Music in Religious Cults of the Ancient Near East

John Arthur Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000210323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Music in Religious Cults of the Ancient Near East presents the first extended discussion of the relationship between music and cultic worship in ancient western Asia. The book covers ancient Israel and Judah, the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Elam, and ancient Egypt, focusing on the period from approximately 3000 BCE to around 586 BCE. This wide-ranging book brings together insights from ancient archaeological, iconographic, written, and musical sources, as well as from modern scholarship. Through careful analysis, comparison, and evaluation of those sources, the author builds a picture of a world where religious culture was predominant and where music was intrinsic to common cultic activity.

1 Introduction

1.1 The ancient Near East as treated here

In the present book, the term ‘ancient Near East’ (often shortened to ‘Near East’) refers to the geographical area that extends eastward from the lands bracketing the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea to the Zagros Mountains beyond the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, during a period of antiquity stretching from approximately 3000 to 550 bce (compare Kuhrt 2005: 1–16; Liverani 2014: 1–33; Podany 2014: 6–15; Van De Mieroop 2015: 1–4, 6, 7–10). It is regarded as comprising the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Elam, and Upper and Lower Egypt, and corresponds roughly to the area covered collectively by modern Turkey, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Egypt (its Mediterranean hinterland, the Nile Delta region, and the Nile Valley), Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. The Arabian Peninsula (comprising modern Saudi Arabia, the Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates), all except the coastal areas of which is mostly desert, is not normally included in discussions of the ancient Near East. Some writers also prefer to exclude Egypt for reasons of contextual focus (e.g. Podany 2014: 6–7; Van De Mieroop 2015: 1; compare Kuhrt 2005: 1–6; Liverani 2014: 8).

The historical period covered here corresponds roughly to the span of time from the beginning of the Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age. It encompasses the rise and fall of many great empires and dynasties, including those of the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. It also saw the blossoming of Mesopotamian and Levantine civilisations, and within the latter the pre-exilic period and most of the exilic period of ancient Israelite history.

The beginning of the Bronze Age is significant as the time from when meaningful quantities of relevant primary source materials start to appear. The end of the Iron Age, on the other hand, is significant in that it marks a watershed in the history of the ancient Near East, not in terms of the development of material culture, but rather on account of relatively rapid changes in the ways in which political and ideological powers became dominant in the region. History’s perception of the significant characteristics of that time of change is reflected in the names it has bestowed on the periods which comprised it: the Neo-Babylonian period, the Persian period, the Hellenistic period and the Roman period. The first three of those periods were initiated within the space of some 250 years, the fourth some 200 years later. In most cases, the periods overlapped to a greater or lesser extent, and none entirely obliterated the marks of the others, or indeed of what had existed before them.

To extend the study of music and religious cults into the era after the end of the Iron Age would require a very different methodological approach from the one adopted here, and would ideally be best served by a separate book. The chronological scope of the present work is therefore limited (but with some flexibility) to a period which permits a reasonable degree of straightforward oversight despite the continually increasing amount of knowledge that becomes available.

1.2 Religion in the ancient Near East

1.2.1 Religion as culture

The peoples of the ancient Near East and its neighbouring lands had no concept of religion as an intellectualised system of belief.¹ For them, that which in modern post-Enlightenment Western thought is understood as ‘religion’ embodied their whole culture: their ancestry, their history as indigenous peoples (as foretold in their traditional myths and narratives), and their real-time material, social and spiritual existence. It is doubtful whether they would have had any appreciation of religion as a discrete and optional element in society.

Deities were intrinsic to ancient Near Eastern cultures. Myths and traditions about them abound in all manner of ancient writings and iconography. Deities were conceived of as real and dynamic; they commanded, supported and guided human beings in return for worship, appeasement and obedience. They also punished (sometimes harshly, and sometimes apparently capriciously), corrected and redirected when human behaviour strayed beyond the accepted norms.

The ancient myths show that the deities were thought of as being like human beings in that they could love and hate, show joy and anger, marry and procreate. Anthropomorphism also found expression in iconography: deities were portrayed typically as fantastic hybrid human–animal, or human–bird, figures. But deities were also regarded as being superhuman in that they could disappear and reappear at will, transform themselves, and transcend distance and time. They could create and destroy, they could give life and take it. While most deities were perceived as benevolent, some were regarded as chthonic, dwelling in the ‘underworld’ and having malevolent intentions towards humans.

The deities were deemed to have established the accepted norms of conduct for all political, spiritual, social, moral and ethical aspects of human life, to the extent that there was no concept of ‘sacred’ versus ‘secular’. The separation of military activity, civil administration, commerce and politics from religion and religious practice, which is normal in modern Western culture, simply did not exist in the Near East in antiquity. A decision to engage in warfare, for example, whether proactively or defensively, was subject to the approval of the gods. Success in battle was seen as a consequence of divine help, and was interpreted as a mark of divine approval; failure was seen as divine withdrawal in disapproval. And further, at major festivals at local temples, prostitution was practised as a celebration of the supposedly divine gift of procreation. If a distinction could be drawn between religious and non-religious elements in ancient Near Eastern culture, it was between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, where the former was exemplified by all that the deities were deemed to have willed for humans down through the ages and up to and including the present, and the latter by humans’ wilful disrespect for the will of the gods and society’s accepted norms.

1.2.2 Theology: monotheism, polytheism and syncretism

1.2.2.1 Introduction

The theology of the ancient Near East was predominantly polytheistic and syncretistic. Despite the biblical tradition which promotes YHWH as the sole deity of Israel and Judah, and the 17-year period in Egyptian history when worship of the deity Aten alone was forced upon the nation,² monotheism and monolatry were exceptional in the context of Near Eastern religion as a whole.

