Sumerian Text Reveals What Blocks The Anunnaki From Returning to Earth

In the last seasons before the war of 2003, two German scientists, Jörg Fassbinder and Helmut Becker, walked slowly back and forth across the ruins of Uruk in southern Iraq, carrying an instrument that listens to the ground.

A magnetometer does not dig.

It measures tiny disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field, the faint signatures left by buried mud brick, filled ditches, and old fires, and a computer turns those whispers into a map.

Their map of Uruk showed streets and houses, gardens, and waterways, and the bed of an old branch of the Euphrates that had once run through the city.

In that dry channel lay the outline of something built.

In April 2003, in the same weeks that the war reached Baghdad, broadcasters around the world carried the news that the tomb of Gilgamesh might have been found.

Nobody had dug a single spadeful.

The reason anyone thought of Gilgamesh at all was a poem.

It is written in Sumerian, and its fullest copy came out of the ground far to the north, at a small town on the Diyala River a few decades earlier.

The poem tells how the king of Uruk lay dying, how he dreamed of the gods sitting in judgment, and how after he died, his people turned the river aside, built his tomb in its bed, and let the water flow back over him.

In that dream, the gods give their verdict on him, and among the powers that will receive the dead king below are the Anunnaki.

That small detail opens three puzzles at once.

Why would a people bury their greatest king under a river where no one could ever visit him? Why does the verdict of the gods in that poem hinge on a man who survived the flood? And what are the Anunnaki, of all beings, doing in a poem about a deathbed? For a great many people today, the Anunnaki mean something very different.

In that picture, they were beings who came down from the sky long ago, who taught and ruled and shaped the first cities, and who then departed.

The question that follows, and that fills books and comment sections and late-night conversations is what keeps them from coming back.

Some say a distance, some say an agreement, some say a barrier of a kind we cannot yet imagine.

It would be easy to wave this away, and it would also be unfair because the idea grows from things that really are in the texts.

Gods do descend in Sumerian literature.

Kingship, the old writers said, was lowered from heaven.

Gods leave their cities, and in some texts they come home again.

Yet, when you read the tablets themselves, slowly the Anunnaki turn up on the far side of a different door.

They are not shut out of the earth.

They sit beside the gate of the place that no one leaves, and in one Sumerian poem they are the ones who stop a traveler from climbing back into the light.

The obstacle in the clay is real.

It simply faces the other way.

So, this is a journey with a few fixed points ahead.

We will meet the Anunnaki as the oldest writers knew them, and watch them move over many centuries from the bright assembly of the sky to the judges’ bench below the earth.

We will hear the exact rule they recite when a goddess tries to return, and what that rule demands in payment.

We will find the one figure the old poems allowed to rise back up, and the narrow opening he came through.

And we will go back to that dry riverbed at Uruk, and ask what the survey really saw beneath it.

The way in is a single tablet.

It has had a long and difficult life, longer than any kingdom that held it, and it has passed through drought and flood and war to reach us.

Its life began, as all such lives did, with a handful of wet earth on a riverbank.

Chapter 1 A lump of Diyala clay The Diyala River comes down out of the Zagros Mountains of Iran and runs southwest across the plain until it meets the Tigris near modern Baghdad.

Around 1800 BC, where the river breaks through the last low line of hills called the Jabal Hamrin, there was a modest town called Meturan.

It was not a great capital.

It sat on the edge of the kingdom of Eshnunna, a power that controlled the Diyala Valley and traded and quarreled with its neighbors.

And towns like Me-Turan lived with the coming and going of armies and caravans along the river road.

Eshnunna itself, the capital, lay downstream near where the Diyala approaches the Tigris.

Its ruins, now called Tell Asmar, were dug in the 1930s by a team from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago led by Henri Frankfort.

And they’re best known for a group of stone statues of worshipers, men and women with clasped hands and enormous staring eyes, which had been buried together beneath the temple floor many centuries before our tablet was made.

Some of them are in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, others in Chicago.

They were made to stand before a god forever, praying on behalf of the people who dedicated them, so that the prayer would go on even when the person could not.

The Diyala Valley, in other words, already had a long habit of making things that stood in for people who were gone.

By the time of our tablet, the valley was a busy corridor.

Caravans came down from the Iranian Plateau with tin and stone, and grain and cloth moved the other way.

Me-Turan, at the gap in the hills, was a place where travelers rested, paid their tolls, and moved on.

Its people farmed the irrigated land along the river, grazed sheep and goats on the slopes, and paid their dues to whichever king held the valley that year.

The tablet began as river clay, dug, soaked, worked until it was smooth and free of grit, and pressed into a flat cushion that could sit in the palm of a hand.

A scribe took a reed cut to a wedge-shaped tip and pressed it into the surface, line by line, sign by sign, turning the tablet over when the front was full and continuing on the back.

We do not know the scribe’s name.

Many school and literary tablets of this period carry no signature at all, and this one gives us the words without the writer.

The words were already old when they were written.

The language was Sumerian, which by then had largely stopped being anyone’s mother tongue.

People in Meturan spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and they learned Sumerian the way later Europeans learned Latin, as the language of learning, prayer, and the classics.

To copy a Sumerian poem was to join a long line of copyists stretching back to the courts of the kings of Ur, who had ruled southern Mesopotamia some three centuries earlier, and who claimed Gilgamesh as a kind of ancestor and brother.

In the copying, mistakes crept in, and so did local habits.

Scholars who later studied the Meturan copies noticed spellings and turns of phrase that set them apart from the versions known from the great southern school city of Nippur.

A poem was not a fixed object.

Each town, each teacher, sometimes each student left a fingerprint on it.

When the tablet was dry, it was hard enough to handle and read, though not fired.

Unbaked clay is surprisingly durable if it stays dry, and surprisingly fragile if it gets wet.

That simple fact will matter again in this tablet’s life, many centuries after anyone in Meturan could have imagined it.

What the scribe pressed into the clay was the story of a death, not a heroic death in battle, not a monster’s claw, but the slow, ordinary ending of a man in his bed.

In Sumerian, his name was spelled Bilgamesh.

Later generations would call him Gilgamesh, and that is the name we will use.

He had built walls, crossed mountains, cut down a forest guardian, and faced the gods.

Now he lay down, and the poem says, in words that the Meturan copy preserves more fully than any other, that he would not rise again.

Chapter 2.

The verdict of the great gods.

The king lies on his bed, and he is ill, and the illness will not lift.

In the poem, he cannot eat, and he cannot stand.

And while he lies there, he dreams.

To a Mesopotamian audience, that was not a small detail.

Dreams were taken seriously as messages from the gods, and there were specialists whose work was to interpret them, and handbooks that listed dream after dream with its meaning.

A sick man’s dream was watched especially closely because it might say whether he would recover.

When the poem sends Gilgamesh a dream on his sickbed, its listeners would have leaned in.

Whatever the god said in that dream would be the answer.

In the dream, he is brought before the great god sitting in assembly.

This was the highest court in the Sumerian imagination, the place where fates were decided, where the destinies of cities and kings were pronounced and could not be unsaid.

The gods look back over his life and list his deeds.

He traveled every road.

He brought back cedar from the mountains.

He killed the guardian of the forest.

He set up monuments for days to come.

And then the poem turns to the one deed that stood above the others, the journey he made to the ends of the earth to find the man who survived the flood.

That man, in the Sumerian tradition, was called Ziusudra.

When the god sent the flood to sweep away mankind, Ziusudra was warned, survived, and was granted something no other human had ever received, a life without end, set apart from ordinary people in a distant land.

Gilgamesh had gone to find him, hoping that the secret could be shared.

The assembly remembers this, and the god Enki, the clever lord of the freshwaters beneath the earth, speaks to it.

In the version that the Me-Turan tablets let us read, Enki reminds the gods that after the flood they swore an oath.

Ziusudra would live forever, but no other human being would be given that gift.

Gilgamesh, though his mother was a goddess, and though he was two parts divine, as later tradition put it, is still bound by that oath.

The great god Enlil in the dream gives the verdict plainly.

He made Gilgamesh’s destiny a destiny of kingship.

He did not make it a destiny of eternal life.

Then comes the consolation, and it is a strange one.

Gilgamesh is told not to despair, not to be bitter of heart.

The fate of all mankind has come to him, as it comes to everyone.

But because of who he was, he will not be an ordinary ghost.

He will be a governor in the world below, a chief among the shades of the dead.

He will pass judgment there alongside the gods of the underworld, Ningishzida and Dumuzi.

And in the most striking phrase of all, he will be counted among the Anunna, the great gods themselves, and sit with them below.

Those two companions are well chosen.

Ningishzida, whose name means something like lord of the good tree, was a god of the earth and the underworld, often shown with serpents rising from his shoulders.

And in some texts, he serves as a throne bearer of the world below.

Dumuzi was the shepherd god, the husband of the goddess Inanna, whose own descent into death was mourned every year in Mesopotamian cities.

To sit beside them was to join the most familiar residents of the land of the dead, gods whose names the poem’s audience had heard in lament since childhood.

Here, then, is what the clay says.

