Somewhere in southern Mesopotamia, a farmer's family dug a ditch to carry river water to a dry field. The barley came up green. Nobody wrote down that they had been clever.
Olga Popova, a historian of the ancient Near East, finds this one of the oddest habits of the first cities. People who built canals and invented writing did not call these things their own work. They said the gods had taught them.
Popova is careful about how far she takes it. She treats it as an observation about how these people thought, and she says plainly that it is unusual. Her point comes in passing, while she talks about what myths were for.
The stakes are easy to miss. We tend to picture the first engineers and scribes as proud inventors, the ancestors of every patent office. If Popova is right, that picture is ours, not theirs. Civilization's earliest breakthroughs came with no inventor attached, and probably with no idea that an inventor was something a person could be.
Myths, she says, had a job here. They explained why things are as they are. Why can we write? Hardly because we are so clever. More likely the gods taught us. Why can we dig canals? Presumably the gods told us that too. Her words for it: people did not say "we're clever, we invented it." They believed the gods had "somehow guided" them.
One of the myths she tells shows how this worked. In it, the goddess Inanna, patron of the city of Uruk, takes the "tablets of wisdom" from the god Enki, so that her city can become civilized. Enki belonged to Eridu, among the oldest cities of the region. The theft also reads as civilization passing from one city to the next. The skills were never made up by anyone. They were divine property, and they changed hands.
A source from outside the conversation fits that picture. World History Encyclopedia (Joshua J. Mark, 2026) describes the story Inanna and the God of Wisdom. Enki holds the meh, the laws and powers behind all of life and the gifts of civilization, which belong to the gods alone. At a drunken party he lets Inanna take them. In the story, then, civilization starts as something owned by gods.
Her host guessed at a reason: maybe nobody had the institution of the author. Popova agreed. For a great many texts, we do not know who wrote or compiled them. Names of scribes start appearing at some point, but a text whose author we actually know is rare. The best-known early case, she says, comes in the twelfth century BCE, though civilization had been going since the third millennium. Before that, people did not credit themselves with achievements. She says it again, because it still strikes her: it is unusual.
There is one well-documented exception that sits oddly beside this. Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled from 2334 to 2279 BCE, is called the world's first author known by name (World History Encyclopedia, Joshua J. Mark, 2026). That is far earlier than Popova's twelfth century, so the two do not line up neatly. Popova's claim is about the general habit, and she says herself that named authors are rare, not absent.
So the first people to master water and write on clay left their work unsigned. They saw themselves as students. Taking credit would have been a strange thing to do when the teacher was standing right there.
For us the habit is hard to even picture. We put our names on everything, from a paper to a photo. Yet the ones who started it all seem to have preferred a quieter arrangement: someone dug the canal, and the gods got the thanks.
They didn't say "we're clever, we invented it." They thought the gods had somehow guided them. It's an unusual way of thinking altogether: not attributing achievements to yourself.
Они не говорили, что мы молодцы изобрели, они считали, что это боги их как-то направили. Это такой необычный образ мышления в принципе. Не приписывать себе каких-то достижений.
— Olga Popova, Osnova, 57:22
