 Okay, our first reading will be Atrahasis, which is also called when the gods like men or when the gods instead of men. It's given that title in its original. When I say it's original, I mean the tablets you see in the background. The ancient cuneiform tablets that this is derived from, they didn't have names like titles. They titled their work by the first line. And the first line of Atrahasis, as you're going to see in Stephanie Dolly's translation, it's when the gods instead of men. That's just a fragment of a sentence. It'll make more sense when you read it. But it's going to be referred to at the end of the text by that title, just that line, when the gods like men. This text, and the tablets that most of it come from, are dated to between the years 1900 and 1700 B.C.E., before the Common Era, or just B.C. So this is about the beginning of narrative literature. Just a reminder where it comes from. This is modern-day Iraq. And we're going to refer to it as Mesopotamia, because it's not specifically Iraq. Although, by the way, the modern word, Iraq, comes from the names of one of these cities, Uruk. But it's called Mesopotamia because it's between these two very large rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. It's sometimes referred to as part of the furval crescent. We're going back about 5,000 years to the beginning, when Sumeria is the first major civilization in Mesopotamia. When the Sumerians invent writing. They invent a type of writing called cuneiform. Now, about the same time, hieroglyphics were being developed in Egypt. But these are not completely separate cultures, as you can see from the map. The furval crescent sort of connects the edge of Egypt with the Mesopotamian river valley. And we're going to be looking at the interchange between cultures up and down that path. But about the same time the Greeks are developing hieroglyphics, the Sumerians are developing cuneiform. And the earliest cuneiform writings are developing around 3100 B.C. We have urban development happening in this area before it happens anywhere else. Pretty much anywhere else in the world. We have large villages and village complexes. But nothing like the urbanization we see happening in Mesopotamia. Just for some perspective, this is still about 1,000 years or 2,000 years before the Trojan War. Same amount of time almost since the writing of the Bible. Before the compilation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Long before all of these cultures become what we know them as being ancient Greece and ancient Israel. Become the cultures we're vaguely familiar with. The Sumerians have already created a major sort of world culture. Now, I mentioned that it was the first urban culture. The city of Ur which is close to the mouth of the Euphrates river. It will be the largest city in the world for 2,000 years up until the rise of Rome. Before that there was no city in the world that was this big. And no city that we would really recognize as a city, like as a large metropolitan area. The way that Ur was. The name Mesopotamia means land between the rivers. I may have mentioned already. It's between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And if you look at this sort of drawing of the landmass. You see the Zagros Mountains in the north. You see the deserts to the west and to the south. But in that middle portion you're in a really dry area. But it's also a watershed area. It's surrounded by really dry areas. But all the rain that falls, as rare as it is for it to fall. Whenever it falls in those areas, it all washes down through Mesopotamia. So Mesopotamia has a pretty steady supply of water. And that water makes it what it is. It enables the agriculture. It enables transportation over further distances that most people are able to travel. And it also, the clay that the earth is mostly composed of in that area. Forms the building materials. So wet clay that dries, there's not enough that you can tell from this picture. This reconstruction, there are not a lot of forests around. In fact, as you'll see when we get to the Epic of Gilgamesh. You have to go a long way to find trees that are large enough to build anything out of. So the only thing you have to build with is clay. But they build really well with it. Very well with it. But they also build out of reeds. They can build buildings out of reeds. And reeds are these really tall grasses that grow in swampy areas. Here in Corpus Christi we have a lot of these sorts of things. Because our geography is not that different than Mesopotamia. But imagine if we didn't have any of the trees. Even as small as our trees are. All we have are these reeds. You can bind these reeds together and build relatively strong buildings. The buildings that in some places are still built. And also the boats that are still built out of these reeds. Which I'll discuss in a second. These have been built the same way for all of this time. For four maybe five thousand years. And there were communities living in Mesopotamia. Pretty much very close to the way they've been living for thousands of years. Until the 1980s and 90s when Saddam Hussein sort of drained the swamp literally. Drained out some of these areas of the Mesopotamian river basin. Where these people had been living. So it killed off the leaves. It killed off the reeds. They had to relocate. But until that we still had people building reed boats. Like the guy you see on the left. As well as building these reed houses. The way you see a picture of one. A modern one on the right. But in that top center picture. You see a carving of one from a tablet. That is more than three thousand years old. We also see depictions in the art from thousands of years ago. Of boats very similar to the ones that are. We're still being built up until the late 20th century. And most importantly the reason we're talking about this culture. This culture is the first one to produce writing. Like I said. And the writing they produce isn't exactly what we might expect. It's not taking some sort of ink. And then writing on a piece of paper. It's not on parchment. It's not even on papyrus. Even though papyrus will be developed shortly here after. It's written on clay tablets. Like I said they built everything out of clay. Because they didn't have the trees for it. They also use that instead of papyrus for writing. And it's a good thing they did. It's ancient papyrus that was written thousands of years ago. For the most part it's completely