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Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

Prisons in Ancient
Mesopotamia
Confinement and Control until
the First Fall of Babylon
J. N IC HO L A S R E I D
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© J. Nicholas Reid 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951897
ISBN 978–0–19–284961–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849618.001.0001
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To my children, Cooper, Noah, Caleb, and Hannah
πορευθέντες δὲ μάθετε τί ἐστιν ἔλεος θέλω καὶ οὐ θυσίαν (Matt. 9:13a)

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Figures xi
List of Tables xiii
Introduction1
The Birth and Evolution of the Prison in Modernity3
The Prison and Punishment5
A Roadmap to This Book14
1. Imprisonment from the Dawn of History to the
First Fall of Babylon 18
Introduction18
What We Know and What We Don’t20
Methodology and the Hymn to the Prison Goddess Nungal28
2. Confine and Control: Lexical and Social-Historical Summary 37
Introduction37
e2-eš237
bīt asīrī42
e2 ennuĝ = bīt ṣibitti43
Other Key Terms54
The Prison in Literary Texts61
Conclusion63
3. How to End up Imprisoned 65
Introduction65
Law Collections in Ancient Mesopotamia66
Imprisonment in Edicts and Law Collections70
Reasons for Imprisonment72
Conclusion84
4. Judicial Process and Proof 86
Introduction86
Justice in Mesopotamia88
Judicial Summoning91
Detainment of Suspects93
Judicial Process95
The Awe of the Judicial Process98
viii Contents
Oaths102
The River Ordeal117
Imprisonment of the Guilty124
Conclusion124
5. The Imprisoned Life 126
Introduction126
Life on the Inside: A Literary Perspective128
Personal Accounts of Life on the Inside130
Ur III Prison Rations136
Old Babylonian Prison Rations140
Time Served141
Conclusion150
6. The King in the Cage: Ritual Purification and Imprisonment 152
Introduction152
Purity and Purification153
Purity and the Gods154
Control Through Imprisonment157
Ritual Purification Through Imprisonment159
Imprisonment and Positive Change162
Conclusion166
Conclusion168
Bibliography 173
Authors 193
Primary Texts 196
General Subject Index 199
Acknowledgments
This project has been my constant companion for many years now. I began
thinking about prisons in ancient Mesopotamia during my doctoral work at
the University of Oxford. After defending my dissertation on slavery, I was
awarded a fellowship as a Visiting Research Scholar (VRS) at the Institute
for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University. It was
then that I was able to enjoy focused time to work on the project. ISAW has
continued to support my research by allowing me to maintain a research
affiliation since my time as a VRS. Finally, I have continued working on it
while teaching at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando (RTSO). I
remain grateful to these institutions and the persons affiliated with them for
the ways they supported my research.
A few individuals deserve particular mention here. Jacob Dahl, my doctoral
supervisor, has supported my research in numerous ways and has remained
a mentor and friend through these many years. Thank you.
Betrand Lafont and Vitali Bartash also read earlier drafts of this book.
The project is much better because of each of you.
I also owe thanks to the anonymous reviewers. Thank you for giving of
your time and for providing invaluable insight into this project.
I have presented on aspects of this research at ISAW, Oxford, and Emory
and have also taught two classes on the subject of prisons at RTSO. Thanks
to those who invited me to present on my research and to those who took
my classes.
As I was working on this project, I published some of the findings with
the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History. I am grateful to the editorial
board for accepting that project. Steven Garfinkle shepherded that article
through the publication process and taught me a lot along the way.
Several people have also contributed to this volume in other ways. Klaus
Wagensonner, who has supported me with friendship, collaboration on
other projects, and numerous photos of tablets through the years, allowed
me to use some photographs in this volume. Eleanor Robson kindly pro-
vided me with permission to use the translation of the “Hymn to Nungal”
included in this volume. Jarett Hall provided me with drawings. Zach
Pennington discussed with me the data related to the length of time people
x Acknowledgments
spent under guard. He also helped by producing the charts included in this
volume to show the findings more clearly. Thanks to each of you.
I would also like to thank Oxford University Press for accepting this project.
Working with Charlotte Loveridge, my acquistion editor, has been great.
While I owe each of you a debt of gratitude, I accept full responsibility for
any errors that remain.
Finally, I would like to thank Blair, my wife, for her constant friendship
and support and for not once asking when I would be done with it. It is to
our children that I dedicate this volume. I hope they will grow up to be
people who love mercy.
List of Figures
1. Map of Ancient Mesopotamia. Courtesy of Jarett Hall. 21

2. Obverse of a tablet of the “Hymn to Nungal,” YBC 4667.
Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection. Photography
by Klaus Wagensonner. 30
3. Prisoner bound by ropes depicted on an Akkadian vase from Uruk.
Paris, Musée du Louvre, AO 5683. Rendering courtesy of Jarett Hall. 38
4. Male and female SAG×MA and ERIMa from Jemdet Nasr representing
a human head with a rope and a yoke respectively. Drawing
by J. Nicholas Reid. 39
5. Living in Prison. Obverse of Sumerian tablet from Umma,
YOS 4, 183. Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection.
Photography by Klaus Wagensonner. 51
6. Graph showing number of attestations of imprisonment
during different reigns. 144
7. Histogram depicting days spent under guard during different reigns. 145
8. Omens of Sacrificial Lambs. Old Babylonian tablet, YOS 10, 47.
Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection. Photography
by Klaus Wagensonner. 166
List of Tables
1. Ur III Prison Texts. 46

2. Prison Rations. 137
3. Captives at Girsu. 138
Introduction
My house gives birth to a just person but exterminates a false one.

Since there are pity and tears within its brick walls, and it is built
with compassion, it soothes the heart of that person, and refreshes
his spirits.
“Hymn to Nungal,” the prison goddess (lines 103–5)
Ancient Mesopotamia is known for being a land of historical firsts. The title
of Samuel Kramer’s book, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in
Recorded History,1 illustrates the point well. While Kramer did not include
prisons in his list of firsts, his discussion of another, more benevolent insti-
tution can serve as an example of one of the problems with his approach.
The initial chapter is entitled, “Education: The First Schools.” Yet, scribal
education in Mesopotamia was not exactly like school as we understand it.
Dominique Charpin writes,
The term “school” appears to be misleading, then, in that it confers an

institutional character on the training of scribes. It also suggests a certain
continuity of that activity at a single site. The archeological evidence yields
a different image: that of houses of literati who trained apprentices at
home. All in all, scribal apprenticeships may hardly have been different in
their sociological reality from the other ways of transmitting knowledge.
That is, they occurred primarily within the context of the family.2
Charpin rightly notes that there are a number of ways in which the term
school, as we understand it, blurs certain distinctions about Mesopotamian
scribal training, which might have been very similar to the transmission of
other knowledge such as making pottery. While not strictly a school, at least
as we understand them, the Mesopotamian historical phenomenon surely
1 Kramer 1988. 2 Charpin 2010a: 32.
Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia: Confinement and Control until the First Fall of Babylon. J. Nicholas Reid,
Oxford University Press. © J. Nicholas Reid 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849618.003.0001
2 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia
belongs to a history of education and schools, because it serves as an early

example of humans passing on the knowledge and the skill of reading and
writing from one generation to the next, even if numerous differences exist
and a direct linear connection cannot be made.
History should not be restricted to an assessment of our institutions
against theirs. This is where Charpin’s more nuanced approach is valuable.
How they educated and passed on the craft of reading and writing is more
important than whether or not their schools were like our schools. The
same may be said of prisons. And although it will be discovered that impris-
onment or detention was multifunctional and only had limited intersection
with “crime,” this work shows how religion, power, and politics can shape
ideology attached to very different social-historical realities.
As such, this book is not about whether Mesopotamia had the first
prisons, as defined predominantly by modern, Western political realities. The
answer to that question hardly deserves a page. Instead, this book is con-
cerned with discovering how imprisonment, as an historical phenomenon,
was employed at the dawn of history.
The editors of the Oxford History of Prisons connect the origins of the
prison to the existence of the cage:
If the cage exists, and if we do not know what else to do with a convicted
criminal who does not need to be killed or whipped or exiled yet who
cannot be allowed to escape adverse consequences for his crime, why not
continue caging? So, we are suggesting, the original justification for the
prison may well have been incapacitation. Whatever else, incarceration
serves to remove a potential offender from the community.3
Such a statement suggests the prison, which they define as an institution of

punishment, finds its origin in the jail as the holding place, which they call
the cage. This book, however, is about what happened before the cage. The
various forms of detention and imprisonment in early Mesopotamia arose
originally out of the desire to gain access to and control labor, resulting in a
multifunctional and multicontextual practice that was adaptable to a variety
of circumstances. Detention in ancient Mesopotamia had limited intersec-
tion with “crime,” a term which will be used loosely to refer to any action
that is considered a breach of a norm that is punishable in some manner.
When those accused of some infraction were detained, the existing social
3 Morris and Rothman 1998: ix.

Introduction 3
structures for corporal confinement were available to be used in order to

meet the needs of the controlling entity. The need to detain in relation to
judicial process likely only increased with the emergence and expansion of
city states, where detention and transportation were employed to bring
certain high-level cases before the palace.
This origin of imprisonment helps to elucidate and assess stated or liter-
ary goals about the prison, disentangling the ideology that came to be
attached to imprisonment from the much more complicated realities of the
everyday practice. As will be seen, imprisonment, as a mechanism of
detention that restricts movement, has a long history of being adaptable to a
variety of circumstances for practical reasons and through the attachment
of ideology. Further, it will be evident that imprisonment has been employed
to meet a number of social goals, as it is historically multifunctional. This is
true of then as it is of now. For example, modern imprisonment in the US
where the stated goals of correction and punishment must be squared with
the everyday realities of how imprisonment is employed and what it accom-
plishes is illustrative of this reality.
The Birth and Evolution of the Prison in Modernity
What is it about imprisonment that resulted in it being fully enveloped into

modern society as a just, safe, and productive response to crime? Until
recently, the almost wholesale acceptance of imprisonment has been viewed
as an advancement in humanity. Criminals were taken off the streets.
Society was safer. And punishment was more humane. Convicts had their
needs met as they were taken out of society and provided with the opportu-
nity to reflect on their misdeeds, with many even afforded the chance to re-
enter normal life, after paying their debt to society. If the system worked, the
end result was a positive change in the prisoner, who through punishment,
isolation, and reflection became a better citizen. In fact, many Americans
believe that imprisonment will result in some form of rehabilitation.4 But
rarely does it work.5 I will limit myself to one example.
4 Jonson, Cullen, and Lux 2013.

5 See discussion of the failure of prisons in Foucault 1995. The original French version was
published in 1975 under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Discipline is not the
best translation of surveiller, which deals with the idea of monitoring or surveillance. For a
discussion of the ways in which the prison has been ineffective in rehabilitation, see
Pisciotta 1994.
On June 6, 2015, a young man named Kalief Browder was found by his
mother hanging from her window-unit air conditioner.6 He had attempted
suicide on at least four prior occasions, but this time was successful. As a
young, black man growing up in New York City, Browder was accused of
stealing a backpack with some valuable belongings. A few months before his
seventeenth birthday, Browder was arrested and taken to the jail at Rikers,
where he would spend the next three years imprisoned without conviction
or trial. For two of those years, Browder lived in solitary confinement.
Eventually, Browder was unceremoniously released from jail when the charges
were finally dropped. But the damage was done. This is but one example of a
negative outcome of a very broken system that has numerous problems.
Efforts to raise awareness have resulted in what appears to be a general
recognition of the problems of imprisonment, even if most do not seem to
grasp the full scale of the problem.7 Even as many of the problems come
into focus,8 few positive alternatives have been offered,9 leaving the system
broken and largely unchanged.
The nature and effectiveness of imprisonment, as well as the need for
reform, has been a topic of debate for some time, but the study of prisons as
an historical discipline is a relatively recent trend.10
6 See the New Yorker essay: Gonnerman (October 6, 2014 Issue). See too the New York Times
article by Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip: “Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3
Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-
browder-held-at-r ikers-i sland-for-3 -years-w ithout-t rial-commits-suicide.html (accessed
December 16, 2019).
7 The war on drugs was the popular answer for a while. For this important thesis in connec-
tion to the disproportionate incarceration of minorities, see now the updated tenth anniversary
edition Alexander 2020 (originally published in 2010) and The Prison and Punishment below.
See Frost and Clear 2018 for a summary of theories related to mass incarceration.
8 See, for example, Pfaff (2017), who looks at systemic problems such as the politicization
of punishment and issues related to the authority of district attorneys among other things. Pfaff
further demonstrates how violent crimes must also be dealt with to move beyond mass
incarceration.
9 Scholars are paying increasing attention to the ways in which environment, age, and other
factors contribute to the emergence of crime. See, for example, Sampson and Laub (2005), who
apply a life-course theory to the emergence of crime. For a fascinating article on recidivism, see
Gladwell 2015. Gladwell reports on efforts to trace rates of recidivism before and after
Hurricane Katrina. They found that those who relocated because of Katrina were more suc-
cessful at breaking the pattern of crime emergence than those who returned to their communi-
ties. For suggestions on how to make differences in the existing system, see Bradley (2018), who
offers a number of solutions within prison systems and communities. For a less optimistic per-
spective, see Sim (2009) for an argument for the abolition of prisons.
10 Little was written about prisons from an historical perspective until the 1970s. See Morris
and Rothman 1998: vii.
Introduction 5
The Prison and Punishment
The historical inquiry into prisons has been dominated by the idea that the
prison is by definition the use of imprisonment for the purpose of punish-
ment. I have written on this topic and even utilized this approach to some
extent, while also attempting to move beyond it.11 The reduction of the
prison to its relationship with punishment intends to reflect modern
notions about prisons particularly in the West, as opposed to related institu-
tions such as jails; a distinction that has nothing to do with ancient
Mesopotamia.
From a methodological perspective, the editors of the Oxford History of
Prisons, although recognizing the limitations of the approach, state that the
punishment of prisons separates such institutions from jails, which are used
for temporary confinement as part of a judicial process or in relation to rel-
atively short stays, typically under a year in the US.12 Other approaches to
the historical inquiry into prisons have also been taken.
David Skarbek, in his book on diversity among approaches to and vari-
ous contexts of imprisonment around the world, states there are certain
fundamental realities belonging to all modern prisons:
All prisons are similar in fundamental ways. They incarcerate people who
are charged with or convicted of crimes. They tend to hold a dispropor-
tionately large number of people from disadvantaged and ethnic, racial,
and other minority communities. Prisoners tend to be more violent, less
patient, less trusting, and less educated than the population outside of
prison. Most prisoners must live and interact with other prisoners; they
have no voluntary exit option. When social scientists think about social
dilemmas, these are some of the most important theoretical characteris-
tics that determine the nature and outcome of the interaction.13
For Skarbek, the prison is for those who are charged and those who are con-
victed, which means he takes a broader view of what constitutes a prison
than the editors of the Oxford History of Prisons. Skarbek, as such, does
not confine his study to the distinctions based on punishment and time,
which are formed largely by the US prison/jail distinction. These central
11 Reid 2016: 81–116. 12 Morris and Rothman 1998: ix.

