The Golden Age

Summary

The Golden Age is the story of a first time in which people lived in plenty and justice, after which things grew worse generation by generation until they reached the narrator's own day. Its oldest complete telling in Greek is Hesiod's poem Works and Days, around 700 BCE. Hesiod says the gods first made a golden race of men who lived in the time of Kronos when he was king in heaven: they lived like gods without care or toil, old age did not come upon them, they feasted and rejoiced, the earth gave them its fruit abundantly without being forced, and they died as if overcome by sleep. Then the gods made a race of silver, whose child stayed a hundred years at his mother's side playing, and when grown lived a short time in misery, because they could not keep from wronging one another or serve the gods, so Zeus put them away. Then a race of bronze, made from ash trees, lovers of war, with bronze weapons and bronze houses, who perished by their own hands. Then the race of heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy, some of whom live in the Isles of the Blessed at the ends of the earth. Then the race of iron, Hesiod's own, which never rests from toil by day nor from perishing by night.

Of the end of this race Hesiod says: children will be born grey at the temples, the father will not agree with his children nor the guest with his host, people will dishonour their parents when they grow old, right will lie in might, and then Aidos and Nemesis will leave the wide earth wrapped in white robes and join the immortals, and no help against evil will remain. The poet Aratus then made Justice herself a maiden who sat among people in the Golden Age, and when they made the sword she rose to the sky and became the constellation Virgo; Ovid named her Astraea. Hesiod, Works and Days 180–201, Aratus, Phaenomena 96–136.

The story recurs in other mythologies under other names. The Romans make the Golden Age the reign of Saturn in Latium; the Persians make it the reign of Yima, in which there was no cold and no heat, no old age and no death; India makes it the Kṛta Yuga, the first age, when right stood whole on four feet; and the Sumerians describe it in the land of Dilmun, where the lion does not kill and no one says "I am an old man".

The idea these stories turn on is that the good lies at the beginning of time, not at its end, and is lost by degrees, not all at once. Each telling gives the loss a sign people can see: Justice leaves the earth and becomes a star, the royal glory flies from Yima in the shape of a bird when he lies, and right in India loses a foot in each age. Most of the tellings also give the story another end: the first age can return. Virgil says the Maiden is coming back and the reign of Saturn with her, and India says the Kṛta Yuga begins again after the last of the ages.

We read the words in the Arabic tongue like this. The Greek word for gold, khrūsós, was taken by the Greeks from the Semites, as the Greek lexicon itself says. In Akkadian it is hurāṣu, gold, in Hebrew ḥārūṣ, and Arabic keeps it in khurṣ, a ring of gold or silver, with kh, r and ṣ in their order. So Hesiod's golden race bears a Semitic name. Kronos, king of that race, is read by this project's Greek essay as qarn, and a qarn is a generation of people: he is the king of the generations, and the story of the five races is a story of qurūn. Saturn is read by the Roman essay from satara, to hide, and it calls him "the god of the bygone Golden Age, the hidden past".

Linguistic Root

Gold: khrūsós and khurṣ

LSJ closes its entry for gold by saying the word is borrowed from Semitic, citing Hebrew ḥārūṣ and Akkadian hurāṣu. The Akkadian dictionary gives the word as gold, with nappāh hurāṣi, "gold-blower", for goldsmith. Lane gives khurṣ and khirṣ as a ring, or a ring of gold and of silver, or an earring with a single bead, whence "so-and-so does not own a khurṣ", she owns nothing at all. The letters correspond regularly: Arabic kh is Akkadian ḫ, which Greek writes χ, and Greek writes ṣ with σ, as the Greek table of the project's sound laws shows. These are written witnesses, not a proposed reading. One point remains: Arabic did not keep the word as the name of the metal but of the ornament made from it; the metal itself is dhahab.

In Arabic itself Lane gathers under one root dhahab, gold, and dhahaba, he went away, passed, was gone, without deriving one from the other. The Arabic name of the metal is built on the letters of passing, and the golden age in every one of these stories is a time that has passed.

Aurum and light

This is a reading proposed on the method. Ovid calls the first age aurea aetas, and the adjective comes from aurum, gold. De Vaan says its Italic form had s: the old form ausom is attributed by the grammarians to the Sabines, the s between vowels then became r as it regularly does in Latin, and the word has Baltic sisters meaning gold. Many connect it with Latin aurōra, dawn, which comes from the same root as the Greek dawn word that the Eos page reads from waḍuʾa and ḍawʾ, light, with Greek s in the place of ḍ. If the connection holds, gold is "the shining one", the metal that gleams. The reading has two weaknesses: the project's Latin table makes Arabic ḍ a d, not an s, so the reading can stand only at the level of the root the two words share; and the link of gold with dawn is itself not certain.

