Inanna's Descent to the Underworld Part 1: The Full Story of the Seven Gates | 3 Hour Sleep Story

For twelve nights this season told the oldest stories on earth the way the clay tells them. Tonight, the other story. The one most people mean when they say Anunnaki: a twelfth planet on a long slow orbit, visitors who came for gold, a worker made in a laboratory out of clay and blood, a memory the tablets are said to keep. It is told whole, at full length, the way the people who believe it tell it, with its wonder intact. And after each part, once and plainly, what the object is: what the word means in the dictionary, what the seal in Berlin actually shows, what the flood poem actually says, what the chromosome and the green tablets actually are. Nobody is scolded. Nobody is lectured. If you have the twelve nights in you, you decide; if not, you are welcome anyway, and you may simply sleep.

Erra and Ishum is the only poem in this season whose author put his own name at the end and told us how he wrote it. He says it came to him in a dream, and that he wrote it down in the morning without adding a line. Tonight is a god of war who cannot

Bonus: three hours of calm sleep music, no talking.

Two nights ago a table was set in a wooden house, and a place was left empty, and a woman said her father's name to a chair. Tonight a priest walks past that house on his way home from saying the office for the dead, sees the candle in the window, knows exactly what it means, and keeps walking.

Bonus: six Mesopotamian Mythology sleep stories in one 11 hour episode.