Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we begin a whole season in the tablet house, and we begin it the way the tablets themselves begin, before there was anything to begin with. Tonight is the Babylonian creation story, the poem called Enuma Elish, which is not a title at all but simply the first two words on the first tablet, When above, because these people did not name their books, they called them by however they started. Seven tablets. About a thousand lines. The world made out of water, then out of noise, then out of a quarrel, and finally out of the body of the oldest thing there was. Tonight you will hear how the sky was fastened up and where the Tigris and the Euphrates were said to come from, and how a city put its own name on the making of everything, and why, once a year, the most powerful man in that city was slapped in the face by a priest until he cried. Stay with it, if you can, to the last chapter, for that. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here on other nights, and heard the old scribe read the story of the gods and the baskets and the flood, and then the long story of what happened to the clay afterward, the fire and the hill and the man at the museum desk. If so, welcome back. Your place on the reed mat is where you left it, and the scribe has been waiting, and there is a whole shelf he has been meaning to get to. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome too. You have missed nothing. The scribe never begins a story that will leave a newcomer behind, and everything you need tonight will be handed to you as you go, in order, slowly, the way you hand someone a cup. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. On the shelves all around, in the dark beyond the light, hundreds of tablets stand on their edges like plates in a rack, each with its little tag hanging down. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds, the way it did before any of this was written and the way it does tonight. The scribe takes down a tablet you have not seen before. It is bigger than the others, and there are six more behind it on the shelf, in a stack, in order. This one, he says, is not old the way the others are old. He means something particular by that, and it is worth having before we start. The story he read you before, the gods and the baskets and the flood, is very old, from the south, from the oldest cities. Tonight's poem is newer. It comes from Babylon, and most people who study it think it was written down in something like the shape we have it about a thousand years before the year one, though a few good scholars argue for older, and the honest answer is that we do not know and the poem does not say. What we do know is that it was copied and copied and copied, more than almost anything else they wrote, so that when the great library was gathered up north, the copies were already everywhere. And we know what it was for, which is rarer, and which is where we will end tonight. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other, the way the whole world feels when you are almost asleep and perfectly safe. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the lamp is near you, the way the river is near you. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you, and it will not mind. There are a great many names in tonight's poem and you will not be asked to keep them. Let them go past you like the river going past the reeds. The ones that matter will come back on their own, three or four times, until they are yours without any effort at all. That is how the poem was built. It repeats itself on purpose, because it was made to be heard by tired people in the dark, which is a thing you and a Babylonian have in common. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing in this story will startle you. There is a war in it, and a mother is killed in it, and I will not pretend either of those is gentle. But they are told the way this house tells everything, plainly, in a low voice, at a distance of three thousand years, once, and then set down and not returned to. The killing is over by the ninth chapter and everything after it is the making of quiet things, stars and rivers and a city and a list of names, which is the softest ending any creation story has ever had. I will tell you one more thing in advance, so you can rest inside the whole of it. The poem does not think the mother is a monster. It gives her a reason before it gives her an enemy, and it lets her reason stand. Hold on to that when we get there, and none of it will trouble you. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the rest of the season will find you as it comes, twelve nights of the oldest stories anyone wrote down, and you will not have to go looking. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
The scribe wets his thumb, turns the tablet to the light, and reads the first line, and the first line is a description of a time when there was no line to read. When above, the heavens had not been named. When below, the earth had not been called by a name. That is how it opens, and it is worth sitting in for a moment before anything happens, because nothing happens for a good while and the nothing is the best part. Above has no name. Below has no name. Not that they were empty. Not that they were dark. Simply that nobody had said them yet, and in this poem a thing is not properly a thing until it has been said. There was water. That is the whole of the beginning. Water, and no edges to it. There were two waters, and they were mingled together, which is the word the tablet uses, mingled, the way you would say two rivers meeting and then no longer being two rivers. One of them was fresh, the sweet water, the kind that comes up cold out of the ground and that you can drink. His name was Apsu. The other was salt, the wide bitter water, the sea. Her name was Tiamat. They had no shore between them and no floor beneath them and no sky above them, because there was not yet any such thing as a shore or a floor or a sky. There was only the two of them, mixed, in the dark, going nowhere, for as long as you like. Think of it, for a moment, as the inside of a very large sleep. There was no dry land anywhere. No reed had been formed. No marsh had appeared. That is nearly a direct quotation and you can hear what kind of people wrote it, because of all the things a person might list as missing from the beginning of the world, they chose the reed and the marsh first. They lived in a place of water and mud and reeds. When they imagined nothing at all, they imagined their own country with the reeds taken out. No god had been brought into being. No name had been called. No destinies had been fixed. That last one is the strange one, and we will meet it again, so let it settle in now while it costs you nothing. Destinies, in this world, are not a mood or a fate hanging over you. They are more like assignments. Somebody's job. The destiny of a river is to run, and the destiny of a door is to open, and somewhere, in these poems, there is an actual physical object with the destinies written on it, and whoever holds it holds the assignments of everything. We will come to that object. It goes missing later in the season, in another poem entirely, and a bird takes it while somebody is having a bath. Tonight it only sits in the background, being important. But at the very beginning, nothing had been assigned. Nothing had a job. The two waters were mingled, and that was all there was, and it went on that way for a length of time the poem does not measure because there was nothing yet to measure time with. And then, in the water, the gods began. Not made. Not created, exactly. The word is closer to formed, or came to be, the way silt comes to be in a slow river, the way a sandbar is one day simply there where yesterday there was current. The two waters mingled and mingled and something began to gather in them. Notice what the poem is doing, and then let it go. It does not begin with a maker. There is nobody outside the water deciding. The water is the parents and the water is the place and the water is the material, and everything that follows, every god and every star and every person, including the ones who wrote this down by lamplight, is made out of what was already there, mixed in the dark, before anything had a name. That is the first tablet's first idea, and it is a kind one to fall asleep to. Nothing came from outside. Everything came from what was already here. The scribe lets the line sit. Out past the doorway the river goes on saying its word to the reeds. Somewhere far south of this room, tonight, the fresh water is still running out into the salt water at the head of the gulf, in the dark, mingling, exactly the way the tablet says, which is not a coincidence at all, because the people who wrote this could walk down and look at it. They did not invent a beginning. They described their own horizon and called it the first day.
The first ones to gather out of the water were called Lahmu and Lahamu, and they are a pair, a he and a she, and their names are almost the same name said twice, which will happen again tonight and is worth expecting. The poem likes pairs. It likes to give you a thing and then its echo. We do not know very much about Lahmu and Lahamu, and I am going to tell you that plainly rather than make something up, because the not knowing is itself restful. They are early. They are before almost everything. In pictures from that world there is a figure sometimes called by that name, a bearded man with long curling hair, six curls, standing and holding a post or a gate, patient, doing his job. Whether that picture and this line in the poem are the same being is argued about by people who have spent their lives on it. Tonight they are simply the first two, formed in the water, given names, and set down. After them, Anshar and Kishar. Another pair, another echo, and these two you can almost translate, because Anshar means something like the whole of the sky and Kishar something like the whole of the earth, though neither the sky nor the earth exists yet, so what has really appeared is the idea of an above and a below, the possibility of a difference, in water that is still all one thing. The poem is building the world the way you would lay out tools before a job. Not the sky. The place where a sky could go. And the poem says, plainly, that they grew. That they were tall. That they surpassed the ones before them. Each generation larger and more capable than the one before, which is a thing the poem simply states, without any anxiety about it at all, and which is going to matter enormously in about four chapters. Then Anu, the sky. Anu is the first name tonight you may already know, and he is the highest of them, the one whose name simply is the sky, the father of the great gods, the one who in all these stories sits at the top and does not come down. He is the son of Anshar, and the poem says he was the equal of his father. Not the copy. The equal. And Anu had a son of his own, and this is the one to hold on to. His name is Ea, and in the older southern poems he is called Enki, and if you were here for the story of the gods and the baskets and the flood, you have met him. He is the one who is clever. Not clever the way a trickster is clever, always working an angle. Clever the way an engineer is clever, or a doctor, or a very good locksmith. He is the god of the sweet water, of the deep fresh water under the ground, and of skill, of the thing a craftsman knows in his hands. He is also, over and over in these stories, the one who thinks of the way out. The poem says of him that he was surpassing in wisdom, wise in understanding, mighty in strength, much stronger than his father's father Anshar. It goes on about him for lines. Among all the sons and grandsons in that water, he is the one the poem stops to admire. Remember him. Tonight he does two things, and one of them is terrible and one of them saves everybody, and they are the same kind of thinking. So now the water has people in it. That is the situation at the end of the first movement, and it is worth taking a slow breath inside it, because this is the last calm page for a while and the poem knows it. Two old waters, mingled, quiet, going nowhere, for longer than there is a word for. And now, inside them, generations. Lahmu and Lahamu. Anshar and Kishar. Anu. Ea. Each one bigger, brighter, quicker than the last, and all of them young, and all of them together, in a small space, inside the bodies of the two oldest things there are. The scribe pauses here and says the next line the way you would say it to a child who is nearly asleep, which is to say lightly, so it does not land too hard. And the young gods, he says, were loud.
They danced. That is the word. In the belly of the old water, in the mingled dark, the young gods came together and they danced, and they made a commotion, and the poem uses a word for it that means something between an uproar and a bustle, the noise of a lot of people in a small room all doing something at once. And they disturbed Tiamat, and they roiled her insides, and they were making merry in her belly, and no one could rest. Now I want you to notice something, because it is the whole hinge of tonight and it is done in one line so quietly that you can miss it. The oldest thing in the universe could not sleep. Not because anyone was cruel to her. Not because there was a war on. Because the children would not settle. Because she was full of them and they were noisy and it went on and on, and she was tired. Every person who has ever been in a house with young people in it knows this exact feeling, and the poem was written for people in such houses, and I do not think that is an accident, and I do not think it is a joke either. It is the reason for everything that happens afterward, and the poem gives it to you first, before it gives anybody a side to be on. Apsu felt it too, the fresh water, the father. And Apsu could not silence them. He came to Tiamat and he said, their ways have become painful to me. By day I cannot rest, by night I cannot sleep. Let us destroy them, so that we may sleep. There it is, said out loud, and it is monstrous, and it is also the most ordinary sentence in the world. He does not want a kingdom. He does not want revenge. He wants it to be quiet so he can sleep. That is the first crime in the Babylonian universe, and its motive is exhaustion. And here is the thing that will keep you with this poem all the way to the end. Tiamat says no. She hears her husband propose to destroy their own children, and the mother of everything, the great bitter sea, the one who by the end of tonight will be a monster in the way the story is usually told, cries out at him. What, she says. Should we destroy what we ourselves have made? Their ways are painful, yes. Let us be patient and kind. Let us be patient and kind. That is on the tablet. That is her line, from the mother of chaos, in the poem written by the people who kill her. I am going to ask you to hold that all night, and I promise it will make the last chapters easier rather than harder. Whatever Tiamat becomes later, and she becomes something enormous and armed and full of serpents, this is where she starts. She starts as the one who did not want to hurt anybody. Whoever put this poem together could have left the line out. They wanted Babylon to be the greatest city in the world and they wanted their god to be the greatest god, and they still gave the enemy the best sentence in the first tablet. Apsu was not persuaded. He had a counsellor with him, a vizier, a god called Mummu, who sat on his knee and kissed him and agreed with him and told him what he wanted to hear, which is the oldest job in any court, and Mummu said, destroy them, and then you will have rest by day and sleep by night. And Apsu's face lit up, the poem says, because of the evil he was planning against the gods his children. And they made their plan, and they made it in the water where the children were, and word of it got out. The poem does not say who told. It says only that it became known, and that when the young gods heard, they fell silent. Not a shout. Not a rush to arms. The commotion in the belly of the water simply stopped, all at once, and they sat there, stricken, and they did not know what to do. That is the quietest line in the first tablet and one of the loneliest lines anywhere in this literature. The noise stops. They understand what their parents have decided. And then, in the silence they have finally made, one of them stands up.
Ea, the clever one, the one the poem stopped to admire. He does not fight his great grandfather. It does not seem to occur to him to fight. What he does is stranger and quieter and, in the world of these tablets, far more powerful, and it is the reason his name is on every list of the wisest gods for the next two thousand years. He writes a spell. The poem calls it a pure incantation, and it says that Ea, who understands everything, perceived their scheme, and made and established against it a design of everything, and skilfully composed his overpowering, holy, resistless spell. And he recited it, and he caused it to be in the water. And Apsu fell asleep. The word is exactly that. Sleep. Ea did not stab the oldest fresh water in the world. He sang him to sleep, deeply, the way you would put out a lamp, and Mummu the counsellor was left dazed beside him, unable to think, and the water went still. Then Ea took the crown from Apsu's head and put it on his own. He took his cloak of radiance. He bound Mummu and put a rope through his nose and held it. And he ended Apsu there, in his sleep, and he built his house on top of him. That is the sentence. He built his house on top of him. The dwelling of Ea, from that day, is called the Apsu, which is the name of the water he stilled. The fresh water under the ground, the deep sweet water that fills the wells and comes up cold in the marshes, is in this poem the body of somebody who wanted a quiet night and did the wrong thing about it, and it is also the floor and foundation of the home of the wisest god, and both of those are true at once and the poem sees no contradiction in it at all. And in that house, in the chamber of destinies, in the shrine of designs, Ea and his wife Damkina lay down, and there their son was born. Marduk. Now, tonight, keep this loosely, but keep it. The son who is going to run the rest of this poem is born in a house built on the body of the first god to die, and he is born there in peace, and his father who did the building is the one who taught him everything he knows. Nothing in the poem comments on this. It is simply the address. The tablet spends a long, glad, slightly ridiculous passage on how splendid the baby was, and the scribe reads it with obvious pleasure. He was the loftiest of the gods, surpassing in every way. His limbs beyond understanding. He had four eyes and four ears, and when he moved his lips, fire blazed. Four ears for hearing, and eyes in like number for seeing everything. His grandfather Anu made him four winds and gave them to him as a plaything, and the child made dust and set a storm to whirling with them. He made waves, the poem says, and he troubled Tiamat, and Tiamat was troubled, and by night she could not rest. You see what it has done. It has come back around, in one line, and set the whole thing going again. The grandmother who could not sleep because of the noise of the young ones is kept awake now by a child playing with the wind, and this child is the one who will kill her, and the poem knows exactly what it is doing when it puts those two sleepless nights in the same tablet. The other gods came to her. They had been sitting in their silence since Apsu died, and now they came and they worked on her, and they said, when they killed Apsu your husband, you did not go at his side. You sat still. And now he has made these four winds, and our insides are churning, and we cannot sleep. Do you not love us? Fight. Avenge Apsu your husband, they said. And you will have rest. And there it is, the same promise, made now to her, in the same words her husband used. Do this terrible thing and afterward it will be quiet. The scribe sets the first tablet down, and takes up the second, and turns the lamp a little. And Tiamat, he says, agreed.
Here is where the poem does something that will help you sleep, and I want to tell you about it before it starts, so that when it happens you recognise it and let it carry you rather than trying to hold on. For the next long stretch, the poem repeats itself. Not once. Three times, and nearly word for word. What Tiamat builds in this chapter is going to be described, in full, in the same order, with the same words, three separate times: once when she makes it, once when a messenger brings the news, and once when the news is passed along again. Three thousand years ago somebody sat in a room like this one and listened to the same list three times in an evening and did not think it was a mistake. It is how the poem breathes. It is how you learn a list without studying it. And it is, for our purposes, the single most sleep friendly structure in Mesopotamian literature, so I am going to let it repeat, gently, the way it was meant to, and you can let it go by like a train you are not catching. So. She agreed, and she began to make an army. She bore, the poem says, monster serpents, sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang. She filled their bodies with venom instead of blood. Fierce dragons she clothed with terror, she crowned them with fearsome glory and made them like gods, so that whoever looked upon them would collapse from weakness. And then the list. The viper, and the dragon, and the hairy hero. The great lion, and the mad dog, and the scorpion man. The fierce storm demons, and the fish man, and the bull man. Eleven of them, the poem says. And here is a small true thing that I like very much and that you can have for nothing. The poem says eleven and then names nine. Count them again if you are still awake. Viper, dragon, hairy hero. Great lion, mad dog, scorpion man. Storm demons, fish man, bull man. Nine kinds, and the tablet says eleven, and it has said eleven every time anyone has copied it for three thousand years, and nobody has ever fixed it. Scholars have pleasant arguments about where the other two went, and the likeliest answer is dull and comforting, that the serpents and the dragons at the head of the list were meant to count and somewhere early somebody stopped writing them out separately. So the oldest complete creation story in the world has a list in it that does not add up, and it was copied that way, carefully, by hundreds of people who could all count, for three thousand years, because it was not their job to correct it. It was their job to carry it. Eleven. Bearers of merciless weapons, unafraid of battle. Now, they sound like a nightmare and they are meant to, but hold them lightly, because we know exactly what most of these were and they are not really nightmares. They are statues. They are the things carved beside doorways. The bull man and the fish man and the scorpion man stood at gates and thresholds all over that world, in stone and in clay, for centuries, and they were not there to frighten the household. They were there facing outward, to keep bad things off. The list Tiamat is making is, in large part, the list of the guardians that stood at the doors of the people listening to this poem. Their own doorkeepers, gathered into one army, in the dark, on the other side. And she needed a commander. She chose one of her own children, a god called Qingu, and she raised him high among them, and she made him her husband and put him in charge of the whole assembly, and she gave him the command of the battle. And then she gave him the Tablet of Destinies. There it is, the object I asked you to remember from the first chapter, and now you can see what it is for. She fastened it to his breast, the poem says. She fastened it to his breast and said, I have cast your spell, I have made you greatest in the assembly of the gods. Your command shall not be altered. The word of your mouth shall be firm. That is what the Tablet of Destinies does. It makes what you say true. Not persuasive. True. Whoever wears it, their word becomes the assignment, and the assignment becomes the world. It is the most powerful object in this literature and it spends most of its existence being stolen, worn on somebody's chest, and taken back. So now there are two sides, and it is worth stopping to see what they actually are, because it is not good and evil and the poem never says it is. On one side, the oldest water, who did not want any of this, who was talked into it by her children after they blamed her for not defending her husband when he tried to kill them, and who has now armed herself with the guardians of doorways and put the assignment of the world on the chest of a son. On the other side, the young gods, in a room, who cannot sleep, who have just heard what is coming, and who have gone completely silent again. The scribe turns the tablet. And, he says, the news began to travel.
A god called Ea heard of it first. He heard the whole of it, everything Tiamat had made, and he was struck dumb, and he sat in silence for a while, and then he went to his own great grandfather Anshar, whose name is the whole of the sky, and he told him. And he told it in order. The monster serpents, sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang, with venom for blood. The fierce dragons crowned with fearsome glory. The viper, the dragon, the hairy hero. The great lion, the mad dog, the scorpion man. The fierce storm demons, the fish man, the bull man. Eleven of them. And Qingu raised up over the whole assembly, with the Tablet of Destinies on his chest. There. That is twice. And Anshar, when he had heard it, called his own vizier, a god named Kakka, and sent him down to the two oldest gods there are, to Lahmu and Lahamu, who were the first ones formed in the water and who had been there through all of it. Go, he said. Go and stand before them and tell them everything. And Kakka went, and he bowed down before Lahmu and Lahamu, and he kissed the ground in front of them, and he stood up, and he told them. The monster serpents, sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang, with venom for blood. The fierce dragons crowned with fearsome glory. The viper, the dragon, the hairy hero. The great lion, the mad dog, the scorpion man. The fierce storm demons, the fish man, the bull man. Eleven of them. And Qingu raised up over the whole assembly, with the Tablet of Destinies on his chest. Three times. I told you it would happen and it happened, and if you were drifting through the middle of that you will have surfaced at the fish man and the bull man and found the ground under your feet exactly where you left it, which is the whole reason they built the poem this way. Nothing is lost by dozing in a room where the important things are said three times. And Lahmu and Lahamu, when they heard it, cried out, and the gods of heaven groaned in bitter grief, and said, what has changed, that she should do this? And they could not understand it either. Anshar heard it and he struck his thigh and he bit his lip and he could not settle. And when he had got hold of himself he spoke to his son, to Anu, the sky, and he said, go. Go and stand before her and speak to her and let her anger be soothed by what you say. And if she will not listen to you, then speak my word to her, that she may be calmed. And Anu went. And Anu came to the edge of what Tiamat had made, and he looked at her, and he could not face her, and he turned around and came back. That is the whole of it. There is no shame in the way the poem tells it. He did not run. He simply could not, and he came back and said so, and the words the poem uses when he returns are the same words it used to describe her, so that the failure is measured against the exact thing that caused it. And Ea had gone before him, in some tellings of this passage, and had turned back as well. So now the two wisest and highest gods in the world have walked to the edge of the water, looked, and come home. And the assembly sits in the hall of Anshar with their lips pressed shut, and nobody says anything, because there is nothing to say. They have tried the sky and they have tried wisdom and neither one could stand in front of the sea. Anshar was silent, looking at the ground, and shaking his head at Ea. The poem says all the gods sat there, their lips closed, silent. Not one of them will go. And this is the moment the whole poem has been building toward, and it is a very old and very good piece of storytelling, and it is doing something to you right now that you may not notice until later. It has spent two tablets making the enemy enormous and then it has walked the two most senior figures in the universe up to her and turned them around, so that when somebody finally does step forward, you already know exactly how big the thing is that they are stepping toward. And it is Ea who thinks of it. Of course it is. He calls his son. The young one. The one with the four eyes and the four ears, born in the house built on the still water, who was given the winds as a toy and made dust with them. Ea takes him aside, alone, into a private room, and tells him everything, and tells him what to say, and how to stand, and what to ask for. Go, my son, he says. Go and stand before Anshar. Speak, and stand there, and when he sees you, he will be at peace. And Marduk came, and Anshar saw him, and the poem says his heart was filled with joy, and he kissed him on the lips and his fear went away. My father, said Marduk, do not stay silent. Open your lips. I will go, and I will do what you have wanted in your heart. What man is it who has brought his battle against you? It is Tiamat, who is a woman, who comes at you with weapons. Be glad and rejoice. Soon you will tread on the neck of Tiamat. Be glad and rejoice, he says again, and soon you will tread on her neck. And Anshar answered him, and told him to go, and to ride out, and to still her with his spell. And the young god said, yes. And then he said one more thing, and it changes everything, and it is why this poem exists.
If I am to be your avenger, said Marduk, to bind Tiamat and save your lives, then convene the assembly. Proclaim my destiny supreme. Let me speak, and let what I say determine things instead of you. Whatever I bring into being shall not be altered. The command of my lips shall never be revoked, never changed. And there is the whole of Babylon in three sentences. He will fight, and he will very probably win, and the price is not treasure and not a title. The price is that from this day the assignment of the world comes out of his mouth. He is asking for what is currently strapped to the chest of the enemy commander. He is asking to be the one whose word is true. It is the calmest and most audacious thing anybody says in this poem, and he says it to a room of terrified elders who have no other offer on the table. They said yes. Anshar sent his messenger to gather every one of them, and they came, and the poem takes its time here and I am glad it does, because after two tablets of dread this is a party. They came together, all the great gods who fix the destinies. They kissed one another. They talked. They sat down to a banquet. They ate bread, and they drank sweet wine, and the poem says the wine made their bodies swell, and they shouted aloud, and they became very carefree, and their mood was merry. Read that again in your head, slowly. The world is about to end and they have a dinner. They get drunk. They cheer. And then, in that state, warm and loud and no longer frightened, they make the young god king. They set out a princely throne for him and he took his seat before his fathers, and they said, you are the most honoured among the great gods. Your destiny is unequalled. Your word is the sky. From this day forward your command shall not be altered. To raise up or bring low, this is in your hand. What you say shall come true. And then they tested him, and the test is the most beautiful small scene in the poem. They set a garment in their midst. One piece of cloth, on the floor, in the middle of the circle of the drunk and hopeful gods. And they said to Marduk, our firstborn, speak, and let this garment vanish. Speak again, and let it come back whole. And he spoke, and the garment was gone. And he spoke again, and the garment was there. That is all. No lightning. No demonstration of strength. They wanted to know one thing only, whether what he said became what was so, and they tested it on a piece of cloth in the middle of a room, and it worked in both directions, the taking away and the giving back, which is the part people forget. And when the gods his fathers saw the word of his mouth, they rejoiced, and they did homage, and they cried out, Marduk is king. And they gave him the sceptre and the throne and the royal robe, and they gave him a weapon that has no equal, and they said, go now, and cut the throat of Tiamat, and let the winds carry her blood away to secret places. He rose from the table.
I have a small confession about this chapter, which is that it is a list of equipment, and that lists of equipment are, in my experience, the best thing that can happen to a person at this hour of the night. Nothing is at stake in a list. Nothing is decided. Somebody is simply laying things out on a table, one at a time, and naming them, and there is nowhere else the story has to be until they are done. So here is what he took. He made a bow, and marked it as his weapon, and fitted the arrow to the string. He took up the mace in his right hand and gripped it. He hung the bow and the quiver at his side. He set the lightning in front of him, and filled his body with a blaze of fire. He made a net, to enclose her inside it, and this is the important one, so let it land softly. Not a sword. A net. He made a net, and he stationed the four winds at its corners so that nothing of her could escape, the south wind and the north wind and the east wind and the west wind, one at each corner, holding it open. His grandfather Anu had given him those four winds when he was a child, as a toy. And then he made seven more. The poem gives them names and the names are their own small weather report. The whirlwind. The cyclone. The four times doubled wind. The wind of unequalled force. And then the ones I like best, because you can feel them on your face if you have ever stood outside in bad weather in a flat country. The evil wind. The tempest. And the great storm, which the poem calls the flood weapon, and which is the same word they used for the flood. Eleven winds, for eleven monsters, and I do not think that is an accident either, though the poem does not say so and I will not pretend it does. He raised up the flood weapon, his great weapon. He mounted his chariot, the storm, which the poem calls unequalled and terrifying, and he hitched four horses to it, and the horses have names too. The Killer. The Relentless. The Trampler. The Swift. Their teeth carried poison, the poem says. They were trained to trample and they knew how to overthrow. And then the last thing, and it is the strangest and the most human item in the whole inventory. He put a red paste on his lips. Some translate it as a herb, or a plant of some kind, and the poem says it was to counter poison, and that he carried it in his hand or held it in his mouth. The strongest god who has ever lived, going out in a storm chariot with lightning in front of him and eleven winds behind him and a net held open at four corners, stopped before he went and put something on his lips in case he was poisoned. That is a person getting ready. That is somebody checking the stove before a long trip. And he set out. And the gods, his fathers, watched him go, and they crowded round, and the poem says they were pressing close to him, all of them, the ones who had been sitting with their lips closed for two tablets, and they watched the young one drive away toward the water. The scribe stops here and looks up. We are going to the fight now, he says. It is short. It is shorter than everything that came before it, which is a thing worth knowing in advance. And when it is finished, nothing in this poem will ever be frightening again. There are four chapters after it and every one of them is a quiet thing being made. He turns the tablet over.
They came in sight of each other, and the first thing that happened was not a blow. It was talk. She is standing there with everything she has made behind her, and he comes on in the storm chariot with the net folded at his side, and the poem says that when he looked at her, at the inside of her, at what she was, he lost his nerve for a moment. His will was distracted, the tablet says. His mind was confused, and his actions were upset. That is on the clay. The greatest of the gods, at the edge of the water, faltered. And the ones behind him, the gods who had crowded round the chariot, saw it and their vision blurred too. And then he took hold of himself and steadied his aim, and he went on, and she saw him coming. They spoke. She spoke first, or he did, the tablet is worn in places, and what passed between them was an argument about who was in the right, which is exactly what you would expect and is somehow the saddest part. He accused her of raising up a son and setting him above his elders, and of plotting evil against the gods her children. She answered him, and the poem says she was beside herself, and lost her reason, and shrieked, and her legs shook under her from the roots up. And she recited a spell, and kept casting it, an incantation, over and over, the way you would say a thing to keep it true. She had the Tablet of Destinies. She had strapped it to somebody else's chest. And when it came to it, standing in front of him, what she reached for was words. She opened her mouth to swallow him. And he drove the evil wind into it so that she could not close her lips. That is the image. That is the one image from this fight I am going to give you, and then we are going to set it down and not pick it up again. Not a blade. Not a wound. A wind, driven into an open mouth, holding it open, so that the mouth could not shut. And the fierce winds followed it and filled her belly, and her body swelled up, and she was held there, open, unable to speak or close or turn. He shot the arrow. It split her belly, and cut through her inside, and split her heart. He overcame her, and extinguished her life, and cast down her body, and stood upon it. And that is the death of Tiamat, in the poem, in about as many words as I have just used, and the poem does not linger on it and neither will we. Three thousand years of people copying this text and not one of them thought the dying needed to be longer. Her army broke. They had been standing behind her, the eleven, the viper and the dragon and the hairy hero, the great lion and the mad dog and the scorpion man, the fierce storm demons and the fish man and the bull man, and when she went down they turned to run, and could not, because he had thrown the net, and the net had four winds at its corners holding it open, and there was nowhere out. He gathered them up and he broke their weapons and he bound them, and the poem says he cast them into prison and shut them in cells. And that is the last we hear of them tonight, and it is worth knowing what happened to them afterward, because it is not what you would think. They did not stay monsters. He kept them. In the later part of the poem the statues of the eleven are set up at the gate of his own temple, standing there, facing outward, doing the job they had always done at doorways, only now on his door. The guardians went back to being guardians. And Qingu, who had worn the Tablet of Destinies on his chest, was taken alive. Marduk counted him among the dead gods, the poem says, which is a cold phrase and the coldest thing in the chapter. He bound him. And he took the Tablet of Destinies off his chest, which was never his in the first place, and he sealed it with his own seal and fastened it to his own breast. Remember that object. We are not finished with it, not tonight and not this season. And then it was over. The scribe puts his hand flat on the tablet for a moment, the way you would put your hand on a table. It is over, he says. Everything frightening in this poem has now happened. From here to the end of the seventh tablet there is no more fighting, no more armies, nobody in danger, and nothing that will ask anything of you. What is left is a very long, very careful making of things, done slowly, by somebody who has just had a terrible day and wants to build something quiet. Outside, the river goes on saying its word to the reeds. He is standing on the body of the oldest water in the world, the poem says, and he rested, and he looked at her. And then he began to think about what she could be.
