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Something here will eventually have to explode

Wherein I do rant.

It's not that I hate all humorous fantasy per se. I am a devotee of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books—though I consider those sort of a species of free-for-all satire, albeit one that makes me laugh out loud in public places—and I am greatly amused by Mary Anne Mohanraj's "Fleeing Gods." (I have not yet read Leslie What's Olympic Games. It's on my to-read-before-some-impatient-friend-clobbers-me-with-it list.) Mostly it's a literary stripe that I just don't read particularly often. This week, I read Esther Friesner's "Last Man Standing" in the January 2005 Fantasy & Science Fiction, and have found myself unexpectedly annoyed.

The story has been favorably reviewed in The Agony Column and I'm sure elsewhere as well. It deals with a sarcastic slave named Namtar who escapes drinking hemlock at the funeral of Gilgameš only to find himself pulled down into the underworld alive by the romantic intrigues of the goddess Inanna; along the way, he runs into everyone from an irate female bartender to the divine Ereškigal to the less than impressed shade of Gilgameš himself, with a side order of scheming priests and vengeful ghosts to boot. In and of itself, it's a very funny story. Namtar follows in a long tradition of wisecracking protagonists who consistently get themselves into hot water and must rely on the same capacity for quick talking to get themselves back out again: he's sort of a servus calidus transplanted from Roman comedy to the ancient Near East; Pseudolus among the mud bricks. The narrative displays about as much reverence as Namtar himself, with lines like "Though the death of gods is sometimes unavoidable—whether to fulfill a prophecy, to respect some hidden rule of the cosmos, to get mortals to sit up and pay attention during temple services, or simply to make for a better story—it can also be a mere temporary inconvenience, like cat-sitting." I didn't find the tone laugh-out-loud hilarious, but the snerk level is evenly high. And who could fail to be amused by the ancient Sumerian pop hit, Love Me, Baby, Like A Sacred Temple Whore?

. . . cut for righteous pedantry.

Herein lies much of my major trouble with the story. Sacred temple whores? Royal funerals in which luckless slaves accompany their betters into the afterlife to satisfy not the strictures of the underworld, but the earthly pomposity of corrupt priests who run everything? When celebrating his newfound freedom, Namtar goes on a binge in the tavern run by his old acquaintance Puabi: "There had even been a time or two (or seventeen) when the pair of them had shared a satisfying measure of beer-fueled fleshly comfort during the Feast of Inanna, all quite amicable as far as casual orgiastic sex goes." Pardon me, what? I am willing to refrain from a fisticuffs about the issue of human sacrifice, as the Sumerian literary text The Death of Gilgameš and the "death pits" of the royal tombs at Ur have been academically linked since the 1920's, but I am much less convinced of the existence of temple orgies. (Sacred prostitution, fine by me: only keep in mind that not every priestess in Mesopotamia is a prostitute. Especially the ones who have taken vows of celibacy.) Then there are the names Friesner chooses for her characters. A slave named Namtar: after the minister of Ištar in the Akkadian version of the goddess' descent? A bartender named Puabi: like the queen buried in the royal tombs of Ur? Don't let me even start on Namtar's former superior, another potter named Ibi-Sin: like Ibbi-Sîn, the last king of the (Akkadian: 2112-2004 BCE) Third Dynasty of Ur? I cannot speak to the accuracy of the name Sabit, but it suggests a Semitic—Akkadian—origin to me. (If anyone knows otherwise, however, please correct me!) Lastly, and perhaps this is the greatest sin my book: Esther Friesner gets Inanna's Descent wrong.

"When Inanna's favorite mortal lover died, the goddess of love and war determined to bring him back from the dead, a land ruled over by her sister Ereshkigal. Dressed in her finest robes, decked with her most precious ornaments, Inanna descended into the land of darkness, her dainty gold-sandaled feet itching to kick her sister's butt and reclaim her own."

