Overview

Acclaimed author and translator Sophus Helle considers an ancient creation story with themes of humanity, class warfare, and catastrophic climate change. The Babylonian poem Atra-hasis is a forgotten masterpiece of political thought. Written in Akkadian in what is now southern Iraq during the early second millennium BCE, Atra-hasis gives us a glimpse of how ancient poets understood the society growing around them. This radical history of the world told from the perspective of the mother goddess conveys the complexity and contradictions that lie at the heart of the human experience. Atra-hasis tells how humanity was created as part of a bargain to resolve the world's first labor strike, in which the lower gods rebelled against the excessive work imposed on them by the higher gods. It depicts humans as workers endowed with defiant intelligence. They multiply and become too loud, so the gods decide to quiet them with a cataclysmic flood. Looking to Atra-hasis, Sophus Helle reveals an ancient story with reflections on power and history that invite comparison to topics of contemporary relevance, including labor, inequality, climate change, artificial intelligence, threats to democracy, disability, care work, sexual consent, and more. Helle considers Atra-hasis as a foundational document of ""pasthumanism,"" a term he uses to describe the study of how cultural conceptions of humanity have changed across centuries. He argues that ancient and non-Western texts remind us that cultural assumptions we now take for granted are neither natural nor necessary.

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Reviews

“This is an excellent and highly original collection of succinct analytical and meditative essays on humanhood in the Atra-hasis. Through dramatic and well-composed form, Helle tells us what this epic is all about and, along the way, distills some broader considerations for conceptions of humanity both ancient and contemporary. I was thrilled to encounter writing so deeply scholarly, richly accessible, and lucid. It’s a pleasure to engage and think with this work.” -- Edgar Garcia, author of ""Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis"" “With Human, Helle presents fresh, accurate, and poetic reflections on a foundational and canonical piece of literature from ancient Babylonia. He guides readers through the story’s themes and juxtaposes ancient and modern in a way that brings the epic to life and encourages reflection on the current state of the world, what it means to be human, and how to navigate so many contradictory things during a major existential crisis. I learned a lot from this book and enjoyed it immensely.” -- Moudhy Al-Rashid, author of ""Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History""

""This is an excellent and highly original collection of succinct analytical and meditative essays on humanhood in the Atra-hasis. Through dramatic and well-composed form, Helle tells us what this epic is all about and, along the way, distills some broader considerations for conceptions of humanity both ancient and contemporary. I was thrilled to encounter writing so deeply scholarly, richly accessible, and lucid. It's a pleasure to engage and think with this work.""--Edgar Garcia, author of ""Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis"" ""With Human, Helle presents fresh, accurate, and poetic reflections on a foundational and canonical piece of literature from ancient Babylonia. He guides readers through the story's themes and juxtaposes ancient and modern in a way that brings the epic to life and encourages reflection on the current state of the world, what it means to be human, and how to navigate so many contradictory things during a major existential crisis. I learned a lot from this book and enjoyed it immensely.""--Moudhy Al-Rashid, author of ""Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History""

Author Information

Sophus Helle is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and the translator of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic and Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author. He is the managing editor for Bloomsbury’s Library of Babylonian Literature and the host of the Danish podcast Mythos.  

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