Welcome back to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight, the second half of Mesopotamia, six more stories in one night. A goddess who walks down into the country of the dead, a god who is given her place, and a bird who steals the tablet that runs the world. Nothing sudden. Rest well.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is the one I have been waiting for since the first night of this season. It is the story of a goddess who went down into the underworld and did not come back the same, and it is told in a poem that is about four hundred lines long, and it is the best constructed thing in the whole of Sumerian literature, and it is built out of seven gates. Seven gates, one after another, going down. And at each one, something is taken off her. That is the architecture of tonight, and I want you to have it in advance, because once you know it you can stop holding anything at all. There is a gate. Something is taken. There is another gate. Something is taken. Seven times. And then she is at the bottom, with nothing on, in front of her sister. It is going to take us two nights, tonight and the next one, and tonight is the going down, and tomorrow is the coming back and what it costs. And I will tell you the ending of tonight now, because it is not an ending you need to be surprised by. She dies. She is hung on a hook on the wall. And she is brought back, and the way she is brought back is the most beautiful thing in this entire literature, and it is not a battle and it is not a trick and it is not a bargain. It is two small creatures made out of the dirt under a god's fingernails, who go down into the dark, and find the queen of the dead in terrible pain, and agree with her. That is the whole of the rescue. They agree with her. Stay with it, if you can, to the eleventh 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 for the three long nights of the famous king, or for the man on the eagle. 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. Tonight is the best possible night to arrive on, because tonight is a poem that explains itself as it goes and repeats everything important. 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 reaches to a different part of the shelf, to the older end, where the tablets are smaller and the writing is not Akkadian. This one, he says, is in the old language. It is older than almost everything I have read you. And it is the tidiest poem in this house. 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. Inanna, who goes down. Ereshkigal, who is her sister and who is already down there. And Ninshubur, who waits at the top, and whose name you will hear more than either of the others, because loyalty is the second subject of this poem. 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 the seven gates will still be there when you come back, because they take a long time. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing tonight will startle you. There is a death in it and it happens in the middle of the night and it is not violent in any way you have to brace for. There is no blood in this poem. Nobody is struck. A woman walks into a room with nothing on and seven judges look at her and she is dead, and it is done in four lines, and it is the strangest and quietest killing in this entire season. 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 half finds you tomorrow. 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. Chapter One. From the Great Above to the Great Below. The poem begins with a decision and does not explain it. From the great above she set her mind on the great below. That is the first line. From the great above she set her mind on the great below. And it says it twice more, three times in all, in the way this poem does everything, with a small variation each time. From the great above the goddess set her mind on the great below. From the great above Inanna set her mind on the great below. My lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and went down to the underworld. And that is all the explanation you get. Now, before we go any further, I owe you her, properly, because we have been mentioning her all season and never sat down with her. Her name is Inanna in the old language and Ishtar in the later one, and she is the same figure in both, and she is the most written about deity in that entire civilisation. And the thing everybody says about her is that she is the goddess of love and war, which is true and which is also the least interesting way to say it, because it makes her sound like two jobs stapled together. Here is the better way. She is Venus. That is not a metaphor and it is not a modern astronomical footnote. Her star, in every text, in every hymn, on every seal, is the planet Venus, and she is identified with it completely and everybody knew it. And Venus does something that no other object in the sky does. It is the morning star and it is the evening star. It comes up before the sun on one side of the year, and it comes down after the sun on the other side, and for thousands of years people in various places thought those were two different stars, because one is at dawn and one is at dusk and they are never in the sky at the same time. They are the same body. It is one planet, doing two opposite things, in two different halves of its cycle, and it swaps. And these people knew that. They tracked it for centuries. There is a famous tablet recording the risings and settings of Venus over decades, kept because the behaviour of that planet was used to date reigns and to take omens. So they had a goddess whose star is the one thing in the sky that is two opposite things and is nonetheless a single object, and they built her out of that. She is love and she is war. She is the morning and she is the evening. She is the one who gives you the harvest and she is the one who takes it. There is a hymn we heard part of earlier in the season in which she is described as turning a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and as being both the friend at the door and the thing at the door. Everything about her is a reversal, and reversal is what her star literally does, twice a year, in front of everybody, on a schedule they could calculate. Hold that tonight, because she is about to do the largest reversal available to anybody, which is to go from the highest place there is to the lowest, and to come back. Now, I have to tell you about a wrong answer here, because it has been in books for seventy years and you may have met it. There was a great scholar, the man who did more than anybody to bring Sumerian literature to ordinary readers, and in his early work he suggested that she went down to rescue somebody. To free her sister's husband, or to free her own. It is a natural guess, because that is what we expect a descent to be for. Somebody goes down to get somebody out. The text does not say that. The text says she set her mind on the great below, which in that language is closer to she decided to, or she desired to, or she turned her attention to. And the man himself revised his view later, and the field moved on, and the older reading survives mainly in retellings. So here is what we actually have. The most powerful goddess in that world, who has everything, decided one day to go down to the one place she does not rule and cannot leave, and the poem does not say why, and everybody who has read it for four thousand years has had to sit with that. I have my own guess and I will give it to you tomorrow night, once you have seen what she does when she comes back up, because that is the part that decides it. You can judge it then. For now, hold it as it stands. She decided to go down. Chapter Two. What She Abandoned. And before she went, she gave things up, and the poem lists them, and the list is a tour of a country. She abandoned heaven, she abandoned earth, and she went down to the underworld. She abandoned her office of holy priestess, and went down. She abandoned her temple in Uruk. She abandoned her temple in Badtibira. She abandoned her temple in Zabalam. She abandoned her temple in Adab. She abandoned her temple in Nippur. She abandoned her temple in Kish. She abandoned her temple in Akkad. Seven cities. Seven temples. Each one named, each with the name of its shrine, one after another, in a line down the country. And every one of those places is real. They are on the map. They have been dug, most of them, and in several of them the temple the poem names has been found, and in a couple of them you could stand in the room. That is what the list is for. It is not decoration. She had a presence in seven cities and a house in each, and the poem takes them away from her one at a time before anything else happens, so that when she goes down she is not a goddess visiting a place. She is a woman who has already given up everything she had upstairs. And I want to walk that list with you, slowly, because it is a real map and it is the calmest thing in the first half of tonight. Uruk first, which is hers above all, the city with the wall, and the great house there whose name means the house of heaven. That is the one she is best known for and it is the one at the top of the list. Then Bad tibira, the fortress of the coppersmiths, out in the marsh country in the south, one of the five cities the King List says held kingship before the flood. Then Zabalam, which is further north, and which was hers so completely that in the early writing her name and the name of that town are bound together. Then Adab. Then Nippur, which is the religious centre of the whole country, where the lord of the air lives, and where kingship is confirmed. Then Kish, up in the north, whose name is what a king said when he wanted to claim the whole land. And last, Akkad. The imperial capital. The city of the family we spent a night with earlier this season, which was the greatest city in the world for a while and which has never been found. It is the one place on that list that nobody has ever stood in, because nobody knows where it is. Each of those has its shrine named in the poem, and I am going to be careful here: the names are given in the text, and the way they are rendered varies between editions, and I am not going to recite you a list of seven that I would have to hedge four of. The house of heaven at Uruk is secure. The temple at Akkad is secure. The rest are there in the tablet and are argued over politely in the notes. But you do not need the names to feel the shape of it. Seven houses. Hers, all of them, in seven different cities, spread from the marshes in the far south up to the north of the country, each one with a staff and a calendar and offerings going in at the correct hours. And she gives up every one of them, in a line, before she takes a single step downward. And now count forward. In a few chapters she is going to come to a door, and behind that door are seven gates, and at each one of them something is going to be taken off her. Seven houses given up on the way in. Seven things taken off on the way down. The poem does not point at that and I only noticed it on the third reading. She is stripped twice. Once by herself, voluntarily, above ground, of everything she owns. And once by somebody else, gate by gate, of everything she is wearing. By the time she stands in front of her sister she has nothing left in either direction, and she arranged the first half of that herself. Chapter Three. The Seven Me. And then she got dressed. And this is the most famous piece of dressing in ancient literature, and every single item comes off again later, in reverse order, one per gate, which is why the poem takes such trouble over it now. And I should say what those powers actually are, because the word for them is one of the strangest ideas in that world and there is no good English for it. The word is me. Two letters. And it means something like the whole set of things that make civilisation work. There is a poem, a different one, in which Inanna goes to the god of the sweet water at Eridu, and they drink together, and he gets drunk and gives her the me, one after another, and she loads them on a boat and takes them home to Uruk, and when he sobers up he tries to get them back and fails, and it is a comedy. And in that poem there is a list of them, and the list is very long and completely extraordinary, because of what is on it. Kingship is on the list. Priesthood is on the list. Truth is on the list. Descent into the underworld and ascent from the underworld are both on the list, which is worth remembering tonight. But also: the art of the scribe. The craft of the carpenter. The craft of the metalworker. The craft of the leatherworker. The craft of the builder. The craft of the basket weaver. Wisdom. Understanding. Purification. Fear. Consternation. Strife. Judgement. The making of decisions. The kindling of fire and the putting out of fire. Weariness. Rejoicing. The blowing out of a lamp. Every good and every bad thing a society does is on that list, sorted, itemised, as if somebody had gone through a whole civilisation and written down each component part. That is what the me are. Not powers in the sense of superpowers. Offices, arts, functions, institutions, and states of mind. The furniture of a working world. And there is one more thing about the me that I want you to have, because it is the strangest property they have and it runs straight through both these nights. They are portable. That is the part that is hard to hold in a modern head. Kingship is on that list, and so is the craft of the leatherworker, and so is wisdom, and so is the blowing out of a lamp. And in the poem where she gets them from the god of the sweet water, she does not learn them or earn them or become them. She loads them onto a boat. They are handed over, one at a time, at a drinking party, by somebody who regrets it in the morning, and she puts them in a boat and sails home with them, and when he sends people after her to get them back it is a chase, and she keeps them, and that is the end of it. So a civilisation, in that way of thinking, is not a condition a place grows into. It is a set of objects. Somebody has them. They can be given, taken, carried, stolen, and put down. And we have seen this before in this house without my naming it. On the first night there was an object worn on the chest that made whatever its wearer said become true, and it was fastened on and later taken off and sealed. Later this season there will be a bird who steals that same object off a peg while its owner is bathing, and the world stops working for as long as it is gone. That is the same idea. Authority is a thing you can hold in your hands, and it can go somewhere else. Which is exactly why the dressing matters so much. She is not putting on jewellery. She is putting on the visible, wearable form of everything she is entitled to do. The crown is the office. The robe is called the robe of ladyship because that is what it is for. The measuring rod and line in her hand are the instruments of somebody who decides where a boundary falls, which is the most concrete authority there is in a country of fields and canals. She is dressing as herself, completely, with nothing left off. And every single item she is putting on can be removed by somebody else, and she knows it, because she is the one who took them off somebody in the first place. She gathered the powers, the poem says. She took the seven of them into her hands, and she gathered them at her feet, and she went. And here is what she put on. On her head, the crown of the open country. On her forehead, the dark wig arranged. Round her neck, small lapis beads. On her breast, the twin egg shaped beads. Over her body, the robe of ladyship, which is the garment of the office, the one that says what she is. On her eyes, the ointment, and the ointment has a name, and its name is a sentence, and the sentence is: let a man come, let him come. Across her chest, the breastplate, and it too has a name, and its name is: come, man, come. On her wrist, the gold ring. And in her hand, the measuring rod and the measuring line, made of lapis, which are the tools of a surveyor and which mean, in the hands of a god, the authority to set the boundaries of things. Seven pieces. A crown, a wig, beads at the neck, beads at the breast, a robe, cosmetics with a name, a breastplate with a name, a ring, and a rod and line. The lists differ slightly between copies and the count is argued about pleasantly and does not matter. What matters is that she is putting on her whole office, every piece of it, at once, and going down into a place where none of it will work. Chapter Four. If I Do Not Return. Before she goes she gives instructions, and she gives them to one person. Ninshubur. That name is going to be said many times tonight and it is worth knowing what it means and what she was. She is Inanna's minister. Her chief attendant. The one who goes ahead of her and speaks for her and carries her messages, and the poem calls her, over and over, the faithful one, and the one who gives good advice, and the one who follows sound instructions. And Inanna sits her down and tells her exactly what to do if she does not come back. I am going down to the underworld today, she says, and once I am there, this is what you will do. Set up a lament for me in the ruined places. Beat the drum for me in the sanctuaries. Go round the houses of the gods for me. Scratch at your eyes for me. Scratch at your mouth. Scratch at your ears, in public. And in private, scratch at yourself where nobody will see. Dress yourself in a single garment, like a pauper. And then go, on your own, to the temple of the lord of the air at Nippur, and go into it, and weep in front of him, and say: father, do not let your daughter be put to death in the underworld. Do not let your good metal be alloyed with the dirt of the underworld. Do not let your good lapis be broken up with the mason's stone. Do not let your boxwood be cut up with the carpenter's wood. Do not let the young woman be put to death in the underworld. And if he will not help you, go to the moon god at Ur, and say the same thing. And if he will not help you, go to the god of the sweet water at Eridu, and say the same thing. Because he knows the plant of life and he knows the water of life, and he is the one who will bring me back. And I want to say what those instructions actually describe, because they are not invented mourning, they are the real thing. Everything on that list is a documented Mesopotamian funeral practice. The lament in the ruined places. There were professional lamenters, and there was a whole genre of lament literature, some of it for individual dead people and some of it for entire cities, and the great city laments are among the most powerful things that world produced. The ruined mound was where you went to make that sound, because it was already a place about loss. The drum in the sanctuaries. There was a specific instrument, a large drum, used in exactly that kind of rite, and it had its own name and its own manufacture ritual. The scratching. Self wounding as a sign of grief is attested in that world and in a great many others, and the poem's detail about doing it in public and also in private, where nobody would see, is the observation of somebody who had watched people grieve. And the single garment of a pauper. Grief clothing, in that world as in ours, was about taking off what marked your status. She is told to dress like somebody with nothing, and to go to the highest gods in the country in that state, and to ask. Ninshubur is going to do every one of those things, exactly, in order, and the poem is going to tell us again when she does, at the same length, which is the way this poem works and which is the best thing about it. And Ninshubur said yes. And that is the whole of chapter four, and I want you to notice that the rescue plan is made by the person being rescued, in advance, in detail, before she leaves, including the order of the appeals and what to say at each one and what to do if the first two say no. She knew she might not come back. She went anyway. And she left instructions. Chapter Five. The Door. And before she gets there, one thing about the journey, because the poem does not describe it and the absence is interesting. There is no descent. Think about that. This is the most famous descent in ancient literature, and the poem contains no travelling. She sets her mind on the great below, she abandons her temples, she puts on the seven things, she gives her instructions, and then she is at the door. No stairs. No tunnel. No river to cross, no ferryman, no gate at the edge of the world, none of the apparatus that later literatures would build for this journey. She decides to go, and then she is there. And I have thought about why, and I think it is because the poem is not interested in the distance. It is interested in the gates. Everything the poem has to say about how far away that place is, it says by taking seven things off her, one at a time, on the way in. The distance is not measured in the ground she covers. It is measured in what she loses. She went down. And when she came to the palace of the underworld, which the poem calls Ganzer, she did a thing that the poem reports without comment and that I have always found startling. She shoved at the door. She acted evilly at the door, the poem says. She pushed at it and she shouted. Open the door, doorman. Open the door. I am alone and I want to come in. And in this poem, that is all she says at the door. She pushes, and she shouts, and she asks to be let in, and she makes no threat at all. But there is a later telling of this same journey, a much shorter poem in Akkadian, in which she goes by her other name, Ishtar, and at the gate of the land of no return she says a great deal more. It is going to matter again later in this season, so I want you to have it now, and to know which poem it belongs to. Here is what Ishtar says to the gatekeeper, in that later poem. If you do not open the gate for me to come in, I will smash the gate. I will shatter the bolt. I will smash the doorpost and I will overturn the doors. And I will raise up the dead, and they will eat the living. And the dead will outnumber the living. That is the threat. It is the first time in this house that anybody has said it and it will not be the last, and I want you to hold on to the shape of it rather than the words, because the shape is what comes back. The threat is not I will hurt you. It is not I will kill you. It is: I will open the door at the bottom of the world and let everything that is down here come up. And notice who is saying it. She is outside. She is trying to get in. She has no authority in that place whatsoever, she is standing in the dark shouting at a doorman, and the biggest thing she can think of to threaten him with is the population of the house he works in. It is a bluff, in a sense. She cannot raise the dead. It is not her house and they are not her dead. Remember that it was said. Remember who said it and where she was standing. Because on a later night in this house, in a different poem, from a different century, somebody is going to say those exact words again, and that time it will not be a bluff, and it will not be shouted through a door from the outside, and the people who hear it will hand over what she asks for inside a single line. So, back to tonight's poem, and to Inanna at the door. The doorman came out, and his name is Neti, and he is the chief doorman of the underworld and he has been doing that job for a very long time. And he said: who are you? And she said, I am the queen of heaven, the place where the sun rises. And he said, if you are the queen of heaven, the place where the sun rises, why have you come to the land of no return? How did your heart lead you on the road whose traveller never comes back? And she lied to him. That is the part everybody forgets. She lies at the door, immediately, and it is a good lie and it is a specific one. She said: my elder sister's husband has been killed. I have come to see the funeral rites. Let the beer of his funeral be poured into the cup. That is why I am here. And I want to stop on that name, because if you were here two episodes ago you have already met him and you may not have noticed. The husband she names is called Gugalanna, and the name means the great bull of heaven. That is the Bull of Heaven. That is the animal she asked her father for, in the Akkadian poem, when a young king in a clean cloak insulted her in the middle of his own city and she went up to the sky in tears and demanded it. The one that came down and opened pits in the ground and swallowed three hundred men of Uruk. The one Enkidu caught by the horns and Gilgamesh killed with a knife between the neck and the horns, and whose hindquarter was thrown at her head. In one tradition that bull is the husband of the queen of the underworld. So the lie she tells at the door of the dead is not a random lie. It is: my brother in law has died, and I have come for the funeral. Now, I have to be careful, because these are different poems in different languages from different centuries and the traditions do not line up neatly, and there are scholars who would not want those two identified as firmly as I have just identified them. The connection is real and it is old and it is not universal. But it is there. And if it is right, then somewhere behind tonight's poem there is a family, and a death in it, and a woman going down to her sister's house with a funeral as her excuse, and the funeral is for somebody her own worshippers killed. Chapter Six. What Ereshkigal Said. So Neti went in to tell his mistress. And here we meet her, and she is the second most important person in these two nights, and I want you to have her properly from the start, because almost every retelling makes her a villain and the poem does not. Her name is Ereshkigal, and it means lady of the great earth, and she is the queen of the underworld and she is Inanna's elder sister. And here is what her situation actually is, because it is worse than people realise and it is the key to both nights. She is not a jailer. She is an inmate with a desk. Everybody else in this literature moves. The sky god sits in heaven but gods come to him and he sends messengers. The lord of the air is at Nippur and kings travel to him. The god of the sweet water is at Eridu and people go down and ask him things. They visit each other. They have dinners. They hold councils and everybody turns up. She does not go anywhere. She has never been anywhere. Everything she rules is down there and everything down there is hers and she cannot leave it, and the reason she cannot leave it is the same rule that is going to be read out at the end of tonight: nobody comes up from there. Including her. There is a story, later, in Akkadian, about the one time somebody tried to get her to come up to a dinner in heaven, and it does not go well, and we are going to spend a whole night on it later this season. For now, hold this. The most powerful woman in the underworld has never once been invited anywhere she could actually go. And she does not come and go. That is the thing about her. Everybody else in this literature travels. Gods go up and down and across and visit each other and turn up at each other's houses. She does not. She is in that place, and she stays in that place, and there is a rule about it that we will get to tomorrow night. And Neti comes in and tells her: your sister is at the door. She has all seven of the powers with her. She is dressed in everything she has. And Ereshkigal listened, and the poem says she slapped her thigh and bit her lip, and then she gave her instructions, and they are cold and exact. Bolt the seven gates of the underworld, she said. Then open the doors of the palace one at a time, a crack. Let her come in. And when she comes, bring her before me bowed low and naked. And at each gate, take one thing from her. And I want to stop on what she does with her body when she hears it, because the poem gives it to us and it is the only window we get. She slapped her thigh. She bit her lip. Those are not decorative. They are the standard vocabulary of distress in that literature, and you find them elsewhere, in laments, in the mouths of people who have just been told something they cannot do anything about. Striking the thigh is what a person does at bad news. Biting the lip is what a person does when they are holding something in. So the queen of the underworld, told that her sister is standing at her door wearing the entire apparatus of her office, does not laugh and does not rage. She hits her own leg and bites her mouth and then starts giving orders. Read the orders again with that in front of you, because they change. Bolt the seven gates. That is the first thing she says. Not seize her, not bring her to me, not throw her out. Lock the doors. Every one of them. You do not bolt seven gates against somebody you are confident about. And then the rest of it, which is not cruelty either when you look at it closely. Open the doors one at a time, a crack. Let her in. Take one thing from her at each gate. Bring her to me bowed low and naked. That is a procedure for admitting somebody dangerous. It is what you do at a border, or at a gate in a wall, when a person with standing arrives and you have to let them in and you are not going to let them in armed. She is not inventing a punishment. She is applying the entry procedure of her own house to a visitor who has never come before, who has arrived unannounced, wearing everything she owns, with a story about a funeral that does not quite hold together. And underneath the procedure, the two small gestures the poem bothered to record. Her sister is at the door for the first time in either of their lives, and the first thing she does about it is bite her lip. Chapter Seven. The Seven Gates. And here is the centre of the poem, and it is seven small identical scenes, and the sameness is the whole effect. She came to the first gate. And the doorman took the crown of the open country from her head. What is this, she said. And he said: be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. She came to the second gate. And he took the small lapis beads from her neck. What is this, she said. Be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. She came to the third gate. And he took the twin egg shaped beads from her breast. What is this, she said. Be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. She came to the fourth gate. And he took the breastplate from her chest, the one whose name is come, man, come. What is this, she said. Be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. She came to the fifth gate. And he took the gold ring from her hand. What is this, she said. Be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. She came to the sixth gate. And he took the measuring rod and the measuring line of lapis from her hands. What is this, she said. Be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. She came to the seventh gate. And he took the robe of ladyship from her body. What is this, she said. Be content, Inanna. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. And I want to say the thing about those seven scenes that makes them work, and then we will go down the last step. It is the same words every time. Not similar words. The same words, seven times, with only the object changing. She asks what is this. She is told to be content, that a power of the underworld has been fulfilled, and that she may not open her mouth against the rites of that place. And in performance, out loud, in a room, that does something that is very hard to do any other way. By the third gate the listener knows the answer before it comes. By the fifth they are saying it along with the doorman. By the seventh it is not information any more, it is a rhythm, and the thing being described has stopped being an event and become a process, which is exactly what it is. She is not being robbed. She is being processed. And that is why the poem repeats. It is not poverty of invention. It is the sound of a procedure being carried out correctly on somebody, seven times, while they ask what is happening and are told each time that the procedure is correct. And she was brought in naked and bowed low. And I want to say one thing about the building she is going into, because the poem gives it a name. It is called Ganzer. The palace Ganzer. That is the house of the queen of the dead, and the poem uses the name as if everybody already knew it, and never once stops to explain it. The land of no return has a palace with a name, and a doorman at the door, and doors that are opened one at a time. And the underworld itself has several names in these poems and they are worth having once. It is called the great earth, which is the same phrase that is in the queen's own name. It is called the land of no return. And it is called, in a word that turns up over and over, the great place below, which is simply a description. There is no word in any of it for punishment. There is no word for burning. It is a large place, underneath, where everybody goes, and the queen of it has a palace and a minister and a doorman and a set of judges, and the whole thing is described exactly the way you would describe a court. Chapter Eight. The Hook. And I want to stay at the bottom of those stairs for a moment before anything else happens. Seven times she asked what is this, and seven times she was told to be content, and the answer she was given was the same answer every time, and it is not an explanation. A power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You may not open your mouth against the rites of this place. And I want to give you the phrase in the original shape, as close as I can, because the translation smooths it. What she is told, more literally, is to be satisfied: a divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled, and she must not open her mouth against the rites of that place. The word for that divine power is the same word we met in the third chapter tonight, the one for the whole set of things that make a working world, the offices and arts and functions, the list that has kingship and the craft of the basket weaver on it side by side. So the doorman is not saying be quiet. He is saying: these are the arrangements of this place, they are complete, they are correct, and there is no procedure by which you can raise an objection. That is the most frightening sentence in the poem and there is nothing violent in it. It is a rule being read out by an official. It does not say you deserve this. It does not say this is a punishment. It says: this is the procedure, it is correct, and you do not get to ask about it. Everything that has ever been taken from anybody by a process rather than a person is in that sentence. And here is the thing about that walk down, which I have thought about more than any other passage in this season. She knew. She is the one who invented the plan for her own rescue and gave it to Ninshubur before she left. She specified what to wear and what to say. She specified the order of the gods to ask. She knew, before she started down the stairs, that this could end with her not coming back, and she went. And at every one of those seven gates she asked what is this. Not why. Not stop. What is this. She is not resisting. She is asking for information, at each stage, and being refused it, at each stage, by somebody doing his job correctly, and she keeps going down. There is a way of reading this poem in which she is being punished for arrogance, and it is a very old reading and I do not believe it, because the poem does not say it anywhere. Nobody in the text says she deserved this. The gods upstairs do not say she deserved it. What they say is that the rule applies, which is a completely different statement. And she came into the room with nothing on. And Ereshkigal rose from her throne, and Inanna sat down on it. And the judges of the underworld, the seven of them, gathered round her and passed judgement. And those judges have a name, and the name is the one this whole season is packaged under, so I am going to say it plainly here. They are called the Anuna. The Anunnaki. That is what they are doing in this poem. They are sitting as a bench. Seven of them, in the underworld, hearing a case, and passing judgement on somebody who has come in without authorisation. In the first episode of this season they were six hundred gods being divided three hundred above and three hundred below and given their duties in writing. Here they are the seven who sit in judgement below. In the poems they are the assembly, the senior gods, the ones who decide. They are gods. Sometimes they are the great gods sitting in council, and sometimes they are the gods of the world below, and here, tonight, they are a bench of judges. And that is worth having tonight, because you have now seen them do the job twice in one season, once as an administrative division and once as a panel of judges, and neither time did anybody come from anywhere. And the judges fastened on her the eye of death. They spoke against her the word of wrath. They uttered against her the cry of guilt. And the woman was turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook. The word for it is the word for a peg or a nail driven into a wall, the kind of thing you would hang a garment on, or a waterskin, or a tool. That is the image. Not a cross and not a gibbet. A peg on a wall, in a room, in a house, with a body on it, the way you would hang up a coat. And the poem puts it in one line and goes straight upstairs to a woman waiting at a door, and does not come back down for two hundred lines. That is the right decision, and it is why the middle of this poem is bearable. The body is on the wall for the whole of the next three chapters and the poem does not look at it once. That is it. Four lines. No weapon, no struggle, nothing described. A look, three sentences spoken, and a body on a hook on a wall, and the poem moves on immediately to what is happening upstairs. Chapter Nine. Three Days. Ninshubur waited. Three days and three nights, and then she did exactly what she had been told to do, in the exact order, without changing anything. She set up the lament in the ruined places. She beat the drum in the sanctuaries. She went round the houses of the gods. She scratched at her eyes and her mouth and her ears in public, and at herself in private where nobody could see. She put on the single garment of a pauper. And she went to Nippur, to the temple of the lord of the air, and she went in and she wept. Father, she said. Do not let your daughter be put to death in the underworld. Do not let your good metal be alloyed with the dirt of the underworld. Do not let your good lapis be broken up with the mason's stone. Do not let your boxwood be cut up with the carpenter's wood. Do not let the young woman be put to death in the underworld. And the lord of the air said no. And here is what he said, and it is important, and it is the same thing the next one will say. My daughter craved the great above. She craved the great below. She who receives the powers of the underworld does not return. Whoever goes to that place, and gets there, stays there. He is not being cruel. He is stating the rule. And you have just heard the rule twice now, once from a doorman on a staircase and once from the highest god in the country, and it is the same rule, and it is going to be the whole of tomorrow night. So she went to Ur. And the poem does not summarise. It says it all again, every word of it, and I am going to say it all again with it, because this is the third time you will hear this speech tonight and the third time is the one that matters. She went to the moon god at Ur, and she went into his temple, and she wept in front of him. Father, she said. Do not let your daughter be put to death in the underworld. Do not let your good metal be alloyed with the dirt of the underworld. Do not let your good lapis be broken up with the mason's stone. Do not let your boxwood be cut up with the carpenter's wood. Do not let the young woman be put to death in the underworld. And the moon god answered her, and he said exactly what the other one had said, in exactly the same words, without a syllable of difference. My daughter craved the great above. She craved the great below. She who receives the powers of the underworld does not return. Whoever goes to that place, and gets there, stays there. Twice now. The same refusal, twice, from the two highest gods she could reach, in identical language, which tells you it is not a personal decision. It is the rule, being read out by the people whose job it is to know the rule. And notice what she does, which is the reason this poem loves her. She does not argue. She does not weep at him a second time or plead or bargain. She has a list, and there are three names on it, and she was given the order by the person who wrote it, and she has now had two refusals, and there is one name left. So she went to Eridu. And before Eridu, I want to say what the two refusals actually mean, because they are not two gods being unhelpful and the poem is careful to make them identical. They said the same thing, word for word, and the words are a statement of law. She craved the great above. She craved the great below. Whoever receives the powers of that place does not return. Whoever goes there, and gets there, stays there. That is not a personal judgement about her. It is a citation. Two of the highest gods in the country were asked to intervene and both of them looked at the situation and gave the same answer, which is that there is no provision for this. And I want to be fair to them, because it is easy to hear them as cold. They are not saying they do not care. They are saying, correctly, that what is being asked for is not a thing that has ever been done and that they do not have the power to do it. The lord of the air holds the tablet that makes commands real and even he cannot command this, because the rule about that place is not a decree that somebody issued. It is a condition of the place. And that is why the third one is different, and it is worth being precise about