No. I like retellings. I have trouble with blatant misrepresentations of mythology. In the Sumerian version, Inanna claims to have come down to the underworld for the funeral of her sister's husband Gudgalana. (There are certain problems with this explanation, given that Ereškigal's consort is traditionally Nergal, the god of plague and chaos; but assume for the moment that Inanna is telling the truth.) In the Akkadian version, the goddess gives no reason at all: the text implies that she has it in mind to take over the underworld from Ereškigal, but nothing Ištar says to her sister to the gatekeeper explicitly makes this point. Whether by the name Dumuzi or Tammuz, the goddess' lover—who is not a mortal; his name contains the determinative DINGIR, unambiguously indicating his divine status—does not enter into the story until Inanna-Ištar has already returned to earth and needs a substitute to take her place in the underworld. In the Sumerian story, she passes over her minister, her manicurist and hairdresser, and her faithful servant, all of whom have observed the proper mourning rites: but Dumuzi, magnificently dressed and playing his flute as blithely as though his lover had never been dead, Inanna happily sics her demon escorts on. The Akkadian version offers a more fragmentary narrative, but even if Dumuzi has mourned his lover and actually been set up as a fall guy by the powers of the underworld (as Ainsley Dicks has suggested), still he is alive and well and living aboveground when Ištar comes back up. A goddess descending into death to rescue her mortal lover, even unsuccessfully, is a sweet story: but it is not this myth.

To a certain degree, I realize that I cannot take too much academic offense—especially on behalf of a field technically not my own. And there is a simple answer to all of my dissatisfactions with "Last Man Standing": Hey. It's a humorous story. It's not mean to be historically accurate. Keep your shirt on. Fine; the shirt stays on. But because you're writing a funny story rather than a note for NABU, does that mean it's not worth the research? About the story, the author says, "This time I would like to blame the British Museum, specifically their section on ancient Sumeria, as well as Larry Gonick, creator of The Cartoon History of the Universe, for his obvious-yet-overlooked observation that in any large gathering of people, there's always some guy who has to be last in line." Frankly, the story reads as though all of Friesner's information about ancient Sumer—because I believe "Sumeria" is a font—derives from pages 105—111 of the graphic novel, especially 110 and 111. I think this bothers me on the grounds of both academia and storytelling. Most people wouldn't know the ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon from a hole in the ground.* Don't make their ignorance worse. You may not care much about the culture from which you take your material, but at least pay a little respect to its traditions. (I have some of the same difficulty with Tom Doyle's "The Floating Otherworld," though I am nowhere near as qualified to rant on the misuse of Japanese mythology as

yuki_onna.) You can twist a story in all sorts of ways and still not warp it beyond its contextual resonance. Same for history: I'd have been enthused to read a historically-detailed, anachronically-sardonic story set in ancient Uruk. Beer straws and lapis lazuli do not make up for what looks like a basic lack of interest in any real exploration of the culture in which Esther Friesner chose to set her story. As it is, I think I might have been happier if she'd made up an fantasy country that bears a close resemblance to Sumer and set "Last Man Standing" there.

So, I suppose that's all my rant comes down to: Care about what you write about. Take the time to get to know the historical period, or the mythical background, on which you're basing your story. (By the same token, although I loved John G. McDaid's "Keyboard Practice: Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals," the phrase Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar—which he uses as an example of ancient Sumerian, a potter's tuneless chant as she throws clay on her wheel—is not Sumerian. Inanna is Sumerian. Ištar is not. The word qatu, moreover, looks suspiciously like the Akkadian word for "hand." I appreciate that he took the time to find out the Sumerian word for "school," e-dubba, and use it; so why not the same attention to a quoted phrase? All right, so most of his readership will neither know nor care. But Assyriologists read science fiction too!) At least make a brief foray in its direction: it can't hurt. If nothing else, fewer writer-scholars will get annoyed.

Rant over. I return to my regularly scheduled Greek epigrams. Feel free to bash me now.