There is no surviving Sumerian or Akkadian text that I know of in which the Anunnaki are beings from elsewhere who are prevented from coming back to the earth.

There are texts, many of them, in which the Anunnaki stand on the other side of the one barrier every human being must pass.

In the oldest poems, they are the great gods who sit in assembly and decide fates, including the fate that a king must die.

In later centuries, they come to be thought of more and more as the judges and dwellers of the netherworld, which the writers called the land of no return.

In one Sumerian poem, which we’ll reach soon, they personally stop a goddess from climbing back out of it and recite the rule that forbids her.

What blocks return in the actual texts is death, and the law that keeps the dead below, and the Anunnaki are not its prisoners, but its keepers.

Nothing in that answer is a trick of translation.

It is simply what the tablets describe.

Some details remain uncertain.

Scholars still argue over what the word Anunna originally meant, over how fixed the numbers and duties of these gods ever were, and over how far the vivid pictures of the underworld were shared belief, and how far they were the work of poets.

But, the direction of the evidence is clear, and it is consistent across many centuries and many copies.

The dying king hears his verdict in the dream and wakes.

The poem lets him feel the full weight of it.

He has been told that he will be honored, that he will rank among gods, that his name will live.

And, he has been told in the same breath that he will never again see the sun rise over Uruk.

The Sumerian scribes understood that a consolation does not cancel a loss.

They let him have both.

In the Me-Turan copy, after the dream, the king’s thoughts turn to practical things and to the people around him.

A dying man has a household.

He has a son, a wife, servants, and musicians.

And, he has gifts that must be prepared for the powers he’s about to meet.

The poem, so grand a moment before, becomes almost domestic.

A family is preparing for a funeral.

One more fact belongs here.

Quiet and plain.

When this poem was copied at Me-Turan, the man it describes had been dead, if he ever lived, for something like eight or nine hundred years.

The scribes were mourning someone their great-grandparents’ great-grandparents had never met.

And, they still did it carefully, line by line, as though the loss were recent.

Chapter 3, The Princely Seed of An.

The word itself is the first thing to look at closely.

In Sumerian texts, the gods in question are usually written Anunna.

In Akkadian, the language that slowly replaced Sumerian in daily life, the same group is called the Anunnaki.

They are the same beings, seen through two languages.

What the name means is still debated.

The first part is clearly linked to An, the god of the sky, the oldest and most distant of the great gods, whose name is also the ordinary Sumerian word for heaven.

The rest is usually connected with a word for prince or nobility and with a word for seed or offspring.

Put together, many scholars render it as something like the princely offspring or the seed of the prince, meaning the children of An, the noble family of the gods.

Others are more cautious and say only that the term marks out the great gods as a group without being sure of its exact origin.

Nothing in the grammar supports the popular rendering of it as those who came down from heaven to earth.

That reading is a modern one and its source belongs to a later part of this story.

In the oldest Sumerian royal inscriptions and hymns, the Anunna are the great gods taken together.

Around 2100 BC, Gudea, the ruler of Lagash, described in long poems on clay cylinders how he built a temple for his city’s god and the Anunna appear there as the divine company who stand by and admire, as the great gods whose approval matters.

In hymns of the same age, a god or goddess may be praised as the greatest among the Anunna, the way a king might be praised as first among nobles.

There is nothing in these early texts that places the Anunna specifically below the earth.

They are simply the high gods, the assembly, the ones whose word decides.

One of the most vivid early pictures of them comes from a poet whose name we actually know.

Enheduanna was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad and around 2300 BC, her father made a high priestess of the moon god at Ur.

Hymns to the goddess Inanna were later attributed to her and copied in schools for centuries.

In one of them, praising Inanna’s terrible power, the poet describes the Anunna, the great gods scattering before the goddess like bats flying off into the clefts of the rocks.

It is a startling image.

The great gods of heaven, the noble seed of An, scatter in fear.

Even at their grandest, the Anunna were a company that could be outshone, overawed, and sent fleeing by a single greater power.

Over time, though, something shifts.

In Akkadian texts, a second group appears alongside them, the Igigi.

The two names are sometimes used almost interchangeably, sometimes as a pair meaning all the gods together, and sometimes as opposites.

Increasingly, especially in the first millennium BC, the Igigi are thought of as the gods of heaven, and the Anunnaki as the gods of the earth and of what lies beneath it.

The clearest statement of this division comes from the Babylonian creation poem, known by its opening words, Enuma Elish, meaning when on high.

It was probably composed in the later second millennium BC to glorify Marduk, the god of Babylon.

After Marduk defeats the forces of chaos and builds the world, he organizes the gods.

In that poem, he divides the Anunnaki into two companies, assigning 300 of them to the heavens and 300 to the earth below, so that in all, there are 600.

The numbers are poetic and schematic, and they do not appear in the older Sumerian texts, but they show how a learned Babylonian of that time pictured the Anunnaki, not as a single band in the sky, but as a great body of gods, half of whom had their place in the lower regions.

In later Akkadian literature, the Anunnaki often appear in that lower role.

In the Babylonian flood story preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh, when the storm rises, the Anunnaki lift up torches and set the land ablaze with their glare, a fierce and frightening image of gods of the earth and its depths.

In the Akkadian poem about the goddess Ishtar’s journey into the underworld, the Anunnaki are summoned from within the realm of the dead and seated on thrones of gold.

In ritual and magic of the first millennium, they are often invoked as gods of the netherworld, the great judges who sit in the dark.

That is the long movement of the name.

The Anunna of the Sumerian hymns are the shining assembly, the noble children of the sky.

The Anunnaki of the later Babylonian world are increasingly the lords beneath the ground, the court before which the dead are brought.

The Me-Turan poem sits right in the middle of this change.

Its Anunnaki still decide fates in a great assembly, and yet the dead king’s honor is to be counted among them in the world below.

So, the beings who modern imagination sends out among the stars were, by the time the last cuneiform scribes were writing, very largely assigned to the dark beneath the earth.

And the barrier that mattered to them was not distance from our world, but the door between the living and the dead.

Chapter 4.

A room of tablets on the frontier.

Back at Me-Turan, the tablet had a working life to lead.

It was not made to be buried.

It was made to be read, recited, learned, and kept.

The building where it was eventually found held a whole group of Sumerian literary texts, together with incantations, the spells and ritual words used against illness, demons, and bad luck.

Literary poems and healing spells sitting side by side may seem an odd mix, but it was common.

The same learned people who copied the great old poems were often the ones called in when someone fell sick or when a household needed protection.

Each person who could read Sumerian could speak to the gods in the old language, and that was useful at a bedside.

We do not know exactly who owned these tablets.

They may have belonged to a teacher and his pupils, or to a family of scribes and exorcists who handed their learning down from father to son.

The poem of the dying king may have been read aloud at a funeral, or studied as a model of fine Sumerian, or simply valued as a story everyone knew.

Perhaps all three.

Tablets like these were not kept in neat libraries with labeled shelves.

In ordinary houses, they were often stored in baskets, in jars, or on simple shelves of wood or mud brick.

And sometimes they were recycled, the clay soaked and reshaped for new writing once a text was no longer wanted.

A poem that survives on a tablet survives because somebody for some reason chose to keep that particular piece of clay rather than turn it back into mud.

The Meturan copy of The Death of Gilgamesh was kept.

The incantations found beside it hint at one possible reason.

Many illnesses in Mesopotamia were blamed on the angry or neglected dead.

And the specialists who dealt with them had to know a great deal about the world below, its gods, its gates, and its rules.

A healer who spent his days sending troubled spirits back down where they belonged might well have wanted on the same shelf a great poem about a king who went down and stayed there with honor.

What we can say is that the tablet lived in a frontier town in an anxious age.

The kingdom of Eshnunna was squeezed between larger powers, and in the 18th century BC Hammurabi of Babylon brought it down.

Towns along the Diyala rose and fell with these struggles.

At some point, for reasons we cannot see from the ruins, the people who used these tablets stopped using them.

The building fell out of use, its roof came down, and the tablets were left where they lay.

Then the slow work of time began.

Mud brick walls melted in the winter rains and slumped over the floors.

Wind brought dust from the plain and laid it down in thin layers.

The town shrank, and later people built and farmed over its remains without knowing what lay beneath.

The tablet, unbaked and fragile, lay in the dark and dry under the hill.

And the poem about a king buried beneath a river was itself buried and waited for about 37 centuries.

Chapter 5 Who has ever come up unscathed? Gilgamesh was not the only one in Sumerian literature to travel toward the world below.

The most famous journey of all was made by a goddess, and she went of her own free will.

The poem that scholars call Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld is one of the great works of Sumerian literature, known from many Old Babylonian copies, most of them from Nippur and Ur.

Inanna was the goddess of love, desire, and war, the queen of heaven, the brightest and most restless of the great gods.

The poem opens with her turning away from the sky, turning away from the earth, and setting her mind on the great below.

She abandons her temples one by one, city by city.

Before she goes, she dresses herself in her royal powers, the crown, the beads, the breastplate, the golden ring, the measuring rod and line, and the robe of ladyship.

Each one a sign of her authority.

She also does something sensible.

She leaves instructions with her loyal minister, a goddess named Ninshubur.

