Lessons in differential history continue as I make my way through Guns, Germs and Steel. I’m fresh out of the part on the invention of writing. Yes, this is crucial stuff for me.

So far, I’ve established that there is at least one kind of writing on Andala. Tani just so happens to be her village’s teacher. As Marie describes the experience of learning alongside Tani’s little sister:

Aia let me play with her writing squares, which I found more intricately detailed than I imagined.

“ra” she said as I picked one up, and “ni” as I pointed to another.
“Spell my name, Aia. Spell Marie.”
Little Aia grabbed two squares and righted them, then read them out to me. “Ai-a!” She said with pride.
“Oh, okay, well done.” In just that moment, she had taught me these weren’t letters but sounds. Each square was a syllable. Or at least what the Ana considered one to be. I figured she’d need another pair for me. “Now spell my name, Ma-Ree, Marie!”
She grabbed three more squares, and slid them around the first half of her name.
“No. That can’t be it.”
Aia grabbed my finger and brought it down the line she’d made. Reading aloud, “ta-kai-yeen”.
“Ah, I should have guessed!”

That’s a syllabary. A writing system similar to an alphabet, but with more symbols as it chooses the next larger unit for its sounds. The Ana use the Azu script, developed by their neighbours for themselves. Anatara is a little awkward when put into written words, as it doesn’t work quite the same way as Azu; a clumsiness Marie hints at above. Nothing quite as bad, I imagine, as the English language’s maddening flights from all reason in the Roman writing you and I share here; but not quite as clean as the Azu’s own tongue for which it evolved.

Speaking of which, I’ve found myself questioning my assumptions given where I’ve just been. So writes Jared Diamond:

To us today, it is tempting to ask why societies with early writing systems accepted the ambiguities that restricted writing to a few functions and a few scribes. But even to pose that question is to illustrate the gap between ancient perspectives and our own expectations of mass literacy. The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancient writing’s main function was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive.

Guns, Germs and Steel, p.235

Sumerian cuneiform was indeed born a dirty mess. Writing, the handful of times we invented it from scratch here on Earth, was not a thunderbolt of inspiration, fully formed in one shot. It evolved. I knew this, but I overlooked it in the interest of clean and shiny simplicity and design. That’s what happens when you read more about Sumerian than you read the stuff for yourself, with the old master as a guide.

You can either invent writing the long and messy way, for yourself, or you can steal it. Actually, it’s not always just that. Sometimes, if you hear someone else has a way to scribble down their language, you rush to its conclusion and invent your own way. Diamond describes this as carbon copying versus diffusion. A good example of the latter is Cherokee. Its inventor, an ingenious fellow by the name of Sequoyah, borrowed some printed English that he couldn’t read, and devised his own syllabary around symbols from our alphabet. He didn’t invent writing, but he didn’t just copy the Romans as we did, either. He didn’t know that the characters he saw worked the way they did as he invented his alternate system, closer to the what the Minoans used than us. Funny what’s possible, when you know it can be done.

Perhaps Andala’s true first writing is dead and buried come Marie’s day. And so the Azu script is a descendant, more like Sequoyah’s, created anew without the telltale cruft?

The Andala that I’m writing, come the time of our discovery, is one in transition from illiteracy into its modern age. We weren’t a necessary trigger, but happened to arrive coincidentally to see it. Or the way it could have been.

I’m not about to kluge up the pretty little writing system I’ve long had squiggling through my mind in the interest of looking the original. Not yet. But this research is leading me to consider the whole geography and history of Andala in new light. The Azu are my world’s oldest people, its first empire and the most populous. Azuya, their continent along with the Ana, is clearly my Old World. What went on there, long before Proteus showed up? And what have I already created, in my unwitting assumptions, that could well be for the better in any case? This is what I’m working on. While I can.

Speaking of clan based societies: Andala has one too. None other than the Ana; my story’s focus.

Whatever is the attraction?

I suppose no small part of it is the escape from our own way. Our Society of Strangers. There’s a certain draw to the tribal world before our time, the way we used to be. When you could talk back to the faces in your everyday experience, because you knew every one of them and they all knew you, too. It’s the life for which we evolved. It is the way we have been for the lion’s share of our existence. Our natural environment is inside the tribe.

But there are costs. Of course.

