hi! i was wondering if there was a way to add an option to remove the activity tab with dashboard unfucker? i think i could do it myself if i got the general idea of how it works, but i just wanted to ask before doing anything
If you're just looking to hide the activity icon, I would probably just recommend using a uBlock filter. uBlock thankfully supports the :has() pseudo-selector, you can just use the filter ##.KTRcB:has([aria-label="Activity"]). If you don't already know JS, I don't really have a concise answer on how to add a feature, but if you do the code should be pretty self-explanatory. The spots you would need to modify are the configPreferences initialization, the checkboxEvent() and initializePreferences() functions, and the config menu string.
I am not able to respond to this ask normally for some reason hence the screencap.
I have more issue with what they did to literally dozens of articles than about their presence on my talk page, frankly. I still have not managed to track down all, and there are a few cases where I can’t do anything. Whatever, they left for now, and the epicenter of their activity has been locked for the foreseeable future.
I do try to mostly pick sources which can be easily accessed so I'm glad that's working.
As for the book, you mean this one? Truth to be told, the author's declaration troubles me. The Epic of Gilgamesh is possibly one of the worst myths to pick as a starting point for learning about Inanna. It presents a non-standard tradition, with Uruk and Eanna presented as Anu’s rather than hers (something that only holds true for the city in the Seleucid period...), and Paul-Alain Beaulieu went as far as arguing the compilers were biased against her, lol. That alone is a bad omen.
Detailed analysis of what is available atm regarding the book under the cut.
Let’s start with the profile of the author. Nothing too bad or fringe, and I do not think you need to be an Assyriologist or otherwise tied to the history of Iraq and/or Syria to have something worthwhile to say about Mesopotamian mythology, so this alone is hardly a problem.
With that out of the way, time to move on to the article and the fragment of the novel provided there for promotional purposes.
The novel is presented as a "fresh take on the oldest story of all: The Epic of Gilgamesh." Not great - it is not the oldest piece of literature in the world, or even of Mesopotamian literature specifically. In fact, it needed there to be a large corpus and a tradition of intertextuality to even arise. The famous version only goes back to the Kassite period. I do not think any single narrative holds the title of oldest myth, we more or less know what the oldest known piece of literature in Akkadian is (a hymn to Shamash where he hangs out with other judge deities), but good luck guessing which of the Early Dynastic Sumerian literary texts is the oldest.
What's next? "In Athens, they call me Aphrodite now. In Babylon, they call me Ishtar." Not a fan of outright equating Inanna and Aphrodite. Truthfully, there are only two factors that lead to the widespread acceptance of this claim online:
a) classicists are, let’s be honest, one of the types of historians who are just universally treated as better. Only Bible scholars rival them in that regard when it comes to the ancient Near East specifically. From an Assyriological perspective, even today their output about Inanna is, essentially, trash. Hyperdiffusionism and orientalism, long debunked myths, and so on. I saw an example on twitter just the other day. If Assyriologists wanted to match this quality they’d need to treat Apollo, Helios and Sol Invictus as interchangeable and base their perception of him on Madeline Miller’s Circe.
b) goddesses are treated as interchangeable so Ugaritic Ashtart maybe being present on Bronze Age Cyprus and MAYBE influencing the local goddess is basically the same as her being Aphrodite and everyone knows Ashtart is BASICALLY Inanna.
Personally I am very skeptical about such claims of direct descent also because ancient Greek authors just consistently show a completely baffling lack of knowledge about Mesopotamian deities, in contrast with their relative familiarity with Egyptian or Phrygian ones. Meanwhile, cultures which undeniably were influenced by Mesopotamia, like Hurrians, do generally show a solid understanding of the basics.
Cyprus does show pretty clear merging of a “Levantine” tradition with a local one, but that’s… not really Mesopotamian, and does not really prove much beyond “Cypriots and first the inhabitants of Ugarit and later Phoenicians were in contact.” In particular, making vague claims about Aphrodite based on that is just faulty scholarship. Part of me thinks it’s also an echo of 19th century need to prove gods which did not fit the sensibilities of the era were not truly Greek.
