The Materiality of Divine Agency 9781501502262, 9781501510687

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The Materiality of Divine Agency

Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records

General Editor: Gonzalo Rubio Editors: Nicole Brisch, Petra Goedegebuure, Markus Hilgert, Amélie Kuhrt, Peter Machinist, Piotr Michalowski, Cécile Michel, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, D. T. Potts, Kim Ryholt

Volume 8

The Materiality of Divine Agency Edited by Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik With contributions from Kim Benzel, Caroline Bynum, Daniel Fleming, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Anne-Caroline Rendu-Loisel, and Karen Sonik

DE GRUYTER

ISBN 978-1-5015-1068-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0226-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0230-9 ISSN 2161-4415 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments With thanks to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, for funding the original workshop on the Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective that was the inspiration for this volume, and to the contributors both to the original workshop and the present volume. Thanks are due also to the anonymous reviewers of this volume and to Gonzalo Rubio for their very thoughtful notes and comments on the contributions included here. Beate Pongratz-Leisten In the name of the contributors I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my co-editor Karen Sonik who took on most of the work in editing our volume. Her rigorous editing was greatly appreciated especially by the younger contributors. Beyond that, collaboration with her has been always an inspiring and enriching experience. Karen Sonik Thanks are due to my co-editor, Beate Pongratz-Leisten, for many years of friendship, for numerous challenging, productive, and ever-inspiring conversations on a striking array of subjects, and for suggesting that we collaborate on this fascinating and very stimulating project. Thanks are due also to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, where I spent a productive year (2010–2011) as a Visiting Research Scholar; to a New Faculty Fellows award (2011–2013) from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and held in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, which enabled me both to further develop my research and to dedicate time to the editing of this volume; and to a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Department of Egyptology & Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University (2013–2014), which permitted the continuation of both editorial work on this volume and the research published in my own contribution here. I am very grateful for the kindness and collegiality of Jonathan Ben-Dov, Mathieu Ossendrijver, and Joan Westenholz while I was in New York; Jacco Dieleman, Sharon Gerstel, and Sarah Morris during my time at UCLA; Matthew Rutz, Felipe Rojas, and John Steele at Brown; Holly Pittman, Steve Tinney, and the other wonderful denizens of the Tablet Room at the University of Pennsylvania; and my new colleagues in the Department of Art & Art History at Auburn University. For putting up with me while I was engrossed in writing and various editorial tasks, I am also, as ever, grateful to family and dear friends, Chander, Sikander, Neena, and Gary Sonik; Sandra Matsuyama, Sasha Renninger, Ariel Smith, Jefferson Wen, Kellie Zimmerman; and, in memory of halcyon days in Philadelphia and London, Stephen Gardner and Donald Grant.

Preface Divine agency, anthropomorphism, and materiality have been the subjects of renewed scholarly interest over the past two decades as new theoretical approaches from the cognitive sciences, anthropology, art history, and material culture studies have entered the respective and intersecting discourses on religion, objects, and images. The contributions in the present volume, which emphasize but are not limited to case studies on the ancient Near East, are intended to address key issues raised by these approaches from a range of different perspectives and within an array of different contexts. Among the persistent and compelling themes and questions considered here are: What is the relationship between the divine and the matter – and form – within which it is presenced? How might the production of divine presence be achieved? How and when or under what conditions do sacral or divine “things” act, and what is the source and nature of their agency? How might we productively define and think about anthropomorphism in relation to the divine? What is the relationship between the mental and the material image? To what extent might the categories of object, image, likeness, and representation overlap – or diverge? Part I of this volume explores the material divine from a cross-cultural perspective. An introduction by Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik (Chapter 1) provides an overview and definition of some of the central terms and concepts of the volume, among these materiality and agency, as well as anthropomorphic, divine, sacral or sacred, and presence. Case studies from a range of cultural and spatiotemporal contexts are explored to elucidate such issues as the various means whereby the divine might be presenced in matter; the multiple modes and multifaceted nature of divine engagement and interaction with individuals; and the manner and contexts in which objects or entities might exercise – or be perceived as exercising – some measure of divine agency. This introductory chapter is paired with a contribution from Caroline Walker Bynum (Chapter 2) that offers a critical assessment of generalized cognitive models of and explanations for the anthropomorphizing and animation of holy things. Taking as a case study the Christian Eucharist during the later Middle Ages in Europe, Bynum explores the material divine through the specific phenomenon according to which the bread and wine of the mass visibly transformed into blood and freshly bleeding flesh. Her work underscores the necessity of carefully situating and understanding specific examples or cases within their individual cultural and historical contexts in addition to pursuing cross-cultural examinations of larger themes or questions pertaining to divine materiality, materialization, anthropomorphism, and agency.

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Parts II and III of this volume elucidate a diverse array of themes and case studies pertaining to the materiality and materialization of the divine and of divine agency in the context of the ancient Near East specifically. The contribution by Benzel (Chapter 3) explores both the inherent properties and the attributed qualities of materials such as gold and silver, which were regarded in Mesopotamia as possessed not merely of economic value but also of magical, sacred, or even divine traits or characteristics. In considering the nature of human perception of and interaction with these materials both in their raw states and following their incorporation into finished things, particularly divine or holy things, Benzel demonstrates the capacity of materials in Mesopotamia to actively produce or create – rather than merely reflect or reproduce – the divine. Pongratz-Leisten’s contribution (Chapter 4) explores the intersection between thing and thought, elucidating the relationship between the material and the mental conceptualization and representation of the divine. Her work emphasizes that it is not just the material divine, in the form of specific objects or images, that is capable of eliciting specific affective responses: mental images are also possessed of cognitive elements and may be emotionally charged or colored. Mental and material conceptualizations, here specifically of the divine, are simultaneously and equally associated with the construction and transmission of knowledge and of memory. Taking as her case study a select but striking array of first millennium BCE texts that describe divine bodies and body parts, Pongratz-Leisten explores the attribution of composite anthropomorphic forms to deities as a means of articulating the power of unified divine agency. She establishes that divine control – as it is achieved, maintained, and protected through cosmic combat – is both inherent and fundamental to the presencing of the divine in the context of these specific compositions. Also focusing on the divine body, but drawing especially on pictorial sources, Sonik (Chapter 5) examines in her contribution the construction of the anthropomorphic divine body in Mesopotamia and the implications and associations of physical and behavioral anthropomorphism. In a case study on Sun God Tablet from Sippar, a ninth century BCE artifact, she further assesses some of the multiple means by which the authoritative and (divinely) authorized status of a cult statue – and its fitness to presence the deity – could be established. In particular, Sonik focuses on the locating of objects, including cult statues, within a pictorial “stream of tradition” as a strategy for signaling their authoritative status and, specifically with respect to objects or images associated with the gods, perhaps also divine authorization for their crafting. In Part III of the volume, the contributions by Fleming and Rendu-Loisel respectively explore visual engagement with the divine and auditory engagement with a supernatural agent. Fleming (Chapter 6), taking the zukru festival

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at the city of Emar as his case study, examines the reciprocal gaze – a meeting of the eyes and, arguably, the minds, between deity and worshipper – as a powerful if non-verbal mode of communicating with the god Dagan. The actions of unveiling and veiling of the face of Dagan’s cult statue during the festival respectively signal the accessibility and inaccessibility of the deity, rendering the reciprocal gaze either physically possible or impossible. RenduLoisel (Chapter 7), analyzing exorcistic rituals from the first millennium BCE, focuses on the element of noise incorporated into three Utukkū Lemnūtu incantations. Her study illuminates the diversity of modes through which divine or supernatural presence may be produced or rendered tangible or material – in this case specifically through the sounding off of Mighty Copper, likely represented within the limited framework of the relevant ritual by a pealing copper bell. This volume had its inception in a workshop on the Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University in April 2011. Organized by Beate Pongratz-Leisten, the workshop included Caroline Walker Bynum, Daniel Fleming, Milette Gaifman, Barbara Kowalzig, David Levene, Michael Puett, Karen Sonik, David Wengrow, and Joan Goodnick Westenholz among participants addressing such diverse cultural contexts as those of Bronze Age China, Archaic and Classical Greece, Mesopotamia, and the European Middle Ages. The workshop profited also from the thoughtful comments of the guests in attendance, and thanks are warmly extended to Brooke Holmes and Irene Winter. While the volume inspired by this workshop has come to focus much more closely on topics pertaining to divine materiality and agency in the context of the ancient Near East than the workshop that inspired it, something of the cross-cultural aspects of the original workshop continue to be communicated especially through the contributions contained in Part I of the volume. It is hoped that one of the original goals of both workshop and volume – to render some of the complexities and fascinating aspects of the Near Eastern material accessible to the numerous other fields currently engaged in elucidating culturally specific issues of the material divine and the materialization of divine agency, and to concurrently render something of the exciting and very stimulating scholarship being conducted in these other fields more accessible to scholars working on the ancient Near East – has been met thereby. The editing of this volume, and the writing of its initial chapter, has been a fruitful collaboration between Beate Pongratz-Leisten, who has written and published extensively on the divine, divine agency, and religious thought and practice in the ancient Near East, and Karen Sonik, whose work has emphasized conceptions – and pictorial and literary materializations – of the super-

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natural in Mesopotamia within the context of the larger Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. That Beate was deep in research pertaining to the cognitive science of religion and Karen in research on neuroaesthetics and anthropological approaches to the non-Western arts while this volume was being structured and edited has been a fortunate and enriching coincidence.

Contents Acknowledgments Preface

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Abbreviations

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List of Illustrations Contributors

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Part I: The Material Divine: Anthropomorphism, Animation, and Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the Materiality of Divine Agency 3 in Cross-Cultural Perspective Caroline Walker Bynum The Animation and Agency of Holy Food: Bread and Wine as Material Divine 70 in the European Middle Ages

Part II: Divine Materials, Materiality, and Materialization in Mesopotamia Kim Benzel “What Goes In Is What Comes Out” – But What Was Already There? Divine 89 Materials and Materiality in Ancient Mesopotamia Beate Pongratz-Leisten Imperial Allegories: Divine Agency and Monstrous Bodies in Mesopotamia’s 119 Body Description Texts Karen Sonik Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images and a Pictorial Stream of 142 Tradition in Mesopotamia

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Part III: A Feast for the Senses: Visual and Auditory Engagement with the Divine and Divine Agents in the Ancient Near East Daniel E. Fleming Seeing and Socializing with Dagan at Emar’s zukru Festival

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Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel The Voice of Mighty Copper in a Mesopotamian Exorcistic Ritual

Index

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Abbreviations ABL

AfO AHw ARET ARM BBR BM CAD CBS CT ePSD

ETCSL

JNES K KAR LKA MIO OrNS PBS RlA Streck Asb.

TIM TM

Harper, W. R. (ed.). Assyrian and Babylonian Letters Belonging to the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum. 14 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1892–1914 Archiv für Orientforschung. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1923– von Soden, Wolfram. Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1959–1981 Archivi reali di Ebla. Testi. Rome: Missione Archeologica Italiana in Siria, 1985– Archives royales de Mari. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Département des Antiquités Orientales, 1941– Zimmern, Heinrich. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der babylonischen Religion. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1901 Siglum for British Museum The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. 21 vols. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1956–2010 Siglum for Catalogue of the Babylonian Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum. London: Harrison and Sons, 1896– Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/index.html). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology Black, J. A., G. Cunningham, J. Ebeling, E. Flückiger-Hawker, E. Robson, J. Taylor, and G. Zólyomi. Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk). Oxford, 1998–2006 Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1942– Siglum for Kouyunjik (Nineveh) at British Museum Ebeling, Erich. Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiösen Inhalts. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1919–1923 Ebeling, Erich. Literarische Keilschrifttexte aus Assur. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1953 Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1953– Orientalia, Nova Series. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1932– Publications of the Babylonian Section. Philadelphia, PA: The University Museum, 1911– Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archäologie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1928– Streck, Maximilian. Assurbanipal und die letzten assyrischen Könige bis zum Untergange Niniveh’s. Vorderasiatische Bibliothek 7. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1916 Texts in the Iraq Museum. Baghdad: Wiesbaden 1964– Siglum for Tell Mardikh (Ebla)

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Utukkū Lemnūtu

YBC YOS ZA

Abbreviations

Geller, Markham J. 1985. Forerunners to Udug-Hul. Sumerian Exorcistic Incantations. Freiburger Altorientalische Studien 12. Wiesbaden – Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Geller, Markham J. 2007. Evil Demons, Canonical Utukkū-Lemnūtu Incantations, Introduction, Cuneiform Text, and Transliteration with a Translation and Glossary. State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts 5. Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project Siglum for tablets from Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven Yale Oriental Series. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1886–

List of Illustrations Fig. 1.1

Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund 2000–308. Carrara Marble Portrait of the Emperor Augustus (ca. 27–1 BCE). 40.5 (h) × 23.2 (w) × 24 (d) cm. Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum (IAP). © Princeton University Art Museum. 26 Fig. 1.2 BM 91000. Late Babylonian Period Limestone Tablet from Sippar (ca. mid-ninth century BCE). Sun God Tablet. 29.2 (h) × 17.8 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. 29 Fig. 1.3 BM 118561. Early Dynastic Period Limestone Plaque (ca. 2500 BCE). Upper Register: Nude male (king?) followed by three worshippers pours libation before anthropomorphic seated god. Lower Register: Nude male (king?) followed by frontally rendered female priestess and two attendants or worshippers pours libation before date-palm stand in front of temple. 22.9 (h) × 26.3 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 37 Fig. 1.4 MMA 1989.361.1. Neo-Assyrian Period Chalcedony Seal (ca. eighth-seventh century BCE). Worshipper kneeling in front of Ishtar image; winged gatekeepers flanking. 3.1 (h) cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (IAP). © The Metropolitan Museum 38 of Art. Fig. 1.5 BM 1866,0415.63. Classical Period Red-Figure Squat Lekythos (ca. 400–380 BCE). Zeus visits Danae in the form of a shower of gold. 17.8 (h) cm. Courtesy British 39 Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 1.6 BM 1856,1226.48. Classical Period Red-Figure Neck Amphora (ca. 440 BCE). Zeus takes the form of a bull to carry off Europa. 32 (h) × 18.5 (w) cm. Courtesy British 40 Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 1.7 BM 1864,1007.275. Classical Period Black-Figure Hydria (ca. 475 BCE). Peleus grapples with a metamorphosing Thetis. 20.3 (h) cm. Courtesy British Museum. 41 © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 1.8 ROM 962.228.16. Plaster Model of Pheidias’ (Lost) Chryselephantine Athena Parthenos (ca. 438 BCE) by G. P. Stevens with additions by Sylvia Hahn (ca. 1970 CE). 1 : 10 Scale. With permission of Royal Ontario Museum. © Royal Ontario 43 Museum. Fig. 1.9 BM 1948,0410.4.73. Artist’s Reconstruction of Pheidias’ (Lost) Chryselephantine Olympian Zeus (ca. 430 BCE); Engraving by Philippe Galle after Drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck (ca. 1572). 21.2 (h) × 26.1 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. 44 © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 1.10 MMA 50.11.4. Late Classical Period Red-Figure Column Krater by the Group of Boston 00.348 (ca. 360–350 BCE). Herakles watches painting of his own statue. 51.5 (h) cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (IAP). © The Metropolitan 49 Museum of Art. Fig. 5.1 BM ME 116722. Calcite Cylinder Seal (ca. 3300–3000 BCE). Priest-king feeding temple flocks (?); reed bundles of Inana. 7.2 (h) × 4.2 (d) cm. Courtesy British 149 Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 5.2 BM 118871. Magnesite Statue of King Ashurnasirpal II (ca. 883–859 BCE) from Temple of Ishtar at Nimrud. 113 (h) × 32 (w) × 15 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. 151 © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 5.3 BM 119427. Pink-White Marble Cylinder Seal (ca. 3000 BCE). Contest Scene (left to right): Nude hero; bull; lion crossed with human-headed bull; lion; bull-man;

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terminal (unfilled space for inscription above anthropomorphic figure in kilt grappling with horned quadruped). 4.5 (h) × 2.8 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 153 Fig. 5.4 BM 23287. White Stone Macehead (ca. 2424–2405 BCE). Lion-headed eagle (Imdugud/Anzud). 11.7 (h) × 11 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 153 Fig. 5.5 BM 117759. Stone Lamashtu Amulet (ca. 800–600 BCE). Lion-headed and eagletaloned baby-snatching demon-goddess grappling snakes, suckled by piglet and puppy, and standing atop a donkey. 12.7 (h) × 6.4 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 154 Fig. 5.6 BM 89115. Adda Seal. Greenstone Cylinder Seal (ca. 2300 BCE) from Sippar (?). Left to right: Warrior god with lion; warrior goddess Ishtar with wings and holding dates; sun god holding saw and arising from the mountains; water god Ea with streams and fishes, with predatory bird perched on hand, bull beneath foot, and distinctive two-faced vizier Usmu behind him. 3.9 (h) × 2.55 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 156 Fig. 5.7 BM 130695. Hematite Cylinder Seal (ca. 2000–1600 BCE). Left to right: (Statue of?) King with mace on trapezoidal scale-patterned dais; intercessory goddess; king with kid (goat) offering; warrior goddess Ishtar holding rod and ring. 2.55 (h) × 1.4 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 156 Fig. 5.8 BM 89110. Black Serpentine Cylinder Seal (ca. 2300 BCE). Sun god with rays holds šaššārum (saw with serrated blade) in one hand as he ascends between mountains; one foot set on mountain in ascending/mastery pose. Flanked by attendant gatekeepers and attendant god on right. 3.8 (h) × 2.45 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 159 Fig. 5.9 BM 102485. Limestone narû (kudurru) Boundary Stone (ca. 1125–1100 BCE). Bears symbols and emblems of the gods. 36 (h) × 22.9 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 160 Fig. 5.10 BM 91000. Image Rendered on Neo-Babylonian Period Limestone Sun God Tablet from Sippar (ca. mid-ninth century BCE). 29.2 (h) × 17.8 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum. 169

Contributors Kim Benzel is Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since starting at the Museum in 1990, she has worked on numerous exhibitions and related publications – such as The Royal City of Susa, Assyrian Origins, Art and Empire, Ancient Art from the Shumei Family Collection, Beyond Babylon, Hidden Treasures from Afghanistan and Assyria to Iberia: Crossing Continents at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Outside of her contributions to Metropolitan Museum exhibition catalogs, Kim’s research and publications focus primarily on the the material and technological agency of jewelry in the ancient Near East. Caroline Walker Bynum is a specialist in the religious history of the European Middle Ages, and professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study and Columbia University. Her recent books include Metamorphosis and Identity (2001); Wonderful Blood (2007), which won the Gründler prize and the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America; and Christian Materiality: An Essay on Late Medieval Religion (2011). Daniel Fleming is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Assyriology at New York University, where he has served since 1990. His early work was focused on the collection of ritual texts from Emar in Late Bronze Age Syria, resulting in two books: The Installation of Baal’s High Priestess at Emar: A Window on Ancient Syrian Religion (1992); and Time at Emar: The Cultic Calendar and the Rituals from the Diviner’s Archive (2000). More recent publications include Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance (2004); The Buried Foundation of the Gilgamesh Epic: The Akkadian Huwawa Narrative (coauthored with Sara J. Milstein, 2010); and The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition (2012). Beate Pongratz-Leisten is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Her recent books and edited volumes include Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (2011) and Religion and Ideology in Assyria (in press). Her current research interests are extremely broad ranging, as reflected in workshops she has recently organized on The Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective (2011), Between Belief and Science: The Contribution of Writing and Law to Ancient Religious Thought (2012), Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Historiography in Mesopotamia (2013), Ancient Near Eastern Literature: Topics, Issues, Approaches (2014), and Ritual and Narrative: Texts in Performance in the Ancient Near East. Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toulouse 2 Jean-Jaurès (France) in the program SYNAESTHESIA. Expérience du divin et polysensorialité dans les mondes anciens: une approche interdisciplinaire et comparée. She also teaches Sumerian at the University of Strasbourg. She submitted her Ph.D. in March 2011 on the topic Bruit et émotion dans la littérature akkadienne (University of Geneva; now in press). Her current research interests are in ancient Near Eastern religions, focusing especially on perception and sensory phenomena.

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Karen Sonik is Assistant Professor of Ancient Art at Auburn University. She completed her Ph.D. in the Art & Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles and Brown University. She specializes in the visual arts and culture of Mesopotamia and interconnections between the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. Her previous work has focused on elucidating conceptions of the supernatural in Mesopotamia; current research explores the relationship between word and image in the ancient Near East and theoretical approaches to ancient and non-Western arts.

Part I: The Material Divine: Anthropomorphism, Animation, and Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik

Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the Materiality of Divine Agency in CrossCultural Perspective Abstract: Specifically addressing the means and manner whereby the divine might be materialized or presenced in a particular matrix, divine images might act on and interact with individuals, and inanimate or even animate objects or entities might acquire a measure of divine agency so that they come to function, in effect, as (secondary) divine agents, this contribution (as well as the diverse essays contained in this volume) maintains a central emphasis on and exploration of the communicative potential and actuality of the material divine. It also explores, as a corollary, such issues as mimesis and portraiture in the context of divine representations, the definition and application of the terms animate and anthropomorphic to the material and materialized divine, and the nuanced distinctions between the concepts of image, likeness, and representation as these are negotiated in diverse cultural and spatiotemporal contexts. Keywords: Agency, animacy, divine, image, likeness, materiality, mimesis, presence, representation

1 Matter Matters and Materiality In recent decades, the development of materiality as a critical term and the burgeoning interest in pursuing its implications across diverse disciplines – anthropology, art history, sociology, and the history and cognitive science of religion among these – has seen the expansion and nuancing of its use and meaning beyond mere corporeity, the possession of physical substance.1 It is

1 This proliferation of uses across diverse disciplines has had some unfortunate repercussions: the concept of materiality has been (rightfully) criticized as not merely unwieldy but, indeed, sometimes utterly opaque and impenetrable, Ingold 2007. It is vital, consequently, to delineate those aspects of or approaches to materiality that are specifically relevant where the concept is being deployed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 15 East 84 th Street New York, NY 10028, e-mail: [email protected] Karen Sonik, Department of Art & Art History, Auburn University, 108 Biggin Hall, Auburn, AL 36849, e-mail: [email protected]

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frequently if not always intentionally delineated as overlapping with material culture,2 itself a complex and somewhat protean concept diversely or even simultaneously signifying the material expression or reflection of human behavior or practice (Glassie 1999: 41),3 an active and dynamic “social practice constitutive of the social order” (Preucel 2006: 5),4 and a “scaffold for distributed cognition” (Dunbar et al. 2010: 4; DeMarrais et al. 2004; Renfrew and Scarre 1998).5 In addition to these inherited implications, materiality has been productively delineated as a multifaceted concept in its own right: a means of exploring both immateriality, “the merely apparent, behind which lies that which is real” (Miller 2005: 1),6 and mutuality, “the myriad ways in which material culture mediates social being” (Preucel 2006: 5; Gosden 1994: 82 ff.), as well as comprising “a relational perspective on materials, one that obliges us to think about their properties, qualities, or affordances” (Hodder 2012: 191; Ingold 2007; Graves-Brown 2000: 4).7 Concomitant with a renewed emphasis on the material, the eliding or obscuring of the traditional boundaries erected between art and nature (Pomian 1990: 69–79; Daston and Park 1998: 265–76; Daston 2004: 21, 24), subject and object (Gell 1998; Miller 2005; Marcoulatos 2003), person and non-person (Hallowell 1960; Kopytoff 1986; Dubois 2003; Knappett 2005), human and nonhuman (Latour 1993, 1999), the mental and the material (Renfrew and Scarre 1998; DeMarrais et al. 2004), the functional and the symbolic (Hodder 1982; Knappett 2005: 8), and spirit and matter (Keane 2003; Meskell 2005) – along-

2 Some of the nuances of the various scholarly conceptualizations of material culture, materiality, and material agency are usefully unpacked in Hicks 2010 and further elucidated (if not necessarily consistently interpreted) in the various other contributions contained in Hicks and Beaudry 2010. 3 Any study of material culture, therefore, must inevitably grapple with its semiotic dimension since material culture – being a product of human activity – inevitably signifies something other than itself, Preucel 2006: 4. 4 As an example of this active functioning of material culture to shape, support, or constitute social order, Preucel (2006: 5) cited Hodder’s (1982: 85) exploration of how different artifact types could diversely function to support or to disrupt specific ethnic distinctions or flows of information within the context of the Baringo district in Kenya. 5 For the elucidation of things in motion, see Appadurai 1986a: 5 ff.; Kopytoff 1986. For the disembodiment of mind into material culture, with material culture not only comprising an expression of human cognition but also playing an active role in the formulation of thoughts and the transmission of ideas, see also Mithen 1998b: 7–8. 6 See also fn. 3 above. 7 Affordances were succinctly described by Graves-Brown (2000: 4) as characteristics of the world that emerged only in the relationship between actor and matter. See, further, Gibson 1977, 1979; Lovelace 1991; Williams and Costall 2000.

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side a developing interest in thoroughly elucidating specific object worlds and biographies (Kopytoff 1986; Gosden 1999; Meskell 2004b) – has given rise to a new and fruitful discourse on matters of matter in which the concept of materiality continues to play a central role. The intention of the current volume is to scrutinize the notion of materiality in its contact with the divine and to reconsider its implications for human cognition. Prerequisite to such an undertaking is the understanding that the human mind operates using representations or mental contents – pictorial, compositional, and abstract – and that experience automatically organizes these in broader frameworks or schemas.8 Taking such cognitive mental states and processes into account transforms the approach to materiality taken here into something distinct from the consideration of matter as mere physical stuff, that which is visible or tangible to the senses. If matter matters, it is the mental framework assigning it meaning in particular institutional and cultural contexts that provides the explanatory pattern for why it matters. The contexts in which it might occur, moreover, are by no means static or singular, so that objects might come down to us with an entire complex trajectory. This approach to materiality, while it acknowledges alterations in the meaning of matter that might (and do) develop over time, should still be regarded as distinct from the life history approach to things that has taken (productive) root in the humanities and social science over the past three decades (i.e. Appadurai 1986b; Schiffer 1999; Meskell 2004b; Morgan 2010). The cognitive approach espoused here, based on the “epistemological condition that no human being can have direct knowledge of any ‘thing’” (Carruthers 1998: 14) but depends rather on memory and active recollection – working, essentially, by association – not only allows for but, indeed, demands the use of information gleaned from textual sources where it is available. It ties into Mark Johnson’s rejection of the rigid objectivist separation of understanding from sensation and imagination and his call for a theory of meaning that “highlights the dynamic, interactive character of understanding” (Johnson 1990: 175; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). Understanding an object is a historically

8 Schemas or schemata, first postulated by the British psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett (1932) to theorize the process whereby the past is flexibly utilized both to adapt to the contemporary environment and to prepare for the future environment (Wagoner 2012: 1040), have since been extensively explored and elucidated; see the discussions in Weisberg and Reeves 2013: 101– 104; Anastasio et al. 2012: 127–59; Hollingworth 2008: 144–46 (specifically on scene schemas); Brewer 2000. While there is some variability in the definition of the concept of schema, it might generally be described as denoting a generic (and dynamic) knowledge structure by which concepts and experiences are organized and processed.

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and culturally embedded, humanly embodied, imaginatively structured event, the meaning of which is always tied to a particular community.9 Meaning, in such a context, becomes a matter of relatedness that is irreducibly intentional: a mental event or symbol may possess meaning only provided there exists some one for whom it “is meaningful by virtue of its relation to something beyond itself” (Johnson 1990: 177) – in this case taking divinity as a referent. It is the specific performative actions of an individual, grounded in his or her understanding and imagination, that establish a relationship between an agent operating on behalf of a divinity and the divinity itself as referent – and that enables us to speak of objects or images as agents or even (detachable) parts of the composite divine.10 In this point in particular, then, the stance on materiality adopted here diverges from that often adopted in material culture studies, according to which (materially existing) things possess a significance, and a capacity to affect the world, that is independent of human action or manipulation of them (Tilley et al. 2006: 4).11 Whether meaning may actually be severed from language in this manner, indeed, remains unclear, and studies on cognition continue to debate this point. The approach adopted here regards cultural knowledge and cultural memory as central to and inextricable from any discussion of the materiality of things, particularly – as in this volume – things that have been assigned sacred status due to their consecration, their use in cultic contexts, or their functioning as (secondary) divine agents.

2 A Definition of Terms: Divine, Sacral, and Animate(d) Things It is useful to include here a brief definition and elucidation of key terms and concepts considered in this chapter and in the volume at large:12 divine, sacral

9 The contributions contained in DeMarrais et al. 2004 address some of these concerns. 10 The concept of the partible person, as delineated in Strathern 1988, and the concept of the partible mind, as delineated in Gell 1998, have contributed to a productive conception of the composite divine; see also (discussing the Mesopotamian context specifically) Pongratz-Leisten, this volume, 2011; also Bahrani 2003: 137. 11 Material culture meanings, as compared in Hodder (1989: 64–78, 73) to meanings in language, have indeed been described as “less logical and more immediate, use-bound and contextual than meanings in language,” and, by virtue of these qualities, as “non-arbitrary.” While this argument must necessarily be examined on its own merits, it emphasizes the necessity of elucidating material culture meanings where possible. 12 Significant care has been taken, wherever possible, to ensure a consistency in the use and meaning of specific terms and language throughout this volume.

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or sacred, and presence. (Agency or “doing,” the capacity to act as a person or at least social other, and anthropomorphism, the possession of human physical form and/or other human qualities, characteristics, or behaviors, are elucidated in the pertinent sections below.) The term divine, notably, is adopted – where appropriate and where possible – in preference to the term God or gods; it has the benefit of being both sufficiently neutral and sufficiently nonspecific to be broadly applicable in the type of cross-cultural discussion undertaken here. Divinity, moreover, need not necessarily be localized in a singular agent, anthropomorphic or otherwise, but may also comprise a relative rather than an absolute status, a cluster of qualities applicable and applied to varying degrees to a range of different types of things.13 Similarly broadly applied are the terms sacral or sacred, which describe things deriving from, offering a channel or a portal to, or otherwise being formally associated with religious practice or even identified with the divine. Sacred objects, in opposition to mundane or even profane ones, were famously defined by Durkheim (1964 [1915]: 47) as “things set apart and forbidden.” This definition may be retained here provided that sacred (as divine) is recognized as a relative rather than an absolute status, one existing on the latter end of the continuum stretching between the ordinary and the special, and that thing is understood as encompassing not merely material objects or matter but also persons, phenomena, or events.14

13 This conceptualization of the divine as a relative category rather than an absolute one was developed by Gradel (2002: 26) with respect to Rome and was productively applied to the Near East by Pongratz-Leisten (2011 and this volume), who noted that divinity as a relative status can be assigned to living and dead kings, ancestors, steles, and cultic paraphernalia. Further pertinent analyses of divinities and divine status in Mesopotamia appear in Selz 1997, 2008; Porter 2000, 2009. See also, on the challenges of constructing any hard and fast divisions between the various supernatural (interstitial) entities of Mesopotamia, which overlap in various features and modes of functioning, Sonik 2013a. 14 A considered analysis of Durkheim’s treatment of the sacred appears in Riley 2005. Discussing things set apart or special (whether positive or negative), Taves (2009: 10–14, 27–29) has also productively drawn on Kopytoff’s (1986, esp. pp. 73–83) analysis of the processes of singularization and individualization. Importantly, the distinction drawn between sacred and profane/mundane/secular is neither absolute nor applicable in all contexts, a point that has been productively elucidated in a number of recent symposia and volumes on the ancient and medieval worlds; see, as a small sample of these works, Ragavan 2013 (publishing a 2012 Oriental Institute Seminar), Walker and Luyster 2009 (publishing the results of a 2006 College Art Association session); Gerstel 2006 (publishing a 2003 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium). Pertinent case studies forcing us to confront the fact that the borders between secular and profane or mundane are often neither what nor where we might expect them to be, if they are to be located at all, include two particularly striking material examples from the western medieval world: the secular and sometimes sexually explicit or even apparently obscene pilgrim(age)

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The term animate is applied here to describe the awakening of specific divine images or objects as well as the presencing (discussed below) of the divine within particular material matrices.15 In some cases, certainly, one might better discuss such sacral or divine things within the framework – quite literally, in some cases – of “things that talk,” composites of different species that “straddle boundaries between kinds” (Daston 2004: 21). The term animate, however, remains useful in that it foregrounds a practical grappling between made things, which are produced or crafted through human agency or mediation, and divine or sacred things, with respect to which human agency is often effaced or even explicitly denied – a grappling that frequently leaves traces in originating contexts even where it has been deliberately downplayed or effaced in theological theorizing. The Greek term acheiropoieta, for example, identifies miraculous portraits or representations that were “not made by any [human] hand,” encompassing in the Christian tradition such images as the Mandylion (Image of Edessa). The acheiropoieta are not limited to this context, however; ancient Greek sources include various accounts of divine images that had miraculously appeared, having fallen perhaps from the heavens or yielded by the seas, and that were understood as products of divine rather than human agency.16 In Mesopotamia, for its part, written sources referred to the birth (Sumerian tu(d); Akkadian [w]alādu) rather than the making or crafting (epēšu) of cult statues, which could also be recognized as divine or gods (ilu) even prior to the performance of the rituals (mīs pî and pīt pî) that enabled them to interact with humans and to both receive and give attention (Walker and Dick 1999:

badges, which are extant especially from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Koldeweij 1999, 2005; Jones 2002, 2004; Stockhorst 2009), and the confounding (at first and even second or third sight) grotesque, bizarre, and sometimes astonishingly graphic renderings in the margins of otherwise sober religious manuscripts (Randall 1966; Camille 1992, 1994; Hamburger 1993; Nishimura 2009). This being said, the delineation of particular spaces, objects, and persons as sacred in specific (if delimited) contexts remains both legitimate and, in our opinion, necessary for analytical purposes. 15 The term animate(d) is here used in preference to living (vivified or enlivened) as a descriptor for matter or images perceived in their originating contexts as possessing or attributed with agency: (social) agency, which may be possessed by all manner of things and images, is not equivalent to biological life or to the full spectrum of human agency, though this latter may be possessed or demonstrated to a greater degree by animate(d) – formally, spontaneously, or otherwise – matter. The term living image (Freedberg 1989; Mitchell 2005) is deliberately eschewed here to avoid entanglement with certain unintended connotations that it has acquired in recent theorizing; see Van Eck 2010: 18 n. 3. 16 The ancient Greek accounts of divine images linked with ephiphanic arrival narratives is thoughtfully explored in Platt 2011: 92–100. See also main text below for a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon.

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116 ff.; Smith 2001: 184–87).17 The mīs pî, moreover, also included an explicit and quite thorough disavowal of human intervention in the making of the divine image by the craftsmen involved (Berlejung 1997: 61–62), suggesting that this remained something of a sensitive point: the hands of the craftsmen involved in the making of the statue were – in a symbolic but quite viscerally effective gesture – severed using a tamarisk wood sword; the craftsmen swore that the craft deities rather than they (the human makers) were essentially responsible for the making of the statue; and the tools that had been used in the making were wrapped in the body of a sacrificed sheep and placed in the river, an act denoting their return to Nudimmud or Ea, the craft(y) god (Dick 1999: 40–41; Walker and Dick 1999, esp. pp. 70, 81, 99–100, 114–15). Even in cases where the role of human agency in creating divine objects or images was acknowledged or recognized, a certain ambivalence is often apparent or is even explicitly addressed in associated narratives relating to the authorization of these divine or sacral things. In Classical Greece, for example, gorgeous and lavishly crafted chryselephantine statues of the gods were commissioned from extraordinary and renowned artists such as Pheidias and Polykleitos (Lapatin 2001).18 These same statues, however, might yet rely on material signs of divine approbation – as the thunderbolt approving Pheidias’ Olympian Zeus – for their legitimization or might even yield pride of place as cult objects to less obviously crafted (worked by human hands) or even assertively uncrafted objects or images (as aniconic representations or the acheiropoieta mentioned above).19 And yet, while they did not undergo formal rituals of

17 The complex and somewhat variable relationship between the divine and the material body or matrix in which it was presenced (the cult statue, for example) in Mesopotamia is explored by Schaudig (2012), who notes examples in which the destruction of the statue is associated with the death of the god as well as cases in which the relationship between the two is severed or the two appear to remain distinct; see also fns. 26, 53, 65 below. 18 Artists (or artisans or craftsmen) working in the ancient world and the Middle Ages do not conform to the model of artist as genius that developed during the Renaissance, see Panofsky 1962; Wallace 2013; also the nuanced consideration of the terms individualism and genius in Wittkower 1973. “Art” works in these periods, far from being driven by the (relatively) modern Western ideals of innovation, autonomy, and imagination, were variously and perfectly legitimately constrained by such demands as those of patrons and of tradition and type; see, for example, Shiner 2001: 22–24 (ancient Greece); the contributions in Li et al. 1989 (China, Mongolia). In some regions and periods, moreover, “copies” and even mass-produced objects and images were created that may with some justification be subsumed under the category of art. See, for example, Ledderose 2000 (on China); Gaifman 2006 (on ancient Greece); Anguissola 2007 (on Rome); Assante 2002, Winter 2003, and Sonik 2014: 267–71 (on Mesopotamia). 19 See, for example, the discussion of the respective roles, treatment, and functioning of the Athena Parthenos and the Athena Polias in fifth century BCE Athens, and the discussion of

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awakening, the inherent potential for animation possessed by Greek statues (Lapatin 2001: 5; Steiner 2001: 106–34), chryselephantine or otherwise, remained: accounts survive of their autonomous movement, speech, and other communication of the will of the gods they represented or even – at least temporarily – presenced or presented. In the Middle Ages, for its part, the Life of Saint Gregory as it is recounted in the Legenda Aurea 20 describes the saint’s encounter with a woman who, having baked the altar bread with her own hands, cannot believe that it is the body of Christ (Bynum, this volume).21 Upon Gregory’s prayer, the bread visibly transforms into a bleeding finger. The disbelieving woman’s faith having been restored, Gregory prays again, and the finger reverts to bread. In all cases, if with necessarily distinct implications and outcomes, the term animate remains an expressively appropriate one to describe the revelation of the divine within or as – or as associated with – the thing. At the last, the term presence in the context of this volume draws on the theorizing of Gumbrecht (1999, 2004, 2006), who explored the production of presence as a potential “other of mimesis” in his analysis of representation and nonrepresentational phenomena. Presence, in his analysis, might be characterized as “the convergence of an event-effect” (Gumbrecht 1999: 359): “The notion of ‘presence,’ in this context, refers primarily to the dimension of space. Based on the Latin verb producere (‘to bring forth’), ‘producing presence’ means to put things into reach so that they can be touched” (Gumbrecht 1999: 355). This notion of producing presence, in the context of the discussion in this volume, is abbreviated to presencing or presenting, and encompasses multifarious modes of rendering the immaterial – and specifically the immaterial divine – material, accessible, and relatable. With respect to the meanings with which the various materializations of divinity discussed here have been en-

Greek images associated with epiphanic arrival rather than epiphanic appearance in the main text below. 20 The Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend was compiled by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1229–1298 CE). 21 An iconographic tradition associated with the miraculous appearance of the finger in the bread or wine exists, with extant images known from the twelfth and sixteenth centuries (a miniature and tapestry, respectively), Bynum 2006: 209. A distinct if better known iconographic tradition of the Gregorymass, in which Christ appears as the Man of Sorrows to Pope Gregory the Great, popular in 1400–1550 CE in Germany and the Low Countries, as well as in England and France, is distinguished by Bynum (2006) as distinct from the story and visual depiction of the finger, and unrelated to issues of doubt or proof of transubstantiation. The religious experience should, rather, be understood as one in which seeing constitutes “seeing through” (Bynum 2006: 215–16, 227) – or seeing beyond.

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dowed or have otherwise accrued, and the modes by which these meanings are recognized by individual viewers, the perspective adopted in this volume is that it is not presence alone but also an individual beholder’s (physical and intellectual) experience and cultural memory that allows for the construction of meaning on the one hand and the recognition or identification of meaning on the other. While Gumbrecht notably distinguished between the two dimensions of physical experience and interpretation,22 the approach taken here draws on the conceptualization of experiential realism (“experientalism”) delineated in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987), which understands bodily or physical experience as shaping linguistic encoding.

3 Presenting and Presencing the Divine: Religious Pictures and Animate(d) Things Why, and how, do “things,” particularly sacral or divine – and seemingly inanimate – things, act? 23 What makes specific matter or materials or forms uniquely capable matrices for presencing or presenting, rather than merely representing, the divine? In Mesopotamia, materials such as gold, silver, and lapis lazuli were assigned – and regarded as inherently possessing – various pure or sacral prop-

22 Gumbrecht ultimately offered an interesting model of ideal meaning-culture as opposed to presence-culture types. In the former, in which presence and meaning appear together, the two are not merely in conflict but fundamentally incompatible: in our “overly Cartesian” context, “presence phenomena always come as ‘presence effects’ because they are necessarily surrounded by, wrapped into, and perhaps even mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning,” Gumbrecht 2004: 105–106. In presence-cultures, however, in which Cartesian dualism and the externalizing of the mind did not prevail, Gumbrecht (2006: 318–19, 323; 2004: 81) postulated such cultures integrated not only physical but also spiritual existence into their frames of human self-reference, so that humans belonged to (and located themselves within) the world of objects rather than standing outside this. The latter model (presence-culture) has compelling implications for the ancient Near East, in which experience and meaning might be regarded as peculiarly or particularly embodied, but cannot be applied uncritically even in this context. 23 The animate/inanimate divide is not necessarily universally recognized (Ingold 2006, though the discussion here is quite nebulous) or negotiated in identical ways across diverse cultural contexts. The Sumerian language, for example, has two genders described as animate and inanimate, though the terms personal and impersonal have been suggested as an alternative (Michalowski 2008: 22). This latter suggestion unfortunately still does not resolve the question of how different types of being or thing are divided or perceived as acting.

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erties that rendered them particularly suitable for use in cultic contexts and for the making of divine or sacral things (Benzel, this volume; Winter 2012, 1999; Hurowitz 2006).24 The relationship between such materials and the things they composed, however, was not a unidirectional one. If the inherently pure status of specific materials was a precondition for their use in divine statues or images, the materials themselves simultaneously produced (or, at least, contributed to producing) the potent agency of the things for which they were used through this selfsame inherent purity. More, the choice of a particular exotic wood for the body of a divine statue, as well as the coating of its face and hands with gold or silver and the inlay of semi-precious stones for its eyes, enabled the animation of the statue or cult image in Mesopotamia by not only signaling or reflecting but also (to some degree) establishing or creating its authoritative status or fitness to presence the divine. While this enablement, in and of itself, was not yet sufficient to fully awaken the statue, the combination of the cultural knowledge assigning particular qualities to the matter used, the deliberate fabrication of the statue using this matter, and the ritual performance of the washing of the mouth and the opening of the mouth (mīs pî and pīt pî) 25 ultimately transformed the statue into a sacred subject with which some degree of “intersubjective encounter” had become possible (Lynch 2010: 40–54, 49). The image became a full manifestation of the divine, a presentation rather than re-presentation of the referent (Winter 2000a: 131). It is useful to consider the Akkadian term ṣalmu in this regard. Once translated as image or even portrait, ṣalmu has been effectively refined to excise the insinuation of mandatory physical similitude even as it continues to denote a natural representation: a portrait, then, might be regarded as a copy of a real person, in contrast to the ṣalmu, which retains the potential to become a person in its own right, “a being rather than a copy of a being” (Bahrani 2003: 125–27).26 The

24 Similar magical or sacral qualities appear to have been attributed to particular materials in ancient Greece; see the discussion of chryselephantine statues in main text and fn. 83 below. 25 An opening of the mouth ritual was also performed in Egypt to animate mummies and divine images and enable them to partake of offerings and, in the case of divine statues, also to receive petitions, see Roth 1992; Lorton 1999; Meskell 2004a: 89 ff; Meskell 2004b: 112–14. The cult statue in Egypt, however, does not seem to have become a divine manifestation in the same manner as in Mesopotamia or India: the statue functioned as the ka, the (transient or perishable) material receptacle or “body” for the ba, the essence or presence of the god, but it remained a statue (bes or sekbem) rather than the actual god (netcher), see Teeter 2011: 43–44; Assmann 2001: 45 f. See also, however, the slightly different take on this in Meskell 2004a, esp. pp. 89 ff. 26 The term ṣalmu has been a subject of particular concern in Near Eastern studies; see further on this subject Winter 1992: 169 ff., 1997; Bonatz 2002; Slanski 2003/2004: 321–23; Machinist 2006: 162 ff.; Frahm 2013: 102 f.; Sonik, this volume.

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attribution of such personhood to particular objects or images does not necessarily imply the possession of the complete spectrum of attributes possessed by a human being (Gell 1998: 126 ff.) but does properly intimate a potential to exercise (or to be perceived as exercising) agency in specific contexts. In India, sacred Hindu statues or images may also be awakened through specific ritual performance: the process of this awakening includes netronmilana, “opening the eyes,” thereby releasing the potent divine gaze (Davis 1997: 35; Eck 1998: 88). If the god is able to look out upon the world, a corresponding opportunity for human worshippers to gaze upon the god – darshan, “seeing,” and, reciprocally, being seen by the deity – is subsequently provided (Eck 1998). The revealing of the eyes, whether by removing a beeswax covering laid overtop them or by painting or carving them in, is similarly significant with respect to Buddhist image consecration ceremonies intended to presence the Buddha (Swearer 2004: 79, 77–95; Gombrich 1966: 24–25).27 Once awakened, the living image is subsequently maintained as a (divine) person through perpetual liturgical action: it is awoken and put to bed, bathed and fed, and dressed and entertained, as well as being the recipient of prayer and itself functioning as a participant in ritual (Davis 1997: 6–7; Lachman 2014: 370–72). The animate(d) statue or image – anthropomorphic or otherwise – is not, then, merely a passive recipient of human action; the divine manifest in these images might be petitioned for material or spiritual assistance and thus presumably possesses the capacity to respond to such petitions. Accounts of specifically Hindu images in medieval Indian literature, moreover, record their active physical engagement with their human devotees; they may move, speak, perform miracles, resolve disputes, and act as rulers and administrators (Davis 1997: 7, 29–30). The recognition of both the human devotees and the materially manifested divine in these contexts as active and socially embedded agents, and of the interaction between them as a reciprocal, multifaceted, and dynamic one, has reclaimed the animate(d) Hindu and Buddhist statues from being analyzed exclusively from the perspective of contemporary (Western) values, specifically those of “aestheticization, desacralization, and secularization” (Faure 1998: 768–69; Reinders 2005: 61–62; Lachman 2014: 372–73). The latent or, perhaps

27 An important article by Winter (2000b) that appears to draw on the concept of darshan explores visual cathexion in Mesopotamia and reveals a similar emphasis on gazing at – and being gazed upon by – the deity, and the similarly striking potency of the divine gaze. On the gaze of divine and supernatural entities in the ancient Near East, see also, Fleming, this volume; Sonik 2013b (the monster’s gaze in pictorial and literary contexts); Dicks 2012 (the divine gaze in literary sources); and Asher-Greve 2003 (the gaze of the goddesses in third millennium sources); also Elsner 2007, esp. pp. 19–26 (on viewing Atargatis at Dura Europa in Syria).

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better, dormant divinity immanent within animate(d) images after – even long after – their removal from their original cultural contexts and their repositioning as works of art has also been explored in a striking treatment by Davis (1992: 43), as has the potential for the assignment of other types and even degrees of agency to divine objects or images by actors outside the theological system in which these originated: “Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic ‘idols’, as ‘devils’, as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images makers or original worshipers” (Davis 1997: 7).28 These nuanced approaches have enabled the productive consideration of animate(d) images and things from less accessible civilizations, as in an ethnographic study by Irene Winter (2000a) that drew on the treatment of modern Hindu (and Buddhist) 29 religious images to elucidate ancient Mesopotamian ones. The treatment of formally animated or awakened images as living persons possessing the capacity to act their wills and to physically interact and communicate with their human worshippers is here deliberately distinguished from the practice of idolatry, defined in this context as the theologically erroneous attribution of love and reverence to an inanimate image (index) or icon of a sacred referent rather than – as properly due – to the sacred referent itself as only facilitated by the viewing of its image. The highly pejorative connotations of the term idolatry, its relatively neutral denotation notwithstanding, render it a challenging term to redeem despite Gell’s (1998: 96, 123–24) powerful attempt to reclaim it as the true name for the worship of images.30 Given the unfortunate but undeniable strength of the historical associations of idolatry with “false”-ness, however, so that the word idol itself became, and in many respects, continues to be “a metaphor for epistemological error” in Judeo-

28 This analysis is very much in keeping with the cultural biography approach so influentially explicated in Kopytoff 1986. 29 There is a perceived mimetic aspect to at least the original image of the Buddha (Lachman 2014: 371; Thompson 2011: 415; main text below) that should not be extrapolated to the images of the ancient Near East. While there is a tradition of authoritative – divine, royal, and other – images in Mesopotamia, these do not rely on physical or physiognomic resemblance to the prototype or referent for their legitimacy or, where they demonstrate such, their agency; see, Sonik, this volume; Winter 2009, 1997, 1989. 30 Gell (1998: 96–54) compellingly argued for the worship of images in certain contexts as emanating not from credulity or ignorance but rather from “the same fund of sympathy which allows us to understand the human, non-artefactual, ‘other’ as a copresent being, endowed with awareness, intentions, and passions akin to our own” (1998: 96).

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Christian and, consequently, the current Western tradition (Daston 2004: 12), the term here is limited in application to instances where images improperly usurp the devotion properly due to their referents or prototypes rather than to instances where animate(d) images – functioning as legitimate (if frequently still secondary) divine agents – properly receive the worship due to the divinity they present or presence in their original cultural and theological contexts. This does not mean, of course, that theoretical discussions locating the two types of religious image within a single category are without utility, and it certainly does not preclude legitimate questions about how the proper or improper functioning of religious images within their original cultural contexts should be determined. The gap between official theology and individual or private practice may comprise, in some cases, a vast one. In the Byzantine world, the apparent blurring of the lines between sacred images or icons and their referents or prototypes by viewers or worshippers led, at least in part, to renewed fears of idolatry and the famous adoption of iconoclasm as official doctrine under Emperor Leo III (717–741 CE).31 Matters unfolded somewhat differently in the west, where idolatry was certainly of theological concern but did not comprise a pressing public concern – or impel a similar policy of sustained iconoclasm – until the advent of the Protestant Reformation in Germany in 1521 CE.32 Prior to this time, and even after this time in other parts of Europe, idolatry was regarded as an abuse of religious pictures but not one demanding condemnation of the entire institution of images (Baxandall 1988: 42). Religious pictures, after all, fulfilled a legitimate and quite significant function as instructional and devotional aids. In his late thirteenth century CE Catholicon, John of Genoa cited three (quite strategic) reasons behind the establishment of images in churches: 1) the instruction of

31 Some instances of relic destruction appear to have occurred alongside the destruction of images but there seems no evidence of a general persecution. Various martyrs of the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm or iconomachy, beginning under Leo III in ca. 726 CE and continuing under Leo’s son Constantine V (741–775) and grandson Leo IV (775–780), and of the second period, beginning under Leo V (813–820) and continuing to a lesser extent under Michael II (820–829) and a greater extent under Theophilus (829–842), are examined in Talbot 1998. Theological – and aesthetic – concerns remain firmly at the fore in the discourse on iconoclasm (Barber 2002), however, social, political, economic, and other issues driving or at least affecting this phenomenon have not gone unexplored; see for example Brown 1973 (iconomachy and monachomachy); Gero 1977 (iconoclasm and monachomachy); Talbot 1998: xii–xiii (for a summary of various theories and approaches, some now discarded); Brubaker and Haldon 2011 (for an extensive historical analysis of the period ca. 680–850 CE). 32 For the Northern European iconoclasm of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, see, for example, Freedberg 1977, 1988; van Asselt et al. 2007.

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the illiterate, for whom images served the same function as books for the literate; 2) the promotion and reinforcing of specific religious subjects and themes in the memory and thoughts of the viewer; and 3) the stimulation of devotional feeling (and, presumably action), it being understood that such might be “aroused more effectively by things seen than by things heard” (Baxandall 1988: 41). It is interesting to note, then, that there yet exist striking and graphic accounts of the visible animation of specific religious images and objects in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (Bynum 2011, this volume). At this time, unconsecrated statues and paintings of individuals walked, wept, bled, and otherwise engaged or interacted with the viewer; typically unconsecrated relics, matter directly deriving from or having been in contact with the bodies of deceased holy persons, stood in for and exercised the miraculous power of the whole; and food stuffs, consecrated bread and wine, visibly transformed rather than invisibly transubstantiated into organic human flesh. In all of the cases discussed here, divine or sacred things animated – ritually, spontaneously, or otherwise – and not only functioned but also were recognized as persons or at least as social others.33 What is pertinent here, however, is less how these various instances of animation were similar (while this may be interesting, it is at best a superficial consideration34) and more how and why particular objects, some anthropomorphic in conception but others emphatically not, came to present or presence the divine in the individual contexts in which they originated – and how a cross-cultural consideration of this question might illuminate in new ways these individual investigations.

33 For the qualities possessed by an object or thing as person or social other, among these self-propulsion or intentionality, see Malle 2005: 228–29 (drawing on Tagiuri and Petrullo 1958: x); Gell 1998: 123; and the very interesting discussion of other-than-human (and particularly supernatural) persons in Hallowell 1990. Such qualities, notably, need not coincide with the full range of qualities possessed by human/biological others but they are sufficient for (some level of) social interaction: social agency is not dependent on or identical with biological life though the agency possessed by and attributed to specifically animate(d) images can certainly be fuller in scope, see fn. 54 below. The role of intentionality in defining or delineating object agency has been challenged as insufficiently nuanced in some contexts – see, for example, the brief summary on the subject in Feldman (2010: 149), who argued that since even individual humans may “act without any conscious evaluation of what their actions mean and [since] their actions often have unintended consequences, a definition of agency that rests on intentionality is too restricted” – but is retained as significant in reference to the divine things discussed here. 34 Though published too late to be addressed in this volume, a thoughtful and nuanced elucidation of the value of comparative scholarship (including key issues, positive outcomes, and potential pitfalls) focusing specifically on the history of religion – and exploring especially the complex and critical issue of pseudomorphism – appears in Bynum 2014.

