From cut-off lips to court-room sodomy: the Middle Assyrian Laws

Most law collections are pretty boring reads. Hammurabi is a snore, with grandiose claims to his achievements in bringing justice, peace and well-being to all. Not so the Middle Assyrian Laws. Here we do come up against sheer difference, for the mind can barely get around the reasons for pressing these laws into clay for all eternity to follow.

For instance:

If a woman should crush a man’s testicle during a quarrel, they should cut off one of her fingers. And if the physician should bandage it, but the second testicle then becomes infected along with it …, or if she should crush the second testicle during the quarrel – they shall gouge out both her .. [text curiously broken here]

One can only imagine what Assyrian domestic quarrels were like.

Then there is:

If a man lays a hand upon a woman, attacking her like a rutting bull, and they prove the charges against him and find him guilty, they shall cut off one of his fingers. If he should kiss her, they shall draw his lower lip across the blade of an axe and cut it off.

Perhaps the most intriguing are these two:

If a man furtively spreads rumours about his comrade, saying, ‘Everyone sodomises him,’ or in a quarrel in public says to him, ‘Everyone sodomises you,’ and further, ‘I can prove the charges against you,’ but is unable to prove the charges and does not prove the charges, they shall strike that man 50 blows with rods; he shall perform the king’s service for one full month; they shall cut off his hair; he shall pay 3,600 shekels of lead.

If a man sodomises his comrade and they prove the charges against him and find him guilty, they shall sodomise him and turn him into a eunuch.

That should stamp out sodomy.

 

Fluid bodies in the ancient Near East: animal-human continuities

One of my arguments in The Sacred Economy, at least in the chapter called ‘On Fluid Bodies: Clans, Households, and Patrons,’ is that the ancient Near Eastern clan included both human beings and domestic animals in a continuum. I base this on the ‘bestiality’ laws, which assume such continuity, since they appear within the framework of what are called ‘incest’ laws. ‘Incest’ here includes both blood and non-blood human relations, as well as your expected sheep, goat, cow, pig, and dog.

Some more evidence has come to light, from the method of recording in the late Uruk period (late fourth millennium). There, clay tablets  list rural and estate labourers, distinguishing between male and female, age groups (children are ‘womb-sucklers’), and their groupings. The curious thing is that exactly the same method is used for recording animals, down to the common term for ‘herd’.

So where were the boundaries? A stronger one was between ruling class human beings and those who tilled the soil and herded the sheep and goats. But the most noticeable boundary was between wild animals and domesticated animals-humans. The clan certainly did not include those wild types, unpredictable as they were and outside the bounds of what counted as part of the tribe.

 

Getting in knots over (ancient) bestiality

For some reason I cannot quite fathom, scholars continue to squirm over bestiality. I am preparing to write a piece on bestiality and other paraphilias for a collection with Routledge called Sex in Antiquity. In reading the scant literature on this topic, I came across a piece by JoAnn Scurlock (in Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception), who appears to be slightly unsettled by the relaxed approach of some of our civilisational forebears to matters sexual and bestial.  She wants to argue that they found it all rather distasteful, skipping by material that suggests otherwise. But the highlight is perhaps this moment in her argument. She notes that in the list of omens in the Cuneiform Texts in the Kuyunjik Collection at the British Museum, the following omen appears:

In the one preserved omen where the human takes the initiative, a man inseminates a horse and kisses it (for Mesopotamians a post-coital act), and it means he will have long days.

Not quite sure whether is the “insemination” or the kiss that is problematic here (how do you pash a horse?). Nonetheless, Ms Scurlock proceeds with this stunner:

This would appear to be an endorsement; however, behavioral omens inhabit an amoral universe where the only calculation is of whether anything about the behavior could be interpreted as being of benefit or harm to the solicitor of the omen. It does not follow that good-omened behavior is necessarily desirable or even legal.

