Great Beasts of Legend: Anzu the Lion Headed Eagle

good evening ladies and gentlemen i'm julian singers the williams director of the pen museum and i'm thrilled to welcome you to the first of the year's great beasts of legend series that's running from the first Wednesday of each month now through June the series provides unparalleled access to the collection to the specialized knowledge of our amazing scholars and discounted admission is a particular benefit of being a member please check the website for subscription information and series schedule as well I come back to hear about sphinxes underwater Panthers hobbits and more so I just saw the hobbits bit it's my particular pleasure tonight to welcome dr. Steve tinnie who will kick off this lectures this lecture series dr. Kinney is the associate curator in charge of the museum's babylonians section and the Clark research associate professor in a serie ology in pens Department Near Eastern languages and civilizations in addition he is the director for the center of the analysis of archaeological material and on top of all of that he's the deputy director of the museum and a much valued colleague who was instrumental in helping us transform the galleries of the museum's starting with the galleries of the Middle East he holds a BA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Michigan his research focuses on the Cimmerian language and the cultural and intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia particularly ancient education and scholarship he will speak this evening about the Mesopotamian Great Beast Anzu the lion headed eagle who wanted to rule the universe please join me in welcoming Steve Tilly all right thank you very much Julian and welcome to you all thanks for coming for those of you coming back welcome back great to see you again some of you remember me is the person who delays the talks most weeks by giving lengthy introductions so today Anzu we are in Mesopotamia primarily southern Mesopotamia what you're looking at here is the Middle East the ancient Middle East and we are almost exclusively down in the south of this area we're going to cover about two millennia from about 2500 BCE to about 500 BCE so we are going to move around or or Rock Lagash nip or Eason and we'll get a little bit up to Assyria up here in the North Nineveh and so on in the second or the very last really part of the talk here's a close-up of the South the cities that were interested in or Brooke especially largish notice this dotted line this is the shoreline of the Persian Gulf in the third millennium BCE so this changes things a little bit it means that or a clog action or very close neighbors and really have to be seen as peers in the system in the third millennium and you'll see how that comes out in a minute so I'm going to start with a little bit of background about Anzu in early Mesopotamia by which I mean let's say twenty five hundred to two thousand BC and the interesting thing about this period is that Anzu is seemingly everywhere this is the earliest attestation of his name I'm sure you can see that right I'll help you out this is an administrative text from what we call nice take three a roughly 24 2500 BCE from a city the ancient name is sure a pack and it actually answers name actually occurs in a proper noun a name right here this star is the God sign ding here and right here it says dingy ER sued so disrespect one of the patron deities of the city and underneath it there's another star ding here and then a me sign and then this sign at the end is Mushin Mushin means bird in Cimmerian and the name of an zoo is always written with the bird sign following it it's called a determinative so this name is sued Anzu most people would say suit is an zu I'm not sure if that's true so Dan Dan zu maybe it's very enigmatic but that's the first time so as I know he's mentioned an zoo pops up in a lot of art context in this period this is a lintel is quite large not as large it is on screen it's in the British Museum it sat above this doorway in the nin horse egg temple in obeyed we actually have quite a lot of the material from obeyed in the pen Museum we don't have the lintel unfortunately now we have some of these bulls and freezes and in the new Middle East galleries that Julian referenced you'll be able to see some of this stuff set up in some way reminiscent of the way that it occurred in the ancient world so Anza was associated with the goddess hood with a goddess nin who sang this is a plaque from the same temple this is one of our pieces that's our number down there and this is a common theme and Zhu is jumping on the back of some kind of wild bull with a beard and a human face I honestly don't understand exactly what that is there are people who say that it represents the God shamash the Sun God it's hard for me to imagine that Anzu is eating the Sun God so when we get to texts things are much better trust me and he occurs or he's not front and center or this is another famous piece in the British Museum from