Sumerian Economics
Public secret: everyone knows but no one speaks. Another kind of public secret: the fact is published but no one pays attention.
A cuneiform tablet called The Sumerian King List states that "kingship first descended from heaven in the city of Eridu," in the south of Sumer. Mesopotamians believed Eridu the oldest city in the world, and modern archaeology confirms the myth. Eridu was founded about 5000 BC and disappeared under the sand around the time of Christ.
Eridu's god Ea or Enki (a kind of Neptune and Hermes combined) had a ziggurat where fish were sacrificed. He owned the ME, the fifty-one principles of Civilization. The first king, named "Staghorn," probably ruled as Enki's high priest. After some centuries came the Flood, and kingship had to descend from heaven again, this time in Uruk and Ur. Gilgamesh now appears on the list. The flood actually occurred; Sir Leonard Wooley saw the thick layer of silt at Ur between two inhabited strata.
Bishop Ushher once calculated according to the Bible that the world was created on October 19th 4004 BC at 9 o'clock in the morning. This makes no Darwinian sense, but provides a good date for the founding of the Sumerian state, which certainly created a new world. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees; Genesis owes much to the Enuma Elish (Mesopotamian Creation Myth). Our only text is late Babylonian but obviously based in a lost Sumerian original. Marduk the wargod of Babylon has apparently been pasted over a series of earlier figures beginning with Enki.
Before the creation of the world as we know it a family of deities held sway. Chief among them at the time, Tiamat (a typical avatar of the universal Neolithic earth goddess) described by the text as a dragon or serpent, rules a brood of monsters and dallies with her "Consort" (high priest) Kingu, an effeminate Tammuz/Adonis prototype. The youngest gods are dissatisfied with her reign; they are "noisy," and Tiamat (the text claims) wants to destroy them because their noise disturbs her slothful slumber. In truth the young gods are simply fed up with doing all the shitwork themselves because there are no "humans" yet. The gods want Progress. They elect Marduk their king and declare war on Tiamat.
A gruesome battle ensues. Marduk triumphs. He kills Tiamut and slices her body lengthwise in two. He separates the halves with a mighty ripping heave. One half becomes sky above, the other earth below.
Then he kills Kingu and chops his body up into gobs and gobbets. The gods mix the bloody mess with mud and mold little figurines. Thus humans are created as robots for the gods. The poem ends with a triumphalist paean to Marduk, the new king of heaven.
Clearly the Neolithic is over. City-god, war-god, metal-god, vs. country-goddess, lazy goddess, garden goddess. The creation of the world equals the creation of civilization, separation, hierarchy, masters and slaves, above and below. Ziggurat and pyramid symbolizes the new shape of life.
Combining Enuma elish and the King List we get an explosive secret document about the origin of civilization not as gradual evolution towards inevitable future, but as violent coup, conspiratorial overthrow of primordial rough-egalitarian Stone Age society by a crew of black magic cult cannibals. (Human sacrifice first appears in the archaeological record at Ur III. Similar grisly phenomena in the first few Egyptian dynasties.)
About 3100 writing was invented at Uruk. Apparently you can witness the moment in the strata: one layer no writing, next layer writing. Of course writing has a prehistory (like the State). From ancient times a system of accounting had grown up based on little clay counters in the shapes of commodities (hides, jars of oil, bars of metal, etc.) Also glyptic seals had been invented with images used heraldically to designate the seals' owners. Counters and seals were pressed into slabs of wet clay and the records were held in Temple archives-probably records of debts owed to the Temple. (In the Neolithic Age the temples no doubt served as redistribution centers. In the Bronze Age they began to function as banks.)
