Stephanie Dalley

I suppose all I can really offer is a meditation upon ignorance. I don’t really understand. And there’s so much that no one understands, the broken lines and lacunae, that even people who read Akkadian can’t comprehend, the allusions to lost stories, the one trace of something, about which nothing else is known.

I don’t feel like I really know these people; the (esp. unmarked) white public doesn’t really claim Middle Eastern mythologies the way that it does European ones, although of course there is a sort of difference between an estranged (and marked, if you like) cousin, and a total stranger—like the author of that baroque Japanese book I read, so delightfully introverted, if completely foreign and difficult to know. These myths are Really old— ancient and ragged, driving, driving on, and also related in some way to our sort of ancient sister civilizations in Israel and Greece, although again, it’s hard to say how exactly. Perhaps no one even really understood back then, even, since there were so many wars and so much violence, people probably would have settled most readily on that they were Not Quite The Same, you know. And much of the knowledge that once was theirs, died with them, eventually, at least.

I’m not quite sure how to deal with the misogyny, which is certainly present, as either identifying or refusing to identify—judging or covering up, I guess—can be bad if it is done in the wrong way. I suppose you could do either, since they are both bad in a way, although the bad way to do it is not so good. I mean, it’s good not to lie, but the truth is a strange thing.

Stephanie is I suppose maybe the only mythology girl I’ve read so far, depending on how you count, and I have several mythology books. As an editor she’s very Wilhelmine, cut and dried, not exactly Stephen Mitchell’s sister, you know. I suppose she doesn’t have to be.

In the end, sometimes, you just find out that you didn’t know, although I suppose it’s never really the end.… (meer)

We’ve all read about the HGB but why has it never been found? Perhaps Babylon was never the location for the Hanging Gardens. Nineveh was the location of the HGB for it was in northern Mesopotamia which has more rainfall while Babylon is in southern Mesopotamia which is much dryer with less access to water. It would have been an overwhelming challenge to channel water across long distances to Babylon while Nineveh was much closer to year round water sources. Herodotus, the great traveller and writer, 484-425 BC visited Babylon yet wrote not a word about the HGB. The author states Josephus, Diodorus Siculus, and Q, Curtius Rufus wrote the HGB were created by an Assyrian king while history states the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar created them in Babylon. How could such an error have been made? The confusion between Nineveh and Babylon is a) the habit of naming gates in major cities after the gods such as in Nineveh. Nineveh was referred to as a city of gates to the gods or “Babylon” and b) Babylon itself was already a gate of the gods. The mixing up of the two names is obvious for only Nineveh had a “Garden Gate, and when Sennacherib, the Assyrian king, destroyed Babylon by deliberate inundation, reducing it to bare level ground and Nineveh was damaged by a later, natural flood so Nineveh was repaired as a new “Babylon” while the original Babylon sank into the flood and was lost to history. The author was meticulous in her research and presents a good case for the Hanging Gardens being located in Nineveh.… (meer)

It's a middle of the road text, better than most, but far from complete. I'm not just talking about the missing fragments, either, although that's understandable. We've got ranges of over a thousand years of text printed in this volume, ignoring some older texts, like Inanna's descent being ignored in favor of Ishtar's more elaborate, but nonetheless curtailed, descriptions. The tale of Gilgamesh is almost always a required reading, of course, and the genesis story is very interesting, but we're still missing whole texts of Dumuzi or Tammuz which were nonetheless much more important to the people of the times than was even brought up here in this text. At best, I can say that this work is merely a short sampling of three whole civilization's written legends. I suppose I'm going to have to keep looking for a single source that collects and breaks down the altered generations of tales, perhaps even dovetailing their metamorphosis into early Greek and Zoroastrian. It would be much too much to ask to see how Inanna became Aphrodite and Isis, or how they became Mary mother of Jesus. I despair to see how Dumuzi the shepherd became the heart of rebirth and how his idea became Jesus. It's just too much of a concept to touch upon this early in our day and age. Quite a shame.

Then again, such concepts were probably too volatile for a mainstream edition and an editor thought it would be best to leave such works undisturbed for fear of shocking the plebs. Of course, nowadays, such a fearless edition would probably be heralded as innovative and bright, but I'm still looking. Perhaps I'd write one if I actually knew how to read the original text. Alas. I'm stuck here.… (meer)