The kings of the first age

Kronos in the Greek essay is qarn: a span of time and a generation of people, as in "He destroyed generations (qurūn)". Hesiod's word for each of his races is génos, offspring, generation, so on this reading the five races are five qurūn, the first under the lord of the qurūn. The Kronos page explains the passage of q to k.

Saturn in the Roman essay is satara, to hide and cover, and the essay calls him "the god of the bygone Golden Age, the hidden past". This fits Virgil's story: a deposed king who hid in Latium, whose time was the golden time. The Saturn page discusses the fourth consonant, n, which satara does not explain.

Jamshid in the Persian essay is jamm and shayyada: abundance gathered together and a building raised high, "the great builder". The older name Yima is read by the Indian Yama page as al-yamm.

Kṛta

Monier-Williams gives kṛta as the past participle of kṛ, to do or make, so "done, accomplished, complete"; the name of the side of a die marked with four dots, the winning throw; and the name of the first of the four ages, also called satya, truth. The four ages bear the names of dice throws: kṛta four, tretā three, dvāpara two and kali one, the losing throw, not the goddess Kālī. Hanuman says in the Mahābhārata that the age was called kṛta because everything in it was accomplished, so people had no need of rites. The Indian essay does not read this word, and we propose no reading for it.

Attestations by Culture

Greece: Hesiod's races and Aratus's Justice

Hesiod tells the five races immediately after the story of Prometheus and Pandora, so the two stories answer one question: why must man toil for his living. Each race has a fate after death: the golden became good spirits on earth, guardians of mortals who watch over judgements and cruel deeds and give wealth; the silver are blessed spirits under the earth; the bronze went down to the house of Hades nameless; and some heroes live in the Isles of the Blessed by Oceanus, where the earth bears them honey-sweet fruit three times a year. Hesiod wishes he had died before the fifth race or been born after it, so he sees another race beyond it. Aratus then tells the first three races from the side of Justice: she sits in the market-places with the golden, comes down alone from the hills to the silver, and flies to heaven from the bronze, the first to forge the sword and eat the plough-ox.

Rome: Saturn in Latium and Ovid's ages

Virgil has King Evander tell how Saturn came first from Olympus, fleeing the arms of Jupiter, an exile robbed of his kingdom; he gathered an unteachable people scattered over the high mountains, gave them laws, and chose to call the land Latium because he had lain hidden safely there. Under that king were the centuries men call golden, as he ruled the peoples in quiet peace, until little by little a worse and duller age came, and with it the madness of war and the love of possession. Ovid's Golden Age has no law and no punishment: people keep faith and right of their own will; no pine has yet been felled to build a ship, no trenches circle the towns; the earth, untouched by hoe or plough, gives everything; spring is eternal, rivers of milk and of nectar flow, and honey drips from the oak. When Saturn was thrown into Tartarus and the world was under Jupiter, the Silver Age came: Jupiter divided the year into seasons, people took to houses, grain was first buried in furrows, and oxen groaned under the yoke.

Iran: the reign of Yima

The hymn to Haoma says that Yima made cattle and people undying in his reign, plants and waters unfailing, and food imperishable; there was no cold wind and no hot, no old age and no death, no envy made by demons, and father and son walked each with the look of a fifteen-year-old. In the Vendīdād Ahura Mazda charges him with the care of the world; he enlarges the earth three times as it fills, and is then warned of a deadly winter and builds the enclosure. In the Zamyad Yasht the royal glory stays with Yima as long as he is truthful; when he came to love words of falsehood and untruth, it was seen flying from him in the shape of a bird, and Yima trembled and fell to the ground before his enemies. The Shahnameh places his fall at the moment he says that everything people have came from him, and Zahhak takes the throne.

India: the Kṛta Yuga

In the Mahābhārata Bhima, brother of Arjuna, asks Hanuman to show him the immense form in which he crossed the sea, and Hanuman answers that the form cannot be seen now, because earth, rivers, plants and gods follow time, and this is an age of diminution. He then describes the ages: in the Kṛta there was one religion, no buying and selling, no manual labour, and the needs of life came by being thought of; there was no disease or decay of the senses, no malice, pride, fear or envy. In the Tretā sacrifice begins and right decreases by a quarter, in the Dvāpara by half, and in the Kali only a quarter remains, and disease, anger and scarcity come. The Laws of Manu say that in the Kṛta age dharma stands on four feet, people do not fall ill and live four hundred years, and in each later age dharma loses a foot and life a quarter. This project's Indian essay says that Kalki, the last avatar of Vishnu, appears at the end of the Kali Yuga to end evil and restore the Golden Age, the Satya Yuga, "the age of truth".

