Call Me Stormy

Finding righteous currents in turbulent times

Archive for the tag “Penn Museum”

12 Jul 2026

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.

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09 Jul 2026

The Lost Species Before Humans

In 1893, a team from the University of Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet slightly larger than a man’s hand from the excavation trenches at Nippur. It was cataloged as CBS 10673, packed into a crate with several hundred other fragments, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it sat in the basement of the Penn Museum for over sixty years, classified as a cosmogonic fragment, Old Babylonian copy, partial text.

The first partial translation was attempted in 1956 by Samuel Noah Kramer, the same Kramer who spent decades assembling Sumerian myths from shattered pieces scattered across twenty museums worldwide. He translated the upper third, assigned it to the category of creation narratives, and moved on to better-preserved material that he considered more urgent.

The lower two-thirds of CBS 10673, covered in dense cuneiform script arranged in two tight columns with unusually small sign spacing, remained untranslated until 2004. No one prioritized it. No one had reason to. Here’s more from Null Source.

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