Overview

Kings build in stone to be feared. Lovers write in clay to be felt. In the bustling city of Ur (c. 2040 BCE), Enki-Illu has achieved everything a young man should want. As a junior scribe in the temple, he wears clean linen robes, sleep on a proper mat, and serves the royal administration of King Shu-Sin. But his soul is being crushed by the weight of official lies-recording bumper harvests while peasants starve, and transcribing hymns that have been sanitized of all human emotion. Kudur is invisible. An orphan gardener who tends the temple's vast date-palm groves, he possesses nothing but calloused hands and a dangerous secret. He taught himself to read from discarded practice tablets found in the mud. Now, in the dead of night, he carves raw, honest, erotic poetry onto broken pottery shards-words that celebrate desire as sacred and defiance as necessary. When Enki-Illu discovers one of Kudur's shards, he doesn't destroy it as the law demands. He seeks out the poet. What begins as a clandestine exchange of texts in the shadows of the Ziggurat blossoms into a forbidden romance that bridges the unbridgeable gap between the scribe's palace and the gardener's hut. Enki-Illu finds his own voice in Kudur's courage; Kudur finds a partner who sees him as an artist rather than a laborer. But the city is changing. High Priest Lugalzagesi has launched a ""Purity Audit"" to cleanse the temple of moral corruption. When their secret is threatened and innocent friends are tortured, the lovers face a choice: burn the poetry and survive in silence, or risk execution to save their words. Together, they hatch a desperate plan: a heist to smuggle their forbidden verses into the one place the priests cannot touch-the King's personal Royal Archive. Clay Tablets of Ur is a lyrical, high-stakes historical romance about two men who refuse to let their love be erased from history. Featuring forbidden romance, slow-burn intimacy, detailed ancient history, class difference, court intrigue, and the enduring power of the written word.

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