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4 Object Agency (Primary and Secondary): Divine and Sacral Things The recognition that even mundane or ordinary objects and images can (and do) possess agency in social relationships, functioning as persons or social others in their interaction with human beings, has in recent decades yielded productive avenues of research in diverse disciplines, among these the cognitive science of religion, anthropology, and art history. In his influential work exploring the attribution of life – or, more accurately, agency or intentionality – to objectively inanimate things, phenomena, and even events, for example, Guthrie (2007: 37; 1993: 39–54) persuasively argued for the development, at least in part, of animism and anthropomorphism as “false positives” or “byproducts” of human perception biases and of the “conceptual framework called theory of mind [ToM],” which render us particularly sensitive to detecting the presence of agents and to indicators of complex (and especially human) agency in the environments we inhabit.35 While these sensitivities occasionally lead us astray, so that we may sometimes attribute agency where none exists, at least they ensure that we are not often caught off our guards: as memorably noted by Guthrie (1993: 6), “it is better for a hiker to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder.”36 If Theory of Mind, the capacity for representing and reasoning about the mental states of others (biological persons, inanimate objects, and otherwise), has been extensively and usefully examined with respect to the origins, development, and functioning of religious beliefs, it should necessarily be considered as only one of multiple potentially relevant factors in this context rather than an explanatory catch-all (Bynum, this volume). While theoretical approaches and insights from the cognitive sciences can and do offer valuable new perspectives on or explanations for specific phenomena that have typically been the province of the humanities or social sciences, with the cognitive science of religion and neuroaesthetics/ neuroarthistory comprising particularly rich and stimulating fields of enquiry, such new perspectives and theories must be applied in nuanced, often carefully limited, and above all culturally mediated ways.37 The specific aspect of 35 The initial study on Theory of Mind, Premack and Woodruff 1978, focused on the chimpanzee. For the subsequent development of the concept and its application to human development and interaction, see Carruthers and Smith 1996; Mithen 1998a, 2000, 2013; Malle 2005; Gärdenfors 2013. 36 For a rather different – and challenging if not utterly convincing – view of the animate vs. the inanimate, and animacy, see Ingold 2006. 37 A powerful case study demonstrating the value of and need for precisely such cultural mediated interpretation is Gell’s (1992: 46) famous analysis of the Trobriand canoe boards,

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Guthrie’s work that is most relevant to the studies contained in this volume, indeed, is not his treatment of the development of anthropomorphism or animism – though this also has had important (if necessarily limited) influence on some of the contributions here – but rather his elucidation of agency, the concept famously adopted and adapted by Gell for his theory of art, as “invisible and polymorphic, [so that] all manner of phenomena are potential agents” (Guthrie 2007: 52). Gell’s (1998: 96) anthropological theory of representational art, focusing on “the production, circulation, and practical use of indexes that have relevant prototypes,” was predicated on the treatment of artworks, images, icons, and other representations as persons (or person-like) or, at least, social others, “that is, sources of, and targets for, social agency.”38 The referent or prototype in this context possesses agency (“doing”) and is the thing that the index represents – not necessarily in a mimetic sense – or stands in for (Thomas 1998: ix). The index, for its part, is the visible, material (physical) thing, the material entity capable of mediating the agency of its referent: it “motivate[s] inferences, responses or interpretations” (Thomas 1998: ix; Gell 1998: 13).39 In championing a de-aestheticization of the (anthropological) study of art, articulated as a position of deliberate methodological philistinism, a “resolute indifference towards the aesthetic value of works of art” (1992: 42; 1998), Gell’s work catalyzed productive new research directions for the types of religious

which possessed particular visual and material properties (bright colors, bold contrasts, and eye spots) that exploited – to some degree – certain “characteristic biases of human visual perception.” Gell argued compellingly, however, that the efficacy of the canoe board as a tool of psychological warfare depended not on its disturbance of the viewer’s perceptual processes but rather on the fact that this disturbance was interpreted (in its original cultural context) as “evidence of the magical power emanating from the board. It is this magical power which may deprive the spectator of his reason. If, in fact, he behaves with unexpected generosity, it is interpreted as having done so. Without the associated magical ideas, the dazzlingness of the board is neither here nor there.” 38 Gell’s work, published posthumously, has yielded a striking number of very productive as well as sometimes problematic applications; see the useful and nuanced analyses in Layton 2003; Rampley 2005; Knappett 2005; Tanner and Osborne 2007; Morphy 2009; van Eck 2010. For art historical purposes at least, it is usefully considered alongside several related but independently conceived theoretical studies, among these Mitchell 2005 and Pasztory 2005, and, on the subject of religious art (or religious visual culture) specifically, Morgan 2005, 2010. 39 The icon, a term that has been mostly eschewed in the context of this volume, is in Peircean terms a thing that physically resembles its referent or prototype. For an unpacking of the complex and problematic relationship between Peirce’s theory of signs and Gell’s theory of agency, see Layton 2003; also, more briefly, Davis 2007.

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objects and materials discussed here.40 Such works, where assigned uncritically to the category of art, and specifically art in the Western sense of being the non-utilitarian objects of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, had too often been neutered and neutralized, their undoubted aesthetic aspects privileged above their other qualities and modes of functioning and interaction.41 The adoption of a deliberately non-aesthetic approach to religious objects and images, then, enabled a renewed emphasis on both their materiality and their agency, and the multiple and complex modes and manners of their functioning in and on the world, affecting – as well as being affected by – the worshipper or viewer. While Gell’s work has facilitated the construction of vital new frameworks within which religious objects and images might be productively analyzed, however, it is by no means a universal remedy: it may be something of an antidote to the aestheticization of sacred images that scholars such as Faure (1998) have legitimately decried but it has also raised new issues (intentionally

40 In arguing for methodological philistinism as a prerequisite to devising an anthropology of art, Gell (1992: 41–42) compared it to the principle Peter Berger (1967: 107) described as methodological atheism in his treatment of the sociology of religion. Both approaches, despite the productive scholarship they have yielded, have been justifiably criticized as too reductionist – albeit on different grounds. On the former, arguing that it is vital to distinguish between the anthropologist’s aesthetic response or judgment to a work, which may properly be suppressed or suspended, and the aesthetic value a work possesses in its originating culture, which is a just subject of enquiry, see Morphy 2010: 24 n. 5; Winter 2007; Dutton 1994 (but see also the nuanced analysis of the implications and impetus for Gell’s argument in Thomas 2001: 2–3). On the latter, for the argument that methodological agnosticism (Smart 1973), an acknowledgement that “the objects of our experience are not all entirely constructed socially,” is a more appropriate form of bracketing in the sociological study of religious experience than methodological atheism, see Porpora 2006: 57 ff. 41 The application of the term art to the material remains of ancient and non-Western civilizations remains problematic. This is less because such civilizations lacked a native concept of art as a discrete category of thing (see Baines 2007) and more because the classification of an object as art has tended to privilege its aesthetic aspects over or even to the exclusion of its other – political/ideological, religious, social – functioning. The term is nevertheless retained here in preference to such categories as visual culture for two reasons: (1) it remains a useful and relevant classifier, delineating a group of objects that are usefully considered in company with each other; (2) the historical weight of the term is such that to deny a civilization its possession of art is (arguably) to exclude it from the ranks of common humanity. For thoughtful if diverse commentaries on art as a human universal, see Dissanayake 1992, 2008; Dutton 2009; Morphy 2010. For considerations of the applicability and utility of the term art to specific cultural contexts, see also Danto 1988, Dutton 1993, and Gell 1996 (on African art specifically, though the discussion here also addresses issues more broadly relevant to non-Western and ancient arts in general); McCallum 1994 and Lachman 2005, 2014 (Buddhist art); Winter 1995, Ross 2005, and Sonik 2014 (on ancient Mesopotamian art); and Baines 1994, 2007 (on ancient Egyptian art).

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and unintentionally) with respect to the desacralization and secularization of religious objects and images and the complex role of aesthetic or at least affective properties or attributes in their functioning.42 Particularly significant considerations both in the context of this chapter and in the larger context of this volume, which addresses the agency of divine and sacral things and materials from multiple different perspectives and in a range of different contexts, are (1) the nature and extent of the (primary or secondary) agency possessed by different (culturally-specific) categories of thing; (2) the context-bound scope of an object’s agency within the specific framework of its communication or intersection with humans and the natural world and, where applicable, the extent to which the exercise of agency is affected by the object’s explicit awakening or animate status – ritually induced, spontaneous, or otherwise; and (3) the concepts of anthropomorphism and, to a rather lesser extent, of iconicity and aniconicity as they pertain to the conceptualization of divine things. The discourse on the nature of the agency attributed to and exercised by divine and sacral things necessarily draws on Gell’s theoretical model of the distribution of agency (1998) and Strathern’s model of the partible person (1988). This comprises a particularly productive framework within which to analyze and conceptualize the relationship between the divine and its material manifestations as it allows for an understanding of divinity as composite, capable of distributing its agency into a diverse constellation of (culturally specific) indexes. These may include, depending on the cultural context, such diverse things as statues or images, celestial bodies, various (inanimate and animate) attributes, the temple, parts of the divine body itself, the divine blood, relics, or even the divine splendor, voice, gaze, or name.43 Crucially, not all of the various materializations or manifestations of the divine are considered equivalent to the divinity – or even to each other.44 For the purposes of nuanced analysis, then, it is useful to distinguish between the divinity as primary agent and all of the various media distributing its agency (its indexes or indices,

42 The need for closer attention to the complex relationships between the aesthetic or affective aspects and the agency or functioning of objects and images is particularly urgent with respect to religious or sacred things but may be similarly emphasized with respect to other types of artwork or thing; see Winter 2007: 59–62, 1995: 2579; Tanner 2000b, 2001. 43 See in this volume Bynum (on relics, flesh, and blood); Fleming (on the divine gaze); Pongratz-Leisten (on the statue, divine body parts, and celestial body); Rendu Loisel (on the voice); Sonik (the divine body and its attributes). 44 A context-bound and culturally specific question is, indeed, whether any of the various divine materializations are considered equivalent to the divine or possessed of its full range of agency.

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which are not themselves equally desirable, functional, or even capable of presencing the divine in all contexts) as secondary agents, thus rendering transparent the “cline from empowering source to empowered manifestation” (Winter 2007: 55). Even as we differentiate the divine from its secondary agents for the purposes of objective or at least external analysis, however, we must continue to contend with the frequent (and cross-culturally apparent) human conflation of the referent and its (re)presentation, of the source of power or agency (the divine) on the one hand with the thing mediating its presence (the material index) on the other – a conflation that has provoked theological theorizing and debate throughout human history. While this conflation is evident in numerous and divergent contexts, it (often) seems evident to different degrees depending on the nature of the material index itself: the physical body or body parts of the divinity are distinguished from the external objects or things acting on behalf of the divine and are assigned different scopes (and sometimes, arguably, spheres) of agency. It is here that the epistemological aspect of the human mind – working on the basis of memory and culture as determining factors in the knowledge of how one might properly interact with the divine in specific contexts – comes in. As an example, various attributes and symbols were conceptualized as having divine status in the ancient Near East; they were not, however, thought to represent the divinity in a mimetic way nor considered to be equivalent to the entirety of the divinity. Rather, they had a referential quality alluding more to one particular aspect or role of the divinity, so that they represented part of its distributed agency within a specific (and rather sharply delimited) context. By contrast, things or materializations linked with the physical body or its capacities, as the statue,45 specific body parts,46 the voice and dream visions, and even the name as an index of the personhood of the divinity seem to represent a fuller spectrum of the agency of a particular divinity.47 The categorization or even ranking of secondary divine agents and the peculiar contexts in which they legitimately function(ed) are thus subjects that demand further investigation. With respect to the second consideration articulated above, then, relating to the context-bound scope of an object’s agency, it is important that we remain

45 See fns. 26, 53, 63. 46 See, for example, the discussion of the divine or demonic hand as causing disease in the ancient Near East in Heeßel 2007, Scurlock and Anderson 2005, esp. pp. 429–528; Böck 2014: 45–76; also see, on the divine body and its parts, Pongratz-Leisten, this volume. 47 In the context of medieval Christianity, see also wine as a substitute for blood, body parts, and relics in Bynum 2011.

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cognizant of the distinction between the agency externally attributed by the (modern) analyst and the agency internally marked by specific practices or even language within the object’s originating cultural context – “until and unless they may be shown to be congruent [italics ours]” (Winter 2007: 42–43; Morphy 2010: 279–80). This point, moreover, informs the question of whether an object’s formal or informal imputation with subjectivity and some degree of intentionality (the capacity to act its will) affects the nature of its agency or, perhaps more to the point, the nature of its interaction, both perceived and real, with the human. Gell (1998: 96–154, esp. pp. 121–52) himself addressed this issue in slightly different terms, discussing the distinction between religious images functioning as aids to worship or piety, which would still have possessed social agency and a measure of personhood in their capacity as things, and those that were themselves worshipped.48 While recognizing that these two categories comprise less a polarity than a spectrum, even those objects or images attributed to or approximating the second type acquired agency – their status as autonomous persons or social others49 – in significant part through its distribution from their referents (Winter 2007: 54; Pongratz-Leisten 2011). Formal consecration or ritual awakening or animation, of course, were not the exclusive modes of or prerequisites for the acquisition or exercise of agency by a divine or sacral thing. As noted above, the particular matter or materials selected for the crafting of religious objects could – but did not always (Bynum, this volume) – possess unique intrinsic magical or sacral properties that rendered them particularly and obviously appropriate to the presenting or presencing of the divine and that could, indeed, impel, or at least enable, animation and the establishment of an object’s (still distributed) agency (Benzel, this volume; Winter 1999, 2012; Platt 2011: 96–97; Lapatin 2010: 140–41, 2001). The third and final consideration relates to the relationship between the physical form of an object or image and the nature of its agency. On the one hand, as Gell (1998: 98) suggested, the distinction between iconic and aniconic representations is something of a blind: “An aniconic idol is a ‘realistic’ representation of a god who either has no form (anywhere) or has an ‘arbitrary’

48 While this is a use of images that Gell (1998: 135) termed idolatrous, seeking as he did to reclaim idolatry from its accumulated pejorative connotations, the term is not applied here – being, in my view, irredeemable – to cases where images properly received worship as legitimate (if still secondary) divine agents; see main text above. 49 Objects or images that have been ritually animated or that are attributed with (some degree of) animacy may possess rather more in the way of biological functioning or requirements (requiring bathing, feeding, dressing, and other types of personal care) than sacred but inanimate objects.

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form, in the particular body he inhabits for the purposes of being worshipped by his mortal devotees … [it] is an index of the god’ … Whatever the idol looks like, that, in context, is what the god looks like, so all idols are equally realistic.”50 That said, the idol was clearly and deliberately shaped in many contexts – presumably with the intention that it ultimately resemble or possess some (not necessarily mimetic) likeness to, or otherwise share some type of attribute with the divine referent (1998: 135).51 Specific forms, as the anthropomorphic, the known theriomorphic, or even some types of irreal therianthropic, enable or at least suggest the possibility of engaging in accustomed modes of interaction.52 The careful articulation of those familiar organs of communication, which are equally those through which human veneration might be most clearly expressed – as the eyes and the mouth – is particularly notable, as are certain of those rites performed to explicitly and formally animate or awaken sacred or divine objects in specific cultural contexts: for example, the eye opening of Buddhist and Hindu statues, the revealing of the face and especially the eyes of Dagan at Emar (Fleming, this volume), or the mouth washing and opening of Mesopotamian cult statues. Specifically anthropomorphic objects or images do not necessarily make for more efficacious or consequential matrices for the presenting or presencing of the divine; however, they do emphasize particular communicative potentials in a way that objects adopting other forms do not – a point that may contribute, in some contexts, to the

50 In her discussion of aniconism in ancient Greece, Gaifman (2012: 4 ff.) noted the apparently self-contradictory nature of the phrase “aniconic image”, as well as the shortcomings of any attempt to define the term aniconic against that which is representative of something else or that which is a likeness of something else. Despite the fuzziness of the term, it was retained in Gaifman’s work, as it is here, in the absence of anything better able “to designate a particular phenomenon in the realms of art, visual culture, and religion” (2012: 5, 17–46). 51 Gell (1998: 135–36) discussed this in the context of the so-called internalist theory of agency, according to which the depiction of the body was concerned less with realistically or mimetically rendering that body and more with a desire to signal the existence of a mind (and, consequently, some degree of intentionality) within it. The sundering of mind from body (Cartesian Dualism), however, and the privileging of the former over the latter, are not universally observed, see fn. 22 above. See also, specifically relating to the ancient Near East, Westenholz 2012 (addressing the critical issue of whether and in what contexts mind may be distinguished from body); Bahrani 2008: 77 (arguing that the body was not merely “the locus of existential identity” but contained innumerable possibilities of and for semiosis beyond those relating to mere personal identity); also Sonik 2012 (specifically addressing the ramifications of bodily transformation or metamorphosis in the ancient Near East in contrast with those apparent in Classical and medieval contexts [Buxton 2009, 2010; Bynum 2001: 15–36]). We ought, consequently, be wary of uncritically appropriating or applying this model. 52 Gell 1998; Hoskins 2006; Guthrie 2007: 37–62, 46.

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privileging of the anthropomorphic form for the presenting of the divine even where many other forms are in simultaneous use.53 In addition to the agency they might have acquired through formal ritual awakening or animation, through embedding in particular social praxis, and through the very matter or materials constituting them, divine objects might also gain and exercise their agency through their physical or sensual interactions with the human viewer. Three-dimensional and textured, their visual and tactile properties have the potential to blur what we might regard as sharp ontological distinctions as those between the animate and inanimate, and between animal, vegetal, and mineral (Bynum 2011: 30) – this despite the fact that, cognitively, the human mind possesses the capacity to discern animate from inanimate things already in the early stages of childhood (Opfer and Gelman 2011).54

5 Mimesis and Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images For the modern scholar, the interaction with the physical materiality of the divine simultaneously casts in high relief the tensions between object and image, image and likeness, likeness and representation, and likeness and content,55 tensions that may in many cultures – ancient and modern – be negotiated markedly differently in practice than in theological theorizing. While Western cultures more traditionally operate with the concept of mimesis, likeness and representation in other contexts (as in the ancient Near East) may be associated with qualitative properties,56 so that images and even portraits may be

53 A famous example is detailed in the Sun God Tablet of the Babylonian King Nabu-aplaiddina (ca. 888–855 BCE), in which the anthropomorphic cult statue of the sun god appears to be privileged over or preferable to the sun-disk that temporarily (but not illegitimately) presences the god, see main text below; Sonik, this volume. 54 But, of course, for the innate (and seemingly adaptive) perceptual sensitivities that bias us toward attributing agency and intentionality where none may objectively exist, see the discussion in the main text; fn. 33 above. For the implications of these sensitivities for animacy, anthropomorphism, and religion, see Guthrie 1993, 2007; Malle 2005; also Boyer 1994, 2001, 2003; Sperber 1994; Barrett 2000, 2007. 55 For the ancient Near Eastern material, see the discussions in Winter 1997: 359–81, 363; Bahrani 2003. 56 Pongratz-Leisten (this volume, 2011: 142 f.), for example, discusses the late second millennium BCE narrative Enuma elish (V 1–2), in which the stars are described as being in the likeness (tamšīlu) of the gods: ubaššim manzāza an DINGIR.DINGIR GAL.GAL / MUL.MEŠ tamšīl-

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constructed to convey the (or at least a) true idea of persons and things rather than privileging physical or physiognomic similitude. The emphasis may well be on enabling cognitive recognition (Winter 2009: 267) rather than relying on physical imitation as a basis for identification.57 It is useful in this context to consider the subject of royal portraiture as it developed in a range of cultural contexts.58 Portraits in the context of the ancient world have been (understandably, given their prevalence) most extensively elucidated in the context of imperial Rome. The image of Octavian is particularly interesting in this regard, undergoing a deliberate overhaul in the period around 27 BCE, when the young and victorious Octavian – having defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE and subsequently consolidated his power and rulership – came to be commonly known as Caesar Augustus (Figure 1.1). The new portrait type marking his transformation has been described as an artificial construct, a mélange of Classical forms that have been intermixed perhaps with a few genuine physiognomic features or references: the result is less a mimetic depiction of Augustus and more a material delineation of Augustus’ unique role and status (as Caesar) in the Roman polity (Zanker 1988: 99). While the newly constructed portrait of Augustus may have retained some physical resemblance to its human subject, it is notable that the emperor’s image itself spawned a phenomenon described as Bildnisangleichung (Massner 1982): this saw other members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty deliberately adopt in their own portraits specific (and iconic) physiognomic

šunu lumāšī ušziz, “He [Marduk] made the position(s) for the great gods, / He established (in) constellations the stars, their likeness.” Far from evoking the Western notion of likeness as resembling the outer (material) qualities or physical appearance of the gods, however, tamšīlu (from the Akkadian mašālu, “to be similar or equal”) suggests a similarity in quality and/or nature. 57 Cognitive recognition, as defined by Goffman (1963: 113), may link a person – or, here, an entity – to specific details or information that might be exclusively linked to his or her personal identity – as name, particular biographical points, etc. – or may locate a person within a larger social or other category: “Cognitive recognition, then, is the process through which we socially or personally identify the other.” Social recognition, in contrast to cognitive recognition, is the process of “openly welcoming or at least accepting the initiation of an engagement … a ceremonial gesture of contact with someone,” Goffman 1963: 113. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the performance of the latter may depend on the success of the former. 58 Pertinent analyses have focused primarily on the image of the king, see Kantorowicz 1957: 87–97, 316–17 (medieval western Europe); Marin 1988 (Louis XIV); Perkinson 2009 (late medieval France); Bann 1984 (nineteenth century CE Britain and France); Belting 1994: 98–99 (ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome); D’Ambra 1998: 96–98 (imperial Rome); Tanner 2000a (for a complex analysis of veristic late Roman portraits not limited to royal representations); and Winter 1989, 1997, 2009 (ancient Near East).

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features or formal devices derived from the images of Augustus in order to evoke and to establish their relationships with him and, through him, with legitimate rulership and authority (Fejifer 2008: 272; Fittschen 2010). The visual kinship established between portraits thus simultaneously constructed and signaled the kinship of the portraits’ referents. Political/ideological (and no doubt also aesthetic) considerations trumped, even if they did not entirely efface, physiognomic verisimilitude in such official images and yet this in no way undermined their legitimacy or validity as true representations.

Fig. 1.1: Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund 2000–308. Carrara Marble Portrait of the Emperor Augustus (ca. 27–1 BCE). 40.5 (h) × 23.2 (w) × 24 (d) cm. Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum (IAP). © Princeton University Art Museum.

The royal image in Mesopotamia, as elucidated particularly by Irene Winter (1989, 1997, 2009), took the matter even further. In this context, an image could be legitimately claimed as a true royal likeness by the king regardless of even token physiognomic resemblance – it was a ṣalam-šarrūtiya, literally an official “image of [my] kingship,” rather than a private image of the man who filled the office of kingship (Winter 2009: 266).59 The purpose of the pictorial

59 The emphasis on rendering the office of rulership rather than the individual ruler is also evident in ruler representations or “portraits” from other contexts. Writing of Mayan rulers in the Classic Period (ca. 250–900 CE), for example, Marcus (1974: 92) noted their portrayal with conventionalized faces “characterized by serenity, formality and rigidity,” conspicuously contrasting in this regard with images of contorted, grimacing, and painfully expressive prisoners. Taking a narrower view of portraiture in this case than Winter (2009), she suggested on this

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representation in such cases was to effectively permit the viewer’s cognitive recognition of embodied kingship, an institution handed down from the gods and properly held by one who, being divinely favored, had been also been divinely (physically) perfected (Winter 1989).60 The ruler’s official image might be further manipulated or deliberately constructed to convey specific qualities of his rulership. Gudea (ca. 2150–2125 BCE), Prince of Lagash, for example, was attributed with an exposed and very muscular right arm, signaling his continued possession of indomitable physical strength and potency despite the storied peace and prosperity of his reign (Winter 1997: 580). Still, it is the textual inscription borne on the image of the king that frequently serves to historicize and to particularize the representation of the ruler (holder of kingship), and to identify him as a specific sovereign (Winter 2009: 266). The royal image in this cultural context comprised a legitimate and accurate likeness of the royal person despite its lack of similitude to the physiognomic features of the individual occupying the office of kingship at any one time.61 With respect to divine or sacred images, the relationship between (authoritative) physical presentation or representation and the divine itself must also confront and ultimately mediate a number of urgent – but culturally specific rather than broadly applicable – theological considerations. A popular legend recounting the origins of the original sandalwood image of the Buddha describes how thirty-two craftsmen were transported up to the palaces of heaven that they might directly observe the distinguishing features and marks of the Buddha and thereby create an accurate representation or “veritable icon” (McNair 2007: 99–100; Lachman 2014: 371). On the Buddha’s return to earth, prototype and image confront each other, with the statue prostrating itself before the Buddha, and an opportunity arises for the image to be directly legiti-

basis that individual portraiture in Mayan art might be said to focus on the prisoners rather than the rulers; on Mayan portraiture, see also the thoughtful discussion in Houston and Stuart 1999, esp. pp. 94–95, n. 19. 60 The Sumerian King List famously begins by recording the descent of kingship from heaven to the ancient city of Eridu (ll. 1–2), after which it is serially held and transferred between the legendary kings of various significant Mesopotamian cities: [nam]-lugal an-ta ed3-de3-a-ba / [eri]dugki nam-lugal-la, “After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu,” Black et al. 1998–2006. 61 Brilliant (1990: 14) has notably argued that some level of similitude, regardless of how artificially constructed or construed, is vital to the relationship between portrait and prototype. This idea was developed by Irene Winter (2009: 258) in relation to the Gudea statues from Mesopotamia, in the context of which she identified Gudea’s chin (regardless of whether it is an actual or an artificially constructed physiognomic quotation) as his signature element: “in concert with the often inscribed label of his name and titles on the body of the statue, [it] allows for both recognition and the perpetuation of his chosen ‘PR image.’”

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mized: the Buddha “accepts, or authorizes, or consecrates the reproduction in question, and effectively the very concept of anthropomorphic reproduction. The statue – this particular statue as well as the idea of the statue in general – is thus imbued with the Buddha’s presence through the actual contact with the Buddha himself” (Thompson 2011: 415). The process of animating subsequent Buddhist statues, reduced to five primary ritual sequences by Faure (1996: 247), is notable for including, alongside the opening of the eyes,62 the insertion of relics or other cult objects into a hollow located either within the body itself or in the statue base, and the establishment of a relationship between a new statue and one that is already established and powerful – as through the use of a cord linking the two together. Both the placement of relics within the statue in the first case and the cord in the second case depend on (here explicitly physical) contact with previously authorized objects or images: the cord in the latter case, indeed, might be compared to an electrical or even umbilical cord that binds the new statue into “a lineage extending back to the original image” directly authorized by the Buddha (Swearer 2004: 80). The efficacy of such physical contact in authorizing new (re-)presentations further recalls the legend of the original image of the Buddha, which derived its authoritative status not only through its physical replication of or similitude to the original or prototype – establishing a basic mimetic relationship – but also through its subsequent direct contact with the Buddha. It is interesting in this context to consider the mode whereby divine images in the ancient Near East might be legitimized, a mode that was not dependent on – or, at minimum, not limited to – any physical or physiognomic resemblance to the prototype. The famous Sun God Tablet (SGT) (Figure 1.2), recording the restoration of the sun god Shamash’s statue and temple at the ancient south Mesopotamian city of Sippar by the Babylonian king Nabu-apla-iddina (ca. 888–855 BCE), offers some insight into the complex and multifaceted relationship between authoritative divine images and the divine itself in Mesopotamia during the late second and early first millennia BCE (Sonik, this volume; Woods 2004; Slanski 2000: 105–112; Dick 1999; Walker and Dick 1999). Lost for nearly two centuries by the time Nabu-apla-iddina came to power, having apparently been destroyed or taken during the Sutaean raids that took place during the reign of Adad-apla-iddina, the missing anthropomorphic cult

62 The opening of the eyes is not necessarily prerequisite to, nor on its own typically sufficient for, the animation of statues of the Buddha but is particularly pertinent to the discussion here as it is linked to issues of mimesis – “at least insofar as the degree of resemblance to the human or divine model can sometimes contribute to the magic trapping of the forces that bring the icon to life” (Faure 1996: 247).

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Fig. 1.2: BM 91000. Late Babylonian Period Limestone Tablet from Sippar (ca. mid-ninth century BCE). Sun God Tablet. 29.2 (h) × 17.8 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum.

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statue of the sun god at Sippar presented the kings of Babylonia with a conundrum: how was a new cult statue of the god to be constructed in the absence of an authoritative image on which to model it? It was not sufficient, after all, to construct just any statue and to perform the relevant rituals to awaken or animate it. It was necessary that the image be an authoritative one – both authorized by and acceptable to the god – with its authoritative status being determined on the basis of such factors as its incorporation of or constitution with the appropriate materials and its endowment with the proper attributes and symbols in order for the image to be accepted by the god and for the divine to be awakened in its matrix.63 Two solutions to the problem of how to represent – as well as how to present or presence – the sun god within his temple at Sippar were ultimately discovered. The first, undertaken during the reign of Simbar-shipak (ca. 1025–1008), was to emplace the sun-disk, a symbol of Shamash, within the temple where the anthropomorphic cult statue had previously stood. Situated thus, the sun-disk received offerings and presumably presenced the divine and interacted with human devotees in much the same manner in which the cult statue had previously been accustomed to do. While there is no indication that the legitimacy of the sun-disk as a material presence of or meeting point with the divine was in question, it does seem that it remained a less ideal image than an anthropomorphic one in its specific capacity as cult statue. This is indicated by the events of Nabu-apla-iddina’s reign in the early to mid-ninth century BCE, when a model for an anthropomorphic image of Shamash was at last recovered – in the form of a fired clay relief – and promptly seized upon to guide the crafting of a new cult statue of the god. In thinking about the relationship between the divine and the image of the divine, it is useful here to note the (probable) limitations of the newly discovered clay relief model, which should likely be imagined as being relatively small in scale and bearing only a two-dimensional rendering (of a three-dimensional anthropomorphic statue?) of the sun god.64 Fortunately, the types of information necessary to construct a new and legitimate anthropomorphic statue of Shamash would not have included precise physiognomic features: the cult statue, after all, was not a portrait in the traditional sense and would not have relied on a mimetic relationship to the god for its authoritative status. It follows that there need not be a precise mimetic relationship either between the depiction on the clay relief and the soon-to-be crafted new anthropomor-

63 This process of awakening, and the recognition that the god is not coterminous with the image, has been the subject of a brief but nuanced discussion by Smith (2001: 183–85). 64 See the discussion on the possible form of the clay relief model in Woods 2004: 38; 42, also fn. 70 below.

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phic cult statue of the sun god. What the legitimacy of a divine image would have depended upon was its acceptance by the god on the one hand and its capacity to evoke cognitive recognition on the part of the viewer on the other. These two prerequisites, notably, may be variously met through information the clay relief model would at least have been capable of providing: the placement of the anthropomorphic body in the proper pose or position;65 the inclusion of the relevant attributes or symbols of the god (as rays rising from his shoulders);66 potentially, if the relief were painted, an indication through the use of specific colors of the proper materials to be used for the constitution of a legitimate divine body;67 and perhaps also the inclusion of (at best) one or two schematically rendered “signature elements” that might further assist in the cognitive recognition of the specific god rendered.68 In addition to providing various types of information useful for the construction of a new and authoritative anthropomorphic cult statue of the sun god, the fortuitously discovered clay relief also served another purpose: it functioned as a vital link in the chain connecting any new image modeled upon it to an older – and (presumably) duly authorized and divinely accepted – anthropomorphic image of Shamash, thus ensuring the continuity of a pictorial stream of tradition (Sonik, this volume, 2014).69 As a final note on the Sun God Tablet, it is worth noting that it includes a reference potentially insinuating the notion of an archetypal (divine) image, the design of which originated with the gods, which was intended to be recreated in the newly constructed cultic image modeled on the discovered relief.

65 The goddess Inana/Ishtar, for example, is recognizable on a number of cylinder seals (as the Old Babylonian seal BM 130695, discussed in Sonik, this volume) due to her frontal face and torso, the weapons arising from behind her shoulders; one bare leg also emerges from her robe and is set upon the neck of a lion, her associated animal attribute. It is possible – though not confirmed – that this is (one of) the form(s) in which her cult statue was rendered. 66 The horned helmet functions as a general divine signifier; personalized attributes, which enable the viewer’s recognition of the image as a specific divinity, include but are not limited to such things as individualized weapons, a particular animal (natural or hybrid monster), and in some cases also an astral symbol. It is not clear that the agency of the divinity is distributed into all of these attributes in the same way – the placement of wild animals and monsters beneath the foot of the anthropomorphic figure of the god indeed suggests they retain something of an independent (and would-be rebellious) primary agency. 67 While little in the way of pigment remains visible to the naked eye, close study has revealed traces of once vibrant color on some clay plaques and figures, among them the socalled Queen of the Night (BM ME 2003,0718.1), formerly the Burney Relief. 68 See fn. 57 above. 69 One might compare this to the chain of images created when Buddhist images are authorized, see main text above; Swearer 2004: 80; Faure: 1996: 247.

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The relevant passage refers to “ú-ṣur-ti ṣal-mi-šú / ṣir-pu ša ha-aṣ-bi / GAR-šú u si-ma-ti-šú,” “a relief of his image, / a fired clay (impression) / of his appearance and attributes [insignia]” (SGT III 19–21; Woods 2004: 85). The key word in this passage is uṣurtu, which certainly designates a graphic design70 but which also possesses another meaning, according to which it may reference a “(divine) design, plan, concept, [or] ordinance” (CAD s.v. uṣurtu A). The use of this term here suggests at least the possibility that the recovered image is a divinely decreed and authorized one, one that is to be precisely imitated in specific not necessarily physiognomic respects in the human attempt to re-create it. If this was indeed the intended implication of uṣurtu here, the cult statue newly created during the reign of Nabu-apla-iddina would comprise a secondary epiphany of an unalterable divine archetype. Such an understanding of events, though necessarily speculative, only reinforces the other messages inherent in the Sun God Tablet inscription, which reiterate the particular divine favor and divinely legitimated status enjoyed by Nabu-apla-iddina during his reign – the material manifestation of which was his access to a model from which to create an anthropomorphic cult statue of Shamash rather than merely having to make do with the sun-disk that his predecessors used (Sonik, this volume). Devotional objects, as Caroline Bynum has pointed out, do not look like the divinity and yet evoke its presence, and the relic does not look like but is a piece of a saint,71 possessing as such the same qualities as the whole agent.72 It is, ultimately, through cultural learning and experience that we recognize the material object as a medium pointing to or marking the presence of the divine, or that we recognize a physical image that possesses the likeness of – even if not a direct physiognomic resemblance to – the divinity that is its referent. If we think of representations not as symbols but rather as mental con-

70 King (1912: 120 n. 4) argued that the clay model might have been a figure in the round but this is no longer generally accepted; see Woods 2004: 94 n. iii 19–20. 71 Caroline Bynum in her comments during the panel dedicated to the volume Idol Anxiety (Ellenbogen and Tugendhaft 2011) organized at the Humanities Center of New York University on September 19, 2011. 72 Discussing the analogy between reliquary (and contained relic) and statue in the Middle Ages, Belting (1994: 299) noted that both comprised proofs of a saint’s physical presence and resembled each other in appearance: the nature of this resemblance is worth elucidating further here. The medieval body part relic (and/or reliquary) as pars pro toto (literally “the part for the whole”) “was the body of a saint, who remained present even in death and gave proof of his or her life by miracles. The statue represented this body of the saint and, as it were, was itself the saint’s new body, which, like a living body, could also be set in motion in a procession [italics ours].” See also, on the nature and functioning of medieval body-part relics and reliquaries, Bynum and Gerson 1997; Hahn 2012: 117–141; on pars pro toto epiphanies, fn. 99 below.

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structs, which have referential entities potentially possessing but not limited to their material aspects, then physical representation can be more usefully conceptualized as presenting or presencing the divine to enable communication rather than as a process of mimetic representation. This notion of presencing the divine brings the active process of creating a likeness to the fore, and makes the divine or the divinity explicitly recognizable in terms of referential qualities and attributes rather than in terms of mere pictorial representation.

6 Internal and External Representations: The Materiality of the Mental Image The papers published in this volume, as well as those presented at the workshop on the materiality of divine agency at its inception,73 further reveal the necessity of defining what is meant by the term image. This is, after all, not necessarily to be equated with a material object or to its (external) form; it may comprise, rather, a mental representation.74 But what is the relationship between the mental and the material, and how might the two inform or shape each other? It is worth interjecting a few remarks here on Michael Baxandall’s important study on the Period Eye (1988), which touched on related issues in its perceptive discussion of the relationship between the cognitive style and the pictorial style of fifteenth century Italy. The images extant from this period are predominantly religious pictures – a description referring not merely to the specific subject matter that they evinced but also to their institutional functioning, intended as they were to stimulate and facilitate particular intellectual and

73 This was held on April 29, 2011 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. 74 The complexities of distinguishing mental from physical images, and of delineating the relationship between these, have attracted ongoing attention in art historical, psychological, history of religion, and neuroscientific discourses, as well as in other disciplines; see, for example, Mitchell 1986: 10–19; Simons 2008, esp. pp. 80–83; Faure 1996: 242–43; Damasio 1999: 318–20; Johnson 2007: 64–65; Bennett and Hacker 2008: 41–43. It is important to note on this subject, however, that the use and meaning of the term mental image may well vary across disciplines and even across the work of scholars within any one discipline, so that no single universally applicable definition is possible. In the context of this discussion, Mitchell’s (1986: 9–19) delineation of mental images as being mutable rather than static or absolute and involving all the senses rather than being exclusively visual, is a useful one – though physical or material images may share these properties to a greater extent than one might expect.

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spiritual pursuits (Baxandall 1988: 40). The nuances of the (visual) artist’s role, and of the relationship between artist, image, and viewer, are carefully unpacked: “The painter was a professional visualizer of the holy stories. What we now easily forget is that each of his pious public was liable to be an amateur in the same line, practised in spiritual exercises that demanded a high level of visualization … the painter’s were exterior visualizations, the public’s interior visualizations” (Baxandall 1988: 45). The extant artworks of this period should not be understood as absolute or utterly self-contained creations: rather, the artist would have understood that his or her artwork would interact with the viewer’s pre-existing internal representations on the subject. The artist, in such a context, must negotiate a fine line: his or her external (material) visualization should generally evoke a specific referent and permit its cognitive recognition and yet not compete with or efface the particularity of the viewer’s internal (if still culturally influenced and mediated) mental visualization of such. The primacy of the mental image is stressed here – both in the modern scholarly analysis of Quattrocento paintings and in the contemporaneous fifteenth century written documents on religious art and its purposes and functioning (Baxandall 1988: 46–47). The mental image itself, however, if it was articulated through internal meditation during prayer, presumably drew on information imparted in orally delivered sermons, written accounts (for the literate), and religious pictures themselves (however lacking in detail), these last used in some cases for instructional purposes. The relationship between internal and external images was necessarily a reflexive one. The mental image in the context of this discussion, as a social and cultural construction itself informed by cultic practice and theological concepts and theorizing, may be translated into material representations, physical and literary/verbal (as created, for instance, during the performance of prayer or in encounters with mythological narrative), and, ultimately, shaped and reshaped by these. Such an understanding of the physical or material image – in whatever form it takes – as ultimately deriving from or being generated by the mental image forces us to re-evaluate our stance on the established antagonistic models of iconism and aniconism in religious systems: “If the mind is conceived as a picture-making machine, how could worship and contemplation proceed without images?” (Clark 1992: 66; Carruthers 1998: 72–73; Sonik, this volume). In the discourse on medieval iconoclasm especially, the image functions as a doctrinal referent – concerned with the anthropomorphic image – of God.75 If we regard the image as a cognitive referent, however, the spiritually 75 The complex functioning of the image of the divine, and the understanding of this functioning, is elucidated in the unfortunate story of the monk Sarapion (a hermit in the Scetis Desert of Egypt), who, in his simplicity, mistook an (anthropomorphic) image, held in his

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adept human actor might still see God in his glorified splendor even in the absence of external (material) visualizations.76 The recognition that the human mind needs to see its thoughts as organized schemes of images (Carruthers 1998: 3) offers the potential to refine the notion of the materiality of divine presence in the context of communication. What is more, the making of mental images also applies to the process of composing a prayer – and to its actual performance. The acts of composing and performing are alike in comprising cognitive processes of gathering tropes and figures to elicit divine agency, thus representing arts of memoria and deep contemplation (Carruthers 1998: 4). The pertinent tropes, of course, must be recognized as deriving their potency and efficacy from their place within and reference to shared traditions, education, and experience, and thus comprise social and cultural phenomena. Memory works not as the ability to reproduce a text, formula, or list of items by rote learning but rather “as a matrix of a reminiscent cogitation, shuffling and collating ‘things’ stored in a random access memory scheme, or set of schemes – a memory architecture” (Carruthers 1998: 4). It is thus not only the object or the image of the divinity that elicits a particular affective response; memory images also have a cognitive element in that they serve as cues to the image and are emotionally colored, to the extent that memories were once regarded as bodily affects (Pongratz-Leisten, this volume).77 In other words, both the material image and the mental image operate in evocative ways and are equally linked with the transmission of knowledge and memory. Such knowledge is culturally learned and shared among a particular group of people, allowing an individual from that group to recognize, for example, a specific divinity in a particular (context-bound) manifestation of its agency. The question of how handmade images or devotional objects differ from images of the mind, and of the precise significance and ramifications of materializing the divine – presencing the unreachable and inaccessible in some sort of matter and rendering it thereby visible and tangible – is thus one which must be addressed within the individual cultural contexts within which such images or objects originated and functioned.

mind, for a “truthful” representation of God (a matter of mimesis). Once Sarapion has had his error explained, he is laid low by grief “because without the image he was accustomed to use in order to pray, he can no longer find God,” Carruthers 1998: 72; also Sonik, this volume. 76 This being the case, it is no surprise to find that mental representations could equally be subject to iconoclasm where deemed incompatible with doctrine – as so poignantly demonstrated in the story of Sarapion, fn. 75 above. 77 The Stoic philosophers in particular were cited by Carruthers (1998: 14, 280 n. 17) as being of crucial importance to the elucidation of the emotional content of images.

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7 Encountering and Experiencing the Divine: Anthropomorphism Across Cultures In investigating human interaction with the divine, the desire and capacity for communication on both the human and the divine parts should be regarded as central to religious activity. Communication presupposes the interaction of at least two agents, and so it is necessary to define precisely what divine agency means in terms of imagining divinities as causal agents with human-like properties that yet possess particular qualities that violate our ontological expectations (Boyer 1994: 100–102; 2001: 61–71).78 Omnipresence and omniscience, for example, which establish a divinity’s efficacy for the community of believers and responsiveness to the particular requests of the individual, comprise exactly such ontological violations.79 As divine presence can materialize in many forms, a crucial step in discussing the materiality of divine agency in cross-cultural perspective is elucidating what individual disciplines bring to the notions of agency (discussed above) and anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism in particular, when considered cross-culturally, emerges as a critical term. Frequently used to reference specifically human shape or physical form, it has become clear that this is too restricted a denotation. In the context of its application to the divine, anthropomorphism might be extended to signify human-like behaviors, capacities, or other qualities even in the absence of human form. Astrological omen compendia from Mesopotamia, for example, reference particular celestial phenomena using anthropomorphizing language, so that planets and stars are described as possessing both agency and feeling despite their lack of human appearance: a lunar eclipse, for example, was couched as “the distress of the moon god … The metaphor implies a conception of the physical moon as a representation of the god Sin, otherwise descriptive language about the god Sin would have no necessary connection to the moon”

78 Ontological categories are abstract concepts (i.e. animal, person, tool) as opposed to concrete ones (i.e. bird, dog, hammer). Religious representations are described by Boyer (2001: 62) as mental representations fulfilling the following conditions: “First, the religious concepts violate certain expectations from ontological categories. Second, they preserve other expectations … [Religious concepts] describe a new object by giving (i) its ontological category and (ii) its special features, different from other objects in the same ontological category.” Basic ontological categories, where combined with “striking but limited violation … [are rendered] particularly powerful and highly memorable,” Tanner and Osborne 2007: 11. 79 This is not to say, of course, that either omnipresence or omniscience is a necessary or consistent feature of the divine in all cultural contexts.

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Fig. 1.3: BM 118561. Early Dynastic Period Limestone Plaque (ca. 2500 BCE). Upper Register: Nude male (king?) followed by three worshippers pours libation before anthropomorphic seated god. Lower Register: Nude male (king?) followed by frontally rendered female priestess and two attendants or worshippers pours libation before date-palm stand in front of temple. 22.9 (h) × 26.3 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

(Rochberg 1996: 475–85). The anthropomorphizing of Mesopotamia’s divinities (Pongratz-Leisten, Sonik, this volume), then, should not be regarded as limited to pictorial or literary conceptions of the divine as human in form (Figures 1.3–1.4). It was also manifested in the attribution of human characteristics, capacities, and behaviors to various phenomena, inanimate objects, and nonhuman entities that were associated with the gods and that came to function as secondary divine agents. This phenomenon, of course, is not limited to Mesopotamia but is evident in numerous other cultural contexts as well. That said, deities materially presenced in or even depicted or imagined with physical forms or bodies resembling those of biological persons, even if these are therianthropic or theriomorphic rather than fully anthropomorphic (and even if these same deities may also be presenced or manifested in objectively inanimate things), offer the capacity for a much more seamless anthropomorphization of their range of social behaviors and embeddedness and of

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Fig. 1.4: MMA 1989.361.1. Neo-Assyrian Period Chalcedony Seal (ca. eighth-seventh century BCE). Worshipper kneeling in front of Ishtar image; winged gatekeepers flanking. 3.1 (h) cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (IAP). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

their interactive potential with other deities and with human worshippers than other types of things. Equipped with such forms, gods might marry and bear children and mingle openly or covertly with kings and even with ordinary mortals. The possession of such (apparently) relatable forms and behaviors should not be regarded, however, as having a straightforward or unambiguous effect on the human relationship or interaction with the divine. A useful case study in this context is ancient Greece, which is notable – especially from the fifth century BCE – for the apparently essential physical and behavioral anthropomorphism of its gods. Delineated, indeed, as extrahuman both in their pictorial representations and in the extant myths and narratives, so that their bodies, while human shaped, diverge from the merely human in scale, fragrance, beauty, luminosity, or other features,80 the gods demonstrate the full range of human emotions and passions, dialed permanently to maximum;81 they are fully socially engaged with each other, embedded in complex divine social networks and households (marrying; bearing 80 These features and their effects are discussed in Lapatin 2010: 141–42; Kindt 2012: 41. This divergence from the merely human is apparent also in the cult statues of the gods; see the discussion in Osborne 2011: 206. 81 Emotions such as lust, anger, sorrow, vengefulness, love, and pain are pursued or acted upon with single-minded intensity, and are lent extra weight by their potentially devastating ramifications for mortals caught up in divine affairs.

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Fig. 1.5: BM 1866,0415.63. Classical Period Red-Figure Squat Lekythos (ca. 400–380 BCE). Zeus visits Danae in the form of a shower of gold. 17.8 (h) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 1.6: BM 1856,1226.48. Classical Period Red-Figure Neck Amphora (ca. 440 BCE). Zeus takes the form of a bull to carry off Europa. 32 (h) × 18.5 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 1.7: BM 1864,1007.275. Classical Period Black-Figure Hydria (ca. 475 BCE). Peleus grapples with a metamorphosing Thetis. 20.3 (h) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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children; possessing parents and siblings, retinues and servants; etc.); and they are intimately embedded also in human social networks and relations, at least in myth, frequently metamorphosing into various objectively animate and inanimate things to pursue, consummate, or escape these relations (Figures 1.5–1.7), only to subsequently resume their anthropomorphic physical forms when these particular actions are concluded (Buxton 2010: 89–90). But what is the relationship between divine anthropomorphism as materially evinced in text and image, mental (re-)presentations of the divine, and human encounters, experiences, and interactions with the gods in ancient Greece? Three points emerge as particularly significant in this regard. The first is that the increasingly perfect physical anthropomorphism of cult statues,82 as exemplified by Pheidias’ chryselephantine Athena Parthenos (ca. 438 BCE) and Olympian Zeus (ca. 430 BCE), arguably magnified rather than minimized – at least in some respects – the gulf between human and divine (Figures 1.8–1.9). The Parthenos may have been human in form but both its massive 38-foot height and the materials from which it was composed, brilliant gold and ivory,83 were efficacious in conveying the unique nature of the divine to mortals, enabling ephiphanic experience through the “divine radiance attributed to [and also presumably rendered visible in] naturalistic forms or precious metals” (Platt 2011: 96–97). Beyond these pictorial cues and the overwhelming aesthetic effect and pleasure afforded by at least some of the cult statues (Steiner

82 The nuances of the definition and proper application of the term cult statue in the context of Greece were briefly addressed by Lapatin (2010: 131): following Irene Romano, he delineated the term as denoting a major or significant image of a deity that may look much like other representations of that deity but that is distinguished by its special setting (within a shrine, temple, or sanctuary), its association with or role as the focus of cultic practice (as indicated by its reception of offerings), and its capacity to stand in or substitute for the deity in specific contexts. While there is ongoing debate about the applicability of the concept of cult statue to the ancient Greek context (Donohue 1997; Mylonopoulos 2010; Pirenne-Delforge 2010: 129–30), the term is retained here – for lack of a better one – in reference to images of the gods in all periods that meet the conditions outlined here. 83 As rare, expensive, and luminous materials, gold and ivory not only pleased the gods but also were considered to possess intrinsic magical and aesthetic properties that manifested or materialized the “beauty, charis, that was an attribute of the gods” (Lapatin 2010: 140–41). In his useful discussion of the peculiar properties of gold and ivory in the context of ancient Greece, and of the relationship between the use of these materials for cult statues and the effective conveyance of divinity, Lapatin (2001; 2010: 140) cites the myths of Pelops and Pygmalion as well as passages from Pliny the Elder (Natural History 8.31), Pausanias (5.12.2), and Artemidorus of Daldis (Oneirocritica 2.39); see also Vernant 1991b: 36–45. For the assignment of sacral properties to materials such as gold, silver, and lapis lazuli in Mesopotamia, see above and Benzel, this volume; Winter 2012, 1999; Hurowitz 2006.

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Fig. 1.8: ROM 962.228.16. Plaster Model of Pheidias’ (Lost) Chryselephantine Athena Parthenos (ca. 438 BCE) by G. P. Stevens with additions by Sylvia Hahn (ca. 1970 CE). 1 : 10 Scale. With permission of Royal Ontario Museum. © Royal Ontario Museum.

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Fig. 1.9: BM 1948,0410.4.73. Artist’s Reconstruction of Pheidias’ (Lost) Chryselephantine Olympian Zeus (ca. 430 BCE); Engraving by Philippe Galle after Drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck (ca. 1572). 21.2 (h) × 26.1 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

2001: 101–103), the distinction between human and divine was similarly preserved in written accounts of the gods, as in descriptions of their capacity for easy mutability and astonishing metamorphoses.84 If the gods were typically or even essentially anthropomorphic (in form and behavior), the anthropomorphic was yet entirely insufficient to encompass them. As underscored by the fate of the unfortunate Semele, the notion of divinity in ancient Greece was “a combination of that which is human and that which is incommensurable-withthe-human” (Buxton 2010: 90; 2009: 158, 177–90; Steiner 2001: 80–81; Gould 2001: 203–34).

84 As Buxton (2010: 90; 2009: 167–68) has noted, however, the metamorphoses undertaken by the gods were frequently into other anthropomorphic bodies rather than into animals or inanimate objects.

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The second pertinent point in this context is that the perfect anthropomorphism of the Classical cult statues was not evident in divine images of earlier periods, a fact that seems not at all to have inhibited their mediation of the divine. Earlier aniconic and semi-iconic (here referring to non-figural or schematically figural) images were certainly known,85 some existing contemporaneously with or even developed subsequent to the perfectly anthropomorphic statues of the Classical Period (ca. 478–323 BCE).86 Pheidias’ gorgeous chryselephantine Athena Parthenos notably existed contemporaneously with the earlier and simpler olive wood (semi-iconic?) Athena Polias on the Athenian Acropolis.87 Indeed, the perfecting of the anthropomorphic divine form in the Classical cult statues has been argued to coincide with a general decline in the statues’ capacity to actually presence the divine (Steiner 2001: 102–103):88 Vernant (1991a: 152) famously delineated a shift, occurring from the turn of the fifth to the fourth century BCE, from “the presentification of the invisible to the imitation of appearance. It is at this time that the category of figural representation emerges in its specific features and, at the same time, becomes attached to mimēsis – the great human fact of imitation, which gives it a solid foundation.” It is worth noting in this respect that it was the Athena Polias that continued to remain the focus of official cultic practice and ritual activity – as the Panathenaic Festival – on the Acropolis even after the erection of the fabulous Parthenos. Some scholars, indeed, noting that there is mention of

85 Among divine representations, Vernant (1991a: 152) notes the aniconic brute stone, beams, pillar, and stele; the theriomorphic or monstrous Gorgon, Sphinx, and Harpies; and the anthropomorphic (iconic or semi-iconic), ranging from schematized to the naturalistic. See also Steiner 2001: 81; Kindt 2012: 45, 51. Most recently, for an in-depth study of aniconism in Greek antiquity, see Gaifman 2012. 86 For the contemporaneous display of – in some cases even in the same general spaces as – aniconic and semi-iconic representations of the gods even when iconic (fully figural or naturalistic) images were known, see Steiner 2001: 80–89; Platt 2011: 83 ff; Spivey 2013: 44– 45, 189–90. 87 For a discussion of the range of postulated reconstructions of the Athena Polias, from the aniconic to the fully figurative, see Platt 2011: 92; also Lapatin 2001: 78. For the use (or, more accurately, lack of use) of the terms Parthenos and Polias to denote the cult statues of the goddess Athena in antiquity, see Lapatin 2010: 127–30. 88 This is not to say that the developing anthropomorphism of divine images was (solely) responsible for the apparent decline in the “presentification” of the divine. Discussing the distinction between the Archaic Period, when the gods were not yet distinguished from their statues, and the Classical Period, when the worship of statues was problematized, Bremmer (2013: 9) has emphasized the effects of the establishment of both the Dodekatheon (the standardized group of twelve gods) and the hero (as intermediate entity) in enlarging the distance between the mortal and the divine; see also the useful discussion in Marconi (2011: 161–62).

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neither a priestess nor an altar of Athena Parthenos nor much in the way of evidence for the statue having been offered dedications or sacrifices, have argued that the Parthenos was not technically a cult statue at all – and the Parthenon, by extension, was not technically a temple, or at least not a temple to the goddess (Hurwit 1999: 27). Other scholars, however, have countered with the apparent presence of a table within the Parthenon, presumably for cultic offerings of some sort to the Parthenos (Lapatin 2010: 132; Mansfield 1985: 232 n. 19; Donohue 1997: 43–44),89 though acknowledging the continuing significance of the Athena Polias. In other parts of the Greek world, too, semi-iconic or aniconic images continued to be significant during and after the Classical Period. Such images, notably, were also associated with epiphanic experience but evoked this not through the awesome splendor of their physical forms or appearances, being made often only of wood – though the olive wood used for the Athena Polias had particular sacred qualities – and also being comparatively simple in form. Rather, their sanctity was located in origin myths of epiphanic arrival (Platt 2011: 95–96): they might fall from heaven, as the Athena Polias itself or the statue of Artemis at Ephesus or Dionysus Cadmus at Thebes; be recovered from the sea, as the statues of Dionysus at Methymna, Heracles at Erythrae, and Hermes Perpheraios at Ainos; or otherwise be bound up with heroic traditions, as the statue of Artemis at Brauron, said to have been brought there by Iphigeneia (Pausanias I 33.1); the wooden Hera at Samos, said to have been brought by the Argonauts from Argos (Pausanias VII 4.4); or the pear wood Hera at the Heraion in Argos, said to have originated in Tiryns where it was dedicated by Peirasos, son of the eponymous founder of Argos (Pausanias II 17.5). There is not evident, then, a clear evolutionary development from the (cult) statue as religious image to the statue as aesthetic artwork (Vernant 1991: 156– 57; Lapatin 2010: 141–42; Marconi 2011: 160–61). Rather, the status of images and their relationship to their referents seems to have been or to have become an issue of critical concern in the Greek world, one diversely mediated by dif-

89 See also fn. 82 above on the meaning and applicability – or inapplicability – of the term cult statue in ancient Greece. Gaifman (2006: 271) offered a striking alternate conception of the relationship between the Parthenos and cult, arguing that even while the Polias remained the focus of cultic activity in the Athenian Acropolis, it was the Parthenos that emerged as the “instrumental emblem [italics ours] of the Athenian cult of Athena Polias in Athens in the midfifth century BCE, a role embedded in daily experience through the statue’s replications on objects such as a painted vase or a terracotta token.” The form and appearance of the Athena Polias, in contrast to the oft-imitated Parthenos, are virtually unknown (Gaifman 2006: 259); Athenian bronze coins from the later third century BCE possibly – but not conclusively – offer a possible reflection of this elusive figure; see Kroll 1982.

