COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
A childless king of Kish pulls an eagle out of a pit, and the eagle carries him up towards the heaven of Anu to find the plant of birth. The tablets break off before the end, and the ancient sources disagree on whether he ever had a son.
Read story 12 min readBefore it was a stone giant at an Assyrian gate, a lamassu was a spirit that walked beside a person, and could walk away. The kings carved it with five legs, so that it stands from the front and strides from the side, and their inscriptions say what it was there to do.
Read story 10 min readAdapa, the sage of Eridu, broke the wing of the South Wind and was called up to heaven, where he refused the bread his god had warned him against. It was the bread of life, and the longest copy of his story was found not in Iraq but in Egypt.
Read story 10 min readHe lived in the fresh water beneath the earth, gave every god a task, ate the eight plants of Dilmun and, after a drinking contest, handed his divine powers to Inanna. To the Babylonians he was Ea, the god who warned the flood hero.
Read story 13 min readInanna went down through seven gates to her sister's realm, was turned into a corpse, and came back only by handing the demons a substitute: her husband Dumuzi. For a century it was read as a myth of the seasons, which the Sumerian poem never says.
Read story 10 min readThe gods made him from a pinch of clay to be a match for the king of Uruk; he grazed with the gazelles, learned bread and beer from Shamhat, wrestled Gilgamesh in a doorway and became his friend. In the older Sumerian poems, though, Enkidu is Gilgamesh's servant.
Read story 11 min readEnlil set him to guard the cedars, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed him to make their names. A tablet that reached the Sulaymaniyah Museum in 2011 fills his forest with birdsong and monkeys, and leaves the heroes wondering what they will tell Enlil.
Read story 11 min readA god spoke to a reed wall, a man built a boat, and after the flood the gods gathered like flies at his sacrifice. Gilgamesh hears it from Utnapishtim himself, but scribes were copying the story a thousand years before the epic's Nineveh tablets, with the hero called Atrahasis.
Read story 13 min readMarduk killed the sea goddess Tiamat, split her like a fish and made heaven and earth from her body, and the poem was recited to his statue at Babylon's New Year festival. It never describes Tiamat as a dragon, and the famous relief said to show their fight portrays another god and another monster.
Read story 14 min readTwo-thirds god and a third human, Gilgamesh watched his friend die, crossed the world to the one man who had escaped death, and lost the plant of youth to a snake. The epic is very old, but it is not the oldest story ever written.
Read story 12 min read
