THE SYMPHONY AND THE STARS: HOW THE MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE MYSTERIES OF THE MUSE SHAPED OUR MIND AND OUR SPIRIT
Part 3
The Doldrums of Ignorance
The Sumerian culture eventually gave way to the Akkadian. The Akkadians conquered most of the Sumerian civilization around 2500 B.C.E., and by 1250 B.C.E. the Sumerians, for all their irrigation and agricultural advances, were simply unaware that without crop rotation vital nutrients are depleted, leaving behind salts and other undesirable elements. Although it’s not entirely understood what happened, the going theory is that they simply ended up unable to grow the food necessary to sustain themselves.
Although the Akkadians crushed our earliest civilized ancestors, the world has a few things to thank them for. First, grammar and transliteration of Sumerian were only possible because the Akkadians were prolific writers and their language was well understood. Second, the Akkadian dictionary is one of the greatest works of plagiarism in the history of mankind. Most of their lexicon and grammar was flatly stolen from the Sumerians and propped up as if it was some great cultural achievement.
The final stages of Sumer coincide with some of the most celebrated names of the Bronze Age. The 18th dynasty of Egypt included Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Nefertiti. The 19th was dominated by Rameses II, or Ramses the Great, who is considered the greatest of the Egyptian Pharaohs and possibly responsible for the Jewish exodus, although the Biblical narrative is almost certainly fiction. The Akkadian Empire consolidated by Sargon the Great eventually dissolved into Assyria in the north and Babylonia in the south, the latter being governed by Hammurabi—much revered for his code of laws that include tossing people into a river to determine their guilt or innocence, and dedicating two-thirds of his word count to dealing with difficult women. The Babylonians adopted Akkadian as their language whereas the Egyptians did not. Although they had more interesting headgear and mummified the dead, hieroglyphics never rivaled the quality of the abstracted cuneiform writing system. As a result, cuneiform became mankind’s lingual parent. On the other hand, the pyramids make Sumerian ziggurats look like braille.
Until the fall of the Babylonian empire in 539 B.C.E., the priestly class, music and celestial religion simply continued to morph instead of evolve. In Egypt, Inanna became Isis, and many archaeologists believe the great pyramids in the Giza Necropolis are aligned to represent the stars in Orion’s belt. The Akkadians passed their incarnation (read, “theft”) of Inanna—renamed Ishtar—onto the Babylonians. However, there are only so many ways to worship the same stars, so musicians need only change the names and tunes. The only remarkable development is that their religions became full-blown astrolatry, the worship of the stars. Although the word astrolatry sounds bizarre, the connection to the word idolatry makes the etymology fairly obvious.
An interesting offshoot of astrolatry is a major interest in exploring astrology, with ritual and song accompanying it at every stage. If one can figure out what the gods want based on their movements, perhaps they might bless you with a cheaper mortgage rate. Although this is progress of a kind, poking at a sheep's liver with a stick to see if it's been drinking too much is hardly worth the smell, and I certainly don't care to read up on what I'm sure are fascinating lyrics put together by the court musicians.
Inevitably, the remnants of Sumer echoed in the temples. The Babylonian calendar was still lunar, and although the moon bull had virtually vanished into the mythological sands of time, it is interesting to note that the Babylonian month and year were associated with the crescent moon. Also, winged bulls maintained iconographic status.
In Egypt, the goddess Hathor was portrayed with a headdress shaped like the bull’s horns, but with the sun instead of the moon atop it. Apis also represented a non-astral incarnation of the bull. Mehet-Weret, the mother of the sun god Ra, is most closely associated with the cow instead of the bull, but was responsible for guiding her son through the netherworld rather than being a celestial object herself. Also, Mehet-Weret was only the grandmother or great-grandmother of the main Egyptian pantheon, as the tradition of incorporating and demoting earlier gods and goddesses continued.
The big takeaway from all of this is that astronomy and music continued to evolve laterally, but were stuck in a quagmire of pedantic reinterpretation. Without a doubt the future of music and astronomy lay together. The names of the planets and constellations changed as did their modes of worship from culture to culture, and the particular flair of hymns and music were mostly orchestration preferences.
The next significant development would be hardly a nudge—it was a colossal leap forward, as discoveries in the principles and mathematics of music informed those vital to the advancement of astronomy and vice-versa. The solar system would be organized and so would music. These are the achievements of the Greeks, and the cultural collision between poetic and mythological tradition and the naissance of science and wisdom would dominate the next 2000 years of human history.