William W. Hallo - The World's Oldest Literature - Studies in Sumerian Belles-Lettres (2009) PDF

The World’s Oldest Literature
Culture and History of the

Ancient Near East
Founding Editor
M.H.E. Weippert
Editor-in-Chief
Thomas Schneider
Editors
Eckart Frahm, W. Randall Garr, B. Halpern,
Theo P.J. Van Den Hout, Irene J. Winter
VOLUME 35
The World’s
Oldest Literature
Studies in Sumerian Belles-Lettres
By
William W. Hallo
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2010
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hallo, William W.
The world’s oldest literature : studies in Sumerian belles-lettres / by William W. Hallo.
p. cm. – (Culture and history of the ancient near east ; v. 35)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17381-1 (acid-free paper)
1. Sumerian literature–History and criticism. I. Title.
PJ4045.H35 2009
899’.9509–dc22
2009003310
ISSN 1566-2055
ISBN 978 90 04 17381 1
Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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To Nanette
CONTENTS
Bibliographic References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Introduction: William Hallo and Assyriological, Biblical and
Jewish Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
part i
programmatics
1. New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature – 1962 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry – 1970 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3. Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics – 1973 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4. Toward A History of Sumerian Literature – 1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5. Assyriology and the Canon – 1990 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
6. Sumerian Religion – 1993 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
7. The Birth of Rhetoric – 2004. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
part ii
catalogues and other scholia
1. On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature – 1963 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
2. Another Sumerian Literary Catalogue? – 1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
3. Haplographic Marginalia – 1977 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
4. Old Babylonian HAR-ra – 1982 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
part iii
royal and divine hymns
1. Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity – 1963. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
2. The Coronation of Ur-Nammu – 1966 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
3. New Hymns to the Kings of Isin – 1966 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
4. The Birth of Kings – 1987 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
5. Nippur Originals – 1989 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
viii contents
part iv
letter-prayers
1. Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition
– 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
2. Letters, Prayers, and Letter-Prayers – 1981 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
3. Lamentations and Prayers in Sumer and Akkad – 1995 . . . . . . . . . . 299
4. Two Letter-Prayers To Amurru – 1998 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
part v
royal correspondence
1. The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian Prototype
for the Prayer of Hezekiah? – 1976 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
2. The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: II. The Appeal to Utu –
1982. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353
3. The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: III. The Princess and the
Plea – 1991 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
4. A Sumerian Apocryphon? The Royal Correspondence of Ur
Reconsidered – 2006. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
part vi
historiography
1. Beginning and End of the Sumerian King List in the Nippur
Recension – 1963 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409
2. Sumerian Historiography – 1983 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
3. New Directions in Historiography (Mesopotamia and Israel) –
1998. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
4. Polymnia and Clio – 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
5. Sumerian History in Pictures: A New Look at the “Stele of the
Flying Angels” – 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
part vii
myths and epics
1. Lugalbanda Excavated – 1983 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495
2. The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from
Mesopotamia and Israel – 1987 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
3. Disturbing the Dead – 1993 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
contents ix
4. Enki and the Theology of Eridu – 1996 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539

5. Urban Origins in Cuneiform and Biblical Sources (Founding
Myths of Cities in the Ancient Near East: Mesopotamia and
Israel) – 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547
part viii
proverbs
1. The Lame and the Halt – 1969 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575
2. Nungal In The Egal: An Introduction To Colloquial
Sumerian? – 1979 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583
3. Biblical Abominations and Sumerian Taboos – 1985 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 589
4. Proverbs Quoted in Epic – 1990 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
5. Proverbs: An Ancient Tradition in the Middle East – 2004. . . . . . . 625
part ix
incantations
1. Back to the Big House: Colloquial Sumerian,
Continued – 1985 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635
2. More Incantations and Rituals from the Yale Babylonian
Collection – 1999 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645
part x
sumerian literature and the bible
1. Sumerian Literature. Background to the Bible – 1988 . . . . . . . . . . . . 661
2. Compare and Contrast: The Contextual Approach to Bibliocal
Literature – 1990 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 677
3. The Concept of Canonicity in Cuneiform and Biblical
Literature: A Comparative Appraisal – 1991 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699
4. Sumerian Literature – 1992 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717
x contents
indexes
Ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Classical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729
Biblical and Rabbinical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 739
Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 743
Personal Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 747
Divine Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 753
Geographic Names, Ethnica, and Names of Sanctuaries . . . . . . . . . . . . 755
Akkadian and Sumerian Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 759
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
I. Programmatics
“New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature.” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962):

13–26.
“The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry.” Actes de la XVIIe Rencontre Assy-
riologique Internationale, Brussels, Belgium, June 30-July 4, 1969 [published
1970], 116–134.
“Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics.” Perspectives in Jewish Learning 5 (1973):
1–12.
“Toward a History of Sumerian Literature.” In Sumerological Studies in Honor of
Thorkild Jacobsen, edited by S.J. Lieberman, 181–203. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1975.
“Assyriology and the Canon.” The American Scholar 59 (1990): 105–108.
“Sumerian Religion.” Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 1
(1993): 15–35.
“The Birth of Rhetoric.” In Rhetoric before and beyond the Greeks, edited by Carol
S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, 25–46; 231–237. Albany: State University
of New York, 2004.
II. Catalogues and Other Scholia
“On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature.” Journal of the American Oriental Society
83 (1963): 167–176.
“Another Sumerian Literary Catalogue?” Studia Orientalia 46 (1975): 77–80.
“Haplographic Marginalia.” Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences:
Essays on the Ancient Near East in Memory of Jacob Joel Finkelstein, edited by M.
de Jong Ellis, 101–103. Hamden: Archon, 1977.
“Notes from the Babylonian Collection, II: Old Babylonian HAR-ra.” Journal
of Cuneiform Studies 34 (1982): 81–93.
xii bibliographic references
III. Royal and Divine Hymns

“Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 17 (1963):
112–118.
“The Coronation of Ur-Nammu.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 20 (1966): 133–
141.
“New Hymns to the Kings of Isin.” Bibliotheca Orientalis 23 (1966): 239–246.
“The Birth of Kings.” Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor
of Marvin H. Pope, edited by John H. Marks and Robert M. Good, 45–52.
Guilford: Four Quarters Publishing Company, 1987.
“Nippur Originals.” DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg
(1989): 237–247.
IV. Letter-Prayers
“Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition.” Journal of the

American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 71–89.
“Letters, Prayers and Letter-Prayers.” Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of
Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel: August 7–14, 1981, 17–27.
“Lamentations and Prayers in Sumer and Akkad.” In Civilizations of the Ancient
Near East, edited by Jack M. Sasson, 1871–1881. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons, 1995.
“Two Letter-Prayers to Amurru.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supple-
ment Series 273 (1998): 397–410.
V. Royal Correspondence
“The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian Prototype for the Prayer
of Hezekiah?” In Cuneiform Studies in Honor of Samuel Noah Kramer, Kramer
Anniversary Volume, edited by Barry L. Eichler, 209–224. Kevelaer: Butzon
& Bercker, 1976.
“The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: II. The Appeal to Utu” In Zikir Šumim:
Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday,
edited by G. Van Driel, Th.J.H. Krispijn, M. Stol, and K.R. Veenhof, 95–
109. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982.
“The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: III. The Princess and the Plea.” Mar-
chands, diplomates, et empereurs: Études sur la civilization mésopotamienne offertes à
Paul Garelli, edited by D. Charpin and F. Joannès, 377–388. Paris: Editions
Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1991.
“A Sumerian Apocryphon? The Royal Correspondence of Ur Reconsidered.”
Approaches to Sumerian Literature: Studies in Honour of Stip (H.L.J. Vanstiphout),
edited by Piotr Michalowski and Niek Veldhuis, 85–104. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
bibliographic references xiii
VI. Historiography
“Beginning and End of the Sumerian King List in the Nippur Recension.”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 17 (1963): 52–57.
“Sumerian Historiography.” History, Historiography and Interpretation, edited by H.
Tadmor and M. Weinfeld, 9–20. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983.
“New Directions in Historiography (Mesopotamia and Israel).” Studien zur
Altorientalistik: Festschrift für Willem H. Ph. Römer, edited by M. Dietrich and
O. Loretz, 109–128. Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 1998.
“Polymnia and Clio.” Proceedings of the XLV e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
(2001): 195–209.
“Sumerian History in Pictures: A New Look at the “Stele of the Flying
Angels.” “An Experienced Scribe who Neglects Nothing”: Ancient Near Eastern Studies
in Honor of Jacob Klein, edited by Y. Sefati et al., Bethesda, MD: CDL Press,
142–162.
VII. Myths and Epics

“Lugalbanda Excavated.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 103 (1983): 165–
180.
“The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from Mesopotamia and
Israel.” Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, edited by
P.D. Miller, Jr. et al., 3–13. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.
“Disturbing the Dead.” Minhah Le-Nahum: Biblical and Other Studies Presented to
Nahum M. Sarna in Honour of His 70th Birthday, edited by Marc Brettler and
Michael Fishbane, 183–192. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993.
“Enki and the Theology of Eridu.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 116
(1996): 231–234.
“Urban Origins in Cuneiform and Biblical Sources (Founding Myths of Cities
in the Ancient Near East: Mesopotamia and Israel).” Mites de Fundació de
ciutats al món antic (Mesopotàmia, Grècia i Roma) (2001): 37–50.
VIII. Proverbs
“The Lame and the Halt.” Eretz-Israel: Archaeological, Historical and Geographical
Studies 9 (1969): 66–70.
“Notes from the Babylonian Collection, I: Nungal in the Egal: An Introduc-
tion to Colloquial Sumerian?” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 31 (1979): 161–165.
“Biblical Abominations and Sumerian Taboos.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 76
(July 1985): 21–40.
“Proverbs Quoted in Epic.” Lingering over Words: Studies in Ancient Near Eastern
Literature in Honor of William L. Moran, edited by Tzvi Abusch et al., 204–217.
Atlanta, Scholars Press, 1990.
“Proverbs: An Ancient Tradition in the Middle East.” Foreword to A Culture
of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev, by Clinton Bailey,
ix–xvi. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
xiv bibliographic references
IX. Incantations
“Back to the Big House: Colloquial Sumerian, Continued.” Orientalia 54 (1985):
56–64.
“More Incantations and Rituals from the Yale Babylonian Collection.” Mesopo-
tamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretative Perspectives: Ancient Magic and
Divination, 1 edited by Tzvi Abusch and Karel van der Toorn, 275–289.
Groningen: Styx Publications, 1999.
X. Sumerian Literature and the Bible
“Sumerian Literature – Background to the Bible.” Bible Review 4 (June 1988):

28–38.
“Compare and Contrast: The Contextual Approach to Biblical Literature.”
The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature, edited by William W. Hallo, Bruce
William Jones, and Gerald L. Mattingly, 1–30. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1990.
“The Concept of Canonicity in Cuneiform and Biblical Literature: A Com-
parative Appraisal.” The Biblical Canon in Comparative Perspective: Scripture in
Context IV, edited by K. Lawson Younger, Jr., William W. Hallo, and Bernard
F. Batto, 1–19. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
“Sumerian Literature.” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 6 Si-Z, edited by
David Noel Freedman, 234–237. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge the following companies and

institutions for allowing him to reproduce his material:
Israel Exploration Society
Tel Aviv University
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Schools of Oriental Research
Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten (NINO)
University of Pennsylvania Press
The American Academy for Jewish Research
Ugarit-Verlag Company
American Oriental Society
Augsburg Fortress Publishers
Yale University Press
Despite my efforts we have not been able to trace all rights holders to
some copyrighted material. The publisher welcomes communications
from copyrights holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can
be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters.
PREFACE
In 1960 and 1961, while serving as instructor and then assistant pro-
fessor of Bible and Semitic Languages at Hebrew Union College—
Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, I spent two summers at the
Yale Babylonian Collection (YBC) in New Haven. My principal object
was to find unpublished texts illustrating my theory on the ‘Sume-
rian amphictyony’ (the so-called bala-system) which I had presented
at the meeting of the American Oriental Society in Toronto in 1955
and was later to publish in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies (vol. 14,
1960). Opening drawer after drawer, I became so familiar with the typ-
ical physical appearance of the bala-texts that I ended up identifying
no less than twenty of them, plus the Hartford seminary text—now
at Andrews University in Terrien Springs, Indiana—which clinched
my whole argument. At the same time I learned to appreciate the
enormous extent and diversity of the YBC, or rather the various sub-
collections constituting the YBC. I also became acquainted with Ferris
J. Stephens, the Curator of the Collection and, to a lesser extent, with
Albrecht Goetze, the Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian
Literature.
The following year, Professor Goetze invited me to Yale as assistant
professor of Assyriology and associate curator of the Collection, suc-
ceeding Stephens who was about to retire. Although my six years in
Cincinnati had been extremely happy, I knew I could not pass up this
opportunity to move into the ‘big time’ (to quote T. Cuyler Young, Jr.,
whom by chance I encountered around then in New York). I received
warm congratulations from my assyriological colleagues, none more
meaningful than those of Samuel Noah Kramer. ‘When you get there,’
he told me, ‘be sure to look into the Sumerian literary texts.’ He knew
whereof he spoke, for some years earlier he had been invited to the
Collection by Goetze to catalogue and identify its Sumerian literary
texts. This he did to perfection, leaving behind a hand-written checklist
in many pages enumerating and identifying some hundreds of literary
texts in Sumerian or, occasionally, Sumerian and Akkadian. Apart from
scattered publications in early volumes like BIN 2 (1920) and BRM 4
xviii preface
(1923), none of these had been published, with the notable exceptions
of hand-copies prepared by Stephens and included by Kramer in his
editions of Gilgamesh and Huwawa (JCS 1, 1947), Inanna’s Descent
(JCS 4, 1950), and the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (1940),
and by Adam Falkenstein in his editions in Sumerische Götterlieder (1959)
and “Sumerische religiöse Texte” (Shulgi A in ZA 50 for 1952). The
rest thus represented arguably the largest hoard of Sumerian literary
texts remaining to be published from any one collection—and more
than any one copyist could handle. For the record, I list here some of
the texts I did publish, as far as they are not included in the present
volume: The Exaltation of Inanna (YNER 3, with J.J.A. van Dijk, 1968);
“Obiter dicta ad SET” (Jones AV = AOAT 203, 1979); “More Incan-
tations and Rituals from the YBC” (1999); “A Model Court Case Con-
cerning Inheritance” (Jacobsen AV, 2002). Occasionally, I also prepared
copies for incorporation in editions being prepared by colleagues, such
as “The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur” by Piotr
Michalowski (1989, fig. 11).
Given my interest in literary texts with historical significance (see
my ‘Polymnia and Clio,’ VI.4 in the present volume) in general, and
my specific involvement with royal hymns in particular (see my ‘Royal
hymns and Mesopotamian unity,’ here: III.1), I decided to concentrate
on ‘Sumerian royal hymns and related genres in the YBC,’ which
became the working title of the volume I embarked on, confident that I
could finish it in relatively short order. But as so often, it proved easier
to find a title for the volume than to complete it, and it was only my
retirement from forty years of teaching at Yale in 2002 which enabled
me to do so. In this, I was significantly assisted by Torger Vedeler,
(PhD., Yale, 2006) under a Mellon Research Grant arranged by Yale’s
Koerner Center for Emeritus Faculty, its director Dr. Bernard Lytton,
and its executive assistant Ms. Patricia Dallai. The texts in question
will be published or republished in that volume with the generous
permission of Benjamin Foster, my successor as Curator and Laffan
Professor.
But even while concentrating on my chosen genres, I did not for-
get Kramer’s injunction. Though never formally my teacher, he was
inevitably a model and inspiration for me as for anyone with any inter-
est in Sumerian literature. I therefore deliberately opened the Collec-
tion to former students and to other collaborators who had left behind
half-finished manuscripts—that is another story, for which see briefly
for now my preface to Litke’s An=Anum (TBC 3, 1998)—but also to
preface xix
my own students and to colleagues from all over who had never been
to the Collection but who seemed willing and able to prepare the hand-
copies so urgently called for. Their main reward was to be permission
to edit the texts they copied or to include them in the editions they
were preparing on the basis of duplicate texts or relevant parallels in
other collections. The following list of the results is not meant to be
exhaustive. It is based in part on the catalogue of canonical texts which
I prepared for the Collection’s forthcoming on-line catalogue under the
direction of Ulla Kasten, Associate Curator of the Collection. Lexi-
cal texts are generally not included here. Dates refer to publication
dates; undated texts remain to be published (AV = anniversary vol-
ume).
Alster, B., Disputation between two scribes (ASJ 15, 1993); Proverbs (1997);
Dialogue 7 (between two scribes) and other wisdom texts.
Beckman, G. and B.R. Foster, Assyrian Scholarly Text (Sachs AV, 1988).
Bodine, W., A Model Contract (RAI 40/1, 2001).
Civil, M., The farmer’s instructions (1994; pls. xiiif.); dialogue between two
women, disputation between bird and fish, disputation between pickaxe and
plow; Dialogue 3 (Enki-mansum and Girini-ishag); Dialogue 4 (The scholar
and his assistant) and other wisdom texts.
Cohen, M., Another Utu hymn (ZA 67, 1977); Balags (CLAM, 1988).
Cooper, J., The Curse of Agade (1983).
Farber, W., Lamashtu amulet (Kantor AV, 1989).
Hoffner, H.A., KÁ.GAL = abullu (MSL 13, 1971).
Jacobsen, Th. and B. Alster, Ningishzida’s boat-ride to Hades (Lambert AV,
2000).
Klein, J., Three Shulgi Hymns (1981).
Kutscher, R., a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha (YNER 6, 1975); Utu Prepares for Judgment
(Kramer AV = AOAT 25, 1976).
Michalowski, Sin-iddinam and Ishkur (Sachs AV 1988); Lamentation over
Sumer and Ur (1989); Hymn to Gibil, Kusu et al. (Hallo AV, 1993); The
Royal Correspondence of Ur; Fable of raven and goose.
Reisman, D., Hymn to Enlil (Two neo-Sumerian royal hymns, 1969); Nisaba
hymn.
Shaeffer, A., hymn to Utu.
Sefati, Y., Love Songs (1998).
Sjöberg, A., in-nin sha-gur-ra (ZA 65, 1975); A father and his perverse son
(JCS 25, 1973).
Van Dijk, J: A Ritual of Purification (Boehl AV, 1973); an en-ne (Kramer AV =
AOAT 25, 1976); lugal-e (1983); incantations and rituals (YOS 11, 1985).
Veldhuis, N., Elementary Education at Nippur (1997, HAR-ra V).
xx preface
In addition to those already mentioned, many other persons deserve

thanks for bringing this book into being. In the first place I wish
to mention Eckart Frahm, our new colleague in Assyriology at Yale.
He cheerfully and whole-heartedly accepted the role of editor for this
project, and went far beyond the traditional duties of an editor in so
doing. In spite of the demands of a growing family and his heavy
teaching and administrative obligations in the Department of Near
Eastern Languages and Civilizations, he was unstinting in the time and
effort he lavished on the project. The publisher left me free to select
and arrange those of my previously published articles germane to the
volume’s theme, and then scanned the reprints I furnished, a process
which has the advantage of producing a continuous text in uniform
type but the disadvantage of misreading quite a number of letters in
the originals. Thus intensive proof-reading was required, in which I was
greatly aided by Robert William Middeke-Conlin, a graduate student
in Assyriology at Yale.
Two of my finest former students agreed to write an introduction to
this volume: I am grateful to Peter Machinist and Piotr Michalowski for
jointly responding to this challenge.
It is customary in these endeavors to include one’s spouse among
those ‘without whom . . ..’ In this case that is no mere formality. Na-
nette Stahl was, as always, counted on for any questions involving
Jewish sources for which I myself did not have the answers. Beyond
that she saw me through a critical time in the state of my health, and
enabled me to shrug off the physical impediments to my work. The
dedication of this book to her is only a small token of my gratitude.
Last but not least, I am happy to acknowledge my debt to Leiden
and to the Netherlands. I spent the academic year 1950–1951 as a
Fulbright Exchange student at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. There I
took courses with masters of Near Eastern studies such as Professors
F.M.Th. de Liagre Boehl (Assyriology), T. Jansma (Aramaic), J.H. Kra-
mers (Arabic), A. de Buck (Egyptology), and P.A.H. de Boer (Ugaritic),
and enjoyed the stimulating company of teaching assistants and fellow-
students like R. Frankena, S.A. Bonebakker, J. Hoftijzer, R. Borger,
P. Lettinga, and others.
In Leiden I also made my first acquaintance with the truly venerable
publishing firm of E.J. Brill, chiefly through their ‘antiquariaat’ or
second-hand bookstore located in the heart of the city. It was housed
in an authentically antique building at the intersection of two canals
(one of them the Old Rijn), and was an easy walk from the University,
preface xxi
then still concentrated on the stately Rapenburg. The University has

long since expanded and spread all over Leiden and its environs, and
Brill too moved to much enlarged quarters on the southern edge of
the city. It is now accessible by bicycle from the suburban railroad
station or, in my case, from the house of my niece. I stopped both
with her and with Brill on my many subsequent visits to my Dutch
alma mater (Prof. Boehl having rewarded my efforts with a ‘candidatus
litterarum Semiticarum’ degree in 1951). It is a pleasure to include what
has meantime become ‘de koninklijke Brill’ in these tributes.
Briefly, some guides to the reader may be indicated here. It should
be noted that, given the scanning method mentioned above, the essays
included herein appear unchanged—except for pagination—from the
form in which they were first published. For permission to reprint the
essays in this volume, see the section on ‘Acknowledgments’ above.
Although the essays appear, as stated, unchanged, they feature two
user-friendly improvements. First, cross-references within the volume
have been carefully and exhaustively indicated (by section and chapter,
rarely by page). Second, a topical index identifies, by page, recurrent
thematic concepts which have not or not yet become the subjects of
my individual inquiries, such as ‘the pattern of usurpation,’ ‘the high
Sargonic period,’ or ‘the classical phase’ of Mesopotamian civilization.
The essays routinely lack the hand-copies of the Sumerian texts
edited therein, but this lack is systematically compensated for by their
nearly simultaneous publication or republication in the forthcoming
volume entitled Sumerian Royal Hymns and Related Genres in the Yale Babylo-
nian Collection, which is to appear in the Yale Oriental Series—Babylo-
nian Texts (YOS).
Hamden, Connecticut
April 23, 2009
William W. Hallo
introduction
WILLIAM HALLO AND ASSYRIOLOGICAL,

BIBLICAL, AND JEWISH STUDIES
William Hallo’s achievements in the field of Assyriology and the

broader ancient Near East, of which the present volume gives ample
and wide-ranging testimony, have roots early in his life.1 They began
with the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish studies more generally, interest in
which pervaded the home in Kassel, Germany, where he grew up until
the family’s forced departure in 1939 because of Nazi anti-Jewish pres-
sure. This interest owed a great deal to his father, Rudolf Hallo, whose
multifaceted training and career centered on Jewish scholarship. The
father’s studies of the art history of European, especially German, Jewry
were among the pioneering efforts in this arena, and his involvement
in the work of his fellow Kasseler, the great Jewish philosopher and
educator, Franz Rosenzweig, led to his succeeding Rosenzweig, upon
the latter’s medical incapacitation, as the head for a short time of the
famous school of adult Jewish education that Rosenzweig had estab-
lished in Frankfurt a.M. in the 1920’s, the Freies jüdisches Lehrhaus.
Rudolf Hallo died too early in his son’s life—at the age of 36 in 1933
in Germany—to have been directly involved in it. But his example
remained, encouraged by his wife, and William Hallo from an early
age had Hebrew instruction. After his departure from Germany on one
of the Kindertransporte, Hallo spent a year in England, then moved on,
1 This biographical information is based on oral knowledge from William Hallo as
well as the following published sources: William W. Hallo, “Suche nach den Ursprün-
gen,” in Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, ed., Vergegenwärtigungen des zerstörten jüdischen
Erbes. Franz-Rosenzweig-Gastvorlesungen, Kassel 1987–1998 (Kassel: Kassel University Press,
1997), pp. 139–146; idem, in Hebrew College Alumni 3/2 (Fall 2003/5763); S. David Sper-
ling, with Baruch A. Levine and B. Barry Levy, Students of the Covenant. A History of
Jewish Biblical Scholarship in North America (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 90–92, 107–
108: nn. 11–18; S. David Sperling, “Hallo, William,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. vol. 8
(Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), p. 282; Joel Kraemer, “Hallo, Rudolf,” ibid.,
p. 282; David B. Weisberg, “William W. Hallo. An Appreciation,” in Mark E. Cohen,
Daniel C. Snell, and David B. Weisberg, eds., The Tablet and the Scroll. Near Eastern Stud-
ies in Honor of William W. Hallo (Bethesda: CDL, 1993), pp. ix–x (Hallo’s bibliography
through 1992, pp. xi–xvi).
xxiv assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies
with his mother and sisters, in 1940 to the United States. There he con-
tinued his Hebrew and Jewish education during his high school years in
New York City, especially at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and then
in Boston, at the Hebrew College, while he was an undergraduate at
Harvard University concentrating in another area of antiquity, Roman
history.
Subsequently, Assyriology became Hallo’s major focus in graduate
study, first at the University of Leiden as a Fulbright scholar in 1950–
1951, where he received the degree of Candidatus litterarum semiti-
carum, and then at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
(M.A. [1953] and Ph.D. [1955]). His M.A thesis, The Ensi’s of the Ur III
Empire, was never published, but many have had access to it and it
remains an important contribution to this day; indeed one might say
that it has never been superseded, even if the large number of cunei-
form tablets from the period that have been published in the subse-
quent half century require an updating of the data collection. Hallo’s
doctoral dissertation, subsequently published as Early Mesopotamian Royal
Titles: A Philologic and Historical Analysis,2 already demonstrated his deep
interest in synthetic historical work. And his many teachers at the Ori-
ental Institute helped him hone his broad intellectual interests with a
concomitant focus on the analytical collection of data. Working under
the direction of I.J. Gelb, he combined his historical interests with the
study of administrative documents, leading him to explore their use in
the reconstruction of political as well as economic systems, and not sim-
ply as texts to be mined for lexicographical purposes.
Hallo’s first faculty appointment was at the Hebrew Union Col-
lege, Cincinnati (HUC) (1956–1962), where he taught a broad range
of subjects, covering Assyriology, Biblical and Jewish Studies. He now
began what would be a consistently abundant writing program that
has lasted to this day. His first publications naturally derived from his
thesis work; they centered on early Mesopotamian historical inscrip-
tions and administrative texts, including pioneering studies of Ur III
administrative texts that sought to analyze their structure and purpose
and to elucidate their technical terminology. After six years at HUC,
Hallo was called to Yale, as successor to Ferris J. Stephens, where he
moved up the ranks from Associate through Full Professor of Assyriol-
ogy and then, in 1976, to Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylo-
2 American Oriental Series 43. New Haven: The American Oriental Society, 1957.
assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies xxv
nian Literature—positions that altogether he would hold for forty years

until his retirement (1962–2002). The Yale positions allowed Hallo to
concentrate more fully than at HUC on Assyriology, with a particular
focus on Sumerian studies. In addition to teaching a range of graduate
courses in Assyriology, and occasionally in other areas of the ancient
Near East especially for undergraduates, Hallo served as Curator of
the Yale Babylonian Collection, where he had access to a rich mine
of cuneiform tablets from all periods of Mesopotamian history. Indeed,
when he became first assistant and then senior curator, the latter in
1963 a year after his arrival at Yale, there was still a large proportion of
the approximately 40,000 manuscripts that had never been published,
including an important set of well-preserved Sumerian literary pieces.
The challenge of dealing with these stimulated Hallo’s broad range of
interests, and expanded the topics of his publications into the area of
Mesopotamian literature, combining a larger view of the intellectual
history of the times with the editing and analysis of specific poems, usu-
ally chosen from the collections at Yale.
The year 1963 was a watershed in Hallo’s public career. Just after
assuming the curatorship at Yale he published articles that very much
set the tone for his entire career. In “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform
Literature,” the very first in the present collection (I.1), he reviewed
authoritatively major aspects of Mesopotamian literature with a view
toward their value for non-Assyriologists, especially those who deal with
the Hebrew Bible. In “Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity” (III.1),
he offered an overview of the genre of Sumerian royal hymns, and in
the process introduced two major themes that he would explore over
the following decades: the political and cultural aspects of literature
and the concept of generic criticism. The two other studies from 1963
that are reprinted in this volume, “On the Antiquity of Sumerian Liter-
ature” (II.1) and “The Beginning and End of the Sumerian King List in
the Nippur Recension” (VI.1), introduce still another facet of his work:
the selective publication of manuscripts from the Yale collection and
elsewhere. But rather than simply publish tablets with a lexicographical
commentary, Hallo used each article as a pretext for a more interest-
ing study. The “Antiquity of Sumerian Literature” article is particularly
important, as it included a unique Ur III catalog of royal hymns and
therefore shed light on a formative, but hitherto barely documented
period of literary activity in Sumerian.
Other text publications have dealt, inter alia, with prayer; and in
the present volume, they are represented by five studies on prayers
xxvi assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies
of individuals to deities that are in the form of letters (Nos. IV.1,2,4;

V.1.2). Two of these articles are noteworthy here (IV.1; V.1). At their
core are editions of hitherto unpublished Sumerian letter-prayers, one
to the god Enki and the other to the goddess Ninisina, both editions
using, among others, manuscripts from Yale. But, once more, the two
articles are much more than text editions. They aim above all to define
and delineate a literary genre, in this instance the letter-prayer, and
especially in the earlier of the two articles, on “Individual Prayer in
Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition” (IV.1), to describe the middle
position of the letter-prayer in a Mesopotamian literary tradition that
for Hallo derived from “secular” letter-orders for material goods of the
Ur III period at the end of the third millennium bc, and eventuated
in the ershahunga penitential prayer form of the later second and first
millennia bc, distinguishing it from what he termed congregational
laments. The “Individual Prayer” article, it may be observed, has been
groundbreaking in Assyriological scholarship: a significant impetus to
further work on this and related literary genres, and to the inevitable
modification of some of its conclusions.3 Hallo would return to this
genre—and the concept of genre is central to much of his thinking
about ancient literatures—over the years, providing broad syntheses
of Mesopotamian literary epistolography, and editing, with full literary
and historical analysis, the Sumerian compositions belonging to what
he called “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa.” Intimately related
to this topic was the first doctoral thesis Hallo directed on Sumerian
literature, Raphael Kutscher’s 1967 dissertation on the compositional
history of a congregational lament, as well as the 1979 dissertation by
Piotr Michalowski on The Royal Correspondence of Ur. One could say
that the chain of influence has reached further down, to Nicole Brisch’s
2003 University of Michigan doctoral thesis on the court poetry of the
Larsa kings, written, in turn, under Michalowski, which is concerned,
in part, with the Royal Correspondence of Larsa, offering new editions
and analysis that build on Hallo’s pioneering work on this material.4 It
3 See, e.g., Piotr Michalowski, “On the Early History of the Ershahunga Prayer,”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 39 (1987), pp. 37–48, who there publishes a new ershahunga
prayer, dating to the Old Babylonian period and thus earlier than the ershahunga’s
known to Hallo when he wrote “Individual Prayer.” Further refinements, and a full-
scale analysis of the genre, were presented by Stefan M. Maul, in his ‘Herzberuhigungskla-
gen.’ Die sumerisch-akkadischen Ershahunga-Gebete. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988.
4 Raphael Kutscher, Oh Angry Sea (a-ab-ba-hu-luh-la): The History of a Sumerian Congre-
gational Lament. Yale Near Eastern Researches. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975;
assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies xxvii
should be added that Hallo’s focus on Sumerian literature and on the

holdings of the Yale Babylonian Collection continues to this day, as he
works to finish a volume of hand copies of all Sumerian literary tablets
from Yale.
The articles we have been discussing, as well as the others in the
present volume, are mainly directed to Mesopotamia, and particularly
to the literary character of its written sources. But Hallo does not
neglect the wider ancient Near Eastern ramifications, particularly those
concerning the Hebrew Bible. Something of this is evident, as noted
above, in Hallo’s 1963 article on “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Lit-
erature.” The two prayer articles just mentioned develop the biblical
connections more directly, if briefly. Building here on a detailed and
critical knowledge of previous scholarship, Hallo offers the illuminat-
ing suggestion that the Mesopotamian letter-prayer tradition helps to
understand the character and function of Biblical prayers of individ-
uals to God. In particular, in the article on “The Royal Correspon-
dence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian Prototype for the Prayer of Hezekiah?”
(V.1), he develops—and nuances—the proposal of his former Leiden
professor, F.M.Th. de Liagre Böhl, that the psalm of King Hezekiah
of Judah in Isaiah 38 actually serves as a kind of letter-prayer ask-
ing God to cure his illness (cf. also another article in the present col-
lection, X.2, on which see further below). What is finally noteworthy,
throughout his Biblical-Mesopotamian comparison, is Hallo’s restraint:
he resists the easy claim that the Biblical texts grew directly out of the
Mesopotamian letter-prayer tradition, because explicit evidence is lack-
ing. At the same time, he is able to lay out, in this tradition, a com-
pelling “early Mesopotamian model” (V.1, 213) for what the Biblical
prayers are doing.
Besides particular Mesopotamian texts, a number of articles in the
present volume study a variety of cultural, including religious, phe-
nomena: thus, the question of literary canons (I.1,5, X.3), rhetoric (I.7),
historiography (VI), proverbs (VIII), lamentations and prayers (IV.3),
kingship (III.4), origins of cities (VII.5), and religion, including cult and
impurity (I.6, VII.2,3,4, VIII.3). Here again, while Mesopotamia is the
Piotr Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur: The Epistolary History of an Ancient
Mesopotamian Kingdom. Mesopotamian Civilizations 15. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, in
press; Nicole Maria Brisch, Tradition and the Poetics of Innovation: Sumerian Court Literature
of the Larsa Dynasty (c. 2003–1763 bce). Alter Orient und Altes Testament 339. Ugarit-
Verlag, 2007.
xxviii assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies
main focus, it is not without wider, especially Biblical concerns. An

illuminating example is the paper on “The Concept of Canonicity in
Cuneiform and Biblical Literature: A Comparative Appraisal” (X.3).
This is the principal and largest of several studies, mostly collected
in the present volume, that focus or touch on canon (besides I.1,5,
see I.4 and IV.1, the latter, on “Individual Prayer,” discussed above).
The paper begins with a concise review of definitions of canonicity as
they have been used for the Hebrew Bible and classical Jewish litera-
ture, with briefer reference to the early Christian and Classical sources.
Hallo finds here a spectrum of meaning for canon, from the narrow,
viz., a single fixed corpus of divinely inspired authoritative literature,
to the broad, viz., a range of recognized corpora, invested with differ-
ing degrees of authority that do not have to be divinely inspired. More
important, he notes, with Nahum Sarna, that even when divine inspi-
ration was used as a criterion in antiquity, it was not the only one;
more visible was what one might call (the term is the present authors’,
not Hallo’s) the bibliographical treatment of texts that the ancients
regarded as canonical, e.g., the notation of line counts and of a stan-
dard ordering of texts and their parts in sequence. It is this bibliograph-
ical treatment that Hallo applies to the study of the Mesopotamian
materials, which is the main focus of his article. Here Hallo discusses a
series of twelve features characterizing those Mesopotamian texts, and
the corpora to which they belonged, that were regarded, at least in
scribal circles, as authoritative and so canonical—the latter term being
used by Hallo without reference to the criterion of divine inspiration.
Hallo then returns to the relevance of these features to the understand-
ing of the canonization process in the ancient Jewish and Christian tra-
ditions, at the same time not neglecting the differences, particularly the
more closed definition of a canonical corpus that eventually came to
be recognized for the Bible. The results of Hallo’s analysis, in this and
his other publications, have become widely known and referred to, but,
to be sure, not everywhere accepted, some critics still seeing an exces-
sive reliance on Biblical models of exclusiveness and authority for the
understanding of the Mesopotamian situation.5 But such critiques have
not always reckoned adequately with the nuances of Hallo’s analysis,
5 The most extensive critique is by Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, “Canon and Can-
onization in Mesopotamia—Assyriological Models or Ancient Realities?” Proceedings of

the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division A: The Bible and Its World [Jerusalem:
World Union of Jewish Studies, 1999], pp. 1*–12*.
assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies xxix
particularly as formulated in his “The Concept of Canonicity” article,

which allows, as we have noted, for a range of similarities, but also for
differences between the Biblical/Jewish/Christian traditions and those
of Mesopotamia. In any case, Hallo’s delineation of the twelve features
involved on the Mesopotamian side remains the most comprehensive
and systematic we have in contemporary scholarship on the scribal
production of texts, and thus a benchmark for any further work on
the subject and its possible canonical significance.
The papers of Hallo’s we have been discussing are, even if they con-
sider wider ramifications, rooted in particular analyses, whether of indi-
vidual texts or of individual cultural phenomena. One other group of
papers in the present volume, however, is deliberately oriented more
broadly, either as surveys of Mesopotamian literature, or as discussions
of what makes up the comparative study of cultures (I.1,3,4; X.1,2,4).
In this group, the paper that combines both orientations most exten-
sively is “Compare and Contrast. The Contextual Approach to Bibli-
cal Literature” (X.2). Hallo begins here with a discussion of method.
Since for him classical literary- or source-critical study of the Hebrew
Bible involves a high degree of speculation—there remaining little hard
and direct evidence of the underlying sources posited for the present
(Tiberian Masoretic) Biblical text—one must go beyond the Bible for
evidence that will help to understand the history of the Bible’s com-
position and its meaning. The comparative study of cultures, thus, is
a necessary part of Biblical scholarship. But, Hallo goes on to warn,
comparison that focuses only or largely on similarities with the goal of
compiling a list of parallels between Biblical and other ancient Near
Eastern literatures is much too one-sided and misleading. It needs to be
balanced by a consideration of contrasts, which can often prove to be
just as, if not more, illuminating in making sense of the nature of the
phenomena at issue, as well as the cultures from which they come. But
even more than a balance between similarities and contrasts, compara-
tive study must, argues Hallo, remain sensitive to the contexts of what
is being compared: context here involving both the immediate Bibli-
cal surroundings and the wider cultural and societal settings in ancient
Israel and the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world as a
whole. Equally, comparison must ask, if the phenomena reflect actual
historical connections, how they are to be construed: are they derived
from a common source, or borrowed one from the other, but then is
Israel the borrower, or the lender? To illustrate these directives, Hallo
turns to a series of particular comparisons gathered from a range of
xxx assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies
scholarship, very much including his own. The comparisons focus on

literary matters, involving common motifs and genres; the use of seal-
ing imagery to express love (Song of Songs 8:6), the curses at the end
of Deuteronomy (28–29), and descriptive rituals (Numbers 7, etc.) are
among the variety of instances considered. While some of the com-
parisons are more convincing than others, still, when gathered in such
number and diversity, they do make the case for the crucial illumina-
tion Mesopotamian literature provides toward the meaning, function,
and structure of Biblical literature—where the latter more often than
not is insufficient in itself to explain its own features.
The focus on comparative studies in not exhausted by the present
collection. Among numerous other illustrations, we may point to the
four summer seminars led by Hallo at Yale, with the support of the
National Endowment for the Humanities. These were explicitly de-
voted to the Hebrew Bible in comparative ancient Near Eastern per-
spective, and the essays from them were edited by Hallo and his asso-
ciates into four published volumes.6 In addition, Hallo was the driving
force and main editor of the three volumes, The Context of Scripture (Brill,
1997–2002), which represent a major new collection of English trans-
lations of texts from all over the ancient Near East that have interest
for Biblical studies. The volumes have already begun to replace the old
standby, James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament.7 Finally, one cannot forget the volume, Origins. The Ancient Near
Eastern Background of Some Modern Western Institutions, which Hallo pub-
lished in 1996 (Brill). As its title indicates, this moves, in its comparative
thrust, well beyond Mesopotamia and the Bible to take up a whole set
of phenomena in the Western tradition, institutional and otherwise, for
which Mesopotamia, but also the broader ancient Near East, provide
the foundations.
6 Carl D. Evans, William W. Hallo, and John B. White, eds., Scripture in Context:
Essays on the Comparative Method. Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series 34; Pitts-
burgh: The Pickwick Press, 1980; William W. Hallo, James C. Moyer, and Leo G. Per-
due, eds., Scripture in Context II: More Essays on the Comparative Method. Winona Lake:
Eisenbrauns, 1983; William W. Hallo, Bruce William Jones, and Gerald L. Mattingly,
eds., The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature: Scripture in Context III. Ancient Near East-
ern Texts and Studies 8; Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press,
1990; and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., William W. Hallo, and Bernard F. Batto, eds., The
Biblical Canon in Comparative Perspective: Scripture in Context IV. Ancient Near Eastern Texts
and Studies 11; Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
7 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press) in three editions (1950, 1955, 1969).

assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies xxxi
Characterizing all of this work, Assyriological sensu stricto and com-

parative, is its bibliographical thoroughness: nothing of the ancient
textual sources, and nothing of the voluminous and often widely dis-
persed modern scholarship appear to have escaped Hallo’s eye. Then,
too, Hallo has never been content with an older style of Assyriologi-
cal investigation, which often could not venture beyond the philolog-
ical examination of a text. As we have seen, even in his philological
investigations—painstaking in the best of the earlier tradition—he has
always asked larger questions, about literary form and tradition, and
cultural setting and profile, and done so very much aware of, though
not obsessive about, wider, non-Near Eastern scholarship in literature,
philosophy, history, and the like. This wider orientation has become
much more common now, as the earlier, basic work of decipherment
and organization of the field has been achieved, but Hallo, it may fairly
be said, was one of its early proponents.
Finally, whether it is a biblical text or a Mesopotamian that is a
later legendary composition, Hallo has wanted to be open and gen-
erous to the possibility that such texts can serve as historical witnesses
to the events, institutions, and the like which they describe. Of course,
Hallo is not oblivious of the distortions and even outright inventions
of Biblical and Mesopotamian texts in these instances. But he is just
as, even more, impatient with scholars who would easily dismiss the
historical footing of the texts or the chance for meaningful compar-
isons of texts and other artifacts across the cultures of the ancient Near
East, especially Biblical Israel and Mesopotamia. As he put it, at the
end of his “Compare and Contrast” article, “What counts is that, in
the understandable revulsion against parallelomania, we not subject the
biblical data to an equally unbridled parallelophobia.” In this regard,
as he himself noted in another of the papers reprinted in the present
volume, “Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics” (I.3),8 his work repre-
sents an effort to deal with the famous 1926 lecture/publication of one
of his Chicago professors, Benno Landsberger, on “Die Eigenbegrif-
flichkeit der babylonischen Welt.”9 Landsberger in that lecture called
8 Thanks to Bill T. Arnold for reminding one of us (Machinist) of Hallo’s re-
marks in his “Problems” article concerning Landsberger: see Arnold, “Assyriology

and Biblical Studies: Time for Reassessment?,” Bible and Interpretation [2005], on-line at
www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Arnold_Assyriology_Biblical_Reassessment.shtml.
9 Benno Landsberger, “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt.” Islamica II
(1926/reprinted 1974) (August Fischer Festschrift), pp. 355–372. Reprinted: Landsber-

ger-Von Soden, Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt (Benno Landsberger); Leis-
xxxii assyriological, biblical, and jewish studies
for a focus on understanding a culture—in his instance, the culture of

ancient Babylonia—from the culture’s own evidence and language(s),
not, at least in the first instance, from comparison with other cultures.
The effect of Landsberger’s lecture, even if it may have gone beyond his
ultimate intent, was thereafter to push many Assyriologists, though by
not means all (cf., e.g., Ephraim A. Speiser), away from active compara-
tive work especially with the Bible. In Hallo’s work, on the other hand,
we may observe an effort to take account of Landsberger’s important
strictures, but to restore a balance: to say that comparison is indeed
necessary as a means of enlarging the context in which the study and
understanding of a culture must proceed.
Peter Machinist
Piotr Michalowski
tung und Grenze sumerischer und babylonischer Wissenschaft (Wolfram von Soden) (Libelli 142;
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), pp. 1–18; Nachwort, p. 19. Trans-
lated: Benno Landsberger, The Conceptual Autonomy of the Babylonian World, trans. T. Jacob-
sen, B. Foster, and H. von Siebenthal, with introduction by T. Jacobsen (Monographs
on the Ancient Near East 1/4); Malibu: Undena, 1976.
i
programmatics
i.1
NEW VIEWPOINTS ON CUNEIFORM LITERATURE*
What was the appearance of a biblical book? How was it conceived,

edited, published? How was it transmitted from age to age, and by what
manner of means was it changed in the course of that transmission?
These are questions which ought to occupy the prolegomena of biblical
exegesis, for anything less than certainty on these points renders any
theory as to the history of a specific biblical text doubly tenuous.
In fact, however, they are questions that, at least outside Israel, are
largely disregarded.1 Palestinian archaeology can offer little comfort,
and internal evidence is hard to come by except perhaps in the case of
a Jeremiah. It is partly for this reason that modem biblical criticism
has achieved such relatively few really permanent results that may
be described as universally accepted. Instead, we have the classical
Wellhausenist school, content to divide the received text into more
and more component sources, not one of which is ever in danger of
being recovered; the generation of the Gattungsforscher, seeking at least to
classify the probable genres of biblical literature according to presumed
but always hypothetical motives or occasions; and the myth and ritual
*
This paper was read to the Third World Congress of Jewish Studies held in
Jerusalem in 1961. The following abbreviations have been used in this article:
ANET J.B. Pritchard, ed.: Ancient Near Eastern Texts. Princeton, 1950.
An.St. Anatolian Studies.
AfO Archiv für Orientforschung.
Ar.Or. Archiv Orientální.
Bi.Or. Bibliotheca Orientalis.
BWL W.G. Lambert: Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford, 1960.
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual.
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
MDOG W. von Soden: Das Problem der zeitlichen Einordnung akkadischer
Literaturwerke, Mitteilungen der deutschen Orientgesellschaft, 85, 1953.
RA Revue d’Assyriologie.
ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie.
1 Cf. J.Ph. Hyatt: The Writing of an Old Testament Book, BA, 6, 1943, pp. 71–80.
4 i.1. new viewpoints on cuneiform literature
school, disclaiming the relevance of formal textual history altogether

with its emphasis on a fluid, oral prehistory.2
There is, however, one approach which seems to offer some prospect
of objective, verifiable data against which to test biblical hypotheses,
and that is the so-called comparative method. As in so many other
areas of biblical scholarship, we find that, in the area of literary tech-
niques, the evidence from the literate neighbours of ancient Israel is
not only relevant to the biblical problems, but also enjoys a scholarly
consensus based on a maximum of facts and a minimum of theories.3
I would like to address myself to two special problems of literary
techniques in the cuneiform area, particularly in Akkadian, leaving it
largely to others to draw the inevitable comparisons for the biblical
situation. The two problems I have in mind are the creative impulse
and the process of canonization in cuneiform literature—two opposite
poles of one larger question which may be described as the formal
aspect of textual history.
Creativity implies first of all authorship, and cuneiform literature, at

least in its principal Sumerian and Akkadian manifestations, is noto-
rious for its anonymity. This anonymity is not the least of the differ-
ences that separate it from literary prophecy in Israel, and from subse-
quent western literature. In fact, there are only two Akkadian compo-
sitions (and at most one Sumerian one) which incorporate explicit ref-
erences to authorship, and these exceptions seem merely to prove the
rule.4 In the so-called ‘Theodicy’,5 a certain (E)saggil-kı̄nam-ubbib has
revealed his name in an acrostic which reads: ‘I, Saggil-kı̄nam-ubbib,
am a (loyal) servant of god and king.’ Apparently he means thereby to
protest his religious and political innocence in face of the rather dar-
ing views expressed in his composition. But the fact that he hides his
name in the acrostic seems to indicate clearly enough that it was only
2 To these well-known schools may now perhaps be added the interesting new view
advanced by S. Sandmel: The Haggada within Scripture, JBL, 80, 1961, pp. 105–122.
3 Almost the only attempt at source analysis in Akkadian of which I am aware
is P. Koschaker’s division of Codex Hammurabi into pre-Hammurabian and Ham-

murabian elements; cf. especially Rechtsvergleichende Studien zur Gesetzgebung Hammurabis.
Leipzig, 1923, and Beiträge zum babylonischen Recht, ZA, 35, 1924, pp. 199–212, esp.
pp. 205 ff. For Sumerian, one may mention T. Jacobsen: The Sumerian King List. Chicago,
1939.
4 W.G. Lambert: Ancestors, Authors and Canonicity, JCS, 11, 1957, p. 1.
5 Latest edition by W.G. Lambert, BWL, ch. 3.
i.1. new viewpoints on cuneiform literature 5
the unusual circumstances of the case that prompted him to break the
usual pattern of anonymity even to this extent, and, though we have
half a dozen further examples of acrostics in Akkadian literature,6 none
of the others include an author’s name.
The Epic of Irra7 was composed by Kabti-ilāni-Marduk. This we
learn from the final chapter of that book. But again the circumstances
under which this information is provided are exceptional. For we are
told that the presumed author received the text of the epic in its entirety
from the deity, and it is precisely in order to tell us this that his name
is included in the composition at all. Moreover, as Lambert has seen,8
the reference to divine inspiration is simply a way of denying Kabti’s
authorship of the epic and implying that he received it from an earlier
authority.
In both of these cases, the evidence for authorship, such as it is, is
incorporated in the texts themselves. There is, however, new and addi-
tional evidence which we owe to the Akkadian penchant for drawing
up lists. We possess certain lists and catalogues of authors, or of literary
compositions and their authors, which have recently been studied by
von Soden and Lambert.9 It is from one of these that we know of the
‘author’ of the Gilgamesh Epic as Sin-liqi-unninni. Lambert has shown
that this name and a number of the others go back to Kassite times,
the earliest datable one being from the fourteenth century.10 True, ‘in
(of ) the mouth of ’ in these catalogues does not imply authorship in
the strict modern sense,11 for even if we date the canonical version
of Gilgamesh to the Kassite period, it is clear that it built on earlier
versions and that the Kassite ‘author’ was in part simply an adaptor.
However, the far-reaching changes which we can trace precisely in this
composition in the passages where both the Old Babylonian and the
6 Ibid., p., 67; cf. W. Hallo: Isaiah 28

9–13 and the Ugaritic Abecedaries, JBL, 77,
1958, p. 328 and n. 11.
7 Last complete edition by Father F. Gössmann: Das Era-Epos. Würzburg, 1956. The
many important reviews of and additions to this edition have been summarized and
augmented by B. Kienast, ZA, 54, 1961, pp. 244–249.
8 JCS, 11, 1957, p. 1.
9 MDOG, pp. 16–17; Lambert, JCS, 11, 1957, p. 5, with a new fragment of the same
catalogue.
10 Ibid., pp. 2–4 and appendix, p. 112.
11 According to Lambert, ibid., p. 6, (ša) pı̄ identifies either the oral source or the
redactor.
neo-Assyrian versions are preserved12 show that the adaptation was at

the same time the work of a creative genius whose name was worthy of
being remembered.
The Kassite period is, however, not the upper limit for recorded
authorship in these and similar catalogues. At least one composition,
Etana, is associated with an author from Ur who must be assigned
to the Old Babylonian period at the latest and probably to the neo-
Sumerian period.13 Traditions of such hoary antiquity of authorship
merge imperceptibly with others which speak of unnamed ancient
sages, usually the seven antediluvian apkallu’s, and blend at last with
another Akkadian conception, that of divine authorship. It may come
as something of a surprise to find divine authorship an explicit tenet
of the Assyrians already, but again Lambert has provided us with the
unequivocal evidence in the form of an unpublished catalogue assign-
ing various canonical books to different deities.14 To this may be added
from a published source, albeit a late one, the statement in the ‘verse
account of Nabonidus’ that the divine Adapa, sometimes regarded as
first of the seven sages, authored the series UD.SAR Anu Enlil.15
Thus the Akkadian bibliographers were aware of the problem, of
authorship, and the old theorem that anonymity implied authority16 has
to be revised for them: in fact, antiquity of authorship implied author-
ity, with divine authorship implying the greatest authority. Though we
cannot, of course, regard these claims as historical, they are not with-
out value for, conversely, divine authorship must have been conceived,
rightly or wrongly, as high antiquity of authorship.17
12 Cf. P. Garelli, ed.: Gilgameš et sa légende, Êtudes recueillies à l’occasion de la VII e Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale, (Paris–1958), Paris, 1960, especially J.R. Kupper: Les différentes
versions de l’épopée de Gilgameš, pp. 97–102.
13 Lambert, JCS, 11, 1957, p. 7.
14 W.G. Lambert: Divine Authorship of Works of Babylonian Literature, paper read to the
American Oriental Society, New Haven, 1960; cf. JAOS, 80, 1960, p. 284.
15 So at least in the translation of Landsberger and Bauer; see A.L. Oppenheim,
ANET, p. 314. The series is, however, otherwise unknown to me. For Adapa, the
apkallu’s, and their works, see H.G. Güterbock: Die historische Tradition und ihre
literarische Gestaltung bei Babyloniern und Hethitern, ZA, 42, 1934, pp. 9–10.
16 So still von Soden, MDOG, p. 16.
17 It certainly cannot be denied that the Old Babylonian period was a time of
intense creative activity. Lambert (BWL, pp. 7–9) has even explained it in ethnic
terms: the peripheral Amorite or Semitic areas were ‘hotbeds of reform’ in matters
literary, while the scribal quarters of the old Sumerian centres like Nippur preserved
the received tradition until Hammurabi’s unification subjected the whole country to
their conservatism.
Official recognition of authorship, human, sage, or divine, is only the

first ingredient of the mechanics of creativity in Akkadian literature.
We have already alluded to the creative role of the presumed Kassite
adaptor of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh epic. The same role has
been posited for the Middle Babylonian period generally in the history
of Babylonian literature.18 But it would be wrong to conceive of the
origin of Akkadian literature in terms of a single, organized reworking
of Old Babylonian models, a once-and-for-all process that left no room
for individual traits. Rather, the evidence gradually accumulating shows
that this view has to be considerably modified.
Let us take first of all the case of the omen literature, for this is quan-
titatively the most important genre in Akkadian literature, forming, in
Oppenheim’s estimate, some 30 per cent, of what he calls the ‘stream of
tradition’.19 A comparison of Old Babylonian and neo-Assyrian omina
shows important differences in content20 as well as in form, for the later
omina love to enlarge on a given theme, exhausting all the possible and
impossible variations conceivable for a given protasis or condition.21 It
has therefore often been thought that the greater part of the late omen
literature was completely artificial, that the vast accretions to the earlier
18 MDOG, p. 22. We know a number of Middle Babylonian redactors by name, e.g.
Ešguzi; cf. J.V. Kinnier Wilson: Two Medical Texts from Nimrud, I, Iraq, 18, 1956,
pp. 136–140.
19 A.L. Oppenheim: Assyriology—why and how?, Current Anthropology, 1, 1960, p. 412.
Since Oppenheim’s provocative study is not everywhere available, it may be useful to

summarize his estimate of the original size and composition of Assurbanipal’s library
here:
Omen texts: about 300 tablets,
Lexical texts: about 200 tablets,
Bilingual incantations and prayers: about 100 tablets,
Conjurations, epics, fables, proverbs, etc.: about 100 tablets,
unclassified (?): about 200 tablets,
lost or not yet identified: 300–600 tablets.
This total of 1200–1500 tablets is considerably below Weidner’s estimate of 5000 in AfO,
16, 1952–1953, p. 198.
20 The older omina were chiefly derived from inspection of the liver and entrails of
sheep (extispicy), the younger ones from a variety of phenomena; cf. e.g. A. Goetze’s
Introduction to: Old Babylonian Omen Texts (= Yale Oriental Series, 10). New Haven,
1947.
21 In the case of monstrous births, for example, the Old Babylonian series considers
the appearance of a foetus with two tails (ibid., No. 56 i 10), while the neo-Assyrian
series adds cases with three to nine tails (Ch. Fossey, Babyloniaca, 5, 1914 and Dennefeld,
Assyriologische Bibliothek, 22, 1914, passim). The ‘cat of nine tails’, be it noted, is a biological
possibility.
corpus were simply generated by the scribes, and that they displayed as
little originality in their creative work as they did in their slavish copy-
ing of older models.
New discoveries force a revision of this view. The British excavations
at Kalah have turned up, among other magnificent finds, an entirely
new category of cuneiform inscriptions: instead of clay tablets, the slime
at the bottom of a deep well had preserved intact wooden and ivory
writing boards covered with wax. These boards were then fastened
together in harmonica fashion to produce a true book. This book
contained, interestingly enough, the astronomical omen series, enūma
Anu Enlil. As the excavators saw, these omina were apparently recorded
from actual, patient observation of celestial phenomena night after
night. They therefore could not employ a writing surface like clay,
which hardens quickly and makes additions and alterations impossible.
The wax surface of the wooden writing boards was ideally suited for
keeping a cuneiform record over a prolonged period of time, and at the
same time entitles us to suppose that much, if not all, of the late omen
literature was likewise a creative, experimental venture, albeit directed
towards ends far from scientific.22
A similar conclusion can be reached in the case of the great lexi-
cal series, such as ana ittišu and HAR-ra = hubullu, which are increas-
˘ ˘ speculation. In this case
ingly recognized as based on observation, not
the object of observation consisted of the actual Sumerian of the neo-
Sumerian and Early Babylonian periods, or at least its written sur-
vivals.23 Nor did the philological spirit die out thereafter, for the com-
mentaries of the later and latest periods represent a scribal innovation
that took many different forms.24
22For the writing boards from Kalah, see M.E.L. Mallowan: The Excavations at
Nimrud (Kalhu) 1953, Iraq, 16, 1954, pp. 94–110 and D.J. Wiseman: Assyrian Writing
Boards, ibid., 17, 1955, pp. 3–13 and Margaret Howard: Technical Description of the
Ivory Writing-Boards from Nimrud, ibid., pp. 14–20. For the general question, cf.
H.Th. Bossert: Sie schrieben auf Holz, Minoica (= Sundwall Anniversary Volume, Berlin,
1958), pp. 67–19.
23 This conclusion was reached independently by H. Limet: Le Travail du métal au
pays de Sumer. Paris, 1960, p. 190 (sub ‘1’) and by J.B. Curtis & W.W. Hallo: Money and
Merchants in Ur III, HUCA, 30, 1959, p. 136.
24 Some of these mukallimātu themselves became parts of the canon, while others
have all the appearance of ad hoc aids prepared by or for private readers of the classical
texts. All show many striking similarities with the so-called synonym lists, and there may
be an organic connection between the two genres. On commentaries, see most recently
E.F. Weidner: Ein ‘Kommentar’ zu šumma izbu, AfO, 19, 1959–1960, pp. 151–152.
In other genres, too, we have new evidence of the creative impulse in

the later periods of Mesopotamian history, periods which are contem-
porary with the presumed date of composition of most of biblical litera-
ture. The process of adapting older literary models did not cease in the
Middle Babylonian period. A comparison of the neo-Assyrian version
of the myth of Nergal and Eresh-kigal, recently edited by Gurney, with
the previously known Middle-Babylonian version of el-Amarna, shows
far-going changes in spite of the retention of the basic outline.25 But a
far more important outlet for the literary talents of the later scribes was
constituted by the royal inscriptions.26 At the courts of the neo-Assyrian
and neo-Babylonian monarchs, these found their true apogee. Many of
these inscriptions, it is true, succumbed to the stereotyped phrases, wild
exaggerations, and progressive distortions which their royal patrons
apparently wanted to hear, and their historical value suffers as much
as their literary merit as a result.27 But others, on the contrary, dis-
play a high degree of objectivity, of immediacy, and of sensitivity. Most
notable in this respect is the lengthy report in the form of a letter, by
a scribe or scribes of Sargon II of Assyria, describing the events of his
eighth campaign. In a new analysis of this text, Oppenheim has dis-
covered its Sitz im Leben: it was read to the assembled citizens of Assur
immediately upon the return of the royal army. It is attuned to its audi-
ence, and its many descriptive details, some of them almost lyrical, not
only delighted this audience, but gave free rein to the scribe’s powers of
observation and expression.28
In still another unexpected quarter, Oppenheim has discovered a
major departure from the fixity of wording previously associated with
Akkadian literature.29 Inserted in the midst of a most unlikely context—
a standard invocation of the gods of the night—he has found a pas-
sage of high poetic quality in which the lone officiating priest surveys
25 Cf. O.R. Gurney: The Myth of Nergal and Ereshkigal (= The Sultantepe Tablets
VII), An. St., 10, 1960, pp. 105–131.

26 MDOG, pp. 24–25.
27 We can assess their historical value best when we have two or even three inde-
pendent reports of the same event, as in the case of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem
or, to take a new example, the battle of Dêr in 720; cf. W. Hallo: From Qarqar to
Carchemish, BA, 23, 1960, pp. 53, 59.
28 A.L. Oppenheim: The City of Assur in 714 bc, JNES, 19, 1960, especially pp. 143–
147.
29 A.L. Oppenheim: A New Prayer to the Gods of Night, Oriens Antiquus (= Studia
Biblica et Orientalia, 3 = Analecta Biblica, 12, 1959), pp. 282–301.

the sleeping city and countryside from the roof on which he is con-
ducting his ritual, and paints this picture in an almost impressionistic
manner. The phrases used by the priestly poet are not in themselves
new. Indeed, Oppenheim has traced a number of them back in dif-
ferent combinations and contexts to Old Babylonian times. But their
employment here shows that some of the scribes, at least, had com-
mand of what Oppenheim calls topoi and could draw on them at will.30
Such topoi can be found also scattered through Sumerian31 and Akka-
dian32 literature, and at least one runs through both.33 The discovery
of the topos in Akkadian poetry thus reveals a situation not unlike one
sometimes associated with the biblical psalms—a stock of phrases, lines,
and even whole stanzas at the disposal of a school of poets who created
from them ever-new combinations.34
The reason why the evidence for the last point is relatively meagre is
to be sought in yet another factor, the last that can be considered in this
connection. The literary texts which are preserved for us tend to come
from palace or temple libraries and schools, and thus implicitly bear
the stamp of official acceptance. They are overwhelmingly dedicated to
30 Ibid., pp. 290–298. As far as I can see, the term was first applied to the cuneiform
field by B. Landsberger: Jahreszeiten im Sumerisch-Akkadischen, JNES, 8, 1949, p. 281.

For a useful definition of the term, cf. G. Bradley: The topos as a form in the Pauline
Paraenesis, JBL, 72, 1953, p. 240.
31 Cf. the frequent topos of ‘fertility’ to which A. Falkenstein has called attention in
ZA, 50, 1952, p. 78 and Sumerische and Akkadische Hymnen and Gebete. Zürich, 1953, p. 361.
32 Lambert, BWL, p, 315, finds lines 143–147 of the Counsels of Wisdom paraphrased
in Harper, Assyrian arid Babylonian Letters, No. 614 Rev. 8 f.

33 The famous line, ‘Who is tall enough to ascend to heaven, who is broad enough to
embrace the earth?’ occurs in more or less identical form first in the Sumerian wisdom
literature, then in the Sumerian epic of ‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’, then
in the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, and finally in the neo-Assyrian poem of the
‘Obliging Servant’; cf. ANET, p. 48, lines 28 f., p. 79, lines 5, and p. 438, lines 86 f.
In the last case, the quotation is dearly intended as the very type of a platitude; cf.
E.A. Speiser: The Case of the Obliging Servant, JCS, 8, 1954, p. 105, n. 21; differently:
Lambert, BWL, pp. 140–141, 148, 327.
34 Needless to say, the biblical topos is not limited to the Psalms. A comparison of
Hos. iv, 9 with Isa. xxiv, 2, for example, or of Gen. xix, 1–9 with Judges xix, 14–25,
shows the same tendency to repeat or enlarge a given theme in a given manner. The
whole problem of such ‘internal parallels’ in the various separate ancient Near Eastern
literatures is worthy of investigation. For some Egyptian examples, see W.K. Simpson:
Allusions to The Shipwrecked Sailor and the Eloquent Peasant in a Ramesside Text, JAOS,
78, 1958, pp. 50–51. For the related question of citations, see R. Gordis: Quotations
as a Literary Usage in Biblical, Oriental and Rabbinic Literature, HUCA, 22, 1949,
pp. 157–219 and Quotations in Wisdom Literature, Jewish Quarterly Review, 30, 1939–
1940, pp. 123–147. Cf. also n. 2 above.
matters of practical concern to these institutions and rarely stray into

pure belletristic, particularly in the later periods.35 But this does not
exclude the possibility that such literature existed, if it was ever reduced
to writing and if we can but find it.36 The excavations at Sultan Tepe
have for the first time turned up a sizeable cache of literary tablets from
what may be considered a purely private library roughly contemporary
with the great public collections at Nineveh and Assur, and of a type
whose existence had previously been deduced from internal evidence.37
And here indeed, besides the ‘official’ texts, there was found such a
delightful piece as the ‘Poor Man of Nippur.’38 Though the library
of Assurbanipal contained a fragment of the same text, a far more
interesting parallel to it turns up in the Arabian Nights. It is probably
just in the area of folk tales and popular maxims that this unofficial
literature found its freest expression, and we are not to suppose that
the dearth of preserved Akkadian proverbs relative to Sumerian is due
to the loss of a sense of humour: they were simply relegated to the pı̄
mātim, the vernacular.39 Another outlet for popular, or oral literature
was the realm of legend, which explains why the same tales might be
associated with different heroes by successive ages.40
35 Even apparently ‘literary’ texts such as Adapa frequently end in ‘practical’ incan-
tations and probably owe their survival to this fact. Cf. Oppenheim, op. cit. (above,
n. 19), p. 413.
36 Oppenheim, ibid., p. 414, suggests that this literature may have been written in
Aramaic, or on perishable materials, or in palaces like that of Babylon which have

so far defied excavation. That there was ever a sizeable body of ‘oral literature’ in
Mesopotamia seems unlikely; cf. J. Laessøe: Literacy and Oral Tradition in Ancient
Mesopotamia, Studia Orientalia Ioanni Pedersen septuagenario. . . .dicata. Copenhagen, 1953,
pp. 205–218.
37 Cf. MDOG, p. 15; E. Weidner: Die Bibliothek Tiglatpilesers I., AfO, 16, 1953,
p. 198; idem: Amts- und Privatarchive aus mittelassyrischer Zeit, V. Christian Anniversary
Volume (= K, Schubert, ed.: Vorderasiatische Studien. Wien, 1956), pp. 111–118; W.G. Lam-
bert: The Sultantepe Tablets: a review article, RA, 53, 1959, p. 121.
38 O.R. Gurney: The Tale of the Poor Man of Nippur (= The Sultantepe Tablets V),
An. St., 6, 1956, pp. 145–162 and addendum, ibid., 7, 1957, p. 136; cf. E.A. Speiser:
Sultantepe Tablet 38 73 and Enūna Eliš III 69, JCS, 11, 1957, pp. 43–44.
39 For the Akkadian proverbs, cf. BWL, ch. 9, for the Sumerian proverbs, E.I. Gor-
don: Sumerian Proverbs (= Museum Monographs. Philadelphia, 1959) and previous literature
cited there, pp. 552–553.
40 Cf. Especially H. Lewy: The Babylonian Background of the Kay Kâûs Legend,
Ar. Or., 17/2, 1949, pp. 28–109, and Nitokris-Naqîa, JNES, 11, 1952, pp. 264–286. For
the Babylonian background of the book of Daniel, cf. W. von Soden: Eine babylonische
Volksüberlieferung von Nabonid in den Danielerzählungen, Zeitschrift f. Alttestamentliche
Wissenschaft, 53, 1935, pp. 81–89.
So far the elements of creativity in Akkadian literature. What can

be said about the opposite but complementary technique of collect-
ing, selecting and preserving that which had previously been created?
Here too, recent discoveries have contributed new insights. It is by now
common knowledge that the literary cuneiform texts—as distinguished
from the monumental building and votive inscriptions on the one hand
and the so-called economic or archival tablets on the other—are often
preserved in numerous different copies, sometimes going back to dif-
ferent periods and places. A critical edition of such a text demands
from the Assyriologist that he combine all such copies, duly noting
attested manuscripts and variant readings in an apparatus criticus,
exactly as in the case of a Greek or Latin author. Indeed, Assyriol-
ogy is now in the happy and exciting period of textual reconstruction
in which the humanists of the Renaissance found themselves when they
were recovering their classical heritage. What is less well known is the
precise manner by which these various copies came into being. Who
determined what texts were to be copied? How many were made? In
what order were they arranged? These apparently mechanical ques-
tions have an interest not only for Assyriology but for ancient literary
techniques in general.
Consider first the question of the number of copies of texts ‘in
circulation’. The seemingly numberless fragments that enter into the
reconstruction of almost any substantial Akkadian or Sumerian text
have sometimes led to the feeling that there was an original abundance
of complete copies in each of the great public tablet collections. One
could picture a reader dictating to a whole ‘scriptorium’ full of scribes,
and indeed this process was employed in some periods for some of the
commoner royal inscriptions—those, at least, which, because of their
shape, it was not possible to print with a brick stamp. But there is
no evidence for such mass-production methods in the case of literary
texts. On the contrary, the abundance of fragments and separate tablets
belonging to the same composition at a single site disappears when
one begins to assign the fragments to a single tablet on the basis of
their expected position, and to assign successive tablets to a single
‘exemplar’ of one multi-tablet series on the basis of certain technical
and orthographic characteristics. In this manner, it has been deduced
by von Soden that even Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh contained
at the most only three complete copies of any one composition, and
of some only one.41 Much the same situation can be demonstrated for
the Old Babylonian copies of Sumerian texts: few discrete exemplars
of even the more popular compositions. It is true that, as Oppenheim
suggests, the methods of the scribal schools may have encouraged their
graduates to construct and maintain small libraries of their own, but as
far as the decisive ‘public’ collections were concerned, i.e. those of the
temple, palace, or school, our evidence to date suggests a very limited
‘edition’ of complete literary texts at any given site in spite of their wide
geographical and chronological attestation.
The situation is different, however, when we consider the brief ex-
cerpts generally referred to as exercise tablets. These are indeed at-
tested in great abundance. What interests us about them here is a
new type of exercise tablet which has recently come to light. Two
small tablets from Assur published by Lambert42 show extracts, not just
from two or three compositions,43 but from ten different series, all of
them identifiable as standard books in the neo-Assyrian stream of tra-
dition. What is even more significant, the compositions are excerpted
in exactly the same order in both tablets, in fact in each case the
lines quoted in the one tablet follow immediately those quoted in the
other tablet when compared with the full version of the texts involved.
What this seems to imply is the existence of an accepted list of classical
texts, and the emergence or a standard order in which they were to be
read or studied.44 In keeping with this hypothesis is the fact that lexical
texts head the list and that omen texts make up the greatest part of
it.
41 W. von Soden: Zur Wiederherstellung der Geburtsomenserie šumma izbu, ZA, 50,
1952, p. 182 (cf. on this series also P.C. Couprie, Bi Or., 17, 1960, p. 187). As von Soden
points out, the reconstruction of the separate exemplars of a given series is a neglected
but valid part of lower textual criticism in Assyriology. (Oppenheim, loc. cit. [above,
n. 19] counts up to six copies of some Nineveh texts.)
42 BWL, Pl. 73 and pp. 356–357.
43 An interesting example of this variety of extract (Akkadian nishu) tablet is Baby-
loniaca, 9, pp. 19 f. and Pl. 1, which has, on the obverse, extracts of ˘ the Lipit-Ishtar
hymn translated by A. Falkenstein, in Sumerische und akkadische Hymnen und Gebete. Zürich,
1953, No. 28, followed by Codex Hammurabi par. 7, and, on the reverse extracts of
paradigms. The tablet is now in Geneva; cf. E. Sollberger: The Cuneiform Collection
in Geneva, JCS, 5, 1951, p. 20 sub 6.3. Cf. also D.O. Edzard: Die ‘zweite Zwischenzeit’
Babyloniens. Wiesbaden, 1957, n. 463.
44 Akkadian idû (NÍG.ZU) is the material to be ‘known’ (i.e. by heart), and tāmartu
(IGI.DU8.A) is the material to be glanced at for reference only. The latter term is
commonest in the colophons of Assurbanipal’s personal (?) library; both occur in the
curriculum of the incantation priest (below, n. 49).
Lambert himself hesitates to draw this conclusion, and in another

context he has specifically warned against viewing the editorial work
of the Babylonian and Assyrian scribes as canonization in the sense
in which this word is applied to the Bible.45 Yet we know that many
Akkadian works had assumed a fixed form by neo-Assyrian times,
and that their division into tablets, and in the case of longer series
into groups of tablets (pirsu) was fully standardized.46 When we add
to this the new evidence for the fixed order of the separate series, we
have some of the essential ingredients of a canon. If the process of
canonization was not completed in the case of the cuneiform literature,
it was only because political events intervened.
There have, indeed, long been indications of the emergence of a
standard order of cuneiform texts, though they have not always re-
ceived the attention they deserved. One is the existence of catalogues
of titles or incipits,47 either of the various tablets (i.e. chapters) of long
series,48 or of successive series.49 Now some of the latter may, it is true,
be simply inventories prepared by zealous librarians.50 But others may
have the further significance of recording the order in which the texts
were supposed to follow each other. This view is in accord with another
45 JCS, 11, 1957, p. 9. I refer only to the element of standardization, not to the claim
of inspiration attaching to the term.

46 The notion that a cuneiform series (iškaru) corresponds to a (biblical) book and a
tablet (.tuppu) to a chapter readily suggests itself. It is harder to find an exact equivalent
for the pirsu.
47 Called DUB.SAG.(MEŠ) or, in neo-Assyrian texts, SAG.DUB.(MEŠ), literally
‘head or top (of ) the tablet’; cf. Kinnier Wilson, op. cit. (above, n. 18), pp. 135–136.
In neo-Sumerian, SAG.DUB seems to identify the person named at the beginning of a
ration or wage list; cf. T. Jacobsen, Studia Orientalis Ioanni Pedersen septuagenario . . . dicata.
Copenhagen, 1953, p. 181.
48 Such a sub-catalogue, or perhaps we should say ‘table of contents’ of a single
series was recently found at Nimrud-Kalah (ND 4358) and published by Kinnier
Wilson, op. cit. (above, n. 18), pp. 130 ff. We also have such catalogues for, i.a., enūma Anu
Enlil (cf. Weidner: Die astrologische Serie Enûma Anu Enlil, AfO, 14, 1942, pp. 184–189)
and the omen series šumma ãlu (KAR 394).
49 Some typical cuneiform catalogues may be noted here: (a) Sumerian: I. Bernhardt
and S.N. Kramer, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena, 6, 1956,
pp. 389–395, and the parallels there cited (lyrics); cf. now also S.N. Kramer: New
Literary Catalogue from Ur, RA, 55, 1961, pp. 169–176. (b) Akkadian: KAR 158 (lyrics);
H. Zimmern, ZA, 30, 1915–1916, pp. 204–229 (mašmašūtu); Kraus, AfO Supplement,
3, 1939, No. 51 (physiognomic omina) and the texts quoted above, n. 48. (c) Hittite:
E. Laroche, Ar. Or., 17/2, 1949, pp. 14–23. In the Bible, Psalm lxviii is a list of incipits
according to W.F. Albright: A Catalogue of Early Hebrew Lyric Poetry, HUCA, 23,
1950–1951, pp. 1–39.
50 So e.g. at Hattusha; cf. Laroche, Ar. Or., 17/2, 1949, pp. 22–23.
fact, long signalized by Landsberger,51 that the last tablets of certain

series have, as their catchline, the first line of another series.52 This too
points in the direction of a standardized order of the canonical texts.
Other criteria for the canonizing process include the collecting, se-
lecting and editing of texts. Evidence for these activities is better known,
though some of it is subject to differences of interpretation.53 Here there
is only room to consider one final question: who was responsible for the
entire process? The answer seems clear. It was the scribal schools. Only
such an institution, with its continuing, corporate character can explain
the wide extent and long endurance of cuneiform literature in the face
of its limited circulation,54 and only such an institution possessed the
resources, the discipline and at the same time the practical need to
produce a canon while limiting its own creative impulses to the form
described earlier.55 We now know a good deal about these schools,
their organization and terminology56 thanks especially to the essays
about school life at Nippur dating from the Old Babylonian period
51 Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon, 1, 1937, p. vii.

52 Note also that sometimes two or more distinct compositions appear in a kind of
series, as for example the ‘Silbenalphabet’ and Atrahasis; cf. C.J. Gadd: The Infancy
of Man in a Sumerian Legend, Iraq, 4, 1937, pp. 33–34, ˘ and J. Laessøe, The Atrahasis
Epic: a Babylonian History of Mankind, Bi. Or., 13, 1956, pp. 98–99. ˘
53 Cf. the divergent interpretations of the important colophon of Nazimaruttash
(c. 1313–1288) by von Soden, MDOG, pp. 22–23, and Lambert, JCS, 11, 1957, pp. 8–
9, or the colophon of the newly found catalogue of the series sa-gig (above, n. 48) by
Kinnier Wilson, op. cit., pp. 136 ff. and Lambert, ibid., p. 6.
54 Lambert, ibid., p. 7 considers the possibility that Kassite scribal schools descended
straight from Old Babylonian ones. It is true that, according to one tradition, the
scribes and learned priests fled to the Sealand at the end of the Old Babylonian period;
cf. B. Landsberger: Assyrische Königliste und ‘Dunkles Zeitalter’, JCS, 8, 1954, pp. 68–
69, n. 174. But the Sealand itself may have restored them to Nippur, for its kings
revived the tradition of Sumerian royal names (ibid., p. 69 and n. 175) and, possibly,
of Sumerian royal hymns (cf. below, n. 61). Lambert, op. cit., pp. 3–4 further holds that
‘scribal families [or guilds] were responsible for transmitting Akkadian literature from
the Kassite period onwards’, i.e. after the demise of the old-style schools. For a similar
evaluation of Hittite scribal organization, cf. Laroche, op. cit., (above, n. 49), pp. 9–
13.
55 The canonical order, in fact, reflects or represents the curriculum of the schools,
which may have begun with the texts mentioned in n. 52, then passed on to the ‘primer’
of Assyriology, the so-called Syllabary A, then to the other syllabaries and vocabularies
before turning to the connected literary and ‘scientific’ texts; cf. n. 56 below.
56 For the Old Babylonian period see B. Landsberger: Babylonian Scribal Craft and
its Terminology, Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Orientalists, 1954, pp. 123–
126. Interesting terms from the later period are to be found in the sa-gig colophon
(above, n. 53) and in the lexical series LÚ-ša.
and studied among others by Kramer, Gadd, and van Dijk.57 But the
existence of comparable institutions and techniques in later periods and
at such diverse places as Assur and Hattusha is implied by the analysis
of their libraries.58 In the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, the scribal
traditions of Mesopotamia found a fitting climax, whether we can still
speak here of a ‘school’ or not.
The schools, however, did not exist in a vacuum. Behind them stood
at all times some form of higher authority. Usually, this was the state,
in the form of the monarch; more rarely it may have been the temple.59
This can be demonstrated by a variety of indications from various
periods. Most obvious is the personal connection between school and
court: scribal training was, at least in some periods, the necessary and
sufficient basis for any public career, administrative, priestly, or military,
and even royal princes were honoured to bear the title of scribe.60 For
the neo-Sumerian and Old Babylonian periods, I have tried to establish
a link between successive Babylonian dynasties and the Sumerian poets,
probably of Nippur, which seems to have involved the honouring of
certain kings in the hymns in return for the patronage of the scribal
schools by royal favour.61 The antiquarian interest of certain of the
later kings is well known,62 and some of them were equally patrons
of literature. There can be little doubt that the scribal schools or guilds
existed with the active consent and support of the state. It seems hardly
too far-fetched to suppose that the work of canonization, if it really was
their work, reflected the needs of the monarchy.
57 S.N. Kramer: Schooldays, JAOS, 69, 1949, pp. 199 ff. (= Museum Monographs, 1);
C.J. Gadd: Teachers and Students in the World’s Oldest Schools, London, 1956; J.J.A. van Dijk:
La Sagesse suméro-accadienne. Leiden, 1953, pp. 21–27. Cf. A. Falkenstein: Der Sohn des
Tafelhauses, Die Welt des Orients, 1, 1948, pp. 172–186.
58 Cf. Weidner, op. cit. (above, n. 37), pp. 197–215; Laroche, op. cit. (above, n. 49),
pp. 7–23, and, for a very general survey, A.A. Kampman: Archieven en bibliotheken in het
oude Nabije Oosten. Leiden, 1942.
59 That the scribes came under the direct patronage of the temples from Middle
Babylonian times on as Lambert suggests (BWL, p. 14) may perhaps be questioned in

the light of the specific exclusion of the secret, i.e. more advanced, texts of certain
priestly techniques (the so-called nis. irtu; cf. R. Borger, Bi Or., 14, 1957, pp. 190–195) from
the scribal canon. On the contrary, the omina, prayers, rituals, etc. are full of specific
applications to the kings.
60 Cf. already V. Scheil: Princes Scribes, Recueil des Travaux, 37, 1915, pp. 127–128.
61 W. Hallo: Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity, paper read to the 171st meeting of
the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, 1961, here: III.4.

62 Cf. most recently G. Goossens: Les Recherches historiques à l’époque néo-babylo-
nienne, RA, 42, 1948, pp. 149–159.

To sum up, then, recent discoveries in Assyriology have provided new

insights into the sources of the creative impulse and into the mechan-
ics of canonization. The possibility thus presents itself of tracing the
growth of a Mesopotamian literary composition through two millennia,
from its first written fixation, through its creative adaptation to new
forms and even new languages, to its final, orderly incorporation into
an official canon. Without this basic knowledge, all higher literary crit-
icism remains hopelessly hypothetical. With it, the foundations are laid
for a comparative approach to biblical criticism.
i.2
THE CULTIC SETTING OF SUMERIAN POETRY
A. Introduction*
Three years ago I announced the identification, in the Yale Babylo-

nian Collection, of a nearly complete hymn to the goddess Nisaba of
which only a few lines were otherwise known from duplicates, and I
promised to deal with it at a future date.1 This paper represents an
attempt to redeem that pledge. But an edition of the hymn with the
traditional philological apparatus no longer appears, to me, either a
necessary or a sufficient approach to the task. It is no longer necessary
because the pioneering work of Adam Falkenstein and his disciples has
provided ample evidence for most of the textual, structural and lexi-
cal problems raised by the hymns to deities in general. It is no longer
sufficient because we are now ready to raise some larger questions con-
cerning this genre to see, if we can, what place it had in the life, and
particularly the religious life, of the culture that produced it. For reasons
that will become apparent, the hymn to be presented here contains
what may be some particularly valuable clues toward resolving these
questions.
The cultic setting of religious poetry is not, admittedly, a question of
interest solely to Sumerologists. It could be investigated with profit for
the first millennium when, indeed, elaborate ritual calendars explicitly
prescribe the particular festivals and other occasions for the recitation
of specific compositions.2 And of course criticism of the Biblical Psalms
has, since the days of Herrmann Gunkel, insisted on the determination
of the “Sitz im Leben” for each genre isolated by the so-called Gat-
tungsforschung. In a recent study of “Individual Prayer in Sumerian”,
I attempted to apply similar form-critical criteria to Sumerian religious
* This portion of the paper was presented to the 17th Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale, Brussels, July 2, 1969, and is reproduced here without change.

1 JCS 20 (1966), 91 n. 14.
2 JAOS 88/I (= AOS 53, 1968), 72 n. 7, here: IV.1.
20 i.2. the cultic setting of sumerian poetry
poetry in order to test for a hypothetical “Sumerian psalter”.3 At the

same time I wished to satisfy some methodological prerequisites for
a meaningful comparison between the neo-Sumerian material and its
potential analogues in later compositions—post-Sumerian, Akkadian,
and Hebrew. It is only a logical extension of this approach to test for
the life situation of the genres isolated in the neo-Sumerian corpus, not
only of religious poetry but of canonical literature generally.
As is well-known, this literature deals in overwhelming measure with
just two subjects: gods and kings;4 for good measure we may add
“and scribes” as a third, and distinctly tertiary, focus of interest. This
objective observation provides an essential first hint, for it follows with
some likelihood that the physical setting for most of the neo-Sumerian
compositions dealing with gods, kings or scribes was, respectively, the
temple, the court, or the school. Leaving aside the last, which is fairly
self-evident, we may concentrate on palace and temple, while keeping
in mind that royal and priestly roles intersected at numerous points.
In trying to identify the particular occasion, secular or religious, for any
given genre, it should be remembered that these genres are valid only if,
and to the extent that, our modern classifications correlate with ancient
designations. Thus, e.g., “myth” has no place in my scheme, since in
the sense of “a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural
beings, actors, or events”5 it does not constitute a literary class by itself
in Sumerian, but either appears in the guise of a hymn of praise (zà-
mí) to a deity or else serves as the introduction to other genres such as
incantations6 or disputations.
Instead, my brief and necessarily hypothetical survey will begin with
the disputations themselves. This is a well-defined genre in the neo-
Sumerian canon—although sometimes confused with the “fable”—
designated there as adaman-duga, or dialogue, and as a sub-category
of the balbal-e, or antiphonal recitation. Its setting in the royal palace
is explicit in at least one instance,7 and it is not difficult to picture
Ibid. 71–75.
3
Cf. JCS 18 (1964), 84 n. 76.

4
5 The Oxford Universal Dictionary (3rd ed., 1955). Theodore H. Gaster (orally; cf.
now p. xxiv of his Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, 1969) prefers an
anthropological definition according to which myth presents a legendary occurrence as
a paradigm for a continuing human experience, i.e., myth uses the punctual to explain
the durative.
6 Though not as often as is sometimes suggested by the published examples, as
pointed out by Lambert, JCS 13 (1968), 108 and n. 2.

7 HUCA 33 (1962), 29 n. 214.
i.2. the cultic setting of sumerian poetry 21
the entire genre as a form of courtly entertainment, with the king

playing the role of royal or divine arbiter between the disputants. There
are even indications that the latter donned masks or costumes for the
occasion.8
Another essentially secular form of entertainment is represented by
the so-called epics, more specifically by the heroic tales of the First
Dynasty of Uruk. These were perhaps directed at a wider audience
than the disputations, for the incipit of the Gilgamesh cycle invites the
whole country to hear or learn9 of his feats, at least in the neo-Assyrian
version. But they surely originated under royal patronage, presumably
achieving their canonical form under the kings of the Ur III dynasty,
who stressed their connection to Uruk in general, and to its first dynasty
in particular.10 It is more difficult to specify the genre and occasion of
these tales, for their endings nearly all remain to be recovered. Where
preserved they seem to be treated as hymns in praise of the long-
deceased royal heroes.
From here it is only a short step towards the hymns in praise of the
living king, collectively known as èn-du-lugal, royal songs.11 As recent
research has emphasized, these are royal hymns in the strict sense,
addressed to and/or spoken by the king himself. They lack any litur-
gical notations and were probably at home in the courtly ceremonial
rather than the temple cult.12 Proportionately they are better repre-
sented at Ur, the political capital, than at Nippur, the religious center.13
They deal with such matters as the coronation of the king, his procla-
mation of justice and law, his intellectual and physical prowess, and his
military achievements. They are, in short, a poetic record of his secular
role. But they cannot be treated in isolation from the songs which com-
memorate his religious functions, or those which celebrate, as it were,
the sacraments of the royal lifetime.
Such songs are essentially hymns to deities, but include formal ref-
erences to the king at specific junctures. All are set in the cult, as
their numerous liturgical notations indicate, but more study is required
before their specific sub-categories are properly characterized. Already
it can be stated that the most common forms in which they are cast
8 Cf. JAOS 87 (1967), 63 (1).

9 Cf. the restoration of Gilg. I 1 in CAD I, 33d.
10 JCS 20 (1966), 136 f, here: III.2.
11 JAOS 83 (1963), 174; BiOr 23 (1966), 240 n. 13, here: IV.1.
12 Falkenstein, ZA 50 (1952), 91.
13 BiOr. 23 (1966), 241 f. Here: III.3.
are the adab and tigi, named after two kinds of musical instruments.14
These are structurally identical except for the short prayer (uru) ap-
pended to the adab.15 They seem to constitute prayers on behalf of the
king in a variety of situations and cannot necessarily be equated with
any one given ceremony. Purely as a hypothesis, it may be suggested
that they were commissioned for occasions such as the installation of a
high priest or priestess (who was often a son or daughter of the king) or
the presentation of a royal votive offering.16
But there are other genres where the cultic role of the king is clearer.
At least some of the balbal-e compositions cast him in the role of
Dumuzi, that is as the male partner in the sacred marriage,17 and such
compositions typically treat, or entreat, the nation-wide fertility that is
supposed to ensue.18 The king’s real marriage is perhaps reflected in
another antiphonal genre, the lum-a-lam-a, if we may follow Buccel-
lati’s suggestion with respect to the so-called “Marriage of Martu”.19
The birth of the royal heir was no doubt a fit subject for hymnography
as was, demonstrably, the death and burial of the king.20
If we now consider all these literary reflections of the royal role in
and out of the cult, they will be seen to add up to a kind of hymnic
biography of the monarch. This can already be demonstrated for Ur-
Nammu and Šulgi, for whom we have a particularly impressive corpus
of royal hymns of all kinds. The same two kings also have left the
largest numbers of royal inscriptions from their dynasty, and both of
these facts can hardly be unrelated to the lengths of their reigns.21
There are striking and sometimes even literal parallels between the
date formulas and the royal inscriptions,22 between the date formulas
and the royal hymns,23 and between the royal hymns and the royal
14 Henrike Hartmann’s doubts on this point (Die Musik in der Sumerischen Kultur, p. 197)
are now dispelled by Kramer, JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 116, line 186.
15 BiOr. 23 (1966), 241, here: III.3.
16 Hartmann, p. 206, suggests that the adab belongs to the royal meal that followed
the processional of the gods and the sacred marriage of the New Year’s celebration.
The fixing of fate for king and country may have followed.
17 BiOr. 23 (1966), 244, here: III.3.
18 Ibid, 241 (4).
19 Amorites of the Ur III Period, p. 339.
20 Kramer, Goetze Volume = JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 104–122.
21 HUCA 33 (1962), 8.
22 Cf. eg. AOS 43 (1952), 92 (Amar-Sin).
23 Cf. eg. JCS 20 (1966), 139, here: III.2, and n. 80 (Ur-Nammu); Falkenstein, ZA
50 (1952), 82 f. (Šulgi). Cf. also van Dijk, JCS 19 (1965), 18, who correlates, and in
part reconstructs, the date formulas of Nur-Adad of Larsa on the basis of VAT 8515
lines 195 ff.
inscriptions.24 I am therefore inclined to reconstruct an annual or bien-

nial ceremony,25 perhaps related to the New Year’s celebration, in which
one and the same event was memorialized in three discrete formula-
tions: at its most concise in the official proclamation of the date for-
mula; more fully in an appropriate royal building or votive inscrip-
tion; and at its most elaborate in the royal hymns.26 The nature of
the event—cultic or secular—may have determined the precise genre
of the hymn and the place of its promulgation.
While this recurrent cultic pattern must remain a hypothesis, there is
more solid evidence for the special and extraordinary occasions which
brought the kings to the temples. Kings and commoners alike could
address petitions directly to the gods, by means of letters deposited
at the feet of their statues.27 Sometimes the addressee was himself a
deceased and/or deified king, as in the case of the elaborate letter-
prayers of Sin-iddinam addressed to the statue of his father Nur-Adad
for transmittal to the sun-god.28 But the living kings were also invoked
as objects of prayer, and a whole category of such prayers has been
identified, characteristically ending each time in, “Oh NN my king”
(RN lugal-mu).29 In at least one case, such a prayer to Rim-Sin involved
a religious processional through the sacred precincts at Ur, with halts
for sacrifices at the locks and gates of each structure, and can be
directly paralleled by archival texts from Ur detailing the sacrificial
expenditures involved.30
It remains now to consider those genres which are wholly at home
in the priestly sphere and do not explicitly involve royal participation in
the cult. Here the clearest case is, perhaps, provided by the lamentation
(balag) for the destruction of a temple. As Jacobsen has seen, a classic
example of the genre such as “The lamentation over the destruction of
Ur” was not composed during the catastrophe, nor even in response to
24 See below, notes 48 and 49.

25 Cf. already JCS 20 (1966), 139 and n. 81, here: III.2.
26 Note that the Sin-iddinam hymn CT 42:45 = UET 6:98 as edited by van Dijk,
JCS 19 (1965), 21 f., refers to the New Year’s festival in Line 10 and to the year-name in
line 23 and perhaps in the last line; cf. Hallo, JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 96 and 98 f.
27 JAOS 88 (1968) 79, and n. 74, here: IV.1.
28 van Dijk, JCS 19 (1965), 1–25. Note he suggests the meaning “to place in the
mouth” for ka-sì or ka-sìg (ad line 45).

29 Hallo, JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 96; v. Dijk, MIO 12 (1966), 63. The genre seems to be
called šudx(KAxŠU)-dè-dingir; cf. Kramer, UET 6/1, p. 10 ad Nos. 102–106.

30 Levine and Hallo, HUCA 38 (1967), 17–58: esp. 48 n. 24.
it, but at the time of the reconstruction.31 It represented, in fact, a litur-

gical apology to the deity for completing the razing of the sanctuaries
as a necessary preliminary to their rebuilding.32 Much the same can be
said for other lamentations.33 The actual dedication of the completed
new temple was presumably the occasion for more joyous expressions,
speciflcally perhaps the class of poems generally referred to as temple
hymns. Their finest representative is certainly Gudea’s hymn in praise
of the rebuilding of the Eninnu at Lagash. But the genre did not begin
with him, since the great cycle of hymns to all the temples of Sumer
and Akkad is attributed, on the strength of its own colophon, to Enhed-
uanna, the daughter of Sargon.
Where, then, do hymns to deities fit into this picture? This is the
question which I posed at the outset, and which we must consider now.
Divine hymns are considerably more common than either “congrega-
tional laments” or temple hymns, and they are generally shorter. In
both of these respects they are, rather, more like the “royal” hymns of
all sorts. Thus the specific cultic events which occasioned them must
have occurred more frequently than the reconstruction of a temple—
if indeed they were occasioned by such events. From all that has been
stated already, it should follow that they were, and it is here suggested
that the specific event involved may well have been the dedication of
a cult-statue of the relevant deity. In a significant number of divine
hymns, the deity is apostrophized precisely in terms of the characteris-
tics associated with the statue, notably the tiara and cloak which radi-
ated the divine splendor. This is true whether we view this splendor in
an abstract sense, as has recently been proposed by Elena Cassin,34 or
maintain the physical interpretation of such terms as ní, su-zi, me-lám,
etc., as I am inclined to do, following Oppenheim.35 The latter scholar
has also drawn attention to the fundamental importance of the statue in
31 AJSL 58 (1941), 22 f. Cf. p. 221: “It must have been written no more than seventy
or eighty years after the destruction.”

32 This seems preferable to the suggestion that the Ur Lament was recited on the
anniversary of the destruction or on the return of the statue of Ningal, as suggested by

Yvonne Rosengarten, RHR 174 (1968), 122.
33 At least of the Old Babylonian period; cf. R. Kutscher, a-ab-ba-hu-luh-ha: The
˘
History of a Sumerian Congregational Lament, Yale University Ph.D. Thesis (unpubl., ˘ 1967),
pp. 1–10. For late and elaborate prescriptions in this regard, see e.g. A. Sachs apud J.B.
Pritchard, ANET 339–342: “Ritual for the repair of a Temple.”
34 Elena Cassin, La Splendeur Divine (= Civilisation et Sociétés, 8, Mouton, 1968), 133 pp.
35 “Akkadian pul(u)h(t)u and melammu”, JAOS 63 (1943), 31–34.
˘
the Babylonian cult.36 In line with this importance, many if not all of the
neo-Sumerian hymns to deities were perhaps originally commissioned
together with statues, and first recited at their dedication. If so, they
anticipated the later techniques of endowing these man-made objects
with their supernatural powers by means of elaborate rituals known as
mouth-washing and mouth-opening37 (The latter concept was already
known at this time even if not in ritual form).38
The divine hymn was not, however, simply used at the dedication
of the statue, and then forgotten, any more than the statue remained
forever sheltered from general view in the niche of its sanctuary. On the
great festivals, the statue left its throne-dais and was carried in public
procession to be admired by all,39 and on these occasions, it may be
suggested, the mouth of the statue was once more formally opened40
and the hymn in its honor again recited.41 In this manner, a text that
began as a dedicatory inscription, of virtually monumental character,
was transformed into a canonical composition, copied and recopied in
temple and school.42
36 “The golden garments of the gods”, JNES 8 (1949), 172–193. “The care and
feeding of the gods”, in his Ancient Mesopotamia (1964), 183–198. Cf. also ANET 342 f.,
for the “Program of the Pageant of the Statue of the God Anu at Uruk.” But cf. also
note 76 below.
37 Cf. e.g. IV R 25: inim-inim-ma. . . ka-duh-ù-da-kam and Ebeling, Tod und Leben
(1931), pp. 109–122. Important new texts are in˘ preparation by C.B.F. Walker of the
British Museum. Note also STT 2: 198–201.
38 Cf. below, note 40 (ka-du -ha); note 56 (buršuma-gal 53: ka gál(a)-tag ); note 52 f
8 4
(nin-mul-an-gim 4: ka-ba-a). For ˘washing of statues see Laessøe. bit rimki, pp. 15 f. and
n. 20. Note that in the Irra-epic, the divine craftsmen (apkallu’s?) are needed to breathe
life into the divine statue; Reiner, Or. 30 (1961), 9 f.
39 Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, 187 and below, Section D, comment to line 7. Cf.
also the hymn to Nintu (TMH n. F. IV 86 and duplicate) which I plan to edit elsewhere
cf. also note 36 above. Here: III.5.
40 Cf. M. Civil, JNES 26 (1967), 211, who lists Ur III texts from Lagash recording the
repeated mouth-opening of the statue of the deified (and deceased) Gudea.

