Anzu and the Stolen Tablet of Destinies: The Full Story

Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight somebody steals something while somebody else is having a bath. That is the whole hook and I am giving it to you in the first sentence because it is the best opening of any story in this season. The most powerful object in this entire literature, the thing we have been mentioning since the first night, the tablet that makes whatever you say become true, is taken off a peg by the doorkeeper while its owner is in the water. And then everything stops.

Not dramatically. Not with a war. The world goes quiet, and the poem uses the word for silence three times in four lines, and that silence is the real subject of tonight. Somebody has to go and get it back, and nobody wants to, and the poem goes round the room asking, and one after another they say no, in the same words, which is going to be very good for you at this hour. And when somebody finally goes, his arrows turn back in the air.

Stay with it, if you can, to the sixth chapter, for that, because it is the strangest thing that happens in this whole season and I have been looking forward to it for weeks. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you have been here for the gates and the flood and the wall. If so, welcome back.

And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome, and tonight is a good one to start on, because it is short and it is clear and it is mostly one thing happening. 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 three tablets, and they are not a long poem, they are a short one.

Three, he says. That is all it needs. 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 are two names tonight. Anzu, who is the bird. And Ninurta, who goes after him. Everybody else is a job title.

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. Nothing tonight will startle you.

There is a fight in it, and it is in the eighth chapter, and it is over quickly, and the thing that is killed is a bird the size of a mountain who has been sitting on a peak for the entire story doing nothing, and it is told once and set down. The last three chapters are a tablet being taken back, a list of names, and a turtle. I said a turtle and I meant it. Wait for it. 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.

And before the bird, I want to give you the object one more time, because tonight is its last appearance and it has been the thread of this whole season. The Tablet of Destinies. You met it on the first night, when a mother going to war fastened it to the chest of her commander and told him his word would not be altered. It was taken off him afterwards and sealed with somebody else's seal. You met the same idea again in the seven gates, wearing a different name, when a goddess put on the whole set of things that make a working world and had them taken off her one item at a time.

And you met it once more in the story of the eagle, in the background, being important. Tonight it is the plot. And tonight is the only time in this entire literature that we get to see what it actually does when somebody uses it, which is why I have been looking forward to this one, and it is not what anybody expects. His name is Anzu, and he is a bird with the head of a lion, and he is enormous. And the first thing to say about him is that he is not a monster from outside.

He is staff. He was born, the poem says, in the mountains, out of the rock, out of the wide earth. And when he was found, he was brought in and given a job, and the job was to stand at the door of the sanctuary of the lord of the air and keep it. He is the doorkeeper of the highest god in the country. That is the whole setup and it is the most important thing about tonight.

Everything that happens is an inside job, done by a member of staff, in the building where he works, to the man who hired him. And he is old. He is very old. There is an image in the art of that world, of a great bird with a lion's head and outspread wings, sometimes gripping two deer or two lions in its talons, and it turns up on temple facades and on votive plaques and on seals, and it is centuries older than the poem, and there is a magnificent copper one, found at a temple in the south, with the wings spread out over two stags, and you can go and look at it. So the bird is real in the way the winged bulls are real.

He was on doorways before he was in a story. And it is worth saying what that copper one actually is, because it is one of the great objects of the ancient world and it is in a museum in London and you could go and look at it this week. It is about two and a half metres across, more than eight feet, and about a metre high. A great bird with the head of a lion, wings spread out flat on either side, its talons sunk in two stags, one to the left and one to the right. It is made of copper on a backing of bitumen, and it was dug up at the foot of a temple in the far south, where it is thought to have hung above the door, about four and a half thousand years ago.

So people going into that building walked under it, every day, for as long as it stood. That is what he was before he was a thief in a poem. He was the thing over the door, with his wings out, holding the animals, keeping whatever was out there out. And the poem takes that figure, the one everybody had walked underneath their whole lives, and asks: what if he wanted the job of the man inside. And one more thing before we go on, because earlier this season there was an eagle in this house who carried a man up into the sky, and these are not the same bird and I am saying so plainly.

That one was a wild eagle in a poplar tree who broke an oath with a snake. This one is a lion headed thing the size of a hillside who works in a temple. Different creature, different poem, different plot, and the only thing they have in common is wings. And there is one more thing about him that I want you to have before he does anything, because it is the reason the poem is not a simple story about a wicked bird. He was given the job by the god he robs.

The poem is explicit. Somebody found him, in the mountains, and brought him in, and made him the keeper of the sanctuary. He did not apply. He did not sneak in. He was recruited, by the household he later robs, because they wanted a doorkeeper and here was an enormous frightening bird and that is exactly what a doorkeeper should look like.

And then they put him at the door of the room where the most powerful object in the universe is kept, and they left him there, alone, every day, for a very long time, with nothing to do but stand. There is a version of this poem where nobody is surprised by what happens next, and that version is the one the poem itself seems to be telling, because it never once expresses shock. It states his thinking, plainly, as though it were the obvious thing for somebody in that position to think. And I want to say what he was actually guarding, because the poem calls it a sanctuary and that word does a lot of work. The inner room of a temple in that world was not a public space.

