Conversation: Singing the Songs of Sumer, the Mesopotamian Mythology of Ancient Iraq w/ Alex W
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dot U-S. That's M-E-D-I-K and the number eight dot U-S to save 25% on age-defying skincare. Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host, Liv, here with another conversation episode. This week's episode was recorded back in January.

I think. Unfortunately, I've been having to record a lot in advance, and that's tough when the history that is so relevant to today's events, or rather when the events of today just keep getting more and more relevant to history. It's tough when I have to wait.

um to release episodes let alone um other sides of it but today's episode is with alex wells who writes about mesopotamian mythology specifically sumerian mythology so uh

ancient Iraq, but of the specific time period of the Sumerian people. And so we talk about Sumerian mythology and ancient Iraq in general. It was a really, really fun conversation. I really want to move beyond Greece and Rome whenever possible. So I'm so thrilled when I have people reach out who have this knowledge that I don't have and just generally have research skills in that field that I don't have. I'm really good at researching Greece, but...

But when it comes to beyond that, I really love when other people can come and share this stuff. And obviously, I'm also really keen on sharing the history and mythology beyond the quote unquote West. Yeah.

This was a really incredible episode, but one thing I really want to flag, and unfortunately I have to record this introduction without my notes on this, just because I have to run out of town and make sure that this is ready to go. But towards the end of the episode, we talk, Alex and I talk about a woman that he knows in Gaza who is trying to get out with her family and her father, um,

They have, as you expect, had a lot of horrible setbacks in trying to save themselves and just generally deserve our support and help. There is a GoFundMe. If you're able to donate, that would be really nice. While obviously there is a quote unquote ceasefire, Israel has not ceased fire, um,

A large number of deaths of Palestinians has still occurred there. They have continually broken the ceasefire in Lebanon and now seem to refuse to leave. Just don't don't let the media lead you to believe that the ceasefire has actually ceased fire. Israel has regularly broken it and.

They're just still killing people. And they've also taken this opportunity when people are distracted by the quote-unquote ceasefire in Gaza. They've taken this opportunity to start mass arrests and mass killings and bombings and burning people's houses down and burning down olive groves in the West Bank, which is another illegally occupied area. So just don't...

It's not over. People in Palestine still need our help. We still need to be loud. And we need to make everyone aware that this ceasefire has not ceased fire. And people are still struggling and still just trying to live. And so please, and I am so sorry that I don't have the names here.

Conversations, singing the songs of Sumeria, Mesopotamian mythology of ancient Iraq, with Alex Wells.

I would love to hear about, you know, what got you into Sumerian mythology, like what, what your background is in it. And I mean, literally anything. But I'm fascinated in the broader ancient Mediterranean, but obviously my knowledge is so rooted in, in Greek that I can rarely go beyond for countless reasons, but that's why I love having people come on to talk about it. So yeah. What, what got you into Sumerian mythology? Let's start there.

Yeah. I mean, you know, growing up, I was always interested in kind of, you know, Greek mythology and the ancient world in general. Um, I did some really good history teachers, uh, growing up, um,

But I didn't really get into it until I was in college. And I had a professor who taught ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So he taught three classes and took all three of them. I found out later that the version of ancient Mesopotamian history that he was teaching was like 50 or 60 years out of date because he was teaching what he learned in school. And, you know, but. Oh, got to love learning that. Right. Well, and it's it's frustrating because he was, you know, like a.

You know, a lecturer is a very particular kind of skill where you have a kind of charisma. You have the same stories that you tell you the same jokes you tell. And it worked. It got me into it. It hooked me. But, you know, I had to update my knowledge. I don't know what might come up in the conversation. He was really into the, you know, what Herodotus said about the temple of Mileta in, I think, Babylon, where like all of the women have to do sex work for the temple. Yes, I do. Oh, dear. I remember learning that as fact. I'm like, wow, that's crazy. And they're like, oh, no one thinks that anymore.

Yeah. I mean, Herodotus, that's so true of so much of what Herodotus spouted. We can find it entertaining now, but the idea of believing it as a fact without other evidence is wild. But that's great. Yeah. And then after college, I just wanted to learn about world history. And I figured I would start at the beginning. And the beginning is Mesopotamia. And I kind of got stuck there. So now it is my interest.

Yeah, I love that. I, I also, I mean, I sort of, I started with Egyptian myself in terms of like what I learned first. And I did, obviously I, I didn't stick with Egyptian. I became completely obsessed with Greek, but it's so interesting to find those, like that one that you kind of, you know, latch onto first. Like I still have this real like love of Greek.

at least the Egyptian art of their mythology, even if I don't know enough of the myth itself, you know? And Sumerian is so interesting or Mesopotamian broadly, because this is something I've, I've focused on myself more and more recently is, is the way we're taught of Mesopotamia as a kind of almost like a, like a defunct place, like a, like I, like, you know, but not in the same way I find that as we do about like, say ancient Greece, like ancient Greece, I find to be taught more as a living thing.

I'm trying to phrase it. Basically, I feel like we are just taught to kind of ignore the Iraq of it all, particularly in North America. And so it's something I've been more and more interested in looking at on the show and really reminding everyone like, hey, the origin of basically all civilizations started in the place where we then spent so many years tearing it apart for wealth and nonsense. Oh, yeah.

We were sort of meant to separate Mesopotamia from Iraq, I've found in terms of the way at least how I was taught.

a good long time ago. And I was a teenager during the Iraq war. So I was still like on the, I was paying attention, but not enough, but more so just the way we say Mesopotamia, whereas we say ancient Greece and like Mesopotamia is a Greek word for this place. So it's interesting to me that we always call it Mesopotamia, whereas we call ancient Greece, ancient Greece, and we call ancient Rome, ancient Rome, you know, it feels like,

If not intentionally separated, it is like inadvertently a separation from the modern people. Yeah. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that like in the 19th century, you know, uh, Mesopotamia was part of the, I think all of it was part of the Ottoman empire or at least a large part of it was. Yeah. Um, if not part of it was Persian, but, um,

You know, because Britain, you know, the British Empire and the French Empire specifically are approaching it as a colonized people or people that they plan to colonize in their future. You know, they're very much talking about them in the same way they talk about Africans and other Asians and so on. So, you know, they're not taking the people there seriously as a as a descendant of a great civilization or members of a great civilization.

Unlike in Greece where, you know, the Greek and Roman literary and mythological stories had been passed down more or less continuously. So you have Renaissance painters that are painting these Greek scenes. So, you know, by the time, and of course there's a whole European, you know, British involvement with like 19th century Greece and the independence against Ottoman empire. So that, you know, kind of like 19th century Greek nationalism is not entirely, but very much a European project of like, this is our heritage and we're, you know, we're defending ourselves against Easterners and so on.

Whereas in Mesopotamia, these texts aren't even really discovered until the mid to late 19th century. And we don't really know about, I mean, you know, the Greeks had mentioned them and we were aware that there was the ancient Babylonians and the Assyrians in this region, but we didn't know about the depth of historical time. And we didn't know exactly what the text said or what the myths were, you know, like anything about the Sumerians period.

It's funny, I haven't looked into this, but when Sumerian was first discovered and the language was translated and we were getting an idea of this, you know, these great city builders and so on, Europeans were pretty much universally, you know, they agreed that Sumerian was an Indo-European language and these were the ancient Aryans. And then, well, good news, guys, we found the ancient Aryans, all of our ancestors, who were the first white people. Oh my God.

Just right between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where all the white people come from. Yeah. And this tied into the whole skull measuring thing. We're like, well, these are white people's skulls. So good news, guys. So, you know, there's that. But I mean, the fact that, you know, A, it's an ancient civilization we only learned about recently, unlike Egypt, which is like, you know, known by the Greeks, known in the Bible and so on. And...

The fact that, you know, when the British and French and Europeans are showing up, these are, you know, mostly Muslim, mostly Arabic speaking. You know, they are not inclined to see them as members of their own civilization. So they're definitely talking about them as outsiders. So, I mean, I think part of that separation between ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq comes from these, you know, racist colonizers in the 19th century that don't want to make that connection.

Yeah, no, exactly. And I think it's, I just think that's so interesting. It's just something that's occurred to me recently. And like, just that way we're sort of taught it as a different place. Anyway, I, I'm already like throwing you into a political side because I don't know how to do anything else these days. But I do want to hear about the mythology itself. Cause I mean, I know the Epic of Gilgamesh is, I guess, you know, what, where I come from and that's basically it. And I know that a handful of, of the gods names and things, but I, I,

you know it's it's it's such an interesting thing because I feel like there's there's often these these names that go around but the stories beyond the epic of Gilgamesh like how much do we have that survives what kind of you know texts in terms of the mythology like where are we working with in that realm like is there is there a lot what yeah tell me what you know I mean that's that's a huge question obviously um I think Gilgamesh is probably a good place to start

Because I mean, people are aware of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's, you know, a book, a Penguin Classics book you could buy and so on. So that, I don't kind of, I, when we're talking, when I introduced the Sumerians, I kind of want to make a distinction. It's not a cultural distinction so much as it is a, there's a time like chronological distinction between the Sumerians and the Babylonians. So essentially Babylonia or Southern Babylonia is Sumer. It's the same geographical region. They lived in the same cities. There's kind of a continuity of culture and, and, you know, cultural practices, you know,

But Babylonian is a different language. So the Sumerians were conquered by Sargon of Akkad. And, you know, at that time, Sumer was this kind of very small geographical region that spoke the Sumerian language, which is unrelated to any other known language.

