The Pitfalls of Dictionary Definitions

I’m not much of a fan of students using dictionary definitions to start a paper or to “prove a point.” Although I like it when a student uses a definition to give a sense of popular usage, that method is rare. Usually, students begin papers this way because they’re having trouble situating the topic within its historical context, and they are using the definition as a way to fill space instead of spending a few minutes to think about what they’re doing. Just as often, students are using definitions with the intent that “this is what the word means, and it only has this meaning.” This practice indicates that the student doesn’t understand how dictionaries are written or how the meaning of a word evolves.

 

Most publishers are not always concerned with accuracy in their definitions. Sometimes the definition in a dictionary merely uses the verb form to define a noun, such as “an advocate is a person who advocates.” If one does not understand what it means “to advocate,” one is not going to know what an “advocate” is. Because of the costs involved in publishing, publishers try to make the definitions as short as possible, trading brevity for accuracy. Moreover, their concern is for how the word is used in popular usage, but they sometimes need help in seeing that a definition is out-of-date or just inaccurate. In June of 2020, the New York Times reported that Merriam-Webster was updating its definition for racism, because they received a complaint about how it didn’t mention systemic racism.

 

As the above paragraph suggests, words are fluid. In fact, they change meaning and usage not only over time but also in different places. For example, the word “hussy,” generally used to indicate a woman of “loose morals,” comes from the Old English “huswife” which is in Modern English “housewife,” or a wife who takes care of the home. Additionally, the word “fantastic” originally meant that something was based in fantasy or created in the imagination. It is only in the past couple of centuries that people have used it to mean that something is “good” or “great.”

 

Also, when words are introduced into a new culture, the meaning of a word can be misunderstood, so that it is used in a different way. As an example, Koreans took the western words “apartment,” “condominium,” “house,” and “villa,” but apply them in different ways. Koreans generally live in large multi-family buildings, which usually range between ten and thirty floors tall. Since they buy these housing units outright, we should call them “condominiums.” Koreans call them “houses” or “apartments,” depending on the speaker. If the condominium building only rises three or four stories tall, Koreans call these “villas.” When Koreans rent a few rooms at a ski resort for a few days, they call this a “condominium.”

 

Even if you have not heard of Jacques Derrida, his philosophical works—which emphasize fluidity of language—have had an important impact on society as they are central to the concepts of deconstructionism and postmodernism. To make his point, Derrida uses puns, double-entendres, and sentences constructed to show just how ambiguous and fluid language is.

 

When academics utilize definitions in their works, they tend to do so in a couple of different ways. One method is to peruse dictionaries from various points in time in order to show how popular usage of words has changed so as to underscore how arguments about a topic have evolved. Another technique is to look at the specific ways in which a word has been used—and therefore defined—within particular primary and/or secondary sources so as to better elucidate distinct ideas associated with that word.

 

In this way, unless a student actually discusses how the definition of a word is important to their argument at various points in the paper, I consider the use of a definition at the beginning of the paper as an indication that it was written at the last minute and that its arguments are going to reflect a general lack of thought.

 

Naram-Sin and the Fall of the Akkadian Empire

 

Victory stele of Naram-Sin,
from Susa, Iran, 2254-2218 BCE.
Pink sandstone, 6′ 7″ high.
Musée  du Louvre, Paris.
(Image from Ancient to Medieval Art page
on Mesopotamia and Persia).

The reign of Naram-Sin (c. 2254–2218 BCE) is important because it helps us to understand why Mesopotamian rulers were not worshiped as gods even though their counterparts in Egypt, the Pharaohs, were. And, yet, as a successful Mesopotamian ruler, Naram-Sin attempted to establish himself as a minor deity. His success lie in part in the favorable perception of the reigns of his father, Manishtushu (c. 2270 BC – 2255 BCE), and his grandfather, Sargon of Akkad (c. 2334–2284 BCE). Because he and his father had been able to hold onto and enlarge the empire created by Sargon the Great, Naram-Sin's reign enjoyed this idea of stability.

