The Me

Also Known As: Sumerian me, written with the cuneiform sign 𒈨; Akkadian parṣu; rendered in English as the divine decrees, the divine powers, the ordinances, the offices, and more recently as the rituals
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Sumerian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Each me holds one working part of civilization, from kingship and the priestly offices to carpentry, song, sexual intercourse, the plundering of cities and the art of the scribe, and whoever holds it holds the thing itself.
Role in Mythos: Enlil gathered them, Enki kept them in the abzu at Eridu and distributed them among the cities, and Inanna carried them off to Uruk in the Boat of Heaven.
Relation to Humans: Everything people do that is not simply eating and sleeping runs on a me, which means human society exists at the pleasure of whichever god currently holds the relevant one. Since the list includes falsehood, enmity and the destruction of cities alongside wisdom and peace, the arrangement obliges people to accept the worst of their own behaviour as something handed down rather than chosen.

The beer went round in bronze vessels at Eridu, and the god of wisdom kept pouring. Across the table sat his daughter, arrived by water that morning, who had been met at the Lions Gate with butter cake and cool refreshing water and made to feel she was in a friend’s house. Enki had known she was coming before she was within six miles of the abzu. He had briefed his minister Isimud on every detail of the welcome, down to the seat at the holy table of An. What he had not planned was the drinking contest, or what he would start giving away once it began.

He gave her the office of en priest and the office of lagal priest. He gave her divinity, and the great and good crown, and the royal throne. He gave her the noble sceptre, the staff and crook, the noble dress, shepherdship, kingship. Between each handful he swore the same oath, in the name of his power and in the name of his abzu, and holy Inanna received what he named. The priestess offices went. Going down to the underworld went, and coming up from the underworld with it. The sword and the club went, and the black garment, and the colourful garment. Then the standard and the quiver, then kissing, then the holy tavern, then the art of song and venerable old age. He gave away the craft of the carpenter and the craft of the coppersmith, the craft of the scribe and the craft of the smith, the leather-worker’s craft and the fuller’s and the builder’s and the reed-worker’s. He gave away wisdom and attentiveness, the kindling of fire and the extinguishing of fire, hard work, descendants, strife, triumph, judging and decision-making. He also gave away deceit, wickedness, the plundering of cities and the making of lamentations, and the text does not pause over that at all.

These were the me. Sumerian scribes counted more than a hundred of them in this one poem and set the whole list out four times, which was thorough of them and lucky for everyone since the tablets have come down so broken that barely sixty survive. Before Enki held them, Enlil had collected them; Enki’s job was custody and distribution, brokering them out from his own city first and then to Ur, to Meluhha, to Dilmun. A city functioned because it had been allotted the right ones.

Sobering up takes a while. When it cleared, Enki looked at the abzu, turned his attention to Eridu, and began asking questions. Where are the office of en priest, the crown, the royal throne? My master has given them to his daughter. Where are the sceptre, the crook, kingship? My master has given them to his daughter. The answer comes back nine times in the same flat words before the tablet breaks off, and Isimud never once varies the phrasing.

What follows is one of the great chases in Sumerian literature, and it is conducted entirely by proxy. Enki sends the enkum after the Boat of Heaven. Then the fifty giants of Eridu. Then the fifty lahama of the subterranean waters. Then all the great fish together. Then the guardians of Uruk, then the Id-surungal, the river itself. Six times something enormous rises out of the water and takes hold of the boat; six times Inanna calls Ninshubur, her minister whose hands and feet water has never touched, and six times she has the me back and the boat under her again.

She brought them in at the Gate of Joy. The boat came up the street of Uruk Kulaba with the crowd standing in awe along it, and the city made a festival of the arrival: bulls slaughtered, sheep sacrificed, beer poured from a bowl, the sem and ala drums going and the sweet-toned tigi instruments under them. She had spent the journey naming the places she passed, one of them after a trader who quoted fifty shekels and delivered less. Enki’s last surviving words in the poem are about establishing something for her in his abzu, and nothing about revenge.

No one ever wrote down what they looked like. This is the strangest thing about the me and the reason they resist every tidy definition: the poem is emphatic that they are held, stacked, carried, guarded and shown off, and equally silent on their form. A few of the entries are straightforwardly physical, since a lilis drum is a lilis drum. Many are not. Basket weaving is a me. So is victory, so is reverent silence, so is venerable old age. The texts never explain how a person loads the attractiveness of women onto a reed boat, and it is possible the question would have struck a Sumerian as beside the point.

Scholars have been circling the word for a century without agreeing on it. Thorkild Jacobsen read the me as patterns of behaviour and tied the noun to the Sumerian verb me, to be. Others have read them as offices, roles actively conferred by gods and performed by people. Annette Zgoll has argued that they are rituals, the property of the gods, in which the deity takes form in whoever carries out the rite. Gertrud Farber-Flügge devoted an entire 1973 monograph to the list alone. The English translations pull in different directions and each one loses something: decree emphasises the authority behind it, power emphasises what it can do, office emphasises who performs it.

Their strength is total and their weakness is built into it. A me works wherever it goes, which is precisely why it can be given away by a drunk god, chased across six stretches of water, and installed in a rival city by the end of the afternoon. They confer without judging. The same shelf in the abzu held righteousness and falsehood, comforting and enmity, peace and the destruction of cities, and Samuel Noah Kramer took this to mean the Sumerians regarded human cruelty as decreed from above, inscrutable, and not open to argument. It is a bleak theology with one consolation buried in it. If the worst things people do were issued from the same storehouse as carpentry and song, then they at least belong to the world’s design rather than to some failure in it.

Enheduanna knew the word’s weight. Writing around 2300 BCE as en-priestess of Nanna at Ur, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, she opened her great hymn with the words nin-me-šara, lady of all the me, and gave Inanna not a share of the divine powers but the whole inventory. By then the goddess who had loaded a boat at Eridu was being addressed as the owner of everything that boat had carried.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the me in Sumerian mythology?

The me are the divine decrees, a set of more than a hundred powers that between them make up civilization. Each me corresponds to one component of organized life, such as kingship, the office of a particular priest, metalworking, the art of song, or the destruction of cities. The Sumerians understood them as the property of the gods, held and transferred between deities and cities.

How did Inanna get the me from Enki?

She sailed to Enki’s shrine at Eridu, was welcomed with food and beer, and drank with him until he began handing the me over one group at a time, swearing an oath with each gift. She loaded them onto the Boat of Heaven and left. When Enki sobered up he sent six waves of pursuers after her, including the fifty giants of Eridu and the fifty lahama of the subterranean waters, and each time her minister Ninshubur recovered the boat.

What do the me look like?

No Sumerian text describes their appearance. The poems treat them as physical enough to be stored in Enki’s E-abzu, loaded onto a boat and displayed to the people of Uruk, but never say what a person would actually see. Some individual me are recognizable objects such as musical instruments, while others are skills like basket weaving or abstractions like victory.

Are all the me good things?

No. The list includes falsehood, enmity, deceit, strife and the plundering of cities alongside wisdom, peace, righteousness and rejoicing. Samuel Noah Kramer read this as evidence that the Sumerians considered human evils to be divinely decreed and inevitable rather than chosen, and therefore not open to question.

Who else in Mesopotamian myth controls the me?

Enlil collected the me first and handed them to Enki, who kept them in the abzu at Eridu and distributed them among the Sumerian cities. After the theft they belonged to Inanna at Uruk, and the priestess Enheduanna addressed her around 2300 BCE as nin-me-šara, lady of all the me.