Steve Watson

The ‘Ur-Nammu Law Code’ is the oldest such collection known, though it is now thought to be the work of Šulgi.[3] It is not a code in our sense but a collection of particular laws which could be of only limited assistance in cases that were not specified. General principles were not given. Since the four examples of early law codes that have survived are each promulgated by a new imperial power, the purpose of these codes may have been no more than to provide a degree of harmonization amongst the law codes of the various regions that now found themselves subject to the one central power. By taking the listed cases as fixed points a provincial judge could align his judgements more nearly to the desires of the central power. On this point, we observe that the law codes of the Semites (e.g. the Amorite Hammurabi) tend to adopt the lex talionis approach, while the codes of the Sumerians (e.g. Ur-Nammu) are more consistently compensatory. This may reflect the generally harsher culture of the more recently settled nomadic Semitic tribes compared to the long-civilised Sumerians.[4]

The legal system was hierarchical and there was a process (unclear to us) by which decisions of lower level courts could be appealed to higher level courts. The lowest level of the justice system was probably a local council which we only see referenced in documents relevant to the appeals process. Above that was a level of judges who, at this time anyway, sat in panels of seven, probably in the temple courtyard or the city gate of a capital city. The specific occupation of Judge is known to exist as early as the Akkadian period,[5] and court records are known from that far back. We also see that the haz?num (mayor) decides much at the local level. Above these judges were probably the ensis and other regional governors. The ensi, of course, had been the original form of sacerdotal rulership in the early ED period and that title had then become customary in many places for the secular rulership. They had doubtless always had a role in dispensing justice, and in the imperial ages that function must have continued relatively unchanged for their respective provinces, except that they were no longer the final court of appeal.  That privilege went to the king.[6]

Apart from the judges themselves, the court also employed a barber; but more importantly there were court officials, called maškim, responsible for organizing the procedures of the courts – oaths, ordeals, punishments, etc. – and for recording what had gone on in a final summary known as a ditilla (‘completed lawsuit.’) From these records we learn that the court process was not adversarial, but rather inquisitorial: the court would try to find the truth of some disputed matter, and the means which they would use were usually, in their general nature, recognisable to us. They could take oral or written testimony from principals or interested parties or witnesses. Oaths would also be administered, to which more weight was given than is usual now. There were also, however, methods not seen in our systems: for example, if the truth about a sorcery, adultery, or homicide case remained uncertain after all other methods had been tried, then a river ordeal was considered a proper final test. In Akkadian times, the river ordeal was also used for trivial matters of debt ownership, but the increasing use of written records for such things meant that decisions could usually be reached by other means.[7]

All the provinces of the core participated in the bala (exchange) institution created by Šulgi in his year 38. Each was required to supply a certain quantity of goods to a bala fund. The kind to be supplied depended upon the province’s specialisations (Lagaš – cereals, Umma – cereals, reeds, timber, etc.,) but it is not recorded that any core provinces were required to supply livestock: that was, seemingly, a duty reserved for the periphery. The quantity depended upon calculations of potential yield made by responsible officials. These dues were in the standard case delivered to centralised collection and distribution points, though they could be delivered directly to some parties who had a standing claim. Once the province had met its obligations to the bala fund it could then withdraw from this fund as it required. The central administration typically distributed a good part of a province’s bala fund within that same province to royal dependents. Actual contributions might differ from those due, in which case the difference would be recorded and a debit or credit carried across. This sytem continued until year 9 of Ibbi-Sin.

Since ED times it had been normal for cities to send offerings and general supplies to the Ekur in Nippur and this custom was regularised in the Ur III system by assigning responsibility for the supply of contributions to various cities of the Land in a regular rotation. The responsibilities were not equally distributed: Lagaš, for example, was required to supply 2 months’ worth, while other cities were assigned one month or a half month only. This responsibility was not assigned to cities in the peripheral regions.[7]

The Outer State

The periphery was also divided into provinces. The overall responsibility for the periphery was vested in the sukkal-mah, or royal chancellor, a court official of Ur, but the actual administration was assigned to officials posted there. In the normal arrangement, each province was governed by a general (šagina,) who was a royal appointee and liable to be temporary in the post, or by a senior captain (nu-banda.) Several of the major core cities, however, were administered by ensis; but this seems to have been merely a terminological difference, since they are seen to be responsible for military affairs in a way that the ensis of the core were not. Each province had a larger settlement that served as the main administrative centre and a number of smaller settlements commanded by a junior captain subordinate to the provincial centre. These military personnel seem, as in the core area, to have been rewarded by the grant of subsistence land holdings on which it is supposed that they raised livestock.

