Conversations: Weave, Baby, Weave, Women’s Work in Ancient Sumeria with Alex W

Liv and Michaela sit down with past episode guest Alex Wells, host of The Drumbeat Forever After https://drumbeatforeverafter.podbean.com/ podcast, all about women and their work in ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia. We love talking with guests that know more about other regions of the Mediterranean (and possibly other parts of the world?) and are so pleased to get these perspectives so we can get a fuller understanding of the ancient world, and not just Greece and Rome. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter our podcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at myths baby dot com slash group trip.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Let's Talk About Myths Baby. This episode is with Alex Wells, a past guest, talking about women's work in ancient Sumeria such as weaving. It's so much fun. It was such a fun episode to write as you will be able to hear. Liv and I were just full of just ADHD struggles that day, or we just could not get our brains to work sufficiently. But you know, it all came out wonderfully and well. And we're so thankful to have people like Alex Wells come on and teach us about things that we don't know about and want to make more accessible for everyone else.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  And this was such a fun topic and was really interesting to see the differences between Greek culture and Sumerian culture and their approaches towards women generally. Um, anyways, I won't keep you any longer. We'll get right into it. Bye.

• 2:23Liv Albert?

  Weave, baby weave, women's work in ancient Sumeria with Alex Wells.

• 2:43Liv Albert?

  But I mean, yeah, did you end up learning about weaving in the Sumerian culture, you know, just purely because you're so involved in researching the culture broadly? Or did you have like an interest in weaving? I guess I'm just sort of curious, you know, how that comes up, not to be too fine a point on it, but like weaving is a woman's job. So it's nice to hear that a man has looked into it at all. So I guess I'm just kind of curious how that came about.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my podcast, like chronologically starts in the Neolithic. So I started off looking at like, what were the earliest kinds of weaving that people were doing? And it turns out for the first several thousand years of the Neolithic, they, even after they had domesticated sheep, right? So they domesticate sheep around the end of the 8000s B.C. So kind of when they're domesticating wheat and barley and these other kind of like Neolithic domesticates, they start keeping sheep and goats fairly early on. But wild sheep and goats do produce some fiber, but you can't really shear them in the same way that you can with with domestic sheep, because a lot of the fibers they grow are these

• 3:52Speaker 02

  kind of coarse hairs that aren't good for weaving. And they also shed the finer wool-like hairs in the spring and the summer. So, you know, wild sheep are not really efficient at producing wool fibers. So probably for thousands of years before, we breed sheep to be more wool producing, people are probably weaving primarily with plant fibers. So flax is the famous one, right? It's a kind of like water intensive crop. You can grow a lot of it in places like Sumer that have irrigation fields.

• 4:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  But oak trees, actually, the inner bark has these really great.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Fibers that basically, you know, you strip out the outer bark, you leave the inner bark in water and the water breaks down the pectin so that you're left with just the fibers. So that even if you don't have any kind of agriculture or, you know, livestock or whatever, you can still harvest enough natural fibers to weave clothes. And that may kind of explain why the oak tree is so important in all these different cultures.

• 4:54Liv Albert?

  That is, that is so interesting. Okay, I'm already just into the fact that knowing this like really like Neolithic aspect, that's so, that's so interesting. I mean, it makes it, I've heard of, obviously I heard of flax. I mean, I have lots of flax linen in my house now, but it's interesting. I mean, oak trees and they are important because like oak is sacred to Zeus. So, yeah, oh, that's so interesting. Okay. So like, and then, yeah, I, I somehow I feel like I, this is not the first time I've spoken about specifics of shearing sheep on this podcast, and yet I've still managed to forget. But yeah, so they, they started realizing that if they, you know, bred them in certain ways, or I imagine it's about shearing them in certain ways to get it to grow differently.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  So actually, they didn't shear them at first. So the, the thing about sheep and goats, the bones themselves are very similar. So archaeologists often can't tell if a random bone that's not one of the different ones comes from a sheep or goat. So often archaeology, they treat them together, right? It's, you know, pigs and cattle and sheep and goats.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  So early on in the Neolithic, they're probably keeping more goats. And when we can tell them apart, we do have evidence that very early on, when they figure out large scale intensive animal herding, the vast majority of these herded goats for two reasons. One, they produce more milk per goat, you know, per female goat. And they also have a shorter gestation period, which means that they can, you know, give birth to more goats. So goats are better for, you know, just subsistence. If you're not using them for secondary products. And then of course you can turn goat hair into, you know, thread. So you can spin the fibers, even if they're not goats bred for fiber production. So over the course of, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to tell, probably by the 5000s

• 6:38Speaker 02

  B.C. and definitely by the 4000s, they are starting to breed sheep that do maintain their longer, you know, fibers all year and, you know, grow less of the, the, the thick fibers that are good for weaving.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  So we can tell that primarily because we can see more spindle worlds in the archaeological record. So usually the wooden dowel part, the spindle itself, you know, decays, but the whirl at the bottom that, you know, gives it the, you know, the physical ability to spin around while we're stationary. Those are usually made of clay. They're often repurposed from potshirts, or they can be just made very easily with, you know, anyone with clay and a kiln. So those get really, really, really common around the 4000s.

• 7:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So I know that's true of Greece, too. Like, the only things that tend to survive of that type of thing is like the the worlds and then the loom weights that they're using by then. So it's so interesting to, I mean, it's so interesting and infuriating the way that everything else like decays and then we don't have evidence of it. We just have like these little bits. But that's, that's really interesting. Okay.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the thing about loom weights. So we know that they were using loom weights in like Bronze Age Greece and Troy. I think we have Greek style loom weights at Troy. In Mesopotamia, like used to marry times and before, they are either using a kind of rectangular frame loom. So their cuneiform sign for a loom is just a rectangle. So it's probably just a frame that you hold. And if you need to, you know, so you, you know, there's not any kind of like lever, they just you turn the frame around and weave from the other side and then you turn it around. So it's either that or they're weaving on the ground, kind of like spread it out between two pegs on the ground that gives you your tension. So neither of those would leave any kind of material record. Unfortunately, we don't

• 8:23Speaker 02

  really have. There is one piece, I was just looking into this recently. It's been described as a hut idol, or, basically, at some point, someone interpreted as a physical symbol of a house. But that's probably not the case. These are in like the 3000s and early 4th, or sorry, late 4000s in northern Mesopotamia. These are probably a structural part of a loom. We don't know what it did or how it was used because we only have this thing that can be made of clay or metal or whatever, that may kind of look like a house, but may be a structural part of a loom. So other than that, we don't really have any parts of the machinery themselves. We only have the spindle worlds that were used to make it into a thread.

• 9:03Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 9:07Liv Albert?

  Okay, so I mean, that yeah, that's just generally interesting. Did I see right in your little, the sort of outline you have that there is like mythology or gods associated to?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Am I jumping ahead? I'm just excited by that.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  No, I just, real quick before we get to Sumer, there's, there's kind of like one more thing in the Caliphalithic that I think is like an important part of the chronology.

• 9:30Liv Albert?

  No, please.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Is that?

• 9:31Liv Albert?

  Timeline.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Like, obviously, women at the household level had been weaving since they had been able to. And, you know, as far as we can tell, there's no way to be certain, but probably it is a woman's job from early on. Because it's, you know, the kind of criteria for women's work, quote unquote, in, in prehistory, is the kind of thing that can be done at home while you're watching kids. The kind of thing that can be put down and easily resumed. You know, again, childcare is a demanding job.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So, you know, probably it makes sense. You know, we see women doing things like potting, you know, making pottery, you know, gardening, things like that.

• 10:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's also like, I think, a more delicate thing, too, where like, they like, would be left smaller hands to be working on things like that as well. That's interesting.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's actually a study, there's a site in northern Syria where they studied it in the, in the 3000s and the 2000s, kind of like before and after, like, industrial production. And at least judging by the size of the fingerprints, it seems like women were doing it when it was a household job, and then men took over and, and when it became a kind of industrial professional job.

• 10:34Liv Albert?

  Sounds right.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Right? But over the course of the 4000s, probably chiefs or some kind of like local leader, maybe a tribal leader, something like that, that have these extended households that are not just, you know, they're extended family, but the chief has dependents and slaves and artisans and other people that are kind of like, separate from the, the economy outside the chief's household. They're dependent on the chief. They get their food from the, the, you know, food that the chief takes from the rest of the people in the political system. And these, you know, powerful households, elite households, whatever you want to call them. Are kind of the first workshops because especially with women, right? Women are more likely to be captured in warfare rather than killed. They're more likely to be enslaved because they're easy to fit into a tribal, like a patriarchal tribal

• 11:20Speaker 02

  system, right? You're not incorporating men as rivals. You're incorporating women into the system that is already built to have women as kind of dependent laborers. And if you have a powerful enough chief, you can have, you know, you could take a bunch of women and force them all to weave in the same workshop. So we do start to see that in the 4000s ish, where we have, you know, these large, you know, important buildings, probably of important households. And we have hundreds of spindle walls in them. So probably they're already assembling these kind of industrial teams of women that we will start to see in Sumer.

• 11:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:54Liv Albert?

  So do we know anything about, sorry, I'm in this might be, you know, too early at this point in the general timeline, but I'm just generally curious if like, I'm imagining these women would be probably enslaved. And I'm just curious if there's any record of them getting like paid for labor. And I, and again, that might come down later when we have records, but.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Right. So that's actually, um, so in Sumerian, the word for female slave is gemme, but it doesn't necessarily only refer to like chattel slaves.

