Archaeological correlates of pious societies
Magic is dying out, although the heights
Still pulse with its vast force …
Above our modern heads the dark’s still dark, …
Wisława Szymborska (1998), 112.
My title is a riff on Peebles and Kus (1977), who sought to find whether some people had more stuff than others had. Our question is how some people use their stuff. The 1977 article focused on the still hot topic of how and whether chiefdoms operated in the North American Mississippian Culture, which expired just as Europeans reached North America for the second and decisive time around 1500 CE.
Norman, Oklahoma, is a pious society. There are lots of churches, which you could see in the archaeological record. And in houses there are lots of Bibles, and though they might or might not be preserved, the time spent perusing them does seem exceptional. We could try to measure piety by statistical measures, such as length of marriages and infrequency of divorce, and there we would find that people in my state do not particularly practise those aspects of piety as much as they get preached at to do. From the perspective of a pious society, it is hard to say that the piety is all-pervasive.
We have been taught to look for temples, and yet I am not alone in wondering if large buildings with some religious paraphernalia should be primarily understood as religious places. Everywhere they were, and are, also places for the redistribution of wealth. The ample storerooms usually associated with such buildings attest to that, and this function is an expression of a central tenet of many types of piety. God and the gods do not cotton to hoarding wealth, and they bless its sharing, especially in ways that enhance particular institutions which have key functions in society. Merely giving to a beggar may be seen as a pious act, but funneling one’s giving through a temple agency gives recognition and clout and not just a feeling of well-being.
In the history of Mesopotamian archaeology we have Sir Leonard Woolley’s reconstruction of the wayside chapels where the correlates of worship appear to be on display (1965, 188–191). And lacking textual indications the presence of small finds that tend toward religious expression may be taken as indicators of religious interest at least of a basic kind. Amulets and seals seem especially indicative of a desire to connect to powers outside the usual range of everyday experience, and votive objects and especially statues attest to important interactions with the higher powers.
I felt a major gap in my exposition of Religions of the Ancient Near East was the lack of a clear and cross-culturally valid definition of piety. I used the term, as do most students of religions of the past. But do we really know what we mean by the term? Rulers in royal inscriptions did not hesitate to identify themselves as “god-fearing,” pāliḫ ili, equated to Sumerian n í . t e and n í . t u k u, both meaning “having fear.”
The word piety in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1378 a, as pietas is “An attitude of dutiful respect toward those to whom one is bound by ties of religion, consanguity, etc. … and between people and gods and among human beings, for example of troops toward their commander.” The Oxford English Dictionary p. 843 P has Pietie from 1604, deriving from Old French piete, already found in the 12th century, as “habitual reverence and obedience to God.” The adjective pious p. 892 is also first found in the early 1600s, but in French from 1539. When the Protestant Reformation raised the question of what was proper religion, then you needed a vocabulary to talk about that.
A rough and ready definition of heightened religious activity used by modern opinion surveyors is whether you go to church more than once a week, meaning twice on Sunday or once on Sunday and once later in the week. But what would the archaeological sign of such activities be? I must imagine that use of religious edifices might show up in more quickly deteriorated facilities, but I could be wrong about that. And sanctuaries in which such activities occurred are not really different from those in which there is celebrated only one service a week. This difference will probably not show up in the archaeological record.
But the sheer volume of houses of worship in Norman, Oklahoma, might. A problem is their variety. Near where I live is a former funeral home the large room of which has become the chancel for a new congregation of Maronite Christians, the body from Lebanon which is in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. I imagine that there are still traces of its previous function in the form of traces of cold storage for bodies, and perhaps other devices. An enormous parking lot remains. This is a relic of funeral directors organising motorcades of tens of cars to drive from the mortuary to the cemetery, which could be at least several kilometres away. Future archaeologists might imagine the parking lot was attached to a megachurch which would need to accommodate thousands on a Sunday. But the relatively small sanctuary would argue against that.
And in this society there are deviant houses of worship. There are storefront churches, places that used to be retail stores but have been cleared of shelves and furniture and now, pretty much as empty auditoria, serve as church meeting places. Also there are not a few formerly private houses that have been reworked, sometimes lightly, into church meeting places. Norman’s longtime mosque too started as two private houses, but has recently been rebuilt with a dome and even a minaret. How will these things look when they are ruins?
Perhaps we who write of religion mean by piety usually an active interest in and support of religious institutions. We cannot for the ancients gauge the attitudes of people but only their behaviours. And an emphasis on what people physically do rather than on belief is a reasonable approach. I have argued that belief was not even a category in the ancient world, and that no one even had the vocabulary to talk about what people thought was true, except in a very practical sense (Snell 2010, 150–151).
Let us examine one ancient site for relevant evidence. Tell Taya, a northern Iraqi archaeological site dug in the 1960s and 1970s by J. R. Reade (1973) is in rainfall agricultural land. It has the advantage of offering a site occupied in the late 3rd millennium BCE which has been almost totally exposed since it was abandoned after a few periods of occupation and has been eroding since. Its attractiveness for the study of urban centres has recently been emphasised by a Danish thesis which explored a number of its features on the basis of sociological ideas about cities. Lind-Bjerregaard (2006) did establish that there was no clustering of large houses, either in terms of area of the houses or street front exposure. The idea is, then, as seen in Elizabeth Stone’s work on Nippur Neighborhoods, that the rich and the poor lived cheek by jowl in Mesopotamian cities (1987, 126–127). Lind-Bjerregaard did not address religious buildings, but she did emphasise that apparently administrative structures were more prominent, and perhaps more centrally located, on possible streams for ease of communication. She posits that, in contrast to more southern Mesopotamia, where temples played an important role in organising households about them, here in the north the key may have been the organisational power of secular lords who may have been in competition with each other.
