VOLUME 10: THE ANCIENT STATE by Hugh Nibley Table of Figures Key to Abbreviations v Foreword vii 1. The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State 1 2. Tenting, Toll, and Taxing 33 3. The Hierocentric State 99 4. Sparsiones 148 5. The Unsolved Loyalty Problem: Our Western Heritage 195 6. Victoriosa Loquacitas: The Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of Everything Else 243 7. How to Have a Quiet Campus, Antique Style 287 8. New Light on Scaliger 303 9. Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and Sophistic 311 10. Paths That Stray: Some Notes on Sophic and Mantic 380 Illustration Sources 479 Table of Figures 1. Marked arrows of the four quarters, Zu¤i Indians of New Mexico 6 2. Etruscan votive model of iron, coin of C. Norbanus, 1916 dime 11 3. From Han dynasty tombs at Ma Wang Tui, 174-145 b.c. 13 4. Furniture of Queen Hetepheres, columns from Festival Hall at Karnak 36 5. Portable shrines of Bedouin tribes 37 6. Wheeled vehicles in Egypt 38 6. Jewish silver coin of 450-300 b.c., Greek vase of 500-400 b.c. 39 Ark of covenant, Apse painting, procession for Islamic saint, Luxor 39 7. Darius, royal tombs, tomb of Germanic chieftain, lady unicyclists 40 8. Maritime Theatre at Tivoli, a.d. 117-138 44 9. Assyrian royal camp, Icelandic map, streets of Jerusalem 103 10. 1880 eyewitness sketch of ceremonies in Peking 105 11. Sassanian silver plate, ivory panel, coins 117 12. Traditional yurt 120 13. Trajan shown on congiaria, Constantius II 153 14. Ay and wife Tyi receiving gifts 156 14. Exuberant dancing and rejoicing by assembled court 157 15. Praefect of the Annonae, his wife and two children 159 16. Byzantine sailors squirt Greek fire from bronze syringes 207 17. Symbol of rhetoric--the upraised two fingers of right hand 262 18. Portrait of Joseph Scaliger 305 Key to Abbreviations HZ Historische Zeitschrift JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology JQR Jewish Quarterly Review PG J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus . . . Series Graeca (Paris: Migne, 1857-66), 161 vols. PL J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus . . . Series Latina/Rom (Paris: Migne, 1844-64), 221 vols. PO Fran‡ois Nau and Ren‚ Graffin, eds., Patrologia Orientalis (Paris: Librairie de Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1903-) PT Pyramid Text RE Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyklop„die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1894-1972) RHR Revue de l'histoire des religions Foreword The essays in this volume represent a very significant part of Hugh Nibley's scholarly corpus. Most of the papers were previously published in academic journals, including Classical Journal, Western Political Quarterly, and Western Speech, from the early forties until the midsixties. The only essays in this volume not previously published are "The Sophic and Mantic," originally a series of lectures delivered in 1963 at Yale University, and "Paths That Stray," drafted at about the same time. The topics of these essays range widely: the role of various objects--the arrow and the tent, for example--in archaic state formation; the political ideology and religious and educational values of ancient states; notes on Joseph Justus Scaliger, one of the outstanding scholars of the seventeenth--or any other--century. The theme--at root deeply religious in nature--that pervades most of these essays is the power and pretensions of the ancient state. If the phrase "The Greatest Show on Earth" had not already been preempted and registered as a trademark by Barnum and Bailey, it would have served as an appropriate subtitle to this volume, since it focuses on a central insight of these essays: however compelling and attractive the educational values, the royal ideology, and the symbols and artifacts of the state in antiquity (or in more recent times, for that matter), they represent, at root, a vast fraud--an endless and shameless effort at personal and national self-aggrandizement. Statecraft, as it has generally been practiced, is merely priestcraft in another guise. There is a legitimate "kingdom," Professor Nibley would remind us, but it is not one that seeks power in this world. As he notes in "The Hierocentric State," apostolic Christianity "was keenly conscious of all the imagery of hierocentric rule and ritual and, above all, of the contrast of the two kingdoms. The Apostles . . . tell us, it is true, that there is a universal throne--but it is not on this earth. The devil is the `Prince of this World,' which is no place for the children of the kingdom--they sojourn here as pilgrims and as strangers. . . . Our heritage and kingdom lie beyond: `here we have no abiding kingdom.' " At the center of this divinely sanctioned kingdom, reflecting in its features a heavenly model, is the temple. Like the hierocentric state, the temple (the subject of several of Nibley's essays elsewhere in the Collected Works) is "oriented about a point believed to be the exact center and pivot" of the cosmos. Further, in many ancient states the tent is inextricably connected with the temple. In a dozen other ways, features of the ancient state are like those of the temple. In one crucial respect, however, they differ: the former focuses on the kingdom of this world, while the latter, though constructed on earth, demands loyalty to a kingdom "not of this world." Nibley's breathtaking erudition--reminiscent of the polymathic tradition of scholarship represented by "the great Joseph Justus Scaliger," as he is fond of calling him--can be seen throughout this volume. By turns, he treats the sparsio, a subtle though important feature of Roman religion (reminding us that Dr. Nibley's early university training was in the Classics and Ancient History); the arrow, a cultural artifact found in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as well as among ancient Indo-European peoples and the Indians of North America; and the impact of the rise of rhetoric in the Greco-Roman world and in the ancient Near East. The essays in this volume reflect Nibley's deep and abiding interest in--may we even say passion for?--the origins of ideas and institutions. In his "Intellectual Autobiography" in Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless (1978), Nibley writes that, finding English to be derivative, he "took to Old English to find what was behind it; what was behind it was Latin, and what was behind that was Greek. In those days we thought that you had reached the beginning of everything with the Greeks" (p. xx). Soon, however, he came to understand that "if you really want to get back of reality, science is the thing; and, as Popper assures us, all science is cosmology: I became a passionate amateur astronomer." Then he discovered that, while "everybody wanted to be a scientist," few paid attention to "the records of the race." And so he abandoned the laboratory for the stacks. We can be glad for that decision, since this book--and the others in the Collected Works--are its fruit. Several of these essays reflect Nibley's quest for origins: he studies the arrow and the tent as two primary artifacts in ancient state formation; he examines the oldest ideologies of the state (which reflect conflicts that, as he states, "already exist[ed] in the premortal sphere"); and he investigates ancient values in learning and education and their subsequent corruption by the Sophists, who emphasized form over substance and denied the prophetic, providing a prologue to and explanation for the educational--and spiritual--crisis of our own age. Despite the book's title, these essays are in fact often highly pertinent to our own time. Astute readers will recognize in these essays many now-familiar themes of Nibley's trenchant social commentaries. The foibles of our age are nothing new, repeating what has been done in other eras. For example, "The Unsolved Loyalty Problem," which deals with loyalty and loyalty oaths in antiquity, was originally written at the time of the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s but raises soul-wrenching questions just as relevant today as they ever were. "How to Have a Quiet Campus, Antique Style," was composed on the occasion of a visit of a former vice-president to the campus of Brigham Young University, whom Nibley calls "an authentic Rhetor--Greek, political, ostentatious, and not overly scrupulous." This essay, as well as "Victoriosa Loquacitas," "The Sophic and Mantic," and "Paths That Stray," speak to our own educational and spiritual malaise as much as to that in the ancient world. As I read "Sparsiones," where Nibley calls the sparsio "the authentic heritage of the Golden Age, the sublime economy of which remains throughout antiquity, and indeed in religious ideology down to the very present," I am reminded of themes developed in some of his essays on current social and religious issues in Approaching Zion (volume 9 of the Collected Works), such as "Work We Must, But the Lunch Is Free." The sparsio may be a manifestation, in a Greco-Roman context, of the "lunch" offered by God that is out of all proportion to man's own effort and contribution. All of this brings us back to the profound, implicit message of these essays: wealth, learning (and its imitations), technology, and assertions of divinely bestowed authority give a false sense of security that are no substitute for the Gospel. Some scholars write with the grace of an elephant. It is one of Nibley's virtues to have a prose style that is both strong and vigorous, while at the same time direct and without affectation--something we would expect, given his strong antipathy to the many seductions of rhetoric. Reading him is a constant pleasure, even where the argument is subtle or a page studded with details. To benefit most fully from reading Nibley, one must be like a cup, ready to be filled to the brim, and then some. Reading some of these essays may require some effort, but that effort is invariably well rewarded. We wish to express our thanks to those who have contributed to the production of this volume. Contributors include Glen Cooper, James Fleugel, John Gee, Fran Hafen, Andrew Hedges, Adam Lamoreaux, Brent McNeely, Tyler Moulton, Phyllis Nibley, Art Pollard, Shirley Ricks, Mark Simons, Morgan Tanner, James Tredway, John Welch, and the staff at Deseret Book, particularly Suzanne Brady, Shauna Gibby, and Patricia J. Parkinson. Special thanks are due to Michael Lyon, who provided the illustrations for this volume. Stephen D. Ricks Chapter 1 The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State In the study of ancient statecraft one is constantly running across references to a gadget that seems so minor and so mechanical that its great importance is easily overlooked as a key to the nature and origin of empire. It is the contention of this paper that the marked arrow supplies decisive evidence for describing the process by which hunters were able to impose a system of government on the world. The marked arrow not only supports the growing suspicion that the peasant societies of the great river valleys became conquering empires by virtue of a discipline forced on them from without, but goes on to show how such a transformation could take place. Whereas only farmers possess the industry and stability necessary to sustain a great state, the marked arrow indicates that it was nomad hunters of the steppe, with their expansive and aggressive ways, who first brought such a state into existence. Both elements, expansion and stability, must be combined if real empire--not a mere adding of fields to fields on the one hand, or the quick plunder of a continent on the other, but a program and technique of permanent, universal rule--is to be achieved. The present study undertakes to show how, by using marked arrows in a peculiar way, prehistoric hunters solved the problem of exercising dominion over vast and scattered areas and then applied the same solution to the more difficult problem of welding peasant and nomad cultures into some sort of union, resulting in the great centralized state of historic times. Three basic questions only will be treated: what the marked arrow was, how it worked in exercising its control over the closely knit and widely ranging tribes of the steppes, and how those tribes used it to coerce the unwilling tillers of the soil to cooperate in bringing forth the great state. I. Modern observers have described how the native hunters of the northwestern coasts of America secure their harpoons and arrows by putting marks of identification on them, thus guaranteeing both the return of the weapon to its owner and the right of the latter to possess the game it has slain. In this as in other things these people have preserved the ways of that Magdalenian hunting culture of which their own has long been held to be the last direct survival. From the same venerable source are descended the marked arrows formerly found all along the northern steppe of Asia and among those Scandinavian bear--and whale--hunters who in ancient as in modern times placed their legally registered marks on hunting arrows and harpoons (which they also called "arrows") to insure their return to their owners and lawful possession of the kill. This practice of marking arrows was once general among the American Indians and still survives among primitive hunters in various parts of the world. Indeed, nothing could be more natural than to put some mark of identification on a highly prized object designed to be risked in the gamble of the hunt. But the mark upon the hunter's arrow is more than a mere identification tag; it is a high and holy object, sharing the "immortal power" of the arrow itself. An arrow in flight is an awe-inspiring thing: once released (so many a proverb proclaims) the arrow is beyond human control and finds its mark only by the workings of imponderable fate. Throughout the world the arrow is a prime instrument of divination and enjoys first place in primitive games of chance; it is the spirit weapon that alone can prevail against the demons or pass through the absolute void between other worlds and our own. The incredible range and accuracy of the primitive arrow that so astound the civilized observer are proof to the savage himself of the operation of a supernatural power, as is evident in the prayers that the legendary heroes of the steppe--Finnish, Norse, Russian, Kazakh, Turkish, and Yakut--address to their three enchanted arrows before releasing them, and, for instance, in the arrow-prayers of the Indian and the Bedouin, all eloquently expressing the humility of men about to entrust their lives and their fate to a power beyond their control. The problem of the hunter is to enlist this strange power in his own interest. This requires recourse to the ingenious economy of the hunting-fetish, that go-between without whose aid a man can neither prevail against the game he chases nor enjoy lawful possession of it once taken. Among a variety of fetishes that achieves these ends, the mark placed upon a shaft is particularly useful, for not only does it establish legal claim to the kill, but it is "the soul of the arrow," directing the missile to its prey and endowing it with superhuman force. Both for identification and as hunting magic the sign on an arrow is a preeminently practical thing; it gets and it proves possession--a point on which hunters are extremely sensitive. Out of sight and beyond the hills, the smitten quarry is still the sacred property of him whose mark adorns the fatal arrow: why shouldn't such a useful claim to ownership apply to other things as well? By sticking his arrow in the ground beside any object, the Vedda claims that object as his own. A natural transition carries the authority of the marked arrow into a wider economy of human affairs. II. Throughout the ancient world a ruler was thought to command everything his arrow could touch. Thus, whenever a ruler of the North