Great Myths and Legends: Adapa the Sage: Flood, Myth and Magic in early Mesopotamia

well thank you for that Julian no I feel like I should dance for you but I'm not going to tonight I'm going to talk to you about a wide range of topics which have to do ultimately with the fragmentary and fragile nature of knowledge we are looking at Mesopotamia southern Mesopotamia particularly you're going to hear a number of city names mentioned several times this evening down here in the South everdew and bore brook Lagash nippur Kish we're really in this area in what I'm talking to you about tonight there are some outliers though up here on this tributary there's a site called Metro Ram which those of us who are purists in the field who really are Nippur study is and this is the center of the study of Nippur here at the end Museum we figure this we feel this is peripheral this is barbaric up here you'll see we may see why later I may not make too much of that and then over here beyond the map off the map literally in Egypt one of the important tablets I'm going to talk about today is actually from the site of amana in Egypt and we're talking about a reasonably long span of time which I'm going to Telegraph as simply early middle and late by late I mean let's say about 650 BCE the middle of the first millennium a period when King Ashurbanipal up here in Nineveh was collecting a massive library a very atypical library actually collecting it deliberately intentionally maybe as many as fifteen to twenty thousand tablets it's hard to count because so many of them are fragmentary and I say atypical because most of the other contemporary libraries seem to have something like 700 or a thousand tablets but I should Bonnie Powell's goal was to have everything and he sent his scribes out there's a letter saying he sent his scribes out into the countryside to get the tablet she didn't have from Babylonia and then there's another great text a couple of texts published recently by one of my colleagues here at Penn Grant frame letter to the king saying that we have these Babylonian scribes in jail and we keep them handcuffed but we let them out every day and they write a few dozen writing boards full of omens and then we put them back in their handcuffs so this is very forcible appropriation of culture from Babylonia very forcible centralization of the culture but that centralization is also a typical and one of the things that we always have to think about when we think about knowledge in Mesopotamia is that we're really talking about the knowledge that is in the heads of individuals and being transmitted from one individual to another in a very tenuous context often and one of my larger sort of research objectives is to put knowledge back in the heads of individuals and I'm going to have a very very tentative attempt to do some of that towards the end of this evening's lecture so I'm talking about a dapper ostensibly I'm talking about it partly for real and partly as a hook and I wanted to start by just looking at who a dapper is okay so here is the god of wisdom and magic and knowledge and ere is the god of ever do the city god of error do and a Sumerian name is Enki and you'll hear me refer to him throughout this presentation as air or Anki air or Anki and you can see for yourself am aid broad understanding perfect in a dapper to disclose the design of the land broad understanding is pulled out there is a technical term and I'm going to come back to later and in fact many of these things the technical terms the designs are a technical term to him he gave wisdom but did not give him eternal life it's a big deal in Mesopotamian literature this issue of immortality right we're gonna come back to that as well in those days in those years he was a sage son of era do a ik reiated him as a guiding light that word is very difficult that guiding light word it means something like common sense in the Chicago serene dictionary they actually leave it untranslated among humankind and you can see the rest he's a priest he's highly knowledgeable he's the creation of air okay that's what a dapper is in this tab and this tablet is one of those tablets from the late period let's say 650 give or take so add Apple lived in error do this is roughly whatever do looks like now the water went away the water went away probably towards the end of the third millennium BCE everdew was abandoned but until then the line of the shore line of the Gulf was much higher than it is now and this map picks it out quite nicely and you can see that ever do an or and blog ash we're actually more or less on the shore now you shouldn't necessarily think about you know the shore of the Atlantic Ocean unless you're thinking of something like the Back Bay these are marshes which are navigable made variable depth of water and there's a very nice artist's reconstruction which shows you what era do could have looked like okay around let's say 3000 BCE and the reason I put this in here is partly because it's pretty and I like pretty things but partly because it allows me to talk a little bit about the space within which a dapper works because I'm always thinking about the mythological space in which things happen and very little of a dapper takes place here on land his job is on land he has to provide food for the gods he's a fisherman but he goes out into the sea and he goes up to heaven okay so a lot of it APIs right range of movement is in these sort of liminal areas now I'm gonna talk a little bit about who a dapper was thought to be in this late period I'm going to move away from the late period as I work through the presentation but I want to establish this first and it's a bit of a mess honestly here's a nice fragment I told you this is about fragments of knowledge this is from a