how. He does not overrule them. He never claims the rule does not apply. He does not go and argue with anybody or issue a counter order. He finds a way through it that leaves the rule standing, and the way through it is two people and a sentence. Chapter Ten. The Dirt Under His Nails. To the god of the sweet water, the one who has been in this house on every single night of this season, the clever one, the one who thought of the way out every time. And she said all of it again, the whole speech, for the third time. And he said: what has happened? What has my daughter done? I am troubled. What has Inanna done? I am troubled. What has the queen of all the lands done? I am troubled. He did not check the rule. He did not weigh it. His first response was that he was upset. And then he took some dirt from under his fingernails. That is what the poem says. He took the dirt from under the fingernails of one hand, and from the other, and out of it he made two creatures. They are not gods. They are not heroes. They are two small beings made out of what a god had under his nails. And their names are the names of two real professions, and this is the part that opens the whole poem up. The words the poem uses for them are the words for two kinds of temple personnel. They are the people who performed at rites, and specifically at rites of lamentation. They sang. They played instruments. They made the sound of grieving on the occasions when grieving had to be done publicly and properly. And they were, in the texts, people whose gender was not the ordinary two. That is not a modern reading imposed on the material. It is in the texts, repeatedly, in several different words for several different roles, and it is stated as a fact about who those people were. There are lists of temple staff that include them. There are hymns that mention them. There is a passage in a hymn to this very goddess that says she is the one who turns a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and these are the people that line is understood to be about. And there is a second creation story, a different one from a different poem, in which the god of the sweet water makes a person who is neither, and assigns them a place in the temple, and the whole point of the passage is that this is a real role in the world and here is where it came from. So when the cleverest god in this literature needs somebody to walk into the land of the dead and do the one thing nobody has managed, which is to sit with the queen of the underworld while she is in agony and say the right thing, he does not make a warrior and he does not make a hero. He makes two temple mourners, out of the dirt under his fingernails, who are neither male nor female, and who are professionally skilled at exactly one thing, which is being present at somebody else's grief and making the correct sound. That is not a coincidence. That is casting. And he gave one of them the plant of life. And he gave the other the water of life. And then he gave them their instructions, and the instructions are the most extraordinary thing in this poem. Chapter Eleven. Agree With Her. Go down, he said. Fly through the door like flies. Slip through the pivots of the door like ghosts. And when you get there, this is what you will find. The mother who gave birth, Ereshkigal, is lying there because of her children. Her shoulders are uncovered. Her breasts are bare. Her hair is swirling about her head like leeks. She is in pain. And she will be crying out. And when she cries out, this is what you will do. When she says, oh, my heart, you will say: you are troubled, our mistress, oh your heart. When she says, oh, my liver, you will say: you are troubled, our mistress, oh your liver. And whoever she is, if she is a goddess, she will hear the words spoken to her, and she will be soothed. And if she is a woman, she will hear the words spoken to her, and she will be soothed. And I want to be very careful and very clear about what he has just described, because it is easy to hear it as a trick and it is not one. He is not telling them to flatter her. He is not telling them to say anything false. There is no deception in it at all. He is telling them to listen to what she says and to say it back to her, accurately, in her own words, with her named as the person it is happening to. That is all. And notice what he says will happen. He does not say she will be fooled. He says she will be soothed. And he says it twice, in two versions, covering every possibility. If she is a goddess, she will hear the words spoken to her, and she will be soothed. If she is a mortal woman, she will hear the words spoken to her, and she will be soothed. He is not making a claim about goddesses. He is making a claim about anybody in pain, and he is so confident of it that he sends two people down into the land of no return with no weapon, no protection, no plan B, and a script consisting of six words. That is the plan. That is the entire rescue plan for getting the most powerful goddess in the world out of the land of no return, devised by the cleverest god in the literature, who has spent this whole season out thinking everybody in every situation. Repeat her pain back to her. Not fight her. Not trick her. Not bargain with her. Not sneak past her. Go and stand next to the queen of the dead while she is in agony, and when she says oh, my heart, say back to her, your heart, our mistress, your heart. And they went down. And they slipped through the door like flies, through the pivots like ghosts, and they came into the room where she was, and she was exactly as he had said. Uncovered. In pain. Crying out. And she cried, oh, my heart. And they said, you are troubled, our mistress, oh your heart. And she cried, oh, my liver. And they said, you are troubled, our mistress, oh your liver. And she stopped. And she looked at them, and she said, who are you, you who have grieved with me over my heart and over my liver? If you are gods, I will bless you. And if you are mortals, I will give you a gift. And she offered them the water gift, the river in its fullness. And they said no. And she offered them the grain gift, the field in its fullness. And they said no. And she said, name your gift. And they said: give us the corpse that is hanging on the hook. And before the rule, one thing about what has just happened in that room, because it went past quickly and it is the largest transaction in the poem. She was offered a river and a field and she asked for a body. That is the exchange, and it is worth weighing. The queen of the dead, moved by two strangers, opens with the two biggest gifts available to her, and they are the two things that country actually ran on: water in the channel and grain in the field. In a farming world those are not symbols. Those are the difference between a good year and everybody dying. And the creatures say no to both, twice, exactly as instructed. And then they name their price and their price is a corpse hanging on a peg, which from her side of the room is worth nothing at all. It is not currency. It is not an asset. It is a body on a wall in a house full of them. So the trade, from her point of view, is that she gave away something of no value to somebody who had just done her the only kindness she had ever received. And from ours, it is everything. Chapter Twelve. No One Ascends Unmarked. And she gave it to them. That is the whole thing. She had been offered the chance to give away rivers and harvests and she had been refused, and then two small beings who had said the only kind thing anybody had said to her in a very long time asked for a body, and she took it off the wall and handed it over. And they sprinkled the plant of life on it. And they sprinkled the water of life on it. And Inanna got up. That is all it says. Three words in the original, more or less. No description of the moment, no light, no gasp, no scene. The plant and the water were sprinkled and she got up. And I want to point at what actually did it, one more time, because the poem has been careful and I want to be careful too. The plant of life and the water of life did the raising. That is the mechanism, and it came from the cleverest god there is, and it is the standard equipment of a rescue in that literature. But the plant and the water were never the problem. He had those from the start. He could have handed them to anybody. The problem was that nobody had ever got past the queen of the dead, and no god had ever thought of a way to, and the two highest gods in the country had said out loud that it could not be done. And what got past her was not the plant. It was two temple mourners standing in front of her in the dark saying, your heart, our mistress. Your liver, our mistress. The plant was the easy part. Somebody had to get into the room. And now, at the very last moment of tonight, the poem turns, and I want you to hear the turn because it is the whole of tomorrow. As she is going up, on her way to the first gate, the underworld speaks. The judges of the dead, the seven of them, said this. Who has ever ascended from the underworld? Who has ever ascended from the underworld unmarked? If Inanna is to go up from the underworld, then let her provide someone in her place. And that is where we stop tonight. The lamp is low now. She is on the stairs, alive, going up, with the two small creatures beside her, and behind her a voice has just said, out loud, the rule that governs everything: nobody comes up from here for free. And tomorrow night is what that costs, and who pays it, and what happens to the person who does, and the ending of it, which is the one thing in this whole story that I would call kind, and which involves a woman who is not in tonight's episode at all, and who is going to walk in tomorrow and offer to take half of somebody's year. Think of it, wherever you are lying. Two small creatures made out of the dirt under somebody's fingernails, in the dark, at the bottom of seven gates, standing beside a queen nobody visits, who has not been agreed with in the whole of her existence, saying back to her, in her own words, the exact shape of her own pain, until she quietened. That is the oldest description in the world of what actually helps. And I want to say why this belongs in a poem, rather than a manual, because I think the poem knows exactly what it has got. A manual might tell us what to do and then leave us alone with the instruction. The poem stays in the room. It gives the voice that cries out, and the voices that answer it, and lets us wait between them. I hear in that waiting something very small, and very ordinary, beside the impossible journey of a goddess. Someone has come close enough to answer. Someone has remained there long enough to hear the next cry. That is my reading of this part, and I give it to you quietly. We do not need to make a lesson out of the room, or carry its meaning further than the words will bear. We can stay with the answering voices for a moment, as if the lamp had been turned down and the house had settled around them. Nothing needs to be hurried here. Look at the shape of the whole night. Seven gates, and at every one of them somebody asks what is happening to her and is told to be content, that a power of that place has been fulfilled, and that she may not open her mouth against its rites. Seven refusals to acknowledge a person. And then, at the very bottom, underneath all of that, in the last room, two small beings who acknowledge somebody. The poem is built as a contrast and it built it on purpose. The whole descent is the sound of being processed by a system that will not answer you. And the rescue is the sound of one person saying to another, in plain words, I can hear that this hurts. The seven gates take everything off her. Two sentences give somebody else everything back. That is the oldest description in the world of what actually helps. It is not a plant and it is not water, though those come after. It is somebody sitting near you and saying your own trouble back to you, so that you can hear that it has been heard. 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 two small creatures who agreed with her. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is the second half, and it is about a bill coming due. Last night a goddess went down through seven gates and had everything taken off her one piece at a time, and was killed, and was hung on a peg on a wall, and was brought back by two small creatures made out of the dirt under a god's fingernails who did the only thing nobody had ever thought to do down there, which was to sit with the queen of the dead while she was in pain and say her own words back to her. And then, as she was going up the stairs, a voice said: nobody comes up from here for free. If she goes, somebody takes her place. Tonight is who. And I am going to be honest with you at the start, because this is the saddest story in the season and there is no point pretending otherwise. Somebody does go down in the end. It is somebody who did not deserve it and did not see it coming, and there is a chase in the middle of tonight, and he is caught. But here is why I am not worried about telling you this at one in the morning. The ending is kind. The ending of this story is a woman walking into the room where the decision is being made, who has not been mentioned once so far, who has no power and no office and nothing to bargain with, and offering to take half of it herself. And the offer is accepted. And that is how the story ends, and it is why they told it for two thousand years, and it is the reason the seasons turn in that country. Stay with it to the eleventh chapter, for her. 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 seven gates. If so, welcome back. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, you can start here without difficulty. A goddess went down into the land of the dead and got out, and the rule of that place is that nobody gets out for nothing, and somebody has to go in her place, and tonight is the finding of that person. 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 has the same tablet as last night, and beside it he has put two others, smaller, and he taps them. These, he says, are different poems. I am going to tell you when we cross from one to the other, because it matters, and because most people who tell you this story do not. 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 new names tonight and you will have them in ten minutes. Dumuzi, who is her husband. Geshtinanna, who is his sister. And the galla, who are the ones doing the taking, and who are not exactly people. 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 a chase in the middle of it, and I am going to tell you now how it ends so that you can lie through the whole of it without tensing. He is caught. It happens quietly. Nobody is hurt in front of you and there is no violence described anywhere in tonight, and the chase itself, which is the longest part of the episode, is mostly a man hiding in a ditch and talking to his sister. 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. Chapter One. Nobody Ascends Unmarked. Here is the rule, said out loud, at the foot of the stairs, by the judges of the dead. Nobody has ever ascended from the underworld unmarked. If Inanna wishes to go up from the underworld, let her provide a substitute for herself. And I want to sit inside that sentence for a moment, because everything tonight comes out of it and because it is not what people usually assume. It is not a punishment. Nobody is angry with her. The judges are not taking revenge and the queen of the underworld, who has just handed over the body off her own wall to two strangers who were kind to her, is not going back on the deal. It is an accounting rule. The underworld, in this literature, is not a prison and it is not a hell. It is a place with a population, and the population is everybody who has died, and the one absolute law of it is that the number does not go down. Things go in. Nothing comes out. That is what the land of no return means, and it is in the name. So if somebody comes out, the books do not balance, and something has to go in to make them balance. And I want to give you the rule properly, because it is the load bearing idea of both these nights and it is nowhere stated as plainly as it deserves. That place is called, among other things, the land of no return. That is not a poetic name. It is a description of a policy, and the policy applies to everybody, including the staff. Her sister cannot come up either. Not because somebody is keeping her down there. Because the place does not have an exit and she is part of the place. So consider what her existence actually consists of. Everybody arrives. Nobody leaves. Every single person she has ever met came in through those seven gates on the worst day of their life, was stripped at each one, and was brought before her bowed low and naked. That is the entirety of her social experience. Nobody has ever come to visit. And upstairs there is a whole society of gods who go to each other's houses and hold banquets and argue in assemblies, and she has a chair in none of it. Hold that, because later this season we will spend a whole night in her house from the inside, and it will matter. And I have to tell you that people in that country did this. Not with a goddess. With each other. The idea underneath tonight, that a thing which is coming for one person can be persuaded to take another instead, was not only a story they told. It was a procedure, written down, with instructions, and it was carried out at every level of that society for well over a thousand years. At the ordinary level it is the figure at the door. Somebody is ill, and the family believes something has come into the house for them, and so a small figure is made, out of clay or dough or reeds, and it is dressed, and it is named, and it is put where the thing will find it first. And the words that go with it say, in effect: here. This one instead. And then the figure is taken out and disposed of, and the person in the bed is left alone. That is a kindness performed with a piece of clay by frightened people at three in the morning, and there are hundreds of texts for it. And at the other end of the society there was a version that used a person. When the omens said that the king was going to die, and the omens in that country were read constantly and taken with complete seriousness, there was a procedure. Another man was put on the throne. He was dressed as the king and addressed as the king and given the queen's place beside him, and he sat there and held the office, and the real king stepped aside and was called, in the letters, the farmer. And the substitute held the kingship for the length of time the omen was thought to cover, which might be a hundred days. And what was coming for the king arrived, and found him on the throne, and took him instead. He did not survive the arrangement. That was the arrangement. We know about this in detail because the scholars who advised on it wrote letters about it to their king, and the letters survive, and they are unbearably matter of fact. They discuss the timing. They discuss whether the omen has been fully discharged. They report that the substitute has gone to his fate, and then they tell the king he may safely return to his throne. So when the judges at the bottom of the stairs say that nobody ascends unmarked and that she must provide a substitute for herself, nobody hearing that poem thought it was a strange rule invented for a story. They thought: yes. That is how it works. That is what you do. And they had a very clear idea of what it costs and who it usually costs it to, which is not the person who is being saved. That is the whole of it. It is not moral. It is arithmetic. And the horror of tonight is entirely a horror of arithmetic, and it is going to be worked out on somebody who has done nothing wrong. Chapter Two. The Ones Who Came Up With Her. So she came up, and they came with her. The galla. That is what they are called, and there is no good translation, and demon is misleading because these are not tempters and they are not evil spirits. They are more like bailiffs. They are the officers of the underworld, and their function is to fetch. And the poem describes them, and the description is one of the great passages in this literature, and it works by telling you what they do not do. They eat no food. They drink no water. They accept no flour offering. They do not drink the poured libation. They take no gifts. They do not enjoy a wife's embrace. They never kiss a child. They do not know the sweetness of anything. And then, having told you all the things they cannot be reached by, the poem tells you what they do. They take the wife from a man's arms. They take the child from a man's knee. They take the bride out of the house of her father in law. That is what they are. They cannot be bribed because they do not want anything. They cannot be softened because they have never had anything soft. They cannot be delayed by an offering because they do not eat. And they come for people who are in the middle of their lives, with somebody holding on to them. And I want to say where else they turn up, because they are not confined to this poem and knowing that changes how the whole thing feels. They are all over the incantation literature. That world had an enormous body of texts for dealing with things that came for people, and a great many of them are addressed to these. There are rituals to turn them aside. There are substitute figures, made of clay or dough or reed, set out at the door, so that when they come they take the figure instead of the person. Which means that this poem, which looks like a myth about gods, is describing a procedure that people actually performed in their houses. Somebody is ill. The family believes something has come for them. And so they make a substitute, and they put it where the thing will find it, and they say the words, and they hope it takes the figure and goes. That is the ritual. And tonight's poem is the story of the one time it was done at the highest possible level, by a goddess, using a person. There are large and small ones, the poem says. They come up out of the ground on either side of her, and they walk with her, and everywhere she goes they are there, and they are waiting for her to nominate somebody. Chapter Three. The Faithful One. And before the first stop, one thing about the shape of what is coming, because knowing it will let you rest through the whole middle of the night. There are four stops and they are the same scene four times. They arrive somewhere. There is a person there. The officers of the dead say: this one, let him go with us and let her go. And she looks at the person and either says no, at length, with reasons, or she does not. Four times. Same structure, same words for the demand, same shape for the answer. And three of the four are refusals, and they get longer and warmer as they go, and then the fourth one is short. That is the whole architecture, and it is the same architecture as last night's seven gates, which was also one scene repeated with one thing changing each time. This poem builds everything out of repetition with a variable, and once you have heard the pattern twice you can let the rest of it go past you knowing exactly where you are. And I want to say who she actually is, because we have had her name for two nights and I have never explained the office she holds. She is a sukkal. That is the word, and you will meet it again later this season, in a different house, when the queen of the dead sends hers up a staircase to fetch a plate of food. It is the position of the one who stands behind, who carries the messages, who goes where they are sent, and who speaks for their master when their master is not there. Every important god in that world has one. It is the most useful job in the pantheon and the least sung. And here is the thing about hers that I did not know until I went looking, and that changed how I read both these nights. Ordinary people prayed to her. There is a kind of scene carved on cylinder seals, and it is one of the commonest images that survives from that whole civilisation, and there are thousands of them. A god is seated. A person is approaching. And between them there is a figure who has the person by the wrist, leading them forward, one hand raised toward the seated god, speaking on their behalf. That figure is the intercessor. That is her role, over and over, in the art of that world, for centuries. Because if you are an ordinary person and you need something from a great god, you do not walk up and ask. That is not how anything worked in that society, not with a king and not with a god. You find somebody who has access, and who is willing to speak for you, and they take you in by the hand. So the position she holds is not only messenger. She is the one who gets you in front of somebody. She is the person who will say your name in a room you cannot enter. Which is exactly what she does in this poem, at enormous personal risk, for three days, going from door to door, being turned away twice, and getting somebody in front of a god who could act. She did her job. That is the whole of it. The job happens to be standing outside great houses asking to be heard on behalf of somebody who cannot speak for themselves, and she did it for three days in a pauper's single garment with dirt on her face. And now she is lying in the dust at the top of the stairs, and the officers of the dead are pointing at her, and the first thing the goddess she saved has to decide is whether to hand her over. And the first place she went was to the person who saved her. Ninshubur was waiting at the edge of the underworld, in the dust, in the single garment of a pauper, exactly as she had been told to be, having done every single thing on the list, in order, for three days and nights. And she threw herself down in the dirt in front of her. And the galla said: this one. Let her go with us. Let Inanna go, and we will take this one. And Inanna said no. And I want to slow down here, because this is where the poem starts doing the thing it does, and the thing it does is a test, applied four times, and the test is not what you would expect. She is not choosing by rank. Two of the people she looks at tonight are lesser gods attached to her own cities, and she refuses to give up either of them, and the fourth is her husband, and she gives him up in a line. She is not choosing by love, or the poem would have kept the husband. There is exactly one criterion and it is applied identically every time. She looks at the person, and at what they are wearing, and at where they are sitting, and she asks one question. Did you grieve for me. That is the whole test. Three people were sitting in the dirt in sackcloth having a terrible three days, and she looked at each of them and said no, not this one. And the fourth was in a clean magnificent robe on a throne in the shade. And listen to what she says, because it is the first of four refusals tonight and the four of them together are the argument of the poem. She said: this is my minister of fair words. This is my escort of true words. She did not forget my instructions. She did not neglect the orders I gave her. She made a lament for me in the ruined places. She beat the drum for me in the sanctuaries. She went round the houses of the gods for me. She scratched at her eyes and her mouth and her ears for me. She dressed herself in a single garment like a pauper. And she went, alone, to the temple of the lord of the air, and then to the moon god at Ur, and then to the god of the sweet water at Eridu, and she brought me back to life. How could I give you her? Let us go on. That is the standard she is applying, and she applies it four times tonight, and it is not rank and it is not affection. It is: did this person grieve for me. Chapter Four. The One Who Was Sitting in the Dust. They went on, and they came to a city called Umma, and to its temple, and there was somebody there, and his name was Shara. And I want to say where they are going, because the route is not invented and it is one of the quiet pleasures of this poem. She is touring temples. Every place she stops at tonight is a real city, and the god she finds sitting in the dust at each one is that city's own god, in that city's own temple, doing what the god of that place would actually be doing. The poem is walking a route that its listeners could have walked. Umma was a working city with a long history, in the same stretch of country as its neighbour and rival, and the two of them spent centuries arguing over a border and a canal, and some of the earliest historical documents in the world are the record of that argument. And its god was the one she meets first, and he is a real deity with a real temple and a staff and offerings, and the reason his name means anything at all today is that people there made offerings to him for two thousand years. Bad tibira is older still, and you heard its name last night, in the list of houses she gave up before she went down. It sits in the marsh country in the south, and it was one of the great early centres, and by the time this poem was written it was already ancient. So consider what the shape of the night actually is. A goddess comes up out of the ground with the officers of the dead on either side of her, and she goes from city to city across her own country, from temple to temple, and at each one there is somebody in the dirt in mourning clothes, and the officers say that one, and she says no, and they go on. It is a procession. It has the shape of a festival route, the kind where an image is carried from town to town and stops at each shrine, and everybody in every one of those towns comes out to see it pass. Except that what is being carried along this route is a decision about who has to die. And at every stop, the answer is no. Not him. Not this one. Not here. Three times, in three real towns, on a road people actually walked, she looks at somebody lying in the dust for her and says: not him. Which is why the fourth stop lands the way it does. And I should say why the mourning matters so much here, because to a modern ear the standard sounds harsh. He did not cry enough, therefore he is taken, is how it reads if you are not careful. That is not what is happening. In that world, mourning was not a feeling you either had or did not have. It was a set of actions, publicly performed, on a schedule, by named people, and it was one of the primary obligations you owed somebody. There were professional mourners. There was correct dress. There were the specific acts, the sackcloth, the dust, the drum, the lament in the ruined place, every one of which Ninshubur was given as instructions and every one of which she carried out exactly. Not doing them was not a failure of feeling. It was a failure to perform a duty, in public, that everybody could see you not performing. So when she comes up and finds three people in the dirt and one man on a throne, she is not measuring how sad anybody was. She is looking at who did the job. He is her son in some tellings, and her singer in others, and the poem calls him the one who does her nails and dresses her hair, which is either a courtier's role or a very intimate one and probably both. And he was sitting in the dust, in sackcloth. He threw himself down in front of her. And the galla said: this one. Let him go with us. Let Inanna go. And Inanna said no. She said: this is Shara, who sings for me. Who trims my nails and arranges my hair. How could I give you him? Let us go on. Chapter Five. The Second One in the Dust. They went on, and they came to another city, Badtibira, and to its temple, and there was somebody there too, and his name was Lulal. And he was sitting in the dust, in sackcloth. He threw himself down in front of her. And the galla said: this one. Let him go with us. And Inanna said no. She said: this is Lulal, who goes with me at my right hand and my left hand. How could I give you him? Let us go on. Three refusals. Three people found sitting in mourning, in the dirt, in the cheapest clothes they own, for her, and three times she has looked at the officers of the underworld and said no. And now I want you to hear the fourth one, and I want you to hear it with all three of those in your ears, because the poem has spent two hundred lines building this and it is about to spend one line spending it. And there is one more thing I have to say before the tree, and it is the hardest question in these two nights and I have put off answering it. Why did she go down in the first place? I said on the first night that the poem does not say, and that the old guess about her going to rescue somebody is not in the text, and that everybody who reads it has to sit with the silence. And I said I would give you my own guess at the end, so here it is, and it is a guess and I am labelling it as one. I think she went to see her sister. Not to conquer her. Not to take her throne, though the poem does have her sit in it, which is the detail that makes people think she came for the kingdom. To see her. Look at the lie she tells at the door. My sister's husband has died and I have come for the funeral rites. That is a family reason. It is the correct and formal reason for one relative to visit another, and it is the only reason she can think of that would get her in. And look at what happens when she arrives. She does not demand anything. She is stripped at seven gates without resisting and she walks into the room with nothing on and asks nothing of anybody. And look at what her sister does when two strangers are finally kind to her, which is to give away a body off her own wall to the first people in her existence who ever agreed with her about anything. Those are two people who did not know how to be in a room together. That is my reading, and the poem does not confirm it, and you should hold it loosely. But I have never been able to make the other readings fit the funeral lie, and this one fits it exactly. Chapter Six. The Apple Tree. Before we go to the tree, I want to give you the other poems, the ones about the two of them before any of this, because the bible I work from says that if the dusk needs warmth before the seizure then the love songs are where to find it, and it is right. There is a whole body of poetry about this couple, in Sumerian, and it was sung for centuries, and it is some of the oldest love poetry in the world. In it she is young and he is a shepherd and her brother wants her to marry him and she is not sure, and then she is sure. There is a poem where she goes out to meet him and comes home late and her mother asks where she has been, and she has a lie ready, and the poem gives you the lie: my girlfriend took me to the square, she says, there was music and dancing, and we sang together, and the time went. There is one where she is telling herself to hurry. Where she says she has bathed and put on oil and dressed and put kohl on her eyes and arranged her hair, and where she checks herself over before she goes out. There is one where he comes to the door and she says, wait, let me tell my mother, and she runs in and tells her, and the poem records what a young woman said to her mother about a man, four thousand years ago, and it is not solemn at all. And there are poems about the two of them together that are frank in a way that surprises people who expect ancient literature to be stiff, and which were sung in public at festivals, and which nobody was embarrassed about. That is the couple. And that is who is sitting under the apple tree. They went on. And they came to a place called Kulaba, and there was an apple tree, and under the apple tree there was a throne, and on the throne there was a man. And he was dressed in a magnificent garment. That is the whole of it. That is the entire crime. He was sitting down, in good clothes, in the shade, on a throne. His name is Dumuzi and he is her husband. He had not put on sackcloth. He had not sat in the dust. He had not scratched his face or beaten a drum or gone round the houses of the gods or made any lament at all. She had been dead for three days and nights and he had been on his throne in his best clothes. And there is one more thing here, and it is what makes this the saddest chapter of the season rather than a simple judgement. He is her husband. There is a whole body of poetry in that same language about the two of them, and it is love poetry, and some of it is very beautiful and a good deal of it is frankly explicit, and it was sung at festivals for centuries. Poems where she is getting ready to meet him. Poems where she describes waiting for him. Poems where he comes to the door and she tells her mother a story about where she is going. That is the same couple. The same two names. And everybody hearing this poem knew those other poems the way you would know the songs about a couple before you were told the rest. So the man under the apple tree is not a stranger who let her down. He is the one from the love poems, sitting on a throne in his best clothes, on the third day, and she has just come up seven flights of stairs from being dead. And the poem does not editorialise. It does not say he was heartless or that he was celebrating. It says he was sitting on a magnificent throne dressed in a magnificent garment, and it puts that sentence next to three men in sackcloth in the dirt, and it lets you do the rest. And she looked at him. And the poem says she fastened on him the eye of death. The same phrase, exactly, that was used against her three chapters ago in last night's episode. Her sister rose from the throne, and she sat down on it, and the seven judges gathered, and the judges fastened on her the eye of death. And now she is doing it, to her husband, under an apple tree, and the poem uses the identical words on purpose so that you cannot possibly miss it. She spoke against him the word of wrath. She uttered against him the cry of guilt. Take him, she said. Chapter Seven. Change My Hands. Before he runs, one more thing about the moment itself, because there is a detail in it that I have never been able to put down. She does it with the same words the judges used on her. Go back three chapters, to the bottom of the seven gates. Ereshkigal rose from her throne. Inanna sat down on it. The seven judges gathered round. And the judges fastened on her the eye of death, spoke against her the word of wrath, uttered against her the cry of guilt. And now: she fastened on him the eye of death, spoke against him the word of wrath, uttered against him the cry of guilt. Word for word. The identical formula, in the identical order, three sentences long. She has been dead for three days. She has come up seven flights of stairs. And the first thing she does at the top, to her own husband, is the exact thing that was done to her at the bottom, in the exact words. The poem does not comment on it. It does not have to. It simply uses the same sentence twice, two hundred lines apart, and lets you find it. That is what the underworld did to her. And that is what she brought back up. And he ran. And here is where I have to stop and tell you that we are leaving one poem and going into another, because this is exactly the place where most retellings blur two texts together and pretend it is one. The poem we have been in, the descent, the one with the seven gates, is nearly finished. It has a few lines left. What happens in the chase, the hiding, the sister, the friend, and the bargain at the end, comes mostly from other poems, related, in the same language, about the same people, and they were separate compositions and everybody who studies this knows they were separate. So I am going to tell them, and I am going to tell you when we cross. But not quite yet. The descent has one more scene before we cross, and it is this one. In the descent itself, this is what happens. He weeps. He lifts his hands to the sky, to the sun god, who is his wife's brother, which makes him a brother in law and which is exactly the family relationship you would use if you were in trouble. And he says: I am the husband of your sister. I brought butter to your mother's house. I brought milk to the house of your sister. That is his case. Not that he is innocent. Not that it is unfair. He says, in effect, I am family and I did the family things. And then he asks for something very specific. Change my hands, he says. Change my feet. Let me get away from the galla. Let them not catch me. Turn my hands into the hands of a snake, and my feet into the feet of a snake. And the sun god heard him, and did it. And I should say why it is the sun he calls, because it is not because the sun happened to be overhead. The sun god in that country is the judge. That is his office, formally, in the hymns and in the law. He crosses the sky every day from one horizon to the other, and the consequence they drew from that is that he sees everything, in every place, with nothing shadowed, which is precisely the qualification you want in somebody who decides cases. He is called the one who illuminates what is hidden. He is called the judge of heaven and earth. And it is not decorative. Law codes were set up under his authority. Oaths were sworn by him. When a case was heard, it could be heard in his temple, and there are documents where the parties go to the gate of his sanctuary to settle a matter. In the prayers of ordinary people in trouble, he is the one you address, and there are a great many of them, and they are some of the most direct writing to survive from that world. A person who has been wronged, or thinks they have, telling the sun about it. So a shepherd standing in a field with the officers of the dead coming along the road does the most natural thing available to anybody in that society who is about to lose everything. He appeals. He lifts his hands to the judge and states his relationship to the court, which is that he married into it, and then he states his good conduct, which is that he brought butter to one house and milk to another. That is a legal filing. It is short and it is badly argued and it is entirely sincere, and the thing to understand is that he is not