Adapa and the South Wind: The Full Myth of How He Refused Eternal Life

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight is a story about a man who was offered eternal life and said no thank you, and it is one of the shortest and strangest things in this whole literature, and the argument about what it means has been running for a hundred and fifty years and is not going to be settled tonight. It is about a fisherman. A very particular fisherman, who worked for a temple in the oldest city there was, and who was clever in a way that nobody has ever been clever before or since. He broke the wing of the wind.

Not with a weapon. He said something, out on the water, in a temper, after his boat went over, and the wind stopped, and it did not blow again for seven days, and heaven noticed. And then he was summoned upstairs, which is a thing that essentially never happens to anybody in this literature, and he was given advice by his father on how to behave when he got there, and the advice was good, and he followed all of it, and it worked perfectly, and because it worked perfectly he went home mortal. Stay with it, if you can, to the tenth chapter, for the bread. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp.

It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here for the two nights of the goddess and the seven gates. If so, welcome back, and your place on the reed mat is where you left it. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome. Tonight needs nothing from any night before it.

The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. The scribe takes down something small. Fragments, he says.

This one is in pieces, and one of the pieces was found in Egypt, and I will tell you why later, and it is a good story. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close.

There is one name tonight and it is Adapa, and there is a place, and the place is Eridu, and by the end of the night you will know Eridu better than most cities you have actually been to. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay.

There is nothing frightening in tonight at all. Not one thing. Nobody dies. Nobody is hurt. Nobody is even threatened.

The most alarming moment in the entire episode is a boat turning over in calm weather, and the man in the water is a strong swimmer and gets home fine and is only angry. This is the gentlest episode of the season and I have put it here on purpose, because last night was hard. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the rest of the season will find you as it comes. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp.

And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.

Start with the place, because everything tonight comes out of it. Eridu is, in that world's own account of itself, the first city. Not the biggest and not the most powerful, and by the time most of these poems were written it was not much of anything. But it was first. The King List, which we opened up on the night of the eagle, begins with a line that is one of the most famous sentences in that literature.

When kingship first came down from heaven, it says, kingship was in Eridu. And the poems say the same. There is a text that begins by saying that once, of all the holy places, Eridu alone had been made. And here is the extraordinary part. They were right, more or less.

Eridu is a real mound in the far south of Iraq, and it has been excavated, and underneath the later temples the archaeologists went down through level after level of earlier ones, each built on the ruins of the last, in the same spot, and they kept going, and the sequence goes back further than anywhere else in that country. The earliest shrine on that site is a small one room mud brick building with a niche in one wall and an offering table, and it is about seven thousand years old, and every temple built on top of it for the next four thousand years was built on the same footprint. Somebody put up a small room in the marshes, and their descendants kept rebuilding it on the same square of ground, without a break, for longer than the entire span of recorded history since. The digging that found all this was done twice. A British vice consul named John George Taylor went out to a low mound called Abu Shahrain in eighteen fifty five, and put trenches into it, and found a great deal of sand and a strange unfinished staircase and very little he could explain, and went away again.

The mound sat there for another ninety years. Then in nineteen forty six a team from the Iraqi Directorate of Antiquities went back. Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd and Mohammed Ali Mustafa, three seasons of work, and it is their report that gives us the sequence. They counted eighteen temples, one on top of another. Think about what that means as a physical fact.

The bottom one is a single room you could cross in four paces. The top one is a platform you could see from a long way off across flat country. And in between are sixteen more, each one taken down to its footings and built over, and each one keeping the same corner of ground, and the same orientation, and the niche in the same wall. Nobody wrote down why. There is no text anywhere that says we must keep building on this exact square.

They simply did it, for something like four thousand years, and the only reason we know is that the mud brick kept the shape of the decision. And there is one more thing from that dig, and it is the right thing to be drifting off on. In one of the early levels, on the offering table, there were fish bones. Not a few. A mass of them, lying on the table in the small room, the remains of the meals that had been carried in to the god of the sweet water in the days before anybody in the world could write.

Somebody in the marshes, seven thousand years ago, caught fish, and walked them up to a room, and left them there. And the man whose story this is, thousands of years later, in the same city, at the same temple, on the same square of ground, was the man who did the fishing. The poem does not point that out. It does not have to. It simply says he was the one who provided the fish, and everybody who heard it in that country already knew what the table in that room had been holding since the beginning of anything.

And I should say what that word means, the one they used for the water underneath, because it is the name of the temple and it is the name of the whole idea and it has been under this entire season without being explained. The word is abzu. It means the fresh water below the ground. Not the sea, which is salt and is a different word and a different being. This is the other water, the sweet water, the kind that comes up into a well when you dig, and rises into the marshes from underneath, and keeps a date palm alive in a country where it does not rain enough to keep anything alive.

Anybody who has lived in a dry place understands the distinction in their body. There is water you can drink and water you cannot, and they are not two versions of one thing, they are two different substances that happen to look alike. So the people of that country pictured an enormous body of the drinkable one lying under the land, and they said a god lived in it, and they built his house at Eridu directly over the place where it came up. The temple's name means the house of the abzu. Some texts call it the house of the deep water.

And in the temple there was, as far as anybody can reconstruct, an actual pool. Think about what a building like that does to a person walking into it. You come in from flat glaring country, out of the heat, through a door in a thick mud brick wall, and it is dim, and it is cooler, and somewhere in it there is standing water, and the water is the god. That is where tonight's man worked. That is the kitchen he baked in.

And it is worth saying that the god of that water is, in every story in this literature, the clever one. Not the strongest. The one who thinks of the answer. The one who warns somebody about the flood by talking to a wall so that he can say afterwards that he never told anybody anything. The one who solves the problem by finding the sentence that does the job.