Almost nobody went in. There was a courtyard, and then rooms, and then, at the end, the cella, and in the cella was the statue, and the statue was the god, present, in the room. And that room was serviced. Somebody came in at the right hours and washed and dressed and fed the god, and put out the meals, and drew the curtain, and left. So the job of the doorkeeper is to stand at the entrance of the most restricted room in the country and control who goes in.

Which means he is not the outer guard. He is not on the city wall or at the temple gate. He is at the last door, the one before the room where the god actually is, and everything that goes in or out of that room goes past him. That is why he could watch the bathing. That is why he knew the routine.

And that is why, when the tablet was on the side and the room was empty, there was nobody between him and it, because being the person between everybody else and it was his entire job.

Every day the lord of the air took off the Tablet of Destinies to wash. And Anzu watched him do it. That is the entire crime, and it happens in about six lines, and it is the most ordinary theft in this literature. The lord of the air is the one who holds the tablet. It is his.

It is the object that makes his word into the state of the world, and by holding it he holds the assignments of everything, which is what kingship among the gods actually consists of. And I want to be exact about what the object actually is, because we have been calling it the Tablet of Destinies all season and the word destinies is doing us no favours. It is not a book of the future. Nobody consults it. Nobody reads out of it what is going to happen.

In none of the poems does anybody sit down with it and look something up. The word underneath it means something closer to allotments. Assignments. The portions handed out. What each thing has been given to be and to do.

A destiny in that language is not a fate that hunts you down, it is a share that was handed to you, the way an office is handed to an official or a field is allotted to a farmer. So the tablet is not an oracle. It is closer to a seal of office, or a warrant. Whoever holds it, their word about who gets what is simply the case. And it is a physical thing, and small enough to wear.

On the first night of this season a mother fastened it to the chest of the one she sent to fight, and afterwards it was taken off him and sealed with somebody else's seal, and I said at the time that the sealing was the important part. This is why. It is an object that can change hands, and everything follows from who is holding it. And every day he undressed to bathe, and he took it off and put it down, the way you would put down a watch. And I want to slow that down, because the whole poem turns on it and it goes past in a line.

Every day. Not once. Not on a festival. Every day, for as long as the doorkeeper had been standing at that door, the most powerful object in the universe was taken off and set down within arm's reach of him, and then picked up again, and nothing happened. That is what a routine is.

It is a thing that has been safe so many times that nobody looks at it any more. Which is what makes the bath the whole story. He takes it off to wash. He has to. In that world you do not go into the water wearing your office, any more than you would get into a bath wearing a crown.

Washing is its own act, and a serious one, and the god of the air is doing an ordinary and correct thing, in his own house, with a member of his own staff at the door. And the doorkeeper stood at the door, and watched, and the poem tells us what he thought. And the poem does something here that this literature almost never does, which is that it tells you what somebody is thinking. Most of the time these poems report. He went, he said, he did.

They do not open people up. And here, for a few lines, we are inside the head of the doorkeeper, watching him look at the crown, and then at the robe, and then at the tablet, and beginning to arrange a plan around them. It is the only interior monologue of any length in tonight, and it belongs to the thief. He looked at the crown of lordship, it says. He looked at the robe of divinity.

He looked at the tablet in his hands. And he began to plan. I will take the tablet of destinies, he said, and I will gather to myself the commands of all the gods. I will make the throne mine. I will command the whole of the rites.

And I will rule. And his heart, the poem says, planned aggression. And then one morning the water was running and the tablet was on the side and there was nobody in the room. And he took it in his hands, and he flew.

And before the silence, one more thing about the theft itself, because there is a detail in it that I keep coming back to. He watched him do it every day. The poem is clear that this was not one opportunity taken on impulse. The lord of the air bathed regularly, and took the tablet off regularly, and put it down regularly, and the doorkeeper stood at the door and watched, and the poem describes him watching and thinking and planning, over a period. So there was a stretch of time, possibly a long one, during which the most powerful object in the universe was being left unattended in front of somebody who had decided to take it and was waiting for the right morning.

And nobody noticed anything, because nothing had happened yet, and because he was doing his job perfectly the entire time. That is the most modern thing in this poem and I do not think it was meant to be. And here is the best passage in the poem, and it is not the fight. The rites were suspended, it says. The brilliance went out of the sanctuary.

The radiance faded. Silence spread. Silence fell. Silence prevailed. That is what happens.

Not fire, not earthquake, not the sky splitting. The word for the shine on a holy thing simply goes out of it, and silence comes into the room and settles, and the poem says it three different ways in a row because it wants you to sit in it. And it is worth understanding what is actually broken, because it is not that anybody has been hurt. Remember what the tablet does. It makes command real.

It is the connection between somebody saying a thing and the thing being so. And it is on a mountain now, in the possession of a bird, who is not using it. So nothing is countermanded. Nothing is reversed. Nothing terrible is decreed.