The contributory system of the periphery was also markedly different from the core. Here we are aware of the names of various kinds of obligation, such as gún-mada, šu-gíd, and máš-da-ri-a; but of these we only have reasonable information concerning the first. We are not sure, however, whether this means it was the most significant of the obligations.

The gún-mada (the ‘rental of the land,’) begun like the bala in Šulgi’s 38^th year, was levied on all soldiers allocated land holdings outside the core area. The size of the levy depended strictly upon the soldier’s rank and was paid in the form of livestock, presumably collected from the local population. In his 38-9^th year Šulgi established the city of Puzriš-Dagan (modern Drehem) to the east of Nippur as a place where those levies – especially the animals – and other levies of livestock could be collected, held, and distributed. The necessity for such a specialised location is evident from the quantities recorded: there could be as many as 200 sheep and goats and 15 head of cattle passing through each day. The officials of Puzris-Dagan possessed assessments of levies due, and deficiencies would need to be made up later. The levy was collected annually in the period September-December, or in some cases twice per year. Once delivered these gún-mada levies and the other levies mentioned formed part of the bala fund described above, and the core was able to draw upon these supplies – especially of livestock – for whatever reason, but presumably especially for temple offerings. In a similar way, the periphery was also able to draw upon the bala fund at need for supplies – especially of cereal.[8]

Standardisation

All administrative texts were in Sumerian, even though there is a suspicion that Sumerian may no longer have been used in common speech, but was a merely learned language, or even a dead one. If that is the case, then the use of Sumerian was probably a further effort to emphasise the legitimacy of the rule of Ur III in the Sumerian Land. In any case, radical reforms were made to the script, in order to facilitate the record keeping of transactions between previously independent states. Something similar was attempted by Akkad, as well as the standardization of the format of records and administrative procedures. This in turn required the establishment of an extensive system of scribal schools.

Again following the lead of Akkad, Ur-Nammu standardised the weights and measures and introduced a new calendar, the reichskalender, and a new uniform system of year-names.[9] We see this reichskalender being used in Puzriš-Dagan, Umma, Girsu, and Ešnunna in royal contexts, but local calendars were not generally displaced.

Recommended Reading

            Shakespeare, Tragedies

            Bible: (Ecclesiastes)

            Nagel, T. (1971) “The Absurd.”The Journal of Philosophy 68, pp. 716-27.

            Camus, A. (1942) Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Editions Gallimard:Paris

Introduction

The question of the Meaning of Life is one of those questions that the layman thinks should be at the very heart of the philosophical enterprise, and yet it is not something that has been of much interest to serious philosophers in the past, whether professional or amateur. There have, of course, been some attempts over the course of the millennia, but nothing approaching the prolonged and systematic efforts directed at questions of such perennial interest as ‘What is Good?’, ‘What is Truth?’, ‘What can we Know?’, ‘Is there a God?’, or ‘What is Beauty?’ And even amongst the topics of recent interest it has not really featured as the centre of its own field of study as has mind, or language. Nevertheless, it has been taken up more recently – but with what success it remains to be seen.

What’s the Question?

There’s an amusing scene in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy[1] where a vast supercomputer built by a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings is asked to answer the ultimate question of ‘Life, the Universe, and Everything.’ After 7½ million years Deep Thought gives the answer “42.” Naturally, this is a disappointment, and Deep Thought is asked to explain itself:

“I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

”But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!” howled Loonquawl.

”Yes,” said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly,” but what actually is it?”

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.

”Well, you know, it’s just Everything . . . Everything . . . ” offered Phouchg weakly.

”Exactly!” said Deep Thought. ”So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”

We’re not quite in that position, since we do have a perfectly grammatically correct question to answer: to whit, “What is the Meaning of Life?” On the other hand our position is very similar because the meaning of the question itself isn’t exactly clear. And we can’t know what sort of thing would even count as an answer to this question until we get that clear – although we are pretty sure that “42” isn’t the answer.