would summon all his subjects to his presence, he would order an arrow, usually called a "war-arrow" (her”r) to be "cut up" and sent out among them. Upon being touched by this arrow, every man had immediately to "follow the arrow" (fylgja ”rum) to the royal presence or suffer banishment from the kingdom. The arrow itself, in fact, was thought to pursue the wretch who failed to heed the king's behest. The "cutting" of the arrow was the placing of the royal mark upon it, giving it the force of the king's seal. As often as not the arrow took the form of a simple rod (stefni), bearing marks of authorization while the message was delivered by word of mouth, a technique recalling that of Australian and some American primitives in sending their message-sticks. The summons-arrow is common to the whole northern steppe, where exceedingly archaic forms of it are to be found and where it has survived until recent times. Both as war-arrow and invitation stick (depending on whether it is rejected or accepted) it appears among the American Indians, especially of the Northwest. But its most significant occurrence is found in altered but easily recognizable forms in the classical civilizations of the Old World. The herald of Zeus goes forth to summon his subjects, armed with a golden wand that subdues all creatures with its touch. Hermes got this staff originally from Apollo, who brought it with him as an arrow from the land of the Hyperboreans, somewhere in the northern steppe. Hermes' specialty is rushing through the air by means of his messenger-staff, the caduceus, which is winged at one end like an arrow and pointed at the other; holding to this the god is able to fly through space, to the upper and lower worlds if need be, exactly as Abaris, the Hyperborean shaman, flies over all the earth as Apollo's emissary when he grasps the arrow that the god has given him as a sign of his authority. It is not necessary to multiply parallels to show that in the earliest stratum of Greek legend we have a typical summons-arrow, wending its way from the far north to impose law and civilization on the world in the name of Zeus. The first message of Rome to Carthage was a symbolic caduceus and javelin (hastae simulacrum) inviting the Carthaginians to submit or be subdued by force. In Israel the Lord, calling upon a city to declare its allegiance to him, sends his rod to it, and a herald (a man of tushiah), seeing the name on the rod, calls out to the people: "Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it" (Micah 6:9). That this rod was an arrow will presently become apparent. An impressive demonstration of the authority of the summons-arrow is the early and widespread rite of the four world-arrows. The Olaf-Tryggvason Saga states a number of times that summons-arrows were sent "in the four directions." For the oldest and greatest festival of India, the Asvamedha, the king must send messengers in the four directions to order "all who have been conquered by his arrows" to appear before him. The common use of the summons-arrow in Aryan India makes the meaning of the rite clear. At the creation of the world, according to Zu¤i doctrine, four marked arrows, "the word-painted arrows of destiny," were carried "to the regions of men, four in number" ( cf. fig. 1), an event resembling a yearly ritual of the Kwakiutls of the Northwest. A variant of this is the shooting of arrows in the four directions, as in the Ghost-dance of the Sioux, where four sacred arrows were shot into the air towards the cardinal points to symbolize the conquest of the earth by the tribe. A like practice is attributed in Jewish legend to the Emperor Titus and to Nimrod who, from Jerusalem and Babel respectively, shot arrows in the four directions and claimed dominion over all that lay within their range. The rite appears also in Indo-Iranian creation myths and in the Sumerian story of Adad and the Zu-bird. In the Old World and the New it is also common to depict the swastika with its four arms formed of marked arrows--plainly the four world-arrows. Related to the world-arrows is the worldwide practice of making a sanctuary by marking off an area on the ground with the point of an arrow, dividing it into four sections by a cross with its arms to the cardinal points. The Germanic custom of claiming land by shooting a fiery arrow over it may be related to the oldest measurement in India, which was the range of a throwing-stick, or "measurement by arrow-casts," later supplanted by measurement in bow-lengths. The apportionment of land by the drawing of arrow-lots was common to the Assyrians and the ancient Norse (whence the expression "lot and scot") and recalls the common medieval custom of transferring the ownership of land baculi more, by the conveyance of a staff or arrow. A marked arrow passed among the guests at a royal banquet in the North announced the transmission of a man's estate to his heir. The ancient and universal concept that God governs the universe and keeps order in it by an arrow, the swift messenger of his wrath that searches out and blasts any who would challenge his authority, can only have had its rise in a real summons-arrow, for everywhere this heavenly arrow--the thunderbolt--is held to take the tangible actual form of a prehistoric stone-headed arrow. It is the arrow of the summus deus, held on loan by an earthly king as a gauge of divine support, that everywhere gives the latter his earthly power and authority, just as the marked arrow of the individual hunter, as a fetish or grant of supernatural power, gives him might and dominion far beyond his own puny capacity. The dread offices of the marked arrow were not reserved to kings alone. Throughout the northern steppe it was the custom to require all who came to the king's assembly to bring arrows with them and to present them personally to the king. From these arrows a census was taken, each man submitting but a single shaft, which represented him and bore his mark, for "both in the Old World and the New, the arrow came to stand as the token and symbol of a man." To arrows thus used may be applied, for want of a better term, the name "census-arrow." The census-arrow is found among the Scythians, Tartars, Persians, Georgians, Norsemen, and American Indians, and it survived in recognizable form in India, Egypt, and the Far East. But like the summons-arrow, it is most frequently met in altered but unmistakable form among nations that had long given up the hunter's way of life. One of the oldest Jewish-Christian legends tells how all the men of Israel were required to attend a great assembly, each bringing his staff, to be handed over to the high priest and used in a lottery for the distribution of brides. In the Qur'anic version of the same story, it is not simply a staff, however, but an arrow that every man must present, and this conforms not only with the primitive Bedouin usage, but also with the original Jewish custom. For in Israel it was necessary for every man at a national assembly to be represented by a "rod" with his name on it (Numbers 17:2); every tribe was a rod as well (Numbers 34:13-29), the tribal rods being "each one inscribed with the name of the tribe." Now the purpose of these rods, Gaster has pointed out, was to determine allotments of brides, and the allotment was performed by throwing rods into the air and reading their message by the manner of their fall; this, Gaster observes, is "tantamount" to the shooting of arrows. It is in fact the commonest form of arrow divination, and seems to hark back to an older dart, or throwing-stick, which is commonly identified and interchangeable with the arrow in archaic divination practices. Gaster's interpretation is substantiated when one turns to the northern steppe to find ancient Scythian, Turkish, Finnish, Mongol, and Ossete tribes regulating their land- and bride-lotteries by the actual shooting of arrows that were marked, like the rods of Israel, with the contestants' names. Related practices are found throughout the North. Thus the winning of Penelope has supplied Homer with a prize nugget, which Finsler has traced back to the northern steppe. The use of all these marked arrows in the making of legal decisions takes us right into the heliastic courts of the Greeks, where every juror had to present a specially colored wand (bakteria) for admission, exchanging it for a symbolon, which he would exchange in turn for his day's subsistence. Both the name and the use of the token identify it (as any lexicon will) with the classical tesserae, or feasting tickets, and the first symbolon, or tessera hospitalis, on record was the arrow that Apollo gave to Abaris: the scholiast calls this arrow a symbolon and says that it supplied Abaris with all the food and drink he needed. Another link between the original arrow-token and the classical tesserae is furnished by that common but enigmatic form of tessera described as a "section of reed." For from time immemorial the Arabs had employed reed arrow-shafts, devoid alike of feathers and heads, but bearing some marks of individual ownership, "to make division" at their tribal feasts. In the Pastor of Hermas, all who come to the assembly of the Lord present sections of willow-reed for admission, each receiving his proper place as designated by certain cuts (schismata) on his rod. Slips of wood were used also in the North to assign places at banquets, but these first appear as arrows, with the specification that "every man's arrows were marked." The red Indian who received an invitation-stick (usually arrow-formed) was required to keep it and bring it with him as a ticket to the feast. Why and how arrows, of all things, came to be used as feasting tickets may be best explained by an episode from the Orvar-Odds Saga. The text gives an authentic picture of a time when a great hunting culture flourished on the plains to the east of the Baltic. There is a tremendous hunt, after which everyone returns to the royal hirthstofa where each guest is assigned his proper seat. All the game is then brought in and thrown in a heap before the king (as in the Greek katabolia), who personally examines all the arrows and, as the marking of each is noted, has his herald give public recognition to its owner for his contribution to the banquet. The same pleasant rite enlivened the feasts of the heathen Bedouin: Jacob has pointed out the survival of the arrow-lottery from those tribal meals of the Arabs at which all the meat was first thrown in a heap and then distributed by portions to each man as his arrow was drawn and his name called out. Various hunting tribes of the Eastern and Western hemispheres have the same custom, whereas the Greek and Roman tesserae follow the pattern: the tesserae were regarded as lots and distributed by lot, each holder receiving the right to share in a feast to which he was supposed to have contributed some prize of the hunt. Marked arrows could, like the Hebrew rods, represent tribes as well as individuals at the feasts. Each of the fifty-two Tartar tribes in the time of Genghis Khan would bring an arrow marked with its name to the great assembly, where one man would be chosen king of the whole nation by a double lottery, first of tribal arrows and then of shafts bearing the names of individuals belonging to whichever tribe won the first drawing. Bundles of fifty-two rods, bearing individual and tribal markings, also represented the full membership of Indian tribes in assembly: Culin says these rods were once arrows. Bundles of seven divination arrows standing for the combined gentes of the Osage recall similar tribal bundles of the Scythians, Alans, Slavs, and ancient Germans (who also chose their leaders by drawing willow lots), and these have been compared in turn with the Persian baresma and the Roman fasces ( cf. fig. 2), a bundle of twelve rods (the rods of Israel were likewise tied in a symbolic bundle of twelve), standing originally for twelve Etruscan tribes. The cosmic numbers seven, twelve, and fifty-two have astral and divinatory significance and suggest the modern card deck, which Culin holds is derived from "a quiver made up of the different arrows of the individuals of a tribe." This communal aspect of the marked arrow was always fundamental to its nature, since arrow-marking was ever as much a bid for public recognition as for divine support. III. The rise of the great state depended, as Moret has recently pointed out, among other things on the development of writing, by which art alone a ruler can extend his word of command indefinitely in time and space. Such control at a distance was the very function of the marked arrow, and Hilprecht has given strong arguments for deriving the earliest written documents, archaic cylinder seals, from "the hollow shaft of an arrow, marked with symbols and figures." If Hilprecht's theory failed of general acceptance, it was because no one could see how the arrow fitted into the picture. In view of the uses of the marked arrow by hunters, however, that should be fairly clear, especially if one considers a few related facts that may be briefly listed. 1. The earliest gods of writing, Nebo, Cadmus, Hermes, etc., were arrow gods. 2. Some systems of writing of mysterious origin, such as Ogam, Runic, and Himyaritic, first appear as arrow-marking. 3. In the Far East, according to Culin, "the ancestry of the book may be traced to the bundle of engraved or painted arrow-derived slips used in divination" ( cf. fig. 3). 4. The cylinder-seal and the arrow are interchangeable not only as tokens but actually as weapons (an utterly incongruous equation in itself), the seal serving as an arrow-missile, and the marked arrow serving as a seal. 5. The first writing, the first seals, and the marked arrow all spring from the same basic need: if, as Herzfeld maintains, the idea of property that produced the seals and writing is as old as humanity itself, may we not look for a still older form of property-marking than the cylinder seal? And is not such a form the marked arrow, which everywhere precedes it and so strikingly resembles it? That the cylinder seal originated very probably somewhere in the north of Asia supports the suspicion. Whatever its origin, the writing of documents was conceived for the same end as the marking of arrows, and the two meet on common ground in the archaic cylinder seal; seal and arrow grew up together, having performed identical functions from the first as instruments of identification and authority. Equipped with such an effective tool, the men of the steppes enjoyed a powerful advantage over the settled agrarians who did not have, because they did not need, anything like it. Against them it was devastating and achieved a permanent conquest; it was an utterly cynical form of persuasion to which they had no answer. The peasants of the Old World tell a remarkably uniform tale of a mad hunter from the North and East who claimed to rule the world in the insane conviction that he had conquered God with his arrow. Such a one was the archaic and mysterious Nimrod, the mighty hunter of the steppes, who shot an arrow into the sky (standard shaman practice) and when a shower of blood ensued believed that he had conquered God and won for himself the universal kingship. The story is based on a genuine hunting ritual of great antiquity, but the literary records all chill with horror at the thought of the man who first turned his arrows from the hunting of beasts to become "a hunter of men," who founded the first great state, invented organized warfare, and "made all people rebellious against God." He it was who challenged God to a shooting-match with the blasphemous boast, "It is I who kill, and I who let live!" In reply to which his followers were turned to stone by God's arrows, while their leader was driven mad in the same peculiar manner (by a fly in the brain) as that Roman Emperor who would destroy God's temple and who shot his arrow in the four directions