We can see the association of Naram-Sin with divinity on the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, a carved sandstone marker that recounts Naram-Sin's defeat of the Lullubi, a people who lived to the east in the Iranian mountains. The stele shows his army marching over the slain bodies of the enemy as he leads his soldiers into battle. Naram-Sin's deified nature is indicated in four ways. First, he carries two weapons, a spear and a bow, suggesting that he is proficient in both, while each soldier carries only a spear or a bow but never both. Second, Naram-Sin's soldiers and the enemy are all the same size, while Naram-Sin is much larger than anyone else; he towers over them much as would a god. Third, the horns on Naram-Sin's helmet were signs of divinity and were only used for gods. Fourth, one can see two stars at the top of the stele, and these stars symbolize the presence of a god or, in Naram-Sin's case, a demigod. Contestation of Naram-Sin's association with the gods was successful until the end of or after his reign, which forces to ask "What changed?" 

People's perceptions of the next part of the story are recounted in "The Cursing of Agade" (sometimes referred to as "The Curse of Akkad"), a text written down sometime after 1750 BCE, though it is believed to have been composed well before then. In lines 1–39, the poem recounts Sargon's success in establishing the empire and the favor that the gods bestowed upon him by ensuring that the the people had food to eat and that the any conquered people provided tributes that included such exotic animals as monkeys and elephants. Indeed, the land was so loved by the gods that old women gave wise counsel, young women entertained, old men were eloquent, and young men could fight.

Everything turns for the Akkadian Empire beginning with line 40, where Naram-Sin builds a new temple for himself that rivaled the temples of the gods. Furthermore, Naram-Sin diverted food and resources from the gods' temples to his own. These actions indicated that he not only rivaled them for supplication but no longer worshiped the gods themselves. These actions angered the gods, and they withdrew their favor from the Akkadian Empire and instead opened the heavens to pour deluge upon the land (lines 149–175). Food became scarce (lines 149–175) and the costs of everything rose (lines 176–192). Life became difficult to sustain as people competed for fewer and fewer resources (lines 193–280).  In the end, the gods destroyed the Akkadian Empire (line 281). While "The Cursing of Agade" contains some truth, the Akkadian Empire did collapse, and its inhabitants suffered widespread hunger, it misses a number of factors because the author(s) could not see the wider picture. 

Historical and archeological investigation into such things as weather patterns, flooding, crop yields, and people's movements provides a broader tableau for us to see. Near the end of Naram-Sin's reign, weather patterns took a turn for the worse throughout the Mesopotamia and even in Egypt. In most years, the Nile valley, the center of Egyptian civilization, enjoyed predictable and well-timed weather. Each year, the rains came before the planting season and caused the Nile river to flood. These rains eroded nutrient-rich soil from Nubia and placed it along the northern Nile and in the river's delta region just before planting season. This regularity ensured abundant crops and sealed the Pharaohs as successful intercessors with the gods for securing this annual bounty. 

By contrast, Mesopotamian weather was erratic, meaning that no one could predict whether or not it would rain or how much rain would fall if it did rain. Moreover, rains often came after the planting season and at a time when floods could wash away the crops. This irregularity is why Sumerians first built canals on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, so that they could direct any floods away from the crops and then try to control how much water could reach the crops. Even with the use of canals, Mesopotamian agriculture was always subject to heat waves and/or floods that could destroy the crops in any given year. For this reason, the Mesopotamian kings were considered to be important intercessors with the gods, but not necessarily great ones.

With the First Interregnum (c. 2181–2055 BCE) in Egypt and the fall of the Akkadian Empire, we see that a major change in weather patterns caused both regions to suffer widespread crop failures. In each kingdom, people died on a massive scale because of hunger. With their respective armies reeling from lack of food, invaders pillaged with ease. Egyptian and Akkadian governments buckled and broke, and administrations on a large scale disappeared, although some leaders were able to maintain some sense of order on local levels. 

Because weather patterns and the orderly flooding of the Nile later returned to normal, Egyptian leaders were able to retain the godhood status of the Pharaohs, even if that belief took a beating. However, it should be no surprise that the more mercurial nature of Mesopotamian weather caused the people to challenge any notion of godhood on the part of Mesopotamian leaders. If weather patterns had remained similar to those experienced through Sargon's, Manishtushu's and the first part of Naram-Sin's reigns, the association might have been strong enough for the common people to accept their leaders as divine. With a regional collapse just after an important ruler had claimed divinity, though, was another matter. In this way, the difference in perception of Egyptian and Mesopotamian rulers lay their role as intercessors for the gods as well as in the relative stability or instability of the region being ruled. 

Enheduanna and Gods

Image of Enheduanna on a clay tablet.
(Image from a Wikipedia page on Enheduanna).

