristocrat like Gilgamesh, the only noble way to acquire these scarce resources was by force. In all future agrarian states, aristocrats would be distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.
⁴⁰
The cultural historian
Thorstein Veblen has explained that in such societies, “labor comes to be associated … with weakness and subjection.” Work, even
trade, was not only “disreputable … but
morally
impossible to the noble freeborn man.” Because an aristocrat owed his privilege to the forcible expropriation of the peasants’ surplus, “the obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy.”
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For Gilgamesh, therefore, the organized theft of warfare is not only noble but moral, undertaken not just for his personal enrichment but for the benefit of humanity. “Now we must travel to the Cedar Forest, where the fierce monster Humbaba lives,” he announces self-importantly: “We must kill him and drive out evil from the world.”
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For the warrior, the enemy is always monstrous, the antithesis of everything good. But significantly, the poet refuses to give this military expedition any religious or ethical sanction. The gods are solidly against it. Enlil has specifically appointed Humbaba to guard the forest against any such predatory attack; Gilgamesh’s mother, the goddess
Ninsun, is horrified by the plan and at first blames
Shamash, the sun god and Gilgamesh’s patron, for
planting this appalling idea in her son’s mind. When questioned, however, Shamash seems to know nothing about it.

Even Enkidu initially opposes the war. Humbaba, he argues, is not evil; he is doing an ecologically sound task for Enlil and being frightening is part of his job description. But Gilgamesh is blinded by the aristocratic code of honor.
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“Why, dear friend, do you speak like a coward?” he taunts Enkidu: “If I die in the forest on this great adventure, won’t you be ashamed when people say, ‘Gilgamesh met a hero’s death battling the monster Humbaba. And where was Enkidu? He was safe at home!’ ”
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It is not the gods nor even simply greed but pride, an obsession with martial glory and the desire for a posthumous reputation for courage and daring, that drives Gilgamesh to battle. “We are mortal men,” he reminds Enkidu: