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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Chaos Reigns

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I'm Helena de Groot. Today, "Chaos Reigns." Learning a new language will humble you. Your mouth cannot seem to produce the sounds. The grammar makes no sense, and even when you get really good, it will not be without years of regularly and publicly going flat on your face. But maybe that's why we do it, to feel humbled. The way you would look up at the night sky and try to fathom the scale of it all. Only here you're looking down at a dictionary thinking about all the words you'll probably never know. If you like being confronted with the depths of your not knowing, Assyriology seems like a great place to start. You have languages that have been dead for thousands of years written on clay tablets of which we only have pieces in cuneiform, a script that may never reveal all of its mysteries. One person who has chosen this path of much resistance is the Assyriologist scholar and translator Sophus Helle. He just came out with a translation of poems by the world's very first named author, Enheduana. Enheduana was a high priestess who lived more than 4300 years ago in the city of Ur, now Iraq. But even though she was the very first author, her poems, written in Sumerian, are not well-known, and they're usually upstaged by much a more famous Babylonian text, this one written in Akkadian, not Sumerian: the Epic of Gilgamesh. And Gilgamesh is actually where Sophus Helle got his start as a translator. Here's our conversation.

Helena de Groot: Why was that the thing that gripped you?

Sophus Helle:Gilgamesh is a story about anxiety. It's a story about the paradoxes of life. It's a story about all of those things that don't add up. It is not a story that comes to a nice, harmonious end. One can find a resolution in it if you, like me, spend many years thinking and writing about the text, but it is a text that puts its thumb, as it were, on all the things that hurt in life and then presses in, and that was really just appealing to me. I started studying Egyptology originally, and the Egyptology courses and the Assyriology courses began in the same half-year, right? During the first half-year you were doing the same set of courses, and then you can switch from one to the other, and I was just really fed up with pyramids, and I was really fed up with the harmony and the symmetry and the nice vision of the afterlife that the Egyptians presented, and, you know, on the other side, you had this text like Gilgamesh. It was just so full of passion and despair and grand emotions that sort of, you know, as one Danish writer described, Gilgamesh rolled through time "like a literary fireball," and that I found much more gripping. And the same is true of Enheduana. I think part of what draws me to her is the intensity of the emotions that emerge from this text.

Helena de Groot: And Gilgamesh is written in what language?

Sophus Helle: So, Gilgamesh, the version of it that I have translated into English, is an Akkadian text. But it does have Sumerian roots. So there are five Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh that are then compiled into a single Akkadian epic.

Helena de Groot: OK. So Sumerian is older than Akkadian, or did they exist at the same time?

Sophus Helle: No, they existed at the same time. So, they exist side-by-side, and they are spoken by the same group of people. So, most people in this region would be bilingual, and that includes Enheduana.

Helena de Groot : And is there a family relation between Sumerian and Akkadian, or no?

Sophus Helle: Not even a little bit. Like, they are about as different as you can get linguistically. Purely in terms of linguistic structure, they are like literally night and day.

Helena de Groot: So, it's like English and Korean or whatever.

Sophus Helle: Yeah. I mean, linguistically it's a lot like Greenlandic and Ethiopic, and, you know, and Sumerian is like nothing else on the planet, except possibly a little bit Greenlandic and Basque and such. It's really weird.

Helena de Groot: They are so far, like, geographically, like that is amazing.

Sophus Helle: I mean, it's probably just a structural similarity, not like a genetic one. They probably don't have a common origin. But, I mean, what they have in common is that they're super weird, and the linguistic term for super weird is isolate.

Helena de Groot: Fair enough, OK. I think that's enough intro on that. I think if we dive deeper, that's what we will spend the episode on.

Sophus Helle: It's a deep hole.

Helena de Groot: But I do want to hear a bunch more about your own experience with translating Sumerian, and why don't we start with cuneiform? Because in your book, there's like a page-sized picture of a clay tablet with, I suppose, a poem by Enheduana on it. And to me, there are these little sort of lines on it, very chaotic, and it looks kind of like the way your legs look if you've been wearing shorts and sitting on the grass for a while.

Sophus Helle: Yeah, right.

Helena de Groot: And so it doesn't look to me like something that you could actually learn to read, and so can you tell me a little bit about the process? How did that go? What is class one?

Sophus Helle: So, OK, cuneiform is truly a wonderful writing system, and it is also worth saying that this is the world's oldest writing system, so that means that when writing is invented, it's cuneiform that's invented. And not only is it the world's oldest writing system, it's also one of the longest-lasting writing systems. It gets invented about 3500 years BC, and then it's used all the way up to around 100 AD. So, there's three and a half millennia…

Helena de Groot: So that's like 5500 years ago it was invented.

Sophus Helle: Yeah, yeah. And, so, we like to say cheekily in our field that we study the first half of history, and then all the other historians do the rest. But cuneiform is wonderful, and one of the reasons it's so wonderful is that each sign has so many meanings. And that's why it allows for these clever ways of expressing meaning. And it allows for interpretation and play in this really interesting way, it's a very intellectually stimulating writing system. It's also just visually very expressive. So, as you said, if you look at it on a photograph, it really just looks like a mishmash, and I will say even the Babylonians had humor about this. There's one tablet that is like a mock contract in which this bird buys property next to the gate of hell, and it compares the cuneiform writing system with the footprints of a bird. So, they are aware of how it looks but…

Helena de Groot: That's great.

