Echoes Of Eternity

By Thomas Yaeger

Much of the cultural production of the ancient world, east and west, was based on the idea of reflecting aspects of the divine in human life and thought. Many social structures and institutions were based on this approach. The model for these things was was astronomy and the heavens, and the heavens were conceived of as a moving image of eternity, and eternity was understood to be coterminous with the Divine. Since it moved, it contained life and thought, and repaid the attention of man. We still live, work and think inside what is a scarcely changed neolithic temple, which is the sky.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Yaeger
• Release date: Jun 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463709375

Thomas Yaeger

I trained as a historian, and studied ancient history and ancient languages (Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian) at University College London, and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, I specialised in the neo-Assyrian Empire, and the ancient Near East. I also have a qualification in philosophy. I'm the author of the revolutionary study 'The Sacred History of Being', and four other books. I tweet regularly on ancient history and philosophy, with the Twitter ID @rotorvator.

Book preview

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

I’ve occasionally submitted work for competitions, and Echoes of Eternity (as it now is), grew out of an extended essay I wrote in 1991-2 for a university prize offered while I was a student at UCL.  It didn’t win, and at the time I didn’t imagine that it would. This is because I began with an essay critical of historicist approaches to the study of the ancient world, and particularly that form of historicism which appears in the writings of Marx. The historicist approach was very widespread in the University of London at the time, and so I regarded writing the essay mainly as an opportunity to blow off some steam which had been building up during the preceding three years.

The essay was titled: ‘Mirrors of the Divine’, and subtitled ‘Aristotle's Teleological Model of the World and the Interpretation of Ancient History’. The main part of the essay was built on three pieces of text I'd written during my course at UCL.

What was the point of the essay beyond the opportunity to criticise modern historical methods? One of the reasons I chose to study ancient history was to understand ancient cultures within their original contexts. Which means gaining an understanding of how they themselves understood the world in which they lived, and in which they functioned. Before arriving at UCL I’d already absorbed Wittgenstein’s criticism of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, which was to the effect that it is arrogant to presume that the ideas of other peoples are absurd or wrong-headed, simply because they do not make sense to us. Wittgenstein argued that if we understood their ideas in their original context, they might turn out to make a great deal of sense.

Modern scholars of ancient history would respond by saying that is exactly what they are doing – it is just that we now understand that the important drivers shaping ancient societies and cultures are material and economic, and are the universal drivers, operating in all times and places. Study those things, and you will understand the cultures.

And so much of the original context of ancient evidence is lost or ignored by modern historians of the ancient world.

However I am not at all arguing that the study of material and economic forces is unimportant. Studying those things is just as important as the other things which are available for study, such as religious ideas and rituals, literature, philosophy, mythology and art. But I grew tired of the argument that for example, the Romans of the 1st century B.C.E. understood their deep history and culture more poorly than we do, because they did not possess the proper context in which to analyse the limited historical materials they had available to them.

The importance of material and economic forces derives from the Marxist philosophical perspective, which is the bedrock philosophy of many historians (though many would deny that they are Marxists in outlook – I once heard an eminent historian say that he was ‘Marxian’ in outlook, rather than a Marxist). The sociological approach to ancient history is based ultimately on Marx’s philosophy.

Marxism contains a useful concept for dealing with things which do not fit the model. That concept is ‘false consciousness’. The philosophical analysis of Marx is assumed to be correct, and so any body of thought which doesn’t square with that analysis is presumed to be wrong, and the product of a false consciousness. According to this way of thinking, the Romans lived in a false consciousness of who and what they were, and why they did what they did. For the whole of their history.

Any body of thought which uses such a catchall concept in which to spirit away what doesn’t fit with its own conceptions, isn’t a properly functioning model of reality. It can’t be, because it already presumes its own truth.

The original four sections of the essay from 1991-2 survive here, though they have been revised and re-englished (‘Synoikismos’ first appeared in Understanding Ancient Thought in 2017). They are ‘Camera Obscura’, ’Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis’, ‘Kingship in Ancient Assyria’, and ‘Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander’. The subtitle of the essay,‘Aristotle's Teleological Model of the World and the Interpretation of Ancient History’, was chosen because of the importance of the teleological perspective in antiquity, and particularly in Greece, and the fact that our principal source of detailed discussion of the concept is Aristotle. Aristotle did not however invent the concept (I have heard a specialist in both Greece and Aristotle rather foolishly suggest that he did).