He divided her in two, and the poem chooses a comparison for it that I have always found strangely gentle, given what is being described. Like a dried fish, it says. Like a shellfish, in some readings, split into its two halves. Not hacked. Not shattered. Split along the seam, the way a thing is opened by somebody who knows where the seam is. He took half of her, and he set it up above, and that half is the sky. Then he fixed a crossbar there, and set a watch, and gave the guards their instruction, and the instruction is one line long and it is the most quietly loving thing in the poem. He told them not to let her waters escape. That is the sky, in this poem. It is the upper half of the oldest water in the world, held up over your head, with a bar across it and somebody watching, so that it does not come down. And when it rains, it is because a little got through. Every person who ever lay under that sky and heard rain on a roof knew what the rain was, according to this poem. It was her. And he crossed the heavens and surveyed the region, the tablet says, and he measured it, and he made the lower half correspond to the upper, so that below matched above. Then he built the stations. He set out the constellations, and gave the gods their places among them, and he fixed the year and marked its divisions, and set three stars for each of the twelve months, so that a person on the ground, looking up, could tell what month it was by which three stars had come round. That is not poetry. That is an almanac. It is a calendar, described as an act of creation, by people whose lives depended on knowing when to plant. And in the middle he set the station of one particular star for himself, so that the others would know their bounds and not go wrong or wander. Then the moon. He made the moon appear, the poem says, and entrusted the night to him. And then he gave the moon his instructions, and I want to read them to you the way they are written, because they are the closest thing in this literature to a lullaby, and because they are, more than anything else tonight, a description of something you have actually seen. He said, go out at the beginning of the month, and shine with horns, six days worth. On the seventh day, be half a crown. At the full moon, stand opposite the sun, in the middle of the month. And when the sun catches up with you at the base of the sky, then diminish your crown, and go back the way you came, and wear less each day, and disappear, and begin again. That is the whole month. Written down, as an instruction, given once, and followed ever since. The night is entrusted to him. That is the phrase. The god who has just killed the sea takes the moon and hands him the night to look after, and then leaves. He made the clouds from her spittle, and set the winds to drive them, and made the rain. He piled up her poison as fog. He took her head and set a mountain on it, and opened springs, and the water gathered. And he opened the deep places in her eyes, and out of her two eyes he let the Tigris and the Euphrates run. There. That is the line the whole chapter has been walking toward and it is the reason people have never quite been able to leave this poem alone. The two rivers that made everything possible, that carried the boats and filled the canals and grew the barley and the date palms and let the cities exist at all, the two rivers that these people lived and died between and named their whole world after, come out of the eyes of the mother. She is crying, and the crying is the rivers, and the rivers are why anybody is alive to write it down. The poem does not say a word about that. It states it and moves on. It piles her tail up and binds it as a great bond to hold the whole thing together, and it sets her crotch as a prop to hold the sky up, and it goes on arranging her, patiently, into weather and geography, and it never once pauses to say that this is sad. I think that is because to them it was not sad. It was simply where they lived. Every day of their lives they drew water from her eyes and drank it and washed in it and floated on it and buried their dead beside it. If somebody had said to a farmer at Babylon that the river was made of grief, he would have said yes, and also that it was made of fish, and that both of those were true and neither was a reason to stop. The scribe turns the tablet. Now, he says, there is a world. And it is empty.
The gods came to him, all of them, and they bowed, and they called him lord, and they asked him what he wanted. And what he wanted, it turns out, was to make something. I will bring together blood, he said, and I will cause bones to be. I will make stand a thing, and its name shall be man. He shall be charged with the service of the gods, so that they may rest. So that they may rest. That is the reason humans exist in this poem, and it is the same reason humans exist in the older poem you may have heard in this house before, the one with the baskets and the strike, and it is worth taking one moment to be clear about the difference, because they are two different stories and both of them are true to their own tablet. In the older southern story, the one from the deep past, the workers of heaven put down their tools and refused, and the wise god made people out of clay mixed with the flesh and blood of one god who had intelligence, and the mothers of the gods gave birth to them, and the people took up the baskets. Tonight's poem is younger and colder and shorter about it. There is no strike. There is no clay. There is a prisoner. Ea, the clever one, the father, the one who put the first god to sleep, is the one who says it. Let one of their brothers be given up, he said. Let him be destroyed, and let people be fashioned. And they asked, in the assembly, who was it who started the war. And they answered themselves, and they said, Qingu. He was bound and held before Ea. They charged him with it, and cut the vessels of his blood, and from his blood Ea made humankind, and laid upon them the service of the gods, and set the gods free. So there are two makings in this literature and they do not agree, and the honest thing, and the thing this house always does, is to say so and let both stand. In one poem you are made from clay and the blood of a god who had intelligence, and the intelligence is the part that carried over. In the other, tonight's, you are made from the blood of the one who lost, the commander of the losing army, the one who wore the Tablet of Destinies on his chest and did not get to keep it. The scribe does not draw a lesson from that and neither will I. Different cities, different centuries, different tablets, and both of them copied out carefully by people who saw no need to choose. And then Marduk did a thing that has always struck me as the most administrative act in the history of religion. He divided up the gods. He took the Anunna, the great gods, six hundred of them, and he assigned three hundred to the heavens and three hundred to the earth, and he gave them their duties and their stations, and he wrote it down. Three hundred above, three hundred below. Filed. And a word about that name, because it is the name of this whole season and there is a great deal of nonsense attached to it. The Anunna, or the Anunnaki, are simply the great gods, the assembly, the senior ones. That is what the word does in these texts. They are here in this poem exactly as they are everywhere else, sitting in a room, being assigned jobs. They do not arrive from anywhere. Nobody in three thousand years of clay ever wrote that they came from somewhere else, because in these poems they are the ones who were always here. And then the gods, all six hundred of them, freed of their work and grateful, said something that surprised me the first time I read it. They said, let us build him a house. Not a temple exactly, at first. A place to stay. They said, whenever we come up to the assembly, let there be somewhere for us to spend the night. Let us build a shrine, and when we arrive, let us rest in it. And Marduk's face lit up like broad daylight, the poem says, and he told them to build Babylon. And about that name, one quiet thing before we go on. They heard it as two words, gate and god. The gate of the god. That is what the people who lived there understood their own city to be called, and it is how the name reached us, through other people's books, in other alphabets, for thousands of years. Scholars now think the name is older than that and came from somewhere else and was probably not originally Babylonian at all, and that the gate of the god is an explanation somebody arrived at later, the way people do with the names of the towns they were born in. I like it better knowing that. They lived in a city whose name nobody could quite account for, and they decided it meant the door, and then they built the door. So they did. Themselves. With their own hands. For one whole year they made bricks, the poem says, and when the second year came they raised the head of the temple high, and they built the tower of it up beside the deep water, and they made a dwelling for Marduk and one for Ea and one for the sky. Six hundred gods, freed from their labour by the making of people, spending a year making bricks. Nobody in the poem finds this funny. I think it is one of the warmest things in it. They did not want a monument. They wanted a place to sleep when they came into town, and they liked it enough to build it by hand. And when it was done they sat down in it, all of them, and they held a banquet, and the poem says they sat in the high shrine which they had made, and the great gods took their seats, and the cup was set out, and they sat down at the feast. And in that room, at that table, with the world made and the people made and the city built, they began, one at a time, to say his names. The seventh tablet is a list, and it is the longest and strangest ending any creation story has, and it is perfect for this hour. Fifty names. Fifty of them, spoken one after another by the assembled gods, each one with a line or two of explanation attached, and it goes on and on, and there is no plot in it at all, and nothing is at stake, and nobody in the room is in any danger, and it is nothing but voices in a warm hall naming somebody they are glad about. I am not going to read you all fifty. I am going to read you some, slowly, and let them go past, and you do not have to hold any of them. They called him Asalluhi, the one who watches over. They called him Namtila, the god who gives life, who restored the ruined gods as though they were his own creation. They called him Tutu, the one who makes the spells clean. They called him Ziukkinna, the life of the host of gods. They called him Agaku, the maker. They called him Shazu, who knows the hearts of the gods, who examines the inside, who lets no evildoer go out from him. They called him Suhrim, and Suhgurim, and Zahrim, and Zahgurim, and the tablet gives each of them a line, and the lines get shorter as they go, the way a list does late in the evening. They called him Enbilulu, the lord who makes the fields abundant, who establishes the canals, who opens the springs and apportions the water. They called him Hegal, the one who heaps up plenty for the people. They called him Gil, who stores the grain in heaps, who brings forth barley. They called him Lugalabdubur, the king who scattered the works of the enemy, who made her flee. They called him Addu, and said, let him cover the whole span of the sky with his roar, and let his good voice sound over the earth, and let the thickness of the clouds diminish, and let him give food below to the people. Nine of the names have to do with water arriving where it is needed. Six of them are about grain. Several are about not letting the guilty go. One is simply that he is kind to the ruined. That is what a god was for, at Babylon, when they sat down to list everything he was. Not thunder mainly. Canals mainly. Barley mainly. Water at the right time. And there is one more thing in the list, and it is not in any of the names. It is in how many there are. Fifty is not a round number chosen for the sound of it. Fifty was already somebody's number. In that world every great god had a numeral, the way a person has a rank, and fifty belonged to Enlil, who had been the lord of the gods, the one at the top, for as long as anybody had been writing anything down at all. So when the assembly sits at that table and says fifty names over a young god from a city that was nothing much a few centuries earlier, they are not paying him a compliment. They are handing him somebody else's number. The whole seventh tablet, the whole long beautiful list you have just half heard on your way down toward sleep, is a change of office, done politely, out loud, in front of everybody, with a cup in hand. That is how a city becomes the centre of the world. Not by winning the battle. By being the one who gets to say the names afterward. And the last lines of the seventh tablet are not about him at all. They are instructions to us. Let them be held in remembrance, the poem says, and let the leading man repeat them. Let the wise and the learned confer together. Let the father recite them and teach them to his son. Let the ears of the shepherd be opened. Let them not be forgotten. And they were not.
Now here is the last thing tonight, and it is the true one, and it is why I asked you at the very beginning to stay awake this long if you could. That poem was not read privately. It had a night. Every spring, in the first month, when the year turned, Babylon held a festival that ran about eleven days, and on one of those days a priest stood in the temple and recited the whole of Enuma Elish out loud, all seven tablets, beginning to end, in front of the god. That is what it was for. That is why there are more copies of it than of almost anything else they wrote. It was the script for the night the year began again. And one last true thing about those copies, which I have saved for here because it belongs at the end. Not all of them say Marduk. Up north, in Assyria, in the country of the king who gathered the great library, there are copies of this same poem in which the young god who goes out to the water and comes back with the world is not Marduk of Babylon at all. He is Assur, the god of the Assyrians. Same poem. Same tablets. Same net, same winds, same bar across the sky. A different name in the middle of it. That is not a scandal and it is not a forgery. It is what people did with a poem this good. They kept every line of it and put their own city in the part that mattered, and both versions were copied out carefully by people who took them seriously, and both are on shelves today. And on the fifth day of that festival, something else happened, and it is the strangest ceremony I know of from the ancient world. They brought in the king. The king of Babylon, the most powerful man in that part of the world, was brought into the room where the statue stood. And the high priest took away his sceptre, and his ring, and his mace, and his crown, and carried them out and set them down somewhere else. And the king stood there with nothing. And then the priest struck him on the cheek. And pulled his ears. And made him kneel, and the king had to say aloud, in front of the god, that he had not sinned, that he had not been careless of the city, that he had not destroyed its walls, that he had not struck the cheek of anyone under his protection. And the priest struck him again, hard, on the cheek. And this is the part that matters, and it is the reason I have kept it for the very end of the night. They were watching for tears. If the king wept, the year was good. If the tears came, it meant the god was satisfied, and the kingship was renewed, and the season would turn properly, and the barley would come up. If he did not weep, that was a bad omen for the year. So once a year, in the oldest continuously inhabited part of the world, the most powerful man alive was slapped in a quiet room until he cried, on purpose, by a priest, in front of a statue, and everybody hoped very much that it would work. And afterward they gave him back his crown, and put the ring in his hand, and set the mace back in his grip, and he walked out into the festival, and the year began. The scribe sets the seventh tablet down on the stack with the other six, in order, and squares the edges with the side of his hand. The lamp is low now. Think of the room in Babylon on the morning after. The festival over. The crown back where it belongs. The statue in its place. The seven tablets going back on their shelf, in order, until the year comes round again. And outside, all the things the poem says were made. The two rivers, running, from her eyes, going down through the barley country in the dark, past the canals that Enbilulu was thanked for, past the fields that Hegal was thanked for, carrying the boats. The moon, doing what he was told. Six days of horns. Half a crown on the seventh. Standing opposite the sun at the middle of the month, and then wearing less each night, and going back the way he came, and beginning again. He has not missed a single instruction since the night it was given to him. The stars in their stations, three for each month, coming round on time. And over all of it, held up, the upper half of the oldest water in the world, with a bar across it, and somebody watching, and the instruction still standing, that her waters are not to escape. That is the world this poem built, and you are lying underneath it right now. It is a strange comfort and I offer it to you exactly as they left it. Every single thing over your head tonight, in this poem, was made out of somebody who could not sleep. The noise that started all of it was children who would not settle. The first crime was a father who wanted quiet. The war was fought by a young god who was given the wind as a toy. And when it was finished, the very first thing he did was to fix a bar across the sky so nothing would fall on anybody, and then to take the moon and hand him the night and tell him how to do it. The night is entrusted to him. That is the line. Somebody was put in charge of the dark, and given careful instructions, and has kept to them ever since. You do not have to keep any of tonight. Not the names, not the eleven, not the order of the tablets. If you remember one thing in the morning let it be the bar across the sky, and the guards told not to let the waters through, and the fact that somebody in a mud brick city three thousand years ago lay down at night, as you are lying down now, and wanted very much to believe that the sky was being held up on purpose, by somebody who had been asked to do it, and who was still there. The scribe leans toward the lamp. Outside, the river is saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds, the way it did before any of this was written. The bar is across the sky. The moon has his instructions. The waters are staying where they were put. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is not a myth. Tonight is a person. Last night, if you were here, we made a world out of water and a quarrel and the body of the oldest thing there was, and we ended with a king being slapped in a quiet room until he cried, so that the year could begin. Tonight is quieter than that and closer to you. Tonight is a woman who lived, who had a job and a house and a staff and a bad year, and who wrote things down, and whose name is on them. She is the earliest author on earth whose name we know and whose work we can still read. Not the earliest writing. Writing is older than she is by centuries, and most of it is receipts. She is the earliest person who put their name at the end of something they made and said, in effect, this one is mine. Her name is Enheduanna. Tonight you will hear what her days were like in a moon temple four thousand three hundred years ago, and what she wrote, and the year a man took her house away from her, and what she did about it, which was to write a poem and send it to a goddess. And at the very end I will tell you about a piece of white stone with her picture on it, which somebody, at some point, took a tool to. Stay with it, if you can, to the last chapter, for the stone. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here last night for the making of the world, or on other nights before that, for the gods and the baskets and the flood, or for the long story of what happened to the clay afterward. If so, welcome back, and your place on the reed mat is where you left it. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome. Nothing tonight will assume you were here before. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. But tonight the scribe does not reach for the shelf. He goes to a wooden box in the corner, and lifts the lid, and takes out something that is not clay. It is stone. Pale, almost white, and cool, and heavy for its size, and round, like a plate, or the lid of a jar. He sets it down in the lamplight where you can see it, and turns it a little so the low light catches the carving on its face. This, he says, is not a story. This is a portrait. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. Tonight there is almost nothing to keep hold of. There is one name that matters and it is hers, and you will have it without trying, and there is a goddess and a moon god and a man who takes her house, and that is the whole cast. Everything else tonight is places, and places do not need to be remembered. A life goes by in order, the way a life does. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the stone. Nothing tonight will startle you. There is no battle in this episode, and I want to say that clearly at the start, because there is a rebellion in it and I do not want you bracing for a fight that never comes. Nobody in this story dies. A woman loses her job, and is frightened, and is away from home for a while, and then she goes home. That is the shape of it. The worst thing that happens tonight is that somebody is made to leave a house they loved, and they get it back. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the rest of the season will find you as it comes. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
It is a disk of white calcite, about ten inches across and an inch and a half thick, and it is carved on one face, and it is broken. Let us look at the carving first and come back to the breaking at the end of the night, because the breaking is the last thing I have to give you and it is worth waiting for. There are four figures on it, in a row, and they are doing something specific. At the front, a naked man is pouring a liquid from a jug onto a tall stepped structure. He is a priest, and the structure is an altar, and what he is pouring is a libation, an offering of drink, which is the oldest form of hospitality there is. You give the guest a cup. The guest here is a god. Behind him, larger than he is, and this is deliberate, because in that world importance is drawn as size, stands a woman. She is wearing a flounced robe, layer on layer of tiered fabric down to her ankles, and on her head is a rolled brim cap, a kind of turban, which is not a decoration. It is a uniform. It says what she is. She has one hand raised, and she is watching the priest pour, and she is in charge. Behind her, two attendants, smaller, one carrying something. And above and behind all of them, cut into the stone, a crescent, or the traces of one. The moon. Now turn it over. On the back, cut into the flat side, there is writing, and this is the part that makes the object what it is. The inscription names her. It gives her titles. It says she is the en priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur, and it says whose daughter she is, and it calls her by her name. Enheduanna. Which is not a birth name at all, and this is the first thing worth knowing about her. It is a title she was given, and it means something like ornament of heaven, or high priestess ornament of the god of heaven. Whoever she was before she came to Ur, that name is gone. What we have is the name of the office, worn by the woman who did the office better than anyone ever had. Now, a disk with a name on it proves that somebody made a disk with a name on it. It is very good evidence and it is not the only evidence, and I want to give you the rest of it now, because in a season where almost everybody is a god it matters that this one is not. There are seals. A seal, in that world, is a small stone cylinder, about the size of the top joint of your thumb, carved all over with a scene and an inscription, cut backwards, so that when you roll it across wet clay it leaves the picture the right way round. Everybody who had authority had one. You wore it on a cord. It was your signature, and rolling it across the clay was how a document became yours. And we have seals belonging to members of her household, and they say so on them. One belonged to a man called Adda, and it says he is the scribe, and it says whose scribe he is. Another names a man who was her hairdresser. Another names her steward. These are not literary objects and nobody was making a point with them. They are the equivalent of an office pass with a job title and a department on it. So the evidence that she existed is not a poem. It is an object with her office on it, and a set of other objects belonging to the people who worked for her, found in the building where she worked, naming her as the person they worked for. She is standing on a piece of stone, in a museum in Philadelphia, tonight, larger than the priest, in her flounced robe, with her hand up, watching a man pour a drink for the moon. And here is the sentence I want you to fall asleep on eventually, though not yet, because we have a whole life to go through first. Everything else in this season is a poem about gods. This is a photograph of an employee. The scribe turns the disk over in his hands and sets it down. Now, he says. How does a person end up on a stone.
Her father was the most successful man of his century, and possibly the most consequential, and almost everything anyone says about his early life is probably a story he told about himself. His name was Sargon, and the name itself is a slogan, because it means the king is legitimate, which is not a thing you are called if nobody has raised the question. The legend, and it is a legend and I will say so, is that his mother was a priestess who could not keep him, and that she set him in a basket of rushes, sealed with pitch, and put him on the river, and that a man drawing water found him and raised him as a gardener. You have heard that story before with somebody else in the basket, and the two are almost certainly related, and which way the borrowing went is argued about, and it is a lovely argument that nobody will ever win. What matters tonight is only that Sargon told it about himself, or let it be told, because he needed an origin and he did not have a royal one. What he had instead was the army. He came up through somebody else's court, and then he was not in somebody else's court any more, and by the end of it he had done a thing nobody had done before. There had always been cities in that country, dozens of them, arguing and trading and occasionally fighting, each with its own god and its own wall and its own king. Sargon put them under one hand. He is generally called the first person to build an empire, and while historians will properly qualify that, the qualification is about definitions and not about the size of what he did. And he had a problem, which is the problem every conqueror has, and it is not military. The cities he had taken were old. Some of them were more than a thousand years old already when he arrived. They had their own gods, their own priesthoods, their own way of doing things, their own language. Sargon and his people spoke Akkadian. The old south spoke Sumerian. He could hold the country with soldiers for as long as he lived, and then it would come apart in a week. And here is a thing about him that I have never got over, and it belongs in a sleep story more than it belongs in a history book. He built a capital. He named it Akkad, and the whole language is named after it, and the whole period is named after it, and for a hundred and fifty years or so it was the richest and most important city in the world, and kings wrote about it, and poems described its harbour and its granaries and the ships from three countries tied up at its quays. Nobody has ever found it. That is not a figure of speech. Every other great city of that world has been dug: Ur, Uruk, Nippur, Eridu, Kish, Lagash, Babylon, Nineveh. Their walls are mapped and their temples are numbered and you can walk in them. Akkad, the capital of the first empire on earth, has never been located. There are candidate mounds and there are arguments and there is a great deal of careful work going on right now, and there is no agreement. The most likely explanation is dull and enormous: it is probably under the modern silt somewhere near where the two rivers come close together, and the rivers have moved since, and it is down there under fields, unopened. Somewhere under a farm in Iraq tonight there is a palace with a throne room in it that nobody has seen for four thousand years. I only tell you so that you have the right feeling about the family this woman came from. They were not ancient to themselves. They were new money, from a city that is now missing. So he did what worked, and it worked for longer than his empire lasted. He put his daughter in the temple. Not as a hostage and not as a spy. As the en priestess of the moon god at Ur, which was one of the most senior religious offices in the whole of the old country, and which was not a decoration either. The en of Nanna at Ur ran a household. She oversaw the rites. She administered land and stores and staff. She was the human counterpart of the god, and in the language of the time she was called his spouse, which meant something formal and institutional rather than anything else, and she held the office for life. And she was the daughter of the northern king, in the oldest office in the southern city, performing the southern rites, in the southern language. It was the most intelligent thing he ever did, and we know it worked because the office he put her in outlasted him by five hundred years, and because kings who came long after and had nothing to do with his family kept putting their own daughters in it, in imitation of him. But that is the politics, and the politics is the least interesting thing about her, and we are done with it now. Because what he cannot possibly have planned, what no father plans, is that the daughter he installed for reasons of state turned out to be able to write.
So here is where she lived, and I want to take our time in it, because it is the most restful room in the season and because she is going to lose it in about four chapters and I would like you to know it well enough to miss it. The city is Ur, in the far south, near the water, in the flat country of canals and date palms and barley. In the middle of it, on a raised terrace, is the moon temple, and the moon god is called Nanna, or Suen, and he is old, older than the city, older than almost anything. And attached to the temple, part of the same complex, is a building called the gipar. The gipar is her house. It is a large square building, thick walled, built around courtyards, and it contains two things at once. It is the residence of the en priestess, with her rooms and her stores and her kitchens and her staff. And it is also the shrine of the goddess Ningal, who is the wife of the moon, so that the priestess of the moon lived inside the house of the moon's wife, which is exactly the kind of arrangement these people found satisfying and which I have always thought is rather beautiful. Thousands of years later a man with a trowel dug that building out of the ground and walked through its rooms, and we know its plan, and we know where the doors were. So. A day. She would have risen before light, because the rites go with the sky and the moon god's business is at night and the turn of the night is when the offerings are made. There is a fire kept somewhere. There is bread. There is beer, which in that country is food rather than an indulgence, thick and slightly sour, drunk through a straw from a jar because of the barley husks in it. There are people everywhere. This is the thing that surprises everyone about ancient temples. They were not quiet. They were the largest employer in the city. There were bakers and brewers and weavers and gardeners and cooks and singers and cleaners and scribes and men who looked after the animals, and all of them ate from the temple's stores, and all of it was written down, because that is what writing was invented for and it is still, in that century, mostly what it is used for. She oversaw it. The offerings, the calendar, the festivals, the accounts. There are seals that belonged to members of her household and they carry names, and the names are ordinary, and I like reading them because they are the only trace we have of the people who were actually in the rooms with her. A man called Adda, who was her scribe. A man called Sagadu, who was her hairdresser, which tells you something about the establishment. Another whose seal calls him her steward. And at the turn of the month, the moon does what it was told to do in last night's poem, and thins to nothing, and is gone for a night or two, and then comes back as a blade of light over the flat country. And when it did, they marked it. The new moon was a festival. So was the seventh day, and the fifteenth when it was full, and the day it disappeared. Her whole calendar was the moon's instruction, followed on the ground. And I should say what the office actually consisted of, because it is easy to imagine something mystical and it was mostly not. She performed the offerings. She presided at the festivals of the month. She managed the estate, which was large, because the temple owned land and the land produced barley and dates and wool and somebody had to account for all of it. She appears in the record as an authority, in the way an abbess or a college head appears in a record, which is to say in documents about property and appointments and stores. There is one part of the job that people ask about and I will deal with it plainly and briefly and then we will move on, because there is a great deal of nonsense written about it. In some cities, in some periods, there were rites in which a priestess and a king enacted a marriage between a goddess and a god. Whether that ever involved anything beyond ritual and formula is not known, and the honest scholarly position is that we do not have the evidence, and that a great deal of confident writing on the subject is confident about something nobody can see. There is no reason to think it has anything to do with this woman's office at Ur, which was the office of the moon god's spouse in a formal and institutional sense, and I mention it only so that you are not left wondering. Now we can go back to the building. Because the building is the thing, and it is real, and you can look at its plan. Thick outer walls, because everything was mud brick and mud brick wants to be thick. A doorway on one side. Inside, courtyards, open to the sky, because that is how you get light and air into a building with no windows worth the name in a country where the sun is an enemy for half the year. Rooms off the courtyards. Storerooms. A kitchen with the fire scars still on it. And on one side of the complex, the shrine of the goddess Ningal, the moon's wife, with its own small court and its own altar. And under the floors, graves. That is not sinister and I do not want it to sound so. They buried the high priestesses in the house. When one died, they laid her in the ground of the gipar and went on using the rooms above her, and the next one came and lived there and was buried there in her turn, and this went on for five hundred years. The women who held that office are all in that floor, one after another, in order, like the tablets on the shelf. And somewhere in that building, in the middle of all that work, there was a person with a stylus and wet clay and a habit.
The first thing she made that we have is not a poem about herself. It is a survey. It is called the Temple Hymns, and it is a collection of forty two short hymns, one for each of forty two temples, in forty two different cities, all across the country, from the far south up into her father's north. Each one is short. Each one names the city, and the temple, and describes the building, and says something about the god who lives in it, and ends with a formula, so that the whole set has a rhythm you can feel even in translation, the way a list of stations on a railway line has a rhythm. And I want you to see what that actually is, because on the surface it is a devotional text and underneath it is something rather astonishing. It is a map. Forty two temples, in order, north and south, the old Sumerian cities and the new Akkadian ones, all of them in one document, all of them treated with the same care, all of them given the same form. Eridu, which they believed was the oldest city in the world. Nippur, the seat of Enlil. Uruk and its great precinct. Ur, her own. Sippar of the sun. Her father's city in the north, and the old southern places his soldiers had marched through. Let me take you down a few of them, in the order she put them, and you can let them go past. The first one is Eridu, in the far south, in the marshes, which they believed was the oldest city in the world and the first place kingship came down. Its temple belongs to the god of the sweet water, and the hymn calls it a house built on the water, standing over the deep, and that is not a metaphor. Eridu sits where the fresh water comes up out of the ground, and the temple is built on top of it, and the whole idea of that god is that he lives underneath in the water that fills the wells. Then Nippur, in the middle of the country, which is not a capital and never was, and which every king in that world had to be recognised at anyway, because it belongs to Enlil, the lord of the air, and his house is called the mountain house, in a country with no mountains. Then Uruk, the great old city, walled, enormous, the one with the precinct of the goddess of the thing that turns over in a night, whose house is called simply the house of heaven. Then Ur, and this one she wrote about her own front door. Then Sippar of the sun, whose temple is called the white house, and the sun god is the god of judgement in that world, so the white house is also the courthouse, and people came to it with disputes and swore oaths there. Then Girsu, which is where she was going to end up living when things went wrong, though she did not know it when she wrote the hymn. And on, and on, temple after temple, city after city, each one four or five or a dozen lines, each one ending in the same closing formula so that you know the shape of the next one before it starts, which is exactly how a person half asleep likes a list to behave. She took a country that had just been forced together by an army and she put it back together as a hymn. Nobody made her do that. It is not an administrative document and there is no evidence anyone commissioned it. And whether every line of it as we have it came from her hand is a real question that I will come back to, because the copies we have are much later. But the collection is hers, and it was known as hers, and it was used for five hundred years afterward in the schools where scribes were trained, which means that generations of children in that country learned to write by copying out a list of temples that a woman had put in order. And at the end of it, after the forty second hymn, there is a line that is unlike anything else in the literature of that world. She signs it. The last lines name her. They say that the compiler of the tablets is Enheduanna, and then they say something that translators render in slightly different ways, but which comes to this: my king, a thing has been made here that no one has made before. Sit with that for a moment. Everything written before this, and there is a great deal of it, going back centuries, is anonymous. Receipts do not have authors. Contracts do not have authors. The old poems and hymns do not have authors, they simply exist, the way a road exists. Nobody had ever thought to put their own name on a piece of writing and claim it, because the idea that a text belonged to the person who arranged it does not seem to have been an idea anybody had. And at the end of a list of temples, in a moon house at Ur, somebody wrote, this is mine, and it is new. That is the sentence that makes her the first author. Not the first writer. Not the first poet, because there were certainly poems before her and singers before that. The first person we know of who stood at the end of a piece of work and put their name on it and said that it had not existed until they made it. The scribe sets his stylus down on the edge of the tablet. She was, he says, about to have a very bad year.
