Marc Van De Mieroop - Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia

Philosophy before the Greeks

FRONTISPIECE. Typical example of a scholarly list from the first millennium. This manuscript contains, in two columns, the text of the first tablet of a syllabary list called Ea. Each entry consists of these elements: a vertical wedge to indicate a new entry; a syllabic rendering of the sign; the Sumerian word sign; the sign name; and an Akkadian translation. Oftentimes the scribe just recorded ditto () when a piece of information was repeated in successive lines. 21.3 cm high. YBC 2176, Yale Babylonian Collection.

Philosophy before the Greeks

THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH IN ANCIENT BABYLONIA

Marc Van De Mieroop

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2016 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van De Mieroop, Marc.

Philosophy before the Greeks : the pursuit of truth in ancient

Babylonia / Marc Van De Mieroop.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15718-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1.Philosophy, Babylonian.2.Knowledge, Theory ofIraqBabylonia.I.Title.

B146.V36 2015

181.6dc232015017273

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Charis SIL

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

13579108642

Contents

Preface

For you will have the wisdom not to think you know that which you do not know. Socrates spoke these words at the end of Platos Theaetetus, the dialogue that is often proclaimed to be the first major treatment of the problem of knowledge in history. Certainly Socrates was not the first human to wonder how we can determine what is true and what is nothe spent most of the dialogue disproving what earlier Greeks had suggested. Long before the Classical Greeks, however, other people too must have asked the question what true knowledge was. To assume that they merely observed the obvious and accepted it as inexplicable fact is culturally prejudiced. This book will investigate how the ancient Babylonians approached the issue, at least those who were literate. They left behind a monumental textual record that stretches in time from before 3000 BC to the first century AD. It contains no systematic explanations of the Socratic type, but shows the rules of critical analysis in practice in thousands of manuscripts that contain anything from a couple of lines of text to hundreds of them. The documentation is massive and can be hard to appreciate, because we have to recreate the methods of inquiry the writers employed through practice rather than theory. But its analysis shows that strict logical rules governed its procedures. To make this clear, I will look at three corpora of texts, two of them large in size, the third much more restricted. Encompassing three areas of scholarly inquirythe study of language, of divinatory signs, and of the lawthey display the same basic ground rules.

The system of reasoning the Babylonians followed was very unlike the Greek one, and thus that of western philosophy built upon the Greek achievements. It was rooted in the cuneiform writing system, which was not an alphabet and was much richer in its use of signs than that kind of script. Few people today understand Babylonian writing, and I will need to explain some of its basic principles, which may put off the uninitiated at the same time that it may sound banal to those who know it. I hope that it will become clear, however, that as a writing system it was as capable to render ideas as the alphabet is, and that for thousands of years people throughout the ancient Near East expressed complex thoughts using it. This study will show a remarkable consistency of Babylonian practices over three millennia, maintained by numerous scholars who elaborated their research within a shared traditionone that had a lifespan comparable in length to the Greek-based western philosophy still in use today. We cannot dismiss the Babylonian approach to knowledge as a mere curiosity of long-gone days. For many centuries it determined how intellectuals reasoned; in fact, it is the only well-documented system of philosophy before the Greeks known to us. And while it was the dominant paradigm in the literate part of the world for a large part of its early history, I will try to show that the Babylonian approach has resonances today and that its study is not purely a matter of antiquarianism.

Writing a book is always a long process and requires the support of others. A number of organizations gave me the time and intellectual space to work on it, especially the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna, Austria, and the Guggenheim Foundation in the United States. I tested out some of the ideas expressed here in lectures at SOAS in London, Wolfson College Oxford, Universit Ca Foscari Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre for Canon and Identity Formation at the University of Copenhagen, IFK in Vienna, the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the University of Ghent. I thank those who invited me to speak and those who made comments. I benefited from conversations with many colleagues and friends, who knowingly or not gave me useful information and forced me to clarify matters in my own mind. I refrain from attempting to make a list, so as not to omit some inadvertentlyall deserve my sincerest thanks.

PART I

AN ESSAY IN BABYLONIAN EPISTEMOLOGY

CHAPTER 1

At the Time of Creation

I Read, Therefore I Am

When the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily wrote his Library of History in the first century BCa universal history in the sense that he mentioned Egyptians and other barbarians briefly before embarking on a detailed account of Greeks and Romans from the Trojan War until his own timehe made only a few remarks about the Chaldeans, who were, he said, the most ancient inhabitants of Babylonia. Unlike the Assyrians and Medes he had just discussed, Diodorus found the Chaldeans interesting not because of their military feats, but because, being assigned to the service of the gods, they spend their entire life philosophizing, their greatest renown being in the field of astrology (Diodorus II 29.2). Many modern translators of this passage avoid the term philosophize and prefer the broader word study, but the original Greek is precise. The text uses the verb