As I picture the invention of real writing took place within a singly brilliant family of temple archivists over three or four generations, say a century. The counters were discarded and a reed stylus was used to impress signs in clay, based on the shapes of the old counters, and with further pictograms imitated from the seals. Numbering was easily compacted from rows of counters to number-signs. The real break-through came with the flash that certain pictographs could be used for their sound divorced from their meaning and recombined to "spell" other words (especially abstractions). Integrating the two systems proved cumbersome, but maybe the sly scribes considered this an advantage. Writing needed to be difficult because it was a mystery revealed by gods and a monopoly of the New Class of scribes. Aristocrats rarely learned to read and write -- a matter for mere bureaucrats. But writing provided the key to state expansion by separating sound from meaning, speaker from hearer, and sight from other senses. Writing as separation both mirrors and reinforces separation as "written," as fate. Action-at-a-distance (including distance of time) constitutes the magic of the state, the nervous system of control. Writing both is and represents the new "Creation" ideology. It wipes out the oral tradition of the Stone Age and erases the collective memory of a time before hierarchy. In the text we have always been slaves.
By combining image and word in single memes or hieroglyphs the scribes of Uruk (and a few years later the pre-dynastic scribes of Egypt) created a magical system. According to a late syncretistic Greco-Egyptian myth, when Hermes-Toth invents writing he boasts to his father Zeus that humans never need forget anything ever again. Zeus replies, "On the contrary my son, now they'll forget everything." Zeus discerned the occult purpose of the text, the forgetfulness of the oral/aural, the false memory of the text, indeed the lost text. He sensed a void where others saw only a plenum of information. But this void is the telos of writing.
Writing begins as a method of controlling debt owed to the Temple, debt as yet another form of absence. When full-blown economic texts appear a few strata later we find ourselves already immersed in a complex economic world based on debt, interest, compound interest, debt peonage as well as outright slavery, rents, leases, private and public forms of property, long distance trade, craft monopolies, police, and even a "money-lenders bazaar." Not money as we understand it yet, but commodity currencies (usually barley and silver), often loaned for as much as 33 1/3rd % per year. The Jubilee or periodic forgiveness of debts (as known in the Bible) already existed in Sumer, which would have otherwise collapsed under the load of debt.
Sooner or later the bank (i.e. the temple) would solve this problem by obtaining the monopoly on money. By lending at interest ten or more times its actual assets, the modern bank simultaneously creates debt and the money to pay debt. Fiat, "let it be." But even in Sumer the indebtedness of the king (the state) to the temple (the bank) had already begun.
The problem with commodity currencies is that no one can have a monopoly on cows or wheat. Their materiality limits them. A cow might calve, and barley might grow, but not at rates demanded by usury. Silver doesn't grow at all.
So, the next brilliant move, by King Croesus of Lydia (Asia Minor, 7th century BC) was the invention of the coin, a refinement of money just as the Greek alphabet (also 7th cen.) was a refinement of writing. Originally a temple token or souvenir signifying one's "due portion" of the communal sacrifice, a lump of metal impressed with a royal or temple seal (often a sacrificial animal such as the bull), the coin begins its career with mana, something super-natural, something more (or less) than the weight of the metal. Stage two, coins showing two faces, one with image, the other with writing. You can never see both at once, suggesting the metaphysical slipperiness of the object, but together they constitute a hieroglyph, a word/image expressed in metal as a single meme of value.
Coins might "really" be worth only their weight in metal but the temple says they're worth more and the king is ready to enforce the decree. The object and its value are separated; the value floats free, the object circulates. Money works the way it works because of an absence not a presence. In fact money largely consists of absent wealth-debt -- your debt to king and temple. Moreover, free of its anchor in the messy materiality of commodity currencies, money can now compound unto eternity, far beyond mere cows and jars of beer, beyond all worldly things, even unto heaven. "Money begets money," Ben Franklin gloated. But money is dead. Coins are inanimate objects. Then money must be the sexuality of the dead.
The whole of Greco-Egypto-Sumerian economics compacts itself neatly into the hieroglyphic text of the Yankee dollar bill, the most popular publication in the history of History. The owl of Athena, one of the earliest coin images, perches microscopically on the face of the bill in the upper left corner of the upper right shield (you'll need a magnifying glass), and the Pyramid of Cheops is topped with the all-seeing eye of Horus or the panopticonical eye of ideology. The Washington family coat of arms (stars and stripes) combined with imperial eagle and fasces of arrows, etc.; a portrait of Washington as Masonic Grand Master; and even an admission that the bill is nothing but tender for debt, public or private. Since 1971 the bill is not even "backed" by gold, and thus has become pure textuality.