Shabana pals library and this is a catalog of texts and authors which starts off with some very interesting lines the Asha booze corpus the lamentation priest corpus oversample these are by air it starts off by establishing the key aspects of knowledge key corporate of knowledge really from the god may the god of magic and wisdom very very interesting the asha poo this technical term and our shabu is a kind of priest who has to do purification and various kinds of ritual and exorcism very often translated exorcism in the literature so the Asha pues corpus when we say sage we probably really been a ship who as well these things are not quite interchangeable but they overlap a lot so we can say adapt er is probably a sage and an archetypal our shippou and we get a little bit more information about him because down here you will see the hyphenated name who ana adapt er up here in the akkadian here a newton sure mr. the the person sign who are a dapper another name for a dapper seems to have been who ana and this is very interesting because a dapper doesn't occur in a lot of places in the literature but who Ana does and you'll see in a moment Oh Annie's does the seven sages more late scholarship these guys are thinking of thinking of thinking all the time sometimes you're not sure what they're thinking about but they're thinking who wanna who purported the broad the designs of the universe this work designs again that's the same word as at the start of that first passage I showed you okay and then a collection of a sequence of names who Anna Duggar and Madoka and mega Lama and me Beluga and in lil des a new drug zu seven sages sevens a magic number in Mesopotamia very important number they are the seven brilliant apke lose the seven brilliant sages the parado fish you can see quite apart from the fragmentary nature of the text there's lots of words that we're hesitant about how to translate parado seems to be some kind of carp so the app Kalu's the sages a fish makes no sense right 7-up Kalu's grown in the river who ensure the correct functioning of the plans of heaven and earth and then we get something interesting another sequence nun Pyrrha gelding the abbe Cal U of n Makar and Makar is an early ruler there are several places where tradition the late tradition associates Kings with sages a good King needs a good sage it's fairly straightforward in their heads and is part of the politics of power in this period because in the court these scholars these exorcists and omen takers and lament ORS are very powerful in the neo-assyrian court and they properly promulgate this kind of propaganda in part to make the point that the King needs them okay the other thing I just want to pick out about this and that another name will come down to later the fourth is Lou Nana two-thirds up kallu partly human who drove the ashram Gallo dragon from N in Kiruna determined to give you lots of smearing tonight the temple of Ishtar of Shuggie Shuggie is a historical King shell gears a ruler who reigned in or let's say around 2050 BCE so what this does is take the progression from deep antiquity down to historical rulers doesn't mean to say she'll react she had a sage called Lou Nana but it does mean that within their mindset they believe that very late list 133 BCE they're still thinking about these things in the time il who was king who won over sage a dapper with sage the very beginning okay I won't go through them all but you see de mu Z the shepherd was king and Enlil died with sage the MU Z is going to come back later as well so again this notion this late notion that Kings have a sage one King one sage and as you'll probably see if you've counted there are seven of them this is where it gets really interesting because this in a sense gives us the key we've had these app Kalos parado Fisher's couldn't really make sense of it this is a native tradition the Mesopotamian tradition in canary form texts but we also have fragments of a mostly lost author named Berossus writing in the third century BCE who was a Babylonian born writer priest who wrote in Greek and he wrote down legends that for a long time were kind of poo-pooed because we thought maybe it was like Herodotus he didn't know what he was talking about but as we've learned more about Mesopotamian culture we've taken Berossus more seriously and you'll see in the very first year there appeared from the Red Sea he renamed the Persian Gulf the very first year of creation a frightening monster named Oh Annie's who Ana a dapper here is the first sage and where is he coming from he's coming from the sea had the whole body of a fish but underneath and attached the head of the fish there was another head human and joined to the tail of the fish feet like those of a man and it had a human voice its form has been preserved in sculpture to this day and you can see beside the extended quote a fish man we call them fish men it's a nice term right now these fish men are widely attested in Mesopotamian iconography and it's clear that they are the representation of the asha poos when they are behaving like a sage when they're performing their magic when they're performing their rituals and what you're looking at here is actually such a ritual in the middle of this Pazuzu amulet we have a person lying down on the bed the incantations say this all the time the sick man is lying on the bed and he's ill and standing around him are these priests and they're wearing these fish costumes and I actually like to think they're real fish skins in a big Tigris carp or something 200 300 pound fish they probably stank to high heaven now but it's all part of the atmosphere right because one of the things you don't see in a very steady representation like this is how activated the ritual is this sound in it there isn't