Over a hundred divine decrees that governed every aspect of civilised existence — from kingship to the art of the prostitute, from truth to the destruction of cities. Held by the gods. Transferable. And once stolen from Enki by Inanna, who got him drunk to do it.
The ME (pronounced "may") were the fundamental properties of civilisation itself — not laws in the sense of rules that humans were expected to follow, but the underlying forces that made civilised existence possible. They were divine decrees: the cosmic mechanisms that caused kingship to exist, priesthood to function, music to be played, the underworld to operate, truth to be distinguishable from falsehood. Without the ME, these things would not merely be illegal — they would cease to exist.
The concept is startling in its sophistication. The Sumerians understood civilisation not as something that humans had built through effort and ingenuity — though they had done that — but as something that existed because divine forces sustained it. The city, the temple, the law court, the scribal school, the military — these were not human inventions but divine gifts, properties of reality that the gods maintained and that could, in principle, be removed. A city from which the ME had departed would not merely lose its organisation; it would cease to be a city in any meaningful sense.
The ME were stored in the Abzu — the sacred underground waters of wisdom at Eridu, Enki's temple city. Enki was their keeper: the god of wisdom held the fundamental properties of civilisation in his keeping, and the stability of the world depended on his maintaining custody of them. Which makes what Inanna did all the more extraordinary.
"He brought to her the ME: He brought to her Lordship. He brought to her Godship. He brought to her the exalted and enduring crown. He brought to her the throne of kingship. He brought to her the exalted sceptre. He brought to her the royal insignia. He brought to her the exalted shrine. He brought to her shepherdship. He brought to her kingship."
— Inanna and Enki, c. 2000 BCE (Enki handing over the ME under the influence of beer)The surviving texts list over a hundred ME in several categories. What is striking about the list is its completeness — the Sumerians included not only the positive properties of civilisation but the negative ones. Falsehood is a ME. The descent into the underworld is a ME. The destruction of cities is a ME. Prostitution is a ME. The enmity of weapons is a ME. The Sumerians understood that civilisation contains its own shadow — that the same divine forces that sustain truth also sustain falsehood, that the forces that build cities also destroy them.
The list includes both construction and destruction, truth and falsehood, heroism and lamentation — the red items mark the shadow ME, the negative properties without which civilisation as the Sumerians understood it would be incomplete. A world with only the positive ME would not be a Sumerian civilisation — it would be something impossible and inhuman. The ME together constitute the complete picture of what it means for humans to live together in organised society.
The myth of Inanna and the ME — "Inanna and Enki: The Transfer of the Arts of Civilisation from Eridu to Uruk" — is one of the most entertaining texts in Sumerian literature. Inanna, Queen of Heaven, decides that Uruk deserves to have the ME. They are currently in Enki's keeping at Eridu. She goes to visit him.
The ME myth encodes a sophisticated understanding of how civilisation works — and how it can be transferred between cities. In the historical reality of ancient Sumer, political power frequently shifted between city-states: Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Nippur, Kish all experienced periods of dominance. The myth of the ME provides a theological explanation for these shifts: the divine properties of civilisation are not permanently attached to any particular city but can be moved. When Uruk rises and Eridu declines, it is because the ME have transferred.
The myth also makes a pointed statement about the relationship between wisdom and power. Enki is the wisest of the gods — and he is outplayed by Inanna through the oldest of strategies: flattery, hospitality, beer and timing. The god who holds the properties of civilisation in his keeping loses them not through force but through a moment of convivial excess. The lesson is not that wisdom is inferior to cunning but that even wisdom has its vulnerabilities — and that the force of love and desire (Inanna's domain) can overcome the force of pure intelligence (Enki's domain) in the right circumstances.
The concept of the ME has modern resonances in several directions. The idea that civilisation consists of transferable properties — that what makes a society function can be itemised, held, lost and transferred — anticipates modern debates about cultural transmission, the spread of institutions, and what happens when the forces that sustain civilisation are weakened or removed. The Sumerians, as so often, identified something genuinely true about the nature of human social organisation and encoded it in a story vivid enough to survive four thousand years.