41 New hymns and even myths may also have been composed when the statue visited
another city on special occasions; cf. v. Dijk, JCS 19 (1965), 21 f. and literature cited
there. For divine journeys in general, see now H. Sauren, Or. 38 (1969), 214–236; Å.W.
Sjöberg, RLA 3 (1969), 480–483.
42 It may be noted in passing that the annual (or perhaps even monthly) recitation
of enuma eliš (at the annual New Year’s festival) was addressed to the statue of Marduk
(Lambert, JCS 13, 1968, 106 f.). Given its epilogue (ib. 107 f.) this text has a better claim
to be regarded as a hymnic “exaltation of Marduk” (YNER 3, 1968, 66 f.; cf. already
v. Dijk, Sagesse, 1953, 39 n. 47) than as an “epic of creation” (a title better reserved
for Atar-hasis). Thus it constitutes late evidence for the perpetuation of the cultic life
situation ˘here suggested for the divine hymns.
This hypothetical literary process can be paralleled in the history of

other canonical genres, as this is gradually coming to light. It is well
known that a number of these genres go back to archival prototypes,
notably the collections of letters,43 of contracts,44 and of legal formulas45
tradited in the schools, while others derive from monumental proto-
types. Among the latter, the late copies of royal inscriptions are most
familiar. Similarly, the clay tablet copies of the Code of Hammurapi,
which were written out in the schools as late as neo-Babylonian times,
ultimately go back to one of the stone steles on which this text was orig-
inally promulgated46 (granted that the stone-cutters may have consulted
some such pre-monumental draft-tablet as PBS 5: 93).
It now seems that the canonical Code of Lipit-Ishtar also had its
monumental prototype for it is closely paralleled by fragments of a
stele from Nippur.47 Other steles at Nippur constitute a cadastre of the
Ur III empire, and were copied out on clay tablets, as Kraus has shown.
The monumental origin of such cadastres goes back even further, for a
new duplicate to the “Frontier of Shara"” dated by Sollberger to the
time of Lugalzagesi, has been identified on a stone tablet in the Yale
Babylonian Collection. But even royal hymns seem to have originally
graced stone steles, as was demonstrated for Hammurapi by Sjöberg.48
And the elaborate style of the royal inscriptions of dynasties such as
Lagash and Larsa make it unlikely that the two genres were entirely
unrelated, albeit they observed certain stylistic distinctions.49
In view of all this evidence, it seems unwarranted to deny out of
hand any possibility of a monumental origin for the canonical genre
of divine hymns. And in fact the Nisaba hymn to which I alluded
at the beginning underlines that possibility. When its opening lines
were published among the literary texts and catalogues50 from Ur, it
43 Cf. e.g. Kraus, AfO 20 (1963), 153 and JEOL VI/16 (1959–1962), 16–39.
44 I plan to treat these in a future study.
45 Cf. HAR-ra = hubullu I–II and ana ittišu, here: II.5.
˘
46 Cf. most recently J.J. Finkelstein, RA 63 (1969), 25–27.
47 R. D. Biggs, AS 17 (1968) 14 f. ad no. 49.
48 It has been suggested for Išme-Dagan *11 (= SRT 13 Rev.) by Römer; cf. SKIZ
p. 18. On the contrary Finkelstein, JCS 21 (1969), 42 n. 5 now suggests the possibility
“that the ‘prologue’ [of CH] was an adaptation of an already known Hammurapi hymn
for the monumental purpose of the stela.”
49 Cf. also the designation 4 na-rú-a, “4 steles,” at the end of the Louvre Catalogue
of literary texts. For Kramer’s latest proposal regarding this enigmatic colophon, see
WZJ 6 (1956/7). 393 n. 3.
50 JCS 20 (1966), 91.
was quickly recognized by the reviewers51 that they largely duplicated

the text of a curious stone tablet from Lagash published long ago by
Thureau-Dangin.52 There are a number of differences between the
Lagash stone, which probably dates to about the time of Gudea, and
the Ur tablet, which dates some 300 years later,53 and also between both
of these and the more complete Yale text. Some of these changes have
theological significance, others are merely orthographic. But the text
of all three versions is essentially the same set of Nisaba epithets, and
is quite different from the combinations of epithets chosen to describe
the goddess in other compositions apostrophizing her. These include a
dedicatory vase,54 the hymn “Great alderwoman”55 (buršuma-gal),56 the
hymn “Lady of wide understanding” (nin-geštù-sù),57 an incantantion
song (? šir-nam-su-ub dNisaba),58 the hymn to the Temple of Nisaba
in Ereš,59 and the hymn to Enlil-bani of Isin.60 We may thus safely
51 Ibid.; cf. Falkenstein, BiOr 22 (1965), 282; Edzard, AfO 21 (1966), 87.
52 RA 7 (1910) 107 and apud Cros, NFT (1910), 171–176. For the particulars of the
find-spot, cf. Cros, ib. 148 f. Both authors describe the tablet. Cros: “convex on one
side only, like the dedication tablets [foundation stones?] and pierced sideways from
side to side, in the thickest part of the convex side, permitting it to be suspended.”
Thureau-Dangin (p. 176) calls attention to the same “special feature which distinguishes
it from the numerous stone tablets of the same plano-convex shape recovered in the
excavations: at the middle of the lower edge is a hole (trou) which diagonally crosses the
slightly concave part of the reverse. The raison d’être of this hole is not clear. It hardly
seems likely, given its position, that it was destined for a thread for hanging it from;
perhaps it served, by means of a little peg (fiche) of wood or metal, to keep the tablet
upright” (my translations).
53 JCS 20 (1966), 92.
54 BRM 4:46. Previously published by Scheil, OLZ 7 (1904), 254.
55 I retain this term in spite of the critique of Landsberger, Symbolae. . . M. David 2
(1968), 90 f., which is wide of the mark in every detail, as I hope to show in another
connection. The hymn is listed in second place (after ours) in the longer Ur catalogue
(above, note 50).
56 OECT 1 pl. 36–39; Chiera, AJSL 40 (1924), 265 f.; Ni. 9622; Ni. 4425. To be edited
by D. Reisman.
57 NBC 11107 (unpubl.).
58 VS II 65; PRAK II C. 39: cf. Bergmann, ZA 56 (1964), 4 f.
59 Cf. for the present Zimmern, ZA 39 (1930), 274 f. A new edition by Sjöberg is in
preparation.
60 A. Kapp, ZA 51 (1955), No. 87; add UET 6:89. Cf. also “Enki and the World
Order,” lines 410–415; von Soden, SAHG, No. 80 (Akkadian; republished CT 44: 35).
Note also the Akkadian fable of “Nisaba and wheat” which ends in a “pure hymn
in praise of Nisaba” (Lambert, BWL, 1960, 168). The “unpublished Sumerian hymn”
to Nisaba which Landgon listed RA 16 (1919), 67 b. 1, as Ni. 4588 in Philadelphia is
actually CBS 4588 and represents the conclusion of Šulgi A according to information
kindly supplied by Å. Sjöberg.
exclude the possibility that we are merely dealing with a conventional

repertoire of Nisaba epithets. The Lagash stone tablet is in fact a
monumental prototype of the canonical copies found at Ur and in the
Yale Babylonian Collection.61 I continue with a rendition of the latter
version, and hope that it will vindicate some of the more far-fetched
proposals made in the course of my introduction.
B. The Blessing of Nisaba by Enki (nin-mul-an-gim)
1. Texts
A YBC 13523, six-sided prism; copy by Shin Theke Kang.
B Istanbul . . ., stone tablet in two columns, reverse blank, publ. Thureau-
Dangin, RA 7 (1910), 107–111 and apud Cross, NFT ( 1910), 171–176; from
Lagaš.
C one-column tablet, publ. Gadd and Kramer, UET 6/1 (1963), Nos. 66 +
71 (for the join cf. Hallo, JCS 20, 1966, 91n. 14); from Ur.62
D six-column tablet, publ. UET 6/2 (1966), No. 388; bilingual; from Ur;
joins D1.
D1 UET 6/3 (in prep.), No. “6”; joins D. Copied by Aaron Shaffer.63
E six-column (?) tablet, publ. UET 6/2, No. 389; bilingual; from Ur.64
F UET 6/3 (in prep.), No. “250”. Cited on the basis of a preliminary
transliteration by Aaron Shaffer. (Note that none of the Ur texts have
excavation numbers.)
2. Catalogue Entries
g UET 5: 86 No. 17.
h UET 6: 123 No. 1
61 Whether the tablet was once intended to be placed in the statue’s mouth (cf. n. 28
above) by way of giving it life in anticipation of the later mouth-opening ceremonies

cannot be answered here. My student, Miss Tikva Frymer, suggests the analogy this
would have in the mechanics of the “Golem.” A nearer parallel may be provided from
the ancient Egyptian “cult of the deceased king, a main feature of which consisted
of rituals performed in front of his statues to make them live and partake of food
offerings” (W.K. Simpson, unpubl. MS). Cf. also the references in A.L. Oppenheim
Ancient Mesopotamia (1964), 364 n. 10; van Dijk, Falkenstein Volume (1967), 239 n. 33.
62 The physical join was confirmed and effected during a visit to the British Museum
in July, 1969.
63 I am grateful to Dr. Shaffer for allowing me to study his copy in advance of
publication.
64 D and E are dealt with briefly by Å. Sjöberg, Or. 37 (1968), 239 f.
3. Distribution of Exemplars
A complete (1–57)
B 1–8 (omits 7)
C 1–6, 52–57
D ii (‘obv.’): 18; iii: 28–29; iv (‘a’): 32–35; v (‘b’): 40–47; vi: 51–54
E 41–47
F 1–20, 43–57
Division into columns (“i” etc.) and cases (“/”) based on A.
Division into verses based on duplicates where available (“(i)” etc.), hypotheti-
cal elsewhere (“[21]” etc.). Division into stanzas (“I” etc.) hypothetical.
Text from A; restorations from duplicates not indicated as such; conjectural
restorations bracketed.
4. Transliteration
I
i (1) nin-mul-an-gima/bdar-ab /cdub-za-gìn šu-du8d
(2) dNisaba/etùr-gale/fduraš-ef tu-da
(3) šegbarx (BAR + NISABA)g naga-kù-gah/ga-zi/kú-a

(4) gi-dii /imin-ej /ka-ba-a
(5) me-gal/ninnu-ek/šu-du7 -a
(6) nin-mu /á1-nun-gál /é-kur-ra
B: a. omits c. new line e-e. GAL.TÙR f-f. uraš-šè g. GI h. ge i. šid j.
na k. omits 1. a
C: d. du7 g. šeg8
F: d. du7
h: b-b. EN (urux?)
II
(7) aušumgal/ezen-e / dalla -è-aa
(8) bdA-ru-rub kalam-ma /im-tac/dka-ka du11
(9) ki-gar a-šedx(MUŠ.DI)-dè/šà-kúš- ù
ii (10) kur hi-nun-ta/mí-zi/du11-ga
(11) ˘
gištú-gar ? /kur-gal-e /tu-da
(12) mí-zi dub-sar-mah-an-na/sa12-sug5/dEn-líl-lá
(13) ˘
gal-zu /igi-gál /dingir-re-e-ne
B: a-a. omits b-b. A-rux-rux (EN.EN) c. da d. new line
F: b-b. dA -ruX-ruX(EN.EN)
III
(14) ab-sín-na /še-gu /mú-mú-dè
(15) dašnan/nam-en-na/u6-di-dè
(16) bára-gal/imin-e /mí-zi-dam
(17) gu-zi-zi-dam /še-zi-zi-dam

(18) eburx(ŠIBÍR) ezen-gal/dEn-líl-la-ke4a
[i-na e-bu-ri-i]m/[. . . P]A.A
iii (19) nam-nun /-gal-la-né /bSU ! nam-mi-in-su-ubb
(20) túg-ma6-kù /šà-ge /nam-mi-in-lác
D: a. kam
F: a. kam (!) b-b. [su-su-ub nam]- mi -in-di (?) c. mu4
IV
[21] nidba(PAD.dINNIN) /nu-gál-la /gá-gá-dè
[22] ne-sag-gal /kurún-na /dé-e- dè
[23] dŠE. [x] /dEn- x / hun-e-dè
[24] ˘
dKù-zù arhuš -sù /dAšnan / hun-e-dè
[25] ˘
en-gal/mu-un-hun-e/ezen mu-un- ˘ hun-e
[26] en-gal/kalam-ma /ím-ma-hun-e ˘
˘
[27] ˘
ki-sikil dNisaba/šudx(KAxŠU)-dè mu-un-rá
V
iv [28] nidba /sikil-la /si nam-mi-in-sá
ni-i[n-da-ab-ba-am] /el-[la-am uš-te-še-ir]
(29) é-GEŠTÚ. /dNISABA-ke4/gál nam-mi-in-tag4
bi-[it . . .]
[30] dub-za-gìn /du10-na /nam-mi-in-gar
[31] dub-mul-an-kù-ta/šà im-ma-kúš-ù
(32) arattaki/é-za-gìn-na/ šu -ni- šè mu-un-gar
i-na [. . .]/bi-tim [. . .] /qá-ti-i-ša i[š-kun]
(33) ereški / hi-nun-na /mua-dù-ù-nam
˘ nu!-[uh-ši-im]/i-pi-i[š]
e-ri-iš i-na
˘
D: a. mu-un-
VI
(34) sig4-NISABA /du13-du13-lá /ki-gar-ra
i-na li-bi-it-t[i . . .] /el-le-tim a-na a[š-ri]ta-ša-ak-ka-a[n]
(35) gištú /nama-galam-ma /sag-e-eš /rig7- ga
ru-bu [ ]
(36) abzu men ?-gal/eriduki/èš-hal-ha-la
v [37] n[un. . . . . .] nun-hal-ha-la ˘ ˘
˘ ˘
[38] engar-gal nam-nun-na/é-ní-gùr-ru/nagar eriduki-ga
[39] lugal šu-luh-luh-ha-ke4/en-mùš-en-gal-la/dEn-ki-ke4
˘ ˘
D: a. nun ! (over eras ?)
VII
(40) é-engur-ra /ki-tuš-a-né
[É-en-g]u-ur i-na wa-ša -bi-šu
(41) abzu eriduki-gaa/dù-dù-a-né
[ap]-zab-amc de-ri-dud /i-na ee-pe-ši-i-šu
(42) hal-laf-kù/šà-kúš-ù-da-né
˘ ha-al g-la-an-kuh /i-na mi-it-lu-ki-šu
i-na
˘
(43) é-gištuškarin(KU)/tùn-bar-ra-né
bi-it ti i-is-kaj-ri-in-ni-im /i-na šu-peel -ti-i-šu
(44) NUN.ME /síg-bar-ra-du8-a-né
ab-gal-lum šak pe-re-et-zu /a-na wa-ar-ki-i-šu /i-na wu1-ušm-šu-ri-im
(45) né- gištú -gao/gál-tag4-a-né
(46) giš -ig- gištú -gap sila-ba gub-baq-né
(47) lilis ?-gal/gišerin-a rti-las-né
[li]- li-iš ra-bi-iš /[. . .-e]l-li
(48) xt gišgišmmar /šu-du8u-a-né
(49) ùbv-bav[. . .]/KU.[. . . ?]PA sìg-[ga]-a-né ?
A: v-v. balag ? ?
D: a. omits f. an h. BA k. omits n. lines 45–46 followed line 47 (?) r. new.
line s. la!-a
E: b. [z]u c. um d-d. NUN.KI e. omits f. an g. omits i. di j. ga l. ú
m. omits? n. lines 45–46 followed line 47 (?)
F: n. lines 45–46 follow line 47 o. KA.[x] p. ka q. a t. lilis?-DU?? u. du7
VIII
vi (50) dNisaba/um-me- gal ?-gal-la/ x -7 mu-una-na-du11 b
(51) dNisaba/mí-zi/mí- ša6 -ga/mí kur-ree tu-da
(traces)
(52) dNisaba /tùr-rad ì hé-me-en /eamaš-af ga hé-me-en
[dNisab]a i-na ta-ar-ba- ˘ si-im/ lu-ú ša-am-nu-um
˘ at-ti/[i-na] su-pu-ri-im/
.
lu-ú l]i-iš- du -um /a[t-ti]
(53) é-nì-gag-ra /kišib-gálh hé-me-en
˘
[. . . . . .]-im/[. . . . . .]-šu/[at-t]i
(54) é-gal-la / agrig ]-zi hé-me-en
(55) gur7-du6/gur7-maš-a/gur ˘ i
7-gur -gur hé-me-en.
˘
C: e. new line f. omits g. gar h.lá i. gú
D: b. e
F: a. omits b. e c. ra d. ra-a e. new line f. omits h. lá i. gú
Doxology
(56) nun-e /dNisaba-ra /mí-du11-ga
(57) a-a dEn-ki/zà-mí-zu/du10-ga-àm
Colophon in A
u4 ]-[x-kam]
iti-še-kin-kuru6
traces of a Samsu-iluna (??) date
5. Translation
I
1. Oh Lady colored like the stars of heaven, holding the lapis lazuli tablet,
2. Nisaba, born in the great sheepfold by the divine Earth,
3. Wild kid nourished (as) on good milk with pure vegetation,
4. Mouth-opened by the seven flutes,
5. Perfected with (all) the fifty great divine attributes,
6. Oh my lady, plenipotentiary of Ekurra—
II
7. Dragon, emerging brightly on the festival,
8. Mother-goddess of the nation, biting off a piece from the clay,
9. Pacifying the habitat with cold water,
10. Providing the foreign mountain-land with plenty,
11. Born in wisdom by the Great Mountain (Enlil),
12. Honest woman, chief scribe of Heaven, record-keeper of Enlil,
13. All-knowing sage of the gods—
III
14. In order to make grain and vegetable grow in the furrow,
15. So that the excellent corn can be marvelled at,
16. That is, to provide for the seven great throne-daises
17. By making vegetables shoot forth, making grain shoot forth,
18. At harvest, the great festival of Enlil,
19. She in her great princely role has verily cleansed (her) body,
20. Has verily put the holy priestly garment on (her) torso.
IV
21. In order to establish oblations where none existed
22. And to pour forth great libations of wine
23. So as to appease šè-x, to appease En-x
24. To appease merciful Kusu and Ašnan
25. She will appoint a great high priest, will appoint a festival
26. Will appoint a great high-priest of the nation.
27. Oh virgin Nisaba, he blesses you in prayer.
V
28. He has verily prepared the pure oblation,
29. Has verily opened the House of Learning of Nisaba,
30. Has verily placed the lapis lazuli tablet on (her) knee.
31. Taking counsel with the holy tablet of the heavenly stars,
32. (As ?) in Aratta he has placed the Ezagin at her disposal,
33. Ereš he has constructed in abundance.
VI
34. She is created out of pure little bricks,
35. She is granted wisdom in highest degree.
36. In the Abzu, the great crown (?) of Eridu, (where) sanctuaries are appor-
tioned.
37. [In ], (where) offices (?) are apportioned,
38. The great princely plowman of the resplendent temple, the craftsman of
Eridu,
39. The king of lustrations, the lord of the mask of the great high-priest,
Enki—
VII
40. The Engur-house when he occupies it,
41. The Abzu of Eridu when he builds it,
42. The Halanku when he takes counsel in it,
43. The house of the box-tree when he fells it,
44. The sage when his hair is loosened behind him,
45. The house of learning when he opens it,
46. The door of learning when he stands in its street,
47. The great kettle-drum of cedar when he finishes (?) it,
48. The . . . of date-palm when he perfects (var.: holds) it.
49. The drum of . . . when he strikes it with the . . .—
VIII
50. On Nisaba, the great . . ., he invokes seven [blessings?]
51. O Nisaba, honest woman, good woman, woman born in the moun-
tain,
52. O Nisaba, in the stall may you be the fat, in the pen may you be the
milk,
53. In the treasure-house may you be keeper of the seal,
54. In the palace may you be the honest steward,
55. In the grain depots may you be the heaper of heaps of grain !
Doxology
56. For the fact that a blessing was invoked on Nisaba by the Prince,
57. Oh father Enki, your praise is sweet!
C. Literary Parallels
Line 1: In her votive inscription (note 54), Nisaba is called the “brilliant
woman” (munus mul-mul-la). She consults with her “lapis lazuli tablet”
in her temple hymn (note 59), in “Hymn C” (note 57), and in the Enlil-
bani hymn (line 53) (note 60). Note also the “holy (or silver) tablet of
Nisaba” in a list of divine symbols (PBS 13:60:11). Cf. also below, ad
lines 30–31.
Lines 2–5: Note what appears to be a progression of metaphors in these

analogous lines: birth, suckling, weaning, “perfecting.” The repertoires
of royal epithets compounded with divine names follow comparable
patterns; cf. Hallo, Titles (1957), 132–142.
Line 3: This familiar theme is applied with variations to both gods and
kings. Thus, Ningirsu, for example, is a “fawn nourished on good milk
by a deer” (TCL 8, pl. LIV 5 ii 4; SGL 1:116); Lulal (= Latarak)65 is the
“fawn of a deer who feeds on the good milk of the mountain beasts”
(HAV 5:6 f.; ZA 57:81); Šulgi is the “impetuous leopard nourished on
good milk” (MBI 3:11; cf. Heimpel, Tierbilder p. 332). Cf. also TMHnF
IV 66 and UET 6:69:7.
Line 8: Cf. im-DI.DU-da dNisaba-ke4 KA àm-da-bé in “Hymn C”

where DI.DU may be an Akkadian gloss (.ti-.tù). As J. van Dijk kindly
pointed out to me, the existence of a verb KA . . . -dun-ud (Falkenstein,
NG 3:9) has been disproved by collation (Claus Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos
1. 264 and p. 193). However, there remain both ka-a . . . dú-ru-ud (NG
3:126) and KA.KA . . . KÚ (YNER 3:16 line 27 and p. 80 s.v.) in the
meanings “eat, feed on, peck at” which fit the present context well. Cf.
also “Enki and Ninhursag” (UET 6/1: 1 and duplicates) line 13: dil-
munkl ugamušen KA.KA nu-mu-ni (ib)-bé “in Dilmun, the crow (raven)
did not peck.”
Line 9: Cf. line 9 of the Temple Hymn: im-gara-šedx-da kuš-du8ù.
Line 11: For the theme of the birth of a deity in (or by ?) the mountain
(kur or hur-sag) cf. Falkenstein, SGL 1 (1959), 116 f. with reference to
˘
Ningirsu, Suen, Inanna, Numušda; BE 29 iii 37 (Ninurta ?); TMHnF 4:
86:2, 4 (Nintu), and line 51 of our poem.
65 For the equation cf., in addition to ŠL 2:330:34, also UET 5:253:7: Da-dLU-LÀL
for which the (brother’s?) seal inscription has Dan-dLa-ta-ra-ak? Elsewhere the two divine
names are kept separate, if juxtaposed, as in bit mesēri II 211 f. (G. Meier, AfO 14, 1942,
150 f.) and in the “Göttertypentext” KAR 298 Rev. 13 f. (O.R. Gurney, AAA 22, 1935,
70 f. and n. 4). Cf. also Kramer, JCS 18 (1964) 37 f., note 11.
Line 12: These epithets recur in whole or in part in the votive inscrip-
tion (note 54)66 and in the Lipit-Ištar hymn *24 (Römer, SKIZ p. 24),
line 19.
Line 14: For grain and vegetable in parallelism, cf. e.g. JNES 18 (1959),
55 f. and 60 f. With the reduplicated verb “grow” they recur in a-ab-ba
hu-luh-ha (note 33) line *220 = CT 42:26:32 (and duplicates) and in CT
˘
36:27:6.
Line 16: For nam-en-na as a qualification of plants and animals, cf.

CAD s.v. bitrû (adj.).
Line 17: See ad line 14.
Line 18: The identical line recurs on the lower edge of HAV 16 (refer-
ence courtesy T. Jacobsen).
Line 19–20: For the periodic cleansing of the divine statue, cf. note 40.
For its daily washing and dressing ceremony, cf. Oppenheim, Ancient
Mesopotamia (1964), 193. For su-ub-(su-ub), “to cleanse”, and the—not
surprising—sequence of ritual washing and dressing, cf. van Dijk, Fal-
kenstein Volume (1967), 246 ff., and UET 6:101:18.
Line 20: Cf. e.g. VS 10:199 iii 19, cited by Falkenstein, ZA 44 (1938),
7: túg-ma6-kù kuš-mà mu-ni-in-lá. For the priestly (elsewhere royal)
character of the ma6-garment, cf. Renger, ZA 58 (1967), 127.
Line 22: For nisag (first fruits, etc.) see in detail van Dijk, JCS 19 (1965),
18–24; for ne-sag as a possible phonetic spelling of the same word, ib.
24. For ne-sag with dè (pour, libate) cf. Römer, SKIZ 194.
Line 24: Kusu and Ašnan are virtual personifications (or deifications) of
the grain, and appear together in a number of passages; cf. Bergmann,
ZA 56 (1964), 25 f.; Falkenstein, An. Or. 30 (1966), 80 n. 5; Krecher, SKly
( 1966), 132–134. At other times, kù-sù(g) is an epithet of Ašnan (ib.).
66 Restoring lines 12 f. as [sa ]-su !-mah [ d]En-lí[l-lá] (collated). She is thus not the
12 5
sister of Enlil (Falkenstein, An. Or, 30, 1966,˘ 110 and note 7 on the basis of this passage)
but, to judge by our text (cf. lines 11 and 51), his daughter.
Lines 25–26: Apart from the numerous references to the installation of

the high priest(ess) in neo-Sumerian date formulas, note offerings by (?)
the ensi for the occasion (en-hun-dè) in NBC 331 (to be published as
˘
BIN 3:352) and, in a literary context, en gi6parx-e mu-ni-ib-hun (UET
6:101:39).
Line 29: For the é-geštú of Nisaba, cf. Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949), 143 f.,
and add Enmerkar 322 (also with gál(a) . . . tag4) and UET 6:101:3.
Lines 30–31: These lines are strikingly reminiscent of Gudea’s dream as

interpreted by Jacobsen apud Oppenheim, Dreams (1956), 245 f. There,
Nisaba puts the tablet of the heavenly stars on her knees and consults
it, while Nindub holds a tablet of lapis lazuli in his hand and sets down
(thereon ?) the plan of the temple (Gudea Cyl. A iv 26-v 4; v. 23-vi 5).
Lines 32–33: For the Ezagin as the residence of Nanibgal67 in Ereš,

cf. Civil, JNES 26(1967), 204 f. line 46. That the distant Aratta, the
prime source of lapis lazuli, also had its “lapis lazuli house” (for the
generic sense of this term, cf. Falkenstein, SGL I 43), seems implied by
Enmerkar 559 f., where “her house in Aratta” is in parallelism with “her
lapis lazuli house.”
Line 34: Cf. the same phrase in the hymn to the temple of Nisaba in
Ereš (note 59) and Zimmern’s comments ad loc., ZA 39 (1930), 274.
Line 39: For the association of the king with lustrations, cf. van Dijk,
Falkenstein Volume (1967), 233–268, esp. 246 f.; Šulgi Letter A, 21 in F.A.
Ali, Sumerian Letters (University Microfilms, 1964) p. 28. For the associa-
tion of the high priest(ess) with the mask,68 cf. Falkenstein, SGL 1 (1959),
96 f.; J. Renger, ZA 58 (1967), 127 and notes 106 f.
67 I am indebted to Professor Jacobsen for this extract from 3 N-T 299 (unpubl.):
4. dNIDABA ni-sà-ba
5. dAN.NIDABA na-ni-ib-gal
6. dHA.NI ha-a-a-um
˘ ˘
68 For this translation of mùš or múš cf. the study announced above, note 39.
Line 42: For the hal-la-kù (variant: hal-an-kù; Akkadian ha-(al)-la-an-ku)

˘ ˘ ˘
cf. Sjöberg, Or. 37 (1968), 239 with reference to our exemplars D and E
and to UET 6:101:3. It is translated by apsûm in YBC 5026 (cited CAD
A 2:194a).
Line 44: This peculiar phrase, with its Akkadian parallels going back
to the Old Assyrian incantation from Kaniš, has been discussed by
Sjöberg, Goetze Volume, (JCS 21, 1961 [1969]), 278. For the root of pērtu
(Semitic pr’) cf. most recently Landsberger, WO 3 (1964), 70 n. 83. Since
cuneiform comparisons with the Song of Deborah are currently in
fashion (cf. P.C. Craigie, JBL 88 [1969], 253–265; H.-P. Miller, VT 16
[1966], 446–459, esp. 454), one may even compare Judges 5:2: “when
locks were loosened in Israel” (contra Craigie, VT 18 [1968), 397–399).
Line 45: For the opening of the house of learning by Nisaba, cf. Gudea
Cyl. A xvii 16 and above, ad line 29.
Line 50: The understanding of this transitional line is based on line 56.
There, the explicit dative postposition indicates that mí-du11 is used,
not as a compound verb with the meaning kunnû, “care for,” but in its
more literal sense of “speaking favorably to.” As such it is parallel to
“determine a good fate for” (nam-du10-tar) e.g. in TLB II 2 ii 8–14 as
translated by Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 33 note 23. The translation of mí-du11
by “caress” (van Dijk, Bi. Or. 11, 1954, 86; Kramer,. The Sacred Marriage
Rite, 1969, 64) or “lick” (van Dijk, Falkenstein Volume, 1967, 259 f.) does
not fit our context.
Line 51: Nisaba is “the good woman” also in her votive inscription
(note 54), For the other epithets, cf. above, ad lines 11–12.
Line 52: This is a common enough topos, though the association of

the (sheep)-fold (tùr) with fat and of the (cattle)pen (amaš) with milk
is not always so precise; cf. e.g. Išme-Dagan *18 as re-edited in BiOr
23 (1966), 244 f [here: III.3]. In the early iconography, either cattle
or sheep (though not both together) emerge from structures that are
clearly related to the pictographic precursors of the later signs for
tùr and tu(d/r); cf. P. Delougaz, JNES 27 (1968), 184–197. The sign
amaš has no demonstrable forerunners before Old Babylonian times;
cf. Landsberger, MSL 2 (1952), 105 f.
Line 53: For the “treasure-house,” frequently in juxtaposition with the

“principal (temple) court” (kisal-mah), cf. Falkenstein, SGL 1 (1959),
˘
62; An. Or. 30 (1966), 131. It also occurs in buršuma-gal (note 56)
line 40 and in the Code of Lipit-Ištar xix 51 (cf also UET 6:192:1). The
variant spelling should be added to those noted by Krecher, SKly (1966),
128, n. 384. For kišib-gál as a professional name in Old Babylonian
economic texts cf. e.g. UET 5:191, 535 f.; as a divine title it occurs in
UET 6: 101:7 (Haia).
˘
Line 55: This common topos recurs with Nisaba in “Hymn C” (note 57)
and CT 42: 4 iii 3; cf. Kramer; PAPhS. 107 (1963), 501–503. Cf. also
Falkenstein, ZA 56 (1964), 51; CAD B s.v. bitrû.
Lines 56–57: That a hymn to one deity address another in the doxology
is paralleled not only by UET 6:101 (cf. Kramer’s comment ib., p. 10
and n. 36) and perhaps by the Sumuqan hymn (UET 6: 75) with its
doxology for Nungal, but also in a sense by all those adab, tigi and
other royal hymns in the wider sense where the blessings for the king
are invoked in the context of a prayer to the deity. The parallels suggest
that in divine hymns like ours, the doxology to the greater deity invokes
his blessings on the lesser deity.
D. Cultic Setting
We may now attempt to reconstruct the cultic setting of our hymn on

the basis of its own allusions and of its literary parallels with other
compositions. But in this attempt, we should distinguish between the
original Lagash version and its later duplicates. To some extent the
latter simply updated the theological conceptions of the former. Thus in
line 1, for example, there is a change from metaphor to simile, and from
the relatively crude anthropomorphism of “holding the tablet” (in this
case still employed also in the Yale version) to the vaguer “perfecting”
of it.69 In line 2, an apparently paternal Earth70 becomes maternal
69 Note the same substitution (?) of the more or less homophonous šu-du for šu-du
7 8
in passages like JCS 4:138 (= SGL 2:108):17.
70 Before tu-da, “born,” the postposition -e normally identifies the mother, rarely
the father as in Gudea Cylinder A ii 28: (Gatumdu) nin-mu dumu an-kù-ge tu-da; cf.
also above, comment to line 11. The postposition -šè identifies only the father, to judge
by SLTN 89 iii 16: a-zi kur-gal-la-šè (variant: kur-gal-e) dNin-líl-le tuda, “(Ninazu) good
and deified.71 In line 3, the earlier version attempts to reconcile two

different facets of Nisaba’s “personality,” her patronage of the arts and
writing in the guise of the reed, and her identification with cereal and
vegetation; the later ones substitute a simple cliché from the standard
hymnic repertoire. But the addition of line 7 may be more significant
from our point of view, reflecting an actual difference in the cultic
use to which the original poem and its later, expanded versions were
put. The stone tablet from Lagash may well be a unique survival of
the original cultic occasion, while the other exemplars may have been
recited at subsequent festivals. As such they added a reference to their
festal setting in the form of line 7, as well as, most probably, lines 18
(see comment ad loc.) and 25. Without these three lines, the original
structure of the hymn can be tentatively restored as made up entirely
of six-line stanzas (except for the 10-line “chorus” in stanza VII) plus
a two-line doxology. The proposed strophic structure is based in the
first instance on the sense, secondarily on such other considerations as
the changing syntactical patterns, the number of cases or lines, and the
division into columns in Exemplar A. If correctly restored, the poem
divides into two halves roughly equal in length if not in content, the
first (stanzas I–IV = columns i–iii in exemplar A) comparable to the
sa-gíd-da, the second (stanzas V–VIII = columns iv–vi) comparable to
the sa-gar-ra of an adab or tigi composition. The doxology, replacing
the urubi prayer of these royal hymns, suggests that Enki has granted
the blessing besought by Nisaba (for the coming year ?) much as in texts
relating the journeys of other deities to their divine fathers or sovereigns
(note 41).72
It would be difficult to be more specific yet as to the original or
subsequent cultic setting of our particular hymn. But it may be worth
noting that Gudea, about the time that Exemplar B was inscribed,
seed born to the Great Mountain (Enlil) by Ninlil”; cf. van Dijk, SGL 2 (1960), 16 and
77 for a slightly different translation. (It hardly seems possible that in the earliest version
of our text, uraš-šé is a kind of syllabic spelling for uraš-e.) For Uraš as a male deity see
most recently Gadd, UET 6/2 (1966), p. 7 n. 34.
71 For the fluctuation between uraš and duraš, cf. Falkenstein, ZA 52 (1957), 72 f., SGL
1 (1959), 57.
72 Note that in UET 6:101, the very similar doxology (lines 56 f.) is in fact labeled
ux-rux-bi-im. But for its one line antiphone, this composition is exactly as long as ours.
It even may have had the same number of stanzas, if the figure “8” inserted over the
line count means anything!
dedicated a statue of himself (?) to Nisaba73 and that, in Falkenstein’s

interpretation, there was even a “temple of the mouth-opening cere-
mony” in Ur III Lagaš containing, among other statues, one of Gu-
dea.74 At the same time, it needs to be stressed again that all the known
statues of Gudea, and indeed virtually every known example of “the
most expensive type of votive, the statue, clearly depicts the worship-
per, not the deity”.75 Recently it has even been argued that there is no
explicit evidence, archaeological or textual, of statues of the deity in
Mesopotamia before the second millennium, and much evidence to the
contrary.76 The most numerous and conspicuous literary parallels seem
to be with other compositions in honor of Nisaba77 and her consort
Haia,78 as is understandable. But there are significant parallels also to
˘
the temple hymn of Gudea of Lagaš,79 and to hymns and myths relat-
ing the visit of one deity to another to receive his blessing, as well as
allusions to priests, festivals and ceremonies usually associated with the
divine statue. Thus the cultic setting of our hymn may have been, orig-
inally, the building of a temple, the dedication of a statue, a journey
from Lagaš to Eridu to obtain the blessing of Enki for Nisaba or her
royal devotee, or even the installation of her high priest. Its subsequent
setting may have been a harvest festival of Enlil or some other festive
occasion which, at least for the time being, must remain hypothetical.
Addenda
To p. 27 n. 52: Another text with a similar (?) hole for attachment is the “Fall
of Lagash”; cf. E. Sollberger, International Congress of Orientalists 22 (1957) 32.
To p. 32, line 3: Jacobsen suggests that šegbar here is simply a misreading of

the earlier GI. Van Dijk compares gisšeg9, which varies with gisšinig in Wilcke,
Das Lugalbandaepos (1969) 126 f., line 402, and is thus here coordinate with naga
-kù-ga. For šegbar as a mythical monster, cf. now van Dijk, Or. 38 (1969) 544 f.
73 Falkenstein, An. Or. 30 (1966), and n. 9, “Statue T.”

74 Ib. 151 and notes 6–7. Differently, Civil, above, note 40, here: IV.1.
75 JAOS 88 (1968), 75. Here: IV.1. Cf. already HUCA 33 (1962), 13 f.
76 Agnes Spycket, Les Statues de Culte dans les textes Mêsopotamiens des origines à la I re
Dynastie de Babylone = Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 9 (1968).

77 Cf. comments to lines 1, 7, 9, 34, 53, 55.
78 Notably UET 6:101; cf. comments to lines 19–20, 25–26; 29, 42, 44 (!), 53, 56–57,
and above, note 1.

79 Cf. comment to lines 1, 30–31, 45, and 50.
To p. 32, lines 8f: Translate perhaps rather: “. . .chatting with the clay, taking
counsel with the earth . . .” and cf. MSL 12 ( 1969) 122: 33: inim-du11-du11(=
i-nim-du-ut.-t.u) = a-ma-nu-ú; note also AHw s.v. muštāmû (ref. court. van Dijk).
To p. 33, line 50: Cf. the seven blessings which Gudea “bestows” (silim . . .
sum) on the newly built Eninnu in Cylinder A xx 24-xxi 12. Restore here
perhaps silim . . . du11/e for which cf. most recently YNER 3 (1968) 89 s.v.
i.3
PROBLEMS IN SUMERIAN HERMENEUTICS
Benno Landsberger, the late dean of Assyriological studies, proposed

that at least in intellectual terms, ancient Mesopotamia constituted a
world to itself. In a 1926 article, intended to be programmatic for subse-
quent studies in the field, Landsberger enunciated what he termed the
Eigenbegrifflichkeit (“conceptual autonomy”) of ancient Mesopotamian
culture.1 Forty years later, while reviewing the subsequent development
of Assyriology, Landsberger found that the Eigenbegrifflichkeit had been
followed more in theory than in practice. Nevertheless, the programme
had served its purpose. It established the autonomy of Assyriology as a
field of study. By freeing Assyriology from its heretofore simplistic role
as an auxiliary tool in comparative Biblical studies, Landsberger’s inno-
vation encouraged scholars to study and evaluate Mesopotamian phe-
nomena on their own terms. Only once the autonomy of Assyriology
became well established did the danger of its slipping back into being
a handmaiden to Biblical studies lessen and the possibility of its climb-
ing into an ivory tower of splendid isolation increase. I suggest that the
time has now come to delineate the major outlines of substantive inter-
connections throughout the Biblical world in which both cuneiform
and West Semitic evidence may play their proper part. I shall attempt
to strengthen the credibility of my suggestion by discussing it from a
variety of perspectives.
The archaeological perspective is basic to Assyriology. It is both inde-
pendent of textual evidence and, if need be, prior to textual evidence.
It embraces both the extra-historic and the pre-historic realms: In this
area, the most far-reaching new development is the clarification of the
chronology of Old World archaeology in general, and the extent and
subdivisions of the so-called Bronze Age in particular. From a bewil-
dering mass of independent excavations throughout the Mediterranean
basin, the realization has finally emerged that much of the inhabited
1 Benno Landsberger, “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt,” Islamica 2
(1926) 355–372; reprinted as vol. 142* of the series Libelli (Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1965) 1–19.
44 i.3. problems in sumerian hermeneutics
world quickly shared in the major developments and innovations of

material culture. The evidence suggests that large areas of the Near
East and even of southern Europe were in some sort of contact with
one another, and that it is no longer necessary, or even proper, to treat
each cultural region in isolation.
Similar insights to those gained through archaeology are now emerg-
ing in a second area—recorded history. The ever growing abundance
of textual materials and their increasingly sophisticated analysis and
integration, makes it possible to claim that large portions of the Near
East moved in a common rhythm from the beginning of history, some
five thousand years ago. Repeatedly, the two extremities of the “Fer-
tile Crescent,” Egypt and Mesopotamia, have been the natural foci of
imperial concentrations of power, destined to aspire to rule the entire
Near East. These imperialistic triumphs repeatedly gave way before the
onslaughts of crasser and more bellicose elements from the less hos-
pitable environments bordering on the Fertile Crescent. This collapse
of these Empires at either extremity, provided the recurrent opportu-
nity for the middle—Israel or Syria—to assert itself.
Given this sort of basic unity of artifactual chronology and political
determinants, it should not be surprising to find some major common
axes on the more detailed level of specific institutions. One must avoid
what has aptly been called “parallelomania,” and be prepared to seek
contrasts as well as comparisons.2
It is significant that Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Israelites fre-
quently posed similar questions, even if they arrived at somewhat di-
verse, even incompatible, answers. For example, in the very crucial
area of the cult, or organized religious practice, we can usefully extend
A. Leo Oppenheim’s description. He called it “the care and feeding of
the gods,” (to which we may add: “and of their worshippers” by com-
parison to Egyptian prayers for food from offerings to the gods).3 The
importance of the cult-statue of the Mesopotamian gods, which Oppen-
heim has rightly stressed, takes on a new dimension when its Akkadian
designation, s. alam ilāni (ili), is compared with the Hebrew cognate, s. elem
elōhı̄m which, by contrast, is most often applied to man who is made in
the image of God.4
Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962) 1–13.

2
3
A. Leo Oppenheim. Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago and
London, The University of Chicago Press, 1964), esp. pp. 183–198.
4 Ezekiel, however, uses the Hebrew term in its Akkadian sense. Contrariwise, the
i.3. problems in sumerian hermeneutics 45
Lest it be argued that the history of religion is a quicksand upon

which it is treacherous to base any correlations, I want to imme-
diately indicate that there is an equally strong case for so sober a
manifestation of mundane matters as the field of juridic practice and
legal formulation. Yohanan Muffs’ study of deeds of conveyance from
all over the Ancient Near East demonstrated with admirable preci-
sion what this approach can achieve. The demonstrably comparable
environments—in this case, the conveyance of property by gift, sale, or
cession (relinquishment)—makes it possible to extend comparison from
simple cognates and loan words to loan translations, and opens new
vistas for plotting the borders of specific cultural borrowings.5
This new appreciation of the significance of loan translations can
lead right down to the lexical level, the minimal unit of meaningful
textual evidence. Numerous lexical cuneiform texts translate individ-
ual terms from one language into another in parallel columns. Some-
times they even add a third or fourth column for additional languages,
particularly in regions outside or between the great centers of the lit-
erate civilizations. Thus they provide us with raw material for lexi-
cal comparisons between the different cultures. Of course, their equa-
tions cannot all be accepted uncritically. But fortunately they can be
checked against contextual references in bilingual, trilingual, and mul-
tilingual texts. These include international treaties such as those from
the Amarna Age, as well as royal inscriptions and literary texts from
many different periods. Together with lexicographical advances in each
of the separate languages, they provide potential functional or “concep-
tual equivalents” to test against the previously mentioned doctrine of
“conceptual autonomy.” This leads me to the next area, both the most
promising and the most dangerous for the comparative approach—the
literary level.
Of all cultural institutions, literature is perhaps most inherently sub-
ject to adaptation and “naturalization” to its own habitat. Yet the inter-
connections between the Bible and the literatures of the Ancient Near
East, and among the several Ancient Near Eastern literary corpora
themselves, are so patent that they demand investigation. I have con-
cerned myself for some time with the many questions raised both by
king (or an outstanding priest) is occasionally called the “image of the deity” (s. alam DN)
in neo-Assyrian; cf. CAD Ş 85c.
5 Yohanan Muffs, Studies in the Aramaic Legal Papyri from Elephantine (Leiden, E.J. Brill,
1969).
and against those who would relate any significant part of Biblical liter-
ature to its Ancient Near Eastern setting, particularly Mesopotamia.
First I investigated two aspects of cuneiform literature in general—
creativity and “canonization” i.e., the mechanics by which a tradi-
tional literary creation was put into the ancient equivalent of a pub-
lished book. These two aspects can be investigated profitably on the
cuneiform side, where the evidence is ample, and applied with caution
on the Biblical side, where it is almost nonexistent.6 Subsequently, I
reversed the equation and used the form-critical method, which has
scored so many notable successes in the study of Biblical literature,
to investigate cuneiform literature, where it rarely has been invoked.
The method seemed fruitful with at least two cuneiform genres. The
first I chose to call “Akkadian apocalyptic”,7 and the second “individ-
ual prayer”.8 From this point it was only a short step toward applying
another cardinal tenet of Biblical and more particularly of Psalm exe-
gesis to the cuneiform corpus, namely, the investigation of the cultic
or other setting of the various poetic genres, or their so-called Sitz im
Leben. Even without definitive proofs, a deeper understanding of the
texts seemed to emerge when they could be tentatively assigned to a
setting in palace or temple respectively or to a specific cultic occasion
such as the dedication of a divine statue, or to a ceremonial occasion of
state e.g., the naming of a new year.9
These illustrations of the potential value of applying methods of Bib-
lical scholarship to the cuneiform corpus and vice versa, raised anew
the possibility of the actual interdependence between the two liter-
atures. For a long time, the academic battle-lines had been clearly
drawn on this fundamental issue. On one side stood the phalanx of
the comparativists, armed with all the weaponry of, to them, almost
self-evident parallels between the vocabulary, the topoi, the very sto-
ries in cuneiform and Hebrew respectively. On the other side, there
were a smaller but no less passionate band of skeptics, challenging
the comparativists to prove that these parallels between two cultures
6 W.W. Hallo, “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature,” Israel Exploration Journal
12 (1962) 13–26, here: I.1.

7 Id. “Akkadian Apocalypses,” Israel Exploration Journal 16 (1966) 231–242.
8 Id. “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 88/1 (=Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser, 1968). 71–89, here: VI.1.
9 Id. “The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry,” Actes de la XVII e Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale (Brussels, 1969) 116–134, here: I.4.

separated by such a gulf of space, time and fundamental outlook are

anything more than fortuitous. They demand to know the mechanics
by which the borrowing might have occurred, the date at which it took
place, even the direction in which it went in any given case. Morton
Smith most vehemently advocates their position. He suggests that the
Hebrew Bible belongs to a people wholly at home in an Iron Age con-
text, who before then were primitive barbarians without demonstrable
connections to Mesopotamia, and whose closest parallels should there-
fore be sought among the Doric invaders of post-Mycenaean Greece
and their culture.10 A choice example of this polemic is his parody of
the comparativists’ position which may be worth quoting here. “Abra-
ham,” he accuses them of implying, “was a theologian as well as a mer-
chant prince; his donkey caravans could barely stagger along beneath
his library of cuneiform tablets.”11
I find Smith unconvincing. To reduce his argument ad absurdum,
one need only grant his parallel—but draw the opposite conclusion,
i.e., that Greek history be reconstructed and Greek literature evaluated
according to the Hebrew parallel instead of vice versa. It then follows,
e.g., that the Doric invaders were not Iron Age newcomers to Greece,
but that they were returning there after an extended Late Bronze
exile in Thessaly, having originally entered Middle Bronze Anatolia,
which they fled in the upheavals of the Old Assyrian period! Any
archaeological or literary evidence in conflict with this theory would
be dismissed as irrelevant or tendentious respectively. One could even
cite the ancient myth of the Return of the Heraclidae12 to support
some such absurd hypothesis. If we avoid extremes, the challenge posed
to the comparative method can be met on a more serious basis. We
should neither exempt Biblical literature from the standards applied
to other Ancient Near Eastern literatures, nor subject it to standards
demanded nowhere else. On this basis, Israelite traditions about its own
past Bronze Age, though these traditions were written down in the Iron
Age, have to be given as much credence as Middle and Neo-Assyrian
notions about the Old Assyrian past. I do not mean to pursue this
10 Morton Smith, “The present state of Old Testament studies,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 88 (1969) 19–35.

11 Ibid. 26.
12 Lord William Taylour, The Mycenaeans (1964) 175; C.H. Gordon, Ugaritica 6 (1969)
278; Studies and Texts I (1963) 4.

analogy here, for I have done so elsewhere13 and I will admit that not all
the mechanics, dates and directions of literary borrowings are now, or
may ever be, amenable to conclusive demonstration. In a recent paper,
I have tested these criteria with respect to a particular set of common
traditions; namely, those concerning the antediluvian kings, patriarchs,
culture-heroes, and particularly cities.
My conclusion is that the antediluvian traditions are native to Mes-
opotamia. They appear to have begun with the antediluvian cities of
Mesopotamia, of which only traces are preserved in the Biblical ver-
sion. The growth of this tradition to include antediluvian kings and
culture-heroes also took place in Mesopotamia while the Biblical recast-
ing of these individuals into patriarchal figures took place in the con-
text of Amorite sedentarization early in the second millennium, when
genealogical interests reshaped Mesopotamian historiographical con-
ceptions. Since of all conceivable genres, the genealogical record is
most obviously a medium of oral historiography, and since comparable
cuneiform sources of the Amorite period (the Genealogy of the Ham-
murapi Dynasty, the Assyrian King List, etc.) likewise betray a fluid,
oral background, it is reasonable to assume they then moved westward,
in oral form.14
To return from this particular example to the more general issue: I
do submit that both Israel and Mesopotamia each had its own highly
developed techniques for preserving those texts which were central to
their separate traditions with more or less fidelity and that this provides
one of the necessary pre-conditions for arguments in favor of literary
inter-connections. In Israel, these techniques (known best from later
times) include the Masorah, the Midrash, the liturgical use of the text,
the refusal at first to translate the text and perhaps most important, the
ultimate willingness to change the meaning of the text either by interpre-
tation or by interpretive translation precisely in order to preserve the
integrity of a received text while accommodating it to the needs of a
constantly changing world view. These are the distinguishing features
13 William W. Hallo and William K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: a History (New
York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971) esp. pp. 113–117 (“The Emergence of Assyria”);
W.W. Hallo, article “Mesopotamia,” Encyclopedia Judaica vol. 16(1971) 1483–1508; esp.
1500 f.
14 William W. Hallo, “Antediluvian Cities,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 23 (1970) 57–
67.
that constitute what I have described elsewhere as the Jewish perspec-

tive in Biblical studies.15
On the Mesopotamian side, too, there are a number of very distinct
and well documented patterns of literary survival or preservation. Each
of them deserves brief attention if we are to meet the chronological
challenge to the comparative method.
The most obvious, and in some ways most remarkable kind of lit-
erary preservation in the cuneiform tradition, is the case of direct sur-
vival. A most telling example of this sort is provided by the famous
laws of Hammurapi. This celebrated code (which is not really a code
at all) actually began as a monument, but its literary merits quickly
became evident to the Mesopotamians themselves. They incorporated
it in the curriculum of their scribal schools, and copied it faithfully, not
to say slavishly, for over a thousand years after its promulgation even
though its legal contents had long since become a dead letter. This
example is taken from Akkadian, a language which remained alive in
Mesopotamia all during that millennium. Even more instructive is the
situation concerning Sumerian which became a dead language soon-
after Hammurapi, though it continued to survive as a learned and
sacred language (like Latin in the Middle Ages and today). There are
numerous examples of Sumerian literary texts whose composition dates
back to the neo-Sumerian period (the end of the third millennium)
which were learned and copied out in the schools of Hammurapi’s
time early in the second millennium, with careful attention to liturgical
notations (even when these, as in the Biblical psalms, were no longer
understood), and to “Masoretic” details such as variant readings or the
numbers of lines. When the Old Babylonian schools came to an end,
the traditional texts and the surviving Sumerian-speaking scholars are
thought to have found refuge in extreme southern Mesopotamia where
(even to this day) one may find many curious survivals of ancient Sume-
rian patterns of living among the so-called Marsh Arabs. Be that as it
may, the Kassite conquest of the southern Sealand late in the second
millennium reunited it with Babylonia and retrieved the old learning.
Then, the newly formed scribal guilds of this feudal age took up where
the earlier scribal schools had left off. They selected a portion of the
surviving Sumerian literary corpus, provided it with a literal translation
into Akkadian and preserved the ancient learning for both Babylonia
15 Id. “Biblical Studies in Jewish Perspective,” in Leon A. Jick, ed., The Teaching of
Judaica in American Universities, (Association for Jewish Studies, 1970) 41–46.

and Assyria well into the first millennium. Much of the original corpus
was lost in the process, and what survived was often badly misunder-
stood, so that the modern scholar can often demonstrate that the trans-
lation into Akkadian is too liberal or simply wrong. But the Sumerian
text itself was preserved.
A familiar example of this process is provided by the great myth
of the warrior-god Ninurta, called Lugal-e. This example can be mul-
tiplied by many other myths about and hymns to the great gods of
the Sumerian pantheon, whose worship continued without interrup-
tion even after Sumerian ceased to be a living language of daily inter-
course in all but (at most) the extreme south of the land. Indeed,
the survival of Sumerian as a learned religious language was in some
part surely connected with the desire to describe and apostrophize the
Sumerian deities, so to speak, in their native tongue. On the linguis-
tic level, however, an important distinction must be added. While the
myths about and incantations to the gods continued to employ the
main dialect of Sumerian after the Old Babylonian period, the sur-
viving hymns addressed to the gods, in common with individual prayer
resorted almost exclusively to the Emesal dialect.16 By the same token as
the second millennium wore on, the kings of Mesopotamia increasingly
favored the more intelligible Akkadian as a vehicle for royal encomiums
and self-predications. Next to the gods these kings were the favorite pro-
tagonists of cuneiform literature as well as its principal patrons. (The
two factors are, again, apt to be related.) The recent discovery that
King Shulgi of Ur is the hero of an Akkadian prophecy (or “apoc-
alypse” as I would prefer to call it) shows that royal taste even dic-
tated the resurrection of Sumerian predecessors in Akkadian format.17
But not exclusively! The classical Sumerian epic cycle dealing with the
lords of Uruk and Aratta survived intact into the libraries of the neo-
Assyrian kings in some cases, for example the Lugalbanda Epic. True,
the late exemplars of this text are accompanied by an interlinear Akka-
dian translation; they represent only two out of the forty exemplars
used in the latest reconstruction of the composition, and one of these
two has been known since 1875!18 But Wilcke’s edition plainly shows
16 Joachim Krecher, Sumerische Kultlyrik (1966) p. 18.

17 R. Borger, “Gott Marduk und Gott-König Šulgi als Propheten. Zwei prophetische
Texte,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 28 (1971) 3–24.
18 IV R 14:1; republished CT 15:41 f. together with the other late copy, ib. 43.
how closely the late text adhered to models a thousand years older19
and also provides precious evidence for the durability of epic literature
in Mesopotamia. When and if a history of Sumerian literature is writ-
ten, that will surely be the occasion to revert to this neglected point.
In this hurried survey, I can pause only briefly to consider the so-
called “wisdom literature.” It is the most durable of all the genres, and
probably also the most genuinely—and literally—popular one. It cen-
ters less on gods and kings than on mortals and commoners, particu-
larly on the scribe or, more generally, the wise man. It owed some of
its longevity to oral transmission—in this respect again differing from
the official canons of temple and palace—and thus survived not only
the transition from Sumerian to Akkadian but also from Akkadian to
Aramaic, as evidenced by the figure of the wise vizier Ahiqar, and from
Aramaic to Arabic, as was shown by O.R. Gurney in his edition of
“The Poor Man of Nippur.”20
The very first examples of intelligible Sumerian literary efforts be-
long to the wisdom genre and date from the Fara period in the mid-
dle of the third millennium. They are proverbs, and among them are
a number which were still being written out in the first millennium.
This is true not only of the old saw about celibacy to which a brief
note by W.G. Lambert first called attention,21 but also of others with
enough Old Babylonian bilingual versions to indicate at least part of
the process of transmission.22 More recently, the Abu Salabikh discover-
ies have opened an entirely new vista on the Sumerian literature of the
Fara period.23 Among these striking finds is a piece of Wisdom called
the “Instructions of Shuruppak,” (i.e. the Sumerian Noah, or his son)
whose name is identical to, or confused with, the ancient Sumerian
name of the city of Fara. Published fragments of this composition now
include an Old Sumerian version, a neo-Sumerian one of Old Baby-
lonian date, and an Akkadian one of Middle Assyrian date.24 It is too
early to characterize the last as a literal translation. If it proves to be
19 Claus Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos (1969) pp. 90 and 92, and his comments p. 23.
20 Anatolian Studies 6 (1956) 145–164.
21 Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 169 (1963) 63 f.
22 M. Civil and R.D. Biggs, Revue d’Assyriologie 60 (1966) 5–7.
23 R.D. Biggs, “The Abū Şalābı̄kh Tablets: a preliminary survey,” Journal of Cuneiform
Studies 20 (1966) 73–88; idem., “An archaic . . . hymn from Tell Abū Şalābı̄kh,” Zeitschrift
fur Assyriologie 61 (1972) 193–207.
24 Cf. the latest (partial) translation by R.D. Biggs apud J.B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient
Near Eastern Texts 3 (1969) 594 f.

so, it would constitute almost the only exception to the curious, but
little-noted fact that such translations otherwise never appear except in
the form of bilinguals, i.e., in the company of their Sumerian origi-
nals. The other chief exception to this rule is the twelfth tablet of the
canonical Gilgamesh Epic. But this truly proves the rule, given the spe-
cial circumstances operative there. A late redactor, not satisfied with the
eleven tablets or chapters of the Akkadian epic, though they formed a
harmonious whole, felt compelled to add a twelfth and for this pur-
pose resorted to straight translation of one of the Sumerian Gilgamesh
episodes which had not been employed in the Akkadian adaptation at
all.
This leads me to the second and somewhat less obvious manner in
which cuneiform literature survived over the centuries; namely, through
organic transformation and creative adaptation. In the case of the Gil-
gamesh Epic, the vehicle for these processes was translation into Akka-
dian, though I am not yet prepared to say in just what order the
various steps proceeded. It has usually been assumed that the Sume-
rian Gilgamesh episodes were received in disjointed form and that
the creation of a unified epic composition was first achieved in Old
Babylonian times, together with the creation of an Akkadian version
which drew freely upon Sumerian models rather than slavishly trans-
lating from them. It is further assumed that the Middle Babylonian
period produced the expansion of the Akkadian text which we know (so
far) mostly in neo-Assyrian copies.25 These presuppositions have been
briefly examined by Hope Nash Wolff 26 and at greater length by Jeffrey
H. Tigay, who concludes that the character and role of Enkidu con-
stitute the integrating factors in the epic; that these factors are lacking
in the extant Sumerian episodes but are conspicuously present in the
Akkadian versions of the same (Old Babylonian) date, as now known
in substantial numbers; and that the integration was presumably, if not
demonstrably, contemporary with the process of translation.27
In any case, translation was not the only vehicle for the creative
adaptation of Sumerian literature. Knowledge of Sumerian was pre-
served and transmitted at the schools by the “professors of Sumerian”
25 Cf. e.g. L. Matouš, “Les rapports entre la version sumerienne et la version
akkadienne de l’épopée de Gilgameš,” apud P. Garelli, ed., Gilgameš et sa Légende (1960)

83–94.
26 “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the heroic life,” JAOS 89 (1969) 392–398, esp. 393 n. 2.
27 Literary-Critical Studies in the Gilgamesh Epic, (University Microfilms) (Yale, unpub-
lished Ph.D. Thesis 1971) esp. pp. 84–96: “The Origin of the Integrated Epic.”
(to use Landsberger’s translation of dub-sar eme-gir) who, in turn, may

have drawn on (and help to demonstrate) the survival of spoken Sume-
rian in the Sealand during the second millennium. In any case, such
knowledge sufficed for the continuous creation of new Sumerian com-
positions, albeit along lines well marked out by older traditions and
in a “decadent” Sumerian which frequently helps one date the texts.28
A good example is provided both by the public and private laments.
The former, comparable to the congregational lament of the Hebrew
Psalter, began as ritual apologies for the demolition of temple ruins
which was the necessary precondition for rebuilding them upon their
sacred sites, and included specific allusions to the historical circum-
stances that had caused the temple to fall into ruins in the first place—
usually the attack of an enemy who, it was hoped, would pay the
penalty incurred in the sacrilege implied in completing the demolition.
From here they gradually developed into formalized complaints for the
inexorable decay or destruction of any shrine from any cause in any
place, until it became quite impossible to connect the genre with any
actual destruction or any actual rebuilding of a given sanctuary. Sim-
ilarly, the private prayer, comparable to the individual laments among
the Psalms, has a long and organic development in form-critical terms.
Its earliest attested format is a letter to the deity, written in standard
Sumerian prose and deposited at the feet of the statue of the god with
the petitioner’s specific request or complaint. From here it was gradu-
ally transformed into a stylized petition, sung to the deity by the profes-
sional chanter using the aforementioned Emesal dialect, the so-called
thin or wailing dialect of Sumerian, and ultimately abandoning the for-
mal elements of the letter such as the salutation, identification of the
petitioner, and stereotyped closing while continuing to reflect the origi-
nal epistolary structure.29
Another way in which cuneiform literature could bridge the millen-
nia was by means of the later Mesopotamians’ rediscovery of their own
past. One should not forget that the cuneiform system of writing spans
more than half of recorded history. Scholars of the library of Assurban-
ipal at Nineveh during the time of Manasseh and Josiah, for example,
were as far in time from the first Mesopotamian written texts as we
are from Assurbanipal. Along with his neo-Assyrian predecessors and
28 A. Falkenstein, MDOG 85 (1953) 1–13.

29 Above, n. 8.
his neo-Babylonian successors, Assurbanipal had just as lively an inter-

est in Mesopotamian antiquities as modern Assyriologists. Therefore,
one should not be surprised that there was an active search for ancient
monuments and clay tablets, especially in the old land of Sumer, in the
south, and that these royally inspired searches were often crowned with
success. Thanks to some recent publications, one such success story can
now be told.
The story begins with a cliche of cuneiform literary history. For
some twenty-odd years it has been considered axiomatic that certain
genres of Sumerian literature disappeared from the canon in the course
of the second millennium because they had become irrelevant to the
ideologies of a new age. Prominent examples of this process of attrition
were the hymns to deified kings and hymns to gods with prayers for
the deified kings. These genres are obviously more suitable to an age
in which mortal kings were still worshipped. In the native hymnic
terminology such hymns were typically classified as adab or tigi-songs,
depending upon the musical instrument used to accompany them.
Some two dozen different compositions so classified were identified
among the then known (1949) examples of Sumerian literary texts
by Adam Falkenstein.30 Though often composed much earlier, all of
them came from Old Babylonian copies, dating approximately from
Hammurapi’s time. Almost as many more were known by title from
a Middle Assyrian literary catalogue; i.e., a document listing various
compositions by their opening words and then classifying them by their
literary genre.31 But these titles, though dating from the late second
millennium, remain just that: titles. Not one of the compositions so
catalogued has yet turned up in its own right. One suspects, therefore,
that the catalogue is the product of a learned antiquary of the library
of Tiglath-Pileser I (c. 1115–1077) rather than a true reflection of the
literary tastes of the turn of the millennium, at least at this point
(col. iii).32 As has recently been shown, other sections (col. viii) may
have a much more living status.33 This is in contrast to a catalogue
composed some four or five centuries earlier which includes half a
30 ZA 49 (1949) 87–91 (Nos. 1–17) and 102 (Nos. 1–7).

31 Ibid. 91 (Nos. 18–21) and 103 (Nos. 8–26).
32 For the date of the text see E. Weidner. Archiv für Orientforschung 16 (1953) 207 (No.
*18).
33 David Wulstan, “The Earliest Musical Notation,” Music and Letters 52 (1971) 365–
382.
dozen identifiable compositions among its thirty-odd tigi and adab-

hymns.34 Indeed, when one returns to Falkenstein’s list, one finds that
the two genres mentioned have completely disappeared from the neo-
Assyrian corpus and all the vast literary treasures of the library of
Assurbanipal, now mostly housed in the British Museum, have not a
single example to offer; rather, they have only a single example.
The sole example cited by Falkenstein was a drum-song (tigi) to the
god Ninurta of which little more was preserved than the colophon (the
equivalent of our title-page though it comes at the end of the composi-
tion) and pitiful remnants of the last five lines of the hymn. Still, even
this tiny fragment was tantalizing, for the colophon could be restored
on the basis of parallels to read “(copy?) of Nippur written out accord-
ing to its old prototype and (checked against the original.)” Now Nip-
pur had been precisely the center of Sumerian learning in the Old
Babylonian period, and the place where royal hymns were composed
whenever the local priesthood deemed a king worthy of the honor. It
was therefore with some interest that I opened a new volume of Sume-
rian literary texts from the Old Babylonian period at Nippur only to
discover a nearly complete “drum-song” the last line of which was lit-
erally identical with the last and only well-preserved line of the neo-
Assyrian fragment.35 My interest thus aroused, I searched for additional
fragments of the neo-Assyrian version among the publications of the
British Museum and located no fewer than five others. All six of them36
exactly corresponded to the Old Babylonian prototype, and I was con-
vinced that they would join to form a single tablet. My curatorial col-
league in London confirmed my suspicions and wrote me the following:
“Congratulations on a brilliant join. The six fragments join exactly as
you predicted, although the shape of the fragments is not quite what
Langdon’s . . . copies made them appear. As you say, it would be very
nice to find the missing fragments, and Walker is going to have a go
at it. You will be receiving the photographs as soon as they can be
made.”37
34 TMH n.F. 3:53. For the identifications sec I. Bernhardt and S.N. Kramer, Wis-
senschaftliche Zeitschrift . . . Jena 6 (1956–1957) 392 f.

35 S.N. Kramer and I. Bernhardt, Sumerische Literarische Texte aus Nippur 2 (1967)
No. 86.
36 S. Langdon, Babylonian Liturgies (1913) Nos. 95, 97, 102, 107, 111 and 127. Four of
these fragments were identified also by Å. Sjöberg, Orientalia 38 (1969) 355 in his review
of op. cit. (n. 35).
37 Letter of February 26, 1969 from Dr. E. Sollberger.
The missing fragments were never found (it would be easier to find
a very small needle in a very large haystack), but the photographs
arrived. I have read the original in London and will make a hand-
copy of it for publication in due course. In the meantime, a German
colleague collated the old Nippur text, which was located at the Uni-
versity of Jena in East Germany, for me. All this careful review has
disclosed that the hymn is addressed not to the warlike god Ninurta but
to the goddess Nintu, patroness of childbirth. She is apostrophized here
for putting her talents at the disposal of Enlil the chief executive of the
gods, by giving birth to the king and the high priest, offices which it is
the function of Enlil to assign to his favorite mortals. [Here: III.5.]
The content of the hymn however, is of less interest than the fact
that the Old Babylonian prototype from Nippur, dated at perhaps
1750 bce, is as faithfully reproduced as the colophon claims in a neo-
Assyrian copy made more than a thousand years later. In the interval,
the ideology which inspired it had completely disappeared and with it
the genre which was its vehicle. It is therefore all the more impressive
that the text was resurrected intact, with as much devotion to accuracy
and objectivity as a modern copyist would bring to the task. It allows
us to infer a more general principle: the rediscovery of lost texts may
be added to the preservation or adaptation of surviving texts as means
whereby the literary heritage of the Bronze Age passed into the Iron
Age within Mesopotamia. Thus the comparative approach to Biblical
studies, by which I mean a restrained and disciplined application of the
cuneiform parallels, can stand up to the challenge which the skeptics
have raised on the issue of chronology.
Author’s Note
The substance of these remarks was originally presented in the series Perspec-
tives in Jewish Learning, Spertus College of Judaica, Chicago, April 18, 1971.
The printed version offered herewith incorporates a considerable number of
stylistic changes by the editor, and was not reviewed by the author either in
manuscript or proof. For appropriate addenda and corrigenda, the reader is
invited to consult my forthcoming article, “Toward a History of Sumerian Lit-
erature.” [Here I.4.] The point of departure for the original version was pro-
vided by James Muilenberg and others, “Problems in Biblical Hermeneutics,”
Journal of Biblical Literature 77 (1958) 18–38; cf. ibid. 39–51, 197–204; 78 (1959)
105–114.
i.4
TOWARD A HISTORY OF SUMERIAN LITERATURE
To Thorkild Jacobsen, with warmth and respect
Literary history is a stepchild of literary criticism. More often than not,

“leading histories of literature are either histories of civilization or col-
lections of critical essays. One type is not a history of art; the other,
not a history of art.”1 And even while proposing remedies for this situ-
ation, Wellek and Warren relegate their suggestions to the end of their
Theory of Literature. Twenty years later, that is still the position Geoffrey
Hartman assigns to the proposals he addresses “Toward Literary His-
tory.”2
In such circumstances, extensive apologies are hardly necessary for
the rudimentary state of Sumerian literary history.3 The recovery of
Sumerian literature, though it began a century ago (1873),4 is an ongo-
ing process that is today far from complete; every year brings first edi-
tions of newly recovered or newly reconstructed works. The only sys-
tematic attempt to subject this growing corpus to some kind of chrono-
logical order5 is today in need of major revisions on linguistic and
other grounds.6 Indeed, the prospect of writing a literary history of
Mesopotamia seems only slightly less dim7 than that of describing its
religion in the opinion of the field’s more skeptical spokesmen.
1 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1948; 3d ed., 1963)
p. 253.
2 Geoffrey H. Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven, 1970) pp. 356–386.
3 See the Bibliography below.
4 This date is chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, as marking the first appearance of
François Lenormant’s Études accadiennes (“Lettres assyriologiques,” seconde série [Paris,

1873–1879J). In three volumes Lenormant offered full editions of substantial numbers
of bilingual Sumero-Akkadian texts, most of them previously unedited.
5 A. Falkenstein, “Zur Chronologie der sumerischen Literatur,” CRRA II 12–30;
MDOG, No. 85 (1953) pp. 1–13.

6 See e.g. M. Civil, “Remarks on ‘Sumerian and Bilingual Texts,’ ” JNES, Vol. 26
(1967) p. 201: “the presence alone of late grammatically incorrect forms in a text is an
unreliable criterion for placing its [original] composition at a late date.”
7 A.L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago, 1964) p. 255: “The literary history
of Mesopotamia cannot be more than outlined, and it is open to serious doubt—and

58 i.4. toward a history of sumerian literature
For all that, it is not too early to assay a history of Sumerian litera-
ture on strictly literary grounds, not only for the sake of a better appre-
ciation of Sumerian literature, but also in the service of the history of
literature. For Sumerian literature meets the criterion of basic linguistic
unity which has now been reinstated as a principle of literary history.8
But beyond that it can claim distinction on the basis of three remark-
able superlatives: it leads all the world’s written literature in terms of
antiquity, longevity, and continuity.9 Its beginnings can now be traced
firmly to the middle of the third millennium bc.,10 and native traditions
would have it that it originated even earlier, with the antediluvian sages
at the end of the fourth millennium.11 Its latest floruit occurred at the
end of the pre-Christian era, and at least one canonical text is dated
as late as 227 of the Seleucid Era and 163 of the Arsacid (Parthian)
Era (or 85 bc.).12 And in the long interval between these extreme termi-
nals, much of it was copied and preserved with a remarkable degree of
textual fidelity.
A single linguistic and literary tradition spanning two and a half or
even three millennia surely deserves to be studied in terms of its own
history. Moreover, it should be fairly easy to avoid some of the major
pitfalls of conventional literary history13 in connection with Sumerian
literature. We are not tempted to use it for the reconstruction of nation-
al or social history given the fact that the last two millennia of Sumerian
literature were produced in the admitted absence of a Sumerian nation
or society and that, even before that time, the very existence of a
I am inclined here to side with the skeptics—whether enough material is available to

embark on the venture of writing such a history.”
8 Hartman, Beyond Formalism, pp. 356–386.
9 For the nearest competition, see Hellmut Brunner, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der
altägyptischen Literatur (Darmstadt, 1966). See also the reviews by V. Wessetzky, BiOr
XXIV (1967) 156–157 and by G. Björkman, BiOr XXIX (1972) 178.
10 R.D. Biggs, “The Abū Slābāíkh Tablets: A Preliminary Survey,” JCS XX (1966)
.
73–88; M. Civil and R.D. Biggs, “Notes sur des textes sumériens archaïques,” RA LX
(1966) 1–16; and below, n. 36. For the chronological question, see Hallo, “The Date
of the Fara Period,” Or, n.s., Vol. 42 (1972) pp. 228–238. The definitive edition of
the literary and lexical texts from Abū Salāb
. ı̄kh (and parallels from Fara) has now
appeared; see R.D. Biggs, Inscriptions from Tell Abū S. alābı̄kh (OIP XCIX [1974]).
11 Hallo, “On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature,” JAOS, Vol. 83 (1963) pp. 167–
176, esp. 175–176, here: II.1.

12 G.A. Reisner, Sumerisch-babylonische Hymnen nach Thontafeln griechischer Zeit (Berlin,
1896) No. 55. No. 49 may even be dated four years later. See also below, n. 46.
13 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 253.
i.4. toward a history of sumerian literature 59
recognizable Sumerian ethnic group has been challenged.14 Nor are we

prone to offer, in the guise of literary history, a series of disconnected
essays on individual authors, given the fact that the vast majority of
Sumerian literary works are anonymous or at best pseudonymous in
authorship.
We are thus virtually forced to devote our attention to the proper
concerns of literary history, beginning with “the establishment of the
exact position of each work in a tradition.”15 From there it is a logical
step to the “morphological approach,” that is, “the history of genres”
or the “problem of the development of a type.”16 Finally the extensive
perspective afforded by our corpus leads naturally to a meaningful
periodization which, while “embedded in the historical process,”17 is
based in the first instance on the cumulative evidence of major periods
of creativity, adaptation, and consolidation of the literary material.
So ambitious a programme can at this stage be tackled only by
means of illustrative examples. But by selecting the examples widely
from a representative genre, it is intended to validate the general ap-
proach and to encourage more systematic efforts along similar lines.
In the long history of transmission, each genre tended to undergo
different treatment. If these different treatments are to be compared, it
must be done according to some common scale. Admittedly there will
inevitably be a subjective bias in the choice of such a scale. The one
chosen here is that of fidelity to the received text. On this basis, it is
possible to grade the genre histories from an extreme of slavish fidelity
on one hand, via various degrees of organic expansion and creative
adaptation, all the way to total suppression or displacement. As we
shall see, however, the extremes join in the case of the occasional late
recovery of an early text that had not survived in the tradition. I will
begin my survey with a rather extreme example of textual fidelity in the
context of a continuing tradition.
The Exploits of Ninurta is the name currently given to the composition

known anciently by its incipit as lugal-(e) u4 me-lám-bi nir-gál. Modern
14 F.R. Kraus, Sumerer und Akkader, ein Problem der altmesopotamischen Geschichte (Amster-
dam, 1970), esp. ch. vii. J.S. Cooper, “Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad,”
Or, n.s., Vol. 42 (1973) pp. 239–246.
15 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 259.
16 Ibid., p. 261.
17 Ibid., p. 265. See in this connection Fawzi Rasheed, “Sumerian Literature: Its
Character and Development,” Sumer XXVIII (1972) 9–15.

classifications assign it to the genre of myth, since its protagonists

are drawn from the divine realm, and its story, however interpreted,
clearly presents a legendary occurrence as a paradigm for a continuing
experience, whether in the human sphere or in nature. But in the native
system, it figures rather as a hymn of praise to the deity, concluding
with the requisite doxology: “Oh Ninurta, it is good (or, in the late
version: exalting) to praise (zà-mí) you,” and this is true of all the texts
to be considered in this section.
The text of the composition, virtually complete in over 700 lines, has
been reconstructed by J. van Dijk from some 130 exemplars.18 Nearly
two-thirds of these date from the Old Babylonian scribal schools at
Nippur and (to a lesser extent) Ur, which flourished in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, respectively. At least three bilingual texts from
Assur may belong to the library of Tiglath-Pileser I (1115–1077 bc.),
according to Weidner.19 The rest date from the first millennium, par-
ticularly the royal Assyrian libraries in the seventh century. A compari-
son of the three versions is instructive. In the overwhelming majority of
cases, the late text reproduces the early text with no more orthographic
variants than can be found among various exemplars of the early text
itself. In other cases, the original sense of the text has been lost, and the
later version substitutes a wholly new one in both Sumerian and Akka-
dian. In those relatively few instances where all three periods are repre-
sented, the Middle Assyrian versions vary with the later and against the
earlier.
Within limits, a similar situation characterizes the shorter epic of
Ninurta called Angim. The edition by J. Cooper shows, however, that
the late version is occasionally closer to the early version than is the
intermediate version.20
In attempting to account for the striking tenacity of this particular
textual tradition, it is necessary to pursue the literary history of the two
compositions further back than their earliest written manifestations in
Old Babylonian times. Both deal with Ninurta; both allude in mytho-
logical terms to campaigns against the “mountains.” In Lugale, the
18 I am indebted to him for his transliteration in manuscript form. The first 180 lines
are preserved on the large Yale tablet YBC 9867 (Old Babylonian).
19 E.F. Weidner, “Die Bibliothek Tiglatpilesers I.,” AfO XVI (1952–1953) 197–215.
20 Chiefly KAR, Nos. 12 and 18. I am indebted to Professor Cooper for an advance
copy of his revised working text (May, 1973) of the edition. As he points out in his
introduction (May, 1975), however, the only fully preserved subscript of the composition
labels it a šìr-gíd-da of Ninurta.
victory of Ninurta is reconstructed in detail; in Angim, this victory is

presupposed and, in its aftermath, the spoils of war are donated in
Nippur. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that real historical events
provide the background.21 Already Hrozný had argued that Lugale
contained an explicit allusion to Gudea (XI 13–16 = lines 475–478 of
the combined text) in the context of (the so-called ki-a-nag) offerings to
the statues of deceased rulers and grandees.22 Several almost verbatim
correspondences between Lugale and the inscriptions of Gudea of
Lagash have been noted and the same can be said for Angim.23 Given
the historical datum of Gudea’s campaigns against Anshan and Elam,
we may well have before us the mythological version of these events.
The compositions probably owe their incorporation into the Nippur
curriculum to the substitution of Ninurta of Nippur for his Lagashite
equivalent Ningirsu24 and their preservation beyond Old Babylonian
times precisely to the sublimation of specific historical allusions into
mythological forms.
What is here suggested then is that these (and possibly other)25 myths
to Ninurta were commissioned in their original form at the court
of Gudea, or at least inspired by his exploits shortly after his reign,
and that they helped to perpetuate his memory thereafter.26 The sug-
gestion cannot be proved as yet, but it can be buttressed by various
21 Cf. Hallo and Van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna (YNER, Vol. 3 [1968]) p. 66.
22 Friedrich Hrozný, “Sumerisch-babylonische Mythen von dem Gotte Ninrag
(Ninib),” MVAG, Vol. 8/5 (1903) p. 64. Cf. A. Falkenstein, in CRRA II 14; Die Inschriften
Gudeas von Lagaš I (AnOr, Vol. 30 [1966]) pp. 45, 139; RLA, Vol. 3 (1971) p. 677.
23 Note especially the reference, by name, to the divine weapons šar-gaz, šar-ùr, etc.,
in both Angim (e.g. ll. 129 f. = III 24 f.) and Gudea’s date formulas and inscriptions;
see simply Falkenstein, AnOr, Vol. 30, p. 111, n. 4. For other correspondences, see
B. Landsberger, “Einige . . . Nomina des Akkadischen,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde
des Morgenlandes, Vol. 57 (1961) p. 12. Note that the same weapons still occur in the
inscriptions of Esarhaddon.
24 Such substitutions therefore have greater significance than is assigned to them
by B. Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream: Aspects of Oral Poetry in Sumerian Myth (Copenhagen, 1972)
p. 44, and “ ‘Ninurta and the Turtle,’ UET 6/1 2,” JCS XXIV (1972) p. 120 and n. 2.
For Ninurta in connection with both Nippur and Lagash, cf. already SLTNi, No. 61 (ed.
M.E. Cohen, in WO VIII [1975] 22–36) 11. 58–87, esp. 1. 64.
25 Cf. also TMH NF IV, No. 49 and Alster, in JCS XXIV 120–125. This text reads
more like a parody than a serious hymn to Ninurta, though A.J. Ferrara, Nanna-Suen’s
Journey to Nippur (Rome, 1973) p. 4, n. 7 calls it “Ninurta’s Journey to Eridu.” See also
M.E. Cohen, in JCS XXV (1973) p. 208 f., n. 29, for multiple allusions to Ninurta myths
in late Ninurta balag-laments.
26 Cf. Falkenstein, AnOr, Vol. 30, p. 45: “although the passage [above, n. 22] does
not mention Gudea by name, it was clear to anyone familiar with Babylonian history
to whom it alluded” (translation mine).
considerations. Gudea appears as patron of Sumerian literary (and

artistic) creations of the highest order (the Cylinders of Gudea; the
statue inscriptions, etc.).27 He enjoyed posthumous worship in the Ur III
period in the form of ki-a-nag offerings;28 and he figured in the Old
Babylonian canonical literature of Nippur29 and Larsa.30
Royal patronage of Sumerian literature did not, however, begin with
Gudea. As early as the Sargonic period, not only can we point to Sar-
gon or Naram-Sin as probable patrons but we can identify the author
whom they commissioned. Enheduanna, daughter of the former and
older contemporary of the latter, claimed the authorship of two signif-
icant cycles of hymns, and there is little reason to deny the claim. For
although pseudepigraphical attribution is not a priori to be excluded,
it is noteworthy that Enheduanna’s principal contemporary monument
was still standing in Old Babylonian Ur as is evident from the copy
identified by Sollberger,31 thus making her an unlikely candidate for
legendary status at that time. Moreover, there is increasing evidence
for women, and especially royal princesses, as authors of major Sume-
rian literary works. Thus, the widow of Ur-Nammu has been proposed
as the author of the hymn memorializing his death and burial,32 and
the daughter of Sin-kashid of Uruk is the author of an important
27 Falkenstein, AnOr, Vol. 30.

28 N. Schneider, “Die Urkundenbehälter von Ur III und ihre archivalische Syste-
matik,” Or. n.s., Vol. 9 (1940) p. 23, and above, n. 22.
29 Hymn to Nanshe (SLTNi, No. 67 and duplicates); tigi-hymn to Ba"u (STVC,
No. 36): cf. Falkenstein, AnOr, Vol. 30, pp. 44–45, and Hallo, “Royal Hymns and
Mesopotamian Unity,” JCS XVII (1963) 115, here: III.1; Temple Hymn No. 20: cf. C.
Wilcke, “Der aktuelle Bezug der Sammlung der sumerischen Tempel-hymnen und ein
Fragment eines Klageliedes,” ZA, Vol. 62 (1972) pp. 48–49. Cf. now also G. Gragg,
“The Fable of the Heron and the Turtle,” AfO XXIV (1973) 51–72, 1. 19.
30 E. Sollberger, “The Rulers of Lagash,” JCS XXI (1967) 282, 11. 198–199. This
text, which Sollberger dates to the middle Old Babylonian (i.e., Larsa) period, is clearly
a kind of polemic against the canonical Sumerian King List as tradited at Nippur,
which ignored both Lagash and Larsa. It thus accomplished for Lagash what the
W-B 62 recension (Langdon, OECT II, Pl. VI) did in its way for Larsa, and both
documents presumably originated from the latter city. That Gudea himself ruled over
Larsa was still unknown to Falkenstein, AnOr, Vol. 30, pp. 42–46, but is now highly
probable in light of the new French excavations, which have turned up a brick to
Nanshe and a clay nail to Ningirsu inscribed by Gudea on the site; see D. Arnaud,
“Nouveaux jalons pour une histoire de Larsa,” Sumer XXVII (1971) 43–44.
31 RA LXIII (1969) 180 (ad UET I, No. 289).
32 C. Wilcke, “Eine Schicksalsentscheidung für den toten Urnammu,” CRRA XVII
86. For her identity, see either Sollberger, “Ladies of the Ur-III Empire,” RA LXI (1967)
69 (Watartum?) or Civil, “Un nouveau synchronisme Mari-IIIe dynastie d’Ur,” RA LVI
(1962) 213 (Tarām-Uram; cf. Hallo, in RLA, Vol. 4 [1972] pp. 13 f.).
letter-prayer to Rim-Sin of Larsa.33 In addition, there are various love

songs and lullabies purportedly sung to the kings of Ur III (notably
Shu-Sin) by their wives or mothers.34
The two Enheduanna cycles are related to each other, although dif-
ferent in character. The first, consisting of Inanna and Ebih, in-nin šà-
gurx-ra, and The Exaltation of Inanna, constitutes hymns of praise to
Inanna, patron deity of the Sargonic kings, in which their triumphs
over foreign enemies and internal rebellions are thinly disguised as
the res gestae of the goddess. In the second, the temples of Sumer and
Akkad are apostrophized in a manner calculated to put royal solici-
tude for them in the best possible light: having triumphed in war and
crushed Sumerian political aspirations, the Sargonic kings are neverthe-
less depicted as defenders of the traditional Sumerian faith.35 This con-
ception of Enheduanna’s work as glorifying her king in war and peace
can be compared, in the visual arts, with the famous Standard of Ur
from the Royal Cemetery at Ur some three centuries earlier. It also pro-
vides a model for the anonymous Ninurta hymns dated (above) nearly
two centuries later, since Lugale focuses on military exploits and Angim
on their cultic consequences. Yet the actual history of the Enheduanna
corpus was quite different from that of the latter.
This history begins as early as ca. 2500 bc. at Abū Salāb
. ı̄kh, among
whose literary tablets, R.D. Biggs has identified not only “an archaic
Sumerian version of the Kesh Temple Hymn”36 but also fragments of
briefer temple hymns more closely related to the later cycle of Enhed-
uanna.37 She is expressly described as the compiler of the cycle in its
colophon, and it thus seems reasonable to suppose that she adapted
and incorporated, at least in part, pre-existing hymns to individual tem-
ples such as those from archaic Abū Salāb
. ı̄kh. But the colophon also
credits her with creating what “no one has created (before),” using the
33 Hallo, “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa” (forthcoming), here: V.1.

34 S.N. Kramer, in ANET (3d ed., 1969) pp. 644–645, 651–652.
35 Hallo and Van Dijk, Exaltation, ch. i; C. Wilcke, in ZA, Vol. 62, pp. 35–61. Wilcke’s
study, like mine of 1970 (below, note 49), investigated the “Sitz im Leben” of Sumerian
poetry and concluded (by a process of elimination) that the Temple Hymns survived in
the courtly ceremonial as implicit praise for any given king who was solicitous of the
temples.
36 R.D. Biggs, “An Archaic Version of the Kesh Temple Hymn from Tell Abū
Salāb
. ı̄kh,” ZA, Vol. 61 (1971) pp. 193–207.
37 Ibid., p. 195 f.; cf. Å. Sjöberg and E. Bergmann, The Collection of the Sumerian Temple
Hymns (TCS III [1969]) p. 6.

terminology of child-bearing, as does The Exaltation of Inanna,38 to

describe the process of poetic creativity. Presumably, it was the com-
position of the cycle as a whole that represented her creative contribu-
tion.39
The oldest actual exemplar used in reconstructing the temple hymn
cycle is dated by Sjöberg to the Ur III period.40 At this period, the text
was still apparently to some degree in flux: a Sargonic date for its origi-
nal composition can be reconciled with its form in the Old Babylonian
version only on the assumption that, in the interim, it was expanded to
admit the inclusion of hymns to temples built in neo-Sumerian times.
This is particularly evident in the case of Temple Hymn No. 9 in
honor of the palace of Shulgi. The internal development of the cycle
of Enheduanna’s hymns to Inanna is somewhat different. All known
exemplars date from Old Babylonian times, and variants among them
are relatively minor.41 In the case of Innin-šagurra, some of the later
Old Babylonian exemplars are written in syllabic Sumerian and include
an interlinear translation into Akkadian.42
What both cycles have in common, however, is their complete dis-
appearance from the canon after Old Babylonian times. Unlike the
Ninurta hymns, it may be argued, they failed to sublimate their histori-
cal particulars sufficiently to qualify for enduring and universal interest
in the cuneiform curriculum. Though their allusions may be obscure
enough to lead to very different modern interpretations,43 they did not
end as proper myth. At best it can be said that one of their themes,
the exaltation of Inanna to equal rank with An at the head of the
pantheon, was taken up in very different form in the bilingual poem
Ninmah-ušuni-girra. Traditionally, this poem is ascribed to Taqı̄sha-
Gula, a lamentation-priest and scholar of Nippur,44 who is said to date
38 Hallo and Van Dijk, Exaltation, pp. 61–62.

39 Sumerian KA-kèš-da, “compiler,” is used of Enheduanna in the colophon of the
Temple Hymns just as kās. iru, its Akkadian equivalent, is used of the author of the Erra
Epic; cf. Sjöberg, TCS III 150.
40 Sjöberg and Bergmann, TCS III 6; see copies, Pls. XXXVII f.
41 For some of the more significant ones, see Hallo and Van Dijk, Exaltation, pp. 41
and 97 f.
42 J.J.A. van Dijk, “Textes divers du Musée de Baghdad,” Sumer XI (1955) 110, PL VI,
and Sumer XIII (1957) 69–79.

43 Compare, e.g., the interpretation of The Exaltation of Inanna offered in Hallo
and Van Dijk, Exaltation, with that of Kramer, in ANET (3d ed., 1969) pp. 579–582.
44 W.G. Lambert, “A Catalogue of Texts and Authors,” JCS XVI (1962) 75–76.
back to the time of Abi-eshuh in the late Old Babylonian period.45 But
its extant exemplars date from the seventh to the fourth centuries bc.46
and show little evidence of pre-Kassite origins.
At best; but the suggestion just offered is much better illustrated
in another instance. If we have so far dealt with the two extremes of
textual preservation—slavish fidelity and total obliteration—we must
consider now the large intermediate area within which preservation
was achieved by means of a greater or lesser degree of adaptation. We
may begin with The Curse of Agade, since this composition, like the
cycles already considered, arose out of a specific historical context. It
too dealt with the Sargonic dynasty; it too formally constituted a hymn
of praise to Inanna; it too dates back to Ur III times on the evidence of
several of its exemplars47 and then enjoyed considerable popularity in
the Old Babylonian curriculum. Beyond that, its history ran a middle
course between the extremes illustrated above. It was neither totally
eliminated from the canon nor simply perpetuated. Instead it was
creatively transformed to meet the ideological requirements of a new
age, the vehicle for (or at least concomitant of ) the transformation
being, in this case, translation into Akkadian. Specifically, the historical
viewpoint and major outlines of the plot of the original composition
(which seem most at home in a neo-Sumerian milieu) are reproduced in
the fragmentary Weidner Chronicle, with certain significant alterations.
Notably they substitute Babylon and Marduk for Nippur and Enlil as
the aggrieved city and its avenging deity respectively.48 But both agree
that Naram-Sin was the victim of the divine retribution (though in
point of historical fact he probably was not), and the Gutian hordes
its instrument.
45 Van Dijk, UVB XVIII (1962) 51 ad line 15.

46 B. Hruška, “Das spätbabylonische Lehrgedicht ‘Inannas Erhöhung,’ ” ArOr, Vol. 37
(1969) pp. 473–522. I fail to see the basis for Hruška’s statement (p. 477) that one of
the exemplars, which he dates to 316 bc, is the latest bilingual literary text known (see
above, n. 12). Cf. also W.G. Lambert, “L’exaltation d’Ishtar,” Or. n.s., Vol. 40 (1971)
pp. 91–95.
47 A. Falkenstein, “Fluch über Akkade,” ZA, Vol. 57 (1965) p. 44.
48 Hallo, “Gutium,” RLA, Vol. 3 (1971) p. 709. Similarly the stele’s version of the
prologue to the Laws of Hammurapi has substituted Babylon and Marduk for Nippur
and Enlil in the version published by D.J. Wiseman, “The Laws of Hammurabi Again,”
Journal of Semitic Studies VII (1962) 161–172. The latter version preserves the oldest
formulation according to R. Borger, Babylonisch-Assyrische Lesestücke II (Rome, 1963) 7;
cf. also A. Finet, Le Code de Hammurapi (Paris, 1973) pp. 31–32.
The Weidner Chronicle pursues the theme of divine intervention in

the fate of empires by applying it in turn to the Gutians themselves.
Although this topic is beyond the scope of The Curse of Agade, it has
a corresponding model in the inscription of Utu-hegal of Uruk, which
is equally a literary document, albeit less well attested. Here too, the
Sumerian Enlil is replaced in the Akkadian text by Marduk, but the
human agent remains the same Utu-hegal. These examples illustrate
the same ideological modernizing within a documented textual tradi-
tion which was posited above for the transition from an assumed and
perhaps oral original from Lagash dealing with Ningirsu to an attested
written version, chiefly of Nippur, centered on Ninurta. They show that
specific historical allusions were not, as such, an insuperable obstacle
to the preservation of literary materials provided their mythical settings
were updated.
Having thus constructed in some detail a paradigm for the category

of “history into myth,” we may deal more briefly with that of “history
into legend,” or what in modern terms is generally regarded as epic.
Again, however, it should be remembered that the modern distinction
is not observed in the ancient texts themselves. Rather these end, as do
“myths” with the typical hymnic doxology except that now the praise is
addressed, not to the deity, but to the deceased heroic mortal.49
As is well known, the principal subject of the Sumerian epic tales is
the First Dynasty of Uruk, to be dated in the Early Dynastic II period
(ca. 2700–2500 bc.), probably in its second quarter (ca. 2650–2600).50
The lords of distant Aratta and the last kings of the First Dynasty of
Kish also figure in the epics, while other literary sources, notably the
History of the Tummal, reveal the links of both Uruk and Kish with
the First Dynasty of Ur.51
The common distinctive feature of the Sumerian epic corpus is that
it deals with heroic rulers of a distant past, in a form reduced to writing
49 Hallo, “The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry,” CRRA XVII 117, here: I.2. Cf. the
listing by W. Heimpel in JAOS, Vol. 92 (1972) p. 290, n. 8. Note that some exemplars
of the Lugalbanda epic write his name with the divine determinative: C. Wilcke, Das
Lugalbandaepos (Wiesbaden, 1969) pp. 51–52.
50 Hallo and Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York, 1971) p. 47. Note
that Sollberger dates (En)mebaragesi of Kish about 2630–2600 bc (Inscriptions royales

sumériennes et akkadiennes [Paris, 1971] p. 39). In my scheme, the latter is contemporary
with Gilgamesh (Hallo and Simpson, The Ancient Near East, p. 46).
51 Hallo and Simpson, The Ancient Near East, p. 46; cf. Sollberger, “The Tummal
Inscription,” JCS XVI (1962) 40 ff.

long after the events described, most likely in the Ur III period, and
very conceivably on the basis of a pre-existing oral tradition. It is
this feature that best accounts for the considerable range of variation
in different Old Babylonian recensions of given epics52 and for their
preservation, beyond Old Babylonian times, in much the same vari-
ety of ways as already detailed for the mythology. Specifically, these
ways include: (1) more or less literal transmission into neo-Assyrian
times together with a verbatim interlinear translation into Akkadian
(Lugalbanda epic);53 (2) scattered allusions in later Akkadian and classi-
cal sources (Enmerkar cycle);54 (3) organic transformation of the original
Sumerian episodes into components of new Akkadian compositions on
the same themes. This last characterization applies in the first instance
to the bulk of the material dealing with Gilgamesh.55 A special case is
represented by the twelfth chapter (tablet) of the canonical Akkadian
Gilgamesh epic, which is a literal translation of one of the pre-existing
Sumerian episodes, and as such the principal exception to the general
rule that straightforward Akkadian translations of Sumerian originals
(outside the area of wisdom literature)56 appear only in the form of
bilinguals, that is, in combination with their Sumerian originals.57
It is debatable whether any of the Dumuzi material fits into this
category. In the first place, it is not certain whether Dumuzi reflects
52 Notably, e.g., in the case of Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living. See in detail
H. Limet, “Les chants épiques sumériens,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire L (1972)
3–24, esp. 8–9.
53 CT XV, Pls. 41–43, edited by Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos, pp. 90–98. See pp. 23–28
for the textual history of this epic.

54 See the references collected by T. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List (AS, No. 11
[1939]) pp. 86–87, n. 115. For the apkallu text cited there, see more recently E. Reiner,
“The Etiological Myth of the ‘Seven Sages,’ ” Or. n.s., Vol. 30 (1961) pp. 1–11.
55 The classic study on this subject is Kramer’s “The Epic of Gilgameš and Its
Sumerian Sources,” JAOS, Vol. 64 (1944) pp. 7–23. Since then the material has been
reviewed by Aaron Shaffer, “Sumerian Sources of Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgameš”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1963), and by J.H. Tigay, “Literary-Critical
Studies in the Gilgameš Epic” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971).
56 Cf. e.g., E.I. Gordon, “A New Look at the Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad,” BiOr
XVII (1960) 127, n. 46, and 129 f., n. 57.