It is often difficult for historians of pre-modern eras to study the lives of women. Within the small number of sources that have survived, few discuss the lives of women and even fewer were written by women. For this reason, highly value those sources that shed light on or were written by Enheduanna (2285–2250 BCE), who was the daughter of Sargon the Great (c. 2334–2279 BCE), high priestess of the Nanna temple complex in the city of Ur, and a renowned poet.

With few exceptions, women were not permitted to fill political roles within Mesopotamian cities. However, we can see with Enheduanna that women occupied important religious roles, through which they influenced the social, cultural, and political life of a city. Enheduanna exhibited her influence in her city through her administering the temple and its personnel as well as by carrying out rituals in Ur's major temple that celebrated the gods and asked for their favor. 

She also had an impact on other temples by writing poems that were recited throughout Akkad. Indeed, enough of her poetry survives to permit us to see that her petitionary poems greatly influenced this genre for thousands of years throughout Mesopotamia, Israel and Judea, and Greece. 

For this reason, discussion of Enheduanna permits an investigation into Mesopotamian belief systems. For example, each city’s main temple was dedicated to a different deity. In Ur, the patron god was Nanna, who represented the moon and wisdom. Other cities focused on Enlil, Itu, Inanna, and so on. Whenever the Sumerian city-states went into battle, their patron god fought alongside them against their enemies.

Despite the adoption of patron gods, the people in each city worshiped all of the gods. While Nanna might protect the city and residents of Ur, Innana or Ninsurhag were called upon in matters of love, lust, and reproduction. When people were worried about water for their crops, they could call upon Enlil, the god of wind and storms, or Enki, the god of water. And Utu was a favorite in matters of justice.

In these ways, the gods represented nature and the elements that affected daily and seasonal life: the weather, water for drinking and crops or the sun that helped crops grow and or killed humans, animals, and plants with its heat. The gods also stood in for such concepts as reproduction, justice, warfare, and so on. There was a god for anything that affected the ability to survive or interactions between individuals. Indeed, peoples around the world worshiped very similar gods, sometimes differing only in name, but often adding or subtracting one or more attributes.

Bronze Age survival depended on many factors that were outside human control. Belief in these gods provided people with a way to concentrate their wishes and fears into prayers that they hoped would sway chance to their benefit. 

With the poem The Exaltation of Inanna, in which Enheduanna asks the goddess of love Inanna, for help, the text can be broken down into several parts. The first 65 lines recount Inanna's power and relationships with the other gods, often whether she is beloved or feared by them. For example, the first few lines state:

Lady of all the divine powers, resplendent light, righteous woman clothed in radiance, beloved of An and Urac! Mistress of heaven, with the great pectoral jewels, who loves the good headdress befitting the office of en priestess, who has seized all seven of its divine powers! My lady, you are the guardian of the great divine powers!

These relationships are important, because they highlight that the gods work through their own powers or by getting the other gods to do favors for them. This reliance on relationships in turn reflects the manner in which people in Sumerian and Akkadian societies were able to accomplish things. 

If someone needed something or to have something done, he or she would approach and petition the individual in a position of authority that he or she felt would most likely hear and help her or him, even if that item or task were not within that individual's authority. That individual in a position of authority would then use his or her relationships with others to accomplish the goal of the petitioner. This web of relationships in Sumerian/Akkadian society has been mapped onto how the gods interact, because this methodology is familiar to humans. In this case, Enheduanna is in a sense reminding Inanna about her relationships to these other gods so that she can more quickly aid the high priestess.

It is with lines 66–73 that Enheduanna turns the poem to her problems and the reason for her petition: she is unable to carry out her role as high priestess to the Sumerian gods.

I, En-hedu-ana the en priestess, entered my holy jipar in your service. I carried the ritual basket, and intoned the song of joy. But funeral offerings were brought, as if I had never lived there. I approached the light, but the light was scorching hot to me. I approached that shade, but I was covered with a storm. My honeyed mouth became venomous. My ability to soothe moods vanished.

We then learn more about the cause of her problems in lines 74–90. As part of his rebellion against Sargon, Lugal-Ane forced Enheduanna into exile. 

Suen, tell An about Lugal-ane and my fate! May An undo it for me! As soon as you tell An about it, An will release me. The woman will take the destiny away from Lugal-ane . . . . In connection with the purification rites of holy An, Lugal-ane has altered everything of his, and has stripped An of the E-ana. 

Enheduanna also makes clear that Lugal-Ane is an enemy of the gods, since he does not fear or worship the gods and has destroyed their temples. 