from Jerusalem, claiming dominion over the whole world. A hundred names might be substituted for that of Nimrod. Japheth, the common ancestor of the people of the northern steppe (Genesis 10:2-5), as Japetus, challenged the rule of Zeus and was smitten by the thunderbolt, even as was his son Prometheus, and for that matter all the other giants. It needs only little research to learn that the crime and the punishment of Nimrod was repeated in the case of Aesculapius, his father Apollo (the Admetus story), the Hyperborean Orion, Sisyphus, Salmoneus, the Emperor Julian (who was smitten by St. Mercurius, the arrow of God), Romulus Silvius, Otos and Ephialtes, Nebuchadnezzar (as legendary son of Nimrod), Lepreus, Bootes, the Cyclopes, Gog and Magog, Esau, Goliath and his brother, who had an archery contest with David, Eurotos, Philoctetes, Herakles, and even Odysseus. The Cannibal Hymn from pre-Dynastic Egypt describes the deceased Pharaoh as a Mad Hunter who seizes the government of the universe and throws all things into disorder, just as the equally ancient Vulture Stele describes the great god Ningirsu as "a beast of prey from the steppe," even while praising him as the author and ruler of all. Folklorists have long identified these terrible hunters of the East with the ubiquitous wild huntsman, a great lord or lady who will do nothing but hunt, who holds his agrarian hinds in utter contempt, and publicly announces that he prefers hunting to heaven. Invariably this monster is in the eyes of the peasantry under a terrible curse, and he usually ends up by being turned to stone when God's bolt overtakes him. Yet his is the rightful rule: "In the rural life of Europe," write Peake and Fleure, "the waste and hunting rights down to our time have typically belonged to the 'lords' in a very special and intimate way," and they argue that this equation of hunting and ruling is the result of prehistoric invasions of Europe by hunting nomads from the Russo-Turkestan steppe. Such a conquest is not a unique event in history, however, but a characteristic one, as when in the eleventh century Saxon farmers found themselves saddled with the outrageous hunting laws of an invading Norse aristocracy. It is the monotonous theme of Asiatic history right into the nineteenth century, when Khazakh, Kalmuk, and Jungar nomads moved in from the east to subject and "govern" the peasants exactly as they were oppressed and controlled by the Scythians in the days of Strabo. The tradition of the Mad Hunter presents the uniform picture of peasant societies enduring the overlordship of nomad intruders from the perennial reservoirs of central Asia, whose way of life was utterly abhorrent to them, and to whom their own was quite incomprehensible. IV. But may the human race be so neatly divided into men of the steppe and men tilling the soil? It may indeed, and it is the arrow that does the dividing. Since the bow can be used effectively only by experts, its general employment ceases whenever hunting is given up as a way of life, only to be resumed in periods of migration. Archery is thus either all-important or negligible in a culture, and the ancient world is divided sharply into two camps, those who use the bow and those who do not. The division is of course geographical: when encroaching forests drove the big game out of Europe at the end of the Paleolithic, the hunters followed their quarry, to preserve on the steppes of Asia a way of life largely forgotten in their former homelands. The resulting cultural dichotomy is a basic fact of history, since civilization as history knows it is the rather calamitous result of bringing these two forms together. Here the marked arrow seems to have played a major role. The civilized people of antiquity had a common tradition that the summus deus at the beginning of everything won dominion of the universe by smiting a dark adversary with an arrow. As has been seen, God rules the universe by an arrow, and the classic emblems of authority--scepter, wand, spear, trident, double axe, crozier, lotus-staff, fleur-de-lis, and so forth--may be traced back rather easily to a common identity with the prehistoric thunderbolt, taking the tangible form of a stone-headed arrow. Throughout the vast reaches of Asia, men were, to use Pliny's expression, "under subjection to the reed." From the Chinese war-lord in the East to Saladin in the West, the arrow--a real arrow and a marked one--is the ultimate symbol of authority, the banner itself being originally but a message-strip tied to an arrow. With that arrow go those techniques of empire which no farmers could have invented: even Rome borrowed her theory and practice of empire whole-cloth from the East, where, so far as we know, the first man to achieve actual rule of the civilized world was no Egyptian or Babylonian (though they all dreamed of being Cosmocrator) but Khian, a nomad Hyksos from the steppes. Symbols of rule and ownership at a lower level were those armorial bearings of the Middle Ages which, whether copied from the tribal insignia of the East or adapted from the earlier house-marks and landmarks of the West, were originally the arrow-marks of hunters. The aristocracy were hunters, whose arrogant and blasphemous mottoes (usually proclaiming the bearer's power to maim if offended) and whose weird and unearthly disguises were designed to inspire paralyzing dread in the simple rustics who by the mere suspicion of presuming to hunt on their own would incur penalties worse than death. Whenever the noble strain was threatened with extinction, it could always count on eager volunteers from the ranks of the bourgeoisie to replenish the blood and maintain the hunting tradition: add to Froissart's testimony the English glue-manufacturer in his vast, dark "lodge," or the Russian baron, or the German industrialist of the nineteenth century diligently cultivating the hunter's way of life in the midst of purely agrarian societies of great antiquity. The ways of the hunting nobility with all their social and political implications have been traced back to the great hunting parks of Asiatic monarchs. These "paradises" prove beyond any doubt that kings must be hunters. The ancients, East and West, visualized power, glory, and dominion as embodied in the person of the Cosmocrator, earthly counterpart of the creator, enthroned in the midst of a vast assembly of birds and animals as well as of men and jinns. The picture of the great king being acclaimed in a single mighty chorus by all living things assembled before his throne meets us full-blown in Sumerian creation hymns; it is reflected in accounts of Adam, Yima, Orpheus, Ninurta, and others as Lord of the Animals and King of the Golden Age; it is a favorite device of the Hellenistic orator and the darling theme of Jewish and Arabic commentators, whose Solomon sits in the midst of the demons and animals as ruler of the world; it produced the Physiologus and the Bestiaries and provides the setting of Reynard the Fox and many a scene in Kalila and Dimna, Babrius, and Aesop, and it begot the Medieval Parliament of Birds, which is not so far from Aristophanes. And wherever we are treated to this wonderful spectacle of the world-king and the assembly of the animals, whether in song, drama, fable, or sermon, it is made to serve as a commentary on government. But the grandiose concept of the universal ruler gathering all the birds and animals in his presence (the theme of the Reynard and hoopoe stories is that one creature alone fails to answer the summons) is no mere flight of fancy nor invention of allegory. Eyewitness accounts of the vast ordered animal parks of the Great Khan, the Mongol emperors at Peking, and the kings of Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia leave no doubt that the staggering project was actually carried out as an adjunct of universal rule. The thing was adopted by the Hellenistic rulers along with their claims to divine authority and copied from them (or taken over directly from Baghdad) by the Byzantine emperors, who transmitted it in turn to the kings of Europe--throne and court everywhere follow the same pattern, which is that of Solomon enthroned in the midst of men and animals. The royal parks of central Asia (the Chinese call the park the Paradise of the West, and the Babylonians placed it in the North, cf. Isaiah 14:13-14) were no invention of royal vanity, for the system of reserving certain areas in which animals are sacrosanct (called by the Arabs jiwar) is a perfectly practical one. The actual assembly of the animals recalls the great tribal hunts or animal-drives of the past: al-Biruni has described such a drive taking place in the immense royal park at Baghdad in the tenth century: it was ritual, of course, but when was the hunt not a ritual? It should be remembered that ritual animal-drives, like the great dances of the Indians of the Southwest, are aimed at increasing and protecting the game as well as exploiting it. But when game is thus protected, and when it is herds of ungulates that one is driving in the hunt, how close is hunting to herding! Jacob speaks of the tame gazelles that regularly turn up in the jiwar whenever animals and men meet on a peace footing. Nevertheless, hunting and not herding is the original motif, though the distinction between them is sometimes very fine. V. Though the arrow rules the world, its victory is not final. For over against its claims must be set the equally valid and venerable claims of the Black-Earth, the Mother of Gods and Men, inculcating the deep conviction that a man can possess only the earth he "quickens," all other ownership coming under the head of fraud. To those who work the soil, the holding of more land than one can exploit is wasteful and meaningless, an offense to God and an affront to Justice herself. The hunter's arrow, on the other hand, marked with his noble "crest," gives him, within the limits of a preserve necessarily much vaster than that of any farmer, the divine right to possess and dominate whatever it can reach. And so the issue is drawn: to those who held broad lands, baculi more, the arrow was the high and holy symbol of possession; to those who cultivated those lands it was "looked upon . . . as the appropriate missile of the robber, or of one who lurked in ambush." The antithesis is complete: there is no understanding between Abraham and Nimrod because each is sure the other is mad. At present a man's signature performs the offices formerly consigned to his seal and for which but a few generations back the actual possession of a staff or tally-stick was indispensable. Thus man has taken another step away from the arrow, but that is only incidental: even the most primitive alteration, the removal of head and feathering, changed the form of the thing almost beyond recognition. It is the function that remains intact. A mere mark or symbol still bestows proprietary right, operating through unlimited time and space, over anything on earth. This is no mere refinement of lawyer's wit, nor is it a universal human concept: it is rather, as its lineage shows, the hunter's peculiar idea of property and right. Since the marked arrow has long since become an antiquarian oddity, it would be wrong to claim that it still divides the world into two camps as of old. Nevertheless there is no other teacher that can show so well how our world came to be a perennially divided one. The marked arrow demonstrates what without it would be a mere surmise: that civilization is the issue of a forced union between two fundamentally hostile ways of life, a union which however productive of history has never been a happy one. This article was originally published in Western Political Quarterly 2/3 (1949): 328-44. Figure 1. The marked arrows of the four quarters, Zu¤i Indians of New Mexico, c. 1900. Usually the only color used was a somber black painted on the wooden shaft, but sometimes the color of the respective direction was used as well. In more finished arrows, the tail feathers were notched and tufted to correspond with the bands, serving as mnemonic reminders of the creation myths. Figure 2. The earliest surviving fasces, c. 600 b.c., is this Etruscan votive model of iron (A) showing Eastern influence in its use of the labrys, the double-axe of Crete. This venerable symbol was later adopted by the Romans, who modified it by using their own securis axe first as a sign of sacrifice and then later of war and capital punishment. On a coin of C. Norbanus (B), 83 b.c., the consular fasces is flanked by a wheat kernel and the snaked-headed caduceus. Our own dime of 1916 (C) was popular until the symbol was tarnished by the Fascist movement. Here the arrow shaft comes full circuit, fulfilling its destiny as the ultimate embodiment of power. Figure 3. From the famous Han dynasty tombs at Ma Wang Tui, 174-145 b.c., come these examples of a bamboo "book" (B) listing a tomb inventory as well as a bundle of notched peach wood sticks (A). An archaic custom even then, each stick represented the individual servant who accompanied his mistress into the next life. Today, patients wishing to divine the god of medicine's prescription consult the tsien tung (C) by shaking the quiver-shaped bamboo container until one of the inscribed sticks "jumps" out. Notes 1. Moritz Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte des Menschen, 2 vols. (Vienna: Hastlben, 1909), 2:392-96; Thorkild Jacobsen, "Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2 (1943): 159-72; Carl H. Bishop, "The Beginnings of Civilization in Eastern Asia," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1940): 431, 433-45. 2. Robert F. Heizer, "Aconite Poison Whaling in Asia and America: An Aleutian Transfer to the New World," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 24 (1943): 421, 429-36, 440, 446; Ales Hrdlicka, The Aleutian and Commander Islands (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 1945), 130, 132; Theodor W. Danzel, Die Anf„nge der Schrift (Leipzig: Vorgtl„nder, 1912), 38. 3. The history of the problem is given by Walter J. Hoffman, "The Graphic Art of the Eskimos," Annual Report of the U.S. National Museum (1895): 763-65, 934-38; see F. M. Bergounioux and Andr‚ Glory, Les premiers hommes (Paris: Didier, 1945), 232-39. 4. Hjalmar S. Falk, Altnordische Waffenkunde (Kristiania: Dybwad, 1914), 101. 5. Walter J. Hoffman, "The Menomini Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 14 (1892-1893): 278; J. Owen Dorsey, "Omaha Dwellings, Furniture, and Implements," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 13 (1891-1892): 287; William Bray, "Observations on the Indian Method of Picture-Writing," Archaeologia 6 (1782): 160; Hermann Meyer, "Bows and Arrows in Central Brazil," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1896): 553, 561, 568, 571, 576-82; Fritz Krause, In den Wildnissen Brasiliens (Leipzig: Doigl„nder, 1911), 264, 268-70, 360, 392-94. 6. Danzel, Anf„nge der Schrift, 34-38; Stewart Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," Report of the U.S. National Museum under the Direction of the Smithsonian Institution (1896): 881. 7. Hanns B„chtold-St„ubli, Handw”rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols. (Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1927-42), 6:1597-98; Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), D1314.1.1-5; Stewart Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 24 (1902-1903): 36-43. 8. On demon-arrows, see Ignaz Goldziher, Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1896), 1:29-33, 87-89, 116-17; B„chtold-St„ubli, Handw”rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 6:1597; Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ed. James E. Stallybrass, 3 vols. (London: Sonnenschein & Allen, 1880), 2:846. On the space-traveling arrow of the wizards, Herodotus, History IV, 36, cf. Erich Bethe, "Abaris," in RE 1:16-17; James Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1883), 2:153; V”lusp , 36-37. 