The Codex
The people you will meet
6 of them, named as far as the story allows: 2 invented outright, 4 drawn from the Mesopotamian record and given a second life.
Most of the people in this world are older than it. The rulers, the gatekeepers and the powers were here long before we arrived, kept in tablets and poems that other people wrote and other people dug up.
So every card below says which kind of person it is: ours, theirs, or theirs with our hand on it. Where the record already has a page about someone, this one sends you there rather than writing a second version of them.
How to read the marks
- of the record
- Of the record, presented as the record has them.
- retold
- Of history or tradition, with a layer of ours over the top.
- ours
- Ours outright. No ancient source names them.
Amara
the scribe who hears a second voice
oursA young scribe of Uruk, quick-handed with the reed, hiding something the temple wants on the night a second voice wakes behind her eyes.
Lu-Nanna
the teacher who knows too much
oursThe steadiest hand that ever taught in the Eanna's house of tablets, and the one a frightened copyist runs to when there is nowhere else to run.
Enkidu
the wild one who became a brother
retoldShaped from clay and grassland to be the king's match, he became his brother instead. Their bond is the heart of the oldest story humankind kept.
Gilgamesh
the king the chronicle borrows
retoldKing of Uruk in the King List and hero of the Epic, who walked to the end of the world after deathlessness, failed, came home, and learned to be a man who dies.
Ninsun
the patient one at the edge of things
retoldA goddess of old Uruk, called the Wild Cow, who reads dreams and counsels a king. The tradition makes her wise; the tablets make her his mother.
Neti
the gatekeeper with the ledger
of the recordChief gatekeeper of the world below, who takes the answers at the outer gate and works the seven bolts by instruction rather than by malice.
Keep exploring the Chronicle