Sophus Helle: What's really wonderful about cuneiform is that if you hold it to the light in just the right direction, then it really pops, suddenly. So, a lot of the experience of reading cuneiform is about encountering light and shadow and the interplay between the two, and orienting the tablet in the right way, so that these letters come to life in a sense.

Helena de Groot: You mean, because it's sort of engraved, and so there's a relief in there?

Sophus Helle: Exactly, exactly. So, we write by putting ink onto paper; they write by taking a stylus and imprinting it into clay. And that actually brings me to your question, which is how do you start to learn cuneiform? And actually, we have these amazing sources from what's called the old Babylonian period—so that's, like, 1750 BCE—where we have so much information about how they learn cuneiform. It's actually one of the things we know best from the ancient world, because when they were learning, they were making exercise tablets, and we found these exercise tablets in the hundreds and in the thousands, and so . . .

Helena de Groot: Are you kidding me? You found thousands-of-year-old textbooks from people who lived already, like, what, four, three . . .

Sophus Helle: Yeah, 3700 years. Yes, in huge numbers. And that's how we know Enheduana, because she's part of the school curriculum. And so there's this wonderful tablet that's from quite early on in the educational system where they're just learning to make the basic shapes, and now they're learning to put those shapes together into like very simple signs, and one of the students is doing this and then takes a bite out of the corner of a tablet because … we don't know why they did this, but I'm thinking that if you're learning a writing system that isn't about putting ink on paper but is about making an imprint, then maybe you're thinking about, well, how does the shape of my . . . I know what my tooth looks like, how does my tooth look in the clay, right?

Helena de Groot: Right.

Sophus Helle: So, they literally just take a bite out of the edge. And another possibility, which is a more tragic possibility, is that this is a student that was thinking a lot about death, because we know that, according to the Babylonians, in the afterlife you would eat clay. So maybe the student is like, oh, I wonder what that would be like. I don't know but . . .

Helena de Groot: Oh, I was just thinking, this is a student goofing around and making his classmates laugh.

Sophus Helle: That's also very possible, but actually, because modern scholars then took that tablet to a dentist and said how old was the student? And it turns out the student was about 13 years old, and so we estimate that that's about when they started school.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. That is so interesting.

Sophus Helle: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: And are there fingerprints on the clay? So, this is wet clay, right?

Sophus Helle: Yeah, it's wonderful when you get a fingerprint, or when you get a little drawing. Like, there's this model letter that the student got tired of writing out and then turned the tablet around and drew a goat. You get these flashes of life, or you get a letter from a student complaining to his mother that all the other students in the school have better clothes than he does. So, you know, the students often produce these quite vivid moments because, apart from anything else, they're teenagers.

Helena de Groot: Right, right. And, so, OK, this basic question I should have started with, maybe, but—cuneiform, is it like an alphabet, or is it pictographic like Chinese?

Sophus Helle: Well, it's a mixed writing system, and what most characterizes cuneiform is its polysemy. So, the fact that every sign can mean many different things, but it can also mean in multiple different ways. So, each sign can signify a sound, but maybe also a whole word, and you really are dependent on the context to put it together and to make sense of each combination of signs.

Helena de Groot: Oh, my. Sophus, it's not getting clear to me how you even learn this thing.

Sophus Helle: Yeah, I mean, cuneiform is complicated but it is rewarding, it really is. And it's gorgeous, I think it's gorgeous.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, it is. It is truly gorgeous. I mean to me, the uninitiated, in part because it just looks completely impossible to read, and so the fact that some people can is magic.

Sophus Helle: Yeah. And I think part of this polysemy really shapes how the Babylonians saw the world, because they really saw the world in linguistic terms. So just like every sign could hold many meanings, so they saw the world as full of omens that held many meanings and that had to be interpreted correctly. For them, the world was really full of meaning and full of signification. For them, the world was one big cuneiform tablet, really, and they are quite explicit about that. They refer to the night sky, the starry sky, as the tablet of the heavens.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow, that is really beautiful. And so, OK, you say that every cuneiform sign has different meanings: sometimes it's a whole word, sometimes it's a sound. And that as far as I understand it—I'm sort of repeating your words back to you— that means that the people who wrote in that language sort of saw a connection, also, between those different words, right? So, can you give me an example?

Sophus Helle: Yeah. I mean, like a particularly beautiful cuneiform sign is the sign ud, which started life as a small drawing of a rising sun. And this sign means all sorts of sounds like ud and tam and pir and lah and so on and so forth. It can also mean "white," it can mean "sun," it can be the name of a sun god, it can be the sign for "pure" in some circumstances. It can be the word for "storm," it can be the word for a monster, and that depends on the context.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow.

Sophus Helle: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: OK, again, super basic question, but since Sumerian is very, very dead, how did you figure out . . . I mean, not you, but like how did people figure out what the words even mean? I mean, especially since it's like an orphan language, right? Since it's not related to anything else.