this scent the incense there are words okay and probably there are other smells as well right so it's very intense experience so a dapper is a fish man is a sage is narubu he's the first sage that's the late tradition there are some other stories about a dapper which are quite mysterious this is not all of the fragments of this text but it's most of them they're two more small fragments that I didn't put on the slide again knowledge fragile easily lost this is from a Shabana pals library this intriguing thing which as usual all our techs are broken in the wrong places right at least that's what we believe probably if they were broken we think oh yeah a dapper Emmerich I exercised kingship in auric adapt is not supposed to be the Sager n Makar that was somebody else right Perignon geld him when he had something the land of akkad that's an expression for the south he something does rain a dapper went down at the depths and n Makar for the sake of a dapper they lifted something in order not to an ancient corpse remotest times sounds fantastic doesn't it an ancient quartz from remotest times we want to know what happens next there's a lot of noise they went down they opened the tomb we don't really know I haven't sexed a little bit more preserved but it's lost so the point of this is that adapt er had stories circulating about him in the first millennium we have fragments of them he's mentioned once or twice and incantations but I didn't want to give you just a catalogue today of everywhere that adapters mentioned because that would be far too tedious the main thing that we know adapt our from is the adapt a myth which we usually call adapt and the Southwind to distinguish it from a dapper and in my car and I'm going to show you now all of the preserved tablets of this myth okay these are all the tablets from ash Bonnie palace library this one you've seen before it's actually not for much money pills library but these are from a Shabana palace library you can see we have just pathetic fragments of this stuff which is very interesting because there are other texts that we have series of tablets for probably this myth was not written down very much which may also give us some clues about its status this now I know some of what you're thinking or at least some of what some of you are thinking some of you are thinking that doesn't like anything others of you are thinking that looks like a tablet only a mother could love right all right it's true but it's extremely important because this is so-called source B of a dapper from a minor it's our longest continuous piece of a dapper in the Akkadian language and until last year it was the biggest piece of a dapper they're being published so this is really what we know the story from but times change in this field and about 20 years ago in rescue excavations in the hammerin basin a team found a house with a collection of a minute of documents and literary texts and among those texts were two tablets two of what I would call us at a standard Sumerian literary tablets multi-column tablets quite large containing a Sumerian version of the myth of a dapper in a way it's a game changer and that's actually why I wanted to talk about this tonight because I it just came out last year right in my class with my students last semester it's it's new it's breaking you know some of you caught the the fuss about the new tablet of Gilgamesh five on the various social media a few weeks ago that was published last year as well these things do come up in our field is great and this is one of the tablets this is a hand copy of the other what we do when we work on these tablets is sometimes you work with photographs sometimes we draw them very painstakingly in this case Antwan Covino spent hours I breaking hours drawing these things so I'm going to hold off talking about the adapt of myth per se for a few more minutes because I want to talk a little bit about kinds of knowledge and I'm going to talk about two kinds of knowledge really oh I didn't realize that until very late when I was preparing this I've made some realizations myself as I've gone through this process this is good day a good day was a ruler in the city of lagash around 2100 BCE and Gudea left us a whole bunch of statuary and texts not much archaeology because it was excavated in the nineteenth century and the archaeology was not done to contemporary standards well to modern standards here's one of the inscriptions on one of the statues we'll go through and then I'm going to contextualize it a bit foreign Anna the Lady of all lands his lady after she had looked at him with her life-giving look Judea whose name is everlasting ruler of lagash the Builder of Nagar Susan Anu being a ruler of lagash with broad understanding there's that phrase there's that a dapper phrase Gudea is being cast as the one who has the knowledge in this text okay it's in Sumerian adapt is an Akkadian it's the same phrase he made a drawing on the brick moulds frame and made a standard shine at the clay pit he mixed the clay in a pure place and made the first brick in an undefiled place he purified the foundation pit by carrying around fire and anointed the platform with oil of princely fragrance he built at the beloved temple the a honor with in-gear sue for her now there's a lot going on here if you have a if you have a an experienced eye to read it one thing is that this is one of the several places in the Gudea corpus where the ritual for creating the first brick is given we don't have this ritual anywhere else in Sumerian we don't have it until the late first millennium apart from good day we have to wait fifteen hundred years before it resurfaces so it's tremendously important and very interesting the good day is the person who knows how to do this because