HISTORICITY (was already taken)

A Short History of Plumbing, Toilets, and Sanitation

In 1856, General Alexander Cunningham was summoned to the Indus River Valley site where East Indian Railway Company workers had uncovered the ruins of an ancient city. The archaeologists who had rushed to the scene were stunned—as archaeologists digging under the auspices of the British Empire were wont to be—by the sophistication of the civilization they’d begun to uncover. One particular point of interest was the complex system of underground brick lined sewage drains, complete with running water and outdoor flush toilets.

To put it in different terms, these British archaeologists uncovered a civilization which had had an underground sewage system circa the third millennium BCE in the same year that the city at the seat of the British Empire—London—had begun to experience the sanitation problems which would lead to the “Great Stink” of 1858.

“Father Thames Introducing His Offspring (Diptheria, Scrofula, and Cholera) to the Fair City of London,” originally published in the July 3, 1858 edition of Punch Magazine. Image courtesy of the Museum of London.

In the 1850’s, the modern flush toilet had begun to replace the chamber pot in the daily waste disposal of many Londoners. This increased the volume of waste being poured into cesspits—which often overflowed into the streets, overwhelmed the medieval drainage system, and emptied into the Thames. The unusual heat levels of the summer of 1858 merged with the bacteria in the sewage filled waters of the Thames to produce a stench so overwhelming that the House of Commons nearly shut down.

Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro weren’t the only ancient cities to have a finer grasp on the intricacies of sanitation than the seat of the British Empire. The sewage of Rome and Istanbul is still carried partially through pipes which are over 1000 years old, and the first inverted siphon system (u-shaped pipes for those of us who are not Troy Barnes) was put into use in the palaces of Crete over 3000 years ago. Those pipes are still in working condition. The Ancient Minoan peoples had a stone sewage system periodically flushed with clean water, and flush toilets dating to around the mid-second millennium BCE have been found in the Minoan archaeological site of Akrotiri.

In the mid-12th century CE the Arab, or possibly Kurdish, engineer Al-Jazari invented a hand-washing device which made use of flush technology (he also invented the first water supply system to be driven by gears and hydropower, and a robot boy band among other things).

Illustration of his water-raising device from Al-Jazari’s work, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Image courtesy of the Topkapi Palace Museum.

In 1596, Sir John Harington developed a forerunner to the modern toilet and had it installed in his house. He also had one installed for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, but she refused to use it because the noise freaked her out.

By the 1850’s, the flush toilet had become a standard fixture in the homes of the bourgeoisie, leading to many much needed updates to old and overburdened sewage systems.

And because I’ve been picking on Britain a lot in this post, I will say that a 31st century BCE hydraulic waste removal system was discovered in one of Britain’s oldest known Neolithic villages: Skara Brae, Orkney. Way to remove that waste, Skara Brae.

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Summary: Ancient Jews and the Development of Monotheism

Question:

since your expertise lies more in jewry, could you possibly give an (albeit stunted and too short for the subject matter) analysis on why judaism developed monotheism and other cultures did not?-samrick

Response made rebloggable by request.

Hmmm. Well you may want to go to my archive page, and scroll to March, April, and May of 2011. In that period I was posting a huge amount of material about ancient Jewish history, and issues relating to Biblical historicity and archaeology, and Biblical textual criticism; specifically the Documentary Hypothesis. A lot of the information contained in those posts can serve as valuable background for what I’m about to tell you. The only post I’m going to specifically direct you to, however, is Yahweh and his Asherah. All of the sourcing for this post and the posts from March-May 2011 is here and here.

Just a note about those posts: I wrote them back when I first started this blog, and before I had started grad school. Therefore, my tone, and the manner in which I convey information is a bit more casual, and a bit less fastidious about argument construction than it is now.

Okay so as for your question…the people known as the Israelites weren’t special or exceptional; they were just another group of semi-nomadic Iron Age Canaanites (for more on this refer to the series of “Passover” posts from April 2011, or to the works of William Dever on my Further Reading page as linked above). They were arranged in a loose confederation of tribes and often had wars and alliances with other Canaanite groups.

They reached a point at around the eleventh century at which the tribal leadership was no longer effective, so they agreed to put themselves under the rule of a king chosen by the tribal leaders. The first king was Saul, and then came David, who usurped Saul’s line. After the death of David’s son Solomon, the northern tribes rebelled against the Davidic line, leading to the formation of two polities: The Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah.  

