Nomads and City Dwellers: Institutions, Worldview

Nomads and City-dwellers

The nomadic Arabs might call themselves ‘Star’s daughter’; Banû Badr, ‘Sons of the Full Moon’; or Banû Hilâl ‘Sons of the New Moon’. The Banû Temîm, Banû Ḍabbâ, and Banû Azd called themselves ‘Sons of Night’, (Banû Ṣarîm). But the townsman of Mecca called himself ‘child of the Sun’. Darkness, storm, wind and rain are his enemies.

An old Hellenic name of the sun is Zeus Talaios, Tallaios, or simply Talos because he encourages growth. Clouds and rain are connected with him when they are beneficial for the crops. For this reason, Zeus also becomes the Thunderer and Rain-giver. The division between solar ideas and the preference for the night sky is not always clear-cut, and nomadic tribes might receive elements of sun worship from townsmen. But according to Goldziher, sun worship always follows the worship of the night sky, never precedes it. It is somewhat confusing to be told that in the Assyrian language, ‘Ibhrîm’ corresponds to a verb for the sun. I-bar-ru-u kib-ra-a-ti ‘marches, wanders through the lands.‘

Nomads often cherish a sense of nobility and feel superior to the agriculturalist bound to the earth, and so when a nomadic society begins to settle down they don’t always think of it as an advance. Arabian historian Ibn Chaldûn glorified nomadism against the life of the townsmen. He thought the nomadic stage was a simpler and more uniform stage and surpassed city life in nobility and purity.

Muhammed said, ‘The Divine Glory (al-sakînat=shekhinȃ) is among the shepherds; vanity and impudence among the agriculturists.’

And the Chalif ‘Omar said, “Learn your genealogies and be not as the Nabateans of al-Sawȃd; if you ask one of them where he comes from he says he is from this or that town.”

When a nation passes from a hunting life to nomadism, or from nomadism to an agricultural life, its relation to external nature is changed. Eventually, the myths are driven out by religion although they may live on in legends, sagas and fables. Monotheism was the first force to deny mythic elements in religion. According to Goldziher, this happened to the Hebrews with the development of Jahveism.

The National Idea

With the development of the national idea, the Hebrew myths were transformed into patriarchs, whereas the myths of the Hellenes were transformed into “Gods and god-born Heros”. It is possible that the Canaanite influence and the monotheistic tendency discouraged the development of a consistent theology from Hebrew mythology, but the Hebrews did have a memory of Heroic figures. Their heroic age took place between the entrance into Canaan and the time of the Monarchy.

Heros originally belonged to mythology, rather than theology. They were gigantic characters with no definite time or place. Over time they were localized and given a time and chronological framework. Their stories are always found at the beginning of national history and are meant to inspire patriotic feeling. Theseus and Herakles were Greek patriots.

In the developmental process the function and meaning of certain mythological figures are changed. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the dominion of Zeus was preceded by that of Uranus. For Goldziher this indicates that before the Hellenic people embarked on a settled agricultural life, and brought Zeus, the bright sunny heaven, into the foreground, the center of their world was Uranus (Varuna), the gloomy overclouded sky. This points to the supremacy of the Night. In Hesiod’s theogony, Chaos is one of the powers preceding the rule of Zeus. Chaos signified darkness in general and Tartarus, ‘a gloomy pit never lighted by the sun’. But later the theological meaning of Tartarus becomes the subterranean place to which the souls of the dead go. Also, the word laylâ merely means ‘night‘. However it is used in Job 36:20 in the sense of ‘nether world’. “Salmâweth also means ‘darkness’ in general, but it is used with reference to Orcus, god of the underworld and punisher of broken oaths. In mythology Tartarus is father of Typhon and Echidna, and Nyx. This is consistent with the nomadic idea that Tartarus is ‘father of waters and springs,’ and also ‘the first born’.

The Myth of Civilization

All agricultural societies have a myth of civilization, which is a sequence of the solar myth. The nomad has no permanent social system; laws and social order are irrelevant. Arts and manufacturing are inconceivable. He has no need for anything but his tents, herds and pasture ground. But the myths of the agriculturist speak of the bringer of arts and manufacturing, social order and law, and this is always a solar figure. The musician and smith are solar figures. So is the navigator and founder of cities. Apollo and Osiris were both inventors of agriculture and teachers of the arts. The Hellenes thought the agricultural life was the only morally perfect condition. And Roman poets in times of military conflict regarded peaceful agriculture as the happy state of the innocence of primeval mankind. On the other hand, the Voguls, who were hunters and fishermen, consider Kulyater, the builder of the first city, to be evil.

“(Kulyater) dwelt in a house locked with seven iron locks. Tarom was angry with him, and seized him by one foot and he fell into the heart of the foaming sea.”

The Persian Jemshîd is a solar hero. He is the builder of cities, the inventor of fine arts, and the cultivator of the vine. According to Goldziher, he was the Iranian Noah. He divided the nation into four classes: Scribes, Warriors, Agriculturists and Artists. In this division, there is no mention of the pastoral life; agriculture is emphasized. In other words, he put an end to nomadic tribal life. But like Prometheus, Jemshîd is hurled down by god for his presumption. This came about because he was conquered by Zohak, ‘from whose shoulders dragons grow up’. After a fall of 100 years he landed on the shore of China and was devoured by the monster waiting for him at the bottom of the sea. But Jemshîd rose again out of the sea, like Jonah.

According to Goldziher, Zohak’s dragons are the dragons of storm and night. The sun is always at war with the storm and the night sky. In many cultures, it is the moon who weakens the sun and brings the flood.

