okay our first reading will be Atrahasis which is also called gods like men or when the gods instead of men it's given that title in its original when I say its original I mean the tablets you see in the background the ancient cuneiform tablets that this is derived from they didn't have names like titles they titled their work by the first line and the first line of out your houses as you're going to see in Stephanie Dolly's translation it's when the gods instead of men that's just our fragment of the senate's jewels it'll make more sense when you read it but it's going to be referred to at the end of the text by that title just that line when the gods like men this text in the tablets that most of it come from are dated to between the years 1900 and 1700 BCE before the Common Era BC so this is about the beginning of narrative literature just a reminder where it comes from this is modern-day Iraq and we're gonna refer to it as Mesopotamia because it's not specifically Iraq although by the way the modern word Iraq comes from the names of one of these cities baroque but it's called Mesopotamia because it's between these two very large rivers the Tigris and Euphrates sometimes referred to as part of the Fertile Crescent we're going back about 5,000 years to the begin when Sumeria is the Sumeria is the first sort of major civilization in Mesopotamia when the Sumerians invent writing they invent a type of writing called cuneiform now about the same time hieroglyphics were being developed in Egypt but these are not completely separate cultures as you can see from the map there the Fertile Crescent sort of connects the the edge of Egypt with the Mesopotamian River Valley and we're going to be looking at the interchange between the cultures up and down that that path but about the same time the Greeks are developing hieroglyphics the Sumerians are developing cuneiform and the earliest cuneiform writings developing around 3100 BC we have urban development happening this area before it happens anywhere else pretty much anywhere else in the world we have large villages and village complexes but nothing like the urbanization we see happening in Mesopotamia just for some perspective this is still about a thousand years or 2,000 years before the Trojan War same amount of time almost since the the writing of the Bible before the compilation of the Iliad and the Odyssey long before all of these cultures become what we know them as being before ancient Greece in ancient Israel become the cultures we're vaguely familiar with the Sumerians have already created a major sort of world culture now I mentioned that it was the first urban culture the city of or which is you know close to the the mouth of the Euphrates River be the largest city in the world for two thousand years but uh up until the rise of Rome before that there was no city in the world that was this big and no city that we would who really recognize as a city like as a as a large metropolitan area the way that or was the name Mesopotamia means land between the rivers I may have mentioned already it's between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and if you look at this sort of this drawing of the landmass you see the Zagros Mountains in the north you see the deserts to the west and to the south but in that middle portion you get you're in a really dry area but it's also a watershed area so it's surrounded by really dry areas but all the rain that follows the as rare as a district to fall whenever it falls in those areas it all washes down through Mesopotamia so Mesopotamia has a pretty steady supply of water and that water makes it what what it is it enables the agriculture it enables transportation over further distances than most people are able to travel and it also the the clay that the earth is mostly composed of at that in that area forms the building materials so wet clay that dries there's there's not enough that you can tell from this picture this reconstruction there are not a lot of forests around in fact as you'll see when we get to the epic of gilgamesh you have to go a long way to find trees that are large enough to build anything out of so the only thing you have to build with is clay but they build really well with it very well with but they also build out of reeds they can build buildings out of reeds in reeds of these you know really tall grasses that grow in swampy areas here in corpus christi we have a lot of these sorts of things because our geography is not different than the mesopotamian but imagine if we didn't have any of the trees even as small as our trees are all we have with these reads you can bind these reeds together and build real relatively strong buildings the buildings that in some places are still built and also the boats that are still built out of these reeds were out she'll discuss in a second these have been built the same way for all of this times before maybe 5,000 years and there were communities living in Mesopotamia pretty much very close to the way they've been living for thousands of years up until the 1980s and 90s when Saddam Hussein sort of drain the swamp literally drained out some of these areas of the Mesopotamian River Basin that where these people had been living so killed off the leaves they had to move I started kill off the reeds they had to relocate but until that we still had people building reed boats like the the guy you see on the left as well as building these reed houses the way you see a picture of one a modern one on the right but in that top center picture you see a carving of one from a tablet that is more than 3000 years old we also see the pic