9. John M. Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 2 vols. (New York: Columbian, 1891), 1:80-81; Paul B. Du Chaillu, The Viking Age, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1890), 2:93-94; A. S. Orlov, Kazakhskii Geroicheskii Epos (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1945), 41, n. 2; 83; N. K. Dmitriev, Turyetskie Narodnye Skaski (Leningrad: Government Press, 1939), 98-102; Friedrich Giese, Trkische M„rchen (Jena: Diederich, 1925), 75-89. 10. Jeremiah Curtin and J. N. B. Hewitt, "Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 32 (1910-1911): 317-18; Frank H. Cushing, "Zu¤i Fetiches," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 2 (1880-1881): 41-43; cf. Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," 881, n. 1; Matilda C. Stevenson, "The Zu¤i Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Societies, and Ceremonies," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 23 (1901-1902): 317-49. The Arab hunter must call on Allah with each bow-shot; Al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jami c as-Sahih, ed. M. Krehl and T. W. Juynboll (Leiden: Brill, 1908), 4:7, and breathe on his arrows, exactly like the Zu¤i; Georg Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben (Berlin: Mayer & Mller, 1897), 125. For arrow-prayers in India, see Victor Henry, La magie dans l'Inde antique (Paris: Leroux, 1904), 151-52. 11. Cushing, "Zu¤i Fetiches," 39; John P. Gillin, The Barama River Caribs of British Guiana (Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1936), 180, 183-84; Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:512. 12. Eduard Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur amerikanischen Sprach- und Altertumskunde, 5 vols. (Berlin: Asher, 1902), 3:378; Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," 881; Edward W. Nelson, "The Eskimo about Bering Strait," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 18 (1896-1897): 157-61, cf. 154; Danzel, Anf„nge der Schrift, 34; Du Chaillu, Viking Age, 2:92-94. To give his arrows greater power and accuracy, Ishi changed the markings on them; Saxton Pope, Hunting with the Bow and Arrow (New York: Putnam, 1947), 26-27. 13. Saxo, Historia Danorum, ed. Hermann Jantzen (Berlin: Felber, 1900), 244; for the Norse expressions, see Richard Cleasby, Gudbrand Vigfusson, and William A. Craigie, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2d ed. (Oxford: University Press, 1957), s.v. "her”r." 14. Karl Weinhold, "Beitr„ge zu den deutschen Kriegsaltertmern," Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 29 (1891): 548; the king's arrow pursues breakers of the King's Peace; B„chtold-St„ubli, Handw”rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 6:1598. 15. Weinhold, "Beitr„ge zu den deutschen Kriegsaltertmern," 548; Finnur J¢nsson, ed., Egils Saga Skalgr¡mssonar (Halle: Niemeyer, 1924), 9, n. 10. 16. Cleasby and Vigfusson, Icelandic-English Dictionary, 42. The message-staff (bothkefli) was readily "in einen Pfeil umgeschnitzt," Weinhold, "Beitr„ge zu den deutschen Kriegsaltertmern," 548. 17. Weinhold, "Beitr„ge zu den deutschen Kriegsaltertmern," 548-49. German Botenh”lzer survived into the late Middle Ages; Saxo, Historia Danorum, ed. Jantzen, 244, n. 1. Summons-arrows were used by the Seljuk Turks in the thirteenth century; these still survive in North India, Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:521; cf. the "alarm-staff" of the Lama gods; Charles A. S. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1941), 213. 18. Walter E. Roth, "An Introductory Study of the Arts, Crafts, and Customs of the Guiana Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 38 (1916-1917): 582; Walter E. Roth, "An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 30 (1908-1909): 362; Garrick Mallery, "Pictographs of the North American Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 4 (1882-1883): 87-88; Walter J. Hoffman, "The Mide'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 7 (1885-1886): pl. xii facing p. 226. 19. Apollo gave the staff to Hermes as a symbolon (Homer, Hymn to Hermes, 527-30) exactly as he gave an arrow-symbolon to his friend Abaris, the Hyperborean, who used it as Hermes did his staff, to carry him through the air as a messenger of the god; O. Crusius, "Hyperboreer," in Wilhelm H. Roscher, ed., Ausfhrliches Lexikon der griechischen und r”mischen Mythologie, 7 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 1:2819. On the Hyperborean origin of Apollo's arrow and Hermes' caduceus, see ibid., 1:2807-9. 20. Crusius, "Hyperboreer," in Roscher, Ausfhrliches Lexikon, 1:2815. Origen, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) III, 31, in PG 11:959-60, reports the belief that Abaris shot himself through the air like an arrow, a favorite trick of the Asiatic shaman. 21. Robert Eitrem, "Hermes," in RE 8:781-84, and Ernst Samter, "Caduceus," in RE 3:1170-71. It is the arrow which gives the title of Pantokrator, ibid., 8:791; Otto Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1906), 2:1072. 22. Gellius, Attic Nights X, 27. 23. Cf. Jeremiah 48:17; Ezekiel 19:10-14; Abraham S. Yahuda, The Accuracy of the Bible (London: Heinemann, 1934), 106-13. 24.Olaf-Tryggvason Saga, c. 102, 104, 222. 25. Paul ‚. Dumont, L'Asvamedha (Paris: Geuthner, 1927), 38, 356, 384, 386. See n. 17 above. 26. Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," 33, 46; cf. Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 3:378-80, fig. 6, for recent Mexican Indian examples; Franz Boas, "The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians," Annual Report of the U.S. National Museum (1895): 508-9, 517, 521. 27. James Mooney, "The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 14 (1892-1893): 832, 915-17; the conquest motif, 788-89. 28. M. Gaster, "Divination (Jewish)," in James Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1928), 4:810, cf. Leonard W. King, "Divination (Assyro-Babylonian)," in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 4:785; the Nimrod version is in the Book of Jasher 9:35. 29. Albert J. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, vol. 6 in Louis H. Gray, ed., Mythology of All Races, 13 vols. (Boston: Jones, 1917), 302-3, 308; Darmesteter, Zend-Avesta, 2:94-96, 103; 1:18-21. The Zu-bird, contending for the government of the world, was smitten by the arrow of the god, who thereupon "founds his cities in the four regions," Peter Jensen, Assyrisch-babylonische Mythen und Epen (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1900), 49-53. 30. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, 302-3, 308; B„chtold-St„ubli, Handw”rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 6:1598; Francis La Flesche, "The Osage Tribe: Rite of Vigil," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 39 (1917-1918): 234; Cushing, "Zu¤i Fetiches," 42; Hoffman, "Menomini Indians," 196-99; Cicero, De Divinatione I, 17; Ludwig Weniger, "Feralis Exercitus," Archiv fr Religionswissenschaft 9 (1906): 246-48. 31. J. A. MacCulloch, Eddic Mythology, vol. 2 in Gray, Mythology of All Races, 201. 32. E. Washburn Hopkins, "Remarks on the Form of Numbers, the Method of Using Them, and Numerical Categories of the Mahabharata," JAOS 23 (1902): 144-47; the arrow cast "is confined to estimating time." The Osage arrows that measure the earth "in flight denote time" as well; La Flesche, "Osage Tribe," 207, 265-67, 369. 33. Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925), 2:275; Benjamin Williams, "On the Land of Ditmarsh and the Mark Confederation," Archaeologia 37 (1856): 381-83. 34. Robert Riddell, "Some Accounts of a Symbol of Ancient Investitures in Scotland," Archaeologia 11 (1794): 47; Octavius Morgan, "On Episcopal and Other Rings of Investiture," Archaeologia 36 (1855): 393-97; Williams, "On the Land of Ditmarsh," 389. 35. Flateyjarb¢k I, 164. 36. See Aeschylus, Eumenides 727-30; Prometheus Bound 358-63, 374, 917; Vergil, Aeneid VI, 587; Hugo Winckler, Keilinschriftliches Textbuch zum Alten Testament (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903), 117, 123; Williams, Chinese Symbolism, 396-97; 2 Kings 13:17-19; Psalms 7:13; 18:13-18; 64:7, and so forth; Zechariah 9:14; Qur'an 18:44; Bernhard Schweitzer, Herakles (Tbingen: Mohr, 1922), 184-86; E. A. Wallis Budge, Book of the Dead, Papyrus of Ani, 3 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1913), 2:400-401. 37. Christian S. Blinkenberg, The Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 87-101; Gerald A. Wainwright, "The Emblem of Min," JEA 17 (1931): 186-93; Gerald A. Wainwright, "Letopolis," JEA 18 (1932): 161-63; and Gerald A. Wainwright, "The Bull Standards of Egypt," JEA 19 (1933): 43; Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, 2:773, n. 3. 38. Hermann Kees, „gypten, in Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 3, pt. 1, 3a (Munich: Beck, 1933), 177; Psalms 45:6; Winckler, Keilinschriftliches Textbuch zum Alten Testament, 117, 123; Henry, Magie dans l'Inde antique, 151-63; R. C. Boer, ed., Orvar-Odds Saga (Halle: Niemeyer, 1892), vii-ix, xiv-xv, 14, 69; Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 1:167, 2:434, 530; when the hero twangs his bow, Zeus himself thunders in the heavens, Homer, Odyssey XXI, 410-14. 39. Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," 881; cf. Hoernes, Natur-und Urgeschichte, 1:562-64. 40. Herodotus, History IV, 81. 41. Jean Joinville, Histoire de St. Louis (Paris: Hachette, 1883), xciii, 475-78 (Tartars); Cl‚ment I. Huart and Louis Delaporte, L'Iran antique: ‚lam et Perse et la civilisation iranienne (Paris: Michel, 1952), 381; Friedrich von Spiegel, Erƒnische Altertumskunde, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1871-78), 2:86-87; Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, 302-3, 308; that these are census arrows appears from Havamal 120a, 130a; for the Indians, see Boas, "Kwakiutl Indians," 522; Garrick Mallery, "Picture Writing of the American Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 10 (1888-1889): 365; Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," 227-29 (fig. 307), 51, 233-34. 42. Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:521, n. 1 (India); C. R. Lepsius, "Der Bogen in der Hieroglyphik," Zeitschrift fr „gyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde 10 (1872): 86, cf. Wainwright, "The Emblem of Min," 190-91; James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 12 vols., 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 9:126 (Koryak); Ren‚ Grousset et al., L'Asie orientale des origines au XV e siŠcle (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1941), 442. 43. Proto-Evangelium of James 9:1; Clement, Epistola I ad Corinthios (First Epistle to the Corinthians) 43, in PG 1:295; Angelo S. Rappoport, Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel, 3 vols. (London: Gresham, 1928), 2:254-58. 44. Qur'an 3:39. 45. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 43, in PG 1:295. 46. Gaster, "Divination (Jewish)," in Hastings, Encyclopaedia 4:809-10. 47. Julius Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1927), 132; Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," 383, 33, 45; cf. W. J. McGee, "The Seri Indians," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 17 (1895-1896): 198-200; Wainwright, "Letopolis," 162, and "Bull Standards of Egypt," 50-51; Egidio Forcellini, Lexicon Totius Latinatatis, s.v. "baculus," no. 9. 48. Dmitriev, Turyetskie Narodnye Skaski, 203-5; Giese, Trkische M„rchen, 115. 49. Georg A. Finsler, Homer, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913-18), 1:1:84. 50. Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution LXV, 1-4; Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 297. 51. Crusius, "Hyperboreer," in Roscher, Ausfhrliches Lexikon, 1:2819. 52. See Hugh Nibley, "Sparsiones," Classical Journal 40 (June 1945): 538-39, nn. 152-54; reprinted in this volume, pages 189-90, nn. 152-54. 53. Qur'an 2:216; Ahlwardt, ed., al-Mu callaqat II, 104; IV, 73-74; VI, 63; Theodor N”ldeke, Delectus Veterum Carminum Arabicorum (Berlin: Keuther, 1890), 36, 77; Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 131-33; George Sale, The Koran (Philadelphia: Moore, 1850), 89; cf. the story of cA'isha in the Sahih of Bukhari in Ernest Harder, Arabische Chrestomathie (Heidelberg: Groos, 1911), 21, and Al-Hariri, Maqamat, s.v. "wasm." 54. Pastor of Hermes, Similitudes VIII, 1-6. 55. Du Chaillu, Viking Age, 1:350-51; J¢nsson, Egils Saga Skalgr¡mssonar, 137 (XLVIII, 6-7); Boer, ed., Orvar-Odds Saga, 38, 9-10; "Hvers mannz skeyti var thar markat"; cf. Havamal 8a. 56. Mallery, "Picture Writing," 365-66; cf. Boas, "Kwakiutl Indians," 522-23. 57. Boer, ed., Orvar-Odds Saga, 39, 9-13. 58. As Boer, ibid., has shown in his edition of the saga. 59. Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben, 89-90, 110-12. 60. Danzel, Anf„nge der Schrift, 39; James G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1919), 1:415; Boas, "Kwakiutl Indians," 522-23; Cushing, "Zu¤i Fetiches," 32. 61. Nibley, "Sparsiones," 537-39, reprinted in this volume, pages 161-62. 62. Joinville, Histoire de St. Louis, 93, 475-78. 63. The Algonquins used fifty-two rods; Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," 49; the Hupa fifty-three, ibid., 235; the Sauk and Fox fifty-one, ibid., 233; cf. 228, fig. 307, 45. 64. Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, "The Omaha Tribe," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 27 (1905- 1906): 242; Francis La Flesche, "Omaha Bow and Arrow Makers," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1926): 494. 65. Herodotus, History IV, 67; Ammianus Marcellinus, XXXI, 2, 24. 66. The Persian king, sitting with the baresma of divination spread out before him as he gives away wealth at the New Year (Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, 299-300), recalls the host at the Indian feast, giving all his wealth to his guests, whose arrow-staves lie spread out before him, Boas, "Kwakiutl Indians," 508; Hoenir's lottery in the Golden Age (V”lusp , in Lawrence S. Thompson, ed., Norse Mythology: The Elder Edda in Prose Translation [Hamden, CT: Archon, 1974], 17) and the King of Babylon "shaking out arrows," Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2:275; Ezekiel 21:26. 67. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 43, in PG 1:295. 68. Ernst Samter, "Fasces," in RE 6:2002-3. 69. Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," 881; cf. W. M. Flinders Petrie, Scarabs and Cylinders with Names (London: School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1917), 4. Theodore C. Foote, "The Ephod," Journal of Biblical Literature 21 (1902): 20-47. 70. Alexandre Moret, Histoire de l'Orient, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1941), 1:96-97. 71. Hermann V. Hilprecht, The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, 11 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1896), 1:2:36; William H. Ward, The Seal Cylinders of Western Asia (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1910), 3-4. If the cylinder seal was derived from a cylinder amulet, Ernst Herzfeld, "Stempelsiegel," Arch„ologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 5 (1932): 51-53, the marked arrow itself is such an amulet. 72. Alfred Jeremias, "Nebo," in Roscher, Ausfhrliches Lexikon, 3:64-65; Gustavus H. Eisen, Ancient Oriental and Other Seals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 78-79; M. H. Ananikian, Armenian Mythology, vol. 7 in Gray, Mythology of All Races, 32-33 (Nabu); Alfred Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913), 82, 89-94, 114, 275, 277 (Nabu-Nebo as Hermes-Mercury), 11, 18, 132, 146 (Nisaba, equivalent of Egyptian Neith); Budge, Book of the Dead, 1:186; cf. Gerald A. Wainwright, "Some Celestial Associations of Min," JEA 21 (1935): 154. On Texctlipoca, the Mexican Apollo-Hermes, as arrow-god, see Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 3:341. 