Mesopotamia - Mesopotamia, or Mesopotamia, - the ancient Greeks called the lands that lay between the rivers of Western Asia - the Tigris and the Euphrates. Here, in the valley of the two great rivers of antiquity, in the IV millennium BC. e. and a culture as high as in Egypt was affirmed. It was one of the oldest centers of human civilization. However, unlike the Nile Valley, where the same people lived for three millennia and the same state existed - Egypt, in Mesopotamia rapidly (by historical standards) various state formations replaced each other: Sumer, Akkad, Babylon (Old and New), Assyria, Iran. Here, different peoples mixed, traded, fought with each other, temples, fortresses, cities were quickly erected and destroyed to the ground. More dynamic than in Egypt were the history and culture of Mesopotamia.

The first inhabitants appeared in Mesopotamia about 40 thousand years BC. e. Small groups of people lived in caves and hunted mountain goats and sheep. This went on for tens of thousands of years, during which their daily way of life hardly changed - time seemed to stand still. Only in the tenth millennium BC. e. significant changes became noticeable - people began to engage in agriculture and switched to settled life; they learned to build huts from grass and twigs and houses from unbaked bricks (bricks were made from clay to which chopped straw was added). So, by the 7th millennium BC. e. the first settlements of early farmers arose in Mesopotamia. Since that time, the development of society has gone faster. By the end of the 5th millennium BC. e. already the entire valley of the Tigris and Euphrates was densely populated, and in the middle of the 4th millennium BC. e. among countless villages and towns, the first real cities appear. At the head of the city was either the high priest of the main city temple, or the leader of the city militia.

The city with the villages located around it was an independent state. Such city-states in the IV-III millennium BC. e. in Mesopotamia, there were about two dozen. The largest were Ur, Uruk, Kish, Umma, Lagash, Nippur, Akkad. The youngest of these cities was Babylon, built on the banks of the Euphrates. Its political and cultural significance has steadily increased - this will be especially noticeable from the 2nd millennium BC. e. It is Babylon who will be destined to play an exceptionally important role in the history of Mesopotamia.

Most of the cities were founded by the Sumerians, so the ancient culture of Mesopotamia is usually called Sumerian. The time of existence of this culture is approximately the entire IV millennium and the first half of the III millennium BC. e. Then, in the XXIV-XX centuries. BC e. the power and influence of the city of Akkad is increasing, whose people borrowed a lot from the Sumerians and adopted their cultural heritage.

Language. Writing

In general, the early culture of Mesopotamia is referred to by researchers as Sumero-Akkadian. The double name is due to the fact that the Sumerians and the inhabitants of the Akkadian kingdom spoke different languages ​​​​and had different scripts.

The Akkadian language belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasian languages. Akkadian writing is represented by verbal-syllabic cuneiform. The oldest monuments of Akkadian writing, made on clay tablets, date back to the 25th century. BC e.

Sumerian writing is much older. It is very decorative and, as the researchers believe, originates from the drawings. However, Sumerian legends say that even before the emergence of picture writing, there existed an even more ancient way of fixing thoughts - tying knots on a rope and notches on trees. Over time, pictorial writing changed and improved: from a complete, fairly detailed and thorough depiction of objects, the Sumerians gradually move on to their incomplete, schematic or symbolic depiction. This is a step forward, but the possibilities of such writing were still limited. So, for many complex concepts, there were no signs at all, and even in order to designate such a familiar and understandable phenomenon as rain, the scribe had to combine the symbol of the sky - a star and the symbol of water - a ripple. Such a letter is called ideographic-rebus. Records were made on clay tiles or tablets: the soft clay was pressed with a fragility of a rectangular stick, and the lines on the tablets had the characteristic appearance of wedge-shaped depressions. In general, the entire inscription was a mass of wedge-shaped lines, and therefore Sumerian writing is usually called cuneiform.
. The very first Sumerian cuneiform tablets date back to the middle of the 4th millennium BC. e. These are the oldest written records in the world.

Subsequently, the principle of pictorial writing began to be replaced by the principle of conveying the sound side of the word. Hundreds of signs denoting syllables appeared, and several alphabetic characters corresponding to vowels. They were used mainly to denote service words and particles.

Writing was a great achievement of the Sumero-Akkadian culture. It was borrowed and developed by the Babylonians and spread widely throughout Asia Minor: cuneiform was used in Syria, ancient Persia, and other states. In the middle of the II millennium BC. e. Cuneiform became the international writing system: even the Egyptian pharaohs knew and used it. In the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e. cuneiform becomes alphabetical writing.

For a long time, scientists believed that the Sumerian language was not similar to any of the living or dead languages ​​\u200b\u200bknown to mankind, and therefore the question of the origin of this people remained a mystery. To date, the genetic links of the Sumerian language have not yet been established, but most scientists suggest that this language, like the language of the ancient Egyptians and the inhabitants of Akkad, belongs to the Semitic-Hamitic language group.

It is the Sumerians, according to modern orientalists, who are the founders of the famous Babylonian culture. Their cultural achievements are great and indisputable: the Sumerians created the first poem in human history - "The Golden Age", wrote the first elegies, composed the first in the world library catalog. The Sumerians are the authors of the world's first and oldest medical books - collections of recipes. They were the first to develop and record the farmer's calendar and left the first information about protective plantings. Even the idea of ​​​​creating the first fish reserve in the history of people was also recorded for the first time in writing by the Sumerians.

Early Sumerian deities IV-III millennium BC e. acted primarily as givers of life's blessings and abundance - it was for this that ordinary mortals revered them, built temples for them and made sacrifices. Most of the early Sumerian deities were formed by local gods, whose power did not go beyond a very small territory. The second group of gods were the patrons of large cities - they were more powerful than the local gods, but were revered only in their cities. Finally, there were the gods who were known and worshiped in all the Sumerian cities.

The most powerful of all the gods were An, Enlil and Enki. An (in the Akkadian transcription of Anu) was considered the god of the sky and the father of other gods, who, like people, asked him for help if necessary. However, he was known for his dismissive attitude towards them and his evil antics. An was considered the patron of the city of Uruk.

Enlil - the god of wind, air and all space from earth to sky, also treated people and lower deities with a certain disdain, but he invented the hoe and presented it to humanity and was revered as the patron of the earth and fertility. His main temple was in the city of Nippur.

Enki (Akkadian Ea), the protector of the city of Eredu, was recognized as the god of the ocean and fresh underground waters. The cult of water generally played a huge role in the beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia. The attitude towards water was not unambiguous. Water was considered a source of good will, bringing harvest and life, a symbol of fertility. On the other hand, being the cause of destruction and terrible troubles, water acted as a powerful and unkind element.

Other important deities were the moon god Nanna (Akkadian Sin), patron of the city of Ur, and his son, the sun god Utu (Akkadian Shamash), patron of the cities of Sippar and Larsa. The all-seeing Utu personified the pitiless power of the withering heat of the sun and at the same time the warmth of the sun, without which life is impossible. The goddess of the city of Uruk, Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar), was revered as the goddess of fertility and carnal love, she also bestowed military victories. This goddess of nature, life and birth was often depicted as a tree woman. Her husband was Dumuzi (Akkadian Tammuz), the son of the god Enki, the "true son" of the watery depths. He acted as the god of water and vegetation, which annually died and resurrected. The lord of the kingdom of the dead and the god of the plague was Nergal, the patron saint of valiant warriors - Ninurt, the son of Enlil - a young god who did not even have his own city. Ishkur (Akkad. Adad) was considered an influential god - the god of thunderstorms and storms. He was depicted with a hammer and a beam of lightning.

The goddesses of the Sumerian-Akkadian pantheon usually acted as the wives of powerful gods or as deities personifying death and the underworld. The most famous were the mother goddess - Ninhursag and Mama - the "midwife of the gods", as well as the goddess healer Gula - originally recognized as the goddess of death.

During the III millennium BC. e. the attitude towards the gods gradually changed: new qualities were attributed to them. Thus, An began to personify the idea of ​​power more clearly. Enki - the embodiment of cunning - began to be revered as the god of wisdom and knowledge: he himself perfectly knew all the crafts and arts, and some of them passed on to people; in addition, he was declared the patron saint of soothsayers and spellcasters. Utu became the supreme judge, the protector of the oppressed and the poor. Enlil personified the idea of ​​power.

The strengthening of statehood in Mesopotamia was also reflected in the religious ideas of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia as a whole. The deities, which previously personified only cosmic and natural forces, began to be perceived primarily as great "heavenly bosses" and only then - as the natural element and "giver of blessings." In the pantheon of the gods, the god-secretary, the god-bearer of the throne of the lord, the gatekeeper gods appeared.

Important deities were associated with various planets and constellations: Utu with the Sun, Nergal with Mars, Inanna with Venus. Therefore, all the townspeople were interested in the position of the luminaries in the sky, their relative position and especially the place of “their” star: this promised inevitable changes in the life of the city-state and its population, whether it be prosperity or misfortune. So gradually formed cult of heavenly bodies, astronomical thought and astrology began to develop.

Literature

Many monuments of ancient Sumerian-Akkadian literature have been preserved, written on clay tablets, and almost all of them scientists have been able to read. Priority in deciphering the inscriptions belongs to Western European scientists, and the most significant discoveries were made in the 19th century.

To date, it has been established that most of the texts are hymns to the gods, prayers, religious myths and legends, in particular, about the emergence of the world, human civilization and agriculture. In addition, lists of royal dynasties have long been kept in temples. The most ancient are the lists written in the Sumerian language by the priests of the city of Ur.

Subsequently, in the III century. BC e., the Babylonian priest Beros used these lists to write a consolidated work on ancient Sumero-Akkadian history. We know from Berossus that the Babylonians divided the history of their country into two periods - "before the flood" and "after the flood". Referring to the Sumerian priests, Berossus lists ten kings who ruled before the flood, and indicates the total period of their reign - 432 thousand years. His information about the reign of the first kings after the flood was also fantastic. The works of Berossus, however, were widely known and popular, and his data were not very disputed. For his wisdom and eloquence, a monument was erected to him in Athens: after all, Berossus wrote in Greek - the monument was with a golden tongue.

The most important monument of Sumerian literature was the tales of Gilgamesh , the legendary king of the city of Uruk, who, as follows from the dynastic lists, ruled in the XXVIII century. BC e. In these tales, the hero Gilgamesh is presented as the son of a mere mortal and the goddess Ninsun. Gilgamesh's wanderings around the world in search of the secret of immortality and his friendship with the wild man Enkidu are described in detail. The legends about Gilgamesh had a very strong impact on world literature and culture and on the culture of neighboring peoples who adopted and adapted the legends to their national life.

An exceptionally strong influence on world literature was also legends about the flood. They say that the flood was arranged by the gods, who planned to destroy all life on Earth. Only one person was able to escape death - the pious Ziusudra, who, on the advice of the gods, built a ship in advance. The legend says that the gods argued among themselves whether it was worth destroying all of humanity: some believed that it was possible to punish people for sins and reduce their numbers in other ways, in particular, by hunger, fires, and also sent wild animals to them.

Then, in antiquity, the first versions of the origin of man arose, which were repeatedly recorded later in various periods, in particular, in the period of the Old Babylonian kingdom (II millennium BC). So, according to the ideas of the ancient Sumerians, which have come down to us in Old Babylonian "Poem about Atrahasis" There were times when there were no people yet. The gods lived on earth, who themselves “carried the burden, dragged the baskets, the baskets of the gods were huge, the work was hard, the hardships were great ... o In the end, the gods decided to create a person in order to put the burden of labor on him. To do this, they mixed the clay with the blood of one of the lower gods, whom it was decided to sacrifice for the sake of the common good. In man, therefore, the divine principle and inanimate matter are mixed, and his destiny on Earth is to work for the gods and for the gods by the sweat of his brow.

The successor of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization was Babylonia. Its center was the city of Babylon (Babili means "Gate of God"), whose kings in the II millennium BC. e. were able to unite under their rule all the regions of Sumer and Akkad. The heyday of the Old Babylonian kingdom fell on the reign of the sixth king of the I Babylonian dynasty - Hammurabi. Under him, Babylon turned from a small city into the largest economic, political and cultural center of Asia Minor.

Under Hammurabi, the famous Code of Laws appeared, written in cuneiform on a two-meter stone pillar. These laws reflected the economic life, life and customs of the inhabitants of the Old Babylonian kingdom. From these laws, we know that a free full-fledged citizen was called "avilum" - a man. This group of the population included landowners, priests, communal peasants, artisans, who, along with traditional craft specialties such as builders, blacksmiths, weavers, tanners, etc., also included doctors, veterinarians, and barbers. The freemen with limited rights were called prone, but they owned property and slaves, and their rights as owners were strictly protected. The lowest stratum of Babylonian society was made up of slaves. The average family had from two to five slaves, wealthy families owned many dozens of slaves. It is characteristic that a slave could also have property, marry free women, and children from such mixed marriages were considered free. All children of both sexes had the right to inherit parental property, but sons were given priority. Divorce, as well as the remarriage of a widow, was difficult.