13 Skarbek 2020: 149.
characteristics of prisons provide Skarbek with the theoretical basis to

compare diversity among approaches to imprisonment in different locales.
In my prior research on Mesopotamian imprisonment, I sought further
connections beyond punishment such as concepts of reform and adminis-
trative mechanisms, both of which are found in the ideology connected to
modern examples of prisons.14 I expanded my research question to under-
stand functionality, length of imprisonment, and what life was like on the
inside. The goal, however, was not to assert that prisons, as we currently
understand them in the modern Western world, were also present in ancient
Mesopotamia. Instead, I sought to understand how Mesopotamian impris-
onment functioned, while arguing for the relevance of the Mesopotamian
evidence for the broader inquiry into a world history of prisons.
The more time I have spent reflecting on the Mesopotamian phenomenon,
the more I am convinced that the historical inquiry into a world history of
prisons cannot be reduced to the notion of punishment. In other words, the
historical inquiry should not be restricted by the claimed modern motivation
of punishment through imprisonment as a supposed civilized form of
justice when even the modern mechanism is used much more expansively
to include the control of the population or subsets of the population and to
achieve certain religious and political ends.
For example, modern, Western examples of the prison cannot be reduced
to whether they are used for punishment or not. In Britain, all local and
state facilities are called prisons because of current political realities.15
Length of time, while a factor, cannot be viewed consistent either. In places
where the US court system is inundated with cases, the District Attorney’s
office may file extensions, holding non-convicted individuals for over a
year.16 Finally, those convicted of minor violations, such as simple assault or
public intoxication, can be punished with very short stays in a jail. Further, it
should be noted that in certain cases in the US, the prison has been used to
detain high-profile suspects while they wait for trial. In the book, Just Mercy,
Bryan Stevenson writes about an example from the 1980s where two
suspects were detained on Death Row in Alabama prior to conviction.17
14 Reid 2016. Many facilities in the US, for example, bear the name correctional facilities.
This relates to the ideology that imprisonment will serve as a crime deterrent. See Tahamont
and Chalfin 2018 and Bonta and Wormith 2018.
15 McConville 1998: 267–87.
16 See discussion in The Birth and Evolution of the Prison in Modernity above on Kalief
Browder for an example of this. On the inefficiencies of the system, see further the recent work
of Pfaff 2017.
17 Stevenson 2015: 52–53, 55–57, 60, 63.
Introduction 7
While anomalous and unjust, as one person was innocent and the other was
held there to coerce false testimony against the innocent person, it shows
the complicated and multifunctional life of imprisonment, even in our
modern political context. This suggests that intentionality must be squared
with functionality in the history of prisons. All of this together with the
historical process and non-linear development of imprisonment indicates
that our inquiry should not be restricted merely to the important question
of punishment.
Despite the expressed concepts of just punishment and correction with
modern examples of imprisonment, the functional nature of imprisonment
extends beyond mere punishment and relates to control. With the US, some
theories link mass incarceration to an attempt to control and/or diminish
the rights of minorities through criminalization and imprisonment.18 The
punishment, in a sense, relates to a broader concept of asserting dominance.
The primary goal is not punishment; it is rather the assertion of power
through the mechanism of punishment. It is through this concept of control
that one can further grasp the connection between imprisonment and correc-
tion. If imprisonment is about controlling society and asserting prescribed
norms, the movement from imprisonment to the release of the offender
naturally relates to the goal of submission to those norms as a precondition
for reinsertion into society. The role of power is but one contributing force
to the practice of imprisonment as it exists today.
Whether you love it, hate it, or find yourself somewhere in between, one
of the most impactful books on the study of prisons is written by Michel
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.19 In it, Foucault
argued that prisons are a modern phenomenon that developed as punish-
ment moved from the spectacle of public, corporal punishment towards the
stated goal of affecting positive change in the person of the prisoner, even if
in reality the assertion of power was the real goal.
Foucault situates his study of the prison in relation to power, knowledge,
and the body.20 Foucault’s work is reasonably easy to understand, yet he
chose to adopt a more literary style, which makes it useful to summarize his
works in relation to reviews that draw out his theses in a concise manner.21
18 See most prominently the work of Alexander (2020), whose work was made famous in
part by the Obama Administration. For an overview of theories relating to mass incarceration
and its potential demise, see Frost and Clear 2018: 104–22.
19 Foucault 1995. 20 Foucault 1995. See Garland 1986: 852.
21 See similar observation in Garland 1986: 849–50.
David Garland describes Foucault’s conception and use of power as

follows: “the various forms of domination and subordination that operate
whenever and wherever social relations exist.”22 Knowledge is a mechanism
of power. Increased knowledge allows greater control for Foucault. Finally,
as summarized by Garland, for Foucault “the human body is the ultimate
material that is seized and shaped by all political, economic, and penal
institutions.”23 Power, as such, is offered by Foucault as the cause for the shift
in punishment from torture to imprisonment.
Despite numerous great insights found in his work, Foucault’s argument
that the movement from the punishment of the body to the punishment of
the soul for the purpose of control fails to account sufficiently for the grad-
ual shifts in punishment in modern Western society. Thus, although simple
historical explanations can be attractive, since they offer straightforward
answers to complicated developments and changes, historical factors that
lead to major social changes are often more complex and variegated.
As such, Foucault’s account of the birth of the prison has received criti-
cism for his structuralist philosophical approach and his failure to argue his
case on the basis of documentary evidence.24 Further, his notion that power
and control are the driving forces behind the prison fails to recognize many
other factors, which contributed to shifts in approaches to punishment. As
stated by Garland, “The prison may thus be retained for all sorts of reasons—
punitiveness, economy, or a plain lack of any functional alternative—which
have little to do with effective control or political strategy.”25 While Foucault
offers numerous cogent insights into the birth of prison, power for the purpose
of control is but one reason for the modern prison system, and it is precisely
the multifunctional nature and adaptability of prisons that require more
nuanced historical explanation.
Pieter Spierenburg offers a “counter paradigm” and several critiques to
Foucault’s history. Spierenburg criticizes Foucault’s explanation for its
structuralist approach. As such, Foucault treats the historical development
22 Garland 1986: 852. According to von Schriltz, “Foucault’s approach revolves around his
theory that ‘power’—his term for clandestine social forces—shaped history more decisively than
the more visible forces of religion, intellectual currents, or individuals” (von Schriltz 1999: 391).
23 Garland 1986: 852.
24 Spierenburg 1984: viii. See criticism of Foucault’s historical work in Garland 1986:
868–72. See further von Schriltz (1999) who criticized Foucault’s inaccurate portrayal of his-
tory. Von Schriltz goes as far to say, “Nor should it be forgotten that this tale is, in virtually every
major detail, wrong” (von Schriltz 1999: 410). Note further still, Alford, who argues that “the
empirical reality of prison (not the same thing as the discourses of penology) shows Foucault
to be wrong” (Alford 2000: 125).
25 Garland 1986: 876.
Introduction 9
of punishment as a series of sudden changes rather than as gradual overlapping

shifts that existed between one approach to punishment and another.26
Further, Spierenburg notes that Foucault fails to discuss the societal devel-
opments that contributed to the changes that took place.27 Most Western
European countries shifted from early modern to nation-states during the
same periods that saw radical changes in approaches to punishment.
The movement from the early modern to the nation-state carried with it
a growing distaste for physical suffering.28 The city and county stopped
being treated as “individual entities” in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. The early modern state continued beyond the revolutionary period
until the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, the distaste for
physical torment only increased. “Repugnance to the sight of physical pun-
ishment spread and intensified. In the end the ‘political conclusion’ was
drawn and public executions were abolished. Still the privatization of
repression had been completed.”29 The focus became less on physical tor-
ment as a deterrence for crime. The certainty of being caught through the
presence of policing, a product of the growing central power of the nation-
state, became the focus of crime deterrence.30 The privatization of punish-
ment continued to have a public presence in the strategic placement of
prisons and across media such as newspapers.31 Other factors should also
be considered.
In the England, the Convict and Penitentiary Acts of 1776 and 1779
resulted in extended periods of imprisonment for criminals “with hard
labour, solitude, and religious instruction in hope that their character could
be amended.”32 When considering the eighteenth century, Laurie Throness
describes a complex overlap similar to what is depicted by Spierenburg, as
described above. There was not an immediate shift from physical punish-
ment to focus on the soul. Instead, Throness discusses conflicting desires
existing in a single historical context in eighteenth-century England. The
competing desires to afflict and transform the criminal co-existed in a sin-
gle legal context. “Sentimental choruses about the leniency and humanity
of English law were contradicted by awful conditions in prisons and on
26 Spierenburg 1984: viii. 27 Spierenburg 1984: viii.

28 See Spierenburg 1984: 204–5. 29 Spierenburg 1984: 205.
30 Spierenburg 1984: 205.
31 Spierenburg 1984: 205. Privatization is not being used here to indicate who owns the
prison, which is a matter of no small importance for current debates about imprisonment.
Privatization is being used here to refer to the non-public nature of punishment with the mod-
ern prison. On private prisons, see Pfaff 2017: 79–104.
32 Throness 2008: 2.
convict ships. Both proportion and disproportion in punishment were

thought to follow the divine pattern.”33 The penitentiary promised to recon-
cile these two, where the severity of punishment, sometimes in solitary con-
finement, placed the prisoner under the gaze of God.34 Through isolation,
prayer, reflection, and religious instruction, the criminal was to be reformed.
The establishment Protestant Church, such as the Church of England, thus
helped to create effectively a “Protestant Purgatory,” which was intended to
spare the criminal from the torments of Hell.35 Throness writes,
As God mercifully, allowed all a lifetime to repent, so long prison sen-

tences in proportion to the gravity of the crime would be a benevolent gift
to serious criminals to allow them enough time to reflect, to produce sor-
row in proportion to their faults, and to demonstrate the fruits of reforma-
tion found in a pattern of industry.36
Since death is final for Protestants, as they do not hold to the doctrine
Purgatory, the Penitentiary became a place where judgment and mercy
could meet. If punishment produces positive change and spares the crimi-
nal from the torments of Hell, then punishment becomes an act of kindness
and moderation, at least conceptually.
The goals of social control and criminal reform can also be seen in the
American example. By 1876, the Elmira Reformatory was opened in New York
state, which marked the beginning of a new approach to crime in the United
States. Twenty reformatories were opened between 1876 and 1920, promising
“benevolent reform: humane, constructive, and charitable treatment.”37
Andrew Pisciotta describes how attempts at instilling a Protestant work
ethic of discipline and self-control for the purpose of creating good, Christian
citizens, who are productive members of society, failed. Instead, Pisciotta
concludes that “reformatories did not achieve their overt goal of benevolent
reform or their covert aim of benevolent repression.”38 Further, the end result
was not the effective control of criminals that Foucault describes; Pisciotta
states “these institutions did not effectively discipline the dangerous class.”39
Despite the failures of the reform movement, the notion that imprisonment
was an effective means of benevolent punishment that could lead to positive
change in criminals remains reflected in many institutions bearing the
33 Throness 2008: 295. 34 Throness 2008: 295. 35 Throness 2008: 295–300.

