"We're the Mesopotamians" by They Might be Giants (2007)
This song is actually pretty funny. It is a reference to "Hey, Hey We're the Monkees" by The Monkees.The song is very catchy and it revolves around a band that consists of four kings of ancient Mesopotamia, one of which is of course the main character of our award winning epic "The Epic of Gilgamesh". So this band is driving around but nobody has ever heard about them which slightly upsets them. I find it very interesting that the most famous rulers of the ancient world are portrayed as an unknown group of musicians.
The four kings that are mentioned: Ashurbanipal was an Assyrian king, famed for sponsoring and building a giant library of tablets from all over the region, a radical undertaking for the time. He was the last great king of Assyria. Sargon the Great was a Semitic Akkadian emperor famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries BC. Sargon's vast empire is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia. Hammurabi was a Babylonian king, famous for being one of the first rulers to codify civil and criminal law. Instead of allowing escalating vengence, Hammurabi's Code worked on the "eye for an eye" premise, such that destruction to balance out wrong-doing must be demonstrably in like kind and measure. Gilgamesh, as is mentioned below, is semi-mythical, but might have been an actual king of Sumer, since he is in the list of kings from the Ashurbanipal library at Nineveh. There is an epic poem about him and his adventures, The Epic of Gilgamesh - his mother was a goddess, and he was reputed to have super-human strength.
Apparently, all of these kings have achieved outstanding things. Yet, they have been forgotten in our time or aren't important enough anymore. They Might Be Giants critize that in a humorous way in my opinion.
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