The fresh water is the intelligence of that world. The place it comes up is the oldest city. And the man who is about to talk his way through the gate of heaven learned how from the water he was standing over every day of his working life. That is Eridu. And it belongs to the god of the sweet water, the clever one, the one who has been in this house every night of this season, and his temple there was built out over the water, and the whole idea of him is that he lives underneath in the deep fresh water that comes up in the marshes and fills the wells.

And before the seven, one thing about how that city thought of itself, because it is the frame for everything tonight. Eridu believed it was first, and everybody else believed it too. There is a text that begins by saying that all the lands were sea, and then Eridu was made, and its temple was built, and the god of the sweet water founded it. Not that Eridu was an early city. That Eridu was the first dry thing.

And the King List says kingship came down from heaven at Eridu, before anywhere. And in the flood story, the sages come out of the water at Eridu. So the whole of that civilisation's origin story is located in one small mound in the marshes at the bottom of the country, and the man we are talking about tonight worked in the temple there, doing the catering, and the story we have is about the day he went fishing. That is the scale this poem is playing at, and it never mentions it, because everybody listening already knew. And in the beginning, they said, there were sages.

Seven of them. They came before the flood, and they came out of the sea, and they were sent by the god of the sweet water to teach people the things people had not worked out for themselves. And the list of what they taught is a list of a civilisation. Writing. Building.

Working metal. Making bricks. Laying out a city. Farming. Law.

The rites of the temples. The crafts. And each one of the seven is attached to a king of the very old time, and their names are recorded, and the first of them, the first of all of them, is the one we are talking about tonight, under one of his names. And their names are recorded, all seven, in more than one list, and the lists mostly agree with each other, which for this literature is remarkable. The first is the one we are talking about tonight, under the name that later became Oannes.

Then one whose name means the one who came from the water. Then one associated with the second king. And so on down the seven, each attached to a king of the very old time, so that the list works as a pairing: this sage advised this king, and that sage advised that one. And after the flood, the lists go on, and they change. The ones who come after are not called sages any more.

They are called scholars, and they are human, and they have ordinary names, and some of them are people we can identify from other documents. So the list has a hinge in it. Before the flood, seven half fish beings out of the sea who taught everything. After the flood, a succession of learned men with jobs. And that hinge is the whole self understanding of a profession.

The scribes and scholars who copied these lists believed they were the continuation of a line that started with something that came out of the water, and that the knowledge they had was handed down, generation to generation, without a break, from before the flood. They were not being fanciful. They were describing what they thought their own job was. And they are shown, in the art, as figures who are half fish, or as men wearing a fish over their shoulders like a cloak, with the fish head over their own head and the tail down their back. There are statues of them, small ones, that were buried under the floors of houses on purpose, and I want to tell you how that was done because it is one of the strangest and most touching pieces of archaeology in that whole country.

We have the instructions. There are ritual texts that tell you how to do it. You make the figures, of clay or of wood, in the correct number, with the correct appearance. You perform a ceremony over them, which includes washing their mouths so that they become able to act. And then you dig a hole in the floor of the house, in the right room, near the door or in the corners, and you put them in a box, standing up, facing the direction they are meant to face.

And then you cover them over and you live on top of them. And archaeologists dig up those boxes. They find them exactly where the texts say they will be, in the corners and by the doorways, with the little figures standing in rows inside them, facing out, having been down there for two and a half thousand years doing the job they were put there to do. Somebody buried a row of small fish men under their floor to keep the house safe, and then went upstairs and had their dinner. That is who Adapa is, in the tradition.

The first of the seven. The one who came first. And a very long time later, a Babylonian priest wrote a history of his own country in Greek, for a Greek king, and in it he told the story of a creature who came up out of the sea at the beginning, with the body of a fish and something like a human head beneath the fish's head, and a voice, and who spent the day among people teaching them writing and mathematics and law and how to build and how to farm, and who at sunset went back into the sea, because he was amphibious. He called him Oannes. And that name went into Greek and then into every European book about Babylon for two thousand years.

And most scholars think Oannes and Adapa are the same figure, arrived at by a different road, and I am flagging that as an identification made later and not a thing the old tablets say. But the fish man in the sea who taught people everything and went home at night is where our fisherman ends up.

And before his job, one more thing about the sages, because there is a detail in the lists that I find quietly devastating and I have been saving it. Not all of them ended well. The lists are mostly a roll of honour. Seven who came before the flood, each attached to a king, each having taught something. And then in one of the texts there is a note about one of them who was sent away, or who offended the god of the sweet water, and was put down into the deep, and there is another who is said to have angered somebody and been dealt with.

The details are broken and the readings differ and I am not going to build anything on them. But the shape is there, and it is the same shape as tonight. The beings who came out of the water and taught everybody everything were in a relationship with a god, and that relationship had terms, and at least one of them found out what the terms were. So when tonight's poem opens by telling you that he was given wisdom and not given eternal life, it is not setting up a surprise. It is stating a condition that the whole class of them lived under, which is that you are given what you are given and there is a line, and nobody tells you exactly where it is until you are standing on it.

But that is the tradition. Tonight's poem is about his job. He is a servant of the temple at Eridu, and the text is very specific about what he does. He baked the bread. He is the one who provisions the god's table.

He prepares the offerings. He does the food. And with his own hands, the poem says, he steers the boat and does the fishing for the temple, and he is the one who brings in the catch. He is the caterer. The wisest human being who ever lived, the first of the seven sages, the one to whom the god of wisdom gave broad understanding, spent his days baking, fishing, and setting the table.

And I want to say what a temple actually was as an employer, because it is the thing that makes his job make sense. A temple in that country was not a church. It was the largest economic institution in the city. It owned land, sometimes enormous amounts of it. It owned herds.