What happens is that the mechanism by which anything at all gets decided has been taken out of the building, and the result is not chaos. The result is that nothing happens. The rites stop. The offerings do not have their effect. The words that are supposed to make things so are said and do not make anything so.

Everything continues to exist and nothing continues to work. That is one of the most sophisticated ideas in this literature and it is in a poem about a giant bird, and it is why the silence gets three lines. And there is one more consequence of the theft, and it is the one that ought to frighten you and probably will not until you think about it later. Nobody could countermand it. The tablet is the thing that makes a command real.

Which means that the only way to reverse what has happened would be for somebody to issue an order that has force, and the object that gives orders force is on a mountain. So the gods are in the position of a government that has lost the thing that makes its decisions binding, and the only way to get it back is to make a decision. They can still talk. They can still meet. They can still agree.

And none of it does anything, and every single one of them knows it, and they hold a meeting anyway, because that is what institutions do. And there is one more consequence of the silence that I want to give you before the meeting, and it is a domestic one. The offerings stopped working. Not stopped being made. Stopped working.

And in that world those are completely different problems and the second one is much worse. Everything in that country ran on a transaction. You bring the god bread and beer and meat, at the right hour, in the right way, and in return the rain comes and the barley grows and the child is born and the illness lifts. That is the arrangement, and it is stated in those terms in a thousand texts, and it is why the temples were the size they were. And the thing that made the transaction bind was the machinery that is currently sitting on a mountain in the possession of a bird.

So picture a country where every temple in every city is still doing everything correctly, every morning, and nothing is coming back. The offerings go in and nothing happens. The prayers are said and nothing happens. The festivals come round on the calendar and are performed properly and nothing happens. That is what the silence is, from the ground.

It is not quiet. It is everybody still shouting and nobody hearing anything.

And the gods gathered, and the sky god, who is the oldest of them, asked for somebody to go. And here is a long lovely passage that is built entirely out of refusals, and it is the best sleep architecture in tonight, so let it happen. And before they start refusing, I want you to hear what is actually being offered, because it is repeated three times word for word and it is easy to let it wash past as flattery. Your name will be the greatest in the assembly. There will be shrines for you in the four quarters.

Your cities will be built. You will have sanctuaries in all the world. That is not a compliment. That is a contract. A god in that country was not an idea.

A god was an institution with a physical address. To have a shrine is to have a building, with a roof and a door and a statue in it. To have sanctuaries in the four quarters is to be worshipped in every direction from the centre, which is the phrase they used for the whole of the known world. And your cities will be built means what it says: settlements, with people in them, whose business is you. So the offer is this.

Go up that mountain, and we will make you real in the ground. You will have somewhere to be, in stone, in four directions, for as long as anybody keeps it up. That is the highest thing the assembly of the gods has to give, and it is offered three times, and it is turned down three times, which tells you exactly how frightening the mountain was. And the ones who turn it down are named in the poem, and they are not nobodies. The first is the storm, the one with the thunder, who is the sky god's own son.

The second is fire. The third is another young god of the same generation. These are working deities with cults of their own, and every one of them hears the offer of shrines in the four quarters and says no thank you. And their reason is the same reason every time, and it is not fear exactly, it is arithmetic. He has the tablet.

Whatever he says becomes what is so. Therefore if I go up there, and he opens his mouth, then whatever he says about me is what I will be. And I will become like clay. Read that last line again, because it is a very precise piece of horror and it is the only frightening sentence in tonight. They are not afraid of being killed.

Being killed is a normal risk and these are gods. They are afraid of being described. The thing on the mountain can say a sentence about you and the sentence will be true. He does not have to beat you. He has to mention you.

And clay is what they were made of, and clay is what people were made of, and clay is what everything in that world was made of before somebody said a word over it and made it something. To become like clay is to be returned to the material, unassigned, before your portion was handed to you. That is what they are all saying no to. Not death. Erasure back to the raw stuff.

And every one of them says it in the same words, three times over, and the sky god listens three times, and the room stays exactly as full as it was. He called for the storm god first, the son of the sky, the one with the thunder. He said: go. Kill Anzu. Bring back the tablet.

And your name will be the greatest in the assembly of the gods. There will be shrines for you in the four quarters. Your cities will be built. You will have sanctuaries in all the world. And the storm god answered him, and said: my father.

Who could go to the mountain that no one goes to? Anzu holds the tablet of destinies in his hand. He has taken the rites of the lord of the air. Command is dispersed. If I go to him, whatever he says to me becomes what is so, and I will become like clay.

And the sky god heard it, and he turned to the next one. He called the god of fire. He said: go. Kill Anzu. Bring back the tablet.

And your name will be the greatest in the assembly of the gods. There will be shrines for you in the four quarters. Your cities will be built. You will have sanctuaries in all the world. And the god of fire answered him, and said: my father.