He has not stood in awe of the greatest deity. He has turned that temple, whose attractions were inexhaustible, whose beauty was endless, into a destroyed temple.

The rest of the poem recounts the resolution that Enheduanna would like to receive from the gods, reassurances that she has remained faithful to them and has protected their secrets, and reminders of the gods' awesome fury and power to their foes as well as their love for humanity.

As this one poem shows, we can learn a lot about Sumerian and Akkadian society from Enheduanna's writings. For example, they suggest how the city-states were ordered politically, how human—and godly—relationships worked, political events as they unfolded, and the religious rites conducted within the temples. It is through analysis of these poems that we can learn more about ancient societies as well as about ourselves.

The Ancient History Encyclopedia contains more context about Enheduanna as well as an example of her poetry. More Sumerian literature, including more of Enheduann's poems, can be found on The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

The Sumerian King List

The Sumerian King List
includes the names of kings
for various Sumerian city-states
and the dates of these kings' reigns.
(Image from the Sumerian King List Wikipedia page.

The Sumerian King List (composed around 2000 BCE) is a great way to introduce people to concepts involved in History and Memory. Basically speaking, History and Memory is a phrase meant to embody the various ways in which peoples' memory of events—including the ways in which people remember or don't remember things—shapes how we understand history. In simple terms, the Sumerian King List is a record of the names of the kings of the various Sumerian city states and includes the dates of their reigns. These simple terms, though, obscure a lot of information that the list tells us about the authors.

To put the king list into greater perspective, we must consider that the Sumerians had been developing different forms of record keeping for their business transactions for centuries before they used writing for anything other than trade. As the list of cuneiform words evolved, people realized that they could use this system of writing for recording events. The king list was one of the first records that focused more on political record keeping than on business. In this way, we learn that the Sumerians needed a writing system to record their trade, but eventually also placed importance on using it for politics. Not long afterward, the Sumerians showed that they greatly valued poetry, as they wrote down many poems.

With the king list, we also see a value placed on memory, in this case on remembering the many men and one woman who had ruled each city. Although the list records a few of the king's deeds, occupations, or relationships, much of the list merely records the name of the ruler and the number of years they ruled. For this reason, we can assume that the list is meant to help the living remember when things happened as they shared stories about events within each reign. In this way, the list serves as a time keeping device much like our modern calendar. Instead of recording things within a year after a certain event, they kept track of events according to the reigns of their rulers.

The list also tells us something about how memory is only valid as long as someone can remember these things happened. For example, the kings who had reigned most recently are recorded with reign dates that we consider reasonable, whether one or two years for someone either unable to secure their leadership or succumbing to death or disease or else with reigns lasting several decades for an accomplished ruler. These are kings of recent memory, meaning that the oldest person living could remember each of their reigns. We can be sure that these individuals actually lived, as they are verified by memory, and that their reign dates are more or less correct.

After a certain point, the reign dates become Methuselahan, and these exaggerations emphasize that anything that happened before the oldest living person was born are events that exist in the time of myth. While Gilgamesh, who has his own epic, is reported to have reigned 126 years, Enkmerkar ruled for 420 years, and Lugalbanda for 1,200 years. The kings who lived before a great flood had even longer reigns lasting anywhere from 18,600 years to 43,200 years. These are kings who died before the oldest living person could remember. Their reign dates are not meant to be taken literally but instead as indicators that the king ruled for a long time or for a really long time. The dates of the antediluvian kings are meant to suggest both long ago in the distant past as well as the success of the king.

Also important to think about is what the authors of the list decided not to record on the king list. Each king's deeds and accomplishments, their faults and scandals, their families, and so on. All of this other information was retained within the realm of oral history, or that which people shared through stories that they told here and their around the city-states. In other words, the author(s) wasn't thinking in terms of recording this information for posterity. Instead, the king list was meant to help people in the there and then to keep track of when each king reigned, with the gaps to be filled in by those who remembered the stories.

As we can see, we can learn a lot about a people from even a "simple" list. We can see what importance they put on what should be written down—as well as what shouldn't be recorded—how this information would be meaningful, and what is too old to be remembered properly. And, yet, we can still see values placed on each piece of information, regardless of the data's "correctness." There's a story in this list, and it's up to us to see what it is.

 

The Legend of Sargon of Akkad

A bust of an unknown king,
though often believed to be of
Sargon the Great of the Akkadian Empire.
(Image from Sargon of Akkad on Wikipedia).