57 This rule has been generally overlooked, except by W. von Soden (Zweisprachigkeit
in der geistigen Kultur Babyloniens [Graz, 1960] p. 9), who noted that the Akkadian transla-
tor “die Übersetzungen in der Regel nicht für sich allein, sondern zusammen mit dem
sumerischen Original abschrieb.” See now also W.G. Lambert, “DINGIR.ŠÀ.DIB.BA
Incantations,” JNES, Vol. 33 (1974) p. 270: “though it is common to find Sumerian texts
with interlinear Akkadian translations, the translations did not usually circulate alone.”
Lambert offers another exception to the rule.
the Urukian ruler of the King List tradition or the antediluvian king of
Bad Tibira. Second, the bulk of the Dumuzi texts are generically cultic
songs according to their subscripts. Only The Descent of Inanna ends,
like the epics, with the zà-mí notation, and this is addressed, not to
Dumuzi, but to Eresh-kigal.58 At best we can regard the Akkadian myth
of The Descent of Ishtar (and possibly that of Nergal and Eresh-kigal)
as preserving elements of a Sumerian tradition which may have dealt
in epic fashion with the exploits of a historic ruler of Uruk.
We have so far dealt with hymns of praise (zà-mí), which can be argued
to have recast recent history into cosmological terms (myth) or more
remote events into heroic ones (epic), in both cases inextricably inter-
weaving the human and divine realms of experience. But this is not
intended to deny that the hymnic genre was equally capable of concen-
trating on either one of these realms in its own right. As long ago as
1944, Kramer collected and classified Sumerian mythology into myths
of origins, myths of Kur (the netherworld), and miscellaneous myths.59
As he interpreted them, these myths took place almost entirely in the
divine sphere, though of course often with an etiological motive, that
is, to account for a continuing situation observed in the human condi-
tion, preferably in terms of its origins. From the point of view at issue
here, what is most striking about these and similar myths is that almost
without exception they have no literary history at all. They appear in
fixed form in copies (sometimes numerous copies) datable to a relatively
short span of time, normally within the Old Babylonian period,60 occa-
sionally earlier.61 Only rarely are the themes of these myths taken up
in recognizably similar forms in Akkadian; in the most striking case,
that of the Flood Narrative, it has even been implied that the Sumerian
58 UET VI/l, No. 10 rev. 14 f.; cf. Kramer, in PAPS, Vol. 107 (1963) p. 515.
59 Sumerian Mythology (Philadelphia, 1944; rev. eds., 1961, 1972).
60 Notably the myths of Enlil and Ninlil, Enki and Ninhursag, Enki and Inanna, and
The Marriage of Martu. Note, however, that the last text is, generically speaking, an
antiphonal poem (lum-a-lam-a) and may reflect a princely wedding or other historic
event; cf. Hallo and Van Dijk, Exaltation, p. 84, and G. Buccellati, The Amorites of the
Ur III Period (Naples, 1966) p. 339.
61 For the Old Sumerian myths of Enlil and Ninhursag (MBI, No. 1) and Enlil and
Ishkur (S.N. Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer [Indian Hills, 1956] p. 106, Fig. 6A), see
Sjöberg and Bergmann, TCS III 7 with notes 7 and 8. For the mythical fragment
Urukagina 15, see most recently Hallo, “Antediluvian Cities,” JCS XXIII (1970) 65 f.;
Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos, p. 132; B. Alster, “En-ki nun-ki: Some Unobserved Dupli-
cates, Ni 4057, etc.,” RA LXIV (1970) 189–190.
version may be later than and dependent on the earliest Akkadian

one.62 Even rarer is the transmission of the Sumerian text, intact and
with an Akkadian translation, into the first millennium, as exemplified
best by the myth of Enlil and Sud.63 Two of the principal themes of the
older mythology, the loves and travels of the Sumerian deities, appar-
ently ceased to interest the later periods by and large, while the third,
etiology, was worked into the cosmological preamble (the prologue in
heaven, as it were) of genres such as incantations more often than it
was left in independent hymnic form. Only the traditions surrounding
Dumuzi continued to exercise their full fascination on later audiences.
The history of royal hymnography is equally instructive. For fully
five centuries (ca. 2140–1640 bc.), some seven successive dynasties were
apparently rewarded for their cultic deference to the national Sumerian
shrines at Nippur through hymns composed in their honor by the Nip-
pur priesthood and tradited wherever Sumerian scribal schools adopted
the Nippur curriculum.64 These hymns included many essentially divine
hymns with only incidental mention of the king (chiefly in the con-
text of short prayer-refrains invoking the divine blessings on the ruler
then controlling Nippur), which were most likely at home in the tem-
ple liturgy:65 of these more presently. Here we are concerned with the
royal hymns properly speaking, that is, those concluding with the typ-
ical zà-mí doxology, spoken by, to or of the living king in first, second
or third person. In the last case, the formal analogy with epics about
the deceased rulers of Uruk is particularly clear, and it is conceivable
that these epics served as models for what, in sum, added up to virtual
hymnic biographies of the contemporary rulers.66 Like the epics, these
compositions lack all liturgical notations and were most likely at home
not in the temple, but in the courtly ceremonial, where they may well
have functioned in the context of the official (biennial?) proclamation
of the royal date formulas.67 Given all these links to specific historic and
62 M. Civil apud W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atra-hası̄s: The Babylonian Story of
the Flood (Oxford, 1969) pp. 138–145. ˘

63 O.R. Gurney and P. Hulin, The Sultantepe Tablets II (London, 1964) Nos. 151–154;
see the partial edition by M. Civil, in JNES, Vol. 26, pp. 200–205. Note also the myth of
Enki and Ninmah, for which see most recently Carlos A. Benito, “ ‘Enki and Ninmah’
and ‘Enki and the World Order’ ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1969).
64 Hallo, in JCS XVII 112–118, here: III.1.
65 Hallo, “New Hymns to the Kings of Isin” BiOr XXIII (1966) 239–247, here: III.3.
66 Hallo, “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu,” JCS XX (1966) 135, here: III.2.
67 Hallo, in CRRA XVII 118–119, here: I.2. A different conclusion was reached
by Daniel Reisman (“Two Neo-Sumerian Royal Hymns” [Ph.D. diss., University of

political situations, it is a tribute to the literary taste and cosmopoli-

tanism of the Old Babylonian schools that they tradited the royal
hymns at all, regardless of their current dynastic affiliation.68 It should
cause little surprise that later ages, with their wholly new ideologies
of kingship, ceased to preserve these compositions.69 Even the genre as
such can at most claim a remote successor in the Akkadian poems cele-
brating the achievements of the Middle Assyrian kings.
It was somewhat otherwise with the royal hymns in the wider sense
(Römer’s Type A),70 that is, the liturgical hymns of various genres. Two
of these, the adab- and tigi-genres, were particularly favored vehicles
for incorporating prayers on behalf of the reigning king in the context
of hymns to deities. These genres survived at least to the extent of occu-
pying a prominent place in two literary catalogues of Middle Babylo-
nian and Middle Assyrian date (ca. 1500 and 1100 bc.), respectively.71
The earlier catalogue listed by title (incipit) and deity up to eleven
tigi-hymns (the individual entries are, however, largely lost) and fifteen
adab-hymns; among the latter, three titles72 can be identified with rea-
sonable assurance as the opening words of adab-hymns for Nanna in
honor of the city of Ur,73 for Nergal in honor of Shu-ilishu of Isin,
and for Ninurta in honor of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin.74 The later catalogue75
listed at least four collections (iš-ka-ra-a-tu) comprising numerous tigi-
songs (za-ma-rumeš te-ge-e) (though the eighteen incipits actually preserved
remain so far unidentified) and “five Sumerian adab-songs (forming)
Pennsylvania, 1969] pp. 39–40), who regarded hymns of type B (including some ad-
dressed to deities without explicit reference to any king) as also belonging to the temple
cult, though perhaps used at royal coronations and the like.
68 Hallo, in JCS XVII 117 with notes 95–99, here: III.1.
69 Daniel Reisman, Kramer Anniversary Volume (AOAT, in press) has identified
OECT I, Pls. 36–39 (and duplicates) as a royal hymn of the zà-mí type (though in
some respects intermediate between types A and B) dedicated to Ishbi-Irra of Isin,
and M. Civil has identified 4R, Pl. 35, 1. 7 as a duplicate (see Reisman). But in spite
of its Kuyunjik number (K. 4755), it may be questioned whether the fragment is neo-
Assyrian.
70 SKIZ, pp. 5 f., Cf. my review in BiOr XXIII 240 f. Here: III.3.
71 Hallo, in JAOS, Vol. 83, p. 169, Nos. 9 and 10, here: II.1.
72 TMH NF III (1961) No. 58, 11. 62, 70 and 67; see the edition by I. Bernhardt and
S.N. Kramer, “Götter-Hymnen und Kult-Gesänge der Sumerer auf zwei Keilschrift-
‘Katalogen’ in der Hilprecht-Sammlung,” WZJ, Vol. 6 (1956–1957) p. 392.
73 SLTNi, No. 58, edited by Sjöberg, MNS I 35–43. Add now ISET I 157, Ni. 4467.
74 Nos. *4 and *26 in SKIZ, ch. 3 and pp. 6–9, respectively.
75 KAR, No. 158; see the partial edition by A. Falkenstein, “Sumerische religiöse
Texte,” ZA, Vol. 49 (1949) pp. 91 and 103.

one collection” (5 za-ma-ru il-ti-a-at GIŠ.GÀR a-da-pa šu-me-ra). Of the

latter, one title belongs to a hymn for An in honor of Ur-Ninurta of
Isin.76
Thus, cultic hymns associated with the early kings of Isin were
preserved into the second half of the second millennium, even though
there is no evidence whatever for any interest in such relatively obscure
kings as Shu-ilishu, Lipit-Ishtar or Ur-Ninurta at this late date.77 But
the explanation for this seeming paradox is not far to seek. So far from
preserving specific biographical data like the true royal hymns, these
cultic hymns allude to the king, when at all, only in the most general
terms. The royal name is, in fact, of such secondary importance in
these contexts that it is very often abbreviated almost beyond the point
of recognition.78 It may well be that such abbreviations, or the generic
term for king (lugal), once substituted for the proper name, freed the
composition of any vestige of historical or political particularism and
smoothed its entry into the general curriculum. And another genre
used in this connection, the antiphonal song (bal-bal-e), provides yet
another model for the same process: the antiphonal song for Inanna
which, in a Louvre version, invokes blessings on Ishme-Dagan of Isin,79
in a Yale version substitutes a reference to Dumuzi, suggesting that it
was suitable for any king performing the role of Dumuzi in the sacred
marriage rite.80
For such reasons, then, the royal hymns of “Type A” survived longer
than those of “Type B,” but not by much. The libraries of the first
millennium have not preserved cultic compositions with the traditional
generic labels (tigi, adab, bal-bal-e, šìr) with one apparent exception: a
tigi-song for Ninurta mentioned on a small fragment from the library
of Assurbanipal at Nineveh.81 But this exception only proves the rule,
for the fragment involved has been successfully joined to five others
76 SKIZ, No. *31, edited on pp. 10–17, and see p. 58, n. 16; Falkenstein, ZA, Vol. 49,
p. 88, No. 2 and n. 2; Hallo, in BiOr XXIII 242 and n. 44, here: III.3.
77 There is, for example, no trace of the Laws of Lipit-Ishtar in copies of post-Old-
Babyionian date. The only Isin kings recalled in the late historical tradition are Irra-
imitti and Enlil-bani.
78 Hallo, “The Road to Emar,” JCS XVIII (1964) 67, n. 11. Add possibly the spelling
Sa (for Samsu-iluna) in a literary catalogue (UET V, No. 86, entry No. 6) according to
Bernhardt and Kramer, in WZJ, Vol. 6, p. 394, n. 4.
79 SKIZ, No. *18, edited on pp. 21–29.
80 Hallo, in BiOr XXIII 244–245, here: III.3.
81 Ibid., p. 242 with notes 35 f., referring to S. Langdon, BL, No. 97.
published in the same volume82 on the basis of a comparison with an

Old Babylonian duplicate from Nippur published in 1967.83 And the
two versions, whose breaks can be largely restored with each other’s
help, prove that the late text is a reliable copy from the older one (or
from a duplicate of it), and that we may in essence accept the state-
ment of its colophon which can be restored on the basis of parallels to
read “[copy] of Nippur written out according to its old prototype and
[checked against the original].” We need only correct the subscript:
it should have read tigi-song for Nintu, not Ninurta. The hymn thus
recovered, nearly in its entirety, is interesting in its own right: it apos-
trophizes Nintu, patroness of childbirth, for putting her talents at the
disposal of Enlil by giving birth to the high priest and the king,84 so
that the “chief executive” of the gods can assign these offices to his
favorite mortals.85 This is the traditional ideology of kingship, already
on the wane when the Old Babylonian copy was written.86 Yet the neo-
Assyrian copyist resurrected the tigi-genre which was its vehicle and,
more than a millennium later, copied the text with all the accuracy and
objectivity that a modern Assyriologist would bring to the task. This
example allows us to derive a more general principle: that the redis-
covery of lost texts may be added to the preservation or adaptation of
surviving texts as means whereby the literary heritage of the third and
second millennia passed into the first within Mesopotamia.87
82 BL, Nos. 95, 102, 107, 111, 127: my letter of February 17, 1969, to Dr. Sollberger,
who confirmed the joins by letter of February 26, 1969.
83 TMH NF IV (1967) No. 86; cf. Sjöberg, in Or, n.s., Vol. 38 (1969) p. 355, who
independently identified this text with four of the Langdon fragments.

84 Assuming that lagal/lagar is a mistake for lugal in the Old Babylonian version;
so Gertrud Farber-Flügge, Der Mythos “Inanna und Enki” (StP, Vol. 10 [1973]). The neo-
Assyrian copyist mistook the sign for si; see my forthcoming edition of the text.
85 An edition of the combined text is in preparation. Here: V.3.
86 For the unique addition of a prayer for the ruling king at the end of a late bilingual
šu-íl-la composition, see J.S. Cooper, “A Sumerian šu-íl-la from Nimrud with a Prayer
for Sin-šar-iškun,” Iraq XXXII (1970) 51–67, For other late bilingual and Akkadian
hymns, prayers and rituals of various kinds with blessings for reigning (neo-Assyrian)
kings, see, e.g., W. von Soden in Falkenstein and Von Soden, Sumerische und akkadische
Hymnen und Gebete (Zurich, 1953) passim; more recently R. Borger, “Baurituale,” in
M.A. Beek, et al., eds., Symbolae. . . de Liagre Böhl (Leiden, 1973) pp. 50–55.
87 On the implications of this principle, also for comparative biblical studies, see my.
“Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics” in Byron L. Sherwin, ed., Perspectives in Jewish

Learning V (Chicago, 1973) 1–12, here: I.3. See also below, note 96, for an example of
an Old Babylonian literary text rediscovered and copied (according to its colophon) in
neo-Babylonian times.
The literary histories we have traced to this point, selected from the
hymnic genres, already point to at least one useful generalization: al-
though the original creative impulse most often arose out of and in
response to a specific historical situation, the long process of canoniza-
tion (that is, the incorporation of the text in fixed form in the generally
accepted curriculum of the scribal schools) tended to suppress allusions
to these situations. If a composition resisted such sublimation or ide-
ological updating, it tended to disappear from the canon. Thus, the
history of Sumerian hymnography repeatedly illustrates the conversion
of history into myth or, more generally, the triumph of religious over
historical interests. The same process can be seen at work in the var-
ious kinds of prayer in Sumerian. This is not the place to repeat the
long history of individual prayer in Sumerian, which has been traced
elsewhere,88 nor that of collective prayer as illustrated by the “con-
gregational laments.”89 Suffice it to say that both histories involve the
transformation of specific petitions or celebrations of particular one-
time occasions into recurrent cultic services or commemorations. Con-
sistent with the increasingly cultic orientation of Sumerian literature in
the first millennium, the corpus of laments and prayers, both individ-
ual (ér-šà-hun-gá) and collective (balag, ér-šem-ma, šu-íl-la), tended not
only to preserve material dating as far back as the very beginning of the
second millennium90 but also to grow by imitation and new additions to
the very end of the first.91
Nor is this the place to review the arguments recently advanced
in favor of the oral prehistory of much of Sumerian literature, based
inevitably, as they largely are, on a combination of hypotheses and
analogies from later, in part much later, world literature.92 Rather, the
object here, while remaining within the limits of the written evidence,
is to extend the scope of the inquiry beyond the confines of canonical
literature in order to gain a fuller picture of both the creative impulse
and the process of canonization. Elsewhere, I have already assembled
88 Hallo, “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition,” JAOS,
Vol. 88 (1968) pp. 71–89, here: IV.1.

89 SKly; R. Kutscher, “A-ab-ba hu-luh-ha: The History of a Sumerian Congrega-
tional Lament” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966; to appear as YNER, Vol. 6).
90 J. Krecher, “Zum Emesal-Dialekt des Sumerischen,” HSAO, p. 88, and “Die
sumerischen Texte in ‘syllabischer’ Orthographie,” ZA, Vol. 58 (1967) pp. 19–22 ad

NFT, Nos. 202–212.
91 M.E. Cohen is preparing new editions of the balag and ér-šem-ma compositions.
92 See especially Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream.
some of the evidence to show the large variety of monumental genres

which found their way into the canon, among them cadastres, law
codes and royal inscriptions.93 (The copying of such monuments from
the original steles is now in fact known to have been a prescribed part
of the scribal curriculum.)94 And I used this evidence to argue that
the typical royal, divine and temple hymn may often go back to a
monumental origin as well. Indeed, this origin is implicit or explicit in
a growing number of cases.95 Even incantations on occasion originated
on “stone steles.”96
What deserves special attention at this time, however, is the creation
of canonical literature out of archival prototypes. On the most basic
level, this involved the orderly abstraction of lexical entries, grammat-
ical forms and legal formulations from documentary sources to form
the core of the perennial cuneiform lexical tradition. This was then
assimilated to the hymnic genre by the simple device of appending
a concluding doxology addressed to Nisaba (and sometimes her con-
sort Haia) as divine patron(s) of the scribal art. While the meaning of
zà-mí in this connection is closer to “glory” or “praise” (Akk. tanittu)
than to “hymn” (Akk. sammû),97 the generic connotation may not have
been totally excluded, for example, at the end of various collections
of model contracts.98 These contracts with their specific tallies, prices
and personal names strongly suggest that they were copied from actual
archives. They differ from functional documents only in two respects:
they are arranged on “Sammeltafeln” in a conscious order, probably
for didactic purposes, that foreshadows later compendia of legal for-
mulations such as ana ittišu; and they substitute for the original list of
witnesses and date the notations “its witnesses, its date (literally: year).”
These clues help to illuminate the evolution of somewhat more gen-
uinely literary genres, such as the collections of letters and related docu-
ments. Whether dealing with the royal houses of Ur, Isin or Larsa, they
93 In CRRA XVII 121, here: I.2.

94 Sjöberg, “In Praise of the Scribal Art,” JCS XXIV (1972) 129 ad “Examination
Text D,” 1. 15.
95 E.g., UET VIII, Nos. 62, 65 and 79, with Sollberger’s comments in the Descrip-
tive Catalogue.
96 B. Alster, “A Sumerian Incantation against Gall,” Or. n.s., Vol. 41 (1972) pp. 349–
358.
97 Both equivalents are attested; see H. Hartmann, Die Musik in der sumerischen Kultur
(Frankfurt, 1960) pp. 71–73.

98 Ist.Ni. 10194, 10570. Differently NBC 7800: til[sic]-la dNisaba ù dHa-ià (cf. YOS I,
No. 28 end: ti-la dNisaba ù dHa-ià). An edition of the whole genre is in preparation.
concentrate on a single thread of interest running through them. In the

Ur correspondence, this is the relation of the king to one of his high
officials,99 in that of Isin, the dispute with Larsa over water rights,100
in that of Larsa a variety of political and personal problems involv-
ing chiefly Sin-iddinam and Rim-Sin.101 While these particular collec-
tions went out of fashion with the end of the Old Babylonian schools,
another survived: the corpus of “scribal letters” revolving around high
officials at Nippur in neo-Sumerian times was still taught at Ugarit and
Hattusha in the middle of the second millennium.102 The many proso-
pographic interconnections among these scribal letters, as also among
certain compositions usually classed with the wisdom literature (e.g. the
Message of Lu-dingira to His Mother and the Pushkin Elegies), suggest
that we have here the makings of, as it were, several novellas of fam-
ily life in aristocratic circles at Nippur; though perhaps never actually
put into this form, such novellas can almost be reconstructed with their
help.103
In much the same way, the Old Babylonian copies of neo-Sumerian
royal inscriptions seem to concentrate by preference on the “triumphal
inscriptions”104 of Shu-Sin of Ur as if in preparation for a connected
history of his campaigns in the East. In the event, this too proved to be
beyond the interest or capacity of Babylonian writers, and it remained
for Assyrian historiography to exploit the potential of the genre.
To sum up: even a cursory glance at the Sumerian texts defined in the
native sources as hymns shows the possibilities inherent in a histori-
cal approach to Sumerian literature. The approach could and should
99 The royal correspondence of Ur is the subject of a forthcoming Ph.D. thesis by

P. Michalowski (Yale).
100 See for now Letter Collection B in F.A. Ali, “Sumerian Letters,” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Pennsylvania, 1964). Cf. also M.B. Rowton, “Water Courses and Water
Rights in the Official Correspondence from Larsa and Isin,” JCS XXI (1967) 267–274.
101 Above, note 33.
102 J. Nougayrol et al., Ugaritica V (1968) 23, ad No. 15; cf. Krecher, “Schreiberschu-
lung in Ugarit: die Tradition von Listen und sumerischen Texten,” UF, Vol. 1 (1969)
pp. 131–158, esp. 152–154.
103 For a modern reconstruction, see e.g. Hallo, “The House of Ur-Meme,” JNES,
Vol. 31 (1972) pp. 87–95.

104 For this useful addition to the typology of royal inscriptions, see J.-R. Kupper, “Les
inscriptions triomphales akkadiennes,” Oriens Antiquus X (1971) 91–106; cf. E. Sollberger

and J.-R. Kupper, Inscriptions royales sumeriennes et akkadiennes (Paris, 1971) pp. 32–33. The
suggestion is criticized by G. van Driel, “On ‘Standard’ and ‘Triumphal’ Inscriptions,”
Symbolae. . . de Liagre Böhl (Leiden, 1973) pp. 99–106.
be extended to other broad categories slighted or ignored above. It

promises new insights and implications for all cuneiform literature and
for the history of literature in general. Here there is room only for a
general hypothesis about the periodization of the literary process.
Employing a variety of cultural criteria which cannot be defended in
detail here, the nearly two and a half millennia of Mesopotamian liter-
ary history referred to at the outset may be conveniently divided into
eight equal installments of three centuries each and labelled accord-
ing to their dominant cultural factor as follows (all dates are approxi-
mate):
2500–2200 bc Old Sumerian (OS)

2200–1900 bc Neo-Sumerian (NS)
1900–1600 bc Old Babylonian (OB)
1600–1300 bc Middle Babylonian (MB)
1300–1000 bc Middle Assyrian (MA)
1000–700 bc Neo-Assyrian (NA)
700–400 bc Neo-Babylonian (NB)
400–100 bc Late Babylonian (LB)
In order to fit the Sumerian component into this framework, one must
also take into account the bilingual and dialectal (Emesal) traditions,
which directly reflect Sumerian models, and the unilingual Akkadian
tradition, which often reflected them indirectly. Nor should one lose
sight of the possible existence, at all times, of an oral tradition. All these
traditions deserve fuller study in their own right.105 I have previously
suggested four distinct canons of cuneiform literature, of which three
involved Sumerian;106 the examples given above may now be used as a
starting-point to elaborate on the suggestion.
105 Dialectal Sumerian has been studied in some detail by Krecher: SKly; in HSAO,
pp. 87–110; in ZA, Vol. 58, pp. 16–65; “Die pluralischen Verba für ‘gehen’ und ‘ste-
hen’ im Sumerischen,” WO IV (1968) 252–277; “Verschlusslaute und Betonung im
Sumerischen,” Lišān mithurti (AOAT, Vol. 1 [1969]) pp. 157–197. On Sumero-Akkadian
˘ W. von Soden, Zweisprachigkeit in der geistigen Kultur Babyloniens
bilingualism, see in general
(Vienna, 1960). For the earliest Akkadian literary originals, see Hallo and Simpson, The
Ancient Near East, p. 62, n. 68; and add now the alleged prototype of “A Naram-Sin Text
Relating to Nergal” edited by W.G. Lambert, BiOr XXX (1973) 357–363. For what may
be the earliest monumental text in Akkadian, see Sollberger’s remarks on UET VIII,
No. 2 (p. 1). The text AO 5477, described by F. Thureau-Dangin (RA VIII [1911] 139) as
the oldest bilingual, is a copy of a Sargonic monumental text, probably of Old Babylo-
nian date; see H. Hirsch, “Die Inschriften der Könige von Agade,” AfO XX (1963) 13,
sub Rimuš b 12 (2).
106 Hallo, in JAOS, Vol. 88, p. 72, here: IV.1 and JAOS, Vol. 83, p. 167, here: II.1.
The Old Sumerian canon drew on the literature created from the
Fara period to the end of the high Sargonic age (ca. 2500–2200 bc).
This period included the pre-Sargonic dynasties of Lagash (Lagash I),
where the literary dialect achieved an early flowering as a vehicle
not only for monumental inscriptions but also for mythology and wis-
dom.107 This first canon was adapted in neo-Sumerian times which,
for literary and linguistic purposes, includes the late Sargonic or
Gudea period (Lagash II), the Ur III period, and the early Isin period
(ca. 2200–1900 bc.). The process of adaptation may be illustrated by the
expansion of the Cycle of Temple Hymns to include references to struc-
tures built under the Ur III kings (above). In Old Babylonian times
(ca. 1900–1600 bc), the portions of the Old Sumerian corpus deemed
fit to survive were given their final fixed form in the schools, that is,
the corpus became a canon in the limited sense in which the latter
term is employed here. In the process, some texts were already pro-
vided with translations into Akkadian. These early examples of (non-
interlinear) bilinguals, notably from the realm of wisdom literature,
include both proverbs and instructions (na-ri-ga) going back to Fara
and Abū Salāb
. ı̄kh. They are also (apart from lexical texts) the only Old
Sumerian materials that survived in any form after their canonization
in Old Babylonian times. The Kesh Temple Hymn, though of equal
antiquity, and the cycles of hymns attributed to Enheduanna in the
high Sargonic period are more typical of this corpus in that they did
not survive.
The neo-Sumerian canon preserved the creations of the neo-Sumeri-
an period (as defined above). Again some of the finest literary Sumerian
of the period originated at the court of Lagash, but Shulgi of Ur,
who claimed the founding of the great scribal schools at both Ur and
Nippur, was also a devoted patron of literature and the arts. In this he
was emulated by his successors both at Ur and among the early kings of
Isin. The rich materials of this neo-Sumerian corpus provided the bulk
of the curriculum for the Old Babylonian schools, which freely adapted
them in one of two ways. Either a received tradition, conceivably still
in oral form, was “modernized” to make it more congenial to the
current Nippur theology, as has been argued above for the myths about
Ninurta. Or, if the text was already received in fixed, written form, and
yet needed updating, as in the case of The Curse of Agade/Utu-hegal
107 Above, n. 61; see now Biggs, “Pre-Sargonic Riddles from Lagash,” JNES, Vol. 32
(1973) pp. 26–33.

sequence, it might be recast completely by a free rendering or loose

imitation in Akkadian. The same technique, whether the source or
the result of the concomitant beginnings of the Akkadian canon (see
presently), is illustrated by the earliest Akkadian episodic tales about
Gilgamesh, which go back to Old Babylonian times when the Sume-
rian versions were still being copied in the schools. The canonization
of the neo-Sumerian corpus presumably took place in Middle Babylo-
nian times, specifically during the period of the “First Kassite Empire”
(ca. 1600–1300 bc).108 This is the likeliest setting for the illustrious ances-
tors who were claimed as eponymous founders by the later scribal
guilds or families. It was also a time when Akkadian came fully into its
own, even assuming an international importance. Scribal schools as far
away as Hattusha, Alalakh, Ugarit, Megiddo and Amarna taught the
standard Mesopotamian curriculum.109 It was in these circumstances
that the neo-Sumerian corpus took its final form. We may picture the
Kassite scribes as weeding out whatever had failed to undergo suitable
adaptation at the preceding stage and providing the rest with a literal,
interlinear translation into Akkadian. At the same time they must have
begun to introduce such external structural features as chapters, sec-
tions, incipits, explicits and the like. The myths of Ninurta may again
serve as examples here, as well as the epics of Lugalbanda.
The Old Babylonian period, so active in both canonization of the
Old Sumerian heritage and adaptation of the neo-Sumerian tradition,
was not demonstrably a creative period in its own right, as far as Sume-
rian is concerned. True, new compositions clearly originated in this
period, for example, royal hymns and other genres involving the kings
of Larsa and, to a lesser extent, of Babylon. In the case of Larsa, one
may suspect a substantial contribution from Lagash, whose traditions
were somehow kept alive in Old Babylonian Larsa,110 and which thus
for the third time contributed significantly to the Sumerian literary
108 K. Jaritz, “Die Geschichte der Kassitendynastie,” MIO VI (1958) 202–225.

109 See Jerrold S. Cooper, “Bilinguals from Boghazköy,” ZA, Vol. 61 (1971) pp. 1–22;
Vol. 62 (1972) pp. 62–81, for examples of Old Babylonian unilingual Sumerian texts
provided with Akkadian (and sometimes Hittite) translations at Hattusha, as well as
examples of new bilingual compositions going back at most to Kassite times. In his
Introduction (ZA, Vol. 61, pp. 1–8), Cooper surveys the history of Sumerian literature
from this vantage point.
110 I hope to demonstrate this more fully in another connection. See for now Hallo
and Simpson, The Ancient Near East, pp. 92–93, and above, n. 30. See also Hallo,
“Choice in Sumerian,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University,
Vol. 5 (The Gaster Festschrift, 1973) p. 110.
scene. But the new texts are so completely cast in the familiar neo-
Sumerian molds that they represent the epigone of that canon rather
than the herald of a new one. The Old Babylonian period deserves
instead to be regarded as the source of the principal Akkadian literary
canon. Previously Akkadian had been considered fit only for admin-
istrative texts, for royal monuments (chiefly translations or imitations
of Sumerian prototypes), and for the merest handful of literary frag-
ments (see n. 105). Now, however, a whole new literary dialect was cre-
ated for Akkadian, and its products freed from excessive dependence
on Sumerian models.111 The resulting corpus probably followed a pat-
tern not unlike its Sumerian precursors, being adapted and greatly
enlarged in Middle Babylonian and especially Middle Assyrian times
and organized by fixed text and sequence in the great libraries of the
neo-Assyrian kings.112
There was, however, a final flowering of Sumerian literature, or
rather of bilingual texts. This is the corpus which Falkenstein has
described as post-Old-Babylonian (see n. 5) and which I prefer to
label simply post-Sumerian (see n. 106). It is readily distinguished from
the earlier canons by both form and content. Its language violates
many known standards of classical Sumerian and often reflects the
native Akkadian speech of its author when it is not in fact actually
a secondary translation from the Akkadian. It displays an increasing
tendency to employ dialectal (Emesal) Sumerian, even substituting it for
the main dialect of the ancestral text-type, as when the earlier letter-
prayers were replaced by the ér-šà-hun-gá laments. Religious texts in
general and cultic texts in particular assumed a dominant place in this
canon, with congregational laments especially prominent. This corpus
presumably originated after the fall of the Old Babylonian dynasty of
Babylon, when Sumerian scholars and scholarship apparently fled to
the Sealand, and the great scribal schools of Nippur and Babylon were
closed. But the Kassites, determined to assimilate the ancient culture
that they conquered, encouraged the new scribal guilds to take up the
111 See most recently Römer, “Studien zu altbabylonischen hymnisch-epischen Tex-
ten,” HSAO, pp. 185–199, JAOS, Vol. 86 (1966) pp. 138–147, WO IV (1967) 12–28.
112 Merely to illustrate the constant additions to this dossier: the Middle Assyrian
laws have hitherto been known only in copies from Assur of Middle Assyrian date
(ca. 1100 bc), but a fragmentary duplicate, presumably from Nineveh and presumably
of neo-Assyrian date, has now been discovered and demonstrates, for the first time, a
historical dimension for this particular tradition; see J.N. Postgate, “Assyrian Texts and
Fragments,” Iraq XXXV (1973) 19–21.
task, and the result, though inferior, kept some knowledge of Sumerian
alive for another millenium and a half. Although the intervening stages
are not clearly attested, it is this late bilingual corpus which served as
the canon of the very latest surviving cuneiform scriptoria in Uruk,
Babylon and perhaps other Babylonian centers of the Seleucid and
Arsacid periods.
With all due allowance for the shortcomings of such a schematic
representation, the above may be charted as a point of departure for
future refinements (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Tentative Periodization of the Canons of Sumer and Akkad.
Bilingual
Approximate Cultural Old Sumerian Neo-Sumerian Akkadian (Post-Sumerian)
Date (bc) Period Literature Literature Literature Literature
2500
Old Sumerian created
2200
Neo-Sumerian adapted created
1900
Old Babylonian canonized adapted created
1600
Middle Babylonian canonized adapted created
1300
Middle Assyrian canonized adapted created
1000
Neo-Assyrian canonized adapted
700
Neo-Babylonian canonized adapted
400
Late Babylonian canonized
i.4. toward a history of sumerian literature
100
81
Selection of Literary Works and Genres Cited
a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha Laments

adab-hymns lexical texts
ana ittišu Lipit-Ishtar laws
An-gim dím-ma Love songs
bal-bal-e hymns Lugalbanda epic
Curse of Agade lullabies
Descent of Inanna Marriage of Martu
Descent of Ishtar Message of Lu-dingira
Dumuzi texts Model contracts
Enki and Inanna Nanshe hymn
Enki and Ninhursag Nergal and Eresh-kigal
Enki and Ninmah nin-mah ušu-ni gìr-ra (see Ex-
Enlil and Ishkur altation of Ishtar)
Enlil and Ninhursag Ninurta and the Turtle
Enlil and Ninlil Pushkin Elegies
Enlil and Sud Rim-Sin letter-prayer
Enmerkar cycle royal correspondence
Exaltation of Inanna Rulers of Lagash
Exaltation of Ishtar scribal letters
Exploits of Ninurta (lugal - e) Temples of Sumer and Akkad
Flood narrative tigi-hymns
Gilgamesh triumphal inscriptions
Gudea cylinders Tummal history
Gudea statue inscriptions Ur-Nammu’s death and burial
Inanna and Ebih Utu-hegal inscription
in-nin šà-gurx-ra Weidner Chronicle
Kesh temple hymn
Bibliography
A useful survey of Sumerian literature, with some attention to historical con-
siderations, is provided by D.O. Edzard and Claus Wilcke in the sixteen articles
on as many different genres listed below; an earlier survey, by M. Lambert,
recognized fifteen major, but only partially comparable, genres. In English,
the material has been assembled at regular intervals by S.N. Kramer, notably
in the articles listed below. The standard chronology of Sumerian litera-
ture is that of Falkenstein, and I have dealt with various aspects of the sub-
ject.
Edzard, D.O. “Der Leidende Gerechte.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon IV, col. 1176–
1177. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Beschwörungen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2109–
2110. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Briefe an Götter und vergöttlichte Herrscher.” Kindlers

Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2110–2111. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Fabeln.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2116. Zurich,
1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Gebete.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2116–2117. Zu-
rich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Gesetzessammlungen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col.
2117–2118. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische historische Kompositionen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI,
col. 2118–2123. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Sprichwörtersammlungen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI,
col. 2150–2151. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Unterweisungen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2154–
2155. Zurich, 1965–1971.
Edzard, D.O., and Claus Wilcke. “Sumerische Mythen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexi-
kon VI, col. 2142–2147. Zurich, 1965–1971.
Falkenstein, A. “Der sumerische Gilgameš-Zyklus.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon III,
col. 804–807. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Inannas Gang zur Unterwelt.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon III, col 2475–
2479. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Zur Chronologic der sumerischen Literatur.” CRRA II 12–30. Leiden,
1951.
———. “Zur Chronologie der sumerischen Literatur, Die nachaltbabylonische
Stufe.” MDOG, No. 85 (1953) pp. 1–13.
Hallo, William W. “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature.” Israel Explo-
ration Journal, Vol. 12 (1962) pp. 13–26, here: I.1.
———. “The Royal Inscriptions of Ur: A Typology.” HUCA XXXIII (1962)
1–43.
———. “Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity.” JCS XVII (1963) 112–118,
here: III.1.
———. “On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature.” JAOS, Vol. 83 (1963) pp.
167–176, here: II.1.
———. “New Hymns to the Kings of Isin.” BiOr XXIII (1966) 239–247, here:
III.3.
———. “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu.” JCS XX (1966) 133–141, here: III.2.
———. “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition.” JAOS,
Vol. 88, pp. 71–89. Published simultaneously as AOS, Vol. 53. New Haven,
1968, here: IV.1.
———. “The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry.” CRRA XVII 116–134. Han-
sur-Seure, 1970, here: I.2.
———. “Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics.” In Byron L. Sherwin, ed.,
Perspectives in Jewish Learning V 1–12. Chicago, 1973, here: I.3.
Kramer, S.N. “Sumerian Literature: A General Survey.” The Bible and the
Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of William Foxwell Albright. Ed, by G.E.
Wright. Garden City, New York, 1961.
———. “Literature: The Sumerian Belles-Lettres.” The Sumerians: Their History,
Culture and Character. Chicago, 1963.
Lambert, M. “La littérature sumérienne, à propos d’ouvrages récents.” RA LV

(1961) 177–196, LVI (1962) 81–90, 214.
Wilcke, Claus. “Sumerische Epen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2111–2116.
Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Königshymnen.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2123–
2126. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Kultlieder.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2126–2135.
Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Lehrgedichte.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2135–2142.
Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Schulsatiren (Schulgedichte).” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI,
2147–2150. Zurich, 1965–1971.
———. “Sumerische Streitgedichte.” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon VI, col. 2151–2154.
Zurich, 1965–1971.
i.5
ASSYRIOLOGY AND THE CANON
The academic scene is rife with delicious ironies. In the midst of an

information explosion, largely of American making, we are warned to
beware of the closing of the American mind. In an increasingly secular
climate, the Bible is assuming a new centrality in literary study. And in
the face of growing disenchantment with established traditions of schol-
arship, new disciplines are clamoring for admission to the traditional
curriculum.
I would like to address all three of these paradoxes, but from the
perspective of Assyriology, a privileged sanctuary immune to scholarly
fashions, in the eyes of its practitioners, or an ivory tower blind and deaf
to the changes agitating other areas of study, according to its critics. But
defenders and detractors will agree that the cuneiform inscriptions, for
all that they may be an arcane and exotic specialty, also represent a
last refuge of the generalist. They cover half of the five-thousand-year
span of mankind’s recorded history, and for much of this “first half
of history” they constitute the main or even the only written sources
anywhere on the globe. These inscriptions span the whole spectrum
of human expression—from the minutest details of everyday record
keeping, through the res gestae of kings, to the kaleidoscopic concerns
enshrined in creative literature. And they do all of this on a scale quite
unsuspected by outsiders.
The cuneiform sources are precious clues to the origins of many
institutions that are with us to this day. Such everyday conveniences
and conventions as writing, the alphabet, the calendar, the week, and
the era-system of dating years all originated in the Ancient Near East.
Fundamental innovations, such as the domestication of plants and ani-
mals, the invention of pottery, the urban revolution, or the institution
of kingship are first attested there and frequently best documented
in cuneiform. Profound confrontations with such issues as life and
death, the nature of the divine, or the role of the individual were first
broached in Sumerian texts, or later those in Akkadian, Hittite, and
Ugaritic.
86 i.5. assyriology and the canon
Thus Assyriologists cannot afford to specialize. Few in number and

confronted by a daunting and still increasing body of texts on a bewil-
dering variety of topics and in a considerable diversity of genres, Assyri-
ologists must, like Daniel, master the “script and language of the Chal-
deans” (Dan. 1:4)—but beyond that prepare to follow wherever their
sources lead, from astronomy to zoology. At the very least, they must
seek the collaboration of specialists in other fields. They may therefore
be pardoned if they cannot themselves be specialists in all the periods,
genres, and topics of their diverse texts.
One of the areas where Assyriology provides a curious anticipation
of current concerns is precisely on the academic scene. Modern readers
may well wonder that the pre-classical world had an academe at all,
and indeed that word is of Greek origin, originally identifying the
groves of the heroic or divine Akademos in a suburb of Athens where,
in the fourth century, Plato and his pupils gathered to perpetuate the
Socratic method or, as enshrined in Plato’s imaginative reconstructions,
the Socratic dialogue. This involved a method of teaching that was
essentially obstetric—that is, by means of question and answer to draw
out of the pupil the dawning recognition of eternal truths. The Romans
therefore called this method of teaching educatio, which means literally
a nurturing or raising, as of plants and animals, but by assonance—
and perhaps by derivation—a “leading or drawing out.” The Greeks,
with their earthier view of matters, called it maieutike, meaning literally
the method of the midwife. In any event, it represented an essentially
spoken method of teaching and learning.
The older learning of the pre-classical Near East, however, was
essentially written learning. Whether in the hieroglyphics of Egypt or
the cuneiform of Mesopotamia, pre-alphabetic writing required the
mastery not of twenty or thirty signs, but of hundreds. There was no
royal road to this mastery. Rather, scribal schools were called for, com-
plete with large scriptoria where pupils took dictation on papyrus or
clay tablet. The very name for the scribal school in the cuneiform tra-
dition was “tablet-house” (or possibly “house of the A-tablet,” referring
to the first primer used in instruction). Such tablet-houses were spread
across the entire Near East, including Egypt, by the end of the pre-
classical age; thus we may legitimately confine ourselves here to the
cuneiform tradition (while admitting that the hieroglyphic tradition has
its own fascination).
The cuneiform tradition as handed down in the scribal schools and
in the scribal guilds that succeeded them was firmly anchored to a
i.5. assyriology and the canon 87
curriculum of written texts—or rather to several successive curricula,

given the millennial history of the tradition. It is possible to identify four
such curricula within ancient Mesopotamia. The two oldest were in the
Sumerian language, the next in Akkadian (a Semitic language related
to Hebrew and Arabic), the last in bilingual Sumero-Akkadian form. In
the rest of the Ancient Near East, these curricula were adopted along
with the cuneiform script, and often accompanied by translations into
the local vernacular or, as in Anatolia, by new curricula in the native
languages.
Within these chronological and geographical variations, the four cur-
ricula demonstrate a remarkable uniformity over wide stretches of time
and space. Thus, for example, the Old Sumerian lexical lists were used
to organize knowledge and propagate the newly invented cuneiform
writing system from the beginning of the third millennium on; they
are found as far from the Mesopotamian source of that invention as
Ebla in Western Syria in about the twenty-fourth century bc, together
with incantations, which represent some of the earliest literary com-
positions attempted in the new medium. Or again, the neo-Sumerian
hymns in honor of long-deceased rulers of dynasties, such as those of
Ur and Isin, were dutifully copied even in schools of such cities as Uruk
and Larsa, which had been their bitter rivals. Portions of the Akkadian
epics about Adapa (the Babylonian Adam?), Gilgamesh, and Sargon
were studied and copied in the middle of the second millennium as
far away as El-Amarna in Egypt, Megiddo in Palestine, and Hattusha
in Anatolia (modern Turkey). Sumero-Akkadian myths and lamenta-
tions about such age-old divine couples as Enlil and Ninlil or Dumuzi
and Inanna were still being translated with almost slavish fidelity to the
received text in the late first millennium bc. The use of cuneiform, by
now chiefly for astrology, came to its final end only in the first century
of the Christian era.
Such fidelity to and tenacity of a written tradition, or what has
sometimes been called a “stream of tradition,” commands our respect.
It also demands a descriptive label for that tradition, preferably the
translation of a native term in line with the widely advocated preference
for describing an ancient culture in its own terms. None such having
been identified in this case (unless it be pi ummani, literally, the mouth—
that is, authority—of the scholars), some Assyriologists have taken to
referring to the cuneiform literary tradition as a “canon”—or, better,
four successive canons—and to the individual texts that comprise any
one of these canons as canonical. Other Assyriologists have strenuously
objected. In Ancient Near Eastern studies, they argue, canon invariably

evokes the image of the biblical canon with its overtones of religious
authority.
A recent symposium at the National Humanities Center in North
Carolina devoted to “The Hebrew Bible in the Making: From Litera-
ture to Canon” wrestled with just this issue. Narrowly construed, the
biblical canon is indeed limited to those texts that any given commu-
nity of faith—Jewish, Catholic, Protestant—considers as of divine inspi-
ration and authority. But a broader concept of canon has also been
emerging in biblical studies—one that extends beyond divinely inspired
texts, indeed beyond biblical texts in much the same way that the tra-
ditional Jewish concept of Torah (literally “law, instruction”) grew from
identifying only the Pentateuch, then to the entire Bible (the “written
law”), ultimately to the whole range of post-biblical explication and
exploitation of the Bible (“the oral law”) in the Rabbinic academies
of the early Christian era. In Jacob Neusner’s words, “Each Judaism
defines what it means by the Torah, or the canon, and . . . various
‘Israels’ (groups of Jews) have defined their canons in diverse ways,”
Much the same could be argued of other faiths.
This wider sense of canon, then, would justify its application equally
to the cuneiform as to the Hebrew corpus. More to the point, it would
be in line with the original sense of the term that, once more, we owe
to the Greeks. The Greek kanon, originally a rod or bar, then a rule,
came in the sophisticated vocabulary of the great library and museum
of Alexandria, which were founded about three hundred years before
the Christian era, to refer to the accepted, authoritative collection of
books by any given author, and eventually the books—by whatever
author—that found a place in the library and in the curriculum of the
schools. We still speak today in this sense of the Alexandrian canon.
As applied to subsequent literature, the term canon has generally been
used in both of these meanings by literary critics. Thus the Chaucer
canon, for example, is generally understood to refer to those compo-
sitions whose attribution to Chaucer is beyond serious question. More
interesting, and certainly more under current discussion, is the other
meaning of the term. When critics and educators speak of “the canon”
today, they are referring to the whole body of writings that, by a kind
of common consent, constitutes the intellectual equipment of the edu-
cated person. In other words, they are once again equating canon and
curriculum, just as the Alexandrians did in the first place, and as some
argue the cuneiform scribes did before them.
The reasons why, in this usage, the concept of canon is the subject
of so much current discussion are at least twofold. One is that the com-
mon consensus has broken down. The canon may be equated with an
ideal curriculum—but the real curriculum, at least of the typical Amer-
ican college, has left it far behind. Critics of American higher educa-
tion, such as Allan Bloom, regard this discrepancy as an unmitigated
disaster. He would like nothing better than to see the curriculum once
more equated with the canon—and both of these equated with “the
Great Books.” By this he seems to mean essentially the great philoso-
phers, from Plato to Nietzsche, or to Heidegger. In spite of the wide
appeal of Bloom’s critique, it is unlikely that many universities will buy
his prescription, either in its general or its particular form. From the
Assyriologist’s point of view, it suffers from a double irony. For one,
it advocates the very technique of education that was the essence of
scribal training in the cuneiform tradition—that is, the close reading
of a common core of classical texts—while at the same time excluding
from this core every component of the cuneiform tradition. Secondly,
it implies the primacy of philosophy in education, when this is the one
humanistic discipline that truly had few or no antecedents in the pre-
classical world. Yet we have much to learn from the Ancient Near East
in such diverse disciplines as history, literature, religion, art, and even
science. One cannot deny a general disenchantment with philosophy—
in its modern guise as one discipline among many, not in its original
sense of the love of learning as such. The restoration of a canon or
curriculum limited to Plato and his epigones would not restore the
enchantment.
But disenchantment with the particular curriculum advocated by tra-
ditionalists does not necessarily entail a rejection of canon as such. On
the contrary, another school of critics of the current academic scene is
attacking the canon precisely because, presumably, it is worth reform-
ing and saving in their eyes. That is the second reason why the canon is
under siege today. The canon must in this view be changed, expanded,
opened in order to survive. It must cease to be exclusively Western,
male, elitist, and start to admit components of third world, feminist,
and black literature. From the vantage point of the Ancient Near East,
more ironies! The Near East belongs to the Western tradition—indeed
it is ancestral to that tradition, yet with the exception of the Bible is
routinely omitted in surveys of Western civilization or, what amounts
to much the same thing, is passed over quickly in the opening pages
of a survey or the first hour or two of a course. Assuredly pre-classical
antiquity and today’s students deserve better. A few illustrations must

suffice.
The figure of Gilgamesh is celebrated in lengthy poems in Sumerian,
Akkadian, Hurrian, and Hittite that evolved over many centuries into
an integrated epic narrative that is at the same time an essay on
the theme of human mortality—the frontiers, in effect, of the human
potential. Such was the appeal of the epic that ancient extracts from
it have been excavated at sites as far from Babylonia as Megiddo
in Israel and Hattusha, the ancient Hittite capital, in Turkey. The
appeal continues to this day, as attested by modern adaptations in
poetic or dramatic form. But Gilgamesh was only the latest and most
familiar of the semi-legendary rulers of the First Dynasty of Uruk (the
biblical Erech) to be celebrated in cuneiform literature. There are epics
about earlier members of the dynasty that describe their campaigns
against the rival city-state of Kish and the distant land of Aratta, the
latter located far to the east, in Iran or even Afghanistan. And there
are whole cycles of poems about Dumuzi, the ruler-turned-deity who,
as embodiment of the dying and reviving fertility of field, fold, and
orchard, was the subject of moving lamentations and, as partner in
the sacred marriage with the goddess Inanna, was the object of much
highly erotic love poetry.
Inanna was also celebrated in the world’s oldest non-anonymous
poetry—the work of a Sumerian poetess of the twenty-third century
called Enheduanna. A princess, priestess, and prophetess into the bar-
gain, this daughter of King Sargon of Akkad has left a considerable
body of compositions of a very high caliber—seventeen centuries before
Sappho. Her portrait has survived and her biography can be recon-
structed in outline. Her work is finding its way into modern anthologies
of women’s poetry, and it does not stand alone. Other Sumerian com-
positions, including dirges, lullabies, love songs, and letter-prayers can
be attributed to later princesses.
For the roots of black literature, we may turn to Egypt, which as-
suredly in one sense forms a part of the African tradition. A recent
New York Times Magazine article may have overstated the case when
it described “many of the words of Solomon” as “borrowed from the
black Pharaoh Amen-En-Eope.” In fact, Proverbs 22:17 through 24:22
are attributed by the Bible to unnamed “sages” (Prov. 22:17) and com-
pared by Egyptologists to the thirty wise sayings of Amen-em-Ope(t),
who was neither a pharaoh nor demonstrably black; there is even some
disagreement as to the direction of the borrowing. But the basic point
remains: if the curriculum is expanded to include a proper representa-

tion of Ancient Near Eastern literature, it can by that very fact begin to
open up to non-Western (or at least pre-Westem), feminist (or at least
feminine-authored) and black (or at least African) components.
In fine, for all its apparent and splendid isolation, Assyriology (along
with Egyptology) can contribute some suggestions for helping to resolve
the paradoxes with which we began. It can help open the study of the
biblical canon to the literary approach. It can help liberate the curricu-
lum from a too exclusive preoccupation with Greek philosophy and its
interpreters. And it can expand the canon—not only in ethnos, gender,
and race but also in time, providing the perspective of a continuous
literary and linguistic tradition that was already as venerable in Plato’s
time as Plato is today.
i.6
SUMERIAN RELIGION
The following study was originally presented to the annual meeting of the
American Oriental Society (Atlanta, Georgia, March 26, 1990). It was offered
for the panel on Sumerology organized by Jack Sasson in honor of the 100th
birthday of Benno Landsberger. It is here dedicated to the memory of Raphael
Kutscher, whose life was committed to religion and Sumerology in extraordi-
nary measure, but cut short far too soon after his 50th birthday. I am proud
to have been his teacher, and humble to have been his friend. (See Addenda,
pp. 110–111, for further updates).
Is there such a thing as Sumerian religion? Thorkild Jacobsen, arguably

our greatest living expert on the subject, does not seem to think so. His
seminal article of 1963 is entitled “Ancient Mesopotamian religion: the
central concerns.”1 And nearly twenty-five years later, his authoritative
Treasures of Darkness (1976) is subtitled: “a history of Mesopotamian
religion.”2 The implication is that the religion of Sumer, Babylonia and
Assyria is a seamless continuum and that language alone is no clue to
where one leaves off and the other begins.
An analogy of sorts might be the case of Biblical religion. While
there may be those who can delineate the border between “Israelite
and Judaean History” (to quote the title of a major work on the sub-
ject by John H. Hayes and J. Maxwell Miller, 1976), there are precious
few who can confidently say where Israelite religion ends and Judaism
begins (see Sperling 1986 for a recent attempt), and the standard histo-
ries of Biblical religion tend to be called the “History of Israelite Reli-
gion” whether by Yehezkel Kaufmann (1937–1956) or by Georg Fohrer
(1968). Certainly no one would venture to divide this particular con-
tinuum on linguistic lines, with Hebrew texts defining Israelite religion
and Aramaic texts Judaism.
When all is said and done, however, we are still left, on the Sume-
rian side, with more than just a linguistic phenomenon. If there is a
1 Jacobsen 1963, rep. in Jacobsen 1970: 39–46, 319–344.

2 Cf. also Römer 1969 (below, p. 94 n. 16).
94 i.6. sumerian religion
Sumerian language (eme-girx) there is also a Sumerian literature written

and transmitted by Sumerian scribes (dub-sar eme-girx);3 there is a land
of Sumer (ki-en-gi(r))4 and a governor (gar-ensi2) of Sumer at least as
early as the Fara period;5 En-shakushanna of the second dynasty of
Uruk (and perhaps Ur) is lord of Sumer (en-ki-en-gi);6 Lugal-zagesi
of the third dynasty of Uruk prevailed over “all the sovereigns of
Sumer” (bara2-bara2-ki-en-gi);7 Utu-hegal of the fifth dynasty of Uruk
claimed to have recaptured the kingship of Sumer (nam-lugal-ki-en-
gi-ra) from the Gutians;8 and beginning with Ur-Nammu of the third
dynasty of Ur, there is a king of Sumer (and Akkad) (lugal-ki-en-gi ki-
uri).9 There are citizens of Sumer (dumu-ki-en-gi-ra10 or dumu-gi(rx))11
and even sheep of Sumer (udu-girx or uligi) as contrasted with sheep of
the mountains or of the foreign lands (udu-kur-ra).12 In Claus Wilcke’s
felicitous formulation, no one would translate udu-girx with “sheep that
bleat in Sumerian.”13
All of these phenomena are lexically attested in Sumerian.14 They are
not mere abstracts imposed on the data by our modern imagination,
but realities grounded in native self-perception. They thus meet the
crucial test of what used to be referred to as the “phenomenology” of
the ancient Near Eastern world by Landsberger.
So why not a Sumerian religion? I will try to justify the reality of
that phenomenon here, even absent a clear lexical equivalent, and I
will do so in terms of the latest studies both of details and of the
ensemble, bearing in mind that such authorities as Jan van Dijk15 and
W.H.Ph. Römer16 have had no qualms about reconstructing a “Sume-
rian religion” and even tracing its history. It is the historical dimension
3Cf. e.g. Gordon 1959: 207 (4).

4RGTC 1 s.v. Ki"engi.
5 Ibid. (TSŠ 627 v 8).
6 Ibid.; cf. Hallo 1957: 4 f.; 1962: 7 with nn. 50, 52.
7 PSD B 141c.
8 IRSA 130–132; cf. Römer 1985.
9 Hallo 1957: 77–88.
10 Wilcke 1974: 216 f.
11 Ibid. 221–223, 230.
12 Hallo 1979a: 5 and n. 21.
13 “Da die Schafe nicht gut auf Sumerisch geblökt haben können”: Wilcke 1975: 42;
cf. Wilcke 1974: 218 f.

14 Gordon 1958: 72–75.
15 Van Dijk 1968; 1971.
16 Römer 1969 albeit in quotation marks (e.g. p. 118).
i.6. sumerian religion 95
that I too will seek to trace—not, however, ab ovo, but beginning at the
point where Sumerian religion can conceivably be distinguished from
Akkadian. I therefore pass over the archaeological and textual evidence
through Early Dynastic times, however suggestive it may be, and com-
mence with Sargon and the Sargonic period.
The founder of the Sargonic dynasty was at pains to wed Sumerian
and Akkadian traditions, including religious traditions. To this end he
equated his Semitic patron deity, the warlike goddess Ishtar, with the
Sumerian goddess of love and fecundity, Inanna of Uruk, and exalted
her to equal status with An, patron deity of Uruk and head of the
Sumerian pantheon.17 He also honored the shrines of all the great
deities, Akkadian and Sumerian, north and south. His programme was
spearheaded by his daughter Enheduanna for whom he newly created
the post of high-priestess of the Sumerian moon-god Nanna at Ur and
who, if her mother was in fact a Sumerian priestess as suggested in
the reconstruction of Enheduanna’s life and works, was well situated to
advocate her father’s programme in her mother’s language.18
The harmonization of Sumerian and Akkadian religious traditions
thus aimed at did not long survive Enheduanna. Although she appar-
ently lived and served as high priestess into the reign of her nephew
Naram-Sin, this grandson of Sargon had other aspirations. He was the
first Mesopotamian king to be deified. According to a revealing pas-
sage on the inscribed statue of Naram-Sin newly discovered in Bassetki
in northern Iraq, this deification took place in direct response to the
expressed wishes of the city of Akkad.19 But it brought two unexpected
religious consequences in its train. One of these was the disaffection of
Enlil who, as effective head of the Sumerian pantheon, issued a “com-
mand” or “word” from his shrine of Ekur in Nippur which, according
to a recent study by D.O. Edzard, led Naram-Sin, first, to a seven-
year suspension of all activity and, ultimately, to his fateful decision
to raze Ekur, thus bringing down the “curse of Agade” on his own
city.20 This succession of events, associated in the Sumerian literary tra-
dition with Naram-Sin himself, probably telescopes matters which took
17 For Inanna as lady of battle (nin-mè) in Gudea, see Steible 1989: 512. For new
evidence of the “elevation of the goddess” see Sjöberg 1988, esp. p. 166.
18 Hallo and Van Dijk 1968: 1–11. The full extent of Enheduanna’s “life and works”
has recently been characterized by Joan Goodnick Westenholz 1989.

19 Jacobsen 1978–1979: 12 and n, 45; cf. Hallo 1980: 190 and n. 18.
20 Edzard 1989; differently Jacobsen 1978–1979: 14.
much longer to transpire. Almost certainly the actual destruction of

Agade did not ensue for another 25 years at least, until after the death
of Naram-Sin’s son and successor, Shar-kali-sharri, and the period of
anarchy that followed.
But there was a second consequence of the deification of both kings
that has only recently been adequately recognized. By raising the king
to divine status, the Akkadians threatened that fine balance between
the secular and sacred power that the Sumerians had worked out in
the Early Dynastic Age.21 To restore the balance, the religious estab-
lishment as represented by temple and priesthood resorted to an inge-
nious stratagem: they invested the great gods with royal status! Two
steps were taken, if not at once then by late Sargonic or early Neo-
Sumerian times,22 to achieve this end. One involved a change in temple
architecture: the older “bent-axis” layout was replaced by the so-called
“straight-axis” design whereby the worshipper approached the cella of
the deity by a doorway now set in the shorter wall at the opposite end
from the cella, i.e. the temple assumed essentially the appearance of
the contemporary palace.23 The second change was intimately related
to the first: once arrived at the cella, the worshipper was confronted
by a life-size, seated statue of the deity looking for all the world like
an enthroned king! The emergence of the cult statue in Mesopotamia
has been carefully studied by Agnes Spycket and dated to the Sargonic
period.24 It was not, however, the consequence of the changes in temple
architecture, as she thought; rather, in my opinion, both developments
were reactions to the deification of the king.
The modifications of the “Spycket hypothesis,” which I have ad-
vanced in two recent papers,25 can be buttressed by appeal to two other
lines of art-historical evidence, relief and glyptic. For while surviving
examples of divine statues are few and far between, there is reason
to consider the seated figure of the deity on steles like that of Ur-
Nammu and on innumerable cylinder seals as representing, not some
kind of abstract conception of the divine, but a concrete image of
the cult-statue. And such images begin precisely in the high Sargonic
21 Hallo and Simpson 1971: 34–54.

22 For the date of the changes see Hallo 1983: 6 f., 1988: 59 f. and n. 37.
23 Hallo 1988: 59 f. n. 37; for a different sketch of the development see now Jacobsen
1989.
24 Spycket 1968; 1981.
25 Hallo 1983a; 1988.
period,26 i.e. with Naram-Sin.27 An alleged example of a standing statue

of a deity on a seal going back to the ED III period28 can be better
explained as the figure of a king, since it lacks a horned crown, and is
not necessarily a statue.
The ED III seal was cited by Jacobsen in a recent study which
reaffirmed his long-held opinion that two ED II statues from Eshnunna
represent deities, not worshippers. I have questioned that opinion both
in print29 and in previous meetings of the American Oriental Society
and will not repeat the counter-arguments here, but only add that it
is firmly rejected by Eva Braun-Holzinger in her authoritative study of
Early Dynastic votive statues.30
The conception of a deity as not just anthropomorphic but what
can best be described as basilomorphic31 can, then, be described as
a distinctly Sumerian reaction to the Akkadian experiment with royal
deification. The new conception survived even though the experiment
itself fell into temporary disuse and disrepute in the late Sargonic
period. And it had significant consequences for the Sumerian cult in
its own right.
In the first place, the divine statue became the focus of the sacrifi-
cial cult. That cult had originated, according to an imaginative aeti-
ology embedded in Sumerian epic, to justify and sanctify a supposed
switch from vegetarianism to meat consumption.32 But now the “con-
cept of consumption,” already well-developed at pre-Sargonic Lagash,33
was wedded to the concept of the anthropomorphic and basilomorphic
deity to create a new fiction: the notion that the statue of the deity
consumed the offerings, both meat and cereal, brought to the temple
by the faithful. What A.L. Oppenheim called “the care and feeding
26 For the concept of the high Sargonic period as consisting of the reigns of Naram-
Sin and Shar-kali-sharri see Hallo 1980: 191, 1981: 255. Cf. Charpin 1987: 94, who
considers the two reigns “la période ‘sargonique classique’.” Contrast Zhi 1989: 4,
where the time of Shar-kali-sharri is described as “the late Sargonic period.”
27 For the glyptic evidence see e.g. Boehmer 1964, 1965; Nagel and Strommenger
1968; Buchanan 1981.

28 UE III No. 387, cited Jacobsen 1988: n. 11.
29 1983a: 8 f.; 1988: 57 f.
30 1977. Note that the statues in question appear as nos. 1 and 2 in her survey of
votive statues. Cf. also her survey of Anzu-representations (1987) which notably omits
the figure on the socle of the male statue; she considers it simply an eagle with head
broken off (oral communication, 10-28-89).
31 Hallo 1988: 60 n. 39.
32 Hallo 1983b, here: VII.1, 1987b, here: VII.2.
33 Rosengarten 1960.
of the gods”34 became an elaborate charade of presenting these offer-

ings to their statues—and then distributing to the king, the clergy and
the favored worshippers what the statue graciously deigned to leave
uneaten. Both literary35 and archival36 texts aver that the deity con-
sumed the best part of the offerings, but we may doubt this. That the
offerings brought in and the distributions brought out of the cella bore
an uncanny resemblance to each other is not only inherently probable
but has been mathematically demonstrated, at least for Old Babylo-
nian37 and Neo-Babylonian times.38
Although now focused on the divine statues, the sacrificial cult was
readily extended to other physical elements of the temple precincts,
which acquired divine status in their own right as evidenced not only
orthographically (they began to be written with the divine determi-
native) but also by the naming of years after their construction and
the composition of hymns commemorating their dedication. Beginning
with the throne39 of the seated statue and proceeding to the deity’s
chariot,40 boat,41 bedstead and temple as a whole, the whole physi-
cal apparatus of the religious establishment thus participated in the
cult. Nowhere is this development more dramatically illustrated than
in offerings made not just at but to the temple gates of Ur, more partic-
ularly to their bolts.42 The evidence for this particular rite comes from
Old Babylonian times, in the form of “descriptive rituals,” as we call
the genre of archival texts which attests to the practice,43 but no doubt
reflects earlier usage as well.44
A second consequence of the emergence of the cult statue was its
employment in the so-called journeys of the gods. Such journeys in-
volved a kind of “courtesy-call” by one deity on another, perhaps
on an annual basis, either to receive the host-deity’s blessings on the
34 1964:183–198.
35 Hallo 1983b: 176 II.375 f. (níg-šu-du11-ga . . . dulo-ga-bi), here: VII.1.
36 Birot 1980: 146 (rēš šı̄rim).
37 Sigrist 1984; previously 1981, esp. 179 f.; cf. Hallo 1979b: 104 f.
38 McEwan 1983. Cf. now Beaulieu 1990 for the royal share of the divine left-overs
(rehâtu) in the first millennium.

39 Sigrist 1989: 501 seems to imply that only the deceased king’s throne received
sacrifices, but the god’s throne clearly did; cf. Schneider 1947.
40 Cf. e.g. Civil 1968.
41 Cf. e.g. the hymn Shulgi R, for which see now Klein 1990.
42 Levine and Hallo 1967.
43 Hallo 1990b, nn. 39–44, with previous literature, here: X.2.
44 Cf. e.g. Sigrist 1989: 501 and n. 4.
visiting deity and that deity’s city, or for other reasons.45 They were
recorded in “descriptive rituals” and celebrated or commemorated in
such compositions as “The Blessing of Nisaba by Enki” (nin-mul-an-
gim).46 Glyptic and other art also recorded the events.
Finally, the cult-statue became a natural addressee for petitions de-
posited at its feet or put in its mouth for transmittal to an even higher
deity. The literary genre which evolved to serve this purpose is the
letter-prayer, and I will not here enlarge on my extensive publications
of and about the genre,47 except to note that this function of the divine
(and royal) statue has now been traced as far back as Gudea.48
As the last-mentioned observation indicates, the royal statue shared
some of the emerging function of the newer divine statue. This is most
conspicuously so in the case of the statues of deceased kings. Deceased
royalty, including not only kings but their wives and progeny, had been
the objects of cultic offerings and other marks of veneration throughout
the Early Dynastic period, almost certainly in the form of statues,49 but
also of some of their accoutrements such as, notably, their thrones.50
But now the statues of deceased rulers were themselves deified, thus
conferring a kind of posthumous apotheosis even on kings who had laid
no claim to divine status in their lifetimes. Thus we find offerings to
the deified statues (lammassātu) of both Sargon and Naram-Sin as far
away as Mari in the Old Babylonian period51 and as late as the Neo-
Babylonian period in Sippar.52 A broken statue of Sargon was carefully
repaired and given offerings when recovered by Nabonidus.53 Similarly,
Gudea of Lagash, i.e., presumably, his deified statue, enjoyed offerings
under official auspices during the Ur III dynasty—even though that
dynasty had conquered his dynasty.54
How, then, are we to evaluate the Ur III dynasty in regard to the
questions raised here today? Did it in fact usher in a “neo-Sumerian
renaissance” as long averred but never adequately demonstrated and
45 Sauren 1969; Sjöberg 1969; Al-Fouadi 1969.

46 Hallo 1970a, here: I.2.
47 Cf. Hallo 1982 with previous literature, here: V.2.
48 Klein 1989, esp. p. 295 (C2); cf. Winter 1989: 581.
49 Hallo in press a.
50 Sigrist 1989: 501 with n. 7.
51 Birot 1980; cf. van de Mieroop 1989: 400 with nn. 55 f. For Manishtushu see Hallo
1980: 190 and n. 16.

52 Kennedy 1969.
53 Lambert 1968–1969: 7 11. 29–36.
54 Cf. most recently Winter 1989: 575 f. and n. 7.
more recently seriously questioned by Andrea Becker?55 Or does it

rather represent, at least in religious terms, a reversion to Sargonic, i.e.
Akkadian, precedent? After all, its second member, Shulgi, sometime
within the first half of his long reign of forty-eight years, allowed him-
self to be deified like Naram-Sin and Shar-kali-sharri of Akkad nearly
two centuries earlier.56 This time, however, the religious establishment
did not feel threatened. Assuming that the changes outlined above
had already occurred, its defenses were in place. By now, the religious
capital at Nippur rivalled the political capital at Ur in importance.
Nippur’s location midway between the Sumerian south(-east) and the
Akkadian north(-west) was ideally suited to reunite Sumer and Akkad
after the bare half century of petty-statism that had followed the death
of Shar-kali-sharri.57 The endorsement of its priesthood was crucial if
any king was to claim the restoration of the Sargonic imperial idea
and the resumption of divine status.58 This endorsement depended not
only on the ability to wrest Nippur itself from any other claimant, by
force of arms if necessary, but more particularly on the rebuilding and
maintenance of its great temples and the provisioning of its extensive
clergy. Ur-Nammu met all these requirements, as did his successors.
They were duly crowned in a ceremony involving both Nippur and
Ur, and a third city (Eridu or Uruk respectively) for good measure.59
A whole new literary genre, the royal hymn, was developed to cele-
brate these and other “sacraments” of the royal lifetime, including the
birth of the king, his marriage, his coronation, his major achievements
in war and peace, even his death and burial.60 Other hymns, though
ostensibly addressed to this or that deity, invoked divine blessings on
the ruler in their concluding doxology and at other key points of the
poem. This kind of royal hymn has long been traced to the immedi-
ately preceding “second dynasty of Lagash” and its most famous ruler,
55 Becker 1985.
56 Hallo 1957: 60 f.
57 Cf. below, p. 103. For the chronological assessment of the “late Akkadian” (or
post-Akkadian or Gutian) period see Hallo 1971: 713 f.

58 Hallo and Simpson 1971: 83. With reference to this concept, Wilcke 1974: 188
n. 30 wrote “Worauf sich die Ansicht W.W. Hallos . . . stützt, daß die Priesterschaft von
Nippur es Šulgi gestattet habe, die Göttlichkeit zu beanspruchen, weiß ich nicht.” The
answer (for now) is the evidence of the royal hymns; see Hallo 1963b, esp. p. 113.
59 Hallo 1966: 136, here: III.2; cf. now also Wilkinson 1986; Sigrist 1989. For the
critique of my position by Civil 1980: 229 see for now Hallo 1990a: 187.
60 Hallo 1966, esp. p. 135, here: III.2.
Gudea.61 More recently, it has been shown that not only the genre as
such but numerous details of its structure, contents, diction, and even
orthography were indebted to Gudea.62 But the neo-Sumerian kings of
Ur (and their successors at Isin) certainly developed both kinds of royal
hymn to their fullest potential. Partly to this end, they and in partic-
ular Shulgi patronized the scribal schools of both Nippur and Ur.63 In
addition, they created a unique system whereby all central provinces of
their Sumero-Akkadian empire assumed responsibility for the upkeep
of the Nippur shrines on a rotational basis tied to the calendar such
that each month was assigned to one or more provinces on the basis
of their ability to contribute from their agricultural wealth. That this
system can be aptly described as a “Sumerian amphictyony”64 I would
maintain against the recent reinterpretation by Piotr Steinkeller.65
Thus we can almost speak of a “concordat” by which religious and
secular interests—or, if one prefers, Sumerian religious traditions and
Akkadian political traditions—were kept in balance during the neo-
Sumerian period. As if to seal the entente, Ur-Nammu revived the
ancient Sumerian cult of the sacred marriage between the king rep-
resenting the god Dumuzi and the queen representing the goddess
Inanna, and rededicated it to the end of conceiving the royal heir.66
This at least is the testimony of the royal hymn, “Shulgi G,” com-
missioned by that heir to assert his own claim to divine status as the
offspring of a union consummated in the temple at Nippur in which
his earthly parents represented the divine couple.67 This particular
hymn, whose interpretation has exercised the ingenuity of half a dozen
Sumerologists, is soon to be definitely edited by Klein.68
A new threat to the entente was posed by the death of the aged
king and the succession of one of his numerous sons which may have
61 Hallo 1963b: 115, here: III.1. Note references to Gudea also in 11. 36–38 of the
great Nanshe-hymn for which see Heimpel 1981: 84 f.; Jacobsen 1987: 129 and n. 11.
62 Klein 1989. For another example of such intertexuality, cf. Gudea Cyl. A xii if,
(é u4-dè ma-ra-ab-dù-e, gi6-e ma-ra-ab-mú-mú) with the “myth of the Pickaxe” 1.36
(u4-dè al-dù-e gi6-(a) al-mú-mú) (ref. courtesy T. Frymer-Kensky).
63 Hallo 1989: 237 with n. 9, here: III.5; Klein 1989: 299 f. with n. 67.
64 Hallo 1960; cf. Tanret 1979.
65 1987, esp. 27–29.
66 Hallo 1987a, here: III.4.
67 The notion that he was already deified as (crown-)prince was refuted already in
Hallo 1957: 61 f. and n. 1.

68 See for now Klein 1981: 40 n. 72.
involved assassination of the former and usurpation by the latter ac-

cording to scattered clues in the later historiographic tradition.69 The
rightful heir, Shu-Sin, claimed divine status from birth in the later
literature70 if not in the contemporary inscriptions.71 He had already
served as vice-roy of Uruk and heir apparent in his father’s lifetime;
when he finally took the throne in his own right, he demanded more.
Hitherto deification of the king had meant only partial assumption of
divine status: the royal name was preceded by the epithet “divine” and
sometimes followed by a title such as “god of his country”;72 in the
iconography, the king and his kin were represented as wearing either
the horned cap or the flounced garment, but never both these hallmarks
of divinity.73 Above all, there was no worship of the living king as there
was of the statue, throne, and other memorials to the deceased king.
Shu-Sin, however, demanded just that. At least four temples were built
in his honor, in Lagash, Adab, Ur and Eshnunna, as we know from
their building inscriptions.74 These have exactly the form of building
inscriptions for temples to the gods, except that the deity’s name and
epithets are replaced by those of the king, and the name and titles
of the royal builder are replaced by those of the local governor! In
one case, moreover, we have more than just the building inscription:
at Eshnunna, the Shu-Sin temple itself survives. Its floor-plan perfectly
illustrates the accommodation of temple architecture to the earlier style
of palace architecture.75 It is probably no coincidence that Shu-Sin is
of all neo-Sumerian rulers the one most abundantly documented in the
literature of the sacred marriage and of erotic poetry generally.76
The fall of Ur at the end of the second millennium, and the suc-
cession of Isin to the hegemony of Sumer and Akkad did not at once
alter the terms of the concordat. But Sumerian was beginning to die
out as a spoken language. The unity of Sumerian religious traditions,
hitherto assured by the supremacy of the scribal school at Nippur and
its curriculum, became harder to maintain as the possession of Nippur
69 Michalowski 1977; Hallo in press b with nn. 79–94.

70 ANET 496.
71 Hallo 1957: 61 and n. 8.
72 Ibid. 56–62.
73 Cf. already Porada 1948: 35; van Buren 1952: 93, 101.
74 Hallo 1962: 18 with nn. 152 f.
75 Frankfort, Lloyd and Jacobsen 1940.
76 See e.g. Jacobsen 1987 Part Two: “Royal Love Songs,” esp. pp. 85–89, 93, 95 f.;
previously Kramer, ANET 496, 644; 1969: 92–95.

passed from Isin to Larsa and back again in the dizzying competition
between these two dynasties.77 As “the long peace”78 of the twentieth
century bc gave way, about 1897 bc, to the “period of the warring king-
doms” and of “maximum political turmoil”79 in the nineteenth, at least
three distinct ideologies or theologies began to compete in the Sumero-
Akkadian sphere.
I delineated these ideologies briefly in my presidential address to the
American Oriental Society, and more fully in the published version of
my remarks,80 so a summary may suffice here. The dominant ideology
remained that of Nippur, and was espoused especially by the first
dynasty of Isin, which considered itself the legitimate successor to the
third dynasty of Ur, as that regarded itself the heir to the first five
dynasties of Uruk. Since Uruk and Ur were the southern, or Sumerian,
counterparts to Kish and Agade in the Akkadian north, and since
Nippur formed the hub of Sumer and Akkad (in the words of the
Temple Hymns line 28 “your right and your left hand are Sumer and
Akkad”), this Nippur theology thus incorporated the traditions of all
four cities and claimed that they all merged in Isin. This viewpoint
is expressed most explicitly in the Nippur recension of the Sumerian
King List,81 and somewhat more subtly in the rest of the Nippur scribal
curriculum, replete as it was with myths about and hymns to all the
deities of the Sumero-Akkadian pantheon, beginning with Enlil, with
epics about the early rulers of Uruk and Kish, with copies of the royal
inscriptions of Akkad,82 and with compositions in honor of the kings of
Ur and Isin.
But as Isin’s control of Nippur was challenged by Larsa throughout
the nineteenth century, so too a rival ideology can be detected at Larsa
to challenge that of Nippur. Because it drew heavily on the traditions
of Lagash, Larsa’s ancient neighbor, it may be called the “Lagash
theology.” In this scheme, the deliberate omission of both Lagash and
Larsa from the Sumerian King List was made good in one of two
ways. Either an antediluvian section was prefixed to the Nippur version
and made to include a wholly spurious dynasty of Larsa,83 or a virtual
77 Loding 1973; Sigrist 1977; Frayne 1989.

78 Hallo and Simpson 1971: 87–92, esp. 92.
79 Ibid.; Hallo 1963b: 118, here: III.1.
80 Hallo 1990, here: X.2.
81 Cf. Hallo 1963a, here: IV.1.
82 On these see most recently Kutscher 1989 ch. 1; Oelsner 1989.
83 Hallo 1970b, esp. p. 63.
parody was created in the style of the Sumerian King List but limited
entirely to the “rulers of Lagash.”84 Myths and hymns were composed
in honor of such southern deities as Ningirsu and Bau of Lagash,
Nisaba and Haia of Umma, and Utu and Sherda (Aya) of Larsa.85 In
addition to royal inscriptions and royal hymns, a new subgenre of royal
letter-prayers was associated with the kings of Larsa.86
In the end, however, both the dynasties of Isin and Larsa bowed to a
third power, that of Babylon. And with them, the theologies of Nippur
and Lagash yielded to a third, that of Babylon. Marduk, the chief deity
of Babylon, became the son of Enki, the traditional rival of Enlil at the
head of the Sumerian pantheon, as his city Eridu was the ancient rival
of Nippur.87
We may therefore regard this third and latest ideology as the “the-
ology of Eridu.” In its conception of the King List, Eridu was the first
of all cities. In its mythology, Enki played the major role.88 More impor-
tantly, he became the patron of the age-old tradition of incantations,
which was taken over almost intact by later Babylonian tradition. It
may thus be said that, while the Nippur theology survived Old Baby-
lonian times only selectively, and Lagash theology not at all,89 the mil-
lennial Sumerian tradition of incantations and conjurations passed via
the Eridu theology into the Akkadian tradition of divination to pro-
vide these twin bases of the later Mesopotamian Weltanschauung.90
And with this merging of the surviving Sumerian religion into Akka-
dian tradition I beg rest my case.91
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Hallo, William W. “A Sumerian amphictyony,” JCS 14 (1960): 88–114.
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1979b)
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Hallo, William W. “Royal ancestor worship in the Biblical world,” Talmon AV,
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Hallo, William W. “The death of kings,” Tadmor AV, in press b.
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20–22.
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literary tradition,” Sjöberg AV (1989): 289–301.
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Kramer, Samuel Noah and John Maier, Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (Oxford
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1969): 1–8.
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(1967): 17–58.
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24 (1973): 47–50.
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precht-Sammlung Jena,” Sjöberg AV (1989): 403–409.
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textes présargoniques Lagaš (Paris: E. de Bocard, 1960). (= 1960b)
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by Michael Rowlands, Mogens Larsen and Kristian Kristiansen. (Cam-
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187–213.
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56–65.
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Orientalia 46 (1977): 363–374.
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Bibliotheca Mesopotamia 11, 1984).
Sigrist, R. Marcel. “Le deuil pour Šu-Sin,” Sjöberg AV (1989): 499–505.
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480–483.
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7 Abt, 1. Bd., 2. Abschnitt B Lieferung 2, 1981).
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AV (1989): 507–513.
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Rituals (= YOS 11, 1985).
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(1989): 397–401.
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of Nanna,” Sjöberg AV (1989): 539–556.
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Ancient Civilizations, 1989).
Abbreviations
ANET James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament (Princeton University Press, 1950; 2nd. ed., 1955; 3rd
ed., 1969).
AV Anniversary Volume
CAD The Assyrian Dictionary (Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, 1965–1989).
IRSA Edmond Sollberger and Jean-Robert Kupper, Inscriptions
Royales Sumériennes et Akkadiennes (Littératures Anciennes du
Proche-Orient 3), 1971.
Kantor AV Essays in Ancient Civilization Presented to Helene J. Kantor, ed. by
Albert Leonard, Jr., and B.B. Williams (= SAOC 47, 1989).
Kramer AV 2 Studies in Literature from the Ancient Near East. . . dedicated to Samuel
Noah Kramer, ed. by Jack M. Sasson (= AOS 65, 1984).
Kraus AV zikir šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus . . ., ed.
by van Driel et al. (= Studia. . . Scholten 5, 1982).
Pope AV Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin
H. Pope, ed. by John H. Marks and Robert M. Good (Guilford,
Ct., 1987).
PSDB The Sumerian Dictionary (University Museum of the University
of Pennsylvania, 1984), volume B.
RAI Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale.
RLA Reallexikm der Assyriologie.
RGTC Répertoire Géographique des Textes Cuneiformes (Wiesbaden: Dr.
Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1977 ff.).
SIC 2 Scripture in Context II: More Essays on the Comparative Method, ed.
by William W. Hallo, James C. Moyer and Leo G. Perdue
(Winona Lake, In., 1983).
SIC 3 The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature: Scripture in Context III,
ed. by William W. Hallo, Bruce William Jones and Gerald
L. Mattingly (= Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies 8,
1990).
Sjöberg AV DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed.
by Hermann Behrens et al. (= Occasional Publications of the
Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 11, 1989).
Speiser AV Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser, ed. William W. Hallo (=
American Oriental Series 53 and JAOS 88/1, 1968).
TSŠ Raymond-Piec Jestin, Tablettes Sumériennes de Šuruppak (=

Memoires de l’Institut Français de l’Archéologie de Stamboul
3, 1937).
UET III Léon Legrain, Ur Excavations Texts III (= Publications of
the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the
University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
to Mesopotamia, 1937).
U.P. University Press.
Addenda
p. 94 n. 13 Cf. now also Herbert Sauren, “Trois tablettes . . .,” OLP 20

(1989) 8 for a measure called sìla-eme-gi7.
p. 95 n. 25 For an extensive discussion of the issues, see now Gebhard J. Selz,
“Eine Kultstatue der Herrschergemahlin Šaša: ein Beitrag zum
Problem der Vergöttlichung,” Acta Sumerologica 14 (1992) 245–268.
p. 97 n. 27 Cf. now also Martha Haussperger, Die Einführungsszene (=
Münchner Vorderasiatische Studien 11, 1991) esp. pp. 69 f.
p. 97 n. 31 Cf. now A. Wendell Bowes, “The basilomorphic conception
of deity in Israel and Mesopotamia,” in The Biblical Canon in
Comparative Perspective: Scripture in Context IV, ed. by K. Lawson
Younger, Jr., William W. Hallo and Bernard F. Batto (= Ancient
Near Eastern Texts and Studies 11, 1991) 235–275.
p. 97 n. 32 For a measured endorsement of this interpretation, see now
C. Wilcke, “Lugalbanda,” RLA 7 (1987–1990) 117–132, esp.
pp. 122 f.
p. 98 n. 34 Akkadian formulations of the conception, late but telling, are
preserved in the Instructions of Shube-awilim (Hallo 1979:
105 f.; cf. now M. Dietrich, “Der Dialog zwischen Šūpē-amēli
und seinem ‘Vater’,” Ugarit-Forschungen 23 (1991) 33–68, esp.
pp. 48 f. top) and in the hemerologies’ “the king should set his
food offering (kurummassu.) before his god (and) goddess, and it/he
will be accepted, his prayer will be answered” (CAD I 273c, CAD
K 579c).
p. 98 n. 38 Moshe Eilat reminds me that “the remainder of the meal
offering” (e.g. Lev. 2: 3, 10) and “what remains of the blood”
(and meat offering) (Lev. 5: 9) are functional equivalents of the
rehâtu in the Levitical legislation of the Bible.
˘ a new edition of the relevant texts, and a critique of ours,
p. 98 n. 43 For
see Dominique Charpin, Le clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi
(Genève/Paris, Droz, 1986) 307–318.
p. 98 n. 44 On “deified” temples, cf. most recently D.T. Potts, “Notes on
some horned buildings in Iran, Mesopotamia and Arabia,”
RA 84 (1990) 33–40.
p. 97 n. 47 Add now W.W. Hallo, “The royal correspondence of Larsa:

III. The princess and the plea,” in Marchands, Diplomates et
Empereurs: Études. . . . offertes à Paul Garelli, ed. by D. Charpin
and F. Joannès (Paris, Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations,
1991) 377–388, here: V.3.
p. 99 n. 49 Now published in “Sha"arei Talmon”; Studies . . . Presented to
Shemaryahu Talmon, ed. by Michael Fishbane and Emanuel Tov
(Winona Lake, Ind., Eisenbrauns, 1992)381–401.
p. 101 n. 68 See now Jacob Klein, “The coronation and consecration of
Shulgi in the Ekur (Shulgi G),” Scripta Hierosolymitana 33 (=
Tadmor AV, 1991) 292–313; previously idem, “The birth of a
crownprince in the temple: a neo-Sumerian literary topos,” in La
Femme dans le Proche-Orient Antique, ed. by J.-M. Durand (= RAI 33,
1987) 97–106.
p. 102 n. 69 Now published in Scripta Hierosolymitana 33 (= Tadmor AV, 1991)
148–465.
p. 104 n. 86 See above, ad p. 99 n. 47.
p. 104 n. 88 Cf. already J. van Dijk, “Le motif cosmique dans la pensée
sumerienne,” Acta Orientalia 28 (1964) 1–59, for “le système
(théogonique) d’Eridu” (pp. 9, 11) and “la théologie d’Eridu”
(p. 11). Note also that Eridu replaced Nippur at the head of the
traditional list of cities, e.g. in the Cycle of Temple Hymns as
compared with the archaic zà-mí hymns from Abu Salabikh.
i.7
THE BIRTH OF RHETORIC*
Rhetoric, long thought of as an invention of classical Greece, has

for some time been held to have had a prior existence in ancient
Israel. A whole school of “rhetorical criticism” has grown up in bib-
lical studies since at least 1969,1 while individual scholars have ana-
lyzed specific biblical texts from a rhetorical perspective.2 Assyriologists
(and Egyptologists)3 have been somewhat slower to take up the chal-
lenge.
Some basic problems beset a rhetorical approach to cuneiform lit-
erature: how to distinguish fiction from nonfiction,4 how to identify a
usually unknown author,5 how to divine his (or her!)6 intention,7 how
to assess the impact on a presumed audience.8 Cuneiform literature
does not, as in the case of classical literature, provide us with a neatly
prepackaged corpus of theoretical prescriptions or practical illustrations
of the art of persuasion in public speaking. It does not, as in the case of
biblical prophecy, preserve impassioned orations inspired by firm belief,
addressed to the innermost circles of power, and transmitted in virtually
* This is an updated version of the chapter by the same name in William W. Hallo,
Origins: the Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Western Institutions (Studies in
the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 6) (Leiden/New York/ Köln: Brill,
1996), 169–187. For details of documentation, the reader is referred to this book, cited
hereinafter by short title (Origins), page and footnote number. (The original version of
this paper was presented to the First African Symposium on Rhetoric: Persuasion and
Power, Cape Town, July 12, 1994, Yehoshua Gitay presiding.)
1 Dozeman and Fiore 1992. Add especially Jackson and Kessler 1974.
2 Gitay 1981; 1991.
3 Michael V. Fox, “Ancient Egyptian Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 1 (1983), 9–22; John Baines,
“Feuds or Vengeance: Rhetoric and Social Forms.” Pp. 11–20 in Studies Wente (below,
p. 236) (1999).
4 Origins 169–170.
5 Ibid. 144–148.
6 Ibid. 262–270.
7 Pearce 1993.
8 Barbara N. Porter, “Language, Audience and Impact in Imperial Assyria,” in
S. Izre"el and R. Drory, eds., Language and Culture in the Near East (Israel Oriental Studies
15) (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 51–72.
114 i.7. the birth of rhetoric
stenographic transcripts by secretaries such as Baruch son of Neriya,9

whose seal impression, recently recovered (albeit from un-provenanced
context), lends new historicity and authenticity to Jeremiah’s words.10
The preserved literature of Sumer and Akkad would not yield read-
ily to the pioneering analyses of the prophetic art of persuasion by
Yehoshua Gitay,11 nor to the whole line of biblical exegesis that goes
by the name of rhetorical criticism,12 and that has most recently been
conveniently surveyed by Watson and Hauser.13 It would not answer
to “a forensic understanding” such as newly and effectively applied by
Edward Greenstein to the Book of Job,14 or to the narratological anal-
yses advanced by him15 and such other literary critics as Adele Berlin.16
It would not resonate to the combination of narratology and rhetorical
analysis championed by Meir Sternberg17 and Mary Savage,18 nor yet
to a novel thesis on the “power of the word” put forward by the late
Isaac Rabinowitz.19
The reasons for these negative assessments are inherent in the nature
of the cuneiform evidence, which differs fundamentally from both the
Classical and the biblical models. Whether we look at the literature
in Sumerian and Akkadian as I intend to do, or in Hittite and in
Ugaritic, each follows its own canons—and forms its own canons, as
we shall see. For all that, some tentative efforts have been made, in
the fairly recent past, to subject portions of the cuneiform canons to
rhetorical analysis. I will review them here briefly, before attempting a
programmatic statement of further possibilities.
It will not, I trust, be considered unduly immodest if I begin the
survey with myself ! In 1968, in collaboration with J.J.A. van Dijk, I
published a first critical edition of a Sumerian poem that we entitled
“The Exaltation of Inanna.”20 It is expressly attributed to the first
9 For this patronymic in the inscriptions see previously David Diringer, “Three
Early Hebrew Seals,” Archiv Orientální 18/3 (1950), 66–67; Emit G. Kraeling, The Brooklyn
Museum Papyri (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), No, 13:6.
10 Origins 146–147, n. 12 and 268; J.H. Tigay in COS 2 (2000) 197–198.
11 Above, n. 2.
12 Cf. above, n. 1.
13 Watson and Hauser 1993.
14 Greenstein 1996.
15 Greenstein 1981; 1982.
16 Berlin 1986; 1994.
17 Sternberg 1983; 1985.
18 Savage 1980.
19 Rabinowitz 1993.
20 Hallo and van Dijk 1968. Latest translation by Hallo in COS 1 (1997), 518–
i.7. the birth of rhetoric 115
non-anonymous author in Mesopotamian history, perhaps in all of

history: the princess Enheduanna (ca. 2285–2250 bce), known also by
other poetic works and by monumental remains.21 The poem’s divi-
sion into 153 lines represents a feature original to the composition,
for these line divisions agree in all of the poem’s numerous exemplars,
and the total is carefully counted in the colophon of at least one com-
plete recension.22 In our edition, we grouped these lines into eighteen
stanzas and three “rhetorical” parts and defended these groupings in
a literary analysis without claiming that they too necessarily repre-
sented “original feature(s) of the composition.”23 The rhetorical parts
we called “exordium” (or “proemium”),24 “the argument,” and “per-
oration” respectively and equated them with stanzas i–viii (lines 1–65),
ix–xv (lines 66–135) and xvi–xviii (lines 136–153). Fifteen years later,
I applied a similar rhetorical analysis to the first Epic of Lugalbanda
(“Lugalbanda in the Cave of the Mountain”).25
While these examples have not been widely followed, it is at least
worth noting that the term “proem” has been used to describe the first
two stanzas of another Sumerian hymn to the goddess Inanna in its
latest translation by Thorkild Jacobsen26 and the first three lines of an
Akkadian prayer to the god Nanna as translated by William Moran.27
And at the sixth biennial conference of the Rhetoric Society of America
held in May 1994 at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, a
paper was presented on “Enheduanna’s ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’:
Toward a Feminist Rhetoric.”28 The author of the paper, Roberta
Binkley, has since then completed a doctoral dissertation on this subject
at the University of Arizona.
To return to my survey, in 1973 Stanley Gevirtz found evidence of
“Canaanite rhetoric” in the Amarna letters. While heavily indebted
to West Semitic (Ugaritic and Hebrew) models, these letters at least
introduced rhetorical flourishes into Akkadian.29 In 1978, Adele Berlin
522. Latest edition by Annette Zgoll, Der Rechtsfall der En-hedu-Ana im Lied nin-me-šara
(AOAT 246) (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1997).
21 Hallo and van Dijk 1968, ch. 1. See in detail Origins 263–266.
22 Hallo and van Dijk 1968, 35.
23 Ibid., 45.
24 Ibid., 53.
25 Origins 172, n. 145.
26 Jacobsen 1987: 113.
27 Moran 1993: 117; cf. below, at note 39.
28 Origins, n. 148.
29 Stanley Gevirtz, “On Canaanite Rhetoric: the Evidence of the Amarna Letters
explored “shared rhetorical features in biblical and Sumerian litera-

ture.”30 She was not concerned with any one composition or genre,
but with the whole gamut of Sumerian poetry, and particularly with a
feature it shares with biblical poetry, namely parallelism. Within this
broader technique, she noted especially two rhetorical features, one
“the particularizing stanza” and the other an ABAB word order pat-
tern.
In his 1980 dissertation, Robert Falkowitz chose to define rhetoric
still more widely. Rather than the prevalent classical definition of rhet-
oric as the art of persuasion in oratory, he preferred the medieval con-
ception in which rhetoric formed a trivium, with grammar and dialec-
tic, within the seven liberal arts, and as such applied to poetry and
epistolography as well as to preaching. It was, in short, intended to
inculcate the ability to communicate in a lofty idiom distinct from com-
mon parlance, let alone colloquialism,31 and was therefore a proper
subject of instruction in the schools. By this criterion, the curriculum
of the scribal schools of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia could likewise
be described as an exercise in rhetoric. That curriculum first required
the Akkadian-speaking students to master the intricacies of cuneiform
writing and the basic vocabulary of Sumerian by means of primers con-
stituting syllabaries and vocabularies. But it then went on to connected
texts in Sumerian and these typically began with the proverb collec-
tions, which Falkowitz accordingly renamed “The Sumerian Rhetoric
Collections.”32
Piotr Michalowski uses rhetoric almost synonymously with stylistics
in discussing negation as “a rhetorical and stylistic device.”33 Historians
of Mesopotamian art have expanded the definition even more, freeing
rhetoric of its verbal associations entirely—for better or worse—and
extending it to the realm of nonverbal communication.34
More recent studies have tended to return to a narrower definition
of rhetoric and to its epistolary setting. Thus Jack Sasson has singled
out the emissaries of Zimri-Lim, the Old Babylonian king of Mari
from Tyre,” Orientalia 42 (1973), 162–177. For some of these models, cf, Moshe Held,
“Rhetorical Questions in Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew,” Eretz-Israel 9 (1969), 71–79.
30 Berlin 1978.
31 See below at notes 39–44 and 129.
32 Falkowitz 1982.
33 Piotr Michalowski, “Negation as Description: the Metaphor of Everyday Life in
Early Mesopotamian Literature,” Aula Orientalis 9 (1991), 134.

34 Winter 1981.
(ca. 1780–1760 bce) for reporting to their sovereign “individually, mas-

sively, and often.” Their letters “contain dozens of long lines and, in
rhetoric, can match the best of biblical prose, full of vivid phrasing,
lively pacing, and a terrific sense of structure.”35 Richard Hess has stud-
ied the longest letter of the many sent by the Egyptian pharaoh at
Amarna to his restless vassals in Asia during the Amarna period, He
concludes that its elaborate argument and stylistic sophistication con-
stitute “a creative use of rhetorical persuasion in order to counter the
arguments of a vassal and set forth the pharaoh’s case.”36 He has also
applied rhetorical standards to the Amarna letters from Shechem and
Jerusalem.37
Kirk Grayson has termed Assyrian rhetoric a “conquering tactic,”
citing both biblical and Assyrian evidence.38 Moran documents the
classical preference for “the plain style” or what in Greek is called
ho ischnos charactér and in Latin subtilis oratio or genus tenue to signal its
use in an Old Babylonian prayer to the moon-god.39 This plain style
should not, however, be confused with colloquialism. Moran regards
the justly famous letter of a schoolboy to his mother (Zinu) as probably
showing “colloquial speech” in Akkadian.40 It has also been detected
in Sumerian, both in wisdom literature41 and in an incantation,42 in
Akkadian depositions in court,43 and in biblical Hebrew.44
The most recent attempt to apply the canons of classical rheto-
ric to cuneiform literature is also the most massive one. In a doctoral
35 Jack M. Sasson, “The King and I: a Mari King in Changing Perceptions,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society 118 (1998), 458; For an example from the third millennium,
cf. Benjamin R. Foster, “The Gutian Letter Again,” N.A.B.U. 1990:31, No. 46.
36 Hess 1990.
37 Richard Hess, “Smitten Ant Bites Back: Rhetorical Forms in the Amarna Corre-
spondence from Shechem,” in J.C. de Moor and W.G.E. Watson, eds., Verse in Ancient
Near Eastern Prose (AOAT 42, 1993) 95–111; idem, “Rhetorical Forms in the Amarna
Correspondence from Jerusalem,” Maarav 10(2003), 221–244.
38 A.K. Grayson, “Assyrian Rule of Conquered Territory in Ancient Western Asia,”
CANE 2 (1995), 961; for the parallel see already H.W.F. Saggs, Iraq 17 (1955), 47; 18
(1956), 55; Hallo, “From Qarqar to Carchemish: Assyria and Israel in the Light of New
Discoveries,” BASOR 23 (1960), 59.
39 Moran 1993; cf. Origins 173, n. 155.
40 ANET 629.
41 Hallo 1979, here: VIII.2; cf. Ibid., n. 157.
42 Hallo 1985, here: IX.1; cf. Ibid., n. 158.
43 Hallo, “The Slandered Bride,” in R.D. Biggs and J.A. Brinkman, eds., Studies
Presented to A. Leo Oppenheim (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1964), 96–97. For bı̄ innam as “a
colloquialism” or “an idiomatic locution” see CAD A/1:377d and B 216 f. respectively.
44 Below, n. 130.
dissertation written at the Hebrew University under the direction of

Aaron Shaffer, Nathan Wasserman has discussed Syntactic and Rhetorical
Patterns in Non-Epic Old-Babylonian Literary Texts (1993). In nine chapters,
he treated in detail the techniques of hendiadys, merismus, rhyming
couplets, geminatio, gradatio, hypallage, enumeratio, the hysteron-
proteron sequence, zeugma sentences and extraposition sentences. Ten
years later, he published an expanded version of the first three phenom-
ena, adding epic texts and discussions of similes (cf. already Wasser-
man 2000) and two other rhetorical devices which he identified by
their Akkadian and Arabic names as damqam-inim and tamyiz respec-
tively (Wasserman 2003).
One should also take note of some recent studies that investigate
essentially rhetorical aspects of cuneiform literature without actually
using the term. Thus Dietz Edzard has dealt with monologues in Akka-
dian literature.45 Laurie Pearce has addressed the question of autho-
rial intention, or “why the scribes wrote.”46 Barbara Porter has raised
the issue of “impact on a presumed audience” with respect to neo-
Assyrian royal inscriptions.47 The possible Mesopotamian background
of specifically political rhetoric has been investigated by Claus Wilcke
for older Babylonia and by Peter Machinist for later Assyria. Wilcke
regards “rhetorical forms” as just one subject among many others
in the scribal-school curriculum, which he, like me, equates with the
“canon” (pp. 66 f.); Machinist alludes to rhetoric early and often (pp. 77,
88, 103) and defends the wider sense of “political” (pp. 103 f. and
383 f.).48
Even this hasty survey, which has undoubtedly sinned by omission,
suggests that there are, after all, some potential insights to be gained
by a rhetorical approach to cuneiform literature. In what follows, I will
attempt to identify some other directions that this approach might use-
fully take. I will not stop to dwell on the peculiarities of cuneiform doc-
umentation, except to emphasize at the outset how it can best be classi-
fied.49 Using both formal and functional criteria, it can be divided into
45 Edzard 1990.
46 Pearce 1993.
47 Above, n. 8.
48 C. Wilcke, “Politik im Spiegel der Literatur, Literatur als Mittel der Politik im
alteren Babylonien,” in Kurt Raaflaub, ed., Anfänge politischen Denkens in der Antike,
(Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 24, 1993), 29–75; P. Machinist, “Assyri-
ans on Assyria in the First Millennium bc,” ibid., 77–104.
49 For the most recent defense of my taxonomy, see Hallo in COS 2 (2000), xxi–xxii.
archives, monuments, and canons. Archives include a vast corpus of

letters, accounts, contracts, and other documents of daily life preserved
on clay tablets in the hundreds of thousands and constituting some 80
percent of the surviving documentation. Although they play a crucial
role in the reconstruction of ancient society and of the well-springs
of our own contemporary institutions, these documents—sometimes
disparagingly referred to by Assyriologists as “laundry lists”—qualify
for rhetorical analysis only in the case of certain letters.50 A smaller
corpus—perhaps 10 percent of the documentation—consists of royal
and other inscriptions that serve us as building blocks in the recon-
struction of ancient history. Such texts are typically inscribed on mon-
uments and can be regarded as “monumental.” In the best of circum-
stances, such as the royal inscriptions of the neo-Assyrian empire, they
may qualify as examples of rhetoric.51 The remaining 10 percent of the
documentation—inscribed on clay surfaces of various shapes and often
recovered in multiple copies—is literary in the broad sense of the term
and has its place in the formal curriculum of the scribal schools where,
after the primers and the proverbs referred to earlier, the students
learned to read and copy out the entire received canon of Sumerian
(and later Akkadian) texts of diverse genres that creatively captured the
whole range of human experience and the reaction of human beings to
the world about them. These texts were literary in the narrower sense
but not by any means always belletristic, for they included religious, sci-
entific, philological, and other genres not intended simply to edify or to
entertain but first of all to educate. Since the curriculum embodied at
any given time all those texts—and only those texts—that were thought
necessary and proper to this pedagogic end, I have argued long and
hard in favor of labelling these texts as “canonical” and their totality at
any given period of history as the canon of that era.52 I would now be
prepared to suggest that they might equally well be labelled “rhetori-
cal,” using that term in the broader, medieval connotation cited earlier,
but extending it far beyond only the proverb collections that stand near
the beginning of the school curriculum.
Proverbs are only one genre among the several that are collec-
tively referred to, on the analogy of the biblical example, as “wisdom
50 Cf. above, nn. 29, 35–38.

