Ancient Verse

I've been doing a lot of research recently for an essay to submit to the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology, and have particularly grown fascinated by the scope of history, and particularly the birth of writing in the Mesopotamia river valley. Most well known is the Epic of Gilgamesh,a hero-myth written down in the 23rd century BCE Akkadian Empire, and for all intents the first action story as well as model for how kings and men ought to behave.


Around the same time though we also apparently find Enheduanna (above), daughter of Sargon the Great of Akkad, high En (priestess) of Nanna, and the first poet known by name, if not the first recorded author. The link contains links to some of her poems, which seem for the most part to be temple hymns to Innana and other Sumerian goddesses. It is interesting to note that after the development of writing, it seems most myths and stories were told in poetic verse, and most narratives were mythic, which lasts until the second emergence of Greek culture and the prose myths of Hesiod's Theogony (800 BCE).

Non-mythic literature doesn't arise until the Japanese serialized "novel", The Tale of the Genji (finished 1021 CE), and European Medieval allegories of the 1300s. We don't start taking stories as literally fictive until Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and even then it had to be published as a "petite historie," a private, little, or dubious history, perhaps because it was still hard to believe that something you hear is true in itself though not true in reality, a bit of doublethink those of us who've grown up in the present are accustomed to.





And just because this is now becoming an absurd saga, Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down the Large Hadron Collider (Really), from Popular Science.