Working with and for strangers is unthinkable in a world of tight knit clans. Perhaps. At least, it goes on at a slower rate than in urban societies like ours. There’s something about the ritualised chaos in our city lives which breeds invention, competition, and revolution. Those things all existed before the city rose in the Middle East a fair while before Sumer, but history has been written by the urbanised ever since. By the victor, as always.

Yet, I can do things my way.

Andala is distinct. Its ruling power is not its most industrious, but simply the most martially gifted. Government is, you could say, “by the tribes, for the tribes.” It’s surely no democracy. Really, it’s no state at all, but a fait accompli. A complex situation for us to misunderstand once again.

The old way is still there, among the Ana, not least in Tani’s own rural home. Yet it is fading into the past in Ayanakert and quite unknown in Zuba. Where there’s change, there’s struggle. Those who urge it onward, and those who’d snuff it out as the peril of their lives. I know these forces exist in Andala, and have some ideas where and when and who they may be. But it’s all still cooking; as I concentrate on its vanguard in woman’s form: a certain magus called Maigan. I’ll know it when I see it. And, so far, I’ve seen her.

My honest fondness for the harmless people is alive and well. As is my instinct for tension. The tribe is a way of mind as much as it is a life. And you can take a man from his people, but you cannot take away his clan.

It’s that time of year again. I often wonder how it is that the United States, of all nations, is at once as powerful, innovative, and fractious as it is. The Internet as we know it could not have been born anywhere else. Let alone thrived. Indeed, there’s a host of countries who want to seize it for themselves. For all of America’s supposed decline, it is still the common thread behind most all of the world’s most significant companies. Good luck trying to avoid Apple, Google, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Amazon and the like. Nothing lasts forever, as a decade ago another company would have led that list. But here we are, without the end in sight.

Yet the ritual chaos acted out in Washington so often comes to this.

One way of looking at history is to lay out the narratives of rise and fall straight on the land. The Second World War was, for the most part, yet another Old World affair. The United States got involved all right, but not bombed or obliterated, like every other power. By the inferno’s end, America stood supreme, a true superpower in a devastated world. Much to Washington’s credit, this opportunity was not wasted. America helped the rest of us out in our hour of need. Another of those fine investments, like the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska, which more than paid off in the end. Forward thinking on as grand a scale as history herself provides.

But I do wonder. As inevitability is a lame excuse in the long run, poorly fitted to the true chaos of the world. The chaos which America has thriving inside. Perhaps it is that clash of world views which keeps the fire of disruption and invention burning? As one thing’s for sure: post-war, post-communism, post-empire Europe is no match. Over here, we’re more peaceful than we’ve ever been, and in the long run richer too. Yet we languish, as the world moves on.

The United States is alive and well in my book. If just as fractious. I won’t put politics like this in the forefront, but I do like to watch my threads as they weave out the back. Could always be a useful foreshadow in the making, for all I know. I haven’t planned that, but then I seldom ever do.

But what of the coin?

There was a plan to mint an almighty treasure. A trillion-dollar platinum coin. I didn’t make this up. That’s the beauty of currency: an arbitrary thing, mere convention really, which has the innate scope for creative solutions of this magnitude. It was of course a terrible idea, and wisely refused. But I did wind up cooking my own idea from it.

How about a barely mentioned backstory that the Washington of the future has minted not just one but a whole incremental series of these things? Inflation alone suggests a bit of an arms race over the coming centuries. One spiralling ever higher until, what? Well, here’s a thought: one coin to rule them all. The one they call infinity.

Just the nonsensical delight of such a thing has me thinking of the Sumerian Tablets of Destiny, which confer the bearer limitless and just as perfectly arbitrary power over all creation. The cosmos in microcosm. The ultimate voodoo doll. An idea made for comics, so says Ihnatko who recalls a memorable instance when a fellow named the Joker held it, and therefore everything, in his hands. Archetypes!

Best of all, I can really have my cake and eat it when some enterprising schemer then decides to “redefine infinity”. Why but not a single, admittedly large, yet finite number? They’ve some good ones by then.

What kind of a world am I writing? As is so often the case, it’s music that makes me stop to think. A wistful little landscape by the name of Where the River Sleeps in this case, brought to my ears by the ever helpful Urban Modernists. I’ll put it in the soundtrack stack. For writing by, at any rate.