• 12:24Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  It's kind of a dependent female manual worker. So they could be slaves, they could be, um, orphans or something that are raised by the temple and have no choice but to work for the temple. You know, there's all kinds of other ways that slaves at a later period in history may be earlier on. So there's all kinds of ways that women can end up as a dependent worker, even if they're not formally taken in battle and turned into chattel.

• 12:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Um, but we do have records. All right. So from, um, Lagash is a Sumerian city-state around 2,400 BCE. We happen to have. I think it's 1800 canyform tablets. So a huge amount of just administrative text from this one temple household. That is the temple to the main goddess of the city. So there's a male and a female goddess that are the married couple gods in charge of the city. And they are represented by the king and the queen. So probably already by this point, the kingship is seen as a yeah, a kind of patrilineal like passed from father to son in most cases. It does sometimes switch from like between different families in a way that we don't totally understand.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  But it does seem like it's a father to son kind of thing. And whoever the king's wife or main wife is that, you know, she is in charge of the temple to the goddess. Which is not only a religious institution, but a huge economic institution with hundreds of again artisans, weavers, potters, you know, scribes, manual workers to work the fields and, you know, herd the cattle and so on.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  So we have a whole bunch of these texts from this particular temple to the goddess. The goddess's name is is read sometimes Baba, sometimes Ba'u. We don't know how to read the second syllable.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  So we do have the, you asked about whether these workers were paid. And the answer is yes, they were paid in barley. So everyone has to eat and even slaves and the lowest of manual workers are paid in the kind of minimum wage of barley.

• 14:22Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Which I believe is 12 silas and I think a sila is about 0.7 liters. So do the math, maybe eight ish liters of barley a month would be their like wage.

• 14:34Liv Albert?

  Right. So by wage, it's really like keep them alive to keep working. Right. So really not so much pay as it is just not dying.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  And you know, especially in the 2000s.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  I don't think much has changed.

• 14:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's not that far off. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's an interesting, I mean, it's nice. We have record, I guess, of what they got, but also like, that seems like a line to draw about whether or not a person is really getting paid. But, oh, yeah, that's, I love that we have those records, though. That's always my obsession.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, as far as, because you know, in the 2000s, especially, there is a silver economy and silver is starting to be used as a precious metal in the way that we would talk about currency. But most people don't have access to it because your average person is either working on their own family farm to buy barley to eat, or they're a dependent worker in some way, right, working on someone else's barley farm to grow barley so they can eat.

• 15:33Liv Albert?

  Right. So I guess it's not that different. Everyone's kind of living in just a world of barley.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  And, you know, higher level temple officials and administrators, you know, they do get barley to, you know, as their own personal food, they get extra amounts to pay their own dependents. And then, of course, if you're an important person in the temple hierarchy, you're also getting distributions of butter and wool and, you know, fine garments and oil and things like that, you know, because the temple economy has is kind of the main engine that produces all these goods. And the better are you, the better off you are in their eyes, the more they will give you of that. So the lowest manual workers, including the women, are getting this kind of like minimum wage in barley. But we do have records that some of them are promoted. So they work in these teams of, I think, 10 to 20 ish. And they have, there's like a team leader, like a shift leader, that she gets listed

• 16:23Speaker 02

  at the beginning of the roles, like, you know, the list of distributions. She gets a higher wage, and that probably suggests some combination of administrative role over the other weavers, and maybe she's doing more skilled work.

• 16:37Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  So, you know, there's just spinning, you know, there's lots of different jobs that are kind of subsumed into weaving and textile production. And some of them are more skill intensive. So probably, certain people are getting promoted, they get paid more. You know, and they they have kind of administrative responsibilities. And then above that, we have the actual bosses that are, you know, again, higher level in the temple hierarchy. These tend to be men, though not always. Men can own, like, some women own some land, but generally, the male landowners within the temple hierarchy, given temple land and teams of temple workers to grow their food on their land, are men. There's one exception, she seems to be, which is a woman who has this higher level administrative role.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  It's not clear. She may be from a wealthy family and is connected with weaving because she was kind of making her way through the administrative hierarchy. Actually, I have the note, my notes app. I may be able to find her name.

• 17:35Liv Albert?

  Delightful. I just love the way we have records of so many things. Like, thank you, cuneiform tablets. Thank you, bureaucracy. Yeah, but just like the way the Greeks did not preserve that type of stuff for us. It's very annoying. No, yeah, they, yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Well, that's the funny thing about papyrus, right? I mean, it's very convenient for them to use, but it's just kind of a trick of preservation that clay tablets, which are easy to use when you have infinite clay, happen to preserve this information that they didn't, you know, they weren't carving this information into stone.

• 18:07Liv Albert?

  No, I know.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  You know, internal records.

• 18:09Liv Albert?

  It's such, and I mean, that's the like wonder and enormous frustration of studying this stuff, right? Is that like most of it we know, but for entirely random reasons and we just have to like work with what we have.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Right?

• 18:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the woman I was looking at is Amete. So she was both a weaving supervisor and at some point in her career, she was the head of female royal servants.

• 18:32Liv Albert?

  So cool. I mean, you know, to a degree.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the members of the royal household, you know, the king, the queen and their children had these huge retinues of servants. They had hairdressers. They had, you know, personal, you know, servants to do their kind of like grooming and stuff. And of course, these people were also part of the temple hierarchy. And even though they are servants, these are often the best paid, you know, people and the most powerful people that are not literally kings and queens, because they are personally in the room at all these discussions. And, you know, have the most intimate access to these royal family members. So she may have been from a, I don't know, wealthy family that gets put in the administrative hierarchy and ends up in charge of weaving, you know, who knows?

• 19:15Liv Albert?

  That's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, just generally, I guess I can't get over the the number of records because I'm just thinking like, oh, man, like what we know about the Greeks and weaving, nothing like this. I mean, we know more of like, I think, how physically they were weaving, but not like, who was getting paid unless, I mean, yeah, Michaela, you're thinking, you look like you're thinking about whether I'm wrong. Um, but like, yeah, it's just, it's so interesting. And I I mean, again, this is also that I've not done enough research into the Greek, but I just am so desperate to know more about like, who was actually doing it and like, what? What their lives were like, and it just kind of seems like at least we have some things about that.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  I don't know much about later periods from thinking to like Bronze Age. Well, my voice, I'm thinking to Bronze Age. I know we do have records from some of the palatial centers because, you know, they got burnt to the ground. That there is evidence. So we do know that there were people who were employed.

• 20:17Liv Albert?

  Also probably getting paid in barley or equivalent.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They were being paid in food and room and board essentially was what they made.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  And I think for the most part, when it came to weaving, it was all all of them were women. Because the reason I've looked into this is through family dynamics, because it'll talk about like, they give the food for the workers. But they also give a certain amount of food for the children of the workers as well, because the children are there with the workers at the same time. So, yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  So, yes, it was happening. I think Pelos was a big center for for textiles. Yeah.

• 21:04Liv Albert?

  Well, I just, I mean, I I think it's one of those things that, and this is like a very broad statement, but I think about it too often to not say it, but like just the ways in which we just completely forget about the logistics for like how people were clothed. Like, I just think that's one of the most like ignored things from a, from a casual person's, you know, historical standpoint of like anyone just like casually learning ancient history like no one is talking about who's making the clothes and it's, you know, I, I just think I didn't even think about it until so, so long. And then you realize like, oh, in order for anyone to be clothed right now, or for any ship to have sails or any of this bedding, like women had to be doing all of these jobs.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  I think also in the modern age, we're very like divorced.

• 21:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  What it takes to make clothes.

• 21:52Liv Albert?

  Exactly.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  I'm sitting here knitting socks.

• 21:54Liv Albert?

  I know. I meant to comment on that earlier. I was like, it's very appropriate.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  But it, it's like, I think, I don't think a lot of, especially with like the rise of fast fashion and everything, people like, oh, it's so easy to go get these things. And I'm like, no, actually, like until recent, in the past, like less than a hundred years, clothing has been, you know, it was a investment.

• 22:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  And people didn't have the amount of clothes that people have today. It's absolutely unnecessary. We don't need the amount of clothes. And I'm saying that to myself as well.

• 22:24Liv Albert?

  To your own closet. But no, you're right. And it's, it's this, yeah, it's the like modern capitalist divorcing from, you know, how things actually happen. But then obviously too, like in terms of learning, it's also in large part that like we, we learn about the wars and the conquering and we don't learn about how those men were not naked, you know, because that, that was the women's job.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  But all the imagery, they're all naked. So.

• 22:46Liv Albert?

  Well, that's true too.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  So maybe.

• 22:48Liv Albert?

  Too.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  No women involved.

• 22:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Were the Sumerians as obsessed with being naked? This is very off topic, but also important.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  So the short answer, they generally wore, men wore some kind of like skirt, kilt type thing.

• 23:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  And women wore a kind of like shawl cloak all over their entire body. Um, there is a particular kind of priest that did the, there was, there was basically a servant to the statue of the God that, you know, in all, in all intents and purposes was the servant of the household of the God. Those priests had to like, did all their important jobs naked and like sacrificial animals, they had to be free of any kind of bodily imperfections.

• 23:27Liv Albert?

  Hmm. Okay.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  So there's a, there's a famous monument, uh, like a stone vase called the work of vase named after like modern, uh, site name of Urk. And one of the rows of that is just a line of naked guys carrying goods to give to the temple. Um, this is irrelevant to, to my interest because basically what they're doing is they're bringing the bride wealth for Anana as part of the sacred marriage between the king of Uruk and Anana.

• 23:54Liv Albert?