you can't just throw up a temple in ancient Mesopotamia you have to do everything right you have to make sure the gods approve of it you have to check in with them you have to sacrifice goats a lot of goat sacrifice bad culture to be a goat in I can tell you it's part of a program this one little statue with this inscription there's actually not the same statue as I showed because the the one that the inscription on is not as aesthetically pleasing but there's a collection of Gudea statues there's a collection of writing there are these extraordinary objects with air cylinders which are the most important Sumerian literary texts we have found to date the longest from a place where they still spoke Sumerian probably which most of our smearing doesn't come from and this has a much longer account of the building ritual for the set for a different temple minge zeus temple and it says that the night before judea is going to make the first brick he goes into the temple and he prays all night and in the morning he bathes ritual bathing you have to be cleansed then he does a sacrifice to make sure the gods that approve it's like those wireless commercials can you hear me now can you hear me now right all the way along the line he's checkpointing by asking the gods of he's doing the right thing and it's all described in this long text okay it's a whole series of statues associated with this this is a rather nice one because Ghaderi statue be this inscription actually is one of the most difficult in Sumerian um similar to the cylinders gives an account of the building but also the blessings that Gudea receives the moment when he meets the god a very fraught moment and you can see on his knees here there's a plan of the temple in the cylinders Gudea incubates a dream asks essentially asks the god to appear to him and give him permission to get build the temple and proceeds to design it this is all good daya not a sage the ruler and they write all over these spaces in various ways here's a dual foundation tablet they build brick boxes and they put images of the ruler carrying a core of a basket you'll see within a moment and they write these very basic inscriptions on them ding inning gear sue or Sanka Liga and Lilla Ning gear sue the mighty warrior of Enloe my first semester students can do this by the way or they they better be able to Gudea there he is NC laga Shaka Gudea ruler of lagash and then Ning Goulet Ning do a listen dispute about what the word is Pomona he brought forth or made appear either an everlasting thing or an essential thing a fitting thing and then on the reverse there's a few more line saying he built the temple of Ning yes he built the a menu running gear sooo very sure standard inscription you put it on bricks you put it on cones you put on architectural features you put it everywhere and you bury them with associative figures this one actually is of shogi and this figure is the ruler holding a work basket filled with clay and the clay is the clay that the ruler is going to use to build the first brick to make the first brick personally and these little foundation tablets are probably mimetic of the first brick the brick of fate and we know from late rituals how important this brick is because we have a very late ritual which says that when you're going to rebuild a temple what you have to do is you have to find the brick of fate the first brick cut it out with the silver saw put it to one side and recite in lamentations to it the whole time as kind of a morning ritual for the old temple that you're pulling down and when you rebuild it the tablet is broken I don't know if you build and you make a new first brick or you reuse the old one but the point is that there is this whole ritual framework this is one form of knowledge ok the ritual knowledge to do things correctly for the gods to ensure the correct functioning of society and the cosmos and to prevent catastrophes like say the flood yeah it all comes together and these programs include the erection of steely in Judaea cylinders he mentions that he put up seven steely they're completely destroyed we have fifty or sixty fragments of them but here in the pen museum we have large portions of a steely of a ruler of or who was just about a contemporary with Gudea probably the overlapped and anima steely this is maybe an overly ambitious reconstruction this will actually be when we redo the Near East galleries in a couple of years this will be one of the pieces that we are sort of showing off when our pride pieces and if you look at this you'll see up here there are ladders you can't see it on this reconstruction there's brickwork visible and this detail you see here there's a figure with a work hoe and a work basket okay and this is probably the ruler and in the upper register Mesopotamian narrative monumental art reads from bottom to top here he is coming up and being introduced to the god you can tell us the God because he has all these parallel horns and the rod on the ring are symbols of kingship so the ritual the building program the statues the steely the writing on the temple all of this is a kind of knowledge that you have to have to do things properly and when they say broad understanding it's a very very subtle expression you wouldn't think that all this stuff lay behind it but it was all obvious to them we have to fill it in so the other thing I want to talk about a little bit is time and this is also a setup for the start of the new adapt er the earlier dapper there are several concepts of time there's a quantitative one time in Mesopotamia is very old you can see here after the kingship descended from heaven the kingship was in error do remember a dapper City yeah and you have these rulers who lived these very long rains a loo limb in one of the