Before the bad year, one more thing she wrote, and it is the longest of them and the most damaged, and it is about the goddess she is going to need. Its name, from its first words, means something like lady of the encompassing heart, and it is a hymn to Inanna, and it is enormous. Two hundred and seventy lines or so, in the pieces we have, and pieces is the right word, because it is broken in many places and we are reading it across gaps. And what it does, over and over, in line after line, is put two opposite things next to each other and say that the goddess is both. She is the one who makes war and the one who makes peace. She turns a man into a woman and a woman into a man. She gives and she takes away in the same movement. She is dressed in fear and she is dressed in delight. To one person she is a friend at the door and to the next she is the thing at the door. To destroy and to build up are hers. To plant and to pull up are hers. Praise and abuse are hers. Deceit and truthfulness are hers. She has the shepherd's crook and she has the thing that takes the flock. To open the door of the house and to close it. To lift up the fallen and to bring down the standing. To be a friend at the door and to be the thing at the door. There is a run of lines that lists the people she is responsible for, and it is one of the strangest and most inclusive passages in the literature of that world, because it does not sort them into good and bad. The old woman, the old man, the singer, the one who mourns, the one who is grieving, the one who is glad, the priest and the priestess and the servant, the strong man and the weak man, and every kind of person who did not fit the ordinary categories of that society, all of them are named as hers, and none of them are named with contempt. It goes on like this, for pages, and it does not resolve, and I do not think it is trying to. Now, I want to be careful here, because this is a goddess who gets flattened in retelling more than any other, and both of the usual flattenings are wrong. She is not a love goddess with a temper. And she is not a war goddess with a soft side. Those are two ways of taking the same person and deciding which half is really her. What the hymn says, and it says it about forty different ways, is that both halves are equally her and that the switching is the point. She is what happens when things change suddenly. A city is at peace and then it is not. A person is loved and then they are not. A crop comes in and then it does not. Everything in that world that could turn over in a night belonged to her, and turning over in a night is exactly what a life in that country did. So when you are the highest priestess in the oldest city and everything is orderly and the calendar runs and the offerings are made on time and the moon does what the moon was told, and then one morning a man arrives with soldiers and it is all gone, you do not pray to the god of the moon about that. The moon is order. The moon is the thing that never varies. You cannot ask the moon for a reversal, because reversal is not what the moon does. You pray to the one whose whole nature is that things turn over. She wrote that hymn, as far as we can tell, before she needed it. Which is either a coincidence or the ordinary fact that a person spends years thinking about the thing they will eventually have to use.
There is one more poem I want to put in front of you, and I have to hand it to you with a label on it, and the label is this: some scholars think this one is hers, and some are not sure, and the honest position tonight is that it is attributed to her and disputed. I will tell it either way, because it is the best short story in her whole world and because if it is not hers it is certainly by somebody who had read her. It is called Inanna and Ebih. Ebih is a mountain. A real one, a range out to the northeast, in the country beyond the rivers, and it stands up out of the plain the way mountains do when you have grown up somewhere completely flat. The poem opens with the goddess speaking about herself, and it is worth hearing because it sets the terms. She says that she is the one who is respected in heaven and on earth, that she fills the sky with her light, that she is a fire and a flood and a storm, and that she will not be denied. It is not modesty and it is not meant to be. In these poems a god announcing what they are is the same act as a king reciting his titles, and nobody in the room found it strange. And in the poem, the goddess looks at it and it does not bow. That is the whole grievance. It does not bow. It stands there, green and forested and full of animals, in its own country, doing well, and it has not lowered itself, and it has not put its nose to the ground, and it has not acknowledged her. So she goes to the sky god, her father's father, and she says she is going to deal with it, and he tells her not to. He says, plainly, that the mountain is terrifying, that its radiance is fearsome, that it is dreadful, and that she should leave it alone. And I like the sky god here, because he is doing what a cautious senior person does, which is to lay out the risk clearly and then decline to help. He does not forbid her. He tells her it is dangerous, and he describes the danger accurately, and he offers no assistance, and he stays where he is. And she says no. And she goes anyway. What follows is short and strange and reads more like weather than like a battle. She raises a storm against it. She strikes at its sides. She sets fire in its woods. And when it is over the mountain is cut down and quiet, and she stands on it and speaks to it, and what she says is not gloating, exactly. It is a list of what it had and what it has now. You had trees, she says, and I have set fire to them. You had rivers, and I have turned them. You would not bow, and now you are lower than I am. And then she builds a shrine on top of it, and puts a throne in it, and sits down. Here is why I wanted you to have this before the next chapter. That is a poem about somebody who would not lower himself to a woman with an office, and about what happened to him. And in about ninety seconds of story time a man is going to arrive at the moon house at Ur and refuse to lower himself to a woman with an office. The poem is not a prophecy. It is older than her trouble, if it is hers at all. But when she sat down in her worst year and chose which god to write to, she chose the one who levelled a mountain for not bowing, and she had that story in her hands, and I do not believe for one second that she had forgotten it.
His name was Lugal Ane, and outside of her poems he is almost nothing. A name in a list. A man who held Ur for a while. What happened, as far as anyone can reconstruct it, is the thing that happens to every empire in its second generation. Sargon died. His sons took over. And all through the old south the cities that had been held down by one man's personal authority discovered that the authority had been personal, and they rose. It was not one rebellion. It was many, in many cities, over years, and the family put them down and they came back and the family put them down again. Her nephew is the one most people have heard of, if they have heard of any of them. His name was Naram Sin, and he was the grandson of Sargon, and he put down a revolt so large that later writers remembered it as the whole world rising at once. And he is remembered for one other thing, which is that he is the first king in that part of the world to write his own name with the sign that marks a god, and to be shown on a monument wearing the horned crown that only gods wore. There is a famous carved slab of him climbing a mountain with stars above his head and his army coming up behind him, and it is in a museum in Paris, and if you have ever seen a picture of Akkadian art you have probably seen that one. It is a war monument and it is doing what war monuments do, and we will leave it on its wall. And a few centuries later somebody wrote a long poem blaming him personally for the fall of the empire, saying he had offended the god at Nippur and brought the mountain people down on everybody, and the poem is a masterpiece and there is very little reason to think it is history. It is what a later age decided must have happened, because empires that end need a reason, and a proud man on a mountain with stars over his head is a very good reason if you are looking for one. That is the family. Grandfather who may or may not have come down a river in a basket. Grandson who put a god sign in front of his own name. And in between, in the moon house at Ur, running the accounts and writing the hymns, the daughter. At Ur, the man who took the city was Lugal Ane. And having taken the city, he needed the temple. This is the part people miss when they imagine ancient rebellions as purely military. He could hold Ur with soldiers. He could not be the legitimate lord of Ur without the moon god's household, and the moon god's household was run by a woman whose surname, in effect, was the name of the family he had just overthrown. So he came to the gipar. The poem does not give us a scene, and I am not going to invent one, and I want to say that out loud because the temptation is enormous and this house does not do it. There is no dialogue. There is no confrontation on a step. What the poem gives us is the aftermath, told by the person it happened to, in the first person, later, from somewhere else. What we can say is what he wanted, because it is obvious from the shape of it. He wanted her to confirm him. To perform the rites in his name. To let the office say that he was legitimate. And she would not. That is the whole of the rebellion in this episode, and it is one sentence long, and it is the most consequential refusal anybody in this season makes. She would not, and so he removed her.
He took the office from her. The poem says he stripped her of the true office, and it is very specific about what that meant in practice, and the specifics are what make it hurt. He put his hand out to her, she says. He took the offering bowl away. He put an end to the rites. And then the line that is the worst one, and it is worst because it is the smallest. He made her leave the gipar. Not the city, first. The building. The house with the courtyards and the kitchens and the stores and the shrine of the moon's wife inside it, where she had lived and worked for years, and where every single thing had a place and she knew where all of them were. She says, and this is her own voice, that she was made to walk out through a window like a swallow. That she was made to fly from the house. Some translations have her carried off in the wind. However you render it, the picture is a person leaving a building not by the door. And then she was gone from Ur altogether, and she went into exile, and the place she went, as far as we can tell, was Girsu, which is another old city off to the east, with its own temple and its own god and no particular reason to care about her. And I want to give you Girsu properly, because I have just named it and walked past it, and it is not a nowhere. It is one of the best documented places in the entire ancient world. That is not an exaggeration. Tens of thousands of administrative tablets have come out of that city and the country around it, from various periods, and they are the reason we know as much as we do about how a Mesopotamian city actually ran. Ration lists. Field measurements. Wool deliveries. The names of ploughmen and the number of days they worked. It is the place where, more than anywhere, the ordinary machinery of that world is visible. It had its own god, a warrior god of the plough and the storm, whose emblem was a great bird with a lion's head, and you will meet that bird properly on a later night of this season. And it had a functioning temple household, with an en of its own, and a calendar, and offerings made at the right hours by the right people, every day, exactly as at Ur. Which is the detail I want you to sit with, because it is the sharpest thing in the whole exile and the poem does not say it. She was not sent to a wilderness. She was sent to another temple city, in full working order, where every morning somebody she did not know went into a building she had no business in and performed, correctly and on time, the same kind of office she had been performing for thirty years and was no longer allowed to perform. She would have heard it. You cannot be in a city like that and not hear it. The drums at the turn of the month. The processions on the festival days. The particular quality of noise a temple makes when the offerings are going in and the staff are all busy and everything is running. All of it going on beautifully, a few streets away, without her. That is what the poem is describing when it says that the day is no good to her and that she does not know what to do with it. She is not lost in a desert. She is a professional, in a town full of her own profession, with no post. And anybody who has ever been out of work in a place where everybody else is working knows the specific sound of that, which is the sound of other people's ordinary Tuesday. Now I want to slow all the way down here, because the middle of this episode is the part of the night where you are most likely to be going under, and because what happens next is not dramatic at all, and I would like you to have it gently. She was, for a period we cannot measure, a woman without a job in a town that was not hers. That is it. That is the disaster. Nobody is chasing her. She is not in a cell. She has, one assumes, money and standing and a name, and somewhere to sleep. What she does not have is the building, and the calendar, and the rites at the turn of the month, and the thing she was. The poem is full of what that felt like and none of it is loud. She says she no longer knows what to do with the day. She says her sweet mouth has turned bitter. She says that the pleasant thing she used to do, the thing that was hers, has been swept away. She says she is like a swallow that has flown, and she says she does not know where the perch is. There is a line where she describes standing in the daylight and it being no good to her, and another where she says she carried the ritual basket and sang the song of joy and now the funeral offering has been set out, as though somebody had died, and the somebody is her office. And in the middle of that, in a borrowed room in a city that was not hers, with no temple to run and no household and no reason to get up early, she did the only thing she had ever been able to do that nobody could take away from her. She got clay.
What she wrote in exile is a hundred and fifty three lines long, and it is called, from its first words, lady of all the divine powers, and it is the most extraordinary document in this entire season, and I am going to walk you through it slowly, because the shape of it is the whole point and the shape is very strange. It begins as a hymn. Not as a complaint. Not as a letter. For the first forty lines or so it is a public, formal, entirely conventional hymn of praise to Inanna, of the kind she had been writing and performing for years, and it is beautiful and it is impersonal and it is exactly what you would expect the high priestess to produce. Lady of all the divine powers, resplendent light, righteous woman clothed in radiance. Beloved of heaven and earth. Great in your greatness. She praises her as the storm. She praises her as the flood that comes down the mountain. She praises the terror of her, the way people scatter before her, the way the land shakes. She spends a long time on how frightening the goddess is, and this is not flattery, or not only flattery, because a person who has been thrown out of her house by a man with soldiers has a very practical interest in the size of the god she is writing to. And then, somewhere around line sixty, without warning, the poem turns. It stops being about the goddess and starts being about her. I am Enheduanna, she writes. That is the line. Four thousand three hundred years ago a woman put her own name inside a poem, in the middle of it, in the first person, as the person the poem is happening to, and as far as anybody knows nobody had ever done that before in the history of writing. I am Enheduanna. I was the high priestess. I carried the ritual basket, I sang the song of joy. Now I am placed in the leper's house. The daylight is hidden from me. The shadow falls over me. My honeyed mouth has become bitter. And then she describes the man, and she describes him without a battle scene and without a curse and in the flattest possible language, which is why it works. That man has taken my crown away from me. He has taken away my office. He has said, this is mine. He set his hand out to me. He put an end to the rites. And then she does something that I find almost unbearable in its ordinariness, and which is the reason I love this poem. She says she asked the moon god first, and he did not answer. She had spent her adult life in the moon's house. She was the moon's own priestess. She was, in the language of the office, his spouse. And she says, in the poem, plainly, that she went to Nanna, and pleaded her case, and there was no answer, and she says the words for it that anybody who has ever prayed and got nothing back would recognise. It is as if he does not care about me. So she turns to the other one. To the goddess of the thing that turns over in a night. The one from the hymn she had already written, the one who is both halves and whose whole nature is reversal, the one who went up a mountain that would not bow. And before the argument there is a passage about the state she is in, and it is the most physical writing in her whole surviving work, and it is not grand at all. She says she cannot stretch out her hand from the pure place where she used to. She says that where there was sweetness there is now no sweetness. She says the good days are turned to a different thing. She talks about her own voice, and this is the part that gets me, because a person whose entire profession was performance says that her mouth, which was for singing, has gone bitter, and that the thing she was known for doing beautifully is now the thing she cannot do. And there is a line in which she says that she is not being spoken well of. That her reputation is being handled by other people, in her absence, and she cannot answer it. Four thousand three hundred years, and that is still the worst part of losing a position, and she got it down first. And she makes her argument, and the argument is not what you would expect either. She does not mostly ask for pity. She tells the goddess that this is a matter of the goddess's own standing. That the world does not yet know her greatness properly. That her power should be spoken of everywhere. She offers, in effect, a trade. Restore me, and I will make you famous. Which is either the most audacious thing anybody says to a god in this literature, or exactly what a temple administrator would say, because it is a proposal, with a benefit stated, from someone who has run a large organisation and knows how requests get approved. And then, near the end, comes the passage I have been saving all night, and I want to give it to you exactly here, at this hour, because it was written for this hour. She describes making the poem. She says that she gave birth to it. That in the night, alone, she brought this thing into being for the goddess, and that what she recited in the middle of the night, a singer should repeat back in the middle of the day. That is a woman describing her own working hours. She wrote it at night. Of course she did. She was a priestess of the moon god for thirty years and her whole professional life ran on the night calendar, and then she lost the office and kept the hours, the way people do, and so the first signed poem in the history of the world was composed in the dark by somebody who could not sleep, and the instruction attached to it is that it should be sung back in daylight by somebody else. You are hearing it in the middle of the night. Somebody, somewhere, is probably reading it in the afternoon. She arranged both. There is one more movement before the end, and it is the one that scholars spend the most time on, because in it she seems to describe the poem working while she is writing it. She says that as she speaks, the goddess grows. That the praise she is putting into the poem is itself the thing that raises her. And so the poem is not only a request for help. It is the payment for the help, delivered in advance, inside the request. She is doing the thing she promised at the same moment she promises it. I do not know how to describe what that is except to say it is the most confident piece of writing I know of from the ancient world. A woman with no office and no house, in a borrowed room in a town she did not choose, wrote a poem whose argument is that the poem itself is so good it constitutes proof that its author should be restored, and then she sent it, and then she was restored. And then the poem ends, and it ends with the thing being granted. The last movement says that the goddess heard her. That her prayer was accepted. That Inanna's heart was cooled, that the day became favourable, that she was clothed in beauty again, and that the light was sweet. The words are careful and formal and there is no scene of triumph, no vengeance, no mountain cut down, no man punished. Just the day becoming favourable. And the light being sweet.
She got the office back. We know this the way we know most things about her, which is sideways, from objects and lists rather than from a story. There are records that place her back at Ur, in the office, afterward. The rebellion at Ur was put down by her family, as the rebellions generally were in that generation, and Lugal Ane goes out of the record entirely, which is the fate of almost everyone who ever held a city for a while. And she went home. I want to give you the walk, because it is the best thing I can give you at this point in the night and because the poem does not describe it, so it is mine to imagine carefully and yours to take or leave. The road into Ur from the east, in the late part of the day, with the flat country going out on both sides, and the canals with their lines of date palms, and the smell of water and mud and animals. The wall, and then the gate. The streets she had known for thirty years, narrow, mud brick, hot on one side and cool on the other. Then the temple terrace, rising up out of the middle of the city, pale in the low sun. And the gipar, with its thick walls and its courtyards, and the shrine of the moon's wife inside it, and the stores, and the kitchens, and the rooms, and every single thing back in the place where she knew it was. The door. Not the window this time. And whatever staff were still there, the scribe called Adda and the steward and the man who did her hair, standing about in the courtyard the way people do when somebody has come back and nobody is quite sure what to say. And then, presumably, the following morning, at the turn of the night, the offerings. Made in the usual way, at the usual hour, in the correct order, by the person whose job it was, which after everything is the most satisfying possible ending, because it is not a triumph. It is a Tuesday. She was the en priestess of Nanna at Ur for the rest of her life. When she died she was buried, as far as we can tell, in the gipar itself, in the ground of the house, along with the other high priestesses who came after her, because they kept that office going for five hundred years and they kept burying them in the same building. And the office went on. That is the part I find steadying, and it is worth having before we go to the last two chapters. Whatever she did in that job, she did it well enough that the job itself became permanent. After her there was another en priestess of Nanna at Ur, and after that one another, and it kept going for something like five hundred years, through the end of her family's empire and the rise and fall of the next one and the one after that. Kings who had no connection to her family at all kept installing their daughters in it, in deliberate imitation, because by then it was simply what a king who wanted to be taken seriously in the south did with a daughter. The last one we know of was the daughter of a Babylonian king called Nabonidus, more than a thousand years after Enheduanna. He is the king who was interested in old things to a degree that annoyed his own priesthood, and when he decided to install his daughter in that office he sent people to dig up the old gipar to find out how it had been done properly. They found the earlier inscriptions. They read them. They rebuilt the building, and put his daughter in it, and wrote down that this was the correct ancient way. A man went digging in the ruins of her house for the right way to do her job, a thousand years later, and left a note saying he had checked. That is the end of the life, and there are two chapters left, and both of them happen after she is dead.
Here is the strangest fact about Enheduanna, and it is the one that took me longest to get used to. We do not have a single line of her poems in her own handwriting. Not one tablet from her lifetime. Nothing from the twenty third century before the year one. Every copy of the Exaltation, of the great hymn, of the temple hymns, every single one of the hundreds of pieces we have, comes from about five hundred years after she died. And they come, almost all of them, from schools. That is the picture, and I want you to have it because it is the warmest thing in the episode and the reason any of this survived. In the old cities, centuries later, in a period when scribes were trained in a formal way in what were essentially classrooms, boys and some girls were taught to write by copying out the standard texts. The way you might have learned handwriting by copying a passage. And among the standard texts, in the curriculum, alongside the old hymns and the proverbs and the lists of trees and birds, were her poems. Picture the room, because we know a fair amount about it. A house in a city, one room of it given over to it, a master and a handful of students. A basket of clay in the corner and water to keep it workable. Round tablets, the size of your palm, with the teacher's line written across the top and the student's copy of it underneath, which is how we can tell which is which. When a tablet was finished with, the clay was soaked and reused, unless somebody happened to throw it in a wall or a floor, which is why we have any of them at all. They learned in stages. First the signs. Then lists, endless lists, of trees and reeds and vessels and animals and stones and professions and place names, which is how you learn several thousand signs. Then proverbs, short and dry and often funny. And then, when a student was good enough, the literature, and the literature was a fixed set of texts that everybody copied, the way every schoolchild in a country ends up having read the same handful of poems. Her poems were in that set. So there are dozens and dozens of copies of the Exaltation of Inanna, in the same hand a child would use, some of them with mistakes, some of them corrected, some of them broken off halfway because whoever it was got tired or was called away or simply stopped. Five hundred years after a woman in a moon house signed a list of temples, children were learning to write by copying out her sentence about being made to leave through a window like a swallow. Now this is also the reason for the honest complication, and I am not going to leave it out. Because the copies are late, we cannot prove that every word we read is a word she wrote. Some scholars think the poems are substantially hers, transmitted carefully, the way texts were transmitted in that world, which was carefully. Others think the schools shaped them over five centuries, and that what we have is Enheduanna as the tradition remembered her. A few go further and treat the whole attribution as a later school's idea about a famous name. There is a useful way of holding all three of those at once, which I did not invent and which comes from the scholars who work on her, and it is that there are several Enheduannas. There is the woman, who certainly lived, whose office is documented, whose disk exists, whose household's seals we can read. There is the author the schools believed in, five centuries later, when they put her name at the head of the curriculum. And there is the figure of the last fifty years, the world's first named author, on posters and in anthologies and on a crater on the planet Mercury, which is a real thing and which is named after her. All three are real. Only the first one had a house.
The scribe reaches over and puts his hand on the white stone. In nineteen twenty seven, a man called Leonard Woolley was digging at Ur, and had been for years, with his wife Katharine, and they went through the moon temple complex and into the gipar, which is how we know its rooms and where its doors were. And in a passage in that building, in the fill, in the rubbish and broken material that had accumulated in it, they found this. Not on a shelf. Not in a case. Not set up anywhere. In pieces, in a passage, among the debris. It had been broken. And Woolley, looking at it, wrote down what he thought had happened to it, and what he thought was that it had not simply fallen. There are marks on it. The face of the carving, the surface with the four figures on it, is damaged in a way that looks to him and to many people since like the work of a tool. Somebody, at some point, with something in their hand, went at it. Deliberately defaced, is the phrase. We do not know who. We do not know when. It could have been in her own century, by somebody who was there when the soldiers came. It could have been generations later, in some other quarrel about some other family. It could have been a person with a reason we would recognise or a person with a reason we would find absurd. Nobody wrote it down. All we have is a broken stone in a passage and the marks on it. And here is the last thing, and it is the reason I asked you at the very beginning to stay awake this long if you could. Among the pieces, they found a flake. One small piece of the carved face, broken off, lying in the fill with the rest. And on that flake, undamaged, was her head. Her face came off in one piece and was not destroyed. Whoever went at that stone with a tool did not manage to take away the part they had presumably most wanted to take away. It broke free and it lay in the ground in the dark of a ruined building for four thousand years with her face on it, and then a man with a trowel picked it up. And they put it back. It is not a perfect restoration, and the people who study it now argue about how much the nineteen twenties repair took liberties, which is a fair argument and a modern one. But the object you can go and stand in front of has a woman on it, larger than the priest, in her flounced robe, with her hand raised, watching a man pour a drink for the moon, and her face is on it, and it is her face, on the piece that came away whole. The lamp is low now. Think of it, wherever you are lying. Somebody built her a stone. Somebody else broke it. The ground kept the piece that mattered. And a man who had never heard of her found it and set it back where it went, and now it is in a case in a museum in Philadelphia, under a light, and people walk past it all day. And in the schools, five hundred years after her death, children copied her sentences to learn how to hold a stylus, which means her words went out through hundreds of hands into the ordinary machinery of a country, and that is the copy that mattered, not the stone. The stone is only her picture. Four thousand three hundred years is a long time for a name to last, and hers lasted because of two completely unremarkable things. She signed her work. And other people, who did not know her and had no reason to care, kept copying it out because it was on the list of things you copied. That is all it takes. Somebody puts their name on something, and then, for a very long time, other people simply do not throw it away. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The moon is doing what it was told to do last night, and thinning, and it will be gone in a day or two, and then it will come back over the flat country as a blade of light, the way it did over her house, at the hour she used to be awake. You do not have to keep any of tonight. If you keep one thing let it be the flake with her face on it, lying in the ground in the dark for four thousand years, waiting, without needing anything, until somebody came. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we come to the famous one. For two nights we have been in the deep background of this world, the making of it and the first person to sign her name to anything in it. Tonight we start the story that everybody has heard of and almost nobody has actually read, and we are going to take three whole nights over it, because it is three thousand lines long and it deserves them. Tonight is the first third. A king who is too much for his own city. A wild man made out of clay and thrown into the grass, who lives with the gazelles and drinks at their waterhole. A trapper who finds him and is frightened. A woman who is sent out to meet him, and who does the thing that turns him from an animal into a person, which is not what you might assume and is much stranger and much kinder. A wrestling match in a doorway that turns into the most famous friendship in literature. And then a long walk north into a forest that nobody was supposed to enter, to kill the thing that lived in it. And I will tell you now, so that you are not braced for it, that the killing happens in the tenth chapter and that the last two chapters of tonight are quiet. We begin on a wall, and in three nights time, at the very end of the third episode, we will end on the same wall. Hold nothing. It will come back to you. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here for the making of the world out of water, or for the woman in the moon house, or on older nights for the gods and the baskets and the flood. If so, welcome back, and your place on the reed mat is where you left it. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome. This is a good night to arrive on, because tonight is a beginning. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The scribe takes down a tablet, and then another, and then another, and keeps going until there are eleven of them stacked at his elbow, and then he puts a twelfth beside the stack rather than on it, slightly apart, which he does deliberately and which we will not talk about for two more nights. This one, he says, is the long one. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. There are three names tonight and they are the only three you need. Gilgamesh, who is the king. Enkidu, who is the wild man. And Humbaba, who is in the forest. Everything else can go past you. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. There is a killing in this story and I am not going to hide it from you. But it is one killing, of one enormous creature, at the end of a long walk, and it is over in a page, and it is followed by two chapters of men floating timber down a river in the sunshine, which is where we are going to leave you. Nothing tonight will startle you. The frightening thing about this poem does not arrive until tomorrow night, and it is not a monster. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, so that the second and third nights find you without your having to look. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
The poem does not begin with the king. It begins with a building, and it begins by talking to you. Go up, it says. Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk along it. Survey the foundation platform, examine the brickwork. Is it not baked brick, of the very best? Did not the seven sages themselves lay its foundations? That is the opening of the oldest long poem in the world, and it is a walking tour. Somebody is standing next to you at the bottom of a wall, telling you to climb up and go along the top and look at the brickwork, and asking you, with obvious pride, to admit that it is good brickwork. Not to admire the king. Not to fear the gods. To go up and look at the bricks. And you can still do this. That is the part that undoes me. The wall of Uruk is in the ground in southern Iraq and it has been dug and measured, and it runs for something in the region of six miles around, and there are the remains of hundreds of towers along it, and where the mud brick has weathered you can see the courses. People go up on it. And it credits the foundations to the seven sages. They come up all through this literature and they are worth having once, tonight, because they will be back later in the season. The seven sages are figures from before the flood, half fish or fish clothed depending on the picture, who came up out of the water at the beginning and taught people the things people did not work out for themselves. Building. Writing. Law. The crafts. There are statues of them buried under the floors of houses, deliberately, as protection, and there are lists of them with names, and each one is attached to a king of the old time. So the poem's claim about the wall is not that a king built it. It is that the wall goes back past kings, to the people who taught the first people how to do anything, and that what you are climbing on is that old. And underneath the boast there is a fact. Uruk is one of the first cities on earth. Not a big village. A city, with a population that ran into the tens of thousands at a time when almost nowhere else on the planet had anything of the kind. Writing appears there. The earliest tablets anybody has found come out of that ground, and they are accounts of grain and beer and workers, and they are older than every story in this season by a long way. The poem tells you the size of the city, and it does it in the flattest possible way, like a man reading out a deed. One square mile is city. One square mile is date grove. One square mile is clay pit. And half a square mile is the temple precinct. Three and a half square miles, it says, is the measure of Uruk. That is a survey. Somebody paced that out, or read it off a document, and put it into a poem, and it survived four thousand years, and it is roughly correct. And then it tells you about the box. There is, the poem says, a copper box at the wall, and in it a tablet of lapis lazuli, and on the tablet is written everything this man went through. Open the box. Undo the fastening. Take out the tablet and read it aloud. So the poem tells you that the poem you are hearing was found in a box in the wall of a real city, written down by the man it happened to. That is not true, and it is the oldest version of that particular lie in the world, and every book that has ever pretended to be a found manuscript is doing what this poem did first. But the wall is real. The wall is six miles of it, still there. Remember the wall. In three nights we come back to it, and a man who has lost everything will point at the brickwork and it will be the ending.
His name was Gilgamesh, and he was king in Uruk, and there is a reasonable chance he existed. I want to put that carefully. There is a king list, made much later, that has him in it, in the right sort of place, in the first dynasty of Uruk, and there are a few other early mentions. He is not attested the way a king with his own inscriptions is attested. But he sits in the record roughly where a real early king would sit, and a good number of specialists think there was probably a man, and that the man became this. The poem says he was two thirds god and one third human, which is not a fraction that works, and everybody who has ever read it has noticed, and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained it, and I find that comforting. The oldest long poem in the world opens with arithmetic that does not add up. His mother is a goddess, called Ninsun, which means wild cow, and she is going to be important tonight because she is one of the few people in this literature who is unambiguously good at her job and completely unbothered by anybody. And he is magnificent. The poem spends a long time on this. Perfect in strength. Tall. Beautiful. He opened the passes in the mountains. He dug wells. He crossed the sea. He restored the temples. He built that wall. And he is a disaster to live near. The city complains, and the complaint is the engine of everything that follows, and it is worth hearing exactly. The young men of Uruk, they say, he does not leave alone. And the daughters, they say, he does not leave alone. Now, the tablets are damaged here, and there is an old reading of this passage that says the king was claiming a right over brides on their wedding nights, and you will find that in a great many retellings. The honest position is that the text does not clearly say it, that the reading depends on restorations of broken lines, and that specialists argue about it and have for decades. What the text definitely says is that he wore the city out. That nobody was left in peace. That the sons were kept from their fathers and the young women from their mothers, and that the people of Uruk went up to the gods and complained about their own king. And that is a good enough problem. A city built by a man who is too strong for it, who has done everything worth doing and has nothing left to do, and who is now simply loose in the streets with all that energy and no war on. And I want to put one other thing beside that, because if we only tell you this version you will get him wrong. There is a separate, older, Sumerian poem in which the same king behaves completely differently. In it, a rival city sends messengers demanding submission, and Gilgamesh goes first to the assembly of the elders of Uruk, who tell him to give in, and then he goes to the assembly of the young men, who tell him to fight, and he takes the second answer and the city holds. Two assemblies. A ruler who asks both of them. That poem is not about a man who is too much for his city. It is about a constitutional question, and it is one of the reasons people argue about how early something like a citizens' assembly existed in that country. So the tyrant of the first tablet is one telling. There are others, older, in a different language, where he is a careful king. The long poem chose the difficult version because a poem needs a problem, and I would rather you knew there were choices being made than think we have a photograph. So the gods hear the complaint, and they do what gods in this world always do, which is not to remove the problem. They make him a friend.
