This chapter presents a detailed examination of the theory of language put forward in the Babylonian cosmogony, Enuma elish. This poem locates the origin of language at the very beginnings of the cosmos’ formation, even before the gods came to be. Accordingly, language is one of the first principles on which the world is founded. Thus, just as there is a temporal and spatial dimension of existence, there is also a linguistic one that is beyond the human and the divine. The poem futher explores this idea in using wordplay and etymology of sacred places, divine objects, and gods. In this context, the patron god of Babylon, Marduk, is conceptualized as a polyonymous cosmic divinity who incorporates into his persona the names of other gods.

Extraordinary individuals in ancient Greece claimed to know the real meaning of names. They understood "real meaning" to be the theological and cosmological truths hidden in language. Although the truths were plural and there was no consensus about what true names ultimately reveal, the theoretical assumptions of those individuals were essentially similar: they believed that language in general, but more specifically the names of the gods, contained crucial information about the cosmos. Classicists tend to think that those views were already present in archaic hexametric poetry and further developed centuries later by philosophers, sophists, and religious innovators of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. But did Greek philosophies of language and the semantics of divine names effectively develop in isolation? The present book explores points of contact between Greek and Mesopotamian systems of thinking about language and reality and argues for the importance of bringing into a dialogue cuneiform and Greek texts concerned with the cosmic function of language.

The theory of recapitulation is best known in its evolutionary form, as it was this form that Ernst Haeckel captured with his famous biogenetisches Grundgesetz (‘ontogeny is nothing other than a succinct recapitulation of phylogeny’). It is a theory that is justifiably associated above all with the natural philosophy of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Yet some historians of science have raised questions about its roots in ancient thought, and this chapter aims to explore a selection of natural philosophers in antiquity (especially Empedocles, Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus) in order to determine how close they came to recapitulation theory. Certain Presocratic thinkers appear to have anticipated recapitulation theory in some evolutionary sense, but it is no longer to be found in Aristotle and the Platonic tradition. This is not simply because Aristotle and Plato rejected evolution, since there are also non-evolutionary versions of recapitulation which are founded upon hierarchical theories of transcendental morphology. It is shown that only the Neoplatonists can be credited with a clear commitment to transcendental morphology but that even they develop their transcendental morphology in a way that does not lend itself to recapitulation theory.

The chapter sketches a broad picture of some ideas, antecedent to Aristotle’s work, about the origin and development of living beings. Against the background of the new cosmological and metaphysical framework of Aristotle’s biological enterprise, it emphasizes what distinguishes Aristotle from the Presocratics and Plato: his rejection of a shared causal story that would account for both the origin of the universe and the birth of animals and plants. This shift helps to make intelligible Aristotle’s rejection of hylozoism and of the opposite view that life arises, mysteriously, from inanimate material ingredients. To demonstrate that Aristotle discusses the biological views of his predecessors without directly using them to build his own theory, the chapter first turns to Presocratic fragments, mostly of Anaximander and Empedocles, which connect biological matters and cosmogony. Second, the chapter takes a fresh look at how Plato reshapes this connection in his Timaeus, offering a new account of the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings. This account then enables us to evaluate, in the chapter’s final section, the changes that Aristotle brings to the study of living beings, including his rejection of the notion of the latter’s progressive formation.

In his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, the fourth-century exegete Calcidius makes ample use of musical theory and its kinship with the related sciences arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Musical theory impacts upon the metaphysical, physical and ethical aspects in his account of the composition of the cosmic soul. Calcidius draws upon the soul’s musical make-up to show how it translates into the arrangement of the heavenly bodies, the relationships between the immortal and mortal creatures in the cosmos, and the tripartite human soul. Emphasizing the overall significance of harmonics for his exegesis, Calcidius, in fact, likens the creator god to a musician who composed the All as a well-tuned symphony. I shall discuss these aspects of his exegesis by placing them, initially, into the context of his sources, thereafter focusing on more idiosyncratic aspects: Calcidius’ referencing of musical composition for the question of the soul’s (un-)createdness, the relationship he establishes between harmonics and his demonology, and his view on human psychological conditions such as anger and passion. These conditions, according to Calcidius, are not merely a consequence of the human soul’s association with the body, but psychological manifestations of its natural make-up, which is determined by numeric-musical proportions.

