Introduction

Francesca Rochberg and Kurt A. Raaflaub

In 1946, Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin, eminent scholars at Chicago University's renowned Oriental Institute, published lectures they had given in the university's Division of the Humanities, under the title The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. The book contains a substantial introduction and conclusion by Frankfort and his wife, H.A. (Groenewegen-) Frankfort, and chapters on Egypt (Wilson), Mesopotamia (Jacobsen), and the Hebrews (Irwin). Penguin published a shorter version (omitting the chapter on the Hebrews) in 1949. The full volume came out in paperback in 1977, was a staple in Western Civilization and other introductory courses taken by generations of college students, and is still in print.

This book thus has had an amazingly long and successful life. No wonder: it represents a rare attempt in Near Eastern studies to step back and look at the big picture not in one but three major civilizations. In this case, the big picture is nothing less than a world-view, reconstructed from the texts of literate complex societies, concerning the place of human beings in society and state, in nature and cosmos, in space and time, in life and death, and in relation to those in power and the world of the divine. At least parts of this book are brilliant and useful as well, for comparative purposes, to other disciplines (such as Classics). Naturally, though, by now, 70 years after its first publication, it is badly outdated in theoretical approach, use and interpretation of evidence, and geographical limitation. But the idea that prompted its production in the first place is still valid and exciting. The present volume does not exactly replace The Intellectual Adventure but it offers at least a big step toward a new version, up-to-date in theoretical underpinning and approach, evidence and scholarship, and much broader in scope, including other eminent ancient or early civilizations.

To begin with evidence and scholarship, recent wars in West and Central Asia have drawn international public attention to the cultural devastation caused by such wars: the plundering of archaeological museums in Kabul and Baghdad and the ravaging of archaeological sites in Iraq which have caused looting and destruction of untold numbers of precious artefacts and texts. Even so, Assyriologists and Egyptologists have for decades been faced with the daunting task of publishing enormous quantities of newly discovered and often fragmentary texts. Although the task is far larger than the capacity of the specialists to handle it, increasing numbers of publications keep improving and changing our knowledge and understanding of almost every aspect of Egyptian and, even more so, Mesopotamian civilization. Recent years have seen the publication of many texts relevant to the questions at hand, and an increasing number of collections provide accessible translations. Except for Israel, where the Hebrew Bible provides a canonical text, the massively increased amount of textual evidence and great advances in its interpretation alone would thus suffice to warrant a new version of The Intellectual Adventure even in its original limitation to the ancient Near East.

Second, there is the question of scope. In the mid-twentieth century, a focus on three Near Eastern civilizations that were in close cultural and political contact especially in the first millennium BCE was perfectly justifiable. In the meantime, regionalism has given way to globalism; scholars and teachers have become increasingly interested in relations and interactions between civilizations; and comparative history, both ancient and modern, has gained ground. Western civilization courses find strong competition in world history courses that look at developments in all parts of the globe. Hence it makes sense to broaden the scope of such a volume and to include not only the civilizations that were in intense contact with the ancient Near East throughout, that is, Greece and Rome, but also other highly developed ancient or early civilizations: China and India in the East, and the Maya and Aztecs in the Americas.

Antiquity is not "the same" worldwide in a chronological sense. Nor do we hold that all cultures should or even can be measured against the standards and norms of the modern West. What prejudices we unconsciously bring to our investigation of other historical cultures are, or at least it is hoped they are, also different from those of Frankfort and his colleagues. Comparison between the thoughts and world-views of cultures that developed independently from each other will help bring into sharp profile the characteristics and achievements of each one of them. Again for the sake of comparison, this volume also includes a chapter on a non-literate early society whose world of thought and concepts is accessible by other means: native North Americans.

A third set of problems concerns theory and approach. The assumption, pervading The Intellectual Adventure from its first page, that human intellection was first engaged on a level of emotion, subjectivity, and the concrete, and then evolved to a higher level of abstraction and objectivity is now recognized as outmoded, based more on general presuppositions than on a close reading or comparison of ancient texts. Long ago, Clifford Geertz called the idea that ancient peoples were not sufficiently cognitively developed for the higher levels of thought a "tissue of errors." Still, specific analysis of ancient intellectual culture has rarely dealt with this issue since the publication of Frankfort's introduction. The first two chapters of this volume (by Francesca Rochberg and Peter Machinist) place The Intellectual Adventure in its intellectual and especially theoretical context and offer an incisive critique of its assumptions.

To explain, the present collection stems from the desire to reconsider and restate some of the same questions raised by the original The Intellectual Adventure, that is, of how in ancient cultures the physical (that has to do with the environment and the cosmos) and the metaphysical (that deals with existence, cultural values, and the gods) were construed. If the motivating questions are similar to those of the original work, however, the inquiry generated by these questions is different. Apart from evidence and scope, the present book does not proceed from the idea that antiquity represents the childhood of human history, or that ancient is the equivalent of "primitive." The questions we pose concerning world-view, cosmology, religion, and society in the ancient world bear relation to those of the original work, but stem from the vantage point of an intellectual climate that differs markedly from that which produced the original. The answers to these questions that Frankfort and his colleagues offered can now be reformulated because so many of the old assumptions about "how ancients thought" have been given up and revised.

In fact, we would suggest, the reasons why such views have been rethought has much to do with the revolution in thinking signaled by the passing of "The Scientific Revolution," "The Grand Narrative," and so on. We are revisiting The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man because so much that underpinned that work has been found to be illusory, namely cognitive and social evolutionary schemes with some of their concomitant beliefs, for instance, in progress or in scientific knowledge as embodying universal natural truths. Despite the fact that these ideas were already profoundly challenged by the time the book came out in the late 1940s, at least in some anthropological circles, such reappraisals did not find a consensus until much more recently. Reflected in the make-up of the present volume is a notion of cultures not as great and canonical traditions to be received and transmitted as such, but as conditioned by history and reflective of the continually changing societies within which literature, religion, and science are variously produced. It is to be hoped that our engagement with ancient cultures will reflect a historiographical attitude more inclusive, more nuanced, less essentializing, less restricted with respect to non-elites, gender, and local variations, all of which are key to a revision rather than simply an extension of the original The Intellectual Adventure.

This volume considers cultures from many regions of the world, from the Old World to the New and within these cultures a diversity of sources representing a wide array of particular responses to particular environments and circumstances. This is precisely our interest, namely, the multifarious response of ancient human beings to the world as they conceived it, both in physical as well as imaginative terms. What unifies us collectively as people in history also divides us, that is, the impulse to relate oneself to the world, to the cosmos, to the divine. Where the original contributors to The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man attempted to fit "speculative thought" into a framework, wholly modern and Western in imprint, in which science and religion were mutually exclusive and the place of the human in the universe was a matter for mythological speculation, we, more than 60 years on, focus on the ancient response to the environment as it is found in forms of social practices and cultural products in which mutually permeable relationships between religion, science, cosmology, and politics are...