Sophus Helle: Yeah, I like thinking of it as an orphan language. That's very sweet. And it is a really good question because it is indeed very dead. It really was through Akkadian. So, first we understood Akkadian, and then, very helpfully, they created what's called lexical lists, which you can sort of compare to dictionaries, where you get the same word first in Sumerian and then in Akkadian. And because we had various ways of understanding Akkadian, we could use our knowledge of Akkadian to reconstruct Sumerian.

Helena de Groot : And just to humor me, how did we know about Akkadian? How did you know what those words meant?

Sophus Helle: Yeah. So, Akkadian, we have a lot more to work with. It is a Semitic language so, you know, sometimes I understand what my partner is saying in Arabic because I'm like, "oh, that's an Akkadian word."

Helena de Groot : Oh, my God, that is so cool.

Sophus Helle: They're close enough to each other that you can work with loanwords, but also you have these like trilingual inscriptions that allowed us first to decipher cuneiform, where you have the same text written in various languages, including old Persian and so on and so forth.

Helena de Groot: Like what? Like what's the text that they were like, "yeah, let's make this three-lingual thing?"

Sophus Helle: So, the Behistu Inscription is sort of our Rosetta Stone—except that with the Rosetta Stone, at least one of the languages was Greek. In the Behistu Inscription, we were working with three unknown languages.

Helena de Groot: Good luck.(LAUGHS) 

Sophus Helle: Yeah, right. And I say "we," you know . . .

Helena de Groot : You weren't there for it, right. One more question about the very basics of Sumerian. How do we know how those words were pronounced?

Sophus Helle: Yeah. So, with Akkadian, again, we have all sorts of ways of guessing. With Akkadian, we can use these other languages that are related to it. We can use how that same word gets spelled in, for example, how the name of a king gets spelled in Hebrew, we have these rare—but important—texts that spell Akkadian words with Greek letters and so on. Like, for Akkadian, we can do various things. With Sumerian, again, it's not just dead, it's a very dead language, and so we have much, much less to work with. And really, one of the few things we can turn to when trying to reconstruct how Sumerian is pronounced is how Sumerian words get loaned into Akkadian and vice versa—but we are much more at a loss with Sumerian. And one of the things with Sumerian is that there are a lot of words that have multiple meanings, where it seems that the same syllable means different things. And that might suggest that it's a tonal language like Chinese, but we don't know.

Helena de Groot: And so do we know if these poems by Enheduana had any kind of rhyme or rhythm or something about the sound?

Sophus Helle: Yeah, there's lots with the sound. I don't think that for Sumerian we can establish rhyme or rhythms. Certainly, we can't at present. I don't think that there is anything. But there is so much other linguistic, verbal, aural play going on, and every line seems so beautifully thought out. And we're still at a state in the field where we don't do that much close reading. We don't do that much stylistic analysis. It's starting to happen more, because there was so much work that needed to be done in just establishing—how does this language work? Like, there's still no agreed upon Sumerian dictionary and grammar. That's still something that we're working on. And just editing the text, figuring out: what do these texts actually say, what are the words on the page—or on the tablet, as the case might be? That has taken us so much work that there is much less in the way of literary analysis. But just—you know—I kept finding verbal patterns and sound collisions and sound rhythms and so on and so forth, that were just absolutely beautiful. But what I didn't find, and what I personally don't believe there is to be found in Sumerian—it's a different case with Akkadian—but with Sumerian, I don't see these more regular patterns. There are definitely passages in the poem where the poem as a work goes into a rhythm for X number of lines, and then moves on to a different one. So, there are all sorts of structures and so on and so forth that you can go hunting for. But not something like consistent meter or a consistent rhyme pattern.

Helena de Groot: Right, right, right. And just to get a sense of what it's like when you're reading Sumerian, right? Should I imagine that you're fluent, whatever . . .

Sophus Helle: Oh, I'm absolutely not. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: OK.

Sophus Helle: I mean, some of my colleagues achieve fluidity within a specific genre. So, you know, people who spend their time looking at Sumerian contracts or Sumerian receipts or something like that—of which there are many, many, many, many, many, many manuscripts—when you've seen a certain amount of Sumerian contracts, you sort of know what they look like, and then you can sort of sight read a tablet. But I think for literature, very few people would be able to sight read a new poem. And it's usually a case of sitting there with the drawings of the tablet and your various dictionaries, your sign lists and so on and so forth, and really working through it line by line. And, certainly, with Enheduana, where the lines are so extremely condensed, and, you know, sometimes a single line can mean two even opposite things at the same time—like they're so full of obscurities, so full of references to other myths and so on and so forth. Enheduana really manages to pack an absolutely incredible amount of information, but also just richness into every single line. And that's something beautiful about her poem. But I think even if you were fluent in Sumerian, reading her poetry is quite the experience. In one line, she compares her speech to honey, and I really think it's such an accurate description of what this feels like. You know, honey is sweet, and this is a very enjoyable poem to read because it's so rich. But honey is also so dense, it's so viscous, it flows so slowly, and that is also what these poems are like to read. They're very intense in that sense.

Helena de Groot: Wow. OK, this is maybe a very silly question, but just the fact that you undertake this project of language learning, you know. Do you think it's reflected at all in the rest of your personality? Like extremely optimistic, or dogged, or what?

Sophus Helle: The way I connect my personality to my work is, you know, in Calvin and Hobbes, I don't know if you read that as a child . . .

