Order and Chaos in Human History: Egypt vs Mesopotamia
the artificial civilisation of Mesopotamia as the blueprint for modern control
The history of human civilisation is the history of our attempts to impose order and stability upon an unruly, ill-disciplined and chaotic world. We impose order by simplifying our external environment. The quintessential examples of this clash between order and chaos are two of the great early river valley civilisations - Egypt around the Nile, and Mesopotamia around the Tigris and the Euphrates.
But there was a fundamental difference in how this clash between order and chaos manifested itself in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Nile was an orderly and largely predictable river and order in Egypt simply had to be maintained and defended whereas, in Mesopotamia, order had to be artificially constructed against the odds. Our modern, artificial civilisation is constructed on the same principles that Mesopotamia was.
Egypt
Compared to the neighbouring regions of Mesopotamia and Greece, Egypt enjoyed a relatively stable political existence, protected against invasion by the natural barriers of the sea to the north and the mountains to the east and the west. The Nile, too, was a friendly and dependable river. Although irrigation and control were fundamental to the expansion of arable land, the Nile was an easy river to control and manipulate in this manner as Steven Solomon explains1:
Unlike other great rivers, the annual flood season arrived and receded with clockwork predictability and in miraculous synchronization with the agricultural cycle of planting and harvesting. It was one of the easiest landscapes to manage for irrigation. Egyptian farmers needed merely to construct embankment breeches, sluice gates, extension channels, and some simple dikes to retain sufficient floodwater to soak the soil in the cultivated, low-lying basins beyond the river before releasing the excess to the next basin downstream. The Nile’s steep gradient, furthermore, kept the river flowing steadily with good drainage that helped to flush out the soil-poisoning salts that afflicted artificial irrigation systems everywhere else. Indeed, the Nile was world history’s only self-sustaining, major river irrigation system.
It was only natural that the Egyptians sought to explain these regularities, and it was only natural that these initial explanations relied on the supernatural powers of the Gods. After all, it is perfectly logical to think of such a well-ordered world as a clockwork machine run from above.
In the ancient world, chaos did not possess the same meaning that it does today. Chaos was the great void, the nothingness, the world that is neither legible nor useful to humans. The opposite of chaos is the cosmos, literally the human world. The cosmos in Egypt is the thin strip of arable land on either side of the Nile river that sustains human civilisation. Chaos is also signified by the nomadic raiders against whom the orderly force of the king stands in protection. God protects from above, and his agent, the king, protects on the ground. To Egyptians, the contrast between the fertile ‘black land’ formed by the seasonal flooding of the Nile and the ‘red land’ of the fearsome desert could not be any clearer.
Every ancient civilisation had a creation myth, an explanation as to how the civilised world was created. The Egyptian myth, which was one of the earliest such myths, went something like this. In the beginning, there was chaos. Chaos was the negation of the present world, and the Egyptians represented it with the ocean (Nun). The chaos had been there forever, and to the Egyptians, it preceded God. In fact, the creator of the cosmos arose from within this boundless chaos.
Creation was not an act of conflict or a battle against chaos. It was an act of differentiation, of realising a legible, bounded world from the nothingness of the boundless chaos. During creation, the illegible one becomes the legible, separable, differentiable many.
The Egyptians believed that gods and humans alike were dependent on the all-important principle of order, which they called Ma’at. The concept of Ma’at was intimately connected to the Egyptian state, and the king saw himself as an upholder of Ma’at. This principle of order was all-pervasive. The same Ma’at that governed the course of the sun and the seasons of the year governed the orderly governance of the state. Amongst the gods, Thoth, the moon god (who was the deputy of the supreme sun-god Ra), was responsible for constantly defending order from the agents of chaos. And just as Thoth was the guarantor of order in the heavens and the king was the guarantor of order here on earth.
But this state of order was not permanent or even resilient. The civilised world was constantly threatened by the forces of chaos surrounding it - the desert, the enemies of the state and the ocean itself. Egyptians called this principle Isfet. There was no greater symbol of the ordered world than the rising of the sun every day. And at the end of every day, the sun-god Ra and the lesser gods had to fight the god of Chaos, the serpent Apophis. Every day, Apophis would have to be defeated so that the sun could rise the following morning and the ordered world could go on.
Apophis could not be defeated once and for all. Just like the desert that surrounded Egypt, he was immortal. At best, mankind could keep chaos at bay, but this required a constant and vigilant struggle. Moreover, the struggle between the cosmos and chaos was one where the most optimistic outcome involved a restoration of the ideal initial order. Progress and change for the good were impossible with predictable consequences, making Egyptian civilisation “one of world history’s most inward-looking, changeless, rigidly ordered, and longest-enduring civilizations”2.