36 Throness 2008: 296–97. 37 Pisciotta 1994: 4. 38 Pisciotta 1994: 4.
39 Pisciotta 1994: 5.
Introduction 11
name penitentiary or correction to this day. But power can take mechanisms
that exist for one purpose and use them in other ways, as seen in imprison-
ment in the US.
To understand the more recent historical implementation of imprison-
ment in the US, one has to go back to at least the Civil War.40 The thirteenth
amendment to the US Constitution, which in 1865 abolished slavery,
includes one exception. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for ‘crime’ whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction.” This caveat, which permitted involuntary servitude for crimi-
nals, became exploitable to control minority populations and to gain access
to labor.41
Not long after the abolition of slavery, laws were developed in order to
control the newly freed people.42 After the Civil War, Union troops occu-
pied the Southern States. But with the Compromise of 1877, Southern
Democrats negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops in exchange for not
contesting the Republican presidential victory of Rutherford B. Hayes in the
election of 1876. This left the newly freed black population, which had been
integrated in the South, vulnerable to segregation and violent control in the
years that would follow.
The gains made during the Reconstruction period were curtailed in part
by the Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
where segregation and discrimination were also implemented by white
vigilante “justice.” As the only legal form of “slavery” remaining in the US,
imprisonment became an effective means of repression and control
of the black population. In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle
Alexander writes,
After a brief period of progress during Reconstruction, African Americans

found themselves, once again virtually defenceless. The criminal justice
system was strategically employed to force African Americans back into a
40 This is not to suggest that earlier examples and overlap are not significant. The Civil War,
however, remains a significant historical marker in many developments that would later take
place. Interestingly, the history of the prison begins much earlier in what would become the
US; von Schriltz states, “In 1690, William Penn made prison the sole means of punishment in
Pennsylvania, until the Queen restored the English penal law in 1718” (1999: 398).
41 Note for example Alexander’s discussion of the Thirteenth Amendment in relation to the
Jim Crow laws (2020: 38–44).
42 See, for example, Blackmon 2008.
system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to

prove successful for generations to come.43
Even after the Civil Rights movement and the end of Jim Crow segregation,
Alexander demonstrates how incarceration extended many of the problems
of the Jim Crow era by continuing disenfranchisement and dehumanization
under the term “criminal” instead of the former overtly racial terminology
employed.44
For Alexander, the now infamous “War on Drugs,” through stiff sentenc-
ing and aggressive policing, resulted in the disproportionate incarceration
of minorities. This insightful work raised awareness of the problem of mass
incarceration in the United States and inspired the popular Netflix docu-
mentary, 13th. Although highlighting a very important contributing factor
to the problem of mass incarceration in the United States, numerous other
problems also exist with the modern American system. As Anthony B. Bradley
writes: “we could legalize all drugs and release everyone from prison
incarcerated for a drug-related charge and America would still have a mass
incarceration and overcriminalization problem.”45 As such, the US problem
of mass incarceration extends well beyond drugs.
John F. Pfaff is perhaps the most important voice for understanding the
greater problems related to mass incarceration in the United States.
Pfaff writes:
In other words, the single biggest driver of the decline in prison popula-
tions since 2010 has been the decrease in the number of people in prison
for drug crimes. But focusing on drugs will only work in the short run.
That it is working now is certainly something to celebrate. But even setting
every drug offender free would cut out prison population by only about 16
percent. There is a hard limit on how far drug-based reforms can take us.46
43 Alexander 2020: 40.

44 The disenfranchisement of criminals was one key way in which the Jim Crow laws were
revitalized after they were long gone. According to the study found at sentencingproject.org,
“A record 6.1 million Americans are forbidden to vote because of felony disenfranchisement, or
laws restricting voting rights for those convicted of felony-level crimes. The number of disen-
franchised individuals has increased dramatically along with the rise in criminal justice popu-
lations in recent decades, rising from an estimated 1.17 million in 1976 to 6.1 million today”
(Uggen, Larson, and Shannon 2016). On these issues, see Alexander 2020.
45 Bradley 2018: 2.
46 Pfaff 2017: 35. It is surprising that Alexander chooses not to engage with Pfaff directly in
her recent tenth anniversary volume of The New Jim Crow when she offers explanations for her
Introduction 13
Pfaff argues convincingly on the basis of data that the larger structural
problems can hardly be met by merely legalizing drugs; nor can the legaliza-
tion of drugs result in a significant change of demographics in the prison
population.47 So while drug related incarceration remains a major problem,
such reform would only touch on a portion of the related problems of mass
incarceration.
Part of the reason for the complexity of real prison reform is that impris-
onment was used as punishment and as a means of control to deal with
numerous social “problems.” Although vigilante “justice” was also carried
out in public ways during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the pri-
vate nature of punishment through imprisonment was exploitable to meet a
variety of ends but in subtle and hidden ways. This subtlety enables an
ongoing problem of imprisonment, long after the reduction of violent,
public punishment. The jail and prison, as such, became effective mecha-
nisms of oppression, but largely out of plain view, precisely because of
their hidden and adaptable nature. Even if one were to buy into the public
presentation of the goals behind imprisonment, its more discreet mode of
oppression makes it exploitable for numerous ends by any who wield the
power to cage.
This complicated example of modern imprisonment illustrates that when
thinking of a history of prisons and imprisonment, one must look beyond
the stated goals and stated functions of the prison to the actual practice. As
a mechanism of punishment that has a presence but occurs out of plain
sight, imprisonment is adaptable and easily shaped by complex social and
religious factors, since the human cost and impact of imprisonment remain
largely hidden or otherwise easily ignored by obscuring basic human dig-
nity through labels such as “criminals” and under promises of increased
societal safety. In the end, the human cost is deemed acceptable because it
claims to deal with “problem” individuals in service to what are considered
greater societal goals of safety and crime deterrence, and all of this is done
with the claimed hope of the betterment of the criminals themselves.
To summarize, modern imprisonment is not just about punishment. In
the US, imprisonment is used for “deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation,
retribution, and restitution.”48 As such, imprisonment is multifunctional.
This fact requires a broader historical inquiry and suggests that simple and
decision to discuss drugs not violence, since she offers a different picture than the one provided
by Pfaff and other scholars. See in particular Alexander 2020: xxii–xxxi.
47 Pfaff 2017: 26. 48 Bradley 2018: 18.
singular solutions to the problem of mass incarceration will hardly account

for real change. Better conditions in prisons will hardly address dispropor-
tionality among those who end up imprisoned. Disproportionality can
hardly be addressed until money and politics play a smaller role in our jus-
tice system. For example, everyone knows that those who can afford better,
more competent legal representation will receive more favorable outcomes
in the current system than those who are dependent upon public defense,
particularly in contexts where public defendants are weighed down by vol-
ume. Much more could be said.49 But the foregoing discussion of Western
models and the developments attached to them demonstrate the compli-
cated history and adaptable nature of imprisonment. Since prisons are mul-
tifunctional, the historical investigation into imprisonment should not
revolve solely around the question of punishment. The study of early
Mesopotamia provides the opportunity to consider the origins and multi-
functional nature of imprisonment at the dawn of history. The adaptability
of limiting corporal movement through imprisonment to meet numerous
social goals and handle numerous social “problems” has deep roots in his-
tory, even though direct connections and linear developments do not exist.
A Roadmap to This Book
Chapter 1 introduces the period of investigation as well various Assyriological

conventions employed when presenting the primary evidence. This is fol-
lowed by a discussion of the secondary literature to demonstrate the current
state of the discussion about imprisonment in early Mesopotamia. After
discussing the state of research on the topic, I introduce the primary sources
related to Mesopotamian imprisonment by using a hymn to a prison god-
dess. This literary text provides both an entry point into the discussion and
allows me to explain the methodological approach I use to study the sources
related to imprisonment in early Mesopotamia.
49 For the structural problems and many real solutions, see Pfaff 2017 and Bradley 2018.
Among these include less politicization and more oversight of District Attorneys and increased
flexibility with sentencing for judges. For a scathing critique of the effectiveness of reform
movements in relation to imprisonment, see Sim 2009. Sim, who has been very influenced by
Foucault, states that the reform movements have been good for bringing to light many prob-
lems that were hidden but argues that such piecemeal efforts have been incapable of producing
real, positive change.
Introduction 15
In the second chapter, I discuss key terms denoting some form of detention
in ancient Mesopotamia in relation to the socio-economic status of the
various types of prisoners housed in these centers of detention. What will
be demonstrated is that the overwhelming evidence suggests that most
prisoners were not held because of “crimes.” This is not to suggest that
imprisonment did not relate to disputes and “criminal” activity. Rather,
imprisonment was utilized throughout the judicial process. But this inter-
section between “crime” and detention seems to be a practical extension of
existing mechanisms (administrative bodies, guards, etc.), rather than a
prison in the strict sense.
In the third chapter, I consider how to end up imprisoned in early
Mesopotamia. To do so, I discuss the so- called law codes of ancient
Mesopotamia. This is followed by a discussion of the ways in which justice
was administered in everyday life. The overall approach involved retributive
and restitutive actions. While imprisonment was not the normal response
to “crimes,” I discuss the attested infractions that led to imprisonment of
one sort or another. The numerous ways by which a person could be impris-
oned points to the multifunctional nature of prisons. This is to be expected
as ancient Near Eastern space was typically multifunctional.50 Nevertheless,
functionality is kept in view.
Chapter four deals with key aspects of the judicial process in ancient
Mesopotamia. Beyond the use of various forms of evidence in trials, ordeals
are attested. These ordeals were intended to determine cases in reliance
upon the gods, which also provided an element of religious coercion. In
particular, the River Ordeal and the Oath Ordeal are discussed in relation to
the prison goddess. The literary vision of the judicial process is situated in
the context of the actual judicial process as attested in the documents of
practice. The literary vision and awe of the judicial ordeal are also attested
in other literary texts, which receive consideration in this chapter, as well.
The awe-inspiring context of approaching the king and partaking in ordeals
before the gods were intended to reveal the truth, induce honesty, and
determine guilt. In particular, by considering the judicial process in con-
nection with imprisonment, it is demonstrated that imprisonment in rela-
tion to “crime” largely functioned as a place of holding until trial and until
punishment but not as punishment.
50 See Reid 2016.

Chapter five discusses what the imprisoned life was like. After consider-
ing the descriptive account in the literary vision attested in the relevant
portion of the “Hymn to Nungal,” life on the inside will be discussed
through a number of documents of practice to answer questions about the
provision of food, abuse, suffering, and time spent on the inside. In particu-
lar, it will become further evident that imprisonment was multifunctional,
not just in relation to purpose but also its context. For example, the admin-
istrative approaches to imprisonment and spikes in lengths of stay in prison
are two areas in which development can be observed, suggesting that
imprisonment was available to be used but the approach was not standard-
ized. Such observations fit with other known changes across locales and
periods of time in early Mesopotamia. The concepts of suffering and misery
introduce the topic of the resultant lament, which bears mentioning in its
Mesopotamian context in the following chapter.
In Chapter six I discuss the topic of purity in ancient Mesopotamia. Purity
touched upon life from top to bottom. While there is not a codified discus-
sion of purity from ancient Mesopotamia, the topic features prominently in
the extant sources.51 An exhaustive discussion of the topic is beyond the
scope of this book, but ritual purification is essential to understanding the
literary vision of the prison and later rituals that connect imprisonment to
the process of purification. While this literary vision is not to be taken as
exemplary of what actually occurred, it asserts the idea that a person can
benefit from the process of imprisonment. When imprisonment is con-
nected to the notion of reform or positive, personal change, it presents the
prisoner’s suffering and the assertion of control over that person’s body as
something that is in the end beneficial for the individual. This adds a fur-
ther coercive element to the process of imprisonment. As C. S. Lewis wrote
in his essay on punishment, “Those who torment us for our own good will
torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their conscience.”52
In Mesopotamia, the transformation that occurs through imprisonment
includes the restoration of the relationship between the prisoner and their
god, adding another religious dimension to imprisonment. This imprisonment
is further presented as a merciful act, since the “crime” deserved a greater
corporal punishment in the “Hymn to Nungal.” That is why the prison
goddess’s house is a house of compassion. Again, while not necessarily
51 See the excellent discussion in Guichard and Marti 2013. 52 Lewis 1987: 151.
Introduction 17
reflective of the everyday Mesopotamian’s perspective about prison, this

literary and ideological conception came to be attached to ritualistic practice.
In the conclusion, I reflect on imprisonment and how ideology must be
disentangled from historical realities. The social-historical picture suggests
imprisonment was a multifunctional practice that only occasionally inter-
sected with the detention of criminals and almost never, if at all, related to
the rehabilitation or punishment of criminals. Yet ideology came to be
attached to imprisonment in literature and rituals that offers a very different
vision of the goals of imprisonment at the dawn of history. I conclude this
book with a discussion about the role history can play in helping to create
change in social institutions.
1
Imprisonment from the Dawn of
History to the First Fall of Babylon
Introduction
This book is about imprisonment at the dawn of history from Late Uruk
until the first fall of Babylon (ca. 3200–1600 BC).1 The beginning of history,
in its strict sense, is typically related to the invention of writing.2 The two
earliest examples of writing in the history of the world are the Egyptian
Hieroglyphs and the Proto-cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia. Although
formerly Assyriologists held that writing was invented in Mesopotamia and
spread to Egypt and China, this theory has been displaced. Now, it is gener-
ally viewed that writing was invented independently four times in the his-
tory of the world in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mayan Mesoamerica.3
From the outset, writing in Mesopotamia was very basic and administra-
tive, but two significant changes occurred in the third millennium. The ear-
liest texts did not include the signs in their proper linguistic position, and
the texts were limited by the lack of grammatical elements.4 With the addi-
tion of syntax and grammar in the early to mid-third millennium, writing
became adaptable to produce numerous text types and genres. Still, most of
the writing of the third millennium was tied to officialdom. But that was
soon to change. Niek Veldhuis writes of the second millennium, “In this
1 On the debate about chronology, see, for example, Aström 1987; Cryer 1995: 651–64;
Roaf 2012: 147–74.
2 See Hallo 1996: 271.
3 For the diffusion model, see Gelb 1963. With the diffusion model, Mayan hieroglyphs were
not viewed as real writing (Thompson 1972; Gelb 1963: 58). For more recent views, see, for
example, Cooper 2004: 71; Michalowski 1994: 53. For an important study on cuneiform, see
Charpin 2010a. There is a debate about whether cuneiform in Mesopotamia or the hieroglyphs
in Egypt came first. The earliest texts are proto-cuneiform, while the earliest examples of hiero-
glyphs are more advanced, suggesting that hieroglyphs could have developed earlier. On early
Egyptian writing, see in particular Baines 2010: 134–49; Baines 2012: 25–63; Baines 2004:
150–89. On cuneiform, see Veldhuis 2012: 3–23; Cooper 2004: 71–99.
4 Veldhuis 2012: 5–6 and Cooper 2004: 80–81.
Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia: Confinement and Control until the First Fall of Babylon. J. Nicholas Reid,
Oxford University Press. © J. Nicholas Reid 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849618.003.0002
Imprisonment from the Dawn of History 19
period, writing lost its almost exclusive link to officialdom, resulting in a