praying in the way we might mean it. He is going to court, in the only court there is, at the last possible moment, in a field. And the judge finds for him. Not on the merits, because there are no merits, and the sentence is not overturned, and nobody says the arrest was wrong. He is simply given a head start. That is the ruling. Not an acquittal. Not a pardon. The judge of heaven and earth listens to a frightened man in a field and gives him the hands and feet of an animal that can get into a small space, and lets him run. And I want to point at what he actually asked for, because it is not what you would ask for. He does not ask to be hidden. He does not ask for a weapon or an army or for the sentence to be overturned. He asks for his hands and feet to be changed into the hands and feet of an animal that can get into a small space. He asks to be made better at running away. That is the whole prayer, and it is granted, and it works, for a while, and it is the most honest thing anybody asks a god for in this entire season. And he got away. Chapter Eight. The Dream. Now, the other poem, the one called Dumuzi's Dream, starts earlier than this, and it is the most frightened piece of writing in this literature, and I want to give it to you properly. It starts with him already afraid, before anything has happened, out with the flocks. His heart was full of tears, it says. He went out to the plain, and he lay down among the buds, and he had a dream. And he woke from it shaking, and he called for his sister. Her name is Geshtinanna, and she reads dreams. That is what she does. And he tells her his, and it is a list of images, and it is the strangest and most beautiful list of bad omens in the literature. Rushes rising up around me. Reeds growing thick. A single reed trembling for me. A pair of reeds, and one is taken away. Tall trees standing over me in the forest, on their own. Water poured on my sacred hearth, and the hearth going out. My cup taken from its peg and falling. My shepherd's stick gone. An eagle taking a lamb from the sheepfold. A falcon catching a sparrow on the reed fence. My goats dragging their beards of lapis in the dust. My sheep scratching the earth with bent legs. The churn lying on its side, and no milk poured. The cup lying on its side. Dumuzi living no more. The sheepfold given to the winds. And his sister listened to all of it and then told him what it meant, one image at a time, and she did not soften any of it. The rushes are the men who will rise against you. The single trembling reed is your mother, who will shake her head for you. The pair of reeds with one taken away is you and me, and one of us will be taken. The tall trees standing alone are the ones who will come for you. The water on the hearth is the house going quiet. The cup falling from the peg is you falling from the knee of your mother. Your shepherd's stick is gone, and the little galla will take it. The eagle with the lamb is the galla, and it will come and get you out of the fold. And then she said: your churn will lie on its side, and no milk will be poured. Your cup will lie on its side. Dumuzi will be no more, and the sheepfold will be given to the wind. And he said: my sister, go up on the hill. Do not go up like a person. Go up with your heart broken. And watch, and tell me when they come. Chapter Nine. His Sister. And I want to introduce her properly first, because she walks into this story in the eighth chapter and takes it over, and almost nobody knows her name. Geshtinanna. It means something like vine of heaven, and she is a goddess of the vine and of the autumn and of the wine that comes at the end of the year, which matters enormously for how this ends. And she is a scribe. That is her other function and it is in the god lists and in the texts, and it is one of the loveliest job descriptions in this literature. She is described as the one who knows writing, and as a keeper of tablets, and in some texts she is the scribe of the underworld, the one who keeps the register down there. Think about that for a second in the light of what she is about to do. The woman who volunteers to spend half of every year for ever in the land of the dead is, in the wider tradition, the person who does the paperwork of the land of the dead. And she reads dreams. That is how we met her, in the poem where her brother wakes up shaking in a field and calls for her, and she goes through his nightmare image by image and tells him the truth about every single one of them without softening any of it. That is who she is. She reads what is written, whether it is on a tablet or in a dream, and she tells you accurately what it says, and she does not lie to make you feel better. Which makes what she does at the end of tonight even more remarkable, because she of all people would have known exactly what she was signing up for. And they came. And he hid, and she watched, and this is the part of tonight that I find the hardest and the best. They caught her first. They came to her, the galla, and they wanted to know where he was, and the poem says they offered her the water gift, the river in its fullness, and she would not accept it. And they offered her the grain gift, the field in its fullness, and she would not accept it. And then they hurt her. The poem says it in a few words and I am going to say it in the same few words and not dwell on it, because it does not dwell on it either. They tore at her. They did things to her. And she did not tell them. That is Geshtinanna. That is the whole of her character and it is enough. Her brother was hiding in a ditch and the officers of the dead came to her and offered her a river and she refused it and then they hurt her and she refused them again, and she never told them where he was. Chapter Ten. The Friend. And before we get to him, I want to give you the hiding one more time, because there is a version of it in another poem where it goes on longer and it is the most exhausting thing in this literature. He is caught, and he escapes. He prays again and he is changed again and he gets away again, and he runs, and he hides somewhere else, and they find him, and he escapes again. And in the poems it happens three times, or five, depending on the copy, and each round is shorter than the last, and each hiding place is worse than the one before, and by the end he is not running to anywhere, he is just running. And in one telling, at the very end of it, he asks to be taken to his sister's house, and he is, and it is there that they get him. I am not going to dwell on that because it is the bleakest passage in two nights and there is nothing in it to hold on to. I mention it because the poem does, and because it explains something about the chapter we are about to have. By the time they get to the friend, they have been chasing him a long while, and the friend knows it, and everybody in that country knows what is happening because it has been going on in the open. So when the field is offered, it is not offered to somebody who does not understand the situation. They went to his friend. The poem does not give him much of a name and does not need to. He was a friend of Dumuzi. He knew where he was. And they offered him the water gift, the river in its fullness. And he accepted it. And they offered him the grain gift, the field in its fullness. And he accepted it. And he told them where to look. And I want to say something about the friend, because he is the only person in these two nights who does the wrong thing for an ordinary reason and the poem is quietly devastating about him. His sister was offered a river and refused it, and was hurt, and refused it again. He was offered a field and took it. That is the whole comparison and the poem makes it by putting the two scenes next to each other in the same words with the same offers, so that the only variable is the answer. Same demons. Same river. Same field. Same phrasing. One says no twice under pain and one says yes twice without being touched. And the poem does not punish him. He does not appear again, and the only word against him comes from Dumuzi himself, one bitter line: that his sister saved his life, and his friend caused his death. He is a man who was offered a field, which is a livelihood, which is the difference between working for somebody and working for yourself, and who told them where his friend was hiding. And they found him in the ditch, and they took him. That is the chase, and it is over, and it is over quietly, and I told you at the start of the night that it would be. He is taken from a ditch by officers who were told where he was by a man who took a field. And I want to give you the hiding, because the poem gives it properly and it is the part that stays with me. He does not hide in a fortress. There is nowhere in this story that is safe and he knows it, so what he does is what an animal does, which is to keep moving to somewhere slightly less obvious than the last place. He hides in the small ditches. He hides among the plants. He goes to his sister's sheepfold, and the poem says the sheepfold is where he is found the first time, and that when they came into it the churn lay silent and the cup lay broken and the sheep scattered. And there is a moment where his mother comes into it, and she is called Sirtur in some copies and Duttur in others, and she is a shepherd's mother and she has almost no lines and she does not save him either. She is simply there, in a poem about her son being taken, doing what a mother does, which is arriving too late and being told. And there are versions of the story where he escapes and is caught again, and escapes again, and is caught again, and hides in his sister's house and in the sheepfold and among the plants, and each time the flight is a little more tired than the last. And in every version, in the end, they get him. Chapter Eleven. Half the Year Each. And before she arrives, I want to be clear about what everybody in this poem has already tried and failed to do, so that you can measure what she does against it. Her mistress tried refusal. Three times, at three stops, she looked at the officers and said no, and each time it worked, and each time it simply moved the problem along the road to the next person. Her brother tried escape. He prayed to a god who granted it, and he was changed, and he ran, and he hid, and he was found. She herself tried silence. She was offered a river and a field and she refused both, and then she was hurt, and she still refused, and it did not save him. Refusal, flight and endurance. Three strategies, tried by three people, all of them failing. And then a woman who has already tried the third one walks in and does the only thing nobody had thought of, which is to accept the rule completely, on its own terms, and find the one arrangement inside it that nobody had noticed was available. And then his sister came. And I want to slow all the way down here, because this is the last movement of two long nights and it deserves to be taken carefully. Consider her position. She has already lost. Her brother has been taken and it is done and there is no ground to stand on, because the rule is the rule and everybody in the poem has now stated it three separate times. Nobody comes up unmarked. A substitute is required. One has been provided. She has nothing to trade. She is not a great goddess with cities and temples. She has no army, no powers to bargain with, no object anybody wants. In the entire poem she has not been shown to own a single thing. She has already been offered the two best things anybody in that world could offer, a river in flood and a field in full grain, and she refused both, so she cannot even claim to have been cooperative. And she has already been hurt, badly, for refusing, which means she knows exactly what these people are willing to do. And she walks in anyway, and she asks. And the only currency she has is her own time, so she offers that, in the largest quantity anybody has ever offered anything in this literature: half of every year, for the rest of forever. She had been on the hill, watching, with her heart broken, because he told her to be. She had been offered a river and refused it. She had been hurt and had not told. And here we cross back into the descent, for its last few lines, and I have to be honest with you, because the clay is broken at exactly this point. Lines are missing. In the lines that survive, she is not even named, and we never see her walk in or hear her ask. Who she is, and how faithful she was, we know from the other poems. So this is the way those broken lines have long been read. When it was finished, and he had been taken, she went to the goddess, and she asked for him. And the poem gives us the decision, and the decision is this. You for half the year, she said, and your sister for half the year. When you are being asked for, you will stay in the underworld. And when your sister is being asked for, she will go in your place. Half the year each. She offered to spend six months of every year, for ever, in the place her brother had been taken to, so that he could spend six months of every year out of it. And it was granted, and that decision is where his story comes to rest, and that is the arrangement that world lived under. And I want to point at who granted it, because it is easy to miss and it changes the ending. It is not the judges. It is not the rule. The rule did not bend, and I want to be clear about that, because it did not. The books still balance. There is still exactly one person in the underworld who was not there before, at every moment, for ever. The arithmetic is untouched. What changed is who. Half the year it is him and half the year it is her, and the total never changes, and the underworld never notices, and the accounts are correct on every single day. She did not break the rule. She found the only move inside it. That is why the poem ends the way it does rather than with a triumph. Nobody won anything. A woman looked at a system that could not be argued with, understood it completely, and found the one arrangement that satisfied it exactly while making it bearable, and then paid for that arrangement herself, for ever, starting immediately. And here I have to hand you the other version, because there is one, in the later language, and it ends differently and I am not going to hide that from you. There is an Akkadian poem called the Descent of Ishtar, and it is much shorter than the Sumerian one, and it is the version most people have actually read because it is the one in the popular anthologies. It is not a translation of tonight's poem. It is a different composition on the same story, and it makes different choices at almost every turn. There is no long journey by the minister to three gods in three cities. The rescue comes differently, and a single figure is sent down rather than two. Ereshkigal in that version is not lying in the dark because of her children. She is described as having the pain of a woman giving birth, and it is one of the strongest images in that text, and it belongs to that text and I am not going to import it into the Sumerian scene because they are two different poems. And at the end of it, the god who was taken is washed, and anointed with oil, and dressed in a red garment, and a flute of lapis is played for him, and the professional mourners perform, and the poem closes on that. Which is a completely different ending. Not a bargain between a brother and a sister. A funeral, done properly, with music. Both are on clay. Both were copied for centuries. When somebody tells you the story of Inanna going down, they are almost always telling you a blend of the two, and I would rather you had them separately and knew which was which. And I want to be careful here about something, because it would be easy to turn this into a lecture and it is not one. Yes, there is a season in it. Dumuzi is a shepherd god and a god of the spring growth and the date palm and the beer, and his sister's name means something like vine of heaven and she belongs to the autumn and to the wine. And there was a month named for him, in high summer, when the land is burnt and everything green is gone, and in that month the women of the cities went out and mourned him by name, and there are poems written for it. And I want to tell you how far that mourning travelled, because it is one of the most remarkable survivals in the history of religion. The month named for him is the fourth month of that calendar, in high summer, when the heat in that country is at its worst and everything green has gone brown. And in that month there was a rite of weeping for him, performed by women, in the cities, publicly. And that rite outlasted the language it started in. It outlasted the cities. It was still being performed, under his name, a thousand and then two thousand years after the poem we are reading tonight was written. There is a line in one of the books of the Hebrew Bible, in the prophet Ezekiel, in which the prophet is shown things happening at the temple in Jerusalem that he is meant to disapprove of, and one of them is that there are women sitting at the north gate, weeping for Tammuz. Tammuz is his name in the later language. That is the same god and the same rite, being performed by women in a city hundreds of miles away and more than a thousand years after the Sumerian poem, and being written down by somebody who did not like it, which is why we have it. And in the calendar of that region the month kept the name. It is still there. In the Hebrew calendar and in the Iraqi and Levantine Arabic calendar there is a summer month called Tammuz, and it is named for a shepherd in a Sumerian poem who was taken because he did not put on sackcloth. The women stopped weeping a very long time ago. The month is still on the calendar. And when the year turned, he came back. That is the shape of it, and everybody who lived in that country lived that shape every year of their lives, and did not need it explained. But the poem does not present it as an explanation of agriculture. It presents it as what happened to a family. A man was taken because he did not grieve properly. His sister, who did grieve, and who was hurt for him and did not tell, went and asked for him, and offered the only thing she had, which was half of every year of her own life. And there is one more thing I want to give you before the last chapter, and it is what happened to the faithful one, because she has been in every chapter of two nights and nobody ever asks. Ninshubur. She waited three days. She did every single thing on the list, in order, exactly. She went to two gods who said no, in identical words, and then to a third who said yes. She is the reason any of this happened. And when her mistress came back up with the officers of the dead beside her, the first person they pointed at was her. And she was spared, and the poem says why, and the reason is that she grieved properly. But that is not the end of her, and this is the part I like. In the wider literature she is everywhere. She has her own hymns. She appears in god lists in her own right, not only as an attendant. She is called the minister of the goddess and she is invoked on her own account, by name, by people asking for things. So the servant who did the paperwork of a rescue, correctly, in order, while everybody more powerful was saying no, ended up with a following of her own. There is a version of the story of these two nights that is about a goddess. And there is a version that is about the person who followed the instructions. And before the last line, I want to say what happens to the two of them afterwards, because there is more of it and it is gentler than tonight has been. The mourning for him became a season, and the season had songs, and the songs are not all grief. There is a body of poetry about his return. About the month ending. About him coming back up, and about what that looked like, and it is written in the same register as the love poems, because to the people who sang it the two things were the same thing: the year turning, and somebody coming back to the door. And his sister goes down as he comes up, and there are poems about that too, and about her, and about what she does down there, which in some tellings is the job she was always suited for, which is to keep the records. So the arrangement they arrived at is not a punishment that repeats for ever. It is a rota. Two people, one post, six months each, handed over twice a year, and a country that watched the handover happen in its own fields and marked it on its calendar. That is what she bought with half of every year of her own life. Not his freedom. A shift pattern. And a shift pattern, if you have ever been the person who could not leave, is not a small thing at all. Chapter Twelve. Sweet Is Your Praise. The lamp is low now. And here is the last line of the poem, and it is not the one anybody expects. The whole thing has been about Inanna. Her decision, her descent, her seven gates, her death, her rescue, her return, her four refusals, her husband. She is in every chapter of both nights. And the last line of the poem is not about her. Holy Ereshkigal, it says. Sweet is your praise. That is the closing line. The poem ends by praising the queen of the underworld. The sister. The one who never goes anywhere. The one who was lying in the dark in pain with nobody to speak to when two small creatures came in and agreed with her. She gets the last line. And I want to say what that would have sounded like to somebody hearing it in a room four thousand years ago, because it is not a small thing. That formula, holy so and so, sweet is your praise, is a standard closing. It is how a great many of these compositions end. It is the line you say at the end of a hymn, to the god the hymn was for. So the ending is not a wistful gesture toward a minor character. It is the technical, formal, unmistakeable closing of a hymn, and it is addressed to the queen of the dead. Which means that at the last moment the poem turns out to have been at least partly a hymn to her all along. Read the whole thing again with that in your ear and it changes. The seven gates are not only a stripping, they are a description of her house and how it is run. The judges are her court. The rule about substitutes is her law. And the one moment of tenderness in four hundred lines happens in her room, to her, when two strangers say her own pain back to her. She gets the last line. And I have thought about why for a long time, and I think it is this. She is the only one in the whole story who gave something away without being made to. Inanna went down and came back and gave up her husband to do it. The judges applied the rule. The galla did their job. The friend took a field. Ereshkigal was in agony, and two strangers were kind to her, and she gave them the body off her own wall, which was hers, which she was entitled to keep, and which nobody could have taken from her. And the poem noticed, and put her name in the last line. Think of it, wherever you are lying. There is a woman on a hill with her heart broken, watching a road, because her brother asked her to. There is a man in a ditch with the hands of a snake, waiting. There are officers who cannot be bribed coming along a road, and they will arrive, and everybody knows it. And afterwards, when it is done, there is a woman walking into a room where nothing can be undone, and saying: give me half. And somewhere below all of it, in the dark, at the bottom of seven gates, a queen who never leaves is being praised in the last line of the poem, for the one afternoon somebody was kind to her. 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 sister who said, half of every year, for ever, and meant it. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is a story about a man who was offered eternal life and said no thank you, and it is one of the shortest and strangest things in this whole literature, and the argument about what it means has been running for a hundred and fifty years and is not going to be settled tonight. It is about a fisherman. A very particular fisherman, who worked for a temple in the oldest city there was, and who was clever in a way that nobody has ever been clever before or since. He broke the wing of the wind. Not with a weapon. He said something, out on the water, in a temper, after his boat went over, and the wind stopped, and it did not blow again for seven days, and heaven noticed. And then he was summoned upstairs, which is a thing that essentially never happens to anybody in this literature, and he was given advice by his father on how to behave when he got there, and the advice was good, and he followed all of it, and it worked perfectly, and because it worked perfectly he went home mortal. Stay with it, if you can, to the tenth chapter, for the bread. 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 two nights of the goddess and the seven gates. 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. Tonight needs nothing from any night before it. 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 something small. Fragments, he says. This one is in pieces, and one of the pieces was found in Egypt, and I will tell you why later, and it is a good story. 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 and it is Adapa, and there is a place, and the place is Eridu, and by the end of the night you will know Eridu better than most cities you have actually been to. 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 at all. Not one thing. Nobody dies. Nobody is hurt. Nobody is even threatened. The most alarming moment in the entire episode is a boat turning over in calm weather, and the man in the water is a strong swimmer and gets home fine and is only angry. This is the gentlest episode of the season and I have put it here on purpose, because last night was hard. 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. Chapter One. Eridu. Start with the place, because everything tonight comes out of it. Eridu is, in that world's own account of itself, the first city. Not the biggest and not the most powerful, and by the time most of these poems were written it was not much of anything. But it was first. The King List, which we opened up on the night of the eagle, begins with a line that is one of the most famous sentences in that literature. When kingship first came down from heaven, it says, kingship was in Eridu. And the poems say the same. There is a text that begins by saying that once, of all the holy places, Eridu alone had been made. And here is the extraordinary part. They were right, more or less. Eridu is a real mound in the far south of Iraq, and it has been excavated, and underneath the later temples the archaeologists went down through level after level of earlier ones, each built on the ruins of the last, in the same spot, and they kept going, and the sequence goes back further than anywhere else in that country. The earliest shrine on that site is a small one room mud brick building with a niche in one wall and an offering table, and it is about seven thousand years old, and every temple built on top of it for the next four thousand years was built on the same footprint. Somebody put up a small room in the marshes, and their descendants kept rebuilding it on the same square of ground, without a break, for longer than the entire span of recorded history since. The digging that found all this was done twice. A British vice consul named John George Taylor went out to a low mound called Abu Shahrain in eighteen fifty five, and put trenches into it, and found a great deal of sand and a strange unfinished staircase and very little he could explain, and went away again. The mound sat there for another ninety years. Then in nineteen forty six a team from the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities went back. Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd and Mohammed Ali Mustafa, three seasons of work, and it is their report that gives us the sequence. They counted eighteen levels of temple, one on top of another, though not every level had a building left in it. Think about what that means as a physical fact. One of the earliest recognisable buildings is a single room you could cross in four paces. Later shrines were much larger. Some of the levels preserve little more than walls, and some preserve no building within the excavated patch. But again and again this part of the settlement held a shrine, and the excavators followed those remains down through the earth. Nobody wrote down why. There is no text anywhere that says we must keep building on this exact square. They simply did it, for something like four thousand years, and the only reason we know is that the mud brick kept the shape of the decision. And there is one more thing from that dig, and it is the right thing to be drifting off on. And in the early shrines, the excavators reported fish bones. They are generally taken as the remains of offerings, laid before the god of that shrine, and which god that was we cannot know, because nobody in the world could write yet. Somebody in the marshes caught fish, and walked them up to a room, and left them there. And the man whose story this is, thousands of years later, in the same city, at the same temple, on the same square of ground, was the man who did the fishing. The poem does not point that out. It does not have to. It simply says he was the one who provided the fish, for a god's table, on ground where, it seems, fish had been laid down since the beginning of anything. And I should say what that word means, the one they used for the water underneath, because it is the name of the temple and it is the name of the whole idea and it has been under this entire season without being explained. The word is abzu. It means the fresh water below the ground. Not the sea, which is salt and is a different word and a different being. This is the other water, the sweet water, the kind that comes up into a well when you dig, and rises into the marshes from underneath, and keeps a date palm alive in a country where it does not rain enough to keep anything alive. Anybody who has lived in a dry place understands the distinction in their body. There is water you can drink and water you cannot, and they are not two versions of one thing, they are two different substances that happen to look alike. So the people of that country pictured an enormous body of the drinkable one lying under the land, and they said a god lived in it, and they built his house at Eridu directly over the place where it came up. The temple's name means the house of the abzu. Some texts call it the house of the deep water. And in the temple there was, as far as anybody can reconstruct, an actual pool. Think about what a building like that does to a person walking into it. You come in from flat glaring country, out of the heat, through a door in a thick mud brick wall, and it is dim, and it is cooler, and somewhere in it there is standing water, and the water is the god. That is where tonight's man worked. That is the kitchen he baked in. And it is worth saying that the god of that water is, in every story in this literature, the clever one. Not the strongest. The one who thinks of the answer. The one who warns somebody about the flood by talking to a wall so that he can say afterwards that he never told anybody anything. The one who solves the problem by finding the sentence that does the job. The fresh water is the intelligence of that world. The place it comes up is the oldest city. And the man who is about to talk his way through the gate of heaven learned how from the water he was standing over every day of his working life. That is Eridu. And it belongs to the god of the sweet water, the clever one, the one who has been in this house every night of this season, and his temple there was built out over the water, and the whole idea of him is that he lives underneath in the deep fresh water that comes up in the marshes and fills the wells. Chapter Two. The Seven Who Came Out of the Water. And before the seven, one thing about how that city thought of itself, because it is the frame for everything tonight. Eridu believed it was first, and everybody else believed it too. There is a text that begins by saying that all the lands were sea, and then Eridu was made, and its temple was built, and the god of the sweet water founded it. Not that Eridu was an early city. That Eridu was the first dry thing. And the King List says kingship came down from heaven at Eridu, before anywhere. And in the flood story, the sages come out of the water at Eridu. So the whole of that civilisation's origin story is located in one small mound in the marshes at the bottom of the country, and the man we are talking about tonight worked in the temple there, doing the catering, and the story we have is about the day he went fishing. That is the scale this poem is playing at, and it never mentions it, because everybody listening already knew. And in the beginning, they said, there were sages. Seven of them. They came before the flood, and they came out of the sea, and they were sent by the god of the sweet water to teach people the things people had not worked out for themselves. And the list of what they taught is a list of a civilisation. Writing. Building. Working metal. Making bricks. Laying out a city. Farming. Law. The rites of the temples. The crafts. And each one of the seven is attached to a king of the very old time, and their names are recorded, and the first of them, the first of all of them, is the one we are talking about tonight, under one of his names. And their names are recorded, all seven, in more than one list, and the lists mostly agree with each other, which for this literature is remarkable. The first is the one we are talking about tonight, under the name that later became Oannes. Then one whose name means the one who came from the water. Then one associated with the second king. And so on down the seven, each attached to a king of the very old time, so that the list works as a pairing: this sage advised this king, and that sage advised that one. And after the flood, the lists go on, and they change. The ones who come after are not called sages any more. They are called scholars, and they are human, and they have ordinary names, and some of them are people we can identify from other documents. So the list has a hinge in it. Before the flood, seven half fish beings out of the sea who taught everything. After the flood, a succession of learned men with jobs. And that hinge is the whole self understanding of a profession. The scribes and scholars who copied these lists believed they were the continuation of a line that started with something that came out of the water, and that the knowledge they had was handed down, generation to generation, without a break, from before the flood. They were not being fanciful. They were describing what they thought their own job was. And they are shown, in the art, as figures who are half fish, or as men wearing a fish over their shoulders like a cloak, with the fish head over their own head and the tail down their back. There are statues of them, small ones, that were buried under the floors of houses on purpose, and I want to tell you how that was done because it is one of the strangest and most touching pieces of archaeology in that whole country. We have the instructions. There are ritual texts that tell you how to do it. You make the figures, of clay or of wood, in the correct number, with the correct appearance. You perform a ceremony over them, which includes washing their mouths so that they become able to act. And then you dig a hole in the floor of the house, in the right room, near the door or in the corners, and you put them in a box, standing up, facing the direction they are meant to face. And then you cover them over and you live on top of them. And archaeologists dig up those boxes. They find them exactly where the texts say they will be, in the corners and by the doorways, with the little figures standing in rows inside them, facing out, having been down there for two and a half thousand years doing the job they were put there to do. Somebody buried a row of small fish men under their floor to keep the house safe, and then went upstairs and had their dinner. That is who Adapa is, in the tradition. The first of the seven. The one who came first. And a very long time later, a Babylonian priest wrote a history of his own country in Greek, for a Greek king, and in it he told the story of a creature who came up out of the sea at the beginning, with the body of a fish and something like a human head beneath the fish's head, and a voice, and who spent the day among people teaching them writing and mathematics and law and how to build and how to farm, and who at sunset went back into the sea, because he was amphibious. He called him Oannes. And that name went into Greek and then into every European book about Babylon for two thousand years. And most scholars think Oannes and Adapa are the same figure, arrived at by a different road, and I am flagging that as an identification made later and not a thing the old tablets say. But the fish man in the sea who taught people everything and went home at night is where our fisherman ends up. Chapter Three. The Man Who Baked the Bread. And before his job, one more thing about the sages, because there is a detail in the lists that I find quietly devastating and I have been saving it. Not all of them ended well. The lists are mostly a roll of honour. Seven who came before the flood, each attached to a king, each having taught something. And then in one of the texts there is a note about one of them who was sent away, or who offended the god of the sweet water, and was put down into the deep, and there is another who is said to have angered somebody and been dealt with. The details are broken and the readings differ and I am not going to build anything on them. But the shape is there, and it is the same shape as tonight. The beings who came out of the water and taught everybody everything were in a relationship with a god, and that relationship had terms, and at least one of them found out what the terms were. So when tonight's poem opens by telling you that he was given wisdom and not given eternal life, it is not setting up a surprise. It is stating a condition that the whole class of them lived under, which is that you are given what you are given and there is a line, and nobody tells you exactly where it is until you are standing on it. But that is the tradition. Tonight's poem is about his job. He is a servant of the temple at Eridu, and the text is very specific about what he does. He baked the bread. He is the one who provisions the god's table. He prepares the offerings. He does the food. And with his own hands, the poem says, he steers the boat and does the fishing for the temple, and he is the one who brings in the catch. He is the caterer. The wisest human being who ever lived, the first of the seven sages, the one to whom the god of wisdom gave broad understanding, spent his days baking, fishing, and setting the table. And I want to say what a temple actually was as an employer, because it is the thing that makes his job make sense. A temple in that country was not a church. It was the largest economic institution in the city. It owned land, sometimes enormous amounts of it. It owned herds. It owned workshops. It had hundreds of people on its books, and we know this because the books survive, in tens of thousands of tablets, and they are lists of who received how much barley and oil and wool, by name, by month. The god lived in the building and was treated as a resident. He had a bed and clothes and jewellery. He was washed. He was dressed in the morning. And he was fed, twice a day, two meals, with a menu, and the menu is recorded: bread, beer, meat, fruit, water, all set out on a table in front of the statue behind a curtain, and left for a time, and then taken away. And afterwards the food went to the staff and to the king, because a meal that has been in front of a god is the best food there is. So the man who provisioned that table is not a minor functionary. He is running the catering for the most important household in the oldest city in the world, and the god he is cooking for is his own father in the story, and the fish he is catching is going on that table tonight. And the poem says a thing about him that is the hinge of the whole story and that everybody skips. He gave him wisdom, it says. He did not give him eternal life. That is stated at the start, flatly, before anything happens, as a description of the arrangement. He was given understanding, and he was not given endless life, and that was the deal from the beginning and everybody involved knew it. And there is one more version of him, older than the poem we are reading, and I want to mention it because it changes the flavour. There are pieces of a Sumerian text, from a site in the east of that country, that tell a version of this story, and in it some of the details are different. The tone is different. And it is a reminder that this was not one fixed story but a thing people told in more than one way for a very long time before anybody wrote down the version we mostly read. I am not going to build tonight on the fragments, because they are fragments. I mention them so that you know that the tidy little poem I am about to tell you is one telling of something older and messier. Chapter Four. The Broad Sea. So he went out fishing. He went down to the harbour, and he got into the boat, and he pushed off without a punting pole, the poem says, and let the boat go where it went, and he was out on the broad sea. I want you to have that picture for a while, because it is the calmest thing in this season. A flat marshy coast at the head of the gulf. Reed beds. Water that goes from marsh to lagoon to open sea without ever quite deciding. A small boat with one man in it, drifting, doing the temple's fishing, the way he did every week. There is a detail in that line which is easy to read straight past, and it is worth stopping on. He pushed off without a punting pole. In the marshes you move a boat with a pole. You stand in the back and you put the pole