Another text that I would share with students in Ancient or Western Civilizations is the Legend of Sargon of Akkad, and I’d have them do a compare and contrast with the Birth of Moses in Genesis. 

Sargon reigned from 2334 to 2284 BCE, and was called Sargon the Great in large part because he created the first empire. It’s believed that Sargon was a commoner who rose through the ranks to become the Cupbearer of Lugalzagesi, the ruler of the Sumerian city state Umma. Even though Lugalzagesi had conquered other city states, he failed to create a cohesive union. Indeed, for centuries, the Sumerian city states had a tradition of defeating one another in battle, receiving concessions from the loser, and then releasing control of the defeated. Each of the city states prized its own independence and lacked the ability to retain control of other city states, largely because each city state was largely devoted to agrarian production and religious devotion of the local deity.

As Cupbearer, Sargon was Lugalzagesi’s best military lieutenant and most trusted advisor. However, Sargon overthrew Lugalzagesi and used Umma’s resources to conquer the other Sumerian states. In order to retain a large cohesive state, Sargon made several innovations that became the hallmark of latter Mesopotamian empires, including:

• establish a standing army,
• place garrisons near trouble points for quick reaction,
• have messengers carry information between him and his garrisons so that he knew what was happening in distant places,
• rotate governors and generals so that nobody could build a following to contest his authority.

The success of his empire lies not just in the fact that he reigned for 55 years but also in that his son and grandson were able to succeed him.

Despite his ability to conquer and retain control of the region, Sargon’s authority was contested by critics, and some of his responses to these criticisms can be found in “The Legend of Sargon of Akkad.” The text addresses how his parents were commoners (most translations say that Sargon’s mother was a priestess, while this one uses the term “changeling”), not members of the elite. In fact, he emphasizes that he was raised by a man who took care of the canals and not by his own parents. The association with religious deities is also important in these texts.

While I spent a lot of time helping my students understand the necessary infrastructure needed to organize people at different sizes of scale (city state versus kingdom/empire), I also wanted them to see how many stories used to shore up criticisms of legitimacy were reused by other peoples largely because those stories are effective. If a narrative works, it will be someone else will rewrite it with a different protagonist simply because the narrative is effective. It also means that we can’t trust many of these origin stories, because they are political stories meant to shape popular opinion and not to state facts about a person’s life. 

Amazingly, the students always seemed to take the similarities between the story of Sargon’s and Moses’ birth in stride. What they always—and I mean always—asked about was the phrase “black-headed peoples.” I have to admit that I still don’t know enough to say anything other than this was a term that the Sumerians used for themselves. Offhand, I’d argue that the Sumerians had at some point been in proximity with a group of peoples with brown or blond hair, and their hair color was the most striking differentiation. 

To a person, the students wondered if this was an expression of racial difference, but I did my best to explain that racial terms weren’t used until the late 1400s/early 1500s. Although people tried to differentiate themselves from other groups in Antiquity, it was never along what we call “race.” Even though people in Antiquity noted differences in skin tone or color between peoples, this factor was never used to separate groups. Other matters, such as language spoken or kingdom of origin were much more important as dividing lines in Antiquity. Even in Ancient Egypt, the peoples of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms were represented with varying skin colors depending upon where they lived along the Nile. Despite that representation in tombs, the peoples of Egypt were considered one people for the very reason that they were all Egyptians. Within the kingdom, people were divided by status and roles.

Within Sumerian and Akkadian culture, the primary division was between the Sumerians and a Semitic people that immigrated to the city states and integrated into the Sumerian culture. In many cases, the integration of these peoples in the ancient texts is marked not by either peoples’ appearances but by the introduction of Semitic words into Sumerian texts and the eventual rise of people with Semitic names within Sumerian politics, society, religion, and culture. While there might have been some conflict between the Sumerians and the Semitic peoples, I have yet to see any indications of it in primary or secondary sources.

https://www.ancient.eu/article/746/the-legend-of-sargon-of-akkad/

Enûma Eliš, "When on high"

One of the tablets containing
the creation poem Enûma Eliš,
"When on high."
(Image from Wikicommons).