Who could go to the mountain that no one goes to? Anzu holds the tablet of destinies in his hand. Whatever he says becomes what is so, and I will become like clay. And the sky god turned to the third one and said it all again, the whole offer, word for word, the shrines and the four quarters and the cities and the sanctuaries. And the third one said it all again too, word for word, the mountain and the tablet and the clay.

Three times. The same offer, the same refusal, in the same words, and if you were drifting through that then you got exactly what it was for, which is that this poem is telling you that everybody said no, and it is telling you by having everybody say no. And notice what the refusal actually is, because it is a good one. They are not cowards. What they are saying is: he has the object that makes speech true, so if I go up there and he speaks, I lose.

You cannot fight somebody whose word is automatically correct.

Before anybody goes, I owe you the other poems, because there are two of them and the red team on my desk says to give them one pointer and not a second episode, and that is exactly right. There are two long Sumerian poems about the young god who is about to be sent, and they are not this story. One of them is a poem about him going to a mountain and fighting a thing made of stone, and then coming back and organising the world afterwards, and the second half of it is a list of stones and what each one is now good for and why, which sounds dull and is not, because it is a poem explaining why flint splits the way it does and why obsidian is sharp and why limestone is soft, and each explanation is a sentence about how that stone behaved in the fight. The other is a poem about him coming home in his chariot, and it is essentially a triumph, and hanging on the front of the chariot are the things he has defeated, and the poem lists them, and the list has a bird on it. So the young god of tonight has a career, and it is written up elsewhere at length, and in it he goes to mountains and deals with what is on them and comes back and gets praised.

That is the pointer, and that is all it is, and we are going back to tonight's poem now. And then somebody proposed a name. In the version we have most fully, it is the clever one, the god of the sweet water, who has been in this house every night of this season, and he goes to the mother of the gods, the one who makes people, and he says: send your son. And I want to say who his mother is, because of all the connections in this season this is the one that made me put my pen down. She is the mother of the gods.

In the poem the clever one goes to her, and it is her he asks, and it is she who calls her son and sends him. And she is the same goddess who made people. She is the one from the older story, the one who was called in when the gods were tired of digging the canals themselves, and who took clay, and mixed it with the blood of a god, and pinched off fourteen pieces, and made the first human beings out of them. Seven and seven. That is her.

That is what she is for. She is the maker. And now go back three chapters, to the room where the assembly is sitting and nobody will volunteer. Every single god who refused gave the same reason, and the reason was: if I go up there he will speak, and whatever he says will be so, and I will become like clay. Clay is her material.

They are all sitting in a room saying that the thing on the mountain can turn them back into the raw stuff, and the person they eventually go to for help is the one who knows what that stuff is for, because she is the one who takes it in her hands and makes things out of it. I do not know whether the poet did that on purpose. Nobody can know that. The connection is there in the text and neither poem points at it, which either means it is an accident or it means it was so obvious to them that it did not need pointing at. But it is there, and it is the sort of thing this literature does constantly, and it is why these poems reward being read next to each other.

The gods are frightened of being unmade. So they go and ask the maker. And she does not go herself. She sends her son, the one whose other job is the plough and the furrow and the seed drill, which is the other way of making something out of the ground. And she called him, and she sent him, and his name is Ninurta, and in the older southern version of this poem the same job is done by a god called Ningirsu and it is the same story with a different name in it.

He is a young god, and he is the one who is always sent. That is his whole character in this literature. If there is a thing on a mountain that has to be dealt with, he goes. And here is the thing about him that almost nobody knows, and it is the reason I like him. He is a farmer.

Not only. He is a war god and a storm god and a hunter and the son of the lord of the air, and all of that is in the hymns. But he is also, and centrally, the god of the plough and of the field, and there is a text called the farmer's instructions, which is a practical agricultural manual, real advice about when to flood a field and how deep to plough and how to keep the seed drill running, and the whole thing is framed as his instruction. So the god they send up the mountain to get the tablet back is the one whose day job is telling people how to grow barley. And there is a version of the poem where the older southern name is used instead, and that god belongs to a particular city in the south and is the same figure, and the story is the same story with a different name in it, which is how this literature works and is worth being unbothered by.

And he went. And the poem says he raised a storm around himself, and gathered the winds, and went up the mountain, and Anzu saw him coming. And Anzu looked down and said: who are you, that you have come to fight me? What made you decide to do this? And Ninurta answered him with his own name and his father's.

I am Ninurta, he said, the son of the lord of the air. I have come to fight you, and I am going to crush you.

And before the arrows, one thing about what he actually walked into, because I want you to have the scale of it. The poem says the mountain shook when he approached, and that the bird saw him coming from a long way off, and it describes the two of them across a distance, and then it describes the noise. Because there is noise in this fight. The poem is loud in a way that almost nothing else in this season is. There are winds.

There is dust. There is a description of the sound of the two of them that uses the word for a storm. And it is worth having, because the rest of this season has been so quiet. We have had a lamp in a room and a river going by and a woman writing in a moon house and a raft in the sunshine and seven gates and a bath. Tonight, for about two chapters, there is an enormous amount of noise on a mountain, and then it stops, and the quiet afterwards is the whole point of it.