51 See above, n. 8.
52 For details, see Origins 144–153, esp. p. 151.
literature.” That literature was concerned with common mortals, not

with gods or kings, and it often offered practical instructions in agricul-
ture and other common human pursuits. Much of it is clearly oral in
origin, and intended for oral delivery. Among the wisdom genres that
would particularly lend themselves to a rhetorical analysis are three
that are usually classified by Assyriologists as dialogues, diatribes, and
disputations respectively.53 Dialogues tend to take place between scribes
or between scribal students and their masters or parents;)54 diatribes
may involve men or women of various walks of life outdoing each
other in inventive invective.55 (Some scholars consider dialogues and
diatribes a single genre.)56 Disputations are the most artful of the three
genres, and the only one identified as such in the native terminology;
the Sumerian term a-da-man (Akkadian tes. îtu. or dās. ātu) recurs in cultic
and archival texts, indicating the occasions when the disputations were
performed.57
The disputations pit two parties against each other in formal de-
bate.58 The parties are typically antithetical phenomena from the nat-
ural or social environment—summer and winter, bird and fish, silver
and copper, hoe and plow, for example. Each party rehearses its advan-
tages first and then the shortcomings of the antagonist in a series of
arguments and rebuttals that may reach three or more “rounds” before
the final judgment is rendered by the deity or, occasionally, the king,
depending apparently on whether the setting of the disputation was
conceived of as the scribal school attached to the temple or as the
palace.59 Typically (though not invariably) the palm goes to the party
that, at the outset, might have appeared the weaker, as if in recogni-
tion of the persuasiveness of its argumentation. (My colleague Victor
Bers reminds me of the fifth-century cliché regarding the victory of the
weaker argument—hētton logos—over the stronger—kreitton logos, “sup-
posedly a mark of sophistic skill and immorality.”) Thus the lowly hoe
triumphs over the lordly plow, perhaps even receiving a token gift for
53 Alster 1990; cf. Origins 175, n. 164.

54 Ibid., n, 165; Herman L.J. Vanstiphout “Disputations” and “School Dialogues,”
in COS I (1996), 575–593. Cf. below, n. 127.
55 Cf. e.g. Sjöberg 1971–1972.
56 E.g. Vanstiphout 1991:24 and n. 4.
57 Hallo apud Alster 1990: 13.
58 See in detail Vanstiphout 1990, 1992; Brock 2001.
59 Origins 176, n. 170.
his pains in what van Dijk described as an anticipation of the enig-

matic qesi.ta’s and gold rings awarded to Job at the end of his disputa-
tion.60
It seems, then, that the disputations have a stronger claim than the
proverbs to be regarded as true exercises in rhetoric. In the view of
H.L.J. Vanstiphout, one of their principal current interpreters, they
“developed out of the abstract and neutral ‘debate situation’ primar-
ily as an exercise in ‘rhetorical skill’ . . . the debate, as a literary and
rhetorical form, is in itself and as such the primary reason for being.”61
And “in most cases the victor wins on rhetorical points: he is the clever-
est debater.”62 Hypothetically, we can reconstruct a kind of dramatic
presentation in which two speakers (or actors or rhetors) assumed the
respective roles. The preserved texts represent the libretti; their con-
tents consist almost entirely of spoken parts, and the narrative interpo-
lations constitute little more than “stage directions.”
Much the same could be said of some of the other genres that
followed the wisdom literature in the scribal curriculum and which,
unlike that literature, focused on kings and gods. What then are some
of the rhetorical and stylistic devices that can be detected in these
genres? I will confine myself to epic (including myth), not only because
it is evidently omitted from Wasserman’s aforementioned thesis (though
included in his book), but also because, of all cuneiform genres, this is
the one that, even in translation, continues to have the widest appeal.63
Who has not heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh?
What is perhaps less familiar is that to this day we still do not
have any complete recension of the epic! Its rediscovery began in
1872 with the publication of The Chaldaean Genesis by George Smith,
which included much of the story of the Flood in what proved to be
Tablet XI of the epic; it created so much excitement in England that
the Daily Telegraph supplied Smith with the funds to return to Kuyunjik
(which turned out to be a part of ancient Nineveh, and included the
royal libraries) and find many more fragments of the epic. But in
60 Job 42: 11; cf. van Dijk 1957. For later survivals of the genre, see G. J. Reinink and
H.L.J. Vanstiphout, eds., 1991: Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Mediaeval Near
East (OLA 42); S. Brock, “The Dispute Poem: from Sumerian to Syriac,” Journal of the
Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 1 (2001), 3–10.
61 Vanstiphout 1991: 24, n. 5; previously H.L.J. Vanstiphout, “On the Sumerian
Disputation Between the Hoe and the Plough,” Aula Orientalis 2, (1984) 249–250.
62 Vanstiphout 1990: 280.
63 Origins 177, n. 174.
spite of more than 130 years of additional discoveries, the epic remains
fragmentary. Even its very first line is broken and subject to different
restorations and translations. The latest suggestion is based on a join
made in 199864 that “yields the first significant new evidence for the
opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh to appear since . . . 1891’ ”65 and
leads to the translation: “He who saw all, (who was) the foundation
of the land”66 or, alternatively, “He who saw the Deep, the country’s
foundation.”67 Earlier renderings included: “Let me proclaim to the
land him who has seen everything”68 and “Him who saw everything,
let me make known to the land,”69 thus inviting the audience to listen.70
And indeed here and in the next four lines, the audience is tempted
by the inducement of sharing in the knowledge of someone who had
travelled widely in the world and experienced much—like Odysseus
polutropon hos mala polla . . . (I) (1). In the next line, this geographical
breadth is matched by chronological depth, for Gilgamesh is said to
have “brought back information from before the flood.”71
But Gilgamesh is not alone among Akkadian epics in thus antici-
pating classical epic by attempting to attract the attention of a pre-
sumed audience at the outset. Claus Wilcke has studied the exordia
of Akkadian epics and identified at least four other examples in which
the poet steps forward to announce in the first person (typically in the
cohortative mood) his intention to sing of a certain subject—a verita-
ble arma virumque cano (Aeneid I) (1)—often followed by exhortations to
the audience to listen.72 Among them are Old Babylonian examples
thought to be hymnic-epic celebrations of Hammurapi’s campaigns
64 T. Kwasman, “A New Join to the Epic of Gilgameš Tablet I,” N.A.B.U. 1998/3:
89, No. 99.

65 A.R. George, “The Opening of the Epic of Gilgameš,” N.A.B.U. 1998/3:90,
No. 100.
66 Ibid.
67 Idem, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1999),
1.
68 CAD N/1:111.
69 J. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1982), 141.

70 Origins 177, n. 175.
71 Ibid., n. 176.
72 Claus Wilcke, “Die Anfänge der akkadischen Epen,” ZA 67 (1977), 153–216; cf.
Wolfram von Soden, “Mottoverse zu Beginn babylonischer und antiker Epen, Mot-
tosätze in der Bibel,” Ugarit-Forschungen 14 (1982), 235–239.
against the north73 and the south,74 and a hymn to Ishtar as Agus̆aya,
“the mad dancer in battle.”75 Only one example dates from the late
period, namely the canonical Anzu Epic).76
Still others of the later compositions substitute for this exordium
a circumstantial temporal clause that sets the stage for the narrative
to follow, a kind of fairy tale beginning with “once upon a time.”
The Akkadian conjunction is enuma/inuma/inumi, “when,” which breaks
down etymologically into in umi, “on the day that,” and as such is a
throwback to the Sumerian u4...a-a, “on the day that; when,” which
is such a standard incipit of Sumerian epic and other genres that it
became the preferred form of the personal names that identified the
antediluvian sages with the works of literature attributed to them.77 In
its Akkadian form it is most familiar from the incipit of the so-called
“Epic of Creation,” enuma elish.78 Other examples include the much-
debated incipit of the (Late) Old Babylonian flood story of Atar-hasis,79
and the Middle Babylonian myth of Nergal and Ereshkigal.80
A third rhetorical solution to introducing epic is to begin with a hym-
nic apostrophe to the royal or divine protagonist—a useful reminder
that myth and epic do not constitute separate genres in cuneiform but
only a subset of hymns to kings or gods.81 With Wolfram von Soden
(inspired by Benno Landsberger), it has therefore become customary to
describe the Akkadian of early examples of the subset as the “hymnic-
epic dialect.”82 The Epic of Erra and Ishum, for example, begins with
a hymnic apostrophe to Ishum.83 Rarest of all is the epic that begins in
medias res, as in the case of the story of Etana, both in its Old Babylo-
nian and its late recensions.84
73 Origins 178, n. 178.

74 Ibid, n. 179.
75 Ibid., n. 180.
76 Wilcke 1977: 175–179; most recent edition Hallo and Moran 1979; latest transla-
tions by Foster 1993: 469–485, 1995: 115–131.

77 Hallo 1963: 175–176, here: II.1.
78 Wilcke 1977: 163–175; latest translation by B.R. Foster in COS 1 (1997), 390–402.
79 Wilcke 1977: 160–163. Latest translation by Foster in COS 1 (1997), 450–453.
For the incipit see B. Groneberg, Archiv für Orientforschung 26 (1978–1979), 20 (with
previous literature); M.-J. Seux, “Atra-hasis I, I, 1,”: RA 75 (1981), 190–191; von Soden,
“Mottoverse,” 235–236.
80 Wilcke 1977: 159; latest translation by Stephanie Dalley in COS 1 (1997), 384–389.
81 Cf. above, n. 63.
82 Origins 179, n. 186, and above, notes 73–75.
83 Origins 179, n. 187; latest translation by Dalley in COS 1 (1997), 404–416.
84 Origins 179, n. 188; latest translation by Dalley in COS 1 (1997), 453–457.
But enough of the proems of Akkadian epics. Let us look also at

their perorations, and let us begin once more with the Epic of Gil-
gamesh. It has twelve chapters, or tablets, a pleasingly round number
in Mesopotamian tradition. Perhaps that is why a twelfth chapter was
added to the epic, for length of composition, whether in terms of chap-
ters or of lines, was a significant factor in cuneiform poetry. Not only
was it one of the few data regularly recorded in the otherwise laconic
colophons,85 but compositional lengths of 200, 480, and 1080 lines may
not be wholly accidental.86
In fact the twelfth tablet is “an inorganic appendage to the epic
proper,” as E. A, Speiser put it.87 C.J. Gadd88 and S.N. Kramer89 had
recognized it long ago as the straightforward translation of a Sumerian
original, a virtually unique occurrence in the long history of Sumero-
Akkadian bilingualism.90 Shaffer’s edition91 shows, in detail, how its
151 lines correspond to the second half of the Sumerian epic of “Gil-
gamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld”92 This second half, as we now
know, is represented by two exemplars newly excavated in the Jebel
Hamrin area, one of which ends with the incipit of another Sumerian
Gilgamesh episode, namely Gilgamesh and Huwawa (Gilgamesh and
the Land of the Living).93
The latest study on the subject argues otherwise, contending that the
twelfth tablet is an organic part of the epic, a “necessary epilogue . . .,
and a final affirmation of the truth of what has been revealed,” i.e.
Gilgamesh’s essential humanity.94 But this study fails on at least two
counts. For one, it overlooks the fact that, outside the epic if not within
85 Origins 179, n. 189; cf. above, note 22.

86 Ibid., n. 190. Cf. perhaps the 200 “lines” of Lamentations 1–3 according to the
calculations of D.N. Freedman and J.C. Geoghegan, “Quantitative Measurement in
Biblical Hebrew Poetry,” in R. Chazan et al., eds. Ki Baruch Hu: . . . Studies in Honor of
Baruch A. Levine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 229–249, esp. pp. 232–233.
87 ANET 97.
88 Origins, n. 192.
89 Ibid, n. 193.
90 Ibid. 160.
91 Ibid. 179, n. 194.
92 Ibid, n. 195.
93 Ibid. 180, n. 196; see now Antoine Cavigneaux and Farouk al-Rawi, “La fin de
Gilgameš, Enkidu et les enfers d’après les manuscrits d’Ur et de Meturan,” Iraq 62
(2000), 1–19; Gianni Marchesi, “í-a lùllumx ù-luh-ha sù-sù: on the incipit of the Sumerian
Poem Gilgameš and Huwawa B,” in S. Graziani, ed., Studi . . . dedicati alla memoria di
Luigi Cagni (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 2000), vol. 2:673–684.
94 Vulpe 1994. For dissenting opinions see Kilmer 1982 and Parpola 1993:192–196.
it, Gilgamesh does achieve a measure of immortality, albeit as god of

the netherworld. As Tzvi Abusch has shown, the twelfth tablet (along
with the sixth) was added to the epic precisely to make that point.95
Moreover, there is ample and incontrovertible evidence for the gradual
growth of the epic over time.
In point of fact the Gilgamesh epic in the final form that is the basis
of most modern translations is the product of a millennial evolution,
an evolution that has been conveniently traced by Jeffrey Tigay.96 At
an earlier stage, it undoubtedly concluded with Tablet XI for, to quote
Speiser again, “the last lines of Tablet XI are the same as the final lines
of the introduction of the entire work (I, i 16–19).”97 The effect is one of
“framing” the entire composition with an invitation to inspect the great
walls of Uruk built, as we know from elsewhere, by Gilgamesh himself.98
Such a framing effect, or inclusio, familiar in the Bible from the Book of
Job (and elsewhere), is lost by the addition of Tablet XII.99
But the frame is not an original part of the epic either! The incipit
of its Old Babylonian recension is “supreme above kings” (šutur eli šarri)
as should have long been seen from the colophon of Tablet II but in
fact was not realized until the discovery of a new fragment of Tablet I
at Kalah and its publication by Donald Wiseman.100 There, as noted
by Shaffer, the words in question occur at the beginning of line 27 of
the first column.101 That implies that the first 26 lines of the canonical
recension, including the entire passage about the walls of Uruk, were
not originally part of the proemium—nor, probably, of the peroration.
The oldest recoverable recension of the Akkadian epic began, not with
the bard speaking in the first person and addressing the audience in the
second, but with a standard hymnic introduction of the protagonist in
the third. This hymnic introduction typically begins with epithets and
keeps the audience in supposed suspense before revealing the hero by
his proper name. It is thus an example of the rhetorical device that we
95 Origins 180, n. 198.

96 Ibid., n. 199.
97 ANET 97.
98 Origins, n. 201; cf. R.J. Tournay, “Inscription d’Anam, roi d’Uruk et successeur de
Gilgamesh,” in H. Goedicke, ed., Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright
(Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 453–457.
99 Origins 180, n. 202.
100 Ibid., n. 203.
101 Ibid., n. 204; cf. also C.B.F. Walker, “The Second Tablet of tupšenna pitema,” JCS
.
33 (1981), 191–195, esp. p. 194.
noted earlier and to which Berlin has given the label of “particularizing
parallelism.”102 It is a device much favored at the beginning of Akkadian
and especially of Sumerian poems.
What this rapid survey of the evolution of the Akkadian Gilgamesh
Epic suggests is that it involved such essentially rhetorical devices as
self-introduction of the “speaker,” invitation to the audience, hymnic
apostrophe to the protagonist, partial repetition of the proemium to
achieve a frame effect and closure, and mechanical addition of an
extraneous addendum to arrive at a preferred length. The evolution of
the composition thus proceeded, at least in part, by successive expan-
sions at its borders. This is a process with possible analogues in the
evolution of the biblical corpus, notably in the case of literary prophecy
as proposed by David Noel Freedman.103 I have similarly advanced the
notion of “a central core of Deuteronomy which gradually grew by
accretion at both ends in what can almost be described as concentric
circles.”104 Of course it was not the only means of expansion. A com-
parison of Old Babylonian and neo-Assyrian recensions of Gilgamesh
and other compositions shows expansion likewise in the interior—not
always with an equally happy result from a modern esthetic point of
view—105 as well as juxtaposition of originally discrete compositions to
form a greater whole.106
But we have not yet traced the evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic back
to its earliest stages. In fact the unified epic was preceded by a series of
discrete, episodic tales not, as yet, organized around the central theme
of human mortality. Whether these discrete episodes were already uni-
fied in the earliest Akkadian recension remains a matter of debate, with
Tigay favoring this view of matters107 and Hope Nash Wolff questioning
it.108 What has hitherto been beyond dispute is that the earlier Sume-
rian episodic tales were not integrated. The new evidence from Me-
Turan raises the possibility that they were beginning to be.109 We have
already encountered one-half of one of them pressed into service for
102 Above, note 30.

103 Freedman 1991, esp. pp. 57–55; 1984.
104 Origins, n. 207.
105 Ibid, n. 208.
106 Ibid, n. 209.
107 Ibid. 182, n. 210.
108 Wolff 1969.
109 Above, note 93.
Tablet XII of the Akkadian epic.110 But with the exception of “Gil-
gamesh and Agga” and “The Death of Gilgamesh,”111 the others too
were bequeathed to the Akkadian poet, not in the form of mechanical
or slavish translations but creatively adapted to fashion an entirely new
composition.
The technique of blending discrete compositions into a larger cycle
did not necessarily involve adaptation of a Sumerian original in a
new Akkadian context, nor did it begin with Gilgamesh—though it is
easier to recognize it there. But let us return where we began, to the
princess-poetess Enheduanna. She is said to be the author of, among
other compositions,112 at least three hymns to the goddess Inanna, each
with its own theme. We have already encountered “The Exaltation
of Inanna,” which commemorates the earthly triumphs of her father
Sargon over his enemies within Sumer and Akkad, and sublimates
them into cosmic terms. The poem “Inanna and Ebih” does the same
for Sargonic triumphs over enemies on the northeastern frontier as
symbolized by Mount Ebih (Jebel Hamrin).113 Finally, the poem “Stout-
Hearted Lady” (in-nin šà-gur 4-ra) tells of the submission of the whole
world to Sargonic hegemony as symbolized by its acknowledgement of
Inanna’s supremacy in every field of endeavor.114 In this sequence, we
move from Sumer and Akkad to the frontier and thence to the whole
world. If we reverse the sequence, we can see the action coming ever
closer to home, in a manner worthy of an Amos.115 And it is precisely
this reverse order in which all three compositions are listed together at
the beginning of a literary catalogue of Old Babylonian date.116
If, then, the three great hymns by Enheduanna in honor of Inanna
are taken as forming an integrated cycle, then they constitute a the-
matic counterpart to her other principal work: the cycle of short hymns
to all the temples of Sumer and Akkad.117 For while the former may be
said to celebrate the theme of “the king at war,” the latter reflects “the
king at peace,” solicitously caring for the temples of all the country in a
110 Origins 182, n. 213.

111 Ibid., n. 214.
112 For the Enheduanna texts not further treated here, see Origins 263–266.
113 Ibid. 182, n. 216. Cf. now Pascal Attinger, “Inana et Ebih,” ZA 88 (1998), 164–195.
114 Origins 182, n. 217.
115 Ibid. 183, n. 218.
116 Mark E. Cohen, “Literary Texts from the Andrews University Archaeological
Museum,” RA 70 (1976), 131–132, lines 1–3.

117 Origins 183, n. 220. For a different view, see now J.A. Black, “En-hedu-ana not the
composer of The temple hymns,” N.A.B.U. 2002:2–4.

major attempt to satisfy the traditional requirements of Sumerian reli-

gion.118 It achieves in exalted poetry what “the Standard of Ur,” found
by Sir Leonard Woolley in the Royal Cemetery, had achieved in picto-
rial terms some three centuries earlier. This precious object, variously
interpreted as a wooden box,119 a desk or lectern120 or, most recently, as
the sound-box of a harp, has four inlaid panels, of which the two largest
show the king at war and at peace respectively, presiding over battle on
one side and over libations on the other.121 It thus shows the king at
war and in peace or, to put it another way, the ruler as king (lugal) and
high-priest (en), his two principal roles,122 and one could claim for the
beginning of the Mesopotamian record, as Irene Winter has said of the
end, that royal rhetoric embraced art as well as literature.
In conclusion, it must seem somewhat audacious to defend the no-
tion of “the birth of rhetoric in Mesopotamia,” given that the more
conventional view looks for the origins of rhetoric in classical Greece.123
And indeed, I admit that this notion, or at least this title, was Profes-
sor Gitay’s, not mine.124 But I am prepared to defend it, along with the
related notion that the idea of humanitas goes back to Sumerian prece-
dent. It has been said that “the humanities were born in a rhetorical
manger. The first recorded use of the word humanitas is in the Rhetor-
ica ad Herrenium, a text roughly contemporaneous with Cicero.”125 But
Latin humanitas may fairly be described as a kind of calque or loan
translation of Sumerian nam-lú-ulu6, an abstract noun formed from the
Sumerian word for “man, human being” (lú) perhaps via its Akkadian
118 Hallo, “Sumerian Religion” in A.F. Rainey, ed., kinattūtū ša dārâti: Raphael Kut-
scher Memorial Volume (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Univ. Institute of Archaeology, 1993), 15–35,
esp. 17, here: I.6.
119 Origins 183, n. 222.
120 Ibid., n. 223; cf. J.-C. Margueron, “L’Étendard d’Ur": recit historique ou mag-
ique?” in Collectanea Orientalia . . . Études offertes en hommage à Agnes Spycket (Neuchatel/Paris:

Recherches et Publications, 1996) 159.
121 Ibid.
122 Donald P. Hansen, “Art of the Royal Tombs at Ur: A Brief Interpretation,” in
R.L. Zettler and L. Horne, eds., Treasures from the Royal Tombs of Ur (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Art and Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998),
47.
123 See e.g. Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore/London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); I. Worthington, ed. Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in
Action (London/New York: Routledge, 1993). On the possible Mesopotamian back-
ground of specifically political rhetoric, see above, n. 48.
124 See above, unnumbered note.
125 Origins 184, n. 226.
loan translation amelūtu. Like the Latin abstract, the Mesopotamian

terms have a double meaning, referring both to “humanity” in the
sense of humankind in the aggregate, and to “humanity, humanism,”
in the sense of that special quality of breeding and deportment that dis-
tinguishes the educated person from the masses.126 A single quotation
among many may serve to illustrate. A dialogue127 in which a father
berates his perverse son for nearly all of its 180-odd lines, includes this
couplet: “Because you do not look to your humanity, my heart was car-
ried off as if by an evil wind / You are unable to make (your) words pay
any attention to your humanity.”128 The first recorded use of the Sume-
rian term antedates Cicero by two millennia, but shares one of his firm
convictions: linguistic ability was at the heart of the scribal curriculum
of Hammurapi’s Babylonia, as much as it was to be the essence of the
Roman rhetorician’s facilitas.
I cannot resist ending with a saying from the Jerusalem Talmud cited
by Richard Steiner in a study of colloquial Hebrew.129 In Megilla 71b
we read that “Greek is good for singing, Latin for warfare, Aramaic
for lamentation, and Hebrew for (divine) speech.”130 Had the sages, like
Daniel’s friends, mastered the “literature and script of the Chaldaeans”
(Dan. 1: 4), they might well have added that Sumerian and Akkadian
are good for rhetoric!
Works Cited (either Explicitly or by Reference to Origins)
Alster, Bendt, 1990: “Sumerian Literary Dialogues and Debates and their
Place in ancient Near Eastern Literature.” In E. Keck et al., eds., Living
Waters: . . . Studies Presented to Dr. Frede Løkkegaard (Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum), 1–16.
Berlin, Adele, 1978: “Shared rhetorical features in biblical and Sumerian liter-
ature.” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 10:35–42.
———, 1986: “Narrative Poetics in the Bible.” Prooftexts 6:273–284.
———, 1994: Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative. Reprint. (Winona Lake,
IN: Eisenbrauns).
126 Van Dijk 1953; cf, Henri Limet, “ ‘Peuple’ et ‘humanité’ chez les Sumériens,”
G. van Driel et al., eds., zikir šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus . . .
(Leiden: Brill, 1982), 258–267.
127 For this genre see above, n. 54.
128 Origins 184, n. 228.
129 Steiner 1992.
130 Origins, n. 230.
Brock, S., 2001: “The Dispute Poem: From Sumerian to Syriac.” Journal of the
Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 1, 3–10.
Cole, Thomas, 1991: The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore/London:
Johns Hopkins University Press).
Dozeman, Thomas B, and Benjamin Fiore, 1992: “Rhetorical Criticism,”
Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York etc.: Doubleday) 5:712–719.
Edzard, Dietz O., 1990: “Selbstgespräch und Monolog in der akkadischen
Literatur.” In T. Abusch et al., eds., Lingering Over Words: Studies. . . in Honor of
William L. Moran (Cambridge: Harvard Semitic Studies 37), 149–162.
Falkowitz, Robert S., 1982: The Sumerian Rhetoric Collections (Ann Arbor, MI:
University Microfilms).
Foster, Benjamin R., 1993: Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (2
vols.). (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press).
———, 1995: From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia
(Bethesda, MD: CDL Press).
Fox, Michael V., 1983: “Ancient Egyptian Rhetoric.” Rhetorica 1:9–22.
Freedman, David N. 1991: The Unity of the Hebrew Bible (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan).
———, 1994: “The Undiscovered Symmetry of the Bible.” Bible Review 10/1
(February) 34–41, 63.
———, and Jeffrey C. Geoghegan, 1999: “Quantitative Measurement in Bibli-
cal Hebrew Poetry.” In R. Chazan et al., eds., Ki Baruch Hu: . . . Studies in
Honor of Baruch A. Levine (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns), 229–249.
George, Andrew, 1999: The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (New York:
Barnes and Noble).
Gevirtz, Stanley, 1973: “On Canaanite Rhetoric: The Evidence of the Amarna
Letters from Tyre.” Orientalia 42:162–177.
Gitay, Yehoshua, 1981: Prophecy and Persuasion: A Study of Isaiah 40–48 (Forum
Theologiae Linguisticae 14) (Bonn: Linguistica Biblica).
———, 1991: Isaiah and his Audience: The Structure and Meaning of Isaiah 1–12.
(Studia Semitica Neerlandica 30) (Assen/Maastricht: van Gorcum).
Greenstein, Edward L., 1981: “Biblical Narratology.” Prooftexts 1:201–216.
———, 1982: “An Equivocal Reading of the Sale of Joseph.” In Kenneth
R.R. Gros Louis, ed., Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, vol. 2 (Nash-
ville, TN: Abingdon), 114–125 and 306–310.
———, 1996: “A Forensic Understanding of the Speech from the Whirlwind.”
In M. V. Fox et al., eds., Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem
Haran (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns), 241–258.
Hallo, William W., 1963: “On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature,” Journal of
the American Oriental Society 83:167–176, here: II.1.
———, 1979: “Notes from the Babylonian Collection, I. Nungal in the Egal: An
Introduction to Colloquial Sumerian?” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 31:161–
165, here: VIII.2.
———, 1985: “Back to the Big House: Colloquial Sumerian, Continued.” Ori-
entalia 54:56–64, here: IX.1.
———, 1996: Origins: The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Western
Institutions (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 6)
(Leiden/New York/ Koln: Brill).
———, and J.J.A. van Dijk, 1968: The Exaltation of Inanna (Yale Near Eastern
Researches. 3) (Repr. New York: AMS Press, 1982).
———, and W.L. Moran, 1979: “The First Tablet of the SB Recension of the
Anzu myth.” JCS 31:65–115.
Held, Moshe, 1969: “Rhetorical Questions in Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew.”
Eretz-Israel 9:71–79.
Hess, Richard, 1990: “Rhetorical Forms in EA 162.” Ugarit-Forschungen 22:137–
148.
———, 2003: “Rhetorical forms in the Amarna correspondence from Jerusa-
lem.” Maarav 10:221–244.
———, 1993: “Smitten Ant Bites Back: Rhetorical Forms in the Amarna Corre-
spondence from Shechem.” In J.C. de Moor and W.G.E. Watson, eds., Verse
in Ancient Near Eastern Prose (ATOT42), 95–111.
———, 1998: “The Mayarzana Correspondence: Rhetoric and Conquest Accounts.” Uga-
rit-Forschungen 30:333–351.
Hunger, Hermann, Babylonische und assyrische Kolophone. (AOAT 2).
Jackson, Jared J., and Martin Kessler, eds., 1974: Rhetorical Criticism: Essays in
Honor of James Muilenburg (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press).
Jacobsen, Thorkild, 1987: The Harps That Once. . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation
(New Haven/London: Yale University Press).
Kilmer, Anne D., 1982: “A Note on an Overlooked Word-play in the Akkadian
Gilgamesh.” In G. van Driel et al., eds., Zikir Šumim: Assyriological Studies
Presented to F.R. Kraus . . . (Leiden: Brill), 128–132.
Kramer, Samuel Noah, 1957: “A Father and His Perverse Son,” National Proba-
tion and Parole Association Journal 3:169–173.
Krstovic, J., et al., eds. 1989: Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism 2 (Detroit
Gale Research).
Limet, Henri, 1982: “ ‘Peuple’ et ‘humanité’ chez les Sumériens,” G. van Driel
et al., eds., Zikir Šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus... (Leiden:
Brill), 258–267.
Machinist, Peter, 1993: “Assyrians on Assyria in the First Millennium bc” In
Raaflaub 1993:77–104.
Michalowski, Piotr, 1991: “Negation as Description: The Metaphor of Every-
day Life in Early Mesopotamian Literature.” Aula Orientalis 9:131–136.
Moran, William L., 1993: “UET 6, 402: Persuasion in the Plain Style.” Journal
of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 22:113–120.
Murphy, James J., ed., 1982: The Rhetorical Tradition and Modern Writing. (New
York, Modern Language Association).
Parpola, Simo, 1993: “The Assyrian Tree of Life.” JNES 52:161–208.
Pearce, Laurie E., 1993: “Statements of Purpose: Why the Scribes Wrote.” In
M.E. Cohen et al., eds., The Tablet and the Scroll: Near Eastern Studies in Honor
of William W. Hallo. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press), 185–193.
Porter, Barbara N., 1995: “Language, Audience and Impact in Imperial As-
syria.” In S. Izre"el and R. Drory, eds., Language and Culture in the Near East.
(Israel Oriental Studies 15) (Leiden: Brill), 51–72.
Raaflaub, Kurt, ed., 1993: Anfänge politischen Denkens in der Antike. (Schriften des
Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 24).
Rabinowitz, Isaac, 1993: A Witness Forever: Ancient Israel’s Perception of Literature and
the Resultant Hebrew Bible. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press).
Reinink, G.J. and H.L.J. Vanstiphout, eds., 1991: Dispute Poems and Dialogues in
the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East. (OLA 42).
Sasson, Jack M., 1998: “The King and I: A Mari King in Changing Percep-
tions.” JAOS 118:453–470.
Savage, Mary, 1980: “Literary Criticism and Biblical Studies: A Rhetorical
Analysis of the Joseph Narrative.” In C.D. Evans et al., eds., Scripture in
Context. (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press), 79–100.
Sjöberg, Åke, 1971–1972: “ ‘He is a Good Seed of a Dog’ and ‘Engardu, the
Fool.’ ” JCS 24:107–119.
———, 1973: “Der Vater und sein missratener Sohn,” JCS 25:105–169.
Steiner, Richard C., 1992: “A Colloquialism in Jer. 5:13 from the Ancestor of
Mishnaic Hebrew.” Journal of Semitic Studies 37:11–26.
Sternberg, Meir, 1983: “The Bible’s Art of Persuasion: Ideology, Rhetoric, and
Poetics in Saul’s Fall.” Hebrew Union College Annual 54:45–82.
———, 1985: The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of
Reading. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Van Dijk, J.J.A., 1953: La Sagesse Suméro-Akkadienne. (Leiden: Brill).
———, 1957: “La découverte de la culture littéraire sumérienne et sa signifi-
cation pour l’histoire de l’antiquité orientale.” L’Ancien Testament et l’Orient.
(Orientalia et Biblica Lovaniensia, 1) 5–28.
Vanstiphout, Herman L.J., 1984: “On the Sumerian Disputation between the
Hoe and the Plough.” Aula Orientalis 2:239–251.
———, 1990, 1992: “The Mesopotamian Debate Poems.” Acta Sumerologica (Ja-
pan) 12:271–318; 14:339–367.
———, 1991: “Lore, Learning and Levity in the Sumerian Disputations: A
Matter of Form, or Substance?” In Reinink and Vanstiphout 1991:23–46.
———, 1996: “ ‘Disputations’ and ‘School Dialogues.’ ” COS 1:575–593.
Von Soden, Wolfram, 1982: “Mottoverse zu Beginn babylonischer und antiker
Epen, Mottosätze in der Bibel.” Ugarit-Forschungen 14:235–239.
Vulpe, Nicola, 1994: “Irony and unity of the Gilgamesh Epic” JNES 53:275–
283.
Walker, C.B.F., 1981: “The Second Tablet of Tupšenna pitema.” JCS 33:191–195.
Wasserman, Nathan, 2000: “Sweeter than Honey and Wine. . .: Semantic Do-
mains and Old Babylonian Imagery.” RAI 44/3: 191–196.
———, 2003: Style and Form in Old Babylonian Literary Texts. (Leiden/Boston:
Brill/Styx).
Watson, Duane J. and Alan J. Hauser, 1993: Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible: A
Comprehensive Bibliography with Notes on History and Method. (Biblical Interpreta-
tion Series 4) (Leiden: Brill).
Wilcke, Claus, 1977: “Die Anfänge der akkadischen Epen.” ZA 67:153–216.
———, 1993: “Politik im Spiegel der Literatur, Literatur als Mittel der Politik
im älteren Babylonien.” In Raaflaub 1993:29–75.
Winter, Irene, 1981: “Royal Rhetoric and the Development of Historical Nar-
rative in Neo-Assyrian Reliefs.” Studies in Visual Communication 7:2–38.
Wolff, Hope Nash, 1969: “Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Heroic Life.” JAOS 89:
392–398.
Zgoll, Annette, 1997: Der Rechtsfall de En-hedu-Ana im Lied nin-me-šara. (AOAT 246)
(Münster: Ugarit-Verlag).
Abbreviations
BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University
of Chicago
CANE J.M. Sasson, ed., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (4 vols.) (New
York: Scribner’s 1995).
COS 1 W.W. Hallo and K.L. Younger, Jr., eds., 1996: The Context of
Scripture I : Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World (Leiden/New
York/Köln: Brill).
COS 2 W.W. Hallo and K.L. Younger, Jr., eds., 2000: The Context of Scrip-
ture II: Monumental Inscriptions from the Biblical World (Leiden/New
York/Köln: Brill).
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
N.A.B.U. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires
OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta
RA Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientate
RAI44 L. Milano et al., eds., Landscapes. . . Papers Presented to the XLIV
Rencontre Assyriologie Internationale (Padua: Sargon srl, 2000)
ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie
ii
catalogues and other scholia
ii.1
ON THE ANTIQUITY OF SUMERIAN LITERATURE*
In setting up a chronological scheme for Sumerian literature, Falken-

stein1 distinguished two major periods of creativity which we may de-
scribe as “neo-Sumerian” (ca. 2115–1815 bc)2 and as late or “post-Su-
merian” (ca. 1500–1100 bc) respectively. The assumed floruit of post-
Sumerian creativity can be supported by a number of arguments. It
was contemporary with a very flourishing period of Akkadian literary
activity;3 it is attested by nearly contemporary copies as well as by later
copies which continue almost to the beginning of the Christian Era;4 it
coincides with a posited revival of Sumerian learning after the sack of
Babylon and the end of the Babylonian “Dark Ages.”5
But the presumed date of neo-Sumerian creativity precedes both the
assumed date of the first major period of Akkadian literary output and
the attested date of nearly all copies of neo-Sumerian literature hitherto
published,6 for both of these categories can be dated approximately
to the period 1815–1665 bc,7 particularly to the time of Hammurapi,
Samsu-iluna and Abi-eshuh of Babylon.8 By contrast, such evidence as
* The substance of this paper was presented to the 173rd meeting of the American
Oriental Society, Washington, D.C., on March 27, 1963.
1 A. Falkenstein, “Zur Chronologie der sumerischen Literatur,” Compte Rendu de
la seconde Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (= CRRAI ) 2 (1951) 12–27; Mitteilungen der

deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft (= MDOG) 85 (1953) 1–13.
2 Or 2050–1750 in the low chronology employed by Falkenstein, ibid., 1.
3 Ibid., 12. Cf. also W. von Soden, “Das Problem der zeitlichen Anordnung akkadis-
cher Literaturwerke,” ibid., 14–26, esp. p. 22.

4 Falkenstein, ibid., 2 and notes 4–6.
5 Cf. W. Hallo, “New viewpoints on cuneiform literature,” Israel Exploration Journal
(= IEJ) 12 (1962) 24 f., note 54 and, for the problems of literary creativity in cuneiform
generally, ibid., 14–21, here: I.1.
6 Some copies of incantations may be dated to the Ur III period on the basis
of their script; cf. e.g. J. Nougayrol, “Conjuration ancienne contre Samana,” Archiv
Orientální 17/2 (= Symbolae Hrozny 2, 1949) 213–226; Falkenstein, LSS nF 1 (1931) 2, note 1
and CRRAI 2 (1951) 19. Cf. also F.R. Kraus, ZA 50 (1952) 49 ad SLTN 48 and 138, and
E.I. Gordon, Bibliotheca Orientalis 17 (1960) 124, note 19.
7 1750–1600 in Falkenstein’s terms; he refers also to some copies dated under Ammi-
s.aduqa (1646–1626).
8 It may be noted in passing that at least some Old Babylonian copies are dated
138 ii.1. on the antiquity of sumerian literature
we possess of the long tradition of “Old Sumexian” literature which

preceded and gave way to the neo-Sumerian canons consists entirely
of contemporary copies: the lexical lists which go back all the way to
the beginnings of writings at Uruk;9 the proverb tablet from Fara;10 a
hymnal fragment attributed to Urukagina;11 the Sargonic cylinder from
Nippur12 and the Gudea cylinders from Lagash.13
Of course, much of the neo-Sumerian literature in Old Babylonian
copies concerns itself with the royal house of Ur and with such of their
predecessors as Gudea of Lagash,14 Naram-Sin of Akkad,15 his high-
priestess Enheduanna,16 and perhaps even Eannatum of Lagash.17 And
other internal indices abundantly support an early date for the origin
to the reign of “Rim-Sin II”; cf. TRS 50 (“Shulgi B”) and YBC 7159 and 4661
(Lamentation over the destruction of Ur, unpublished).
9 Of these, the most striking example is a particular version of a list of nomina pro-
fessionis which is attested throughout the third millennium over a wide area embracing
Uruk, Ur, Shuruppak, Lagash and Susa; cf. A. Deimel, “Zur ältesten Geschichte der
šumerischen Schultexte,” Orientalia o. s. 2 (1920) 51–53; Falkenstein, Archaische Texte aus
Uruk (1936) 45, and UET 2 (1935) Nos. 14, 264, 299–301.
10 A. Deimel, Schultexte aus Fara, No. 26. This text even finds echoes in the neo-
Sumerian literature, as shown by T. Jacobsen apud E.I. Gordon, Sumerian Proverbs (1959)
550.
11 F. Thureau-Dangin apud G. Cros, Nouvelles Fouilles de Tello (1910), [180], AO 4153;
cf. E. Sollerger, Le Système Verbal (1952) 174.

12 G.A. Barton, Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions (1918) No. 1; cf. Falkenstein, CRRAI
2, 19.
13 One may regard these cylinders either as the earliest examples of the neo-Sumeri-
an category of “temple hymns” (cf. Falkenstein, CRRAI 2, 14, bottom), or as the climax
of a long tradition of “Old Sumerian” literature which is gradually coming to light
(ibid., 18). Note also the predilection for cylinders among the scribes of the lexical and
literary texts of the “Agade-Gutian period.”
14 E. Chiera, STVC No. 36, translated by Falkenstein, Sumerische und akkadische Hymnen
umd Gebete (= SAHG) (1953) No. 16.

15 Notably the “Curse of Agade” to be edited by S.N. Kramer; cf. the references in
Gelb, MAD 22 (1961) 201 sub “Late Legends” 1–2.

16 She is the “author” of the Collection of Temple Hymns (cf. H. Zimmern, ZA
39 [1930] 249, J.J.A. van Dijk, Sumerische Götterlieder (= SGL) 2 (1960) 24, note 44), and
figures prominently in at least two major hymns to Innin; cf. provisionally van Dijk,
Sumer 13 (1957) 65. The Yale Babylonian Collection possesses a complete text of the
shorter of these in three tablets which have been copied for publication.
17 Cf. below, note 46. For the cycle of epics dealing with the First Dynasty of Uruk,
cf. Falkenstein, CRRAI 2, 24–27. It is unlikely that the composition of any of the poems
mentioned antedates the neo-Sumerian period (cf. ibid., 22); that they were created in
the Ur III period itself finds additional support in the fact that this dynasty introduced
a cult of deified rulers including such predecessors dynasts as Sargon, Manishtushu and
Naram-Sin of Akkad (cf. H. Hirsch, Archiv für Orientforschung 20 [1963] 5, 16) and Gudea
of Lagash.
ii.1. on the antiquity of sumerian literature 139
of these and other hymnic compositions, which some hitherto unpub-

lished copies from Ur and Nippur will eventually confirm. Meanwhile,
however, it is possible to add to this evidence the testimony of a neo-
Sumerian inventory of forty-two hymnal incipits found in the course
of cataloguing the Yale Babylonian Collection. Of these incipits, some
may, with more or less certainty, be identified with titles of compositions
previously known from Old Babylonian copies or Old Babylonian cata-
logues, or both. The inventory in question is thus by some two or three
centuries the oldest witness of its kind to the antiquity of any major
works of neo-Sumerian literature. It is inscribed in four columns on a
large, well-preserved tablet18 which was thoroughly baked, apparently
in antiquity. In outward appearance it resembles an Ur III name list,
and its signs have precisely the form current in Ur III economic texts.
A terminus post quem is provided by two of the titles which apostrophize
the deified Shulgi.
The subscript of the new catalogue also supports an Ur III dating.
The last line reads, in effect: pà-da nì-ú-rum. Although one might inter-
pret this as “personal name (Pada)19 +title,”20 a more likely rendering is
“(tablets) found (or recovered) by Ni"urum.” The verb pà(d) is used in
apparently this sense in another Ur III catalogue,21 in the court judg-
ments,22 and in accounts23 of the Ur III period. Ni"urum is, moreover,
attested as a personal name in Ur III texts,24 interestingly enough at
least once as an archivist.25
We are dealing, then, with the oldest example yet found of what
is by now an impressive number of Sumerian literary catalogues and
inventories. I have been able to count in all seventeen lists of this type,
eight of them identifying works of “neo-Sumerian” literature and nine
chiefly those of the post-Sumerian group (see the Table). We owe our
18 YBC 3654 (80 × 132 mm.).

19 In Ur III texts, Pada almost always occurs as a merchant; cf. N. Schneider,
Orientalia o. s. 23 (= Das Drehem- und Djohaarchiv 4/1, 1926 f.) 175 f.
20 For nì-ú-rum (variant: nì-u -rum) DN as a royal epithet, cf. most recently A.
4
Kapp, ZA 51 (1955) 86; Jacobsen, ZA 52 (1057) 131 f., note 90 (6).
21 Below, Table, No. 2. Though as old as our text, this inventory includes no titles
that can, as yet, be identified with known compositions.

22 Falkenstein, Neusumerische Gerichtsurkunden 3 (1957) 151.
23 Ibid. 2 (1956) 392 top; cf. A.L. Oppenheim, Catalogue of the . . . Eames Collection (=
AOS 32, 1948) 132 and 249 (ad S 1).

24 Cf. e.g. Schneider, op. cit. (note 19), 38, s.v. Gar-ú-aš.
25 M.L. Hussey, Harvard Semitic Series 4 (1915) 23 iii 3 (Shulgi 48). For ša (GÁ)-dub-ba
x
= šandabakku, “archivist,” see Falkenstein, op. cit. (note 22) 159.
knowledge and understanding of the neo-Sumerian, Old Babylonian

and Middle Babylonian catalogues chiefly to Kramer,26 while Ungnad
has dealt briefly with the neo-Assyrian ones.27 The Middle Assyrian
catalogue has often been cited in the literature,28 the neo-Babylonian
one almost never.29 The Old Babylonian lists differ formally from all the
later ones in that they seem to exhibit no single consistent sequence or
system of classification; the later lists not only classify the texts by genre
but, as is shown by the existence of duplicate copies in at least two
cases (Nos. 11–12, 15–16), apparently arrived at a canonical version of
the catalogues themselves, as in the case of the contemporary Akkadian
catalogues and “tables of contents.”30
Table. Cuneiform Catalogues of Sumerian Literary Texts

Present
Museum No. Date Provenience Location Place of Publication
1. YBC 3654 Ur III ? Yale Published herewith
2. HS 1360 Ur III Nippur Jena Pohl, TMH nF 1/2
(1937) 360; Kramer and
Bernhardt, ibid. 3 (1961) 55
3. ? Old Babylonian Ur ? Kramer, RA 55 (1961)
169–176
4. ? Old Babylonian Ur Baghdad Figulla and Martin, UET 5
(1953) 86
5. HS 1504 Old Babylonian Nippur Jena TMH nF 3, 54; WZJ 6
(1956/7) pl. iii
6. CBS 29. 15. 155 Old Babylonian Nippur Philadelphia Kramer, BASOR 88 (1942)
12
7. AO 5393 Old Babylonian ? Louvre Genouillac, TCL 15 (1930)
28
8. VAT 6481 Old Babylonian ? Berlin Zimmern, VS 10 (1913) 216
9. HS 1477 Middle Babylonian Nippur Jena TMH nF 3, 53; WZJ 6,
pls. i–ii
26 TMH nF 3 (1961) pp. 19 f. (No. 2); RA 55 (1961) 169–176 (No. 3); WZJ 6 (1956–1957)
389–395 (Nos. 4–9, with I. Bernhardt); cf. also Kraus, OLZ 50 (1955) c. 518 on No. 4.
27 OLZ 21 (1918) cc. 116–119 (Nos. 11–16).
28 E.g. T.J. Meek, JBL 43 (1924) 245–252 and previous treatments there cited. For the
Sumerian entries, cf. Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949) 91, 103.

29 S. Langdon alluded to it in Babyloniaca 3 (1909–1910) 248 and, more recently,
M. Weitemeyer in “Archive and library technique in ancient Mesopotamia,” Libri 6

(1955–1956) 237, note 65.
30 On these see most recently Hallo, IEJ 12, 23 f. and notes 47–49, here: I.1; W.G.
Lambert, “A catalogue of texts and authors,” JCS 16 (1962) 56–77. For an Akkadian
“inventory” of texts, cf. e.g. Langdon, RA 28 (1931) 136 (Rm. 150).
Present
Museum No. Date Provenience Location Place of Publication
10. VAT 10101 Middle Assyrian Assur Berlin Ebeling, KAR 1 (1919) 158
11. K 2529 + 3276 Neo-Assyrian Nineveh London IV Rawlinson (1875)
60 = IV R2 (1891) 53
+ Langdon, Babylonian
Liturgies (1913) 103a
12. K 2 Neo-Assyrian Nineveh London Bezold, Catalogue 1 (1889)
p. 1
13. BM 82-3-23, 5220 Neo-Assyrian Nineveh London Langdon, Babylonian
Liturgies 151
14. K. 9618 Neo-Assyrian Nineveh London ibid., No. 115
15. K 3141 Neo-Assyrian Nineveh London ibid., No. 138
16. K 3482 Neo-Assyrian Nineveh London ibid., No. 139
17. Herbert Clark Neo-Babylonian ? Jerusalem (?) Luckenbill, AJSL 26 (1909)
Cylinder 28
a Cf. also. Langdon, RA 18 (1621) 157–159 (reference courtesy F. J. Stephens)
As might be expected, the new catalogue differs considerably from all

the later ones. In purpose, it is probably closest to the other Ur III
example and represents, like that, an inventory of texts “found” or
“recovered.” In content as well as structure, it resembles rather the
post-Old Babylonian ones for, like these, it apparently limits its titles
to hymns and classifies them. In terms of identifiable titles, however, its
only parallels, with one or two possible exceptions (see nos. 8, 23 below),
are with the Old Babylonian catalogues. Even these identifications are
not always certain, for it appears that the incipits were not, as yet,
always quoted verbatim.31 Many are still entirely unknown, at least
to me. The text is offered here in copy,* transliteration, and tentative
translation in the hope that others may contribute identifications from
as yet unpublished texts or from texts overlooked here.
A number of the incipits can be identified with a reasonable degree
of assurance.
No. 2: den-líl-lá [d]u11-ga-ni nu-kúr, “of Enlil—his command is
unchanging.” This composition may be tentatively identified with a
31 In some cases it is even conceivable that our inventory identified compositions not
by their opening but by their concluding lines, their so-called u r ux (EN), for which see
last Falkenstein, ZA 52 (1957) 69–72.
* This copy is not included here, but in the original article: pp. 171–172, and in the
forthcoming Sumerian Royal Hymns (see above, Introduction).

hymn to Enlil whose popularity can be gauged by the large number of

exemplars collected by Falkenstein, who edited it,32 and by its appear-
ance in at least two of the Old Babylonian catalogues, where it is listed
under its opening phrase of den-líl-sù-du-šè. Our entry seems rather
to be based on the opening couplet which, in its fullest form, begins,
“Enlil, his command is ‘far and away’ the loftiest, his word (variant: his
command) is holy, a thing unchanging.” One Old Babylonian exemplar
has a shorter version:
Obverse
i 1) an-edin-zi-da dar-a Raised in the true upper steppe
2) den-líl-lá [d]u11-ga-ni nu-kúr Of Enlil—his command is
unchanging
3) [l]ugal an-kù-ga me-te-bi Oh king, the norm of holy heaven
4) lugal den-líl-ra gub-ba Oh king, appointed for Enlil
5) en gu4-bàn-da Oh lord, fierce ox
6) še-ir-zi en-da-gal Oh brilliance, lord of the south
6a) (erased)
7) mí-zi mí-du11-ga Confidently cared for one
8) en su-lí-im Oh lord, awesome splendor
9) ur-sag en-huš-gal Oh hero, great fiery lord
10) ur-sag en-me-ša-ra-túm-ma Oh hero, lord created for all the
divine ordinances
11) lugal a[n-šà-t]a hi-[li-gùr]u? Oh king, laden with beauty from
Heavens’ midst
ii 12) nin me-e-hé-du7 Oh lady, fit for divine ordinances
13) en inim-nun-zu Oh lord, knower of the princely word
14) dšul-gi hi-li-sù Oh Shulgi, adorned with beauty
15) dšul-gi dingir-zi Oh Shulgi, true god
16) en gal-zu-an-na Oh Lord, expert of heaven
17) lugal-mu hi-li-gùru My king, laden with beauty
18) lugal inim-ša6 Oh king, the good word
19) ur-sag šà-kù-ta Oh hero, from the holy womb
20) lugal a-ma-ru Oh king, a flood
21) lugal me-lám-huš Oh king, fiery radiance
22) ur-sag ní-gal-gùru Oh hero, laden with awe
23) en-an-ki-a Lord in heaven and earth
24) lugal u4-gù-di Oh king, thunderer
25) lugal giš-túg-dagal Oh king, wide understanding
26) ur-sag šul-zi-tu-da Oh hero, born to be a true youth
27) nin hi-li-sù Oh lady, adorned with beauty
28) agrig! ?-zi-ukkin-na True steward of the assembly
32 SGL (1959) No. 1. The Yale Babylonian Collection has at least three more unpub-
lished exemplars (YBC 4618, 4651 and 9858).

Reverse
iii 29) ušum-huš-an-na Fiery dragon of heaven
30) lugal-me šà-ta ur-sag-me-en I am a king, from the womb I am a
hero
31) nin-mu múš-za-gìn-za na-dar-a My lady, who in your bright visage
ever endurest
32) en me-lám-sù-sù Oh lord, adorned with radiance
32a) šu-nigín 32 ša-du-lugal Sub-total: 32 royal hymns
33) lugal-en gal-di-an-na Oh lofty king, distinguished one of
heaven
34) sag-me-en-kù Oh holy headband (?)
35) ama hé-gál-la-dù-a Oh mother, created for bounty
36) gu4-e si-gar-re Oh ox, horned one
37) nun-né é-en-ku4-ra-ta Oh prince, after entering the house
of the lord
38) u4-za-la-ra . . .. storm
39) ur-sag pirig-huš-úru me-gal-gal Oh hero, taming (?) the fiery lion, all
the great divine ordinances
40) ur-sag šà-tùr Oh hero, in the sheepfold
41) dumu-an-na Child of Heaven
42) sahar ka-a-dù-a Boy(?), created in the mouth
43) šu-nigín 10 ša-du-igi-šè-àm Sub-total: 10 hymns which are ‘out of
use’
44) pà-da Nì-ú-rum Recovered by Ni"urum
(Rest of column uninscribed)
No. 2: “Enlil, his command is ‘far and away’ the loftiest, a thing
unchanging.” For the interpretation of the subscript of this part of our
inventory, it is important to note that this hymn, while it contains no
actual mention of any specific king, is nevertheless characterized by
allusions to an unnamed king (lines 84–95), and possibly refers to his
coronation.33
No. 8: en-su-lí-im, “Oh lord, awesome splendor,” This reading is of-

fered, with all due reserve, on the basis of the Middle Babylonian
catalogue from Nippur at Jena. In the last section of this catalogue,
there are listed fifteen adapu-songs (a-da-ab-me-eš), five of which, alone
among the hymnal incipits of this catalogue, can be identified with titles
known from Old Babylonian copies or catalogues. Among them is a
single one to Su"en which the editors render as en-su-ši-gùr-ru (l. 77).
The reading su-lim is here proposed on the basis of su-lim-ma in a
33 Falkenstein, ibid., p. 10.

Warad-Sin inscription,34 and of the Akkadian equivalent šalummatum,

which may be somehow cognate.35
No. 21: lugal me-lám-huš, “Oh king, fiery radiance.” A hymn of King
Shu-Sin to the god Ninurta (BE 29:1) begins: ur-sag-ul gal-le-eš nir-
gál [x-me]-lám-huš. If x is restored as [lugal] here36 it would provide
something of a parallel to our entry.
No. 22: ur-sag ní-gal-gùru, “Oh hero, laden with awe.” Our title may
possibly identify the šìr-gíd-da of Martu (SRT 8) whose first two “stan-
zas,” in Falkenstein’s scansion of the text37 begin respectively ur-sag and
ní-gal-gùr-ru.
No. 23: en-an-ki-a, “Lord in heaven and earth.” This title is virtually
identical with No. 42 of the Louvre catalogue (en-e-an-ki-a), as well as
with the beginning of iii 19 in the Middle Assyrian catalogue (en-gal-
an-ki-a).
No. 30: lugal-me šà-ta ur-sag-me-en, “I am a king, from the womb

I am a hero.” This is the incipit of Shulgi’s “Hymn A,” a “Selbst-
prädikation” without liturgical classification or structure. It was the
most popular of the many hymns in honor of this king, to judge by
the number of attested copies: in addition to the fourteen exemplars
employed by Falkenstein in his reconstruction,38 the Yale Collection
alone has at least seven unpublished duplicates. It occupies the first
place in the Old Babylonian catalogues of Philadelphia and probably
of the Louvre, and the fourth in the Ur catalogue recently published by
Kramer.
No. 31: nin-mu múš-za-gìn-za na-dar-a, “My lady, who in your

bright visage ever endurest.” This title is the virtual equivalent
34 Thureau-Dangin, SAKI 214 f.; cf. Hallo, Bibliotheca Orientalis 18 (1961) 9 sub Warad-
Sin 6, and Deimel, SL 2, 7, 157.

35 For the values NI = lí and ŠI = lim in early Sumerian, cf. Sollberger, ZA 54 (1961)
27, 146 and 42, 261. For su = šalummatum, cf. B. Landsberger MSL 2 (1951) 133 vii 51; for
su-zi = šalummatum cf. Falkenstein, ZA 48 (1944) 98 and CAD I/J 43b s.v. igisus. illû.
36 Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949) 88 No. 3 restores [n u n].
37 SGL 1 No. 4.
38 ZA 50 (1952) 63 ff.
(expanded by two signs) of the last title in the Louvre catalogue. To

judge by its allusions, it may be a temple hymn.
No. 32: en-me-lám-sù-sù, “Oh lord, adorned with radiance.” This

could be the ù-LU.LU-ma-ma hymn to Nanna published by de Ge-
nouillac39 and edited by Sjöberg40 whose first couplet begins en and
ends me-lám-sù-sù. Note, however, that me-lám-sù-sù could also be said
of kings.41
No. 35: ama-hé-gál-la-dù-a, “Oh mother, created for bounty.” Since

dù-a, “created,” is virtually synonymous with tu-da, “born,”42 this title
may be identical with the last title but two of the Louvre catalogue
which, as collated by Kramer,43 reads ki-dùg ama-hé-gál-lá-tu-da.
No. 41: dumu-an-na, “Child of Heaven (or, of An).” Although a num-

ber of deities are called dumu-an-na,44 the epithet occurs as incipit only
in an adapu-hymn to Ba"u,45 This hymn has been attributed to Eanna-
tum = Lumma (the latter name or word occurs in the text) by Kramer.46
While there is as yet little other evidence that the tradition of royal
hymns goes back quite this far,47 the Lagashite allusions in the compo-
sition may at least point to a Lagashite ruler as its possible “author,”
for hymnic Sumerian had certainly attained to the level of the piece in
question by Gudea’s time.
This point is of interest in connection with the two classificatory sum-

maries found in our inventory. The first thirty-two titles are, in fact,
summarized as ša-DU-lugal, “royal hymns,” the other ten as ša-DU-igi-
šè-àm, “hymns which are out of use,” or “former hymns.” The reading
39 TRS 30.
40 Der Mondgott Nanna-Suen 1 (1960) No. 6.
41 Cf. e.g. SRT 14 (“Shulgi C”), line 3.
42 The two verbs even occur as variants of each other in literary contexts; cf. e.g.
line 138 of the shorter hymn of Enheduanna (above, note 16) in SLTN 64 iv 14 (ma-ra-
tu-ud) with YBC 7167, 38 (ma-ra-dù).
43 WZJ 6, 393, note 3 (ad No. 65).
44 Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 1: 42, note 4; Falkenstein, SGL 1, 127 f.; Hallo, JNES 18 (1959)
56; J. Lewy, HUCA 32 (1961) 37, note 44.

45 CT 36, 39 f., translated by Falkenstein, SAHG No. 9.
46 Bibliotheca Orientalis 11 (1954) 172 and note 19.
47 Cf. above, notes 14–17. The dating and political implications of the royal hymns
will be dealt with in a separate paper in JCS. Here: III.1.

and translation of these previously unattested terms48 present some dif-

ficulty. The spelling ša-DU invites comparison on the one hand with
the group ad-ša4 = nissatum, ur-ša4 = rimmum and še-ša4 = damāmum, all
expressions for vocal action, on the other with èn-DU = zamāru, “song.”
The reading èn - ša4 for this last word49 seems ruled out by the phonetic
or variant spellings en-du,50 èn-di-a-ni = zamārša,51 and èn-da-ka-mu.52
The parallels thus favor, though they do not prove, a tentative reading
and rendering as ša-du-lugal, “royal hymns,” a category which, it has
sometimes been argued,53 was represented by Sumerian a-da-ab.
The significance of the second summary is harder to determine.
While igi-mu-šè, igi-zu-šè, etc., is attested in the sense of “on behalf
of myself, yourself, etc.,” igi-šè can hardly be explained in this way. It
occurs, for example, in Rim-Sin 6 and 754 in the expression du11-ga-ni
igi-šè-gin which Thureau-Dangin already translated by “dessen Wort
vorangeht (allen anderen),”55 For igi-šè in a trial document, Falken-
stein proposes a translation “zuerst,” “ohne dabei aber sichere Belege
bieten zu können.”56 My translation “former hymns” attempts to paral-
lel “royal hymns” in the other summation, and takes into account that
the only reasonably certain identification in this group of titles (No. 41)
is with a hymn to what is most probably a pre-Ur III ruler of Lagash.57
So far we have undertaken to date Sumerian literature from with-
out. The Babylonians themselves, however, were not indifferent to the
same problem. Indeed, a startling new document which has just been
published permits us not only to trace the Mesopotamian tradition of
48 The nearest parallel may be ša-mu-DU, variant šumu(n)-DU, cited by Falkenstein,
ZA 49, 84. Cf. ibid., 48 (1944) 94 for the correct interpretation of the alleged equation
ša-DU = nazâzu (Deimel, ŠL 2, 353, 25).
49 Considered ibid., 85, note 3.
50 VAS 10 (1913) 182, 9 f., quoted by Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 1, 158.
51 CADZ 36a; hardly en-sá-a-ni.
52 For èn-du-ka-mu in ugu-mu 104, to be published in MSL 9 as an appendix to
HAR-ra = hubullu XV; reference courtesy M. Civil.

53 “Practically all adab-hymns are royal compositions” (Kramer, loc. cit. above, note
46) or, more precisely, they are “Götterhymnen, in welche Gebete für einen König
eingestreut sind” (id., WZJ 6, 391).
54 Hallo, loc. cit. above, note 34.
55 SAKI 219c vs. 5.
56 Neusumerische Gerichtsurkunden 2, 333 ad TCL 5, 6168, 18.
57 But for the fact that our text divides the sign IGI + ŠÈ (= LIBIR) over two lines,
one would also be tempted to connect the phrase with the common entry libir-àm said
of animals or workers in Ur III tallies from Lagash; cf. Deimel, ŠL 2, 445, 20; Jacobsen,
Pedersen AV (1953) 181.
literary catalogues down to the very end of cuneiform writing and even
beyond, but also to reassess the notions which the Babylonians them-
selves held as to the antiquity of their literature. In the current report
of the excavations at Uruk, van Dijk has presented a late Seleucid text
in which, for the first time, the names of all the seven ante-diluvian
sages are given in their full cuneiform version, and linked with, or even
dated to, the seven ante-diluvian kings known from certain versions of
the Sumerian King List.58 These entries are followed by others in which
a selection of post-diluvian sages and scholars are similarly “dated” to
the reigns of more historical kings.
This unique document, when considered in combination with the
catalogue of authors and their works recently published by Lambert,59
serves to show that, in the late native view, at least three series were
thus as it were “dated” to the neo-Sumerian period. They were, oddly
enough, Etana,60 Irra,61 and a series known by the name of its author
as Enlil-ibni or si-dù.62 These bibliographical notices are not, of course,
to be taken literally. The Babylonians regarded not anonymity (as was
once thought) but antiquity of authorship as a measure of authority.63
They therefore were not above attributing texts or versions of obvi-
ously late date to impossibly early authors or, conversely, associating a
patently late author with the time of an early king. But in this pro-
cess of tendentious bibliography, they were perhaps not entirely indif-
ferent to objective considerations of historical and literary fact. If Sin-
liqi-unninni could be dated to the time of Gilgamesh,64 it should not
58 Van Dijk, UVB 18 (= Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, Abhandlungen 7, 1962) 44–52.

That the link implies an attempt to “date” these authors follows from the plausible
restoration [ina tars. i] at the head of each entry by van Dijk (cf. especially p. 46). For the
ante-diluvian king list section, see the articles by Finkelstein and Hallo, JCS 17 (1963)
39–57.
59 Above, note 30.
60 Lu-Nanna is, according to Lambert’s catalogue (vi 11), the author of the Etana
series; elsewhere he is linked to Shulgi (Lambert, note 14a). For Shulgi’s role as a patron
of literature, cf. e.g. van Dijk, Bibliotheca Orientalis 11 (1954) 87, note 44 = Hallo, HUCA
33 (1962) 29, note 214.
61 Kabti-il(ani)-Marduk, who is known as the author of the Epic from its own text,
and whose name can reasonably be restored in Lambert’s text (iii 1 f.), is linked to [Ib]i-
Sin in van Dijk’s text.
62 Cf. vi 13 of Lambert’s text with line 14 of van Dijk’s text, where “Sidu, otherwise
(known as) Enlil-ibni” is “dated” to the reign of [Išbi]-Irra. Lambert (p. 72) conjectures
that his series may identify the Atra-hasis Epic.
63 IEJ 12, 16, here: I.1.
64 van Dijk, line 12, restored.
be forgotten that the Sumerian and Old Babylonian antecedents of his

Gilgamesh Epic reach back long before his time. If the blatantly Middle
Babylonian Irra Epic could be linked to the end of the Ur III period,65
it may have been, as van Dijk points out,66 because the worship of
Irra reached its height precisely at that time. If the otherwise unknown
“Series of Enlil-ibni” was linked to an author of the same name under
Ishbi-Irra, it may be because, in its Sumerian form of si-dù, that name
actually occurs in neo-Sumerian times.67 In short, we cannot simply
dismiss the new-found data as both pseudepigraphical and anachronis-
tic. The long line of sages and scholars who have newly emerged from
what was once the almost proverbial anonymity of Babylonian litera-
ture stand in the middle between the works attributed to them on the
one hand and the monarchs they supposedly served on the other, and
one or the other of these correlations may need to be taken seriously in
each case.68
What is more important in this connection, however, is the onomas-
ticon of the new-found sages themselves. True, these apkallu’s have long
been known for the “practical” role which they played in various peri-
ods of Mesopotamian history, notably as apotropaic figurines deposited
in the foundations of buildings and corners of rooms.69 In one of sev-
eral rituals prescribing their construction,70 they are each given names
beginning with u4-mu. As Güterbock has seen,71 this ūmu may be the
“Geistertier” which in HAR-ra = hubullu translates UG (pirigx).72 The
names would thus reflect the grotesque appearance of such figurines
both in the prescriptions and in the actual finds. At the same time,
65 Above, note 61.

66 P. 51.
67 E.g., TCL 5, 6038 v. 4; Hallo, JCS 14 (1960) 104 (= 112), 16, 35.
68 For one of many parallel problems in Biblical criticism, cf. Hallo, Biblical Archaeolo-
gist 23 (1960) 46 and note 64: either the Jonah of II Kings 14:25 is a historical figure, and
the attribution to him of the “prophetic” book bearing his name is a pseudepigraphical
fiction; or the book is indeed his work, and his mention in II Kings is an anachronistic
insertion. But we need not reject both concepts.
69 For some actual examples found in situ see M.E.L. Mallowan, Iraq 16 (1954) 85–
92 and pls. XVII–XX. If the curious apkallu šiqla in R.C. Thompson’s Reports of the
Magicians 1, 170 and 2 xviii f. is more than just an idiomatic variant for maltaktu,
“clepsydra” (von Soden, Orientalia 20 [1951] 163 f.), it may reflect another “practical”
usage.
70 Zimmern, ZA 35 (1924) 151 f.
71 ZA 42 (1934) 10.
72 Landsberger, Fauna 75.
since ūmu is usually written UD,73 the three ante-diluvian apkallu-names

beginning with UD may have been linked to the three post-diluvian
apkallu-names in pirig.74 But this interpretation of the new apkallu-names
in UD, even if accepted, must be regarded as secondary, as is also the
sequence of cities attached to it,75 which is wholly divergent from that of
the ante-diluvian cities with whom, through their kings, the apkallē are
now seen to be linked.
It seems much more suggestive to regard UD in these names as hav-
ing its usual sense of enūma, “when,” one of the commonest of liter-
ary openings in both Sumerian and Akkadian.76 On this interpretation,
four of the names resemble nothing so much as: incipits! I have already
mentioned, in the case of Enlil-ibni, that a series could be named after
its supposed author. Is it perhaps equally possible that, in this section of
the tradition, an author might be identified with his presumed opus?
The fourth entry, en-me-galam-ma, suggests as much, for the name
of this ante-diluvian apkallu happens to recur as the incipit of a hymn
to Enki and king Ur-Ninurta preserved both in Old Babylonian copies
and a catalogue,77 as van Dijk has seen.78 It is less clear why he pre-
supposes a Sumerian pronunciation udan for u4-an and thus rejects
the comparison of the first apkallu, the Oannes of Berossos,79 with
the famous astronomical series u4-an-den-líl. We already know the first
apkallu, by his more familiar name of Adapa,80 as author of the oth-
erwise unknown series u4-SAR-an-den-líl-lá from the Verse Account of
Nabonidus81 in a context with other divine symbols comparable to the
73 Ibid.
74 E. Reiner, Orientalia 30 (1961) 6.
75 Ur, Nippur, Eridu, Kullab, Keshi, Lagash, Shuruppak.
76 Cf. e.g. CAD I/J 160b–e, s.v. inūma.
77 Kramer, WZJ 6, 390 ad HS 1504, 7.
78 P. 48 ad No. 4.
79 For the identification of u -an with Oannes, see now conclusively Lambert, JCS
4
16, 74 and van Dijk, UVB 18, 47 f. But whereas van Dijk takes u4-an as an abbreviation
of u4-an-(na)-ad-da-pà, Lambert cogently argues that u4-an is, as in Berossos, the full
name, and Adapa the epithet. In fact, the equation of the loanword adapu with ù-tu-
a-ab-ba (literally “born of the sea”) which Lambert cites in this connection suggests
that the epithet be understood as “recovered from the water” (for this meaning of
pà cf. above, notes 21–23 and the name Túl-ta-pà-da cited by Falkenstein there) and
thus linked with Berossos’ notices about Oannes rather than with those preserved in
the Middle Babylonian myth of Adapa, as van Dijk suggests, or with those in the
“Etiological myth of the ‘Seven Sages’ ” (Reiner, above, note 74).
80 This equation is clinched by Lambert’s catalogue (i 6) and parallels there cited.
81 Lambert, p. 70 ad i 5; cf. Hallo, IEJ 12, 16 and note 15. Here: I.1.
u4-SAR, “lunar disc.”82 His name also recurs in Rm. 618 at the head
of a catalogue of Akkadian literary works beginnings precisely with u4-
an-den-líl-lá.83 It is thus easier to suppose that the scribe of the Verse
Account erred in his rendering of Oannes/Adapa’s chief work than
that he attributed to the first sage a totally obscure one. In Lambert’s
list of authors, the astrological series is even attributed to Ea himself,
and both forms of the tradition thus agree in according to it the highest
possible antiquity (cf. above, note 63). That this is not solely a tenden-
tious attribution is clear from the fact that at least one “forerunner” of
the series has been found on an Old Babylonian copy,84 and that its title,
in both Sumerian and Akkadian, has turned up on the Old Babylonian
catalogue from Ur published by Kramer.85
Probably the second apkallu-name in the new list, u4-an-du10-ga, also
conceals an incipit in u4 = enūma, “when.” The third name, en-me-du10-
ga, actually occurs in the neo-Assyrian catalogue of texts and authors,
oddly enough in the midst of the section of human scholars (um-me-
a), as author of two otherwise unknown Sumerian series.86 The last
apkallu, ù-tu-abzu, “born of the deep,” seems strangely reminiscent of
Adapa again.87 In sum, it would not be surprising if all the apkallu-
names turned out eventually to identify known cuneiform series. This
would vindicate the long held view of classical scholars that in Berossos’
version of them they are none else than the revealed writings of the
Babylonians.88 The excerpts of Berossos preserved by later historians
may then be regarded in a sense as the last of the Sumerian literary
catalogues as the newly found Yale inventory represents, so far, the
first.
82 Lambert, ibid. On lunar discs and related matters, cf. my review of Limit’s Travail
du Métal in Bibliotheca Orientalis 20 (1963) 141 f.

83 Cf. A.H. Sayce, “The literary works of ancient Babylonia,” Zeitschrift für Keilschrift-
forschung 1 (1884) 190 f. and C. Bezold, Catalogue 4 (1896) 1627. Note also in HABL 923: 8
apkallu (NUN.ME) UMUN.A.DA.PÀ, “the sage Umun-Adapa,” (not “the sage and [u]
Adapa” as translated in ANET 450).
84 E. Weidner, Archiv für Orientforschung 14 (1942) 173 f. and note 7; T. Bauer, ZA 43
(1936) 308–314.
85 RA 55 (1961) 172, lines 49 f.
86 Lambert, JCS 16, 74 ad iv 11.
87 Ibid. and above, note 79.
88 H. Gelzer (1885) apud P. Schnabel, Berossos und die babylonisch-hellenistische Literatur
(1923) 27, 175.

ii.2
ANOTHER SUMERIAN LITERARY CATALOGUE?
The number of texts now identified as catalogues or inventories of

Sumerian literary works cited by their incipits continues to grow. Ten
years ago, I listed seventeen of them in JAOS 83 (1963) 169 (here:
II.1). In the same year, Cat. 3 (cited here according to my list) was
published by Gadd and Kramer as UET 6/1:123. Since then, the
same authors have published at least one and possibly three more
examples of the genre from Ur (UET 6/2:196–198). In the first of
these, note that the second preserved entry resembles Entry 6 in Cat. 1
(JAOS 83:170), the fourth is probably the incipit of the “Monkey Letter”
(Ali Sumerian Letters, B 14), the sixth equals Entry 13 of Cat. 1, and the
eighth resembles Entry 9 of the latter.
New discoveries also suggest a revision of my view that, in contrast to
both the earlier and later catalogues, “the Old Babylonian lists . . . seem
to exhibit no single consistent sequence or system of classification”
(JAOS 83:168). Wilcke has published an Old Babylonian catalogue
of incantations from the John Rylands Library (AfO 24, 1973, 14 f.)
and Kramer has announced the discovery of two large catalogues of
congregational laments (ír-šèm-ma) from the British Museum which
appear to be equally old.1 The tradition of generic classification was
firmly established by Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian times;
the significance of the respective catalogues, Cat. 9 (TMH n.F. 3:53)
and Cat. 10 (KARI 158), for the history of Sumerian literature is taken
up elsewhere.2 The list of neo-Assyrian catalogues (Cats. 11–16) should
be augmented by Rm. 2, 220, devoted to individual laments (ír-šà-hun-
gá) and published by Langdon, RA 22 (1925) 119–125 together with new
editions of Cat. 15 (Langdon, BL 138) and Cat. 16 (ib. 139). For the neo-
Babylonian catalogue Cat. 17 (Luckenbill, AJSL 26:28), see now S. Levy
and P. Artzi, Sumerian and Akkadian Documents in Israel (= Atiqot 4, 1965)
No. 99.
1 29th International Congress of Orientalists, Paris, 1973. Professor Kramer kindly
informs me that his publication of these texts will also appear in the present volume,
but our contributions have been submitted independently of each other.
2 Hallo, “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” (forthcoming), here: I.4.
152 ii.2. another sumerian literary catalogue?
I now propose to see another Old Babylonian catalogue in CBS

14077, published in 1934 by Chiera as STVC 41. I am indebted to Peter
Michalowski for the collations marked with an asterisk and to David
Owen for a photograph. The original may have had as many as six
columns, as there are clear traces of signs (not copied) to the left of
the “obverse?” and to the left and right of the “reverse?”, though it
is not excluded that these formed the conclusion of the lines on the
other side in the first two cases. Also, the copy fails to show double
dividing-lines after “obverse?” 2 and 12, in the latter case followed by
the 10-mark to indicate, evidently, that ten compositions were included
between the two double dividing-lines. Note also that the bottom of the
“obverse?” is in fact the, edge of the tablet. On the “reverse?” there is
a double dividing-line after line 10.3 Since these dividing lines do not
seem to reflect any generic grouping (see presently), the guess may be
ventured that they were drawn, mechanically after every tenth entry.
The following identifications may be suggested.
“OBVERSE?”
Line 10: ga-ša-an-mu dè-gu[r] = entry 9 in Rm. 2, 220 (RA 22: 123).
Line 13: dUtu è-ma = eršemma for Utu, listed in Cat. 11 (IV R2 53) ii 26
(cf. ibid, i 5 and iii 16) and edited by Schollmeyer, Šamaš (1912) as No.
34.
Line 14: x é -gi4, -a x é -[ta nam-ta-é] = balag of Inanna listed in Cat.
11 i 44.
“REVERSE?”
Line 2: an nam-[ . . . ]: cf. an-ne(var.: -né) nam-nir-ra (var.: gál) = “Sum-

mer and Winter,” catalogued in Cats. 3, 6, and 7 (RA 55:169 ff.;
BASOR 88:12; and TCL 15: 28 respectively) as Entries 22, 29 and
31 respectively.
Line 3: a-ba-a mu-un-ba-a[l-e] = “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu” as
reconstructed in my edition) JCS 20 (1966) 139, here: III.2.
3 Another, now erased, may have once been mistakenly inserted after line 9.
ii.2. another sumerian literary catalogue? 153
Line 4; me-a lu! = balbale-song of Suen, edited by Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen,

No. 1, with the corrections of M. Lambert, Or. 30 (1961) 89 f. and van
Dijk, OLZ 60 (1965) 27; listed in Cat. 5 (TMH n.F. 3: 54) as Entry 2.
Line 5: me am-xra: cf. the next entry in the same catalogue (me-a am).
Line 7: [ši]m-zi-da dar -ra: cf. entry 1 in the Yale catalogue. I take
this opportunity to correct the reading and translation in JAOS 83
(1963) 170 to dingir šim-zi-da DAR-a, “goddes colored with eye-paint
(kohl).” Admittedly, the reading gùn(-na) would be expected.
Line 10: [dHend]ur?-sag xšul gi6-a du-du: cf. ISET 1: 71 Ni. 9501:1, a
hymn to Nergal beginning (if the column marked “ii” is in fact the
first) [ . . . šu]l gi6-a du-du kur-kur tuku4-tuku4 (tutki).
Line 11: [...]-x gu4 -gim: cf. perhaps the opening line of Šulgi F (Heim-
pel, Tierbilder, No. 5.68).
Granted the above identifications, the order of entries in STVC 41

would be: (“obverse?”) individual lament, congregational laments;
(“reverse?”) disputation, royal hymn, divine hymns. It would seem,
moreover, that a number of entries are shared in common by Old
Babylonian and neo-Assyrian catalogues, though these are separated
from each other by more than a millennium.
ii.3
HAPLOGRAPHIC MARGINALIA
Scribal mistakes call for scribal corrections. In the vast genre of archival
texts, scribes often erred in their arithmetic and then corrected them-
selves by the time-honored device of an (intentional) compensating
error to arrive at a proper total.1 In literary texts, a common lapsus
calami consisted of omitting an entire poetic line. In such a case, prob-
ably detected when the scribe counted his lines and entered their total
in the colophon, a simple corrective was available; the left edge of the
tablet. This was normally blank except where the scribe had used up
the obverse, reverse, and bottom edge of the tablet and still needed
more space for additional lines.2 Otherwise he could use it to enter the
missing line, normally (as far as can be seen from the published copies)
in a downward direction relative to the point of insertion. When pos-
sible, a straight line before the entry indicated where on the obverse
or reverse of the tablet it was to be inserted. The practice in question
is already attested in Old Babylonian copies of Sumerian literary texts,
where it was discovered by Kramer a quarter of a century ago. He
wrote:3
Line 59, as the copy shows, was written on the left edge, since it was
accidentally omitted by the scribe who indicated by means of a short
horizontal line the exact place where it belongs. This interesting scribal
practice was relatively simple to figure out in the case of the Yale tablet
as a result of a comparison of the passage beginning with line 54 with the
parallel passages beginning with lines 30 and 45, not to mention the pres-
ence of the line in the duplicate, cf. line 327 of the restored text. There is
at least one other example of this scribal device in the published Sume-
rian literary texts which has remained unrecognized hitherto because of
lack of duplicating material. Thus in the all-important “deluge” tablet
published in PBS V 1, the signs written on the left edge are preceded
by a short line just as in the case of the Yale tablet; it is therefore
1 No example comes to mind at this writing.

2 See for example W.W. Hallo and J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna,
YNER 3 (1968) pls. 5 and 9.
3 Samuel Noah Kramer, “ ‘Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World,’ Continued and
Revised,” JCS 4 (1950) 206 f. n. 45.

156 ii.3. haplographic marginalia
not a colophon (cf. PBS IV 2, p. 63 and Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic

and Old Testament Parallels, p. 105) but a line that was accidentally
omitted between lines 5(!) and 6(!) of col. vi., which might perhaps be
restored to read; an-den-líl-li zi-u4-sudx-ra mí b[í-in dug4-ge-eš] “An and
Enlil ch[erished] Ziusudra.”
Commenting, on the line from the Sumerian Flood Story, Civil stated
in 1969: “Kramer’s suggestion to insert here the line from the left
edge of the tablet is in probability correct,”4 but he assigned it the
line number “255a” as an index of his hesitancy on this point.5 The
hesitation no longer seems necessary in view of the large number of
additional examples of the identical practice now available. They are
catalogued here in the context of the discussion of “scribal errors in
cuneiform,” the topic of the Assyriological Colloquium at Yale for
December 16, 1975.6
Kramer himself noted a third instance in CT 42 (1959) 1: the fifth
of the seven familiar “heroic epithets” of Enlil having been omitted
inadvertently after line 6 of the obverse, the scribe inserted the missing
line in the right edge.7 The switch to the right edge in this case may be
a function of the late date of the exemplar (on which see presently) or it
may have been prompted by the enigmatic “musical” notations which
pre-empted the left margin (edge?).8
The text in question is a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha, now edited by Kutscher.9
˘ ˘ ˘
The exemplar involved is said to be Neo-Babylonian in date.10 Kutscher
called attention to a second example of the practice in the same com-
position, for the Old Babylonian scribe of the Yale text YBC 4659
accidentally omitted line *155 and inserted it on the left edge, with a
straight line “pointing to” line *156.11
The fifth example is provided by the Nippur text Ni. 4552, pub-
lished by Kramer in 1963 and re-edited by Jacobsen as “The Sister’s
4 M. Civil, “The Sumerian Flood Story,” apud Lambert-Millard, Atra-hası̄s (1969)

172. ˘
5 Civil, in Lambert-Millard, Atra-hası̄s p. 145.
6 See Appendix to this article. ˘
7 S.N. Kramer, “CT XLII: A Review Article,” JCS 18 (1964) 36 n. 1.
8 On these notations see most recently W.G. Lambert, “The Converse Tablet: A
Litany with Musical Instructions,” apud H. Goedicke, ed., Near Eastern Studies in
Honor of William Foxwell Albright (1971) 335–353.
9 Raphael Kutscher, Oh Angry Sea (a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha): The History of a Sumerian
Congregational Lament, YNER 6 (1975) 68. ˘ ˘ ˘

10 YNER 6 11 (quoting E. Sollberger).
11 YNER 6 107 f.; cf. the hand-copy on plate 7 (!).
ii.3. haplographic marginalia 157
Message.”12 The text can be reconstructed with the help of an unpub-

lished Yale duplicate.13 The omitted line is line 27 in Kramer’s edition
and line 11 of the restored text; it occurs at the indicated point of inser-
tion in the Yale text as well as in the published duplicate (UM 29-16-8).
The sixth example occurs in another Nippur tablet, Ni. 4233, pub-
lished on p. 74 of ISET (1969), as pointed out in my review of the
volume.14 The text is a hitherto unknown hymn to Nin-imma.
But the practice was not confined, even in Old Babylonian times, to
texts from Nippur and whatever site was the provenience of the Yale
texts. It was noted in a literary text from Ur by Kramer15 and in one
of unknown provenience by Limet.16 These examples are particularly
illuminating, the former because the omission occurred at the very end
of the obverse and before the inscribed lower edge,17 the latter because
the insertion, coming as it does at line 26 of an obverse of 34 lines, had
to continue along the bottom edge of the tablet.
A different solution was adopted by the scribe of MLC 1207, likewise
of unknown provenience. Here the scribe squeezed the omitted line
into two lines running down the left edge before the point of insertion
which, as usual, was marked by a straight line. That line then follows the
insert rather than preceding it.18 A simpler, if less traditional, approach
was employed at Kish, to judge by the only example from that scribal
center in which the insert comes near the end of the obverse: here the
12 S.N. Kramer in “Cuneiform Studies and the History of Literature: The Sume-
rian Sacred Marriage Texts,” PAPS 107 (1963) 524; The Sacred Marriage Rite (1969)
p. 103 f.; T. Jacobsen, “The Sister’s Message,” The Gaster Festschrift, ANES 5 (1973)
199–212.
13 NBC 10923 This text shows that our bal-bal-e began at line 17 of the published
editions with di-da-mu-dè di-da-mu-dè. Line 16 should, with the photograph and
against the editions, probably be restored as [bal-bal-e-dInanna]-kam; to judge by the
Yale text, it was probably preceded by Kramer’s text no. 11.
14 W.W. Hallo, review of Çıg, Kızılyay and Kramer, Sumerian Literary Tablets and
Fragments in the Archaeological Museums of Istanbul 1 (1969), in JCS 18 (1971) 39

n. 1.
15 See his remarks apud C.J. Gadd and S.N. Kramer, Literary and Religious Texts:
First Part, UET 6 (1963) 35 (p. 5).

16 H. Limet, “Le poème épique ‘Innina et Ebih’,” Or. NS 40 (1971) 14. For the
˘
(unknown) provenience of PUL 550, see p. 11, and Limet, RA 63 (1969) 5.
17 The copy does not show the exact placement of the insertion, except that it is
located “on the left edge.”

18 J. van Dijk, “Incantations accompagnant la naissance de l’homme,” Or. NS 44
(1975) 65–69 and n. 35. The copy will appear in YOS 11.
scribe simply reversed the usual direction of the omitted line and wrote
it up the left margin above the line of insertion.19
That the practice continued unabated into the first millennium, as
demonstrated by the third example (above), was clearly recognized
by C. Bezold long ago, as is amply demonstrated in his Kouyunjik
Catalogue (footnotes to pp. 543, 554 and passim thereafter). It has
been less explicitly stated in more recent treatments. Thus Lambert
noted that a Babylonian copy of a late Assyrian fire incantation “adds
a whole line (III 27) in the left margin, while the duplicates have it
in the text.” But, he adds, “in this case it is not clear if the line was
lacking from the basic copy used by the scribe.., or if the scribe of [the
Babylonian copy] accidentally omitted it at first, but later discovered
the fact when checking the work.”20 Even though the copy in question
has other scribal notations in the form of textual variants, it seems clear
that we have here another simple case of scribal correction comparable
to the Sumerian precedents from the second millennium. Note only
that, in distinction from those, the present tablet has two columns on
each side and therefore the scribe availed himself of the space between
the columns for his insertion. Moreover, his line runs up, rather than
down this space. But it begins, as usual, at the point of insertion, and
this point is clearly marked by a wedge, comparable to the straight line
in the Old Babylonian convention.
Finally, the practice can be traced even beyond Mesopotamia as far
west as Ugarit. The famous snake charm RS 24.244, first published
by Virolleaud,21 has three lines of text running down the left margin
underneath a straight line which constitutes a simple extension of the
line dividing the fifth and sixth stanzas of the text.22 Virolleaud did not
know what to make of these three lines of text,23 but Astour, who first re-
edited the composition, described them as “a summary of an omitted
or additional incantation strophe; with it, the number of repetitions
would amount to twelve.”24 More specifically, he compares the twelve
pairs of deities in the related text RS 24.241 and says “the scribe of
19 Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream p. 165 pl. 18. Alster’s note, p. 55 line 23, seems unaware
of the nature of the scribal practice involved.

20 W.G. Lambert, “Fire Incantations,” AfO 23 (1970) 39.
21 Ch. Virolleaud, “Les nouveaux textes mythologiques et liturgiques . . . ,” Ugaritica
5 (1968) 567 no. 7.

22 This fact was called to my attention by David Wortman.
23 Ugaritica 5 574.
24 M.C. Astour, “Two Ugaritic Serpent Charms,” JNES 27 (1968) 15.
ii.3. haplographic marginalia 159
[RS 24.244] inserted a marginal note”25 to be translated “after (the

strophe on) Rešeph, (insert that on) Astarte, (namely:) ‘With Astarte in
Mari/is the incantation for the bite of the serpent’ ”26
A minor difficulty with this interpretation (from the point of view of
the Mesopotamian scribal usage) is only that the insertion seems to be
placed physically before the stanza on Resheph!
These examples should suffice to establish the chronological and
geographical scope of a cuneiform scribal device intended to rectify
the omission of lines from literary texts.
Appendix
The Assyriological Colloquium at Yale was conceived by J.J. Finkel-

stein in 1966. It continued to function under his leadership until his
death, and in his spirit since then. The original conception of the Col-
loquium remains as stated in the invitation of September 15 1986:
“a forum for informal and extended discussion of topics and prob-
lems in Assyriology which interest any of the participants . . . lim-
ited to Assyriologists within short rail or automobile travel distance
to New Haven (and) Assyriologists from abroad or elsewhere in this
country present in the area at the time of the meetings.” Finkelstein
sent invitations to A. Goetze, W.W. Hallo, T. Jacobsen, S.N. Kramer,
W.L. Moran, O. Neugebauer, A. Sachs, Å. Sjöberg, and F.J. Stephens.
All but one (Neugebauer) of these ten attended the first Colloquium,
which since then has grown to include numbers of additional, and espe-
cially younger, participants without sacrificing its informal and intimate
character. After a decade of meetings, it seems appropriate to list briefly
the formal topics of each Colloquium in a volume dedicated to the
memory of its founder.
1966 no set topic

1967 W.W. Hallo, Classification of the Lexical Texts
1968 T. Jacobsen, Comments on Oppenheim’s “Mesopotamian Religion”
1969 A.J. Sachs, Astronomical Diaries
1970 Å.W. Sjöberg, Examination Text A
1971 W.L. Moran, Peripheral Akkadian
1972 J.J. Finkelstein, The Goring Ox
25 JNES 27 (1968) 21.

26 JNES 27 (1968) 22. Cf. now also T.H. Gaster, ANES 7 (1975) 33–51.
1973 S.J. Lieberman, Fragments of a Theory of Cuneiform Writing

1974 M. de J. Ellis, Land Tenure in the Old Babylonian Period. Minor
communication: S.N. Kramer, The GIR5 Profession
1975 B.R. Foster, Sumerian Society under Sargonic Rule. Minor commu-
nication: J. Cooper, W.W. Hallo arid A.J. Sachs, Scribal Errors in
Cuneiform
ii.4
OLD BABYLONIAN HAR-RA1
The late Edgar J. Banks, source of so many collections of cuneiform

tablets throughout the United States, left a considerable number of clay
cones and tablets to his widow at his death in 1945. When it became
known to me in 1970 that she was anxious to dispose of them, con-
tact was quickly made with her and with her daughter, Mrs. James
McLachlan. Over a thousand tablets thus came into the possession of
the Yale Babylonian Collection, where most of them are now acces-
sioned among the numbers 15339–16384. Subsequently a large number
of fragments were turned over to the Collection by the Banks family;
these remain to be accessioned. The cones were also examined, but
as they all proved to be duplicates of familiar examples of Lagash and
Old Babylonian royal inscriptions, only a representative sample was
retained (now YBC 16435–16445) and the rest were returned to the
family and disposed of elsewhere.
Among the tablets thus newly accessioned, by far the majority were
neo-Sumerian archival texts from Umma and Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem),
with a sprinkling of earlier or later date. But here and there some
canonical texts were identified in the group, for example, Inanna and
Ebih lines 121–132 (YBC 16037). In some ways the most interesting of
these isolated texts is YBC 16317, presented here in transliteration.
1 See JCS 31 (1979) 161–165, here: XIII 2 for the first installment in this series.
A copy of YBC 9871, the subject of the first note, has meanwhile been prepared by
Randall McCormick and is appended to this note: the copy of YBC 16317 included
here is also his work. The substance of the present remarks was presented to the 191st
meeting of the American Oriental Society, Boston, March 16, 1981.
My thanks go to Stephen J. Lieberman and Miguel Civil for reading and comment-
ing on this paper. They do not necessarily endorse all of its conclusions.
162 ii.4. old babylonian har-ra
i ii
[lugal-me]- en ’a
lugal-mí-du11 ’an
en-e níg ’giš-taškarin/gigir?
nin-me gi-NUN.ME.TAG
5 bur-šu 5 [?] udu
dumu -é na4-ka-gi-na
dumu-é máš? [?]- du8 ?
dumu-é lú- x
nam? NE ? bi
10 dInanna? 10 X
šà-ga?-an? X
in-nin X
u6
Reverse uninscribed
YBC 16317 was first identified as a literary catalogue (or inventory) by

Mark E. Cohen and myself, and quickly recognized as a rather unique
example of this by now increasingly familiar genre by virtue of the
entries in its second column. These entries refer not, as elsewhere, to
literary compositions, but rather to lexical texts. The neo-Sumerian
and Old Babylonian examples of the genre so far known are devoted
almost exclusively to literary texts.2 Only a text from Ur (UET 5 86),
first identified as a catalogue by Kraus,3 includes one indubitably lexical
entry (ugu-mu in line 19)4 and two other entries that may refer to proto-
Izi (line 9)5 and an excerpt of Nigga (line 6)6 respectively. Column ii
of our text thus represents the oldest systematic listing of lexical texts
in any literary catalogue or inventory, hitherto known only from neo-
Assyrian times.7
Column i, on the other hand, lists the more traditional literary
compositions as met with also in numerous other neo-Sumerian and
2 See the most recent survey by J. Krecher, “Kataloge, Literarische,” RIA 5 (1980)
478–485.
3 OLZ 50 (1955) col. 518; cf. Bernhardt and Kramer, WZJ 6 (1956–1957) 394 n. 4;
Hallo, JCS 20 (1966) 90 f, here: III.2.

4 Civil, MSL 9 (1967) 59 (1).
5 Civil, MSL 13 (1971) 9.
6 Civil, MSL 13 (1971) 9 and 92.
7 See especially W.G. Lambert. “A Late Assyrian Catalogue of Literary and Schol-
arly Texts,” Kramer AV (AOAT 25 [1976]) 313–318. [Note now, however, the discovery
that BE 1773a represents “a list of lexical and perhaps literary texts housed in the tem-
ple of Amurru in Nippur” in Kassite times; I. Finkel and M. Civil, MSL 16 (1982) 3.
Added in proof.]
ii.4. old babylonian har-ra 163
especially Old Babylonian catalogues and inventories. In fact, it lists

them, in part, in the identical sequence. Thus the first four entries, if
line 1 is correctly restored, refer to the exact same compositions as the
first four entries in the “Philadelphia catalogue”8 and probably in the
“Louvre catalogue” (TCL 15 28)9 as well. The first three recur in the
“Andrews University catalogue”10 at the head of the second section and
the fourth as part of the first section which there, apparently, is devoted
to the works of Enheduanna. (It may be noted, in addition, that the
next entry in three of these four catalogues is the great Enlil-hymn den-
líl-sù-rá-šè.)11 Altogether, the relationship between column i of our text
and previously identified catalogues may be charted as follows:
Table I
YBC Phil. Louvre UET UET Andrews
16317 5 86 6 123 Univ. incipit
1 1 [1] 4 7 lugal-me-en (šà-ta)
2 2 [2] 5(!) 8 lugal-mí-du11(ga)
3 3 [3] 9 en-e níg-(du7-e)
4 4 [4] 8 3 nin-me-(šár-ra)
5 15 2 bur-šu-(ma-gal)
6 dumu-é-(dub-ba-a)
7 24 33 dumu-é-(dub-ba-a)
8 dumu-é-(dub-ba-a)
9 47?? [6]?? 23? IIa?? nam-(lugal?), nám-(nun-e?)
25?
10 d Inanna
11 26? šà-ga-AN
12 8 8,34?? 10? 13? 5? in-nin
44? 40?? 36?
13 49?? 31?? 21?? u6
The extremely abbreviated form of the entries in YBC 16317 makes

the identification of incipits 9–13 quite problematical, and the ensuing
remarks will be confined primarily to the significance of the second
column.
8 Kramer, BASOR 88 (1942) 14. P. Michalowski kindly showed me his manuscript
of another “Philadelphia catalogue,” to be published in Oriens Antiquus as “A New

Sumerian Literary ‘Catalogue’ from Nippur,” but it has no entries in common with
those in YBC 16317.
9 Kramer, BASOR 88 (1942) 17.
10 Mark E. Cohen, “Literary Texts from the Andrews University Archaeological
Museum,” RA 70 (1976) 129–144, especially 130–133.