There were only three temples identified (Reade 1973). Temple 1 is on the citadel and right near another major structure which was interpreted as an administrative building. Temple 2 is some distance to the north, located on a slight mound, and Temple 3 is further west located on the Wadi Taya which was an important source of water in some seasons. None of the temples is as big as the administrative centres, which again cluster along a wadi.
We may conclude perhaps that Tell Taya was not a particularly pious community in the narrow sense we have defined above. There are no obvious candidates for wayside chapels or other shrines in the warren of private houses. Reade’s catalogue of small finds, however, does have interesting objects which probably should be interpreted as objects of religious value (Reade 1973, pls lxvii–lvii).
These reflections lead us to consider who decides to build temples and who decides to participate in religious activities. Often in the past we have assumed that city leaders were decisive in this, and yet they were hardly significant in making sure their clients had enough small religious objects. This was much more likely to be an activity pursued household by household and may have been connected to the craft skills and the individual concerns of the households at particular times. Old people would not be interested in fertility charms, and young people do not usually worry about arthritis or demon possession.
The secularising trend in U.S. culture continues unabated, in spite of what we may have read about the U.S. Presidential elections. Surveys show non-church identification and atheism growing, along with indifference to religion. But within the U.S. there is lots of regional variation, and in the Bible belt in the South, though secularism is rising in adherents, it is still hard to see its influences. A recent volume on Red State Religion argues that the apparent political tack of religious people in America’s Middle West has not dominated politics in so widespread a way as might appear in the media (Wuthnow 2012). And what further would be its physical manifestations? At best perhaps a litter of campaign buttons on a church floor. But in Mesopotamia nobody voted for king.
Perhaps, as Laneri has indicated in Performing Death, the most likely locus for physical manifestations of piety is burials and other funerary arrangements. But cemeteries are rarely found in Mesopotamian sites, and because of that they present problems of typology and variation which are hard to study. What one should be looking for is deviation from established clichés of burial. This gets us into the fascinating area of epitaphs, and what people say about the dead, including what the dead said about themselves, but again, these are rare in Mesopotamia (Alster 1980; Bottéro 1982).
Let me end with a suggestive obituary. William Hughes Hamilton III, born in 1924, died recently at 87 years old and was notable as the instigator of a 1966 Time magazine cover story on the question “Is God Dead?” His point was that secularism had overtaken American life and that belief in eternal damnation or salvation was waning; his argument was that such views of God were not defensible any more, and that Christian theology should advance with its ethical teachings without making claims about God’s roles or God’s approval of what modern churches did. This stance led him to find his traditional Presbyterian church uncomfortable, but it did not keep him from arguing he was still a Christian (New York Times 11 March 2012, 20). From Hamilton’s courageous probing I think we can conclude that piety actually takes many forms in our societies and probably did in the ancient world too. I do not know whether Hamilton had lots of crucifixes or amulets around when he died; I am fairly certain he died surrounded by lots of Bibles. Archaeologically the latter would not usually survive, while trinkets might.
Archaeology allows us to think along with the long dead, but never as fully or as complexly as they actually lived. As Szymborska reminds us, the clouds above our modern heads remain as dark as ever.
Bibliography
Alster, B. (ed.) (1980) Death in Mesopotamia. XXVI Rencontre Assyriologique International, Copenhagen: Akademisk.
J. Bottéro (1982) Les inscriptions cunéiforms funéraires. In G. Gnoli and J.-P. Vernant (eds) La Mort, les morts dans les societies anciennes, 373–406, Cambridge and Paris, Cambridge University Press and Sciences humaines.
Laneri, N. (2007) An Archaeology of Funerary Rituals. In N. Laneri, Performing Death, 1–13. Chicago, Oriental Institute.
Lind-Bjerregaard, M. (2006) Stadt-Form und Gesellschaft. Eine Untersuchung der Beziehung zwischen Stadtstruktur und Gesellschaftsstruktur durch eine Analyse der Stadtplan von Tell Taya anhand soziologischer Stadttheorien. Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen.
Peebles, C. S. and Kus, S. M. (1977) Archaeological Correlates of Ranked Societies. American Antiquity 42, 421–448
Reade, J. E. (1973) Tell Taya (1972–73): Summary Report. Iraq 35,155–185, pls lvii–lxii.
Snell, D. (2010) Religions of the Ancient Near East. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Stone, E. (1987) Nippur Neighborhoods Chicago, Oriental Institute.
Szymborska, W. (1998) Poems New and Collected. New York, Harcourt.
Woolley, L. (1965) Excavations at Ur. New York, Thomas Crowell.
Wuthnow, R. (2012) Red State Religion. Faith and Politics in America’s Heartland. Princeton, Princeton University Press.