There’s always the temptation to dream of the rural idyll. Call it Neverland, Narnia, or Middle Earth. I found myself realising the similarity when said song came on, as, by chance, I was reading up about the romantic upper corner of Vermont. Suddenly, words and music were in tune. Coming from Scotland, I knew well what I was seeing. This is yet another place which defines itself in mountains and wide open nature, with only the lightest smattering of rickety human influence here and there. (Every last stone-built one of them with a history several centuries deep, even so.) We did not invent this. Neither did the Northeast Kingdom counties in leafiest New England. Nor did anyone, ultimately, I think.

What is this recurring, common thread? And why are we forever fantasising about the same old thing?

Let me get up on my high horse about archetypes once again. I’m sure I’ve heard this one further afield than fiction. Namely an ancient idyll by the name of paradise. Quick: to Sumer!

Dilmun is a land that is “pure”, “clean” and “bright”—a “land of the living”, which knows neither sickness nor death. What is lacking, however, is the fresh water so essential to animal and plant life. The great Sumerian water-god Enki therefore orders Utu, the sun-god, to fill it with fresh water brought up from the earth. Dilmun is thus turned into a divine garden, green with fruit-laden fields and meadows.

—Samuel Noah Kramer in History Begins at Sumer. Chapter 19: “Paradise”.

We, humans everywhere, have always dreamed of green and pleasant lands. The historic record doesn’t get any older than Sumer, and there it is already. A full-sprung trope, tied up in the gods. In fact, speaking of those, as Kramer ends the chapter:

Paradise, according to the Sumerian theologians, was for the immortal gods, and for them alone, not for mortal man. One mortal, however, and only one, according to the Sumerian myth-makers, did succeed in gaining admittance to this divine paradise. This brings us to the Sumerian “Noah” and the deluge myth, the closest and most striking Biblical parallel as yet uncovered in cuneiform literature.

Some stories come down through one culture after another. But it is their origins I find the most intriguing. Not least as paradise appears to be truly archetypal, cropping up when and wherever there is man to imagine them, no matter Sumer and Babylon. This is just the kind of comparative mythology I most evidently like:

Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both. In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead.

So says the Wikipedia, fount of all truth! Well, I buy it in this case. And what a word: “paradisaical!” Yoink.

Paradise is “baked into us”, I reckon, in its simplest form of a promised, perfect, land. Like the other archetypes which form the deepest bedrock of our minds, it’s been there as long as we have been. A beacon like that could well have been an advantage, if you like your philosophical speculations framed in Darwin’s terms. All I can really say is that it feels a good, sound guess. Hard wired dreams are just as human as the shape of our hard wired hands. No surprise then that we so often find them, there in front of us.

I’ve addressed paradise unwittingly already, when Proteus discovered Andala. A lush, rich, Earthlike world so utterly unlike every other alien planet and moon they had reached so far. Surely every place capable of supporting human life is a paradise, nay, paradisaical, compared to the barren wastes elsewhere in space? It’s hardly even a question.

But what world is the same thing from pole to pole? Not ours, that’s what. A common shortcut I’ve seen and bemoaned in many a space story is the single climate world. (I am not even remotely the first.) And so I’m keen to do my worlds justice with diversity. The first one Marie covers is also the smallest of them all: Gaia. The terraformed moon.

“This whole place doesn’t really want to stick together. The gravity is fake. The atmosphere is fake. The tides, the wind, the sea. Might all look nice and natural on the surface, but it’s not. And the way it works is in sections.”

I wonder where I got that idea? Well, not in space, but sure enough in spirit.

Gaia, the irony in its name well intended, is alone in its artifice. Aria may be just as terraformed, but being a full blown planet with comparable mass to Earth does wonders. In my system, at any rate. Self consistency is the one true rule.

Andala is a natural world like ours, able to sustain its environment without the need for technology. But quite how it arose in the first place, with people the very image of ourselves, is the underlying mystery in Proteus and beyond.

Going full circle then, I ought to remember not to paint Kentaken in too pure, pastoral hues or to mistake an archetype for my own. The key is in intent. Know what you are doing. Use the tools of our inbuilt wherewithal. But be creative when you do. I will know to try.

Yes, it’s all been Proteus, lately. Goodness, if that little ploy hasn’t grown to almost fifty chapters already, of a thousand words apiece. Not quite what I had in mind. But I shan’t repeat myself. It’s all good practice.