the royal tombs of war which will also be laid out in spectacular fashion in the new galleries this is the so called piece side I think many of you will be familiar with it it shows people bringing produce for some kind of a banquet this is the ruler the King Cimmerian for King is big man and he's bigger than everybody else right then there's a war side nice chariots and phalanxes and again the king is up here receiving prisoners no hanzou's yet the ends I always complain the nobody looks at the ends of this royal standard of war this is one end has this nice mountain goat jumping over a mountain is set in the mountains these three holes may even be the archaic genera form sign for melting yeah and on the other end there we've got our Anzu down at the bottom here we've got two of them and here's a blow-up that the bull man here is looking a little bit startled I think I think I would be as well and here's the platform bait for comparison and then finally my sort of iconic piece today is another piece that's associated with the city of war it's actually found at a place called Mari up the Euphrates in a little treasure trove we don't know what the treasure trove was for it's clearly sent to or sent from or sorry to mari maybe it's a dowry or something um but this is the best Anzu out there yeah the wings are the wings are lapis lazuli this blue stone the body and the head and the tail are gold and you can see in the eye sockets bitumen and the bitumen would have had shell or some kind of inlay so this would have been a fantastic piece it's in the Louvre because the French excavated Mari so when we first find Anzu he's all over he's associated with a bunch of people bunch of deities but it's the city of lagash where he's really really super important in lots of ways firstly he's a great art item this is a plaque made by the or dedicated by the temple administrator of lagash and is dedicated to the god ninja suit so when we talk about largish we actually mean to cities like Minneapolis and Paul or Philadelphia Camden we say lagash gear suit there's two towns that are quite close together and the actors a pair and this is dedicated to the gardening gear sue who's the chief god of gear sue and this says doo doo whose the name of the administrator the Saenger dingy earning gear sue car the Saenger of the chief administrator ding gear Sue and it tells us what this nice thing is for umm you see the Anzu holding Lyons we'll come back to that later he says he's dedicated due to dedicated it's a new year sue and down here he says he fashioned it to use for the nails in the roof beams the gagging yeah sure so when they're making these big temples they fix these plaques and they drive nails through them as part of the construction and you can see that doo doo is here unfortunately is broken and Anzu with his lions remember noon horse sang it they had a deer and then this I don't understand and this I'm very curious about is this just filler you'll see in a moment that when they described in gear so in the texts they describe his lower parts as being like the flood and I'm just curious I'm just speculating whether all these wavy vortex spinning eddying lines could be an allusion to that or maybe they're just filler so then we get a little more pregnant I think because we have material that has larger more politically-motivated inscriptions this is a piece we call the studio 2 vultures it's also in the Louvre I'm going to show you close-ups of each piece but you see this characteristic shape there were lots of these things in 3rd millennium Mesopotamia we have bits of one that belonged to or enamor that we're going to put in the galleries the data tells us he made seven so what's on this well the King a an atom in his chariot you can see how similar the area is to the chariots on the royal center of war scene essentially the same culture same artwork a nice fax you can see the inscription I'll talk about the inscription a moment they are walking over the bodies of their enemies not a good day for them it's called the steely of the vultures because of this part of the relief you can see there are people this is a head and these are rib cages and the vultures are tearing at the bodies on the battlefield here's a vulture who's carrying off a loose arm yeah hence the title this is a sign an emblem a standard with an zu on top of it and this is probably the gardening gear suit not everybody would agree with that but I think it has to be and in gear sue is holding a net full of the naked bodies of slain enemies and holding the net is an zu himself holding the Lions and this text is about the defeat that like a she inflicts on its enemies and about how they all have to swear oaths to respect Lagash in the future and that's what all of this is about is very highly ritualized is the earliest account of ritual practice we have and it's probably from about 23 2400 BC so fast-forward a bit we're still in Lagash because really Ning gear so and Anzu is allagash thing okay this is my old friend Gudea he was