And undoubtedly these ideas held good for the age in which they were formed. During the 18th and 19th centuries the world of secular culture was an autonomous kingdom, where progress owed nothing to the beliefs and sanctions of the existing authoritative religion. But it is dangerous to argue back from the highly specialised conditions of an advanced and complicated civilisation to the elementary principles of social development. Indeed, it needs but a moment's thought to realise that that extraordinary age of intellectual, political and economic revolution is comparable with no other period in the history of the world. It was at once creative and destructive, but essentially transitional and impermanent, and this instability was due to no other cause than to that very separation and dislocation of the inner and outer worlds of human experience, which the thinkers of the age accepted as a normal condition of existence. For a social culture, even of the most primitive kind, is never simply a material unity. It involves not only a certain uniformity in social organisation and in the way of life, but also a continuous and conscious psychic discipline. Even a common language, one of the first requirements of civilised life, can only be produced by ages of co-operative effort-common thinking as well as common action. From the very dawn of primitive culture men have attempted, in however crude and symbolic a form, to understand the laws of life, and to adapt their social activity to their workings. Primitive. man never looked on the world in the modern way, as a passive or at most mechanistic system, a background for human energies, mere matter for the human mind to mould. He saw the world as a living world of mysterious forces, greater than his own, in the placation and service of which his life consisted. And the first need for a people, no less vital than food or weapons, was the psychic equipment or armament, by which they fortified themselves against the powerful and mysterious forces that surrounded them. It is impossible for us to draw the line between religion and magic, between law and morals, so intimately is the whole social life of a primitive people bound up with its religion. And the same is true of the earliest civilisation. The first development of a higher culture in the Near East, the beginnings of agriculture and irrigation and the rise of city life, were profoundly religious in their conception. Men did not learn to control the forces of Nature, to make the earth fruitful, and to raise flocks and herds, as a practical task of economic organisation in which they relied on their own enterprise and hard work. They viewed it rather as a religious rite by which they co-operated as priests or hierophants in the great cosmic mystery of the fertilisation and growth of Nature. The mystical drama, annually renewed, of the Mother Goddess and her dying and reviving son and spouse was, at the same time, the economic cycle of ploughing and seed-time and harvest, by which the people lived. And the King was not so much the organising ruler of a political community as the priest and religious head of his people, who represented the god himself and stood between the Goddess and her people, interpreting to them the divine will, and eventually even offering up his own life for them in solemn ritual ceremony. Thus there was a profound sense that every man lived not by his own strength and knowledge, but by his acting in harmony with the divine cosmic powers, and this harmony could only be attained by sacrifice and at the price of blood, whether the sacrifice of virility, as in Asia Minor; of the first-born children, as in Syria; or of the life of the King himself, as we seem to see dimly in the very dawn of history throughout the Near East. It is even possible that agriculture and the domestication of animals were exclusively religious in their beginnings, and had their origin in the ritual observation and imitation of the processes of Nature which is so characteristic of this type of religion. Certainly the mimicry of Nature was carried to very great lengths, as we can see in the religion of Asia Minor in historic times. Sir William Ramsay has even suggested that the whole organisation of the shrine of the Great Goddess at Ephesus and at other places in Lydia and Phrygia was an elaborate imitation of the life of the Bees and the hive, the priestesses being named Mellissa-the working bees-the priests or Essenes representing the drones, while the goddess herself was the Queen Bee, whose behaviour to her temporary partner certainly bears a striking analogy to that of the Goddess to Atthis in the Phrygian legend. It is, however, only in highly conservative regions like Asia Minor that we can see this. primitive religion in comparative simplicity. In Babylonia at the very dawn of history in the fourth millennium B.C.,,it had already developed a highly specialised theology and temple ritual. The God and Goddess of each city had acquired special characteristics and personalities, and had taken their place in a Sumerian pantheon. But Sumerian civilisation still remained entirely religious in character. The God and the Goddess were the acknowledged rulers of their city, the king was but their high priest and steward. The temple, the house of the God, was the centre of the life of the community, for the God was the chief landowner, trader, and banker, and kept a great staff of servants and administrators. The whole city territory