Instead, some inside details.

First up is quite what I meant in the latest opening:

Our welcome in Ayanakert was good and warm. Tani, our steadfast advocate then and since, caught Akanai’s agile fancy with her grandstand tales and infectious keen. The pair of them shared an instinctive curiosity, in fact, unable to leave a stone unturned once spotted. Not all Andalans, or Ana, are like this; as I’d seen for myself with Tani’s parents. So they have a name for it. Essin. Despite her rural accent and antiquated ways, the king’s household recognised Tani as Essaieen the moment she got him started. I could see it in their cringing eyes. Each spurred on the other.

This is Marie’s first mention of an idea I conjured up a while ago in Dimensions of Identity. I can’t think of a pithy introduction beyond what I wrote then and since. The concept of Essin and its identity as Essaieen is as big a deal to the Ana as good and evil is to us, or indeed possibly even gender. My intuition’s antennae are a-tingle with the possibilities, even if what I’m writing here this moment sounds too nebulous to be of much note. Let’s just say I’m working on this. And that such experiments may very well be what Proteus is for.

Then there are the statues:

“This is Anatai-kalikaleh. Akanai’s aka.” Said Tani of a statue, the first of a crescent in the hall. They were lifesized and really quite exquisitely detailed.
“His mother.” I explained. “She ruled Andala too?”
“Mm.” Said Tani, who began to name all of them. “Ankelika-kalikaleh. Anaster-kalikaleh. Kanekina-kalikaleh. And…” She paused to look back at Akanai, who waved her on. “Ayana-kalikaleh.” Said Tani, in hushed reverence at the smallest statue of the line. Little Tani almost towered over it in comparison. “They’re all women.” Observed Kingston.
“Aye, and they’ve all got the same fashion sense too.” Robin naturally dwelled on the figures lack of clothes.
“Is Akanai the first male to rule Andala?” Mina asked Tani. “The first man?”
“Mm.” She nodded. “Do not hold it up against him.”

They are of course Andala’s rulers, in reverse order back to the first. Kingston raises a good, if obvious, point. Akanai is none other than the first king of the unified tribes. Every chief before him was a queen. Not that we should hold this against him. These are modern times.

As for the statues themselves, I do have something like cult images in mind. What’s good for Sumer is often good for Andala. I’m not sure as yet quite how Akanai fits into his people’s religion, and whether his ancestors are considered godesses as such, or not. But I’m thinking about it, and so a hook left here and there is welcome enough to me.

What’s the deal with those funny numbers?

“Nai-nai-nai-nai?” Asked Akanai. Then his automated translation in our ears. “65,535?” It said, quixotically.
“Marie know number-speak yet?” Asked Tani, who I had not taught our own system.
“Bigger.” I grinned.
“Kaia!” She told him. More.
“Anka-ko-nai!?” Asked Akanai, with a raised brow. “4,294,967,295!?”
“That’s pretty damn specific.” Grumbled Kingston.
“That’s some power ae two. Near enough.” Noted Robin.

Near enough. But the base is 16. Namely hex. Nai-nai-nai-nai is the Anatara equivalent of 0xffff, or 65,535 to those of us who don’t think in bits. Take a guess at what anka-ko might then mean, given Akanai’s second stab amounts to 0xffffffff. Evidently, they have their own kind of scientific notation. Another convenient, if not too egregious, shortcut.

My notes say the actual answer to his question is 14 billion humans on Earth by 2169. And another 2 billion between Aria and Gaia, apparently, which sounds a bit high. Let’s just say Marie was right. Consistency being what matters when you are, of course, making it all up as you go along.

And finally the finale:

I showed Tani my ten digits plus three from my friend, knowing she had no idea what our numbers meant. My translator whispered its guess to me when Mina said, but I wanted to make a point.

“That many ahreni. That’s how long we took to get here from our home.”

She and Akanai looked at us, and eachother, understanding what I’d said but finding it a little hard to believe. Then Akanai muttered something and Tani laughed.

“You are old!” She giggled.
“Tell me aboot it.” Sighed Robin.
“Yes. I suppose we are.” I said. “But don’t hold it against us.”

