From Assurbanipal to Apocalypse

[us4-he2-gal2]

From Assurbanipal to Apocalypse

Today I am reviewing an article by Seth L. Sanders, entitled "The First Tour of Hell: From Neo-Assyrian Propoganda to Early Jewish Revelation" (JANER 2009 vol.2). As the title suggests, Sanders has a very interesting suggestion to make in regards the origin of hell , and this is based on his study of the Assyrian text known as "The Underworld Vision of an Assyrian Prince". This text have briefly been discussed at enenuru before and I sent a translation around by email (let me know if you didn't get it.)

The author begins with a history of translation of the text in question - and indeed, it turns out to be a rather interesting history.. The tablet containing the underworld vision of an Assyrian prince is extremely important, as the text itself represents something of an "unprecedented" piece of Mesopotamian literature - the dialogue is unique in many respects. His sketch of the history of its translation reads something like the following -

Early in the 20th century, the tablet was discovered intact and nearly complete, but very dirty. Erich Ebeling was the first to give a translation of the text in 1931, his translation was pioneering but "hampered by the unprecedented nature of the text" .. later von Soden wrote a sharply critical review of Ebelings work, and using photos of the cleaned tablet was able to significantly improve on the translation as well as provide an Assyriologically sound linguistic and historic context for it. Shortly thereafter, in 1941, Carl Frank, an "arch-National Socialist" made another contribution that explained textual parallels and make a wide range of art-historical identifications - Sanders explains however, that Frank also attempted to undermine von Soden because of possible influence from his Jewish instructor (Benno Landsberger) , while he praised Ebeling "for having produced his work in an independent and therefore ethically and morally pure fashion." Sanders notes however that von Soden had already joined the Nazi party by this time and so Franks attacks proved in consequentual; indeed as von Soden became the most well known Nazi Assyriologist, Frank's attacks seem now somewhat ironic. Benno Landsberger himself however, was driven out and he resided then at Ankara university, Turkey, then moved on to Chicago (the author notes that it was these very same sort of forced immigrations that made achievements like the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary possible.)



Moving on to the text itself, Sanders gives this plot outline: "The text prediccument of one Kummay (as the Assyrians would likely have pronounced his name), a crown prince who is undergoing a personal crises. After a damaged portion we find him consulting diviners for help and piling up jewels like dirt. Surrounded by luxury he is nonetheless in a panic, "he did [not] rest by night, he did not stop wailing."

Kummay sets his mind to going to the netherworld, if only in vision form, a feat which has a long tradition in Mesopotamian epic - he burns incense and follows a series of actions which have mythic or ritual conotations we dont fully understand. However as Sanders relates, "this attempt to break the barrior between worlds seems to constitute the very hubris for which he is punished by the terrifying vision which he experiences." Kummay prays to Ereshkigal for help but apparently angers her, as she appears to him in a dream and says "I have nothing to say".

Kummay curses the dream and again prays to her for help at which point he recieves the full and terrifying underworld vision ..


A prinicpal segment in this second, more intense and terrifying vision is Kummay's witnessing in rapid progression a series of netherworld gods - as Sanders explains, these gods are given in a sort of list like format - the format in fact follows the format of lists such as the Goettertypentext. "This is an established way of describing images of gods and demons which proceeds from head to hands and feet to objects carried or trampled on, using standard terminology." What is key, and the author is careful to point out, is that the use of the Goettertypentext here is unique, because it has been "transformed by its framing...it is framed not objectively, in the voice of the omniscient third person "speaker," as in old scholarly texts, but in the subjective first person voice of someone who has actually seen what he is talking about - not the copies, plaster models or figurines of the underworld gods that the Goettertypentext text describes, but the originals: the gods themselves. Thus while we might call the form "secondary," derivative of the Goettertypentext, the Underworld Vision makes the opposite claim: Kummay is seeing the actual divine forms on which the texts and figurines are based." Importantly, he notes further:

"The move by which traditional mythic notions are made personal has been considered typical of apocalyptic; in other cultures it has been considered typical of the shaman, who personally encountered the characters and geography of myth in his real life."