If she does not come back, Ninshubur is to raise a lament for her, to beat the drum in the assembly, to go about the shrines of the gods tearing at her own face and clothes, and to go to the great gods one after another and beg them not to let their daughter die below.

At the edge of the netherworld in Annanox, loudly, and demands to be let in.

When the gatekeeper asks why she has come, she gives a reason that is itself about grief.

She says she has come for the funeral rites of Gugalanna, the husband of her elder sister, to see his funeral offerings poured.

Whether that is the truth or only a pretext, the poem never quite says.

The gatekeeper Neti goes to his mistress.

The queen of the underworld is Ereshkigal, Inanna’s elder sister, and she’s not pleased.

She orders that the seven gates be opened one at a time, and that at each gate the visitor be stripped of one of her powers.

So, Inanna passes inward, and at each gate something is taken.

Each time she asks what is happening, and each time she’s told to be quiet, that the ways of the underworld are perfect and must not be questioned.

By the time she reaches the throne room, she’s naked and bowed low.

What happens next is told in very few lines.

Inanna moves her sister from the throne and sits on it herself.

And then the Anunna, the seven judges, pronounce judgment against her.

Ereshkigal fixes on her the eye of death, speaks the word of wrath, and Inanna becomes a corpse, and the corpse is hung on a hook on the wall.

Three days and three nights pass.

Up above, Ninshubur does exactly as she was told.

She lets out her lament, beats the drum, tears at her own eyes and mouth, puts on a single garment like a beggar, and goes first to Enlil at Nippur, then to the moon god Nanna at Ur.

Both refuse her.

“Inanna went where she should not have gone,” they say, “and whoever goes there does not come back”.

Only the third god she tries, Enki at Eridu, is troubled.

He takes dirt from under his fingernails and makes two small creatures, neither male nor female, and sends them down with the food of life and the water of life.

They slip through the gates like flies, find Ereshkigal groaning in pain like a woman in labor, and sympathize with her.

Grateful, she offers them a gift, and they ask for the corpse on the hook.

They sprinkle it with the food and water of life, and Inanna rises.

And now comes the line that matters.

As Inanna is about to ascend, the Anunna sees her.

In the Sumerian, they ask a question that is really a law.

“Who,” they say, “has ever come up from the underworld unscathed? If Inanna is to go up from the underworld, let her provide a substitute for herself”.

There it is, set down by Sumerian scribes almost 4,000 years ago.

The Anunna, the great gods, gathered in the realm of the dead, physically holding back someone who is trying to return to the world above.

The obstacle is not a wall or a distance.

It is a rule of balance.

Something must be given for something taken.

No one leaves without leaving someone behind.

Inanna goes up surrounded by the demons of the underworld, small grim beings who know no food and no drink, who take the wife from the husband’s lap and the child from the nurse’s knee.

They try to take Ninshubur, and Inanna refuses because Ninshubur mourned her.

They try to take two of her sons, and she refuses because they too sat in the dust in mourning clothes.

Then they come to the city of Kulaba near Uruk and find her husband Dumuzi sitting on a throne in splendid robes, not mourning at all.

Inanna fixes on him the same eye of death that had been fixed on her and gives him to them.

The grief in the poem runs in both directions.

Inanna is mourned faithfully and saved by that mourning.

Dumuzi, who did not mourn, is taken.

The scribe seem to say that how you carry someone else’s loss is noticed, and that it matters even among the gods.

The poem’s own law, put in plain words, has no exceptions.

Whoever goes down to that place must leave something there in payment if they are to come back up at all.

Chapter 6, The Door at the Edge of the Dust.

The same journey was later told in Akkadian in a much shorter poem known today as The Descent of Ishtar.

Ishtar is the Akkadian name of Inanna.

Copies survive from the first millennium BC from the libraries of Nineveh, and an older Middle Assyrian copy came from the city of Asshur.

It is not a translation of the Sumerian poem.

It is a retelling, darker and more compressed.

It opens with a description that would be copied almost word for word into other texts.

Ishtar sets her mind on the land of no return, the house of darkness, the house which those who enter cannot leave, the road from which there is no way back.

There, the poem says, the dead live without light.

Dust is their food and clay their bread.

They are clothed like birds in garments of feathers, and over the door and the bolt lies a thick layer of dust.

When Ishtar reaches the gate, she does not knock politely.

She threatens.

If the gatekeeper does not open the door, she says, she will smash it, shatter the bolt, break the doorposts, and tear the doors away.

She will raise up the dead, and they will eat the living.

The dead will outnumber the living.

It is an extraordinary threat, and it shows what the gates were for.

The door of the land of no return was not only there to keep visitors out, it was there to keep the dead in.

If it fell, the whole order of the world would collapse, and the hungry dead would flood back into the land of the living.

The same threat turns up elsewhere, which suggests it was a stock phrase, a fear that writers knew their listeners shared.

In the standard Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, when Ishtar is rejected by Gilgamesh and goes weeping to her father Anu to demand the Bull of Heaven, she warns that if he refuses, she will smash the doors of the netherworld and raise up the dead to devour the living.

And in a poem about the god Nergal and the queen of the underworld, it is Ereshkigal herself who uses it.

Nergal has come down to her realm, become her lover, and then slipped away back up to the sky.

Ereshkigal sends her minister to the gods with a message.

If they do not send him back to her, she will raise the dead to eat the living, and the dead will outnumber the living.

Look at who is speaking in each case.

A furious goddess of love scorned, a lonely queen of the dead abandoned.

In both, the threat to unleash the dead grows out of loss and rejection.

The door between the worlds was imagined as strong, but only just strong enough.

And what might break it was not an army, but a broken heart.

Later in the poem, when Ishtar has been stripped and struck down, and the god Ea has sent a rescuer, Ereshkigal gives an order to her minister Namtar.

He is to go and knock at the Palace of Justice, to bring out the Anunnaki and seat them on thrones of gold, and then to sprinkle Ishtar with the water of life.

The Anunnaki, in this telling, are fetched from the inner court of the dead, and set in their places like a bench of judges before the release can happen.

The great door with its bolt under the dust is guarded by a gatekeeper, but the ones who must be seated before anyone leaves are the Anunnaki.

Chapter 7 The tablet room in Istanbul By the middle of the 20th century, scholars could read most of Inanna’s descent, but they had not found it all in one place.

The poem had to be assembled from many broken pieces, and those pieces were scattered across the world, which is where a quiet and remarkable woman enters the story.

Between 1889 and 1900, an American expedition from the University of Pennsylvania dug at Nippur, the religious center of Sumer, and found tens of thousands of tablets.

Under the law of the Ottoman Empire which ruled the region at that time, many finds went to the Imperial Museum in Constantinople, the city we now call Istanbul.

Others, by permission and by gift, went to Philadelphia.

Fragments of the same poems, and sometimes fragments of the very same tablet, ended up on two continents, thousands of kilometers apart.

The American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer spent much of his career trying to bring those pieces back together on paper.

In the 1930s and 40s, he traveled to Istanbul to copy the Nippur tablets kept there.

In the tablet archive of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, he found two Turkish women who had become expert in the material, Muazzez İlmiye Çığ and Hatice Kızılyay.

Muazzez Çığ was born in 1914 in Bursa.

She studied ancient languages at the new Faculty of Language, History, and Geography in Ankara, one of the first generation of Turkish students trained in the cuneiform world, and in 1940, she began working at the tablet archive in Istanbul.

Together with Hatice Kızılyay, she spent years sorting, cleaning, cataloging, and copying the tablets, among them thousands from Nippur.

It was patient, unglamorous work done in dim storerooms over many winters.

When Kramer came looking for pieces of Sumerian literature, it was largely their knowledge of the collection that made his joins possible.

A join is made by recognizing that two broken pieces once belonged together from the shape of a break, the color and texture of the clay, the size and slope of the handwriting, the way one line runs off the edge of one fragment and continues on another.

It can take years for the right two pieces to meet even in the same room.

When they lie in different countries, it may depend entirely on someone remembering from a hand copy or a photograph that they have seen that broken edge before.

The three of them later published copies of Sumerian literary texts together, and Kramer acknowledged their help warmly.

Through this work, Kramer was able to publish an edition of Inanna’s Descent in the early 1940s and an expanded one around 1950, putting together lines from Istanbul and lines from Philadelphia, so that for the first time in almost 4,000 years, the goddess could be followed from her temples to the hook on the wall and back again.

Kramer went on to write books for general readers, and in the 1950s, he introduced a whole generation to the idea that many of the world’s first poems, laws, and proverbs were written in southern Iraq.

Many of the texts he described had passed at some point through the careful hands of the two women in Istanbul.

Muazzez Çığ went on to write popular books about Sumer for Turkish readers, and in her old age, she became a public figure.

In 2006, when she was 92, she was put on trial in Istanbul over a passage in one of her books about the headscarf in ancient Mesopotamian religious life.

The case drew attention across Turkey and beyond, and she was acquitted.

She lived to the age of 110 and died in 2024, having seen the field she helped build grow across almost the whole of the 20th century and into the next.

By the time she retired, the Descent of the Goddess could be read almost line by line.

