MODES OF THOUGHT IN ANTERRAN LITERATURE
c667, 2nd year classics
file: 201
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INT. LECTURE HALL - DAY
Raquel (over the phone): Hey Professor, I'm so sorry it's taken me this long to get back to you, but things got complicated. Um, I'm in Beijing. I can't talk about it on the phone, but I'm fine. I'm fine. So, um, I'll be back as soon as I can be. Uh, okay. I have to go. Bye.
Professor: There. See? She's fine.
Hai Rong: Randomly flying off to Beijing doesn't seem fine to me. And I'm, I'm from there. It's just, it's just weird she didn't tell me.
Students shuffle in.
Professor: Raquel is very capable. I'm sure there's a good reason. Alright, everyone let's get settled down. Great, thank you. Okay, uh, Hai Rong can you hit that first slide please?
Click of the projector.
Professor: So, this inscription was found carved into some pillars that were excavated from a circular site in Prime A. We think it's a temple because there are no cooking hearths or trash pits. Um, and from the carving on the north wall located up here, right, you can see that the We get this first quote, um, it says, “and so each of the first ones through sacred dirt gathered from the land of their ancestors into the altar of fire. With a gift of our bodies from 10 to 9, we received the blessing of Ma’Tokka, the god of bees, the god of starlings, the god of locusts. the god of Anterra. We are bound in ceremony and in blood, and thus this city was founded on sacred ground, and we could be a people blessed by the gift of Ma’Tokka, and share joy and pain together into eternity.”
So it sounds like a ritual to me, right? Which is pretty exciting. Hi Rong, hit that next one.
Click of the projector.
Professor: Okay, so take a look at this. Prior to the discovery of Prime A, the oldest known city was discovered in central Anatolia. That's now Turkey, right? Um, this existed from about 7500 BCE for almost 2000 years. Çatalhöyük is perhaps more of a megasite than a city. Uh, definition, megasite. Basically, meaning that the center of the city moved around, for instance, for a long time, it was on one hill and then at a certain point, the population center shifted over to an adjacent hill. It's pretty, pretty strange. Um, there were no grand monuments, right?
There were no temples or marketplaces like in later cities. Instead, these tightly packed mud brick homes were, they were built nearly on top of each other. Um, and in some cases literally on top of each other. There were no streets or alleys. The city's residents navigated the sidewalks on the roofs of each other's houses and there were holes in the roof in order to come down into each individual residence. Uh, so nearly 8, 000 people at one point called Çatalhöyük home. And the settlement represents a turning point for civilization. A shift from nomad to settler. As you can imagine, there's some debate about why. Uh, does anyone have a theory on why this shift happened?
Student: Farming. Growing food instead of looking for it.
Professor: Yeah, right. Okay, from hunting and gathering to cultivation and animal husbandry. Um, agriculture. Opened the door to a stable food supply, which then led to more free time to build temples, or create art, or form centralized governments. That's one way that we've been thinking about it.
Hai Rong: First came the temple, then the city.
Professor: Right! First came the temple, then came the city. Klaus Schmidt, nice get. Uh, now Herr Schmidt was a German archaeologist who led the excavations at Gobleki Tepeh. Uh, this is a pre-Neolithic site in Anatolia within the Fertile Crescent area of Upper Mesopotamia. Gobleki Tepeh is the site of humanity's oldest known temple, and it was constructed almost 11,000 years ago. Uh, 6,000 years before Stonehenge, right? At the time of the construction of this site, most of the human race still lived under hunter gatherer tribes, and building a monument of this size would have required, like, massive coordination of multiple tribes coming together in greater numbers than had, uh, we had any evidence of ever coming together before. So, this site predates agriculture, it predates domestication of livestock, it predates pottery.
The 50 colossal T-shaped pillars were engraved with intricate humanoid figures, jaguars, scorpions, boars, vultures, and snakes. Deadly creatures, not deer or the other sort of previously seen targets of the hunt. Despite the need for hundreds, possibly thousands of people in order to build the equivalent of the Great Pyramids, there were no houses, no agriculture nearby, no kitchens, no cooking fires. The nearest water was three miles away. So, Herr Schmidt decides that what people wanted to build was temples. And that religion is what brought them together. And they eventually developed agriculture in order to feed the builders of the temples.