*Which is pretty much what it looks like, these days. Memo to self: don't make national monuments out of mud brick.

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Yay for righteous pedantry! And yes, if one is writing something historically based/mythically based/etc., why not go that extra mile with the research?

By the way, have you ever read Judy Grahn's book The Queen of Swords? A long poem based on the Inanna story...I haven't read it in years, but I remember liking it when it came out.

No, I haven't: I'd love to see that. I have read Clysta Kinstler's The Moon Under Her Feet, a retelling of the Christ story that recasts him—from the perspective of Mari Anath, the Magdalene—as a dying god in the manner of Dumuzi and Osiris, and so handles Inanna's descent and return. (She links it to Salome's dance of the seven veils, actually, which may be historically bizarre but—like dying gods, which were more or less an invention of Frazer's spare time—makes for such a lovely mythological resonance, how could you leave it?) I read the book in high school and remember liking it; she seemed to have a decent handle on mythology and intriguing Christian heresies into the bargain. I'll have to check it out again now that I know slightly more about Inanna.

an interesting retelling, I am reminded of contemporary Mayan ritual linking Jesucristo with the Hero Twin mythogy and the death and rebirth of the sun god out of Zibalba

I wasn't aware of that particular syncretism: I think that's wonderful. Where did you learn it?

All's I have to say is that it's a shame the shirt stayed on ;)

I have achieved sexy pedant-hood. Go, me. : P

A fine rant. While it is true that most of the readers of these stories aren't going to know much about the cultures they misrepresent, you raise a very valid point when you argue that authors should CARE what they write about. They should care about details. The audience should CARE too, but they don't. Unfortunately, few people today care much about Mesopotamia, which is why at this very moment we Americans are standing by while Iraq is systematically looted to pander to wealthy private collectors of antiquities, most of whom are Western. The loss of knowledge that comes from this lack of caring is incalculable.

The two stories in question do nothing to help alleviate this general ignorance, mostly because, I suspect, the authors and then the editors were simply lazy, and that's a real shame. I've done translation work for projects on Mesopotamia, both a play and a novel, and the fact is that Sumerian and Akkadian are both beautiful languages representing a fascinating culture. "Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar" is neither Sumerian nor Akkadian-- it is in fact nothing but gibberish, much like the attempt at Akkadian in Jacqueline Carrey's "Kushiel's Avatar" (see page 42), which seems to have simply been simply a bunch of words pulled out of dictionary without any regard to morphology or syntax.

There is plenty of room for humor in Mesopotamia. There is plenty of room for drama. And yes, there are even Assyriologists like me who are willing to help authors get it right when they come to us with questions.

But only if the authors decide to care.

I'm not entirely convinced that it's the fault of the audience (or even the editor), or that it should even be. We are talking about a relatively obscure culture, for the overwhelming majority of today's readers; in any case, one must surmise, if we were the editor, that the author knows her stuff. Why should he question it further?

Beyond that, it's the responsibility of the author to make sure the details are spot-on, if that is even her intention in the first place (which it may not be)—and our responsibility is to make it clear that we might have issues with the story. The ball is then in the author's court. Beyond that . . . ?

Agreed, the first responsibility is that of the author, and editors are notoriously overworked. But a big part of the reason this culture is obscure is because the wider audience generally doesn't care (the other big reason is that too many professional Assyriologists refuse to publish works oriented toward the public, preferring to limit their efforts to obscure journals-- but that's another rant for another time). And so efforts like these, where the author so clearly only wants to use the culture of Mesopotamia because of their own flawed preconceptions about it, rather than out of any respect or genuine interest in that culture, only adds to the public's ignorance, and no one but folks like Sovay and I complain. And that ignorance, as I noted above, is complicit in the ongoing destruction of our own heritage.

I don't think putting the blame on the wider audience is the answer to this, in the sense that if it's not presented to them in something that they can understand and digest, then it might as well be irrevelant. It's more an issue of packaging and marketing than anything else and no one to date has done that quite successfully, in regards to this culture.