So there’s a historical backdrop for you.

As Canaanites, the Israelites were polytheists. They primarily worshiped Ba’al, Astarte, El, Yahweh, and Asherah. There were more, but those are the most important ones. If you pick up the Bible and look at the books of Judges-II Kings, you’ll see that the author of these books worked very hard to convey the idea of Israelite society as a strictly polytheistic one. However, what can actually be seen in those books is a picture of a society with two distinct forms of worship: there was the Israelite folk religion—in which Ba’al and Asherah etc were worshiped alongside Yahweh—and then there was the religion of the Jerusalem elites who worshiped only Yahweh. In some cases isn’t wasn’t just folk religion: as you’ve seen in the post linked above, worship of Asherah was so widespread that her symbology was present in the Temple.

All of this changed around the eighth century BCE after the 722 fall of the Northern Kingdom to the Assyrian Empire. There came into power within the priesthood a group referred to by scholars as the Yahweh Alone Party. This group was comprised of religious radicals who wanted to institute two things throughout Israelite society 1) worship of Yahweh as the sole deity, and 2) the idea that Yahweh could only be worshiped in Temple in Jerusalem; the writer of Deuteronomy-most of II Kings was a member of this group.

This group instituted a series of reforms which included the destruction of unsanctioned places of worship, the removal of Asherah’s presence from the Temple, the destruction of Asherah poles and alters to Ba’al, and the fusion of El and Yahweh into a singular deity.

However, these reforms were hardly effective. The people continued to worship as they pleased (albeit in a quiet manner) while the King of Judah and the Jerusalem priesthood went about their business, worshiping only Yahweh and pretending that the people did as well. 

As you can see, that still wasn’t close to monotheism as we currently understand the term. The event which dramatically changed Israelite/Judahite religion from a form of varied polytheism into strict monotheism came in 586 BCE: the Babylonian Exile. In this year, the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, destroyed the Temple, and shipped off the majority of the population to Babylon. There, the Judahites were a minority. As a minority they were faced with a question: do they assimilate and cease to be Judahites, or do they forge an enduring identity to ensure the continuation of their existence in exile?

They chose the latter. A big part of the formation of this identity was final abandonment of the worship of the old gods, and the full acceptance of monotheism with Yahweh at the center of their worship. Another aspect of this identity formulation included the determination of how Yahweh could be worshiped without the Temple; the solution to this was the writing of the Bablyonian Talmud.

When Persia conquered Babylon less than 100 years after Babylon’s conquest of Judah, the Persian emperor allowed the “Yehudites” to return under limited self-rule to the Province of Yehuda. Some returned and some stayed; what these two communities now had in common was that they worshiped Yahweh. As history went on and Exile turned to Diaspora, this monotheism and the forms of worship contained in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds became the factor which continued to distinguish Jews, far flung as they came to be.

So there’s your answer: the Babylonian Exile created a situation in which proto-Jews realized that they had to unify lest they be destroyed. They chose to unify, and with this unification came the full acceptance of monotheism. This monotheism was still a very ancient form of what we now call “Judaism,” but that’s how Jewish monotheism came to be. At least, that’s the short version of how that form of monotheism came to be.

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Overview: Why Anti-Semitism exists

Question:

I’m doing A-level History and I’ve always wondered why in the past Jewish people have been such a large target for violence and discrimination. I understand that Hitler was a psychopathic racist, but there seem to be a number of cases where Jews have been victimised. Do you know if there was a starting point to this or a particular reason behind it or is it just the world being a terrible place? -herewegoforthe100thtime

Response made rebloggable by request.

The only real answer I can give you about why violent anti-Semitism has existed for the last 2500 (give or take a few centuries) years is because they occupy a place outside of the norm.

In the years before Christ and before the Diaspora really expanded beyond the Near East, they were an isolated pocket of monotheists who clearly followed their own distinct culture and religion within polytheistic societies. An important aspect of this was that, in these societies, the citizenry were often expected to worship the king/emperor as a god. The fact that the Jews would not do so rather complicated things. In addition, the province of Judah/Judea was a highly sought after seaport, and the presence of Jews in that area—not to mention their occasional armed assertion that they should have sovereignty over it—really pissed off whichever ruler was in charge of it during said armed assertions.