They went to the goddess who makes people. Her name here is Aruru, and she is one of the birth goddesses, and she is the one who made the human race in the first place. And they said, you made him. Now make his equal. Make somebody who can match him, so that they can contend with each other, and Uruk can have some peace. And she washed her hands. I love that detail more than almost any other in the poem, and it is one line and easy to miss. Before she made a living creature she washed her hands, the way you would before handling dough. She washed her hands, and she pinched off some clay, and she threw it down in the wild country. And a word about that clay, because we have been here before in this house and the two are not the same. In the older story, the one with the baskets and the strike, the whole human race is made out of clay mixed with the blood of a god, once, at the beginning, to carry the work. Two nights ago, in the Babylonian poem, people are made out of the blood of the commander of the losing army, once, so that the gods can rest. This is neither of those. This is one man, made on request, as a match for another man, by a goddess who washed her hands first. It is not the creation of humanity. It is a commission. Same material. Completely different job. The tablets are perfectly comfortable having all three of these in the same library and so are we. And there, in the open, out beyond the fields, Enkidu came into being. He is covered in hair. The whole of him, shaggy, all over his body. The hair of his head grows long, like a woman's, thick as the barley goddess's. He knows nothing of people or of settled country. He wears no clothes, because there is nobody to have taught him about clothes. He eats grass with the gazelles. He crowds in at the waterhole with the animals and drinks alongside them. He is not lonely and he is not a savage and the poem is entirely without contempt for him. He is simply an animal, and a well fed and contented one, and he is enormous. And I want to give you what he was actually like before anybody got to him, because the description is one of the most carefully made things in the poem and it is not what people remember. He wears no clothes. He knows no people and he knows no land. He does not know bread and he does not know beer. And he lives with the animals, and this is the part that matters. He does not hunt them. He eats grass with the gazelles. He jostles at the watering hole with the wild beasts, and the poem says the herd is glad of the water and so is he. He is not a wild man in the sense of a savage. He is a wild man in the sense of a creature who belongs to a herd, and is happy in it, and has never been anything else. And what he does that brings him to anybody's notice is not violence. It is that he fills in the trapper's pits and pulls up the traps and lets the animals out. That is his crime. He keeps undoing the hunting. Which means the poem introduces its second hero as somebody who is preventing people from making a living, out of straightforward sympathy for the things being caught, without any idea that he is doing anything at all. And then it puts him next to the king. Look at what these two actually are, side by side, because the poem has built them as a matched pair on purpose and every detail lines up against its opposite. One is inside the greatest wall in the world. The other has never seen a wall. One is two thirds god. The other is made of clay and thrown into the open country. One is described as a bull rampaging through his own city, taking whatever he wants from people who cannot refuse him. The other is described as a creature drinking peacefully with a herd, taking nothing, and going out of his way to spare animals he could have eaten. The poem is not making a hero and a monster. It is making two halves of a person, and then spending the rest of the night putting them together and watching what the combination does. And then the traps start disappearing. There is a trapper working that country, setting pits and snares for the animals, and he comes out one morning and his pits are filled in and his snares are pulled up and the animals are drinking calmly at the waterhole. And he sees, standing among them, a man. The poem is very good about the trapper. It says his face froze, the way a man's face does. It says he went home and could not speak of it properly, and that he was rigid with fear, and that his heart was pounding. And it says he went to his father. And his father, who is an old man in a hut at the edge of the wild country, gives him a piece of advice that changes the history of literature. Go to Uruk, he says. Go to the king. Tell him what you have seen. And ask him for a woman.
Her name is Shamhat, and she works at the temple of the goddess of the thing that turns over in a night, and what her profession was exactly is one of the longest running arguments in this field, and I am going to give you the honest version rather than either of the confident ones. There was a class of women attached to temples in that world, with titles, and duties, and standing. Some of those duties involved rites and music and celebration. Whether and how they involved anything else is argued about endlessly, and the words for them are translated in a dozen ways depending on which decade and which scholar you are reading. She has been called a prostitute and a priestess and a courtesan and a temple servant, and every one of those carries a load of assumptions from the translator's own century. What the poem tells us is what she does, and what she does is the thing that matters. She walks out into the wild country with the trapper. Three days walk, out past the fields, to the waterhole. And they sit down and they wait. For two days nothing. And on the third day the animals come down to drink, and among them is the man. And she does what she was brought to do, and the poem says it plainly and without any leering at all, and takes about four lines over it. She was not ashamed, it says. She took him in. For six days and seven nights, Enkidu was with her. And then the important part. When he stood up and went back to the animals, they ran from him. The gazelles saw him and scattered. The wild creatures of the open country backed away from him. He tried to go after them and his legs would not do what they had done. His body was heavy. His knees were slow. He was not the same thing any more. And he came back and sat down at her feet, and the poem says that he had lost his strength, and that he had gained understanding, and that he was wise, and broad in his thinking. Now, that exchange is the whole of it, and I want to be careful with it, because it can be told two ways and one of them is much better and also more accurate. The bad way is to say he lost his innocence. That is a Genesis reading laid over a poem that is older and that does not have the same idea in it at all. What the poem actually says is that he became able to think, and that the price of it was that he could no longer run with the animals. Not because he had done something wrong. Because he had changed species. You cannot be a person and also be a gazelle. The herd knew before he did. And what does she do with him, this woman who came out to the waterhole for six days with a trapper? She talks to him. She sits with him and tells him about the city. And this is the longest speech any woman gets in the poem and it is worth having properly, because everything after it happens because she said it well. Come with me, she says, to Uruk of the walls, to the holy temple, where the people are dressed in fine clothes, where every day is a festival, where the young men are handsome and the young women are lovely, where there is music and drums and the perfume of cedar. And then she says the thing that lands. There is a man there, she says. His name is Gilgamesh. He is powerful and beautiful and there is nobody like him, and he does not sleep at night, and the city is worn out with him. You are his equal. You were made his equal. Go and see him, and he will see you, and you will know each other. She is not seducing him into the city. She is recruiting him. She has understood, in six days at a waterhole, exactly what he is for, and she goes and gets him, and she is right about all of it. And I will tell you now, because tomorrow night is heavy and I would rather it did not surprise you there: the poem does not forget her. In the second episode a dying man will curse her by name for having brought him out of the wild country, at length, bitterly, and then the sun god will answer him and list everything she gave him, and he will take the curse back and bless her instead. She is the only person in this poem who is cursed and blessed by the same man in the same conversation. And then she takes off her clothing and she divides it in two and she puts half of it on him. That is how Enkidu gets dressed. She tears her own dress in half and gives him one half and wears the other half herself and takes him by the hand like a child and walks him to the shepherds' camp.
I want to spend a whole chapter here, because this is the gentlest passage in the entire epic and hardly anybody ever tells it. The shepherds put food in front of him and he does not know what it is. They set out bread, and he stares at it. He has never seen bread. He does not know that it is food. He had, the poem says, only ever sucked the milk of wild animals. He squints at it and turns it over and does not eat it. And they set out beer, and he does not know what to do with that either. And somebody, one of the shepherds, tells him. Eat the bread, Enkidu, they say. It is what people live on. Drink the beer. It is the custom of the land. And I want to stop on the beer for a moment, because we hear the word and think of an indulgence and in that country it was nothing of the kind. Beer there was made from barley bread, broken up and fermented, and it was thick, closer to a gruel than to anything you would order now, and it was drunk through a straw made of reed or metal because of the husks floating in it. There are pictures of people sitting round a single large jar with several straws going into it, which is how you drank in company. It was food. It was a large part of how an ordinary person got their calories. Workers were paid in it, by the day, measured out in fixed rations along with barley and oil, and those ration lists are among the earliest documents anybody wrote. And there is a hymn to the goddess of beer, whose name is Ninkasi, and the hymn is a recipe. It goes through the process, step by step, the soaking and the baking and the mashing and the vat, in praise language, so that a person singing a hymn to a goddess is also being told how to make beer, which means the oldest brewing instructions we have are a song. So when the shepherds put a jar in front of him, they are not offering him a drink. They are offering him dinner, and the answer to the question of what people in that country ate. So he ate the bread, until he was full. And he drank the beer. Seven jugs of it. And then, the poem says, he became expansive and he sang. He was joyful. His face lit up. He washed his hairy body with water, and he rubbed himself with oil, and he put on clothes, and the poem says, and this is the line, that he became like a man. Seven jugs of beer and a wash and a change of clothes. That is the initiation. That is the whole ceremony of becoming human in the oldest story we have. Somebody hands you bread and explains what it is for, somebody pours you a drink, you get cheerful, you have a wash, you put on a shirt. And then he takes a weapon and goes out at night to guard the flocks against the lions and the wolves he used to live beside, and the shepherds sleep, and the poem says they slept soundly, because there was a man watching. And it is worth saying what that meant in practice, because the poem is specific and the picture is wonderful. He had spent his whole life on the other side of that arrangement. He knew where the lions lay up in the day. He knew what a wolf does at the edge of a flock and how long it waits. He had drunk at the waterhole beside every animal that was now coming for the sheep, and he knew all of them by sight and by sound and probably by smell. So he sat out at night with a weapon, in the dark, listening, and the poem says he caught wolves and drove off lions, and that the herders lay down and slept. He was, within a week, the best thing that had happened to that camp. And then a stranger comes through, going to Uruk for a wedding, and Enkidu asks him what the city is like. And the man tells him about the king, and about what the king does, and Enkidu's face goes white with anger, and he says, take me there.
Meanwhile, in the city, the king has been dreaming. He has had two dreams and he does not understand either of them, and he takes them to his mother, because his mother is a goddess and this is what she is for. In the first dream, he says, the stars of the sky were above me, and something fell out of the sky like a lump of rock, and it landed in front of me. And I tried to lift it and it was too heavy. And the whole city gathered around it. And I loved it. The poem uses the words the way you would about a person. He says he was drawn to it as to a wife. He says he bent over it, and lifted it with great effort, and brought it to his mother, and laid it at her feet. And Ninsun, wild cow Ninsun, listens to the whole thing and then explains it to him without a moment of confusion. That, she says, is a friend. There is coming to you a strong companion, one who rescues a friend. He is the mightiest in the land. And you will love him as you love a wife, and you will bend over him, and I will make him your equal. And then he has a second dream, about an axe lying in the street, and the city gathered round it, and again he loved it, and again she says the same thing. It is a man. It is your friend. You will love him. Now, I want to say something about this, because it is the thing people most often ask about this poem and it deserves a plain answer. The language in these dreams is love language. It is the language you would use about a spouse, and the poem uses it deliberately and repeatedly, and the scholarship on whether that means what a modern reader would take it to mean is large, serious, and unresolved. What is not in dispute is that this is the central relationship in the poem, that it is described in the most intimate terms the language had, and that everything that happens for the next two nights happens because of it. The poem itself does not seem to feel any need to categorise it. I am not going to do it for them. So he is expecting a friend when Enkidu walks into town. And Enkidu walks into town and the people come out and look at him, and they say he is the same build as the king, shorter perhaps, but broader, and the city fills up with a kind of excitement, and somebody says, a rival has come. There is a wedding happening, and the king is going to it, and the door of the house is open. And Enkidu goes and stands in the doorway and puts his foot across it, and will not let him in. And they fight. They fight in the doorway and then out into the street. The poem says they grappled like bulls, that they shattered the doorpost, that the wall shook. It is a proper fight and it is not one sided and it goes on. And then the king gets his knee bent to the ground and puts his foot back down and stops. And it breaks. Whatever it was between them breaks, right there, in the street, with the wedding guests watching. Gilgamesh turns away, and his fury goes out of him, and Enkidu speaks first, and what he says is not a taunt. He says, your mother bore you as one apart. Your head is raised above other men. Enlil has given you the kingship over the people. And they kissed each other, the poem says, and they became friends. There are older tablets of this scene, from centuries before the long version, and two of the best known sit in museums in America and are called after them, one at Pennsylvania and one at Yale. They tell the same events in a different tone, warmer and rougher and less grand, and in one of them, after the fight, Enkidu stands there and weeps because he has understood that he has come into a settled life and will not go back, and Gilgamesh has to comfort him. One sentence of that is all I want to give you, because two versions is a texture and three is a lecture. Some older tellings are gentler. The scene is the same and the men are softer in it. The scribe stops for a moment. That, he says, is the whole problem of the first two tablets solved in one afternoon by two men who wanted a fight. The city is at peace. The king has somebody to talk to. The wild man has a house. Everybody in Uruk got what they asked for. He turns the tablet. And if it ended there, he says, nobody would have copied it for two thousand years.
What happens next is that Enkidu becomes unhappy, and it is one of the most human turns in the whole poem. He has a house now. He has a friend. He eats bread and drinks beer and sleeps under a roof. And after a while he goes soft, and he sits down, and he weeps, and Gilgamesh asks him what is wrong, and Enkidu says, my arms have gone slack. My strength has become weak. Idleness has come over me. The wild man got a comfortable life and it made him miserable. And Gilgamesh, who has been looking for something to do since the first tablet, has an idea. There is, he says, a forest. It is far away, in the mountains to the north or the west depending on which version you are reading, and it is full of cedar, which is the most valuable timber in the world to a country that has no trees worth the name. Cedar is what temple doors are made of. Cedar is what roofs are made of. Cedar smells extraordinary and lasts for centuries and does not grow anywhere within a month's walk of Uruk. And it is guarded. The guardian's name is Humbaba, and he was appointed by Enlil himself to keep that forest, and he is a terror by design. Enlil put him there so that people would not cut the cedars. He has a voice like a flood. His mouth is fire. His breath is death. And he has seven of something that the poems call radiances or auras or terrors, which are put on and taken off like garments, and which are the reason nobody has ever got near him. Let us go, says Gilgamesh, and kill him, and cut the cedar, and make a name that lasts. And here is the thing I want you to notice about this poem, and it is the reason it is not a hero story in the way we usually mean. Everybody tells him not to. Enkidu tells him not to first, and Enkidu is the one person who has actually been there. When I lived in the wild country, he says, I knew that forest. I have seen where he goes. Humbaba's roar is the flood, his mouth is fire, his breath is death. Why do you want to do this? It is a battle that cannot be won. Then the elders of Uruk tell him not to. The council of the old men of the city, who have watched him grow up, tell him he is young, that his heart is carrying him away, that he does not know what he is proposing, and that the road is long and the thing at the end of it is not something a person defeats. And when he will not be talked out of it, they change tack, and this is the part I like. Having failed to stop him, the old men give him instructions. Do not rely on your own strength alone, they say. Let Enkidu go in front of you, because he knows the road and he has walked the forest. Let him lead. He who goes in front saves his companion. And when you make camp, dig a well, so that the water in your waterskin is always fresh. And pour a libation to the sun god, and remember your father. That is what the council of a city says to a young man who will not be stopped. Take somebody who knows the way. Let him go first. Dig a well every night. Keep your water fresh. Say your prayers. Think of your father. And then his mother tells him not to, or as near to it as a goddess will come. Ninsun goes up onto the roof of her temple. She washes. She puts on a clean robe and the ornaments of her office and her crown. She sets out an offering and lights incense, and she raises her arms to the sun god, and what she says to him is a complaint. Why, she says, did you give my son a restless heart and then let him go? She does not stop him. That is not the kind of goddess she is. She asks the sun to watch the road, and she asks the winds to be with him, and then she does something that I think is the best thing anybody does in the first half of this poem. She comes down, and she sends for Enkidu, and she puts a token round his neck, and she adopts him. She makes the wild man her son. Formally, in front of the priestesses, so that the man made out of clay and thrown into the grass, who had no mother and no people and no name until a woman gave him half her dress, now has a family and a temple and a place he belongs to. And she says to him, Enkidu is not of my body, but I have taken him as mine. And then she tells him to look after her son.
They went out through the gate, and the young men of Uruk cheered them, and the elders gave them advice all the way to the wall, and then they were on the road, and the road is long. Fifty leagues in a day, the poem says. A journey of a month and a half they made in three days. And at the end of each day they stopped, and they dug a well, and they poured out water, and they made an offering of flour, and then Gilgamesh climbed the mountain and went to sleep on purpose to have a dream, because in this world that is a technique. And I want to give you the ritual, because it is the same every night and repetition at this hour is the whole point. They stop before dark. They dig a well, so there is fresh water. They pour some of it out on the ground as an offering. They put out flour. Then Gilgamesh goes up the slope, alone, and draws a circle of flour around himself, and lies down inside it with his back against the hill. He would put his chin on his knees, the poem says. And sleep came over him. Chin on the knees. A very large man, on a mountainside, curled up inside a ring of flour, with his chin on his knees, waiting for a dream. It is the least heroic posture in the poem and it is repeated four nights running. And I want to stop on the circle of flour, because it is not a decorative detail and I did not know what it was the first several times I read this. It is a real ritual object. That world had a large and well organised profession of people whose job was to deal with things that came at you from outside the ordinary run of life. Illness, bad dreams, a house that felt wrong, a persistent run of misfortune. And one of the standard tools of that profession was a line of flour, poured on the ground, drawn around a person or a bed or a doorway, to mark out a space that the thing could not cross. There is a word for it. It appears in the ritual texts constantly. Draw the circle. Pour the flour. And then the patient sits inside it, or lies down inside it, and the work is done from there. So the picture in this chapter is not a warrior improvising a bit of camp craft. It is a man performing a domestic protective rite that ordinary people in that country performed in their own houses, on a mountainside, alone, before deliberately going to sleep in a place he is frightened of. He is doing what your grandmother would have done. And that is what makes the posture land the way it does. He digs the well, and pours out the water, and sets out the flour, and goes up the hill by himself, and draws the circle around himself the way an exorcist would draw it around a sick child, and then he sits down inside it and puts his chin on his knees. The strongest man in the world, on a mountain, inside a ring of flour, with his knees up. And the reason he is doing it at all is the other half of the practice, which is that going to sleep in order to receive a dream was a technique, and a respectable one. There were people whose job was to interpret dreams. There were texts listing what dreams meant, long catalogues of them, this image signifies that outcome. And there were rituals for asking, deliberately, for a dream to be sent, and for what to do with a bad one when it came. So he is not sleeping badly and having nightmares. He is going up the hill on purpose, four nights running, to request information, in the correct manner, inside a protected circle, and every time he gets it, and every time it terrifies him, and every time his friend sits with him in the dark and tells him it means the opposite. That is the ritual, and it is repeated four nights, and it is the most restful passage in the whole poem. And every night he woke in the middle of it, and every night the dream was terrible, and every night Enkidu explained it to him and made it good. The first night he dreams the mountain fell on them. And Enkidu says, the mountain you saw is Humbaba. We will kill him and throw his body down and it will lie like the mountain. The second night he dreams of a bull that seizes him, and the ground splits, and dust darkens the sky, and then a man gives him water from a skin. And Enkidu says, the bull is not an enemy. The one who gave you water was the sun god. The third night, thunder and lightning and fire falling and the ground turning to ash. And Enkidu says, it is good. Now I want you to see what is happening on that road, because it is not really about dreams. Every night, a frightened man wakes up in the dark on a mountain and tells his friend the worst thing his mind has produced. And every night his friend, who is more frightened than he is, and who said out loud before they left that this could not be won, listens to the whole thing and then tells him calmly that it means they are going to be fine. Enkidu lies to him for three nights running, gently, at altitude, so that he can sleep. That is what the dream chapters are. And on the last morning they came down out of the passes, and there was the forest.
Here is where I have to tell you about a tablet that we have only had since twenty fourteen. For most of the time that people have been reading this poem, the arrival at the cedar forest was short. A few lines. They stood and stared at the mountain of cedar, they looked at the height of it, they marvelled, and then the story moved on to the killing. And then a museum in Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, bought a tablet. I am going to be plain about that, because it matters. It was not excavated. It was bought, from a dealer, along with a group of other tablets, in the years after the invasion and the looting, when enormous numbers of objects came out of the ground illegally and went onto a market. The museum was buying them to get them back into the country rather than out of it, which is a defensible policy and also means that we do not know what hole in what ground this thing came out of, and we never will. A scholar was working through what the museum had acquired, tablet by tablet, and came to this one, and recognised the shape of the lines, and got a colleague, and the two of them published it in twenty fourteen. I want to be honest about how that feels, because it is two things at once and both are true. It is one of the great finds of the last hundred years in this field, and it exists in our hands because somebody dug a hole illegally in a country that was falling apart and sold what came out. Every specialist who works on this material lives with that, and the museums that bought objects back to keep them in the country have made an argument about the least bad option available, and reasonable people disagree about it. What nobody can do is pretend the tablet came out of a clean trench, because it did not. So we say where it came from, and then we read what is on it. And what is on it is about twenty lines of Tablet Five that nobody alive had ever seen. And what those twenty lines contain is the forest. Not the height of the trees. The noise. The monkeys. There are monkeys in the cedar forest. They are chorusing, the tablet says. There is a whole troop of them up in the canopy making a racket, and the poem describes it as a kind of music, and it says that Humbaba listens to them, and that the sound of them is like the musicians who play for a king. And the cicadas. There is a shrill of cicadas going all through it, constant, the way cicadas are. And birds calling to each other. And doves moaning. And something answering something else across the valley. And the resin. The cedar bleeds its resin and it runs down the trunks, and the tablet says the ground was soaked with it, and the smell of it must have been enormous, because cedar resin is one of the strongest smells there is and this is a whole forest of it in the heat. Do you understand what that changes? For three thousand years the cedar forest was a location. It was where the monster lived. And then somebody bought a broken tablet from a dealer, and now the cedar forest is a place with monkeys shouting in the treetops and insects screaming and birds and the smell of hot resin, and Humbaba, the terror, the thing with a voice like a flood, sits in the middle of it listening to the monkeys as though they were his orchestra. He is not a beast in a cave. He is a king in a country, and it is a loud, green, extremely alive country, and he is at home in it. And the same tablet has one more thing in it, and it is the one that hurts. Enkidu knew him. When Enkidu lived out in the wild country, before the trapper and the woman and the bread and the beer, he had been in that forest and he had known Humbaba, and the tablet has him saying so. They were, in some sense, familiar to each other. So the man who told his friend it could not be won, and who then walked six hundred miles to do it anyway, and who lied about his dreams for three nights to keep him calm, is about to help kill somebody he used to know. And now the two of them are standing at the edge of the trees, and they can hear the monkeys, and neither of them says anything for a while.
They cut a cedar. That is what starts it. Not a challenge, not a horn, not a shout. They take an axe to one tree, and the sound of it goes through the forest, and Humbaba hears it and comes. And when he comes, he is wearing his radiances, and this is the part of the story that I find most interesting and that gets left out of every retelling. The seven terrors are not weapons and he does not fight with them. They are worn. They are something like an atmosphere, a blaze that surrounds him, and there are seven of them and they can be put on one at a time and taken off one at a time, and while he is wearing all seven of them nobody can come near him. The word for them is used elsewhere in this literature for the radiance of gods and of kings and of certain objects. It is what makes a thing unapproachable. And there is one detail about them that I have always liked. Each one has a name, and the names are not grand. They are the names of the weather in a country where the weather can kill you. And when he takes them off, he takes them off one at a time, and while he is doing it he is speaking, and what he is saying is a challenge and a boast and a description of what he intends, and it goes on, and the two men stand there and let him finish. And the sun god, who Ninsun asked to watch the road, sends the winds. Thirteen of them, in the Akkadian version. The great wind, the north wind, the whirlwind, the storm, the ice wind, the tempest, the sandstorm, and more, and they come all at once, from every direction, and they pin him. And in the older Sumerian version of this story, which is a different poem and which I am flagging as a different poem, it is done differently and I think more cleverly. There, Gilgamesh talks to him. He offers him a gift, and asks for a radiance in exchange, and Humbaba takes the gift and gives one up. And then another gift, and another radiance. He offers him his elder sister to be his wife and his younger sister to be his servant. He offers him flour, and water skins, and shoes for his feet, and each time he asks for one more, and each time Humbaba hands one over, because each time the offer sounds like the beginning of a friendship. And when all seven are gone, Gilgamesh takes hold of him. That is the oldest confidence trick in the world and it is being run on a monster, and the reason the poem can do it is that Humbaba is not stupid. He is lonely. He has been standing in a forest by himself for as long as anybody can remember, guarding trees for a god who put him there, and a young man comes to the edge of it and offers him a family. He gives away everything that makes him unapproachable, one piece at a time, to somebody who says he wants to be close to him. However it is done, it ends the same way. The radiance comes off. The winds hold him. And he is on the ground with a man standing over him. And he begs. He appeals to Gilgamesh directly. He says he will serve him. He says he will cut the trees for him himself, and build him a house out of them. He says, in the Sumerian version, that he never had a mother or a father, that the mountain bore him. And Gilgamesh hesitates. That is on the tablet. The king wavers. He is about to let him go. And Enkidu says no. Enkidu, who did not want to come, who said it could not be won, who knew him in the old days, is the one who says finish it, because if you let him go you will never get home and Enlil will hear of it and everything we have done will come apart. So they killed him. The poem does it in a few lines and I will do it in fewer. They struck him, and it was done, and the forest went quiet for a distance of two leagues around, and the mountains shook, and the cedars, the poem says, cried out. There is one more line, in some versions, and I will give it to you and then close the chapter. As he goes down, Humbaba curses them. He says, may the two of them not grow old together. May Enkidu not find peace. Note that he does not curse the king. He curses the friendship, and he is specific about which of the two he means, and he is the only character in the poem who says out loud what is going to happen. And that is the killing, and it is finished, and nothing else in tonight's episode will ask anything of you. And before Nippur, one thing about the journey back, because the poem skips it and the geography is worth having. They went there on foot, and it is not a short walk. Whatever mountain range the cedar forest is meant to be, and the poem is not consistent about it and the older Sumerian version and the later Akkadian one point in different directions, it is a very long way from a city in the far south of Iraq to any mountain with cedars on it. Hundreds of miles. Weeks. And they did it twice. Out and back. The poem gives you fifty leagues a day and a journey of a month and a half done in three days, which is the standard way this literature says a long way, quickly, and which nobody was meant to take as a measurement. What it actually was, if you strip the poetry off, is two men walking to another country and back, with a head, and then building a raft.
They took the head to Nippur. They cut cedars, a great many of them, and they made a raft, and they took the head of the guardian with them, and they went to the city in the middle of the country where Enlil lives, and they laid it in front of him. And Enlil was furious. Not pleased. Not impressed. Furious, and the poem does not soften it. Why did you do this, he says. Why did you burn the forest? Why did you kill the guardian? He should have eaten the bread you eat and drunk the water you drink. That is the line. He should have sat and eaten with you. And then Enlil does the strangest and most beautiful thing in the whole of tonight, and almost nobody knows about it, because it survives best in the older Sumerian poem rather than in the famous version. He takes the seven radiances, and he gives them away. He gives the first one to the fields. He gives the second to the rivers. He gives the third to the reeds. He gives the fourth to the lions. He gives the fifth to the palace. He gives the sixth to the forest. And the seventh he gives to the goddess of the great prison. And in the Sumerian telling he does it while he is still angry, which is the part that makes it make sense. He is not rewarding anybody. He is refusing to let the thing simply be gone. Somebody destroyed a piece of the world's furniture, and rather than replace it or restore it, the lord of the air takes what made it frightening and scatters it through everything that people have to live alongside anyway. And before he gives them away, I owe you an explanation of what they are, because the word has been in this house all season and I have been translating it and never defining it. The radiance. It is a real term with a real meaning and it is one of the central ideas of that whole civilisation. It is not light in the ordinary sense. It is the visible, terrible, unbearable brightness that something powerful gives off, and the point of it is that you cannot look at it and you cannot stand in front of it. Gods wear it. It is a standard part of the description of a god. Kings wear it, and being covered in it is one of the things a god grants a king when he makes him king. Temples have it. Weapons have it. And monsters have it, which is why the guardian of the forest has seven. And it can be taken off, and given, and lost. That is the part that matters, because it means it is treated as an object rather than a quality. A god can put it on somebody. A god can strip it off. When a king was defeated, the texts sometimes say his radiance was taken away, and they mean it as a description of what happened, not as a metaphor for morale. So the seven that the guardian wears are not seven feelings. They are seven detachable pieces of terror, worn like armour, and the whole of the confrontation in the forest is about getting them off him one at a time, which is what the winds are for. Which is why what happens next is so surprising. There is a version of this story in which the hero takes the radiances. He kills the guardian and he puts them on and he is now the frightening thing, and that would be the ordinary shape of it, and there is a Sumerian poem where he does hand them over and the question of who ends up wearing them is live. And in this telling, nobody wears them. The lord of the air takes seven pieces of pure terror, the awful shining that made a creature unapproachable, and he does not keep them and he does not destroy them and he does not give them to the men who did the killing. He puts them in the fields, and the rivers, and the reeds, and the lions, and the palace, and the forest. Which means that from that day, according to this poem, a certain amount of the terrible is simply in the ordinary furniture of the world. In the river you cross. In the reeds by your house. In the field you work in. Not concentrated any more, not standing in one place in a forest with a face on it, but distributed, in small quantities, through everything. And I have thought about that for a long time and I do not think it is a punishment or a consolation. I think it is an explanation. Somebody was trying to say why an ordinary field, in ordinary daylight, can occasionally feel like that. Think about what that is. The terror that kept people out of a forest is broken up and distributed, in pieces, across the ordinary world. Into the crops. Into the water. Into the reed beds along every canal in the country. Into the animals. Into the buildings people live in. The thing they killed did not go anywhere. It was handed out. So that afterward, when you stand in a field at evening, or come up on a river in the dark, or hear something move in the reeds, and feel that small lift at the back of the neck that has no reason attached to it, the poem has an explanation ready for you, and the explanation is that a piece of the guardian was put there on purpose after he died, by the lord of the air, so that the world would not be entirely safe and entirely dull. They wanted a monster killed. What they got was a monster divided into the scenery.