It owned workshops. It had hundreds of people on its books, and we know this because the books survive, in tens of thousands of tablets, and they are lists of who received how much barley and oil and wool, by name, by month. The god lived in the building and was treated as a resident. He had a bed and clothes and jewellery. He was washed.

He was dressed in the morning. And he was fed, twice a day, two meals, with a menu, and the menu is recorded: bread, beer, meat, fruit, water, all set out on a table in front of the statue behind a curtain, and left for a time, and then taken away. And afterwards the food went to the staff and to the king, because a meal that has been in front of a god is the best food there is. So the man who provisioned that table is not a minor functionary. He is running the catering for the most important household in the oldest city in the world, and the god he is cooking for is his own father in the story, and the fish he is catching is going on that table tonight.

And the poem says a thing about him that is the hinge of the whole story and that everybody skips. He gave him wisdom, it says. He did not give him eternal life. That is stated at the start, flatly, before anything happens, as a description of the arrangement. He was given understanding, and he was not given endless life, and that was the deal from the beginning and everybody involved knew it.

And there is one more version of him, older than the poem we are reading, and I want to mention it because it changes the flavour. There are pieces of a Sumerian text, from a site in the east of that country, that tell a version of this story, and in it some of the details are different. The tone is different. And it is a reminder that this was not one fixed story but a thing people told in more than one way for a very long time before anybody wrote down the version we mostly read. I am not going to build tonight on the fragments, because they are fragments.

I mention them so that you know that the tidy little poem I am about to tell you is one telling of something older and messier.

So he went out fishing. He went down to the harbour, and he got into the boat, and he pushed off without a punting pole, the poem says, and let the boat go where it went, and he was out on the broad sea. I want you to have that picture for a while, because it is the calmest thing in this season. A flat marshy coast at the head of the gulf. Reed beds.

Water that goes from marsh to lagoon to open sea without ever quite deciding. A small boat with one man in it, drifting, doing the temple's fishing, the way he did every week. There is a detail in that line which is easy to read straight past, and it is worth stopping on. He pushed off without a punting pole. In the marshes you move a boat with a pole.

You stand in the back and you put the pole down into the mud and you push, and the boat goes, and you have complete control of where it goes and how fast. It is the ordinary way to travel in that country and in places it still is. To push off without the pole is to give that up on purpose. Some scholars read the line as nothing more than a description of a small craft with no gear in it. Others hear something about the man in it, that he was easy enough on that water to go out onto it the way you would lie down on your own bed.

Either way, the picture the words make is a man in a boat with nothing at all in his hands, going wherever the water was going, in the shallow warm sea at the top of the gulf, doing his job. And the job was fishing for a temple. That is a real occupation and we know a good deal about it, because temples in that country kept accounts, and the accounts survive, and they are extremely boring, which is exactly why they are trustworthy. A temple was a household. It had a god living in it, and the god was fed, twice a day, every day, with real food on a real table, and somebody had to bring the food.

There were bakers on the rolls, and brewers, and herdsmen, and gardeners. And there were fishermen. So this is not a man who went fishing one afternoon. This is a man whose whole working life was to go out on that water and come back with what the god would eat that evening, and then to do it again the next day, and the next, for as long as he was able to lift a net. Picture the mornings of that.

The flat light before the sun is properly up. The reeds standing black against a sky the colour of the inside of a shell. The water so still that the boat looks like it is sitting on the sky rather than on anything wet. Herons in the shallows doing the thing herons do, which is nothing whatsoever, for a very long time, extremely well. He would have known that water the way you know the way from your bed to your door in the dark.

Where the channel narrows. Where the mud comes up under you. Which reed beds hold fish in the cool season and which ones go quiet. Where you can hear the gulf out past the last of the marsh, sounding different from the river. And on the day this story is about, none of that knowledge was any use to him, because there was nothing wrong.

It was calm. It was ordinary. It was the kind of day you do not remember afterwards and would never have remembered, except for what happened at the end of it. Let that be the picture for a little while. The boat with no pole in it.

The man lying back in it with his hands empty. The water going nowhere in particular and taking him along with it. The temple behind him on its platform out over the water, and the fish not caught yet, and the whole long afternoon still in front of him. Nothing in this scene is going to hurt anybody. I told you that at the start and I meant it.

What is coming is a squall, and a swim, and a very bad temper. And then the South Wind came.

And before it happens, one thing about winds in that country, because we are about to break one and you should know what you are breaking. They had four of them, and they were not weather in the way we mean weather. They were beings, with directions, and each one had a character, and they turn up all through this literature. The south wind is the one off the water, wet and heavy, and it is the one that brings the moisture and the boats. The north wind is the cold one, the one that comes down off the mountains, and in the flood poem it is the north wind that finally clears the sky.

The east wind and the west wind fill out the set, and together the four of them are the corners of the world, and when a god wants to hold something open he stations them at the four corners of a net, which is exactly what happened on the first night of this season. They are also, and this is the part that matters tonight, given as gifts. A grandfather gives four winds to a child to play with. A young god raises seven more and gives them names. So a wind, in this literature, is an object with a will, that can be given away, stationed, harnessed, and named.

Which means it is also the kind of thing that can have a wing. The South Wind blew, and it turned him over. That is what happened. The boat went over and he went in the water, and the poem uses a phrase for it that is the best phrase in the whole text. It made him dwell in the house of the fishes.

That is where he was. In the house of the fishes. Not drowning, not dying, simply in the water, with the boat upside down, and the catch gone, and a long swim. And I want you to have the geography, because it explains the wind and it explains the boat. That coast is not a coast the way you might picture one.

It is the place where two enormous rivers, having come down through a completely flat country for hundreds of miles, arrive at the sea and cannot decide where the edge is. There are reed marshes that go on for days in every direction, with channels through them, and lagoons, and islands made of reed that float. The water is fresh, then brackish, then salt, and the line moves. People lived in that landscape for thousands of years and some still do, in houses built of reed bundles on platforms of reed, with reed boats, and photographs from a century ago look almost exactly like carvings from five thousand years before them. So he is not out on an ocean.

