A World in Crisis

Europe is burning. Out of control heatwaves and wildfires, once the preserve of dry brushlands, are now bringing a new wave of terror to the historic capitals of Western civilisation. The UK broke its own temperature record in eighteen separate places on the same day. Soaring temperatures, bringing with them destructive weather events, are the new normal, a new normal that poses a threat to human civilisation as well as life on Earth.

Elsewhere, the twin forces of War and Plague bring with them Famine and Death. Global trade routes, already under immense strain from the Covid-19 pandemic, are further threatened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine which also served to cut off a quarter of the world's grain supply. It's no wonder that the world of today has an apocalyptic feel to it, or that billions of people find themselves without answers, without purpose, alienated by a vast global machinery that only seems to move money from place to place and attend to the whims of the elites, rather than the needs of the masses.

How do we, as Sumerians, approach the global crisis? Was it sent by the gods? The answer from a Sumerian perspective is an unequivocal NO. It is humans who were given custodianship over the Earth, to rule as we see fit, and the gods who laid out a model of good governance and good society to follow. Civilisation was intended to be a place of sanctuary, a place where all would be provided for and be elevated to express their potential in turn, and where the forces of the numinous divine found in nature would continue to express themselves in the new forms that they took in the fabric of human society.

Nisaba, Lady of the Good Grain, came to oversee writing, invented as a means to keep track of food supplies and then of civic adminisration. Inana, Queen of the Date Palm, claimed authority over the storehouse gate wherein the dates would be heaped up, and of the fecund powers of nature that caused not just the crops but also the cities to flourish. The flourishing of civilisation is therefore to be understood as a joint endeavour between humans and gods.

"May 'There is enough, there is enough' be your blessing, and may 'There is none' be your abomination."
- fragment of a balbale poem to Inana

The covenant of civilisation that was made at Eridu c. 5500 BCE between a small group of migrants, most likely having their origins in the Upper Euphrates Valley, and the manifestation of Enki that they met in the sweet waters of the Persian Gulf, provided that the gods would give everything that the cities needed to thrive in return for being given a place of honour in the midst of those cities, and a share in the spoils of civilisation, which humans were otherwise free to use for their own fulfillment.

The peoples of Mesopotamia understood that the blessings of the gods were not automatic, and weren't to be taken for granted. The ancestral memory of the Sumerians contained 200,000 years of nomadic, hunter-gatherer life, which was a cruel life where each day brought a new struggle to survive, and small bands of humans wandered the Earth perpetually searching for their next meal. They understood that civilisation had to be taken care of, good order established, and the principles of the gods upheld, because these were the things that had brought them out of the state of nature in the first place, and without those things, they would easily fall back to the state of nature again.

"Heaven is far, earth is most precious, but it is with heaven that you multiply your goods, and all the lands breathe under it."
- Instructions of Šuruppak, c. 2500 BCE

Dignity, justice, and equity are part of the divine order of the universe, and when human rulers administer their domains in a way that strips people of their dignity, fails to secure justice, and breeds inequity, that is understood as a withdrawal from the covenant of civilisation. If we take the work of the gods and the splendours of civilisation for granted, we can hardly demand the acquiescence of the divine to the destruction of the world order. Unfortunately, that's where the historical trends have led us. The reverence of the divine spark found in every facet of nature and civilisation was transformed over millennia into the worship of gods who represented nothing more or less than the sum total of the empires that wore their image irreverently while conquering and crushing the lands around them. The Babylonian and Assyrian empires at their height were exactly this - imperial endeavours bent on world conquest, usurping the name of the gods to do so, and a distinction must accordingly be drawn between the social, political and religious characteristics of the first great imperial age, which began in the aftermath of the Bronze Age Collapse in the 13th century BCE, and that of the age of the first Sumerians, who emerged on that marshy plain full of hope, awe and wonder.

Even late in Mesopotamia's independence, the principles of the divine order were well understood. The Instructions to a Prince, written about 800 BCE, begins: "If a king does not heed justice, his people will be thrown into chaos, and his land will be devastated. If he does not heed the justice of his land, Ea [Enki], king of destinies, will alter his destiny and will not cease from pursuing him." The style of the Instructions is that of a Babylonian omen text, following an if-then formula, suggesting that its author was all too aware of the fate that had befallen unjust kings in the past.

This tells us that in the Mesopotamian worldview, it's the administrator of the land - in this case, the king - who is responsible for its fate. When we look at the world around us today, and we look upon the faces of those who administer the nations of the Earth, we see careless administration, we see indifference to crisis and suffering, and we see maniacs as bent on conquest as were the most tyrannical of the Assyrian kings. We have seen throughout history the creation and entrenchment of an elite political class, administering the earth while being entirely detached from the consequences or the people they claim the authority to rule over. For the West, the Arab world and their various colonies, this was achieved through the promotion of a vicious, all-conquering monotheism. Between the Enlightenment age and the present day, this monotheism has, in large parts of Christendom, been superseded by a secular state religion in which the state and its political class stand alone, supreme, in control of mass media and news corporations, demanding devotion and obeisance while blinding itself to the human suffering taking place within its borders.

Such religious and political control of the information sphere has been used to sever the connection of much of the world to their spiritual roots. With the development of capitalist modes of production, it is the Holy Dollar that has taken its place on the altar of society, such that the only worthwhile work to a capitalist order is the work that yields profit. The cause of human dignity and human fulfillment is directly opposed to the fanatical capitalist mentality of maximising profit, and so these two forces have inevitably collided in a dialectic of their own throughout the period of industrialisation and through to the modern day.