shion's in the art from thousands of years ago of boats very similar to the ones that are we're still being built up until the late 20th century and most importantly the reason we're talking about this culture is because this culture is the first one to produce writing like I said and the writing they produce isn't exactly what we might expect it's not taking some sort of ink and then writing on a piece of paper it's not on parchment it's not on not even a papyrus even though papyrus will be developed shortly here after it's written on clay tablets like I said they built everything out of clay because they didn't have the trees for it they also use that instead of papyrus for writing and it's a good thing they did because ancient papyrus that was you know written thousands of years ago for the most part has completely decomposed every now and then we'll find something from 2,000 years ago maybe through maybe 2500 years ago I'm not sure what the old strip iris is but it's not nearly as old as these tablets and these tablets survived because even when the libraries that they were stored in burned to the ground with it invading army would invade they would destroy it all the temples destroy the libraries destroy the palaces set everything on fire but when you have a clay tablet set on fire all that really does is solidified it makes it even stronger the thing is then the building collapses onto those tablets so it shatters into fragments so you still have a lot of writing that's visible it doesn't burn but it tends to be broken up the way you see here and we have a lot of tablets coming from libraries like the kind I just described kind that they get compiled they're thousands of years of scribes who are there recording oral traditions stories they've heard mostly recording things like financial records in fact long before we have any kind of narrative text we have records of financial transactions somebody from Egypt or from Syria wants to trade with somebody from Mesopotamia and they send merchants to you know carry these livestock or something like that well they have to get something back and they have to have something to show that I sent this merchants with 20 sheep to trade to this person for some silk or gold or whatever I don't want that person taking my twenty sheep to show up with fifteen she can say that's all that he gave me I want to have some way to send a message to that other destination that I won't be going to so that person knows that I actually did send 20 sheep so this is what most of these texts are being used for but of course it doesn't take long before people start to use them to write down other things record stories that people for the most part assume all you have to do is tell just like you may not read that much because you spend more of your time watching television or watching movies or on the internet but you tend to sort of think well that's where I get my entertainment for the most part narratives were the same way most of the time you would hear somebody tell a story you wouldn't think Oh somebody should write this down but luckily for us somebody did so it develops I'm compared to earlier with high regret hieroglyphics which we tend to think of as being pictures well cuneiform started out as pictures as well that each of these cuneiform texts are in uniform letters or words is arranged in columns so the first column is a picture of an ox at the top and the blue and then below that is the cuneiform representation that would later take on so if you wanted to carve into wet clay a picture of an ox you could draw you can sort of drag your stylist across and make these make these marks that you see in the top but that takes a long time so if you're writing out something along that's gonna take a long time to drag your your stylus through this so instead people start to just push the stylus in and make these wedge shapes that's you know you can see in the second row that ox has now started to look like one two three four five maybe six impressions done with this flat stylus and the stylus the tip of the stylus looks not like the type of tip of a pencil but the tip of a flathead screwdriver so imagine taking a wet piece of clay pushing it with a flathead screwdriver the the thing on top is gonna be a lot more difficult to make them the thing just below it as long as you know that second thing is an ox well as that gets developed and you try to start writing faster and the changes over time the word doesn't just mean ox by itself it now means new and maybe mispronouncing this but that syllable is more important than the image of the animal of the Ox same thing happens with a bird you can kind of see that looks like a bird the second column but by the time 600 years passed and you're working with these styluses these flathead screwdrivers it starts to look like something very different and you know if you look at water the wavy lines at the top make a lot of sense but the the thing it becomes by 650 BC doesn't look like anything I'd associate with water and the one forehead but you can see how it starts as a as an image it then takes on a phonetic value it doesn't really matter what object it refers to it matters more what the pronunciation is and we combine those to make big words to make names to make that sort of thing and here are some of the tablets that the story of Atrahasis has written them with the narrative about your houses these come from between 1900 and 1700 or 1600 BCE we have pieces of them that you can tell by the keenya form on each one they weren't written by the same person these were written in different times by different