He is out in a shallow, hot, glaring, enormous flatness of water and reed, in a small boat, in the middle of the day, on his own. And the wind that matters there is the one off the water, and it comes up fast, and on water that shallow it does not make a swell, it makes a chop, and a chop is what turns a small boat over. And he lost his temper. And what he said is the reason this story exists, and I want to give it to you exactly, because it is four lines long and it is the strangest thing anybody says in this entire season. South Wind, he said.

You have blown all your brothers' winds against me. I will break your wing. And as the word left his mouth, the wing of the South Wind broke. Now, hold on to what has just happened, because it is easy to slide past. He did not have a weapon.

He did not use a spell, or an incantation, or a ritual, or a god's name. He was angry, in the water, and he said a thing, and the thing became true. That is the same power we have met before in this season. It is the power the young god of Babylon asked for on the first night, when he made them test him by making a garment vanish and come back. It is the power that is written on the tablet that gets stolen and worn on people's chests.

The command of the mouth being the same as the state of the world. And here it is, in the hands of a temple caterer, in the water, in a bad mood. And the South Wind, which is a being with a wing, went down and did not get up.

And before the seven days, one small thing about that number, because it has been everywhere this season and tonight is the last time I will point at it. Seven days is not a week in the sense we mean. That country did not run on a seven day cycle for ordinary purposes, though there were days in the month marked out as significant and some of them fall at seven day intervals, and the argument about how that relates to what came later is long and interesting and not for tonight. What seven days is, in these poems, is the standard duration of a complete event. The flood was six days and seven nights.

The vigil over a friend's body was six days and seven nights. The test with the loaves was six days and seven nights. And now the wind does not blow for seven days. It is the length of a thing that has run its full course. Not a short time and not for ever.

Long enough that it is finished. For seven days the South Wind did not blow over the land. And I want you to feel that, because in that country it is not a curiosity, it is a catastrophe with a slow fuse. The south wind is the wind off the water. It is the one that brings the moisture up from the gulf into that flat hot country.

It is what moves the boats up the rivers. It cools the afternoon. And it stopped. Not for an hour. For seven days, in a place where the summer temperature would kill you.

And the poem gives those seven days one line and then never comes back to them, which means they are yours, so take them slowly. The first day nobody notices, because a wind that does not blow on one day is only a still day, and still days happen. The second day the fishermen notice, because the boats that go out on that wind are not going anywhere, and the sails hang, and men who intended to be somewhere else are standing on the shore looking at flat water with their hands on their hips, which is what men have always done in that situation and probably always will. By the third day the air over that country has gone dry and hard and very clear, and you can suddenly see much further than you are used to seeing, all the way out to the edge of the marsh where the light shakes. By the fourth day the heat is a problem, because that wind is what moves the air over the reed beds, and without it the water goes glassy and warm and the middle of the day becomes something you sit out rather than work through.

By the fifth day it is being talked about in the temple. By the sixth day it has been mentioned in the offering, because that is partly what an offering was for, and somebody has said a careful sentence to the god of the sweet water about how the air has stopped moving and whether anything might be done. And on the seventh day, upstairs, somebody finally asks. Now, is any of that in the poem? Not a word of it.

The poem says seven days and stops, and I have just built a week out of one line, and I want to be honest that I have done it. But it is the right kind of building, because that is exactly the sort of gap this literature leaves on purpose. The line is there so that you will feel the length of it. Nobody who first heard this poem needed to be told what a week of dead air over those marshes was like. They had been in it.

The poem could say seven days and stop, and the whole room would supply the heat and the flat water and the boats not going out. You are the room now. So lie there and let it be seven windless days on a hot flat coast a very long time ago, with nothing at all happening, and nobody in any danger. And upstairs, the sky god noticed. He said to his minister: why has the South Wind not blown over the land for seven days?

And the minister said: my lord, Adapa, the son of the god of the sweet water, has broken the wing of the South Wind. And the sky god heard it and rose from his throne and said: bring him to me. And now I owe you the Egypt story, because I promised it at the start of the night. In the fourteenth century before the year one, there was a pharaoh who moved his capital. He built a completely new city on a bare site on the east bank of the Nile, and he lived in it, and then he died, and his successors abandoned it, and it was never built over.

Which means that when it was finally dug, in the eighteen eighties and after, the archive was still there. And the archive is the foreign correspondence of the Egyptian court. Letters from kings of other countries. Letters from vassals in the Levant asking for troops. Letters about gold and marriages and grain, hundreds of them, and they are the single best window anybody has into how that whole world talked to itself.

And they are not in Egyptian. They are in Akkadian, in cuneiform, on clay, because Akkadian was the language of international correspondence across that entire region, the way French was in Europe for two centuries. A king in Egypt wrote to a king in Anatolia in the language of Babylon, and both of their scribes had to learn it. And if your scribes have to learn it, you need teaching material. So in among the letters there are school texts.

Word lists. Exercises. And a small number of literary pieces, used the way a language class uses a short story. And one of them is tonight's poem. That is how we have a copy of a Mesopotamian myth from the fourteenth century before the year one: an Egyptian scribe was learning Akkadian and this was on the syllabus.

The other pieces we have come from the great library in the north, seven hundred years later. So we have a homework copy from Egypt and a library copy from Assyria, and between them, in fragments, a poem that was clearly known everywhere and for a very long time. And I want to say one thing about the relationship between those two, because the poem calls it a father and a son and that is not quite what it is. The god of the sweet water made him. That is what the texts say.