was, moreover, the territory of the God, and the Sumerians spoke, not of the boundaries of the city of Kish or the city of Lagash, but of the boundaries of the God Enlil or the god Ningirsu. All that the king did for his city was undertaken at the command of the God and for the God. Thus we read how Entemena of Lagash 'made the mighty canal at the boundary of Enlil for Ningirsu, the king whom he loved.' At the command of Enlil, Nina, and Ningirsu he cut the great canal from the Tigris to the Euphrates-the Shatt el Hai-which was one of the greatest feats of ancient engineering. All the remains of the ancient literature that have come down to us prove that this is not merely the phraseology of the state religion, it represented a profound popular belief in the interdependence and communion of the city and its divinity. Turning to Egypt, we find a no less intensely religious spirit impregnating the archaic culture. The Egyptian religion is, however, less homogeneous than that of Mesopotamia or of Asia Minor. In the first place, there is the worship of the animal gods of the nomes, which is the primitive religion of the natives of the Nile valley; secondly, there is the cult of Osiris, which is essentially similar to that of the Asiatic nature-god Tammuz and Adonis, of whom we have just spoken, and which was no doubt introduced into the Delta in predynastic times from Syria or Palestine; finally, there is the religion of the Sun God, which became the official cult of the Pharaohs and inspired the whole development of the archaic Egyptian-civilisation. Never, perhaps, before or since has a high civilisation attained to the centralisation and unification that characterised the Egyptian state in the age of the Pyramid Builders. It was more than state socialism, for it meant the entire absorption of the whole life of the individual in a cause outside himself. The whole vast bureaucratic and economic organisation of the Empire was directed to a single end, the glorification of the Sun God and his child the God-King. 'It is He (the Sun God) who has adorned thee (Egypt). It is He who has built thee. It is He who has founded thee. Thou dost for Him everything that He says to thee Thou carriest to Him every tree that is in thee. To every place where His heart desires to be.' * It is indeed one of the most remarkable spectacles in history to see all the resources of a great culture and a powerful state organised, not for war and conquest, not for the enrichment of a dominant class, but simply to provide the sepulchre and to endow the chantries and tomb-temples of the dead kings. And yet it was this very concentration on death and the after-life that gave Egyptian civilisation its amazing stability. The Sun and the Nile, Re and Osiris, the Pyramid and the Mummy, as long as these remained, it seemed that Egypt must stand fast, her life bound up in the unending round of prayer and ritual observance. All the great development of Egyptian art and learning-astronomy and mathematics and engineering-grew up in service of this central religious idea, and when in the age of final Breasted, 'The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt,' pp. 13-14. decadence, foreign powers took possession of the sacred kingdom, Libyans and Persians, Greeks and Romans, all found it necessary to take the gifts of Horus' and to disguise their upstart imperialism under the forms of the ancient solar theocracy, in order that the machinery of Egyptian civilisation should continue to function. Yet both in Egypt and in Western Asia, the primitive theocratic culture had begun to decline by the second half of the third millennium B.C. The rise of the great states in Egypt and Babylonia had, on the one hand, made man less dependent on the forces of Nature, and on the other hand, had brought him face to face with a new series of problems-moral and intellectual-which appear in a striking form in the early Egyptian literature of the Middle Kingdom. The song of King Intef, the Admonition of Ipuwer, the complaint of KhekheperreSonbu, and above all the so-called Dialogue of One Weary of Life with his own Soul, all bear witness to a profound criticism of life, and an intense spiritual ferment. And at the same period in Babylonia we find a similar attitude expressed in the poem of the Righteous Sufferer, the so-called Babylonian Job. Man no longer accepted the world and the state as they were, as the manifestation of the divine powers. They compared the world they knew with the social and moral order that they believed in, and condemned the former. Consequently, for the first time we get a sense of dualism between what is and what ought to be, between the way of men and the way of the gods. The state and the kingship are no longer entirely religious in the kings of the new type-those 12th Dynasty monarchs who are among the greatest and most virile monarchs that have ever reigned. We are conscious of a clear realisation of human, personal power and responsibility and at the same time of a profound disillusionment. We see this in the famous inscription which Senusret III set up at the southern boundary of Egypt bidding his subjects not to worship his statue, but to fight for it, and yet more intimately in the warning that the founder of the dynasty, Amenemhet I, gave to his son and successor. Fill not thy heart with a brother, know not a friend, make not for thyself intimates wherein there is no end, harden thyself against subordinates, that thou mayest |