However, I doubt that any ignorance has any part in the destruction of our own heritage. I don't see your logic points in that statement, as human nature being what it is, we do it to ourselves, usually.

Hi, all...
I'm flattered an humbled to have found a few words from my story so intelligently and seriously discussed. First, let me apologize for my lack of command of Sumerian grammar. And for the obvious fact that I mixed Sumerian and Akkadian. But I would seek to push back on the characterization of laziness. While I cannot pretend to a specialist's knowledge, I have genuinely tried to do my research.

The quote -- while synthetic -- is meant to characterize a real, if somewhat heretical late Sumerian (hece the overlap of languages) thought: that the demon Pazuzu is the hand of the Goddess. While I may not have put it as eloquently as I might, it was integral to the story (and to the ending, where the posessed pianist raises his right hand and hisses). Yes, I have taken liberties with the spoken language, but my intent, at least, was authentic.

Like most science fiction writers, I do try to respect known facts while bending them here and there in service of storytelling. I'm very happy for the feedback, and will most certainly keep this group's critique in mind.

At the risk of asking for even more, I'd be happy to share with anyone interested a story of mine which appeared in an anthology called ReVisions last year. Called "The Ashbazu Effect," it is an alternative history in which printing is invented in Sumer. I'd be most happy to hear what folks here think, so that I can do a better job next time.

Best Regards.
-john

I would very much like to read that, actually, and not only for the purposes of academic critique. Is ReVisions still readily findable in bookstores?

One of the reasons the line read oddly, I think, was that it used Akkadian vocabulary but not Akkadian grammatical structure. (The phrase "Pazuzu is the hand of the goddess Ištar" would, I think, come out looking like ^dPazuzu qāt ^dIštar / qātu ša ^dIštar, depending on how you wanted to express the genitive.) So it came across as somewhat more strung-together than might have been intended.

I had not before made the connection with Janacek's gesture in the next-to-last scene. Thanks!

Thanks very much for the grammatical insight. I struggled over the qatu vs. qat; my knowledge derives mostly from reading Kramer and slogging through Snell's "Workbook of Cuneiform Signs."

While the ReVisions anthology is not in bookstores anymore, the story is scheduled to be reprinted in the online journal Tekka. Or, if you'd like to take a peek now, you can download a pdf from my site: http://www.www.torvex.com/jmcdaid/files/index.shtml

Again, thanks for the input. I really have great respect for Sumer and have a passion for getting the important stuff right.

Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you: thank you for "The Ashbazu Effect"! I am far less qualified to comment on the day-to-day of alternate Sumerian history than on Akkadian grammar, but I enjoyed the story greatly.

John-- Thank you, first of all, for your most civil response to my criticism of your work. In my turn, I must apologize to you for my remark about laziness; it was unfair of me to make, since I did not know the circumstances of your research for the story and so made an unfounded remark.

This is a tough time to be an Assyriologist, watching Iraq's cultural heritage destroyed and stripped away by organized crime while the American occupation does nothing (or in some cases actively participates, as they did at Babylon) and the American public looks the other way. The result is that we scholars sometimes lash out in frustration, but this is no excuse for bad behavior on my part.

I would be happy to look over your story and provide what feedback I can. I have a vision of a Sumerian printing press that resembles a breadmaker-- toss in dirt and water and voila! Tablets!

hansthebold@yahoo.com

Thanks so much for your note; no apology required. One is quite often justified in suspicions that writers have attempted to handwave the hard stuff; science fiction, particularly in its mass media incarnations, is especially guilty. As a field, sf has not done a particularly good job with Sumer (Robert SIlverberg's work excepted) and the image of Pazuzu from "The Exorcist," to be polite, fails to capture significant dimensions of this demon's role.

