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| Translator | N. K. Sandars |
| First Written | 1971 |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Origin | Babylon |
| Publisher | Penguin |
| ISBN-13 | 9780140442496 |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | July 26, 2025 |
Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia
The poem 'Inanna's Journey to Hell' has such incredible moments. I loved the seven steps / seven portals into the underworld, where at each one Inanna must divest of something more. What a great resonant image. And the grieving mother speaking to her dead son: 'you look different!'
Noted on July 29, 2025
This is one of those books that's a huge introduction and commentary wrapped around a small piece of text. In this case, it's a really interesting framing from NK Sandar, around a new translation of the Enuma Elish and some other babylonian/ish texts. Really interesting!
Noted on July 29, 2025
[ from Inanna's Journey to Hell ]
Now she is coming to death's kingdom,
she is the mother desolate
in a desolate place; where once
he was alive, now he lies
like a young bull felled to the ground.
Into his face she stares, seeing
what she has lost - his mother
who has lost him to death's kingdom.
O the agony she bears,
shutting in the wilderness,
she is the mother suffering so much.
'It is you'
she cries to him,
'but you are changed.'
Quoted on July 29, 2025
[ don't eat food offered to you the underworld! From 'Inanna's Journey to Hell']
They will offer water from the river,
do not take the water of death.
They will give you grain from the fields
of the dead, do not take that seed.
Quoted on July 29, 2025
The physical universe - radiation, gravitation, electrical fields, explosions and collisions - is a man-made metaphor, not reality itself; and the conflicts of Apse and Ea, Tiamat and Marduk, ar neither more nor less than that. If an hypothesis is deemed true 'if it works', and if for us the general theory of relativity and quantum physics work, then the death and resurrection of Tammuz or Baal.. did truly work. ...We can choose today between Continuous Creation and the Big Bang, and the ancient world had the same choice. Creation of the universe ex nihilo by Yahweh was a cataclysmic physical event as much as any Big Bang.
Quoted on July 29, 2025
Even so the danger is not removed once and for ever. Floods can still come raging down from the north, to blot out villages and cities; or the sea may brim over the sand-banks of the south and flood the maritime plain, 'the deserts of the sea' as the Authorized Version names them. These are the powers represented by Tiamat and the monsters of her creation. Continual mental and ritual activity were needed simply to hold the world in equilibrium. Marduk's battle must be fought year after year. Tiamat is never entirely conquered.
Quoted on July 29, 2025
When the conflict of the gods leads to the death of Apse, Tiamat is startled into creativity; but left to herself she can only make monsters, the proper progeny of chaos.
Quoted on July 29, 2025
... almost as an afterthought man is created; and he is created a slave in the service of the gods.
Quoted on July 29, 2025
Some of the names cannot be translated, and sometimes even when the parts that make up a name known we are no nearer its real meaning. What, for instance, would a stranger to Western civilization with a basic knowledge of English make of the sentence: 'The chairman went into the boardroom'? Might he not see a carpenter going into a log cabin?
Quoted on July 29, 2025