Religious views

An important innovation in the religious life of Mesopotamia II millennium BC. e. there was a gradual promotion among all the Sumerian-Babylonian gods of the city god of Babylon - Marduk. He was almost universally revered as the king of the gods. The priests explained this by the fact that the great gods themselves ceded supremacy to Marduk, since it was he who was able to save them from the terrible monster - the bloodthirsty Tiamat, with whom no one dared to fight.

The Babylonian gods, like the Sumerian gods, were numerous. They were portrayed as patrons of the king, which testifies to the formation of the ideology of deification of the strong royal power. At the same time, the gods were humanized: like people, they strove for success, desired benefits, arranged their affairs, acted according to circumstances. They were not indifferent to wealth, owned material goods, could acquire families and offspring. They had to drink and eat like people; they, like people, were characterized by various weaknesses and shortcomings: envy, anger, indecision, doubt, inconstancy.

According to the teachings of the Babylonian priests, people were created from clay to serve the gods. And it was the gods who determined the fate of people. Only the priests could know the will of God: they alone knew how to call and conjure spirits, talk with the gods, and determine the future by the movement of heavenly bodies. The cult of heavenly bodies thus becomes extremely important in Babylonia. In the unchanging and therefore miraculous movement of the stars along a once and for all given path, the inhabitants of Babylon saw the manifestation of divine will.

Attention to the stars and planets contributed to the rapid development of astronomy and mathematics. Yes, it was created sexagesimal system, which to this day exists in terms of time - minutes, seconds. Babylonian astronomers for the first time in the history of mankind calculated laws of circulation of the sun, moon and eclipse frequency, and in general they were significantly ahead of the Egyptians in astronomical observations. Scientific knowledge in the field of mathematics and astronomy often outstripped the practical needs of the inhabitants of Babylonia.

All scientific knowledge and research of scientists were connected with magic and divination: both scientific knowledge and magic formulas and spells were the privilege of sages, astrologers and priests.

People obeyed the will of priests and kings, believing in the predestination of human destiny, in the subjection of man to higher powers, good and evil. But resignation to fate was far from absolute: it was combined with the will to win in the fight against a hostile environment. The constant awareness of the danger to man in the world around him was intertwined with the desire to fully enjoy life. Riddles and fears, superstitions, mysticism and witchcraft coexisted with sober thought, precise calculation and pragmatism.

All the main interests of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia were focused on reality. The Babylonian priest did not promise blessings and joys in the kingdom of the dead, but in case of obedience he promised them during his lifetime. In Babylonian art, there is almost no depiction of funerary scenes. In general, the religion, art and ideology of Ancient Babylon were more realistic than the culture of Ancient Egypt of the same period.

The ideas of the inhabitants of Babylon about death and the posthumous fate of a person boiled down to the following. They believed that after death a person gets into "country of no return", there he will remain forever, resurrection is impossible. The place where the deceased will stay is very dull and sad - there is no light there, and the food of the dead is dust and clay. The departed will no longer know human joys. Everyone is doomed to remain in such an equally sad situation - regardless of their status and behavior during life - both noble and rootless, rich and poor, both the righteous and the scoundrels. Only those who left numerous male offspring on earth will probably be in a slightly better situation - they can count on receiving funeral sacrifices and will drink clean water. The worst fate awaited those whose body was not buried. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia believed that there was a certain connection between the living and the dead: the dead could give the living the necessary advice or warn them from trouble. The living tried to be closer to their dead: the dead were often buried not in cemeteries, but directly under the floor of the house or in the courtyard.

Such ideas about the connection between the living and the dead were strengthened by the belief in the existence of a personal god of man - ilu, who took part in all his affairs. There was a special connection between a man and his ilu: from generation to generation, a personal god was transferred from the body of the father to the body of the son at the moment of conception. A man - the son of Ilu - could count on the intercession of his personal god and on his mediation when addressing the great gods.

monumental art

The religious beliefs of the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia were reflected in their monumental art. Temples dedicated to the gods played a particularly important role. Temples were the most important cultural and economic centers in the cities of Mesopotamia. They owned the land on which thousands of communal peasants worked, many temple slaves. They traded with near and far countries, engaged in real estate transactions; they had workshops, archives, libraries and schools.

Temples were built in such a way as to demonstrate the power of their deity. The classic form of Mesopotamian temples was a tall stepped tower - a ziggurat. , surrounded by protruding terraces and giving the impression of several towers, which decreased in volume ledge by ledge. There could be from four to seven such ledges-terraces. The ziggurats were painted, with the lower ledges being made darker than the upper ones; the terraces were, as a rule, landscaped. The most famous ziggurat in history can be considered the temple of the god Marduk in Babylon - the famous tower of babel, about the construction of which as about Babylonian pandemonium says in the Bible.

In the main inner hall of the temple, a statue of a god was placed, made, as a rule, from precious woods and covered with plates of gold and ivory; the statue was dressed in magnificent clothes and crowned with a crown. Access to the hall where the statue stood was open only to a narrow circle of priests. All other residents could see the deity only during a short time of festive ceremonies, when the statue was carried through the streets of the city - then God blessed the city and the surrounding area. Especially important was the New Year's holiday, timed to coincide with the spring equinox, when the gods determined the fate of the city and citizens for a year.

Actually the sanctuary of the god, his "dwelling", was in the upper tower of the ziggurat, often crowned with a golden dome - where the god stayed at night. Inside this tower there was nothing but a bed and a gilded table. However, this tower was also used for more specific earthly needs: the priests conducted astronomical observations from there.

The priests taught that the gods could receive guests - the gods of other temples and cities, and sometimes they themselves went to visit; the gods appreciated delicious food - the meals of the gods took place in the morning and in the evening: however, the deity absorbed food and drinks, only looking at them; some gods were passionate hunters, and so on.

Architecture and fine arts

In general, architectural monuments of Babylonian art have come down to us much less than, for example, Egyptian. This is quite understandable: unlike Egypt, the territory of Mesopotamia was poor in stone, and the main building material was brick, simply dried in the sun. Such brick was very short-lived - brick buildings almost did not survive. In addition, the fragile and heavy material significantly limited the possibilities of builders, dictating the very style of Mesopotamian buildings, which were distinguished by heaviness, simple rectangular shapes, and massive walls. Along with this, the most important elements of architecture here were domes, arches, vaulted ceilings. The rhythm of horizontal and vertical sections determined the architectural composition of the temple in Babylonia. This circumstance allowed art historians to express the point of view that it was the Babylonian architects who were the creators of those architectural forms that later formed the basis of the building art of Ancient Rome, and then Medieval Europe. So, many scientists believe that the prototypes of European architecture should be sought in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.

For Babylonian fine art, the image of animals was typical - most often a lion or a bull. Marbles are also remarkable. figurines from Tel Asmar, depicting a group of male figures. Each figurine is placed in such a way that the viewer always meets her gaze. A characteristic feature of these figurines was a finer elaboration compared to figurines from Egypt, greater realism and liveliness of the image, and somewhat less conventionality.

The culture, religion and art of Babylonia were borrowed and developed by the Assyrians, who subjugated the Babylonian kingdom in the 8th century. BC e. in ruins palace in Nineveh Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (VII century BC), scientists discovered a huge library for that time, which included many (tens of thousands) of cuneiform texts. It is assumed that this library kept all the most important works of Babylonian, as well as ancient Sumerian literature. King Ashurbanipal - an educated and well-read man - went down in history as a passionate collector of ancient written monuments: according to him, written down and left for posterity, it was a great joy for him to parse beautiful and incomprehensible texts written in the language of ancient Sumerians.

More than 2 thousand years separated King Ashurbanipal from the ancient culture of Mesopotamia, but realizing the value of old clay tablets, he collected and preserved them. Education, however, was not inherent in all the rulers of Assyria. A more common and constant feature of the Assyrian rulers was the desire for power, domination over neighboring peoples, the desire to assert and demonstrate their power to everyone.

art

Assyrian art I millennium BC e. full of pathos of strength, it glorified the power and victory of the conquerors. The images of grandiose and arrogant winged bulls with arrogant human faces and sparkling eyes are characteristic. Each bull had five hooves. Such, for example, are images from the palace of Sargon II (VII century BC). But other famous reliefs from Assyrian palaces are always the glorification of the king - powerful, formidable and merciless. Such were the Assyrian rulers in life. Such was the Assyrian reality. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the peculiarity of Assyrian art is images of royal cruelty, unprecedented for world art: scenes of impalement, pulling out the tongues of prisoners, ripping off the skin of the guilty in the presence of the king. All this was the facts of the everyday life of the Assyrian state, and these scenes are conveyed without a sense of pity and hesitation.

The cruelty of the customs of the Assyrian society was apparently associated with its low religiosity: not religious buildings, but palaces and secular buildings prevailed in the cities of Assyria, just as in the reliefs and paintings of Assyrian palaces - not religious, but secular subjects. Numerous and superbly executed images of animals, mainly a lion, a camel, a horse, were characteristic.

Culture of New Babylon

New Babylon was a huge and noisy eastern city with a population of about 200 thousand people - the largest city in the Ancient East. The city itself became an impregnable fortress - it was surrounded by a wide ditch with water and two fortress walls, one of which was so powerful and thick that two chariots drawn by four horses could freely ride on it. There were 24 large avenues in the city, and the famous Tower of Babel, one of the seven wonders of the world, remained the most important attraction. It was a grand seven-tiered ziggurat 90 meters high. The landscaped terraces of the Tower of Babel are known as the seventh wonder of the world - "Hanging Gardens of Babylon". There are many legends about Babylon, and scientists still have a lot to do to distinguish truth from fiction in them.

In the VI century. BC e. the Persians launched an offensive against Babylon: the city fell and the Persian king Cyrus II (? -530 BC) solemnly entered it. The Persians respected the religious holidays and rituals of the Babylonians and made sacrifices to their gods. Cyrus formally retained the Babylonian kingdom as part of the Persian state as a special political unit and did not change anything in the social structure of the country. Babylonia continued to actively trade with Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and was one of the richest provinces of the Iranian Empire, annually paying more than 30 tons of silver as a royal tax.

Since that time, Babylonia has become easily accessible for those wishing to settle in it. Active resettlement of people has led to the acceleration of the processes of ethnic mixing and interpenetration of cultures.

Art of Iran VI-IV centuries. BC e., as researchers believe, is even more secular and courtly than the art of its predecessors. It is more calm: it almost does not have the cruelty that was so characteristic of the art of the Assyrians. At the same time, the continuity of cultures is preserved. The most important element of fine art is the image of animals - primarily winged bulls, lions and vultures. Reliefs depicting solemn processions of warriors, tributaries, and lions were widespread.

In the IV century. BC e. Iran, like Egypt, was conquered Alexander the Great(356-323 BC) and included in the sphere of influence of the Hellenistic culture.

Alexander did not seek to change the way of life and the system of worldview that had developed in the country, and even he himself went through the ancient rite of becoming Babylonian kings in the main temple of the city. After the death of Alexander the Great, nicknamed the Great, the process of decline of Ancient Mesopotamia begins. When in the II century. BC e. the Romans appeared here, Babylon and other previously famous and prosperous cities were already in a state of complete desolation.

In the III century. BC e. Sassanids become the ruling dynasty in Iran. They sought to prove that they were descended from the gods, and for this purpose, on their orders, colossal reliefs were created depicting scenes from their victorious wars of conquest. But not all wars were successful for the Persians. Many monuments of Sasanian Iran perished in the fire of these wars, many perished later. All that remains of high Sasanian art is the ruins of palaces and temples, several dozen gold and silver vessels, the remains of silk fabrics and carpets. Medieval stories have brought us the story of one such luxurious carpet that covered the entire floor in the huge front hall of the palace of Tak-i-Kesra in Ctesiphon. By order of one of the Arab commanders who captured the palace, the carpet was cut into pieces and divided among the soldiers as spoils of war, and each piece was sold for 20 thousand dirhems. The walls of the palaces were decorated with frescoes with portraits of nobles, court beauties, musicians, images of the gods.

