Tatiana Dubin
Ur in the 3rd millennium BCE was a clammy city, like New York at the of height summer. The greasy air thickened with brick debris, falcons shitting down on the Sumerians from up near the clouds. A people fueled by beer and barley who had once trekked unknowable distances to settle on this humid strip of land on the banks of a raging river where they decided to build one of their most important cities—the official realm of the lecherous moon god and, much later, the birthplace of biblical Abraham—amid low-lying swampland, choosing a life conducted in a permanent state of stickiness. Embracing their predicament whole-heartedly, almost in homage to my subject, I left half-moons of sweat on café seats throughout August. Clusters of mud-brick homes and terraced temples; city walls meant to keep wild pigs at bay; inhaling the nastiest pockets of sewage; no sirens, but the high-pitched calls of marsh-dwelling shepherds, echoing across the flattest landscape.
Positioned at the southernmost tip of the fertile crescent, Ur was both annoyingly abundant (schools of fish begging to be caught) and uniquely vulnerable to the whims of a sadistic storm deity named Enlil, who entertained himself by periodically flooding the city and watching its inhabitants scramble and drown. Hysterical laughter rippled across the sky as currents overwhelmed canals, smashed stone ramparts, leveled levees, erased smooth streets. Other weather gods existed, tricksters who dwelled in salty waters and lightning deities who rode atop ferocious bulls, but none as unpredictable and terror-inducing.
Some argue that it was this problematic environment that spurred the Sumerians to “give birth to civilization” and invent all the things we remember them for—hydraulic engineering, bureaucracy, urbanism, astrology, wheeled chariots, writing; the list goes on.
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Has a catastrophic climate made me more innovative? Mother’s infant wails like a beast unleashed behind sealed doors—. Another expert claims that the Sumerians were an especially “poetic” people. Her mouth swelling from crescent-moon to full-moon in milliseconds—. Many Sumerian homes had makeshift pipes that redirected excess water thirty to forty feet below ground. There was nothing for me to do but absorb her onslaught—.
Bad weather is known to cause erosion (i.e., a gradual disintegration of the self—), which is why the Sumerians reconstructed their roofs and strengthened their drainage systems every year. To protect yourself from deluge means incessant grooming and solving your structural imperfections while the tide is still calm. Hammering blood-shot eyes into the mirror—. It means filling the gaps that led to collapse the last time. Starving yourself for the purpose of examining your foundations; your bones an insurance policy—.
Sumer’s northern neighbors, the Akkadians, were fortunate to have settled in a temperate terrain of rich forest greens, rolling hills that provided natural insulation from the elements, valleys ideal for prancing. But stability turned them cruel. Burly warmongering types who are responsible for the world’s first known empire, founded in around 2334 BCE by a skull-smashing upstart named Sargon the Great remembered for bulldozing Sumerian cities into submission. Someone described the Akkadians as being more “temperamental” than the Sumerians. So well-acclimated that they brewed their own storms.
So well-adjusted that they reshaped the region in their image and established permanent dominion over Sumer, forcing the fragmented landscape of Mesopotamia into a contiguous, centralized system of power. The generations borne into such paradoxical weather—seasons of snow-covered lagoons; torched sun & frozen hail—were bound to evolve into liminal creatures, ever-shifting disorders of content and form. Tormented from so many angles, yet having forgotten the ancient strategies of storm-control, the Sumerian-Akkadians grow frazzled, weathered, angry. Just last week I used my scalding tears as weapons, dragged my unflappable husband from slumber and into the eye of my chaos; my throat pumping its pain up into the ceiling—. What’s wrong?, what an idiotic question, it’s unsayable—. His curled body a shell I want to break through, especially when it’s holding mine. My body piles of trash I’d like him to crush clean, turn tiny and square—.
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Weather is experienced differently depending on where you stand; the same goes for history.
Position yourself atop Ur’s thick walls and behold Sargon’s cantering armies spilling into the city. Observe whirling maces stir windstorms & drive the sky into downpour. But then jump down, ignore the rolling Sumerian heads, find the blue-glazed temple complex and crawl into its innermost places, where you’ll find Sargon’s daughter, named Enheduanna, newly appointed by her father to the most important religious office in the land, High Priestess of the Moon God. She’s probably 12, young enough to have avoided marriage, and unbeknownst to most, she is soon to become history’s first known author; the first person with enough courage (hubris—?) to inscribe her name on her work. Ropes of carnelian and lapis lazuli beads pattern her chest. Against her forehead are gilded leaves. When archeologists excavated her temple in the 1920s, they found a seal that belonged to her hairdresser; think skilled and supple fingers threading sections of hair with golden strands. Enheduanna would have been nervous, but you might have sensed her excitement. A foreign city; a divine post; naked men who pour libations as I bow my head in prayer. But after a few weeks, the adrenaline subsides, a stale front surfaces.
I can see Enheduanna twiddling her thumbs in a terraced temple garden dripping with dates and heavy figs, a sacred place where the roses plume grander, birds chirp louder, juniper groves shade generously, rhythmic breezes from palm-fanning slaves, and the lushness overwhelms, a place so idyllic it has become demoralizing—like walking into a baby blue day full of frisbees and good cheer; you want to vomit, scream, summon a tornado, and just imagine if you were stuck in that juxtaposition forever, powerless. The pomegranate blossom blown away by the wind is freer than she is; the concentric pathways lead nowhere but the fishpond; so I understand why she—trapped in the type of paradisiacal grove that inspired biblical Eden, surrounded by such engineered majesty, a whole class of gardeners polishing the flora—might have lost her cool and had a tantrum, each note splintering her vision. How does a cloistered priestess, stuck in a choreographed world, get through the day? It’s during moments like this one, when she realizes that she’s been left to rot in other people’s dreams, that her will bursts through like weeds up through a city sidewalk; and to stop herself from going under, to keep herself above ground, (to attempt to wield the boiling fist in her throat, to not let it destroy her—), when she begins squawking like the birds she can’t follow (eventually, she will sing—), thrashing like the holy trees in the wind, and as the diviners drag her away, she tears out the planted flowers as if they were her hair. The nape of her lovely neck exposed to the sky.
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Tatiana Dubin is a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at Columbia University. She is writing an experimental biography of the ancient Mesopotamian poet Enheduanna. Find more of Dubin’s writing about ancient Mesopotamia here, or follow her on Twitter @DubinTatiana.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Cosmetic shell.” 35-1-66B. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Crawford, Harriet. Ur: The City of the Moon God. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Crawford, Harriet (Ed.). The Sumerian World. Routledge, 2017.
Pournelle , Jennifer R. “Physical Geography.”
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Halton, C., & Svärd, S. (Eds.). Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Anthology of the Earliest Female Authors, 2017. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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McHale-Moore, Rhonda. "The Mystery of Enheduanna’s Disk." Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society. 27.2000: pp. 69-74.
Oates, Joan. Babylon. Thames and Hudson London, 1979.