An erotic tragedy.

How do you divine the mind of an impotent king? That is the question Nergal the eunuch ponders in The Eunuch, a story of late Babylonian mayhem and debauchery. Famine is on the land. The granaries are empty. It has not rained in three years. And King Nebuchadnezzar’s astrologers are nervous. Very nervous. Unless the King can successfully inseminate his Holy Bride—in a midnight ritual known as the Festival of the Golden Bull—the throne will not survive. Something must be done. Nergal is supposed to aid the King’s efforts for the Ministry of Illegitimacy, a shadowy cabal of corrupt diviners, scribes, and priests.

Babylonian orgies, however, bore the eunuch. He would rather eat a pot of deep-fried pig’s intestines than watch a dendrophile copulate with a particularly gratifying hole in a potted orange tree. He spends his time cataloging the self-aggrandizing behavior and physical blemishes of the participants. Soon, however, Nergal’s special talents are needed by the King. This leads him to fall in love with the divine barmaid, a concubine named Siduri, who is famous for trampling the grape and culling the vine of men’s hearts. The only problem is that the King is in love with her too.

Yet The Eunuch is more than your typical 6th century BCE sex novel. Fragments of the cuneiform epic surfaced in the spring of 2003, when the American Army invaded Baghdad and the National Museum of Iraq was sacked. The clay tablets tell the true story behind the madness of King Nebuchadnezzar.