11 Last edited by Daniel Reisman, Two Neo-Sumerian Royal Hymns (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Pennsylvania, 1969) pp. 41–102.

Ductus and appearance clearly suggest an Old Babylonian date for

YBC 16317. It may therefore be doubted that, as has been suggested
by Civil,12 the first two entries in the second column refer to the
two tablets, respectively, of “Syllabary B.”13 For this two-tablet com-
pendium, derived from the canonical Ea=A=nâqu, replaced proto-Ea
in the scribal curriculum only in neo-Assyrian times.14 Thus the first
entry is more likely to be either the elementary primer a-a, a-a-a,15 or
proto-Ea itself, now newly edited by Civil,16 while the second entry may
be an early version of the great god-list An=Anum which, when it did
not preface the divine ancestors of Enlil as in TCL 15 10, began with
An.17
It may be noted in this connection that, at a later date, the succes-
sors to these respective series did succeed each other in at least one
arrangement in two neo-Babylonian extract tablets18 formerly in the
E.A. Hoffman Collection and now on deposit at Yale.19 Interestingly
enough, precisely the opening lines (from six to thirteen lines in each
case) of successive series are quoted here as follows:20
Table II
Col. EAH 197 EAH 198 + 200
i writing exercise writing exercise
ii Syllabary A 1–11 Syllabary A 1–8
Syllabary A 329–340 Syllabary A 329–343
iii Syllabary B I 1–11 Syllabary B I 1–8
Syllabary B II 1–11 Syllabary B II 1–13
iv Weidner God List 1–9 Weidner God List 1–6
HAR-ra I 1–7 HAR-ra I 1–9
MSL 14 (1979) 166.

12
Edited by H.S. Schuster and B. Landsberger as “Das Vokabular Sb” in MSL 3

13
(1955) 89–153; additions in MSL 9 (1967) 149–153.

14 Civil, MSL 14 (1979) 166, notes that the oldest Sb texts are Middle Babylonian at
the earliest.
15 Edited by M. Çığ and H. Kızılyay, Zwei altbabylonische Schulbücher aus Nippur
(1959) 66–76 as “Silbenalphabet B.”

16 MSL 14 (1979) 1–81.
17 J. van Dijk, “Le motif cosmique dans la pensée sumérienne,” ActaOr 28 (1964)
1–59, fig. 1.
18 For the type, see most recently Hallo, JCS 31 (1979) 61 and nn. 4–8, here: VIII.2;
add, inter alia, KAR 40 and perhaps UET 6 251 f.

19 J.A. Maynard, “A Neo-Babylonian Grammatical School Text,” JSOR 3 (1919) 65 f.
20 See the summary by Borger, HKL 1 (1967) 331 ad loc. For the “Weidner God List”
see Lambert, RIA 3 (1969) 474; Krecher, UF 1 (1969) 140, 147–149.

These two tablets, which D.C. Snell has undertaken to study and
re-edit, have an unusual appearance, but one that is paralleled by
other neo-Babylonian exercise tablets (unpublished), as S.J. Lieberman
assures me.
The general order: syllabaries—god-lists—vocabularies was already
followed in the Old Babylonian scribal schools according to an edub-
ba"a-essay cited by Sjöberg.21 And this order also appears in the second
column of YBC 16317. Specifically the next six entries may be com-
pared, with varying degrees of probability, to the incipits of the Old
Babylonian forerunners to HAR-ra (better: ur5-ra) = hubullu tablets III,
VIII, XIII, XVI, XX, and “XXV” (LÚ).22 The absence ˘ of the fore-
runner to HAR-ra I (and II) from this list calls for some comment.
Long ago I suggested that “just as ana ittišu I–VI seems intended for,
or derived from, the contract literature of neo-Sumerian and Early Old
Babylonian times, so HAR-ra = hubullu, though it appears today like a
veritable cuneiform encyclopedia, ˘ may originally have been intended
for or derived from the numerically vaster account literature of the
same periods. The character of the first two tablets of HAR-ra is
not out of keeping with this interpretation; instead of the names of
products, places, and professions, these introductory ‘chapters’ seem to
explain the standard ‘ledger entries’ of the account texts.”23
Since this view was expressed, however, it has become clear that
in fact the first two tablets of HAR-ra may have to be regarded as
a separate composition from the rest of the series in Old Babylonian
times. Civil stated as much, albeit without documentation, in 1976:
“The series HAR-ra started originally with the tree list (Tablet III of
the canonical recension). The late Tablets I and II derive from a list
of legal terms, phrases from the old collection of ‘model contracts,’24
and excerpts from Proto-Izi, but were first compiled in Old Babylonian
times. The oldest dated forerunner to HAR-ra I–II is from the fifteenth
year of Samsuiluna.”25 Actually an unpublished Louvre forerunner (that
21 A. Sjöberg, “The Old Babylonian Eduba,” Studies Jacobsen (AS 20 [1976]) 162 f.
22 On HAR-ra “XXV” see Civil, MSL 12 (1969) 90 and 223 f.; Reiner, MSL 11 (1974)
ix f.
23 J.B. Curtis and W.W. Hallo, “Money and Merchants in Ur III,” HUCA 30 (1959)
136; see also Hallo, “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature,” IEJ 12 (1962) 18 and
n. 23, here: I.1.
24 See on these Hallo, “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” Studies Jacobsen
pp. 195 f. and n. 98, here: I.4.

25 Civil, “Lexicography,” Studies Jacobsen pp. 127 f.; see also M.T. Roth, Scholastic
is, Sumerian only) dates from the first year of Samsu-iluna, according
to Arnaud (AO 7012).26 But in any case, the example of AO 779627
shows that the later HAR-ra I–II could constitute a single tablet in Old
Babylonian times. The fact that none of the forerunners of HAR-ra I
and II continue with excerpts from III lends weight to Civil’s assertion
that they constituted a discrete series.
Further grounds for Civil’s view may be found in his earlier remarks
on school tablets of type II/2, described as relatively long extracts on
the reverse of tablets of type II/1, each side devoted to a different
series,28 or at least a different part of the same series.29 In this connec-
tion, Civil stated, in 1971: “a large number of exercise tablets of the type
II/2, emanating from the uncertain hand of beginners and containing
the opening lines of the list, typically mark the beginning of a lexical
compilation. Thus . . . the hundreds of fragments of type II/2 tablets
inscribed with the Forerunner to HAR-ra III found in Nippur clearly
show that HAR-ra started with the third tablet of the canonical series
in the OB schools.”
These hundreds of fragments are as yet unpublished, and the Old
Babylonian forerunners to HAR-ra III–V remain unedited.30 (From V
on, most of these forerunners are reconstructed separately in MSL.)
But we can already form an impression of their appearance from the
texts catalogued by Landsberger in 1957.31 It is clear that the incipit of
the Old Babylonian recension, as of the canonical HAR-ra III, was giš-
taškarin; see, for example SLT 149 and especially SLT 194, a II/2-type
tablet with an extract of HAR-ra XI on the obverse and a doxology
to Nisaba followed by a double dividing line and HAR-ra III 1 ff. on
the reverse. (In passing, it may be noted that one of the newly found
tablets from Ras Ibn Hani, the North Syrian coastal site which has also
yielded tablets in Ugaritic script and language, contains precisely HAR-
Tradition and Mesopotamian Law: A Study of FLP 1287 (Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1979) 13 and nn. 31 f.
26 Arnaud, RA 69 (1975) 88. Stephen J. Lieberman, who plans an edition of HAR-
ra I–II, kindly informs me that AO 7012, which he is to publish, is in fact dated to

Samsu-iluna 15. He notes that it lacks a catchline to HAR-ra III or anything else.
27 C.-F. Jean, “Prototype de la première tablette HAR-ra:hubullu AO 7796,” RA 33
(1936) 85–90.
28 Civil, MSL 12 (1969) 27.
29 Civil, MSL 14 (1979) 5 and below ad SLT 194. Compare also, for example,
SLT 128 (HAR-ra III and X) and BIN 2 67 (HAR-ra III and Vlllf.).
30 Meantime note the compilation by Borger, HKL 3 (1975) 103 f.
31 MSL 5 (1957) 90 f.
ra III 1–30.)32 Thus our new catalogue would bear out Civil’s hypothesis
if the third entry of column ii could be read as giš-taškarin. But even
if it must be read giš-gigir, it would point to Old Babylonian HAR-ra,
for that was the incipit of the second tablet in some Old Babylonian
recensions, replaced in the canonical HAR-ra V by the synonymous
giš-mar = narkabtum.
At this point it is necessary to pause and attempt to reconstruct the
structure of Old Babylonian HAR-ra as far as this is possible with
the aid of a reasonably careful survey of the grouping of passages as
revealed in MSL 5–11. The recensions with the largest tablets seem to
have encompassed the entire series in five tablets as follows (Roman
numerals refer to the tablets of the later, canonical recension):
(1) III–VII, represented by LTBA 1 78 f. and possibly by Ist. Si. 53 (Sippar)
(2) VIII–XII: SLT 191 + 89
(3) XIII–XV: Copenhagen 10098; N 5547; UM 29-16-571; UM 29-16-207+;
SLT 37+SLT 46+N 5491.
(4) XVI–XIX: CT 6 11–14 (Sippar); AO 4304 (Telloh); SLT 233 + 234?;
SLT 217+(?)
(5) XX–XXIV: N 6252.
There was also apparently a recension with a larger number of smaller
tablets, grouped approximately as follows (exemplars cited by way of
illustration only; Middle Babylonian texts from the periphery are in-
cluded on the assumption that they followed the Old Babylonian pat-
tern).
(1) III–IV: N 5133 (MSL 14 27); Syria 12 pl. 46 and 10 pl. 77:5 (Ugarit)
(2) V–VII: Ist. Si. 720 (Sippar); UET 7 87 (Ur)
(3) VIII–X: SLT 84
(4) XI–XII: SLT 41; SLT 190; 3 N-T 346; UM 29-16-391+
(5) XIII–XV: (see above)
(6) XVI–XVII: CBS 10183; SLT 76+; Ras Shamra 22.346+ and 22.337
(Ugarit); Alalakh 447
(7) XVIII–XIX: PBS 1 14+; SLT 69; KBo 1 47+ (Hattusha); Ras Shamra
20.32 + 17.03 (Ugarit)
(8) XX–XXII: MSL 11 93–109; UET 7 79 (Ur)
(9) XXIII–XXIV: MSL 11 109–128.
Of course numerous exemplars confined themselves to the contents of
a single canonical tablet or less. But it is interesting to note that with
the exception of variant or “non-canonical” traditions such as UET 7
32 Jacques and Elisabeth Lagarce, “Découvertes archéologiques à Ras Ibn Hani,”
CRAI (1978) pp. 45–65, especially p. 57; see also the same authors in UF 10 (1978) 438 f.
92 (XI, XVIII, XVII, XIX) or IM 51144 (V or VI–X, XVIII[?]),33

ordinarily no tablets crossed the borders of the 5-tablet recension; only
the exercise tablets of Type II/2 (see above) excerpted widely divergent
chapters of the series on obverse and reverse respectively, as follows:
III and VIII–IX: BIN 2 67 and 3 N-T 595
III and X: SLT 128
III and XI: SLT 194
XIII and XXIII–XXIV: N 5081; CBS 6115
XIV and XXIII–XXIV: N 5543
Finally it may be noted that the grouping of the HAR-ra tablets in the
late commentary series HAR-gud was quite different from all of the
above.34
Given these observations, it seems safe to conclude that our inven-
tory records the 5-tablet recension of HAR-ra as standardized in the
Old Babylonian schools and their middle Babylonian successors.35 It is
therefore the more interesting that the next entry is lú, for some sort
of lú-list followed HAR-ra in the canonical sequence.36 In the earlier
canon, proto-lú was followed by proto-izi and proto-diri37 and that may
conceivably be the case here as well.38
Any attempt to assess the over-all significance of the new inventory
is necessarily risky. Yet one wonders whether there is not a significance
in the rough juxtaposition of literary texts in column i and lexical texts
in column ii (admittedly the columns are not precisely aligned with
each other). Civil suggested as much when he wrote me (in reference to
YBC 16317): “In the introduction to the revised edition of proto-Ea in
MSL 14 . . . , I show that there is a clear relationship between what is on
the obverse of the ‘type II’ exercise tablets and what is on their reverse.
I wonder if your list of lexical series reflects this situation.”39 Could it
be, in other words, that our list described (or prescribed) the pairing of
33 Cf. MSL 6 144–153, 7 177–208. Note that Landsberger describes IM 51144 as “a
different recension from the Nippur series” (MSL 7 197). Civil also calls my attention
to two unpublished forerunners from the Oriental Institute (A 7895 and A 7896) which
follow a divergent order (XX[?], XIV, XIII and XVII [?], XIV, XIII, XI respectively).
34 Landsberger, MSL 7 (1959) 57–61.
35 For tablet XX, our MÁŠ (for ZI?). [x]-du diverges from the (reconstructed) a.
3
ša-du8 of MSL 11 97, but that may need review.
36 Civil, MSL 12 (1969) 90.
37 Civil, MSL 12 (1969) 90.
38 In ii 9, read perhaps ib(b)i bi (=qutru, “smoke, incense”) following MSL 13 16:7,
x
36:10, and 160 f.:15 f.
39 Letter of March 4, 1977.
Lipit-Ištar 23* (Lipit-Ištar A) with the god-list, of Gilgamesh and the

Land of the Living with HAR-ra III–IV (or V–VII), of the Exaltation
of Inanna with HAR-ra VIII–XII, and so on? If so, were such pairs
standard in the Old Babylonian schools, or at the discretion of each
master? And was our text less inventory or catalogue than curriculum?
These concepts merge anyway in my view of the Old Babylonian
edubba"a.40 A preliminary check of the evidence convinced Civil of the
existence of “a definite pattern which must reflect the organization of
the subject of the curriculum in a fixed succession.”41 At the same time
it suggests that, for example, proto-Ea was most often paired with the
forerunner to HAR-ra XIII–XIV, that is, the third tablet of the Old
Babylonian recension, and not with buršuma-gal as in YBC 16317.42
Clearly no one explanation will suffice for all the Old Babylonian
catalogues and inventories. But just as clear is their intimate link with
the curriculum of the scribal schools. By way of illustration, one may
point to BE 31 9, an Old Babylonian tablet which lists twenty lines
selected from lines 416–654 of the composition Lugal-e (the equivalent
of tablets X–XIV in the later recension) at, on the average, 12-line
intervals, as follows:43
Table III
OB NA
No. BE 31 9 recension recension interval
1 1–2 416? X1 19
2 3–4 435? 13
3 5 448 15
4 6 463 XI 1 16
5 7 479 8
6 8 487 10
7 9 497 16
8 10 513 XII 1 12
40Hallo, IEJ 12 (1962) 13–26, here: I.1; cf, Sjöberg, Studies Jacobsen pp. 162 f., and,
for a restatement of some of my views, see J. Olivier, “Schools and Wisdom Literature,”
Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 4 (1975) 49–60.
41 MSL 14 (1979) 5 f.
42 S.J. Lieberman points out, however, that in his experience the only literary texts
occurring in more than one or two-line excerpts together with lexical texts on exercise
tablets are proverbs and Lipit-Ištar B (24*), for which see n. 54 below.
43 Based on a manuscript of Lugal-e which I owe to the courtesy of J. van Dijk. Note
that only in a limited sense can the text therefore be said to catalogue “Einzeltafeln” of
the composition as suggested by Wilcke, AfO 24 (1973) 50 n. 2.
OB NA
No. BE 31 9 recension recension interval
9 11 525 7
10 12 532 15
11 13 547 10
12 14 557 XIII 1 11
13 15–16 568? 13
14 17 581? 14
15 18 595? 8
16 19 603 9
17 20 612?? IV 1 10
18 21–22 622 15
19 23 637 4
20 24 641 [14]
While there may be special reasons for this choice of lines,44 the inter-
vals thus established fall within the typical range of length of extracts
from literary texts which was regarded as the daily pensum at a certain
level of instruction as indicated by the existence of numerous tablets of
this length (Civil’s Type III).45 This level was presumably intermediate
between the primary stage, represented by lenticular tablets with 2–5
line extracts (Civil’s Type IV) and the advanced stage, represented by
extracts of 30 or more lines (Civil’s Type II/2).46 That 10–30 lines were
the daily pensum is confirmed by im-gíd-da or “long tablets” (to us they
mostly look wide because we read them at a different angle)47 which
carry a specific date (year, month, and day); when successive portions
of a single composition are copied on these extract-tablets by one and
the same scribal pupil, we can get an accurate estimate of his typical
daily assignment. Thus, for example, a certain Qišti-Ea copied lines 1–
18 of the letter of Puzur-Šulgi (also known as Puzur-Marduk) to Šulgi
44 Civil notes: “The lines from Lugal-e have been chosen by the scribe as the points
where the sections about particular stones start; the fact that there is an interval of
about 12 lines simply reflects the length of these thematic sections. I prefer to see in
BE 31 9 a mnemotechnic list to help remember the order in which the stones are
confronted by Ninurta.” (Letter of 7-28-81.)
45 MSL 12 (1969) 28, 152; 14 (1979) 5. See also Hallo and van Dijk, Enheduanna
(1968) 39 (5).
46 MSL 12 (1969) 27 f., 152; 14 (1979) 5; Hallo and van Dijk, Enheduanna pp. 38 f. (3
and 4).
47 But some, like UET 6 33 with 30 or more lines per side, look long even to us. Cf.
H. Hunger, Babylonische und Assyrische Kolophone (AOAT 2, 1968) p. 7; CAD L s.v.

liginnu.
on an im-gíd-da dated Samsuiluna—/IX/2548 and the balance of the

text (lines 19–33) on an im-gíd-da dated the following day.49 Or again, a
certain Damqi-ilis̃u copied lines 1–63 of the Disputation between Cat-
tle and Grain on an im-gíd-da dated X/15 and lines 63–123 of the
same composition on one dated X/25.50 If six of the intervening ten
days were spent in school,51 then he was responsible for about 10 lines
per day. Thus BE 31 9 is quite possibly a checklist of twenty successive
assignments in a scribal school covering nearly a month’s work, since
there were 23 and 24 schooldays in a month depending on whether it
was a hollow month of 29 days or a full month of 30.52 And YBC 16317
may similarly represent assignments of type II tablets in a school situa-
tion.
It has recently been suggested by Vanstiphout that some royal hymns
were written less to glorify the king than to provide elementary illus-
trations of Sumerian grammar for the instruction of scribal students.53
He was alluding to compositions like Lipit-Ištar B (*24), which he has
edited,54 noting that it never occurs in the literary catalogues, while
Lipit-Ištar A (*23) occurs in two of them55 or rather, as we can say now,
in five of them.56 At the same time, Sauren independently identified cer-
tain edubba"a-essays as ideally suited for instruction in Sumerian gram-
mar, among them some, like dumu-é, which are listed in the catalogues
(see above, Table 1).57 It seems, then, that the catalogues cannot be used
as criteria for the level of instruction at which a text was employed.
While lenticular school tablets probably serve to identify the most ele-
mentary levels of instruction, those of Type II seem to show connected
literary texts at an intermediate stage of the curriculum.
48 YBC 4654 (unpubl.).

49 YBC 4606. Both texts are incorporated in the edition by P. Michalowski, The
Royal Correspondence of Ur (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976) pp. 200–213.
50 UET 6 33 f.; cf. Hunger, Kolophone p. 25, who reads X/14 and X/24 and notes
another im-gíd-da of 60 lines inscribed by the same scribe on X/21 (UET 6/2 131).
51 Kramer, “Literary Texts from Ur VI, Part II,” Iraq 25 (1963) 174; “Modern Social
Problems in Ancient Sumer: Evidence from the Sumerian Literary Documents,” in

Edzard Gesellschaftsklassen (CRRA 18, 1972) p. 119; Hallo, “New Moons and Sabbaths:
A Case-study in the Contrastive Approach,” HUCA 48 (1977) 12 f.
52 Hallo, HUCA 48 (1977) 12 f.
53 H. Vanstiphout, “How Did They Learn Sumerian?” JCS 31 (1979) 118–126.
54 Vanstiphout, “Lipit-Eštar’s Praise in the Edubba,” JCS 30 (1978) 33–61.
55 JCS 31 (1979) 123.
56 See above, Table 1, sub lugal mí-du -ga.
11
57 H. Sauren, “E -dub-ba-Literatur: Lehrbücher des Sumerischen,” Orientalia Lo-
2
vaniensia Periodica 10 (1979) 97–107.
YBC 16317 and its analogues (above, Table 1), serve as further evi-
dence to this effect. As Civil has seen,58 items 1–3 in the new catalogue,
and perhaps the Kesh-hymn (see item 9) and the Enlil-hymn (dEn-líl
sù-rá-šè) “are the only ones (with the exception of proverbs and cer-
tain short tales) which are found in type II/2 exercise tablets.” More-
over, they were apparently studied in this order, given the discovery of
exemplars of item 1 with the incipit of item 2 as catchline, and of the
Enlil-hymn with the incipit of the Kesh-hymn as catchline,59 precisely
the sequence found in the catalogues from Philadelphia, the Louvre,
and Andrews University.60 But YBC 16317 is, apart from UET 5 86, the
only catalogue to include lexical genres, and it is the first one to list
them in some kind of systematic association with the standard literary
texts of the (intermediate) scribal curriculum.
58 Civil, Studies Jacobsen, p. 145 n. 36.

59 Civil, Studies Jacobsen, p. 145 n. 36. For another example of such a “catchline”
see Sjöberg, ZA 63 (1973) 43 (1). See also Hallo, JCS 31 (1979) 161 n. 7 for balag-texts
excerpted in the same order on excerpt tablets and in a catalogue text.
60 Above, nn. 8–10. In the Andrews University catalogue, I read the beginning of
line 11 as [ná]m- nun -e.

iii
royal and divine hymns
iii.1
ROYAL HYMNS AND MESOPOTAMIAN UNITY1
Falkenstein and Edzard have introduced the concept of Babylonian

Intermediate Periods on the analogy of the Egyptian pattern. Appar-
ently they construe unification as the norm of Babylonian political life,
and periods of fragmentation as departures from this norm. This point
of view has been questioned in a number of reviews of Edzard’s other-
wise exemplary book on the so-called “Second Intermediate Period of
Babylonia,”2 but these arguments are directed only against taking unifi-
cation as the norm of political life. To quote my own review, “the peri-
ods of political unity which enclose Edzard’s two ‘intermediate’ peri-
ods are either too hypothetical (Uruk I and Kish I), too interrupted by
disunity (Agade—Ur III), or too short (Hammurabi 30—Samsu-iluna
9) to qualify as norms of Babylonian political achievement, even if it
can be shown (p. 3) that the Babylonians themselves regarded them as
such.”3 This paper seeks to address itself to the latter question: can it be
shown that, no matter what their actual experience, the Neo-Sumerian
and Old Babylonian states of southern Mesopotamia regarded unifica-
tion as a theoretical norm of their political thought, in short as a political
ideal?
There are, of course, a number of well-known grounds for an affir-
mative answer to this question, foremost among which is, perhaps, the
Sumerian king list. This king list (like some of its Babylonian succes-
sors), has rightly come to be regarded as a political tract, designed
to perpetuate the perfectly transparent fiction that Sumer and Akkad
had, since the Flood, been united under the rule of a single king, albeit
that king might come at any given time from any one of eleven differ-
ent cities.4 Second, certain royal titles and epithets were, at any given
1 The substance of this paper was presented to the American Oriental Society, in
Philadelphia, on March 30, 1961.

2 D.O. Edzard, Die “zweite Zwischenzeit” Babyloniens (1957).
3 Bibliotheca Orientalis 16 (1959) 235.
4 The restoration “11 [citie]s which exercised kingship” at the conclusion of one
Nippur recension of the King List is now confirmed by a new fragment of a duplicate
text from Nippur; cf. Hallo, JCS 17 (1963) 56, here: VI.1.
176 iii.1. royal hymns and mesopotamian unity
time, the prerogative of just one dynasty, though the authority which
the title implied might be quite as fictitious as the unity it was supposed
to suggest. Thus the title “King of Ur,” or epithets like “supporter/hus-
bandman/herdsman of Ur” were claimed by the kings of Isin from the
collapse of Ur III through the early years of Enlil-bani, that is some
eighty years after Isin had, perhaps peacefully,5 ceded actual control of
Ur to Larsa. Nor was this claim, so far as is known, challenged during
that time.6 Other titles, too, had a character that lifted them above local
significance and were held by only one city or dynasty at a time7 and,
what is equally revealing, some altogether unexpected epithets recur in
totally different dynasties.8
Third, the “amphictyonic” league which I have tried to reconstruct
for the Ur III period9 implies a specific kind of ideal unity far ante-
dating the establishment of Ur’s hegemony under Ur-Nammu and
Shulgi,10 and outlived it at least in the sense that the members of the
amphictyony also constituted, by and large, the separate kingdoms of
the Early Old Babylonian period, kingdoms which, it can be argued,
preserved the internal peace of the Ur III period for more than a cen-
tury.11 Fourth, the installation of his daughter as high-priestess of the
moon-god Nanna at Ur seems to have been the prerogative of what-
ever king controlled the city of Ur at the time. At least five dynasties
succeeded each other in the almost unbroken succession of these royal
appointments that has now been established for the interval from Sar-
gon of Akkad to Rim-Sin of Larsa12 and, whatever the basis of the
prerogative may have been, there is no evidence for rival claimants to
it even during periods of political upheaval. Indeed, the uniformly long
tenures of these high-priestesses, from Enheduanna13 to Adad-guppi of
5 E.I. Gordon, “Lipit-Ishtar of Isin,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin (Ober-
lin, Ohio) 14/1 (1956) 20 f.

6 Hallo, AOS 43 (1957) 16–18; JNES 18 (1959) 57.
7 AOS 43: 150–155.
8 Ibid., 156; note especially the early Lagash epithet kur-gú-gar-gar DN revived by
Nur-Adad of Larsa (ibid., 137).

9 JCS 14 (1960) 88–114.
10 Cf. especially Thorkild Jacobsen’s arguments for an early “Kengir league” in
ZA 52 (1957) 99–109.
11 Hallo, Bibliotheca Orientalis 16 (1959) 238.
12 Edmond Sollberger, AfO 17 (1954–1956) 23–29, 45 f.
13 The special case of this daughter of Sargon must be considered separately in the
light of her hymns to Innin; cf. for the present Adam Falkenstein, RA 52 (1958) 129–131.
iii.1. royal hymns and mesopotamian unity 177
Harran,14 can only be explained on the assumption—most clearly val-

idated in the case of Enannatumma15—of their immunity to dynastic
change.
Finally, we may briefly mention certain significant indications of
national consciousness. There is, on the literary level, the perpetuation
of the “historical tradition,”16 including the historical allusions in the
omen literature,17 both serving to unify the separate traditions of the
individual city-states. On the political level, there is the tendency to
revive traditional royal names such as Sharruken and Naram-Sin. And
on the religious level, the worship of the deified Gudea of Lagash in
Ur III18 and of the deified Ur III kings in the Isin period19 attests
to a feeling of temporal unity and implies a sense of spatial unity in
Mesopotamian political thought.
To this fairly impressive array of arguments, I would like to add
another, from the so-called royal hymns. The term will be used here
somewhat loosely to include all those Sumerian hymns which honor,
pray for or otherwise commemorate specific kings, as well as certain
related Sumerian texts such as laments, letters to gods and political
correspondence mentioning kings. A significant number of these com-
positions expressly or indirectly attest to a kind of cosmic conception of
Mesopotamian unity or, following Jacobsen’s analysis, they picture the
assembly of the gods at Nippur as conferring supreme executive power
(illilūtu) on one of their number so that this deity might then confer its
earthly equivalent on the king or e n s í of his or her city.20 That city was
thus recognized, at least by the religious poetry, as prima inter pares and
it should therefore be of interest to see which cities and dynasties were
thus honored.
The royal Sumerian hymns, in the narrower sense, have lately re-
ceived a great deal of attention, and as a result we now know of over
a hundred examples of this genre, though the number may decrease
14 Cf. most recently C.J. Gadd, “The Harran inscriptions of Nabonidus,” Anatolian
Studies 8 (1958) 35–92.

15 Gordon, loc. cit.
16 H.G. Güterbock, ZA 42 (1934) 1 ff.
17 Albrecht Goetze, JCS 1 (1947) 253–265.
18 Nikolaus Schneider, Orientalia 9 (1940) 17–24, with the reservations of Sollberger,
AfO 17 (1954–1956) 33, note 124 and Falkenstein, Neusumerische Gerichtsurkunden 1 (1956) 6,
note 7. Admittedly all the evidence comes from Lagash itself so far.
19 TCL 15: 18 (AO 5374); cf. Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949) 83.
20 Apud H. and H.A. Frankfort, Before Philosophy, 207–213; ZA 52 (1957) 105 f. In other
cases, supreme power is withdrawn in the same manner.

slightly as fragmentary passages are shown to belong to single compo-

sitions. Seventy-three separate compositions were identified by Falken-
stein in a survey of the genre in 1952.21 Some thirty additional examples
can already be added to the list, chiefly from more recent publications.
These are indicated in the ensuing footnotes which may serve as a pro-
visional complement to Falkenstein’s list and to Lambert’s survey of
Sumerian literature22 in which the royal hymns receive only scant atten-
tion.23 The bulk of these 100-odd compositions may be assigned to four
major dynasties, with Ur and Isin boasting some forty each, and Larsa
and Babylon up to ten each. Of these dynasties, only Ur is represented
by all its kings, and these in rather divergent numbers, though the
proportions are comparable to those established for the Neo-Sumerian
royal inscriptions.24 Thus for Ur-Nammu, at least seven separate com-
positions can now be identified,25 for Shulgi some thirty,26 and for Shu-
Sin four.27 Although Falkenstein no longer regards BE 29:1 iii f. as a
21 ZA 50 (1952) 61–63 with notes 2–10 (p. 61) and 1–7 (p. 62).
22 M. Lambert, RA 55 (1961) 177–196; 56 (1962) 81–90.
23 Ibid., 81. Cf. also the brief notice by S.N. Kramer in The Bible and the Ancient Near
East (= Albright AV, 1962), 263 f., notes 66–70.

24 Hallo, HUCA 33 (1962) 8.
25 The published texts listed by Falkenstein, ZA 50:61, note 2 have now been edited
by G.R. Castellino, ZA 52 (1957) 17–57; 53 (1959) 106–131. Åke Sjöberg has identified
TCL 15:38 as a syllabically written duplicate to SRT 11; cf. Orientalia Suecana 10 (1961)
3–11. Add CT 44 (1963) 16, previously published by Stephen Langdon, PSBA 40 (1918)
45 ff. and unpublished texts from Istanbul (cf. Orientalia 22 191) and Jena (cf. WZJ 5
761, Nos. 3, 24, 89, 116).
26 Using Falkenstein’s sigilla (ZA 50: 62 f.), Shulgi A can now be augmented by
J.J.A. van Dijk, Sumer 13 (1967) 79B, and Shulgi D by Kramer et al., Orientalia 22
(1953) pls. xlviiif. (1st. Ni. 4571; cf. Falkenstein, Iraq 22 [1960] 146 f.). Shulgi I (BE 31: 54)
belongs to the genre of royal correspondence; cf. Kramer, JAOS 60 (1940) 253, note 60,
and note 1A-wi-il-la-ša in 1. 16—the name is frequent in this genre—and the concluding
catchline or colophon dI -bi-dEN.ZU lugal-mu-[ra ù-na-a-du11(?)]. Shulgi S (STVC 58) is
not a hymn either; cf. below, note 32. Van Dijk, SGL 2 (1960) 13–15 has shown that
Langdon, Babylonian Liturgies (1913) 195B is a hymn (a - d a - a b) for Shulgi, while
Erica Reiner, Orientalia 30 (1961) 10, holds likewise for the bilingual text PBS 1/1 (1911)
11. New are CT 42 (1959) 40 (with duplicate SLTN 52) edited by Falkenstein, Iraq 22
(1960) 139–160, and TLB 2 (1957) 2, edited by van Dijk, Bibliotheca Orientalis 11 (1954)
85–88. Finally, at least two hitherto unknown titles of Shulgi-hymns appear in a Yale
catalogue of royal hymns to be published by the writer; here: II.1. Among unpublished
pieces are one each from Jena and Philadelphia (cf. Bernhardt and Kramer, WZJ 5 762
No. 33—not a hymn—and 6 393, note 2 ad no. 26) and 11 from Istanbul (cf. Orientalia
22 191).
27 To Falkenstein’s list, ZA 50 61, note 4, add now Kramer et al., Belleten 16 (1952) pl.
lxvi and pp. 360–363 = University Museum Bulletin 17/2 (1952) 31–33 (Ni. 2461). Like
hymn to Amar-Sin,28 that ruler figures in the “royal correspondence” of

Ur III29 as do Shulgi, Shu-Sin, and Ibbi-Sin.30 In addition, the Ur III
kings figure prominently in other literary categories such as law-codes
(Ur-Nammu),31 disputations (Shulgi32 and Ibbi-Sin),33 love-songs34 and
collections of royal inscriptions35 (Shu-Sin), and laments (Ibbi-Sin).36
At Isin, eight out of the first ten rulers, including all of the first seven,
are represented by royal hymns, as follows: Ishbi-Irra: 5;37 Shu-ilishu: 2;38
Iddin-Dagan: 3;39 Ishme-Dagan: 14;40 Lipit-Ishtar: 5;41 Ur-Ninurta: 6;42
SRT 23, this text is really a love-song rather than a hymn; both texts carry the native
designation b a l - b a l - e, “dialogue” (?). Three other Shu-Sin pieces are signalized
from Istanbul and Jena.
28 Below, note 43.
29 Orientalia 22, pl. xl (Ni. 3803).
30 At present still largely unpublished; cf. most recently F.R. Kraus, AfO 20 (1963)
153.
31 Kramer and Falkenstein, Orientalia 23 (1954) 40–51 and pls. iv–vii.
32 Van Dijk, Bibliotheca Orientalis 11 (1954) 83, note 1 and 87, note 44.
33 Id., La Sagesse (1953) 46 f. (Summer and Winter).
34 Above, note 27.
35 See especially Edzard, AfO 19 (1959–1960) 1–32 and pls. i–iv. For other late copies
of Ur III inscriptions, see HUCA 33: 24 ff. sub Ur-Nammu 7 iii, 27 ii, 37; Shulgi 4 ii, 54;
Amar-Sin 3 ii; Shu-Sin 20 ii; Ibbi-Sin 9–10.
36 ZA 50 61, note 5.
37 Ibid., note 7; add one unpublished piece each from Yale and Istanbul (Orientalia
22 191).
38 Ibid., note 8.
39 Ibid., note 9. To the famous “sacred marriage” text, add now Kramer et al.,
Orientalia 22 (1953) pls. xliii–xlvi (Ni. 9802 + 4363) and Turk Arkeoloji Dergisi 8 (1959)
pl. vii (Ni. 9635). Cf. also below, notes 96 f.
40 ZA 50 61, note 10. Add: Langdon, Babylonian Liturgies 196 (cf. van Dijk, SGL 2
15 f.), HS 1594 (unpublished), Orientalia 22 (1953) pl. li (Ni. 4105, Ni. 4391) and three
other texts (ibid., p. 191). Note that SEM 112 duplicates TCL 15: 9 (Edzard, op. cit., 80,
note 391). SRT 36 has now been edited by Castellino, RSO 32 (1957) 13–30.
41 ZA 50 62, note 1. Add: HS 1557 (unpublished); Kramer et al., Belleten 16 (1952)
pls. lixf. (Ni. 9695), whose incipit recurs in the catalogue TMH n. F. 3 (1961) 53 67,
and eight other Istanbul fragments copied by Mme. Kizilyay (Orientalia 22 191). With
TCL 16: 48, lines 77 f., cf. the school-text Babyloniaca 9 (1926) 19, lines 1 f. (cf. Hallo,
Israel Exploration Journal 12 22 f., note 43, here: I.1). To TCL 16:87 etc. (cf. Falkenstein,
SAHG No. 27) add Kramer, University Museum Bulletin 17/2 25, fig, 12; the school-
text UET 1:296 duplicates TCL 16:87 v lines 6 f. (= lines 120 f. in SAHG 27). Note also
the letter PBS 13:46 ii. Cf. also below, note 96.
42 ZA 50:62, note 2. VAT 9205 has now been edited by Falkenstein, ZA 52 (1957)
58–75. Add: van Dijk, Sumer 11 (1955) 110, no. 9 (with duplicate SLTN 137); VAT 8212
(cf. Falkenstein, ZA 49 149), and VAS 10:199 ii-9–iii 7 following Kramer, Belleten 16
(1952) 358, note 10 and Bibliotheca Orientalis 11 (1954) 172, note 19. The incipit of the
latter composition recurs in the catalogue TMH n.F. 3 (1961) 54, line 11.
Bur-Sin: 2.43 These are the very same Isin kings as are memorialized
in certain Dumuzi liturgies between the kings of Ur III and an as yet
unidentified dynasty or dynasties.44 The tradition resumes, and then
just as abruptly stops again, as noted by Edzard,45 with Enlil-bani (2
hymns).46 Interestingly enough, it is precisely to the time of Enlil-bani
that we may date the first royal hymn in honor of a king of Larsa,
an unpublished one to Nur-Adad;47 for the last eleven years of Nur-
Adad’s reign coincide with, the first eleven of Enlil-bani’s. The kings
of Larsa continue to monopolize the poets’ attentions, though in much
smaller measure than their predecessors, with Sin-iddinam represented
by at least four compositions,48 Sin-iquisham by one,49 and Warad-Sin
by one.50 Rim-Sin is the subject of a “letter to a god”51 and of a hymn-
like incantation.52 Then the poets’ focus shifts to Babylon, where not
only Hammurapi, the conqueror of Rim-Sin I,53 but also his first two
successors, Samsu-iluna54 and Abi-eshuh,55 are found in this context.
˘
So far, it is clear, we have a virtually unbroken succession of royal
hymns from Ur-Nammu to Abi-eshuh that is, from about 2100–1700 bc,
˘
and during these four hundred years, there is no evidence that more
than one dynasty successfully competed for the poets’ attention at any
one time even while they frequently succeeded in winning a share of the
political hegemony. Admittedly this is an argument from silence. But it
43 BE 29:1 iii 37-iv 38 should be assigned to Bur-Sin of Isin; cf. Falkenstein apud
Edzard, op. cit., 137, note 724. Another text of the same king is at Yale (unpublished).
Here: III.3.
44 Cf. Edzard, ibid., 138–140 and above, note 19.
45 Ibid., 142 top.
46 ZA 50 62, note 3. OECT 1:10–12 has now been edited by A. Kapp, ZA 51 (1955)
76–87.
47 ZA 50 62, note 5; Edzard, op. cit., 145.
48 CT 42 (1959) 45; UET 5:86 (catalogue of hymns includes one to Sin-iddinam),
and two Yale texts (unpublished).

49 VAT 8531 (unpubl.), translated by Falkenstein, SAHG 23; photo of obverse ibid.,
pl. 9.
50 The catalogue UET 5:86 lists one hymn to Warad-Sin.
51 TCL 15:35, edited by Raymond Jestin, RA 39 (1942–1944) 91–94. On this genre,
see Falkenstein, ZA 44 (1938) 1–25; Analecta Biblica 12 (1959) 69–77; Kramer, ANET
(1955) 382.
52 Gadd, Iraq 22 (1960) 157–165.
53 ZA 50 62, note 7. Add Orientalia 22 (1953) pl. lii (Ni. 4225) and one other
Istanbul text (ibid., p. 191). Sjöberg has shown that TLB 2:3, “hymne autolaudatoire
de Hammurabi,” is a copy of part of a bilingual stele of which numerous fragments
have been published as UET 1:146 and YOS 9: 39–61; ZA 54 (1961) 51–70.
54 ZA 50 62, note 7. Add PBS 10/2:11 (Falkenstein, Archiv Orientalni 17/1 214).
55 ZA 50 62, note 7. Cf. now also CT 44 (1963) 18.
is worth pursuing, for we have not yet exhausted the roster of royal
compositions and must now consider five somewhat isolated examples
which do not or may not belong to the dynasties already mentioned.
The first is a hymn to Ba"u56 which Falkenstein translated in Sume-
rische und Akkadische Hymnen und Gebete as No. 9.57 It is designated as an
a-da-ab hymn, a category that almost always includes references to a
king, and indeed a king appears several times in it. But this king, in
Falkenstein’s translation at least, is nameless, and all that can be said
with some certainty is that he was a ruler of Lagash. It is possible that
the poem is incomplete in its present form.58 For the urú-bi prayer which
otherwise always closes the a-da-ab compositions (and only these) and
which always includes the king’s name, is missing from this particular
text, an omission which may be due to lack of space.59 On the other
hand Kramer has found the king’s name in this text too, for he regards
the lum-ma occurring repeatedly in it not as an epithet but rather as
the well-known “Tidnum-name” of Eannatum.60 There is no need to
choose here between the two positions, except to point out that there
is nothing in the present text to suggest any extraordinary antiquity.61
It resembles the standard royal hymns in both form (except as noted)
and content,62 and if it really refers to Eannatum it may be simply a
late attempt to create a hymn in the new style for the long-deceased
ruler.
The first ruler definitely known to have been honored in a royal
hymn in this style is Gudea of Lagash, and it is to him that I would be
inclined to date the origin of the genre. The reference here is not to
the Cylinders of Gudea, which may be regarded as the climax of a long
56 CT 36:39 f., republished by Anton Deimel, Šumerische Grammatik 2 (1939) 236 f.

57 Other treatments ibid., 238–243; Maurus Witzel, Keilinschriftliche Studien 5 (1925)
159–170. For a rather different rendering, cf. Margarete Riemschneider, Augengott und
Heilige Hochzeit (1953) 174 f.
58 Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949) 89, note 1.
59 Ibid., 92 and SAHG p. 364. For the uru-bi, see most recently ZA 52(1957) 69 ff. For
the only uru-bi which mentions a city, not a king, see Sjöberg, Der Mondgott Nanna-Suen
(1960) 42 top.
60 Bibliotheca Orientalis 11 (1954) 172, note 18. On the name Lumma (or Humma)
see most recently Jacobsen, ZA 52 (1957) 131 f., note 90 (6) and Edzard, Genava˘8 (1960)
249 f., superseding Zwischenzeit 9, note 39 and therefore, in part, my critique of Hartmut
Schmökel in JAOS 78 (1958) 307, note 8.
61 Cf. my forthcoming paper “On the antiquity of Sumerian literature” in JAOS 83
(1963), here: II.1.

62 Cf. above, note 20.
tradition of “Old Sumerian” literature,63 but rather to a short hymn

to Ba"u64 which answers the description given by Jacobsen (above) and
resembles the preceding Ba"u hymn in other details as well.
The third text that must be mentioned here is a short “Gottesbrief,”
or letter addressed to a god, in this case Meslamtae"a, by Sin-kashid,
king of Uruk.65 In contrast to the contemporary building inscriptions
of this king, his name here is written with ka, not kà(GA). But even
without this index, the script alone proves beyond doubt that what we
have here is a school-copy, later by far than the time of Sin-kashid. In
other words, he had also entered the select circle of rulers canonized by
the scribal tradition. Whether this isolated example is evidence that he
had met whatever requirements this claim to canonization implied may
be left open here. But this question could be answered affirmatively
without upsetting the scheme that has been suggested. For the date of
Sin-kashid, though still uncertain, cannot have been far from either
Enlil-bani of Isin or Nur-Adad of Larsa.66 One may even propose that
his brief patronage of the Sumerian poets, if such it was, fell between
the similar claims of those two rulers.
A more difficult problem is posed by the newly published hymn
to Anam of Uruk,67 whose activities date to the first years of Rim-
Sin of Larsa. This hymn, however, is not patterned after the standard
royal hymns in structure; it was found at Uruk and, though its specific
historical setting seems to be an action in favor of the citizens of Nippur,
it may well be doubted whether it enjoyed more than local circulation.
Anam, still a shadowy figure in spite of the new finds from Uruk,
broke with inscriptional canons in other ways: his “private” building
inscriptions are unparalleled in the millennial tradition of this genre,68
as is his studious avoidance of the royal title both in his inscriptions69
and in the hymn. In distinction from all the rest of the “Sin-kashid
63 Cf. note 61.

64 STVC 36 (from Nippur), translated by Falkenstein, SAHG No. 16.
65 TCL 16:58. Here: V.3.
66 Cf. Edzard, op. cit., 153, and now the detailed exposition by Falkenstein, Bagh-
dader Mitteilungen 2 (1963). Nur-Adad and Enlil-bani were contemporaries from 1860–
1850 and Sin-kashid’s reign includes this period. Note also that Enlil-bani was the last
ruler of Isin to mention Uruk in his titulary (AOS 43:7 f.; Edzard, op. cit., 77, note 375),
and that this is the only city other than Isin which the Larsa kings never took over into
their titles or epithets.
67 Falkenstein, Baghdader Mitteilungen 2:80–82 and pl. 13.
68 Ibid., 36; cf. Hallo, HUCA 33 (1962) 1, note 4.
69 AOS 43: 111.
dynasty,” he chose a Sumerian name for himself 70 and for Irdanene his
son,71 and the solicitude of both rulers for the citizens of Nippur72 may
also betoken a special predilection for Sumerian traditions.
The last text to be considered is a small fragment from Nippur
copied by Mme. Ciğ73 and described by Kramer.74 It mentions Damiq-
ilishu and has therefore been assigned to the last king of the Isin
dynasty by Edzard.75 Since there is little doubt of the hymnic character
of the fragment, this attribution, if correct, would tend to disprove my
argument from silence, and to show that a dynasty could re-enter the
orbit of the Sumerian “national poetry” even after its preeminence
had already passed to another city. Now it is true that Isin unfolded
considerable strength in its last years, and Damiq-ilishu himself sparked
a resurgence that led to his recapture of Isin for over ten years.76
However, the possibility also exists that we are dealing with a hymn
to the Damiq-ilishu, not of Isin, but of the Sealand Dynasty. True,
this king’s name is spelled Damqi-ilishu in the date formulas of Ammi-
ditana which are the only contemporary indices for the writing of his
name.77 But this is equally true of the Isin king in some Larsa date
formulas,78 and is in any case not a compelling argument as was shown
by the case of Sin-kashid of Uruk (above). On the other hand, there
is some reason to believe that the Sealand did indeed consider itself
the heir of the defunct Isin dynasty79 and of Sumerian traditions in
general.80 Damiq-ilishu’s successors all took ever more ponderous and
archaizing Sumerian names,81 and the presence of a separate “professor
of Sumerian” at the Nippur schools of Hammurapi and Samsuiluna82
implies some ignorance of the language by the general run of students
70 Falkenstein, Baghdader Mitteilungen 2:35, note 155.

71 This relationship is now revealed by a date formula, ibid., 19,.
72 Ibid., 37.
73 Orientalia 22 (1953) pl. lii (Ni. 4428).
74 Ibid., 193.
75 Op. cit., 142, note 747.
76 Hallo, JNES 18 (1959) 58 f.; Bibliotheca Orientalis 16 (1959) 238.
77 Benno Landsberger, JCS 8 (1954) 69, note 178. Cf. also Barbara Morgan, Manch-
ester Cuneiform Studies 2 (1952) 52.

78 Cf. e.g. YOS 5:223.
79 Schmökel, Geschichte des alten Vorderasien (1957) 112.
80 Ibid., 5. For a general estimate of the history and culture of the “Sealand,” see
R.P. Dougherty, The Sealand of Ancient Arabia (= YOSR 19, 1932).

81 Landsberger, JCS 8:69 f. and notes 175–180.
82 Idem, International Congress of Orientalists 23 (1954) 125; Gadd, Teachers and
Students (1956) 18.

and teachers, and a source of native speakers from outside of Babylonia

which may well have been the Sealand. Indeed, Landsberger has put
forth the suggestion that Sumerian learning fled to the Sealand from
about the time of Ammi-ditana to about the time of Agum II, i.e., in
the middle portion of the Sealand Dynasty.83 This suggestion, based
on the cryptic recipe for glassmaking fictitiously dated to the reign of
Gulkishar, seems to find a legendary echo also in the Irra Epic.84
Later than this it would be unrealistic to look for true Sumerian royal
hymns, for the post-Sumerian literature which begins about 1500 bc85 is
conspicuously lacking in those categories which, in the neo-Sumerian
literature, owed their “Sitz im Leben” to the cult of the deified king.
Thus Chiera’s proposal to see in PBS 1/2:94 and 134 a hymn to
the Kassite king Enlil-amah,86 i.e., Kadashman-Enlil,87 is inherently
improbable. In fact these texts˘ are duplicate versions of an Old Babylo-
nian “Gottesbrief.”88
Thus we find the royal hymns and related genres attested for Gudea
of Lagash, all five kings of Ur III, the rulers of Isin through Enlil-bani,
possibly Sin-kashid and Anam of Uruk, the rulers of Larsa from Nur-
Adad on, Hammurapi, Samsu-iluma and Abi-eshuh of Babylon, and
˘
possibly Damiq-ilishu of the Sealand. It could, of course, be argued
that the royal hymns were first composed, not in the lifetime of these
kings, but more or less posthumously. This must indeed be the case,
for example, with PBS 10/2:6, the Ur-Nammu composition which
details his death and burial. But the apparent duplicate HS 145089 pre-
serves the last line of this text and suggests that it actually belongs
to the category of lamentations90 or liturgies for the dead.91 In spite
of occasional anachronisms, there are strong indications that at least
some of the hymns were contemporary with the rulers they honored,
most notably where their incipits are preserved in contemporary cat-
alogues,92 or where the texts we possess can be shown to have been
83 JCS 8 70, note 181.

84 Notably in the passages quoted by Miss Reiner, Orientalia 30 (1961) 9 f.
85 Falkenstein, MDOG 85 (1953) 1–13.
86 AJSL 39 (1922) 40.
87 F.M. Th. Boehl, AfO 5 (1928) 248 f.
88 Falkenstein, ZA 44 (1938) 1; SAHG No. 41 (translation).
89 Castellino, ZA 53 (1959) 131.
90 Kramer cited ibid.
91 So Lambert, RA 55 (1961) 196 ad No. 74.
92 Above, note 26.
copies93 or duplicates94 of stele inscriptions. For it is difficult to imagine

that later generations would go to the length of newly incising on stone
hymns to deceased rulers.
It can also be argued that ‘local and historical considerations inter-
vened’ in the selection of royal hymns for the libraries and the scribal
curriculum.95 In other words, there may have been “extra-canonical”
compositions adhering more or less to the standards of style and for-
mat set at Nippur but circulating only in the scribal centers directly
controlled by the relevant dynasts. Such compositions might explain
the possibly concurrent appearance of hymns to Enlil-bani and Damiq-
ilishu (but see above) of Isin at Nippur and of texts devoted to Sin-
kashid and Anam of Uruk or to the kings of Larsa from Nur-Adad
to Rim-Sin, none of which have hitherto appeared on Nippur copies.
What must be pointed out, however, is that even within this hundred-
year period, the hymns to the earlier Isin kings continued to form part
of the scribal curriculum, not only at Nippur, but also at a variety of
scribal centers not subject to Isin, as revealed by newly identified school-
texts with short extracts of Isin hymns from Larsa,96 Uruk,97 Ur98 and an
unidentified site.99
If then all the proposed attributions and dates are granted, the extent
of our genre can be said to cover close to five hundred years and as
many as seven different dynasties. At no time is there a certain gap of
even so much as a generation between the rulers or dynasties commem-
orated in the genre. The biggest assured gap lies within the dynasty of
Isin, where the absence, to date, of Sumerian compositions mention-
ing Lipit-Enlil and Irra-imitti (1873–1861) may be connected with the
93 So the Ur-Nammu hymn TCL 15:12 according to Falkenstein, Iraq 22 (1960) 147,
and the Ishme-Dagan hymn SRT 13 according to Sjöberg, ZA 54 (1961) 70.

94 Above, note 53.
95 Lambert, RA 56 (1962) 81; but the case in point cited there illustrates the hazards
of this line of reasoning, for the discovery that SLTN 137 duplicates the new Ur-Ninurta
hymn Sumer 11:110 (above, note 42) invalidates the contention that “pour une raison
qui reste à déterminer, Nippur a probablement banni de ses rayons le nom de ce
prince.”
96 Falkenstein, Baghdader Mitteilungen 2:42, note 190.
97 Ibid., 41 f. and note 190.
98 Above, note 41.
99 Above, note 41. Cf. also Falkenstein’s conclusion “dass damals im Kreise der
sumerisch gebildeten Priesterschaft, und generell aller literarisch Gebildeten, die alten
‘Königshymnen’ geläufiger geistiger Besitz gewesen sind,” Archiv Orientální 17/1 (1949)
214.
breach of the long peace between Isin and Larsa after 1897.100 Yet, at
the same time, there is no certain case of contemporaries from differ-
ent dynasties being honored simultaneously by what may be regarded
as the “canonical” tradition of hymnography, although the century of
maximum political turmoil (ca. 1865–1763) may perhaps be reflected by
a temporary breakdown in the hegemony of the canonical tradition.
It is this relatively brief period, including as it does the upheavals fur-
ther north and involving also Eshnunna, Assur and Mari, which can
truly be described as the “period of warring kingdoms”101 or even, if
one wishes, as an “intermediate period.” For the rest, the Early Old
Babylonian hymnography supplies a powerful argument in favor of the
theoretical concept of Mesopotamian unity, recognizing a single dynast
as the earthly holder of a divinely granted primacy over his fellow-
rulers, be these kings or ensí’s, in times of imperial unification as well
as of petty-statism. Whether this recognition depended on the posses-
sion of Nippur102 or on some other factor is a question which cannot be
answered here. But this much seems clear: the Early Old Babylonian
period was not a departure from the norm, but as true an expression of
the amphictyonic ideal as the age of Shulgi that it followed or the age
of Hammurapi that it ushered in.
100 Above, note 11.

101 Cf. Bibliotheca Orientalis 16 (1959) 238, note 27.
102 Thus, at least tentatively, Edzard, op. cit., 103.
iii.2
THE CORONATION OF UR-NAMMU
The brief but brilliant literary productivity of Ur is second, as of now,

only to that of Nippur in the Old Babylonian age, and it is there-
fore of particular interest to compare the oeuvre of the “Ur school”
with that of other centers, and especially Nippur.1 It exhibits on the
one hand striking similarities and on the other impressive differences,
both in its roster of compositions and in its treatment of the tradi-
tional texts.2 To illustrate the latter point, I wish to compare the new
Ur-Nammu hymn from Ur (UET VI/1: 76 f.) with an unpublished par-
allel from the Yale Babylonian Collection.3 While there is no intention
to anticipate the edition of the Ur copies (to which the coauthors of
UET VI/1 rightfully have the priority), it is hoped that this juxtapo-
sition will underline the fact that the fixation of many neo-Sumerian
texts was a continuing process which was far from having run its course
when the Ur exemplars were prepared. At the same time, it should
help to show that literary texts may contain significant historical mate-
rial.
The Yale text has a perfectly balanced structure which is entirely
lacking in the Ur versions. It begins4 and ends with two five-line stan-
zas in which Ur-Nammu is spoken of in the third person as if by a
chorus, followed (respectively preceded) by two couplets addressing Ur-
Nammu (?) in the second person. Its central and major portion is a
self-predication recited by Ur-Nammu in the first person. As such, it is
comparable to Šulgi A and other royal hymns of self-praise which share
a common absence of liturgical classification (other than z à - m í) and
are therefore attributed by Falkenstein to the courtly ceremonial rather
1 Presented, in substance, to the 175th meeting of the American Oriental Society,
Chicago, April 14, 1965.

2 Cf. my review of UET VI/1 JCS 20 (1966), pp. 89–93.
3 YBC 4617; provenience unknown, but the orthography is strictly “Nippurian.”
The copy will be included in a projected volume of Sumerian royal hymns and related
genres from the Yale Babylonian Collection.
4 Actually 6 lines but an error may be assumed.
188 iii.2. the coronation of ur-nammu
than to the temple cult.5 The following paraphrase is based on the Yale
version, with restorations from the Ur versions.6
In the introduction, the poet (or chorus) asks; “Who will dig the
canal which purifies the reservoir and cleanses the ditches?”7 and an-
swers: “Divine Ur-Nammu, the wealthy one, will dig it, the effective
youth,8 the rich one, will dig it.” He (or it) then turns to Ur-Nammu
and acclaims him king “by Enlil (and) the lord Ašimbabbar.”
The body of the hymn begins with Ur-Nammu describing his elec-
tion to kingship in Nippur by Enlil: “I am chosen in Sumer and Akkad,
in Nippur, the mountain of life, he has made my fate good for me, I
have ‘looked’ upon his shining forehead, kingship has been given to
me.” Next, the king describes his investiture in Ur, ticking off the stan-
dard regalia:9 throne, crown,10 scepter, staff and crook. The third step
in this process, preserved only in the Yale text, is a fragmentary refer-
ence to confirmation by the divine triad of Sin (Ašimbabbar), Enlil and
Enki.11
The rest of the self-predication consists entirely of a variation on the
theme of royally inspired fertility.12 Ur-Nammu, having dug a canal of
abundance for Ur, and given it a name, now boasts of his city as one
whose watercourses13 are fish and whose overflow is fowl, whose canals
5 ZA 50 (1952) 91.
6 For complete transliteration and translation, see appendix.
7 i -pa (B: p á ? ) - b i - l u h. Actually this is a name rather than an epithet (cf. line 24).
7 5
It recurs in CT 15: 16: 13930: 6 in parallelism with Tigris and Euphrates; cf. A. Falken-
stein, Sumerische und akkadische Hymnen und Gebete (1953) 81:56 and Å. Sjöberg, Der Mondgott
Nanna-Suen (1960) 46:6, where line 3 can perhaps be restored as i 7 - [ ( g i š ) k e š d a - k ù - g ] e
etc.
8 Š u l - z i. This epithet, which is also applied to Ur-Nammu in SRT 11: 43, was con-
verted by the Ur scribe into d š u l - g i in a mistake which, however, tends to confirm the
reading of the royal name. For ŠUL - z i as a variant spelling of s u - z i, cf. Falkenstein,
Bi. Or. 6 (1949) 54.
9 For the first three, cf. Falkenstein, Ar. Or. 17/1 (1949) 221.
10 Omitted in the Yale version, perhaps metris causae, since it disturbs the strict
strophic parallelism of the two central stanzas (3/2/2/2/2/2 each).

11 The end of line 19 can perhaps be restored with the help of UET VI/1: 76, though
the traces in the Yale version look more like i - b a - T [ E - . . . ] than like i - b a - e - [ n e ],
“they bestow.” For i - with - b a cf. HUCA 33 (1962) 16 f., notes 132, 146.
12 For this topos and the related one of divinely inspired fertility, cf. Falkenstein,
ZA 47 (1942) 197–200; AfO 16 (1952 f.) 60; Sumerische und akkadische Hymnen und Gebete
(1953) 101 and 361; SGL 1 (1959) 23 f.; Landsberger, JNES 8 (1949) 281, note 110;
Kramer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963) 501 (= CT 42 ii 19-iii
4) and correct my reference in Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962) 19, note 32, here: I.1
accordingly.
13 a - r á - a - ( b i ), variant: a - r á - b i = alaktu. (I owe this suggestion to my student
iii.2. the coronation of ur-nammu 189
produce grass and honey, and are filled with carp, whose cows eat in
the canebrake and whose fields grow grain like a forest. He concludes
with the hope that his canal may continue to produce. Now the chorus
replies to Ur-Nammu in a somewhat obscure couplet which mentions
Eridu, and then concludes with a mosaic of royal titles and epithets, a
reference to the king’s brilliance,14 and the usual closing doxology: “Oh
divine Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, your praise is sweet.”
So much for the Yale version. Space prevents me from detailing all
its divergences from the Ur versions.15 But they may be illustrated by
the concluding stanza, for this has a particular significance. Of the five
titles and epithets attributed to Ur-Nammu in this passage, only the
first, “king of the four quarters,” survives more or less intact in the
Ur version. The rest are wholly or largely changed. They thus may
legitimately serve to date the Vorlagen of the respective exemplars, at the
same time that they underline the danger of using Sumerian literary
texts to reconstruct the history of the Mesopotamian titulary.16 Let us
look first at the Yale version, which reads: “King of the four quarters,
who satisfies the heart of Enlil, divine Ur-Nammu, provider of Nippur,
sustainer of Ur.”
The divine determinative was used, in their lifetime, by all the kings
of Ur and Isin except Ur-Nammu, while the title “king of Ur” was
borne by all the kings of the Third Dynasty (ca. 2111–2004 bc), passed
from them to the early kings of Isin (Šu-ilišu to Lipit-Ištar, ca. 1984–
1924), and from these to the middle kings of Larsa (Gungunum to
Abisare, ca. 1932–1895).17 But the other titles and epithets had a much
more limited usage in the same span of time.18 The title “king of
the four quarters” was not employed by Ur-Nammu at all, and by
Raphael Kutscher.) One could also translate; “Whose increase is fish, whose surplus
is fowl,” taking a - r á - a = alaktu in the mathematical sense of “multiplication factor,”
“times.”
14 The notion that the king brings light to the country (both day and night?) is also
a frequent topos, if less thoroughly elaborated than that of fertility; cf. eg. CH i 40–44:
ki-ma dUTU a-na SAG. GI6 wa- s. e-em-ma ma-tim nu-wu-ri-im.
15 See below, Appendix. Note the partly syllabic orthography of the Ur version,
especially in its second half. For another syllabically written Ur-Nammu hymn, cf.
Sjöberg, loc. cit, (below, note 32).
16 My methodological reluctance to do so in Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles (=
American Oriental Series 43, 1957) seems vindicated against the implied or expressed
objections of some of its reviewers; cf. especially J.J.A. van Dijk, ZA 55 (1963) 270–272.
17 Cf. simply the summaries in Hallo, Titles, 150–156.
18 š à - d e n - l í l - l á - d u
10 is not considered a title or epithet here. For the (otiose?) - e n
in d u 10 - g e - e n, cf. now possibly J. Krecher, ZA 57 (1965) 29 f.
Išme-Dagan of Isin alone among Early Old Babylonian rulers.19 The

epithets “provider of Nippur” and “sustainer of Ur” were peculiar
to Išme-Dagan, and only the former was revived briefly by the later
Larsa kings in two rather curious inscriptions.20 It thus seems wholly
reasonable to conclude that the prototype of the Yale version of this Ur-
Nammu hymn dates back to the time of Išme-Dagan of Isin (ca. 1953–
1935); obviously it is blithely indifferent to the proper titles of Ur-
Nammu himself.
It is less easy to date the prototype of the Ur exemplars by this
means. These read: “king in heaven (and) the four quarters, favorite
of Enlil, provider of Sumer and Akkad, beloved of Enlil.” The epithet
“favorite of Enlil” recurs only in a late copy of an Ammi-ditana inscrip-
tion,21 while “provider of Sumer and Akkad” is entirely unknown in
the monumental texts.22 “Beloved of Enlil” is an epithet attested, in
its Sumerian and Akkadian forms, no less than four times for Šu-Sin
of Ur,23 and for no other king in the late third or early second mil-
lennium. But it does not appear to be original here, following as it
does on the Enlil epithet of the preceding line. It would therefore be
rash to conclude that the prototype of the Ur exemplars dates back
to the reign of Šu-Sin, or even that it antedates that of the Yale text
at all. Perhaps most revealing in this connection is the absence of the
“king of Ur” title in the Ur versions, for until the breach of the long
peace between Isin and Larsa after 1897 bc,24 this had been an undis-
puted part of the Mesopotamian titulary for over two hundred years
(see above.) Hardly less significant is the consistent omission of the
“determinative of divinity” before Ur-Nammu’s name, for this usage
was maintained in all the royal inscriptions of the later neo-Sumerian
and Early Old Babylonian periods except in part for those emanating
from the successors of Gungunum of Larsa.25 On this evidence it would
19 Hallo, Titles 52–54, where the reference to “Išme-Dagan 9” (YOS 9: 25 and Sumer
13:182), implied on p. 152, should be added.

20 Ibid. 147, note 2.
21 Ibid. 139 f. (LIH 100).
22 Its substitution for “provider of Nippur” in the Yale text is interesting in the light
of the conclusion that the possession of Nippur was the basis of the title “king of Sumer
and Akkad”; ibid. 83–85, 126 f.
23 Cf, Šu-Sin 1, 2, 5 and 14 in my bibliography of Ur III royal inscriptions, HUCA 33
(1962) 23–43.
24 JCS 17: 118, here: III.1.
25 Hallo, Titles, 60–63.
therefore appear that the Ur versions originated in the latter part of

the nineteenth century bc, perhaps as much as a century after the Yale
version.
All this does not mean, however, that the hymn I have described
and others like it are totally worthless as a historical source.26 On the
contrary, the hitherto available Ur-Nammu hymns can all to some
extent be correlated with independent evidence from archaeological,
monumental, or other literary sources and thereby shown to contain an
authentic historical kernel. These hymns already add up to something
like a poetic biography of the monarch.27 In the poem that apparently
opens the cycle,28 Ur-Nammu is referred to exclusively by his early
title of “king of Ur.” He is first called to “lordship” ( n a m - e n - n a );
he is given the royal title ( m u - d u10 ), he establishes justice, and for
good measure he is also credited with taming the Gutians. That Ur-
Nammu, alone among Ur III kings, claimed the lordship of Uruk is
confirmed by his inscriptions, though their exact date and significance
is in dispute.29 The allusion to his role as lawgiver is paralleled from his
contemporary inscriptions30 and now substantiated by the discovery of
his lawcode31 which, analogy suggests, was promulgated very early in
his reign. The warfare against the Gutians, unrecorded in his preserved
date formulas, must also fall into the early part of his reign, or even
into the period of his vassal status as governor of Ur under Utu-
hegal of Uruk, the conqueror of the Gutians (see below). All these
˘
events certainly antedate Ur-Nammu’s rebuilding of the Ekur, the great
temple of Enlil at Nippur, an achievement commemorated in another
hymn,32 and amply attested also by contemporary inscriptions datable
to the latter part of Ur-Nammu’s reign.33 The concluding chapter of
Ur-Nammu’s poetic biography is represented by a composition which
26 So Gadd, CAH I2 fasc. 28, (1965) 6: “But the style of boast and flattery . . . which
swelled these courtly compositions . . . is destitute of real information upon the actual
events of the reign or upon the personality of the monarch.”
27 Cf. the brief summary by Gadd, ibid. For bibliographical details, cf. JCS 17: 113,
note 25, here: III.1 and add Chiera, Catalogue of the Babylonian Cuneiform Tablets in the
Princeton University Library (1921) p. 28 No. Ex 389 = SRT p. 23 ad No. 11.
28 TRS 12, edited by G. Castellino, ZA 53 (1959) 118–131.
29 Hallo, Titles, 7 and notes 1–3; cf. van Dijk, ZA 55 (1963) 270 f.
30 Ur-Nammu 28.
31 Cf. below, note 73.
32 SRT 11; cf. Castellino, ZA 53 (1959) 106–118; Falkenstein, SAHG 17; Åke Sjöberg,
Orientalia Suecana 10 (1961) 3–11.

33 Hallo, Titles, 82; Ur-Nammu 3 and 16 in my bibliography (above, note 23).
describes his death and burial.34 Even this event is archaeologically

confirmed in the sense that the discovery of the massive hypogaeum of
the neo-Sumerian kings at Ur suggests an equally elaborate ceremonial
interment.35
Into this sequence it is less easy to place the two newly repub-
lished Ur-Nammu hymns copied by Pinches.36 But our own hymn fits
into it readily. In spite of its apparent preoccupation with irrigation
and agriculture, it is really concerned with Ur-Nammu’s coronation,
based on his contributions (perhaps “out of pocket”) to the building
of canals at Ur, and the resulting fertility of the city. The corona-
tion and enthronement of Ur III kings is attested by both literary and
archival texts. Thus the well-known hymn to Enlil called d e n - l í l - s ù -
d u - š è commemorated a royal enthronement according to Falkenstein,
who edited it.37 It shares with our hymn the subscript “your praise is
sweet/exalted,”38 and the alternation between (first,) second and third
persons, almost as if different persons were speaking or addressed in
turn. And Edmond Sollberger has edited a number of archival texts
from the reign of Ibbi-Sin which refer to the coronation of that king.39
This is celebrated in Nippur, Uruk and Ur,40 presumably because Nip-
pur is the religious center, Ur the political capital and Uruk, from all
indications, the ancestral home of the dynasty (see below). Such multi-
ple coronations are familiar from later usage both within and beyond
Mesopotamia.41
It is therefore instructive to note that three cities also figure in our
“coronation hymn.” Two of them, Nippur (line 12) and Ur (line 14
and, in another context, lines 22–34), are the same, but Uruk is re-
placed by Eridu.42 The chief deities of Nippur, Ur and Eridu, and these
34 PBS 10/2:6 (and HS 1450), edited by Castellino, ZA 52 (1957) 17–57; cf. ZA 53

(1959) 131 f.
35 Cf. Woolley, Antiquaries Journal 11 (1931) 345–359 and pls. xli–xlv; 12 (1932) 357–363
and pls. lix f.

36 CT 44: 16. 37. Cf. lines 5 f.
37 Sumerische Götterlieder 1 (1959) p. 10.
38 Ibid. 7 f., 107.
39 JCS 7 (1953) 48–50; 10 (1956) 18–20.
40 Jacobsen, JCS 7 (1953) 36, note 2.
41 Cf. e.g. the coronation of Assyrian kings in Nineveh and Harran to which J. Lewy
has called attention in HUCA 19 (1946) 456 ff.

42 Perhaps Uruk was still too closely identified with Ur-Nammu’s late sovereign, Utu-
hegal, while Ur-Nammu’s coronation signalled the transfer of the hegemony from Uruk
˘ Ur (see below).
to
alone,43 figure in our hymn and each of them under two names or
aspects: Enlil of Nippur also as Nunamnir, Sin of Ur44 also as Ašimbab-
bar, and Enki of Eridu also as Nudimmud.45 The association between
Enlil and Sin (Ašimbabbar) is particularly stressed,46 reflecting the com-
mon hymnic conception according to which Enlil, as chief executive
of the divine assembly at Nippur, confers a portion of his “Enlilship”
(illilūtu) on the god of a particular city (in this case the moongod of Ur)
so that the latter may in turn pass it on to the mortal he has chosen as
king.47
What, then, does the new hymn add to our knowledge concerning
the circumstances of Ur-Nammu’s accession? To answer this question,
we must first review what is already known on this subject from the
other literary sources, and also from the monuments and archives. As
is well-known, the inscriptions of Ur-Nammu after his accession are so
laconic that they reveal next to nothing directly about his rise to power
except that, early in his reign, he declared Ur’s independence48 by the
classic device of building the walls of the city49 and, a little later, occu-
pied himself, more than any other neo-Sumerian king,50 with irriga-
tion.51 Indirectly, Ur-Nammu’s royal inscriptions demonstrate his close
connection with Uruk, as does the evidence of the literary texts. Thus,
Ur-Nammu invokes Ninsun of Uruk—or, more precisely, of Uruk-
43 If Utu occurs in UET VI/1:77:12, it is only in the sense of “daylight” like i t i x (UD.
dNANNA) for “moonlight” in the corresponding line of the Yale version.
44 Note that the moongod does not appear as Nanna in the text.
45 Note that the Ur versions again lack this structural virtuosity.
46 Lines 7 f., 18 f.
47 Cf. JCS 17:113 and note 21, here: III.1.
48 On the “pattern of usurpation,” cf. my remarks in JNES 15 (1956) 221, 18 (1959)
55; Bi. Or. 16 (1959) 237 f. Still another element in the pattern is the change of theo-
phoric names like Puzur-Šulgi to Puzur-Numušda at Kazallu, i.e. from such as honor
the sovereign to ones honoring the local deity; cf. Gadd, CAH I2 fasc. 28 (1965) 21.
49 Cf. the date formula of RTC 269 and ITT IV 7547 (Sollberger, AfO 17:12) and
the inscription “Ur-Nammu 9” (SAKI 186b etc.). For the early date of these bricks, cf.
Hallo, Titles, pp. 79, 82.
50 The only other inscriptionally attested project of this kind in Ur III is the reservoir
(g i š - k é š - d u) of Šulgi at Adab (“Šulgi 8” = OIP 14:37–39). Cf. also J. Nougayrol, RA 41

(1947) 23–26, for the reservoir of Ugme of Lagaš.
51 Cf. “Ur-Nammu 22–24, 27–28” (HUCA 33:26 f.) and the date formulas “g” (=
Šulgi 2 or 3 according to Kraus, Or. 20 [1951] 392–394, but against this hypothesis cf.
now, in addition to Sollberger’s arguments, also Goetze, Iraq 22 (1960) 156 iii) and “h”;
Sollberger, AfO 17 (1954–1956) 12 f. Cf. also Hallo, Titles, 82, and on the whole question,
Th. Jacobsen, “The waters of Ur,” Iraq 22 (1960) 174–185 and pi. xxviii.
Kullab—as his personal deity ( d i n g i r - r a - n i ).52 Similarly, in hymns to

both Ur-Nammu and Šulgi, Gilgameš of Uruk-Kullab is referred to as
friend and brother, and Lugalbanda and Ninsun are addressed as father
and mother.53 Moreover, the composition of a whole cycle of epics con-
cerning the First Dynasty of Uruk, appropriately termed “La Geste
d’Uruk” by Maurice Lambert,54 can probably be dated to the Third
Dynasty of Ur: the exclusive preoccupation of Sumerian epic literature
with Uruk can hardly be explained other than on the assumption that
the court at Ur considered Itself the legitimate successor to Uruk. For
this pattern recurs at least twice: the dynasty of Agade provided much
of the inspiration for the Akkadian “historical tradition,” probably cre-
ated under the First Dynasty of Babylon, and the Third Dynasty of Ur,
in its turn, seems to have absorbed the attention of the poets of Isin,
whose royal patrons regarded themselves as heirs of Ibbi-Sin.
52 “Ur-Nammu 15” = UET I 47. The intensely personal nature of the relationship
implicit in this epithet is clear from the fact that each king applied it to only one deity,
while he called numerous deities his “king” or “queen.” Note, e.g., for the periods here
under discussion, these kings and their personal deities as culled from the monuments,
cited in part according to my bibliographies in HUCA 33 and Bi. Or. 18:
Gudea: Ningizzida (passim)
Ur-Nammu: Ninsun (Ur-Nammu 15)
Sin-kašid: Lugal-banda (Sin-kašid 8)
Ur-dukuga: Dagan (Ur-dukuga 1)
Damiq-ilišu: Martu (Damiq-ilišu 2)
Rim-Sin: Nergal (Rim-Sin 12)
In private ex-voto’s inscribed on behalf of the king, it is not always certain whether the
deity invoked is the personal god of the king or of the donor:
Nammahni: Nin-šubur (Déc. en Chaldée pl. 44bis 5)
˘
Šulgi: Meslamtaea (Šulgi 37)
Ibbi-Sin: Meslamtaea (Ibbi-Sin 4)
Gungunum: Dagan (Gungunum 2)
Hammurapi: Martu (Dussaud, Monuments Piot 33 [1933]1)
Note that Ninsun is the only goddess in the above list, and that Ur-Nammu elsewhere
(cf. the next note) refers to her as his mother. It thus seems possible to extend the
concept of the personal deity to goddesses referred to, in the inscriptions, as “mother”
of the king and, by extension, to widen the above list by regarding the royal d u m u
DNx epithet as identifying DNX as the personal god or goddess of the king. (For these
deities see Hallo, Titles, 134–136.) Note also that, in Sin-kašid 8, the expressions “Lugal-
banda his god” and “Ninsun his mother” stand in parallelism.
53 Falkenstein, ZA 50 (1951) 73–77 ad Šulgi A 7; cf. also the Ur-Nammu lawcode
(below note 73), where Ur-Nammu is called dumu-tu-da-dnin-sun.

54 RA 55 (1961) 181 f.
The actual circumstances of Ur-Nammu’s accession, however, must

be reconstructed from texts that antedate it, notably from fragments
of two limestone steles55 dedicated on behalf of Utu-hegal by a person
˘
whose name and title were restored as Ur-[Nammu], governor (GÍR.
[NITA]) of Ur, by Gadd and Legrain,56 followed by Jacobsen.57 It has
even been suggested that Ur-Nammu was a son or other close relative
of Utu-hegal, and for this reason his governor at Ur, much as the
˘
military governors (šakkanakku’s) at Uruk (and elsewhere) in the Ur III
period were drawn from among the innumerable progeny of the kings
of Ur.58 Certainly the two cities had a venerable history of dynastic and
administrative union behind them.59
Other inscriptions of Utu-hegal also bear on the problem. Apart
˘
from the late and almost hymnic versions of his fight against the Gu-
tians, these inscriptions are all clay cones commemorating what ap-
pears to be a single event: the revision of the boundary between Ur
and Lagaš in favor of Lagaš.60 The longest version refers to the ruler
or governor of Ur as the “man of Ur,” but this need not have been
Ur-Nammu, as Gadd insists.61 It could have been the Lušaga whose
“boundary cone”62 seems to have tried to assert the independence of
Ur by the more modest device of acknowledging only the Moongod
of Ur,63 not Utu-hegal or any other sovereign, as his king, rather than
˘
by claiming the royal title for himself;64 this Lušaga, in turn, may or
may not have been identical with the donor of a private ex-voto to Bau
55 UET I 30 f.
56 Ibid., p. 7.
57 The Sumerian King List (= AS 11, 1939) 202, note 31.
58 Sollberger, AfO 17 (1954–1956) 12, note 8. Cf. also Hallo, Titles, 105, where note 2
should be corrected to read “YOSR IV/2: 31 and note 2; 33 and note 3,” and BIN V
316 added to the documentation.
59 To the evidence adduced in Hallo, Titles, 4–20, one may possibly add the cases of
Kuruda and Ur-Utu, two rulers of the Fourth Dynasty of Uruk in the King List who
may or may not have been identical with, respectively, a priest of Innin at Ur (YOS IX
10) and an e n s í of Ur under Naram-Sin (RTC 83; cf. Sollberger, AfO 17:30; H. Hirsch,
AfO 20:24, note 256).
60 These clay cones exist in three versions; to the exemplars listed by Sollberger,
AfO 17:12, note 7, add now Edzard, Sumer 13 (1957) 175: 2 (8 and 9 line versions). Note
also YOS IX 112 and B. Schwartz, New York Public Library Bulletin 44:807 ff.:16 f.
61 CAH I2 fasc. 28 (1965) 4.
62 Edzard, Sumer 13 (1957) 181.
63 Even the governor of another city (Enlila-išag, ensí of Nippur) dedicated an
inscription at Ur to “Nanna, king of Ur,” presumably at this time (UET I 87).

64 For this practice, cf. the references above, note 49, especially Bi. Or. 16:237. For
the Florentine parallel there cited, and others, see now M. Treves, Velus Testamentum 10
of Lagaš.65 Or again, the “man of Ur” in the Utu-hegal cones could

˘
have been the Namhani who appears under this designation in an
˘
archival text66 and who, in his turn, may or may not be identical with
the homonymous governor ( e n s í ) of Umma in the time of Iarlagan of
Gutium67 and with the Nammah(a)ni, governor ( e n s í ) of Lagaš, whose
˘
inscriptions are known, in at least one instance,68 from Ur itself.
This Nammahni is almost certainly the last “independent” gover-
˘
nor of Lagaš;69 his viceroy was Ur-abba,70 son of Utukam the over-
seer ( u g u l a ).71 Ur-Nammu defeated Nammahni,72 but retained Ur-
˘
abba as governor of the defeated city, as shown by his early date-
formulas.73 Probably it was at this time that virtually all the monu-
ments of Nammahni at Lagaš were systematically defaced, with a spe-
˘
cial effort to erase the defeated ruler’s name, as well as that of his wife
Ninhedu; the effort was so nearly successful that it has escaped notice
˘
so far. As sovereign of both Lagaš and Ur, Ur-Nammu emphatically
restored in Ur’s favor the border which Utu-hegal had redrawn for
˘
Lagaš.74
Summing up, then, we may say that Ur under Ur-Nammu was heir
to a long history of dynastic and administrative union with both Uruk
and Lagaš, a partnership in which Ur had fallen to a low estate vis-
(1960) 430 f. For another Old Babylonian example, cf. S. Simmons, JCS 14 (1960) 26,
where Bel-gašir is addressed as king of Šaduppûm.
65 YOS I 9.
66 S.L. Langdon, Babyloniaca 7 (1923) 67: N a m - h a - n i AB.ŠEŠ.KI - a (early neo-
Sumerian).
67 YOS 113. Cf. C.H. Johns, PSBA 38 (1916) 199 f.
68 According to Burrows, Antiquaries Journal 9 (1929) 340, “on a brick Nam-mah-ni of
Lagash is for the first time represented at Ur.”

69 Sollberger, AfO 17: 31 f. Note, however, that a slight revision of the genealogy
proposed there seems required on the combined evidence of Golenishev No. 5 (see next
note) and SAKI 62: 13, as follows:
70 V.K. Shileico, Zapiski vostočnogo otdêlênija . . . 25 (1921) 138 f. No. 2 (= Golenishev
5152).
71 G. Cros, NFT241.
72 According to his lawcode; cf. Kramer, Or. 23 (1954) 40–48. For the problem of the
spelling of his name there, cf. Falkenstein, ibid., 49.

73 Sollberger, AfO 17:11 f. Differently Kraus, Or. 20 (1951) 396.
74 “Ur-Nammu 28”; partial translation by Jacobsen, Before Philosophy (1949) 210 f.
à-vis both. Ur-Nammu may have been a loyal vassal of Utu-hegal of

˘
Uruk during that king’s short reign of seven and a half years when
Sumer as a whole was occupied with the expulsion of the Gutians. But
at Utu-hegal’s death, if not before (see above), he asserted his complete
˘
independence by the classical devices of building the walls of Ur, dating
by his own date formulas, dedicating his inscriptions to his personal
gods and the gods of his own city,75 and other elements of the “pattern
of usurpation.” In the early stages of his independence, he could not
yet count on the loyalty of the whole land; before assuming the title
of “king of Sumer and Akkad,” therefore, he was known simply as
“strong man (that is, we might almost say, independent ruler) and King
of Ur.” As such he built, besides the walls of Ur, only the temples of
his personal (Urukian) deities,76 the great terrace é - t e m e n - n í - g ù r u,
the wall of the temenos area é - k i š-n u - g á l, and perhaps the temple
of Enki at Eridu. Only later did he begin the construction of the great
monuments to the patron deities of Ur, the network of canals in its
vicinity, and the complex of temples to Enlil at Nippur.77
What, then, does the new hymn add to this evidence? Taking the
hymn at its word, we find: (1) Ur desperately needs “hydraulic devel-
opment”; (2) Ur-Nammu stands ready to supply this, perhaps from his
own resources; (3) he is accordingly invested with the symbols of king-
ship in a ceremony involving the sanctuaries and deities of both Nippur
and Ur, and possibly also Eridu; (4) he carries out the needed improve-
ments at Ur; (5) Ur is blessed with the resulting abundance; (6) Ur-
Nammu is acclaimed by new titles and epithets.
If we were to refer these allusions to Ur-Nammu’s original acces-
sion as independent king of Ur, they would stand in hopeless contra-
diction to the facts as reconstructed from the contemporary records
above. Even discounting much of (3) and (5) as clichés of royal hymnog-
raphy, the fact remains that Ur-Nammu could claim neither the kind
of economic improvements which are the theme of this hymn, nor the
allegiance of Nippur, and in consequence of “Sumer and Akkad,”78 at
the very outset of his independent reign. If the hymn contains a his-
toric kernel at all, it must be this: sometime after his accession at Ur,
75 Above, notes 49 and 65.

76 For the temple of Ninsun (above note 53), cf. also the date formula RTC 265
(Sollberger, AfO 17:11).
77 Hallo, Titles, 77–83.
78 Above, note 22.
Ur-Nammu launched two great building programs, the irrigation proj-

ects around Ur and the reconstruction of the temples of Nippur. In con-
sequence he was crowned “king of Sumer and Akkad” in a ceremony
which symbolized and constituted the definitive transfer of national
allegiance to the new dynasty. On the testimony of the date formu-
las, this ceremony can hardly have taken place earlier than his fourth
year,79 and there is on the face of it no reason to doubt the possibility
that our hymn or its prototype was originally composed for it. Indeed,
the correlation between neo-Sumerian regnal years on the one hand
and royal hymns on the other is a high one both in terms of numbers80
and in terms of content.81 It almost leads one to suppose that all the
hymns were originally commissioned annually (or biennially) for such
occasions as were also commemorated in the date formulas. The con-
clusion, at any rate, imposes itself: the literary tradition can be used to
fill the lacunae of Sumerian history, but only where the contemporary
monuments and archives have provided the framework.
Appendix
Transliteration of YBC 4617 (= A)

Variants from UET VI/1: 76 (= B) and UET VI/1: 77 (= C)
1) [ a - b a - a m u - u n - b ] a - a l - e a - b a - a m u - [ u n - b a - a l - e / i 7 ]
a-ba-a mu-u[n-ba-al-e]
2–3) [ i 7 - k e š d a - k ù ] a - b a - a m u - u n - b a - [ a l - e ] / i 7 a - b a - a
mu-un-ba-al-e
4) [ i 7 - p a 5 - B I ] - l u h a a - b a - a m u - u n - b a - a l - e / i 7 a - b a - a b
mu-un-ba-al-e
5) d U r - d N a m m u a k ù - t u g m u - u n - b a - a l - e b
6) š u l - z i a n ì - t u g m u - u n - b a - a l - e b
7) l u g a l - m u b á r a - z a d e n - l í l - l e e n - d a š - í m - b a b b a r
8) š u l - d s u e n b á r a - z a d e n - l í l - l e e n - d a š - í m - b a b b a r
9) l u g a l š à - z i - t a a n a m - t a r - r a n a m - n i r - r a s a g - í l
10) d U r - a N a m m u a š u l - i g i - í l - l a k u r - [ g a l ] b d e n - l í l - l e
79 According to Sollberger, AfO 17:14, the fourth year date “semble consacrer la
royauté d’Ur-Nammu sur Sumer-Akkad.”

80 JCS 17:113 and note 24, here: III.1.
81 Cf. e.g. ZA 51 (1952) 91. Is it too daring to suggest that each date formula was
formally introduced together with a new hymn?

11) d n u - n a m - n i r - r e a k i - e n - g i k i - u r i - a b g á - e c m u - u n -
suh-end
12) n i b r u k i - a a h u r - s a g n a m - t i - l a - k a n a m - m u b
i m - m i - i n - d u 10 c
13) s a g - k i z a l a g - g a - n i m u - u n - š i - i n - b a r n a m - l u g a l
ba -an- sì
14) u r ì m k i - m a a é - m u d - k u r - r a - k a b
15) g i [ š - g u - z ] a - m à a s u h u š - [ b i i m - m i - i n - g ] i - e n b
15a) ( a g a - m e - l á m m e - t é š n a m - l u g a l - l a s a g - m à i m - m i - g á l )
16) g i d r i a - k ù u k ù - š á [ r s i s i - e - s á š u - m à i m - m i - i n - s á ]
17) š i b i r - b u r u x ( š i b í r ) u k ù - d a g a l - l u - a . . . h [ é - l a h 4 - l a h 4 -
e]
18) e n - d a š - i m - b a b b a r a - k e 4 z i - u 4 - s ù - [ . . . ]
19) d e n - l í l - l e - b i - d a i - b a - e ! - [ n e ]
20) m u - d a - r í m u - d u 11 - g e - d [ u 7 . . . ]
21) d e n - k i - k e 4 g i š - t ù g g e š t u g - d a g [ a l . . . s ] a g - e - e š
m[u-rig7]
22) g á - e u r u k i - m à i 7 - [ h é - g á l - l a m ] u - b a - a l / i 7 - k e š d a -
kù mu-sa4
23) [ u r ] í m k i - m a i 7 - h é - g á l - l a m u - b a - a l / i 7 - k e š d a k ù
mu-sa4
24) m u - d a - r í d u 11 - g e b a - a b - d u 7 - à m i 7 - p a 6 - B I - l u h
m u š e
25) g á - e u r u - m à a - r á - a - b i k u 6 - à m d i r i - b i m u š e n - à m
26) u r í m k i - m a a - r á - a - b i k u 6 à m d i r i - b i m u š e n - à m
27) g á - e i 7 - m á ú - l à l - e m u - u n - d ù s u h u r k u 6 - e à m - s i - e
28) u r í m k i - m a ú - l à l - e m u - u n - d ù s u h u r k u 6 - e [ à m ] - s i - e
29) g á - e u r u - m à g i - z i - b i l à l - à m [ ? ] / á b - e h a - m a - k ú - e
30) u r í m k i - m a g i - z i - b i l à l - à [ m ? ] / á b - e h a - m a - k ú - e
31) g á - e [ . . . ] - x k u 6 h u - [ ]
32) u r í m k [ i - m a ]
33) g á - e i 7 - m à a - [ r á - a - b i h u - m u ] - u n - [ t ù m ] / g i š - d u s u - e
hu-mu-un-na-lá-e
34) u r í m k i - m a i 7 - m à a - r á - a h u - m u - u n - t ù m / g i š - d u s u - e
hu-mu-un-na-lá-e
35) l u g a l - b i l u g a l - e r i d u k i - g a p a - a - z u s u d - à m
36) d n u - d i m - m u d l u g a l - e r i d u k i - g a p a - a - z u s u d - à m
37) l u g a l a n - u b - d a l i m m u - b a š à d e n - l í l - l á d u 10 - g e - e n
38) d U r - d N a m m u ú - a n i b r u k i s a g - u š u r í m k i - m a
39) i t i x ( U 4 - d N A N N A ) - š è k a l a m u r í m k i - m a - š è
40) s i l 5 - a u 4 m i - n i - i b - z a l - z a l - l e - d è
41) d U r - d N a m m u l u g a l - u r í m k i - m a z à - m í - z u d u 10 - g a - à m
Variants
4) aB: i 7 - g i š - B I - ( . . . ] ; bB: a - b a .
5) aB: U r - d N a m m u ; bB: + a - b a m u - u n - b a - a l - e .
6) aB: d š u l - g i ; bB: + a - b a m u - u n - b a - a l - e .
7) B omits.
8) B omits.
9) aB: - d a .
10) aB: U r - d N a m m u ; bB: + - z a l a g .
11) aB: d n u n - n a m - n i r ; bB: u r i - e ; cB: m e - à m ; dB:
m u - u n - RI - e
12) aB: - e ; bB: n a m ; cB: m i - i m - m i .
13) B omits.
14) aB: - e ; bB: - k a m .
15) aB: - a - n i ; bB: omits - e n .
15a) from B; A omits.

16) aB: g i š ! - g i d r i - .
19) restoration from B; rest of B obverse lost.

21a–d) B reverse 1–6 inserts a four-line stanza here as follows:
[ é - k i š - n ] u - g á l s a g - g e g á l - l [ a ? ]
[ é - t e m e n - n í - g ] ù r - r u k i - t u š š à - h ú l - l a / [ . . . ] - d a ú r - b i
im-mi-in-gi
[ g i š n á ? - g i ? - r i n ? - n ] a - k a m g ú - d a - a m b i - l á ? !
[ . . . k ] ù - g i ! (C!) k ù - b a b b a r - r a g u b - b a - à m / i m - m i - i r - m i -
re
22) B, C: n a r i - m u u d - h é - g á l - l a b a l a - u b - b a / i 7 - k e š d a - k ù
m u - š e
23) B and C omit.
24) B, C: m u - d a - r i d u 11 - k e d u - a - b a i 7 - p á - B I - l u h
m u - š e
25) B, C: g á u r u k i - m à a - r á - b i k u 6 - a b / t e - l i - b i
m u - š e - n a
26) B, C: i 7 - k e š d a - k ù u r u k i (c omits) - b i k u 6 - a b / t e - l i - b i
m u - š e - n a ( C : m u - s i g 5 )
i 7 - p á - B I - l u h a - r á - b i k u 6 - a b / t e - l i - b i m u - š e - n a ( C :
mu-sig5)
27–30) Cf. B rev. 14 = C rev. 8: g ú - g ú - b i ( C : - m u ) Ú . I T 4 ( C :
i t i ! t é š - a )
lú-a (C: -ú) ú-làl-e kú-e
31–34) Cf. B rev. 13 = C rev. 7: h é - g á l - b i k u 6 h u - m a - r a - a b - t ù m
é - k i š - n u - g á l - š è
34a) B and C add: a - g à r g a l - b i š e - g u - n u m ú - m ú g i š - t i r - g i m
lam!-lam!- ma-x
35–36) B and C omit.
37) B (breaks off here) and C: l u g a l a n - n é u b - d a l i m m u - b i
š e - g a d e n - l í l - l á
38) C: [ U r ] - d ! N a m m u ! ú - a k i - e n - g i k i - u r i - e k i - á g a
den-líl-lá
39–40) C: [ g ] a - n a - g a r u r í m k i - m a - k e 4 i t i s i l - a d u t u
mi-ni-in-[?]/za-e-en-za-e-le za-e-me-en
41) C: U r - d N a m m u l u g a l - m u - d a - a - r i z à - m í - z u d u 10 - g a
Translation
1) Who will dig it, who will dig it, the canal—who will dig it?
2–3) The Keshdaku-canal—who will dig it, the canal—who will dig it?
4) The Pabiluh-canal—who will dig it, the canal—who will dig it?
5) Divine Ur-Nammu, the wealthy one, will dig it.
6) The true youth, the prosperous one, will dig it.
7) Oh my king, on your throne by Enlil (and) the lord Ašimbabbar!
8) Oh youth of Suen, on your throne by Enlil (and) the lord Ašimbab-
bar!
9) I, king from the true womb (on), (whose) destiny (is) lifting the head
proudly in leadership,
10) (I,) Ur-Nammu, the youth who is pleasing to Enlil the ‘great moun-
tain.’
11) Am chosen in Sumer and Akkad by Nunamnir.
12) In Nippur, the mountain of life, he has made my fate good for me.
13) Looked upon me with his shining forehead, given me the kingship.
14) In Ur, in the Mudkurra-temple,
15) He has made the foundation of my throne firm for me.
15a) He has placed the crown peculiar to kingship on my head,
16) Has pressed the holy scepter for guiding all the people in my hand,
17) The staff and crook for directing the numerous people.
18) The Lord Ašimbabbar a life of long days
19) Together with Enlil—they bestow.
20) Enduring years worthy of praise
21) (And) extensive wisdom Enki has donated.
22) As for me, in my city I have dug a canal of abundance, have named it
the Kešdaku-canal.
23) In Ur I have dug a canal of abundance, have named it the Kešdaku-
canal.
24) An enduring name worthy of praise, the Pabiluh-canal I have named
it.
25) As for me, my city’s watercourse is fish its ‘overhead’ is fowl.
26) Ur’s watercourse is fish, its ‘overhead’ is fowl.
27) As for me, in my canal one produces ‘honey’ plants, it is filled with
suhur-fish.
28) In my city one produces ‘honey’-plants, it is filled with suhur-fish.
29) As for me, my city’s zi-reeds are honey, the cows will surely eat it.
30) Ur’s zi-reeds are honey, the cows will surely eat it.
31) As for me, my city’s . . . may. . . fish,
32) Ur’s . . . may. . . fish,
33) As for me, my canal’s watercourse will surely bring it, will suspend it
for him from a carrying-board,
34) In Ur, my canal’s watercourse will surely bring it, will suspend it for
him from a carrying-board.
35) Its king is king of Eridu—your office is long,
36) Nudimmud is king of Eridu—your office is long.
37) King of the four quarters, who satisfies the heart of Enlil,
38) Ur-Nammu, provider of Nippur, sustainer of Ur,
39) By moonlight the nation for Ur.
40) In rejoicing will ever pass (its) days.
41) Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, your praise is sweet!
iii.3
NEW HYMNS TO THE KINGS OF ISIN*
On present evidence, the development of Sumerian literature passed

through three major stages which may for convenience be labelled Old,
neo- and post-Sumerian respectively.1 Most of its principal genres are
attested in more than one of these stages, and some in addition sur-
vived in the form of Akkadian translations or adaptations. Proverbs and
incantations, for example, are known from all periods; neo-Sumerian
myths and epics were tradited or adapted in Akkadian in the post-
Sumerian period, and hymns to gods and lamentations continued to be
composed, to some extent on earlier Sumerian models, in both Sume-
rian and Akkadian, to a very late date. But each stage of Sumerian
literary creativity also knew certain genres of its own, and for the neo-
Sumerian stage, one of the most characteristic genres was certainly the
“royal hymn.” Such hymns, whether invoking gods on behalf of kings,
or addressed to the kings or, as it were, recited by the kings themselves,
were composed and tradited in Mesopotamia only while the kings were
objects of worship in their own right. Into this period (notably ca. 2100–
1800 bc in the “middle chronology”) fall nearly all the attested examples
of the genre, with the exception of a few disputed forerunners, and a
number of epigonic imitations,2 and within this period the genre was
studied in all schools professing to teach Sumerian, even as far away
as Susa,3 without regard to political or dynastic affiliation. The royal
hymns are thus an important source of specifically “neo-Sumerian” his-
tory and institutions, while the very fact of their being studied in this
period is in itself important testimony to the religious and scribal sup-
port of Mesopotamian unity in a period when that unity was more
often an ideal than a reality.
* W.H. Ph. Römer, Sumerische ‘Königshymnen’ der Isin-Zeit. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1965 (8vo,
XII + 292 pp.).

1 Cf. W.W. Hallo, On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature, JAOS 83 (1963) 167, here: II.1.
2 Cf. Hallo, Royal hymns and Mesopotamian unity, JCS 17 (1963) 112–118, here: III.1.
3 Cf. MDP 27 (1935) 220–222 for three exemplars of “Šulgi A” not utilized by
A. Falkenstein in his edition of the text in ZA 50 (1952) 63–91.