Zoroastrianism

The state religion in Sasanian Iran was Zoroastrianism - named after the founder of this religion Zarathushtra (in Iranian transcription, in Greek transcription - Zoroaster). The historicity of Zarathushtra has not been reliably established, but most scholars tend to consider him a real person. It is believed that he lived between the 12th and 10th centuries. BC e. Zarathushtra initially began to preach in his homeland (in Eastern Iran), but was not recognized by his community and was persecuted by the local ruler. The Prophet was forced to leave his homeland and preach in other lands, where he found powerful patrons. Zarathushtra was killed by one of his enemies who pursued him all his life.

Zoroaster is credited with compiling the oldest part of the Avesta - the canon of Zoroastrianism. This is the oldest religious Iranian monument, a collection of sacred books containing a set of religious and legal prescriptions, prayers, chants, and hymns. The text of the Avesta was codified under the Sassanids in the III-VII centuries.

Already in the "Younger Avesta" the image of Zoroaster was mythologised. It was told how the spirits of darkness tried to kill or tempt the prophet, promising him unlimited power over the world, and how Zarathushtra repelled all these intrigues. Subsequently, the Zoroastrian tradition made the figure of Zarathushtra even more mythical. According to legends, he was created by the supreme deity not as a real person, but as a spiritual entity at the very beginning of life and placed in the trunk of the tree of life. Six thousand years later, during the period of fierce universal struggle between good and evil, Zarathushtra received a bodily incarnation and was illuminated by the unearthly light of truth in order to contribute to the victory of good over evil.

The starting point of Zoroastrianism was the worship of fire and the belief in a just struggle between good-light and evil and darkness. This struggle, the prophet taught, underlies the universe, and its outcome depends on the free choice of man, his active participation in this struggle on the side of good.

The Sassanids patronized the Zoroastrian religion. A large number of fire temples were established throughout the country. . The temple was a domed hall with a deep niche, where a sacred fire was placed in a huge brass bowl on a stone pedestal-altar.

Zoroastrian fire temples had their own hierarchy. Each ruler owned his own fire, lit in the days of his reign. The greatest and most revered was the fire of Bahram - a symbol of Truthfulness.

Preaching Zoroastrian morality, the prophet formulated the so-called ethical triad: good thoughts - good words - good deeds. Its fulfillment is an indispensable condition for a righteous way of life. From what he thought, what he said and what he did, his posthumous fate depends. Zarathushtra taught that already three days after death, the soul goes to the place of retribution for judgment, where all the deeds of a person are weighed and their future fate is decided. For those who were active on the side of good, Zarathushtra promised posthumous bliss, he threatened the accomplices of evil with terrible torment and condemnation at the last judgment, which will be at the end of the world. The "Younger Avesta" predicted the death of the world and a terrible judgment in three thousand years, when the righteous would be saved and the evil punished.

The main deity of the Zoroastrian pantheon, personifying goodness and the victory of the forces of good, was Ahuramazda. The revelations of Ahuramazda were passed on by Zarathushtra to his disciples in the form of the Avesta. The bearer of the evil inclination in the Zoroastrian pantheon was Azriman. The symbol of fertility was the mythical creature Senmurva, depicted in the form of a dog-bird. The beautiful Anahitu was considered the goddess of love and earth.

The change of Zoroastrianism as the dominant religion dates back to the 7th century, when Iran was conquered by the Arabs, who destroyed the ancient flourishing cities in order to establish a new faith (Islam). However, the remarkable Sasanian art had a strong influence on the Arab Muslim culture, and through the Arabs - on Spain and other countries of Western Europe. Traces of Sasanian art can still be found in the territory from China to the Atlantic.

The most ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia created a high culture, which had an exceptionally strong influence on the further development of all mankind, becoming the property of many countries and peoples. On the territory of Mesopotamia, many features of material and spiritual culture arose and took shape, which for a long time determined the entire subsequent course of the world-historical process. The first city-states appeared here, writing and literature arose, science was born. The civilization of the Ancient Mesopotamia had a huge impact on the ancient, and through it - on the medieval culture of Europe, on the Medieval East, and ultimately on the world culture of the New and Modern Ages.

The greatest achievement of the culture of ancient Mesopotamia was the invention of writing. Many scientists believe that it was Sumerian writing that was the earliest in the history of mankind - it dates back to the 4th millennium BC. e.

Here, in Mesopotamia, complex counting systems arose, the development of scientific thought, especially astronomy and mathematics, began.

The religion of the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia illuminated the existing social order: the ruler of the city-state was considered a descendant of the gods, not only the royal power itself was deified, but also the cult of dead kings.

The most ancient myths of Mesopotamia had a strong influence on the subsequent development of world religions: these are myths about the creation of the world, the Flood, etc.

The cultural achievements of the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia are great and indisputable: they created the first poems and elegies in human history; the world's first library catalog was compiled, the famous library of cuneiform texts was collected by Ashurbanipal. Architectural forms, embodied in temples, ziggurats, towers by Babylonian architects, later became the basis of the building art of Ancient Rome, and then Medieval Europe.

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2.4. Spiritual culture of Mesopotamia. In Sumer at the end of the 4th millennium BC. e. mankind for the first time left the stage of primitiveness and entered the era of antiquity, here begins the true history of mankind. The transition from barbarism to civilization means the emergence of a fundamentally new type of culture and the birth of a new type of consciousness. The spirit of Mesopotamian culture reflected the crushing power of nature. Man was not inclined to overestimate his strength, observing such powerful natural phenomena as a thunderstorm or an annual flood. The Tigris and Euphrates flooded, destroying dams and flooding crops. Heavy rains turned the solid surface of the earth into a sea of ​​mud and deprived a person of freedom of movement. The nature of Mesopotamia crushed and trampled on the will of man, constantly made him feel how powerless and insignificant he was.

Interaction with natural forces gave rise to tragic moods, which found its direct expression in people's ideas about the world in which they lived. Man saw in it order, cosmos, not chaos. But this order did not ensure its security, as it was established through the interaction of many powerful forces, periodically entering into mutual conflicts. With such a view of the world, there was no division into animate or inanimate, living and dead. In such a universe, any objects and phenomena had their own will and character.

In a culture that considered the entire universe as a state, obedience had to act as the first virtue, because the state is built on obedience, on the unconditional acceptance of power. Therefore, in Mesopotamia, the "good life" was also the "obedient life." The individual stood at the center of expanding circles of power that limited his freedom of action. The circle closest to him was formed by power in his own family: father, mother, older brothers and sisters, outside the family there were other circles of power: the state, society, gods.

A well-established system of obedience was the rule of life in ancient Mesopotamia, because man was created from clay, mixed with the blood of the gods and created in order to work instead of the gods and for the good of the gods. Accordingly, a diligent and obedient servant of the gods could count on signs of favor and rewards from his master. The path of obedience, service and reverence was the road to earthly success, to the highest values ​​of life: to health and longevity, to an honorable position in the community, to wealth.

Another major problem of the Mesopotamian spiritual culture was the problem of death, which seemed to be evil and the main punishment for man. Indeed, death is evil, but it cannot negate the value of human life. Human life is inherently beautiful, and this is manifested in all aspects of everyday existence, in the joy of victory, in love for a woman, etc. Death, on the other hand, marks the end of an individual's life path. Moreover, it seems to stimulate a person to live wisely and meaningfully in order to leave a memory of himself. One should die fighting evil, even fighting death. The reward for this will be the grateful memory of descendants. This is the immortality of man, the meaning of his life.

People do not have the opportunity to avoid death, but this does not give rise to a pessimistic attitude towards life. A person in all situations must remain a person. His whole life should be saturated with the struggle for the establishment of justice on earth, while death is the culmination of life, the completion of the successes and victories that have fallen to his lot. In general, a person's life is predestined from birth, there is no place for accidents in it, the possibility of somehow influencing the course of events is excluded in advance. It was in Mesopotamian mythology that the concept of rigid determinism of human life was created, which assumed the Last Judgment, the golden age and heavenly life - ideas that later became part of the religious beliefs of the peoples of Western Asia and biblical mythological literature.

Thus, the spiritual culture of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations appears at the same time as an alloy of an undivided and at the same time differentiated reality based on a specific mythology that grew directly from the primitive consciousness, retaining many of its original qualities. This mythology was anthropomorphized only to a small extent, since it was not addressed to personal empathy. She performed the function of affirming and exalting the divine-universal principle, embodied in the personality of the all-powerful despot. Such a mythology does not know completeness, it is always oriented towards supplementing, adapting it to a certain religious, state or everyday reality. All this taken together makes the spiritual culture of the Mesopotamian peoples generally uniform, despite ethnic diversity, as well as resilient and plastic, capable of growing and becoming more complex, as well as creating the greatest cultural values.

The spiritual culture of Mesopotamia strove to reflect all aspects of human activity. At the same time, knowledge was considered the most valuable, which made it possible to avoid misfortunes or get rid of their consequences. Therefore, in the spiritual culture, a special place was occupied by the prediction of the future - fortune-telling. This system was developed very widely, including divination by the movement of stars, the Moon, the Sun, atmospheric phenomena, animal behavior, plants, etc. Divination could predict events both in the country and in the life of an individual. Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian priests and magicians had extensive knowledge of the human psyche, had experience in the field of suggestion and hypnosis.

In general, the formation of the spiritual culture of the peoples of Mesopotamia was inextricably linked with the development of their religious consciousness, which went from the worship of the forces of nature and the cult of ancestors to the veneration of the single supreme god An. In the process of development of the culture of the Mesopotamian civilizations, religious ideas took shape in a complex system in which the idea of ​​deification of the king and royal power dominated.

The main duty of people in relation to the gods was the offering of sacrifices. The sacrificial ritual was complex: incense was burned, and the libation of sacrificial water, oil, wine, prayers were raised for the well-being of the donor, animals were slaughtered on the sacrificial tables. The priests who were in charge of these rites knew what dishes and drinks were pleasing to the gods, what could be considered “clean” and what was “unclean”.

During the performance of ritual and ritual ceremonies, the priests had to cast spells, know the relationship of the gods, remember the legends about the origin of the universe, their people, be able to portray the gods, play musical instruments. In addition, they had to predict the weather, tell people the will of the gods, be able to heal ailments, perform various agricultural rituals, and do much more. Thus, the priest was at the same time a priest, a poet, a singer, an artist, a healer, an agronomist, a performer, etc. Knowledge of various artistic languages ​​was necessary for him to perform his duties professionally, since there were no special artists, musicians, dancers in the temples, it was the priests and priestesses who sang sacred texts, acted out ritual scenes, and also danced.

Mesopotamia became the birthplace of many religious ideas and dogmas, most
of which were assimilated and creatively reworked by neighboring peoples -
mi, including the Greeks and the ancient Jews. This can be verified by
measure of biblical tales, in accordance
with which there are quite certain
nye ideas about paradise. Holy books
gi, religious painting and literature
draw a beautiful garden, where walking-
|| Adam and Eve are hiding in the branches of a tree

the tempting serpent lurked, persuading Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. It turns out that the Sumerian ideas about the Garden of Eden, where there is no death, largely correspond to the biblical ones. The description of its location also testifies to the borrowing of the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bdivine paradise by Christianity; the Bible directly states that the rivers of paradise are located in the Euphrates region, that is, in Mesopotamia.

A comparison of the biblical description of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis with the Babylonian poem "Enuma Elish" ("When above") reveals many similarities in them. Cosmogony, the creation of man from clay, and the rest of the creator after this coincide in many details.
2.5. The Art of the Mesopotamian Civilizations. The works of the Mesopotamian culture mainly served cult purposes and the solution of various practical problems. Products of artistic creativity were used to facilitate labor processes, regulate social relations and perform religious and magical rites. The process of social stratification developing in that era gave rise to a special category of works of art intended for public ceremonies that carry a certain symbolic load. The deification of the images of the leaders was carried out in laudatory songs - hymns and monumental tombstones. Objects that perform the functions of attributes of power (wands, scepters, weapons, etc.) became objects of artistic creativity.

Perhaps the very first step in separating artistic consciousness into an independent sphere was the construction of a special “house of God” - a temple. The path of development of temple architecture - from an altar or a sacred stone in the open air to a building with a statue or some other image of a deity, raised up on a hill or on an artificial platform, turned out to be relatively short, but the formed type of "God's house" did not change later for millennia .

Temples were built in cities and dedicated to the respective god. At the temple of the main local deity, there was usually a ziggurat - a high tower surrounded by protruding terraces and giving the impression of several towers, decreasing in volume ledge by ledge. There could be from four to seven such ledges-terraces. Ziggurats were built on hills of bricks and faced with glazed tiles, with the lower ledges painted in darker colors than the upper ones. The terraces were, as a rule, landscaped.

The deity was supposed to protect the city, which was considered his property, so he was supposed to live at a higher altitude than mortal people. To do this, a golden dome was built in the upper part of the ziggurat, which served as a sanctuary, that is, "the dwelling of God." In the sanctuary, the god rested at night. Inside this dome there was nothing but a bed and a gilded table. But the priests also used this sanctuary for more specific needs: they conducted astrological observations from there.