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ferent individuals across divergent or even singular spatio-temporal moments.90 On the one hand, the blurring of the line between divinities and their cult statues is suggested by a range of examples from throughout much of Greek history. An episode in Homer’s Iliad (Book VI 360–66) records the Trojan women’s carrying of offerings to the statue of Athena within her shrine and their prayer that she take pity on their suffering – but the goddess physically rejects their plea by nodding her (or at least her statue’s) head. Pausanias (ca. 110–180 CE), in keeping with common practice, frequently refers to statues by the names of their referents without differentiating them as images, and further records the active intervention and consultation of divine images in everyday human life, from their healing of the ill to their offering of prophesies or information.91 In other cases, accounts survive of the chaining of divine statues to prevent their – or, rather, the divinities’ – departing or desertion or, more ominously, to check their – or, again, the divinities’ – dangerous or inimical proclivities or powers (Pausanias III 15.7, 15.11; Barasch 1992: 36–39).92 On the other hand, philosophers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Plato explicitly challenged the anthropomorphizing of the gods in the first case and the confusion of the image with the imag(in)ed in the latter.93 In Aeschylus’ Eumenides (ll. 397–405; Collard 2002: 96), the miserable Orestes makes his way to Athena’s altar and statue in order to beseech the goddess but Athena is not perpetually or permanently present there. She hears the clamor of his cries only from a distance, being engaged with other business, and comes (or returns) to find

90 This does not negate the general shift in the relationship between the divine and the divine statue occurring during the turn from the Archaic to the Classical Period that was articulated by Vernant (1991) and considered more recently in the context of other visual, social, and historical developments in Marconi 2011; Bremmer 2013. 91 Pausanias (VII 22.2–3) records, for example, the enquiries put to a statue of Hermes in the marketplace of Pharae; see also Spivey and Squire 2005: 82; Elsner 1998: 203–205; Osborne 2010: 66–68. 92 Bremmer (2013: 11–12), recounting Menodotus’ account of the binding to a willow bush of a statue of Hera, observed that bound or fettered statues (especially of Ares, Artemis, and Dionysus) in the Greek world shared several specific qualities, being venerable in age or at least archaic in style and being also potentially dangerous (possessing the capacity to escape the temples or religious sites where they were located), and being linked also to “rites of reversal.” See also Steiner 2001: 105–108, 152–68; Meuli 1975: 1035–81. 93 Xenophanes’ (ca. 570–478 BCE) criticism of the anthropomorphizing of the divine is preserved only second hand in a citation by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215 CE). For Heraclitus’ contemptuous account (Diels and Kranz 1952, fragment B5) of those who prayed to statues “as if they were chattering with houses, not recognizing what gods or even heroes are like,” see Steiner 2001: 79, 121–25. For Plato’s views, see Laws 931a; also the discussions in Lapatin 2010: 133; Squire 2011: 160–61.

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Orestes seated at her statue: “From far away I [Athena] heard a cry summoning me from Scamander, where I was taking possession of a land where the Achaean leaders and chieftains had assigned to me for ever, root and branch, a great portion from their captured spoils … From there I have come in swift pursuit with unwearied feet, wingless and with the folds of my aegis flapping.”94 And various surviving vase paintings explore the relationship between the divine (or semi-divine) and the statue: a black-figure composition depicting the Rape of Cassandra appears to represent Athena herself (as her statue[?], which otherwise does not appear) actively intervening as the lesser Ajax profanes her temple (Marconi 2011: 158 fig. 12);95 a red-figure calyx krater from Taranto (ca. 400–375 BCE) depicts a statue of the god Apollo bearing a bow and phiale within his temple while the god himself appears outside the temple playing his lyre;96 and an Apulian column krater (ca. 350 BCE) depicts a bemused Herakles observing the painting of his own image (Figure 1.10).97 In light of this diversity of views, the authoritative cult statue of the god in ancient Greece, whether aniconic or iconic (and specifically anthropomorphic), might be best characterized as being distinct from and yet still a channel for accessing and, at least in some cases, also pleasing the gods (Auffarth 2010: 470, 476–78; Lapatin 2010: 136, 140). Where it was authorized by the god, as through divine inspiration, revelation, or an explicit sign of divine approval, the statue mediated and even periodically – though not permanently – presenced the divine.98

94 The significance of this episode for the relationship between the divine and statues of the divine is briefly discussed in Auffarth 2010: 470; Meineck 2013: 173–76. 95 For this and other treatments of this scene, which in later periods might see Athena represented as a statue or depicted twice, once as an independent entity standing behind her statue, see Marconi 2011: 159 fig. 13, 162 fig. 15; Bremmer 2013: 9. 96 This interpretation of the imagery is generally but not universally accepted and it remains possible (though we think unlikely) that two images of the referent (Apollo himself) are depicted here rather than images of Apollo and his statue respectively. This example may be considered alongside a red-figure South Italian vase, a Lucanian bell krater by the Pisticci Painter (ca. 430–420 BCE), that again depicts both Apollo and (apparently) the statue of Apollo; Marconi 2011: 163, fig. 16; Platt 2011: 114 ff.; Lapatin 2010: 133–35; also Auffarth 2010: 470. 97 A fragmentary vase by the Iliupersis Painter (ca. 350–325 BCE) bears a similar scene, Lapatin 2010: 133–35. 98 A famous episode from Pausanias (V 11.9) records Pheidias’ prayer to Zeus to indicate whether the god approved his statue (the Olympian Zeus). A thunderbolt signaled the god’s approbation. The divine origination and/or approval of the image in which the god was to be presenced (or, at least, mediated) may be paralleled with the Mesopotamian requirements for an authoritative and legitimate form for the divine image; see main text above. For the distancing of the image from the mortal craftsman in Greece, akin to the distancing of the cult statue from the mortal craftsman in Mesopotamia, see Tanner 2006: 48–55.

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Fig. 1.10: MMA 50.11.4. Late Classical Period Red-Figure Column Krater by the Group of Boston 00.348 (ca. 360–350 BCE). Herakles watches painting of his own statue. 51.5 (h) cm. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (IAP). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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The third and final point has to do with the interaction between the material and the mental, and the modes in which the developing anthropomorphic conceptualization of the gods affected and was affected by the rather emphatic (and in some cases deliberately awe-inspiring) materiality of the divine statue in ancient Greece, particularly from the Classical Period onwards. This interaction emerges as a strikingly complex and reciprocal one, particularly when viewed through the lens of epiphanic experience: “The tangible physical presence embedded in the human form enabled the Greeks to ‘see’ and recognize their gods, thus making the concept of divine epiphany possible; by the same token, the epiphanic experience must have been instrumental in the creation of the earliest Greek cult images” (Henrichs 2010: 33). Once the relationship between a specific deity and a particular cult image had been established, however, the interaction necessarily became something of a reflexive one: the likeness of the cult statue could, and often did, shape subsequent epiphanies – the physical manifestation of the divine to humans in dream or waking visions and the corresponding recognition of the divine by the human – which in turn presumably shaped subsequent cult statues.99 The increasingly anthropomorphic images and behaviors of the gods, moreover, arguably stimulated and enabled particularly intense channels of communication between human and divine even as they, paradoxically, reinforced the enormity of the gulf between the two different types of being. Prior to leaving this discussion, it is useful to touch upon the phenomenon evinced during the Middle Ages (Bynum, this volume), which saw a striking increase in Eucharistic miracles during the period between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries CE. Divine presence manifested in explicitly non-anthropo-

99 See also the discussion in Gell 1998: 25, which recognizes a type of feedback loop between material images and mental representations. Epiphany, significantly, was not necessarily visual (it might be aural or olfactory, for example) but it was necessarily sensual, “insofar as manifestations of divinity can only gain significance through human perception,” Platt 2011: 10 ff. (on Greece); Bynum, this volume (on the European Middle Ages); Rendu Loisel, this volume (on Mesopotamia). Platt (2011: 258 ff.) explored epiphanic dream visions and the role of dreams in the mutually reinforcing and reciprocal relationship between epiphany and image, and noted also (2011: 10 n. 33) the delineation of so-called pars pro toto epiphanies by Petridou, in which divine emblems or attributes “are experienced metonymically as manifestations of the gods themselves,” underscoring the fact that a purely anthropomorphic conceptualization of the divine in ancient Greece is rather too limited and limiting; see also fns. 50, 85, 87 above. The bibliography on epiphany in the ancient Greek context is vast. Several useful sources, which include additional bibliography, include Burkert 1997; Marinatos and Shanzer 2004; Bremmer 2008, esp. 215–33; Osborne 2010: 68–70; and a forthcoming edited volume announced from Petridou and Platt; also, on human divine encounters in the context of Late Antique divination, see Johnston 2010.

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morphic matter – bread and wine – despite the ready accessibility of pre-existing human-shaped (or part thereof) “holy things” such as relics, statues, and wall paintings. Of particular interest in the context of this discussion is not just that apparently inanimate food stuffs animated, becoming quite literally true “meeting places” with the divine, as Bynum termed them, but also that this animation coincided with the anthropomorphization of the food stuffs: bread and wine visibly transformed into bleeding flesh to signify their presencing of the divine. Fields such as psychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (Atran 2002; Boyer 2001, 2003: 119–24; Barrett 2007) have long observed that the human mind tends to assign human properties such as intention, will, responsiveness, and goal-directedness to inanimate objects, non-human entities, and even to natural phenomena or events (ToM).100 Such findings have important implications for the investigation of the materiality of divine agency as they suggest the mind’s need for some type of image or representation to act as a focus for human-divine interaction. Theory of Mind has further demonstrated that, regardless of whether supernatural beings are imagined in inanimate, invisible, polymorphic, anthropomorphic, or abstract terms, human interaction with such beings always occurs in the anthropomorphizing mode of communication – and that all these various forms are attributed with (or perceived as possessing) agency. Physical anthropomorphism is certainly not a prerequisite for a particular material or matrix to effectively presence or present the divine – indeed, it may hamper such presencing in certain cases and contexts – but it does have the potential to enable particularly intense access to the otherwise inaccessible and uncontainable, suggesting some level of common ground for the purposes of engagement and communication. Even where the divine is seemingly immaterial (or inanimate or aniconic, for that matter), conceptualized as an incorporeal power or as pure divine will, it is still typically imagined or conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms or attributed with anthropomorphic capacities or behaviors in order that it explicitly remain able to see, listen or respond to, or act on behalf of humankind.

8 Frameworks of Communication: Primary and Secondary Divine Agents and Agency Part of our task in this volume was to broaden the notion of materiality beyond the physical object and to understand how things and thought relate to each 100 See fns. 33, 35 above.

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other – and specifically how the human mind works in experiencing the divine. In pursuing what Caroline Bynum (2011: 20, 32) has called the “materialization of piety” and “resituating body in matter,” and in inquiring into the functioning and meaning of holy matter, we might – through investigating specific frameworks of interaction and communication – succeed in gaining insight into issues beyond those of objectification, production, or the value embodied in commodities and their place in gifting and exchange, as well as of the exercise of power through material culture and technology (Bourdieu 1977; Miller 1987; Graves-Brown 2000). Experience, after all, always occurs in the context of particular frameworks, and it is the experience of the frame that elicits particular responses, as was ingeniously demonstrated by the art historians Ernst Gombrich (1979) and Michael Baxandall (1988: 29–108). Gombrich undertook a compelling enquiry into the human response to the frame in which a particular object or image was set while Baxandall elucidated the important concept of the period eye, recognizing human visual perception as relying not only on innate skills (and a common ocular apparatus) but also on learned skills based in and developing out of contemporary socio-cultural practices and contexts.101 From a slightly different perspective, the subject of framework and context has been explicitly taken up by psychologists and neuroscientists exploring the making and perception of objects and images, the physical factors and other contextual features of the visual field as they interact with both common human physiological structures and individual psychology, and the effects of a viewer’s previous personal and socio-cultural experiences on what and how he or she sees. Discussing art specifically, though the implications of his analysis are not restricted to art objects, Solso (1994: 102) observed that artworks are always experienced in context: context here not only includes such things as the physical and sociopolitical environment within which art is observed and the people in one’s company during this observation but also is shaped by the personal knowledge and prior cultural experience of the viewer and by common human physiological structures: “Basic perception is fixed by physiological structures that are jointly enjoyed by all members of the species … [but b]oth individual psychology and common physiology contribute to the perception of art.” Personal knowledge and experience, moreover, is not randomly or arbitrarily

101 For responses to the concept of the period eye at the time it was posited, see the discussion in Langdale 1998; also Tanner 2010. More recent studies have considered the gendered eye, for example, as well as the cultural eye. The latter, posited by Coote (1992: 248), might comprise “a society’s way of seeing, its repertoire of visual skills, which I [Coote] take to be its visual aesthetic.”

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stored in the brain; it is, rather, “systematically organized around themes, or schemes, that are important structures in the understanding of art,” as well as of the world at large (Solso 1994: 102).102 Schemas or schemata, comprising both the organization of information and the rules governing its use and combination, once activated, enable us to make particular inferences about particular objects and images, whether these are mundane or sacred, and to construct larger interpretations of them (Solso 2003: 7–14, 223–60).103 In specific relation to our inquiry into the materiality of divinity, the social context of communication was closely pursued as potentially determining the manner in which divinity materialized or was ultimately presenced within a material matrix. All social frameworks involve rules (Goffman 1986); Alfred Gell’s inferred intentionality of things and artifacts, consequently, only operates effectively if the particular constraints and conditions of a frame are fully exploited rather than neglected by the agents involved. Various examples from Mesopotamia, as an example, demonstrate that specific settings provide for or accommodate specific materializations of divine agency – and that these settings might, moreover, provide clues for decoding or fully accessing the particular divine agent under consideration.104 In the context of the cult, it is not only the anthropomorphic statue but also the various associated symbols or attributes that may function to present or presence the divinity. The latter (symbols and attributes), however, typically function in more narrowly delimited contexts than the anthropomorphic image – which comprises a significantly less trammeled agent, one capable of a significantly broader spectrum of “do-

102 See also fn. 74 above. The relationship between personal (visual and other) experience and the making of art has been relatively recently, if controversially, explored in a discussion of neural plasticity in Onians 2007a, 2007b: 1–17; for thoughtful critiques of Onians’ work, see Tallis 2009; Rollins 2009. Productive discussions of the relationship between visual experience and history and visual perception include Deregowski 1972, 1999; Hochberg 1972; and the very useful summary of scholarship contained in Phillips 2011. 103 See fn. 8 above. Solso (1994: 116) offered an example of a “street schema” advising us of which features to expect and how they might interact with each other: “We expect to see a fire hydrant near the street and not flying high in the air.” A homogeneous population may possess a more-or-less common schema, however, individual variations and expectations remain, these depending on individual knowledge and experience. Schemas, moreover, though they remain dynamic even once formed, may be sufficiently powerful to mislead or overwhelm direct perception and memory, see Brewer and Treyens 1981, and the discussion of their study in Solso 1994: 116–20. See also, however, the issues with the scene schema specifically raised in Hollingworth 2008, esp. pp. 144–46. 104 In her analysis of the notion of portraiture in the Persian tradition, Soucek (2000) stresses the aspects of setting and action as clues for decoding the image of particular historical persons in Mughal and Qajar paintings.

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ing.” Standards and weapons of gods, for their part, could be rented and taken on journeys, during the course of which they acted as divine witnesses to the performance of an oath taken in the context of tax collection or the establishment of the boundaries of a lot. Other examples abound: during thunderstorms, the weather god Adad materialized in his voice, while celestial bodies functioned as instantiations of the divine in the context of divination. It is cultural knowledge of the particular framework within which such secondary agents legitimately functioned that allows us to recognize and to delineate the full scope and spectrum of divine agency and to elucidate the various modes of its interaction with humans and the mundane world.105 The fluid notion of divine agency frequently resists modern (and even ancient and medieval) attempts at absolute structuration, which often privilege the anthropomorphic conceptions or human-shaped images of the divine – to the detriment of its other complex and manifold manifestations. The scope and variety of these manifestations, their specific significations, and the modes of their functioning are delineated and elucidated in the remainder of this volume.

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Platt, Verity. 2011. Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pomian, Krzysztof. 1990 Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge. MA: Polity Press. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2011. Divine Agency and Astralization of the Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia. Pp. 137–87, in Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, ed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Porpora, Douglas V. 2006. Methodological Atheism, Methodological Agnosticism and Religious Experience. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36(1): 57–75. Porter, Barbara, ed. 2000. One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World. Transactions of the Casco Bay Archaeological Institute 1. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Porter, Barbara, ed. 2009. What Is a God? Anthropomorphic and Non-Anthropomorphic Aspects of Deity in Ancient Mesopotamia. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Premack, David, and Guy Woodruff. 1978. Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1(4): 515–26. Preucel, Robert W. 2006. Archaeological Semiotics. Social Archaeology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ragavan, Deena, ed. 2013. Heaven on Earth: Temples, Ritual, and Cosmic Symbolism in the Ancient World, The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminars 9. Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Rampley, Matthew. 2005. Art History and Cultural Difference: Alfred Gell’s Anthropology of Art. Art History 28(4): 524–51. Renfrew, Colin, and Chris Scarre, eds. 1998. Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Riley, Alexander T. 2005. “Renegade Durkheimianism” and the Transgressive Left Sacred. Pp. 274–302, in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rochberg, Francesca. 1996. Personifications and Metaphors in Babylonian Celestial Omina. Journal of the American Oriental Society 116: 475–85. Rollins, Mark. 2009. Review of Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki by John Onians. The Art Bulletin 91(3): 377–81. Ross, Jennifer C. 2005. Representations, Reality, and Ideology. Pp. 327–50, in Archaeologies of the Middle East, ed. Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Roth, Ann Macy. 1992. The psš-kf and the ‘Opening of the Mouth’ Ceremony: A Ritual of Birth and Rebirth. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 78: 113–47. Schaudig, Hanspeter. 2012. Death of Statues, Rebirth of Gods. Pp. 123–50, in Iconoclasm and Text Destruction in the Near East and Beyond, ed. Natalie M. May. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Schiffer, Michael Brian. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behavior, and Communication. London: Routledge. Scurlock, JoAnn, and Burton R. Anderson. 2005. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine: Ancient Sources, Translations, and Modern Medical Analyses. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Selz, Gebhard J. 1992. Ein Kultstatue der Herrschergemahlin Šaša: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Vergöttlichung. Acta Sumerologica 14: 245–68.

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Caroline Walker Bynum

The Animation and Agency of Holy Food: Bread and Wine as Material Divine in the European Middle Ages Abstract: This essay uses the Christian Eucharist, in which bread and wine are understood literally to become the body of God, as a case study to raise questions about the nature and historical situating of the material divine. Noting that Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the proliferation of miracles in which the stuff of the Eucharist transformed into visible blood or bloody flesh and remained as such, providing a locus of pilgrimage and devotion, Bynum argues that the emergence of such miracles cannot be explained simply as the reflection of theological developments, as responses to the power of consecration exercised by a priestly class, or as the expression of a basic need for an anthropomorphic divine lodged in human cognitive structures. She explains that the miracles preceded the theology that theorized them, that religious objects in the later Middle Ages sometimes animated in the absence of or in opposition to clerical control, and that Christians had access to more obviously anthropomorphic holy things, such as statues and relics, that also sometimes came alive but were less highly charged religiously than Eucharistic miracles. Placing the emergence of Eucharistic transformation miracles in the context of a European culture that possessed a newly urgent sense of the lability of matter even outside areas of religious experience, Bynum argues that examples of divine materiality should be examined and explained in the context of their specific historical backgrounds. She also points out that western medievalists have in general ignored the fact that the central Christian rite is a food ritual and suggests that the appearance of the divine in food is a phenomenon in need of cross-cultural exploration. Keywords: agency, animation, anthropomorphism, Dauerwunder, Eucharist, food ritual, materiality, material divine, miracle, transformation miracles

Ever since the groundbreaking work of the German scholar and Jesuit Peter Browe in the 1920s and 30s, specialists in the western European Middle Ages

Caroline Walker Bynum, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ 08540, e-mail: [email protected]

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have known about the great increase in Eucharistic miracles between the twelfth and the early sixteenth century (Browe 1929a: 137–69; 1938).1 Even nonmedievalists have heard stories about bread and wine turning into visible red stuff and have perhaps been exposed to various naturalizing explanations of such transformations, the favorite being a particular kind of red mold (Micrococcus prodigiosus) that grows on damp bread (Browe 1929b: 332; Bauerreiss 1931: 20; Löffler 1931: 9). But these occurrences are far stranger than we are accustomed to recognize, and strange in two senses. First, it is strange that over the long course of the development of Christianity it should be food stuffs that came to be the most intense and literally “true” meeting place with the divine. After all, both relics (body parts of dead holy people and objects in contact with them) and icons (two-dimensional representations of holy people) were prominent in medieval Christianity, western and eastern, and each can be understood as a more obvious point of intersection with the divine, the icon because it is anthropomorphic and representational in the sense of iconic (that is, it looks like the saint to be worshipped) and the relic because it is indexical (that is, it derives from, or has been in contact with, a holy body).2 Second, it is strange that, in the later Middle Ages, these food stuffs, which were theorized by theologians exactly as invisible transformations, came sometimes to be visibly changed, and visibly changed into living bodily stuff – that is, into freshly bleeding flesh. In other words, these objects were by no means merely the sort of highly charged objects Lorraine Daston (2004) has influentially called “things that talk” – a category that includes anything a historian can analyze as having special cultural power. They were non-anthropomorphic material that was understood literally to animate – that is, to reveal itself to be living, organic material of the human body – and therefore to act as God. Such Eucharistic miracles, in all their strangeness, relate directly to the topic of the material divine and its agency. They do so by raising a number of questions about how something is understood to “become holy” in the Christian tradition: How important is anthropomorphism or some sort of “likeness”? How crucial is ritual to inducing the holy to appear or to finding it in matter? What is the role of theological and spiritual traditions – and of controversy about them – in heightening the belief that the divine is present? What is the relationship between the visible and the invisible in religious understanding?

1 For a different approach to some of the questions asked in this paper and different medieval texts used to explore them, see Bynum 2013. 2 Although it usually does not look like the whole person it stands in for, a relic is the holy person’s bodily remains or an object that has touched them.

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Bread and wine were theorized by Christian theologians, at least from the early thirteenth century on, as literally but invisibly becoming the flesh and blood of Christ (who is both God and human). But bread and wine do not “look like” flesh and blood, so there is no simple question of similitude here. The miracle makes them “look like” flesh and blood, but the miracle occurs only exceptionally. The bread and wine are “made holy” by a ritual, done by a priest, which is called consecration. But consecration does not make the stuff transform visibly. Indeed to some theologians, the doctrine of transubstantiation means that the invisibility of the divine is necessary for presence after consecration. Moreover, there were other objects in the Christianity of the later Middle Ages that were not consecrated but that nonetheless animated or underwent transformation: for example, statues (that are not consecrated or even in some cases blessed) and relics (that may be authorized as holy by being moved into an altar but are not in any technical sense consecrated). There were also holy objects known as sacramentals (such as oil and water) and church furnishings (such as the top of the altar but not the pedestal) that were consecrated yet did not transform. Why then did bread and wine increasingly manifest divine presence in the period between 1150 and 1500? I shall suggest that the sacrality of bread and wine in the later Middle Ages is not, in any simple sense, a case of the anthropomorphism often claimed by cognitive scientists to be central to religious discourse, art, and practice (Guthrie 1980: 181–94; 1993; Barrett and Keil 1996: 219–47).3 Nor can the animation and agency of the Eucharistic elements be attributed directly to a need on the part of the devout to encounter “likeness” to God. In churches filled with crucifixes and pietàs, images of the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment, the human face of God was immediately and multiply present already. I shall also argue that historians cannot rely either on theological statements by medieval figures or on the presence or absence of certain ritual acts to account for moments when divine presence changes from invisible to visible. Nor can they rely on these to indicate which objects metamorphose. Although the ritual performance, the historical tradition, and the theology that situate holy matter play a role in our understanding of the agency of transformed objects, we must also consider the philosophical and scientific assumptions of the period and even aspects of local history in order to ascertain why certain objects in certain places animated and acquired agency, and why they transformed in specific ways. I begin with some background on the development of these miracles. There are a few early medieval accounts of the bread and wine used in the central

3 For reservations about the cognitive-science approach, see Laidlaw 2001: 211–46.

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Christian rite of the mass turning into visible flesh and blood. But it is important to note, first, that some of these supposed early accounts are later interpolations into earlier texts; second, that they tended to have a certain negative overtone (that is, to be seen as occurring because people of lower spiritual development doubted and therefore needed visible assurances); and third, that the proper response to these stories was thought to be prayer requesting that the visibly transformed material revert as quickly as possible to its earlier form. I give two examples. In Paschasius Radbertus’s De corpore et sanguine Domini (830–833), a later redactor has inserted a particularly graphic story, borrowed from the Lives of the Fathers, in which “a certain Scythian who was great in active life [i.e. in works of piety] and simple in faith” sees an angel descend to the altar, slaughter a boy spread out there with a knife, catch his blood in a chalice, and then break his body into pieces.4 Once the doubting Scythian has received his vision, however, he is instructed by his more sophisticated companions that God knows human nature cannot eat raw flesh; thus, this compassionate God transforms the boy’s body into bread and his blood into wine so that faith can receive it. It is almost as if the reverse transformation, not the initial vision, is the important miracle. A second such tale is included in two lives of pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), written about two hundred years after his death. In this account, a woman is said to have laughed during mass, claiming that the bread could not be the body of Christ because she had baked it herself. When the pope prayed for a sign, a finger appeared in the chalice. As a result, the woman believed in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and Gregory then prayed for the bloody finger to revert to bread and wine so the congregants might take communion.5 In the twelfth century, we find a fundamental change in the pattern of such stories. First, their number increases (and this does not seem to be a result simply of better reporting or of the survival of a larger number of texts). Second, although they continue sometimes to be accusatory in implication (that is, they respond to doubt, to ritual impurity, or to abuse and violation), they come to have a much wider range of functions: they support various sorts of resistance to clerical authority (especially on the part of women); they serve as rewards for faith (rather than as antidotes to lack thereof); they become more

4 Radbertus 1969: 88–89. This story is a later interpolation, but borrowed from an early text. It is sandwiched between the story of Gregory and the finger in the chalice and the story of Plecgils, both of which Radbertus apparently added to his own manuscript. 5 The earliest version of the story is found in the 8 th century life of Gregory by Paul the Deacon and was repeated in the 9 th century one by John the Deacon. On the motif of the Gregorymass, see Meier 2006; Gormans and Lentes 2007.

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explicitly apotropaic (as living matter, they ward off disease, decay or death); and they serve as weapons to persecute outgroups, especially Jews, sometimes to the point of justifying or inciting pogroms. Third, these miracles last. They are what German historians call Dauerwunder. Instead of accepting that the transformation is visionary or, if physical, momentary, or indeed praying that the miraculous stuff revert to ordinary form as soon as possible so that it may be consumed, people (both ecclesiastical authorities and the ordinary laity) preserve it, place it in precious and elaborate containers, translate it into churches, and venerate it. It becomes the focal point of pilgrimage. I give one twelfth- and two fifteenth-century examples. The first comes from the historian and ethnographer, Gerald of Wales, who tells of a host in Flanders, half of which changed into flesh while the other half (the part held by the priest’s fingers) retained the appearance of bread. Kept in a crystal container, it was verified, we are told, by “faithful and honest clerics of the French king.” People streamed to the spot. Gerald reports that he journeyed through the region eight days after the miracle and scrutinized it for himself (Gerald of Wales 1862: 40–41).6 Fascinated by the stories of transformation he collected, some of them quite improbable, Gerald is careful to frame and authenticate this account by asserting himself to be an eyewitness. By the time we reach the fifteenth-century miracles, documentation of such cases of the “material divine” is both more extensive and much more varied. The trial and execution of 27 Jews and a Christian priest for host desecration at Sternberg in 1492 is reported in accounts of the torture and confession of the Jews spread throughout the area in Latin and German broadsheets. For contemporaries, the abuse and its consequences were documented as well by the objects (nails and a blood-soaked table top) allegedly used to torture the host – objects that were adduced into the trial as evidence and survive until today in a chapel of the little church where the bleeding host was installed and became the center of a very successful pilgrimage. The miraculous material itself, attacked explicitly by Luther in 1520, disappeared in the early years of the Reformation (Bynum 2007: 69–72). At Zehdenick, in the neighborhood of Sternberg, where there was an active pilgrimage to a supposed blood miracle about 1500, the only early evidence is a pilgrimage badge, which bears a bloodspotted wafer. But the account, written as anti-Catholic propaganda in the later sixteenth century although drawing on older oral tradition, tells of a woman who stole a host to bury under her beer keg “so that people would prefer to drink her beer.” The host bled – whether as protest or as revelation is not clear – and the bleeding earth, collected in vessels by the people and carried

6 For another account, see Heribert of Clairvaux 1855, Col. 1370.

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into the church, performed healing miracles (Bynum 2007: 58–59). My point here is not to explore the complex questions of evidence raised by these objects. My point is the shift from the devotional and doctrinal lesson that is the moral of the early stories to the later focus on the presence of the stuff itself. Why did the bread and wine of the Christian mass assert itself, so visibly and so abruptly, to be transformed into flesh and blood – and why did it remain as such? The standard explanation western historians have given for such miracles is theological.7 As is well known, the bread and wine that was central to the Christian rite of the Eucharist was understood, already in the early church, to be the place where Christ’s body was “really present” once the words of consecration were said by the priest. According to the Gospel of Matthew, on the night before he was crucified, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke and gave to his disciples and said: Take ye and eat. This is my body. And, taking the chalice, he gave thanks and gave to them, saying: Drink ye all of this. For this is my blood of the New Testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins. (Matthew 26:26–28)

The ritual of the mass, modeled on this supper, was understood to be a sacrifice of God offered by God to God for his adherents. It was a communal meal that bound Christians together. It was also a way of participating in the incarnate divine by taking it into oneself. For all the talk of sign and sacrament, type and symbol, no early writer doubted that a sacred reality lay behind the bread and wine, which were increasingly referred to as the “body of the Lord.” As an early hymn put it: [We are] looking forward to the supper of the lamb … whose sacred body is roasted on the altar of the cross. By drinking his rosy blood, we live with God … Now Christ is our Passover, our sacrificial lamb; his flesh, the unleavened bread of sincerity, is offered up. (Walpole 1922: 350–51)

Exactly how Christ was “really present” in the bread and wine was not a question that engaged early theologians. But in the late eleventh century, as a result of theological controversy, lines were drawn more sharply between those who understood the bread and wine as symbols and memorials – triggers of reverence, so to speak – and those who argued that the elements literally (albe-

7 Western medievalists are blessed – or maybe cursed – with a great deal of textual material from the period that itself interprets religious phenomena. And it is from this that an explanation has been constructed.

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it invisibly) became the physical body and blood of Christ at the words of consecration. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, a technical formulation was required of the faithful: Jesus Christ himself is both priest and sacrifice, and his body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated [a technical term using Aristotelian categories] into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God, so that to carry out the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from him the body he himself receives from us. (Denzinger and Schönmetzer 1976: 260)

The explanation usually given for the proliferation of Eucharistic miracles after 1100, and for the fact that they came to take the form of Dauerwunder, has been that such miracles were the result of this definition of the Fourth Lateran Council. In other words, the church said that these things literally became God’s body in substance or nature, although the appearance remained unchanged. People had trouble accepting this. Miracles that made manifest the substance under the accidents erupted in order to prove that the transformation was real and to quell widespread anxiety about doubting it (Browe 1926: 167–97; Langmuir 1996: 287–309). Such miracles also supported the role of consecration by the clergy in creating such holy stuff and hence were part of the clericalization of religion that is a major characteristic of post-Gregorian Reform Christianity.8 To historians and art historians who study other cultures (especially cultures where there is little or no indigenous theoretical material available and other sorts of interpretation must perforce prevail), strictly theological explanations will seem inherently implausible. And they have always seemed so to me (although I confess that I have always been fascinated by theological ratiocination). The reasons for rejecting purely theological explanations, or even explanations restricted to a religious context, are numerous. First, the chronology is wrong. The definition given by the Fathers of the Fourth Lateran Council comes after Dauerwunder have already begun to appear (as is evident from the account given by Gerald of Wales mentioned above). It seems clear that the need for a definition of Eucharistic presence came not only because of earlier controversy about what the ritual of the Eucharist meant but also because of the growth of a piety that supported such miracles. In other words,

8 The period after the Gregorian reform movement of the late eleventh century, also called the Investiture Controversy, saw the growing separation of the clergy from the laity by differences in lifestyle (for example, clerical celibacy) and the enhanced power of clerics and, increasingly, of the papacy.

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enthusiasm for material manifestations of the divine produced a need to theorize them. Indeed, it could be argued that the definitions of ecclesiastical authorities both in the eleventh century and at the Fourth Lateran Council could not have caused the surge in such miracles after 1100 precisely because they were an argument against them. “Transubstantiation” means that the change is not seen. In general, western theologians, who treated relics and images as objects that point to God’s power and presence, not as full instantiations of the divine, tended to want to keep Eucharistic change invisible, however ontologically different the Eucharistic elements might be from relics or images (Browe 1929b). Although some theologians strove to account for the plausibility of visible eruptions of flesh and blood (in what was often extremely convoluted argumentation), many rejected such miracles in favor of a deeply interiorized spirituality that is one of the roots of the reformations of the sixteenth century (Browe 1929b; Bynum 2007: 85–111). A second, and even more important, argument against theological causation is this. Broad and deep changes in performance – in what both priests and people were doing in and even outside the mass – led to and framed such miracles.9 A number of developments between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries tended to move the Eucharist away from a communal meal and toward a mystery whose impact came when a hidden something was revealed. The words of consecration, said in Latin, which was a language ordinary people did not understand, became less audible. The priest now stood in front of the altar with his back to the congregation. By the thirteenth century, screens that (because they were pierced) functioned to focus as well as to hide the ritual were erected between the ordinary laity and the apse where the altar was located (Jung 2000: 622–57). By the fourteenth century, elaborate altarpieces that opened and closed depending on the day of the liturgical year provided a backdrop for the ritual performed in front of them. The focal point of the mass came to be not the moment of consecration but the moment when the priest elevated – that is, lifted up – the host.10 All this tended to privilege revelation – the moment of seeing the wafer – and that wafer was no longer the homebaked bread offered by housewives (as described in the story of Gregory and the bloody finger) but a flat, thin, almost transparent disk, often stamped with an image of the crucified Christ.11 Nor was the revelation of the host only vi-

9 On the importance of performance and sensation in creating religious response, see Morgan 2010: 9–12. 10 The piety of the period around 1200 focused on what an influential early study called “the desire to see the host,” see Dumoutet 1926. 11 Earlier wafer designs – even for unleavened bread – more often had simple monograms. On changes in Eucharistic practice and host veneration, see Jungmann 1959.

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sual. Through incense, music, genuflections, and candles, all the senses – smell, hearing, taste, and touch as well as sight – were awakened. Increasingly then, the central Christian ritual, the mass, involved a kind of synesthesia. Moreover, the consecrated host, paraded in Corpus Christi processions or exposed on the altar outside the mass in gorgeous crystal and gold monstrances, became a holy object in and of itself, inspiring terror as well as devotion. Eucharistic miracles involved tasting blood in the mouth, hearing angelic music or threatening voices, feeling kissed or flooded with sweetness, as well as seeing Christ. Whether or not the experience was one of sensible transformation, what was in play was an intense, reverberating presence. Hence it was at least as much the performance of the liturgy as the words of clerical consecration per se that induced the holy to descend into matter. A third problem with seeing Eucharistic theology as the trigger for miracles of transformed hosts, chalices, and altar linen is the fact that these miracles were part of a much larger class of things that, so to speak, “came alive.” Or – to put it another way – they were one among many types of animation that were undergirded by no theology of “real presence” or “transubstantiation.” Since the early Middle Ages, there had been stories of bleeding or oozing or otherwise fertile or living relics. But in the later Middle Ages such stories were on the increase, and often the relics predate the miraculous metamorphosis by hundreds of years. (In Naples, for example, the blood of Januarius – supposedly a fourth-century martyr – began to liquefy only in the fourteenth century.) From the fourteenth century well into the early modern period, claims proliferate of paintings and statues that bleed, weep, glow, wink at viewers, or even come down off their walls or pedestals and walk around (Thunø and Wolf 2004). Moreover, the acquiring of agency by such objects – agency to heal, to pacify conflict, to increase fertility, even to wage war – was not necessarily linked to clerical consecration or even clerical control. As I said above, statues and paintings were not in any simple sense consecrated, although they were sometimes blessed. Relics can perhaps be understood as consecrated when the saint’s body is translated into an altar, but especially in the early Middle Ages, as Julia Smith (2010; 2012) has emphasized, the laity (independent of clerical authorization or direction) simply collected material that was in contact with, or actually was, the body of a holy person as a means of access to the power of the divine. Moreover, statues, relics, and Eucharistic elements sometimes animated in support of clerical or lay authority but sometimes in defiance of it. Hosts supposedly became bleeding flesh to accuse Jews of sacrilege, heretics of wrong belief, or corrupt priests of licentious behavior or impure ritual practices, thus underlining the authority of prelates, lay lords, and of the dominant

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culture. But women, children, the poor, even criminals received visions in which Christ bypassed altar and Eucharist to come directly to the lowly; pictures and statues spoke to marginal people and those at work in ordinary tasks. Indeed debate over some of the most famous miracle hosts (such as those at Wilsnack) raised the issue of whether the miraculous matter had been consecrated at all. As Peter Browe himself underlined in his work in the 1930s and historians such as Charles Zika and Hartmut Kühne have emphasized since, the specific social and political circumstances of miracles of transformation and agency must be studied for clues as to when and where specific transformations occur (Browe 1938; Zika 1988: 25–64; Kühne 1999: 51–84). Objects that had been neglected sometimes manifested divine agency in order to renew the prestige of their site or to provide the area with a competitive locus of pilgrimage. For example, once the cult at Wilsnack blossomed in the fifteenth century, almost a hundred similar sites appeared in competition and imitation; preachers extolled them as inducements to devotion and local lords encouraged them as casting special protection over border areas.12 In the later Middle Ages, the art of Europe in all its many forms seems increasingly to call attention to the materials of which it is made. An example is provided by the almost innumerable winged altarpieces, which were usually flat on the outer wings (and sometimes painted in grisaille – i.e. grey) but three-dimensional and gilded when the wings were opened on feast days and the inner shrine revealed. With such objects, the further one penetrates toward the central frame of the ritual, the more tactilely insistent the object is. The miracle of stigmata, which first emerged around 1200 (no early medieval claims are known), provides another example of the increasing charge felt to be present in the very stuff of things. A literal manifestation of the wounds of Christ in the body of a believer, stigmata came to be described in texts and depicted in images as the “incising” or “imprinting” by a crucifix (a devotional object) into the believer who sees it (Bynum 2011: 112–16). Moreover, touching and feeling as well as seeing objects induced the experience of a living God. A nun at the convent of Emmerich said she felt God’s body when she clutched cloth against her breasts; a chronicle from the convent of Katharinenthal in Switzerland told of a sister who touched the hands and feet of a Christ statue lying in a sarcophagus and felt them to be “flesh and blood as if a living person were lying here.”13 Such experiences parallel Eucharistic ones. For example, several Low Country women tasted sweetness in their mouths when they re-

12 On north German sites, see Bynum 2007: 25–81. 13 For the example from Katharinenthal, see Hamburger 1998: 85, 485 n. 243; for Emmerich, see Van Engen 2008: 279.

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ceived the host; Colette of Corbie saw the host as chopped meat on a platter.14 In all this, there is a close relationship between materiality and visible signs of living presence. In other words, some material objects – whether felt or seen, whether anthropomorphic or not, whether consecrated or not – come to insist on their own materiality as alive under fingers, before eyes, in mouths. Yet one cannot argue that naturalism of representation or anthropomorphism accounts for animation, since many of the speaking wall paintings of the later Middle Ages are in no way more realistically rendered than their silent neighbors, and the Eucharistic elements that sometimes, but only sometimes, appeared as human flesh are not stricto sensu anthropomorphic. Indeed the more one knows about the later Middle Ages, the clearer it becomes that the entire culture, secular as well as religious, courted the animation of objects – that is, the visible or sensible manifestation of life in them. The period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century in Europe saw an increasing fascination with animated matter in senses too numerous to go into fully here. I cite efforts on the part of aristocrats – both ecclesiastical and lay – to construct mechanical objects that mimicked life: dragons that belched fire, statues that spoke, mechanical singing birds, and various sorts of chambers of special effects (Kieckhefer 1989; Eamon 1983: 171–212). I also note that it was in this period that alchemy, basically rejected by intellectuals in the twelfth century, flourished and gained greater and greater credibility; that astrology flourished also and along with it complex theories of a world soul (that is, of a completely animate universe); and that werewolves and other animal-human metamorphoses became increasingly common in the literature of fantasy and entertainment and, more important, gained support and sometimes rather frantic polemic in favor of their facticity. Even an object such as the magnet, which was explicitly theorized as “not alive” in the twelfth century, was re-theorized as animate in the sixteenth century. And in ways I have discussed elsewhere, matter itself was increasingly conceived under various paradigms that assumed it to be organic or closely analogous to the organic. Dauerwunder were the transformation phenomena that received the most sophisticated theorizing, but enthusiasm for radical transformation was everywhere (Bynum 2011: 217– 65). This observation brings me to the point where I can return to the theological and devotional context of transformation miracles but in a much broader sense. Historians of Christianity have paid so much attention recently to the prominence of the human Christ in late medieval devotion and theology that

14 For Low Country examples, see Bynum 1987: 115–29. On Colette, see Peter of Vaux 1966: 558, 560–62.

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they have failed to underline sufficiently the emphasis on the manifestation of God in all of creation. Yet theologians such as Bonaventure and charismatic reformers such as Francis of Assisi saw God’s footprints in the entire created world. Francis, as is well known, preached to birds and wolves and, as is less well known, urged his brothers to smear the walls of the church with meat on Christmas so that the very building would feast on the day of the Lord’s birth (Thomas of Celano 1926: 244). The Provençal visionary Marguerite of Oingt (1965: 101) saw Christ as a mirror reflecting all of creation. Nicholas of Cusa, a political theorist, theologian, and mystical writer who emphasized the incomprehensibility of God, not only saw Christ as the human conduit leading the entire universe back to the divine but also saw creation as the unfolding of the infinite in the finite and particular. In his De visione Dei, Nicholas wrote: “[O God] … no one can approach you because you are unapproachable … [H]ow will you give yourself to me if you do not at the same time give me heaven and earth and all that are in them? … [H]ow will you give me yourself if you do not also give me myself?” (Nicholas of Cusa 1997: 246–47) 15

Eucharistic transformation miracles may be seen as, in some sense, the “return of the [anthropomorphic] repressed.” The human figure or bleeding flesh that sometimes appeared in bread and wine moved the material in which the divine inhered from food stuff to human-shaped or at least human-associated matter. But when it was visually encountered as a Dauerwunder, it was almost invariably organic not anthropomorphic. And to theologians, those who recorded miracles, and the Christian devout who went on pilgrimage, it was also understood as standing for, including, and encompassing the entire created universe. Even when liturgists paid attention to the symbolism of the Eucharistic elements as both body and food, they tended to emphasize body as community and in-gathering, not just as Christ’s flesh. Why, they asked, had God chosen bread and wine for his Passover? Because the wafer is made up of many grains, as the body of Christ – that is, the church – is made up of many Christians. Grapes crushed into wine signify those same Christians in community as well as a gift offered back to God in thanksgiving for his offering of life to his children. Thus far, I have explained the sort of visible and insistent transformation we find in Eucharistic miracles both by citing the development, from New Testament times on, of the centrality of the stuff of the Christian ritual meal and

15 And see the sensitive discussion by H. Lawrence Bond in his Introduction to Nicholas of Cusa 1997: 18.

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by underlining the presence in the later Middle Ages of a greatly increased cultural desire (among intellectuals and the wider populace alike) for the experience of many kinds of animated matter. Nonetheless, there is, as I said at the beginning of my essay, something counter-intuitive here that medievalists, who regularly study miracles, have almost ignored. Despite the naturalistic explanations that might be given (such as mold or hallucination or outright fraud), despite New Testament support for giving the Christian version of the Passover meal central importance, despite everything we know from anthropological comparisons about the importance of commensality, it is odd that food became the premier place of divine manifestation. Christ was understood to be God incarnate in a human body. But it is odd that divine presence was thought to become sensibly, visibly, tactilely present as human flesh and blood – not mystically or symbolically or ritually present but literally present – in something that in no obvious way “looks like” or represents, iconically or indexically, the incarnate God. In other words, not only is it odd that bread and wine became invisibly flesh and blood, it is also odd that what sometimes became visible and palpable flesh and blood was bread and wine. Indeed, whether or not the bread and wine were visibly transformed, they were understood to have extreme power. Transformation miracles were a tiny minority of the encounters clergy and laity had with divine matter, which was mostly received as, at least visually, ordinary bread. The woman at Zehdenick, like others we know of who put consecrated wafers in fishponds or sprinkled them on cabbages, believed the hosts they stole induced fertility even before they bled or glowed or reassembled themselves out of crumbled bits. Those who first revered the bleeding wafers found after the fire at Wilsnack in 1383 resisted the effort of the local bishop to re-consecrate the elements. Early accounts of the veneration that emerged almost immediately after the burning of the church claim that the hosts bled anew in order to deflect the bishop’s action, thus either asserting themselves to be already consecrated or, more radically, asserting that they did not need consecration (Bynum 2007: 26). Transformation miracles were the visible insistence of food stuff on divine power it possessed invisibly. The prominence of food as divine presence, divine agency, and indeed divine identity raises several larger questions that lurk behind many of the papers for this volume. Does it matter whether an object in which sacrality inheres – and in particular an object that is claimed to come alive visibly and sensibly – is human-shaped or has human or bodily or organic attributes? How far is the control of a specialized priestly class necessary to the appearance and agency of the material divine? Why does the material divine tend to transform visibly at certain periods and in certain contexts more than in others? How does the particularity of the material – the stuff – of holy objects figure

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in their power and in their tendency to animate? The Christian Eucharist – God dwelling and acting in the product of grain and grape – raises these questions acutely. Scholars of comparative religion and cognitive scientists interested in explaining the particular form in which divine agency is embodied would do well to pay more attention to the broad range of organic and inorganic stuff in which the holy is understood to appear. In this paper I have functioned as a historian, asking a historian’s question: Why did a particular sort of thing occur in a particular historical period? I have explained that a certain kind of miracle erupted in a particular form at a particular historical moment in the later Middle Ages; I hope I have, at least in part, explained the timing as owing not only to long-standing religious traditions but also to aspects of the wider culture. But the deeper issue is twofold and, as I have suggested, I am not satisfied with the answers usually given – if indeed the questions are raised at all. First: why is it bread and wine that is the instantiation of God? And second: why was there such eagerness for the visible, tactile, sensible appearance of the divine as human body? Why was an invisible presence, especially if enhanced by incense, candlelight, and other aspects of performance, not enough? Most theologians in the later Middle Ages asserted the invisibility of Eucharistic presence. Some also attempted to explain away literal appearances. Moreover, there were inherent problems involved in attempting to preserve transformed material stuff as if the transcendent and unchangeable endured in it. Even supposedly miraculous material decays and hence eventually ceases to display the divine.16 Such decay of the ostensibly sacred creates problems both for those who manage and worship at cult sites and for those who theorize the nature of the miraculous. Nonetheless, at a particular period in the later Middle Ages, not only were bread and wine thought to be the place above all others where the divine inhered but that divine was also thought at least sometimes to appear in food as visible, sensible, living flesh and blood.17 Western medievalists have, by and large, explained this away by naturalizing it or have reduced it to a consequence of theology. Perhaps the oddest thing of all, then, is that medievalists have not found it odd.

Bibliography Barrett, Justin L., and Frank C. Keil. 1996. Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity; Anthropomorphism in God Concepts. Cognitive Psychology 31: 219–47. 16 For elaboration of this point, see Bynum 2011: 256–65, 284–86. 17 For recent attention to the Eucharist as food, see Wirzba 2011; Grumett 2012: 26–27.

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Bauerreiss, Romuald. 1931. Pie Jesu: Das Schmerzensmann-Bild und sein Einfluss auf die mittelalterliche Frömmigkeit. Munich: Karl Widmann. Browe, Peter. 1926. Die Hostienschändungen der Juden im Mittelalter. Römische Quartalschrift 34: 167–97. Browe, Peter. 1929a. Die eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder des Mittelalters. Römische Quartalschrift 37: 137–69. Browe, Peter. 1929b. Die scholastische Theorie der eucharistischen Verwandlungswunder. Theologische Quartalschrift 110: 305–32. Browe, Peter. 1938. Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters. Breslauer Studien zur historischen Theologie, NF 4. Breslau: Müller & Seiffert. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2007. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2011. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2013. The Sacrality of Things: An Inquiry into Divine Materiality in the Christian Middle Ages. Irish Theological Quarterly 78: 3–18. Daston, Lorraine, ed. 2004. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books. Denzinger, Henry, and Adolfus Schönmetzer, eds. 1976. Decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council. Pp. 259–66, in Enchiridion symbolorum: Definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum. 34 th ed. Freiburg: Herder. Dumoutet, Édouard. 1926. Le désir de voir l’hostie et les origines de la dévotion au SaintSacrement. Paris: Beauchesne. Eamon, William. 1983. Technology as Magic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Janus 70: 171–212. Gerald of Wales. 1862. Gemma ecclesiastica in Giraldi Cambrensis opera 2, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock, and G. F. Warner. Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores 21. London: Longman & Co. Gormans, Andreas, and Thomas Lentes, eds. 2007. Das Bild der Erscheinung: Die Gregorsmesse im Mittelalter. KultBild 3. Berlin: Reimer. Grumett, David. 2012. Review of Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. The Times Literary Supplement, 6 April 2012: 26–27. Guthrie, Stewart. 1980. A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Current Anthropology 21(2): 181–94. Guthrie, Stewart. 1993. Faces in the Clouds. A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamburger, Jeffrey. 1998. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. New York: Zone Books. Heribert of Clairvaux. 1855. De miraculis libri tres. Cols. 1271–1384, in Patrologia Latina 185bis, ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris: J.-P. Migne. Jung, Jacqueline E. 2000. Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches. Art Bulletin 82: 622–57. Jungmann, Joseph A. 1959. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (Missarum Sollemnia). Trans. F. A. Brunner and C. Riepe. Abridged edition in 1 volume. New York: Benziger Brothers. Kieckhefer, Richard. 1989. Magic in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Kühne, Hartmut. 1999. ʻIch ging durch Feuer und Wasser…ʼ: Bemerkungen zur Wilnacker Heilig-Blut-Legende. Pp. 51–84, in Theologie und Kultur: Geschichten einer Wechselbeziehung: Festschrift zum einhundertfünfzigjährigen Bestehen des Lehrstuhls für Christliche Archäologie und Kirchliche Kunst an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, ed. Gerlinde Strohmaier-Wiederanders. Halle: André Gursky. Laidlaw, James. 2001. A Well-Disposed Social Anthropologist’s Problems with the ‘Cognitive Science of Religion’. Pp. 211–46, in The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography, ed. Harvey Whitehouse. Oxford: Berg. Langmuir, Gavin. 1996. The Tortures of the Body of Christ. Pp. 287–309, in Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löffler, K. 1931. Mittelalterliche Hostienwunder und Wunderhostien in Westfalen und Niedersachsen. Auf Roter Erde: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Münsterlandes und der Nachbargebiete 6: 9–22. Marguerite of Oingt. 1965. Speculum. Pp. 89–103, in Les Oeuvres de Marguerite d’Oingt, ed. and trans. Antonin Duraffour, Pierre Gardette, and Paulette Durdilly. Publications de l’Institut de Linguistique Romane de Lyon 21. Paris: Belles Lettres. Meier, Esther. 2006. Die Gregorsmesse: Funktionen eines spätmittelalterlichen Bildtypus. Cologne-Weimar-Vienna: Böhlau. Morgan, David, ed. 2010. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. London and New York: Routledge. Nicholas of Cusa. 1997. De visione Dei. Pp. 235–89, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings. Trans. H. Lawrence Bond. New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Peter of Vaux. 1966. Life of Colette of Corbie. Pp. 532–89, in Acta Sanctorum … editio novissima, ed. J. Bollandus, G. Henschenius, J. Carnandet et al. March, vol. 1. Brussels: Culture and Civilisation. Radbertus, Paschasius. 1969. De corpora et sanguine Domini. Pp. 1–131, in Corpus christianorum: Continuatio medievalis 16, ed. Beda Paulus. Turnhout: Brepols. Smith, Julia M. H. 2010. Christianity in Miniature: A Look Inside Medieval Reliquaries. Newsletter from the Institute for Advanced Study, Fall 2010: 5. Smith, Julia M. H. 2012. Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c. 670–1200). Proceedings of the British Academy 181: 143–67. Thomas of Celano. 1926. Second Life of Francis. Pp. 129–268, in Legendae S. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis XIII et XIV conscriptae. Analecta franciscana, sive Chronica aliaque varia documenta ad historiam Fratrum minorum spectantia 10, fascicule 2. Quarrachi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae. Thunø, Erik, and Gerhard Wolf, eds. 2004. The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Analecta Romana Supplement 35. Rome: “L’erma” di Bretschneider. Van Engen, John. 2008. Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church. Church History 77(2): 257–84. Walpole, Arthur Sumner. 1922. Early Latin Hymns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wirzba, Norman. 2011. Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zika, Charles. 1988. Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in FifteenthCentury Germany. Past and Present 118: 25–64.

Part II: Divine Materials, Materiality, and Materialization in Mesopotamia

Kim Benzel

“What Goes In Is What Comes Out” – But What Was Already There? Divine Materials and Materiality in Ancient Mesopotamia Abstract: Throughout the long history of the ancient Near East, there is substantial textual and archaeological evidence that the materials from which certain objects were made possessed significance beyond their value as commodities. Some of these materials were regarded as having magical properties, while others perhaps possessed even sacred or divine ones. In this contribution, Benzel examines two of these materials, gold and silver, from archaeological, textual, metallurgical, and cognitive perspectives. In so doing, she focuses on how each material might have been experienced, observed, and perceived in its raw state before being transformed into a finished product that was both physically and mentally constructed. For instance, by unpacking the elements of purity, luminosity, and holiness that are variously associated with gold and silver, she addresses which of these components are inherent physical properties, which were qualities assigned by human agents, and how the two might have interacted in ancient contexts. This careful scrutiny makes it possible to understand how and why these metals were deemed to have the capacity to animate objects and images with sacredness or holiness, or, at the very least, to activate further ritual efficacy to produce or reproduce the divine rather than simply to reflect it. Keywords: agency, materials/materiality, divine/divinity, sacred/sacredness, holy/holiness, gold, silver

1 Introduction Throughout the long history of the ancient Near East, there is substantial textual and archaeological evidence that the materials from which certain artifacts were made possessed significance beyond their value as commodities. Some of

Kim Benzel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028–0198, e-mail: [email protected]

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these were regarded as having (inherent) magical properties1 and were, in some cases, considered sacred or divine in nature. This subject was explicitly addressed by Victor Hurowitz (2006: 22), who, in an investigation of the material aspect of artistic production, delved into the operational and theological bases for what he calls the “divinity” of the materials, not just the objects they become or adorn: “For Mesopotamian iconoplasts, the materials which go into the idols are already of divine nature. They belong to the gods or embody a god, so that when the idol is produced it does not become a god ex nihilo.” The internal logic for Hurowitz is that “no new divinity is brought into existence” so “the craftsman does not face the problem of creating something beyond his power”; in other words, “what goes in is what comes out.” It is important to stress at the outset that materials in the ancient Near East had a multitude of practical and/or economic functions, and that their role in the production of Mesopotamian material culture is in no way restricted to magical or cultic contexts. An abundance of extant economic and administrative texts from the third millennium BCE onward has led to considerably more scholarly research on the practical operational value of certain materials, particularly gold and silver, in the bureaucratic systems of the ancient Near East. However, it is the less easily accessed and less frequently addressed role of certain materials within the realm of the sacred that is my interest here. I will not limit any discussion of agency2 to the context of cult images. By combining information on materials, especially gold and silver, from ancient texts, archaeological finds, and existing modern scholarship with an analysis of how these materials might have been experienced, observed, and perceived in their raw state and then transformed into finished products that are physically and mentally constructed, I hope to uncover – even in the absence of more explicit texts, like those that describe the making of divine statues – processes at work that were able to animate other artifacts (such as jewelry) in much the same way.

1 The distinction between properties that are considered magical versus ones that may be religious (sacred or cultic) in nature is a complicated one; a full discussion of the issues involved is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper. The term “magic” is especially problematic yet remains in common usage because we lack a better – or as widely comprehensible – term; see further Schwemer 2011. 2 In this paper I use the term “agency” as defined by Alfred Gell (1992, 1998) in his seminal works on art and agency. Gell argues that images and artifacts can act on their users, i.e. achieve agency, through a sort of technical virtuosity. In Gell’s sense of agency, works of art have the power to influence their viewers and to make them act as if they are engaging with animate beings rather than with inanimate matter. Here, that sense of agency is applied to materials as well as to objects.