As an interested amateur, I share your horror and sadness at the impact of America's adventure in Iraq in lives, cultural hostility, and irreplaceable artifacts. Even before this latest episode, the contributions of the region to Western culture were given short shrift, and I cannot imagine the situation will improve. I'd like my stories to at least contribute to a more positive understanding and be responsibly researched. I'm actually very glad to have met you all -- which never would have happened without this thread. So thanks for caring enough about my writing to challenge it. :)

or even better yet make you laugh by linking you to something dorchadas posted relatively recently . . .

particularly since i am starting to translate Gilgamesh tablet XI (whee! the deluge!) and have to keep myself from thinking "King Gilgamesh rules over everything with a cruel and controlling eye from his Levitating Darkness Throne at the Ziggurat of Ur!"

Ziggurat Barley points.

*ksnerk*

I think the problem with the Doyle story is the opposite--he likes the culture so much that he's eager to wrap himself up in it, pour it all over his face, and lap it up from the floor. Problem is that he wrecks the culture by trying to insert his own fantasies of what it should be into what it is. It's classic white-man's-lit: oh, yes, those foreign gods are terrible and dangerous--unless a Western man is present. His all powerful gaze makes them sexy, and isn't that what godhood is all about? I don't buy for a minute that he's actually ignorant of the culture he's representing, I just think it's more important to him to live out his fantasy of himself in Japan through literature than to be honest and true to the culture itself. Mythology is a feed-bag, and he's a bottomless horse with rider-abandonement issues.

Japan is currently very prone to this--probably more so than any other culture going. But deliberate obfuscation is not quite the same as woeful ignorance. Still, they should both be beaten with their repective wronged culture's implement of choice.

(See? I said you were more qualified on this topic than I.)

Why Japan more than any other culture at the minute?

Because Japan has been designated a Cool Culture, and that combines with the long tradition of condescending Orientalism to create a fetish among Westerners for all things Japanese.

[arriving via referral from a message thread at SFF Net]

This is a good rant, but a bad review. As it happens, I haven't read "Last Man Standing", and so cannot comment on the story's literary strengths or failings -- but then again, I know too little about the story from this post to be able to tell whether it's a good story or not, and the comments on the ways in which the story and the source myths don't match are not enough on their own to suggest a conclusion.

That said, I do have specific familiarity with the issues involved in writing about mythological figures -- in this case, the native folklore of the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes living in the Columbia River Gorge area. My late grandfather personally collected stories from (then) older Indians living in that region, and published a collection thereof (Legends of the Klickitats, long out of print now but findable in regional libraries or on the used market). And I have a short story arising from that folklore appearing this spring in a YA fantasy anthology (details in my own LJ for those interested).

A couple of observations arising from that background:

My grandfather's book is a retelling, and a significant measure of whether it's a good one or not is the question of whether he "got the details right". To that end, the best reviews he got were from the Indians from whom he'd collected the stories, and they expressed much approval for the book at the time.

My short story is not a retelling -- it's a new story extending on the folklore. In one sense, it's still very important to get the details right; I need to represent the mythological elements as accurately as I can, and that dictated several creative decisions in the writing process. At the same time, it's impossible for me (or any storyteller approaching the same source material) to present new work without relying to some degree on imagination to provide new context or re-interpret the existing lore.

To give a further example -- a week ago, I went to a children's-theater performance of a play by a local Indian writer retelling another version of a myth related in my grandfather's book. As children's theater, it was a good show. As a retelling of the mythology, it was very different from my father's version -- but that didn't make it wrong; there is in fact a second version of the same story in general circulation from a variety of sources. I found myself dissatisfied with several of the author's choices in translating even that version of the myth to a modern children's play, based on what I do know about both iterations of the story, but that too does not (mostly) make the author's choices wrong.

Were I writing a similar script, I would almost certainly make different choices; in fact, I'm tempted to try my hand at that particular challenge. But even if my personal motive for writing such a script is the writer's classic "I could do better than that!", that script's success or failure as theater would rest not on any comparison between the two, but on the literary merits of the work itself and the execution given by anyone choosing to produce it.