Mina’s answer is correct. Proteus took six years, or the better part of thirteen ahreni to discover and reach Andala. But I like my tricks, and Tani’s reaction might not be to quite what Marie had in mind.

From the introduction of Inanna by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer:

“In the first line of ‘The Descent of Inanna,’ ‘From the Great Above she set her mind to the Great Below,’ what exactly does ‘mind’ mean?”
“Ear,” Kramer said.
“Ear?”
“Yes, the word for ear and wisdom in Sumerian are the same. But mind is what is meant.”
“But—I could say ‘ear’?”
“Well, you could.”
“Is it opened her ear or set her ear?”
“Set. Set her ear, like a donkey that sets its ear at a particular sound.”

As Kramer spoke, a shiver ran through me. When taken literally, the text itself announces the story’s direction: From the Great Above the goddess opened (set) her ear, her receptor for wisdom, to the Great Below.

I reckon that’s a pretty economic name for knowledge. And that is what I mean with all this Ana talk of giving people their ears:

“I am an explorer. I travel to new places. That’s what I do. What about you?”
“I give the young watchers their ears.”

Even so, seeing as this is Tani talking, not all is as it seems. As came up today:

“Tani! You’re a teacher!”
“Tee-sher?” She quietly asked.
“You tell them how to do things. Like writing. Taralika, isn’t it? You teach them how to read.”
“Mmm. The Talai here is the young watchers. I give the young watchers their ears.” In truth, she said the “young washers”, but I knew what she was on about.

In this case, it was a sleight of hand in foreshadowing. If that. But the general rule most surely applies. Tani just can’t get her tongue around every sound in common English:

“Tee-sher. Tee-ker. Tee-ser. Tee-ter.” She mumbled to herself, unable to get the funny sounding word out quite intact.
“Don’t worry about it. Humanitara is a funny language!”
“Humanitara?” She grinned. “I think you mean you talk In-lish.”
“Oh, I sometimes do. When I’m drunk…” I rolled my eyes to show I was kidding.
“Druh-unk?” She wondered in an instant. Ever so earnestly.
“Do me a favour and forget I said that!”
“Crazy Humanitara. Dunk. Teesh. Keeld-eren. I hear Azu! I hear Katani!”

Which is to say don’t be surprised if our narrator turns out to be a touch optimistic at times. Not every slip of Tani’s dodgy English needs wind up in the text. So is my excuse!

I expect I’ll be relying on it with the stuff that’s coming up. You’ll see. What else but Anatara would they speak in Ayanakert? Well, for one thing, it is not quite all an Ana city. By any means.

Speaking of Sumer, it was, of course, my source for Tani’s first attempt at making legend.

Storytelling naturally intrigues us storytellers. The Sumerians were surely into it, dedicating a good part of their all-important writing to the deeds of gods and heroes. We know a fair bit about how they saw the world and their lives within it through this record. The way you praise your heroes and curse your villains says a lot about you and your intended audience. What I find most fascinating of all, however, is the fact that, sometimes, your readers live tens of centuries later than you thought. Just imagine it. As that is all we ever can.

My own knowledge of the world’s oldest literary style comes from the highly recommended History Begins at Sumer by the great Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer. It’s a series of thematic essays, each one cutting through the historic record from a different angle, and all of them backed up with quotations straight from the ancient source. Reading direct line for line translations of the original material makes for a very different experience than reading other people’s narratives, such as mine right here. You begin to get a sense for the pace of that pioneering people’s prose, as well as a tantalising sweep of their foreign yet familiar vision of humanity and the world. I can do no more than to simply state that I’ve unbound admiration for the painstaking work that has gone on, and continues to, in reconstructing that culture, so distant and all the more telling because of it. As for my part, I will borrow what I can!

Tani’s story is my take on the Sumerian style of legend, as I’ve read in Kramer and elsewhere, transported to the scene she found as she watched Bee’s descent on Andala. Marie’s version is already told. Her Ana counterpart’s went like this:

First, I, brave Tani of the noble Talai, the feared of the forest and the sovereign of the steppe, was out upon the night. Beyond Keyet, beyond the final fortress of the dawn, Tani sets her eyes to mighty Kai, in plea, and obtains a vision. A streak of fire, like aner without a master, like aner without a guiding soul, is brought across the sky. Is tearing the roof of eternity in two. Fire threatens the very night, the very day, fire endangers the realm of life itself! I, Tani of the righteous Talai, brightest children of all the Ana, Tani fixes her fiercest vision to the baleful fire. Tani asks of greatest Kai the chance to prove herself, and knowing this truth, Tani follows the fire across the farthest highest wilderness of sky.