And kind of everyone north of them, so the area around Baghdad, northern Iraq, and much, if not all of Syria at the time, spoke the Akkadian language or very closely related East Semitic languages. So this is a distant relative of Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic. So we know Semitic languages. And obviously, European academics knew Semitic languages before we discovered the Akkadian language.

So, you know, Sargon's conquest is around 2300 BCE. By around 2000 BCE, it seems that nobody speaks Sumerian as a mother tongue anymore, or at the very least in the urban centers. You know, they continue to use Sumerian in writing. Scribes are in Sumerian. All the old texts are in Sumerian. The administration of governments is often still in Sumerian. But increasingly, starting around 2000 BCE,

we get texts, basically like instructional texts for scribes that appear to be written as if they don't know Sumerian and they have to be taught it. So, but at this point, yeah. So at this point, all of them are speaking Akkadian. So again, the Semitic language in Sumerian.

Kind of like the areas of Akkad and Sumer, it's Babylonian. So Babylonian is the southern dialect of Akkadian. And then Assyrian is the northern dialect of Akkadian. So from about 2000 until 500 BC or so. We can call that the Babylonian period. It's divided into old, middle, late Babylon and so on. Yeah.

So I bring it up because the Epic of Gilgamesh, as we know it, is a Babylonian epic. So it's written in the Babylonian language. It was the first fragments that we have date from 1800 BC or so. It probably reached its full modern form by around 1000 BC. And then the full texts, the full tablets we have from the Neo-Assyrian library are from the 600s BC.

So that's kind of the entire Babylonian era, which is the inheritors of the Sumerian language. But it's a different language. They have different names for the gods. It's like Greek and Roman. Very similar traditions, but they have their own names for the gods that they bring into it. And then, of course, it's just later. Yeah. So, yeah, when we're talking about the Sumerians, we're really talking about the 2000s BC in kind of south central Iraq. Yeah. Yeah.

And that is the period when they're actually speaking this as a mother tongue. They're probably speaking it to each other. It's a lingua franca between the urban centers and even between Sumer and the nearby urban centers that don't speak Sumerian.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Thank you. Because I, I did not know any of that. And absolutely, that's the most important context to start things off. I mean, I knew I Yeah, I knew what all the different regions but the the time periods and the the kind of loss of Sumerian but keeping it for administrative stuff. That's really interesting. Yeah.

Do we have any sense of what, like, I guess we wouldn't really know why they would do that. It just sort of like what happened, but that's really, that's really interesting. And then, so the Epic of Gilgamesh though, we know like what survives is from that, you know, 600s you said, but we know that it was considerably older, right? Cause we have, we must have fragments and things from earlier. Yeah.

Right. So we have earlier versions of this Babylonian epic, like fragments. So again, we don't know if it was the whole story or if they just had a part of the story that lines up with what became a part of this larger story.

Yeah. That are, you know, in the old Babylonian language in the old Babylonian period. But I also, I should mention that we do have Sumerian epics about Gilgamesh. So we have five, five poems and one of them has two different versions. So six total versions of Sumerian language poems about Gilgamesh. So these are probably produced for the Kings of Ur in the 21st century BCE. So the last century of the 2000s. Yeah. So this is kind of, I don't know, it's,

Like personally, my podcast has done the archaeology kind of up to 2100 BCE. And I have not gone further because I know there's I think there's 100,000 tablets dating from this one century. And I am not. Yeah. Well, and a lot of those are very kind of boring administrative, you know, like we give this much grain to these five workers. Yeah. It's like linear B, right? Like, well, exactly. Yeah. Or linear A rather. Or no, I guess not linear A. Jesus. Yeah.

Well, both. I mean, it's... Yeah, but Linear A, we don't know. I just, my brain went... Right. We don't actually know what Linear A says, Liv. But yeah, no, it's like Linear B with all the tablets where it's like, oh, it's great. We have this ancient Greek language from the Bronze Age, but they wrote down not exciting things at all. Well, actually, two things. Just one real quick. Yeah.

I don't know how to assess this claim, but I have come across, I've talked to a guy who has spent his entire life working on the linear A problem. And he has published a book arguing that it's the Hurrian language. So the Hurrians in kind of Northern Syria and like kind of the, the Northern mountain fringes of Mesopotamia, like Northern Syria to like Northeastern Iran area. Yeah.

A language that's unrelated to any existing, like, modern language, but had another... Right. Had some relatives in the past. Again, I don't know how to assess this. I don't speak Korean. Yeah. Yeah. It would kind of make sense, because all you have to do is get on a boat from where we knew they were and then go across the Turkish coast to Crete. And they're there. Yeah.

Yeah. Again, who knows if that's true? No, but that's interesting. Yeah, it's an interesting theory. Because it is, yeah. With the location of the Minoans, it really could be anything from that whole region, basically. Right. That's interesting to know.

Yeah, and then just kind of looking at the content of the linear B texts, and presumably the linear A text, they're really doing the exact same thing, kind of inventing from first principles, the same things that the Mesopotamians did in the late 3000s, when they have these big cities, they have to administer these big palace economies with all these different workers, this huge bureaucracy. And they just have to basically just keep receipts of everything, like administrative records of what materials are coming in, what materials are going out, who's getting paid, who owns what land, etc., etc.

um and you know they are obviously speaking a different language and they you know they're not close enough to the cuneiform using part of the world where they import the cuneiform language or writing script um so they invent their own you know first principles um but the thing about the cuneiform script that is invented in the late uh 3000s so at the end of the uruk period is that um

This is a book that came out in the early 90s by Denise Schmant-Besserat, and it's been assimilated by academia around QNA form. It hasn't really made it into the pop cultural consciousness yet that it wasn't really as much of an invention as it was just a combining of existing record keeping techniques.

So they were already using bits of clay and these tokens. So, you know, the tokens would be exchanged for, I don't know, I could talk a long time about this. I know you want to get to the mythology eventually. I mean, I love the history too. All I'll say is that they had these tokens with symbols on them and many of those symbols, like the first cuneiform signs were drawings of those tokens with those symbols.

So like there's a circle with a cross on it. So they had a disc shaped token with a cross on it that represented a sheep. And then one of the first cuneiform signs is a circle with a cross on it that represents a sheep.

I love learning that stuff. Thank you. I love to be able to kind of... I like that explanation for how and why something began like that. This really practical purpose and you can watch the progression. It's just so damn interesting. I might as well call this podcast Let's Talk About the Ancient World at this point because I just want to learn everything. Yeah.

So like now I'm into linear B, like in linear B it's interesting because we don't have stories, but we do have like the names of so many gods because of the record keeping around temples and things. So is that what we're working with when it comes to the Sumerians as well? It just like older and more ancient. So, you know, that, that stage of writing where they're only using it for records and nothing else, I'd say that last from the,

3,200 very roughly like that period of time is very hard to get dates from. So, you know, the late three thousands to maybe 2,800 or so is only, only records and only really from Uruk and a handful of other sites. Um,

Starting in the early 2000s BCE, we have a lot of texts from Ur that are doing the same kinds of administrative record type thing. Their advancement is they use the cuneiform script to indicate phonetic sounds instead of only words. So now instead of the symbols, you know, the symbol stands for a word. Now the symbol stands for a sound that you could use to clarify which word you mean or if you're spelling a person's name correctly.

So, I mean, that allows us to, A, we can be sure they're writing in the Sumerian language instead of writing some other language with a symbolic script. So that's in the early 2000s. And that is the next, you know, that is the like prerequisite for writing stories and poetry and things that aren't just here's an administrative language, you know, administrative system. This is a sign for sheep. This is a sign for grain, whatever. So by the 2500s BC or so, that's when we have our first...

We have a couple of really short stories. We have one about Gilgamesh's parents meeting and

that is kind of the courtship. And, you know, his, his dad, Luka Banda goes to the East where his mother kind of like mountain mountain goddess, I guess, bakes some bread and then he takes her back to meet his mom. Oh, that's so cute. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, lots of, lots of historical tie-ins there, but basically we have a couple of works of literature from the mid two thousands. And then the,

Sargon takes over We don't have any text surviving As in the tablet is from that period And the tablet is of a mythological narrative We do have the hymns that are accredited To Enheduanna Who is Sargon's daughter

And those are written down hundreds of years later, but scholars appear to agree that it's a pretty good chance that they were really written by an Edwana. We can't be sure, but it's unlikely they would say that unless it was true. And the texts themselves do seem to be serving the political propaganda purpose of the dynasty of Sargon.

Yeah, I read some of hers recently, the new translation by... Oh, Sofasela? Thank you. I was turning to look. You got it faster than me. Yeah, so beautiful. And I just love that Edwana's work exists as anything. But that, yeah, that's so...

Sorry, I cut you off too, but I'm just so, I'm so fascinated firstly by having record of stories from that period because it is just so, so, so far, so far before the Greeks ever thought of writing down a story. And so do we know...

Like I'm certain that they also had the tradition of oral storytelling because that's just what ancient cultures did in such a beautiful way. But do we have any sense of what drove them to record stories that early? Like in a written form? So I have a theory. I mean, this wouldn't necessarily apply to the mid-2000s when these are Sumerian speaking cities that are writing down the Sumerian myths that they use. In general, I think... Sorry.