So, how should we understand the question? Well, notwithstanding what I have just said, I don’t think that we can work it out by investigating the semantics of the terms involved. In fact the way to get at what people mean by this question is exactly to look at the sorts of answers that have been proposed. But don’t worry; this isn’t quite as absurd as it appears. (We’ll get to absurdity later, I assure you.) Think of it this way: people have felt the need for a solution to some vaguely felt problem – not yet well defined in their own minds. They have proposed solutions or responses that seem to them to be properly directed at this vaguely felt problem, and they have at the same time tried to express the problem with which they are concerned. From inspection of the answers, we can determine whether the question is well-framed. If not, then we modify the question so that the answer makes more sense. From inspection of the question, we can determine whether there is a coherent problem being addressed. If not, then we can either dismiss the whole pursuit, or modify the question to make it more coherent. (This is something like an approach we call ‘reflective equilibrium,’ where we adjust related but incoherent beliefs and intuitions piecemeal until they are coherent.) Luckily, we can start with better answers than “42,” and better questions than “What do you get if you multiply six by nine.”

It doesn’t always work, of course. It might be that there are, in fact, several different questions being asked and we would then need to distinguish them. Some people think that this is exactly what’s going on, and that no answer is going to be entirely satisfactory because if it perfectly answers one of the questions, it will leave others unanswered.

In any case, I’m not going to pursue that reflective process here – because life is short and time is brief – instead, I’m just going to mention a couple of the possible interpretations of the question that have been thought to be good. Thus:

1.      What is the significance of life – or of one’s life (or what should it be.)

2.      What is the purpose of life – or of one’s life (or what should it be.)

A Question of Significance?

So let’s consider this first possible interpretation. And again we notice that although this seems more precise than the original form, yet there are still several ways that this can be understood. We’ll just look at two.

Is Man’s Life Significant?

In the first place, they might be wondering what is the place of Mankind in the Universe. Are we important and how? And to whom? It would be nice to think that humans are objectively pretty special, but is that just a conceit? We used to think that we were the special creation of God – the purpose of the whole creation was tied up in our salvation. Our home, the Earth, was the centre of the Universe and we were the most important thing on it. But the story of our self-image since the beginning of the Modern era has been one of continued diminution. We have discovered that the Earth isn’t the centre of the universe, but goes around the Sun. And the Sun isn’t the centre either, it’s a perfectly unremarkable main sequence, yellow dwarf, middle-aged star 25,000 light years from the centre of a typical spiral galaxy in a universe so vast that it is literally beyond our comprehension. We’ve also discovered that our recorded history of 5000 years is about a tenth of the time that humans have existed, and only 1 millionth of the age of the Earth, and even less than that of the Universe. We’ve also found that Man was not distinguished by a special creation from all the other creatures of the Earth, but arose through the processes of evolution from some common, vanished, barely living non-cellular organism. We are an accident that has happened in no special time or place; tiny, momentary, and insignificant. Even our mighty brains are the development of smaller brains and eventually of the tiniest spinal bulges. The software which ran on them continues to run in us, and although Freud’s psychology is no longer credible, his original insight that our minds are much darker than we had imagined remains valid. We are closer to the beasts than to the angels that we have imagined.

On the other hand of course, the Earth is the only place in all this vast universe that we know has life on it. And we are by a long, long margin the smartest things that have ever lived on the Earth. And we are not only smart but self-aware and conscious, and we can think about ourselves, and our awareness, and we can recognise Good and Evil, and True and False, and Beautiful and Ugly, and we can speculate on possibilities and necessities, in ways that no other creatures are able to do. And we can tell each other about all these things using language which is unknown outside humans. This means that we have value in a way that all the rest of creation does not. Just consider: a rock has no value in itself, but only as it is valued by a person or some other thinking, valuing creature. (Remember, we talked about this when we looked at Kant’s defence of the Kingdom of Ends form of the Categorical Imperative.) And it makes no difference how big that rock is. If it were the size of a planet it would have no value unless someone valued it. Now, If you look into the sky at night you can see vast numbers of stars and you can try to imagine the really immense numbers of planets and stars and galaxies and groups of galaxies that exist out there; but as far as we know they are all quite dead and empty, and thus without any intrinsic value other than that which we give to them. So in a way, we can still think that we are special – at least until we discover intelligent aliens or they discover us. But then again, even if there were other valuers in the Universe, it would still be true of us that even if there were no others our very existence would suffice to give the Universe value. In that case we – meaning humans – would be important in some way; but that doesn’t distinguish, say, my life as important, only that any valuer’s life is important. Whether you think that’s enough is a matter for you.