What's interesting in all this, to me, is the question : do you retell a story as accurately as possible or are you allowed some semblance of free will in your worldbuilding?

Because a story uses elements of a culture or society does it mean that it must take all aspects of it and play them out as they were/were told? Does it mean that if I were to have a thought on a singular concept of ancient Sumer that I have to incorporate the whole? Why?

In the course of writing fantasy one can and often does steal bits of culture. If one is representing a specific culture and a "what if it happened like this" - be it humourous or not - ok, I'd say, yes. The details are the thing.

But if you aren't? Why should you have to use all of it?

As has been noted elsewhere what often can inspire - not always does, but CAN - is the resonance a certain story has with an individual. Those resonances can be picked apart and played separately from the original, essences or specific spots teased into their own story. It is not necessary to recreate the whole.

We've all had a novel or legend or some such produced into a visual medium from a written one. And at some point we've been disappointed. As faithfully as one follows the word, the intent and reaction will always be personal. And outside of pure luck, we all will have at least once our personal reaction missed in some one else's "take" on a story.

And that's a direct translation. In the sense of using parts of a culture, even the cultures name, I feel no need in certain writings to follow the culture exhaustively, or even faithfully.

If it were about recreating the same stories, verbatium, then I'd have some way to nod my head and agree. But it's not.

2 cents and inflation.

When one retells a story, there is inevitably some modification involved; I've done it myself. Sometimes that is in fact the whole point of the retelling, to invert a story or to use a familiar image in a different way to make a dramatic or comedic point. I have no objection to this. This could well have been the intention in both the cases that appeared in F&SF, and had the authors taken even a little more care in their research (say, using an actual book instead of a comic book as a source of information; excellent though the Cartoon History of the Universe is, it has inaccuracies and is by necessity filled with simplifications), they could probably have produced works of much better quality than they did.

My objection, in other words, is in the details, not in the general ideas or themes of the stories. It takes little research to know that Ishtar is an Akkadian goddess and that her Sumerian counterpart is Inanna. And anyone who has enough interest in details to discover that Mesopotamian schools were called "edubba" should be able to determine that "qatu" isn't a Sumerian word, and that if one wishes to quote one line of Sumerian, one can probably find an Assyriologist who will render a reasonable translation; I've produced much longer translations for authors myself. In the end it's simply a matter of having enough pride in one's own work to try and get the details right, so that one's efforts don't come off looking like quick hack-jobs.

I've seen science fiction writers who labor to get the physics of an orbiting moon correct; why can't they do the same for history or mythology?

In the course of writing fantasy one can and often does steal bits of culture. If one is representing a specific culture and a "what if it happened like this" - be it humourous or not - ok, I'd say, yes. The details are the thing.

But if you aren't? Why should you have to use all of it?

It's not so much the pitch-perfect recreation of a whole that I'm looking for, I think, as a certain fidelity to those aspects that one does choose. Technically, I suppose, the story is set in a fantastic version of ancient Sumer rather than a strictly historical setting: it has gods and ghosts running around all over the place; Sumer of the mythological narratives, rather than Sumer of the economic texts. But given that it localizes itself in that explicit place and time, rather than in a clearly fantasy society that happens to share certain characteristics—ziggurats, mud brick, a goddess of love and war whose libido is an epic force all unto itself—with the culture from our own past, it falls for me into the category you mention above: a specific culture and a "what if it happened like this?"

I have absolutely no problem with stealing bits from various cultures to make a wholly new one that will still contain certain echoes for the reader. Mary Gentle's Rats and Gargoyles, with its thirty-six Decans and Jacobean dramas, five cardinal directions and secret societies who dream of building a New Jerusalem, is a prime example of this technique. Likewise Patricia McKillip's In the Forests of Serre, whose forest-dwelling witch and firebird derive immediately from Russian folktales. Motifs out of their original context can resonate just as powerfully. But that is not, I think, what is happening in "Last Man Standing." If the action takes place in ancient Sumer and involves the gods, unless the point is that key details differ already in this iteration of the world, then the mythology should be true to itself. Humorous or not. The rest, however wildly divergent, will resonate all the more.

