chapter4

Alexander believed that all human beings were one people who subjected to one law of reason and one form of government. He tried to implement this ideology by taking a Persian bride and arranging the marriages for eighty of his officers and ten thousand of his soldiers with the Persian women. For Alexander did not follow Aristotle’s advice to treat the Greeks as if he were a leader among friends and kindred, and other people as if he were a master among plants and animals. Despite Aristotle’s promotion of the inductive and deductive methods of thinking, he himself was more a scholastic-theoretician than a systematic practitioner. When the practical Alexander encountered the Persians, he realized that he is among kindred, although more distant than the Greeks were. He decided that it would be cumbersome to his leadership to follow Aristotle’s advice, because such behavior would only increase the numbers of his battles by spawning the numerous seditions. That is why the Persians resisted him so little that, in several years and with a small army, he could capture the empire that had been built on blood for centuries.

Alexander believed that he came as a heaven-sent governor and mediator for the entire world. Those whom he could not persuade to unite with him, he conquered, thus bringing together all men, uniting and mixing them into one great melting-pot, where the men with different characters, marriages, and habits would be equal before law. Alexander bade all people to consider his empire as their fatherland where they should discern each other not by their external characteristics (such as color of their clothes, eyes, hair, skin, or by the shape of their noses or ears, or by their food and marriages), but only by their internal values-virtues (goodness and wickedness).

After Alexander’s death, his generals divided the vast empire into three kingdoms, the bureaucracies of which consisted of mercenaries of middle-class Greeks and the loyal upper class Macedonians. As the trade and travel between Greece and India expanded, and the Greek merchants and bureaucrats settled in the lands (where a millennium ago their ancestors used to pasture the sheep and cattle), they spread the Greek culture. They pushed the world toward the intermingling of the different (and not so different) cultural traditions. The Greek traditions and beliefs spread to the East, while the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician and other Semitic traditions and beliefs moved into Europe. A growing cosmopolitanism replaced the localism of the city-state. Although the majority of the officer corpus of the Macedonian armies consisted of Greek-mercenaries, the inner-circle of the Macedonian kings consisted of the loyal Macedonian aristocrats, and thus, the bureaucracies of these kingdoms were molded by the hierarchical, hereditary aristocracy patterns.

The Macedonian rulers encouraged the practice of worshiping the king as a god or as his representative on the earth. For instance, the Egyptian priests conferred on the king of the Greco-Egyptian Dynasty the same divine powers that were previously conferred by them onto the king of the Persians and on the kings of all 25 previous dynasties. The Macedonian kings, following the Alexander’s lead, founded new cities modeled after the Greek cities. These new cities adopted the political institutions of the Hellenic Greece, including a popular legislative Assembly and an aristocratic executive Council. The Macedonian kings usually did not intervene into the internal city affairs, because the executive council usually consisted of the upper class and the assembly could not consider the issues of the foreign affairs. Hellenistic cities, inhabited by diverse racial and ethnic groups were dominated by a Hellenized upper class, which overcame linguistic and racial distinctions. Koine had been a Greek dialect that was spoken throughout of the Mediterranean world.

Hellenistic cities engaged in economic activities on a larger scale than the Greek city-states. The market economy developed in the integrated area of Greece and the Near East. Business methods became more refined. The increased movement of peoples led to the adoption of common currency standards. International trade became easier through the improvements in navigation techniques, better port facilities, and a decrease of barter and an increase in the monetary and banking economy. The wealth of the upper and middle classes surpassed the wealth of the Periclean Athenians.

The greatest city of the Hellenistic Age was Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in Egypt. Strategically located at the mouth of the Nile, Alexandria was an unrivaled commercial and cultural center of that time; goods from the Mediterranean world, east Africa, Arabia, Persia, and India circulated in its marketplaces. This cosmopolitan center, with its voluminous library, attracted all kinds of scientists, artists, and poets. Alexandrian physicians advanced medical skills and improved surgical instruments and techniques of operation. By dissecting bodies, they added to the anatomical knowledge of the time. Their advanced knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was not significantly improved for nearly the two next millennia.

Mathematical and astronomical knowledge was also developing faster than it had been developing in the Hellenic Athens. Eighteen centuries before Copernicus, the Alexandrian astronomer Aristarchus asserted that the earth was a planet that revolved around the sun, and that the stars were situated at great distances from the earth. The Alexandrian mathematician Euclid creatively deducted hundreds of geometrical theorems that were proven based on the deductive method alone and were a profound witness to the power of the human mind. Archimedes, a Syracusan who studied mathematics and physics at Alexandria and later became known as an ingenious inventor of the war engines and other mechanical devices, established a new branch of physics (hydrostatics) that studies the pressure of liquids at rest. The Alexandrian geographer Eratosthenes sought a scientific explanation for this enlarged Hellenistic world. He divided the earth into its climatic zones and asserted that the oceans are joined. He also accurately measured the circumference of the earth.

The makeup of the Hellenistic armies also reflected this cosmopolitan spirit. The serving-men came from the lands that stretched from the banks of the Indus River on the East to the banks of the Guadalquivir River on the West, from the Danube in the North to the Nile in the South. In the ex-Phoenician, ex-Egyptian, and ex-Syrian cities, a middle-class emerged, the members of which spoke fluent Greek, wore and used Greek-style clothes, homes, and furniture, and adopted the Greek customs. Sculptures and other artifacts of that era show the influence of many lands and peoples. The historians were accustomed to writing not only local chronicles, but also first-class world histories. The Hellenistic social scientists demonstrated a fascination with the traditions and beliefs of the Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Babylonians, Egyptians; and they soon translated the Scriptures of these ideologies into Greek. Actually, the Greeks creatively developed Stoicism from Hinduism and Buddhism, as they previously developed the Golden Ratio from the Egyptian Canon of Proportions.

In the representation of the human figure, the Egyptian painters and sculptors were guided by so-called canons, which changed slightly during two millennia of the Old and the New Kingdoms. These canons were the rules of proportions that set out the ideal measurements for depicting human figures and the ideal relationships between their parts. The Egyptian artists constructed a grid in which each square measured one half of a unit. For instance, the distance from the bottom of the hair or wig to the shoulder was a unit, from the shoulder to the bottom of the tunic – five units, and so forth. The main purpose of this ideal system was to ease the construction of a generally recognizable royal image.

On the other hand, the Greeks thought that not only the members of royal families actively participated in history but also the talented members of the upper and middle classes (the appointed leaders, orators, scientists, athletes, actors, etc.). Therefore, the Greeks created own canons, which were based on the Golden Ratio. The Greeks thought that any form (including the human figure) is most aesthetically pleasing when it is constructed in accord with the Golden Ratio.

Through the process of systematizing the Greeks’ spiritual and material values, we can discern their evolutionary process. This evolution went from the monarchical city-state through the city-state with the aristocratic republic, in which the upper class was dominant through the military bureaucracy. The evolution continued through the city-state with the commoners’ republic, in which the middle class was dominant through the civil bureaucracy. The evolution continued through the republican empire to the monarchical empire, with the following dissolution of the Greek culture in the larger, Greco-Roman culture.

The spiritual and material values of the Greeks do not come down to us merely by way of a few artifacts of marble or bronze. They are still alive in us as a synthetic idea – the idea of emotional, yet systematically rational common man, who should be the measure of all things. The Greeks’ spiritual and material culture is the actual record of their history. Through the changes in their material culture (architecture, sculpture, painting, and other artifacts), we can scan the years that were missing from the records of their spiritual culture. Thus, we can see the ever-evolving continuity and duration – the birth of Greek culture from the smaller two, its flowering, its decline and its rebirth in a larger culture.

The earliest period in which the Greeks made life-size stone sculpture is called the Archaic Period. It left a rich and vivid record of how the Greeks idealized the human form. The figures are massive, crude, and excessively abstract. They are not meant to portrait the common men, but rather, they stand for the idea of an immortal hero, a semi-god. This figure expresses the highest point of the inductive reasoning, which arrived at the idea of ever evolving, yet changeless eternity – Father-God, Mother Nature, or both.

The sculptures retain the rigid and blocky form of the stone from which they were cut. The use of this technique suggests that the sculptors were under the impression of the idea of immortal and omnipresent power. The sculptures stand poised and serene, emanating the feeling of awe and inferiority. For those early Greek artists moving matter and its space and time meant little, as for their teachers – the Egyptian artists, because space and time (as the indispensable characteristics of the spiritual and physical reality) were not a part of their consciousness. They only felt it on the subconscious level, because the consciousness includes not only the inductive reasoning, but also the deductive one and their systematization (synthesis).

The early Greek artists did not think deductively, moreover, systematically, about themselves, their society, and its environment. Thus, their sculptures were not a thorough reflection of the contemporary reality with its real forms, but rather those sculptures (with their clenched fists and the arms pressed against the side were to stand) were the representation of the upper class monarchical ideology. The latter was created with the intent to repress and subjugate the commoners, spiritually and materially. That is why the facial expression of the early Greek sculptures (the so-called Archaic smile) was intended to extract from a viewer the feeling of awe, fear, and inferiority. The sculptures represented the abstract and universal, not the casual and particular. Individualism was carefully excluded because, for the earliest, semi-nomadic, semi-tribal Greeks, their gods symbolized the abstract, inductive, and universal powers.

Centuries passed. The Greeks gradually developed their spiritual and material culture. They became more sophisticated. The structure of their society, of their city-state, became more discernible and stabilized. They developed their agriculture and industry. Their middle class of merchants, farmers, and artisans developed own ideology and became dominant (through the civil bureaucracy) in the society.

The Greeks respected the old gods, but now had a higher regard for the common man and his material and spiritual life. Athletes and philosophers became more respectable than the war heroes and semi-gods. The images of the former were captured on vases, in bronze, and in stone. Their models were now the common men, not the idealized universal powers. That can be seen in the sculpture of the Charioteer, from the early 5^th century BC. The Charioteer is not as simplified and geometric as the earlier Archaic figures. However, his robe hangs straight and still. His body is stiff and erect. We do not see the drama and action of the event. Rather, the sculptor has given us the idealized symbol of the victor in a game. Although the features of the face are serene and timeless, yet now there are touches of realism in the youthful sideburns and the unshaven face. This subtleties and details of the weekday human life was totally absent in the art of the previous century.

A few decades later, the Disc-thrower would vividly indicate the change that took place in the Greek’s outlook. Now the arms reach out into space. The tense body is twisted, crouches slightly, and poised in anticipation of the throw. He is a man about to be in swift motion; and time and space are indispensable characteristics of the moving matter. Thus, the Greeks moved from their Archaic 2D world of the eternal and the changeless and entered the 3D world of moving matter.

Thus, the Greek history shows us the change to an age not only of supermen, but of the common men also. First, the archaic warrior (with his virtue of manhood) marches into battle like mechanical robot. The face of that old hero tells you – ‘keep smiling never matter what’. His body is rigid and unyielding. Later, by the mid-5^th century BC, the past stiff angularity is no longer discernible. The horsemen from the friezes of the Parthenon symbolized a new age, relaxed and confident – the Periclean, the Middle-class Age of Greece, with the new virtue of goodness – daring with deliberation. Thus, the new hero (who was immortalized through the Parthenon’s horseman) is soft, fleshy, and reflect the natural movement. However, both sculptures reflect the humane dignity and self-restraint, so much admired by both major classes of the Greeks.

The inductive rhythm of the beginning of Greek art was later combined in the Periclean Age with the human individualistic characteristics, which had been growing in importance as the Greek culture mellowed. The middle-class systematic art balanced inductive-deductive geometry of the upper-class cold superman with the warm, emotional, and moving nature of the common man. It was a brief historical balance that came between two wars, eighty years apart – the Ionian Greeks’ victory over the Persians and the Ionian Greeks’ defeat from the Dorian Greeks.

The systematic rhythm and naturalness of the Spearbearer and the Parthenon friezes soon slipped into the upper class pretentious pose, with smooth muscles that flows beneath the soft skin of the 4^th century statue of Hermes, carrying the infant Dionysus. The body of Hermes sways into a relaxed S-curve. The marble has been polished in such a degree as to simulate the soft warmth of feminine skin. Thus, the sculptor of the Hermes exceeded the systematic naturalism and restrained idealism of the previous generation of artists. By the end of the 4^th century, in the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, the new and excessively refined Greek culture moved into the Near East and northern Africa. The days of the middle class dominated Ionian Greeks were numbered, and the Greco-Macedonian Monarchical Empire soon replaced the remnants of their Republican Empire.

The difference between the middle class dominated Greeks and the following upper class dominated Hellenistic Greeks can be demonstrated by a comparison of two places, which represent the artistic crux of the respective ages. These two places are – the Acropolis of Athens and the Acropolis of Pergamon, in Asia Minor. As can be seen in the reconstruction, Pergamon had a magnificent Acropolis, which was built during the 2^nd century BC.

Atop of the Pergamon’s Acropolis was built the Great Altar to Zeus, which reflected the age of the monarchical empire in the same way as the Parthenon reflected the age of the middle class dominated society. The development of Greek culture in broad instead of in deep, extensively instead of being intensive, had been reflected in a strong sense of widening space. The Great Altar of Zeus seems invited the worshipper to enter. Its huge staircase was its central feature, the steps of which was constructed that way with intent to extract from the worshipper a feeling of expanding universe, by inviting the worshipper to move upward, further and further. Atop of the staircase stands a row of columns, which seem from below as the continuation of the steps, which invite the worshipper to step down into the wide cosmos.

On the other hand, the dominant structural motif of the Parthenon was the rows of columns, which enclosed one in the cozy temple, where one felt oneself comfortable, as in own home. The sculptural decoration on the Parthenon was placed behind and above the Doric columns. The intent was to subordinate the sculptures to the columns and the latter to the whole structure, thus making the Parthenon synthetic and comfortable. The Parthenon’s frieze is shallow in carving, restrained, and its rhythm changes unchanging, like its columns.

In contrast, the Altar of Zeus stresses the sculptural frieze, which was now at the bottom of the staircase, easy accessible to a viewer. Moreover, the sculpture of frieze is now deeply carved. The theme of the sculpture is the War of the Giants and the Gods. Through the theme of the sculpture and its deep carving, the sculptors tried to instigate energy of the climbers, who would stumble over the first step. The rhythm of the sculptures is rugged and not organic. These sculptures convey the feeling of their agitated and restless motion into a wide cosmos. Serenity and humane dignity of the Parthenon’s figures no longer appealed to the hearts and minds of the Hellenistic Greeks, who now prefer the muscular and emotional figures. The love of harmony and balance, which was in favor in the middle class dominated society, now was replaced for an extremely emotional outlook, which was reflected in the hysterical and twisted bodies, whose realism and individuality was exaggerated for the greater shock appeal.

The Greek culture was dominant in the Mediterranean region from the mid-Hellenic to the mid-Hellenistic periods. Nevertheless, it was exposed to diverse languages, customs, and ideologies. Correspondingly, it was enriched by the cross-fertilization, particularly, by Buddhism.

a. The Points of Connection of the Stoicism and the Knowledgeable One’s Ideology (Buddhism)

Buddha (c.563-483 BC) was born in Nepal. Siddhartha was his given name, Gautama – his surname, and Sakyas – the name of his tribe. His father was a chieftain in a small horticultural confederation. He was brought up in luxury and had been exceptionally handsome. At sixteen, he married a neighboring princess, Yasodhara, who bore him a son – Rahula.

Buddha appeared to have everything: wealth, handsome looks, family, and was destined for the social power. Despite all this worldly success, Buddha yearned for spirituality. When he was born, his father summoned fortunetellers to find out what the future held for his heir. The fortunetellers agreed that this was not a usual child; they also agreed that if he remained with this world – he would become the greatest conqueror of the world, the India’s unificator and benefactor, the Universal King. On the other hand, if he would not be the world conqueror, then he would be the World Redeemer.

Facing with these options, his father bent for the first option and decided to surround Buddha with all the sensual pleasures, thinking that they would attach Buddha to this world. He surrounded Buddha with dancing girls and shielded him from the sick, decrepit, and ugly individuals – even when Buddha rode, the runners cleared the road before him from such persons. However, one day, Buddha encountered with a decrepit, broken-toothed, gray-haired man who was crooked and bent bodily, leaning on a staff, and trembling. Thus, Buddha learned the bitter fact of the old age. Then he encountered with a sick person, lying by the roadside; and after that he encountered with a corpse. Then he encountered with a shaven-head monk, in the ochre robe, with a bowl, and learned about the people who withdrew from this world. Thus, he concluded that the body is temporal and subject to destruction. He became anxious about death and asked himself a question – if life transfers into death, and then, is there somewhere the realm of life in which there is neither age nor death?

This anxiety of dying became his mania-nervosa until he found the source of it and became Buddha, because Buddha, from Sanskrit, means ‘to wake up’ and ‘to know’; thus, he became the ‘Awakened One’ or ‘Knowledgeable One’. The Knowledgeable One becomes such from a moment when a person shakes off the doze of ordinary awareness from himself and wakes up for the happy life that is without the anxiety of dying.

Once the Knowledgeable One-to-be had perceived the inevitability of the bodily pain and its decay, the sensual pleasures lost their charm. The singsong of the dancing girls, the rhythmic tune of flutes and cymbals, the sumptuous feasts and processions only mocked his infected mind. He was determined to quit the destructive snare of his home and to follow the way of a truth-seeker. He said goodbye to his wife and son and went to a forest. When he reached the edge, he changed his clothes, shaved his head, and plunged into the forest in search of the knowledge.

During the following six years, he concentrated toward this goal and his search was not easy. His search moved through three distinctive stages. The first stage was to seek out two of the most prominent Hindu-masters of the day and pick their wisdom of this vast tradition. He learned a great deal about the psychosomatic discipline (raja yoga) and the Hindu ideology. In fact, the Hindus claim that the Knowledgeable One was one of their own; they hold that he was a dissenter in order to reform Hinduism, and that his agreements were more important than his dissent. However it could be, in due time, he decided that he had learned all that Hinduism could teach him.

The second stage came when the Knowledgeable One-to-be joined a band of ascetics, in order to try their way. He thought that his sensual body powerfully interfered in the work of his mind. Therefore, he should subdue it with austerity. Sometimes he grew so weak that he fainted; and if his companions had not been feeding him some warm rice, he could easily be dead. Thus, he learned the futility of asceticism. This experience did not bring him the knowledge, but the negative results could also teach something. Thus, he realized his first principle – the Middle Way between the two extremes of asceticism and indulgence. He embraced the idea of the rationed life – the body is given what it needs for functioning properly, but no more.

In the final stage of his quest, the Knowledgeable One-to-be devoted himself to a combination of rigorous thought and mystic concentration along the lines of the psychosomatic discipline. One evening he felt that a breakthrough was near and he sat under a tree and vowed not to arise until he gets the knowledge. On the first night of the to-be Knowledgeable One’s temptations, the Evil One rushed to this tree trying to disrupt his concentration by torturing him through his desires – parading three voluptuous women with their retinues. When the Knowledgeable One-to-be did not switch his concentration, the Evil One masked under the Death and tempted him with hurricanes, torrential rains, and showers of flaming rocks. However, the Knowledgeable One-to-be had so emptied himself of his selfishness that the Devil’s weapons found no target to strike and turned into the flower petals. The desperate Devil tried his last weapon – he challenged the Knowledgeable One-to-be on the ground of his right to know life and death. However, the Knowledgeable One-to-be touched the earth with his right fingertip and it responded with an earthquake and the Devil’s army fled in rout. Then his meditation deepened and his mind pierced at last the bubble of the universe and he found the Gate of the Infinite Bliss. Thus, the Knowledgeable One-to-be had transformed into the Knowledgeable One. The bliss of this experience kept him seated under the tree for seven days; then another wave of bliss kept him riveted to this spot for forty-two more days.

Then the Devil tempted him the last time, appealing to his reason. The Devil did not argue the burden of re-entering into this world with its banalities; he dug deeper. Who could be expected to understand the truth as profound as that which the Knowledgeable One had seized and held? How could the speech-defying revelation be translated into words, or the visions, which scatter definitions, be caged into a language? How one can show himself that what will only be found by him, or how one can teach self about what will only be learned by him? Why bother yourself to play the idiot before an ignorant audience? Why not wash one’s hands, say goodbye to own body, and slip at once into the Nirvana? The Knowledgeable One contemplated these questions for nearly a day and then answered, "There will be some, which will understand", and the Devil vanished from his sight forever.

Then, for nearly a half of a century, the Knowledgeable One trampled the dusty roads of India until his hair became white and step infirm, preaching the ego-scattering, life-redeeming message. He founded an order of monks, challenged the staled Hindu priests, and accepted their bewilderment and resentment. In addition to training monks and supervising the affairs of his order, he maintained the public preaching and private counseling, encouraging the faithful, and comforting the distressed. The Knowledgeable One withdrew from society for six years, and then returned into it for forty-five more years. Following this pattern and trying to maintain his busy schedule, the Knowledgeable One devoted nine months of a year to this world and, for the rainy three months, he retreated to contemplate with his monks. His daily pattern was molded in the same manner – three times a day he withdrew from the public for meditation.

At the age of 80 and after 45 years of an arduous ministry, the Knowledgeable One died from dysentery after eating a meal of the dried pork in the home of a smith. While dying, he informed the smith that of all the meals he had eaten during his long life, only two he had blessed. One of those meals gave him the strength to reach the knowledge under his tree and the other was opening to him the final Gate of the Infinite Bliss (Nirvana) right now.

The most striking characteristics of his personality were a combination of a cool head and a warm heart, which shielded him from sentimentality and indifference. His every problem, he dissected into its components, thus that they could be reassembled in logical order, according to their meaning and assumptions. He was a master of dialogue and dialectic. His character was balanced with tenderness and infinite compassion. The hollow distinctions of class and caste meant so little to him that he often appeared not to even have noticed them. He respected all persons with whom he encountered; this attitude stemmed from the fact that all of them were fellow human beings. He refuted all attempts of his disciples, during his lifetime, to turn him into a god. At one annual assembly, he asked his disciples whether in word or in deed they had found any fault in him. When a flatterer exclaimed, "Such faith have I, Lord, that methinks there never was nor will be nor is now any other greater or wiser than the Blessed One", and the Knowledgeable One admonished him:

"Of course, Sariputta, you have known all the Knowledgeable Ones of the past. No, Lord. Well then, you know those of the future? No, Lord. Then at least you know me and can penetrate my mind thoroughly? Not even that, Lord. Then why, Sariputta, are your words so grand and bold?"

He did not conceal his temptations and weaknesses – he showed how difficult it was to him to attain the knowledge and how he remains fallible. He confessed that if he had had another so powerful drive as the sexual one, he would never have achieved the knowledge. He admitted that the months, when he was first alone in the forest, had brought him to the brink of mortal terror. "As I tarried there, a deer came by, a bird caused a twig to fall, and the wind set all the leaves whispering; and I thought, ‘Now it is coming – that fear and terror of death’."

The entire life of the Knowledgeable One was saturated with the conviction that he had to perform a cosmic mission. Immediately after he had had the knowledge of life and death, his soul felt the rusty and dimmed souls of humanity that were crashed and desperately in need of help and guidance. He had no choice but to agree with his followers that he had been born into the world for the advantage, the good, and the happiness of the many.

Moving from the Knowledgeable One to the religious ideology of Knowledge (Buddhism), we must remember that it had grown from Hinduism. Unlike Hinduism, which slowly developed from the ancient Aryan tradition through minutest cultural accretion, the ideology of Knowledge appeared, so to speak, overnight, and it appeared fully formed. In general, it was an ideology of reaction against the perversions of the Hindu priests – the Indian version of Protestantism. To understand the teachings of the Knowledgeable One, first we must understand the general development of any ideology, either religious or political.

Six features of any ideology appear so regularly as if their seeds are in human nature. The first one of these is authority. If we lay aside the divine authority and approach scientifically the matter at hand, then we will see that any ideology represents the interests of the social classes or factions (special interest groups). An ideology is based on reasoning, and therefore, the talented individuals, who could represent the particular interests and capture the attention of the majority of the people, would capture the brunt of the social prestige. They would influence governmental decisions and their advice would be sought and generally followed. If the ideology of such talented individuals would be institutionalized (organized as a bureaucratic body), then these individuals would represent either political or religious authority.

The second feature of any ideology is the ritualistic one. As the anthropologists tell us, the ancient people first devised body language and danced out their ideology before they thought it out. Any ideology arises out of the collective expression of joy or grief. When I would lose a friend or when I would win millions of dollars, I would wish not only to be with people but also to interact with them and interact in such a way that would relieve me from my isolation. Many animal species act in such a manner. A bumblebee would dance before her partners, showing them the way to a rich supply of food. The families of gibbons would welcome the rising sun by singing in unison.

An ideology usually begins from a ritual, but soon the explanations are required; thus, the third feature of any ideology – the reason and speculation or social conscious – appears on the stage. What is the life, what is the death, and where do we go? People wish-to-know their limitations.

The fourth feature of any ideology is its tradition. In a society, it is rather a tradition than reason and speculation that preserves what past generations have learned and transferred to the present as the pattern of an action. Therefore, a tradition is a social instinct or subconscious.

The fifth feature of any ideology is its mystic area, where it tries to measure immeasurable. An ideology is a theory that is based on a system of the axioms or beliefs. These axioms or beliefs are taken as obvious and are very difficult to prove or disprove and usually a tradition sustains them (like the tradition that had supported the axiom of the sun, which revolves around the earth). An ideology must have something unknown because an ideology always tries to explain something total (like the Universe, Nature, God, or Communism) through the point of view of its parts (the human beings are parts of the Universe...). The whole is greater than its part; and therefore, the part will always have some vague knowledge about some other parts of the whole. Therefore, any ideology would have some unknown and mystic area, which can accommodate the imagination of its believers. However, it should wake up the believers’ curiosity, not hinder or suppress it. This vague knowledge must be constantly scrutinized, and the reason should not be hiding behind the supernatural things.

The sixth feature of any ideology is faith or hope – for what is faith if not hope, since it is the belief that the Nature, God, Power, Justice, or Truth will eventually be on our side.

Each of these features – the authority, rituals (or body language), reason (or social conscious), tradition (or social subconscious), vague knowledge (or mysticism), and faith (or hope) – contributes in some degree to an ideology. However, these features can also impede the work of an ideology. Thus, the Knowledgeable One saw all six features impeding Hinduism.

The Hindu authority (its priests) had become hereditary and exploitative, because they were hiding the religious secrets from the lower classes, and because they charged excessively for their ministry to the lower classes. The Hindu rituals, its body language, had become the mechanical devices for evoking miracles (like the Babylonian abracadabra). The Hindu reasoning (its social conscious) had lost its experiential base (its inductive method), and made a stress on the deductive method of thinking, thus degenerating into the scholastic and meaningless hair-splitting. The Hindu tradition (its social subconscious) had turned stale, because the priests insisted on the implementation of Sanskrit (an ancient Aryan language), which was no longer used by the masses (like, later, Latin was used in Luther’s Germany). The Hindu priests have considered the vague knowledge (the Hindu mysticism), as the fantastic tricks that were necessary to maintain their social power; therefore, the priests took all precautions that this vague knowledge would not be clarified.

Thus, the priests, who at the beginning of the Hinduism were developing this ideology and were the progressive leaders, now had the decelerating impact on Hinduism and became retrogrades and a selfish caste.

Finally, the Hindu priests mistreated the faith (hope), because they undercut the individual’s responsibilities for own deeds by substituting the active faith (hope) with the passive faith (fatalism).

When the Knowledgeable One came onto this corrupt and degenerated Hinduism, he determined to clear and clarify it, and to inhale a new life into it. Thereafter, the Knowledgeable One preached an ideology that: shuns the authority, rituals, traditions, and mysticism; and promoted the reason and hope.

1. He preached an ideology that shuns of the authority, because, on the one hand, he wanted-to-break the priests’ monopoly on the Hindu ideology and to make it accessible to the masses. On the other hand, he wanted-to-challenge each individual of the lower classes not rely passively on the priests, but search actively own ideology. "If the teachings, when followed out and put in practice, conduce to loss and suffering – then reject them." E. A. Burtt, The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, 32.

2. He preached an ideology that shuns the rites and rituals. He considered the Hindu rites as irrelevant to the labor of the ego-reduction. He argued that they were worse than irrelevant because they chained the human soul. Therefore, he resisted instituting own rituals.

3. He preached an ideology that shuns of the tradition. "Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps onto yourselves. Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone beside themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height." Ibid.49.

4. He preached an ideology that shuns the supernatural things, such as miracles and fortune telling. He condemned all kinds of mystification as low arts. "By this you shall know that a man is not my disciple – that he tries to work a miracle." He considered all appeals to the supernatural as the attempt to cheat making shortcuts and simplistic solutions that divert an individual from the hard labor of the very self-advance.

