About the book
Water that was there before anything. A void that is somebody's ancestor. An egg laid in the dark by Night. A giant taken apart and used for parts. A god who is sick and brings up the sun. A world made five times over, each attempt worse than the last. Thirty creation myths retold in full, from Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, India, Iran, China, Japan, Iceland, Finland, Aotearoa, the Society Islands, Samoa, the Congo, Yorubaland, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and the forests of eastern North America. And with each one, the part other collections leave out: where it actually comes from. Who wrote it down, in what year, for which employer, and what that did to it. Sarmiento's chronicle was commissioned by the viceroy who beheaded the last Inca. Ellis was an army colonel in the country his regiment was subduing. The oldest surviving statement that the world was made by thought and speech was ground up as a millstone and then read backwards for a century. Every source is named, dated and described, including what is wrong with it — and where a source says it does not know, this book says so and supplies nothing. Thirteen corrections were logged while it was made, five of them because a file was not what its name claimed, and they are printed in the book.
