 Those are the opening lines of Atrahasis read by Klaus Wilka for the University of London's Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East and it serves as an introduction to a text in a way that reminds us this is a voice from another culture it's a voice from the past it's a very foreign voice telling a very foreign type of story and it also reminds us that the form of the story is not necessarily the kind we're used to going to in order to find the contents of the story. We are used to opening a novel whether it's Harry Potter or Moby Dick and having a text that was written by one author as a whole the the text itself has a beginning middle and end everything fits together there's a reason for everything that we read there's nothing that wanders off there's no repetitions that you know no description of a story that stops and restarts and because of that when you opened Mists from Mesopotamia and you read Atrahasis you probably found that this is not where you're used to this is not what you expect a story to look like and the reason for that is that this text did not come through the usual sort of process of authorship that we're accustomed to the the version you have most of what you read from Dolly's text comes from an old Babylonian version that was inscribed into clay tablets in cuneiform by someone identifying himself as Epicaia but Epicaia was not the author he did not create this text most likely he was ascribed possibly ascribed in training someone who was just learning the to write cuneiform and the way you learn to write cuneiform is the way you learn to write your alphabet except cuneiform is a much much more complicated system of writing because it's not just 26 letters that you have to learn that you can recombine to make a small range of sounds it's something that as I mentioned last time is evolved from a pictographic script where a word or a letter stands for an entire thing a letter is a word and it this changes it starts to take on phonetic sounds that you could recombine those individual letters standing for sounds but it's still much larger range of images that you have to learn to be able to inscribe into a tablet so the way you do that is by copying somebody else's writing and you don't just want to copy a text of a manifest for a merchant ship or something like that that would be boring you copy a story that's enjoyable and story that's popular and one of those stories is this story of these three disasters that befall this one person and this person has helped from this from his patron god in here and it seems that epic I was actually transcribing this as an exercise and we're going to see later this becomes very important because this is one of the ways that stories like this end up being found all over the Middle East the same story in one or two or three identifiable narrative forms will be found over a wide range of area the same area where we find cuneiform writing the that style of writing we also tend to find the same stories so if the guy is writing this text the the one version the OBV the old Babylonian version that you have in your addition he's taking this story from somewhere else he's transcribing it he's doing us a great service by preserving it and he's also helping us to identify when he's writing and this is something very few fragments of any of the cuneiform texts unfortunately do for us but because he says at the very end of the text that this was written by the hand of epic I in the month of IR in the the year of Amisaduka was king he's telling us that he's right during the reign of King Amisaduka and we have enough court records in cuneiform that we can identify that Amisaduka was a king during somewhere between 1702 and 1682 before the common era BC so he identifies about when he was writing and he identifies what he has written the physical objects the tablets that he has written and this is very helpful because remember that these are found all in fragments the the cuneiform texts they're fired in clay could potentially last forever they won't erode but they are found in collapsed libraries and they're they're shattered so we have to find the bits and pieces and we never find all the pieces like with any any glass or porcelain or anything you've ever shattered you know you're never going to get all the pieces so he helps us out not only by preserving some text but even what we've lost from him we know how many lines might be missing in one place or another because he tells us that he's just completed the third tablet of three tablets that third tablet has 390 lines on it all three tablets together have 1245 lines so we know when the the text was written we know how much how many lines total would have been in all those tablets and we have the majority of what he wrote and we at least by having those numbers know how how many lines are missing but as I said he's not the original author there are older versions of this text that are just less complete and they're all a little bit different and not only different wordings but sometimes different sequence of events different names for the main character and that sort of thing and that's because this story like most of the stories that we're going to read in fact almost all the stories that we're going to read in this class this semester come from oral tradition their products of writing but the stories themselves predate the narrative sometimes by centuries and we know that these types of things happen because there have been oral storytellers up to the present day who are able to remember entire epics you know things that would you know highly frustrate us we tried to remember it takes a whole lifetime of training learning line by line a particular a particular narrative and we know that these weren't just recited the way we might recite poetry but they were sung we have the the text themselves show indications of things like musical refrains were the same few passages will be read or you know sung over and over again the way you would not expect in a in prose you wouldn't really expect in narrative poetry unless it was something that would be like a chorus in a song you like the course you want to hear it over and over again you don't actually want to read the same passages over and over again that combined with the fact that we find the liar L Y R E a term for a type of harp we find this in the the archaeological excavations of Mesopotamia and we find it has a really important place in that culture and the picture