I understand I'm not going to change anyone's mind with these thoughts. But there are my two cents in return.

As a sort of counterpoint, I'm reminded of the time I took a book on Regency England out of the library and discovered that, even though this was a time and place I knew almost nothing about, it all sounded vaguely familiar. And this certainly wasn't because anything about the time was notably similar to ours. Then I realized that what it was echoing back to was Mairelon the Magician, a book by Patricia Wrede that's set in a sort of fantastic alternatic Regency world, in which wizardry is a part of life so integral that it's just another thing you can study at elite schools provided you have the money to attend -- and everything else is the same. I'm sure Wrede may well have made historical errors somewhere, but in my subsequent studies I've found I've actually been able to rely on her details and descriptions as an accurate representation of the time as we know it (I can't quite bring myself to rely on any fantasy book as a definitive source of fact -- and I don't study Regency England -- but in hindsight there are places I could have). And it didn't read like a history primer, or "look what I found in my research," but as a straightforward portrayal of the world as the narrating character knows it.
I imagine it would have worked just as well as a story without that accuracy, but that sort of really seamless grafting made it so much more awesome -- a combination of its being such a plausible spinoff of what really did exist, and the fact that creating a world that really approaches ours in its casually intricate weirdness is something that even the best authors very rarely pull off. Impressionist worlds can be quite wonderful (and are sometimes a better location for a given story), but there's something particularly satisfying in visiting a place that so clearly has a life outside of any of its characters.

[continued...]

As a hopeless pedant myself, I also do feel a bit betrayed when something comes across at first glance as factually fastidious, and then turns out not to be. Obviously, in art the end is not in those sort of details, as shown by plenty of great artists -- and historians -- who created compelling visions that were less than strictly factual. But one often gets signals from a work about how seriously it intends to be taken -- if someone is going to write a work that contains large amounts of precise detail about a culture, I'd expect them to try to make that detail as accurate as reasonably possible. Conversely, if an author is painting someplace in really broad strokes and throwing in anachronisms that clearly know they are -- and revel in being -- anachronisms, I don't get my historical hopes up and am content to hear whatever they have to say on their own terms. But I think there's a important distinction between sloppy history/facts and "Variations on a Theme of Ancient Sumer", between not caring because historical accuracy takes so much work and not caring because the point you're trying to make has a limited amount to do with the specific time and place in which the story is set.
I would put most if not all folktales in the second category -- the time and place in which they arose are integral, but so is their universal element, and by nature they constantly transform themselves to fit new audiences. On the other hand, my mother once read a book, set in our everyday world, in which the narrator's daughter swims and loses a race by the narrow margin of one second. This sounds perfectly plausible, but if you actually have a daughter who swims (like my mother does), you know that that's actually an extremely large time difference, with swimming times being regularly measured in fractions of a second -- and then the reality of the whole world of the book gets punctured a bit, because it just doesn't ring real on the level it wants to. And because it wouldn't have been very hard just not to make that mistake, if the author really knew the subject in the way that they were representing that they did.
I suppose I could generalize and say that this philosophy would allow for any number of variations on the Innana story, but not for the unsubstantiated claim that those alternate variations were the standard in ancient Sumer. Similarly, I suppose you could have, say, a version of ancient Sumer whose Innana legend involves a corner deli, or otherwise clearly makes no claim of representing what ancient Sumer actually was. Not having read this book, I couldn't say with confidence which it is in this case.

It's a short story, so I imagine you could pick it up and give me your reactions: I'd love that, actually. I am working in a vacuum here.

I like the idea of Inanna's descent to the corner deli . . .

From what little I know of her, it seems like she might consider it the epitome of slumming...

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Something here will eventually have to explode

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Assyriological Agony

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i feel i should aid in your ranting . . .

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