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2 Existing Scholarship on Materials and Materiality in Mesopotamia From the third millennium BCE onward there is considerable evidence that the ancient Mesopotamians assigned not just economic value and prestige to stones and metals, but also magical qualities. While the potential for magical efficacy is widely accepted with respect to such materials, their role in the production of the sacred is less frequently acknowledged, apart from their use in the making of divine statues, as noted by Hurowitz and others. Yet examples range from Early Dynastic temple foundation deposits that include segments of raw or unworked stone and metal (Delougaz 1940; Ellis 1968: 131–44; Moorey 1994: 224) to Early Dynastic and later texts that imply the sacral, or perceived sacral, qualities of certain stones and metals – or of particular objects because they were made from those specific materials (Lambert 1971: 473; Farber-Flügge 1973; van Dijk 1983; Krebernik 1986; Selz 1997; Pongratz-Leisten 2009: 422). This link between materials and the sacred continues through into the first millennium BCE, when analogous connections are made in documents such as the mīs pî (Walker and Dick 1999) and assorted esoteric and ritual texts (Goff 1963: 162–211, esp. pp. 178, 189–90, 196–99; Sachs 1969: 331–34, esp. ll. 190– 205, 365–70, 385–95; Menzel 1981: nos. 22 (T24–28), 24 (T32–38), 29 (T46–48); Livingstone 1986, esp. pp. 105, 177, 179, 182; Maul 1994). Many of these ritual texts make clear that certain materials (metals and stones), and often also the craftspeople specializing in working with those materials, were integral to the efficacy of the particular sacred and cultic rituals being described. Materials to be used, moreover, were prescribed in a way that goes beyond the merely practical, professional, and efficient. Written sources from across Mesopotamia’s chronological spectrum also point to the consistent use of, for example, gold, silver, and lapis lazuli in the building of temples as those materials were considered uniquely appropriate to a divine abode and its divine efficacy (Sachs 1969: 333, ll. 365–75; Kramer 1952; Moorey 1994: 225; Ross 1999: 93, 184, 310– 12; Winter 2007: 55–59; Pongratz-Leisten 2009: 417 ff.; Winter 2012). Similarly, objects made of such materials are regularly cited in texts as especially suitable for cultic use, a feature that is indeed corroborated archaeologically by finds from temple contexts (Leemans 1971: 507; Sachs 1969: 334, ll. 385–95; Moorey 1994: 221; Ross 1999, esp. pp. 156 ff.). In fact, it seems that gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian were often kept in temple storehouses, inventoried by temples as the property of the deity, or referenced in literary and administrative texts as belonging to the deities rather than to the temple or its administrators (Legrain 1947: nos. 344, 703; Bottéro 1949; Sachs 1969: 331–34, ll. 190–200,

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365–70; Sjöberg and Bergmann 1969; Kramer 1969: 579 ff.; Al-Rawi and Black 1983; Cooper 1986: 78–79, La 9.5; and Ross 1999: 48, 184, 193–94, 307–12). Indeed, a significant number of literary compositions from a variety of periods closely associate these same precious materials – both in their raw state and in the form of (or incorporated into) finished products – with the sacred.3 It is all the more remarkable, then, that the notion of inherent sacredness has rarely been part of the scholarly discourse on jewelry in the ancient Near East. Jewelry, after all, comprises an object category overwhelmingly constituted by the very materials – gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian – consistently connected to the sacred. It is also an object category known to have been produced in great quantities for the adorning of cult statues that are widely accepted as functionally divine (Oppenheim 1949; Legrain 1947: nos. 344, 703; Maxwell-Hyslop 1960; Sachs 1969: 331–32; Sack 1979; Cohen 1993: 164; Ross 1999: 186–87; Walker and Dick 1999; Bidmead 2002: 54–55). The ritual progression of the first millennium BCE akītu festival offers useful insight into the associations and agency of jewelry in divine contexts: not only were certain artisans ordered to the temple to make jewelry of gold and precious stones for the adornment of the cult statues used in the ritual, but also that same jewelry was then “decommissioned” or deactivated, along with the statues, when its purpose had been fulfilled. This suggests that the jewelry was integral to all aspects of the ritual’s efficacy and thus empowered and decommissioned in much the same manner as the divine statues themselves (Goff 1963: 178; Sachs 1969: 331–34; Cohen 1993: 406–53; Bidmead 2002: 46 ff).4 But how did this 3 Jennifer Ross (1999) has provided a nearly complete collection and detailed discussion of many of these references and sources in her dissertation on precious metals and political development in the third millennium BCE, so I will not repeat the exercise here beyond what has been mentioned above and cited in the accompanying footnotes. However, I will reiterate and emphasize certain examples and introduce additional ones as they relate to my arguments or to material not included in Ross’ discussion. 4 It is noteworthy that the jewelry for the statues was created and destroyed along with the statues. This speaks to the argument that jewelry should be regarded as analogous to the statues themselves in terms of having potential agency. It is worth considering whether the fire – burning – used in the akītu ritual for deactivating divine (cult) statues was not just symbolic of purification (as opposed to simple decommissioning by breaking) but deliberately took into account the most effective and complete way of erasing the form of the jewelry – by melting it. A related expression of jewelry’s potential agency can be found in a curse that accompanied the lavish tomb of an Assyrian queen found at Nimrud in 1989, in which it is specifically stated that the curse will apply not only to one who removes or desecrates the queen’s body but also to whomever touches her jewelry (Damerji 1999: 52, fig. 18; Al-Rawi 2008: 119 ff., Text No. 1, Figs. 15a, b). This overall concept of making, destroying, and protecting against the destruction of both jewelry and statues jibes well with the biblical prohibition against both categories – images and jewelry – in Isaiah 3:18 (Wildberger 1991: 151–52). Al-

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jewelry acquire such agency? Was it only by virtue of its association with the statue it adorned or did the very materials of which it was made animate the jewelry, at least in part? In an Old Babylonian ritual text describing the worship of Ishtar, the goddess’ jewelry is publicly displayed and is apparently the object of ritual libations as an emblem of the goddess, independent of but in addition to its already close association with the identity and the worship of Ishtar herself (Groneberg 1997, esp. pp. 18, 136; Leemans 1952; Sladek 1974; and Cohen 2005). By what means does this jewelry become (seemingly) divine in its own right? As already demonstrated in earlier periods by the compositions known as the Descent of Inana (Sladek 1974) and the Descent of Ishtar (Sladek 1974; Lapinkivi 2010), jewelry is not merely body embellishment, it is also inextricably linked to the identity(ies) of the goddess(es) and, in those contexts at least, to the totality of the divine powers of the goddess(es) in question – begging for an application of current theories of embodiment. Once again, one must ask how jewelry becomes both multivalent and potent in this way. The jewels of certain priestesses in third millennium through to first millennium BCE contexts are described as insignia of office and yet also seem to be among the essential agents that allow for the priestesses’ connection to and operation within the sacred or divine sphere (Gadd 1951; Menzel 1981: no. 2 [T2–4]; Winter 1987; Westenholz 1989: 254, 260; Frayne 1990: 224–31, no. 15, pp. 299–301, no. 2; Westenholz 2006; Suter 2007). Jewelry made of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian is thus mentioned in connection with the sacred, or as if it is itself sacred or even divine, in enough literary examples to impel serious consideration of what exactly it is that gives certain jewels such power or, more to the point, such potent agency. While not all Mesopotamian jewelry falls into this category, I do wish to identify and discuss here examples that fall into the realm of sacred ornaments in order to establish the (apparent) existence of such agency. In order to effectively explore all the above issues and questions, however, one must look at the making of jewelry and other examples of Mesopotamian material culture in ways similar to those employed by scholars for the making of divine statues, starting with the nature of the raw materials used – including but not limited to their procurement (Helms 1993; Moorey 1994), economic value (Simmel 1990 [1900]; Moorey 1994; Ross 1999; Van De Mieroop 2002), and practical and symbolic functions within the social, political, and religious

though not often linked together in ancient Near Eastern scholarship, jewelry and the cult statues they adorn seem to travel similar pathways and embody similar potential for efficacy and agency, together and independently of each other; see Benzel 2008: 25; Benzel 2013.

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spheres (Helms 1993; Ross 1999). In the absence of explanatory texts, can one identify what it is about a given material that in certain contexts links it to the sacred or the divine, or gives it sacred or divine qualities? Is there some innate property of a given material that might account for the association? Are certain materials capable of further transforming and animating the objects they become – statues, temples, or jewelry – or do they simply reflect the sacredness or divinity that is perceived to reside therein? Materials and their role in agency are rarely adequately considered in studies of ancient Near Eastern artifacts, despite the textual evidence so clearly pointing to their significance.5 When agency is investigated, it seems to be primarily in a way that does not consider the material itself, just the object it becomes. While scholars such as Mary Helms (1993), Roger Moorey (1994), and Jennifer Ross (1999) have made significant contributions to our understanding of the practical application, archaeological context, symbolic value, and ideological impact of prized materials (as distinct from finished products), no one has fully addressed what it is about these materials, specifically, that gives them such import and power. Helms and Ross in particular emphasize the ideological, cosmological, and metaphorical connections between materials and the political and/or divine spheres – the former on the level of procurement of materials and crafting processes, the latter on the level of the materials themselves – but neither accounts for the potential agency (let alone sacred agency) of the actual materials, only for the symbolic political impact associated with procuring them and making objects out of them.6 Erica Reiner (1995) has written about the efficacy of certain raw materials, but mostly from the perspective of popular magic, medicine, and apotropaic functioning, not as these materials relate to the production or reproduction of the sacred or sacred objects. Nonetheless, her contribution is essential to the aspect of inherency that is discussed below. To my knowledge, Irene Winter is alone in having investigated the operational values of materials within the wider context of Mesopotamian artifact production, often with an emphasis on those works associated with the sacred and the divine. Winter’s seminal explorations of materials and crafting in the

5 Recent scholarship has begun to more fully address and embrace the notion of agency, thanks in large part to the work of Alfred Gell (1992, 1998). The impact has been quite noticeable in the realms of ancient Near Eastern art history and anthropology (see, e.g., Bahrani 1995, 2002, 2003, 2008; Winter 2007, 2008, 2012; and Benzel 2013) and is now evident in the area of philology as well (see, e.g., Selz 1997, 2008; and Pongratz-Leisten 2011). 6 For Helms (1993, esp. pp. 2–3, 14 ff.), raw materials can be endowed with magical or even divine potency but it is their acquisition and crafting, not their natural state, that gives them their true supernatural charge. I would argue that it is all three that make for such agency; see also Winter 2012.

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ancient Near East provide a crucial foundation for the analysis I undertake here. However, although she has addressed issues of agency with respect to finished objects, her studies of materials and crafting were done from a mostly semiotic and reflective,7 rather than an agentive, point of view and leave room for further probing into both areas. For instance, Winter (1996: 46) describes lapis lazuli as “yielding a kind of lustrousness that is seen as particularly positive and auspicious, so that persons and things that are holy, ritually pure, joyous or beautiful are generally described in terms of light.” In other words, the person or object is holy or ritually pure, and the material lapis lazuli reflects that state through its physical luster or sheen, qualities perceived to be associated with purity and/or holiness. The material is thus a metaphor, not an agent. Yet, in the same article, Winter (1999: 57 n. 35) remarks in a footnote “that it is possible in Mesopotamia […], what we tend to see as mere references to valuable materials could instead represent very purposeful selections of materia with associated instrumental agencies.” With this comment, Winter indicates that there may be more than the symbolic or metaphorical attached to her “ascribed properties” for materials. She concludes the article by saying that “it is essential to take into consideration the multivalent associations of lapis and its underlying (sacred) properties” (1999: 53). I would like to explore where Winter left off, first by redefining sacredness as a quality, not a property,8 then by taking “sacred” out of parentheses when it comes to certain materials. In general, the existing scholarship tends to confuse and conflate the properties and the qualities of materials, thereby confusing and conflating what is inherent to a given material versus what is culturally assigned to it, as well as what might be the agency of a material versus the agency of an object. Furthermore, properties and qualities are not separate

7 See, for example, Winter 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2012. For a similar emphasis on the symbolism of materials – gold, in particular – versus any potential agentive aspects, see Summers 2003: 83. Martina Zanon (2012) has recently contributed to the discussion and again focuses on what materials (especially metals) reflect rather than what they might have been perceived to activate. 8 Here I take from Ingold (2011: 30), who quotes Pye (1968): “The properties of materials are objective and measurable. They are out there. The qualities on the other hand are subjective: they are in here: in our heads.” Ingold expands on this, but it is this basic distinction between “properties” and “qualities” that I find useful to my discussion of materials, as these terms have thus far been used more or less interchangeably in the existing scholarship on the ancient Near East. However, the original impetus for further investigating the distinction came from Mary Helms’ (1993) excellent work on skilled crafting as well as from an article written by Irene Winter, in which she distinguishes between material properties and ascribed properties (Winter 1999). I would like to thank Beate Pongratz-Leisten for challenging but helpful discussions about materiality, as well as for referring me to Tim Ingold.

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entities and operations but parts of an interconnected system that must ultimately be viewed as a whole if one is to understand the agency embedded in or generated by the materials, the making, or the finished object (Ingold 2011: 19–32). Thus, I would like to submit that, in certain contexts, the natural, inherent properties of certain materials have the intrinsic potential to give to humans (the makers and consumers) a perception of inherent sacredness, holiness, or divinity that, in turn, allows for those makers and consumers to assign sacredness, holiness or divinity as a quality back to the material itself, not just to the object it becomes. Such an object, in its finished form, can therefore be perceived as sacred, holy, or divine both because of the materials of which it is made and because of its functional association with the sacred, holy, or divine. The agency is not unidirectional; it is multidirectional and multidimensional – a live interaction of sorts.9 And that interaction, ironically, thrives on conflation, or ambiguity, for its operational efficacy (Bahrani 1995, 2002, and esp. 2003; Selz 2008; and Taussig 1993, 2006: 121–55). I believe that this interaction is embedded, or inherent, in the Sumerian language itself when it comes to gold and silver, which will be the focus of the following discussion.

3 The Materiality of Gold and Silver in Mesopotamia The term for gold in Sumerian is generally read ku3-sig17.10 The noun ku3 (also ku[g]) in this context is translated as “metal,” or sometimes “precious metal,” and ku3-sig17 is then interpreted as “yellow (precious) metal” or gold (Ross 1999: 3–4 [following Civil 1976 and Heimpel 1982]; ePSD s.v. kugsig). The Sumerian term for silver, for its part, is ku3-babbar, generally translated as “white metal” (CAD K s.v. kaspu; Moorey 1994: 232–40; Ross 1999: 4; ePSD s.v. kugbabbar).11 (The Sumerian ku3 functions not only as a noun but also as an adjective and verb, so that context is especially important in interpretation.)

9 See also papers from a recent symposium presented by the Bard Graduate Center and The Institute of Fine Arts/New York University titled Beyond Representation: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Nature of Things, September 27–29, 2012. Several of the speakers likewise stressed the complex and interactive character of agency. 10 See Ross 1999: 3–6 for a full explanation of the readings; also see CAD H s.v. hurāṣu; Leemans 1971: 504–15; ePSD s.v. kugsig 11 See also Pongratz-Leisten 2009, esp. pp. 417–18, 422, for a brief summary of assorted readings of the term ku3, as well as for her more nuanced understanding of the full ku3-sig17 (p. 422) that informs and supports my own.

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While the accepted translations of “yellow metal” and “white metal” for gold and silver are perfectly rational from a strictly metallurgical and/or economic point of view, I suggest that in certain contexts in Mesopotamia the two metals possessed metaphysical values that, while they are recognized today, have not been fully applied to how these metals were practically experienced and cognitively conceptualized.12 In order to make my point I begin with the Akkadian equivalent to ku3, the term ellu. The definitions given for ellu are several: “clean or pure”; “holy or sacred”; “free or noble” (CAD E s.v. ellu). In the Assyrian dictionary, the first meaning (“clean or pure”) is extended to incorporate the terms “bright” and “shining” in the sense of “shining purity” (CAD E s.v. ellu 1c). Indeed, ku3 in its function as adjective is listed in the Sumerian dictionary (ePSD s.v. kug) as “(to be) pure, bright, shiny.” Outside the field of philology, Winter (1994, 1995: 2573, 1999, 2007, 2012), in a vein similar to Elena Cassin (1968) and Françoise Bruschweiler (1987),13 has used the terms ku3 /ellu quite extensively in her art historical scholarship on radiance as an aesthetic value in Mesopotamia, specifically linking them to the shining brightness of gleaming metals and lustrous or highly polished stones.14 Like others, however, Winter suggests that this quality of “shining purity,” or luminosity, in objects and imagery is “achieved through contact with the sacred or the divine” (Winter 1995: 2573; Berlejung 1998: 132–33; Pongratz-Leisten 2009: 422; and Zanon 2012: 224, 227), thereby crediting the originary divine presence or emanation to the objects rather than to the metals and/ or stones from which they are made or with which they are adorned. In other words, the tendency has been to conflate or collapse the ideas of purity, luminosity, and holiness – as well as the materials and objects – when it comes to the application of the terms ku3 /ellu, assigning the combined qualities to objects and images that are associated with already established cultic activities and therefore predetermined to be sacred, holy, and/or divine.15 The materials

12 Here I follow a methodology along the lines of how Winter (1994, 1995, 1999, 2003, 2012) redefines “value” in the context of Mesopotamian artifact production and how she uses “marked agency” to better understand the operational value of artifacts (Winter 2007). In doing so, however, I am conscious of the fact that, on a practical level, the Sumerians were keenly aware of the varying degrees of gold’s compositional value, depending on purity (i.e. alloys and loss); see, for example, Van De Mieroop 1986. 13 A pertinent comparative case study on the Yolngu appears in Morphy (1992). 14 This, however, seems not to have influenced how the terms for gold and silver are read and understood by philologists. 15 For a discussion of this conflation and confusion of the meanings attached to the term ku3 , see Pongratz-Leisten 2009, esp. pp. 417 ff.; also see Cooper 1999 and Selz 1997: 191 n. 78, who likewise struggle with how to untangle the various senses of the term.

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therefore serve as little more than metaphors.16 While the conflation of these aspects may itself be a deliberate part of the equation, it is worth examining the physical properties of gold and silver in order to distinguish, as separate entities, the concepts of purity, luminosity, and holiness/sacredness. In so doing, I stress the notion of inherency introduced by the art historian David Freedberg in The Power of Images (1989: 32, 66–74), in which he defines inherence as the degree of life or divinity believed to inhere in an image or object 17 – and, at times, in the raw or unworked materials themselves.18 My interest here is in showing how one might more fully, or at least differently, understand ku3 /ellu and agency as they relate to gold and silver. In the following section, I acknowledge for ku3 the various conceptual meanings attributed to ellu. I also recognize the practical meaning of “purity” as it pertains to the various states of compositional purity (alloys) of gold and silver, a physical reality that was clearly understood and manipulated by Mesopotamian metallurgists (Hallo 1963: 139; Boese and Rüß 1971: 519 ff.; Van De Mieroop 1986, 1999: 116 ff.; Moorey 1994: 217–19; Ross 1999: 5–8, among others). The description of gold and silver as “precious metals” comes close to a sense of at least the physical properties of both these materials; it implies a level of purity (read as “preciousness”) inherent to the specific metallurgical makeup of gold and silver but not of all metals, of which more will be said below. “Precious metal” in this context encompasses the practical and economic implications of metallurgical purity, which were undeniably of critical importance to the Mesopotamians, but does not address the possible conceptual or metaphysical ones, which I believe were equally crucial. Fortunately, art historians such as Winter have redirected our understanding of gold and silver, as they relate specifically to works of art, to include the concepts of purity, holiness/sacredness, and light (or radiance), which I hope to show are likewise organic to the metals and were recognized as such by the ancients. My emphasis in the following section is on distinguishing between the properties of the materials and the qualities culturally assigned to the materials.

16 For a discussion of Sumerian metaphors, in which he argues that they can be “statement[s] of essentiality” versus simply representing the literary technique of simile, see Selz 2008: 19. 17 See also Benjamin 1968, esp. pp. 222–23, for a similar sense that the power of a cultic artifact, like the power of nature itself, issues independently from within. 18 See also Helms 1993: 146–59 on “naturally endowed” versus “skillfully crafted” materials.

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4 Qualities versus Properties of Gold and Silver Sacredness or holiness is a mental construct or quality that can encompass purity because things sacred or holy are often assumed to be conceptually (ritually or theologically) pure, and shine or light is often thought to radiate conceptually from such a state of purity. In the case of gold and silver, however, the purity and shine are found in, and thus founded on, the very essence or nature of the metals themselves and are observed – and observable – as such. They are inherent properties of the metals, not ones achieved by human intervention (via refining, ritual cleansing, or incantations) or garnered from contact with already sacred or holy objects. Nor are these properties attributed or assigned to the metals by humans: they reside in the materials themselves and emanate from there. Thus, I believe that the manner in and purposes for which these metals were used in Mesopotamia were dictated by the fact that, owing to their inherent properties of purity and shine, they were regarded as inherently sacred or holy in quality and possessed the capacity to imbue whatever objects and images they became with the same sacredness or holiness. But where might this perception of gold and silver have come from? When relatively pure,19 neither gold nor silver ever lose their shine or color, proper-

19 The issue of what constitutes relative purity is a difficult and, to some degree, subjective one. For the purposes of the present discussion, I use the term “relative purity”, as it relates to gold, to indicate what might also be called native, or naturally occurring, gold. Native gold is never entirely pure; in its natural state (and, depending on region), it is found combined with varying amounts of silver (10–30 %) and sometimes with traces of copper (1–2 %) and/ or other metals (Ross 1999: 21). For instance, although only a minimal number of scientific compositional analyses have been undertaken for the gold found at Ur in southern Mesopotamia (Plenderleith 1934: 292–93, 294, Table III; Moorey 1994: 231–32; Tony Frantz, Department of Scientific Research, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, personal communication regarding an unpublished analysis of gold headdress from Ur, MMA 33.35.3, 2010; and forthcoming joint study between the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum, Germany), it appears that its average composition is consistent with natural occurrences of gold as they are thought to have been exploited during the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia (Ross 1999: 21, 32 ff.; Tony Frantz, personal communication, 2010). Furthermore, it is likely that much of the gold used in Mesopotamia during this period was in actuality electrum, an alloy of gold and silver that also occurs naturally and in similar ratios of gold to silver as native gold, although it may also have been alloyed deliberately (Moorey 1994: 217–18; Tony Frantz, personal communication, 2010). While there is some evidence that Mesopotamian goldsmiths had the technology to manipulate the composition of metals by the middle of the third millennium BCE (Boese and Rüß 1971: 519 ff.; Moorey 1994: 217–19; Ross 1999: 5–8), at present it is thought that most of the gold used at Ur and other sites represents the naturally occurring form of either gold or electrum (Tony Frantz, personal communication, 2010). Of relevance to the argument above is that, based on the few existing

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ties that distinguish them from most other metals. In such a state of relative purity, moreover, neither metal oxidizes with time or with exposure to oxygen – in contrast to copper, lead, and other metals that do, even when in their purest forms. In more modern contexts, gold and silver have been counted among the “noble metals,” those that are resistant to corrosion (Cushing 1967). It is from this physical property that the notion of “precious metal” probably derives. Unlike the more scientific term noble metal, however, precious metal (as it is commonly used today) is primarily a market or economic term connoting material value: as such, it does not encompass the full impact of the physical properties of gold and silver. While a number of noble and precious metals exist,20 gold and silver (or, as a combined alloy, electrum) are the only two noble metals that were actively used in the ancient Near East. They retained their shine and brilliance, as long as they were not combined with significant amounts of baser elements, such as lower alloys or solder. Gold and silver, therefore, may have had the physical distinction, among the metals known to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, of being essentially immutable and eternal, inside and out. For obvious reasons, these are properties that were considered to correlate well (metaphorically and metaphysically) with conceptions of the sacred, the holy, or the divine – and, in fact, continue to do so in many cultures and religions across the globe (Winter 2012). One cannot help but think of the underlying premises of alchemy and the similar conflation of the physical and the metaphysical in its practice and perception, as well as the manner in which alchemy tries to directly challenge the very property of immutability associated with gold and silver (Eliade 1962). All this said, it is very important to note that purity, shine, and immutability are properties inherent to the materials of gold and silver before they become objects. It is therefore likely that the perception or quality of sacredness or

analyses of the gold or electrum used at Ur, the average composition of the metal is pure enough (70–90 % gold) that it would have been able to resist corrosion. Silver, on its own and when not combined with gold to constitute electrum, is quite a different matter, as it is not found at all pure – not even relatively so – in its natural state. Thus, I use the term “relative purity,” as it relates to silver, to indicate its state after extraction and deliberate refining. The nuances and implications of this difference between gold and silver for the purposes of this article are discussed in greater detail in Benzel 2013 as well as below. For the moment, the fact remains that both metals (and therefore electrum as well) are quite resistant to corrosion when “relatively pure,” regardless of the divergent natural states of gold and silver. 20 The others are: ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. Electrum may be considered a noble metal as it combines gold and silver. I thank Debbie Schorsch of the Department of Objects Conservation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the reference to Cushing 1967 and for her assistance with the scientific aspects of this article. If there are any misunderstandings or misstatements in the above text, they are mine alone.

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holiness was also first and foremost assigned to the raw metals – and only after to the objects that were made out of them. Of further interest is that, in the context of the sacred or the divine, the qualifier ku3 can carry the connotation of “irrevocable” or “unchangeable” – as in the irrevocable or unchangeable word of a deity.21 This sense of ku3 is so organically and physically related to gold and silver’s property of inherent immutability that one wonders if it might actually have derived from there. It is worth considering that “sacredness” or “holiness” per se is not the only issue at stake here; one should add the notion of “immutability”, a concept that is so closely aligned with the sacred, the holy, and the divine that it is just as easily interpreted as such. The notion of immutability would also better express the use of the metals in royal contexts: Mesopotamian rulers were just as concerned with eternity and immutability as were experts concerned with sacred spheres. However, it is easy to see how the elements of purity, luminosity, and holiness/sacredness might conflate and overlap, physically and from a cognitive perspective, in the materials of gold and silver – both in the past and in the present. On the other hand, what does seem clear is that the flow of agency(ies) between the materials of gold and silver and the objects they supposedly only describe is not unidirectional. Here, there is a crucial physical distinction to be made between gold and silver. While native gold is often found in an already relatively pure state that does not necessarily require refining in order to be worked, silver is most frequently mined from ores that contain notable amounts of other metals and impurities: further processing is therefore necessary before it can acquire “pure” or even “relatively pure” status (Moorey 1994: 234; Ross 1999: 21–22).22 This begs the question of how silver could be considered sacred, holy, or divine, or even immutable, without an origin in an inherent state of relative physical purity. Perhaps the key point here is that the properties of shine or brilliance are possessed by gold and silver in their relatively pure states, regardless of how these states were achieved (whether through deliberate refinement or through discovery already in this form). Hurowitz (2006: 9, 11) emphasizes a “virgin” state, this being the state of the materials before they are worked

21 Pongratz-Leisten (2009: 418–20, 423) examines specific passages in Shulgi G ll. 9–12 in which ku(-g) denotes the decision of Enlil. Due to its origin, the decision is plausibly interpreted as inherently divine. This interpretation is further supported by the juxtaposition of the divine word with the me, which “represent the institutions, cultural achievements and divine forces which fuel and maintain the comic, cultic, political, and social order. The divine word is directly linked with this dynamic process, thereby automatically acquiring the authoritative character of inalterability and integrity, a reason … [she prefers] the translation ‘authoritative’ or ‘irrevocable,’ instead of ‘schicksalsbestimmend.’” 22 See also fn. 19 above for a discussion of “relative purity” with regard to gold and silver.

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into objects (for him, cult statues), as being the pure and, for him, divine one for metals and stones. In Hurowitz’s interpretation, then, the inherent purity of specific materials was associated with the stage before the skilled crafting takes place, regardless of whether this was achieved through deliberate refinement or was the product of nature. The end result is that gold and silver remain distinct from other metals: once relatively pure, both metals retain their purity; once made to shine, they retain their brilliance. In other words, they are immutable, in a way that other metals and materials simply are not. Hurowitz (2006: 9–10), however, does not adequately consider the source of this inherency, other than that it is derived from the gods (theologically speaking), nor the finer distinctions between purity and divinity.23 Of critical importance is that the property of purity is natural to gold, even in an untouched state, and that the property of shine is natural to “virgin” gold and silver alike. In both cases, the capacities to shine in perpetuity and to be eternally pure and clean are not bestowed on them from any outside entity or agent: they are truly inherent to the material. As such, the Sumerian gold- or silversmith would have experienced exactly those properties when working the metals and certainly would have noted their exceptional nature. In terms of Mesopotamian theology, these materials did not require ritual cleansing or purifying (unless subsequently tainted); being inherently “pure”, they would remain so for eternity.24 Thus, it may have been the inherency and immutability of the purity and shine that the Mesopotamians reacted to and cognitively absorbed as sacred, perhaps even divine. Purity and shine, in a manipulated form, can be reproduced by human intervention; inherent purity and shine cannot. Likewise, manipulated shine wears off on most materials, requiring constant polishing and renewing of the surface. Most materials are therefore not immutable either. One can see how the Sumerians might have conceived of these phenomena as deriving from a sacred or divine source. To my mind, then, the purity, shine, and immutability of gold and silver are inherent and natural properties, and would have been observed as such by the makers who interacted with the materials. Sacredness, holiness, divinity, and/or immutability, for their part, were conceptualized as qualities, constructed and assigned by the makers and consumers who interacted with the materials and the objects they became (Ingold 2011: 29–30). This is distinctly different

23 Hurowitz (2006: 9–10) discusses not only the exotic, mountainous origins of gold, but also the inherent divinity of the gold and precious stones used for cult statues as a divinity not “natural” to the materials but rather instilled into the materials by a divine source. 24 See Bynum 2013 (esp. p. 14) for a pertinent discussion of divine materiality of objects in the Christian Middle Ages.

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from how these particular properties and qualities are most often distinguished and portrayed. For example, Winter (1995: 2573) notes: “Objects that are holy or ritually pure and clean (KU3 /SIKIL; ellu, ebbu) are said to be imbued with light, their luminosity achieved through contact with the sacred or the divine.” And, “[t]o the extent that shine is a signal of purity and sacredness, the shining vessel is declared manifestly appropriate for use in the cult” (Winter 1994: 125). In a similar vein, Pongratz-Leisten (2009: 422) has noted: The term ku(-g) occurs as a component in terms for metals such as silver (kù-babbar) and gold (kù-sig17 ), and therefore, in contrast to … dadag [ebbu], it denotes a state that is inherently pure [ellu]. Owing to its association with metals, it describes a shining and lustrous quality that characterizes anything associated with the divine, the cultic equipment such as the kettle included and extends to the food offerings, the priestly office as well as the prayers addressed to the deities.

I would suggest instead that because purity and shine are inherent to gold and silver, they emanate from the metals themselves. In other words, purity and shine both signal and activate the sacredness that is then assigned to gold and silver or to the objects made from them. Freedberg addresses the notion of inherence with respect to materials as well as to images and objects and, in doing so, makes a similar distinction between raw materials and unworked ones. In his chapter on aniconism, he traces the impulse to impart inherent divinity onto unworked materials back to the ancient world, specifically to the ancient Asiatic cultures (Freedberg 1989: 66–74). There are examples from many cultures, past and present, of natural stones, unworked and untouched by humans, being set up and worshipped as cult objects. Freedberg offers the explanation that “their form suggested some kind of inherence,” that “their divine origins were self-evident” (Freedberg 1989: 66–67). Here, he points to the natural or geological state of such stones as the impetus for assigning the quality of sacredness or holiness; in other words, something in their physicality or materiality suggests the sacred or divine – for example, in the case of Greek baitulia, or meteoric stones, it was the fact that they fell from heaven (Freedberg 1989: 33–34) – thus their “sacredness” was perceived as inherent. Perhaps the Sumerian perception of gold and silver followed a similar cognitive pathway as that for baitulia. After all, as Marcel Mauss (2006: 150) has pointed out, the act of technological creation begins with “matter which man has not created.” Enticingly connected to this point is that at least one other metal, meteoric iron (Sumerian ku3-an),25 25 See ePSD s.v. kugan (METAL), wr. kug-an, “a metal, perhaps meteoric iron”; see also CAD A s.v. amūtu B. I am grateful to Marc Van De Mieroop for drawing my attention to the existence of ku3 (or kug)-an and its relevance to this discussion.

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also possessed the properties of inherent shine and resistance to tarnish: the significance of this metal’s clear and observable origin in the heavens can hardly be considered a mere coincidence. Where ku3 is used as qualifying adjective, then, I would suggest this does not solely designate a physically pure, refined state, nor does it solely express economic and symbolic values of “precious” as assigned or ascribed by human agents, nor does it solely refer to the shining qualities of the discussed metals gained only from association with a “sacred” or “holy” object. Could the natural purity, luster, and immutability of the metals as physically experienced by and conveyed to those who worked and used the metals simultaneously activate the mental perception of inherent sacredness, holiness, and/or immutability, which was then conveyed back upon the metals by those same human agents? While finished objects that are qualified with the adjective ku3 are usually considered to be sacred or holy because of their functional relationship to the gods – via a form of distributed agency or personhood 26 – this qualification may also be due to (and/or signal) an activation that takes place on a material level. In other words, ku3 could be regarded as marking agency in several directions, indicating the interaction that takes place between the materials and the consumers on the level of the materials themselves both before the latter become objects and again after they have been formed into finished works. To me this both qualifies Gell’s theory of agency and exemplifies the distinction made by Winter (2007: 55) for finished works of art, that the “hierarchy from the inherently agentive to the delegated agent is important when theorizing the agency of “art” – whether established through performative sacralization or merely by social accord.”27 Perhaps this equation can be extended to the materials themselves, which in their case may not require “performative sacralization” but only social accord. While the conflation of the concepts of purity, luminosity, and sacredness/holiness that is so prevalent in the scholarship is ultimately logical and understandable, it may well obfuscate critical aspects of difference that could help us to understand how and why culturally ascribed sacred or even divine agency may have been assigned to the actual materials of gold and silver in certain contexts.

26 As coined by Alfred Gell (1998); for the use of the terms and their application in the field of Mesopotamian studies, see, e.g., Bahrani 2003, 2008; Winter 2007; Selz 2008; and PongratzLeisten 2011. 27 Winter (2007: 55) uses the term “inherently” descriptively rather than essentially.

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5 Gold, Silver, and other Materials in Mesopotamian Ritual and Cultic Contexts Hurowitz (2006) counts gold among the materials that were considered “divine” when first millennium BCE cult statues were made, and indeed it is well attested in various periods that gold was used abundantly as an overlay to represent the skin of a divinity in the form of a cult statue (Oppenheim 1949; Archi 1990 and 2005; Zettler 1992; Lewis 2005; Winter 2012) as well as for the jewels and garments that adorned the statue (Oppenheim 1949; Berlejung 1998: 132–33; Bidmead 2002: 54 ff.; Lewis 2005: 83–85; Robins 2005: 6). Therefore, it seems to me that gold and silver could be explored for a similar designation of sacredness and for a similar agency, in the context of certain aspects of third and second millennium BCE artifact production. Because the conceptual underpinnings of the Mesopotamian worldview, with respect to certain cultural values at least, changed surprisingly little over millennia, such chronological comparisons, when made consciously, are not as radical as they might seem (see also Ross 1999: 306). Combined with the textual and archaeological evidence – indicating that gold and silver were used in foundation deposits, cited in lists of inanimate yet deified objects, prescribed for use in religious rituals and assorted magical procedures, employed to adorn temples, fashioned into a variety of cultic equipment, inventoried in temples and temple storehouses as the property of the gods, and referred to in conjunction with deities in a seemingly endless array of literary compositions – it becomes increasingly possible to think of these metals as, at the very least, able to participate in a “what goes in is what comes out” process for objects, especially jewelry, from all periods. A Neo-Assyrian ritual to “block the entry of the enemy in someone’s house” is one that falls into the category of popular magic (Wiggermann 1992: 1–32). It seems to be one of many that illustrate the distinction discussed by Hurowitz (2006) and Pongratz-Leisten (2009) between materials that are inherently pure and therefore ritually “ready” and those that need to be “made” pure to be ritually effective. In the context of the ritual, gold and silver seem to be among the materials that are inherently “ready” and able to effect further ritual efficacy, whereas other types of material need to be purified in order to be fit for ritual use.28 Keeping in mind the distinction between inherent and

28 Interestingly, Selz gives the additional meaning of “fit for cultic purposes” to the term ku3 in his article on third millennium BCE deified objects (Selz 1997: 195 n. 154). See also Winter 1995: 2573 for a similar and added sense of the term.

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manipulated purity discussed above, what is most interesting to me is that gold and silver are among the materials used to make “not yet pure” materials “pure”: [When you make the statues of cornel wood] [in the morning at sunrise you shall go to the wood,] [you shall take] a golden axe and a [silver] saw, with censer, torch and [holy] water you shall consecrate [the cornel tree], … With the golden axe and the silver saw you shall touch the cornel tree and Cut it down with a hatchet; … (Wiggermann 1992: 7, ll. 28–32 and ll. 41–42)

And: in the morning at sunrise you shall go to the clay pit and consecrate the clay pit; with censer, torch and holy water you shall [purify] the clay pit, seven grains of silver, seven grains of gold, carnelian, hulā[lu-stone] you shall throw into the pit, the prepare the setting for Šamaš, … (Wiggermann 1992: 13, ll. 145–48)

In this ritual it appears that cornel wood, when collected for the making of an efficacious statue, requires purification. This must be accomplished by way of the various procedures detailed. The golden axe, silver saw, grains of gold and silver, and carnelian, however, comprise raw or unworked materials as well as objects made of those materials, and are used to collect the cornel wood and purify the clay pit as part of the ritual. Nowhere is there mention of these precious materials needing their own purification or consecration; they simply “exist” in the text as materials ready to consecrate the not-so-ready materials needed for the ritual.29 In other words, they can be understood as the agents of purification and/or consecration and are thus, presumably, already and inherently consecrated. From various other textual sources, again primarily dated to the first millennium BCE and including the mīs pî and namburbi rituals, it is likewise clear that these same materials of gold, silver, and certain stones (such as lapis lazuli, carnelian, and agate) are almost always included in the initial or preparatory purification of the “holy water” that is so often an essential component in the further ritual purification of people, places, and things (Walker and Dick 1999:

29 See Bynum 2013 (esp. p. 14) for analogous phenomena from Christianity during the Middle Ages; and also Hurowitz (2006: 17 ff.) for the corollary concept of using “tainted” materials and its reverse agency.

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77, 87, 102; Maul 1994: 95, 122). The holy-water basin that in the mīs pî ritual will purify the temple and “wash” the mouths of the gods (i.e., their statues) so that all becomes “pure” and “bright,” for example, is itself consecrated by materials such as gold and silver (Walker and Dick 1999: 102). Similarly, Stefan Maul deliberately mentions, albeit in passing, the “purifying powers of gold and silver” in the context of namburbi rituals (Maul 1994: 95). In so doing, he seems to suggest qualities for gold and silver that go beyond the simply magical or apotropaic powers associated with almost all namburbi rituals and other magical and medical incantations.30 Maul (1994: 107) also reminds us of the use of these same materials, along with a few others, for amuletic necklaces that were known to have served not just as items designed to protect the wearer but also as virtual substitutes for the person himself or herself.31 This is an extraordinary illustration of the agency of these particular materials. Their powers or efficacy – such that they can stand in for a biological being – go beyond what is, to me, simply magical. This conflation of the biological and the conceptual reminds us of the materials and jewelry that are so closely tied to the identity and powers of Inana/Ishtar, or of the materials, garments, and jewelry that are part of the creation, identity, and efficacy of cult statues. Zainab Bahrani (2008: 78) has eloquently described this Mesopotamian phenomenon of identity inhering in both the organic body and inorganic objects that were in contact with the body.32 While purity and sacredness or holiness are not necessarily linked or related, and while it is difficult to clearly distinguish between magical and divine efficacy when it comes to materials, one can assume from this sampling of references only that these are indeed examples of inherently pure materials that are also inherently able to consecrate – and, because of this capacity, are able to animate subsequent aspects of a variety of ritual procedures that produce or reproduce the magical, the sacred, or even the divine (such as “holy water” and divine statues). For Winter, following Gell (1998), this would constitute a case analogous to one in which “the agency of the image is only able to be autonomous once the agency of the referent behind has been (ritually or by

30 There is much to be said about the distinction between the magical and medical uses of metals and stones and their use in the production of the divine; however, such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article. 31 Maul bases this statement on a prayer to Shamash, in which the supplicant pronounces that he wears on his body (presumably in the form of a necklace) silver, gold, and various other metals and stones that would serve both amuletic purposes and as a veritable substitute, or replacement, for himself in the event of bodily harm or even mortal threat. 32 See also related applications in Taussig 1993, 2006 (esp. pp. 121–55); Gell 1998 (esp. pp. 99 ff. on contagious magic); Nakamura 2005; Bynum 2013 (esp. p. 10); and Benzel 2013.

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belief) transferred in to the image in a chain linking the originating source or person to the extended or distributed material person” (Winter 2007: 54). For me, gold and silver might, in this context, be considered such originating sources. I am reminded of the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece, which Sir John Boardman (2012) recently mentioned in a lecture on gold, noting that the fleece becomes divine presumably by virtue of being inundated with gold – and I would add that the perceived “divine” efficacy of gold in this instance seemingly required no further explanation, culturally speaking.33 A scenario from the third millennium BCE provides a close archaeological corollary for the ability of raw or unworked gold, silver, and precious stones to consecrate in a manner similar to the one described by the later ritual texts mentioned above. At Khafaje in central Mesopotamia, foundation deposits uncovered in the two preserved corners of the Temple Oval foundation (Delougaz 1940: 85–86, figs. 78, 79; Ellis 1968: 132, 140) consisted of two separate groupings of neatly arranged rectangular pieces of raw materials: gold, carnelian, lapis lazuli, and slate; and slate, lapis lazuli, gold, and copper. The materials, otherwise unworked, were purposefully selected and intentionally formed into rectangles, then arranged and placed into the foundation of the temple. The process of precisely selecting, forming, and placing particular materials recalls the treatment of materials in purification procedures known from the later ritual texts just discussed. Foundation deposits in Mesopotamia come in various forms and are composed of various materials and objects, even animal sacrifices (Ellis 1968). They are usually found in the corners of buildings and in the foundations, hence the name, and in general have been interpreted as components of building rites undertaken to ensure a fortuitous completion of the edifice as well as luck and protection for its inhabitants. As such, they are considered to have had some sort of ceremonial or magical efficacy and purpose, but beyond that are usually regarded simply as “deposits of formless and miscellaneous objects … [that] rendered the whole proceeding more solemn and numinous” (Ellis 1968: 140). However, even Richard Ellis (1968: 140), whose scholarship is not inclined to magical thinking, observed: “In the case of two particular deposits it must be admitted that some symbolism at present inaccessible to us may have governed the deposit of materials. The rectangular plaques deposited in the Temple Oval at Khafajah … are not casual fragments or objects intended for some other use.” Likewise, Pinhas Delougaz (1940: 88), the excavator of Khafaje, remarked: “The materials alone seem to have been important.” I take this

33 See Bynum (2013: 16 ff.) on the issue of attitudes to divine matter being culturally and period specific.

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to mean that the materials were deemed by the excavator to have importance and efficacy independent of the foundation deposit itself. Donald Hansen (1998: 48) made similar observations about Ur III and Old Babylonian foundation deposits, which included semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli and carnelian in chipped or bead form, and he compared the potential efficacy of the materials in these deposits to that of identical materials used in jewelry. Nicholas Postgate (1997: 211) most directly expressed the possibility of agency for the materials included in foundation deposits: “The point here is the copper is attributed properties, security and firmness or safeness and solidity, which are to stand for the properties the royal builder wishes to impart to the building itself. It is recognized as partaking of a substance, and is put into the foundation for the properties which its substance confers, not for its appearance or its function.” While the Khafaje deposit is not accompanied by a text that explains the operational value of the buried materials therein, it is apparent that the deposit comprised unworked pieces of the same raw materials that typically were used in first millennium BCE ritual texts and were therefore capable of an analogous magical and, I propose, sacralizing efficacy.34 Temples are often described as being adorned with gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian – materials seen by most scholars as reflecting the sacredness or holiness of the edifice. While it is possible to argue for the reflective aspect of the materials used for the completed temple, it is less easy to do so for the foundation deposits. The fact that these materials were already on site before the building process began, in the same raw or unworked form that has been discussed previously, attests to an operational progression that begins with the perceived inherent efficacy of the particular materials themselves and continues with their capacity to further consecrate or animate the objects (or, in this case, buildings) that they become. Like the many examples – both literary and archaeological – of the potency of gold, silver, and precious stones mentioned, the bits of raw material in the Temple Oval foundation must have been placed there not as a reflection of the sacred as it was embodied by the temple (which was not yet built!), but as a perceived means of animating or activating the very foundation so that the entire structure, once built, would become sacred (which, of course, was the intention).35 34 It is in the context of foundation deposits that Winter (1999: 50 n. 35) comments: “At least it is possible that in Mesopotamia as well, what we tend to see as mere references to valuable materials could instead represent very purposeful selections of materia with associative instrumental agencies.” 35 Irene Winter has suggested (personal communication, 2012) that each bit of raw material may have stood for a specific deity, a phenomenon for which there is evidence from other contexts in Mesopotamia (see also fns. 37 and 38 below).

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However, it must also be said that many of these same materials were used to decorate the outside of the temple and seem to remain efficacious in that context as well; they were not placed there simply to reflect the sacredness or holiness of the completed edifice. Evidence for this can be seen in the various examples of the Sumerian Temple Hymns, which refer to the me, the divine gifts of civilization, as adorning temples (Sjöberg and Bergmann 1969, TH no. 26, 30, 40; ETCSL 4.80.1, ll. 204–8, 315–20, 379–91, 500–505).36 Since it is well established that temples were most often ornamented with the materials of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli, the question of whether the me, in this case, were not tied directly to the materials is one well worth considering. In fact, at least one other Sumerian composition refers to the divine powers as being “golden” (Black et al. 2004: 197). This would further explain why an Early Dynastic period text from Girsu in southern Mesopotamia describes the burning of temples and palaces and the taking away of their “precious metals and lapis lazuli” (Cooper 1986: 78– 79, La 9.5). The phrase designating “precious metals [ku3 ] and lapis lazuli” is repeated fourteen times in this short text and is distinguished from the destroying of statues, so the point is clearly an important one – one that appears to attribute as much agency to the materials as to the statues and temples they become. Although the taking away of the materials is translated as either “bundled off” or “plundered”, I wonder whether the sense intended here is more closely related to the literal deactivation of the sacredness and efficacy of the temples, much like statues and monuments were taken away or destroyed as a means of neutralizing the power and efficacy of the respective gods or rulers they depicted. These monuments were not just booty in an economic or political sense or objects of senseless destruction; they embodied the living presence and power of the (divine, royal, or other agents) depicted that were being ritually decommissioned according to principles of Mesopotamian technology and theology.37 Furthermore, it seems that what is also being conveyed in the Girsu text is the removal of an integral and organic component of the temple – essentially a bodily component – the skin of the temple, reminding us of the gold

36 Parts of the epic titled Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which speaks about the procuring of materials for the building of temples, also suggest that the me may be associated with the materials that are commonly used for temple decoration (Kramer 1952). 37 If Winter’s suggestion (personal communication, 2012 and fn. 35 above) is correct, that specific materials stood in for specific deities, then perhaps the taking away of the materials was conceptually analogous to the taking away of cult statues, in that the materials may have been alternate forms or manifestations of the deities in question. It is a well-attested fact that deities were represented (presenced) in manifold ways in Mesopotamia (e.g., as their respective animal attributes, in emblematic form, and so forth).

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“skin” of cult statues mentioned earlier. Hence, the materials here may have been not just “valuable” booty but rather (or also) materials that had efficacy or agency directly related to, or even responsible for, the efficacy and agency of the temples themselves. Is it possible that material, temple, and deity were, in this context, all being conflated into one concept of the divine?

6 Conclusion: Materials and the Sacred in Mesopotamia As a final point on the topic of materials that are animated, sacred, or possibly even divine, I would like to draw attention to some of the more recent scholarship on anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic deities in which there is increasing mention of materials – not just objects and images – as potentially non-anthropomorphic conceptions of the holy and the divine. For example, the work of Gebhard Selz (1997) on third millennium BCE lexical texts underscores the inclusion of various animals and objects in lists of deified entities, but also takes into account temple records that indicate offerings were made to a variety of non-anthropomorphic items, including metals. Additionally, Alasdair Livingstone (1986: 177, 182) has published esoteric texts from later periods in which certain materials, gold and silver among them, are very clearly and directly equated with specific deities. In one such text, gold and silver are even assigned the dingir determinative, a lexical indicator of divinity (Livingstone 1986: 182). Perhaps most interesting of all in this regard is the idea put forth by Stefan Maul in a 1999 lecture at Harvard University that “many of the gods of Mesopotamia were closely linked to particular metals, stones, or other material objects and at times appear to have been represented by such objects, or in some sense even equated with them.”38 Herman Vanstiphout (cited in Porter 2009: 202–3) has noted the fluidity that may have existed in the Mesopotamian concept of the divine, fluidity that, generally speaking, we do not easily accept today: “What if we differentiate between deity, divinity, and holiness, but to them, the idea of dingir is a unity with different aspects, a dingir is something that has the property of holiness and/or power.”39 If a dingir can be “something that has the property of holi-

38 See Porter 2009: 195 for a mention and brief summary of Maul’s lecture, which unfortunately remains unpublished; see also Winter (personal communication, 2012 and fn. 35 above). 39 For the notion of fluidity with respect to Mesopotamian concepts of the divine, see also Pongratz-Leisten 2011 and Bynum 2013 for the same in later Christian contexts.

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ness” (although I would define this as a quality), then the materials of gold and silver as described in this paper and in the contexts discussed would certainly qualify. I believe it is this notion of the sacred or holy that can be conveyed by gold and silver on multiple levels: the physical, the metaphorical, the metaphysical, and the lexical. The insistence on the part of most scholars today that a substance or object cannot be sacred, holy, or divine unless specifically deified, or marked with a dingir sign, seems too restrictive for the Mesopotamian mindset, which seems to have been anything but single-minded. For this reason, I have presented a number of textual and archaeological instances from disparate periods of Mesopotamian history that point to the presence and use of materials, particularly gold and silver, in situations that are clearly associated with one or another aspect of the sacred or divine. Much earlier scholarship has steadfastly resisted, or at least failed to acknowledge, the possibility that certain materials, in certain contexts, might have been considered sacred (or divine) or might have possessed sacralizing (or divine) agency in their own right. While some scholars have felt compelled to acknowledge a persistent connection between these materials and the divine, they have nevertheless retreated when approaching the conclusion that a material substance might in fact have been perceived as animate, or as independently able to produce or reproduce the sacred or the divine. Rather, they have preferred the notion that materials simply reflect the sacredness or divinity of the objects into which they were made or act merely as metaphors for the sacred or the divine. Years ago, A. Leo Oppenheim provided, in his typically prescient way, a rare hint that metals, especially gold, might have possessed primary rather than distributed or reflected agency. He did not use the word “inherent,” but came closer than most to inferring it. In his seminal article on “the golden garments of the gods,” he raised, then abandoned, the topic with one tantalizing comment: “The use of gold and the specific technique involved for the decoration of these garments was obviously intimately linked to a specific functional value of the ornaments utilized; they alone have endowed these garments with the aura of sacredness which could not be transferred to other media” (Oppenheim 1949: 191).

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Beate Pongratz-Leisten

Imperial Allegories: Divine Agency and Monstrous Bodies in Mesopotamia’s Body Description Texts Abstract: This contribution discusses a selection of texts that, although very different in genre, elucidate in one form or another the notion of the divine body and divine agency in the ancient Near East. These include hymns to the god Ninurta, the Göttertypentext, and Body Description Texts. What these texts have in common are their reflections on the theological understanding of and approach to divine agency, cult, and exegetical thought about the divine body. Crucial to our modern understanding of these texts is the ancient notion of the composite nature of both the body and of divine agency. It is this concept of the composite that allows for the allegorical take on the divine body evident in the Body Description Texts. Pongratz-Leisten further suggests that inherent to the presencing of the divine in these latter texts is the notion of divine control achieved through cosmic battle – as revealed by the combination on a single tablet of allegorical texts with exegetical commentaries on combat myths. Keywords: combat myth, cultic calendar, cultural memory, (distributed) agency, iconography, immanence, mimesis, ritual, parataxis

1 Introduction The multiple modes in which human beings establish communication and interaction with the divine world directs our attention towards both the need to presence1 the divine and to the active process of assigning agency to divine beings. Such presencing, however, must be understood as the result of the crea-

1 On the notion of presencing as borrowed from Gumbrecht, see Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume. Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, 15 East 84 th Street New York, NY 10028, e-mail: [email protected]

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tion of mental images, which form part of the cultural memory circulating within and passed on among distinct communities of people and which, accordingly, have the capacity to materialize in a multiplicity of different forms. It is thus not only the object or the image of a divinity that elicits a particular affective response; memory images also have a cognitive element in that they serve as cues to the image and are emotionally “colored” (Carruthers 2000: 14), i.e. memories are considered to be bodily affects. In other words, both the material image as well as the mental image operate in an evocative way and are equally linked with the transmission of knowledge and memory. As discussed in the introduction to this volume, such materializations need not necessarily result in the divine assuming an anthropomorphic physical form. The process of materialization is, however, based in the attribution of human agency to all the material forms of the divinity, among these the statue, the celestial body, the standard, and various other cultic paraphernalia – thus implying the capacity for intentionality, goal-directedness, and the ability to act on the part of such “things.” By broadening the notion of materiality beyond the physical object and exploring how things and thought relate to each other (i.e. how the human mind works in experiencing the divine by relying on learned memory images), we come closest to grasping the Mesopotamian notion of tamšīlu, “likeness,” which addresses the quality of an image – evoking particular characteristics that it possessed – rather than its mimetic appearance. Thus, if it is said in Enuma elish that Tiamat created her army of monsters and, by giving them the terrifying melammu-splendor, made them godlike (melammu uštaššâ iliš umtaššil), this statement refers to the awe-inspiring rather than the mimetic quality of their physical forms – an interpretation predicated on the cultural knowledge that would certainly have been possessed by the original audience of Enuma elish of the effects of the melammusplendor (Pongratz-Leisten 2011:142–143). Experience always occurs within the context of particular frameworks, and it is the experience of the frame that elicits particular responses, as was ingeniously demonstrated by the art historian Ernst Gombrich (1979) in his inquiry on the human response to the frame in which a particular artwork was set. Applied to our inquiry into the materiality of divinity, it is the particular social context of communication that might determine the specific way in which divinity materializes. All social frameworks involve rules (Goffman 1986); Alfred Gell’s (1998) inferred intentionality of things and artifacts, consequently, only operates effectively if the particular constraints and conditions of a frame are fully exploited rather than neglected by the agents. Mesopotamian culture lends itself particularly well to demonstrating that specific settings provide for a specific form of divine agency and might even provide clues for

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decoding the particular agent under consideration (Soucek 2000).2 The statue of the divinity, for example, acts in the cult, as does the symbol. The latter, however, could be dispatched for use in judicial contexts: standards and weapons of gods could be rented and go on journeys during which they acted as divine witnesses to the performance of oaths taken with respect to establishing the boundaries of a lot or collecting taxes. During thunderstorms, the weather god Adad materializes in his voice. The celestial body, by contrast, stands in for the divinity in the context of divination. It is thus the particular framework of divine agency that allows us to locate, perceive and identify the social life of the divinity and his or her secondary agents, as well as to delineate their mutability through recontextualization. Moreover, the notion of distributed agency through secondary agents in particular contexts such as cult, divination, jurisdiction, and purification ritual presupposes cultural knowledge and expertise in the interaction and communication with the divine in the ancient Near East and is linked to the rise of professional experts with the emergence of the city states at the beginning of the third millennium BCE. These experts not only administered the temple household, took care of the daily cult and festive calendar, and interpreted communication with or from the divine by means of divinatory practices so as to properly advise the ruler, but also created a large and multifarious body of cultural texts that reflected in one way or another on the materialization of divine presence tied to the question of divine agency (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). In the following chapter I will present a selection of those texts that have the potential to particularly elucidate the notion of the divine body and of divine agency in ancient Mesopotamia. All of these texts are products of erudite scholarship reflecting theological thought, mythic tradition, and cultic practice alike, and date from early- to mid-first millennium BCE contexts (the Neo-Assyrian to the Late Babylonian Period). These texts include hymns to the god Ninurta, the Göttertypentext, and the Body Description Texts. All of these texts, moreover, are concerned in one way or another with the divine body presencing the divinity either in cultic or divinatory contexts or in exegetical terms, but it is important to note here once again that while the anthropomorphic shape of the human body clearly represents the paradigm for its description, human physical form is not the determining factor for divine agency.