a king of lagash around 2100 BC and he left us the most important piece of Sumerian literature in existence today is building account where he builds the new temple for linguistic the aina new the fifty house and what's so interesting about this is that Anzu features in it in gear so an undo feature in it the account starts with a little praise to lagash and it continues if Gudea incubating a dream he lies down in the temple and has a dream and the dream is something he doesn't understand because an extra Mesopotamia you never understand your own dreams you always have to go to an interpreter Asst and that interpreter Asst is often your mommy okay so ghoulia goes to his divine mother nan che the goddess of lagash and nan she explains the dream she says my shepherd that's good there I will explain explain your dream for you in every detail the person who as you said was his enormous as the heaven so as it as enormous as the earth whose head was like that of a God whose wings as you said were like those of the Anzu bird and whose lower body was like a flood storm that was ninja SU he spoke to you about the building of his shrine the aina new so the gardening gear su has physical attributes like an Zhu and he appears to go there and says you must build my temple okay and good day it does we have lots and lots of archaeological evidence of that unfortunately we don't have the architecture the site was dug in the nineteenth century and the walls were either not discovered or not identified um but we have lots and lots of bricks and cones and so forth and what's interesting about this temple is that when Gudea rebuilt it he features Anzu in it because he changes the name it's not just the aina new it says up here ding in India su or sang Kaluga and nila the mighty hero of Enlil his Lord falling yasou Gudea the NC of lagash the governor of lagash built Munna do the a and zou babara he is an Zhu a ding yi the God's eye in me Lucian the bird sign the white Anzu he built Ninja Sue's house which is called the white Anzu and it's hard for us to imagine what those look like here's a nice reconstruction of a temple that's not the aina loop because we don't have it but Gudea describes it for us house mooring post of the land this is part of the theology the cities are where the heavens are anchored to the land the temples of the anchor points grown so high as to fill the space between heaven and earth a new new the fifty house the true brick work for which Enlil the god of NIP were the supreme god the king of the gods at the time Ning gear soos father determines a good fate remember faiths we only took a lot about fates in an extra twenty minutes or so Greenhill standing to be marveled outstanding out above all the lands the house is a great mountain reaching up to the skies it is boo to the Sun God filling the midst of the heavens the fifty how sane anew is the white Anzu bird spreading its talons upon the mounted land so there's a lot of references to answer at Lagash which make him look like an agent of the gods a feature of the gods not something that's opposed to the gods which is something we have to keep in our heads now you only have to keep three texts in your heads today Judea Sanders Luger Panda and Anzu and the Akkadian Anzu myth and Zone in note sir it's not so bad Luke el Banda who the heck is lugar Banda some of you know some of you never heard of him most of you have heard of Gilgamesh lugia banda is Gilgamesh his father and Lugar banda meets and zoo in the mountains lugar banda is an officer in the army of a legendary king called elmer car who travels into iran with his army and lugar Banda falls sick and he doesn't want to slow the army down so he says no no don't worry about me labs I'll be fine just leave me in this cave I'll sort something out and there's a whole text about this there are two compositions about Lugar bandha one of which in which he gets left in the mountains and the other which he gets out which is good for him right we're a little bit later now in time gradually going down through the millennia not even the centuries this tablet is in our collection and it's one of the Cimmerian pieces of Lugar bandha and I put the copy here just to convince you that actually does something say something and if you're looking close up you can almost see some of this yourselves now what's this that's a dinghy ursine right what's this it's a bird sign the mushin this is an M do good this time it's different sign same name Anzu just so you know I'm not making it all up right it's important to have transparency of these things so a cave in Iran we don't have any native depictions of this story so the start of this composition lugal bandha and an su lugar bandha is stuck on his own in the cave he gets out and he finds an zoo's nest and zoos not there only the chicks are there but he has a thought this is his plan I shall treat the bird as befits him I shall treat Anzu as befits him I shall greet his wife with affection I shall see an zoos wife and an zoos childhood a banquet