Hi, Junguerites Here is my, or better said, Lewis Mumford contribution to Bertil=B4s series on titanism. I was doubting of made a resume of Mr. Mumford studies on the egyptian 'megamachine' - as I have stated in a previous mail, LM never (or rarely) uses the term titanism, but I think there are obvious kinships. Finally, I have thought it would be better to hear Mumford himself, so I have tied some paragraphs - those which are interested on these matters can see the complet view at his excelent books: Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine, Vol I Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine, Vol II The final work has ended quite long (sorry!!) - and, perhaps, rather fragmented - but I think it=B4s worth the trouble. ...During the third millennium B.C. a profound change took place in human culture. History, in the sense of a transmissible written record of events, came into existence; amd a new set if institutions, which we associate with 'civilization' sprang up in a few great river valleys. Archeologists have attempted to portray this transformation mainly as the result of technological changes: the invention of writing, the potter=B4s wheel, the loom, the plow.... ... All these technological improvments were important, but behind them was a more central motive force that has been neglected: the discovery of the power of a new kind of social organization, capable of raising the human potential and bringing about changes in every dimension of existence - changes that small, down-to-earth communities, on the early neolithic scale, could hardly contemplate even in the imagination... ...Out of the early neolithic complex a different kind of social organization arose: no longer dispersed in small units, but unified in a large one: no longer 'democratic', that is, based on neighborly intimacy, customary usage and consent, but authoritarian, centrally directed, under the control of a dominant minority: no longer confined to a limited territory, but deriberately 'going out of bounds' to seize raw materials and enslave helpless men, to exercise control, to exact tribute. This new culture was dedicated, not just to the enhancement of life, but to the expansion of colective power. By perfecting new instruments of coercion, the rulers of this society had, by the third Millennium, B.C., organized industrial and military power on a scale that was never to be surpassed until our own time.... ...In all these operations two changes become increasingly evident, a change of pattern and a change in scale. The coomon factor that underlies these activities is an incresae in mechanical order, mathematical exactitude, specialized skill and knowledge, and, above all, centralized intelligence. these new qualities derived directly from the sistematic observation of the heavens, and the careful plotting of the movements of the planets and the procession of the seasons... .. there is general evidence of a shift in interest and authority from the gods of vegetation and animal fertility - subject to human weakness, to suffering, misfortune and death - to the gods of the sky: the moon, the sun and the planets, the lightning and the strom wind - powerful and implacable, awful and irresistible, not to be swayed from their course... ... The regularity and order that had first come in with neolithic grinding and polishing, and became visible in geometric patterns and decoration, now spread over the whole landscape: rectangles, triangles, pyramids, straight lines, bounded fields, testify to both astronomic order and strict human control. Standardization was the mark of the new royal economy in every department... ...But, above all, there was a change in scale. quantification and magnification are the marks of the new technology. Instead of thr little neolithic shrine, tehre stands a towering temple, the 'Mountain House', and nearby a huge granary: instead of the cluster of frail, mud-walled village houses. for a score of families, a wall-engirdled city, with a thousand or more families, no longer merely a human home, but hte home of a god: indeed a replica of Heaven... ... The increase in the food supply and the population tha marked the dawn of civilization may well be characterized as an explosion if not a revolution; and together they set off a train of minor explosions in many directions, which have continued at intervals over the entire course of history. But this outburst of energy was subjected to a set of institutional controls and physical compulsions that had never existed before, and these controls rested upon and ideology and a myth which perhaps had their faint beginnings in the magical ceremonies in paleolithic caves. at the center of this whole development lay the new institution of kingship. the myth of the machine and the cult of divine kingship rose together... ... As to the origin of the king=B4s unconditional supremacy and his special technical facilitiesm there is no room for doubt: it was hunting that cultivated the initiative, the self confidence, the ruthlessness taht kings must exercise to achieve and retain comand; and it was hunter=B4s weapons that backed up his commands, whether rational or irrational, with the ultimate authority of armed force: above all, the readiness to kill... ... The original connection between kingship and hunting has remained visible all through recorded history: from the stelae upon with both Egyptian and assyrian kings boasted their prowess as lio- hunters, to the preservation of vast hunting forest as the inviolable domains of kings in our own epoch. benno Landsberger notes that with kings in the Assyrian empire hunting and fighting were virtually interchangeable occupations. the unscrupulous use of the weapons of the hunt to control the political and economic activities of whole communities was one of the effective inventions of kingship. Out of that a whole series of subsidiary mechanical inventions eventually came... ... The agency that effected this change, the institute of divine kingship, was the rpduct of the coalition between the tribute- exacting hunting chieftain and the keepers of an important religious shrine. Without that combination, without that sanction, without that luminous elevation, the claims that the new rulers made to unconditional obedience to their king=B4s superior will, could not have been established: it took extra, supernaturla authority, derived from a god or a group of gods, to make knigship prevail throughout a large society... ... this fusion of sacred and temporal power released an inmense explosion of latent energy, as in a nuclear reaction. At the same time it created a new institutional form, fro which there is no evidence in the simple neolithic village or paleolithic cave: an enclave of power, dominated by an elite who were supprted ina grandiose style by tribute and taxes forcibly drawn from thew whole community... ...Witness the final act of Marduk=B4s battle with the primeval goddes Tiamat: "With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull". Should we surprised, then, to find that the period of political unification of the Upper and Lower Nile Valley, which marks the beginnigs of the kingship in Egypt, coincides with mass graves in which are found an unsual quantity of cracked skulls?.... ... So much for the shadowy events that must have led up to the establishment of kingship. the neat step, which set it on foundations that sustained, with occasional lapses, for more than five thousand years, come sproperly with