2 Priscilla Soucek, in her analysis of the notion of portraiture in the Persian tradition, stresses the sigificance of setting and action as clues for decoding the images of particular historical persons in Mughal and Qajar paintings.

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2 The Body of the God in the Text 2.1 Hymns to Ninurta The first two texts discussed here are hymns addressed to the warrior god Ninurta: the Syncretic Hymn to Ninurta (Foster 2005: 713–14) and the Hymn to Ninurta as Sirius (Foster 2005: 715–16). The so-called Syncretic Hymn to Ninurta comprises an account of the god’s bodyscape that follows his anthropomorphic form from head to toe, a descriptive strategy borrowed from the structure of lexical lists concerned with the human body and from the physiognomic omina series (Reynolds 2002: 216). In this hymn, subsequent to the address praising the kingship of the warrior god, every body part is equated with a divinity of the Babylonian pantheon. While the anthropomorphic body often serves to mediate the worldview, the multitude of gods is here merged – in a speculative theological approach – into the body of a single deity (Ninurta) to express the power of unified divine agency. The deities listed in the text do not follow the hierarchical order known from other genres such as god lists or myth. Rather, the referential framework of the divine bodyscape is a mixture of independent divinities and the astral secondary agents, such as Pabilsag and the Pleiades, of Ninurta. Syncretic Hymn to Ninurta, the Warrior Deity (beginning broken) 3′ […] of the great gods has exalted [you], 4′ O Ninurta, warrior, you […] 5′ You […], who gather to yourself their powers, 6′ You take their responsibilities, you […]. 7′ Kingship of lords is [entrusted] to your hands. 8′ O lord, your anger is a […] deluge, 9′ O warrior of the gods, you are lofty […]. 10′ O lord, your face is Shamash, your lock [Nisaba], 11′ Your eyes, O lord, are Enlil and [Ninlil], 12′ Your eyeballs are Gula and Belet-il[i], 13′ Your eyelids, O lord, are the twins Sin (moon) [and Shamash (sun)]. 14′ Your eyebrows are the corona of the sun which [ …], 15′ Your mouth’s shape, O lord, is the evening star, 16′ Anu and Antu are your lips, your speech [is Nusku?], 17′ Your discoursing tongue(?) is Pabilsag (Sagittarius), who […] on high, 18′ The roof of your mouth, O lord, is the circumference of heaven and earth, abode of […],

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19′ 20′ 21′ 22′

Your teeth are the Seven (Pleiades), who slay evildoers, Your cheeks, O lord, are the rising of bri[lliant] stars, Your ears are Ea and Damkina, sages of wisdom […], Your head is Adad, who [makes] heaven and earth [resound] like a smithy, 23′ Your brow is Shala, beloved [sp]ouse who contents [Adad’s heart], 24′ Your neck is Marduk, judge of heaven [and the netherworld] the deluge […], 25′ Your throat is Zarpanitum, creat[ress of peo]ple, who […], 26′ Your chest is Shullat, who examines […], 27′ Your upper back is Hanish, who establishes p[lenty, who r]ains down abundance, 28′ Your right side is Uta-ulu, who […], 29′ Your left side is Ninpanigingarra […], 30′ Your fingers are […], 31′ Your […] are Dagan […], 32′ Your navel, O lord, is […], 33′ Your [ …] is Zababa [ …], (fragmentary lines, then breaks off ). (KAR 102+328; Foster 2005: 713–14) The overall effect of this composition is unquestionable: major (otherwise independent) gods were (alongside astral aspects of the warrior Ninurta) unified into a single divinity, thus maximizing the potential of Ninurta’s agency and both declaring and demonstrating his supremacy among the gods. It is worth elucidating one specific facet of this text here (the choice of Shamash as Ninurta’s face) to emphasize the types of considerations that likely informed specific comparisons made within the hymn. The description of Ninurta’s bodyscape begins with his face, which is likened to the sun-god Shamash. This is an interesting association, one that might be accounted for by the recognition that Ninurta’s astral aspect was Sirius, the arrow star (mulkak-si-sa2 /šukūdu). Sirius was said, already in the ancient texts, to be the brightest star in the sky, a convention that continued right into Old Iranian (Streck 1998: 517; Panaino 1995: 2–3) and Roman tradition (Baudy 2001: 47). The statement “your face is the sun(-god)” may also be regarded as establishing an intertextual link with the second text to be discussed here, the Hymn to Ninurta as Sirius, which is addressed to the warrior god in the context of extispicy. The particular epithets chosen to praise Ninurta as Sirius in the latter text are, significantly, (clearly) adopted from the sun god Shamash. As the examination of the liver when addressing the sun-god with a query was imagined as a case in court (Maul 2013: 38–45), the transfer of Shamash’s epithets to

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Ninurta-Sirius can be explained by his agency as judge in the context of extispicy, thus effectively providing an adequate framework of human-divine interaction (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume) and eliciting the expected responses from the divinity. Hymn to Ninurta as Sirius O greatest Ninurta, warrior god, vanguard of the Anuna-gods, commander of the Igigi-gods, Judge of the universe, who oversees (its) opposition = equilibrium, Who makes bright darkness and illumines gloom, Who renders verdicts ( pāris purussê) for teeming mankind! O my splendid lord, who satisfies the needs of the land, … Who grasps truth and justice and destroys […], Indefatigable arrow (šukūdu) that [kills] all enemies, Great storm, who grasps the leadrope [of heaven and netherworld], Judge of verdicts (dayyān purussê), diviner of oracle[s …] (bārû têrēti) Conflagration that incinerates and burns up the wick[ed ], Whose name in heaven is “Arrow Star,” Whose name is greatest among the Igigi-gods, Among all your gods your divinity is doubled.3 At the rising of the stars your face shines like the sun. (K 128; Foster 2005: 715–16; Burrows 1924) This latter hymn, then, reveals that the particular choice of the address to Ninurta in the first hymn (the likening of his face to the sun god and judge Shamash) was directly linked with the scope of the agency expected from that god in one of the specific contexts (here divination) in which he functioned. He was addressed in his astral aspect as Sirius to gear his agency towards the performance of extispicy and to secure the efficacy of the ritual.

3 Burrows (1924: 34) translates “Fixer of Harmony”; Foster (1996: 634) translates “your divinity is singular”; Mayer (2005: 54) suggests “in der Gesamheit aller Götter ist deine Gottheit die ungewöhnlichste.” The reference is typically grouped with CAD Š/1 s.v. šanû B, “to change,” rather than šanû A, “to do again, to repeat.”

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2.2 Göttertypentext My third text belongs to a different category, that of texts describing the appearance of a statue as the materialized presence of the divinity within the context of the cult. Termed the Göttertypentext by Carl Bezold (1894a: 114) and its more recent editor Franz Köcher (1953), the text is an Assyrian copy of a Babylonian original recovered from Assur and describes the appearance of 27 statues (ALAMmeš ). Similar texts are known from Nineveh with some fragments duplicating the text from Assur. Some relevant fragments were published already in the late nineteenth century by Carl Bezold (1894a, 1894b). Discussing these fragments in his monograph Ninive und Babylon, Bezold (1903: 122) categorized them as descriptions or even prescriptions for sculptors, intended to provide the exact knowledge required to create the correct appearance of the divinity (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). Later, however, Bezold (1916) abandoned this interpretation in favor of an astral approach, suggesting that the text actually provided descriptions of celestial bodies rather than statues. Further fragments were subsequently published by R. C. Thompson, who submitted a first edition of all the then-known fragments in 1904. Franz Köcher (1953) provided a renewed edition, with additional fragments and discussion of duplicates. It was Köcher who took up Bezold’s original idea of these texts as descriptions of statues – and, I think, rightly so. In total, the descriptions of fourteen statues are fully preserved, nine are preserved in part, and four are broken away. Each section describes the divinity from head to toe and, at the end, provides its name. From the descriptions in the various sections it becomes obvious that recognition of the respective divinity was based not only on the particular shape or form of the body but also by its posture or gait (i.e. its positioning with one foot set in front of the other or the raising of an arm to carry a weapon or emblem), as well as, significantly, by the host of its associated attributes (such as the headdress, the animal on which it stood, and other objects or symbols). Below, I provide the section specifically dedicated to the description of the god Ninurta as an example: Göttertypentext (MIO 1) Col. I 51′ The head (carries) a horn and a po[los?] 52′ The face is (the one of) a hum[an being]. 53′ The cheek is set (in profile). 54′ He has a pursāsu-headdress. 55′ His hands are (the ones of) a hum[an being].

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[His right hand?] reaches [high? …] The mace … In h[is] left hand […] the lead-rope of […] and he carries a […]. With a sash … of sheep leather

Col. II  1 he is covered [on] hi[s chest].  2 He is girded [with a mesirru-belt].  3 He is girded with a [n]ēbehu-belt.  4 (His) body is (the one of) a human being.  5 The dress is a […].  6 His ri[ght] foot from … to his …  7 is open/bare? and stands (firmly).  8 His left foot is opened in a walking pose.4  9 He tramples with his foot on the Anzu bird. 10 His name is Ninurta. (Köcher 1953: 57–95) As the other sections of the text, the specific account of Ninurta provides a description of the standard iconography that made the statue recognizable to the viewer by means of identifiable, culturally agreed upon indicators.5 Representation of the divine, in other words, was a matter not of mimesis but rather of the combination of the correct attributes conventionally associated with a particular deity.6 In this case, it is above all the triumphant pose of Ninurta trampling on the Anzu bird – embodying in an iconic manner the victory of the warrior god over the disruptive forces of chaos – that enables us to identify him as such. The primary concern of this text, consequently, might be characterized as the creation of the iconographic bodyscape of the divinity as an iconic representation of its essence crystallized in the particular scope of its agency. The iconographic decoding of the image based on headgear, attributes, and the assigned emblematic animal, was rooted not only in the cultural memory as transmitted in former materializations of the divinity but also in mythic narrative and other texts. The encounter with the god in the form of his statue,

4 This translation is offered in CAD P s.v. purīdu A1a. 5 For the image of a divinity to be recognizable on the basis of identifiable indicators rather than similitude see Bynum 2011: 61; Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume. 6 See also, for images from the Middle Ages, Bynum 2011: 59.

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however, was not restricted to iconographic decoding. Rather, through its materialization in the statue, divinity in the scope and spectrum of its agency disclosed itself and came to life in the viewer’s mind, and triggered the viewer’s culturally learned knowledge (and recognition) of the particular identity and, consequently, agency of that divinity. Importantly, the particular signifiers and markers chosen to identify or denote a divinity did not need to encompass the entire range of his or her attributes as established by cultural tradition, as is demonstrated in a passage from Gudea Cylinder A 4 14–18 (Edzard 1997: 71): “There was someone in my dream, enormous as the skies, enormous as the earth was he. That one was a god as regards his head, he was the Thunderbird [Anzu] as regards his wings, and a floodstorm as regards his lower body.” While part of this much earlier text (dating to the late third millennium BCE) corresponds to the first millennium Göttertypentext with respect to its characterization of Ningirsu/Ninurta as more-or-less anthropomorphic and its reference to the monster Anzu (his famous and ultimately subjugated enemy) in association with him, the evocation of the god’s stature in Gudea Cylinder A is particularly striking – and worth further elucidating. It insinuates, I would suggest, more than merely the god’s colossal size: Ninurta/Ningirsu appears to permeate and perhaps even to encompass the entire cosmos (or at least that part of the cosmos experienced by human beings), thus anticipating a message promulgated by the later body description texts discussed below. Moreover, in describing the floodstorm, one of the most destructive weapons of the god, as comprising Ninurta/Ningirsu’s lower body, the description in Gudea Cylinder A – in the same manner as the description in the Göttertypentext, if using only partially overlapping signifiers – specifically presences the god’s agency here as a warrior divinity. All of this being said, what we should not lose sight of in all of this is the fact that the respective audiences of these compositions possessed the necessary cultural knowledge and experience for these evocations to trigger their recognition of not only the specific aspect of the particular god being referenced but also the larger complex of roles – or full spectrum of agency – traditionally exercised by the divinity. Exposure to longstanding tradition had shaped an archetypal image of the god that would have been constantly present in the mind of the reader or viewer, an image characterized by particular physical qualities, sphere or scope of agency, and modes of interaction with and within the human and divine realms respectively. This archetypal image had the potential to be activated regardless not only of the medium or particular framework or scheme within which the divinity was encountered but also of whether the divine image comprised a mental representation (internal visualization) conjured and shaped by means of narrative or a material representation function-

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ing as an external visualization (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). Far from presence alone, it is the physical and intellectual experience and cultural memory of an individual that permits the construction of meaning on the one hand and the recognition (or identification) of meaning on the other.

2.3 Divine Body Description Texts The third category of texts I would like to discuss here are the so-called Body Descriptions Texts. As already demonstrated by Frances Reynolds, this corpus of texts shares features with both the lexical series and the omen series, the latter including physiognomic omens and šumma izbu, “if a malformed …”, (Reynolds 2002). In contrast to these other texts, however, the Body Description Texts do not necessarily follow the body in a logical sequence from head to toe (or vice versa). Most of the Body Description Texts are grouped with other genres on a single tablet, as with cultic calendars that are given mythological explanation, cultic commentaries mythologizing ritual action, or apotropaic rituals. All of these texts date to the first millennium BCE and are deeply informed not only by mythic, ritual, and theological traditions but also by astrological knowledge.7 In the tables (1–2) below I provide an overview of the Body Description Texts as they are combined with other texts on a single tablet: examining the particular grouping of the texts in these examples, I would argue, has the potential to illuminate their meaning. This short survey of texts reveals that, while animate and inanimate objects might be equated with gods, not all of these texts contain “body description” components. Note further that the tablets from Assur and Nineveh all contain sections commenting on ritual performance and mythologizing certain ritual gestures performed by the king during state rituals. These ritual gestures are all explained in terms of the combat myth in which a warrior god (Ninurta and Marduk, or even Nabu) battles a terrible or monstrous adversary (Tiamat, Qingu, Asakku and Anzu). In other words, the combat myth comprises the plot underpinning ritual performance and triggering the respective exegetical commentary. The combat myth, notably, appeared in many variations in ancient Near Eastern literature: the Sumerian poems Ninurta and the Stones (Lugal-e or Lugale) and the Return of Ninurta to Nippur (An-gim or Angim) and the Babylonian

7 Regarding astrological knowledge see especially the text BM 55551+, as edited by Frances Reynolds (1994).

II. 1–63, and rev. 1–8: Rites of Egašankalamma Theomachy, parricide

II. 1–18: Body Decription Text

II. rev. 20–25: Cultic Commentary Procession of the king as Ninurta

II. rev. 17–19: Cultic Commentary Combat Myth: Tiamat, Qingu

II. rev. 1–16: Commentary on Enuma elish

II. 30–38: Descriptions of the Heavens

II. 24–29: Cultic Commentary Combat Myth: Enmešarra, Ninurta, and Anzu

rev. 9–16: Body Description Text Equatation of plants, metal, animal with body parts

Assur

Assur

II. 19–23: Ishtar

TIM 9 59+LKA 71+72 Livingstone 1989: 95–98, no. 38

KAR 307 II. 1–18 Livingstone 1989: 99–102, no. 39

Tab. 4.1: Body Description Texts from Assyria.

rev. 1′–8′: Body Description Text Very fragmentary

II. 1′–38′: Cultic Commentary Theomachy + combat myth

Nineveh

CT 15 43f Livingstone 1989: 92–95, no. 37

II. 9′–10′: Body Description Text Anzu

Cultic Commentary Fragmentary

YBC 7144 Beckmann and Foster 1988: 25, no. 22; cf. Livingstone 1990: 68–69 Assur?

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Body Description Text God’s body parts equated with animals, plants, wool, minerals, instruments, tools

Combat Math Foreign invasion of Babylonia primarly by Elamites, also Assyians triggered by astrological omens relating to Marduk and Ninurta as victorious warrior goods and Tiamat Asakku, and Anzu as adversaries

Ritual Calender Text

Babylon (Seleucid Period?)

BM 55551 + (Hymn to Ninurta?)

Equation of cultic implements and ritual ingredients with gods

Ritual for Curing a Sick Man

BM 34035 II. 13–23 Livingstone 1986: 172–73

Tab. 4.2: Body Description Texts from Babylonia.

Plants, minerals, metals, stones, wool, animals, implements, ritual ingedients equated with gods

CBS 6060 and dupl. Livingstone 1986: 176–179 (Arsacid Period?)

Cultic Calendar Similar to BM 55551+ (Reynolds 1994, 2000)

BM 55466 + BM 55486 + BM 55627

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Anzu Epic, for example. They all revolved around the warrior figure Ningirsu/ Ninurta and his battles against various monstrous forces threatening the divine order. That all of these mythic narratives were perceived as variations upon the same theme, namely Ninurta’s victory over the forces of chaos, is explicitly stated in the first millennium version of the Anzu Epic (I 9–12; Foster 2005: 555–78), which refers to Ninurta’s textual history as follows: Hear the praise of the mighty one’s power! It is he who in his fierceness bound and fettered the stone creatures [references Ninurta and the Stones], Overcoming soaring Anzu with his weapon [references Ninurta’s Return to Nippur and the Anzu Epic], Slaying the bull man in the midst of the sea [reference to lost narrative?].

Elements of the Ninurta mythology were absorbed into the theology shaping the image of the Babylonian chief god Marduk at the end of the second millennium, as Lambert perspicaciously observed already in 1986. Such adaptation included elements of the plot of the combat myth to be included in Enuma elish, as well as Marduk’s adoption of Ninurta’s weapons. Such adaptations suggest, moreover, that the actors in the various myths were not conceived as wholly unique individuals but functioned, to some extent, as interchangeable entities. Persons or individuals were primarily conceived as social types and were linked with a particular set of functions (Pongratz-Leisten 2014). The individual characters of any one type – in this case the warrior (Ningirsu, Ninurta, Tishpak, Marduk, Assur, or king) and the enemy (Asakku, Anzu, Labbu, Tiamat, or historical [human] enemy) – however, were more-or-less exchangeable. This combination of type and particular set of functions allowed for the establishment of a particular action as trope (White 1999) or icon that could be mediated equally in myth, royal inscription, and epic, as well as in image and ritual. This is not to say that every combat myth developed its particular adversaries identically, however; in the end, individual adversaries remain recognizable for the audience as distinct characters. Their contours with regard to the plotline, however, were laid out in such a way that the king could step into the role of the divine warrior vanquishing an enemy who possessed the typical monstrous features of a mythic adversary. As the particular type specified in any one context could even be human, the cultic commentaries mythologize ritual performance without necessarily referencing a particular mythic narrative. Rather they focus on the plot of a certain type of myth in this case the combat myth. The performance of the king during the ritual was considered to reflect the deeds of either Ninurta or Marduk in their role of warrior god and divine leader figure, as stated in the following passage of a cultic commentary (KAR 307, r. 20–23; Livingstone 1989: 102):

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The king, who wears on his head a gold tiara [the one of Assur] from the inside of the temple and sits on a sedan chair, while they carry him and go to the palace, is Ninurta, who avenged his father. The gods, his fathers, decorated him inside the Ekur temple, gave him the scepter, throne and the staff, adorned him with the splendor of kingship, and he went out to the mountain [i.e. the realm of chaos].

In addition to the combat myth, the Neo-Assyrian exegetical commentaries tend to include still another type of mythic stratagem explaining the organization of power (and even perhaps the fact of usurpation), this being the theomachy involving the parricide of the ancestors gods or elder gods by a god representing the younger generation, a paradigm structuring the myth of the first millennium Theogony of Dunnu.8 I would like to suggest that the grouping of the Body Description Texts together with the Cultic Commentaries in the Assyrian material from Assur and Nineveh is meaningful. Although the name of the divinity or monster in the Body Description Texts is preserved only in one case as that of Ninurta’s adversary Anzu, this particular constellation of cultic commentaries – revolving primarily around the combat myth (and sometimes theomachy) together with Body Description Texts – suggests that the protagonist hidden in the Body Description Texts must be a defeated monster such as Anzu or a defeated god belonging to the elder generation such as Anu. The equation of the various body parts of the defeated adversary with different types of animate and inanimate things, then, must be significant as well. Body Description Text (KAR 307, 1–18; Livingstone 1989: 99)  1 [… is his …]. Tamarisk is his topknot. …  2 […] is his […]. The palm frond is [his] beard.  3 [Cedar] is his [kne]es. The apple is his ankle bones. The snake is his penis. The harp is his hand.  4 […] his wings.  5 […] is his […]. The cat is the blood of his heart. The partridge is a drop of his heart’s blood.  6 […] … [is his …]. The pig is his inwards.

8 Parricide is not a stratagem indigenous to Sumero-Babylonian thought, and it seems that this theomachy was impacted by the mythology revolving around the Hurrian god Kumarbi as told in the Kumarbi Cycle, in which Kumarbi – as the representative of the older generation of gods – is threatened in his position by the younger Teshub (Hoffner 1998: 50–55). One might wonder whether the integration of the parricide mytheme into Enuma elish with Ea slaying Apsu could be a further indication for a first millennium date of this myth (in addition to its intertextuality with first millennium incantations).

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The scorpion is his lip. The whet-stone is his tongue. The leek is the hair of his armpits. The drum is his lower jaw. The lion is his larger intestines. The dog is his smaller intestines. The raven is his mole. The poplar is [his] stature. The kettledrum is his heart. The date palm is his backbone. The reeds are his fingers. Silver is his skull. Gold is his sperm. The thorn bush is his breast hair. The boxthorn is the hair of his groin. His ear wax is lead. The fruit tree is his bone. The fish are his breasts. The figs are his … Oil is his tears. The bulrush is his nose mucus. The dried dates are his flesh. The aromatic … is [his] li[ps]. […] is the … of his blood. The grapes are [his] eyeballs.

In this Body Description Text above from Assur (KAR 307), each part of the body of the adversary is equated with an animal, object, metal, tree or plant, or fruit. The comparisons are stated in a series of nominal sentences, each of which contains the comparative object and a body part. An interesting aspect of this text – and of other Body Description Texts – is that the defining feature comes first and represents the subject of the nominal sentence; the body part comes second. While the text ends up describing nearly the whole body, it differs both from the hymns discussed above and from lexical tradition in that the order of the body parts is “not from head to toe or the reverse, but seemingly arbitrary” (Livingstone 1986: 98). On the basis of a Sumerian hymn (OrNS 43, 331, 18) asserting “Your eyes are a lion!” (igi.zu pirig.am3 ), Alasdair Livingstone (1986: 98) has suggested that although the part of the body “is equated with the whole of an animal, it corresponds strictly only to a part, the eye of a lion or the face of a raven.” Note, however, that in the Sumerian hymn, the body part (here the eyes) is the subject of the nominal sentence. The order in the Body Description Text above (KAR 307), however, is the reverse. The question that poses itself, consequently, is whether the intention of the text is merely to provide a description of the body of the monster or the god or whether there is something else at work here. As the sequence of the body parts is rather arbitrary, I would posit that the emphasis is, in fact, on the comparanda rather than the body parts themselves. The list of the comparanda, notably, includes cultural objects that played a role in the cult including metals, animals, trees, fruits and plants:

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Tab. 4.3: Divine Body-Parts and Comparanda in KAR 307, 1–18 (Livingstone 1989: 99). Objects

Associated Divine Body-Part

Harp Drum Kettle Drum Whet Stone

Hand Lower Jaw Heart Tongue

Metals

Associated Divine Body-Part

Gold Silver Lead

Sperm Skull Ear Wax

Animals

Associated Divine Body-Part

Snake Cat Partridge Pig Scorpion Lion Dog Raven Fish

Penis Blood of the Heart Drop of Heart’s Blood Inwards Lips Larger Intestines Smaller Intestines Mole Breast

Trees, Fruits, Plants

Associated Divine Body-Part

Tamarisk Palm Frond Cedar Poplar Palm Tree Reeds Leek Thorn Bush Boxthorn Šaššūgu-Tree Bulrush Apple Figs Oil Dates Grapes

Topknot Beard Knees Stature Back Bone Fingers Hair of the Armpits Breast Hair Hair of the Groin Bone Nose Mucus Ankle Bones ? Tears Flesh Eyeballs

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Although there is a Late Babylonian compendium that compares various plants, trees, metals, stones, minerals, animals and objects used in the cult with divinities (CBS 6060+) it is doubtful that this notion determined the choice of the comparanda in our text (KAR 307), as many animals or trees mentioned in KAR 307 are not listed in the compendium. While most of the objects, metals, and plants might have been used or might have played a role in the cult or in purification rituals, not all of them belonged into such context. Rather, they were either part of daily life (in the form of commonly encountered flora and fauna, general environment, and building materials) or imports from outside of Mesopotamia. A major number of the trees, plants, and fruits mentioned were cultivated in the gardens and orchards of the cities in the alluvial plain but the cedar tree had to be imported from the Amanus. All of the animals mentioned in the text were part of Mesopotamia’s naturally occurring fauna but some of them belonged to the domesticated category while others, such as the lion, represented a threat both to humans and their herds. All of the metals, by contrast, had to be imported. In some cases, the rationale for the pairing might have occurred on the basis of similitude with regard to texture, shape, or color – as in the case of the snake paired with the penis, the harp paired with the hand, the whet-stone with the tongue, the leek with the hair of the armpit, the gold with the sperm, the boxthorn with the hair of the groin, and the grapes with the eyeballs (Reynolds 2010: 292–94). But physical similitude does not seem to have been the driving force for the assemblage as a whole. The most important aspect of the items included in the list of comparanda, rather, was that they represented an integral part of daily food consumption, husbandry, economic life, and trade, and, as such, were crucial for the maintenance of civilization in the alluvial plain. Parataxis as a mode of linguistic reasoning, in this case juxtaposing two families of things, body parts and natural things, was intended to express their synonymous nature and thus to explain the essence of the monster or divinity so compositely described. Consequently, I would consider the role all these things played in ritual and cultic contexts as a secondary one. Integral to my understanding of the Assyrian texts is, moreover, the manner in which death was conceived in Mesopotamia as its conceptualization in that context differed greatly from our modern one. In the combat myths, for instance, the death of the monster or divine adversary did not translate into complete annihilation. Rather, in the Sumerian myth Ninurta and the Stones the monster Asakku is transformed into the netherworld; in the case of Enuma elish the dead body of Tiamat is used as material to create the universe; and, in the myth Girra and Elamatum, Elamatum is transformed into a celestial body. Defeated gods were relegated to the netherworld. In other words, the corpse

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was not dead matter but potent stuff that could (or should) be used to create something new. Complete death, annihilation, and even exile from the netherworld was entailed (primarily) in the complete disintegration of the body, which is why the claim of Assyrian kings to have dispersed the bones of enemy ancestors was such a potent and terrible bit of psychological warfare (CAD E s.v. eṣemtu 1b). Control over the body of the defeated monster, then, implied control over the trees, plants, fruits, animals, metals, and fabricated objects represented by its body parts and, by extension, insinuated control over the territory in which they originated. Note that many cultic implements and the divine statues themselves were made of materials such as woods, precious metals, and semi-precious stones that had to be imported into Mesopotamia and thus possessed a spatial component of territorial control – as conveyed in our text. Note further that many of these materials, such as gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and carnelian, were valued not only as commodities but also for their inherent unchangeable, shining, and lustrous properties, which entailed a cultural notion of purity and sacredness, i.e. qualities associated with the divine (Benzel, this volume). Equating the body of the monster with items originating from all parts of the known world thus operated as an imperial allegory of universal control in the terrestrial sphere.

2.4 The Late Babylonian Body Description Texts With the Late Babylonian period, then, the category of combat myth and the mythologizing exegesis of the calendar could be associated with astrological omens, thus shifting the exegesis to the astralizing of the combat myth. The Late Babylonian text BM 55551+ from Babylon and its duplicate (?) BM 55466+ transpose the combat myth into the heavens by relating astrological omens to the combat between Marduk and Ninurta as victorious warrior gods and Tiamat, Asakku, and Anzu as their antagonists. The night sky in the month of Ṭebētu in particular is an astrological portrayal of Marduk’s battle against Tiamat and Qingu: This astro-mythological conflict is probably a secondary interpretation of an astrological omen or omens of Elamite invasion. The relative positions of the heavenly bodies representing the combatants would have accorded with the interpretation that a battle was being prepared and fought. The Elamites, sometimes paired with the Assyrians, called Subarians, play a prominent role in this text as destructive invaders of Babylonia and removers of Marduk’s statue. Apotropaic rituals against these invaders are mentioned repeatedly … Specific equations are made elsewhere in the text: Tiamat with Elam, Qingu with Assyria, and Marduk with Babylonia. (Reynolds 2000: 369)

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In Seleucid times the combat myth had thus gained new meaning by fusing it with omens and the calendar. It is also in this late period, then, that the Body Description Text contains the description of a god, probably Ninurta rather than his adversary Anzu – indicating once more the exchangeability of Marduk and Ninurta in the role of the warrior god. Similar to the Syncretic Hymn to Ninurta, this text again emphasizes a systematic description of the body of the god from head to toe. In addition to the pairing of the body parts with mammals, birds, insects, fish, reptiles, humans, plants, minerals, wool and textile, foods, containers, and instruments, it adds the pairing of the god’s navel with Nippur, thus adding the theological notion of Nippur, the cultic center of Enlil and Ninurta, as the axis mundi of the cosmos (Reynolds 2010: 294). With all these items now being equated with body parts of Ninurta rather than the antagonist, the textual focus has shifted from the material aspect to the aspect of divine control and divinity permeating the natural and civilized world and achieving cosmic dimensions, a notion which was previously introduced in the text by the astralization of the combat myth. In other words, the astralization of the combat myth in this late text generated an allegorical take on the body of the warrior god absorbing the body of the defeated adversary and, with it, the material world. All items mentioned are now integral parts of the body of the warrior god representing the existing power structure. In contrast to the Syncretic Hymn to Ninurta, which was intended to convey the notion of multiple divine agencies unified in one divinity, this particular Body Description Text assigns agency of cosmic dimensions by means of combat to a single divinity. Divine agency in the form of combat myth, however, is here represented only in its final result, namely the complete absorption of the defeated adversary into the body of the warrior deity. In both cases, with the monster and the warrior divinity having absorbed all the items of the controlled territory, another notion – one of divine immanence in nature – can be redefined. Francesca Rochberg (2009: 83 n. 206) has already pointed to the inadequacy of our language of transcendence and immanence in analyzing Mesopotamian religion and advised that we move “away from such potentially misleading terminology to forge new analytic categories for the study of Mesopotamian religion.” Ultimately, however, she continued to use such categories for convenience and distinguished various forms of the materialization of the divine according to the three text categories of myth, divination texts, and prayer. According to her classification, the celestial body in myth refers to the divinity as primary referent while in divination texts the celestial body takes this role (as primary referent). In prayer, as in myth, however, the celestial body again points to the divinity as referent. The limits of

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such a categorization lie in the fact that they have been probed exclusively with respect to celestial bodies but have not been more broadly examined. Moreover, in noting that the specific character of divine will and specific divine attributes “were understood in human terms, i.e. the gods’ capacities for action in various arenas such as in warfare, justice, or sovereignty, [so that] the conceptualization of the gods was fundamentally anthropomorphic … [and, regardless] of the gods’ manifested forms, as stars, animal, object, or indeed as human, they were spoken of in human terms,” Rochberg (2009: 83 f.) in principal already acknowledged a hierarchy in the agency of a divinity that was conceived primarily in anthropomorphic terms. In addition to the notion of distributed divine agency framed by its various contexts of either cult, divination, jurisdiction, warfare, treaty-making, or other, and entailing various physical forms such as the statue, celestial body, and standard acting on behalf of the divinity as secondary divine agents (Pongratz-Leisten 2011: 146–49; Rochberg 2009), one might now adduce the theological-speculative thought as expressed in the allegorical Body Description Texts. These texts are not concerned with the agency of the warrior god, i.e. the combat per se, which represents the theme of the exegesis of ritual performance in the first section of the texts. Rather, their focus is on the moment when the divinity has already taken control of the adversary, with the adversary’s body parts read as the stuff that constitutes the world and civilization. It is only, then, by equating the body parts of the adversary with a host of items – or with the divinity completely absorbing the body of the adversary and permeating the cosmos, civilization, and nature alike – that material matter is rendered divine. In both cases, the concept of distributed divine agency and exegesis, our modern distinction between animate and inanimate things and our conception of immanence do not provide adequate frameworks of description. Rather, as suggested by the ancient texts, it is the composite notion of the body and the notion of the person, and by extension of the divinity, as an assemblage of parts (Pongratz-Leisten 2011: 138–40) that allowed for thinking either in terms of distributed agency (divinity as primary agent; statue, celestial body, standard as its associated secondary agents) or in allegorical terms, i.e. equating animate and inanimate things with body parts of the adversary or divinity and thus turning civilization and nature into the presencing of the divine. Inherent to this presencing of the divine, however, is the notion of divine control achieved through cosmic battle, as revealed by the combination of these allegorical sections with the exegetical commentaries on the combat myth. In other words, allegorical readings of the Body Description Texts remain elusive as long as they are read separately from the preceding exegetical commentaries that allude to the combat myth. Their cosmological significance is not embedded

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in the parataxis itself (equating body parts with physical entities). It reveals itself only by means of contextual reading. However, while the notion of distributed divine agency distinguishes between the divinity as primary agent and physical phenomena such as the statue or celestial body as secondary agents, the allegorical reading totally and completely conflates the divinity and the cosmos. Other than the secondary agents, the allegorical reading that rendered the divine visible in the world of natural phenomena and things (Brown 2007: 5) implies “both the interpretive process, which moves from what is already visible to transcendent referents, and the compositional process, which seeks to express imagistically what is otherwise abstract or invisible” (Copeland and Struck 2010: 5–6), in this case imperial control through the warrior divinity dominating the body of the chaotic force (Assyrian) or the divine body having absorbed the forces of chaos (Late Babylonian): “The device of personification” – or, in this case, the use of the divine bodyscape – “is bound up with both of these processes of rendering the abstract visible” (Copeland and Struck 2010: 6).

Bibliography Baudy, Gerhard. 2001. Der Messianische Stern (Mt2) und das sidus Iulium: zum interkulturellen Zeichengehalt antiker Herrschaftslegitimation. Hallesche Beiträge zur Orientwissenschaft 31: 23–69. Beckman, Gary, and Benjamin R. Foster. 1988. Assyrian Scholarly Texts in the Yale Babylonian Collection. Pp. 1–26, in A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs, ed. Erle Leichty, Maria deJong Ellis, and Pamela Gerardi. Philadelphia, PA: Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund. Bezold, Carl. 1894a. Über keilschriftliche Beschreibungen babylonisch-assyrischer Göttertypen. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 9: 114–25. Bezold, Carl. 1894b. Zwei Fragmente mit Beschreibungen babylonisch-assyrischer Göttertypen. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 9: 405–409. Bezold, Carl. 1903. Ninive und Babylon. Bielefeld and Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing. Bezold, Carl. 1916. Eine neue babylonisch-griechische Parallele. Pp. 226–235, in Aufsätze zur Kultur- und Sprachgeschichte, vornehmlich des Orients, Ernst Kuhn zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet von Freunden und Schülern, ed. L. Scherman and C. Bezold. Breslau: Verlag M. & H. Marcus. Brown, Jane K. 2007. The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner. Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press. Burrows, Eric. 1924. Hymn to Ninurta as Sirius (K 128). Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 56: 33–40. Copeland, Rita, and Peter. T. Struck. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carruthers, Mary Jean. 2000. The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Edzard, Dietz Otto. 1997. Gudea and His Dynasty. The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods Volume 3/1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated. Foster, Benjamin R. 2005. Before the Muses. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Goffman, Erving. 1986. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gombrich, Ernst Hans. 1979. The Sense of Order. London: Phaidon Press. Hoffner, Harry A. 1998. Hittite Myths. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Köcher, Franz. 1953. Der babylonische Göttertypentext. Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung 1: 57–95. Lambert, Wilfred G. 1986. Ninurta Mythology in the Babylonian Epic of Creation. Pp. 55–60, in Keilschriftliche Literaturen. Ausgewählte Vorträge der XXXII. Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Münster, 8.−12. 7. 1985, ed. Karl Hecker and Walter Sommerfeld. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Livingstone, Alasdair. 1986. Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Livingstone, Alasdair. 1989. Court Poetry and Literary Miscellanea. State Archives of Assyria III. Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project and Helsinki University Press. Livingstone, Alasdair. 1990. Recently Published Mystical/Mythological Explanatory Works. N.A.B.U. [Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires] 1990, no. 3: 68–69. Maul, Stefan M. 2013. Die Wahrsagekunst im Alten Orient. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck. Mayer, Werner. 2005. Das Gebet des Eingeweideschauers an Ninurta. Orientalia 74: 51–56. Panaino, Antonio. 1995. Tištrya, vol. 2. Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2011. Divine Agency and Astralization of Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia. Pp. 137–87, in Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, ed. Beate Pongratz-Leisten. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 2014. The Mythology of the Warrior God in Text, Ritual, and Cultic Commentaries, and the Shaping of Marduk’s Kingship. Journal of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies 7: 13–18. Reynolds, Frances. 1994. Esoteric Babylonian Learning: A First Millennium Calendar Text. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Birmingham. Reynolds, Frances. 2000. Stellar Representations of Tiāmat and Qingu in a Learned Calendar Text. Pp. 369–78, in Languages and Cultures in Contact. At the Crossroads of Civilization in the Syro-Mesopotamian Realm. Proceedings of the 42e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, ed. Karel van Lerberghe and Gabriela Voet. Leuven: Peeters. Reynolds, Frances. 2002. Describing the Body of a God. Pp. 215–27, in Mining the Archives. Festschrift for Christopher Walker on the Occasion of his 60 th Birthday, 4 October 2002, ed. Cornelia Wunsch. Dresden: Islet. Reynolds, Frances. 2010. A Divine Body: New Joins in the Sippar Collection. Pp. 291–302, in Your Praise is Sweet. A Memorial Volume for Jeremy Black from Students, Colleagues and Friends, ed. Heather D. Baker, Eleanor Robson, and Gábor Zólyomi. London: British Institute for the Study of Iraq. Rochberg, Francesca. 2009. The Stars Their Likenesses. Pp. 1–52, in What is a God? Anthropomorphic and Non-Anthropomorphic Aspects of Deity in Ancient Mesopotamia. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Soucek, Priscilla. 2000. Theory and Portraiture in the Persian Tradition. Muqarnas 17: 97– 108.

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Streck, Michael P. 1998. Art. Ninurta. Pp. 512–22, in Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie 9no. (3/4), ed. Dietz Otto Edzard et al. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Thompson, Reginald Campbell. 1903–1904. The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, Being Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits, which Attack Mankind. 2 vols. London: Luzac and Co. White, Hayden. 1999. Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Karen Sonik

Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images and a Pictorial Stream of Tradition in Mesopotamia Abstract: Focusing on the divine image in Mesopotamia, this contribution explores the construction and implications of the anthropomorphized divine body; the nature of the relationship between the image (specifically the ṣalmu) and its divine referent; and the means by which the authoritative and authorized status of a divine image might be established, in order that the image might successfully presence the deity. Taking the ninth century BCE Sun God Tablet (SGT) from Sippar as case study, Sonik specifically examines the embedding of images within the pictorial stream of tradition as a means of establishing their authoritative status. Such an embedding might be accomplished through both pictorial and written strategies: pictorial compositions may be deliberately designed to incorporate archaizing motifs or elements, visually announcing their ties to the (or even a specific period of the) ancient and esteemed past; written accounts, for their part, might trace or deliberately construct an object’s relationship to a more ancient model or even authoritative prototype with origins in the divine sphere. Keywords: anthropomorphism, cult statue, (divine) image, materiality, mimesis, pictorial stream of tradition, ṣalmu

1 Introduction: The Image and Likeness of the Divine: Why the Material Matters In his fifth century CE Conferences, a compilation of twenty-four dialogues with the desert fathers of Egypt on the principles of monastic life and prayer, the Christian monk and theologian John Cassian (ca. 360–465 CE) included an unhappy but compelling account of how the monk Sarapion, who lived as a her-

Karen Sonik, Department of Art & Art History, Auburn University, 108 Biggin Hall, Auburn, AL 36849, e-mail: [email protected]

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mit in the Egyptian desert of Scetis, came to lose his way to God.1 This account is worth briefly elucidating here as it provoked a number of complex questions on the status and functioning of divine representations that ultimately shaped the development both of this volume and of this specific contribution. Venerable and pious if also somewhat simple and naïve, Sarapion has been described as an Anthropomorphite,2 one who attributed human physical form or features to God.3 (This attribution was based in a literal understanding of Genesis 1:26, according to which mankind is made in the image and after the likeness of God.) Sarapion was greatly disturbed, accordingly, when the patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, promulgated a doctrine of incorporeity in his festal letter of 399 CE, arguing against the anthropomorphizing of God. Initially rejecting this new doctrine, Sarapion was yet ultimately persuaded to it by the eloquence of the deacon Photinus,4 who explained that Genesis 1:26 was to be understood not literally but spiritually: it was impossible, Photinus made clear, that the “immeasurable and incomprehensible and invisible majesty [of God] … could be circumscribed in a human form and likeness, [or] that indeed a nature which was incorporeal and uncomposed and simple could be apprehended by the eye or seized by the mind” (Cassian X III.3; Ramsey 1997: 372). Cassian’s story, however, does not end here; what has passed so far, indeed, is mostly preamble. The crux of the account (Carruthers 1998: 70–76) is what occurs when the monks join in prayers of thanksgiving for the success of Photinus’ persuasion:

1 The influential theological writings of this period include those of Saint Augustine (ca. 354– 430 CE) and Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345–399 CE). The dialogues recorded in the Conferences of Saint John Cassian (John the Ascetic) should not be regarded as historical or objective autobiographical accounts (Driver 2002: 2 ff.); rather, they offer insight into Cassian’s own complex elucidations of theology and practice. The story of Sarapion, though it may be a fabrication, is quite an illuminating one in this regard, Stewart 1998: 10, 85–90. 2 For the applicability – or inapplicability – of the term Anthropomorphite and its pejorative connotations, see the discussion in Patterson 2012: 9–24; Clark 1992: 44–45, n. 5. 3 Certain passages of Scripture, as Genesis 1:26, were apparently read literally: “if Adam, the first human being, was created in God’s image, then the archetype of that image, God, must have some sort of human form which served as the model for the created human form,” DelCogliano 2003: 377. For the Anthropomorphite “heresy” or controversy in Egypt, see Clark 1992, esp. pp. 43–84; Shepherd 1938. 4 Stewart (1998: 87–88) has noted the sharply drawn contrasts between Sarapion and Photinus: the former is aged and pious but simple, bearing a name “redolent of pagan antiquity” (derived as it is from Serapis, a god of Ptolemaic Egypt), and he comes from Egypt, with its long history of paganism; the latter, apparently young and theologically erudite, bears a name meaning “shining” and hails from Cappadocia, which has gained a new reputation for theological learning; see also Shepherd 1938: 270.

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But the old man [Sarapion] got so confused in his mind during the prayers, when he realized that the anthropomorphic image of the Godhead which he had always pictured to himself while praying had been banished from his heart, that he suddenly broke into the bitterest tears and heavy sobbing and, throwing himself to the ground with a loud groan, cried out: ‘Woe is me, wretch that I am! They have taken my God from me, and I have no one to lay hold of, nor do I know whom I should adore or address.’ (Cassian X III.4–5; Ramsey 1997: 372)

Having surrendered on doctrinal grounds the anthropomorphic image of God he so long held in his heart – while this was a mental image, the circumstances here underscore the fact that it was neither less powerful nor problematic on this account than a material one would be – Sarapion “no longer has a way to think about God at all: all he can do is howl in grief [italics mine]” (Carruthers 1998: 73). The story of Sarapion is one deeply and specifically grounded in the theological debates and concerns of fourth and fifth century CE Christianity, which was grappling (and would continue to grapple over the following centuries) with issues of anthropomorphism, idolatry, and iconoclasm. As such, it is far removed – geographically, chronologically, culturally, and theologically – from the spatiotemporal context with which I am primarily concerned in this contribution, that of ancient Mesopotamia from the late fourth millennium through to the mid-first millennium BCE (the period from the rise of the first cities in the south through to the fall of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires). But the elucidation of this episode impelled the definition of a series of questions on the role and status of the material divine that stands at the heart of this volume: How might the divine be legitimately materialized and/or conceptualized? What exactly is meant by anthropomorphism, and why, in what contexts, to what extent, and with what implications is the divine anthropomorphized? How might the human worshipper indeed interact with the divine without anthropomorphizing it to some degree? What is the relationship between the image and its referent? Is it necessarily to be understood as one of mimesis or physical similitude, or might an image yet be ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ to its referent on other grounds? 5 And what particular qualities or characteris-

5 The truth value of an image is not the central point in Cassian’s dialogue though it arguably re-emerges as a concern in Theophilus’ subsequent interaction with the monk Aphou of Oxyrhyncus; for the episode and its implications, see Drioton 1915–17: 99–100; Shepherd 1938: 265; Clark 1992: 59–64; Patterson 2012: 51–58, esp. p. 55. Cassian is more concerned with the cognitive utility of images, their functioning as “sites upon which and by means of which the human mind can build its compositions, whether these be thoughts or prayers,” Carruthers 1998: 72.

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tics might establish a divine image as authoritative and authorized 6 – and so fit to presence a deity? These are questions worth pursuing not despite the fact but, indeed, because they are differently negotiated across a range of cultural and religious contexts from the ancient to the modern, and within the framework of both Western and non-Western civilizations. Such cross-cultural exploration is by no means expected to yield any universal truths: what are of interest, rather, are the particular questions, issues, and possibilities that are raised in cultural contexts other than our own, which force our own cognitive and intellectual dilation – and which lead us to attend to vital differences as well as similarities in understanding and in practice, or even demand that we revisit the very foundations of our assumptions of what is or was and how it came to be.7 In this chapter, emphasizing ancient Mesopotamia specifically, I have explored these issues within the framework of three overarching questions: (1) How is the divine conceptualized and/or materially represented? (2) What is the relationship between the divine on the one hand and images of the divine on the other? (3) And, where the divine is legitimately represented, what makes for an authorized and authoritative divine image? 8 This final question is eluci6 The term authentic, which might otherwise be used here, has been deliberately eschewed (both in this contribution and throughout the volume) due to its problematic connotations and applications – particularly with respect to images. Aptly described by Dutton (2003b: 258) as a “‘dimension word, a term whose meaning remains uncertain until we know what dimension of its referent is being talked about,” it is worth noting that the term might yet better insinuate something of the Mesopotamian concern (evinced particularly in the first millennium BCE) with recovering the original and presumably true form of things such as temples and, arguably, cult statues. 7 Sometimes, indeed, we may be forced to the realization that we have been asking not merely the wrong questions but the wrong sorts of questions entirely. For a cross-cultural overview of some of the critical issues and theoretical approaches involved in this volume (and the workshop on which it is based), see Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume. For a thought-provoking consideration of some of the key issues involved in comparative analysis with respect to the study of religion, see Bynum 2014. 8 A pertinent issue, unfortunately largely beyond the scope of this study, concerns the relationship between king and god in Mesopotamia and specifically the king’s own role as a divine ṣalmu or “image” in some contexts: this presumably insinuates a likeness in essence rather than physical form, though it may have a physical aspect in that both the king and the gods are (typically) perfectly formed. The thirteenth century BCE Tukulti-Ninurta Epic (l. 18′), for example, describes the king as the eternal ṣalmu of Enlil (Machinist 2006: 161; Frahm 2013: 103) and the king in Neo-Assyrian contexts is frequently described as the ṣalmu of Bel/Marduk (Cole and Machinist 1998: no. 46 11′; Machinist 2006: 167) or, more frequently, of Shamash (Parpola 1993: no. 196 4′–5′; Machinist 2006: 173). A fascinating if still ambiguous passage in a letter from Adad-shumu-usur to the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon (680–669 BCE) appears to delineate the king, who stands at the apex of society and mediates the relationship between

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dated through an analysis of the specific circumstances, recounted both in pictorial and written form on the ninth century BCE Sun God Tablet, of the restoration of the cult statue of Shamash at Sippar.

2 Divine Conceptualization and Material Representation: Imag(in)ing the Gods in Mesopotamia In Mesopotamia, the gods are visible in some of the earliest surviving literary and pictorial compositions of the developing urban civilization.9 The mode and manner in which they come to be conceptualized and pictured – as essentially anthropomorphic entities – is arguably shaped (at least in part) by specific factors associated with the process of urbanization; once the primary anthropomorphic form of the gods is established, moreover, it persists throughout much of the subsequent history of Mesopotamia, a span of some 2,500+ years.10 the human and divine realms, as the ṣalmu (image) or muššulu (mirror) of the gods, and then goes further in (apparently) delineating ordinary humans as the images or shadows of the king: ordinary mortals would thus possess some relationship to the divine, albeit a secondhand one (Parpola 1993: 166, no. 207 9′–13′; Stol 2000: 148; Machinist 2006: 173–74; Frahm 2013: 112–13 n. 3.4). For more substantial scrutiny of this subject, see the recent publications of Machinist 2006; Frahm 2013. See also on the relationship between the human and the divine the account of the making of human beings using divine blood or matter in combination with clay in the Akkadian composition Atrahasis; also Abusch 2002b: 44–46, 2003: 681–83. 9 Rather than positing an evolutionary development in the conceptualization of the divine from symbolic to anthropomorphic or a conflict between the symbolic and anthropomorphic forms (Jacobsen 1976: 128–29), I think it likely that the anthropomorphizing of the gods was underway already at the beginning of urban civilization in Mesopotamia, even if its firm establishment – in the pictorial sources and otherwise – is only evident from the Early Dynastic Period onwards. Supporting an anthropomorphizing conceptualization of the gods from “the beginning of our knowledge,” see Lambert 1997: 2, 1990: 120–25; also the discussions in Ornan 2009, 2005, esp. pp. 173–74. For a different view, now fallen (rightly) out of favor, which regarded the gods as passing through a pre-anthropomorphic stage – during which the gods had theriomorphic or therianthropic forms, or the religious system emphasized totems or emblems – prior to their anthropomorphic conceptualization, see, for example, Jacobsen 1961; Spycket 1968; Foster 1974: 351; also Hallo 1983: 6–14. 10 This is not to say that the anthropomorphic form of the divine prevailed in all media in all periods; indeed, Ornan (2005) has undertaken an extensive study of the avoidance of humanshaped renderings of the divine in the mid-second through the first millennium BCE. Even this aversion, however, did not preclude the continued appearance of anthropomorphic cult statues during this time.

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Concomitant with the rise of the first cities in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BCE are a number of striking sociopolitical, economic, religious, and technological developments.11 The cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing system, utilizing reed styluses to impress signs into tablets shaped from easily accessible clay and initially used to keep track of economic and administrative transactions, developed in subsequent centuries to record more complex compositions such as letters, royal inscriptions, and a striking array of literary genres, among these proverbs, incantations, rituals, mythological and other narratives, and hymns and prayers to the gods.12 Monumental art and architecture appeared on a large scale, utilized especially to express and to disseminate the worldview and concerns of the ruling elite, as well as to celebrate and to make visible the glory of the gods and the kings who guarded and protected the new urban enclaves.13 It is also possible that we see already in the late fourth millennium, though this remains necessarily speculative, some of the earliest anthropomorphic images of the gods. On the 1.05 meter tall alabaster Warka Vase (ca. 3200 BCE) recovered from the Eanna Precinct Level III at Uruk, for example, the king presents a wealth of offerings to a female figure typically identified as either Inana – the Sumerian goddess associated with sexual love, fertility, and warfare – or her human priestess.14 If the identity of the female figure on the vase remains in dispute, however, Inana’s presence in the depicted context does not. This presence is marked by, and potentially even localized in, the reed bundles with streamers that appear in the uppermost register of the vase. Intimately associated with Inana, these indeed become the pictographic sign for

11 The traditional model of the rise and development of urbanization in the Near East as an exclusively southern phenomenon has been challenged in recent years as an increasing amount of evidence for early complexity in the north has been uncovered; see, for example, Oates et al. 2007; Matney 2012. 12 The mode in which individual genres of written composition from Mesopotamia are named or defined is a subject of ongoing discussion and, sometimes, dispute: see, for example, Vanstiphout 1986; Tinney 1996; Cooper 2006; George 2007b; Michalowski 2010. 13 For explicit treatments of the significant ideological aspects of the surviving art of Mesopotamia, see Reade 1979; Marcus 1995; Winter 1997; Ross 2005; Pollock 2011; Sonik 2014; Pongratz-Leisten, forthcoming. The elucidation of the ideological aspects of Mesopotamia’s pictorial art does not and should not preclude a broader and more multifaceted approach to its analysis, one that includes significant aesthetic considerations; see Winter 2003, 2002, 1995. 14 Pertinent analyses of the vase, its pictorial composition, and the history of its interpretation and figures, appear in Suter 2014; Cooper 2008; Bahrani 2002; Hansen 1998: 46. Suter’s (2014) analysis is notable for its contextualization of the Warka Vase imagery within the larger corpus of contemporary representations, and for its suggestion that the female figure in the uppermost register, rather than being either goddess or priestess, might represent the queen.

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the goddess in written sources. Their repetition on the Warka Vase – the reed bundles appear three times in the uppermost register – has led Suter (2014: 552) to assert that these cannot have functioned as simple icons of the goddess in symbolic form: major gods, as she observes, are not depicted more than once in a single scene. A caveat worth voicing here, however, is that pictorial convention in this period is unlikely to have been utterly fixed or established and that the evidence of contemporary images, while significant, is not definitive. It is notable, moreover, that there in fact survives from this same period at Uruk the so-called Warka or Lion-Hunt Stele (ca. 3200 BCE), a monument that seems to depict a significant (albeit human rather than divine) figure, the so-called “priest-king,” twice in a single visual field.15 The priest-king, the conventionalized figural representation of the ruler at Uruk in the late fourth millennium, even if not a deity in his own right, stood at the apex of human society, occupying the position nearest the gods.16 His (apparent) recurrence on the Warka Stele, once with spear and once with bow and arrow, leaves open at least the possibility that the thrice-repeated reed bundles on the Warka Vase directly presenced Inana within their matrices.17 That said, the dearth of evidence for their precise signification means they might also be more generally (and perhaps better) regarded as markers of the goddess’ presence in the depicted space: her (temple) storehouse.18 The reed bundles associated with In-

15 While the two images of the priest-king appear one above the other rather than side-byside, there is no ground line or other division between them. Other examples of Mesopotamian imagery in which a single figure appears two or more times in a single visual field, albeit from much later periods, include the famous Middle Assyrian Altar (SMB VA 8146, 8227) of TukultiNinurta (ca. 1244–1208 BCE) and one of the Neo-Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs (BM ME 124886, 124887) of Ashurbanipal (ca. 668–627 BCE). For the figure and functioning of the priest-king, see Schmandt-Besserat 1993. 16 While we lack textual sources from this early period that might delineate the precise functioning and status of the ruler, the extant visual sources appear to emphasize the religious obligations and divine service already inherent in his role. 17 A possibility does not, of course, make for a plausibility. Even on the Warka Stele there is the possibility that two distinct figures are represented by the lion-slayers – as the priest-king and crown prince, their relative ranks perhaps communicated by their sizes – though this possibility is rather undermined by the fact that both figures are bearded (suggestive of a virile maturity) and identically dressed. 18 Suter (2014: 552) has elegantly suggested the reed bundles be regarded as “markers of numinosity” rather than merely markers of sacred space or as individual divine presences: “they flagged the presence of the respective deity whether it was in a particular place, object, or person.” Given the ongoing lack of clarity regarding the nature of divine conceptualization and representation in the Late Uruk Period, this characterization seems a usefully ambiguous one.

