A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

loody close.’ The tremendous volcanic explosion of the island of Santorini - about 1500 B.C. -
devastated the whole Mediterranean area. Then, between 1250 and 1150, the same area became a
prey to hordes of invaders known as ‘the Sea Peoples’, who attacked the bleeding civilisation like
sharks. Under all this stress, the old, child-like mentality could no longer cope. The men who
rebuilt civilisation needed new qualities of ruthlessness and efficiency. Besides, all this violence
demanded a more subtle response. ‘Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man
who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if
a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbour his hatred
and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive.’
The first sign of this ‘change of mind’, says Jaynes, can be found in Mesopotamia. Around 1230
B.C. the Assyrian tyrant Tukulti-Ninurta I had a stone altar built, and it shows the king kneeling
before the empty throne of the god. In earlier carvings, the king is shown standing and talking to
the god. Now the king is alone; the god has vanished. A cuneiform text of the same period contains
the lines:
One who has no god, as he walks along the street
Headache envelops him like a garment.
Headache is the result of nervous tension, of losing contact with the intuitive self. And when man
suffers from stress, he reacts to problems by losing his temper. And it is at this point, according to
Jaynes, that cruelty first becomes a commonplace of history. It is in the Assyrian carvings of about
this period that we first see illustrations of men and women impaled, children beheaded.
This, then, is Jaynes’s fascinating if highly controversial account of the coming of self-awareness
and of crime. And it is open to one very obvious objection; that it is practically impossible to
imagine complex human beings - such as Sargon of Akkad or Hammurabi -without self-awareness.
Jaynes points out that consciousness is not nearly so important - or so necessary - as we seem to
think; a man playing the piano performs an extremely complex set of operations while his mind is
elsewhere, enjoying the music. If he becomes conscious of his fingers, he plays badly. But this
example is deceptive. The man had to learn to play the piano slowly and consciously; only then
could he do it ‘automatically’. If he had never possessed self-consciousness, he would have been
incapable of learning to play, since playing - like any other complex operation - demands selfcriticism.
There are other strong objections to this aspect of Jaynes’s theory. Professor Gordon Gallup of New
York State University, has conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to determine whether
animals possess self-awareness. Various animals - seventeen species in all - were placed in a cage
with mirrors. Then the animal was anaesthetised and its face painted with a red, odourless dye.
When the animal woke up, it was easy to see whether it recognised - through its mirror-image - that
its face had been dyed. Two species - chimpanzees and orang-outangs - inspected their faces in
exactly the same way that a human being would under similar circumstances; none of the others
showed the least interest in their reflections. Most other species behaved in various ways that
showed they regarded their mirror-images as other members of the same species - making friendly
overtures or even attacking the image. Some of them continued to behave in this way even after
years of acquaintance with mirrors, revealing total inability to recognise themselves.
Significantly, gorillas were among those unable to recognise themselves - significantly because
gorillas are closely related to chimpanzees and orang-outangs. There is one basic difference: the