down into the mud and you push, and the boat goes, and you have complete control of where it goes and how fast. It is the ordinary way to travel in that country and in places it still is. To push off without the pole is to give that up on purpose. Some scholars read the line as nothing more than a description of a small craft with no gear in it. Others hear something about the man in it, that he was easy enough on that water to go out onto it the way you would lie down on your own bed. Either way, the picture the words make is a man in a boat with nothing at all in his hands, going wherever the water was going, in the shallow warm sea at the top of the gulf, doing his job. And the job was fishing for a temple. That is a real occupation and we know a good deal about it, because temples in that country kept accounts, and the accounts survive, and they are extremely boring, which is exactly why they are trustworthy. A temple was a household. It had a god living in it, and the god was fed, twice a day, every day, with real food on a real table, and somebody had to bring the food. There were bakers on the rolls, and brewers, and herdsmen, and gardeners. And there were fishermen. So this is not a man who went fishing one afternoon. This is a man whose whole working life was to go out on that water and come back with what the god would eat that evening, and then to do it again the next day, and the next, for as long as he was able to lift a net. Picture the mornings of that. The flat light before the sun is properly up. The reeds standing black against a sky the colour of the inside of a shell. The water so still that the boat looks like it is sitting on the sky rather than on anything wet. Herons in the shallows doing the thing herons do, which is nothing whatsoever, for a very long time, extremely well. He would have known that water the way you know the way from your bed to your door in the dark. Where the channel narrows. Where the mud comes up under you. Which reed beds hold fish in the cool season and which ones go quiet. Where you can hear the gulf out past the last of the marsh, sounding different from the river. And on the day this story is about, none of that knowledge was any use to him, because there was nothing wrong. It was calm. It was ordinary. It was the kind of day you do not remember afterwards and would never have remembered, except for what happened at the end of it. Let that be the picture for a little while. The boat with no pole in it. The man lying back in it with his hands empty. The water going nowhere in particular and taking him along with it. The temple behind him on its platform out over the water, and the fish not caught yet, and the whole long afternoon still in front of him. Nothing in this scene is going to hurt anybody. I told you that at the start and I meant it. What is coming is a squall, and a swim, and a very bad temper. And then the South Wind came. Chapter Five. The Word That Broke a Wing. And before it happens, one thing about winds in that country, because we are about to break one and you should know what you are breaking. They had four of them, and they were not weather in the way we mean weather. They were beings, with directions, and each one had a character, and they turn up all through this literature. The south wind is the one off the water, wet and heavy, and it is the one that brings the moisture and the boats. The north wind is the cold one, the one that comes down off the mountains, and in the flood poem it is the north wind that finally clears the sky. The east wind and the west wind fill out the set, and together the four of them are the corners of the world, and when a god wants to hold something open he stations them at the four corners of a net, which is exactly what happened on the first night of this season. They are also, and this is the part that matters tonight, given as gifts. A grandfather gives four winds to a child to play with. A young god raises seven more and gives them names. So a wind, in this literature, is an object with a will, that can be given away, stationed, harnessed, and named. Which means it is also the kind of thing that can have a wing. The South Wind blew, and it turned him over. That is what happened. The boat went over and he went in the water, and the poem uses a phrase for it that is the best phrase in the whole text. It made him dwell in the house of the fishes. That is where he was. In the house of the fishes. Not drowning, not dying, simply in the water, with the boat upside down, and the catch gone, and a long swim. And I want you to have the geography, because it explains the wind and it explains the boat. That coast is not a coast the way you might picture one. It is the place where two enormous rivers, having come down through a completely flat country for hundreds of miles, arrive at the sea and cannot decide where the edge is. There are reed marshes that go on for days in every direction, with channels through them, and lagoons, and islands made of reed that float. The water is fresh, then brackish, then salt, and the line moves. People lived in that landscape for thousands of years and some still do, in houses built of reed bundles on platforms of reed, with reed boats, and photographs from a century ago look almost exactly like carvings from five thousand years before them. So he is not out on an ocean. He is out in a shallow, hot, glaring, enormous flatness of water and reed, in a small boat, in the middle of the day, on his own. And the wind that matters there is the one off the water, and it comes up fast, and on water that shallow it does not make a swell, it makes a chop, and a chop is what turns a small boat over. And he lost his temper. And what he said is the reason this story exists, and I want to give it to you exactly, because it is four lines long and it is the strangest thing anybody says in this entire season. South Wind, he said. You have blown all your brothers' winds against me. I will break your wing. And as the word left his mouth, the wing of the South Wind broke. Now, hold on to what has just happened, because it is easy to slide past. He did not have a weapon. He did not use a spell, or an incantation, or a ritual, or a god's name. He was angry, in the water, and he said a thing, and the thing became true. That is the same power we have met before in this season. It is the power the young god of Babylon asked for on the first night, when he made them test him by making a garment vanish and come back. It is the power that is written on the tablet that gets stolen and worn on people's chests. The command of the mouth being the same as the state of the world. And here it is, in the hands of a temple caterer, in the water, in a bad mood. And the South Wind, which is a being with a wing, went down and did not get up. Chapter Six. Seven Days. And before the seven days, one small thing about that number, because it has been everywhere this season and tonight is the last time I will point at it. Seven days is not a week in the sense we mean. That country did not run on a seven day cycle for ordinary purposes, though there were days in the month marked out as significant and some of them fall at seven day intervals, and the argument about how that relates to what came later is long and interesting and not for tonight. What seven days is, in these poems, is the standard duration of a complete event. The flood was six days and seven nights. The vigil over a friend's body was six days and seven nights. The test with the loaves was six days and seven nights. And now the wind does not blow for seven days. It is the length of a thing that has run its full course. Not a short time and not for ever. Long enough that it is finished. For seven days the South Wind did not blow over the land. And I want you to feel that, because in that country it is not a curiosity, it is a catastrophe with a slow fuse. The south wind is the wind off the water. It is the one that brings the moisture up from the gulf into that flat hot country. It is what moves the boats up the rivers. It cools the afternoon. And it stopped. Not for an hour. For seven days, in a place where the summer temperature would kill you. And the poem gives those seven days one line and then never comes back to them, which means they are yours, so take them slowly. The first day nobody notices, because a wind that does not blow on one day is only a still day, and still days happen. The second day the fishermen notice, because the boats that go out on that wind are not going anywhere, and the sails hang, and men who intended to be somewhere else are standing on the shore looking at flat water with their hands on their hips, which is what men have always done in that situation and probably always will. By the third day the air over that country has gone dry and hard and very clear, and you can suddenly see much further than you are used to seeing, all the way out to the edge of the marsh where the light shakes. By the fourth day the heat is a problem, because that wind is what moves the air over the reed beds, and without it the water goes glassy and warm and the middle of the day becomes something you sit out rather than work through. By the fifth day it is being talked about in the temple. By the sixth day it has been mentioned in the offering, because that is partly what an offering was for, and somebody has said a careful sentence to the god of the sweet water about how the air has stopped moving and whether anything might be done. And on the seventh day, upstairs, somebody finally asks. Now, is any of that in the poem? Not a word of it. The poem says seven days and stops, and I have just built a week out of one line, and I want to be honest that I have done it. But it is the right kind of building, because that is exactly the sort of gap this literature leaves on purpose. The line is there so that you will feel the length of it. Nobody who first heard this poem needed to be told what a week of dead air over those marshes was like. They had been in it. The poem could say seven days and stop, and the whole room would supply the heat and the flat water and the boats not going out. You are the room now. So lie there and let it be seven windless days on a hot flat coast a very long time ago, with nothing at all happening, and nobody in any danger. And upstairs, the sky god noticed. He said to his minister: why has the South Wind not blown over the land for seven days? And the minister said: my lord, Adapa, the son of the god of the sweet water, has broken the wing of the South Wind. And the sky god heard it and rose from his throne and said: bring him to me. And now I owe you the Egypt story, because I promised it at the start of the night. In the fourteenth century before the year one, there was a pharaoh who moved his capital. He built a completely new city on a bare site on the east bank of the Nile, and he lived in it, and then he died, and his successors abandoned it, and it was never built over. Which means that when it was finally dug, in the eighteen eighties and after, the archive was still there. And the archive is the foreign correspondence of the Egyptian court. Letters from kings of other countries. Letters from vassals in the Levant asking for troops. Letters about gold and marriages and grain, hundreds of them, and they are the single best window anybody has into how that whole world talked to itself. And they are not in Egyptian. They are in Akkadian, in cuneiform, on clay, because Akkadian was the language of international correspondence across that entire region, the way French was in Europe for two centuries. A king in Egypt wrote to a king in Anatolia in the language of Babylon, and both of their scribes had to learn it. And if your scribes have to learn it, you need teaching material. So in among the letters there are school texts. Word lists. Exercises. And a small number of literary pieces, used the way a language class uses a short story. And one of them is tonight's poem. That is how we have a copy of a Mesopotamian myth from the fourteenth century before the year one: an Egyptian scribe was learning Akkadian and this was on the syllabus. The other pieces we have come from the great library in the north, seven hundred years later. So we have a homework copy from Egypt and a library copy from Assyria, and between them, in fragments, a poem that was clearly known everywhere and for a very long time. And I want to say one thing about the relationship between those two, because the poem calls it a father and a son and that is not quite what it is. The god of the sweet water made him. That is what the texts say. He is described as the son of that god and also as his creation, and both at once, and the literature does not treat those as different claims. And what he was made for is service. He is the one who provisions the temple. He was given understanding so that he could do that well. So this is not a father giving his boy advice about a job interview. This is a maker briefing the thing he made, before it goes into a situation it was not designed for, using knowledge the thing does not have. And when it goes wrong, the son does not blame him. That is the part I keep returning to. He stands in front of the highest god there is, having just refused eternal life, and he is asked why, and his answer is four words long. My father told me to. There is no resentment in it anywhere. He is not complaining. He is explaining. He did what he was told by the person who made him and who had never been wrong before, and he says so, and the poem does not give him a second thought about it. Chapter Seven. What His Father Told Him. And now the god of the sweet water, who knows everything, and who has thought his way out of every situation in this literature for eleven episodes, sits his man down and coaches him. And the coaching is detailed, and it is practical, and every single piece of it works. And before the words themselves, the clothes, because the clothes are half the plan and they are easy to skim past. Mourning in that world was something you wore and something you did to your body, and it was legible across a room. You let your hair down and left it uncombed. You put off the clean bright garment and put on a dark one, or a rough one, or in some texts you tore what you were wearing. You did not oil your skin. You sat lower than usual. Every one of those is the reverse of what a person did when they were presenting themselves properly, and that is exactly the point. Grief was shown by undoing the ordinary care of yourself, in public, where it could be seen. So the instruction is not go up and mention that you are sad. The instruction is arrive at the highest door in existence deliberately looking like a man who has had a death in the house, and let the two gods at that door ask you about it. He is going to be asked. That is the whole design. Nobody stands at a gate in torn clothes with their hair down and is not asked. And there is a second thing in the design that I love, which is that his father does not tell him to lie. Look at it closely. Every single word he is coached to say is true. Two gods have vanished from the land. That is a fact, and everyone in that country knew it, and there were festivals about it. Which two? These two. Also a fact. He is not tricking anybody. He is walking up to two gods who are absent for part of every year and saying, out loud, in the proper clothes, that their absence was noticed. That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick. It is a courtesy paid so exactly that it works like one. And now the words, which the poem gives in full, and which you are going to hear twice tonight, so there is no need to hold on to any of it. Here is what he tells him. Let your hair go. Do not comb it, do not tie it. Put on a mourning garment, the clothes of somebody who has had a death. When you go up the road to heaven, you will come to the gate. And at the gate there are two gods standing, and their names are Dumuzi and Gizzida. They will look at you and they will say: young man, for whom do you look like this? For whom are you dressed in mourning? And you will say: two gods have vanished from our land, and that is why I am dressed like this. And they will say: who are the two gods who have vanished from the land? And you will say: Dumuzi and Gizzida. And they will look at each other, and they will smile, and they will speak well of you to the sky god, and they will show you a kind face. That is the first half, and it is a compliment delivered as a mourning, and it is one of the most charming pieces of advice in the literature. Go up in black, and when the two gods at the door ask who you are grieving for, tell them it is them. And then the second half. When you stand before the sky god, they will bring you the bread of death. Do not eat it. They will bring you the water of death. Do not drink it. They will bring you a garment. Put it on. They will bring you oil. Anoint yourself with it. And do not forget the instructions I have given you. Hold on to the words I have spoken. And I want to say who those two at the gate actually are, because it makes the advice much better than it first appears. One of them is the shepherd we spent two whole nights on, the one who was sitting under the apple tree in his best clothes, and who was taken, and whose sister offered half of every year to get him out. And the other is a god of the same kind, associated with vegetation and with the year turning, and in some texts he is a serpent god and in some he is a doorkeeper, and the two of them are frequently paired. They are both gods who go away and come back. That is what they have in common and that is why they are standing at that particular door. So the advice is this. When you get to the gate of heaven, you will meet two gods whose entire nature is that they disappear for part of every year and are mourned while they are gone. And you should tell them that you are in mourning for two gods who have vanished from the land. And when they ask which two, you say their names. It is not flattery. It is the single most precisely aimed compliment in this literature. He is telling the two gods who spend half their existence being absent that somebody down on earth noticed they were gone and put on mourning clothes about it. Of course they smile. Of course they take him in. Chapter Eight. The Gate. Before the gate, the going up. The poem gives it about as much room as I just did. He took the road to heaven, and he went up to heaven, and when he had come up to heaven he approached the gate. That is the whole journey. Four clauses and he is there. And I think that is worth sitting with for a moment, because a later literature would have made an epic out of exactly that stretch, and this one does not even slow down for it. There is no ordeal on the way. Nothing tests him. There are no guardians to argue past, no rivers to cross, no counting of doors. He does not earn the ascent and he does not survive it. He simply goes, the way you would walk up a road out of a town, and at the top of the road there is a gate, and there are two people standing at it. Nobody in this literature does that. Think of the nights we have already had. A king who went to the ends of the earth to find one man and could not stay awake for a week. A goddess who went down and had to give up something at every one of seven doors. A man who tried to fly up on the back of an eagle and lost his nerve looking down. Going between the levels of that world is the hardest thing anybody attempts, and it usually fails, and it always costs. And here a fisherman from Eridu walks up in mourning clothes and is let in. The reason, as far as anybody can tell, is that he was not going. He was sent for. The difference between climbing and being summoned is the whole difference, and it is why the poem does not bother to dramatize the road. When you are called upstairs, the stairs are not the story. So let the going up be slow and easy in your head, because there is nothing in it to hold on to. A man on a road, in a dark garment, with his hair loose and uncombed and moving a little in the air. The country falling away behind and below him and gradually not mattering. The light changing to the kind of light you get in the last hour, where everything is the colour of the inside of a lamp. And a gate at the top of it, standing open, with two figures beside it who have been standing there a long time. And now the thing I want you to notice about what happens at that gate, which is that you have already heard it. You heard it in the last chapter. Every line of the conversation that is about to take place was told to him in advance by his father, word for word, and now it happens, word for word, and the poem does not shorten it. It does not say and it went as he had been told. It writes the whole exchange out again with nothing changed. That is not the poem being lazy. That is how this literature works, and it is the single most restful thing about it. These poems were made to be heard. And when a thing matters, it is said in advance and then said again when it happens, and sometimes said a third time when somebody reports it to somebody else. The listener is never asked to hold anything in their head. The poem does the holding for them. Which means that if you drifted off during the advice, you are about to get all of it again, and you have lost nothing, and that was the arrangement from the beginning. So here it is, for the second time, happening. And he went up. The road to heaven, the poem says, and he took it, and he came to the gate. And there were two gods standing at it, and they were Dumuzi and Gizzida. And they looked at him and said: young man, for whom do you look like this? For whom are you dressed in mourning? And he said: two gods have vanished from our land, and that is why I am dressed like this. And they said: who are the two gods who have vanished from the land? And he said: Dumuzi and Gizzida. And they looked at each other, and they smiled. Every single word of it happened exactly as his father said it would. The question, in the same words. The answer, in the same words. The follow up question, in the same words. And the smile. And they took him in, and they spoke well of him. And this is the part I love. The two gods at the gate of heaven, who have just been told by a stranger that he is in mourning for them, are pleased. Not suspicious. Not offended at being told they are dead. Pleased that somebody noticed. And they went in with him and put in a word for him. Chapter Nine. Before the Sky God. And I want you to see the room he is walking into, because we have been in it before this season and it is worth remembering what it is like. It is the hall of the sky god. He is the oldest and the highest, and his name simply is the sky, and he sits above the great gods, the same body that has appeared in almost every episode of this season, though this poem names no assembly of them in the room tonight. They are the ones who decided that a death was owed after the Bull of Heaven. They are the ones who sat in silence with their lips closed when nobody would face the sea. They are the ones who will refuse, one after another, to go up a mountain after a bird. And into that room walks a caterer from a temple in the marshes, in mourning clothes he was told to put on, having correctly guessed the names of two gods at the door. He is the only human being in this entire season who is brought into that room alive and gets to speak. That is worth sitting with. A mortal stands before the sky god in heaven and answers a question, and it is a man who was in a fishing boat that morning. And say a word about the one on the seat at the top, because he has been mentioned all season and he has barely appeared. His name is the word for sky. Not a sky god with a separate name who happens to govern the sky. The name is the thing. When a scribe wrote that name he was writing heaven, and when he put the sign for god in front of it he was writing the god who is heaven, and the two uses sit side by side in the same texts. He is the oldest of them and the highest, and the striking thing about him in the poems is how rarely he does anything. He does not fight. He does not travel. He does not come down. He is the one the others go up to, and he sits, and he is appealed to, and now and then he decides. You have heard him in this house without much noticing. When the goddess wanted a bull to send against a king, she went up to him and demanded it and he gave in. When a bird stole the tablet, he was the one who had to be asked what to do. He is the ceiling of that world. Things stop with him. And his house has a gate, and the gate has two doorkeepers, and beyond the gate is a hall, and in the hall the sky god sits, and hears whoever has been sent for. Picture that hall the way the poem lets you, which is barely at all. It does not describe it. There is no throne described, no light described, no scale given. That is normal for this literature and it is worth knowing, because we are used to being shown the room. These poems almost never show you the room. They tell you who is in it and what was said. Which leaves the room to you. So make it what you like, and make it quiet. High walls, or no walls. A floor you cannot hear a footstep on. A long soft light with no source you can point at. Gods standing about in it, not menacing, mostly bored, the way any body of officials is bored until the interesting item comes up the list. And the interesting item tonight is a fisherman. And the sky god said: come here, Adapa. Why did you break the wing of the South Wind? And Adapa said: my lord. I was fishing in the middle of the sea for the house of my master. The sea was like a mirror. And the South Wind blew and turned me over, and made me dwell in the house of the fishes. And in the anger of my heart, I cursed it. The sea was like a mirror. That is his defence and it is the loveliest line in the poem. It was completely flat. There was no reason for it. It was calm and then it was not, and I was in the water, and I lost my temper. And the two gods at his side spoke for him, and said a good word. And the sky god's mood changed. And the poem says he became quiet, and then he said, and this is the turn of the whole story: Why did the god of the sweet water disclose to an impure human being the plan of heaven and earth? And I want to stop on that word, impure, because it is not an insult in the way it sounds in English. Purity in that world is not about morals. It is a technical condition, like being earthed or not earthed. There are things that make you fit to approach a god and things that make you unfit, and they are physical and procedural: washing, clothing, what you have touched, what you have eaten, whether the correct words have been said over you. Priests were purified before they went in. Objects were purified before they were used. There is an entire ritual called the washing of the mouth that turns a made object into a thing that can act. So when the sky god says impure human, he is not saying wicked. He is saying: this one has not been through the procedure. He is not qualified to be up here. And that is exactly what makes the situation so awkward, and why the sky god's mood changes rather than hardens. He is looking at somebody standing in his hall who should not be able to be standing in his hall, who got here because somebody gave him understanding he was not supposed to have, and who has just given a completely reasonable account of himself. The problem is not that he is bad. The problem is that he is unqualified and obviously excellent. He has made him important. He has made a name for him. What can we do for him? Chapter Ten. The Bread of Life. And before the table, one thing about what has just happened in that room, because the poem changes gear and it does it in a single line and it is easy to read past. The sky god was going to kill him. That is what everybody in the scene expected, including his father, which is why the instructions were what they were. A mortal broke a piece of the weather. He was summoned. He was going to be dealt with. And then two gods at the gate smiled at him, and he gave a good answer, and the sky god's mood turned, and the poem marks the turn by having him ask a question rather than pronounce a sentence. Why did the god of the sweet water disclose the plan of heaven and earth to a human being? That is not the question of somebody about to execute anybody. That is the question of somebody who has just realised he is talking to a person who should not be able to hold this conversation, and is now curious. And curiosity is what saves him, and then curiosity is what costs him, because the next thing the sky god does is offer him something nobody had planned for. Bring him the bread of life, said the sky god. Let him eat. And they brought the bread of life to him. And he did not eat. Bring him the water of life, said the sky god. Let him drink. And they brought the water of life to him. And he did not drink. Bring him a garment. And they brought a garment, and he put it on. And I want to point at those last two items, because they are not consolation prizes and they are the reason the ending is not a humiliation. Giving somebody a garment, in that world, is an act with a specific meaning. It is what you do when you take somebody into your household or your service or your protection. Kings gave garments. Temples gave garments. The word for it turns up in administrative documents about appointments. To be clothed by somebody is to be attached to them. And more than that. We can be fairly precise about what being clothed by somebody meant, because that gesture turns up all over the written record of that world and it is never casual. A king clothes an official when he appoints him. A temple clothes a priest when he takes up his office. In the letters between courts, robes travel back and forth as gifts, and everybody involved understands exactly what a robe means and how much it means, and there are complaints when the robe sent is not good enough. To be dressed by a superior is to be placed. It says this one is mine, and everyone can see it from across the room, because it is on him. And oil on the skin is the same kind of act. Anointing is how you mark somebody as consecrated, or as installed, or as belonging. So the sky god offers him four things, and he refuses two and accepts two, and the two he accepts are the two that mean you are one of ours. He goes home mortal, and he goes home in a garment given to him by the highest god there is, with that god's oil on him. Bring him oil. And they brought oil, and he anointed himself. And there is a symmetry in that room that the poem never points at, and I think it is the best thing in the whole story. This is a man who lays a table. That is his job, every day of his life. He bakes the bread and he catches the fish and he sets them out on a table in front of somebody who is greater than he is, and then he stands back, and then he clears it away, and then he does it again tomorrow. And now he is upstairs, and somebody else has done the baking, and somebody else has carried it in, and somebody else has set it down in front of him. For the first and only time, he is the one at the table. And he will not eat. And the sky god looked at him and laughed. I want to be careful here, because the word can be read more than one way, and the way you read it decides how the whole night lands. It can be the laugh of somebody who has just watched a trick work. It can be the laugh of a man who is genuinely delighted and a bit amazed. It can be, and I think in the sound of the line it is, the laugh of somebody who has been outmanoeuvred by an underling he rather likes, and who has decided not to mind. He does not take the garment back. He does not undo the anointing. He does not punish anybody, not the fisherman and not the god who coached him. He asks the question, he hears the answer, and he sends him home. Come, Adapa, he said. Why did you not eat, and why did you not drink? Now you will not live. And Adapa said: my father told me not to eat and not to drink. And the sky god said: take him and send him back down to his earth. Chapter Eleven. Kind or Cruel. And before the argument, I want to be precise about what he was actually offered, because the poem is precise and the translations vary. He was offered the food of life and the water of life. Those are not vague. They are a matched pair, and if you were here two nights ago you have already seen them used. Two small creatures made out of the dirt under a god's fingernails went down through seven gates carrying exactly those two things, a plant of life and a water of life, and they sprinkled them on a corpse hanging from a peg, and the corpse got up. That is what they do. They are the standard equipment for undoing death, and we watched them work. So when the sky god says bring him the food of life and the water of life, he is not offering an abstraction. He is offering the same two substances that took a dead goddess off a wall in this house two nights ago, and they are on a table in front of him. And he did not touch them, because his father said not to. And there is the argument, and it has been going for a hundred and fifty years, and I am going to lay it out for you as fairly as I can and then not settle it, because the tablets do not settle it. Here is the question. The god who coached him is the god of wisdom. He knows things. He is, in every other story in this literature, the one who sees the way out and takes it. Did he know? Reading one. He did not know. He assumed, reasonably, that a mortal summoned to heaven for breaking part of the weather was going to be executed, and that what they would put in front of him would be the food of death, and he told him not to touch it. He was trying to save his life, and the sky god changed his mind, and by the time the bread on the table was the bread of life the instructions were already out of date. Under this reading it is a tragedy of timing and everybody meant well. Reading two. He knew exactly. He is the god who does not want humans to have what the gods have, and this is the same god who in another poem saves one man from a flood and lets everybody else drown, and he sent his own servant up to heaven with a set of instructions engineered to make sure that the one human being who might have been offered eternal life would politely decline it. Under this reading it is the coldest thing anybody does in this literature. And the tablets do not tell us. There is no line where he explains himself. There is no line where he is confronted about it. The poem simply has him give the advice, and the advice turns out to be wrong, and it ends. The red team on my desk for this season says, and I agree with it, do not decide for the tablets whether he was kind or cruel. So I will not. Both readings are available, both have been held by serious people for a century, and the honest thing at one in the morning is to hand you the fork and let you take whichever branch you like. I will say one thing that is not an answer but that I think about. He followed the instructions. Every part of them. He got the hair right and the clothes right and the two gods at the gate right and the answer right and the smile right. Five things out of six, and every one of them worked exactly as promised, and the sixth thing was wrong, and the sixth thing was the one that mattered. That is what it is like to be given advice by somebody wiser than you, and it is true whether they meant well or not. And there is one more thing I want to give you before the end, and it is the afterlife of this man, and it is my favourite fact about him. He did not stay in a poem. His name turns up in the practical literature, the incantations, the things that were actually said over people. When somebody was ill, there were formulas to be recited, and a number of them invoke the sages, and some of them invoke him by name, and the logic is straightforward: he is the one who was given understanding, he is the first of the seven, and if you want a word to work then you say it in his name. There is a class of texts where the person performing the ritual identifies himself with him. The exorcist says, in effect, I am not doing this on my own authority. The words I am saying are the words of the sage. He is the one speaking. So a man in a house, several thousand years after this poem was written, standing over somebody with a fever, would say a formula that began by putting the fisherman's name in front of it. The one who broke the wing of the south wind with a word became the name you used when you needed a word to work. And there is a last thing about the ending that I want to give you, because it is not the one anybody expects and it took me a long time to arrive at. He was right. Not right about the food. He was wrong about the food, and it cost him, and he knew it about four seconds after the sky god started laughing. But look at the whole shape of his life as the poem gives it. He was given understanding and not eternal life, and the poem tells you that at the very start, as a description of the arrangement, before anything happens. So the question of whether he could have had eternal life is a question the poem already answered in its second paragraph. He could not. That was never available. What happened in the sky god's hall is a scene about a man being offered something he had already been told was not his, by somebody who had just been surprised into offering it. And he said no, because his father told him to, and his father was the one who had given him understanding in the first place. He behaved, from the beginning to the end, exactly as the person he had been made to be. He was given wisdom and he used it, and what wisdom told him to do was to follow his instructions, and the instructions were wrong on the last item. That is not a fall and it is not a failure. That is the ordinary condition of doing your best with what somebody wiser than you told you, which is the condition of almost everybody who has ever lived. Chapter Twelve. The Empty Boat. The lamp is low now. He went home. That is the last thing in the story. He was sent back down to his earth. Not punished, not cursed, not diminished. Sent home, in the garment they gave him, with the oil on him, mortal. And there is one more piece of tablet, a fragment, and on it the story ends differently, or ends further, and I promised you the fork and this is part of it. On that fragment the lines are damaged, but the sky god seems to settle something on him, and in some readings it concerns his city of Eridu. Then the lines turn to the harm and the sickness brought upon people, and to a healing goddess called Ninkarrak, whose bandages will soothe it. After that the tablet goes on, broken, and we lose it. Which means that in that copy the story does not simply stop with a man losing eternal life. It turns toward healing, toward the kind of words you would say over somebody who was ill, though nothing on that fragment says that anybody called on Adapa himself. The story of the first of the sages, who baked the bread and did the fishing, turns in that copy toward a sickbed. And I find that a better ending, and I am not certain it is the true one, and both are on clay. And one more thing about the ending, and then I will let you go. We do not have all of it. I said at the start that this poem is in pieces, and it is worth being honest about how many pieces and how big the gaps are, because it changes what you should do with the argument you just heard. What we have in Akkadian is several fragments, of different lengths, from Egypt and from Mesopotamia, and they do not join up cleanly. The Egyptian reading copy comes from the thirteen hundreds before our era. Much later pieces were found in the royal libraries at Nineveh, and not every surviving fragment has a known place of discovery. They give us parts of the beginning and of the end and a certain amount that overlaps. In between there are lines missing, and at the edges there are lines missing, and the last part breaks off. So when scholars argue about whether the god of wisdom was saving him or ruining him, they are arguing about a text with holes in it. Some of what looks like a deliberate silence in the poem may simply be a piece of clay that is not there any more. I do not say that to take anything away from tonight. I say it because it is the truest thing about this whole literature and it belongs at the end of the season's gentlest night. Everything we have from that world came out of the ground broken. Every poem in this house, every night of it, arrived as fragments, and somebody sorted them, and somebody guessed at the joins, and somebody wrote a careful footnote saying that this line is uncertain. The confidence you hear in any retelling, mine included, is standing on top of a great deal of patient uncertainty, and the people who did that patient work are the ones who deserve the credit for there being a story here at all. And that is a strangely comfortable thought to sleep on, I think. Because it means the story survived anyway. Broken, incomplete, copied by a bored student in the wrong country, filed in a library that burned, dug up in bits, and still here, still arguing with itself about whether a fisherman was tricked, three and a half thousand years after somebody first pressed it into wet clay. So think of it, wherever you are lying. There is a harbour at the oldest city in the world, in the marshes, at the head of the gulf, in the evening. The temple is out over the water on its platform, on the same square of ground where somebody put up a one room shrine seven thousand years before, and where their descendants will keep rebuilding it for four thousand years after. And there is a boat tied up, empty, with the water moving under it. And I will tell you what happened to that place, because it is the last thing and it is a quiet one. Eridu did not last. It was the first and it was not the biggest, and over the centuries the water changed. The shoreline moved. The marshes that fed it shifted, and the channels silted, and the wells went brackish, and the people went where the water was. By the time the great library up north was copying this poem, Eridu had been more or less empty for a very long time. It was a memory. It was the place everything started, in the stories, and it was a mound in the desert with a temple on it that nobody had used in centuries. And they still built there. Kings still came and restored the temple, or said they had, because being the one who repaired the oldest shrine in the world was worth saying. There is a ziggurat on that mound that was left unfinished. So the last picture of tonight has an extra layer in it, and I have been keeping it back. The harbour with the empty boat is a harbour that would eventually have no water in it. The temple over the water is a temple that would eventually stand in sand. And the man walking up from the boat to bake the bread in the morning is doing a job that would be done there, in that spot, by somebody, for another three thousand years, and then not. And the poem about him was copied out by a schoolboy in Egypt and by a scholar in Nineveh, in two different countries, hundreds of years apart, after his own city had gone quiet. He is back. He has been to the gate of heaven and stood in front of the sky god and been offered the bread of life and said no thank you, politely, because his father told him to, and now he is home and he will bake the bread in the morning. The south wind is blowing again. It came back when the wing healed, or when somebody fixed it, and the poem does not say, and the marshes are moving the way they move when there is wind off the water, and it is cool for the first time in a week. 