The lamp is low now. Here is the last picture of the night, and it is the quietest thing in the poem, and it is what they actually did next. They cut the cedars, and they made them into timber, and they built an enormous door. A door for the temple at Nippur, for Enlil's own house, made of cedar from the forest that Enlil had told them to leave alone, which is either an apology or a provocation and the poem does not say which. Seventy two cubits high, it says, and twenty four wide, and a cubit thick, and its pivot and its fittings all of one piece. And then they put it in the river, and floated it home. That is the image. Two men on a raft of cedar logs going down the Euphrates in the sun, several hundred miles, at the speed of the current, with a door lashed to the deck. And I can tell you what happened to that door, because the poem tells us, though not tonight and not tomorrow. It is standing in Enlil's temple at Nippur, and tomorrow night, a man who is dying is going to turn his face to the wall and speak to that door, out loud, and blame it, and it is one of the strangest small moments in the whole epic. Keep the door somewhere at the back of your mind. It comes back sooner than you think. There is nothing to do on a raft. That is the whole point of it. You cannot make it go faster. You steer occasionally. The country goes past on both sides, flat and green and then flat and yellow, with the date palms in lines along the banks and the villages coming and going and people looking up from the fields at two men and a very large door. And here is the thing underneath the whole story, which I have saved for the raft because it is a restful fact rather than an exciting one. Cedar was real, and getting it was a real problem, and it is one of the things that country genuinely spent centuries doing. There are no cedars in southern Iraq. There is barely a tree worth cutting. The building materials there are mud, reed and date palm, and date palm makes a poor beam. So every substantial roof, every temple door, every important building, needed timber from somewhere else, and somewhere else was hundreds of miles away in the mountains, in the country we now call Lebanon and the ranges north of it. And they went and got it, for thousands of years. There are royal inscriptions, ordinary administrative ones, not poems, in which a ruler records with obvious satisfaction that he brought cedar down from the mountain, and gives the dimensions of the beams, and says what he made with them. One ruler of a southern city describes bringing cedar in rafts down the river and lists the lengths. So the plot of the most famous poem in the world is a logistics problem. A country with no trees needs timber. The timber is far away and the road is dangerous and there is something in the mountains that stops people taking it. Two men go and get some. Everything mythical in this story is sitting on top of a completely ordinary and very old commercial fact, and the fact is that somebody had to go and fetch the wood. And it would have smelled of cedar the entire way. That resin the tablet talks about, soaking the ground of the forest, is in every log under them, in the heat, for weeks. The most famous friendship in literature spent the best part of a season lying on a raft in the sunshine, smelling of cedar, with nothing to do. I do not think either of them was ever happier than that, and I am fairly sure they did not know it at the time, and I am telling you now because tomorrow night is the other kind of night, and I would rather you fell asleep on the river. Think of it, wherever you are lying. The forest is behind them and still enormous, because they took a handful of trees out of a mountain of them, and the monkeys are still up in the canopy making their noise, and the cicadas have not stopped, and the resin is still running down the trunks in the heat, and nobody is guarding any of it now. The radiances are out in the world, in the fields and the rivers and the reeds. The head is in Nippur. And the two of them are lying on their backs on a raft of cedar in the middle of a wide brown river, going home, not talking, in the sun. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. You do not have to keep any of tonight. If you keep one thing, keep the raft. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is the hard one, and I am going to tell you that at the start rather than let you find it. Last night two men walked six hundred miles, killed the guardian of a forest, and floated home on a raft of cedar in the sunshine with nothing to do. Tonight one of them dies. I want to be plain with you about how this house handles that, because you are lying down and you did not come here to be upset. The death in this story is not violent. Nobody is killed. There is no accident. A man becomes ill, and lies in a bed for twelve days, and his friend sits with him, and then he dies, and then his friend cannot accept it for a week and finally does. That is the whole of it, and it is the oldest description of that experience anybody wrote down, and it is four thousand years old, and it is still, line for line, exactly right. We will tell it the way this house tells everything. Plainly, in a low voice, once, and then set down. It is finished by the tenth chapter and the last two chapters of the night are a washing and a quiet city. Before that there is a goddess who makes an offer and is refused, and a bull that comes down out of the sky, and one of the great insults in literature, thrown by a man who is about to pay for it. Stay with it if you can. And if you cannot, if tonight is the wrong night for this one, then let it go past you, because that is allowed here and always has been. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here last night on the raft. If so, welcome back, and your place on the reed mat is where you left it. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome, and you have missed less than you think. Two men are friends. They went and did something enormous together. That is everything you need. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The scribe takes the stack of tablets and moves the first five to one side, and puts his hand flat on the sixth. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. It is the same three names as last night, and you already have them. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you, and tonight, more than any other night in this season, drifting is not a loss. This is a poem about a man who could not let go of something, and there is no version of tonight where sleeping through part of it is a failure. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing tonight will startle you. There is a bull in it and it does not go well for the bull, and there is a bad dream in the middle of the night, and I will tell you before it starts that the dream is about a house, and that the house is not frightening once you have seen it properly, and that the poem itself takes the fear out of it before it lets you go. And I will tell you the very last thing now, so you can rest on it the whole way through. This story does not end tonight. Tomorrow night the same man walks out of the city to look for a way not to die, and he does not find it, and he comes home anyway, and the ending is kind. Whatever happens in the next two hours, there is a third night and it is the gentlest of the three. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, so that the last night finds you. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
The sixth tablet begins with a man washing his hair. He washed his matted hair, the poem says. He cleaned his gear. He shook out his locks over his back. He threw off his soiled clothes and put on clean ones, wrapped a cloak about him and tied on a sash. They have come home. The timber is delivered. The thing that could not be done has been done, and the road dust is being scrubbed off in a courtyard in Uruk, and somebody has laid out a clean cloak. And I want to hold this for a moment, because it is the last ordinary morning in this poem and nobody in it knows that. They have been away for months. The city has had them back for long enough that the parade is over and the story has been told in every house. The timber went to Nippur and the door is standing in it. Enkidu has a room somewhere in the palace and a place at the table and a name that people in the street know. The thing they went to do is done and it worked, and there is nothing on the calendar. This is the part of a life that nobody writes down, and the poem gives it four lines and then it is gone: a man in a courtyard with wet hair, in the sun, being handed a clean cloak. And then he put on his crown. That is the sentence that starts everything that follows. A young man, freshly washed, in clean clothes, putting on a crown, in the sunlight, in the middle of his own city, at the height of his life. And I want to give you the city he was standing in, because this is the last time we see it working and tomorrow it will be a place he is walking away from. It is the middle of the day. The wall is out there, six miles of it with its towers, and inside it the streets are narrow and the walls are mud brick and every surface that faces the sun is too hot to touch and every surface in shadow is cool. There is a smell of dust and animals and baking and the river. In the temple precinct the offerings are going on at the hours they always go on at. In the workshops somebody is beating copper. Down by the canal the boats are tied up and being unloaded, reed bundles and barley and fish and wool coming in, and dates and cloth going out. Out past the gate the fields go to the horizon in strips with the irrigation ditches between them and men standing in them up to their ankles opening and closing the water with their feet. A hundred thousand ordinary things happening at once, the way they do in a city on a warm afternoon, and none of them are in the poem, and all of them are underneath it. And in the middle of that, a young man in a courtyard with wet hair, putting on a crown. And Ishtar looked up. Now, we have met her before in this house, and we will spend two whole nights with her later in the season, so tonight I will only say what you need for the next hour. She is the goddess of the thing that turns over in a night. She is the one whose whole nature is reversal, who is both halves of everything and neither of them for long. In the Sumerian she is Inanna. Here in the Akkadian she is Ishtar. Same figure, different language, and I will use the name the tablet uses. She looked down and saw a beautiful man in a clean cloak, and she wanted him. And I have to tell you what that meant for a king of that city in particular, because without it the next chapter reads as a man turning down a proposal, and it is a great deal more than that. The kings of the south were married to her. Not personally, and not all of them, and the details are argued about, and I will give you the argument in a moment. But the idea itself is well attested and it ran for centuries. There was a rite in which the king of a city and the goddess were joined, and the hymns that go with it are explicit and joyful and were sung in public. The king takes the part of her husband, the shepherd. She receives him. And out of that union, in the language of the hymns, comes the good year: the flocks increasing, the grain heavy, the canals full, the storehouses filling up. There is a body of poetry about this that is some of the most frankly happy writing to survive from the ancient world, and a good deal of it is put in her mouth. Now the argument, briefly and honestly. Whether this was ever physically enacted, by a living king with a living priestess, or whether it was performed with images, or sung rather than done, is genuinely disputed, and the scholars who work on it disagree, and anybody who tells you flatly which it was is going beyond the evidence. What is not disputed is that the relationship existed as an idea and mattered enormously: that being the one she chose was part of what made a king of that country a king. So hold that, and now look at the courtyard. A young man is standing in the middle of Uruk, which is her city, in which the great temple is her house, having just done the most celebrated thing anybody in that city has ever done, freshly washed, putting on a crown. And the goddess of that city looks down and offers to marry him. That is not a private matter and it is not only a compliment. It is the offer, made directly and in person, of exactly the thing that legitimates a king of Uruk. She is proposing the arrangement his whole office is built on. Which is why what he does next is not a man being rude to a woman. It is the king of her city, standing in her city, in front of everybody, refusing the thing that makes him the king of her city.
Come, Gilgamesh, she says. Be my husband. Grant me your fruit. And then she makes him an offer, and I want to read it out, because it is one of the great seductions in literature and because it is entirely material and there is not one word of feeling in it. You shall be my husband and I shall be your wife. I will have a chariot harnessed for you, of lapis lazuli and gold, with wheels of gold and horns of amber. Storm demons shall draw it, mighty mules. You shall enter our house in the fragrance of cedar. When you enter our house, the threshold and the dais shall kiss your feet. Kings and lords and princes shall bow down before you. Everything the hills and the lands produce shall be brought to you as tribute. Your goats shall bear triplets and your ewes twins. Your donkey shall outrun the mule. Your ox shall have no rival at the yoke. Listen to what she is actually offering. A vehicle. A house that smells expensive. Rank. Tribute. And then, at the end, and at length, livestock. Better breeding rates in your goats. Twins from your ewes. A faster donkey. A stronger ox. And I want to unpack two items on it, because they are the ones a listener from that world would have heard loudest. A chariot of lapis lazuli and gold. Lapis is a deep blue stone and there is none of it anywhere near that country. All of it, every single piece in every object in every museum, came overland from the mountains of what is now Afghanistan, across two thousand miles, hand to hand, for thousands of years. It is the most expensive material they had, and it is the material they used for the eyes of statues and the beards of gods, and she is offering him a vehicle made of it. And storm demons to pull it. Not horses. She is offering him weather in harness. And then, after the lapis and the gold and the storm demons and the kings bowing at his threshold, she gets to the part she clearly thinks will close the deal, and it is livestock fertility. Your goats will have triplets. Your ewes will have twins. That is not an anticlimax. That is the offer. Everything before it is decoration and that is the actual product, because in a country living one harvest from disaster the thing you want from a god is not a chariot. It is that the animals keep having young. That is not a love song. That is a prospectus. She is offering him a life in which everything increases, which in a farming country is the single most desirable thing there is, and she is offering it as a transaction and she is completely open about that. Now before he answers I want to put one fact beside her offer, because it changes the shape of the scene. She has done this before, and it is on the calendar. In the cities of that country there was a rite in which a king and a priestess enacted a marriage between the goddess and her consort, and there are poems written for it, love poems, some of them very beautiful, in which she chooses him and brings him into her house. Whatever that rite actually consisted of, and I said last week that we do not know and I meant it, the important thing tonight is that it existed, and that everybody listening knew it existed, and that being chosen by her was a real institutional thing that happened to real kings. So this is not a goddess making an unusual pass at a stranger. This is the arrangement, being offered in the ordinary way, to the king of her own city, in front of everybody. And here is the other half of that offer, which is the part he does not mention and which the audience would have supplied for themselves. Her house is in that city. Not a temple in the abstract. A precinct, at the centre of Uruk, one of the biggest structures anybody had built by then, with courtyards and storerooms and a staff running into the hundreds, and it is the reason the city is the size it is. She is not an outside force arriving with a proposition. She is the landlord. So when she stands in front of him and offers him a chariot and a house and tribute and better livestock, she is offering him a partnership in the institution his city is built around, and she is offering it to a man who has just come back from a famous journey and washed his hair and put on a crown. There is a version of this scene where he says yes and it is the shortest poem in the world and nobody remembers his name. And he says no. And the way he says no is one of the reasons people have been arguing about this poem for a hundred and fifty years, because he does not say no politely.
What would I have to give you, he asks, if I took you as a wife? And then he answers his own question, and he does it with a list. And the metaphors are worth going through slowly, one at a time, because they are all household objects and they are all objects that have failed, and a person listening in that country would have owned every single one of them. A brazier, he says, that goes out in the cold. The one thing in the house that is supposed to be warm, on the night you need it. A door that does not keep out the wind. Not a door that will not open. A door that is there, and shut, and useless. A palace that crushes the men inside it. The building that is supposed to be the safest place there is, coming down on the people it was built for. A waterskin that soaks the man carrying it. You are three days into a journey and the one thing keeping you alive is running down your back into the sand. A shoe that bites its owner's foot. Everyone has had that shoe. Limestone that crumbles in the wall. A battering ram that breaks in the enemy's country. Pitch that stains the hands of the man carrying it. Every one of those is a thing that exists to do a job and does the opposite of it. He is not calling her wicked. He is calling her unreliable, which in a country where the wrong year kills you is a far worse accusation, and she knows it, which is why the rest of tonight happens. And then he stops arguing in metaphors and starts naming names. Which of your lovers, he says, did you love for ever? Tammuz, he says. The husband of your youth. For him you ordained wailing, year after year. That is real, and every listener in that world knew it, because in every city there was a season when the women went out and mourned that god by name, and the mourning was on the calendar. He is telling her that her first husband has an annual funeral. And I am going to stop on that one, because it is the first item on the list and because it is the only one of them that we are coming back to. Later in this season, two whole nights of it, you will hear how that happened. You will hear what she was doing when it was decided, and where she had been, and what it cost her, and who was standing in front of her when she chose. And you will find that the wailing he is throwing in her face here, the annual mourning that every listener in that world could hear in their own street at the right season, is the end of one of the saddest stories anybody ever wrote. He is using it as an insult. It is not an insult. It is a receipt for something that nearly destroyed her. He does not know that. He is twenty something and furious and showing off in a courtyard. But you will know it, later this season, and when you get there I will remind you that a man in a clean cloak once used it as a debating point. The bird with the bright colours, he says. You loved him, and then you struck him and broke his wing, and now he stands in the woods crying my wing, my wing. The lion, perfect in strength. You loved him, and you dug seven pits and seven more for him. That one is worth a moment because of how it is phrased. It does not say she killed him. It says she dug pits, seven and seven of them, which is fourteen holes in the ground for one animal, and the picture is not of an execution, it is of a hunt organised at enormous scale, by somebody who wanted very much to catch a particular lion and was prepared to dig for a week. That is the pattern under the whole list, if you want it. She does not lose interest. She turns her whole attention onto the next thing with exactly the force she turned it onto the last one, and the force is the problem. The horse, magnificent in battle. You loved him, and you decreed for him the whip and the spur and the lash. You decreed that he should gallop seven leagues, and that he should drink muddied water, and for his mother you decreed weeping. The herdsman who kept the flocks, who heaped up ash cakes for you every day and slaughtered kids for you. You struck him and turned him into a wolf, so that his own herd boys drive him off, and his own dogs bite his thighs. And I want to give the shepherd his own paragraph, because his is the most horrible of them and it is horrible in a specific way. He did everything right. That is the point of him. The poem says he heaped up ash cakes for her every day and slaughtered kids for her, which is a description of a man performing his devotions properly and consistently for a long time. He is not a rival or a rebel or somebody who refused her. He is a good worshipper. And she turned him into a wolf. And then, and this is the detail that makes it land, his own herd boys drove him off. The boys who worked for him, who knew him, who had probably been fed by him, chased him away from his own flock. And his own dogs bit his legs. The animals he had spent his life protecting, and the young men he had trained, and the dogs he had raised, all turned on him at once, and none of them did anything wrong, because what they were looking at was a wolf. And then the last one, and this is the one with the most story in it. Your father's gardener, he says. His name was Ishullanu, and he brought you baskets of dates, every day, and made your table shine. And you looked at him and went to him and said, my Ishullanu, let us taste your strength, put out your hand. And Ishullanu said no. He said, what do you want of me? Has my mother not baked? Have I not eaten? He said, in effect, I am fed, I am fine, I do not need this. And she turned him into a small creature, a frog or a mole depending on which translation you read, and put him in the middle of his own garden where he could not go up and he could not go down. And you, says Gilgamesh, would love me and then treat me as you treated them. Now. I want to be careful here, because this passage is usually presented in one of two ways and both of them are simpler than the poem. It is not a straightforward case of a hero seeing through a wicked goddess. He is being deliberately cruel, at length, in public, to somebody who has just proposed to him, and the poem gives him no lines of regret about it, and everything that happens for the rest of tonight is set in motion by it. And it is also not simply arrogance. Every single item on that list is true. Those stories existed. The audience knew them. He is not making up slanders, he is reciting the record, and the record is what it is. What he is actually doing, and I think this is the honest reading, is refusing to become a story. Every one of those lovers ended up as something else, a bird, a wolf, a mole, a season of mourning. He has just come back from making a name that will last. And she is offering him a place in a list. The scribe turns the tablet. She went up to heaven, he says, in tears.
She went to her father, who is the sky, and she wept, and she told him what had been said to her. And her father said, well. Did you not provoke him? That is Anu's answer, and I have never been able to decide whether it is the most reasonable line in the poem or the worst thing a parent has ever said, and I suspect it is both, which is why it has survived. And she demanded the Bull of Heaven. Give me the Bull, she says. Let me strike him down in his own city. And Anu said no, at first, and gave a practical reason. If I give you the Bull of Heaven, he says, there will be seven years of empty husks in Uruk. Seven years of nothing to eat. And she said, I have seen to it. I have piled up grain for the people. I have grown grass for the animals. I have stored against the seven years. And before we go on I want to tell you what he was actually bargaining about, because seven years of empty husks is not a poetic phrase. That country lived on barley, and barley lived on irrigation, and irrigation lived on the rivers behaving. When the rivers ran low, or ran in the wrong place, or came down too hard in the spring and took the canal banks out, the crop failed, and there was no other crop. There were no reserves in an ordinary household beyond what was in the jar. A bad year meant selling things. Two bad years meant selling people, and that is not a figure of speech either, because debt slavery was a legal institution and the documents survive. Seven years is not a bad patch. Seven years is the end of a city. And there is a reading of this whole chapter that I find persuasive and that I will give you as a reading and not as a fact. The Bull of Heaven, in the sky, is the constellation we still call the Bull, which is Taurus, and it comes up in the sky at a particular season. And what the Bull does when it arrives in the poem is open pits in the ground and dry things up, and the price of it is seven years of husks. So one way to read this chapter, and it is not the only way, is that a goddess brought down the drought. Not a monster. The weather. And he gave her the Bull. I want you to notice what has just happened, because it is easy to lose in the drama and it is the reason this scene is in the poem at all. She did the paperwork. She was refused, in public, insultingly. She went to her father and asked for the most destructive thing available. He told her the cost, and the cost was seven years of famine for a city of tens of thousands of people. And she went away and arranged the grain and the fodder in advance so that the cost would not fall, and then she came back and asked again. That is not a tantrum. That is a goddess of a city, who is furious, who is also responsible for that city, taking the trouble to make sure her revenge does not starve her own people. She is not a good character in this chapter. She is a competent one, and the poem knows the difference, and almost nobody retelling it does.
The Bull came down. It came down out of the sky at Uruk, and the poem describes what it did in a way that has nothing to do with a fight and everything to do with an earthquake. And I want you to hear the shape of what follows, because it is built out of three of the same sentence and the numbers go up, which is exactly the kind of thing that carries a tired listener along without asking anything of them. It snorted, and a pit opened in the ground, and a hundred men of Uruk fell into it. It snorted a second time, and a second pit opened, and two hundred men fell in. It snorted a third time, and a pit opened in front of Enkidu, and he fell in up to his waist. Three snorts. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred. And the third pit opens under the one person in the city who is not going to fall all the way in. And I should say what those pits are, because the poem is not being fanciful. In a country of irrigated fields and canal banks, the ground opening and swallowing people is not a metaphor for anything. Banks collapse. Ground undercut by water gives way. Somebody who lived there and heard this would have pictured something they had seen. And then he climbed out and took it by the horns. The rest is short. Enkidu got hold of it, by the horns and then the tail, and held it, and turned it, and Gilgamesh came in past its head like a butcher, the poem says, like a man who knows exactly where to put the knife, and he put it in between the neck and the horns, and it was over. And they took the heart out and offered it to the sun god, and then they sat down together, the two of them, and rested. I like that line more than any of the fighting. They killed the thing, and they gave the heart to the god who had told them to go to the forest, and then the two of them sat down on the ground next to it and rested, the way you would after moving furniture. That is the whole of the Bull of Heaven, and it is the last time in this poem that either of them is happy. And then Ishtar came up on the wall of Uruk. She stood on the great wall, the one from the first chapter of last night, the one you were told to go up on and admire the brickwork, and she looked down at what was left of the Bull, and she began to lament, and she said, woe to Gilgamesh, who slandered me and killed the Bull of Heaven. And Enkidu heard her.
He tore off the Bull's hindquarter, and he threw it at her. Up at the wall, into the middle of the women standing around her, and it landed in front of her, and he shouted, if I could get hold of you I would do the same to you. I would drape its guts on your arms. That is the moment. That is the exact moment this poem turns, and everything from here to the end of tomorrow night is the consequence of a man throwing a piece of meat at a goddess because she was crying about a bull. And here is what I want you to hold on to, because it is the saddest thing in the episode and nobody ever says it. He did it for his friend. Gilgamesh insulted her. Gilgamesh made the list. Gilgamesh is the one who said no and said it with a catalogue. Enkidu, who was made out of clay two weeks ago in narrative time, who learned what bread was from a shepherd, who has been a person for about a year, sees somebody standing on a wall attacking his friend, and does the only thing he can think of, which is to make it worse. And she did something in response that almost every retelling leaves out, and it is the most dignified thing in the chapter. She gathered the women. The poem says she assembled the temple women and the courtesans and the priestesses, and they set up a lament, over the hindquarter of the Bull, which was lying there in the dust where he had thrown it. They held a funeral for a piece of meat, in public, in front of everybody, and they did it properly. That is not a joke and the poem does not treat it as one. She has been insulted twice in one day, once with a list of everything that ever went wrong in her life and once with an animal part thrown at her head, and what she does is gather her people and hold a formal mourning, out loud, where the city can hear it. And then they went through the city in the parade. They washed their hands in the river. They rode through the streets of Uruk and the people came out to look at them. Gilgamesh called to the singing girls, who is the finest among men? Who is the most glorious of males? Gilgamesh is the finest. Enkidu is the most glorious. And then he did the thing with the horns, and it is a small strange domestic detail that I have always liked. The poem measures them. It says each horn held thirty minas of lapis, and that the pair together would hold six measures of oil, which is a great deal of oil, and it gives you the thickness of them at the base. Somebody measured the horns. And then, having measured them, he did not put them in the temple. He dedicated them to his father, who is a dead king, and then he took them home and hung them on the wall of his own bedroom. Two enormous horns from the thing that came down out of the sky, on the bedroom wall, over the bed. And they are there through everything that happens for the rest of tonight. They are there while a man is dying in the next room. They are there through the six days and seven nights. Nobody in the poem ever mentions them again. And they poured out oil for the god of the city. And then they held a celebration in the palace, and everybody drank, and afterwards the young men lay down to sleep on the couches of the night. And Enkidu lay down, and Enkidu had a dream.
He dreamed the gods were sitting together. Anu, and Enlil, and Ea, and the sun god, in a room, in conference, and they were talking about the two of them. Because they have killed the Bull of Heaven, said Anu, and because they have killed Humbaba, one of them must die. Let it be the one who stripped the mountain of its cedar. And I should say who is in that room, because there are four of them and each one is there for a reason. Anu is the sky, the oldest and the highest, the one whose name simply is the sky, and he is the one who gave the Bull away in the first place because his daughter asked him for it. He speaks first, and what he says is that a death is owed. He is the one who set the whole thing running and he is the one who calls for the settlement. Enlil is the lord of the air, the one who appointed the guardian of the cedar forest and put him there and expected him to stay there. Of the four he has the strongest grievance, because both of the things these men did were done to his property. Ea is the clever one, the one who has been in this house before on other nights, the one who put the first god to sleep and built his house on top of him and thought of the way out every time there has been a way out. He is in the room. The poem records that he is in the room. And he does not speak. I have thought about that a great deal. The god whose entire character in this literature is that he finds the loophole, sitting in the meeting where his own great grandson's friend is condemned, saying nothing that anybody wrote down. And the fourth is the sun, who told them to go in the first place, and he is the only one who argues. And Enlil said, let Enkidu die. Gilgamesh shall not die. And the sun god spoke up for him. He said, was it not at my word that they killed the Bull and Humbaba? I told them to go. Should Enkidu now die innocent? And Enlil turned on him and said, you talk to them like one of their companions. You go down among them every day. And that is the end of the argument. I want to sit with this for a moment because it is the coldest scene in the poem and it does not get told. There is no punishment here in any sense we would recognise. There is no weighing. Nobody asks what either of them intended. Two men did two things, both of which were done with the encouragement of one of the gods in the room, and the room decides that a death is owed, and then chooses which of the two of them will supply it, and chooses the one who is not a king, and the one who was made out of clay for the purpose of being a companion, and who has, in the whole of his short life, done exactly one thing that was his own idea, which was to throw a piece of meat at a goddess in defence of his friend. And the god who sent them speaks up for him and is told to be quiet. And there is one more thing about that scene that I only noticed after reading it many times, and it has stayed with me. Enkidu is asleep when it happens. He is not in the room. He is lying on a couch in a palace after a party, full of beer, and he is dreaming, and what he dreams is a meeting he was not invited to in which four people decide he should die. And the poem gives no indication whatever that the dream is inaccurate. That is a strange and modern kind of horror and it is sitting in the middle of the oldest epic we have. Not a monster. Not a battle. A committee, in another room, while you are asleep. Enkidu woke up and told Gilgamesh the dream, and then he said, my friend, why are the great gods in council? And then he became ill.
Here is where the door comes back, and I told you it would. He is lying down and he is angry and he is frightened, and he starts cursing things, and the first thing he curses is a piece of carpentry. He turns his face toward the cedar door, the one they cut in the forest and floated down the river in the sun and set up in the temple at Nippur, and he speaks to it as though it could hear him. O door, he says. O door of the forest. You have no sense. You have no understanding. For twenty leagues I sought out the finest timber for you. I saw the cedar and I carried it. There is no wood like you. Your height is seventy two cubits, your width twenty four. Your pivot and your fittings I made. I set you up in Nippur. If I had known, door, that this would be my reward, I would have taken an axe to you. I would have made you into a raft. That is a dying man shouting at a door. And it is the same door. That is the part I want to make sure you have. Last night, at the very end, two men floated a raft of cedar logs down the river in the sun with a door lashed to the deck, and I told you to keep it somewhere at the back of your mind, and this is why. The last good day of his life produced an object, and the object is still standing in a temple two hundred miles away, in perfect condition, doing exactly what it was made to do, and he is in a bed and he is not. There is nothing wrong with the door. That is the whole problem with it. And it is one of the truest things in the poem, because nobody in that state is reasonable, and the object he chooses to blame is not the goddess and not the gods and not his friend. It is the one thing he made with his own hands that is still standing somewhere, doing fine, while he is not. And then he cursed the trapper who found him at the waterhole. May his catch be small. May his profit be cut. May the beasts escape his snares. And the curse on the trapper is longer than I gave it and it is oddly specific, and the specificity is the interesting part. He does not wish him dead. He wishes him unemployed. May your profits be cut. May your income be halved. May the game escape your nets. May whatever you catch get away in front of you. A man dying in a bed, working through the people who changed his life, curses the first one by wishing him a bad season. It is such a small, real, human size of anger. He does not have the imagination for anything worse in that moment, because nobody does, and the poem knows it, and lets him be petty for four lines before it lets him be terrible for twenty. And then he cursed the woman.
He cursed Shamhat by name, and it goes on for a long time, and it is ugly, and I am going to summarise it rather than perform it, because there is nothing in it worth having and the poem itself does not think there is either. He wishes her ruin. He wishes her homeless. He wishes her the worst life he can imagine, in detail, at length, from a bed, because she is the one who brought him out of the wild country and into a world where this could happen to him. And the sun god heard it from heaven. And the sun god spoke, and this is the answer, and it is one of the few times in this literature where a god corrects somebody and is entirely right. Enkidu, he says. Why are you cursing the woman? She gave you bread to eat that was fit for a god. She gave you ale to drink that was fit for a king. She clothed you in a great garment. And she gave you Gilgamesh for your companion. And now he, your friend and your brother, will lay you out on a great bed. He will lay you on a bed of honour. He will settle you in a restful place, the seat at his left hand, so that the rulers of the underworld will kiss your feet. He will have the people of Uruk weep for you, and he will make himself filthy with grief and put on a lion skin and go into the wild country. And I want to point at one line in that speech, because it is doing something the poem does not draw attention to. The sun god tells him what is going to happen at his funeral. He tells him that his friend will lay him out on a bed of honour, that the city will weep, that the rulers of the underworld will kiss his feet, and that Gilgamesh will make himself filthy with grief and put on a lion skin and go out into the wild country. He is being told, in advance, by a god, that he is going to be mourned properly. That is the whole content of the consolation. Nobody offers him more time. Nobody offers him a reprieve or an afterlife worth having, and in about a page he is going to describe the afterlife and it is dust. What he is offered is the certainty that somebody will mind. And it works. That is the part I cannot get over. It works, immediately, and he stops cursing and starts blessing. And Enkidu heard it, and his anger went quiet. And he took it back. And I want to give you the blessing properly rather than in summary, because he had cursed her for a long time and the poem gives the blessing the same length, and that balance is deliberate and it is the whole moral architecture of the chapter. May governors and princes love you, he said. May the man who is a league away slap his thigh at the sight of you. May the man who is two leagues away shake out his hair for you. May no soldier be slow to loosen his belt for you. May he give you obsidian and lapis and gold. May his gift to you be earrings of filigree. May his storehouse be filled for you and his granary heaped. May you be brought into the presence of the gods. May the wife of a man, the mother of seven, be left for your sake. That last one is a hard line and I am not going to soften it, because it is a curse on somebody else inside a blessing, and the poem does not notice, and that is what people were like. But look at the shape of what he wishes her. Money, standing, jewellery, a full storehouse, and to be received respectfully in the temple. He is a dying man wishing a woman a secure old age, in the only terms he has, using the only currency he knows about, and it is the last kind thing he does. He called out again, and he said, let me bless her instead, and he did. May governors and princes love you. May the young man undo his belt for you. May you be given gold and lapis. May the mother of seven be abandoned for your sake. I do not want to over explain that, but I do want to say one thing about it. He is dying. He has been told by a god, out loud, exactly what she gave him: bread, beer, clothes, and a friend. Those are the four things from the shepherds' camp, the whole of his humanity, listed back to him as an inventory. And he understands that he would not undo any of it. That is the moment he accepts his own life, and it happens about a day before he loses it, and it is the reason the rest of this is bearable.