But The Death of the king of Uruk, the poem of the dream and the verdict in the river, was still known only in scraps, a few broken lines from Nippur.

How much more was waiting under the ground and where? Chapter 8.

Water rising in the Hamrin.

The answer came from the Diyala Valley and it came because of a dam.

In the late 1970s, the government of Iraq began building a dam across the Diyala River where it cuts through the Jabal Hamrin.

The reservoir behind it would flood a broad basin of farmland and villages and with them dozens of ancient mounds.

The Iraqi Antiquities Authorities knew that once the water rose, those sites would be lost to study for generations, perhaps forever.

What followed was one of the great rescue campaigns in the history of Near Eastern archaeology.

Iraq invited teams from many countries, from Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy, the United States and elsewhere to dig alongside Iraqi archaeologists in the basin before the water came.

For a few short seasons, the Hamrin was crowded with excavators working against a fixed deadline.

Mounds that had been ignored for centuries were opened, mapped and recorded in a hurry.

Prehistoric villages, early dynastic forts and old Babylonian towns came to light one after another.

One of the mounds was called Tell Haddad.

Its excavation was carried out by an Iraqi team from the State Antiquities Service.

Together with a neighboring mound, it turned out to be the ancient town of Meturan, a name confirmed by the tablets found there.

In an old Babylonian building, the excavators came upon a group of clay tablets, Sumerian literary texts and incantations lying together where they’d been left some 37 centuries earlier.

Among them were copies of The Death of Gilgamesh, longer and better preserved than anything known from Nippur.

The moment of finding a tablet is rarely dramatic.

It usually begins with a change of color in the soil, a flat edge where there should be a curve, a careful brush, a trowel set aside.

The tablets were unbaked and fragile, and the excavators had to lift them without crumbling them, record exactly where each lay, and send them to Baghdad.

The workmen who dug alongside them, villagers from the basin whose homes were themselves about to be flooded, carried baskets of earth off the mounds as they had done on Iraqi excavations for 100 years.

The rescue work in the Hamrin produced far more than one poem.

The basin turned out to hold a long sequence of human history, from late Stone Age farming villages to fortified settlements of the 3rd millennium BC and Old Babylonian towns.

And the reports of those seasons still fill shelves in archaeological libraries.

Some of the most experienced Iraqi excavators of their generation worked there, learning to read the soil quickly and record carefully under a deadline that could not be moved.

For the foreign teams, it was a rare period of close cooperation with Iraqi colleagues before the war with Iran and the long troubles that followed made such work much harder.

The names in the excavation reports are mostly those of directors and specialists.

The local workmen who did the digging rarely appear at all.

Yet it was their hands that first touched most of these objects, and their knowledge of the ground, the feel of mud brick against earth, the sound a trowel makes on a buried floor, that often decided what was found and what was missed.

When they went home in the evenings, it was to villages that were themselves on the list to be flooded.

Then the dam was finished and the water rose.

Over the following years, the reservoir spread across the Hamrin basin.

Villages were abandoned, fields went under, and Tell Hadad, the low hill that had kept a poem about a buried king safe for all those centuries, slipped beneath the surface of a lake.

The tablet left the ground just in time.

The town that made it is now underwater, in some years deeper and in dry years shallower, but always wet, which is exactly the condition that unbaked clay cannot survive.

Had the rescue come a few seasons later, the death of Gilgamesh might have dissolved quietly at the bottom of a reservoir, and no one would ever have known what it said.

Even out of the ground, unbaked tablets remain vulnerable.

Museums have long had to decide whether to fire such tablets in a kiln to harden them, a step that protects the clay from damp and handling, but cannot be undone, or to keep them as they are, carefully stored, dry, and still.

Either way, from the moment of excavation, a tablet like this one depends entirely on the people who look after it.

The dam was completed in the early 1980s, and it still holds back the Diyala today, watering farms downstream and generating power for a country that badly needs both.

The rescue campaign is remembered now as one of the last great collaborative efforts in Iraqi archaeology before decades of war, and as a reminder that the most valuable finds are sometimes made not because anyone set out to find them, but because the land itself was about to be lost.

Chapter 9, Two Readers in Baghdad.

In Baghdad, the Me-Turan tablets went to the Iraq Museum, and then to the people who would read them.

Reading a tablet like this is slow work.

The signs must be identified one by one, often where the surface is worn or broken.

The spellings must be untangled because the Me-Turan scribes did not always write Sumerian the way the Nippur scribes did.

Lines must be compared with every other copy of the same poem, if there are any.

And all of this must be done by people who can read a dead language that no one has spoken for 4,000 years.

Cuneiform signs can stand for whole words or for syllables, and the same sign can have several readings depending on context.

Some signs are not pronounced at all, but sit in front of a word to tell the reader what kind of thing it is, a god, a city, a wooden object, a person.

The name of the Anunna, for instance, is usually written with the sign for the god and followed by signs that scholars read as nun and na, often with a small star-shaped sign that marks a divine name.

A reader has to choose the right value each time, and the only real guide is long familiarity with thousands of other texts.

Two good scholars can look at the same damaged sign and see two different things, and both may be partly right.

The two scholars who took on the Tell Halaf literary tablets were Farouk Al-Rawi and Antoine Cavigneaux.

Farouk Al-Rawi was an Iraqi Assyriologist trained in Baghdad and abroad, who taught at the University of Baghdad and spent his career working on the tablets of his own country.

Antoine Cavigneaux was a French specialist in Sumerian literature and incantations, later based in Geneva.

Between them, they had the knowledge of the Iraqi collections and the patience for difficult Sumerian.

Reading the Me-Turan copies meant comparing every line with the scraps from Nippur, and where the Nippur pieces were silent, working from the Me-Turan text alone.

In places, the scribe’s spelling was unusual or the surface was worn, and a single line might take days to settle.

Some passages had simply never been read before by anyone in the modern world, which meant there was nothing to check them against except the grammar of Sumerian itself and the scholars’ own judgment.

Through the 1980s and ’90s, they worked through the Me-Turan texts, publishing first articles and then, in 2000, a full edition of The Death of Gilgamesh in French under the title Gilgamesh and Death.

The Iraq of those years was not an easy place for scholarship.

War with Iran, then the Gulf War of 1991, then more than a decade of sanctions cut Iraqi scholars off from journals, conferences, and colleagues.

Much of the work had to be done across distance and difficulty, through photographs, copies, and occasional visits.

Even before the full edition appeared, the British scholar Andrew George was able to draw on the Me Turn Material for his English translation of the Gilgamesh poems published in 1999, so the general readers could follow the dying king’s dream almost as soon as specialist could.

What they found changed how the poem could be understood.

The Nippur fragments had preserved bits of the deathbed scene and a few lines from the end.

The Me Turn copies filled in the middle.

They gave the dream at length, the assembly, Enki’s reminder of the flood, the verdict that Gilgamesh would become a governor of the dead and be counted among the Anunnaki.

And they gave a passage that no one had read before, a passage about what happened after the king died.

In that passage, the dead king’s son raises the people of Uruk.

They go out to the river, and the river, the Euphrates itself, is made to move.

Chapter 10, a tomb beneath the river.

The son is called Ur-Nungal in the poem.

He calls up the men of Uruk and of the district around it, and they block the Euphrates and turn it aside so that it is bed lies dry.

In the empty riverbed, they build a tomb of stone.

Its doors and fittings are made with care, and the poem describes the work like a great public project, a whole city laboring for one man.

Then the household goes down.

In the Me Turn version, the king’s beloved wife, his beloved son, his concubine, his musician, his entertainer, his barber, his cupbearer, his steward, the members of his palace, lie down with him in the tomb.

The text does not dwell on how, it simply lists them, the people of his household, taking their places beside him as they had done in life.

Many scholars have connected this passage with the royal tombs at Ur of the mid-3rd millennium BC, where kings and queens were buried with attendants who had died with them.

Whether the poem remembers that practice or simply imagines it is still argued over.

The royal cemetery at Ur, excavated in the 1920s and early 1930s, contained a small number of exceptionally rich tombs dating to around 2600 BC, in which the principal burial was accompanied by many other people, servants, guards, musicians, and women of the household, laid out in rows with their instruments and ornaments.

How those attendants died and whether they went willingly is still debated by archaeologists.

What is clear is that in at least one period of Sumerian history, a ruler’s household might follow its master into the grave.

And the Maturin poem, written centuries later, still carried an echo of that world.

Then the gifts are laid out.

Gilgamesh weighs out presents for the gods of the netherworld, for Ereshkigal and her minister, for the gatekeeper, for Ningishzida and Dumuzi, for a whole list of powers below, so that he will be well received in their land.

He goes down not as a supplicant, but as a great man arriving with presents for his hosts.

The same scene appears in another Sumerian poem about a king who certainly lived.

Ur-Nammu founded the dynasty of Ur that ruled southern Mesopotamia around 2100 BC, and a poem composed after his death describes his arrival in the netherworld.

He too comes with gifts, weapons, and vessels, and fine garments, presented to the gods below one after another.

And he too is given an office there, to judge among the dead, with Gilgamesh already in place as a fellow judge.

But the poem does not stop at his welcome.