  Ooh. Okay. And they had to be naked. Love it. Glad I asked. Glad I asked. Everyone, every ancient culture had some reason why everyone had to be naked for something at least, you know, and I respect that.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  I wanted to say though, as you were talking about, uh, modern, like modern fashion, uh, and I mean, I think it's worth pointing out that even though many, many aspects of textile production have been mechanized, sewing has not. So I mean, you could have machines that, that, you know, can make clothes or can make cloth quickly, but still you have large workshops of, you know, uh, women in the global south largely that are doing this kind of like, uh, factory manual labor that, you know, someone has to sew all these garments together. And we kind of haven't gotten over that. It was still this really labor intensive, exploitative process.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  And also, um, there's like this explosion to, especially in the past couple of years after the pandemic, people have started getting into like, um, uh, yarn craft, like knitting and crocheting now. And people like are realizing actually just how much work it takes and we can mechanize like knitting, we can do machine knitting. But crochet is something we can't do and people are learning that now. And then they're like, they go out there and they learn how to crochet and they're doing it. And then they, they, they, they're thinking now about like, oh, when we see something crocheted in a store and it's on sale for like 20 bucks. It's like, that probably took whoever made it X amount of time. And how are they actually making a profit from this? Cause like I've had people.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Classmates and stuff and they see me knitting and they're like, oh my God, can you like knit me a sweater? And I'm like, oh my God, do you want to give me like 600 bucks? And they're like, what? I'm like, I'm dead serious. Like I'll do it if you pay for the materials and my time, I'll do it.

• 25:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Right. No, and to just like, I mean, to, to link both of your points and put a really fine point on it. Like, yeah, all of that is so true. And the disconnect we have is the capitalism that has turned it into like all basically slave labor of mostly people in the global south, who we in the west, the west, civilization west, and that horrible word. You know, just, we just buy as if it's nothing because to us it costs so little, even though, yeah, people are like dying to make it.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  We aren't confronted with it. We are, we are shown it. And so like, I think it's, it's sort of the same situation when people like, like factory farming, horrible. What they do to animals in like factory farms, not okay. But then I think of like, um, like my people, like traditional hunting and stuff, like say traditional hunting, they're using guns. But like, when people are horrified by that, I'm like, what do you mean, man? Like, first of all, you're gonna, those people are excellent hunters. They've been hunting their whole life. They're gonna know how to kill an animal in a way that is gonna cause the animal to leave. And but people are just so divorced from that kind of thing. And like, so divorced from what food preparation actually looks like. And like, we're so used to going to the store and buying our nicely packaged things that like,

• 26:50Liv Albert?

  You know, just giving barley for, for working for a little while.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  You're like, what do I do with this barley? And I'm like, oh no.

• 26:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, and I think that's why, like, yeah, having, I mean, even just this platform where it's like, it's entirely relevant to talk about the ancient practice of weaving is such a great reminder that it is something that is still very, well, like not, again, like the weaving has been mechanized, but the actual creation of clothes is still something being done by human hands. We just don't see it. But like that reminder of like how long this is something. It is, yeah, how much labor and just how long this has been like this human act. And yeah, it's, it's really interesting to, I don't know, look at in all, in all sides of the ancient world and then also the terrible capitalistic mess we live in now.

• 27:36Speaker 03

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• 27:50Liv Albert?

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• 30:58Liv Albert?

  So yeah, I mean, again, I don't want to jump ahead, but maybe I'm not by talking about the mythology side of it now. Or yeah, if you're, I mean, I love that you went as far back as Neolithic. So if you have other timeline stuff that you wanted to look at first, that's great too, because all of this is just so much older than what I'm, that what we usually work within. It's very interesting.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess just to connect the threads, I guess.

• 31:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Good one.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  But you know, I was talking about these kind of like elite households that are amassing these large dependent teams of workers. Those basically grow into the temples. I mean, like people disagree on exact, because I mean, the operative difference between a temple and a palace household is that the palace household has a living family that is at the center of it. It's unclear the extent to which a temple was, because I mean, the, the temple always has a head priest. And the head priest lives in the building generally. And, you know, has all the most important roles and, you know, exercises the most power in a political sense. It's unclear if that's just the ruling family and the specific language they used to talk about it is this kind of specifically Samarian.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, this is, this is our king, quote unquote, but he lives in the temple and he's a primarily a, uh, you know, the, the king of Uruk is a husband of the goddess Anana.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Um, so I mean, that's the way that he's incorporated into the, the, the gods household. But, you know, in, in a functional sense, the, the palace is just an overgrown chief's household. And it has all the same, uh, teams of dependent artisans and so on.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And then I just, um, uh, Michaela, you were talking about being able to, um, trace family dynamics. In these, uh, texts about the women weavers and we, we do actually kind of, um, inch up to that in these texts I was talking about from Lagash. Because, um, basically, you know, these are women, many of them have kids. And what appears to be the case is that their sons stay with them while their young children need to be cared for. But at some point around age six to eight or so, they get assigned to a different job, or at the very least are no longer being supervised by their mother.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Do you know if they get like assigned to whatever, or do like, are they aware of who the father is to the point that like they would then be assigned to? His, whatever his profession is or his craft is. Cause I know that will happen in my, the Mycenaean world sometimes.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  As far as I know, the texts don't specify. We do have some information about jobs being passed down. Like there was, uh, there was one, uh, in the same, um, temple of Lagash. There was one girl, there was an orphan, but she was raised by, I think, a pig herder. So she ended up growing up to become a pig herder.

• 33:44Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  So there is some evidence that the kind of manual or like the palace dependent jobs and temple dependent jobs are passed down generationally. The sons don't work in weaving. So if they are assigned to their fathers, we don't have any information who their fathers are.

• 33:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  We do have the children noted that they are children and you know, who their mother is in the weaving team. Generally, girls appear to have grown up to become weavers. These particular texts only cover about eight years, I believe. So we don't have generations and generations to track that.

• 34:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  But it appears to be the case that girls would grow up and join the weaving team. And then we do have a couple cases of one woman whose name was Sasa, who happens to have had the same name as Da Queen at the time, but different woman. She appears to have been the kind of team babysitter or maybe the adoptive mother. So in one record, she's listed with five boys and two girls, which is a lot of kids for one person, but not, you know, impossible. And then the next year she's listed with two boys instead of five boys. So either three of them died or she was kind of like taking in these children from a different woman on the team or a different woman in the temple household.

• 34:51Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  So around that, around the same time, there was a new woman hired named Munatame. She had one son and one daughter. And then she disappears from the records. And then when she disappears, Sasa now has three boys and three girls. So it appears that she took in Munatame's children.

• 35:07Liv Albert?

  Oh, this is so interesting. We have their names. That's so cool.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Munatame appears in the records, but her barley ration is reduced to zero. So either she died and they're just keeping her in the texts to just kind of like, no, you know, we didn't move team. She is just dead and her barley ration is zero. Or she might have been moved to a different group.

• 35:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. But her son is given a ration of 12 seela of barley, which is a kind of child sized amount. So I don't know, maybe I was wrong about the minimum wage earlier because I think, I think it's below the minimum wage for an adult, but.

• 35:38Liv Albert?

  Okay. Yeah. It's still more about like, yeah, enough food, I guess, to keep them alive. But minimum wage seems like a right enough analogy.

• 35:48Liv Albert?

  But that's, yeah, that's, I'm just so obsessed with the fact that we have, like, not only all these real women's names, but also like that level of detail about the children involved and just this team structure. Like, that's so interesting.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, honestly, my favorite, or one of my favorite things about the invention of writing in, in, in Uruk is that in these earliest texts, like the very earliest generation of, uh, texts written with, uh, you know, proto-cuneiform writing, we have lists of slaves and/or dependent workers, right? These kind of, the lowest level of manual worker. Um, I think one text has a list of two hu- two hundred and eleven, I think, of their names, right? Written out, the slaves' names. And then we have the important, you know, the, the head priest of the temple and so on. But they're always referred to with their office title, like, you know, the, the, the job title of their office.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Or they're depicted in, um, in art, right? As a, you know, a big, important guy holding a mace or whatever. Or they are, um, or, you know, they assign documents with a, a, a cylinder seal that has a kind of like pictorial depiction that everyone at the time would, okay, that's the seal of the head priest. But we, they never write their first names. So we don't know the names of the most important people running society. We do have the names of the hundreds of slaves who, who, uh, you know, uh, worked in the fields. We can't necessarily read all those names that early. So they, they don't look like Sumerian names. It's not clear whether they are from somewhere else or whether they're just using an early version of Sumerian that, you know, we can't read. But it is ironic that we have the workers' names, not the king's.

• 37:18Liv Albert?

  I love that, though. That's like, yeah, that's, that's, that's ideal, honestly. I mean, it's not, obviously, but like, it's very nice for once to have those people, like, represented or just even like remembered. You know, like, that's the saddest part when you think about just the very real, everyday people who were not fancy at all or were enslaved or all of these things and just the fact that their names aren't lost is really nice.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Right?

• 37:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah, just the everyday stuff and like, that, that's what seems to really come out of Mesopotamia and the Sumerians specifically, but like just ancient Iraq overall, like in this really beautiful way of, yeah, just having record of the, there's like people, you know, that's, that's so nice. And also, just like everyday, everyday stuff, random shit. I like, I want to know about the most random stuff.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. I do love that as early as now 2700 BCE or so, we do have just random people's names. There was a guy from ancient Ur named Lulu. And I think there were two different guys. One of them owned a lot of land and some of the one of them was like a carpenter or something like that.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  But you know, it's it's a nickname for a longer because Lou was the Samarian word for man. So it's probably man of something, something, something.