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right.

Sophus Helle: I absolutely love Calvin and Hobbes. There's this show-and-tell that Calvin always has to do; he always has to bring something to class and then talk about it. I think a lot of my life is an extension of that principle. So, you know, I call my work advanced show-and-tell when I'm just trying to, like, say, "oh, I found this thing that I find really cool, let me talk to you about it." And that is definitely something that bleeds into my non-academic personality as well.

Helena de Groot: Right, like you're forever in like gathering shells on the beach and showing like, "oh my God, look what a cool shell I found."

Sophus Helle: Yeah, yeah. That's my basic human impulse: "Look, what a cool shell."

(BREAK)

Helena de Groot: OK, let's get to a poem. But before we do, could you give me a little bit more context on Enheduana? So, who was she? What was the world she was a part of? And what makes her interesting to you?

Sophus Helle: Yeah, absolutely. So, Enheduana is a high priestess and royal princess who lived some 2300 years BCE in what is now southern Iraq. So, she was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, who had united these previously independent city-states to create the world's first empire. And then he installs his daughter Enheduana as high priestess of the moon God Nanna in the city of Ur. So that's a port city—it's not a port city anymore, because the coastlines have shifted, but at this time it would have been at the very southern end of the empire. And so she is, you know, one of the most powerful women in the world at this time. It's debated how much of a political office this was. I think it was quite political. It might have been more symbolic. Different people have different opinions on that. But she is in a very powerful city, acting as the de facto representative of this new and very controversial empire. So, she lives through a time where absolutely everything is changing, everything is being turned upside-down, and in a very real sense, the world is growing—because the soldiers of the empire are making their way into places that people had never even heard of in the previous generations, and traders are reaching entirely new places. And so the ports of Ur would have bustled with all sorts of exciting and exotic "where is that?"—you know, people had no idea existed. And in the archaeological record, we can see new stones arriving in this period from as far away as Afghanistan, but also there would have been all sorts of things that we can't see in the archaeological record anymore, like foreign foodstuffs or textiles or perfumes or wines or whatever it might be. The soldiers of the empire, they make their way into Turkey. And you know, the art of this period shows that there was some sort of contact with ancient Egypt as well. At the same time, this new amassment of wealth means that there's real progress being made on the artistic front and the technological front. So, people can just do more with these materials as well. There's an explosion of wealth and that really propels innovation and change. But I think, a lot like we're seeing today, just because things are moving very fast and the world is growing and new things are becoming possible, that doesn't always feel like things are going in the right direction. (LAUGHS) So at the same time, this is a time of deep social disruption, where the old nobility of these cities that had just been conquered, they deeply resent the new emperors in the city of Akkad, and they revolt all the time. So there's just constant social turmoil. And one of those revolts is depicted in Enheduana's best-known poem, which is the “Exaltation of Inanna." And so the historical Enheduana probably would have had to deal with these revolts in one form or another. If she wasn't actually exiled, as she is in the poem, then she would have faced off these uprisings as a fairly regular occurrence. At the same time, the climate is also changing. It's not human-made climate change as we see today, it's actually quite obscure what the causes of this climactic change are, but the world is becoming drier and that is in turn propelling new social disruption. And it's quite telling that it seems like two of the main five kings of this period were assassinated. So it is quite a dramatic time. And the empire culminates, at least in size, under Sargon's—what's the English word?—grandson, sorry, Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sin. So that would have been Enheduana's nephew, who defeated nine rebellions in a single year. And another thing that happens during Naram-Sin's reign is that the writing system is radically revolutionized. So it becomes sleeker and more abstract, but it also turns 90 degrees. So everything about this period is changing, including the language that people spoke. Because there's the situation where people are growing up with Sumerian and Akkadian, the balance between those two languages shifts, because Akkadian is made the language of state administration, and so Sumerian begins a slow decline that eventually leads to its death. And that is the kind of period that Enheduana lives in. It's a period of like larger-than-life drama of, you know, great historical excitement but also great historical unrest.

Helena de Groot: Alright. Well, let's get to some lines from the poem. You already mentioned the exaltation, can you tell me a little bit about that text? It's a hymn.

Sophus Helle: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Who's it for, and what compelled Enheduana to write it?

Sophus Helle: Yeah. So this is a hymn to the Goddess Inanna, and Inanna is perhaps better known by her Akkadian name, which is Ishtar. And Ishtar / Inanna is just the most compelling, the most interesting goddess from the ancient world, possibly ever. She is often described as the goddess of war and love. I would say a better description is war and sex. But even beyond that, in Enheduana's poems particularly, she emerges as first and foremost the goddess of change. She is the goddess of contradiction, of paradox, of transformation. She is the goddess of all the things that don't fit into a stable world order. And she is the patron deity of the old Akkadian empire. So Enheduana's poems seek to elevate this goddess to the head of the pantheon. And that is, of course, a political move because, you know, this is the goddess that protects the new empire. So by making her the head of the pantheon, you're also saying that the empire is supreme. And of course, it's a theological consideration, because it's about which God rules the other gods and so on and so forth. But I think it is really also a claim about what kind of reality we live in. If you're taking the goddess of change and instability and contrast and so on and so forth and saying, "this is the goddess that rules the cosmos," then you're also making a statement about what kind of cosmos we live in. We live in a cosmos that is changeable. And during Enheduana's lifetime especially, the cosmos felt very, very changeable.