Does Life Signify Anything?

But perhaps the ‘meaning’ in the original question is more like the meaning in the question: “What is the meaning of the play ‘King Lear’?” In this case we now have a question of interpretation. We are asking “What does this play signify?” But by ‘signify’ now, we want to know how this play should be understood in some deeper sense. How should it make us feel and how should it affect our view of the world when we hear it conclude? I think this gets us closer to the idea behind the question, but now it looks as if there’s supposed to be some over-riding theme or intention in the story of our life that can be interpreted at its end – and most people will seriously doubt whether there is any such thing, because they’re too aware of the many contingencies (accidents and luck) that went into the forming of their life story. Did you pass that exam to become a pilot or did you get drunk the night before and fail? Did you speak to the girl at the shop who would have been your wife or was she distracted by a car going past and turned away from? So many trivial causes with such huge effects, this surely can’t be how a meaningful story is written.

And if we do think that this is the only way to give a life a meaning, and that no life can have such a theme or plan, then we may conclude that no life has any such meaning. Thus it follows that life is meaningless, and we might as well stop trying. Then we might agree with the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth[2] when he tells us that

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Thus, nihilism. What exactly is the point of going on living a life which has no meaning? Why go on living? But we’ll get back to Nihilism; we have other options to explore before that.

A Question of Purpose?

So now let’s consider the question of purpose. Again, we find that the question is possibly more precise – at least it seems to direct us toward certain answers while ruling out some others – and yet there are still several ways of taking it.

What Makes a Life Valuable?

One way of taking it is to ask what things there are that make a life have or gain value, so the question of meaning becomes the question of purpose becomes the question of “What Makes a Life Valuable?” And this seems naturally enough to point to the problem of determining what system of values is appropriate to us.  

Now, you might think that this is actually quite an easy question to answer, and that the answer would be the sort of thing that we might have treated in the section on Ethics. What are we to do? Why, the Good, of course; and the only difficulty – which we will claim has proved great but does not seem to be a priori insurmountable – is to decide what the Good is. At the very least, in this question we think we have something that we can get our teeth into. But let me remind you of some of the difficulties that are involved in this question (and note that they’ve been mentioned in passing earlier.) First, consider the Utilitarian definition of Good as being that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number. An essay question on this topic asks you to compare what you’d be required to do if you really believed this with what you’re likely to value doing more highly. Is this a fault in you or in the ethical theory? Second, remember the visitor to the hospital who goes only out of Duty and never out of spontaneous desire to see their sick mother. They value only doing the right thing, and we say, don’t we that that is not enough. Something of value is omitted from such a life. Finally, you might be some kind of Hedonist, possibly a utilitarian again, who thinks that the ultimate moral value is pleasure – or perhaps you even believe that the only thing worth pursuing is pleasure – but that doesn’t mean that you’d agree that a life spent in a happiness machine could be counted as a well-spent life. There’s some value determinative of a well-spent life which isn’t to be found by maximising that moral quality. And this is perfectly typical of moral theories. So it looks as if something is missing from such theories that we would require in the sort of theory that we’d take to be an answer to the question of meaning/purpose/value.

The point of all this is just that if we are going to find a value for Life then we’re going to have to look elsewhere than in the places that we’ve already looked for value. And if we locate a candidate it will have to be able to pass the sorts of tests that the ‘moral’ values just failed. Perhaps you can think of some candidates, but let’s now move on to another approach.

Does Life Have Some End at which it Aims?