73. John Rhys, Celtic Heathendom (London: Williams & Norgate, 1898), 268; G. Dottin, "Divination (Celtic)," in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 4:788; Charles Vallency, "Observations of the Alphabet of the Pagan Irish, and of the Age in Which Finn and Oslin Lived," Archaeologia 7 (1785): 276-85; Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 2:304; John A. MacCulloch, "Die Kelten," in Alfred Bertholet and Edvard Lehmann, eds., Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Tbingen: Mohr, 1925), 2:610. Taken together, these references make the case clear. Rune, arrow, and feasting-ticket are plainly identical in Havamal 8a, 120a, 130a. 74. J¢nsson, Egils Saga Skalgr¡mssonar, 240-41 (LXXII, 12-16); Du Chaillu, Viking Age, 2:92; Williams, "On the Land of Ditmarsh," 381-83; Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben, 110, n. 2. The oldest runes appear on arrowheads, Blinkenberg, Thunderweapon, 85; e.g., the Kovel spearhead. The strongest rune was an arrow, Williams, "On the Land of Ditmarsh," 388. 75. Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," 887. 76. Jensen, Assyrisch-babylonische Mythen und Epen, 45, 47; cf. E. D. Van Buren, "Seals of the Gods," Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 10 (1934): 170; Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 4:151; Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 133. 77. Herzfeld, "Stempelsiegel," 53. 78. Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 24-26. 79. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, F1066; Uno Holmberg, Finno-Ugric Siberian [Mythology] (Boston: Archaeological Institute of America, 1927), 404; Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 1:287; Herodotus, History V, 105; G. M. Bolling, "Divination (Vedic)," in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 4:829; Roth, "Animism and Folk-lore of Guiana Indians," 361. 80. Max Seligsohn, "Nimrod," in Isidore Singer, ed., Jewish Encylopedia, 12 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), 9:309-11; Book of Jasher 9:29. 81. Herodotus, History IV, 26; James G. Frazer, "The War of Earth on Heaven," in Apollodorus, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1921), 2:318-26; Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 1:287; Book of Jasher 9:20-26. 82. Karl Preisendanz, "Nimrod," in RE 17:624-28; Alfred Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916), 158-60; Book of Jasher 7:29-47; Clementine Recognitiones I, 30-31, in PG 1:1224-25. Josef Grivel, "Nemrod et les ‚critures cun‚iformes," Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 3 (1874): 141-43, gives a list of his sinister epithets. 83. Qur'an 2:258. 84. Sale, Koran, 269, note e; Otto Keller, Die antike Tierwelt, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Cramer, 1913), 2:447-51. The godless of Jurhum were destroyed in the same way, according to Al-Bakri, in Kitab Mu cjam ma Istacjam: Das geographische W”rterbuch des Abu cObeid cAbdallah ben cAbd el-cAzŒz el-BekrŒ, ed. Ferdinand Wstenfeld, 2 vols. (G”ttingen: Deuerlich, 1876-77), 1:25. 85. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 95a. 86. Strabo, Geography VII, 4, 6. 87. Lucian, De Saltatione (On the Dance) 46, includes Odysseus among other mad giants. 88. Raymond O. Faulkner, "The `Cannibal Hymn' from the Pyramid Texts," JEA 10 (1925): 102, 97-103; Anton Deimel, Sumerische Grammatik (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1924), 142. 89. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, 3:918-50; Ludwig Laistner, Das R„tsel der Sphinx, 2 vols. (Berlin: Hetz, 1889), 2:156, 225-28, 243-50. 90. Harold Peake and Herbert J. Fleure, The Steppe and the Sown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 59. 91. Phillip H. Leathes, "Exemption from the Forest Laws," Archaeologia 15 (1806): 209-24; Samuel Pegge, "On the Hunting of the Ancient Inhabitants of Our Island, Britons and Saxons," Archaeologia 10 (1792): 165-66; Dains Barrington, "Observations of the Practice of Archery in England," Archaeologia 7 (1785): 47, 50. 92. Grousset, L'Asie orientale, 304-5, 307; Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 2:122, 392-403. 93. On its sudden neglect, Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 2:487-88, 275-77; Sophus Mller, Nordische Altertumskunde, 2 vols. (Strassburg: Trbner, 1897): 1:253; Meyer, "Bows and Arrows in Central Brazil," 553, 560; Lucien M. Turner,"Ethnology of the Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 11 (1888-1889): 312; La Flesche, "Omaha Bow and Arrow Makers," 487-88; Finsler, Homer, 1:2:69-71. On its readoption, Ernest Sprockhoff, "Pfeilspitze," in Max Ebert, Reallexicon der Vorgeschichte, 14 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1924), 10:106; Mller, Nordische Altertumskunde, 2:131; F. Lammert, "Pfeil," in RE 19:2:1427. 94. Pliny, Natural History XVI, 65. 95. Sprockhoff, "Pfeilspitze," 10:106, cf. 102-3; Peake and Fleure, Steppe and the Sown, 32; Carl Schuchhardt, Alteuropa (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1935), 135-37; Carleton S. Coon, The Races of Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 166-68, 46-48, 71-74. 96. A few examples: Enuma Elish (Babylonian Creation Hymn) IV, 101-47; Heinrich Sch„fer, "Der Speer des Horus," Zeitschrift fr „gyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde 41 (1904): 68-70; Lepsius, "Der Bogen in der Hieroglyphik," 80, 85; Wainwright, "Letopolis," 162; Darmesteter, Zend-Avesta, 2:297; Wernicke, "Apollon," in RE 2:23; Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 2:434 (Book 26); 1:284 (Book 19); M. Lauer, ed., Des Moses von Chorene Geschichte Gross-Armeniens (Regensburg: Manz, 1865), 22; Edward T. Werner, Myths and Legends of China (London: Harrap, 1922), 182; Culin, "Games of the North American Indians," 32-35. 97. For extensive comparisons, Blinkenberg, Thunderweapon, passim; Arthur B. Cook, Zeus, 3 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1914-40), 2:473, 574, 774, 777, 780, 786-89, 798-806, 1045-49; Edward D. Clarke, "On the Lituus of the Ancient Romans," Archaeologia 19 (1821): 386-400; H. B. Walters, "Poseidon's Trident," Journal of Hellenic Studies 13 (1892-93): 13-20; Benjamin W. Bacon, "Eagle and Basket on the Antioch Chalice," Annals of American Schools of Oriental Research 5 (1923-24): 6-8, 19; Yahuda, Accuracy of the Bible, 106-13. 98. For China, see Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," 882-83; on Ghenghis Khan and Prester John, see The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. Manuel Komroff (Garden City: Garden City, 1926), 87-88 (I, 49), the arrow nature of the staves being clear from William Crooke, Religion and Folklore of Northern India (Oxford: University Press, 1926), 309-10. On wands of office in the Near East, Clarke, "Lituus," 398; cf. the chart by T. Canaan, "Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine," Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 6 (1926): 129, pl. 4, who also shows how the weapon became a banner, 121, 123, 125-29; cf. Al-Waqidi, Futuh al-Sham (Calcutta: Thomas, 1854), 34; Joseph von Karabacek, "Zur orientalischen Altertumskunde I: Sarazenische Wappen," Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philologisch-historische Klasse 157 (1908): 20-21. 99. Frederick J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 1:13-15; the pedigree of the Imperial eagle is Asiatic; Bacon, "Eagle and Basket," 7. On Khian as first Cosmocrator, Moret, Histoire de l'Orient, 1:475. 100. Bertram Thomas, Arabia Felix (New York: Scribner, 1932), 204, n. 1; 379, 69; Danzel, Anf„nge der Schrift, 35. That the wasm of heraldry was originally an arrow-mark is clear from Al-Hariri, Maqamat, index, s.v. "wasm al-qidh." 101. Williams, "On the Land of Ditmarsh," 384-87; Danzel, Anf„nge der Schrift, 34-41; Edwin Freshfield, "Mason's Marks at Westminster Hall," Archaeologia 50 (1887): 2-4. "The Marks of Sundrye of Chief Mene of Virginia" (1590), as published in William W. Tooker, "The Swastika and Other Marks among the Eastern Algonkins," American Antiquarian 20 (1898): 339-40, are all arrows. 102. As in Scotland the arrow "crest" reproduces the mark of the owner's tartan, so the Arabs call the marked arrow and the striped garment of the nobility by the same name, sahm; Edward W. Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (London: William & Norgate, 1872), 1:4:1454-55, no. 8; Mal'uf, Al-Munjid (Beirut: Al-Tabca al-Kathaw-likiya, 1937), 30, s.v. "burd"; Ahlwardt, ed., Mu callaqat I, 79. For a like identity in the New World, see Meyer, "Bows and Arrows in Central Brazil," 553. 103. Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:550-57. 104. August Wnsche, Salomons Thron und Hippodrom, Abbilder des babylonischen Himmelsbildes (Leipzig: Pfeiffer, 1906), passim; August von Gall, Basileia tou Theou (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), 128-205; Morris Jastrow, "Adam and Eve in Babylonian Literature," American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 15 (1899): 193-214; Darmesteter, Zend-Avesta, 1:11-12, 15-18; 2:98-101, 202; Albrecht G”tze, Kleinasien (Munich: Beck, 1933), 133-35; Michael Psellus, Xiphilin 442-44; Lucian, De Astrologio 987; Dio Chrysostom, Oratations XL, 32-41; XXXII, 63-66. Friedrich Dieterici, Thier und Mensch vor dem K”nig der Genien (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1879). Thaclabi, in Rudolf Brnnow, Chrestomathy of Arabic Prose-Pieces (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1895), 2. The literature on this theme is very voluminous. For early Christian versions, see Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians 43, in PG 1:295; Apostolic Constitutions II, 56-57, in PG 1:722-38. 105. The Travels of Marco Polo, Komroff, ed., 104-8 (I, 60-61) (Great Khan); Grousset, L'Asie orientale, 341-43, 367, 364 (China and Indochina): Huart and Delaporte, L'Iran Antique, 283, 372; Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1925-44), 4:37, 39, 55, 56 (Persia); Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, 177-80, 193; Daniel 4:21-37 (Babylonian-Assyrian). 106. William W. Tarn, "Ptolemey II," JEA 14 (1928): 247; Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Caeremoniis Aulae Byzantinae (On the Ritual of the Byzantine Court), Joseph J. Reiske, ed., in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae, 2 vols. (Bonn: Weber, 1829), 1:404-6 (I, 89); Corippus, Justin II, 62; Byzantine Ceremonialbook (tenth century) in Gustav Soytes, Byzantinische Geschichtschreiber und Chronisten (Heidelberg: Winter, 1929), 33. On the Baghdad version, Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam (London: Luzac, 1937), 199. 107. Al-Biruni, Chronologie orientalischer V”lker, ed. Eduard C. Sachau (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1923), 226; cf., Mez, Renaissance of Islam, 419. The ancient feast of Artemis the huntress at Laphria was such an animal-drive, Pausanius, Description of Greece VII, 18, 8-13. On the jiwar, Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben, 83, 220-21; cf. Hermann Gollancz, The Book of Protection (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), xxxiv, xliii-xliv, esp. lxxxiv (no. 24); Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 4:142; B„chtold-St„ubli, Handw”rterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 6:1400, 1404-6. See especially A. F. L. Beeston, "The Ritual Hunt: A Study in Old South Arabian Religious Practice," Le Mus‚on 61 (1948): 183-96. 108. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (London: Black, 1901), 95-96; Boaz Cohen, "An Essay on Jewish Law," Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 6 (1934-35): 124-25, 127, 136; Walter Ashburner, "The Farmer's Law," Journal of Hellenic Studies 30 (1910): 97; 32 (1912): 87. Cf. Plutarch, Solon XV, 5; Hesiod, Erga (Works and Days) 272-314; Varro, De Re Rustica I, 10, 2; Plutarch, Numa 16; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities III, 1, 3-5. 109. John Y. Akerman, "On Some of the Weapons of the Celtic and Teutonic Races," Archaeologia 34 (1852): 186. Yet in the Middle Ages only the rich used the bow; Thomas D. Kendrick, A History of the Vikings (New York: Scribner, 1930), 35; Mller, Nordische Altertumskunde, 1:253, 148; cf. La Flesche, "Osage Tribe," 364. 110. Hilary Jenkinson, "Exchequer Tallies," Archaeologia 62 (1911): 367-80; "Medieval Tallies, Public and Private," Archaeologia 74 (1924): 289-324. Tenting, Toll, and Taxing Even in the great classic treatises on the state, its image is never without a sinister side. The combination of unlimited power and limited wisdom can never be a reassuring one, but it is the actual behavior of sovereign states and princes that is most disturbing. The key to understanding the behavior of delinquents, we are often told, is an insight into early background and environment. It is the purpose of this paper to show how the state spent the most impressionable years of its childhood living as an orphan of the storm in tents of vagabonds where it acquired many of the habits and attitudes that still condition its activities. Scene I--An Open Place: Thunder and Lightning It was not until early in the present century that H. M. Chadwick pointed out what should have been obvious to everyone, namely, that epic literature, a large and important segment of the human record, is the product not of unrestrained poetic fancy but of real years of terror and gloom through which the entire race has been forced to pass from time to time. We now have good reason to believe, after many years of controversy and discussion, scientific and otherwise, that the violence of the elements that forms the somber backdrop of the "Epic Milieu" was more than a literary convention. Many ancient sources recall that after the waters of the Flood had subsided there came a great "Windflood" which converted large areas of the world to sandy deserts; A. Haldar considers the Sumerian version of the Windflood to be "an excellent example of a text describing historical events in terms of religious language." The historical reality is attested by windblown sand deposits from various and widely separated periods, which can be broadly correlated with some of the major migrations of peoples. According to S. N. Kramer, "The factors primarily responsible for the more characteristic features of the Greek, Indian, and Teutonic Heroic Ages" were at work "in the ancient Near East as a whole" in the earliest recorded times. These factors, i.e., a V”lkerwanderungszeit and a general disintegration of civilization, are always accompanied and aggravated if not caused by violent and prolonged atmospheric disturbances. Wherever we turn, the earliest records of the race offer the surprisingly uniform portrait of a wandering storm-driven hero--a Horus, Enlil, Marduk, Mazda, Zeus, Teshub, Celtic Mercury, or Norse Othinn, to name but a few--mounted on his thunder-wagon and leading his toiling hosts across the windy steppes while the earth trembles and the sky gives forth with appalling electrical displays. Biologists today are calling attention to the interesting theory that when man, ages before any recorded V”lkerwanderung, was forced out of whatever tropical paradise his body was and still is designed to inhabit, it was necessary for him to devise a system of air-conditioning in order to survive in a hostile alien environment. Within his clothes, as Sir Dudley Stamp observes, even the Eskimo "is living . . . in the steamy heat of the Amazon Forest." But the air he breathes must also be tempered, and this is possible only in the confines of a house which, since its owner must keep moving, is necessarily a portable house. During the crucial migrational phases of their existence, men have had to live in tents, superbly practical dwellings which, aside from making survival