It lets the dead king speak.

He mourns that he never finished the wall of Ur, that he will not enjoy his new palace, that his wife will no longer be held in his arms, and his son will no longer sit on his knee.

His city weeps above, and he weeps below.

That poem shows that the honors promised to Gilgamesh were not just a fantasy for a legendary hero.

They were what people at court hoped for and feared when their own kings died.

A dead ruler went down with gifts, took up his office below, and still grieved for everything he had left unfinished on the earth.

At last, the doors are sealed, the stone is set in place, and the river is let back in.

The Euphrates flows over the tomb, and the poem says in effect that his resting place was hidden beneath the water so that no one could find it.

Uruk was the city Gilgamesh was remembered for walling, and its ancient wall, much of it still traceable, runs for around 9 km around a vast field of ruins.

From a magnetometer survey, that is an enormous area.

The German teams worked across large parts of it over more than one season, building up the picture strip by strip, a map of a city drawn not from what could be seen, but from what lay hidden in the soil.

Here, the survey at Uruk comes back into view.

When Jörg Fassbinder and Helmut Becker mapped the city with their magnetometer, they found, among much else, the channel of an old watercourse that once ran through Uruk, and within it, the outline of a structure.

Their reported comments to journalists in April 2003 linked it cautiously with the tomb described in the poem, and with the lines about a burial in the bed of a diverted river.

It was that link which traveled around the world, and in the retelling, it hardened.

The headline said the tomb of Gilgamesh had been found.

What they actually had was a map of magnetic contrasts, not a tomb.

A magnetometer can show where walls and ditches lie.

It cannot read an inscription, date a building precisely, or say who lies inside it.

No excavation followed.

The war closed Uruk to foreign archaeologists for years, and when German teams were later able to return to the site under the German Archaeological Institute, there was a great deal else to do, and no publicly confirmed tomb of Gilgamesh came out of the riverbed.

It remains, as far as I’ve been able to find, an unexcavated feature with an extraordinary story attached to it.

There is something worth noticing, though, about why the story caught.

The poem describes a tomb deliberately placed where no one can reach it.

Beneath water, sealed away.

It is a burial designed to defeat visitors.

And 37 centuries after the poem was copied, people looked at a shape under the earth and longed very much to open it.

The diverted river was meant to keep the dead king beyond reach of the living.

The modern headline was the old longing to reach him, still at work.

Chapter 11, the case for travelers from the sky.

For many people who come to these tablets today, the Anunnaki are something else entirely, and that view should be set out properly in its strongest form before anything is said against it.

In that view, the gods of Sumer were not imaginary.

They were real beings, more advanced than humans, who arrived on Earth from somewhere beyond it.

The texts, read this way, are not myths but memories, garbled and poeticized over thousands of years of an actual encounter.

The Anunnaki came down, organized the first cities, taught writing and law and farming, set up kings to rule on their behalf, and then, for reasons of their own, withdrew.

The great question that follows is why they have not come back, and whether something, a distance, a decree, a barrier, stands in their way.

The evidence offered for this is not invented from nothing, and it deserves to be stated honestly.

Sumerian texts really do say that kingship was lowered from heaven.

That phrase appears at the opening of the Sumerian King List and elsewhere, and it describes authority coming down from above to the first cities.

The gods in Sumerian literature really do travel between heaven and Earth, and between cities, by boat, on foot, sometimes in ways that sound almost like journeys through the air.

Enki sails his boat to Nippur.

Inanna travels to Eridu and comes back with the powers of civilization loaded onto her own boat.

The great gods sit in assembly and decide the fate of the Earth, sometimes by vote, sometimes by argument, as though they were a council of rulers with real power over human affairs.

The art can be read in the same way.

Gods wear horned crowns that look like no earthly headgear.

Assyrian reliefs show winged figures and a god in a winged disc floating above the king.

Cylinder seals carry stars and crescents and raid symbols in the sky above the figures.

Then there are texts about gods leaving.

In the city laments of the early second millennium, the great poems of mourning over the fall of Ur and other cities, the gods abandoned their homes.

The goddess of Ur leaves her city, and the poem describes the gods’ departure as the reason disaster could fall.

And there are texts about gods coming back.

In a first millennium composition known as the Marduk prophecy, the god of Babylon speaks in the first person about his own travels, how he went away to the land of Hatti, to Assyria, to Elam, and how he returned home to Babylon.

A god who leaves, stays away for a long time, and then comes back in glory is not a modern idea.

It is in the clay.

On top of this, in the 1970s, the writer Zecharia Sitchin argued in a series of popular books that the Anunnaki were visitors from a distant planet, and translated their name as those who from heaven to earth came.

His books reached millions of readers, and much of the modern picture of the Anunnaki grows from them, with later writers adding ideas of their own about why the visitors left and what keeps them away.

That is the case in its best form.

A people says its gods came down from above, ruled from cities, decided human fates in council, departed, and in some texts returned.

It is understandable that a modern reader, living in an age of space flight, sees in this a memory of something real.

To be fair, specialists have not always made the alternative easy to find.

Many of the best translations sat for decades in expensive academic volumes, while the bold popular books sat on the shelves of every book shop.

People went looking for the Anunnaki, and the first story they met was the one about the stars.

Some of them stayed with that story, and some went on to read further.

And many of the most thoughtful questions about these texts still come from readers who first heard of the Anunnaki that way.

Now, the tablets can answer the name first.

As we saw, the most widely held scholarly reading of Anunna is something like the princely offspring, the noble seed of the sky god.

It is a family name for the high gods, not a description of a journey.

The rendering as those who from heaven to earth came does not follow from the Sumerian signs or the grammar, and specialists in the language do not accept it.

Then the gods’ journeys.

The gods do travel, but always within a world the Sumerians knew.

Enki’s boat goes up the river from Eridu to Nippur.

Inanna’s boat carries powers between two Sumerian cities.

The gods’ homes are the temples that people built for them, with their statues inside, fed and clothed daily by priests.

When a god left a city in the laments, it usually meant something very concrete.

The statue had been carried away by an enemy, or the temple had been destroyed, or the gods’ favor had turned.

When Marduk says he traveled to Hatti and Elam and came home, the history behind it is known.

His statue was carried off as plunder by foreign armies and later brought back.

The gods’ absence was a war, and his return was a victory parade.

The phrase about kingship being lowered from heaven belongs to the same world.

In Mesopotamian thought, kingship was an office that belonged to the gods, symbolized by objects such as the crown, the scepter, and the throne.

In the Akkadian story of Etana, one of the early kings of Kish, those symbols are described as lying before the god Anu in heaven before there was any king on earth, waiting to be given.

To say that kingship came down from heaven was to say that the gods had granted the right to rule.

It was a claim about legitimacy, much as later kings in many lands would speak of ruling by the grace of God, not a record of a landing.

The art speaks the same language.

The horned crown was the standard mark of a god in Mesopotamian art for thousands of years, the way a halo marks a saint in later painting.

The winged disc above Assyrian kings is a divine emblem adapted from older Egyptian and Syrian imagery.

The stars and crescents on cylinder seals are the symbols of particular gods, the moon god’s crescent, Ishtar’s eight-pointed star, the sun god’s rayed disc, and on some carved boundary stones these symbols are set beside the god’s names.

Then, the Anunnaki themselves.

In the texts, the Anunnaki never depart from the earth at all.

Quite the reverse.

Over the centuries, they are placed more and more firmly inside it as the gods of the earth and the realm beneath.

The ones in Inanna’s descent are sitting in the underworld.

The ones in the descent of Ishtar are fetched from the palace of justice below and seated on golden thrones.

The meter and poem promises the dead Gilgamesh a place among them in the world below.

If there is a barrier in these texts, it is the one around the land of no return, and the Anunnaki are on the inside of it, guarding it, not on the outside waiting to get back in.

None of that makes the modern idea foolish.

It is a sincere attempt to make sense of very old and very strange texts, and the writers who first proposed it were responding to a real feeling that these poems describe something larger than ordinary life.

They do.

But what they describe, again and again, is not an arrival from space.

It is the boundary of death and the gods who rule on the other side of it.

The Anunnaki of the tablets never once leave this world.

In every text that places them, they belong to it, and in the end they are found deep within it.

Chapter 12.

The Envoy at the Meal for the Dead.

This scene is a composite built from the letters of foreign envoys at the court of Mari and from Mari’s own records of the offerings made to its royal dead.

It is high summer on the middle Euphrates in the reign of Zimri-Lim around 1770 BC, and you have been at Mari for almost a month.

You came up the river from Babylon with letters for the king and gifts from your own master, and you have been waiting ever since for a proper audience.

Envoys wait.

It is most of what envoys do.

You have learned the names of the palace stewards, which of them can be persuaded to carry a message, and which will forget it on purpose.

And you have written home twice already to complain politely about the delay.

The journey itself took many days upriver against the current.

The boat hauled by men on the towpath where the water ran too strongly.

The banks green with irrigated fields and then suddenly bare where the desert came down to meet the river.

Mari, when it came into view, stood back from the water within its great ring of walls with the palace at its heart, a building so large and so famous that rulers far away were said to ask permission to send visitors just to see it.