Another way of taking the purpose question is to ask whether there is some overall goal at which Life aims or at which any individual life aims (or, in either case, should aim.) Thus the question as we’ll understand it is “What is the Goal of Life?” The answers to this question are usually divided (neatly, but somewhat naively) into those goals that come from within ourselves, and those that come from without. We’ll start with the latter.

i.                    God’s Purpose Determines Our Purpose

The obvious external source of purposes is God. But that is not the only source: Marxists, for example, saw themselves as agents for the impersonal forces of History itself. But let’s deal with the more plausible alternative. (Note that in what follows I’m going to assume that it’s the Christian God that is at issue here. Other types of theism would presumably provide other types of meaningfulness.)

The Christian reasoning is fairly straightforward. God is the benevolent creator of the world. God rules the world, and does so according to rational principles. God has a rational plan for the world, which is to say, a plan to achieve some aims by means of the created world. (We know that God has plans with respect to the world because we know that God is rational and wouldn’t do anything without a reason.) ‘God … so orders all events within the universe that the end for which it was created may be realized.’[3] As parts of this creation, our purposes are subordinate to the purposes of God. It only remains for us to discover how our purposes ought to be so aligned, and what our subordinate purposes ought to be.

The best way to do this would be to determine what God’s purpose is and to adopt those subordinate purposes that reason would declare to be necessary to its achievement.  Unfortunately, God is never quite explicit about what His purpose is, and we are reduced to assuming that behaving in the way that God wants us to behave, or adopting the values that God wants us to have are sufficient to the purpose. So how do we determine those? Well, in the first place, God’s plan, that ‘so orders events,’ Aquinas identifies with “Eternal Law,” part of which is the “Natural Law” which gives us our moral guidance. And we are able to determine through reason, says Aquinas, what the Natural Law commands. Good. So that tells us how we are to behave. In the second place, the Christian tradition recognises a simple guide to the sort of things that make life worth living. We are supposed to feel love for our neighbours. A special sort of love that is denoted agaph in the tradition and which also denotes the type of love that God feels for us. Because we are loved by God, and because it is incumbent upon us to love what God loves, it follows that we should love one another, and so:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love (agape) your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.[4] If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?[5]

Love, then, of this special sort is the value that we derive from the assumption of God. And we have a perfectly comprehensible motivator for our actions. Especially those which satisfy the little rubric

            Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Of course, there are a few difficulties with all of this – even ignoring the arguments that led to this point. The first of these is a version of the Euthyphro problem that you might remember from earlier. If the necessary and sufficient condition for the goals we pursue being worth pursuing is that God says to pursue them, then we’d have to accept that if God said that we should stand on our heads, that would be our goal in life. This would be unacceptable, so we must have some criteria independent of God. If that’s the case, then we really haven’t solved the problem of the source of our goals.

Another problem might be that you doubt that there is a God anyway, and so there’s no getting a purpose by subordinating yourself to God’s purposes. But thinking of a world in which there is no God, would it seem reasonable to suppose that that lack by itself made our lives meaningless, whereas they would have had meaning otherwise. And looking at the people you admire: would you think it likely that what they were doing was meaningless if there’s no God, but meaningful otherwise? None of this seems reasonable to me.

ii.                  We Determine Our Own Purposes

a.      Our Life as Lived Determines Our Purpose

Let’s put that aside then and consider the idea that our purposes have an internal source. Think of the lives of some people that we might admire: people such as Mother Theresa or Jonas Salk or Norman Borlaug or Shakespeare or Bach or Mahatma Gandhi or Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill, or others who’ve made a mark on the world. How much better the world is because they were in it! Some of these people may have adopted their forms of life because of some sort of deep thought about the sorts of things that they valued and how to advance their interests. Most probably did not, but simply got on with the business of living and found to their surprise that there were values that were worth their allegiance.

It may be that this is the most common way of discovering a meaning in life. We experience life as meaningful if we live it in pursuit of values that have the capacity to inspire us and to claim our attachment to them. And those values need not be discovered through philosophical thought – indeed, they might not be able to withstand even slight philosophical scrutiny as final values – but can be discovered in the course of simply living one’s life. These are the sorts of values that are created for one who accidentally becomes responsible for a child and learns to value that child’s welfare, or who discovers injustice in their place of work and becomes a union organiser, and so on. If this is really the source of the values that motivate us then the appropriate advice for us all is the phrase seen on Australian TV:

            Life, be in it.

b.      We Can Simply Declare a Meaning and Live Accordingly

That, however, is a pretty unphilosophical way to go about things. It leaves one vulnerable to the charge that one is not living a fully considered life; and, of course, it means that the meaning one has found in life is vulnerable to the criticisms of the cynic and the nihilist.