He had one more dream and then he told it, and it is the oldest description of the afterlife in any literature, and I am going to give it to you carefully, because the poem gives it carefully. He said, there was a man standing there whose face was dark, whose face was like a bird's, with wings. And he took hold of me and he led me down. Down the road, he says, from which there is no coming back. Down to the house where those who go in do not come out. Down to the house whose people are deprived of light. Where dust is their food and clay is their bread. They are clothed like birds, he says, with wings for garments. And they sit in the dark, and they do not see light. Now hold on, because the next part is the part that matters. And in that house, he says, I saw the crowns. Kings, in a heap, who had ruled the land in the old days. The ones who wore the crowns are all in there, and now they serve the food and pour the water. I saw priests. I saw the ecstatics and the singers. I saw the ones who anointed the great gods. And I want to go through what he saw, in order, because it is a list and it is a good one. He saw the kings, he says, the ones who had ruled the land in the old days, all of them together, and the crowns they wore are set aside now, and the ones who wore the crowns are serving the meat and pouring the water. He saw the ones who had been anointed. He saw the priests. He saw the ones who spoke for the gods and the ones who went into a trance for them and the ones who sang. He saw the old gods of the earth, sitting there, who had been replaced by newer ones and had gone down and stayed. And in the middle of it, seated, was the queen of the netherworld, and kneeling in front of her was her scribe, holding a tablet, reading aloud. The scribe has a name, and I will not ask you to keep it, but she is a woman and her job is to keep the register of the dead, and she reads it out to the queen, and that is the last image in the whole vision: not a judge, not a punishment, a clerk with a list, reading the names of everybody who came in. That is the afterlife in this world, and I want you to see it properly, because it is not a punishment. There is no fire in it. There is nobody being tormented. There is no judgement scene, no scales, no accusation, and no sorting of anybody into anywhere. It is dark and it is dusty and everyone is there, and the kings are doing the serving now, and there is a bureaucrat with a tablet keeping the record, because of course there is, because these are people who could not imagine an institution of any size without somebody writing it down. It is a very large, very old, very quiet room, and everyone you ever heard of is in it, wearing feathers, sitting in the dust. And I will tell you now, because it will make two later nights easier, that you are going to come back to this room. The queen he saw sitting in the middle of it, with the scribe kneeling in front of her reading from a tablet, has a name, and later in this season we are going to spend two entire nights in her house, from the inside, going down through it a gate at a time. And when we get there you will already know what it looks like, because a dying man described it to his friend tonight, from a bed in Uruk, before anybody took you down the stairs. The dust, the feathers, the dark, the kings doing the serving, the clerk with the tablet. Same house. Different door. That is not a comfortable idea and I am not going to pretend it is a lovely one. But it is not cruel. Nobody in that house is being hurt. And every single person in that story, the kings and the priests and the singers and the man in the bed telling it, ends up in the same room, which is the one thing that world was absolutely certain of. And then there were twelve days, and the poem counts them, and I am going to count them with you slowly because this is the last thing before the end and because counting is a good thing to do at this hour. On the first day he was ill and he lay down. On the second day his friend sat with him. On the third and the fourth and the fifth the poem does not tell us anything, and the not telling is the truest part of it, because there is nothing to tell. That is what those days are. Somebody is in a bed and somebody else is in a chair and the light goes across the wall and comes back the next morning. The poem says his sickness grew heavy. It says he was in his bed. It says the days went by. On the tenth day the poem says his sickness grew worse. On the eleventh and the twelfth day he called out. Twelve days. That is the whole of it. There is no crisis, no turn for the better, no last stand and nothing dramatic in any of it. A strong man who could hold a bull by the horns lay in a bed for twelve days and got weaker, and his friend, who had killed the guardian of a forest, sat next to him and could not do one single thing about it. He was ill for twelve days. The poem says it exactly like that. He lay in his bed and the days went past and they are counted, and on the twelfth day he called Gilgamesh over. And he said, my friend, a god has taken against me. I am not dying the way a man dies in a fight. I would have been glad to fall in the field. I am dying in a bed. And then he said one more thing, and it is the last thing he says in three thousand lines, and it is not a farewell. He said, my friend, the great goddess has cursed me, and I will not die like a man who fell in battle. I was afraid of the fight and so I die dishonoured. My friend, the one who falls in battle is fortunate. I am not. He is ashamed. That is what he goes out on. A man who wrestled a king in a doorway, who walked six hundred miles and helped kill the guardian of the cedar forest, who caught the Bull of Heaven by the horns while it was opening pits in the ground and men were falling into them, dies apologising for dying in a bed. There is no reply to that in the poem. Nobody tells him he is wrong. The scene simply ends. And then he died.
The eleventh chapter is what happened afterward, and it is why this poem is four thousand years old and still the best thing anybody has written about this. He would not let them take him. And I want to be careful and slow here, because this is the part of the poem that everybody who has lost somebody recognises immediately, and it is the part that the poem is best at, and I am not going to rush it. The first thing he did was touch him. He touched his heart, the poem says, to see whether it was beating, and it was not. That is the first act. Not a cry, not a collapse. A hand on a chest, checking, because until you have checked you do not have to know. And then he covered his face. The poem says he veiled his friend like a bride, which is one of the strangest and most tender comparisons in the literature, and translators have argued about it for a century. Whatever else it means, the physical action is clear and it is the one everybody does. He put something over his face, because a face that is not doing anything is the hardest part. And then he began to move. He circled him like an eagle, the poem says. He paced back and forth in front of him like a lioness whose cubs have been taken. He tore his hair out. He tore off his fine clothes and threw them down as though they were unclean things. Read those in order, because the order is the whole point. Circling. Pacing. Pulling at himself. Getting rid of his own clothes. That is not grief as a feeling. That is grief as a physical condition, described from the outside by somebody who had clearly watched it happen, and every single one of those actions is something a person actually does, and none of them help, and he does all of them. And then he called on everything to weep. That is the whole of it. He touched his friend's heart and there was nothing. He covered his face, the poem says, the way you cover the face of a bride, and then he circled the body like an eagle, and he paced, and he tore out his hair, and he tore off his fine clothes and threw them down as though they were unclean. And he called on everything to weep. This is a long passage and it is a list, and it is the gentlest thing in the chapter, and I am going to let it run, because a list of everything in the world being asked to mourn one man is exactly the right shape for this hour. May the roads weep for him, he said, the roads we walked together. May the forest weep for him, the cedar we went for. May the bear weep, and the hyena, and the panther, and the leopard, and the stag and the ibex, and all the wild animals of the open country. May the pure river weep, along whose banks we used to walk. May the elders of Uruk weep. May the young men weep. May the ploughman weep at his plough, who used to praise your name. May the shepherd weep, and the herdsman, who used to bring you butter and beer. May the woman of the alehouse weep, who used to put beer in your hand. May the field weep for you as if it were your mother. May the cypress and the cedar weep for you, which we went through together in our anger. May the bear and the hyena and the panther and the tiger and the stag and the leopard, the lion, the wild bull, the deer and the ibex, all the creatures of the open country, weep for you. May the holy river weep for you, along whose banks we used to walk. May the pure Euphrates weep for you, from which we used to draw water for the skin. May the young men of the wide city weep for you, who watched us fight the Bull and win. May the farmer weep for you, who used to sing your name over his furrow. May the one who anointed your back with oil weep for you. May the one who put the beer in your cup weep for you. May the harlot weep for you, who rubbed you with sweet oil. May the elders of the walled city weep for you, who put their hands to your neck in blessing. Notice the shape of that. It begins with the road and the forest, which are places, and it goes through the animals, which he had known before he was a person, and then it comes into the city and gets narrower and narrower and more and more particular, until at the end it is not a country weeping, it is the individual named human beings who did small physical kindnesses for him. The one who put oil on his back. The one who filled his cup. A man who has lost somebody starts with the whole world and finishes with the person who used to hand him a drink. Anybody who has done this knows the order it happens in and it is that one. And then he said the thing that is quoted more than any other line in this poem, and it is quoted because it is exactly true. My friend, my younger brother, who chased the wild ass of the hills and the panther of the open country. We conquered everything. We went up the mountain. We seized the Bull and killed it. We brought down Humbaba in the cedar forest. Now what is this sleep that has taken hold of you? You have gone dark, and you cannot hear me. And then he did the thing the sun god had promised he would do, and which nobody has mentioned since. He made himself filthy. He put off everything he owned that marked him as a king. He let his hair go. And he put on the skin of a lion and went out of the city, and this is the state he will be in for the whole of tomorrow night, walking across the world in an animal skin looking for a man who did not die. The king of Uruk, who washed his hair and put on a crown in the first chapter of tonight, ends the same episode dressed as the thing Enkidu used to hunt. And he sat with him for six days and seven nights, and he would not give him up for burial. And on the seventh day he saw what happens to a body, and he understood, finally, that his friend was not going to wake up. And he gave him up. That is the resolution, and it is done, and the last chapter of tonight is quiet.
He did everything. He called the country. That is the phrase the poem uses, and it means he sent word out and had people come in, and the list of who came is a list of trades. The coppersmiths. The goldsmiths. The stoneworkers. The jewellers. The ones who worked lapis and the ones who worked carnelian and the ones who cast metal and the ones who cut and polished. Every skilled maker in the country, called to one room, to make one object. And what I find steadying about that, at this hour, is that it is the most practical possible response to something nobody can do anything about. He cannot bring him back and he knows it. So he commissions work. He finds the best people at each trade and he gives them a job and a material and a deadline, and for a while there are forty people in a workshop doing something careful with their hands because of somebody who died, and the poem thinks that is worth several lines. The body of it lapis, the poem says. The chest of gold. And I want to say what a statue like that actually was, because it is not a monument in a square. In that world, an image of a person, made properly and set up in the right place, was how the dead were kept in the ordinary business of the living. You put the figure somewhere it would be seen. You put food in front of it. You said the name out loud, because a name said out loud was the thing that kept somebody from going completely out of the world. The worst thing that could happen to you after death, in that literature, was not punishment. It was that nobody said your name and nobody put out the water. There are texts about ghosts, and the ghosts in them are not angry, they are hungry and thirsty and forgotten, and the remedy is always the same: somebody remembers to put something down for them. So the statue of lapis and gold is not a tribute. It is an arrangement. It is a man building a thing that will make it possible to go on feeding his friend, by name, indefinitely, in a room, every day, for as long as anybody keeps it up. And then he laid out the offerings, and the poem lists them, and the list is long, and I will give you a piece of it because it is the most careful writing in the whole tablet. He brought out a great table of elmwood. He filled a carnelian bowl with honey. He filled a lapis bowl with butter. He set out a flask and adorned it and displayed it to the sun. For the queen of the netherworld he set out a knife, its handle of lapis. For her scribe he set out a stool. And then he went through the gods of the underworld one at a time, and I am going to let this run, because it is the last long list of the night and it is the most soothing thing in the tablet. For the queen of the netherworld he set out a knife with a lapis handle, and he displayed it to the sun, and he said, may she be pleased with this, and may she walk beside my friend, and not let him be uneasy in his heart. For her scribe, who kneels in front of her with the tablet, he set out a stool. For the god who guards the gate, he set out a thing that was his. For the one who keeps the record of the dead. For the shepherd of the underworld. For the god of the river that has to be crossed. For the ones whose names are only in these lists and who have no stories at all, one after another, each with an object, each displayed to the sun, each with the same request attached. May you be pleased with this. May you walk at my friend's side. May he not be uneasy in his heart. That is the whole of the last tablet. A man going down a list of everyone who works in the place his friend has gone to, and giving each of them something good, and asking every single one of them, in the same words, to be kind to somebody who has just arrived and does not know anybody there. It is a man ringing round. That is what the whole of the last tablet is. A man going through a list of gods, one at a time, and giving each of them a good object, and asking each of them to be kind to somebody who has just arrived and does not know anybody. And there is a separate poem, older, in Sumerian, and I am flagging it as separate because it is not part of the long epic and it is not tonight's tablet. It is called the death of Gilgamesh, and it is about the other funeral, his own, and it contains one image that people never forget once they have heard it. In that poem they turn a river aside. They divert the water from its bed, and in the dry riverbed they build the tomb, and they lay him in it with his household, and then they let the river back, and it runs over the top of him, and nobody can ever find it or dig it up. That is a different poem about a different burial and I will not pretend it belongs to tonight. But I mention it because in nineteen ninety a team surveying an old dried up channel of the Euphrates in Iraq found a structure in the riverbed, and the newspapers had a wonderful few weeks, and the archaeologists were considerably more careful, and it remains exactly what it was: an interesting feature in a dry channel near where the poem says it should be. The lamp is low now. And then Uruk without him. The city goes on. It has to. The Bull's horns are still hanging on the bedroom wall, holding their oil. The wall is still six miles round with its towers. The temple is still there and the offerings are still made at the right hours by the right people, because that is what a city is, a set of things that keep happening whether anybody feels like it or not. And that is the thing about a city, and it is either the coldest fact in the poem or the kindest one and I have never settled it. Nothing stops. The bread is baked at the same hour. The boats come in. The water is opened into the fields at the right time because if it is not the barley dies, and the barley does not know anything has happened. The offerings are made at dawn by the person whose job it is. The gate is opened and closed. If you have ever lost somebody you know both of the ways that feels. It is unbearable that the world does not stop. And it is also the only reason you get through the week, because the world not stopping is what carries you, hour by hour, from the morning to the evening, whether you agree to it or not. And a man is walking around inside it who has not slept properly in a week, who has put a statue of gold and lapis somewhere he can see it, and who has just understood something that everybody in this story except him has known the whole time, which is that this happens to everyone, and it is going to happen to him. That is the whole of tomorrow night, and tomorrow night is the kind one, and I will tell you the shape of it now so that you can go to sleep on it rather than on this. He is going to leave the city and go out into the wild country and look for the one man who did not die. And I will tell you the shape of the whole of it now, so that it is waiting for you rather than sprung on you. He walks east until he comes to a mountain with a gate in it, and the gate is kept by two creatures who are half scorpion, and they tell him that what is on the other side is twelve hours of complete darkness with no light in it at all, and that nobody has ever gone through, and he goes through anyway, and the poem counts the hours, one after another, in the dark, and it is the strangest passage in the whole epic and it is going to be the most restful thing you have heard in a month. And he comes out the other side into a garden where the trees have fruit made of carnelian and lapis, and there is a woman there with a tavern at the edge of the sea, and she says the wisest thing anybody says in this literature, and he does not listen to her. And then a boatman, and a crossing, and an old man on an island who tells him about a flood, and a plant at the bottom of the sea, and a snake. And then home. He is going to walk through a mountain in the dark. He is going to meet a woman with a tavern at the edge of the world who gives him the best advice anybody gives anybody in this literature. He is going to hear the story of the flood from the man it happened to. He is going to be offered a plant that undoes old age, and he is going to lose it, in a way that is so ordinary and so annoying that you will laugh. And then he is going to come home, and stand in front of that wall, and say something about the brickwork, and it is going to be the ending. He does not find what he goes for. He comes back anyway, and the coming back is the point, and it is the last thing this poem has to say and it takes it three thousand lines to say it. But that is tomorrow. Tonight he is in a city that is going on around him, in the dark, with a gold and lapis statue of somebody in the next room, having finally, on the seventh day, let them take the body away. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. Think of it, wherever you are lying. The statue is in a room somewhere in the palace, lapis and gold, being looked at. The horns are on the bedroom wall, holding their oil, and nobody has taken them down. The door is standing in the temple at Nippur, two hundred miles away, in perfect condition, and it will still be standing there in a hundred years and it does not know anything. And out in the country the ploughman is at his plough and the shepherd is with the flock and the woman of the alehouse is filling somebody's cup, and every one of them has been asked, by name, in a poem, to weep for a man they may never have met, and four thousand years later they are still being asked, every time anybody reads it out. That is the only thing anybody has ever been able to do about this. Make a list of the people who were kind to somebody, and read it out, and keep reading it out. You do not have to keep any of tonight. If you keep one thing, keep the woman of the alehouse, who was asked to weep, and who used to put a beer in his hand. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is the kind one, and it is the last of the three, and it is the one I have been looking forward to since we started. Last night a man died in a bed and his friend sat with him for six days and seven nights and would not let him go, and then on the seventh day he understood, and he let them take the body, and he had a statue made of lapis and gold, and then he walked out of his own city in a lion skin and did not tell anybody where he was going. Tonight is where he went. And I will tell you the whole shape of it now, because there is nothing to protect you from tonight and knowing the ending will not spoil anything. He is looking for a way not to die. He does not find one. He comes home anyway. And on the way he walks through a mountain in the dark for twelve hours, and comes out into a garden where the trees are made of gemstones, and meets a woman who keeps a tavern at the edge of the sea and who tells him the truest thing anybody says in this entire literature. He crosses an ocean you are not allowed to touch. He hears the story of the flood from the only man it did not kill. He is given a plant that undoes old age and he loses it to a snake, in a way so ordinary and so annoying that people have been laughing about it for four thousand years. And then he comes home and stands in front of a wall. Which is where we started, two nights ago, if you were here. And if you were not, it will not matter, because the wall explains itself. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here last night, in which case I am glad you came back, because last night was heavy and tonight is not. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome, and you have missed nothing that will stop you. A king lost the person he loved most. He has gone out to see whether that has to happen. That is all you need. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The scribe takes the last three tablets of the stack, and sets the twelfth one aside again, apart, the way he has done for three nights, and this time he says something about it. This one, he says, we will come to at the end, and I will tell you what it is and why it is not really part of the story, and then we will read it anyway, because it is beautiful and because leaving things out is not what this house does. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. There are two new names tonight and neither of them is difficult. A woman who keeps a tavern, and a very old man on an island. Everything else you already have. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. There is nothing frightening in tonight. Nobody dies. There is a flood in it, told once, at a distance of four thousand years, by an old man sitting down, and it is over in a chapter, and everything on either side of it is a man walking, or floating, or sitting in a garden, or asleep. In fact I will tell you the single most restful thing about tonight in advance. The longest passage in this episode is a man walking through complete darkness for twelve hours, and the poem counts the hours one at a time, and almost nothing happens in any of them. It is the closest thing to a lullaby in the whole of ancient literature and I have been saving it for you. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the rest of the season will find you as it comes. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
He went out into the open country and he wept. That is how the ninth tablet begins. Not with a decision, not with a speech. A man walking away from a city, crying, in an animal skin. For my friend Enkidu, he says, I weep bitterly, and I roam the wild country. And then he says the thing that is actually driving him, and it is not what people usually say it is. He does not say, I miss him. He says that too, but that is not the sentence that turns him around and sends him east. The sentence is this. Shall I not be like him? Shall I too not lie down, and never rise again, for ever and ever? He has understood something and he has understood it too late and it is now the only thing in his head. Not that his friend is gone. That he is next. And he is afraid. The poem says so, flatly, and it is one of the best things about it. The strongest man in the world, two thirds god, who wrestled a king in a doorway and killed the guardian of a forest and caught the Bull of Heaven by the horns, is frightened of dying and says so out loud and goes to do something about it. And what he does about it is set off on foot to find one particular person. There was a man, long ago, before all of this, who survived the flood. And the gods gave him life without end, and put him somewhere far away, at the mouth of the rivers, and he is still there, and he is the only person who has ever been given the thing Gilgamesh now wants. So he is going to go and ask him how. And I want to give you the state he is in, because the poem does and most retellings tidy it up. He is not travelling. He is roaming. The word the poem uses is the word you would use for an animal ranging over country, and it is the same word it used for Enkidu in the first episode, before the trapper, when he was out with the gazelles. The king of Uruk has gone back to being the thing his friend used to be, and the poem does that on purpose and never mentions it. He does not wash. He does not change his clothes, because he is not wearing clothes, he is wearing skins. He sleeps in the open. He eats what he kills. And he is afraid at night. There is a passage where he lies down in a mountain pass and wakes because there are lions around him in the moonlight, and he is frightened, and he lifts his axe and goes at them, and the poem says he scattered them and killed them and took their pelts. That is not a hunting scene. That is somebody who cannot sleep, in the dark, in the open, dealing with the thing that woke him, badly, and then lying back down. He kills lions in the passes on the way and wears their skins. He does not sleep properly. The poem says his cheeks are hollow and his face is drawn and his heart is sick, and that he looks like a man who has come a long way. And then he comes to a mountain.
Its name is Mashu, which means twins, and it has two peaks. And the poem describes it in a way that I want you to hear properly, because it is one of the great images in this literature and it is done in two lines. The tops of it reach up to the vault of heaven. The bottoms of it reach down to the underworld. That is a mountain that goes all the way through. It touches the roof of the sky at the top and the floor of the dead at the bottom, and it stands between them, and the sun goes into it in the evening and comes out of it in the morning, and there is a gate. And the gate is kept. The ones who keep it are called scorpion people, and there is a man and a woman, and the poem says that their terror is awesome, that a look from them is death, and that their radiance is terrifying and covers the mountains. And the mountain has a name that people have argued about for a long time, and I will give you the argument in one breath because it is a pleasant one. Some think Mashu is a real range, out east or north, and there are candidates. Others think it is not a place on any map, that it is the mountain at the edge, the one the sun goes into, and that looking for it is like looking for the horizon. The poem does not care. It has two peaks, the sun uses it, and there is a gate. And there are pictures of them. That is what I love about this. They are a real thing in the art of that world, a human head and torso on a scorpion's body with the tail up over the back, standing at doorways, and they are on seals and on carved slabs and on the bases of thrones, and every single time they appear they are doing the same job, which is standing on either side of something and guarding it. So he comes up to the gate, and they see him, and he shields his face for a moment. And then he takes his hand down and goes toward them. And the male one says to his wife, this one who has come to us, his body is the flesh of the gods. And the woman answers, two thirds of him is god and one third is human. And here is where it becomes one of my favourite scenes in the poem, because they do not fight him. They ask him questions. They ask why he has come such a long way and by such a difficult road. And he tells them. He says he is looking for the old man who was given life, because he wants to ask him about death and about living. And the scorpion man listens to all of it and then explains the situation to him, kindly and completely, like somebody at a desk. Nobody, he says, has ever done this. There is no passage. The road into that mountain is twelve double hours long. The darkness is thick and there is no light in it. Not at the start, not in the middle, not at the end. From sunrise to sunset there is darkness. And Gilgamesh says, I am going anyway. And the scorpion man opens the gate. That is what happens. That is the whole encounter. He does not have to defeat them. He does not trick them. Two beings whose glance is described as death listen to a man explain what he wants, tell him honestly how hard it is, and then open the gate for him and tell him to be careful. The gate of the sun, the poem says, was opened for him. And he went in.
Here it is. I am going to read you this the way the poem does it, which is one hour at a time, in the same words, twelve times, and I want you to understand before I start that this is not a passage where you are supposed to be paying attention. The poem repeats itself here more than anywhere else in three thousand lines. Somebody sat in a room four thousand years ago and heard the same sentence twelve times in a row on purpose. It is the deepest and slowest thing in the epic and it exists to make a very long walk feel very long. So let it happen. Let it go past you. There will be nothing to miss. At one double hour of distance, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see what was ahead of him and he could not see what was behind him. At two double hours of distance, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see what was ahead of him and he could not see what was behind him. At three double hours of distance, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see what was ahead of him and he could not see what was behind him. At four double hours of distance, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see what was ahead of him and he could not see what was behind him. Nothing has changed. Nothing is going to change for a while. That is not a failure of the story, that is the story. Somebody is walking under a mountain and the hours are the same as each other, and the poem is going to say so, in the same words, until you feel it in your legs. At five double hours of distance, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see what was ahead of him and he could not see what was behind him. At six double hours of distance, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see what was ahead of him and he could not see what was behind him. Halfway. Nobody has ever done this and there is no way to know how far along you are, and he has been walking in complete darkness for six hours, and there is nothing to look at and nothing to hear and nothing to steer by. At seven double hours, the darkness was dense, and there was no light. He could not see ahead of him and he could not see behind him. At eight double hours, he cried out. The darkness was dense, and there was no light, and he could not see what was ahead of him or what was behind him. At nine double hours, the north wind licked at his face. There. Did you feel that? Eight hours of nothing at all, in the same words, in the dark, and then a small cold wind on the side of his face, and it is the most welcome sentence in the whole epic, and it is a change in the weather. At ten double hours of distance, the way out was near. He could feel it. That is the poem's phrase, more or less. Not saw. Felt. There is a quality of air near an opening that anybody who has been underground knows about, and the tablet has it. At eleven double hours, at a distance of two double hours, the light began. At twelve double hours, it was bright. And he came out ahead of the sun. That is the passage. That is twelve hours of walking in the dark under a mountain, told in the fewest possible different words, and if you were drifting through the middle of it, that is exactly what it is for. Nothing was missed. The whole point of the eighth hour crying out is that you are as tired of the dark as he is. And what is on the other side is a garden.
He came out of the mountain and there was a garden, and everything in it was made of jewels. The poem lists them, and the list is short and strange and no two translations agree about all of it, and I am going to give you the version I like because I do not think precision helps here. Carnelian, it says, bearing its fruit. A vine hanging with grapes, and the grapes are lapis lazuli. Foliage of lapis. Thorns and thistles of some clear stone. Cedars of agate. Coral, and pearl, and one tree hung with what the poem calls the fruit of the sea. Trees made of stone, bearing stone fruit, in the light, at the far end of the mountain, in a place where nobody has ever been. And I want to tell you what those two stones actually were to the people hearing this, because if you do not know that, the garden is only pretty, and it is not only pretty. It is the most extravagant thing in the poem. Neither of them comes from that country. There is no lapis lazuli in Mesopotamia. There is none anywhere near it. In the ancient world essentially all of it came from one place, a set of mines high in the mountains of what is now northeastern Afghanistan, and from there it travelled, hand to hand, over passes and across deserts and down the rivers, something like fifteen hundred miles, to end up in a workshop in a flat country that has no stone in it at all. And carnelian is the same story in the other direction. The finest of it came from the far side of the Gulf, out of the great cities of the Indus valley, and it arrived by sea, through the islands, in ships, along a trade route that operated for centuries and is documented on both ends. So these are not gems in the way we might think of gems. They are the two most travelled objects in that world. They are the things that came from the absolute edge of the known map, from places most people had only heard named, at enormous cost, over years, through more hands than anybody could count. And what did they do with them when they arrived? They put them in the ground with their dead. In the great cemetery at Ur, in the graves of that period, there are headdresses of gold and lapis and carnelian, and beads by the thousand, and inlays, and a lyre with a bull's head on it. The most far travelled material available to them, and they buried it. Now go back to the garden. A man has walked to the end of the world, in the dark, through a mountain, looking for a way not to die. And he comes out the other side, and what is growing there, on the trees, is exactly the two substances his own people put in their graves. Carnelian is bearing fruit. Lapis is hanging in leaves. The poem does not comment. It simply describes the garden, item by item, the way an inventory does, and moves him through it. But everybody in that room knew what those stones cost and where they ended up. And the man walking under them is out here because he has understood, three weeks too late, that he is going to be buried too. And I want to stay in the garden for a moment, because it is the only place in this poem that is purely beautiful and it goes past in a dozen lines. Think about what a garden of stone fruit would actually be. Nothing in it grows. Nothing in it can be eaten. It is a garden that gives nothing and costs nothing and asks nothing, standing at the far end of a mountain, in the light, where nobody comes. And the materials are the materials of the temple. Carnelian and lapis and agate are what you make the eyes of a statue out of, and the beard of a god, and the jewellery of a queen. Every stone in that garden is a stone somebody in Uruk would have recognised instantly as belonging on an object of enormous value. So it is not an alien landscape. It is a garden made out of the most precious things his own city knew about, growing on trees, unattended, at the end of the world, in the sun. He does not touch any of it. The poem does not say he tried to pick anything. He walks through and goes on, because he is not looking for treasure and it does not occur to him that a tree made of lapis is worth stopping for. The sun god sees him there. And this is another one of those moments I keep pointing at, where the poem is quietly kinder than it needs to be. The sun looks down at the man standing in the jewel garden in his lion skin and speaks to him, and what he says is not a warning or a rebuke. It is closer to what you would say to somebody who is doing something hopeless. The life you seek, he says, you will not find. And Gilgamesh answers him, and the answer is one long complaint and it is completely reasonable. After I have walked all this way, after roaming the wild country, am I now to lay my head down in the earth and sleep for ever? Let me look at the sun and see the light. I have had enough of the dark. The sun god does not have an answer to that. Nobody does. So he goes on, out of the garden, down toward the water.
At the edge of the sea there is a house, and in the house there is a woman, and her name is Siduri, and she makes and serves beer. That is her job. She is what the poem calls an alewife, which was a real profession run by real women in that country. There were laws about them in the law codes, and I am going to tell you two of them because they are real and they are marvellous. There is a famous set of laws, carved on a tall black stone that stands in a museum in Paris, made for a Babylonian king, and among the sections about oxen and boundary walls and surgeons there are sections about the woman who sells beer. One says that if she takes payment in silver rather than in barley, or if she gives short measure, she is to be punished. So there was a fixed exchange rate and somebody was checking it. And another says that if outlaws gather in her house and she does not seize them and take them to the palace, she is to be put to death. Think about what that tells you. The law assumed that if there was trouble anywhere in a town, it would be in the beer house, and that the woman running it would know exactly who was in the room, and it made her responsible for it. They were not just serving drinks. They were the closest thing that world had to a place where you found out what was going on, and the state knew it, and legislated for it. They kept houses where you could get a drink, and they extended credit, and they knew everybody, and if you wanted to know what was happening in a town you asked the woman who ran the beer house. And this one is at the end of the world, on the shore, with the sea in front of her, and she has a jar and a mash tub and a set of vats and, the poem is very clear about this, a door with a bolt on it. And she is standing outside and she sees something coming. She sees a man wearing skins with the body of a god and the face of somebody who has come a very long way, and she does what any woman running a bar by herself at the edge of nowhere would do. She goes inside and bolts the door and goes up on the roof. I love her so much. Four thousand years of literature and one of the very few completely sensible characters in it is a publican who saw a large stranger in a lion skin coming up the beach and locked up. And I want to be fair to him too, because from the beach it looks different. He has been walking for a length of time the poem does not measure. He has come out of twelve hours of darkness and through a garden nobody has seen. He has not spoken to a human being since the scorpion people, and before that since he left his own city, and he has been talking to himself and to the dead the whole way. And he comes over a rise and there is a house with smoke coming out of it and a woman standing outside, and it is the first ordinary thing he has seen in months, and she takes one look at him and locks the door. Both of them are entirely right and neither of them is being unreasonable, and that is why it is a good scene. And he shouts at her from outside. He says, what did you see that made you bolt the door? I will break the door. I will smash the bolt. And she calls down from the roof, perfectly calmly, and asks him who he is. And he tells her. He gives her the whole thing. He says who he is, and what he did, the Bull and the forest and the guardian, and then he tells her about his friend, and the poem gives him the same lines he has been saying since the first chapter of tonight. My friend whom I loved has turned to clay. Shall I not lie down like him, and never rise again? And then he says, I am afraid of death. And I want to point out what changed her mind, because it is not the threat. He threatened to break the door and she did not open it. What he did next was tell her who he was, and then tell her about his friend, and then say out loud, to a stranger, from the wrong side of a bolted door, that he was afraid. And then she came down. She did not open the door for the king of Uruk. She opened it for somebody who said he was frightened. And she comes down and opens the door.
