◆ PARALLAX

You people always say context when the picture is too obvious.

Yes. Context is the name of the thing that keeps obvious wrong answers from stealing your lunch.

Dalley arrived. First surprise: it is much more violent and much less spacey than the documentaries. Second surprise: footnotes are addictive.

Footnotes are domesticated uncertainty. Once you learn to like them, the clean secret-history book starts to feel like sweetened milk.

What about the Igigi strike? Gods rebel because they are tired of mining and then make humans to work. That sounds exactly like engineered labour.

It sounds like labour theology because it is labour theology. Atrahasis is wrestling with why humans exist, why work is painful, why mortality is built in, and why divine order needs human toil. Turning it into a mining memo is not making it more literal. It is making it less interesting.

The strike is one of the great myths because it makes civilisation begin with exhaustion. Divine workers refuse an unbearable load; humanity is made to carry it; kingship and temple economy follow. It is not a factory report. It is an origin story for being born already indebted.

So the gods are metaphors now. Convenient.