A more robust, and I think more respectable philosophy of life can be found in an alternative option: that we choose what our life is to mean. This is the sort of thing that has in recent times been most often associated with the philosophical position of Existentialism, very popular during the 50s in France and Germany and later fashionable in other places. We saw this in the case of Sartre earlier, who declared that it was our duty to live authentically – or perhaps he would say that we have the choice of living authentically or of living in ‘bad faith;’ and that it was up to each of us to choose well. In any case, if we agree that values come from people then we’ve pretty much already decided that it is the decisions of people themselves which are going to provide the meaning in their lives. Human beings find meaning in life through pursuing goals that they have themselves decided to value. This means, however, that every person is ultimately responsible for the values that they are pursuing, and they have to make an effort to discover them.

It’s an open question how satisfactory any of this is, however, since we might well choose to pursue goals that are not, according to my intuitions, the sorts of things that would give life meaning. We might for example, think that watching TV all day and all night was worth doing, or collecting stamps, or jumping on one foot. Once again, it looks as if we have intuitions of what could be valuable that don’t allow the free choice of ends that this position would defend. But are our intuitions grounded in anything substantial/objective/real? It seems that we haven’t actually gotten very far in this enquiry.

Nihilism

The apparent failure of these attempts to find a meaning for Life has led some to adopt the position called Nihilism: that is, to deny that there is a meaning. This fits in nicely with the rest of our sceptical philosophizing. What can we know? Nothing. What is good? Don’t know – so possibly nothing. Is there a self? Probably not. How does the mind come from matter? Don’t know – it doesn’t look like it can. Is there such a thing as a Mind? Maybe not. And so on. It is also an old temptation, which we can see in Ecclesiastes (1:2), for example,

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,

which probably dates to the 3^rd century BC; and also in the words of some of the Classical philosophers. It was dormant in the time of the Christian dominance of learning, but came roaring back with Nietzsche in modern times.

Absurdity

But if we adopt the nihilist point of view, we then have an apparent incoherence or paradox or something unwelcome, because if Life is Meaningless or without Significance, or it has no Purpose, then there is nothing to do with your life but just to keep living it while accepting that nothing you do has any Meaning/Significance/Purpose. But the thing about going on living is that you can’t just resign yourself to it and cease to engage with life. In order to carry on living you really have to make decisions about the things that you are required to do from year to year, day to day, and moment to moment. You need to put out the rubbish on Tuesday mornings, you need to go to work and try to perform up to the appropriate standard, you may even need to put on a happy face and wish people a nice day if you’re in the service industry. And all of this while you are aware of the crushing burden of the futility of life. Thomas Nagel[6], I think, makes a special note of the obvious mismatch between the consciously considered worth of our actions and lives, and the degree to which our lives must be dominated by these ‘pointless’ actions. This mismatch, he says, accounts for the persistent feeling amongst some of our sensitive souls that life is absurd. That feeling of absurdity would be greatest for nihilists, of course, but it is a likely feature of anyone who thinks that life is basically trivial.

In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus referred to the old Greek myth in which Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill, and when it rolled back down, to start again, and to continue this forever. This never ending, unavoidable, ultimately futile task Camus claimed was a model for our own lives. What, then, is to be done? We may, of course, fall into despair and commit suicide; but this, Camus says, is simple cowardice. We may accept a supernatural solution to the problem and take the meaning of our life from some supposed transcendental source; but this is merely a suicide of the rational mind, says Camus, and no more respectful of our humanity than the previous option. Finally, we may accept the absurdity of life and even embrace it. We accept the truth of the situation we are in and we face it. This makes us heroic. Which I guess is worthwhile.

What’s the Answer?

I don’t really know.

 [1] Adams, D. (1979) Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, p. 121.

[2] Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

[3] Catholic Encyclopaedia, s.v. ‘Divine Providence’ (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12510a.htm )

[4]       The rain it raineth on the just

        and on the unjust feller.

        But mostly on the just because

        The unjust hath the just’s umbrella. 