The Hebrew Myth of Civilization

It is remarkable that in the biblical creation story the sun is the father of the human race. The Arabs call Adam Abû-l-bashar, ‘father of all flesh’. Adam’s name signifies ‘the Red’, which is etymologically the same as Edôm. If we accept the second chapter of Genesis at face value, the nomadic Hebrews have the same parentage as the Greeks, who called the mother of mankind Pyrrha, ‘the Red’.

And the solar lineage continues, uninterrupted, in Cain. The names of Cain’s descendants are simply repeated in the posterity of Seth, who was not part of the original myth. Cain is Kayin, the inventor of agricultural implements. This creates a problem under Goldziher’s system of interpretation. The killing of Abel has been presented as a primitive nomadic idea, part of the war between the sun and the cloud. But before an artisan or blacksmith figure can be given a part in a people’s myths, the arts, crafts or manufacture would have to be a part of their culture. Goldziher proposes that a solar figure would have been the murderer in the primitive myth as well, but that he did not receive the name of Kayin until the stage of civilization.(Goldziher, Ignác. “Mythology Among the Hebrews and its Historical Development. Longmans, Green, and Co. London. 1877.)

Noah, the second father of the human race, was a solar figure as well.

The Problem of Cain

De Vaux interprets the story of Cain (Genesis 4: 11-16) as the Hebrew condemnation of nomadism, arguing that wandering was imposed on him as a curse. But according to Goldziher, the Hebrew conception of the world glorifies the Nomadic life. The Hebrews thought agriculture was a curse imposed by God on fallen humanity. Arab nomads agree on this point and include manufacturing and the arts in the same category.

Goldziher was aware of the confusion concerning the identification of mythical figures and thought this disagreement may have been the result of an error in the writings of Philo Herennius, who used Greek cosmogony to interpret the Phoenician myth of civilization. In Goldziher’s description of the Phoenician myth, Chrysoros was the Opener, Navigator, and Smith, a Solar character, and was the progenitor of Aypos or Ayporfs and Aypvrjpos… ‘From them are derived the agriculturists and those who hunt with dogs. These later are called Wanderers to and fro.’ It is possible that because the sons of Chrysoros were described as hunters and wanderers, hunting and the nomadic life were confused with the origin of agriculture.

“Now hunter and wanderer and as we have seen, are attributes of the Sun, who shoots his rays at the monster of the storm, and is ‘a fugitive and a vagabond,’ engaged in a migration from east to west.”

Cain was a hunter and a wanderer, but not a nomad.

 The Authors

Roland de Vaux (1903-1971) entered the Catholic priesthood in 1929, and became a Dominican the same year. Jerusalem became his residence in 1934 and he spent the rest of his life there, first as a student, then as a teacher at the Ecole Biblique, a French Catholic theological school in East Jerusalem. He became interested in archaeology while in Israel and was influenced by William F. Albright, Kathleen Kenyon and Benjamin Mazar. His team took part in the excavations of Khirbet Qumran and several caves near Qumran, led by El-Assouli, caretaker of the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which came to be known as the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. De Vaux’s sources, include texts about pre-Islamic Arabs, ethnographic studies about the Arabs of today, and his own archaeological work.(Roland de Vaux biography, 6 Feb. 2012, Available: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Roland_de_Vaux)

Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921) was born in Székesfehérvár, Hungary. In 1868 while attending university in Pest he was awarded a fellowship by the minister of religion and education, Józsf Eötyös, to study abroad. In Berlin one of his professors was Heymann Steinthal, co-author of “Mythology Among the Hebrews”. Goldziher toured the Middle East between September 1873 and April 1874, where he was the first European to attend lectures at Al-Azhar Theological University in Cairo. While there he formed a friendship with the leader of Pan-Islamism, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī. Today he is best noted for his work on modern Islamic scholarship. His bibliography was compiled by Bernát Heller in 1927. “Mythology Among the Hebrews” published in English in 1887, was the first of two major Jewish works. In this book he refuted the thesis of French scholar Ernest Rénan, who denied the existence of Hebrew mythology.( Goldziher, Ignác. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. 6 Feb. 2012, Avaliable: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Goldziher_Ignac)

Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899) was a German philologist and philosopher. He studied at the university of Berlin, and in 1850 was appointed Privatdozent of philology and mythology. In 1863 he was appointed assistant professor at the Berlin University. From 1872 he was also privatdozent (unpaid lecturer) in critical history of the Old Testament and in religious philosophy at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums. Steinthal and his brother-in-law, Moritz Lazarus, established the society for the new science of folk psychology in 1860.(Heymann Steinthal biography, 6 Feb. 2012, Available: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Heymann_Steinthal)

Goldziher uses Steinthal’s and Lazarus’s theory of ‘folk psychology’ to interpret mythology and to explain differences in customs and the process of change from one mode of existence to another; from nomadic life to agricultural life in this case. The influence of Steinthal and Lazarus places the conversation about nomadism in the context of Europe’s pre-World War II conversation about the problem of unity in a nation of diverse people. Steinthal and Lazarus, were ‘emancipated’ Jewish intellectuals, and believed in the superiority of the ‘German spirit’ as expressed in philosophy, science and literature. They saw themselves working toward a unified German nation. The main criticism of their theory concerned the contradiction between the idea of a unique Jewish identity, and the idea of the German national spirit. The Jews, they claimed, were not a nation but a confession within the German nation and could serve the nation best if they kept their unique character. According to some of their peers, this was not consistent with the idea of a ‘harmonious Volksgeist’, the centerpiece of folk psychology. In spite of the theory’s critics, folk psychology made a contribution to the social sciences when its key concepts were used by scholars such as Georg Simmel and Franz Boas.(The Mind of the Nation: the Debate About Völkerpsychologie. 6 Feb 2012. Available: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/19064/)