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 like a mirror, and a man in a boat on it, before any of it happened. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we go back down. Three episodes ago a goddess went down through seven gates and was killed and was brought back by two small creatures who were kind to the queen of the dead while she was in pain. And I said at the time that the queen was the second most important person in those two nights, and that she never goes anywhere, and that there was a rule about it that we would come to. Tonight is her story. Tonight is how she got married. And I want to tell you at the start what kind of story this is, because it is not the one you would expect from that description. It is not a romance and it is not an abduction, though it has been called both. It is a story about somebody who has never been invited anywhere, and a party she cannot attend, and a god who is rude to her messenger, and what happens when he is sent down to apologise. And there are two versions of it, from two different centuries, and they are so different in tone that scholars write whole articles about the gap between them. In one he goes down and seizes her. In the other he goes down and stays six days and then runs away in the morning while she is asleep, and she wakes up and finds the bed empty and cannot find him anywhere, and what she does about that is the centre of the night. I am going to tell you both, and I am going to tell you which is which. 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 seven gates. If so, welcome back, and you already know the house we are going to. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome, and all you need to know is that there is a place under the ground where everybody goes eventually, and it has a queen, and she is lonely. 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 two tablets side by side, and they are not the same size, and one of them is much longer than the other. Same story, he says. Different rooms. 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. Ereshkigal, whom you have met. Nergal, who is the one who is sent down. And Namtar, who is her minister, and who does all the actual work in this story, and who nobody ever thanks. 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. Nobody dies. There is a threat made in the middle of the night, one line long, and it is the most alarming sentence in this entire season, and it is not carried out and it was never going to be, and I will tell you so at the time. And there is a marriage in it, and this house tells that the way it tells everything, which is to say with a closed door and a description of the morning after, and nothing at all in between. 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. Chapter One. The Party She Could Not Come To. And before the party, I want to put her in front of you properly, because we have met her twice in this house and both times through somebody else's eyes. The first time was in a dying man's dream. A young man in a bed in Uruk described a house of dust where everybody goes, and said that in the middle of it there was a queen seated, with a scribe kneeling in front of her reading from a tablet. That is all we got. A figure on a chair in a room full of dust, being read to. The second time was through her sister, who came down uninvited and lied at the door and was stripped at seven gates and killed and hung on a peg. And in that poem she is the one who gives the order. She slaps her thigh and bites her lip and instructs the doorman, and then the seven judges fasten on her sister the eye of death, and she is, for most of that story, the immovable fact at the bottom of the stairs. And then, near the end of it, two small creatures find her lying in the dark in pain with nobody to talk to, and say her own words back to her, and she softens immediately and gives them what they ask for. That is the last thing we saw her do. Somebody was kind to her once and she handed over a body off her own wall. Tonight is her episode, from the inside, and everything in it follows from that one fact: she is somebody nobody visits. And since we are going to spend the night in her house, let me give you the house properly, because we have only ever had glimpses of it and they were all from people who were frightened. The fullest description in the literature comes from that dream, the one the dying man had in Uruk, and it goes like this. There is a road that goes down, and it goes to a house that people go into and do not come out of. To the road whose road does not come back. To the house whose people are deprived of light. Where dust is their food and clay is their bread. They are clothed like birds, with wings for garments. They sit in the dark and never see the light. That is the description, and it has been quoted for a hundred and fifty years as the bleakest thing in ancient literature, and I want to take it apart a little, gently, before we go down there for the night. First: it is a dream. A frightened, feverish young man dreamed it while he was dying, and the poem is careful to say so. It is not a survey. It is what somebody's fear looked like at three in the morning. Second: it is a house. Not a pit. Not a furnace. Not a place of punishment, and there is no fire in it anywhere, and nothing in that literature says that anybody goes there because they deserved to. Everybody goes. The king goes, and the priest goes, and the person who was kind their whole life goes, and they all get the same dust. It is not just, and it is not unjust. It is simply where the road ends. And third, and this is the part that matters tonight: it has a household. There is a doorkeeper on the gate with a name. There are seven gates with seven bolts and somebody to draw them. There are judges who sit. There is a scribe who kneels in front of the throne and reads out what has been recorded, which means there are records, which means somebody keeps them. There is a minister who goes up and down the stairs. That is not a pit. That is an institution, with staff, and a queen at the top of it, and a great deal of paperwork. And she has been running it since before there was anything to run it for. Her name says what she is. It means, as closely as the words will go over, the lady of the great earth, or the lady of the great place, and the great earth is the earth underneath, which is not a metaphor to them and is simply the lower half of a world that has two of them. So she is the lady of downstairs. She has the larger half by population and the smaller half by everything else. And nobody has ever come to see her. The gods held a banquet. That is how it starts, and it starts up in heaven, and everybody who was anybody was invited, and the poem gives you the guest list the way these poems do. And then somebody remembered her. And they sent a message down, and the message is one of the most awkward pieces of writing in this literature, because it is an invitation that is not an invitation, and everybody in the room knew it when they sent it. Here is what it says. We cannot come down to you. You cannot come up to us. So send your messenger, and let him take your portion. Read it again, because everything tonight is in it. They are having a party. She is not able to come, and they are not able to go to her, and that is not rudeness, that is the structure of the universe. She rules a place nobody leaves, and she is somebody, and the rule applies to her as much as to anybody. She has never been up there. She is never going to be up there. So they are doing the correct and considerate thing, which is to send down a portion. They are saving her some of the dinner. And I have thought about that for a long time and I cannot decide whether it is kind or whether it is the loneliest sentence in the season, and I suspect it is both, which is why it is in a poem. And the more I sit with that message the more I think it is the saddest polite sentence ever written down. We cannot come down to you. You cannot come up to us. Both halves are true and neither is anybody's fault. The gods cannot go down there because going down there is the one journey with no return leg, and it applies to them too, which is the entire plot of an earlier episode this season. And she cannot come up because she is the queen of a place nobody leaves and the rule does not make an exception for the person in charge. So there is a permanent, structural, unfixable separation between her and everybody she is related to, and once a year or however often it is, they have a dinner and send her down a plate. She sent her minister up to collect it. Chapter Two. Everybody Stood Up. And before he goes up, one thing about what he is carrying, because it is easy to miss what the errand actually is. He is going up to fetch a plate of food. That is the whole mission. The gods are having a banquet, his mistress cannot attend, they have sent word that a portion is being kept for her, and he is going up the longest staircase in the universe to collect it and bring it back down so that she can eat some of the same dinner they are eating, on her own, in her own house, afterwards. That is not a diplomatic mission. It is a takeaway. And every single god in that room stood up for him. Which tells you they understood what it was. They knew exactly what that errand meant and who it was for and what it cost her to have to send somebody, and they rose, all of them, because the least you can do for a queen who cannot come to dinner is to be on your feet when her servant walks in to collect her portion. His name is Namtar, and he is her vizier, and he is the one who goes up and down and carries messages and does the actual business of that household, and if there is a working person in this story it is him. And I want to give you that staircase, because it is a real piece of the architecture of that universe and it turns up in more than one poem. They imagined the world as a stack. There is the sky above, and there is the earth, and underneath the earth there is the fresh water, and underneath that there is the land of the dead. And the levels are connected. There is a way up and a way down, and in this poem it is a stairway, a long one, described as the long stairway of heaven, and it goes from the gate of the underworld all the way up to the gate of the sky god. And the thing I like about it is who uses it. Not the gods. The gods, in this poem, do not go up and down that staircase. It is used by messengers. It is used by staff. It is the service stair, and the only characters we ever see on it are viziers carrying things between two households that cannot visit each other. And I want to say a word about what a vizier was, because the word we use for it carries the wrong furniture with it. In that world the great households all had one. A temple had one. A palace had one. A god had one. It is the person who stands slightly behind and slightly to the side, who knows where everything is, who says the words their master has given them to say, and who goes and does the thing. They are not advisors, exactly. They are the hands and the voice. When a god sends a message in these poems, a vizier carries it. When something has to be arranged, a vizier arranges it. Most of the actual events in this literature are performed by somebody whose name you would not be able to recall an hour later. And the queen of the dead has one, and his name is Namtar, and he has a second job that makes him one of the more unsettling minor characters in that whole world. His name means something close to fate, in the specific sense of the fate that is allotted to you, and in the medical and magical texts he is the one who is blamed when a person sickens. He is invoked in incantations. He is the thing you ask to be turned away from a house. He is, in that language, roughly what people mean when they say a person was taken. And in this poem, that figure, the one whose name people said over the beds of the sick, spends the entire story going up and down a staircase collecting a plate of food and delivering messages and being sent back out again to look one more time. I find that enormously reassuring and I want to say why. The gods in this literature are not distant. They have jobs. They have staff. They have errands that do not go well and messages that are awkward to deliver. The being who was the fear at the edge of every illness in that world is, in this poem, a man doing his rounds, going up the long stairs one more time because his mistress asked him to. Nothing in the dark is only dark. Everything in there also has a day job. And he went up the long stairway of heaven. And when he came in, the gods stood up. All of them. The short version says they rose, every one, in respect, because he came in the name of the queen of the great earth, and to disrespect her messenger would be to disrespect her. Every single one of them stood up. Except one. Chapter Three. The One Who Did Not Stand. And before we get to him, one thing about the room he was sitting in, because the poem assumes it and it is worth having. The gods of that world hold assemblies. Constantly. It is the single most frequent scene in this entire literature and you have watched it happen half a dozen times this season. They met to decide who would face the sea, and they got drunk first and made a young god king at the table. They met to decide which of two friends would die, and one of them was asleep at the time and dreamed it. They met to decide who would go up the mountain after the bird, and everybody said no in the same words. They met to hear a complaint about a city and its king. That is how that universe is governed. Not by decree from a single throne. By a body that convenes, and argues, and votes, and can be embarrassed. Which is why the failure to stand up matters so much. In an assembly, standing when somebody's representative comes in is not a courtesy. It is the recorded position of the house. He did not abstain quietly. He sat, in a room where everybody else was standing, and everybody saw. And he went back down, and he told her. My lady, he said. The gods stood up for me. All of them. Except one. One god did not rise. He stayed in his seat. That is the short version. In the long one the gods all knelt to the minister, and the one who would not kneel stood. And I want to give you Namtar properly, because he is the most overworked character in this season and nobody has ever put him on a poster. His name means fate, or the decree, and in the wider literature he is the one who carries out the sentence. He is the queen's minister and her enforcer and, in the medical texts, the one whose name you say when somebody is dying of something. And what he actually does in this poem is errands. He goes up the stairs. He collects the food. He comes back down and reports. He is sent up again to make a demand. He comes back down. He is sent up again with a threat to deliver, and he delivers it, in front of the entire assembly of heaven, on behalf of a woman who cannot be there. Then he searches that room for a face he knows, and cannot pick it out, and comes back down with only a description. And he is sent up again. Six trips up and down the longest staircase in the universe, carrying messages between two parties who cannot meet, and at the end of the poem nobody thanks him and he gets no reward and no name in any list, and when the story ends he is presumably still doing it. And she heard that, and the poem says she was furious, and she sent him straight back up with a message, and the message is the plot of the whole night. Bring me that god, she said. Bring me the one who did not stand. Now I want to say something about that, because it is easy to read it as a queen taking offence at a slight, and I do not think that is what the poem is doing. She has never been to their house. She cannot go. The only presence she has up there is the man she sends. He is her whole diplomatic corps, her entire face in that room, the sum total of her participation in the society of the gods. And they all stood up for him except one. Somebody in a room she will never enter did not bother to stand for the only piece of her that will ever be there. So she is not defending her dignity in the abstract. She is defending the only thing she has. And I want to say what it means that they handed him over, because the poem does it in one line and it deserves more. They did not defend him. There is no scene where the assembly debates it. There is no god who stands up and says he is one of us and we do not send our own down there. The demand comes up, and it is a serious demand from a serious quarter, and they look at the situation and they produce him. And what makes it worse, and the poem is quiet about this, is what they are producing him for. Everybody in that room knows what the land of no return is. Everybody in that room has just been reminded, by the invitation, that nobody comes back from it. They are handing a colleague over to a jurisdiction with no appeal and no exit, because he did not stand up at dinner. And the only one who does anything about it is the god of the sweet water, who does not argue either, but who takes him aside on the way out and gives him fourteen diseases and a plan for keeping the doors open. That is the pattern of this whole season, if you want it in one sentence. The assembly agrees to a thing. And then one god goes and quietly arranges for somebody to survive it. Chapter Four. Fourteen at the Gates. And before the fourteen, one more thing about what he had just been asked to do, because the poem is very clear about it and it is the reason he needs an escort at all. He is going down there alive. That is not a normal thing. Everybody else who goes through those gates goes through them dead, and that is the whole design of the place. There is a procedure for arriving and there is no procedure for leaving, and we spent two whole nights on what happens to somebody who tries. So the gods are sending a living god down into a house from which nothing returns, to answer a summons, in person, and every single one of them knows what the odds are, and that is why they are so quick to hand him over and so careful about how they equip him. They are not sending him to a meeting. They are sending him somewhere they expect him to stay. And the gods heard the demand, and they did what a group of people always does when somebody they have wronged asks for one of them. They gave him up. But before they sent him, the god of the sweet water took him aside, because that is what he does, and he equipped him. He gave him fourteen. Fourteen creatures, and the poem names them, and the names are not names in the way we use names. They are conditions. And here they are, as close as anybody can render them, because the names are difficult and translations differ. Fever. Chills. Lightning. The trembler. The one who burns. The one who seizes. The wind. Sudden fever. Convulsion. The one who strikes. The hot one. The one that comes at noon. The one that comes at night. And the one whose name nobody agrees about. Fourteen of them, and every single one is a symptom. That is the thing to notice, and it is the same thing the poem did with the Seven in the last episode of this season, though we have not got there yet. These are not soldiers. They are conditions. They are the list of things that happen to a body when a plague god goes past, given names and sent along as an escort. So the god of plague is going down into the house of the dead with fourteen diseases walking beside him, and they are going to be posted at the doors, two at a time, to hold them open. And I find that a very strange and very exact piece of imagining. The thing that keeps the way out of the underworld open, for the one person who is going to come back up it, is illness. Fourteen of them, and here is the arrangement, and it is the tidiest piece of tactical planning in the season. There are seven gates, and he is going to have to go through all seven, the same seven the goddess went down through, and at each one he is going to be met and stopped. So he stationed them in pairs. Two at each gate. Fourteen creatures, seven gates, two apiece, and each pair holds its own door open so that the way back up stays open behind him. Which means the whole way down, at every level, there are two of them standing in a doorway, waiting. And I want to give you the gates properly, because we went down through seven of them twice in this season and I never told you they had names. They do. In the poems the doorkeeper is named, and in this one the gates themselves are counted off as he goes, and at each one he is challenged and at each one he answers and is let through, and the fourteen he brought are posted as he goes. And I should be honest about what I can and cannot give you there, because I said properly and I meant it. The keepers are named in the text. The gates are counted. But the names are difficult, and the readings differ between the copies, and half of what you would find printed in one translation is a guess that a different translator did not make. So I am not going to recite you a list of seven names and let you believe they are solid, because two of them are not. What I can give you, and what the poem does give, is the going down itself, one gate at a time, and it is the calmest structure in the whole of this literature, and we have been through it twice already this season, so you know the rhythm of it in your body by now. So take it slowly, because there is no hurry anywhere in this and nothing waiting at the bottom that means him any harm. The first gate. A keeper comes out. A challenge, an answer, and the bolt goes back. And two of the fourteen step into the doorway and stand there, and the door does not close behind him. The second gate. The same. A keeper, a challenge, an answer, the bolt. Two more step in and stand. The third gate, and by now the pattern is doing the work for you, because that is what these lists are for. You are not meant to be counting. You are meant to stop counting. Fourth. A keeper, an answer, a door that stays open. Fifth. The same. Sixth. The same, and by this point the poem is not telling you anything new at all, it is only telling you that it is still going, and that there is still further down to go, and that behind him there is now a line of held doors going all the way back up to the daylight. Seventh. And through it, into the courtyard. And there is one detail in the long version that I love. He does not go down as a supplicant. He goes down with the doors being held open behind him, which means that from the moment he sets foot on the stair, every single person down there can see that he has arranged to be able to leave. Which is not something anybody else who has ever come down those stairs has been able to do. Think about how that would look from the bottom. The whole household of the dead watching a god come down through seven gates with a pair of diseases wedged in each doorway behind him, so that the doors cannot close. He did not arrive. He arrived with the exits propped. And I want you to have the picture of that staircase behind him as he steps in, because it is the exact opposite of the descent we watched three nights ago. The goddess went down through the same seven and every one of them shut behind her and took something off her as it went. The crown, then the beads at her neck, then the beads at her breast, then the breastplate, then the ring, then the measuring rod and line out of her hands, and last of all the robe, and she arrived at the bottom with nothing left and no way back. He arrives with everything he came with, and seven open doors behind him, and a pair of fevers standing in each one. Same stairs. Same gates. Same house. One of them was going to be allowed to leave. Chapter Five. The First Telling. Now, the shorter version, and I want to tell it first because it is shorter and older and cruder and because you should hear it before the good one. The short version was found in Egypt. That is the fact I promised you. In a place on the Nile there was an archive of diplomatic letters, from all over the ancient world, written in the language of Mesopotamia because that was what everybody used for international correspondence at the time, the way people used French later. And among the letters there were school texts, used for teaching that language to Egyptian scribes. And one of them is this story. So the way we have the oldest version of tonight's poem is that somebody in Egypt was learning Akkadian, about three and a half thousand years ago, and their homework survived. And in that version it goes like this. He goes down. He goes through the gates. He comes into the room. And he takes her by the hair and pulls her off the throne and onto the ground to kill her. And she weeps. And she says: do not kill me. Be my husband and I will be your wife. I will put the tablet of wisdom in your hand. I will let you be king over the wide earth. You will be lord and I will be lady. And he heard it, and he took her up, and he kissed her, and he wiped the tears off her face. And he said: what you have asked of me these months, it is granted. And that is the end of the short one. I have never liked it much and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is a hundred lines long, it is a school exercise, and it resolves a situation that took four chapters to build with an assault and a proposal in eight lines. But it is the oldest telling and it is honest that this is a story about power, and the longer one, which is far better, does not forget that either. And I should say where those longer tablets came from, because the find is a good story in itself. There is a mound in the south of what is now Turkey, near a village, and in the nineteen fifties archaeologists digging there came on a collection of tablets heaped against the outside wall of a building. Not a palace and not a great state library. The working collection of a family of priests. And what was in that collection is extraordinary. Literary works, rituals, incantations, medical texts, and copies of poems that we either did not have at all or only had in pieces. The long version of tonight's story is one of them. So the reason we have the good version of this poem is that a provincial family in the far north kept a working library, and its tablets ended up in a heap against an outside wall, and the clay survived, and two and a half thousand years later somebody dug it up. And there is one more piece of the Egyptian find that I want to give you, because it is one of the great archaeological accidents and it explains a great deal about how anything survives. That city on the Nile was built once, lived in for about fifteen years, and abandoned. The king who built it had made a religious change that his successors reversed, and when he died they went back to the old capital and back to the old gods, and his city was left. Not destroyed. Left. The population moved out, the buildings were quarried for stone here and there, and the desert came in over the rest of it. Which is the single luckiest thing that could have happened to a document. A city that goes on being lived in gets rebuilt. Floors are dug up. Old rubbish is cleared. Archives get thrown out when they stop being current, and clay tablets, once nobody needs them, are exactly the sort of thing that ends up as fill in somebody's wall. A city that is abandoned in one generation and never reoccupied keeps its rubbish exactly where it was dropped. So the correspondence of an entire imperial court, including the school exercises the junior scribes were working through, sat in the sand for three and a half thousand years because a religious experiment failed and nobody wanted to live there afterwards. And that is why we have the older version of tonight's poem: not because anybody preserved it, but because a whole city was left alone. Chapter Six. Do Not Sit Down. The long version comes from tablets written some seven centuries later, found in the north, and it is several times the length, and it is a different thing entirely. In this one, before he goes down, he is given a briefing, and the briefing is a list of things not to do. The god of the sweet water sits him down and says: When you go down there, do not do the things people do in a house. When they bring you a chair, do not sit down on it. When the baker brings you bread, do not eat the bread. When the butcher brings you meat, do not eat the meat. When the brewer brings you beer, do not drink the beer. When they bring you water for your feet, do not wash your feet. And when she goes to the bath, and puts on her robe, and lets you look at her body, do not look at her as a man looks at a woman. And I want to stop on that list, because it is not arbitrary and it is not squeamishness. Every single item on it is an act of accepting hospitality. Sitting in the chair. Eating the bread. Eating the meat. Drinking the beer. Washing your feet in the water they bring you. Those are the things a guest does, in that world, in every house, and doing them is how you become a guest, and being a guest binds you to the household. To eat in a house is to be of the house. That is not a Mesopotamian idea particularly. It is very close to a human universal, and it survives in the language we still use. We say somebody has been taken in. We say we broke bread with them. Sharing food is the thing that converts a stranger into a guest, and a guest is somebody the household is now responsible for and who is now, in some measure, obliged back. Every culture that has ever written anything down has rules about this, and the rules are always heavy, because the stakes are high in both directions. To feed somebody is to accept them. To refuse to feed somebody is a serious act. And to eat and then behave as though nothing was owed is close to the worst thing a person can do. That is why the rule exists. In that literature, if you eat the food of the dead you belong to the place. It is not a trap laid by anybody. It is how the boundary works. So he is being told: go into that house, and be in it, and accept nothing from it, and come out. And I want to say one more thing about that list before he goes, because there is an item on it that is not like the others and the poem knows it. Five of the six are about accepting service. A chair, bread, meat, beer, water for your feet. Those are all things somebody hands you, and refusing them is difficult and rude and possible. The sixth one is not like that. The sixth one is: when she goes to the bath, and puts on her robe, and lets you see her, do not look at her the way a man looks at a woman. That is not about accepting something. That is about not feeling something, which is not a thing anybody can be instructed to do. And the clever god who gave the list, who has never in this entire season given anybody advice that did not work, must have known that. He got the first five right and the sixth was never going to hold, and I do not think he expected it to. And he went down. And he did not sit in the chair. And he did not eat the bread. And he did not eat the meat. And he did not drink the beer. And he did not wash his feet. And the thing that makes it beautiful rather than merely clever is that the same rule works in both directions. She is not laying a trap. Nowhere in the poem does she try to make him eat. The bread is brought because bread is brought to a guest, and the chair is set out because a chair is set out for a guest, and the water for his feet arrives because that is what arrives, and none of it is a scheme. It is a house doing what a house does when somebody arrives. She is being a good host. That is all. She has almost certainly never had the opportunity before. And he is standing in the middle of her hospitality refusing every single piece of it, item by item, in silence, because he was told to. Sit down, and he will not sit. Eat, and he will not eat. Drink, and he will not drink. Wash, and he will not wash. Imagine being on the other end of that. Imagine the first visitor you have ever had, going through your house declining everything in it. The poem does not say what she thought about that, and I have wondered about it for as long as I have known this story, and I think it is why the sixth instruction was the one that broke. And then she went to the bath. Chapter Seven. Six Days. And before the door closes, I want to say what he had actually been told about her, and what he found instead, because the gap between those two is the whole poem. He was briefed as though he were being sent into a hazard. Do not sit. Do not eat. Do not drink. Do not wash. Do not look at her. Take fourteen diseases with you and post them at the doors so you can get out. That is how you prepare somebody for a hostile environment. Every instruction assumes that the house will try to keep him and that she is the mechanism by which it will do it. And what he found, when he got there, was a woman who had been alone since the beginning of the world, who had sent her servant upstairs to collect a plate of food from a party she was not able to attend, and who was so unused to being treated as somebody that a single act of ordinary rudeness from a stranger at a banquet was enough to make her demand him in person. Nobody warned him about that. There is no instruction on the list for it. You cannot prepare somebody for the possibility that the frightening thing at the bottom of the stairs is lonely. I am going to tell you what the poem says and then I am going to close the door, because that is what this house does. The poem says that she bathed, and that she put on her robe, and that he looked at her the way a man looks at a woman. And they went to bed. And they were together, and the poem counts the days off, one by one, up to six. That is what it says. It says it plainly, once, without any detail at all, and then it moves on, and I am going to do the same. Six days. And there is something in the counting that I did not notice the first three times I read this poem, and once you see it you cannot stop seeing it. All season the measure of a complete thing has been six days and seven nights. The flood ran six days and seven nights. The king sat by his friend's body for six days and seven nights. The test he failed, with the loaves going stale on the mat beside him, was six days and seven nights. That is the shape of a whole event in this literature. It is the full course. It is how you say in that language that a thing ran all the way to its end. And this one counts up to six, and then the clay is damaged. The very next line is broken. The editors restore a seventh day in it, so the count may well have run on to seven, but the number itself is lost. For a long time I read that as the one place all season where the count falls short, broken by a man leaving early. I cannot tell you that now. The gap is in the clay, and a gap in the clay is not a choice anybody made. Six days and seven nights is a phrase you can feel arriving, and here the seventh may well have come, on a line we no longer have. What the clay gives us for certain is six. So let the six be six. There is a house under the ground with a courtyard in it, and a bath, and a bed. The door at the top of the stairs is shut and there is nothing on the other side of it that anybody in there is thinking about. No party. No stairway. No message waiting to be carried anywhere. Two people who have both been alone for a very long time, in a room, for six days, and nothing in the poem about what was said, because the poem does not tell you and neither will I. That is the calmest stretch of this entire season, and it is calm precisely because nothing is happening in it that anybody wrote down. Six days of a door being closed. And I want to say the thing about those six days that the poem does not say and that is sitting underneath all of it. She has never had this. That is what the whole first half of the episode has been telling you. She has never been to a party. She has never been up the stairs. Nobody stands for her except by proxy and one of them did not even do that. And now there is somebody in her house who came down through seven gates to get there, and it is six days. And on the seventh morning he was gone. Chapter Eight. The Seventh Morning. And before he goes, I want to say why he went, because everybody who reads it wants to know, and the poem's own answer is nearly lost. It survives in a single broken line, something about his being away from heaven, and the rest of that line is gone. In what is left, he does not say he was afraid, or that he regretted it. He gets up and he goes, and he tells a lie on the way out. So we are left with the situation, and the situation is this. He was sent down to that house as a defendant, under strict instructions to accept nothing from it, because accepting anything from that house is how you belong to it. And he accepted the largest thing in it. Which means that when he woke on the seventh morning, he was not a visitor who had overstayed. He was somebody who had done the one thing he was told would bind him to the land of the dead, six times over, and who had a staircase behind him with the doors still propped open by fourteen diseases, and who knew that the propping would not last for ever. I think he ran because he understood exactly what he had done and could not face the size of it before breakfast. And then he thought about it for a while and came back, which is the only thing in the poem that redeems the morning. He got up, and spoke to her about going, in lines that are partly lost, and left her sleeping. And at the gate he gave the doorkeeper a message that he said came from her: the visitor from heaven is to leave before daybreak. It was not true. And then he went up the long stairway, and out. And she woke up. And the poem gives us her waking, and it is the reason this version is worth several times the length of the other one. She got up, and bathed, and gave her orders for the day: the visitor from heaven was to eat her bread and drink her beer. And Namtar told her that he had gone before daybreak. And she understood. And I want to give this the room it deserves, because it is the whole reason I put this episode in the season and it is one of the great small scenes in ancient literature. Think about what she is working out, on her throne. She has spent her entire existence in a house nobody visits. The one time a message came from upstairs it was a note explaining that they could not come and neither could she. Her only contact with the rest of the world is a servant who goes up and down a staircase carrying things. And then somebody came down. Not a corpse. Not a delivery. A person, who came down through seven gates on purpose, and stayed. And now she has bathed, and ordered his bread and his beer, and her own minister is telling her he went before daybreak, and she is doing the arithmetic that anybody does in that situation, which is: he planned this. He left in the dark, while I slept, so that he would be a long way off before I worked it out. That is the moment. That is the whole episode. And what she does about it is the reason the poem is several times longer in this version, because in the short one she is a queen who is overpowered and offers a throne, and in this one she is a person who wakes up alone and reacts. And then she cried out like a woman in labour, and the poem says she fell from the throne to the ground, and wept where she fell. And she called for Namtar, who has been doing the work in this story from the first chapter, and she sent him up. And I want to say what those six days actually cost, on both sides, because the poem is not sentimental about it and neither will I be. For her, it is the only week of her existence in which somebody was there. For him, it is a week during which he broke every instruction he was given by the god who was trying to keep him alive, in a house he was told not to accept anything from, with the queen of the dead, while fourteen diseases held the doors open behind him. And at the end of it he did what a great many people do after a week like that, which is to leave quietly before anybody wakes up, and to tell a lie at the gate on the way out. That is not a heroic exit. The poem is not presenting it as one. It is a man getting his sandals and going. Chapter Nine. Find Him. Go up, she said. Go up the long stairway of heaven. Go into the room where they are all sitting. And find him and bring him down. And Namtar went up. And here is where the poem does something extremely clever and slightly funny. He cannot find him. Because the