[5] Matt. 5:43-46

[6] Nagel (1971)

Architecture

Ur-Nammu’s determination to display his piety and to repair the damage done by the Guti (or by neglect in the interregnum) showed itself in reconstruction efforts all over Sumer in the name of his god ad of the local gods of the cities. Most elements of the architecture, such as the temples, palaces, houses, canals, etc., are natural developments of those elements as they occurred in earlier periods, and are adequately treated above,[1] but there are certain new forms that are introduced which will be considered below. We can only regret, however, that no traces of the defensive walls built to deter invaders from the north-west have survived, since they were certainly a novelty that would be worth study.

Ziggurats

The kings of Ur (especially Ur-Nammu) are notable for their construction of ziggurats in several cities of their realm, namely Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Uruk, and Nippur. Although the platforms upon which Sumerian temples had been built had become ever larger and more dominant since the Ubaid period, the ziggurats built now seem to have been the first to take the ‘classic’ southern form,[2] consisting of a staged structure on a regular rectangular base with two flights of steps from the side and one flight up the centre of the main face of the structure.

The most impressive example is the ziggurat of Ur, dedicated to Nanna, whose construction was begun by Ur-Nammu and continued by his successors. Its name was é-temen-ní-gùr-ru, ‘the house whose foundation is clad in terror.’ Its platform at its base measures 61m x 45.7m and the first stage is 15m high sloping inwards for stability. It has a mud brick core with a 2.4m casing of baked brick set in bitumen. The layers of brick were supplemented at 6-8 course intervals by thick mats of reeds, possibly for extracting damaging moisture from the core. There were also many drainage pipes from the core for the same reason. Woolley thought that these might have been required to provide drainage for trees that were planted on the sides of the structure, but this is not thought likely by most others.[3] The faces of the stages were decorated with buttress and recesses in the manner typical of most Sumerian temple architecture from as far back as the Ubaid period[4]. It is oriented so that its corners point towards the compass directions, and its step approaches are on the north-east face. All three stairs meet at the top of the first stage below a gatehouse, after which only the central staircase continues. Reconstructions based on representations on seals and reliefs as well as on other examples of the type, indicate that there were actually three stages and a small shrine at the top, but of these nothing but the first stage and some traces of the second remain. When Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt this sacred structure a thousand years later, the shrine was faced with blue glazed bricks, which may or may not tell us something about the original shrine.

Figure 1:               Ur Nammu’s ziggurat at Ur (as it appeared before recent partial restoration)[5]

Figure 2:               The proposed original form of the ziggurat of Ur.[6]

Mausolea

Spectacular burials of the kings of Ur have already been noticed in the ED period. Now, in a nearby area, the kings of Ur III are once again noticed making spectacular provision for their remains in the form of a series of mausolea for Ur-Nammu, Shulgi, and Amar-Sin. It is extremely rare to find the tombs of Mesopotamian rulers, but what this signifies is not certain. Given that the furnishings of the much more primitive ED tombs proved so exciting, it is unfortunate that these later imperial tombs were looted in antiquity, leaving only traces of gold leaf to suggest the wealth that had been there.

                          (a)                       (b)  

Figure 3:       (a) Entrance to a Mausoleum[7]            (b) Plan of the Mausolea[8]

The mausolea consist of chambers built below the ground level of the time covered by baked-brick corbel vaulting. They could be reached by steps leading down to a floor of baked brick set in bitumen. Above these chambers were funerary chapels, but these have not been so well preserved. Woolley discovered that a new and lower quality floor had been constructed several metres above the original floor of Ur-Nammu’s tomb, and he proposed that a rising water table had flooded the tomb sometime after the initial construction, making this unsatisfactory alteration necessary in order to provide a surface to receive the king and his treasures.[9]

The Temple Precinct of Ur

The mausolea were then just outside the temple precinct of Ur, which seems to have been the focus of the building efforts in Ur by Ur-Nammu and his heirs. Although it is not an innovation, its interest and importance is such that a brief description is warranted.[10]

Figure 4:               The Temenos at Ur.[11]

The ziggurat described above was the outstanding structure in a complex of religious and secular structures behind a temenos. The temenos shown in the illustration, however, is the later reconstruction by Nebuchadnezzar. The ziggurat was built upon a terrace and the terrace was surrounded by another wall, which was not a solid structure but consisted of a series of rooms variously connected. In the south-east corner of this wall was a small building called the e-dub-lal-mah, which served as the main entrance to the ziggurat courtyard and as the ‘Seat of Judgement’ for the king. To the northwest of the ziggurat, but within the inner enclosing wall was a shrine to Nanna, Ur-Nammu’s god, Ur’s main god, and the god to whose worship the ziggurat was devoted. Also attached to this wall was a second courtyard with a grand entrance facing away from the ziggurat (so that one would enter facing directly towards it) also dedicated to Nanna.