people but we can tell that they're writing the same narrative of the same story there gonna be other versions of this otra House's story obviously once you get into it you'll you'll see what I'm talking about and we'll talk more about that after you've read it but right now I'll just say that you'll see several different in the text that we're going to read you're gonna see several different notations that won't make much sense if you're expecting to read a novel but the reason they're there is because we're starting with texts like this we're starting with manuscripts like this broken clay tablets with cuneiform on them like this that were written by different hands at different times but are trying to tell what seems to be the same story probably something from oral tradition a story that maybe not exactly word for word but pretty close to word-for-word as close as that scribe can get now if you if a modern reader wants to figure out what's on these tablets they go through several processes so two cuneiform experts WG Lambert and AR Millard went through all these Atrahasis tablets and transcribed them from the cuneiform into the phonetic pronunciation of those words say they took those what a dimension we become phonetic letters and translated them into the words that they pronounced in the Roman letters that we use today and then they also offer a translation but you'll notice the the brackets and then the the ellipses the the periods between those brackets those indicate that you can't really tell you can tell this word starts off as being this but it might be one thing it might be another well this is actually the text that your translator Stefan dollie uses she uses the column on the left she doesn't use exactly their English translation on the right but she uses their column on the left when she writes the book or compiles the book myths from Mesopotamian and the steps that she goes through and she also combines tablets from other sources besides the the lambda milord ultra hostas account but each time it goes through one of these translations the translator has to make the decision do this word is probably this but the end is broken off and should I go ahead and translate it is that thing I think it is or should I leave it open so even a Lamberton milord had to make those decisions and then dolly is using their text instead of going right back to the actual tablets so she has to she will pick up whatever decisions editorial decisions they make incorporate them in her translation but then she'll also have to decide what would a modern English audience interpret something this way or will they misunderstand it so I need to change the word and then how do I deal with all those broken areas well every time you take other sources and you translate them or you decide what do I keep what do I leave out what do I change do we need to change the meaning a little bit so that people understand do I need to create a coherence remember that term associate of coherence we used in the previous lecture do I take something that doesn't make sense to try to make it more coherent well that's called redaction redaction is the process of compiling a single text from multiple text and editing them to make the new text more coherent and again just a reminder it's red letters that's a term I want you to know later on we'll be using that throughout the rest of the semester okay so here's a page from myths of Mesopotamia that is one of the ones you're gonna read and notice that there are these open brackets that means in that first open bracket there's a line that can't be read so it's one of those where there's a crack or there's the the cuneiform has been rubbed to where it's just smooth you can't tell what it says so instead of trying to fill in the gaps and this is something that if somebody was translating this for a popular press book the kind you would expect to read like a novel then they might decide well this probably means this I'll go ahead and make this thing up but but Dali doesn't do that she leaves these brackets open and says basically we don't know what today but that means as a reader you have to decide what goes there now you don't actually have to decide but you're probably gonna find yourself filling in the gaps immediately if it's something that you can go ahead and infer you might do that but sometimes you're not gonna have any idea what goes there and that's okay it's okay not to know what goes in the gaps you'll then you'll see also some brackets that do have text in there now I'm gonna talk about where those texts come from if if that's from a broken area then where did she get these words how does she know what's there if there's a break in that fragment I'm gonna leave that question open for right now I'm gonna come back to that later on but I want you to go ahead and see if you can figure out where those words come from when you read this in the larger context you're gonna start to maybe see oh I recognize those texts from somewhere else so in the meantime you figure out where those words within the brackets came from if that if there's actually a crack or break there um you're also gonna see the letters obv and SBV in the left hand side left hand margin don't just overlook that those are important they're gonna be even more important when we read the epic of gilgamesh obv stands for the old Babylonian version SBV stands for standard Babylonian version those come from two different what we call recensions the oldest in the majority of the Atrahasis texts that you're gonna read comes from these tablets that were written down somewhere between 1900 and 1700 BC but