broad array of changes in the form, function, and social location of writing.”5
By the end of the Old Babylonian Period, cuneiform writing was quite
advanced with literature, law collections, royal inscriptions, legal texts, and
administrative documents all being well-attested.6
This rich textual record attests to the social and economic structures of
the early second millennium, which, although not static, had very “deep
roots” in the third millennium.7 After the fall of Babylon, the written record
and our knowledge about prisons lessens until the first millennium.
Limiting the period of investigation to the early phase of Mesopotamia is
inspired by Nicholas Postgate, who wrote on social and economic structures
in his book, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History.
Postgate chose this period and confined his investigation to Southern
Mesopotamia because of its rich documentation and how the early to mid-
second millennium practices were deeply embedded in third millennium.8
Although this work is primarily focused on southern Mesopotamia until
the first fall of Babylon, many of the changes of the Old Babylonian period
are best understood in relation to the Mari record, which was a town in
modern day Syria and positioned on the Euphrates River.9 As such, this
material will be drawn upon at numerous points. Finally, evidence from
later periods will be mentioned where relevant in order to offer illuminat-
ing examples from ancient Mesopotamia and to highlight some changes in
practice that occurred.10
The nature of the evidence of imprisonment from early Mesopotamia is
both rich and rather limited for this period. The richness of the data can be
seen in the written documentation that touches on the practice. Imprisonment
is attested in numerous text types from literary to administrative.
The written documentation, however, is limited by accidents of discovery
and the general unevenness of the record. For example, as will be discussed,
the documentation of imprisonment for the Ur III period is largely
administrative, while the material for the Old Babylonian period relates less
to administrations and some of it is also literary in nature. Beyond the
5 Veldhuis 2012: 3. See further elaboration in Veldhuis 2012: 11–12.

6 On the development of cuneiform writing in relation to levels of literacy, see in particular
Veldhuis 2011: 68–89.
7 Postgate 1992: xxi–xxiii. 8 Postgate 1992: xxi–xxiii.
9 On Mari, see Durand 1997: 41–56. On the Amorites in the Ur III period, see Michalowski
2011: 82–121 and Sallaberger 2007a. See now de Boer 2014.
10 A project on imprisonment for the later periods is planned by the author.
written record, to date a clear physical prison has not been found for early
Mesopotamia (Figure 1). This may never change, since the evidence points
to imprisonment occurring in multifunctional spaces that were employed
primarily for different purposes, such as temples, households, and road-
houses. So, while much can be gleaned about the physical context surround-
ing imprisonment through the written documentation, the archaeological
record is rather limited in relation to imprisonment.
As with all Assyriological research, the findings of this work must be
taken to be ongoing in nature, since new things are being discovered, and
numerous texts already in museums await publication. It may be safely
assumed that at least some of these relate to imprisonment.11 And yet, the
significant body of evidence assembled here demonstrates that such a work
as this is long overdue.
The presentation of this evidence follows standard Assyriological con-
ventions. Akkadian is transliterated in italics. Sumerian is transliterated in
normal script. Uncertain readings are indicated by all caps. Full brackets
([. . .]) indicate a full break in the text, while partial brackets (˹. . .˺) indicate a
partial break. Erasures are marked by the degree symbol (°). A superscript
exclamation point (!) indicates that the reading has been corrected, while a
question mark (?) denotes uncertainty.
I have chosen to include transliterations for most of the quoted texts, so
those with Assyriological training can easily access the original language
behind the translation, while those outside of the Assyriological community
may want to skip the transliterations. When a text is transliterated in the
footnote, the line numbers are indicated but not written out. Each text is pre-
sented with tablet sides indicated and line divisions denoted by a (/). Changes
in the side of the tablet are denoted by (//) and the side (i.e. // Reverse:).
What We Know and What We Don’t
Although there is a lot of evidence relating to prisons in ancient Mesopotamia,

there is much we don’t know. While limitations will surely remain, the subject
of imprisonment deserves fuller treatment.
11 For example, it was conveyed to the author in personal correspondence that many of the
texts in the Museum of the Bible Collection related to prisons. Since most of their texts were
from the Ur III period, it is likely that this data would have some implication for the length of
time or rations discussion below. However, without access to these texts that were subject to
seizure by the Federal Government because of illegal acquisition, I cannot be certain.
Figure 1. Map of Ancient Mesopotamia. Courtesy of Jarett Hall.
In this section, I discuss secondary literature pertaining to imprisonment

in ancient Mesopotamia. This section consists of two main parts followed
by a summary of the state of research. Although I am restricting this
work to the period leading up to the first fall of Babylon, it is useful to
explain what has been written about the later periods and how scholars
have drawn upon the ideas of the earlier texts to discuss imprisonment in
the later periods.
Although prisons have been discussed in Assyriological research for
some time, the study of imprisonment in Mesopotamia was significantly
advanced in the 1990s by Piotr Steinkeller and Miguel Civil. Steinkeller’s
article, “The Reforms of UruKAgina and an Early Sumerian Term for
‘Prison,’” considers UruKAgina’s claim that he released various people from

“prison” (e2-eš2).12 Steinkeller compiles a substantial amount of evidence
relating to prisons, particularly in the Old Akkadian and Ur III periods. In
his article, Steinkeller seeks to draw implications about the humaneness of
“Sumerian social and legal institutions”13 and in the process provides semi-
nal lexical work on the early terminology related to prisons. While, as will
be seen in this work, I am not convinced of the humaneness of imprison-
ment, at least as it is often employed, Steinkeller’s research on the topic of
prisons and indeed the third millennium remains indispensable.
Civil studied another important Sumerian term related to prisons
(ennuĝ), discussing a semantic range for this important term for the Ur III
period.14 When an imprisonment context is suggested by the texts in
Assyriological research, attempts are made at understanding functionality
and context. This is often done by considering whether or not imprison-
ment was used as a means of punishment and by discussing the length of
time someone spent in detention. For example, even though the terminol-
ogy for imprisonment is not present in the two texts he discusses, Claus
Wilcke points to two fragmentary texts from Nippur that read like prison
rosters, since these include offenses such as theft, flight, arson, murder, and
plundering a house.15 Wilcke contextualizes his discussion of these frag-
mentary texts with the following statement: “The consequences for the
offenders are in no instance mentioned. One may assume that, as Ur III
texts suggest, the duration of the stay in prison was limited to a certain time
and that there one had to compensate the offence with labour.”16 This is not
the only discussion in which the Mesopotamian evidence related to prisons
is partially assessed by the recorded lengths of time people spent in prison.17
The lengths of stays in prison during early Mesopotamia is reconsidered
below, since this has been one of the key points of inquiry.
Another key point of inquiry is the question of punishment, since pun-
ishment is linked so closely to imprisonment in the modern Western world.
For example, when discussing the Ur III period, Bertrand Lafont and
Raymond Westbrook write:
12 On the spelling of the ruler’s name, the capital KA indicates that we do not know how the
sign was to be read.
13 Steinkeller 1991: 232. 14 Civil 1993: 75. 15 Wilcke 2007a: 117–19.
16 Wilcke 2007a: 120.
17 See discussion of Kleber and Frahm 2006: 116 n. 30, who conclude that some recorded
lengths of time during the Neo-Babylonian period were extensive even though it is typically
denied that prison sentences existed in the ancient Near East.
Imprisonment is mentioned but not specifically as punishment. It applied

to debtors and criminals pending payment of penalties. If Wilcke’s inter-
pretation of LU 3 [Laws of Ur-Namma] is correct, a person guilty of false
imprisonment is imprisoned and pays a fine of fifteen shekels. If the
talionic principle is involved, the imprisonment is best understood as
imposed pending payment.18
Elsewhere, Westbrook summarizes his understanding of prisons in the

ancient Near East as follows: “Prison was used as an interim measure to hold
persons until their punishment was decided or until they paid a penalty or
debt owing.”19 By so doing, Lafont and Westbrook view ancient Mesopotamian
imprisonment as coercive for payment rather than a form of punishment.
This seems to be a rather accurate description and reflects the consensus in
the secondary literature that mention prisons in ancient Mesopotamia.
Earlier studies had already recognized the problems with freely applying
the term prison to the ancient Mesopotamian example. Johannes Renger,
for example, argues that modern notions of prisons are not applicable to the
Old Babylonian evidence and deliberately avoids the term prison, while
employing imprisonment throughout to denote the type of confinement
used during the period.20 Much like the conclusions of Westbrook, Renger
argues that imprisonment during the Old Babylonian period was coercive
for payment rather than a form of punishment.21
Scholarship on prison contexts in Old Babylonian Mari came to similar
conclusions. Marie-France Scouflaire argues that various forms of coerced
detainment and restraint were employed during the period, but prisons, in
the proper sense of the word, did not exist. Rather than institutions of puni-
tive confinement and rehabilitation, Scouflaire argues that workhouses
existed and that prisons were used prior to guilt being determined. Prisons
were also used after trial but only until acts of punishment were carried out,
such as the payment of a fine or the death penalty.22 In sum, within the field
of Assyriology, prisons in ancient Mesopotamia are not viewed as utilized
for punishment.
Outside of the field of Assyriology, little attention has been devoted to the
subject of imprisonment in ancient Mesopotamia. This is understandable,
18 Lafont and Westbrook 2003: 221. See similar interpretation in Neumann and Paulus 2011:
201. They view the imprisonment to be for payment.
19 Westbrook 2003a: 75 n. 54. 20 Renger 1977: 76–77.
21 Renger 1977: 76. 22 Scouflaire 1987: 25–35; Scouflaire 1989.
since much of the Mesopotamian evidence has not been available to non-
specialists. The material more widely known from Mesopotamia, however,
has been handled largely through the lenses of biblical data rather than an
extensive treatment of the subject in its own right. The Old Babylonian bīt
asīrī is one of the complexes that has been related to prisons and is refer-
enced twice in The Oxford History of the Prison.23
Since the publication of that volume, Andrea Seri has produced a signifi-
cant monograph on the bīt asīrī. While the bīt asīrī is commonly translated
“the house of prisoners” or “house of prisoners of war,”24 Seri argues that it
was not a prison but functioned more like an administrative group during
the reign of Rīm-Anum of Uruk, who rebelled against Babylon around 1742
BC during the reign of Samsu-iluna.25
Annunziata Rositani, however, argues that the bīt asīrī was more than an
administrative unit. She suggests that it was a physical place managed by the
“state” where the prisoners of war were held prior to and in between work
assignments.26 Rositani writes, “All the occurrences analyzed seem to con-
firm that the asīrū were foreigners, not ordinary prisoners, that they were in
some way under—and directly dependent on—that palace administration,
given to the king as presents and employed in government activities.”27
According to this view, the “house of the prisoners (of war)” consisted of
human resources that were detained and moved about as controlled labor for
the crown. Either way, the bīt asīrī is not considered a place of punishment, as
it functions more as an institutional body where human resources (particu-
larly slaves and prisoners of war) were detained, worked, and allocated.
While the origin and primary functions of imprisonment seem to relate
to coercing and controlling labor, as well as holding in relation to judicial
process and payments, imprisonment took on ritual significance as well.
Tikva Frymer-Kensky uses the Old Babylonian “Hymn to Nungal” to
illuminate the River Ordeal and the role of the prison in Mesopotamia.28
Frymer- Kensky works through the text with commentary interspersed
throughout. She highlights the ways in which the text claims that the prison
and Nungal set free the righteous but detained the wicked. The prison held
23 Peters 1998: 3, 9.
24 For the translation, “house of prisoners of war,” see Leemans 1961; Rositani 2018: 43;
Rositani 2020: 194.
25 Seri 2013: 20, 139–40.
26 Rositani 2018: 46; Rositani 2020: 204; Rositani 2021: 24. This perspective follows the
viewpoint of Charpin (2014: 132–33), who considers the bīt asīrī to be a “camp de transit” for
prisoners of war who were not currently on assignment.
27 Rositani 2018: 62. 28 Frymer-Kensky 1977a: 78–89.
offenders prior to trial and subjected them to the River Ordeal. Perhaps the
most surprising part of the text, however, is that the convicted must return
to the prison. The offender is released only after the prison had purified
her/him. Frymer-Kensky writes, “This time the man has not come to await
trial, for he has already been snatched from the river. He is detained here
in confinement as a prison sentence after his trial has been concluded.”29
According to Frymer-Kensky, this indicates that, at least from the vantage
point of this text, detainment could be used as a place of holding until
judgment and a place of punishment after conviction.30 It should be noted
again that this literary text is very difficult to reconcile with the evidence of
archives, which suggests that imprisonment was used for temporary detain-
ment as part of the judicial process, to force job performance, and in relation
to debts or fines. As noted by Hans Neumann and Susanne Paulus, imprison-
ment was primarily used for remand, forcing debt retirement, and fulfilling
job performance. Although they remain open to the possibility that some
instances may have been punitive, this was not the case normally.31
In general, similar discussions can be found in research considering
imprisonment after the first fall of Babylon as well. Again, attention is given
to why prisoners were held and duration. Further, as the ritual significance of
imprisonment becomes known better in the later periods, the Old Babylonian
“Hymn to Nungal” is often referenced to understand some of the intersection
between imprisonment and purification.
It should be noted that like the earlier period, people were detained for a
variety of reasons. When dealing with the Middle Babylonian period,
Jonathan Tenney observes that runaway workers were sometimes captured
and placed in prison or in fetters alongside people who were being detained
because of “crimes,” such as striking a mother or elder brother and unsanc-
tioned uses of temple personnel. People could act as guarantors to secure
the release of runaways. Beyond this, little information is known about
imprisonment during the period.32
Recently, Yuval Levavi published four Middle Babylonian texts dealing
with the prison. Levavi writes, “The modern concept of prison as a place of
rehabilitation for criminals was foreign to the ancient near east (van der
Toorn 1992: 468), and the different Mesopotamian law codes only mention
detention as collateral, and not as punishment (Versteeg 2000: 125–27).”33
29 Frymer-Kensky 1977a: 87. 30 Frymer-Kensky 1977a: 89.