Outside this connected complex were other buildings, not all of which are understood yet. In the angle between the ziggurat courtyard and the courtyard of Nanna is the e-nun-mah, which may have been a ‘treasury.’ To the southeast was the gi-par-(ku)[12], containing a major shrine to Ningal, the consort of Nanna, and minor shrines to several other gods. It also contained the tombs of some of the priestesses. It was probably the living quarters of the priestess and the administrative centre of the temple complex. To the East of this was the e-hursag, which may have been a royal palace for religious purposes.[13]

‘House-Plan’ Temples

The final innovation to be noted is in the design of temples. From at least the ‘Ubaid period, the standard form of the temple was ‘bent-axis’, in which the main entrance was to the side of the altar[14], but beginning at this period temples adopted the ‘house-plan’ in which the approach to the altar in its sanctuary was direct from a main entrance flanked by towers through antechambers and a courtyard surrounded by rooms with various other functions. The details could vary, but this basic plan was retained henceforth.

Figure 5:               Governor’s Palace and Temple of deified king Shu-Sin in Eshnunna[15]

In the temple illustrated, shown as it appeared at the end of Ur III, there is also the possibility of a bent-axis approach through the adjoining palace. This may represent an intermediate step in the adoption of the ‘house-plan’, with the religious preference for the palace entrance only gradually being overwhelmed by the importance of the street entrance required for the conduct of the temple’s economic business.[16]

[1] Ch. 9.

 [2] Nissen, p. 190, Roaf, p. 105.

 [3] Leick, pp. 126f. (ref. to Woolley, C.L. (1952) Ur of the Chaldees, Harmondsworth, p.92.)

 [4] Frankfort:AAAO4, p. 18.

 [5] Frankfort:AAAO, p. 52.

 [6] Roaf, pp.104f

 [7] Lloyd:AM, p. 154.

 [8] Crawford, p. 72.

 [9] Lloyd:AM, pp. 153f.

 [10] Op. cit., p. 153.

 [11] Hawkes:AAA, p. 173.

 [12] 9.15

 [13] Hawkes:AAA, p. 173

 [14] 1.7

 [15] Crawford, p.91 (c.f. 9.18.)

 [16] Frankfort:AAAO4, p. 106

In fact, I had also assumed that an additional contributing factor to the supposedly widespread template could be sought in the transformation of the common forms of the shamanic experience (see, for exx., M. Eliade, Shamanism) into more sophisticated and intellectualised forms affected by mythological retellings – such as we might see in the Christ story and the supposed Harrowing of Hell episode added quite some time later. (I don’t doubt that the initial popularity of the Frazer paradigm was motivated by its usefulness as a stick with which to beat the Christians – as if to say that their story could be explained as just another version of a common theme; where to be explained was to be explained away. Christians of the time, and I think both Lewis and Tolkien are examples, felt obliged to react by claiming that God tells stories in the real world that we are prepared to understand because we’ve seen them before in the mythological world. This, however, is beside the point.)

It turns out, however, that there are very few models for any such template. There are a fair number of stories of dying gods, but the details of their stories are not at all regular. And neither is there any great regularity in their ritual expressions – when these even exist or can be discovered. There follows a selection of the deities most prominently offered as exemplars of the type, together with a schematic description of the relevant mythological content, and also with whatever may occur as a related ritual. It is noticeable that there are almost no examples of gods actually explicitly dying and rising again as required.

 I do notice that more than a few of these stories have an element of sexual attachment in them. This is something that isn’t properly explained by the template of the corn story, and is not what you’d expect from the shamanistic aspect either. Perhaps it’s just a natural addition people make to stories as a motivator for some kinds of actions: part of our set of innate narrative preferences.)