Then Jesus and the War of the Jews (or Christianity and the War of the Jews if you prefer) happened. In the centuries leading up to the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, Jews continued to hold an uncertain place. This is where the whole “the Jews killed Jesus” thing comes into play.

The Romans killed Jesus—he probably pissed off the Jewish authorities, but those authorities lacked the ability to carry out criminal procedures. The Romans killed Jesus because they were freaked out by how influential he was becoming, and crucified him. Crucifixion was a fairly commonplace mode of execution for anyone from pretty criminals to revolutionaries within the Roman punitive system. However, because the early Christians were heavily persecuted in the Roman Empire, they certainly couldn’t indict the Romans for the killing of Jesus, so they ascribed it to the Jews.

Because of “The Jews killed Jesus,” and the concept that Jews represented nothing more than God’s reminder of the incompleteness of life before the arrival of Christ, Jews became oppressed and marginalized in Europe in a far different way than they had been under the Romans and the ancient governments.

Medieval Jews were frequently expelled from various European polities. Lynchings were frequent; especially on Easter. Massacres also occurred in retribution for accusations of blood libel—the ritual killings of Christian children at the hands of Jews.

Because money-lending was considered to be an unclean, un-Christian occupation, it was one of the few avenues open to Jews which allowed them to make a living. Certain other business related occupations were open to them as well. Although these were the occupations Jews were forced into by their oppressors, it quickly became another excuse used by Christian society to incite violence and hatred against them.

Things were better for Jews in the Islamic World. There were laws which made it clear that Jews were second-class citizens, but they had freedom to work and operate in public and worship and attain an education without living in fear of being massacred by their surrounding neighbors. In fact, some of the most celebrated works of medieval Jewish scholarship were produced by this Sephardic community.

As European society moved out of the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment, attitudes towards the Jews began to change. It is not that mainstream society had ceased to discriminate against them, but that the Enlightenment had altered their thought processes. They still vehemently disliked the Jews, however, Enlightenment thinkers believed that, as humans, Jews deserved official Emancipation. The understanding was that, once Emancipated, Jews would no longer have a reason to remain Jewish and would convert to Christianity.

Around the nineteenth century, European governments began to extend some rights—or at least official toleration—to the Jewish community. However, Jews remained hated and mistrusted because, as far as Christian society was concerned, Jews would be the other for as long as they refused to convert to Christianity. They believed that Jews viewed themselves not as Germans or French or Viennese, but as Jews first and everything else second; the notion that Jews had primary loyalty to each other over international boundaries was deeply disturbing to these populations. They also mistrusted the ability of Jews to be able to truly assimilate because of certain aspects of public modes of Jewish worship, such as the prayer to return to Eretz Tzion.

There also remained hatred towards the Jews in rural populations because rural communities resented the economic stranglehold they perceived the Jews as having over them.

In the modern era, it was primarily the idea of Jewish separateness, and Jews as the controllers of money which fueled anti-Semitism. We can see these forms of anti-Semitism coming out in the Dreyfus Affair, and in the writing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

However, European Jewry DID modernize, or assimilate. Certain populations assimilated so completely that they would have been hard pressed to acknowledge their own Jewishness. That is why the policies of the Third Reich came as such as shock to German and Austrian Jews: many of them had simply ceased to think of themselves as Jews. The problem was that non-Jewish society never stopped viewing them as such.

And that brings us to the Holocaust. I am not going to discuss anything past the Holocaust because I feel that that material is too political to fall within the scope of this blog.

So, in conclusion, Jews are hated and have been hated for such a long time because they are the Other. They never fit into any society’s concept of “the norm” and always insisted upon living outside of it, refusing to give up their traditions, laws, and ways of life. Their Otherness frustrated, angered, and fostered resentment in those surrounding them, creating situations in which they were forced into certain paths and modes of behavior because all others were closed to them. Later, these paths and behaviors became additional avenues for violence and hatred.

I hope this has answered your question. This post, of course, highly simplifies a crapton of information because I am trying to give you an overview of ~2500 years of history. This post is also centric on European Jews in the Common Era simply because I haven’t devoted much study to the experiences of Jews outside of this sphere (I do however, have to read a book about Jews in the Ottoman Empire for a class next week and I am super-excited to learn more about that community).

Because this is such a broad overview, please feel free to ask me to discuss a narrowed down version of this. Like, instead of “Why does anti-Semitism exist?” I can also answer more specific things like “What fueled nineteenth century German anti-Semitism,” or “What was Roman policy towards the Jews?” etc.