5. He preached an ideology that promoted reason and speculation. "It is not on the view that the world is eternal, that it is final, that body and soul are distinct, or that the Knowledgeable One exists after death, that a spiritual life depends. Whether these views or their opposites are held, there is still rebirth, there is old age, there is death, and grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair.... I have not spoken to these views because they do not conduce to absence of passion, or to tranquillity and the Infinite Bliss (Nirvana). And what have I explained? Misbalance have I explained, the cause of misbalance, the destruction of misbalance, and the way that leads to the destruction of misbalance have I explained. For this is useful." E. J. Thomas, The Early Buddhist Scriptures, 64.

6. He preached an ideology that promoted intense self-searching, because many people had accepted the circle of birth and rebirth as inevitable and fatal. He considered it as the self-conviction to a nightmare of eternal hard labor. He considered ridiculous the notion that only the priests could attain the knowledge of life and death. He told his followers, that ‘whatever their caste is, they can achieve the Bliss Infinity in this very lifetime’. "The Knowledgeable One only point the way. Work out your salvation with diligence." C. Humphreys, Buddhism, 120.

The first formal discourse of the Knowledgeable One, after his six-year quest and awakening, was a declaration of his main discoveries, his four convictions about life, which are the axioms of his system.

The First Truth is that life is misbalance (dukkha). The word ‘dukkha’ was used in Pali to refer to the axle of a wheel that was off-center or to the bone that had slipped from its socket. The exact meaning of the First Truth is – Life is the result of a dislocation. Something has gone wrong in the universe or in a body and it is out of joint. If its pivot is not adjusted, is not true, and its movement is not free, then friction or interpersonal conflict is excessive and its movement is impede, and it hurts. The Knowledgeable One pinpointed six moments when the life’s misbalance becomes apparent. Despite their physical, mental, or social differences, all human beings experience six fears. These fears are – the trauma of birth, the fear of sickness, the fear of aging, the fear of death, the fear of living among the hateful things and persons, and the fear of living without the loved ones. He concluded that when our life components mal-adjacent (the body and mind, motor-perceptions and sensations, feelings and thoughts), they are painful. Somehow our life has become maladjusted to our reality and this misbalance obstructs our real happiness until it is overcome.

In order to heal the rupture, we need to know the cause of it.

The Second Truth identifies that the cause of the life’s misbalance is desire (tanha). However, to shut down all desires in our present state would be to die, and to die would not mean to solve life’s problems. The Knowledgeable One explicitly admitted that such a desire as liberation is necessary for the happiness of others. Therefore, only those desires are bad that are directed for our private fulfillment. When we act to benefit others, when we have altruistic desires, then we are free. However, that is precisely where the difficulty is hidden – how to maintain that free state of ours, because our selfish desire pulls us back from our freedom. Our egoistic desire consists of all those inclinations, which "tend to continue or increase separateness, the separate existence of the subject of desire; in fact, all forms of selfishness, the essence of which is desire for self at the expense, if necessary, of all other forms of life.... All that tends to separate one aspect [of an organic unity, VS] from another must cause misbalance and suffering to the unit... Our duty to our fellows is to understand them as extensions, other aspects, of ourselves – fellow facets of the same Reality." Ibid. 91.

I could understand this as if I would hurt, for instance, my neighbor’s dog, thus hurting my neighbor. The latter is a member of my community, which is a unit of my society. Therefore, I would hurt my society and the society would feel the pain, but I would not. Why? Because I would be the cause of misbalance, but I would not be the effect of it and therefore would not suffer; the others would suffer because of me. Buzz! Wrong thinking, would say the Knowledgeable One. Where is the man who concerns in the same degree that the standard of living for the whole world should be raised, as he concerns that his own salary should be raised? Where is the woman who is as concerned that no one is hungry as that she concerns about her own children? Here, said the Knowledgeable One, is where the trouble begins; this is why we all suffer. Because if you, and he, and she, and others would think like I just did, then not others but me, but all of us, including me, would suffer. The difference would be that we would suffer, but suffer not in the same time, not by the same cause, and not with the same intensity. Instead of linking our hope and love to the whole unity, we persist in attaching them to the tiny burros of our separate selves. Coddling our individual identities, we lock our souls inside our egos and seek fulfillment through their intensification and expansion. Then we suppose that this imprisonment can bring our release and freedom. However, our ego is like a hernia – the more it swells, the more it shuts off the free-flowing circulation (on which our health depends), and the more our pain increases.

If the cause of the life’s misbalance and suffering is our selfish desire, then, as the Third Truth states, our cure is in our overcoming of such selfishness. If we could be released from the narrow borders of our self-interests into the vast universe, we would be relieved from our torments.

The Fourth Truth follows as – the overcoming of the selfish desire (the way out of our captivity) is through the Nine-Lane Highway

The Knowledgeable One approached the problems of life like a physician, starting from a careful examination of the symptoms that provoked the patient’s concern. If everything would go smoothly and freely, then the patient-to-be would not worry about his life’s process as he would not usually worry about his digestive process, and there would be no necessity for the Knowledgeable One’s advice and diagnosis. However, this is usually not the case. The patient usually comes with more pain, more conflict, and less freedom than he should have. Therefore, his life is out of joint – misbalance.

Then the Knowledgeable One asked, what is causing these abnormal symptoms? Where is the nidus of the infection? What is always present when the suffering occurs; is it absent when the suffering is absent? When the particular selfish desire, which caused misbalance, is determined; then, it can be overcome. How it should be overcome – by riding through the Nine-Lane Highway, a course of treatment. However, it is not an external treatment (such as rituals, pills, or operations, which can be passively accepted by the patient), but it is an active, internal treatment – through self-training.

The Knowledgeable One distinguished two modes of living: the first is an unreflective, unreasonable, subconscious mode; and the second is a reflective, reasonable, conscious mode. In the subconscious mode, the individual is "wandering about". He is pushed and pulled by the internal impulse and the external circumstance like a puppy, which is left alone in an open space on a stormy night. In the conscious mode, the individual releases self from ignorance, from unwitting impulse, from selfish desire. Through prolonged and patient discipline, an individual riding on the Nine-Lane Highway becomes a different human being – becomes the one who is cured of crippling disabilities. The Knowledgeable One liked to say, "He who seeks may win happiness if he practice [self-discipline, VS]".

First Lane – Right Association. When you enter on a highway, you enter it through the entrance-lane; your life-adjustments also begin from a preliminary step – right association. We are the social animals, and our every action accompanies with our associations and associates, whose values and attitudes affect our associations and actions. Asked how an individual begins his life-adjustments, the Knowledgeable One replied, "An inspirer of an active faith [hope] appears in the world, and the individual subconsciously associates self with such a role model". When a wild horse is to be tamed, a good trainer usually begins by yoking it to one that has already been through the process. Through contact and association, the wild horse perceives that its future conditions are not so bad and not so incompatible with being just a horse. What the trainer expects of the wild horse does not entirely contradict the nature of the latter, though temporarily, the new condition can frighten it. The contagious example of its yoked-fellow can teach the horse as effectively as nothing else. Training for the spiritual life or for the life-adjustments of an individual is not different from the training of a wild animal.

The Knowledgeable One thought that health is as contagious as disease and virtue as contagious as vice. Human beings cannot make progress on this Highway unless they are supported by role models, who generate a field of confidence (a field of active faith). Therefore, he proposed that we should try to associate ourselves with the right role models, converse with them, observe their actions, and try to comprehend their teachings. Then we could proceed into the next, faster lane.

Second Lane – Right Views. Being social animals (subconsciously associating and using the inductive method of thinking), human beings are also rational animals, which use conscious associations and the deductive method of thinking. The Knowledgeable One acknowledged that we need some map, some blueprint, that our reason can trust, in case that we have will-power to direct our energy toward the good ends. We will not have our synergy (the combined energy of our subconscious and conscious) until our reason is satisfied; and this satisfaction is usually based on our deductive method of thinking. The Four Truths of Life correspond to our reason and usually provide it with orientation. If suffering is present, it is accompanied by a selfish desire, which can be cured, and the method of curing it lies in the Nine-Lane Highway.

Third Lane – Right Intent. On the previous lane, the individual has found out what his basic life-problem is. Now he must make up his mind and determine what the will power he really has. He cannot sit on a fence for long. People, who achieved greatness, usually accumulated their energy entirely into one goal. The great man can do a hundred things each day, but most of them, directly or indirectly, tighten with one goal, which he considers as supreme. When such a man, with single-mindedness, seeks liberation, he may expect that his efforts will not be in vain.

Fourth Lane – Right Speech. To attain our goal we must choose the appropriate means; and one of the means is our speech, which reveals our character. If we would start from an extreme resolution – to speak truth and nothing but the truth, then we would be likely to fail because we have started from the finish. However, if we would start from a resolution to notice how many times a day we deviate from the truth, and follow up through this process by asking ourselves why we did so, then we probably would achieve our goal. Similarly, we should proceed with our right (good and kind to others) speech. It would be better if we began not from an extreme decision – not to speak unkind word, but from watching our mouths and becoming aware of our motives, which prompted our unkind speech. After we would master our awareness about how we do talk, the need for change will appear.

Firstly, this change will direct toward veracity. The Knowledgeable One approached to the truth rather practically than theoretically – he considered a deceit rather foolish than evil, because it reduces one’s soul and increases his ego, thus lessening one’s chances to achieve happiness. For why does one deceive? Behind all rational excuses, there is always present the fear of revealing to others or to self who one really is.

Secondly, this change will direct toward kindness. Idle chat, gossiping, slandering, false witnessing, and other verbal abuses should be avoided, not only in their obvious forms but also in their covert forms (subtle belittling or "accidental" tactlessness). The latter are usually more vicious because they are intended to prolong the abuser’s malevolence.

Fifth Lane – Right Conduct. Another mean to achieve our goal is a thorough and more objective evaluation of our behavior before trying to improve it. The trainee should reflect on own actions, trying to find the deepest motives that prompted them. After he would master his awareness about own motives, he should proceed toward selflessness and kindness. The Knowledgeable One detailed these general directives in the Five Precepts: do not lie, do not kill, do not steal, do not be unchaste, and do not intoxicate self.

Sixth Lane – Right Livelihood. One more mean to achieve our goal is our occupation. The word ‘occupation’ usually means both our work and our job; both require most of our attention. The Knowledgeable One considered that an individual’s spiritual progress to be impossible if he has only job for hands and no work for mind: "The hand of the dyer is subdued by the dye in which it works". For those who are bent on giving their minds the full load of work, the right livelihood means joining the monastic order and subduing selves to its discipline. For the layperson, it means engaging in occupation that promotes conscious and reasoning.

Seventh Lane – Right Effort. The Knowledgeable One stressed our will power, because reaching the goal requires tremendous efforts. We should develop own virtues and curb own passions. "‘He robbed me, he beat me, he abused me’ – in the minds of those who think like this, hatred will never cease." To get rid off these obstructing thoughts, the Knowledgeable One recommended to remember, that "passion and sin are more than the filthy mire, and that you can escape misery only by earnestly and steadily thinking of the Way". To curb your passions, your passive wish (the low level of your volition) will do you no good, unless it is accompanied by effort. You should act, and act steadily (methodically) in accordance with the Nine-Lane Highway precepts for obtaining peace of mind. You should not try to leap from the first lane into the fifth in a matter of seconds, for you would risk not only own life, but other lives as well. A mature man has more confidence in the steady pace than in the quickie spurt.

Eighth lane – Right Mindfulness. The Knowledgeable One acknowledged a tremendous influence that our mind has over our lives. A Buddhist text (the Dhammapada) begins with the thought – "All we are is the result of what we have thought.... All things can be mastered by mindfulness". It is probably from here that Plato developed his Theory of Ideas. However, he had not followed precisely the more practical Knowledgeable One, who thought that our ideas had existed in us and realized gradually and slowly. Plato, like a youngster, tried to leap from the second lane into the eighth by stating that our ideas have their independent existence from us, and thus are independent from our efforts and actions. Therefore, the logical consequence of the Plato’s Theory of Ideas is fatalism, and the logical consequence of the Knowledgeable One’s Theory of Life is hope.

The Knowledgeable One thought that our sins are the results of our ignorance, not our innate evilness. More specifically, he considered that though our sins are our faults, they are prompted by our ignorance of own true nature. To overcome gradually our ignorance, he recommended prolonged and continuous self-examination, because he believed that our liberation (from own subconscious and animal-like existence) might be achieved only through self-awareness. We should deeply understand ourselves, seeking our every minutest motive. If we maintain our focus on our motives and interests, then we would perceive that our thoughts and feelings are flowing in and out and have no permanent existence in us. Our reason should witness all of our perceptions and thoughts without either condemning some or preferring others. The disciple should keep his mind in control of his senses and impulses, rather than being driven by them. The disciple should meditate upon own fearful and disgusting sights until he would no longer experience aversion toward them, because he should pervade the whole universe with his loving thoughts.

The conscious of a commoner is usually in the semi-alert state, therefore, the Knowledgeable One recommends that the disciple should seek the steady awareness of each own action and every own thought and feeling in own stream of consciousness. Then the disciple becomes aware of the minutest moment when his conscious submerges into a sleep and even if he breathes in or out. Therefore, the disciple should thus make up his schedule as to have time for intro- and retrospection. Through his practicing, the disciple would arrive at some insights, such as:

1. He would discern that all his emotions, images, or thoughts are accompanied by his body sensations and vice versa.
2. He would discern the patterns of own obsessive thoughts and feelings and would discern how these obsessions develop into his misbalance and sufferings. Practicing, the disciple develops his ability to cope with the stiffening grip of these obsessions and helps himself to release from them.
3. He would discern that each of his mental and physical states is a part of a continuous flow, which is discreet at the same time. The flow is continuous and discreet because the ‘discerning’ means a disruption of an apparently continuous flow of his consciousness into ideas, ideas into thoughts, thoughts into words, words into sounds, etc.
4. He would realize how little control he has over own thoughts and sensations and how little awareness he usually has of his reactions.
5. He would realize that behind his thoughts and perceptions there is nobody who would orchestrate them but him alone. When his attention to his minutest motives would be properly refined, then he would realize that his conscious is not continuous and constant. As if the waves of light alternate with the waves of dark so rapidly that, we see only steady light; so with our consciousness, which seems to be steady, though actually it is not. Having these insights, the disciple begins to dissolve his belief in his separate self-existence.

Ninth lane – Right Concentration. This technique is much the same as the Hindu psychosomatic discipline (raja yoga) and essentially it has the same goal. When the mind has been properly focused and adjustments have been made, then the three poisons (delusion, craving, and hostility) would be exterminated and the mind would rest in its true condition – the direct perception of the Infinite Bliss (Nirvana).

The Knowledgeable One used the word Nirvana as a synonym for the life’s goal. From Sanskrit, Nirvana means ‘to extinguish’, as a fire (deprived of fuel – selfish desires) ceases to draw. Negatively defined, Nirvana is the state of mind in which all selfish desires have been completely dissolved and the restrictive Gate (through which the individual soul connects with the Infinite Life) is wide open. Positively defined, Nirvana is that Infinite Life itself. The Knowledgeable One thus positively characterized it – "Bliss, yes bliss, my friends, is Nirvana".

Hinduism conceived the individual soul as a spiritual substance that retains its separate identity forever. The Knowledgeable One denied the soul as a homunculus, a ghostly specter within the body that animates and outlasts it. To explain his notion of soul, the Knowledgeable One used the image of a flame being passed from candle to candle. Is the flame on the final candle the original flame? Although the original flame influences all others through the chain reaction, it influences without transferring the substance of the candle. The Knowledgeable One believed that we are freed from the pain (that derived from our craving for permanence and continuity) only if we whole-heartedly accept the concept of the constant change of matter.

The Knowledgeable One accepted the gist of the Hindu transmigration concept. His notion of destiny or fate. Fate (karma) can be summarized as follow:

1. A chain of causes chains an individual life to other individual lives that have preceded it up to now and to those lives that will follow. The present conditions of the individual life are determined by the way the previous individual lives were lived. The Knowledgeable One was a determinist, but not a fatalist.

The desires comprise our interests – what we pay attention to and what influences the content of our mind as attractive love and repulsive hate. Our interests (that will later be realized through our active wants-to-give, our passive wishes-to-receive, and our balanced wills-to-take what is lawful and just) have appeared not by accident but by definite lineage and have formed our attitudes (mental habits and obsessions). Acting only through our wills, we form our mental habits; however, the excessive acting through our want-to-give can lead us to be the victims of our own kindness. Having only our wishes, we form our obsessions. The latter include cravings of all sorts – pride, envy, arrogance, pompousness, etc. Having the excessive amount of our wishes-to-receive can lead us to be the patients of a mental institution. Therefore, the best way is to act on such amount of wants as you have wishes. The qualitative balance of your wills-to-take what is just, you can define through the careful analyses of the quality and quantity of your friends and foes.

2. The individual’s will power remained free throughout the whole causal chain of lives until the individual dissolves his selfishness and completely submerges into the Infinite Bliss. The present state of an individual is the product of his own and his predecessors’ prior acts; nevertheless, within the present, the individual can be influenced through his mind but cannot be controlled. Therefore, people remain free to choose and shape their destiny or fate.

Although our attitudes tend to become fixed, we are not bound by our personal histories. We can have new ideas; and by implementing these ideas through our will power, we can change our mental habits and obsessions; thus changing ourselves. The ultimate destiny of the human soul is a condition in which all identification with the historical experience of the finite Self (of a knowledgeable one-to-be) will be dissolved in the Infinite Bliss. Because the Infinite Bliss has no time or rather has time as integrated at once, in all its three dimensions – past, present, and future, the historical experience of a knowledgeable one not only remains but also increases immensely.

3. Admitting the causal sequence of life is not the same as admitting that a substance of life has been also transmitted (remember the example about the flame and the candle). It is through our ideas and perceptions (these are all that our mind has) that our mind (soul) shows itself.

Neither the determinism nor the freedom of will (that were affirmed in the two previous points) requires that our thoughts and perceptions be considered as material things (substances) that are transmitted from mind to mind. My acquisition of a concern for Justice from my parents and a concept of Justice from Plato do not mean that some substance has leaped from their minds into mine.

b. Splitting of the ideology of Knowledge

Every ideology is invariably split. Christianity was split into the Eastern and Western Churches, each of them was split again into Orthodox (Catholicism) and Protestantism, and each of them was again split by national and factional reasons. Splitting happened because each society was split into social classes and each class was trying to accommodate this ideology for protection of the particular class interests. The same happened with the ideology of Knowledge. Because India, China, and other countries of the Far East (which embraced this ideology at that time) were essentially agricultural countries and had tiny middle-classes, the ideology of Knowledge was split into the Big and Little Ferries as reflections of the interests of the upper and lower classes.

Any ideology is split when people begin to question it based on their essential interests. Two such questions are always present when a schism (split) occurs:

The first question concerns how human beings relate to each other, whether they are independent or interdependent. A few people are acutely aware of their particular interests and they need their freedom to pursue those interests actively. For them, their initiative is more important than their bonding. Such people see others as making their own ways through life; they reason that what each individual achieves, he achieves it only because he was actively pursuing his goals (interests). ‘Look at Frank Sinatra; he was born in the slums of Hoboken, New Jersey; his father was an alcoholic; all his siblings went to the dogs. So, tell me no more about the influence of heredity or environment. He got his fame and money all by himself!’ This is the attitude of the pioneers, inventors, and founders of the upper class.

On the other side of the social fence are the majority of people whose interests lie in the area of interdependence. Such people see their separateness as unsubstantial and hard to sustain. Each of them grew up in a family, supported by the extended family, community, and society; thus, they came to the conclusion that although our bodies are separate, we are all parts of one big family on a deeper level. That is what patriotism is all about. When the upper class of a country seems palpably to threaten the interests of the upper class of another country, then the latter would stir up patriotism and nationalistic chauvinism of the lower class to help it win a war. However, for a peaceful time it would be better for the smooth ruling to put patriotism to smolder under the ashes.

The second question concerns the relationship between the parts of a human being – what is better, his head or his heart. What would you choose, to be respected or to be loved? Classic ideologists and the majority of the upper class prefer ideas above feelings because they seek wisdom. Romantic ideologists and the majority of the lower class prefer feelings above ideas because they need compassion.

The Knowledgeable One bequeathed – "Be lamps unto yourselves; work out your salvation with diligence". The classic group of his followers had considered that whatever progress a member of this group would make, it would be his own insight (gained through his own meditation) into his own misbalance and suffering. The romantic group of his followers argued that compassion is the more important feature of the ideology of Knowledge because seeking knowledge of oneself for the sake of oneself is a contradiction in terms. For them, a human being is human because he is social; otherwise, he would be an individualistic animal. Therefore, love and compassion are the greatest things in the world. The classic faction insisted that the ideology of Knowledge was a full-time work and those, who devoted selves to it, should give up the world and become monks. The romantic faction held that this ideology was applicable and relevant in the world (for laypersons) as well as in the monastery (for professionals).

Both factions claimed that they are ferries (yanas) that serve to carry people across the sea of life to the shores of knowledge of life and death. However, the romantic faction asserted that because it serves the majority of a population, it should have the larger of the two vehicles. Therefore, romantics claimed for themselves the name the Big Ferry (Maha-yana) and tried to label the opposite faction as the Little Ferry (Hina-yana). Later, this name-calling party tactic was successfully used by the Russian ‘greater-eans’ (bolshe-viks) to excommunicate and belittle their political opponents in the eyes of the lower class people.

Naturally, classics have preferred to call themselves as the people who taught the doctrine of the Elders (thera – ‘elders’, wada – ‘doctrine’). By taking this name, the upper class faction regained the initiative and claimed that their party taught the original teaching of the Knowledgeable One as it was recorded in the earliest texts, the Pali Canon. These texts were written by the disciples of the Knowledgeable One and they were written after his death. Although the memory of people at that time seemed to be impeccable, it still left room for suspicion of tampering. Besides, as the lower class faction counterclaims, the Knowledgeable One taught more profoundly than eloquently by his own life. He did not remain in the Infinite Bliss after he gained the knowledge of life and death, but returned to this world to devote self to others.

However it may be, the upper class faction held, that "By ourselves is evil done, by ourselves we pain endure, by ourselves we cease from wrong, by ourselves become we pure, no one saves us but ourselves... we ourselves must open the Gate, the Knowledgeable One only show the Way."

The lower class faction held that the fate of the individual is linked to all forms of life, and they are ultimately undivided – "There is a knowledgeable one in every grain of sand".

For the upper class faction, the main goal of life is to acquire wisdom – the profound insights into reality, which clarify to us the causes of our misbalance, anxieties, and sufferings. From these realizations follow automatically our four virtues – even-mindedness (equanimity), compassion, loving-kindness, and joy in happiness of others.

For the lower class faction, compassion cannot follow automatically because one’s meditation yields his personal power that can be destructive for others if one has not deliberately cultivated compassionate concern for others as the main motive for practicing this discipline. Therefore, compassion must be prioritized over wisdom. "A guard I would be to them who have no protection, a guide to the voyager... a bridge for the seeker of the other shore."

For the upper class faction, the main mean in acquiring wisdom is own faction (party, monastic order), which is compounded in the bureaucratically ruled monasteries.

For the lower class faction, the service to the common people is the primary concern and its priests usually marry and are under the supervision of the commoners.

For the upper class faction, the ideal knowledgeable one is one who wanders like a hermit and who alone (with prodigious concentration) unhesitatingly strikes out for the Infinite Bliss.

For the lower class faction, the ideal knowledgeable one is one who (having reached the brink of the Infinite Bliss) voluntarily gives up his prize and returns to the world to show the way to the Infinite Bliss to others.

You decide which one of the two is less selfish or closer to you.

Finally, the upper class faction remains conservative – with fundamentalist adherence to the letter of the early Pali texts. Whereas, the lower class faction is more democratic (less restrictive in the interpretation of the disciplinary roles) and generally has a higher opinion about the abilities of the commoners. The latter faction, being a small Indian sect, converted the king Asoka (c.272-232 BC) who strove to extend the ideology of Knowledge to over three continents and made it a world religion. He extended this ideology into Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan. Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia embraced the upper class faction approach, which envisioned the entire society organized into a three-layer system (a monarch with his soldiers at the top, the monastic community in the middle, and at the bottom – the rest of the people).

Thus, the people’s interests progress full circle. The ideology that began as a revolt against authority, rituals, traditions, and mysticism, returns with all of them.

Further splitting

After the ideology of Knowledge was split between the upper and lower class factions, the ideology of the upper class continued as a unified tradition, whereas the ideology of the lower class divided into several schools. We will look at two of them – Chan in Chinese or Zen in Japanese and the Tibetan version of the ideology of Knowledge. We will look at them because the Zen version deepens our knowledge about our reasoning (conscious) and because the Tibetan version deepens our knowledge about our feelings (subconscious).

The Zen masters draw their inspiration half from the common sense and practical orientation of Chinese and half from the otherworldly Hindu; thus balancing the two and refusing to permit the mind to retreat completely into the Infinite Bliss. Therefore, we should first look carefully at Chinese classics.

1) The ideology of the Skillful Master

The Skillful Master (Confucius or Kung Fu-tze; from Chinese, kung means ‘art’ or ‘skill’ and tze means ‘master’; c.551-479 BC) was born in an impoverished family, in the principality of Lu, in what is now the Shantung province of China. In his boyhood, Confucius did well in archery, hunting, and fishing. In his adolescence, Confucius bent his mind on learning language, history, and mathematics. In his twenties, Confucius held several insignificant governmental positions, had married, and established himself as a tutor. The fame of his personal qualities and practical wisdom spread rapidly, attracting a group of ardent disciples.

His goal was to reorder the ill society through using the public office as the main mean. He hoped to receive the commanding governmental position from the upper class peacefully, as appreciation of his abilities. However, the contemporary rulers were much too afraid of his candor and integrity to appoint him to any significant position. Once the feudal lord of the Lu province (who had gained his supremacy through usurpation) asked the Skillful Master for advice on how he could rule better. The Skillful Master replied that he had better learn to govern himself before trying to govern others. The ruler neither killed him on the spot nor appointed the Skillful Master as his Prime Minister. Instead, he tossed the Skillful Master a governmental post with a sounded title but no authority, hoping to keep him quiet. When the Skillful Master realized the ruler’s motive, he resigned in disgust. The Skillful Master was invited to a governmental post again only at the end of his life, but he was too old for office and he spent his last years teaching and editing the Chinese classics.

The Skillful Master’s failure as a politician was the indispensable consequence of his deviation from own Golden Mean Rule. He had not acted on his wills-to-take what was just, but had acted on his extreme wants-to-give and wishes-to-receive; or most probably, he came up with this Rule when it was too late to follow through it. He thus described himself:

"There are four things in the Way of the profound person, none of which I have been able to do. To serve my father as I would expect my son to serve me. To serve my ruler as I would expect my ministers to serve me. To serve my elder brother as I would expect my younger brothers to serve me. To be the first to treat friends as I would expect them to treat me. These I have not been able to do." Confucius, The Doctrine of the Mean, ch.13.

He failed as a political practitioner, so what? Later, Plato finished his political career in the same manner. But then again, his doctrine, his method of teaching, and his encyclopedic knowledge in history, poetry, government, mathematics, music, divination, and sport let him be one of the world’s greatest teachers.

The Skillful Master lived at a time when the cohesion of the Chinese society had deteriorated to the same level as European societies a millennium later during the 2^nd European Dark Age. Nearly two centuries before the Skillful Master was born, the ordering power of the Chou Dynasty had collapsed, and rival barons were waging continuous wars. Whole populations, which were unlucky enough to be captured, were beheaded (including women, children, and the aged). The social glue (common interests, as expressed through culture) was no longer sticky. The Skillful Master saw it and concluded that what sticks the pack (or herd) together is instinct.

According to the Skillful Master, it is instinct, not the reasonable calculations of the common interests, that produces the cooperation among ants and bees, as well as throughout the sub-human world. There is plenty of violence in nature, but in general, it is between species, not within them. The Skillful Master probably did not observe the war between the red and black ants or between the African killer bees and common bees. On the other hand, if he had observed them, then he might have concluded that these kinds of wars were not "general". However, he did conclude, that within the species, there is the herd-instinct, which sticks the individuals into a viable cooperation, preserves and keeps life stable. However, this automatic source of social cohesion disappears with the emergence of the human species; men are the animals without instincts, without in-built mechanism that can preserve and stabilize their life. So, what can hold anarchy at bay?