late texts a dapper is the sage of a loo limb or a very sim named 28,800 years al alga 36,000 years together they rain for more than a quarter million years this total actually down here is off this is why it says seek the scribe got it wrong and this is this part of the Sumerian king list this is actually an Oxford you can go and see it in the Ashmolean this is the first kind of column and then then the flood swept over okay after the flood had swept over and the kingship had descended from heaven the kingship was in Kish remember that so one version of time is there's this deep remote part quarter of a million years old more than a quarter of million years old with Kings that reigned a very very long time divided by the flood and restarted afterwards the flood story you still got time to see it upstairs if you're quick before it closes this is the start of the flood story which some writers call the original sis the cities in the flood story are in the same sequence the same cities as in the king list clearly these traditions knew each other they're from the same approximate cultural context after the something of kingship had descended um after the throne a kingship had descended from heaven but the first of the cities ever do was given to Nooh demurred a very obscure scholar named for Anki and then the rest are not so important so again in the flood story the initial creation okay is established with ever do as a recipient the first recipient of kingship then there's a very qualitative notion of antiquity um I'm not going to read this whole quote but at the top you see I transcribed the first few words of the smear in the first several lines who raya who foudre raya maria niba de areia Marea mu sudra Rhea Rhea is a particle that means far off long ago distant who Yi and mu mean year stood and bad both mean remote or far off very concise terminology very parallel terminology in those days in those distant days once upon a time a qualitative notion of the origin of things this is also the first creation and this is from a text again that we know from the 18th century BCE and I'm really leaving alone most of the later stuff now and this is what really got me interested in this topic because what I see in the meta ran the new early adapter is an attempt to say something new the author is grappling with a new expression of time radar who to be Daniel a tankini Bartolotta mu radar mu beta lotta eggy amaru burrata eggy amato amaru burrata after the flood swept over it's very difficult to understand this actually this is just a juxtaposition of words with particles attached them very literally with those far-off days with their son I think the Sun had already been put in place this is the point this is not primordial time this is not original time this is midpoint time it's far off but it's way past original creation in your radar Nibiru alotta if I'm understanding bar correctly bombing split divide after the night had been separated from the day long since the latter amyl radar move battle ah da till means to finish complete with those years since they had been completing already we already had the cycle of time and in other Mesopotamia missed time the dividers of time the celestial components have to be put in place so this is how the early adapter starts off and you can see after the flood swept over line for establishing the chaos of the land after humanity had been blank in the dust as if there were not enough frustrations in this field ok right here the scribe didn't write the verb come on I don't know if there's some deep sort of existential point the humanity was so badly wiped out you can't even find a word for it or if the scribe wasn't sure how to write maybe some of these texts we know are transmitted by dictation and in these texts in particular you can see how there are hearing errors as I would suggest they are right here in this line kinzig noon Albie this is really kinzig Lulu Gao meals and and dining room so you can see that maybe describe isn't catching things fast enough perhaps that's it after all the lands from below to above being run together the ananda the gods of heaven and earth as many as there were had no meals or dining room have this in the flood as well this is the downside of destroying humanity humanity a better feed you right though so I've kept you waiting long enough I'm finally going to tell you the story of adapt and the south wind I'm going to talk about the relationship of that to the flood and then that to these guys sitting in mid to Ram on the barbaric periphery of Mesopotamia and what they were thinking so this is the better preserved of the two tablets from meta ran you can see that the start that I just quoted is fairly well preserved then the ends of the lines are all missing in the first column or the beginnings of lines it's very very fragmentary what we can recover from it is that there's some kind of a reboot going on to use contemporary terminology right the flood has decimated everything decimated humanity decimated the animal population and in this passage down here they started numerating how the four-legged animals are returned to the land and so forth and it looks like kingship is re-established in Kish which fits right in the Sumerian king list after the flood passed over and kingship descended again and descended to Kish that's right good and if we're understanding it correctly down around here scoop down around here somewhere in this quite badly broken passage it looks like humanity doesn't have a guide remember that word at the beginning that a dapper was a guiding light or something a common sense maybe it's related to that conceptually and it looks like a dapper may be created so although it's very difficult to pull a lot out of this obverse the front it's