Singling out Babylon as a city associated with Ishtar is INCREDIBLY weird too. Why not Akkad? Why not Kish? Why not Mari? There was a distinct “Ishtar of Babylon” especially in the first millennium BCE but she is ultimately of limited importance and, following the modern consensus, was poorly received in Uruk. Does the author think Akkadian was only spoken in Babylon? Is she aware the names were used interchangeably in Uruk itself? Does she even know which cities which deity was worshiped in?
The use of the term Anunnaki non stop is another weird point. Anunna, with later variants Annunaki (ki = "of earth") and Anunna-anna (anna = "of heaven") is, simply put, just a fancy term for a group of deities. “A murder of crows” for deities, if you will. I would go as far as arguing that in many cases there is 0 reason to even leave it untranslated, much like how DIĜIR.MEŠ or other ordinary plurals. It only acquired a specific meaning as a logogram in Hurrian context, where it referred to Enna Turenna, ancestors of other gods, and in first millennium BCE text, where it refers to underworld deities (note that this does not apply to ex. Inanna’s Descent, where Anunna appear in an underworld context but according to Dina Katz are just major gods). That the gods are warring with each other, when coupled with this term, is suspicious too, but more on that in a sec. For now, suffice to say I suspect this is, in fact, not a reference to the "theomachy" seals or anything like that.
The description of Inanna's marriage - one would presume to Dumuzi - is weird. "Forced into a marriage to negotiate a peace"? Political marriage? With Dumuzi? The guy whose mother barely exists outside of texts about him? The guy consistently portrayed as a b list god, who was never a major deity, and whose cult center was a satellite of Uruk of limited importance? Also, is this some sort of deconstruction? Inanna appears in romantic and erotic poetry, that's hardly a topic relevant to political marriage. There are tons of cases which would work for a political marriage story, like deities whose cults were transplanted to new places because of the destruction of their original cult centers who promptly acquired new spouses. the love poetry romantic relationship thing is really hard to miss. Look how many of the Inanna-Dumuzi poems are on ETCSL. And that's not even all there is!
A huge red flag is the focus on gods having children with humans. Demigods are EXCEEDINGLY rare in Mesopotamian mythology. Hell, even fully divine children born out of wedlock seem pretty rare. Gilgamesh is, simply put, a rather unique entity. Sex is pretty common in Mesopotamian literature, but it typically occurs between deities, most commonly between couples.
There is only one type of source I am aware of keen on this sort of speculation - the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, one of the “fathers” of modern ancient aliens, and all around scummy fraud. A good summary of Sitchin’s absolutely deranged views, as well as a thorough debunking based on opinions of exports in every field he invaded has been compiled by Jason Colavito, see here for an online edition. One of the main topics of his nonsensical work is the firm belief in a "war" between Enki and Enlil, which is why I earlier said the mention of war between deities makes me suspicious.
Sitchin pased away a few years ago after like fort years of "research." Sadly, his ideas keep being repeated by the tv show Ancient Aliens (over and over and over again), as well as in similar “literature” - examples are too plentiful to link all, so I’ll limit myself to some funny examples from Colavito s blog like this and this (feat. new age relationship therapists who believe polyamory is the key to defeating the Anunnaki).
Sadly, these “theories” pop up in less expected places too. Their fans include musicians such as Nik Turner (to all of my followers also interested in Mesoamerica, this one’s four you, it’s a crossover episode) and Matt Pike, and various other celebrities around the world, as seen for example here (double feature with “if there are still monkeys, how is evolution real?”). Sitchin is also referenced in one of the leaked emails from a certain famous 2016 case (doesn’t seem the sender was anyone important, tbf). Most bafflingly, in 2016 his claims were presented as truth in a speech given by Kadhim Finjan al Hammami, the Iraqi minster of transportation, which was poorly received domestically for obvious reasons (this is presently the best referenced part of his English wikipedia article; no clue what the Arabic version is like).