In the tribal society the answer was the spontaneous culture (tradition that is based on moral). Through generations of trial and error, certain behavioral ways prove to contribute to the tribe’s prosperity. The tribal council does not sit down to decide what the majority of the tribe wishes in the long-run and what would be the better behavioral patterns that would secure those wishes. The tribal council usually decides based on the short run interests of the majority. Therefore, the behavioral patterns take shape gradually over centuries. During those centuries, generations selected customs, keeping the satisfying ones and discarding the destructive ones. Becoming established, the viable customs are transmitted through generations instinctively (subconsciously, with the mother’s milk); and those tribes that fail to evolve the viable customs cease to exist, for none have remained for studying.

Nowadays, when we have moved so far from the tribal traditional life toward the reason-bound society, it is difficult for us to realize how completely the tribal customs were in control of everyday life. However, we can also see the remnants of such customs (in the corporate dress code, for instance), which continue to dictate our social behavior on subconscious level. As you can imagine, the tribal customs were very grave; however, they served two very surviving social functions – keeping asocial acts in check and continuing the subconscious process of socialization through generations. Group expectations in the tribal societies were so strong and uncompromising that the youth adopted them without deliberations and sometimes even without questions.

Under the Chou Dynasty, the agricultural China had accommodated too many tribes with too many contradictory customs and it could not adopt these tribes organically. Moreover, the development of city life had led to the development of the small middle-class, the individuals of which stressed reason, not customs. These individuals had ceased to consider themselves as tribal men. Self-conscious rather than group-conscious, reason rather than instinct, law rather than custom, self-interest rather than group-expectation had become the mainstream feature of spiritual life that eventually dethroned the Chou Dynasty and threw China into its Dark Age of feudal wars.

The first individualists were probably the hyperactive people, who raised strange questions, could not find their place, and could not identify themselves completely with the group, thus feeling boredom. Once such people appear, the individualistic epidemic spreads like a wildfire; and then, the society needs such ruthless dictators as Stalin or Poll Pot to extinguish or put it to smolder under the ashes. However, the monarchs of the Chou Dynasty were either not so ruthless to the Chinese or did not have so a powerful (intellectually and technologically) bureaucracy as Mao Ze Dong had.

However it may be, during the Skillful Master’s time, China only began to come out of its Dark Age, and this social unrest put on him its lasting impression. How to stop the violence and social anarchy became the main problem of his life.

First, the Skillful Master tried to get answers from the ancient Chinese classics, which were fairly divided among the proponents of the upper and lower classes. The upper-class ideologists (who called themselves the Realists) thus put the question forward:

What would you do when people would not behave? Would you hit them? What people understand best is force. When the middle-class individualists would emerge, they would start to stir reasoning. The pull and push of their passions and self-interests would be so strong that only the grave threat of total extermination would keep them in line. Chat as you please of the reason and morality of commoners, in the final analysis it is the brute force that saves the day. The only way to avoid universal violence among self-seeking individualists is to maintain an effective army that stands ready to beat the hell out of those who transgress the laws. Social order is based on the system of "penalties and rewards". Those who would do what the ruler would command should be rewarded; those who would not do should be punished. Therefore, there must be clear laws with severe penalties for their violation. Obviously, the list of laws should be detailed because self-seeking individualists would be bias in their interpretations. Making his law, a knowledgeable ruler should foresee every possible implementation of this law and should provide it with the greater number of details.

"If a law is too concise, the common people dispute its intentions." Therefore, the requirements of the law and penalties for its infractions should be clearly specified and heavy. "Idealists [the proponents of the lower class, VS] are always telling us that punishments should be light. This is the way to bring about confusion and ruin [of the power of the upper class, VS]. The object of rewards is to encourage, that of punishments -- to prevent. If rewards are high, then what the ruler wants will be quickly effected; if punishments are heavy, what he does not want will be swiftly prevented." Arthur Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, 199.

The upper-class ideologists assumed that people are generally lustful, greedy, and jealous; commoners are lazy, shirk hard jobs, and delight in idleness. Many of the commoners would pretend to be moralists if they think it would help them to get ahead, thus promoting sham morality and fake altruism in society. Because commoners are shortsighted, rulers must have long-range vision. The masses wish security, but they hate the means with which security is produced. If there would be nobody to check upon the commoners’ drive for immediate gratification, then they would soon be victims of the pains they most fear. However, if commoners would accept some currently disliked things, they would have the wished pleasures overall. Of course, there may be a few honest people; but would those few enough to keep order among millions of dishonest ones? Therefore, for the majority of the people, audits are indispensable. Life is tough, and we may wish that it was not, but wishing could not change reality.

In short, the upper-class ideologists’ answer to the problem of social anarchy was – there must be the draconian laws and their forceful and steadfast implementation.

The lower-class ideologists proposed as the solution to the problem of social anarchy not brutal force but universal love. Their recommendations to the rulers sounded like those that follow:

"The ruler should feel toward all people under heaven exactly as he feels toward own people, and regard other States exactly as he regards own State.... Mutual attacks among States, mutual seizures among chieftains, mutual injuries among individuals – these are major calamities in this world.... These calamities arise out of want of mutual love. At present, rulers have learned only to love own States and not those of others. Therefore, they do not hesitate to attack other States. The chieftains have learned only to love own province and not those of others. Therefore, they do not hesitate to seize other provinces. And individuals have learned only to love selves and not others. Therefore, they do not hesitate to injure others. Therefore, all calamities in the world – strives, complaints, and hatred – have arisen out of want of mutual love.... [This calamitous state] can be altered by the way of universal love and mutual aid.

But what is the way of universal love and mutual aid? It is to regard the State of others as own, the province of others as own, and other persons as self. When all the people in the world love one another, then the strong will not overpower the weak, the many will not oppress the few, the wealthy will not mock the poor, the honored will not disdain the humble, and the cunning will not deceive the simple. And it is all due to mutual love." Yi-pao Mei, Motse, the Neglected Rival of Confucius, 80.

The upper-class ideologists brushed away the proposition of the mutual love as sentimental and impractical to the problem of social cohesion. The lower-class ideologists insisted that love is good, and what is good – cannot be useless and impractical.

Neither the proposition to use the brutal force and the draconian laws nor the proposition of the mutual love and aid impressed the Skillful Master. He rejected the upper-class ideologists’ reliance on the army and laws that serve only to the upper-class interests because it is excessively external. The army (regulated by laws) can limit the people’s initiative and business, but it is too cruel to inspire commoners in their mutual weekday relationships. Laws can stipulate conditions of marriage and divorce, but they cannot provide love and compassion. Therefore, the government (the ruler) needs something that it (he) cannot provide by itself (himself) – purpose and motivation. The Skillful Master also rejected the lower-class ideologists’ reliance on mutual love and aid because it is excessively internal. Relying exclusively on love meant to him – to preach ends without means.

So, the love is not only pitying others (which is compassion or feeling) but is also reasoning and understanding the real needs (long-range interests) of others. So, what is the deal? What is the middle ground? When asked, "Should one love own enemy?" The Skillful Master replied: "By no means. Answer hatred with justice and love with benevolence". Thus, his middle ground is – be just to your foes and benevolent to your friends. Marvelous! He defined his goal – to be just and benevolent.

Nevertheless, how could this goal be implemented? What are the means for being just and benevolent?

Being just and benevolent means that the individual must use his reason (conscious) to calculate and ponder his every relationship to find out who his enemies are and who his friends are, and to treat them appropriately. To find out what is appropriate benevolence or justice in a particular relationship the individual must be individualistic, he must develop his reason.

The Greeks followed unhesitatingly through this logical step, which meant to them that in building their just and benevolent State, first, they should destroy own ignorance, if not of all people then at least of the majority.

However, to the Skillful Master, this logical step meant not the Cultural Revolution, but the gradual and steady transition. It meant to him not quickie spurts and unexpected jumps, but the gradual transition should take place between the past spontaneous culture and the new cultivated culture.

Culture has to be transmitted from the old to the young, and the habits and the ideas must be maintained as a seamless web of memory among the bearers of the tradition, generation after generation. If the continuity of a tradition of a peaceful cooperation in a society is ruptured, then the society is going down and soon will disintegrate. Unless the rupture is repaired, the society will break down into the bitter factional wars. For when the continuity is interrupted, the cultural heritage is not being transmitted. The new generation is faced with the task of rediscovering, reinventing, and relearning by trial and error most of what it needs to know. No one generation can do this.

However, full allegiance to the society can be given only by a man’s second nature, ruling over his first and primitive nature, and treating it as not quite himself. Then the disciplines, necessities, and constraints of a civilized life have ceased to be alien to him, and imposed from without. They have become his inner imperatives.

When the country is in a transitional period, a proposed innovation must be continuous with the past, for it should be compatible with what people have known and are already accustomed to. Only then, the majority of population would accept this innovation as effective. The past spontaneous tradition that emerged without conscious intent and its alternative (the deliberately cultivated tradition-to-be) should not be one discarded and another accepted in the lifetime of one generation, because a tradition-to-be can become a tradition only when at least two generations had accepted it.

The transition from spontaneous to cultivated culture requires that intellectuals (the social conscious) have been keeping the old traditions intact, and at the same time, defining for what goals the new traditions-to-be shall henceforth serve. That is why the study of the correct attitudes (mental habits) becomes the principal task of the government. When the new goals and corresponding traditions-to-be would be defined, then every formal and informal device of education should be employed that the majority of the population would adopt the new values. Moral ideas should be driven into the people by every possible means (in temples with proverbs, in schools with history, in theaters with stories, and in homes with toys) until they become mental habits and the people act on them unconsciously in their daily affairs. Then the ruler will not need a considerable part of his army to keep own people in line. You could call this process "brainwashing", but the essence of the matter would not be changed by such name-calling. The only viable question is this – who would define which interests are and will be important for the collective well being and how would they go about such a task? Which of those interests should be either perpetuated or suppressed in laws and cultivated culture?

In organizing their gangs, teenagers act on their common subconscious interest in exploring the new social opportunities for their other interests, and their leaders are the embodiments of such opportunities or they consciously promote such opportunities. Corporations, monastic orders, and complex societies are built on the same principle. Therefore, it is the task of the leaders and intellectuals to determine which laws and customs are outgrowing and incoming.

"What the Great Learning teaches, is to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence. The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to. To that calmness, there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end. Things have their root and their branches. Affairs have their end and their beginning. To know what is first and what is last will lead near to what is taught in the Great Learning.

The ancients, who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed. Their States being rightly governed, the whole Empire was made tranquil and happy. From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

It cannot be, when the root is neglected, that what should spring from it will be well ordered. It never has been the case that what was of great importance has been slightly cared for, and, at the same time, that what was of slight importance has been greatly cared for." Confucius, The Great Learning.

Cultivated culture differs from spontaneous culture in requiring constant attention of the state and corporate bureaucracies. By its form, cultivated culture requires bureaucratic attention to maintain the power of State or corporation intact in spite of the increased individualism that threatens to erode this power. This is the formal responsibility of education. However, its essential responsibly is to shape the character of the stable social life, which education is supposed to beget. Therefore, the brunt of governmental attention should be directed toward the content of that education. The Skillful Master outlined five individual and social characteristics (humanism, maturity, decency, moral prestige, and social harmony), on the development of which education should be directed.

1. Humanism (Jen - two humans). This concept describes the ideal relationship that should exist between human beings – goodness, benevolence, love, human-heartedness, or human-kindness. The Skillful Master conceived humanism as the virtue of virtues – a sublime perfection that he had never seen fully embodied. To the noble men humanism may dictate even sacrificing their lives to preserve others. The humanist feels respect for self and others simultaneously – the sense of the dignity of human life. Such attitudes as magnanimity, good faith, and charity, follow necessarily. In public life, humanism prompts indefatigable diligence. In private life, humanism begets altruism, courtesy, and the ability to feel the feelings of others as own (empathy). In short, humanism requires – "Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do onto you." Confucius, The Analects, XII: 2.

2. Maturity (Chun tzu - the best or superior). This concept describes a fully developed and adequate individual, who is not petty, mean, or low-spirited. This individual has self-respect and respect for others. When he approaches another individual, he thinks not, "What he can do for me?" but "What can I do for him?" In any circumstances, this individual has no fear or irritation toward others. He is not turned into either a snob by success or an inferior by failure. The Skillful Master thought that only on such individuals the civilized society could be founded.

3. Decency (Li - appropriateness or balance and ritual). This concept means propriety – the way something should be done. The Skillful Master thought that most people needed the best role models – to memorize the deeds of these heroes in their particular situations with a view to duplicate their deeds. The Skillful Master wished that people cultivated in themselves such characters that would automatically do what is appropriate in the particular situation. People should sharpen their manners because manners make the man in daily life. Cultivating manners should start from cultivating speech-patterns, because:

If a word is not in accord with an idea, if an idea is not in accord with language, "if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried out to success.... Therefore, a mature man considers it necessary that the names he uses be spoken appropriately."

Most of our communication proceeds through speech, not body language. Therefore, most of our communication, as the precursor of our deeds, proceeds through receiving waving sounds, combining them into words and thoughts, and expressing own reaction in own speech. If a sound (or its visual representation – a letter) would be misused, then the domino effect would take place and the whole process of communicating would be inappropriate and inadequate in the real situation. Therefore, people should devise the normative language (semantics), in which the essential words would carry the meanings they should carry if life is to be well ordered.

Secondly, cultivating manners should proceed through the Mean of the words and thoughts. The Mean (Chun yung) means literary ‘middle’ and ‘constant’, i.e., to be constantly in the middle of the disruptive extremes. The individual, who accommodates the concept of the Mean into his character, balances his temper between indulgence and abstinence, and checks own overdose and depravity in their embryonic stage. The Skillful Master, in his Book of Decency, advises, that 

"Pride should not be indulged. The will should not be gratified to the full [where it becomes either the wish-to-receive or want-to-give, VS]. Pleasure should not be carried in excess."

Later, Aristotle also recognized that people are not always rational and their passionate characteristics can never be eradicated, and therefore, ignored. Aristotle considered surrendering oneself completely to own desire as descending into the animal stage of one’s development. However, completely depriving oneself of the gratification of own desire and living as a hermit would be a foolish and unreasonable rejection of human nature. Aristotle stated that by proper training people could learn to curb their desires and achieve moral well being (virtue) when they rationally avoided the extremes of behavior. "Nothing in excess" was his motto.

However, in contrast with the Skillful Master, Aristotle was inconsistent and did not stress the constant feature of his Golden Mean Rule. There is nothing wrong with the want-to-give and wish-to-receive in a short-run situation, but they become extremes in the long-run period. One who submitted self to their constant influence in the end may become either a beggar or a nut, as I pointed out earlier. However, the constant respect for the Mean Rule brings the individual into the state of internal and external harmony, balance, and will-to-compromise. There is nothing wrong with an individual who has wished-to-be a hero (to-receive respect from the society) and, when opportunity occurred, jumped into a flaming house and saved a child. However, when his wish-to-be a hero becomes his constant obsession to be in the public eye, then, his passive wish-to-receive may transform into active want-to-give (extremes converge often into each other). Thereafter, he may start artificially setting other houses on fire in order to give his "helping" hand to save their residents. Thus, his extreme and constant obsession of being a hero would play a dirty joke on him (making him a criminal instead of a hero) and would jeopardize the lives and property of others.

Thirdly, cultivating manners should proceed through its realization in the Five Constant Relationships that constitute the foundation of social life. Those five constant relationships, the Skillful Master considered as the frame, within which one might achieve the maximum fulfillment. The five relationships are between parent and child, husband and wife, elder and junior siblings, elder and junior friends, and ruler and subject. In each of these relationships, different responses are appropriate or decent: parents should love, children should revere; elder siblings should be gentle, younger siblings should be venerable; husbands – good, wives – "listening"; elder friends – tactful, younger friends – respectful; rulers – benevolent, subjects – loyal. Three of the five relationships relate to the family, which the Skillful Master considered as the basic unit of society. Within the family, it is the children’s reverence for parents and veneration for elders that creates the atmosphere of peace, mutual support, and general happiness. The Skillful Master held, that "The duty of children to their parents is the foundation from which all other virtues spring". However, when the meanings of the parents become no longer meaningful to their children, then the society goes toward own destruction. The young should honor and serve the old not simply because the young would soon enough be self the old and would need to draw on own past investments, but also because years and experience bring a ripening of wisdom and mellowing of character.

In his Rectification of Names, Doctrine of the Mean, Five Great Relationships, and Regard for Age and the Family, the Skillful Master described the first meaning of decency – appropriateness and balance. However, the second meaning of decency is ritual, which fuses what is appropriate and what is right to do (an idea and the action that is based on that idea) – into rite. When right behavior is constant, then, the individual’s life becomes a well-choreographed, sacred dance, in which there is a pattern for every action.

4. Moral prestige (Te - social respect). This concept means public respect for the individual and his ability to influence governmental decisions. The Skillful Master thought that no government could keep all its subjects under its watchful eye all the time. Therefore, the government must rely on the appreciable confidence of the public in what it is doing to protect the public interests. He considered the public trust and popular support of governmental actions as the foundation of the prosperous economy and the militarily powerful government, for "if the people have no confidence in their government, it cannot stand". The popular support for governmental actions arises only when people perceive their leaders as mentally and physically able to govern, sincerely devoted to the common welfare, and as having attractive personalities (character that compels charm and respect). Real prestige is the power of moral example. Virtue of goodness becomes embodied in society not through laws or military power, but through the moral individuals, we most admire. Therefore, all eyes are directed toward the ruler. If he is deceitful or "challenged" mentally, there is no hope for prosperous and dignified life in the society. However, if the ruler is a real leader (whose actions spring from his moral subconscious), then he will attract such allies into his government, who cannot be purchased for money but can only be attracted by the moral prestige. Complete devotion of such governmental officials to the public welfare will soon be adopted by the local governments and, then, by the commoners.

5. Social harmony (Wen - the peaceful art). This concept is the contrast to the art of war, and it refers to music, literature and science, and the visual art (painting, sculpturing, architecture, and the theatrical art). The Skillful Master considered that the peaceful art has a catalytic ability to transform an individual into the virtuous state of mind and make it easy for him to regard other people. He held that, in the end, the victory goes not to the State that has more battalions, but to the State that has the finest art and science and which is the embodiment of the moral character of the nation.

Humanism, maturity, and decency are the main characteristics of the civilized individual, and the society helps him to develop these characteristics with the help of its own characteristics – moral prestige and social harmony. Therefore, cultivated culture is the ever-evolving process of self-cultivation toward becoming more humane. Such a progressive individual (one who is bent on self-cultivation) positions self into the ever-evolving crosscurrents of human relationships. The human relationships cannot be fulfilled if the individuals are in isolation from each other. The hermitic saintliness had no meaning for the Skillful Master, for apart from the human relationships, the individual self cannot exist as a human self. The humanness of self is a center of human relationships; it develops through interactions with other individual selves, is defined by them, and depends on them. The Skillful Master saw the human self as a node in the social net. If such a node would be destroyed, the entire net may become useless.

The Skillful Master’s answer to the upper and lower class ideologists’ question what is better mind or heart (force or love) was – the mind-heart unity in a fully realized human being through ever-expanding his sympathy and empathy. The internal expansion of the progressive individual deepens, becoming more satisfying and refined as his humanism and maturity grow and the possibilities of his decency are increasingly realized. The external expansion of this progressive individual begins with self and spreads successively unto his family, community, nation, and the entire humanity. In shifting the center of his emphatic concern from himself to his family, he overcomes own egoism. Moving from his family to his community, he transcends own nepotism. Moving from his community to his nation, he overcomes own localism, and moving toward the entire humanity, he overcomes own chauvinistic nationalism.

Finally, the Skillful Master did not concern himself with the question of how it would be possible to protect the public (lower classes) from the ineffective hereditary bureaucracy. Rather he considered that while the bureaucrats remain humane, mature, and decent, there is no need to create the laws (and other bureaucrats for their implementation) to protect the public from the bureaucrats’ hereditary greediness and mediocrity.

Before the teaching of the Knowledgeable One became cultivated in China, the Chinese had combined the earthly Confucianism with the romantic Taoism.

2) The Way of the Old Master

Taoism pronounced as Dowism and originated with Lao Tzu, who was born about 604 BC. Tao means ‘way or flow’, Lao means ‘old’, and Tzu means ‘guy, fellow, or master’. Nothing certain is known about his life; therefore, I will talk only about his teaching.

The Old Master advocated to cultivate the natural virtue and goodness, and to seek greater privacy for the aged. He wrote his testament (The Way and Its Power), which can be read in an hour and which remains the basic text of Taoism.

The Way is an inductive way to the realization of the ultimate reality. This Way or Flow cannot be clearly perceived, for it is too vast and deep for human conscious to measure it. Around the Flow is the Womb from which all life springs and to which it returns. Though the Way is ultimately transcendent, it is also constant. It is the norm, rhythm, driving power of nature, and ordering principle of the universe. The Way is based rather on spirit than on matter, because the former cannot be exhausted. The more people draw upon the Way, the more it follows, for the Way is "the fountain that is ever on". Later, a Neo-Platonic, Plotinus said that the Way is also his way. The Way or Flow is the spirit of life; and although it is inevitable (for when autumn comes "no leaf is spared because of its beauty"), it is benign (flowing rather than discreet, graceful rather than jerky, and infinitely generous). Giving life to all things, the Flow may be called "the Mother of the World". However, because all things are dying in this Flow, it may also be called "the Grave of the World". The Way resembles Plato’s Ideas – the eternal laws that structure the universe. Rather it may better be conceived as the Christian integrating principle of the whole – the Spirit, as the glue that sticks together the Father and the Son. Because the basic text of Taoism has been translated as The Way and Its Power (Tao Te Ching), I will rather refer to the Way as the Flow of the power of life and death that unites the light (the life energy-to-push) and the dark (the death force-to-pull).

This teaching was later divided between two viewpoints – theoretical and practical. Theoreticians consider our power from the viewpoint of conservationists, who try to conserve their power by expending it more efficiently. The practitioners consider our power from the viewpoint of those who rely on the infinitely increasing supply of this power.

Knowing different aspects of reality, we can repair a machine or even a living being. The theoreticians held that knowing our power and conserving it (by not expending it in useless, draining ways the main of which are friction and conflict) means to live effectively (wisely) and to die in good time. To avoid life’s conflicts and frictions means to reduce them to the minimum – to the state of inertia or pure effectiveness.

The practitioners, who asserted the necessity of training programs, were eager to go beyond the simple conservation of our power. They were willing-to-take more power than the present situation had been allowing them. (Sic! They transcend the energy constancy law in a system!) Referring to the power of life and death (chi), the practitioners experience it as flowing through them. If there is no flow, then power is blocked. In the latter case, their main objective would be to repair the flow of power because to be alive is good, but to be constantly alive is even better and is the ultimate bliss. To accomplish their goal of maximizing power, the practitioners would work first on their own minds and then, using own minds as instruments, they would work with internal and external objects.

The work on own mind goes through meditations, which are the same as the Hindu psychosomatic discipline (raja yoga). Concerned more about the society than about the individual, the Chinese tried to improve the part of the meditation technique that improves concentration. By psychically channeling the individual power that the disciple of the psychosomatic discipline accumulated through meditation into the society, the practitioners were trying to increase and harmonize the social vitality and welfare. The practitioners, adopting Confucianism, were trying to influence directly and indirectly the social power. Directly, they were trying first to draw power into own mind-hearts and then to beam it to others, thus influencing that part of the social power that was responsible for the moral prestige and ritualized etiquette. Indirectly, they influenced that part of the social power that was responsible for wealth. The practitioners should be socially unnoticed. Only thus, their lifetime enterprise would give maximum effect for the community.

The practitioners were fascinated with the psychosomatic discipline that allowed them to separate their inner from their outer selves and to advance their self-consciousness. Awakened consciousness would let the individual see not just the perceived objects but also own mind with which he perceived them. However, this new and exciting world of the inner self contained a problem. Successive deposits of anxieties littered the soul and it should be cleaned. To succeed in this inward work, the individual must reverse all selfishness and cultivate cleanliness of own thoughts and body. The soul can be known only in a life that is harmonized and beautified. The external uncleanness and perturbing emotions must be repaired; otherwise, they will prevent introspection from seeing what is behind them. When all uncleanness, anxieties, and selfishness would be dispelled, then, as the apogee of the meditation, would come a condition of alert waiting with a blank mind. With this condition of the mind would come joy, truth, and power. The harmony of the practitioner’s mind would be the same as the harmony of the cosmic mind and they could communicate in unison (in the same tone).

The social utility of this condition of the mind lay in the extraordinary internal and external power that it provides to the individual, who can now "shift Heaven and Earth". A ruler, who is clean, desireless, and has the psychic power (electrifying magnetism and intellect), can transform it into the moral prestige and automatically turn his subjects from their unruly desires.

Acquiring the internal power, the practitioners tried to maximize the social power by working on the external objects (including other people). They invented diets – to see if the social power could be increased nutritionally. Experimenting in this area, the practitioners have developed a remarkable herbal medicine. Experimenting with the bodily senses, they developed acupuncture; however, their real goal has not been to cure the individuals but to increase the social power. Therefore, sexual experiments were also conducted. One of such experiments was based on the premise that men would not only retain their male lightness (yang – the life energy-to-push) but also acquire some of the female darkness (yin – the death force-to-pull) if they would retain their semen after intercourse by squeezing the base of the penis at the moment of ejaculation. (It is a pity that Mr. Clinton did not do his experiments based on this hypothesis; otherwise, he would not care about his "DNA" stains by now.) Thus, the experimenters would probably absorb some of the female force-to-pull. These efforts to extract the power of life and death (chi) from the external objects (in their gaseous, liquid, and solid forms) resulted in the programs of the bodily movements, such as the tai chi chuan. These programs try to combine gymnastics, dance, martial art, meditation, and the concept of the male-female power organically in order to channel the cosmic power into the society, where it should eliminate the blockages of its internal flow.

Reflection and experimentation require time, free from searching the means of subsistence, and in the agricultural China, such time was available only to the upper-class individuals. There were pestilence and droughts, floods and wars (all kinds of natural and social disasters), which should be constantly monitored and, as the situations required, be induced or stopped. The upper class responded to such problems by institutionalizing the practitioners’ approach and taking from the teachings of the Old Master, the Skillful Master, the Hindus, and the Knowledgeable One what was appropriate for protection of their class long-run interests. From this institutionalization derived the Chinese sacred texts and the line of "papal" succession in the Way of the Old Master church that has been continuing down to the present patriarch, who resides on the island of Taiwan.

We have to keep in mind that we have only some knowledge about how to increase the power of life and death in the system by channeling the power of its subsystem into it (we can harness the molecular or atomic power into our earthly system). However, we know nearly nothing about how to increase the power of the system by channeling the power of its super-system into it (for instance, how to increase the power of the solar system by channeling the power of our galaxy into it). Likewise, we have some knowledge about healing through faith in oneself or others. Placebos and pep rallies, hypnotists and magnetic persons can generate power, the hidden reservoirs of which we do not know yet.

The priests of the Way of the Old Master church have been promising to make such cosmic power available for the Chinese public. Thus, they have developed the magical rituals that proceed on the assumption that higher power exist (that power rules matter, consciousness rules power, and sub-consciousness rules consciousness) and can be made available for the public. Traditionally, the upper class understood magic as the means by which higher (occult) power can be tapped for use in our earthly world. The development of these means led necessarily to their duality – if the life energy could heal, then the death force could be invoked as the mean of the demonic power directed for malevolent purposes.

The theoreticians-conservationists (whose theory was not institutionalized because it was not applicable in the interests of the upper class) have the same concern as the upper-class practitioners – how to improve the Way (Flow) to maximize the animating power of life and death. Their specific concerns felt on deepening their research of the first question of a continuum, which begins with the question how life’s normal portion of the life and death power (chi) can be deployed to best possible effect. The next question is how the normal quotient can be increased. The final question is if cosmic power can be focused (like with the help of a burning glass), how it can be deployed for the welfare of the people. However, the object of the theoreticians is to use effectively the presently available (qualitatively and quantitatively) power of life and death. The basic way to do this, is to perfect the appropriate redistribution streams in the flow of the life and death power. The best redistribution is the individual’s inertia or his effectiveness and creative quietude, which should not be mixed up with idleness or abstention.

The individual’s effectiveness combines seemingly incompatible conditions – supreme activity and supreme relaxation. These supremes should not be taken as the extremes because these seeming incompatibles can coexist in those human beings that are not selfish, self-enclosed entities. Such individuals ride the unbounded flow (Tao) of power (Te) of life and death (chi) that sustain them through their subconscious minds. One way to be effective is to redistribute the life and death power following the calculated directives of the conscious mind (reason). However, the results of reasoning are rarely impressive because the conscious redistribution of the life and death power tends to be the mechanical rearrangement of it rather than be the organic inspiration of it. It is easier to the conscious mind to follow the patterns of "wires" with which our brain is constructed. However, the genuine effectiveness or creativity, as every real artist or pregnant woman knows, comes when the more abundant resources of the subconscious mind are somehow channeled.