204 iii.3. new hymns to the kings of isin
Nowhere is this more strikingly illustrated than in the royal hymns of

the first dynasty of Isin, which continued to be copied out in the schools
of Uruk after that city had won its freedom from Isin,4 of Ur, Larsa
and Šaduppum5 after the hegemony of Sumer had passed from Isin
to Larsa, and of Nippur after the dynasty of Babylon had succeeded
to both. This is clear not only from the surviving texts recovered in
these and other centers, but also from the literary catalogues of Ur and
Nippur which provide us with systematic information as to the scribal
curriculum of these centers.6
The hymns to the kings of Isin form about 40 % of the corpus of
neo-Sumerian royal hymns,7 and this important body of material has
now been made the subject of a monograph by W.H. Ph. Römer, a
disciple of the school of Adam Falkenstein which has done so much
for the recovery of neo-Sumerian hymns and prayers. His Sumerische
‘Königshymnen’ der Isin-Zeit is, from the philological point of view, an
exemplary work. All the relevant material is, to begin with, collected
in a useful bibliography,8 and then a sizeable portion of the textual
material is presented in more or less definitive editions.9 No study of the
genre, or of the specimens selected for treatment here, will henceforth
be able to ignore Römer’s exhaustive presentation.
The difficulty of editing Sumerian literary texts is, as is well known,
due in no small measure to the lack of a proper Sumerian dictio-
nary in the sense of Erman and Grapow’s Wörterbuch der ägyptischen
Sprache. There is not even as yet a glossary of the type of Friedrich’s
4 Cf. JCS 17: 117 end, and notes 96–99, here: III.1.
5 Ibid.; for Ur cf. also below, note 8 (*32); for Šaduppum (in the former kingdom of
Warium = Ešnunna), cf. Ur-Ninurta *31b = van Dijk, Sumer 11 (1955) pls. XIII–XV.
6 Cf. Hallo, review of UET VI/1 in a forthcoming issue of JCS.
7 Cf. my tentative survey in JCS 17: 113–115, here: III.1.
8 Pp. 2 f.; the bibliography is complete with respect to published texts with the
exception of UET VI/1: 89, which should be added as an Ur duplicate to *32. For
additional unpublished Yale material see below. No doubt for greater ease of citation,
Römer abandoned the system of sigla such as introduced by Falkenstein for the royal
hymns of Šulgi of Ur. This is to be regretted, since the latter system provides for
additions to the corpus, and reserves Arabic numerals for royal inscriptions while citing
royal hymns by capital letters. As to whether *34 (Damiq-ilišu) belongs in the list, cf. my
reservations, JCS 17: 116 f, here: III.1.
9 Pp. 6–55 (transliteration and translation only); pp. 77–278 (full editions). The appa-
ratus criticus could have been relieved of numerous notations of the type “[duplicate
exemplar]: wohl auch so,” etc.—a judgment of the textual evidence which is really self-
evident. It would have been more to the point if the passages in question—indeed all
the principal texts—had been collated, but apparently this was feasible only in the case
of those from the Louvre (p. [IX]).
iii.3. new hymns to the kings of isin 205
Hethitisches Wörterbuch. The author thus found himself under the neces-
sity of defending nearly every line of his translation either by refer-
ence to the latest studies of the relevant idioms by his colleagues, or by
extended collections of “Belegstellen” assembled by himself. It is fair to
say that perhaps 90 % of his commentary is thus largely lexicograph-
ical. An extensive index of Sumerian words, prepared by M. Dietrich
and H. Hunger, (pp. 279–287) helps the reader to find his way to the rel-
evant discussion; indeed, this index will remain an indispensable tool in
the absence of the much-desired glossary. The separation of text, com-
mentary and footnotes renders the process somewhat cumbersome, and
one might almost have wished that the author had assembled all his lex-
icographical discussions in one simple alphabetical order at the end of
the book.10 But such methodological observations should be understood
as detracting in no way from the truly monumental extent or the sub-
stantive philological contributions of Römer’s work, which is singularly
free from errors of omission or commission.11
On pp. 5 f., Römer proposes a classification of “royal hymns” which
represents a refinement of Falkenstein’s system.12 The latter, in basic
accord with the native designations, distinguished between hymns to
gods described in their own colophons as “adab of D(ivine) N(ame)”
or “tigi of DN” and containing, as it were, incidental allusions to the
reigning (?) king, on the one hand, and royal hymns proper on the
other. The latter are addressed to the king throughout, or are spoken
by him, and carry no native designation, though they usually end in
a doxology, “your/my praise (zà-mí) is sweet/good/exalted”, which
almost has generic force.13 It may be useful to correlate the native
designations, as far as preserved, with Römer’s classification in tabular
form.
10 It might even be desirable in future treatments of this kind if the passages cited to
establish the meaning of a word were more often quoted in full, even when they have
been located and cited by previous investigators, whose contributions would not receive
any the less credit by this procedure.
11 Of the neglible typographical errors not already noted in the corrigenda ap-
pended to the volume, only a few are worth noting here: p. 60 n. 96: Der numinose
Begriff . . . ; p. 104 line 10: zà-til-(la); p. 204 n. 59: SLTNi 71, 3, p. 283 mú-(mú): 194 f.:
p. 286 ukù-ta-è-a: 69296; umuš: 69290.
12 Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949) 1481 f.; 50 (1952) 91.
13 For EN (ŠÀ)-du-lugal(a) as an earlier native designation of “royal hymn”, see
x
Hallo, JAOS 83: 174, here: II.1.
Römer’s Native Römer’s

King No. designation classification
Išbi-Irra *1 [. . .] special class (but like A la)
*2 (ki-ru-gú composition) A Ic
*3 [. . .] A Ic(?)
*3a tigi of Nanâ see below
Šu-ilišu *4 adab of Nergal A Ia
*5 [adab of An] A Ia(?)
Iddin-Dagan *6 šìr-nam-ur-sag-gá of Ninsianna A IIa
*7 — BI
*8 adab of Ninezen A Ia
Išme-Dagan *9 adab of Baba A Ib
*10 (ki-ru-gú composition) (?)
*11 (copy of royal inscription?) A IIa
*12 [. . .] B II
*13 [. . .] A Ia
*14 [adab of Nergal?] A Ia
*15 — A IIb
*16 — A III
*17 [adab] of Enlil A Ia
*18 bal-bal of Inanna A IV
*19 [. . .] (?)
*20 [. . .] (?)
*21 bal-bal-e of Enki A Ia
*22 [. . .] A Ia
*22a [. . .] (?)
Lipit-Ištar *23 (zá-mí-mu du10-ga-àm) B II
*24 RN zà-mí BI
*25 adab of An A Ic
*26 adab of Ninurta A Ia
*26a [. . .] BI
*26b šìr-nam-gala of Ninisina (?)
*26c [. . .] (?)
Ur-Ninurta *27 (ki-ru-gú composition) A Ic
*28 tigi of Enki A Ia
*29 adab of Ninurta A Ia
*30 adab of Inanna A Ia
*31 adab of An A Ic
*31a [adab of Iškur] (?)
*31b – (?)
Bur-Sin *31c adab of [Ninurta] A Ia
*31d [adab of Enlil?] see below
Römer’s Native Römer’s

King No. designation classification
Enlil-bani *32 (zà-mí composition?)14 BI
*33 [. . .] (?)
Damiq-ilišu *34 [. . .] A Ia(?)
Note that the classification A I includes: all adab and tigi-hymns as well
as some of the bal-bal and ki-ru-gú compositions.
On pp. 6–55, Römer illustrates the structure of the various sub-
types of ‘royal’ hymns—as classified by him—by extensive translitera-
tions and translations of well-preserved examples. In this analysis, he is
chiefly guided by the content of the poems rather than by their formal
structure, relying for the latter on the pioneering discussions by Falken-
stein in 1949 and subsequently.15 Since the Isin texts are particularly
rich in classificatory and structural notations, and since the available
material has grown somewhat in the interval, a review and recapitula-
tion of Falkenstein’s conclusions may be attempted here on the basis of
the Isin material.
1. The adab16 structure in its fullest form consists of:

a. one or more bar-sud and šà-ba-tuk sections in pairs;
b. sa-gíd-da and its antiphone (giš-gi4-gál);
c. sa-gar-ra and its antiphone,17 and
d. urubi.
2. The tigi in its most complete form differs from this scheme only in
the absence of the urubi-section and, so far, of the antiphone to the sa-
gar-ra.18 More often than the adab, it also lacks the initial bar-sud/šà-
ba-tuk stanzas,19 but the case of *3a (see below) now shows that this was
14 Read the closing doxology as: dub-sar umún?!-aka é-dub–ba-a é-na-ri-kalam-
ma-ka zà-mí-zu gá-la nam-ba-an-dag-ge and cf. Falkenstein, Welt des Orients I (1947)
185.
15 ZA 49 (1949) 85–105; SAHG (1953) 20–28; ZA 52 (1957) 58 f. Cf. also the useful
summary by Henrike Hartmann, Die Musik der Sumerischen Kultur (1960) 197–244 which,
however, does not seem to go beyond Falkenstein’s conclusions.
16 Already in Falkenstein’s survey, ten out of sixteen adab-hymns can be shown to
belong to the Isin dynasty; cf. ZA 49: 87–91.

17 Cf. e.g. *31c and Falkenstein, ZA 49: 92 and 98(b) against SAHG p. 20. Cf. now
also *31d (below).

18 Cf. however the fragmentary lines following the sa-gar-ra’s of *14 and *17, and the
12 unlabelled (so Falkenstein, ZA 49: 104) lines which conclude *28.

19 Present in eight out of fourteen well-preserved adab’s, in one out of six tigi’s.
not an essential difference between the two categories, as Falkenstein

was still inclined to think.20
3. Ki-ru-gú-compositions are represented by at least two and possibly

more genres among the royal hymns of Isin. Thus *6 is designated a šìr-
nam-ur-sag-gá of Nin-sianna, and *26b as a šìr-nam-gala of Ninisina,
In *2 and *27, the designations are lost, while *10 represents only a
single ki-ru-gú of a longer text whose subscript is likewise unknown.
As far as preserved, all these compositions share a common division,
simpler than that of adab and tigi, into stanzas of unequal length
separated by the rubric ki-ru-gú no. X. Sometimes these rubrics are
followed by short antiphones,21 and in two cases, these antiphones are
in turn followed by a šà-ba-tuk of one or two lines.22 It may be noted
here in passing that the ki-ru-gú structure is also attested for another
type of šìr-composition, namely the šìr-nam-šub-DN.23 Although the
other examples of this genre24 do not contain the rubric ki-ru-gú, they
display a similar strophic structure by virture of their dividing lines or
contents.25
4. That bal-bal-(e) compositions had a place in the canon of “royal

hymns” in the wider sense was already known, for Ur III, on the basis
of the “song of a priestess to Šu-Sin” which is designated as a bal-bal-e
of the goddess Bau.26 More recently, Kramer published a fragmentary
bal-bal-e of Inanna, also in honor of Šu-Sin,27 and he is inclined to
connect at least two other bal-bal-e’s of Inanna with this same king.28
In the light of Išme-Dagan *18 and *21, the genre must now be given
a definite place among the royal hymns of Isin as well. The former is,
according to the Yale duplicate (see below) a bal-bal of Inanna, while
the latter is described as a bal-bal-e of E[nki].29 Poems of rather diverse
20 ZA 49:104; SAHG pp. 20 f., followed by Hartmann, 204 f.

21 *6 after ki-ru-gú 1, 8, and 10 (= last); *2 after ki-ru-gú 5; *26b after k. 3 and 4 (=
last); *27 after k. 2, 3, and 7.
22 *6 (= Römer, p. 132), line 131; *26b, line 2.
23 Cf. VS II 68 = A. Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen No. 7.
24 SLTN 61; VS II 65; CT 42: 13; ib. 22; KAR 15 f.; JCS 16:79: HSM 3625.
25 For a balag-DN in ki-ru-gú form, cf. CT 36: 35–38.
26 SRT 23, translated by Falkenstein, Welt des Orients (1947) 43–50 and SAHG
No. 25, by Kramer, ANET (1950) [496] and by Jacobsen, JCS 7 (1953) 46 f.
27 PAPhS 107 (1963) 508 and 521.
28 Ibid. 508 f., No. 9 and 510, No. 11.
29 The restoration of the divine name is based on the context.
character belong to this genre,30 although a significant number of its

representatives treat, in whole or in part, some aspect of the theme
of fertility.31 The genre normally has no structural indicators, but this
does not always imply a lack of strophic structure, as a glance at Išme-
Dagan *18 (below) indicates. Note also that in Išme-Dagan *21, the last
lines seem clearly designated as an antiphone.32
5. The royal hymns in the strict sense, i.e. those addressed to and/or
spoken by the king himself (Römer’s types B I and B II respectively)
generally end with a doxology in zà-mí (praise) by which we may
designate the entire genre.33 Such zà-mí compositions lack the specific
rubrics of the genres previously discussed, but often display an equally
intricate strophic structure. This is perhaps less clear from Römer’s
exposition (pp. 23–55) than from a brief but symmetrical Ur-Nammu
hymn edited elsewhere.34 The absence of terminological rubrics in
the royal hymns proper thus does not reflect an absence of strophic
structure but is rather due, as Römer implies (p. 5), to their being part
of the courtly ceremonial and not of the temple liturgy. This conclusion
raises a further question of more than passing interest.
If the notations of those genres at home in the temple ritual were
primarily liturgical stage-directions, what validity do they also possess
for the strophic structure? Römer (p. 5 and passim) takes them to apply
to the entire preceding section, so that the poems of Class A are com-
posed entirely of such “labelled” sections. It is, however, worth con-
sidering an alternative possibility, namely that the respective notations
identify and designate only the immediately preceding line or lines.
The neo-Assyrian copy of a tigi to Ninurta35 from Nippur36 seems to
recognize this possibility by placing the notation sa-gar-ra-àm on the
same line as the text. And the adab to Bau which is probably the ear-
liest representative of the entire genre37 is clearly seen to be structured
30 SAHG p. 22; cf. Hartmann, 227 f.

31 Ibid. Cf., in addition to the texts already mentioned, especially SAHG No. 1; van
Dijk, Sagesse, ch. IV; Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen No. 1.
32 Cf. SRT 5 where the antiphone follows the generic rubric; for the antiphonal
character of the last couplet in *18 see below.

33 Cf. the chart above, pp. 208–209; Hartmann, pp. 212–215.
34 Cf. Hallo, The Coronation of Ur-Nammu, in a forthcoming JCS, here: III.2.
35 Langdon, BL 95; cf. Falkenstein. ZA 49: 103 no. 26. Here: III.5.
36 Cf. the corrected copy of the colophon, BL pl. LXXIV.
37 CT 36: 39 f.; cf. SAHG No. 9 and my remarks JCS 17:115, here: III.1.
in two stanzas of six strictly parallel pairs of strophes each,38 provided

the one-line sa-gíd-da, its two-line antiphone, and the one-line sa-gar-
ra39 are set apart from the poem as such. Although there are perhaps
no equally telling examples among the Isin hymns,40 it may be worth
noting that in the few instances where extracts from these hymns are
inscribed on a single tablet or Sammeltafel, the “sections” so excerpted
do not begin and end with the notations under discussion. This is in
contrast to the situation with ki-ru-gú compositions, extracts of which
regularly feature one or more complete “ki-ru-gú’s”. It is also interest-
ing to note that, at least at Nippur, extract tablets sometimes corre-
spond to meaningful units of those royal hymns which lack any struc-
tural notations. Thus STVC 78, for example, represents the introduc-
tion of Lipit-Ištar *24 (Römer, p. 23) plus the first line of the second
section by way of a “catch-line.” SLTN 69 contains precisely the suc-
ceeding “king and wisdom” section of the same poem (Römer, p. 24);
its reverse is uninscribed. The case of the bar-sud and šà-ba-tuk is less
clear, but it may at least be noted that there are explicit instances of
one-line šà-ba-tuk’s,41 just as there is now42 a one-line sa-gíd-da. While
therefore the liturgical notations may sometimes (and in the case of
the ki-ru-gú always) occur at the end of a stanza, they should not
be regarded as necessarily or originally designating the stanzas them-
selves.43
On pp. 55–57, Römer discusses the question of the deification of
kings, and on pp. 143–149 the problem of the “sacred marriage,” both
of which subjects loom large in the conceptual sphere of the royal
hymns. With these brief exceptions, the more general implications of
the texts dealt with are not the subject of the work under review. It is
to be hoped that the author, now so intimately acquainted with the
idiom of his genre, will devote himself to the fuller sense behind it
38 Cf. Hartmann, p. 200, note 1.

39 Lines 30, 31 f., and 55 respectively in Falkenstein’s numbering, lines 31, 33 f., and
58 in Hartmann’s. The designation sa-gar-ra is missing from the end of the text, but
justifiably supplied by Falkenstein, SAHG 9: 55; the urubi-section, which would have
contained the royal name, is also missing at the end of the tablet.
40 Note however in *31d (below) that the strophic triplets are best preserved if Rev.
8’–10’ are treated as a one-line sa-gar-ra and its two-line antiphone.

41 Cf. e.g. *6 line 131.
42 *3a: 24 (see below).
43 Note that the scribe of *31b in the Harmal exemplar seems to have indicated
some kind of strophic structure by means of line counts after lines 37, 63, and 71.
in future studies. This is also the reviewer’s intention. It would, for

instance, be important to consider such questions as these: what was the
relationship between the royal hymns and the royal inscriptions? Were
the royal hymns always composed in the lifetime of the king honored or
also posthumously, as in the case of “Ur-Nammu’s Death and Burial,”
perhaps even long after their death? If not, did they continue to be
used cultically after the death of the ruler honored, or were they solely
preserved in the schools? If the latter, why were the liturgical notations
of the hymns of type A so carefully preserved, at least at Nippur?
Why, on the other hand, did the Ur curriculum preserve, as it appears,
primarily hymns of type B, i.e. royal hymns from the courtly sphere
(viz.: *7, *12, *23, and *32; *22a, *26b and *26c are too fragmentary to
permit classification)? And why, in turn, did the Sumerian curriculum
of Middle Assyrian times in Assur preserve precisely an adab of An for
Ur-Ninurta44 to the apparent exclusion of all other royal hymns? Which
deities were honored, or addressed, most often in the royal hymns?45
Important as they are, these questions cannot be answered here.46
Here, rather, it seems more appropriate to supplement Römer’s mate-
rial with the aid of eight unpublished texts in the Yale Babylonian Col-
lection of which the author was, necessarily, largely unaware.47 The
material, which will appear in copies in a forthcoming YBT volume,
may be listed in accordance with Römer’s system as follows:
*3a. YBC 9859
*18. YBC 4609 (B)
*23. NBC 7270 (= T); YBC 7155 (= U); YBC 7168a (= V); YBC 7196 (= W);
MLC 1839 (= X)
*31d. NBC 9034.
As will be seen by a comparison of Römer s bibliography (pp. 2 f.), two
of these texts are entirely new; the others duplicate known composi-
tions. They will be dealt with here in chronological order.
44 Cf. Römer, p. 58, note 16 ad *31.

45 A glance at the list above, pp. 208–209, will show six male and six female deities so
honored—the latter once each. Note that Enlil, Enki and Nergal are each represented
twice on the list, and An and Ninurta no less than three times—but never for the same
king!
46 Cf. for the present my study in JCS 17:112–118, here: III.1, which did not reach
the author until his work was nearly complete (Römer 58, note 1).
47 See preceding note.
I. 3a. Hymn to Nanâ with prayer for Išbi-Irra
A. Classification. According to its own subscript, the new hymn is a tigi

of Nanâ. Hymns to Nanâ are anything but common48 and tigi’s to her
are so far entirely unknown. But the use of the tigi as a “royal hymn”
in the wider sense, i.e., as a hymn to a god with invocation of blessing
on the deified king, though not as universal as in the case of the adab-
compositions, is attested,49 though only once more for the Isin dynasty
(Ur-Ninurta*28).
B. Structure. The new hymn is complete in 35 lines of text and eight

lines of liturgical notations whose significance in terms of the tigi-genre
has already been indicated above (p. 209–211). Applying the conclusions
reached earlier (pp. 211 f.), we may divide the hymn into two balanced
if not completely equal halves, each of which is, in turn, made up of
a long opening section extolling the goddess, and a shorter concluding
section in praise of the king. The basic strophic unit of the poem is the
couplet, occurring eleven times; there are also three triplets and one
quatrain. The last line of each of these strophes begins with the name of
the goddess or king respectively.50 This analysis may be studied in detail
in the transliteration and translation that follow. It could be applied
without essential modification also to Šu-ilišu *4 (Römer ch. III), which
is the most carefully structured adab-composition in the Isin repertoire.
C. Transliteration.
(upper edge) DIŠ dNisaba
I
1) [n]in-me!-nun-na u4-gim dalla-è hi-li-zi-da ul-šè pà-da
2) dna-na-a me-te é-an(a)-ka in-nin-ra túm-ma
3) gal-zu nu-u8-gig-ge nin-kur-kur-ra zi-dè-eš-šè pà-da

4) dna-na-a kalam é-an(a)-ka igi-gál-sì-mu ba-e-zu (bar-sud-àm)
5) an-gim-ša6 mí-sag-màš nin-dal-dal-le-e-du7

6) dna-na-a kù-dinanna-ke zi-dè-eš umún-aka
4
48 Cf. SLTN 71 for a fragmentary example.

49 Cf. Falkenstein, ZA 49 (1949) 102, nos. 1, 6, 7; Hartmann, op. cit. 207–209.
50 Thus, at least, on the assumption that the long passage here numbered lines 21–
22 is in fact to be divided over two lines. For their disposition on the tablet, see the
forthcoming copy. Note that the ends of both line 22 and, it is assumed, line 19 are
written into the blank second half of the notational lines that follow them.
7) mí-mul-an hé-me-a nin-kù-zu nì-nam-šè gál-la

8) mí-zi šà-sù-rá nin inim-šè gál- la -bi ì-zal-le-éš
9) umuš kù-dInanna-ke4 aka nu-u8-gig-e ki-ága
10) dna-na-a di-kuru -gal dingir dúr-mah ki-unugki-ga ti-la (ša-ba-tuk-àm)
5
11) mí-zi eš-bar-du10-kalam-ma-kam di-di-bi gal-zu
12) dna-na-a si-s[á-u]ru-ukù-lu-a igi-gál
13) mí-maha inim-kù du11-g[e-d]u7 nin hi-li-a túm-ma

14) dna-na-a sag-íl é-an(a)-ka lú-inim?-ša -ge kalam-ma (bar-sud-2-[kam-
6
ma-à]m)
15) an-e igi-ša6 kalam-ma lugal -kur-kur-ra-[. . .]
16) dna-na-a kalam é-an(a)-[. . .] hi-li [. . .]
II
17) šul sipa-zi dumu-dnu-nam-nir-re in-[. . .]
18) diš-bi-ìr-ra me gal-di [. . .] gu [. . .]
19) dna-na-a sù-ud-šè a-ra-zu-ni kurun-gim su-ub-x / en-LI-zi-da-na-ka è-
an-na-kam (ša-ba-du-ga)
20) diš-bi-ìr-ra sag-uš mùš-nu-túm-mu é- an-na (sa-gíd-da-àm)
21) ša-mu-du-pà dna-na-a kalam-ma nu-u8-gig-e / ki-ága-zu
22) diš-bi-ìr-ra ul-šè lú-inim-ša6-ga-ni / hé-me-en (giš-gi4-gál-bi-im)
III
23) nin-gal šà-ki-zi-šà-gál-túm-ma nu-u8 -gig-e di-bi šu-gá-gá
24) me-kirix (KA)-zal šu-dagalxxx nu-u8-gig-e ma-ra-an-sì
25) dna-na-a nin-gal šà-ki-zi-šà-gál-túm -ma nu- u -gig-e di-bi š[u-gá]-gá
8
26) ukù-e diš-bi-r-ra lugal sipa -bi-me-en
27) dna-na-a inim-d[u -an-na-ta nin]-kur-kur-ra za-e-me-en
11
28) èš-e kul-aba4 . . . in- . . . ša-mu-na-ab-bé
29) ukù-e za-ra šà-bi i[m-mi-ni]gín ši-im-da-ab-bé-en
30) dna-na-a mí-zi MU.HÉ.ŠA sag-gi -ga-me-en
6 6
31) inim-kù-zu-zu in-nin-na-ra zal-le-eš im-ma-ša6
32) šul hi-li-a pà-da nu-u8-gig-e dumu dEn-líl(a)-ke4
33) dna-na-a in-nin me-kù-zu KA? ša-ra-mú-mú
IV
34) [ki]-ná-šè igi-zi nam-ti-la za-e NE? hu-mu-ni-in-du8
35) [di]š-bi-ìr-ra šul hi-li-a pà-da (sa-gar-ra-àm) tigi-dna-na-a-kam
D. Translation
I
1) Lady of the “princely” attributes, emerging brightly like the day (light),
eternally summoned in appropriate beauty,
2) Nanâ, ornament of Eanna, created for the goddess (Inanna),
3) Omniscient one, appropriately summoned as queen of all the lands by

the Hierodule (Inanna),
4) Nanâ, you teach the nation science in Eanna, (barsud)
5) As good as An, woman of the pure head (?), fitting for the “flying lady”
(Inanna),
6) Nanâ, properly educated by the holy Inanna,
7) Heavenly shining woman that you verily are, wise lady who is available
for everything,
8) Righteous, long-suffering woman, because you pass (the day) in being
available at the command of Inanna(?),
9) Counseled by the holy Inanna, beloved by the Hierodule (Inanna),
10) Nanâ, great judge, deity who occupies the high throne of the sanctuary
of Uruk. (šabatuk)
11) Righteous woman who “is” the favorable verdict of the nation, who
knows all its lawsuits,
12) Nanâ, who understands justice for city and scattered people,
13) Lofty woman honored by holy command, lady created in beauty,
14) Nana, pride of Eanna,. . . of the nation (2nd barsud)
15) By An, the benevolent eye of the nation, the king of all countries,
16) Nanâ, in Eanna . . . beauty. . .
II
17) The hero, the righteous shepherd, the son of Nu-namnir (Enlil), has . . .,
18) Išbi-Irra . . .,
19) Nanâ for length of days his prayers like liquor. . . (2nd šabatuk)
20) Išbi-Irra, ceaseless povider of Eanna (sagida)
21) Summoned in song (?), your Nanâ who is beloved by the nation and the
Hierodule (Inanna),
22) Išbi-Irra, eternally may you be the one who “makes her words good.”
(Its antiphone)
III
23) Great queen, created in the “place of sustenance,” counseled (?) by the
Hierodule (Inanna),
24) Luxurious attributes have been generously given to you by the Hierod-
ule,
25) Nanâ, great queen created in the “place of sustenance,” counseled (?) by
the Hierodule.
26) Of (!) the people, oh Išbi-Irra, you are their king (and) shepherd,
27) Nanâ, you are the queen of all the countries [by An’s] spoken com-
mand.
28) In the chapel, in Kullaba,. . . he verily declares it,
29) The people turn their hearts towards you, you verily address them,
30) Nanâ, righteous woman, you are the. . . of the blackheaded ones.
31) Your wise word is brightly made good for the goddess (Inanna),
32) The hero summoned in beauty by the Hierodule, the son of Enlil (Išbi-
Irra).
33) Nanâ, the goddess has verily caused your holy attributes to grow . . . for
you.
IV
34) You have verily opened the righteous eye of life upon (his) bedstead,
35) Išbi-Irra (is) the hero summoned in beauty. (sa-gara)
Drum-song of Nanâ
II. *18. Hymn to Inanna with Prayer for Išme-Dagan as Dumuzi 51
A. Texts: TRS 97 (= ll. 1–26; A), edited by Römer, pp. 21 f. and notes
179–185 (p. 64); YBC 4609 (ll. 1–36; B).52
B. Classification: bal-bal-dinanna-kam (according to B).
C. Structure: As usual with this genre, the poem has no structural

indicators, but is clearly structured nonetheless, especially in its fuller
form (B). This can best be made clear from the following transliteration
which assumes two stanzas of four quatrains each,53 followed by a kind
of antiphone (though not labelled as such) constituting, like the urubi
of an adab, a prayer for the king in A, in B a reference to Dumuzi
for which, conceivably, the appropriate royal name was meant to be
substituted. The careful structuring of the poem extends even to a
“strophic parallelism,” as may be seen from a comparison of, e.g.,
strophe 3 with 7 or 4 with 8.
D. Transliteration of B; variants, emendations and most restorations

from A.
I
1) ab-gù du11-ga amar-gù-sù(d)-ra
2) ain-nin é-tùr-ra nì-nigín-na-me-ena
3) lú-ki-sikil anu-un-du9-na-ama
51 This interesting identification seems imposed by the variant conclusions of the two
versions (cf. esp. line 34).

52 I am indebted to my student Raphael Kutscher for the identification of B with
TRS 97 and for a number of suggestions in regard to its reading.

53 Line 25 does not fit into this scheme, but as it is identical with line 28, at least in
B, it may probably be regarded as secondary. Line 8a occurs only in A.

4) dinanna dugšakìr-e gù hé-em-me

5) dugšakìr anita-dam-a zu b gù hé-em-me
6) dugšakìr ddumu-z[i] gù hè-em-me
7) dinannaa dugšakìr-e [g]ù hé-em-mea
8) dugšakìr d adumu-zi gù hé-em-mea
8a) dInanna.
9) búr-rua dugšakìr-ra g[a]-mu-ra-anb-tugc-àmd

10) dinanna ur -re gaa-mu-u b-húl-l[e]c
5 8
11) dugšakìr kù-ge gù x ša -mu-na-a[b-bé]
12) dnin-é-gal ur -re ga-mu-u -húl-[le]

5 8
13) sipa-zi lú- i -lu-du10-ga-[ke4]
14) ur-ša4-àma i- lu ša-mub-ra-ni-i[b-bé]
15) in-nin ai- lu anì ku7-ku7 -[da]
16) dinanna šà- zu hé-ema- hul -[le]
II
17) in-nin éa-tùr-ra ku4-[ra]- zu-dè
18) dinanna tùr ša-mu-[u8a-da-húl-le]
19) nu-u8-gig amaš-a ku4- ra-zu -[dè]
20) dinanna amaš ša-mu-u - da -[húl]- le a
8
21) é- ubur a-ra-ka ku4-ra- zu -dè
22) u8-u8-[zi]-dè aša-mu-ra-an-bàra-gea
23) nitadam-zu dama-ušumgal-an-na
24) gaba-kù-z[a A.A]N.MA al hé-em-me
25) amaš-kù-ge ì ki ha-ra-sù-e
26) u5 ì-sù-e ga ì-sù-e
27) dinanna ur -re ša-mu-u -húl-le
5 8
28) amaš-kù-ge ì ha-ra-sù-e
29) dnin-é-gal ur -re ša-mu-u -[húl]-le
5 8
30) lugal-šà-ge-ne-pà- da -zu
31) ddumu-zi dumu-d en-lil -ra
32) é-tùr-e ì-ga ahé-en-da-ab-béa

33) [a]maš-ea kirix (KA)-zal-la bhé-en-da-ab-béb
III
34) [sip]a-zi-dama u4-da- ni héb-sù-ud
35) a[si]pa-zi ddumu-zi-dé u -nam-hé-a-ke a
4 4
36) bal-bal-dinanna-kam
37) amu-bi 35a
Variants from A: 2. a-ain-nin-e tùr-e gin-na-e. 3. a-au4-um-du-ù-nam. 5.

a-anitadam (UŠ, MÍ.DAM); b-ke added. 6. Omitted. 7. a-aOmitted. 8.
x 4
a-aOmitted. 9. a-búr; b-ab; c-túg?; domitted. 10. ahé; b-e-; c-e. 11–12. Omit-
ted. 14. aOmitted: bomitted. 15. a-anì-nam-ma, 16. a-mu-e. 17. aOmitted.
18. a-u8-mu-. 20. a-e. 21. a-bu-. 22. a-ašu-mu ba-ra-gi-nam. 23–24. Omit-
ted. 25. a-ab-x-. 26–31. Omitted. 32. a-amu-ra-ab-di!-et!?.
33. a-a; b-bhé-sù. 34. a-a dIš-me-dDa-gan; bomitted. 35. a-au8-e silá-bé mí-zi-di-
dè. 36, Omitted. 37. a-a26.
A adds catchline (?): nitadam(MÍ.UŠ.DAM)-mu u6 du10-ge-eš hé-i-i.
E. Translation of B.
I
1) Cow of the good voice, calf of the far voice,
2) You are the goddess who encompasses everything in the stall.
3) Virgin who is a ‘lip,’
4) Inanna, may you call to the churn!
5) To the churn may your husband call!
6) To the churn may Dumuzi call!
7) Inanna, to the churn may you call!
8) To the churn may Dumuzi call!
8a) Inanna . . .
9) Let me be the one who gets the churning of the churn for you.
10) Inanna, let me make the reins glad.
11) “To the holy churn ca[ll!”] I will verily say to him.
12) Ninegal, let me make the reins glad.
13) The righteous shepherd, the man of sweet song
14) Will verily recite a song of (lit: which is) jubilation, for you.
15) Goddess who sweetens everything (in) song.
16) Inanna, let your heart be glad.
II
17) Goddess, when you enter the stall,
18) Inanna, you will verily make the stall glad with me.
19) Hierodule, when you enter the sheepfold,
20) Inanna, you will verily make the sheepfold glad with me.
21) When you enter the ‘house of the udder,’
22) I will verily make all the mother sheep spread out for you.
23) Your husband Ama-ušumgal-anna
24) On your holy breast he craves . . .
25) By the holy sheepfold may fat be extensive for you.
26) The herdsman will make it extensive for you, he will make milk exten-
sive.
27) Inanna, I will verily make the reins glad,
28) By the holy sheepfold may fat be extensive for you,
29) Ninegal, I will verily make the reins glad.
30) For your king who is called in their hearts,
31) For Dumuzi the son of Enlil,
32) By the stall decree fat and milk!
33) By the sheepfold decree ‘fertility’!
III
34) To him who is the true shepherd—may his days be long—
35) To the true shepherd, Dumuzi, to days of abundance—
36) It is a balbale of Inanna.
37) Its lines: 35.
III. *23. Self-Predication of Lipit-Ištar
This text was reconstructed by Römer in its entirety from nineteen dif-
ferent exemplars and fragments (pp. 29–38).54 Three unpublished pieces
from the Jena collection could not be utilized. These exemplars are
now augmented by five duplicates from the Yale Babylonian Collec-
tion which may be labelled in continuation of Römer’s sigla as fol-
lows:
T NBC 7270 (prism; orig. complete in 4 cols.)
U YBC 7155 (ll. 46–77) (orig. ca. 41–80)
V YBC 7168a (ll. 53–67) (orig. ca. 41–80)
W YBC 7196 (ll. 63–86) (rev. uninscribed)
X MLC 1839 (ll. 82–105) (orig. ca. 70-end)
This composition was clearly the most popular in the whole repertoire,
attested in copies from Kiš (M, N) and Ur (R, S) as well as Nippur, and
employed at an early stage of instruction as shown by a brief extract on
a practice tablet (Q) containing also quotations from other texts, and by
its presumable occurrence in the Ur curriculum.55 The new exemplars
offer numerous variants from Römer’s edition, but many of these are
purely orthographic and do not affect the sense of the hymn. Only the
more significant revisions in the translation, as suggested by the new
variants, will therefore be mentioned here.
56. T, U, V: inim-ša6-ša6-ge (T: -gim?) den-líl hun-gá-me-en, “I am

appointed/installed (according) to the favorable dictates (of ) Enlil.”
62. U, V: MURUB-tùm é-babbar nu-ub-dab-bé-me-en, “I am one who

does not carry off the . . . brought into Ebabbar.”
54 For two of these (O and P), only the notes of Kramer, BiOr 11: 17636 were available
to the author.
55 Cf. my review of UET VI/1 in a forthcoming JCS.
T: UŠ-túm gá! nu-dág-bi-me-en, by conflation with l. 66 (T: [eridu]-

ki
-ta gá nu-dág-ge-bi-me-en); cf. also l. 58 (T: gá la nu-dág-ge dnusku
gub-ba-me-en).
69. T, W: zi-šà-gál uruki-ni-šè al-di(T omits)-me-en, “I am the one who

desires sustenance for his city,” or “I am the sustenance desired for his
city.”
71. T, U, W: lugal mè-šè ku-kur-du7-du7-me-en, “I am the king who

charges into battle (like) a flood.” Cf. now A. Sjöberg, AS 16 (1965) 66.
78. W: ur-sag igi-zalag-ga ka-kešda-ge-na-me-en, “I am the hero with

the shining eyes, the firm regiment.” For ka-kešda in parallelism with
ugnim (cf. l. 77), cf. Enheduanna A (nin-me-šár-ra) 46 f.: ugnim-bi ni-
bi-a ma-ra-ab-gin-gin-e / ka-kešda-bi ni-bi-a ma-ra-ab-si-il-le. For ka-
kešda with ge-na, cf. RA 12 f. 73 f. (Exaltation of Ištar) 11 f.: ka-kešda-mè-
a ge-ne-da-zu-dè = ki-s. ir ta-ha-za ina kun-ni-ka!- (ref. courtesy van Dijk).
T’s reading (ur-sag igi-zalag-ga ka-kešda nu-du8-a-me-en) is based on
conflation with 1. 72.
79. W: dLi-pi-it dumu dEn-líl-lá-me-en. For such abbreviations of the royal

name in hymns and elsewhere, cf. my remarks in JCS 18 (1964) 67 and
notes 11 f.
80. T: kuš-eden a-šedx(MÙŠ.DI)-dè zi-dè-eš KAL-me-en;

W: kuš-a-eden-lá a-zi KAL-a-me-en, “I am the one who . . . the
waterskins effectively with cold water (var.: with effective water).” For
the “life-giving water” of W (so also A?!), cf. e.g. Emeš and Enten (van
Dijk, La Sagesse 49) 297; for a-zi-(da) in the sense of “good seed,” cf.
Römer p. 249.
81. T, W: igi-gál-kaskal-la (T: -e) an-dùl erén-na-me-en, “I am the ob-

server of the campaign, the protection of the soldier.” For the king as
“protector,” cf. van Dijk, La Sagesse, p. 82 ad Dumuzi and Enkimdu 73.
83. T, W, X: šà-dugud-da inim-šè-gál-la-me-en, “I am the ‘heavy-

hearted’ (i.e. serious-minded) one available for / at ‘the word’.” For
this variant, cf. already S. For the construction, cf. Römer p. 124 ad *4:
62. The line thus properly excludes any reference to justice.
84. T, W, X: dim-ma galga-sù (T adds: -e) a-rá-e kin-gá-me-en, “I

am the one who has mastered planning, counsel and calculation.”
Again, the intrustive moral tone can be eliminated. For kin-gá, cf. most
recently Goetze, Iraq 22 (1960) 151 f., Falkenstein, ZA 56 (1964) 61.
87. (T omits this line.) X: na4 ?? úbùr-u-da ukù-ta-è-a, “I am the one

who emerges from the people (like) mint (from) the stone.” Admittedly
this dubious translation fits neither into the context of “the king and
wisdom” (ll. 82–86), nor into that of “the king and justice” (ll. 88–
97).
96. T, X: kala-ga-me-en (X: nì-gi ) pa bi-è-a, “I am the strong one who

has appeared (var. who has made justice appear).” As a royal title, kala-
ga has virtually the sense of “sovereign, legitimate.” The longer variant
may be preferable here, or it may be due to conflation with 1. 106.
98. T, X: é-gal nam-lugal (X adds: -la) ki-tuš-kù du10?-du10 -ga-me-en,

“I am the one whose holy dwelling has been made pleasant (?) in the
royal palace.”
99–100. T, X: nitadam-mu kù-dinanna-ke4 / giš-gu-za-gá suhuš-bi ma-

ni- in-gi “My spouse the holy Inanna has made the foundation of my
throne firm for me.” These two lines belong together as one couplet.
They represent a cliché of royal hymnography.
101–103. These lines represent only two lines in fact. Note that their
order is reversed in K, while in S the end of the first line seems to
have been wrongly joined to the end of 1. 100. The different exemplars
appear to represent successively more expurgated versions, with T
at one extreme and A at the other. For convenience, all the textual
witnesses will be recorded here.
asù-daa u4-ul-blé-a-ašb cgú-dac hu-mu-dni-lád / ki-náe ní-du10 nìf-šà-húl-lag-
kah, “For length of days she embraces me (var. ever lies . . . with me) / On
the bed (var. seat) of pleasure and rejoicing.” a-aK: sù(d)-rá. b-bSo X; T:
-lá-àm; K: -lé-e-éš; A: -a-aš. c-cT: AŠ.AM.DU.X. d-dSo A; T: un-ná-ná
eA: -tuš. fX omits, gSo T, S; A, K: -le-. hSo S; A: -da.
IV. *31d. Hymn to [Enlil(?)] with Prayer for Bur-Sin
A. Classification. Although the rubric is lost, the composition is almost

certainly an adab, since the concluding sagarra is followed by an anti-
phone and an urubi.
B. Structure. Only about half of the text is preserved, but it may be

supposed that at or near the end of the obverse, which is concerned
with the deity, there was a sagidda. The notations sa-gar-ra, giš-gi4-gál-
bi-im and urú[urux-bi-im] are preserved on the reverse and edge. There
is no trace of bar-sud or šà-ba-tuk notations, but these are occasionally
absent in adab-compositions. Quite apart from such notations, how-
ever, the preserved lines show a clear triplet arrangement to judge by
their content.
C. Transliteration.
1) [ a]n-ki-šè aš(a)-ni-šè
2) sag -[rib šà-a]š-ša4 da-nun-ke4-ne
3) ka-t[a]-è-a-ni ság nu-[?]
4) dnu-nam-nir eš-bar-du -ga nu-kúr- ru
11
5) sag-kù-gál ní-su-zi-ri-a
6) aš-a-ni-šè sag-il nun-gal-e-ne
7) és -nibruki dur-an-ki-a-ka
8) é -kur é-nam-tar-tar-re-da
9) [?] ku-za-gìn-na dúr bí-in-[gar]
10) [kù]-dnin-líl kur-gal-da zà-[?]
11) [ ] gú-da ù-mu-ni-in-lá.
12) [ ]-du11-ge
rest of obv. and beg. of rev. lost
R. 1) uru- á-ág -[ ]
2) ka-kešda-bi [ ]
3) den-líl-me-en du -ga-[zu ma]h-àm
11
4 ) dingir na-me nu-mu-e-da- búr -re
5 ) [na]m i-ri-tar pa-è ga-mu-ra-ab-diri
6) [na]m-ti-zu nam-ti ga-mu-ra-ab-dah
7) d utu-gim u -zu ga-ra-ab-sù-sù-ud
4
8) [k]ur-kur-ra dingir-bi za-e-me-en sa-gar-ra-àm
9 ) en-nam-tar-re . . . -me-en
10) dbur-dEN.ZU giškim- lugal mu-e-ti-le-en giš-gi -gál-bi-im
4
11) nì- zi ni-gi-na pa bí A-è kuš-kalam-ma mu- su-ub
Lower edge
12) [ ]-utu-è-ta utu-šú-uš-e
mu-zu hé-im- húl
13) [ s]ag-zu hé-ni-in-íl
14) [ s]ag-bi-šè hé-pà
Left edge
uru
[urux -bi-im a-da-ab den-líl-lá-kam]
D. Translation.
1) Uniquely . . . towards heaven and earth,
2) First among equals of (all) the Anunna,
3) Whose utterances are not overturned,
4) Nunamnir, who does not alter the decrees (once) pronounced,
5) Chief canal inspector who is clothed with awesome splendor.
6) Uniquely lifting the head most proudly of (all) the Igigi,
7) In Duranki, the sanctuary of Nippur,
8) In the Ekur, the house where fates are to be determined,
9) In the house of precious metal and stone he has made his dwelling.
10) Holy Ninlil, equal in rank with the ‘great mountain’ (Enlil),
11) When she embraces him in . . .
12) ...
R. 1) The city instructions . . .
2) Its regiments . . .
3) You, oh Enlil, your pronouncements are lofty,
4) No god whatever can . . . with you.
5) “When fate is determined I will make it appear more brightly for you,
6) To your life(span) I will add life for you,
7) I will make your days long like the Sun for you.”
8) You are the god of all the (foreign) lands (sagara)
9) You are the lord who determines fate . . ...
10) (For) divine Bur-Sin you are the royal support (Its antiphone)
11) Righteousness and justice have appeared, the body of the nation has . . .
12) . . . . . . . . . . . . from sunrise to sunset may your name rejoice!
13) . . . . . . . . . . . . may you lift your head!
14) . . . . . . . . . . . . may he summon (you) at their head!
(urubi) [adab of Enlil]
iii.4
THE BIRTH OF KINGS*
“Love is strong as death.” This defiant challenge from the Song of

Songs, which Marvin Pope made the motto and Leitmotif of his monu-
mental commentary, was also the starting-point of Franz Rosenzweig’s
essay on “Revelation, or the Ever-Renewed Birth of the Soul,” the
center-piece of his programmatic synthesis of religious philosophy, with
its “grammatical analysis of the Song of Songs” according to which
“the analogue of love permeates as analogue all of revelation.”1 For
an Assyriologist who has spent many profitable hours studying both
authors, it would therefore be intriguing and rewarding to trace the
theme of love and death in the cuneiform sources. But this would have
to be done in terms of kings (or gods), the preferred focus of cuneiform
literature.
The reason for these preferences is not far to seek. Palaces and
temples were the chief patrons of both arts and letters in Sumer and
Akkad—and then as now, he who pays the piper calls the tune. As a
result we unfortunately know less than we would like about the com-
mon man: his concerns, his aspirations, his reactions to life. These mat-
ters figure in literature only or chiefly in proverbs and other types of so-
called wisdom texts, numerically a relatively small literary genre. And
in the plastic and other representational arts, Mesopotamia preserves
little to rival the revealing vignettes of the lot of the average man or
woman provided in Egypt by funerary deposits and tomb paintings. By
contrast we know almost too much about the king—too much at any
rate to convey in the span of a brief article. I will not attempt to do
* The substance of these remarks was delivered to the symposium on Kingship
in the Ancient Near East, Brooklyn Museum, October 24, 1976, organized by Made-
line I. Noveck and chaired by Edith Porada. The full version, including a transcript
of the ensuing discussion, will appear in the forthcoming proceedings of the Sympo-
sium. The footnotes incorporate references to the illustrations included as slides in the
original presentation.
1 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (William W. Hallo, trans.; Boston, Beacon
Press, 1972): Part Two, Book Two, esp. pp. 156, 199, 201–204.
224 iii.4. the birth of kings
so here, nor even to summarize the lifetime of a typical Mesopotamian

king by constructing a kind of biographical collage derived from all
the abundant documentation of the third and second millennia bc.
Such a composite portrait would properly begin with a study of the
mystique surrounding the royal birth, and grappling with this question
has convinced me that it deserves, all by itself, all the time at my
disposal. It has the advantage of highlighting the differences between
royalty and commoners and whatever (if anything) lies in between.
Then too, it involves also the royal parents, so that it covers much of
the royal lifetime anyway. And finally, it touches on a basic problem
of any political system, namely the mechanics of transferring power
from one administration to the next. Even in our day, the presidential
succession continues to be the subject of constitutional amendments—
how much more acute the problem is in authoritarian governments
around the world. This is obvious from a look at the headlines: China
yesterday, Yugoslavia today, Russia tomorrow—all confront problems of
succession, and so did early Mesopotamian monarchy. I will therefore
reject Shakespeare’s invitation “For God’s sake let us sit upon the
ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings”2 and focus instead
on the generally happier tales of their birth and accession.
The birth of the royal heir, “la naissance du dauphin” as it is put
in a recent French treatment,3 has an elemental importance in the
whole ideology of kingship whenever and wherever that office is hered-
itary. It was not always so. At the dawn of Mesopotamian history lies
what archaeologists call the Jemdet Nasr period—one of the most fruit-
ful and inventive cultural phases of all. I equate it with what native
historiographic traditions call the antediluvian period, that legendary
time when eight shadowy kings ruled five ancient cities until all were
swept away by the Great Flood.4 In the various Babylonian versions
of this tale, the kings in question were not connected to each other as
father and son; they were not even necessarily consecutive. That view of
2 Richard II, Act III, Scene 2, line 155.

3 Herbert Sauren apud Paul Garelli, ed., Le Palais et La Royauté (= Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale 19 [1971], 1974): 457–471. This volume is an excellent
survey of the current state of studies on Mesopotamian kingship. (Hereinafter cited as
RAI 19.)
4 For a convenient if schematic chart of the literary evidence, see W.W. Hallo and
W.K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: a History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch,
1971): 32 (fig. 6). (Hereinafter cited as ANEH.)
iii.4. the birth of kings 225
the matter was injected into the antediluvian traditions, perhaps under
Amorite influence, in their biblical recasting in Genesis 4 (Adam to
Naama) and Genesis 5 (Enosh to Noah).
After the flood mankind was vouchsafed a second chance. Once
more, according to native Mesopotamian historiography, “kingship was
lowered from heaven” and this time it was entrusted to a single city,
Kish. We may therefore call the period after the first dynasty of Kish,
and I equate it, in archaeological terms, with the First Early Dynas-
tic Period (ca. 2900–2700).5 A dozen names of kings are recorded in
one form of the native traditions but they are of no importance—
mere names without associations (other than those—e.g., animals or
totems—conjured up by the meanings of the names themselves) and
without family connections to each other. But another tradition is more
significant: it begins kingship with a certain Etana of Kish, and weaves
a long legend around his lengthy efforts to secure an heir. This leg-
end is known in fragments of neo-Assyrian, Middle Assyrian and Old
Akkadian date. Thus it represents one of the most persistent, not to
say perennial concerns of Mesopotamian arts and letters: how to insure
male issue.6
Recent discoveries of new fragments have made a somewhat better
understanding of the epic or legend of Etana possible. As interpreted
by an Assyriologist who is also a historian of medicine, the new frag-
ments are said to show that Etana married a certain Mu-dam, whose
very name is pregnant with meaning—to wit she is the one who gives
birth (mud-àm)!7 But her first pregnancy ended badly, almost disas-
trously.8 Fortunately, the queen had a dream which revealed the means
needed to overcome her obstetrical problems: Etana had to get her the
plant of life. Unfortunately that was easier said than done and the next
5 ANEH 41 (fig. 7).

6 Ibid. 40, note 29, for literary allusions to Etana, to which add M.E. Cohen, ZA
65 (1977): 3, note 6 (ad 14, line 78); G. Komoróczy, Acta Antiqua 23 (1975): 46 f. and
notes 27–34.
7 J.V. Kinnier Wilson, “Some Contributions to the Legend of Etana,” Iraq 31 (1969):
8–17; idem, “Further Contributions to the Legend of Etana,” JNES 33 (1974): 240. This
reading and interpretation is, however, far from certain in any of the three fragmentary
passages involved (Sm 157+, first and last lines; K9610, last line), nor is the attribution
of either of the fragments to Etana conclusively proven, according to W.G. Lambert,
JNES 39 (1980): 74, n. 1.
8 Kinnier Wilson’s restorations and translations of the fragmentary passage (JNES
33:239) are, however, quite problematical and it is not even clear that the two fragments
on which they are based belong either to each other or to Etana; cf. Lambert, ibid.
three chapters (or tablets) concern Etana’s complicated and adventur-

ous quest for this rare pharmaceutical, including one or more flights
to heaven on the wings of an eagle, the theme most often illustrated in
the Old Akkadian “Etana seals.”9 But despite at least one crash land-
ing, his efforts were crowned with success, or so we may surmise. For
one thing the Sumerian King List preserves the name of Balih, Etana’s
son and successor, together with the royal descendants of his successor.
For another the newly identified fragments of the legend describe just
how a shoot from the plant of life was used, like a poultice, to relax the
uterus at the first signs of labor-pains; and a painless delivery followed.10
The legend I have just excerpted has many other interesting features
and can be understood on many levels. A recent interpretation, for
instance, regards it as an elaborate astral allegory.11 The portions I have
quoted might lead one to consider the tale as a paradigm for obstetri-
cal complications—indeed, it may owe its long survival and apparent
popularity to the fact (demonstratable in other myths and epics, though
not here) that its recitation was prescribed as a prophylactic measure
against the illness or other evil narrated in it. And the device of attach-
ing the paradigm to the figure of a king would be of a piece with the
vast majority of Sumerian and Akkadian belles-lettres generally.
That still entitles us to ask why this particular legend was attached
to this particular king, the first king of all (after the Flood) according
to its own version of history. My answer would be that the ancient
author was deliberately trying to explain the origin of royal succession,
and in the process to give it the highest possible antiquity and there-
fore also authority. Even heaven was not too far to go when it came
to facilitating the birth of the royal heir, and this was established by
the very first king. Nor was it possible to substitute a concubine for the
proper queen (although admittedly the passage in question is very frag-
mentary). Much the same theme inspired the Ugaritic epic of Keret,
sometimes thought to be the Kirta who was regarded as the founder or
eponymous ancestor of the royal house of Mitanni. Depending on how
the text is interpreted, Keret’s difficulties began when a succession of
9 For one of many examples, see André Parrot, Sumer: the Dawn of Art (New York:
Golden Press, 1961): 188 (fig. 226).

10 Iraq 31 (1969): 15 f.
11 Sauren (N 3).
disasters wiped out either all his children12 or all his intended brides.13
Here the main quest is for a new wife of royal blood, but the birth of
the heir is again the goal of the exercise.14
But for all assurances of the legend, neither hereditary kingship nor
Mesopotamian unity was securely established by Etana’s alleged prece-
dent. For as we move into the Second Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2700–
2500 bc), we see the rule of the country divided between several com-
peting city-states, and the succession passing from father to son only
intermittently.15 In fact, this is the heroic age of Mesopotamia’s early
history, enshrined forever in the Sumerian epics about Gilgamesh16 and
the other lords of Uruk in the south and their antagonists at Kish in
the north and in Aratta far to the east The charismatic leader, chosen
for his prowess in battle or his skill in diplomacy, characterized this age,
and immortality (if we credit “Gilgamesh and the land of the living” as
well as the later Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh) was sought not through
progeny but by heroic and memorable exploits leading to lasting fame
(zikir šumi). Election to kingship was by vote of an assembly of arms-
bearing citizens, and royal birth was evidently neither necessary nor
sufficient to secure that election.
This pattern changed by the middle of the 3rd millennium, in what
archaeology likes to describe as the 3rd (and last) of the Early Dynas-
tic periods (ca. 2500–2300).17 Actually it is only now that we are really
entitled to speak of true dynasties—at least if we mean by that term a
succession of kings who claimed the right to rule by virtue of birth (or,
occasionally, of marriage) into a given family. This was achieved by a
new alliance of royal and ecclesiastical interests: the king endowing ever
more lavish temples and their growing complements of priests and ten-
ants, and in return having his claims to the reins of government legit-
imized by the priesthood. Already in the heroic age, some rulers had
claimed divine descent: Meskiaggashir and Enmerkar of Uruk from
Utu according to the Sumerian King List and the epics respectively,
12 So most persuasively, not to say ingeniously, Joshua Finkel, “A Mathematical

Conundrum in the Ugaritic Keret Poem,” HUCA 26 (1955): 109–149.
13 So most recently B. Margalit, “The Ill-fated Wives of King Krt (CTA 14:14–21a)”
UF 8 (1976): 137–145.
14 Herbert Sauren and Guy Kestemont, “Keret, roi de Hubur” UF 3 (1971): 181–221;
M.C. Astour, “A North Mesopotamian Locale for the Keret Epic?” UF 5 (1973): 29–39.
15 ANEH 47 (fig. 8).
16 See Parrot, Sumer (N 9): 186 f. (figs. 223–225), for what are generally taken to be
Old Akkadian representations of Gilgamesh.

17 ANEH 52 f. (fig. 9).
Mesilim of Kish from the mother-goddess Ninhursaga according to his

own inscription. Beginning with the great Eannatum of Lagash, every
ruler now explicitly proclaimed his divine descent. In the famous Stele
of Vultures,18 Eannatum even calls himself “the seed-implanted-in-the-
womb of Ningirsu” or, again, says that “Ningirsu implanted the seed
of Eannatum in the womb and [Ninhursage or Ba"u] bore him.”19 His
two immediate successors were regarded as sons of Lugal-uru(b) and,
presumably, of Inanna, his divine spouse.20 The last Lagash rulers in
this period (Lugalanda and Urukagina) were respectively sons of the
goddesses Nanshe and Ba"u, while their contemporary and conqueror,
Lugalzagesi of Umma, had Nisaba for a divine mother.
The new ideology did not content itself with the impregnation and
gestation by a divine father and mother respectively. Throughout the
pre-natal and post-natal period, the gods attended the pre-ordained
successor. This is stated most explicitly in the royal epithets. To illus-
trate, we may revert to the stele of Eannatum, which describes him as
“king of Lagash, endowed with strength by the god Enlil, nourished
with life-giving milk by the goddess Ninhursaga, named with a good
name (throne-name?)21 by the goddess Inanna, endowed with under-
standing by the god Enki, heart’s choice of the goddess Nanshe,” and
so on and so forth.
Of course, not all Mesopotamian kings were “born to the purple.”
New dynasties were founded, and old ones toppled, when usurpers
seized the throne. In such cases, legitimation came of necessity after
the fact, not before—in part, for example, by the very name assumed
on accession, which defied all challenges, as in the instance of the
most celebrated usurper of all, Sargon of Akkad,22 whose Akkadian
name has been interpreted to mean “the king is legitimate.” As if
18 Parrot, Sumer (N 9): 135 (fig. 164).

19 Åke W. Sjöberg, “Die göttliche Abstammung der sumerisch-babylonischen Herr-
scher,” Orientalia Suecana 21 (1973): 87–89; T. Jacobsen, Kramer Anniversary Volume (=
AOAT 25, 1976; hereinafter abbreviated as Kramer AV ): 251 and note 13, now favors
Ba"u.
20 See below, note 66.
21 Literally “sweet name,” as in Hittite myths of Hurrian derivation; see H.A. Hoff-
ner, JNES 27 (1968): 201 f. Is a loan-translation involved? Cf. Hittite “sweet sleep” (ibid.,
notes 36 and 39) with Sumerian ù-du10-ku-ku. I hinted at the sense “throne-name” in my
Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles (= AOS 43, 1957): 133 f. Sjöberg, however, sees mu-nam-en-
na as the throne-name; “Abstammung” (N 19): 112.
22 Parrot, Sumer (N 9): 171 (fig. 206). But the head may equally well picture his
grandson Naram-Sin.
to make up for his lack of divine parentage and innate endowments,

posterity surrounded Sargon’s birth with an extraordinary profusion
of legends, the most famous of which is no doubt that according to
which his mother was a high-priestess (and thus either not free to bear
children or possibly specializing in the procreation of royalty!)23 who
therefore exposed him in a basket of rushes in the Euphrates where,
like Moses, he was rescued and raised by a foster-parent. This tale
recurs in one form or another all over the world; the general tendency
is to regard the Moses tale as modelled on the Sargon legend, or both
as derived from a common original. A third possibility is too often
overlooked—namely that the tale of Sargon is modelled on that of
Moses! For its earliest textual witnesses date from the seventh century,
and there are no internal indices requiring us to suppose a date of
composition appreciably closer to the events of the late 24th century
which it describes.
The considerable family of Sargon managed to extend its sway
over all the high political and priestly offices of Mesopotamia, a land
which thus experienced its first truly imperial unification.24 But Sargon’s
two oldest sons and first successors were (in my reconstruction) born
before this unification had been achieved, and they too could not claim
divine parentage. Indeed, their birth may have been complicated by a
statistical rarity. Although it is only, so far, a learned guess, they may in
fact have been twins. This is indicated on the one hand by the tradition
that the succession passed first to the younger of the two, and on the
other by the very name of the elder brother, Man-ishtushu,25 which
means “who (is) with him?” and may be an abbreviation (to judge by
parallel Sumerian names) of either “who compares with him?” or “who
comes out with him?”26
It was only with the son of this Manishtushu that the “dynastic
ideology” could be fully applied to the Sargonic kings. Naram-Sin the
great, in my opinion really the greatest member of the dynasty, actually
23 On a possible son of Enheduanna and on the question whether the en-priestess
was allowed to have children (inside or outside the sacred marriage), see the discussion
by J. Renger, ZA 58 (1967): 131 and H. Hirsch, AfO 20 (1963): 9 and note 79.
24 ANEH 58 (fig. 10).
25 Parrot, Sumer (N 9): 178 (figs. 214 f.).
26 ANEH 59; previously T. Jacobsen, AS 11 (1939): 112n. 249. The nearest Sumerian
equivalent is a-ba-an-da-è or a-ba-ì(in)-da-(an)-è, for which cf., e.g., MSL 13:87:40 and
NRVNI 14, and which C. Wilcke apud D.O. Edzard, BiOr 28 (1971): 165 n. 8, regards as
a possible twin-name.
claimed divine status for himself (the first Mesopotamian king to do

so),27 as did his son Shar-kali-sharri after him. The latter in addition
claimed divine parentage again after the manner of the Early Dynastic
rulers.28
But the empire forged by the great Sargonic kings collapsed in anar-
chy after the death of Sharkalisharri, and the country reverted to its
characteristic pattern of small to medium-sized city-states.29 Culturally,
the pendulum swung back to the south, where Lagash enjoyed a renais-
sance under the house of Ur-Ba"u. But a curious phenomenon charac-
terized the succession here. Ur-Ba"u was blessed with a large number
of daughters, and presumably no sons. So it appears that the throne
passed successively to no less than three of his sons-in-law.30 Of these
the most famous was certainly Gudea,31 whose own humble origins
are only lightly concealed behind his telling autobiographical note: “I
have no mother: you (oh goddess Gatumdug) are my mother; I have no
father: you (oh Gatumdug) are my father.”32
With the accession of Gudea begins what I like to designate as
the classical phase of Mesopotamian civilization, a half millennium
(ca. 2100–1600), roughly coterminous with the Middle Bronze Age in
the rest of Western Asia, when the cultural traditions crystallized into
their most typical form. I will therefore spare you a detailed history
of the separate stages in the evolution of the ideology of royal birth
and present instead an overview of the legacy which this entire age
bequeathed to posterity. This is the easier because the period as a whole
is amply documented and, in particular, a new literary vehicle, the royal
hymn (and to a lesser extent the royal correspondence) emerged now to
give formal expression to the details of the royal ideology. Combined
with the older but intimately related genres of royal date formulas and
royal inscriptions, the testimony of the hymns allows us to generalize
with some assurance.
27 Parrot, Sumer (N 9): 175–177 (figs. 211–213).

28 Sjöberg, “Abstammung” (N 19): 91 f. and note 1.
29 ANEH 66 (fig. 12).
30 Renger, “The Daughters of Urbaba: Some Thoughts on the Succession to the
Throne During the 2. Dynasty of Lagash,” Kramer AV (1976): 367–369.

32 Cylinder A iii 6 f. and the related passage in “The rulers of Lagaš,” for which
see E. Sollberger, JCS 21 (1967) [publ. 1969]): 286 and note 80. At the same time the
physical description in the next line of the Cylinder implies divine birth; cf. Jacobsen,
Kramer AV (1976): 251, note 15; A. Falkenstein, Die Inschriften Gudeas von Lagaš (AnOr 30,
1966): 2 f.
Perhaps the most significant new development is a “solution” of the

mechanics of divine birth. It may have occurred to you to wonder how
the concept of divine parentage was reconciled with a basic reluctance
to regard the royal offspring himself as a deity—a reluctance the more
conspicuous by contrast with Old Kingdom Egypt.33 Though two of
the Sargonic kings and (after Ur-Nammu) all those of Ur and Isin in
the classical phase claimed divinity of sorts, only one king (Shu-Sin
of Ur) actually permitted himself to be worshipped like a “real” god
in temples dedicated to his worship in his own lifetime,34 a practice
which was apparently particularly abhorrent to the many Amorite
dynasties which divided the rule of Mesopotamia among themselves
about 1900 bc, a century after the fall of Ur. I would like to propose
here a new solution to the paradox: that the divine parentage of the
future king was achieved or symbolized in the cultic rite of the so-called
sacred marriage or, in other words, that the (or at least an) object of
that rite was to produce a royal heir and to establish his divine descent.
In all the recent spate of discussions on the sacred marriage, this
point of view has barely been considered.35 Let me therefore give you
first a brief description of the institution as now known. It was a cer-
emony in the temple precincts in which a king and what is generally
taken to be a priestess36 consummated a sexual union to the accompa-
niment of offerings and hymns or prayers by the clergy. The prayers
make it abundantly clear that the union was, at least on one level, a
symbolic one. The king symbolized a god and his partner a goddess.
Most often the divine couple were perceived as Dumuzi and Inanna
33 Cf. Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1948):
301, who grapples with the Eannatum pasages (above, note 19) in this connection.
34 ANEH 84 and Hallo, “The Royal Inscriptions of Ur: a Typology,” HUCA 33
(1962): 18. For other possible indications of “emperor-worship” in Ur III times, see
Claus Wilcke, RAI 19 (1974): 179 f. with notes 30–58 (pp. 188–192).
35 J. van Dijk, BiOr 11 (1954): 84, note 9, at least raised the question: “It is not at all
certain that the sacred marriage had any relation to procreation” (translation mine). Cf.
also Renger’s reference to “children of an en-priestess who (at least in part) sprang from
the union in the sacred marriage,” ZA 58 (1967): 131 (translation mine). Sjöberg ponders
whether the royal offspring could have been engendered in the sacred marriage, and
Inanna thus regarded as divine mother as specified (only) in the case of Anam of Uruk;
see Or 35 (1966): 289 f.
36 Cf., e.g., S.N. Kramer, RAI 17 (1970): 140: “And who, finally, played the role of the
goddess throughout the ceremony? It must have been some specially selected votary of
the goddess, but this is never stated . . . .”
respectively, but other pairs were possible depending on local circum-

stances.37 The prayers also suggest a variety of symbolic meanings for
the act: as the basis for the royal partner’s own claim to divinity,38 as a
guarantee of fertility for the country as a whole,39 as a ritual enactment
of an astral myth, as proof (or refutation) of the belief in a seasonal res-
urrection of Dumuzi, as a possible part of the annual new year’s ritual40
or, alternatively, as a unique element in the coronation ritual once at,
or near, the beginning of each reign.41
Apart from the obvious lack of clarity in the sources themselves
reflected in these partly divergent interpretations as to the significance
of the sacred marriage, it must be emphasized that they all confine
themselves to its symbolic level. They ignore the real act and its real-
ity level. If we stop to consider what actually transpired, it was, after
all, the consummation of a sexual union. This is explicitly stated in the
texts, and may be deduced also from innumerable artistic representa-
tions, if not in quite the measure that earlier interpretations suggested.42
I would like therefore to propose that on the real, as against the sym-
bolic level, the sacred marriage in the classical phase served to engen-
der the crown prince, thus bridging the gap between the cosmic and
the earthly which had been left open by the earlier ideology. For the
king, this is expressed tellingly by substituting for his name the name
37 A novel illustration of such local variations comes from Emar, where the sacred
marriage was consummated in an annual (?) seven-day ritual between the high priestess
(entu) and the storm-god (Baal); see for now D. Arnaud, Annuaire de l’École Pratique des
Hautes Études (Ve section) 84 (1975–1976): 223 f.
38 So especially Frankfort, Kingship (N 33): 295–299.
39 Here as elsewhere (see below, note 41), one interpretation is not necessarily mutu-
ally exclusive with another. According to Kramer, the very purpose of Ninsun’s giving
birth to Shulgi was to assure the fertility of the country; see RAI 19 (1974): 165.
40 See especially van Dijk, “La fête du nouvel an dans un texte de Šulgi,” BiOr
11 (1954): 83–88; W.H.Ph. Römer, Sumerische “Königshymnen” der Isin-Zeit (= DMOA 13,
1965): cf. IV.
41 Renger, RLA 4 (1975): 257. In fact, the coronation may have been scheduled
to coincide with the New Year’s ritual, but previous commentators seem to have
overlooked this possibility.
42 Frankfort, Sculpture of the Third Millennium bc from Tell Asmar and Khafajah (= Oriental
Institute Publications 44, 1939): pl. 112, fig. 199. Line drawing by Johannes Boese,
Altmesopotamische Weihplatten (= Untersuchungen zur Assyriologie . . . [ZA Suppl.] 6,
1971): pl. IV, fig. 1 (AS 4). This, together with some half dozen seals, is the only
representation of an erotic scene considered a remotely possible candidate for a sacred
marriage depiction by J.S. Cooper, “Heilige Hochzeit. B. Archäologisch,” RLA 4 (1975):
259–269, esp. p. 266.
of Dumuzi (or another god) in certain sacred marriage texts;43 for the
priestess—if the feminine partner was a priestess—it is explicit in her
very title (or one of them: nin-dingir) which means “the lady who is a
deity” (not the lady of the god),44 a point underlined by the statue of
a high priestess of the moon-god at Ur which has attachments for the
horned cap symbolizing divinity—with this attachment (now lost), the
statue represents the moon-god’s heavenly consort (Ningal), without it
the priestess who dedicated the inscription to her.45 And just as mor-
tal king and human priestess are god and goddess in the rite, so the
product of their union emerges as divinely born without forfeiting his
essential humanity. A solution has been found for uniting a transcen-
dent conception of divinity with an immanent conception of kingship,
and the solution is congenial to the Mesopotamian world-view.
But if this solution is so genial, it may be asked why it has not been
proposed before. One reason may be the ambivalent role of Inanna,
whose multifarious roles conspicuously minimize the maternal one,46
another the relative silence of the sources. They seem to dwell in loving
detail on the physical aspects of the sacred marriage on the one hand,
and on the divine birth of the royal heir on the other, without ever
linking the two events explicitly. It would not be difficult to account
for the silence: marriage and birth were sacraments of the royal life-
time which were celebrated in an elaborate liturgy, but the gestation
period which intervened was not. It therefore was not the cultic stim-
ulus for commissioning a textual genre. Moreover, the silence of the
texts is more apparent than real. Besides the frequent references in
43 Hallo, BiOr 23 (1966): 244 f., here: III.3.

44 Falkenstein, Inschriften Gudeas (N32): 2, note 8; cf. Renger, ZA 58 (1967): 134 f., 144.
45 L. Legrain, Museum Journal 18 (1927): 223–229. Hallo, “Women of Sumer,” apud
D. Schmandt-Besserat, ed., The Legacy of Sumer (Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 4, 1976): 32 f.

and fig. 16.
46 F.R. Kraus, WZKM 52 (1953): 53 f. She is invoked as mother only by two or three
minor deities, notably Lulal (Kramer, JCS 18 [1964]: 38, note 13; but elsewhere Lulal
seems to be regarded as son of Ninsun: Sjöberg, Or. Suec. 21 [1972]: 100 and note 1),
Šara (Šu-Sin 9; otherwise only in Anzu I iii 77, for which see Hallo and Moran, JCS
31 [1979]: 84 f.), and Sutitu (BRM 4:25:44; but in An-Anum IV 135, Sutitu is herself
a manifestation of Inanna), and only by one king (above, note 35). In the “Descent
of Inanna,” Shara and Lulal are both spared by Inanna but not identified as her
sons; Kramer, JCS 5 (1951): 13:312–330. Curiously, the logogram for mother-goddess
(protective goddess) is AMA.dINANNA, but here dINANNA has its generic sense of
“(any) goddess”; cf. CAD s.vv. amalı̄tu, ištarı̄tu; J. Krecher, HSAO (1967): 89, note 2. The
frequent reference to Inanna as kiskil (ardatu) refers to her youthfulness and (relative)
childlessness, not to her virginity.
hymns and elsewhere to the paternity of Mesopotamian kings in the

royal epithet “seed of kingship” or “seed of the gods,”47 at least one of
these kings, Ur-Nammu of Ur,48 seems to refer to his maternal descent
with the epithet “seed of the high-priestess” or “high-priesthood.”49
And, indeed, the very solution proposed here had been adumbrated
by Thorkild Jacobsen.50 Writing on early Mesopotamian political devel-
opment in 1957, he analyzed the liturgical abab-hymn51 now known
as Shulgi Hymn G. Jacobsen concluded “one is led to interpret (it) as
meaning that Shulgir was engendered on an entu priestess of Nanna
in Nippur, presumably during the celebration of the ‘sacred marriage’
between Nanna and the entu, in which Ur-Nammuk as king embodied
the divine bridegroom, Nanna.”52 But except for a single and some-
what ambiguous remark in my own history of the Ancient Near East,53
and a generally negative critique by Sjöberg,54 this suggestive insight
has not been followed up, even by Jacobsen himself. In his “Religious
Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia”55 and even more fully in his recently
published history of Mesopotamian religion,56 Jacobsen returned to the
problem of the sacred marriage with never a hint of the engendering
of the crown-prince. S.N. Kramer came up with a different analysis
47 W.G. Lambert, “The Seed of Kingship,” RAI 19 (1974): 427–440.

48 Parrot, Sumer (N 9): 228, fig. 281.
49 Claus Wilcke, RAI 19 (1974): 180 and 194, note 72. Lambert, however, translates
one of the two passages involved “seed of lordship” (“Seed” [N 47]: 428). (Note that en
can mean either lord or priest[ess].)
50 Previously, Adam Falkenstein spoke obliquely of the “Gotteskindschaft des Königs,
die aus der Stellvertretung eines Gottes . . . durch den König bei der Götterhochzeit
erwachsen ist” in BiOr 7 (1950): 58.
51 Published by Gadd as CT 36:26 f.
52 Thorkild Jacobsen, ZA 52 (1957): 126 f., note 80; reprinted in his Towards the Image
of Tammuz (= Harvard Semitic Series 21, 1970): 387 f., note 80.
53 ANEH, 49: “The crown prince, born of the sacred marriage between the king
and the priestess of a given god, was considered the son of that god and subsequently
invoked him as his personal patron.” Whether or not this state of affairs can be pro-
jected back into the Early Dynastic III period as proposed there, it is here maintained
that, by the classical phase, the crown-prince became, rather, the son of the god repre-
sented by the king and the goddess represented by the priestess.
54 Or 35 (1966): 287–290.
55 Apud Hans Goedicke and J.J.M. Roberts, eds., Unity and Diversity (= The Johns
Hopkins Near Eastern Studies 7, 1975): 65–97.

56 The Treasurers of Darkness (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976): esp. 32–37. At the
same time Jacobsen returned to the theme of the “birth of the hero” (i.e., king) without
explicitly referring to the sacred marriage; see Kramer AV (N 19); previously: JNES 2
(1943): 119–121.
of the Shulgi hymn,57 which he entitled “Šulgi, Provider of the Ekur:

His Divine Birth and Investiture.” He has also contributed an entire
monograph on the sacred marriage rite58 as well as numerous editions
of new sacred marriage texts;59 nowhere does he mention any human
birth resulting from it. Wilcke interprets the same Shulgi-hymn to mean
that immediately upon his birth in the Ekur, the temple of Enlil at Nip-
pur, Shulgi was recognized as crown-prince by Enlil in the lifetime of
his father Ur-Nammu, but without suggesting a sacred marriage in this
connection.60 Renger, who summed up the textual evidence on the insti-
tution for the authoritative Reallexikon der Assyriologie in 1975, mentions
Jacobsen’s suggestion in passing only to reject it.61 For good measure
he attributes a similar opinion to Adam Falkenstein,62 but it is not true
that Gudea is said by the latter to have sprung from a union of priestess
and male partner “anlässlich einer H[eiligen] H[ochzeit].” On the con-
trary, Falkenstein twice emphasizes that the nature of the cultic setting
to which Gudea alludes is unknown!63
The new conception of divine birth as here proposed involves of
necessity also a clarification of the royal father’s role. He had now
for the first time to be regarded as the husband of the goddess, and
the royal titulary duly reflects this. Beginning with Amar-Sin of Ur,
and consistently with nearly all the kings of Isin, he is styled “the
(beloved) spouse of Inanna.”64 The attempt to trace this usage back
to Eannatum of Lagash65 was already rejected by me in 195766 and the
57 S.N. Kramer, “CT XXXVI. Corrigenda and Addenda,” Iraq 36 (1974): 93–95; idem,
RAI 19 (1974): 165 f.

58 Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Indiana University Press, 1969). Cf. idem, “The
Dumuzi-Inanna Sacred Marriage-Rite: Origin, Development, Character,” RAI 17

(1970): 135–141.
59 Kramer, “Cuneiform Studies and the History of Literature: the Sumerian Sacred
Marriage Texts,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963): 485–527; idem
apud J.B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (3rd ed.; Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1968): 637–645.
60 Wilcke, RAI 19 (1974): 181 and 195, note 76.
61 Renger, “Heilige Hochzeit A. Philologisch,” RLA 4 (1975): 258.
62 Ibid.; cf. idem, “Daughters” (N 30): note 16.
63 Falkenstein, Inschriften Gudeas (N 32).
64 Hallo, Royal Titles (N 21): 140 f.; cf. idem, JNES 31 (1972): 88.
65 Renger, “Heilige Hochzeit” (N 61): 258 f.; Wilcke, RLA 5 (1976): 80 f., even wants
to extend the usage back to Mesannepada.

66 Hallo, Royal Titles (N 64); similarly Sjöberg, Abstammung (N 19): 90, and Sollberger
and Kupper, Inscriptions Royales Sumériennes et Akkadiennes (= Littératures Anciennes du

Proche-Orient 3, 1971): 55.
alleged reference to it under Naram-Sin of Akkad67 is from a late copy

where its authenticity must be at least questioned.
Somewhat more ambiguous is the role of the female partner in the
new conception of the sacred marriage. Was she exempt from the inter-
diction of childbirth such as we posited in the case of Sargon’s mother?
Could she have been the high-priestess of the moon-god as Jacobsen
suggested, given the fact that this office was, during the classical phase,
regularly filled by the daughter of the king himself ? Or was she some
other member of the royal family, as in the case of many other highly
placed priestesses? Was she, or did she become, the wife of the king?68
Or was she, at least sometimes, the sister of the king, as has been sug-
gested in the case of the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin?69 If the woman did
not prove to yield a male heir, was she allowed to try again, or not?
In other words, was the sacred marriage performed only one time
or as many times as proved necessary? Was it performed in only one
place, or were a number of cities privileged to have their temples con-
duct the ceremony—as seems indicated by the fact that the new king
later regarded different deities as his parents in different cities of his
kingdom. Did a consistent ideology emerge which defined a dynasty
as a succession of kings sharing the same divine parents, and identi-
fied a change of dynasty as a change of divine parents?70 What about
sons born to the king before his accession, i.e., presumably outside
the framework of the sacred marriage? Were they excluded from the
succession? These and other intricacies involved in the intertwining of
heavenly and dynastic relationships remain to be resolved by further
study of the royal hymns and other relevant sources.
Such studies will also yield significant new data on the further career
of the crown-prince after his birth—the solicitude of his mother or
wet-nurse as expressed in royal lullabies,71 the education of the prince
in such diverse fields as scribal skills, music, athletics, hunting and
67 Renger, “Heilige Hochzeit” (N 65), based on F. Thureau-Dangin, RA 9 (1912): 34 f.
Cf. also Wilcke (N 65): 80 f.

68 Cf. notes 84–91 to the Discussion (above, note*).
69 Jacobsen, “The Reign of Ibbi-Suen,” JCS 7 (1953): 37 n. 6; cf. N. Schneider,
“Die ‘Königskinder’ des Herrscherhauses von Ur III,” Or 12 (1943): 190, who suggests
rather that Ibbi-Suen’s queen and (his!) daughter may have been namesakes. Jacobsen’s
reference to Schneider, Götternamen (AnOr 19): 202, appears to be in error.
70 So most explicitly, it would seem, according to “The Rulers of Lagaš”; see Soll-
berger (N 32): 275–291, esp. 279, note 5.

71 Kramer apud Pritchard ANET, 651 f. For additional literature, see my “Women of
Sumer” (N 45): 32, note 68.

warfare,72 his service in the administration as viceroy of the ances-

tral domains,73 his own (earthly) marriage, his coronation,74 his actual
reign,75 his death,76 and his afterlife in the cult77 and memory78 of the
people.
Here there is time only for a short look at what became of the con-
cepts I have already discussed after the classical phase. The phase I
have described included (in one sense indeed climaxed in) the reign
of Hammurapi of Babylon.79 For after him a period of decline set in
terminating with the sack of Babylon about 1600 and the ushering in
of the Babylonian Dark Ages or Middle Ages. One often characterizes
the period beginning with Hammurapi as marked by a gradual break-
down of the older religious values, more specifically as a time of secu-
larization.80 But that is not entirely fair. More to the point may be again
Jacobsen’s characterization of the late second millennium in terms of
the rise of a personal religion, as a period, that is, in which the individ-
ual turned directly toward his own personal deity rather than, through
the mediation of priests and kings, to the awesome great gods of the
older pantheon.81 And he approached them, not as subject to ruler,
72 See especially G.R. Castellino, Two Šulgi Hymns (bc) (= Studi Semitici 42, 1972).
73 See my “The Princess and the Plea,” (forthcoming), here: V.3.
74 Hallo, “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu,” JCS 20 (1966): 13–41, here: III.2. For
parallels to the text edited there, see now Wilcke, Kollationen . . . Jena (= Abhandlungen
der Sächsischen Akademie . . . 65/4, 1976): 47 f. On the coronation ceremony, see now
A.K. Grayson, Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts (1975): ch. 7, with literature cited, 78
n. 2.
75 See especially Kramer, “Kingship in Sumer and Akkad: the Ideal King,” RAI 19
(1974): 163–176.
76 Kramer, “The death of Ur-Nammu and His Descent to the Netherworld,” JCS
21 (1967 [publ. 1969]): 104–122; Wilcke, RAI 17 (1970): 81–92; Kramer(N 71): 659; Piotr
Michalowski, “The Death of Šulgi,” Or 46 (1977): 220–225.
77 See, e.g., Josef Bauer, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft Suppl. 1
(1969): 107–114; Ph. Tallon, RA 68 (1974): 167 f.

78 As expressed particularly in the onomasticon. Cf. on this point already Hallo,
JNES (1956): 220 n. 4 and now H. Klengel, “Hammurapi und seine Nachfolger im
altbabylonischen Onomastikon,” JCS 28 (1976): 156–160 (ref. courtesy R. Kutscher).
For Shulgi as private name see R. Frankena AbB (1966): 65 (LIH 2:83) 24.
80 Rivkah Harris, “On the Process of Secularization under Hammurapi,” JCS 15
(1961): 117–120; eadem, “Some Aspects of the Centralization of the realm . . . ,” JAOS 88
(1968): 727–732, esp. 727 f. For the emergence of seals dedicated to the king instead of
the deity or his temple (ibid.) see more specifically Hallo, “Royal Inscriptions of Ur”
(N 34): 18–20.
81 Jacobsen, Treasures (N 56): ch. 5: “Second millennium metaphors. The Gods as
parents: rise of personal religion.”

but as child to parent—capricious still like all the Mesopotamina gods,

but potentially at least loving and caring like a parent.82 In so doing,
however, he was merely following in the footsteps of royalty: the kings
of the earlier era had already discovered the divine parent in the
ideology of kingship. Now the common man claimed the same privilege
for himself. Perhaps, then, we should characterize the Late Bronze
Age not so much in terms of secularization as of democratization.
Whether this prepared the Mesopotamian citizen adequately to cope
with the emerging ideology of Assyrian kingship I will leave for others
to decide.83
82 On some of the problems involved, such as the number, gender, and character of
the personal deities, see Achsa Belind apud Yvonne Rosengarten, Trois Aspects de la Pensée
Religieuse Sumérienne (Paris: de Boccard, 1971): 156–159. See now in detail H. Vorländer,
Mein Gott (= AOAT 23, 1975).
83 For Middle Assyrian notions of divine parentage (of the king) see Peter Machinist,
“Literature as Politics: the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic and the Bible.” CBQ 38 (1976): 455–
482, esp. 465–468. For the sacred marriage in the first millennium, see CAD and AHw
s.v. hašādu; differently Renger, RLA 4 (1975): 258 § 24.
iii.5
NIPPUR ORIGINALS
Åke Sjöberg, who has devoted so much of his scholarly effort to Sume-
rian literature, has also provided an authoritative description of the Old
Babylonian scribal schools which created and transmitted it.1 He was
puzzled by the ancient designation of the scribal school as é-dub-ba-
a, a problem only made thornier by van Dijk’s reading of the gloss
to it as e-pe-šá-ad-bu2 Perhaps he will accept the etymology “house of
the A-tablet,” which I proposed a quarter of a century ago, and now
bring out of its obscurity in his honor.3 The reference is presumably to
one of the three primers with which instruction in the scribal schools
began, i.e. either Proto-Ea = naqû, whose incipit is á = A, or the so-
called “Silbenalphabet B” whose incipit is a-a, a-a-a.4 The importance
of the latter primer was proverbial for, in Sjöberg’s translation, an old
saw held that “a fellow who cannot produce (the vocabulary beginning
with) a-a, how will he attain fluent speech?”5 The further notion that
a-a was in exclusive use at Nippur, and replaced outside Nippur by the
“Silbenalphabet A” (incipit me-me, pa4-pa4)6 seems less likely in view
of the reference to both series together in an Edubba-essay known in
1 Å.W. Sjöberg, “The Old Babylonian Eduba,” in Sumerological Studies in Honor

of Thorkild Jacobsen, AS 20, 159–179. This paper was presented to the 35e Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale, Philadelphia, July 11, 1988.
2 AS 20, 159 n. 1; cf. J.J.A. van Dijk, VAS 24, 9 ad 6 iii 2=MSL 12, 97:133 and
112:133. Previously B. Landsberger Brief 75. In the discussion M. Civil pointed out that
the expression is not a genitive. C. Wilcke cited an unpublished etymology suggested by
D.O. Edzard: “house which distributes the tablets”; cf. meantime AfO 23 (1970) 92 n. 5.
For the standard Akkadian translation bı̄t .tuppi see e.g. Sjöberg, ZA 64 (1975) 140: 2, 4.
3 W.W. Hallo, “Mesopotamia, [Education in]” apud Martin M. Buber and Haim
Y. Ormian, eds., Educational Encyclopedia Vol. 4: History of Education, cc. 39–46,

esp. c. 41 (in Hebrew).
4 Sjöberg, AS 20, 162. The third, and perhaps most elementary, primer was called
tu-ta-ti.
5 AS 20, 163.
6 B. Landsberger apud M. Çığ and H. Kızıyay, Zwei altbabylonische Schulbücher
aus Nippur, Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayinlarindan, 7th Series No. 35, 98.
H. Behrens, D. Loding, and M.T. Roth, Dumu-E2-Dub-Ba-A: Studies in Honor of Ake

W. Sjoberg, ©1989, pages 237–247. Reprinted with permission of the University of
Pennsylvania Press.
240 iii.5. nippur originals
exemplars from Ur7 as well as Nippur.8 That the Nippur school set the
standards in scribal education is, however, indisputable, and it is to it
that I wish to turn.
The great scribal school at Nippur was founded by Shulgi of Ur if we
may interpret lines 272–332 of his hymn B to this effect,9 and it was here
that the neo-Sumerian corpus of literature was adapted10 and shaped to
the needs of the scribal curriculum. The preeminence of Nippur in this
enterprise was a corollary of the prestige of the temple of Enlil and
its priesthood. It was the ambition of successive or rival kings to rule
Nippur, to win the allegiance of this priesthood, and to commission
hymns in their honor from the graduates of the scribal school.11
The curriculum thus developed at the scribal school of Nippur be-
came normative (perhaps even in its most elementary stages)12 for scrib-
al schools of Old Babylonian date wherever found and it influenced
those of Middle Babylonian date in the periphery as well. Much of
the belletristic in Sumerian and even in Akkadian dealt with high life
and low life at Nippur, be that vignettes of aristocratic life associated
with figures like Ludingirra13 or the House of Ur-meme,14 or more
popular entertainments like “The Poor Man of Nippur.”15 As far as
the personal names mentioned in them can be identified with historical
personages, they can be firmly dated to the (later) Ur III and (early) Isin
periods (ca. 2050–1900 bc.); this lends some semblance of credibility to
the tradition that attributes a late medical text to an apkallu of Nippur
in the time of Enlil-bani of Isin.16
7 Sjöberg, AS 20, 162 f. (UET 6/2, 167:14 f.); cf. already D.O. Edzard, review of
UET 6/2 in AfO 23 (1970) 93.
8 Sjöberg, review of UET 6/2 in OrNS 37 (1968) 232–241, esp. p. 235 (Nr. 167).
9 Hallo, JCS 20 (1966) 92, n. 33, here: III.2; The Ancient Near East: A History 83;
G.R. Castellino, Two Šulgi Hymns (bc), Studi Semitici 42, 19, 223 f.; Hallo, AS 20, 198,
here: I.4.
10 Hallo, AS 20, 198, here: I.4.
11 Hallo, “Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity,” JCS 17 (1963) 112–118, here:
III.1; Hallo and W.K. Simpson The Ancient Near East: A History 37 f., 78, 83, 86.
12 Cf. above, notes 6–8.
13 Cf. most recently Sjöberg, “The first Pushkin Museum elegy and new texts,”
JAOS 103 (1983) 315–320; J.S. Cooper, “New Cuneiform Parallels to the Song of
Songs,” JBL 90 (1971) 157–162.
14 Cf. most recently R.L. Zettler and M.T. Roth, “The Genealogy of the House of
Ur-me-me: A Second Look,” AfO 31 (1984) 1–14.

15 Cf. most recently M. dej. Ellis, “A New Fragment of the Tale of the Poor Man of
Nippur,” JCS 26 (1974) 88 f., with the first Nippur fragment of the tale (neo-Babyonian).
16 Hunger Kolophone No. 533; Lambert, JCS 11 (1957) 2 n. 8.
iii.5. nippur originals 241
What was the floruit of the Nippur school? The answer to this ques-
tion is not as simple or obvious as might be expected. To my knowl-
edge, there is not a single dated literary or school text from Nippur
among the thousands already published, a fact not previously remarked
upon. There are, however, half a dozen other lines of evidence that can
be drawn upon. The first is paleography. Broadly speaking, the bulk
of the Nippur canonical texts belong in the Old Babylonian period to
judge by their writing, with only occasional survivals in neo-Sumerian
script and, thus, presumably of Ur III date.17 Secondly, literary texts
from other sites often enough do carry Old Babylonian dates, ranging
“from the reign of Rimsîn to that of Ammis.aduqa,”18 i.e., at a max-
imum, from 1822–1626 bc. in the middle chronology. But the second
half of this two-century span can effectively be eliminated from con-
sideration in light of a third factor, the evidence of dated archival texts
from Nippur. These occur more or less continuously throughout the
neo-Sumerian and Early Old Babylonian periods,19 but cease abruptly
in 1720 bc., the thirtieth year of Samsu-iluna.20 Fourthly, while a royal
hymn,21 and perhaps one other composition,22 was still written in Sume-
rian for and under Abi-ešuh, the immediate successor of Samsu-iluna
˘
(1711–1684), neither of them occur on tablets from Nippur. Fifth, the
native traditions confirm, however allusively, that Sumerian learning
disappeared from Babylonia and fled to the Sealand until that was
17 E.g., two joining fragments of e2-u6-nir; cf. Sjöberg, The Collection of the Sume-
rian Temple Hymns, TCS 3, 6 and 16, and pls. xxxvii f. Among the Nippur texts
assigned to Yale (3 N-T, 4 N-T and 5 N-T) are a number of Ur III exemplars of literary
texts; they were copied by A. Goetze and will be published by the Oriental Institute.
For 6 N-T texts of Ur III date, cf. M. Civil, OrNS 54 (1985) 33 f.
18 Sjöberg, TCS 3, 6.
19 See e.g. for the interval from Lipit-Enlil of Isin to (the twenty-eighth year of ) Rim-
Sin of Larsa (1873–1795 bc) R. Marcel Sigrist, Les sattukku dans l’Ešumeša durant la
période d’Isin et de Larsa, BibMes 11, esp. p. 7.
20 Elizabeth C. Stone, “Economic crisis and social upheaval in Old Babylonian
Nippur,” in L.D. Levine and T.C. Young, Jr., eds., Mountains and Lowlands: Essays
in the Archaeology of Greater Mesopotamia, BibMes 7, 267–289, esp. 270 f.
21 TCL 16, 81, for which see J. van Dijk, “L’hymne à Marduk avec intercession pour
le roi Abi-"ešuh,” MIO 12 (1966–1967) 57–74.

22 CT 44, 18,˘ for which see Hallo, JCS 17 (1963) 115 n. 55, here: III.1 and JCS 19
(1965) 57, here: III.1, has now been edited by B. Alster and U. Jeyes, “A Sumerian Poem
about Early Rulers,” Ac.Sum. 8 (1986) 1–11, but col. rev. i line 5 which E, Sollberger
apparently read igi A-bi-e-šu!-u[h...], parallel to igi dUtudx [...] in the preceding line,
˘
is read uhhur (i.e. uhhur3 = IGI.A)-bi e mah[...]and left untranslated in the new
edition. ˘ ˘ ˘˘
reunited to Babylonia,23 presumably under the Kassite king Ulamburi-

ash (ca. 1420 bc.).24 Finally, the general pattern of cuneiform archives
and libraries is that they are best preserved from the century (or half
century) immediately preceding their destruction. Combining all these
lines of evidence, we may tentatively assign the bulk of the Sumerian
literary texts from Nippur, and hence the floruit of its scribal school, to
the century from 1820–1720 bc.
In the three hundred years that followed (1720–1420 bc) under the
rule of the Sealand Dynasty, Nippur was unoccupied.25 Under Kassite
rule, it became the seat of a gu2-en-na (= šandabakku,26 or gu"ennakku27),
with or without special privileges.28 Whether its scribal school reopened
is not known, for there are few if any copies of Sumerian literary texts
that can unambiguously be dated to the Kassite period and attributed
to Nippur.29 What is apparent is that its literary heritage was not
lost entirely. Already in the reign of Nazi-maruttash (ca. 1307–1282),
a collection of hemerologies copied at Assur includes one with the
famous colophon which, in W.G. Lambert’s translation, reads30 “Dies
fas according to the seven a[pkallı̄?], originals(s) of Sippar, Nippur, Baby-
lon, Larsa, Ur, Uruk, and Eridu. The scholars excerpted, selected,
and gave to Nazi-maruttaš, king of the world” etc. Although Lambert
and Hermann Hunger31 differ on the significance of this colophon for
the history of canonization in cuneiform,32 both agree that it provides
23 Hallo, JCS 17 (1963) 116 f, here: III.1. Differently J.D. Muhly, JCS 24 (1972) 179,
who questions “the assumed migration of the scribal tradition from Babylon to the
Sealand in the 28th year of the reign of Samsuiluna.”
24 J.A. Brinkman, Materials and Studies for Kassite History 1, 31 and 318 f.
25 McGuire Gibson apud Stone, BibMes 7, 270 n. 9.
26 B. Landsberger, “Das Amt des šandabakku (GU .EN.NA) von Nippur” in Lands-
2
berger Brief 75–77, Brinkman, “The Monarchy of the Kassite Dynasty,” CRRAI 19,
395–408, esp. 406 f.
27 So CAD G s.v.; cf. MSL 12, 97:135, and John F. Robertson. “The Internal Political
and Economic Structure of Old Babylonian Nippur: the Guennakkum and his ‘House’,”
JCS 36 (1984) 145–190.
28 Brinkman, CRRAI 19, 408, and n. 83.
29 For the alleged case of PBS 10/2, 3 see now P. Michalowski, JCS 39 (1987) 42, who
considers it neither Kassite nor from Nippur. For PBS 10/4, 12 (Hunger No. 40) see
below, n. 81. For Rimut-Gula and Taqiš-Gula as Nippur scholars and authors at this(?)
time cf. Lambert, JCS 16 (1962) 75 f.
30 JCS 11 (1957) 8. S.J. Lieberman informs me that, according to collation, the text
can be restored as 7 um-[ma-ni] or 7 DUB.[MEŠ] but not 7 ap-[kal-li] (forthcoming).