Hieroglyph as magic focus of desire deflects psyche from object to representation. It "enchains" imagination and defines consciousness. In this sense money constitutes the great triumph of writing, its proof of magic power. Image wields power over desire but no control. Control is added when the image is semanticized (or "alienated") by logos. The emblem (picture plus caption) gives desire or emotion an ideological frame and thus directs its force. Hieroglyph equals picture plus word, or picture as word ("rebus"), hence hieroglyph's power and control over both conscious and unconscious -- or in other words, its magic.
Photo by William van Bergen, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
- 7-21-08
- Peter Lamborn Wilson's blog
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Thumbs up.
second that!
Metonymy Is the
Metonymy
Is the psuedonymity
Of the countless recitations of Deuturonomy
That disguise the lies our eyes perceive
And claim law chipped into ancient masonry
How gleefully simple is the tangled etch we sketch
That trapped us all in papyrus bets we hedged
The slips we slipped....
Lol! Nice! Reminds
Lol! Nice!
Reminds me of another I wrote recently:
The tug of war
The tug of war
It beckons us all to hope for more
But dashes that hope in the heat of the earth’s core
Vibrantly pushing through the surface of the floor
Violently sprouting up in wars against our own law
Ironic metaphors abound for sure
For surely there is more than this
Daily struggle for the easiest of bliss
Where every day anger makes a clenched fist
And even silence is violent sorta like a slit wrist
And boredom is the order of this our longest hour
That drains passions and ambitions like a weak and wilted flower
I want to tower above and beyond the call of duty
Giant luminosity grows like branches from my beauty
But I am a tree that gets cut down in the city
Dutifully harmful in the eyes of health and safety
Idly keeping watch among the concrete and less pretty
As mammal s more like insects repeat the nitty-gritty
Oh well, I know well what these strange creatures can’t yet tell
That we all spring from the same eternal well
And actually reside in heaven, not in regulated hell
“Pray tell”, we yell, “what makes thee trapped inside your shell?”
And get met with quill and ink before we’ve had time to think
“These papers should ensure your safety in this clink!”
The devil’s smile it does beguile as he pokes us off the brink
Down in the abyss where we drown in seas of paper
Records of our copies of our information’s data
All in case we might forget ourselves later
And appear uninsured standing before the creator
My policy would be useless against his actions anyway
It’s in the small-print they use to sign your life away
And when they fly His flag as they drag your land away
And when they plunder secretly in countries far away
Building themselves a Babylon a Babylon a Babylon
As brooks and streams babble on
As words and dreams babble on
Come on everyone lets carry on
The tug of war
The tug of war
The tug of war
:-)
Raf: how nice
I could drink a book of this kind of poesy.
Maybe you and cjmoore should develop an e-zine or e-mag of a rhyming/non-rhyming interpretation of 'reality'?
I can't tell you how many times words like this have carried far. These words of yours, they carry. They travel. They convey.
I, for one, truly appreciate them.
Maybe we want more. Maybe there should be a section of just more or maybe we just will hunt and find . . . such more.
thank you
i'm just looking at this article again after many moons and so spotted your comment. Thank you!
I haven't written much recently, i confess. I think the words may find their way out someday, somewhere! ;-)
Nice. Money is black magic.
Oh Writing, You Dead Friend
Two great quotes here that will linger in my consciousness for a spell:
"money must be the sexuality of the dead"
and
"the coin begins its career with mana"
Wilson makes a compelling argument about the trappings of writing. Reading it, I was reminded of Plato's Phaedrus. In the wikipedia article on the subject, Socrates muses on the same or similar myth of Thoth (or Theuth or Toth). and asserts that writing:
"is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with."
And yet the thought follows: we might not ever have heard this voice of Socrates if Plato did not decide to capture it in text. Wilson himself is using text to communicate this idea that writing has a role in our enslavement to a ruling class and keeps us separate from our own imagination. I struggle with this seeming paradox when I look at my own desire and interest in living and working in an aural/oral context mostly. It is hard not to conclude that Writing is both blessing and curse.
