by Jeroen Bouterse
Under Nanna’s moon – a girl under Nanna’s moon, alone I lie
Under Nanna’s moon drifting over the pure mountains alone I lie,
Under the mountains of the cedars where sleeps Mullil alone I lie.[1]
“It would be nice to go back to caring about the moon”, writes Omar El Akkad in 2025. He can’t, because “no description of the moon […] reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.” Bertold Brecht wrote in the 1930s that in his time, talking about trees was almost a crime, because it implied silence about so many wrongs.
Brecht’s words are addressed To those born after, those who “will emerge from the flood that engulfed us”. They are asked to judge mildly: “when you speak of our weaknesses, remember too the dark time from which you escaped.” El Akkad’s book is titled One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. For him, the passing of time will allow us to settle down in comfortable and hypocritical narratives about our own innocence, and teach us nothing.
The lines above are an attempt to escape into a time where caring about the moon and talking about trees were possible. The millennia-old poetry produced by the early cities of ancient Mesopotamia seems out of reach of modernity and its missiles. We can rest our eyes on a divinity dedicating a riverbank to his mother:
May its meadows grow herbs for you,
may its ledges grow grapevines and (yield) grape sirop for you,
may its slopes grow cedar, cypress, supalu-trees and box for you,
may it adorn itself for you with tree fruit like an orchard.[2]
The distant past was not innocent; people died young there, from disease, violence, and hunger – there is Sumerian verse mentioning starvation threats as an instrument of war.[3] Even between these generic but optimistic lines of blessing – a demon that terrified the high gods themselves has just been vanquished; the future looks bright – it is not difficult to read helplessness and terror. We have to hope that meadows grow their herbs and slopes grow their cedar trees; the alternative is awful to imagine.
When the Sumerians sang about the trees and the moon, they were not substituting beauty for reality. Brecht writes: “I practised love without paying attention / And I looked at nature without patience”; Sumerian verse on the other hand speaks with detail and care about nature, and deals with procreation with a cheerfulness that is always on the verge of trepidation. In one poem, the goddess Ninmah cries that her city is lost, after the god Enki has caused a child to be born prematurely.[4]
I am not the grass
Enki was making a point. Ninmah had boasted she could thwart human well-being by creating abnormalities, and caused some people to be born blind, or cripple, or to lack male or female reproductive organs. Enki found meaningful work for all of them: the blind could become a musician, the cripple a smith, the neuter a courtier. The takeaway is that everyone adds value, that bringing people into the world is a good thing; that every human life is precious, not because of a divine command or because of the dignity of the individual soul, but because it is needed. The only thing that really harms a city is being deprived of people altogether.
Every birth, then, is a small triumph; and there is a loss in every unfinished pregnancy or early death – a noticeable retreat of civilization against its other. When demons take the shepherd Dumuzi, they also leave his sheepfold in disarray: “the cups lay on their sides, Dumuzi lived there no more, the winds only swept the fold.”[5] Dumuzi has been abducted from a place where his presence mattered; one that becomes empty or haunted in his absence. Where the person disappears, human culture also withdraws. Inanna, Dumuzi’s wife, voices the same idea:
On his couch you have made the jackals lie down,
in my husband’s fold you have made the raven dwell,
his reed-pipe – the wind will have to play it,
my husband’s songs – the North Wind will have to sing them![6]
Some of the most touching lines I have read in Thorkild Jacobsen’s moving translation are of Dumuzi realizing he has died. There too, attention is drawn to what his absence takes away from the world that remains – in this case, specifically his mother, who is still looking for him.
Woe! I am become a ghost! Woe, I am become a ghost,
I am not one who can answer my mother listening in Guedinna,
my mother, who is calling me in the desert,
who is letting the call for me resound in the desert.
She will not be answered
I am not the grass, will not grow up for her again,
I am not the waters, will not rise for her again,
I am not the grass sprouting in the desert,
I am not the new grass growing up in the desert![7]
The gap that a person leaves when they are torn away is not something that nature’s cycles can easily fill or smoothen.
To far-off days
Reaching back beyond Brecht’s dark times, I should also reckon with the fact that the Sumerians thought of themselves as living after the Deluge. They famously gave us the Flood story; it is one of the threads connecting them to our world. In a Sumerian text about the death of Gilgamesh, the god Enki remembers how “in those days, in those distant days, in those nights, in those distant nights, in those years, in those distant years, after the assembly had made the Flood sweep over to destroy the seed of mankind”, he was the only one who stood up for our survival, under the condition that individual immortality would be taken away from us. In another poem, it is awareness of his finite existence that leads Gilgamesh to go on his quest to the cedar forest, to slay its guardian and cut down its trees.
In the later (Akkadian) Gilgamesh epic, these stories are connected more strongly. Gilgamesh’ friend and lover Enkidu joins him in the destruction of the cedar forest, where its defeated guardian curses them. After their return, a chain of events results in Enkidu’s death. This prompts the inconsolable Gilgamesh to look up the survivors of the Deluge in a bid for personal immortality. He learns that he is irreversibly cut off from the pre-diluvian past; he can only bring its story home. There is consolation at the end of the poem in the realization that though Gilgamesh will die, his city will live on.
Given the loving way in which Sumerian poetry connects its depictions of lively and well-ordered cities with the thriving of its inhabitants, the most disturbing texts are descriptions of destroyed communities. In the lamentation for Ur, we learn of violence and hunger overtaking the city – “weak and strong both perished in the famine. The old men and women who could not leave the house were consigned to the flames”.[8]
As the events themselves have now passed, the Sumerian lamentation focuses on the depopulation that has resulted. The goddess Ningal – wife of the moon-god Nanna – surveys the devastation from outside, and observes what the city has come to now that it is emptied of people:
my sheep are not left in their fold, their shepherd boy was led off captive.
In my city’s river dust is gathered, foxholes are verily made therein,
flowing waters are not carried in them, their collector of tolls was led off captive.
On my city’s fields is no grain, their farmer was led off captive,
my fields, like fields withdrawn from the hoe, have verily grown new weeds;
my orchard-troughs, full of honey and wine, have verily grown mountain thorn.[9]
The desolation is pictured as the result of a storm ordered by the mighty storm-god Enlil. The lamentation appeals to the moon-god never to allow that storm to be repeated.
O father Nanna, may that storm (on its flight) from your city not alight!
May it not pile up your dark-headed nation before your eyes.
May that stormy day – like rain rained down from heaven – not recur!
It asks for the day the storm took place to be erased from the calendar, to be carried off “to far-off days, to other days, to the end of time”.[10]
Those words themselves have been carried to far-off days, to us born later. The storms are with us, too. Whether we get to talk about trees or the moon, I can’t say; but in those distant days, they talked about all of it.
[1] Thorkild Jacobsen, John A. Wilson, Most Ancient Verse. University of Chicago Press: 1963, p. 5
[2] Thorkild Jacobsen, The harps that once … Sumerian poetry in translation. Yale University Press: 1987, p. 254.
[3] Ibid., 275 (explaining the story of which he then presents the translation).
[4] See the link in the main text, or for Jacobsen’s translation (which I rely on): The harps that once, 158ff.
[5] Again, using Jacobsen’s translation: The harps that once, 31.
[6] Ibid., 49.
[7] Ibid., 76.
[8] Ibid., 461.
[9] Ibid., 464.
[10] Ibid., 473.