Today, a little before sunset, the heat begins to break.

A servant comes to your lodging with word that the foreign envoys are invited to be present at the evening’s rites.

You know what this means.

At the new moon, the king of Mari makes offerings to the dead, to his own fathers and grandfathers and to kings of long ago, and important guests are sometimes allowed to attend, standing at a respectful distance.

It is a mark of favor.

It is also, you suspect, a quiet reminder of whose ancestors are being honored and how far back they reach.

You dress in your best linen, the robe you have been saving, and walk with the other envoys through courtyards where the paving still holds the day’s warmth.

There are men from Yamhad in the west, men from the hill country to the north, an official from somewhere in the east whose dialect you can barely follow.

You nod to one another, your rivals, all of you.

But tonight there is nothing to compete over except who stands nearest the door.

There was a real edge to that joke.

Among the letters from Mari is a report of trouble at a royal meal when garments were handed out to some foreign envoys and not to others and the slighted guests protested that they were being treated as lesser men.

Gifts of clothing at a king’s table were public measures of honor watched and counted by everyone in the room.

You were warned about it by your own master’s officials before you left and you have rehearsed more than once what you will say if it happens to you.

The right takes place in a room within the palace set aside for it.

The air is thick with the smell of cooked meat and beer and the oil of the lamps.

Along one side are statues and emblems of the dead kings and in front of them tables have been laid.

There is bread and meat and beer poured into vessels and water.

A priest calls out names one after another and with each name something is set down or poured.

You listen carefully because names are your business.

You recognize the names of the king’s own father and of earlier kings of his house and then to your surprise you hear names you know from far older stories.

The scribes of Mari it turns out set offerings before the spirits of Sargon of Akkad and his grandson Naram-Sin, kings who had ruled the whole land some five centuries before and who Mari had claimed in its own way as part of its line.

You have heard of this but it is something else to see it.

The great conquerors of the old songs are being given bread and water in a palace room by people who never knew them.

The king himself stands near the front.

He’s not as tall as the reliefs of kings and he looks tired which you will not mention in your letters.

He watches the pouring with close attention as a son watches over a duty he has inherited.

Somewhere outside a woman is weeping and no one seems to think it strange.

It is the season of the meal for the dead and in many houses of Mari tonight there will be a little bread and a cup of water set out for a father or a mother or a child who did not grow up.

You think without meaning to, of your own father.

He died two summers ago, and it was your brother at home who kept the monthly offerings for him, calling his name and pouring the water while you traveled from court to court carrying other men’s letters.

You wonder whether your brother has done it this month.

You wonder whether your father, wherever he is, in that gray place below where the scribes say the dead eat dust, has felt the water reach him or felt it fail to come.

A little apart from the others stands a woman of the palace, perhaps one of the king’s own family, her face very still, watching the water darken the clay where it falls.

You have heard that the women of Mari’s royal house write letters of their own to the king and to one another about dreams and omens and the health of children.

You wonder whose name she is waiting to hear.

When it’s called, a short name you do not recognize, she closes her eyes and does not open them again until the next name has been spoken.

Near the tables, a singer begins a lament in Sumerian, the old language which most people in this room cannot follow word by word.

You catch only a few phrases, a name, the word for the land below, a cry that rises and falls like the wind over water.

It does not matter that the words are strange.

Everyone understands what kind of song it is.

Beside you, the envoy from the hill country has bowed his head.

You do not know his language well enough to ask whom he is thinking of, and you would not ask in any case.

In a room like this, every guest is quietly counting their own dead.

The rite ends simply.

The last names are called, the last water is poured, the lamps are trimmed, the envoys file out into the night.

From the roof of your lodging later, you can see the river below, very dark, and on the far bank, small fires where the boatmen are camped.

The new moon is a thin line low in the west.

You sit down and begin a letter to your master in Babylon.

You tell him that the king of Mari is in good health, that the audience has been promised again, that the harvest along the river looks strong.

You do not tell him that you stood in a room tonight and heard the names of dead kings called out one by one into the lamplight, and that for a moment you were not thinking about treaties at all.

That part you keep for yourself.

Chapter 13 A breath through a hole in the earth.

If no one comes back from the land of no return, does anyone ever come back at all? There is one Sumerian poem in which for a brief moment someone does.

It is also, as it happens, a poem about Gilgamesh.

Scholars call it Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the netherworld.

The poem opens on a willow tree growing on the bank of the Euphrates, which the goddess Inanna rescues from a flood and plants in her garden at Uruk, hoping to make a throne and a bed from its wood.

A snake makes its nest in the roots, a fierce bird nests in the branches, and a dark spirit lives in the trunk, and Inanna weeps because she cannot clear them away.

Gilgamesh comes to her aid, drives them out, cuts the tree, and from part of its wood makes two objects for himself, usually translated as a ball and a mallet or a hoop and a stick.

They seem to be playing pieces for a rough game played across the city square.

He plays with them so hard and so long that the people of Uruk complain.

And at that moment, through some carelessness, the ball and the stick fall through a crack down into the netherworld.

Gilgamesh weeps for them.

His companion Enkidu, the wild man who became his friend and servant, offers to go down and bring them back.

Gilgamesh agrees, but gives him careful instructions.

In the world below, he says, “You must not draw attention to yourself.

Do not wear clean clothes, or the dead will know you’re a stranger.

Do not anoint yourself with sweet oil, or they will gather around at the smell of it.

Do not throw a stick.

Do not carry a staff.

Do not wear sandals.

Do not raise your voice.

Do not kiss the wife you love or strike the wife you hate or kiss the child you love or strike the child you hate.

If you do these things, the outcry of the underworld will seize you.

Enkidu goes down and does every single one of them.

He wears clean clothes.

He anoints himself.

He throws a stick.

He wears sandals.

He shouts.

He kisses and strikes and the netherworld seizes him.

No demon takes him, the poem is careful to say, no illness, no fallen warrior.

It was the earth itself, the great below, that took him and held him.

Here is the rule from the other side.

It does not matter that Enkidu was alive, that he went down on an errand, that he meant to come straight back.

Once the world below has taken hold of you, it does not let go.

Gilgamesh goes weeping to the gods.

He goes first to Enlil at Nippur, who will not help.

In some versions, he goes next to the moon god, who also refuses.

Then he goes to Enki at Eridu, the same clever god who had saved Inanna.

Enki speaks to Utu, the sun god, who passes each night through the world below on his way from the western horizon to the eastern.

Utu is told to open a hole in the earth and he does.

And through that hole, the shade of Enkidu rises up from the netherworld like a breath of wind.

It is fitting that the sun should be the one to open the way.

In Mesopotamian belief, the sun god crossed the sky by day and then, at sunset, passed down into the world below, traveling through it during the night and rising again in the east at dawn.

He was almost alone among the great gods in making that journey every day, entering the land of no return each evening and leaving it each morning.

Prayers to him sometimes asked him to look after the dead or to judge their cases because he alone saw both worlds.

The hole he opened for Enkidu was, in a sense, his own road, lent for a moment to a friend.

The two friends embrace.

In the poem, they kiss and hold each other and then Gilgamesh begins to ask questions.

He has a chance that no living person has had to ask someone who has seen the world below what it is like.

And he does not ask about the Anunnaki or the gates or the throne of Ereshkigal.

He asks about people.

He asks first about Enkidu’s own body.

Enkidu’s answer is hard.

The body Gilgamesh used to touch, he says, is eaten by vermin like an old garment and filled with dust.

Gilgamesh sits down in the dust and weeps.

The later Babylonian epic tells Enkidu’s death differently.

There he does not go down on an errand.

He falls ill after offending the gods and dies slowly in bed cursing and then blessing the life that brought him to the city.

Gilgamesh refuses to let him be buried.

For 7 days and 7 nights he sits by the body hoping that his friend will rise until a worm falls from Enkidu’s nose and he finally understands.

Then he has a statue made of him, sends for gold and lapis and fine stones, and lays out offerings for the gods of the world below so that Enkidu will be welcomed there.

Two poems, two ways of losing the same friend.

In one, the friend is taken by a rule he broke.

In the other, he is taken by nothing at all, only by the ordinary end that comes to everyone.

Then he asks about the dead in general and Enkidu answers one question at a time.

The opening is only wide enough for a voice.

The visit is only long enough for a conversation.

But for the length of that conversation, the land of no return has very slightly been opened.

So this is the one return that the old poems allow.

Not a god coming back in glory, not a king rising from his tomb, but a friend’s ghost drifting up through a small hole in the ground for a single afternoon of questions.

When Gilgamesh asks him how it is down there, Enkidu begins his answer, as the poem tells it, by saying that if he told his friend the rule of the netherworld that he had seen, his friend would sit down and weep.

Chapter 14, bread, water, and a spoken name.

What Enkidu tells his friend is one of the strangest passages in all of Sumerian literature.

It is a kind of census of the dead given as a string of short questions and short answers, and it survives with some differences both in the Sumerian poem and in an Akkadian translation that later scribes attached to the end of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh as its 12th tablet.

The details vary between copies, and some lines are broken, so what follows is the general shape rather than a word-for-word account.