And he shot. And this is the passage I have been promising you all night and it is thirty seconds long and it is the most extraordinary idea in this season. The arrow flew, and Anzu saw it coming, and he spoke. And what he said was this. Reed that has come, he said.

Go back to your canebrake. Bow frame, go back to your thicket. Bowstring, go back to the sinew of the sheep. Feathers, go back to the birds. And the arrow turned back in the air, and it never reached him.

The shaft, which is a reed, he told to go back to being a reed growing in a marsh. The bow, which is wood, he told to go back to being a tree in a wood. The string, which is sinew, he told to go back to the sheep. And the flights, which are feathers, he told to go back to being feathers on a living bird. It did not hit him.

It did not fall. It turned round, as though it had heard him and was on its way home. The poem never says it came to pieces. It says only that the shaft turned back, and that no arrow came near his body. Now sit in that for a moment, because there is nothing else like it.

That is the tablet of destinies being used, and it is the only time in any of these poems that we get to watch somebody use it, and this is what it can do. It does not throw fire. It does not summon an army. It says a true thing about what something used to be, and the thing obeys. Every arrow he shot turned back.

Not one came near his body. Not because he was fast or armoured, but because on that mountain, for as long as he held that object, a weapon could be told to go back where it came from, and it would obey. And Ninurta stood there with a bow that was not going to work and no idea what to do. And I want to sit in that for a moment because the poem does, and because it is the only time in this season that anybody is defeated by an argument. He is not outmatched.

He is better armed and he is younger and he has the whole assembly of heaven behind him and he has already got up the mountain, which is more than anybody else was willing to do. And none of it is any use, because every time he acts, the thing he acts with is told to go home, and turns back. That is a very particular kind of helplessness and I do not think there is another example of it in ancient literature. You are not beaten. You are not outfought.

Your arrows are turned round in mid air by somebody telling them where they came from. And he stands there on a mountain, in the wind, with a bow, and his arrows turning back in the air in front of him. And I want to stay with that arrow for one more minute, because there is a second thing in it that took me a long time to see. Look at what the four things are. The reed comes from a canebrake.

The bow frame comes from a wood. The string comes from a sheep. The feathers come from a bird. That is a manufacturing list. That is somebody describing, in reverse, exactly how an arrow is made and where each part of it came from, and any person in that country who had ever handled a bow would have known all four of those things and probably done two of them.

So the great supernatural power in this poem, the thing the tablet of destinies actually does when we finally get to watch it work, is to know accurately what everything is made of and where it came from, and to say so out loud. It is not magic in the sense of something arriving from outside. It is knowledge, applied with authority, and the authority is what makes the knowledge bite. And there is a thing I have been circling for two chapters and I want to say it plainly before the answer comes back, because it is what the whole poem is actually about. Speech and force are two different technologies, and this poem is about what happens when one of them stops working.

Look at what has been tried. The gods held a meeting, which is speech, and it produced agreement and no result. They made an offer, three times, in identical words, which is speech, and it produced three refusals. Somebody went up the mountain with a bow, which is force, and the force was turned back by speech in mid air. And the thing that finally works is neither of them on its own.

It is force applied at the precise moment when the other party's speech is committed elsewhere. That is the whole solution. Not a stronger arrow. Not a better argument. Timing.

And it comes from the one god in this literature who has never once in twelve episodes solved anything by being stronger than somebody. He put the first god to sleep with a spell. He got a goddess back from the queen of the dead by having two small creatures agree with her. He told a fisherman what to say at a gate. And here he wins a fight he is not present at by predicting what a bird will say to its own feathers.

So he sent a message. And I want to say something about weapons with names, because it is one of the genuinely strange habits of this literature and tonight is the clearest example of it. Things that hit people were given names in that world, and the names were not decoration. A mace had a name. A bow had a name.

A great door had a name, and so did a gate, and so did a canal, and so did a temple, and so did a boundary stone. When a king dedicated a weapon in a temple he wrote the name on it, and the name was usually a whole sentence, something like the one that brings down the mountain, or the one that does not turn back. And a named thing, in that language, is a thing with a share of its own. It has been allotted something. It is not entirely furniture any more.

Which is why the mace in tonight's poem can be sent on an errand. So when the poem says he sent his weapon down the mountain with a message, nobody who first heard it found that surprising. Of course the mace can carry a message. It has a name. And I have to tell you about the messenger, because the messenger is a mace.

His weapon in this poem has a name, and the name means something like the smasher of thousands, and it is not simply an object. It flies. It talks. It goes on errands. It reports back.

In the Sumerian poems it is a character with opinions who occasionally gives him bad advice and has to be corrected. So the sequence is this. A young god is on a mountain, unable to hit anything, and he takes his weapon and tells it what to say and throws it, and it flies several hundred miles down to the marshes in the south, delivers the message, waits for the answer, and flies back with instructions. That is how a question gets asked in this poem. You throw your mace at somebody who knows.