• 38:37Liv Albert?

  Cute. Yeah. Those are my grandparents' dogs name when I was very young. That's cute. No, I, yeah, it's it. I mean, and nicknames are are short forms and stuff too. Like, that's even more just like so normal and real about these people. It's very. Yeah, it's just really lovely. So like, do we know? Do we know like what they made? Is it all really like obvious? Were they just, you know, weaving clothes, fabrics for whatever? Like, do we have any kind of specifics? Just since we seem to have such random things from this world?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  So we know from the records that some of them were weaving wool, some of them were weaving linen. So it does specify in their job titles, which is which. It doesn't really break down the industrial process because all that probably would have been. You know, the the record's only concerned with how much barley goes out of the temple coffers.

• 39:27Liv Albert?

  Right. They're worried about the people and the eating, what they're eating more than anything.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Right. So the actual division of labor is was probably done, you know, orally and less formally.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  As far as what they were making, we it's it's one of those things where just like in the records, they don't specify generally because they would have known, like, you know, you go to up against the person and ask. But in general, we do have a lot of names for garments. But it's kind of like fruit or minerals or other things or birds or whatever, where we have a lot of, we know that this is the name of a type of garment or a type of bird or whatever. But because there's no way to tie it to a specific, you know, piece of art or anything like that. And of course, we don't have the garments themselves. We don't know. So sometimes we can see it's like, okay, well, there's this one particular kind of garment that appears to be associated with Bahrain and like the Persian Gulf area.

• 40:16Liv Albert?

  Cool.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  And there's certain things that are kind of like more priestly robes and stuff, but no one ever explains that in the text. So we kind of don't know for sure.

• 40:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Without that connection, you're like, well, I have the word, but what does that mean? Yeah, yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  But I mean, generally, I think what they would have been making is. Property for the the temple household. So I mean, like I said, it's giving out gifts of garments and, you know, cloths and stuff to its dependents. It's giving them out as gifts. So a messenger comes and brings word from, you know, some other place and you give the messenger a little gift. They're making bedding. So again, the sacred marriage is kind of one of this, one of these most important religious rites around which all of Submaritan civilization revolves. And, you know, you have to create a new set of bedding for the bed that you put the god statue on. So they're, you know, they're making, and of course you have to make robes for the people working in the the temple.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  So again, it's just kind of like reproduction of what you we are doing in the temple every day and someone has to make all new garments.

• 41:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. We just seen the temple structure. I, I'm sure I asked you about this more last time, but my memory is shot and I have no idea. But like the whole temple structure is just so interesting. I mean, that it's so, I mean, it kind of sounds like what you were saying earlier, like that this that is sort of the equivalent or potentially the equivalent of like their leadership structure? Or was it something that there were like a lot of these temple, like sort of household structures, whatever, like, yeah, I mean, I don't mean a physical structure, but like a complex, you know, in terms of whole household of things, like, would there be lots or multiple? Am I asking a dumb question? I have no idea what I'm asking even like, is this something that was like all over the place in like a certain city? Or I would imagine it's like there's one in this city and it's kind of,

• 42:04Liv Albert?

  yeah, the the sort of what the whole town revolves around.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. So we, so, you know, starting in the 4000s B.C. or so, right? We start to see our first big important buildings that's that kind of resemble temples. They could be a temple already. They could be a chief's household or whatever.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  And these are like, you know, like you said, the the center around which the larger settlement is created. So people move to the settlement. You know, frustratingly, we we know basically nothing about if there were tribal structures and different lineages and clans that we don't know. Like there's there's some evidence, there's, it's frustrating a little to say how it would have worked that people are moving to the city from all these different places, probably different cultural, language, religious background and so on. But we we do know that, you know, over the course of the 3000s and early 2000s, people are moving to the cities from elsewhere. And probably the temple is the main. The you know, the focus of the culture that all of them are, you know, you you move to Uruk, you accept that Inanna is the goddess, you know, you accept that this temple has the um, you know,

• 43:05Speaker 02

  is the main economic engine of the city. As for how many, generally, a city will have a couple of major temples that have hundreds or maybe a couple thousand dependents. That, you know, the the king and queen usually, if they are not literally living in the building and doing their religious rites, a couple of times a year, they will, there will be a major religious festival that the king and the queen play the major role, probably some kind of procession, some kind of sacred marriage ritual, moving from the major temples to the other major temples to visit and and make sure the god, you know, has face time with all the followers. So there's going to be a couple of major temples and then a whole lot of minor kind of neighborhood shrines.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  So we actually have a pretty good record of this from the Lower Diala River. So these are the sites of Esh Nuna and Tutub, the modern site name of Tutub is Kafaja. So, um, you know, we have excavated the big temples there from the early 2000s, but we've also excavated kind of just random parts of the city. So we have individual domestic households and then sometimes adjacent to the households or is just like crammed in between them, we have a temple-like building, but it's only one room. Or, you know, it's it's a specifically non-domestic space. It's often walled off from most of the rest of the neighborhood, but, you know, it has an altar or it has some other fixture that it's clearly used as a religious space. So if we knew more, I should specify, when I said we have basically no evidence about

• 44:32Speaker 02

  clans and structures like that, we have some land sale records that show that often several people, up to a couple dozen people, have to sign off on selling their land to a rich guy. So we have, we have records of, um, you know, all these people, they're all related to each other, they all have common ancestors, they're all selling this land at once. So that suggests to us that there are groups of extended family structures, like a clan or something that has collective rights to farmland that it can't be sold unless all of them agree.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  That is pretty much all we have.

• 44:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  And there's some evidence, I was reading recently, that maybe even if they're not literal family structures, things like, you know, Smiths and Carpenter, various artisanal crafts may have been conceived of like clans in that when you send your son to apprentice with them, they are, they become the quote, quote, son of that family. And they, you know, even if they're not related by blood, the, you know, the craft is passed down from master to apprentice.

• 45:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, like a family union.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I like that.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, guilds and unions and family structures were very coterminous.

• 45:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, that, that's really interesting. I mean, even just having that kind of land sale documentation, like, that's interesting.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:39Liv Albert?

  You know, and again, we're just, just kinetiform and the way that they preserve or unintentionally preserve things. It's so interesting. Um, I mean, the thing, obviously, the, the thing, well, not obviously, but the thing that does like always completely warp my mind is like the, the length of time that, I mean, I don't even, I don't even want to say, I want to say Mesopotamia broadly because there were so many, you know, people and like, so you, you look at the Sumerians, what, they were around for a really long time, right? Like, what kind of, you know, is there, were there big sort of changes in what we know of, of the weaving world or the whole, just like kind of how it all functioned over the, you know, centuries, millennia that the Sumerians were going?

• 46:25Speaker 02

  For lack of a better term. Technology, I don't really, I don't know.

• 46:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  To be honest, I don't know of any big technological changes. And to be honest, that's kind of the case for most of the ancient world. I mean,

• 46:38Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  All of the important stuff was figured out by the 3000s B.C. at the latest. And they kind of kept doing that for thousands of years. Um, and, you know, like, I was listening to Patrick Guiman, I don't know if you know.

• 46:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Um, but he was talking about kind of, You know, because we live after the Industrial Revolution, we're used to thinking of technological, we're used to thinking of historical change as technological change, right? That when people hear about the Bronze and Iron Age, like, okay, well, they invented a better kind of weapon that allowed them to win more wars. They're in, that's not really the case. Most of the advancements were in terms of social organization, right? You get more people together in a kingdom or a city or a whatever. And that's kind of what happened in the 3000s. When you get people moving to cities, it's kind of like an industrial revolution in the sense that they're moving from their rural, substance agricultural lifestyle to a city where it has a much more, you know, complex division of labor.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  You know, they are working for, you know, kind of elites in, you know, it's a much more complicated economy and political structure than living in a village and, and, you know, tending your sheep and whatever. Yeah, I don't know where I was going with that, but that's where the reason we're coming from.

• 47:45Liv Albert?

  No, that's really interesting. And like it, yeah, I think it is something you think of, yeah, a lot of like, not evolution, but yeah, technological advancements and all of these things. And it's just, I don't know, it's interesting with them specifically because the, I don't want to completely give away how little I know about this region, but like the Sumerians were the earliest, were they?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Uh, depends on.

• 48:09Liv Albert?

  I mean, in Mesopotamia.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Okay. So, yeah, they're the earliest, they're the ones who invent writing. So from our perspective, they're the, the first to do a lot of things. There's a book by Samuel Noah Kramer called, History Begins at Sumer. Just because we, they give us our first evidence for a whole bunch of stuff.

• 48:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  They weren't the first city. So the first city is in northern Syria. It's called Tell Brak. And that seems to have reached a size of 10 to 20,000 people in the early 3000s.

• 48:39Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  At a time when there are cities in, in, in southern Mesopotamia and Sumer.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  There are cities, but they're nowhere near that big.

• 48:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  So technically they got there first, but we don't have any text from them.

• 48:52Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  They do seem to have been working on kind of a parallel track towards inventing writing. They have a system of, uh, potter's marks and apparently a system of numerical note keeping. So they, they were kind of right there.

• 49:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  500 years before the, the, you know, Sumerians, but they didn't get there. So they may have been colonized by the Sumerians.

• 49:12Liv Albert?