Helena de Groot: Right. So to go back to what you said at the beginning—you studied Egyptology, but then you got sick of all the symmetry and all the order.

Sophus Helle: All the harmony, yeah, right.

Helena de Groot: Right, right. So here you are more in your element.

Sophus Helle: Yeah. But yeah, I mean, so the exaltation to Inanna combines two parts. One of them is this hymnic exaltation of Inanna, trying to make her the Queen of the Gods. And the other is this autobiographical section in which Enheduana tells of her own plight. So there's been one of these many uprisings in Ur led by a person named Lugal-Ane, and he has taken power in Ur and thrown Enheduana into exile, and she is wandering through the thorns of foreign lands. And she then prays to Nanna. And here it's important to distinguish between the moon god, Nanna and his daughter, Inanna. It's quite confusing. But so she is then praying to Nanna, the god she served, and he does not seem to answer. And Enheduana compares her situation to an open court case that is unresolved. It is not going one way or another. She is exiled but still alive. And Nanna seems to be unwilling or unable to intervene. So instead Enheduana prays to his daughter Inanna, saying "won't you do something instead?" But the poem almost seems to break down, and Enheduana seems to say that she has lost the eloquence with which she was once able to soothe the heart of the angry gods. She says that her honey mouth has become froth and that her soothing words have turned to dust. And so this effectively becomes a poem that is very much about itself, about whether Enheduana will be able to compose this hymn to Inanna, and so save herself from exile by recruiting and exalting this goddess. And currently she seems unable to do that. And without—spoiler alert! I mean, to be fair, this text has been around for 4000 years and we've had plenty of time to read it, but spoiler alert—she does, in the end, manage to write this poem.

Helena de Groot: One of the things that I felt was so surprising in how the poem opens is—you know, this is a hymn, so it's a praise song for the goddess Inanna. But instead of being like, "Oh, you're so amazing," she starts with a litany of all the cruel,

horrifying ways of their rule. And so can you tell me, what was the thinking there?

Sophus Helle: Yeah, absolutely. And it is quite striking. Like you walk into this text, and it is called "The Exaltation of Inanna," and you are absolutely blown away by the terrifying power of this goddess that is evoked in quite intense ways. Like it's really, "Oh, wow." And there is a genre that Enheduana is drawing upon here, that is called a ritual lamentation. And so the idea behind the ritual lamentation is that the gods might sometimes impose devastation on humanity just as a show of force, just to show how powerful they are. You know, "See what I can do?' I can absolutely destroy you.

Helena de Groot: A flex.

Sophus Helle: Right, a flex. The gods' going to the gym is just, like, wiping out a city or something. And so in order, then, to show the gods, "Like we get it, we acknowledge your power, and so you don't have to do this. You don't have to impose this devastation on humanity." You would perform these ritual laments in which you sing of the destruction, even if that destruction has not been imposed yet, as a sort of preventative measure. So singing about the terrifying power of the gods is a way to honor the gods. And the word for, you know, being in awe of the gods and being fearful of the gods is one and the same.

Helena de Groot: Right, and as you were talking, of course, I'm also reminded that the word awesome and the word, terrific like they all, stem from those double meanings, right? Like, awesome doesn't necessarily mean a good thing, and so with terrific also.

Sophus Helle: Right. Terrific and terrifying, awesome and awful. They all come from the same set.

Helena de Groot: OK, so you want to read a part?

Sophus Helle: Yeah, sure.

Helena de Groot: So, let me see. I was thinking we could start on page seven, and then could we just skip over a little bit and then read on on page ten?

Sophus Helle: Absolutely. I just want to remark on how curious it is. Like I'm reading this from my phone, you know, just from—

Helena de Groot: Your other tablet. (LAUGHS)

Sophus Helle: Right. Anyway.

My queen, you are the guardian of the god's great powers. You lift them up and grasp them in your hand. You take them in and clasp them to your breast. As if you were a basilisk, you pour poison upon the enemy. As if you were the storm god, grain bends before your roar. You are like a flash flood that gushes down the mountains. You are supreme in heaven and earth. You are Inanna. My queen, hearing your battle cry, the enemy bows down. Fleeing sandstorms, terror and splendor. Humanity assembled to stand before you in silence. And of all the gods' powers, you took the most terrible. Because of you, the people must march past the threshold of tears. Because of you, they go to the great house of grief. Because of you, they yield all they own without a fight.

Helena de Groot: I mean, you know, one question I had is like—it sounds like all this fire and brimstone, right? "Grain bends before your roar," "fleeing a sandstorm," "humanity assembled to stand before you in silence," just absolutely stunned. It doesn't sound fun to live through, but it sounds really fun to translate.

Sophus Helle: (LAUGHS) It was very fun to translate. I also think it's interesting with Inanna, because—I'll comment on whether it's fun to live through first, and then whether it's fun to translate afterwards.

Helena de Groot: Great.

