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Q is for Queen

Depiction of Queen Puabi in a 1900 textbook on the British excavations in Mesopotamia. Puabi was mis-translated as Shub-Ad but did earn the title Queen in this graphic.

Notable queens are rare in ancient history. Kings, emperors, and pharaohs fill the pages of history with battle deeds, law-making, and public works. Queens get barely a mention. Yet every Sargon and Ramses had a goal to produce offspring. Male leaders all married, multiple times, to create alliances with surrounding territories. There were plenty of queens, even if we don’t know much about them. I found five worthy of discussion.

Queens presuppose the existing of kings. Kings led successful armies, trade delegations, and public works projects. Queens were usually only the mother of the heir, although a smart king would rely on his queen for much more–to act in his absence, to guide children to become future leaders, and to help address needs of the population. Every now and then, she’d put on armor; every now and then, she would rule if the king died and the heir was too young.

Most ancient cultures had multiple gods, and while one was King above others, there was also a Queen. Yahweh originally had a wife–Asherah. Jesus had a mother who was Queen of Heaven.

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P is for Poem

My name is Calypso And I have lived alone
I live on an island And I waken to the dawn
A long time ago I watched him struggle with the sea
I knew that he was drowning And I brought him into me
Now today Come morning light
He sails away
After one last night
I let him go

Calypso by Suzanne Vega, still telling tales of the hero Odysseus (800 BCE) in the 21st century.
The Sumerian love poem, “The Love Song for Shu-shin,” mentioned in L is for Library. Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg).

The ancient poems that we know were written down, which dates them from @2100 BCE onward. Few people actually read them aside from the kings, priests, or scribes, since very few could read. The earliest poems we know were meant to be said aloud, told as stories. Surely, you can picture the poet–man or woman–standing in the firelight, weaving words of magic in front of an audience as it dozes from the wine and the heat of a Mesopotamian summer night. Perhaps the poet’s eyes gaze at something above the listeners’ heads, maybe at the sparks of firelight that dance above the dark and form shapes of heroes and heroines, of lovers and fighters, whose tales sink into the dreams of the drowsy.

Most of the poems written long ago lost the battle of centuries. Much of what we have are cobbled-together bits and pieces from tablets crumbled away or papyrus half-shredded. None of it was originally written in English. Whatever we have is filtered: patched back together, translated, missing bits filled in, with interpretative decisions about lines, rhyme schemes, word choice. We have to accept it as is.

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O is for Oncology

Offering to the Egyptian deity, Imhotep, god of medicine and architecture. Painting by Ernest Board, 1912.

There is no treatment…

From an Egyptian medical text @1600 BCE describing removal of breast cancer tumor.

As a disease of the cells, cancer is likely the oldest disease on Earth. Oncology is the study of cancer, of tumors specifically, since tumors are how cancer shouts Hey, I’m here! to the body. Cancerous tumors have been found on fossils, both dinosaurs and fish from earlier ages. As soon as there were cellular life forms, there must have been cancer.

Before I go any further, F#CK Cancer. Though it’s not really cancer’s fault, that’s just what it is. It’s part of the natural world, and Mother Nature makes the rules, not me. Even so, F#CK Cancer.

I don’t know any Egyptian swear words, so I can’t translate that into hieroglyphics for you. But the Egyptians knew about cancer, as did the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese. Other than finding skeletons with tumors, what we know now about what they knew then comes from what they wrote. And what they wrote shows that this scourge of our modern health system has been a scourge since they put up stone towers and started figuring out how to make bread.

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