The symbolic coloring of the temple, in which the colors were distributed from darker to lighter and brighter colors, connected the earthly and heavenly spheres with this transition, united the elements. Thus, the natural colors and shapes in the ziggurat turned into a coherent artistic system. And the unity of the earthly and heavenly worlds, expressed in geometric perfection and inviolability of the forms of stepped pyramids, directed upwards, was embodied in a symbol of a solemn and gradual ascent to the top of the world.

A classic example of such architecture is the ziggurat in Uruk, one of the most important centers of Mesopotamian religious and artistic culture. It was dedicated to the moon god Nanna and was a three-tiered tower with a temple on the upper terrace. Only the lower platform of very impressive dimensions has survived to this day - 65 x 43 m and a height of about 20 m. Initially, the ziggurat of three truncated pyramids stacked on top of each other reached a height of 60 m.

No less majestic was the palace architecture. The cities of the Mesopotamian civilizations looked like fortresses with powerful walls and defensive towers surrounded by a moat. A palace towered over the city, usually built on an artificial platform made of mud bricks. Numerous palace premises satisfied a variety of needs. The palace in the city of Kish is one of the most ancient in Western Asia. It reproduced in terms of the type of a secular residential building with a number of deaf, windowless living quarters grouped around a courtyard, but differed in size, number of rooms, and richness of decoration. The high outer front staircase, on top of which the ruler appeared like a deity, went out into an open courtyard intended for meetings.

Almost no architectural monuments of the Mesopotamian culture have survived to our time. This is due to the absence of building stone on the territory of Mesopotamia. The main material was unfired brick, which is very short-lived. Nevertheless, individual surviving buildings allowed art historians to establish that it was the Mesopotamian architects who were the creators of those architectural forms that formed the basis of the building art of Greece and Rome.

Another achievement of the art of the Mesopotamian civilizations was the development of various ways of transmitting information in the form of pictographic (pictorial) and cuneiform writing.

Cuneiform writing gradually evolved from pictorial writing. It got its name because of the similarity of the shape of its signs with horizontal, vertical and angular wedges, the combinations of which first depicted words, then - syllable signs consisting of two or three sounds. Cuneiform was not an alphabet, that is, a sound letter, but contained ideograms that denoted either whole words, or vowels, or syllables. The difficulty lies in their ambiguity. Reading such texts was extremely difficult, and only an experienced scribe, after many years of study, could read and write without errors. Most often, scribes used special determinants (determinants), which were supposed to exclude reading errors, since the same sign had many different meanings and ways of reading.

The Sumerians were the creators of cuneiform writing, later it was borrowed by the Babylonians, and then, thanks to the development of trade, it spread from Babylon throughout Asia Minor. By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. e. Cuneiform became the international writing system and played a large role in the development of Mesopotamian literature.

Thanks to cuneiform writing, many monuments of Mesopotamian literature have been preserved - they were written on clay tablets, and almost all of them were readable. Basically, these are hymns to the gods, religious myths and legends, in particular, about the emergence of civilization and agriculture. In its deepest origins, Sumero-Babylonian literature goes back to oral folk art, which included folk songs, the ancient "animal" epic and fables. A special place in Mesopotamian literature was occupied by the epic, the origin of which dates back to the Sumerian era. The plots of the Sumerian epic poems are closely connected with myths that describe the golden age of hoary antiquity, the appearance of the gods, the creation of the world and man.

The most outstanding work of Babylonian literature is the "Poem of Gilgamesh", in which the eternal question about the meaning of life and the inevitability of death of a person, even a glorified hero, is raised with great artistic power. The content of this poem dates back to deep Sumerian antiquity, since the name of Gilgamesh, the semi-legendary king of Uruk, is preserved in the lists of the most ancient pairs of Sumer.

The “Poem of Gilgamesh” occupies a special place in Mesopotamian literature, both due to its artistic merit, and because of the originality of the thoughts expressed in it: about the eternal desire of man to know the “law of the earth”, the secret of life and death. Deep pessimism is permeated with that part of the poem, where the future life is depicted as an abode of suffering and sorrow. Even the famous Gilgamesh, despite his divine origin, cannot earn the highest mercy from the gods and achieve immortality.

Mesopotamian literature was also represented by poems, lyrics, myths, hymns and legends, epic tales and other genres. A special genre was represented by the so-called laments - works about the death of cities as a result of raids by neighboring tribes. In the literary work of the peoples of Ancient Mesopotamia, the problems of life and death, love and hatred, friendship and enmity, wealth and poverty were posed, which are characteristic of the literary work of all subsequent cultures and peoples.

The art of Mesopotamia, originally associated with the ritual, having gone through several stages, acquired in the 2nd millennium BC. e. appearance in which modern man already guesses familiar features. The variety of genres, poetic language, emotional motivation of the actions of the characters, the original form of works of art testify to the fact that their creators were real artists.

Assyrian art and the history of its formation can serve as a typical model for understanding Mesopotamian culture. Assyrian art of the 1st millennium BC. e. glorified the power and victories of the conquerors. The images of formidable and arrogant winged bulls with arrogant human faces and sparkling eyes are characteristic. The famous reliefs of the Assyrian palaces have always glorified the king - powerful, formidable and merciless, which were the Assyrian rulers. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Assyrian art features unparalleled depictions of royal cruelty: impalement, tearing out the captives' tongues, etc. The cruelty of the customs of Assyrian society was apparently combined with its low religiosity. In the cities of Assyria, not religious buildings, but palaces and secular buildings prevailed, just as in the reliefs and paintings of Assyrian palaces, not religious, but secular subjects.

On the Assyrian reliefs, the king does not hunt in general, but in the mountains or in the steppe, feasts not “abstractly”, but in a palace or in a garden. The sequence of events is also conveyed on late-time reliefs: individual episodes form a single narrative, sometimes quite long, and the course of time is determined by the arrangement of the scenes.

The creation of such bas-reliefs was only possible for a whole army of professional artists who worked according to a strictly specified setting. The unified rules for depicting the figure of the king, its location, dimensions are strictly concise and entirely subordinate to the idea - to show the power and strength of the king-hero and his great deeds. At the same time, many specific details in different drawings and reliefs turned out to be exactly the same. Even images of animals tend to be "composed" of standard parts. The freedom of the artist's creativity consisted only in presenting as many characters as possible, showing several plans, combining the beginning of the action and its result, etc.

The degree of study of the ancient Eastern civilizations allows, as noted above, to form only the most general idea of ​​the main milestones in the development of their artistic culture. The approximateness of the recreated picture is felt even stronger if we take into account that the choice of fine art as the dominant form is determined by the monuments at our disposal, of which the majority are works of this particular type of art.

Comparing and comparing the available cultural monuments and features of the era under consideration, it is possible to determine the rules and norms that the ancient masters were guided by in their work. The first conclusion that most obviously suggests itself in this analysis is that the artistic meaning of objects was inseparable from their utilitarian purpose and from their magical (or religious) function. Since it was the purpose of the object that determined its magical and artistic features, there is reason to single out such a feature of Mesopotamian art as utilitarianism. It is quite obvious that this feature at different stages of Mesopotamian culture manifested itself to varying degrees, but it was always inherent in it.

In addition, the study of the monuments of Mesopotamian art allows us to conclude that the informative element prevailed in his artistic consciousness. Informativeness in monuments of art means the inherent ability to preserve and communicate (transmit) information specially incorporated into specific works by their creators.

Informativeness is most fully and vividly expressed in those monuments of fine art that contained various forms of pictorial (pictographic) writing. It should be emphasized that in the future, with the emergence of other types of writing (hieroglyphic, syllabic, alphabetic), monuments of artistic culture retain this property in the form of inscriptions that accompanied sculptures, reliefs, paintings, or their own short explanations, etc.

Mesopotamian culture had a huge impact on the development of other peoples. Within its framework, for several millennia, the artistic activity of the most ancient civilizations was carried out, and the progressive movement of artistic thinking took place. The Hellenic

antiquity, it draws strength from Western and Eastern medieval cultures. Indeed, for the first time in history, it was in Mesopotamia that a strong artistic continuity was established, the first artistic styles were formed.
Literature:

Beletsky M. The Forgotten World of the Sumerians. - M., 1980

Vasiliev L. S. History of the East: In 2 volumes - M., 1994

Zabolotskaya Yu. History of the Middle East in antiquity. - M., 1989

Klochkov I. S. Spiritual culture of Babylonia: man, fate, time. - M., 1983

Culture of the peoples of the East. Old Babylonian culture. - M., 1988

Lyubimov L. The Art of the Ancient World. - M., 1996

World Artistic Culture: Proc. allowance / Ed. B. A. Erengross. - M., 2005

Sokolova M.V. World culture and art. - M., 2004

Oppenheim A. L. Ancient Mesopotamia. - M., 1990

The origins of the culture of ancient Egypt

Culture of the Old Kingdom

Culture of the Middle Kingdom

Culture of the New Kingdom

Religion and Art of Ancient Egypt

Topic 3.

The culture of the ancient civilizations of Egypt
In the history of mankind, the civilization of Ancient Egypt arose one of the first and existed for about three millennia - approximately from the end of the 4th millennium BC. e. until 332 BC e., when it was conquered by Alexander the Great. The conquest of Egypt by the Greeks forever deprived it of its independence, but the Egyptian culture continued to exist for a long time and retain its values ​​and achievements. For three centuries, the heirs and descendants of the commander Ptolemy ruled here. In 30 BC. e. Egypt became a province of Rome. Around 200, Christianity came to the territory of Egypt, which became the official religion until the Arab conquest in 640.
3.1. The origins of the culture of ancient Egypt. The culture of Ancient Egypt is a typical example of ancient Eastern culture. The Egyptian state arose in northeast Africa, in the Nile Valley. The name "Egypt" was given to the state by the Greeks who came to the country to get acquainted with its cultural achievements. The name comes from the ancient Greek "Aigiptyus", which is the name of the Egyptian capital of Memphis, distorted by the Greeks - Het-ka-Ptah (the fortress of the god Ptah). The Egyptians themselves called their country Ta-Kemet (Black Earth) by the color of its fertile soil, as opposed to the red earth of the desert (Ta-Mera).

The ancestors of the ancient Egyptians were nomadic hunting tribes who lived in the Nile Valley and belonged to the Hamitic group of peoples. They were distinguished by slender body proportions and dark brown skin. As with all Eastern cultures, the population of ancient Egypt was not homogeneous. From the south, Nubians entered Egypt, whom the Greeks called Ethiopians, who had more pronounced Negroid features. And from the West, Berbers and Libyans with blue eyes and fair skin penetrated into Egypt. In Egypt, these peoples assimilated and became the basis of the entire population.

Gradually, two states formed on the territory of Egypt - Upper Egypt in the south in the narrow Nile Valley and Lower Egypt in the north in the Nile Delta. Upper Egypt was a stronger and more powerful union, striving to capture the northern regions. Around 3000 BC e. King of Upper Egypt Less subjugated Lower Egypt and founded the first dynasty of the united state. From that moment on, Ancient Egypt exists as a single one, and the reign of the first two dynasties is called the Early Kingdom. The king of united Egypt began to be called "pharaoh" ("big house"), which indicated his main function - the unification of lands. Pharaoh Menee founded the city of Memphis, which was originally a fortress on the border of Upper and Lower Egypt, and later became the capital of a single state.

The history and culture of Ancient Egypt were largely predetermined by its geographical location. The real world of the Egyptians was limited by the narrow valley of the great river Nile, surrounded on the west and east by desert sands. It was the nature of the country and its only huge river, on the spills of which the life and well-being of the people depended, that were the most important factor that determined the attitude and worldview of the Egyptians, their attitude to life and death, their religious views.

The fact is that as a result of continuous tropical downpours and melting snow, the sources of the Nile overflowed, and it flooded every year in July. Almost the entire river valley was under water. Four months later, by November, the Nile waters subsided, leaving behind a thick layer of silt on the fields. Dry land after the flood of the Nile became wet and fertile. After that came the second four-month period (November - February) - the time of sowing. The agricultural cycle ended with the third four-month period (March - July) - harvest time. At this time, unbearable heat prevailed, turning the earth into a cracked desert. Then the cycle was repeated, starting with the next spill.

Thus, the existence of Egypt
that directly depended on the spills of Ni-
la and not by chance the "father of history" Hero
dot called Egypt "the gift of the Nile". Basic
wu of the country's economy was irri-

irrigation (irrigated) agriculture. Irrigation systems required centralized management, and this role was taken over by the state, headed by the pharaoh.

