ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Wilson, for his part, seems on the whole to pursue an independent course, and only in a few perfunctory asides does he make a courteous bow in the direction of the mythopoeic hypothesis. Jacobsen, on the other hand, goes to the opposite extreme and tries hard to meet the requirements of his assignment by reading mythopoeic mentality into the texts rather than out of them. Failure to reckon with the fact that primitive thought is supremely conscious of the parallelism between the punctual and the durative, the real and the ideal, also leads Jacobsen to the dubious idea that the ancient Mesopotamian transferred to the cosmos the pattern of his own state, mentally projecting upon it his own social order. Against this background of mythopoeic thought, it is argued, the perennial problems of human existence the problem of man in nature.