He is described as the son of that god and also as his creation, and both at once, and the literature does not treat those as different claims. And what he was made for is service. He is the one who provisions the temple. He was given understanding so that he could do that well. So this is not a father giving his boy advice about a job interview.

This is a maker briefing the thing he made, before it goes into a situation it was not designed for, using knowledge the thing does not have. And when it goes wrong, the son does not blame him. That is the part I keep returning to. He stands in front of the highest god there is, having just refused eternal life, and he is asked why, and his answer is four words long. My father told me to.

There is no resentment in it anywhere. He is not complaining. He is explaining. He did what he was told by the person who made him and who had never been wrong before, and he says so, and the poem does not give him a second thought about it.

And now the god of the sweet water, who knows everything, and who has thought his way out of every situation in this literature for eleven episodes, sits his man down and coaches him. And the coaching is detailed, and it is practical, and every single piece of it works. And before the words themselves, the clothes, because the clothes are half the plan and they are easy to skim past. Mourning in that world was something you wore and something you did to your body, and it was legible across a room. You let your hair down and left it uncombed.

You put off the clean bright garment and put on a dark one, or a rough one, or in some texts you tore what you were wearing. You did not oil your skin. You sat lower than usual. Every one of those is the reverse of what a person did when they were presenting themselves properly, and that is exactly the point. Grief was shown by undoing the ordinary care of yourself, in public, where it could be seen.

So the instruction is not go up and mention that you are sad. The instruction is arrive at the highest door in existence deliberately looking like a man who has had a death in the house, and let the two gods at that door ask you about it. He is going to be asked. That is the whole design. Nobody stands at a gate in torn clothes with their hair down and is not asked.

And there is a second thing in the design that I love, which is that his father does not tell him to lie. Look at it closely. Every single word he is coached to say is true. Two gods have vanished from the land. That is a fact, and everyone in that country knew it, and there were festivals about it.

Which two? These two. Also a fact. He is not tricking anybody. He is walking up to two gods who are absent for part of every year and saying, out loud, in the proper clothes, that their absence was noticed.

That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick. It is a courtesy paid so exactly that it works like one. And now the words, which the poem gives in full, and which you are going to hear twice tonight, so there is no need to hold on to any of it. Here is what he tells him. Let your hair go.

Do not comb it, do not tie it. Put on a mourning garment, the clothes of somebody who has had a death. When you go up the road to heaven, you will come to the gate. And at the gate there are two gods standing, and their names are Dumuzi and Gizzida. They will look at you and they will say: young man, for whom do you look like this?

For whom are you dressed in mourning? And you will say: two gods have vanished from our land, and that is why I am dressed like this. And they will say: who are the two gods who have vanished from the land? And you will say: Dumuzi and Gizzida. And they will look at each other, and they will smile, and they will speak well of you to the sky god, and they will show you a kind face.

That is the first half, and it is a compliment delivered as a mourning, and it is one of the most charming pieces of advice in the literature. Go up in black, and when the two gods at the door ask who you are grieving for, tell them it is them. And then the second half. When you stand before the sky god, they will bring you the bread of death. Do not eat it.

They will bring you the water of death. Do not drink it. They will bring you a garment. Put it on. They will bring you oil.

Anoint yourself with it. And do not forget the instructions I have given you. Hold on to the words I have spoken. And I want to say who those two at the gate actually are, because it makes the advice much better than it first appears. One of them is the shepherd we spent two whole nights on, the one who was sitting under the apple tree in his best clothes, and who was taken, and whose sister offered half of every year to get him out.

And the other is a god of the same kind, associated with vegetation and with the year turning, and in some texts he is a serpent god and in some he is a doorkeeper, and the two of them are frequently paired. They are both gods who go away and come back. That is what they have in common and that is why they are standing at that particular door. So the advice is this. When you get to the gate of heaven, you will meet two gods whose entire nature is that they disappear for part of every year and are mourned while they are gone.

And you should tell them that you are in mourning for two gods who have vanished from the land. And when they ask which two, you say their names. It is not flattery. It is the single most precisely aimed compliment in this literature. He is telling the two gods who spend half their existence being absent that somebody down on earth noticed they were gone and put on mourning clothes about it.

Of course they smile. Of course they take him in.

Before the gate, the going up. The poem gives it about as much room as I just did. He took the road to heaven, and he went up to heaven, and when he had come up to heaven he approached the gate. That is the whole journey. Four clauses and he is there.

And I think that is worth sitting with for a moment, because a later literature would have made an epic out of exactly that stretch, and this one does not even slow down for it. There is no ordeal on the way. Nothing tests him. There are no guardians to argue past, no rivers to cross, no counting of doors. He does not earn the ascent and he does not survive it.

He simply goes, the way you would walk up a road out of a town, and at the top of the road there is a gate, and there are two people standing at it. Nobody in this literature does that. Think of the nights we have already had. A king who went to the ends of the earth to find one man and could not stay awake for a week. A goddess who went down and had to give up something at every one of seven doors.

A man who tried to fly up on the back of an eagle and lost his nerve looking down. Going between the levels of that world is the hardest thing anybody attempts, and it usually fails, and it always costs. And here a fisherman from Eridu walks up in mourning clothes and is let in. The reason, as far as anybody can tell, is that he was not going. He was sent for.

The difference between climbing and being summoned is the whole difference, and it is why the poem does not bother to dramatize the road. When you are called upstairs, the stairs are not the story. So let the going up be slow and easy in your head, because there is nothing in it to hold on to. A man on a road, in a dark garment, with his hair loose and uncombed and moving a little in the air. The country falling away behind and below him and gradually not mattering.

The light changing to the kind of light you get in the last hour, where everything is the colour of the inside of a lamp. And a gate at the top of it, standing open, with two figures beside it who have been standing there a long time. And now the thing I want you to notice about what happens at that gate, which is that you have already heard it. You heard it in the last chapter. Every line of the conversation that is about to take place was told to him in advance by his father, word for word, and now it happens, word for word, and the poem does not shorten it.