In general, I think the tablets that we have, probably the text that they write down is the text that they perform during the religious ritual or performance or celebration or whatever. So probably as they're doing the sacrifice, as they're doing the procession of the god statue from city A to city B, as they're doing whatever they're doing, probably this is the text they're reading out. And we think that partially because the

The text itself has some of the hallmarks of an oral performance. It has repetition. It has these kind of couplets where it says the same thing twice, but in different ways that are kind of a poetic restating of it.

And, you know, you can imagine them kind of shouting it out to a big crowd and then reiterating the important parts and so on. And maybe they would have been some like we certainly have liars that survived from this time, like the bull liars from the Royal Tombs of Ur. So, I mean, there may be a musical performance aspect to it. I've seen people theorize there may have been a

like acting performance, like people dress up as the gods or something like that. I mean, so, I mean, we're only getting a very small fraction of what the experience of this was from the text. My theory about why we have so many, I mean, you know, literacy advances. So we have more texts from later periods than early periods, my theory. So we have a lot of texts that if they were not composed for the first time during the 21st century under these powerful Kings of Ur,

Probably they're reworking or re, I don't know what the word is, kind of like updating existing Sumerian texts and traditions and myths and so on. A, to serve the political needs of these kings of Ur who are inheriting from Sargon. So they're trying to recreate this like Mesopotamian-Hispanic empire. They don't realize much of it, but I mean, they're definitely trying to aspire to we are the one true king, you know,

But also this is in the period when the Sumerian language appears to be on its way out. We don't know exactly, but I guess that the reason they're writing all this stuff down is because the oral, like the oral nature of it is dying out and you can perform the Sumerian oral text as you have been doing, but more and more people won't understand it. Or you might not understand the dialect, like an archaic dialect that, you know, um,

So I think part of the reason why they're writing these texts down in a version of Sumerian that is rapidly becoming this kind of archaic dead language is to preserve it because everyone is speaking Babylonian, which, you know, is a Semitic language, but a lot of the vocabulary comes from Sumerian.

So it's still a continuation of the Sumerian culture. They still view the Sumerians as their own ancestors, their own culture, right? They don't think of themselves as we're the Babylonians and there's a separate people that were the Sumerians. Like we are the Sumerians. We just speak a different language, you know? Yeah. So they keep calling themselves the black headed people, which is kind of the Sumerian name for,

Them themselves us you know You know this is especially the case After around 2000 when you know We have more and more indications that nobody Speaks Sumerian and even though everyone Speaks Babylonian and all of the Non temple And non you know kind of All the you know we have letters and stuff between merchants Like all of that stuff is in Sumerian All of that stuff is in Babylonian now So none of them are using Sumerian Unless they're in this very elite Educated context

I just love the idea that they wanted to write it down. Like, that's just so... That's so cool. Because even just the recognition that language is dying out and so you want to record it, like, that feels just so...

Like, I don't, I mean, I love the Greeks, but that just feels so like above what they ever did. Like we only have, you know, we, they, they didn't write down Homer for like 500 years and, you know, they, they just watched a language die out or maybe they didn't, you know, really conceptualize linear B like becoming lost, but just this idea of like,

Like such a similar thing, I guess. Though linear view is just a writing system, you know, it wasn't. So it's, it's, I don't know. I'm kind of talking around myself around in circles now, but I just absolutely, I find that so interesting as compared to the Greeks where we, we do have, you know, such an enormous period of time when not only were they, you know, just not writing a lot of stuff down, but almost like not writing stories down specifically, like storytelling stayed this, this,

oral thing that they just you know it took a good long time before they were like maybe we should record this for the future and and so the the sort of foresight uh to to be writing that type of thing down in sumerian is it's just very interesting well i will say in the ilia there is the one little mention of remembering language

I forget there's someone tells a story about someone else. I think it's Bellerophon. I might be wrong about a story about someone who you basically they give him a text. They call it like baleful signs or something.

Baneful signs? I don't know. Basically, they give someone, an illiterate person a text that says, kill this guy, and he can't read it. He goes to the other place, and he gets killed. Yeah, that is Bellerophon, I believe. Yeah, okay. So, I don't know if that's kind of a winking reference to, like, we remember Linear B, or whether it's in the Iron Age, like, we don't know language, but these other guys do, so maybe they're using, you know, some other language, you know.

Yeah. No, that I love those little bits and pieces you can kind of find in that, that, that, well, I mean, it is so fun because it is so full of like things that you can tell are from this earlier time and then recorded later. And then also like completely like, what's the word I want? You know, I can't find it when it doesn't fit the timeline. Right. When things are like completely anachronistic. Right.

Words are hard today. Yeah, like, it's... There's such an interesting combination. Yeah, I just... Having that story... Also, it's like, the Iliad and the Odyssey are obviously... I mean, I love them to the ends of the earth, and they're invaluable pieces of literature, but they're, like, this big epic thing that was written down. So I just love the idea that we also have, like, just a little fragment of, like, Gilgamesh's parents meeting. Yeah.

Like that, I mean, maybe it was from a larger epic, but it just feels like such a nice quaint little thing as compared to what we end up having from the Greeks from that earliest time. And of course, much later we get little things like that. But I mean, of course, it's also all about survival. And the nice thing about, I imagine, a lot of the tablets like in Linear B is that

fire ends up preserving a lot of, a lot of that stuff in a way that, you know, if it wasn't on a clay tablet that happened to go through a fire, it wouldn't have happened. But yeah, that's not always the case. Cause I mean, clay will air dry. Right. The only problem is that like, that's how we have most of the tablets. Like most of them were not burned in a fire. Most of them were just buried and we found them. Great. But the problem with that is that if it's just air dried and not like turned into ceramic, it's very fragile and flaky and it breaks apart.

So, I mean, unlike, you know, like Homer, we have the Byzantine era manuscripts, right? That, you know, scribes copy down and copy down over the centuries. And eventually we have one big scroll or something that is the more or less complete text. And either we have that or we have nothing. Like, right, the accident of Euripides surviving is that we either have, you know, this play or we don't have anything. Or we have one quote from Plato. Versus, you know, here we don't have, like, obviously the chain of transmission was broken sometime in the Iron Age or so.

So we only have the objects that were produced by these ancient scribes. And because they're made of this material that can survive, but, you know, it's unlikely to survive intact. You know, we have most of the, we have most of the tablet. Maybe we have it in a couple of chunks and, you know, along the cracks where it's broken, we just will never know what those signs were.

So a lot of the times in these ancient texts, you will have large chunks that are just missing or maybe this word says this, but we don't have the whole sign, so we can't be sure. And frustratingly, because you start at the top and go down to the bottom, the top and the bottom are the most likely parts to break. So often we're missing the beginning versus the end. So we only have the middle of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the question of transmission is something that will haunt me for the rest of time.

Like what we don't have because scribes didn't do it. Right. Yeah. Just on transmission though. One thing I should have mentioned earlier is that like, there's, there's kind of two questions for like, how do we have this in writing? Like the first one is how was it written down for the first time?

But really how we have this particular story, the vast majority of the time, it's because, you know, centuries earlier, someone decided to write it down for the first time. And then it was written down continuously by scribes who were learning how to practice the language and especially learning how to practice the, like, you know, the dead Samaritan language or just the archaic literary form of language that they wouldn't use. Yeah.

So, you know, they have to learn how to write the, you know, literary form of the language as it exists in these texts that are passed down. So, you know, we usually have the version that was written down by the 50th scribe to copy it down, who copied it down from this person. And they don't, like sometimes to update the language, like it's not word for word the way it used to be, but it is often sentence for sentence. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The more it's coming down, the more likely. Yeah. Literally. Yes. And because they're often students learning how to write. Yeah. We do have those mistakes. We have math mistakes. You know, we have like someone's homework that they threw it up on and we still have, you know, they're, they're, you know, forgot to carry the one or whatever. Yeah. I love that. That's yeah. I mean, anytime there's that stuff in any kind of ancient world, I'm just so completely obsessed. Yeah.

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I realize I've picked your brain about the history so, so much and I could keep going forever, but I would love to hear more about the, what kind of mythology exists? What do we know about, you know, I, you, you focus on, or you in, in your outline, you said specific God. So I'm happy for you to focus on whoever you, you know, know most, most about or most interested in, but I would love to hear what we know about any, any of their, their deities or, or the stories themselves. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, in the outline I sent, I focus on Enki and Inanna. So Enki is the patron god of Eridu. And I should mention, kind of compared to the Greek tradition, in the Sumerian tradition, the gods are much more tied to a very particular city and a very particular temple in that city. That makes sense. So, like, you know, in their imagination, the god lives in a building that you can walk to and, you know, leave an offering at the building or whatever, you know, you're probably not gonna be allowed inside the building, but you can see it. Mm-hmm.

And you can go there and people tell you like, oh yeah, that is the home of Enki that he created, you know, at the beginning of time. And you can see it. And, you know, maybe they didn't know in the exact same way that we know now, but in 2000 BC, you go to Eridu and you're looking at a building that is 4,000 years old, or at least the site there has been continuously rebuilt on over and over and over and over, you know, for 4,000 years. And in a way that is what makes the temple so important is that they have this particular square of land has been the temple for thousands of years.