Chapter four investigates Hittite conceptions of human nature. I argue that the Hittites imagined the human to have mimicked the deities on multiple levels. In the context of regular humanity, Hittites believed that both humans and deities possessed a body and soul(s). Whereas the human soul inhabited the human body, deities’ souls could inhabit any number of cult objects. Because the nature of the human soul was the same as that of a deity, it enjoyed a share in the divine state even in its natural condition. Like their neighbours, the Hittites understood the body to have come from the material of the earth. However, the Hittites imagined it as a particular type of metal-rich soil. Furthermore, they envisioned the soul as having had a liquid constitution. For this reason, they thought that they could actually drink the souls of humans and deities during different rituals. In the present life, royal figures could experience temporary moments of deification and empowerment. This occurred during ritual meals, when the monarch would contact the gods by drinking them into his or her body and participate in the divine, at least for a few moments.

Chapter three examines Mesopotamian conceptions of human nature. I argue that Mesopotamians viewed the human as a composite nondivine-divine space. Having been created from slain deities, the physical body participated in the divine nature. For some Mesopotamians, participation in the divine state was not wholly positive. The aspect of the deities that influenced them to rebel in heaven in fact formed part of the body’s constitution. Thus humanity’s propensity to disrupt the ordered cosmos stemmed from its share in the divine nature. The human was also conceived as a microcosm of the temple. As a microcosm of the cosmos, the temple was originally created to be the meeting point between divine and nondivine. Likewise, the deities created the human self as a physical space in which they could install themselves. The human was therefore a physical embodiment of the divine on a general level, just like the temple, and like the cosmos before that. Divine embodiment in a human context was clearest in ideas surrounding the royal self. The king participated in the divine nature to the point that, like true deities, he could install himself within multiple bodies at the same time.

The third variant of Milgrom’s theory (T2) is a relativistic theory. A number of relativistic variants have been proposed. The lack of a unique relativistic theory complicates the generation of testable predictions, but two predictions are only weakly dependent on the form of the relativistic Lagrangian: an early epoch of cosmic reionization, and a particular value for the amplitude ratio of the first and second peaks in the power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations. The first of these two predictions is possibly corroborated, and the second has definitely been confirmed. However, no relativistic version of MOND has yet been proposed that can accurately explain the full CMB spectrum.

This chapter studies voices that were skeptical or even inimical towards the supposed utility of historical knowledge for the construction and functioning of a proper political order. In particular, I focus the discussion on the Guodian Laozi and the Mengzi, as representative examples of, respectively, the cosmogonic and bioethical literatures of the late Warring States period that were part of this broader antihistorical current. In the Laozi, we see the delineation of a cosmogonic history, a type of deep history that was mobilized to question and undermine the meaningfulness and relevance of all other historical narratives. In the Mengzi, we see a purposeful distancing from and subjugation of historical knowledge as an authoritative source towards the proper cultivation of one’s ethical potential. The cultivated skepticism or even hostility towards the authority of the past in these two different texts points to the contentiousness of the field of the past in the latter half of the Warring States period.

What if the consistency of the Goddess’s account of the cosmic order according to the opinions of mortals, in the second part of Parmenides’ poem, was the very sign of its own deceitful character? This chapter attempts to show that Parmenides’ use of the terms kosmos and diakosmos refers to the use of these terms and their cognates in epic poetry and that this source is the best one for us to reconstruct the missing steps of the Doxa part of the poem. Parmenides transposes the Homeric vocabulary of dividing and ordering troops, arranging collective occupations, into the field of cosmology in order to illustrate how the words of men are swift to order a beautiful representation of the universe. Parmenides’ goddess delivers the most complete cosmogony and cosmology of the Archaic world, while also stating that it is merely words. The shaping and ordering of the universe are an arrangement of words, given all power to build a world by their own means. They are all the more consistent as they are demiurgical and deceitful.