decomposed. Every now and then we'll find something from 2,000 years ago. Maybe 2,500 years ago. I'm not sure what the oldest papyrus is. But it's not nearly as old as these tablets. And these tablets survived because even when the libraries that they were stored in burned to the ground. Invading army would invade. They would destroy all the temples. Destroy the libraries. Destroy the palaces. Destroy the clay tablets set on fire. All that really does is solidify it. It makes it even stronger. The thing is then the building collapses onto those tablets so it shatters them into fragments. So you still have a lot of writing that's visible. It doesn't burn. But it needs to be broken up the way you see it here. And we have a lot of tablets coming from libraries like the kind I just described. The kind that get compiled. There are thousands of years of scribes who are there recording oral traditions, stories they've heard. Mostly recording things like financial records. In fact long before we have any kind of narrative text we have records of financial transactions. Somebody from Egypt or from Syria wants to trade with somebody from Mesopotamia and they send merchants to carry these livestock or something like that. Well they have to get something back. They have to have something to show that I sent this merchant with 20 sheep to trade to this person for some silk or gold or whatever. I don't want that person taking my 20 sheep to show up with 15 sheep and say that's all that he gave me. I want to have some way to send a message to that other destination that I won't be going to. So that person knows that I actually did send 20 sheep. So this is what most of these texts are being used for but of course it doesn't take long before people start to use them to write down other things. Record stories that people for the most part assume all you have to do is tell. Just like you may not read that much because you spend more of your time watching television or watching movies or on the internet but you tend to sort of think that's where I get my entertainment for the most part. Narratives are the same way. Most of the time you would hear somebody tell a story you wouldn't think, oh somebody should write this down but luckily for us somebody did. So it developed, I compared it earlier with hieroglyphics which we tend to think of as being pictures. Well Cuneiform started out as pictures as well that each of these Cuneiform texts or Cuneiform letters or words is arranged in columns. So the first column is a picture of an ox at the top in the blue and then below that is the Cuneiform representation that it would later take on. So if you wanted to carve into wet clay a picture of an ox you could draw you could sort of drag your stylus across and make these marks that you see in the top. But that takes a long time so if you're writing out something along that's going to take a long time to drag your stylus through this. So instead people start to just push the stylus in and make these wedge shapes that you can see in the second row that ox is now starting to look like one, two, three, four, five, maybe six impressions done with this flat stylus. And the tip of the stylus looks not like the tip of a pencil but the tip of a flat head screwdriver. So imagine taking a wet piece of clay pushing it with a flat head screwdriver. The thing on top is going to be a lot more difficult to make than the thing just below it. As long as you know that second thing is an ox. Well as that gets developed and you try to start writing faster and it changes over time the word doesn't just mean ox by itself it now means goo and I'm maybe mispronouncing this but that syllable is more important than the image of the animal of the ox. Same thing happens with a bird. You can kind of see that it looks like a bird in the second column but by the time 600 years passed and you're working with these styluses these flat head screwdrivers it starts to look like something very different. And you know if you look at water the wavy lines at the top make a lot of sense but the thing it becomes by 650 BC doesn't look like anything I'd associate with water the one for head I don't even know. But you can see how it starts as an image it then takes on a phonetic value it doesn't really matter what object it refers to it matters more what the pronunciation is and we combine those to make words to make names to make that sort of thing. And here are some of the tablets that the story of Atrahasis has written on with the narrative of Atrahasis. These come from between 1900 and 1700 or 1600 BCE we have pieces of them that you can tell by the cuneiform on each one they weren't written by the same person these were written at different times by different people but we can tell that they're writing the same narrative of the same story there are going to be other versions of the Atrahasis story obviously once you get into it you'll see what I'm talking about and we'll talk more about that after you've read it but right now the text that we're going to read you're going to see several different notations that won't make much sense if you're expecting to read a novel but the reason there is because we're starting with texts like this we're starting with manuscripts like this broken clay tablets with cuneiform on them like this that were written by different hands at different times but are trying to tell what seems to be the same story probably something from oral tradition a story that maybe not exactly word for word but what that scribe can get now if a modern reader wants to figure out what's on these tablets it goes through several processes so two cuneiform experts W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard went through all of these Atrahasis tablets and transcribed them from the cuneiform into the phonetic pronunciation of those words so they took those what had eventually become phonetic letters and translated them into the words that they pronounced in the Roman letters that we use today and then they also offer a translation but you'll notice the brackets and then the ellipses the periods between those brackets those indicate that you can't really tell you can tell this word starts off as being this but it might be one thing it might be another well this is actually the text that your translator uses the column on the left she doesn't use exactly the English translation on the right but she uses their column on the left when she writes the book or compiles the