Now. I have to explain something about this passage, because it is the most famous thing in the poem and the situation with the text is genuinely interesting. In the standard version, the one on the eleven tablets, what she says to him is short. She says the life you seek you will not find. She says that when the gods created humankind, they set death aside for humankind and kept life for themselves. And then she points him toward the boatman. But there is an older tablet, from centuries before, an Old Babylonian one, and on it she says a great deal more, and what she says on it is the single most quoted passage from any Mesopotamian text, and it is the reason people love this poem, and I am going to give it to you and I am going to be honest with you that it is not on the eleven tablet version. Some older tellings have her say this. Gilgamesh, where are you wandering? The life that you are looking for, you will never find. When the gods created humankind, they kept everlasting life for themselves and gave death to us. So. Let your belly be full. Enjoy yourself, day and night. Make every day a festival. Dance and play, day and night. Let your clothes be clean. Let your head be washed. Bathe in water. Look at the child who is holding your hand. Let your wife be happy in your arms. For this, she says, is what people are for. That is it. That is the oldest surviving statement of that particular idea in any literature on earth, and it was written down by somebody in a mud brick country four thousand years ago and put in the mouth of a woman running a bar. And I want you to notice, because almost nobody does, that it is not a grand philosophy. Look at the list again. A full stomach. Clean clothes. A wash. Something to celebrate. Somebody small holding your hand. Somebody you love, glad you are there. Every single item on it is a domestic thing that costs nothing and that you can have tonight. And I want to say what has happened to that passage since, because it is one of the most travelled pieces of writing in the world. It has been read as the oldest expression of a particular idea about living for the day. It has been quoted in books about grief. It gets put on posters. It turns up in a great many wedding readings by people who have no idea it is spoken by a barmaid to a man in a lion skin at the end of the world. And there is a resemblance that people notice and argue about, between what she says and a passage in one of the books of the Bible, in the one about vanity and the sun and everything being a chasing after wind, which also tells you to eat your bread and drink your wine and enjoy life with the one you love. Whether there is any connection between them, direct or through the air of a shared world, is a real scholarly question and the answers range from probably to certainly not. I am not going to settle it and I do not need to. What matters tonight is that a very old idea about how to live with the fact of dying appears first, as far as we can tell, in the mouth of a woman running a bar at the edge of the sea, telling a man to go home. She is not telling him that life is short so seize it. She is telling him to go home and have dinner. And he does not listen to her. That is the part that makes this the best chapter in the poem. She gives him the answer, in full, in plain language, at the exact halfway point of the story, and it is the correct answer, and he thanks her and asks for directions to the ferry. He is going to spend the rest of the episode finding out that she was right.
There is a boatman, and his name is Urshanabi, and he works for the old man on the island, and he is sitting in the wood with some things. The poem calls them the stone ones, and nobody is entirely certain what they were. They are objects, or figures, made of stone, and they have something to do with how the boat crosses, and they may be a crew or a charm or a set of fittings, and the honest answer is that specialists disagree and the text does not explain because everybody listening knew. And Gilgamesh, who has just come out of a mountain and a jewel garden and a conversation with a woman who told him to go home, arrives in a state and smashes them. He breaks the stone ones before anybody has explained anything to him. And Urshanabi looks at what he has done and says, in effect, well. Now you have made this harder. Because the stone ones were how they got across, and now there is another way and it is worse. They must cross the Waters of Death, and the rule about the Waters of Death is one line long and it is the most frightening rule in the poem because it is so specific. Your hand must not touch it. Not a monster in it. Not a current. If any part of your hand touches that water, that is the end. So they cannot row. And here is the solution, and it is my favourite piece of problem solving in ancient literature. Go into the forest, says the boatman, and cut three hundred punting poles, each sixty cubits long. Trim them. Cap them. And then, when we are out on the water, you will take one pole and push us forward with it, and then you will let it go and take the next one. Never touch the water. Use each pole once, and drop it, and take a new one. Three hundred poles. Three hundred pushes. One at a time. And I want you to feel the arithmetic of it, because the poem gives you the number and then moves on and the number is the whole point. Three hundred poles, each sixty cubits long. That is a pole about ninety feet long, which is an absurd length, and there are three hundred of them, and they have to be cut and trimmed and capped before anybody gets in the boat. So before the crossing there is a day, or several days, of two men in a forest with axes, felling and trimming and stacking, in silence, making three hundred identical objects that will each be used exactly once. And that is how they cross. A man standing on a boat in a dead flat sea, taking a pole, pushing, dropping it in the water, picking up the next one, pushing, dropping it, three hundred times, for however long that takes, in silence. And when the poles run out, and they do run out, he takes off the skin he has been wearing and holds it up on his arms as a sail, and the wind takes them the rest of the way in.
His name is Uta napishti, and it means something like he found life, and he is sitting on the shore when they come in, and he has been there a very long time. And he watches the boat coming and he says to himself, why are the stone ones smashed, and who is that on board who is not my boatman. And Gilgamesh comes ashore and stands in front of him, and the old man looks at him, and asks the question everybody in this poem asks him. Why are your cheeks hollow? Why is your face sunken? Why is there sorrow in your heart? Why do you look like someone who has been on the road a long time, with cold and heat beating on your face? And Gilgamesh tells him the whole thing again. The friend, the clay, the fear, the road. And then he says, I have come to see you, whom they call the far away one. I have come to ask about life and death. And before the lecture there is a passage I skipped over and I want to give it to you, because it is the clearest statement in the poem of how that world understood the arrangement. He says, nobody sees death. Nobody sees the face of it. Nobody hears its voice. But it cuts people down. And then he says, we build a house and we think it will stand for ever. We seal a contract and we think it will hold for ever. Brothers divide an inheritance and think the settlement is permanent. There is enmity in the land and people think it will always be there. The river rises in flood and people think the flood is the way things are. And every one of those is a thing that ends. And then, and this is the part that is doing the real work, he says that the great gods and the mother goddess who fixes destinies sat down together, and they established death and life, and they did not disclose the day of death. They fixed both. Not death alone. Death and life, together, in the same session, by the same committee, and the only thing they withheld was the date. That is not a curse and it is not a punishment for anything. It is an administrative decision, taken once, at the beginning, by the same people who assigned the rivers their courses and gave the moon his instructions. And the old man does not tell him a secret. That is the thing about this scene that people are never ready for. There is no technique. There is no ordeal to pass. He has walked to the end of the world and the man he came to see gives him a lecture, and the lecture is very good and very sad and completely useless to him. Do we build a house for ever, he says. Do we seal a contract for ever. Do brothers divide an inheritance for ever. Does the river always rise in flood. The dragonfly, he says, drifts on the water, and its face looks at the sun, and then suddenly there is nothing there at all. Nobody sees the face of death. Nobody hears the voice of death. But death cuts down humankind. We build houses. We make agreements. Brothers argue over property. The rivers rise. And the sleeping and the dead, he says, are just alike. And Gilgamesh looks at him and says, all right. But you are standing there. You are exactly like me. There is nothing different about you. I came here to fight you for it and I find you lying on your back doing nothing. So tell me how you did it. And the old man says, I will tell you a secret. I will tell you a hidden thing of the gods. And Gilgamesh, who has not understood yet, keeps pushing. He says, I looked at you and I expected to find somebody different. I was going to fight you for it. And I find you lying on your back. Tell me how you joined the assembly of the gods, he says. Tell me how you found life without end. And the old man says, all right. And then he tells him about the flood.
I told you at the start of tonight that the flood is one chapter, and this is it, and it is being told by a very old man sitting on a beach who was there, and that is the only reason it is in this poem at all. There was a city, he says, called Shuruppak, on the bank of the Euphrates. It was already old. And the gods, who were in it, decided to bring a flood. He does not say why. The standard version does not give a reason, and that is worth noticing, because the older poem we told in this house in the seed special does give one, and it is noise. In that poem the world got loud and one god could not sleep and that is how it started. Here it is simply decided. And one of them told. The clever one, the one who has been in this house on every night of this season, the one who put the first god to sleep and built his house on top of him, went to a reed fence, and spoke through it, and pretended he was speaking to the fence rather than to the man on the other side of it, and said, reed fence, reed fence, wall, wall. Listen. Tear down your house and build a boat. Give up possessions and save your life. Take the seed of all living things on board. And the man asked, what do I tell the city? And the god told him what to say, and what he told him to say is a lie, and it is the coldest thing in the chapter. Tell them, he said, that you have to leave because the lord of the air is angry with you, and that when you go, the gods will rain abundance down on them. So they built it. And the whole city helped. The carpenters and the reed workers and the children carrying pitch, and he killed oxen and sheep every day and gave them beer and wine as though it were a festival, and they worked, and they thought they were building something that would bring them rain. And before the dimensions, one thing about that lie, because it is the most uncomfortable moment in the chapter and the poem does not flinch from it. The city helped him build it. All of them. The carpenters and the reed workers and the pitch carriers and the children, and he fed them and gave them beer and wine and it was like a festival, and every single one of them drowned. He does not say that. He does not have to. He lists the work and the food and the good spirits of it, and then a page later everybody is clay, and the poem lets you do the subtraction yourself, which is far worse than being told. He gives the dimensions. He says the deck was an acre, that the sides were a hundred and twenty cubits, that he divided it into seven levels and each level into nine compartments, that he drove in water plugs and stowed the punting poles. Then he loaded it. Silver and gold. His family. The craftsmen. And the animals of the field, and the beasts, and the seed of all living things. And he handed the boat over to the boatman and went in and shut the door. And it came at dawn. A black cloud on the horizon. The storm gods went ahead of it over the mountains and the valleys, and the dykes broke, and the light turned to darkness, and the land was shattered like a pot. For one whole day the storm blew. And then the south wind came, and the flood went over the mountains. And here is the line that makes this chapter what it is. The gods were frightened of it. They fled. They went up to the highest heaven and cowered there like dogs, crouched against the outer wall. And the goddess cried out like a woman in labour, and she said, how could I have spoken like that in the assembly of the gods? How could I have ordered a war to destroy my people, when it is I who gave birth to them, and now they fill the sea like fish. And the gods sat and wept with her, and their lips were parched. Six days and seven nights the wind blew and the flood flattened the land. And the poem counts those days the way it counted the hours in the mountain, and the counting is the same kind of counting, and if you noticed that then you have noticed the architecture of the whole episode. One day and one night the south wind blew and the flood went over the land. A second day. A third and a fourth. A fifth, a sixth. Six days and seven nights, the wind and the flood levelling everything. And on the seventh day the storm stopped. The sea grew calm. The wind died. The flood ended. And he opened a hatch, he says, and the light fell on my face. And he looked out, and everything was flat, and everything was silent, and all of the people had turned back into clay. And he sat down and he wept, and the tears ran down his face. That is the line I would keep if I could only keep one from the whole flood. Not the storm. Not the gods cowering like dogs against the wall of heaven. A man opening a hatch after seven days in the dark, getting the light on his face, looking out at a completely flat and completely silent world, and sitting down on the deck and crying. He does not celebrate. He does not give thanks yet. He sits down, and he cries, and the poem gives it one line and then goes on. And then the boat came to rest on a mountain, and it held, and it did not move. And the mountain has a name in this poem and it is not the one most people expect. It is called Nimush, and it is somewhere in the mountains to the east, and it is not the mountain that other traditions later settled on. Same shape of story, different peak, and the poem is perfectly clear about which one it means. And on the seventh day after that he let out a dove, and it went and came back, because there was nowhere to land. And he let out a swallow, and it went and came back. And he let out a raven, and the raven saw that the water had gone down, and it fed, and it circled, and it did not come back. And he opened everything to the four winds and made an offering, and poured out incense on the mountain, and the gods smelled it and came round it, and the poem says they gathered over the sacrifice like flies. And afterward there was an argument among them, and the lord of the air was furious that anybody had survived, and the clever one answered him and said, you should have punished the wrongdoer for his wrongdoing, and not sent a flood on everybody, and there were better ways, a lion, a famine, a plague, and next time do that instead. And then the lord of the air came aboard the boat and took the old man and his wife by the hand, and made them kneel, and touched their foreheads, and blessed them, and said, until now this man was human. From now on he and his wife shall be like us. And they shall live far away, at the mouth of the rivers. And that, says the old man on the beach, is how I got what you came here for. It was given to me once, by a council of gods, after a flood, as a settlement, and there is not going to be another council and there is not going to be another flood. There is no way for you to get it.
But there is a test, and the old man offers it, and it is the funniest and saddest thing in the poem. You want life without end, he says. Very well. Let us start with something simpler. Do not sleep for six days and seven nights. And I want you to see the trap in it, which he does not. The old man has just spent a chapter explaining that he got what he has by an accident of history that cannot repeat, and that there is no method, and Gilgamesh has heard none of it. So the old man stops arguing and sets a demonstration instead. He does not test him against death. He tests him against sleep, which is the small daily version of it, the one everybody loses to every single night without minding, and which this poem has already told you twice is the same thing. The sleeping and the dead are just alike. He said that a page ago and nobody was listening. And Gilgamesh sits down to stay awake. And the poem says that no sooner had he sat down than sleep came over him like a fog. Immediately. Not on the third night. Not after a heroic struggle. He sits down to prove he can defeat death and he is asleep before the sentence ends, because he has walked across the world in a lion skin and crossed an ocean by punting three hundred times and he has not slept properly since his friend died. And the old man looks at his wife and says, look at this strong man who wanted eternal life. Sleep is blowing over him like a fog. And his wife says, touch him, wake him up, let him go home the way he came. And the old man says no. He will lie. Bake a loaf for him and set it by his head, every day, and mark the wall. So she baked. And I want to slow this down because it is the gentlest test in literature and nobody ever notices what it actually is. She is not trying to catch him out. She is his wife, and she has lived at the mouth of the rivers with an immortal husband for an unimaginable length of time, and a young man has just arrived off a boat in a state, and her husband has set him an impossible task, and the young man has fallen asleep instantly. And her response is to bake. Every day, for seven days, she makes a loaf of bread and puts it beside the head of a sleeping stranger, so that when he wakes up and says he was not asleep, there will be something kind on the floor next to him that proves it without anybody having to argue. She could have woken him. She suggested it. Her husband said no. So she did the only useful thing available, which was to keep a record, in bread, of how long somebody had been asleep. And this is the detail I want you to have, because it is the most domestic proof anybody has ever offered of anything. The first loaf went hard as a stone. The second went like leather. The third was soggy. The fourth had gone white on the crust. The fifth had turned grey with mould. The sixth was still fresh. And the seventh was still on the coals when they woke him. And they woke him, and he said, immediately, I only just dozed off. You touched me and woke me. And the old man said, count your loaves. And he looked, and there they were in a row beside his head, one hard as stone, one like leather, one soggy, one white, one grey, one fresh, and one still baking, and he had to do the arithmetic himself, and there is no arguing with bread. And he understood, and he said, what do I do now? Wherever I set my foot, death is there. That is the moment the poem has been walking toward since the first tablet. Not a defeat by an enemy. Not a failed ordeal. He was beaten by being tired, in front of the only person who ever got what he wanted, and the evidence was seven loaves of bread in a row, going from stone hard to still baking, and he counted them himself. There is no arguing with bread. That is the whole of it. He can argue with gods and he has, twice. He can argue with a scorpion man at a gate and he did. He cannot argue with the fourth loaf.
They put him out. He is washed, and his skins are taken off him and thrown into the sea, and he is given clean clothes that the poem says will not show their age until he gets home. And the boatman, who is banished for having brought him, goes with him. And as they are pushing off, the old man's wife speaks up. She says, he came all this way. He wore himself out getting here. What are you going to give him to take home? And that is why he gets the plant. Not because he earned it. Because a woman on a beach thought a man should not go home with nothing. And the old man tells him about it. There is a plant, he says, that grows at the bottom of the sea. It has thorns like a rose and it will prick your hands. If you get hold of it, you will be young again. And the method is real, and it is the last piece of ordinary craft in the poem. That coast had pearl divers, and they worked exactly like this: a stone tied to the feet to take you straight down without wasting air on swimming, cut it loose at the bottom, take what you came for, and let the water bring you up. People were doing that in the gulf for thousands of years and were still doing it within living memory. So the great supernatural quest of the oldest epic ends with a man using the standard commercial diving technique of his own coastline. So he tied stones to his feet, the way the pearl divers did, and the stones took him down into the deep water, and he saw it, and he took it, and it cut his hands, and he cut the stones loose and the sea threw him back up onto the shore. And he had it. And he did not eat it. That is the part everybody forgets. He had it in his hand, on the beach, and he did not eat it. He said, I will take this back to Uruk. I will give it to the old men there. I will let an old man eat it and see what happens. And then I will eat it myself and go back to being young. He was going to test it on the elderly of his city first. And I have come round to liking him for that, though it took me years. It is not cowardice and it is not selfishness, or not only. He has spent this entire episode being told by everybody he meets that there is no way round death, and he has not believed any of them, and now he has a plant in his hand that is supposed to undo old age and he has no idea whether it works. So he does the sensible thing. He is going to take it home and give it to the old men of Uruk, who would like to be young again more than he would, and watch. The first recorded plan for a clinical trial is in the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh and it does not go ahead because of a snake. And then, on the way home, after a day of walking, he found a pool of cool water, and he went down into it to bathe, and he left the plant on the bank. And a snake smelled it. The poem says it caught the fragrance of the plant. It came up silently and it took the plant and it went back down, and as it went it shed its skin. And Gilgamesh sat down on the bank and wept. That is the whole loss. Not a battle. Not a theft by an enemy. He put it down for ten minutes to have a wash after a long walk, and a snake found it, and that is why snakes shed their skins and get to be new and we do not. He said, for whom have my arms laboured? For whom has my heart's blood been spent? I gained nothing for myself. I have done a good deed for a snake. I have done a good deed for a snake. That is the last complaint in three thousand lines and it is the most human sentence in the poem, and if you have ever lost something stupidly after working very hard for it, you have said a version of it.
They walked the rest of the way home. And when they came in sight of the city, the man who had crossed the waters of death and been to the end of the world and lost everything he went for turned to the boatman, who had never been to Uruk in his life, and said this. Urshanabi. Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk along it. Survey the foundation platform. Examine the brickwork. Is it not baked brick, of the very best? Did not the seven sages themselves lay its foundations? One square mile is city. One square mile is date grove. One square mile is clay pit. And half a square mile is the temple precinct. Three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk. And that is the end of the poem. Nothing else. No death scene for him, no summing up, no last words to anybody. The last thing in eleven tablets and three thousand lines is a man pointing at some brickwork and giving the dimensions of a city. The poem stops the way a person stops talking when they have said the thing they meant. Those are the same words that opened it, two nights ago, in the first chapter of the first episode. The wall we started on. The brickwork we were told to go up and admire before we had met anybody. And now we know who is saying it, and when, and what he has just come back from. That is why they are there. He went out to find a way not to die and he did not find one. He came back with nothing in his hands, having lost even the consolation prize to a snake. And the first thing he does when he sees his city is point at a wall he built and tell a stranger to go and look at the brickwork. Not, I am going to live for ever. Not, I have understood the meaning of life. Look at the wall. Look at the bricks. Three and a half square miles. Good work, that. That is the answer. That is the whole answer, and it takes three thousand lines to arrive at it and it is four words long. Look at the wall. And the woman with the tavern told him the same thing a thousand lines earlier and he did not listen, and I want to put the two of them next to each other because they are the same answer in two registers. She said, eat your dinner, wash, hold the hand of the child, and let your wife be glad you are there. He said, look at the brickwork. Both of them are saying: the thing that lasts is the thing you actually did and the people who were actually there. Now, the twelfth tablet. The scribe picks up the one he has kept apart for three nights and holds it. This one, he says, is not part of it. And I will tell you exactly what it is, because the honest version is more interesting than pretending. The eleven tablets you have just heard are a single poem with a beginning and an ending, and the ending is the wall. The twelfth tablet is a translation, into Akkadian, of the second half of a completely different and older Sumerian poem, and somebody attached it to the end of the collection at some point, and it does not follow on. Enkidu is alive in it. The poem contradicts itself the moment it starts. So it is not the ending. It was stapled on. And it goes like this. Gilgamesh drops two objects, a ball and a stick of some kind, and they fall down into the underworld. And Enkidu says he will go and get them. And Gilgamesh tells him how to behave down there so he can come back, and the instructions are wonderful and they are all about not being noticed. Do not put on clean clothes. Do not anoint yourself with oil. Do not carry a weapon. Do not raise your voice. Do not kiss the wife you love and do not strike the child you dislike, because the outcry of the dead will seize you. And Enkidu goes down and does every single one of those things wrong, and he is held. And then his shade comes up, through a hole in the ground, and the two of them embrace, and Gilgamesh asks him what it is like down there. And what follows is a list, and it is the last thing in the collection, and it is a strange, gentle, oddly practical list. Did you see the man with one son? I saw him. He weeps bitterly at the peg driven into his wall. The man with two sons? He sits on two bricks and eats bread. Three sons, four sons, five, six, seven, and each one is a little better off than the last, and the man with seven sons sits among the lesser gods and listens to music. Did you see the man with no heir? He eats bread like a broken brick. Did you see the palace eunuch? He stands in a corner like a useless stick. Did you see the woman who never gave birth? She is thrown aside like a broken pot, and no man takes pleasure in her. Did you see the young man who never undressed his wife? I saw him. You put a rope in his hand and he weeps over the rope. Did you see the young woman who never lay with a husband? I saw her. You put a reed mat in her hand and she weeps over the mat. Those are hard lines and I am giving them to you flat, because that is how the tablet gives them, and because the values in them are four thousand years old and are not ours and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What the list is doing is measuring everybody by the same one thing. Did you see the stillborn children? I saw them. They play at a table of gold and silver, with honey and butter. That one is different from all the others and it is the only tender line in the list, and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why it is there, and I like it enormously. Did you see the one who fell in battle? I saw him. His father and mother hold up his head and his wife weeps over him. Did you see the one whose body was left in the open with nobody to bury him? I saw him. His ghost does not rest. He eats scraps. Did you see the one with nobody to make offerings for him? I saw him. He eats what is scraped from the pot and thrown in the street. And that is the twelfth tablet. Not a moral. A survey, of who has a good time down there and who does not, and the answer, every single time, is the number of people left up here who remember you. It does not belong to the poem. But it is saying the same thing the wall says and the same thing the woman with the beer said, which is that the only thing that carries over is other people, and I think whoever attached it knew exactly what they were doing. And one last thing about the three nights, and then we are done. You have now heard the whole of it. Not a retelling of the famous bits. The wall, the wild man, the woman who talked him into the city, the bread and the beer, the doorway, the road, the forest with the monkeys in it, the killing, the raft of cedar in the sun. The bath and the crown and the offer and the list and the bull and the haunch. The council in the room while he was asleep, the door he shouted at, the twelve days, the six days and seven nights, the statue, the offerings, the list of gods to be kind to a new arrival. And then the lion skin, the mountain, twelve hours of dark, a garden made of stone, a woman with a bolt on her door who told him to go home and eat his dinner, three hundred poles, an old man on a beach, a flood, seven loaves, a plant, a snake, and a wall. That is three thousand lines and about four thousand years and it comes out at look at the brickwork. The lamp is low now. Think of it, wherever you are lying. The wall is still there. That is not a figure of speech. It is in the ground in southern Iraq, six miles of it, with the stubs of its towers, and people have walked on it and measured it and photographed it, and you could go. And the last thing that a man who had been to the end of the world and back wanted anybody to do was to go up on it and look at how well it was made. Not at what he found. At what he built. And there is one more thing about him and it is the last true fact of the three nights and I have kept it for here. He got what he wanted, in the end, and nobody in the poem tells him. Not eternal life. But afterwards, for two thousand years, in that country, Gilgamesh was a god. Not a big one. A specific one, with a specific job. He became one of the judges of the dead, down in the house of dust that his friend described from a bed in Uruk, and people wrote his name on tablets and buried them, and in the incantations for the restless dead it is Gilgamesh who is asked to settle the case. There are little offerings recorded to him. There are prayers that begin by naming him as the one who gives judgement below. So the man who walked to the end of the world because he could not bear that everybody goes down into the dark ended up working there. Not as a prisoner. As the person you ask for when there is a problem. Nobody planned that. It is just what happened to him over the following two thousand years, in the ordinary religious practice of ordinary people, and he never knew, and I find it one of the most satisfying facts in the whole of this literature. He wanted not to go down there. He went down there, like everybody. And then they gave him a desk. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. You do not have to keep any of tonight. If you keep one thing, keep the woman at the beer house, who told him to go home and have his dinner, and who was right. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is a small story and I think it may be the most restful thing in this whole season. For three nights we have been with the famous one, the king who could not be satisfied, and we left him last night pointing at a wall. Tonight is a different kind of king in a different kind of city, and his problem is not that he wants too much. His problem is that he wants one thing, an ordinary thing, the most ordinary thing there is, and he cannot have it. He wants a child. That is the whole of it. A king in a city called Kish, a long time ago, before almost everything, who had everything a man in that world could want except an heir, and who went looking for a plant that was supposed to help, and who ended up going to get it in a way that nobody before or since has ever tried. He went up on the back of an eagle. And what he saw from up there is the reason I have been looking forward to tonight since we started, because in the middle of this poem there is a passage where a man looks down at the world from higher and higher up, and describes what it looks like as it gets smaller, and it is four thousand years old, and it is the only thing like it in all of ancient literature, and it is going to be the last thing you hear before you go to sleep. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you have been here for the three long nights of the famous story. If so, welcome back, and you can put it down now. Tonight asks nothing. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, you have picked the easiest one, and everything you need will be given to you as it comes. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The scribe puts the eleven tablets of the long poem back on the shelf, and the twelfth beside them, and then he goes further along the shelf and takes down something much smaller. Three tablets. Not eleven. And two of them are broken. This one, he says, does not end. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. There is one name tonight, which is Etana, and one word, which is Kish, and Kish is a place. There is also an eagle and a snake and they are not given names, because they do not need any. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing tonight will startle you. There is one cruel act in the middle of it, done by a bird, to some young snakes, and I will tell it once and plainly and briefly and then it is over and it is answered. Nobody in this story is tortured. Nothing is described that you would not want in your head. The worst thing that happens is that somebody breaks a promise, and gets caught, and is punished, and then is forgiven by the person he wronged, which is more than most stories manage. And there is a fall in it, at the end, and I will tell you now, in advance, so that you can rest through the whole flight: nobody is hurt by it. The poem does not describe an impact. It breaks off. That is not me protecting you, it is the actual state of the tablet, and we will talk about it when we get there. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the rest of the season will find you as it comes. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
There is a list. It is one of the strangest documents that world produced and it is called the King List, and what it does is give you the kings of the country in order, one city at a time, with the length of each reign, going back and back and back, past the flood, into numbers that stop making sense. Twenty eight thousand years, it says, for one of them. Thirty six thousand for another. And then, partway down, a line that says the flood swept over, and after the flood, kingship came down again from heaven, and the numbers start behaving. Twelve hundred years. Then nine hundred. Then four hundred. Then a hundred. And by the time you are into the range where we have other evidence, the numbers are ordinary human reign lengths and the names start matching people we can find elsewhere. And I want to stay with those numbers for a moment, because if you were here for the two long specials earlier this year you already have the key to them and you may not have noticed. Before the flood the list gives reigns of twenty eight thousand years, thirty six thousand, forty three thousand. Nobody has ever thought those were literal, including, I suspect, the scribes who copied them. Look at what they are made of. That world counted in sixties. Sixty, and six hundred, and three thousand six hundred, and thirty six thousand, and those were the round numbers, the way ten and a hundred and a thousand are round numbers to us. The unit of three thousand six hundred had its own name and its own single sign, and it turns up everywhere in their arithmetic. So the enormous reigns are not a claim that a man lived for thirty six thousand years. They are round numbers in base sixty, written by people saying, in effect, a very long time, and then a very long time, and then a very long time, the way we would say ages and ages. And after the flood the numbers come down and keep coming down until they are ordinary, and by the time you reach the part of the list where we have other evidence, the reigns are the length of a real reign and the names are people we can sometimes find on other objects. Which means the King List is doing something rather sophisticated. It is saying: back there, before the water, time worked differently and the numbers are not the point. Here, after it, we are counting properly. Etana is on the after side. He is in the first city of the ordinary world. The city after the flood is Kish, and among its kings there is one line that says more than any of the others. Etana, the shepherd, the one who went up to heaven, who consolidated all the lands, ruled. That is it. That is the whole entry. Everything we have tonight is a poem written around one line in an administrative document, and the line is so strange that somebody clearly wanted to know what it meant, and made a story to answer it. He is called the shepherd. That is a title, not a job. Kings in that country were called shepherds all the time and it is a compliment about looking after people rather than a description of livestock. And Kish is real, and it is dug, and I want to tell you what came out of it, because it is a real place under a real sun and people have stood in it with trowels. It is a group of mounds north of where Babylon would later be, and it was excavated in the nineteen twenties and thirties by a joint expedition from Oxford and a museum in Chicago, and they were there for years. They found a city with a very long history. They found temples and palaces and thousands of tablets. And in the early levels they found something that people still argue about, which is a set of burials with vehicles in them. Carts or chariots, with the remains of the animals that pulled them, buried with the dead. They found a flood layer, too, a stratum of clean water laid silt between levels of occupation, which is a real thing that real rivers do and which turns up at several sites in that country at different dates. It is not evidence of one enormous flood covering the world. It is evidence that the rivers there did what rivers do, repeatedly, catastrophically, to people who lived on their banks, which is the far more interesting fact and is almost certainly where the story came from in the first place. So Kish is not a legend. It is a set of mounds with pottery in it and a museum's worth of tablets and a layer of river silt, and a very long time ago somebody was king of it. It is north of Babylon, a group of mounds, and there was a city there very early, and for a while in the deep past to be called king of Kish was the most prestigious thing a ruler in that country could be called, so much so that kings of other cities used the title when they had no connection to Kish at all, the way people use a title that has stopped meaning what it meant. So we have a real city, and a real title, and a name on a list, and a line that says he went up to heaven.
