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take care of one another and live in harmony. It's a lovely sentiment, but while it may work in theory, it almost always falls apart in practice. Communes and organizations led by one person, often a man, end up the same way. They turn into cults. That wasn't the goal for religious philosopher and preacher John Humphrey Nous, but even his idealistic troop wound up with that notorious label. However, unlike other cults, his didn't end with mass death or suicide.

It ended with spooning. John was born in eighteen eleven in Brattleboro, Vermont. His father had been a teacher, a minister, and had even served with the U. S House of Representatives, while his mother happened to be the aunt of the nineteenth U S President Rutherford B. Hayes. John was religious like his father, but even more so. After witnessing a revival in eighteen thirty one, he went through a conversion and abandoned his law degree at Dartmouth in favor of

the seminary. Instead, he studied the Bible well religiously and learned how to preach before diving into the world of antislavery activism. However, the more he studied, the more obsessive

he grew. His beliefs shifted. For example, while enrolled at the Yale Theological Seminary, John had tried to pin down the date of Christ's second coming, which, too many was meant to be a date set far into the future, but not to John, he believed that it had already happened in seventy a d. And that humans were on a downward spiral towards sin and degradation. He preached perfectionism, that those who had converted could be free of all sin.

He also believed in keeping multiple wives, known as complex marriage. His views got him expelled from Yale, with his professors labeling him as a heretic, but that didn't deter him from exploring them further. He believed that his faith had given him carte blanche to ignore the traditional moral values of the time, and that he could do as he pleased. His family encouraged him to return home and find a

new path, but John refused. He instead traveled around preaching to anyone who would listen and picking up strays in a way. One of those strays happened to be a woman named Abigail Merwin, who was already married when she started following John's teachings. John, however, developed feelings for his students and wouldn't let a trivial thing such as marriage getting his way. In eighteen thirty seven, he created the idea of a spiritual spouse, which flew in the face

of traditional monogamy. To John, relationships were meant to be shared, and the more wives a man had, the marrier. In fact, the term free love, which picked up steam during the late nineteen sixties, was originally coined by John. As he continued to preach, he gained more followers, leading to the creation of the Society of Inquiry around eighteen forty five, with almost thirty six members under its wing. The society

became the start of John's grand utopian vision. Unfortunately, John's unorthodox beliefs, especially those concerning his nine wives, were not shared by the Vermont legislature. The spiritual leader was arrested and charged with adultery. However, he was released before the start of his trial in April and used that time to organize his followers and leave Vermont entirely. So they moved to New York, where they settled in a small

city in the middle of the state. John happened to know some of the fellow perfect Actionists there, who were able to share a portion of their land and help his people get established. He even renamed the group after their new home. What had started as a modest commune eventually grew into a palatial state that they called the Mansion House, completed in eighteen sixty two. And how did they get the money to build such a house. Well, they sold all manner of goods, such as canned fruits

and vegetables, thread leather bags, and hats. But it was the production and sale of something even more desirable that put their commune on the map, and even after their community fell apart in the early eighties, that business continued to thrive. Look in most kitchens today and you're likely to find something from the company, some product of the lucrative business they began almost two hundred years ago. Forks, knives, and spoons, all made and sold by a utopian community

at the New York town of Oneida. Read any book, watch any movie or TV show, or see any play, and you probably don't realize that they all have one thing in common William Shakespeare. Even though the play right behind Othello, Hamlets and King Lear may not have written the works being produced today, his tropes and his words are all over them. Stories about deceitful family members, star crossed lovers, and enemies who become lovers can all chart

their origins back to Shakespeare. So can words like lonely, swagger and zany. Shakespeare was responsible for more than seventeen hundred words in the English language that we still used today, but he was far from the only writer of his time. Many had come before him and had also contributed significantly to the written word. However, one stands above them all.

Before Romeo and Juliet, before Plato and Aristotle, there was an ad Wuanna and Aduana was the daughter of Sargon of a Cad, founder of the Achadian Empire in ancient Mesopotamia. She lived during the twenty third century BC, but almost nothing was known about her until nineteen seven. That year, a British archaeologist named Sir Leonard Woolley found several ancient relics in his travels that carried her name. One was a disc made of alabaster that had broken apart into

several pieces. The artifact was eventually reconstructed, which allowed scholars to read its contents. The back of the disc mentioned Sargon of a cod and Aduana and her husband Nana Suan. Sargon had been a ruthless conqueror who had laid waste to dozens of cities and city states across the region with his massive army. One of those city states was a place called Er located in present day Iraq, R had been home to a Sumerian cult built around Nena Suan.

Sargon knew the importance of bridging the gaps between the Acadian and Sumerian empires, and Nana Suan was at the center of each, so he appointed and Aduana to the role of High priestess handled the job, but Nana Suan wasn't a human like an Aduana or even Sargon. He was a god, specifically the moon God, and an Aduana worshiped him. As high priestess. She came to embody Nana Suan's actual wife, the goddess Ningle, hence her being listed

on the disc as the moon God's spouse. The other side of the disc bore a relief of an Aduana standing before a nude figure pouring some kind of drink. It was possible that the figure was Nana Suan. Soon after, other objects were excavated and reassembled, shedding more light on the identity of the elusive daughter of Sargon the Great and Aduana's Sumerian name translated to ornament of Heaven, and

she had a great political sway among her people. Her parentage and her high ranking status made her a leader, and with the help of her writings, she was able to unify Mesopotamia. Poems, religious hymns, and other works that have been lost for thousands of years. Now being dug up and analyzed, they gave deeper insight into a woman who didn't know her true place in history, and a

Duana was the world's first named author. She composed odes to the Sumerian goddess Nana and the Akkadian goddess Ishtar, odes that exalted the deities of both cultures and brought them together. Her work was instrumental in building one central belief system for the people of Mesopotamia. She did this through her poems, which she wrote for forty two southern temples, expounding on the individual qualities that she admired in each of them, all of which had been chiseled into clay tablets.

Many of the tablets recovered by Wooly and other archaeologists were only fragments, with large chunks of her writing broken off and missing, But what was there was still enlightening. In a hymn titled the Exaltation of Nana, and Aduana wrote of the goddess's pensiont for violence, The author prayed to her for help with a Sumerian rebel named google Anna, who had knocked her from her purchase high priestess. She begged for revenge against the rebel and to have her

title restored. In the end, her prayers were answered, and an Aduana was once again made high priestess to her people. Another hymn, which was told from the goddess and Nana's perspective, spoke of revenge against the mountains of Eba because they would not bow down to her. After being turned down for help from the other gods, she destroyed the mountains herself. According to some experts, this hymn was an Aduanna's way of telling a fictional story about a very real ecological

disaster that had occurred. Anna Duanna was a person unlike any other. She didn't just pray to her gods. She wrote poetic narratives about them. They became like characters to her, with lives and wills of their own. Not many people know who Anadu Wanna is today, and that's a shame, because there is still so much she can teach us. She wasn't just the first named author. She was among the very best whoever lived. I hope you've enjoyed today's

guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I Make Another Award winning show called Lore which is a podcast, book series, and television show and you can learn all about it over at the world of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.