Thursday, 30 October 2060 BCE
From the Almanack Sumerian Debate Collection1
When kings had learnt to borrow against the unborn,
when the granaries contained promises of grain,
when in Uruk2 the benches of the assembly were divided
and the places where men sat became the names of their descendants,
the two Hands began to quarrel.
They had kneaded one loaf.
They had lifted one child from the water.
They had washed in one basin;
each accused the other of making it dirty.
The Right shook its rings.
The Left struck the table.
Over the table, over the bread upon the table,
they raised their voices.
The Right Hand
O Left, smudger of tablets, backward sister!
Even when you write a law
you drag your flesh through what is written.
I am the hand of the oath and the clasp.
I hold the beam while the carpenter fixes it.
In my joints the knowledge of the dead survives:
how tightly to bind, how gently to carry,
which timber will bear weight.
Before you were born, the roof sheltered you.
Before you spoke, a language waited in your mouth.
You propose to begin the world again.
Have you brought another world to live in while you work?
The king wears my ring.
The priest raises me above the cradle.
What are you, that you should take precedence over me?
The Left Hand
O Right, little landlord of five fingers!
You inherited a ring
and believe you forged the gold.
I held the ladder while you climbed.
From the roof you announced
that heaven had placed you higher.
I pulled the petition from beneath your elbow.
I pressed the seal into hands that owned no seal.
I said the child born in the ditch
had a claim upon the city.
You counted the ancestors of the hungry.
I counted the hungry.
When I loosened the chain, you cried: Theft!
When I opened the gate, you cried: Disorder!
At every birth you inspect the infant’s fingers
for the keys to a house already built.
What are you, that you should take precedence over me?
The Right Hand
And what did you do with the keys?
You opened the prison.
You filled it with the keepers of the prison.
Then with their wives.3
Then with the man who asked how long they must remain.
You declared the fingers equal.
The thumb dissented.
You brought out the knife.
O maker of clean beginnings,
your basin is full of blood!
I keep the little workshop from the tax collector.
I keep the scribe’s door against the priest.
A man should eat the fruit of the tree he planted.
A woman should shut her door upon a ruler.
You have a plan for every room.
Where shall we go to be beyond your reach?
The Left Hand
Those were my words when you defended the palace.
You have put them on like a dead man’s gloves.
You praise the planter.
Show me the hands that dug.
In the house of steam, in the house of iron,
the wheel took three fingers from a child.
You entered three fingers beneath the cost of production.
You said the child had freely chosen hunger’s alternative.
I stopped the gear.4
I brought the scattered hands together.
One finger could be bent; a thousand hands held fast.
I won an evening in which the worker saw the sky.
I brought the child a slate instead of a spindle.
You call me idle because I made an hour
in which a person could be idle.
Hold out your palm.
Let the machine read your principles.
The scribe records:
Then years passed over the Hands.
The merchant changed his seat in the assembly.
The patriot changed his song.
The Right learnt to summon crowds.
The Left learnt the weight of the official seal.
Each found, among the other’s discarded garments,
something that fitted.
The Hands disputed over who had changed.
The scribe needed a fresh tablet.
The Right Hand
O Left, keeper of tomorrow’s feast,
how long must the guests go hungry?
You seized the granary in the name of all.
You appointed one finger to count the sacks,
one to count the counters,
one to arrest the finger that found the sacks were empty.
You praised the harvest.
The village ate its seed.
You praised the village.
The villagers disappeared.
I saw your fist upon the table.
You called it the workers’ hand.
A worker opened his mouth;
you closed it.
Even your own little finger trembled before you.
You called its trembling proof of guilt.
The Left Hand
I have seen that fist.
The seal upon the orders was my own.
I will not scrape it from the clay.
Its prisoners were mine also.
The organiser, the doubter, the poet,
the woman who remembered what we had promised:
their names were scraped from my own tablets.
But you, lover of the ancient household,
what new master did you welcome through its door?
He promised to break the unions.
You lent him your strength.
He promised to restore the nation.
You straightened every finger in salute.
Then he searched the body for foreign blood.
He drew up lists of limbs to be removed.
The neighbours vanished.
Their houses stood conveniently empty.
Do not rub your palm upon the flag.
The stain will go through.
The scribe records:
After the cities burned, the Hands worked among the ashes.
They raised roofs, laid pipes, carried medicine.
The sick received beds.
The old received bread.
For a while the Hands quarrelled over the measure
and still delivered the grain.
Each afterwards claimed
to have done the work alone.
The Right Hand
I am tired of your clerks.
To mend a window, I must petition seven offices.
To open a stall, I must feed a room of scribes.
You have built a great machine for distributing bread;
it distributes instructions for obtaining bread.