and the sky guard the former king of the gods before any law will fetch the be a goddess Ninkasi her fermenting that is a blue lapis lazuli her beer cask is of refined silver and of gold if she stands by the beer there is joy if she sits by the beer there is gladness may she make my beer serving perfect here's Lugar Banda's great plan when the bird has drunk the beer and is happy when an Zhu has drunk the beer and is happy he can help me find the place to which the troops of Orica going and Zhu can put me back on the track of my brothers so the new girl band that has a great plan he's gonna get an Zhu drunk I then get his help right how does that work out well pretty well actually um this illustration is from a kids book about Lugar bandha i'm very charming description of Lubell bandha with the Anzu family he's up younger than I would imagine him a little bit of artistic license so what's happened in the interim is that lugar Banda has carried out this plan he's also decorated the nest with lots of finery and made it shine and he's hung salted meat in front of the chicks and he's groomed the chicks he's done everything he can so that when the Anzu flies back carrying cows in his talons he sees his nest and this is what happens the bird is exultant and zoos exultant he says i am the prince who decides the destiny of rolling rivers I keep on the straight and narrow path the righteous who follow n lilz counsel my father Enlil brought me here he let me borrow the entrance to the mountains as if with a great door if I fix a fate who shall alter it if I but say the word who shall change it so what we're learning from this is that Anzu can declare define the fates decree the fates we didn't know this before this text whoever has done this to my nest made it like a temple essentially if you are a god I will speak with you indeed I will befriend you if you're a man I will fix your fate I shall not let you have any opponents in the mountains you shall be hero fortified by Anzu sounds like a pretty good fate just random piece of Anzu artwork there's so much of it I couldn't put it all in the slideshow we'd have been here all night so lugal bandha replies to the Anzu and says well fine what fate do you propose for me an answer provoke proposes several fates in turn and to each one lugar bandha says no I don't want that so look Amanda actually refuses the a mezuzah fakes and you know answers getting a little bit ticked off at him and says now look my lugar bandha just think again it's like this a willful clout box will be put back in the track and a bulking ass should be made to take the straight path in other words you know I can just set you'd rights I don't have to tolerate this right but I will grant you what you put to me I shall assign you an allotted destiny according to your wishes so wholly lugar bandha answers him let the power of running be in my thighs you wants to be able to run fast okay let me never grow tired let there be strength in my arms let me stretch my arms wide let my arms never become weak and if you do that I shall have the woodcarvers fashion statues of you and you will be breathtaking to look upon your name will be made famous thereby in Sumer and will renounce the credit of the temples of the great gods well lugar band is doing there he is saying if you do this me I'll make you a decoration on all the temples and in fact we know that and who figures as decoration on temples because you know for one thing we saw that one and Anzu grants him this wish and lugar bandha is then able to run after the army and catch up with his friends and there's lots of hugging and general sort of bro fest and they go on their way and they defeat the Iranians they are atoms so in this composition there's nothing about an zu which is a legitimate and Zeus job assigned by Enlil is to sit in the mountains and decree fates and who helps Google Panda and lugar Bandar is subsequently the father of Gilgamesh so Anzu is actually crucial in that whole series of tradition so at Lagash he seems to be an okay guy and in this lugar van der Gilgamesh cycle he seems to be an okay guy as well what happens next so Anzu and the north end in order is another name for ning year soo essentially there's a phenomenon in ancient Mesopotamia where the cities have their chief gods and their spouses and their families and several of the cities have groups of gods that share parallel functions so Ning gear su is the warrior God the Son of Enlil at lagash Nanoha is the warrior God the Son of Enlil in nip war which is n Lil's home and Enlil in the third millenium the early second millennium is the Supreme God he's the king of the gods he owns the kingship of the gods and you'll see that's gonna come out in a moment now the text that we were just looking at lugar bandha and the a mizzou dies out just about around 1730 BCE or so there's another phenomenon in Sumerian literature which is that it almost all dies out at this time it's most prevalent in nippur and after the end of the 18th century BCE only a few