What I was doing with the three sections which followed on from the opening criticism of the historicist approach, was showing how (firstly) the evidence for the development of the Athenian polis suggests a background of philosophical and religious ideas out of which the practicalities of the polis were woven; (secondly)  how the extensive evidence we have for the religious and moral background to Assyrian Kingship shows that the conception of what the king represented was essentially teleologically understood, some three centuries before Aristotle, and shaped by a body of religious ideas which are available to us in Assyrian records. it explores the Assyrian emphasis on excellence and perfection, which anticipates ideas later discussed by Aristotle; (thirdly) how the principle source for the life of Alexander (Arrian’s Anabasis) constructs its argument according to a teleological frame, in which the principle protagonists represent different points of view about whether or not a man can become a god in his lifetime. This was not merely an artistic conceit, since the argument illuminates the desperate contradiction which underlies the idea of deification of the living if Aristotle’s teleological interpretation of divinity is correct (argued in the Nicomachean Ethics), which is that the gods, who are at the apex of the creation, can only contemplate, and are utterly incapable of action.

All the rest of the essays (parts two and three) are additional, and were written between 2003 and 2020.

‘The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.’ dates from 2004, and suggests that Plato was not constructing his philosophy according to a programme of research of his own, but was working within something like an agreed and traditional ontology, connected to ideas of the divine, which is discussed. Understanding this allows us to make sense of a number of earlier philosophical writings which are often fragmentary.

‘Post-Enlightenment Plato and That which Cannot Move’ explores this argument in terms of the actual texts of the dialogues. The world view which emerges is clearly paradoxical, and Plato and his predecessors cannot be understood unless the paradoxicality of his outlook is recognised and embraced. The paradoxical nature of reality is what he wished to convey. From the enlightenment onwards, there has been a concerted effort not to see this. Written in 2016.

‘Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire’ is a discussion of the Mesopotamian input into the development of philosophy in Greece from the late eighth to the mid-sixth seventh centuries B.C.E. The Assyrians captured Athens (according to Abydenus, who was a pupil of Aristotle), and they were there long enough to build a temple, and cast statues of the gods in bronze.  Originally written in 2004, and now updated.

‘The Threshold in Ancient Assyria’ looks at the carpet style designs used to decorate the thresholds and entrances to Assyrian royal palaces, with their designs of alternating lotuses, open and closed. Is this just decorative design, or do they tell us something about how the Assyrians conceived of the transition between one state and another? Also written in 2004.

‘Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East’ explores the relationship between iconography in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and the transcendentalist patterns of thought which lie behind the deliberate breaking of symmetries. Written in 2018.

Part Three begins with ‘The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth’, This short chapter explores the meaning of one of the most puzzling passages in the New Testament, and shows that it has its origin in a profound philosophical idea, related to the ‘holiness code’ found in Leviticus, though it is now used to justify temporal power. Written in 2019.

The three chapters which follow concern what we can know of intellectual life in British Neolithic and early Bronze Age. I was essentially conducting a dialogue with both myself and the evidence while writing these, so they represent research in progress. Consequently there is substantial repetition of things discussed along the way. I’ve left them as they are, since they show how I got to the position outlined in the third chapter.

‘Being and Eternity in the Neolithic’ explores some aspects of the late British Neolithic which suggest the presence of a transcendentalist view of reality. Written in 2017.

‘Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’ is an extensive chapter, which builds on the idea that the builders of the megaliths had a transcendentalist and essentially proto-pythagorean outlook on the nature of reality, and that this outlook shaped their cultural production. Pythagoras reputedly spent 22 years studying in Egypt, and much of what we term as ‘pythagorean’ is therefore likely to be a great deal older. This chapter examines the ancient fit of the ideas which are associated with Pythagoras. Written in December 2017.

‘The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard’ explores the Neolithic and Bronze Age interest in whole numbers, mathematics, geometry, the idea of the infinite, and of infinite series. The chapter concludes that the measure of the megalithic yard expresses the ancient perception that the infinite and the finite are necessarily conjoined. Written in February 2020.

‘What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died’ is an extract from a letter written to a specialist in ancient astronomy in early 2019, in response to questions about how the decline in the interest in astronomy and related mythology happened, as Christianity took hold.

‘Marxism and Historicism’ discusses the fact that the Marxist understanding of reality is a deliberate inversion of Neoplatonist understanding, as mediated through Hegel’s use of the writings of Proclus, who was last head of the Athenian Academy. Written in 2015.

All of these chapters, including the two on Marxist ideas in the study of history, illustrate the important role played by philosophical ideas and abstractions in the cultural production of a number of civilizations. These ideas arise ultimately from conjecture about the nature of eternity, and questions relating to the divine – what it is, and what it means for mortals. The Greek word for these puzzles was ‘aporia’. What I am suggesting in these chapters is that such puzzles played a significant role in the development of thought about the nature of the divine,  as well as about the nature and importance of liturgy, art, and ritual practice, and the development of many other details which we associate with the rise of civilization.