Sumer: Dilmun and the spell of Nudimmud

The poem Enki and Ninhursaga opens with Dilmun: no raven caws there, the lion does not kill, the wolf does not carry off the lamb, no eye-disease says "I am the eye-disease", no old woman says "I am an old woman", no old man "I am an old man". But Dilmun in the poem is not a time that has passed; it is a distant land, which before Enki's water had no ploughland, and where Enki then eats the plants and is cursed by Ninhursag. There the gods settled Ziusudra after the flood, alive and undying. In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta there is a spell attributed to Nudimmud, that is Enki: on a day when there is no snake, no scorpion, no hyena, no lion, no dog and no wolf, no fear and no trembling, all the lands address Enlil in a single tongue. The ETCSL translation renders it as a wish for a day to come; others read it as a description of a time past, and the text allows both.

China: the Great Unity

In the Liyun chapter of the Book of Rites Confucius says: when the Great Way was followed, all under heaven was shared; people chose the worthy and able, spoke sincerely, and no one treated only his own parent as parent or his own son as son; the old were provided for until death, the able-bodied had work, the young the means to grow; widows, orphans and the disabled were all supported; robbers and traitors did not appear, so the outer doors were left open. "This is what we call the Great Unity", datong. Then: now that the Great Way is hidden, the realm is a family inheritance, each loves his own parents and sons, walls and moats are built; and he calls the age of the good kings who came after "the Small Tranquillity", xiaokang.

The North: the golden pieces

The Völuspá says that at the beginning of time the gods met on the plain of Iðavöllr, built altars and temples, set up forges, made treasures and tools, and played at board games in the enclosure, happy, lacking nothing of gold, until three giant maidens came. After Ragnarök the earth rises green from the sea, and the gods find in the grass the golden game pieces they owned in the first days.

Symbolic Reading

The project's essays read the Golden Age as a memory of real history, and differ on which history. The Greek essay reads Hesiod's races as a compressed history of craft: the golden race is the time of hunting and gathering, when man lived with nature without labour before agriculture; the silver, the beginnings of farming; the bronze, the time of smelting bronze, weapons and war; the iron, Hesiod's own time. The Roman essay reads Saturn's age as "the memory of abundance" and "a time of agrarian equality" before classes and slavery, and makes the Saturnalia, when slaves eat with their masters, a day on which that equality returns. The Persian essay reads Jamshid's reign as a memory of the first agricultural revolution and of the weaving, building and metalwork he taught.

The disagreement among the essays is already in the texts. Hesiod and Ovid make the Golden Age a time without ploughing, when the earth gives of itself, and Ovid puts the first furrows in the Silver Age. Aratus puts the oxen and the plough in the Golden Age, Virgil makes Saturn a giver of laws, and Jamshid teaches the crafts. In some tellings, then, the Golden Age is a time before labour; in others, a time of just labour. What all the tellings share is that the loss is moral before it is material: the lie in Yima's story, the sword in Astraea's, the love of possession in Virgil and Ovid, theft, falsehood and fraud in Manu, and the realm turned into a family inheritance in the Book of Rites. The Sumerian essay reads Dilmun as an ecological memory of a green oasis rich in fresh springs on Bahrain, closer to a place than to a time.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Golden Age resembles the food of immortality in that people in it do not grow old, but it differs in that immortality there is won and then lost by a single act, while here old age and death come in stages, race after race. In Hesiod the golden race die as if overcome by sleep: they die without sickness, but they are not immortal.

Some tellings end with a catastrophe after which a remnant of the first age is kept: Yima builds his enclosure before the deadly winter, as in the northern Fimbulwinter, and Ziusudra lives in Dilmun after the flood. The first age returns in the tellings that make time a circle: Kalki restores the Satya Yuga in the avatar cycle, the world is renewed in Zoroastrian Frashokereti, and the earth rises green after Ragnarök. Virgil makes the return near, when Astraea comes back.

The kings of the first age in Rome and Iran are also culture heroes: Saturn teaches farming and law, Jamshid smithing, weaving and building. The Roman and Persian tellings make the Golden Age the work of a king who taught people, while the Greek telling makes it a gift of the gods in which man has no hand.