Women are usually sexually aroused in the presence of the excited men. It does not matter what those men are doing (killing each other, working manually or mentally) but, as long as they excited, the women transfer subconsciously their passive wishes-to-receive into their active wants-to-give selves to those men. Thus, they channel the male life energy into themselves and create a new life. That this creativity could happen, certain dissociation from the conscious mind should occur – the individual should relax his (her) conscious and let it flow.

Therefore, the individual’s effectiveness (or quiet creativity) is his supreme activity and relaxation, which are his mind’s simplicity, flexibility, and freedom from reasoning that flows through him when his ego and conscious efforts yield to a power not his own. The theoreticians’ approach to the problem of creating a perfect man and a perfect society was a direct opposite to the Skillful Master’s approach. The Skillful Master taught to deploy every effort of the society and individual to mold the "second nature" (reason) of the individual, the pattern of his ideal responses, which he might consciously deploy. The theoreticians, on the contrary, taught that the "first nature" of the individual was more important than the "second nature". In their view, the individual should first attune himself with the cosmic Flow of power and let own behavior flow spontaneously (subconsciously), in unison with the cosmic Flow.

The individual, whose subconscious mind directly connected with the cosmic Flow of power and nurtured by it, possesses an abundant vitality that has no need for violence or jerkiness. He simply lets the Flow of the life and death power to flow in and out, until life and death become dancing partners, which are in perfect balance with each other. He is not indifferent or inactive; on the contrary, his actions are simple and flexible, and thus, effective, because no motion is wasted for useless embellishing or scrambling. Effectiveness or real creativity requires a delicate skill – to be unselfish. When an individual is unselfish, he is like a thread of that fisherman, who managed to land a huge fish because his thread although thin but had no flaws in it. The secret of being unselfish lies in the Flow of power itself, which, like water, seeks out the low places to fill them up. The Chinese hieroglyphs for a swimmer mean "one who knows the nature of water". Likewise, the individual, who understands the Flow of the life and death power, knows that it will sustain him if he stops useless flapping around and trusts himself to its support.

"Do you have the patience to wait till the mud settles down and the water becomes clear? Can you remain inactive until your right action arises by itself? ... Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet, for dissolving the hard and flexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice." The Way and Its Power (Tao Te Ching), ch.15, 78.

Such characteristics of water, as its infinite flexibility and powerfulness, are nearly the same as those of the Flow of the life and death power. The individual, who complies with those characteristics of water and the Flow of power and becomes unselfish, "works without working". He thinks and acts without strain – his eloquence is without embellishments and he persuades without arguing.

"Those selfish people who would try to take over the earth and shape it in accord with their wills, I notice, never succeed. They will be unsuccessful because the earth is so delicate that the mere approach of a selfish man would mar it, and when such a man would reach out his fingers to grab it, the earth is gone.... The best leader is that, whose existence is hardly noticeable for people. For a good leader is that, who talks little, but when his work is done and the goal is fulfilled, then people will say, ‘We did it by ourselves’." Ibid. ch. 29, 17.

The romantic approach of the theoreticians was also combined with their tendency for naturalness. Their preference for simplicity and naturalness would soon lead the theoreticians to the extremes of their wants-to-give, because they did not discern yet the two extremes of the middle will-to-take. They became skeptical to the contemporary urban culture; they ridiculed it and idealized the primitive horticultural past State. They neglected the form, preferring the content. They considered the Skillful Masters’ attempt to arrange the social life in accord with reason as pointless. "Back to nature" became their motto.

Their rebellion against the upper-class bureaucratic practitioners turned out to be a fruitful experience, which conceived the notion of the relativity of all human values and the identity of opposites. The traditional Chinese representation of the Flow of the life and death power as the symbol of the active, life-sustaining, energy-pushing, male principle (yang) that permeated the passive, life-giving, force-pulling, female principle (yin) summarizes all of life’s essential polarities. Among those polarities are -- life and death, male and female, attractive and repulsive, push and pull, active and passive, good and evil, right and wrong, want-to-give and wish-to-receive, freedom and slavery, dependence and independence, light and dark, energy and force, acceleration and deceleration, positive and negative, space and time, full and empty, past and future, north and south, left and right, up and down, summer and winter, big and small, finite and infinite, mind and matter, God and Nature. Although the polar halves of the universe or a family are in tension, they are not in the simplistic disagreement but complement and balance each other. Permeating each other private domains to their deepest places and moving through them in time, at the final analysis, both find themselves resolved by the circle of the Flow of power that surrounds them as their eternal unity, wholeness. In their totality, the opposites appear as moving stages in a constantly circulating process, in which the polarities turn consequently into the past places of each other. Where once there was the North Pole, will someday come the South Pole and vice versa. Where once was life, there once will be death and vice versa. No matter or idea can be considered as absolute in this relative world.

The Chinese literature is prolific with dialogues between the proponents of the Skillful Master and the Old Master on the themes of relativity. Once two of them were strolling along a river and an Old Master’s disciple told to a disciple of the Skillful Master: "Look how the minnows dart hither and thither at will. Such is the pleasure fish enjoy". The latter was amazed and asked: "You are not a fish. How do you know what gives pleasure to fish?" The former responded: "You are not I. How do you know I do not know what gives pleasure to fish?" The latter did not find the effective counter-argument because the knowledge of different species was not there. However, now we can provide the effective answer to that sarcastic disciple of the Old Master. ‘I know that you do not know what gives pleasure to fish because both of us are from the same species and our senses are working in the same manner. However, the fish is a different species, and different species have different senses. For instance, the retina of a human eye contains about 95 percent of rods that are responsible for our black and white vision and about 5 percent of cones that are responsible for our color vision. However, nearly all kinds of birds have diametrically opposite percentage of rods and cones in the retinas of their eyes. Therefore, an eagle can see its prey from 3 kilometers above at the noon, but can hardly see anything at the dusk. Because the differences of the sensory systems, the different species feel differently. Therefore, I know that you do not know what gives pleasure to fish.’ If you can find an effective counter-argument to my argument, I will appreciate if you send me it at my e-mail address: [email protected].

However, for now, we should look carefully at other lovers of the riddles about relativity.

3) Zen teaching

Observing a practicing group of Zen masters who converse with each other, you would be puzzled at their dialogues and statements. They would set traps, trying to trick each other to assert something that might imply its opposite. Are they serious in this double talk (dialectics)? It is very difficult to believe that they are serious, but they are. They are serious exactly because they are acutely aware of the limitations of their words. The words occupy an ambiguous place in our lives. They are indispensable to us, for we would be on the same level of intellectual development with the bees. We would probably spend a half of a day trying, with body language, to explain to the minor members of our family where we put the box with their favorite cereal; and more probably, we would not have the cereal at all, having the only body language. Words are the parts of our communicating code and can mislead us, fabricating a virtual reality – when we imagine that something that stands for something actually exists. A husband could be fooled by his infidel wife and coming home would cry – "Honey, I am home". However, there is no ‘honey’, as well as there is no ‘home’ any more – the woman and the house are still there, but the 'wife' and ‘home’ have gone.

The words have three limitations:
1. Words construct an artificial world, in which our actual feelings are camouflaged and multi-faceted things and persons are reduced to few facets; it is called stereotyping or profiling.
2. Even when our descriptions (by using words) are accurate, these descriptions are not the described actual things – a menu is not the meal itself.
3. Our highest experiences (in meditating or sex) avoid words almost entirely.

Any ideology recognizes to some extent that our words and reason fall short of reality even if they do not actually distort it. The rationalist usually tries to avoid this fact as paradoxical and giving too much to chew upon to mystics. Zen mystics acknowledge that their meditation transforms them with its striking darkness and they see the uniqueness of their school in that it makes breaking the language barrier its pivotal point in the pursuit of knowledge of life and death.

According to the Zen tradition, it was the Knowledgeable One, who first made this point in his Flower Sermon, by refusing to equate his actual experience with any verbal substitute. While standing on a mountain with his disciples, the Knowledgeable One held aloft a golden lotus in silence. No one understood the meaning of this eloquent body language but one disciple, whose quiet smile had indicated to the Knowledgeable One that he had gotten the point. Thereafter, the Knowledgeable One designated this disciple as his successor. Zen mystics continued in this tradition by defining their treasure as "a special transmission" over the Scriptures. The Zen denomination also has its texts, but they are not like other ideological Scriptures. Almost entirely they are devoted to stressing the point that Zen, as a specific way to knowledge of life and death, cannot be equated with any verbal formula. Indeed, a multitude of disciples had interrogated their masters about the Zen discipline and only received a menacing ‘Huh!’ for an answer. The masters saw that through such questions, the disciples were trying to fill their life’s gap with words and ideas instead of realizations of these words and ideas. Words are not bullets; they cannot kill.

Contrasting with most ideologies that usually circle around a creed of faith of some sort, the Zen discipline refuses to lock itself into a verbal dungeon. Life is too rich and colorful to be confined into the pigeonholes of words. The elders of other ideologies usually regard the slightest disrespect to God’s word as the deadliest sin, but Zen masters may order their disciples to shred their Scriptures and to avoid such words as the Knowledgeable One or the Infinite Bliss. Zen masters are not interested in theories about knowledge of life and death, they want-to-know the real life and death. They want their disciples’ minds to spring from their verbal bonds into a new mode of apprehending.

Every point can be expressed in its extremity, and we should not infer that Zen masters refrain entirely from reasoning in words. Although our minds are not the ideal mirrors of reality, when working in special way, our reason can actually help our awareness toward our goal – to know life and death. If our way of reasoning seems at times like using a thorn to remove a thorn, then our reason can also play an interpretive role in connecting a newly discovered world to the world of common sense. In the appropriate circumstances, Zen masters would try to explain any personal experience. However, they see the duality of our words, and therefore, consider, firstly, that Zen logic and description makes sense only from a point of view of a particular experience (and later the existentialists, like Sartre, went through this way). Secondly, a Zen master is determined that his disciples attain a particular experience themselves, not allowing them to talk about it.

In the tricky matter of succession, the elders of other ideologies went through the way of institutionalizing their wills (as the papal succession through the cardinals’ voting). Zen masters trusted the future of their ideology to a specific state of their own and their disciples’ minds. In this state of the two minds, the teacher’s and student’s conscious and subconscious are working in unison and the knowledge of the teacher is transmitted subconsciously to the student like flame that is passed from candle to candle. It is this transmission of the old Knowledgeable One to the young Knowledgeable One constitutes the essence of the Zen discipline.

For several centuries this subconscious transmission was symbolized by the handing down of the Knowledgeable One’s robe and bowl from patriarch to patriarch, until the Sixth Patriarch concluded that even this simple body language was a step toward the confusion of the form with its content. Since then, the Zen tradition circles around the succession of teachers, each of who has received his state of mind from his predecessor. The training, by which the disciples are prepared to receive and take the Knowledgeable One’s mind, can be approached through consideration of the three main terms: seated meditation (zazen), riddle-problem (koan), and consultation concerning meditation (sanzen).

The seated meditation is generally the same as in the psychosomatic discipline (raja yoga). A disciple sits in the lotus position and his half-closed eyes retire on the straw mat he is sitting on.

The riddle-problem that the Zen masters devise for their disciples would look like the riddle. For instance – "What did your face look like before your parents were born?" The disciple must not dismiss the puzzle, but must direct all attention of his mind toward the problem, sometimes using logic, sometimes being illogical, waiting until an acceptable answer erupts. During this time, his mind is working in a very special way, for the Zen discipline considers the reason (conscious) if not the anchor of the mind, then at least a ladder too short to reach the heaven. Therefore, the disciple’s conscious must be surpassed, and solving the puzzling problem is designed to assist in such surpassing. The mind should be upset, unbalanced, and should eventually revolt against the usual reason that imprisons it. By forcing the mind to scramble with what, from its usual and stale point of view, is absolutely absurd, the Zen master tries to drive the mind of his disciple into a state of extreme agitation in which its subconscious turns against its conscious. This internal struggle of the mind eventually exhausts it until it sees that thinking is no more than thinking about something real or feeling something real is more than feeling for it. Having baffled its own conscious, the mind counts on a flash of sudden insight to bridge the gap between the secondhand, reflective, conscious life and the firsthand subconscious life. Struggling with the riddle-problem, the disciple must not have books or the advice of his fellow-disciples because they could produce the secondhand reflective answer. However, twice a day, the disciple meets his master for the private consultation, which concerns his meditation.

This consulting is invariably brief. The disciple states his riddle-problem and follows through it with his updated answer. The right answer usually comes with the self-validating force. However, if it does not come. Then, the master makes a close examination of the disciple, to arouse him from his immaturity, to beat down his false ideas and prejudices, just as the smelter removes the lead and quicksilver from the gold in the smelting-pot. The master’s other service to his disciple is to keep him energized and determined during the long training years.

The first important discovery in this training is an intuitive experience. The training may take years, but the actual experience of knowing life and death comes in a flash of light. Wherever this intuitive experience appears, it brings joy and a sense of reality that challenges the ordinary language. Other ideologies tend to relate such intuitive experiences to the apogee of the spiritual quest, but Zen school considers them as the moment of departure. It considers that the real training begins from arriving to an intuitive experience, for there must follow other intuitive experiences as the disciple learns to move freely in them.

The Zen discipline tries to improve the less than ideal state of the world and at the same time it does not allow to its disciple to withdraw from the world. Zen fuses the temporal with the eternal, to widen the perceptions of the disciple so that his wonder of the intuitive experience can flood the everyday world. Being amazed with the first experience of the Infinite Bliss, the newly born Knowledgeable One recognizes relativism of all phenomena and his wonder spreads to usual objects, like a tree or a boulder. He can perform his daily routine with the understanding that each of the usual objects is equally a manifestation of the Infinite Bliss. This understanding bears with itself the feeling of the internal and external beauty and harmony. With this sense of life’s harmony comes an objective outlook on the relation of the newly born Knowledgeable One to others – their welfare becomes so important as if it were his own. He now feels gratitude to the past and responsibly to the present and future state of things. He now value unity that is simultaneously empty (because it erases old borders) and full (because it creates new connections). With relativism comes the willingness-to-compromise. The duality of self and other, finite and infinite, attraction and repulsion are transcended, and even the duality of life and death disappears.

4) Tibetan version of the ideology of Knowledge

The Tibetan version of the ideology of Knowledge has another name – Vajra-yana (the Thunderbolt Ferry). Originally, Vajra was the thunderbolt of Indra, the Hindu thunder God who was often mentioned in the early Pali Canons. However, when the lower-class ideologists transformed the teachings of the Knowledgeable One into the Big Ferry, they transformed the Knowledgeable One into a cosmic figure. The Tibetans also transformed Indra’s thunderbolt into the Knowledgeable One’s diamond scepter, thus changing the connotations of power, by adding the hardness and lucidity of a diamond to the power of the thunderbolt.

The essence of the Tibetan improvements of the ideology of Knowledge lies in their Tantras – 'extensions', which are the secret texts that were added to the Hindu corpus. In these texts, the Tibetans focused their attention on the inter-relatedness and relativity of things. These texts also promised the proponents of this discipline that, by practicing it, one could definitely reach the Infinite Bliss in a single lifetime. The Tibetans claim that the acceleration of this process is possible by using all the latent powers of the individual’s body and mind; and the most important latent power is sexual power.

After all, sexual power keeps the circle of life and death in progress, and thus, it must be linked directly with the Infinite Bliss. Sexual power is the divine power of Hesiod’s Eros; it is divine when a male joins a female in passionate love. When both lovers want-to-give each other more than wish-to-receive from each other, then, at the moment of their mutual ecstasy, there is no possibility to discern whether their experience is more physical (somatic) or spiritual (psychic) and whether they perceive themselves as one or two.

From Greek, ecstasy means ‘to stand outside’, ex – ‘out’, and stasis – ‘to stand’. It means that at the ecstatic moment, each lover steps out of self, becomes unselfish, thus opening the Gate of the Infinite Bliss. What distinguishes the Tibetans’ version of the ideology of Knowledge from others is their willingness-to-take the sexual power as an ally in the work that aims to achieve the Infinite Bliss. Through their art, active fantasies, and overt sexual engagement, the Tibetans keep the physical and spiritual components of the sexual power in constant unity. Their art shows couples in coital embrace and helps them to activate their fantasies, which should be constantly cultivated. The Tibetan sexual practice is pursued not as the law-breaking rebels, but under the strict supervision of a teacher (guru), and as the culminating festival of a long spiritual discipline. The spiritual emotions, for which the individual works, are his ecstatic and altruistic realizations of his transcendent identity. The individual learns how to depart from self freely, to be unselfish first on the family level; then, he can proceed on other levels (community, nation, or humankind).

The ideology of the Old Master was diametrically opposite to the Skillful Master’s rigid and formalistic ideology, but their blending together with Hinduism and the different versions of the Knowledgeable One’s ideology yielded nearly effective understanding of reality. This rich blending of ideologies gave the spiritual food to chew upon for the Greek minds, and not only for the Stoics, but also for the Skeptics and Cynics.

3. Skepticism

The Epicureans and their predecessors, the followers of the Old Master, tried to attain personal happiness by withdrawing from the evils of social life and thus reducing pain and anxiety. Like the inexperienced students, the Epicureans tried to switch from one extreme to another (from the complete immersion into the political affairs of the State to the complete withdrawal from civic life). Being mostly the members of the Greek upper class, they wish to withdraw from society and wish to grow their gardens, thus looking for the peace of mind. However, they did not explained who would be protecting them and "their" gardens from robbers and murderers.

The Stoics and their predecessors, the followers of the Knowledgeable One and the Skillful Master, also tried to attain personal happiness and peace of mind by harmonizing the individual’s reason with the universal reason (the Universal Order, Infinite Bliss, or God, which underlies Nature or chaotic matter). However, in differ from the Epicureans, the Stoics tried to achieve their goal by being socially active. Like the full-fledged husbands, the Stoics learn how to depart freely from self and be unselfish in the midst of civic life. As the real representatives of the middle-class, the Stoics believed that by nature we are all members of one family, that each individual is unique and significant, and that distinctions of social ranks or genetics are insignificant. Therefore, all human beings should be equal before the laws of the society, which, in their turn, should not contradict the natural laws – the laws of the Universal Reason. Only by submitting self to these laws, the individual can be harmonious and happy.

The Skeptics, the Greek school of the upper-class ideology, disbelieved the Stoics and Epicureans that there is a definite way to achieve harmony and happiness. The Skeptics held that the individual could achieve inner and outer harmony (the peace of his mind or the comfort of his soul) simply by recognizing that none of the people’s beliefs were true. Thus, the individual would believe that the people’s beliefs could not bring them into the state of harmony and happiness, except this one – that nothing is true. The Skeptics avoided the argument why their principle would lead to harmony and happiness, but the principles of others – would not. Consequently, they taught indifference to all other theories, except own, and urged people to conform with accepted views and customs (which, of course, were the upper-class views and customs) whether they were true or not.

The Skeptics argued that the gods or the forces of nature might not exist or be animated and reasonable, but, by refusing to worship them, the individuals would only inflict trouble onto selves and society. Therefore, the individual should follow the crowd and be in the very midst of it. By realizing own inability to understand the sheer fabric of the society and universe, the individual should suspend own judgment and not commit self to a particular system of beliefs, thus achieving harmony and happiness. The intellectual exercises did not bring truth, harmony, and happiness; therefore, why one should care about them. Clever reasoning about the essence of things (metaphysical speculation) would bring neither surety nor security, and therefore, neither harmony nor happiness. Therefore, instead of submitting self to a particular discipline or a system of beliefs, the individual should go through "own" way (which is the same as the way of the crowd, which itself is on the leash of the Skeptics) and should "ever smile and never laugh". This was the position of the staunch conservatives who were suspicious to the new-riches and hostile to the new ideas that could damage their short-run interests or even ruin their social dominance.

However, the more liberal Skeptics took a more positive and cunning approach to the new ideas and theories. These liberals tried to refute the novelties and to pinpoint their limitations. They did not reject reasoning from the start, but tried to find defects in reasoning itself. Thus, Carneades, following the lead of the Old Master in the question of relativity, came up with an idea that all ideas (including mathematical theorems or proves) should be regarded as hypothesis that were based on the unproven assumptions. Then, nothing should be considered as absolute. If our universe appears as ordered, he argued, it should not be assumed that the Universal Reason (God) created it. Therefore, there should be no certainty in anything; and where is no certainty (spiritual surety or physical security), there is no harmony and happiness. So, why should one care about anything?

4. Cynicism

The Cynics were the extremists-skeptics, who tried to implement practically the principle of Skepticism -- that there is nothing true in the world. Consequently, the Cynics scorned the established values and customs, considering them barriers, with which society limits individuals who follow own nature. Therefore, they regarded the family, community, society, public opinion, and laws as unnecessary obstacles to their personal freedom. Consequently, they rejected all kinds of property and corresponding to it loyalty to family, community, and nation. They cultivated social apathy – indifference to friends and foes, to close relatives and distanced relatives, to acquaint people and to complete strangers. Thereafter, they ridiculed all kinds of doctrines and ideologies, except own, of course.

A cynic, Diogenes once said, 

"Look at me... I am belonging to no family or State... I have no property and nobody possesses me. Neither I have to rule my wife and children nor my nation; I have no home or ruler’s palace, but only earth, sky, and a rough cloak. Yet, what do I lack? Am I not free from pain and fear, am I not free?" Epictetus, The Discourses, II: 147.

A cynic learned in the hard-way to be self-sufficient and secure, as before him a Hindu hermit did. The latter learned the art of keeping ego dispersed lest it overcome his mind and close the Gate of the Infinite Bliss when he returned from a forest into society to become a homeless mendicant in his final stage of life. However, going around a marketplace with their begging bowls, they were both (the cynic and the Hindu- stranger) still depending on the society, which they so much scorned. Their needs might become minimal, but they were still human beings and, as such, were depending on other human beings. They did not realize that their "freedom" and "independence" fell down under their own all dissolving relativism.

The Hellenistic Age started from the formation of the Macedonian Empire. The members of the upper and middle classes of this empire, sharing the common Greek culture and language, began to look upon themselves as the members of the world society. However, with the death of Alexander, the Empire was broken down into several kingdoms, which constantly scramble with each other for territories and slaves, thus preventing the embodiment of the universalistic tendencies of this era. Nevertheless, the spread of the Greek civility from Spain to India gave the common cultural denominator to the Hellenistic world. However, the Greek civility was limited almost entirely to the upper and middle classes, and in many cities, it was often skin-deep. For instance, in Alexandria, conflicting customs of the elite and the lower class people often led to riots masked under nationalistic slogans, because the countryside retained traditional religious views, local languages, and family customs. The lower classes are always suspicious toward changes in the common or institutional (law) language because such development impedes their abilities to compete with the upper class in the distribution of the national surplus.

Regarding the city-state as the best mean for a happy life, the Hellenic Greeks had not wished the expansion of their territory or population, for they had no means to control them. They struggled to expand the lower class by acquiring more slaves, but they rarely granted citizenship (the abilities to pay taxes and actively participate in the affairs of the State) to foreigners. The abundance of cheap manual labor and the lack of free immigration of the intellectuals and inventors led to stagnation of the Hellenic economy, and their reckless political decisions led them under the Macedonian yoke. However, their idea of a State as a community from citizens, through citizens, and for citizens, is the keystone of the contemporary Legal State – the government that based its actions not on brutal military force, but on laws devised, debated, altered, executed, and obeyed by the free citizens. This idea was passed unto the Hellenistic Greeks of the Macedonian Empire and its remnants, who, in their turn, passed it onto the Romans, who united the entire Mediterranean world and made possible the worldly federalism, with its laws and bureaucracy.

The Hellenistic Greeks conceived the concept of the world-state, but they had a too weak middle-class and not enough means to embody this concept. Only in the Greco-Roman Age, which started from the formation of the Roman Republican Empire, people could find these means by developing an empire-wide system of law and citizenship, and embodying this system into a federation of States that unified the different nations (class societies) of the Mediterranean world.

B. Greco-Roman Age

Roman history is divided into four periods – monarchical city-state, republican city-state, republican empire, and monarchical empire. The Roman Republican city-state started from overthrowing the Etruscan-Roman monarchical dynasty in 509 BC. The Republican Empire started from the victory over the Carthaginians and Macedonians in 146 BC. The Monarchical Empire started from the victory of Octavian Augustus’ army over the army of his rival – Antony and the latter’s ally – the last Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra, at Actium, in 31 BC. However, before we proceed with the Etruscans and Romans, we should have the background of the Mediterranean world and other empire builders.

1. Ancient urbanism

Some scholars understand ‘civilization’ as the level of development at which people live together peacefully in communities. However, if you compare the present-day communistic China with the United States based on this vague concept, then you will be lost in this scholasticism and will not understand which of them is more "civilized." In China, the bureaucrats kill the dissidents and criminals at once so that the rest of the urban population could live less "peacefully" but in less anxiety, for a while. Thus, the Chinese have had sporadic civil wars. In the United States, the bureaucrats wage a constant war with the criminals and dissidents. Thus, the Americans have the permanent civil war on their streets; they live more "peacefully" but in greater anxiety than the Chinese. Roughly speaking, one Tiananmen Square can be equated with ten Wacoes and McVeys. Who is more "civilized" under this terminology, I do not know. Therefore, I understand ‘civilization’ as the level of the urban development, as the level of urban culture and technological progress. I refer to the ancient urbanism specifically as to the first stable human settlements that became the basis for later agricultural city-states, nations (class societies), and empires.

The study of ancient urbanism is concerned with the earliest segments of the much broader subject called ancient history. The span of ancient history began with the invention of writing in about 33^rd century BC and lasted for nearly 40 centuries. Humankind existed long before its written word, but writing made the keeping of its historical records possible.

The first ancient urban societies arose in the river valleys of Euphrates, Tigris, and Nile (of modern Iraq, Syria and Egypt), in the river valleys of Indus and Ganges (of modern Pakistan and India), and in the valleys of Huang He and Yang Tze (Yellow and Fellow-Man rivers) of China, on the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, and in Central America. All of these urban societies had certain features in common. They were horticulturists (gardeners) who built the defensive walls around their settlements against pastoralists’ invasions. These settlements gradually became cities. The citizens (the inhabitants of those cities) invented forms of writing, learned to make pottery and use metals, and created the complex urban and social infrastructures (with their canals and roads, buildings and utilities, and their class systems).

Apart from written records and carved inscriptions, knowledge about the ancient peoples is derived from the work of archaeologists, whose most significant findings have been made in the past two centuries.

2. Nomads and Horticulturists as the founders of the urban culture

The decisive factor that made it possible for humankind to settle in permanent communities was horticulturalism (gardening – the domestication of plants). After gardening was developed in the major river valleys, such as Mesopotamia (from Greek, the term means ‘between rivers’ of Euphrates and Tigris) in about 9^th millennium BC, people living in tribes or family units did not have to be on the move continually searching for food. Once people could reliably control own food-supply (its annual production and distribution), their lives changed entirely. People began to found permanent settlements in fertile river valleys. Settlers learned to use the water supply to irrigate the land. The small gardens provided them with vegetation for food, fabrics, and fodder for small number of domesticated animals.

Gardening not only made settlements possible (and ultimately the building of cities) but it also made available a reliable food supply. With more food available, more people could be fed and populations were increasing. The growing number of people allowed for a greater division of labor and made them available for more kinds of work, which led them to the development of more complex urban and social structures. With a food surplus, a settlement could support a variety of workers who were not only gardeners.

Gardening needs and always depends upon the water supply. For the earliest societies, this meant rivers and streams or regular rainfall. The first urban life grew up along rivers. Later communities were able to develop by taking advantage of the rainy seasons. All of the ancient urbanism probably developed in much the same way, in spite of regional and climatic differences. As villages grew, the accumulation of more numerous and substantial goods became possible. Heavier pottery replaced animal-skin gourds as containers for food and liquids. Cloth could be woven from flax and linen instead of wool. Permanent structures made of wood, brick, and stone could be erected. By trading their tools, clothing, vegetable food and drinks with the pastoral (nomadic) people for cattle, they excited the interest and yearnings of the latter toward own wealth. Thus, they had provoked invasions and necessitated selves to build the defensive walls around own settlements.