What? How is a collection of omens amoral, especially when their purpose is to ensure benefit or harm? And how can good-omened behaviour not be desirable? The presence of bestiality does seem to unsettle the normal processes of logic.

Anyway, I plan to include the smooching horse in my article, along with further reflections on the hippophilic Hittites and the fascinating ritual for a man who has a twinge of guilt for a dalliance with a goat.

 

Quote of the day: on men and chickens

Where there are men, there must be chickens.

Peasant saying from Ningxia, China, 1936.

 

On skin colour and the myth of classicism

Two somewhat different quotes, the first of which offered a new theory of skin colour – over against the standard theory, which held until about the eighteenth century, that skin colour was due to exposure to the sun. This one has more to do with cooking time in the womb:

A man of discernment said: The people of Iraq have sound minds, commendable passions, balanced natures, and high proficiency in every art, together with well-proportioned limbs, well-compounded humours, and a pale brown colour, which is the most apt and proper colour. They are the ones who are done to a turn in the womb. They do not come out with something between blonde, buff, blanched, and leprous colouring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Ethiopians, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two.

Ibn al-Fakih al Hamadhani, from Kitab al Buldan (Book of Countries, 903)

And a great example of how the myth of classicism took off in places like Germany in the nineteenth century, turning the Greeks into good Europeans, so much so that the ancient Greeks – with their slave-holding, veils for women, and a penetrating culture (for adult men) – would hardly have recognised themselves:

We regarded Greece as our second homeland; for it was the seat of all nobility of thought and feeling, the home of harmonious humanity. Yes, we even thought that ancient Greece belonged to Germany because, of all the modern peoples, the Germans had developed the deepest understanding of the Hellenic spirit, of Hellenic art, and of the harmonious Hellenic way of life. We thought this in the exuberance of a national pride, in virtue of which we proclaimed the German people the leading culture of the modern world and the Germans the modern Hellenes. We announced that Hellenic art and nature had been reborn more completely in German poetry and music than in the poetry and music of any other people of the contemporary world … Our enthusiasm for Greece was inseparable from our enthusiasm for our fatherland … We looked back to classical antiquity as to a lost paradise.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, on student life in a German Gymnasium. From his Kulturgeschichtliche Charakterköpfe (1891).

 

Smelling like the sea

One of things I love about summer is swimming in the ocean and then letting the salt water dry on my skin. In fact, with a daily swim I don’t bother with any other form of washing – at times for days, if not weeks on end. I’m like a salt shaker and what’s left of my hair gets bleached. But the best part is sniffing my armpits. Why? They smell like the deep blue sea.

 

How big was the ancient Near Eastern clan?

I have just finished a discussion of the institutional form of kinship-household for my study of the sacred economy, although it has been a bit of a trial. Too often did I come across assertions that seem to echo the religious and political right: the ‘family’ or household was the basis of ancient society. All of which led me to ask how how big ancient clans really were. For obvious reasons, most seem to assume that it was restricted to human beings, largely made up of blood relations.

But they miss two obvious elements: the dead and animals. How so?

Given the ubiquity of veneration for the ancestors, the dead were obviously part of the clan. While Nancy Jay’s point is well taken – “Ultimately the dead are only important as they integrate and differentiate relations among their living descendants” – I would like to stress that the dead are not merely tools of the living, but are very much part of the clan, one that is constructed beyond the boundaries of the living. Of course, the dead do not engage materially in agricultural production, but even here they are recipients of reallocated produce, typically left at their graves. Their prime function was ideological, an extra-economic dimension that was very much part of the kinship-household.

However, I suggest the kinship group extended even further. An insight may be gained from an unexpected quarter, namely, the incest laws in the Hebrew Bible. The prohibitions against incest read as follows:

Whoever has sex with [šōkeb] a beast shall be put to death (Ex 22:18 [19 in ET]).