Deities were of various types. The ancient Israelites’ deity worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple was by tradition incorporeal and invisible (§1.3.2.2). In Mesopotamia and Egypt, deities could include living and deceased pharaohs and rulers as well as mythological personages. In Anatolia and Mesopotamia, artefacts, including musical instruments, could be deified or divinised. In ancient Israelite religion as expressed in the Hebrew Bible, there was no doctrine of divine kingship. Kings were subordinate to the deity; they were not regarded as divine, and they were not worshipped. Although the deity is described and referred to in royal terms in many places in the HB (especially in poetic passages concerned with dignity, magnificence and power), such descriptions and references are not expressions of a theological equality of deity and monarch. Rather, they are metaphors which make use of images of the dignity, majesty and power of kingship to express the greatness of the deity.³

1.2.2.2 Levant

In the northern Levant, the large Late Bronze Age corpus of cuneiform texts on tablets from ancient Ugarit (modern name: Ras Shamra), located on the northeastern Mediterranean coast in what in antiquity was the southeastern corner of the Hittite empire (now in modern Syria), has revealed the names of 234 deities. Some 178 of them are named as the recipients of sacrificial offerings. Many of those deities’ names (or their Canaanite and Hebrew variants) also appear in the HB. Many of the deities named would have belonged, together with YHWH, to the general corpus of deities worshipped in the Levant in the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age (Pardee 2002a: 12–24, 222; Hess 2009: 95–112).⁴

The HB gives some idea of the multiplicity of deities worshipped in the southwestern Levant in addition to YHWH (e.g. Miller 2000; Hess 2009). The divine name ʾelohim (Elohim) frequently encountered in the HB and usually translated ‘God’ in English bibles (and regarded as referring to the deity of the Israelites) is the plural form of the divine name ʾel (El). El was the generic name for ‘god’ throughout the Near East in antiquity, but was also the name of the chief deity in the pantheon of Canaanite gods. El could have various ‘personas’, for example: ʾel ʾelyôn, ʾel shadday, ʾelôah and, of course, ʾel himself, all of which are referred to in the HB. The literal meaning of the plural form ʾelohim is ‘gods’ and is used to refer collectively to the ‘personas’ of El. The names of those personas probably originally signified individual deities.⁵ Similarly, elsewhere in the HB, the divine name baʿaliym (Baals) (e.g. HB Judges 2.11) is the plural form of baʿal, the name of the storm and fertility god Baal, and is used to refer collectively to his various ‘personas’.

The Moabite god Chemosh, the Ammonite god Milcom/Molech, as well as other deities, were worshipped at elevated locations near Jerusalem (HB 1 Kings 11.7–8).⁶ The goddess ʿasherah (Asherah, the consort of El in Canaanite and Ugaritic mythology) is mentioned several times in the HB as an object of worship, and was known under variant names, including plural forms, for example: ʿasherah (singular), ʿashtaret (singular), ʿashtoret (singular), ʿashtarôt (plural) and ʿastarôt (plural).⁷ The HB mentions three instances of Israelites worshipping images of calves, symbols of youthful vigour and strong leadership (HB Exodus 32.1–5; 1 Kings 12.25–33).⁸

Archaeological finds provide further evidence of polytheism in the Levant. The discovery of a small, well-preserved bronze figure of a calf in the remains of a Late Middle Bronze Age stratum of the city of Ashkelon (Hess 2009: 136, 155–156) is of interest in relation to the instances of the Israelites’ worship of images of calves, referred to above. At Tel Haror, a Late Middle Bronze Age city in the northern Negev, west of Beer-sheba, a red painted arm was unearthed, probably belonging to the statue of a deity (Hess 2009: 137), and other possibly relevant finds (Oren 1997). Among Late Bronze Age remains from Beth-shean is the depiction of a deity, perhaps the warrior-goddess Anat (Hess 2009: 138). At Shechem, a bronze figure of a Canaanite god was found among the Iron Age I remains (Wightman 2007: 164, 165, Plate 3.3; Hess 2009: 133, and n. 19).

Evidence suggesting the worship of a plurality of deities at individual locations comes from three sites. In the tenth-century bce stratum (Iron Age II) at Megiddo, the find of duplicated cult items suggests that two deities could have been worshipped there (Wightman 2007: 190; Hess 2009: 299). Evidence from eighth-century bce levels of excavation in Iron Age II Arad points to the worship of two deities there also, one of whom is likely to have been YHWH (Wightman 2007: 187–189 with Figure 3.18 and Plate 3.7; Hess 2009: 283, 303–304). Inscriptions discovered at the third site, Kuntillet ʿAjrud, an Iron Age II site on the Negev–Sinai border, are said to consist of ‘requests, prayers and blessings to and by “Yahweh of Teiman and his Ashera,” “El,” and “Baal,”’ and a blessing formula ‘“By Yahweh of Samaria and his Ashera.”’ Close to the inscriptions, on the same surfaces, are drawings of humanoid figures which are also relevant (Hess ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Author’s note
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Types of cultic activity and the music associated with them, 1
• 3. Types of cultic activity and the music associated with them, 2
• 4. Musical media, 1: the human voice, chordophones and aerophones
• 5. Musical media, 2: membranophones (drums) and idiophones
• 6. Musical media, 3: groups and ensembles; sanctity and divinisation; organisation and administration
• 7. Approaching the musical sound-world
• Appendix
• Index of Ancient Greek, Latin and Near Eastern words and phrases
• General index