possible, have always satisfied the two deepest "felt needs" of the race, namely, the yearning for change and adventure and the equally strong craving for protection and security. The tent of the migratory chief is, as J. Morgenstern informs us, both the protective palladium of the tribe and its invitation to journey "through a totally unknown country." We have pointed out elsewhere in this volume that the earliest kings or leaders of the people lived in tents. Pharaoh, who ruled over the least migratory of people, performed every major function of his ritualized existence in a tent. Even the pillars of his palace suggest the poles of a tent that protects the wanderer by night in a strange land ( cf. fig. 4). Anu, the first and highest of Mesopotamian deities, is "the rider of the storms who occupies the dais nt] of sovereignty." The tent of Moses was a palladium for wandering Israel in "the desert of darkness." And when the oldest cities were overwhelmed by the great wind, the only refuge for the Lady Ishtar herself was in the tents of the nomads, which have ever been the asylum for the outcast and the last redoubt of afflicted humanity under siege by the elements. And if deity and sovereignty dwell in tents, such tents are understandably the proper place for oracular consultations, solemn counsel, and inspired leadership. The ancient tribal shrines of the Near East known variously as cutfa, markab, mahmal ( cf. fig. 5), qubba, bait, 'aron, tebet, and so forth, all had two characteristics in common: they were, according to Morgenstern, "all tents or tent-like structures," usually dome-shaped, and all were mounted on a box-like frame or understructure whose common name of merkab meant either wagon or ship, and shows that it was meant to provide mobility. In an important study A. Alf”ldi has recently made it possible for the student to enjoy the surprising spectacle of great royal tents moving all over the ancient world on their ceremonial wagons (cf. fig. 12, p. 120), while J. Smolian now describes the ritual itinerary of such vehicula sacra ( cf. fig. 6) in Europe and the East as common to both kings and gods. Both studies discuss the cosmic nature of the wheel-borne dome-shaped shrine or royal baldachin, for paradoxical as it may seem, such symbols of supreme stability as the throne, temple, holy city, and even sacred world-mountain are often depicted either as revolving wheels or as mounted and moving on wheels ( cf. figs. 7, p. 40, and 11, p. 117). Throughout the ancient world divinity and royalty, following the course and example of the heavenly bodies, moved through the spaces above and below in covered wagons or boats or in a combination of the two--the carrus navalis or ship-wagon of the carnival procession. Such vehicles were floats, moving through space in a state of suspension between heaven and earth. As the early migrants moved across the empty plains where, as Altheim has noted, the cleansing winds remove all tracks and landmarks, leaving only the stars as familiar guide-posts and companions, they felt themselves to be moving among the heavenly bodies, and actually that is what they were doing. In ritual and mythology the distinction between earth-travel and sky-travel often disappears, while the ceaseless play of lightning in the background is a constant reminder that the tremendous powers of the upper world are terribly real and not too far away. Holy Camp and Holy City For the nomads the qubba or domed red leather tent of the chief is the qibla by which the tribe when it camps takes its bearings in space (cf. fig. 5, p. 37), the qubba itself being oriented with reference to the heavenly bodies. For the Asiatics as well as the Romans the royal tent was a templum or tabernaculum, a sort of sacred observatory, being like the tabernacle of the camp of Israel and at the same time a kind of planetarium or "model of all the cosmos." The central pole of the tent is commonly identified with the pole of the heavens, and the tent itself with the Weltenmantel or expanse of the firmament; other tent-poles sometimes represent the four cardinal points or the two turning-points of the Sun at the summer and winter solstices. The tent-pole theme is carried over into the pillars of temples and palaces, and even into the columns of medieval churches and the stately fa‡ades of our own public buildings. The orientation of shrines, temples, cities, and countries to represent earthly counterparts of the cosmos has been the subject of intensive investigation of recent years. The first cities are now believed to have arisen around sacred shrines, of which the city itself, then the whole land, and finally the entire earth was thought to be an organic extension. It has also become apparent that the shrine or temple, which in time sought to draw all things into its orbit, always made its first appearance as a tent. The classic example is that portable tent that sheltered the Ark of the Covenant on its travels, for which Solomon's temple served only as a sort of temporary resting-place. The archaic ritual tents of the Pharaohs have their exact counterparts in the cult-huts of the Mandu, which in turn have been shown to be identical in form and function to the earliest reed-shrines of Mesopotamia as well as to the oldest Indo-European tent-shrines. And if the first temples were tents, the first cities, whether in Asia, Africa, or Europe, were camps. That fact is the key to the whole problem of the Holy City or hierocentric state, according to Korvin-Krasinski's observation: "The quartered pattern of the world and space with the cultic shrine in the center as representing a scale-model of the entire creation, is actually incomparably older than the world capital," having its origin "in the ceremonial camp," from which the pattern passed over to the city by way of the great Megalithic ritual complexes. We long ago called attention to the ceremonial camps that sprang up around the great hierocentric shrines during the year-rites, and to the manner in which they gave rise to certain enduring economic, political, artistic, and religious features of our civilization. The most wonderful thing about Jerusalem the Holy City is its mobility: at one time it is taken up to heaven and at another it descends to earth or even makes a rendezvous with the earthly Jerusalem at some point in space halfway between. In this respect both the city and the temple are best thought of in terms of a tent, according to Jerome, while the Church itself is also best represented as a tent, at least until the time comes when the saints "will no longer have to use a movable tent," according to the early Fathers, who get the idea from the New Testament. The Jewish sectaries of the desert referred to the law itself as "the royal tent," and thought of themselves quite literally as the camp of Israel sharing their tents with the heavenly hosts. The idea of the heavenly tent or Holy City as a place of safety suspended above the earth meets us also in the holy mountain and the shrine or city that stands upon it, the holy island of which the circular Atlantis is a type, such floating shrines as Noah's Ark and the moon-boat of the Syrian Goddess, and in such mysterious structures as the Hippodrome, Hadrian's Villa ( cf. fig. 8), and the Kacba, all of which were thought of as floating in their own space remote from contaminating earthly contacts. It is now fairly certain, moreover, that the great temples of the ancients were not designed to be dwelling-houses of deity but rather stations or landing-places, fitted with inclined ramps, stairways, passageways, waiting-rooms, elaborate systems of gates, and so forth, for the convenience of traveling divinities, whose sacred boats and wagons stood ever ready to take them on their endless junkets from shrine to shrine and from festival to festival through the cosmic spaces ( cf. fig. 6, pp. 38-39). The Great Pyramid itself, we are now assured, is the symbol not of immovable stability but of constant migration and movement between the worlds; and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, far from being immovable, are reproduced in the seven-stepped throne of the thundering sky-wagon. Tent and City as Survival Outposts In the oldest records of the race, as Haldar has shown, the desert was a fearful reality, "the dead-world of the steppe, that began just outside the city wall." "The boldness of those early people who undertook to found permanent settlements in the shifting plains," wrote H. Frankfort, "had its obverse in anxiety." Mowinkel maintains that the very foundation of religious ritual is man's awareness that "the world of life and blessedness is completely surrounded by the world of death and damnation, the desert, the wasteland, das E-lend." The patch of green won from the desert by the waters of life or the circular clearing in the forest is a haven of refuge, a shelter and sacred vara in which men and animals seek refuge from the savage storms and equally savage monsters that range abroad in the vast outer world. At the beginning of the second book of his cosmology, al-Kazwini describes the first city as a sort of survival outpost, set up by determined cooperative effort on an all but uninhabitable planet. It is like a "space station," hermetically sealed off from the hostile surroundings, completely self-contained with gardens and pastures included within its protecting walls, and fully equipped with mosques, markets, baths, and those means of aesthetic and intellectual fulfillment which keep men from becoming a danger to each other through boredom and overcrowding. More familiar in Oriental literature is the image of the super-palace in its fortified oasis, whose inhabitants become overconfident in their safety and end their days in wicked debauchery as the great and spacious building goes down in ruins before the storm. The concept is still with us: "This desire to dwell on a safe little island," writes L. Vax, "is what we call humanism. It is nothing but the wish to build a city which will shut out both the sub-human and the super-human." Once safe within the walls we hear "the laugh of the libertines, . . . meant to give them a feeling of relative security," but in reality an expression of an inescapable fear of the terrors without. That it is indeed the externi timor that brings cities into existence and keeps them going is indicated by what is called "the paradox of the Moslem city," the paradox being that while in Moslem civilization the city is "the indispensable focal point of all material and spiritual culture," life within such a city is completely "anorganic and disorganized." What preserves the life of such imperishable communities as Mecca, Damascus, Jerusalem, and so forth, as Professor Godbey pointed out long ago, is the fact that they never lose their original significance as shrines and asylums, thanks to the unbroken persistence of the first conditions under which they were founded, namely the presence of a real and dangerous wilderness just outside the gates; the holy city is forever a place of refuge in a hostile world. The obsessive awareness of constant and lurking danger without, which brought the city into existence, is no less fundamental in the formation of the state; the transcendent importance of the king lies in the conviction that with him there is safety, he alone can cope with the powers of death and outer darkness, meeting them head-on in the yearly ritual-combat and spending the rest of the year making his rounds in his perennial task of imposing divine order on the benighted outer fringes of the universe. The Royal Progress In his divine mission of extending the dominion of light and order the king is constantly leading his embattled hosts into dark and unknown regions on an eternal Royal Progress. The student of the Royal Progress who confines his attention to the medieval and modern sources is puzzled to find the practice flourishing in such widely scattered places as Ireland, Central Africa, and the islands of the South Pacific, while it is absent on the steppes of Europe and Asia where one would normally expect to find migrating kings. Actually the Royal Progress is a world-wide institution of great antiquity, which turns up in a few backward corners of the world in later times precisely because it is only in such places that the primitive conditions necessary to its existence survive. If, for example, among the nineteenth-century Baganda there could be no capital because "for each king a new royal enclosure is built," the same system prevailed in the Old Kingdom of Egypt where, "paradoxically enough, the capital was less permanent than the towns in the provinces, for in principle it served for only a single reign. . . . Until the middle of the Second Millennium b.c. . . . there was no truly permanent capital in Egypt." If the Tartars and Mongols built no temples or cities because their gods traveled about on wheels, the same held true of the Hittites and Persians before them. In medieval Europe it was the rule for a king to have no capital but to move continually from place to place with his whole court in a set ceremonial Progress which never ceased. Such mobility, according to the latest and fullest study of the subject, was "the very essence of royal existence," prevailing in fact "in any situation characterized by a typically feudal structure of government," that is, in any Heroic Age or Epic Milieu. The Royal Progress ideally followed the course of the sun, setting out from the scene of the coronation at the winter solstice and ending up at the same spot exactly a year from the day of departure; it was so arranged that each of the major solar festivals would be celebrated at some important shrine along the way, each such celebration being a minor repetition of the coronation rite itself. The whole operation is astonishingly like that of Egypt, where the usages of the Royal Progress are well documented from the beginning. In Egypt as in the West the king's purpose in going from place to place is to be recognized and acclaimed as the bringer of good things, but it is also very apparent that along with the festive and sacral aspects of the royal parousia (and that word establishes significant ties between eastern and western, Christian and pagan practices), the King's Progress was meant to dramatize the original seizure and subduing of the land; it is always the triumphal procession of a victor, pacifying the land, receiving formal submission, suppressing rebellion, rewarding loyalty, imposing justice and order on the world. The Royal Progress goes back originally, according to Peyer, to the overrunning of "conquered farmers and herdsmen" by "cattle-owning nomadic tribes. Hence," he concludes, "the journeys and entertainment of the ruler (Herrscherreise und Gastung) appear as the result of the superimposing of the authority of nomadic warriors over sedentary agrarians." This, we have maintained, is exactly the situation attested by the evidence of the "marked arrow" in many parts of the world. The Royal Progress is a survival of the V”lkerwanderung, an annual repetition of the Landnahme, with the king receiving the ecstatic (often compulsory) acclamations of the inhabitants, while long lines of cattle and hostages--the children of local chiefs who might make trouble--were being brought to the "gisting" places as tribute. Wherever the king went the people were expected to "guest" him and his company for three nights, though it was common practice for them to move on after a night or two. Since the whole existence of royalty was a brilliant and impressive progress through the lands, kings were never able to stop the parade without forfeiting their principal glory; and so the splendid royal junkets, arrogant and benevolent, religious and military in nature, which both overawed their subjects and alarmed their neighbors, remained right down until World War I "not an optional policy but an