Yeah. That's so cool. That's like the Greeks when they went to Egypt and they were like, holy shit, these pyramids are wild. Yeah. Just like that, that span of time. So that's interesting. So they, so Inanna though, she's pretty widespread. Is she not? Am I wrong in that? So the answer is yes. Yeah. It's, it's difficult to say whether Inanna spread out of Uruk because Uruk was the most important city in like West Asia. Um,

For a large part of the three thousands and into the two thousands, like it was the biggest city by far. There are indications that it was politically powerful. It's very hard to say what that means before, you know, written language. Yeah.

So it's not clear whether Inanna existed in Uruk before and then she spread out to the rest of the area and now everyone worships the Uruk version of Inanna. Or whether this is just a particular archetype of a goddess. Because there are similar goddess statues and images of goddesses that we see all over, like all over everywhere, all over Eurasia. And, you know, for sure outside of the area that Uruk would have had direct contact with.

So it's also not clear if the version of Inanna that we have from texts, you know, in the after 2000 BC mostly, you know, does that reflect other goddesses influencing Uruk or is it just kind of a shared archetype around this whole region? Like we don't know.

Um, what we do know is that Inanna is very much more interesting than most female goddesses, especially from the Iron Age and later. Um, and yeah, I mean, part of that may be from an, I mean, I would imagine part of it is from an earlier period when, you know, women had a larger role in society and, um,

the female aspect of divinity was accepted, you know, because like there is for sure in Mesopotamian mythology over like between the 2000s and the 1000s, we do see female goddesses being replaced by male gods. So Inanna is a warrior goddess. She, you know, part of her role is to lead men in battle and to sow heads like barley, sorry, to reap heads like barley. That's a joy. Thank you.

No, yeah. So she's a ferocious lion that is rampaging over the battlefield. And probably this has to do with Uruk and its enormous army waging some kind of battle with someone. But later on, after a certain point, we only have male warrior gods. And earlier on, we have Nisaba, the female writing goddess. Later on, we have Nabu, the male writing god, etc. Those are writing goddess? Yes, Nisaba.

Nisaba. How do you spell that? Because now I have to write it down. Yeah. N-I-S-A-B-A. Okay. Nice and simple. I am obsessed now. Thank you. Yeah. But she got replaced. Yeah. Eventually. Naturally. Mm-hmm.

Okay, so then when it comes to Inanna, is that where, because I know that Ishtar, this is me going like, I just have Googled some Mesopotamian stuff and also read Edheduanna. Because Ishtar and Inanna are usually linked. Is that where that's kind of coming from? Or is that the language changing? What's that? So the way I understand this is like, you know, Cimmerian has Inanna that she is the

you know, she's tied to the Kings of Uruk. Like she is in many ways, what, um, legitimizes the dynasty of Uruk at some point in history. Um, so, you know, Sumer is conquered by Sargon of Akkad. You know, Akkad is kind of up North in this Acadian speaking region. Um,

He wants to be the legitimate king of the Sumerians as well as these other regions. And there appears to have been a goddess named Ishtar or something like Ashtar. It's spelled differently in earlier texts, but it's the same goddess. And

You know, we don't know exactly what the order of events here is besides the fact that when, you know, once he is the legitimate king, he builds an enormous temple in his hometown of Akkad or Agade to Ishtar. And that is his version of Inanna. So when he shows up in Sumer, he's like, well, I am beloved by Inanna, who I call Ishtar because I have this big temple to her in my hometown. And that, you know, that gives me the legitimacy to be your king and to build your temples in your area. Yeah.

So, I mean, probably there are two separate gods originally, but because of this cultural, political, social fusion, you know, once they are speaking Babylonian and they have this unified tradition with two different branches, they, you know, they have two different names for the same goddess. They call her Ishtar, but they know that she has called the Nana in their sacred text and probably in performances of the rituals and so on. And from then on, they call her Ishtar as her primary name, but the text also calls her a Nana. And, you know,

Yeah, so Inanna is a Sumerian phrase. Probably the original phrase would have been Nin Anak, which means lady of heaven or like lord of heaven, gender neutral. Gender neutral with heaven. What a concept. Yeah, Sumerian is... I'm not an expert in the language itself. I don't think there are...

I don't think the language is necessarily gendered in that you have to have a separate male and female word for everything. Obviously, they do have specific words for father and mother and so on. But like, yeah, it's not as like intensely gendered as other languages. And that does appear to link up with.

a less patriarchal outlook compared to the later Mesopotamian cultures. Yeah. Interesting. I'm glad you're just really like, I mean, my, my ongoing theory is just all the different ways that there was, you know, that the patriarchy slowly quashed any kind of equality, let alone just general like,

yeah female power at all so that's really that's really interesting even language it reminds me I recently spoke with Emily Hauser who talks about how women became poets and but in a very literal sense of like there was no feminine word for poet at all like they didn't even have a word for Sappho

They like wouldn't call her a poet, like all of these different. It's such an interesting thing to see how language, especially a gendered language, can can make those can like just really like make it or really change how how we how we understand language.

what people are. So anyway, that that's fascinating to know. It was, I don't even, sorry, but my ADHD is going wild today too. But that is, that is such an interesting way of just knowing that there was not a gendered Lord or lady of heaven. I love that. That's where you were, I believe. Yeah. That's so, I mean, going back to N Heduana. Yeah. She was the N,

The N, like E-N, is the Sumerian word for lord. It has all these other meanings, but I mean, it's usually translated as lord. She was the lord of the Temple of Nana, who is the moon god of Ur.

So this is one, obviously one of the big, famous, important temples of Sumer that Sargon is trying to establish himself as legitimate king over. And it was common for kings to place their daughter in charge of a prominent temple. And the way that works is the human in charge of the temple is married to the god. So you need the opposite gender from the god to be in charge of the temple.

So you have a male moon god in Ur that needs a woman to be his wife and to be politically in charge of the whole temple bureaucracy. And also to perform whatever main ritual it is that symbolizes marriage between the male god and the female human. Yeah. That's really cool, too. So women just got to lead temples because they were gods. Yes. Yeah.

That and their appearance, like the word N, E-N, appears to be, and this is hotly debated, it appears to be the name of the head guy in charge of Uruk during the peak of Uruk's power, because Inanna is a female goddess. So you need a man in charge of the Temple of Arrakis to be the husband of Inanna. Right.

and this is what ties into the sacred marriage like the heroes gamos um that you know we don't know exactly what it was um again that this also ties back into the herodotus thing where it's like oh well there was for sure a temple prostitute and you know whoever she is for sure had sex with the king like you know maybe personally i think it was the king and his wife that have a you know very important night um that you know rejuvenates the kingdom and ensures fertility and all that kind of stuff yeah um

And in that case, his wife would be... The idea of just automatically assuming prostitutes, sorry. It's just like the most Greek thing. Yeah. And this is something that I have yet to study in detail, so I don't want to make any definitive pronouncements on it. My impression is it's probably more boring and less shocking than some random woman has sex with a king in public or whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's... Yeah. It's wild. That's really interesting. And it had...

They're all, I, sorry, now I'm resetting my brain. I promise I can talk every once in a while. It just becomes, you know, I'm sure, you know, as a podcaster, um, that is, I, I just absolutely love to hear about obviously these goddesses and, and even just women in, in the real human world who, who had that sort of power. Then when it comes to the Epic of Gilgamesh, um,

just because to I'm going to bounce around apparently with all the mythology questions I want to ask you but I'm trying to think of it's been a long time since I read it but am I connecting this to goddesses or just so I want to hear you talk about the epic of Gilgamesh that's the next question my brain is asking but I you know I would love to hear I guess about that or how it connects with Inanna's in it is that right Ishtar she's in it yes she's like the sacred goddess

Yeah, so Gilgamesh is the king of Uru. So, I don't know, the question ties into it twice in the Epic of Gilgamesh, because like...

I don't know. In the questionnaire I filled out to, you know, apply to be a guest, one of the things we were looking for is like the, you know, LGBT history of the ancient world. And I don't know. I could make an argument that the text of the Babylonian epic intends you to read Gilgamesh and Enkidu as lovers. Yeah. So at the beginning, Gilgamesh is this tyrannical king. He's abusing his, you know,

enforcing the right of the first night with the women that are getting married. He's taking all the men out to war and wearing them out. Uh, you know, everyone hates this guy. So, you know, the people cry out to the gods to solve our problem and fix this guy for us. So they send, you know, Enkidu, who's this kind of beast man. He's living with animals. He's eating grass with the herds in, you know, in the wild. Um, he gets found by a trapper and his son. Um, they bring a quote unquote temple prostitute from Uruk from the temple of Inanna named Shamhat. Um,

And this is another, like one of the main things that this whole idea is based on. So she goes to see Enkidu. They have sex for one or two weeks, depending on the translation. And this is a process that makes him human. Like now, now, you know, now he has known the, you know, the touch of a woman and specifically not any woman, but a woman who is a major priest or major official in the temple of Inanna, which is the main, you know, organ of Sumerian civilization period.