Presently, Tani hears a terrible explosion of thunder without lightning! I am not dismayed. Kai is on my side. Next, Tani sees the fire change direction, Tani sees the fire choose its path. She is still a stranger to fear. Whatever this may be she sees before her, Kai has spoken, Kai is on my side. Lastly, Tani sees the fire become…

The fire! It became sera! Before her eyes, Tani saw in amazement, the fire was now metal! She follows the metal fire. Tani hastens to keep it in her sight, as the metal moves so quickly you could not believe her if she told you. Lastly of all, the metal approaches the river, the metal nears Aykataliya, the metal chooses to rest upon the bank. Tani watches it, Tani who knows no fear. Tani approaches it. I reach the metal. I stand upon its back!

From the metal, as Tani watches, from out of the metal’s mouth, she walks! Her name is Marie.

Repetition is key to Sumerian writing. They were practically always at it. Quite whether it was how they talked, or, more likely, how they emphasised themselves for recital, it turned out quite a favour for their translators thousands of years later. The surviving tablets are just as beat up as you might expect in that time, and “fragments” are truly that. This habit of saying things not once, of saying things not two times, this habit of saying things at least thrice, made the impossible only difficult. It made the puzzle possible at all. It was a kind of redundant error correction built into their text.

Emesal, for instance, only really made sense to us as Inanna and her women peers were so often repeated by their male narrator.

What I did was to take the feel and flow I could remember from the translations, and place Tani at the centre. As she is improvising her own legend, I reckoned a little awkwardness was in order. She shifts about, speaking in first person and then third again, indeed there’s even second in there, mixed up from line to line. Her story is unprepared, and she is not well versed in presenting such a mighty feat to a crowd. But Tani is well educated by the local standards, knowing a good selection of her culture’s staple favourites, so she has this one in her when the moment comes. Just as vital: she has the ego for it.

Tani had her work cut out for her. She did her best, and it almost even did the trick. She must do better for the next time, as she has bigger powers to impress, and scenes more complex than her little village. She’s on the right track, she just needs to find her audience. The attention her visitors bring should soon see to that.

Marie can thank her lucky stars to have Tani for a friend. Their bond is the beginning of everything for Earth and Andala. And as such, you just know it’s going to turn a little tricky. High tales and hopes as always. Legends within the one they know to tell.

Another Protean push is underway. And, well, it’s a little thick with my fictive language. What to say? There’s a tension between my hesitation to dive too deep with the stuff on one hand, and the demands of active narrative on the other. Proteus is all first draft. With all that this entails. So I’ve been leaning in favour of overdoing all this Anatara stuff for the time-being, with the thought it can be cut out somewhere along the way. Certainly, there’s more of my made up language on show for now than I’d ever aim to see in Alpha when I’m finished.

Already, I find I’m playing games. Here’s a prime example. The latest “chapter” of Marie’s tale, a name I’ll use for convenience’s sake, contains this conversation.

“He sounds just like your dad.”
“Why Marie think that?”
“Tah-neeeeee…” I said, in my best Taki impression. Aia and Atty immediately laughed themselves into howling hysterics.
“Marie! Do not talk like man.”
“Talk like what?”

Why would men talk different? As ever, this goes back to Sumer.

Like the ancients themselves, I’ve a soft spot for Inanna. She was their ever-present and mischievous sex and war goddess, at once both the guardian of harlots and the Queen of Heaven. Yes, a complex and ultimately Sumerian state of affairs! Inanna was one of the most popular of the gods, and easily the most mentioned goddess. Indeed, the tablets often speak in her own words. The strange thing being that when they do, these are in a different dialect.

Sumerian women spoke emesal. “Women’s talk” or “fine language”. And that included Inanna as their archetype in goddess. A different variety of speech entirely from the men? The existence of such a fussy distinction intrigues me. Let alone how it ever came about in the first place. How did mothers speak to their infant sons? Yet it survived into their writing and that was that. Colour me baffled.

And that is usually just the moment when I say “yoink!”

