As Eager as a New Moon: A Glimpse of Gilgamesh & Inanna

This is just a small, contemporary glimpse of the first love story ever written down, thousands of years before the Bible. It comes from a land hot, dry and sparse, and a people wily enough to make it work there, what we now know as southern Iraq. What we think of as Sumer was first settled in the fifth millennium B.C. In the centuries that unfolded, the Sumerians became a profoundly substantial culture, not just artistically but economically. The cuneiform tablets they gradually developed are where we, fairly recently, unearthed the stories of Inanna.

Whether it is Gilgamesh carving a throne from a tree for Inanna, or sending a lover to sedate Enkidu, both stories are partially to do with humans renegotiating the terms with the earth around them, and through that, the gods themselves. These stories are an axis between the aboriginal and the so-called civilised worlds.