Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda: Bronze

No sooner had the first dynasties of Sumer been established than they fell to warring with each other like junk yard dogs. This caused, as the King List says, the kingship to be carried off to Awan, near Susa. This was the great Elamite center bordering Khuzistan, which was coveted for its mineral wealth. But then "Awan was smitten with weapons" and the kingship once again "was carried off to Kish." By 3000 BC, Kish and Uruk, thanks to large-scale irrigation, each housed 20-30,000 people, at least half of whom were serfs or slaves of the temple-palaces. Eridu, in the extreme south, couldn't have been occupied without an efficiently managed irrigation system. For the irrigation-masters, this automatically entailed ruthless political control.

Above is a sample of the pictographic cuneiform writing from an obelisk of the king of Kish, c. 2600 BC. This writing is fully deciphered. Most of what we know of the organization of ancient Mesopotamia comes from the tax rolls of the temple palaces. Thus we know that of the 1200 members of the Baba temple community in Girsu, c.2500 BC, more than 100 were fishermen. The temple, not the fishermen, owned the fish. There was private property, but most of that fell into the hands of the military aristocracy. Citizens were divided by law into nobility, commoners, serfs and slaves. Slaves were legally defined as farm animals and fed half the rations of free workers.

The voracious bureaucracy, under the pretext of national security, confiscated or taxed everything in sight. "Who transgress the established norms, violate contracts..../Who having eaten did not say 'I have eaten it,'/Who having drunk, did not say 'I have drunk it,'/Who said 'I would eat that which is forbidden,'/Who said 'I would drink that which is forbidden.'"

Sumerian kings rationalized their military consolidation in pharmaco-shamanic terms. The first King of Kish, Etana, "he who stabilized all the lands," was cursed with childlessness for his efforts. In order to lift the curse, Etana rescued an eagle that had been cast into a pit by a serpent whose friendship it had betrayed by devouring its young. The grateful eagle then transported Etana to heaven to obtain 'the plant of birth,' thus enabling the continuance of his line. Etana's image, grasping the magical plant while perched on the back of the eagle, remained a standard device of Sumerian cylinder seal cutters for millennia. The floating sacramental goat below, from a Sumerian cylinder seal, c.2500 BC, indicates that the King's drink is magical.

The kings of Early Dynastic Sumer claimed descent from the Goddess, whose figurines still predominate in the finds of 4300-3500 BC. "A-Anne-pada king of Ur, son of Mes-Anne-pada king of Ur, has built a temple for Ninhursag." Enlil was in the ascendancy, but he was still the son of Ninhursag, the Horned Mother.

According to the Sumerian tablets, Ninhursag, 'Lady of the Mountain,' caused eight great plants to grow in Dilmun (Eden), the 'Land of the Living' east of Sumer, where neither sickness nor death was known. The eight great plants of the Land of the Living were grown through three generations of Goddesses, all born of the water.

But Enki, the Sumerian Apollo, whose name means 'heaven-earth,' An-Ki, sent his satyr to pick the plants, so that he could eat them. The enraged Ninhursag cursed Enki with death, and then disappeared. Enki's eight precious organs began to deteriorate as he started to die, and even Enlil, 'heaven's breath,' couldn't save him. Whereupon the fox volunteered to find Ninhursag in exchange for a boon. At the fox's bidding the Goddess returned, and seated Enki by her womb. She caused eight healing Goddesses to come forth, each offering the magical herb specific to each of Enki's deteriorating organs. The last organ to be healed, without which Enki would die, was the rib. For the rib, ti, 'the Lady of the Rib,' Ninti, was brought into being. Ti also means 'to make live,' because Ninti offered Enki the fruit that completed his healing process. Ninti was 'the Lady Who Makes Live.' That is the literal meaning of 'Eve,' the Lady of the Rib. That is also the original function of Eve's fruit.

A major trading partner of the Sumerian and succeeding Akkadian powers was Egypt. Each Neolithic village of Egypt had identifed itself by a magical plant or animal totem. The Bronze Age process of amalgamation left 22 totemic districts in Upper (southern) Egypt and 20 in the Delta to be organized by the early dynasts. Throughout the Egypt of this period images of the pharmaco-shamanic Goddess predominate.

From the Pyramid Text The Goddesses Suckle the Deceased, c.2500 BC: "He hath trampled for himself these thy rays into a ramp beneath his feet, that he may go up thereon unto his mother, the living snake that is upon Re. She hath compassion on him, she giveth him her breast, that he may suck it, O king." Snake milk was always the pharmakon of the gods. The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, c.2000 BC, has our Egyptian hero washed up on an island inhabited by a kindly giant prophetic snake with brows and beard of lapis-lazuli. As soon as the sailor left it, to make the lapis snake's prophesies come true, the island disappeared.

The large-scale mining of lapis lazuli, turquoise, marble, alabaster, diorite, carnelian, jasper, obsidian, amber, copper, gold, silver, cinnabar, lead, tin, iron, zinc, manganese, arsenic, sulphur and salt drove the invention of chattel slavery. State monopolies of the copper trade, practiced by most ancient empires, allowed control of the production of weapons. The discoveries that molten arsenic and tin would turn copper into bronze, that silver could be extracted from both lead and copper ore, and gold from quartz, only served to increase the value of slaves. So did the great municipal building projects. Slaves became as important to the state trading monopolies as the precious metals themselves. The Cretan tribute-bearers below, depicted on the Tomb of Rekmara (c.1460 BC), offer blooming magical flowers to Pharoah, to grease the wheels of international commerce.

Hammurabi's Code (Babylon c.1700 BC), and the virtually identical earlier Sumerian codes we have, are typical of the law codes of most of Babylon's trading partners. They are largely concerned with management of the slave system and protection of governmental fiscal prerogatives. Society was divided into 'men, subjects, and slaves' in Hammurabi's 300 paragraph code.

Although the principle of 'an eye for an eye' is enshrined in Hammurabi's Code, this applied only to parties of equal rank. If an aristocrat, a 'man,' knocked out the tooth of a commoner, a 'subject,' he owed him a little money, not his own tooth. Not only major offenses such as murder, kidnapping, theft and false accusation, but relatively minor offenses such as filial disobedience, adultery, breach of contract and failure to pay the oppressive taxes were punished with death, reduction to slavery and/or vicious lashing or mutilation.

Another legal document puts it succinctly: "Sin-balti, a Hebrew woman, on her own initiative has entered the house of Tehip-tilla as a slave. Now if Sin-balti defaults and goes into the house of another, Tehip-tilla shall pluck out the eyes of Sin-balti and sell her." The vast bulk of the Mesopotamian population were either slaves or serfs. About 100 of the 300 paragraphs of Hammurabi's Code refer directly to the rules governing slavery.

The king of Mari, Zimri-Lim, left over 20,000 neat, legible clay tablets to us, including his correspondence with Hammurabi (1728-1686 BC). That and thousands of other tablets prove that among the elite, literacy, and a very high level of medical, chemical, geological and mathematical knowledge was common. His stela shows a genuflecting Hammurabi receiving the law from Marduk. Below that is some of the original text.