book a myth from Mesopotamia and the steps that she goes through and she also combines tablets from other sources besides the Lambert and Millard Atrahasis account but each time it goes through translations the translator has to make a decision this word is probably this but the end is broken off should I go ahead and translate it is that thing I think it is or should I leave it open so even Lambert and Millard had to make those decisions and then Dolly is using their text instead of going right back to the actual tablets so she will pick up whatever editorial decisions they make would a modern English audience interpret something this way or would they misunderstand it so do I need to change the word and then how do I deal with all those broken areas well every time you take other sources and you translate them or you decide what do I keep what do I leave out what do I change do I need to change the meaning so the people understand do I need to create a coherence do I take something that doesn't make sense to try to make it more coherent well that's called redaction redaction is the process of compiling a single text from multiple texts and editing them to make the new text more coherent and again just a reminder it's red letters that's a term I want you to know later on we'll be using that throughout the rest of the semester okay so here's a page from Missa Mesopotamia that means in that first open bracket there's a line that can't be read so it's one of those where there's a crack or there's the cuneiform has been rubbed to where it's just smooth and you can't tell what it says so instead of trying to fill in the gaps and this is something that if somebody was translating this for a popular press book the kind you would expect to read like a novel then they might decide well this is these brackets open and says basically we don't know what's there but that means as a reader you have to decide what goes there now you don't actually have to decide but you're probably going to find yourself filling in the gaps immediately if it's something that you can go ahead and infer you might do that but sometimes you're not going to have any idea what goes there and that's okay it's okay not to know what goes in the gaps come from if that's from a broken area then where did she get these words how does she know what's there if there's a break in that fragment I'm going to leave that question open for right now I'm going to come back to that later on but I want you to go ahead and see if you can figure out where those words come from when you read this in the larger context you're going to start to maybe see oh I recognize those texts from somewhere else right there you're also going to see the letters OBV and SBV in the left hand side left hand margin don't just overlook that those are important they're going to be even more important when we read the Epic of Gilgamesh OBV stands for the old Babylonian version SBV stands for standard Babylonian version those come from two different what we call recensions in the majority of the Atrahasas text that you're going to read comes from these tablets that were written down somewhere between 1900 and 1700 BC but sometimes there's going to be big breaks or things you're going to be missing and Dolly's going to use the standard Babylonian version to fill in but she'll tell you over in the left hand column that she's switching from OBV to SBV so that's what that means what came before like in this example what comes above the table around between 750 BC and then when you see OBV everything after that is going to be back to the old Babylonian version and like I said without the majority of what we're going to read is from the old Babylonian version so really really ancient literature but because there's so many breaks because so many gaps and because this is something that comes from a very very different cultural context we have the title character of Atrahasas he's a human he's the only human mentioned in this entire story he's a king of Shorapak we're told you'll notice that Shorapak the city is really close to the city of Uruk it's close to the city of Babylon it's between this literally right between the two rivers the Tigris and Euphrates River and it's one of the oldest places that where we find ancient writing so it's as we're going to get to later on when we talk about his his parallel characters this is probably a more of a literary figure that his name is going to have a meaning similar to names that we're going to come across later on so the story or the this narrative tells us he's the king of Shorapak he's a human king and he's a devotee of the god Inki or Aya now a very important aspect of switching back and forth between the same god is described as Aya his name is EA but the old version the older version of the god and the older version of these texts his name is Inki well Inki is a very prominent god in the Sumerian and Babylonian Pantheon these are slightly different Pantheons but they're all the Mesopotamian cultures sort of adapt each other's gods and they change their name sometimes or they change their the god El El we'll see later will be replaced by a god named Marduk after Marduk's culture overtakes El El's culture but Inki is pretty well respected as a god and as a character in all these cultures for a couple of thousand years he's known both as Inki and Aya he's the god of the fresh water which is called the Opsu a water god might not seem like that important a god but remember this is the land between the rivers this is a land sandwiched between a desert one of the worst deserts on earth and dry mountains both of which are very inhospitable so these rivers the Tigers and Euphrates rivers enable not only life but enable this flowering urban civilization so obviously in this place the god of fresh water is going to be very important fresh water by the way is distinct from the type of salt water in human technology the salt water has its own gods in particular the monster called Tiamat which I may talk about later on but fresh water is the water of life it's sometimes referred to as sweet water in some of these translations he's also the god of wisdom he's a god of wisdom and that doesn't just mean he's wise himself but he's a helper of mankind he sends these seven sages of philosophy he's also a trickster he's not entirely up front with everything as we're going to see in Atrahasis he's going to make a promise and then break that promise in Atrahasis and we'll