god of the sweet water, who equipped him on the way down, has done one more thing. He has changed him. In some readings he has made him bald, in some he has altered his appearance, and the effect is that Namtar goes into the assembly of the gods, looks along the row, and cannot pick him out. So he goes down and reports that the god is not there. There is only one odd god among them, he says, bald and squinting and lame, sitting with the rest. And she sends him up again. The message he carried up the first time, out loud, to the whole assembly, I have kept for the next chapter, because it is the most alarming sentence in this season, and I told you it was coming and that it was not going to happen. And I want to say what she does in between, because the poem gives it and it is the part that hurts. She sends him up a second time. That is the detail. She hears that description, a bald god, squinting, lame, and she knows at once who it is. Nobody has told her. She simply knows him. Which is a thing people do. She is not stupid. She is the queen of a place where everybody eventually arrives and she has been running it since before there were cities. She even names the trick. The god of the sweet water, she says, has sprinkled him with water to change him. So she sends her servant straight back up the stairs with the plainest order in the poem: go and seize that god, and bring him to me. That is the most human thing anybody does in this entire season, and it is done by the queen of the dead, and the poem does not comment on it at all. And I want to stay with the minister for a moment, because this is the worst day of his working life and nobody in either poem notices. Think about what he is actually being asked to do. He is the one who went up the stairs at the start of all this to fetch a plate of food, and had an entire room of gods honour him, all but one. He is the one who had to go home and report that. He is the one who was sent back up to complain about it. He is the one who was standing there when the offender came down, and he is the one who showed him in. And now he is being sent up that staircase again, in the morning, to walk into the assembly of every god there is, in front of all of them, and ask for the return of the man who spent six days in his mistress's house and left before she woke up. There is no dignified way to run that errand. And he runs it anyway, twice, because that is what he does, and the poem gives him no interior life whatsoever and no line of complaint, and he is on that staircase more than any other character in the story. I have been calling him the working person in this poem and I will say it once more plainly. Every single thing that actually moves in this story is moved by him. The plate of food is carried by him. The insult is witnessed by him. The complaint is delivered by him. The search is run by him, twice. The threat is spoken by him, out loud, in a room full of gods who all know he is only the messenger. He is the reason there is a story at all, and he is never thanked, and I think he should be mentioned at least once in a house where somebody is listening. Namtar. That is his name. Say it before you drift, if you like. And the other thing to see in this chapter is what the gods do, which is nothing. They do not hand him over the first time. They let a servant walk the length of the universe, look along a row of faces, fail to find the one he is looking for, and go home with nothing but a description. And they know. Every one of them knows exactly where the man is sitting, because he is sitting among them, and somebody has arranged for him not to be recognisable. That is not cruelty. It is worse than that in a way, it is convenience. The easiest thing for a room full of gods to do is nothing, and so they do nothing, and a minister goes up and down a staircase twice for no reason. Not even a threat makes them point him out. Chapter Ten. What She Said She Would Do. Here is the message. Give me the god who came down to me. If you do not send him back, I will raise up the dead. I will bring them up, and they will eat the living. And I will make the dead outnumber the living. That is the line, and every single thing that has ever been made out of that idea since, every risen dead thing in every story you have ever been told, is downstream of a sentence like that one, written on clay, a very long time ago. And I want to be clear about why it works, and it is not because it is frightening in the way a monster is frightening. It works because she can do it. Nobody in the poem doubts it. Nobody says she is bluffing. She is the queen of that place and the population of it is everybody who has ever died and the only thing keeping them down there is her keeping them down there, and she has just told the gods that if they do not return one person she will open the door. And the balance of the whole universe in that literature depends on her not doing it. Which means she has, sitting in her lap the entire time, from the first line of the poem, the power to end everything, and she has never used it, and the only thing that ever made her reach for it was somebody slipping away while she slept. And you may have heard words like these before, in this house, three nights ago, and if you did, I owe you a correction. I want to be exact about it, because it is the best thing in the season and I have been waiting for it since the seven gates. They are not in the old Sumerian poem we followed down the seven gates. There, the sister pushes at the door and shouts, but all she asks is to be let in. The threat belongs to the Akkadian telling of the same descent, where she is called Ishtar, and there, at the gate, she swears she will break the door and the bolt, and bring up the dead to eat the living, until the dead outnumber the living. Same words. Same door. Different woman on it. And the difference between the two is the whole of tonight. When Ishtar said it, she was outside, in the dark, with no standing in that place at all, trying to get in. She could not do a single thing she was threatening. She did not own those dead. It was the biggest sentence she could think of to shout at a doorkeeper, and she was let in, and stripped at every gate, one thing at a time, until she came to the bottom with nothing. That is what happens in that poem to somebody who says those words from the outside. And now the same sentence is said by the one person in existence who is not bluffing, and it is not shouted at a doorman, it is sent upstairs in the mouth of a servant, into a room she has never been allowed to enter, and the response is not to bolt anything. And there is one more turn on it, and it is the one I find hard. The sister said it to get in. She is saying it to get somebody back. And I want to be exact about what she is threatening, because people hear it as a horror story and it is not one, it is a constitutional argument. She is not proposing to unleash monsters. She is proposing to stop doing her job. Her whole function, the thing she is for, the reason that place exists and has a queen, is that the dead stay where they are put. That is the service she provides to the entire universe. Everything above her depends on her keeping the door shut, and she has kept it shut for as long as there has been a door. And what she says is: give him back, or I will open it. And the poem does not have anybody argue with her. There is no scene where somebody says she would never, or that she could not, or that it would be wrong. The gods hear the message and nobody refuses her. They tell her minister to come in and look for him, because the threat is completely credible and because everybody in that universe knows that the only thing standing between the living and everybody who has ever died is one woman's willingness to keep doing a job nobody has ever thanked her for. And still the looking does not find him. In the end, in lines that are badly broken, he seems to give himself away. And there is a moment in between that I have not given you, and it belongs here because it is the only time in the poem that he explains himself. Before he goes back down, he goes to the god of the sweet water, the one who briefed him in the first place, and he says, in effect: I have to go back. And the god does not stop him. That is worth noticing. This is the god whose entire method in twelve episodes of this season has been to find the way out. He told him not to sit and not to eat and not to drink and not to wash his feet, and the whole point of those instructions was to keep him from belonging to that house. And when the man comes back and says he is going anyway, the god who spent the first half of the poem trying to prevent exactly this outcome helps him get ready. Chapter Eleven. He Came Back. And he went down again. And this time he did not creep. The poem says he came down at speed, through the gates, and that he went through the courtyard, and that he came in, and that he laughed. And then he took her by the hair and pulled her off the throne. Now, that is the same act as the short version, and it lands completely differently, and I want to say why. In the short version that is an assault by a stranger who had been sent down to his death, because she had asked for him so that she could kill him. In the long version it comes after days together. He slipped away before daybreak while she slept, and she woke and made ready for him and was told he had gone, and cried out, and fell from her throne and wept, and then threatened to end the world to get him back, and he came back, laughing, and pulled her off her chair. It is not the same gesture at all. It is the gesture of somebody who has come back. And then, the poem says, they took hold of each other, and they went to bed, and it counts the days again, one by one, up to six, and a seventh in a line the editors have had to restore. And then the tablet breaks. That is where it ends, in the middle, and we do not have the last of it, and what we have of the very end is fragmentary lines that seem to be about the arrangement afterward, and the arrangement is that he stays. That is how the god of plague and war becomes the king of the underworld. He goes down as a defendant and he comes back as a husband. And there is one more thing about him that belongs here, at the end, because it is the bridge to the last night of this season. The god who goes down in tonight's poem, who is rude at a banquet and is sent to apologise and stays six days and comes back and becomes king of the underworld, is the same figure as the god in the final episode of this season. Same deity. Different name and completely different poem. Tonight he is a young god in a story about wanting somebody. In the last episode he is the god of plague and war, sitting in a room, unable to keep still, being talked into destroying cities by seven numbered functions, with a herald in front of him arguing all the way. And the reason I mention it here rather than there is that it changes both. The god who cannot settle in the last episode of this season is the same one who came down seven flights of stairs and stayed, and who left in the morning, and who came back at a run when he was called. Whatever else he is, he is somebody who comes back. And there is one more thing I owe you, which is who he was to the people who actually worshipped him, because tonight he has been a character in a story and he was also somebody with a temple and a city and a festival. His city is called Kutha, north of Babylon, and his temple there had a name that means something like the house of the warrior of the underworld, and it was one of the significant sanctuaries of that country for a very long time. And what he was, in ordinary religious life, is the god you dealt with about the things that kill people suddenly. Plague. Fever. War. The sudden death, as opposed to the slow one. In the god lists he is set beside the fever demons and the plague spirits, and in the medical texts his name turns up in the diagnoses. Which means that the marriage in tonight's poem is not a romance somebody invented. It is a theological explanation. It answers a real question that people in that country would actually have asked, which is: why is the god of sudden death also a king in the land of the dead? And the answer the poem gives is: because he went down there once, and he was rude, and then he stayed. That is a very strange way to explain a pantheon, and it is much better than the tidy version would have been. And there is one more thing I want to say about the difference between the two versions, because I have been treating it as a matter of length and it is not. The short one is about a problem being solved. There is an offence, and a summons, and a confrontation, and an offer, and it is accepted, and the situation is resolved. It is shaped like a negotiation, and it ends with terms. Nothing in it is about wanting anything. He does not want her and she does not want him. She wants to live and he wants a throne and they arrive at an arrangement. The long one is about somebody not being able to stay away. And the difference is not that one is romantic and the other is not. It is that centuries apart, two writers looked at the same situation, a god of death and a queen of the dead ending up together, and one of them thought the interesting question was how the deal was struck, and the other thought the interesting question was why he came back. That is a real change in what people wanted from a story, and you can watch it happen across the gap, and I do not think you get many chances to see that this clearly in a literature this old. Chapter Twelve. The Two Tellings. The lamp is low now. So there are two of them, and they do not agree, and I want to leave you with both rather than with a blend, because a blend would be a poem nobody wrote. And before I set them side by side, it is worth saying where each of the two actually came from, because the places are almost as good as the poems. The short one turned up in Egypt. It is on a tablet from the same archive as the Adapa fragment, from that abandoned city on the Nile where a pharaoh's foreign correspondence sat in the sand for three thousand years. So the short telling of this story survives because somebody in Egypt was learning the international language of the day and this was on the syllabus, exactly as with the fisherman. Two of the strangest stories in this literature reached us as homework. The long one comes from further north and much later, from tablets found at more than one site, including a provincial town where a family of priests kept a working library, the kind of collection that gets copied out by students and annotated in the margins. So the two versions are separated by something like seven centuries, several hundred miles, and an entire change in what the story was thought to be for. And that is the part I want to leave with you. Because the usual way a story changes over the centuries is that it gets shorter, and harder, and more like a summary of itself. Details fall off. The middle gets compressed. What survives is the plot. This one went the other way. The old short version is the efficient one. He goes down, he takes her, she saves herself by offering him the throne, and it is over in a fraction of the space. It is a story about power changing hands, and it is told the way you would tell somebody how a thing came to be arranged the way it is now. And some seven centuries later the telling we have is several times longer, and every single one of the added parts is about feeling. The list of things he must not accept. The bath. The six days. The empty bed in the morning. The false message at the gate. The servant sent up the stairs twice. The threat, which in the short version does not exist at all. Somebody, in a room, a very long time ago, took a brisk little story about a god acquiring a queen, and decided that the interesting question was not how he got there but what it was like for her. That is seven centuries of people telling each other the same thing and slowly working out what it was actually about. And they did it with clay and a reed, in a language nobody has spoken in two thousand years, in a town whose name we are not entirely sure of. The short one, from a schoolroom in Egypt three and a half thousand years ago, says: he went down and took her by the hair and she saved her life by offering him a throne. The long one, from the north, some seven centuries later, says: he went down under strict instructions to accept nothing, and he accepted her, and then he slipped away before daybreak, and she nearly ended the world, and he came back. Same characters. Same gates. Same ending, in the sense that he stays. And I think the difference between them is one of the most interesting things in this whole season, because it is centuries of somebody thinking about the same story and deciding it needed to be about wanting rather than about winning. So think of it, wherever you are lying. There is a house at the bottom of seven gates, and it has a courtyard and a bath and a bed and a throne in it, and it has a queen who has never in her existence been anywhere else. There is a party going on upstairs that she has never once attended, and somebody has been sent down with her portion of the food, because they are not unkind, they simply cannot come. There is a minister going up and down the stairs, doing all the work, saying the messages he is given, and nobody in either poem ever thanks him. And there is one morning, in the long version, in the middle of the story, where she wakes and bathes and orders his bread and his beer, and her minister tells her he went before daybreak. And of everything in this entire season, of all the floods and the battles and the seven gates and the eleven monsters and the wall of Uruk, that is the moment I think about most. The queen of the dead, who could raise every corpse there has ever been, ordering bread and beer for somebody who has already gone. She got him back, though. That is the ending, and it is on the tablet, and it is worth going to sleep on. 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 portion of the dinner they sent down, because they could not come. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight somebody steals something while somebody else is having a bath. That is the whole hook and I am giving it to you in the first sentence because it is the best opening of any story in this season. The most powerful object in this entire literature, the thing we have been mentioning since the first night, the tablet that makes whatever you say become true, is taken off a peg by the doorkeeper while its owner is in the water. And then everything stops. Not dramatically. Not with a war. The world goes quiet, and the poem uses the word for silence three times in four lines, and that silence is the real subject of tonight. Somebody has to go and get it back, and nobody wants to, and the poem goes round the room asking, and one after another they say no, in the same words, which is going to be very good for you at this hour. And when somebody finally goes, his arrows turn back in the air. Stay with it, if you can, to the sixth chapter, for that, because it is the strangest thing that happens in this whole season and I have been looking forward to it for weeks. 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 gates and the flood and the wall. If so, welcome back. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome, and tonight is a good one to start on, because it is short and it is clear and it is mostly one thing happening. 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 three tablets, and they are not a long poem, they are a short one. Three, he says. That is all it needs. 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 names tonight. Anzu, who is the bird. And Ninurta, who goes after him. Everybody else is a job title. 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 a fight in it, and it is in the eighth chapter, and it is over quickly, and the thing that is killed is a bird the size of a mountain who has been sitting on a peak for the entire story doing nothing, and it is told once and set down. The last three chapters are a tablet being taken back, a list of names, and a turtle. I said a turtle and I meant it. Wait for it. 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. Chapter One. The Bird. And before the bird, I want to give you the object one more time, because tonight is its last appearance and it has been the thread of this whole season. The Tablet of Destinies. You met it on the first night, when a mother going to war fastened it to the chest of her commander and told him his word would not be altered. It was taken off him afterwards and sealed with somebody else's seal. You met the same idea again in the seven gates, wearing a different name, when a goddess put on the whole set of things that make a working world and had them taken off her one item at a time. And you met it once more in the story of the eagle, in the background, being important. Tonight it is the plot. And tonight is the only time in this entire literature that we get to see what it actually does when somebody uses it, which is why I have been looking forward to this one, and it is not what anybody expects. His name is Anzu, and he is a bird with the head of a lion, and he is enormous. And the first thing to say about him is that he is not a monster from outside. He is staff. He was born, the poem says, in the mountains, out of the rock, out of the wide earth. And when he was found, he was brought in and given a job, and the job was to stand at the door of the sanctuary of the lord of the air and keep it. He is the doorkeeper of the highest god in the country. That is the whole setup and it is the most important thing about tonight. Everything that happens is an inside job, done by a member of staff, in the building where he works, to the man who hired him. And he is old. He is very old. There is an image in the art of that world, of a great bird with a lion's head and outspread wings, sometimes gripping two deer or two lions in its talons, and it turns up on temple facades and on votive plaques and on seals, and it is centuries older than the poem, and there is a magnificent copper one, found at a temple in the south, with the wings spread out over two stags, and you can go and look at it. So the bird is real in the way the winged bulls are real. He was on doorways before he was in a story. And it is worth saying what that copper one actually is, because it is one of the great objects of the ancient world and it is in a museum in London and you could go and look at it this week. It is about two and a half metres across, more than eight feet, and about a metre high. A great bird with the head of a lion, wings spread out flat on either side, its talons sunk in two stags, one to the left and one to the right. It is made of copper on a backing of bitumen, and it was dug up at the foot of a temple in the far south, where it is thought to have hung above the door, about four and a half thousand years ago. So people going into that building walked under it, every day, for as long as it stood. That is what he was before he was a thief in a poem. He was the thing over the door, with his wings out, holding the animals, keeping whatever was out there out. And the poem takes that figure, the one everybody had walked underneath their whole lives, and asks: what if he wanted the job of the man inside. And one more thing before we go on, because earlier this season there was an eagle in this house who carried a man up into the sky, and these are not the same bird and I am saying so plainly. That one was a wild eagle in a poplar tree who broke an oath with a snake. This one is a lion headed thing the size of a hillside who works in a temple. Different creature, different poem, different plot, and the only thing they have in common is wings. And there is one more thing about him that I want you to have before he does anything, because it is the reason the poem is not a simple story about a wicked bird. He was given the job by the god he robs. The poem is explicit. Somebody found him, in the mountains, and brought him in, and made him the keeper of the sanctuary. He did not apply. He did not sneak in. He was recruited, by the household he later robs, because they wanted a doorkeeper and here was an enormous frightening bird and that is exactly what a doorkeeper should look like. And then they put him at the door of the room where the most powerful object in the universe is kept, and they left him there, alone, every day, for a very long time, with nothing to do but stand. There is a version of this poem where nobody is surprised by what happens next, and that version is the one the poem itself seems to be telling, because it never once expresses shock. It states his thinking, plainly, as though it were the obvious thing for somebody in that position to think. And I want to say what he was actually guarding, because the poem calls it a sanctuary and that word does a lot of work. The inner room of a temple in that world was not a public space. Almost nobody went in. There was a courtyard, and then rooms, and then, at the end, the cella, and in the cella was the statue, and the statue was the god, present, in the room. And that room was serviced. Somebody came in at the right hours and washed and dressed and fed the god, and put out the meals, and drew the curtain, and left. So the job of the doorkeeper is to stand at the entrance of the most restricted room in the country and control who goes in. Which means he is not the outer guard. He is not on the city wall or at the temple gate. He is at the last door, the one before the room where the god actually is, and everything that goes in or out of that room goes past him. That is why he could watch the bathing. That is why he knew the routine. And that is why, when the tablet was on the side and the room was empty, there was nobody between him and it, because being the person between everybody else and it was his entire job. Chapter Two. The Bath. Every day the lord of the air took off the Tablet of Destinies to wash. And Anzu watched him do it. That is the entire crime, and it happens in about six lines, and it is the most ordinary theft in this literature. The lord of the air is the one who holds the tablet. It is his. It is the object that makes his word into the state of the world, and by holding it he holds the assignments of everything, which is what kingship among the gods actually consists of. And I want to be exact about what the object actually is, because we have been calling it the Tablet of Destinies all season and the word destinies is doing us no favours. It is not a book of the future. Nobody consults it. Nobody reads out of it what is going to happen. In none of the poems does anybody sit down with it and look something up. The word underneath it means something closer to allotments. Assignments. The portions handed out. What each thing has been given to be and to do. A destiny in that language is not a fate that hunts you down, it is a share that was handed to you, the way an office is handed to an official or a field is allotted to a farmer. So the tablet is not an oracle. It is closer to a seal of office, or a warrant. Whoever holds it, their word about who gets what is simply the case. And it is a physical thing, and small enough to wear. On the first night of this season a mother fastened it to the chest of the one she sent to fight, and afterwards it was taken off him and sealed with somebody else's seal, and I said at the time that the sealing was the important part. This is why. It is an object that can change hands, and everything follows from who is holding it. And every day he undressed to bathe, and he took it off and put it down, the way you would put down a watch. And I want to slow that down, because the whole poem turns on it and it goes past in a line. Every day. Not once. Not on a festival. Every day, for as long as the doorkeeper had been standing at that door, the most powerful object in the universe was taken off and set down within arm's reach of him, and then picked up again, and nothing happened. That is what a routine is. It is a thing that has been safe so many times that nobody looks at it any more. Which is what makes the bath the whole story. He takes it off to wash. He has to. In that world you do not go into the water wearing your office, any more than you would get into a bath wearing a crown. Washing is its own act, and a serious one, and the god of the air is doing an ordinary and correct thing, in his own house, with a member of his own staff at the door. And the doorkeeper stood at the door, and watched, and the poem tells us what he thought. And the poem does something here that this literature almost never does, which is that it tells you what somebody is thinking. Most of the time these poems report. He went, he said, he did. They do not open people up. And here, for a few lines, we are inside the head of the doorkeeper, watching him look at the crown, and then at the robe, and then at the tablet, and beginning to arrange a plan around them. It is the only interior monologue of any length in tonight, and it belongs to the thief. He looked at the crown of lordship, it says. He looked at the robe of divinity. He looked at the tablet in his hands. And he began to plan. I will take the tablet of destinies, he said, and I will gather to myself the commands of all the gods. I will make the throne mine. I will command the whole of the rites. And I will rule. And his heart, the poem says, planned aggression. And then one morning the water was running and the tablet was on the side and there was nobody in the room. And he took it in his hands, and he flew. Chapter Three. Silence. And before the silence, one more thing about the theft itself, because there is a detail in it that I keep coming back to. He watched him do it every day. The poem is clear that this was not one opportunity taken on impulse. The lord of the air bathed regularly, and took the tablet off regularly, and put it down regularly, and the doorkeeper stood at the door and watched, and the poem describes him watching and thinking and planning, over a period. So there was a stretch of time, possibly a long one, during which the most powerful object in the universe was being left unattended in front of somebody who had decided to take it and was waiting for the right morning. And nobody noticed anything, because nothing had happened yet, and because he was doing his job perfectly the entire time. That is the most modern thing in this poem and I do not think it was meant to be. And here is the best passage in the poem, and it is not the fight. The rites were suspended, it says. The brilliance went out of the sanctuary. The radiance faded. Silence spread. Silence fell. Silence prevailed. That is what happens. Not fire, not earthquake, not the sky splitting. The word for the shine on a holy thing simply goes out of it, and silence comes into the room and settles, and the poem says it three different ways in a row because it wants you to sit in it. And it is worth understanding what is actually broken, because it is not that anybody has been hurt. Remember what the tablet does. It makes command real. It is the connection between somebody saying a thing and the thing being so. And it is on a mountain now, in the possession of a bird, who is not using it. So nothing is countermanded. Nothing is reversed. Nothing terrible is decreed. What happens is that the mechanism by which anything at all gets decided has been taken out of the building, and the result is not chaos. The result is that nothing happens. The rites stop. The offerings do not have their effect. The words that are supposed to make things so are said and do not make anything so. Everything continues to exist and nothing continues to work. That is one of the most sophisticated ideas in this literature and it is in a poem about a giant bird, and it is why the silence gets three lines. And there is one more consequence of the theft, and it is the one that ought to frighten you and probably will not until you think about it later. Nobody could countermand it. The tablet is the thing that makes a command real. Which means that the only way to reverse what has happened would be for somebody to issue an order that has force, and the object that gives orders force is on a mountain. So the gods are in the position of a government that has lost the thing that makes its decisions binding, and the only way to get it back is to make a decision. They can still talk. They can still meet. They can still agree. And none of it does anything, and every single one of them knows it, and they hold a meeting anyway, because that is what institutions do. And there is one more consequence of the silence that I want to give you before the meeting, and it is a domestic one. The offerings stopped working. Not stopped being made. Stopped working. And in that world those are completely different problems and the second one is much worse. Everything in that country ran on a transaction. You bring the god bread and beer and meat, at the right hour, in the right way, and in return the rain comes and the barley grows and the child is born and the illness lifts. That is the arrangement, and it is stated in those terms in a thousand texts, and it is why the temples were the size they were. And the thing that made the transaction bind was the machinery that is currently sitting on a mountain in the possession of a bird. So picture a country where every temple in every city is still doing everything correctly, every morning, and nothing is coming back. The offerings go in and nothing happens. The prayers are said and nothing happens. The festivals come round on the calendar and are performed properly and nothing happens. That is what the silence is, from the ground. It is not quiet. It is everybody still shouting and nobody hearing anything. Chapter Four. Nobody Volunteers. And the gods gathered, and the sky god, who is the oldest of them, asked for somebody to go. And here is a long lovely passage that is built entirely out of refusals, and it is the best sleep architecture in tonight, so let it happen. And before they start refusing, I want you to hear what is actually being offered, because it is repeated three times word for word and it is easy to let it wash past as flattery. Your name will be the greatest in the assembly. There will be shrines for you in the four quarters. Your cities will be built. You will have sanctuaries in all the world. That is not a compliment. That is a contract. A god in that country was not an idea. A god was an institution with a physical address. To have a shrine is to have a building, with a roof and a door and a statue in it. To have sanctuaries in the four quarters is to be worshipped in every direction from the centre, which is the phrase they used for the whole of the known world. And your cities will be built means what it says: settlements, with people in them, whose business is you. So the offer is this. Go up that mountain, and we will make you real in the ground. You will have somewhere to be, in stone, in four directions, for as long as anybody keeps it up. That is the highest thing the assembly of the gods has to give, and it is offered three times, and it is turned down three times, which tells you exactly how frightening the mountain was. And the ones who turn it down are named in the poem, and they are not nobodies. The first is the storm, the one with the thunder, who is the sky god's own son. The second is fire. The third is another young god of the same generation. These are working deities with cults of their own, and every one of them hears the offer of shrines in the four quarters and says no thank you. And their reason is the same reason every time, and it is not fear exactly, it is arithmetic. He has the tablet. Whatever he says becomes what is so. Therefore if I go up there, and he opens his mouth, then whatever he says about me is what I will be. And I will become like clay. Read that last line again, because it is a very precise piece of horror and it is the only frightening sentence in tonight. They are not afraid of being killed. Being killed is a normal risk and these are gods. They are afraid of being described. The thing on the mountain can say a sentence about you and the sentence will be true. He does not have to beat you. He has to mention you. And clay is what they were made of, and clay is what people were made of, and clay is what everything in that world was made of before somebody said a word over it and made it something. To become like clay is to be returned to the material, unassigned, before your portion was handed to you. That is what they are all saying no to. Not death. Erasure back to the raw stuff. And every one of them says it in the same words, three times over, and the sky god listens three times, and the room stays exactly as full as it was. He called for the storm god first, the son of the sky, the one with the thunder. He said: go. Kill Anzu. Bring back the tablet. And your name will be the greatest in the assembly of the gods. There will be shrines for you in the four quarters. Your cities will be built. You will have sanctuaries in all the world. And the storm god answered him, and said: my father. Who could go to the mountain that no one goes to? Anzu holds the tablet of destinies in his hand. He has taken the rites of the lord of the air. Command is dispersed. If I go to him, whatever he says to me becomes what is so, and I will become like clay. And the sky god heard it, and he turned to the next one. He called the god of fire. He said: go. Kill Anzu. Bring back the tablet. And your name will be the greatest in the assembly of the gods. There will be shrines for you in the four quarters. Your cities will be built. You will have sanctuaries in all the world. And the god of fire answered him, and said: my father. Who could go to the mountain that no one goes to? Anzu holds the tablet of destinies in his hand. Whatever he says becomes what is so, and I will become like clay. And the sky god turned to the third one and said it all again, the whole offer, word for word, the shrines and the four quarters and the cities and the sanctuaries. And the third one said it all again too, word for word, the mountain and the tablet and the clay. Three times. The same offer, the same refusal, in the same words, and if you were drifting through that then you got exactly what it was for, which is that this poem is telling you that everybody said no, and it is telling you by having everybody say no. And notice what the refusal actually is, because it is a good one. They are not cowards. What they are saying is: he has the object that makes speech true, so if I go up there and he speaks, I lose. You cannot fight somebody whose word is automatically correct. Chapter Five. The One Who Went. Before anybody goes, I owe you the other poems, because there are two of them and the red team on my desk says to give them one pointer and not a second episode, and that is exactly right. There are two long Sumerian poems about the young god who is about to be sent, and they are not this story. One of them is a poem about him going to a mountain and fighting a thing made of stone, and then coming back and organising the world afterwards, and the second half of it is a list of stones and what each one is now good for and why, which sounds dull and is not, because it is a poem explaining why flint splits the way it does and why obsidian is sharp and why limestone is soft, and each explanation is a sentence about how that stone behaved in the fight. The other is a poem about him coming home in his chariot, and it is essentially a triumph, and hanging on the front of the chariot are the things he has defeated, and the poem lists them, and the list has a bird on it. So the young god of tonight has a career, and it is written up elsewhere at length, and in it he goes to mountains and deals with what is on them and comes back and gets praised. That is the pointer, and that is all it is, and we are going back to tonight's poem now. And then somebody proposed a name. In the version we have most fully, it is the clever one, the god of the sweet water, who has been in this house every night of this season, and he goes to the mother of the gods, the one who makes people, and he says: send your son. And I want to say who his mother is, because of all the connections in this season this is the one that made me put my pen down. She is the mother of the gods. In the poem the clever one goes to her, and it is her he asks, and it is she who calls her son and sends him. And she is the same goddess who made people. She is the one from the older story, the one who was called in when the gods were tired of digging the canals themselves, and who took clay, and mixed it with the blood of a god, and pinched off fourteen pieces, and made the first human beings out of them. Seven and seven. That is her. That is what she is for. She is the maker. And now go back three chapters, to the room where the assembly is sitting and nobody will volunteer. Every single god who refused gave the same reason, and the reason was: if I go up there he will speak, and whatever he says will be so, and I will become like clay. Clay is her material. They are all sitting in a room saying that the thing on the mountain can turn them back into the raw stuff, and the person they eventually go to for help is the one who knows what that stuff is for, because she is the one who takes it in her hands and makes things out of it. I do not know whether the poet did that on purpose. Nobody can know that. The connection is there in the text and neither poem points at it, which either means it is an accident or it means it was so obvious to them that it did not need pointing at. But it is there, and it is the sort of thing this literature does constantly, and it is why these poems reward being read next to each other. The gods are frightened of being unmade. So they go and ask the maker. And she does not go herself. She sends her son, the one whose other job is the plough