He sent his own weapon, which in this poem is a character with a name and can talk and fly, back down the mountain to the god of the sweet water, to ask what to do. And the answer came back, and it is the best piece of advice in this literature, and it is entirely mechanical. Do not stop shooting, he said. Keep going. Raise a dust storm around him so that he cannot see.

Wear him out. And in the middle of it, cut off his wings. Tear out his pinions. Throw them away, one to the right and one to the left. And then he will look, and he will see his own feathers flying past him in the air, and he will not know what they are, and he will call out to them.

He will say wing to wing. And the moment he says that, the moment those words are out of his mouth, put the arrow through him.

And before it works, I want to say what the advice actually understands about him, because it is a piece of character reading and not a piece of tactics. The clever god knows him. Near the start of the poem, when the lord of the air first set eyes on the bird, it was the clever god who looked the bird over, and told the lord of the air what he was, and said, put him on the door. He is a long way away now, in the marshes in the south, and the message came by mace. And what he says is: cut his wings off and throw the feathers past him, and he will call out to them.

That is a prediction about behaviour. Not about physics. He is saying: this creature's entire instinct, the thing he does without thinking, faster than he can consider it, is to speak to a thing that is out of its place and tell it to go back where it belongs. He has been doing it to arrows all afternoon. It is the only move he has.

It is what he is. So put his own feathers in front of him, and he will do it to those, automatically, because that is what he does. And the moment he does, he is speaking to the wrong object. That is not a trick played on a monster. That is somebody who has known him since the day he was hired, working out, from a description delivered by a flying mace, exactly what he will do when he is frightened, and building the whole plan on it.

And that is exactly what happened. He kept shooting. He raised the dust. He kept the fight going until the bird grew tired and his wings sank in the storm, and then he aimed at his back, and cut away the pinions, and the feathers went flying out into the air on both sides. And Anzu saw feathers going past him.

And he did what anybody would do, and what the clever god knew he would do, which is that he tried to fix it. He called out to them. Wing to wing, he said, meaning come back, meaning join, meaning be whole again. And in that instant he was not talking about the arrow. That is the trick, and it is exquisite, and it took me a long time to see it properly.

His power only works on the thing he speaks to. Every time an arrow came at him he spoke to the arrow, and the arrow obeyed. The moment he spoke to his own feathers instead, the arrow was nobody's business. And it went through him. And the poem says he fell, and that the mountain shook, and that the wide earth was quiet.

And I want to stop on that quiet, because it is the second silence in this poem and it is not the same as the first. The first silence was the world stopping. The rites failing, the words not landing, everything continuing to exist and nothing continuing to work. This silence is a mountain with a dead bird on it and the wind going over. Same word, probably.

Completely different thing. And the poem puts them at either end of the story on purpose, so that the whole shape of it is: silence, and then a great deal of noise, and then silence again, and the second one is the one you can sleep in.

And before he picks it up, I want to say what that moment actually is, because the poem does not make a fuss of it and it is the largest opportunity anybody is ever offered in this literature. He is alone on a mountain. There are no witnesses. The assembly is a very long way below and they have already demonstrated that not one of them will come up here. The previous holder is dead on the ground next to him.

And the object that makes any word true is lying loose. There is nothing between him and it except his own decision. And we have just spent four chapters establishing that whoever holds it can say a thing and have the thing be so, which means that if he picked it up and said I am the lord of the air, that sentence would be correct, immediately, and there would be no mechanism anywhere in the universe by which anybody could disagree. That is the situation. The poem sets it up meticulously and then does not comment on it at all.

And the damaged lines are right there. And Ninurta took the tablet of destinies out of his hands. And the mountain is worth a word, because it is the last mountain of this kind in the season. In the poem it is simply his mountain, the one nobody can reach, and where it is meant to be is not said, and the general sense is somewhere north and east, in the ranges, which is where that country put everything it did not control. Every mountain in this literature is in that direction.

The cedar forest was that way. The place where the sun goes in and out is that way. The country where the eagle carried the king is up. It is a flat country, and everything strange in its stories is on high ground somewhere over the horizon. And in this case there is a bird on it, and now there is not.

And here is the fragment I have to be honest with you about, because it is one of the most interesting broken places in this whole literature. There are lines, damaged, in which something happens after the recovery and before the praise at the end. Something about the tablet, and about him, and about not letting it go, and the text is in pieces and the readings differ and nobody can tell you with confidence what it said. Some think it is a moment of hesitation. That the young god, standing on a mountain with the object that makes any word true in his hands, thought about it.

Others think the damaged lines say nothing of the kind. The clay breaks there, and I am not going to tell you what was on it. And when the clay picks up again, the poem is praising him, and the matter seems settled. Most readers take it that he gave the tablet back, that it went home to the lord of the air, and the rites started again and the brilliance came back into the sanctuary and the silence ended. But the lines that would tell us so are lost, and I will not pretend otherwise.