Now, only about 5 percent of Gobleki Tepeh has been excavated so far, so who knows what other revolutionary stuff will be uncovered there. Yeah? Jimena, go ahead.
Jimena: So, were towns formed because of agriculture or the other way around.
Professor: Well, right. That’s exactly the question. Thank you for bringing me back to task. What I was trying to get to in a long winded way is that very question. Did agriculture give way to complex societies, or did complex societies precede agriculture? I believe that a particular religious ceremony integral to the spiritual and cultural life of Anterrans from this time of the founding of the city could illuminate in some way the answer to that question. Next slide.
Click of the projector.
Professor: Okay, thanks. Now, here are a series of bas relief carvings uncovered near the inscription that I read at the beginning of class. Notice the nine first ones, throwing handfuls of dirt into the fire. You can see that here, right? Uh, in the next panel, go ahead, Ma’Tokka is seen here as a humanoid figure with the bottom half of an insect, um, kind of looks like a wasp. Ma’Tokka is summoned from the flames, and he's holding a ceremonial dagger. We're missing panels three, four, and five, but, uh, the story resumes here in panel six. I think it's a story, maybe it's a recipe. Uh, one of the first ones now holds the ceremonial dagger, and cuts off the fourth finger from their left hand, throwing the severed finger into the fire. And in the final panel here, we see all nine of the first ones, but look at this, they are all missing that same finger. And they've been encircled with what looks like twine or rope.
Gross, right? Um, but, not too surprising, maybe a little more extreme than what we usually see, but ritual body modification, it's not uncommon in religious rites, right? Um, we think of it as, maybe a little bit primitive, but circumcision in Christianity, uh, there are watches and vigils, fast, depriving mourners of food, drink, sleep.
Um, those are all practiced by the Siyana in New Guinea, as well as obviously Ramadan, right? Um, periodic fasting. Uh, the fire ant ceremony, um, that's conducted by the Setere Mawe in the Amazon, where, uh, the young men who, in order to prove themselves, uh, as I guess, quality members of the tribe and achieve adulthood, have to wear these woven mitts that are filled with, uh, bullet ants, fire ants, that, uh, are excruciatingly painful when they bite you. They have to do this 20 times. 20 times in order to become fully accepted grown men of the tribe. So pain and suffering transforms the individual. Symbolically, sometimes literally, bringing them closer to death, only in order to experience a spiritual rebirth. This is not new. This is everywhere. Look at Luke Skywalker getting his hand cut off in Star Wars, right?
So, how can we understand the sacrifice of the first ones without understanding the God that demanded the sacrifice? Ma’Tokka is, ironically, the God of Compassion. Um, more often he's represented as a swarm, uh, a swarm of bees, of ants, or birds. And if you read up on the creation myths, or if you were here over the summer, then you might recall there was Ikopaa. And Ikopaa was the thousand eyed god. Anyone remember? Read up on that? Okay. Um, well, Ma’Tokka is the sun. Um, And one of several offspring, actually. Ma’Tokka is responsible for hiding Ikopaa to keep the world safe. That's going to sound weird if you don't remember the story. Ikopaa, the god with a thousand eyes, was created in order to always have one eye open, in order to establish that the world existed.
If all of Ikopaa's eyes closed at once, the world would reset to zero. You know what? And we'd all have to start from scratch again. Um, so, Ma’Tokka, son of Ikopaa, has hidden Ikopaa in order to keep Ikopaa safe. Right? Ma’Tokka is the guardian of the world, and he does this out of compassion for mankind. What's really fascinating is that a similar ceremonial ritual was commemorated in Prime B. The other city that's 17 kilometers northwest of the city, right? Uh, but it was different. They had changed it. So here we can really start to track the change from the Second Empire to the Third Empire. The next phase of Anterran society, which gets ugly. Um, next slide.
Click of the projector.