31 Neumann and Paulus 2011: 201.
32 Tenney 2011: 115–20. 33 Levavi 2017: 99.
Levavi helpfully discusses prisoner release, as well as the contexts and

functions of imprisonment. Contra Levavi it does seem that the concept of
rehabilitation does exist in literature and ritualistic texts. Perhaps, it would
have been better to say that the concept is not attached to the actual practice
in any visible way. Still the distinctions Levavi draws are important and
accurate on the whole.
When considering the late period, the questions of punishment and dura-
tion are used to assess the well-attested practice of imprisonment. For the
Neo-Babylonian period, Joachim Oelsner, Bruce Wells, and Cornelia Wunsch
devote a paragraph to the topic of imprisonment, referencing “ample evi-
dence that prisons were in use.”34 The authors note that theft, fraud, and
likely other offenses resulted in imprisonment. Cities, temples, and even
individuals had prisons. The evidence also includes escape attempts and
prosecution. They conclude: “It is not clear if prisons were used primarily
for punishment, or if suspects and criminals were detained under guard
only while the authorities awaited the payment of a fine or the conclusion of
an ongoing investigation (TCL 13 219).”35 While Oelsner, Wells, and
Wunsch leave open the possibility that prisons were used for punishment,
Mariano San Nicolò, writing over fifty years prior, argues that the instances
in which people were held under guard are best explained as those awaiting
a judicial decision or because of a debt that needed to be paid.36
Other lines of inquiry must also be made since the evidence points to
ritualistic imprisonment. Claus Ambos, although noting that the prison
goddess Nungal does not play a role in the later ritual and the tradition
of the hymn ends after the Old Babylonian period, argues a similar idea of
transformation can be found in the ritual of the king during the month
of Tašritu in which the king lodged the night in a reed hut that symbolized a
prison.37 On the next day, the king came out of the hut as a new person
whose offense had been cleared. This purifying concept of the prison rep-
resents an ideological motive behind the use of prisons that extends beyond
mere punishment to include the rehabilitation of the offender with the goal
of assimilation back into society. With the royal ritual, the king is able to
resume his former duties after ritualistic incarceration. Making reference to
San Nicolò,38 Ambos views prisons as holding places until punishment such
as a fine or physical punishment was meted out.39
34 Oelsner, Wells, and Wunsch 2003: 967.

35 Oelsner, Wells, and Wunsch 2003: 967. See Contenau 1929 pl. CXVI (text 219).
36 San Nicolò 1945: 1–2. 37 Ambos 2013: 104–16. 38 San Nicolò 1945: 1–2.
39 Ambos 2013: 104.
If imprisonment is supposed to transform, it leads to the question if it

ever really worked. Kristin Kleber and Eckart Frahm publish a text dealing
with a failed escape attempt from prison during the Neo-Babylonian period.
They situate their study in the broader context of other evidence relating to
prisons in ancient Mesopotamia. In particular, the authors offer a proso-
pography of prison wardens in the Eanna archive, and they compare a text
that deals with an escape attempt and the consequences to the ideal of char-
acter reform through imprisonment found in the “Hymn to Nungal,” the
Sumerian hymn cited below that deals with the prison and the prison god-
dess Nungal.40 In the “Hymn to Nungal,” the prison gives birth to the
prisoner; refines the character like silver; and preserves life by delivering the
offender from the death penalty.41 In Kleber and Frahm’s text, by contrast,
an incarcerated thief fails to conform and commits murder in order to escape.
Kleber and Frahm appear to lean toward being somewhat open to the possi-
bility that some of the instances of detention were more than holding, citing
texts which refer to people being held for longer periods of time and those
instances which may indicate that the detainee was held as punishment.42
Even if this were the case, instances of imprisonment for punishment would
at the very least be the exception and not the rule. Rather, the prison, when
relating to punishment, was a mechanism to hold someone in relation to
punishment not for punishment.
In summary, it is recognized that people were held under guard in ancient
Mesopotamia, but the notion that people were held for the purpose of
punishment has been generally rejected or at least treated as an exception to
the more common purposes of such confinement. These assessments largely
revolve around two key questions:
1. Why were people held under guard?

2. How long were people held under guard?
As seen above in the survey of scholarship, the purpose of detainment is the

most frequently referenced question in the Assyriological discussion about
imprisonment in relation to the broader theoretical conversation about
prisons and jails. The related question of length of time, which features
prominently in the systems found in the US, is also referenced in Assyriological
40 Kleber and Frahm 2006: 109–22.

41 See recent editions in Civil 1993: 72–78; Attinger 2003: 15–34.
42 Kleber and Frahm 2006: 116 and nn. 29–30.
discussions. In the US, jails are often local institutions used for holding and
punishment. But sentences in jails do not typically exceed one year.
Previously, I wrote on prisons in early Mesopotamia and argued that
prisons were multifunctional and occurred in private and administrative
contexts.43 Beyond this, I also demonstrated that people were held in p risons
for longer periods of time than previously documented. However, I viewed
this spike in lengths of time as potentially explained by unique political cir-
cumstances rather than reflective of normal practice. I sought to assess the
Mesopotamian prison in relation to purpose, context, and duration, rather
than strictly in relation to the question of punishment. By so doing, I sought
to understand the multifunctional imprisonment of early Mesopotamia on
its own terms while also asking questions of broader historical concern.
That article in many ways laid the foundation for this more expansive work.
Nevertheless, this book moves beyond the jail/prison distinction to under-
stand the origin of imprisonment/detention in relation to gaining access to
and controlling labor.
Methodology and the Hymn to the Prison Goddess Nungal
When seeking to understand imprisonment in early Mesopotamia, one

must determine how the documentation relates to historical reality. Since
there is an extant hymn to a prison goddess that introduces numerous key
concepts and offers a dramatic picture of life on the inside together with a
goal of imprisonment, I will use the hymn as a launching point from antiquity
for this discussion of imprisonment. But before doing so, it is important to
introduce the text briefly and articulate how the text is being used in this study.
The literary text, the “Hymn to Nungal,” from the Old Babylonian period
(ca. 1900–1600 BC) describes the prison and the work of Nungal, the
daughter of Ereškigal and a goddess of the Netherworld, who was the lady
warden of the prison (Figure 2).44 The “Hymn to Nungal” belonged to the so-
called Decad, which was a group of ten literary texts that were frequently
copied as part of scribal training during the Old Babylonian period.45 With the
hymn’s claims of compassion in lieu of the death penalty and the refinement of
43 Reid 2016.
44 Cavigneaux and Krebernik 1998: 615–18. See also George 1992: 284, who points to the
appearance of Manungal (=Nungal) among underworld deities in An = Anum (CT, 25 4, 4ff.).
45 On the Decad, see Tinney 1999: 159–72 and Delnero 2012: 11–15.
character through ritual lament, this text provides an entry point from
antiquity to ask historical questions about the nature, functions, and goals
of imprisonment in ancient Mesopotamia.
Mario Liverani discusses four main approaches to literary texts employed
in historical writing. First, early literature can be demythologized in search
of the actual events lying underneath the stories. When the various elements
which are deemed ahistorical are removed from the narrative, a “kernel of
history” is left.46 Second, literature may be treated as historical fiction,
which, simply put, is the addition of historical events to a fictitious story.47
Third, the literature can be ignored completely. This approach is sometimes
employed in studies which focus on documents of practice but has been
criticized for not considering all of the available evidence. Finally, literature
can be viewed as representative of the thoughts and political contexts at
the time of composition rather than informative of the events or periods
described.48
In this study, literary texts, such as the “Hymn to Nungal,” are compared
to other documentation that may be more securely connected to historical
practice. As such the ideas introduced in literary texts will be assessed
against administrative documents, legal texts, “law collections,”49 and other
text types. While literary texts do not always tell us what happened, they
provide a window into some of the conceptual world and ideology that
came to be attached to imprisonment. In general, it appears that the literary
text to the prison goddess has explanatory power for developments in later
rituals that deal with the prison, and how it points to some reliable aspects
of imprisonment. However, these aspects have to be tested against the evi-
dence found in the other documentary record.
Disentangling ideology attached to imprisonment from the everyday
practice is not a problem with antiquity alone. As seen with modern Western
examples of imprisonment, the historical inquiry into prisons is not just
about what happens, it also involves the concepts and ideology attached to
the practice, which in turn flows from and at times contributes to the con-
text in which actual events occur. So, with these methodological consider-
ations, which show both the relevance and limitations of literary texts, I
now include a translation of the hymn itself.
46 See discussion in Liverani 1993: 42–46.

47 For a summary and criticism of these first two approaches, see Liverani 1993:
42–46, 51–52.
48 See, for example, Liverani 1993: 42–52.
49 See discussion of “law collections” in Chapter 3.
Figure 2. Obverse of a tablet of the “Hymn to Nungal,” YBC 4667. Courtesy of

