Mesopotamian society, to do the work their superiors told them to do, to accept death as inevitable, and to refrain from aspiring to any other arrangement. That is, the Mesopotamian status quo is the way things ought to be.40 The Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen calls this “propaganda”;41 we might use the less judgmental expression “worldview formation.” The Mesopotamian stories include divine action, symbolism, and imaginative elements; the purpose of these stories is to lay the foundation for a worldview