It does not say and it went as he had been told. It writes the whole exchange out again with nothing changed. That is not the poem being lazy. That is how this literature works, and it is the single most restful thing about it. These poems were made to be heard.

And when a thing matters, it is said in advance and then said again when it happens, and sometimes said a third time when somebody reports it to somebody else. The listener is never asked to hold anything in their head. The poem does the holding for them. Which means that if you drifted off during the advice, you are about to get all of it again, and you have lost nothing, and that was the arrangement from the beginning. So here it is, for the second time, happening.

And he went up. The road to heaven, the poem says, and he took it, and he came to the gate. And there were two gods standing at it, and they were Dumuzi and Gizzida. And they looked at him and said: young man, for whom do you look like this? For whom are you dressed in mourning?

And he said: two gods have vanished from our land, and that is why I am dressed like this. And they said: who are the two gods who have vanished from the land? And he said: Dumuzi and Gizzida. And they looked at each other, and they smiled. Every single word of it happened exactly as his father said it would.

The question, in the same words. The answer, in the same words. The follow up question, in the same words. And the smile. And they took him in, and they spoke well of him.

And this is the part I love. The two gods at the gate of heaven, who have just been told by a stranger that he is in mourning for them, are pleased. Not suspicious. Not offended at being told they are dead. Pleased that somebody noticed.

And they went in with him and put in a word for him.

And I want you to see the room he is walking into, because we have been in it before this season and it is worth remembering what it is like. It is an assembly. The sky god is the oldest and the highest, and his name simply is the sky, and he sits at the top, and around him are the great gods, and it is the same body that has appeared in almost every episode of this season. They are the ones who decided that a death was owed after the Bull of Heaven. They are the ones who sat in silence with their lips closed when nobody would face the sea.

They are the ones who will refuse, one after another, to go up a mountain after a bird. And into that room walks a caterer from a temple in the marshes, in mourning clothes he was told to put on, having correctly guessed the names of two gods at the door. He is the only human being in this entire season who is brought into that room alive and gets to speak. That is worth sitting with. Twelve nights of gods arguing with gods, and exactly one mortal, in the whole of it, stands in the assembly of heaven and answers a question, and it is a man who was in a fishing boat that morning.

And say a word about the one on the seat at the top, because he has been mentioned all season and he has barely appeared. His name is the word for sky. Not a sky god with a separate name who happens to govern the sky. The name is the thing. When a scribe wrote that name he was writing heaven, and when he put the sign for god in front of it he was writing the god who is heaven, and the two uses sit side by side in the same texts.

He is the oldest of them and the highest, and the striking thing about him in the poems is how rarely he does anything. He does not fight. He does not travel. He does not come down. He is the one the others go up to, and he sits, and he is appealed to, and now and then he decides.

You have heard him in this house without much noticing. When the goddess wanted a bull to send against a king, she went up to him and demanded it and he gave in. When a bird stole the tablet, he was the one who had to be asked what to do. He is the ceiling of that world. Things stop with him.

And his house has a gate, and the gate has two doorkeepers, and beyond the gate is a hall, and in the hall the great gods gather when there is something to settle. Picture that hall the way the poem lets you, which is barely at all. It does not describe it. There is no throne described, no light described, no scale given. That is normal for this literature and it is worth knowing, because we are used to being shown the room.

These poems almost never show you the room. They tell you who is in it and what was said. Which leaves the room to you. So make it what you like, and make it quiet. High walls, or no walls.

A floor you cannot hear a footstep on. A long soft light with no source you can point at. Gods standing about in it, not menacing, mostly bored, the way any body of officials is bored until the interesting item comes up the list. And the interesting item tonight is a fisherman. And the sky god said: come here, Adapa.

Why did you break the wing of the South Wind? And Adapa said: my lord. I was fishing in the middle of the sea for the house of my master. The sea was like a mirror. And the South Wind blew and turned me over, and made me dwell in the house of the fishes.

And in the anger of my heart, I cursed it. The sea was like a mirror. That is his defence and it is the loveliest line in the poem. It was completely flat. There was no reason for it.

It was calm and then it was not, and I was in the water, and I lost my temper. And the two gods at his side spoke for him, and said a good word. And the sky god's mood changed. And the poem says he became quiet, and then he said, and this is the turn of the whole story: Why did the god of the sweet water disclose to an impure human being the plan of heaven and earth? And I want to stop on that word, impure, because it is not an insult in the way it sounds in English.

Purity in that world is not about morals. It is a technical condition, like being earthed or not earthed. There are things that make you fit to approach a god and things that make you unfit, and they are physical and procedural: washing, clothing, what you have touched, what you have eaten, whether the correct words have been said over you. Priests were purified before they went in. Objects were purified before they were used.

There is an entire ritual called the washing of the mouth that turns a made object into a thing that can act. So when the sky god says impure human, he is not saying wicked. He is saying: this one has not been through the procedure. He is not qualified to be up here. And that is exactly what makes the situation so awkward, and why the sky god's mood changes rather than hardens.

He is looking at somebody standing in his hall who should not be able to be standing in his hall, who got here because somebody gave him understanding he was not supposed to have, and who has just given a completely reasonable account of himself. The problem is not that he is bad. The problem is that he is unqualified and obviously excellent. He has made him important. He has made a name for him.

What can we do for him?

And before the table, one thing about what has just happened in that room, because the poem changes gear and it does it in a single line and it is easy to read past. The sky god was going to kill him. That is what everybody in the scene expected, including his father, which is why the instructions were what they were. A mortal broke a piece of the weather. He was summoned.

