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She came back up the stairs and went looking for who had missed her.
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Her minister was sitting in the dirt in sackcloth, unwashed. So was the woman who did her hair. Her sons had not changed their clothes since she left.
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Then she walked into her own hall and found her husband on the throne in a clean garment.
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The Oldest Story We Have Turns on What He Did While She Was Gone.
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The Descent of Inanna was pressed into clay about four thousand years ago. The shorter version came out of the ground in the 1860s, and the longer one took scholars most of the twentieth century to reassemble from broken tablets.
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Everyone tells the part where she goes down, and almost nobody tells the part where she comes back.
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She is stripped at each of seven gates on the way in, one item per gate. Her sister has her killed and her body hung on a hook. Three days later she is revived, and the underworld attaches a condition to her release: nobody leaves without leaving somebody behind.
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So she walks back into her own city with the collectors at her heels, and she has to hand one of them over. Here is what she found, in order:
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Ninshubur, her minister, in the dust in sackcloth, refusing to be cleaned up. |
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Her hairdresser, in mourning, hair torn loose. |
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Her musician, in mourning, not playing. |
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Her sons, in mourning, in the clothes they had on the day she left. |
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Dumuzi, her husband, in a fine garment, on her throne, in the hall where she had left him. |
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Four times the collectors reach for somebody and four times she stops them, and the reason never changes. This one was in the dirt for me.
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Then she reaches the hall, and she does not ask him one question.
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He had not torn his clothes. He had not given up the chair. He had not spent one day without the thing that was his only because of her.
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She fixed the eye of death on him, and that is where the story stops being comfortable.
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The poem itself is uneasy about it, and scholars have argued the justice of it for a century, because his whole offense was carrying on with his week. The story weighs that and treats it as enough.
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Then comes the ending nobody quotes. His sister Geshtinanna volunteered to serve half his sentence, which is how the Sumerians explained why half the year goes dark, with this year’s turn landing next Tuesday.
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When you come back up, and you will, look at who is in the dust before you look at who is on the throne.
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Also True
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The Feed
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Monkey-barring is still moving through American dating searches: never letting go of one bar until the next one is already in hand, so no stretch of time gets spent holding nothing. It is named for the playground because that is what it looks like from underneath. Dumuzi did not invent the move, he was just the first one it got written down about.
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The Mirror
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The last time you went a full week without reaching out, what did he do with that week, and how did you find out?
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Today’s Devotion: Write down the names of everyone who checked on you during your last hard week. Not the ones who would have. The ones who did.
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Keep your power in your own hands.
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Sofia
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