Gilgamesh asks about a man who had one son.

Enkidu says he weeps bitterly beside a peg driven into the wall.

A man with two sons sits on a couple of bricks and eats bread.

A man with three sons drinks water from a waterskin slung on a saddle.

And so it goes on, the fortunes of the dead rising with every son until the man with seven sons who sits on a seat among the junior gods and listens to the proceedings as one of the honored company.

Gilgamesh asks about the man who had no heir at all.

That one, Enkidu says, eats bread as hard as a kiln-fired brick.

He asks about the woman who never gave birth, and Enkidu says she’s cast aside like a flawed pot, and no man takes pleasure in her.

The poem is not gentle.

It is a hard, bare account of a world in which what happens to you after death depends on who is left behind to remember you.

Then there are the dead whose deaths were unhappy.

The man who was eaten by a lion cries bitterly for his hands and feet.

The man who fell from a roof cannot have his bones set.

The man whose body lay unburied in the open country, in one version, has a ghost that finds no rest in the netherworld at all.

And the man who has no one to make offerings for him eats the scraps from the cooking pot and the crusts of bread thrown into the street.

The Akkadian version adds two more figures who stay with many readers.

The man who fell in battle is honored, Enkidu says, his father and mother holding up his head while his wife weeps over him.

And the man who was burned in a fire is not there at all.

His ghost, Enkidu says, went up with the smoke into the sky.

And then, in the middle of all this hardness, a line that stops many readers.

Gilgamesh asks about the little children who died before they knew their own names, the stillborn babies.

Enkidu answers that they play at a table of gold and silver laden with honey and cream.

So, the land of no return was not, in the Mesopotamian imagination, a single gray place where everyone was equal.

It was a place where the living could still reach the dead and still change how they fared by remembering them.

The dead could not come back, but food, water, and a name could go down.

The Akkadian word for the ghost of a dead person was a temmu.

A person who died properly, was buried properly, and was cared for afterwards, would become a ghost that rested more or less among the shades below.

A person who died badly or lay unburied, or had no one to care for them, could become a restless ghost, one that wandered and hungered and might trouble the living.

A great deal of Mesopotamian magic was aimed at calming such ghosts, sending them back to the world below with offerings and prayers.

The care of the dead had a name, too.

The family offering made to the ancestors, usually at the new moon, was called kispum.

It might be modest, a little bread and water and some flour.

And it was accompanied by the most important act of all, calling the dead person’s name.

The one who did this was called the caretaker, and in old Babylonian families, this duty often fell to the heir.

Inheritance documents and adoption contracts sometimes mention it directly.

A son who took over the family house took over the family dead with it.

The graves of this period say the same thing in their own way.

Burials across Mesopotamia often contain a cup, a jar, sometimes a little food, the things a person would need on the road below and in the first days among strangers.

Many contain almost nothing else.

The gifts are rarely treasures.

They are provisions, the kind of thing you might pack for someone setting out on a long journey from which everyone knew they would not come home.

That is why the census of the dead turns on sons.

In a world where the eldest son inherited both the house and the duty of the offerings, every son meant one more person who might pour the water and speak the name.

A man without children was not only lonely in life, he was afraid of a hungry death.

The same tablets that keep this fear also keep its gentlest answer.

The Sumerian story of Dumuzi, the husband Inanna gave to the demons, does not end with him lost forever.

In the closing lines of Inanna’s descent after he’s been taken, his sister Geshtinanna mourns him so faithfully and searches for him so long that a new arrangement is made.

Dumuzi will spend half the year in the world below, and his sister will take his place for the other half.

Brother and sister will share his death between them.

Another Sumerian poem, often called Dumuzi’s Dream, shows what that sister was like.

When the demons come hunting for her brother, Geshtinanna is the one who knows where he is hiding, and they press her to give him up.

She will not.

The poem says they tried to force it out of her, and she still would not tell them.

In the end, it is someone else who betrays him.

The sister who refused to speak becomes the one who shares his fate.

Scholars have read this ending in different ways.

One long tradition sees in Dumuzi a figure of the growing season, a shepherd and a god of plenty who vanishes in the dry heat of summer and returns with the green, so that the poem explains the turning of the year.

Others are more cautious, pointing out that the Sumerian texts never quite say this in plain words, and preferring to read the poem as a story about the boundaries of divine power, or about the rights of mourning that were actually performed for Dumuzi in Mesopotamian cities.

The two readings are not enemies.

A story can explain the seasons and the ache of a lost brother at the same time.

It is, as far as the Sumerian poems go, the only lasting return from the land of no return, and it is bought entirely by grief, not by power, not by cleverness, not by force, but by a sister who would not stop mourning.

And it is still not a full return.

It is a share, a season, a half of something that cannot be whole again.

What did it feel like then to live with this arrangement every year in a family of your own with your own dead beneath the floor? Chapter 15.

Ur, the last cold month.

This scene is a composite.

It is built on the houses excavated at Ur in the 1920s and 30s, many of which had family burials beneath their floors, and on the texts about caring for the dead that we have just met.

It is the end of winter at Ur a little before dawn, around 1790 BC, and you are the oldest person in the house.

You’re a woman of perhaps 60, which is old enough here to have outlived most of the people you grew up with.

Your knees ache in the cold.

The brazier in the courtyard has gone out in the night, and the air in the house is damp and gray.

You’re awake as you usually are at this hour before anyone else.

In the next room your son is snoring softly, and beyond him the baby of the house stirs and settles again.

Out in the lane a dog is nosing at something by a doorway.

Far off toward the temple quarter, you can hear the faint knocking of someone already at work, a potter perhaps, or a baker getting the ovens going.

The city is not quite awake, and neither entirely are you.

The house is in one of the crowded quarters of the city on a narrow lane that bends between other houses so close that the neighbors can hear each other cough.

It is built of baked brick at the bottom and mud brick above, with the rooms arranged around a small open courtyard.

At the back, in a narrow room the family has always kept for the gods of the household and the family dead, there is a brick vault beneath the floor.

You know exactly who is down there because you were there when each of them went in.

Your husband’s father, a stern man who taught your husband his trade.

Your husband’s mother, who was kind to you when you first came to this house as a bride, younger than your granddaughter is now.

Your husband himself five winters ago.

And two of your own children, a boy who lived 3 years and a girl who lived only a few days.

When the vault was opened for your husband, you saw in the lamplight the small bones of your children lying where they had been laid, and you were not frightened by it.

You were glad they had company.

You remember your husband’s funeral more clearly than you would like.

The women of the lane came to the house with their hair unbound, and their wailing filled the courtyard for a day and a night.

The vault was opened and its cold breath filled the back room, and your son and his cousins lowered your husband down on a reed mat.

You put a cup beside his hand and a jar, and the little copper pin he always used to fasten his cloak because a man should not arrive among strangers looking poor.

Then they sealed the vault again with bricks and mud.

The floor was swept and the house was a house once more, with a little more silence in it than before.

You get up slowly and go into the back room.

There is a small offering table there and a niche for a clay figure of the household god.

You light a lamp from the embers you saved in a pot, and the room takes on its familiar shape.

The worn bricks, the cracked plaster, the dark place in the floor where the vault lies sealed.

It is not the day of the full offering.

That comes with the new moon, and then your son will do it properly as the heir of the house with flour and bread and a cup of water poured out, and the names spoken one after another in the right order.

That is his duty now.

But you were doing this long before he was born, and old habits do not obey new rules.

So you set a small piece of yesterday’s bread on the table and a little water in a clay cup, and you say the names quietly under your breath so as not to wake anyone.

When you say your husband’s name, you remember him as a young man at the harbor on the canal laughing at something a boatman said.

When you say your daughter’s name, you remember almost nothing, only the weight of her and the smell of her head and the silence afterward.

You have heard the old story that the little ones play at a table of gold and silver with honey and cream.

You do not know whether you believe it.

You choose to.

Your mother-in-law taught you the names when you first came here, standing in the same room with a lamp in the same niche.

Some of the names she taught you belong to people she had never met herself, her husband’s grandparents and their parents, people who had lived in this house long before her time.

A few of those names you’ve forgotten, and it troubles you more than you admit.

Now and then you try to recall them, lying awake, and sometimes one comes back and you say it aloud in the morning so that it does not slip away again.

You have lived through hard times in this city.

When you were a girl, the kings of Larsa ruled Ur, and the city was busy and prosperous, full of merchants who traded down the Gulf for copper and stones.

You remember the great processions, the music, the crowds at the harbor.

Now there is talk of trouble up river, of the king of Babylon growing strong, of armies and taxes.

Your son worries about it at night.

You try to tell him that kings come and go, and that the family will still be here in this house with its dead under the floor.

You’re not sure that is true either, but it is what an old woman is for.

Outside, the sky over the courtyard begins to pale.

Somewhere a donkey shifts in its stall, and a neighbor’s child begins to cry and is hushed.

You hear your granddaughter stirring in the next room.

In a little while, she will come and find you here as she often does, and sit with you, and ask you about the people under the floor.

You will tell her their names and what they were like and what they used to say, so that one day, when you are under the floor yourself, she will know whose names to say and in what order and which one liked his bread warm.