Sophus Helle: I think part of what is interesting about Inanna is that she is this profoundly changeable goddess. So she has this absolutely terrifying side, and then she has this sensual, delightful side that is associated with sex and with love and with youth and so on and so forth. And so this is a poem that very much brings out one side of her. But at the same time, you hear elements of the other side in Enheduana's poetry as well. So another poem that was attributed to Enheduana is called "The Temple Hymns," and that consists of 42 hymns to the various temples, gods and cities of the Sumerian world. And there you see some of the hymns that address her in this much more sensual guise. And so living in Inanna's world is not just living through terror but it is living in a world where terror is always possible, but also where absolute delight is always possible. And where radical transformation of one into the other is always possible. It is, and it is not, a fun world to live in, because it is a world that is very difficult to characterize as one or the other, because Inanna is very difficult to characterize as one or the other. And especially in the poem called "The Hymn to Inanna," Enheduana really—I think it's one of Enheduana's most intellectual poems. She has this long, long list of attributes that belong to Inanna that are all contradictory. Inanna is there described as the goddess of victory, but also of defeat, and of joy but also sadness, and of telling the truth, but also of lying, and so on and so forth. And because again Inanna rules the world, well, these are the aspects that make up the world. Like, the world is so difficult to say, you know, is it one thing or is it other? Well, it is one thing changing into the other, and it is opposite things coexisting. And so it's a very interesting vision of the world at the same time as it can be an absolutely terrifying vision of the world.

Helena de Groot: It's beautiful, because we often think about, OK, why have human beings come up with—I mean, if I may say it like that—different gods, right? And it's often because the world is so chaotic that they need a little bit of order. Like, well, maybe if I can appeal to the god of storm or the god of war, or whatever. But yeah, to have a god that is just all of it, all the chaos.

Sophus Helle: Yeah, and there's a text that makes this very explicit called "Enki and the World Order," in which a God called Enki creates the world order. And everybody, all the gods, get like a nice little role to play—and then at the end, Inanna shows up and is like, "What the fuck? You didn't give me anything to do?" And he's like, "Well, you're the goddess of undoing all the other stuff. You are the goddess of creating everything that should not be created, and destroying everything that should not be destroyed," and so on and so forth. So she is the element of chaos within an ordered world. And then Enheduana flips that relation by making chaos the highest force to which all the other gods are subservient.

Helena de Groot: That's so interesting. I mean, also this idea, right? That, of course, I think most of us know more from Buddhism, that change is the only constant. Is that from Buddhism? Is it Taoism?

Sophus Helle: I mean, I would definitely say I mean both Taoism and Buddhism have that as a key foundational thought.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean it's true now, it was true then. But yeah, we don't like it, right?

Sophus Helle: It's a difficult thought, it really is. And I think, like, both Buddhism and Taoism sort of urge a kind of acceptance of that fact, a sort of like equanimity. I don't exactly think that Enheduana is urging equanimity. She is, if anything, urging the power of language as the only kind of thing within the world that has power.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Sophus Helle: But that is something I interpret from the poems. But I think different readers would see that relation differently.

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because, you know, as a person who interviews poets, it's nice to hear a little bit about you know…

Sophus Helle: The power of language, right.

Helena de Groot: Please indulge me.

Sophus Helle: I mean, it works in different ways at the same time. So as I said, this is very self-referential poetry. And this is a poem about a poem that intervenes in the world and changes the course of the world. Because ultimately, Enheduana's words, as depicted by Enheduana at least, have real power. They change the course of the story.

Helena de Groot: Right, she gets her job.

Sophus Helle: She gets her job back. And I think there is a sense of power that was felt to be inherent in the Sumerian language, especially as a medium of communication with the gods. By communicating with the gods in eloquent, beautiful Sumerian, you could sway their hearts. So, like, language can do things in that sense. But it's also very rhetorical—like it's not just on the level of religion, it's also like rhetorical power. Enheduana, especially in the "Exaltation," is often using metaphors drawn from court cases and so on and so forth. I mentioned earlier that she compares her own situation to an open court case. And the court case is also a sphere in which language has real power, in which, you know, the power of persuasion is paramount.

(BREAK)

Helena de Groot: OK. So you know, one thing that I thought was interesting is that, of course, part of the clay tablet is missing.

Sophus Helle: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: What happened?

Sophus Helle: Yeah. So I mean, like clay is this wonderful material in which it's right. Because I mean, apart from anything else, it's cheap. And so, so much of the European Middle Ages' writing culture is shaped by how extremely expensive parchment is. You know, that limits literacy in a very real sense. Like, clay you can pick up from the ground, literally. And so another wonderful thing about clay is that it's extremely durable. I like to say—and this is a bit of a dig at my Egyptologist colleagues—like if you cough very loudly near papyrus, it will break. And like, clay is just clay. And if you write a clay tablet in 2000 BC and throw it in the ground, it's still there for a thousand years later. You know, that's one of the wonderful properties of clay, and that's why we have so extremely many sources from these cultures. We have an abundance of written material. And a lot of that written material is things like contracts or letters or receipts, but you know, we have an astronomical amount of cuneiform texts that scholars—because there [are] so few scholars who can read these sources—are still making their way through. But the other side of the equation is that clay also snaps easily, like it fragments easily. So yes, we have this abundance of written material, but it's essentially the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle. And, you know, in a very real sense now, we have made strides with things like AI and other digital technologies to solve this jigsaw puzzle for us, but that means that there are a lot of holes in the text. And in "The Exaltation of Inanna," because it was so popular in the ancient world, because it was such a fixed element of the curriculum, it's actually one of the very few literary texts where we can reconstruct a complete text. And that doesn't mean we have one perfectly preserved cuneiform tablet, it means that we have a bunch of cuneiform tablets that fill in each other's holes. But that's not the case for the other texts attributed to Enheduana, like the "Hymn to Inanna" or "The Temple Hymns."