compositions survived what happens is that the tradition changes and we start to have myth of myths written in another language the other language with main language fork in air form which is called Akkadian okay Akkadian the Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew we understand it much better but there are far fewer tablets and I just wanted to think for a few moments before we talk about the Akkadian Anzu myth about the state of preservation of this composition it's amazing that we know it as well as we do there are 16 tablets and fragments there may be more tomorrow but today there are 16 and they range from about 1700 BC to about 500 BCE it's about 1,200 years so it's less than 2 tablets per century on average and many of these things are fragments now they actually cluster don't be misled into thinking there's actually 1.5 tablets per century couple from around 1650 with a couple from around 750 7650 couple from around 550 so they cluster over time they mostly can give the same version to the extent we can reconstruct it with a couple of tablets that give apparently bizarre or alternate versions but we can reconstruct a pretty nice what we call a standard Babylonian version which is what I'm going to talk about now and that was divided into three tablets where tablet is like a book in a book like a part of a book right so they're not physical tablets necessarily they may be and it totals only about 570 or 600 lines start a very long text we're not talking about the Iliad here right and if you're curious you can go and read the whole thing on Iraq which is the cordless building website that I run and you can see the URL up there now we do happen to have an amazing first millennium Assyrian depiction of the battle between New Norcia and Anzu and this is the actual relief that's in the British Museum and this is a drawing of it and you can seen an author on the right and an Zhu on the left right in the middle of combat so let's take some time and look at this story events ooh so it starts off with some praise of Enlil and Nippur and there's a little broken passage and in that passage somehow hands who appears and Enlil here's word that Anzu is out there in the mountains this is a common set up in a class of myths that we call combat myths which usually start with some kind of good stuff and then there's a threat and in this case the threat is Anzu but n little thinks about this threat and co-op's him and he says well why don't we bring the answer into my temple he can go out of my temple and he can hold the fates that I decree Anzu status is not to decree fates directly but he does get to execute them I suppose or remember them for Enlil and all is fine for the first 30 40 lines of the text Anzu is doing his job and then he starts to get greedy he starts to look at Enlil and look at the tablet of destinies which I'll talk about in a second and he covets the power and he starts to hatch a plan to steal the tablet of destinies so what is this tablet of destinies the tablet of destinies is the thing that allows you to control the universe we know from one isolated Assyrian text that they actually made some copies of the tablet of destinies and it had designs on it there are broken descriptions with designs we don't have the actual tablet unfortunately if we did presumably we could rule the universe right this tablet of destinies is associated with being king of the gods holding the ultimate power over the gods okay and it features very prominently in a myth that's derived from Nanoha and am zu which I'm not going to talk about extensively today but which gives us a very good insight into it and where we learn this is a myth about Marduk creating Babylon where we learn that really the passage of power of the kingship of the gods is associated with the passage of the tablet of destinies if you have the tablet of destinies during so Anzu watches Enlil and watches Enlil and forms his evil little plan and one day when Enlil is bathing and he's naked so he doesn't have his power he doesn't have his tiara he doesn't have his powerful clothes Anzu grabs the tablet of destinies and flies off the Bounty's silence falls over the gods it's never a good thing in Mesopotamian literature when silence falls noise activity is good silence is death the gods don't know what to do eventually they get their act together a little bit and say you know what Anzu is sitting out there in the mountains he's got the tablet of destinies he's decree inflates his real threat we have to send somebody out to deal with him let's ask some brave gods and they ask a series of gods I will say between you and me I always feel nervous about saying this sort of thing that they're fairly minor and unimportant gods the reason I feel nervous about it is because one day I confidently expect to be struck down on stage while I'm saying these things but they ask Google ooh the son of issuer and Google says no way Anzu is out there he's got all the power he's got a tablet of destinies that mountain is an unapproachable