and the furrow and the seed drill, which is the other way of making something out of the ground. And she called him, and she sent him, and his name is Ninurta, and in the older southern version of this poem the same job is done by a god called Ningirsu and it is the same story with a different name in it. He is a young god, and he is the one who is always sent. That is his whole character in this literature. If there is a thing on a mountain that has to be dealt with, he goes. And here is the thing about him that almost nobody knows, and it is the reason I like him. He is a farmer. Not only. He is a war god and a storm god and a hunter and the son of the lord of the air, and all of that is in the hymns. But he is also, and centrally, the god of the plough and of the field, and there is a text called the farmer's instructions, which is a practical agricultural manual, real advice about when to flood a field and how deep to plough and how to keep the seed drill running, and the whole thing is framed as his instruction. So the god they send up the mountain to get the tablet back is the one whose day job is telling people how to grow barley. And there is a version of the poem where the older southern name is used instead, and that god belongs to a particular city in the south and is the same figure, and the story is the same story with a different name in it, which is how this literature works and is worth being unbothered by. And he went. And the poem says he raised a storm around himself, and gathered the winds, and went up the mountain, and Anzu saw him coming. And Anzu looked down and said: who are you, that you have come to fight me? What made you decide to do this? And Ninurta answered him with his own name and his father's. I am Ninurta, he said, the son of the lord of the air. I have come to fight you, and I am going to crush you. Chapter Six. The Arrows That Turned Back. And before the arrows, one thing about what he actually walked into, because I want you to have the scale of it. The poem says the mountain shook when he approached, and that the bird saw him coming from a long way off, and it describes the two of them across a distance, and then it describes the noise. Because there is noise in this fight. The poem is loud in a way that almost nothing else in this season is. There are winds. There is dust. There is a description of the sound of the two of them that uses the word for a storm. And it is worth having, because the rest of this season has been so quiet. We have had a lamp in a room and a river going by and a woman writing in a moon house and a raft in the sunshine and seven gates and a bath. Tonight, for about two chapters, there is an enormous amount of noise on a mountain, and then it stops, and the quiet afterwards is the whole point of it. And he shot. And this is the passage I have been promising you all night and it is thirty seconds long and it is the most extraordinary idea in this season. The arrow flew, and Anzu saw it coming, and he spoke. And what he said was this. Reed that has come, he said. Go back to your canebrake. Bow frame, go back to your thicket. Bowstring, go back to the sinew of the sheep. Feathers, go back to the birds. And the arrow turned back in the air, and it never reached him. The shaft, which is a reed, he told to go back to being a reed growing in a marsh. The bow, which is wood, he told to go back to being a tree in a wood. The string, which is sinew, he told to go back to the sheep. And the flights, which are feathers, he told to go back to being feathers on a living bird. It did not hit him. It did not fall. It turned round, as though it had heard him and was on its way home. The poem never says it came to pieces. It says only that the shaft turned back, and that no arrow came near his body. Now sit in that for a moment, because there is nothing else like it. That is the tablet of destinies being used, and it is the only time in any of these poems that we get to watch somebody use it, and this is what it can do. It does not throw fire. It does not summon an army. It says a true thing about what something used to be, and the thing obeys. Every arrow he shot turned back. Not one came near his body. Not because he was fast or armoured, but because on that mountain, for as long as he held that object, a weapon could be told to go back where it came from, and it would obey. And Ninurta stood there with a bow that was not going to work and no idea what to do. And I want to sit in that for a moment because the poem does, and because it is the only time in this season that anybody is defeated by an argument. He is not outmatched. He is better armed and he is younger and he has the whole assembly of heaven behind him and he has already got up the mountain, which is more than anybody else was willing to do. And none of it is any use, because every time he acts, the thing he acts with is told to go home, and turns back. That is a very particular kind of helplessness and I do not think there is another example of it in ancient literature. You are not beaten. You are not outfought. Your arrows are turned round in mid air by somebody telling them where they came from. And he stands there on a mountain, in the wind, with a bow, and his arrows turning back in the air in front of him. And I want to stay with that arrow for one more minute, because there is a second thing in it that took me a long time to see. Look at what the four things are. The reed comes from a canebrake. The bow frame comes from a wood. The string comes from a sheep. The feathers come from a bird. That is a manufacturing list. That is somebody describing, in reverse, exactly how an arrow is made and where each part of it came from, and any person in that country who had ever handled a bow would have known all four of those things and probably done two of them. So the great supernatural power in this poem, the thing the tablet of destinies actually does when we finally get to watch it work, is to know accurately what everything is made of and where it came from, and to say so out loud. It is not magic in the sense of something arriving from outside. It is knowledge, applied with authority, and the authority is what makes the knowledge bite. And there is a thing I have been circling for two chapters and I want to say it plainly before the answer comes back, because it is what the whole poem is actually about. Speech and force are two different technologies, and this poem is about what happens when one of them stops working. Look at what has been tried. The gods held a meeting, which is speech, and it produced agreement and no result. They made an offer, three times, in identical words, which is speech, and it produced three refusals. Somebody went up the mountain with a bow, which is force, and the force was turned back by speech in mid air. And the thing that finally works is neither of them on its own. It is force applied at the precise moment when the other party's speech is committed elsewhere. That is the whole solution. Not a stronger arrow. Not a better argument. Timing. And it comes from the one god in this literature who has never once in twelve episodes solved anything by being stronger than somebody. He put the first god to sleep with a spell. He got a goddess back from the queen of the dead by having two small creatures agree with her. He told a fisherman what to say at a gate. And here he wins a fight he is not present at by predicting what a bird will say to its own feathers. Chapter Seven. What the Clever One Said. So he sent a message. And I want to say something about weapons with names, because it is one of the genuinely strange habits of this literature and tonight is the clearest example of it. Things that hit people were given names in that world, and the names were not decoration. A mace had a name. A bow had a name. A great door had a name, and so did a gate, and so did a canal, and so did a temple, and so did a boundary stone. When a king dedicated a weapon in a temple he wrote the name on it, and the name was usually a whole sentence, something like the one that brings down the mountain, or the one that does not turn back. And a named thing, in that language, is a thing with a share of its own. It has been allotted something. It is not entirely furniture any more. Which is why the mace in tonight's poem can be sent on an errand. So when the poem says he sent his weapon down the mountain with a message, nobody who first heard it found that surprising. Of course the mace can carry a message. It has a name. And I have to tell you about the messenger, because the messenger is a mace. His weapon in this poem has a name, and the name means something like the smasher of thousands, and it is not simply an object. It flies. It talks. It goes on errands. It reports back. In the Sumerian poems it is a character with opinions who occasionally gives him bad advice and has to be corrected. So the sequence is this. A young god is on a mountain, unable to hit anything, and he takes his weapon and tells it what to say and throws it, and it flies several hundred miles down to the marshes in the south, delivers the message, waits for the answer, and flies back with instructions. That is how a question gets asked in this poem. You throw your mace at somebody who knows. He sent his own weapon, which in this poem is a character with a name and can talk and fly, back down the mountain to the god of the sweet water, to ask what to do. And the answer came back, and it is the best piece of advice in this literature, and it is entirely mechanical. Do not stop shooting, he said. Keep going. Raise a dust storm around him so that he cannot see. Wear him out. And in the middle of it, cut off his wings. Tear out his pinions. Throw them away, one to the right and one to the left. And then he will look, and he will see his own feathers flying past him in the air, and he will not know what they are, and he will call out to them. He will say wing to wing. And the moment he says that, the moment those words are out of his mouth, put the arrow through him. Chapter Eight. Wing to Wing. And before it works, I want to say what the advice actually understands about him, because it is a piece of character reading and not a piece of tactics. The clever god knows him. Near the start of the poem, when the lord of the air first set eyes on the bird, it was the clever god who looked the bird over, and told the lord of the air what he was, and said, put him on the door. He is a long way away now, in the marshes in the south, and the message came by mace. And what he says is: cut his wings off and throw the feathers past him, and he will call out to them. That is a prediction about behaviour. Not about physics. He is saying: this creature's entire instinct, the thing he does without thinking, faster than he can consider it, is to speak to a thing that is out of its place and tell it to go back where it belongs. He has been doing it to arrows all afternoon. It is the only move he has. It is what he is. So put his own feathers in front of him, and he will do it to those, automatically, because that is what he does. And the moment he does, he is speaking to the wrong object. That is not a trick played on a monster. That is somebody who has known him since the day he was hired, working out, from a description delivered by a flying mace, exactly what he will do when he is frightened, and building the whole plan on it. And that is exactly what happened. He kept shooting. He raised the dust. He kept the fight going until the bird grew tired and his wings sank in the storm, and then he aimed at his back, and cut away the pinions, and the feathers went flying out into the air on both sides. And Anzu saw feathers going past him. And he did what anybody would do, and what the clever god knew he would do, which is that he tried to fix it. He called out to them. Wing to wing, he said, meaning come back, meaning join, meaning be whole again. And in that instant he was not talking about the arrow. That is the trick, and it is exquisite, and it took me a long time to see it properly. His power only works on the thing he speaks to. Every time an arrow came at him he spoke to the arrow, and the arrow obeyed. The moment he spoke to his own feathers instead, the arrow was nobody's business. And it went through him. And the poem says he fell, and that the mountain shook, and that the wide earth was quiet. And I want to stop on that quiet, because it is the second silence in this poem and it is not the same as the first. The first silence was the world stopping. The rites failing, the words not landing, everything continuing to exist and nothing continuing to work. This silence is a mountain with a dead bird on it and the wind going over. Same word, probably. Completely different thing. And the poem puts them at either end of the story on purpose, so that the whole shape of it is: silence, and then a great deal of noise, and then silence again, and the second one is the one you can sleep in. Chapter Nine. Taking It Back. And before he picks it up, I want to say what that moment actually is, because the poem does not make a fuss of it and it is the largest opportunity anybody is ever offered in this literature. He is alone on a mountain. There are no witnesses. The assembly is a very long way below and they have already demonstrated that not one of them will come up here. The previous holder is dead on the ground next to him. And the object that makes any word true is lying loose. There is nothing between him and it except his own decision. And we have just spent four chapters establishing that whoever holds it can say a thing and have the thing be so, which means that if he picked it up and said I am the lord of the air, that sentence would be correct, immediately, and there would be no mechanism anywhere in the universe by which anybody could disagree. That is the situation. The poem sets it up meticulously and then does not comment on it at all. And the damaged lines are right there. And Ninurta took the tablet of destinies out of his hands. And the mountain is worth a word, because it is the last mountain of this kind in the season. In the poem it is simply his mountain, the one nobody can reach, and where it is meant to be is not said, and the general sense is somewhere north and east, in the ranges, which is where that country put everything it did not control. Every mountain in this literature is in that direction. The cedar forest was that way. The place where the sun goes in and out is that way. The country where the eagle carried the king is up. It is a flat country, and everything strange in its stories is on high ground somewhere over the horizon. And in this case there is a bird on it, and now there is not. And here is the fragment I have to be honest with you about, because it is one of the most interesting broken places in this whole literature. There are lines, damaged, in which something happens after the recovery and before the praise at the end. Something about the tablet, and about him, and about not letting it go, and the text is in pieces and the readings differ and nobody can tell you with confidence what it said. Some think it is a moment of hesitation. That the young god, standing on a mountain with the object that makes any word true in his hands, thought about it. Others think the damaged lines say nothing of the kind. The clay breaks there, and I am not going to tell you what was on it. And when the clay picks up again, the poem is praising him, and the matter seems settled. Most readers take it that he gave the tablet back, that it went home to the lord of the air, and the rites started again and the brilliance came back into the sanctuary and the silence ended. But the lines that would tell us so are lost, and I will not pretend otherwise. And there is a small thing in the fight that I have never seen anybody mention, and I want to give it to you because it is the last piece of the puzzle. He had to wear him out first. Whatever else you think about the wings, the poem is careful about how they come off. The arrows have all failed. So he keeps the fight going, in the wind and the dust, until the bird is so tired that his wings sink in the storm, and his back is open to the darts. So the sequence is: shoot from far away and be turned back. Raise the dust. Keep fighting until he tires and his wings drop. Then aim at his back, and cut the pinions away, and scatter them. And then, when he calls out to his feathers, shoot. The clever god's plan is not really a trick about words at all. It is a plan for wearing down something that can turn a weapon back with a word, and then giving a young god one clear shot at the exact second the thing is distracted by its own feathers. Chapter Ten. The Names. And they gave him names. And I want to give you some of them, because a list at this hour is the best thing I have, and because they are a portrait of what that world wanted a young god to be. They called him the one who made every enemy bow before his father. They called him the one who can slay mountains. They called him the one who broke the strength of the soaring bird. They called him the guardian of the throne. They called him the master of secret knowledge. In Elam they called him Hurabtil, and in Susa they called him Inshushinak. And in the furrow, they said, his name was Ningirsu, because that is who he is when he is not on a mountain. For the city of Isin they called him Lugalbanda, and there are more, temple after temple, city after city. And that is the point of the list. So many of those names belong to the gods of other cities, one after another, and the poem gathers every one of them into him. And if you were here on the first night of this season you will recognise exactly what is happening, because we ended that night with a room full of gods sitting at a table saying names over a young god who had killed something and brought something back, and here it is again, in a different poem, in a different city, for a different young god. They called him the one who can slay mountains. They called him Hurabtil, and Inshushinak, and Lugalbanda. They called him by his name in the furrow. Name after name, each with a line or two attached, and the poem gives them one at a time in a list, and the list is the ending, or as much of it as the clay has kept. And the reason the two poems have the same ending is that this is what that world thought a victory actually was. Not the killing. The naming afterward. The moment when the assembly agrees, out loud, in front of everybody, what somebody now is. And there is one fact about this god and this bird that I have been keeping for the end of the list, and it is the strangest true thing in the episode. The bird is his emblem. Not the bird's own. His. The god who goes up the mountain and kills the lion headed eagle carries the lion headed eagle as his sign. In the south, where he is worshipped under the older name, the great bird with the lion's head is the emblem of his temple and of his city. It is on the seals. It is on the votive plaques. It is on the maces dedicated to him. On one of the most famous carved monuments to survive from that country, a stone slab set up by a king to commemorate a border war, the god is shown holding a net with the defeated inside it, and above the net, with its wings out, is the bird. And when a ruler of that same city rebuilt the god's great temple, centuries later, and wrote an enormous poem about doing it, the temple is described again and again in terms of that bird. It is the thing the building is likened to. The name of the temple itself is bound up with it. So the emblem of the god who killed the Anzu is the Anzu. Now, I want to be careful here, because there is an obvious explanation and it is probably the right one, and it is that this is what a trophy is. You put the thing you defeated on your standard. Kings did it with lions. Cities did it with the beasts of their neighbours. To carry the bird is to say every time anybody looks at you that you are the one who took it down. But I do not think that is the whole of it, and here is why. The bird on those monuments is not dead. It is not hanging. It is not being trodden on. It has its wings out and it is holding animals in its talons and it is doing exactly what it was doing over that temple door four and a half thousand years ago, which is guarding. It did not become a trophy. It went back to work. And that, I think, is the actual ending of tonight, underneath the list of names and the tablet being taken back. The doorkeeper robbed the house and was killed for it, and then the household put his picture back over the door and kept him there, with his wings out, guarding, for the next two thousand years. They did not need a new doorkeeper. They needed that one to go back to being what he was before he wanted the room behind him. And before the turtle, I want to gather up something that has been running all season and that finishes tonight. Count the young gods. On the first night, a young god of a new city was given the kingship because nobody else would face what was in the water, and he asked for the power to make his word true as his price, and they tested him on a garment and gave it to him, and at the end of the night they said fifty names over him at a table. And tonight, a young god is sent up a mountain because nobody else will go, and he wins by a trick told to him by the same clever god, and at the end of it they say names over him. Same shape. Two different cities, two different languages, probably several centuries apart. That is what those poems were for. A city with a rising god needed a story in which their god does the thing that has to be done and is named for it afterwards, and the shape of that story was fixed and everybody used it. Which means that when you hear the naming at the end of tonight, you are hearing the same ceremony you heard on the first night of this season, performed for somebody else, by people who wanted their own god to be the one at the table. Chapter Eleven. The Turtle. Now. There is another poem, and it is in the older language, and it is not this one, and I am telling you that clearly because I am about to tell you a story that contradicts the ending you just heard. It is called Ninurta and the Turtle. And in it, the same young god comes home from beating the bird, and the tablet has already gone back to the deep water, and great things are promised to him, and it is not enough. He wants more. He wants the whole world. And the god of the sweet water, who told him how to win, notices. And he does not fight him. He does not argue with him. He goes down to the deep water and takes some clay and he makes a turtle. And the turtle comes up, and it starts scratching at the ground with its claws, and it digs a pit. And the young god, who has just beaten the storm bird and been promised so much, falls into the hole. And the turtle gets in with him, and starts gnawing at his feet. And he cannot get out. That is it. That is where our copy goes. The mightiest young god in the country, the one who broke the bird, at the bottom of a pit dug by a turtle, with the turtle biting his ankles, and the god who made it standing at the edge looking down. And I want to say why I have given you that, because it is not in the main poem and I could have left it out. The Akkadian poem breaks at exactly the moment he might have kept the tablet. It breaks there. That is genuinely all we have. And there is a whole separate poem, in an older language, in which he wants more than he was given, and a turtle puts him in a hole. That is not proof of anything about the broken lines. Two poems, two traditions, and I am not merging them. But when somebody tells you the clay breaks at the interesting moment, and there happens to be another poem where a young god's ambition goes wrong and is dealt with by a reptile, I think you should be told about both, and then you can hold them however you like. And there is one more thing about that object I want to gather up before we finish, because it has been running through this whole season and tonight is the last time we will see it. Count where it has been. On the first night of this season, a mother going to war strapped it to the chest of her commander, and it was taken off him after the battle and sealed with somebody else's seal and fastened to a different chest. On the seventh and eighth nights, the powers that a goddess put on and had taken off her one at a time at seven gates are the same kind of thing by a different name, the offices and functions of a working world, worn as clothing. And tonight it comes off a peg while somebody is washing, and goes up a mountain, and is taken back on the mountain, and after that, by most readings, it goes home, though the clay that would show us is broken. Nobody in three thousand years of this literature ever destroys it. Nobody ever hides it for good. It gets taken, and it gets recovered, and it changes hands, in poem after poem, and the thing that stays constant is that somebody always goes after it. That is not a coincidence. That is what they thought about authority. It is an object. It can be picked up by the wrong person. And the story is always about putting it back. And there is one more thing about him afterwards, and it is not what you would expect from a story where he is the villain. He did not become a byword for wickedness. The lion headed bird went on being carved over doorways. He went on appearing on seals and plaques and in temple decoration. The image did not go away and it did not become a warning. People kept putting him up over their entrances, wings out, exactly as before, for centuries after this poem was in circulation. And his name turns up in the incantation literature in a way that is almost affectionate. He is invoked. There are texts where his name is used against other things, on the reasonable principle that if you have a problem you want something enormous on your side. So the thief in the poem and the guardian on the door are the same figure and both were held at once, without any apparent difficulty, by the same people, for a very long time. Which is a thing this literature does constantly and which I have come to find restful rather than confusing. Nobody in that world seems to have felt that a story about somebody had to settle what they were. The bird stole the tablet in the poem and kept the door in the house, and both were true on the same afternoon. And there is one last thing I want to give you, and it is about the young god and what happened to him afterwards, because it is not what happens to the young god on the first night of this season. That one became the head of a pantheon. His city became the centre of the world and his name went into every list and the fifty names stuck. This one did not. He stayed important, for a long time, in the south and then in the north, and he had great temples and a serious cult and kings named themselves after him. But he never became the god of the whole country. He remained what he was at the start, which is the one who is sent when there is a thing on a mountain. And the poem is completely at peace with that. The names it gives him at the end are the names of somebody excellent at a particular job. The one who can slay mountains. The one who made every enemy bow before his father. The name in the furrow. That is a career, not a coronation. And I find it the more restful of the two, at this hour, because most people are not going to end up running the pantheon, and the alternative the poem offers is to be extremely good at the thing you are sent to do and to be thanked for it by name at a table afterwards. Chapter Twelve. The Mountain Quiet. The lamp is low now. The tablet is out of the bird's grip. That is the ending, and it is a very small ending for a story with a bird the size of a hillside in it. The object was taken, and it was carried up a mountain, and it was taken back on the mountain, and soon after that the clay breaks, and most readers have it carried home and given back to the one it belongs to. And if that is how it went, and most think it is, then the brilliance came back into the sanctuary, and the rites started again, and the offerings began to work, and words began to mean things again. Think about what that would have felt like, in that world, if you believed it. There was a period, in the old time, when the machinery of the world was switched off. Nobody knew how long. And then it came back on. And on the mountain there is a very large dead bird, and nobody is on that peak now, and nothing is guarding anything, and the wind is going over it. And somewhere else, in a different poem in an older language, a young god is at the bottom of a pit with a turtle, and neither of them is going anywhere, and the god who arranged it is standing at the edge, and the tablet is safe. That is the last picture I have for you tonight and I am aware it is a peculiar one. The most powerful object in this literature spends its entire existence being taken off a peg and fetched back. Somebody steals it and dies. Somebody recovers it and possibly wants it. Somebody makes a turtle. And at the end, by most readings, it goes back to where it was, and everything starts working again. 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 arrow turning back in the air, and a voice on a mountain telling the reed to go home to the marsh, and the feathers to go home to the birds. Sleep well. Goodnight.
Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is the last night of the season, and it is the only poem in it whose author put his own name at the end and told us how he wrote it. He says it was given to him in a dream. He says it came to him in the middle of the night, complete, and that when he woke up he recited it, and that he did not leave out a single line and he did not add one. That is written on the tablet, in the poem itself, at the end, by a man called Kabti ilani Marduk, son of Dabibi, and it is the most remarkable statement of authorship in this entire literature, and it is where I want to start tonight, because everything after it is about what people do with a text. The poem itself is hard. I am going to tell you that plainly. It is about a city tearing itself apart while its god is out of the room, and it is the most difficult subject of the season, and I have put it last on purpose. And here is why it is the right ending, and why you can rest through the whole of it. It ends with a tablet on a peg. The last thing in the poem, the last thing in this season, is an instruction about how to keep the poem safe, and a promise about what happens in the house where it is kept. And people did it. They copied it out and hung it up. There are pieces of this poem that were made to be worn and to be fixed to walls, because people believed that having the words in the house would keep the thing in the words away. Which means the last night of this season ends where the first special ended: with somebody keeping a piece of clay, and the clay outlasting everything it describes. 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 all of it, the two waters and the woman in the moon house and the three long nights of the famous king and the eagle and the seven gates and the fisherman and the queen who was left alone and the bird on the mountain. If so, welcome back, and this is the last one, and I am glad you came. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, you have chosen the hardest one to arrive on and you are still welcome, and I will hold your hand through it. 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 five tablets and sets them out, and then he does something he has not done all season. He puts his hand flat on top of them and leaves it there for a moment before he opens anything. 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 names tonight. Erra, who is the one who cannot settle. And Ishum, who is the one who talks him down. Everything else is a city or a number. 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 now the promise, and tonight it is a longer one than usual, because tonight needs it. There is a disaster in this poem. Cities are destroyed and people die and it is the subject of the middle of the night. And I am going to tell it the way this house tells things, which means you are going to hear it as weather. Not as wounds. Not as a list of what was done to whom. There will be no bodies described in this episode and no cruelty performed in front of you. What you will get is the way it looks from a distance and afterwards, which is how anybody who has actually lived through one of these tells it: the streets, the silence, the things left in the wrong places, the river. And the whole disaster is over by the ninth chapter, and the last three chapters are a god sitting down, a remnant surviving, and a piece of clay on a wall. 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 whatever comes next in this house will find you when 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. Chapter One. The Man Who Had the Dream. Start with him, because he is the only one we have. In this entire season, out of twelve nights of poems, there is exactly one work whose author signs it, and it is this one, and the signature is at the end where a colophon goes, and it says this. The composer of this tablet was Kabti ilani Marduk, son of Dabibi. He revealed it to him in the night. And when he recited it in the morning, he did not leave out anything at all, nor did he add one line to it. Now, we have met an author before this season. On the second night there was a woman in a moon temple who put her name at the end of a collection of hymns and said that something had been made that had not been made before, and she is the first author whose name we have. This is different, and the difference is the whole of tonight. She said: I made this. He says: this was given to me, whole, in the night, and all I did was write it down without changing anything. That is a claim about revelation, and it is the oldest one of its kind that we have in that form, and it is worth being careful about how we take it. He may have believed it exactly. Poets in a great many traditions have described work arriving that way, and anybody who has ever made anything knows the feeling of a thing coming faster than you can account for. He may also have known that a poem carries more weight if it comes from a god than if it comes from a man, and both of those can be true at once in the same person and usually are. What matters tonight is what he thought he was doing. He thought he was writing down something that was given to him for a reason, and the reason, as the end of the poem makes clear, is that having it in your house is supposed to protect you. He was not composing literature. He was making a thing that works. And there is one more thing about that claim that I want to give you, because it is the part scholars find most interesting and it is genuinely odd. He says he did not skip a line and did not add one. Think about why somebody would say that. It is a strange thing to insist on. Nobody says it about a shopping list. You say it about a text that came from somewhere else and that you are responsible for transmitting accurately, which is exactly what a scribe says about a copy. So he is describing himself as a copyist of something he received, rather than as the maker of something he invented. He is claiming the role of the person who does not change anything. And that is a claim about accuracy, and accuracy matters because of the way this poem ends, where Erra himself, the god of the poem, promises that having the text in your house protects you. A protective text has to be right. A word out of place in a formula is a formula that does not work. So the boast at the end is not vanity. It is a quality guarantee, attached to a product, by the person who made it, and it is the oldest one I know of. And there is one more thing about the frame before we go into the poem, and it is the reason I opened the last night of the season with a colophon rather than with a god. Every other poem in this season is anonymous. Twelve nights. Eleven of them come to us with no author at all. The great creation poem, the famous epic, the descent, the eagle, the bird on the mountain, the fisherman: all of them arrive with no name attached, or with a traditional attribution added centuries later by scribes doing their best. And that is normal. That is how nearly all of this literature reaches us. These were not books with authors on the spine. They were texts, copied and recopied, belonging to a tradition rather than to a person. And twice in twelve nights that breaks. A woman in a moon house at Ur put her name at the end of a collection of hymns and said that a thing had been made that had not been made before. And a man in Babylon put his name at the end of a poem about a catastrophe and said it was given to him whole in the night and that he had not changed a word of it. Those are the only two, and they are at opposite ends of the season, and one claims to have made something and the other claims to have received something, and between the two of them they cover the whole range of what people have ever said about where writing comes from. Chapter Two. The One Who Could Not Settle. His subject is a god called Erra. And you have met him, though not under that name. He is the plague god and the war god, and he is the same figure as the one who went down through seven gates two nights ago and married the queen of the dead, and in this poem he has a different name and a very different mood. He cannot settle. That is his whole condition at the start of the poem and the poem says it beautifully. He is lying down and he is getting up. He speaks to his weapons and tells them to smear themselves with deadly poison. His heart, the poem says, urges him to do battle. And then he tells his weapons to go and hide in their corners. And he tells his companions to go back to their dwelling. And then he cannot. