Cait’s Reviews > Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World's First Author > Status Update

“We can only speculate as to why. Since students at this level were still learning how to write, which in cuneiform is done by pressing a reed stylus into clay, this student must have been thinking about the imprints that solids leave on surfaces, and perhaps it was only natural to experiment by biting it. Or the student may have been thinking about death. According to Babylonian belief, shades in the underworld were condemned to ‘eat dust and live on clay.’ Perhaps our unnamed student was nagged by fears of the afterlife, and thought to test how bad it would be.”

oh this IS my new favorite thing I’ve ever read