In the history of Ancient Egypt, there are several main periods: pre-dynastic (4 thousand BC), the Old Kingdom

(2900-2270 BC), Middle Kingdom (2100-1700 BC), New Kingdom (1555-1090 BC) and Late Kingdom (XI century - 332 BC). In turn, these main stages are divided into periods of interregnums, characterized by the collapse of a single state and invasions of foreign tribes.
3.2. Culture of the Old Kingdom. As already noted, the periods of reign of the pharaohs of the I and II dynasties are usually called the Early Kingdom in the history of Egyptian culture. The second period (III-U1 dynasty) was called the Old Kingdom. It is characterized by the formation of a new centralized state, the formation of the state apparatus, the allocation of administrative districts. At the same time, the unlimited power of the pharaoh is affirmed, it is deified, which finds its expression in the construction of pyramid-tombs.

The era of the Old Kingdom was perceived by the Egyptians themselves as the time of the reign of powerful and wise kings. The centralization of power in ancient Egypt gave rise to a specific form of social consciousness - the cult of the pharaoh, based on the idea of ​​the pharaoh as the ancestor of all Egyptians. At the same time, the pharaoh was seen as the heir to God, the creator and ruler of the world. Therefore, he had power over the entire cosmos. The well-being of the country was due to the presence of the pharaoh. Thanks to him, regularity and order prevailed everywhere. Pharaoh himself kept the balance of the world, which was constantly threatened by chaos.

The decisive role in the formation of the Egyptian culture of this stage was played by the religious and mythological ideas of the ancient Egyptians: the funeral cult and the deification of the power of the pharaoh, which were an integral part of the religion.

gia, deifying the forces of nature and earthly power. Therefore, religion and mythology are the key to understanding the entire culture of Ancient Egypt.

The religious views of the Egyptians were mainly formed precisely in the era of the Old Kingdom on the basis of impressions from the real natural world. Animals were endowed with supernatural, magical qualities, immortality was attributed to them. So, for example, the god Horus was likened to a falcon, Anubis - a jackal, Thoth was depicted as an ibis, Khnum - a ram, Sebek - a crocodile, etc. At the same time, the Egyptians worshiped not the animal itself, but the divine spirit, which took the form of the corresponding animal.

In addition, since cattle breeding occupied a leading place in the economic life of the Egyptians, the deification of the bull, cow, and ram began from ancient times. The bull named Apis was revered as the god of fertility. It had to be black with light markings. Such bulls were kept in special rooms and embalmed after death. Under the guise of a cow, or a woman with cow horns, Hathor, the goddess of the sky and the patroness of nature, was revered. She was also considered the goddess of fertility and trees (date palm, sycamore), watered the souls of the dead in the afterlife with life-giving moisture.

However, as the Egyptian civilization developed, the gods began to take on an anthropomorphic (humanoid) appearance. The remains of their early images survived only in the form of bird and animal heads and appeared in the elements of the headdresses of the Egyptians.

The most important feature of the attitude of the inhabitants of Egypt was the rejection of death, which they considered unnatural both for man and for all nature. This attitude was based on the belief in the regular renewal of nature and life. After all, nature is renewed annually, and the Nile, spilling over, enriches the surrounding lands with its silt, supporting life and prosperity. But when it goes back to its banks, a drought sets in, which is not death, since the next year the Nile will flood again. It was from these beliefs that the creed was born, according to which death did not mean the end of a person’s existence, resurrection awaits him. For this, the immortal soul of the deceased needs to reconnect with his body. Therefore, the living must take care that the body of the deceased is preserved, and embalming is the means of preserving the body. Thus, concern for the preservation of the body of the deceased led to the emergence of the art of making mummies.

The idea of ​​the need to preserve the body for a future life eventually formed the cult of the dead, which determined many phenomena and features of Egyptian culture. The cult of the dead was for the Egyptians not an abstract religious obligation, but a practical necessity. Believing that death is not the cessation of life, but only the transition of a person to another world, where his earthly existence continues in a peculiar way, the Egyptians sought to provide this existence with everything necessary. First of all, it was necessary to take care of the construction of the tomb for the body, in which the life force "ka" would return to the eternal body of the deceased.

"Ka" was a double of a person, possessing the same physical qualities and shortcomings as the body with which "ka" was born and grew up. However, unlike the physical body, "ka" was an invisible double, the spiritual power of a person, his guardian angel. After the death of a person, the existence of his "ka" depended on the safety of his body. But the mummy, although more durable than the body, was also perishable. To provide an eternal receptacle for the 'ka', precise portrait statues were made of hard stone.

The dwelling "ka" of the deceased person was supposed to be a tomb, where he lived near his body - a mummy and a portrait statue. Since the afterlife "ka" was conceived as a direct continuation of the earthly one, after the death of the dead, it was necessary to provide everything that they possessed during life. The reliefs carved on the walls of the burial chambers reproduced the scenes of the daily life of the deceased, replacing for his “ka” what surrounded him in everyday life on earth. These images were perceived as a continuation of real earthly life. Equipped with explanatory inscriptions and texts along with household items, they were supposed to enable the deceased to continue to lead his usual way of life and use his property in the afterlife.

And although death was recognized as equally unnatural for all Egyptians, reliable tombs and inaccessible crypts, equipped with "everything necessary" for the deceased, were created only for the rich and those in power. Pyramids were built only for the pharaohs, because after death they connected with the gods, becoming "great gods".

Initially, burials were made in tombs, consisting of an underground part, where a sarcophagus with a mummy stood, and a massive above-ground building - a mastaba - in the form of a house, the walls of which were tilted inward, and ended with a flat roof on top. Household and religious items, vessels with grain, items made of gold, silver, ivory, etc. were left in the mastaba. These figurines were supposed to come to life and fulfill all the physical needs of the deceased in the afterlife.

In order for the “ka” to return to its body after death, a portrait image of the deceased was placed in the tomb. An obligatory condition was the image of the figure as a whole, standing with the left leg extended forward - the pose of movement towards eternity. The male figures were painted brick red, the female figures yellow. The hair on the head was always black and the clothes white.

In the statues of "ka" special importance was attached to the eyes. The Egyptians considered the eyes to be the mirror of the soul, so they fixed their attention on them, strongly tinting them with paste, to which crushed malachite was added. The eyes of the statues were made from different materials: pieces of alabaster imitating squirrels were inserted into a bronze shell corresponding to the shape of the eye, and rock crystal for the pupil. A small piece of polished wood was placed under the crystal, thanks to which that brilliant point was obtained, which gave liveliness to the pupil and the whole eye.
One of the main tasks in the construction of the tombs of the pharaohs is to give the impression of overwhelming power. This effect of the building was obtained when the builders were able to increase the above-ground part of the building in diagonal height. This is how the famous Egyptian pyramids arose. The first of these was the pyramid of the pharaoh of the III dynasty Djoser in Saqqara. The pharaohs of the 4th dynasty chose a place near Saqqara in modern Giza for the construction of their burials. Three of the most famous pyramids of the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaur (Greek Cheops, Khafre and Mykerin) were built and still preserved there.

Great importance was attached to the interior decoration of the tombs. The walls were covered with colored reliefs, glorifying the pharaoh as the son of a god and the winner of all the enemies of Egypt, as well as numerous magical texts, the purpose of which was to ensure the eternal happy life of the pharaoh. These reliefs were real art galleries. It was believed that with the help of prayers for the dead, the images were supposed to come to life and thereby create a habitual habitat for the deceased.

At the same time, the boundless hostile deserts approaching the Nile from both sides had a significant impact on the attitude of the Egyptians. The desire to overcome nature, not to feel like a speck of dust in the game of natural forces led to the emergence of magic, which became a form of illusory protection of a person from the pressure of the mysterious forces of nature. For the Egyptians, the role of such magical protection was played by a complex system of ideas about the gods, identified with animals that lived in dense thickets of papyrus that grew along the banks of the Nile.

By the end of the period of the Old Kingdom, various artistic crafts were formed in the culture of the Egyptians. In the tombs and pyramids, a large number of elegant vessels made of various types of stone, artistic furniture made of various types of wood, richly decorated with bone, gold, and silver, have been preserved. Each decoration was given a special meaning. So, for example, the legs of the chair were made in the form of bull legs or winged lions, which were supposed to protect the seated person. Numerous figurines were made representing people engaged in daily activities, as well as images of Egyptian gods in the form of animals and birds.

By the XXIII century. BC e. separatist sentiments intensified sharply in ancient Egypt, as a result of which the country broke up into several independent states. This state of fragmentation continued for about two hundred years. During this time, the irrigation system fell into disrepair and fertile

the land began to swamp. The capital of the united state, Memphis, also fell into decay. Against this background, other cities stood out - Herakleopolis and Thebes. The need for a new unification of Egyptian lands was felt more and more acutely, which was carried out after a number of military clashes. Thebes won the fight, and this victory opened a new period in the development of Egyptian culture, called the Middle Kingdom.

For many centuries, in the culture of Mesopotamia, there was a process of eliminating some deities and cults and exalting others, processing and merging mythological plots, changing the nature and appearance of those gods who were to rise and become universal (as a rule, they were credited with the deeds and merits of those who remained in the shadows or dying in the memory of generations). The result of this process was the formation of the religious system in its form, as it has come down to our days according to the surviving texts and archaeological excavations.

The religious system bore a noticeable imprint of the socio-political structure that really existed in this region. In Mesopotamia, with its many successive state formations (Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia), there was no strong stable state power. Therefore, although at times certain successful rulers (Sargon of Akkad, Hammurabi) achieved considerable power and recognized power, there were, as a rule, no centralized despotism in this region. Apparently, this also affected the status of the Mesopotamian rulers fixed by the religious system. Usually they did not call themselves (and others did not call them) the sons of the gods, and their sacralization was practically limited to granting them the prerogatives of the high priest or recognizing their right to direct contact with God (an obelisk with the image of the sun god Shamash, handing Hammurabi a scroll with laws that entered history as the laws of Hammurabi).

This relatively low degree of centralization of political power and, accordingly, the deification of the ruler contributed to the fact that in Mesopotamia quite easily, without fierce rivalry (which took place in Egypt), many gods got along with each other with temples dedicated to them and priests serving them. Mythology has preserved information about the Sumerian pantheon, which already existed at the early stages of civilization and statehood in Mesopotamia. The main ones were the sky god An and the earth goddess Ki, who gave birth to the powerful air god Enlil, the water god Ea (Enki), often depicted as a fish-man and who created the first people. All these and many other gods and goddesses entered into complex relationships with each other, the interpretation of which changed over time and depending on the change of dynasties and ethnic groups (the Semitic Akkadian tribes, mixed with the ancient Sumerians, brought with them new gods, new mythological plots).

Most of the Sumerian-Akkadian-Babylonian gods had an anthropomorphic appearance, and only a few, like Ea or Nergal, bore zoomorphic features, a kind of recollection of totemic ideas of the distant past. The sacred animals of the Mesopotamians included the bull and the snake: in myths, the gods were often called "powerful bulls", and the snake was revered as the personification of the feminine.

It already follows from the ancient Sumerian myths that Enlil was considered the first among the gods. However, his power in the pantheon was far from absolute: seven pairs of great gods, his relatives, at times challenged his power and even removed him from office, overthrowing him into the underworld for wrongdoings. The underworld is the realm of the dead, where the cruel and vengeful goddess Ereshkigal ruled omnipotently, who could only be pacified by the god of war, Nergal, who became her husband. Enlil and other gods and goddesses were immortal, so they, even if they fell into the underworld, returned from there after a series of adventures. But people, unlike them, are mortal, so their destiny after death is an eternal stay in the gloomy realm of the dead. The border of this kingdom was considered a river, through which the souls of the buried were transported to the kingdom of the dead by a special carrier (the souls of the unburied remained on earth and could cause a lot of trouble to people).

Life and death, the kingdom of heaven and earth and the underworld of the dead - these two principles were clearly opposed in the religious system of Mesopotamia. And not only opposed. The real existence of farmers with their cult of fertility and the regular change of seasons, awakening and dying nature could not but lead to the idea of ​​a close and interdependent relationship between life and death, dying and resurrection. Let people be mortal and never return from the underworld. But nature is immortal! Every year she gives birth to a new life, as if resurrecting her after a dead winter hibernation. It was this regularity of nature that the immortal gods had to reflect. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the central places in Mesopotamian mythology was occupied by the story of the death and resurrection of Dumuzi (Tammuz).

