The oldest road down, and what we changed

There is a Sumerian poem about the queen of heaven walking into the land of the dead. It is roughly four thousand years old, it survives on clay tablets dug out of Nippur and Ur, and you can read every line of it today in Oxford's online corpus of Sumerian literature.

Our first Adventure Chamber, The Descent, is that poem. Not loosely inspired by it. The seven gates take what the poem says they take, in the order the oldest tablets give. The judgment in the throne hall happens as the tablet tells it, no softer and no gorier. The two small creatures who go down to bring her back are made from the dirt under a god's fingernails, exactly as written. The shepherd king is taken from his fine throne for the crime of not mourning, and nothing in our telling apologizes for that arithmetic, because the poem never does.

Because this is educational before it is anything else, here is what we added.

You, first. The poem sends the queen down alone. The temple hand you play, the small one chosen to carry her things as far as any living thing may go, is ours. The gatekeeper is the poem's, and he is courteous and exact in the tablet too. His clay ledger, and the question it asks you at the door out, are ours. The hunters below are the poem's, and they genuinely cannot be bribed, and that detail is four thousand years old. The writ they carry with your name on it is ours.

Where one manuscript disagrees with another about what the first gate takes, we follow the oldest road, and the chamber says so on screen rather than quietly choosing one and hoping nobody asks.

One thing we did not have to add: the fear. The queen below is not a monster in the poem. She grieves, she labors, and when kindness finally reaches her she is moved by it. She is also the sovereign of a house whose rules are perfect, and she hung her own sister on a hook because the rules allowed it. Four thousand years later that is still the most frightening kind of power there is, and it needed no help from us.

Sources

The poem: Inana's descent to the nether world, ETCSL c.1.4.1, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk). Also consulted: Wolkstein and Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983), the translation most readers meet first; and Dina Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources (2003), for the gate architecture and the gatekeeper.

We would rather you checked them than took our word for it. That is the whole point of building it this way.

chambers, history, myth, cuneiform