This organised worrying was referred to as ‘lamentation’. It wasn’t only a personal matter – it was ritualised, institutionalised and shared throughout the entire society.
We all know they anxious and lamented as a result of they wrote about it. I needed to rise up shut and private with some historical Mesopotamian cuneiform script. There’s lots of cuneiform script on show within the British Museum. I can’t learn it – and there aren’t many individuals who can – however I figured it might be instructive simply to take a look at it, and suppose a bit in regards to the individuals who carved it.
Palms and minds of the Mesopotamians
Cuneiform is the writing system that they utilized in Mesopotamia. It was invented within the mid-fourth millennium BC and used for millennia afterwards, though it developed on the way in which. It was mainly a system of indicators inscribed on clay tablets, produced by urgent a wedge into a chunk of clay to make a three-dimensional impression. So once you’re a cuneiform inscription, you’re trying by the hands and minds of the individuals who made them.
By finding out these cuneiform writings, Assyriologists like Wisnom have been in a position to perceive an amazing deal about life in historical Mesopotamia, and analysis how these individuals noticed their world. It was a world, as Wisnom defined to me, that was filled with fear and worriers.
Let’s take a second for a fast recap on the place and once we’re speaking about. Mesopotamia is a geographical time period – it means between the rivers, and the rivers in query are the Tigris and Euphrates, so broadly the place trendy Iraq, north-east Syria and a part of south-east Turkey are right now. Mesopotamia was a spotlight for historical civilisations from the fourth millennium BC onwards and Assyria and Babylonia have been two of these civilisations, Assyria to the north and Babylonia to the south. Relations between these two kingdoms within the first millennium BC have been, in Wisnom’s phrases, “tense”. Her guide focuses on the time of the final nice Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, who reigned within the mid-seventh century BC from his splendid capital at Nineveh. His brother was king of Babylon, and as is so typically the way in which, the siblings fell out and went to conflict. The upshot was an Assyrian victory over Babylon. Nonetheless, a couple of many years after Ashurbanipal’s demise, revenge was served when the Babylonians and their allies descended on Nineveh and decreased this mighty metropolis to rubble in 612 BC. Its stays are actually to be discovered on the outskirts of Mosul.
Why burning a library was excellent news for historians
The destruction of Nineveh included the burning of the good library of Ashurbanipal – the library of historical knowledge in Wisnom’s guide title. You may think {that a} raging hearth in an amazing library could be a Very Unhealthy Factor for later historians. Nonetheless, as a result of the traditional Mesopotamians used clay tablets, the conflagration acted like a large kiln and fired the tablets, making them extra more likely to survive for posterity. Crushed and forgotten although these tablets have been, their subsequent rediscovery within the nineteenth century offers an enormous supply of fabric for us to know how these individuals noticed the world round them. Numerous the writings in Ashurbanipal’s library have discovered their approach to the British Museum, together with reliefs, sculptures and statues as properly.
And that’s how we all know what the Babylonians and the Assyrians anxious about, and the way they coped with these worries.
To know the central position of fear in historical Mesopotamia, you’ve obtained to understand the size and class of those civilisations. Assyria was one of many nice powers of the traditional world, identified for its army power, monumental structure and intensive forms.
The Babylonians have been famend for his or her scholarship and cosmopolitan tradition. Babylon turned a centre of spiritual ritual, regulation and mental life. Assyrian and Babylonian fortunes rose and fell turn-by-turn over the centuries. As Wisnom notes in her guide, “Assyrian tradition owes a lot to the Babylonians that the 2 might be troublesome to disentangle.” She likes to make use of the time period Mesopotamian to confer with elements of their tradition which are shared, in addition to regarding earlier Sumerian texts. “They have been guardians of information stretching again a thousand years earlier than them,” she says, inheriting and preserving earlier Sumerian and Akkadian traditions.
To know the central position of fear in historical Mesopotamia, you’ve obtained to understand the size and class of those civilisations
Flood, hearth, famine and concern
This lengthy historic reminiscence introduced with it an equally enduring consciousness of the danger of pure catastrophe. Flood, hearth and famine have been issues they knew and feared. Additionally they knew that the way in which to keep away from disaster was to maintain their gods glad. They’d a pantheon of gods who have been energetic in every day life. Mesopotamian gods, says Wisnom, “behave very similar to human beings do… they’ve sturdy personalities, they are often persuaded, they are often tricked. They do issues, they care, they intervene, and individuals are actually attempting to get their consideration and name them over to their aspect.”
“They’d methods to deal with it,” says Wisnom. “They’d prayers. They’d rituals. They may go to the exorcist to assist them undergo a really elaborate process the place they offer voice to all of that and specific it.”