He was going to be dealt with. And then two gods at the gate smiled at him, and he gave a good answer, and the sky god's mood turned, and the poem marks the turn by having him ask a question rather than pronounce a sentence. Why did the god of the sweet water disclose the plan of heaven and earth to a human being? That is not the question of somebody about to execute anybody. That is the question of somebody who has just realised he is talking to a person who should not be able to hold this conversation, and is now curious.

And curiosity is what saves him, and then curiosity is what costs him, because the next thing the sky god does is offer him something nobody had planned for. Bring him the bread of life, said the sky god. Let him eat. And they brought the bread of life to him. And he did not eat.

Bring him the water of life, said the sky god. Let him drink. And they brought the water of life to him. And he did not drink. Bring him a garment.

And they brought a garment, and he put it on. And I want to point at those last two items, because they are not consolation prizes and they are the reason the ending is not a humiliation. Giving somebody a garment, in that world, is an act with a specific meaning. It is what you do when you take somebody into your household or your service or your protection. Kings gave garments.

Temples gave garments. The word for it turns up in administrative documents about appointments. To be clothed by somebody is to be attached to them. And more than that. We can be fairly precise about what being clothed by somebody meant, because that gesture turns up all over the written record of that world and it is never casual.

A king clothes an official when he appoints him. A temple clothes a priest when he takes up his office. In the letters between courts, robes travel back and forth as gifts, and everybody involved understands exactly what a robe means and how much it means, and there are complaints when the robe sent is not good enough. To be dressed by a superior is to be placed. It says this one is mine, and everyone can see it from across the room, because it is on him.

And oil on the skin is the same kind of act. Anointing is how you mark somebody as consecrated, or as installed, or as belonging. So the sky god offers him four things, and he refuses two and accepts two, and the two he accepts are the two that mean you are one of ours. He goes home mortal, and he goes home in a garment given to him by the highest god there is, with that god's oil on him. Bring him oil.

And they brought oil, and he anointed himself. And there is a symmetry in that room that the poem never points at, and I think it is the best thing in the whole story. This is a man who lays a table. That is his job, every day of his life. He bakes the bread and he catches the fish and he sets them out on a table in front of somebody who is greater than he is, and then he stands back, and then he clears it away, and then he does it again tomorrow.

And now he is upstairs, and somebody else has done the baking, and somebody else has carried it in, and somebody else has set it down in front of him. For the first and only time, he is the one at the table. And he will not eat. And the sky god looked at him and laughed. I want to be careful here, because the word can be read more than one way, and the way you read it decides how the whole night lands.

It can be the laugh of somebody who has just watched a trick work. It can be the laugh of a man who is genuinely delighted and a bit amazed. It can be, and I think in the sound of the line it is, the laugh of somebody who has been outmanoeuvred by an underling he rather likes, and who has decided not to mind. He does not take the garment back. He does not undo the anointing.

He does not punish anybody, not the fisherman and not the god who coached him. He asks the question, he hears the answer, and he sends him home. Come, Adapa, he said. Why did you not eat, and why did you not drink? Now you will not live.

And Adapa said: my father told me not to eat and not to drink. And the sky god said: take him and send him back down to his earth.

And before the argument, I want to be precise about what he was actually offered, because the poem is precise and the translations vary. He was offered the food of life and the water of life. Those are not vague. They are a matched pair, and if you were here two nights ago you have already seen them used. Two small creatures made out of the dirt under a god's fingernails went down through seven gates carrying exactly those two things, a plant of life and a water of life, and they sprinkled them on a corpse hanging from a peg, and the corpse got up.

That is what they do. They are the standard equipment for undoing death, and we watched them work. So when the sky god says bring him the food of life and the water of life, he is not offering an abstraction. He is offering the same two substances that took a dead goddess off a wall in this house two nights ago, and they are on a table in front of him. And he did not touch them, because his father said not to.

And there is the argument, and it has been going for a hundred and fifty years, and I am going to lay it out for you as fairly as I can and then not settle it, because the tablets do not settle it. Here is the question. The god who coached him is the god of wisdom. He knows things. He is, in every other story in this literature, the one who sees the way out and takes it.

Did he know? Reading one. He did not know. He assumed, reasonably, that a mortal summoned to heaven for breaking part of the weather was going to be executed, and that what they would put in front of him would be the food of death, and he told him not to touch it. He was trying to save his life, and the sky god changed his mind, and by the time the bread on the table was the bread of life the instructions were already out of date.

Under this reading it is a tragedy of timing and everybody meant well. Reading two. He knew exactly. He is the god who does not want humans to have what the gods have, and this is the same god who in another poem saves one man from a flood and lets everybody else drown, and he sent his own servant up to heaven with a set of instructions engineered to make sure that the one human being who might have been offered eternal life would politely decline it. Under this reading it is the coldest thing anybody does in this literature.

And the tablets do not tell us. There is no line where he explains himself. There is no line where he is confronted about it. The poem simply has him give the advice, and the advice turns out to be wrong, and it ends. The red team on my desk for this season says, and I agree with it, do not decide for the tablets whether he was kind or cruel.

So I will not. Both readings are available, both have been held by serious people for a century, and the honest thing at one in the morning is to hand you the fork and let you take whichever branch you like. I will say one thing that is not an answer but that I think about. He followed the instructions. Every part of them.

He got the hair right and the clothes right and the two gods at the gate right and the answer right and the smile right. Five things out of six, and every one of them worked exactly as promised, and the sixth thing was wrong, and the sixth thing was the one that mattered. That is what it is like to be given advice by somebody wiser than you, and it is true whether they meant well or not. And there is one more thing I want to give you before the end, and it is the afterlife of this man, and it is my favourite fact about him. He did not stay in a poem.