Let the baker choose the flour.
Let the buyer choose the baker.
No finger knows what all the fingers know.
And leave the old songs in the village.
The living have planted memories there.
You arrive with a map of human happiness
on which their houses do not appear.
O tender sister, so easily offended by the world,
must every mouth ask your permission
before it speaks?
The Left Hand
O Right, invisible when the wages are counted,
heavy as a millstone when the rent falls due!
You freed the stall.
The great merchant bought the street.
You freed the scribe.
He bought the scribes also.
Now every morning a thousand voices
announce how dangerous I am.
You sold the village’s loom across the sea.
When the weavers asked for work,
you pointed to the stranger at the gate.
You cherish the songs.
You have sold the hall in which we sang them.
And when your counting house fell down,
whose palm did you extend?
The public hand, the common hand,
the hand you said could do nothing!
You held it out beneath your falling gold.
The scribe records:
Now the Hands received tablets made of glass.
The Right pointed.
The Left pointed.
The merchant of the tablets counted every pointing
and was well pleased.
Their fingers grew nimble.
The roof leaked.
The Judgment
At last they went before Nisaba,5
who keeps the account of grain and the account of words.
The Right said: I have preserved the body.
The Left said: I have liberated the body.
Nisaba summoned those whose bodies they had spoken of.
The mill child came.
The prisoner came.
The widow came with the rent book.
The scribe brought a tablet the priest had forbidden.
Many arrived whom neither Hand had thought to summon.
Nisaba heard them.
Then she said:
Left, in your claim that those born empty-handed
have a claim upon the granary,
you take precedence.
The ring establishes no right over the unringed.
An old chain gains nothing from its age.
The Left lifted itself in triumph.
Nisaba struck the table with her stylus.
Put down that fist.
You shall open the granary.
You shall publish the count.
The hungry shall question your arithmetic.
The prisoner shall name the hand that struck him.
You shall make no law forbidding him to name you.
Right, keep the door against the ruler.
Keep it also when the ruler wears your ring.
Keep the scribe’s liberty
when he writes against you.
You shall have work enough.
The Left said: Then I have won?
You have been given the heavier basket, said Nisaba.
Lift it.
The Right said: And what of my honour?
The roof, said Nisaba.
It is still leaking.
Thus the Left Hand took precedence in the matter of the empty hands.
Its victory was entered upon the tablet.
Beneath the victory the scribe entered its obligations.
Praise be to Nisaba,
who leaves room on the clay
for the account of what happened next.
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Sumerian debates were a genre of formal literary disputation, popular in Sumerian-influenced civilizations, in which animals, seasons, tools and other things argued for ultimate primacy. They were some of the best-selling editions of the Mesopotamian tablet editions of Almnack. Other examples include Hoe and Plough, Sheep and Grain, and Ronald McDonald vs The Burger King. ↩
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When envoys from Kish demanded Uruk’s submission, Gilgamesh put the question to the city’s assembly twice: first to the elders, who voted to submit, then to the able-bodied young men, who voted to fight. See Gilgamesh and Aga, lines 1–29. Thorkild Jacobsen built his case for a two-chamber “primitive democracy” in the early Sumerian cities partly on this episode: Jacobsen, T. (1943). “Primitive Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 2(3), 159–172. doi:10.1086/370672. ↩
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The Right Hand might add that it took nearly four millennia for the Left to develop the innovation of walling up their children too. ↩
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The original Sumerian word here is 𒌢, umbin, meaning “wheel” but also “fingernail”, “claw”, “finger”: so the wheel that took the child’s fingers was written with the same sign, and pronounced the same, as the fingers themselves.
Later Archive translators read umbin as symbolising a “wheel with claws”, the component of previously undocumented Sumerian machinery; hence the wording here, “I stopped the gear.” Sîn-lēqi-Rabassa, “Magarru or Ṣupru? Notes Toward a Techno-Akkadian Disputation of the Hands,” Almnck. Vol. 2231, x·30.
Our Archive maintains this reading, not least since Mario Savio settled the matter on the steps of Sproul Hall, Berkeley, on 2 December 01964, when he observed “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … and you’ve got to make it stop.” ↩
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Nisaba was the goddess of grain, and so of the accounts kept of it, and so of writing itself: her name was written with the sign for an ear of barley. When Gudea of Lagash dreamt of rebuilding his temple, she appeared to him holding a stylus of refined silver over a tablet of propitious stars (Gudea Cylinder A, lines 110–114, 134–140). Scribes signed off their school exercises in her name. A thousand years later the Babylonians took writing from the goddess and gave it to the god Nabu; the Archive has never accepted the transfer to that smug, bearded interloper. ↩
Welcome, compeer.
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