the bounds of hisotry. more specially sacred history, for it was based on the application of supernatural powers to the control of human behaviour... ....here a new kind of science, different from the close observation and intimate association that fostered domestication, came into existence: now based on an abstract impersonal order: counting, measrument, exact notation -- attributes without whose early development no such consummate monuments as the pyramids could have been built.. This new power and order were effectively symbolized, as I have already noted, by the establishment of the first egyptian solar calendar... Space and time, power and order, become the main categories of a divinely regulated existence... ... Both modes were symbols of rational order and coercive physical power and both significantly remained a royal or priestly monopoly through the ages: for the exclusive right to coin money and establish uniform weights and measures is an emblem of all state sovereignty... ...On the theological basis of kingship, then , the testimony of Mesopotamia is as clear as that of Egypt fro all their hisotric and geographic differences of culture. And the words uttered by the earliest kings of both lands continue to ring through history both in the claims of 'legitimate' kings like Louis XIV, and in the no less extravagant assertions of a hitler, a Stalin, or a mao, whose abject and adoring followers have imputed omniscience to them... ... as a condition of taking office, Marduk insist that when he gives a command, he must be obeyed by his fellow gods without question. "Let my word instead of you, determine the fates: unaltearble shall be what I may brng into being: neither recalled nor changed shall be the command of my lips". These words are worth noting. they set forth the terms on which the new collective mechanism was brought into existence... ... This new emphasis on unqualified power of command was in some measure, it would seem, a necessary reaction to the disorders and difficulties that multiplied with the growth of population. Regularity and security now became a political desideratum; for while small groups of people may migrate when threatened, a whole city or a closely settled countryside cannot be evacuated fro a season when overwhelmed by flood or starved by drought.. There was genuine need for some unifying authority in these great valleys; and kingship, for lack of more rational cooperative authority, met that need... Though neoltihic agriculture had produced a hitherto unheard and abundance of food, this very afluence breed new anxieties. " Throughout Mesopotamian history," Frankfort notes, " the kingship of the gods was believed to have originated, not as a natural concomitant of an orderly society, but as the product of confusiona nd anxiety". But, as I have some times observed, in the case of once poverty-stricken friends who have become affluent, wealth and security themselves may bring on a state of anxiety not experienced when their possesors did not know where the next day=B4s food was coming from... ... The association of kingship with anxiety, fear, and crisis has ben, unfortunately, a long-continued one. Thorkild jacobsen has shown that the oldest known political institution that can be identified, through a Mesopotamian text, is the urban assembly of all free men, This assembly in turn left the power ot deal with current matters in the hands of a group of elders, but in times of emergency they chose a king to "take charge for a limited period". Millenia later, herodotus pictres a similiar delegation among the Medes and Persians.... ..."The command of the palace, like the comman of Anu, cannot be altered. The King=B4s word is right; his utterances, like that of a god, cannot be changed". these words resound with sickening familiarity in our present totalitarian states, wheter 'democratic' or 'communist'... ... The relationship between king and community trascended the loyalties of clan, family, neighborhood; and it explain why kings, or even upstart counterfeits, so often won popular support, as against such minor contenders for power and authority as magnates and nobles. Under this mystique of absolute power, functins that would later be taken over by the machine were at first conceived and executed solely through the unique offices of kingship... .. Action at a distance, through scribes and swift messengers, was one of the identifying marks of the new megamachine; and if the scribes formed the favoured profession it was because could not be effective used without their constant service, to encode and decode the royal messages. " the scribe, he directeth every work that is in his land" an Egyptian New Kingdom composition tell us. In effect, they probably played a part not too dissimilar to that of the political commissars introduced into the Soviet Russian army. they made possible the constant report to political headquarters essential for a centralized organization.... .. "The egyptian magistrate," Erman observes, "cannot think of these people otherwise than collectivelly; the individual workman exist for him no more than the individual soldier exists for our high army officers". Precisely: this was the original pattern of the archetypal megamachine and has never been radically altered... ... These divisions, inevitably, became part of the broader social organization that operated beyond the closed domain of the megamachine. And by the time Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century. B.C. the overall divison of labor and the mintue subdivison of specialism - no longer confined to the megamachine - had reached a point comparable to that which it has come to in our time; for he records that "some physicians are for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth, others for the belly, and others for internal disorders"... In some three centuries, possibly in half that time in Egypt, the human machine had been perfected. the kind of mind that designed the pyramids and the massive temples and walled cities represented a new human type, capable of effecting the abstract organization complex functions in a structural design whose final forma determined every stage in the work. Not merely mathematical calculations but meticulous astronomical observations were necessary for the siting of these great structures, so that each side was oriented exactly in line with the true point of compass... ... The minds that solved these problems and carried out these designs were obviously minds of the highest order, with a unique combination of theoretical analysis, practical grasp, and imaginative foresight: Imhotep, who built the first stone pyramid at Sakkara, was a minister of state, an architech, an astronomer, and a physician. No narrowly trained specialists or 'expertes' these, but men who moved freely over the entire area of existence, like the great artists of the Italian Renascence. their prowess and their self- confidence were equal to any occasion: indeed sometimes defied prudence and outstripped the powers of their mighty machines, as later in the embedded Assouan obelisk, wieghing 1168 tons, never finally detached from the solid rock... ... Now the workers who carried out these designs also had minds of a new order: mechanically conditioned, executing each task in strict obedience to instructions, infintely patient, limiting their response to the word of command. Machine work can be done only by machines........
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.