The goddess of love and fertility in Mesopotamia was the beautiful Inanna (Ishtar), the patron goddess of the city of Uruk, where a temple was built in her honor (something like a temple of love) with priestesses and temple servants who gave their caresses to anyone (temple prostitution). Like them, the loving goddess bestowed her caresses on many - both gods and people, but the story of her love for Dumuzi was most famous. This story has developed. In the beginning (the Sumerian version of the myth), Inanna, having married the shepherd Dumuzi, sacrificed him to the goddess Ereshkigal as a payment for her liberation from the underworld. Later (Babylonian version) things began to look different. Dumuzi, who turned out to be not only the husband, but also the brother of Ishtar, died on a hunt. The goddess went to the underworld for him. The evil Ereshkigal left Ishtar with her. As a result, life on earth ceased: animals and people ceased to reproduce. The alarmed gods demanded from Ereshkigal the return of Ishtar, who came to earth with a vessel of living water, which allowed her to resurrect the dead Dumuzi.

The story speaks for itself: Dumuzi, personifying the fertility of nature, dies and is resurrected with the help of the goddess of fertility, who conquers death. The symbolism is quite obvious, although it did not appear immediately, but only as a result of the gradual transformation of the original mythological plot.

The mythology of Mesopotamia is rich and very diverse. It also contains cosmogonic plots, stories about the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, including people molded from clay, and legends about the exploits of great heroes, primarily Gilgamesh, and, finally, the story of the great flood. The famous legend of the great flood, which subsequently spread so widely among different peoples, entered the Bible and was accepted by Christian teaching, is not an idle invention. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who especially singled out among other gods the god of the south wind, which drove the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates against the current and threatened catastrophic floods, could not perceive such floods (especially the most destructive of them) as a great flood. The fact that such a catastrophic flood was indeed a real fact is confirmed by the excavations of the English archaeologist L. Woolley in Ur (in the 1920s and 1930s), during which a multi-meter layer of silt was discovered that separated the most ancient cultural layers of the settlement from more later. It is interesting that the Sumerian story of the flood preserved in fragments in some details (the message of the gods to the virtuous king about the intention to arrange a flood and save him) resembles the biblical legend about Noah.

The religious system of Mesopotamia, changed and improved by the efforts of different peoples over many centuries, in the II millennium BC. e. was already well developed. Of the great many small local deities, often duplicating the functions of each other (note that in addition to Ishtar there were two more goddesses of fertility), several main, universally known and most revered ones stood out. A certain hierarchy of them also developed: Marduk, the patron god of the city of Babylon, moved to the place of the supreme god, whose influential priests put him at the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon. With the rise of Marduk, the sacralization of the ruler was also associated, whose status acquired more and more holiness over time. In the II millennium BC. e. The mythological interpretation of the deeds, merits and spheres of influence of all the powers of the other world of all gods, heroes and spirits, including the rulers of the underworld and numerous demons of evil, illness and misfortune, in the fight against which the Mesopotamian priests developed a whole system of spells and charms, was also somewhat revised. In particular, each person turned out to be the owner of his own divine patron-patron, sometimes several, which contributed to the formation of personal ties "man - deity". A complex cosmological system was developed from several heavens, covering the earth as a hemisphere, floating in the world's oceans. Heaven was the residence of the highest gods, and the sun god Shamash daily made his way from the eastern mountain towards the western mountain, and at night he retired to the “inside of heaven”.

At the service of the gods, magic and mantles, which had achieved considerable success, were put. Finally, through the efforts of the priests, much was done in the field of astronomy and the calendar, mathematics and writing. At the same time, it should be noted that, although all this pre-scientific knowledge had a completely independent cultural value, their connection with religion (and the connection is not only genetic, but also functional) is undeniable. And not so much because priests stood at their source, but because all this knowledge was connected with religious ideas and even mediated by them.

In fairness, it should be noted that by no means all aspects of life, not the entire system of ideas and institutions of the ancient Mesopotamia were determined by religious ideas. For example, the texts of the laws of Hammurabi convince us that the rules of law were practically free from them. This very significant point indicates that the religious system of Mesopotamia, in the image and likeness of which later similar systems of other Middle Eastern states were formed, was not total, i.e., did not monopolize the entire sphere of spiritual life. It left room for views, actions and practices not directly related to religion, and it was this practice that could influence the nature of the religious ideas of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Semitic tribes of Syria and Phenicia to the Crete-Mycenaean predecessors of the ancient Greeks. It is possible that she played a certain role in the emergence of freethinking in antiquity. This is worth paying attention to because the second version of the most ancient religious system of the world, the ancient Egyptian, almost simultaneously with the Mesopotamian, led in this sense to other results.

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Ascetic hermits, whose very appearance as an institution was a kind of reaction of the religious tradition to the increasingly complex social structure of society, to the departure from the primitive

Fundamentals of ancient Indian religious philosophy
Everything phenomenal, that is, everything that is perceived by the senses and is in constant change, is unreal, that is, impermanent, unstable, not immovable, non-eternal. But behind all the hair dryer

Vedanta
The Vedanta system is one of the most philosophically rich and capacious. Its foundations date back to about the 7th century. BC e., although the Vedanta Sutra dates only to the 2nd century BC. BC e.,

Oppositional teachings: Jainism
The orthodox religious doctrines of ancient India, genetically ascending to the religion and mythology of the Aryan Vedas, were closely connected with the system of class inequality, which found

Jain theory
Like all ancient Indian doctrines, the teachings of the Jains proceeded from the fact that the spirit, the soul of a person, is certainly higher than his material shell. Achieve salvation (moksha), and even more complete

Ethics of Jainism
The principles of Jainsia ethics, as it was in Zoroastrianism, proceed from a clear opposition of truth to error, right to false. Its foundations are formulated in the so-called

Jain lifestyle
The Jain community has always been based on lay people. Belonging to the Jain community over time, as is usually the case within almost any ethno-confessional community, has become an

ascetic monks
A special and highest layer among the Jains are ascetic monks, who completely break with normal life and thus become above the rest, turning into an almost inaccessible standard, oh

Cosmography and mythology of Jainism
According to the Jains, the universe consists of the world and the non-world. The non-world is an empty space, akasha, inaccessible to penetration and perception and distant from the world

Jainism in Indian history
Although Jainism as a religion was in principle an open doctrine, formally available to anyone who would like to join it, the wide popularity and many adherents of this teaching

Buddhism in India
Buddhism, like Jainism, was a reaction of the non-Brahmin strata of the ancient Indian population to Brahminism. Samkhya, Yoga, Vedanta systems with their doctrines and practical recommendations with

Legend of Buddha
The son of a Shakya (Sakya) prince, Siddharta Gautama was born in the 6th century. BC e. Miraculously conceived (his mother Maya saw in a dream that a white elephant entered her side), the boy is so

Buddha's teaching
Life is suffering. Birth and aging, sickness and death, separation from a loved one and union with an unloved one, an unattained goal and an unsatisfied desire - all this is suffering. Suffering proi

The first communities of Buddhists
These sources indicate that Buddhism was supported by Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, primarily by the urban population, rulers, warriors, who saw in Buddhist preaching

Monasteries and Sangha
Soon the monasteries became the main and, in fact, the only form of organization of Buddhists, unfamiliar with the hierarchically organized church structure and having no influence.

Fundamentals of Buddhism Philosophy
The philosophy of Buddhism is deep and original, although it is based on the general worldview principles and categories developed by the theorists of ancient Indian thought as early as

Ethics of Buddhism
In the previous chapter it was already said that the doctrines opposed to Brahmanism made a conscious emphasis on ethics, on the social and moral aspects of people's behavior. Of course,

Mahayana Buddhism
Buddhism as a doctrine has never been something unified and whole, which came out almost ready-made from the lips of a great teacher, as legendary traditions say. Even if with reservation

Cosmology and mythology of Buddhism
The cosmology and mythology of Buddhism are most fully and vividly represented in the Mahayana, with its thousands of buddhas and bodhisattvas, who supplemented the small host of buddhas and arhats of the Hinayana. Boo

Buddhism in India and beyond
Mahayana Buddhism was an important step in transforming Hinayana religious philosophy, initially not very well known outside the narrow circle of monks, into a more common and understood

Hinduism
Indian religious systems are characterized by structural looseness and amorphousness, tolerance, and freedom of personal choice. Each religiously active person independently decided where and

Rise of Hinduism
In the process of rivalry between Buddhism and Brahmanism, or rather, as a result of this rivalry and as a result of overcoming it, Hinduism arose. Structurally, this doctrine was similar to Buddhism.

Religious and philosophical foundations of Hinduism
The foundations of Hinduism go back to the Vedas and the legends and texts surrounding them, which largely determined the nature and parameters of Indian civilization in its historical, cultural, philosophical

Trimurti - Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu
The most important of the numerous gods of Hinduism are considered three (trimurti) - Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. It is usually noted that these three in the system of Hinduism, as it were, divided the main

Shiva and the cult of the lingam
The vast majority of Hindus are divided into Shaivites and Vishnuites, who prefer Shiva or Vishnu respectively. Shiva, genetically ascending to the Vedic Rudra, but practically in t

Shiva and shakti
Hindus, especially Shaivites, find many merits, deeds and hypostases in the great Shiva, ascribe to him many important functions. However, it is believed that all the strength and power

Durga and Kali
Their collective name, as well as other incarnations of Shiva's wives, is Devi, but at the same time, Devi also has an independent cult, many temples are dedicated to her. And yet she is best known in the hypostasis

Rama and Ramayana
Rama is the hero of the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. This classical epic took shape in its completed written form several centuries before our era and became widely used, became one

Legends and myths. Mahabharata
Traditions and myths have firmly entered the life of every Indian, becoming an important part of Hinduism. Of the epic tales of a broad plan, in addition to the Ramayana, Indians know the Mahabharata, the great

Brahmins and temples
The priests of Hinduism, the bearers of the foundations of its religious culture, ritual rite, ethics, aesthetics, forms of social and family structure and way of life were members of the Brahmin castes, descendants of

Mantras and sorcery
The belief in the need for the mediation of a priest to achieve goals that can be realized only with the assistance of supernatural forces goes back to ancient magic. In India and in

Rites and holidays
And the Brahmin priests with their highly solemn temple and respectable household rituals, and the semi-literate village witch doctors with their mantra spells

Family and caste
Numerous household and family ceremonies associated with a wedding, the birth of a son, and the handing of a cord to a young man as a sign of his “new birth” are something similar (this is only

Hinduism and Islam. Modernization of Hinduism
Hinduism, which absorbed and reflected many features of the national culture and psychology of Indians with their way of life, nature of thinking, value orientations, including

Islamization of India
The process of Islamization of India took many centuries. During it, many millions of Indians were converted to Islam, initially in the northwest of the country, in the contact zone, where its influence is felt.

Interaction between Islam and Hinduism
True, the privileges that the adoption of Islam gave in India were significantly weakened by the passivity of Hinduism, which still personified the foundations of the Indian way of life and cultures.

Guru Nanak and the Sikhs
At the turn of the XV-XVI centuries. the legendary Nanak, the founder of the Sikh doctrine, preached the foundations of a new doctrine that called for uniting Muslims and Hindus. In his homeland, Punjab

Govind and Khalsa
The name Govinda is associated with a radical reorganization of the Sikh communities and the transformation of the Sikhs into a powerful political and military force. Having become the head of the Sikhs at a difficult time for them, Govind will

Ramakrishna and Vivekananda
One of the most prominent figures among the reformers of Hinduism was Ramakrishna (1836–1886). A pious Brahmin prone to ecstatic impulses, he spent time in temples from his youth, then

Neo-Hinduism and Modernity
In the neo-Hinduism that developed on this basis in the 20th century. began to differ in different directions and currents. On the one hand, it was a movement for more or less progressive reforms.

Religion in ancient China
If India is the realm of religions, and the religious thinking of the Indian is saturated with metaphysical speculations, then China is a civilization of a different type. Social ethics and administrative

Shantsy, Zhoutsy and Shang-di
All these and many other important features of the religious structure of China were laid down in ancient times, starting from the Shang-Yin era. Shan civilization of urban type appeared

Divination and fortune tellers in the Shang
The main point in the ritual of communication with the divine ancestors was the rite of divination, which was usually combined with the rite of sacrifice. The purpose of divination was to put the

Zhou, Shandi and the cult of Heaven
The era of Shang-Yin was relatively short. In 1027 BC. e. united around the tribe of the Chou peoples, the union of the peoples surrounding the Shang in the decisive battle of Mus defeated the Shants, who

Cult of dead ancestors
If the highest transcendent principle in the cult of Shandi was transferred in Zhou China to the cult of Heaven, then the attitude towards Shandi as the first ancestor and, in general, the practice of deifying the dead before

Cult of the Earth
The lower classes of Chinese Zhou society were peasant communities with their usual rituals and cults, among which the cult of the earth occupied a central place. Ever since the Neolithic, this ku

Priests-officials
Ancient China did not know priests in the proper sense of the word, just as it did not know the great personalized gods and temples in their honor. The same supreme deities worshiped by the Shang

Rituals in Zhou China
The interests of administrative regulation, political control and ensuring the effectiveness of the leadership of the son of Heaven practically dissolved the sacred principle. This did not exclude

ancient chinese religious philosophy
The division of everything that exists into two principles was in China perhaps the most ancient principle of philosophical thinking, as, in particular, is evidenced by those reflected in trigrams and hexagrams.