Helena de Groot: I once—I don't know how true this is—but I once read that one of the reasons that, like, say, we're on the train or whatever, and someone's having a loud phone conversation, right? The reason that we can't stop listening, even if we don't want to, is because there's something really compelling about the fact that we only hear one side and so there are these holes.

Sophus Helle: Right, I love that.

Helena de Groot: It's like our mystery-solving brain is like, "I wonder what's going on there." And so I was wondering, like, what was it like for you to encounter these gaps? I mean like, was it frustrating? Was it like . . .

Sophus Helle: I mean, again, this is something I thought about maybe less with Enheduana than with Gilgamesh, where there [are] a lot more holes. Like there's just, there's a lot more missing. I think there's an American poet and playwright called—I'm going to do my best to pronounce his name—Yusef Komunyakaa, and he writes about Gilgamesh, that it would not be as compelling if it were not for all these fragments, because these breaks, as he says, you can imagine within those breaks. And I definitely try to make the case for the lacunae, for the fragments, because I do think that they can be places of real beauty, in which glimpses of possibilities just, you know, rush in to fill these empty spaces. I will say, though, having mounted this defense of the lacunae in the case of Enhneduanna, it is also incredibly frustrating, because truly the fragment in the "Hymn to Inanna" falls in the most frustrating place it possibly could. Like, it feels designed to frustrate me personally. It feels like an attack. (LAUGHS) Because part of what's so interesting about the "Exaltation" is that it combines this hymn to Inanna with this autobiographical section, and I kind of prefer the hymn's vision of Inanna. I think it's a very interesting, intellectually engaging notion of what Inanna is like. But then we get to the autobiographical section and we read the words, "I am Enheduana, the High Priestess, I am the Broken Nanna," and then there's a huge break where the autobiographical section would presumably have gone. and is not there.

Helena de Groot: So you learn what you already know, that she was a high priestess, and then whatever you didn't know, you're not going to find out.

Sophus Helle: Yeah, yeah. It's quite annoying.

Helena de Groot: But so because, you know, you said that the field is in a way still very new, and you also said that since there's so many surviving texts and so few of you lot that you're still making your way through these texts . . . So do you have any hope that at some point in your lifetime, you'll get to find out?

Sophus Helle: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Especially with these new digital technologies. Because I mean, often you have these cuneiform tablets that are essentially the size of like, you know, it's like maybe three or four words in it, but that can be enough if you just have enough of them and you can piece them together. And it is complicated, because a lot of the new tablets that come in, come in from illegal looting and a black market that has a lot of ties to like truly shady organizations, where a lot of the money comes from western art collectors who are engaging in unethical practices. So, you know, when a new tablet appears sometimes it can be a source of celebration, but it can also be a source of like, "Ah, this means that some money made its way from a bad place to another bad place." But I mean, we get new tablets of Gilgamesh on a regular basis. And I'm definitely holding out hope for a tablet that will give me the autobiographical section of the "Hymn to Inanna." I would much rather have that than a new Gilgamesh tablet, I will say.

Helena de Groot: Just putting it out there, manifesting as they say.

Sophus Helle: I'm manifesting the autobiographical section of "Hymn to Inanna," hard.

Helena de Groot: So I have a last question, and it's a question that of course is probably something you've been thinking about a lot too. But you know, especially from the history of 5000 years ago, we have mere scraps, and those scraps that remain are often scraps that document the life of the richest, the most powerful, right, for obvious reasons. And so I was trying to find a parallel with today. Like, imagine that 5000 years from now, archaeologists find a scrap from our culture today. And then I was trying to think, alright, you know, what's the parallel with the Enheduana poems, where she tries to appeal to the god of war? And so naturally, I had to think of Hollywood movies that glorify war. You know, Top Gun, Black Hawk Down,Pearl Harbor. And I don't want to comment on, like the artistic merit, you know, let's not do that. But just in terms of the worldview that's embedded in them, if 5000 years from now that's all they know about us, what would they think about us?

Sophus Helle: It's interesting. You think that they glorify war. I mean, I don't know that I fully agree. I mean, like, I see where you're coming from because Inanna is the goddess of war, and she is being elevated to the supreme position in the pantheon. But I also think that the difference between Top Gun and . . .

Helena de Groot: The difference, let's get it. (LAUGHS)

Sophus Helle: Well, the main difference is that Top Gun—I haven't seen Top Gun, like a great foundation for a comparative reading . . . but they glorify the heroes. They glorify—typically men—as the agents of warfare. And Enheduana's poems do the exact opposite. When they are describing war, it is as if war has no agents, only victims. And so the soldiers of war appear in the "Exaltation" as men who are being led in chains before Inanna while the wind fills the squares where they used to dance. That is the closest you get to actual human agents of warfare—in the moment in which they are disempowered. And so war becomes this machinery that is impersonal. And to the extent that it's powered by anybody—we would say it's being powered by the military-industrial complex, but Enheduana says that it's being powered by Inanna, in a very real sense. And knowing the horrors of warfare, like having this lamentation-like logic of acknowledging the horror of warfare makes warfare less likely to happen.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Sophus Helle: And I do think in a sense, you know, you can read Enhuadanna's poems, and according to that same ambiguity, they are celebrations of warfare in the way that they exalt almost in this carnage. But they are also trying to create war through language so as to prevent it in reality.