the Yale Babylonian Collection. Photography by Klaus Wagensonner.
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CHAPTER XII
THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS
Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first
establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth
century, the Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of
a bitter, determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had
conquered but had not destroyed the Persians; and, although the
magic of the hero’s personality held them faithful to him during his
too brief life, he was no sooner dead than they hastened to prove
that they had no intention of tamely giving up their nationality.
Peucestas, the Royal bodyguard who received the satrapy of Persia
itself on his master’s death, and was confirmed in it at the first
shuffling of the cards at Triparadisus, found it expedient to adopt the
Persian language and dress, with the result that his subjects
conceived for him an affection only equal to that which they
afterwards showed for Seleucus[768]. Later, when the rise of the
Parthian power under Arsaces brought about the defeat of Seleucus
II Callinicus, the opposition to European forms of government found
a centre further north[769], whence armies of lightly-equipped
horsemen were able to raid up to the Eastern shores of the
Mediterranean[770]. Thanks probably to the knowledge of this support
in reserve, when Western Asia found the military power of the Greek
kings becoming exhausted by internecine wars, she began to throw
off the alien civilization that she had in part acquired, and to return
more and more to Persian ways[771]. When the Romans in their turn
set to work to eat up the enfeebled Greek kingdoms, they quickly
found themselves in presence of a revived nationality as firmly held
and nearly as aggressive as their own, and henceforth Roman and
Parthian were seldom at peace. The long struggle with Mithridates,
who gave himself out as a descendant of Darius[772], taught the
Romans how strong was the reaction towards Persian nationality
even in Asia Minor, and the overthrow of Crassus by the Parthians
convinced his countrymen for a time of the folly of pushing their arms
too far eastwards.
With the establishment of the Empire, the antagonism between
Rome and Persia became still more strongly marked, and a struggle
commenced which lasted with little intermission until the foundation
of the Mahommedan Caliphate. In this struggle the advantage was
not always, as we should like to think, on the side of the Europeans.
While Augustus reigns, Horace boasts, there is no occasion to dread
the “dreadful Parthians[773]”; but Corbulo is perpetually fighting them,
and when Nero commits suicide, the legend immediately springs up
that the tyrant is not dead, but has only betaken himself beyond the
Euphrates to return with an army of Rome’s most dreaded enemies
to lay waste his rebellious country[774]. Towards the close of the first
Christian century, Trajan, fired, according to Gibbon, by the example
of Alexander, led an army into the East and achieved successes
which enabled him to add to his titles that of Parthicus[775]; but the
whole of his Oriental conquests were given back by the prudent
Hadrian on his succession to the throne. During the reign of Marcus
Aurelius, Avidius Cassius obtained some solid victories on the
frontier; but Macrinus is said to have bought off the Parthians with a
bribe of nearly two millions of money. The rise of the Sassanian
house and the retransfer of the leadership from the Parthians to their
kinsmen in Persia proper brought about the reform of the Persian
religion, and added another impulse to the increasing strength of
Persian national feeling. Alexander Severus may have gained some
successes in the field over Ardeshîr or Artaxerxes, the restorer of the
Persian monarchy[776]; but in the reign of the last named king’s son
and successor Sapor, the capture of the Emperor Valerian with his
whole army, and the subsequent ravaging of the Roman provinces in
Asia by the victors, showed the Republic how terrible was the might
of the restored kingdom[777]. Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, did
much to restore the prestige of Roman arms in the East; and
although he was assassinated when on the march against Persia,
the Emperor Carus shortly after led a successful expedition into the
heart of the Persian kingdom[778]. In the reign of Diocletian, indeed,
the Persians lost five provinces to the Romans[779]; but under
Constantine the Great the Romans were again vanquished in the
field, and the Persians were only prevented by the heroic resistance
of the fortified town of Nisibis and an incursion into their Eastern
provinces of tribes from Central Asia from again overrunning the
Asiatic possessions of Rome[780].
Henceforward, the history of the long contest between the two great
empires—“the eyes,” as the Persian ambassador told Galerius, “of
the civilized world[781],” is the record of almost uninterrupted advance
on the part of Persia and of continual retreat on the side of Rome.
The patriotic enthusiasm of a Julian, and the military genius of a
Belisarius, aided by the dynastic revolutions common among
Oriental nations, might for a time arrest the progress of the
conquering Persians; but, bit by bit, the Asiatic provinces slipped out
of the grasp of the European masters of Constantinople. In 603 A.D.,
it looked as if Persia were at length in the position to deliver the final
blow in a war which had lasted for more than five centuries. By the
invasion of Chosroes and his successive captures of Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Egypt, it seemed as if the Persians had restored the
world-empire of Cambyses and Darius; but the Persians then
discovered, as Xerxes had done a millennium earlier, how
dangerous it is for Orientals, even when flushed by conquest, to
press Europeans too far. The Roman Emperor Heraclius, who never
before or afterwards gave much proof of military or political capacity,
from his besieged capital of Constantinople collected an army with
which he dashed into Persia in a manner worthy of Alexander
himself. After six brilliant campaigns he dictated to the Persians a
triumphant peace in the very heart of their empire[782]. A few years
later, and its shattered and disorganized remains fell an easy prey to
the Mahommedan invaders.
The effect of this long rivalry might have been expected to produce
in the Romans during its continuance a hearty dislike of the customs
and institutions of the nation opposed to them; but almost the exact
contrary was the result. It may be argued that Rome’s proved skill in
government was in no small measure due to her ready adoption of
all that seemed to her admirable in the nations that she overcame.
Or it may be that the influence which the memory of Alexander
exercised over all those who succeeded to his empire led them to
imitate him in his assumption of Persian manners. The fact remains
that, long before the division of the Roman Empire into East and
West, the Romans displayed a taste for Oriental luxury and
magnificence which seems entirely at variance with the simplicity
and austerity of the republican conquerors of Carthage. It is hardly
too much to say that while Alexander’s conscious aim was to make
Asia Greek, the Romans, on possessing themselves of his Asiatic
conquests, allowed themselves to become to a great extent
“Medized,” and showed an unexpected admiration for the habits and
culture of Alexander’s Persian subjects.
It may of course be said that this was in external matters only, and
that the “Persian furniture” which excited Horace’s wrath[783] might if it
stood alone be looked upon as merely a passing fashion; but the
Court ceremonial introduced by Diocletian argues a steady tendency
towards Persian customs and forms of government that must have
been in operation for centuries. The household of a Julian Caesar
was no differently arranged from that of a Roman noble of the
period, and his title of Prince of the Senate showed that he was only
looked upon as the first of his equals. But Diocletian was in all
respects but language a Persian emperor or Shah, and his style of
“Lord and God,” his diadem, his silken state dress, the elaborate
ritual of his court, and the long hierarchy of its officials, were all
designed to compel his subjects to recognize the fact[784]. As usual,
the official form of religion in the Roman Empire had for some time
given indications of the coming change in the form of government.
The sun had always been the principal natural object worshipped by
the Persians, and a high-priest of the Sun-God had sat upon the
Imperial throne of Rome in the form of the miserable Heliogabalus.
Only 13 years before Diocletian, Aurelian, son of another Sun-God’s
priestess and as virile and rugged as his predecessor was soft and
effeminate, had also made the Sun-God the object of his special
devotion and of an official worship. Hence Diocletian and his
colleague Galerius were assured in advance of the approval of a
large part of their subjects when they took the final plunge in 307
A.D.,and proclaimed Mithras, “the Unconquered Sun-God,” the
Protector of their Empire[785].
In spite of this, however, it is very difficult to say how Mithras
originally became known to the Romans. Plutarch says indeed that
his cult was first introduced by the Cilician pirates who were put
down by Pompey[786]. This is not likely to be literally true; for the
summary methods adopted by these sea-robbers towards their
Roman prisoners hardly gave much time for proselytism, while most
of the pirates whom Pompey spared at the close of his successful
operations he deported to Achaea, which was one of the few places
within the Empire where the Mithraic faith did not afterwards show
itself. What Plutarch’s story probably means is that the worship of
Mithras first came to Rome from Asia Minor, and there are many
facts which go to confirm this. M. Cumont, the historian of Mithraism,
has shown that, long before the Romans set foot in Asia, there were
many colonies of emigrants from Persia who with their magi or
priests had settled in Asia Minor, including in that phrase Galatia,
Phrygia, Lydia, and probably Cilicia[787]. When Rome began to
absorb these provinces, slaves, prisoners, and merchants from them
would naturally find their way to Rome, and in time would no doubt
draw together for the worship of their national deities in the way that
we have seen pursued by the worshippers of the Alexandrian Isis
and the Jewish exiles. The magi of Asia Minor were great supporters
of Mithridates, and the Mithridatic wars were no doubt responsible
for a large number of these immigrants.
Once introduced, however, the worship of Mithras spread like wild-
fire. The legions from the first took kindly to it, and this is the less
surprising when we find that many of them were recruited under the
earliest emperors in Anatolian states like Commagene, where the
cult was, if not indigenous, yet of very early growth[788]. Moreover the
wars of the Romans against the Persians kept them constantly in the
border provinces of the two empires, where the native populations
not infrequently changed masters. The enemy’s town that the legions
besieged one year might therefore give them a friendly reception the
next; and there was thus abundant opportunity for the acquaintance
of both sides with each others’ customs. When the Roman troops
marched back to Europe, as was constantly the case during the civil
wars which broke out on the downfall of the Julian house, they took
back with them the worship of the new god whom they had adopted,
and he thus became known through almost the whole of the Roman
Empire[789]. “From the shores of the Euxine to the north of Brittany
and to the fringe of the Sahara[790],” as M. Cumont says, its
monuments abound, and, he might have added, they have been met
with also in the Egyptian Delta, in Babylon, and on the northern
frontiers of India. In our own barbarous country we have found them
not only in London and York, but as far west as Gloucester and
Chester and as far north as Carlisle and Newcastle[791]. The Balkan
countries, like Italy, Germany, Southern France, and Spain, are full of
them; but there was one part of the Roman Empire into which they
did not penetrate freely. This was Greece, where the memories of
the Persian Wars long survived the independence of the country, and
where the descendants of those who fought at Salamis, Marathon,
and Thermopylae would have nothing to do with a god coming from
the invaders’ fatherland. It is only very lately that the remains of
Mithras-worship have been discovered at the Piraeus and at Patras,
in circumstances which show pretty clearly that it was there practised
only by foreigners[792].
Notwithstanding this popularity, it is not easy to say exactly what god
Mithras’ European worshippers considered him to be. If length of
ancestry went for anything in such matters, he might indeed claim a
greater antiquity than any deity of the later Roman Pantheon, with
the single exception of the Alexandrian gods. Mithras was certainly
worshipped in Vedic India, where his name of Mitra constantly
occurs in the sacred texts as the “shining one,” meaning apparently
the material sun[793]. He is there invoked in company with Varuna,
generally considered the god of the sky, and therefore according to
some, the prototype of the Greek Zeus and the Latin Jupiter[794]. His
appearance in a similar connection in the sacred books of the
Persians led the founders of the comparative study of religion to
think that he must have been one of the primitive gods of their
hypothetical Aryan race, and that his worship must go back to the
imaginary time when Persians and Hindus dwelt side by side in the
plains of Cashmere. But this theory is giving way before proof that
the original home of the Indo-European race was Europe, and has
been badly shaken by the discovery at Boghaz Keui of tablets
showing that the gods Mithra and Varuna were gods of the
Mitannians or Hittites[795] at some date earlier than 1500 B.C., and
therefore long before the appearance of the Persians in history. If the
worship of Mithras were not indigenous in Western Asia, it may
therefore well have come there independently of the Persians[796].
There is no doubt, however, that the roots of Mithras-worship went
very far down into the Persian religion. In the Yashts or hymns which
are the earliest evidence of primitive Iranian beliefs, Mithra—to use
the Avestic spelling of his name—frequently appears, not indeed as
the material sun, but as the “genius of the heavenly light” which
lightens the whole universe[797] and is the most beneficent among the
powers of Nature. Mithras is not here, however, the Supreme Being,
nor even the highest among the gods benevolent to man. This last
place is occupied in the Zend Avesta by Ahura Mazda, “the
omniscient lord,” who appears to be the Persian form of Varuna, the
god of the sky whom we have seen associated with Mitra in the
Vedas[798]. Nor is Mithras in the Zend Avesta one of the six
Amshaspands, the deified abstractions or personified attributes of
Ahura Mazda, who, in the later developments of the Persian religion,
occupy towards him much the same position that the “Roots” of
Simon Magus and the Aeons of the Pleroma among the Gnostics do
towards the Boundless Power or the Ineffable Bythos[799]. In the later
Avestic literature, he appears as the chief of the Izeds or Yazatas, a
race of genii created by Ahura Mazda, who are the protectors of his
universe and the helpers of mankind in their warfare against the
powers of darkness[800]. In the latest as in the earliest Persian view of
the personality of Mithras, therefore, it is plain that he occupies an
intermediate position between the Creator and man.
It is not, however, in the religion associated with the name of
Zoroaster that we must look for the origin of Mithraism. The date of
the sacred books of Mazdeism and the historical existence of
Zoroaster himself have recently been brought down to as late as the
VIIth century B.C.[801] and the appearance in Asia of the Persian tribes
as conquerors, whereas Mithras was, as we have seen, worshipped
in Asia Minor nearly a millennium earlier. Moreover, the strict dualism
which set Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil, in eternal and
perhaps equal opposition to Ormuzd, the god of light and goodness,
seems to have been unknown before the Sassanid reform in 226
A.D., by which time the worship of Mithras in Europe was at its
apogee[802]. M. Cumont is, therefore, doubtless right when he thinks
that Mithraism was derived not from Mazdeism, but from Magism or
the religion of the Magi, the tribe of Medes whose domination was
put an end to by Darius the son of Hystaspes, and whose name was
afterwards given to a priestly caste and has passed into our own
language as the root of the word “magic.”
That these Magi practised a religion different from that taught in the
Avestic literature is plain enough. The romantic story told by
Herodotus of the Magian who seized the throne of Persia during
Cambyses’ absence in Egypt on the pretence that he was the king’s
brother whom Cambyses had privily put to death[803], is fully
confirmed by Darius’ trilingual inscription on the Rock of Behistun,
first copied and deciphered by Sir Henry Rawlinson and lately
published in elaborate form by the British Museum[804]. Darius here
narrates how “a certain man, a Magian, Gaumata by name ... lied
unto the people (saying) ‘I am Smerdis, the son of Cyrus, the brother
of Cambyses.’ Then all the people revolted from Cambyses and
went over to him, even Persia and Media and the other provinces.”
Darius goes on to record that “thereupon Cambyses died by his own
hand[805],” that the seven Persian nobles overthrew the pretender
much in the way described by Herodotus, and that “I rebuilt the
temples of the gods, which that Gaumata, the Magian, had
destroyed. I restored that which had been taken away as it was in
the days of old[806].” This he tells us he did “by the grace of Ahura
Mazda,” and that by this grace he always acted. The memory of
these events was kept up by the festival of the Magophonia or
Massacre of the Magi which was yearly celebrated in Persia and
during which no Magus dared show himself in the streets[807]. Darius’
words show that there was a religious as well as a dynastic side to
the Magian revolt, though whether the false Smerdis restored the old
worship of the land, which he found in danger of being supplanted by
Zoroastrianism or the worship of Ahura Mazda, may still be doubtful.
In any event, the reformation or counter-reformation made by Darius
did not succeed in entirely uprooting the old Magian faith, for
Herodotus speaks of the Magi as still being in his time the priestly
caste among the Persians, and as acting as diviners and sacrificers
to the Achaemenian kings who ruled Persia up to Alexander’s
Conquest[808].
The Magian religion as it appears in Herodotus and other Greek
authors, however, seems to have shown none of the hostility to the
powers of darkness so apparent in the religious literature collected
by the Sassanian kings. “The whole circuit of the firmament” was,
according to Herodotus, their greatest god or Zeus; and he says that
they also “sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire and
water, and to the winds”; but that “they do not, like the Greeks,
believe the gods to have the same nature as men[809].” He also tells
us that later they borrowed from the Arabians and the Assyrians the
worship of a goddess whom he calls Mitra, and although he is
probably wrong as to the origin and sex of this deity, his evidence
shows that Semitic admixture counted for something in the Magian
worship. In other respects, the Magian seems to have been a
primitive faith given up to the worship of the powers of nature or
elements, which it did not personify in the anthropomorphic manner
of either the Semites or the Greeks, and to have paid little attention
to public ceremonies or ritual. It follows therefore that, like the
religions of many uncivilized people of the present day, it would draw
no very sharp distinction between good and evil gods, and would be
as ready to propitiate or make use of the evil, that is those hostile to
man, as the good or benevolent. Plutarch, who describes the religion
of the Magi more than three centuries after Herodotus, when the
name of Zoroaster the Persian prophet and the dualistic belief
favoured by his teaching had long been popularly known in the West,
says that the Magi of his time held Mithras to be the “Mediator” or
intermediary between “Oromazes” or Light on the one hand, and
“Areimanios” or Darkness and Ignorance on the other, and that they
used to make bloody sacrifices to the last-named in a place where
the sun never comes[810]. It is easy to see how such a cult, without
the control of public ceremonies and with its unabashed traffic with
the powers of evil, would be likely to degenerate into compulsion or
magic.
There was, however, another popular superstition or belief which,
about the time when Mithraism made its appearance in Europe, had
spread itself over Western Asia. This was the idea that the positions
and changes of the heavenly bodies exercise an influence over the
affairs of the world and the lot both of kingdoms and individual men.
It probably began in Babylonia, where the inhabitants had from
Sumerian times shown themselves great observers of the stars, and
had been accustomed to record the omens that they drew from their
motions for the guidance of the kings[811]. This kind of divination—or
astrology to call it by a familiar name—received a great impulse after
Alexander’s Conquest, in the first place from the break up of the
Euphratean priestly colleges before referred to, and the driving out of
the lesser priests therein to get their own living, and then from the
fact that the scientific enquiry and mathematical genius of the
Greeks had made the calculation of the positions of the heavenly
bodies at any given date and hour a fairly simple matter to be
determined without direct observation[812]. It was probably no mere
coincidence that the Chaldaei and the Mathematici, as the
astrologers called themselves, should have swarmed at Rome under
just those emperors in whose reigns Mithraism began to push itself
to the front[813].
While we may be sure that these factors, the religion of the Magi, the
practice of magic, and the astrological art, all counted in the
composition of the worship of Mithras, we yet know but very little of
its tenets. No work has come down to us from any devotee of
Mithras which will give us the same light on the way his worshippers
regarded him that the romance of Apuleius and the encomium of
Aelius Aristides have cast on the mental attitude of the devotees of
the Alexandrian cult. The extensive books of Eubulus and Pallas on
Mithras and the history of his worship, which Porphyry tells us were
extant from the reign of Hadrian down to his own time[814], are
entirely lost, and our only source of information, except a very few
scattered notices in the Fathers and in profane writers like the
Emperor Julian and Porphyry himself, are the sculptures and
inscriptions which have been found in his ruined chapels. These
texts and monuments the scholarly care of M. Cumont has gathered
into two large volumes, which will always remain the chief source
from which later enquirers must draw their materials[815]. From their
study he comes to the conclusion that, in the religion of Mithras,
there figured above him the Mazdean gods of good and evil
respectively called in the Zend Avesta Ahura Mazda and Angro