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To follow shortly - the text in Assyrian context, and its contact with early Jewish Apocolyptic visions

[us4-he2-gal2]

Assyrian Context and early Jewish Apocalyptic

Sanders believes that "the Underworld Vision.." can most plausibly be dated to the reign of Assurbanipal, in the time when that king was facing off against a tough Elamite opponent (Teumann). While confronting this opponent Assurbanipal experienced great anxiety, whereon a series of events occur that seem to parallels the Underworld Vision text..

First, the author relates, a soothsayer is called on who first sees a night vision of Ishtar - the first vision is called a šuttu, a lighter intensity vision..the soothsayer is terrified by the first vision whereupon another night he has another vision, this one a tabrītu, a more intense vision. This sequence and the terminology used is an exact parallel with the Underworld Vision text. Further indications for the text being linked with the reign of Assurbanipal are that kings unusual description of himself as a scribe, and his particular reverence to Sennacherib (who features prominently in the dialogue with Nergal toward then end of the text).

At what point was the Underworld Vision written? Sanders suggests "Nergal's prophecy of political unrest - inauspicious propaganda for the beginning of a royal career- is more plausibly a vaticinum ex eventu written when the crown prince had already become king and was in fact experiencing the unrelenting political unrest which Shamash-Shuma-Ukin and others were to create for Ashurbanipal. And we know that he himself experienced this unrest as divine persecution."

(in other words Kummay = Ashurbanipal)

The author continues: "The Underworld vision, then, in its unification of a first-person confessional narrative with epic visions of the other world and scribal genres of revealed knowledge functions as "documentary evidence" that Assurbanipal has indeed seen divine things as part of his education, at the hands of the gods as well as humans, and that these divine things jibe with the ones listed in his archives. As a narrative of a man's moral development, the vision constructs a three-dimensional image of an imperfect being who is brought into line and made pious by a troubling but precious intimacy with the gods."







The influence on Jewish Literature/




The Underworld Vision can be convincingly argued to be the first "Tour of Hell" type narrative in antiquity, "the first-person narration of a scribal list of revealed things, the terrifying throne-theophany, and the set of demonstrative explanations of otherworldly visions, each known from Hellenistic Jewish Tours of hell, are all attested here." The author explains that apocalyptic literature is known to have significant Mesopotamian features, the earliest forerunner within Biblical tradition of the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic Tour of Hell is being "Ezekiel 40-48, a text composed in Babylon."

So Assurbanipal used his "Tour of hell" text in a imperial propagandistic fashion, a text that "reimagines the king, not as a warrior, leader, or builder, but as visionary." Sanders sees Assurbanipal as an innovator, whose inscriptions attest to his attempt at the "imperial colonization of dream life", that is to say, he consistently reports on the dreams of his subjects wherein they were visited by gods promoting Assurbanipal's rule. His visions, those of his subjects and those that make up the Underworld Vision, therefore, are all imperial propaganda of a sort..

By very strong contrast, later Judaic tours of hell and apocalyptic literature backing a different cause: "it has been argued convincingly that the chief political innovation of the exilic and later Judaism is the replacement of the figure of the king as sovereign with the prophet and his revealed text." The author further suggests "..the Underworld Vision shows us that in the Neo-Assyrian period the most powerful king in the known universe has already begun to see, and represent himself in his publications, as a visionary scribe. It is as a part of this shift in image of the sovereign that we can understand later texts such as Exodus 31:18, "And he gave Moses, when He had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone inscribed with the finger of God." The narrative of God's writing of the tablets is the first Near Eastern myth in which the high god serves as his own scribe."


This very particular form of literature passed then from imperialistic king with visionary backing, to the prophetic vision of the oppressed. Sanders concludes with a reflection on the strange situation whereby some of the most efficacious literature from the oppressed Jewish scribe took a cue from one of the most impressive and literate of imperial rulers: "This strange passage from propaganda to revelation testifies to the profound slipperiness of the human religious imagination certain texts exceed their historical contexts in ways that should surprise us."

[xuchilpaba]

May 26, 2010 11:52:58 GMT -5 us4-he2-gal2 said:

At what point was

I'm curious are they tying this to Sheol, traditional Jewish spirit world, or Gehenna? (Jewish mystic hell in later texts.)

I always found the Sumerians to be quite pessimistic in their views of the afterlife.