organic need" for the rulers of Europe and Asia. In the Saga of Dietrich of Bern, a basic source for the understanding of the way of kings, ancient and medieval, Asiatic and European alike, we see the great Attila not as a destroyer but as a beneficent liberator moving ever from one stathr to the next, staying but one night in each and hunting in between. For the Royal Progress is also the Royal Hunt, and animals are expected to be as compliant as men to the rule of the Cosmocrator. In the West the king was before everything the Lord of the Forest, his sylvan sovereignty resting on his immemorial rights as a hunter. Hence the royal beneficium to obedient subjects was originally the king's permission to use his forest for woodcutting and grazing--not for hunting; and the gradual reduction of the common people to a state of total servility toward the end of the Middle Ages was effected largely through the manipulation of the forest laws, first by the barons and then by moneyed investors, whose legalistic legerdemain in dealing with forest laws resulted, according to Thimme, in the concept of "property and dominion as we understand them today." But originally there was only one king of the forest, and he was a hunter. On his progress along the King's Highway or Royal Road, the monarch spent his nights at castles which were not proper dwellings but rather guarded supply-dumps and fortified camping-places, where one ate, slept, and worked under canopies with rushes and straw beneath one. "Nearly all the great Seigneurs," writes Peyer, "from the earliest times had no fixed residence, but moved ceaselessly from castrum to castrum," where the necessary supplies had been gathered to provide for the guesting of the lord and the support of his military plans. The meaning of the well-known derivatives of castrum--camp (castra) and castle--needs no discussion. The stopping-places of the Merovingian and Carolingian rulers was a Pfalz (palatium, palace), from the old word for a domed tent, designating also "the celestial vault, the tent of heaven," that is, the age-old qubba of the nomad chief. The basic idea is never lost from sight as kings continue to feast, sleep, and sit in state beneath gorgeous tents called variously pavilions, canopies, baldachins, heavens, and "states"--for the king to sit in state means in the strict sense of the word to be in his statio or camping-place on the march (cf. fig. 11, p. 117). Trespassing Heroes Since the business of the royal and priestly qubba was "to lead the people upon a migration through a totally unknown country, to select for them the road which they must travel, and to indicate for them the place of their ultimate settlement," the problem of possible trespassing becomes a very serious one for the owner of the tent. "The laws of tenting," says the Talmud, "are the most difficult and complicated in all the written and oral law." Since the wanderers are seeking a favored land, they are bound to find the place inhabited if they ever get there; and in the eyes of the natives, the invaders can only appear as godless and evil men, the Wild Huntsmen, the feralis exercitus. "The steppe is the underworld," wrote A. Jeremias, "and in oriental tales the hunter is the Man of the Underworld." The attitude of the settled dwellers in the land toward their invaders is vividly set forth in a passage from the early Christian Psalms of Thomas: I looked into the Abyss and saw the Evil One With his Seven Companions and Twelve attendants; I saw them putting up his tent and lighting the fire in it. . . . I saw their traps and their tents spread out. . . . And I saw them lying about, drinking their stolen wine and eating their stolen meat. But there is something to be said for the other side. The red tent moved into lands only "in sheer desperation, when the very existence of the . . . tribe was at stake." Achilles makes it clear at the beginning of the Iliad that it was not his idea to leave his own domains to plunder other men's; the invader is not acting from choice. The nobility of the Epic Hero is that in his tragic predicament he does what he must, and even his innocent victims amid their cries of distress never accuse him of base or reprehensible behavior. The great folk-heroes such as Odysseus, Aeneas, Abraham, Siegfried, or Abu Zaid are all homeless wanderers, never sure of their status or reception in strange places and often reduced to dissembling and even to begging in situations of almost unbearable tension. Many ancient monarchs sought to relieve the unpleasant tensions raised by the trespassing issue by simply making a virtue of necessity, glorying in their irresistible and hence divinely sanctioned might and grabbing everything they could as if by right. Yet even the fiercest of these, such as the Assyrian monarchs or Genghis Khan, categorically deny that their dominion is held by force alone, and tirelessly insist that they conquer and rule by an express mandate from heaven--even the bloody-minded hero of the Egyptian Cannibal Hymn waves a written document for all to see, "a warrant of appointment as `Great Mighty One' . . .given him by Orion, Father of the Gods." Surprisingly enough, the apparently academic question of trespassing was of great concern to the rulers of old. A clear demonstration of that concern is to be found in the well-known ritual combat of the Year Rite, a showdown between two armed heroes, each claiming to be the legitimate heir to dominion and accusing his rival of usurpation and fraud in the long-winded legalistic stichomachia that should always precede a formal duel. It is the classic showdown between the invader and the invaded, each accusing the other of trespass: for if the defenders of a land have the sacred mission of preserving the established order from the onslaughts of monsters from the outer darkness, the invaders are led by a knight in shining armor who finds the land in possession of the Dragon, the Lord of Misrule, from whose primordial misgovernment it is his sacred duty to deliver it. The theme has recently been studied by J. Trumpf, who notes that the foundation of an ancient city can never proceed in peace and order until the local dragon, who has misruled and oppressed the land from time immemorial, is got out of the way. Trumpf duly observes (as we also have done) that the nomads of the steppes, that is, the normal invaders, refuse to acknowledge the humanity of an enemy but can conceive of any opposition to themselves only as some form of monstrous perversion, the annihilation of which is a holy calling. Thus they clear themselves of the charge of trespassing. But just who is the trespasser? By what right do the prior inhabitants of the land possess it? After all, the Trojans had sacked as many cities and stolen as many cattle as the Achaeans who invaded them. In the old bestiaries it is the animals who claim prior occupancy and accuse the human race of trespassing upon the earth; the notable treatise on the theme by the "Chaste Brethren of Basra" depicts all the animals assembled before the throne of Solomon to sue the human race for trespassing--they complain that men have driven them from their homelands and have continued to pursue them even into the deserts without any vestige of legal right, like Shakespeare's banished nobility who go to the woods to act like "mere usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse, to fright the animals, and to kill them up in their assign'd and native dwelling-places." Although practically any nomad chief who had both people and cattle at his back considered himself to be legitimate, all such people, as Tacitus observed, are liable to meet their nemesis in others of their kind with which occasional collisions are inevitable. The result is a showdown, a trial of arms in the chivalric or horse-rider's manner, which no true ruler can escape. The code of chivalry is not a settlement worked out between farmers and nomad warriors, between whom there is no real understanding or even communication, but rather a system of settling the touchy question of possession between parties neither of whose claims will stand too close an examination. The claims of brute force are denied in favor of the idea that combat itself, if attended by the proper formalities, is a form of divination which clearly proclaims the will of heaven in the assignment of property. Furthermore, what is won by combat must be maintained by combat, and the proud and truculent mottoes of heraldry were a standing invitation to trial at arms. A noble was required and expected to invite assault, according to the rules of chivalry, "because everyone seeks distinction, one mark of which is to offend fearlessly." "An insult," writes F. R. Bryson, commenting on this, "was regarded as causing one of the two parties to lose honor," thereby forcing him to fight to get it back. The prince who hesitated to take issue when another set foot on his lands vi et armis ("by force and by arms," still the official definition of trespassing) actually forfeited his right to their possession, as did the German rulers after the death of Charles the Bald who, by failing to expel poaching barons from their forest lands, forfeited the legal claim on those lands to the barons. The Battle for the Tent The combat between chiefs was no mere brawl but a splendid and formal affair, with time, place, and procedure stipulated ahead of time. Whether it was a set battle between Pharaoh and an invading desert chief, or a ritual chariot race between rival Vedic princes, or a set-to between Asiatic war lords, played like a game of chess, or the elaborately ordered duels of the sagas or jousts of the Middle Ages, it was understood that the winner was to take all, usually including the erstwhile loyal retainers of the loser. The correct and formal method of announcing one's intention of occupying a land was by the pitching of a red tent upon it, such a tent proclaiming the owner's "unique position as universal ruler--a superman and a cosmic being, according to the views of the ancients." To the many examples given by Morgenstern we might add that Adam in the beginning, according to an old and widespread tradition, took possession of the world as he journeyed through it by setting up his red leather tent wherever he went. How old the tradition may really be can be surmised from a prehistoric Egyptian festival in which the Besitzergreifung des Landes, according to W. Helck, was dramatized by the setting up of red and white tents representing the two worlds in conflict. Everywhere in the ancient world the chief's banner and tent served together and interchangeably as his flag of defiance wherever he went. The setting up of the tent of the Ark at Gilgal was a formal Landnahme, according to von Rad; and among the Arabs "to pitch one's tent on strange or disputed ground was a deed of honor." The sacred tent and the royal tent when they are not one and the same are always pitched side by side, as Morgenstern explains, pointing out that the tent of inspiration makes it possible for "an entire people [to] wander about in a strange and unknown country with reasonable assurance, and . . . at last find its proper place for resettlement." "The tent of the Lord will not be replaced by a permanent tent," wrote the first of the Christian Doctors, "until the final combat when the Lord has put all his enemies beneath his feet and bound the dragon." The early sectaries of the desert, as they raise the tent of defiance to the hosts of Evil, view their own tents as the camp of the hosts of heaven ready to dispute for the possession of the earth. When Alexander had seized the tent of Darius he had achieved his final military victory, for by that act, following an ageless tradition, all the Great King's holdings were formally transferred to him. And when Eumenes after the death of Alexander "found it useful to carry with him as a mascot Alexander's tent, which he could represent as still inhabited by his great master's spirit," he was really announcing to the world that the universal empire was now his. The Greeks need not have borrowed the chivalric pattern from the Orient, for already in the Iliad Poseidon, "the owner of the earth," as both his name and his epithet, Gaie-ochos, show him to be, rushes into the council of the gods in great alarm crying: O Father Zeus, what mortal upon the boundless earth will ever again credit the gods with intelligence or ability? Haven't you seen how these long-haired Greeks have actually built a wall around their ships and dug a ditch, without having paid for the privilege by appropriate offerings of submission to us? The fame and honor of that deed will spread as far as the sun shines, while all that Phoebus Apollo and I have won in fair combat from the hero Laomedon [i.e., the original holder of Ilium] will be forfeited. The whole concept of chivalry is embraced in those lines. Of course the royal tent is surrounded by a camp. At the primordial battle for the possession of the world the Titans camped on Mount Ortys while over against them on Mount Olympus stood the camp of the gods. In the days before Rome the kings of the Veii, Volsci, Aequi, and other tribes used to challenge each other by camping on each other's lands, the hosts being arranged aequo campo conlatisque signis (on a level plain with standards joined together), in the best Oriental manner, with the avowed intention of carrying off cattle and everything else unless stopped. When the Romans joined in the game their king would cast a spear into the enemy's land "to claim a place for their tents" (ut castris locum caperent), with a formal invitation to the owners to submit or fight. In northern and eastern Europe where "the lords of the land established their dominion by open combat," we have the stirring picture of two imperial tents, landtioldr, pitched in groves on either side of a fair field, each surrounded by the tents of its retainers um stathinn, as the mobile base from which the land was to be seized and governed. By herald and trumpet the two rulers challenge each other to a trial of arms and fight according to strict and formal rules. Almost a thousand years later we find the same sport in the great tournament of Calais. "Three vermillion-coloured pavilions were pitched near the appointed place for the lists," Froissart reports, "and before each were suspended two shields, one for peace and one for war. . . .Any who desired to perform a deed of arms was required to touch one or both of these shields." Hearing of the challenge on the disputed soil of Calais, the nobility of England "said they would be blameworthy if they did not cross the sea," which they did in large numbers--for not to accept a challenge is as ignoble as not to give one. "Sir John Holland was the first who sent his squire to touch the war-target of Sir Boucicault who instantly issued from his tent completely armed," and the tournament was on. The procedure was faithfully repeated for all the days of the affair; an English knight would touch the "war-shield" of a French lord sitting fully armed and out of sight in his tent, waiting to rush forth with great fury at the first hint of a challenge. Even more puerile than such antics was the ritual attack on the tent itself. Since set combat was forbidden after sundown, the wee small hours were reserved for the standard attack on the rival's tent, a vital maneuver, since once the tent had fallen the enemy's morale, and often his resistance, was broken. A particularly realistic version is the sequel to the brutal trespassing of the Adversary in the Psalm of Thomas mentioned above: the issue was settled when the true Lord burst on the scene, "pulled up their tent and threw it over on to the ground, kicked out their fire, tore open their nets and set free all the captive birds in them." The ultimate in heroic gestures for the Arab was a night-raid on the tent of a chief: "They suddenly knock down the principal