below me here on the bottom left is from the standard of or which beautifully designed lapis lazuli work of art that shows you know a lot of things having to do with life in ancient or but one of the things that features prominently is this guy holding a harp and you see that the harp has this sort of bull head on the front of it and that dates from a thousand years or almost a thousand years before epic I write such a house so this is something that is part of this very old culture now we don't know what they were seeing on these are we know these are very important they're buried with royalty we they're immensely ornate and such that we know this is an extremely important object and that tells us that what it was used for was an extremely important part of Mesopotamian culture but as you can imagine in oral tradition things are going to stay the same all the time word for word is going to be easier if it's a song you can remember the lyrics to a song better than you can remember a speech that you have to memorize but even that's going to change over time and perhaps due to that we have different versions of the atrahasas story about the same time period that Ipigaya is writing and you know a little bit before we have tablets describing a similar series of events but the main character is named Ziosudra and he is also the king of Shiropak he is also a priest of Aia which remember is the name of Inki in other cultures so you know if you take a look at the map in the background of the bottom right in Uruk Inki might be referred to as Aia whereas in Shiropak he might be referred to as Inki the same god but slightly different stories slightly different concept of him from one city to the next well Ziosudra is probably the same sort of thing his name literally means he of long life in ancient Sumerian and remember Sumerians come along before the Akkadians Ipigaya is Akkadian he's writing the old Babylonian version of atrahasas in Akkadian so it's a different language and the names will be a little bit different but also some of the events are a little bit different and these tablets tell us that there were different stories that weren't just different in time but they were being carried in slightly different cultures a culture up the river was telling the story slightly differently at the same point in time so confronted with all these different versions we tend to ask well which one is the real one which is the the original or at least we try to create a composite ourselves that's why it's important to go back and remember the difference between a story and a narrative the story is the event or the sequence of events that I'm telling about but my telling is itself the narrative I am narrating what happened what happened is the story what I'm saying or what I'm writing is the narrative and we tend to think of a narrative is coming from some original version either an actual event or at least an original text and if I think of a text as having an original like there was one original atrahasas story and or one original definitive edition authoritative edition that's something we call an ur text I'm not in everyday language but when we're talking about how narratives work if I had this idea that there's a single original text that preserves the real or genuine story and that all later versions drive from that I'm thinking of an ur text but what we find is however far back we go however many new pieces of fragments of these tablets we get we don't get closer to an original we actually get more diversity we get more different versions instead of getting closer to a single authoritative one and so we should actually think of these as the story at least as multi-form that is there's not just one version there's all these different story elements that the any individual narrator or writer can choose from in order to tell one iteration of a story and iteration is another term that will help us sort of figure out how this works you know the term reiterate if I say something over again I reiterate it well each individual time I say that thing that is one iteration so an iteration is one particular narration of a story it attacks the song a play a movie an illustration or whatever sorry to throw more terms at you I promise the whole semester won't be like this once we get this toolbox of conceptual terminology down you'll be able to use that for the text for the rest of the semester but there's a steep learning curve right here at the beginning now as literary theorist Porter Abbott says when defining narrative as opposed to story he says you know we never see a story directly we never just know what is happening or what has happened instead we always pick it up through narrative discourse in other words other people speaking or writing or singing about this thing the story is always mediated mediated meaning there's some conveyance we don't have direct contact to the story it's coming through media media is plural we use the phrase to or the the term to talk about the news media but that term is plural it doesn't mean just one news outlet one newspaper one news channel but all of these different sources trying to tell the same story giving different narrative versions so the story is always mediated by a voice style of writing camera angles in in movies actors interpretations in movies are on stage even when we're watching something we're still getting it we're having it framed so that what we call a story is really something we construct so it's happening in our heads we're taking different versions different presentations trying to put them together to create what we think is the version but what we're actually doing is creating yet another version in our own heads but he says but most stories if they succeed that is if they enjoy an audience or readership do so because they have to some extent successfully controlled the process of story construction so it's not just a free-for-all if you and I hear the same story we might have slightly different versions of it but we don't have wildly different versions of it in other words sometimes we see the thing that Frederick Bartlett knows in the in the story of the ghost lecture i talked about Frederick Bartlett and his memory experiments he would have the the chinook story read to a cambridge student in britain and the cambridge student would change certain things and he says you know when a story is passed from one person to another each man repeating it as he imagines what he has heard from