I wish I were able to claim with any honesty that my reason for turning to those arts was anything so astute and far-sighted. But no such princely notions were in my mind. What attracted me to writing was my notion that it was magical. To be able to work magic, that magic or any other, was tremendously attractive.
It seemed miraculous that words could be captured like hawks in flight, and imprisoned in a piece of red clay, and set loose again by anyone who knew the art of it. In the beginning I did not even think such a thing was credible. "You invent the words as you go along," I told the school-father. "You pretend that there are meanings, but you simply make everything up!" Coolly he handed the tablet to the assistant, who read from it everything that the school-father had read, word for word. Then he called in one of the older boys from another room, and he did the same; and then I was whipped on the knuckles for my doubting. I doubted no longer. These people-ordinary mortals, not even gods-had some way of bringing the words alive out of the clay. So I paid close heed as the school-father's assistant showed me how to prepare the soft clay tablets, how to cut a reed stylus to a wedge-shaped end, how to make the marks that are writing, by pressing the stylus into the tablet. And I struggled to comprehend the marks.
Understanding them was enormously troublesome at first. The marks were like the scratchings of a hen in the sand. I learned to tell the differences out of which their meanings sprang. Some of the marks stood for sounds, na and ba and ma and the like, and some stood for ideas, like god or king or plough, and some showed how a word was meant to stand in relation to the words around it. Then I caught the knack of this wonderful witchcraft. I found that almost without effort I could make the marks yield their meanings to my eye, so that I could look down a tablet and read from it a list of things, "gold, silver, bronze, copper," or "Nippur, Eridu, Kish, Uruk," or "arrow, javelin, spear, sword." Of course I could never read as a scribe reads, swiftly scanning the columns of a tablet and bringing from it its full wealth of meaning and nuance: that is the task ofa lifetime's devotion, and I have had other tasks. But I learned my writing-signs well, and know them still, and can never be deceived by some treacherous underling who means to play me false. We were taught also concerning the gods, and the making of the world, and the founding of the Land. School-father told us how heaven and the earth had come forth from the sea, and the sky been put between them, and the moon and the sun and the pla~ were fashioned. He spoke of the bright and shining Sky-father who decrees what must be done, and of Ninhursag the great motl and of Enlil the lord of the storm, and of the wise Enki and radiant sun Utu, the fount of justice, and cool silvery Nanna, ruler of the night; and of course he spoke much oflnanna the mist'. of Uruk. But when he told how mankind was created it saddel and angered me: not that we were brought into being to be serfi the gods, for who am I to question that, but that the work was done in such a cruel and slipshod way.
For look, look you, how the job was managed, and how we sm for our makers' foolishness!
It was at a time when the gods lived like mortals on the earth tilling the soil and caring for their flocks. But because they were gods they would not deign to work at their tasks, and so the gr withered and the cattle died, and the gods grew hungry. Thereafter the sea-mother Nammu came to her son Enki, who dwelled lazily then in the happy land of Dilmun where the lion did not kill and the wolf did not snatch the lamb, and she told him of the sorrow a distress of his fellow gods. "Rise from your couch," she said, "all use your wisdom to bring forth servants, who will assume our task and minister to our needs."
"O my mother," he replied, "it can be done." He told her to reach into the abyss and scoop up a handful of clay from the depths of the sea; and then Enki and his wife the earth-mother Ninhursag and eight goddesses of birth took the clay and fashioned it, and shape the body and the limbs of the first mortal being, and said, "Or servants will look like that."
Enki and Ninhursag, out of joy at what they had achieved, gave a great feast for all the other gods, and showed them how the creation of mankind would ease their lives. "See," he said, "each of you will have your own estate on the earth, and these beings will assure your tasks and minister to your needs. These will be the serfs who toil, and over them we will place bailiffs and sheriffs and inspector: and commissioners, and above them kings and queens, who will life in palaces just as we do, with butlers and chamberlains and coachmen and ladies-in-waiting. And all of these creatures will toil day and night to provide for us." The gods applauded, and drained many a mug of wine and beer; and they all grew gloriously drunk.
In their drunkenness, Enki and Ninhursag continued to bring forth beings out of the clay. They brought one forth that had neither male organs nor female, and said it would be a eunuch to guard the royal harem; and they laughed greatly at that. And then they brought forth beings with this disease and that, of the body or of the spirit, and set them loose into the world as well. And lastly they made one whose name was "I Was Born Long Ago," whose eyes were dim and whose hands trembled, and who could neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees. In this way did old age come into the world, and disease and madness and everything else that is evil-as the drunken joke of the god Enki and the earth-mother his wife, the goddess Ninhursag. When the mother of Enki, the sea-mother Nammu, saw what he had done, she exiled him in her anger to the deep abyss, where he dwells to this day. But the injury was done; the drunken gods had had their joke; and we suffer under that and always will. I will not quarrel with their having made us to be their creatures and their things, but why did they make us so imperfect?
I asked the school-father that question, and he had me whipped on my knuckles for the asking.
I learned other things that confused and frightened me. These were the tales and legends of the gods, the same ones that the harper Urkununna had sung in the palace courtyard. But somehow when the stories fell from the lips of that sweet and gentle old man they had lit a warm light of pleasure in my soul, and when I heard them in the dry precise voice of the pinch-faced school-father they seemed transformed into dark and disturbing things. Ur-kununna had made the gods seem prayful and benevolent and wise; but in the schoolfather's telling the gods seemed foolish and ruthless and cruel. And yet they were the same gods; and yet they were the same stories; and yet even the words were same. What had changed? Ur-kununna had sung the gods loving and feasting and bringing forth life. Schoolfather gave us quarrelsome bickering untrustworthy gods who cast darkness upon the world without warning and without mercy. Urkununna lived in joy, and walked to his death uncomplaining, knowing he was beloved of the gods. School-father taught me that mortals must live their lives in endless fear, for the gods are not kind. yet they were the same gods: wise Enki, lordly Enlil, beautiful anna. But the wise Enki had created old age for us, and the weak~ of the flesh. The lordly Enlil had in his unquenchable lust raped young girl-goddess Ninlil, though she cried out in pain, and he l fathered the moon upon her. The beautiful I nanna, to free her, from the nether world, had sold her husband Dumuzi to the demo The gods, then, are no better than we are:just as petty, just as selfi just as thoughtless. How had I failed to see these things, whe~ listened to the harper Ur-kununna? Was it merely that I was t young to understand? Or was it that in the warmth of his singi the doings of the divine ones took on a different semblance?
The world that school-father revealed to me was a world that x~ bleak and chancy. And there was but one escape from that wor] to an afterlife that was even more harsh and terrifying. What hop then? What hope for any of us, king or beggar? That was what t] gods had made for us; and the gods themselves are just as vulnerai: and frightened: there is Inanna, stripped bare in her descent into he standing naked before the queen of the nether world. Monstrot Monstrous! There is no hope, I thought, not here or anywhere afte