City-dwellers were dependent upon rural residents for buying surplus crops for their food. Trade was mutual, as residents of cities were often specialized artisans that could offer their skills. "Mesopotamian cities controlled the agricultural land and collected crop surpluses from villages in their vicinity. In return, the city provided rural districts with military protection against bandits and raiders and a market where villagers could acquire manufactured goods produced by urban specialists (16). But society was highly stratified because of this rural-city divide. Class divisions were sharply evident in Mesopotamian society -- the infamous law code of Hammurabi meted out different punishments according to class.
Even within religious structures, this inequality was tolerated by the Babylonians. The gods were conceptualized as anthropomorphic and not necessarily beneficent. The gods showed favor to some but not to all. Although all members of the society seemed to participate in some sort of religious rituals and superstitions, it is unclear how much the official temples were open to the general public. "Scholars similarly debate whether common people had much access to temple buildings and how religious practices and beliefs affected their everyday lives" (19). But even members of the elite subscribed to the belief that humanity was placed on earth...
All humans could be humbled by divine power.
In
contrast, Egypt evolved as much more human-centric culture. Its large population, spawned by the relative ease of raising and finding food, demanded a complex political system of
leadership that placed a great deal of
authority in
kinship (25). Eventually, the Egyptian leaders came to be regarded as gods themselves. There was no objective law code, fair or unfair, like the impersonal Law of Hammurabi. Instead, the king's will was all. "So much depended on the kings that their deaths evoked elaborate efforts to ensure the well-being of their spirits on their journey to rejoin the gods" (25).
Although ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia possessed far different views of humanity's relationship to the gods, some of the effects of these diverse points-of-view were very similar from a practical point-of-view. In Mesopotamia, because the gods were unfair, then it was deemed to be acceptable for human beings to be unfair to others as well. The king was not seen as all-powerful and wise, but there was no attempt to use a system of laws or
religion to create a more egalitarian society. Ancient Egypt took a more benign view of the goodness of the gods and the cosmos, but this lead to a 'cult of personality' in its system of leadership. The Pharaohs were viewed as omnipotent, and their word was law. All human beings must serve the living gods that ruled, and stark divisions existed between the Pharaohs and the mere mortals who served them and tilled the…