Mathematics and astronomy were an early outgrowth of agricultural production and exchange. People studied the movements of the heavenly bodies to calculate seasons. By doing so, they created the first calendars. With a calendar, it became possible for them to calculate the arrival of each growing season. Measuring the land areas, they promoted the social justice by dividing their property accurately, in order to tax effectively. Measuring grains and fruits, they promoted the peaceful family life and housekeeping. Later came measures of value, as commodity and money exchange became common practices.

At the beginning, a settlement was based on one horticultural tribe society. However, in time, the waves of nomads would deposit as new tribal divisions, and when this settlement would be transferring into a city-state, it would have not only well-defined tribal but also class divisions. The presence of a class-society means the presence of a bureaucracy, which supposedly should live on tax and keep the lower classes in harmony and happy. Naturally, the use of various ways of measuring the taxes led the bureaucrats to record keeping; and for this, some form of writing was necessary. All the earliest urban societies seem to have used hieroglyphs (writing with pictures that represent both sounds and objects to the reader). The best known of the ancient writing systems is Egyptian hieroglyphics (the term meant "sacred carvings" since many of the earliest writings were inscribed on stone and their contents were the gods’ commandments and their executions by the kings and other bureaucrats).

When the city-states would devise the new technology of production (farming on large lots, instead of growing crops in small gardens), then the surplus would be enough to support the national bureaucracy, which would unite several cities under its command into a nation with one language. When the nations, through the selective process, would develop plants and animals that are more productive and would build faster roads, canals, and other means of transportation and communication, then, and only then, these nations could afford an imperialistic bureaucracy. The latter would unite several nations (class societies) with different languages into one federation of nations (empire).

All of the major ancient urban cultures (in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China) emerged in the 4^th -2^nd millennia BC. Historians still debate over which one emerged first. More evidence points in the direction of Mesopotamia, which probably had been the primal instigator of other urban cultures for a couple of centuries at the end of the 4^th millennium BC.

3. Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a region that is part of modern Iraq. As the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow south out of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), they are about 400 km apart; the Euphrates runs south and east for 1300 km and the Tigris flows south for 885 km before they join, reaching the Persian Gulf as the Shatt al-Arab. The river valleys and plains of Mesopotamia are open to attack from the rivers, the northern and eastern hills, and the Arabian and Syrian deserts to the west. Rainfall is sparse in most of the region, but, when irrigated, the fertile soil yields heavy crops. In the south, date palms grow, supplying rich food, useful fiber, wood, and fodder. Both rivers have fish, and the southern marshes contain wildfowl. Mesopotamia’s richness always attracted its poorer neighbors, and its history is a pattern of invasion of nomads, which conquer a territory, become the upper class, prosper for a while, decay, and lose their power to a new wave of northern Aryan or southern Arab pastoralists.

a. Early Mesopotamian city-states

By about the 5^th millennium BC, small tribes of gardeners had made their way to the river valleys of Mesopotamia. During the 5^th millennium BC, these tribes known as the Ubaidians established settlements in the region known later as Sumer; these settlements gradually developed into the main Sumerian cities: Adab, Eridu, Isin, Kish, Kullab, Lagash, Larsa, Nippur, and Ur. On the floodplains, the Ubaidians raised wheat, barley, and peas. They cut through the riverbanks so that water for their crops could flow to lower lying soil. Several centuries later, as the Ubaidian settlers prospered, the nomads from Syrian and Arabian deserts and from the Caucasus and Zagros Mountains began to invade. At first, their invasions were peaceful -- they were the merchants and individual immigrants. Then, the nomads turned to violence, becoming the raiders in quest of booty and the migrating entire tribes in quest of more fertile pastures. The need for self-defense and irrigation led the Ubaidians to intensify the organization and building of the walled settlements and canals. The Sumerians, who conquered the Ubaidians, continued the work that was started by the latter on these irrigation systems; they drained marshes and dug canals, dikes, and ditches. The oldest settlement in the area is probably Eridu, but Uruk (biblical Erech) has more preserved artifacts; here mud-brick temples were decorated with fine metalwork and stonework. The Sumerians were probably responsible for this early urban culture, which spread north up the Euphrates.

b. Sumerians

The lower parts of the Mesopotamia, with its fertile plains, was called Sumer (biblical Shinar). The history of Sumer has been reconstructed solely from fragmentary writings on clay tablets and from other evidence that was uncovered and interpreted by modern archaeologists. Use of the name Sumer dates probably from about the beginning of the 3^rd millennium BC. Their origins are shrouded in the past.

The ancient inhabitants of Sumer had frequently faced the attacks of external invaders and wild beasts, extremes in temperature, droughts, violent rainstorms, and floods. The art of the pre-literate Sumerians (Ubaidians) reflected both their love and fear of these natural powers, as well as own military prowess. The soil of Mesopotamia yielded the major building material of the urban culture – the mud brick. The Ubaidians also used clay for their pottery and terra-cotta sculpture; later, the Sumerians also used it for writing tablets. Few wooden artifacts have been preserved. The Suzerains (the inhabitants of Susa) used basalt, sandstone, diorite, and alabaster for their sculptures. Stone was rare and certain types had to be imported. The Sumerians used metals (such as bronze, copper, gold, and silver), shells, and precious stones for the finest sculptures and inlays. They used stones (such as lapis lazuli, jasper, carnelian, alabaster, hematite, serpentine, and steatite) for cylinder seals.

The art of the Ubaidians and Sumerians reveals the four-millennium-long tradition that, on first glance, appears homogeneous in style and iconography. However, it was created (if not, then sustained) by waves of invading nomads who differed ethnically (linguistically) from the horticultural inhabitants of the plains, whom they conquered and made their serfs and slaves (the base of the later lower class of the city-states). Each of these invaders made their own contribution to the urban culture (particularly, art) of this region. The first dominant people (who became the upper class of the city-states, controlled the region, and shaped its culture) were the Sumerians followed by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks. The Sumerians created the horticultural city-states; the following waves of the nomads created agricultural nations (the upper class of several united cities speaks one language), and empires (the ruling bureaucracy of many united cities speaks several languages).

The earliest architectural and artistic remains known to date come from northern Mesopotamia from the proto-Neolithic site of Qermez Dere in the foothills of the Jebel Sinjar. Levels, dating to the 9^th millennium BC, have revealed round sunken huts outfitted with one or two plastered pillars with stone cores. When the humans abandoned these buildings, they left the human skulls on the floors, indicating that their owners departed from this world involuntarily.

The scholars designated the Mesopotamian art of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (before written history, about 70-35 centuries BC) by the names of archaeological sites. The northern sites are at Hassuna, Samarra, and Tell Halaf. Archeologists excavated houses and painted pottery at Hassuna. They found pottery with figurative and abstract designs at Samarra. This pottery might have had religious significance. They found seated female figures (presumed to be mother goddesses) and painted pottery at Tell Halaf. In the southern sites, the early ages are called Ubaid (about 55-40 centuries BC) and early and middle Uruk (about 40-35 centuries BC). Archeologists found dark-painted light pottery first at Ubaid. Later, they found such kind of pottery at Ur, Uruk, Eridu, and Uqair, but they named the period as the Ubaid culture.

In the first level (about 55 centuries BC) of a long sequence of archaeological levels excavated at Eridu, a small square sanctuary was uncovered. The pre-Sumerians had built it as a niche with a platform, which could have supported a cult statue, and an offering table nearby. Subsequent temple structures that were built on top of it are more complex, with central sacred chamber (cella) surrounded by small rooms with doorways. The pre-Sumerians decorated the exterior with elaborate niches and buttresses, typical features of later Mesopotamian temples. Clay figures of the Ubaid period include a man (from Eridu) and a woman holding a child (from Ur).

Archeologists have found artifacts from the late Uruk (the Proto-literate period – about 35-29 centuries BC) at several of the sites, but the major site was the city of Uruk (modern Warka or the biblical Erech). The major building from level five (about 35 centuries BC) at Uruk is the Limestone Temple. The superstructure of the temple is not preserved, but limestone slabs on a layer of stamped earth show that it was niched and monumental in size (76 x 30 m). The pre-Sumerians decorated some buildings at late Uruk with colorful cones, inserted into the walls to form geometric patterns. After the Sumerians captured Uruk, the new technique came into use – whitewashing, as in the White Temple, which gets its name from its long, narrow, whitewashed inner shrine. It was built in the area of Uruk dedicated to the Sumerian sky god (Anu). The White Temple stood about 12 m above the plain, on a high platform, prototype of the ziggurat – a stepped tower.

The ziggurat became a typical Mesopotamian religious structure that was intended to bring the priest or king nearer to a particular god, to provide a platform where the god could descend to visit the worshipers, and to remind the upper class people about their nomadic mountainous ancestors. A temple, which was both a commercial and a religious center dominated each city, but gradually the palace took over as the more important structure, reflecting the gradual process of the military and civil bureaucracy taking over the clerical bureaucracy.

Archeologists unearthed only a few stone sculptures of the Proto-literate period at Uruk. The most beautiful is a white limestone head of a woman with large open eyes, eyebrows, and a central part in her hair, all intended for inlay. A tall alabaster vase with horizontal registers (or bands) depicts a procession at the top, with a chieftain presenting a basket of fruit to the goddess of love and fertility (Inanna). In the central register – nude priests are bringing offerings, and at the bottom register – a row of animals over a row of plants.

Archeologists excavated a cylinder seal in the earlier Sumerian period at Uruk, which associates with the first use of clay tablets. The cylinder remained the standard Mesopotamian seal shape for the following three millennia. These small-engraved stones of personal identification were rolled along clay to create a continuous pattern or a ritual scene in miniature. The earliest seals display decorative motifs – bulls, priests (or chieftains) bringing offerings, shepherds, hunters, boats, buildings, serpent-headed lions and other grotesque figures. Mythical (combining the parts of different species into a species) and real animals are depicted with great realism.

The first historical epoch of Sumerian dominance lasted from about the 33^rd century BC until 2340 BC. While pre-Sumerian architectural traditions continued, the Sumerians introduced a new type of building, the temple oval – an enclosure with a central platform that supports a shrine. Horticultural city-states, centered at such cities as Ur, Umma, Lagash (modern Al-Hiba), Kish, and Eshnunna (modern Tell Asmar), were headed by chieftains, whom the relatives did not consider as divine.

Much of the artifacts of this period are commemorative in nature – plaques depict banquet scenes, celebration of victories, or the completion of a temple. These plaques were often made on the boundary stones, as was the limestone stele of Chieftain Eannatum of Lagash, who ruled at about 2425 BC. In two registers on one side of the stele, the king is depicted leading his army into battle; on the other side the god Ningirsu, symbolically represented as much larger than a human, holds the net containing the defeated enemy.

The Standard of Ur, a wooden plaque inlaid with shell, schist, lapis lazuli, and pinkish stone, has three registers of processions and religious scenes. Mythological figures are the subjects of finely carved cylinder seals and metal sculptures. In a large copper relief from the temple at Ubaid, a lion-headed eagle with spread wings hovers over two heraldic stags. Half-man, half-bull images were popular, as were male heroes who battle with lions. Not all of the mythological beings can be identified.

Elegantly crafted objects, such as crowns, daggers, vases, and decorative objects, also have been excavated. Many were found at the Royal Cemetery of Ur (of about 27^th century BC). The Sumerian sculpture (usually of gypsum alabaster) displays a variety of styles and geometric forms that are very picturesque; it comprises figures of worshipers, either priests or rulers. Twelve such sculptures were found at the Temple of Abu at Tell Asmar. These stone sculptures (of about 27^th century BC) have huge, round staring eyes made of shell and black limestone. An alabaster figure of a seated male (of about 24^th century BC) from Mari is slightly more realistic.

A lyre sound-box from Ur reflects not only what kind of music the upper class Sumerians were enjoying, but also the superb craftsmanship of their middle and lower classes. The image of the bull's head is known from the 7^th millennium BC, when it probably embodied the male power at Çatal Hùyùk. At Ur, the bull's head was combined with a stylized human male beard. From this combining of the male powers of different species in a particular image came to us through the Greeks' mythological figures, like Pegasus (the winged horse) and Griffins (the eagle-lions).

The Sumerian data shows that about the 33^rd century BC, a nomadic people migrated from their homeland, located northeast of Mesopotamia (modern Iran-Afghanistan), invaded Sumer, and began to intermarry with the native population. The new mixed language became known as the Sumerian non-inflectional language. The root words of the Sumerian language are not subject to inflective change, such as one of the Indo-European or Semitic languages. The basic grammatical units consist of word complexes rather than the individual words; and usually these grammatical units retain their independent structures. The grammatical structure of the Sumerian language resembles that of other non-inflectional (Ural-Altaic) languages, such as the Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian, and some Caucasian languages, but with a few Indo-European elements.

The Sumerian language had six vowels: three open vowels, a, e, o; and three corresponding closed vowels, a, e, u. The vowels were not sharply articulated and often were modified in accordance with a law of vowel harmony. This law applied especially to vowels in short, unaccented grammatical particles. At the end of a word, or between two consonants, the vowels were often suppressed. Sumerian had 15 consonants: b, p, t, d, hard g, k, z, s, sh, ch (as in Scottish loch), r, l, m, n, and ng (as in lung). The consonants were not pronounced at the end of a word unless the word was followed by a grammatical particle that began with a vowel.

Most Sumerian roots were monosyllabic and might be joined with other roots to form polysyllabic words. Nouns frequently consisted of compound words, such as lu-gal, ‘king’ (literally meant ‘big man’); dub-sar, ‘scribe’ (‘tablet writer’); and di-ku, ‘judge’ (‘judgment determiner’). Abstract terms were formed with the use of prefix 'nam'; thus, nam-lu-gal meant ‘kingship’. Plurals were formed by repetition of the roots. Sumerian had no grammatical gender, but nouns were divided into the two categories, animate and inanimate; grammatically, animals belong to the inanimate category.

The Sumerian sentence consisted of a predicate and a series of substantive complexes related to the predicate as subject, direct object, indirect object, or dimensional object, which established location. The predicate consisted of the verbal root and a series of grammatical elements (infixes) inserted into the body of a word. These infixes served to corroborate the relationship between the predicate and the complexes that had already been established by the grammatical particles. The substantive complex might consist of a noun, or of a noun and its modifiers, such as adjectives, genitives, possessive pronouns, and relative clauses. The relationship particles (postpositions) are always at the end of the substantive complex.

The Sumerian language was relatively poor with adjectives because genitives were often used instead. Copulas and conjunctions were rare; their functions were being assumed by the use of parallel arrangements of clauses and complexes. No relative pronoun existed in the language. Instead, relative clauses were indicated by a nominalizing particle at the end, as in some Indo-European languages. Relative clauses, however, were used only to a limited extent; frequently a passive particle, which was identical in form to the infinitive, was substituted for the relative clause. The main Sumerian dialect was the one known as Emegir, religious or the ‘princely tongue’ of the upper class. Several other dialects were used; the lower class had its own, and women and eunuchs used their own.

The stable surplus of production and the need for cooperation on the large irrigation projects led to the development of bureaucracy and law. Thus, the Sumerians are credited with forming the earliest of the ancient urban centers. The cities differed from primitive gardening settlements. A priest organized work groups of farmers to tend the large lots of land and provide barley, beans, wheat, olives, grapes, and flax for the community.

These early cities, which existed by the 3^rd millennium BC, were called temple towns because they were built around the temple of the local god. The temples were eventually built up on towers called ziggurats (holy mountains), which had ramps or staircases winding up around the exterior. Public buildings and marketplaces were built around these shrines. The ziggurat in Ur was measured 66´ 46 m at the base and about 21 m high. Later, the Egyptians would build their first pyramids that looked remarkably like the ziggurats. The ziggurats were surrounded by low walls, which enclosed houses and offices of the priests, and the shops of potters, carpenters, weavers, tanners, and other middle-class people. Many priests, priestesses, singers, musicians, prostitutes, and eunuchs conducted the temple rites. People offered their sacrifices as a daily routine.

The temple towns grew into city-states, which are considered the basis of the first true cities. At a time when only the most rudimentary forms of transportation and communication were available, the city-state was the most governable type of human settlement. Leaders (called ensis), who were authorized by the council of elders, ruled city-states and controlled the local irrigation systems. The food surplus provided by the farmers supported these leaders, as well as priests, artists, artisans, and others. The Sumerians contributed to the development of metalworking, wheeled carts, potter’s wheels, and writing.

Most scholars now accept that writing began with accountancy. It was developed as a direct consequence of the necessities of an expanding economy. Some time in the late 4^th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in the early Mesopotamian city-states reached a point at which it became a burden to the memory of the ruling upper class. To record transactions of the merchants in the comprehensive, verifiable, and permanent form, became indispensable to the bureaucrats, to justify their taxes. The first written symbols are generally thought to have been the pictorial representations of concrete objects.

A few scholars believe that an unknown citizen of Uruk invented writing, some time in the 33^rd century BC. Some scholars believe that it was invented by a group of the clever bureaucrats of the same city. Some believe that it was accidental discovery. However, the majority of the scholars believe that it was the result of the long evolution. This same majority support the theory, which stated that writing grew out of a long-developing counting system of clay "tokens" that have been found in many Middle Eastern archeological sites. According to this theory, the first step toward writing was made when the Sumerians substituted the 3D tokens with the 2D signs that resembled the shapes of the tokens.

In the Middle East, the archeologists excavated large numbers of small, nondescript clay objects, which date from 8000 BC to 1500 BC. The earliest objects are undecorated spheres, discs, and cones, while the later ones are incised and more complex in shape. Probably these objects were used as the counting units, some kind of the ancient abacus. Different shapes and incisions specified not only the quantity but also the quality of the exchanged products (the bushels of barley, the baskets of dates, the number of black and white sheep and cows, etc.). This token system was an embryonic pictographic writing; hence, the decline in use of tokens and the growth in use of the clay-tablets at the beginning of the 3^rd millennium BC.

With the development of trade, the tokens began to be enclosed in a clay envelope, probably to guarantee the accuracy and authenticity of stored tokens, which could be tampered with if stored on a string or in a bag. The clay envelope (the "bulla") was usually shaped as a ball, the outer surface of which had been sealed, and impressions (corresponding to the content) had been made on its surface. These exterior marks on bullae were a step toward the marking of clay tablets with more complex signs, which would lead to the invention of writing. This theory answers on the question -- how the writing was invented, but not on the question -- why it was invented.

I believe that wring was invented after the nomads capture the horticulturists and organized the Sumerian class society in the 33^rd century BC. It might be a coincidence when the earliest Sumerian records came from the 33^rd century BC and, exactly in the same century, the Sumerian nomads captured the Ubaidians (the Lower Mesopotamian horticulturists) and organized the Sumerian class society. It still might be another coincidence that the earliest Egyptian writing dates from the 31^st century BC and, precisely in the same century, the Semitic nomads captured the Lower Egyptian horticulturists and organized the Egyptian class society. However, it is hardly a coincidence that the earliest Hindu writing dates from the 25^th century BC and, "coincidentally," in this same century, the Aryan nomads captured the Indus Valley horticulturists and organized the Hindu class society. "Coincidentally," the first Chinese writing dates from the 12^th century BC, when the Manchurian nomads captured the Yellow River Valley horticulturists and organized the Chinese class society. "Coincidentally," the first Meso-American writing dates from the 6^th century BC, when the Mayan nomads captured the Olmec horticulturists and organized the Mayan class society. When coincidences become too numerous, they become the rule.

The growing needs of the bureaucracy and middle-class stimulated the invention of a form of writing. The Sumerians had probably invented the first form of writing. They engraved pictures on clay tablets in a form of writing known as cuneiform (wedge-shaped). Clay was abundant and relatively easy to mark with a stylus and to erase if the mistake was made. When such a clay-tablet had been fired, it became the more durable record.

The Sumerians wrote their earliest records from about the 33^rd century BC, and they used the clay-tablets to keep the accounts of the temple food storehouses. The earliest tablets have signs, which are the pictographic or quasi-pictographic numerals and symbols (such as barley, bushel of barley, jar of beer, etc.). By about 25^th century BC these picture-signs were being refined into an alphabet. After about the 20^th century BC, Sumerian was no longer spoken, but it continued to be in use as a literary language until cuneiform writing died out near the 1^st century BC. The Sumerian culture was adopted by many other new nations (class societies) in some degree, but the existence of Sumerian was subsequently forgotten until cuneiform was deciphered in the 19^th century.

The Sumerians developed the first calendar, which they adjusted to the phases of the moon. Later, the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and Greeks adopted the lunar calendar. An increase in trade among Sumerian cities, and between Sumeria and distant regions of Mesopotamia, led to the growth of the middle class of merchants and farmers.

The Sumerians believed that the universe was ruled by a group of living beings (human by form, but immortal by content, who possessed super-human powers). The Sumerians believed that these gods were invisible to mortal eyes; they guided and controlled the universe in accordance with well-laid plans and duly prescribed laws. The Sumerians had four creating gods: An—the god of heaven, Ki—the goddess of earth, Enlil—the god of air, and Enki—the god of water. Heaven, earth, air, and water were regarded as the four major components of the universe.

In the 6^th century BC, the Greeks revolutionized this thought by omitting the living beings with spontaneous desires and actions from the creators and engines of the universe and began to consider them as the non-animated powers of nature. Thus, Thales of Miletus (c.624-548 BC) considered water as the basic element of nature and believed that through processes, similar to the formation of ice or steam, water gave rise to everything in the world. Thales also broke with the long held belief that earthquakes were caused by the god of the sea, and offered an explanation that the earth floated on water. When the water experienced turbulent waves, earthquakes rocked the earth.

Another Ionian Greek, Anaximander (c.611-547 BC) rejected any specific matter as the basis of the universe. He suggested that an indefinite matter, which he called the Boundless, was the source of all things. He believed that from the primary matter (which contained the powers of heat and cold) gradually emerged a nucleus (the seed of the world). He thought that the cold and wet condensed to form the earth and its clouds, while the hot and dry formed the rings of fire, which appear to us as the moon, sun, and stars. The heat from the cosmic fire dried the earth and shrank the seas. From the warm slime on the earth arose life, and from the first sea-creatures evolved land animals, including human beings.

Another Ionic, Anaximenes (died c. 525 BC) asserted that a primary matter was air, which accounted for the order of nature. The rarefied air became fire, while wind and clouds were formed from the condensed air. Further condensation of air produced water, soil, and stones. He insisted that the cause of a rainbow was not a goddess, but the rays of the sun that felt on the dense air.

Parmenides (c.515-450 BC) of Elea (a Greek city in southern Italy) rejected the materialistic view of the Ionians that all things emerged from one primary matter. He asserted that reality is one, eternal, and unchanging, and that an argument must be without contradictions and be consistent with our reason. We know reality not through our senses and experience, which are frequently misleading, but through our mind (reason). He stated that truth could be reached only through abstract thought. Parmenides’ concept of an unchanging reality that could be understood only through thinking process, later became the foundation of Plato’s theory of Ideas.

Democritus (c.460-370 BC) reaffirmed the Greeks’ confidence in knowledge derived from the sensual perceptions, but also insisted to regard reason. He put two concepts in the foundation of his model of the universe – empty space and an infinite number of atoms. Eternal, indivisible, and imperceptible, these atoms moved in the empty space. All things consisted of colliding atoms, and their combinations accounted for all changes in the world, in which everything behaved according to mechanical principles. Later, Newton put these two concepts of Democritus into the foundation of his theory of the universe. Although Einstein reconsidered Newton’s concept of time and took it as a characteristic of a moving particle, he left the concept of empty space without change.

The Sumerians held that the act of creation was accomplished through utterance of the divine word; the creating gods merely had to make plans and pronounce the name of the thing for it to be created. To keep the cosmos in continuous and harmonious operation and to avoid confusion and conflict, the gods devised the set of universal and unchangeable rules and laws that all beings were obliged to obey. Later, Moses renovated slightly these two concepts and put them into the foundation of his story.

Next in importance to the creating deities were the three sky deities, the moon god; the sun god; and the queen of heaven. The latter was also the goddess of love, procreation, and war. The moon god was the father of the sun god and the goddess of love. Sumerian poets composed numerous myths about the exploits of the goddess of love. Another god of great importance was the deity in charge of the violent and destructive south wind. One of the most beloved deities was the shepherd god Dumuzi (biblical Tammuz). The shepherd god was originally a mortal ruler whose marriage to the goddess of love ensured the fertility of the land and the fecundity of the womb. However, this marriage ended in tragedy when the goddess (offended by her husband’s apathy toward her) decreed that he be carried off to the netherworld for six months of each year – hence derived the sterile months of the hot summer. At the autumnal equinox, which marked the beginning of the Sumerian New Year, the shepherd god returned to the earth. His reunion with his wife caused all animals and plants to be revitalized and made fertile again. Each New Year, the Sumerians celebrated the marriage between the shepherd god and the goddess of love. The high point of the celebration was a ritual, wherein the king impersonated the shepherd god; the goddess of love was impersonated by one of her leading priestesses.

Other Sumerian gods included those in charge of rivers, mountains, and plains; of the cities, fields, and farms; and of tools such as pickaxes, brick molds, and plows. These gods were worshiped not only in the great temples but also in small shrines in family homes. Each of the important deities was the patron of one or more Sumerian cities. The cities were sacred communities dedicated to serve the divine masters. The citizens hoped that appeasing the gods would bring security and prosperity to their cities.

Large temples were erected in the name of the deity, who was worshiped as the divine ruler and protector of the city. A patron god was the real owner and ruler of the city and its land, and the temple was his abode where the god was offered food, clothing, and the homage of his servants. Thus, the temple became the economic and cultural heart of a Sumerian city. Most middle-class citizens worked for the temple priests as tenant farmers and artisans who managed the lower class of serfs and slaves. Priests coordinated the city’s economic and political activities – supervising the distribution of land, water, and food supply; collecting rents; operating businesses; and receiving contributions for festivals. The wealthy citizens often bequeathed their lands onto the temple, which, in time, became a major owner of the city-state’s land. The temple priests and clerical bureaucracy not only cooperated with, but also competed with the king and the army and civil bureaucracy in wealth and power.

When the clerical bureaucracy would take over the army and civil bureaucracy, then the decline of a dynasty would begin. It would happen because the clerical bureaucracy would rather engage into small but frequent warfare with neighbors over boundaries and water supply than to engage into a building of a nation. Thus, the clergy would completely exhaust and drain the state bureaucracy. Soon, a new wave of nomads would take control over the weak State. Some priests would survive the invasion, and would collaborate with the invaders. They would gradually take control over the new State bureaucracy again, thus repeating the vicious circle of history, until the day will come when the middle-class will be strong enough to take power and to supervise the government.

When an army of the nomadic tribes, under the command of their chieftain, captured a Sumerian city, the chieftain became the new king and the founder of a dynasty. His main duty was to wage offensive or defensive war. Warfare between cities eventually consolidated the governmental power around the kings (lugals), whose authority replaced that of city-state rulers. By 2375 BC, the king Lugalzaggisi of Umma united most of Sumer, which became a more unified State, with a common culture and a centralized government (established army and civil bureaucracy).

The Sumerian kings did not consider themselves as gods but as great men, who were chosen by the gods as their representatives on the earth. Gods bestowed on the kings the land and other possessions. The kings were the gods’ tenants who must faithfully, and in accord with the god given laws, execute, manage, and report to the gods through the priests about conditions of that property.

The Sumerians considered the earthly governments as replicas of the heavenly government, wherein no god was all-powerful; usually the assembly of gods made the essential decisions. Unlike Egypt, which was protected from nomadic invasions by vast deserts, Sumer had no natural barriers to such invasions. Feeling themselves surrounded by enemies, the Sumerians lived in constant anxiety that permeated their urban culture. Therefore, neither their gods were all-powerful nor their kings. Thus, the Sumerian upper class usually lacked the surety and self-confidence of the Egyptian upper class. Therefore, the State bureaucracy, in its essential decisions, leaned often on the clerical bureaucracy.

The king administered the laws, which came to him from the gods and through the priests. Like every Sumerian, the king had to obey the divine laws, which provided people with some degree of surety, thus quenching some of their anxieties. Later, in typical Sumerian tradition, first Hammurabi, then Moses claimed that their codes of laws rested on the divine authority, violating which meant the opposition to the divine order.

The Sumerians believed that human beings were fashioned of clay and were created for supplying the gods with food, drink, and shelter, so that the gods might have full leisure for their divine activities. The Sumerians emphasized that the main four gods created planned and harmonious order in the universe, but the minor gods were responsible for its disorder. Later, Moses embraced wholeheartedly this concept of human origin, but he emphasized that God created a harmonious order and (in the story of Creation) he blamed people for a disorder in the universe. Moses tried, but without success, to reconcile his fundamental contradiction that the creatures could go astray against the will of their all-powerful and just Creator. This contradiction implies that either God is not all-powerful and just or the people are not responsible for their deeds.