Doug Rushkoff, in his recently posted video, states that with every great leap forward in media, we've missed the opportunity for the individual and simply created new forms of centralization. The alphabet freed writing from priests but the average person simply listened to what the priests read. The monopoly of hallowed scribes was ultimately challenged by the mass-production of the printing press, but was so expensive only a merchant class of publisher/printers could produce it. Typical citizens shifted from listening to reading. Since then more and more people are able to write and the last hurdle has become broadcasting. The printing press has today heard its death knell from Internet self-publishing, but Rushkoff claims we are still missing the clarion call of media innovation, which is to become "programmers" in our open source society, fully participatory.
As I re-listen to Rushkoff's speech, it occurs to me that we, the citizens of literate societies, have reached some kind of critical threshold in our relationship with writing. Perhaps that is why there is so much thought in the noosphere around this topic. As it is now a widespread part of our culture to self-publish, maybe we are able to finally butt up against the limitations of this medium, something which was impossible to do when it was solely the domain of an elite cadre or priests, scribes, merchants, et. al. Are we starting to get sick of text? Because I can now broadcast my own? This "great liberation" of our own voices may in fact be occuring solely to bring us to the awareness that writing was never capable of liberating us to begin with. That a voice is only truly a voice when it is spoken in the presence of others.
I also hear Rushkoff making a call to move from the individual (which in this context could be seen as the solitary act of writing and consuming text) to the social (which could be seen as coming together and making connections through the aural/oral). This reminds me of what Socrates-by-proxy (Plato) by-way-of-Wikipedia further expounds about writing:
"Accordingly, the legitimate sister of [writing] is, in fact, dialectic; it is the living, breathing discourse of one who knows, of which the written word can only be called an image."
Quoting Socrates:
"The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge- discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it happy as any human being can be."
I interpret this to imply that speaking in conversation (there is much to suggest that to Socrates/Plato, dialectics implies speaking) has Life in it, whereas writing in and of itself is, essentially, dead, echoing Wilson's assertion of money-as-magic-writing as the "sexuality of the dead." Life implies dynamism, growth, change, unpredictability, novelty. This exercise I am engaging in right now, in capturing these thoughts in words (I'm tempted to write "binding"), as pleasurable as it is to me, is in this view a kind of necrophilia. Whereas if I was physically in a room, I would be participating in a form of life-creation. But does this take into gradations of dialectics? What if I was on a conference call, or video feed or some other technological variant? Obviously I've more questions than answers.
In my own explorations in theater, I know that writing will only get you so far. Theater is a live art, so it is a truism that simply projecting a playwright's words on a screen falls short of the idea of what a play is. Speaking the words to another human being, an audience or a fellow actor, has something in it that writing alone can never do. Similarly, searching for guidance on how to practice one's craft in books and other writing has been for me grossly inefficient at best, futile at worst. I like this last bit from the Phaedrus on this note:
"No written instructions for an art can yield results clear or certain, but rather can only remind those that already know what writing is about."
Maybe we already know everything.
word!
inarticulacy intended . . .
!!!amazing. I have been
!!!amazing. I have been thinking about this stuff recently, so I can testify to it being hot in the noosphere. i agree with zezt that psychedelics - acid for me - can wipe the slate clean, at least for the duration of the trip. you feel like you are sufficient as you are, without the need to justify yourself through some kind of abstraction. you can sit under a tree and just listen as the layers of your being unfold to reveal deeper and deeper shades of ecstasy. and you realise that 'reality is this' - yr voice sounding, and you sound the most perfect 'aum' you ever sounded, and relish its isness.
i heard something interesting on this recently from saul williams. he "talked" about how poetry has come to be seen as all these guys sitting down writing. writing, writing. but go back to homer and there's an oracular tradition, a spoken word. and he also says something about how a 'per-son' is defined by the sound SHe makes.