sort of jives with the parts that we have it's frustrating we don't have more but sumiran is a field of frustration so you have to live with that here's the reverse of this early source from meta run and there's a little bit of a very approximate plot outline there but I'm actually going to tell the story partly based on this and partly based on the Amana source because it turns out they're very very similar so the setup is that a dapper has to go fishing because one of the things you offer to Ankita a er this fish makes sense because you're living by the sea and he's out there fishing and the south wind turns his boat over capsizes his boat and the dapper in a rage curses the wind he says right I'm gonna break your wing and when he says it when he says the words he breaks the wing of the south wind this is a different kind of knowledge that a dapper has a dapper has magical knowledge incantations you can change the world by yelling at it which probably works for a lot of us actually so the wind the south wind doesn't blow for seven days and the sky God our new finally notices this and says to his Vizier he says I'm with the south wind and the labrat his Vizier says there's this character a dapper son of err who broke the wing of the south wind and now it won't blow and an who says what you imagine right and he summons a dapper to heaven he says get him bring him to me I want to talk to him but before a dapper leaves a a gets in the way and a a talks to a dapper and says look there's a few things you've got to do before you go up there firstly you have to adopt a mourning posture you have to wear dirty torn clothes you have to have your hair unkempt and you're going to meet a couple of gods when you arrive and they're going to say why you mourning and you're going to say you're mourning fordham Uzi and English leader and the other thing he says is you're going to be offered the food of death and the water of death and you must not drink and you must not eat you're also going to be offered oil to anoint yourself with and new textiles new clothing because your clothes are ruined those you can do you can anoint yourself and you can dress but you're not allowed to eat and drink because it's the food of death and the water of death so a dapper goes on his way to heaven and it's not really specified how he does this but he arrives and he arrives with the Guardian God's the musii and English cedar and they say why are your clothes ripped why is your hair unkempt and he says oh because these two gods died the movie in English Dida and I'm mourning them and they smile they're happy of course he's buttering them up right i--i was ahead of the game here he knew what was gonna happen and they give him a favourable introduction to and they bring him in and Anne talks to him and says what happened with the wind you know you can imagine Anna depe says look I was out fishing and the wind turned the water over and it capsized me and I yelled idiot anger I didn't mean to do it but I broke the wing of the south wind analysis well okay and he seems to be mollified it's quite complicated some of the words aren't so well understood and there's a larger context within which we're interpreting this but he seems to be modified and what the text says is that he offers a dapper the food of life and the water of life and he offers him the oil to anoint and the textiles so a dapper is as good as his word to and he anoints himself with the oil and he puts on the garment but he doesn't eat the food of life he doesn't drink the water of life and I'm says stupid human now you're not going to be immortal go back to earth and that's more or less where the text ends there's some broken stuff but to all intents and purposes we can say the text ends there so the question is what to make of this right and you can imagine that when the text was first translated people took it at face value they said a Ettrick dedapper a anu that a dapper was going to be offered the water of life and the food of life and he tricked him and he tricked him out of immortality because we have this mythology that immortality is automatically going to be a great thing right we should all want to be immortal I think we can sort of argue with that maybe but you also know probably there is mythology min Mesopotamia as well Gilgamesh is in part about the quest for immortality this business about things that living and things that are dead and things that are going to survive forever comes up all the time not just in humans but also in States so it's an issue with dynastic dynastic change so about thirty years ago my dissertation adviser peurto Mikhailovsky wrote I think it was a five-page article disrupting this perspective and pointing out a couple of things first he said look a dapper nose magic a isn't tricking a dapper into not becoming immortal a is ensuring that magic returns to earth because the knowledge could be lost an is trying to trick a dapper into becoming immortal staying in heaven and not bringing magic back to earth and the other thing he pointed out was at the structure of this text is like a rite of passage so you have an initial state of APIs on earth he's the passenger he goes to heaven he changes his clothes he comes back he reintegrates and he pointed out that that's the structure of many many incantations is the basic structure of incantations in Mesopotamia and he proposed that far from understand a dapper as a text which is a trick of a er we should understand it as a myth that our shampoos told exorcists purification priests told to explain why they still have their power on earth and how it was almost lost but it was saved by a as wisdom so this is very interesting hasn't been universally accepted but very broadly thought about Peter will see this video and