  Right. Well, that's, I mean, when you're talking about such early times in human history, it's like, God, yeah, I mean, first is obviously relative. It's about just what we know versus any kind of like reality. But that that alone is interesting. It's just the whole, I don't know, the whole region. Like, when were the, this is, I'm, this is terrible. I'm so sorry, my brain. When were the Egyptians? They were like, almost the same time.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Pretty much the same. Yeah, they invented writing almost at the same time.

• 49:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah, okay, great. At least I'm not crazy and getting.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  I don't know either. I didn't.

• 49:38Liv Albert?

  I know. It's like.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  I'm like, I always just remember Egypt is early.

• 49:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, same. Exactly. Where I'm like, no, no, like, they're, they're the same, right? I mean, I just know that by the time the Mycenaeans were out doing anything, the pyramids were already there. And they were like, these people are wacky. Um, but that's what I got. So, you know, check, this is my professional, professional job. I clearly know what I'm talking about. Um, no, it's just, yeah, it's so fascinating. I'm, I'm so obsessed with like, what we can or can't know from like, so flipping long ago. Um, I don't, yeah, I, I, I would love to hear more of whatever, obviously. I don't know quite what the direction, or if women in general, or what, if you've exhausted your, your weaving knowledge, what?

• 50:21Speaker 02

  What would you talk about mythology if you want?

• 50:23Liv Albert?

  Please.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, the weaving goddess was named Utu with two T's. So, U T T U, not the sun god, whose name is U T U, Utu. Um.

• 50:33Liv Albert?

  Helpful.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  So, she is not a major character in the narratives for mythology, but she figures in the creation myths, because, you know, at the beginning of time, the gods hand down the social roles. And there are actually a number of female goddesses that are connected with crafts, like, um, like, uh, working with stone and like, uh, jewelry and stuff like that.

• 50:53Liv Albert?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, it's not just a bunch of men have man jobs, and then one woman is a weaver.

• 50:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  But Utu is kind of.

• 51:00Liv Albert?

  Like the Greeks, you say?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. Um, Utu is kind of the archetypal woman. Uh, Therese Rodin wrote a, uh, I think it's like a, like a thesis or something, but it's very, very useful to me, because she goes through these myths about, uh, Enki and his wife. Um, and Enki's a kind of creator god that figures, you know, he also figures prominently in these creation myths. Um, so, you know, Utu is kind of the archetypal woman. She is given the archetypal female task. And, um, she also, so, you know, I, I mentioned this myth last time I was here, actually. But, um, this is the one I mentioned that has these interesting connections to, uh, Adam and Eve.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  So this is the myth Enki and in her sangha. And basically, it's a kind of disjointed myth. There are kind of three separate parts and it's unclear how they relate to each other. But broadly, it's a creation story. Yeah. Um, so, so this, this, this book I mentioned by Theresa Redan. She's kind of arguing that at an earlier stage in development, the creation myths were more focused on female creativity and reproduction. Because the humans are created by Enki's wife, who is the goddess of motherhood and birth, but also pottery and making statues out of clay.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  So, and there's also a persistent Sumerian symbolic connection between clay pots and kilns and the womb. It's kind of like complex symbolic relation, relationship between building a human figure out of clay. Obviously, we have many, many, many, many figurines from prehistory. You fire that in the womb, which is the kiln that becomes a person. And then, of course, the woman herself is the kiln and then the thing that comes out of it is a person that is the clay that's been fired. Um, so that seems like, yeah, exactly.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Like, that's how, I'm pretty sure that's exactly how it works. Yeah. That's biology. Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  So in this story, we have the same kind of narratives and the same kind of goddess that literally creates humanity. And, um, but, but we have Enki inserted into it and his penis is very symbolically important and plays a major role. And that may be, um, yeah, as Theresa Redan suggests, that may be kind of like trying to, you know, make the male role more, more important. And it may be, um, a kind of reflection of a trickster character. So Enki is a trickster. So there, you know, tricksters appear in, um, you know, all kinds of world folklorists. And often, um, there's a, there's a book by Paul Radin or Redin about the Winnebago trickster. There's this long kind of, um, you know, story.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  And it's all kind of comical, right? There's farting and shitting and there's, there's dick stuff. There's apparently a common North American trope where he like either removes his penis. He's like hot girls bathing over there. So he finds a way to like, cut off his penis and move it over there. Or he finds a way to like, extend it like a hose and then. Suffer some kind of mishap. So it may be that Enki is this kind of trickster character and all of these funny misadventures involving his, you know, genitalia or whatever, end up as part of the, you know, serious hallowed creation myth. Um, so it's not clear exactly, but either way. So at the beginning of the story, Enki is, um, the Submarians are kind of a wetland ecosystem. So Enki's wandering around, um, quote, digging his phallus into the

• 54:27Speaker 02

  dykes, plunging his phallus into the reed beds. So he's literally plowing the muddy ground with his dick. And

• 54:34Speaker 03

  You know, as men do. No, no, this tracks. I think this actually men are weird sometimes.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  So Enki sees his wife and he's like, hey, let's have sex. So they have sex. And then she gives birth to a goddess, you know, her daughter. And then, uh, Enki sees his daughter wander around. He's like, oh, let's have sex with her. So in, it depends on the version, but

• 54:57Speaker 03

  three or four times. We love early gods. They're just doing great stuff all the time. Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  Well, and like the thing about trickster stories is that part of their social purpose is to teach why, um, social practices exist the way they do. So we show the trickster violating the rules that we know exist to show us why that's a bad idea, why that turns out badly for him. So that these are why we have the proper rules of marriage.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  So the, the, the third or fourth daughter that he has sex with is Utu, the weaving goddess. So previously, the, the daughters don't seem to have had any feelings one way or the other about the fact that their fathers are impregnating them. But, uh, Utu talks to her mother, right? The, the creation goddess. And the mother says, I'm going to give you some advice. And parents giving advice is a very kind of like common, um, I don't know, trope in Submarian mythology. So, yeah. So her mother tells her, like, don't let him have sex with you until he brings you cucumbers, uh, yeah, cucumbers, apples, grapes, and then, uh, say, uh, after that point, quote, "You will indeed have hold of my halter." So this is the creation of bride

• 56:01Speaker 02

  wealth, right? So this is the legitimate Submarian, uh, you know, marriage ceremony where the, you know, the man can't have access to the woman unless he brings her food for the wedding banquet.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  So this is historically attested. We know that, um, in Sumer, bride wealth wasn't necessarily an exchange of livestock that you would keep and add to your herd, as it was in some other cultures. It was mostly the groom's family pays for the wedding banquet. And you load up a cart with food, you bring it to the bride's family's household. If they agree, then that food becomes a wedding banquet. So it's kind of like an ideology about how this tradition came to be, this legitimate marriage.

• 56:37Liv Albert?

  And cucumber, I just have to flag that one. That's I'm just, I'm thrilled to hear that cucumber is high on the list.

• 56:47Liv Albert?

  I guess when I think of like Persian cucumbers, those are a very nice type of cucumber. They must be all from that area. And I didn't think of cucumbers ever. Sorry now, apparently I can, I can pick up on anything.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  The name changes that have the different names of the different kingdoms in the same period always fucks with my brain. Cause that's why I'm like, this is why I'm, I'm a Hellenist. Because my favorite thing though, at the same time is when I talk to like modern historians, I say that like as if like medieval historians and I feel so uppity to them. I'm like, you look at the 11, like the 1100s, I look at like, that's modern to me. And then I talk to people who are like,

• 57:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah, in Samaria.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  I'm the youngest child.

• 57:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah, this, well, and I think that's the like, the most interesting part about ancient history or history generally. And also the thing that like, I think gets kind of like lost in how we're taught to learn about it is just like, the volume of time that is like spanning. And yeah, it's just so much more interesting if you really center yourself in like just how long ago and just how much time passes.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  And the thing I think I really like about looking at sort of like, um, this, that region, Mesopotamia, sort of whatever, is it really forces you to think about, what does a society need to rise versus like, let's look at the political bullshit that happens in like Greece, you know, and like whatever. It like, I find it because like so much of, um, sort of world cultures kind of actually started in this region, right? Like, Greece was inhabited by people who moved over from the fertile crescent back in prehistory. Like we're actually, by looking at that region, we, we are being forced to think about what is it exactly that, um, feeds a society that helps a society grow?

• 58:36Speaker 03

  That is beyond sort of the power structures. Like what are the everyday things that help, you know, uplift people so that we can expand? And so stuff like, you know, getting to a point where we can have these. Complexes where we can have this much like weaving going on. It's like, how do we get there? You know? And it's just the perfect area of the world for it too. I mean, it's called the Fertile Crescent for a reason. It is.

• 58:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  It's wonderful, but yeah, anyways, that's my, that's.

• 59:04Liv Albert?

  No, but I think uh to to link right back to this mythos, like I, it's so interesting hearing such like an early form. Like I feel like I can almost see sort of ripples of these kinds of early stories in the way that the Greek kind of, you know, cosmogony, the whole creation of the world, like the way that that is formed. I regularly look at that and I'm, you know, wondering about what kind of, what echoes are like in those stories? Because they are so clearly calling on earlier things and this feels like one of those. What do you have, Michaela? He looks so alert.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Oh, the um, that exact thing of how we know myths so shared and whatever.

• 59:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Greece is not a place that gets flooded. It does not get flooded. So, but then we have the Deucalion and Pyrrhus story and it's like, this is not something that happens in Greece. But where does get, where in this world, um, that area gets flooded very easily? We have a lot of flood myths. You know, Mesopotamia area. So it's like absolutely, that story comes from people having contact in there and the Greeks being like, we need our own flood story.