sometimes there's gonna be big breaks or things gonna be missing and Dolly is going to use the standard Babylonian version to fill them but should tell you over in the left-hand column that she's switching from OB v to SB v so that's what that means what came before like in this example what comes above the OB v must have been the SB v the standard Babylonian version the one that came around between 700 650 BC and then when you see OB v everything after that is going to be back to the old Babylonian version and like I said without your houses the majority of what we're gonna read is from the old Babylonian version so really really ancient literature but because there's so many breaks because so many gaps and because this is something that comes from a very very different cultural context I'm gonna go through a quick list of characters the dramatis personae we have the title character of Atrahasis he's a human he's the only human mentioned in this entire story he's a king of sure pock we're told you'll notice that sure part of the city is really close to the city of Uruk it's close to the city of Babylon it's between the is literally right between the two rivers the Tigris and Euphrates River and it's one of the oldest places that where we find ancient writings so it's possible there was a historical king named Atrahasis but as we're going to get to later on when we talk about his his parallel characters this is probably a more of a literary figure that his name is going to have a meaning similar to names Macross later on so the stories are the this narrative tells us he's the king of sugar pack he's a human King and he's a devotee of the god Enki or a ax now a very important aspect of switching back and forth between the old Babylonian version the standard Babylonian version is the standard Babylonian version is written at a time when the same God is described as a ax his name is EA but the old version the older version of the God and the older version of these texts his name is inky well inky is a very prominent God in the Sumerian and Babylonian pantheon these are slightly different pantheon but they're all all the Mesopotamian cultures sort of adapt to each other's gods and they change the name sometimes or they change their stories a little bit usually they change who's more important so the god L L will see later will be replaced by a god named Marduk after Martin's culture overtakes elinoz culture but Ikki is pretty well respected as a god and as a character and in all these cultures for you know a couple of thousand years he's known both as inky na he's the god of the freshwater which is called the OPSEU a water God might not seem like that important of God but remember this is the land between the rivers this is a land sandwiched between a desert we want a worse desert on earth and dry mountains both of which are very inhospitable so these rivers the Tigris and Euphrates rivers enable not only life but enable this you know flowering urban civilization so obviously in this place the god of fresh water is gonna be very important fresh water by the way is distinct from the type of salt water you'd have in the Persian Gulf even in the mythology the salt water has its own gods in particular the the monster called Tiamat which I may talk about later on but fresh water is the water of life it's sometimes referred to as sweet water in some of these translations he's also the god of wisdom he's a god of wisdom and that doesn't just mean he's wise himself but he's a helper of mankind he sends these seven sages to teach humans technology art and philosophy he's also a trickster he's not entirely upfront with everything as we're gonna see in a tree houses he's gonna make a promise and then break that promise in Akhter houses and we'll learn more about what's going on there as we move into the epic of gilgamesh but all of these elements would be very important because this character we're gonna see transform as his his story gets retold across cultures then there's the the eldest of the gods the father of the gods is called Anu after him all the Elder Gods are called the Anunnaki they're the the gods of the of an older generation a lot of mythologies have this there's a generation of gods long time ago and then they're replaced by these younger gods and Greek mythology it was Cronus the latin saturn who was later and he and the Titans were later replaced by the god Zeus or Jupiter well I'll new is later I don't know if you'd say he retires or whatever but ll his son who is the war god and the sky God he later replaces onnu although it's a peaceful transition or maybe he just steps up the power and on who's still in the background not who still tends to make a lot of decisions but ll is the really the most forceful the most outspoken most demanding you can tell this is somebody who thinks he ought to be in charge he's also referred to and sometimes in the text as in lieu but he's the war god he's a sky God in other words he's a storm guy so it's not just the peaceful sky but when he comes he brings the storms with it and he's the chief god of the agigoo these are the younger sky gods they follow a lil but they are subordinate to the Anunnaki the other gods which a little himself is an elder God as is Enki and of course honey min 2 is called the womb gods she's referred to also as billet elite or mommy and literally that that's how it will be pronounced mommy this tends to be a common feature of all languages because when infants are just learning to talk the M sound is one of the first ones they're able to make and you know who are they making it to who's always the one that's