Thomas Yaeger, May 10 – September 20, 2019, and May 7, 2020.

Part One

Camera Obscura: Marx, Aristotle & Ptolemy

Is it the case that we are blinded to the importance of certain kinds of evidence by our preconceptions? There is a tendency among classical scholars to treat the rise of Greek civilisation and its formal institutions (such as the polis) as the rise of civilisation itself. This is not to say that classical scholars are entirely unaware of developments in the near east during the third and second millennia B.C.E., but that there is in their minds a feeling that somehow Greece is the only case worthy of study; the paradigmatic case to which all earlier civilisations might have aspired, but could never have reached.

Greece is the successful case, the one in which intellectual and cultural patterns reached a perfection worthy of their interest; only in Greece were institutions developed which possessed an excellence of their kind, and it is the excellence of the object of study, the soaring nature of the Greek achievement, which justifies its isolation as an academic field.

Ancient historians, on the other hand, have a twofold problem: their subject tends to follow the demarcation lines set by the classical scholars (and the archaeologists concerned with Greece and Italy), so that both those concerned with classical civilizations and the Near Eastern specialists have more difficulty than is necessary in drawing on the insights of other areas of scholarship. Further, the disciplines of history and archaeology in general have imported the methodology and attitudes of other intellectual fields; particularly from sociology.

The effect of this importation has reinforced the trend in historiography away from bad nineteenth century habits, such as an undue emphasis on the role of the individual, and an unhealthy concentration on the interests and views of those who exercised power in the periods in question.

These are pressures which may distort our apprehension and understanding of ancient civilizations. In the former case, the problem is that the worth and significance of the object of study has to a large extent already been decided; in the latter case, the movement away from an unsatisfactory approach to historical problems has resulted in a number of key questions not being asked and being rendered virtually unaskable.

Several methods have been devised, more or less unconsciously, in order to isolate Greek civilization and its institutions from contamination; these need not be listed or discussed here. What is important is that the polis is often treated as though it is a specifically Greek phenomenon, to be understood only within the Greek context; and that it is necessarily something which arose from that particular context alone. Comparison with other cultures is regarded as illegitimate beyond certain limited bounds. Either connections are de facto not there, or in cases where connections are very apparent, obvious conclusions are often treated as a priori unsound, if they threaten the autochthonous model of Greek civilisation.

What is allowed is the retrojection of the supposed universal laws which underpin the development of human society, and which must have underpinned all social and political structures since their first creation. Scholars look for these, and the precise details of the cultures under scrutiny do not so much give rise to theories as to their place and meaning, as lend support to the universality of the retrojected picture of cultural development.

Much of our view of the development of Greek (Athenian) politics between the 7th and 4th centuries comes from Aristotle; from two works on politics: the Politics itself, known from antiquity, and from the Athenian Constitution, recovered from Egypt at the end of the last century (1890s). The Politics tells us of what sort of political ideas could be thought in the context of the fourth century in Athens (particularly in conjunction with the Republic of Plato, the Statesman, etc,). It also gives some comparative information about other constitutions, such as the Cretan, the Spartan, and of particular interest, the Carthaginian. Other sources are few: apart from inscriptional evidence, there is little apart from the writings of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and Thucydides to draw upon for the early development of the Greek conception of the polis. Each of these sources has to be used with care, for the very simple reason that the writers themselves often did not fully understand the evidence they were trying to explain.

In the case of Aristotle for instance, it is most often understood by scholars that he portrays the polis as (in practice) a development towards democracy (which was not seen as positive by Aristotle). Whereas (for Aristotle, in the Politics, at least) the true struggle is the need to balance the conflicting interests of the rich and poor: seemingly what has always underpinned the development of society and its institutions. The recognition of the necessity of observing the true nature of this struggle is taken to be a mark of Aristotle's empirical approach to data.

That the reforms to the institutional arrangements within the archaic polis might have been intended to broaden democratic participation, or even to balance the forces at work within its structure, these possibilities are currently rejected by historians, who see instead a series of reforms designed to support established power (or insufficient evidence either way). This approach appears to provide an adequate explanation for the major reforms for which we have evidence: the reforms of Solon, Cleisthenes, and to a lesser extent, that of Ephialtes.

Thus, the developments are understood to be broadly explicable in terms of what are taken to be universals; in terms of the human interest in power and the creation of ideological constructs to support the pursuit of power and its maintenance.

Naturally it is not a matter of dispute that what human beings do in critical circumstances and in daily life is shaped by their surroundings and events (amounting to at least one