i think its got to do with the fact that 'we haven't focused on the body'. we haven't learned to enjoy ourselves as we are, to go deeper into the cores of our being. from the get-go we have been taught to absract, abstract, symbolise. if more of us can get with some spiritual technology and connect with left-brain hemisphere bliss, we would start to become self-sufficient and self-sustainable, and our bliss would flow out into the world and recreate it.
thanks for the article and the great comments. Here is a quote from Tim Leary:
'Ecstasy means to break out of verbal prisons, suspend your imprints, see things anew, perceive directly. With freshened perception goes the feeling of liberation, insight, the exultant sense of having escaped the lifeless net of symbols. Men drink, smoke, chew or fast to escape the tryanny of words, the limits of the imprint; to regain what they have lost in socialisation. The ecstatic is wordless.'
http://themanwithnoname12.blogspot.com/
An interesting series of
An interesting series of linkages . . . as hypothesis.
We all know the maxim: the winners write the history.
I'm not too sure about "Sumeria" being the origin of 'writing'.
Egypt, Sumeria, Mohenjo Dara (India) the ancient Central American cultures, all seem to appear out of nowhere. We don't have any significant details of evolution of these cultures from 'sticks and stones'.
What would we call an axiom or 'maxim' of oral tradition?
It seems likely that in the ages of oral tradition, when writing didn't exist, 'one's word was one's bond', and the liar would automatically be defined as an enemy of community or 'the state' . . . or at least, called an "artist" a 'story-teller'.
By definition, an oral tradition in a community will be somewhat different from an oral tradition in an enimical or 'enemy' culture or community or state.
A typical example: the story of the gun-fight at the 'OK corall'. There is an extant oral tradition of the 'other side' of this story that sees the Earps as the 'bad guys'.
Questioning any 'Truth' as such can be part of an impetus towards a collective or perhaps subconscious disatisfaction with either oral histories or written 'records' taken as 'bottom line'.
We also have that most common axiom: don't believe everything you read. This 'saw' wasn't born in a vacuum. Today maybe we'd say: 'hear/see' thanks to television and the prepoderance of using 'media' as political tool.
Taken together, in either case, maybe we can see why the 'scientific' method was seen as the salvation of the desire for something 'concrete', something that can exist with the least amount of debate. Multiple experimentors developing results that are either confirmed or unconfirmed and so through communication or shared reports a 'thing' can be, hopefully, more like what it actually is, and so 'oral' or 'written' realities might thereby be subject to test or at least questioning. However, because of the dictum: publish or perish and the expediency of commercial interests 'funding' education: some research that is truly valuable 'perishes' while others, amenable to commercial interests, thrives, and so 'science' is no longer the ideal delineated above. An awful state of affairs which, hopefully, the internet can at least alter through proferring "the rest of the story". There is no 'freedom of choice' if there is only one producer, one product. Variety is the spice of life, and it seems, a means for us to really judge.
However, we can't dispense with oral tradition very lightly.
'Telling the truth'. Far from being subject of 'test' as in a lab, oral tradition while being at or near the very basis of juris prudence, or 'eye-witness' reports, has been shown by strict investigation by experts in psychology and the ways perception can be modified by fear, rush, or prejudice.
So we still come away with some questions. Even 'reasonable doubt' has perforce been altered because of a recognition these things. Reasonable doubt has grown, while absolute surety of various written records have diminished. Because of 'special interests' writing the 'record'. We have all seen various steles with certain kings or queens images efaced and think: winners write the history or rewrite it.
How do we judge the stories of children and their 'invisible' friends? We circumscribe their utterances to a zone: childish jibberish. When an adult sees and thinks and talks like a child, we define such as 'idiots' or sometimes as artist/geniuses/but/still/mad....
When do we take an adult and circumscribe their utterances into that scarier and mystical region called "Prophecy" or something to do with that arcane status of "Seer"ism? or "shamanism"?
We don't know the rules today. We are content to have a tv-newsanchor-personality soft-soap reality for us.
We have sometimes put the spinnings/creations of artists which predict the future or mirror the times into a convenient category of "coincidence", imagination or even halucination and speculation and here and there can be "correct". But mostly wrong . . . at least in their own times and places. With enough time, these traditions become co-incident with actual events as seen and heard, and someone with memory may dredge up the record, and deem that or those as "seers".