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to say this is a poem about a god of war wanting a war, which is true and is not the interesting part. What the poem actually describes is restlessness. He is not angry at anybody. There is no grievance. Nobody has done anything to him. He is a being whose entire function is destruction, and there is nothing happening, and he cannot sit still, and the poem gives him three or four pages of trying to sit still before anything else happens. And that is a very old and very accurate observation about how these things start. Not with a cause. With somebody who cannot bear the quiet. And I want to say how unusual it is that a poem opens this way, because I do not think you can appreciate the rest of tonight without it. Almost everything in this literature opens with an action or a scene. When the heights of heaven had not been named. He who saw the deep. From the great above she set her mind on the great below. Somebody does something, or a state of the world is described, and then events begin. This poem opens inside somebody who cannot get comfortable. There is no event. Nothing has happened. Nobody has been wronged. There is a god in a house, lying down, getting up, telling his weapons to ready their poison and then telling them to go and hide, and not settling. And that goes on, in a long poem, for pages, before a single thing occurs. That is a portrait of a mood, written down three thousand years ago, and it is one of the earliest pieces of writing anywhere that is interested in a state of mind for its own sake rather than as a reason for a plot. And what makes it worse, and better, is that he knows. He is not deceived about himself. He argues with himself, out loud, in the text. He orders his own weapons back into their corners, which is a thing you only do if some part of you expects them not to stay there. He sends his companions home. He is a being who understands exactly what he is about to do and is watching himself walk toward it. And then the Seven start talking, and they say the thing that finishes it, and I will come to them next. But I want you to notice, before anybody talks him into anything, that he was already up. The talking did not start this. He was pacing before they said a word. All they did was give a restless being a reason, and a reason is a very easy thing to give somebody who has already got their boots on. That is why this poem has never stopped being read, and it is why it is the last night of this season. It is not about a monster arriving from outside. It is about the moment when something that was being held in check, by nothing more than its own decision to stay sitting down, stops deciding that. Chapter Three. The Seven. And before them, one more thing about him, because there is a version of this god you have already met and it will change how you hear tonight. Two nights ago he came down seven flights of stairs, and he was rude at a banquet before that, and he stayed six days, and he left in the morning without waking her, and he came back at a run when she called for him. That is the same god. The one who cannot settle tonight, who is lying down and getting up and telling his weapons to ready themselves and then to go and hide, is the one who went down through seven gates and stayed. And I do not think that is a coincidence, and I do not think the poems were written to fit together, and I still think it is worth holding, because there is a kind of person who cannot be still and who is nevertheless capable of going a very long way and staying, and this literature has him in two poems doing both. Tonight is the version where nobody calls him back. And then there are the Seven, and they get him up. They are called the Sibitti, which simply means the seven, and they are the children of the sky god and the earth, and when they were born their father gave each of them a function, and the functions are the poem's coldest lines. To the first he said: go, and let nothing escape you. To the second: burn like fire, and scorch like a flame. To the third: take the face of a lion, so that whoever sees you melts away. To the fourth: let the mountain collapse when you lift your weapon. To the fifth: blow like the wind, and search out the edges of the world. To the sixth: go through the high country and the low, and spare nobody. And to the seventh: you are loaded with the venom of a serpent, and you will kill whatever lives. Seven of them, and each with one job, and the jobs are the seven ways a country can be destroyed. And I want to say something about them, because it is a rule of this house and it matters. They do not have names. Not one of them. They are numbered, first through seventh, and each one is a function, and that is deliberate and it is how the poem wants them. They are not characters. Nobody could tell you what the fourth one is like. They are the seven things that happen when order stops, given in a list, and they are much more frightening as numbers than they would be as people. And I want to say one thing about them before they speak, because it is a rule of this house and I have kept it all season. Seven is not a random number in this literature and it is not decoration. Count what has been seven in this season. Seven tablets of the creation poem. Seven sages who came out of the water at the beginning. Seven gates going down, and seven judges at the bottom of them. Seven terrors worn by the guardian of the cedar forest and given away afterwards. Seven days and seven nights, over and over, for a storm and for a vigil and for a test with seven loaves. Seven days the south wind did not blow. It is the number they used when they meant a complete set of something. Not many. All of them. So when the poem says there are Seven, and gives each of them one destroying function, it is not saying that seven bad things exist. It is saying: here is the complete set, with nothing missing. And there is one more thing about the Seven, and it is a true one and it is up in the sky. In the astronomical texts of that country, there is a star group called the Seven, and it is the cluster we call the Pleiades. Anybody can see it. It is the small tight knot of stars in the winter sky, the one that looks like a handful of dust or a tiny dipper, and most people can pick out six of them with the naked eye and some people can see more, and it has been called seven in an extraordinary number of unrelated cultures all over the world. And in that country it was called the Seven, and it was associated with this group, and there are omen texts about it and offerings made to it. So the seven destroying functions in tonight's poem are also a thing you can go outside and look at. They are up there now, or they will be in a few months when the season turns. A small cluster, very high, easy to miss, and if you know where to look you can find them in about four seconds. And they come to him where he is lying down, and they talk to him, and what they say is the oldest and most effective argument in the world for starting something. They say: spiders have spun their webs all over our battle gear. They say: we no longer remember the road through the mountain passes. They say: the wild animals have got bold. They say: people have forgotten what you are. And they say: we are bored, and our strength is going soft, and take us out. Chapter Four. The Bolted Door. And I should tell you the shape of the whole poem before we go on, because it is five tablets and knowing where you are helps. The first tablet is him not being able to settle, and the Seven talking him into it, and then the trick on the god of Babylon. The second and the third are that god away from his seat, and the destruction. And the destruction is the worst of it. The fourth is Ishum's speech, the inventory, the whole terrible list read back to him. And the fifth is him sitting down, and the remnant, and the blessing on the house that keeps the tablet. So the persuading and the trick come first, and then the disaster, and the last two tablets, close to a third of the whole thing, belong mostly to one person talking somebody down, and then the aftermath. That is a large share for a poem about destruction, and it tells you what the author thought he was writing. He was not only writing about a catastrophe. He was writing about the argument that ends one. And one more fact about this poem before we meet the man who argues, because it changes how you hear the whole thing. People kept it. We have a great many copies of this text. More than of most things in that literature. It turns up at site after site, in full copies made for libraries and in extracts and on small tablets with only a few lines of it, and it goes on being copied for centuries after it was written. That is not what usually happens. Most of what survives from that world survives because one or two copies happened to be in one or two places that happened to burn at the right moment. This one survives because a lot of people, in a lot of towns, over a long time, wanted a copy in the house. And we know why, because the poem tells us at the end, and I am going to keep that for the last chapter where it belongs. But hold on to the fact itself while you listen to the rest of tonight. Somebody wrote a poem about a god who could not sit still, and a country coming apart, and a friend who talked him down. And then, for hundreds of years, people in that country went on copying it, and some of those copies were made to be hung up or carried. Not the creation poem. Not the flood. This one. The one about the collapse, and the argument that ended it. I think about that a great deal. A society that had lived through a long bad stretch produced a text about exactly that experience, and then that text became the one people wanted on the wall, and I do not think it was because they enjoyed the destruction. I think it was because of the last tablet. And there is one person standing in front of them, and his name is Ishum. He is the herald. He goes in front of Erra the way a torch goes in front of a procession, and he is the closest thing this poem has to a conscience, and from the first tablet to the fourth he keeps trying to stop what is happening. And the poem gives him an image that I have thought about ever since I first read it. He is the bolted door. That is what he is called. Not a wall, not an army, not an opponent. A door with the bolt across it, standing in front of something that wants very much to get out. And a bolted door is a thing that works completely, right up until it does not. He argues. He asks him why he has planned harm against gods and people. He tells him plainly that what he means to do is crush the lands and wipe out the people in them. The practical argument the poem saves for the very end, and gives to Erra himself, who admits that without Ishum the gods would have had nobody left to bring them their offerings. It is a good argument, because a god with no worshippers is a god with no dinner. And Erra does not listen to him, and goes anyway, and Ishum goes with him, because that is his job, and this is the part of the poem that I find hardest and truest. He does not leave. He argues the entire way, and he loses every argument, and he goes along. And before the trick, I want to say what Ishum actually is, because his name tells you and it is a lovely piece of the poem's design. His name means fire, and specifically the useful kind. Not the fire that burns a city. The fire in a lamp. The fire under a pot. The torch somebody carries in front of a procession so that people can see where they are going. That is what he is. He goes in front, and he lights the way, and in this poem he goes in front of the god of plague, which means that the light that shows you what is coming is walking directly ahead of it. And he is the one who argues. The lamp is the conscience. The little flame that lets you see is also the voice that keeps saying, look at what you are about to do. I do not think that is an accident. I think somebody built that poem very carefully and gave the restraining voice the name of the smallest, most domestic, most useful fire there is, and put him in front of the largest one. Chapter Five. The Statue Needs Cleaning. And now the trick, and it is the cleverest and pettiest thing in this whole season. Erra goes to Babylon, to the god of that city, the one we spent the first night of the season making a world with, and he does not attack him. He gives him advice about his appearance. He says: look at yourself. Look at your clothing. Look at your regalia. The gold has gone dull. The jewellery is tarnished. Your crown does not shine the way it should. Your image is not what it was. And the god of Babylon, and this is the part that makes the poem work, agrees with him. He says, yes. I know. And he explains why he has not dealt with it. He says that the last time he left his seat, the world was ruined. He says that when he stood up before, the flood came, and the order of things came apart, and the craftsmen who knew how to do this work were lost, and the materials are in places nobody can reach any more. So he has been sitting there in tarnished gold for a very long time because he does not dare to get up. And Erra says: go. Go and get it seen to. I will sit here while you are gone. I will keep the order of heaven and earth. I will hold the reins. And I want to give you what he actually says when he explains himself, because it is the most surprising speech in the poem and it is spoken by the god we made a world with on the first night of this season. He says: I did move, once. And when I moved, the flood came, and the order of things was undone. He says: the craftsmen who did this work are gone. They went down into the earth in that flood and they have not come back, and the ones who knew where the materials come from went with them. The wood is in a place I cannot reach. The stones are somewhere I do not know. He says: how am I supposed to have it repaired when the people who know how are dead. That is the god of the greatest city in the world, sitting in tarnished gold, explaining that he cannot get his own image cleaned because the skills to do it were lost in a disaster long ago and nobody has them now. And every single person who has ever tried to get something repaired that was made by people who are no longer alive knows exactly what he is describing. And I have to tell you the thing underneath this scene, because it is not invented and it is the reason this passage would have landed like a stone on anybody who first heard it. The statue really did leave. More than once in the actual history of that city, an army came, and took the image of the god out of the temple, and carried it away to another country, and kept it. Not smashed. Taken. It went to the east once and it went to the north once and it went away more times than that, and each time it was gone for years, and in one case for a very long time indeed, and getting it back was the work of a king who built his whole reputation on doing it. That is not a legend. That is administration. There are inscriptions about it. There are letters about it. Bringing the god home was a political event with a date. And in between, while the statue was away, the city still stood and the temple still stood and the priests still came to work and the offerings were still prepared, and the room at the middle of all of it was empty. So when this poem has the god of Babylon say that the last time he got up from his seat the world came apart, the people hearing it were not being told a story about the deep past. They were being told, in the language of myth, about a thing that had happened to their own city inside living memory, more than once, and would probably happen again. And when the poem says the craftsmen who knew how to do this work are gone, and the materials are in places nobody can reach, that is also not a metaphor. Skills die out. That is a plain fact about the world. A workshop is a chain of people teaching people, and if the chain is broken for one generation, by a war or a plague or a deportation, the thing they knew how to do is simply gone, and what is left is the object they made and nobody able to repair it. The far country where the good wood came from is on the other side of a border that is now closed. The stone came from a mountain that is now in somebody else's hands. The men who knew how to work the gold went away in a column with their tools, and did not come back, and did not train anybody here. That is what he is saying. Not I am too grand to be cleaned. He is saying: the world that made me has been broken for so long that I cannot be maintained any more, and if I stand up, you will all see it. And the god of Babylon looked at him, and thought about it, and got up, and went. Chapter Six. The Seat Is Empty. And I want to give you what actually happened at that handover, because the poem is careful about it and it is the moment everything turns. He did not seize the throne. He was invited to sit in it, temporarily, by the person whose throne it is, in front of witnesses, for a stated purpose, with an agreed end date. And he accepted the invitation and gave an undertaking, and the undertaking is in the poem: I will hold the reins of heaven and earth. I will keep the order of things while you are away. And then he did not. That is the crime of this poem, and it is not theft and it is not violence and it is not rebellion. It is a breach of trust by somebody who was handed responsibility for a while and who used the interval. And the god of Babylon is not stupid, and this is the part that has bothered me since I first read it. He asks. Before he goes, he asks who will keep everything in order, and the answer he is given is a promise, and he weighs it, and he goes. He made a judgement about somebody's character and he got it wrong, and a country came apart, and there is no version of this poem in which he is blamed for that, and I have never been sure whether that is generous or whether it simply did not occur to anybody. And I should say what was actually going on in that country when somebody sat down and wrote this, because the poem is not a fantasy about a hypothetical collapse. We cannot date it exactly. The estimates run across several centuries and the arguments for each are technical and unresolved, and I am not going to pretend to more precision than the people who work on it have. But the period it is usually set against is one that anybody would recognise. Babylonia went through a long stretch in which the central authority could not hold the country together. Peoples from the west moved in and out of the settled land, sometimes trading and sometimes raiding. Canals went uncleared. Roads became unsafe. Towns that had been continuously occupied for two thousand years were abandoned. And the record of it is not a battle account, because there was no single battle. It is a slow thinning out, visible in the fact that the documents stop. That is the texture this poem is written in. Not an invasion with a name and a date, where an army arrives and a wall falls and afterwards you can say what happened. Something much harder to describe, in which nothing in particular occurs on any given day, and the shepherd does not go out because the road is not safe, and then the field is not cleared because the shepherd is not there, and then the canal silts because the men who cleared it went somewhere else, and at the end of it there is a town with nobody in it and no one moment you can point to and say that is when it happened. Which is exactly what the poem describes, and it is why it does not give you a war. Read chapter seven again when you are awake, if you ever do, and notice what is actually in it. There is very little fighting. What there is, is a list of things not working. The rites performed and not landing. The decisions made and not being right. The people still in their offices and no longer able to do their offices. That is what somebody who has lived through it writes. Not the day the walls came down. The years in which everything was still standing and none of it worked. And the reason he wrote it as a story about a god who could not sit still, rather than as a chronicle, is that a chronicle would have had to blame somebody, and he had no one to blame. There was no invading emperor. There was no wicked king. There was a long bad stretch, and it came, and then it stopped, and nobody could account for either. So he wrote it as a being who could not stay in his house, and a friend who talked him down, and that explains it about as well as anything. And that is how it happens. Not a battle. Not a siege. Not an invasion from outside. The god of the city was persuaded to leave his own seat for a while, for a good reason, by somebody who offered to keep an eye on things, and he went, and the seat was empty. And everything that follows follows from that. The poem is completely clear that the disaster is not something Erra does with a weapon. It is what happens when the thing that holds a place together is not in the place. The rites go on being performed and stop landing. The decisions go on being made and stop being right. The people who ran things are still there and are no longer able to run things. And underneath it all, gradually and then quickly, everything that was being held together stops being held together. That is the whole mechanism of the poem and it is why this text has never stopped being read, because everybody who has lived through the collapse of anything recognises it immediately. Nobody attacked. The middle went out. Chapter Seven. What It Looked Like. Before the cities, one thing about what actually holds a place together in that world, because the poem assumes you know it and we do not. It is not the army and it is not the king. It is the offerings. Everything in that country ran on a schedule of things being done at the right hour by the right person. The god was woken and washed and dressed and fed twice a day. The festivals came round on the calendar and were performed. The canals were opened and closed by agreement between villages who had been making that agreement for centuries. The fields were measured and the boundary stones were where they had always been and everybody knew whose was whose. And all of that is a chain of people doing a thing at a time because the person before them did it and the person after them will. There is nobody enforcing most of it. There is no mechanism. It runs because it has always run and because everybody involved expects everybody else to keep doing it. That is what comes apart in this poem. Not the walls. The expectation. And once the expectation goes, the walls do not matter, because a wall is only a wall if there is somebody who has agreed to stand on it. And now the middle of the night, and I am going to keep my promise. Here is how the poem tells it, and here is how I am going to tell it. The city that had a hundred thousand people in it, and the roads out of it, and the fields around it. The gates standing open. The offerings not made, not because anybody forbade it, but because the person whose job it was is not there. The canals not cleared, because clearing a canal takes forty men and an agreement about who does it, and there is no longer an agreement about anything. Brother against brother. That is in the poem, in those words, and I will say it once. Neighbourhood against neighbourhood. The people of a city turning on each other, not because a foreign army came, but because when the thing that arranges people stops arranging them, the arrangement they fall back into is a bad one. And Erra going through it, and the Seven going through it, each of them doing their one function. The poem names cities. Babylon. Sippar, the old city of the sun. Uruk, with its wall. Der. It goes through them the way a person going through a disaster afterwards goes through a list of places, saying, and there, and there, and there too. And there is one city on that list where the poem pauses over something very particular, and I want to give it to you properly, because it is one of the most specific things in the whole passage and it is usually skipped. Uruk. We have been there before in this house. It is the city with the wall, the one the famous king built and then came home and looked at. And in this poem it belongs to the goddess, and it is her city, and it has been her city since long before anybody in the poem was born. And what the poem singles out about Uruk is not its wall and not its temple. It is the people who worked in the temple. The goddess of that city had, attached to her house, a body of performers. They sang and they danced and they played at her festivals, and they carried out the rites that belonged to her, and they were a recognised part of the establishment with a place in the accounts and a share of the offerings like anybody else on the rolls. And some of them lived and dressed and presented themselves in ways that crossed what that society otherwise expected of men and women, and that was not a secret and not an accident. It was their office. It was understood to be part of what the goddess was and what her worship involved, and it had been so for a very long time, and the texts describe it plainly, in administrative documents, without any fuss at all. And in this poem, the god of plague turns on them specifically. The poem says he set his face against them, and that he changed how people saw them, and that they became a thing the city turned away from. I am telling you that because it is in the poem and because leaving it out would be a kind of lie about what the poem says happened. And I am telling you plainly, without dwelling on it, because it is somebody's real history. What I want you to notice is where the poet puts it. It is in the middle of the list of ruined cities. It sits between a temple with nobody serving in it and a canal nobody is clearing. The author is putting the turning on those people in exactly the same category as the offerings failing and the fields going back to nothing. He is saying that this too is what it looks like when the middle goes out of a place. Not only that the roads stop being safe and the rites stop working. Also that people who belonged, who had a name and an office and a share of the offerings, stop belonging. And he lists it as damage. Not as correction, and not as anybody getting what was coming to them. Damage, in a list of damage, done by a god who could not sit still, to a city that had not done anything. And it says what was left. And here is the phrase that made me choose this poem for the last night, because it is the truest thing in it. The land was made a wilderness, and the wild animals came in. That is it. That is what it looks like. Not corpses. Grass in the street. Animals in the places where people were, which is what you see in every photograph of every abandoned place, and which is the thing that tells you, more than any ruin, that something has stopped. And there is a historical question sitting under all of this that I have to handle carefully, and the honest answer is that we do not know. People have tried very hard to attach this poem to a particular disaster. Babylon was sacked more than once. Cities in that country were taken and burned and depopulated repeatedly across the centuries, and there are candidates, and there are scholars who have argued for this year or that one, and the arguments are serious. And they do not agree, and the poem does not say. So I am going to do what the red team for this season told me to do, which is to name it as a reading and not as a fact. Some people think this poem is about a specific destruction. If it is, we cannot prove which. And it may equally be about all of them, or about the kind of thing that happened often enough in that country that everybody knew what it looked like without needing a date. I lean toward the last of those, and I will tell you why. The poem never names a year. It never names a king. For a text that is otherwise very specific, listing cities by name and describing exactly what happened in each, it is conspicuously silent about when, and I do not think that is an accident. I think it was written to be usable. And I want to give you a little more of what the poem actually shows you, because I have been keeping it at a distance and there is one register in it that I think you should have, and it is not the violent one. It is the register of things being in the wrong place. The poem describes a country where the arrangements have come apart, and the way it does it is by naming ordinary things and saying where they are now. The one who should be inside is outside. The one who should be outside is inside. The father does not ask after his son. The son does not ask after his father. The mother is chatting cheerfully while her daughter is not there. The lame overtake the swift. The weak get the better of the strong. The city is a heap. The temple is a shell. The canal has no water in it and the field has no crop and there is nobody to argue about whose turn it is. That is what the poem gives you. Not wounds. Inventory, of a place where every relation has been swapped or emptied, listed in short flat sentences, one after another. And the reason that is worse than a battle scene, and also the reason it is bearable at one in the morning, is that it is what it actually looks like. Anybody who has been near a collapse will tell you that the memory is not dramatic. It is a list of small wrong things. Chapter Eight. The Speech. And then Ishum speaks. And this is the turn, and it is the whole reason this poem is a poem and not a lament, and the turn is not a battle and it is not a trick. He talks to him. The bolted door, who has been arguing and losing and following the entire way, walks up to the god of plague in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened, and starts talking, and does not stop. And what he says is not you monster. He is far too clever for that. He tells him what he has done. In order. Plainly. Without any accusation in it at all. He says: you have done this to that city. And this to that one. And this is what has happened to the people who lived there, and this is the state of that temple now, and this is who is left. He gives him an inventory. And then he says the thing that turns it. He says: the innocent and the guilty went down together. That is the argument. Not that it was wrong to be angry. Not that nobody deserved anything. That whatever this was for, it did not sort anybody, and the person who did the sorting was him, and it did not sort. And Erra listened. Chapter Nine. He Sat Down. And before he does, I want to say the honest thing about this poem's subject, because we have spent six chapters on it and I have kept it at a distance and that was deliberate but it should not be the last word. This happened. Not the god. The thing the poem is describing happened, repeatedly, in that country, over a very long time. Cities in Mesopotamia were taken and burned and emptied. Populations were deported. Canal systems were left uncleared and the land went back to salt and reed. There are periods of a century and more where the archaeology shows large areas simply going quiet. And the people who wrote and copied this poem had either lived through one of those or were one generation from somebody who had. That is why it was copied so often, and why it ended up on amulets, and why the last chapter of it is an instruction for keeping it in your house. It was not a story about something that might happen. It was a story about the thing that everybody expected would eventually happen again, written by somebody trying to do something about it with the only tool he had, which was words. I have told it gently tonight because that is what this house does and because you are lying down. But I am not going to end the season pretending it was ever a metaphor. And then the god of plague did the thing that nobody in this entire season has done, and I have saved it for the last night on purpose. He stopped. Not because he was defeated. Nobody beat him. There was no fight. Nobody in the poem was in any position to make him do anything. And he did not stop at once. First he sent Ishum out, with the Seven behind him, to lay waste one last place, a far mountain called Sharshar. Then he rested. He had listened to a speech from his own herald, and when he spoke again, to all the gods, he admitted that in his anger he had made no difference between the righteous and the wicked. That is what happened. And he sat down. And then he gave his last command, through Ishum, and it is the last decree of the season, and it begins small. Let the remnant survive. Let the handful who are left in the land become many again, he says. Let the small and the great walk the roads side by side. And then it goes further. Let the gods who left in anger come home to their shrines. Let the temples that fell be raised again. Let the two rivers carry their waters of plenty. And that is what he gives. Not an undoing. A remnant, and permission for it to grow, and the promise that what fell will be built again. And I want to be honest about what kind of gift that is, because it would be easy to play it as a happy ending and it is not quite one. It is a promise, not a repair. Nobody who died comes back. The temples and the cities are not rebuilt by a decree, they are rebuilt slowly, by people, over generations, in the ordinary way. What he grants is the end of further destruction, a blessing on the survivors, and his word that the rebuilding will come. And that, in the experience of everybody who has ever lived through one of these, is exactly what actually happens. Nothing is undone. It stops. And then there is a very long time afterwards during which a smaller number of people slowly rebuild something that is not the same as what was there. The poem knows that. It does not offer you more than it can. It offers you the stopping, and the remnant, and the permission, and the promise of building again, and that is all any of these poems ever offer anybody, and it is more honest than most things written since. And I want to say one thing about how long that took, because the poem is honest about it and I have been compressing. Ishum does not talk him down in an afternoon. He has been arguing since the first tablet. He argued before it started. He argued in the middle of it. He walked the entire way, watching, and every time he opened his mouth he lost, and he kept opening his mouth. From the first tablet to the fourth. And the speech that finally works is not more eloquent than the ones that failed. It is not cleverer. The only thing that is different about it is when it is given, which is after, when the thing is done and there is nothing left to argue for except stopping. That is not a heroic model and I am not going to dress it up as one. The lamp in front of the fire did not prevent anything. What he did was stay next to it the whole way, and keep saying the same thing, and be there at the exact moment when it could finally be heard. Sometimes that is the whole job. Chapter Ten. The Remnant. And I want to stay with that word, because it is the last idea of this season and it has been in every episode. A remnant is what is left when most of it is gone. The library at Nineveh was a remnant. The fire went through it and the walls came down on it and a hill grew over it and what came out, two and a half thousand years later, was pieces. Not the library. Fragments of the library, in tens of thousands of bits, some of them the size of a fingernail, and out of that we have every single thing I have read to you this season. Every poem in this season is a remnant. The one about the two waters is missing lines. The woman in the moon house survives in copies made five hundred years after she died. The famous king is two thirds recovered. The man on the eagle breaks in the air. The queen and the god who left in the morning stop in the middle of a sentence. And tonight's poem, the one about a city coming apart, is one of the better preserved things in that whole literature, and the reason is the last chapter. And I want to give you Ishum's speech at more length, because I summarised it and it is the best writing in the poem and it deserves better. He does not begin with the destruction. He begins with a compliment, which is the tactic of somebody who has been arguing with this person for three tablets and has learned what does not work. He says: warrior. You are the one who is strongest. You are the first among the gods. And then, having established that he is not challenging him, he starts the inventory. He says: you did this to that city, and its people are gone. You did this to the next one, and the temple stands and nobody serves in it. You did this to the third, and the canal is not cleared and the fields have gone back to nothing. And then he comes to the people themselves, and this is the line that lands. He says: you struck down the old men at their doors and the young women in their own rooms, and even then you would not rest. That is the argument. Not that Erra is cruel. That it reached past the walls and the temples to people who were simply at home, and that what came down was not a punishment falling on the guilty, it fell on everybody, and even then he could not settle. And just before that in the speech comes the line I gave you earlier: the innocent and the guilty went down together. And before the blessing, I want to put the whole shape of the ending in front of you, because it is unusual and I have not said it plainly. Nothing is undone and nobody is punished. Think about how strange that is. The god who did this is not defeated, not chained, not exiled, not diminished. He sits down, and he makes a decree, and the decree is generous, and then the poem praises him. That is genuinely the ending. The last movement of a poem about the destruction of cities is a hymn to the god who destroyed them. And I do not think that is cowardice or flattery. I think it is the most clear eyed thing in the poem. Because he is not going anywhere. Plague is not going anywhere. War is not going anywhere. The thing this poem is about will come back, and everybody reading it knew that, and a poem that ended by putting him in chains would have been a lie that nobody could use. So instead it ends with the only two things that were actually available. He stopped. And there is a text you can keep in your house. Chapter Eleven. The Blessing on the House. Because at the end of it, after the author's name, the poem does something that no other poem in this season does. It hands the last word to Erra himself, and the god of plague blesses whoever keeps it. He says: in the sanctuary of the god who honours this poem, let abundance gather. The scribe who learns it will escape from the enemy. The singer who chants it will not die in the plague. And then, the line that did it. Whatever house this tablet is kept in, however angry Erra grows and however murderous the Seven, the sword of plague will not come near it. Read that again. Put a copy of this poem in your house, and the thing this poem is about will not come to your door. And people did. And I want to be careful and exact about this, because it is the last claim of the season and I would rather understate it than overstate it. We have copies of this poem on objects that are not library tablets. Some of them are small, and shaped to be hung or carried, and what is written on them is usually not the whole poem but a short passage, most often from the last tablet, the lines with the protection in them. Not always. One carries a passage from the third tablet, and one carries a great deal of the poem. That is what an amulet was in that world. Not a charm in the vague sense. A piece of a text, the effective part, written out and kept close, because the words were understood to do the work. And the poem tells you to do it. That is the extraordinary part. The text contains, inside itself, the instruction for its own copying and display, and a statement of what will happen in the house where it is kept. So a man wrote a poem about a catastrophe, and attached to the end of it an instruction saying that keeping the poem prevents the catastrophe, and people followed the instruction, and that is why we have so many copies, and that is why we have the poem at all. The text arranged its own survival. That is the thing I have been saving all night. We have copies of this poem, and some of them are not library copies. They are small. They are made to be carried or hung. There are pieces of Erra written on objects that are amulets, made to be worn or fixed up, and most of them carry the lines with the protection in them, and one of them, a black stone from Assur, still holds part of the copper pin it hung from. So a man had a dream, or said he did, and wrote a poem about a city tearing itself apart, and at the end of it he had the god of plague himself promise that keeping the poem would keep the disaster away, and for centuries afterwards people in that country copied out its protecting lines and hung them up. And there is one more thing about the amulets that I want to give you, because it is a small physical fact and it is the last one of the season. Some of them are stone, and some of them are clay, and they are small enough to hold in your hand. And what is on them is not decoration. It is text. Somebody sat down with a stylus and copied out the effective part of a poem onto an object the size of a playing card, in a script where every sign is a set of wedges pressed in individually, which takes a long time and a steady hand and good light. And then they put it up in a house, and lived under it. That is a person doing something about a thing they cannot do anything about, with the only material available, which is words on clay, and doing it carefully. And it did not work. It could not work. The plagues came anyway and the cities were taken anyway and the poem's own subject kept happening to the people who kept its copies. And they went on making them, and the ones they made are the reason the poem is not lost. That is the last irony of this season and it is the same one the second special ended on. The thing they did to save themselves did not save them, and it saved the poem, and the poem is how we know they were there. Chapter Twelve. The Tablet on the Peg. The lamp is low now. And that is the season. Twelve nights, and we started with two waters mingled in the dark with no names on anything, and we end with a piece of clay on a peg in somebody's house. And I want to put the whole thing in front of you once, quickly, and then let you go. We made a world out of the body of somebody who could not sleep, and a bar was fixed across the sky so her waters would not come down, and the moon was handed the night and given his instructions and has not missed one since. We met a woman with a lamp in a moon house at Ur who signed her name to a list of temples, and lost her house, and wrote a poem to get it back, and got it back, and whose face was chiselled off a stone by somebody and survived anyway on the piece that broke free. We spent three nights with a king who could not be satisfied, and watched him make a friend, and lose him, and go to the end of the world about it, and come home and point at some brickwork. We went up on the back of an eagle and watched the sea turn into the basket the bread comes in. We went down through seven gates and were told each time to be quiet, and at the bottom two small creatures made of the dirt under a god's fingernails said back to a queen in pain the exact shape of her own pain, until she quietened. We watched a sister offer half of every year, for ever, and mean it. We watched a fisherman refuse the bread of life because his father told him to. We watched a queen who has never been anywhere wake up alone and nearly end the world about it, and get him back. We watched an arrow come apart in the air and go home to the marsh and the sheep and the birds. And tonight we watched a city come apart because somebody stood up from a chair, and a herald who lost every argument keep arguing until it stopped. And every single one of those came to you tonight off a piece of dried river mud that somebody pressed with a cut reed, by lamplight, beside a river, and that then survived a fire, and a hill, and two and a half thousand years, and a sea voyage, and a museum drawer, and a hundred and seventy years of people slowly working out what it said. The scribe puts the five tablets down with the rest. And then he does the last thing he does every night, which is to bank the lamp. Think of it, wherever you are lying. Somewhere, in a house, a very long time ago, there is a small piece of clay hanging on a peg by the door, with words on it about a disaster, put there by somebody who believed that having the words in the house would keep the thing away. And the disaster came anyway, eventually, the way it does, to that house or another. And the clay is still here. We have it. It is in a museum, and people can read it, and I have just read some of it to you. And I want to say the last true thing of the season, and then bank the lamp. Every one of these poems is about somebody making something and somebody else keeping it. The world in the first episode is made and then held up with a bar across it and a guard told not to let the waters through. A woman signs a list of temples and five hundred years later children copy it out to learn their letters. A king builds a wall and comes home from the end of the world and tells a stranger to go and look at the brickwork. A man feeds a bird for eight months. Two creatures say somebody's pain back to her. A sister keeps half a year, every year, for ever. A fisherman is handed a garment. A queen keeps a door shut. A young god carries an object down a mountain and puts it back on its peg. And tonight, a man has a dream, and writes it down, and the god in it tells you to keep the tablet, and people did, and here it is. That is what this whole season has been about, and I did not plan it that way, and it turned out to be the only thing all twelve of these have in common. Somebody wrote something down. Somebody else kept it. And it came through. 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. You do not have to keep any of this season. If you keep one thing, keep the tablet on the peg. Sleep well. Goodnight.