Professor: Alright, as you can see, uh, the west side of this circular structure has been damaged. So, a bunch of the panels we're looking at are missing. And what I'm guessing is probably panel 3B here. Next one. Uh, we see a row of nine figures in chains. Um, the next intact panel is 6B. Go ahead. And now those figures and these priests all seem to be missing the fourth fingers on their left hands.
Okay, absent in this panel is Ma’Tokka. He's not there. Who we see now, uh, is Ra Tak, mistress of the victorious hunk. Ra Tak is… Well, she's tough, man. She's the god of war, the god of achievement, and the god of amassing wealth. She appears here again with the blade, though this one looks more like a sword than a ceremonial dagger, right? Um, you can tell by the length that that's a weapon. Um, um, we have not seen any weapons of war in the carvings up until this point. So, something has shifted. Now take a look at this slide. Go ahead.
Click of the projector.
Professor: Here you can see the chains, right? The twine, or the rope, that we saw in Prime A, that's transformed into chains on these other figures here.
A strange buzz starts to build.
Professor: So, Are they slaves? Why are they taller than the other figures? Are they depicted this way because they're more important? Um, were they another tribe with different genetics going on? Ow!
Hai Rong: What happened?
The buzzing stops.
Professor: I don't know. Ow! God, my arm. Ah, my arm just started hurting.
Did I bang it on something?
Hai Rong: No.
Professor: That's so strange. Ow. I was just standing here. What, what's going on?
Hai Rong: Do you want to see a doctor? Hey, you should sit down.
Professor: No. No, I'm okay. God damn. Ow. Um, okay. So, there's another shift that starts happening in the culture at the same time that we see this shift in the ritual. From the Ma’Tokka version to the Ra Tak version, which is a change in the caste system. We still haven't done a deep dive on the caste system of Anterra, um, and we will, but for now, just be aware that this new sub caste emerges, um, it's named in multiple carvings in Prime A, and these people are known as the Vessels.
They're described as, quote, bearers of sin, uh, the vessels of pain, uh, but pain can translate as sadness, too, so that, that sounds a little more dramatic, um, and also as, uh, cup of tears. Um, so, who are the people? They're relegated to the status of Cup of Tears. And why are they always depicted as taller than the rest of the Anterrans?
This is an invitation to speculate. Um, so just be aware, drawing a line here. Uh, we're going beyond facts now, and we're just going to jump into the swimming pool of wild conjecture. I have a friend, uh, had a friend. Um, in Beijing who was working on an interesting hypothesis. This is that the Antarrans were not Homo sapiens.
Wait, wait, nobody is saying that they're from outer space. What she was suggesting is that they could have been Homo erectus. More specifically, she was working on a theory that these were the Denisovans. Have you guys heard of the Denisovans? Okay, I'm going to put a link on the website for you to check out. Very interesting, not a lot of DNA to work with, but in Siberia and throughout Asia, we presume, there was a separate branch of the Neanderthals, um, called the Denisovans. Um, So we already know that various groups of human ancestors were walking around at the same time as contemporary Homo sapiens. That's not even a dispute, right?
Okay, so back to facts now. Homosapiens, Neanderthals, some other branches of the tree of Homo erectus were all alive and coexisting in separate tribes that interacted with each other. Uh, across the globe. That's true. What we don't know is if any of these other branches besides human could have ever even developed a culture. But if Dr. Chen was right, that there might have been an actual city and culture and religions and mythology built up by a different branch on the evolutionary tree. That would shake things up a bit as far as our understanding of the predominance of homo sapiens and the sort of, uh, you know, weird species centric supremacy that we all kind of enjoy being at the top of the food chain.
So that might give you some ideas for your thesis papers. Um, speaking of which, at least three of you have not made appointments to see me. And we're running out of time. Okay, so get cracking. All right. We're gonna pick it up next week. Um, I want to talk about the Anterran notion of time and it's, it's really fascinating. So we'll see you then. Okay?
Modes of Thought in Anterran Literature. This podcast is made possible by Harbridge University, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Peeler Prize in Archaeological Literature, and the Harbridge Family Trust. With an in-kind donation and production assistance from Wolf at the Door Studios. For more information and a reading list, please visit wlfdr.com.