In the 'economic' tradition we have received, we have always used odds and math to determine values.
Whether regarding oral tradition or written tradition.
I don't think we can vilify writing any more than, prior to it, we could in any black-and-white or extremist way, vilify oral currents or "currency". There were "story" tellers. Entertainment "specialists". We are wont to think that some of these "stories" were coded forms of compacting "facts" into the least number of spoken words. Or maybe even words with an apparent 'report' content but which the Bible Codists tell us are about something utterly different. Go figure. According to some, their entire content requires figuring, it is entirely mathematical. Even "fractal" and containing the most obtuse or obscure and even unknown forms of abstract language. Celestial language only 'seers' can penetrate. Go figure.
No doubt, there were people who learned to preserve oral traditions in very strict ways. Especially as these pertained to preservation of land and power for the sake of preserving a lineage of received power or authority.
What about before that? Were we simply sloppy? So in that sphere of the ages of abundance, when such need for strict preservation of 'acquisitive propensity' and its transmission through time to heirs was simply never thought about, such things were unimportant. Everyone knew everything important. Such exaction in speach or preservation of stories as literal and eternal 'truths' perhaps might have been seen as a mistake only in retrospect. This in reference to the tradition that at one time humanity at large were enlightened. The "Golden age" people.
It is evident from any reading of the histories and study of the different evidences of modern archaeology and the many different oral and written histories that something happened on earth that sent humanity as it was into an 'emergency' mode. Perhaps this is the foundation of much of what we call modern day thinking and attitude and maybe even explains a form of blindness born of a global form post-traumatic-stress syndrome.
Very deep topic. Not something easily pussled out and figured out.
If we grant probity to the idea set forth, that 'writing' began in Sumer, which I doubt, I simply posit that this might be too late a record to really touch on something much older and which can still be found that tells a different story. Not just slightly, but maybe dramatically different. And in case people think I'm purely skeptical, I can even see the "Roswell rock" story, found elsewhere on this sight, as capable of being seen in this light. Tho' I tend to doubt it. But there are definite other 'signs' that our idea of history is way off. Mostly because we don't have a proper appreciation of time and record.
What does "serpent" mean? We know what it means to most of us today. Does it carry the same content it did to the original thinkers? There are numerous ways to see "serpent" in terms of some 'line' that squiggles along. Maybe a line of force, maybe a line of thought, maybe a minor thing that becomes a major thing with time. Maybe it refers to "string theory", maybe it deals with insinuation and propoganda and 'subtlety'.
Maybe it deals with a force inherhant in everyone termed "kundalini" or maybe it deals with a tendancy in everyone to spin tales and subvert truth. Only a study of the varient materials or talking to people who maintain a strict oral tradition will help one to decide. Personally, I tend to think much of reading to some early point is onl confusing and confounding. After some point, taken together with things we have learned to value from the living with whom we have lived and live, these writings and traditions can take their place in a perspective that is more potent than any echos from the past taken by themselves.
A cosmic consciousness alone might accomodate all these streams of data and see them for what they are: minor pieces of information that seen from afar take a shape and obtain a meaning that close-up are only jibberish. It would be, in my view, foolish to attempt to draw any conclusions from jibberish. They are pieces. And as such, only time and patience will enable us to put them together as hints at something useful. The first-hand experiences are something different. We might still have difficulty translating their complex messages into our current state of wisdom and so come to behave in a way appropriate to their challenges. Live and learn.
======================
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation." HERBE
Hi Hakim
Hakim, i've been trying to reach you for quite a long time now. I finally got to this blog and i'm greatful for it. I'd like to send you some texts about Cannafascism. If you wish to write to my personal e-mail, the one i'm using for this blog. We would love to have you in Argentina. I got TAZ, that's the only book i could find in Buenos Aires. I'm working on the english version of the blog but for now it's in spanish. May be you can read some.
Sincerely, Comander.
http://cannafascismo.blogspot.com
Interesting
I don't want to read or hear
Public secret: everyone knows but no one speaks?