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Fierce Historical Ladies post: Enheduanna

In the Ancient Near East, religious appointments were political appointments. Thus, as the High Priestess of the Moon God Nanna, Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE) was a very powerful political player in the cities of Ur and Uruk. She was appointed to the post by her father, King Sargon of Akkad, in order for him to consolidate his power in the above two cities.

And indeed, Enheduanna was a political, cultural, and literary force to be reckoned with. She was the writer of protest literature, and is recognized by Assyriologists as the creator of the theology associated with Innana; in fact, her authorship of these compositions make her the first identifiable author in world literature. Her writings were so well loved that copies of her work have been found throughout the Near East, many of them dating to hundreds of years after her death.

Me who once sat triumphant, he has driven out of the sanctuary.
Like a swallow he made me fly from the window,
My life is consumed.
He stripped me of the crown appropriate for the high priesthood.
He gave me dagger and sword—‘it becomes you,’ he said to me.
…
It was in your service that I first entered the holy temple,
I, Enheduanna, the highest priestess. I carried the ritual basket,
I chanted your praise.
Now I have been cast out to the place of lepers.
Day comes and the brightness is hidden around me.
Shadows cover the light, drape it in sandstorms.
My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.
Even my sex is dust.

-Enheduanna, after her first removal from her post

After her father’s death, the throne of Akkad was taken by her brother Rimush. He was not a strong ruler, and she was expelled from her position in the turmoil surrounding his rule. Though she was eventually reinstated as High Priestess, the experience affected her enough to compose the narrative The Exaltation of Inanna.

After Rimush came the rule of her nephew, Naram-Sin. Naram-Sin, understanding the political advantages of having a daughter installed as High Priestess of Nanna, expelled Enheduanna from her post, and installed his own daughter instead. In her anger and fury over her expulsion, Enheduanna composed the Curse of Akkad, in which Naram-Sin is cursed and cast out of Akkad by Enlil.

Though we can only hear her voice through her writings, those writings give us a clear idea of the woman she was: a woman who, after losing her place in life, refused to fall quietly into obscurity, and instead struck back with a damning literary response.

She refused to allow herself to be forgotten during her life, and that refusal carried on long after her death. And today, thousands of years after her death, she is one of the earliest women in history whose name is known to us.

Through her work, Enheduanna created her own reality and her own legacy.

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Artifact Profile: the Guennol Lioness

Before you read this post, you should know that I refer to myself as an “antiquities Communist,” meaning that I do not believe any private person has the right to own historical artifacts, capitalism be damned. Further, I believe that cases like the one below—aided by institutions such as Sotheby’s—are the lifeblood of the black market in antiquities; a market which, through the indirect application of imperialism, forces impoverished peoples to destroy their nation’s archaeological record so that those who have already benefited from their subjugation can continue to benefit through indirect means.

So that’s my bias. The issue that is being discussed here is not of museum ethics or international law; this issue is straight up ethical/philosophical.

The Guennol Lioness; photo courtesy of Sotheby’s

The Guennol Lioness is of Elamite origin and is thought to have been made between 3000 and 2800 BCE—the same period in which writing systems were being developed, the wheel was being invented, and cities were beginning to rise. Experts believe that the Lioness would have been used to ward off evil, and that it was probably owned by a person of high social standing. It also must be noted that many Ancient Near Eastern deities were portrayed as figures of both animal and human attributes, encapsulating the Mesopotamian belief in the attainment of power through the combining of the physical attributes of different species.

In 1931, New York art dealer Joseph Brummer came to possess the figure after reporting its discovery at a site near Baghdad. In 1948, the piece was purchased by Alastair Bradley Martin and Edith Park Martin. As a trustee and President of the Brooklyn Museum, Mr. Martin had the object—along with other artifacts from his family’s collection—displayed at the museum, and kept them there on a long term loan.

In 2007, the Martin family took the object—their family property—off of loan with the intent to sell it through the Sotheby’s auction house. At this point, it was one of the last antiquities of its age and type still in private hands. Here is a video of the Executive VP of the Sotheby’s auction house discussing the Lioness; they’ve disabled embedding, but I really encourage you to click through to it!

On December 5, 2007, the piece sold to an anonymous British bidder for nearly $57.2 million, setting a world record (which has since been broken) for an antiquity sold through an auction house.

