Human: Critical Antiquities: Human: Babylonian Reflections on Labor

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.