mountain I'm not going to go near the unapproachable mountain so they asked gibble the son of Anna need to and gibble says the same thing I am NOT going out there and they asked Shara the Sun of Ishtar and it says the same thing you cannot expect me to approach that unapproachable mountain and deal with that character who's got the tablet of destinies I'm not doing it No so they've all got their flat denials the gods are not happy about this they don't know what to do for a minute but they go to the God with the plan and those of you who know anything about Mesopotamian myth she know there's one God who is called aya in Cimmerian Enki he's the god of wisdom and magic and he's always a God with the plan and a SS at a what we're going to do first we're going to take the birth goddess the the creation goddess mummy and make her queen of the gods Bailey Ely and then we're going to have her tell her son in order that he'd better go out there and deal with that monster so they elevate mommy to become Bella TV and Bella Ely talks to an otter vastly concur flying Anzu says mother to her son devastate the earth where he was created wreck his dwelling let the battle array resound against him let your ferocious battle force rage on against him let the entirety of it make the dust storm block him draw the bow let the arrow become poison to him let your features become changed like a Galu demon send out fog so he can't see your face let your radiance go against him that your attack be glorious may you have radiance don't let the Sun Shine on him let the bright day turn to darkness for him destroy his life and conquer Anzu that the wind carry his feathers as good news to Enlil devastate and disrupt his mountain domain cut down the life of wicked Enlil let kingship re-enter endles temple the a core well nota turns out to be a good son and doesn't refuse like everybody else has but he flies into a battle rage he goes to his cave or his house or whatever he has them in he gets the seven winds and his weapons his bone his arrow and he marches out against Anzu fearless but not as it turns out completely successfully he challenges Anzu and so it's basically I'm Lenora I'm here to kill you and the text continues Anzu heard his utterance and let loose his furious clamor from the midst of the mountain darkness fell and the mountain was covered as the Sun the light of the Gods grew dark he roared the attack the sign of Anzu was his clamour a cloud of death rained down arrows flashed like lightning the mighty one in order the resplendent one the one of mommy the support of our new and Dagon the loved one of nishiguchi the bow and knocked an arrow from the hand hold of the bow he launched an arrow Anzu called out to it arrow that has come returned to your reed bed frame of the bow returned to your forest bowstring to the Rams tendon arrow flight to the bird and because he was carrying the tablet of destinies of the gods in his hand the bowstring in the bow launched an arrow but it did not approach and zhuzh body because Anzu can rewrite the fate of the arrow so he's him he's absolutely unapproachable as all the other girl said before the battle became deathly still in the battle was held back the clash of weapons ceased in the midst of the mountain Anzu was not conquered so more silence more problems fortunately the neuter is not out of options so it turns out he has a magical talking mace we all need one called shower shower means in Cimmerian a leveler of Myriad's and he says to shower go to air report everything you've seen and then come back and tell me what is as I should do convenient huh so shower goes off and repeats verbatim in the text what has just happened one of the phenomena in these mythological texts as you get these long repeated passages so the battle has happened Cheryl reports it to eya eya thinks for a minute and he says okay I know what to do and he gives shower the instructions and shower comes back and shower then speaks that may speaks to nota and this is what he says what AAA says via shower do not rest in battle that's how you will win tire him out so that he lets his wingtips droop in the oncoming force of the storm wind Oh Lord take hold of your arrows by their ends cut off his wingtips strike them off left and right let him look at his wings so these magic words fail him then he will call out my wings to his wings but you must fear him still draw from the hand hold of your bowl at the arrow go like lightning let wingtip and wing play like butterflies destroy his life and conquer Anzu let the wind carry his feathers as good news to Enlil devastate and disrupt his mountain domain cut down the life of wicked Anzu let kingship re-enter and Lil's temple the a core some of this is familiar to you right is the same motivational speaking as mommy gave her boy and it has the same result the notes of flies back into his battle rage grabs all his weapons again and they resume battle the description is quite short it's slightly broken there's a few lines broken but it's quite