• 1:00:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Those nice people over there have one, but meanwhile.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  It's just the sharing. It's just the sharing culture too.

• 1:00:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I mean, the, just to really even just remind the listeners, because I love this one, but also like, the Greeks were seeing that place and they were like, well, that's, that's a city between two rivers. Uh, it might, you know, we'll give it a name and we'll register, you know, how, just how, how fertile, but also like, yeah, the floods and all of this thing. But that's, that's my really, you know, poorly phrased way of reminding the listeners that the word Mesopotamia is just Greek for between two rivers.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  The amount of times I don't think about that and then whenever.

• 1:00:49Liv Albert?

  No, it took me like.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Looking at it. I think we had that moment together. I think we had that realization.

• 1:00:54Liv Albert?

  I had it in the mo-, no, because I had it in the most delightfully stupid of ways in that like my, this is just how my ancient brain, ancient history brain works is that one day I was looking at. The different mythological locations to the Greek underworld, of which there are a few. And I was on a modern map and I was trying to find, um, there's one in like, uh, like the, the middle of the mainland, um, on the west side. And I was like, oh, where, where is this one? And I was looking on a modern map for this entrance to the underworld. And I saw that there is still a little Greek town that is called Mesopotamia. And I looked at that modern Greek town with that name and I said, Jesus fucking Christ live.

• 1:01:38Liv Albert?

  The word means between two rivers. And it was, it took me looking at it written in Greek and like on a modern map for me to be like, duh. And anyway, I just love that. But I also think of all the ways in which the Greeks influenced how we see the much more ancient world. And it's, that's a bizarre thing too. Like the Western civilization of it all. Like these people who came 2,000 years later get to give the name that we now use to describe, like it's

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  It's a really stupid story that is completely off topic, but it's just sort of that, that realization of, oh, that's what a word means, or that's how that thing works. When I was like in grade nine or something, I remember I was sitting in science class with my friends. And then I went, oh my God. And they were like, what? I went, Kanga and Rue. And they're like, yeah, I'm like kangaroo. And they were like, Michaela, yes.

• 1:02:32Liv Albert?

  I don't know kangaroo.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  From Winnie the Pooh, Kanga.

• 1:02:36Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  The mother kangaroo.

• 1:02:37Liv Albert?

  I thought you meant that, oh yeah, that I knew. I thought you meant that the, the etymology of the word kangaroo was linked to something.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:02:44Liv Albert?

  Got it.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  I doubt it.

• 1:02:46Liv Albert?

  No, no, that's

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  But like sort of moments like that happen with Greek all the time. Where I'm just like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. But I don't know.

• 1:02:55Liv Albert?

  Well, the, I mean, and it's just even English words. This one came up in a recent conversation. And I'll use it to pull us right back to the right region. Well, not, not really. This is, that's a forced, that's a forced analogy. But that like the, um, the modern Greek word, and I guess it's the ancient Greek word as well. Um, for giraffe is cameli pardali, which is literally just spotted camel.

• 1:03:17Liv Albert?

  Because everything, so many things are based on how the Greeks imagined stuff. And at some point, they got to see a giraffe and they were like, well, gosh, I think that looks just like a spotted camel. And then now that's just still the word. Honestly, fair. Define delightful. And again, that was my force because I'm sure they're not giraffes or I'm sure they do not have giraffes in ancient Iraq, but still.

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• 1:05:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I guess I'm just obsessed with that, but I would love to hear more of the mythology. This idea that there was like, I don't know, there's so much more women involved in this early mythology, and I guess that's what I'm desperate to hear more of. It's like, does the whole weaving goddess, does her, I mean, the marriage stuff? I feel like you weren't even done. We just got all talking about from cucumbers.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  No, yeah, just to to finish up this this myth I was talking about. Right, so so Anki, you know, wants to have sex with his his most recent daughter. Her mother, his wife, has told her to demand bride wealth, basically.

• 1:05:47Liv Albert?

  And a cucumber that took us way off track, apology.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Yep. It's all good.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  So Anki, even though he is now bound by these cultural customs, he's still going to find a trick to to, you know, find a loophole. So he has to procure the vegetables from a gardener. So he disguises himself as a gardener and knocks on her door and says, I'm a gardener. Let me give you these fruits, you know, on behalf of Anki. So this is, actually, we have another myth that kind of like shows the marriage process more in in greater detail. So basically, when the, like, when when the groom's family wanted to marry, they would send a representative to the bride's family. So the word is coolie, which means like friend in Samarian. So it can be a friend of the groom or just one of his cousins or whatever. So that, you know, if they, so the bride's family can decline politely and not ruin anyone's day.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  And also, just, you know, it's it's part of the custom. We have very similar traditions in in modern West Asia.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  So here, Anki is disguising himself as a gardener, bringing bringing fruits ostensibly from Anki, even though he is Anki. So this is enough, you know, Uto opens the door, they have sex. And then this is when,

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  you know, as I said last time, this is when Anki's wife tricks him into impregnating himself so that he can know the pain of childbirth, and then he has to go through this whole process to give birth to, out of his various body parts, so that he learns the lesson.

• 1:07:16Liv Albert?

  I see, okay, that's, I'm fucking obsessed with that because, again, I mean, I'm sure you told it to me before, so I apologize for acting like I haven't heard it. But that's how my brain is. But like, once again, I imagine I am obsessed with this idea because.

• 1:07:32Liv Albert?

  Like I can see where it gets brought into Greek mythology while simultaneously bringing the women down a few notches. And that's what I can see in like, just from what that entire myth, I can see the whole of this evidence of it. Like, it's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like I throughout ancient culture, you can just really watch the solidification of the patriarchal stranglehold that it got on society. But this is, that's wild.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Oh, actually, yeah. I was listening, Liv, I was listening to your podcast you did with Ancient History Fangirl recently.

• 1:08:08Liv Albert?

  Oh, God.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  And I think-

• 1:08:10Liv Albert?

  Oh, on their show?

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I believe so.

• 1:08:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, great. That one was recorded ages ago, but I saw that they dropped it recently. I was like, what did I record recently? You were like, oh, no. I know, I was like, what did I forget? But yes, now I know what you're talking about.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  No, but I, you know, you just made me think of Zeus giving birth out of his thigh.

• 1:08:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  I think on that podcast you recorded it ages ago. One of you were wondering, or I think someone said that thigh is a euphemism for genitalia.

• 1:08:37Liv Albert?

  They love to say that, and I'm not convinced yet. So are you here to convince?

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  I don't know about Greece or Greek. In Sumerian, the word for thigh also means loins. So in poetry about sex, they use the same word for both. That may be one of these, like, it's a joke in Greek because they're referencing Babylonian tradition or whatever. So I can't speak to the Greek. But in Sumerian, the thigh is a euphemism for genitalia.

• 1:09:04Liv Albert?

  All right. Well, you know what? If anyone was gonna get that, and it wasn't me, it would be those guys, because Jen and Jenny are better at looking at other cultures in addition to Greek. So, that, that sounds right. But no, that, I mean, there is that moment, because that's how Dionysus is born from Zeus, after he kills Dionysus's mother. Because again, like, the Greeks always have this, like, you can see this, that kind of mirror of the myth while plucking out the women a little bit.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:30Liv Albert?

  Because there's that moment with Zeus, but then there's also Athena, right, who he gives birth to via his head because he ate her mother. But, and I just think it's so interesting, because in the Greek, at least in the sources that we have, there is no connection to a man experiencing childbirth, or like, that being part of it at all. And that makes such a big difference, you know? Whereas in the Greek, they, the reason that kind of functions is to, like, have a way for Zeus to be, um, a-

• 1:10:01Liv Albert?

  Like, why can't I think of the word? But anyway, the way he can make a child on his own. Things without a woman. It's. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and yeah, so it's not about like a man experiencing childbirth in that case. It is about a man subsuming a woman's role completely, you know, and, and it's, that's, it's really interesting to see the kind of like an alternate side of it. But even still with like the, the earliest stories of the Greeks, you know, they make Gaia creates the world, but then she immediately creates a man who like suffocates her. Like, there's all these different like kind of layers of it. And to see a sort of earlier story that involves the women in a more natural and like actual biological way is really, it's interesting. And now I'm a little bit obsessed

• 1:10:43Liv Albert?

  with making those comparisons. But so it, it, does the, the weaving goddess, does she end up doing more in the, you said she wasn't in many narratives, which makes sense. Is there more beyond that kind of creation story, which was also delightful?

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  So, um, I don't, there's, there's two other, um, kind of shorter mentions.

• 1:11:02Liv Albert?

  Oh, great.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  Um, just real quick, though, I, um, no, yeah. So, so in this, in the one I was just talking about, you know, Anki is tricked into impregnating himself, and his birth goddess wife has to help him give birth. And the way she does that is by literally putting him inside her vulva. So again, he gives birth out of his various body parts, and those become different gods that are named, their, their names are puns on those body part names. But still, he has to rely on female reproductive capacity in order to, to undo what he did to himself.

• 1:11:32Liv Albert?

  That's interesting. See you again. Wow.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  And, uh, I, I don't know if you were, you were, you were, uh, suggesting this earlier, but I don't know, just the, the theme of a father preying on his, his children at the beginning of time reminds me of, uh, you know, Uranus and Cronos and Zeus.

• 1:11:48Liv Albert?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  And I, I don't know if you mentioned on the show, but we have a, um, A Hurrian myth that is exactly that.

• 1:11:55Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Exactly the story of Uranus and then Cronos and then Zeus.

• 1:11:58Liv Albert?