31 Babylonische und assyrische Kolophone, AOAT 2, 6 and no. 292.
32 Cf. Hallo, “The Concept of Canonicity in Cuneiform and Biblical Literature: A
Comparative Appraisal,” (in press), here: X.3.

early evidence for the recovery of literary texts from Nippur in Kassite
times.
The same may be argued for Tukulti-Ninurta I (1244–1208 bc.), who
plundered the libraries of Babylonia and kidnapped their scholars to
begin some kind of renascence of learning in Assyria33—and no doubt
Kassite Nippur was one of his targets. (Note that after Adad-šuma-
us.ur [1218–1189], no major restorations were undertaken at Nippur
until the time of Assurbanipal.)34 Certainly the library founded at Assur
by Tiglath-Pileser I (1115–1077) incorporated copies of actual Nippur
originals, as their colophons testify. These have been conveniently cat-
alogued by Hunger and include exemplars of ana ittišu tablets III35 and
VI36 as well as two exemplars of a bilingual šir-nam-šub to Nin-Isina,37
which Hunger describes as the oldest examples of originals attributed to
a private owner.38 What is particularly noteworthy about this composi-
tion is that it is duplicated by an Old Bablonian exemplar (presumably
in Sumerian only) to which Mark Cohen has called attention in his edi-
tion of the text.39 It offers at most only one variant of more than trivial
significance, but since it is fragmentary and unpublished, it is not the
best candidate for my argument.
For this purpose I prefer to move on to the neo-Assyrian period,
when under royal auspices the public and private libraries of Babylonia
were again searched in order to stock the royal libraries of Assyria,
this time at Nineveh. This was true in particular of Assurbanipal (668–
627 bc), who is widely regarded as the author of the well-known rescript
to the governor of Borsippa ordering the confiscation of all kinds of
literary works both from temple and private libraries for inclusion in
the Ninevite libraries.40 As Lieberman has pointed out, the text is not
a letter but a school text in two (identical) copies; if at all the word
33 Peter Machinist, “Literature as Politics: The Tukulti-Ninurta Epic and the Bible,”
CBQ 38 (1976) 455–482. The plunder of the libraries is detailed in vi rev. B 2’–9’
(p. 457); the kidnapping of the scholars remains for now a hypothesis on my part. Cf.
Machinist, The Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta I (unpub. Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1978), 128 f.,
366–373.
34 Maximilian Streck, Assurbanipal, VAB 7, lxiv.
35 Hunger Kolophone No. 58.
36 Hunger Kolophone No. 43A.
37 Hunger Kolophone No. 44.
38 Hunger Kolophone 7.
39 JAOS 95 (1975) 611 n. 20.
40 Simo Parpola, JNES42 (1983) 11, based on CT22, 1.
of a king, there is no demonstrable connection to Assurbanipal, for it

was bought together with tablets from Sippar(?).41 However, there is
other evidence that Assurbanipal followed closely in the footsteps of
Tukulti-Ninurta I: as Simo Parpola has recently shown, he followed up
his triumph in 648 bc. over Babylonia (which had rebelled under his
brother Shamash-shum-ukin), by demanding or requesting well over
2,000 canonical tablets from private owners in Babylonia, and then
carefully cataloguing them.42 Among these accessions, two are specif-
ically said to be from Nippur, including a single tablet belonging to
Aplaia and a collection of 125 tablets belonging to another exorcist,
Arrabu.43 The tablets in question are, presumably, all parts of the late
canon of omens, exorcisms, laments and the like.
But the library of Assurbanipal also preserved examples of Sumerian
literary texts that originally formed part of the neo-Sumerian canon.44
Ordinarily these had been continuously handed down in the “stream
of tradition,” and provided with an interlinear Akkadian translation.
Nippur may have played a part in this transmission, to judge by the
substitution of Nippur deities like Ninurta for what may have been
originally Ningirsu in cases like lugal-e and an-gim.45 But what of the
recovery of a Nippur original that had been lost in the intervening
millennium?
We actually possess a parade example of a Sumerian literary text
copied, according to its colophon, from a Nippur original, and of which
this original, or a duplicate, has turned up in the modern excavations.
I refer to the drum-song (tigi) in honor of the goddess Nintu in her
guise as Aruru. This text is known both in an Old Babylonian exem-
plar recovered by the original University of Pennsylvania excavations
at Nippur and now part of the Hilprecht Sammlung at Jena and in a
neo-Assyrian copy preserved in six separate fragments from Nineveh
in the Kuyunjik collections of the British museum. The Old Baby-
lonian exemplar was published by Bernhardt and Kramer in 1967,46
41 S.J. Lieberman, “Why Did Assurbanipal Collect Cuneiform Tablets?,” paper read
at AOS meeting, March 20, 1988.

42 “Assyrian Library Records,” JNES 42 (1983) 1–29.
43 JNES 42 (1983) 14.
44 P. Michalowski, JCS 39 (1987) 38 f. and nn. 4–9.
45 Hallo, AS 20, 183–185, 198, here: I.4; JAOS 101 (1981) 253–257.
46 TuM n.F. 4, 86; collations in Wilcke Kollationen 85.
the neo-Assyrian fragments by Stephen Langdon in 191347—separately,

even though Bezold had already suggested more than twenty years ear-
lier that two of them (BL 95 and 102) belonged together.48 One of them
(BL 95) was translated by Langdon49 and Witzel.50 Four of the frag-
ments (BL 95, 97, 102 and 127) were identified as belonging to our text
by Åke Sjöberg in 1969,51 and these were duly employed in the edi-
tion of the text in 197652 by Claus Wilcke, who had also collated the
Jena text in the same year.53 Independently, Jacobsen had noted two
of Langdon’s fragments (BL 9554 and 97) as duplicates of the Jena text
in 1973 in his comprehensive “Notes on Nintur.”55 Herbert Sauren has
also provided me with a detailed strophic analysis based on my translit-
eration, and J. van Dijk with extensive comments on my preliminary
edition.
My own study of the text appeared in 1973, albeit in a context not
readily accessible to colleagues.56 I identified two further fragments in
Langdon’s volume (BL 107 and 111) and asked Edmond Sollberger to
join all six. He confirmed the join by letter of February 28, 1969,
and I prepared a hand copy on the occasion of a visit to the British
Museum in 1971. It is published below, together with a photograph
made in 1969, with the kind permission of C.B.F. Walker and the
Trustees of the British Museum. In 1976, I again dealt with the text,
and its implications for the history of Sumerian literature.57 The new
edition promised there is now superfluous, since it would differ only
to a limited extent from that published at the same time by Wilcke,
but it is worth noting the colophon of the rejoined exemplar. Although
still heavily damaged, enough remains of the first line and the ends
47 BL Nos. 95, 97, 102, 107, 111 and 127.

48 Bezold Cat. vol. 2 sub K. 2489 and K. 6110.
49 BL 53 f.
50 M. Witzel, AnOr 10, No. 70.
51 OrNS 38 (1969) 355 (review of TuM NF4) and TCS 3, 153 (ad line 267).
52 AS 20, 235–239; cf. already idem, Kindlers Literatur-lexikon 5 (1965–1971) 2127
top (stanzas A-B).

53 Above, note 46.
54 He wrote 75 by mistake.
55 OrNS 42 (1973) 296. See p. 288 and more recently idem, JQR 70 (1985) 45 and
n. 10 for possible etymologies of Aruru.

56 “Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics,” Perspectives in Jewish Learning 5 (1973)
1–12, here: I.3.

57 AS 20, 193, here: I.4.
of the last four lines to make a complete restoration possible. The first
line clearly reads: “Copy of Nippur, written and collated according
to its original.”58 The next six lines can be restored on the basis of
one of the “standard” colophons of Assurbanipal59 though the precise
form restored here recurs only once more, on the inscription of Agum-
kakrime,60 as follows: “tablet of Assurbanipal, king of the universe,
king of Assyria, who relies on Assur and Ninlil. He who trusts in you
will not be shamed, oh king of the gods, Assur! Whoever carries off
(the tablet) (or) writes his name (on it) in place of my name, may
Assur and Ninlil angrily and furiously overthrow him and destroy his
name (and) his seed in the land!” In my article of fifteen years ago,
I cited this example to elucidate one of the “problems in Sumerian
hermeneutics,” namely the survival of Sumerian literature from Old
Babylonian times to neo-Assyrian times and beyond, when they could
conceivably have exercised some influence, however indirect, on other
literatures, including the Bible. By the side of direct survival and what I
called “organic transformation and creative adaptation” including but
not limited to translation into Akkadian, I saw our text as testimony to
the “Mesopotamians’ rediscovery of their own past,”61 and concluded
“the rediscovery of lost texts may be added to the preservation or
adaptation of surviving texts as means whereby the literary heritage of
the Bronze Age passed into the Iron Age within Mesopotamia.”62 The
preservation of traditional texts and the degree to which their wording
was respected in later versions has often been studied, most recently by
Mark Cohen in connection with the lamentations.63 Adaptation can be
studied, e.g., by means of the evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic.64 But
rarely has any attention been paid to the case of the recovery of literary
texts in antiquity in this connection.
At this time, I would like therefore to consider the extent to which
the late copy of our composition did or did not adhere to the “Nippur
58 Entered (in part) by Hunger Kolophone as No. 538.

59 Type e in VAB 6, 358 f.; Hunger Kolophone No. 319e.
60 5R 33.
61 Perspectives in Jewish Learning 5 (1973) 8, here: I.3.
62 Perspectives in Jewish Learning 5 (1973) 10, here: I.3.
63 Mark E. Cohen, Sumerian Hymnology: The Eršem-ma, HUCA Supplements 2,
esp. 110–138: “Eršemmas preserved in both OB and First Millennium copies.”

64 Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic; cf. Jeffrey H. Tigay,
Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism.

original,” referring thus, somewhat loosely, to the sole surviving Old

Babylonian exemplar. We are already familiar with late copies made
from monumental texts and some of these, especially of neo-Babylonian
date when royalty itself set an example of antiquarian interest, show
remarkable fidelity, even in ductus, to their prototypes,65 though oth-
ers just as clearly do not.66 There are also imitations of Sumerian
monumental inscriptions, including one from Nippur by Assurbanipal
so authentic looking that Hilprecht published it as an inscription of
the Kassite king Meli-Shipak.67 Even archival texts were occasionally
recopied;68 typically such copies were characterized by nail markings
which appear on the edges.69 So it should occasion no surprise to find
the same true of literary texts. Let us see what differences they dis-
play. The poem is carefully structured into three three-line stanzas in
the sagarra70 each echoed by a stanza identical except for the prefix-
ing to the stanza of the name of the goddess (sometimes prefaced by
“mother”), so the following survey will deal with two lines at a time.
Of these differences, the greater part are purely orthographic (see
figure 1). They occur in Old Babylonian texts as well and could easily
have occurred in the Old Babylonian original from which the neo-
Assyrian copyist worked. This applies to items 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 12 and 16.
Simple scribal lapses are involved in items 14, 15 and probably 4, new
scribal conventions in items 9 and 17. No differences are registered for
items 10 and 13. That leaves only four significant differences. In item 5,
the late scribe seems genuinely to have been unfamiliar with the sign
LAGAR. (For an example in neo-Assyrian see the colophon of Irra I
65 Cf. e.g., MLC 2075, noted in Hallo, “Royal Inscriptions of Ur: A Typology,”
HUCA 33 (1962) 1–43 sub Ur-Nammu 7 iii; other examples HUCA 33 (1962) sub
Ur-Nammu 27 ii and 37; Šulgi 4 ii and 54; Amar-Sin 3 ii; Šu-Sin 20; Ibbi-Sin 9–10;
Hallo, “Bibliography of Early Babylonian Royal Inscriptions,” BiOr 18 (1961) 4–14 sub
Išbi-Irra 2, Iddin-Dagan 2; Išme-Dagan 10, 12; Ur-Ninurta 2; Warad-Sin 9 ii and 26–
28; Sin-kašid 8 ii; D.O. Edzard, RlA 6, 64 f.; CT 44, 2; M. Civil, OrNS 54 (1985) 40;
A.R. George, Iraq 48 (1986) 133–146.
66 Cf. e.g. UET 1, 172 (= Amar-Sin 3 ii) and D.O. Edzard’s comment in RIA 6, 64 f.
67 BE 1, 82; cf. VAB 6, lxiii f.
68 Cf. e.g. E. Leichty, “A Legal Text from the Reign of Tiglath-Pileser III,” Studies . . .
Reiner, AOS 67, 227–229.

69 AOS 67, 229; JCS 36 (1984) (= TBC 1) 2 f.
70 This strophic structure has been studied by Wilcke in his edition, but note an
identical structure in the sagidda of Ibbi-Sin C, edited by Sjöberg, OrSuec 19–20 (1970–
1971) 147–149, 155–157, 166–170. (Complete lines 7–9 of Sjöberg’s edition accordingly,
that is, to agree with lines 2–4, not with line 5.)
in KAR 168, rev. ii 33.) It is hard to make sense of his substitution; the
best I can do is suggest that he conceived of en and si as somehow the
constituent parts of the office of ensi.71
Figure 1
“Echo”
Item Stanza Line(s) Line(s) OB Original NA Copy
1 A [1] 4 e2-keš3-a e2-keš3ki-a
2 2 5 tu-[da] u3-tu-da
3 3 6 kur-kur-ra- ka kur-kur-ra-ke4
4 B 7 10 ši-mi-in-e3 ši-mi-in-e3-SAGa
5 8 11 lagar si
6 9 12 bi2-in-u3-tu bi2-in-tuš
7 C 13 16 sag-bi-še3-e3-a sag-bi-še3-e3-a-me-en
8 14 17 ša-mu-ni-inb-gal2 mu-ni-in-gal2
9 15 18 –c lines 18–19 written as one line
10 D 20–23 24–27 – –
11 E 28 32 [mu-u]n?- na-ab -be2 mu-na-ab-be2
12 29 33 [mu-u]n-na-du12-a nu-und-na-an-du12-a
13 30–31 34–35 – –
14 F 36 40 d[ur2-ku3 gir]i4-zal-la edur -ku e giri -zal-la
2 3 4
15 37 41 ama-dnin-tu bara3f-dNin-tu
16 38 42 KU3.GI KU3.GI-gag-am3
17 39 43 – lines 43–44 written as one line
18 (subscript) 45 – NAR.BALAG [NA]R.BALAGti-gi
[dn]in-tu-ra-kam dnin-urta
a. 7 only. d. 29 only, 33 omits:

b. 17 only, 14 omits. e–e. 36 only, 40 omits.
c. Restore e2-gal (with Sauren) or tug2-ma8(ME) f. 37 only, 41 ama.
with RlA 4, 257. But note traces of sign. g. 38 only, 42 omits.
In item 6, the late scribe again seems to have misunderstood his

prototype. Unfamiliar with the concept of the divine birth and descent
of kings,72 he simply had the goddess seat the king on the holy throne-
dais (parakku).
71 For a similar suggestion in another context see S.N. Kramer, ANET3 (1969) 574
n. 12, but see on this B. Alster, “Sum. nam-en, nam-lagar,” JCS 23 (1978) 116 f., esp.
n. 12–13. For another possible explanation, see Hallo, AS 20, 193 n. 84, here: I.4. In
the discussion, M. Civil pointed out that LAGAR is routinely written like SI in late
texts.
72 Cf. Sjöberg, OrSuec 21 (1972) 97 for Nintu-Ninhursaga in this connection, notably
as the mother of Hammurapi and Samsu-iluna. Is this ˘ a clue to the date of our text?
Cf. also Sjöberg, TCS 3, 142 f.
In item 8, the late scribe may have been unfamiliar with the assever-
ative preformative, and simply omitted it. Its occurrence in late texts is,
at best, rare.73
The most significant—indeed surprising—variant is the final item.
Where the original describes the composition, quite properly, as a
drum-song (tigi) of Nintu, the copy calls it a drum-song of Ninurta.
Now it is true that we know of no other tigi’s to Nintu, while we
already have recovered five to Ninurta. In addition to the four listed
by Wilcke,74 see now what must be a tigi for Ishme-Dagan;75 admit-
tedly the rubric is lost, but the presence of the notation sagidda—rev.
2—and its giš-gi4-gal—rev. 3—and the absence of barsud and šabatuk
makes that seem likelier than an adab.76 And it is also true that Nin-
urta enjoyed particular veneration in Assyria beginning with Tukulti-
Ninurta I in Middle Assyrian times.77 But our poem is so obviously
about the goddess and her “obstetric” role that it is hard to account for
a confusion with the warlike Ninurta. Moreover, the literature about
Nintu as Aruru was also extensive, and much of it survived into the late
period. It deserves treatment in its own right; here I will content myself
with cataloguing it. (See Appendix.)
Thus the goddess Nintu in the guise of Aruru was no stranger to the
late scribes, even though more often in the context of laments than of
hymns. The subscript of the Nineveh exemplar presumably represents
an outright error in comparison with its Nippur original.
Assyrian access to the surviving literary heritage of Nippur may have
been eased somewhat by that city’s role as a haven of pro-Assyrian loy-
alty in the tumultuous last decades of the empire—a loyalty for which
Nippur paid dearly even before the empire fell,78 and probably even
more thereafter. Nevertheless, Nippur continued to furnish originals,
now for Babylonian copyists, including another hemerology of uncer-
tain provenience.79 By Achaemenid times, it had certainly regained
its commercial, if not its religious or cultural prominence, as is clear
from the records of the house of Murashu and similar enterprises, and
73 A. Falkenstein, ZA 48 (1944) 73.

74 AS 20, 290 f.
75 Sjöberg, OrSuec 23–24 (1974–1975) No 2.
76 Cf. Hallo, BiOr 23 (1966) 246, here: III.3; Wilcke, AS 20, 258.
77 Cf. H.W.F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon 336.
78 Cf. Oppenheim, “Siege Documents from Nippur,” Iraq 17 (1955) 60–89; Oppen-
heim, Ancient Mesopotamia (2nd ed.), 161.

79 CT 4, 6; cf. Hunger Kolophone No, 480; Jensen, KB 6/2, 42 ff.
Akkadian, as well as Sumerian, texts continued to be copied there.80

So it is that, even as late as Seleucid times, Nippur is still the source
of literary originals. The latest known colophon to this effect,81 on
an undated tablet said to have been found at Uruk, but more likely
originating in Nippur, occurs on the ritual of the kalû priest.
With this rapid survey I have done no more than remind all of us
that the recovery of neo-Sumerian literature from Nippur as a royal
objective probably began as early as Kassite times, is well attested in
Middle Assyrian and neo-Assyrian times, and continued under private
or priestly auspices into Seleucid times. The modern excavations at
Nippur, begun a century ago, which have done so much for the redis-
covery and restoration of Sumerian literature, have thus resumed a pro-
cess with a millennial ancestry.
appendix
Hymns to Nintu as Aruru
In addition to our own hymn, the roster includes:

1. An eršemma entitled egi2-mah-dA-ru-ru, listed in the Kuyunjik
˘
catalogue first published as 4R2 53 (No. 69 in Cohen Eršemma
11). The text is unknown but it is unlikely to be our tigi-hymn,
which begins nin (or egi2)-dA-ru-ru.
2. A lamentation entitled ul4-ul4-la mu-un-gin, published by John
A. Maynard from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection
(No. 112) in JSOR 3 (1919) 14–18. The YBC possesses a copy made
of this text by Vaughn Crawford in July 1957 and a transliteration
and translation prepared by T. Jacobsen.
3. An OB lamentation (no rubric!) (CT 36, 47–50) newly edited by
Kramer, “Keš and its Fate” in Gratz College AV (1971) 165–175
and entitled a-dA-rux-rux, (EBUR) e-dA-rux-rux, photo: Kramer,
RA 65 (1971) 182 f.
4. [ a-š]i-ir-zu mu2-ab-ba-ši-[ ] Emesal lament(?) from
Brussels? published by Speleers as Speleers Recueil 189; cf. Zim-
mern, ZA 32 (1918–1919) 56 f. Krecher Kultlyrik 119 ff. has shown
that part of this text is paralleled in VAS 2, 25 ii 8–15 (specifically,
cf. 11. 3 f. with VAS 2, 25 ii 13 and 12, 11. 7 f. with ii 14 f.)
80 Hunger Kolophone No. 40(!), 119–123; cf. J. Oelsner, RA 76 (1982) 94 f.

81 Hunger Kolophone No. 110; cf. Thureau-Dangin, RA 16 (1919) 155.
5. The third and fourth stanza (ki-ru-gu2) of a balag to dMah begin-

˘
ning edin-lil2-la2 ša3-mu lil2-la2, edited by Scheil in RA 17 (1920)
45–50 and by Witzel in AnOr 10 as no. 18. The fourth stanza
begins a e2 a e2 dA-ru-ru edin-lil2-la2.
6. PBS 10/2, 115–117 edited by Langdon there and by Witzel, AnOr
10, No. 34.
7. Zimmern, VAS 10, No. 173.
8. Genouillac Kich 2, C 56.
9. TCS 3, No. 7 (hymn to the e2-keš3 of Aruru).
10. Genouillac Kich 1, B471.
11. Speleers Recueil No. 203 (cf. Zimmern ZA 32 [1918–1919] 57 f.) (cf.
Krecher Kultlyrik 81 ff.).
12. KAR 73 rev. // Langdon OECT 6, pl. XVI (Sm. 679 + 110), cf.
pp. 56 f.
13. The Kesh temple hymn (Gragg, TCS 3).
14. Ashmolean 1930.362 (reverse?), Emesal lament to Aruru?
iv
letter-prayers
iv.1
INDIVIDUAL PRAYER IN SUMERIAN:

THE CONTINUITY OF A TRADITION1
I. A Sumerian Psalter?
Since the first Psalm studies of Hermann Gunkel at the beginning of

this century, the exegesis of the Biblical Psalter has accorded an ever
more prominent place to the comparison of the hymns and prayers
of the cuneiform tradition of ancient Mesopotamia.2 As early as 1922,
Stammer ventured to point out numerous “Sumero-Akkadian parallels
to the structure of Biblical psalms”3 in a study which, admittedly, found
little favor with Assyriologists.4 In the 1930’s at least three different
monographs reverted to the theme, Cumming comparing “The Assyr-
ian and Hebrew Hymns of Praise,” Widengren “the Akkadian and
Hebrew Psalms of Lamentation,”5 and Castellino both “The lamen-
tations and the hymns in Babylonia and in Israel.”6 All these studies
retain their usefulness but, with the exception of Castellino’s, they suffer
from a common defect: they tend to exempt the Mesopotamian mate-
rial from the very Gattungsforschung which, following Gunkel, they
accept as axiomatic for Hebrew psalmody.
This is the more strange since the Akkadian material comes provided
with its own generic classifications, and with specific indications of its
cultic Sitz im Leben. Often enough, it is cited by title only, and incor-
porated within elaborate cultic calendars or ritual prescriptions and
1 Originally presented, under the title of “The Psalter of the Sumerians,” to the
Philip W. Lown Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, November 2,

1966.
2 For exhaustive bibliographies of current psalm exegesis, cf. the periodic surveys
in Theologische Rundschau n.F. 1 (1929, by M. Haller), 23 (1955, by J.J. Stamm). For a

comprehensive historical survey, cf. K.-H. Bernhardt, Das Problem der Altorientalischen
Königsideologie (= VT Supp. 8, 1961) chs. 1–3.
3 Bernhardt, op. cit., 83 n. 5.
4 Cf. the review by B. Landsberger, OLZ 28 (1925) 479–483.
5 Bernhardt, loc. cit.
6 Le lamentazioni individuali e gli inni in Babilonia e in Israele (1939).
256 iv.1. individual prayer in sumerian
thus clearly secondary in importance to its context.7 Indeed, Gunkel8

and Mowinckel9 relied on these aspects of the Mesopotamian material
to justify a parallel approach to the Psalms, and Begrich10 had drawn
elaborate comparisons between the individual laments of the Bible and
the private prayers of Mesopotamia as early as 1928.
In the 1940’s and 1950’s, the comparative study of the Psalms turned
most of its attention, perhaps understandably, to the newly discovered
Ugaritic texts which were evidently so much closer to the Psalms in lan-
guage, style and imagery than any other Ancient Near Eastern parallels
yet unearthed. Patton’s monograph on the “Canaanite parallels in the
Book of Psalms” was followed by the briefer treatments of Coppens and
O’Callaghan, and a number of penetrating contributions by Albright.11
Yet the fact remains that the Ugaritic texts adduced in all these studies
are neither hymns nor prayers, and thus can only indirectly serve to
illuminate the categories of Biblical psalmody as such.
The present decade has, happily, witnessed a reassertion of the rel-
evance of the Mesopotamian material while recognizing the need to
confine the assessment of parallels within comparable Gattungen, at
least to begin with. Thus E.R. Dalglish’s valuable study of “Psalm 51 in
the light of Ancient Near Eastern Patternism”12 is a deliberate attempt
to meet the methodological standards first demanded of Stammer’s
book forty years earlier: to compare this unique subspecies of individ-
ual lament with the comparable penitential categories in cuneiform.
Bernhardt has reviewed the entire history of Psalm exegesis with spe-
cial reference to the so-called “royal psalms,” and evaluated these in
the light of the Ancient Near Eastern ideology of kingship without,
however, limiting himself to a specific cuneiform genre.13 More recently
7 “No adequate study of literary types in the vast Akkadian liturgy has yet ap-
peared” although “as compared with the Psalter, the Babylonian texts promise a
much larger body of definite results, as in many cases not only the liturgical texts are
preserved in writing, but also the order of the ceremony in which they were sung or
recited,” W.G. Lambert, AfO 19 (1959–1960) 47. Cf. already S. Langdon “Calendars of
liturgies and prayers,” AJSL 42 (1926) 110–127.
8 cf. e.g. Gunkel-Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen (1933) § 1.3–§ 1.5.
9 Cf. now D.R. Ap-Thomas, “An appreciation of Sigmund Mowinckel’s contribu-
tion to Biblical studies,” JBL 85 (1966) 315–325.

10 Bernhardt, loc. cit.
11 Ibid.
12 (Leiden, 1962), with notes by A. Falkenstein. Cf. the review by Castellino, VT 15
(1965) 116–120.
13 Op. cit. (note 2).
iv.1. individual prayer in sumerian 257
still, Mitchell Dahood’s commentary on Psalms 1–50 in the Anchor

Bible has returned to the Ugaritic parallels with a vengeance, in part
out of an understandable disenchantment with the excesses of the older
Mesopotamian comparisons.14
But to say that recent Psalm criticism has more accurately recog-
nized the limits of the comparative method is not to imply that it has
everywhere reached them. For if the rich spectrum of Mesopotamian
religious poetry was not monolithic in terms of its genres, neither was
it a single unchanging canon throughout the nearly three millennia of
its attested existence. Quite the contrary, I believe we can distinguish
at least four different cuneiform “canons” within Mesopotamia, each
the product of a very different age and set of religious presuppositions,
and each thoroughly transformed before it was accepted into the next
canon. Of these, only the two latest ones have hitherto been system-
atically invoked in any comparative study of the Biblical Psalter: on
the one hand, that is, the Akkadian canon which, originating in Old
Babylonian times, was expanded and organized in Middle Babylonian
times and enshrined in the great libraries of the neo-Assyrians and, on
the other hand, the late bilingual Sumero-Akkadian tradition of Middle
Babylonian times which, elaborated in those same libraries, received its
final form in the epigonic schools of Seleucid and Parthian Babylonia
long after the demise of a native Akkadian body politic.14a
But there were at least two other recognized bodies of cuneiform lit-
erature which preceded these. One of these is the Old Sumerian canon
whose beginnings go back, it would seem, almost to the beginnings of
writing itself, and which may well have been gathered into an official
corpus under the Sargonic kings of Agade. Much of this literature is
only at this moment beginning to yield to the spade of the excavator
and the cryptographic skills of the decipherer, and it is still too early to
assess its true import.15
But there is a more substantial body of Sumerian literature, which
I would like to call neo-Sumerian and which, at least since the Sec-
ond World War, has absorbed the attention of ever more Assyriologists.
This literature, chiefly created under the dynasties of Agade, Ur III
14 M. Dahood, Psalms I (1–50), (The Anchor Bible, New York, 1966). Cf. the review
by D.A. Robertson, JBL 85 (1966) 484–486.

14a Cf e.g. the numerous parallels considered by G.R. Driver, “The Psalms in the light
of Babylonian research,” apud D.C. Simpson, ed., The Psalmists (1926) 109–175.
15 Hallo, JAOS 83 (1963) 167, here: II.1; M. Civil and R.D. Biggs, “Notes sur des
textes sumériens archaïques,” RA 60 (1966) 1–16.

and Isin I, was organized into a scholarly curriculum in the Old Baby-
lonian period. It attained a high degree of literary excellence and to
some extent survived the destruction of the Old Babylonian schools to
influence, as I think, also the literary products of later ages. Up to now,
this neo-Sumerian literature has been almost completely neglected by
comparative Biblical studies, at least as far as the comparative study
of the Psalms is concerned. Yet I hope to show that we now know it
well enough to attempt to compare it, not only with the Akkadian and
bilingual religious poetry of later Mesopotamia, but also with Biblical
psalmody.
In order to do so within the bounds of the methodology already
set forth, it is necessary in the first place to essay a generic classifi-
cation of neo-Sumerian religious poetry. Only then will it be possible
to match the resulting categories with the corresponding genres in the
later material, whether Babylonian or Biblical. Finally, a single genre
from the several canons will be subjected to closer scrutiny in order to
weigh specific comparisons and contrasts in the balance.
The concise bibliography of neo-Sumerian literature compiled by
Maurice Lambert may serve as a starting-point for our classification.16
His survey recognizes fifteen separate genres. Two of these, myths and
epics, fall outside the purview of religious literature in the narrow
sense at issue here, i.e. hymns and prayers. This is also true of the
three types of wisdom literature which Lambert distinguishes17 even
though, of course, a few examples of wisdom compositions may be
found among the neo-Sumerian hymns just as they found their way
into the Hebrew Psalter. A similar ambiguity surrounds the so-called
love-poems on the one hand, and on the other the “catalogue texts”
which have an analogue in Ps. 68 if Albright’s interpretation of the
latter text18 is correct. Finally, we must eliminate from consideration the
genre of “Learned and Scientific Texts” which are largely or wholly
prose in form and non-literary (i.e. monumental or archival) in origin.
That leaves us with seven genres of neo-Sumerian religious poetry, to
wit: lamentations, hymns to gods, hymns to temples, liturgies, royal
hymns, compositions devoted to the “philosophy of history,” and those
on religious philosophy,—seven prima facie components of an assumed
neo-Sumerian psalter. Let us see whether they warrant the label, first
16 “La littérature sumérienne . . . ,” RA 55 (1961) 177–196, 56 (1962) 81–90, 214.

17 For a more detailed subdivision, cf. E.I. Gordon, Bi. Or. 17 (1960) 124.
18 HUCA 23/1 (1950–1951) 1–39.
collectively on the basis of their common treatment and canonical

arrangement, and then individually on the basis of their distinguishing
characteristics.
To begin with, then, can we speak of the seven genres, taken to-
gether, as a canonical19 collection in the sense of the Biblical Psalter?
The usual criteria here would seem to be an authoritative text, a
reasonably fixed number and sequence of individual compositions, and
the grouping of these compositions into recognizable books or sub-
divisions.20 Recent discoveries at Qumran have warned us not to apply
these tests too rigorously even to the Biblical Psalter, and the evidence is
even more tenuous in the case of the Sumerian texts. But it does suffice
to show that some of them, at least, are met there as well. Duplicate
exemplars of single compositions, for instance, show a large measure
of agreement even when found at widely scattered sites, not only in
wording but also in textual details that may be described as “masoretic”
such as line counts, strophic structure, classification and so forth. Or
again, compositions of the same genre, or of closely related genres, were
often collected on single tablets in an order which seems to have been
more or less fixed. We are not yet in a position to restore this order
in anything like its entirety, nor the major groupings of the corpus
as a whole, but the analogy of the later canonizations of cuneiform
literature suggests that the Old Babylonian schools were busy fixing
both order and grouping. In short, we will not be adjudged terribly
premature if we already operate with the hypothesis that the religious
poetry of the neo-Sumerian tradition constituted the materials of what,
in effect, may be described as a complete Psalter from the literary point
of view.
Let us now turn more specifically to the individual genres as isolated
above, beginning with the hymns, a category which by virtue of its
importance gave its name to the entire Biblical Psalter, and which
survived it as a living form in the Hodayoth of Qumran and the psalms
of Sirah if not of Solomon. The same category is also well-represented
in the neo-Sumerian corpus, in all of its diversity. There are, first of
all, the hymns to various deities, corresponding to the Biblical hymns
to God in several respects. For one thing, they are the most numerous
of the hymns. More important are the structural parallels, the natural
19 I am concerned here only with the literary sense of the term, not its religious or
cultic connotations.
20 Cf. Hallo, IEJ 12 (1962) 21–26, here: I.1.
consequence of the essential nature of hymns, which, by their very

definition, were “laudatory.” Thus the invocation of the deity in the
vocative is followed (or, in the Sumerian, initially preceded) by one or
more epithets in apposition to the divine name, and by long recitals
of the deity’s attributes, and of his achievements—past, present and
future—in mythology and history, whether these are properly objects of
praise, or awe or outright terror. The public recital which provided the
setting for the hymn is frequently alluded to in its very text by repeated
exhortations to the soloist or chorus to sing the deity’s praises or to
respond to them antiphonally. The typical hymn concludes with a final
doxology phrased in one of a relatively limited number of stereotyped
formulas. All these characteristics apply equally to the Biblical as to the
neo-Sumerian examples of the genre.
The more specialized hymnal genres of the Psalter are also repre-
sented in Sumerian. Thus the “Zion songs” may be likened to the more
elaborate hymns to temples and sacred cities in the neo-Sumerian cor-
pus, while the “royal hymns”21 resemble that class of Sumerian hymns
to a deity which include, or conclude with, a prayer on behalf of a spe-
cific king. These hymns have been described as “royal hymns in the
wider sense,” and had a place in the public worship of the temples.
They must be distinguished from Sumerian royal hymns in the stricter
sense, in which the king’s praises are put into his own mouth in the first
person, or addressed to him in the second. Such hymns have no liturgi-
cal annotations or classifications; they have few references to the deity
nor pray to him on behalf of the king, but rather emphasize the king’s
merits. Presumably they belonged in the courtly ceremonial rather than
in the temple service, and it is harder to find their analogue in the Bib-
lical Psalter, though a relatively secular poem such as Ps. 45 might be
cited for comparison.
Conversely, it is difficult to find a precise Sumerian equivalent to the
much-debated accession hymns of the Psalter. For while the ideology
of Mesopotamian kingship may have somehow influenced the latter,
it is there applied to God in a fundamentally different sense. This is
true also in large measure of such minor Biblical categories as “pilgrim
songs,” congregational thanksgivings, “legend” and “wisdom” psalms.
“Liturgies” on the other hand, are represented in the neo-Sumerian
corpus by a number of examples.
21 Cf. W.H. Ph. Römer, Sumerische ‘Königshymnen’ der Isin-Zeit (1965) and my review, Bi.
Or. 23 (1966) 239–246, here: III.3.

Turning next to the congregational laments, this relatively minor

Psalm genre, to which most of the Book of Lamentations should be
added, corresponds to the rather substantial body of lamentations over
the destruction of cities in the neo-Sumerian corpus. In both cases, it is
clear that real historic events, and more specifically national disasters,
inspired the compositions. But both tended to sublimate the events
into vague and involved allusions to the flight of the divine presence
or the breakdown of cultic processes. As a result, there is sometimes
uncertainty in both as to just what historic event is intended, the more
so as there seems to have been no great reluctance about applying older
allusions to more recent events. On the Mesopotamian side, it is clear
from the number of Sumerian examples; from their intricate strophic
structure and liturgical glosses; and from their survival in other forms
into later periods, that the public laments represented a thoroughly
institutionalized, temple-centered response to the recurrent trauma of
wholesale destruction which was visited on the Mesopotamian city-
states and empires throughout their history.22 What then of the prayers
of the individual which form the largest single quotient of the Biblical
psalter? Oddly enough, individual, or at any rate private, prayer is very
poorly represented in Sumerian literature.23 In part this may be because
the official cult concentrated on the king, and had little use for the
private individual, who relied more often than not on a popular religion
to which the official religious literature bears little direct testimony, or
on the intercession of his personal protective deity with the great gods
of the official pantheon. Indeed, our chief examples of private prayer
in early Mesopotamia come not from canonical texts at all, but from
the monuments.24 The ubiquitous seal cylinders of the neo-Sumerian
and adjacent periods typically show the private seal owner led before
the great god by his personal deity. And the typical purpose of private
votive objects (as of royal ones) was to forward to the deity the prayer
which doubled as the name of the object by leaving the object, with
its inscription, on permanent deposit in the cella of the temple, close
to the niche which held the statue of the deity. Such inscribed votive
22 Cf. R. Kutscher, a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha: the history of a Sumerian congregational lament (un-
publ. Ph.D. thesis, Yale, 1966); J. Krecher, Sumerische Kultlyrik (1966); T. Jacobsen, PAPhS
107 (1963) 479–482.
23 Cf. A. Falkenstein, “Das Gebet in der sumerischen Ueberlieferung,” RLA 3 (1959)
156–160, where prayers contained within other literary genres are also listed.
24 Cf. Hallo, “The royal inscriptions of Ur: a typology,” HUCA 33 (1962) 1–43 esp.
pp. 12–14.
objects were, then, considered as taking the place of the suppliant, and
relieving him of the need to proffer his prayer in his own person, orally
and perpetually. This is stated in so many words by many of the votive
inscriptions, and is implied also by the fact that the most expensive
type of votive, the statue, clearly depicts the worshipper, not the deity.
Other types of votive objects such as steles, bowls, and replicas of tools
and weapons from the petitioner’s daily life, were simply more modest
means to attain the same end. But even such objects were made of
semi-precious stones or precious metals and thus beyond the means of
most worshippers, and there was consequently the need for a less costly
method of written communication with the divine. Apparently, then, it
is out of this essentially economic context that there gradually arose a
canonical literary genre as a vehicle of individual prayer. At first it took
a form which was less literary, or canonical, than economic, or archival.
For the formal choice fell upon the letter, a form abundantly familiar
to the neo-Sumerian scribes for straightforward economic purposes.
Presently, the bare outlines of the archival letters were elaborated to
create what constituted, in content if not in form, true prayers, albeit
in prose, and ultimately they freed themselves entirely from the style of
the letter to develop into poetic parallels of the Biblical laments of the
individual. It will be my purpose to examine this particular genre, its
literary history, and its later affinities, more closely.
II. The Neo-Sumerian Letter-Prayers
Let me begin my presentation of the genre with a translation of one of

its shorter and more familiar examples (B6):25
Speak to my king with varicolored eyes who wears a lapus lazuli beard
Say furthermore to the golden statue “born” on a favorable day,
(to) the “sphinx” raised in the holy sheepfold, summoned in the pure
heart of Inanna26
(to) my lord, the prince of Inanna:
“You in your form are a child of Heaven,
Your command like the command of god is never equalled (var.: is not
rebutted by the foreign lands)
Your words are a storm-wind (to be) rained down from heaven, having
none to count them (var.: shepherd them)
25 Cf. below, (V), for a bibliography of the genre and previous treatments.
26 For an Ur III example of a lapus lazuli “sphinx” cf UET 3:415:2.
Thus speaks Uršagga your servant:

‘My king has watched over my person,
I am a citizen (lit.: son) of Ur,
If my king is (truly) of Heaven,
Let no one carry off my patrimony,
Let no one destroy the foundations of my father’s house.’
May my king know it.”
This brief but fairly representative example may suffice for the moment
to indicate that, formally, our genre belongs to the category of Sume-
rian letters. As such, its literary analogues are of several kinds. There
are, first of all, the preserved examples of royal correspondence in
which the reigning king (not, as here, the statue of the deified king)
is addressed by, or addresses himself to, one of his servants. Such let-
ters are known to us so far only in the form of literary imitations of
assumed originals allegedly emanating from the chancelleries of Ur and
Isin.27 As such they share some of the flourishes and other stylistic char-
acteristics of our genre. Secondly, the school curriculum has preserved
a small number of private letters, in Sumerian as well as Akkadian, as
mundane in style as in content, which served as models of everyday
correspondence for apprentice scribes.28 Their purely fictional charac-
ter may be judged by the fact that one of them is supposedly written by
none other than a monkey.29
If, however, we wish to find the origin of our genre in the “real”
world, we have to go back of all these literary letters of the Old
Babylonian period to the archival documents of the neo-Sumerian
period. Several hundred Ur III letters are known, and in their most
characteristic form they constitute drafts, or orders to pay in kind,
drawn on the great storage-centers of the royal economy in favor of
the bearer, usually the representative of the king or of some high, royal
official.30 Such documents, while letters in form, are orders in function,
and have therefore been aptly designated as letter-orders.31 The texts
27 Cf. F.R. Kraus, “Altmesopotamische Quellensammlungen zur altmesopotamis-

chen Geschichte,” AfO 20 (1963) 153–155.
28 See below (V), sub B , M, O, and P for Sumerian examples. For Akkadian
19
examples, cf. F.R. Kraus, “Briefschreibübungen im altbabylonischen Schulunterricht,”
JEOL VI/16 (1959–1962) 16–39. To all appearances, the pitifully executed Akkadian
examples come from a much more rudimentary stage of the curriculum.
29 Below, V, sub B .
14
30 Cf. E. Sollberger, The Business and Administrative Correspondence under the Kings of Ur [=
TCS 1, 1966).
31 A.L. Oppenheim, AOS 32 (1948) 86 ad H 24 et passim; Hallo, HUCA 29 (1958)
we are here considering, while essentially identical to them in form,

function as prayers. I therefore propose to call them letter-prayers.32
The seven or eight separate examples in ten to twelve copies of the
genre recognized until recently33 can now be more than doubled by
newly published exemplars from Ur and by unpublished material from
the Yale Babylonian Collection.34
Let us first consider the structure of the newly-named genre. It
begins with a salutation to the divine addressee which employs the
basic terminology of the archival letters: to my god speak, thus says35
NN, your servant (so I; cf. B14, B19, M, O, P), but usually elaborates on
it in two significant ways. In the first place it nearly always modifies
the adressee’s name with a longer or shorter succession of laudatory
epithets in the form of appositions (F, G, J). In the second place,
it frequently adds a second salutation, including further epithets and
ending ‘to him say furthermore’ (B1, B8, C2, D, H, K, L).36 On one
occasion there is even a third salutation ending ‘to him (say) for the
third time,’ (B16)37 while other letters content themselves with additional
epithets or predicates at this point (B6, B17, C, E).
The message itself now follows, and its length varies considerably.
In the longest example so far attested (H), it runs to about 45 lines,
or five times the length of the salutation. But in other instances, the
message is little longer than the salutation, and in a number of cases
it is shorter. Indeed, there are two instances where, at least as far as
preserved, the texts ends with the salutation (E, C) and one of these
even lacks the phrase “thus speaks NN” (E). The body of the letter
has no recognizable structural subdivisions like the salutation. However,
most of its sentiments can be classified as expressing (1) complaint
97–100. For neo-Babylonian letter-orders, cf. Oppenheim, JCS 5 (1950) 195 ad UET 4:
162–192.
32 This term seems preferable to F. Ali’s “letters of petition” (Ar. Or. 33: 539), or
Falkenstein’s “Gottesbrief ” which is difficult to translate. The genre is here taken to

include letters to deities, as well as those to kings and other mortals couched in the
elaborate style of some of the letters to deities.
33 A. Falkenstein, OLZ 36 (1933) 302; “Ein sumerischer Gottesbrief,” ZA 44 (1938) 1–
25; “Ein sumerischer Brief an den Mondgott,” Analecta Biblica 12 (1959) 69–77; J.J.A. van
Dijk La sagesse suméro-accadienne (1953) 13–17.
34 See below, V.
35 na-ab-bé-a. So always except in J which has nu-ub-bé-a ub-be-a! Once na-bé-a in
PBS 1/2:93:3 (= B14).

36 ù-ne-dè-dah; for the reading cf. Falkenstein, ZA 44:11 but note now the apparent
ù-di! -a-dè-dah in L.
37 ù-na (yar. ne)-de-peš.
(2) protests (3) prayers and (4) formal reinforcements of the appeal,
though not necessarily in that order.
The conclusion of the letter-prayers (when preserved) may occasion-
ally consist of a vow to repay the kindness besought in the body of
the text. More often it consists of a brief stereotyped formula either
borrowed from the language of secular letters or peculiar to the genre
itself. We will consider the various formulations in due course. For now,
let us turn to the contents of the various letter-prayers, following the
structural outline already presented.
To begin with the addressees, they include five of the great gods, and
two goddesses. No discernible principle governs the choice of the male
deities, but two of them appear to be from the circle of Nergal, the
lord of the netherworld, if not Nergal himself (C, G), which seems to
bespeak a special concern with the threat of death. The others are Utu
(D2), Nanna (E), Enki (H), and Martu (J). The goddesses invoked can be
described more consistently. They are both healing goddesses, in one
case (B17) Nintinuga, and in two or three others (F, D4) Ninisina.38 In at
least two of these cases, the choice of addressee is clearly dictated by the
contents of the letter, for they are petitions for relief from sickness.
The letters addressed simply to “my god” (I)39 or “(my) king” (B1,
B6, B8, K) pose more of a problem since, on the one hand, gods
were sometimes addressed as “my king” even within the context of the
letter-prayers (J) and, on the other hand, the deified (and/or deceased)
king could be addressed as “my god.” In at least one case, it is clear
that the letter-prayer is addressed to King Šulgi of Ur (B1), and there
is another text which, though not formally a letter-prayer, has been
described as a letter or prayer to the deified Rim-Sin of Larsa.40 But
where neither royal name nor divine name is mentioned, it is difficult to
decide the exact status of the recipient, whether addressed as “god” or
“king.” Perhaps the question is of secondary importance, for both were
petitioned in similar terms (albeit for different ends?), and in similar
guise (i.e. in the form of their cult statue; cf. B6, K),
For the sake of completeness, I will mention here also two “letter-
prayers” addressed neither to gods nor to kings but to private persons,
or at most to officials (B16, L). One of them is from a priest of Enlil to
38 Kraus, JCS 3 (1949) 78 n. 30 recognizes a whole sub-genre of letters to healing
deities.
39 Cf. also JCS 8:82; CT 44:14.
40 Falkenstein, Analecta Biblica 12 (1959) 70, n. 1 ad TRS 35.
his son, the other from a scribe to his relative or colleague (gi-me-a-
aš). Both are stylistically identical with the authentic letter-prayers, and
not with the simple literary “practice-letters” between private persons
(B19, M, O, P). Perhaps they represent an intermediate stage in the
development from secular letter-order to letter-prayer.41
The epithets applied to the various addressees in all these letter-
prayers are drawn freely from all the rich storehouse of attributes avail-
able for embellishing Sumerian religious and monumental texts in gen-
eral. But the choice was not wholly a random one, for in most instances
there was a decided emphasis on those qualities of the addressee which
were crucial for the substance of the petition that followed in the
body of the letter. Thus the letters which prayed for the restoration
of health praised the healing goddess for her therapeutic skills (B17, D4,
F); one which asked for legal redress stressed the unalterableness of the
divine command (B6); one of those concerned with scribal problems
(H) addressed Enki as the lord of wisdom. In one of the two “private”
letter-prayers, a father apostrophizes his son, among many other things,
as “the son who is available for his god, who respects his father and
mother (var. mother and father)” (B16).42
Our next question concerns the character of the presumed writers
of the letter-prayers, as far as these may be identified by their personal
names or professional titles. This is not always possible, for a name like
Uršagga in B6 (above) is common enough, the virtual equivalent of our
“Goodman” or Everyman. Whether the Gudea of I is a private person
or one of several city-rulers of that name is not clear. Here as in other
cases (J), there is only indirect evidence for the question. However, by
far the largest number of letters are clearly written by scribes (C, F, G,
H, K, L). Even where the writer claims a more specialized title in the
salutation (B1), he may still refer to himself as a scribe in the body of the
text. This state of affairs is readily explained when we remember the
origin of the letter-prayers genre in the context of the scribal schools.
As in the case of the “school essays,” the scribe found in his own life
and circumstances the materials for exercising his stylistic talents.
One of these scribal letter-prayers (C) is even penned by a woman
scribe—and thus becomes, incidentally, a rare bit of evidence for the
existence of such women at this time. It is not the only letter-prayer
41 Note that some of the same personal names occur in different kinds of literary
letters. Cf. B16 and B7,8 B16 and B19, K and M.

42 dumu dingir-ra-(a)-ni-ir gub-ba/a-a-ama-a-ni (var. ama-a-a-ni)-ir nì-te-gá.
from a woman (cf. B17) but it is the only one which reveals her status,
not only professionally but socially, for it seems (the passage is however
broken) that she is further identified as a daughter or retainer of Sin-
kašid, king of Uruk. As a matter of fact, we possess one example of
a letter-prayer written by a king himself—in this case Sin-iddinam
of Larsa, a later contemporary of Sin-kašid (D4). It may be noted
in passing that the Akkadian tradition of (royal) letter-prayers is first
attested, at Mari, only a generation or two after this.43 So much for the
writers, real or fictitious, of the letter-prayers. Let us now consider their
actual messages: the petitions which were the subject of the letters, and
the sentiments employed to convey them.
The complaint with which the body of the letter often begins may
refer to either the causes or the consequences of one’s suffering. One of
the favorite stylistic devices is to describe one’s life as “diminishing”
(B1)44 or as “ebbing away in cries and sighs” (B17).45 One petitioner
seems already to foresee his bones carried off by the water to a foreign
city (K).46 Another form of complaint is to stress the loss of friends and
protectors: “those who know me, my friends, are on a hostile footing
with me” (B17);48 “those who know me no longer approach me, they
speak no word with me, my own friend no longer counsels me, he
will not set my mind at rest” (H below).49 The loss of protection or
patronage is expressed both plainly: “I have no protector” (B17, B1, L)50
and metaphorically: “like a sheep which has no faithful shepherd, I am
without a faithful cowherd to watch over me” (I);51 “I am an orphan”
(lit, the son of a widow, B1)52 which recalls Gudea’s moving plaint to
Gatumdu: “I have no mother—you are my mother; I have no father—
you are my father.”53
43 G. Dossin, Syria 19 (1938) 125 f. Cf. also Van Dijk, Sagesse 13 f.; E.A. Speiser,
“Omens and Letters to the Gods,” AOS 38 (1955) 60–67 = Oriental and Biblical Studies
(1967) 297–305; and below nn. 96 f.
44 zi-mu ba-e-tur; the variant (YBC 6458) has, however, ba-i.
45 im-ma-si im-ma-diri-ga-ta zi al-ir-ir-re. For a slightly different translation, cf.
Römer, SKIZ 113, end. Cf. also H 23 below.

46 gìr-pad-du-mu šà-uru-kúr-ra-šè a nam-ma-an-tùm.
48 zu-a kal-la-mu gìr-kúr mu-da-an-gin; var, ba-an-díb-bé-eš (cf. Civil, Iraq 23:167).
49 Cf. the same topos in the individual laments of the Psalter, e.g, Ps. 31:12, 38:12,
41:10, 55:13–15.
50 lú-èn-tar-(re) la-ba-(an)-tug (nu-un-tug).
51 udu-gim sipa-gi-na nu-tug na-gada-gi-na nu-mu-un-túm-túm-mu. Cf Å. Sjöberg,
Bi. Or. 20 (1963) 46 f.

52 dumu-nu-mu- (un) -zu-me-en.
53 Cyl. A iii 6 f.; cf Ps. 27:10.
The petitions of the letter-prayers concern, in the first instance, the

same problems as their complaints. Relief from sickness is thus one
of them; in the letters to healing goddesses, it is phrased typically as
“may she remove from my body (interrupt) whatever sickness demon
may exist in my body”54 (B17, D4), and is followed by the hope for
restoration of complete health: “may you place my feet in the station of
life” (B17);55 “may Damu your son (oh healing goddess) effect my cure”
(D4).56 Letters addressed to deified kings typically seek divine or royal
protection where other friends and protectors fail: “oh my king, may
you be my protector” (B1, B8; cf. B6).57 But some of the same texts go
further and their petitions may be more specific than their complaints
had been. One seeks to be confirmed in the claims to his patrimony
(B6, above); another prays for his freedom, perhaps from debt-slavery
(B1).58 This is also true of the two letter-prayers addressed to private
persons. In one, a father seems to be pleading with his son for support
in his old age (B16); in another, a scribe asks his colleague or relative for
preferment to a higher post and other favors (L). Thus the letter-prayers
were clearly the vehicle for expressing a variety of human needs.
In addition to the complaint and the petition, the body of the letter-
prayer is usually reinforced by protestations of past merits and present
deserts on the part of the suppliant. He argues his moral innocence or
ignorance, his cultic piety, his unswerving loyalty to the god, or simply
his high political or social status: “I do not know my guilt” (B8);59 “I do
not know my sin, of my sin I have no knowledge” (K);60 “I observed
(all) your festivals and offerings”61 or, negatively phrased, “my proper
devotions (?) I have not withheld from you” (J),62 or both together: “I
performed (or sent) the regular prayers, the sacrifices and the offerings
generously (mah-bi) to all the gods, I did not withhold anything from
them” (D4).63 To emphasize his loyalty, the penitent may insist “I do not
54 á-zág su-mà gál-la su-mà íb-ta-an-zi; var. gá-la ha-ba- an-dag -ge (SEM 74: 14).
Cf. van Dijk, Sagesse 15 f.
55 Ib.
56 dDa-mu dumu-zu nam-a-zu-mu hé-ak (SEM 74: 16).
57 lugal-mu èn-(mu) hé-tar-re; var. hu-mu-un-tar-re.
58 ki-ama-mu (var. -bi)-šè hé-im-mi-íb (ib) -gi -gi .
4 4
59 šul-a-lum nu-zu.
60 nam-tag-mu nu-zu nam-tag-mà geštú la-ba-ši-gál.
61 ezen-sizkur-zu-uš x ba-gub-bu-da-gim, (SEM 74 = D ?)
4
62 nì-ša -ga-tuku-mu la-ba-e-ši-kéš.
6
63 dingir-re-e-ne-ir mah-bi inim-ša -ša -gi-nam-ma / sizkur-ra nidba(PAD. dINNIN)-
6 6
bi i-kin-en/nì-nam nu-mu-ne-kéš.
speak hostile (foreign) words” (I),64 perhaps even that he has not sworn
by a foreign king (G).65 On the contrary, he asserts, “I am a citizen of
Ur” (B6)66 or “I am a scribe” (H, B1).67 One letter lists the past military
and other service of the writer in detail (B1). Apparently the recital of
past achievements or present rank is supposed to qualify their bearer
for future favors.
To persuade the deity to act on his behalf, however, the penitent
does not rely solely on his own past merits and present status. Rather,
in time-honored fashion, he seeks to persuade the deity or king to act,
as it were, “for the sake of thy name,” as well as to sway him by promise
of future benefits. The element of “suasion” is typically (and somewhat
provocatively) phrased as the protasis of a conditional sentence: “If my
queen is truly of heaven” (B17, D4); “if my king is truly of heaven”
(B6).68 Note that the latter expression also occurs in the letters to living
kings.69 The vows of the letter-prayers are even less subtle: if his or
her petition is granted, the writer says, “I will surely be your slave-girl,
will serve as court sweeper of your temple, will serve in your presence”
(B17)70 or “dwell in your gate and sing your praises . . . and proclaim
your exaltation” (H; cf. D4: J),71 preferably in public.72 Perhaps the most
persuasive offer that the petitioner can dangle before the deity’s eyes
is to endow him or her with yet another epithet, based on their latest
kindness: “When I have been cured, I will rename my goddess the one
who heals (?) the cripples” (B17, cf. also G 46).73
So much for the body of the letter-prayers. Their conclusion is much
briefer, but it includes, in at least two instances, another important clue
to the cultic situation of the entire genre, for reference is made there to
“(my) letter which I have deposited before you” (H [variant], G). This,
together with the fact that it is a statue which is actually addressed (B6)
shows clearly that our letters reflect a practice of leaving petitions in the
64 dingir-mu lú-kúr-di nu-me-en (Falkenstein, OLZ 1962:373.)

65 lugal-kúr-ra mu-ni nu-mu-un-pà-dè.
66 dumu uríKI-ma-me-en.
67 dub-sar-me-en.
68 Falkenstein, ZA 44:22.
69 E.g. Šulgi to Irmu 3, 30; L.B. 2543 (unpubl.).
70 ù gá-e geme-zu(var.-ni) (hé)-me-en é-za-a (var. é-a-ni) kisal-luh-bi hé-me-en igi-
zu(var.-ni)-šè hé-gub Cf. Gadd, Ideas of Divine Rule 27 n. 3, who compares Ps. 84:10 [=
84:11 in the Hebrew version].
71 KA-tar-zu ga-si-il (D ); palil?-e? KA-tar-zu hé-si-il-e me-tés numun hé-i-i (J).
4
72 Cf. e.g. Ps. 22:23; 26:12; 35:18 and below, note 92.
73 Van Dijk, Sagesse 15 f. (line 20).
temple, at the feet of the cult statue or at least in its own cella.74 But
the brief concluding formulas are also crucial for assigning the genre its
proper place in Sumerian literary history. For of these formulas some,
like “may my king know it”75 (B6), “it is urgent” (B10)76 or “do not be
negligent” (O),77 are clearly borrowed from the older clichés with which
the secular letter-orders and royal letters of Ur and Isin closed. Others,
as befits our genre, are more florid: “at the command of Enlil may
(my) eyes behold your face (B17).”78 But the most common conclusion:
“may the heart of my god (or king) be appeased” (B1, G, H, I) helps
to identify our genre as the lineal antecedent of the post-Sumerian
penitential psalms, to which we may now turn.
III. The Post-Sumerian Penitential Psalms
The Sumerian, penitential psalm, or ér-šà-hun-gá,79 is first attested by

a single example from Nippur dated to the Middle Babylonian period.
The text in question, published and edited by Langdon as long ago
as 1917, was recently re-edited by the late Father Bergmann.80 It does
not actually carry any generic designation, but it ends with the typical
closing of the later, labelled eršahunga’s: “may your heart be appeased
like that of a natural mother, like that of a natural father.” This is, in
74 After hearing the present paper at its original presentation (above n. 1), Prof.
Jacobsen pointed out that the excavations in the Diyala region uncovered a clay
tablet in an unopened envelope lying near the base of a cult statue. As he recalled,
the envelope bore only the ascription “to DN,” Note also that the late (?) copy of a
votive inscription of Sin-iddinam published by van Dijk, JCS 19 (1965) 1–25 includes
two “letters” confided by the king to the statue of his father for transmittal to Utu.
75 lugal-mu hé-en-zu; cf. BIN 2:53:3 which, according to Falkenstein, ZA 44:24 and
Anal. Bibl. 12:70 n. 2, is also (an extract from) a letter to a god, although that seems hard
to prove.
76 a-ma-ru-kam. For the expression, cf. Sollberger, TCS 1, p. 99 (49).
77 gú-zu na-an-šub-bé-en. With this closing cf. za-e nam-ba-e-še-ba-e-dè-en-zé-en in
the Ibbi-Sin correspondence: CADE 48b and Hoffner, JAOS 87 (1967) 302.
78 du -ga dEn-líl-lá-ka(var. -kam!) múš-me-zu igi hé-bi-du (var. ba-ab-du ). Cf. UET
11 5 5
6: 173 iv 6 f.: du11 dnin-in-si-na mùš Iugal-mà-kam igi-bi-ib-du8, which thus is clearly
also the conclusion of a letter (in spite of Kramer’s reservation, ib., p. 4), presumably to
a king.
79 Cf. S. Langdon, OECT 6 (1927) pp. iii–x; RA 22 (1925) 119–125. The Akkadian
equivalent is given variously as unnînu(?) (ŠL 2:579:392), eršahungû (AHw 245 f.) or šigû
(see refs. Dalglish, op. cit., 34 f.).
80 PBS 10/2:3, ed. by B. Bergmann, ZA 57 (1965) 33–42.
expanded form, also the typical ending of the earlier letter-prayers, but
since the Middle Babylonian example is not otherwise cast in the form
of a letter, we may see it as an early example, or at least a forerunner,
of the eršahunga.81 Its significance for our purpose lies, then, in the
fact that it provides the missing link between the neo-Sumerian letter-
prayers of the Old Babylonian period, and the fully developed post-
Sumerian penitential psalms of the first millennium, whose very name
(literally lament for appeasing the heart, i.e. of the god) reflects its
concluding formula.
At first glance, the comparison may seem far-fetched. The late genre
is, to begin with, wholly poetic in style, as attested not only by the
language, parallelisms and other internal features, but also by the fact
that its lines, in distinction from the earlier letter-prayers, are now fixed
in their division and as to their number for each separate composi-
tion. In the second place, the new genre has lost all formal traces of
any epistolary origins, with one possible exception, namely the use of
the phrase “your servant” to refer to the penitent, whether he other-
wise presents himself in the third or in the first person.82 Thirdly, it is
couched in the emesal-dialect of Sumerian, once erroneously translated
as the “woman’s language”83 but more properly described as a kind of
whining or wailing tone used by women or goddesses neither exclu-
sively nor universally, but by them only in certain contexts, and also by
certain men, notably the singers called gala (kalû) and in the context of
lamentation.
In these formal or external respects, then, the post-Sumerian peni-
tential psalms clearly represent a new genre as compared to the neo-
Sumerian letter-prayers. Indeed, if we were to confine ourselves to their
formal characteristics, we might be forced to conclude that they were
simply the later successors to the neo-Sumerian eršemma-psalms. The
eršemma, however, survived in its own right and under its old desig-
nation, albeit chiefly as a subsection of longer compositions. And when
we consider the penitential psalms from the point of view of contents
81 J. Krecher, ZA 58 (1967) 28 regards it as “den Eršahunga-Liedern nahestehend
und also wahrscheinlich aus der frühen Kassitenzeit(?).”

82 Cf. the references and literature cited by Dalglish, op. cit, (note 12) 31 f. n. 58. The
same usage appears to apply to the Akkadian “literary prayers of the Babylonians”; cf.
W.G. Lambert, AfO 19 (1959–1960) 47 f.
83 SAL is here rather “thin, attenuated.” Cf. now J. Krecher, “Zum Emesal-Dialekt
des Sumerischen,” Falkenstein AV (1967) 86 n. 1.

and phraseology, a different picture emerges. For this aspect of their

description, we may rely largely on Dalglish’s summary.84 The typical
eršahunga, then, begins with a long hymnic introduction in which the
deity invoked is apostrophized by a succession of epithets designed, in
Dalglish’s words, “to remind them of their special attributes, whose
exercise may have caused the distress of the worshipper or may be the
cause of salvation later to be invoked in the prayer.” As such, they of
course immediately recall the salutations of the letter-prayers.
The complaint section of the eršahunga includes, like that of the
letter-prayers, a description of the penitent’s distress, a confession of
his sin, and a final cry of woe. The description of his distress is less
specific here than in most of the letter-prayers, and even the allusions
to sickness are more often meant metaphorically than literally. But the
other two elements often employ the phraseology of the letter-prayers
almost verbatim. Sins are typically committed in multiples of seven
in both genres,85 and in both there is an emphasis on the penitent’s
ignorance of his sins, or of his specific transgressions.86 The cry of
desperation in both may resemble the bleating of an animal or the
moans of a woman in child-birth,87 though the later genre adds a few
characteristic interjections of its own.
Another typical portion of each penitential psalm is the petition, or
prayer in the narrower sense. Since the distress is described vaguely as
an unknown sin or sins, or the resulting affliction, the petition too is,
naturally, less explicit than in the letter-prayers. Even so, expressions
such as “free me from my sin,” “remit my punishment,”88 or “rescue
me from destruction”89 can be found in both genres.
The votive formula which is so marked a part of the letter-prayers
recurs with little change in the eršahunga’s; both thus differ from the
84 Op. cit. (above, n. 12), pp. 21–35. To Dalgish’s list add now probably CT 44:14
and 24.
85 Cf e.g. I 8 f. (Kramer, TMH nF 3 p. 21) with IV E 10:45 ff.: na-ám-tag-ga imin-a-
rá-imin-na. Note also Jacobsen, JCS 8:86 (CNM 10099) (end): dingir-mu nam-tag-ga-
mu imin-[ . . . ].
86 Cf. e.g. K (above, n. 60) with IV R 10:42: na-ám-tag-ga nì-ag-a-mu nu-un-zu-àm
= anni epušu ul idi.

87 Cf e.g. B (above, note 45) with K. 3153 (OECT 6:21–23; BA 5:578 f.): ib-si ši-mu
17
zi-ir-ra = mas. i napišti ı̄tašuš.
88 Cf. the gate called šul-a-lum-du -du (H 49, below) with the eršahunga-passages
8 8
cited CADE 170a.
89 Cf. H 51 f. (below) with PBS 10/2:3:7 (Bergmann, ZA 57:34): nam-da-ad-gu-ud
šu-bar-zi sag-ki!-tum ZA.GI.

more or less unconditional thanksgiving formulas of other late genres.

Compare for example the previously quoted “If Damu your son effects
my cure, then I will surely sing your praises”90 with the later “Absolve
my sin and I will sing your praises.”91 Both genres, too, stress the
favorable “publicity” which will redound to the deity.92
Finally, we may return to the starting point of our comparison by
considering the concluding formula of the penitential psalm. In its
fullest form it includes seven different formulations, but of these, only
the last two recur in virtually every instance, namely: “may your heart
be appeased like that of my natural mother and father.”93 Thus we
have here the closing formula of many letter-prayers expanded only to
include the specific equation between personal god and parent which
had been merely implicit earlier.94
In spite of certain formal and substantive differences, then, the post-
Sumerian eršahunga’s in striking measure perpetuate the tradition of
the neo-Sumerian letter-prayers, and Falkenstein’s assessment that they
derive from Akkadian conceptions needs to be reviewed.95 The formal
differences no doubt reflect a change in the cultic situation: instead
of commissioning a scribe to deposit a clay tablet in letter form at
the feet of the divine statue, the later penitent commissioned the gala-
singer to recite his prayer orally. Perhaps it was feared that gods could
no longer read Sumerian, for while letters continued to be addressed
to them96 or deposited before their statues,97 they no longer served as
prayers but as royal reports or oracular inquiries respectively; and they
90 Above, notes 56 and 71.

91 OECT 6:43:49; cf. Bergmann, ZA 57:41.
92 Cf. H 53 (below) with PBS 10/2:3r8 (ZA 57:41 f.): ukù-e pà-hé-ni-ib-bé ka-na-mé
hé-ma-zu.
93 Dalglish, op. cit., p. 32.
94 On this equation, see also Hallo, JCS 20 (1966) 136 f., n. 53, here: III.2.
95 “Nach meiner Auffassung trotz sumerischer Sprache sind die ér-šà-hun-gá-Kom-
positionen aus akkadischen Vorstellungen herausgewachsen,” apud Dalglish, op. cit., 34,
n. 72.
96 Most notably the famous report of Sargon’s eighth campaign; cf. A.L. Oppen-
heim, “The city of Assur in 714 bc,” JNES 19 (1960) 133–147, who lists the other exam-
ples of the genre. Previously Ungnad, OLZ 21 (1918) cc. 72–76. Cf. also H. Tadnor,
JCS 12 (1958) 82.
97 Referring. to Knudtzon, Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott, Jastrow stated long ago:
“Aus Andeutungen in den Texten selbst geht. . . hervor, dass man die aufgeschriebene
Frage vor dem Gottesbild niederlegte”: Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens 2 (1912) 175;
cf also W.W. Struve, ICO 25/1 (1962) 178.
were now written in the vernacular, like the letter-prayers to the gods of
Anatolia,98 Egypt99 and elsewhere.100
The substantive changes too are readily explained in terms of his-
torically attested changes in the Babylonian Weltanschauung as these
have been delineated by Jacobsen.101 Where the earlier Babylonians
worried chiefly about the divine origin of natural misfortunes and man-
made disasters, the later ones were more concerned with their own
sins, known or unknown, as the causes of their afflictions. The petition
of the individual accordingly witnessed a corresponding shift in empha-
sis: the deity was now entreated to remove, not the affliction, but the
sin; not the symptom but the assumed underlying cause. It is, how-
ever, not my purpose to dwell on these differences, important though
they certainly are as indices of developmental stages in the history of
Mesopotamian religion. From the point of view of literary history, it is
the similarities between the earlier and the later genre that are most
impressive. They entitle us to regard the neo-Sumerian letter-prayers
as the lineal antecedents of the post-Sumerian penitential psalms, and
to throw them into the balance in any comparison with the individual
laments of the Biblical Psalter.
IV. A New Sumerian Letter-Prayer (H)
A. Texts102
YBC 4620 (= A) complete in 56 lines
YBC 7205 (= B) “rectilinear” extract tablet,103 ll. 1–15.
YBC 8630 (= C) “rectilinear” extract tablet;103 ll. 36-end.
98 According to Goetze, Kleinasiatische Forschungen 1 (1930) 220, the “second plague
prayer” of Muršili (ANET 394–396?) was in the form of a “Gottesbrief.” (Ref. courtesy
H. Hoffner, Jr.)
99 G.R. Hughes, “A Demotic letter to Thoth,” JNES 17 (1958) 1–12, with other
examples of the genre.

100 Cf. the Jewish custom of depositing “letter-prayers” in the Western Wall, which
survives to this day.

101 Cf. for the present his “Ancient Mesopotamian religion: the central concerns,”
PAPhS 107 (1963) 473–484.

102 Copies to be published in a forthcoming YOS volume.
103 Cf. Gordon, S. P. p. 8.
B. Structure
The letter-prayers have no structural labels,104 but the present text, by
virtue of its great length, shows a clear strophic structure based on
meaning units and the occurrence or recurrence of certain formulas.
There is also the evidence, in exemplar A, of the line count. While the
total (56) is correct, the subtotals are too low by two for the obverse (31
for 33) and too high by two for the reverse (25 for 23). Unless they were
slavishly copied from a model (in which case it is hard to see why the
disposition of the lines would have been altered), this seems to imply
that the formulas of lines 2 and 7 were not counted as separate lines,
while the long lines 39 and 40, which in A are written over 11/2 lines
and in C over two separate lines, were in fact counted separately. On
this assumption, and with one minor transposition (moving the couplet
18 f. after line 27), the poem consists of eleven five-line stanzas plus a
concluding “doxology” of one line.
C. Transliteration of A105
i
d
en-ki en-zà-dib-an-ki-a nam-ma-ni zà nu-di ù-na-a-du11
d
nu-dim-mud nun(1)-gištú-dagal-la(2) an-da nam-ba-an-tar me-zi hal-
ha(3) a(4)-nun-ke4-ne a-rá-bi ság [nu-di]
5) gal-zu-mah u4-è-ta u4-šú-uš igi-gál ba-ab-sè-[ga?] en-nì-zu lugal-engur-ra
dingir-sag-du-ga-mu-ú[r] ù-ne-dè-dah
ii
‘dEN.ZU-ša-mu-úh (5) dub-sar dumu Ur-dnin-[. . .] ìr-zu na-ab-bé-a
10) u4 šu mu- e (6)-du11-ga(7) nam-lú-ulù-uš mu-e-ni-[n-. . .] mu-pà-da-

zu-šè! IM-šub li-bí-ak ab-ba-gim [. . . ] ezen-sizkur-zu-uš (8) gìri-mu
la-ba-ni-sil lul-aš ì-du-un-na
iii
e-ne-éš (9)nì-a-na(10) bí-ak-a(11)-mu di nam-tag(12)-ga(13)-mu
nu-[til?]
ù(14)-nam-tar-ra(15)-ke4(16) mu-DU(17) ki-lul-la ìl-la-en izkim
na-ma-ab(18)-kin
15) dingir-kúr-ra nam-tag(19) (20)hu-mu-túm(21) zá-bi nu-mu-da-pà
u4-la-la-má é-bi an-né bí-du-ga.
sag-sìg-šè nam-tag-mu nu-me-a gaba im-ma-da-ri-e[n]
104 On these cf. my remarks Bi. Or. 23 (1966) 241 f, here: III.3.
105 With a few minor restorations based on B and C; these are not indicated as such.
v(b)
bappir -ra-bala- bàn -da-gim kišib-e ba-ab-dáb-bé-en
níg-šu-kaskal-la giš-šudun-bi-TAR-a-gim har-ra-an-na ba-gub-
bé-en
(iv)
20) ki-ná ú-u8-a-a-e ba-ná-en a-nir mu-un-si-il
alan-ša6-ga-mu gú ki-šè ba-lá giri-šè ba-tuš-en
[. . .]. PÁ.AH-mu ki ba-ni-in-íl uktin-mu ba-kúr
[. . .] ù-nu-ku gìri-mu-a ab-sì zi-mu ba-da-zal
u4-zalag-ga -u4-HI-da-gim im-ma-an-ak ki-túm-mu ba-an-zé-ir
v(a)
25) dub-sar-me-en nì-mu-zu-zu a-na-mà uh-šè ba-ku4-re-en
šu-mu sar-re-dè ba-DU ka-mu inim-bal-bal im-ma-an-lá
ab-ba nu-me-en gištú-mu ba-dugud igi-du8-mu ba- gil -gil
vi
guruš-ad-hal é-lugal-a-ni íb-ta-è-a-gim sag ki-a mu-túm-túm
lú-zu-a-mu na-ma-te-gá inim-ma na-ma-ab-bé
30) ku-li-mu ad nu-mu-da-gi4-gi4 šà-mu la-ba-še4-dè
lú-in-na su-lum-mar-šè ba-ku4-re-en nam-tar-mu ba-kúr-e-en
dingir-mu za-ra nir-im-ta-gál-en lú-šè nam-mu
vii
guruš-me-en a-gim ki-lul-la nam-ma-bàra- gè -en
lower edge 31
reverse gùd-ús é-mu la-la-bi nu-mu- gi-gi
35) é-dù-dù-a-mu sig4-e nu-ub-tag- ge4-a
giš-ù-tur-tur (22) ki-píl-là-mú-a-gim(23) gurun(24) la-ba-íl
giš-suhhuš gú(25)-má(26)-da-mú-a-gim pa-mu la-ba-sìg-sìg
viii
tur-ra-(27)me-en(28) u4-mu nu-me-a ur5-šè nam-ba-du-un
sahar-ra nam-bí-ib-bala-e-en
ki ama-a-a(29) nu-gub-ba(30) ba-e-dab-bé-en
a-ba-a a-ra(31)-zu-mu mu-ra-ab-bé-e
40) ki im-ri-a-mu gú nu(32) -si-si-iš zà mu-e-tag-ge-en
a-ba-a kadra-mu (eras.: mu) ma-ra-ni-íb-ku4(33)
ix
ddam-gal-nun-na nitalam ki-ága-zu
ama-mu-gim ha-ra-da-túm ír-mu hu-mu-ra-ni-ib-ku4- ku4
dasal (34) -alim-nun-na dumu-abzu-ke
4
a-a-mu-gim ha-ra-da-túm ír-mu hu-mu-ra-ni-ib-ku4-ku4
45) ír-šà-ne-ša4-mu hu-mu-ra-[ab]-bé

ír-mu hu-mu-ra-ni-ib-ku4-ku4 (35)
x
u4-da nam-tag (36)ga-mu-ra-túm(37) erim -ta (38)KU-mu-da(39)
(40)ki-kiruda-da-da-mà(41) igi (42)ù-ba-e-ni-bar(43) (44) ama5-
mu šu-te-ba-ab(45)
ki-kukkú-ga-mu u4-šè (46)ù-mu-e-ni-ku4(47)
ká-šul-a-lum-du8-du8-za(48) ga(49)-túš KA-tar-zu ga-si-il
50) nam-tag-mu(50) gu-gim ga-mu-ra-si-il
nam-mah-zu ga- àm (51)-du11
xi
ki-nam-tag-dugud-da šu-nigin-zu ár ga-à[m-. . . ] (52)
ka-garáš-a(53)-ka šu-bar zi sag-ki-tùm(54)-mu [. . .] (55)
ukù-e pa ga-ni-ib-è kalam-e hé-zu-z[u] (56)
dingir-mu ní-te-gá-zu gá(57)-me-en
55) ù-na-a-du11 (58)mu-ra-gub-ba-mu(59) arhuš(60) tuk-ma-r[a] (61) (62)
xii
[š]à dingir-mu ki-bi ha-ma(63)-gi4-gi4
25
56
D. Variants (Other than Line Divisions)
1. B: en-mah
2. B adds: -ke4
3. B: -hal-la
4. B: da-
5. B: -ùh
6. B omits
7. B adds: -ta
8. B: šè !
9–10. B: a-na-àm
11. B: -ka-
12–13. B omits
14. B omits
15. B: -mu
16. B: omits
17. B: e-ne ?
18. B: -ni-in-
19. B: -a (?)
20–21. B: ha-ma-tùm
22–23. C: NE-gim ba-gub
24. C: gurumx(GAM)
25. C: omits
26. C: má-gíd-
27–38. C: -mu
29. C adds -m]u
30. C: - be-en ?
31. C omits
32. C: nu-mu-un-[. . .]
33. C inverts the next two couplets, thus: 43, 44, 41, 42.
34. C: asal-lú- HI -
35. C: omits line 45.
36–37. C: hu-mu-ra-ab-tù[m]
38–39. C: KU-ma-a[b]
40–41 C: ki- ru -da-mu
42–43. C: i -ni-in-bar
44–45. C: arhuš tuku-mu- da-ab
46–47. C: mi-ni-in-KU?
48. C omits
49. C: ga-an-
50. C omits
51. C: -an-
52. C omits line 51
53 C omits
54. C: -túm-
55. C: UN-x-y
56. C omits 1. 54
57. C: gá-e-
58–59. C: im -ma-ra-sar
60. C: giš-
61. C: -ta
62. C inserts a line: [. . .]- mu-ra hu-mu- un-gál -[. . .]?
63. C: -ma-ab-
E. Translation106
i
1. (1) To Enki, the outstanding lord of heaven and earth whose nature is
unequalled
(2) Speak!
2. (3) To Nudimmud, the prince (1) of broad understanding who determines
fates together with An,
3. (4) Who distributes the appropriate divine attributes among the Anun-
naki, whose course cannot be [reversed]
4. (5) The omniscient one who is given intelligence from sunrise to sunset,
106 See below, IV.3 for a new translation (pp. 313–315).

5. (6) The lord of knowledge, the king of the sweet waters, the god who
begot me,
(7) Say furthermore!
ii
6. (8) (This is) what Sin-šamuh the scribe, the son of Ur-Nin [. . .],
7. (9) your servant, says:
8. (10) Since (2) the day that you created me you have [given] me an educa-
tion.
9. (11) I have not been negligent toward the name by which you are called,
like a father [. . .].
10. (12) I did not plunder your offerings at the festivals to which I go regu-
larly.
iii
11. (13) (But) now, whatever I do, the judgment of my sin is not [. . .]
12. (14) My fate(3) has come my way, I am lifted onto a place of destruction, I
cannot find an omen.
13. (15) A hostile deity has verily brought sin my way, I cannot find(?) its side.
14. (16) On the day that my vigorous house was decreed by Heaven
15. (17) There is no keeping silent about my sin, I must answer for it.
iv
16. (20) I lie down on a bed of alas and alack, I intone the lament.
17. (21) My goodly figure is bowed down to the ground, I am sitting on (my)
feet.
18. (22) My [. . .]. is lifted from (its) place, my features are changed.
19. (23) [. . .] restlessness is put into my feet, my life ebbs away.
30. (24) The bright day is made like an “alloyed” day for me107 I slip into my
grave.
v
21. (25) I am a scribe, (but) whatever I have been taught has been turned into
spittle (?) for me
22. (26) My hand is “gone” for writing, my mouth is inadequate for dialogue.
23. (27) I am not old, (yet) my hearing is heavy, my glance cross-eyed.
24. (18) Like a brewer (?) with a junior term(?) I am deprived of the right to
seal.
107 Cf. “Man and his God” (Kramer, VT Suppl, 3:175) line 69. Van Dijk also calls
my attention to Ur Lament (Kramer, AS 12:36) 190: u4-HI-da ba-da-an-tab, and the

new variant from Ur (UET 6/2:137:73): u-mud!-e ba-da-an-ku4. This, and parallel
expressions like our line 48 or Reisner, SBH pl. 77:20 f., suggest a meaning “day of
darkness” and possibly a reading u4-mux-da for our expression.; for mud = dark(ness),
cf. u4-mud = ūmu da"mu. (CADD 74c), dNanna i-mud = dSin adir (CADA/1: 103b).
Note also an-usan-da = da"ummatu (CADD 123b), where USAN (USÁN) may have the
reading mudx (cf. USÀN = NUNUZ + ÁB × SA and MÙD = NUNUZ + ÁB × KAŠ).
25. (19) Like a wagon of the highway whose yoke has been broken (?) I am
placed on the road
vi
26. (28) Like an apprentice-diviner who has left his master’s house I am
slandered ignobly.
27. (29) My acquaintance does not approach me, speaks never a word with
me,
28. (30) My friend will not take counsel with me, will not put my mind at rest.
29. (31) The taunter has made me enter the tethering-rope, my fate has made
me strange.
30. (32) Oh my god, I rely on you, what have I do to with man?!
vii
31. (33) I am grown-up, how am I to spread out in a narrow place?
32. (34) My house (is) a plaited nest, I am not satisfied with its attractiveness.
33. (35) My built-up houses are not faced with brick (?)
34. (36) Like little (female) cedars planted in a dirty place, I(?) bear no fruit.
35. (37) Like a young date palm planted by the side of a boat, (4) I produce no
foliage.
viii
36. (38) I am (still) young, must I walk about thus before my time? Must I roll
around in the dust?
37. (39) In a place where my(5) mother and father are not present I am de-
tained,
38. who will recite my prayer to you?
39. (40) In a place where my kinsmen do not gather I am overwhelmed,
40. who will bring my offering in to you?
ix
41. (41) Damgalnunna, your beloved first wife,
42. (43) May she bring it to you like my mother, may she introduce my la-
ment before you
43. (43) Asalalimnunna, son of the abyss,
44. (44) May he bring it to you like my father, may he introduce my lament
before you.
45. (45) May he recite my lamentation to you, may he introduce my lament
before you.
x
46. (46) When I(6) have verily brought (my) sin to you, cleanse (?) me from evil!
47. (47) When(7) you have looked upon me in the place where I am cast down,
approach my chamber!(8)
48. (48) When(9) you have turned my dark place into daylight,108
49. (49) I will surely dwell in your(10) gate of Guilt-Absolved, I will surely sing
your praises!
50. (50) I will surely tear up my(11) sin like a thread, I will surely proclaim your
exaltation!
xi
51. (51) As you reach the place of heavy sin, I will surely [sing your] praises.
53. (53) Release me at the mouth of the grave, [save me] at the head of my
tomb!
53. (53) (Then) I will surely appear to the people, all the nation will verily
know!
54. (54) Oh my god, I am the one who reveres you!
55. (55) Have mercy on(12) the letter which I have deposited before you!(18)
xii
56. (56) May the heart of my god be restored!
F. Translation-Principal Variants
(1) B: the lofty lord

(2) So B. A: On
(3) So B. A: The X of fate
(4) C: by a long-boat
(5) C omits
(6) C: he
(7) C omits
(8) C: have mercy on me!
(9) C omits
(10) C omits
(11) C omits
(12) C: Hear
(13) C: (which) I have written to you
G. Abridged Glossary109
ad-gi4-gi4 (30): von Soden, AHw s.v. malāku Gt (mitluku); van Dijk, SGL 2: 98.
ad-hal (28): CADB s.v. bārû.
a-gim (33): von Soden, AHw s.v. kı̄am.
an-da nam-tar (3): Falkenstein, SGL 1:99 f. ad STVC 34 iii 7.
108 Cf. Kramer, Two Elegies 1. 89.

109 Only the latest discussions are listed, and occasionally an additional reference. No
reference is made to words adequately explained in Deimel, Šumerisches Lexikon. I am
indebted to J. van Dijk for the references marked [v. D.].
a-rá (4): Römer, SKIZ 108 ad SRT 12:21.

arhuš-tuku (47[var.], 55): Römer, SKIZ 264 n. 13.
e-ne-èš (13): CADI s.v. inanna.
gaba-ri (17): Von Soden, AHw s.v. mahāru.
gal-zu (5): CADE s.vv. eršu A, emqu.
gil-gil (27): CADE s.v. egēru.
gìr-sil (12): CADH s.v. habātu A [v. D.].
giš-suhuš (37): MSL 5:117:288 and 142:28.
giš-ù (36): Falkenstein, GSGL I 72; SAHG 153:32.
gùd-ús (34): Falkenstein, SGL 1:71; ZA 57:121 f.
gú-ki-šè-lá (21): Falkenstein, ZA 57:97 f.
gú-si-si (40): Römer, SKIZ 155:28.
har-ra-an / kaskal (19): Römer, SKIZ 178 f.
igi-gál (5): CADB s.v. bišı̄tu, bišı̄t uzni [v. D.].
igi-gál-sì: van Dijk, SGL 2: 116; Hallo, Bi. Or. 23:243–244, here: III.3.
im-ri-a (40): Sjöberg, Falkenstein AV 202–209.
Cf. also me-a-im-ri-a-mu, MSL 4:56:660e and passim as late OB PN.
IM-šub-ak (11): Jestin, Thesaurus 2:24. CADA/1:305c s.v. ahu, aham nadû [v. D.].
kadra (40): von Soden, AHw. s.v. kad/trû.
ka-garáš (52): von Soden, AHw s.v. karāšu II.
KA-tar-si-il (49): Bergmann, ZA 56:34 ad SEM 74:17. Cf. the syllabic spelling
CT 44:14: ka-ta-ar-zu še-si-li-im.
ki-kukkú-ga (48): Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 76 ad TRS 30:10.
ki-lul-la (14, 33): Castellino, ZA 52:32.
ki-píl-lá (36): Jacobsen apud Gordon, S.P. 461.
kiruda (47): Falkenstein, ZA 56:128.
kišib-dáb (18): Oppenheim, Eames, 129, 242 ad P 18.
ki-túm/tùm/tum (24, 52): van Dijk, Sagesse 62; Falkenstein, ZA 57:109.
ku4-(ku4) in sense of “turn into” (25, 31, 48): Hallo and van Dijk, Exaltation of
Inanna, Glossary, s.v.
lá (26): von Soden, AHw, s.v. ma.tû II.
la-la with é (16): Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 174;
Krecher, Sumerische Kultyrik 141.
la-la-gi4 (34): ib.
lú-in-na (31): Jacobsen apud Gordon S.P. p. 461.
LUL-aš (12): von Soden, AHw s.v. ma"diš; UET 6:2:5.
lú-zu-a (29): Civil, Iraq 23:167; JNES 23:5, ad Ludingira 6.
me-zi-hal-ha (4): Falkenstein, ZA 49:106:10; VS 2:8:26.
nam-mah-du11 (50): Hallo and van Dijk, loc. cit., s.v.
nam-mu (32): ib., s.v.; cf. Falkenstein apud MSL 4:42; Castellino, ZA 52:34.
níg-šu (19): Civil, JAOS 88:13, n. 56.
nir-gál with dative (32): Falkenstein, SGL 1:103 ad STVC 34 iii 30.
pa-sìg-sìg (37): cf pa-sig7 = arta banû CADS. . 139a.
sag-du (6): CADB s.v. banû.
ság-du11/di (4): Falkenstein, SGL 1:44; ZA 57:93.
sag-sìg (17): van Dijk, SGL 2:30.
sag-túm-túm (28): Landsberger, MSL 4:27:11; Hallo, Oppenheim AV 97 note
23 ad OBGT III 173 ff.
sahar-ra-bala (38): Hallo and van Dijk, loc. cit., s.v. sahar-da . . . gi4.
su-lum-mar (31): Civil, JAOS 88:8 f.
šà-ki-bi-gi4-gi4 (56): Civil, Oppenheim AV 89.
šu-bar-zi: ŠL 2:354:121 f. [v. D.].
šu-du11 (10): Römer, SKIZ 69, n. 305. AHw s.v. liptu, lipit qātē [v. D.].
šul-a-lum (49): CADE s.v. ennittu.
šu-te-gá (47): Römer, SKIZ 86 f.
u4-HI-da (24); Hallo, BiOr. 20:139 s.v. nig-SAR/HI-a and above, n. 106.
uktin (22): Falkenstein, An. Bibl. 12:72 no. 1; ZA 55:4 n. 8; CAD s.vv. bunabuttum,
s. ubur panı̄ [note: Goetze, JAOS 65:225:69 reads ukkur.]
ù-na-a-du as noun (55): Hallo, Bi. Or. 20:142 [3]; Civil, JNES 23:7 ad Ludingira
7.
ù-nu-ku (23): CADS. s.v. (la) s. alālu/ s. alı̄lu.
ú-u8-a-a-e (20): Krecher, Sumerische Kultyrik 114 f.
zà-dib (1): Römer, SKIZ 252.
zà-pà, (15): cf. Kramer, TMH 3 p. 21:9.
zà-tag (40): Falkenstein Bi. Or. 22:282 n. 24; Gordon, S.P. pp. 68, 81.
V. List of Letter-Prayers and Other Neo-Sumerian Literary Letters
The letter-prayers and other neo-Sumerian literary letters were tradited

in the schools both singly and in Sammeltafeln, but apparently the
order was not entirely fixed. Many of the twenty items in Collection
B (see below) occur in different groupings on other Nippur tablets.
In BE 31:21, for example, B7 is followed by the catchline of B8 and
in STVC 8, B14 and B15 follow each other without a break; but in
SLTN 129, the sequence is B7, (break), B10, B14.110 B12111 and B18112 follow
each other in SLTN 131, which Falkenstein has described as “einen
literarischen Sammeltext,”113 and B12 recurs at the end of a collection
of model contracts.114 At Ur, one tablet (UET 6:173) has the following
sequence: B17, K, B1 B4, B8. Another (UET 6:174) begins with B7,
continues with A, and ends with B17. Note also that B14 occurs in an
110 Gordon, Bi. Or. 17 (1960) 141 (7) regards these texts as “Essay Collection No. 7,”
but it is clear that all the texts included in it are letters.

111 Cf. F. Ali, “Blowing the horn for official announcement,” Sumer 20 (1964) 66–68.
112 F.A. Ali, “Dedication of a dog to Nintinugga,” Ar. Or. 34 (1966) 289–293.
113 NG 1 (1956) 32.
114 NBC 7800 (unpubl.); separately also on YBC 12074 (unpubl.).
Ur catalogue text together with non-epistolary entries.115 The following

list therefore is necessarily arranged in a somewhat arbitrary order.
I. “Royal Correspondence”
A Letter Collection A: royal correspondence of Ur; cf. for the present
F. Ali, Ar. Or. 33 (1965) 529 ff. Eight duplicates from the Yale Babylonian
Collection will be published in a forthcoming YOS Volume.
B Letter Collection B; cf. Ali, ibid, and Ar. Or. 34 (1966) 289 f., note*. 114a
Includes the royal correspondence of Isin and the following letters more
or less in the style of the letter-prayers.
B1 From Aba-indasa116 to (Šulgi) Texts: UET 6:173 ii 2-iii 6; 178; 179;
YBC 6458 (unpubl.)
B6 From Ur-šagga to “my. . . king” Texts: BL 5; ZA 44 pl. I; UET 6:177;
YBC 6711 (unpubl.) Translation: Langdon, BL, p. 15; revised in BE 31,
p. 25; Falkenstein, ZA 44:1–25; Kramer, ANET 382; above, 264 f.
B7 From Lugal-murub to (his) king Texts: BE 31:21:1–18; SLTN 129 left edge
and obv.; UET 6:174a; PBS 13:46 iii. Translation: Langdon, BE 31, p. 48
B8 From Lugal-murub to (his) king Text: UET 6:173 iv 8 ff.; cf. also BE 31:21
(catchline)
B10 From Ur-Enlila to the ensi and sanga Texts: PBS 13:48 iii; SLTN 129 rev.
1–5; YBC 7175 (unpubl.); unpubl. tablet in private possession in Ohio (ref.
courtesy R. McNeill).
B14 From Ugudulbi (“the monkey”) to Ludiludi his mother Texts: PBS 1/2:
92; 93; STVC 8:1–7; SLTN 129 rev. 66 ft Cf. also above, note 114.
Translations: Falkenstein, ZA 49:337; van Dijk, Sagesse 14; cf. Gordon,
Bi. Or, 17:141, n. 156.
B15 From Utudug to Ilakni"id Texts: STVC 8:8; PBS I/:95; cf. Ali, Ar. Or.
33:539, n. 45.
B16 From Lugal-murub to Enlil-massu his son Texts: BE 31:47; UET 6:175; ib.
176; YBC 7170 (unpubl.)
B17 From Inannakam to Nintinugga Texts: PBS 1/2:94; 134; UET 6:173 i-l’-4’;
ib. 174e; ib. 180. Translations: van Dijk, Sagesse 15 f.; Falkenstein, SAHG
No. 41.
B19 From Inim-Inanna to Enlil-massu. Text: PBS 1/2:91.
115 UET 6:196:4! Some of the other entries in this catalogue duplicate or resemble
entries in the Yale catalogue of royal hymns. Cf. UET 6:196:6 with Hallo, JAOS 83
(1963) 171:13, here: II.1, also UET 6:196:2 and 11 with JAOS 83:171:6 and 9 respectively.
114a After this article was completed, I obtained a Xerox copy of Ali’s dissertation from
University Microfilms (Ann Arbor, Michigan); to this I owe three or four corrections or
additions in the following list.
116 Perhaps identical with the Indasu whose defeat by Šu-Sin is recorded in late
copies; cf. Edzard, AfO 19 (1959–1960) 9–11, but note also J. Laessøe, AS 16 (1965)
195 f.
C From the daughter (?) of Sin-kašid, king of Uruk, to Meslamtaea-

Nergal(?) (salutations only)117 Text: TRS58
D Royal correspondence of Larsa,118 including the following:
D2 From [. . .] to Utu Text: UET 6:182 (?)
D4 From Sin-iddinam, king of Larsa, to Nin-isina119 Texts: UET 8:70;
YBC 4705, YBC 4605 (unpnbl.); cf. also SEM 74.
II. “Scribal Correspondence” 120

E From [. . .] to Nanna (salutations only) Text: Anal. Bibl. 12:71 f. Translations:
Falkenstein, ib., 69–77; Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 104–107
F From Nanna-mansi to Nin-isina Text: TRS 60 Translation (in part): Kraus,
JCS 3:77 f.
G From Nanna-mansi to [. . .] Text: BE 31:7 Translation: Langdon, ib. pp. 21–
25
H Sin-šamuh to Enki Texts: YBC 4620, 7205, 8630 (above) Translation: Hallo,
above.
I From Gudea to “my god.” Text: TMH n. F. 3:56 Translation: Kramer, ib.,
pp. 20 f. cf. Sjöberg, Bi. Or. 20:46 f.
J From Etel-pi-Damu to Martu Text: YBC 5631 (unpubl.), here: IV.4.
K From Inim-Enlila to (his) king Text: UET 6:173:5’–14’
L From Gudea-Enlila to An-mansi his relative Text: TMH n. F. 3:57.
M From [. . .] son of Inim-Enlila to [. . .] Text: BE 31:29 Translation:
Langdon, BE 31, p. 48.
III. “Personal Correspondence”

O From Sag-lugal-bi-zu to Nur-Kabta Text: L.B. 1013, to be publ. in
TLB III.
P From Etel-pi (?)-Enlila to Nudimmud-siga his father (?) Text: PBS 12: 32.
117 Was there a small collection of Uruk letters between those of Isin and Larsa as in
the case of the royal hymns, for which cf. my remarks JCS 17 (1963) 116? Here: III.1.
118 Cf. S.N. Kramer, JAOS 88 (1968) 108, n. 3.
119 I intend to edit this letter elsewhere.
120 E, I and J are included here only provisionally.
iv.2
LETTERS, PRAYERS, AND LETTER-PRAYERS
Over a period of years, I have defended the comparative approach to

biblical literature in a number of papers.1 At the Third World Congress
of Jewish Studies in 1961, I suggested a programmatic approach to the
possibilities of eliciting the processes of creativity and the mechanics
of canonization from Mesopotamian examples.2 At the Fourth World
Congress in 1965, again from this platform, I suggested a possible
cuneiform solution to the vexing problem of the origin of biblical apoc-
alypse.3 In 1966, I traced the origin of individual prayer in Sume-
rian from its beginnings in the late third millennium to a point where
it could, conceivably, have inspired certain features of the individual
laments in the Psalter.4 Then in 1969, I attempted to apply some of
the criteria of biblical scholarship to investigate the cultic setting of
various Sumerian poetic genres.5 In 1971, I addressed some of the
chronological problems inherent in any attempt to compare Meso-
potamian and biblical literature.6 And at the Sixth World Congress
in 1973, I presented a possible Sumerian prototype to the prayer of
1 This paper represents portions of an earlier (1974) version of remarks delivered

to the 7th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 10, 1977. The revised
paper, actually delivered under the title “The Expansion of Cuneiform Literature,” will
appear shortly in the Jubilee Volume of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
Both versions served as introductions to the second letter-prayer of Sin-iddinam, of
which a full edition is to appear in a volume in honor of F.R. Kraus, here: V.2.
2 William W. Hallo, “New viewpoints on cuneiform literature,” Israel Exploration
Journal 12 (1962) 13–26, here: I.1.

3 Idem, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” Israel Exploration Journal 16 (1966) 231–242.
4 Idem, “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society 88/1 (Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser, American Oriental
Series 53, 1968) 71–89, here: IV.1.
5 Idem, “The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry,”Actes de la XVIIe Rencontre Assyri-
ologique Internationale, Brussels, 1969 (1970) 116–134, here: I.2.