I am not aware of anyone credible spelling the name as NinshubAr rather than NinshubUr. A quick search reveals mostly shoddy self-help books, “goddess movement” literature (or, as I like to call it, esoteric terfism) and the like. Meanwhile, every credible source under the sun, and even books I normally dislike, stick to correct Ninshubur (or variant transcriptions thereof with dashes, diacritics etc).
I am also not aware of any source presenting Ninshubur as a warrior deity. Well, source other than Louise Pryke’s Ishtar, a book which dedicated more space to Joss Whedon than to Nanaya. After all, being worshiped alongside Inanna for some 2000 years is nowhere near as important as being a sex pest who wrote some episodes of a shoddy tv show which is like Inanna because...? I no longer remember the logic. It was insane.
If anything, an argument can be made that Ninshubur is the opposite of a warrior deity. Her primary role was to mediate and “soothe hearts” (see here and here) and that's explicitly why she was a popular deity. In none of the narrative texts she appears in is her role even remotely belligerent. The closest she comes to that is Inanna and Enki, I suppose, but it’s still hardly a warrior role. While I have my issues with Olga Tokarczuk’s Inanna novel, Anna In w Grobowcach Świata (I don’t think there is an English translation despite the author’s moderate international success), I actually think it got Ninshubur (my bad, “Nina Szubur”) well, which means it’s something doable even if the author is a self professed Jungian and uses dubious sources. Not a hard bar to clear (with all due respect for Tokarczuk)!
The focus on there being only twelve deities plus Inanna is… incredibly weird. Mesopotamian pantheon was huge, with a lot of local variation. God lists typically enumerated hundreds of deities, with An = Anum, the most extensive known text of this sort, having over 2000 entries, though obviously many are epithets and not individual deities. The humongous numbers show up in Enuma Elish too.
When it comes to actual active worship in individual locations: Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s study of the pantheon of Neo-Babylonian Uruk has entries for around 60-70 (give or take a few since regional hypostases are listed separately), I’ve seen a similar figure given for Early Dynastic Lagash. So I think it’s reasonable to assume that this was the norm for a city pantheon. Not all of these will be big shots,naturally, but a pantheon cannot only consist of gods representing the main cities and a couple of natural forces or celestial bodies. Understanding why the mediators, the personified professions, the spouses and children, the foreign imports and the weird leftovers who do not fit any category are there is pretty significant and I’m not a fan of just glossing that over.
Myths actually do reflect that. Even the famous ones! To use just the example of Epic of Gilgamesh: Sumuqan, the one actual “fertility deity” (he was responsible for, quite literally, the multiplication of animals) is namedropped when Enkidu is first introduced; Ennugi, a courtier of Enlil, is mentioned in the flood section of the story (there’s an incantation which credits him with creating grubs, to illustrate what caliber of deity are we dealing with here), as are Adad’s sidekicks Shullat and Hanish (a pair of twins with a penchant for destruction), in the Old Babylonian version Humbaba’s master is Wer, a distinctly “northwestern” weather god, Aya (“dawn”) plays an active role when Ninsun negotiates with her husband Shamash, and obviously Ninsun and Siduri are both deities (contrary to what some online hot takes presume; the need to demythologize mythology is kind of tiresome). There’s even a goddess only attested there, Silili.
Thirteen does not seem to be a number associated with Inanna anywhere. She does have a well attested numerical association, with 15. The numeral 15, if preceded by the dingir sign, the “divine determinative”, could be used as a fancy logogram to represent her name; hemerologies assign the fifteenth day of the month to her. The logic was basically just “30 is the number of her father (because moon god = lunar month), so a half of that makes sense”, though, it had nothing to do with the number of worshiped deities. Have to be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen either 12 or 13 treated as a religiously significant number in any Mesopotamian text, now that I think of it. I guess there are twelve gods in the curse formula of the Code of Hammurabi? For more see here (it’s old and in German though).