You blow out the lamp.

The bread and water stay on the table.

The light comes up over her, gray and then gold, and the house begins its day.

Chapter 16, Baghdad, April 2003.

Back in the modern world, the tablet from Meturan had been resting in Baghdad since its rescue from the Hamrin in the collections of the Iraq Museum.

In April 2003, the same month that the Iraq headlines went round the world, the museum came close to losing a great deal of what it held.

The war that began in March reached Baghdad in early April.

As the government collapsed, there was a period of several days in which there was no effective authority in much of the city.

Government buildings were looted, so was the Iraq Museum.

The museum staff had prepared as best they could.

In the weeks before the war, many of the most important objects had been moved to safe storage.

Some of it in places known only to a handful of people, and the galleries had been partly emptied.

Even so, when looters broke in, they went through offices, storerooms, and display areas, smashing cases and carrying off whatever they could find.

In the confusion of those first reports, numbers were given that later turned out to be far too high, and the story was told and retold with different figures.

The investigations that followed, including one led by a United States Marine officer named Matthew Bogdanos, eventually estimated that around 15,000 objects had been taken.

Over the following years, a large part of them were recovered.

Some returned through amnesties, some seized at borders and in foreign markets, many still missing.

The Iraq Museum holds one of the largest collections of cuneiform tablets in the world, many tens of thousands of them from excavations across the country over more than a century.

Most are never on display.

They sit in storerooms in boxes and drawers, recorded by site and season, waiting for the scholars who may spend years on a single group.

After the looting, the museum’s conservators and registrars faced not only the losses, but the disorder, broken cases, scattered records, objects moved in haste, and the slow work of checking every box against its register.

At the center of the museum’s struggle were Iraqi staff who had worked there for decades.

One of the most visible was Donny George Youkhana, the museum’s director of research, who in the weeks and months after the looting worked tirelessly to assess the damage, recover what could be recovered, and speak to a world that often heard only the most dramatic version of the story.

Another was Lamia Al-Gailani Werr, an Iraqi archaeologist and a specialist in cylinder seals, who had studied in Baghdad and London, and who helped with the long work of identifying and recording what had been lost and what had come back.

I have not been able to find any record that the Metro and copies of The Death of Gilgamesh were among the objects stolen in those days, and it would be wrong to suggest that they were.

Much of the museum’s tablet collection came through the war intact, but the tablets of Tell Haddad were in the same building under the same roof during the same frightened weeks, and their survival, like that of so much else, owed a great deal to people who put the collection ahead of their own safety.

Donny George later left Iraq after receiving threats, and spent his last years teaching in the United States.

He died in 2011.

Lamia Al-Gailani Werr kept working with the museum for years, and died in 2019, still involved in the project of rebuilding its collections and training its staff.

The museum reopened, closed again, and reopened again in 2015.

In the years since, objects have kept coming home from America, from Europe, from private collections, sometimes in batches of thousands.

In the summer of 2021, some 17,000 objects were flown back from the United States in a single shipment.

Many of them small clay tablets that had been smuggled out during the years of chaos.

The clay that left Me Turan in a hurry ahead of a rising reservoir has outlived a dam, a war, an invasion and a looting.

And it is still there, still readable in the city where it was first deciphered.

Chapter 17, The Land of No Return.

Go back one last time to the river.

The Euphrates no longer runs through Uruk.

Over the centuries it shifted its course to the west as rivers on that flat plain always have, and the great city it once fed was left stranded in the desert.

The channel that Jörg Fassbinder and Helmut Becker traced with their instrument is dry now, a faint line in the ground that only a magnetometer can really see.

When they walked across it, step by careful step, they were walking above water that had gone, past houses that had fallen, and over a shape that no one has yet uncovered.

It is easy with hindsight to smile at the headline that followed, a magnetic map is not a tomb, and a tomb is not a name.

But the scientists themselves never claimed more than a possibility, and the possibility was not absurd.

The poem they had in mind really does describe a king buried in the bed of a diverted river at Uruk, and their survey really did find a built structure in an old river channel there.

What lies inside it, if anything, and when it was made, no one can yet say.

It may be a building from a much later age.

It may be a wall, a key, a sluice.

It is very unlikely to be the tomb of a man who may or may not have lived some 47 centuries ago.

But no spade has gone into it, and until one does, the riverbed at Uruk keeps its secret in exactly the way the poem said it would.

German archaeologists did return to Uruk in the years after the war under the German Archaeological Institute and its long-time director there, Margarete Van Ess, and they have gone on mapping, protecting, and studying the site, which became a World Heritage Site in 2016 as part of the Southern Iraqi Marshes and Ancient Cities.

Their work has added greatly to what is known about the city, its temples, its canals, and its long life.

Through all of it, the shape in the old riverbed has stayed what it was in 2003, a line on a magnetic map, one feature among thousands, with a poem hanging over it like a lamp.

And that, in the end, is the shape of the answer to the question that brought us here.

There is a Sumerian text, more than one in fact, that speaks about what blocks a return, but it is not about the Anunnaki being kept away from the earth.

In The Death of Gilgamesh, the great gods, the Anunna, sit in their assembly and decree that even a king who has two parts divine must die because of an oath they swore after the flood, and they promise him only a place among them below.

In Inanna’s Descent, the Anunna, sitting as judges in the underworld, seize a goddess who is trying to go back up into the light and state the law of the place.

No one leaves the underworld unscathed, and anyone who goes up must leave a substitute behind.

In the later Akkadian poem, The Gate of the Land of No Return holds back the dead, and the Anunnaki must be seated on their golden thrones before anyone can be released.

Across many centuries, the Anunnaki move from the shining assembly of the sky to the dark court beneath the earth.

What blocks return in all of these texts is death itself, with its door and its law, and the Anunnaki are not shut outside it.

They are the ones who keep it.

That answer is less exotic than the modern story of travelers from the stars, and the people who hold that modern story have every right to keep asking their own questions of the texts.

But the clay is not boring.

It is if anything more intimate.

It describes again and again the most universal experience of all, the moment when someone we love goes through a door we cannot follow them through, and the long work afterwards of living on the near side of it.

For the people who wrote these poems that work had a form.

You could not bring the dead back.

The Anunnaki had made sure of that, but you could send things down to them, bread, water, a name spoken aloud at the new moon.

You could keep them fed, keep them remembered, keep them from becoming hungry ghosts eating scraps in the street.

And if you could not do it for them yourself, you could make sure that someone else would, a son, a daughter, a granddaughter sitting in the lamplight learning the names in order.

The most lasting image in all these texts is perhaps the smallest one.

Ninshubur, the faithful minister, putting on a single rough garment like a beggar, tearing at her own face and walking from city to city, from one god’s doorway to the next, refusing to accept that her mistress was gone.

Two great gods tell her there is nothing to be done, that whoever goes there does not come back.

She keeps walking, and because she keeps walking, the goddess on the hook is brought back up into the light.

The poem does not pretend this is how it usually goes.

Most of the time in Mesopotamia, as everywhere, the door stays shut and the walking ends, and the mourners go home and set out bread and water on a little table in a back room.

But the scribes chose to keep the story of the one who did not stop, and to copy it again and again in school after school for more than a thousand years.

Perhaps they kept it not because they believed grief could open the underworld, but because they knew that grief, faithfully carried, is what holds the living together on this side of the door.

There is one riddle that remains, and it grows straight out of the matter and tablet.

Why did the poet promise a dying king a seat among the Anunnaki below? Was it pure consolation? a way of telling the grieving people of Uruk that their king had not simply vanished into the dust, but had gone to take up an honored office? Was it politics, a way for later kings who claimed Gilgamesh as their ancestor to say that their own line reached into the world of the gods, above and below? Or was it the beginning of something larger, the idea that great men might become powers among the dead, to be prayed to and honored, which later turned into the worship of heroes and saints in many lands? The text itself does not tell us which.

Each answer fits some of the evidence, and none fits all of it.

If you have a theory of your own about why a scribe in a small town on the Diyala wrote that a dead king would be counted among the Anunnaki, I would very much like to read it.

Leave it in the comments below.

The story of the one god who did come back, at least for half of every year, is a story of its own.

Dumuzi, the shepherd husband of Inanna, taken by the demons from his throne, and his sister Geshtinanna, who would not let him go, have their own poems and their own laments, sung in the streets of Mesopotamian cities every summer for well over a thousand years.

The video on your screen right now goes further into that story, into the dying shepherd, the mourning sister, and the long season of weeping that later reached far beyond Sumer.

As for the tablet from Me-Turan, it is still in Baghdad, a slab of dried river clay not much bigger than a hand, carrying a poem about a king who was told he would never rise again.

It was made in a frontier town.

It survived the fall of that town.

It was lifted out of the ground a few seasons before a lake closed over its home.

It was read by an Iraqi scholar and a French one through years of war and sanctions, and it came through the looting of its museum.

Somewhere under a dry channel at Uruk, a shape lies waiting for someone to look.

Somewhere under the floors of the old houses of Ur, families still lie together where their grandchildren laid them.

Thank you for spending this time with me and with all of them.

Goodbye for now and take good care until we meet again.