short but it's brutal they're slinging blows at each other they're wrestling they're drenched in sweat they rapidly become exhausted which is just what they wanted to happen Anzu rested in the oncoming force of the storm wind and let his wingtips droop the Lord took hold of his arrows by the ends he cut off and Sue's wings striking them off left and right Anzu looked at his wings and it took away his magic words then when he called my weightings to the wings the arrow flew against him the arrow went right across his heart he made the arrow pass through wingtip and winged the arrow passed through heart and lung he killed the mountains he disrupted and devastated the mountain domain Nanette had killed the mountains he disrupted in devastated Mountain domain he devastated the wide earth in his fury he devastated the midst of the mountains he killed evil and zoo but he Ronin Orton took the tablet of the destinies of the gods in his hands and the wind carried the feathers of Anzu as a sign of his good news so a ax played a trick on a masu big as an zoo's feathers are the same material feathers as the flights of the arrows and when an zoo called his wings to him he also called the arrow to him so air was clever enough to use an zoos ability to rewrite the destinies against him so the text winds up with the Naruto returning triumphantly to Enlil and being praised and being given a series of names new names and among those names they say in the furrow 'no nota your name will be ninjutsu in the city of nice or Nanoha your name will be lugar Honda so they appropriate all of those other traditions into this myth at the end so the rewrite not only am zeus story but also the history of the mythology as well so what is going on here how does a perfectly ordinary thermal nem BCE monster become an evil demon well I'm sorry to say it's probably politics we're all fed up of politics alone only the best chance we have understanding this comes through another very very important document which comes down to us in copies from let's say 1750 BCE give or take a few decades and is called the Sumerian king list and the sumerian king list is a long text you can see how big this thing is lists all the kings of each of the dynasties that were considered to have been sovereign over Sumer now this is not a matter of historical reality you understand is a matter of perspective okay so the notion is that at any given point one city is supreme over Sumer and here are all the cities in the section of the King list that occurs after the flood that it says ruled Sumer in the order that it gives them in the text Kish Brooke or r1 Kish again Hamas E or ik or a de mari Kish aksha Kish Brooke Agra die Erik or Eason by ësin were down around 1850 1900 BCE which famous city that we've been talking about today is never listed a sovereign of the silver huh I know you're thinking it you just don't want to shout it out it's Lagash la gas is never mentioned there despite the fact that we know from their monuments and from the scale of Buda is building operations that they had a culture just as significant as other Mesopotamian cities so what happened another question who writes history though winners exactly Lagash is very powerfully important 24 2300 BCE 22 2100 BCE Judea really represents in a way the pinnacle of Lagasse's importance because right at the same time as Judea war is resurging and there's a king called Annamma who probably basically put sluggish out of business largish becomes a province in the or three state and never retains never regains rather is former importance by the end of the third millennium the beginning of the second millennium Lagash is a backwater and all of that important stuff about ninjutsu and Gudea and they anatta man the seed of the vultures all of that is not just forgotten it's suppressed because it's not mentioned in the king list so it seems reasonably plausible to think that maybe around the time that they are suppressing like ashes importance they also twist Anzu story a bit Anzu so far as we know in the third millenium isn't doing anything wrong when he sits in the mountains and decrees fates and they'll put him there to do it but in the story the Akkadian story of an Zhu and in Horta and Zhu steals the tablet of destiny she's got no right to it so that's a big contrast and I think it's an interesting one for the history of them sort of myths and political politics we can carry the story on through other texts the story I mentioned earlier about Murdoch is known usually as the Babylonian epic of creation it's not a very good title for it because it's really the story about how Murdoch becomes king of the gods and when mud it becomes king of gods he slaves another monster Tiamat the sea so then Anzu gets sucked into this thing that there are bad monsters out there but I hope I've made the case that in the third millennium BC he doesn't really deserve it so my closing thought for you is this should we believe the revisionism of the Akkadian story or maybe we should as I like to think