Wait, this is just a “well there are twelve olympians and it’s BASICALLY the same” thing, isn’t it? Oh wait, no. How could I forget Sitchin’s obsession with Mesopotamian deities corresponding to “twelve planets,” with Ishtar/Inanna as a "bonus" without a planet (it does not take much familiarity with Mesopotamian mythology to see the problem). It’s likely just ancient aliens again. Troubling!
There isn’t really a single equally well attested grouping in Mesopotamia, while figures such as 7 and 50 might show up as the number of “great gods” (with no list provided), they are uncommon. Add to this major gods could vary between locations - even between the “core” cities (Nanshe in Lagash, Nanaya in Uruk, Zababa in Kish…), let alone “peripheral” ones, where Dagan, Inshushinak or the pair Teshub and Shaushka appear side by side with “truly Mesopotamian” deities. Given that dealing with this reality was a major aspect of Mesopotamian theology, I think a good modern adaptation should at least try to address it in some way. To be fair, the variability is also true for Greece and its neighborhood, take into account how popular Helios was in Rodos or Hecate in Lagina.
As a side note, where is Utu? Was Inanna born without her twin? What the hell. How does this work. Is this setup for Sitchinesque "the sun is Apsu actually"?
Tl;dr ancient aliens/10, sounds awful.
could you elaborate on the eurynome thing? i only know eurynome the oceanid, and eurynome wife to ophion
Oh are you asking about Eurynome being the goddess of all things? Don't worry, that's yet another thing Robert Graves invented LOL dude made a lot of weird headcanons, like Apollo and Orion being boyfriends and Hestia giving up her throne for Dionysus (some of them are unfortunaly taken as facts akdjs). The goddess Eurynome in Greek mythology, as far as I know, is an Oceanid, the mother of the Charites.
sorry, i have to ask: how the hell did you finish a 130k+ novel in 4 MONTHS???? TALENT /srs
KJNGFN THANK YOUUU and quite honestly i have no earthly clue :’) i would say being out of school helped but since i was working retail through the draft, i’d probably attribute it instead to a desperate need to have something fun to do, my intense love for the characters & themes i was writing about, and a very stubborn desire to meet a certain word count goal every month!! before i started writing wayfarer in november i hadn’t written anything significant since finishing sevensworn over the summer, so i may have also had a lot of words i needed to get out of my system after such a long period of burnout/rest fdkjnkjnh
re: anon about poc with light hair/eyes. when a poc does it, the intent is usually different from when a white person or non-black (in most cases) person does it. for example, i have many characters with very dark skin, white hair, and blue eyes, but i have MORE characters with dark hair and dark eyes because i understand the implication of the former. most people who aren't poc who use this trope do not, and that's the difference
you know what i hate most about l*re olympus? when i rightfully point out stuff about the rape culture/weird dynamic/the way it purposefully misinterprets the myths, stans come out of the woodwork to tell me "it's just fiction" when I KNOW THAT. IT'S WHY I POINT IT OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE🤦🏾♀️
I feel like people who say “it’s just fiction” literally prove our point though, don’t they? By admitting that you only see it as fiction and inherently separate from real life, you think that it can’t possibly affect you and are thus unaware of how it does affect you, and it already has because you’re defending it so strongly and violently against justified criticism instead of acknowledging that it’s flawed but you like it anyway. People who CAN separate fiction from reality are able to acknowledge how fiction can affect reality and are aware of where the line is drawn for them personally. People who go “IT’S JUST FICTION” think they know the line, but already are so closely attached to their fiction that it is affecting them personally.
@namelessscribe yeah ovid’s version isn’t “worse” or anything i’d just like for once to see some love given to the other version. tumblr in general is like the worst resource for greek myth i’ve maybe ever seen and like 80% of the takes on it are rancid. if people wanna retell that myth in that way they certainly can i’m just very bored and tired of it, especially when it’s presented as “superior” or “feminist” when it rarely gets deeper than “but what if WOMEN were doing imperialism” or whatever. also if i see one more post about hades and persephone i will die on sight
