Descent Into The Underworld
In the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, there’s a small clay tablet copied by a student scribe in the city of Nippur, nearly four thousand years ago.
What’s written on it isn’t a story of heroic deeds or a hymn to the gods. It reads like a checklist. Step by step instructions for one specific journey: the goddess Inanna’s descent into the underworld, to face her older sister, Ereshkigal.
And there’s one detail in this checklist that gets copied identically, exemplar after exemplar, for centuries, without a single variation. To get inside, Inanna has to pass through seven gates. Here’s more from Null Source.
