“A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided …
the third river is the Tigris … and the fourth river is the Euphrates.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”–Genesis 2
I think that the fundamental mythical argument of Genesis
… is that 6000 years ago in Meso-Potamia (the land in the middle of the rivers, the cradle of Civ), the first man worthy of that label settled down and became a wheat farmer, and in fact by doing so became the first man.
All that previous stuff about Out of Africa and the taming of fire, stone tools and hunter-gathering … those weren’t humans. Because real humans settle and farm and build temples and go to war with each other and write down laws about contracts and marriage and slavery, and about not fucking each other in the butt.
Right out of the gate you can see why I have issues with Judeo-Christianity.
The Yaweh-God’s Own Word says, poetically, that until the land was ‘worked and kept’, with all the gainful employment and property rights that implies, humanity didn’t exist. That berry-picking lot of deerslayers were mere primates–the God of agriculture, ‘animal husbandry’, kingship, wrath, war, and heaven-blessed social stratification has just got to be worshiped–He made the first real Man, dammit, and did so in His own image.
Everything I write* is a heresy against the whole shitpile.
The shaky promise of predictable abundance, apples in February, was the real snake’s temptation. “Come down from the tree-covered mountain to the river and the garden; settle down, plant, worship, obey, and never want again. Think of the children. Vote for the pro-life god, unless you’re a woman, or somehow don’t own or keep land.”
I believe that buying into this tempting promise was the biggest mistake the human species ever made. It did give us six thousand years of self-congratulatory glory. But it was a devil’s bargain and will prove to be an evolutionary dead end, first for the woolly mammoth, and then for the polar bears, and finally for the sub-species that made the mistake too.
***
When you try to go back and map the very beginning of Lit, there are problems.
A classic liberal arts education looks to the Greeks, because when classical liberal arts education was invented, that’s what we knew as ‘earliest’.
In my opinion, we have a lot to learn from the new ‘first civ’ of the Adam’s own kin the Sumerians, not just about the genesis of writing and written art, but about how civilizations happen, and end.
The newly corrected origin story says: Right, so knowing what we know now (with science!), Gilgamesh and his epic is the real first literary work.
One thing I learned presents a challenge for that myth.
It turns out that when the Sumerian cities like Ur and Uruk were ‘discovered’ in the 19th century, about a half-million inScribed clay pieces from them were shipped from Iraq to Great Britain.
For the most part, right up until today, they sit there piled up and untranslated.
The original modern publication we know as the Epic of Gilgamesh was printed in 1930 and was drawn from exactly 112 tablets and tablet fragments.
As more fragments are decoded and placed in order, the Epic slowly grows. The most recent version includes translations of twice as many clay pieces.
So it’s pretty short, changing all the time, and may or may not be as epic as some of the hundreds of thousands of other chunks no one’s ever read. This seems like a pretty rough candidate to declare the first work of Lit ever.
It’s an educated guess, but only a guess, and that’s the best we’ve got for now.
***
I do sort of like this feeling of being up against the limitations of science and art.
I am interested in what Sumer has left to tell us, about the devil’s bargain of civilization.
I have a sense of being compelled, around resolving the harsh paradox of considering myself a writer on the one hand, and an anarcho-primitivist (more or less) on the other.
*irony noted, in yesterday’s post