And you shall not ejaculate [tittēn šĕkobtekā] into any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman bend over before [ta‘ămōd lipnê] a beast to copulate [rv’] with it: it is a perversion (Lev 18:23).

If a man ejaculates [yittēn šĕkobtô] into a beast, he shall be put to death; and you shall kill the beast. If a woman approaches any beast to copulate [rv‘] with it, you shall kill the woman and the beast; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them (Lev 20:15-16).

“Cursed be he who has sex [šōkeb] with any beast.” And all the people shall say, “Amen” (Deut 27:21).

Apart from the consistent pattern of translations attempting to soften the earthy directness of the Hebrew, it is worth noting, first, that these texts ban sex with any animal and, second, that the command explicitly (and graphically in the case of Lev 18:23) addresses women as well as men on two occasions. Yet, all attempts to interpret these texts isolate them from their literary contexts. Three of the four occurrences of the ban on bestiality occur in the context of the incest taboo. In Lev 18:23, bestiality comes at the conclusion of a long passage on the incest taboo (Lev 18:6-18), where we find bans on: sex with one’s (assuming a man’s) mother, father’s wife (who is obviously different from one’s mother), sister or even stepsisters (daughters of one’s mother or father), granddaughters, half-sisters, paternal and maternal aunts, a paternal uncle’s wife, daughter-in-law, brother’s wife, a woman, her daughter, and her granddaughter, and sisters. At the close of this collection of incest taboos we also find laws against sex with a woman during her period, sex with a man’s neighbor’s wife, devoting one’s children in the fire to Molech, a ban on male-on-male sex, and finally on bestiality. Rather similar lists of incest taboos, albeit with a few less examples, appear in Lev 20:10-21 (in which vv. 15-16 are found) and in Deut 27:20-3 (the context for v. 21). In other words, the ban on bestiality is one instance of a much more flexible and extended incest taboo, a taboo that includes not merely relations by blood, but also wider clan relations, menstrual sex, male-on-male sex, and bestiality.

The following conclusions may be drawn from these biblical texts. First, they operate with a massively different sexual economy in which there is no sliding scale of sexually forbidden acts: bestiality is on the same level as having sex with one’s aunt by marriage or a menstruating woman. That is, sex with animals, the same sex, and extended relatives are all on par. Second, the biblical laws assume that animals are on the same level, sexually, as a man’s extended clan and his fellow men. The clan does not stop with human beings. Hence the laws on bestiality are located within a much expanded range of incest taboos. In this respect, these laws have a deep continuity with the Hittite laws on bestiality, which I have studied elsewhere. Despite apparent differences – the Hittites permitted sex with horses, the dead, and being penetrated by an ox, for instance – they indicate a common and shared sexual economy, one that suggests a common understanding of kinship structures that include human beings, the dead, and animals.

The economic implications should be obvious: patterns of allocation and reallocation, largely concerning foodstuffs, involve these clan members as well. The animal’s own contribution was in terms of milk, wool, or hair, and on death its body parts. They were also recipients, of water, food, and care, and the household space – in both village-communes and towns – is inconceivable without the omnipresent domesticates. Even more, they were understood as agents in their own right, acting in ways that manifested the capriciousness of the gods, to be watched and studied closely, to be divined through myriad means. In other words, through the creative expansion of one’s sexual and kinship horizons, animals were included within the workings of the sacred economy.

 

Wolf in the forest today

While taking a long hike through a local forest this afternoon, in the teeth of a bitter wind and some driving snow, we came across a long run of these:

They ran for a few hundred metres along a track deep in the forest, spaced out at an even distance, here in the Oberlausitz region of Saxony, which is close by the Czech and Polish borders.

‘Look at those tracks’, I said. ‘Do you think they’re from a wolf?’

‘Nah, that’s a big dog’, Christina said. ‘Shit, it’s big though’.

‘Are you sure?’ I said.

‘You can see that it’s on a lead’, she said.