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Fig. 5.1: BM ME 116722. Calcite Cylinder Seal (ca. 3300–3000 BCE). Priest-king feeding temple flocks (?); reed bundles of Inana. 7.2 (h) × 4.2 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

ana on the Warka Vase notably also appear alongside the priest-king in other pictorial contexts in which he is represented (Figure 5.1): this is perhaps unsurprising as Inana was the patron goddess of the city of Uruk and the king’s satisfaction of her needs of key importance for the city’s well-being.19 If the precise nature of the physical materialization – and, for that matter, the mental conceptualization – of the divine in this earliest period of urbanization (Late Uruk Period, ca. 3500–3100 BCE) remains ambiguous, the gods attained rather more consistent physical forms and characteristic attributes over the course of the following Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2900–2350 BCE). As southern Mesopotamia especially came to be characterized by rapid urban development, and as individual gods came to serve as patrons and protectors of individual rising city-states, the material representation of the divine appears to have undergone a concurrent development: gods came to be consistently (though not exclusively) depicted with human forms in at least those pictorial compositions extant to the present day. There are two features of the flourishing urban environment of early to mid-third millennium Sumer that are particularly pertinent to this development. The first is the now consistent walling and the fortification of the cities, which served to establish a symbolic as well as a material boundary between

19 Inana has a venerable and intimate link with the city of Uruk; the role of the god An in the early city – despite his traditional link to Inana at this time – appears to be rather more ambiguous, Beaulieu 2003: 103–108.

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the world inside the city and the world outside of it, so that culture and the trappings of divinely ordered and protected civilization were – conceptually as well as tangibly20 – bounded and delimited, separated from the harsh and rather more savage conditions of the exterior wilderness, in which chaotic, dangerous, and hostile elements and entities continued to originate and dwell. The second is the explicit (though not necessarily new) understanding of the cities as inhabited by their patron gods or goddesses, with the temple of the divine patron functioning not only as the dominant institution and symbolic center of the city but also as the literal house (e2 ) of the god.21 Abandonment by a patron god, whether metaphorical or material (as, for example, through the theft or destruction of the cult statue), was associated with the withdrawal of divine favor and could signal dire consequences – misfortune, devastation, even utter destruction – for a city,22 much as abandonment by a personal god could lead to grave misfortune for an individual.23

20 This is not to say that all the city’s activities, nor all those associated with the city, were necessarily contained within the city walls: craft workshops and residential suburbs, as well as exterior fields and orchards, and a harbor district were external to the walls but remained integral to the city, Van De Mieroop 1997: 65–77. For a brief account of city fortifications in the ancient Near East, see Mazar 1995. The cities of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, too, formed a cultural if not a political unity, bound together by a common language, technological developments, and religion: that this unity was recognized by the people of the region is indicated by their use of the term kalam, “the Land,” to reference the network of Early Dynastic city-states in opposition to kur or kur kur, “the mountains, other land, or “all foreign countries” (Postgate 1992: 272–73). 21 In addition to being the symbolic center, the patron god’s temple was also frequently the actual center of the city: elevated above the surrounding landscape, in some cases built upon an artificial platform and in others simply set upon the accretion of earlier temples (some dating back to the Ubaid Period) located in the same spot, it was also often monumental in size and (often) the oldest monumental building in the city, Van De Mieroop 1997: 77. 22 In the Lament for Sumer and Ur (LSUr), the patron god of the city turns away (l. 68) – among other signs of coming calamity – prior to the destruction visited on the land. See also the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (LU) for the gods’ abandonment of their temples (in their respective cities) prior to and as signal of (or even catalyst for) the coming wave of destruction (ll. 1–38); the Lament for Nippur (LN) for the patron god’s anger with and turning away from his city (l. 79, 88); the Lament over Uruk (LW), also for the patron god’s turning against his city and the city’s abandonment by its chief gods and protective udug and lamma daimons (D ll. 21–26); and the Eridu Lament (LE), which sees Enki, patron god of Eridu, outside his city as it is devastated (A ll. 11–12). Relevant publications include Black et al. 1998–2006; Michalowski 1989 (LSUr); Samet 2014; Kramer 1940 (LU); Tinney 1996 (LN); Green 1984 (LW); Green 1978 (LE). 23 Abusch (1999, 2002: 46–47), for example, discusses the (perceived) role of the witch in alienating the personal god from an innocent victim.

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Fig. 5.2: BM 118871. Magnesite Statue of King Ashurnasirpal II (ca. 883–859 BCE) from Temple of Ishtar at Nimrud. 113 (h) × 32 (w) × 15 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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The material as well as the conceptual boundaries of Self in opposition to Other were thus erected and articulated:24 within the city or, by the Early Dynastic Period, the network of cities dotting the Mesopotamian landscape dwelt civilized human beings, their kings, and their gods; beyond the city walls dwelt ambiguous and strange (if not necessarily wholly hostile) outsiders, as well as more explicit and terrifying enemies – mortal, supernatural, or even divine.25 Categorical identity came, at least in some cases, to be inscribed into the very forms and flesh of individual figures. The kinship of the civilized city-dwellers, whether human or divine, was signaled by their shared anthropomorphic forms – with gods and kings possessing particularly perfect or perfected physiques (Figure 5.2);26 the alterity of outsiders and enemies, regardless of whether these were ambiguously dangerous, potentially helpful, or explicitly harmful, might be marked by physical anomaly, a measure of bestiality or brutishness in appearance, or even explicit corporeal hybridity (Figures 5.3–5.5).27 Corporeal coding was not the only means of distinguishing Self from Other, however. Behavior and convention, as well as possession of familial and/or community networks, also distinguished civilized city-dwellers, human or di-

24 The model of Self vs. Other has received (just) criticism as being overly simplistic in recent years and certainly does not reflect the complexities of day-to-day human interaction, in ancient or in modern periods. That said, it remains an enormously powerful conceptual model for a reason, and is notable in the context of Mesopotamia as a recurrent – if continuously nuanced and sometimes strikingly undermined – theme in the extant visual arts and written narratives of the region. 25 Michalowski (2009: 152–53) has made a compelling case for the rise of quite a different worldview, as manifested in the extant pictorial and written compositions, during the Old Akkadian Period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE) as the kings of Akkad accumulated an empire under their rule: “The inscribed texts proclaim a new version of the world, with Akkad at the very center, and rays of control emanating in all directions, to the very ends of the universe.” With the fall of the Akkadian empire, a return to (or new construction of, depending on how one views the evidence) the confrontation between Self and Other begins to be apparent; see also fn. 24 above. 26 In the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (I 49–50; George 2003: 541), for example, it is said of the eponymous hero that “Bēlēt-ilī drew the shape of his body, / Nudimmud brought his form to perfection.” In Enuma elish (I 87–100; Lambert 2013: 55), it is said of the god Marduk that “his figure was well developed, the glance of his eyes was dazzling, / His growth was manly, he was mighty from the beginning … Anu rendered him perfect: his divinity was remarkable … His figure was lofty and superior in comparison with the gods / His limbs were long, his nature was superior.” See also the studies by Irene Winter (1989, 1996, 2009) on the (sexually) attractive and shapely body of Naram-Sin, the coded physiognomy of Prince Gudea of Lagash, and royal “portraits” in general; also see Suter 2012. 27 For analyses of Mesopotamian characterizations and representations of outsiders, see Wiggermann 1997, Pongratz-Leisten 2001, Sonik 2013.

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Fig. 5.3: BM 119427. Pink-White Marble Cylinder Seal (ca. 3000 BCE). Contest Scene (left to right): Nude hero; bull; lion crossed with human-headed bull; lion; bull-man; terminal (unfilled space for inscription above anthropomorphic figure in kilt grappling with horned quadruped). 4.5 (h) × 2.8 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 5.4: BM 23287. White Stone Macehead (ca. 2424–2405 BCE). Lion-headed eagle (Imdugud/Anzud). 11.7 (h) × 11 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 5.5: BM 117759. Stone Lamashtu Amulet (ca. 800–600 BCE). Lion-headed and eagletaloned baby-snatching demon-goddess grappling snakes, suckled by piglet and puppy, and standing atop a donkey. 12.7 (h) × 6.4 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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vine, from unsettled, barbaric, and even exiled or isolated outsiders.28 Deities were embedded in social and familial networks29 – related to each other by marriage or by blood (lines of descent) – reinforcing the sense of unity among the cities they guarded, and of which they served as patrons, against the surrounding outer world and its considerable dangers. All this is not to say, however, that the anthropomorphic body or convention utterly bounded the divine, or even that the divine was portrayed anthropomorphically in all contexts or aspects. The Mesopotamian gods were individually associated with a range of attributes, among these natural and/or fantastic animals;30 weapons and a variety of other objects characteristic of their particular roles or spheres of agency;31 and even anthropomorphic viziers (such as the god Enki/Ea’s human-shaped but distinctively two-faced vizier Isimud/Usmu) that enabled the viewer’s cognitive recognition of individual divine figures where they were represented in the company of such (Figure 5.6) – provided of course that the viewer possessed the appropriate cultural knowledge or experience to trigger such recognition (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). As an example, an Old Akkadian Period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE) cylinder seal (Figure 5.7) bears an image of the goddess Inana/Ishtar, associated with sexual love and warfare – here depicted in anthropomorphic form with several of her personal attributes. Several specific features combine to render her recognizable both within the context of the larger category she inhabits (major goddess) and in terms of her specific identity (Inana/Ishtar): she is depicted en face, as other intercessory female divinities – both major (Asher-Greve 2003) and, in later periods, also minor (Wiggermann 1998; Uehlinger 1998); she has one leg bared and thrust out from her garments, in a mastery pose that simultaneously

28 For the role of behavioral convention and family/community in distinguishing between the civilized humans and gods and the barbaric human nomads and dangerous monsters and daimons, see Sonik 2013; also Sumerian compositions such as the Marriage of Martu; Gilgamesh and Huwawa A; and Lugale (Ninurta and the Stones or Ninurta and Azag) and Akkadian compositions such as Enuma elish and the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. 29 Gods might also possess their own households, including a spouse, children, often a personal vizier or counselor, and a range of servants. 30 The relationship between the fantastic animals or monsters and the gods with whom they appear is not simply that of divine attribute and divinity: the monsters and, sometimes, natural animals as well, are often set beneath the feet of the deity with whom they are associated, pictorially signifying ongoing (and perhaps fragile?) divine subjugation of fundamentally wild, chaotic, and rebellious entities. 31 The weapons Sharur and Shargaz, for example, are associated with the warrior god Ninurta; see further fn. 38 below.

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Fig. 5.6: BM 89115. Adda Seal. Greenstone Cylinder Seal (ca. 2300 BCE) from Sippar (?). Left to right: Warrior god with lion; warrior goddess Ishtar with wings and holding dates; sun god holding saw and arising from the mountains; water god Ea with streams and fishes, with predatory bird perched on hand, bull beneath foot, and distinctive two-faced vizier Usmu behind him. 3.9 (h) × 2.55 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 5.7: BM 130695. Hematite Cylinder Seal (ca. 2000–1600 BCE). Left to right: (Statue of?) King with mace on trapezoidal scale-patterned dais; intercessory goddess; king with kid (goat) offering; warrior goddess Ishtar holding rod and ring. 2.55 (h) × 1.4 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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insinuates her martial prowess and her sexual aspect;32 and her role as warrior is underscored by the weapons that rise from behind her shoulders and the dangerous lion, her associated animal, that she keeps firmly underfoot. There is also, in the visual field above, a star-disk – the eight-pointed star signifies the goddess’ astral aspect as Venus – and a crescent, the symbol of the moon god Sin (father of the goddess in some traditions). The goddess is also attributed, as all the gods come to be by the mid-third millennium BCE onwards, with the horned headdress that functions as a pictorial signifier of divine status.33 What is interesting about all of the various attributes with which Ishtar is depicted, objectively animate and inanimate,34 is that they simultaneously advertise her status as something more than merely human even as they are carefully located so as not to breach or interrupt the boundaries of the anthropomorphic body itself. They add to rather than replace elements of the body, a careful preservation of the integrity of the anthropomorphic form that is in marked contrast to the composite or hybrid bodies with which the gods of nearby regions such as Egypt are sometimes endowed. In Mesopotamia (as noted above), the therianthropic or composite theriomorphic – or otherwise physically anomalous – body is instead reserved primarily for the representation of ambiguous outsiders, dangerous if not necessarily hostile Others, and explicit enemies (Sonik 2013) – particularly the interstitial or in-between supernatural entities that appear concurrently with, and that function variously as terrifying challengers of or still-dangerous subordinates to, the anthropomorphic gods

32 The pose in which the goddess is depicted is frequently called the “ascending posture” where it is associated with the god Shamash, who is rendered on Old Akkadian cylinder seals especially with one foot set upon a mountain peak, Collon 1982: 85–87, figs. 169–77. I would suggest that “mastery posture” is a more fitting appellation for this pose, which is associated in numerous other contexts, both pictorial and literary – including but by no means limited to the famous Victory Stele of Naram-Sin (ca. 2250 BCE) – with the utter defeat of the enemy; see also Westenholz 2000: 103–110. 33 If the horned helmet (Romano 2008 and, somewhat out of date, Furlong 1987) comes to be a pictorial signifier of divinity by the late Early Dynastic Period, it is not always clear what degree of divinity it represents – particularly in later periods, as in the first millennium BCE. Divine viziers, for example, wear the horned helmet in pictorial compositions but neither fulfill the same functions nor possess the same type or degree of power as the great gods that they serve. Divinity, in some contexts at least, is more usefully assessed as a relative rather than absolute status in the context of Mesopotamia (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume; Pongratz-Leisten 2011). 34 Mesopotamian divisions between and assessments of animate and inanimate sometimes diverge in quite unexpected ways from contemporary ones.

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already in some of the earliest extant pictorial and literary sources from the ancient Near East.35 In the context of the developing urban civilization of Mesopotamia,36 then, the uninterrupted human form is used to represent civilized – in other words, city-dwelling – human beings and their patron gods alike. If the anthropomorphic body was particularly salient for divine representation, however, being the primary form of cult statues throughout much of the history of the region,37 it was not the exclusive one in which the divine was represented or even presenced. Symbols, emblems, or attributes associated with the gods appear also to have been capable, in at least some contexts, of mediating divine agency and demonstrating behavioral anthropomorphism – albeit to a limited degree. During the Old Babylonian Period, for example, there are multiple instances of divine weapons and emblems, kakku and šunniru/šurinu respectively, functioning to represent or even presence the divine in legal contexts. The šaššārum or saw of the sun god Shamash (Figure 5.8), the bašmu-snake of Esharra, and a variety of other divine weapons and emblems are described as witnessing oaths, resolving the status of property in dispute, and even sitting and hearing law cases (Slanski 2003/2004: 318; Dombradi 1996: 333 f.).38 The symbol or attribute appears fully adequate to signify at least the relevant aspect of divine presence and attention in such narrowly restricted contexts (Pongratz-Leisten

35 The earliest comprehensive and substantially complete literary narratives from Mesopotamia are extant only from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), though these include already such compositions as Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird, Gilgamesh and Huwawa, and Ninurta and Azag among their number – all dealing respectively with heroic (human or divine) encounters with monstrous Others. Images of hybrid or fantastic creatures are extant from even earlier periods, appearing in pictorial compositions dating from the beginning of (and perhaps even prior to) Mesopotamia’s urban civilization (late fourth millennium BCE). 36 It is worth noting that rapid and striking alterations in social circumstance in eleventh and twelfth century Europe, driven by economic, urban, and political developments, as well as technological changes, were similarly associated with a renewed interest in delineating the Self in opposition to the Other, see Bynum 2001: 26–27; also Strickland 2003, esp. p. 9, 61. 37 Though cult statues have not generally survived from Mesopotamia – the use of perishable wood and reclaimable precious metals in the making of divine statues would certainly have hindered the preservation of such – some indication of their (anthropomorphic) appearance may be gleaned from written sources describing them and from glyptic and other images apparently depicting them; see Renger 1980–1983; Seidl 1980–1983; also Ornan 2005. 38 In the narrative context of Lugale (Ninurta and the Stones), moreover, Ninurta’s weapon Sharur not only speaks to the god (ll. 23–69, 122–50), offering its independent observations and advice on tackling a rapidly developing monstrous threat from the mountains (Azag), but also embraces him (l. 120, 264); for the status and functioning of Sharur (and the weapon Shargaz, also belonging to Ninurta), see further Cooper 1978: 122–23, n. 129 f.; Suter 2000: 290 ff.; Black et al. 2006: 155–56, 164–86, 370; fn. 31 above.

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Fig. 5.8: BM 89110. Black Serpentine Cylinder Seal (ca. 2300 BCE). Sun god with rays holds šaššārum (saw with serrated blade) in one hand as he ascends between mountains; one foot set on mountain in ascending/mastery pose. Flanked by attendant gatekeepers and attendant god on right. 3.8 (h) × 2.45 (d) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

and Sonik, this volume): the anthropomorphic cult statue of the god, with its more multifaceted and less trammeled agency, appears not to be required for such limited functions. Symbols or attributes could, indeed, even be formally purified and awakened through the mīs pî and pīt pî, the ritual washing and opening of the mouth performed on anthropomorphic divine and royal statues, enabling them to speak, hear, eat, drink, and smell (Walker and Dick 1999; Slanski 2003/2004; Hurowitz 2003).39 From the Kassite Period (ca. 1574–1157 BCE) onwards in Babylonia, moreover, the extant pictorial renderings of the gods are primarily non-anthropomorphic (Figure 5.9) – though written accounts of these periods continue to attribute anthropomorphic bodies and behaviors to the gods and though major cult statues apparently continue to take human form (Ornan 2005: 12, 60–72). Divine anthropomorphism, figural and behavioral, thus functioned strategically in multiple and complex modes. Where figural, it served to physically bind the inhabitants of Mesopotamia to their gods, visually coding them as denizens of the same urban landscape and participants in the same civilized

39 For the relationship between awakened image and divinity, see the discussion in Berlejung 1997. For the connotations of the terms awakening and animation with respect to living images, see also the discussion in Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume; Smith 2001: 183–86.

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Fig. 5.9: BM 102485. Limestone narû (kudurru) Boundary Stone (ca. 1125–1100 BCE). Bears symbols and emblems of the gods. 36 (h) × 22.9 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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lifeways, with all the specific practices, conventions, and prohibitions thereby entailed.40 Where behavioral, it served a similar cohering function, as well as insinuating at least the possibility of communication and interaction with, and especially a capacity to respond to, human worshippers. If it rendered the divine accessible, however, such anthropomorphism did not render divinity simple or diminish its vast potency – as underscored by the constellation of diverse attributes associated with (and in some cases capable of at least a limited presencing of) each god. The problem of idolatry in this case, defined for the purposes of this volume as the theologically erroneous attribution of love and worship to an inanimate image of the divine rather than to the divine itself, does not apply. As further discussed below, where the divine image is properly materialized and consecrated,41 it does not so much become as become revealed as a divine presence in its own right, one to which worship, devotion, and other communications is properly directed. (This does not, importantly, render the image coterminous with the divinity. Divine statues may be destroyed; gods [typically] go on.42)

40 This is not to say that the behavioral codes or prohibitions observed by humans are precisely identical to those observed by the gods. Still, the extant literary narratives from Mesopotamia offer some striking examples of the constraints incumbent upon the behavior both of civilized mortals and divinities: in the Sumerian Enlil and Ninlil, the god Enlil is famously exiled from Nippur for his rape of the young maiden Ninlil; in Lugale (Ninurta and the Stones), the proper filial devotion observed by the god Ninurta is repeatedly stressed (in opposition to the unanchored and rebellious existence led by the fatherless Azag); and the Marriage of Martu includes a litany of improper and barbaric behaviors purportedly practiced by the Amorites and rendering the (Amorite) god Martu (Beaulieu 2005) unfit as a marriage partner. 41 The significance of the (true) form of an object or monument, and an underscoring of the necessity of using the appropriate materials (for practical as well as metaphysical reasons) is suggested by the case of the Ebabbar, the temple of the sun god at Sippar reconstructed during the reign of Nabonidus (ca. 554 BCE) after a supposedly faulty reconstruction under Nebuchadnezzar (ca. 598 BCE). Nebuchadnezzar, according to the later ruler Nabonidus, not only failed to find the original (true) foundations of the Ebabbar – signifying a failure to obtain the sun god’s consent for rebuilding(?) – and yet rebuilt anyway but also used inferior materials for the crafting (Schaudig 2010: 156–57). See also, on the significance of the specific materials used to the status of a final product, Benzel, this volume. 42 See, however, the apparent identification of the goddess Ba’u with her statue in the Lament for Sumer and Ur 173–177. Ba’u was seemingly “considered to have died in the course of the destruction of her sanctuary and her cult statue by the Elamites,” Schaudig 2012: 124; also Heimpel 1972; Selz 1992.

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3 Divine (Re)-Presentation: Mimesis, Naturalism, and the Truth Value of Images What is the relationship between the image and its referent, between the divine representation – whether mental or material – on the one hand and the divine itself on the other? In addressing this question, it is useful to briefly explore the general role and status of images in Mesopotamia before considering divine images specifically and the nature of their relationship with the gods. Of especial interest in any discussion of Mesopotamian images is the Akkadian term ṣalmu (Sumerian alan).43 Encompassing both two- and three-dimensional images, including figurines, statues, and reliefs across a range of materials, the term ṣalmu appears to have been applied particularly (though not exclusively) to anthropomorphic representations and of these particularly (though again not exclusively) to representations of deities and kings.44 While the three-dimensional ṣalmu, particularly where comprising a divine or royal statue intended to function in cultic contexts, could be explicitly and formally awakened and consecrated through the ritual washing and the opening of the mouth (Walker and Dick 1999), even relief images appear to have possessed something of a performative aspect or capability, as well as the potency and agency of their referents or prototypes (Slanski 2003/2004: 321–22; Bahrani 2002, 2003: 143–44). In several key respects, then, the Mesopotamian ṣalmu diverges in its relationship to its referent from at least commonplace contemporary conceptions of (portrait) images and their relationships or likenesses to their referents, especially insofar as the latter insinuate mimesis or naturalism (Winter 2009). Mary Stieber (2004: 5), in a pragmatic delineation of these two complex and

43 An important elucidation of ṣalmu was undertaken by Winter (1992, esp. pp. 169 ff.), who refined upon the CAD (s.v. ṣalmu) definition of the term as encompassing figurines or statues in the round, reliefs, and drawings: Winter instead presented it as a generic signifier for an image, capable of being diversely manifested in a variety of media. See also the earlier treatments of the term, Van Buren 1950: 145–46, 1941: 66 ff; also Canby 1976: 123; Dalley 1986; Cooper 1989: 44; Winter 1997; Livingstone 1999; Bonatz 2002; Bahrani 2003: 121–48; Slanski 2003/2004: 321–23; Machinist 2006: 162 ff.; Frahm 2013: 102 f. For a recent treatment of the Sumerian alan, equated with ṣalmu in the lexical lists, see Evans 2012: 112–15. 44 Slanski (2003/2004: 322) notes, for example, that the symbols on the Babylonian narû (formerly kudurru) were not described as ṣalmu, suggesting that – at least in this particular context and period – “ṣalmu tend[ed] to be reserved for representations of gods and of humans, that is, anthropomorphic representations.”

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problematic terms,45 characterized a mimetic object as “a perfect facsimile, but … never the real thing. A mimetically realistic work of art invariably signals trickery; it invites comparisons with nature and carries overtones of accomplishing the impossible or the unlikely, of matching or even besting nature.” The ṣalmu or image in Mesopotamia is the opposite of this type of facsimile: it does not – or at least may not – look like its referent and yet it is the (or at least some part of the) real thing. Naturalism, for its part, which may be better regarded as a stylistic mode or language rather than an action – the degree to which an art object visually corresponds to what the majority of human beings, or at least those within a particular cultural context,46 would characterize as the “actual appearance of nature or physical reality [italics mine]” (Stieber 2004: 5) – never comprises an entrenched impulse in the corpus of Mesopotamian imagery. This is not to say that it is entirely absent: the naturalism of Old Akkadian Period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE) art has rendered it particularly appealing to the modern Western eye. It is to reaffirm, however, that naturalistic images are not privileged above other types of representation – and should not be regarded on this single basis as more developed or more evolved or more effective than the pictorial compositions of preceding or succeeding periods.47 At the crux of the matter, then, is that at least some images in Mesopotamia operated and were recognized as persons or beings in their own right – rather

45 While elucidating the full art historical, anthropological, and philosophical issues surrounding these terms is beyond the scope of this work, for interesting critical perspectives on mimesis see Elsner 1991; Taussig 1993; Halliwell 2002; Camille 2003; Stiles 2003. For relevant sources pertaining to naturalism, see fn. 46 below. 46 However naturalistic a visual representation, its possession of artistic appeal relies on its incorporation of a formal aspect or element that distinguishes it ineluctably from nature; see further Tanner 2006: 67–70; Layton 1977: 34 (citing Boas 1955: 79). Moreover, one’s perception of a visual representation and its verisimilitude may be shaped in not inconsequential ways by both cultural and environmental context and previous perceptual experience; see Deregowski 1972, 1973, 1999 (also Layton’s detailed 1977 critique of Deregowski’s assumptions and conclusions) and Phillips 2011. 47 This is not to say that Old Akkadian Period art did not have an ongoing appeal to the later inhabitants of Mesopotamia: various specifically Akkadian compositions, motifs, and even stylistic elements were (arguably) consciously resurrected and deliberately deployed in the Old Babylonian and even Neo-Assyrian (and, further east, perhaps also in the Achaemenid) periods, see Garrison 2012; Feldman 2009; Collon 1986: 31 A.28; 84 no. 103; 87–88. Ideology, however, rather than – or, at least, rather than only – aesthetics was the basis for this phenomenon: the Old Akkadian Empire and its great kings were renowned as “paradigms of worldly power” throughout much of the subsequent history of the ancient Near East, see Garrison 2012: 32, 46; also Beaulieu 2013: 130–31.

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than merely copies of beings (Bahrani 2003: 125–27).48 The ṣalmu in Mesopotamia functioned, possessing the capacity to act in and on the world (Winter 2003; Ross 2005; Sonik 2014; Pongratz-Leisten forthcoming). As part and parcel of this functioning, the styles in which particular objects or images were rendered could, and often did, serve explicitly as “carrier[s] of meaning” (Winter 1989: 582), so that style became “a consciously deployed strategic instrument with specific rhetorical ends … [a means of] complementing or even activating the more overt message(s) provided by content” (Winter 1998: 57).49 Rather than relying on physiognomic or physical replication of a prototype for its legitimacy or efficacy, a ṣalmu may be better regarded as partaking in the essence of its referent: it materialized or made visible the true substance of that which it represented or presenced rather than merely replicating the external form of such.50 If the truth-value of an image, its authoritative status or legitimacy, and especially its capacity to exercise (some degree of) agency did not depend on physical or physiognomic similitude to the referent, however, on what basis were these determined? More to the point, given the subject of this volume, what precise tangible or intangible qualities or characteristics were essential to an authoritative and legitimate divine image – a ṣalmu capable of presencing its divine referent? These questions are explored below through an investigation of the famous ninth century BCE Sun God Tablet (SGT), which recounts in written and pictorial form the restoration of Shamash’s anthropomorphic cult statue after its disappearance from Sippar and lengthy inaccessibility to the Babylonian kings.51 48 The nature of the agency exercised by such ‘persons’ is discussed in Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume. Once made or generated (tud or walādu, “to give birth, generate” are used in reference to the making of cult statues rather than the epēšu used to describe the making of other types of objects) and subsequently awakened or animated (as through the mīs pî and pīt pî), moreover, these types of such objects appear to have been perfectly capable of acting within their defined spheres without further intervention – at least so long as the matter held: the refurbishment or reconstruction of mudbrick temples and wood cult statues fallen into disrepair was a subject of significant concern; see, for example, Gudea Cylinder A; Erra and Ishum; Walker and Dick 1999: 63–66; also the contributions by Ambos (2010: 228–29), Dalley (2010: 243–44), and Schaudig (2010: 156–57) in Boda and Novotny 2010. 49 For a general discussion of style and its definition in the context of the ancient Near East, see Winter 1998; for specific case studies demonstrating her points, see Winter 1989, 1996, 2000. 50 The relationship between royal images and their referents has been thoughtfully examined in Winter 1989, 1992, 1997, 2009; for the relationship between divine images and their referents more generally, see the discussions in Ornan 2005; Porter 2009; Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume. 51 While the results of this case study are not to be broadly applied to other Mesopotamian contexts – Mesopotamia was by no means a monolith, culturally, in precise religious practice,

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4 Authorized and Authoritative Divine Images: The Sun God Tablet as Case Study 52 4.1 The Face and Favor of Shamash: The Account of the Sun God Tablet (SGT) During the eleventh century reign of Adad-apla-iddina (ca. 1068–1047 BCE), Babylonia was subject to devastating Sutaean raids.53 Among the consequences of these attacks were the devastation of the Ebabbar, the temple of the sun god Shamash at Sippar, and the withdrawal of the god himself – as presenced in his cult statue – from the city (SGT I 1–12). While the cult statue of Shamash was presumably seized or destroyed by the semi-nomadic Sutaeans, this is explicitly not stated in the Sun God Tablet. Instead, the tablet describes Shamash’s statue as having (ambiguously) disappeared (SGT I 10–12; Woods 2004: 83) – an event attributed later in the tablet to the sun god’s anger at the land (SGT III 11–14) – so that Shamash’s withdrawal and the vanishing of the cult statue (the two events are not utterly congruent) might be attributed to independent divine agency.54

or otherwise, over the millennia of its long history – they nevertheless elucidate some recurrent themes regarding the crafting, reconstruction, and presentation of divine images in the region. 52 Created during the ninth century BCE reign of Nabu-apla-iddina, the Sun God Tablet presents numerous and knotty problems to philologists, art historians, and scholars of religion alike. The account of events that it offers is certainly expedient, deliberately constructed so as to address particular political and religious concerns and requirements. The miraculously discovered clay model of the sun god described in the account, on which the legitimate restoration of the Shamash cult statue hinges, does not survive and, indeed, may never have existed. Even if it did exist, it may well have belonged (as it has frequently been attributed) to the category of pia fraus (pious frauds). Other such frauds are certainly known, among these an ostensible Old Akkadian inscription of Manishtushu that is in fact a Neo-Babylonian forgery, Woods 2004: 40; see also Schaudig 2010: 158; Beaulieu 2013: 128 ff. I propose to put all of these concerns about pious frauds and constructed circumstances aside for the purposes of the analysis in the main text below. Whether deliberately contrived or containing at least kernels of historical truth, the Sun God Tablet account offers striking insight into an issue of key concern here, namely, how the authorized and authoritative status of a (specifically divine) image might be established. 53 The term Sutaean here may actually reference Aramaeans, see further Kottsieper 2009: 397. 54 See also Woods (2004: 41) for the ambiguous nature of this vanishing, although other scholars have more directly linked the statue’s disappearance with the actions of the enemy Sutaeans even in the Sun God Tablet account (Beaulieu 2013: 125).

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Over the course of the nearly two centuries that followed Adad-apla-iddina’s reign, subsequent Babylonian rulers sought to enquire into the sun god’s appearance (šiknu). Shamash, however, refused to show his face: his image (ṣalmu) and attributes (simtū) had “vanished beyond grasp,” signifying his abiding wrath at his city (SGT I 11, III 11–14; Woods 2004: 83, 85). The Babylonian kings were thus faced, at least for a time, with a striking quandary: how might one presence a deliberate absence? 55

55 The experience of Mesopotamian kings who failed to receive divine authorization for the making of cult statues and temples (and the implications of failed constructions, see Ambos 2010: 224–26; Schaudig 2010: 147–48) suggests, rather strongly, that one would not. This quandary, the problem of presencing an absence, may also account in part for why, as Melissa Eppihimer (2014) has provocatively queried, posthumous images of the Old Akkadian kings are not generally known from later periods, despite the ongoing interest in their exploits (another complicating factor is almost certainly the complex nature of interactions between literary and pictorial narrative compositions in Mesopotamia, see Sonik 2014). Following the death of a king, the extent to and circumstances within which his essence remained accessible – and a posthumously produced ṣalmu remained capable of partaking of it – may well have been limited, even in the case of divine kings. It is perhaps notable that when the Babylonian king Nabonidus (ca. 555–539 BCE) discovers (or so he reports) a broken statue in an ancient temple foundation, which he takes for an image of the Old Akkadian king Sargon, he does not use it as a model for a new construction but rather restores the original, re-erecting it in its place – if no longer buried in the foundation it is still retained in the Ebabbar – and establishing an offering for it (Schaudig 2010: 157–158; Garrison 2012: 45). While the antiquity of the statue may well have imbued it with special status and been partially responsible for its refurbishing, it is possible that, even broken, something of the original presence was perceived as continuing to inhere in the matter (for a discussion of the rituals of consecration, installation, and maintenance that bring the royal image into “being,” see Winter 1992), a presence that perhaps could not be transferred to a newly crafted statue. There is some evidence for the production of apparently posthumous funerary images of particular individuals in at least some contexts: in the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (VII 82; George 2003: 638–39), Gilgamesh promises Enkidu he will make a statue (ṣalmu) of him (Enkidu) “in gold without limit” but this promise is only fulfilled after Enkidu’s death (VIII 69–72); surviving artifacts such as the Tell Asmar votive or worshipper figures may also comprise funerary statues (Schmandt-Besserat 2007: 82– 85; Mayer-Opificius 1988: 252 ff.) though it is not clear whether these would have been produced during the lifetime of the referent or posthumously. Still, funerary statues may be linked to the well being of the deceased individual and his or her living relations or descendents in a way that other images are not, and so able to partake in or more readily access the essence of an individual: Scurlock (2002: 1) has described such objects as material loci for either or both the zaqīqu and eṭemmu, intended to ensure that the dead receive their proper funerary offerings and so remain at rest in the netherworld rather than returning to (materially) harm or harass the living. Certainly, cases in which immaterial, invisible, or directly inaccessible entities are bound to the material and visible in order that they may be addressed or engaged (or expelled) are well known, see Abusch 2002a: 151–94; Abusch and Schwemer 2011: 20–23 (on witches); Schwemer 2011: 430 (on ghosts).

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During the reign of Simbar-shipak (ca. 1026–1009 BCE), a solution of sorts was reportedly found: the sun-disk, a prominent symbol or emblem of Shamash, was enshrined in the temple and used to presence the divine in place of the absent anthropomorphic cult statue (SGT I 16–19; Woods 2004: 51–52, 83, 93). Despite its non-anthropomorphic physical appearance, there is no indication that the sun-disk was an illegitimate sacred image: it received regular offerings in the manner previously assigned to the vanished anthropomorphic statue (SGT I 20–23) and presumably functioned and interacted with human worshippers in much the same way. And yet, the misfortunes recorded as befalling the land while the sun-disk was enshrined in the temple, taking the form of “hardship and famine” (SGT I 24–25) during the reign of Kashu-nadinahhe (ca. 1008–1006 BCE), suggest it was somehow insufficient in this particular context – particularly as the recorded misfortunes resulted in the ultimate cessation of offerings to Shamash (SGT I 26–28). Whether the sun-disk’s insufficiency was understood to derive wholly from a fundamental limitation in its capacity for presencing the divine,56 or whether it was attributed in part also to Shamash’s continued detachment from or anger with his city (SGT I 13–15, III 11–18) – precluding his dedicated protection of or actual presence in the land despite the existence of a legitimate material symbol that might, in other circumstances, have been capable of presencing him to at least some degree – is unclear. The numerous accounts extant from Mesopotamia of the devastation suffered by cities and by individuals after the withdrawal of their gods, however, is suggestive.57 Over a century later, with the ascension of Nabu-apla-iddina (ca. 888–855 BCE) to the Babylonian throne, the Sun God Tablet records the restoration of Shamash’s favor to Sippar. This favor materially manifests as a clay model (uṣurtu), miraculously discovered on the west bank of the Euphrates (SGT IIII

56 This line of thought is supported by Woods’ analysis of the pictorial composition on the Sun God Tablet (Figure 3.10): the comparatively larger scale of the anthropomorphic statue in relation to the sun-disk arguably reflect not only the relative positions of these two objects in the cult but also the relative status of the kings responsible for enshrining each (Woods 2004: 80). 57 In the Akkadian poem Erra and Ishum (Foster 2005: 880–913; Bodi 1991: 52–68), Marduk is persuaded to abandon his dwelling, permitting Ishum to devastate humankind. In the Sumerian laments (Lament for Sumer and Ur, Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, Lament for Nippur, Lament over Uruk, Eridu Lament), the turning away of the patron god from his or her city – or the explicit abandonment of a city by its gods and protective daimons – signaled or even potentially catalyzed the destruction of that city, see also fn. 22 above. For the suffering incurred by individuals whose personal gods have withdrawn, see, for example, Abusch 2002a; Scurlock and Andersen 2005: 439–40.

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19–24; Woods 2004: 85),58 bearing the form or appearance (šiknu) and attributes (simtū) of the sun god (SGT III 21) and permitting the construction of a new and authoritative anthropomorphic cult statue modeled upon it. But on what basis was the clay model itself, and the image of Shamash it bore, established as authoritative and how was the sun god’s authorization for the new cult statue indicated?

4.2 A Material Epiphany? The Clay Model on the West Bank of the Euphrates The mode in which the clay model bearing the appearance and attributes of Shamash is described upon its introduction into the Sun God Tablet account is notable: rather than being described as a ṣalmu (image), it is specifically described as an uṣurtu (a relief or plan) of Shamash’s ṣalmu, a point followed up below. Likely relatively small in scale and comprising a two- or perhaps even three-dimensional rendering, it is yet possible that the model could have conveyed much or all of the information necessary to construct an authoritative cult statue of the sun god: the proper position or pose of the divine body; the specific attributes of the deity depicted (Pongratz-Leisten, this volume); and, provided the clay was painted, perhaps the proper materials in which to craft the anthropomorphic statue (Benzel, this volume).59 Though the clay model itself does not survive,60 we get a sense of what it might have looked like from the pictorial composition on the Sun God Tablet itself, which depicts the cult image ultimately based on the model (Figures 1.2, 5.10). Shamash is here shown seated and holds the rod and ring, a pose familiar already from the Old Babylonian Period Law Stele of Hammurabi, though an even older tradition of representation (extant especially from the Akkadian through the Old Babylonian Period) depicts him in the so-called ascending pose with one raised foot set atop a mountain and one upraised hand holding

58 For an overview of the various reconstructions proposed for the clay relief, see Woods 2004: 42 n. 96, 94 iii 20. 59 Traces of pigment survive on a variety of apparently unpainted pictorial compositions from Mesopotamia, the Neo-Assyrian orthostat reliefs and the Old Babylonian Period Queen of the Night Plaque (formerly the Burney Relief) among them. The ultimate materials used for the new cult statue, including “reddish gold (and) lustrous lapis lazuli” (SGT IV 18–19; Woods 2004: 85), could certainly have been indicated through pigment on the clay relief model though these materials certainly possessed intrinsic properties and qualities that would have rendered them a natural choice; see further Benzel, this volume; Winter 1999. 60 It is possible, indeed, that it never existed; see fn. 52 above.

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Fig. 5.10: BM 91000. Image Rendered on Neo-Babylonian Period Limestone Sun God Tablet from Sippar (ca. mid-ninth century BCE). 29.2 (h) × 17.8 (w) cm. Courtesy British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

the saw with which he cuts through the mountains to rise at dawn (Collon 1982: 83–87, nos. 164–77, pls. XXIV–XXV). General signifiers of divinity include the horned crown and archaizing tiered robe with undulating flounces (Collon 2007: 62), while more specific markers of the sun god include the rod and ring he holds – associated with divinity, authority, and justice (Collon 2007: 57; Slanski 2007) – and attributes such as the bull-men, with which Shamash is associated by the Old Akkadian period, and the sun-disk, such as that which temporarily stands in for his absent cult statue at Sippar after the late second millennium BCE Sutaean raids.61 Overall, this depiction possesses a clear and

61 The horned helmet functions as a general divine signifier; personalized attributes, which enable the viewer’s recognition of the image as a specific divinity, include but are not limited to such things as individualized weapons, a particular animal (natural or hybrid monster), and in some cases also an astral symbol. It is not clear that the agency of the divinity is distributed into all of these attributes in the same way – the placement of wild animals and monsters beneath the foot of the anthropomorphic figure of the god, for example, suggests these retain something of an independent (and would-be rebellious) primary agency.

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striking relationship in style, content, and composition with significantly earlier (late third and early second millennium BCE) images of the sun god (Collon 2007: 57–65; Woods 2004: 42–45; Beaulieu 2013: 126–27). If this relatively brief accounting indicates the types of information that the clay model of Shamash might have provided to permit the construction of a new anthropomorphic cult statue, there are still two distinct but related preconditions that would need to have been met before a new cult statue could be begun: 1. the clay model would have to be established as an authoritative representation of Shamash in its own right, in order to be a fit model for a new cult statue; and 2. Shamash would have to authorize the crafting of a new cult statue. Mesopotamian kings who constructed or refurbished or even moved divine apparatuses – such as temples and cult statues – without divine authorization, after all, met a famously bad end (Curse of Agade; Cooper 1983, 1993: 16–17; Hurowitz 1992: 160–63; Ambos 2010: 225–26).62 The specific manner in which these pre-conditions were satisfied in the Sun God Tablet account is thus worth investigating further. It is worth establishing, to begin with, that divine authorization was not communicated solely through direct epiphany. Prince Gudea of Lagash, seeking to rebuild the Eninnu temple of Ningirsu over a thousand years prior to the reign of Nabu-apla-iddina, famously encountered the god Ningirsu in a nocturnal vision (Gudea Cylinder A ll. i 17–19; Edzard 1997: 70). This did not stop Gudea from also having his dreams interpreted; witnessing specific natural phenomena; and performing extispicy, among other actions, as he sought to confirm the god’s will. Other kings were similarly impelled by dreams, astral or other omens, prophecy, and urgent divine inspiration in their decisions to construct or reconstruct divine dwellings (Hurowitz 1992: 143–59). Nabu-apla-iddina, as described in the Sun God Tablet account, never directly encounters the sun god – in a dream vision or otherwise. Instead, the newly discovered clay model appears to comprise a material epiphany of Shamash – albeit one that seems, at least initially, more a revelation by than of the sun god – revealed to an intermediary, here Nabu-nadin-shumi, the šangû priest of Sippar. The deliberate association of Shamash’s restored favor in the Sun God Tablet account (III 11–18) with Nabu-apla-iddina’s demonstrated fitness for rulership – particularly extolled are his marked piety (SGT II 29-III 5); his heroic deeds, including his casting out of the Sutaeans, thus closing the circle

62 Further on the issue of divine authorization for temple building, see Hurowitz 1992: 154– 60; also Averbeck 2010: 16–19; Ambos 2010: 224–26.

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that began with the Sutaean raids and the disappearance of Shamash’s cult statue under Adad-apla-iddina (SGT II 26–28); and striking martial prowess (SGT II 23–25) – contextualizes the clay model as material signification of the god’s authorization for the crafting of a new cult statue (ṣalmu) based upon it. The Sun God Tablet (IV 5–6) indeed goes so far, after recording the discovery (III 19–24) of the clay model (uṣurtu) of the sun god’s image (ṣalmu), as to assert that Nabu-apla-iddina has been divinely charged with the crafting of that image (to serve as the new anthropomorphic cult statue of Shamash, presumably) – though it does not say whether this divine charge was solely communicated through the newly found clay model or whether it was also imparted to the king through other means. The very fact of the model’s discovery after nearly two centuries during which the sun god refused to show his face at least supports its status as material signification of the will of Shamash, as does the particular location and mode of its discovery. It is described as having been miraculously and effortlessly discovered on the west bank of the Euphrates (SGT III 23–24),63 a state of affairs strikingly reminiscent of the accounts of epiphanic arrival – as by falling from heaven, being thrown up by the sea, or originating in association with heroic or legendary figures – that established the sacred status of certain divine images in ancient Greek and other contexts (Platt 2011: 95–96; PongratzLeisten and Sonik, this volume).64 It is also perhaps worth noting that the river and the riverbank have certain associations in Mesopotamian (and particularly late second and first millennium BCE) contexts that may endow the discovery of the clay model on the bank of the Euphrates with particular significance: anthropomorphic cult statues, as part of the mouth-washing (mīs pî) ritual that served to awaken them, were specifically transported to the riverbank for their ritual purification, for their severance from human crafting or agency, and for the establishment of their divine origins or antecedents (Berlejung 1997: 53–55;

63 There is no reference to Nabu-apla-iddina having explicitly searched for it, as his predecessor(s) did (SGT I 13–15). 64 It is perhaps worth mentioning another notable thing that appears on the banks of the “pure Euphrates,” albeit in a Sumerian composition of a much earlier period: the singular halub-tree of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld. Berlejung (1997: 53 ff.) has discussed, albeit for later contexts, the significance of the riverbanks and the orchard in the opening of the mouth ritual as representing, simultaneously, both cultivated land and ṣēru, “wild, uncultivated, sometimes demonic land … the area of transition between the world of the living and the world of the dead.” The origins of the lone halub-tree in this context suggests its alterity, and may account in part for subsequent events when it is carried into the city of Uruk.

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Dick 1999: 40; Walker and Dick 1999: 75–76).65 Even if the clay model in question is never explicitly described as having been actively designed or sent by Shamash, then,66 its discovery is at least permitted by the god and localized, potentially significantly, on the riverbank – and both the authoritative status of the clay model and divine authorization for the crafting of a new cult statue modeled on it are implied thereby. If the mere discovery of the clay model of Shamash signals its status as a divinely authorized and authoritative image, the sun god having refused to reveal his face to any of Nabu-apla-iddina’s predecessors, this is not, I would argue, the sole basis upon which the model’s authoritative status is predicated in the Sun God Tablet account. Alternate sources of the model’s legitimacy and authoritative status may include both its (visually) asserted place in the pictorial or material stream of tradition and its apparent aesthetic quality or value, as signaled by the powerful physical and emotional response it evokes from Nabu-apla-iddina upon the latter’s viewing of it (SGT IV 8–10).

4.3 Authoritative Images and a Pictorial “Stream of Tradition” The deliberately archaizing features of the miraculously discovered clay model, as indicated by the cult statue based on it (itself known only from the depiction of it on the Sun God Tablet), insinuate it may itself have been modeled on one or even a chain of earlier ṣalmu – as the original cult statue that vanished from Sippar during the raids of the Sutaeans – capable of presencing the sun god

65 Hurowitz, for example, notes the riverbank not only as the site of purification of the newly created cult statue (2003: 15), where the statue is awakened though not transformed into a god (having been an ilu throughout and crafted of divine materials; see also Benzel, this volume), but also the site where a damaged cult statue may be cast into the river and so returned to Ea (2003: 156). The riverbank, in Berlejung’s (1997: 55) reconstruction, comprises a type of “paradigmatic threshold” where the divine image transitions from the human craftsmen from whom it is now separated and Ea, the divine (true) father of the image. I am indebted to Beate Pongratz-Leisten for her thoughts on this line of analysis; see also Dick 1999: 43; Walker and Dick 1999: 75; Hurowitz 2003: 153. 66 It is also, for that matter, not described as having been created through direct physical contact with the god, though the nature of its association with the divine sphere will be explored further in the main text below. It is thus not precisely qualified as a type of acheiropoietos, an object made without human hand (see Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume), as the question of whether it is an ancient (human-)made artifact, newly discovered, or whether it originates more explicitly and immediately in the divine sphere remains open; see main text below for further discussion.

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and stretching back to a real or imagined original initiated or at least approved in the divine sphere.67 It was, according to this reconstruction, located within an ancient and longstanding pictorial stream of tradition. But what was the nature of this stream of tradition and how did it serve to establish the authoritative status of images or visual compositions, sacred, cultic, or otherwise? In his seminal 1964 volume, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, A. Leo Oppenheim (1977 [1964]: 13) famously coined the phrase “stream of tradition”68 to describe the means and mode whereby some degree of intellectual, cultural, and even ideological continuity was preserved in Mesopotamia from the early second through to the late first millennium BCE.69 The continuity apparently evinced could in fact be superficial or even entirely (or almost entirely) illusory, despite deliberately constructed appearances to the contrary. Discussing Mesopotamian royal ideology, for example, Roaf (2013: 331–34, 352– 53) observed that while the memory of prominent royal culture heroes such as Gilgamesh, Sargon, and Shulgi was effectively preserved in scribal contexts,

67 The success of this type of strategic visual affirmation of the clay model’s status as authoritative image would necessarily depend upon access to earlier (legitimate) models of Shamash to which it might be compared. While the Sun God Tablet (I 11; Woods 2004: 83) asserts the vanishing of Shamash’s appearance and attributes “beyond grasp,” one wonders if older images of Shamash, albeit lacking either authoritative status, the necessary information to construct a new cult statue, or evidence of the god’s authorization for a new crafting of his image, nevertheless continued to exist. 68 Rochberg (2004: 3) notably preferred “Mesopotamian scribal scholarship” to Oppenheim’s “stream of tradition” in her work on divination, noting that the former carried more ideological weight in unifying the practices and presuppositions of scribes associated with literary or scholarly divination. 69 This is a rather more generic definition than is typical but I prefer to distinguish between the stream of tradition and the specific forms and modes of its materialization. Locating the origins of the literary stream of tradition is a tricky prospect. While a “canon” of Sumerian compositions used for scribal training (George 2007a: 448) is apparently known from the Old Babylonian Period, the date of composition of these texts remains in question: the literary narratives at least appear to have undergone a major revision in content and intent as part of the military, political, economic, and administrative reforms undertaken by the Ur III king Shulgi (ca. 2094–2047 BCE). Michalowski (2009: 157) has argued that the existing Sumerian and Akkadian literature, excepting only a few examples such as the Instructions of Shuruppak and the Hymn to the Temple at Kish, “was summarily discarded [at this time], and new texts were commissioned, all in the now dead Sumerian language … [and] centered around the figure of the divine kings of Ur, and on their imaginary predecessors [as Gilgamesh] from the city of Uruk.” Some scholars, indeed, would even more narrowly locate the stream of tradition in the period from the late second millennium BCE onwards, at which time “a fairly welldefined corpus of texts … was transmitted only by being copied by scribes … the scribes only made minor changes, subtractions, or additions to the corpus, and they evidently strove for textual stability,” Koch-Westenholz 1995: 75.

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establishing a persisting model of ideal kingship and the qualities possessed by an ideal king (see, for example, Winter 1989, 1996; Kramer 1974), the practical reality of kingship from the third through to the late first millennium BCE reflected a much broader spectrum of possibilities: “there were different ideologies in different reigns and regions … In some cases we can document changes in the ideology within a single reign … No doubt there were also different ideologies current in a single reign adhered to by different groups within Mesopotamian society” (Roaf 2013: 332). Still, even the semblance of continuity was rendered possible only by the particular nature of scribal practice and education in the Near East: individual figures, themes, narratives (and, in certain periods, even corpora) might be kept alive over centuries, even millennia, through their copying out by successive generations of scribes. In addition to literary compositions70 such as the Gilgamesh narratives, which were materialized and transmitted (and transformed) over a period of more than a thousand years,71 compositions such as the Laws of Hammurabi have yielded copies recovered from a range of Mesopotamian cities over the course of at least a millennium. These copies were produced not only while the Stele of Hammurabi remained accessible at Sippar but also after it had been carried off to Susa by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte, drawing in this latter case on still accessible tablet copies of the departed original stele (Roth 1995: 19–20; Van De Mieroop 2005: 129–30). The desire to maintain a cultural continuum, or at least the impression of such a continuum, should be regarded as a defining feature of civilization in Mesopotamia. Even the appearance of a literary stream of tradition, however, was rendered possible only by the operational circumstances of a scribal education designed to initiate scribes and bureaucrats into a deliberately formulat-

70 The term literary composition here encompasses not just the well-known mythological narratives extant from the Near East but also, depending on the period, such genres as city lamentations, debate poems, incantations, love songs, proverbs, prayers, royal and divine hymns, prayers, and some letters and royal inscriptions. If these are frequently termed texts, it is important to recognize that this term often identifies not an individual or unique written account but rather a composite construction based on multiple and sometimes quite disparate copies or fragments; see, for example, Michalowski 1989: 25. 71 Materialization should here be regarded as including both performance and writing. Scribal education likely involved a strong oral and aural component, perhaps in the recitation of texts or compositions by master scribes for repetition and memorization by their students, as well as in the discussion and exegesis of these: according to this view, writing would have functioned primarily “as an aid to memory, and the corpus of texts transmitted by the sages formed a backbone around which theories, comments, and explanations were elaborated and transmitted orally,” Beaulieu 2004: 536; also Black et al. 2006: 275 ff; Delnero 2012.

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ed and exclusive intellectual and ideological tradition72 and by the ongoing accessibility of written compositions on ancient and venerable monuments.73 If references to the stream of tradition in Mesopotamia generally allude to literary materializations of such, I would suggest that a similar conceptualization is (perhaps even more) profitably pursued in the pictorial sphere, in which key conventions, compositions, subjects, or even styles of rendering specific figures or motifs, once established, might recur – often adapted to their new contexts and deployed with conscious intent – over millennia; in which prominent images or monuments might remain both accessible and influential over hundreds or even thousands of years; in which explicit innovation (particularly with respect to form) was often deliberately veiled if by no means altogether suppressed;74 and in which the authoritative status, efficacy, or even meaning or functioning of particular images or compositions might rely (at least in part) on their actual or even merely affected relationships to more ancient compositions, which themselves might claim an origin in the divine sphere.75 As a trope, moreover, stream of tradition felicitously conveys something of the actual nature of the transmission, appropriation, and adaptation of older or venerable pictorial content, conventions, or styles, which eddied and surged somewhat unpredictably within a larger and only superficially singular flow. A useful case study in explicating some of the complex factors involved in analyzing the place of and relationship between specific artworks in the picto-

72 For this tradition as deliberately constructed rather than organically developing, see, for example, the discussions of Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE) scribal training in Vanstiphout 2003: 17; Veldhuis 2004: 112–113. 73 The identification of any particular text or composition as part of the stream of tradition – and the confident identification of specific allusions or responses to, or quotations of, particular compositions – is a challenging task in its own right. It is not always apparent whether a perceived relationship between texts was consciously or unconsciously or even coincidentally created, particularly since references or allusions to the materialized stream of tradition could be “markedly oblique” (Halton 2009: 51). There is, moreover, the problem of distinguishing between deliberate references to particular works from the stream of tradition and references that are based on generic tropes, the similitude of which may derive from their drawing upon a common cultural wellspring. 74 See, for example, Winter’s (2003) study of masterworks, in which she discussed ingenuity and skillful production as important aspects of craftsmanship or artistry in Mesopotamia. These qualities, however, are not necessarily identical with innovation in subject matter or mode of representation, which could be conventionalized or which relied on their continuation of a particular visual tradition for their authority and/or meaning; see Sonik 2014. 75 For a discussion of the general phenomenon whereby individual artists or artisans are effaced in the account of artistic creation, see Helms 1993: 77–87; for a similar effacement and for the role of the divine in creative endeavors in Mesopotamia specifically, see Winter 1995: 2571.

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rial stream of tradition is the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin (ca. 2250 BCE). Erected in the temple courtyard of Shamash at the sun god’s patron city of Sippar, the stele – alongside various other Akkadian Period monuments – apparently continued to stand there for a thousand years. Only in the mid-twelfth century (ca. 1158 BCE), during the reign of the Babylonian king Zababa-shuma-iddina, was it removed, seized as war booty by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte, who likely also seized the Law Stele of Hammurabi (discussed above) from Sippar. Carried back to the city of Susa in modern-day Iran, where it subsequently remained until its modern rediscovery by French archaeologists in the nineteenth century, the stele was there re-erected and dedicated to the Elamite god Inshushinak. Depicted on Naram-Sin’s stele is an important pictorial composition communicating the Akkadian king’s victory over the Lullubi tribe in the restive mountain regions east of Mesopotamia: a muscular, exquisitely proportioned, and divine Naram-Sin ascends a mountain, crushing a defeated enemy beneath one mighty foot as the (other) gods, in the form of their symbols located in the sky above, overlook the victory. Notably, some type of relationship – whether indirect or even direct (if in complex and limited ways) – has been postulated as existing between the stele and the later rock reliefs at Sar-i Pol (early second millennium BCE) and even Behistun (ca. 521–519 BCE) in Iran.76 In assessing the nature of this relationship, it is worth noting that the Stele of Naram-Sin likely continued to be accessible as a model to at least some artists or artisans in Mesopotamia over the course of the millennium that it stood at Sippar: it would, moreover, have been esteemed not merely on the basis of its antiquity and aesthetic qualities77 but also by virtue of its role as a material remnant of the Old Akkadian Empire, which attained and retained the status of an exemplary polity (with model rulers) for nearly two thousand years after its fall.