closest to an infant it's gonna be the mother so that's why mater and Latin you know mu ter and in German mu T and in Hindi across the world there's these M sounds but literally the womb goddess is named mommy more often than in in the text should be referred to as nin 2 or Belle athili she is the creator of humans and as the womb goddess you might think oh well I know how she creates humans watch how she actually creates humans this is a very important point and remember where we are in Mesopotamia everything's built out of clay the buildings built out of clay the the tablets are built out of clay watch the the story the creation of human beings with that in mind and when we talk about the world a lot when you read this text a lot of things are gonna make much sense if you are thinking about the earth as this sphere and you know outer space you know being outside of it in the Sun being stationary in the earth orbiting that keep in mind how the the Mesopotamians envision the the world the world was of course flat but it wasn't or there was a sort of rounded dome over it so you look at the sky it looks like a dome but there are if the if the sky is a dome and Scott the the stars are up there they must be attached to that dome but now where did the rain come from well in the Mesopotamian conception there was this this firmament this sort of ceiling basically on the sky and there were these vents of these gates you're gonna see it referred to as the gates of the sky and the text about your hostas and those gates can be opened and that allowed the water that was up that firmament there's this big tank of water above the ceiling of the sky and those vents can be opened and that's where the rain came from and you wanted that rain to be you one of those gates to be opened every now and then so that water would fall down into the rivers and water your crops and that sort of thing but you didn't want too much rain because you're in this River Valley and if there's too much rain upstream well then you've got a flood coming another source of water is the water under the earth and this is the OP suit this is a Keyes domain and so the Mesopotamians noticed that even when it wasn't raining there was water coming up into the river and so there were natural springs where water would come up through even when there was a clear sky so this is another source of freshwater or sweet water as they as the best pain is described and then you've got mountains on either side that are surrounding the world that holds up this dome of the sky and also you've got an underworld and sort of you know conceived it as a cave region there's gonna be we're gonna see later that's where the the souls of the dead are and then even below that there's the the beep which is sometimes just referred to as the waters of the deep and this is water you can't drink this is not the sweet water this is salt water or something like that this is the realm of the goddess Tiamat or the monster tima but the importantly are the the gates the the gods are imagined as having keys to the the sky the vents in the sky that let the rain down they have keys to the spring water doors that prevent the water of the OPSEU from coming up into the rivers and they can lock those and so there's no water or they can open them up and so water comes out this is if you're trying to imagine what they're talking about imagine the world looking like this okay so I'll there's several questions I want you to think about as you read out your houses you know you don't have to keep this list next to you the whole time you read it just read it and try to figure out what's going on and then think about these questions and then maybe go back and look and see if you can find the answers and I put page numbers there to kind of lead you to where I'm where I'm looking if you're confused the first is who is the main protagonist of the narrative now a protagonist is the primary character in a narrative who must overcome a conflict to achieve a goal the antagonist is a character who is the main source of conflict for that protagonist so who is the main protagonist and who is the main antagonist also think about try to figure out why do the gods create humans to start with and how do they create humans why does Elmo want to destroy humanity what are the primary conflicts faced by the gods what how did the gods resolve their disputes with each other who says this line do not reveal your gods do not work do not pray to your goddess and how is this strategy meant to work why does this this person say this what kind of relationship does Atrahasis have with Enki i've already said that he's a devotee of a key but there are a lot of different ways that a relationship between a human and a god could go look and see how that relationship works what kind of relationship does Enki have with ella the a fellow god how did the gods feel after the flood what do we know about Anu the chief god what knew the sacrifices made by humans do for the gods in other words one of gods there why do humans make sacrifices to God is it just to say hey I'm devoted to you do the gods actually get something out of it watch for that how did the gods finally resolve the conflict with the human population and lastly who is the first to hear the song or the narrative of the flood according to the narrative itself and this is gonna be right through the end right through the end we're gonna have some lines of text that tell us a lot about not just what's in that narrative but how that narrative came down to us so enjoy your reading and I'll post another video to watch after you've finished your reading