Yeah. So now he's been civilized by sex with, you know, with this thing that has a connection to the Temple of Inanna. So now he is a, you know, he has the wisdom of man and so on, and he loses his animal strength. So he goes to see, to basically fight Gilgamesh. So Gilgamesh, you know, they have this fight, but where they meet is at, it's at a bridal chamber. I forget...

exactly how they get there but they have this big fight they meet at a bridal chamber they have this intense physical contest and Gilgamesh is civilized through contact with us so it parallels the sex that he just had with Shama they have this intense thing and at the end of this intense physical contest now they're best friends and Gilgamesh has been fixed so Gilgamesh has been brought to civilization by this you know so and the fact that it happens in a bridal chamber I think there was something going on there literally um

Oh, sorry. And then the other thing is that at some point, and this is also, we also have a Sumerian poem about this, is that Inanna tries to proposition Gilgamesh. And this probably has something to do again with the whole kingship ritual of Uruk, where the king does some ritual to symbolize sex with Inanna. So Inanna shows up in person to Gilgamesh and says, hey, let's do it. He says no, because all of your previous boyfriends ended up meeting some kind of tragic end. He lists them. Yeah.

And this, you know, pisses her off and she goes up to unleash the bowl of heaven, like this big monster to tear up Uruk and he has to fight the bowl of heaven. You know, he and Enkidu eventually defeat the bowl. So, I mean, given that this was written down kind of during, sorry, and I'll say one more thing about Shamhat, which is that when Enkidu is dying,

he's punished by the gods for defeating another mythical monster type guy. As he's dying, he curses Shamhat and says, basically the curse he gives is you will be a basically streetwalker. Like, you know, you will be the lowest of the lowest of the sex workers. No one will respect you. You know, you'll be abused and so on. And then he changes his mind and like, nevermind. I changed my mind. That's a little harsh. You know, he gives her a blessing. So I think, and it's not my original idea, but people have talked about this as kind of representing the ambivalence of

you know, women, Inanna, the temple of Inanna, sex in general, you know, patriarchy, kind of like it's, it's this ambivalence between this older version of, you know, Inanna is the main goddess. Women are, if not equal, at least they have an important role in society. Sex is normal and not a shameful or, you know, a private thing.

to this very patriarchal, you know, women are in the household, all the important gods are male, everyone in public life is male. The only women, you were like, this is by the end of the 1000s BCE in Assyria, this is when we first have the first legal reference to veiling. And it's not that women are required to wear the veil. It's that it's expected that upper-class women will get to wear the veil and lower-class women are not allowed to wear the veil. So it's expected that everyone wants to. And that if you're appearing uncovered in public, it's because you're quote-unquote available.

you know, to, to the patriarchal appetite and so on. So the idea is that everyone will want to, and their punishment is for lower class women wearing the veil, even though they're not allowed to. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. I, I, yes, this, this like kind of fight between like an earlier form of what I'll just call equality between the genders, you know, it's,

as like i just love the idea of it kind of a text representing this this clash between this earlier time when women had power and status because i i find that in a lot of greek texts more and more that i read them you know that just even how we see certain goddesses aphrodite as compared to hera when particularly we know that a lot of aphrodite's you know

character and conceptualization is coming from the East coming from I mean there's I'm going to not be able to reference any kind of reasonable argument but I know the argument is there that you know Ishtar and Nana leads to Aphrodite down the line of these characters that kind of are being you know obviously these regions all were in contact and they're you know influencing each other in whatever way but I just love

to be able to visualize this kind of contradiction between these generations. So yeah, seeing in the story this sort of the fight between a powerful Inanna, an incredibly important Inanna as compared to what you were saying with

with Shamhat, it's so interesting. And so do you think that these things are coming from the span of time I imagine that this story was being told as compared to when it was recorded for us? Right.

Yeah, and, you know, we don't know because there are so many gaps in between these, you know, Sumerian texts probably written in the 21st century, and we have the tablets are mostly from the 18th century BC versus the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is, you know, probably begun around that the time when we have the Sumerian text, and then the final version is a thousand years later or so. Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh, there's just so much. I mean, ancient texts broadly, like I could talk forever. Mm hmm.

um so do you like i mean i i'm also just like unfamiliar with quite how much you know mythology does exist but oh actually no to go back to gilgamesh and kidu being being lovers because i i'm so glad to hear that i just remember i i know i covered it on the show i think it was like right at the beginning of the pandemic actually so so long ago now um but

I just remember like going through it and I'd read it in school and everything. And, and I, you know, forget what I thought, but I just remember going through it, you know, in, in, on the podcast and just thinking like, these guys are obviously lovers. Like I, I just, that's my main memory of it is just that there was a hell of a lot of evidence. And so like, is that something, I mean, I imagine that's something that people talk about pretty broadly, like pretty often nowadays, but yeah, I mean, yeah, you, you, you made the argument. Do you think that,

I don't know what question I'm asking. I just want to talk more about, I guess, them as lovers. Or if we know what kind of was accepted back then, really anything. So as to the question of LGBT issues in the Sumerian world, that's very tricky. I'll come back to that. I will say one quick thing about the Iliad is that when Achilles is mourning Patroclus, the text describes him, his grief, as the grief of a lioness who comes back from, you've heard this?

I think so. Or I just know, like, I want this line, but I'm nodding because I know that Achilles' grief is a woman's grief in every way. Yeah. Well, there's that. But the text describes his grief as that of a lioness coming back to see that someone else has killed her cubs. And that exact metaphor also appears in the Gilgamesh, when Gilgamesh is in the Enkidu.

So, I mean, I think there's probably this, you know, archetype or whatever of, you know, to, you know, a man mourning is the closest, you know, the most important man in his life. Yeah. That uses this particular metaphor. And, you know, it comes at a very particular point in the story. It's kind of the end of the end of the heroic part and beginning of the tragic part, if you will.

That okay now now the fun part is over now we are really in the grief, you know, in the Iliad Patrick was his death obviously foreshadows Achilles, and everyone grieving him they're really grieving Achilles who's the main character of the story and we know he's gonna die and so on.

And I mean, the rest of the Epic of Gilgamesh is about Gilgamesh's grief and Gilgamesh's knowledge of his own death, right? Because his brother dies. And now the second half of the story is about him confronting his own mortality and human mortality and the limits of the human body and so on. So a lot of parallels. No, no, a lot of parallels between Achilles and Patroclus and Gilgamesh and Enkidu. That's really interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and it's so, I mean, I think so much comes, I mean, it makes perfect sense really is what I guess I'm, I don't know if I'm forming words right now, but it makes sense, you know, that, that these kinds of relationships would form. And it's just such an interesting thing to imagine that we have to really fight for it to be like a reasonable argument that these men were lovers, like as if,

As if there's, it's just, I sort of were required to think like it's either one or the other two that like either they were lovers or, you know, Achilles was, you know, straight and, you know, what, like, it's just an interesting, it's an interesting thing to just discuss broadly these days because like, it just feels to me like so obvious and it doesn't really make a big change.

To just be like, well, yeah, they were probably lovers because the text described them as loving each other pretty like, you know, pretty deeper than than just good pals, I guess, you know, and it's so it's interesting. Like in Greece, we have so much.

Being, you know, coming in from the the pederasty of it all, you know, the nature of kind of what is and is not OK. And what does it say about Achilles if he is in this relationship? But it's really not about, you know.

whether he's in the relationship it's about which role he was taking on if he wasn't it's just such a it's a fascinating thing to just be breaking down these types of relationships in stories where they're it's very clear that these two men had an intimate relationship in whatever way that is but it's like this this fight to be able to call it intimate because it implies something i don't know this is now my an ongoing rant but i love to hear that that it is

I mean, so similar in so many ways to Achilles and Patrick was so specifically like, I mean, there's so much influence. I love it. And the interesting thing is like, you know, in the larger context of this transition from a, you know, more, more equal time to a more patriarchal time. It's, it's kind of complicated by the fact that in the Sumerian epics about Gugamesh, Enkidu is Gugamesh's slave. Like he's not his equal. There, there's no reference to them having any kind of close relationship whatsoever. He's just a loyal slave.

So whatever kind of romantic relationship that must have been added later or emphasized later or whatever that was not in the original scenario. That's even more interesting and dark. Yeah. Just as late. Well, yeah, that's weird.

I mean, I don't know. That's just very interesting. Also, it's just fascinating to have a story that was living and changing for so long. We know the Iliad was for a few hundred years, but we don't really have too much evidence that we can actually look at because of how it survived. But having access to these tablets that span such a

long period of time. And, and so are there a lot of places where, where the storyline kind of diverges in that, that strong a way, or that's the wrong word, but you know, that, that kind of severe, I guess. Well, so yeah,

So we have five Gilgamesh epics and let's see, at least two of them appear in the epic, the Babylonian epic in more or less the same form. The part where he defeats the bowl of heaven with the Nana and so on. And the part where he defeats Humbaba or Huwaba in Sumerian. So those, those, you know, episodes were probably, you know, told, you know, popular stories to tell and then retold in a similar way in the Babylonian epic.

We have some other ones that are not included at all. There's one where he goes to war against Kish in the north that does not appear in the epic at all. That one actually does tie in interesting ways to the historical record because King of Kish

that he goes to war against his father is named Enmei Bargesi who appears in the Sumerian king list as a one of the important kings of Kish and we have texts from that historical king in real life so that's I think the first historical figure that is mentioned in both the you know the archaeological record and in the Sumerian legendary record wow

Yeah, so he I mean, this is just me again, trying to connect a degree because it's what I understand. But so he's very much their Heracles, right? So he's just like featuring in to so many different stories in over so much time. Just it does he kind of fit that role of like, the you know, the I don't know, the I get whatever role that Heracles this is a terrible question. I apologize. But do you think he's similar to Heracles?