tent-poles," Burckhardt reported 130 years ago, "and whilst the surprised people are striving to disengage themselves, . . . the cattle e] driven off by the assailants," though the main purpose is to get not cattle but honor. Among the nomads the overthrow of a man's tent signifies the dissolution of his fortunes, for his whole existence centers around the main pole of his tent. When Crum, the Great Khan of the Bulgars, made a night-raid on the tent of the Emperor Nicephorus, he made a drinking-cup of his rival's skull to commemorate the exploit. The tent-raid is by no means limited to the East. Froissart tells how Lord James Douglas rode into the English camp by night, "galloped to the King's tent, and cut two or three of its cords, crying at the same time, 'Douglas! Douglas forever!' " Fauquement did the same thing in the Duke of Normandy's camp, "cutting down tents and pavilions, and then, seeing that it was time, collecting his people and retreating most handsomely." Trumpf is puzzled by the peculiar rite with which the oldest Greek founding festival, the Septrion, commemorated Apollo's victory over the Python and the founding of the world-center at Delphi. What is peculiar is that there is no dragon in the rite, but that should not seem strange since Trumpf himself has the acumen to notice that Pytho the dragon simply represents the original inhabitants of the land. Instead of a dragon-fight there is a troupe of men bearing torches and led by a youth representing Apollo, who in the dead of night steal up in perfect silence on a tent or reed booth; suddenly they throw their torches into the tent, setting it afire, overturn a table that stands in it, and then run away like mad without looking back. An odd type of dragon-fight, to be sure, but one whose significance should be clear by now; it is particularly interesting because of its great antiquity. Alternatives to Fighting: Toll and Taxing Let us recall that what so alarmed Poseidon the landowner at the sight of a strange camp on his shores was the failure of the campers to make proper payment for the privilege of setting up on his land. They were digging in, and unless immediately called to account would cause the owners to lose both face and property with nothing but glory for themselves--trespassers are not trespassers if they can get away with it. Everywhere certain allowance is made for campers who are merely passing through a country; all that is demanded of them is good behavior and a three-day time limit. But those who frequented a land for long or regular periods were required to pay tolls and purchase safe-conduct to keep things from getting out of hand. The derivation of the word toll is very doubtful, but on one thing all the authorities are agreed, that it is derived from Late Latin tolonium, meaning a toll-booth or tent. Toll is defined as "payment exacted . . . by virtue of sovereignty or lordship . . . for permission to pass somewhere." Specifically it is "a charge for the privilege of bringing goods for sale to a market or fair, or setting up a stall. . . . It can only be claimed by a special grant from the Crown." It was collected at a toll-booth, "formerly, a temporary shed erected at a market, etc., for payment of tolls . . . a booth, stall, or office at which tolls are collected." Wherever the merchants pass, even on the sands of the Gobi desert, the tent of the toll-collector awaits them. The great fairs of Europe were tent-cities, temporary camps set up yearly on the king's land, where foreigners were allowed for a set period to camp and set up their booths. The two things to notice about toll are (1) that the word always goes back to a tent or booth of some kind--which makes one wonder whether it might not once have meant "tent-money" (Danish told "toll," teld "tent"), and (2) that it is a token payment only, given in recognition of sovereignty or lordship and never as a business arrangement between equals; it does not cover damages nor defray expenses but simply recognizes ownership by a prescribed ritual and solicits as a privilege permission to camp on another's land at a designated spot and for a limited and specified period of time. A tax, like a toll, is payment for temporary occupation of another's land, with the difference that the occupation in this case lasts for a whole year, at the end of which a new tax must be paid. The oldest taxes on record are those tributes of the produce of the land (a tithe or a fifth), which were brought to the designated collection centers, the local shrines of the god who owned the land, as "rent paid for the use of the land." In making the collection and spending it in pious works the king was the god's agent and the priests were his assistants. Thus the earliest temple "functioned actually as the manor-house on an estate." Since as countless hymns inform us, God owns the earth and all that is in it, any payments made by men to him are the purest token payments, given not because he needs them but as a gesture acknowledging his ownership. That is why failure to pay even a trivial tax calls forth quick and savage reprisals which are out of all proportion to the money involved but represent the correct official reaction to an act of open defiance. For refusal to pay implies willingness to fight and vice versa. From the earliest times a king might live in peace with another by paying him socage, that is, "money rent. . . not burdened with any military service," i.e., money paid to avoid fighting. When Sir Robert Knolles asked the Duke of Picardy, "How much will you pay us in ready money for all this country if we will not despoil it?" he was not cynically selling the Duke "protection," since the latter was expected to meet in joyful combat any who came to despoil his lands. As explained in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tax in its many contexts always retains the basic idea of a charge brought against an intruder; to be taxed always implies an element of trespass, and the paying of a tax always has the flavor of appeasement. The only thing sure about the root meaning of the word according to Skeat is that it signifies "to touch" or tag, suggesting to the ingenuous mind a possible connection between being taxed and being tagged: once one's war-shield has been touched one must choose between settling with the challenger by meeting him in arms or by giving him a token of submission for the luxury of remaining in one's possessions without a fight. The paying of tolls and taxes was not a declaration of loyalty to the recipient and his way of life, but a bid to be free of both. The zeal with which the peasants of Europe clamored to have the "irksome personal services" including the picturesque performances of the droit de gite converted into a money tax or cash payment, the eagerness of "the wealthy franklin [to pay] money rather than be dubbed a knight," and the insistence even of the lesser nobility on paying socage to enjoy "freedom from scutage," i.e., the obligation of chivalry, all express the basic idea of the money-tax as a settlement defining the limits of obligation beyond which the payer is free. No such area of personal freedom was allowed by the mystique of feudalism, which was a sacred covenant of total commitment. Likewise toll is paid by strangers in a country not as an act of fealty, but for the express purpose of remaining strangers without being considered enemies or trespassers. The theory that one was taxed to support the strong arm of the nobility in return for its protection against attackers from without was a late and contrived one that effaced the original significance of the tax as an escape from feudal obligations. The Old Order Remaineth But feudalism has ever been tenacious of its holdings and with the assistance of the lawyer and the priest has managed to hold its own in the most adverse circumstances. Far from fading into the past, "absolute monarchies," as H. Kohn puts it, "were the pacemakers of modern nationalism." Far from presenting a gradual unfolding of human liberties, the passing of the Middle Ages brings only their progressive curtailment as the seizure of the common forest right by the "ungezgelte[n] Jagdlust der M„chtigen" (the unbridled passion of the mighty for hunting) is succeeded by the acquisition of those rights by wealthy commoners who finally exclude the public from the forest altogether. At the end of the Middle Ages Geoffrey Tˆte-Noire was considered something of a monster because "none dared ride over his lands"; but it took the modern free world to come up with the absolute dominion of the No Trespassing sign. The survival of the feudal or chivalric way of life into modern times can be illustrated by Froissart's Chronicle, that "complete body of the antiquities of the 14th century," in which the king commands respect and loyalty only to that degree to which he risks his person in single combat and expends the devoted energies of his people in tireless military campaigning, where the nobility live frankly by pillage, ever "seeking adventures . . . for by all means, allowed by the laws, of arms, every man ought to molest his enemy," where the great prelates of the church raided each other's domains in the perennial manner of the war lords of the steppes. A leading role is played by the terrible free companies, who played exactly the same game as the nobility and "made war on every man that was worth robbing." Even the common people when they arose in their might to shake off the oppressor operated in the accepted manner, organizing themselves into bannered companies and placing (by force if necessary) those of noble birth at their head, impatient of the lord who sat peacefully at home, but willing to follow to the death any noble who would lead them to deeds of glory and rapine on others' lands. In short, all classes aspire to the same glory and think of success in the same terms, because it never occurs to them that there might be any other standard of achievement. (Even our own society remains hypnotized by the same goals that drew Froissart's "perfect prince," Caston de Foix, who "loved earnestly the things he ought to love," namely gold, food, sports, shows, "arms and amours" and above all a successful business deal.) The cities were no exception, but "during the late Middle Ages . . . grew less democratic and took on more of the coloring of their aristocratic ambience." They achieved independence only to place themselves under the great war lords or exalt their own leading citizens to noble rank as they sent formal challenges to each other and raided each other's possessions in the best chivalric manner. The long-debated question of whether European cities were founded primarily for protection or for trade ended with a split decision, since the two advantages are inseparable and at any rate seem to yield priority to religion, for early markets and towns grew out of "seasonal meetings of hunters" devoted to ancient religious observances. But whether it began as a shrine, market, or fortified place of refuge, the city always starts out as a camp, to judge by the root meanings of the various words for it: civitas from *kei-, "camp," Stadt from Old German stedir, "Landungsplatz"; Statt (our state) from statio, a stopping-place on the march; burg from phyrkos, the hastily built fence surrounding a fortified camp (town refers to the same fence, as does the Slavic gorod). The Arabic mahalla is also a stopping-place on the march, and it has been shown that madina, long thought to come from din, a place of judgment, is to be related to maidan, a campground or jousting-field. The rising cities of the Middle Ages naturally resented the archaic claims and method of the lords in their castles, but they resented them out of envy as they aspired to the same rights and privileges. Gastrecht, Schutzzoll, and Stapelrecht were urban versions of tenting-rights, toll, and taxing respectively, and as such were administered with a severity that only the most tyrannical baron would have risked. The cities offered Pfahlbrgertum or shanty-town citizenship to those who deserted their lords to settle in tent-cities outside the city walls, where they continued to pay a tax for camping on the city's land. City merchants complained loudly against the onerous toll charger of the barons even while they levied a high Schutzzoll on goods passing through their own territories. And while the droit de gite was steadily whittled away for the king, the cities used their Gastrecht and Stapelrecht to forbid transients to acquire property or engage in any business while in the city. What the cities most resented was the baronial courts of law, yet whenever they gained power, the leading property-owners of the town held a tight monopoly on all judicial offices. Stadtluft macht frei (the city air makes one free) not only by offering shelter and anonymity to the refugee, but no less by opening the doors of aggrandizement and even nobility to the citizen. The Rights of Man But what of human rights, the rights of man? Do they not break away at last from the old ideology? They do not. They are a product of the Enlightenment, which put nature in the place of God and made man a child not of heaven but of earth. Naturalism and Humanism find man's origin in the earth and its elements: it is as a literal excrescence of the planet that mankind has an inalienable right to its substance and its living-space. Baconian science, the founding fathers, French revolutionaries, Physiocrats, English liberals, pragmatic philosophers and educationists, free-enterprising capitalists and Marxists all see eye to eye on one basic point and share with each other and the ancient lords of the steppes the fundamental gospel of One World: it is here below in "the things of this world" that a man must seek his fulfillment. Instead of putting an end to the wild dreams of Nimrod, the mad hunter of old who aspired to bring all creatures under his sway and in the best chivalric manner challenged God to a duel for possession of the world, modern scientific thinking tends to confirm man's forlorn hope of seizing the earth for himself. The monarchs of the past in their search for permanent tenure went to spectacular extremes to convince themselves and the public that it was their calling to reign here below as Lords of Eternity in the Garden of Delights: from prehistoric Egypt to modern England the Master of the King's Tents and Revels has exerted himself to present to the eyes of men majesty benignly reclining in a garden bower as he presides over a feast of abundance to which all the world is invited. This royal mummery was the greatest tent-show on earth, according to Alf”ldi, and it was staged all over the ancient world in rites which "represent[ed] a harmony between man and the divine which is beyond our boldest dreams." And yet the great garden party soon becomes a great bore, as king and caliph discover in countless popular tales and legends; this world can offer but a peep-show paradise after all. The whole thing, aside from being enormously expensive, is too strenuous and contrived for real delight--it is vanity fair, the tent-city from which the robber Pilgrim is only too glad to escape even with empty pockets, provided, of course, that he has some other world, some New Jerusalem, to escape to. The Other Nomads The yearning for such a world and the faith in its existence, or even the mere possibility of its existence, has always offered an alternative to the heavy-handed warrior's solution to the problem of survival in a hostile world. Pilgrims, like all nomads, have a deep distrust of anything that might tie them down or hamper their freedom of movement. The city especially, designed to make man forget the marginal and nomadic nature of life on earth and hence lose sight of the distant Celestial City, is to the pious pilgrim an object of loathing and suspicion. Not only do the early Jews and Christians think of themse