It behooves us, as Sumerians, to state the following:

The global capitalist order is fundamentally broken. Heavily militarised, it lurches from crisis to crisis under the inept leadership of the political elite. These waves of crisis threaten all life on Earth and are a matter of direct concern for the immediate future of civilisation.

The Sumerian faith concerns itself with the good order of society. It must, in that sense, concern itself with politics, in the modern sense; the ancient Sumerians would not have seen the administration of a city or a nation based around the greater good of all its inhabitants as anything other than one of the functions to which a rightly ordered society must dedicate itself. In contrast, a society organised around the thirst for profit and conquest has come at the cost of human dignity and manifest experience of spirituality.

Once we recognise the existing order of society as being unfit for purpose and unacceptable to human dignity, we must then turn our thoughts to what should replace it. The one great global movement against the existing order - Soviet-style communism, rooted in orthodox Marxism - achieved nothing more than the creation of a new political class, its goals the same conquest and entrenchment, where the secular state took its place on the altar of the nation and professed a dangerous, anti-spiritual, eugenicist scientific-materialism as the pseudo-religious order of the land. The administrators of that system had their own role in dragging the world through oscillating periods of crisis.

The Sumerian faith is an orthodox faith with long-established tenets. Among those ancient tenets are depictions of what a just society should look like. These tenets are not mere religious dogma - they are the lessons of a people, learned in the ongoing struggle for survival and the blood and suffering of countless generations, and expressed in the records kept by the Sumerians themselves that they may serve as a guide to future generations. It is eminently clear that our existing society falls well short of every benchmark, and that the modern Sumerian faith should concern itself with what the good order of a modern society should look like.

Society and technology have changed immeasurably since the last documents were written in the Sumerian tongue. However, the basic principle that new technology should be used for the betterment of human lives translates losslessly across the years. Technological growth should be pursued just as it was during the Ur III period, which was the greatest technological boom in history until the Industrial Revolution. While automation is fundamentally desirable, it must be pursued in such a way that the labour burden on humans is diminished. The world is likely to face many ethical and societal questions around automation in the coming decades, and if automation is not used to reduce the labour burden, it will invariably be used to boost the profits hoarded by the elites.

Society must be structured in such a way as the Earth is given proper reverence and is taken care of in a manner befitting such a precious natural gift. A matter of immediately pressing concern is the climate crisis, and so the goal for the future must be nothing less than 100% sustainable, emission free energy, to be achieved as soon as possible. Future technology may permit for essentially unlimited amounts of energy to be generated at negligible cost, and such technology should also be the subject of proper study and inquiry. Aside from the climate crisis, proper care must be taken of local ecosystems. Pollution is a direct affront for the divine. All our natural resources must be safeguarded on the understanding that they are not our sole property: we are holding them in trust for the gods and for future generations.

The restoration of human dignity is also fundamental. Society must count it as an obligation and a blessing to be able to provide for the wellbeing of all the people who constitute it. A society not relentlessly centred around profit will be able to dedicate time and attention to the arts, which are themselves a manifestation of the divine creative spark present in all human beings. All people should be able to find employment in a way that they are directly connected to the fruits of their labours, which serve a part of the collective endeavour to continually improve the condition of society and all its inhabitants. 

The spiritual needs of humanity should be considered an integral part of human dignity. The numinous power of the gods found in nature has been transformed by the co-operative effort of the human and divine endeavour into the terrain of the city, the suitable dwelling on Earth for humans and gods alike, and the divine powers woven into every facet of civilisation must be respected and revered. The ideal future society would give the gods a place of honour at the centre of it, as was the case for the vast majority of settled human history.

The specific form of the political administration of the future society should be a matter for the local inhabitants. A Sumerian perspective would suggest that a localised form of governance based on city-states would be preferred, interconnected through a globalised system of trade but with a backup focus on the capacity for local self-sufficiency in case of emergency. It would also suggest that a place be found in the civic administration for respected members of the local community as well as spiritual and faith leaders, likely under an office of executive power. This office need not belong to a king, as some of the earliest Sumerian city states had their chief administrative position (ensi) as an elected one.

Although the establishment of such a society might seem like a distant dream, it is important and necessary to set out the principles of good governance, as understood by the ancients in line with the divine order of the Universe, in order to set out a means of comparison with how society is laid out and administered in the modern day. The Sumerian faith is a faith based around civilisation and the entire history of the human effort, and teaches us to scrutinise the way our society is administered and its relationship with the divine, the natural world, and the human lives that it claims dominion over, and further to work and pray for the good administration of the Earth to be set in place as a precondition for the liberation of humanity and freedom from scarcity.

Lady of the highest heaven,
In whose presence An may tremble,
Queen of gate, and rod, and key,
Of earth and sky, of land and sea,
O Inana, may your name,
May your glory and your fame,
Yet be lifted ever higher,
Fuelling passion and desire,
May the hearts of every nation,
In a grand conflagaration,
Yet be stirred with holy power,
For to bring the day and hour,
When, like Ebih, all the tyrants,
Bitter thieves and landed pirates,
Bow down low, and their foundations,
Be condemned to ruin of ages.
𒆬 𒊩𒌆𒈨𒈬 𒍠𒊩