The Sumerians Had The Internet Before The Internet And Called It The Me

5,000 years ago, a Sumerian city received a delivery. And the moment that delivery arrived, the city developed writing and law and music and the capacity for legitimate government to function. Not because anyone taught them. Not because they figured it out themselves. Because something arrived by boat. We have a word for a system that stores all human knowledge and capabilities in one place. And when you connect to it, you can access things you could not access before. When you lose the connection, those things stop working. We invented that in 1983. We called it the internet. The Sumerians invented it 5,000 years earlier. They called it the ME. They described it as a list of over 100 items, physical objects that could be stored, stolen, and transported. And they believed that whichever city possessed them could function as a civilization. Whichever city lost them could not. The woman who delivered the cargo got the god who owned them drunk at dinner, took everything while he was not paying attention, and sailed away before he sobered up. He sent seven separate forces to stop her. She defeated all seven using the very things she had already taken. The list of what she was carrying is sitting in Philadelphia right now. It has been there since the 1890s. It has been translated. It has been studied. And nobody has formally answered the question that occurs to any engineer or systems architect who reads it carefully. What exactly was the ME? Not what it symbolized. What it actually was. Because the text does not describe a metaphor. It describes a transfer. A specific operational system moved from one location to another that made civilization possible wherever it landed. I spent a long time reading this list. I want to show you what is on it. Because the answer I keep coming back to is the one nobody wants to say out loud. They are pronounced May. And for 5,000 years scholars have been arguing about what they actually were. I want to start with the physical description. Because it is the strangest part of this. And the part that the standard academic treatment tends to move past very quickly. That ME are described in the Sumerian texts as objects. Physical objects. Objects that can be held in the hand. Stored in a specific location. Loaded onto a boat. And transported from one city to another. They are kept in a specific place. The Abzu. The underground realm of the god Enki at the city of Eridu. They are stored there the way a library stores books or a server stores files. And here is where it gets specific in a way I find very difficult to categorize comfortably. Most of the ME on the list are not physical objects by any modern definition. Truth. Falsehood. Heroism. The making of decisions. Descent into the underworld. The destruction of cities. These are not things you can put in a box. These are processes. Systems. The capacity to do something. The ability to operate within a specific domain of human activity. And yet the texts describe the ME as being stored in the Abzu. Handed from one being to another. Loaded onto a boat. And used as tools by whoever possessed them. The academic response has been to call the ME symbolic. Divine decrees. Cosmic laws. The abstract principles that govern civilized life. Personified in the way ancient cultures personify abstract concepts. But that does not explain what the texts actually describe happening with the ME. What the texts describe is not metaphor. It is mechanics. Let me tell you the story the tablets record because it changes the way you read the list. In the myth of Inanna and Enki inscribed on tablets dating to approximately 2000 BCE and found at Nipur across multiple excavations. The goddess Inanna travels to Eridu. She goes to Enki's underground realm to where the ME are stored. She arrives. Enki greets her. They feast and they drink. As the drinking continues Enki becomes generous. He begins handing her the ME one by one. Naming each one as he gives it. Over the course of the feast he gives her all of them, more than 100 ME, transferred from his possession to hers. She loads them onto her boat, the boat of heaven, and departs for Uruk. Taken at face value it is a story about a goddess getting a god drunk and walking off with the contents of his library. The second part is more interesting. Enki sobers up and when the effects of the beer cleared from him he looks around the Abzu and realizes the ME are gone. He calls his minister. His minister confirms that yes, he gave them all to Inanna while drinking. Enki is not pleased. He sends forces after her. The text records seven separate attempts to recover the ME. Each time Inanna uses what she already possesses to defeat whatever Enki sends. She uses the power she has already received to protect the power she has already received. Seven times. Seven times she wins. She arrives at Uruk and the text describes what happens when the ME arrive. Joy in the city. Life in the city. Kingship established. Scribal arts established. Music established. Law established. The city comes online. I want to stay with that phrase because it is not one I am using loosely. The text does not say the people of Uruk learned these skills. It does not say Inanna taught them. It says the ME arrived and those things became operational. The relationship is direct and causal. You have the ME, the function works. You lose the ME, the function stops. This is a description of an external system that cities could possess or lose and whose presence or absence determined what those cities could do. And now I want to return to the list. Because when you read it with this framing, it reads differently. Kingship is on the list. Not a king. Not instructions for selecting a king. The capacity for kingship to function. The ability of a human being to exercise legitimate authority over others in a way that is recognized and sustained. Whatever makes that possible is called the ME of kingship. And it can be possessed, transferred, and lost. The craft of the scribe is on the list. Not a scribe. Not writing materials. The capacity for scribal arts to function. Whatever allows a civilization to produce and transmit written records. That is a ME. And the destruction of cities is on the list. Lamentation is on the list. Falsehood is on the list. The ME are not a list of good things. They are a list of all things. The Sumerians considered even negative functions, the ability to destroy, to deceive, to grieve, as capacities that required a me to operate. Something external to the human being that, when present, made those functions possible. The academic philologist Gertrude Farber, in the most important scholarly study of the ME, summarized the concept this way. All spheres of civilization and culture, institutions of state, institutions of religion, spiritual values, emotional values, social conditions, professions, and tools, are permeated by the divine powers, which are designed and executed by the gods. All spheres. Permeated. Not symbolized by. Permeated by. Here is my problem with the purely metaphorical reading. The Sumerians were not a civilization that confused metaphor with mechanics. They invented the written record. Their administrative tablets describe grain deliveries with the precision of modern logistics. Their mathematical tablets contain the square root of two calculated to six decimal places. These are people who distinguish between what something is and what something represents. When a Sumerian scribe wrote that a shipment of barley arrived at a specific temple on a specific date, he was not writing metaphor. He was recording a transaction. When the same civilization wrote that Inanna loaded the Mi onto a boat, that Enki sent seven waves of forces to recover them, and that when they arrived, the city of Uruk began to function differently, that text uses the same vocabulary and the same transactional grammar as the barley tablet. The Abzu is not a metaphorical location. Archaeologists have identified the physical site as Tell Abu Shahrain in southern Iraq, where the oldest temple layers in the world have been excavated going back to 5,400 BCE. The Mi are stored somewhere real. They are transported on a real boat. Their arrival in a real city produces real changes. The text is describing something operational, something a city either has or does not have, something whose presence changes what that city can do. And what it describes, when you read it carefully, is not a collection of divine symbols. It is a manifest. A list of everything that needs to be present for a civilization to function, organized as discrete transferable units, stored in a central location, distributed by a controlling authority, and capable of making the difference between a city that works and a city that does not. Samuel Noah Cramer, the scholar who spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania Museum translating these tablets, concluded that the Mi were the Sumerian answer to a single question. Why is civilization possible at all? Why do humans build cities? Why do some communities develop writing and law and music and others do not? The Sumerian answer was simple. Because someone gave them the Mi. Whatever the Mi actually were, something physical, something informational, something we do not have a modern category for, the civilization that built the world's first cities believed that civilized function depended on receiving something from outside. Something that could be possessed, transferred, protected, and lost. Enki had them. Inanna took them. Uruk received them and became one of the greatest cities in the ancient world. The question nobody has formally answered is the one that occurs to any engineer or systems architect who reads that list carefully. What exactly were you receiving when you received the M.E. of kingship or the M.E. of the scribal arts or the M.E. of the making of decisions? Not the symbol of those things. Not the divine blessing of those things. The operational capacity for those things to function, whatever that is. The tablets are in Philadelphia. The list is translated. The question is still open.