Helena de Groot: That's so interesting. I mean, I see all kinds of new parallels, because Full Metal Jacket—

Sophus Helle: Right.

Helena de Groot: Is sort of an anti-war movie but then of course, people watch it, and for reasons that have more to do with those people than with the movie. They do see it as sort of, you know, like, "Oh, isn't war great? It's so terrible but wow."

Sophus Helle: Yeah, where Apocalypse Now—Apocalypse Now might be a good parallel, where it's like, this is objectively a critique of war that also engages in the glorification of war, and where people have very localized agency. Like their agency does not extend to being able to control the world events that are putting them in the position that they are in. But at the same time, there is an almost, like, a delight in suffering. There's this perverse delight that definitely also shines through in Enheduana's poetry as well. And I also think it's particularly interesting in this context to see how modern Iraqi poets have used Enheduana to protest the Gulf Wars, or the many other wars that the country of Iraq has been subject to. I think there are mainly two streams of reception of Enheduana in the modern world. One is a typically Western feminist movement that sees her as a source of inspiration as you know, the world's first author was a woman. And then there is a second strand that is like the Iraqi strand that connects Enheduana to themes of war and themes of exile resulting from war.

Helena de Groot: It's interesting, right? Her resonance with the modern world, after 5000 years.

Sophus Helle: And like currently the city in which she lived or, you know, it's part like the actual archaeological site is part of a military base.

Helena de Groot: That's a little hard to notice.

Sophus Helle: Sometimes the parallels are too loud. But yeah like part of it was built by Saddam Hussein, but then was taken over by the Americans during the invasion of Iraq.

Helena de Groot: Is that part of what attracted you to these poems, the contemporary resonance?

Sophus Helle: I mean, what attracted me to the poems was, again, the advanced show and tell instinct. I think these are incredibly good poems, just as poetry. I think the use of metaphors especially, I like to think of them as like blizzards of images that really overwhelm and confound the readers. I like to say that they strain and stretch the limits of the Sumerian language to express the force of this divinity. I think they carry out really interesting reflections about what kind of cosmos we live in. and so on and so forth. And I can't believe that they're not known, especially when these are the first poems that we can link to a historically named individual in the historical record. and that that person is a woman. Like. there are so many things about these poems that for me shout, like, "why are these not better known," and so my show-and-tell instinct is very loud. It's like, you know, let's bring her to greater fame. Let's get people talking about her. There's so much more to be said, and so much more to be drawn out of these poems.

Helen de Groot: It's so beautiful. You know, it's sort of like your work is parallel to the work of the poem. The poem is like, "Hey, Inanna. You are so important. You've been sort of underestimated, because, like the head of the pantheon is typically not you, but let me actually tell you, it is you." And so you're also being like, "Hey, I know everyone gets really excited about Homer and all those guys, but really, it's this woman Enheduana from thousands of years earlier."

Sophus Helle: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that is how I feel. My book is very much the exaltation of the "Exaltation." And at one point, I also have to hold myself back, because we can elevate Enheduana, a woman of color, being the first author that we can name and identify. She should be at the beginning of every literary curriculum, I really do think that. And, you know, it can feel like a feminist fight. It could feel like a fight for expanding our sense of literature beyond the Western canon, and it is those things. But at the same time, as you said, she is also a very limited view on the ancient world. She might have been one of the most powerful women alive. Like she's not representative in any way, shape or form of the period she is talking from, and she belonged to an oppressive empire that she was very actively trying to justify. Like it is interesting, especially in the context of Iraq, because it can feel like a postcolonial project, and it can feel like a superimperial project, all at the same time.

Helena de Groot: So here we are again, the goddess Inanna embodying every possible contradiction, both the goddess of victory and defeat.

Sophus Helle: And power and resistance, always.

Helena de Groot: Sophus Helle is the translator of TheComplete Poems of Enheduana: The World's First Author and also of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic. He also writes essays and articles on Babylonian epics, climate change, AI, and much more. Sophus Helle is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, and soon he will be joining the classics department at Princeton. He also made a website where you can find much more about Enheduana and her poems, including a more literal translation with annotation. You can find that on Enheduana.org. That's e-n-h-e-d-u-a-n-a dot org. Sophus also designed a keyboard layout that makes it easier to transcribe and transliterate Akkadian and Sumerian, if that's what you're into. Oh, and if you speak Danish and have some questions about my pronunciation of Sophus' last name, let me play you this bit for my conversation.

Helena de Groot: Could you pronounce your name for me, first and last, so I get it right?

Sophus Helle: Yeah. So I say "Sophus Hell." My mother says "Helle," but I like "Hell." Go for maximum effect.

Helena de Groot:  The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric (UNKNOWN). I'm Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.