In a society the place concern of the gods was interwoven with every day life, ritualised expressions of fear weren’t eccentric – they have been important. I don’t need to provide the impression that these individuals have been superstitious bumpkins although. These have been superior societies – pioneers of writing, structure, arithmetic, and astronomy – however their cultural sophistication didn’t free them from concern. Fairly the alternative.
WATCH | Dr Selena Wisnom on historical nervousness
Lament, and let the Gods know you’re there
They believed the world was sustained by divine order, and that dysfunction – famine, floods, sickness, invasion – meant that one thing had gone flawed within the human relationship with the gods. Misfortune wasn’t random: it was a message.
And they also acted, commonly and ritually, to specific their anxieties and attempt to restore divine favour. “They lament to the gods within the temples each single day,” says Wisnom. “They’ve individuals whose job it’s to sing in entrance of the gods 4 instances a day, these very, very lengthy litanies, bewailing the entire potential issues that might go flawed to the town.”
These skilled lamenters have been primarily state-appointed nationwide worriers. Their job was to think about worst-case eventualities in elaborate poetic type, and recite them in public ceremonies, even when no quick disaster was at hand. “If you happen to make it clear to the gods that they may do all these horrible issues to you,” says Wisnom, “then they gained’t really feel the necessity to do it.”
It was an act of pre-emptive humility – ritualised worrying within the hope of divine mercy.
With a view to know what you want the gods to do in your behalf sooner or later, it’s essential know what’s coming your method. One of many methods the Assyrians and Babylonians handled their worries in regards to the future was by trying to foretell it. They developed extremely refined methods of divination, which have been handled not as superstition however as an important type of scholarship. Their premise was easy however profound: if misfortune is a message from the gods, it should be attainable to learn the indicators prematurely.
This method took many types. Celestial omens have been particularly vital. The motion of stars and planets, eclipses, and strange celestial occasions have been meticulously recorded and interpreted. The Assyrians and Babylonians have been very proficient at finding out the celebrities. Wisnom notes that Mesopotamian astronomers might “predict the actions of any star or planet to an accuracy of 4 minutes on any day, previous or future,” utilizing solely naked-eye observations and mathematical ingenuity.
These skilled lamenters have been primarily state-appointed nationwide worriers. Their job was to think about worst-case eventualities in poetic type, and recite them in public ceremonies
The knowledge of sheep entrails
However divination didn’t cease on the sky. The Assyrians additionally practised extispicy – the studying of entrails – as a way of answering particular questions posed to the gods. “It was probably the most vital methods for kings to obtain divine steerage,” says Wisnom. Clergymen would sacrifice a sheep, study its liver and different organs, and interpret the form, texture, and marks in line with detailed manuals. The method was collaborative, peer-reviewed and surprisingly scientific in its method.
Different types of divination included dream interpretation, studying smoke patterns, and deciphering odd occurrences within the pure world – like a pig dancing in a city sq. or a goat giving beginning to a two-headed child. Any anomaly may maintain a message.
I’m studying this as a response to uncertainty. I’ve locked in my mortgage fee as a result of I didn’t know if the rate of interest was going to spiral upwards, so I’ve listened to the predictions of monetary consultants and acted accordingly. Meaning I don’t want to fret about it as a result of I really can’t do something about it. If you happen to consider you could get divine steerage from the celebrities or a sheep’s liver, then you can also get certainty in regards to the future, and I suppose, cut back nervousness. Managed threat it’s referred to as, I feel.
The individuals in Nineveh and different cities throughout the Mesopotamian world had loads to fret about. Their world was filled with unseen risks. They’d demons, witches and ghosts to cope with. Malevolent forces might afflict people or communities, and their signs – bodily, psychological or social – needed to be interpreted and handled.
Demons have been blamed for sleeplessness and melancholy. Others, like Lamashtu, threatened pregnant ladies and infants. Even King Ashurbanipal’s grandfather Sennacherib was mentioned to have been bothered by a demon that left him “so depressing his advisors have been afraid to talk to him”.
Witchcraft, too, was taken critically. If somebody suffered from unexplained weight reduction, dizziness, or persistent nervousness, a analysis of witchcraft may comply with. “Witchcraft is definitely a diagnosable illness like the rest,” says Dr Wisnom.
Remedy got here by rituals. Collectible figurines have been made and destroyed; incantations have been recited; choices have been made to the gods. Exorcists – removed from being theatrical performers – have been extremely skilled specialists who used a mix of formality, medical data and divine petition to assist sufferers. “The exorcist is extra like a lawyer than a magician,” Wisnom explains. “He pleads with the gods to vary their verdict.”