Mesopotamia
Unlike Egypt, Mesopotamia presented a much more unstable environment to its people and “life was a long struggle against a recalcitrant nature”3. The Tigris-Euphrates river system presented a much greater challenge to human attempts to control it for irrigation and agriculture. The Tigris and the Euphrates often veered wildly from flood to drought. Year-long and strenuous labour was required to irrigate the land. The Tigris and Euphrates were the source of life if they were controlled and moulded to the will of man. Otherwise, they were agents of havoc that wreaked death and destruction upon the people, “the dangerous, menacing source of sudden, ruinous inundations like those in which the men of Sumer struggled to make land out of a watery waste”4.
The Egyptian cosmos did not have to be constructed against the odds, against the unruliness of nature, as it had to be in the Tigris-Euphrates delta. The cosmos only had to be protected and maintained in Egypt, whereas it had to be constructed against the odds in Mesopotamia. In Steven Solomon’s words,
if natural hydraulics made Egypt a gift of the Nile, Mesopotamia was an artificially contrived civilization whose success was achieved in defiance of the design of nature through the water-engineering ingenuity and willful organization of society.
The fury of nature wasn’t the only agent of chaos that threatened the Mesopotamian cosmos. War and conquest were routine phenomena, and the land saw a succession of different kingdoms. The Mesopotamians faced the constant threat of guerrilla warfare and raids from the nomadic tribes and were themselves in a state of constant warfare with each other.
However, it was precisely this immense effort required to construct an artificial order that led Mesopotamian civilisation to invent many of the fundamental aspects of civilisation and control. As William H. McNeill explains,
Mesopotamian rulers could avail themselves of no ready-made natural instrument for securing their centralized authority, but had slowly and painfully to develop law and bureaucratic administration as an artificial substitute for the natural articulation which geography gave to Egypt.
The Enuma Elish: the quintessential myth of man’s struggle against chaos
In Mesopotamia, the cosmos did not just emerge from the initial chaos. It is a reconstruction of an ideal heavenly prototype. The physical conception of the cosmos was the state and its intellectual underpinnings were mythological. In Mesopotamia, the quintessential myth of man’s struggle against chaos was conceived - the Enuma Elish.
In the Enuma Elish, the universe was initially in a state of chaos and disorder. Order arose from a conflict in which the young male warrior Marduk, symbolising order, slew the demoness Tiamat (symbolising chaos) and created the cosmos from her corpse. The slaying of Tiamat is the victory of order over chaos and it represents the beginning of an era when human beings could control nature. Tiamat personified the salty sea water and her death may have represented a victory over the floods that were a constant threat to survival in the Mesopotamian floodplains.
Accounts similar to the Enuma Elish can be found in most Indo-European cultures. Enuma Elish influenced the Genesis creation mythos common to both Judaism and Christianity. In the Rig-Veda, the first of the Vedas in the Hindu religion, the god Indra plays the part of Marduk and slays the personification of drought, the demon Vritra. In Greek mythology, Zeus battles the dragon-god Typhoeus.
But the influence of this mythological tradition does not stop here. The idea of the ordered world as originating from water was also held by the man many think of as the first scientist, Thales of Miletus. Thales’ account of the origins of the world is simply the Enuma Elish with ‘Marduk left out’5. Similarly, the Pythagorean view of the world can be summarised as6:
Order and beauty are created when some form of limit, or definition, is imposed on the unlimited raw material of the universe.
which is simply a restatement of the core idea within the Enuma Elish.
This simple change of removing God from nature was a monumental step. But in many respects, it preserved the essential character of the older mythological tradition. Science at its origins was still speculation that sought to explain human experience. Like myth, science sought to obtain unchanging eternal principles that could provide order to the chaos of human experience.
Mythological explanations did not prevent the Mesopotamians from coming up with accurate predictions for natural events such as solar eclipses, just as Thales famously did in 585 BC. And whether the ultimate order was ordained from heaven or not made no difference to the constant day-to-day struggle to control nature and impose order upon it.
The Mesopotamian approach to control gave birth to the dominant approach to control and civilisation - an artificially constructed and simplified order. But in the ancient world, the Chinese tackled a similarly chaotic river, the Yellow River, with a fundamentally different approach that went hand in hand with a fundamentally different attitude towards chaos - both subjects of a future essay.
Note: Almost all the unreferenced detail in this essay on Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology has been taken from Norman Cohn’s book ‘Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith’.
Steven Solomon in ‘Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization’.
ibid
Norman Cohn in ‘Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come’
J M Roberts and Odd Arne Westad in ‘The Penguin History of the World’
Farrington via Wallaca Matson in ‘Miletus: The Invention of Science’
Anthony Gottlieb in ‘The Dream of Reason’