learn more about what's going on there as we move into the epic of Gilgamesh but all of these elements are going to be very important because this character we're going to see transform into the gods the father of the gods is called Anu after him all the elder gods are called the Anunaki they're the gods of an older generation a lot of mythologies have this there's a generation of gods long time ago and then they're replaced by these younger gods in Greek mythology it was Cronus or the Latin Saturn I don't know if you'd say he retires or whatever but Ellil, his son who is the war god and the sky god he later replaces Anu although it's a peaceful transition or maybe he just steps up to power and Anu is still in the background Anu still tends to make a lot of decisions but Ellil is really the most forceful, the most outspoken, the most demanding Ellil but he's the war god and he's the sky god in other words he's a storm god so it's not just the peaceful sky but when he comes he brings the storms with it and he's the chief god of the Igigi these are the younger sky gods they follow Ellil but they are subordinate to the Anunaki the elder gods which Ellil himself or Mami and literally that's how it will be pronounced Mami this tends to be a common feature of all languages because when infants are just learning to talk the M sound is one of the first ones they're able to make and who are they making it to who's always the one that's closest to an infant it's going to be the mother so that's why Mater across the world there's these M sounds but literally the womb goddess is named Mami more often than in the text she'll be referred to as Nintu or Bellatili she's the creator of humans and as the womb goddess you might think oh well I know how she creates humans watch how she actually creates humans this is a very important point and remember where we are in Mesopotamia everything's built out of clay the buildings are built out of clay watch the story of the creation of human beings with that in mind and when we talk about the world when you read this text a lot of things are going to make much sense if you are thinking about the earth as the sphere and outer space being outside of it in the sun being stationary in the earth orbiting that keep in mind how the Mesopotamians envisioned the world the world was of course flat there was a sort of round dome over it so if you look at the sky it looks like a dome but there are if the sky is a dome and the stars are up there they must be attached to that dome but now where does the rain come from well in the Mesopotamian conception there was this this firmament this sort of ceiling basically on the sky and there were these vents on the sky and those gates could be opened and that allowed the water that was up above that firmament there was this big tank of water above the ceiling of the sky and those vents could be open and that's where the rain came from and you wanted that rain to be you wanted those gates to be opened every now and then so that water would fall down into the rivers and water your crops and that sort of thing but you didn't want too much rain because you're in this river valley and if there's too much rain upstream there's the water under the earth and this is the Opsu this is Inki's domain and so the Mesopotamians noticed that even when it wasn't raining there was water coming up into the river and so there were natural springs where water would come up through even when there was a clear sky so this is another source of fresh water sweet water as the Mesopotamians described and then you've got mountains on either side surrounding the world that holds up this dome of the sky and also you've got an underworld and sort of you know conceived it as a cave region there's going to be we're going to see later that's where the souls of the dead are and then even below that there's the deep which is sometimes just referred to as the waters of the deep and this is water that you can't drink this is not the sweet water this is the monster TMI but importantly are the gates the gods are imagined as having keys to the sky the vents in the sky that let the rain down they have keys to the spring water doors that prevent the water of the Opsu from coming up into the rivers and they can lock those and so there's no water or they can open them up and so water comes out this is if you're trying to imagine this okay so I'll there's several questions I want you to think about as you read you know you don't have to keep this list next to you the whole time you read it just read it and try to figure out what's going on and then think about these questions and then maybe go back and look and see if you can find the answers and I put the page numbers there to kind of lead you to where I'm looking if you're confused the protagonist is the primary character in a narrative who must overcome a conflict to achieve a goal the antagonist is a character who is the main source of conflict for that protagonist so who is the main protagonist and who is the main antagonist also think about or try to figure out why do the gods create humans to start with and how do they create humans why does El-Lil want to destroy humanity what are the primary conflicts faced by the gods what how do the gods resolve their disputes with each other who says this line do not revere your gods do not pray to your goddess and how is this strategy meant to work why does this person say this what kind of relationship does Atrahasas have with Inky I've already said that he's a devotee of Inky but there are a lot of different ways that a relationship between a human and a god could go look and see how that relationship works what kind of relationship does Inky have with El-Lil a fellow god how do the gods feel after the flood what do we know about Anu, the chief god what do the sacrifices made by humans do for the gods in other words why do humans make sacrifices to gods is it just to say hey I'm devoted to you do the gods actually get something out of it watch for that how do the gods finally resolve the conflict with the human population and lastly who is the first to hear the song or the narrative of the flood into the narrative itself this is going to be right toward the end right toward the end we're going to have some lines of text that tell us a lot about not just what's in that narrative but how that narrative came down to us so enjoy your reading and I'll post another video to watch after you've finished your reading