Placing worries in a pot
I suppose the purpose is that these individuals didn’t fear in silence. They anxious very publicly, loudly and commonly. Nervousness was given a voice, a schedule and, typically, a proxy. “They assigned worrying to professionals and stuck instances of day,” Wisnom notes. “It’s not really that totally different from what the NHS means that we do.”
The NHS’s Each Thoughts Issues platform gives steerage on handle persistent fear utilizing self-help CBT methods. These embrace figuring out whether or not a fear is hypothetical or sensible, writing worries down to achieve distance from them, and allocating a set time every day to course of them – methods that echo the Assyrian follow of ritualising nervousness by structured lamentation. Because the NHS explains, “If you happen to discover that you simply’re continually worrying, it could actually assist to present your self a set time to do it – after which let these worries go the remainder of the day.”
I’m pondering that the traditional Mesopotamians would possible have authorized.
There was additionally no disgrace in acknowledging emotional misery. Letters from royal students, clergymen and even kings embrace candid confessions of despair, hopelessness and guilt. Ashurbanipal himself as soon as wrote: “I did completely every part proper… and but nonetheless I’m continually depressed.”
Not so distant, not so bizarre
If the size and solemnity of Mesopotamian lamentation sounds distant and peculiar, dangle on for a second to contemplate how we’ve reacted to catastrophe and risk in Britain in current instances. I’m reminded of an article that Professor Natalie Mears, a historian of early trendy Britain, wrote for BBC Historical past Journal a couple of years in the past about nationwide days of prayer in Britain (should you’re a HistoryExtra member, you may learn it in full here now). She notes that since 1535, there have been greater than 500 such events in England and Wales alone. These weren’t mere spiritual observances – they have been formal, state-sanctioned rituals in response to nationwide nervousness.
“There appear to have been two principal motivations for the nation to come back collectively in prayer: to hunt God’s assist in secular affairs, and to supply thanks for his intervention,” says Mears.
So Charles II, in 1666, ordered a “day of solemn fasting and humiliation” after the Nice Fireplace devastated the capital. However there have been additionally days of thanksgiving when the nation had been delivered from catastrophe, corresponding to after Trafalgar and Waterloo within the early nineteenth century.
Extra lately, in Might 1940, simply days after changing into prime minister, Winston Churchill authorized a nationwide day of prayer in response to the disaster unfolding in France. “Folks all through Britain flocked to their native church buildings and chapels,” Mears writes. When information broke of the Dunkirk evacuation’s success 5 days later, many noticed it as divine deliverance.
How totally different is that this nationwide prayer for deliverance, and humiliation earlier than God, from historical Mesopotamian lamentation? Appears fairly just like me. Would it not even be going too far to recommend that the banging of pots and pans outdoors throughout Covid was the government leader iteration of lamentation and thanksgiving in a extra secular Britain? Have been we attempting to hammer away our worries in regards to the pandemic, as a lot as say because of the NHS and first responders?
Gods, demons and algorithms
The Assyrian and Babylonian response to nervousness was, in some ways, deeply pragmatic. It acknowledged concern as a part of life, and sought to have interaction with it overtly and communally. There have been specialists to diagnose it, rituals to handle it, and no expectation that people ought to bear it alone.
Their world might have been crammed with gods and demons somewhat than algorithms and financial graphs, however the emotional terrain is acquainted. They present us that naming our fears, expressing them in structured methods, and in search of help from others are timeless methods for resilience.
As Wisnom displays: “Even the king of Assyria was admitting to feeling garbage. One thing we will all relate to.”
The issue with that is within the sensible software right now. I’m not the king of Assyria, and nor are you, so we will’t instruct a temple {of professional} lamenters to take our worries off our shoulders.
However possibly there’s something primary right here, when it comes to private delegation of worrying. “I do just like the idea of delegating your worrying to someone else or one thing else,” says Wisnom. “that’s one thing that I’ve in truth inadvertently tried myself. One evening I used to be very anxious about one thing. It was late at evening. No person was awake so I referred to as a pal in America as a result of they’re awake in America. He mentioned to me ‘Don’t fear. I’ll maintain your worries till morning,’ and it really labored. I obtained again to sleep.”
So if maybe the strategy of delegation is a bit alien once we examine ourselves to the traditional Mesopotamians, the underlying idea works. Delegate your worries to another person, or one thing else, and also you may discover the demon inside extra manageable.
This text is a part of HistoryExtra’s new Life Lessons from History Substack publication. Subscribe to the publication for extra articles and podcasts exploring the methods wherein historical past can assist us stay higher, happier, more healthy or extra productive lives.