because I'm a very fond of the third millennium consider an Zhu not to be a bad monster but a monster that sometimes does bad things thank so I'm happy to take some questions as usual um if you'd like to ask a question there are some microphones in the aisles if you come to the microphone and we can all hear them yes please do any of these myths exist today in their culture um I don't think so I mean I I wouldn't pretend to be an expert in contemporary middle eastern folk tales for example but I can tell you that in terms of the history of the combat myths generally the the whole thing about Lenora and Anzu fades into Marduk and Tiamat the sea and that actually survives until late antiquity there's a Greek paraphrase of it by a guy called de Mazda mascius and I think the 4th century CE II but after that it pretty much dies out as far as I'm aware yeah please well it was very taken by your mentioning of the tablet of destinies I think I need one of those well we all do but doesn't work at this more than one but I was just wondering about um hit as much as I guess writing was um had been invented not too long before maybe so writing was invented we would say somewhere around 3200 3000 BC something like that could is this sort of a reflection of the idea that the rating held power for sure um so this this issue of writing holding power words hold power very much so names hold power in the ballot so quill Babylonian epic creation one of the tests that Marduk has is to see if he can make a constellation disappear with his words and he does so he wishes it out of existence and wishes it back into existence but writing is also extremely fundamental to this culture because for example Gilgamesh Lugar Banda's son the whole Gilgamesh tradition is essentially about how to achieve immortality through writing nor one of the threads of it and in fact the epoch of creation also ends saying you know we've told this and written it down so that future generations will know so writing is everywhere when you do divination you open up an animal kill animal opener and read what's on the liver and the liver is called the tablet of the gods the heavens the constellations are called the writing of the heavens so they do think of their world through writing but it's also the oral part the words and incantations which is what happens with Anzu when he loses wings he loses magical incantations thank you as a as an astronomer I'd like to have that constellation trick okay thank you very much for the question I think you or maybe next yeah um does a similar revisionism inform the treatment of hawawa the demon in the Gilgamesh story because I know there's something bivolo about his role in the woods yeah so that actually is an excellent question and suggest to me that you've been reading your Gilgamesh so very good so the question about for well wha is exactly analogous in some ways with the question of an su because who wa lives in the cedar mountains and Lebanon and he is a happy monster in his jungle and I think you probably are familiar with the recent texts of tablet 5 that made such a furor in social media over the last year which really describes who our in his environment and it's clear that when Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill huwa they are committing sacrilege Enlil has put who are there as the rightful guardian of the forest or the jungle so yeah the this notion that um you know monsters are all bad is our notion and in fact these characters are more kind of liminal beings that are not quite girls are not quite humans but they have their role and the gods have assigned their role and when we disrupt that role we commit sacrilege thanks for the question thank you yes these since or was supposed to be a cosmopolitan city with a lot of different peoples inhabiting I just wonder if hanzou appears in other cultures that weren't happening or if it if Anzu traveled outside of the Sumerian area that's a very interesting question did Anzu travel I'm going to be honest and say not that I know of I do not have an exhaustive acquaintance with all of the iconography ever ran for example but I don't think anybody's ever pointed out that he was anything more than a very local monster and he traveled in the sense that you know I mentioned there were sixteen pieces of this so he travels to souza in Iran there are two tablets from souza of this story and he travels to Turkey because we have another site in Turkey whose arena where we have two tablets from there and that version actually is slightly different so the story travels with caneta from culture but I don't know if Anzu the creature travels as a very interesting question thank you okay so thank you very much for your attention for the person you

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 79,260

Rating: 4.7194901 out of 5

Keywords: Anzu, Mesopotamia, Great Beasts, mythology, Steve Tinney, penn museum, monsters, lectures

Id: n3PyezJuia4

Length: 50min 10sec (3010 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2016