Whenever I taught “Ancient Civilizations” or the awfully named “Western Civilizations,” I always started the course with Sumer and the Babylonian Empires. I did this partly to emphasize that what we call “Western Civilization” began in what we now consider to be the East, whether Middle East or Ancient Far East. Indeed, we inherited from Sumer our method of telling time (using a double twelve-hour system and with the hours and minutes broken into 60 units each), basic concepts of geometry, and such easily recognizable expressions such as “the four corners of the earth” and “the seven seas.” In many ways, we owe great debts to Sumer, and we short change ourselves by believing that we derived nothing from lands outside “the West.”

One of the things that I hope surprised my students is how much Sumerian beliefs influenced a certain religion known as Judaism that came along much later. One of my projects was to have the students compare and contrast Tablets IV and V of the Enûma Eliš (composed c. 1750 BCE) with the stores of creation in the biblical Genesis. My intent was never to diminish the Genesis stories, particularly since the author of the creation of the universe and earth did a beautiful job of retelling the Enûma Eliš in a new way that builds on the poetic aspects of the original. And that’s the key, the later retelling builds on and expands the original so as to inspire people in the process of creating a unique identity.

To be fair, the Hebrews were not the first to expand on the Enûma Eliš. The Akkadians (who created the first empire by conquering the Sumerian city states) rewrote the tale around 1200 BCE so that Marduk, the Akkadian sky god, took center stage and surplanted the Sumerian Anu. While I’m sure that they made some other changes or additions, placing Marduk in the role of the protagonist was pivotal to their use of the story to show Akkadian dominion over the city states.

This webpage at the Ancient History Encyclopedia provides more contextualization for the story as well as presents the Akkadian text itself.

https://www.ancient.eu/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/

The Concept of Civilization

One of my interests has concerned how people think about “civilization.” In a discussion with a student, Margaret Mead once stipulated a definition that placed the beginning of civilization before the construction of settled edifices, whether as part of a civitas (the general Latin concept of a demarcated city, whether with a wall or sense of community) or polis (the general Greek concept of community often containing urban centers). The student asked Mead what was the first indication of civilization, and it is suggested that the student most likely expected the answer to be something like a tool or a clay pot. However, Mead said that the first sign would be a femur that had been broken and then healed, since it meant that other individuals cared for the injured person long enough for the individual to heal and to return to caring for herself/himself again (https://divinity.yale.edu/news/15000-year-old-bone-and-fall-2013-issue-reflections). This is a very attractive idea, but we have examples of wild or feral animals caring for injured partners (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=60suFxmr_Ks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2L89b5RHME, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lQaMypcyqc,. There are others, but these are the ones that I’ve seen most often in social media). These examples mean that this idea does not separate humans from, say, feral cats, and we do not think about wild animals as having civilizations of their own.

“The Epic of Gilgamesh” contains one of the, if not the, oldest discussions of civilization. In the tale, the author(s) states that civilization resulted from the construction of walls around a collection of homes and other buildings. This point was important enough for the author(s) to state it at both the beginning and the end of the story. The Gilgamesh cycles were originally shared orally long before the Sumerians invented writing, so it is possible for this element of the stories to have survived from a period before the city-states grew large enough to become threats to each other. Since the author(s) talks about peoples who are not settled and does not mention other cities, the purpose of that wall was to protect settled, agrarian peoples from attacks by migratory hunter-gatherers. The wall establishes a barrier between those whom the author(s) considers uncivilized (migratory, dangerous, lacking government, etc.) and civilized (settled, fairly peaceful, having government, etc.). Although likely formed in oral versions, this element was first written by a Sumerian author while surrounded by city-states, but later interpreters retained it in the versions that they reworked in the age of Mesopotamian empires.

 

The Greeks share the Sumerian dichotomy between civilized and uncivilized, but the dividing line was not a physical barrier but the Greek cultural identity. Though not all Greeks lived within walled cities, they did share fairly similar cultural attitudes if not values. After all, the Greeks inhabited polities around the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas with a variety of political and cultural expressions, but they shared similar ideas about what it meant to be Greek. They expressed the demarcation of Greek/civilized and Not Greek/uncivilized in terms of language, the most evident aspect of their shared culture. By contrast, the Greeks characterized the non-Greek peoples as making “bar bar” sounds, from which we get the term “barbarian,” which is a synonym for “uncivilized.” This characterization is most evident in the Amazigh peoples of northern Africa but whom the Greeks and Romans named Berbers (from the sounds “bar bar”), an appellation that we continue to use.