Confucius and Confucianism
All the noted features of the system of beliefs and cults in ancient China played a huge role in the formation of the foundations of traditional Chinese civilization: not mysticism and metaphysical abst

Confucius
Confucius (Kung Tzu, 551-479 BC) was born and lived in an era of great social and political upheaval, when Zhou China was in a state of severe internal crisis

Social ideal of Confucius
The highly moral jun-tzu, constructed by the philosopher as a model, a standard for imitation, had to have two most important virtues in his view: humane

Social order according to Confucius
Confucius, starting from the social ideal he had constructed, formulated the foundations of the social order that he would like to see in the Celestial Empire: “Let the father be the father, son

Ancestral worship and xiao norms
We are talking about the cult of ancestors - both dead and living. Significantly changing the content and forms of this cult, known in its main features to almost all peoples ("Honor the father and m

Cult of family and clan
The Confucian ancestor cult and xiao norms contributed to the flourishing of the cult of the family and clan. The family was considered the core of society, the interests of the family were given much more importance than

Confucianism and legalism
The process of turning Confucianism into the official doctrine of the centralized Chinese empire took considerable time. First, it was necessary to develop the doctrine in detail, to achieve its development.

Transformation of Confucianism
The transformation of Confucianism into the official ideology was a turning point both in the history of this teaching and in the history of China. Arriving at the service, becoming officials, taking into their own hands from

Confucian upbringing and education
Starting from the Han era, Confucians not only held control of the state and society in their hands, but also made sure that Confucian norms and value orientations became

Examination system and shenshi class
The origins of the competitive selection system go back to Zhou China: the rulers of the kingdoms were interested in nominating suitable candidates for the positions of officials, which is mentioned

Confucians in Chinese history
The Confucians and the officials recruited from among them usually effectively ran the entire vast empire, with the exception of those periods when China was in a state of crisis and prices.

The cult of form in Confucianism
The concept of "Chinese ceremonies" affects the life and life of every Chinese - just as much as every Chinese in old China was involved in Confucianism. In this sense, ceremonies

Confucianism is the regulator of life in China
The Confucian centralized state, which existed at the expense of a rent-tax from the peasants, did not encourage the excessive development of private land ownership. As soon as the gain is private

Taoism
The tops of Chinese society lived according to Confucian norms, performed rites and rituals in honor of the ancestors, Heaven and Earth, according to the requirements of Liji. Anyone who was above the level

Philosophy of Taoism
Taoism arose in Zhou China almost almost simultaneously with the teachings of Confucius in the form of an independent philosophical doctrine. The founder of the Taoist philosophy is considered to be the ancient Chinese

Theocratic state of the Taoists
The “state” of the Taoist popes-patriarchs, who passed on their power by inheritance, existed in China until recently (the 63rd Taoist pope from the Zhang dynasty

Taoism about achieving immortality
The human body is a microcosm, which, in principle, should be likened to the macrocosm, that is, the Universe. Just as the Universe functions in the course of the interaction of Heaven and Earth,

Taoist Pseudosciences
The fascination with magical elixirs and pills in medieval China caused the rapid development of alchemy. Emperor-funded Taoist alchemists worked hard on transma

Taoists in medieval China
Strengthened by the further development of their theory, the Taoists in early medieval China managed to become a necessary and indispensable part of the spiritual culture of the country and people. During the Tang era

Upper and lower layers of Taoism
Over the centuries, Taoism has experienced ups and downs, support and persecution, and sometimes, albeit for a short time, has become the official ideology of a dynasty. Taoism

Pantheon of Taoism
Incorporating over time all ancient cults and superstitions, beliefs and rituals, all deities and spirits, heroes and immortals, eclectic and promiscuous Taoism easily satisfied with

Chinese Buddhism
Buddhism entered China from India, predominantly in its northern Mahayana form, in the 2nd century BC. The process of its strengthening and development in China was complex and lengthy. It took many centuries and

Spread and Sinicization of Buddhism
Spreading and strengthening, Buddhism was subjected to significant sinicization. In general, the Chinese Confucian civilization is unique in terms of stability, adaptability, ability to

Buddhism in the Tang era (7th-10th centuries). Decline of Buddhism
At the beginning of the Tang era, China was covered with a dense network of Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries. Many of them were famous and influential. Often these were entire monastic towns with many

Buddhism and Chinese culture
Buddhism has existed in China for almost two millennia. During this time, he has changed a lot in the process of adapting to Chinese civilization. However, it had a huge impact on

Religious syncretism in China. Tradition and modernity
Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, coexisting for many centuries, gradually drew closer to each other, and each of the doctrines found its place in the emerging all-Chinese

Pantheon of China
The system of gods, rituals and cults within the gigantic structure of religious syncretism was complex and multi-tiered. At its highest tier were the nationwide cults of Heaven and

Cult of the forces of nature and animals
In the bureaucracy of Yuhuang shandi, there were ministries and departments of thunder, fire, water, time, five sacred mountains, exorcism, etc. Various departments passed through these departments.

Good and evil spirits. Wish Cult
On the example of the cult of foxes, one more feature of the system of religious syncretism and religions in general in China is visible - non-differentiation, almost blurred lines between the forces of good and

Value system in traditional China
So, what are the main positions that characterize the traditional Chinese value system, formulated primarily by Confucianism? Confucians from ancient times

Transformation of Traditional China
The clash of traditional Chinese structure with European capitalism and colonialism in the middle of the 19th century. sparked a strong backlash in China. In the beginning it was the Taiping Rebellion

Peasantry and its traditions
The Chinese peasantry - unlike, say, the Indian peasantry with its castes and karma - has always been rebellious in years of social crisis. It (especially the poorest part of it) b

Revival of traditions
China - most likely, to the great happiness of this vast and ancient country - is not Russia. This elementary truth should have been learned long ago by all those who today are so often and already accustomed to

Buddhism and Shinto in Japan
Indian and Chinese civilizations have had a significant impact on neighboring countries and peoples over the centuries. And although this influence was multifaceted, and on the periphery

Shintoism
The complex process of cultural synthesis of local tribes with newcomers laid the foundations of Japanese culture proper, the religious and cult aspect of which was called Shintoism.

Buddhism in Japan
Having penetrated Japan in the middle of the 6th century, the teachings of the Buddha turned out to be a weapon in the acute political struggle of noble families for power. By the end of the VI century. this fight was won by those who did

Buddhism and Shinto
The Kegon sect, which took shape and gained strength in the 8th century, turned the Todaiji Temple in the capital, which belonged to it, into a center that claimed to unite all religious movements, including

Buddhism under regents and shoguns
From the 9th century the significance of the political power of emperors is a thing of the past. The functions of the regent-ruler are in the hands of representatives of the aristocratic house of Fujiwara, on women

Zen Aesthetics
Buddhism and especially Zen had a huge impact on the development of various aspects of Japanese national culture, and above all on the education of a sense of beauty. Specialists more than once

Confucianism in Japan
Japanese culture differs from Chinese-Confucian culture in yet another aspect. If China was almost completely dominated by conformism, which had only weak outlets in the form of Taoism

Confucianism and Shinto
Yamazaki Ansai, like other Japanese Confucians, sought to combine Confucian principles with Shinto norms. He put forward the theory that neo-Confucian li (not the old

The cult of the emperor and the rise of nationalism
On the eve of a new era of bourgeois development, Japan increasingly rallied around the figure of the divine tenno, the mikado, symbolizing its highest unity, its far-reaching claims.

The New Religious Situation in Japan
The defeat of Japan in World War II meant the decline of Shintoism as a state ideology that brought up militarism and nationalism, the cult of the emperor and "great Japan". Shinto n

Soka-gakkai sect
Formally, this sect, founded in 1930 on the basis of the teachings of the Nichiren school, can be considered Buddhist. However, in reality, it, like the vast majority of new sects and teachings of religious

Lamaism
Buddhism, as already mentioned, was that universal world religion, which was a common religious component of various civilizations of the East, from India to Japan. Distributed

Origins of Lamaism. Tantrism
The doctrinal basis of Lamaism (from the Tib. "Lama" - the highest, that is, the adherent of the doctrine, the monk) is, as mentioned, Buddhism. However, since the predecessor of Buddhism in Tibet was the

Stages of the genesis of Lamaism
The first traces of the penetration of Buddhism into Tibet are recorded rather late - only in the 5th century, when it was already well known and widely spread in India and China. Up to the era

Activities of Tsongkhapa
A native of eastern Tibet, Tsongkhava (Tsongkaba, 1357-1419) from a young age became famous for his exceptional abilities, which later formed the basis of the emerging around his name

The Dalai Lama and the Theory of Incarnations
Even in early Buddhism, the doctrine of rebirth was developed, genetically ascending to the theories of the Upanishads. This theory of karmic rebirth, which boils down to the disintegration of the dharma complex

Fundamentals of the theory of Lamaism
The foundations of the theory of Lamaism were laid by Tsonghava, who, in a number of his works, substantiated his own reforms and synthesized the theoretical heritage of his predecessors. Subsequently

Ethics of Lamaism
By getting rid of avidya and embarking on the path of knowledge-prajna with the help of the lama, the lamaist thereby improves his karma and, in the end, can make it so good that one

The magical practice of lamaists
Since this minimum was not easy for everyone, Lamaism has always paid great attention to other, simpler and faster methods of achieving the goal, that is, to the very mysticism and magic that

Pantheon of Lamaism
The world of buddhas and bodysattvas, saints and heroes, which had already become very populous in Mahayana Buddhism, continued to grow and become organized in Lamaism. The hierarchy of all these divine persons

Monasteries, lamas and rites
Shrines containing images of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and saints of the lamaist pantheon, as well as various accessories of lamaist magical practice (from prayer drums

Lamaism and modernity
Lamaism played a huge role in the historical destinies of a number of peoples of Central Asia, primarily the Tibetan. The Lamaist doctrine, having glorified the Dalai Lama, turned Tibet into a sak

Civilizations of the East: religious and cultural traditions and modernity
For thousands of years, religion, the tradition sanctioned by it, and the culture that developed on this basis not only formed the group experience of generations and a stable system of common

Arab-Islamic civilization
The Arab-Islamic civilization has its roots - as, indeed, the ancient Christian European civilization - in the ancient Near East, this cradle of world culture. Myths and le

Hindu-Buddhist tradition-civilization
The Hindu-Buddhist tradition-civilization, like the Chinese-Confucian one, belongs to a different meta-tradition than the Near East-Mediterranean civilization.

Sino-Confucian tradition-civilization
Chinese-Confucian tradition-civilization based on indifference to religion as such with its faith, gods, mysticism and metaphysics (Taoism and Buddhism for all their

Comparative analysis of Eastern traditions
After a brief description of the main Eastern traditions-civilizations, let us turn to a more in-depth comparison of them. It's not so much about comparing them with each other, about

Religious traditions of the East and the problem of development
The European tradition-civilization gave rise to capitalism and thereby caused a sharp acceleration in the pace of evolution, including practically the entire world, primarily

Religions today. Islamic fundamentalist extremism
The inferiority complex caused at one time, especially in the 19th century, by a vivid comparison of backward Asia with advanced Europe, is now a thing of the distant past. Traditional Structure B

For many centuries, in the culture of Mesopotamia, there was a process of eliminating some deities and cults and exalting others, processing and merging mythological plots, changing the nature and appearance of those gods who were to rise and become universal (as a rule, they were credited with the deeds and merits of those who remained in the shadows or dying in the memory of generations).

The result of this process was the formation of the religious system in its form, as it has come down to our days according to the surviving texts and archaeological excavations.

The religious system bore a noticeable imprint of the socio-political structure that really existed in this region. In Mesopotamia, with its many successive state formations (Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia), there was no strong stable state power. Therefore, although at times certain successful rulers (Sargon of Akkad, Hammurabi) achieved considerable power and recognized power, there were, as a rule, no centralized despotism in this region. Apparently, this also affected the status of the Mesopotamian rulers fixed by the religious system. Usually they did not call themselves (and others did not call them) the sons of the gods, and their sacralization was practically limited to granting them the prerogatives of the high priest or recognizing their right to direct contact with God (an obelisk with the image of the sun god Shamash, handing Hammurabi a scroll with laws that entered history as the laws of Hammurabi).