Later, the Greeks tried to escape this contradiction by conceiving their gods as an expression of the worldly disorder. Although the gods were the subjects of a single powerful god, Zeus’ authority over them was based only on his superior strength. Zeus had finally accomplished his will in the matter of Achilles’ wrath, but he knew the limits of his power. He could not save the life of his son, Sarpedon, because behind all the Greek gods stood the mysterious all-averaging power of Fate, to which even Zeus should bow. Fate was the source of the Greeks’ orderly universe.

The Sumerian minor gods, Moses’ human beings, and all Greek gods (except the primordial order – Fate) represented the blind and chaotic powers of the universe. These disorderly powers, according to Sumerians and Moses, could not be controlled at all by the people, because not only the common Sumerians and Hebrews, but also their kings had to obey the divine laws, which were devised by gods and bestowed onto the people through the priests.

According to the Hindus and Greeks, the chaotic powers could be controlled in some degree by gods and by people, because people have minds, through which each individual could know the divine laws and choose to follow them or not.

According to the Christians and Muslims, only the people can control the disorderly powers, because God bears absolute love for every human being. Why should you love not only your friends but also your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you? "So that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.... Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:45, 48)" This law is from a moral code of a perfectionist-Platonist (in other words, it is grossly unrealistic). Therefore, the Sumerians and Hebrews were excessive pessimists, the Hindus and Greco-Romans were moderate realists and the Christians and Muslims would become excessive optimists.

The Sumerians considered the present life as the humanity’s most precious possession, although it was beset with uncertainty and haunted by insecurity. For when human beings die, their spirits descend to the netherworld, where life is more wretched than on.

In the centuries that followed the conquest of the Sumerians, the country grew rich and powerful. Art and architecture, crafts, and religious and ethical thought flourished. The Sumerian language became the prevailing speech of the land, and their cuneiform script was to become the basic means of written communication throughout the Middle East for about two millennia.

The first Sumerian ruler of historical record, Etana, king of Kish (c. 2800 BC), was described in a document written centuries later as the "man who stabilized all the lands". Shortly after his reign ended, a king named Meskiaggasher founded a rival dynasty at Uruk, far to the south of Kish. Meskiaggasher, who won control of the region extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Zagros Mountains, was succeeded by his son Enmerkar (c. 2750 BC). The latter’s reign was notable for an expedition against Aratta, a city-state far to the northeast of Mesopotamia. Lugalbanda (the name means "the king’s guardian"), one of his military leaders, succeeded Enmerkar. The exploits and conquests of Enmerkar and Lugalbanda form the subject of a cycle of epic tales constituting the most important source of information on early Sumerian history. At the end of Lugalbanda’s reign, Enmebaragesi (c.2700 BC), a king of the Etana dynasty at Kish, became the leading ruler of Sumer. His outstanding achievements included a victory over the country of Elam and the construction at Nippur of the Temple of Enlil, the god of air. Nippur gradually became the spiritual and cultural center of Sumer. Enmebaragesi’s son Agga (c. 2680 BC), the last ruler of the Etana dynasty, was defeated by Mesanepada, king of Ur, who founded the 1^st Dynasty of Ur and made Ur the capital of Sumer. Soon after the death of Mesanepada, the city of Uruk achieved a position of political prominence under the leadership of Gilgamesh (c. 2700-2650 BC), whose deeds are celebrated in stories and legends.

Legend of Gilgamesh

Gilgamesh epic, an important Middle Eastern literary work, was written in cuneiform on 12 clay tablets about 20^th century BC. However, the prologue suggests that Gilgamesh himself wrote this account and left the tablets in the foundation of the city wall of Uruk for all to read. This heroic poem is named for its hero, Gilgamesh, a tyrannical ruler of the city of Uruk (biblical Erech, now Warka, Iraq). The people of Uruk complained to the gods of Gilgamesh’ oppression and the gods responded to their prayers and created a counter-weight to Gilgamesh. They sent a wild, brutish man, Enkidu (the name means ‘a son of the god of water’), to challenge Gilgamesh in a wrestling match.

Enkidu was a mixture of human and divine, human and wild animal at the beginning. He was brought up by wild beasts, ate only uncooked food, and embodied the conflict between animal and human natures (between conscious and subconscious). When Enkidu became a protector of the animals by breaking the hunters’ traps and filling in their pits, then he became a threat to the human society. The people decided to neutralize this threat through socializing Enkidu. First, a prostitute seduced and educated him in the pleasures of human society. Then, shepherds taught him to eat cooked food, wear clothing, and anoint self as humans do. He was weakened through this transformation, but, at the same time, he acquired the taste of fame and glory. The prostitute leads him to Uruk – to fulfill his destiny, to confront Gilgamesh.

When the contest ends with neither as a clear victor, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become close friends. Each finds in the other the true companion he has sought. Because of this union, their prodigious energies are directed outward, and Gilgamesh proposes their first adventure, aiming to gain them glory and to refresh the spirit of Enkidu, which was confused and weakened by social life. They journey together to the great Cedar Forest in the country of the Living and slay the terrible giant Humbaba, who possessed the seven splendors of the world. However, the latter was no threat to the people of Uruk, and before own death, he curses the victors. The god of air (Enlil) is enraged and curses the heroes, and gives to others Humbaba’s seven splendors.

When the two heroes return to Uruk, Ishtar (guardian goddess of the city) proclaims her love for the heroic Gilgamesh. When he rejects her, she sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy the city. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the bull. Punishing Enkidu for participating in this killing, the gods convict him for death.

Enkidu’s death reveals to Gilgamesh the hollowness of mortal fame and compels him to undertake a solitary journey. He tries to find out the wise man Utnapishtim and to learn from him the secret of immortality. His journey begins with a challenge of the fierce lions, which guard the mountain passes. The next challenge is the dark tunnel that brings him to a prototypical garden of paradise. Gilgamesh is discouraged and tested at every step, but he at last finds Utnapishtim. The sage recounts to Gilgamesh a story of a great flood (identical to that, which later, Moses refrained in his story of Noah and the Great Flood).

After much hesitation, Utnapishtim reveals to Gilgamesh that a plant bestowing eternal youth is in the sea. Gilgamesh dives into the water and finds the plant; however, he fails a simple test of his potential for immortality when he cannot remain awake for sixth days and seven nights. In addition, he fails a second test and, in a moment of carelessness, he loses the rejuvenating plant to a serpent. Defeated and empty-handed, Gilgamesh returns at last to Uruk. He consoles himself with a hope that his worldly accomplishments will endure beyond his own lifetime.

Tablets containing portions of Gilgamesh story have been found throughout the Middle East and in all the languages written in cuneiform characters. The late biblical writers have modeled their account of the friendship of David and Jonathan on the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Numerous Greek writers also incorporated elements found in the Gilgamesh epic into their dragon-slaying epics and into stories concerning the close bond between Achilles and Patroclus.

The story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu depicts the bond of friendship, personal loyalty and valor (the moral code of the upper class). It also reflected the quest of the Sumerian upper class people for worldly fame, and their vain attempt to escape the unknown that is called ‘death’. This saga was widely known in ancient times and played the same role for the Mesopotamians as Homer and Vergil’s poems for the Greeks and Romans – the role of the cement of the upper class.

Sometime before the 25^th century BC, the Sumerian Empire, under the leadership of Lugalanemundu (the knowledgeable king) of Adab (ruled 2525-2500 BC), was extended from the Zagros to the Taurus Mountains and from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. Subsequently, the empire was ruled by Mesilim, king of Kish, who flourished about 2500 BC. By the end of his reign, the clergy took control over the civil bureaucracy and the Sumerian State had begun to decline and disintegrated into the city-states again. The latter engaged in constant internecine struggle over the borders and water supply, thus exhausting own economic and military resources. Eannatum, the ruler of Lagash, who flourished about 2425 BC, succeeded in extending his rule throughout Sumer and some of the neighboring lands. However, his success was short-lived. The last of his successors, Uruinimgina (who flourished about 2365 BC and instituted many social reforms) was defeated by Lugalzagesi (c. 2370-2347 BC), the ruler of the neighboring city-state of Umma. For about 20 years, Lugalzagesi was the most powerful ruler in the Middle East.

By the 23^rd century BC, the power of the Sumerians had declined to such a degree that they could no longer defend themselves against the nomadic invasions. The Akkadian (Semitic) tribes under the leadership of Sargon I the Great (c. 2335-2279 BC), succeeded in conquering the entire country. Sargon founded a new capital, Agade, in the far north of Sumer and made it the richest and most powerful city in the region. At this time, the Akkadian language began to replace Sumerian; the people of northern Sumer and the conquering invaders, fusing gradually, became known ethnically and linguistically as the Sumero-Akkadians. The land of Sumer acquired the composite name Sumer and Akkad, and their language became a new dialect of the Semitic family languages. The Akkadian dynasty lasted about a century.

During the reign of Sargon’s grandson NaramSin (ruled 2255-2218 BC), the Guties, an Aryan nomads from the Zagros Mountains, sacked the city of Agade. They then subjugated the Sumero-Akkadians. After several generations, the Sumerians regained their independence from the Guties and Akkadians. The city of Lagash flourished once more and it achieved prominence during the reign of Gudea (c. 2144-2124 BC), numerous statues of whom have been recovered. Gudea was an extraordinarily pious and capable ruler, and he has become the best known Sumerian to the modern world. The Sumerians achieved complete independence from the Guties and Akkadians when Utuhegal, king of Uruk (ruled 2120-2112 BC), won a decisive victory, which had been later celebrated in the Sumerian literature.

One of Utuhegal’s generals, Ur-Nammu (ruled 2113-2095 BC), founded the 3^rd Dynasty of Ur. In addition to being a successful military leader, he was also a social reformer and the originator of a law code that antedates that of the Babylonian king Hammurabi by about three centuries. Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi (c. 2095-2047 BC) was a successful general, a skillful diplomat, and a patron of literature. During his reign, the system of education flourished.

Before the beginning of the 2^nd millennium BC, the Amorites (Semitic nomads, relatives of the Akkadians) from the Lebanon Mountains and Syrian Steppes that were situated to the west of Sumer and Akkad, invaded the kingdom. They gradually became masters of such important cities as Isin and Larsa. The Amorites’ invasion threw into confusion the Sumerians, and there was a widespread political disorder – rebellions and riots in most of the Sumerian cities. This situation encouraged the Elamites (relatives of the Hurrians and Armenians, nomads from the southern Zagros Mountains that were situated to the east of Sumer) to attack Ur in 2004 BC, and to take into captivity the last ruler of Sumer, Ibbi-Sin. The Elamites took control over the ancient cities and, mingling with the local people, became the new upper class.

During the centuries following the fall of Ur, bitter, internecine, inter-city struggle for the control of Sumer and Akkad was going on. First, Isin and Larsa were fighting between each other, and later, Larsa and Babylon. Hammurabi (c. 1823-1763 BC) of Babylon defeated Rim-Sin of Larsa and became the sole ruler of Sumer and Akkad. This victory marks the death of the Sumerian State and the birth of Babylonian State. Under the leadership of Hammurabi, Babylon adopted the Sumerian urban culture almost entirely.

c. The Babylonians

The first (by importance) condition of the transition to agriculture from horticulture was the unification of large horticultural population and territory by a group of the nomadic tribes. The second condition of such a transition was the creation of large irrigation systems, which could provide considerable surplus that was necessary for maintenance of the large bureaucracy, the effectiveness of which would largely depend on the well-adjust laws, in accord with which this bureaucracy would operate. To predict and quickly cope with the consequences of the annual floods of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers were necessary the knowledgeable bureaucrats, who could manage the ever changing situation on a day-to-day basis. The high tides and winds that came from the Persian Gulf could aggravate the dangerous floods. Probably that is how the biblical myth of the great flood was created by the Sumerians. Therefore, the second (after the physical force) feature of the city-state bureaucracy was its intelligence, its knowledge of the drainage systems and ability to organize large masses of population for the productive end.

The physical force was prevalent feature of the military bureaucrats, and the intelligence (as a mixture of fiction and science) was the prevalent feature of the clerical bureaucrats. The process of separation of the fiction and science was the reflection of the process of separation of the clerical and civil bureaucracies. The commander-in-chief became the high priest -- the head of the city-state (ensi -- the chieftain-king). He managed defense of his State, controlled taxes, and organized the public jobs and feast ceremonies around the temple.

Each Sumerian city-state had the main temple and the local shrines, which were dedicated to the main god and his offspring. Usually the chieftain-king divided his territory in three parts. The first part consisted of those lands that provided the maintenance of the military bureaucracy; usually these lands were cultivated by the serfs (first, as the war-prisoners, and later, as the property-less people). The second part consisted of those lands that were given as a lifetime property (it could not be inherited) to the lower upper class priests and the upper middle class artisans and merchants. The third part consisted of the lands that were leased to the middle and lower middle-class farmers for a fee-tax, which usually was not more than 20% of the crop.

When the 3^rd dynasty of Ur managed to unite (to conquer) the Sumerian city-states into the State of Sumer at the end of the 22^nd century BC, the complexity of social life increased and required the separation of the civil bureaucracy from the clerical one. The economic archives of that time show the qualitative leap in the accounting of the labor force, lands, and other means of production, which was reflected in the systematic census of the above mentioned means of production. Thus, the land census accounted not only for the quantity of allotments, but also for their quality (in short, their location, location, and location -- to the water, to the city, etc.). The labor force also was estimated from the quantitative and qualitative points of view. Thus, the Nippur archives show that serfs were divided as having 1, 2/3, 1/2, 1/3, and 1/6 of a labor force.

The continuous maintenance of allotments by the descendants (up to the 3^rd - 6^th generations) of those bureaucrats and farmers who received those allotments only as the lifetime property led those descendants to believe that these allotments were their private property. Thus, gradually, more and more state property was transferred into the sphere of the private property; and correspondingly, more and more property was transferred from the sphere of the direct exchange of commodities into the sphere of the indirect (money) exchange of products and means of production. More and more people became involved into the money exchange; some of them went bankrupt, felt into the net of the loan sharks, and became the lower class of serfs and slaves. Such development led to the increased tensions inside the society. The hidden and open resistance of the middle class necessitated the regulation of the property rights, which required further development of the civil bureaucracy, and particularly its branch -- the administration of justice. Thus, the first codexes of laws were created.

Although the Semitic and Aryan nomads conquered the Sumerians, their urban culture was carried on by their successors – the Akkadians, Amorites, Guties, and Elamites. However, this struggle for control of Mesopotamia between the Semitic-speaking and Aryan-speaking nomads, buttressed by the certain ideology, would spawn hatred through millennia. Later, we will see how this physical struggle transferred into ideology, and vice versa.

The Babylonians made distinct cultural and technological contributions to the growth of ancient urbanism. They added to the knowledge of astronomy, advanced the knowledge of mathematics, and built the first great capital city, Babylon. The Babylonian king Ham-Mu-rabi compiled the Code of laws in the 18^th century BC. This was the most complete collection of laws and edicts, and the earliest legal code known in its entirety. A copy of the code, engraved on a block of black diorite nearly 2.4-m high, was unearthed by a team of French archaeologists at Susa, the Elamites’ capital-city (modern southwestern Iran). The three pieces of the block have been restored, and ever since it is an exhibit of Le Louvre Museum in Paris.

1) The Code of Ham-Mu-rabi (Hammurabi)

A bas-relief (in which the king is depicted receiving the code from the sun god, Shamash) emphasizes the divine origin of the written law. Justice was the most important quality of this god. The code is set down in horizontal columns of cuneiform writing: 16 columns of text on the facial side and 28 on the backside. The text begins with a prologue that explains the extensive restoration of the temples and religious cults of Babylonia and Assyria. The code is composed of 282 articles, which begin with directions for legal procedure and a statement of penalties for unjust accusations, false testimony, and injustice done by judges. Then follow laws concerning property rights, loans, deposits, debts, domestic property, and family rights. Then follow sections that relate to personal injuries through the malpractice of physicians. Then follow property damages that are caused by neglect in various trades. Rates for various forms of service in most branches of trade and commerce were fixed in the code. Punishments for crimes were generally severe – death penalty for false witnessing, housebreaking, kidnapping, aiding the escape of slaves, and receiving stolen goods.

The basis of criminal law in the Code of Ham-Mu-rabi was equal retaliation that would later be expressed in the Mosaic laws as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". The laws offered protection to all three classes of Babylonian society: the upper class of the land-owning aristocracy; the lower class of the serfs and slaves; and the middle-class of farmers, merchants, and artisans. Each class had its own crimes and punishments. For the same kind of crime the poor and the rich would be punished differently; for example, an individual would receive more severe punishment for harming an aristocrat than for harming a commoner. However, on the first glance, the code appears as if its creator sought to protect the weak and the poor, including women, children, and slaves, against injustice at the hands of the rich and powerful.

The code appealed to the law and justice of Ham-Mu-rabi’s rule. The code ended with an epilogue that glorified the mighty works of peace executed by Ham-Mu-rabi. The code explicitly stated that Ham-Mu-rabi had been summoned by the gods "to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil". Ham-Mu-rabi described the laws, which he had compiled, as enabling "the land to enjoy stable government and good rule". Ham-Mu-rabi stated that he had inscribed his words on a pillar in order "that the strong may not oppress the weak, that justice may be dealt the orphan and the widow". Ham-Mu-rabi proclaimed: "Let any oppressed man, who has a cause, come into the presence of my statue as king of justice, have the inscription on my stele read out, and hear my precious words. So that my stele may make the case clear to him, may he understand his cause, and may his heart be set at ease!"

Moses made only some minor adjustments in the code of Ham-Mu-rabi, to accommodate it to the needs of his semi-nomadic people. Ham-Mu-rabi emphasized the laws against perjurers as the most severe transgression against the law and society itself. This system of the laws gives the prevalence to the rights of society over the rights of individual. However, at the same time, Ham-Mu-rabi makes the laws more bearable to the lower class, because the interests of the poor lie rather in the sphere of truth than in the sphere of property. Moses only reemphasized the prevalence of the rights of the society over the rights of the individual. However, he reflected the shift of interests and he gave the prevalence to the interests of the upper class, which rather preferred to protect life and property than to say the truth. In short, Ham-Mu-rabi emphasized the ‘don’t lie’ over the ‘don’t kill and don’t steal’. Moses, on the contrary, emphasized the ‘don’t kill and don’t steal’ over the ‘don’t lie’. However, in general, both of these systems are the same; and the contemporary inquisitorial system of criminal procedures is derived from both of them. As I pointed out earlier (see p.7), only the Greeks and Romans, who developed the controlling middle-class, managed to come up with a new system of laws. From this new system of laws derived the contemporary adversarial system of criminal procedures that gives the prevalence to the rights of individual over the rights of society.

Many provisions of Ham-Mu-rabi’s code relate to business transactions and show the importance of trade to the Babylonians. The economy of the Babylonians depended heavily on foreign and domestic trade because it developed from the economy of the Sumerian city-states. The latter had relatively strong middle-classes because their upper classes were divided between the clerical bureaucracy on one side, and the army and civil bureaucracy on the other side. This division of the Sumerian upper class was derived from the frequent changes of the army and civil bureaucracy that would change with every new wave of the nomadic invasions. In such circumstances, it was hard for the clerical bureaucrats to believe and to advise other people to believe that the kings are the gods. Therefore, neither the Sumerian clergy nor the Sumerian army and civil bureaucrats (unlike the Egyptian upper class) considered own kings as the gods. Therefore, the Sumerian, and then, the Babylonian kings, did not consider themselves to be gods, but the great men (heroes, supermen) who were selected by the gods to represent them on earth. The gods ruled the earth through the kings, who reported to the former about the conditions of their lands and peoples and asked for their advice on how to improve those conditions. Therefore, the Sumerian and Babylonian economies were more often managed not by the state bureaucrats (as in Egypt) but the clergy and the middle class entrepreneurs.

The temple priests were engaged in trades because they possessed surplus product that was collected as rents from farmers who used the temple land. At the beginning of Sumerian history, the middle-class of merchants, farmers, and artisans was subservient to the clergy and the army bureaucrats. However, over the centuries, the cynical merchants (who saw many lands and peoples) had become more entrepreneurial and had acted less and less as the simple agents of the temple or palace. However, for the upper class of the Sumerians and Babylonians, the domestic, and particularly foreign, trade had become very important because it provided aristocrats with the new and fresh kinds of pleasure. Thus, governments instituted regulations to prevent fraud that would spoil their pleasures. Severe punishments were imposed for dishonesty in business transactions, which now had to be recorded in writing. Consequently, a system of weights and measures was devised to facilitate the trade. The different kinds of services were regulated through the laws, to prevent excessive interest rates that would make the middle-class more wealthy and powerful than the upper class.

The main goal of Ham-Mu-rabi was -- to make his society surviving; and it meant that his bureaucracy should be effective, well adjust, and resistant to the internal and external corruption. In that end, the function of each individual of the Babylonian society should be defined, and his/her property (rights and responsibilities) would be firmly fixed in the written form, that "the strong may not oppress the weak". Therefore, Ham-Mu-rabi started from the rights and responsibilities society, its property; that is, from the property of the State itself, which are the laws themselves ('the death to those who lie in the court of law'). Then (in the articles 26-41), he considers the property of the upper class (the bureaucrats, the officers of the State) and prohibits the sale of their property for silver. The articles 48-113 were directed against the usurers of the middle class, who were prohibited to take property of a debtor in order to cover his debt. The norm of percent was fixed, as 20% in money and 33% in natural form.

Property is the rights and responsibilities of an individual toward others in a society, in a relation between those individuals about the use or abuse of a thing or service. In order to be "fair and just," the State (its bureaucracy) should be effective, and the Babylonians saw their just State as expressed in the social inequality; however, the middle and lower classes also had their rights and responsibilities. Particularly, the commoners (farmers, artisans, and merchants) could have their own husbandry and slaves. The serfs and slaves could have their own family; the marriages between the lower and middle class people were legal, and children of such kind of marriages would consider as belonging to the middle class. This kind of children could be the heirs of the real estates and could have their own husbandry and own slaves.

The Sumerians and Babylonians imported the goods that were difficult to find at home – timber of cedar and cypress, oils and fragrances from the Mediterranean coastal lands; precious metals and stones from Afghanistan and India; ivory from the east coast of Africa; and copper from the Persian Gulf. In exchange, they exported textiles, fine metal-works and jewelry, wheat and barley, and the dry dates. The Sumerian and Babylonian entrepreneurs were the pioneers of the international trade, and they set up the trading outposts in the distant Mediterranean and Indian lands where they were the source of cultural dissemination (diffusion).

In the 17^th century BC, the Babylonians struggled with the Semitic tribes of the Amorites, who took power in Ashur to the north. However, soon after, all northern cities fell to newcomers. A raid, launched (c. 1595 BC) by Hittites X, who led the Aryan tribes from the Taurus Mountain (now in Turkey), brought Babylon down. Later, for nearly four centuries, the Kassites controlled Babylon. Ashur fell to the Mitanni State, set up by the Hurrians from Caucasus, who were presumably relatives of the Armenians. The Hurrians had been in Mesopotamia for centuries, but after the 17^th century BC, they spread in large numbers across the whole of the north and into Asia Minor (present-day Turkey).

Kassite Babylon flourished for three centuries, but then the clergy took control over the State bureaucracy and Babylon had become the easy prey for the Semitic Assyrians.

d. The Assyrians (Ashurians) and Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians)

Assyria was a State, the territory of which lay in what is present-day northern Iraq. Assyria was roughly triangular in shape and about the size of the state of Idaho. Assyria included a part of the Tigris River valley. The western part of the country consisted of steppe land suitable only for the nomadic tribes. The eastern section, however, was fit for horticulture, with wooded hills and fertile valleys watered by potent streams. To the east of Assyria lay the Zagros Mountains; to the north, several terraces led up to the Caucasus Mountains. To the west, the Mesopotamian plain stretched toward the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. To the south was the state of Sumer (later, Sumer and Akkad, and still later, Babylonia). It can be said that Assyria lay inside the Aryan triangle. The best-known cities of Assyria, all situated in the northern territory of present-day Iraq, were Ashur (now Sharqat), Nineveh (now the excavated mound Kuyunjik), Calah (now Nimrud), and Dur Sharrukin (now Khorsabad).

Settled agricultural life began in this area in the middle of the 7^th millennium BC. The horticulturists cultivated wheat and barley and pastured cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They built their houses (some of which contained up to four rooms) of compact clay; they also used round ovens (adobe) for baking their ground flour, and stored their grain in large, bitumen-covered clay jars. These gardening people wove textiles from thread spun with the help of spindle whorls and made knives of obsidian and other flint-stones. They used celts (stone-chisels) and other ax-shaped stone tools, such as adzes and hoes. Their pottery was made of skillfully fired clay and was painted in attractive patterns. Vases, beads, amulets, and stamp seals were produced from obsidian and other hard stones. Clay was used for the production of ritual and religious female figurines.

The tribal composition of the horticulturists of northern Mesopotamia may have been a people known in later days as Subarians, who spoke an agglutinative language. The Subarians buried their dead in between the own houses rather than in a cemetery. Often the Subarians positioned a corpse with the knees drawn up to the chin. The Subarians built first towns at the turn of the 3^rd millennium BC, and among their towns was Ashur. Later, in the 26^th century BC, the Aryan nomads conquered Ashur, rebuilt it into the capital city, and their ideology and language dominated the area for about three centuries. The Ashurians worshipped for their own national god Ashur (the god of truth and light). In the 23^rd century BC, the Semitic nomads conquered the region and their customs and inflected tongue (from which later Babylonian derived) became dominant in the region. The Assyrian script was a slightly modified version of the Sumerian cuneiform.

The late Assyrian culture resembles that of the Babylonian. The Assyrian religious practices and beliefs were almost identical with those of the Babylonians. The Assyrians substituted only the name of the main Babylonian god Marduk for the name of the Aryan traditional god Ashur, though the content of this god became of that of the Semitic Marduk.

The Assyrian literature was a virtual copy of its Babylonian counterpart. The more intellectual Assyrian kings, such as Ashur-Banipal, boasted of stocking their libraries with the copies of Babylonian literature. Social or family life, marriage customs, and property laws all resembled those of Babylonian. The three Assyrian law codexes (by in large, the family laws that have been found thus far) have a marked similarity to the Sumerian and Babylonian law collections. However, the penalties were often more severe and brutal.

Because Assyria was at the cross-road of the major caravan-ways of the ancient Middle East, its middle class played active role in the development of the civil bureaucracy; and the 'Trade Charter' of the merchant guild of the city of Kanesh witnesses about it. Notably, the Assyrian laws of the 15^th-14^th centuries BC were not claiming the divine authority and were not delivered through the priests and kings but were expressing the will of the people of the city of Ashur. Those articles of laws that were preserved to us characterize the property rights and particularly a quite complicated procedure of sale of the tribal and family lands. These articles reflected the development of the money exchange and the growth of the lower class of slaves and serfs not only of the prisoners of wars but also of the impoverished members of the Assyrian upper and middle classes. The common practice of transferring the members of the upper and middle classes into the lower class people was through so-called "adoption" of a debtor when the latter, although a grown up, could be adopted and legally would be considered as an adolescent. The other methods of creation and perpetuation of the three-partied class-society was through the sale of the children of a debtor to his creditor. A girl or a boy would function as a slave until she or he would be ransomed.

In the middle of the 3^rd millennium BC, the Assyrians, like most of the Middle East nations, came under the influence of the Sumerians. A temple of this period, excavated in the city of Ashur, contained statues remarkably similar in style and appearance to those found in the temples of Sumer. From about 2300 BC, the Semitic nomads under the leadership of Sargon I conquered Ashur and Ashuria became a province of the empire of Sumer and Akkad. Thereafter, it became known as Assyria. About 2000 BC, another Semitic nomads from the Arabian Desert, the Amorites, conquered much of Mesopotamia, including Assyria. By 1850 BC, the Assyrian merchants had colonized parts of central Anatolia (Asia Minor). They had prospered for awhile on a trade in copper, silver, gold, tin, and textiles, thus rousing jealousy of the Aryan nomads, the Hittites, who conquered the Asia Minor in the 17^th century BC and dominated in this area until the 12^th century BC.

About 1810 BC, Shamshi-Adad I, who ruled the Assyrians in the years 1813-1780 BC, succeeded in extending his domain from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea. Shamshi-Adad may have been the first emperor on the earth, because he established the first empire in the ancient Middle East, the bureaucracy of which spoke in different languages. He divided his empire into provinces headed by specially appointed administrators and councils. He also instituted the regular censuses of the population and the empire-wide postal system. However, this first Assyrian Empire did not last for long and ceased to exist when Shamshi-Adad's son, Ishme-Dagan I was defeated in the year 1760 BC by the Babylonian king Ham-Mu-rabi. Thereafter Assyria became a part of the Babylonian Empire, which was also short-lived. The Kassites, the Aryan nomads from the Zagros Mountains, invaded Babylonia in the early 16^th century BC and seized it. Another group of the Aryan nomads, the Hurrians, infiltrated all northern Mesopotamia and Phoenicia in the mid-16^th century BC.

