Two ringed and banded dry pillars stand framing the entrance to a shrine as an offertorial procession approaches it again on the seal in Figure 52, which is also from the Uruk period:
The essential contrast between green wood and the dry pillars of the sanctuary is brilliantly expressed on the next seal, again from the Uruk period, where two gentle herbivores flank the green wood as in later Assyrian and Aegean iconography (compare Figures 23, 44, and 53):
Henri Frankfort explained this scene as feeding of the temple herd. If his explanation is correct, then the green wood and the dry column in this very early Sumerian image may have had opposite and complementary symbolic properties not unlike those of the mudyi and mukula trees among Victor Turner’s modern Ndembu of Central Africa. Be he man or god, the anthropomorph is the trickster and the ogre under the green wood in the scene on this seal. He feeds his animal clients at the green wood one moment, but the next moment may be expected to slaughter them himself or to sanction their slaughter by others for his own sustenance and that of the gods under the sign of the temple pillars. Ndembu similarly celebrated the distribution of plant food at the mudyi tree and their hunters’ killing of animals for meat at the hewable mukula tree. What more abstruse metaphorical symbolism may have attached to these two Sumerian trees, green and dry, must remain for scholars of Sumerian archaeology to decipher if they can. But it is amply apparent that the same arboreal dyad with its concomitant motifs as found in cults of the modern world was also operative in the earliest cults of Mesopotamia more than five millennia ago. Arthur Evans wrote, “the coincidences of tradition are beyond the scope of accident,” and indeed they are. But the coincidences of this particular motival tradition cannot be accounted for in the history of religion and cult. They lie only within the scope of oral fable.
In respect to cattle, the type of Sumerian temple that is represented by the gateposts on the seals in Figs. 51-53 supra had to be as paradoxical as the behaviour of its anthropomorphic attendant who is pictured feeding the cattle green branches in Fig. 53. The temple was a place of protection and nourishment for its herds, yet it was also their abattoir. As the sign of such temples, the dry pillar could not escape having the same dual, self-contradictory, simultaneously benevolent and baneful signification. If the temple was indeed Inanna-Ishtar’s, then her strange behaviour in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, where at one moment she offers her love and favours to Gilgamesh and at the next moment prosecutes a vicious vendetta against him, is entirely consistent with the character of her temple in relation to its animal clients, who are similarly first protected and nurtured, then slain. A small cylinder from the Jamdat Nasr period67 neatly encapsulates the paradox (Fig. 54). Outside the temple, the cattle were to be fed, but to be eaten inside:
In sharp contrast to the tame Sumerian temple herds beside hewn stocks, wild herbivores frequented green trees in the absence of any hewn rods or posts on other seals, like the one in Fig. 55, which has also been assigned to the Jamdat Nasr period.67
But the temple cattle were a domestic herd or flock, and therefore their feeding takes place in the simultaneous presence of both the green and the hewn wood. Were they wild, they too might feed at a green tree without the presence of the dry pillar, because the green tree of oral fable is regularly associated with unreciprocal, lawless, or merely emotionally motivated giving or taking of goods and benefits. In contrast to it, the dry wood customarily signifies reciprocity and consequence, or a rule of law in all matters of property and exchange. The temple herd is kept and cared for, but in time it must recompense its keepers and their gods with its own flesh; meanwhile the feral herbivore takes from the green tree at its own pleasure and owes nothing in return. If innumerable human and animal heroes in every age have found themselves caught in the web of this same paradox of domesticity as they move between the green and dry trees of oral fable, then it must be because the Sumerian temple herd’s dilemma of having to give back to its keepers as much as it receives is inherent in the very nature of culture, whether animal or human, anywhere in any era.
No doubt the story of the Two Trees has persisted in oral narrative tradition because it is about a feature of culture equally as persistent and essential as itself: the need for reciprocity and recompense. That would explain the longevity and universal appeal of the story-pattern, but it still leaves unanswered the question of why the pattern should persistently and universally consist of its particular motifs: the two trees, the schizotropic ogre, the concealment or disappearance of persons, etc. One can find sufficient reasons for a tale’s existence, some of local and some of more general validity, but still not merely on that account know anything certain about the tale’s origins.