This relatively low degree of centralization of political power and, accordingly, the deification of the ruler contributed to the fact that in Mesopotamia quite easily, without fierce rivalry (which took place in Egypt), many gods got along with each other with temples dedicated to them and priests serving them. Mythology has preserved information about the Sumerian pantheon, which already existed at the early stages of civilization and statehood in Mesopotamia. The main ones were the sky god An and the earth goddess Ki, who gave birth to the powerful air god Enlil, the water god Ea (Enki), often depicted as a fish-man and who created the first people. All these and many other gods and goddesses entered into complex relationships with each other, the interpretation of which changed over time and depending on the change of dynasties and ethnic groups (the Semitic Akkadian tribes, mixed with the ancient Sumerians, brought with them new gods, new mythological plots).

Most of the Sumerian-Akkadian-Babylonian gods had an anthropomorphic appearance, and only a few, like Ea or Nergal, bore zoomorphic features, a kind of recollection of totemic ideas of the distant past. The sacred animals of the Mesopotamians included the bull and the snake: in myths, the gods were often called "powerful bulls", and the snake was revered as the personification of the feminine.

It already follows from the ancient Sumerian myths that Enlil was considered the first among the gods. However, his power in the pantheon was far from absolute: seven pairs of great gods, his relatives, at times challenged his power and even removed him from office, overthrowing him into the underworld for wrongdoings. The underworld is the realm of the dead, where the cruel and vengeful goddess Ereshkigal was omnipotently in charge, who could only be pacified by the god of war, Nergal, who became her husband. Enlil and other gods and goddesses were immortal, so they, even if they fell into the underworld, returned from there after a series of adventures. But people, unlike them, are mortal, so their destiny after death is an eternal stay in the gloomy realm of the dead. The border of this kingdom was considered a river, through which the souls of the buried were transported to the kingdom of the dead by a special carrier (the souls of the unburied remained on earth and could cause a lot of trouble to people).

Life and death, the kingdom of heaven and earth and the underworld of the dead - these two principles were clearly opposed in the religious system of Mesopotamia. And not only opposed. The real existence of farmers with their cult of fertility and the regular change of seasons, awakening and dying nature could not but lead to the idea of ​​a close and interdependent relationship between life and death, dying and resurrection. Let people be mortal and never return from the underworld. But nature is immortal! Every year she gives birth to a new life, as if resurrecting her after a dead winter hibernation. It was this regularity of nature that the immortal gods had to reflect. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the central places in Mesopotamian mythology was occupied by the story of the death and resurrection of Dumuzi (Tammuz).

The goddess of love and fertility in Mesopotamia was the beautiful Inanna (Ishtar), the patron goddess of the city of Uruk, where a temple was built in her honor (something like a temple of love) with priestesses and temple servants who gave their caresses to anyone (temple prostitution). Like them, the loving goddess bestowed her caresses on many - both gods and people, but the story of her love for Dumuzi was most famous. This story has developed. In the beginning (the Sumerian version of the myth), Inanna, having married the shepherd Dumuzi, sacrificed him to the goddess Ereshkigal as a payment for her liberation from the underworld. Later (Babylonian version) things began to look different.

Dumuzi, who turned out to be not only the husband, but also the brother of Ishtar, died on a hunt. The goddess went to the underworld for him. The evil Ereshkigal left Ishtar with her. As a result, life on earth ceased: animals and people ceased to reproduce. The alarmed gods demanded from Ereshkigal the return of Ishtar, who came to earth with a vessel of living water, which allowed her to resurrect the dead Dumuzi.

The story speaks for itself: Dumuzi, personifying the fertility of nature, dies and is resurrected with the help of the goddess of fertility, who conquers death. The symbolism is quite obvious, although it did not appear immediately, but only as a result of the gradual transformation of the original mythological plot.

The mythology of Mesopotamia is rich and very diverse. It also contains cosmogonic plots, stories about the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, including people molded from clay, and legends about the exploits of great heroes, primarily Gilgamesh, and, finally, the story of the great flood. The famous legend of the great flood, which subsequently spread so widely among different peoples, entered the Bible and was accepted by Christian teaching, is not an idle invention. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who especially singled out among other gods the god of the south wind, which drove the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates against the current and threatened catastrophic floods, could not perceive such floods (especially the most destructive of them) as a great flood. The fact that such a catastrophic flood was indeed a real fact is confirmed by the excavations of the English archaeologist L. Woolley in Ur (in the 20-30s), during which a multi-meter layer of silt was discovered that separated the most ancient cultural layers of the settlement from more later. It is interesting that the Sumerian story of the flood preserved in fragments in some details (the message of the gods to the virtuous king about the intention to arrange a flood and save him) resembles the biblical legend about Noah.

The religious system of Mesopotamia, changed and improved by the efforts of different peoples over many centuries, in the II millennium BC. e. was already well developed. Of the great many small local deities, often duplicating the functions of each other (note that in addition to Ishtar there were two more goddesses of fertility), several main, universally known and most revered ones stood out. A certain hierarchy of them also developed: Marduk, the patron god of the city of Babylon, moved to the place of the supreme god, whose influential priests put him at the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon. With the rise of Marduk, the sacralization of the ruler was also associated, whose status acquired more and more holiness over time. In the II millennium BC. e. The mythological interpretation of the deeds, merits and spheres of influence of all the powers of the other world of all gods, heroes and spirits, including the rulers of the underworld and numerous demons of evil, illness and misfortune, in the fight against which the Mesopotamian priests developed a whole system of spells and charms, was also somewhat revised. In particular, each person turned out to be the owner of his own divine patron-patron, sometimes several, which contributed to the formation of personal ties "man-deity". A complex cosmological system was developed from several heavens, covering the earth as a hemisphere, floating in the world's oceans. Heaven was the residence of the highest gods, and the sun god Shamash daily made his way from the eastern mountain towards the western mountain, and at night he retired to the “inside of heaven”.

At the service of the gods, magic and mantles, which had achieved considerable success, were put. Finally, through the efforts of the priests, much was done in the field of astronomy and the calendar, mathematics and writing. At the same time, it should be noted that, although all this pre-scientific knowledge had a completely independent cultural value, their connection with religion (and the connection is not only genetic, but also functional) is undeniable. And not so much because priests stood at their source, but because all this knowledge was connected with religious ideas and even mediated by them.

In fairness, it should be noted that by no means all aspects of life, not the entire system of ideas and institutions of the ancient Mesopotamia were determined by religious ideas. For example, the texts of the laws of Hammurabi convince us that the rules of law were practically free from them. This very significant point indicates that the religious system of Mesopotamia, in the image and likeness of which later similar systems of other Middle Eastern states were formed, was not total, i.e., did not monopolize the entire sphere of spiritual life. It left room for views, actions and practices not directly related to religion, and it was this practice that could influence the nature of the religious ideas of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Semitic tribes of Syria and Phoenicia to the Cretan-Mycenaean predecessors of the ancient Greeks. It is possible that she played a certain role in the emergence of freethinking in antiquity. This is worth paying attention to because the second version of the most ancient religious system of the world, the ancient Egyptian, almost simultaneously with the Mesopotamian, led in this sense to other results.

Introduction

Culture is one of the most ancient phenomena of human life. It arose and developed together with man, making up what qualitatively distinguishes him from all other living beings and nature as a whole. However, interest in its study and comprehension as a special phenomenon of reality has developed relatively recently. For a long time - for millennia - culture existed as something taken for granted, unconscious, inseparable from man and society and not requiring any special, close attention.

Culturology is a humanitarian science that studies culture as a system, i.e. generally. It originated at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and was widely recognized in Europe and around the world. Cultural studies began to develop in our country in the early 90s.

In general, culturology has not yet reached a completely mature level and is in its infancy.

Culture of Mesopotamia

The culture of Mesopotamia arose around the same time as that of Egypt. It developed in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and existed from 4 thousand BC. e. until the middle of the 6th century BC. e. Unlike the Egyptian culture of Mesopotamia was not homogeneous, it was formed in the process of multiple interpenetration of several ethnic groups and peoples, and therefore was multilayer . The main inhabitants of Mesopotamia were the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Chaldeans in the south; Assyrians, Hurrians and Arameans in the north. The cultures of Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria reached the greatest development and importance.

The origin of the Sumerian ethnos is still a mystery. It is only known that in 4 thousand. BC. the southern part of Mesopotamia is inhabited by the Sumerians and lay the foundations for the entire subsequent civilization of this region. Like the Egyptian, this civilization was river. By the beginning of 3 thousand BC. in the south of Mesopotamia, several city-states appear, the main of which are Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Larsa and others. They alternately play a leading role in the unification of the country.

The history of Sumer knew several ups and downs. The 24th - 23rd centuries BC deserve special mention, when the rise Semitic city of Akkad north of Sumer. Under King Sargon the Ancient, Akkad managed to subjugate all of Sumer to his power. The Akkadian language replaces the Sumerian, and becomes the main language throughout Mesopotamia. Semitic art also has a great influence on the entire region. In general, the significance of the Akkadian period in the history of Sumer turned out to be so significant that some authors call the entire culture of this period Sumero-Akkadian.

Culture of the Sumerian-Akkadian state

The basis of the Sumerian economy was agriculture with a developed irrigation system. Hence it is clear why one of the main monuments of Sumerian culture was the "Land Owner's Almanac", containing instructions on farming - how to maintain soil fertility and avoid clogging it. Cattle breeding was also important. Sumerian metallurgy reached a high level. Already at the beginning of 3 thousand. BC. the Sumerians began to manufacture bronze tools, and at the end of 2000. BC. entered the Iron Age.

From the middle of 3 thousand. BC. potter's wheel is used in the manufacture of dishes. Other crafts are successfully developing - weaving, stone-cutting, blacksmithing. Extensive trade and exchange take place both between the Sumerian cities and with other countries - Egypt, Iran, India, the states of Asia Minor.

The importance of Sumerian writing should be emphasized. The cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians turned out to be the most successful and effective. Improved in 2 thousand. BC. Phoenicians, it formed the basis of almost all modern alphabets.

The system of religious and mythological ideas and cults of Sumer partly echoes the Egyptian one. In particular, it also contains the myth of a dying and resurrecting God, which is the God Dumuzi. As in Egypt, the ruler of the city-state was declared a descendant of God and was perceived as an earthly God. At the same time, there were noticeable differences between the Sumerian and Egyptian systems. So among the Sumerians, the funeral cult, belief in the afterlife did not acquire great importance. Equally, the priests among the Sumerians did not become a special layer that played a huge role in public life. In general, the Sumerian system of religious beliefs seems to be less complex.

As a rule, each city-state had its patron God. However, there were gods who were revered throughout Mesopotamia. Behind them stood those forces of nature, the importance of which for agriculture was especially great - sky, earth and water. These were the sky god An, the earth god Enlil and the water god Enki. Some stars were associated with individual stars or constellations. It is noteworthy that in the Sumerian writing, the pictogram of a star meant the concept of "God". Of great importance in the Sumerian religion was the Mother Goddess, the patroness of agriculture, fertility and childbearing. There were several such goddesses, one of which was the goddess Inanna, the patroness of the city of Uruk. Some Sumerian myths - about the creation of the world, about the global flood - had a strong influence on the mythology of other peoples, including Christian ones.

In the artistic culture of Sumer, architecture was the leading art. Unlike the Egyptians, the Sumerians did not know stone construction, and all structures were made of raw brick. Due to the swampy terrain, buildings were erected on artificial platforms - embankments. From the middle of 3 thousand. BC. The Sumerians were the first to widely use arches and vaults in construction.

The first monuments of architecture were two temples, White and Red, discovered in Uruk and dedicated to the main deities of the city - the god Anu and the goddess Inanna. Both temples are rectangular in plan, with ledges and niches, decorated with relief images in the "Egyptian style". Another significant monument is the small temple of the fertility goddess Ninhursag at Ur. It was built using the same architectural forms, but decorated not only with relief but also with round sculpture. In the niches of the walls there were copper figurines of copper gobies, and on the friezes there were high reliefs of lying gobies. At the entrance to the temple - two statues of lions made of wood. All this made the temple festive and elegant.

In Sumer, a peculiar type of religious building developed - a ziggurat, which was a stepped, rectangular tower. On the upper platform of the ziggurat there was usually a small temple - "the dwelling of God." Sumerian literature reached a high level. In addition to the aforementioned "agricultural almanac", the most significant literary monument was the Epic of Gilgamesh. This epic poem tells about a man who saw everything, experienced everything, and knew everything, and who was close to unraveling the mystery of immortality.

By the end of 3000 BC. Sumer gradually falls into decay, and, in the end, Babylonia conquers it.