 

One of the most radical arguments along these lines was most clearly—and most fully—elaborated in Augustine of Hippo’s “The City of God.” Augustine’s argument in this context is that the City of Man is full of sin and exhibited the worst in humans regardless of the state of civilization. By contrast, the City of God was open to the best in humanity regardless of whether or not the individuals were considered “civilized” by other humans so long as these people gave themselves over entirely to Christ. In this way, spiritual salvation through complete surrender of one’s body and soul to Christ permitted one to enter the superior spiritual civilization established by God.

 

These ancient usages of civilization have resonated with people into the modern era. We still make judgments as to what demarcates the civilized from the uncivilized. The definitions are often written from an idealized and sometimes righteous conceptions of the author’s perceptions that other observers don’t see a difference between the two groups under discussion. For example, it is a commonplace to describe the civilized as peaceful and the uncivilized as violent; however, such definitions overlook the fact that both groups provide abundant examples of being peaceful or violent.

 

Possibly the most intense articulation of rivalry between civilizations was the Cold War. The US stood for democracy, capitalism, and individual liberty, while the Soviet Union represented communism, authoritarian government, and anti-imperialism. However, the most recent that gained popular notoriety was Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” which pits the “civilized” values of the Christian West against the “uncivilized” values of the Muslim East. In brief, Huntington argued that civilizations are more prone to be in conflict with each other because of differing value systems. Huntington assertions stem from an ideological perspective and relied heavily on cherry-picked evidence. By ignoring ideology and looking at the evidence, Giacomo Chiozza refuted Huntington’s arguments in “Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Evidence from Patterns of International Conflict Involvement, 1946–97.” Chiozza notes that nations are more likely to be in conflict with bordering states regardless of its civilization designation or stated values. Moreover, conflict was less likely between nations of different civilizations when they did not share a border, which means that conflicting values was not an issue. 

 

The spiritual variation was most widely disseminated in Hall Lindsey’s 1970 book, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” but whose ideas continue to reverberate within evangelic Christianity. Lindsey loosely conceptualized Augustine’s ideas and about 1600 years of changes in Christian theology within Cold War ideology. The book’s argument is that the confrontation between the US (fighting for Christ) and the Soviet Union (Satan’s champion) would lead to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Its construction would usher in the last battle between Christ and Satan and the end of the physical world. God would then carry out the Last Judgement to separate the saved from the damned. Conversations with some evangelicals shows that this narrative has been updated within the War on Terrorism, with Islam replacing the Soviet Union as the great enemy.

 

The dichotomy between “uncivilized” and “civilized” is always used to different cultures, but it always does so be denigrating those characterized as “uncivilized.” While the Sumerians were settled agrarians and they maligned hunter-gatherers, humans continue to combine aspects of both cultures even if we rely more on growing our food. After all, how many of us have supplemented grocery shopping (which we are able to do through a highly developed system of domesticated food production) by hunting wild game or by picking such wild plants as berries, mushrooms, and so on? I know that I have.

 

Likewise, the comparison and contrast of civilizations is often performed to denigrate. Consider Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” in which he treats the civilization of which he is a part in positive terms and the civilization that he perceives as an enemy in negative ones. Indeed, a google search for definitions for “civilization” reveals that most of them setup that dichotomy between one that is superior and one that is inferior by using superlatives or loaded words like “advanced.” The most palatable definition shared by modern dictionaries avoids the loaded language and instead centers upon treating peoples within a given area or region in terms of their “society, culture, and way of life.” 

 

Depite all of the above, it is important to bear in mind that the characterization of civilization belonging to the civilized, as if every person within its designated borders shares the same level of development, is inaccurate. In the fourteenth century, Ibn-Khaldun (1332–1406), who is considered to have created the discipline of sociology, observed that a civilization contains peoples at all levels of development: from uncivilized to civilized, no matter how one defines the terms. Notwithstanding how advanced (regardless of how one defines the word) a civilization (again no matter the definition) might be, its population will vary greatly in terms of how individuals do or do not embody, represent, of take advantage of that exposition of civilization. 

 

In the end, I think of the difference between uncivilized and civilized as being whether or not an individual has joined with others within a civitas or polis style organization. This is not to say that agrarian-based societies are better than hunter-gatherer ones, as the Gilgamesh author(s) suggests but to emphasize the settled nature of the civitates/poleis and its emphasis on edifices for homes, religious observances, food storage, government, and so on. As for “civilization,” the definition would have to consider the relationships between and/or characteristics of peoples in some form of association with civitates/poleis regardless of whether or not the individuals participate in the civitates/poleis.