76 This relationship has been addressed in Root 2013: 44–49, 1995: 2621, 1979: 199; Feldman 2009, 2007, esp. p. 266 (suggesting Darius might deliberately have deployed the glorious style of the Old Akkadian Empire) and p. 269 (exploring the relationship between Behistun, Sar-i Pol, and the Stele of Naram-Sin as reflecting “multiple interacting trends within the Mesopotamian and western Iranian traditions”); see also, however, the important contribution of Westenholz (2000). 77 That the aesthetic qualities of Mesopotamia’s visual arts and images can (and should) be assessed, albeit in accordance with Mesopotamian standards rather than our own, has been well established through the work of Winter (1995, 2002). Other potentially useful modes of approaching the aesthetics and visual art objects of cultures other than our own have been and are being developed by theorists working on other non-Western arts, the anthropology of art, neuroaesthetics, and evolutionary aesthetics; see, for example, Layton 1981: 6–18; Coote 1992; Gell 1995; Dutton 2003a; Brown and Dissanayake 2009.

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Further, subsequent to its seizure as booty by Shutruk-Nahhunte and its erection at Susa, the stele was potentially rendered accessible to artists or artisans of Elam and, in later centuries, of Achaemenid Persia78 – and aspects of its content and style may have continued to be mined and adapted for use in contemporary imagery as a means of establishing a visual and material link with Akkad and its legendary kings.79 Any discussion of a pictorial stream of tradition should not, however, be limited to major monuments. Specific pictorial conventions, themes, and compositions would have been as effectively circulated or transmitted (or revived) across centuries, as well as across geographical regions, through miniature arts such as cylinder seals – which might have been retained as heirlooms, dug up from the ground, survived in more official contexts as dynastic seals or temple treasury holdings, or the design of which may have been known or reconstructed from their sealings in later periods – or, in some periods, perhaps even through the circulation of so-called sketch- or pattern-books80 as through monumental arts such as royal stelae. The appearance of Old Akkadian subjects, visual motifs, and compositions in Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian glyptic art has been particularly observed (Garrison 2012: 31–33; Collon 1986: 31 A.28, no. 103; 2). Specific motifs and tropes, based as they were within a larger cultural context, may also have circulated, materialized, and been transmitted in a range of modes beyond the pictorial – as through oral and written accounts. All of these various corpora, indeed, may have contributed to the resurrection or resurgence of a particular image or pictorial composition in a particular period and to its ongoing effectiveness in such new contexts. The famous pose struck by Naram-Sin on his Victory Stele, for example, an ascending pose with

78 Feldman (2009: 275–77) elucidates the difficulties in ascertaining how long the Stele of Naram-Sin remained on view and where it was situated in Susa after its apparent initial erection by Shutruk-Nahhunte in the temple of Inshushinak, though she notes some circumstantial evidence for its continued accessibility at Susa into (or even after) the reign of Darius. 79 See fn. 47 above. As a companion piece, likely also looted from Sippar under ShutrukNahhunte and erected at Susa, it is worth noting that the Stele of Hammurabi (discussed above) also possesses pictorial content, if somewhat less striking in composition, that would have been accessible alongside the written content first at Sippar (?) and subsequently in Susa. For the pictorial motif of the king receiving the rod and ring from the god – as depicted on the Law Stele of Hammurabi as well as in numerous other contexts – in Elamite or Neo-Elamite compositions at Susa, including an originally Babylonian stele re-cut to suit its new context, see Harper et al. 1992: 122 n. 4, 181–82, fig. 117; Feldman 2009: 280. 80 Discussing the possible circulation of pattern-books, see Collon 1986: 4, 89; Collon 1987: 99; Moorey 1999: 34, 104; Garrison 2012: 31–32. The existence of such “pattern-books” prior to the first millennium and widespread writing in ink has also been challenged; see, for example, Matthews 1995: 457.

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a defeated enemy trampled beneath one foot, functions as a graphic and unmistakable sign of utter subjugation in a wide variety of sources even outside the corpus of royal monuments such as stelae and rock reliefs. Various of the extant Sumerian and Akkadian literary compositions from Mesopotamia, for example, among these the late third millennium BCE compositions Shulgi B (l. 26; Black et al. 1998–2006) and the Victory of Utu-hegal (l. 52; Black et al. 1998–2006) and the late second millennium BCE composition Enuma elish (II 145–148; Talon 2005: 45; Lambert 2013: 71), record the physical assertion of victory over the enemy through the placement of the enemy leader’s neck beneath the foot of the conquering king. The specifically pictorial manifestation of this particular trope arguably possessed an earlier circulation in the form of the so-called “ascending posture” (Figure 5.8) adopted by the sun-god Utu/Shamash on Old Akkadian Period cylinder seals (ca. 2350–2150): the ascending posture in this glyptic context insinuated not merely ascent but also, arguably, a measure of mastery over the distant and wild zones that the sun god – alone of all the deities of the heartland – oversaw. The extraordinary reach of the sun god is asserted in such literary compositions as Gilgamesh and Huwawa A (GHA), in which Utu is the sole familiar of Huwawa, the lonely and monstrous guardian of the far-distant Cedar Forest (GHA ll. 154–156; Edzard 1990: 189, 1991: 220–21). In later periods, anthropomorphic gods – especially as depicted in the glyptic corpus – continued to adopt a similar pose with respect to the animals or monsters that served as their specific attributes, simultaneously signifying their mastery over the beasts and the (original and perhaps even ongoing) rebellious natures of these. As a closing note on the significance of the pictorial or material stream of tradition in Mesopotamia, and the degree to which an image or monument’s authoritative status might depend on its actual or even merely affected relationships to earlier objects or even to a prototype originating in the divine sphere, it is worth noting the first millennium BCE phenomenon according to which kings sought out the temennu (the true or original foundations) of Babylonian temples as a means of affirming their fitness to rule. The actual discovery of the temennu was significant not as the outcome of a mechanical undertaking (excavation) on the part of the king (Schaudig 2010: 160), though active searching seems certainly to have been required, but rather as a product of divine revelation, a material signifier of the gods’ favor that simultaneously permitted a ruler to bind his reign to a much more glorious and ancient – indeed, even original or prototypical – past. The exposure of the temennu to daylight was perceived “as an ominous sign that testified to the king’s legitimacy and which allowed him to tie his rule directly to the time of the prototypes of Babylonian civilization. This sign would have been worthless if the gods

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themselves had not given it to him … Sometimes the gods actively helped the king by sending dreams or rains that revealed exactly where the workmen should dig” (Schaudig 2010: 160). This uncovering of the original foundations also permitted the new temple to be constructed in accord with the location and appearance of its predecessors, ensuring its acceptance by – and the ongoing protection of – the deity intended to inhabit it, as well as its ongoing conformity with the cosmic order. An improperly built or renovated temple might be rejected by the god or might even be caused to collapse: the deity, in such circumstances, would no longer be able to inhabit it and so would not be available to guard the city or respond to royal entreaty (Ambos 2010: 224–29). While the specific phenomenon of searching for the temennu is only strongly attested from the eighth century BCE onwards (Schaudig 2010: 160), it has striking elements in common with some of the events recorded in the Sun God Tablet account (early- to mid-ninth century BCE). Chief among these shared elements are the negative portrayal of the reign or actions of an earlier ruler by a later one, concomitant with the later king’s claiming of particular divine favor due to his (divinely permitted or assisted) discovery of an ancient and hence authoritative model – or even prototype – on which a new creation might be based. Thus, the Sun God Tablet (I 13–15; Woods 2004: 83) avers that the king Simbar-shipak, a predecessor of Nabuapla-iddina, failed to discover the appearance of Shamash despite searching it out, much as Nabonidus (ca. 555–539 BCE) enumerates earlier Babylonian and Assyrian kings, Nebuchadnezzar II in particular, who failed to uncover the earlier foundations of the Ebabbar temple at Sippar that were ultimately revealed to him. The Sun God Tablet, moreover, notably refers to the miraculously discovered clay model of Shamash as an uṣurtu, typically translated as relief or plan but astutely suggested by Pongratz-Leisten to more specifically denote a divine design or prototype in its use here. Given the archaizing nature of the clay model’s imagery and the epiphanic mode of its arrival, and considered within the (admittedly later) context of the Babylonian kings who sought out the prototypical foundations of temples, both to affirm the legitimacy of their own new constructions and the favor bestowed on them by the gods, such a reading of uṣurtu seems worth investigating further.

4.4 The Aesthetic Impact of the Clay Model As a final strategy for establishing the authoritative status of the miraculously discovered clay model of the image of Shamash, as discovered during the reign of Nabu-apla-iddina, the physical response of the king to the experience of beholding the image (ṣalmu) on the clay should not be overlooked: the Sun

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God Tablet (IV 8–10; Woods 2004: 85) records that the king’s “face beamed in exultation” (CAD s.v. râšu 1a) and “his spirit rejoiced” (Woods 2004: 85; also CAD s.v. elēṣu 1a). Winter (1995: 2574–77; 2000: 24, 27, 29) has thoughtfully explored the prominent role of visual experience in assessing value in her work on Mesopotamian aesthetics, emphasizing the positive and even awe-struck regard directed at divine and royal images and temples: “the links that ancient Mesopotamia crafted between aesthetic affect and the sacred seem closest to what was obtained in medieval Europe or in Hindu and Buddhist Asia, where a primary role of the aesthetic experience was to provide a conduit for encountering the divine” (Winter 1995: 2579). Nabu-apla-iddina’s delighted response upon seeing the image of Shamash on the clay model, seen in this light, is more likely a signifier of the image’s intrinsic aesthetic value and capacity to evoke pleasure and awed admiration – as the (images of the) gods are wont to do – than a mere expression of relief that a long-lost model has at last been found.81 Such a capacity to evoke physical and emotional satisfaction through visual assessment of it might be regarded as further underscoring the authoritative status of the clay model in its own right – and its fitness to serve on this basis as the guide for the crafting of a new and authoritative anthropomorphic cult statue capable of evoking a similar response.

5 Conclusion The relationship between the divine image and its referent in Mesopotamia remains, ultimately, a challenging one to delineate. The primacy of the anthropomorphic physical form (and behaviors) of the gods, while certainly rendering possible particularly intimate and familiar modes of interaction and engagement with the divine (Fleming, this volume), was also arguably rooted, at least in part, in a strategic assertion of the kinship of the civilized city-dwellers – human, royal, and divine – against outsiders and Others during the period of developing urbanization in Mesopotamia. If the gods are physically and

81 It might also be regarded as attesting to the authenticity (see fn. 6 above) of the image; even a clever forgery would presumably not have been capable of deceiving the eye and the emotions of the king. Elsewhere in the Sun God Tablet (IV 40–45), Nabu-apla-iddina’s gaze and eyes comes into play again as they fall benevolently upon the priest, Nabu-nadin-shumi, to whom the clay relief of Shamash’s image was originally revealed and who brought the relief to the attention of Nabu-apla-iddina. This benevolent royal gaze corresponds to good fortune for the priest: the restoration of the regular offerings of Shamash, along with a new endowment, entails a generous portion allotted to Nabu-nadin-shumi.

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behaviorally anthropomorphized, however, and if their material bodies are rarely interrupted or rendered composite or hybrid in the manner of the Egyptian gods, the divine should not yet be regarded as simple nor the anthropomorphic divine image as a mimetic or even necessarily complete rendering of the divine. The image or ṣalmu, divine or otherwise, materializes not the physiognomy but the essence of that which it represents: it is concerned less with capturing physical form and more with substance. The perfected and glorious bodies with which the gods, particularly as presenced in their anthropomorphic cult statues, may be endowed – incorporating rare, sacred, and even divine materials (Benzel, this volume) – may render visible something of the awe-inspiring substance of the divine. Deities are perhaps rendered most recognizable, however, and something of their awesome and composite agency (Pongratz-Leisten, this volume) most effectively communicated, through the range of their associated and typically additive rather than integrated symbols and attributes – these comprising constellations of things into which divine agency may be distributed to varying degrees (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). At the last, several of the various strategies whereby images, and specifically anthropomorphic cult statues, may be established both as authoritative and as authorized – fit to presence the divine – are elucidated in the ninth century BCE Sun God Tablet account, though some of these strategies may certainly be chronologically and geographically delimited. Among the significant points on which the Sun God Tablet touches are the primacy of the anthropomorphic form for the cult image; the limitations in the capacity of divine symbols or attributes (in this case the sun-disk) to mediate divine agency across contexts; the fundamental necessity of obtaining the authorization of the god for the crafting of his or her divine image or apparatuses; the suggested role of visual assessment and aesthetic response in signaling the authoritative status or perhaps even the truth-value of specific images; and the overall importance of executing and erecting divine things in their proper forms, places, and materials in order that they might successfully house and/or presence the gods. Left ambiguous in the Sun God Tablet account, though the circumstances described are suggestive, is whether it is possible to successfully presence to any degree an absent or, at the very least, unresponsive deity in an apparently legitimate and authoritative, albeit limited, divine image (here the sun-disk). On this final point, it is perhaps worth noting that while an authoritative cult statue or image might be identified as ilu, “god” or “divinity” even before the successful performance of the mīs pî (Berlejung 1997: 52) and the formal awakening of the image’s senses, the distinction between the divine and even the anthropomorphic cult statue in which it might be presenced is emphatically

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asserted in other contexts (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume), as in cases where the cult statue is seized or even destroyed by enemy forces. The immaterial divine and the material divine image are not coterminous and the deity may typically depart even a correctly crafted and formally awakened cult statue or divine symbol.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and to a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Department of Egyptology & Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University, which enabled the completion of the research presented here.

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Part III: A Feast for the Senses: Visual and Auditory Engagement with the Divine and Divine Agents in the Ancient Near East

Daniel E. Fleming

Seeing and Socializing with Dagan at Emar’s zukru Festival Abstract: The practice of ancient Near Eastern religion grappled in all of its aspects with the problem of relating to perceived powers that were visible only in their effects. Toward this end, divine images in human form had the advantage of representing the gods in their most crucial likeness to humanity, as social beings capable of communication with those who felt the impact of their actions. While the representation of divine bodies had more than one implication, the gods’ availability for contact was focused on the same physical feature that dominates human interaction: the face. Fleming focuses here on elucidating the implications of a document encountered during his investigation of ritual texts from Late Bronze Age Emar. An account of the festival version of the zukru, this document is notable for its recording of how Emar’s principal deity, Dagan, was rendered accessible or inaccessible by the removal or use of a veil. During the zukru, access to the gods by the common people was tied to the material presence of the divine as the deities departed their designated sacred spaces for the street where all could salute them. With the covering and revealing of Dagan’s face, we find that the focus of religious interaction could be visual – not as awed gazing at a sacred tableau but as a two-way exchange, a meeting of the eyes. In this interaction with the material image of the divine in anthropomorphic form, and especially through engaging with the eyes and the face of the deity, a world of non-verbal communication was opened to people who depended on a relationship with the beings who governed their fates. Keywords: Bronze Age, Dagan, Emar, materiality, zukru festival

The practice of ancient Near Eastern religion grappled in all of its aspects with the problem of relating to perceived powers that were visible only in their effects, not as beings in themselves. Toward this end, divine images in human form had the advantage of representing the gods in their most crucial likeness to humanity, as social beings capable of communication with those who felt

Daniel E. Fleming, New York University, 53 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012, e-mail: [email protected]

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the impact of their actions (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). While the representation of divine bodies had more than one implication, the gods’ availability for contact was focused on the same physical feature that dominates human interaction: the face. So far as physical images of deity facilitated what was understood as concrete contact between otherwise separate classes of being, such occasions for communication had to be managed with great care, in what we would identify as “ritual” by its bounded and repetitive nature. In my investigation of ritual texts from Emar in Late Bronze Age Syria, I encountered one document that recorded the inaccessibility and accessibility of its principal deity by the use or removal of a veil.1 This text provides the peculiar service of repeated ritual instructions, first for offerings and then for the movement of gods that frames these expressions of devotion.2 This movement is not abstract; physical objects are transported from their shrines inside the city walls to a place of assembly outside them. Access to the gods by the common people is tied to the material presence of the divine, as the deities depart their designated sacred spaces for the street, where all may salute them.3 I have wondered why the scribe responsible for this text was provoked to create this rare second account of the ritual procedure. Throughout this section of the text, which I include below, there is particular concern to track the condition of the principal god’s face, which is either “open” or “covered,” the latter evidently by means of some sort of veiling, though no noun is mentioned.4 In a way, then, the whole repeated ritual account is preoccupied with 1 The texts from Emar that deal with ritual come from the diviner’s archive found in the building M-1, among a wide-ranging collection of documents relating to many different deities and sanctuaries. These are published in Arnaud 1986: nos. 274–535. I have published two booklength studies of the Emar rituals: Fleming 1992, 2000. In this article, I will undertake only the targeted study of this one ritual case; statues may be veiled when they are out of formal use, see Walker and Dick 2001: 230–33; Farber 2003: 208–13; Ambos 2004: 53–57; Ambos 2010: 228–29. This further use was pointed out to me by Beate Pongratz-Leisten. 2 This pattern was not recognized in Arnaud’s original publication, and it affects every aspect of ritual reconstruction for the Emar zukru text (Emar VI.3 373). The argument for this reading is found in Fleming 2000: 50–54. 3 Roberto Da Matta (1984: 217–18) observes of Carnaval in Brazil that processions temporarily level a diverse populace: “As the saint passes and is seen, the faithful may transfer temporarily their group, class, or social loyalties to this new focus.” For discussion of Emar festival processions in relation to “city unity,” see Fleming 1996: 96–101. 4 The Akkadian verbs are katāmu, “to cover,” and petû, “to open.” A similar veiling is attested in the Ebla enthronement ritual (ARET XI 3, 24–25): “While they will perform their ritual weeks, the faces of Kura and Barama shall not be covered with a veil. When they have performed that day the seven-day rituals and (then) they will cover with a veil the faces of Kura and Barama.” See also Rutz 2013. Thanks are due to Pongratz-Leisten for these references.

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an aspect of the religious encounter that is defined by the materiality of a divine image: the god can see and be seen (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume). Such representation of worship as social exchange depends in execution on the physical object, evidently though perhaps not necessarily in human form. For this occasion, I have offered the text and some modest context, in hope that it will contribute to a larger conversation about “the materiality of divine agency.”

1 Emar’s zukru Festival The small city of Emar occupied the great bend of the Euphrates River in northwestern Syria for over a millennium, until its destruction in about 1180 BCE.5 Its last generations produced various surviving cuneiform archives, the largest of which belonged to a religious leader who styled himself “the diviner of the gods of Emar,” with a supervisory role in a collection of local public rites and divine establishments.6 This archive contained several hundred clay tablets of widely varied types, including legal documents from the family and a larger circle, work from scribal and divinatory training, and texts that reflected the diviner’s responsibility for ritual administration.7 While the scribal and divinatory training materials have much in common with examples found across the Near East, the ritual administration followed local needs in a way that produced some unprecedented written results. The longest texts address public religious celebrations that have no known counterparts in textual forms that are likewise distinct. Where they focus on single events, these are called “festivals” and tend to be observed with some combination of especially significant days and seven-day blocks of ritually static feasting.8 Among these, the longest text and by far the most expensive occasion recalls the zukru festival, the name of which defines some spoken act the meaning of which is only susceptible to guesswork from etymology. There seems to have been an annual zukru celebration, evidently at the first full moon of the

5 For multidimensional treatment of the site through lenses of both textual and non-textual evidence, see d’Alfonso, Cohen, and Sürenhagen 2008. See http://www.ieiop.csic.es/emar/en/ Presentation.html for a bibliography on Emar studies through 2007. 6 The generations of this diviner’s family are treated in detail by Cohen (2009: 147–83), with particular reference to this title in connection to Ba‘la-malik (p. 170). 7 On the diviner’s archive as such, see Fleming 2000, ch. 2; and Pedersén 1998: 61–64. 8 I review the “festivals” as a set in Fleming 1996: 88–96; cf. Fleming 1992, ch. 4, for discussion of the festivals in the context of the Emar rituals as a whole.

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autumn-based year and preserved in a separate short text.9 The festival version, however, sets out a much more lavish rendition for a seventh year, underwritten mainly by the local king, who thereby inserts himself into a city-wide tradition that did not otherwise offer him a central role.10 Ritually, the zukru revolved around a single event that could be observed on one day, the removal of the god Dagan to a site outside the city walls, from which he returned in a parade that began by procession between upright stones.11 For the seventhyear festival, this core event is extended into a series of four repetitions. The zukru itself lasts seven days, with feasting outside the city on the first and seventh days. Before this, the countdown to the major festival is launched by observance of a previous sixth year at the same date, and then official consecration of the seventh-year feast takes place forty days later – still during year six. In the festival text, the opening sixth-year rite is conceptually the standard annual custom – whatever the actual practice – and the consecration anticipates the zukru while remaining self-consciously preparatory. These distinctions are important because they relate somehow to differences in the treatment of Dagan through each iteration of the procedure. Various lines of evidence indicate the preeminence of the zukru in Emar’s religious calendar. The very fact that this one event was selected for the special seventh-year celebration under royal sponsorship suggests its public stature. According to the ritual account, all the gods of Emar are brought to the site with the upright stones, where the whole populace joins in a lavish feast. When the gods are listed in a long middle section of the text, roughly a hundred individual shrines are named, far more than in any other such compilation. At the head of the list stands Dagan, widely known as the lead god of the middle Euphrates River throughout the Bronze Age, and for reentry into the city, he is accompanied by a deity whose name is rendered as dNIN.URTA, the god identi-

9 The two texts are Emar VI.3 373 and 375. In his original publication, Arnaud unnecessarily separated the obverse and the reverse of Msk 74298b as two different ritual texts, which he numbered 375 and 448. It turns out that his text number 449 joins to this tablet, which should be read as a single document, clearly defined in its opening lines by the zukru and confined to setting in a single year. 10 This role for palace finances in a text with script shared by the so-called “Syro-Hittite” (or “Free Format”) legal documents represents a significant obstacle to interpretation of Emar’s tablet history in series, with the Conventional (“Syrian”) group largely older than the Free Format,” an approach pursued systematically by Yoram Cohen and Lorenzo d’Alfonso in their various publications (see the bibliography in d’Alfonso et al. 2008; Cohen 2009. For a proposal to redefine the categories of legal documentation from Syrian and Syro-Hittite to Conventional and Free Format, see Fleming and Démare-Lafont 2009: 19–26. 11 The interpretation advanced here is elaborated at length in Fleming 2000, ch. 3.

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fied with Emar’s collective standing in law and diplomacy.12 It appears therefore that the zukru somehow represents a calendrically based renewal of divine-human commitments for Emar as a city.

2 Veiling Dagan’s Statue The section of the zukru festival provided here in translation is the second part of the text, which focuses on the movement of the gods.13 In it, the festival is broken down into the four days in which all the gods depart the city and Dagan is driven between the upright stones. These key days are set in bold typeface. 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

When the sons of the land of Emar give the zukru festival [to] Dagan Lord of the Offspring during the seventh year:14 During the sixth year, in the month of SAG.MU,15 on the 15 th [day], the Šaggar-day, they bring out Dagan Lord of the Offspring in procession, his face uncovered. They perform the lesser sacrificial homage before [him] at the gate of the upright stones.16 After they sacrifice, eat, and drink, they cover his face. The wagon of Dagan passes between the upright stones.17 He proceeds to [dNIN.URTA]. They have dNIN.URTA mount (the wagon) with him; their faces are covered. [On] the same day, they purify all of the oxen and sheep. On the same day, (once) they bring out [all of the] gods, just before the evening

12 Dagan receives systematic treatment in the volume by Feliu (2003). On the social range of Dagan’s primacy, see Fleming 2008: 43–49. 13 For my own edition of the Akkadian text, with notes, see Fleming 2000: Appendix: Texts and Translations with Collation Notes, section A. 14 This identification of Dagan as bēl bukari is specific to this festival, see Fleming 2000: 88– 89. 15 SAG.MU means “the head of the year,” which as a month name renders the zukru in some sense a New Year festival. This identification is not shared by the text for an annual zukru, which names the month Zarati, from the old local calendar. 16 The “sacrificial homage” is a rite called the kubadu, a noun derived from the verb “to be heavy, to honor.” 17 These stones are called sikkānu, a term known also from Ugarit and Mari.

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they bring out Šaggar [...] from dNIN.URTA’s temple, from the House of Assistance.18 Also, the [breads and the meat that were before (all of) the gods] go up into Emar. During the month of Niqali, [on the 25 th day,] they bring out [Dagan] Lord of the Offspring and all of the gods19 in procession to the gate of the upright stones. His [face] is covered for both his departure and his return. From that day they release the pure calves (and) lambs (from?) the bronze knife. The wagon (of Dagan) passes between the upright stones. He proceeds to dNIN.URTA; also the breads and the meat that were before the gods go up into the city. During the next year, in the month of SAG.MU, on the 14 th day, the lambs that had been set aside they distribute to the gods. the next day, the 15 th day (of ) Šaggar, they bring out Dagan Lord of the Offspring, along with all of the gods and the Šaššabēyānātu-spirits in procession to the gate of the upright stones.20 Dagan’s face is covered for his departure. They give to the gods the offerings as prescribed on the tablet. They bring out in procession Dagan the very father and Šaggar on the very same day.21 Also the Šaggar breads for all Emar go up. Just before evening, Dagan passes between the upright stones. They cover his face. In the great gate of battle they perform the rites just as for the consecration day.22

18 Šaggar is a lunar deity evidently identified with the full moon. The “House of Assistance” is the bīt tukli, with the second noun derived from the verb, “to trust.” 19 The 25 th day is restored based on the parallel calendar of the first section of the text (line 17). The month sequence SAG.MU – Niqali is found also in the administrative text Emar VI.3 364:1–2. 20 The feminine plural noun šaššabēyānātu is marked with the divine determinative that makes these some category of non-human spirit beings, difficult to identify, see Fleming 2000: 78–82. 21 “The very father” is a-bu-ma, with the emphatic -ma. 22 The “consecration day” is the ŭmu qadduši, a day of preparation immediately before the main ritual event in the Emar festivals generally.

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The breads and the meat that were before the gods go up into the city.

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On the sixth day the lambs that had been set aside they distribute to the gods, just as (mentioned) previously.23

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On the seventh day Dagan, along with all of the gods and the Šaššabēyānātu-spirits, goes out in procession, his face covered. They give the ritual requirements to the gods, just as for the day (mentioned) previously.24 All of the meat and breads, everything that they consume, from the [seven] days and from [between] the upright stones they take up and [place] in return. Nothing goes up [into] the town. After the fire, just [before evening] ... They uncover Dagan’s face. The wagon of Dagan passes [between] the upright stones. He proceeds to dNIN.URTA. [They have dNIN.URTA mount (the wagon) with him.] They perform the rites just as for the day (mentioned) previously.

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[When the citizens of Emar] consecrate the zukru festival [...]

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Throughout, the writer returns repeatedly to the question of whether or not Dagan’s face is to be “covered” or “open” at various stages of procession and presence. Sometimes a particular moment of covering or uncovering is specified, and at other times, only a current state is observed, one way or the other. The structure of the ritual sequence is not transcribed so carefully as to allow certainty at every point. We have to extrapolate in some cases based on continuity from the last stated condition and on patterns associated with each activity. Even with elements of uncertainty, some conclusions emerge. We will return to the implications of these observations shortly. 1. In the sixth year, the whole parade out of the city to the shrine of stones takes place with Dagan’s face uncovered. This never occurs during the rest of the event. The unveiled procession is associated with a rite performed on first arrival at the upright stones, likewise unique to this first major day. All are invited to enjoy visual contact with Dagan.

23 The sixth and seventh days belong to a seven-day period of offering and feasting delineated in the first section of the text (line 75). 24 “Ritual requirements” are parṣu, the common word for “ritual,” applied at Emar to particular offering portions, Fleming 1992: 137–40.

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2.

Each major day incorporates a feast, before Dagan is brought between the stones. In the sixth year, Dagan’s face is clearly open for this occasion, and on the seventh day in the seventh year, it appears to be covered. We cannot be sure for the other two principal days. When his face is veiled, Dagan does not participate visually in the last great feast: he is a guest yet he does not join his hosts as they eat and drink. 3. Dagan is unveiled for procession between the stones only for the zukru festival itself in the seventh year, on both the opening and closing days. The god only sees the stones – and is perhaps seen by them – during the climactic event. 4. Dagan’s face is uncovered for the trip back into the city only on the seventh day of the festival. Even on the key opening day of the seventh-year festival, the god returns to his temple veiled. This arrangement creates a movement in the ritual progress that I had not noticed previously. On the first day of the seven-day celebration, Dagan’s movement between the stones is the focus of his active engagement. Only on the seventh day is this engagement extended to the procession back into the city. With this final parade, Dagan settles back into his temple home. The festival text warrants more leisurely reading, but these represent the most striking features of the veiling patterns.

3 Seeing and Socializing with Dagan While the use of images to embody the divine presence in ancient sanctuaries is a commonplace, their removal from those sanctuaries for procession among the people shows the gods in direct interaction with the human communities touched by their power, interaction unmediated by the sacred space of temples or by the personnel who served there. Once removed from the carefully constructed space that governs contact with deity at home, the basis for access to the gods of Emar appears to change. As the populace gathers for celebration, with attendance guaranteed by the liberal supply of free food, it will see the gods both in the streets and at public sacred sites not their own.25 It is striking then that the scribe from the diviner’s writing center who composed this text

25 Da Matta (1984: 218–19) contrasts the religious occasion of Carnaval with the modern military parade, for which barriers are set up and the parade is confined to the government center, reflecting the domination of high over low.

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was concerned to delineate carefully the people’s access to Dagan through the vehicle of his statue. In its procession outside the temple home, the physical image of Dagan is treated as a person of prestige. Its physicality allows not just that the god be moved, with his presence made visible in a concrete object, but also that his accessibility to what surrounds him be stage-managed. This access is materially reflected in the covering and uncovering of the god’s “face,” most simply understood as the literal visage of an anthropomorphic image. Although the face is associated with various crucial elements of our sensual experience, in Near Eastern idiom, it is especially linked to sight, and sight is the basis for relationship.26 A superior may refuse to look at a supplicant and thus reject the approach, and willingness to meet the eyes promises a successful exchange. In its religious manifestation, focus on eye-contact with the gods borrows this essentially social mode of human relationship, with a powerful choice of nonverbal communication.27 In the zukru festival, the veiling and unveiling of Dagan’s face draws attention to this question of social contact in the relationship of superior to subordinate. Use of the veil introduces further nuance to the divine presence promised by the image as such: the god may be present but unavailable. It is rare to have such attention to veiling the god in an ancient ritual text, and this displays a particular concern with tracking the god’s availability for action through the sequence of four primary ritual days that frame the zukru as part of a sevenyear cycle. Our next question should then be: what is arranged for Dagan’s direct engagement with the world around him through the various episodes of his removal from the city for festivities at the shrine of upright stones? By means of the shifts in patterns of covering and uncovering Dagan’s face through the four main days of the seven-year zukru text, the god’s attention

26 This question of visual contact or the lack of it comes up regularly in discussion of relationship between Yahweh and his people in the Hebrew Bible; for one treatment of this idiom in the context of Near Eastern perspective, see Veenhof 1995: 33–37. For the significance of visual contact (with the divine and otherwise) and visual assessment in Mesopotamia, see Winter 2000, Asher-Greve 2003, Sonik 2013; for an analysis of literary references to the divine gaze in Mesopotamia, see Dicks 2012 and forthcoming; for a discussion of viewing the divine in the context of late first millennium BCE Syria at the site of Dura Europos, see Elsner 2007: 19–22. Thanks are due to Karen Sonik for these references. 27 For the importance of the “face” in Akkadian texts, see the CAD s.v. amāru A5 panū, “to see personally, to visit”; and s.v. naṭālu 2a2’. In the Brazilian context, even without the whole ancient framework of eye-contact, Da Matta (1984: 217–18) comments that a relationship between saint and spectator is created simply by looking at the uplifted statue and, as the procession passes, sacred loyalties momentarily overshadow the daily bonds of kin or class.

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and orientation is made to undergo a set of changes that stand out against the generally repeating structure of each day’s program.

4 The Four Main Days The Sixth Year: The opening observance on the 15 th of SAG.MU in the sixth year seems to represent continuity with regular annual practice, which gives everyone access to Dagan as he leaves the city to celebrate the zukru at the external site.28 Strangely, this access is denied for the observance of the seventh year. The contrast for the seventh-year event, where everyone goes outside the city to accompany a veiled god, suggests a tension of expectation, that Dagan’s face will finally be uncovered so that he can participate in some awaited rite. All who are present will look toward that moment. Consecration of the Seventh Year: The consecration day of the seventh-year event, forty days after the sixth-year observance, emphasizes only his covering. The whole occasion is freighted with anticipation. Although Dagan’s very presence outside the city calls for access to him, perhaps we should not assume his unveiling only for the feast; the text mentions only his veiling for both processions. Procession between the Stones: The seventh-year zukru itself occupies seven days counted from the 15 th of SAG.MU, the first full moon of the year. The novelty here is that Dagan’s face is uncovered for procession between upright stones. These stones, called sikkānātu, are identified at Emar and elsewhere in the region with divine presence.29 Nothing about their basic use separates them from images in human form, which draws the mind to the possibility of communication and exchange with the gods as with other humans. In effect, therefore, the site with the stones is a shrine, though the gods represented are not named. The stones are always identified as plural, and Dagan passes between them in a wagon. We are left to wonder whether there are only two or rather a passage of stones set

28 This is the arrangement defined at the start of the text for the annual zukru, Emar VI.3 375:4, “On the 15 th day, the Šaggar(-day) – the very same day – [Dagan] goes out in procession, his face uncovered.” 29 On the sikkānu at Emar and in Syria, see Fleming 2000: 82–86; Durand 2005.

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up in two rows. In either case, we are shown a meeting of the gods, with the leading deity of the Emar region brought out of his urban temple residence to encounter gods worshipped in a less elaborate physical form at a site separate from the city and yet still joined to it by proximity and the zukru rite itself. Dagan’s passage between the stones follows the day’s feast and initiates his return to the city. On this opening day of the zukru, we are told only that the god was veiled during his trip out of the city and that they cover his face immediately after the procession between the stones. It is left unclear when the veil was removed, whether before the feast or just before this procession, but the fact of his direct encounter with the stones is signaled by the move to veil him afterward. While all the people are surely watching, the god appears to be unveiled for communication with the divine beings present in these stones, to see and be seen as he proceeds between them. Whether the stones are identified with an old cult for regional gods, with (divinized?) ancestors, or with something else, it is likely that this is an exchange between sentient beings, not simply Dagan’s observation of a traditional religious site. This exchange appears to be the moment everyone has been awaiting – not to approach the god themselves as Emar’s human community but to witness his review of some standing assembly defined by neither Emar’s human population nor its population of gods with urban shrines, all of whom have been brought out to join the spectacle. Return to the City: In spite of the fact that Dagan’s procession between the stones launches the return of everyone to the city at day’s end, his face is covered again for this last parade on the 15 th of SAG.MU, the first day of the zukru proper. This pattern is emphasized for every main day of the sequence, so that the seventh and final day of the festival stands out by its contrast: Dagan returns to the city unveiled. Only on the last day is the god’s review of the stones finally linked to the processional return by his continuing contact with his surroundings. Just as the city could participate in Dagan’s departure from Emar to visit this external shrine a year before the seventh-year event, it could now celebrate with him a triumphal return to his residence as the festival drew to a close. This distinction of availability from mere attendance in different stages of the zukru festival is made possible by the embodiment of the divine presence in a physical object that could be treated as a personage, especially since it possessed a face. The face is a key vehicle for social contact, which is engaged especially through the eyes. Touch is not necessary for establishing relationship, and in many cases (particularly in engaging with the divine) is inappro-

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priate and undesirable. In ancient polytheism, the gods’ personal character was distributed through a community comparable to a human one, so that the world consisted of intertwined human and divine societies. Religious exchange with the gods was approached as a social undertaking, constrained by social protocol familiar to human communities. Festivals might then be regarded as parties with both humans and gods invited. While stories could imagine conversation between humans and gods as if the latter were simply people on the street, physical images allowed the exercise of a ritual imagination. Specific possibilities for interaction and exchange between gods and humans could be embodied in the manipulation of the divine figures. The preoccupation with veiling and display during particular moments of Emar’s zukru festival shows the extent to which these encounters with the gods were approached in social terms, as prescribed contact between people. In my original study of this text, I interpreted the veiling of Dagan in terms of exposing or cloaking his divine glory (Fleming 2000: 92). While this may be correct in itself, I now think I overplayed the notion of divine luminescence. In choosing when to make Dagan available to the world around him and when not, the ritual overseers treated him as a VIP, separating the time when he could see and be seen from time when he was present but not a full participant. Emar’s zukru seems to have been the principal public event in the city’s cycle of annual rites that maintained relations between divine and human societies. Dagan was the leading god of the region, and the whole community of gods and humans gathered to acknowledge his centrality to city life.30 It may be that the departure and grand reentry into the city somehow recognized the creation of Emar and its Dagan temple as achievements that maintained continuity with an older heritage of Dagan in the land, as represented by the external sacred site (Fleming 2000: 133–40).31 In any case, the manufacture of divine statues had implications beyond the physical space defined by fixed temples and shrines, where humans could approach a god in his material home. Statues of modest size could be moved, and their transportation outside the sanctuary permitted contact with the larger populace – not specially sanctified

30 This combination of public festivity with maintenance of universal order, even in settings with political tension, recalls a major preoccupation of Victor Turner (1969), who explored the ways in which group experiences of liminality fostered community among the participants; cf. Van Gennep 1960. A whole population could enter a liminal state during pilgrimage or festival by leaving the physical settings that defined the varieties of status for an occasion and place devoted to a common bond, Turner 1974: 195–97. 31 I have added to my original analysis a collection of biblical references to the movement of Yahweh’s ark into Jerusalem, see Fleming 2013.

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for sacred space. With this attention to covering and revealing the god’s face, we find that the focus of religious interaction could be visual – not as awed gazing at a sacred tableau but as a two-way exchange, a meeting of the eyes. In Near Eastern antiquity, the language of seeing and averting the eyes communicated respectively the conferring of favor and rejection, the ultimate poles of social experience when dealing with people of power. Through interacting with the physical image in human form, and especially through engaging with the eyes and the face, a world of non-verbal communication is opened to people who depend on a relationship with the beings who govern their fates.

Bibliography Ambos, Claus. 2004. Mesopotamische Baurituale aus dem 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. Dresden: ISLET. Ambos, Claus. 2010. Building Rituals from the First Millennium BC: The Evidence from the Ritual Texts. Pp. 221–38, in From the Foundations to the Crenellations: Essays on Temple Building in the Ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible, ed. Mark J. Boda and Jamie Novotny. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Arnaud, Daniel. 1986. Recherches au pays d’Aštata, Emar VI.3: Textes sumériens et accadiens. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur la Civilisation. Asher-Greve, Julia M. 2003. The Gaze of Goddesses: On Divinity, Gender, and Frontality in the Late Early Dynastic, Akkadian, and Neo-Sumerian Periods. NIN 4(1): 1–59. Cohen, Yoram. 2009. The Scribes and Scholars of the City of Emar in the Late Bronze Age. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. d’Alfonso, Lorenzo, Yoram Cohen, and Dietrich Sürenhagen, eds. 2008. The City of Emar among the Late Bronze Age Empires: History, Landscape, and Society. Münster: UgaritVerlag. Da Matta, Roberto. 1984. Carnaval in Multiple Planes. Pp. 208–40, in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Dicks, Ainsley. 2012. Catching the Eye of the Gods: The Gaze in Mesopotamian Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Durand, Jean-Marie. 2005. Le culte des pierres et les monuments commémoratifs en Syrie amorrite. Florilegium Marianum 8. Paris: Société pour l'étude du Proche-Orient ancien. Elsner, Jaś. 2007. Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Farber, Walter. 2003. Singing an eršemma for the Damaged Statue of a God. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 93: 208–13. Feliu, Lluis. 2003. The God Dagan in Bronze Age Syria. Leiden: Brill. Fleming, Daniel E. 1992. The Installation of Baal’s High Priestess at Emar: A Window on Ancient Syrian Religion. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

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Fleming, Daniel E. 1996. The Emar Festivals: City Unity and Syrian Identity under Hittite Hegemony. Pp. 81–121, in Emar: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Syrian Town in the Late Bronze Age, ed. Mark W. Chavalas. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. Fleming, Daniel E. 2000. Time at Emar: The Cultic Calendar and the Rituals from the Diviner’s Archive. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Fleming, Daniel E. 2008. Integration of Household and Community Religion in Ancient Syria. Pp. 43–49, in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, eds. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fleming, Daniel E. 2013. David and the Ark: A Jerusalem Festival Reflected in Royal Narrative. Pp. 75–96, in Literature as Politics, Politics as Literature: Essays on the Ancient Near East in Honor of Peter Machinist, eds. David S. Vanderhooft and Abraham Winitzer. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Fleming, Daniel E., and Sophie Démare-Lafont. 2009. Tablet Terminology at Emar: ‘Conventional’ and ‘Free Format’. Aula Orientalis 27: 19–26. Fronzaroli, Pelio. 1993. Testi rituali della regalità (archivio L.2769). Archivi reali di Ebla, Testi 11. Rome: Missione Archeologica Italiana in Siria. Pedersén, Olof. 1998. Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500–300 B.C. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. Rutz, Matthew. 2013. Bodies of Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Diviners of Late Bronze Age Emar and Their Table Collection. Ancient Magic and Divination 9. Leiden: Brill. Sonik, Karen. 2013. The Monster’s Gaze: Vision as Mediator Between Time and Space in the Art of Mesopotamia. Pp. 285–300, in Time and History in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 56 th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Barcelona, 26–30 July 2010, ed. L. Feliu, J. Llop, A. Millet Albà, and J. Sanmartín. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Veenhof, Klaas. 1995. ‘Seeing the Face of God’: The Use of Akkadian Parallels. Akkadica 94/ 95: 33–37. Walker, Christopher, and Michael Dick. 2001. The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual. State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts 1. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Winter, Irene. 2000. The Eyes Have It: Votive Statuary, Gilgamesh’s Axe, and Cathected Viewing in the Ancient Near East. Pp. 22–44, in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel

The Voice of Mighty Copper in a Mesopotamian Exorcistic Ritual Abstract: In the inquiry regarding the materiality of divine agency, exorcism constitutes an important and fruitful field of research. In exorcistic rituals, the powerful incantations and the specific objects used complement each other. They create a special atmosphere that assists the priest in experiencing the divine. In exorcism, the priest might call upon a god in order to protect himself before attempting to banish the demon from his patient. He might also ask, however, for the help of a secondary agent (a material object) in performing the ritual. This object arguably becomes, at least for the duration of the procedure, a beneficent agent invoked by the exorcist, who derives his power from the Mesopotamian gods associated with magic, Asalluhi/Marduk in particular. This contribution focuses on three noisy rituals described in the first millennium BCE canonical Utukkū Lemnūtu (Evil Demons) incantations. In the seventh tablet of this corpus, a demonic entity called “Mighty Copper” is involved in the exorcistic process. A musical instrument – most likely a copper bell – is used by the priest to produce a powerful and frightful noise that has the power to expel evil. At this particular moment, and only at this time, the noise produced is identified as the voice of Mighty Copper. Mighty Copper, rather than being a simple copper bell, endows the benevolent agent with a concrete and physical presence capable of assisting the exorcist, fighting on his side against the malevolent demon afflicting the patient. Keywords: copper bell, exorcism, incantation, Mighty Copper, ritual, urudu-nig2-kala-ga, za-pa-ag2

In her study on ritual, Catherine Bell attempted to provide general and nonexhaustive definitions, offering a typology capable of including all kinds of rituals rather than limiting herself to a specific culture. The ritual I will present here is of a type she called a “ritual of afflictions” (Bell 1997: 115–20), which appeases a spirit that is oppressing or harming someone. In such rituals, humans are not completely helpless or subordinate to the cosmic order. The pro-

Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel, University of Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, 5 Allées Antonio Machado, 31000 Toulouse, e-mail: [email protected]

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cedure gives a concrete sense and a physical presence to entities such as gods or demons. As will be demonstrated below, the ritual protocol discussed here (relating to Mighty Copper) fits this definition as supernatural or divine assistance is embodied in the animate(d) tool – a copper bell – used during the ritual. This paper focuses on an exorcistic ritual described several times in the canonical Utukkū Lemnūtu incantations,1 a first millennium canonical series that ranks among the most important surviving collections of Mesopotamian exorcistic incantations. The history of its constitution is very complex though the incantations are attested throughout two millennia in Assyria and in Babylonia, with exemplars spanning the Old Babylonian (ca. 2000–1600 BCE) to the Seleucid (ca. 323–64 BCE) periods. Duplicates and variants have also been found on the borders of the Mesopotamian world, as at Emar, Ugarit, Bogazköy, and Sultantepe. Since their first publication at the beginning of the twentieth century by Thompson,2 these incantations have been intensively studied for their philological and literary interest, and the vocabulary they contain is extensively quoted in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD). The Old Babylonian version of these incantations, Udug-hul, is written in Sumerian; these incantations are more or less similar (as in content, vocabulary, and order) to Tablets III–VIII of the first millennium version. The later (first millennium) version, Utukkū Lemnūtu, is bilingual and written on sixteen tablets; it constitutes the main corpus for the present study.3

1 The rubric of each incantation gives the title of the series (Udug-hul-a-kam; Utukkū Lemnūtu); see Geller 2000. For the use of the term magic in the Mesopotamian context, see Schwemer 2011. 2 For the historical presentation of the series, see Geller 1985: 3. The oldest incantations of this type were discovered at Susa (third millennium). The main Old Babylonian sources were discovered in the libraries of Nippur. Middle Assyrian versions are also known (KAR 24; see Geller 1980). These incantations remained popular in the Hellenistic period (Uruk, Borsippa, Sippar, and Babylon). 3 Most of its manuscripts were first published at the beginning of the twentieth century by Reginald Campbell Thompson as volumes 16 and 17 of the Cuneiform Texts of the British Museum (Thompson 1903–1904). Markham J. Geller published the Old Babylonian incantations in 1985 (plates, transcription, translation), reconstructing the text with the help of the canonical series. In 2007, a new edition designed for students, comprising a transcription, a translation, and a reconstruction of the whole canonical series, was published by Geller. A new scientific edition, integrating all the duplicates, is expected in the next few years. The present study, based on the existing works (with plates from CT), may probably have to be revised when the variants and the duplicates are published. For a historical presentation of the Utukkū Lemnūtu incantations, one may refer to the introductions given in Geller 1985 (Old Babylonian version [Udug hul] abbreviated here as UHF) and Geller 2007 (canonical series abbreviated here as Utukkū Lemnūtu). Some of these incantations were studied in Falkenstein 1931: 44–76.

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The exorcistic ritual is developed in the same manner in three different incantations at the beginning of the seventh tablet of the canonical version (Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 1–97),4 the incantations all sharing the same pattern and following the same main milestones. As the ritual instructions are practically identical in each case, I will focus primarily on the first one and its description. After a short presentation of this exorcistic process, I will explore in detail how a supernatural agent, Mighty Copper, is staged in the ritual and embodied in the ritual tool, acting on behalf of the divine world to assist the exorcist in chasing away a malevolent demon. With its terrible voice, it serves to frighten away the evil demon present around the body of the patient.

1 General Description of the Ritual Procedure The three incantations are built on a single scheme and follow the Marduk/Ea incantation type described by Falkenstein (1931: 44–76).5 With a prescriptive goal, the ritual is presented as a mythological and etiological narrative, which places the ritual instructions and gestures in a mythological time, and associates them with the great gods of Magic (Enki/Ea and Asalluhi/Marduk).6 The god Enki/Ea explains (step by step) to his divine son Asalluhi/Marduk what has to be accomplished when a man has been attacked by a demon at night. In the performance of the ritual itself, the exorcist shoulders the role of the god Asalluhi/Marduk (Maul 1994: 41; Geller 1985: 12–15),and acts in accordance with the instructions given by the great god Enki/Ea. At the beginning of each incantation, a narrative offers a literary development of the topic of the demonic attack by night. The three incantations build on each other like a musical crescendo, from the particular to the general: in the first text, demons are like prowlers attacking in the street; in the second, demons pounce on the lonesome traveler like robbers and break into his house; in the third one, finally, demonic deeds in their overall nature are ad-

4 The protocol developed in those rituals keep the same pattern of the Old Babylonian series (UHF l. 646–795). The ritual procedure should be conformed to what was fixed by the tradition, although questions remain about the reality of this ritual practice in daily life: more than a millennium after the Old Babylonian version, it is more than likely it would not work (or be understood) in the same way. 5 For a new presentation and the addition of another type to this incantation typology, see Schramm 2008: 17–20. 6 For a brief presentation of these gods in magical contexts, see Bottéro 1987–1990: 228–31.

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dressed. The physical and mental sufferings of the sick individual, who might be anyone who has been attacked by a demon, are then described in literary terms: “He cannot eat, he cannot drink; he has been spending the day in (crying) ‘woe!’ and ‘alas!’” (Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 7–8); “His eyes are open, but the man cannot see anything; his ears are open, but he does not hear anyone” (Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 37–38).7 As we will see below, the ritual most likely takes place at night in the private dwelling of the patient, and the ritual is accomplished around or near his bed, though this has also been contaminated by the demonic attack. The final step of the ritual procedures does not directly concern the question of the materiality of divine agency: once the demon is gone, this involves the purification of the house and the setting of a protective magical fence in flour. I will just focus on its two first parts.

2 Water, Smoke and Flame: Chasing Namtar Away Before going further into details, I would like to clarify how the term “demon” is understood here. Neither humans nor gods, demons in ancient Mesopotamia are conceived as “in-between” beings or Zwischenwesen, closer to the Greek concept of daimon (Barbu and Rendu Loisel 2009: 304–10; Sonik 2013) than to our modern conception of demon. Two sub-categories may be distinguished among these demonic entities that are clearly present in the ritual text I discuss here: on the one hand, there are malevolent entities, hostile to humans (that is, the demon-utukku afflicting the patient), and, on the other hand, supernatural entities providing assistance may act benevolently, and be considered separately as genii (Sonik 2013: 111) The latter is clearly the role played by Mighty Copper in our exorcistic procedure. At the beginning of the ritual, two entities seem to be present around the body of the patient: first, the demon (who induced the illness); and second, as noted in the text, Namtar or Fate (who is present when the patient is in critical condition). As Stol demonstrates, the demonic affliction is hardly a demonic “possession” in the familiar sense of the demon’s seizing or entering into the

7 For examples of similar literary expressions, see Ludlul bēl nēmeqi II 73–74: “My eyes stare but cannot see; my ears are open but do not hear”; Streck Asb. 252, r. 9: “I was spending the whole day in (crying) ‘woe’ and ‘alas!’”

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body (Stol 1993: 51–53). The demon is “tied”, rakāsu, to his victim (Utukkū Lemnūtu VI 132) and covers him like a garment, kīma ṣubati katāmu (Utukkū Lemnūtu III 32). First and foremost, the purpose of the first part of the ritual procedure is to chase away Namtar. Namtar, literally “Fate”, is known in ancient Mesopotamian literature as the divine minister of the queen of the netherworld, Ereshkigal. Here, the entity mentioned may be considered as his hypostasis, that is, the death sentence afflicting someone who is physically in danger. The priest takes a vase, asammu or šaharratu, fills it with water, and puts some tamarisk and a plant called innuš (Akkadian maštakal) in it.8 These two plants are commonly coupled for purification purposes in apotropaic namburbû rituals, as demonstrated by Stefan Maul (1994: 44, 62–67). Then, over this water, the exorcist recites the “incantation of Eridu” (Eridu being the terrestrial residence of the great god Enki/Ea). The mention of the origin of the spell is a guarantee of its efficacy. The priest sprinkles the sick man with this magical, efficacious, and purifying water, though the magic it contains has been activated by the formulation of the spell. Then, he passes the censer and a torch over him. These purification gestures will chase away Namtar as if it is water, a vital step to ensure a positive prognosis: namtaru ša ina zumur amēlu bašû kīma mê liṣrur, “May Fate-Namtar, being in the body of the man, drip like water” (Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 14). This image could be associated with the sweat dripping (ṣarāru) from the skin of the sick man while the exorcist passes the torch close around him.9 In exorcistic rituals, the use of the censer and the torch both create a particular atmosphere: a magical, visible, and sweet-smelling cloud is physically present in the ritual scene near the sick body. In other incantation texts, the evil is conceived as being something like smoke or steam. Burning herbs and materials produce another aromatic cloud that will be blended with the evil steam already present but not visible to human eyes. As it disappears in the atmosphere, the magical but visible smoke created by the priest will sweep the evil away in the wind.10

8 A medicinal plant used in magical rituals (u2in-nu-uš dEa: in a commentary, it is one of the tools of the āšipu, see PBS X/4 12, i 16; JNES 15: 136, 74). 9 In an incantation from Tell Haddad, the evil will drip like the sweat from the body, Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi 1995: 30, 40. 10 A Lipšur-incantation, which has a lot in common with the Šurpu series, says as follows: “They (demons) shall not approach NN, son of NN, son of his god; may it (the evil/curse) rise to heaven like smoke, may it, like an uprooted tamarisk, never return to its place” JNES 15 36– 137, 98–99. See also Maqlû V 51–60, 82–88; Maqlû VI 19–72; Maqlû VII 1–7; Meier 1967; Abusch 1991: 233–53; Abusch 2002.

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3 Mighty Copper: An Animated Entity Once Namtar is gone, the life of the patient is no longer in danger. The exorcist can concentrate on the main demon acting on the body. The second part of the exorcistic process constitutes the dramatic peak of the ritual. Impressive sonorous and spectacular visual effects are staged so that the malevolent demon will be afraid and will flee the body of the patient. The ritual instructions explain in detail the procedure: the exorcist has to play a musical instrument made of copper. Called urudu-nig2-kala-ga (“Mighty Copper”), it must be strategically placed so that it will resound loudly. Several suggestions on the type of instrument that urudu-nig2-kala-ga (Mighty Copper) might represent have been proposed.11 The best identification remains the one suggested by Gurney already in 1935 and followed by Maul, this being that Mighty Copper is a sort of bell like the one in the collections of the Vorderasiatische Museum in Berlin (VA 2517), which could have been used in apotropaic and purification rituals.12 Here are the ritual instructions explaining to the exorcist how and for what purpose Mighty Copper should be used: urudu-nig2-kala-ga ur-sag an-na-ke4 za-pa-ag2 me-lam2-a-ni hu-luh-ha nig2-hul-[dim2 ] ba-ab-bu-ra šu u-me-ti MIN-ú qar-ra-du da-nim šá ina ri-gim me-lam-mi-šú gal-tú mim-ma lem-nu i-na-as-sa-hu le-qé-e-ma ki za-pa-ag2 sum-mu u-me-ni-de2-a a-tah-zu he-a a-šar ri-gim na-du-ú ú-ru-šum-ma lu re-ṣu-ka tu6-du11-ga inim den-ki-ga-ke4

11 The Akkadian reading of this logogram remains unknown, see Cooper 1978: 151 n. 1: for Zimmern (1918) and von Soden (AHw s.v. nigkalagû), it was similar to a lilissu, a kettle-drum. For Gurney (1935: 15, 58, 55, 84), it was a bell. In a late mystical commentary (BBR n°27, 9), urudu-nig2-kala-ga is equated with two deities: some scholars assumed that this indicates that the instrument is in two parts. For Lambert (1968: 110), it was a cymbal?; see also Kilmer 2003: 368 and Livingstone 2007: 172 (l. 4), 179 (l. 44). But this mystical commentary could also indicate the two parts of a bell, the bell and its beater. The instrument was understood as a gong in Cassin (1968: 47) and a tigû-drum in Reiner (RA 63: 171); this latter interpretation was refuted in Cooper (1978: 150 n. 5), as no glosses or commentaries could confirm this reading. In other texts of the first millennium, Mighty Copper appears sometimes in relation to kuš-gu4-gal (kušgugalû; “Skin of Great Bull”), but this is only attested in the late periods, see Schramm 2008: 195–96 12 Thanks are due to my colleague Strahil Panayotov, who drew my attention to the association with the bell VA 2517, first suggested by Maul (Klengel-Brandt and Maul 1992: 88, esp. n. 51). For the use of urudu-nig2-kala-ga in namburbû, see Maul 1994: 98 n. 71 and Panayotov 2013.

