Nanshe

Nanshe

Nanshe (also known as Nanse, Nazi) is the Sumerian goddess of social justice and divination, whose popularity eventually transcended her original boundaries of southern Mesopotamia toward all points throughout the region in the 3rd millennium BCE. She became one of the most popular deities of the Mesopotamian Pantheon for her selfless devotion to the good of humanity.

Continue reading…

Margaret Atwood, from The Door: Poems; “Sor Juana works in the garden”

can i read your thesis i wanna know about how mesopotamians kept their loved ones close. i feel like there might be something about roots or foundations or grounding, connecting the family to the home & people to place both physically and metaphorically. gravesites are powerful powerful place connections and im really curious about what we know about a culture whose gravesites and homes were one and the same. i imagine they were pretty comfortable with death

so it's not online yet because i want to publish it first in a journal BUT i can tell you a bit about it. this is gonna be specifically about the old babylonian period (19-15th centuries BCE) because that's what my thesis is on, but with some changes it's pretty much applicable throughout mesopotamian history

so the basic thought behind burial under the houses is that the dead don't cease to part of the family. ancestor cult is an important aspect of mesopotamian culture and domestic religion. the netherworld is not a nice place, it's dark and dusty and all the spirits have for food is dust. but if you feed your ancestors (this is a ritual called the kispum which consists of food offering, libation and the calling of their names. it's a regular ritual that some sources say was done monthly, and others say it was during the yearly festival of the dead in the month of the god dumuzi/tammuz) then they'll have things to eat and drink in the afterlife! and if you are a spirit, the more descendants you have, the more your well-being is ensured! it's a symbiotic relationship. if your ancestors are satisified, they can help you out with things and act as sort of benevolent protective spirits over the household and the family, and also welcome you in the netherworld when you die. but spirits who were not properly buried or aren't given the proper offerings can wander, come back to haunt you and cause harm. if you would like to know more about this, i recommend dina katz's book, the image of the netherworld in the sumerian sources, an amazing read. the point is, the dead are part of the family, they have their metaphorical place in the family structure and a physical place in the home

people in the notes mentioned that moving probably was difficult. and it definitely was. some of the people buried in these houses were in underground tombs, built from burnt clay bricks, and some others were just in graves dug into the earthen floor, all around the houses. now these brick tombs are often found completely empty, no skeletons, nothing. which means that the family took them when they moved away. probably because they were in some way the most important ancestors, maybe the main lineage of the family? this part is not really clear because these bones are missing, they took them, we don't know anything about them. however, in ur, there are two examples of just the skull being buried and i think that means that family moved to this house from somewhere else and brought the skulls of their ancestors along and re-buried them. it's a very rare find though

from an anthropological perspective, the phyisical proximity of the graves in the same place where the living slept, ate, worked, raised children, etc, was a kind of constant reminder. of their shared ancestors, of their shared identitiy as a family and as a larger clan or kinship group. from a psychological point of view, it was a strategy of coping with grief

important to note also, that this was not practiced by every family. there are houses with no graves at all or just one or two graves, certainly not the whole household. this means that most likely there existed also cemeteries, burial grounds outside the cities. to my knowledge, no cemetary like this has been found yet. but it would be insanely interesting to see what they were like and how the people buried there were different from the people buried in the houses at the same time!

in the end, let me give you a quote from the myth of erra and išum (translated by karel van der toorn in the book mesopotamian magic). this is what a man says about his house:

"These are my living quarters, I have personally made them and will have my peace within them, and when fate has carried me off, I will sleep therein."

i said i can't write a poem about this. and i don't have to, because they already did and it's beautiful

"Oh hell yeah finally some good information about Pythagoras and Goetia, this is really interes- what the fuck is snake-blasting."

I support piracy obviously but I double support academic piracy because there’s not even any argument to be made about taking away royalty money from academics, you don’t get paid for publications, you’re literally just submitting your work to a private publishing house that makes millions of dollars off of it

Ancient sumerian wheat demon who holds dominion over pestilence and crops