I’m not sure how far I’ll run with this, but here’s the current plan. Kentaken, the backward outer fringe of the Ana kingdom in which Marie and company landed, still clings to the old ways. And once upon a time, there was a gender difference in pronunciation, if not full dialect, between Ana men and women. The drawling vowels of the men there are a telltale to every other Ana. As clear an accent as you’d encounter anywhere on Earth. The fact it’s just the men is my borrow from Sumer. I may just build up a bigger picture of the why and wherefore later.

Another purposeful oddity, as if it could be a plain and prosaic mistake!, is the way Aia and Atty say la. The usual Ana exclamation of wonder, “light”, they say as lai instead. Why? Well, how about they are the vanguard of a generational shift? The same thing happens here time and time again. It would help if they were in the city, let alone out where they are, but I can contrive. As one who looks for the future in the deepest past, I naturally like the idea that old and new can share the same strange place.

Much later in the story, well beyond Marie’s account of Proteus, I’ve another scene set aside for Tani. In fact I’d thought of this before all the plot and details of the current thread, and in a sense it’s what she’s for and where she really came from. A lifetime has passed, and Tani is as old an Ana as there has ever been. She’s living in London instead of her childhood home among the Talai. Madala, a character still to be born back in the Proteus narrative, comes to see her. And what does she notice? Tani still talks the old way. So much has changed since then.

While writing the latest part of Proteus, I happened upon a bunch of stuff about the sky lore of Taurus. Although I’ve been into astronomy for the most part of my life, the constellations and their mythology was never something I paid attention to. Fie!, pseudoscience, fie!

But then I got into ancient history and the human side to the equation of the stars. So, armed with a touch of patience now, I took a second look at Taurus. As says Wikipedia:

The identification of the constellation of Taurus with a bull is very old, certainly dating to the Chalcolithic, and perhaps even to the Upper Paleolithic. Michael Rappenglück of the University of Munich believes that Taurus is represented in a cave painting at the Hall of the Bulls in the caves at Lascaux (dated to roughly 15,000 BC), which he believes is accompanied by a depiction of the Pleiades. The name “seven sisters” has been used for the Pleiades in the languages of many cultures, including indigenous groups of Australia, North America and Siberia. This suggests that the name may have a common ancient origin.

The Paleolithic is the stone age. Consider me impressed. I can’t say that when I look between Orion and the Pleiades, patterns my eyes surely agree with, anything much stands out in animal form. There’s blood red Aldebaran and the triangle of the Hyades, but the rest of it? I’d assumed the constellations as we know them were inventions of the Greeks or Babylonians. Necessary divisions of the sky, and quite perfectly arbitrary. But if there’s something to the notion that these go as far back as claimed here, well, see if you can guess.

Taurus marked the point of vernal (spring) equinox in the Chalcolithic and the Early Bronze Age (the “Age of Taurus”), from about 4000 BC to 1700 BC, after which it moved into the neighboring constellation Aries. The Pleiades were closest to the Sun at vernal equinox around the 23rd century BC. In Babylonian astronomy, the constellation was listed in the MUL.APIN as GU.AN.NA, “The Heavenly Bull”. As this constellation marked the vernal equinox, it was also the first constellation in the Babylonian zodiac and they described it as “The Bull in Front”. The Akkadian name was Alu.

One of the four tribes of Andala, and the one we see the most of from the start, is called the Ana. I picked the name a little while before delving into Sumerian legend and discovering the overlap with their name for heaven. An was one of the primordial gods, in charge of the celestial world, and Inanna was heaven’s leading goddess. (Their shared temple was the very place where writing was invented, no less.) It is so simple a sound I considered the recurring coincidence far from unlikely. That it is, but the good part comes next:

In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest works of literature, the goddess Ishtar sends Taurus, the Bull of Heaven, to kill Gilgamesh for spurning her advances. Gilgamesh is depicted as the neighboring constellation of Orion, and in the sky they face each other as if engaged in combat. In early Mesopotamian art, the Bull of Heaven was closely associated with Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare. One of the oldest depictions shows the bull standing before the goddess’ standard, as it has 3 stars depicted on its back (the cuneiform sign for ‘star-constellation’) there is good reason to regard this as the constellation later known as Taurus.

