Podcast | Older than Writing

Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos.

Enheduanna

Enheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now.

The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written about her before. I first met her as a cuneiform tablet in a dusty, forgotten corner of a Brussels museum. That tablet had been written six hundred years after Enheduanna died. She lived around 2400 BCE. So her songs went on being copied for six centuries, and were cut into clay, and that is why I could find one of them on a day when I was in Brussels to talk to people there about the Disinfolklore analytical method.

Enheduanna lived in the city of Ur. In the marshland the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, some four thousand three hundred years ago. That is the same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes, the writer and artist, refers to in his recent piece in Byline Times, “The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface”.

She was the daughter of Sargon, the first monarch to bind Sumer and Akkad into one dominion. She was high priestess of Nanna, the moon god.

There is an alabaster disc of her in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. It is also where Donald Trump went, but we will not hold that against it. I have not managed to visit the Penn Museum yet and I am desperate to. The disc was carved in her lifetime, and I will post a picture of it beside this piece. On it she stands larger than the men around her. That stone still catches the light after four millennia. The way a full moon does.

What Enheduanna did, as the first named author in human culture, was not in the end to describe her world. It was to intervene in it. She used words to set her world right. A usurper defiled the temple she served, a ziggurat of the kind the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. She did not merely record the outrage. She wrote against it. Her writing outlived him.

The averaging engine

We are told reading and writing are dying. In truth, as Peter Jukes recently put it in Byline Times, they are exploding. There is more of both than in any century before ours.

The real worry his essay raises is subtler. These new machines, the large language models we hear so much about, produce fluent text at stunning speed. One thing they do is predict the likeliest next word from billions already written. They are, as his piece has it, “avatars of the average”. They “produce nothing new but predict the old”.

There is a counterweight worth putting beside that. One of the founders (@importai) of Anthropic wrote on X this weekend that the idea of these models as stochastic parrots has in many ways ruined our capacity to understand their real power.

That landed with me.

Until last November I thought I parroted the stochastic parrot line myself. They do predict the next word. But at the level of meaning they do not predict in that same stochastic way, and that is where the mystery sets in.

Jukes’s warning still stands. If we lean on them too hard we may learn to average too. We may mistake the plausible for the true. His piece ends on a line that resonates. “The trouble with our moment is not that we grant our machines too much mind, but that we grant ourselves too little.”

Every word of that is right.

It is also one half of an alabaster disc. I have been holding the other half in my hands and in my mind all summer. The whole disc begins where writing itself begins, with a woman writing to the moon, to the moon god Nanna. It travels a road older than the machines. Older than the essay as a form. Older than cuneiform, which was used six hundred years after Enheduanna’s death to record what she had once sung as a prayer.

It is older than writing.

What a writer is for

Something subtle is buried in the word writer.

A writer’s job, as I have come to understand my own, is to recouple two things that power, that mana, is forever trying to prise apart. What is legally right, and what is morally right.

The tools for that work are hidden in the vocabulary of the work itself. We right the world by writing. We set down words that act in a reader’s mind like a writ, a summons, a binding instrument. Right, write, writ, word. Say them. Write them. You will hear one sound under all four. An R with a hard stop behind it. R-t-.

These are not plays on words. They are clues. They are clues to the early Indo-European mind, and to the minds that fed into it, out of which our whole culture comes.

That same sound surfaces in the Vedic ṛta and the old Iranian arta. Both are Indo-European languages, attested very early in writing. Both mean truth, the true order of things. And the sound is in truth itself. Look at it closely. Strip its vowels and the skeleton sits there. T-R-T. The second letter and the second to last. The same two consonants, R and T, hiding inside an English word, one language family away and two thousand six hundred years from the rock inscriptions at Behistun in Iran, where arta stands carved in the living rock from around 500 BCE.

And the sound is in writing nine centuries before Behistun. Around 1400 BCE the monarchs of Mitanni, on Mesopotamia’s northern rim, bore Indo-Aryan names built on arta-. Artatama: his abode is truth. Artashumara: he remembers it.

That little R-t- skeleton has travelled again and again through the languages from Ireland to India. It is ṛta in the Ganges valley. Arta in Persia. Rectus in Rome. Recht and right and truth in the Germanic languages, like English and, well, German. It never quite keeps the same letters around it. It never once lets go of the same meaning. Rightness.

The words a writer works with are made at their root, another R-t- word, of the truth sound. To write is, etymologically, to true the world. To make the crooked line straight. Enheduanna did it with a hymn. I try to do it in podcasts, tweets, essays, posts and pieces like this one. The instruments a writer uses change. The office does not. I hold the same office as Enheduanna, grand as that may sound, and it is the truth.

The sound a writer cannot un-hear

This is the discovery I have spent six years chasing. It started, as things usually start for writers and for artists, with getting snagged on the material. There is an R-t- in started, and in writer, and in artist.

Years ago the sound of a word stopped me the way a knot in the grain stops a hand. The word was Manu, the first human and first monarch of the oldest Indian tradition. A crowd of other words came with it, uninvited, all carrying the same two consonants in the same order. M, then N.

Say them slowly. Moon. Month. Mind. Meaning. Memory. Human. Money. Mana. Karman.

The thing in the night sky. The span of time it measures. The organ that measures the world within us. The meaning that organ makes. The memory it keeps. The human who does all of this. The woman who makes that human, and you might look on PowerofMana.net for “The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal”. And the sacred power once thought to run through all of it. Mana.

One small sound, M-N-, sitting beneath the deepest things a person can name.

A writer’s first duty here, as ever and everywhere, is suspicion. So I followed the sound. Through thousands of scholarly papers. Across tens of thousands of kilometres between Ireland and India, again and again, in travels I recount in Finding Manuland.

What I found is this. The oldest recoverable word for the moon in the ancestral tongue behind English, and behind all living Indo-European languages including Persian and Vedic and Sanskrit and Hindi, does not mean “the bright one”. It is not Luna, and it is not the sound inside lunacy. It is méh₁nōt, and it means the measurer.

So many of these sounds sound alike that I would ask you to read along as you listen, if you can. Not if you are driving. Not if you are on your b…

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