About 1500 BC, Assyria became a province of Mitanni, another Aryan State that had extended its control over all northern Mesopotamia. Assyria remained a province until early in the 14^th century BC, when the Mitanni military bureaucrats suffered a serious defeat from the Aryan Hittites, whose militarism was on a rise. Taking advantage of being in the middle of two extremists, an Assyrian leader, Ashur-Uballit I, led the Assyrians to independence and even annexed some of the territory of the Hittites and Mitanni. Thereafter, he ruled the Assyrians in the years 1364-1328 BC.

Ashur-Uballit I was succeeded by a series of energetic and able rulers, who were effective and succeeded in extending the Assyrian boundaries and in keeping at bay their powerful neighbors, the Urartians, the Hittites, the Mitanni, the Babylonians, and the Lullubi. The Assyrian armies defeated Mitanni and conquered Babylon at about 1225 BC.

Beginning about 1200 BC, a new wave of migrations changed the face of practically all western Asia. From the Balkan Peninsula, Ionic islands, and Asia Minor came a conglomeration of peoples, known as the Sea Peoples (the proto-Greeks), who put an end to the Hittite Empire in Asia Minor. The Aryan nomads, called Mushki, who settled in eastern Anatolia, became a constant threat to Assyria on the northwest. To the west of Assyria, a group of Semitic nomadic tribes, known as Aramaeans, was multiplying excessively, and therefore, was on a move. Assyria resisted the pressures and attacks of its new neighbors fiercely and, generally, with success. During their bitter struggle for survival, the Assirian upper class developed their military bureaucracy that would be notoriously famous through centuries for its cruelty and terror that they inflicted on many Middle East nations.

At the brink of the 11^th century BC, the Assyrian campaigns took the form of raids in search of booty and tribute. For instance, Tiglath-Pileser I, who ruled the Assyrians in the years 1115-1076 BC, defended his domain against the Aramaeans and the Mushki by conducting sporadic raids into far north territories (up to the Lake Van in Urartu) and into far west (up to Palmyra). Generally, the foreigners fled at the approach of the Assyrian army; those who fell behind were either massacred or enslaved and carried off to Assyria; their villages and cities were ransacked and demolished; however, the Assyrians were not trying to annex their territories yet. Although the Assyrians reached the Mediterranean shores at about 1100 BC, the Aramaean tribes from the Syrian steppe halted their expansion for the next two centuries and, with related Chaldean tribes, overran the Assyrian Babylon.

Only toward the end of the 10^th century BC, the pattern of conquest changed, and the Assyrians began to annex the conquered population and territory. That is, they began to occupy the territory and to force own bureaucracy on the conquered population, thus making Assyria the center of a new empire, which would incorporate the conquered lands and population as provinces and provincials into the Assyrian domain. Thus, Adad-Nirari II, who ruled the Assyrians in the years 912-891 BC, annexed the territory of the Aramaean tribes that centered east of the Habur River. His son, Tukulti-Ninurta I, annexed several more Aramaean territories around the city of Harran and the central Euphrates Valley.

The major Assyrian cultural artifacts of that era are represented in the field of art and architecture, which considerably deviated from the previous traditions. If the early history of the art of the Assyrians is largely the same as that of the Babylonians, then the Middle Assyrian art (1350-1000 BC), although showing some dependence on the established Babylonian stylistic traditions, is already deviating from them. Although the temple architecture and the ziggurats were still popular and the religious subjects were still rigidly depicted in this period, the civil and military themes were already depicted more realistically. At this time, the technique of polychrome glazing of bricks became popular in Mesopotamia. Later this technique resulted in the typical Neo-Babylonian architectural decoration of the entire structures with glazed bricks.

Motifs of the sacred tree and crested griffins was used in cylinder seals and palace wall paintings and may have come from the art of the Mitanni (an Aryan State to the northeast of Assyria). The plant ornamentation of that period became highly stylized and artificial, in comparison with the earlier representations. The development of the Assyrian ideology (which became increasingly abstract) went hand by hand with the replacement of the statues of gods with their symbolic substitutes. Much of the artifacts came from the times of Tukulti-Ninurta I, who ruled the Assyrians in the years 1244-1207 BC. The Assyrian artists of that period emphasized the distance between the gods and humans. The narrative frieze, which derived from the scenes on the earlier steles and seals, became the most important aspect of the Assyrian art.

In 1000-612 BC, in the Neo-Assyrian period, in the time of the great political leaders, the Assyrian middle class flourished. The first great leader of this period was Ashur-Nasirpal II, the son of Tukulti-Ninurta II, who ruled the Assyrians from 883 to 859 BC and organized the construction of the city of Nimrud (the biblical Calah). The walls of Nimrud were encompassing an area of about 3.6 sq. km, which included the citadel (with the main royal buildings like his Northwest Palace, which was decorated with relief sculptures).

During the leadership of Ashur-Nasirpal II, the Assyrian bureaucrats extended their control to the north and east. The Assyrian militarists were hard on their close neighbors and deliberately cruel; however, they inclined more to deliberate with their powerful and distant neighbors, such as the Urartians to the north and the Babylonians to the south. Gradually, the Assyrians advanced toward the Mediterranean Sea. After one successful campaign, Ashur-Nasirpal ordered to plant the Lebanese cedars on the slopes of the Amanus Mountains to provide wood for the restoration of the city of Calah, which he made his capital, in order to improve the effectiveness of his bureaucracy. Numerous inscribed monuments of Ashur-Nasirpal have been unearthed in the ruins of Calah, making him one of the best-known Assyrian leaders.

Shalma-Neser III, the son of Ashur-Nasirpal, organized more than 30 campaigns in the years 859-824 BC against the Arameans, to the west of the Euphrates. Although the Assyrians had some success and even received considerable tribute from the allies of the Arameans, such as the Israelites, the Assyrians failed to control the conquered territories for long. One of Shalma-Neser's monuments is now in the British Museum -- the Black Obelisk, on which the king Jehu, who ruled the Israelites in the years 842-815 BC, is depicted kissing Shalma-Neser's feet.

Toward the end of Shalma-Neser's rule a revolt broke out and Assyria for several years submerged into a civil war. Consequently, the Assyrian military power was diminished, and the Assyrians began to rebuilt their military bureaucracy only when Tiglath-Pileser III came to power in 745 BC. He ruled the Assyrians effectively until 727 BC and managed to create a world empire. His reforms started from reestablishing the supremacy of the military bureaucracy over the civil and clerical bureaucrats. The system of civil justice was reduced to the court-martial. He established a standing (permanent) army, consisting largely of foreign mercenaries, and planned his campaigns with the objective of annexing enemy territory. The conquered peoples were deported from their traditional lands and resettled within the Assyrian domains in order to break their nationalism; that is their subconscious loyalty to their ex-upper class. The Assyrian military, bureaucrats under Tiglath's command, pacified the Aramaean tribes that were harassing the Assyrians in the central Tigris valley, expelled the Urartians from Syria, annexed the Aramaean territories of Arpad and Damascus, and subjugated the cities of Palestine and Babylonia.

The successors of Tiglath-Pileser, Shalma-Neser V (727- 722 BC) and Sargon II (722-705 BC), followed the Tiflath's legalistic policies and managed to extend the Assyrian dominion in all directions, from southern Anatolia to the Persian Gulf and from Egypt to the Zagros Mountains. Conquered regions of Armenia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were left under client-kings or were annexed, in cases when their upper classes refused to collaborate. Following ancient practice, rebellious subjects were deported, resulting in a mixture of ethnic groups across the empire. Thus, at the beginning of Sargon's reign, the Assyrians deported the population of ex-Israel, which had been conquered during Shalma-Neser's leadership.

During his reign, Sargon led campaigns against the Urartians and the Medes, annexed numerous territories in Syria and southern Anatolia, and defeated the Aramaeans in the central Tigris Valley and the Chaldeans in the lower Euphrates Valley. In order to ensure effective control of this vast empire, which extended from the Taurus Mountains to the Persian Gulf and from the Zagros Mountains to Egypt, Sargon divided it into some 70 provinces. Governors of those provinces were directly responsible to Sargon, whose capital-city was Calah. Toward the end of his reign Sargon delegated some of his military power to his son Senna-Cherib (705-681 BC), while leaving for himself the authority over the civil bureaucracy and building a new city, Dur Sharrukin (now Khorsabad). Under his management, there were erected the city walls and a royal palace with impressive bas-reliefs.

During the rule of Sargon's administration, his capital city of Dur-Sharrukin covered 2.6 sq. km (1 sq. mi.) and was surrounded by a wall with seven gates. Three of those gates were decorated with reliefs and glazed bricks. In the city was his palace of more than 200 rooms and courts, an imperial temple, some smaller temples, and residences of the upper and middle class people. He also established a library in Nineveh. At the brink of the 7^th century BC, the civil administration and middle class bloomed; industry, trade, and agriculture were encouraged throughout the empire; the infrastructure was improved and the taxes were lowered.

Royal chronicles recounted the king's bravery in battles and in hunting; they were often carved on both the exterior and interior walls of the palace in horizontal bands with cuneiform texts, in order to impress visitors. The viewer was greeted by huge guardian sculptures at the gate; the guardians were hybrid genii, winged human-headed lions or bulls with five legs (for viewing both front and side). Sometimes the mythological figures were portrayed in the form of a Gilgamesh-like figure with the lion cub or a worshiper bringing a sacrifice, as is a portrait of Sargon II with an ibex (c. 710 BC, Le Louvre).

The construction of Dur-Sharrukin was completed only after Sargon's death by his son and successor, Senna-Cherib, who ruled in between the years 705-681 BC. Later Senna-Cherib moved the Assyrian capital to Nineveh where the Assyrians built for him the Southwest Palace. The North Palace at Nineveh was built for Ashur-Banipal, who ruled the Assyrians in between the years 668-627 BC. The Assyrian artists decorated these palaces with magnificent reliefs, using gypsum alabaster, native to the Assyrian region of the upper Tigris River. This kind of stone is easier for carving than the hard stones used by the Sumero-Akkadian artists.

The subject matter of these alabaster reliefs is mostly military -- the king is hunting lions, or other animals, or he has a triumph over his human enemies and is feasting in his garden, like that relief that preserved in the British Museum. This relief depicts a harpist and birds in the trees that are pacifying the royal couple with music. The reclining king is sipping wine under a vine, his attendants with feather fans are keeping him and his queen cool, while the severed head of the king of Elam (an Aryan State to the east of Nineveh) is hanging from a nearby tree.

During the 9^th - 7^th centuries BC, stylistic changes took place; thus, the late Nineveh reliefs are considerably different from the early Nimrud reliefs. In the latter, scenes that depicted army-life are surrealistic; that is, the Nimrud reliefs represent symbolically an army by a few soldiers, whose size does not correlate with the size of the surrounding objects. Figures are in bands, one above the other, as if the observer has to suggest the 3D space, but it does not feel that way. However, in the Nineveh scenes, the figures are already carved in lower relief, occupy the entire picture surface, and have the greater quantity of details; moreover, some figures even overlap, thus creating a sense of the 3D space.

At the site of Tell Ahmar in northern Syria, a palace decorated with Assyrian wall paintings was uncovered. Some of the paintings are attributed to the mid-8^th century BC; others were painted in the 7^th century BC, by order of Ashur-Banipal. Scenes from the earlier paintings depict the winged genii, the defeat of the enemy, their merciless execution, the following ceremonial receptions of the bureaucrats, and their recording of delivered booty from subjugated nations. The paintings in Khorsabad were more formal and repetitious, and were arranged in bands that are topped by two figures paying homage to a deity.

The Assyrian sculptors excelled at hunting scenes; their finest reflections on the animal forms are the dying lion and lioness and details of a hunt from Ashur-Banipal's palace at Nineveh (the late 7^th century BC, British Museum). Other reliefs from this monument depict real events: everyday life in the army camp, battles, the siege and conquest of cities, and the brutal treatment of captives. Although landscapes and seascapes were not rendered with the photographic realism, the observer is still able to reconstruct the forms of fortifications, buildings, ships, chariots, horse trappings, hunting equipment, weapons, ritual libations, and costumes. The various ethnicity peoples that inhabited Mesopotamia and Syria in the 1^st millennium BC are depicted with great realism and can be identified by their facial features, dress, and hairstyles.

Under Sargon II, the Assyrian Empire was the most powerful and extensive empire in the Middle East. The upper and middle class Assyrians became more cohesive culturally (in language, in ideology, in the production and distribution of the material and intellectual goods and services). However, the internal defect of the monarchical bureaucracy led it to cling for the unable heirs of the ex-able and ex-alive ruler. Thus, Sargon's successors set as their main goal the extensive development of their empire (instead of ordering and intensifying what was already in their domain). Thus, they embarked on the conquest of Egypt, Elam, and Babylonia. To ensure victory over these external foes, they weakened their armies in the northern and northeastern frontier regions, and overburdened the middle class by additional taxes. In the northern regions, the Medes and the newly arrived migrants (the Cimmerians and the Scythians) were harassing the Assyrians without retribution.

Although Senna-Cherib controlled the lands, conquered by his father (Sargon II), the effectiveness of his bureaucracy started to deteriorate. Senna moved his capital from Dur Sharrukin to Nineveh. He was the first Assyrian leader, who used the navy against his own citizens. Thus, in 694 BC, when the Chaldeans rebelled against his greedy bureaucrats, his navy pursued and defeated them. In 689 BC, when the Babylonians revolted once more against the Assyrian over-taxing, Senna ordered to demolish and to flood the entire city of Babylon. Such a ruthless toward own middle class does not dispose the commoners to peaceful and productive life.

Although Esar-Haddon, who ruled in the years 681-669 BC, favored more the middle class than his father, Senna-Cherib, and helped the Babylonians to rebuild their city, he favored even more the expansionistic policy. Thus, his military bureaucracy bloomed and multiplied and, during his rule, the Assyrian roster contained for nearly 150 bureaucratic positions. Under Esar's command, the Assyrians crossed the frontier of Egypt and captured the capital-city of Lower Egypt, Memphis.

Esar's son Ashur-Banipal, who ruled in the years 669-627 BC, continued the Egyptian campaign. His army penetrated the Upper Egypt and captured Thebes. Later, his army sacked Susa (now Shush, Iran), the capital-city of the Elamites (an Aryan State to the southeast of Babylon). Ashur-Banipal is also famous for his vast library at Nineveh, where he collected (but did not use) the knowledge of the conquered people.

Trying to be effective, the Assyrian bureaucracy engaged in large-scale projects, such as improving roads, establishing postal service, and building irrigation systems. The Assyrian upper class tried to maintain and spread the ancient Sumerian culture. They copied and edited the Sumerian and Babylonian literature adopted the old Sumerian gods, but the Sumerian culture did not match with a new form of ruling – with absolute monarchy. Therefore, a period of civil wars and revolts by oppressed subjects had followed, and soon, the Assyrian upper class was weakened enough to allow nomads to sack the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BC.

Frequent revolts demanded a strong military machine, but it had crumbled under the pressure of inner disorganization. Internal pressures and attacks from the Aryan Medes and the Semitic Chaldeans caused the Assyrian Empire to collapse. On the remnants of the Assyrian Empire arose the Chaldean Empire, which included Babylonia, Assyria, Syria, and Palestine. The Medes took the Iranian hill country, leaving Mesopotamia to the Chaldeans.

A full-scale revolution followed the death of Ashur-Banipal, and little is known about this Assyrian Dark Age (that is why it is called the Dark Age). The Medes sacked the city of Ashur in 614 BC, and, aided by the Babylonians, captured and ruined Nineveh in 612. The Assyrian army, led by the last Assyrian king, Ashur-Uballit II, retreated to Harran (to the northwest of the Assyrian ex-capital), where Ashur-Uballit died in 609 BC. This defeat marked the end of the Assyrian Empire.

Although the Chaldeans (in coalition with the Medes and Scythians) defeated the Assyrians in 612 BC, sacked Nimrud and Nineveh, and established own sovereignty, they did not establish a new cultural patterns or iconography. Their boundary stones still depicted in old manner the scenes and images of kings with the old symbols of the gods. The Neo-Babylonians embodied their creativity in the architecture of Babylon, which was destroyed in 689 BC by the Assyrian Senna-Cherib and was restored by the Chaldean Nabo-Polassar (r. 626-605 BC) and his son Nebuchad-Nezzar II. It took nearly a century for the Babylonians to rebuild outer and inner walls of their city. The central feature of the rebuild-city became the temple of Marduk, which was erected on the top of the seven-story and 91-m high ziggurat Etemenanki (from the biblical studies known as the Tower of Babel).

The ziggurat had been built of sun-dried bricks and faced with baked bricks; northward from it passed the processional way, walls of which were decorated with the enameled reliefs of lions. Passing through the Ishtar Gate, this passage led to a small temple outside the city, where ceremonies for the New Year Festival were held. Two palace complexes were to the west of the Ishtar Gate; since the times of Ham-Mu-rabi, a residential area lay to the east of the processional way.

Ham-Mu-rabi (Hammurabi) was actually the biblical Ham, from whom the biblical authors derived the Hamites. It is notable how these authors conceived their "table of nations".

"This is the account of Shem, Ham and Japheth, Noah's sons, who themselves had sons after the flood.

The Japhethites. The sons [the descendants, VS] of Japheth: Gomer [Homer, VS], Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras. The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath and Togormah. The sons of Javan: Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim and the Rodanim. (From these the maritime peoples [the Greeks, VS] spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language.)

The Hamites. The sons of Ham: Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan. The sons of Cush: Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah and Sabtecah. The sons of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan. Cush was the father of Nimrod, who grew to be a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; that is why it is said, 'Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD.' The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Calneh, in Chinar. From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth, Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city. Mizraim was the father of the Ludites, Anamites, Lehabites, Naphtuhites, Pathrusites, Casluhites (from whom the Philistines came) and Caphtorites. Canaan was the father of Sidon, his firstborn, and of the Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, Arkites, Sinites, Arvadites, Zemarites and Hamathites. Later the Canaanite clans scattered and the borders of Canaan reached from Sidon toward Gerar as far as Gaza, and then toward Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, as far as Lasha. These are the descendants of Ham by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.

The Semites. Sons were also born to Shem, whose older brother was Japheth; Shem was the ancestor of all the sons of Eber. The sons of Shem: Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, Lud and Aram. The sons of Aram: Uz, Hul, Gether and Meshech. Arphaxad was the father of Shelah, and Shelah the father of Eber. Two sons were born to Eber: one was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided; his brother brother was named Joktan. Joktan was the father of Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, Obal, Abimael, Sheba, Ophir, Havilah and Jobab. All these were sons of Joltan. The region where they lived streached from Mesh toward Sephar, in the eastern hill country. These are the sons of Shem by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.

These are the clans of Noah's sons, according to their lines of descent, whithin their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood." (Genesis 10).

Now we can see how the authors of the Old Testament used the known to them names of the famous people, tribes, cities and localities; and later, we will see for what reason they did thus.

Now we have to return to the Ishtar Gate, which was erected about 575 BC and is one of the few surviving Neo-Babylonian structures. Its facade and the processional way that led up to it were of glazed bricks and were excavated by German archaeologists and taken to Berlin, where the monument was reconstructed. The complex (about 30-m long) is on display in the Asian Museum of Berlin. Restoration of an earlier version of the Ishtar Gate, the processional way, and the palace complex, which were built of unglazed brick, has been undertaken by the Iraqi.

Little of that epoch was preserved, as little or nothing remains of the famous palace of Nebuchad-Nezzar II, the Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The talented general and brilliant administrator, Nebuchad-Nezzar II ruled the Chaldean Empire from 604 to 562 BC. Under his command, the Chaldeans rebuilt Babylon and embellished it with magnificent temples and palaces, among which was the famous palace of the Hanging Gardens that was built for his Median wife, who bored of the plane view of the river-valley. The 110-m high building was modeled on a ziggurat and consisted of a series of vaulted terraces, which were surrounded by a trench of flowing water. Trees, shrubs, and flowers decorated each terrace. After the death of Nebuchad-Nezzar II, the Chaldean Empire was torn apart by civil war and by the Persians, Aryan nomads who had settled in southern Iran.

The Babylonians, under the rule of their last king, Nabo-Nidus (556-539 BC), rebuilt the old Sumerian capital of Ur, including the ziggurat of Nanna, which rivaled with the ziggurat Etemenanki at Babylon and survived well; its facing bricks have recently been restored.

In 539 BC the Neo-Babylonian kingdom fell to the Persians under the leadership of Cyrus the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Dynasty. Thereafter, Mesopotamia became part of the Persian Empire. At first, Cyrus declared that his capital-city would be Babylon, and he ordered to build a royal palace there. Later, Darius transferred the Persian capital into Persepolis.

Throughout their history, the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian upper classes relied almost entirely on the organization and power of their military bureaucracy. The main force of the army was the infantry (heavy and light). Both kind of infantry were equipped with pikes, bows, and short swords; but only the heavy infantry was protected by armor. Cavalrymen rode without saddles and were equipped in the same manner as the light infantrymen. Three-man crews drove heavy chariots. Siege towers and battering rams were used for attacking and breaking down the walls of fortifications.

The king was the commander in chief of the military bureaucracy, the president of the civil bureaucracy and the high priest of the clerical bureaucracy; therefore he was an embodiment of an absolute monarch. However, with the growth of either empire, the chain of command had been constantly increasing, and ambitions and intrigues of the military bureaucrats of the highest ranks became a constant threat to the life of the Assyrian or Chaldean monarch. Only in brief periods of the 9^th century BC (during the rule of Ashur-Nasirpal II and his son Shalma-Neser III) and at the brink of the 7^th century BC (during the rule of Sargon II), the Assyrian upper class relied heavily on the civil bureaucrats. And only during the end of Nebuchad-Nezzar's rule, the Neo-Babylonian middle-class and civil bureaucrats could act on equal terms with the military bureaucrats. Thus, toward the end of the reign of the Assyrian and Chaldean dynasties, when the selection of a successor (by blood or by abilities) became a crucial issue not only among bureaucrats but also among commoners, palace revolts and revolutions became common place. This central weakness in the organization of the Assyrian and Chaldean bureaucracies was greatly responsible for the disintegration and collapse of their empires.

e. The Persians

Under the Persians, Mesopotamia became divided into the provinces (satrapies) of northern Ashur and southern Babylon. Although Babylon was no longer a capital city, it continued to play a role of the main economic center of the Persian Empire. During 25 years (550-525 BC), under the leadership of Cyrus the Great and his son, Cambyses, the Persians conquered all lands between the Indus and Nile rivers, between the Black and Arabian seas.

Following the Assyrian example, the Persians employed the Egyptian model of absolute monarchy. They developed an effective bureaucracy, which stabilized and to some degree unified their vast territories. The Persian Empire was divided into 20 provinces with a corresponding number of governors. The central bureaucracy allowed the provincial bureaucracies a large measure of self-governing. The Persian bureaucrats respected local cultural traditions, as long as the locals paid their taxes, served in the Persian army, and abstained from rebellion.

The Persian bureaucracy chose Aramaic language, widely used by merchants earlier, as the official language of the Empire. Aramaic language of the Arameans of Syria was written in letters based on the Phoenician alphabet. By making Aramaic the universal language of the Empire, the Persian bureaucracy simplified the oral and written communication among large number of its ethnic groups (ex-nations). The Empire was also unified through an elaborate network of roads, through a regular postal service, through a common system of weights and measures, and a common monetary system. Despite the appearance of political and cultural unity, the Persians were the eclectics – their palaces had the Babylonian terraces, the Egyptian colonnades with the Assyrian decorated winged bulls.

Their blooming material eclecticism was based on their spiritual eclecticism that produced its own marvelous fruit – the ideology of Zoroaster (pronounced in ancient Persia as Zarathustra, which meant 'one, who has goldy camels'). This ideology would rival with Christianity for the minds and hearts of the Europeans for nearly a millennium. Even St. Augustine (a major Christian theologian) had been for nine years a Manichean (a Zoroastrian sect) until he was converted to Christianity.

1) Zoroaster

Zoroaster (c. 630-550 BC), the founder of this ideology, taught his disciples to believe in a Lord of Light (Ahura Mazda – the Wise Lord of goodness, justice, and life) and in a Lord of Darkness (Ahriman – the Lord of evil, destruction, and death). The Lords of Light and Darkness were in constant conflict with each other. People were free to choose between these two powers to follow. By choosing, to follow the Lord of Light, they would prefer good over evil; and by choosing to follow the way of the Lord of Darkness, they would prefer evil over good. To serve the Lord of Light, the individual must speak only the truth and do only good and justice to others. A just and wise individual would be rewarded for such his behavior with eternal life in paradise – a realm of the pure light, goodness, and pleasure. The followers of the Lord of Darkness would be cast into a realm of pure darkness and eternal torment. The Orthodox (‘strait opinion’) Zoroastrians rejected temples, blood sacrifices, and all kinds of magic. Instead, the Zoroastrians insisted on developing the conscious part of the human mind (the reason) through ethics, common to Hinduism and the ideology of the Knowledgeable One.

Zoroaster was born in the eastern Persian mountainous province of Airyana Vaejah. Being still a young man, he received revelations from the Lord of Light. Zoroaster’s difficulties of preaching and his conversations with the godhead are recorded in the Old Avesta. After years of struggle with the priests of the established ideologies, he converted a chieftain of the Turkmen, Vishtaspa, who helped him to establish Zoroastrianism as a religion. After that, Zoroaster devoted his time to raising cattle (which he considered as sacred animals) and to preaching his ideology, through which, he had hoped to unite the settled Aryan cattle-herders against those folks, who continued to practice nomadic paramilitary life-style. "Glorifying the Lord of Light and giving forage to the cattle, these are the best," thus spoke Zoroaster. He preached to nomads "to stop violence, stealing of cattle, and ruining settlements that peace and Goodness can come". Zoroastrianism reflected the longings of those ex-nomads, who achieved prominence in captured lands, who became the upper class in a newly organized class society, and who now wanted peacefully exploit the newly "acquired" slaves and lands. The long-run interests of the Aryan nomadic tribes were reflected in their craving for such a place on the earth, "where many cooking is going on and all get big chunks of food, where horses snort and wheels creak, where lash whips and many chewing is going on, where vaults have all kinds of stuff that is necessary for good life".

The doctrine, that was expressed in the Old Avesta (Gathas), consists of worship to the Lord of Light, as the One who embodies Truth (Asha), and who opposes the embodiment of Lie, the Lord of Darkness. All that is good derives from, and is supported by the emanations of the Lord of Light – the Holy Spirit (the Spenta Mainyu, a creative power), a Good Mind (Wisdom), Truth, Energy, Activity, Health, and Life. The emanation differs from the transformation in the sense that, when a subject transforms into an object, the subject disappears completely and transfers into the object, however, when a subject emanates into an object, they become two. All evil is caused by the emanations of the Lord of Darkness – the Evil Spirit (the Angra Mainyu, a destructive power), a Bad Mind, Lie, Force, Passivity, Disease and Death. Having allied himself with Lie, the individual chooses to follow the way of the dark forces; whereas, allying himself with Truth, the individual chooses to follow the way of the light energies. Upon death, the individual’s soul will be judged at the Bridge of Discrimination; the followers of Truth will cross the bridge and be led to paradise; and the adherents of Lie will fall into hell. All evil will eventually be eliminated on the earth in an ordeal of fire and molten metal – sounds like the Armageddon, does it not?

Structurally, the logical defect of the elimination of one side (the evil one) in the dualistic system can be explained by eclecticism of the Zoroastrians, who compiled their doctrine of two other ideologies – the ancient Aryan cosmology and contemporary Hinduism.

The Old Avesta (that was based on the Hindu system and was probably outlined by Zoroaster himself) promoted worship of the Holy Spirit and his emanations (including Truth). The New Avesta describes a cult of worshiping to the Lord (Ahura) who is the custodian of Truth (Asha). This portion of the Scriptures was composed after Zoroaster’s death by his disciples.