Ishtar, Ištar, Astarte, Venus, Inanna, call her what you like, is beyond a doubt my favourite of the Sumerian gods. They seemed quite keen on her too. She plays quite the nemesis for Gilgamesh in his epic, where as sex goddess she takes offense at his refusal, and once her beloved bull is killed, she plays her rôle as queen of harlots and has her city’s courtesans line the walls to wail a dirge for the departed beast. Trust me, it’s quite the Swiftian yarn once you’re into it!

The same iconic representation of the Heavenly Bull was depicted in the Dendera zodiac, an Egyptian bas-relief carving in a ceiling that depicted the celestial hemisphere using a planisphere. In these ancient cultures, the orientation of the horns was portrayed as upward or backward. This differed from the later Greek depiction where the horns pointed forward. To the Egyptians, the constellation Taurus was a sacred bull that was associated with the renewal of life in spring. When the spring equinox entered Taurus, the constellation would become covered by the Sun in the western sky as spring began. This ‘sacrifice’ led to the renewal of the land. To the early Hebrews, Taurus was the first constellation in their zodiac and consequently it was represented by the first letter in their alphabet, Aleph.

Yes, it’s bulls everywhere. Fine. Another reason to be pleased with the pretty Pleiades. And there goes my notes for but a word of detail in Marie’s telling. I’m not sure if I’ll have reason to make use of it again at some point, but with me it’s best to never rule it out.

For an infidel, I seem to care a lot for religion. My stock answer is psychological: I reckon that religion is hard wired into our unconsciousness; an evolutionary advantage from our earliest and most mysterious times. If Joseph Campbell is anything to go by, deep and juicy archetypes lie in there aplenty. And so I’m attracted to it, yes, as a source and guide for good creative work.

Just don’t expect me to don anything holier than a bathrobe any time soon.

As it happens, I’m fresh from watching two thirds of the latest series by Bettany Hughes, called Divine Women. I’ve been a bit of a fan of hers since The Minoans and finding she was ahead of me on a subject I’m already into, this was a natural watch. Off to the, ugh, iPlayer.

To be fair, I scarcely watch any television at all. So I’m not sure how much of the new-shot-every-half-second or NYPD Blue-grade shaky cam was new to this or just standard operating procedure lately in documentaries in general. I’m sure I’ll sound an old git to contemporary ears, but I really did like NYPD Blue back in its day, especially as a credulous young teen, and I’ve nothing against kinetic editing when it’s in sync with the content. This one just seemed jarring to me, for what it’s worth. And occasionally, unwittingly, amusing. Once or twice the cameraman couldn’t help but just wander off entirely.

My main focus in archaic religion has been Sumer. Inanna, alas, gets only passing mention in this show. And that’s to its detriment, as her parallels with Aphrodite and the other featured goddesses are deep. The Sumerians, crucially, did well to record her and thus the earliest traces of her prehistoric ancestors. One such motif which slipped the show found itself in parentheses in the Telegraph’s poor review:

(in common, it seems, with many other ancient goddesses, Durga is often pictured with lions)

Indeed, Inanna too. And I do wonder why. Another aspect of the archetype? Along with gender bending devotees and ritual frenzy. Told you this is lively stuff.

Anyway, I disagree that the show was quite as bad as the paper said. Hughes has the good sense to visit Göbekli Tepe, after all, and serves up a fitting introduction for that assumption-shattering place. (A subject I must write about sometime in its own right.) But the complaints are mostly true. There’s good stuff in here, and a decent theme, it’s just the small matter of bringing the whole to completion which is, as ever, the ordeal.

But as for my work?

Well, I’ve been developing a religion for the Ana and Azu on Andala. This wasn’t part of my original vision but has grown along with the tale, such that I can’t see Andala without it now. That world and its people pose such a question for us that the best way I know to approach it is by this comparison. To understand them, we have to figure out what they believe. Why, it’s archaeology in novel form! With my taste in reading, who could have ever guessed?

My natural instinct was to focus on a goddess. Who else but a woman makes a world? (Ahem. Realises self.) Little did I know what riches I would find in going back to writing’s origin. I’ll set about describing what I’ve come up with, and from what sources, another time; but for now I will leave with this. The primal goddess Hughes begins her series looking for was alive and well, I think, long before even stunning Göbekli Tepe. She is as hard wired into us as breath and thirst. And of course has just as firm a home on Andala.