L’écriture du corps : forme, destin, et prédestination dans la Mésopotamie ancienne

The focus of this article is the human body and its parts; in particular, the integrity of the body parts and their relationship in what we could call a body semantic where the body is a medium. The article begins with the discussion of the Sumerian myth Enki and Ninmah, focusing on the creation of six “imperfect” beings by Ninmah. It examines the relationship between physical shape (me-dim2) and destiny (nam-tar), which is the cause of the dispute between Enki and Ninmah, and how this myth conceives “destiny” as social integration and capability of providing “daily bread”, according to Enki’s words. Ninmah’s claim for a relationship between the body and the destiny is furtherly investigated in the article, that continues with the analysis of the body as message and the relation among its parts as grammar. It discusses teratology and physiognomics, where the shape of the body is a divine encrypted message to be deciphered by human beings. This message, namely the presage, refers to the community’s fate in teratology and to the person’s destiny in physiognomic, thus the person bearing his/her future written in his/her own body.