And there is a small thing in the fight that I have never seen anybody mention, and I want to give it to you because it is the last piece of the puzzle. He had to wear him out first. Whatever else you think about the wings, the poem is careful about how they come off. The arrows have all failed. So he keeps the fight going, in the wind and the dust, until the bird is so tired that his wings sink in the storm, and his back is open to the darts.

So the sequence is: shoot from far away and be turned back. Raise the dust. Keep fighting until he tires and his wings drop. Then aim at his back, and cut the pinions away, and scatter them. And then, when he calls out to his feathers, shoot.

The clever god's plan is not really a trick about words at all. It is a plan for wearing down something that can turn a weapon back with a word, and then giving a young god one clear shot at the exact second the thing is distracted by its own feathers.

And they gave him names. And I want to give you some of them, because a list at this hour is the best thing I have, and because they are a portrait of what that world wanted a young god to be. They called him the one who made every enemy bow before his father. They called him the one who can slay mountains. They called him the one who broke the strength of the soaring bird.

They called him the guardian of the throne. They called him the master of secret knowledge. In Elam they called him Hurabtil, and in Susa they called him Inshushinak. And in the furrow, they said, his name was Ningirsu, because that is who he is when he is not on a mountain. For the city of Isin they called him Lugalbanda, and there are more, temple after temple, city after city.

And that is the point of the list. So many of those names belong to the gods of other cities, one after another, and the poem gathers every one of them into him. And if you were here on the first night of this season you will recognise exactly what is happening, because we ended that night with a room full of gods sitting at a table saying names over a young god who had killed something and brought something back, and here it is again, in a different poem, in a different city, for a different young god. They called him the one who can slay mountains. They called him Hurabtil, and Inshushinak, and Lugalbanda.

They called him by his name in the furrow. Name after name, each with a line or two attached, and the poem gives them one at a time in a list, and the list is the ending, or as much of it as the clay has kept. And the reason the two poems have the same ending is that this is what that world thought a victory actually was. Not the killing. The naming afterward.

The moment when the assembly agrees, out loud, in front of everybody, what somebody now is. And there is one fact about this god and this bird that I have been keeping for the end of the list, and it is the strangest true thing in the episode. The bird is his emblem. Not the bird's own. His.

The god who goes up the mountain and kills the lion headed eagle carries the lion headed eagle as his sign. In the south, where he is worshipped under the older name, the great bird with the lion's head is the emblem of his temple and of his city. It is on the seals. It is on the votive plaques. It is on the maces dedicated to him.

On one of the most famous carved monuments to survive from that country, a stone slab set up by a king to commemorate a border war, the god is shown holding a net with the defeated inside it, and above the net, with its wings out, is the bird. And when a ruler of that same city rebuilt the god's great temple, centuries later, and wrote an enormous poem about doing it, the temple is described again and again in terms of that bird. It is the thing the building is likened to. The name of the temple itself is bound up with it. So the emblem of the god who killed the Anzu is the Anzu.

Now, I want to be careful here, because there is an obvious explanation and it is probably the right one, and it is that this is what a trophy is. You put the thing you defeated on your standard. Kings did it with lions. Cities did it with the beasts of their neighbours. To carry the bird is to say every time anybody looks at you that you are the one who took it down.

But I do not think that is the whole of it, and here is why. The bird on those monuments is not dead. It is not hanging. It is not being trodden on. It has its wings out and it is holding animals in its talons and it is doing exactly what it was doing over that temple door four and a half thousand years ago, which is guarding.

It did not become a trophy. It went back to work. And that, I think, is the actual ending of tonight, underneath the list of names and the tablet being taken back. The doorkeeper robbed the house and was killed for it, and then the household put his picture back over the door and kept him there, with his wings out, guarding, for the next two thousand years. They did not need a new doorkeeper.

They needed that one to go back to being what he was before he wanted the room behind him. And before the turtle, I want to gather up something that has been running all season and that finishes tonight. Count the young gods. On the first night, a young god of a new city was given the kingship because nobody else would face what was in the water, and he asked for the power to make his word true as his price, and they tested him on a garment and gave it to him, and at the end of the night they said fifty names over him at a table. And tonight, a young god is sent up a mountain because nobody else will go, and he wins by a trick told to him by the same clever god, and at the end of it they say names over him.

Same shape. Two different cities, two different languages, probably several centuries apart. That is what those poems were for. A city with a rising god needed a story in which their god does the thing that has to be done and is named for it afterwards, and the shape of that story was fixed and everybody used it. Which means that when you hear the naming at the end of tonight, you are hearing the same ceremony you heard on the first night of this season, performed for somebody else, by people who wanted their own god to be the one at the table.

Now. There is another poem, and it is in the older language, and it is not this one, and I am telling you that clearly because I am about to tell you a story that contradicts the ending you just heard. It is called Ninurta and the Turtle. And in it, the same young god comes home from beating the bird, and the tablet has already gone back to the deep water, and great things are promised to him, and it is not enough. He wants more.

He wants the whole world. And the god of the sweet water, who told him how to win, notices. And he does not fight him. He does not argue with him. He goes down to the deep water and takes some clay and he makes a turtle.