Mainyus, or in more familiar language, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Behind
and above these again, he would place a Supreme Being called
Zervan Akerene or Boundless Time, who seems to be without
attributes or qualities, and to have acted only as the progenitor of the
opposing couple. This is at first sight very probable, because the
Orphic doctrine, which, as we have seen, made Chronos or Time the
progenitor of all the gods, was widely spread in Asia Minor before
Alexander’s Conquest, and the Persian colonies formed there under
his successors must therefore have come in frequent contact with
this most accommodating of schools[816]. Traditions of a sect of
Zervanists in Western Asia, who taught that all things came from
Infinite Time, are also to be found[817]. But most of these are recorded
after Mithraism had become extinct; and M. Cumont’s proofs of the
existence of this dogma in the European religion of Mithras can be
reduced on final analysis to a quotation from a treatise by Theodore,
the Christian bishop of Mopsuestia who died in 428 A.D., directed, as
it would seem, against the “Magi” of his time, in which he admits that
their dogmas had never been written, and that the sectaries in
question, whom he calls Magusaeans, said “sometimes one thing
and deceived themselves, and sometimes another and deceived the
ignorant[818].” M. Cumont’s identification of the lion-headed statue
often found in Mithraic chapels with the Supreme God of the system
has been shown elsewhere to be open to serious question, and the
figure itself to be susceptible of another interpretation than that which
he would put upon it[819]. On the whole, therefore, while M. Cumont’s
mastery of his subject makes it very dangerous to differ from him, it
seems that his theory of a Boundless Time as the pinnacle of the
Mithraist pantheon cannot be considered as proved.
Whether Ormuzd and Ahriman played any important part in the
Roman worship of Mithras is also doubtful. With regard to the first-
named, both Greeks and Romans knew him well and identified him
unhesitatingly with Zeus and Jupiter[820]. Hence we should expect to
find him, if represented at all on the Mithraic sculptures, with the
well-known features, the thunderbolt, and the eagle, which long
before this time had become the conventional attributes of the
Roman as well as of the Homeric father of gods and men. We are
not entirely disappointed, for we find in a bas-relief formerly in a
chapel of Mithras at Sissek (the ancient Sissia in Pannonia) and now
in the Museum at Agram, the bull-slaying scene in which Mithras
figures and which will be presently described, surmounted by an
arch on which is ranged Jupiter seated on his throne, grasping the
thunderbolt, wielding the sceptre, and occupying the place of honour
in a group of gods among whom we may distinguish Mars and
Mercury[821]. In another bas-relief of the same scene, now at the
Rudolfinum in Klagenfurt, he is depicted in a similar position in an
assembly of the gods, which although much mutilated seems to
show Zeus or Jupiter in the centre with Hera or Juno by his side[822].
But the most conclusive of these monuments is the great bas-relief
found at Osterburken in the Odenwald, wherein the arch
surmounting the usual bull-slaying scene contains an assembly of
twelve gods with Zeus in the centre armed with thunderbolt and
sceptre, while around him are grouped Apollo, Ares, Heracles, Hera,
Athena, Aphrodite, Nike, Poseidon, Artemis, Hades, and perhaps
Persephone[823]. When by the side of these we put the many
inscriptions left by the legionaries to “the holy gods of the fatherland,
to Jupiter best and greatest, and to the Unconquered One”; to
“Jupiter best and greatest, and to the divine Sun, the Unconquered
Sun,” and other well-known names of Mithras, there can be no doubt
that his worshippers used to adore him together with the head of the
Roman Pantheon, and that they considered Mithras in some way the
subordinate of or inferior to Jupiter[824]. Yet there is nothing to show
that the Mithraists as such identified in any way this Jupiter Optimus
Maximus with the Persian Ahura Mazda, Oromasdes, or Ormuzd, or
that they ever knew him by any of these outlandish names.
The case is different with Ormuzd’s enemy Ahriman, who evidently
was known by his Persian name to the Roman worshippers of
Mithras. In the Vatican can be seen a triangular marble altar
dedicated by a clarissimus named Agrestius who was a high-priest
of Mithras, to “the god Arimanius[825],” and altars with similar
inscriptions have been found at Buda-Pesth[826]. At a Mithraic chapel
in York also, there was found a statue, now in the Museum of the
Philosophical Society in that city, which bears an inscription to the
same god Arimanius[827]. There is therefore fairly clear evidence that
the Mithraists recognized Ahriman under his Persian name, and that
they sacrificed to him, as Plutarch said the “magi” of his time did to
the god whom he calls Hades[828], and this agrees with Herodotus’
statement that the Persians used to do the same to “the god who is
said to be beneath the earth[829].” Although this gave occasion to the
Christian Fathers to accuse the Mithraists of worshipping the devil,
we are not thereby bound to conclude that they looked upon
Arimanius as an essentially evil being. It seems more probable that
they considered him, as the Greeks did their Hades or Pluto, as a
chthonian or subterranean power ruling over a place of darkness and
discomfort, where there were punishments indeed, but not as a deity
insusceptible of propitiation by sacrifice[830], or compulsion by other
means such as magic arts[831]. It has been shown elsewhere that his
image in a form which fairly represents his attributes in this capacity
appears with some frequency in the Mithraic chapels, where a
certain amount of mystery attached to its exhibition[832]. It seems to
follow from these considerations that the worshippers of Mithras
attributed to their special god no inferiority to Ahriman as M.
Cumont’s argument supposes, and that the only power whom they
acknowledged as higher than Mithras himself was the Roman
equivalent of Ormuzd, the Jupiter Optimus Maximus adored
throughout the Roman Empire of their time as the head of the
Pantheon[833].
The connection of Mithras with the sun is also by no means easy to
unravel. The Vedic Mitra was, as we have seen, originally the
material sun itself, and the many hundreds of votive inscriptions left
by the worshippers of Mithras to “the unconquered Sun Mithras[834],”
to the unconquered solar divinity (numen) Mithras[835], to the
unconquered Sun-God (deus) Mithra[836], and allusions in them to the
priests (sacerdotes), worshippers (cultores), and temples (templum)
of the same deity leave no doubt open that he was in Roman times a
sun-god[837]. Yet this does not necessarily mean that he was actually
the day-star visible to mankind, and the Greeks knew well enough
how to distinguish between Apollo the god of light who was once at
any rate a sun-god, and Helios the Sun itself[838]. On the Mithraic
sculptures, we frequently see the unmistakable figure of Mithras
riding in the chariot of the Sun-God driven by the divinity with long
hair and a rayed nimbus, whom we know to be this Helios or his
Roman equivalent, going through some ceremony of consecration
with him, receiving messages from him, and seated side by side with
him at a banquet which is evidently a ritual feast. M. Cumont
explains this by the theory that Mithras, while in Persia and in the
earliest Aryan traditions the genius of the celestial light only[839], no
sooner passed into Semitic countries and became affected by the
astrological theories of the Chaldaeans, than he was identified with
their sun-god Shamash[840], and this seems as reasonable a theory
as can be devised. Another way of accounting for what he calls the
“at first sight contradictory proposition” that Mithras at once was and
was not the sun[841], is to suppose that while the Mithraists wished
those who did not belong to their faith to believe that they
themselves worshipped the visible luminary, they yet instructed their
votaries in private that he was a deity superior to it and in fact the
power behind it. As we shall see, the two theories are by no means
irreconcilable, although absolute proof of neither can yet be offered.
One can speak with more certainty about the Legend or mythical
history of Mithras which M. Cumont has contrived with rare acumen
to reconstruct from the monuments found in his chapels. It is
comprised in eleven or twelve scenes or tableaux which we will take
in their order[842]. We first see the birth of the god, not from the head
of his father Zeus like Athena, or from his thigh like Dionysos, but
from a rock, which explains his epithet of “Petrogenes” or rock-born.
The god is represented in this scene as struggling from the rock in
which he is embedded below the waist, and always uplifts in one
hand a broad knife of which we shall afterwards see him make use,
and in the other a lighted torch[843]. He is here represented as a boy,
and wears the Phrygian cap or so-called cap of liberty which is his
distinctive attribute, while the torch is doubtless, as M. Cumont
surmises, symbolical of the light which he is bringing into the
world[844]. The rock is sometimes encircled by the folds of a large
serpent, probably here as elsewhere a symbol of the earth, and is in
the Mithraic chapel discovered at Housesteads in Northumberland
represented in the form of an egg, the upper part remaining on the
head of the nascent god like an egg-shell on that of a newly-hatched
chicken[845]. This is probably due to some confusion or identification
with the Orphic legend of the First-born or Phanes who sprang from
the cosmic egg; but the central idea of the rock-birth seems to be
that of the spark, hidden as it were in the stone and leaping forth
when struck. In one or two examples of the scene, the miraculous
birth is watched by a shepherd or shepherds, which leads M.
Cumont to draw a parallel between this and the Adoration of the
Shepherds at the Birth of Christ.
The next two scenes are more difficult to interpret with anything
approaching certainty. In one of them[846], Mithras is represented as
standing upright before a tree from which he cuts or tears a large
branch bearing leaves and fruit. He is here naked, save for the
distinctive cap; but immediately after, he is seen emerging from the
leafage fully clothed in Oriental dress. In the next scene—the relative
order of the scenes seems settled by the places they most often
occupy on different examples of the same sculptures[847]—Mithras in
the Phrygian cap, Persian trousers, and flowing mantle generally
worn by him, kneels on one knee drawing a bow, the arrows from
which strike a rock in the distance and draw from it a stream of water
which a kneeling man receives in his hands and lifts to his mouth[848].
Several variants of this scene exist, in one of which a suppliant is
kneeling before the archer-god and raising his hands towards him as
if in prayer; while in another, the rock may well be a cloud. M.
Cumont can only suggest with regard to these scenes, that the first
may be an allusion to the Fall of Man and his subsequently clothing
himself with leaves as described in the Book of Genesis, and that the
second scene may depict a prolonged drought upon earth, in which
man prays to Mithras and is delivered by the god’s miraculous
production of rain. He admits, however, that this is pure conjecture,
and that he knows no Indian, Persian, or Chaldaean legend or myth
to which the scenes in question can be certainly attached. It seems
therefore useless to discuss them further here.
Passing on, we come to a series of scenes, the meaning of which is
more easily intelligible. In all of these a bull plays a principal part. It is
abundantly clear that this bull is no terrestrial creature, but is the
Goshurun or Heavenly Bull of the Zend Avesta, from whose death
come forth not only man, but beasts, trees, and all the fruits of the
earth[849]. In the Mithraic sculptures, we see the Bull first sailing over
the waters in a cup-shaped boat[850] like the coracles still used on the
Euphrates, or escaping from a burning stable to which Mithras and a
companion have set fire[851]. Then he is depicted grazing peaceably
or raising his head now and then as if alarmed by some sudden
noise[852]. Next he is chased by Mithras, who seizes him by the
horns, mounts him[853], and after a furious gallop casts him over his
shoulders, generally holding him by the hind legs so that the horned
head dangles to the ground[854]. In this position, he is taken into the
cave which forms the chapel of Mithras.
Here, if the order in the most complete monuments be followed, we
break off to enter upon another set of scenes which illustrate the
relations between Mithras and the sun[855]. In what again seems to be
the first in order, we see Mithras upright with a person kneeling
before him who, from the rayed nimbus round his head, is evidently
the god Helios or Sol[856]. In one representation of this scene, Mithras
extends his left hand towards this nimbus as if to replace it on the
head of its wearer[857] from which it has been displaced in yet another
monument[858], while in the other, he displays an object not unlike a
Phrygian cap which may, however, be, as M. Cumont suggests,
something like a water-skin[859]. Generally, Mithras is represented as
holding this object over the bared head of the kneeling Sun-God, as
if to crown him with it[860]. Then we find Mithras with the ray-crowned
Sun-God upright beside him, while he grasps his hand in token, as it
would seem, of alliance or friendship[861]. If we accept the hint
afforded by the theory that the rock yielding water on being split by
the arrows of Mithras is really a cloud producing the fertilizing rain,
we may imagine that we have here the unconquered god removing
clouds which obscure the face of the great life-giving luminary and
restoring to him the crown of rays which enables him to shed his
kindly light upon the earth. The earth would thus be made fit for the
creation of man and other animals which, as we shall see, follows;
but in any event, the meaning of the scene which shows the alliance
is, as M. Cumont has pointed out, not doubtful[862]. In one monument,
where Mithras grasps the hand of the person we have identified with
the Sun-God before an altar, he at the same time draws his sword,
as if to perform the exchange of blood or blood-covenant usual in the
East on swearing alliance[863]. Possibly the crowning scene, as M.
Cumont also suggests[864], is to be connected with Tertullian’s
statement that in the initiation of the Mithraist to the degree of miles
or soldier, he was offered at the sword’s point a crown, which he cast
away from him saying that Mithras was his crown. If so, it would
afford some proof that the initiate here, as in the mysteries of Isis,
was made to impersonate the sun, which is on other grounds likely
enough.
We return to the scenes with the Bull, which here reach their climax.
This is the sacrifice of the Bull by Mithras, which forms the central
point of the whole legend. Its representation, generally in bas-relief,
was displayed in the most conspicuous position in the apse of the
Mithraic chapel, where it occupied the place of the modern altar-
piece, and such art as the Roman sculptors succeeded in displaying
was employed to make it as impressive and as striking as
possible[865]. It shows the god grasping with his left hand the nostrils
of the beast, and kneeling with his left knee in the middle of the Bull’s
back, while with his right hand he plunges the broad-bladed dagger
with which he was armed at his birth into the Bull’s shoulder[866]. A
dog leaps forward to lap the blood flowing from the wound, while at
the same time a scorpion seizes the Bull by the genitals. A serpent
also forms part of the group, but his position varies in the different
monuments, while that of the other animals does not. Sometimes, he
lifts his head towards the blood, as if to share it with the dog,
sometimes he is extended along the ground beneath the Bull’s belly
in apparent indifference to the tragedy enacted above him[867]. Before
the Bull stands generally a youth clothed like Mithras himself in
Phrygian cap, tunic, and mantle, as well as the anaxyrides or tight
trousers in which the Greeks depicted most Easterns, while another
youth similarly attired stands behind the dying victim. These two
human figures are alike in every particular save that one of them
bears a torch upright with the flame pointing upwards, while the other
holds a similar torch reversed so that the flame juts towards the
earth. We know from a Latin inscription that the torch-bearer with
uplifted torch was called Cautes, he with the reversed one
Cautopates, but of neither name has any satisfactory derivation or
etymology yet been discovered[868].
The meaning of the group as a whole can, however, be explained by
the documents of the later Persian religion. The Bundahish tells us
that Ahura Mazda created before all things the Bull Goshurun, who
was killed by Ahriman, the god of evil, and that from his side came
forth Gayômort, first of men, while from his tail there issued useful
seed-plants and trees, from his blood the vine, and from his seed the
different kinds of beasts[869]. Save that the bull-slayer is here not the
god of evil but the lord of light himself, the myth is evidently the same
in the Mithraic bas-reliefs, for in some of the earliest monuments the
Bull’s tail is actually shown sprouting into ears of wheat, while in
others the production of animals as a consequence of the Bull’s
death may be indicated, as well as the birth of the vine[870]. That the
dog plays the part of the guardian of the Bull’s soul is probable from
what we know of later Persian beliefs[871], while the scorpion as the
creature of Ahriman may be here represented as poisoning the seed
of future life at its source[872]. That Mithras is not supposed to kill the
Bull from enmity or other personal reasons, but in obedience to
orders from some higher power, is shown by the listening pose of his
head during the sacrifice. This is M. Cumont’s opinion[873], as also
that the serpent here takes no active part in the affair, but is merely a
symbolic representation of the earth[874]. The whole drama is clearly
shown as taking place in a cave or grotto, as appears from the arch
of rocks which surmounts, and, as it were, acts as a frame to, the
Tauroctony or bull-slaying scene in most Mithraic chapels. This cave,
according to Porphyry, represents the universe.
The Legend, however, does not end with the death of the Bull. In the
chapel at Heddernheim, the great slab on which the Tauroctony is
sculptured in bas-relief is pivoted so as to swing round and display
on its other face another scene which we find repeated in a slightly
different form on many monuments[875]. Mithras and the Sun-God are
here shown as partaking of a ritual feast or banquet in which grapes
seem to figure. At Heddernheim, the grapes are tendered to the two
gods over the body of the dead bull by the two torch-bearing figures
Cautes and Cautopates, while on an arch above them various
quadrupeds, dogs, a boar, a sheep, and a cow, are seen springing
into life. In other monuments, the same scene generally appears as
a banquet at which Mithras and Helios are seated side by side at a
table sometimes alone, but at others in company with different
persons who can hardly be any other than initiates or
worshippers[876]. That this represents some sort of sacrament where
a drink giving immortality was administered seems probable, and its
likeness to representations of the Last Supper is sufficient to explain
the complaint of Justin Martyr and other Fathers that the devil had
set on the Mithraists to imitate in this and other respects the Church
of Christ[877]. The final scene of all comes when we see Mithras
arresting the glorious chariot of the Sun-God drawn by four white
horses, and, mounting therein, being driven off by the ray-crowned
Helios himself to the abode of light above the firmament[878]. In this
also, it is easy to see a likeness between representations of the
Ascension of Mithras and that of Elijah or even of Christ[879].
However this may be, the Legend of Mithras, as thus portrayed,
shows with fair closeness the belief of his worshippers as to his
place in the scheme of the universe. Mithras was certainly not the
Supreme God, a rank in the system filled by Ahura Mazda, or his
Latin counterpart, Jupiter Best and Greatest[880]. But this being, like
the Platonic Zeus and the Gnostic Bythos, was considered too great
and too remote to concern himself with the doings of the visible
universe, in which Mithras acts as his vicegerent. Whether Mithras
was or was not considered as in some sort the double or antitype of
the Supreme Being cannot be said; but it is worth noticing that in the
Vedas, as among the Hittites, Varuna and Mitra form an inseparable
couple who are always invoked together, and that the same seems
to have been the case with Ahura Mazda and Mithra in the oldest
religious literature of the Persians[881]. It may therefore well be that
the learned doctors of the Mithraic theology regarded their Supreme
Being and Mithras as two aspects of the same god, an idea that, as
we have seen, was current at about the same period among the
Gnostics. It is, however, impossible to speak with certainty on such a
point in the absence of any writings by persons professing the
Mithraic faith, and it is highly improbable that the rugged soldiers
who formed the majority of the god’s worshippers ever troubled
themselves much about such questions. For them, no doubt, and for
all, perhaps, but a few carefully-chosen persons, Mithras was the
Demiurge or Divine Artizan of the universe[882], which he governs in
accordance with the laws of right and justice, protecting and
defending alike man and those animals and plants useful to him
which Mithras has himself created from his own spontaneous
goodness. Hence he was the only god to whom they admitted
allegiance, and although the existence of other heavenly beings was
not denied, it is probable that most of them were looked upon as
occupying at the best a position less important to us than that of
Mithras himself.
It is probable, moreover, that all the scenes in the Mithraic sculptures
in which we have seen the god taking part were considered as being
enacted before the creation of man and in some heaven or world
midway between the abode of Infinite Light and this earth. That the
grotto into which Mithras drags the primordial Bull is no earthly
cavern is plain from Porphyry’s remark that the Mithraic cave was an
image of the universe[883], as well as from the band of zodiacal
figures or the arch of rocks which sometimes encloses the bas-
reliefs, the sky being looked upon by the Babylonians as a rocky
vault. The sun and moon in their respective chariots also appear
above the principal scene; and a further hint as to its whereabouts
may be found in the fact that the flowing mantle of Mithras is
sometimes depicted as spangled with stars, thereby indicating that
the scenes in which he appears are supposed to take place in the
starry firmament. Hence is explained the epithet of μεσίτης or
Mediator, which Plutarch gives him[884], and which should be
interpreted not as intercessor but as he who occupies a position
midway between two places[885]. That the higher of these in this case
was the Garôtman or abode of Infinite Light of the Avestic literature,
there can, it would seem, be no question; but what was the lower?
Although the statement must be guarded with all the reserves
imposed upon us in all matters relating to the religion of Mithras by