There is for sure. There's the lion defeating lion motif, which I mean, Gilgamesh defeats, you know, fights lions in the epic. We have all kinds of art of heroic figures that may or may not be Gilgamesh or the current king of Uruk or some other legendary figure fighting lions or beasts. And I mean, I think there's that aspect. The thing about Gilgamesh specifically is that he appears to be a kind of venerated royal ancestor, not just in Uruk, but for all of Sumer.

So we have a person's name that is, I think Gilgamesh is the chosen one of Utu, who is the sun god.

I forget. I want to say that that particular like inscription is from Ur. I'm not sure. Anyway, that's like 2700 BC. So right at the beginning of language that we can read in Sumerian, we have a person's name that references Gilgamesh. Some people use this to argue that Gilgamesh was the king at that time. And this guy's name was praising the current king. That may be so. It may be that he was, you know, his name is praising a legendary figure. But we have in the kingdom of Lagash, kind of Southeastern Sumer in the 2400s,

The kings all have their, you know, their father's tomb and their, you know, their ancestors tomb so the kings are paying homage to their own ancestors and the previous kings of this kingdom. And in the same way, the same kind of ritual, they were also paying homage to Gilgamesh. So they see themselves as in a real, you know, political way the inheritors of Gilgamesh's kingdom and legacy.

So, I mean, I think my, again, this is my personal theory, because Uruk was the biggest city in Sumer by far in the late 3000s, early 2000s. It appears to have been the center of this political phenomenon that was the creation of urban society and all that kind of stuff. My guess is that all these kings in various Sumerian cities, they have to trace their legitimacy back to that particular period of Uruk's history.

That was, you know, these kings did this ritual with Inanna. Inanna, you know, they were beloved by Inanna. So she legitimized their kingdom. Therefore, me ruling in Lagash in the 2400s dates back to those guys in Uruk, you know, the 3200s or whatever. It's giving a need. Yeah. That need to like align yourself with a more ancient culture. That's interesting. Yeah.

No, I mean, similar with Sargon, right? He has to align himself with the Inanna archetype, you know, the Inanna analog in his own society, both to legitimize himself to the Siberians, like, oh, you know, the goddess that legitimized your kings, she legitimizes me too. And also to, you know, to talk to the other people outside of Siberia, like, oh, you know, the important Siberian goddess that, you know, was in charge of the Siberian, you know, most important dynasty, that's me too. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. I mean, so I love just hearing the ways in which the ancient cultures were all so similar in very unique ways, but so similar, you know, just these things that...

That really legitimized rulers, especially when you're going around trying to conquer other people. Especially this...

when your language is different or you're trying to adapt and, and, you know, combine with other cultures too, because so often, you know, call it, they were colonizing for sure, but they weren't necessarily trying to like wipe out an entire culture. Like we consider colonization now, you know, it was a lot more of like, we're, you know, we're colonizing, we're ruling you, but there was a, often a kind of intention to like meld things together to make it, you know, seem more legitimate. Right.

versus to completely destroy an earlier culture. And I just find that if we can say anything was okay about colonization, that part's nicer. Well, I mean, I think if anything, it drives home just how historically anomalous and, you know, brutal and vicious settler colonization is. Because I mean, in the ancient world, there's a finite number of people and you need as many people as you can to work your fields and do all the kind of manual labor and stuff, you know, tend your herds.

you know, if you're conquering someone, you're going to make them pay tribute to you. You're going to put your guys in charge, give them big estates or whatever, but the population of the city will remain more or less. I mean, okay. The, the, the, um,

you know, this is true unless there is a violent conquest where you kill all the men and the slave, all the women and so on. Like there is that. So I, you know, obviously that's not like they're not there. Yeah. But, but you can't do that to every kingdom you conquer or you'll have no kingdom. You'll let you rule over a wasteland. You know, you, you have to do that. You know, people chose to do that to set an example. But ultimately you want to rule the people that you conquer so that they can do the work because you need people to do the work. You know, there, there's not enough people in the entire world to,

To kill all the different ethnicity and then import your entire ethnicity to do the jobs that they were already doing. Yeah, I guess that is... I need to use the term settler colonization more. Like, in terms of what does make it so much more fucked up today. Because it really... Anyway. Yeah, it's... Yeah, that's...

Sorry, now I'm resetting my brain from that. Yeah, it's just, it's a fascinating thing. I think of this with like the Hellenistic kings too, because it was a sort of similar thing where they would, you know, go in and make a temple a kind of combo between their gods and the local gods, because it just wasn't about, you know, wiping a culture entirely off the map. That, that

That came with the Judeo-Christian religions, which was nice of them. So it's, yeah, it's just such a foreign thing to us now. And I, it's just, it's fascinating. They were all colonizing, but it just was so much less dark. It's, yeah. So when it comes to the mythology itself, like,

do you, one of my favorite things about Greek mythology is that we have such objectively silly stories that are coming from this ancient world where we just think of like, Oh, the wonders of, of the ancient people and all they, all they were able to achieve. But like, does, does Mesopotamia do Sumerian have silly myths too, that you like? So I have some stories about Enki and Enki is a trickster God. And those are the best.

yes so it you know like hermes is the analog like the american hermes um but that's all i want in a myth so thank you well just the idea that he is um and i read a book called trickster makes this world by i think lewis hyde that argue i did not really understand what the whole deal with tricksters is because like you hear stories about them doing wacky pranks and you know getting uh you know pulling pranks and you know getting uh

consequences made it out to them in return. I never really understood why they were also so intimately tied with creation myths and with the, you know, the, the ideological stories about why things are the way they are. Like how, what does that have to do with this guy being silly? So the, the explanation that this book has is that, you know, these narratives about this guy who wants like, you know, everyone else is living this kind of ordered polite life. He wants, he wants to transgress those boundaries. He wants something that he can't have under the polite rules.

So he comes up with a trick to get it or manipulate someone to get it, or, you know, he's going to be, you know, basically manipulate or extract what he wants. And for a while, he's driven by this kind of base urge to get what he wants and he gets it, but he faces the consequences. Someone finds out he gets punished. He gets, you know, he falls into his own trap.

And then he has to, you know, his process of coming to terms with, you know, winning and then being defeated and then having to reintegrate into the social order that he violated. You know, that is the story of why these social rules exist in the first place. So like, why, you know, why is this like this? Well, it's because this one guy tried to do it the other way. And then he, you know, he fooled himself. Yeah. So that, and yeah, I'm looking at the story of Enki, sorry, Enki and Ninhursanga.

And this is a quick content warning. And it sounds worse than, well, it's pretty bad. Content warning for incest and child sexual abuse. The ancient myths. Well, yes. So it starts off with what is objectively just a very silly image, which Enki plowing fields with his erect phallus.

So Inky is, he's a trickster. He's a god of wisdom and fresh water, but also he's a creation god of, you know, his creative force is male sexuality. So lots of dick stuff.

And, of course, the imagery of plowing a field with a dick analog, or in this case, literally a dick, that ties into the sex poetry between Inanna and Dumuzi, where there's a lot of like, oh, plow my irrigated fields kind of thing. So, you know, that's there. Great. Yeah, I mean, if, yeah, that, there's a lot of that. A lot of very explicit sex poetry between Inanna and Dumuzi about their consummation of their marriage. And just...

Plowing fields. Yeah. So in the story, you know, his wife is Ninhursanga. And this is, I don't know if I can definitively make statements about this, but there is a very common archetype of the Sumerian goddess that is a mother who creates humans by molding them out of clay. So she's a sculptor and a clay worker. And that is the story that's passed down to the Babylonians of how humans were created is a mother goddess made them out of clay.

And also in Sumerian poetry, there's a lot of parallels between the womb and the pottery kiln. So the idea that it's a vessel that you put the human life into and it turns it into a finished human life. Yeah. And also between wombs and pots. So again, we have the clay vessel that holds the important thing that you're moving around. This may tie into a widespread prehistoric practice where if a baby died young, they would bury it in a pot.

So they're called infant jar burials. They're widespread all across, especially northern Mesopotamia in the 4000s, especially 3000s. So that may be, you know, you died, you know, you weren't able to fully reach your adult form, but we're going to bury you in a womb analog because you were still a child or a baby. So there's a very potent kind of, you know, imagery thing going on with the mother who makes the human out of clay and then the human is baked in the kiln and the womb is the kiln and also the pot.

um yeah and also craftsmen like artisans other kinds of sculptors also have a either a different goddess or a similar goddess that um nin moog is her name the lady of the sculptor but um maybe i'm obsessed with that the greeks then just were like the men did it the men sculpted the humans from clay no no exactly i'm glad it was a woman in that um

Yeah, so, right, that's Enki's wife. So Enki is the male sexuality creator god, she's the female sexuality creator god. So in this story, Enki and Nintrasanga, they have sex, she gives birth to a daughter. So now Enki has sex with that daughter, and she gives birth to another daughter. Then he has sex with his granddaughter now, and she gives birth to another daughter. So three or four times, depending on the version of the myth, he has sex with his daughter to create another daughter.

