“Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’, and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. Nomos thus came to mean ‘law’, ‘fair distribution’, ‘that which is allotted by custom’ - and so the basis of all Western law.
The verb nemein - to ‘graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’, or ‘to spread’ - has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ - especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’: hence ‘numismatics’.”
From volume X of the file · Book · 21st century
Themes: justice & law · language & writing
More from Bruce Chatwin
“Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttar-akurus or ‘the Men of Perfect Virtue’ of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability.
The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal.
One characteristic of the Men of the Golden Age: they are always remembered as migratory.”
“I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg—people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end. I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’
The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu...”
“It is a paradox of the monotheistic faiths that, although they arose within the ambit of the desert, the desert people themselves show an indifference towards the Almighty that is decidedly cavalier. ‘We will go up to God and salute him,’ said a bedu to Palgrave in the 1860s, ‘and if he proves hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off.’”
“The Bushmen, who walk immense distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. ‘When we die, we die, they say. The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.’ Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians—with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds—project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”
“The Hero Cycle, wherever found, is a story of ‘fitness’ in the Darwinian sense: a blueprint for genetic ‘success’. Beowulf leaves... Ivan leaves... Jack leaves... the young Aboriginal on Walkabout leaves... even the antique Don Quixote leaves, And these Wanderjahre, and combats with the Beast, are the story-teller’s version of the incest taboo; whereby a man must first prove ‘fitness’ and then must ‘marry far.
In practice, it scarcely matters whether myths are the coded messages of instinct, whose structures will reside in the central nervous system, or tales of instruction handed down from the Year Dot. One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. Seldom, if ever, in myth, is it desirable, morally, for a man to kill a man in cold blood.”