His name turns up in the practical literature, the incantations, the things that were actually said over people. When somebody was ill, there were formulas to be recited, and a number of them invoke the sages, and some of them invoke him by name, and the logic is straightforward: he is the one who was given understanding, he is the first of the seven, and if you want a word to work then you say it in his name. There is a class of texts where the person performing the ritual identifies himself with him. The exorcist says, in effect, I am not doing this on my own authority. The words I am saying are the words of the sage.

He is the one speaking. So a man in a house, several thousand years after this poem was written, standing over somebody with a fever, would say a formula that began by putting the fisherman's name in front of it. The one who broke the wing of the south wind with a word became the name you used when you needed a word to work. And there is a last thing about the ending that I want to give you, because it is not the one anybody expects and it took me a long time to arrive at. He was right.

Not right about the food. He was wrong about the food, and it cost him, and he knew it about four seconds after the sky god started laughing. But look at the whole shape of his life as the poem gives it. He was given understanding and not eternal life, and the poem tells you that at the very start, as a description of the arrangement, before anything happens. So the question of whether he could have had eternal life is a question the poem already answered in its second paragraph.

He could not. That was never available. What happened in the sky god's hall is a scene about a man being offered something he had already been told was not his, by somebody who had just been surprised into offering it. And he said no, because his father told him to, and his father was the one who had given him understanding in the first place. He behaved, from the beginning to the end, exactly as the person he had been made to be.

He was given wisdom and he used it, and what wisdom told him to do was to follow his instructions, and the instructions were wrong on the last item. That is not a fall and it is not a failure. That is the ordinary condition of doing your best with what somebody wiser than you told you, which is the condition of almost everybody who has ever lived.

The lamp is low now. He went home. That is the last thing in the story. He was sent back down to his earth. Not punished, not cursed, not diminished.

Sent home, in the garment they gave him, with the oil on him, mortal. And there is one more piece of tablet, a fragment, and on it the story ends differently, or ends further, and I promised you the fork and this is part of it. On that fragment there is less of a trick and more of an honour. The sky god settles something on him. There is a decree about his standing, and about the city of Eridu, and about what he will be for people afterward.

And it turns into an incantation, a thing you would say over somebody who was ill, invoking him. Which means that in that version the story does not end with a man losing eternal life. It ends with him becoming the thing you call on when you are sick. The first of the sages, who baked the bread and did the fishing, becomes the name you say over a fever. And I find that a better ending, and I am not certain it is the true one, and both are on clay.

And one more thing about the ending, and then I will let you go. We do not have all of it. I said at the start that this poem is in pieces, and it is worth being honest about how many pieces and how big the gaps are, because it changes what you should do with the argument you just heard. What we have is four or five fragments, of different lengths, from different places and different centuries, and they do not join up cleanly. The Egyptian schoolboy copy is the fullest single run of the middle of the story.

The pieces from the library up north give us the beginning and some of the end and a certain amount that overlaps. And in between there are lines missing, and at the edges there are lines missing, and the last part of the last fragment breaks off. So when scholars argue about whether the god of wisdom was saving him or ruining him, they are arguing about a text with holes in it. Some of what looks like a deliberate silence in the poem may simply be a piece of clay that is not there any more. I do not say that to take anything away from tonight.

I say it because it is the truest thing about this whole literature and it belongs at the end of the season's gentlest night. Everything we have from that world came out of the ground broken. Every poem in this house, every night of it, arrived as fragments, and somebody sorted them, and somebody guessed at the joins, and somebody wrote a careful footnote saying that this line is uncertain. The confidence you hear in any retelling, mine included, is standing on top of a great deal of patient uncertainty, and the people who did that patient work are the ones who deserve the credit for there being a story here at all. And that is a strangely comfortable thought to sleep on, I think.

Because it means the story survived anyway. Broken, incomplete, copied by a bored student in the wrong country, filed in a library that burned, dug up in bits, and still here, still arguing with itself about whether a fisherman was tricked, three and a half thousand years after somebody first pressed it into wet clay. So think of it, wherever you are lying. There is a harbour at the oldest city in the world, in the marshes, at the head of the gulf, in the evening. The temple is out over the water on its platform, on the same square of ground where somebody put up a one room shrine seven thousand years before, and where their descendants will keep rebuilding it for four thousand years after.

And there is a boat tied up, empty, with the water moving under it. And I will tell you what happened to that place, because it is the last thing and it is a quiet one. Eridu did not last. It was the first and it was not the biggest, and over the centuries the water changed. The shoreline moved.

The marshes that fed it shifted, and the channels silted, and the wells went brackish, and the people went where the water was. By the time the great library up north was copying this poem, Eridu had been more or less empty for a very long time. It was a memory. It was the place everything started, in the stories, and it was a mound in the desert with a temple on it that nobody had used in centuries. And they still built there.

Kings still came and restored the temple, or said they had, because being the one who repaired the oldest shrine in the world was worth saying. There is a ziggurat on that mound that was left unfinished. So the last picture of tonight has an extra layer in it, and I have been keeping it back. The harbour with the empty boat is a harbour that would eventually have no water in it. The temple over the water is a temple that would eventually stand in sand.

And the man walking up from the boat to bake the bread in the morning is doing a job that would be done there, in that spot, by somebody, for another three thousand years, and then not. And the poem about him was copied out by a schoolboy in Egypt and by a scholar in Nineveh, in two different countries, hundreds of years apart, after his own city had gone quiet. He is back. He has been to the gate of heaven and stood in front of the sky god and been offered the bread of life and said no thank you, politely, because his father told him to, and now he is home and he will bake the bread in the morning. The south wind is blowing again.

It came back when the wing healed, or when somebody fixed it, and the poem does not say, and the marshes are moving the way they move when there is wind off the water, and it is cool for the first time in a week. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds. You do not have to keep any of tonight. If you keep one thing, keep the sea like a mirror, and a man in a boat on it, before any of it happened. Sleep well.

Goodnight.