The poem opens with the gods founding a city, laying out its plan, building its walls, digging its river, and then looking around and noticing that there is nobody in charge. They had not yet set up a king, the poem says. The sceptre and the crown and the staff were laid up in heaven before the great gods, and there was no counsellor for the people. And then kingship came down. And I want to give you the opening of the poem properly, because it is one of the more beautiful bits of scene setting in this literature and I skimmed it. The great gods laid out the plan of a city, it says. The lesser gods, the ones who do the work, laid its foundations. They drew the design of it. They marked out where the streets would be. They dug the river that would water it. And then the poem says that the seven gods who decide things barred the gates against trouble, and barred them against the lesser gods too, and set the city up, and looked at it. And it was empty of a king. At that time no tiara had been tied on. No crown. No sceptre laid down in lapis. No shrine had been built. The seven were shutting the gates against the ordinary people. The sceptre and the crown and the cap and the staff were laid up in heaven before the sky god, and there was no counsellor for the people. And then kingship came down from heaven. That last line is a formula and it is the same formula the King List uses, and it is one of the load bearing sentences of that whole civilisation. Kingship is not something a strong man takes. It is an object that is kept in heaven and lowered into a particular city, and it can be taken away again and lowered somewhere else, and the King List is essentially a record of which city was holding it at any given time. And Etana was the one, and he was a good king, and the poem does not spend any time on his wars because he does not appear to have had any worth mentioning, and this is the second thing tonight that is unusual. The first is the eagle. The second is that we are three chapters in and nobody has fought anybody. What we have instead is a man going to a temple every day with the same request. He has no son. That is the problem. In that world it is not a private sadness, though it is that as well. A king with no heir is a city with a succession crisis in waiting, and everybody knows it, and it sits over the whole reign like weather. But the poem does not present it that way. It presents it as a man who wants a child. And he goes to the sun god. Every day, the poem says. He offers a sheep. He burns incense. And he says the same thing over and over. Lord, he says, you have crossed the mountains. You know the way of the land. Give me the plant of birth. Show me the plant of birth. Take away my shame and let me have a son. The plant of birth. That is what he is asking for and it is worth pausing on, because it tells you how they thought about it. Not a miracle. Not a blessing in the abstract. A plant. Something that grows somewhere, that can be found and fetched and used, and that somebody knows the location of. And they had a whole literature of those. We have hundreds of medical tablets from that country. Not magic, or not only magic. Lists of symptoms and lists of treatments, arranged by part of the body, from the head downward, which is how the great medical compendium is organised. If a man's temples hurt him. If a man's eyes are clouded. If a man's stomach is hot. And then the remedies, and the remedies are recipes. Take this plant and that plant and grind them and mix them with beer or with oil or with honey, and give it to him to drink, or bind it on, or let him lie down in it. There are hundreds of plant names in those texts and we cannot identify most of them, which is one of the standing frustrations of the field. We have the recipe and not the ingredient. And there were plants and rituals specifically for childbirth and for conception, and there are incantations to be said over a woman in labour, and some of them are beautiful and some of them are very frightened, and among them the phrase turns up for the plant that helps. So when a king asks the sun god for the plant of birth, he is not asking for a wonder. He is asking a god who sees everything on the earth to tell him which plant, out of the hundreds in the lists, and where it grows. He is asking for the last line of a recipe. That is a very practical kind of hope, and it is the kind that keeps a person going to a temple every morning for years, because a thing that exists can in principle be got. And I want to say what that request actually meant in that world, because we hear a king asking for an heir and we think of a throne, and for them it was something much closer to the ground. A household in that country was a going concern. It had land, or a trade, or a workshop, and it had obligations, and it had a family shrine, and somebody had to keep all of it running after you. And more than that, somebody had to say your name and put out the water, which is the thing we talked about two nights ago: the dead in that world were not tormented, they were hungry, and the remedy was a living person who remembered to set something down for them. So a man with no children was looking at two things at once. A property that would go sideways to a brother or a nephew. And a very long time in the dark with nobody putting anything out. And there were legal remedies, and we have hundreds of them. Adoption contracts are one of the commonest documents from that world. A man adopts a son, sometimes an adult, sometimes an apprentice, sometimes a slave who is freed as part of the arrangement, and the tablet spells out the terms: he will support me while I live, and after I die he will pour the water for me, and in exchange he takes the house. That is what those documents actually say. He will pour the water for me. So Etana has options, and the poem knows he has options, and he does not want them. He wants a child. He goes back to the temple every morning and asks for a plant. And after a long time, the sun god answered him. Go, he said. Cross the mountains. There is a pit. And in the pit there is an eagle, and he is in a bad way, and he will show you the plant.
To understand what is in the pit and why, we have to go back before Etana entirely, to a tree, and this is the oldest part of tonight and probably the oldest thing in it by centuries. In a sanctuary of the storm god there was a poplar. And in the top of the poplar an eagle had built a nest. And down among the roots of the same tree, a serpent had made a den. Two households in one tree. One at the top and one at the bottom. And before I tell you the agreement, one thing about the tree, because it is a detail that gets dropped and it is the reason the whole thing is serious. The poplar was in a sanctuary. It was inside a god's precinct, on holy ground. So the two of them are not making a private arrangement out in the countryside. They are neighbours living on temple land, and everything that happens between them happens in front of a god's house. That is the difference between a squabble and a case. And they made an agreement. They swore it in front of the sun god, which is the way you swore anything in that country, because the sun sees everything on the earth in the course of a day and is therefore the natural witness and the natural judge. Contracts were sworn to him. Oaths were taken in his name. If you wanted a promise to have teeth, you made it in front of the sun. And that is not a poetic idea. It is how the legal system worked, and we have the paperwork. There are thousands of contracts from that country, on clay, for sales and loans and marriages and adoptions and the hire of a boat, and a great many of them include an oath, and the oath is sworn by a god and often by the king as well. Court cases were settled by oath. If the evidence ran out and it came down to one person's word, the court could require them to swear, in the temple, in front of the symbol of the god, and if they swore, that was the end of the matter, because nobody was believed to be willing to lie there. The sun god in particular had that job because of what he does. He crosses the whole sky every day and looks down at all of it. There is nothing on the surface of the earth he has not seen. In the hymns to him he is addressed as the judge, the one who lights up the dark places, the one from whom the criminal cannot hide, and there are lines that say he sees what is done in the depths of the mountains and inside closed houses. So when a bird and a snake in a tree swear an oath in front of the sun, the audience is not hearing a charming detail. They are hearing two parties execute a binding contract in front of the only witness who cannot be fooled, and they know exactly what happens to whoever breaks it, because they have seen it happen to their neighbours. And the promise was this. We will hunt, and whatever either of us catches, we will share, and we will feed each other's young. And for a while they did. The eagle would come back with something from the plain and there would be enough for the serpent's young, and the serpent would take something in the grass and there would be enough for the eaglets, and the poem says they lived like that and the young of both of them grew. It is a good arrangement between two creatures who have no natural reason to trust each other at all, and the poem takes its time with it, and there is a real warmth in the way it describes them eating together at the foot of the tree. And then the eagle's young grew up.
And the eagle had a thought, and the poem gives it to us, and it is the thought of somebody talking themselves into something. He looked at the serpent's young, down among the roots, and he said to himself, I will eat the serpent's children. And one of his own young, the poem says, one of the eaglets, a particularly clever one, spoke up and said, father, do not do it. Do not eat them. The net of the sun god will catch you. Whoever breaks the oath of the sun, the sun will punish. And his father did not listen. He came down and he ate them. And I want to say one thing about why he did it, because the poem is careful about this and it is not simple wickedness. He was hungry, and his own young were hungry, and there was a nest full of food at the bottom of his own tree. That is the whole motive. The poem does not give him malice. It gives him an appetite and an opportunity and a bad idea, and the bad idea is the ordinary one, which is that the arrangement had held for a long time and he had come to think of it as a thing that would go on holding no matter what he did to it. That is how most oaths get broken. Not by villains. By somebody who has stopped believing that the other party can do anything about it. That is the cruel act and it is finished. I told you it would be short and it is, and everything that happens afterward is the answer to it. And the serpent came home, carrying food, the way he had every day, and the nest was empty. And the poem says he cried out. It says he went to the sun god and lay down before him, and he said, I trusted you. I made the oath in front of you. My friend has eaten my children. Look at what has been done to me. Your net is the wide earth and your snare is the distant sky, and the one who breaks the oath cannot escape you. And the sun god answered, and I want you to notice something about him that runs through this whole poem. He does not intervene. Not once, in the whole story, does he do anything himself. He does not strike the eagle down. He does not restore the serpent's young. He does not put the plant of birth into anybody's hand. What he does, every single time, is tell somebody where to go and what to do, and then let them do it. Go to the mountain. There is a dead bull. Get inside it. There is a pit. There is a man coming. He is the judge and the witness and he is the one everybody appeals to, and his entire method is to give accurate directions to people who are able to act, and then stand back. In a season full of gods who flood the world and split the sea and hand out radiances, the sun god of this poem is a magistrate who gives out addresses. And the sun god answered. And what he says is one of the coldest and most satisfying pieces of practical advice in this literature, and it is not a thunderbolt. Go along the road, he says. Cross the mountain. There is a wild bull there, dead. Open it. Get inside it. Wait. And every bird in the sky will come down to eat, and the eagle will come with them, and he does not know what he has coming, and he will go looking for the fattest part, and he will go inside, and when he does, you take him by the wing. Take him by the wing. Tear his wings and his feathers and his talons. Pull him out and throw him into a pit, and let him die there of hunger and thirst.
So the serpent went and found the carcass and got inside it and waited. And I want you to sit in that for a second, because it is one of the strangest images in this literature and nobody ever mentions it. Somewhere out on the plain, in the heat, there is a dead bull, and inside it there is a snake, lying still, waiting for a bird. And the birds came, the way they do. And the eagle came with them, and he circled, and he looked at it, and the poem says he was cautious. He was suspicious of it. He said to his young, come, let us go down and eat. And the clever one spoke up again, the same one who told him not to eat the serpent's children, and said, do not go down. The serpent may be inside that bull. And the eagle, again, did not listen. He went down. He went round the outside of it first, and then he went in among the ribs, looking for the fat, and he found the good part and began to eat. And the serpent took him by the wing. And it was done the way the sun god said. And here is a thing about this fable that I have saved for exactly this point in the night, because it is one of my favourite facts in the whole season. This story travelled. Two and a half thousand years after somebody first wrote it on clay, in a completely different country and a completely different language, there is a fable that goes like this. An eagle and a fox were friends and lived beside each other, the eagle in a tree and the fox at the foot of it, and they agreed to look after each other. And the eagle, when food was short, took the fox's cubs and fed them to its own young. And the fox could not climb the tree, and so called on the gods. And the eagle was punished. That is Aesop. That is a Greek fable, in the collections that every European schoolchild was made to read for two thousand years afterward. Nobody can prove the line of descent, and scholars who work on this are careful about it, and the honest position is that the resemblance is close, that stories of this kind travelled along the same roads that everything else travelled along, and that the Mesopotamian version is very much older. But there it is. A snake at the bottom of a tree in a temple precinct in a country that no longer exists, four thousand years ago, and a fox at the bottom of a tree in a Greek schoolbook, and a small child in a classroom in the eighteenth century reading about a broken promise between neighbours and being told to think about what it means. The same story, still working. The wings and the feathers and the talons. And then he threw him into a pit and left him there. And the eagle called out from the bottom of the pit, and he called every day, and what he called was to the sun god, the same one who had arranged all of it. Have mercy on me, he said. I am dying in a pit. And the sun god answered him, and the answer is the reason this poem is in this season rather than in a book of fables. He said, you are wicked and you have done a terrible thing. What you did is hateful to the gods. You are under a curse and I will not come near you. And then he said: but there is a man coming.
And here they meet, and it is the middle of the poem, and it is two damaged creatures finding each other at the bottom of a hole. And before Etana arrives, I want to give you what had been happening in that hole, because the poem gives it and I passed over it in a sentence and it deserves better. He prayed. Every day, from the bottom of the pit, with his wings torn and no way out, the eagle prayed to the sun god. And the poem gives us the prayers, and they go on, and they change as they go. At first he argues. He points out what he is worth. He says, in effect, look at me, I am the eagle, am I to die in a pit? Then he bargains. He offers what people always offer. Get me out of here and I will do whatever is asked of me for the rest of my life. And then, after long enough, he simply asks. Do not let me die here. And every day the sun passed over the pit, because that is what the sun does, and the eagle could see him go over, and the sun answered him and the answer was no. He said: you are wicked. What you did was an abomination. You broke the oath and I am the one it was sworn in front of, and I will not come near you. That is the answer, and it is repeated, and there is no softening in it. And still the eagle prayed. That is the part I keep coming back to. He knew what the answer was. He had heard it. He went on asking anyway, every day, to the one god who had already told him plainly that he was not coming. And then one day the sun god said: there is a man on his way. He did not lift him out. He did not forgive him. He did not take back a word of what he had said about the oath. What he did, after a long time, was mention to somebody else that there was a bird in a hole. And that is the whole theology of this poem in one movement, and I find it steadying rather than bleak. The god will not come down. He never comes down, not in this story, not once. What he does instead is see everything, and tell the truth about it, and then quietly put two creatures who need each other in the same place at the same time. The eagle prayed for months to a god who would not touch him. And then a man came over the hill. Etana comes over the mountains, the way the sun god told him, and he finds the pit, and he looks down into it. And there is a bird at the bottom of it with no feathers. The poem does not sentimentalise this. The eagle has been in a pit for a long time. He cannot fly, because he has no wings to speak of. He cannot climb out. He has been calling to a god who told him he deserved it. And Etana says, what are you? And the eagle says, I am an eagle, and I am here because of what I did, and if you get me out I will give you anything. And Etana says, I want one thing. Show me the plant of birth. And the eagle says, I do not know where it is. And I want to sit in that, because it is the honest centre of the poem. The god told him to come here. He crossed a mountain. He found the pit exactly where he was told it would be. And the thing at the bottom of the pit, the thing he was sent to, does not have the answer. That is not a trick and the poem does not treat it as one. The sun god did not lie to him. He sent him to the eagle because the eagle is the way to the plant, not because the eagle knows the way to the plant, and those are different things, and nobody explained the difference to him because nobody explains anything to anybody in these stories. So he is standing at the edge of a hole in the ground, having done everything he was told, looking at a featherless bird who cannot help him. And what happens next is the reason I love this poem more than I expected to. He gets him out anyway. That is my favourite exchange in the whole story and almost nobody tells it. He does not have the answer. The god sent him to a bird who does not know. And the eagle says, get me out anyway, and feed me, and let my wings grow back, and then I will take you up to the goddess who has it, and we will get it from her. Which is a completely different proposition, and much larger, and Etana agrees to it.
Before the months, the getting out. The poem does not make it easy or quick. He goes down, or he reaches down, and the tablets are damaged here and the mechanics are not clear, and what is clear is that a man got a large injured bird out of a pit on his own with no equipment. And then he did not leave. And this is the part I love, because it is not an adventure at all. It is eight months of physical therapy. He got him out of the pit. And then, every day, for month after month, he fed him. The poem counts the months, and the counting is the same kind of counting the last three nights have taught you to lean back into. In the first month, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, Etana fed the eagle. He brought him what he had. And in the fifth month the eagle's feathers began to come back. In the sixth month he was stronger. In the seventh month he could move his wings. In the eighth month, the poem says, he could fly a little way, and in the ninth or the tenth, depending on which copy you are reading, he was whole. Eight months of a king walking out to a pit in the plain with food for a bird that ate somebody's children, because the bird said he would help. And in that time they talked, and the poem says the eagle taught him things, and that they became friends, and it uses the same word for friend that the long poem used for the two men we spent three nights with. And when he could fly, the eagle said, now. My friend. Let us go up. And I want to give you one thing about that offer before he accepts it, because the eagle's proposal is stranger than it sounds. He does not offer to fetch the plant. He is a bird. He could go and get it, or look for it, or fly over the country and find where it grows and come back and say. That would be the obvious deal, and it is the deal a fable would make. What he offers instead is to carry the man. And that is a completely different proposition, because it means the man has to go up. Not send somebody. Go, personally, on the back of a large bird, into the sky, past the gates, to ask a goddess for something in person. And the reason, I think, is that the eagle understands the arrangement better than the king does. You cannot send a servant to ask for a child. That is not the kind of request that can be delegated. Whatever this plant is and whatever getting it involves, it is going to require the person who wants it to be there. So the deal he offers is: I cannot get it for you. But I can get you to where it is.
He said, put me on your back. That is how it is done. Not a chariot, not a rope, not a basket. The eagle lay down and the man got on and took hold, and the poem says he set his chest against the eagle's breast and his hands on the feathers of its wings and his arms along its sides. And before they go up, one word about the measure, because the poem counts the ascent in a real unit and it is worth knowing what it is. A league, in that country, is a distance and also a time. It is the distance a person walks in two hours, and their day was divided into twelve of those, and so the same word does duty for both. It is somewhere around seven of our miles. It is the unit you would use to say how far the next town is, and it turns up constantly in ordinary documents, in itineraries and land measurements and the descriptions of journeys. So when the eagle says they have gone up one league, he is saying they have gone as far straight up as a man walks between breakfast and the middle of the morning. That is a real and homely measurement, and it is the one they had, and using it for the sky is exactly the sort of thing this poem does. Nobody had a word for altitude. They had a word for how far you walk before you stop, and they pointed it upward. And the eagle said, hold on. And they went up. And now here is the passage. I want to set it up properly, because it is the whole reason this poem survived and it is unlike anything else that world wrote down. What follows is a description of the earth from above, in stages, as it gets further away, given as a conversation between two friends, and it works by comparing what he can see to ordinary household things. And they went up one league. And the eagle said, my friend, look down at the land. What does it look like? And Etana looked, and said: the land has become a hill, and the wide sea has become like a channel of water. And they went up a second league. And the eagle said, my friend, look down at the land. What does it look like? And Etana looked, and said: the land has become a garden plot, and the wide sea has become like a trough. And they went up a third league. And the eagle said, my friend, look down at the land. What does it look like? And Etana looked, and said: the land has become like a furrow, and the wide sea has become like a bread basket. And I want you to notice what everything is compared to on the way, because the list is the most revealing thing in the poem. The sea becomes a channel of water, which is an irrigation ditch. Then it becomes a trough, which is what animals drink from. Then it becomes a bread basket. The land becomes a hill, then a garden plot, then a furrow. Every single comparison is a farm or a kitchen. Not one of them is grand. There is no attempt at awe and no reaching for a large word. A man goes higher than anybody has ever been and describes what he sees using a ditch, a drinking trough, a bread basket, a vegetable bed and a plough line. Which tells you exactly who this poem was made for, and it was not kings. And it is worth saying plainly that nothing else in the ancient world does this. Other literatures have people carried into the sky. What they do not have is somebody working out, patiently and in order, what the ground would actually look like from up there, and getting it broadly right. The scale shrinks. The sea narrows. The features flatten out into lines. Somebody sat in a mud brick room a very long time ago with no way of ever finding out, and reasoned it through, and wrote down what it would be like.
And before we go higher, one more thing about that country, because it is why the comparisons work. It is flat. Not gently rolling. Flat, in the way that only a river floodplain is flat, for hundreds of miles in every direction, with nothing on the horizon in most places except the palm lines along the canals and the mounds of old cities. Which means that nobody who lived there had ever been high up. There is no hill to climb outside the city and look down from. There is no cliff. The tallest thing anybody in that landscape had ever stood on was a temple platform, and the highest of those gets you perhaps thirty metres, enough to see the fields and the canals laid out and the next town. So the person who wrote this had one single experience to build on, which is the view from the top of a ziggurat, and from up there the country does look like a plan. The fields are rectangles. The canals are lines. The whole irrigated landscape is a diagram, because it was laid out as one. And from that, he extrapolated. If thirty metres makes the fields look like a plan, what does much higher make them look like? And he worked it forward, step by step, and got it right. That is not mysticism. That is somebody standing on the only high place they had, looking down, and thinking carefully about what would happen if they kept going. Stay with that for a moment before we go higher, because there is something in it worth having. Every single comparison is a thing from a kitchen or a farm. A hill. A watering channel. A garden plot. A trough. A furrow. A bread basket. That is a man who has never been off the ground trying to describe the earth from above, and reaching for the only vocabulary he has, which is the vocabulary of the things in his own yard. The sea, which is the largest thing anybody in that country could conceive of, looks like the basket the bread comes in. And the sequence is right. That is the part that gets me. The order of it is correct. As you go up, the land flattens and simplifies and the edges soften, and the large water becomes a shape you could hold, and somebody worked that out with no way of checking it, and got it right, four thousand years before anybody could confirm it. There is a shape carved into the ground in Peru that people say is a picture only visible from above. There are all sorts of stories about ancient people and flight, and almost all of them are nonsense. This is not one of them. This is not a claim that anybody flew. This is a poem, plainly labelled as a poem, in which a man imagines what the world looks like from higher and higher up, and gets the sequence right by thinking about it, and I find that far more impressive than the alternative. And they went up higher still. They passed the gate of the sky god, and the gate of the lord of the air, and the gate of the god of the sweet water. And those three names in that order are not decoration, and I want to give you what they meant, because it is one of the most satisfying pieces of ancient thinking I know and it turns this flight into a diagram. That world divided the sky into three bands. They drew them as three roads or paths running across the heavens, and every star and every planet was assigned to one of them, and there are star lists that do nothing but sort the sky into these three groups, and they were used for centuries. The middle band, the one along the celestial equator where the sun and the moon and the planets run, was the way of the sky god. The northern band was the way of the lord of the air. And the southern band was the way of the god of the sweet water. Three roads in the sky, named after three gods, with the stars distributed between them, worked out by people watching from flat rooftops with no instruments over hundreds of years and written down in lists that we can still read and check. So when the poem says they passed the gate of one and then the gate of another, it is not being vague. It is describing a man going up through the actual, formally defined, professionally catalogued structure of the sky, band by band, in the correct order for somebody rising. The astronomers made the map. The poet put a man on a bird and sent him through it. And the earth kept getting further away. And the eagle said, my friend, look down at the land. What does it look like? And Etana looked. And he said, I cannot see it.
I looked, he says, and I could not find the land. And my eyes cannot get enough of the wide sea. And then he says, my friend, I cannot go up to heaven. Turn back. Take me down. And the poem says they fell. And now I have to be honest with you about the tablets, because this is exactly where they break, and what happens next depends on which copy you are reading and none of them are complete. In one version they come down together, the eagle and the man, falling, for two leagues and then another and then another, and the eagle is holding him, and then the tablet stops. In another there is a dream afterwards. He dreams, and what he dreams is that he goes up again, and the pieces we have of it are tantalising in the exact way that broken tablets always are. There is a gate. There is a house. There is a woman seated on a throne with lions at her feet, and around her there are creatures kneeling, and she says something to him, and the tablet breaks. She is presumably the goddess he went for, and the throne is presumably where the plant is, and the tablet breaks. And then there are lines that read like a second ascent, and they are more confident than the first one, and one fragment has the eagle telling him to hold on and not look down, which is either very good advice from a friend who has watched this go wrong once, or a later scribe having exactly the same thought I just had. And then that breaks too. And in the King List, which is a completely different document written by people keeping records rather than telling stories, the entry says he went up to heaven and consolidated all the lands, and then it names his son, and gives the length of the son's reign, and moves on to the next king. And the son has a name, and I will give it to you because it is the only thing we have of him. He is called Balih in the list, and the list gives him a reign, and then moves on. That is the entire biography of the child a man went up to heaven to get. A name, a number, and the next entry. There is no poem about him. There is no story attached to him at all. He is a line in a document. And I find that oddly moving rather than sad, because it is what actually happens to almost everybody, and because the whole of tonight is a story about a man who wanted exactly that: a name after his own on a list, and a number after it, and somebody to keep the household going and pour the water. He got it. It is on the list. It is the least dramatic possible fulfilment of the most dramatic possible quest, and the poem that tells the quest does not even survive long enough to mention it. So the administrative document says he had a son. And the poem, which is the thing that would tell us how, breaks off in the air. I am not going to invent an ending for you. The house does not do that. What we have is a man who went up and looked down and lost his nerve at the top, and a fall that is not described, and a separate list which says that afterwards there was a boy. You may take that however you like. I take it as a good ending, and I will tell you why in a moment.
Here is the thing that makes this poem different from everything else in this season. We have pictures of it. And the pictures are older than the writing. And I should say what a cylinder seal actually is, because it is the most characteristic object that civilisation made and almost nobody outside the field has held the idea of one properly. It is a stone cylinder, usually between two and four centimetres long, about the thickness of your finger, drilled through the middle so it can be strung. You wore it, on a cord round your neck or pinned at the shoulder. It was yours. It was your signature. And the whole outside of it is carved, in reverse, in intaglio, with a scene, so that when you rolled it across a piece of wet clay it left a continuous picture, and you could roll it as long as you liked and the scene would repeat. They were cut with a bow drill and abrasives, in hard stones, at a size where the figures are a few millimetres tall, and the good ones are among the finest miniature carving anybody has ever done, and they were made in the millions over three thousand years, and they turn up everywhere. And on a number of them, from the deep past, there is a man on the back of a bird, and on a number of them, from the deep past, there is a man on the back of a bird, going up, and below him there are shepherds looking up, and dogs, and sheep. And I have to be careful here, and I would rather be careful than exciting. Not everybody agrees those seals show Etana. There is no writing on them saying so. What there is, is a man on a large bird going up, and below him shepherds looking up and dogs and a flock, and the identification with this story was made by scholars looking at the picture and knowing the poem, which is a reasonable thing to do and is not the same as proof. Some specialists have argued the figures are something else entirely. The debate has been going for the better part of a century and it is a good natured one. So I will put it the way the evidence puts it. There are old seals showing a man carried up by a bird over a flock. There is a poem about a man carried up by a bird who was a shepherd king. Most people who have looked at both think they are the same thing. Nobody can demonstrate it. Those seals are from before any tablet of this poem that we have. Centuries before, in some cases. Which means the story was already in people's heads, already recognisable enough that a carver could put it on an object the size of your thumb and expect anybody who saw it to know what it was, long before anybody wrote it down. That is what those seals are. They are proof that a story existed, in a country, in people's mouths, being told and retold, for a long time before it reached clay. And I want to give you one thing about the flight that I have deliberately held back until now, because it belongs at the end. Look at who is carrying him. He is being flown up to heaven on the back of a creature who ate his neighbour's children, broke a sacred oath, was caught, was mutilated, was thrown in a hole, and was left there by the god he prayed to, and who was only ever going to die at the bottom of that pit. And a man he had never met came over a mountain and pulled him out and fed him for eight months. That is the arrangement that gets him into the sky. Not a virtue. Not a reward. A man who wanted something did an enormous kindness to somebody who did not deserve it and could not repay it in any ordinary way, and the repayment, when it came, was the only thing that creature had, which was the ability to fly. The poem never says any of that out loud. It just puts the two of them in the air together. And there is one more thing about the bird and the snake that I owe you, because scholars have noticed it and it would be dishonest to leave it out. Later on, in the north, in the great library we spent a whole special on, there are copies of this story in which the eagle and the serpent are described in language that reaches toward two other creatures from other poems. There is a storm bird who steals a tablet, who we will meet later this season. There is a horned serpent that turns up in god lists and on gates. And some scholars hear those echoes in these copies and think the later scribes were rhyming this fable with those figures, deliberately, the way an educated writer will let one story lean on another. That is a reading about how the text was copied, and it is a good one. It is not a claim that the eagle in the tree is that other bird, and I am not going to merge them, because they are different stories with different plots and the poems keep them apart. And there is one more small thing, and it is the kind of detail this house exists for. There is a catalogue, made much later by scribes who were keeping track of their own literature, which lists works and who composed them. And beside this poem there is a name. A man called Lu Nanna. That is all we have. A name in a list of authors, attached to a poem about an eagle. We do not know when he lived or what else he wrote or whether he wrote this at all rather than having it attributed to him by somebody centuries afterward, which happened a great deal. But somebody, sitting down to make a list of the country's books, wrote a person's name next to this one, and thought it mattered who made it. And there is one more thing I want to put in front of you before the end, because it is the strangest fact about this poem and I have been saving it. We do not know how it ends and we may find out. That is not true of most of what I have read you this season. The great creation poem is essentially complete. The famous epic is two thirds recovered and the missing third is being filled in slowly. But tonight's poem is in a genuinely broken state, and the pieces we have come from three different periods and three different cities, and the ending is missing from all of them. And tablets are still being joined. That is the thing people outside the field do not realise. This is not a closed subject. There are, at a conservative estimate, tens of thousands of cuneiform fragments in museum drawers that have never been fully read, and there are projects working through them, and the work of matching a fragment in one museum to a fragment in another has been transformed in the last twenty years by photography and by databases. Pieces of poems get joined. New lines turn up. We got twenty lines of the cedar forest that way in twenty fourteen and I told you about it on the third night of this season. So the honest position on tonight is: the tablet breaks in the air, and it might not always. Somewhere, possibly, in a drawer, in a museum, in a box that was catalogued in nineteen twelve by somebody who wrote unidentified literary fragment on the card, there is the rest of it.
The lamp is low now. I said I would tell you why I take it as a good ending, and here it is. He did not get the plant. There is no version of this poem in which anybody finds the plant of birth. The whole quest, the temple, the years of asking, the pit, the eight months of feeding a bird, the flight through three gates of heaven, and the object he went for never appears. The tablets break before it and the fragments do not contain it. And in the King List, he has a son anyway. I do not think that is a gap in the story. I think that may be the story. A man spent years asking for one specific thing in one specific way, and went to enormous and frankly ridiculous lengths to get it, and had an extraordinary experience on the way, and came home without it, and then had the thing he wanted, in the ordinary way, later, and the poem does not even think that part is worth writing down. Which is very close, if you think about it, to what the woman with the beer house told the other king last night. So think of it, wherever you are lying. There is a city of mud brick on a plain, with a wall around it and canals going out from it in lines and fields beyond that, and it is a very long time ago, before almost everything, and its king is not in it. He is above it, on the back of a bird, holding on, looking down. And the land is a hill. And the sea is a channel of water. And higher, and the land is a garden plot, and the sea is a trough. And higher, and the land is a furrow, and the sea is a bread basket. And higher, and it is gone. Every single thing in the world that anybody was worried about that morning, every field and every canal and every wall and every argument and every debt and every unanswered prayer, all of it, from up there, is a garden plot and a bread basket and then nothing at all. He could not bear it, and he asked to come down, and I think that is the most reasonable thing anybody does in this entire season. Think about what he was actually looking at. Not danger. There is nothing dangerous in the sky in this poem. No storm, no hostile god, nothing coming at them. The eagle is strong and the eagle is holding him and the eagle has done nothing but rise steadily since they left the ground. What frightened him was that he could not see home any more. That is all. He looked down for the hill and the channel and the garden plot and the trough and the furrow and the bread basket, and they had gone, and there was nothing underneath him that he recognised, and he said take me back. Every person who has ever gone further than they meant to knows that exact moment. Not the moment of danger. The moment when you look back for the thing you came from and it is not there. And he did the sensible thing, which is what people do, which is to say out loud to whoever is with them, I would like to go home now. And somewhere below him the shepherds are looking up, because they are on the seals, carved by somebody four thousand years ago who wanted you to know that there were people on the ground watching. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. You do not have to keep any of tonight. If you keep one thing, keep the sea looking like the basket the bread comes in. Sleep well. Goodnight.