  Oh, my gosh. What is Hurrian?

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so these are a, um, it's a different language that was spoken within the Hittite Empire.

• 1:12:07Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Like Turkey in the Late Bronze Age.

• 1:12:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  Um, so they had a lot of Hurrians, um, also Northern Syria area. So they incorporated a lot of Hurrian myths and like god names and stuff. And we happen to have, you know, written in the Hurrian language. A story about a, you know, tyrant god at the beginning of time who kills all his children and eats his son. Except he actually eats a stone and then the sun blah, blah, blah, and they cut off his balls. So that, that entire story from Hesiod, Hesiod, um, comes directly out of, of Late Bronze Age, um, you know, story from West Asia.

• 1:12:39Liv Albert?

  See, this, this is what I need. I want, I just really wish that there, somebody had just made a book that is exactly what I want to learn. This is the problem. There's just too many things to pick up.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Problem is, there probably is a book out there.

• 1:12:48Liv Albert?

  I know, and then it's a-

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  And it's buried somewhere.

• 1:12:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, or like impossible to read. Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Liv Albert?

  Because it's just there, there has to be so many connections to be made. That like results in the Theogony because like. And Hesiod was just, what a fucking guy. Oh, what is this? Oh, from Hittite to Homer. Oh, and I know that little, I know that, that cute little guy on the cover. He's in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Liv Albert?

  Um, okay. Okay. Well, I'm writing that down from Hittite.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is exactly the book you want.

• 1:13:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it, it sounds like, the problem is the Homer, but I mean, it still works. I'm sure it's the book I want.

• 1:13:27Liv Albert?

  No, that's, yeah, because there are, yeah, okay. Well, I mean, now that, because clearly you're just like a wealth of these myths that I can connect to Greek ones. Do you have anything else up your sleeve? Or any other fun Sumerian ones that are, are or are not related to weaving? I'm just, now I'm keen for anything.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  Well, so there's, um, like the, the most interesting Sumerian goddess is Anana. Right? So most Sumerian gods, both male and female, are perfect in every way. They are the perfect king or queen. They are noble and patient and so on, and they always do the right thing.

• 1:13:56Liv Albert?

  That's interesting. That's not like Greek.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it kind of makes for a boring story. And I think the the main difference from Greek is that we have the narratives produced by the temples.

• 1:14:05Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:14:06Speaker 02

  Whereas the Greeks were, you know, sharing stories that were passed down because they were interesting and not the official propaganda of the temple.

• 1:14:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So actually, that's a great lead in question. And this is, this is, I'll be honest, entirely from my own knowledge and maybe because I'm writing the Odyssey for kids. But did the, did the, did the Sumerians or just in that realm, did they also, I imagine they had oral storytelling as a major theme among them, but that's not something that necessarily survives in the same way. Is that kind of what you're saying? That like the stories that we have are from the temple, but they would have had oral storytelling?

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Right. So we do have epics, like epic poems that are very much in the kind of Gilgamesh tradition. Gilgamesh and Iliad and so on. These are mostly stories about the legendary early kings of Uruk. So Gilgamesh, we have, I think, five, five or six, depending on how you count. Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, and we have four other long narratives about other kings of Uruk. And these are, obviously, they're written, right? They were canonized in the sense that they were written down in a very standardized way by the time we have the texts. But they, you know, they clearly show evidence of having been an oral medium before that. There's all kinds of repetition and kind of like poetic, you know, stuff.

• 1:15:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  And they, in terms of subject matter, there are, you know, Inanna plays a major role. There are gods and stuff, but mostly it's an adventure story. It's about a war between two kingdoms. There's, you know, magical creatures and so on.

• 1:15:38Liv Albert?

  I know. I can't believe I asked that question when the Epic of Gilgamesh exists. Can I just say that's just where my brain is at today? Like, duh. But I'm still very thrilled for your answer. That did not sound like duh. So thank you.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Gilgamesh, the Epic of Gilgamesh is later, right? So.

• 1:15:53Liv Albert?

  No, I know. But I also had a conversation that featured it in like a week ago. So it's really just my brain going into near ridiculous levels of smush. But yeah, it's still, I'm glad to know that we have this like palace propaganda style, though, too. Like, yeah. Sorry, I keep going on whatever, everything.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Um, no, I'm just in terms of like, you know, in the Odyssey, um, you know, uh, Odysseus goes to the island of, uh, Scaria, right? And there's the, the, uh, the bard there that tells the, the Homer story. And we have a similar thing in one of the, um, Gilgamesh stories where in the Samurian version, the bowl of heaven is sent, you know, to punish him and ravage Uruk and stuff. And he is hanging out in his palace and his bard, and he's like drinking beer and his bard is singing a song about how Gilgamesh is being a coward by not going out and fighting the bull. So like within the bardic narrative, we have the, the image of the bard singing a bardic narrative.

• 1:16:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's the story within a story is always the best. I mean, clearly, because I like the Odyssey. But I mean, that one feels fun because that sounds like you're just directly like kind of insulting. Gilgamesh, like at least in the Odyssey, it's very much like, oh, here's this bard gonna sing about all the other great things Odysseus did, but this is much more like, dude, what the fuck are you doing?

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Yes, and actually on the topic of thigh being a euphemism for genitalia.

• 1:17:21Liv Albert?

  Oh, please.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  In the Gilgamesh and the bull story, Gilgamesh, you know, defeats and kills the bull. And then Inanna was the reason the bull was sent. So he throws the bull's haunch at her and it slaps her in the face. And I've heard it suggested that he's actually throwing the bull's pizzle at her. And it's another euphemism.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  Fantastic. I bring us back to that for the past bit since we started talking about that. I have been looking at my.

• 1:17:43Liv Albert?

  The etymology?

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Been looking at my dictionaries and everything.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  What I want, Liv, is if you can find me the OG Greek of Dionysus popping out of the thigh, so I can see exactly what word they use.

• 1:17:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  Because from my understanding in Latin, absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:18:00Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:18:01Speaker 03

  Euphemism for it. But in Greek, it's not until Cornegreek, so later periods where the actual word for thigh, meros, becomes a euphemism for lornes. In the earlier periods, meros would have been very much about the thigh and specifically because it was tied with sacrifice. So the thigh bone, um, and sort of that area being something sacrificed. So in earlier Greek, it doesn't look like it was used as much as a euphemism.

• 1:18:27Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  Latin, apps, 100% absolutely. And so.

• 1:18:30Liv Albert?

  I mean, I'm fairly willing to bet, because I can't think offhand, Dionysus.

• 1:18:37Liv Albert?

  Origin mythology is often quite late.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Liv Albert?

  What we have of it. So I'm willing to bet that what survives is from a later period when maybe that was more of a euphemism. I think this is all to say that I this thing that has honestly, I'll be, I mean, I love Jen and Jenny to make very clear. They are two of my closest friends in the world.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  They're delightful.

• 1:18:57Liv Albert?

  Um, and that is something that I have spent years being like, I don't know, guys, I really just like it as that it's in his thigh. Like, I don't, not everything has to be a euphemism for balls, okay? Um, and so I'm feeling a little bit like I did them wrong here, uh, but we'll see about how much we can prove.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  It's complicated. What can we actually say?

• 1:19:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. The problem is it's and

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  It's nice.

• 1:19:23Liv Albert?

  Out of love. They're too certain in their statements, but that's true for like every, and because I don't know how to be certain about a statement.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  That's why I love studying ancient history, like classics and later is you don't get to be certain on anything.

• 1:19:33Liv Albert?

  Exactly. And I love that.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  There is no fucking certainty. You can't say, there's very little things you can say for a fact. And that's what I love about it. Cause you get to sit here and have conversations and like build off of each other. And you know, history is made in the conversations of things. And so also it took me way too long. Like, I was like, okay, I know how to say thigh. It's mayros. And then I was sitting here and I was like, how do you say penis in Greek? I sat here for way too long. Liv, you know it.

• 1:20:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I know I do.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  It's phallos. And I Googled it and I went, oh, I'm dumb today.

• 1:20:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah. No, the problem is when they're too obvious.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause I'm also like looking at in my dictionary, right? My actual like little and Scott. Is this Homeric? No, it's classical Greek and biblical. And so, but even it says mayros is the upper part of the thigh or the ham.

• 1:20:24Liv Albert?

  The ham.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  So it's very animal based. Well, then when I went to phallos. A membrum virile, a figure thereof.

• 1:20:32Liv Albert?

  Membrum virile.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  The Latin, Romans are fucking weird. No, this is my Greek dictionary.

• 1:20:39Liv Albert?

  I know, but that that was Latin.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  I know, but it's like, it's Little and Scott is great, except for it's so old. That's the problem with all the dictionaries and I don't know if um

• 1:20:50Liv Albert?

  They did a new one.

• 1:20:51Speaker 03

  Sumerian stuff has the same problem. They were made so long ago, like a hundred plus years ago, and they have never updated in language to actually follow along to where we're at society. So we'll read something and I'll be like, what the fuck does that word? I don't even use that word in English these days. I have to Google the word. I'm like, oh, okay. There was absolutely, we were translating Swetonius's Life of Nero. And he's talking about the the spectacles he puts on. And one of them was like pacified the bull.

• 1:21:22Liv Albert?

  Lovely.

• 1:21:23Speaker 03

  And the word, there was a word used in there and it was absolutely like when we're going to the dictionary and everything, it was like had intercourse, mounted, and I translated it as bonked. I was just like, this makes more sense. I like this better. This works better for our modern day English. They had the bull bonk passive.

• 1:21:49Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 1:21:49Liv Albert?