will probably call me the moment after sorry Peter but I would like to connect it now with the flood story because I think that we can start to see some interesting things think about the flood story humanity is destroyed and there's a survivor the survivor is always somebody who is extremely expert in the ways of air Anke in one of the versions a myth that we call Atrahasis the flood survivor is called Atrahasis exceedingly wise and that phrase Atrahasis is used of a dapper he's exceedingly wise there's a certain continuity there in the Cimmerian flood story the flood survivor is the a sudra the gods are going to destroy humanity but Enki heir intervenes just as he intervenes with a dapper and he's always getting the way of these things in the flood story see a Sutra is not just a priest he's also a king a ruler lu gal Gooden let me call him okay see a suitor survives the flood has his sacrifice and then is sent to live far away where humans can't reach him so Enki wins because he preserves the knowledge of his utterance Ziusudra but he sort of loses because the a sudra goes so far away and I think that some of these guys these early guys were thinking about that and you see it in another text that we have from meta ran the death of Gilgamesh same site same period same heads all of this is in the same heads the middle of the text after Lord Gilgamesh had arrived at the Assembly this is the Assembly of the Gods Gilgamesh is depressed that he's going to die and he's sort of railing against it and they console him they say the gods say to Lorde Gilgamesh as regards your case after having traveled all the roads that there are having fetch cedar the unique tree from its mountains having killed whoever in his forest you set up many steely for future days setting up the steely as a way of getting immortality writing his immortality in Gilgamesh having found in many temples of the gods you reach the a sudra in his dwelling place having brought down to the land the divine powers of Sumer which at that time were forgotten forever the orders and the rituals he carried out correctly that rites of hand-washing and mouth washing Gilgamesh got to the flood survivor and brought back the knowledge that was almost lost after the flood just like a dapper goes to heaven but comes back again Anki and eya are in this he's in this all the time for the same reason right because knowledge is fragile and he wants to preserve it and these are the two kinds of knowledge that I realized eventually I was talking about tonight this is why I talked about good day a good day as knowledge the rulers knowledge is about how to build temples properly adapt as knowledge is about magic how to control the world with words they're not unrelated but they're both part and parcel of the same thing so just by way of a few words of conclusion we've looked at several myths the flood story and the dapper and the narrative of Gilgamesh we seem to be connected by a common thread and that thread is what happens to knowledge after the flood what happens to knowledge that is extremely tenuous that is preserved in fragments in the way that we have it and there's another little angle to this and that is who does knowledge belong to it's very interesting that Gilgamesh brings it back but it's also certainly the case that by the time we get scenes like this this is a watercolor riffing off the Pazuzu amulet I showed you afterwards and you can see there are a couple of fish men attending to the guy on his bed and somebody reading this is actually here a model of a sheep's liver this is how you do one of the ways you do omens by the time you reach this late period all the knowledge is putatively in the heads of the experts but what about in the early period and when does it change why does good day I have this knowledge why is meta and Gilgamesh talking about Gilgamesh the ruler recovering the knowledge I don't know the answer to that but I think it's very interesting think about whether in very very early times before we really see the mythology the knowledge was configured differently perhaps more in the heads of rulers notionally unless in the heads of sages so I wanted to finish with a moral and the moral of my story is this we've spent about 45 minutes discussing knowledge and we've seen lots of fragments of tablets and we've seen how frail knowledge is physically and mythologically and I expect we're all sitting here or standing here feeling pretty smug because it can't happen to us right knowledge is safe now but my question to you is do you all back up your work every time you stop thank you you

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 146,125

Rating: 4.7359958 out of 5

Keywords: Catalan Myths And Legends, Adapa (Deity), Mesopotamia (Literature Subject), history, Archaeology (Interest), Science, Myth, Legend, University Of Pennsylvania Museum Of Archaeology And Anthropology (Museum), Penn Museum, Philadlephia, Philadelphia Museum, Dr. Steve Tinney, priests, Sumer, Flood (Literature Subject), Ancient History

Id: ciiwb8xsuYU

Length: 45min 56sec (2756 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2015

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[u/alllie]

Thousands of years ago, scholar-priests in ancient Sumer told a tale about a man who lived long before them, a tale of Adapa, who was so clever that his magic could disable the winds, and who travelled to heaven to meet the gods. Recently published tablets shed new light on Adapa, starting with an evocation of the time just after the Great Flood had passed over. The evening will tell several stories: of the new discoveries and their decipherment; of Adapa himself; and of the ancient guardians of this strange and magical tradition whose writings have survived almost four thousand years.