Zoroaster’s teaching is praised and revered in the New Avesta. However, its systematic outlook, compiled with additions from the earlier Aryan beliefs that were somewhat different from that of the contemporary Hinduism. In the New Avesta, the emanations occur in the company of other sacred powers; a Lord has the epithet of a "possessor of Truth"; however, the Evil Spirit and Lie are not mentioned. Many natural objects, mythical creatures, and ancestral spirits were worshiped. At last, the very figure of the Lord became to resemble not the Zoroastrian Lord, but the truth god, Varuna (sometimes pronounced as Asura) of the most ancient Hindu Scriptures (the Rig-Veda). This transformation happened because it was the representatives of the entrenched upper class of an agricultural society who compiled the later books (and particularly the 3rd part of the New Avesta); and this class already gave prevalence to the settled agricultural life. Thus the authors of the New Avesta glorified the labor of a ploughman, not a shepherd, as the authors of the Old Avesta did. The later teachers stressed that the essence of Zoroastrianism would be clear there, "where wheat and barley are cultivated with diligence". However, the authors of both Avestas concurred in their conviction of asceticism. They preached that asceticism weakens a man in his struggle with the Dark forces; if a man would leave his land, he would eternally stay "by the gate of others with the begging bowl". "No one of those, who do not eat, is not able to be diligent in husbandry and in procreation of sons, who multiply the wealth of a family and assist in the victory of Good".

The depth of Zoroaster’s ideology had exerted a profound influence on the Greek thought – Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers showed a great interest in his doctrine. Zoroaster’s ideas strongly affected Judaism, Christianity and Islam, particularly their angelology, demonology, and eschatology (a discipline of the death and resurrection). These influences have been traced to the Manual of Discipline found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

When the city-state of Ashur was established by the Aryan Hurrians under the leadership of Kikia before the 25^th century BC in northern Mesopotamia, it was dedicated a masculine power of Truth (Asha). Later, when the Semitic-speaking Amorites captured the city, they rededicated it to a feminine power of Love (Ishtar, whom the Phoenicians called Ashtoreth, the Greeks called Aphrodites, and the Romans called Astarte or Venus). Thus, the Amorites launched the first ideological war that would go through millennia.

The common ancestors of the Persians, the Greeks, and the Hindus are the Aryans – the nomadic groups of the Indo-European peoples, and it is probable that they worshiped a number of similar deities. The Lord (Ahura) of the New Avesta has wives (which are called Ahuranis) who, like the truth god’s (Varuna’s) wives (which are called Varunanis) are Rain, Clouds, and Waters. The Zoroastrian Lord is possessor of Truth, as the Aryan Varuna is custodian of Rta (from Sanskrit arta or asha means ‘truth’ or ‘cosmic order’). That is why the Greek word art means ‘bread’. However, the Latin word art means an action through which the truth of an object is revealed. The sun is the ‘eye’ of both deities, and the name of the Lord (Ahura) is at times joined to that of the sun god (Mithra). In the Hindu Scriptures, the names of the sun god (Mithra) and the truth god (Varuna) are similarly joined. The New Avesta also reveres Haoma (in the Hindu Vedas, it is ‘soma’; and from Greek soma means ‘a body’ and coma means ‘drowsiness’), a mystical plant, from which the Aryans yielded an intoxicating juice. However, the Old Avesta warned against this ‘filth of intoxication’ as impairing the Good Mind (reason). I believe that this so-called "mystical" plant is the common hemp, a kind of which we know as marihuana, from which some Canadian restaurateurs make not only drinks but also whole meals. The worship of the ancestral and natural spirits (the fire god, Agni, for instance) likewise have the Aryan parallels.

The Old and New Avestas were written in the same dialect; they are the main parts of the Scriptures, but there are liturgical additions, called the Clear (Yasna). The liturgical additions (which are hymns to individual deities) were written in another dialect, and thus further entangled the web of the Zoroastrian doctrine. The latest part of the Scriptures, the Worship (Vendidad) was composed in the 3^rd century BC (after the Greek conquest of Persia) and is mainly a codification of the Zoroastrian rituals and laws. These customs included the exposure of corpses, protection of dogs, and the joyful slaughter of sacrificial animals. The last part of the Zoroastrian Scriptures permits some customs, which the first part (the Old Avesta) had prohibited.

Thus, the weak internal design slowed the expansion of the Zoroastrian doctrine and did not allow it to become the ideology of the lower class, because universality is a necessary characteristic of such an ideology. Only when a doctrine is based on a universal principle, such as the universal love, which can be used by all major classes of a society to protect their particular interests, only then, it can become the ideology of the lower class. The ideology of the upper class (valor and loyalty) is too hot and too odd for the lower class that needs compassion. Intelligence and reason (the ideology of the middle class) is too cold to feel compassion. However, the valor, loyalty, and intelligence can tolerate compassion. The Zoroastrians could satisfy the valor and loyalty condition, and, in some degree, not insult intelligence; but they could not give the feeling of compassion.

Indeed, the Persian upper class very soon employed the Zoroastrian doctrine. Darius I (550-486 BC) was the first Persian king who recognized the Zoroastrian ideology as the established religion. His inscriptions are full of praises to the Lord of Light. Darius stressed rationality of this doctrine and seemingly regarded Lie as a cosmic force. His son, Xerxes I, was also a worshiper of the Wise Lord. Most impressive was his conception that Truth (Arta) would be attained in the afterlife – this view reflected the old Aryan idea that Truth or Cosmic Order (Rta) has a location beyond the earth. He even named his son in the name of Truth (Arta-Xerxes I). The latter was also a worshiper of the Wise Lord, but he also approved the old Aryan cosmology, which would lead to the syncretism (union of things seemingly repulsive to each other) of the last part of the Zoroastrian Scriptures.

Arta-Xerxes II (409-358 BC) venerated the Wise Lord and the sun god; in his reign the first Persian temples were built. Under the rule of the Greek Seleucids (312-64 BC) and the Parthian Arsacids (c. 250 BC – 226 AD), multiple cults flourished along with Zoroastrianism. The new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids (226-641) established the Zoroastrian ideology as the state religion of Persia. In the Sassanid theology, the Lord of Darkness was opposing the Lord of Light, but not to the one of the latter emanations – the Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu). According to a Greek historian, Herodotus, this theology had already appeared in the syncretic Magian system in the 4^th century BC. Certain Sassanid theologians taught that the Lords of Light and Darkness were the twin sons of Infinite Time (Zervan), but this concept was eventually rejected.

The Arabs gradually converted Persia to Islam after its conquest in the 7^th century. Zoroastrianism survived, however, in small, nomadic, semi-egalitarian communities of ‘Gabars’ in the southeastern mountainous regions of Iran (Yezd and Kerman) where about 20 thousands of them still live. "Gabars" is a derogatory term that the Arabs coined to discriminate against the non-Muslims. It is the same as the Greek term "barbarians" for the non-Greeks, the Jewish term "Gentiles" for the non-Jews, the Christian term "pagans" for the non-Christians and the Renaissance thinkers’ term "Goths" for the non-intelligent people. The Zoroastrians (called Parsis) are numerous and prosperous in India, mainly in the area of Bombay. They still recite the Zoroastrian liturgy and tend the sacred fires, but today a few of them still follow the Magian prescriptions of placing corpses on the raised edifices (the so-called towers of silence) to be the prey of vultures.

As I already mentioned, every ideology would eventually be split, only to be adjusted for the interests of the different classes and even factions. That was exactly what happened with the Zoroastrian ideology, which was split by the Manicheans.

2) Mani

Mani (c. 216-276), the founder of the Manichean ideology that (for nearly a millennium) presented a major challenge to Christianity, was born into an aristocratic Persian family in southern Babylonia. His father, a pious man, brought him up in an austere sect of the Mandaeans (from Aramaic, manda means ‘knowledge’). The Aramaic name Mandaean is the equivalent of the Greek name Gnostic (‘knowledgeable’). Therefore, I will call the members of the Mandean sect and the Christian sect of Gnostics as the Searchers of Knowledge and their sects as the Knowledge sects. A sect is different from an established religious denomination in respect that the majority of the upper class does not support the sectarian ideology.

The Searchers of Knowledge originated in Iranian region, where they appeared as the 'heretics' Zoroastrians at the beginning of the new era. The word 'heretic' derives from the Greek word 'hetero,' and means 'another kind', as opposed to orthodoxy or 'strait opinion'. Their rituals and texts reflect Zoroastrian, Judeo-Christian, and the Knowledgeable One influences.

The major teachings of the Persian Searchers of Knowledge derived from the ideology of the Knowledgeable One. The Searchers of Knowledge believed that the human soul (that imprisoned in the body and material universe) can be saved through revealed knowledge (that might come in an instant, after a meditation), a rigorous moral life, and ritual observances. They also believed in a redeemer, the Knowledgeable One (Manda da Hayye), who knows life and death. This redeemer once dwelled on earth, where he triumphed over the demons who are the rulers of the earth and where they try to keep the soul imprisoned. He can thus assist the soul in its ascent toward reunion with God, the Infinite Bliss. They regarded Jesus as a false messiah, but they revere John the Baptist. They emphasized the importance of frequent baptism as a ritual of purification. Unlike the other Knowledge sects, the Persian Searchers of Knowledge have traditionally regarded marriage and procreation as important moral obligations and their priests were hierarchically organized and called Nasoreans, ‘observers of the rites’.

The Egyptian, Jewish, Syrian, and Greek Searchers of Knowledge flourished during the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries and were a major challenge to orthodox ("strait") Christianity. Most of the sects of the Searchers professed Christianity, but their beliefs somewhat diverged from those of the Christian majority in their early Church. These dissidents promised to their adherents a secret knowledge of the divine realm, which is beyond this material world where the sparks of the Divine Being fell from that divine realm. They taught that the material universe (in which human bodies were imprisoned) is wholly evil and through reawakening by knowledge, the divine element in the individual could be returned to its own home – in the transcendent divine realm.

To explain the origin of the material universe, the Searchers of Knowledge developed a complicated system. From the original unknowable God, a series of lesser divinities (you know them as ‘angels and demons’) was emanated. The last of those divinities, Sophia (‘wisdom’), conceived a desire to know the unknowable Supreme Being. Out of this illegitimate desire was produced a defective, evil god (demiurge or devil) who created the material universe. The divine sparks (that dwell in every human being in this material universe) had fell from or had been thrown by God in order to redeem humanity for that ill-conceived desire. The Searchers of Knowledge identified the evil god with the God of the Christian Old Testament. This first part of the Christian Scriptures they interpreted as an account of this evil god’s efforts to keep humanity immersed in the material world and in ignorance, and to punish their attempts to acquire knowledge. From this point of view of the evil god’s deeds, they understood the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise for eating an apple of knowledge, the Great Flood, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Although most Searchers of Knowledge considered themselves Christians, some sects assimilated only minor Christian elements into an apocryphal body of unorthodox Christian texts. The Christian Searchers of Knowledge refused to identify the God of the New Testament (the Father of Jesus) with the God of the Old Testament, and they developed an unorthodox interpretation of Jesus’ ministry. They wrote apocryphal Gospels (such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary) to substantiate their claim that the risen Jesus told his disciples the truth about his origin. They asserted that Christ (the divine spirit) inhabited the body of the man Jesus and did not die on the cross but ascended to the divine realm, from which he had come. They rejected the appeasing suffering and death of Christ and His bodily resurrection. They also rejected other interpretations of the Gospels, made by the majority.

Some Knowledge sects rejected all sacraments; others observed baptism and the Eucharist, interpreting them as signs of the awakening of knowledge. Other rites were intended to facilitate the ascent of the divine element of the soul to the divine realm. Hymns and magic formulas were recited to achieve a vision of God or to distract the demons, which might capture the ascending spirit of a dead individual and imprison it again into a body. The Valentinians (followers of Valentinus, a teacher of a Knowledge sect, who taught in early 2^nd century) celebrated a special rite (called the bridal chamber) – the reunion of the lost spirit with its heavenly counterpart.

The moral prescriptions of the Searchers of Knowledge ranged from asceticism to libertinism. The concept that the body and the material world are evil led some sects to renounce marriage and procreation. Other Knowledge sects held that because their souls were completely alien to this world, it did not matter what they did in it. The Searchers of Knowledge generally rejected Moses’ moral commandments, which were the foundation of the Old Testament, regarding them as part of the evil god’s effort to entrap humanity.

The question of whether the Knowledge sects first developed as a distinct non-Christian ideology has not been resolved. Nevertheless, it is highly probable that they had developed from the Zoroastrian communities in Mesopotamia and had been influenced by the Jewish sectarians, who had fled Palestine after the failure of their revolt against the Romans in the late 1^st century.

By the 2^nd century, Christian teachers of the Knowledge sects (such as Valentinus and his disciple Ptolemaeus, who were influential in the Roman Church) had developed their doctrine with some elements of the Platonic metaphysics and with some unorthodox Christian traditions. The Knowledge sectarians, while continuing to participate in the larger Christian community, also gathered in small groups to follow their secret teachings and rituals. They created a state inside the State (I mean – a church inside the Church), and this situation became intolerable for the Christian bureaucracy.

Moreover, during the 2^nd century, a Knowledge sect had emerged in eastern Syria, the members of which stressed an ascetic interpretation of Jesus’ teachings. Another ascetic sect appeared in Egypt. Partly as a reaction to the Knowledge sectarians’ heresy, the clerical bureaucrats strengthened the Christian organization by centralizing authority in the office of bishop. Using their better organization and excommunicative technique, the orthodox bureaucracy launched the ‘witch-hunt’ against the dissidents, who were poorly organized. After that, as the orthodox Christian bureaucracy developed its theology, philosophy, and propaganda machine, the primarily cosmological teachings of the Knowledge sectarians had appeared (for the masses of the Christians) as the bizarre or crude ideology of the upper class. The Christian bureaucrats and some Neo-Platonic philosophers (such as Plotinus) attacked not the basic concept of the Searchers of Knowledge (which states that the material world is essentially evil) but some minor details of their doctrine. They could not touch the basics because their own doctrine was essentially the same.

Plotinus (205-270 AD) was born in Egypt, studied at Alexandria for ten years, and in his forties, went to Rome, where he established a Neo-Platonic school. Plotinus impressed his students with his communistic ideas that people should give their fortunes to the poor, set their slaves free, and should devote themselves to lives of study and ascetic piety. Plotinus, being a sexagenarian, with the permission of the Roman emperor Gallienus, designed to establish a communistic commonwealth on the model of Plato’s Republic, but the implementation of the project failed because of the opposition of the emperor’s counselors.

Plotinus’s system was based mainly on Plato’s theory of Ideas. However, whereas Plato assumed archetypal Ideas to be the link between the supreme God and the material world, Plotinus accepted the Zoroastrian concept of emanation. Zoroaster supposed the constant transmission of powers from God to His creations through several agents, the first of which is the cosmic mind (nous) or pure intelligence, whence flows the soul of the world. From the latter flow the souls of humans and animals, and finally, the inanimate matter. Human beings thus belong to two worlds, that of the senses and that of pure intelligence (reason). Because the (inanimate) matter is the cause of all evil, the goal of life should be to escape the material world of the senses. Hence, people should abandon all earthly interests for those of intellectual meditation. Through purification and exercising their intellect, people can gradually lift themselves to an intuition of the cosmic mind and ultimately to a complete and ecstatic union with the Infinite Bliss, Ultimate Good, One, or God -- the source of all existence.

For Plotinus this reality was a sea of tears and sorrow from which the commoner yearned to escape into the "higher" reality, which was not in this world but beyond it. Therefore, the principal goal of life of a commoner should not be comprehension of this reality and neither fulfillment of his human potential nor betterment of his community, but knowledge of the "higher" reality. Plotinus felt that the reason could neither describe nor understand the Infinite Bliss, which is beyond all human knowledge. Therefore, joining with God requires a leap of a soul (through its purification) that it could return to its eternal home.

When Plotinus talks about the matter, he usually drops its predicate ‘inanimate’, but that is the root of the problem. Do you really think that this universe has something that is inanimate? Every material body has its attractive force (gravity, darkness) and its repulsive energy (active force, light), has it not? If so, then you cannot discern the fine line between the external light and dark because they are in constant motion and because your senses are composed of the same ever-moving matter. However, you can discern this line if you mentally break its constant motion; that is, if you mentally substitute a dynamic process with its static representation. Later, we will return to this matter, but for now, we should proceed with the Christian Orthodoxy.

The Christian bureaucrats asserted their identification of the Christian God of the New Testament with the Judaic God of the Old Testament and their belief that the New Testament is the only true revealed knowledge. The total propaganda war was completed in a temporal victory of Orthodoxy. By the 3^rd century, the Knowledge sects began to submit to the upper class Christians, after being persecuted by them. By the end of the 3^rd century, the Searchers of Knowledge as a distinct movement had disappeared, but they fertilized the soil for the teaching of Mani.

From the age of his puberty, Mani experienced visions, in which an angel designated him to be the prophet of a new and ultimate revelation. Being on his first missionary journey to India, Mani was influenced by the teachings of the Knowledgeable One. Being under the protection of the new Persian emperor, Shapur I (ruled 241-272), Mani preached throughout the Empire and even sent missionaries to the Roman Empire.

He preached a "utopia," "the Earth of Light, the divine surface of which is of diamond stuff [of carbon, who would argue with that? VS], which will never be ruined. All the beautiful things are born by the Earth of Light: the hills, entirely covered with flowers; the trees, the fruits of which do not fall down or rot or wormy. The streams carry eternally the divine liquid that fills all Kingdom of Light, where are the infinite number of houses and palaces, thrones and beds, which exist from eternity. The precious Earth of Light is infinite, and searching of her edge or shore is useless; truly, it is free from any kind of suppression; there is no the needy and miserable; there everyone moves at own will and lives by own free will." The rapid expansion of the Manichean egalitarian ideology provoked the hostility of the leaders of the orthodox Zoroastrians, who reasonably noted that the real earth is limited, and therefore, we all depend on each other, and there is no such thing as the absolutely free will. Thereafter, the Zoroastrian establishment accused Mani in the communistic radicalism and preaching robbery of the property of others. When Bahram I (ruled 274-277) succeeded to the throne, the Zoroastrians persuaded him to have Mani arrested as a heretic, after which he either died in confinement or was secretly executed.

The Manichean doctrine reflects the strong influence of the Searchers of Knowledge. Mani proclaimed himself the last prophet in a succession that included Zoroaster, the Knowledgeable One, and Jesus. Mani asserted that his doctrine consummated and contained the partial revelations and doctrines of all previous prophets. The fundamental concept of the Manichean doctrine is its dualistic division of the universe into contending realms of good and evil – the realm of Light (spirit), ruled by God, and the realm of Darkness (matter), ruled by Satan. Originally, the two realms were entirely separate, but in a primal catastrophe, the realm of Darkness invaded the realm of Light, and the two became mixed and engaged in a constant struggle for world domination. The human race is a result and a microcosm of that cosmic struggle. The human body is material and, as such, is evil. The human soul is spiritual, a fragment of the divine Light, and must be redeemed (for the individual’s bodily desires) from its imprisonment in the body and the world. The way of redemption is through knowledge of the realm of Light, which discloses through the succession of divine messengers, who include the Knowledgeable One, Jesus, and the last one – Mani himself. With this knowledge, the human soul can conquer the bodily desires that perpetuate its imprisonment in this world, and thus, it can ascend to the divine realm.

The Manichaeans divided themselves into two categories according to their degree of spiritual perfection. Those, who were called the elect, practiced strict celibacy and vegetarianism and abstained from wine; they were only supposed to preach and do no manual labor. They were assured to ascend to the realm of Light after death. The other category was called the auditors, who were much more numerous, but with lower spirituality. They were permitted marriage (although procreation was discouraged), observed weekly fasts, and served the elect. They hoped to be reborn as the elect.

Mani believed that all fragments of divine Light would be redeemed, this universe would be destroyed, and Light and Darkness would be eternally separated. He also believed that the failure of previous prophets to record their teachings led to their dilution and distortion by their disciples. Subsequently, he wrote several books to serve as the Scriptures of his ideology. Fragments of these scriptures, along with hymns, catechisms, and his cosmology, had been found in Tibet and Egypt in the early 20^th century. Other sources for studying the Manichaean ideology include the writings of St. Augustine (who once was a Manichaean and, after his converging into Christianity, wrote polemics against the Manichean movement).

During the 4^th century, the Manichean ideology spread throughout China, Persia, and the Roman Empire, especially in North Africa. Although the Manichean ideology as a distinct ideology had failed to become the lower-class ideology, its continuing influence can be traced in the medieval dualistic heresies of the Albigenses, Bogomils, and Paulicians. This influence can also be traced in Gothic architecture, in the medieval Jewish mystical doctrine, known as Cabala, in the metaphysical speculation that surrounded the alchemy of the Renaissance, in the paintings of Caravaggio and Rembrand, in the theosophy and anthroposophy of the 19^th century philosopher Steiner. The 20^th century nihilism, existentialism, and the writings of a psychologist Carl Jung can also be traced to the Manichean ideology.

Having said that, I should give a concrete example of its influence; so, I choose to show the implementation of the Manichean idea of the active and counteractive forces of light and dark in the Gothic architecture and art.

Architecture was the dominant form of expression of the Gothic Age in art. Emerging from Romanesque antecedents, Gothic architecture continued long after the other arts had embraced the Renaissance. Although a vast number of secular monuments were built in the Gothic style, mostly the West-Christian Church employed the new architecture to attain the realization of its own medieval interests.

One of the two distinguishing features of the Gothic architecture is a type of vault that consists of thin intersecting arches, the ribs, which (in combination with pointed transverse arches) support the light masonry cells of the vault. Although the earliest Gothic churches had a variety of forms, the creation of a series of large cathedrals in northern France, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, took full advantage of the new Gothic vault. The architects of the cathedrals found that the outward thrusts of the vaults were concentrated in the small areas at the springing of the ribs and were deflected downward by the pointed arches. Therefore, the pressure could be counteracted readily by narrow buttresses and by external arches (so-called flying buttresses).

Consequently, walls of glass (the second distinguishing feature of the Gothic architecture) could largely replace the thick walls of Romanesque architecture, and the interiors could reach unprecedented heights. Thus, a revolution in building techniques had occurred, and it had been started by a remarkable man, Abbot Suger of monastery at Saint-Denis, near Paris.

Suger was born in 1084 and educated in the monastery school of Saint-Denis along with the future French king Louis VI. Later, Suger became a close religious and political advisor to Louis VI and to Louis VII, and was a successful go-between between the Roman church bureaucrats and the French bureaucrats. While Louis VII was crusading in 1147, he appointed Suger as a temporary ruler of France. From 1122 Suger was the Abbott of the monastery of Saint-Denis, which had a special meaning for the French because Denis was the first bishop of Paris and the patron saint of France.

Martyred by decapitation at Paris in 258 AD, in the persecutions of Emperor Valerian, Denis was buried in the monastery. St. Denis is represented in art as raising himself to carry his severed head. In popular medieval belief, St. Denis was identified with Dionysius Areopagite, a 5^th century Greek theologian from Syria, who admired Pythagorean and Manichean ideas. Dionysius wrote many mystical and speculative books (among which is The Celestial Hierarchy) that were very influential in the Medieval times. The monastery was also the place of Charlemagne’s coronation and the burial place of the members of the French royal family.

Suger made extensive preparations while contemplating on his burning question – how to rebuild and to make this place the spiritual center of France. He searched for a new kind of architecture that would reinforce the ruling authority of the clerical and state bureaucracies. Suger had read the works of Dionysius, who stressed the mathematical harmony that should exist between the parts of a building and on the mystical effects of light and dark. Combining these concepts with the theory of musical ratios, Dionysius developed a system that expressed complex symbolism based on mathematical ratios. The thought that these theories about light and dark and the mathematical symbolism of architecture could be attributed to St. Denis (as a medieval case of mistaken identity) invigorated Abbott Suger in his research.

Because the orthodox Christians associated the formal qualities of light with Christ, Abbott Suger rearranged the elements of medieval architecture as to express the relationship between light and God in the most impressive manner. Suger conceived the chevet (the East End of church, comprising the choir, ambulatory, and apse) as to emphasize the integration of light with lightness. The entire chevet area was covered with the ribbed Gothic vaults, which were supported by the slender columns and pointed arches. None of the individual architectural elements that Suger and his collaborators used was new. All of these elements could be found in the previous local Romanesque and even more ancient architectural styles, because people are subconsciously obsessed with vaults (domes) and columns from prehistoric times.

Following in the riverbed of the Plato-Freudian theory, I think that, on the subconscious level, columns represent for us the male sexual organs that support the domes, which represent the pregnant female bellies or breasts. The enclosed (by the domes) dark spaces, like the mother’s womb, protect us from the bad weather, and give us the delightful feeling of security.

However it may be, Suger’s revolutionary synthesis consisted in rearranging the well-known architectural elements to create the Gothic style.

The Gothic ribbed vault supersedes the earlier barrel vault because it requires less buttressing. The barrel vault exerts weight-pressure along its entire length, and therefore, needs strong buttressing. However, the weight of the ribbed vault is concentrated only at the four corners of the rib bases. This distribution of the structural weight is more efficient, because the entire structure can be buttressed at intervals, which can free more space for glass-windows and colored light. The ribs can be built before the intervening space is filled in, and filled with lighter materials, because their weight-bearing capacities are improved (relatively to the barrel vault, of course).

The light (that had so inspired Mani, Dionysius, and Suger) should not simply be the natural daylight but it should be darkened; that is how we have colored light. Suger’s architectural solution were stained glass windows, through colored fragments of which, the daylight filters in and evokes the elevating feelings of bliss and closeness to God.

In the evolution of Gothic architecture, the progressive enlargement of the windows was not intended to shed more daylight into the interiors, but rather to provide a luminous darkness, vibrant with radiance, which can still be appreciated in the Sainte-Chapelle and in the cathedral of Chartres. The dominant colors were a dark saturated blue and a brilliant ruby red. Small stained-glass medallions (illustrating episodes from the Bible and from the lives of the saints) were reserved for the windows of the chapels and the side aisles. Their proximity to the observer made their details easily distinguishable. Each of the lofty windows of the clerestory was occupied by single monumental figures that (because of their colossal size) were also readily visible from below.

However, from the 13^th century the mystic darkness had been gradually dispelled as the grisaille glass (the white glass decorated with designs in gray) was more often employed in the predominantly yellow colored panels, while the other colors grew progressively lighter in tone.

Thus, the essence of the teachings of the Zoroastrians, Searchers of Knowledge, and Manicheans has proved to be very durable. It is durable because it derived from the ancient Aryan concept – the view that the inner spirit of the individual must be liberated from the world that is deceptive, oppressive, and evil.

f. Hellenistic and Roman Times

After the Macedonian Empire disintegrated in the 3^rd century BC into several kingdoms, the Greek dynasty of the Seleucids held Mesopotamia. A dozen new cities were founded; Seleucia on the Tigris was the largest, bringing Hellenistic culture, new trade, and prosperity. A major new canal system, the Nahrawan, was initiated. About 250 BC the Parthians took Mesopotamia from the Seleucids. The Parthian rulers (the Arsacids) organized their bureaucracy on the Old Persian manner, so that several autonomous vassal-state bureaucracies (with different cultures) developed. After rebuffing Roman attacks, the Parthians fell to the Persian Sassanids in 226 AD. The Parthian domain extended from the Euphrates to present-day Afghanistan. Effective bureaucratic system and improved irrigation canals and drainage brought prosperity. Intermittent conflicts with the Eastern Roman (after 395, Byzantine) Empire in the northwest, where it had common borders with the Roman province of Syria, and with Arabs (with whom the Persians had the common desert border) led to disaster. Uncontrollable growth of population among the Semitic nomadic tribes led them to an explosion and expansion, which destroyed Sassanid Persia in 635. On their spears and under the green flag, the Arabs brought to the Persians a new religion, Islam.

g. Medieval and Modern Times

For the next century, the Semitic dynasties ruled Mesopotamia. Hordes of Semitic nomads settled in the land, and the Arabic language displaced Greek and Persian. After becoming a State ideology, Islam had been used by each class for protection of own particular interests. Thus, conflicts had burst and divisions had been deepen. In this respect, the Muslims were not better or worse than others. Baghdad became the center of the Muslim Empire under the Abbasid caliphs (750-1258), who introduced Turkish bodyguards. The latter gradually took control, establishing own dynasties in the area. After the Mongol sack of Baghdad (1258), administrative decay, class conflicts, and further attacks by Bedouins and Mongols led to the deterioration of the canal system, restricting agriculture and souring the soil.

The Ottoman Turks and Safavid Persian rulers waged intermitting wars for control of Mesopotamia from the 16^th to the 18^th century, when family dynasties controlled Baghdad and other Mesopotamian cities. The Turks eventually prevailed. During World War I, the British Empire took over Mesopotamia. Iraq became a British colony and France captured Syria. Iraq and Syria became independent in 1932 and in 1945, respectively.

egyptians

Victor J. Serge created this page and revised it on 04/13/03