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urudu-nig2-kala-ga ur-sag an-na-ke4 za-pa-ag2 me-lam2-a-ni hu-mu-ra-ab-tah-e udug hul a-la2 hul ha-ba-ra-e3 ú-tuk-ku lem-nu a-lu-ú lem-nu lit-ta-ṣi Sumerian: Take Mighty Copper, warrior of An, who drives out anything evil through his voice and his awe-inspiring radiance. Lead him where the voice is given off. Let him be your ally. To the incantation, the word of Enki, may Mighty Copper, warrior of An, increase his voice and his awe-inspiring radiance, so that the evil utukku-demon and the evil alû-demon go out! Akkadian: Take ditto (i.e. Mighty Copper), warrior of An, who drives out anything evil through the voice of his awe-inspiring radiance. Lead him where the voice is given off. Let him be your ally, so that the evil utukku-demon and the evil alû-demon go out! (Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 15–20; copy in CT XVI 24)

The vocabulary employed is of great interest in helping us to understand the animated characteristic of Mighty Copper, before precisely defining its nature. The Akkadian term rigmu is not specific, designating equally voice (of man, god, animal, storm) and every kind of noise. The Sumerian, however, employs the term za-pa-ag2 to designate the sound produced by hitting the bell. Employed with animated beings (human, god, animal), za-pa-ag2 is by itself neither positive nor negative, inducing joy or fear (Römer 1982: 308–309, 13–14; Geller 1985: 127, 676; Schramm 2008: 198; Couto-Ferreira 2009: 186–87). It is built on pa-ag2 , meaning “to breathe”, with a sonorous feature, Sumerian za (Krecher ZA 60: 197). In the Old Babylonian lexical texts Proto-Lu2 (635–38; Civil 1969: 55) and Ugumu (111–18; Couto-Ferreira 2009: 34–35), za-pa-ag2 is quoted in a succession of loud cries let out by a living being and suggesting warlike wrath or despair. In the following example, za-pa-ag2 is associated with other terms designating loud, powerful, and frightful cries: “At her loud cry [za-pa-ag2 ], the gods of the country are shivering in fear. Her roaring makes the Anunna tremble like a lonely reed. At her rumble, they hide altogether” (Inana C 11–13; Sjöberg 1975: 178–179). More than a cry or a song, za-pa-ag2 designates the flow of the voice, the resonance and the vibration of an animated entity. In another ritual (bīt mēsiri), the sound produced with this piece of copper is associated with the rumble of the thunder, literally conceived in ancient Mesopotamia as the voice of the great storm god Adad: URUDU.NIG2 .KALA.GA ša rigimšu dannu naši Adad bēl birqi ušašgama eli bīti: “He? will make roar over the house Mighty Copper, whose powerful voice is carried out by Adad, lord of lightning” (AfO 14 [bīt mēsiri II] 146, l. 121). In this context, Mighty Copper is mentioned with a succession of other deities materialized in the ritual tools.

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Mighty Copper has not only a voice (za-pa-ag2 ) but also his own melammu, “awe inspiring radiance”, a quality from the divine world, with the Sumerian possessive suffix for animate beings (-ani; for an inanimate being, -bi would have been expected). Furthermore, the Akkadian text uses the verb warû (l. 17), which is usually found with animate entities (animal or human).13 So, the exorcist is not bringing Mighty Copper as he would if it were a simple ritual object; he is accompanying it, leading it to the strategic place where its voice can be as loud as possible. Once Mighty Copper has been strategically placed, it becomes the ally of the exorcist: the Akkadian substantive rēṣu (Sumerian a2-tah) designates gods or allies in royal inscriptions,14 that is, living and helpful entities. The term is also employed to qualify weapons of the gods.15 Ringing the bell will produce a powerful and frightful noise. At this particular moment, and only at this moment, the specific noise produced is identified specifically as the voice (za-pa-ag2 ) rather than simply the noise (gu3 ) of Mighty Copper.16 The mention of the melammu or “awe-inspiring radiance”, could also be concrete and might refer to the visual and luminous effects created in the ritual scene: the powerful cry is associated with a luminous intensity. To understand these luminous effects, we have to consider how and when the ritual is accomplished. It must take place in the private house of the patient, as it has also been contaminated by the demonic attack. In the second incantation (described in Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 27–68), the exorcist has to build a magical and apotropaic fence in flour at the gate of the house. Accomplished during the night (Wiggermann 2000: 246 ff.), luminous effects are of the utmost importance,17 symbolizing the presence of the god Nuska, vizier of Enlil: “A lamp may be present in the sleeping room, showing that the rituals were performed at night, the time of demoniac threats and frightening dreams. In fact, the lamp is the symbol of Nuska, Enlil’s vizier and the representative of law and order in the absence of daylight (Shamash)” (Wiggermann 2007: 108). It is possible that the luminous effects mentioned in our ritual are produced by the lamp or the torches (either the one used in the first part of the ritual or others present

13 Examples of this usage are cited in CAD A/II 313–17. 14 See for example, “his trust is Assur, his ally is Adad”, LKA 62, 3. 15 “The weapon of Ishtar is my support,” CT XXXI 19 18. 16 The meaning of the sumerian term gu3 is as ambiguous as the Akkadian rigmu, meaning “voice, noise, cry.” For “noise”, one might expect an onomatopoeic term based on reduplication (dumdam za, etc.); see the examples in Black 2003. 17 Several of the ritual scenes depicted on the Lamashtu amulets clearly include the lamp; see Wiggermann 2007: 102–16, esp. p. 107, figs. 3:1, 3.2, 3.62, 3.63.

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to light the ritual scene). This light is reflected by the polished surface of the copper. When the copper is hit and vibrates, noise and light vibrate together.

4 Mighty Copper as a Supernatural Entity Embodied in the ritual scene thanks to the copper instrument, it seems clear that Mighty Copper provided supernatural assistance to the exorcist. One may wonder about its very nature. Its identification as a supernatural agent does not relate to what it manifests through similitude. In literature, neither similes nor metaphors mention it but Mighty Copper, where it does appear, is frequently qualified with the epithet “warrior/hero of the great god An” (Utukkū Lemnūtu VII 15, 47, 87; IX 48′; XII 83; XVI 120′), suggesting its belonging to the divine world and the mythological domain.18 This idea was first suggested by Cooper in his edition of An-gim, The Return of Ninurta to Nippur (Cooper 1978: 153). For Cooper, the instrument as it appears in the Utukkū Lemnūtu incantations is the mythological representation of the monster Copper from the literary cycle of Ninurta. In the Sumerian debate poem Silver and Copper, Copper is also presented as urudu-nig2-kala-ga.19 As Schramm (2008: 196) pointed out, however, the epithet “warrior of An” (ur-sag An/qarrād Anim), present in the Utukkū Lemnūtu incantations, does not fit the mythological association with Ninurta. The association with the great god An could be related to the very nature of Mighty Copper as we will see below. The voice of Mighty Copper is also produced for purification purposes during the akītu or New Year festival (Thureau-Dangin 1921: 140; Linssen 2004: 230), and is involved in other exorcistic rituals including other canonical Utukkū Lemnūtu (IX 48′; XII 83–87; XVI, 119′–34′) incantations. In one of these, Mighty Copper is summoned in the same manner as other divine entities, especially those related to magic or the god An: d

nun-ur4-ra dugsila3(=baharx )-gal an-na-ke4 dugsila3-gaz udun ki-ku3-ga-ta al-šeg6-ga2 e2-a he2-ni-ib2-sar-re udug urudu-nig2-kala-ga ur-sag an-na-ke4 [za-pa-a]g2 he2-ni-ib2-hu-luh-ha

18 Could this epithet ur-sag be a clue that we ought consider Mighty Copper a monster? One may notice that Mighty Copper is presented in an incantation as coming from the mountain, far from the civilized world; see Sonik 2013. 19 In late periods, the determinative urudu disappeared and we only find nikkal(a)gû; Cooper 1978: 150 n. 5; Schramm 2008: 195 n. 15 and 16.

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May Nunura,20 the potter of An, chase him (=the demon) away from the house in a silagaz-vase, fired in a pure kiln; may the voice of Mighty Copper, hero of An, frighten the demon.21 (Utukkū Lemnūtu IX 47′–48′; Geller 2007: 147)

In this ritual procedure, the exorcist summons various divine agencies associated with different tools used during the ritual: Shamash is the lord of the aromatic cedar (l. 41); Ningirimma is the lady of the censer (l. 42); Girra, the divine fire (l. 43); Nisaba is summoned because of the flour and the seeds scattered as a magical fence at the end of the ritual procedure (l. 45); Lisi (l. 46) is invoked because of the plants used; and Nunura is the divine potter who crafted the pot employed during the ritual. In this context, Mighty Copper is mentioned for its terrific and frightful voice and summoned because of its divine (or at least supernatural) nature. Furthermore, one may notice that Nunura and Mighty Copper are qualified with an epithet that links them to the great god An. In our exorcistic procedure, the priest calls upon a kind of good entity, a genius, who assists him during the ritual, fighting on his side against the malevolent demon. Taking on the role of Asalluhi/Marduk, from whom he received its magical powers, the exorcist is a substitute for the god. His authority allows him to summon a divine agent in the ritual process. Mighty Copper could be a kind of Weapon of the great god An.22 Mighty Copper is the main character of a fragmentary incantation published by Schramm in his compendium (Schramm 2008: n°2). This incantation describes its mythological creation involving several deities: Ninagal, the divine blacksmith, works the metal; Gibil, the divine Fire, melts it; and Ara, the

20 For Nun-ura, see RlA IX, 620–21; as the divine potter, he is frequently mentioned in magical contexts, in association with Enki/Ea. See also Civil and Sallaberger 1996: 5–6. 21 The Akkadian translation of this text reads dMIN pa-ha-ru GAL-ú šá dA-nim ina MIN-e šá ina ú-tu-ni KÙ-ti ba-áš-lu ina É liṭ-ru-us-su / [še]-ed MIN-e qar-rad da-nu [ina] rig-mi-ka li-gal-lit-su, “May (Nun-ura), the great potter of An, chase him (= the demon) away from the house in a (silagaz)-vase, fired in a pure kiln; as for the demon-šēdu, may (Mighty Copper), hero of Anu, frighten him with its (text: your) voice.” The use of -ka, the 2 nd person singular possessive suffix, may refer to the sound produced by the exorcist (to whom the ritual instructions are addressed) when he hits the copper. 22 In this instance, Mighty Copper would be a secondary agent; the primary agent would then be the great god An. Secondary agents function as media in the cult and facilitate the communication between the human realm and the divine sphere. A secondary agent is a clue to the presence of the deity (statue, symbol or celestial body), see Pongratz-Leisten 2011: 137– 187, 146–148; also Gell 1998: 7.

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great minister of Enki, takes care of its appearance with a great sense of art (l. 1′–23′): en2 urudu-kalag-ga hur-sag-ta du3-a … (break) … 1′ [dNi]n-a2-gal […]: dMIN […] / šu ku3-ga-a-ni-ta mu-ni-in-sa5 x […]: a-na qa-t[i]-šu […] / 5′ gir4 udun sikil-la […]-ra mu-n[i?- …]: ana ki-i-ri u ú-tu-[ni ] el-lu? […] / nig2-nam nig2-gal2-la ug3 šar2-ra […]: mim-ma šum-šu meš-re-e kiš-šat ni-ši-šú / dGibil6 za-gin3-na geš-nu11 g[al: 10′ dMIN el-lu nu-[ú-ru ] ra-bu- ú š[á dA]-nim / urudunig2-kalag-ga im-du3-a […] x: MIN-ú pi-tiq e-ri-i […] / urudu nig2-kalag-ga še-e[r-zi? ...]: MIN-ú […] / 15′ x [x a2 ]-kuš2-u3 zi u[g3? ...]: [x (x)] ma-na-ha-ti-šú na-piš-tu x […] / [… ma]h gal-la kig2 galam-ma x […]: [… -r]i ṣi-riš ra-biš a-na ši-p[ir] / [ni-kil]-ti in-né-ep-pu-u[š ] / 20′ [ dAra su]kkal mah nun gal dEn-ki-ke4: [ dUs-m]u [SUKKAL] ṣi-ru šá ru-bé-e GAL-e dÉ-a / [… k]u3-ga eš3 mah im-mi3-in-du8-du8: […] x x el-li É ṣi-ri ú-za-in-šú / [… su d]ingir-re-e-ne-ke4 tum2-ma: 25′ [ana ṭub-b]a-a-ti šir DINGIR.MEŠ ú-šá-lik-šú Mighty Copper made in/from the moutain (…) Ninagal, in his pure hand he delivered … In the pure oven and kiln … Everything, riches of the totality of people. Gibil, the pure, the great Light (of An ?) … Mighty Copper, the creation … Mighty Copper … toil, life of the people … august, awesome, accomplished work … Ara, the great secretary of the great prince Enki, … the pure, he adorned the great shrine with it. … [to make] the gods happy (lit. ‘to … the flesh of the gods), he made it (Mighty Copper) suitable. (Schramm 2008: 100–102, l. 1–25’)

After this invocation, the instrument is magically prepared and purified. Its voice will be used to chase the malevolent demon as it is exposed at the end of the incantation. The incantation mentions two different ovens (kīru and utūnu), but no tools such as hammer or anvil. This could indicate that the copper was melted rather than shaped by beating the metal sheet, which would be a point in favor of the identification of Mighty Copper as a kind of bell. With this mythological creation, Mighty Copper is no longer a simple instrument made by human hands but a form of supernatural assistance. Mighty Copper belongs to the mythological and cosmic world and, as an animate entity, holds a terrific and efficient power thanks to its voice and its melammu, embodied in the auditory and visual effects when the instrument is played during the ritual. Major studies in the field of Mesopotamian religion show that a divine entity did not need to be understood with anthropomorphic features (Porter 2009, 2000; Rochberg 2009; Selz 1997). The particular status of Mighty Copper may be linked to the supernatural nature of other musical instruments, such as the kettledrum (lilissu) or the harp (balag), based on their particular role during the ritual by producing specific sounds (Livingstone 2007: 104). Following Barbara Porter and Gebhard Selz, musical instruments such as drums were considered or identified as divine not only by the presence of the dingir determinative, but also by receiving offerings or being the property of a god. In his in-

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quiry regarding cultural materials of the third millennium, Selz (1997: 168) shows that, even in those early periods, images and objects can be understood as representations of divine powers, and, in that way, can be treated as independent entities. He understands “cultic object” as a designation of an object that is worshipped, and that plays a role in a religious ceremony. The objects were considered to be divine and several factors may explain the deification of the musical instruments (such as the harp or the drum). Selz suggests the following main factors: First of all, their highly-impressive appearance is a factor, as we can gather from the pieces exhibited in the British Museum. Given the great importance Sumerian literary documents ascribe to the ‘awe-inspiring’ appearance of gods, men and objects, this fact should certainly not be underestimated. Secondly, music is not only for the pleasure of man and god, it also creates a means of communication between our world and the realm of the divine. It is evidently due to this that music and musical instruments feature regularly in the context of death and afterlife. (Selz 1997: 174)

To this, one may add the powerful visual and auditory effects produced in making Mighty Copper resound. With a voice and a melammu, Mighty Copper seems to be alive and powerful. Especially in the ritual context, the divine and the human worlds are not separated but merge with one another (Guthrie 1993: 190–91). Cult objects and paraphernalia play an important role in the interaction with the gods. Anthropomorphism must not be limited to a visual aspect of the imagined agent but can be applied to different cultic objects or images that are understood as animated entities (Pongratz-Leisten and Sonik, this volume; Pongratz-Leisten 2011: 143). In the work of Alfred Gell (1998), an agent is one able to initiate causal events in his/her/its environment; its origin can only be explained by mental states (intentions) and not by a state of the physical world. Images, then, may be treated as persons in cults and ceremonies. Cognitive theories of religion and anthropology highlight the sensory dimension of divine agency. An agent must be heard or seen.23 Todd Tremlin (2006: 76) suggests the following definition to distinguish between agent and object: Agents are not to be confused with objects, which, from the perspectives of both ontology and cognition, are very different things. Objects are all the things that exist but can only respond to the world, if they respond at all, in purely mechanistic ways. Objects include everything from natural things like rocks and sticks to common animate things like plants and trees to human-made artifacts like clothes and catapults. Agents, on the other hand, are beings capable of independently and intentionally initiating action on the basis of

23 This idea was also suggested by Barrett (2000) in his discussion of a Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device.

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internal mental states like beliefs and desires […] Objects are predictable and generally harmless once understood. Agents are unpredictable and capable of dangerous and exploitive behaviors or of offering personal benefits like food, sex, and protection.

In attributing agency, human minds try to give sense to any event happening in their surroundings. Agents have minds and feelings; they are intentional and occupy our whole environment. Anything suspected of agency through our senses is identified by the human mind as a trace or sign of a presence. In that context, noise and luminous effects (especially shadow and darkness) play an important role (Tremlin 2006: 77). In the case of Mighty Copper, the frightful noise produced and heard by the patient and the exorcist was understood as the voice of a supernatural agent, fighting on the side of the exorcist against the malevolent demon. At the particular moment of the ritual, Mighty Copper is no longer a simple object but an agent, acting on its own but under An’s command. The ritual scene and gestures transcend the ordinary use of the instrument and make the action efficacious and “sacred” with the presence of the great gods (Tremlin 2006: 167). The ritual instructions presented in this paper may suggest a concrete solution found by the exorcists for a ritual that could not be performed in the temples or the shrines but only in private contexts. Bringing the bell and making it resound loudly in the house of the patient (it is easy to transport to the ritual scene and it does not need typical musical knowledge), the ritual protocol assists the exorcist in setting up or materializing a supernatural image or presence.24 With its frightful and powerful voice, its awe-inspiring radiance, and its epithet, Mighty Copper is no longer a human hand-made bell but has come to belong to the divine world. In the ritual scene, it is already a benevolent agent, with a concrete and tangible presence, embodied in the ritual instrument. Mighty Copper is not introduced as an object, then, but as an animate entity. The materiality of this particular agency constitutes the dramatic peak of the ritual. The visual and noisy effects involved in the magical procedures have a real emotional and psychological effect on the patient. His whole body is invested through his senses in this extraordinary meeting. Seeing the arrival of Mighty Copper, the patient hears its loud and particular voice and sees its terrific awe-inspiring radiance. Mighty Copper lets its frightful cry resound loudly all over the bedroom.25 Its melammu reflects itself on the body of the bed24 For an example of this from a context relating to witchcraft, see Abusch and Schwemer 2011: 22. 25 Producing loud or strange noises will chase away demons or purify the scene where the ritual takes place. Musical instruments (like the reed-pipe embubu) are also employed for the efficacious sounds they produce, see Rendu Loisel 2011.

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ridden patient, directly on the malevolent demon present in the body. During the exorcistic procedure, Mighty Copper is also invested with intention, responsiveness, and goal-directedness, becoming a fully conscious entity. Going further, it is possible that a specific ritual was accomplished for the “deification” of the copper bell after its human creation. A ritual of mīs pî, “opening of the mouth”, could also have been performed as it was for the kettledrum lilissu (Selz 1997: 178, n. 37). If this was the case, it is possible that Mighty Copper should be understood as an autonomous agent possessing some degree of divinity rather than a secondary agent.

Acknowledgments I express my gratitude to Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Karen Sonik for giving me the opportunity to present my researches. I also want to thank my colleagues Dahlia Shehata and Emmert Clevenstine for their remarks. This paper would not have been the same without the useful comments and remarks of Markham J. Geller and Strahil V. Panayatov. May they both be warmly thanked.

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Index abstract 5, 36, 51, 139, 198 acropolis 45, 46, 60 Adad 54, 113, 121, 123, 217, 218 Adad-apla-iddina 28, 165, 166, 171 Adad-shumu-usur 145 aesthetic(s) 15, 18, 19, 20, 26, 42, 46, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 97, 114, 115, 117, 147, 163, 172, 176, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186, 193 aestheticization 13, 18, 19 affordances 4, 59, 62 agency vii, viii, ix, 3, 4, 7–9, 12–14, 16–24, 31, 33, 35, 36, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64–68, 70–72, 78, 79, 82, 83, 89, 90, 92–98, 101, 104–107, 109, 100, 111, 112, 114–117, 119–127, 137, 138– 140, 155, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 169, 171, 181, 186, 199, 211, 214, 222, 223, 225, 226 – distributed agency 21, 22, 104, 119, 121, 138 – secondary agency 20 agent(s) viii, 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32, 36, 37, 51, 53, 54, 89, 93, 95, 102, 104, 106, 110, 120, 121, 122, 138, 139, 195, 211, 213, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224 Ajax 48 alchemy 80, 100, 114 altar 10, 46, 47, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 148 alterity 117, 152, 171, 192 akītu festival 92, 113 Akkadian 8, 12, 25, 54, 58, 97, 114, 116, 146, 152, 155, 157, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173, 176, 177, 178, 182, 184, 185, 186, 189, 198, 201, 205, 209, 210, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220 allegory 136, 139 amuletic necklaces 107 An (Anu) 122, 132, 152, 220 Angim / An-gim 128, 184, 219, 225 aniconic 9, 22, 23, 45, 46, 48, 51 aniconicity 20

animal(s) 24, 31, 36, 44, 56, 80, 108, 110, 111, 125, 126, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 155, 157, 169, 178, 217, 218 animate(d) 3, 6, 8, 10–16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 42, 51, 60, 64, 70, 71, 72, 78, 80, 82, 83, 89, 90, 93, 107, 109, 111, 112, 128, 132, 138, 157, 164, 212, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222, 223 animation vii, 1, 10, 12, 16, 22, 24, 28, 51, 70, 72, 78, 80, 159 anomaly 152 anomalous 157 anthropomorphic vii, viii, 3, 7, 13, 16, 23, 24, 28, 30–32, 34, 37, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 64, 65, 70, 71, 80, 81, 111, 116, 120, 121, 122, 127, 138, 140, 144–147, 152, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162, 164, 167–171, 178, 180, 181, 189, 191, 197, 205, 221, 226 – anthropomorphism vii, viii, 1, 7, 17, 18, 20, 24, 36, 38, 42, 45, 51, 59, 70–72, 80, 83, 142, 144, 158–161, 222 – Anthropomorphite 143, 185, 189 – anthropomorphized 142, 144, 181 – anthropomorphizing vii, 36, 37, 47, 51, 143, 144, 146 – anthropomorphization 37, 51 Anzu(d) 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 137, 153, 158 Aphou of Oxyrhyncus 144 Apollo 48 apotropaic 74, 94, 107, 115, 128, 136, 215, 216, 218 Ara 220, 221 Archaic Period (Greece) 45 archive(s) 140, 184, 189, 191, 198, 199, 210, 225 Artemis 46, 47 Asakku 128, 130, 131, 135, 136 Asalluhi 211, 213, 220 ascending posture 157, 178 Assur 63, 125, 128, 129, 131–133, 182, 184, 218, 226

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Index

Assyria(n) 38, 55, 58, 62, 65, 68, 92, 97, 105, 112, 113, 115, 116, 121, 125, 129, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 148, 163, 168, 177, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 210, 212, 224, 225, 226 – Middle Assyrian Period 148, 212, 225 – Neo-Assyrian Period 38, 105, 115, 116, 121, 132, 140, 144, 145, 148, 163, 168, 177, 186, 189, 191, 192, 193, 225 astral 31, 116, 122, 123, 124, 125, 157, 169, 170 astralization 65, 116, 137, 140, 226 astrology 80, 187 Athena 9, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 61, 62, 63 – Athena Parthenos 9, 42, 43, 45, 46 – Athena Polias 9, 45, 46, 61 attribute(s) 13, 20, 21, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 42, 50, 53, 82, 110, 125, 126, 127, 138, 149, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 166, 168, 169, 173, 178, 181 Augustus 25, 26, 63, 69 authentic(ity) 145, 180, 185 authoritative (image) viii, 12, 14, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 48, 101, 142, 145, 164, 165, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178–181 – authoritative image(s) 24, 30, 142, 172, 173 authorized (image) viii, 28, 30, 31, 32, 48, 72, 142, 145, 165, 172, 181 axis mundi 137 ba 12 Babylonia 30, 55, 60, 113, 116, 117, 130, 136, 141, 159, 165, 183, 185, 191, 212, 227 – Old Babylonian Period 31, 54, 93, 109, 114, 158, 163, 168, 173, 175, 177, 184, 192, 212, 213, 217 Babylonian 24, 28, 29, 31, 54, 61, 65, 66, 68, 93, 109, 114, 115, 121, 122, 125, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 144, 152, 155, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 212, 213, 217, 224, 225 Ba’u 161 beauty 38, 42, 58, 59 Behistun 176

Bel 145, 201, 214, 217 body viii, 9, 10, 12, 20, 21, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 52, 55–57, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 92, 93, 107, 113, 119–139, 140, 142, 152, 155, 157, 158, 168, 183, 191, 192, 193, 204, 213, 214, 215, 216, 220, 223, 224 – bodyscape 122, 123, 126, 139 Body Description Text(s) 119, 121, 127, 128– 139 Bonaventure 81 bread(s) vii, 10, 16, 51, 70–77, 81–83, 202, 203 Bronze Age ix, 197, 198, 200, 209, 210 Browe, Peter 70, 71, 76, 77, 79, 84 Buddhist 13, 14, 19, 23, 28, 31, 58, 59, 63, 67, 180 Byzantine 15, 55, 58, 59 canon 173, 192 carnelian 91, 92, 93, 106, 108, 109, 136 Cassandra (Rape of) 48 Cassian, John 142, 143, 144, 185, 190, 191 celestial 20, 36, 54, 65, 120, 121, 125, 135, 137, 138, 139, 187, 220, 226 – celestial body 20, 120, 121, 135, 137, 138, 139, 220 – celestial bodies 20, 54, 125, 138, 226 – celestial phenomena 36 censer 106, 215, 220 chaos 126, 131, 132, 139 charis 42, 50 Christ 10, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 189 Christianity 21, 71, 72, 76, 80, 85, 106, 144 chryselephantine 9, 10, 12, 42, 43, 44, 45, 62 city-state(s) 149, 150 civilization(s) 14, 19, 57, 64, 68, 110, 117, 135, 138, 140, 145, 146, 150, 158, 173, 174, 178, 182, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193, 209 Classical Period (Greece) 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50 cognition 3–6, 56, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 222 cognitive vii, viii, x, 3, 5, 11, 17, 24, 25, 27, 31, 33, 34, 35, 51, 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 64, 70, 72, 83, 84, 85, 89, 97, 101, 102,

Index

103, 120, 144, 145, 155, 185, 222, 224, 227 – cognitive recognition 25, 27, 31, 34, 155 – cognitive referent 34 – cognitive science(s) vii, x, 3, 17, 51, 55, 56, 59, 72, 85, 224 – cognitive science of religion 3, 17, 85 – cognitive scientists 72, 83 Colette of Corbie 80, 85 combat myth(s) 119, 128–132, 135–138 commodities 14, 52, 54, 61, 89, 136 communication 10, 20, 23, 33, 35, 36, 50– 53, 61, 65, 119, 120, 121, 161, 197–198, 205–209, 220, 222 composite divine 6 composition(s) viii, 48, 92, 93, 99, 100, 105, 110, 123, 127, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 152, 155, 157, 158, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173–178, 185, 192 consecrate(d) 16, 28, 72, 78, 79, 80, 82, 106, 107, 108, 109, 161, 162, 203 consecration 6, 13, 22, 55, 59, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 106, 166, 183, 200, 202, 206 constellation 20, 25, 132, 161, 181 copper ix, 99, 100, 108, 109, 211–224, 226 copper bell ix, 211, 212, 224, 226 cornel wood 106 corporeal 152 – corporeal coding 152 – corporeal hybridity 152 corporeity 3 craft(ed) 8, 9, 30, 56, 98, 114, 139, 150, 166, 168, 172, 180, 182, 184, 187, 220 crafting viii, 8, 22, 30, 94, 95, 102, 161, 165, 170, 171, 172, 173, 180, 181 crucifix(es) 72, 79 Crucifixion 72 cult(s) viii, ix, 8, 9, 12, 23, 24, 28, 30–32, 38, 42, 45–48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64, 68, 79, 83, 90, 92, 93, 102, 103, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 125, 133, 135, 138, 142, 145, 146, 150, 158, 159, 161, 164–173, 180– 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 189, 192, 207, 209, 210, 220, 222, 226 – cult statue(s) viii, ix, 8, 9, 12, 23, 24, 30– 32, 38, 42, 45–48, 50, 56, 60, 62, 64,

231

92, 93, 102, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 116, 142, 145, 146, 150, 158, 159, 161, 164– 173, 180–182, 184, 186, 189 cultic 6, 7, 12, 31, 34, 42, 45, 46, 90, 91, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105, 114, 119–121, 128– 132, 135, 136, 137, 140, 162, 173, 210, 222 – cultic object(s) 222 – cultic practice(s) 34, 42, 45, 121 – cultic calendar(s) 114, 119, 128, 130, 210 – cultic commentary(ies) 128, 129, 131, 132, 140 cultural viii, ix, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 82, 101, 105, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 127, 128, 133, 136, 145, 150, 155, 163, 173, 174, 175, 177, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 192, 209, 222 – cultural biography 14, 59, 61, 186 – cultural continuum 174 – cultural knowledge 6, 12, 54, 120, 121, 127, 155 – cultural learning 32 – cultural memory 6, 11, 119, 120, 126, 128, 182 culture(s) vii, 3, 4, 6, 11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 36, 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 76, 79, 80, 83, 85, 90, 93, 100, 103, 116, 118, 120, 140, 150, 173, 176, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 193, 210, 211, 226 cuneiform 60, 66, 69, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 147, 183, 184, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 199, 212, 225, 226, 227 Curse of Agade 170, 184 dadag 103 Dagan ix, 23, 123, 197–209 daimon 150, 155, 167, 214 darshan 13 Dauerwunder 70, 74, 76, 80, 81 deified entities 111 deified objects 105 deities viii, 9, 37, 38, 54, 91, 103, 105, 110, 111, 122, 155, 162, 178, 181, 188, 189, 197, 198, 216, 217, 220, 226

232

Index

deity viii, ix, 13, 42, 50, 64, 65, 91, 101, 109, 111, 116, 122, 126, 137, 140, 142, 145, 148, 155, 168, 179, 181, 182, 189, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204, 207, 220, 226 demon(s) 54, 141, 154, 188, 191, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227 demonic 21, 171, 211, 213 – demonic affliction 214 – demonic attack 213, 214, 218 – demonic deeds 213 – demonic entity(ies) 211, 214 – demonic hand 21 – demonic possession 214 desacralization 13, 20 Descent of Inana 93 Descent of Ishtar 93 devotion(al) 15, 16, 32, 35, 61, 70, 75, 78, 79, 80, 84, 161, 187, 198 dingir 111, 112, 221 – dingir determinative 111, 221 Dionysus 46, 47 distributed agency 21, 22, 104, 119, 121, 138 distributed cognition 4 divinatory 61, 121, 199 divine vii, viii, ix, 1, 3, 5–16, 20–24, 27, 28, 30–37, 42, 44–48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 87, 89, 91–94, 96, 97, 100–108, 110–117, 119–122, 124, 126–128, 131, 134–140, 142–146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 155, 157–159, 161, 162, 164–176, 178– 183, 186, 189, 190–192, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204–208, 211–215, 218– 224, 226 – divine agency vii, viii, ix, 3, 33, 35, 36, 51, 53, 54, 65, 79, 82, 83, 104, 112, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 137, 138, 139, 140, 158, 165, 181, 199, 211, 214, 222, 226 – divine body(scape) viii, 20, 21, 31, 119, 121, 122, 128, 134, 139, 140, 142, 168 – divine bodies viii, 197, 198 – divine image(s) 3, 8, 9, 12, 28, 31, 45, 47, 48, 55, 58, 64, 115, 127, 142, 145, 161, 162, 164, 165, 171, 172, 180–182, 183, , 186, 189, 197, 199

– divine statue(s) 12, 47, 50, 90, 91, 92, 93, 107, 136, 158, 161, 208 – divine weapon 158 diviner 124, 198, 199, 204, 210 divinity 6, 7, 10, 14, 15, 20, 21, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 42, 44, 50, 53, 54, 56, 62, 65, 89, 90, 94, 96, 98, 102, 103, 105, 111, 112, 120–127, 132, 135, 137–139, 152, 155, 157, 159, 161, 169, 181, 182, 188, 209, 224, 226 Dodekatheon 45 Ea 155, 156, 213, 215, 220 Eanna Precinct 147 Egypt(ian) 12, 19, 25, 34, 55, 58, 62, 63, 67, 113, 116, 117, 142, 143, 157, 181, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Elamite 130, 136, 161, 174, 176, 177 ellu 97, 98, 103 Emar ix, 23, 197–209, 210, 212 emblem(atic) 46, 50, 93, 110, 125, 126, 146, 158, 160, 167, 183 Enki 150, 155, 213, 215, 217, 220, 221 enliven(ed) 8 Enuma elish 24, 96, 129, 131, 132, 135, 152, 155, 178 epiphanic 10, 46, 50, 171, 179 – epiphanic arrival 10, 46, 171, 179 – epiphanic experience 46, 50 epiphany 32, 50, 56, 59, 65, 168, 170, 189 Ereshkigal 215 Esarhaddon 145, 184 etiological narrative 213 Eucharist vii, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83 Eucharistic 50, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83 Euphrates 167, 168, 171, 199, 200 evil 141, 211, 213, 215, 217, 225, 227 exorcism 211, 224 exorcist 211–224 exorcistic ix, 211–224, 225 extispicy 123, 124, 170 eye(s) ix, 12, 13, 18, 23, 28, 31, 33, 52, 56, 57, 58, 62, 68, 80, 122, 133, 134, 135, 143, 152, 163, 180, 193, 197, 205, 207, 209, 210, 214, 215 face(s) ix, 12, 23, 26, 31, 59, 72, 84, 90, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133, 155, 165, 166, 171, 172, 180, 197–209, 210, 225

Index

233

feast 79, 81, 84, 195, 199, 200, 203, 204, 206, 207 festival viii, ix, 45, 92, 113, 116, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 219 flame 214 flesh vii, 16, 20, 51, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 133, 134, 152, 221 food 16, 51, 70, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 103, 135, 137, 204, 223 food stuff(s) 16, 51, 71, 81, 82 foundation deposit(s) 91, 105, 108, 109, 114 framework(s) ix, 5, 8, 17, 19, 20, 51–54, 120, 121, 122, 124, 127, 138, 145, 205 Francis of Assisi 81 Fourth Lateran Council 76, 77, 84

Heraclitus 47 Herakles 48, 49, 62 Hermes 46, 47 Hindu 13, 14, 23, 57, 180, 185 horned headdress 157 host(s) 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85 host desecration 74 holy / holiness vii, viii, 16, 34, 51, 52, 66, 70, 71, 72, 76, 78, 82, 83, 84, 89, 95– 104, 106, 107, 109–112, 116, 226 hulā[lu-stone] 106 Huwawa 155, 158, 178, 185 hybridity 152 hymn(s) 75, 85, 110, 115, 116, 119, 121–124, 130, 133, 137, 139, 147, 173, 174, 225, 226 Hymn to Ninurta as Sirius 122, 123, 124, 139

gaze ix, 13, 20, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66, 180, 205, 209, 210 genii 214 genius 9, 64, 68, 69, 220 genre(s) 56, 119, 122, 128, 147, 174, 184, 186, 192, 227 Gerald of Wales 74, 76, 84 Gibil 220, 221 Gilgamesh 68, 152, 155, 158, 166, 171, 173, 174, 178, 186, 193, 210 Gilgamesh and Huwawa A 155, 158, 178 Girra 220 Girra and Elamatum 135 Girsu 110 god list(s) 122 gold viii, 11, 12, 17, 39, 42, 69, 78, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96–112 Golden Fleece 108 Gospel of Matthew 75 Greece ix, 9, 12, 23, 25, 38, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 189, 191 Gregory the Great 10, 56, 73, 77 Gregorymass 10, 73 Göttertypentext 119, 121, 125–128, 140 Gudea 27, 68, 114, 127, 140, 152, 164, 170, 185, 191, 192

icon(s) 14, 15, 18, 27, 28, 55, 58, 61, 63, 71, 131, 148, 191 iconic 22, 25, 45, 46, 48, 55, 71, 126, 183 iconicity 20 iconoclasm 15 iconographic 10, 126, 127, 184 iconography 62, 115, 119, 126, 184, 190, 227 iconomachy 15 ideology 58, 63, 65, 68, 114, 163, 173, 174, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 193 – ideological aspect(s) 147 – ideological continuity 173 idol(s) 14, 22, 23, 32, 58, 68, 90, 192 idolatry 14, 15, 22, 144, 161 ilu 8, 172, 181 image(s) vii, viii, 3, 6, 8–28, 30–35, 38, 42, 45–54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 77, 79, 85, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98, 99, 103, 107, 108, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 126, 127, 131, 139, 142–148, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162–182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 197, 198, 199, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 215, 222, 223 immaterial 10, 51, 166, 182 immateriality 4 Inana 31, 93, 107, 147, 148, 149, 155, 217 inanimate 3, 11, 14, 17, 20, 22, 24, 37, 42, 44, 51, 64, 90, 105, 128, 132, 138, 157, 161, 218

harp 66, 116, 132, 134, 135, 221, 222, 226 headdress 99, 125, 157, 186 Hera 46, 47

234

Index

incantation(s) ix, 99, 107, 132, 141, 147, 174, 211–213, 215, 217–221, 225 index(es) 14, 18, 20, 21, 23 indexical 71, 82 India 12, 13, 57, 58, 68, 117 Inshushinak 176, 177 intentionality 16, 17, 22, 23, 24, 53, 120 interaction vii, viii, 13, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 24, 36, 38, 42, 50, 51, 52, 54, 62, 96, 104, 119, 121, 124, 127, 144, 152, 161, 166, 180, 189, 197, 198, 204, 208, 209, 222 Iphigeneia 46 Ishtar 31, 38, 93, 107, 115, 129, 151, 155, 156, 157, 218 ivory 42 John the Deacon 73 justice 124, 138, 169 kakku 158 kalam 150 kettle drum 134, 216 Khafaje 108, 109 king(s) 7, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37, 38, 58, 61, 62, 64, 68, 74, 116, 128, 129, 131, 132, 136, 145–149, 151, 152, 156, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176–180, 184, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192, 200, 225 kingship 26, 27, 58, 62, 66, 114, 116, 117, 122, 132, 140, 174, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191 Kish 173 ku3 96–98, 101 ku3-babbar 96, 103, 104, 105, 110 ku3-sig17 96, 103 kug 97, 103 kur 150 Lagash 27, 152, 170 Lamashtu 154, 218 Lament for Sumer and Ur 150, 161, 167 lapis lazuli 11, 42, 68, 91, 92, 93, 95, 106, 108, 109, 110, 117, 136, 168, 187, 193 law 47, 158, 168, 174, 176, 177, 190, 201, 218 legitimate 8, 9, 15, 22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 48, 54, 144, 145, 164, 165, 167, 173, 181

legitimized 28 lexical 111, 112, 114, 122, 128, 133, 162, 217 – lexical list(s) 122, 162 – lexical tradition 133 life history 5 light 69, 83, 95, 98, 99, 103, 117, 118, 178, 218, 219, 221 likeness vii, 3, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 33, 50, 55, 56, 64, 71, 72, 120, 140, 142, 143, 145, 162, 183, 186, 189, 197, 226 Lisi 220 liturgical 13, 59, 77 Lives of the Fathers 73 living image(s) 8, 13, 159 Lugale / Lugal-e 128, 155, 158, 161 Lullubi 176 luminescence 208 luminous 42, 218, 223 magical viii, 12, 18, 22, 42, 89, 90, 91, 94, 105, 107, 108, 109, 115, 213, 214, 215, 218, 220, 221, 223 manifest(ed) 13, 37, 42, 50, 72, 76, 79, 138, 152, 162, 167, 219 manifestation(s) 12, 20, 21, 32, 35, 50, 54, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 110, 178, 205 Maqlû 215, 224, 226 Marduk 25, 123, 128, 130, 131, 136, 137, 140, 145, 152, 167, 211, 213, 220 Marguerite of Oingt 81, 85 mass vii, 10, 56, 73, 75, 77, 78, 84 maštakal 215 mastery posture 157 material(s) vii–ix, 3–10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 42, 50, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70–83, 84, 85, 87, 89–112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 127, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 144, 146, 149, 150, 152, 161, 162, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 188, 193, 197, 198, 199, 208, 211, 215, 222, 225 material culture vii, 4, 6, 52, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 85, 90, 93, 118, 188 material divine vii–ix, 1, 3, 70, 71, 74, 82, 144, 182

Index

materiality vii–ix, 3–6, 19, 24, 33, 35, 36, 50, 51, 53, 55–57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 68, 70, 80, 84, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96, 102, 103, 113, 115, 120, 142, 197, 199, 211, 214, 223 matrix / matrices 3, 8, 9, 11, 23, 30, 35, 51, 53, 148 matter vii, 3–8, 11, 12, 16, 22, 24, 35, 51, 52, 59, 62, 68, 70–72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 90, 103, 108, 115, 136, 138, 142, 146, 149, 164, 166, 175 me 101 meaning(s) 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 32, 33, 46, 52, 59, 60, 61, 97, 98, 105, 128, 132, 137, 143, 145, 164, 175, 186, 193, 199, 217, 218 medieval 7, 13, 21, 23, 25, 32, 34, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 67, 70–83, 84, 85, 180, 185, 190, 191 memoria 35 memory vii, 5, 6, 11, 16, 21, 35, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 64, 68, 119, 120, 126, 128, 173, 174, 182, 185 mental(ly) vii, viii, 4, 5, 6, 17, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 50, 89, 90, 99, 104, 120, 127, 144, 149, 162, 214, 222, 223 – mental conceptualization(s) viii, 149 – mental content(s) 5 – mental image(s) viii, 33, 34, 35, 120, 144 melammu 120, 218, 221, 222, 223 metamorphosis / metamorphoses 23, 41, 42, 44, 56, 66, 72, 78, 80, 184 methodological philistinism 18, 19 Micrococcus prodigiosus 71 Middle Ages vii, ix, 9, 10, 16, 32, 50, 56, 61, 66, 70–83, 84, 85, 102, 106, 113, 126 Mighty Copper ix, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216– 224 mimesis 3, 10, 24, 28, 35, 45, 117, 119, 126, 141, 142, 144, 162, 163, 185, 186, 192 mimetic 14, 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 33, 120, 163, 181 miracle(s) 13, 32, 50, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 mis pî 8, 9, 12, 68, 91, 106, 107, 117, 159, 164, 171, 181, 192, 210, 224 monster(s) 13, 31, 54, 66, 120, 127, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 155, 169, 178, 191, 210, 219 muššulu 146

235

myth(s) 38, 42, 46, 56, 59, 108, 114, 115, 119, 122, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 185, 187, 191, 225 mythic tradition 121 mythological 34, 115, 128, 136, 140, 147, 174, 213, 219, 220, 221, 226 – mythological creation 220, 221 – mythological explanation 128 – mythological narrative 34, 174 mythologize 131 mythologizing 128, 136 mythology 60, 66, 131, 132, 140, 189, 191 Nabu 128 Nabu-apla-iddina 24, 28, 30, 32, 69, 165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 179, 180, 193 namburbi ritual 106, 107 namburbû 215, 216 Namtar 214–216 Naram-Sin 152, 157, 176, 177, 193 narû 66, 160, 162, 191 naturalism 80, 162, 163, 187 naturalistic 42, 45, 82, 163 Neo-Assyrian 38, 105, 115, 116, 121, 132, 140, 144, 145, 148, 163, 168, 177, 186, 189, 191, 192, 193, 225 netherworld 116, 123, 124, 135, 136, 166, 171, 215 netronmilana 13 Nicholas of Cusa 81, 85 Ninagal 220, 221 Ningirimma 220 Ningirsu 127, 131, 170 Ninurta 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 155, 158, 161, 184, 219, 225 Ninurta and the Stones 128, 131, 135, 155, 158, 161 Nisaba 122, 220 noble metal(s) 100 noise ix, 211, 217, 218, 219, 223, 224 noisy 211, 223 Nudimmud 9, 152 Nuska 218 oath(s) 54, 121, 158 object(s) 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 32, 33, 35,

236

Index

36, 37, 44, 46, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103–112, 117, 120, 125, 128, 133, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143, 148, 155, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 172, 176, 178, 193, 198, 199, 205, 207, 211, 218, 222, 223 objectivist 5 Octavian 25 official image 26, 27 Old Akkadian (Period) 152, 155, 157, 163, 165, 166, 169, 176, 177, 178 Old Babylonian (Period) 31, 54, 93, 109, 114, 158, 163, 168, 173, 175, 177, 184, 192, 212, 213, 217 Olympian Zeus xv, 9, 42, 44, 48, 55 omen compendia 36 omina 65, 122 omnipresence 36 omniscience 36 ontological 24, 36, 77 opening of the mouth 12, 65, 159, 162, 171, 224 opening the eyes 13, 28, 68 Orestes 47, 48 Other(s) 152, 157, 158, 180 outsider(s) 152, 155, 157, 180 Pabilsag 122 palladium 100 Panathenaic Festival 45, 62 pantheon 122, 183 parade 200, 203, 204, 207 Parthenos 9, 42, 43, 45, 46 Paschasius Radbertus 73 Passover 75, 81, 82 Passover meal 82 patron(s) 9, 62, 63, 67, 149, 150, 155, 158, 167, 176 patron god(s) 149, 150, 155, 158, 167, 176 perception viii, 17, 18, 50, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 64, 67, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 163, 185, 188, 189 performative 6, 104, 162 period eye 33, 52, 62 person(s) 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 36, 37, 53, 63, 67, 71, 78,

79, 95, 107, 108, 121, 131, 138, 148, 163, 164, 205, 222 personhood 13, 21, 22, 60, 68, 104 Pheidias 9, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48 Photinus 143 physiognomy / physiognomic 14, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 122, 128, 152, 164, 181 pictorial viii, ix, 5, 13, 26, 31, 33, 37, 38, 42, 55, 57, 66, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 157, 158, 159, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 185, 189, 191 – pictorial stream of tradition viii, 31, 142, 172, 173, 177 – pictorial representation(s) 26, 33, 38, 189 pilgrimage 61, 70, 74, 79, 81, 85, 208 pīt pî 8, 12, 159, 164 Plato 47 Pleiades 122–123 Polias 9, 45, 46, 61 polytheistic 14, 66, 191 popular magic 94, 105 portrait 8, 12, 24, 25, 26, 30, 56, 58, 62, 64, 67, 68, 152, 162, 173, 189, 193 portraiture 3, 25, 27, 53, 60, 66, 121, 140 prayer(s) 10, 13, 34, 35, 47, 48, 73, 103, 107, 115, 137, 142, 143, 144, 147, 174, 185 precious metal(s) 42, 92, 96, 98, 100, 110, 116, 136, 158 presence(d) vii, viii, ix, 3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 24, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 59, 67, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 97, 110, 112, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 142, 145, 147, 148, 158, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 181, 183, 197, 198, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211, 212, 218, 220, 221, 223 presencing viii, 8, 10–11, 21–23, 33, 35, 51, 119, 121, 138, 161, 164, 166, 167, 172 presentation(s) 12, 21, 24, 27, 28, 42, 142, 162, 165, 199, 212, 213 presentification 45, 67 presenting 10, 11, 22, 23, 24, 33 priest(s) 64, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 103, 170, 180, 184, 189, 211, 215, 220 priestess(es) 37, 46, 93, 116, 117, 147, 209, 226 priest-king 148–149

Index

procession(s) 32, 78, 85, 129, 198–207 Protestant Reformation 15 prototype(s) 14, 15, 18, 27, 28, 66, 116, 142, 162, 164, 178, 179 pure 11, 12, 51, 95, 97–107, 171, 185, 202, 220, 221 purification 92, 106, 108, 121, 135, 171, 172, 214, 215, 216, 219 purify(ing) 102, 106, 107, 201, 215, 223 purity 12, 89, 95, 97–107, 136 Qingu 128, 129, 136, 140 qualitative 24 Quattrocento 34 relic(s) 15, 16, 20, 21, 28, 32, 51, 64, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78, 85 relief(s) 24, 30–32, 148, 162, 168, 176, 178, 179, 180, 185, 186, 189 representation(s) vii, viii, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, 22, 24–27, 32–36, 38, 42, 45, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 71, 80, 96, 113, 115, 116, 126, 127, 140, 143, 146–149, 152, 157, 158, 162, 163, 168, 170, 175, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 197–199, 219, 222, 226 reproduction 28, 58, 94 resemblance 14, 25, 26, 28, 32 Return of Ninurta to Nippur 128, 184, 219, 225 rigmu 217, 218 rite(s) 23, 47, 70, 73, 75, 84, 108, 129, 199– 203, 206–209, 210 ritual(s) ix, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 20, 22, 24, 28, 30, 45, 55, 58, 59, 61, 65, 67, 68, 70– 82, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 128, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 140, 147, 159, 162, 166, 171, 182, 183, 190, 192, 197–205, 208– 224, 225, 226, 227 Rome 7, 9, 25, 58, 64, 189 royal 14, 25, 26, 27, 43, 62, 68, 101, 109, 110, 113, 114, 115, 131, 139, 140, 147, 152, 159, 162, 164, 166, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 185, 187, 191, 192, 193, 200, 210, 218, 225 – royal ideology 173

237

sacral vii, 6–12, 17, 20, 22, 42, 91 sacrality 72, 82, 84, 113 sacrament 75, 76 sacramentals 72 sacred vii, viii, 6–8, 12–16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 27, 46, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61, 64, 65, 67, 75, 83, 85, 89–112, 117, 148, 167, 171, 173, 180, 181, 197, 198, 204, 205, 208, 209, 223 sacredness 89, 92, 94–112, 136 ṣalmu 12, 142, 145, 146, 162–164, 166, 168, 171, 172, 179, 181, 184 Sarapion 34, 35, 142–144, 185 Sar-i Pol 176 šaššārum 158, 159 schema 5, 53 schemata 5, 53, 56 scheme(s) 35, 53, 127, 213 scribal scholarship 173 scribal training 173, 175 scribe(s) 173, 174, 198, 204, 209 seal(s) 31, 38, 149, 153, 155, 156, 157, 159, 177, 178, 184, 189 secularization 13, 20 Semele 44 semi-precious stone 12, 109, 136 shadow(s) 146, 223 Shamash 28, 30, 31, 32, 107, 122, 123, 124, 145, 146, 157, 158, 164–173, 176, 178– 180, 218, 220 shrine(s) 42, 47, 79, 198, 200, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 221, 223 Shulgi B 178 Shulgi G 101 Shutruk-Nahhunte 174, 176, 177 signification(s) 54, 148, 171 silver viii, 11, 12, 42, 89–112, 133, 134, 136, 219 Simbar-shipak 30, 167, 179 similitude 12, 25, 27, 28, 72, 126, 135, 144, 164, 175, 219 simulacrum 184 Sin 36, 157 singularization 7 Sippar viii, 28–30, 140, 142, 146, 156, 161, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 177, 179, 212 Sirius 122, 123, 124, 139

238

Index

slate 108 smoke 214–215 standard(s) 54, 120, 121, 138 star-disk 157 statue(s) 80, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 102, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114, 116, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 136, 138, 139, 142, 145, 146, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164–173, 180–182, 184, 186, 189–192, 198, 201, 205, 208, 209, 220 Stele of Hammurabi 58, 168, 174, 176, 177 stele(s) 7, 45, 58, 63, 148, 157, 168, 174, 176, 177, 182, 184 stigmata 79 stream of tradition viii, 31, 142, 172–178, 186 St. Januarius 78 Sternberg 74 subjectivity 22, 58, 209 Sumerian 8, 11, 27, 54, 55, 63, 66, 96, 97, 98, 102, 103, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 128, 133, 135, 147, 155, 161, 162, 167, 171, 173, 178, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 209, 212, 217, 218, 219, 222, 224, 225, 226 Sumerian Temple Hymns 110, 116 sun-disk 24, 30, 32, 167, 169, 181 sun god viii, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 69, 123, 124, 142, 146, 156, 158, 159, 161, 164– 173, 176, 178–181, 193 Sun God Tablet viii, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 69, 142, 146, 164–173, 179–181, 193 šunniru / šurinu 158 supernatural viii, ix, 7, 13, 16, 51, 54, 66, 94, 152, 157, 191, 212, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221, 223, 226 Susa 174, 176, 177, 187, 212 Sutaean(s) 28, 165, 169- 172 symbol(ic) 4, 6, 9, 14, 21, 30, 31, 32, 53, 60, 65, 66, 75, 92, 93, 94, 95, 104, 114, 121, 125, 146, 148, 149, 150, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 167, 169, 176, 181, 182, 189, 190, 191, 192, 210, 218, 220 Syncretic Hymn to Ninurta 122, 137 synesthesia 78 Syria 13, 54, 198, 199, 200, 205, 206, 209, 210

tamarisk 9, 132 tamšīlu 24, 25, 120 temennu 178, 179 temple(s) 20, 28, 30, 37, 42, 46, 47, 48, 60, 65, 91, 92, 94, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 132, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 187, 190, 191, 202, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 223, 226 Temple Oval 108, 109, 114 theology 15, 56, 61, 62, 70, 72, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 102, 110, 131, 143, 183, 187 theomachy 129, 132 Theophilus 15, 143, 144, 191 Theory of Mind (ToM) 17, 51, 62, 63, 65 therianthropic 23, 37, 146, 157 theriomorphic 23, 37, 45, 146, 157 thing(s) vii, viii, 4–12, 14, 16–22, 24, 25, 31, 35, 37, 38, 42, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 76, 78, 79, 83, 84, 95, 96, 99, 106, 113, 120, 132, 135, 138, 139, 145, 163, 169, 171, 181 Tiamat 120, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 140 torch 106, 215, 218 transformation(s) 23, 25, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 70–74, 76, 78–82 transformation miracle(s) 70, 80, 81, 82 transubstantiation 10, 72, 77, 78 trope(s) 35, 131, 175, 177, 178 Tukulti-Ninurta Epic 145, 188 Tukulti-Ninurta I 148 udug hul 212, 217, 225 unconsecrated 16 Ur III 109, 118, 173, 184 urbanization 146, 147, 149, 180 ur-sag 216, 217, 219 Uruk 113, 147, 148, 149, 150, 167, 171, 173, 183, 186, 191, 212, 225, 226 uṣurtu 32, 167, 168, 171, 179 Utu 178 Utu-hegal 178 Utukkū Lemnūtu ix, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225 veiling 198, 201, 204, 205, 206, 208 Venus 157

Index

verisimilitude 26, 163 Victory of Utu-hegal 178 Victory Stele of Naram-Sin 157, 176, 177 visualization 34, 35, 127, 128 visualizer 34 vivified 8 voice(s) 20, 21, 54, 78, 121, 211, 213, , 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223 wafer(s) 74, 77, 81, 82 warfare 18, 136, 138, 147, 155 Warka Vase 147–149 warrior 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 155, 156, 157, 217, 219 warû 218

239

water 72, 106, 107, 156, 214, 215 weapon(s) 31, 54, 74, 121, 125, 127, 131, 155, 157, 158, 169, 218, 220 worldview 105, 122, 147, 152 Wilsnack 79, 82 wine vii, 10, 16, 21, 51, 70–73, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83 Xenophanes 47 Zababa-shuma-iddina 176 Zehdenick 74, 82 Zeus 9, 39, 40, 42, 44, 48, 55 zukru viii, 197–209 Zwischenwesen 54, 66, 191, 214, 226