And the turtle comes up, and it starts scratching at the ground with its claws, and it digs a pit. And the young god, who has just beaten the storm bird and been promised so much, falls into the hole. And the turtle gets in with him, and starts gnawing at his feet. And he cannot get out. That is it.

That is where our copy goes. The mightiest young god in the country, the one who broke the bird, at the bottom of a pit dug by a turtle, with the turtle biting his ankles, and the god who made it standing at the edge looking down. And I want to say why I have given you that, because it is not in the main poem and I could have left it out. The Akkadian poem breaks at exactly the moment he might have kept the tablet. It breaks there.

That is genuinely all we have. And there is a whole separate poem, in an older language, in which he wants more than he was given, and a turtle puts him in a hole. That is not proof of anything about the broken lines. Two poems, two traditions, and I am not merging them. But when somebody tells you the clay breaks at the interesting moment, and there happens to be another poem where a young god's ambition goes wrong and is dealt with by a reptile, I think you should be told about both, and then you can hold them however you like.

And there is one more thing about that object I want to gather up before we finish, because it has been running through this whole season and tonight is the last time we will see it. Count where it has been. On the first night of this season, a mother going to war strapped it to the chest of her commander, and it was taken off him after the battle and sealed with somebody else's seal and fastened to a different chest. On the seventh and eighth nights, the powers that a goddess put on and had taken off her one at a time at seven gates are the same kind of thing by a different name, the offices and functions of a working world, worn as clothing. And tonight it comes off a peg while somebody is washing, and goes up a mountain, and is taken back on the mountain, and after that, by most readings, it goes home, though the clay that would show us is broken.

Nobody in three thousand years of this literature ever destroys it. Nobody ever hides it for good. It gets taken, and it gets recovered, and it changes hands, in poem after poem, and the thing that stays constant is that somebody always goes after it. That is not a coincidence. That is what they thought about authority.

It is an object. It can be picked up by the wrong person. And the story is always about putting it back. And there is one more thing about him afterwards, and it is not what you would expect from a story where he is the villain. He did not become a byword for wickedness.

The lion headed bird went on being carved over doorways. He went on appearing on seals and plaques and in temple decoration. The image did not go away and it did not become a warning. People kept putting him up over their entrances, wings out, exactly as before, for centuries after this poem was in circulation. And his name turns up in the incantation literature in a way that is almost affectionate.

He is invoked. There are texts where his name is used against other things, on the reasonable principle that if you have a problem you want something enormous on your side. So the thief in the poem and the guardian on the door are the same figure and both were held at once, without any apparent difficulty, by the same people, for a very long time. Which is a thing this literature does constantly and which I have come to find restful rather than confusing. Nobody in that world seems to have felt that a story about somebody had to settle what they were.

The bird stole the tablet in the poem and kept the door in the house, and both were true on the same afternoon. And there is one last thing I want to give you, and it is about the young god and what happened to him afterwards, because it is not what happens to the young god on the first night of this season. That one became the head of a pantheon. His city became the centre of the world and his name went into every list and the fifty names stuck. This one did not.

He stayed important, for a long time, in the south and then in the north, and he had great temples and a serious cult and kings named themselves after him. But he never became the god of the whole country. He remained what he was at the start, which is the one who is sent when there is a thing on a mountain. And the poem is completely at peace with that. The names it gives him at the end are the names of somebody excellent at a particular job.

The one who can slay mountains. The one who made every enemy bow before his father. The name in the furrow. That is a career, not a coronation. And I find it the more restful of the two, at this hour, because most people are not going to end up running the pantheon, and the alternative the poem offers is to be extremely good at the thing you are sent to do and to be thanked for it by name at a table afterwards.

The lamp is low now. The tablet is out of the bird's grip. That is the ending, and it is a very small ending for a story with a bird the size of a hillside in it. The object was taken, and it was carried up a mountain, and it was taken back on the mountain, and soon after that the clay breaks, and most readers have it carried home and given back to the one it belongs to. And if that is how it went, and most think it is, then the brilliance came back into the sanctuary, and the rites started again, and the offerings began to work, and words began to mean things again.

Think about what that would have felt like, in that world, if you believed it. There was a period, in the old time, when the machinery of the world was switched off. Nobody knew how long. And then it came back on. And on the mountain there is a very large dead bird, and nobody is on that peak now, and nothing is guarding anything, and the wind is going over it.

And somewhere else, in a different poem in an older language, a young god is at the bottom of a pit with a turtle, and neither of them is going anywhere, and the god who arranged it is standing at the edge, and the tablet is safe. That is the last picture I have for you tonight and I am aware it is a peculiar one. The most powerful object in this literature spends its entire existence being taken off a peg and fetched back. Somebody steals it and dies. Somebody recovers it and possibly wants it.

Somebody makes a turtle. And at the end, by most readings, it goes back to where it was, and everything starts working again. 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 arrow turning back in the air, and a voice on a mountain telling the reed to go home to the marsh, and the feathers to go home to the birds.

Sleep well. Goodnight.