I wondered about the absence of human footprints along a muddy track and the  long lope between prints. She wondered about the size of the middle pad and the long claw marks at the front of the print, not to mention the size of an animal that would leave such deep prints.

Back at our lodgings by dusk and slowly warmed up again, we decided to check on wolves in this area.

The results: this is the favoured area for wolves returning to Germany, after an absence of 150 years!

Why? It is a relatively sparsely populated region, with 20,000 hectares of forests, open country, moors and heathland. And there’s plenty of game, since too many deer roam the forests. In fact, a wolf pack lives right here, initially a handful but now with cubs born every year. It all began about ten years ago, when a pair decided to cross the border from the mountains in Poland and set up a new home hereabouts. They mated and had two female cubs. Now known as One Eye and Sunny, they found mates, reproduced, and so the pack has expanded year by year. The young males born have set out to find new territory, roaming throughout the eastern parts of Germany and then as far as Jutland and the Netherlands. And now they are meeting up with some of their Mediterranean cousins from Italy and France. Apparently, a wolf can travel up to 200 km of an evening.

Given the German propensity to have everything managed, neatly and carefully, there is a ‘Wolf Office‘ right here, with all the information you might or might not want.

So yes, they are wolf tracks. A match for the wild boar spoor we saw yesterday.

 

The creativity of religion, or, some unexpected uses of sheep and goats

Given that sheep and goats formed the economic basis (as far as fauna are concerned) of the sacred economy in the ancient Near East, one would expect creative uses of such animals. That is, one used every conceivable part of the animal, and the animals performed all manner of functions. Some would be expected – fibre, milk, meat, bones – others less so. Such as:

If a woman quarrelled with her man, she could seek to overcome his anger by knifing a sheep, touching its death wound, holding a magnet in her right hand and an iron boat in the left – not to forget the necessary prayer to the goddess Ishtar. Why? Her man’s anger would be as dead as the sheep and he would – like the iron boat – find her magnetism simply irresistible.

More intriguing is the ritual for the man with a twinge of regret for intercourse with a goat. Yes, there is a ritual for this too. It goes:

You take hair from the she-goat. On the roof, before Shamash, you tie up a virgin she-goat and you take hair from a she-goat whose hair and body are red. You lay them out before the virgin she-goat and pour a libation of beer over them.

Of course one wonders why, but it may well be that the opposition between one’s recent dalliance and the goat with whom one has not copulated, along with the opposition between the colours red and white (hair from the respective goats), all point to the wish for separation.

It goes on:

You tie that hair up in a linen cloth. You put it on the ground before Shamash. You kneel on it and say as follows … You say this three times and report your doings and then prostrate yourself. You throw that linen cloth into the gate of a beer distributor and after fifteen days you remove it. The gain of the beer distributor will be diminished but the omen will stand to one side and its evil will not approach the man and his household.

Why a beer distributor? Not only was beer a crucial product of agriculture, perhaps one of the reasons why human beings gathered together in the first place, but it may also be due to the fact that the goddess Ishtar was the patron of both goats and sex.

 

Berlin etc in winter

Apart from the four constituent items of Berlin life – moustaches, a beer in hand while walking down the street, dogs on trains and in shops, and the omnipresent cigarette (Germany would have to have the highest number of smokers, apart perhaps from Bulgaria) – a number of other items have caught my eye.

Toilets are few and far between, which explains the frequent yellow patches in the snow – which has been falling for over a week. So when a public toilet turns up, it is a rather glorious affair. A cause for celebration:

Of course, you have to pay for the damn thing.

And then, up north while visiting the Wulfshagenerhütten Basisgemeinde, a Christian communist community (thanks Anthony), I came across some stunning ice trees:

Not the warmest place if you happen to be a bird.

Penultimately, just around the corner and up the Karl-Marx Allee is an old friend:

Although he still has to contend with Friedrich’s cigar smoke:

But I am sure Friedrich, the great connoisseur of beers, would have found the following useful: