Dalamatia Ten Councils, civilization delivered as organized knowledge = The Sumerian ME, divine decrees / arts of civilization

The Sumerian word ME (often capitalized in scholarly transliteration to mark its specialized sense) denotes one of the strangest concepts in early human religious vocabulary. Samuel Noah Kramer, in The Sumerians (1963), defined the ME as "the fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations relating to civilized life, as conceived by the Sumerians." The ME were not laws in the legal sense, not customs in the cultural sense, not rituals in the religious sense, though they overlapped with all three. They were divine decrees, held primarily by Enki at his temple in Eridu, that constituted the categorical structure of civilization itself. To possess the ME was to possess the right to a civilized order; to lack them was to live in barbarism.

The myth of Inanna and Enki, ETCSL 1.3.1 in the Oxford corpus, tells how Inanna of Uruk traveled to Eridu, dined and drank with Enki, and convinced him to give her the ME, one set at a time, in his drunken generosity. The text lists more than one hundred ME explicitly: kingship, priesthood, the eternal lordship, the godship, the noble crown, the throne of kingship, the noble scepter, the staff, the noble shrine, shepherdship, kingship, the lasting lady-ship, the office of priestess, the office of singer, the office of clad-one, music, eldership, heroism, power, enmity, straightforwardness, the destruction of cities, lamentation, rejoicing of the heart, falsehood, art, the assembly, descent into the netherworld, ascent from the netherworld, the cult of the kurgarra, the cult of the girbadara, the cult of the sagursag, the standard, the quiver, sexual intercourse, the kissing of the lips, prostitution, justice, lawsuit, the giving of judgments, decisions, the chamberlain, the lordship, the priesthood, the carpentry craft, the metalworking craft, the scribal craft, the smithcraft, the leatherworking craft, the building craft, the basket-weaving craft, wisdom, attentiveness, holy purification, the shepherd's hut, the burning of coals, the sheepfold, fear, terror, dismay, strife, peace, weariness, victory, the troubled heart, judgment, decision-making, exalted lamentation, instruction, music, eldership, complete kingship, troubled heart, judgment, decision, the rebellion, the kindly word, treachery, justice, the destruction of cities, lamentation, rejoicing of the heart, falsehood, the kingly office, ... the list runs on. The composer of the text was attempting to enumerate the entire content of civilized order.

The Urantia Book account of the Prince's administration in Dalamatia closely matches this taxonomy. UB 66:5.1 records that the Prince's hundred staff "were organized for service in ten autonomous councils of ten members each." The councils are then enumerated: food and material welfare under Ang, animal domestication under Bon, conquest of predatory animals under Dan, dissemination of knowledge under Fad, industry and trade under Nod, revealed religion under Hap, art and science (Lut), tribal relations (Tut), supreme court of tribal coordination (Van as chairman), and the council on coordination of all the others. Each council had a defined domain. Each council taught the corresponding skills to the surrounding evolutionary humanity. UB 66:5.9 specifies that "Fad formulated the first alphabet and introduced a writing system. This alphabet contained twenty-five characters." UB 66:5.11 records that the commission on industry and trade under Nod "contributed directly to the elevation of standards of living by providing many new commodities to attract the fancy of primitive men."

The structural match with the Sumerian ME is immediate. Both are organized inventories of civilization. Both are held and dispensed by superhuman beings at a central administrative location (Eridu / Dalamatia). Both encompass the same general domains: governance, priesthood, crafts, music, writing, law, conflict, peace, food, agriculture, animal husbandry. The Sumerian myth of Inanna taking the ME from Enki, on the UB reading, is the cultural memory of the historical transmission: civilization was organized as discrete categorical knowledge in the hands of the loyal staff (Enki = Van), and was carried forward into the post-Dalamatian era through the descendants of the Material Daughter (Inanna = Eve). The mythological narrative of one god giving the ME to another, in the form of a meal and a journey, is the stylized priestly memory of the actual transfer of civilizational knowledge from the original Dalamatian center to the second garden under Adam and Eve.

Two further details. First, the number. The Sumerian text's enumeration of the ME varies between roughly seventy and over one hundred items in different recensions, but the typical organization is into thematic groups of around ten: ten ME of kingship, ten of priesthood, ten of crafts, and so on. UB tradition organizes the staff into ten councils of ten. The same decimal architecture, applied to the same categorical content, in the same geographic region, is unlikely to be coincidence. Second, the location. The ME were held at Eridu, the oldest of the Sumerian cities and traditionally the first city after kingship descended from heaven. UB tradition places Dalamatia in the same general region, on the eastern Mediterranean coast that subsequently submerged. Eridu's mythological priority is, on the UB reading, the cultural memory of the priority of Dalamatia.

The strongest counterargument is that the ME concept may be a purely intra-Sumerian theological development, with no need for a deeper historical referent. The reply is that the ME's strange specificity (organized inventory of civilizational categories) is anomalous against neighboring traditions. Egyptian theology has nothing exactly like the ME. Hittite theology has nothing exactly like it. The Sumerian ME stand out as a peculiarly explicit attempt to enumerate the totality of civilized order, which is exactly what we would expect if the underlying memory was of an actual historical administration that delivered civilization as organized knowledge. The intra-Sumerian explanation can describe the development of the ME concept; it cannot fully account for why the concept took this specific form.