So eventually his wife has a problem with this for obvious reasons. And so she, she devises a trick. So now he's going to fall into his own trap. Cause you know, he's, he's dripping semen all over the place. So she tricks him into creating plants that are, that grow from his semen kind of like the, the mandrake and European lore. I did not know about that. Now I'm learning everything. Love it. Thank you. Yeah. That's I forget the details. I think it's hanged men,

The, you know, with the last drops of semen out of their, out of their junk after they die, fall onto the ground. And then a mandrake grows from that. And that's shaped like a human. I think I might get that wrong, but that's, that's also, yeah. Great. Thank you. Yeah. So yeah. So Enki is a creator God and he's, you know, they're at the beginning of cosmological history. So he's still assigning the destinies to everything.

So he sees these plants that he, you know, does not remember creating that are made from his semen. And he assigns them destinies like, oh, I don't remember these, but it gives their names on. And then he eats them and impregnates himself accidentally because he eats the plant that was grown from his own semen. So now he's falling into his own trap. Right.

So now he's falling victim to the same thing that he was victimizing others with. So his wife, of course, is a mother goddess and a goddess of childbirth and fertility. So now he has to enlist her help to help him give birth, but he doesn't have a womb. So he's going to have to give birth out of his various other body parts. And here's a bit that does not translate well out of the Sumerian because the names of the body part that he gives birth to a god out of, he gives birth to a god with a name similar to that body part.

Right. Like his hair is called Siki, I think. So he gives birth to the goddess Nin Sikila, which means the pure lady. But it sounds like hair and so on. So there's a bunch of these. But the one that I think is, you know, intensely, intensely interesting is the goddess Ninti, which in Sumerian means lady of life. She's born from his rib. And the Sumerian word for rib is ti.

So you have a goddess named Lady of Life who's born from his rib. So in the book of Genesis, Eve is Hebrew for life and she's born from Adam's rib.

So I didn't know that was Hebrew for life. That really adds something. Thank you. Wow. The pun on rib doesn't work in Hebrew, but the idea that at the beginning of history, this kind of creation myth that involves, uh, you know, a man or sorry, a woman being born out of a man's rib. And that woman is the lady of life. Um, that's a, that's not my insight. That's Samuel Noah Kramer is a famous sumo religious, um,

That's really interesting and so checks out on the Christianity of it all. Yeah, because obviously, you know, the Babylonian captivity, you know, the elite of Judah, once it was conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the 500s BC, you know, the literate elite, you know, the priests and so on, were forcibly relocated to Babylon as part of this...

Yeah, because, you know, the ancient analog to settler colonization was not get rid of these people by killing them. It's move, you know, we have this rest of the population that is hostile to us. We're going to break them up and move them in chunks to other regions so that they'll be surrounded by cultures that are alien to them, you know, speaking different languages so they can't rise up against us. But we still need their labor to make our whole empire work.

So that's what they did to part, not all, but a large part of the historical people of Palestine in the 500s when they conquered it. And they wanted to keep a close eye on the elites of what was formerly the Temple of Jerusalem. So they moved them to Babylon, the city. And that's a huge part of the biblical story. But...

As a result, we get all these little things that appear to be very specific memories of something Sumerian or at least Babylonian that are separate from the Western, you know, Semitic slash ancient Judean mythology. One of those is the flood myth. So in the book of Genesis,

this is the documentary hypothesis. There's the, you know, the Old Testament, as we know it, is combining different separate stories that tell the same story, but in different ways. So we have two different stories about the flood. And one of them appears to be the ancient Judean idea that it rains a whole lot and then you have a flood, which makes sense. But there's, you know, separately in the story, there's, I forget the exact details, but God basically is like pulls out the plug in the firmament

And this ties into Anki because Anki is the god of the Abzu. His temple is called the A-Abzu, the house of the Abzu, which is this mythological force that is the fresh water table underneath the ground. So Sumer is a flat plain. You have the rivers used to irrigation. But just beneath it, there is one big, essentially underground lake that is drinkable water so you can dig wells into it. Yeah.

That, you know, that is a big part of Enki's portfolio as a god. But in the Book of Genesis, that is the thing that floods and floods the earth is that this mythical force of fresh water that is separate from the rain and the ocean. So that probably also ties into the whole, you know, the Samaritan experience.

And Enki is a major player in the flood myth. So he's actually the trickster that defies the gods to tell the one Noah stand in to build the boat to save all the animals against the gods wishes because he wants to save a remnant of humanity. That's really interesting. Yeah. Huh. This is now tying in with something I've got coming in the future. So thank you. Yeah.

I'm going to be speaking with someone about the biblical history and general ancient history of Palestine. So I'm interested particularly in how those stories connect. I am not a person who has ever really interacted with the Bible outside of existing in North America. And so I am, you know, I find so many stories.

parallels with greek mythology just in terms of what little i do know um is in the bible but to hear the the connections with with the sumerian as well is unsurprising but still continues to add add more i think of it so often when it comes to just like the the ancient greek mythological idea of like a quote-unquote virgin birth as compared to you know in the in the bible um

Are there any other major examples like that where we see these such explicit parallels with what ends up in either the Old or New Testament? I would imagine the Old.

I mean, I'll say briefly that the sex poetry I was talking about between Inanna and Dumuzi, the biblical song of songs. I've heard that the actual text is fairly late. It's got some Hellenistic influences on. But the genre of text where it's a long narrative poem about a young couple consummating their marriage. The genre certainly comes from Mesopotamia and also the lamentations. We have lamentations over the destruction of our homeland. That is a 100% Sumerian genre.

So, I mean, honestly, the thing about the Bible and, you know,

most Christians, you know, mostly interact with the book of Genesis, the book of Exodus, and then the New Testament, right? We have God creates the world. We have the, you know, the Hebrews flee Egypt. Now we have Jesus. Like that's, that's great. No, but the thing is the Old Testament, you know, the Hebrew Bible is such a rich text of, you know, in the, in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies. Yeah. It's got so many influences, so many different things. It's, you know, the God's covenant with, with Moses and,

Has the same format as Assyrian treaties with their subject peoples. So, I mean, in a way, in the period of all their neighbors making literal political treaties with Assyria, they're writing this text like, well, we have our treaty with our higher power, but our higher power is God, etc. Yeah, there is. I mean, obviously, because it was produced in the ancient Near East and, you know, but there's infinite parallels with all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I guess, yeah, everything, what little I do know would typically be coming from the New Testament because it's all just, you know, being Christianity infused into North American culture versus like the actual text themselves. And David and Jonathan are very much a Gilgamesh and Enkidu type. I think David and Jonathan, those are the, that's where the phrase, like his love was greater to me than that of a woman's or something. Oh, okay.

There's not the exact same metaphor like there was with Gilgamesh and Achilles, but the kind of legendary genre of mourning your heroic dead male friend is definitely there when David appears to have caused Jonathan's death. Well, I mean, the same could be said for Achilles and Patroclus. That's a very good point. Yeah, that's the tragedy of it all.

Yeah. Oh, that, I love that. I will say, so I don't know, I can, I can summarize it quickly, but there's one story, the Inanna's descent to the underworld that ties in very interestingly with Persephone, especially. Oh, great.

So, yeah, so this is a cycle of myths. We have a couple different myths that tell like overlapping parts of the story. But essentially Inanna is going to visit her sister, Ereshkigal, who is the queen of the underworld. I can summarize this a bit. So basically her sister, when she gets there, kills her and puts in like hangs Inanna on a meat hook. So Inanna is not only a god visiting the underworld, but she's dead and in the human underworld.

Um, so her servant, um, you know, loyal servant Ninshubor tries to get the other gods to help and only Enki agrees to help. So, um, some, some myth stuff happens. We have a similar birthing scene to the one in Enki and Ninhursanga where, um, Ninshubor has to go down and, uh, Ereshkigal is going through a very similar birthing scene and she has to help her and show sympathy in the same kind of, um,

mythological topos, I guess. Anyway, Adana comes back to life, but she's only allowed to return to her, you know, god life if she can find a substitute for her in hell. So it's kind of the plot of the Pirates of the Caribbean stories where, you know, the head of the underworld says, you can go back to Earth, but only if you find me someone to take your place. So Adana goes around to all of her, you know, loved ones who are still alive. She sees her servant is properly grieving her death, you know, sackcloth and ashes and, you know, you know,

ritually injuring herself she visits her son he's also you know grieving properly but she visits her husband Dumuzi and he's living high on the hog he's you know living comfortably in Uruk he's you know like acting as the king so she's like oh screw you you should be properly grieving my death so she kills him and you know forces him to take her place in hell um so he escapes there's a whole series of events where he and his sister try to hide him from the demons that are trying to drag him back to hell um essentially at the end of the story um

Dumuzi does end up getting dragged to the underworld as Inanna's substitute, and Inanna's grieving him correctly, right? Even though she literally just caused his death. She wants to perform the proper rituals of grief. And she also sees that Dumuzi's sister is also correctly grieving her brother and had made some kind of promise like, oh, if only they had taken me instead of him. So Inanna sees that his sister is doing the proper grief, so she says, okay, we'll cook up a deal. Half the year, Dumuzi will be in the underworld, and half the year, Dumuzi's sister will be in the underworld.

