Guest post written by Inanna author Emily H. Wilson
Emily H. Wilson is a journalist and is the first female editor of New Scientist magazine. She has a life-long interest in prehistory and ancient history. She is married and lives in the West Country. Inanna is an enthralling and lyrical fantasy re-telling of The Epic of Gilgamesh that will captivate readers of Madeline Miller and Jennifer Saint.
The world has seen a flood of mythological retellings in the past five years. Many of them have focussed on the legends of ancient Greece, but increasingly writers have been turning to other ancient cultures for inspiration.
There are some ancient civilisations, however, that have barely got a look as the market for books in the myths /history/fantasy space has ballooned. One of those sadly neglected cultures is Ancient Sumer, which lay in what is now modern Iraq.
Here are ten reasons why, in my humble opinion, we urgently need some novels set in Sumer:
1. Ancient Sumer doesn’t have great name recognition these days, but it is actually the world’s first civilisation. Two thousand years before the Greeks set out for Troy, Sumer had cities, canals and writing. By the year 3,500BC, the Sumerian city of Uruk, to pick just one example, had a population of 50,000 and if you had wandered in to it, it would not have seemed so different from a medieval city of Europe. Many of the things we accept as normal today – for example, there being 60 minutes in an hour – have come to us from the Sumerians. What a world to set a novel in!
2. One of the strangest things about Sumer is that, for thousands of years, no one remembered it had ever existed. It was only when the Victorians became passionate about the archaeology of the Middle East that people began to realise that before the great civilisations of Babylon and Assyria, a much earlier civilisation had flourished in what is now modern Iraq. This strange forgetting lends Sumer an undeniable air of great mystery – a perfect basis for any novel.
3. The clay tablets the Sumerians wrote things down on turned out to be an astoundingly good way of storing information across the ages. Far better than papyrus, for example. That means we have about five million words of text left to us in Sumerian, and about ten million in Akkadian, the language that rose up in the region after it. The two languages survived, side by side, until almost the time of Christ (although only in written form for Sumerian). We have more words left to us from antiquity in Akkadian than in Latin. This is a treasure trove of information for anyone wanting to set a novel in Sumer.
4. The very oldest literature in existence comes to us from Ancient Sumer, either recorded in Sumerian, or in the later Akkadian. The most famous of these pieces of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the eponymous hero gets into various sorts of trouble, and then sets out to the far side of the world in search of immortality. But there are many other amazing stories from Ancient Sumer and some of them older than the Epic. Many of them are so bold and extraordinary that they beg for a retelling…
5. Many of these myths are also the basis for Greek and Roman myths, and also in the case of the story of the ark, for parts of the bible. In the original ark story, by the way, Noah was called Upta-napishtim (which you will see different spellings of). If you are going to retell a myth, why not go back to the source?
6. Robert Silverberg, the very successful science fiction writer, wrote a book called Gilgamesh the King in 1984. Perhaps because the novel rather fell between genres – was it fantasy? Historical? Science fiction? – he failed to find an audience for it at the time. But these days readers are more comfortable with books that are harder to categorise.
7. Sumer has not only big myths, but very big characters. First there is Gilgamesh. He was a big star of the literary canon of Sumer; hugely popular down the ages. But he wasn’t the only great hero of Sumer. The other was Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war. The Sumerians adored Inanna. She was hugely powerful. And she was hugely unusual. She was not a goddess of motherhood or healing or babies. She was a goddess who conquered realms. She was categorically amazing. She went on to become Ishtar, and then, in part, Aphrodite and Venus … making her arguably the longest lived female deity in recorded history. If Circe deserved her own book, surely Inanna does too?
8. Satisfyingly, Gilgamesh and Inanna do not only appear in their own myths. Their myths also intertwine in interesting ways …The two stars are connected. So not only do we have big characters, but we have a world forming… a stage to dress.
9. But it’s not only about Gilgamesh and Inanna. The other gods in the Sumerian pantheon – Inanna’s grandfathers, for example – are also interesting … in many cases, horribly interesting. Although most of the stories about them only come down to us in fragments, they remain an eye-opening insight into the time when prehistory turned into history. You could write a novel about pretty much any of them.
10. Last but not least, the Sumerian stories do have a few odd lines in them that have led to a whole spin-off industry of ‘the Sumerians were aliens’ conspiracy theories. More grist to the mill, for anyone wanting to set a novel in these times, you might think!
The very happy ending to this totally impartial posting is that I bear good tidings: someone has indeed just written a new fantasy / historical novel set in Sumer in 4,001BC and that person is me. The novel stars Inanna, Gilgamesh and a host of other excellent characters, and it’s just the start of a trilogy called The Sumerians. You can order the first in the series, Inanna, right here.
And may the gods of Sumer look kindly on you…
