"When the gods instead of man
Did the work, bore the loads,
The gods' load was too great,
The work too hard, the trouble too much.
The great Annunaki made the Igigi [humans]
Carry the workload sevenfold.
Anu their father was king,
Their counsellor warrior Ellil
Their chamberlain was Ninurta...."
-- The Atrahasis Epic, 18th century B.C.
"Every single one of us gods declared war!
We have put [a stop] to the digging.
The load is excessive, it is killing us!
Our work is too hard, the trouble too much!
So every single one of us gods has agreed to complain to Ellil."
-- The Atrahasis Epic, 18th century B.C.
"Clay tablets inscribed with the Old Babylonian version of the [Atrahasis] epic can be dated around 1700 B.C." -- Stephanie Dalley, translator, 1998
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11 comments:
The great Annunaki made the Igigi [humans]
Carry the workload sevenfold.
These gods are wimps! No wonder they had to leave. Now, I have a question: the author is human, because he/she is addressing to and about gods. He was created to carry the burden not to write! Yet, he goes on writing… writing about gods digging so that rivers of mespotemia flow… these buggers can fly all the way from alpha-centuri (right OIM?) but don’t know how to build a digging robot, but know how to build an Igigi seven times stronger…crap!
OIM, listen to Jeff, if not me. I now know why I need to hold on to my investment in Lily… they make prozac, OIM get some!
Abderite LOL.
Hi KV.
Missed ya.
If I was a history denier I would think the billions of people who came before me were sick too.
"He [Richard Dawkins] has the arrogance to say that anyone who does not share his views is infected with a virus. No wonder he cannot coexist peacefully with them." -- Freeman J. Dyson, physicist, September 2007
As to your question and logical argument, or rather lack thereof, you are conveniently forgetting about the giants.
And the fact that the Earth was a mining planet suggests that most of their metal couldn't be used to build robots but instead was being diverted to build celestial arms for interplanetary warfare purposes.
Furthermore, biologically engineered humans have several advantages over robots, for example: humans are less intelligent and are of a far more slavish nature than automatons. Robots fight back!
so the aliens formed a worker's union?
OIM,
How about this: your 1000th grandson follows your footsteps looking into old books, and runs into a stone that depicts acts described in some of the magazines that today outdo your favorite cities your hot rock throwing god destroyed.
Poor kid! He would have no choice but to believe that the hot rock throwing fellow named god was defeated!
OIM,
You quoted Dyson:...[Richard Dawkins] has the arrogance to say that anyone who does not share his views is infected with a virus...
Dawkins is right, except he should have been clear by stating that virus of brain, called bad meme...
KV,
If 99% of the world has a virus, and you and Richard Dawkins don't, I, like the rest of the world, willingly choose the virus.
I for one am much more inclined to buy into the idea of aliens tampering with early primates than I am the notion of an actual god creating life out of whole cloth.
The idea of God invites the unanswerable question of who designed God? Whereas alien manipulation of our genes is explained easily by the aliens evolving naturally on their own long before us. (Or even engineered by their own ancient benefactors)
Our naturally-selected evolution took us to some state they found promising and of all Earth's species, early hominids were artifically selected to be advanced over hundreds of thousands of years... Patient bastards, these Progenitors...
Yes, it's kinda Star Trek-ish or Larry Niven-ish, but its far more likely of the two scenarios.
Also, if the aliens visited us in pre-history, they would have been godlike to our ancestors.
However they, like the Gods of mythology, seem to have been much more active in the past. Have they moved on to some other solar system and are even now engineering lifeforms far from Earth? If so, it creates an epic far more inspiring than any found in our so-called holy books.
They stuck around for a few millenia and went on their way, a whole civilization of genetic engineers, wandering the galaxy in vast slower-than-light ships, tweaking the genes of likely candidate species... somebody oughta make a movie... Bruckheimer maybe...or that Spielberg guy, I hear he's good.
OIM,
Your BAD MEME in your brain spoke:
If 99% of the world has a virus, and you and Richard Dawkins don't, I, like the rest of the world, willingly choose the virus.
This kind of virus makes you think delusionally, like if 99%..., then believing the conditional as hot rock thorwing god.
Lily time...
JK,
You too?
This idiot of the poem is writing about god who created Igigi..., which we presume he was one, or he was a defeated alien or some other chicken legged alien, who had only advanced to write on clay tablets, but was somehow transported down to keep the records for the wimps.
Now why would you give so much intelligence to a machine called Igigi for digging and widening a trench or two? All you need is a motor (running on plasma extracted from the hot air of the wimps), and remote controlled power drive. Heck, you can impress many fair maidens with that crap!
KV,
Not me, too... I'm just saying I prefer aliens to gods.
Notice how I invoked Rodenberry? That's me saying it's sci-fi (syfy?) but still preferable to actual religious memes.
I've tried very hard to shake my pre-iron age superstitions, thank you very much!
:)
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