the last narrator it undergoes many successive changes and that much we we kind of predict i tell you a story you tell somebody else that story they tell somebody else that story it changes each time but he says just like the definition i just read at length it arrives at that relatively fixed form in which it may become current throughout a whole community so it eventually sort of stabilizes it just doesn't just sort of diverge out of control but the important part is within that community so when you leave the chinook community in the Bartlett example and you go into the cambridge university in in england community that's when these huge changes take place so we have to be sort of aware that when a story jumps from one culture to another it's going to change which is why we want to focus on you know try to use people within that community as authorities even if we don't really understand the story we're telling so for example if you take a native american story if you have to choose between a version that comes from an anthropologist and a version that comes from another member of that native community you want to privilege the one of the native community they're going to understand the the context they're going to interpret it more like their source is going to interpret these things that's the ideal but what we tend to do is a little bit of both we take two different sources or 50 different sources of a particular story and we put them together in our own heads in our imaginations when we do this in a text remember we'll call this a redaction when you take you know multiple source texts and combine them into one text but even before we we actually try to do that we actually do it in our own heads well i heard this version from of the the war of the ghost from the cambridge student i heard this version from this native american writer and even though i might want to say the native american writer probably knows it better in my actual memory they tend to kind of converge i tend to take bits and pieces of one and bits pieces of the other and i might forget which one was the the the source for a particular detail in that text but that's just a natural way we absorb stories we don't necessarily remember one version from another version from another version we combine them all into our own versions and this is what we're going to call in this class a myth now the word myth has a lot of different definitions a lot of different applications the term or the word myth comes from the ancient greek word muthos which meant more than just what we typically think of the myths weren't just about you know zoos and the gods and that sort of thing one use of it was just a word or a speech or something you say in public something you say in a conversation or the thing you talk about the thing you say the the fact that you relate not the fact itself not the object in a scientific sense but your description of it so if somebody says i don't know but i heard whatever then they tell you something that's the kind of thing that was typically referred to as muthos as a myth and it's not something that's necessarily false like when you know we have the show myth busters we talk about we call something a myth that means that it's false but it's without the distinction of truth or falsity here i don't know for sure but here's what i've heard that's that kind of thing so it might be in the form of a story that's told not something you have to believe exactly as i tell it but also not the assumption that it's wrong the assumption that there might be some truth to it you don't really go beyond that before you just relay this narrative version of a story from one person to another but of course in atrahasis we have what looks like the thing we typically define as myth as we have gods they're creating the world they're they're fighting with each other and we probably don't assume that there is much truth value in in this story we probably don't assume that there you know there was an actual god named lll and he was there was a god named inky or aya who helped this guy atrahasis so we look at it frequently people will say things like art is the lie that tells the truth or you know there's truth with a capital t that's that's more universal than facts this is actually the kind of thing that would technically classify as a myth it's trying to tell some general truth by telling facts that aren't quite right but then we have these kinds of stories about gods and this sort of thing and i want to distinguish those from other types of myths so three more terms that will help us distinguish that kind of myth one is cosmology and a cosmology isn't necessarily a myth the cosmos is the universe a russian cosmonaut is an astronaut so cosmos is the world we live in but the world beyond as well and it's a concept it's not the actual universe in this sense it's a concept of the universe it's a schema of the universe how that universe looks and for the ancient mesopotamians the universe looks something like the picture on the bottom left there was the water below the earth there was water above the earth above the ceiling of the sky that ceiling of the sky was held up by the pillars of these these tall mountains and above the you know there were these gates in the sky that would sometimes allow water in that water tank out that would fall down to the earth that would be the rain that's a schema of how the cosmos is it's a cosmology don't confuse that term cosmology with the term cosmogony or cosmogony that g o n comes from the the greek word genesis which by the way is a greek term which means beginning so this is the beginning of the cosmos in other words this is a myth dealing with the creation of the world how the world came to be and i want to that's one type of myth and i want to distinguish that from another type of myth which is called an etiology sometimes it's spelled with an a e that's the way i'm going to spell it in here sometimes it's just spelled with an e at the beginning but it's a story about the origin not of the whole cosmos but of a particular natural phenomenon or a cultural practice i'll come back to an example of that in a minute all right so that's i know a lot to take in so take a minute and go over these terms write them down especially the red letter terms they'll things that you'll need to know for a quiz but also we'll be applying them to a text and then when we get to the next video we'll actually apply those to reading the text of atrahasis