Unsettling Sovereignty: Politics and Poetics in the Baal Cycle

摘要

Cosmological speculations hold political ramifications. The breakdown of the hierarchical society of the European Middle Ages, for example, belonged to a general breakdown of hier-: archical order in thought, belief, and action.~1 At the level of cosmology, this was exemplified in the turn from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican picture of the universe, since no analogy between above and below is possible in Copernican thought.~2 In the ancient Near East, the Babylonian epic Enūma eli? offers the most explicit expression of a parallel between political hierarchy and cosmological order. The late twelfth-century B.C. poem was intimately connected with the institution of Babylonian kingship.~3 By telling the story of Marduk's defeat of Tiamat (the primordial waters) and his subsequent organization of the universe, Enūma eli? depicts the world as structured according to a fixed hierarchical order. Marduk sets heaven and earth in their proper places.~4 At the same time, the unequivocal acceptance of his kingship by the other gods establishes the hierarchy of rank among them. This hierarchy is reiterated on the spatial plane when Marduk fixes the position of his star Neberu as a reference point for the positions of all the others.~5 At the level of human politics, Marduk's cosmogonic act ushers in the establishment of Babylon.~6 That city's position at the apex of the world political order mirrors Marduk's position among the gods.