Because the purchaser was anonymous, nobody is quite sure on the location of this artifact. Perhaps the individual has private conservators, perhaps they do not; there is no way of knowing. What we can know for sure, however, is that this item—which has so much to say about such a vital point in human history—is not available to the public, and it is probable that it will not again be available for public viewing for a very long time.

So, while we can certainly talk about the extent to which Western museums can function as imperialist institutions, I would make the argument that these auction houses are the real enforcers of this form of imperialism; not the museums. Museums might do some imperialistic, unethical, and downright illegal things (as you have seen in previous posts), but at least the artifacts they are being unethical about remain accessible to the public.

I apologize for breaking so strongly with my promise to uphold objectivity in these artifact posts, I just feel very strongly about the topic of antiquities as things which can be purchased and owned by private individuals, and the imperialistic institutions which feed off of this market. Further, I understand that the world runs on capitalism and that this is no exception, I can, however, criticize this particular aspect of it as much as I want.

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Assurbanipal’s Library

The other day I was walking into my apartment with a friend, excited to introduce her to the masterpiece that is Summer Heights High, when all of the sudden a name popped into my head: Assurbanipal. And I was like “Why is an Assyrian-sounding name popping into my head?” It was clearly a sign.

Assurbanipal (685 BCE– 627 BCE) was the last great emperor of the neo-Assyrian Empire. Despite his popularity amongst his own people, he was known for the brutality he showed to his enemies; he once put a dog chain through the jaw of a defeated king and forced him to live out the rest of his life in a dog kennel, and he celebrated his conquest of Elam by displaying the head of the defeated king Teumann in the port of Nineveh. However, this is not a post about Assurbanipal’s military activities and regional hegemony; this is a post about something way more awesome: his library.

Assurbanipal was a highly literate collector of texts and tablets. Though Assyrian rulers before him had begun to build a library, he was responsible for the most active and aggressive collecting; in the year 648 alone he accessioned more than 2000 tablets into his collection. He sent scribes into every corner of the empire to collect texts from temples and vassal states, and he used his violent reputation to acquire texts from unwilling donors.

He collected all kinds of texts, including royal inscriptions, mythological/religious texts, legal documents, medical documents, administrative documents, grants, decrees, incantations, and so forth. Included in the library were such texts as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enuma Elish, the story of Adapa, the Epic of Atrahasis, and the Descent of Ishtar. He also collected textual commentaries.

He was not merely a collector, but he devised a standard format and script for all of the texts within his collection. Though he had the originals of the majority of the texts he collected, he had his scribes re-copy each text using a standardized cuneiform script and layout with each text ending with an identification stating that the text belonged to the “palace of Assurbanipal, king of the universe, king of Assyria.” The scribes doubled as translators when the originals were written in languages, such as Sumerian, which had died out of usage.

Nineveh was destroyed by the Babylonians, the Scythians, and the Medes in 612 BCE. They burned the palace, and instead of destroying everything as they had intended, the heat from the fire baked the clay tablets on which the majority of the texts in Assurbanipal’s library were recorded, ensuring their preservation.

According to Persian and Armenian tradition, it was Assurbanipal’s library which inspired Alexander the Great to create his own library. Though he died before he could put his plans into motion, his friend and successor Ptolemy I began work on it, and that project grew into the great Library of Alexandria. Of course, this is arguable as Alexander was active after the destruction of Nineveh, but it is possible that the memory of the library was still active in the region, or that it Alexander had access to the ruins.

Either way—and sadly unlike the Library of Alexandria—Assurbanipal’s library remained intact within the ruins of Nineveh until it was discovered at the site of Kouyunjik (located in modern Iraq) first in 1849 by Austen Henry Layard, and then in 1852 by Hormuzd Rassam (Layard’s assistant).

Unfortunately, in the nineteenth century, archaeological excavations in the Ancient Near East were conducted by wealthy young adventurers who were searching for Biblical sites. They tended to treat archaeological sites like their own private playgrounds, and remove artifacts as they saw fit with no record of layers, excavation order, or immediate provenance. Upon their arrival in Europe, the tablets taken from the Kouyunjik site were so thoroughly mixed up that is has proved nearly impossible to reconstruct the original order.

The majority of these texts are held within the collections of the British Museum. Information regarding ongoing work with this collection by the museum in cooperation with the University of Mosul in Iraq may be found here: The Ashurbanipal Library Project.

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