  Ancient people and they're both, I don't even know. Um, no, the

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  I thought.

• 1:21:53Liv Albert?

  Lately going off the rails. You've gotten a particularly ADHD heavy day from us and you've handled it incredibly well. This is so interesting. Do you have, okay, I mean, we could wrap up. I don't know what timing you have or if you have a bit more. I, the mythology is is really been very entertaining. Do you have anything else that you just like keep in your hat for like weird Sumerian myth? It doesn't even have to be connected to anything we've talked about today. I just am now obsessed with it.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Well, um, I do have one. I don't know, one little myth that, where Utu is not a major character, but it is another creation myth about Enki.

• 1:22:35Liv Albert?

  Great.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  So um, it's again, very, very penis heavy. He ejaculates out the tigress.

• 1:22:41Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is a pun in Sumerian because the words for father and water and um.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Another word, I forget, but it's a pun where he becomes the father of the river because, oh, father, semen and water are all awe, like the literary.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  Beautiful.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  So, oh, yeah, and it describes that as a bridal gift, literally bride wealth. So again, we have a ideology about Enki inventing bride wealth with this means.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  And the whole fucking river.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Of course. I love ancient mythology. They're so wacky.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  But yeah, so as he's giving all the gods their various roles, he invents weaving. He appoints Uto, the goddess of weaving.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  Right? So he's, the quote is, he picked out the toe from the fibers and set up the loom. Enki greatly perfected the task of women. Enki placed in charge of them, Uto, the conscientious woman, the silent one. So obviously female gender roles there.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  But when he's given all the gods their roles, Inanna comes and she's angry that he didn't give her a specific role. Because Inanna was kind of too important to be the goddess of any one thing.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  So like, you know, books will say she's the goddess of sex and statecraft and war, which is true. But she's also a bunch of other things, you know, like shepherding and stuff. So Enki, sorry, so Inanna comes to Enki and she says, basically, why didn't he give any roles? And Enki says to Inanna, I placed in your hands the spindle and the hairpin. I settled on you the staff and the crook with the shepherd stick behind them or beside them. So here, Inanna is associated with livestock, but also her roles kind of intersect with Uto, right? If she has the spindle as part of her, like, you know, symbolism.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  So as he's talking to Inanna, he says, I made you tangle straight threads. I made you straighten out tangled threads. I made you put on garments. I made you pick out the toe from the fibers. I made you spin with the spindle. I made you color tufted, yeah, I made you color tufted cloth with colored threads. And then here's the line I quoted last time. Inanna, you heap up human heads like piles of dust. You sow heads like seed. Inanna, you destroy what should not be destroyed. So on the one hand, we see that her roles do intersect with Uto. She is also, you know, she also has, you know, control or authority or whatever over weaving and women's work and specifically Inanna is kind of a god of chaos. So the idea of like, like sorting out tangled threads or weaving together threads that are not currently tangled, the kind of like liminality

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  between chaos and order, that Inanna is kind of the god of that in particular. And that's also true with gender roles and all kinds of other things that Inanna is kind of the god of liminality. Um, so yeah, there's, there's Inanna's role overlapping with Uto.

• 1:25:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I, Inanna generally is so interesting. And I'm, am I right? Ishtar is a later name, right? Inanna's earlier?

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Ishtar is the name in the Semitic language of Akkadian. So Assyrian and Babylonian are dialects of Akkadian. And it's a Semitic language, whereas Sumerian is, you know, linguistic isolate. So it's the same goddess, more or less, and they were worshipped by the same name at the same time, just by different people.

• 1:25:50Liv Albert?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  And then eventually people stopped speaking Sumerian.

• 1:25:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Okay. That's, yeah. I just always know, I mean, I remember the connection from having, you know, looked into any of this, but specifically she is this goddess who gets linked to Aphrodite in a lot of ways, which I've always thought is like both interesting. And I think it's either, it's like, it feels like either kind of a hit on Inanna or a compliment to Aphrodite to make those kinds of connections, you know, because Inanna is so much more powerful, I think than any one Greek goddess. Like they're, the Greeks were not kind of, they were not, you know, keen on giving a woman that much importance in their world. And so it's really interesting to learn about Inanna in that way, because she was then kind of linked to Aphrodite. And there are, you

• 1:26:35Liv Albert?

  know, there's connections to be made that lead from Inanna to, you know, Astarte and Phoenicia, and then to Aphrodite. And kind of again, like you're watching like a decline in importance, but it sounds to me like Inanna, I mean, it sounds like I could name like five different Greek goddesses and put them all into one, you know, and that, that would be more equivalent to Inanna. And yeah, go ahead.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  I mean, if you think about a goddess who is the goddess of war and statecraft, who exercises a lot of male roles, who is kind of the person that a king will consult when he wants wise counsel. I mean, that's Athena, right?

• 1:27:07Liv Albert?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, that is kind of what happens to Inanna, who is at the very least closer in time to a period when women would have had a bigger, so you know, role in public and social life. And even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is written later than the Sumerian poems, we can kind of see this decline in status for Inanna. Where, I mean, Gilgamesh throwing some part of a bowl at her face is certainly disrespectful. If it's a penis, even more so. And then the shamhat, the quote-unquote temple prostitute. When Enkidu is dying, he curses her and says, like, "I curse you to be a streetwalker. You will be the lowest of the low." And then he kind of thinks about it and then takes it back and then blesses her instead.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  So we kind of get a view of this kind of ambivalence of, okay, well, these women who are associated with the temple household of Ishtar at that point, you know, who, it's unclear what quote-unquote temple prostitution is or was or whatever.

• 1:28:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  But, you know, it's unclear how we feel about this. Do we have this kind of old reverence for it? Or do we live in this urban economy where these are the most abused women, the most exploited women, you know, the woman who, you know, can be quote-unquote purchased for a small sum of money? You know, is that, do we have the greatest disrespect for them? Or are we wholly on to this old reverence? And the Epic of Gilgamesh is not quite sure.

• 1:28:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah, well, and, and I know that we would have talked about this heavily last time, so I won't rehash too much, but like, that's probably in large part due to the, the really fragmentary nature of like, the older versions of Gilgamesh, right? Because I know like, there are pieces that are super old, but then the, the like, functionally, you know, full-length one that we have now is like, hundreds and hundreds of years younger, right?

• 1:28:52Speaker 02

  Yes, so that's true of the Babylonian epic. So yeah, basically, the, the, what we call the Epic of Gilgamesh, probably finished by the end of the 1000s B.C. We have some fragments of it back to 1800-ish B.C.

• 1:29:04Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  The Sumerian poems are actually a couple hundred years older than that.

• 1:29:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  Those are probably written in the 21st century B.C.

• 1:29:10Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because there's a particular dynasty that they're connected to.

• 1:29:14Liv Albert?

  Interesting. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I'm just obsessed with all of it. I just want all of the ancient world to like, exist in my brain. But that is not practical. Um, yeah, I, I mean, I, I think I could go on about this forever, but we have kept you for an hour and a half of some ADHD wackiness, but also so much- Information about weaving in a way that, I mean, I assumed you had a lot, but like, I'm fucking obsessed with how much there is. And also just that there was this goddess of that and in such specific, I don't know, they're just that that was so interesting. Thank you. I guess is what I'm trying to say. I'm obsessed now.

• 1:29:53Liv Albert?

  No, I'm very happy to. I love, I want to hear more and more about Sumeria. I mean, or Sumeria, but the Sumerian people. And also I know that I struggle with what questions to ask because I know so little. But this has been really, really fascinating. Do you want to tell the listeners where to find so much more from you, since you have your own whole podcast? And I imagine lots of other nerdy exploits?

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So my podcast is called The Drumbeat Forever After. The title is a quote from a Babylonian creation myth. And that is, it's on what you might call informal hiatus, because I'm working a lot of it into a book. And the book is right now more intellectually engaging for me, which is, I guess, great for me, but bad for everyone who wants more podcast content.

• 1:30:39Liv Albert?

  Relatable.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  So that's that. Maybe more to come in the future, depending on how this project goes. So.

• 1:30:48Liv Albert?

  Hell, yeah. Yeah. No, that's, yeah, that's wonderful. I mean, I'm excited to hear about this book. So you'll have to come back and talk about it whenever it's more of a reality. In every way. Yeah, no, this has been utterly fascinating. And this is my brain just fully backfiring. No, thank you so much. I'm just going to wrap it up so that my brain can like, shut it off. But like, honestly, this has been really interesting. And you've been incredibly patient with my brain. So I appreciate it.

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Let's talk about myths, baby, is written and produced by the one and only Liv Albert on a wonderful little vacation on the other side of the pond. I think that's something we say anyways. Michaela Pangorish is the Hermes to all your Olympians, the producer struggling. Get everything done before her own vacation to Berlin. What's she gonna do there? I don't know. We'll find out. Select music by Luke Chaos. Thank you, Luke. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, a collection of creators that all strive to bring you accurate and reliable information on the ancient world. These include the wonderful friends at Movies We Dig, the partial historian Sweetbitter, and so much more. Get ad-free episodes and much more by subscription to the Oracle Edition on Patreon at patreon.com/mithsbaby

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  or via the link in the episode's description. Are you a scholar or academic or an expert in something from antiquity, from Greece to Rome, to Egypt, to anywhere in the Near East? We would love to have you on the show as a conversation guest. Go to mythsbaby.com/contact and fill out our podcast guest forms. We want to hear from you, so please reach out. Talk to you all next week. Bye-bye.

• 1:33:30Speaker 06

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