So they get to switch off, which is exactly the Persephone story, right? Though you have one God for half the year in the underworld. So he's kind of a, you know, liminal figure between death and the, you know, Dumuzi is the royal standard, right? He is the standard for the King of Uruk. So I don't know. There's something there. I don't know exactly what it is. Yeah. No, I like that. I mean, and, and to go off of there's something there, I feel like there's gotta be something there with Osiris.

too right like because I don't know enough of the story but it just was screaming to me of like that kind of um

you just use the word and then I lost it, but that in between experience between the, the under and the upper world, I, that's so interesting. So is he, it like, is that related to like the earth's fertility at all in, in that, that myth as well? Like, cause for, with Persephone, you know, it also makes sense because the earth is, is growing or not growing, you know, when she is and is not above is, are there, is there tie in there?

So, I mean, the text doesn't make it explicit, but I mean, the ritual that Dumuzi does with Inanna or the king does with Inanna, you know, a big part of that is to ensure the fertility. So, I mean, they do it, I think, at the New Year festival, which is the harvest festival. Right. Or, you know, the beginning of the harvest season. Yeah.

So, I mean, it is, you know, their whole deal is for sure tied in with the agricultural abundance. Yeah. And do you know the, or do you know of the Golden Bough? The, like, Victorian... I know the concept, and I, yeah, not enough more. I know the term. Yeah.

Yeah, so basically, you know, this guy, you know, James Fraser, basically, you know, went all through Victorian anthropology for all of its problems and found what he appeared, you know, what he interpreted as one monomyth. You know, probably not. But, you know, you know, in this idea, there is this, you know, fertility festival. There's a man and a woman. They have sex. They get married. Their marriage and consummation is the ritual that ensures the bounty of the plants, the animals and so on. And the man has to be sacrificed. Right.

So, you know, he found all these analogs in these various world cultures where the man who ensures fertility is sacrificed every year. He is, you know, he's the king for the year, then the auntie sacrificed. So, I mean, Dubuzi obviously is, you know, he is both parts of that. He is the agricultural ritual, the sacred marriage, and he is sacrificed to ensure the, you know, the abundance. If you haven't read The King Must Die by Mary Reno. Yeah, I have. I know I've not.

It's very heavily based on the Golden Tao. And the Hunger Games is very heavily based on it. Oh, wow. Yeah, so Katniss in the capital doing the Hunger Games is Theseus in Minoan Crete doing the bowl jumping game. Wow. Yeah, it's more or less the same story. Or the second half of The King Must Die is the Hunger Games. And, you know, the author of the Hunger Games is very explicit about that.

Interesting. Oh, that's good to know. I've, I had, I had that book. I have to say, I realized it didn't come with me when I moved. Um, but it, uh, it's the Theseus of it all that always threw me off and I didn't pick it up. I know he has value sometimes, but like, I can't get past it. We'll say this book does not have him doing all the weird murders.

Yeah, great. Well, that's good. You know, the serial killing. Yeah, yeah, fair. No, and the bull jumping is interesting because it's so much more connected to like the actual visuals of... I've heard really good things about Mario No's work, but haven't actually read them. That's...

um sorry my computer just did something i didn't know i was going to do um i i just love those parallels i love those parallels i also love just anecdotally like the victorians trying or and later because i think of like i don't again i don't know enough and that's fine um but like i think of joseph campbell too like of these people who wanted to like prove this monomyth and i don't understand quite

What the purpose was. Like I know in their heads there was a purpose. But it's just like you know they don't have to all be the same.

They all have really interesting, like, I think what's interesting is actually what is the same about all ancient myths and what is different. But like, yeah, anyway, Victorian Thor Wilde. Can I do my very small rant on Joseph Campbell? Please. Okay. So I, I, I, unless it's that you love him and then I'll stop. No. So like, you know, the main thing I know about Joseph Campbell is like, you know, he read the, these various myths. And then of course, Star Wars is like, you know, George Lucas explicitly trying to do Joseph Campbell in space or whatever.

So I read Joseph Campbell a bit ago. The thing that struck me about him, I mean, obviously, you know, many, many people smarter than me have said that he misunderstands and, and, you know, cherry picks these examples, you know, whatever. The thing that, that struck me the most is that he is obsessed with the teenager in a modern American nuclear household growing up and leaving his family and his parents and nuclear household behind and becoming a college student or whatever. Like it's very much centered on like the mid-century American experience of being 17. And to me, that,

like most myths are about adults. Like if there are kids in myths, they're like magic and grew up in 10 days and are basically adults. Like there's not really mythology about being a teenager. That's very much an American, like either you're a kid or you're an adult and you're doing adult stuff. To me, to me, that misses the mark, but my friend had never seen star Wars. So we're watching the star Wars movies and it's driving home to me. How much of all of it is just like, Oh, I'm a teenager. I'm so angsty. I hate my parent figures. I want to grow up and go to college and be a cool adult, but they won't let me like,

Because George Lucas thinks that that is the key to unlocking all, you know, Achilles and Gilgamesh and all that kind of stuff. Like, hey, no, it isn't. No. But also Joseph Campbell had some kind of weird hang up about being a teenager. And then George Lucas had either had or acquired the same hang up about being a teenager. Like, I don't know. I don't get it. I don't have a clever thing to say about it, but it is weird.

It is. No, I agree. Like there's not, there's not any real teenage, like it depends. I mean, it does, it screams to me of what you're saying, like the, the American, I'll say the Americanness of it all, because I also think there's just this general mentality, like in that sort of realm of just like the assumption that the American experience is the human experience. And that's always been hilarious to me, particularly as a Canadian, because we just like sit above America watching and going, what is actually happening?

And we're a mess ourselves, to be clear. But that's so interesting because, yeah, you're right. At least in Greek mythology, everyone is... I mean, if you're specifying an age, it doesn't imply teenage-dom like it would now. They were young, sure, but that's because everything happened when you were younger. Like,

If a girl is getting married at 14, I'm not assigning the same teenage experience to her as I would like a modern person. It's such it reminds me of Robert Graves, too, where it's just like they had sometimes had maybe had interesting insights, but it's also clouded by this like predetermined idea that they were looking to prove that you're like, well, then what is really going on here? Yeah.

That is, yeah, I love that. I've not read Joseph Campbell, but I just know enough to be like, I don't need to read Joseph Campbell, but other people can tell me stuff like that.

I am, this was absolutely so fascinating. I've already had some ideas. Do you have an episode of your podcast where you cover like, I mean, say the, the underworld myth specifically, or any that you think might be like particularly relevant to my listeners? Um, yeah, so I, I did those, I think episodes seven through nine or so in the, in the late single digits. Um, those are me and my friends reading through the myths and, and, you know, doing funny voices and stuff. Um,

Um, most of my podcast is about the archeology, which is, Oh, that's great too. Less fun. Uh, or at least less goofy I'll say. Um, yeah. So, um, yeah. Podcast is called the drumbeat forever after. And, um, yeah, I mean, you know, all of, all of the episode titles have the myth that they, that we do in the title. So you can see. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting. Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry, just a quick plug for my friend Asil in Gaza. Thank you. Yeah, as your listeners probably know, yeah, obviously Israel is doing genocide in Gaza. This is the Holocaust again. You know, the precise situation is that day by day, there's not enough aid. Israel is blocking aid into Gaza. So there's a very finite amount of it, which means the price of it should be, it's a disaster. It should be passed out free. The price of the aid is intensely inflated. So they're paying several times what Americans in America are paying for food.

So they need money to live. And Egypt is essentially asking for bribes to allow them to leave Gaza into Egypt. And that's not even possible now because Israel has closed the Rafah crossing. Yeah. So you have a link and you can post it along with the episode. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's Free Palestine. And this is literally like, yeah.

I don't know. My brain doesn't even know how to say anything anymore because of the horror that we're all just watching all of the time. So I am very thrilled to share that link and thank you for what you're doing to help that family and just, oh my God.

uh yeah well said earlier too so thank you um is there would you already talked about your podcast is there anything more that you'd like to share with my listeners beyond listening to your podcast and helping dozens as we all should also a shout out to my friend kelsey uh her part of florida was devastated by hurricane helene but she's a huge fan of yours so thank you hi

I'm sorry about Florida for lots of reasons, but particularly that. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for doing this. Sorry. I didn't mean, but yeah, it's been very fun. Um, I'm so thrilled to hear about more Mesopotamia and everything and also archeology. So I'm excited to know about your, uh, to listen to your podcast and to share it with my listeners. Um,

Yeah. I thank you for allowing me to just ask you all of my rambling questions about the Sumerians. Cause I just, every time I get a new topic like this, I'm like, the problem is I want to know everything, but also we need to fit it into an hour and a half, but this was so much fun. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for listening. It was really, really fun to have this conversation about Sumerian mythology and just to see the

To see this history and mythology beyond, you know, Greece and Rome. And so I'm so grateful to Alex for coming on and sharing all of this with us. Let's Talk About Myths, baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Penguish is the Hermes to my Olympians.

My incredible producer, select music in this episode was by Luke Chaos. The podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you all. Keep in touch. I have that newsletter that will go out. My website will have more and more soon. We're going to try to go beyond that.

the broligarchy of social media in whatever way we can and continue sharing important and fun and nerdy stuff. Thank you all so much. Follow Alex everywhere I have put in the episode's description and find more from him. And I am Liv and I love this shit.

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