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Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia:

Confinement and Control Until the First

Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia: Confinement and Control

Mental Health in Prisons: Critical Perspectives on

The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, Volume II:

A Short History of the Ancient World Nicholas K. Rauh

The Mathematics of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India,

A History of Modern Africa 3rd Edition Richard J. Reid

Ancient Supercontinents and the Paleogeography of Earth

The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism

Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

To my children, Cooper, Noah, Caleb, and Hannah

πορευθέντες δὲ μάθετε τί ἐστιν ἔλεος θέλω καὶ οὐ θυσίαν (Matt. 9:13a)

1. Map of Ancient Mesopotamia. Courtesy of Jarett Hall. 21

1. Ur III Prison Texts. 46

My house gives birth to a just person but exterminates a false one.

The term “school” appears to be misleading, then, in that it confers an

1 Kramer 1988. 2 Charpin 2010a: 32.

2 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

belongs to a history of education and schools, because it serves as an early

Such a statement suggests the prison, which they define as an institution of

3 Morris and Rothman 1998: ix.

structures for corporal confinement were available to be used in order to

The Birth and Evolution of the Prison in Modernity

What is it about imprisonment that resulted in it being fully enveloped into

4 Jonson, Cullen, and Lux 2013.

4 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

The Prison and Punishment

11 Reid 2016: 81–116. 12 Morris and Rothman 1998: ix.

6 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

characteristics of prisons provide Skarbek with the theoretical basis to

8 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

David Garland describes Foucault’s conception and use of power as

of punishment as a series of sudden changes rather than as gradual ­overlapping

26 Spierenburg 1984: viii. 27 Spierenburg 1984: viii.

10 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

convict ships. Both proportion and disproportion in punishment were

As God mercifully, allowed all a lifetime to repent, so long prison sen-

33 Throness 2008: 295. 34 Throness 2008: 295. 35 Throness 2008: 295–300.

After a brief period of progress during Reconstruction, African Americans

12 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to

43 Alexander 2020: 40.

14 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

singular solutions to the problem of mass incarceration will hardly account

A Roadmap to This Book

Chapter 1 introduces the period of investigation as well various Assyriological

50 See Reid 2016.

16 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

reflective of the everyday Mesopotamian’s perspective about prison, this

Imprisonment from the Dawn of History 19

period, writing lost its almost exclusive link to officialdom, resulting in a

5 Veldhuis 2012: 3. See further elaboration in Veldhuis 2012: 11–12.

20 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

What We Know and What We Don’t

Although there is a lot of evidence relating to prisons in ancient Mesopotamia,

Imprisonment from the Dawn of History 21

Figure 1. Map of Ancient Mesopotamia. Courtesy of Jarett Hall.

In this section, I discuss secondary literature pertaining to imprisonment

22 Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia

‘Prison,’” considers UruKAgina’s claim that he released various people from

Imprisonment from the Dawn of History 23

Imprisonment is mentioned but not specifically as punishment. It applied

1. Map of Ancient Mesopotamia. Courtesy of Jarett Hall. 21

1. Ur III Prison Texts. 46

of punishment as a series of sudden changes rather than as gradual overlapping

29 Frymer-Kensky 1977a: 87. 30 Frymer-Kensky 1977a: 89.