6 Idem, “Problems in Sumerian hermeneutics,” Perspectives in Jewish Learning 5 (1973)
1–12, here: I.3. Some of the points taken up in the articles listed in notes 2 and 4–6 were
developed further by J.H. Tigay, “On some aspects of prayer in the Bible,” AJS Review
1 (1976) 363–379.
288 iv.2. letters, prayers, and letter-prayers
Hezekiah.7 The text in question is one of several letter-prayers to which

I have given the collective title of “Royal Correspondence of Larsa.”
Today I wish to present a second composition from the same collection,
at the same time pursuing the case for the comparative approach that
can be made on its basis.
Cuneiform literature provides us with an unrivalled opportunity for
reconstructing a literary history within the biblical world. While the
biblical scholar must rely very largely on hypotheses (including, in
one form or another, the fundamental “documentary hypothesis”) to
recover the pre-history of the canon, the cuneiformist disposes of doc-
umented evidence for many of the successive stages through which a
given composition passed. The antiquity of the Sumerian literary cor-
pus has now been pushed back as far as the middle of the third mil-
lennium bc.8 The corpus grew and in part endured to the Seleucid
and Arsacid periods at the very end of the pre-Christian era.9 And in
the interval there are examples both of faithful preservation of indi-
vidual texts and of their creative adaptation. When such texts are sub-
jected to form-critical analysis, it becomes distinctly possible to attempt
to write genre-histories that take into account organic transformations
of the structure, the language, and even the function of whole genres
in response to the changing demands of evolving ideologies and his-
toric circumstances. It is only by tracing such genre-histories down to
their later stages that one can meet the pre-conditions for possible com-
parisons with biblical genres; and it is only when the same histories
have been traced back to their origins that such comparisons stand to
add meaningful dimension to the insights gained from the compara-
tive approach. I could illustrate this point from new discoveries in the
realm of Akkadian apocalyptic,10 but I prefer to confine my illustration
to the genre of Sumerian letter-prayers with special attention to royal
letter-prayers. Let me briefly review the stages by which the letter-form
was wedded to the prayer-function to produce this peculiar cuneiform
phenomenon.
7 Hallo, “The Royal correspondence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian prototype for the
prayer of Hezekiah?” Kramer Anniversary Volume (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 25,
1976) 209–224, here: V.1.
8 Idem, “Toward a history of Sumerian literature,” Sumerological Studies . . . Jacobsen (=
Assyriological Studies 20, 1976) 181–203, here: I.4, esp. 182, note 10.
9 Ibid., note 12.
10 Idem, loc. cit. (above, note 1), with notes 25–39.
iv.2. letters, prayers, and letter-prayers 289
A late fiction has left us an alleged letter (in Akkadian!) from the
first antediluvian sage Adapa (= Adam) to the first antediluvian king
(Alulim),11 but according to earlier native tradition, it was Enmerkar of
Uruk, during the Second Early Dynastic period (ca. 2600 bc), who first
resorted to a written letter.12 The first surviving example of an actual
letter is said to come from Fara at the beginning of the Third Early
Dynastic period (ca. 2500 bc).13 From the end of that period (ca. 2350–
2300 bc) at least a half dozen letters have survived, all in Sumerian.14 In
the succeeding Sargonic period (ca. 2300–2100 bc) letters were written
in both Sumerian15 and Akkadian.16 In the Ur III period (ca. 2100–
2000 bc) letter-writing really came into its own. The vast majority of
letters were written in Sumerian; they have been conveniently collected
by Sollberger17 and added to in numerous recent articles and reviews.18
Sollberger entitled his corpus of 373 neo-Sumerian letters “The busi-
ness and administrative correspondence under the kings of Ur”.19
11 O.R. Gurney and P. Hulin, The Sultantepe Tablets 2 (1964) Nos. 176 + 185. Cf. the
remarks of M. Civil, JNES 26 (1967) 208. For other implications of the text, cf. Hallo,
“Antediluvian Cities,” JCS 23 (1970) 62 and note 69; for the equation see provisionally
ibid. 60 and note 36.
12 S.N. Kramer, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (1952) lines 504–507. However, the cru-
cial phrase KA . . . gub, which Kramer hesitantly translates as “set up the words,” has
the technical meaning of “assignment, instruction” in the school-essays and proverbs.
For the preceding passage (lines 502 f.), according to which the letter was necessitated
because the herald was “heavy of mouth,” see Tigay, “Moses’ speech difficulty,” Gratz
College Annual of Jewish Studies 3 (1974) 29–42, esp. 37, note 53.
13 Cited by E. Ebeling, RLA 2 (1938) 65 s.v. Briefe, but I have been unable to find a
letter among the published Fara documents, for whose date cf. Hallo, “The date of the
Fara period,” Gelb Volume (Orientalia 42, 1972) 228–238.
14 See the list compiled by E. Sollberger, TCS 1 (1966) p. 3 sub 6.1.2a and add
D.O. Edzard, Sumerische Rechtsurkunden (1968) No. 96 (ITT 2:5758). Cf. also J. Bauer,
“Altsumerische Beiträge. 3. Ein altsumerischer Brief,” WO 6 (1971) 151 f.
15 See the list complied by Sollberger, TCS 1 (1966) p. 3 sub 6.1.2b (1-1c) and add
T. Donald, MCS 9 (1964) No. 252; Edzard, Sumerische Rechtsurkunden (1968) No. 95
(Sollberger, RA 60, 1966, 71); D.I. Owen, JCS 26 (1974) 65.
16 F.R. Kraus, “Einführung in die Briefe in altakkadischer Sprache,” JEOL 24
(1976) 74–104 (with complete bibliography); K.R. Veenhof, ibid., 105–110. Cf. also the
bibliography by A.L. Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia (1967) 201.
17 TCS 1 (1966).
18 E.g. Hallo, “The neo-Sumerian letter-orders,” BiOr (1969) 171–175, which see also
for a description of the genre. For other additions see Owen, JCS 24 (1972) 133 f. and
note 1; Piotr Michalowski, JCS 28 (1972) 161–168.
19 See Hallo, loc. cit. (above, note 18) 171 f. for a critique of this title.
And indeed, like nearly all their more occasional predecessors,20 they
are short and business-like when exchanged between private persons, or
concerned with routine administrative matters when, as was more often
the case, they involved royal chancelleries. But the growing popularity
of the letter format in neo-Sumerian times went hand in hand with
a growing standardization in epistolary style. Not only the opening
formulas21 but the message itself 22 became subject to fairly stringent
rules, a process brought to a head when letter-writing entered the
formal curriculum of the scribal schools. It is these schools which, along
with the temples, preserved the knowledge of Sumerian alive during
the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 bc) while Akkadian became
the vernacular for the population as a whole. The schools continued
to teach the writing of letters in Sumerian even while nearly every
real letter (and thousands of them have survived) was being written in
Akkadian.23 (Whether they also taught Akkadian epistolography is open
to debate).24 And as models of style to this end they turned in the first
instance (as was so often the case also elsewhere in the curriculum)25 to
the examples set and left by the Third Dynasty of Ur.26
20 For a pre-Sargonic letter of more than routine interest, see Sollberger, CIRPL
sub Enz 1, translated by Kramer (after A. Poebel), The Sumerians (1963) p. 331 and by
Sollberger in his Inscriptions Royales Sumériennes et Akkadiennes (1971) pp. 75–77 (report on
an Elamite raid to En-entar-zi, the future ruler of Lagash). For a comparable Sargonic
letter (report on Gutian raids by Ishkun-Dagan), see Hallo, “Gutium,” RLA 3 (1971)
710 and the translation by Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia (1967) 71 f. (No. 2); but
this and the other Ishkun-Dagan letter (ibid., No. 1) may be literary, according to a
suggestion of P. Michalowski.
21 Sollberger, TCS 1 (1966) pp. 2 f. sub 6.1 and 6.1.1.
22 Hallo, BiOr 26 (1969) 172.
23 The huge corpus of Old Babylonian letters is being newly edited by F.R. Kraus
et al., Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Übersetzung (1964 ff.). For English translations
of selected Akkadian letters of all periods, see Oppenheim, Letters From Mesopotamia. For
the last examples of (non-literary) Sumerian letters in Early Old Babylonian see Hallo,
BiOr 26 (1969) 175 (Nos. 388–390).
24 Kraus defended this thesis in “Briefschreibübungen im altbabylonischen Schu-
lunterricht,” JEOL 16 (1964) 16–39 and then questioned it in his introduction to

AbB 5 (1972) vii f. For an Old Babylonian school letter from Sargon of Akkad, see now
O.K. Gurney, UET 7 (1974) 73 I 1–17.
25 Cf. e.g. my remarks on lexical texts, HUCA 30 (1959) 136.
26 For general surveys see Hallo, “List of letter-prayers and other neo-Sumerian
literary letters,” loc. cit., (above, note 4), 88 f.; C. Wilcke, “Die Quellen der literarisch
überlieferten Briefe,” ZA 60 (1970) 67–69 with 4 tables. Earlier surveys by Edzard,
AfO 19 (1959–1960) 3 n. 27 and Kraus, ib. 20 (1963) 153–155.
It is to this ancient scholarly interest that we owe the preservation of

the “Royal Correspondence of Ur,” a corpus of over twenty separate
letters between the kings of the Third Dynasty and their high officials.
Only about half of them have been edited or translated hitherto,27 but a
new edition of most of them was the subject of a recent doctoral disser-
tation at Yale by Piotr Michalowski, and it is thanks to his efforts that I
can characterize the collection here briefly. All the letters touch on high
affairs of state: the defence of the country; the subservience or insubor-
dination of local governors; the maintenance of trade in vital raw mate-
rials and foodstuffs; and so on. They were exchanged between the king
and some of his highest officials; the prime minister Irmu,28 the mili-
tary viceroy of the great defensive-wall of the country (bad-igi-hursanga),
Puzur-Marduk,29 the crown prince Amar-Suen, the merchant Ur-dun,
the presiding officer of the assembly, Sharrum-bani,30 the governor
of Kazallu, Puzur-Numushda,31 and the founder of the Isin Dynasty,
Ishbi-Irra.32 When fully restored, they will throw a bright new light on
the history of Mesopotamia in the 21st century, for although our sur-
viving examplars were written as late as the eighteenth century, there
is little need to doubt that they go back to authentic originals from the
royal archives. The events, the places, and especially the persons men-
tioned in them tally too well with what is known of Ur III times from
contemporaneous documents to allow any other conclusion.32a
27 Note especially the following (in order of appearance): A. Falkenstein, ZA 49

(1949) 59–79; Kramer apud ANET (1950, 1955) 480 f.; T. Jacobsen, JCS 7 (1953) 36–
47; P.v.d, Meer, Chronology2 (1955, 1963) p. 45; Kramer, The Sumerians (1963) pp. 331–335;
F.A. Ali, Sumerian Letters (1964) pp. 27–52; Wilcke, WO 5 (1969) 1–31; ZA 60 (1970) 54–
69; Edzard, MDP 57 (1974) No. I; Kramer, OECT 5 (1976) ch. 2. Cited in notes 28–32a,
36–38, 40–42 and 50 by name, date, and page only.
28 Kramer (1965) 331–333; Ali (1964) 27–41; Wilcke (1969) 2 f., 6 f.; (1970) 62–64; cf.
also Ali, Sumer 26 (1970) 145–178; Kramer (1976) 13–15.

29 Wilcke (1969) 3–6; Note that Puzur-Marduk was previously called Puzur-Shulgi.
For the significance of the name-change for the “pattern of usurpation,” see Hallo,
JCS 20 (1966) 136 n. 49 and references there, here: III.2.
30 Wilcke (1969) 7 f. On the Šu-Sin correspondence see also S. Lieberman, JCS 22
(1969) 53–62.
31 Falkenstein (1949) 60–63; Kramer (1955) 480 f., (1963) 333–335; Ali (1964) 42–52;
Wilcke (1970) 60–62; Edzard (1974) 9–34. Note that Puzur-Numushda was also called
Puzur-Shulgi; cf. above, note 29. Cf. also Ali Sumer 26 (1970) 160–178.
32 Jacobsen (1953) 39 f.; Kramer (1963) 333; v.d. Meer (1963) 45; Wilcke (1970) 55–59;
Edzard (1974) 9–34; Kramer (1976) 15–18.

32a Ali (1964) 1–26; reprinted as “Two collections of Sumerian letters,” Ar.Or. 33 (1965)
529–540.
The style of these royal or “historical” letters is straightforward

and unembellished, and differs little from the isolated examples of
actual letters on public affairs preserved in original exemplars of pre-
Sargonic and Sargonic date.33 The address is short and to the point,
e.g. “Say to my king, this is what Puzur-Šulgi the governor of Kazallu
your servant says.” The conclusion is equally simple, usually either
“May my king know it” or (when the king is writing): “It’s urgent
(literally: it’s of a flood)—don’t be negligent”.34 The body of the letter
may include an occasional repetition or such clichés as “if my king
is (truly) of heaven”,35 but on the whole sticks to the subject at issue.
When grouping the letters, the scribes generally paired the letter to
the king with his answer, in that order.36 Much the same can be said
of four letters to and from Iddin-Dagan and Lipit-Ishtar, two kings
of Isin who date from the following century (1974–1954 and 1934–
1924 bc respectively)37 as well as of a small number of miscellaneous
letters and documents generally grouped with “Letter Collection B”38
and sometimes referred to as “the Royal Correspondence of Isin”.39
But the Ur III period also bequeathed a very different kind of letter
to the curriculum. This consisted of a highly stylized document which,
while epistolary in structure, was in terms of its function a true petition.
Such a petition could be addressed to an individual,40 a king,41 or a
deity;42 but regardless of the addressee, it appears that in each case it
was in effigy that he or she was addressed. That is, the petition in letter-
form was meant to be deposited at the feet of the statue—whether that
33 Above, note 20.

34 For a-ma-ru-kam and its variants see Sollberger, TCS 1 (1966) p. 99 s.v.
35 E.g. Hallo, TLB 3 (1973) 172: 5.
36 See the charts by Wilcke, 1970, facing p. 68.
37 Ali (1964) 63–79. A fifth letter of the same (?) type is mentioned by M.B. Rowton,
JCS 21 (1967 [publ. 1969]) 273.

38 Ali (1964) 19–26; cf. the comments of Wilcke (1970) 67–69.
39 Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968) 88 f., here: IV.1. Note, however, that the “non-historical”
items in this collection can mostly be identified with Ur III personages. Cf. also
M.E. Cohen, “The Lu-Ninurta letters,” WO 9 (1977) 10–13, who claims the letter Ni
4326 + 9254: 9 ff. (ISET 2: 119) for Enlil-bani of Isin.
40 E.g. the letter of Lugal-MURUB to Enlil-massu, for which see Ali (1964) 130–136.
41 E.g. the letters of Aba-indasa, Uršaga and Lugal-murub, for which see, Ali (1964)
53–62, 80–98. For other treatments of the Uršaga letter, see Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968) 75 f.
and 88, here: IV.1, (sub B6); JNES 31 1972) 94 f.
42 E.g. the letter of Inannaka(m) to Nintinugga, for which see Ali (1964) 137–143 and
Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968) 89, here: IV.1, (sub B17) and JNES 31 (1972) 91 f.
was itself a votive, royal or divine statue.43 In this function, in short, the
petition served as a vehicle of communication with deceased or divine
intercessors. I have therefore designated the genre as a letter-prayer,
and assigned it a major role in the development of individual prayer in
Sumerian.44
The typical letter-prayer began with a salutation loaded and over-
loaded with epithets of the addressee suitable to the purposes of the
petitioner. If sickness plagued him, he might rehearse the healing pow-
ers of the deity; if unjustly accused, the king’s concern for righteousness;
if promotion to higher office was his goal, he might remind a supe-
rior of his solicitousness for underlings in general and his past favors
to the suppliant in particular. To accommodate the growing number of
invocations, the address formula was expanded into two or even three
salutations, each with its own stereotyped predicate.45
The message too assumed a more literary cast. Usually it is possible
to isolate discrete sections, devoted respectively and successively to the
recital of the addressee’s past beneficences, the petitioner’s past deserts
and present tribulations, and his promise to sing the deity’s praises to
the multitudes when and if his wishes are fulfilled. The parallels that
this structure suggests to the biblical psalms of individual lament or
thanksgiving are apparent, and the millennium or more that separate
the respective genres can be largely bridged by the later development
of the letter-prayer into the eršahunga, the lament for appeasing the
heart of the angry god which became the typical vehicle for individual
prayer in Sumerian after Old Babylonian times.46 Although the generic
43 Hallo JAOS 88 (1968) 79 and note 74, here: IV.1. Even when a private individual is
addressed (above, note 40), note that he is apostrophized in terms more suitable for the
statues of the protective deities that flanked the entrance to temples and palaces (dalad,
dlamma). Note an Akkadian letter-prayer similarly addressed via the writer’s personal
deity (a-na DINGIR a-bi-ia) to Marduk! Lutz, YOS 2:141; cf. the edition by van Dijk, La
Sagesse . . . (1953) 13 f., and the remarks by Kraus, “Ein altbabylonischer Brief an eine
Gottheit,” RA 65 (1971) 36.
44 Above, note 4. See there for details of the characterization offered here.
45 The first two found their way into the Old Babylonian lexical list called izi
(M. Civil et al., MSL 13 [1971] 33 lines 487 f.) and, from there (?), all three were incorpo-
rated, oddly enough, into the late canonical lexicon of professional names called Lú =
ša (Civil et al., MSL 12 [1969] 106 lines 84–86; cf. the collation of C.B.F. Walker, BiOr 29
[1972] 310 ad loc.). Cf. also the catchline of NBGT I (MSL 4 [1956] 147: cf. TCS 1, p. 1).
46 For recent discussions of this genre, see Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968) 80–82, here: IV.1;
JCS 24 (1971) 40 ad SLTF 223; JAOS 97 (1977) 584 f. ad M.J. Seux, Hymnes et Prières
. . . (1976) 139–168; W.G. Lambert, JNES 33 (1974) 267–322; Werner Mayer, Studia Pohl:
Series Maior 5 (1976) 32 note 63.
designation47 does not appear in subscripts before the first millennium,

examples of the genre have been identified in Middle Babylonian copies
and perhaps even earlier.48 Moreover, there is already a reference to
bringing eršahunga-texts from Babylon to Assur as plunder in the Middle
Assyrian exemplar of the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic.49
The original date of composition of the earliest letter-prayers, like
that of the historical letters, can be traced back to Ur III times, for all
of their writers can be identified with persons prominent under that
dynasty, and specifically at the religious capital of Nippur. This asser-
tion is made in the light of monumental and archival texts actually dat-
ing back to Ur III times, as well as of the other genres of literary texts
preserved in Old Babylonian copies, all of which preserve the same
names in the same functions.50 Indeed, one can weave the evidence of
all these diverse genres together to reconstruct an intimate picture of
the family relations and careers of the political and religious aristocracy
at Nippur in the 21st and 20th centuries. I have made an attempt in this
direction for one such family (“The House of Ur-Meme”) but it is not
my purpose to pursue that line here.51 Nor do I propose to trace the
evolution of the petitionary letter into a special vehicle for scribal con-
cerns.52 Rather I wish to pursue the development of the literary letter
in another direction, namely that of the royal letter-prayer.
47 MSL 13 (1971) 232:15; differently AHw s.v. eršahungû.

48 See the edition of CNM 10099 (obv.) and duplicates by Lambert, JNES 33 (1974)
291 f., its bilingual successor ibid. 288 f., and its (exceptionally!) unilingual Akkadian ver-
sion ibid. 278 f. (lines 71–86). In the last, note especially line 155 (pp. 282 f. and Lam-
bert’s comment p. 305) with its seven-fold sins (for which cf. JAOS 88: 81 n. 85, here:
IV.1).
49 Lambert, AfO 18 (1957) 44:6. Cf. Peter Machinist, The Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta I
(Ph.D. Thesis, Yale, 1978) 128:6 and 370 f.

50 See above, notes 40–42. For biographical details on Aba-indasa, see JAOS 88:88
n. 115, here: IV.1; on Uršaga, see JNES 31:94 f.; on Lugal-MURUB, sec BiOr 26:174 and
below, note 52; on Inannaka, see JNES 31:91f. As for Enlil-massu (above, note 40), note
that he is also the addressee of letter B 19 (Ali [1964] 149–152), where he is described as
a pupil of the “academicians” (um-mi-a) Nabi-Enlil and Enlil-alša (= Zuzu); for all three
of these individuals, see Hallo, “Seals lost and found” in M. Gibson and R.D. Biggs,
eds., Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East (= Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 6; 1977) 57 with
notes 13–20.
51 Hallo, “The House of Ur-Meme,” JNES 31 (1972) 87–95.
52 For the “scribal correspondence” see provisionally the list in JAOS 88:89, here:
IV.1, sub II. Its survival is attested by the bilingual version of a letter addressed to Lugal-
MURUB (above, notes 40 f. and 50) “the Nippurian” (ni-pu-ri-ia; so J. Krecher, UF 1,
1969, 152 f.) and now known in more or less contemporaneous copies from Hattusha,
Ugarit and Assur; see J. Nougayrol, Ugaritica 5 (1968) 23–28, 376 No. 15, and 628 Fig. 17.
Up to this point in time (i.e., ca. 1900 bc), the literary letters of the
school curriculum were of two discrete types, though both types were
grouped together, in some instances, on large single tablets. The histor-
ical letters were written by the living king, or to him by his highest offi-
cials, while the letter-prayers were all composed by private individuals.
The letter-prayer, indeed, represented the private individual’s cheapest
form of communication with the deity, for though the Mesopotamian
worshipper seems to have lived by the rule of í÷éø §ä éðô úà äàãé àì
(Deut. 16:16; cf. Ex. 23:15, 34:20), he could rarely afford the optimal
dedicatory, or votive, offering: the statue of the worshipper set up in the
cella of the deity and inscribed with his prayer, which was conceived
thereby as profferred perpetually by the statue of the worshipper to the
statue of the deity, both statues serving as images or surrogates of their
originals.53 Less costly votives were available: usually elaborate stone
carvings and replicas of bowls, maceheads, seals and other tools and
weapons of daily life.54 Their inscriptions might proclaim their purpose
in the standard votive formulas as being “for the sake of the long life
of the donor” and/or designated beneficiaries such as the king, or the
donor’s wife and children. Or, alternatively, a specific prayer, whether
as a petition for success in a given venture, or as thanks for favors
previously asked and now granted, might be added to the basic ded-
icatory inscription, usually as the “name” of the votive object.55 Even
such objects, however, proved too expensive for the masses. As a result,
the letter was introduced as an alternate form of petition. Possibly it
required a small concomitant offering and certainly a fee to the scribe,
but no more. A letter addressed to the deity (or to the deified king)
via his statue could be commissioned from any trained scribe, and
deposited at the feet of the cult-statue much as generations of wor-
shippers have inserted their letters to God in the chinks of the Western
Wall.
53 The result was often a chapel filled with statues, such as those recovered by the
Chicago expeditions to the Diyala Valley cities of the Early Dynastic period; cf. e.g.
P. Delougaz and S. Lloyd, Pre-Sargonid Temples in the Diyala Region (OIP 58, 1942) 188,
fig. 149.
54 For a more detailed typology of votive objects, see Hallo, HUCA 33 (1962) 12–14;
for their inscriptions, ibid., 16 f.; Sollberger and Kupper Inscriptions Royales (1971) 29 f.,
For the view that the objects should be termed “dedicatory” rather than “votive” see
A.K. Grayson, JAOS 90 (1970) 528 f.; G. van Driel, JAOS 93 (1973) 68 f.
55 See I. J, Gelb, “The names of ex-voto objects in ancient Mesopotamia,” Names 21
(1956) 65–69.
But a more compelling analogy can be suggested, for among the

“historical” or “biographical” psalms of David preserved in the bibli-
cal Psalter are five (Psalms 56–60) which share the designation MIK-
TAM and commemorate those events in his life which strengthened his
legitimacy as king.56 These psalms, apparently inscribed on steles, are
somehow related to the prayer of Hezekiah concerning his illness, des-
ignated as a “letter” (Isaiah 38:9),57 and confirm the convergence of the
letter-prayer and the royal prayer in the literary tradition of Israel. In
Sumerian literature, the convergence begins with Sin-iddinam of Larsa
(ca. 1849–1843 bc) and anticipates five discrete aspects of the biblical
tradition: royal attribution, historical or biographical context, special
emphasis on illness, pestilence, war or other national crisis, monumen-
tal medium, and epistolary structure or designation.
If it be argued that the chronological gap between the two traditions
is prohibitively large,58 that gap can be closed in part by intervening
evidence, such as the significant corpus of Hittite royal prayers.59 And
the discovery of ever more examples of bilingual (Sumero-Akkadian)
or trilingual (Sumero-Akkado-Hittite) hymns and prayers at the Hittite
capital and at Ugarit reveals the probable mechanisms of the transmis-
sion of Babylonian models: in the major libraries and scribal schools
of the periphery, it was customary to copy and translate the classical
texts of the Old Babylonian tradition and at the same time to create
native compositions in the local vernacular which closely followed the
Babylonian prototypes.60 When, as in the case of the hymn to Ner-
gal, recently republished in translation by Seux, we can compare the
peripheral version of the second millennium with the canonical version
from neo-Assyrian Nineveh, we cannot help but be impressed with the
temporal and spatial extent of a literary tradition that began in Baby-
lonia two thousand years earlier.61 And now, thanks to the discovery of
a neo-Assyrian duplicate, the literary tradition of the royal Sumerian
56 See in greater detail Hallo, “The expansion of cuneiform literature,” (above,
note 1).
57 Ibid., and “A Sumerian prototype . . . ” (above, note 7).
58 On this argument in general, see above, note 6.
59 On these see Ph.H.J. Houwink ten Cate, “Hittite royal prayers,” Numen 16 (1969)
81–98.
60 H. G, Güterbock, “The composition of Hittite prayers to the Sun,” JAOS 78
(1958) 237–245.
61 Seux, op. cit. (above, note 46) 78–81 and my comments JAOS 97 (1977) 584(1).
letter-prayer can be followed from the 19th century bc all the way to
the 7th. Therewith the potential link to the royal prayer in the Bible is
strengthened.62
62 See above, note 1. For a possible epigraphic parallel to the cuneiform letter-prayer,
see Joseph Naveh, “A Hebrew letter from the seventh century bc,” Israel Exploration Jour-
nal 10 (1960) 129–139; cf. Dennis Pardee, “The judicial plea from Mes.ad Hashavyahu
.
(Yavneh-Yam): a new philological study,” Maarav 1/1 (1978) 33–66, who classifies the
document as “a judicial plea in epistolary form—in more traditional terms, a letter of
petition” (ibid., 38; cf. ibid. 55).
iv.3
LAMENTATIONS AND PRAYERS

IN SUMER AND AKKAD
The lamentations of ancient Mesopotamia are poetic responses to real

or imaginary disasters. They can be broadly divided into two groups
which, in keeping with usage in biblical criticism, can be described as
congregational (communal) and individual laments, respectively. Within
each group, the material can be further classified according to the focus
of the lament: a city or temple, a deity, or a deceased king on the one
hand; a living king or a deceased individual on the other. In keeping
with this classification, the native scribes recognized various specific
genres (literary categories), often labeling the compositions accordingly
and always adhering strictly to the traditional norms that featured a
common, distinctive set of characteristics. In the millennial history of
these genres, language is a useful index of date, with the earliest stages
generally represented by main-dialect Sumerian, followed by dialectal
Sumerian, Sumero-Akkadian bilinguals, and Akkadian unilinguals. In
the survey that follows, the compositions are organized by genre and
within each genre by language or dialect. They are cited by the titles
generally coined for them by Assyriologists, rather than by their ancient
titles, which normally consisted of their opening words or “incipit.”
In the conclusion, the genres are compared and contrasted with their
biblical counterparts.
Congregational Laments
Forerunners in Main-Dialect Sumerian

The earliest example of a congregational lament dates from the Old
Sumerian period and constitutes a kind of forerunner to the lamenta-
tions over the destruction of temples and cities of the Neo-Sumerian
canon. “The Fall of Lagash” is a unique composition, preserved on a
single clay tablet dating from, or at least referring to, Uru-inimgina
(Urukagina), the last ruler of the First Dynasty of Lagash, around
300 iv.3. lamentations and prayers in sumer and akkad
2350 bce. It catalogs the shrines of Lagash devastated by Lugalzagesi

of Umma and puts the blame squarely on that ruler or his patron-deity,
absolving the ruler of Lagash. Lugalzagesi went on to conquer all of
Sumer but was in turn defeated by Sargon of Akkad (Agade). The story
is related in a text better described as a legend than as a lamentation.
But the dynasty that Sargon founded came to grief in its own turn
at the hands of the Gutians. According to the “Curse of Agade,” the
destruction of Akkad occurred during the reign of Sargon’s grandson,
Naram-Sin, although other evidence suggests a later date for the event.
This highly tendentious hymn has many features in common with the
city-laments. A supposed lament for the city of Kirga is not a parody
of the genre but rather a proverbial complaint about the loss of “stan-
dards” (DI.IR.GA).
The linguistic evidence attests to the importance of musical accom-
paniment to formal lamentation. There are harps of lamentation (BA-
LAG A.NIR.RA) and of wailing (BALAG ÍR.RA). Reed-(pipes) of wail-
ing (GI ÍR.RA = qān bikı̄ti) gave rise to the technical term for ritual
wailing (GI.RA.NÚM = girrānu). For percussion instruments see below.
City-Laments in Main-Dialect and Dialectal Sumerian

The Sargonic Empire was restored to some extent by the Third Dy-
nasty of Ur whose own fall at the end of the third millennium was
regarded as an especially devastating sign of divine displeasure. No less
than six laments commemorated the event, and they did so in such
vivid terms that they suggest the reaction of eyewitnesses. Because of
their specific allusions to historic personages and events, they are some-
times described as “historical laments.” Two of them, however, men-
tion King Ishme-Dagan of Isin, and were therefore written at least fifty
years after the disaster, and so, probably, were the others as well. In fact,
the laments were designed as liturgical accompaniments to the royal
rebuilding of the destroyed temples, which involved the inevitable raz-
ing of their remains—a possible sacrilege against their gods. Like their
forerunners, therefore, the city-laments describe the earlier destruction
in lurid detail. They seek to absolve the royal rebuilder by heaping
blame on the foreigners who caused the original devastation. But unlike
their forerunners, they were intended for liturgical use, as indicated
by their division into anywhere from four to twelve or more stanzas
designated as “first genuflection” (KI.RU.GÚ), “second genuflection,”
and so on. Their allusions to specific destructions made them unsuit-
iv.3. lamentations and prayers in sumer and akkad 301
able for subsequent reuse in the liturgy, but they were adopted into
the Neo-Sumerian canon and widely recopied in the scribal schools of
mid Old Babylonian times (about 1800–1700). Three of them were writ-
ten wholly or largely in the main dialect of Sumerian. The “Lamenta-
tion over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur,” which may be the first in
the series, catalogs the devastation visited on all the major cities of the
Ur III Dynasty in its second stanza, while concentrating on the capital
city of Ur in the other four. The laments for Eridu and Uruk (modern
Warka, biblical Erech) bemoan the fates of these two cities in at least
eight and twelve stanzas respectively.
Three other city-laments bewailed the fate of the political capital at
Ur, the religious capital at Nippur (modern Nuffar), and, in fragmen-
tary form, the more obscure town or temple of Ekimar. They were
written wholly or largely in a dialect of Sumerian called “Emesal” (lit-
erally “thin” or “attenuated speech”). This dialect was affected, in liter-
ary texts, by women or goddesses and by the liturgical singers (GALA
= kalû) who specialized in reciting lamentations. Females were often
described as bemoaning the fate of their cities, their husbands, or their
sons, and the theme of the weeping mother (sometimes compared to
the mater dolorosa of the Christian tradition) has been recognized in sev-
eral types of laments. The kalû-singers may have been castrati singing
in a kind of falsetto; in any case, they became the butt of unflattering
references, particularly in the proverbs.
Tambourine-Laments and Harp-Songs in Dialectal Sumerian

Inevitably, the Dynasty of Isin came to an end, meeting its doom at the
hands of the rival Dynasty of Larsa. The event was commemorated in a
number of compositions in which Nin-Isina (the divine “Lady of Isin”)
in one or another of her various manifestations laments the fate of
her city. Most often, these compositions were labeled as “tambourine-
laments” (ÉR.ŠÈM.MA, from ÉR = tazzimtu, lament, or bikı̄tu, wailing,
and ŠÉM = halhallatu, tambourine). Over one hundred compositions
of this genre ˘were˘ recorded in two catalog texts that list their incipits
(i.e., the first line or first words of each). They were addressed or
attributed to a variety of deities, and probably composed during the
First Dynasty of Babylon, which, under King Hammurabi, succeeded
Isin and Larsa as the main political power of the region. At least
twenty-five of the tambourine-laments are preserved in whole or in
part; they are invariably composed in dialectal Sumerian.
Except for those that refer to Isin, they do not, like the city-laments,
describe a specific, historical destruction or reconstruction and can
better be regarded as “ritual laments.” They couched their complaints
in such generalized language that they could be reused liturgically
for many centuries. Indeed, some of the Old Babylonian examples of
the genre recur in copies of the first millennium, and new examples
were still being copied and perhaps even composed as late as the first
century.
But the late ershemmas served a new purpose. Except when used in
certain ritual performances (KI.DU.DU = kidudû), the first-millennium
ershemmas were now appended to another genre, the song of the harp
or lyre (BALAG = balaggu). Harp-songs were alluded to already in
the third millennium and are known from a dozen actual examples
in the second and from many more in the first. They included some
of the longest of all Sumerian poems. They were divided into liturgi-
cal stanzas like the city-laments, but sometimes featured as many as
sixty-five or more of them. Occasionally they were accompanied by
glosses (marginal annotations) possibly representing musical notations
or instructions. In their late form, each harp-song concluded with a
tambourine-lament, and the resulting combinations were catalogued
together as “39 lamentations of gods” (literally “of Enlil”) and “18
lamentations of goddesses” (literally “of Inanna”). All were written in
dialectal Sumerian, but the first-millennium recensions often added a
word-for-word translation into Akkadian, which was inserted between
the Sumerian lines in interlinear fashion.
A survey of the entire genre as well as the detailed history of par-
ticular examples shows clearly that these long compositions became
increasingly repetitive; they were filled with stock phrases; and some-
times with whole stock-stanzas. The effect is best described as litany-
like. That these compositions were employed in the liturgy is clear from
cultic calendars that specified their recitation on certain days of the cul-
tic year, sometimes in identical form for different deities on different
days. In this way, their divorce from specific historical events became
complete.
The genre known as “hand-lifting” laments (ŠU.ÍL.LA) consists of
late compositions in dialectal Sumerian with an interlinear Akkadian
translation. Like the tambourine-laments and harp-songs, these laments
typically seek to appease an angry deity on behalf of the city, temple,
and community. They are to be clearly distinguished from the Akka-
dian incantations of the lifting of the hand (see below) that deal with
individual distress.
Unilingual Akkadian City-Laments

Although the liturgical lamentations in dialectal Sumerian often ac-
quired (interlinear) translations into Akkadian in the first millennium
(see above), their format and style were not much favored in new Akka-
dian compositions. Occasional lament-like passages were embedded in
other literary genres, as in the case of Marduk’s “Lament over the
Destruction of Babylon” found in the fourth tablet (chapter) of the Myth
of Erra, which was composed toward the end of the second millennium
(see “Myth and Myth-making in Sumer and Akkad” earlier in this vol-
ume). As late as the Seleucid period, an Akkadian text lamented the
destruction of the cities in Sumer and Akkad, apparently at the hands
of the Gutians. If it was alluding to the historical Gutian invasion in
the third millennium, the lament may represent a late copy of a much
earlier Akkadian original, or perhaps the Akkadian translation of a lost
Sumerian original. More likely it was using the ethnic label in a purely
geographical sense to designate any warlike enemy on the northern or
eastern frontier. The text has also been regarded as “a neo-Babylonian
lament for Tammuz,” the Akkadian equivalent of the ancient Sumerian
deity Dumuzi.
Dumuzi-Laments
Ever since the domestication of plants and animals in the early Neo-
lithic period, Mesopotamian agriculture featured a mixed economy in
which farmers and seminomadic pastoralists lived in an uneasy but
interdependent symbiosis. During the late spring and summer, when
vegetation dried up in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, cattle and
sheep were driven to the highlands in the east, where verdure con-
tinued to grow. Sumerian mythology equated these highlands or moun-
tains (KUR in Sumerian) with the netherworld (likewise named KUR),
and the seasonal cycle with cosmic events. The desiccation of the fer-
tile soil was thought to reflect the banishment to the netherworld of the
god of fertility. The rebirth of fertility in the winter (and early spring)
echoed his return to the world of the living. Most often this god was
called Dumuzi, whose name can mean “the healthy child,” but other
gods such as Damu, son of Nin-Isina, also filled the role. Dumuzi was
the son of Duttur (or Ninsun), the brother of Geshtinanna, and the
husband of Inanna. These goddesses (and others) figured prominently
as reciters of lamentations designed to assure the return of the deceased
deity to the world of the living. Even Inanna, who, according to the
mythology, was responsible for consigning Dumuzi to the netherworld
in the first place, participated in these appeals. The “Death of Dumuzi”
is recounted in a moving Sumerian lament and incorporated in a num-
ber of other compositions of a mythological character, such as “The
Descent of Inanna,” “Dumuzi’s Dream,” “Dumuzi and the GALLA-
demons,” and “Inanna and Bilulu.”
The historical tradition knew of two mortals who also bore the name
of Dumuzi, one a “shepherd” and ruler of Pa-tibira (or Bad-tibira)
before the Flood, the other a “fisherman” and ruler of Uruk just before
Gilgamesh. On the basis of late laments in which the divine Dumuzi
is associated (or even identified) with other antediluvian kings, and of
references to him in other laments as “shepherd,” the earlier mortal
(rather than the later one) may have served as prototype of the deity.
Laments for Kings

The deified Mesopotamian kings of the classical period (about 2250–
1750) were considered stand-ins for Dumuzi, especially in the rite of
the “sacred marriage” and, albeit more rarely, in the ceremonies sur-
rounding their death and burial. The death of kings was a major
concern of Mesopotamian ideology, particularly if death was untimely
or took a bizarre form. The topic was often addressed in the histo-
riography, particularly in its characteristically Mesopotamian form of
(historical) omens, which assumed connections between observed nat-
ural phenomena and historical events. At other times the issue was
dealt with in the liturgy, if it can be assumed that some laments for
Dumuzi were actually addressed to the newly deceased king. (See also
“Theologies, Priests, and Worship in Ancient Mesopotamia” in Part 8,
Vol. III, and “Love Lyrics from the Ancient Near East” in Part 9,
Vol. IV.)
There were also a number of compositions mentioning the king by
name. Their prototype may be “The Death of Gilgamesh,” a Sumerian
epic that details the legendary fate of this celebrated ruler of Uruk.
Certainly this narrative has many points of resemblance with “The
Death of Ur-Nammu,” a poem about how the founder of the Third
Dynasty of Ur met his death in battle, a fate Mesopotamian kings
normally reserved for their enemies. This lament composed for Ur-
Nammu’s burial was so moving and so personal in its language that it
has sometimes been attributed to his widow.
Lamenting the death of Mesopotamian royalty was also noted out-

side of strictly literary texts. Thus, for example, the founder of the
First Dynasty of Ĭsin, which succeeded the Third Dynasty of Ur, was
mourned in a “great wailing” (ÉR.GU.LA) according to a simple ar-
chival text that also records a banquet for his successor. Nabonidus,
the last king of the last independent Mesopotamian dynasty, ordered
a seven-day period of mourning for his mother when, in 547 bce, she
died at the venerable age of 104. This information is recorded in a
short third-person subscript added to her lengthy autobiography, turn-
ing that monument into a funerary inscription, another genre occasion-
ally attesting to laments for departed royalty.
Excerpt from the “ ‘Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur” (Fourth Stanza)
There is lamentation in the haunted city, reed-(pipes) of wailing are intoned
there.
In its midst there is lamentation, reed-(pipes) of wailing are intoned there.
In it they (the people) pass their days in lamentation. Oh my son, you who are
its native son by your own deserts, why should you wail?
Oh Nanna [i.e., the Moon-god, patron-deity of Ur], you who are its native
son by your own deserts, why should you wail?
There is no turning back the completed judgment of the (divine) assembly!
The command of An and Enlil (heads of the pantheon) knows no overturning!
Ur was indeed given kingship (but) an eternal reign it was not given.
From time immemorial, since the nation was founded, until the people multi-
plied,
Who has (ever) seen a reign of kingship that would take precedence (forever)?
Its kingship, its reign is wearied in extending itself.
Oh my Nanna, do not weary yourself more, leave your city!
Individual Laments
Elegies
The destruction of cities or temples and the real or imaginary death
of gods and kings were all alike cause for communal or congregational
lament. The death of a private individual, however, or even the sickness
or discomfiture of a king, were cause for individual lament. The death
of individuals inspired the elegy, which is infrequently attested. Two
such elegies, identified as I.LU (= nubû or qubbû), are attributed to
a certain Lu-dingira (“man of God”) and recited over his deceased
father and wife, respectively. Lu-dingira is known from another text
(“Message to His Mother”) as a citizen of Nippur living in a distant

country. It is possible that his elegies form part of a novelistic treatment
of such life, and episodes of aristocratic life in Nippur are preserved
in other genres. The fact that all six exemplars of the text appear to
stem from Nippur may lend support to such a supposition. One of
them, moreover, has interlinear glosses in Akkadian. The genre may
have survived in unilingual form in “An Assyrian Elegy,” by and for
a woman who died in childbirth; in the “Lament of Gilgamesh for
Enkidu,” embedded in the eighth tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh; and
elsewhere.
Private Letter-Prayers in Sumerian

From a fairly early period on, the great gods of the Sumerian pantheon
were imagined as having human form. They were so represented in
the iconography, and human feelings were attributed to them in the
religious literature. They were deemed subject to certain human weak-
nesses, such as anger or jealousy, and accordingly appeased by their
mortal petitioners. Ideally, the penitent was expected to become a priest
or other officiant in the temple, there to stand in permanent personal
attendance on the deity, the latter represented by a divine symbol or,
later, by an anthropomorphic statue. Where this was impossible, the
same purpose could be served by replacing the worshiper with a statue
depicting him in an attitude of permanent attendance on the statue
of the deity in the temple. Stone carvers inscribed the statue with the
name of the entreated deity and the name of the worshiper, as well as
a formulaic prayer for the long life of the worshiper, his family, and his
king. More modest votive objects could also be commissioned. These
might be replicas in precious metal or in stone of tools, weapons, and
other objects used in the daily life of the worshiper. But even such votive
offerings were beyond the means of most people, who therefore made
do with commissioning a scribe to write a clay tablet that was deposited
at the feet of the divine statue. Private communication with the gods
therefore typically assumed the form of a letter and the function of a
prayer. The resulting genre can best be described as a letter-prayer.
Letter-prayers can be traced to the Neo-Sumerian period (end of the
third millennium). They are directed to many of the great gods of the
Sumerian pantheon, including Enki, Nanna, Nin-Isina, Martu, Nin-
dinugga, and Ninshubur. Occasionally they may address a king or even
a deceased(?) kinsman, but here, too, most probably in the form of their
statues. The letter-prayers typically open with an elaborate salutation in

which the deity is invoked by a series of epithets selected to emphasize
those divine qualities that will best serve the petitioner’s needs. Thus,
the sick penitent may praise the healing capacities of the healing god or
goddess, the man deprived of his patrimony may appeal to the deity’s
sense of justice, and the scribe undeservedly relieved of his duties may
seek the wisdom of the scribal patron deity. While standard letters make
do with one simple salutation, the letter-prayers require a second and
sometimes even a third salutation if they are to accommodate all these
invocations. The body of the letter that follows prominently features
the complaints and protests of the petitioner and reinforces the appeal
for divine assistance by emphasizing the deity’s past favors and the
penitent’s past deserts and innocence. The conclusion of the letter-
prayer may include promises to sing the deity’s praises if the prayer is
answered, as well as a closing formulaic request for quick action typical
of normal letters, or a new formula praying that the heart of the deity
be appeased.
Royal Letter-Prayers in Sumerian

Although in origin a private, and more economical, alternative to
prayers inscribed on expensive statues and other votive objects, the
letter-prayer came to be employed by royalty, especially under the
Dynasty of Larsa before that city succumbed to Hammurabi. The ear-
liest example of “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa” is an intriguing
document that recounts how Sin-iddinam commissioned a statue of his
father and royal predecessor so that the latter might “forward” the son’s
prayers, in the form of two letters placed in the statue’s mouth, to the
sun-god Utu, the patron deity of the dynasty. The same Sin-iddinam
was responsible for at least two other letter-prayers, one to Utu to
lament the evil fate that has befallen Larsa, and the other to the heal-
ing goddess for restoration of the king’s health. The correspondence
climaxes in a letter-prayer addressed, not to a deity but to Rim-Sin, last
king of the dynasty. In it, the princess Nin-shatapada, daughter of the
founder of the rival Dynasty of Uruk, begs Rim-Sin to restore her to
her priestly office, urging him to treat her with the same magnanimity
he displayed toward Uruk after defeating its king. The terms in which
she writes mirror those employed in the date-formulas, inscriptions, and
hymns of the dynasty. The incorporation of her letter-prayer in the cor-
respondence of the dynasty suggests that the petition was granted.
Bilingual and Akkadian Letter-Frayers

Letter-prayers were not commonly written in Akkadian. The earliest
example may be an Old Babylonian letter addressed to the writer’s
personal deity for transmittal to Marduk. Others come from Mari
under Yasmakh-Adad and Zimri-Lim in the eighteenth century, and
at least one of them is quite elaborately constructed. Zimri-Lim is
also the addressee of a letter-prayer, and this is in interlinear bilingual
(Sumerian and Akkadian) form; whether it was an authentic letter or
the creation of a learned scribe is not certain. The latter explanation
seems to apply to some of the private letter-prayers known in Sumerian
from the Old Babylonian schools at Nippur, Ur, and elsewhere, many
of them involving a certain Lugal-murub of Nippur, and certainly
to the bilingual letter to Lugal-murub—known from schools of Late
Babylonian date in Assyria (Asshur), Anatolia (Khattusha) and Syria
(Ugarit).
There are other examples of letters to and even from the gods from
Old Babylonian to Neo-Assyrian times, but these cannot be said to
function as prayers. The royal Assyrian letters to the gods, in particular,
allow kings to report on their military triumphs in more imaginative
style than the customary annals and other royal inscriptions. There
is, however, one surviving example of the classical letter-prayer in late
times. “The Appeal to Utu,” originally created at Larsa by or for its
king, Sin-iddinam, is reproduced in a bilingual letter from Sippar of
uncertain date and in another exemplar from the seventh-century royal
library at Nineveh. Babylon replaces Larsa of the original version, and
a king whose name is lost no doubt replaces Sin-iddinam. So late a
representative of the old genre encourages us to seek its echoes also in
the Hebrew Bible (see below).
Bilingual Laments for Appeasing the Heart

The true successors of the Sumerian letter-prayers must be sought in
another genre altogether. This is the ÉR.ŠÀ.HUN.GA, literally the
˘
“lament (ÉR) for appeasing (HUN.GA) the heart (ŠÀ) (of the angry
˘
deity).” Such laments typically conclude with the wish, “May your
heart be appeased like that of a natural mother, like that of a natu-
ral father.” This is a slightly expanded form of the most common end-
ing of the earlier letter-prayers: “May the heart of my god (or king)
be appeased.” Other major characteristics of these laments also echo
the earlier genre, abandoning only its epistolary format. In place of

one or more salutations, these laments begin with a long invocation
of the deity that stresses, like the earlier salutations, the divine qual-
ities responsible for the penitent’s distress or his hoped-for salvation.
The worshiper catalogs his sins, typically in multiples of seven, while
claiming ignorance of their specific nature. He promises to sing the
deity’s praises once he is forgiven and rescued or cured. The new genre
begins to be attested in Old Babylonian times, probably at the end of
the period. By the end of the Middle Babylonian period, King Tukulti-
Ninurta was carrying off examples of the genre to Asshur, according
to his epic, and at least one Middle Assyrian example is known from
there.
The genre really became popular in the first millennium. At least
130 distinct compositions are known from surviving examples and from
catalogs. They are addressed to at least fifteen different gods and six
goddesses, as well as to “any god” or to a “personal god.” Like the
late congregational laments (above), they are recited by the lamentation
priest. This priest is even described as “the one of the heart-appeasing
lament” in “The Fashioning of the GALA (lamentation priest),” an Old
Babylonian harp-song. Like other compositions in his repertoire, they
are invariably composed in dialectal Sumerian and typically are pro-
vided with an interlinear Akkadian translation. One lengthy ritual text
prescribes the recitation of numerous heart-appeasing laments together
with congregational laments. Unlike those laments, however, the heart-
appeasing laments are intensely personal in nature and are concerned
with the fate not of city or country but of the individual penitent,
even when, on occasion, that penitent is the king himself, repeating
the lament after the priest like any private client.
Individual Prayer in Akkadian

The typical Mesopotamian gesture of prayer, lifting the hand to the
mouth, is attested both linguistically and in art; it gave rise to a genre of
“prayers (literally, incantations) of the lifting of the hand” (INIM.INIM.
MA ŠU.ÍL.LA.KAM), Because they combine the form of an incanta-
tion with the function of a prayer, they are often referred to in German
as Gebetsbeschwörungen (incantation-prayers); in English they are more
often known as “prayers in rituals of expiation.” Collectively, they con-
stitute a late and wholly Akkadian means of communication with the
divine. They feature prominently a section devoted to complaint or
lament, in which the individual penitent, speaking in the first person,

or another party speaking on his behalf in the third, addresses the
deity in the second. As in the earlier Sumerian and bilingual individual
laments, these complaint sections are preceded by a salutation to the
deity and introduction of the penitent. They are followed by rehearsals
of his virtues, his specific request, and a conclusion that emphasizes his
gratitude and vows to express it in material and other ways. Unlike
the earlier Sumerian and bilingual individual laments, however, the late
prayers include none, so far, on behalf of women.
Just Sufferer Compositions

All the genres so far reviewed are more or less liturgical in charac-
ter. Apparently, they served as librettos for such activities as razing
ruined temples prior to rebuilding them, praying for the resurrection
of Dumuzi and the fertility he symbolized, burying a sovereign or a
relative, or offering sacrifice for one’s health and welfare. As such they
belong to the broader category of prayers, individual or collective, and
were presumably the product of the temples, and more particularly of
such clerical poets as the lamentation priests. But there was also an
avenue for a more philosophical approach to the problem of human
suffering and the related one of divine justice. This literature of “theod-
icy” debated the goodness and omnipotence of the deity in the face of
unpunished evil or unrequited good; it was unconnected with sacrifice,
penitence, or any other liturgical rite or activity. Presumably the prod-
uct of the scribal schools, it belonged to the broad category of wisdom
literature (see “The Contemplative Life in the Ancient Near East” in
Part 9, Vol. IV).
The theme of the “just sufferer” dealt with the apparent discrep-
ancy between human deserts and divine rewards; if the sufferer was not
wholly just, he was certainly more pious than many of those whose for-
tunes seemed better. While such themes are also raised in a number of
letter-prayers and liturgical laments, they are central to a succession of
wisdom texts, beginning with “Man and His God,” sometimes regarded
as a Sumerian parallel to the biblical Job. This composition is described
in the colophon of one of its exemplars as a “supplication-lament to a
man’s (personal) god” (ÉR.ŠÀ.NE.ŠA4 DINGIR.LÚ.LUx.KAM), but no
other examples of such a genre are known, and it may be questioned
whether it is liturgical in character. Like the later Akkadian treatments
of the theme, it has a fairly simple tripartite structure, beginning with
a description of the sufferer’s condition, continuing with his complaints

to the deity, and ending with divine relief or restoration.
The Akkadian treatments of the theme include one from the late
Old Babylonian period, one from the late Middle Babylonian period
discovered at Ugarit (in Syria), and two from the first millennium.
The first of these is the “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” also known
by its native title, ludlul bēl nēmeqi (“Let me praise the lord of wisdom
[that is, Marduk]”). It is also sometimes called “The Babylonian Job.”
The second is known as the “The Babylonian Theodicy.” Of these
first-millennium examples, the former follows the traditional structure,
although it is spread over four tablets (chapters) with more than a
hundred lines each. The latter has a much more elaborate structure.
It comprises twenty-seven stanzas of eleven lines each, and each of
these eleven lines begins with the identical syllable. The twenty-seven
successive syllables in turn form an acrostic that spells out the sentence
“I am Saggil-kinam-ubbib the incantation-priest, worshiper of god and
king.” The acrostic thus reveals (and at the same time conceals) the
name of the author (who may be the sufferer himself ) and asserts his
religious and political loyalty lest the poem as a whole be thought to
suggest otherwise. The poem features a dialogue between the sufferer
and his friend. The latter, well-meaning but stubborn in his defense of
divine justice, insists, against all evidence to the contrary, that suffering
must always be deserved.
“The Letter-Prayer to Enki”
To Enki, outstanding lord of heaven and earth whose nature is unequalled,
speak!
To Nudimmud, the prince of broad understanding who determines fates
together with An,
Who distributes the appropriate divine attributes among the Anunnaki, whose
course cannot be reversed,
The omniscient one who is given intelligence from sunrise to sunset,
The lord of knowledge, the king of the sweet waters, the god who begot me,
say furthermore!
This is what Sin-shamukh the scribe, the son of Ur-Nin. . ., your servant, says;
Since the day that you created me you have given me an education.
I have not been negligent toward the name by which you are called, like a
father. . .
I did not plunder your offerings at the festivals to which I go regularly.
But now, whatever I do, the judgment of my sin is not. . ..
My fate has come my way, I am lifted onto a place of destruction, I cannot
find an omen.
A hostile deity has verily brought sin my way, I cannot find its side.
On the day that my vigorous house was decreed by Heaven

There is no keeping silent about my sin, I must answer for it. . ..
I lie down on a bed of alas and alack, I intone the lament.
My goodly figure is bowed down to the ground, I grovel at (people’s) feet.
My. . . is lifted from its place, my features are changed.
Restlessness is put into my feet, my life ebbs away.
The bright day has darkened for me, I slip into my grave.
I am a scribe, well versed in my craft, yet I have been turned into a dolt.
My hand is fit for writing, but my mouth is inadequate for dialogue.
I am not old, yet my hearing is heavy, my glance cross-eyed.
Like an apprentice-diviner who has left his master’s house I am slandered
ignobly.
My acquaintance does not approach me, speaks never a word with me,
My friend will not take counsel with me, will not put my mind at rest.
The taunter has brought me to derision, my fate has made me strange.
Oh my god, I rely on you, what have I to do with man?!
I am grown-up, how am I to spread out in a narrow place?
My house is a plaited nest, I am not satisfied with its attractiveness.
My built-up houses are not faced with brick.
Like little (female) cedars planted in a dirty place, I bear no fruit.
Like a young date-palm planted by the side of a boat, I produce no foliage.
I am still young, must I walk about thus before my time?
Must I roll about in the dust?
In a place where my mother and father are not present I am detained, who
will recite my prayer to you?
In a place where my kinsmen do not gather I am overwhelmed, who will
bring my offering to you?
Damgalnunna, your beloved first wife,
May she bring it to you like my mother, may she introduce my lament before
you.
Asalalimnunna, son of the abyss,
May he bring it to you like my father, may he introduce my lament before
you.
May he recite my lamentation to you, may he introduce my lament before
you.
Today let me take my sin to you, snatch me from the evildoer!
When you have looked upon me in the place where I am cast down, have
mercy on me!
When you have turned my dark place into daylight,
I will surely dwell in your gate of Guilt-Absolved, I will surely sing your
praises!
I will surely tear up my sin like a thread, I will surely proclaim your exalta-
tion!
As you reach the place of heavy sin, I will surely sing your praises!
Release me at the mouth of the grave, save me at the head of my tomb!
Then will I surely appear to the people, all the nation will verily know!
Oh my god, I am one who knows reverence!
Have mercy on the letter which I have deposited before you!
May the heart of my god be appeased!
Possible Biblical Analogues
It is never easy to document the relationship between biblical and

Mesopotamian literature, even in the presence of striking parallels be-
tween phrases, passages, or whole compositions on both sides of the
equation. Wherever borrowing is suspected, it is necessary to ask where,
when, and even in what direction it might have occurred. If many cen-
turies separate a notion that is shared by Mesopotamian and biblical
literature, it may be that they both relied independently on a now-
missing third source. As an example, we can mention the remarkably
similar provisions concerning the goring ox in the “Laws of Eshnunna”
(twentieth or nineteenth century bce) and the Book of the Covenant
(Exodus 21:28–36). But a more likely case for comparison exists when
the Mesopotamian analogue, or at least its genre, survives in the Late
Period. This is particularly the case with the various genres of lamenta-
tions.
The laments over the destruction of cities and temples, and their suc-
cessors, the tambourine-laments and harp-songs, display many features
in common with the biblical Book of Lamentations and with the con-
gregational laments of the Psalter such as Psalms 44, 74, 79, 80, and 83.
In both an angry deity has abandoned his city and caused or ordered
its destruction, which he is invited to inspect. There are also features
found in the Mesopotamian lamentations that are lacking in the bib-
lical texts, such as the special laments attributed to goddesses and the
appeal to lesser deities for their intercession. Laments for Dumuzi are,
of course, absent from the Bible as such; but Ezekiel’s condemnation of
the women who sat at the gate of the Temple “wailing for the Tam-
muz” (8:14) shows not only that the practice was known in the exilic
period but that it was so widely accepted that Tammuz (the Akkadian
name of Dumuzi) had become a generic noun in Israel. Of laments for
kings, the outstanding biblical example is David’s lament for Saul and
Jonathan, who perished in battle against the Philistines (2 Samuel 1:17–
27). It belongs to a poetic genre (the qînâ) whose special meter has been
linked to the peculiar dance accompanying a wake. Like some of its
Mesopotamian analogues, it was entered in a larger written collection,
the Book of Jashar (“Book of the Upright,” 2 Samuel 1:18) or, perhaps,
the Book of Song, and it was to be taught to the Judaeans. Similarly,
Jeremiah’s laments over King Josiah were entered in the anthology of
qînâ-laments (2 Chronicles 35:25). The genre was also used to mourn
nonroyalty, as in David’s brief lament for Abner (2 Samuel 3:33–34),
an analogue of sorts to the Sumerian and Akkadian elegies for private
individuals.
The royal letter-prayers in Sumerian find an echo in the Psalm of
Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:9–20) who, like King Sin-iddinam of Larsa, pleads
for divine release from illness by composing a prayer described as a
miktāb (written document). It may be related to the genre of miktām
in the Psalter (Psalms 16, 56–60) and to other forms of individual
laments there. Like the late bilingual laments for appeasing the heart,
the individual laments of the Psalter have lost the explicit epistolary
structure and formulas of the earlier Sumerian letter-prayers, but they
retain other echoes of possible prototypes in letter form.
The obvious parallels between the “Just-Sufferer” compositions in
Sumerian and Akkadian and the biblical book of Job, including its
ancient prose narrative frame, extend not only to their comparable
treatments of a common theme but also, in the case of “The Baby-
lonian Theodicy,” to the dialogue structure familiar from the poetic
core of the book of Job. Thus, while there are undoubtedly universal
elements in the language of lamentation everywhere, its particular evo-
lution in Mesopotamia permits the reconstruction of genre histories.
It also suggests the possibility that some features of this millennial tra-
dition influenced biblical psalmody and wisdom literature before and
during the exilic period (sixth century bce).
Bibliography
General Studies
Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once. . . . Sumerian Poetry in Translation
(1987), contains a number of Sumerian texts sensitively translated and
annotated. Relevant to this chapter are those translated on pp. 28–84,
357–374, and 445–484
Joachim Krecher, “Klagelied,” Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 6 (1980–1983),
studies the lament as a literary type; and in Jack M. Sasson, ed., Studies in
Literature from the Ancient Near East (1984), are discussed particular examples
of laments on pp. 67–82, 143–148, 193–200, 211–215, 255–260, and 315–
320.
Congregational Laments
Forerunners in main-dialect sumerian
Jerrold S. Cooper, The Curse of Agade (1983).
City Laments in Main-Dialect and Dialectal Sumerian
Margaret W. Green, “The Eridu Lament,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 30
(1978)
Samuel N. Kramer, “Keš and Its Fate,” Gratz College Anniversary Volume,
edited by isidore david passow and samuel tobias lachs (1971)
———, “The Weeping Goddess: Sumerian Prototypes of the Mater Dolorosa”
Biblical Archaeologist 46 (1983), and “Lamentation over the Destruction of
Nippur,” Acta Sumerologica 13 (1991)
Piotr Michalowski, The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur (1989).
Tambourine-Laments and Harp-Songs in Dialectal Sumerian
Bendt Alster, “Edin-na ú-sag-gá: Reconstruction, History, and Interpreta-
tion of a Sumerian Cultic Lament,” Rencontre assyriologique internationale 32
(1985)
Jeremy A. Black, “A-še-er Gi6-ta, a Balag of Inana,” Acta Sumerologica 7
(1985)
———, “Sumerian Balag Compositions,” Bibliotheca Orientalis 44 (1987)
Mark E. Cohen, Sumerian Hymnology: The Eršemma (1981), The Canonical
Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia, 2 vols. (1988), and “A Bilingual Šuilla
to Ningeštinanna,” in DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Åke W.
Sjöberg, edited by Hermann Behrens, Darlene Loding, and Martha
T. Roth, Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund,
vol. 11 (1989)
Jerrold S. Cooper, “A Sumerian Šu-íl-la from Nimrud with a Prayer for
Sin-šar-iškun,” Iraq 32 (1970), and “Warrior, Devastating Deluge, De-
stroyer of Hostile Lands: A Sumerian Šuila to Mar-duk,” in A Scientific
Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs, edited by Erle Leichty,
Maria de J. Ellis, and Pamela Gerardi, Occasional Publications of the
Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, vol. 9 (1988); Joachim Krecher, Sumerische
Kultlyrik (1966)
Samuel N. Kramer, “Two British Museum iršemma catalogues,” Studia
Orientalia 46 (1975), 48/3 (1977)
Raphael Kutscher, Oh Angry Sea (a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha): The History of a Sumerian
Congregational Lament (1975) ˘ ˘˘
W.G. Lambert, “The Converse Tablet: A Litany with Musical Instructions,”
in Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William Foxwell Albright, edited by Hans
Goedicke (1971)
Konrad Volk, Die Balağ-Komposition úru àm-ma-ir-ra-bi (1989).
Unilingual Akkadian City-Laments
Alfred Pohl, “Die Klage Marduks über Babylon im Erra-Epos,” Hebrew
Union College Annual 23, pt. 1 (1950–1951).
Dumuzi-Laments
Bendt Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream; Aspects of Oral Poetry in a Sumerian Myth (1972),
and “A Dumuzi Lament in Late Copies,” Acta Sumerologica 7 (1985)
Samuel N. Kramer, “The Death of Dumuzi: A New Sumerian Version,”
Anatolian Studies 30 (1980).
Laments for Kings
William W. Hallo, “The Death of Kings,” in Ah, Assyria: Studies in Assyr-
ian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor,
edited by Mordechai Cogan and Israel Ephal, Scripta Hierosolymi-
tana, vol. 33 (1991).
Individual Laments
Elegies
Samuel N. Kramer, Two Elegies on a Pushkin Museum Tablet: A New Sumerian
Literary Genre (1960); and “The Gir5 and the ki-sikil: A New Sumerian
Elegy,” Essays on the Ancient Near East in Memory of Jacob Joel Finkelstein (=
Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences), edited by
Maria de Jong Ellis (1977)
Erica Reiner, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylo-
nia and Assyria (1985).
Private Letter-Prayers in Sumerian
William W. Hallo, “Individual Prayer in Sumerian; The Continuity of a
Tradition,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88, no. 1 (1968), here: IV.1
and “Letters, Prayers, and Letter-Prayers,” Proceedings of the Seventh World
Congress of Jewish Studies, 1977 2 (1981), here: IV.2.
Royal Letter-Prayers in Sumerian
William W. Hallo, “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian
Prototype for the Prayer of Hezekiah?” in Cuneiform Studies in Honor of
Samuel Noah Kramer, edited by Barry L. Eichler, Alter Orient und Altes
Testament, vol. 25 (1976), here: V.1
———, “II. The Appeal to Utu,” in zikir šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented
to F.R. Kraus, edited by G. van Driel (1982), here: V.2
———, “III. The Princess and the Plea,” in Marchands, Diplomates et Empereurs,
edited by D. Charpin and F. Joannes (1991), here: V.3
———, “The Expansion of Cuneiform Literature,” Proceedings of the American
Academy for Jewish Research 46–47 (1979–1980).
Bilingual and Akkadian Letter-Prayers
Rykle Borger, “Ein Brief Sin-iddinams von Larsa an den Sonnengott.
Sowie Bemerkungen über ‘Joins’ und das ‘Joinen,’ ” Nachrichten der Akade-
mie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen; I. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1991)
F.R. Kraus, “Ein altbabylonischer Privatbrief an eine Gottheit,” Revue d’As-

syriologie 65 (1971).
Bilingual Laments for Appeasing the Heart
Samuel N. Kramer, “The Fashioning of the Gala,” Acta Sumerologica 3 (1981)
Stefan M. Maul, ‘Herzberuhigungsklagen’: die sumerisch-akkadischen Eršahunga-
Gebete (1988) ˘
Piotr Michalowski, “On the Early History of the Ershahunga Prayer,”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies 39, no. 1 (1987).
Individual Prayer in Akkadian
Rudolf Mayer, Untersuchungen zur Formsprache der babylonischen “Gebetsbeschwö-
rungen” (1976)
Cecil J. Mullo Weir, A Lexicon of Accadian Prayers in the Rituals of Expiation
(1934).
Just Sufferer Compositions
W.G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (1960)
Gerald L. Mattingly, “The Pious Sufferer: Mesopotamia’s Traditional
Theodicy and Job’s Counselors,” in The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform
Literature: Scripture in Context III, edited by William W. Hallo, Bruce
William Jones, and Gerald L. Mattingly, (1990)
Jean Nougayrol, “Une version ancienne du ‘juste souffrant,’ ” Revue Biblique
59 (1952), and “(Juste) souffrant (R.S.25.460),” Ugaritica 5 (1968)
Donald J. Wiseman, “A New Text of the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous
Sufferer,” Anatolian Studies 30 (1980).
Possible Biblical Analogues

Jean Bottéro, Le Problems du Mal et de la Justice Divine à Babylone et dans la
Bible, Recherches et Documents du Centre Thomas More, vol. 14 (1976)
F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep O Daughter of Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre
in the Hebrew Bible (1993)
Paul Wayne Ferris, The Genre of the Communal Lament in the Bible and the
Ancient Near East (1992)
William C. Gwaltney, “The Biblical Book of Lamentations in the Context
of Near Eastern Literature,” Scripture in Context II, edited by William W.
Hallo, James C. Moyer, and Leo G. Perdue (1983)
Thomas F. Mcdaniel, “The Alleged Sumerian Influence upon Lamenta-
tions,” Vetus Testamentum 18 (1968).
See also The Influence of Ancient Mesopotamia on Hellenistic Judaism (Part

1, Vol. I) and Hittite Prayers (Part 8, Vol. III).
iv.4
TWO LETTER-PRAYERS TO AMURRU*
The Akkadian name Amurru designates an ethnic entity conventionally

equated with the biblical Amorites or, alternatively, ‘a social group—the
Semitic nomads from the western steppe’,1 as well as the steppe itself,
an area located on the frontier between Mesopotamia and the Levant.
It thus seems appropriate to discuss Amurru in the context of a tribute
to Cyrus H. Gordon, whose work has so often illuminated both sides of
just this frontier.
The first known reference to an Amorite occurs in a Fara text; more
than 30 references have been identified in the Ebla corpus, and the
ethnic label recurs in Sargonic times.2 In Old Babylonian times, the
Amorites seem to have been regarded, and to have regarded them-
selves, as distinct from the Akkadians of Mesopotamia. This is sug-
gested as early as the beginning of the First Dynasty of Babylon by
the mention of an ‘assembly of Amurru’ (puhrum ša Amurrim) in a letter
from Sippar-Yahrurum,3 largely ignored since its publication in 1967,4
which also refers to Sumu-abum, presumably the first king of that
* The substance of this paper was presented to the joint meeting of the Amer-
ican Schools of Oriental Research and the Society of Biblical Literature, Chicago,
20 November 1994, for the session entitled ‘Scholar for all Seasons: A Tribute to Cyrus
H. Gordon’.
1 J.J.M. Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon: A Study of the Semitic Deities Attested to
in Mesopotamia before Ur III (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972),
p. 16. According to J. Zarins, ‘Jebel Bishri and the Amorite Homeland: the PPNB
phase’, in O.M.C. Haex et al. (eds.), To the Euphrates and Beyond: Archaeological Studies
in Honour of Maurits N. van Loon (Rotterdam/Brookfield, VT: A.A. Balkema, 1989),
p. 44, the Amorites were ‘Semitic populations . . . from the western desert of Iraq and
Southeastern Syria’ involved in ‘pastoral nomadism’.
2 A. Archi, ‘Mardu in the Ebla texts’, Or 54 (1985), pp. 7–13.
3 K.A. Al-A"dami, ‘Old Babylonian Letters from ed-Der’ Sumer 23 (1967), pp. 151–
167 and pls. 1–17 and facing p. 156, esp. pp. 153–156 (IM 19431 = IM 49341!). For the
possible identification of ed-Der (Tall ad-Dair) with Sippar-Yahrarum, see L. de Meyer
in Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes 3 (1980), pp. 208–209.
4 But cf. S.J. Lieberman in M. de J, Ellis (ed.), Nippur at the Centennial (Occasional
Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 14; Philadelphia: The University
Museum, 1992), p, 129 n. 13.
320 iv.4. two letter-prayers to amurru
dynasty (c. 1894–1881 bce), and Alumb(i)umu of Marad, previously

identified as a contemporary of the second king, Sumu-la-el (c. 1880–
1845).5
Further attesting to the distinctiveness of the Old Babylonian Amor-
ites are the repeated references to ‘an Akkadian or Amorite’ in the
edicts of the later kings of the dynasty, notably Ammi-ditana(?) (c. 1683–
1647)6 and Ammi-saduqa (c. 1646–1626).7 The latter, moreover, claimed
a common ancestry with the Amorite rulers of Assyria in the so-called
‘Genealogy of the Hammurapi Dynasty’.8 A final index of Amorite self-
awareness was the belief in a deity variously called ‘the Amorite god’9
or simply Amurru.
The evidence on Amurru the deity has been critically assembled
by Edzard; the following survey may be regarded as a supplement.10
He is not attested in the texts of Early Dynastic date from Abu Sal-
abikh,11 Fara12 or Ebla,13 but is known from theophoric personal names
beginning in Old Akkadian (Sargonic) times14 and from offering lists
beginning in neo-Sumerian (Ur III) times.15 By Old Babylonian times,
there are four known royal inscriptions dedicated to Amurru the deity,
all dating around 1800 bce, one by Damiq-ilishu, the last king of Isin
5 W.F. Leemans, ‘King Alumbiumu’, JCS 20 (1966), pp. 48–49.

6 F.R. Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen in altbabylonischer Zeit (SD, 11; Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1984), p. 160 line 7; for the assignment to Ammi-ditana, see p. 293. For other suggestions
see W.W. Hallo, ‘Slave Release in the Biblical World in Light of a New Text’, in Z. Zevit
et al. (eds.), Solving Riddles and Untying Knots: Studies in Honor of Jonas C. Greenfield (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), pp. 79–93, esp. 81 n. 5.
7 Kraus, Königliche Verfügungen, pp. 170–175, pars. 3, 5, 6, 8, 9.
8 J.J. Finkelstein, ‘The Genealogy of the Hammurapi Dynasty’, JCS 20 (1966),
pp. 95–118.
9 dDINGIR. MAR. TU = ilum amurrûm. Or: ‘the god of Amurru’ (il Amurrim).
10 D.O. Edzard, ‘Martu (Mardu). A. Gott’, RLA, VII, pp. 433–438; previously E.
Ebeling, ‘Amurru. 2. a) Gott’, RLA, I, pp. 101–103. See now also J. Klein, ‘The God
Martu in Sumerian Literature’, in I.L. Finkel and M.J. Geller (eds.), Sumerian Gods
and their Representations (Cuneiform Monographs, 7; Groningen: Styx. 1987), pp. 99–116.
(This study appeared too late to be included here.)
11 P. Mander, Il Pantheon di Abu-Sālabı̄kh (Istituto Universitario Orientale: Series Mi-
.
nor 26; Naples, 1986).
12 LAK 211 refers to dTU; cf. Edzard, ‘Martu’, p. 433.
13 F. Pomponio, ‘I nomi divini nei testi di Ebla’, UF 15 (1983), pp. 141–156. Previously
G. Pettinato, ‘Culto ufficiale ad Ebla durante il regno di Ibbi-Sipiš’, OrAnt 18 (1979),

pp. 85–215 and pls. i–xii.
14 Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon, pp. 15–16, 69–70.
15 N. Schneider, Die Götternamen von Ur III (AnOr, 19; Rome: Pontifical Biblical
Institute, 1939), p. 41 No. 307.

iv.4. two letter-prayers to amurru 321
(1816–1794),16 two on behalf of Rim-Sin, the last king of Larsa (1822–

1763),17 and one on behalf of Hammurapi of Babylon (1792–1750).18
We are also reasonably well informed on what the deity looked like,
or at least how he was pictured on Old Babylonian cylinder seals,
thanks especially to the study by Kupper; by contrast, the contem-
poraneous canonical cuneiform literature on Amurru is not exten-
sive.19
In Akkadian, a 45-line hymn to the ‘Amorite deity’ (of Old Baby-
lonian date) was published by Gurney.20 In Sumerian, Amurru was
known as Martu (or perhaps Mardu or Marru or Amarru).21 The ear-
liest literary text addressed to Martu (and Numushda) may be a dialec-
tal (eme-sal) hymn in syllabic orthography from Lagash published by
Thureau-Dangin22 and partly edited by Poebel.23 There are three frag-
mentary collections of compositions which include hymns to the deity,24
one of them, also in syllabic orthography, edited by Bergmann.25 There
is a short ‘tambourine-lament’ (ér-šém-ma)26 published by Figulla,27 and
16 W.W. Hallo, ‘Oriental Institute Museum Notes 10: The Last Years of the Kings
of Isin’, JNES 18 (1959), pp. 54–72. Latest re-edition by D. Frayne, Old Babylonian Period
(2003–1595 bc ) (The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods, 4; Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 103–104.
17 Frayne, Old Babylonian Period, pp. 305–308.
18 Frayne, Old Babylonian Period, p. 360.
19 J. -R, Kupper, L’Iconographie du dieu Amurru dans la glyptique de la I re dynastie babyloni-
enne (Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres, Mémoires, 55,1; Brussels: Palais
des Académies, 1961). Cf, pp. 69–76, for the ‘sources littéraires’.
20 O.R. Gurney, Literary and Miscellaneous Texts in the Ashmolean Museum (OECT, 11;
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), No. 1; cf. pp. 15–19 and W. von Soden, ‘Zu dem
altbabylonischen Hymnus an Anmartu und Ašratum mit Verheissungen an Rı̄m-Sîn’,
NABU (1989), p. 78 No. 105.
21 For various proposals see A. Falkenstein, Sumerische Götterlieder (Abhandlungen der
Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse 1959/1; Heidelberg: Carl

Winter, 1959), p. 120 n. 2.
22 F. Thureau-Dangin in G. Cros, Nouvelles fouilles de Tello (Paris: E. Leroux, 1910),
p. 207.
23 A. Poebel, ‘Sumerische Untersuchungen. II: V. Der Emesal-Text AO 4331 + 4335
Vs. 2–5’, ZA 37 (1927), pp. 161–176, 245–272.

24 VS 2.75–77.
25 E. Bergmann, ‘Untersuchungen zu syllabisch geschriebenen sumerischen Texten:
3’, ZA 57 (1965), pp. 31–33.

26 For this genre, and the translation offered here, see in greater detail Hallo,
‘Lamentations’, apud J.M. Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. III (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), pp. 1871–1881, here: IV.3.
27 CT 42.7 iv; cf. S.N. Kramer, ‘CT XLII: a Review Article’, JCS 18 (1964), p. 41.
The text is 28 lines long.

two ‘long songs’ (šìr-gíd-da)28 published by Chiera.29 One of these, a fairly

standard hymn of 58 lines, was edited by Falkenstein.30
The other one, longer and more important, is mythological in char-
acter, and was characterized as ‘an Amorite creation story in Sume-
rian’ by Chiera, who provided a first transliteration and translation
of the text.31 It was renamed ‘The Marriage of Martu’ by Kramer,32
and seems to involve the deity’s wooing of the daughter of the god
Numushda of Kazallu, already linked to Martu in the Lagash hymn
mentioned above (n. 22). Since Kazallu lay upstream from Nippur
between the Euphrates and Arahtum Rivers, the city may well have
served as a kind of way station for Amorites on their way to Sumer.33
In Buccellati’s words, the composition may be said to have dealt with
the ‘marriage of a Mesopotamian woman to an Amorite nomad, and it
could well be that a princely marriage had provided the Sitz im Leben
for the myth’.34 In a recent study, Klein subtitles it ‘the urbanization of
“barbaric nomads” ’.35
For my purposes here, perhaps the most relevant literary text is a
prayer to Martu published by Langdon which has the characteristic
conclusion of a lament for appeasing the heart [that is, of the angry
28 On this genre see C. Wilcke, ‘Formale Gesichtspunkte in der sumerischen Lite-
ratur’, in S. J. Lieberman (ed.), Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen (AS, 20;
Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 287; it is entered among other
genres in line 594 of the unilingual lexical list known as ‘Old Babylonian Proto-Lú’; see
Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon 12 (1969). p. 54.
29 E. Chiera, Sumerian Religious Texts (Crozer Theological Seminary Babylonian Pub-
lications, 1; Upland, PA, 1924), No, 8; idem, Sumerian Epics and Myths (Oriental Institute
Publications, 15; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). No. 58.
30 Falkenstein, Sumerische Götterlieder, No. 4.
31 Chiera, Sumerian Religious Texts, pp. 14–23.
32 S.N. Kramer. Sumerian Mythology (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society,
21; Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1944; 2nd edn. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1961), pp. 98–101 and n. 89. Cf. idem, The Sumerians (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1963), p. 253; new edition idem. ‘The Marriage of Martu’, in J. Klein
and A. Skaist (eds.), Bar Ilan Studies in Assyriology Dedicated to Pinhas Artzi (Ramat Gan:
Bar Ilan University Press, 1990), pp. 11–27.
33 Kupper, L’Iconographie, p. 75.
34 G. Buccellati, The Amorites of the Ur III Period (Istituto Orientale di Napoli Ricerche,
1; Naples: Istituto Orientale di Napoli, 1966), p. 339.

35 J. Klein, ‘The Marriage of Martu: The Urbanization of “Barbaric Nomads” ’, in
M. Malul (ed.), Mutual Influences of Peoples in the Ancient Near East (Michmanim, 9; Haifa:
University of Haifa, 1996), pp. 83–96. Cf. also idem, ‘Additional Notes to “The Marriage
of Martu” ’, in A.F. Rainey (ed.), kinattūtu ša dārâti: Raphael Kutscher Memorial Volume (Tel
Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1993), pp. 93–106.
deity]’ (ér-šà-hun-gá),36 although not its generic subscript. It was dated to

the Kassite period by Bergmann,37 but to the Old Babylonian period
by Michalowski,38 and is partially paralleled by another Old Babylo-
nian text, possibly from Sippar39 or Lagash.40 Since I hold fast to my
conviction that such laments may be considered successors to the letter-
prayers as means of personal communication with the divine,41 it raises
the question whether there were, in fact, letter-prayers to Amurru in
the Old Babylonian repertoire. The answer is yes—and not only in
Sumerian but also in Akkadian.
To begin with the Akkadian evidence, van Soldt has published what
he regards as ‘probably a school exercise’,42 containing a late Old
Babylonian letter to Amurru43 in Akkadian.44 The letter is said to be
a ze"pum,45 defined by Kraus as a kind of letter46 and by Finkelstein
more particularly as a roughly square tablet, typically used for letters
which centered on an order or directive to the addressee to deliver
some commodity to a third party or to the sender, and dated to the
late Old Babylonian period beginning with Ammi-ditana.47 This text,
however, does not answer to this description as regards its contents.
36 On this genre see most recently Hallo, ‘Lamentations’, here: IV.3. Previously
S.M. Maul, ‘Herzberuhigungsklagen’: Die sumerisch-akkadischen Eršahunga-Gebete (Wiesbaden:

Otto Harrassowitz, 1988), and the reviews by M.E. Cohen, JAOS 110 (1990), pp. 571–
572 and by Hallo, BiOr 49 (1992), pp. 77–78.
37 Bergmann, ‘Untersuchungen’, pp. 33–42.
38 P. Michalowski, ‘On the Early History of the Ershahunga Prayer’, JCS 39 (1987),
pp. 37–48, esp. p. 42 (4).

39 Michalowski, ‘Early History’, pp. 42–43 (6).
40 Hallo, review of M, Çiğ and H. Kizilyay, Sumerian Literary Tablets and Fragments in
the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul I, JCS 24 (1971), p. 40.

41 See Hallo, above, n. 36.
42 A parallel of sorts may be found in the tradition of ‘model-letters’ in Chinese
culture; cf. A. McNair, ‘The Engraved Model-letters Compendia of the Song Dynasty’,
JAOS 114 (1994), pp. 209–225. My colleague H. Stimson assures me that the model-
letters in these compendia indeed refer to epistles not characters.
43 Misspelled dMAR.MAR.TU, but this is just one of ‘many mistakes’ noted by the
editor.
44 W.H. van Soldt, Letters in the British Museum (AbB, 12; Leiden: E J. Brill, 1990),
pp. 84–85, No. 99.

45 Van Soldt, Letters, p. 84.
46 F.R. Kraus, ‘Altbabylonisches ze"pum’, BiOr 24 (1967), pp. 12–14. Previously Hallo,
‘The Royal Inscriptions of Ur: a Typology’, HUCA 33 (1962), p. 14.

47 J.J. Finkelstein, Late Old Babylonian Documents and Letters (YOS, 13; New Haven/Lon-
don: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 4–6; cf. S. Greengus, review of CT 58 and AbB 7,
JAOS 101 (1981), p. 258.
It is not a ‘letter-order’, to use the term first coined by Oppenheim,48

but a ‘letter-prayer’, using the term first introduced into the discussion
by me.49 Herewith van Soldt’s translation of the letter:
(1–3) Speak to my lord Amurrum whose pronouncement is heard before
Shamash: (4) Thus says Ardum, your servant. (5–6) You have created me
among men and you have made me pass (safely ?) along the street. (7–9)
Also, I used to bring you a sheep offering every year and I prepared (it)
in honor of your venerable rank (ana ilūtika kabittim). (10–12) (But) now an
enemy has befallen me (ikšudannima) and I am miserable (muškēnekūma).
(Even) my brothers do not come to my help (ul i"arirūni). (13–14) If your
great divine power (?) (AN-ka rabı̄tum) . . . (ša-ra-am) (me), raise me up from
the bed on which I am lying. (15–17) (Then) let me come to you, to your
divine presence, bringing a generous (.tahdam) sheep offering. (18–19),.. (da
mu za ši ki il ma zu / la ma x ma). May my family not be dispersed (qinni
la ipparar). (20–22) May the one who sees me submit a petition (?) (ušaqrib)
to your lofty divine power.
The evidence for the existence of a tradition of Old Babylonian letter-
prayers written in Akkadian has been mounting steadily.50 In 1968, I
was able to list only four possible examples, three of them from Mari.51
One of these is probably addressed, not to a personal deity (lamassu),
but to an Assyrian princess named Lamassi or Lamassi-Assur.52 The
others have been newly translated by Moran,53 Charpin and Durand54
and Foster55 respectively. (Whether the appeal of Kussulu56 to the
48 Hallo, ‘The Neo-Sumerian Letter-Orders’, BiOr 26 (1969), pp. 171–175, esp. p. 172.
49 Hallo, ‘Individual prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition’, JAOS 88
(1968), repr. in Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser (ed, W.W. Hallo; AOS, 53. 1968), pp. 71–
89, here: IV.1, esp. p. 76.
50 Cf. the survey by R. Borger, RLA 3 (1957–1971), pp. 575–576, to which the follow-
ing may be considered a supplement.

51 Hallo, ‘Individual Prayer’, p. 78 n. 43, here: IV.1.
52 M. Birot et al., Répertoire analytique 2 (ARM, 16/1; Paris: Geuthner, 1979), p. 143 s.
vv. (ARM 4.68).

53 W.L. Moran, ‘A Letter to a God’, ANET (3rd edn, 1969), p. 627, based on
G. Dossin, ‘Les archives épistolaires du palais de Mari’. Syria 19 (1938), pp. 125–126).
54 D. Charpin and J.-M. Durand, ‘La prise du pouvoir par Zimri-Lim’, MARI 4
(1985), pp. 339–342, with a new copy; cf. pp. 293–299; cf. J.M. Sasson, ‘Yasmah-Addu’s
Letter to God (ARM 1:3)’, NABU (1987), pp. 63–64 No. 109.
55 B.R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL
Press, 1993), p. 157 No. II 38 = idem, From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient
Mesopotamia (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1995), p. 294; previous translation by T. Jacob-
sen et al., Before Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949), p. 221 (YOS 2:141).
56 I follow the transcription of Foster, Before the Muses, I, pp. 154–155 = idem, From
Distant Days, pp. 293–294, on the assumption that the name alludes to a bodily defect,
perhaps involving the kaslu/kislu.
moon-god57 is a letter-prayer58 or an exercise in rhetoric59 or even a

parody60 remains a matter of debate.) In addition, Kraus61 and Fos-
ter62 have identified additional examples of the genre, and de Meyer
has published a new one from his excavations at Sippar-Yahrurum,63
addressed by the lamentation-priest Ur-Utu to a goddess.64 There is
now even a bilingual letter-prayer addressed to Zimri-Lim of Mari,
according to Charpin.65
When we turn to unilingual Sumerian letter-prayers, there were
already nine addressed to various deities in the ‘list of letter-prayers and
other neo-Sumerian literary letters’ which I compiled in 1968,66 and
their number has been augmented by at least one entirely new example
of the genre, addressed to Nin-Shubur.67 The list today is in need of
updating, since some of its entries have meantime appeared in proper
editions, most notably the letter-prayer of Sin-iddinam, king of Larsa,
57 C.J. Gadd and S.N. Kramer, Literary and Religious Texts: Second Part (UET, 6/2)
No. 402.
58 So Charpin, Le clergé d’Ur (1986), pp. 326–329, followed by K. Hecker and W.H.P.
Römer, Lieder und Gebete (Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments, 2.5; Gütersloh:
Mohn, 1989), pp. 750–752.
59 W.L. Moran, ‘UET 6, 402: persuasion in the plain style’, JANESCU 22 (1993),
pp. 113–120; W.W. Hallo, Origins: The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern
Western Institutions (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East, 6;
Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), p. 173.
60 So tentatively D.O. Edzard, review of Lieder und Gebete. I, by W.H.P. Römer and
K. Hecker, Or 63 (1994), pp. 138, 139.

61 F.R. Kraus, ‘Em altbabylonischer Privatbrief an eine Gottheit’, RA 65 (1971),
pp. 27–36; idem, AbB 5 (1972), p. 140 (TCL 1.9). New translation by Foster, Before the
Muses, I, p. 156 No. II 37 = idem, From Distant Days, p. 294. F.R. Kraus, ‘Eine neue
Probe akkadischer Literatur: Brief eines Bittstellers an eine Gottheit’, JAOS 103 (1983),
pp. 205–209: repr. in J.M. Sasson (ed.). Studies in Literature from the Ancient Near East . . .
dedicated to Samuel Noah Kramer (AOS, 65; New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1984),
pp. 205–209.
62 S. Dalley et al., The Old Babylonian Tablets from Tell al Rimah (London: British School
of Archaeology in Iraq, 1976), No. 150, as interpreted by B.R. Foster, ‘Letters and
Literature: A Ghost’s Entreaty’, in M.E. Cohen et al. (eds.), The Tablet and the Scroll:
Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo (Bethesda: CDL Press, 1993), pp. 98–102.
63 L. de Meyer, ‘Une lettre d’Ur-Utu galamah à une divinitè’, in M. Lebeau and
P. Talon (eds.), Reflets des deux fleuves: Volume de Mélanges offerts a André Finet (Akkadica
Supplementum, 6; Leuven: Peeters, 1989), pp. 41–43. Cf. above, n. 3.
64 On this Ur-Utu, see for now M. Tanret, ‘Les tablettes scolaires dècouvertes à Tell
ed-Der’ Akkadica 26 (1982), p. 39.

65 Charpin, ‘Les malheurs d’un scribe ou de l’inutilité du sumérien loin de Nippur’,
in deJong Ellis (ed.), Nippur, pp. 7–27.

66 Hallo, ‘Individual Prayer’, pp. 88–89, here: IV.1.
67 C.B.F. Walker and S.N. Kramer, ‘Cuneiform Tablets in the Collection of Lord
Binning’, Iraq 44 (1982), pp. 78–83.

to Nin-Isina,68 and that of Nin-shatapada daughter of Sin-kashid, king

of Uruk, to Rim-Sin, king of Larsa.69 Others have been republished70
or duplicated by newly published or newly identified exemplars.71 In
particular one should add to the list the letter-prayer of Sin-iddinam
to Utu,72 which survived in recognizable if altered, bilingual form into
neo-Assyrian times.73
One of the letter-prayers in the list was addressed to Amurru (Mar-
tu).74 In 1989, van Dijk found its incipit in a late Old Babylonian
catalogue of literary letters from Uruk,75 and even thought he could
posit a possible duplicate though this proves not to be the case.76 I
provide here a transliteration and translation of the Yale text, leaving
the discussion of philological details for another occasion.77
YBC 5641
(1) dMar-tu dumu-an-na dingir me To divine Amurru, son of Heaven,
kù-kù-ga deity of all the positive (or: holy)
divine attributes,
68 D4 on the list. Cf. Hallo, ‘The Royal Correspondence of Larsa. I. A Sumerian
Prototype for the Prayer of Hezekiah?’, in B.L. Eichler (ed.), Kramer Anniversary Volume
(AOAT, 25; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1976), pp. 209–224, here: V.1.
69 C on the list. Cf. Hallo, ‘The Royal Correspondence of Larsa. III. The Princess
and the Plea’, in D. Charpin and F. Joannès (eds.), Marchands, diplomates et empereurs:
Etudes sur la civilisation mésopotamienne offertes à Paul Garelli (Paris: Editions Recherches sur
les Civilisations, 1991), pp. 3787–3888, here: V.3.
70 Notably M, republished in ISET 1 (1969), p. 126 (Ni 972).
71 Note, for example, VS, 17, p. 36 (duplicate of B6), YBC 16550 (unpublished
duplicate of B7), and UM 29-15-995 (unpublished duplicate of I according to M. Civil,

‘Enlil: the Merchant: Notes to CT 15 10’, JCS 28 [1976], p. 78 [b 3]).
72 W.W. Hallo, ‘The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: II. The Appeal to Utu’,. in
G. van Driel et al. (eds.), ZIKIR ŠUMIM: Assyriological Studies Presented to F. R, Kraus . . .
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982), pp. 95–109, here: V.2.
73 R. Borger, ‘Ein Brief Sîn-idinnams von Larsa an den Sonnengott’, Nachrichten der
Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Phil.hist. Klasse (1991), pp. 39–81.

74 Hallo, ‘Individual Prayer’, p. 89 (J). Correct the museum number listed there to
YBC 5641.
75 J. van Dijk, ‘Ein spätaltbabylonischer Katalog einer Sammlung sumerischer
Briefe’, Or 58 (1989), pp. 441–452, esp. pp. 444–445. (line 19). Now republished by
A. Cavigneaux, Uruk: Altbabylonische Texte aus dem Plaquadrat Pe XVI —4/5 (Ausgrabun-
gen in Uruk-Warka Endberichte, 23; Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1966), pp. 57–59 and
p. 157, No. 112.
76 BE 31.30.
77 My thanks to Miguel Civil for collating my transliteration with the original and
suggesting several improvements (October 1994) and to Piotr Michalowski for ceding
his prior rights to publication (cf. NABU 1991, 32 No. 48).
(2) šà-lá-sù lú-zi-dè ki-aga2 inim!-šùd Merciful one, enamored of the

a-ra-za giš-tuku upright man, hearing words of
prayer and supplication,
(3) lugal-mu-ù-ra ù-na-du11 My king, speak!
(4) [#] E-te-el-pi 4-dDa-mu ìr-zu This is what Etel-pi-Damu your
nu-ub-bé-a servant says.
(5) mu-mu ba-sa4-a si-sá-aš dib-bé mu My name by which I am called,
bí-in-du11-ga ‘Proceeding-in-righteousness (or:
straightforwardly)’, (is) the name
which one had pronounced (on me)
there,
(6) ú hé-tuku mu-zu ba-e-ni-pà (With) ‘Let-him-have-food (of life?
is) your name’ I was summoned by
you here,
(7) a hé-tuku mu-zu ba-e-ni-pà (With) ‘Let-him-have-water (of life?
is) your name’ I was summoned by
you here.
(8) níg-ša6-ga-tuku-mu la-ba-e-ši-kéš My accumulated treasures have not
been withheld from you.
(9) é-la-la-zu e-ra-ni-gá-gá šu-a-gi-na Your luxuriant temple I am
e-ra-gál establishing for you here, I have
deposited the regular offerings for
you.
(10) níg-gig-ga-zu en-nu- un bí-ag (Over) your sancta I stood guard
mu-zu sag li-bí-in-sì there, your name no one (else) took
care of there
(11) igi -zu nigin2 ! -na-mu-dè hi ! -li-a When I turned around before you,
BI li-bí-ib-dib no one surpassed it in beauty there.
(12) lugal ? mu-zu nu-mu-ni-in-pà ‘King’(?) (is) your name—no one
ne-gim e-ra-nigin2 ! -me-en (else) invoked it here, (but) I am the
one who turns around to you like
this.
(13) [u4-n]u-du10-ga? u4-mu ár-ni An unfavorable day (??) (is) my day,
ŠU.BA.ZI mi-ni-in-TAR ...
(14) [x y z] kúr-ra-ta kar-mu-da? ì-nigin2 When I escape from a hostile. . . he
nam-mu-en turns around—what is it to me?
(15) e ? -ne ? dingir-mu-da ? šà-ne-ša4-mu With ‘This is my god’ may your
šà-kù-zu hé-tùm holy heart proffer my plea!
(16) [DI]Š.ŠI da-ríka ! -tar-zu hé-si-il-e For enduring ages (?) may I recite
me!-téš hé-i-i your praises, in unison may I bless
you!
Although they belong to two distinct linguistic and literary traditions,

the two letter-prayers have much in common besides only their divine
addressee. In particular they share an essentially similar structure or
rhetorical strategy.78 Both begin with a short salutation, continue with

a brief self-introduction of the letter-writer, and proceed to the body of
the letter, divided each time into five sub-sections as follows:
1. rehearsal of past benefactions by the addressee on behalf of the
letter-writer;
2. rehearsal of past services rendered or devotions shown by the
letter-writer to the addressee;
3. specification of the letter-writer’s present plight;
4. petition for redress of grievances;
5. vow to demonstrate gratitude in the future if the petition is grant-
ed.
The body of the letter thus moves logically through time, from past to
present to future. The Akkadian example adds to the end of the body
an additional request which is largely unintelligible, and concludes with
a formal closing that may be described as instructions to the human (or
divine?) mailman. The suggested structure of the body of the two letters
can be represented graphically as follows:
BM 97298 YBC 5641

(1) ll. 5–6 ll. 5–7
(2) ll. 7–9 ll. 8–12
(3) ll. 10–12 ll. 13–14
(4) ll. 13–14 l. 15
(5) ll. 15–17 l. 16
additional request ll. 18–19
All these structural or rhetorical features can be paralleled, singly or

collectively, in other examples of the genre, most conspicuously so in
other examples of the subgenre of letter-prayers from private individ-
uals. The letter-prayer to Enki by Sin-shamuh the scribe, for example,
has all four of the major subdivisions and all five of the subsections
identified above.79 By contrast, the royal letter-prayers of the ‘Royal
Correspondence of Larsa’ tend to elaborate greatly on the salutation
78 Foster, ‘Letters and Literature’, p. 98, uses the latter term; for a fuller study of
rhetorical features in cuneiform literature, see Hallo, Origins, pp. 169–187 and here: I.7.
79 Hallo, ‘Individual Prayer’, pp. 85–87; here: IV.1, see pp. 75–80 for the structural
analysis of the genre as a whole. New translation in ‘Lamentations’ (above, n. 26),

p. 1876. Cf. also B. Böck, ‘ ‘Wenn du zu Nintinugga gesprochen hast. . . ’: Untersuchun-
gen zu Aufbau, Inhalt, Sitz-im-Leben und Funktion sumerischer Gottesbriefe’, Altorien-
talische Forschungen 23 (1992), pp. 3–23.
and the description of the present plight, while dealing lightly or not all
with the subsections devoted to past deserts80 and the vow, and with the
closing formula.81
It must be left for another occasion to compare and contrast all the
respective elements of the letter-prayers thus identified from examples
in both languages. Here I will confine myself to just one of them, as an
indication of where such investigations may lead. I refer to what may
be called the ‘mailing instructions’ of the letter-prayers. These form
the conclusion of the Akkadian letter-prayer to Amurru, which I would
retranslate as follows: ‘May whoever sees me forward (my message)
to your well-disposed godliness’.82 In the Sumerian letter-prayer they
constitute, in its entirety, the petition: ‘With “This is my god” may your
holy heart proffer my plea’!83 The implication here seems to be that
Amurru, acting as the petitioner’s personal deity, will forward his plea
to an even higher authority, presumably one of the great gods of the
Sumerian pantheon.
Such ‘mailing instructions’ are implicit in votive inscriptions begin-
ning with the most expensive kind as represented by statues, and for
which letter-prayers are simply a cheaper substitute. Sometimes, in-
deed, they are explicit, as when Gudea instructs his statue to speak
to (the statue of ?) Ningirsu, using precisely an epistolary form of salu-
tation: ‘Gudea said to (or: placed a word into the mouth of ) the
statue (saying): Statue! Speak (to) my king’,84 or when Sin-iddinam of
Larsa ‘commissioned a statue of his father Nur-Adad and two letters
which that statue was asked to convey to the sun-god Utu, patron-deity
of Larsa’.85 They are justified by the philological evidence to the
effect that prayers were placed in the mouth of statues86 and the
80 Cf. ANET, p. 399 for comparable emphasis in a Hittite royal prayer.

81 See above, nn. 68–69 and 72–73.
82 amirūia ana ilūtika banı̄tim ušaqrib.
83 Above, line 15.
84 gù-dé-a alan-e gù im-ma-sì-mu alan lugal-mu ù-na-du = Gudea Statue B vii 21–
11
25 as transliterated by J. van Dijk, ‘Une insurrection générale au pays de Larša avant
l’avènement de Nur-Adad’, JCS 19 (1965), p. 12; cf. Falkenstein, Die Inschriften Gudeas von
Lagaš I: Einleitung (AnOr, 30; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1966), p. 177 and n. 5.
Cf. Wilcke, ‘Formale Gesichtspunkte’, p. 252.
85 W.W. Hallo, ‘The Expansion of Cuneiform Literature’, Proceedings of the American
Academy for Jewish Research 46–47 (1979–1980), pp. 307–322, esp. 318, based on van Dijk,
‘Une insurrection genérale’, pp. 1–25. Cf. Wilcke, ‘Formale Gesichtspunkte’, p, 252.
86 Van Dijk, ‘Une insurrection genérale’, p. 12; W.W. Hallo, ‘The Cultic Setting of
Sumerian Poetry’, in A. Finet (ed.), Actes de la XVIIe RAI (Ham-sur-Heure: Comité Belge
archaeological evidence that letters were placed at their feet,87 and

that hymns,88 laments89 and even royal inscriptions90 occasionally show
physical signs of means for attachment to what may have been statuary.
The Akkadian and bilingual corpus has so far not produced further
examples of ‘mailing instructions’. But there are at least two other
ones from the conclusions of Sumerian letter-prayers. The penultimate
line of the letter of Sin-shamuh to Enki, already mentioned, reads,
in one version:91 ‘Have mercy on the letter which I have deposited
before you!’92 Another version expands this to two lines which, as far
as preserved, read: ‘Hearken to the letter which I have written to you
/ to my . . . may you(?) place(?) it.’93 The letter of Nanna-mansi to an
unknown addressee94 has a self-reference near its end as follows: ‘The
letter which I have deposited for you—may it make the heart of my
king glad / may I cause someone to recite my . . . to him’.95
To bring these ruminations to a conclusion, then, we can say that,
in literary terms, the two letter-prayers to Amurru which we have
considered are thoroughly assimilated to Sumero-Akkadian norms of
Old Babylonian times, while yet displaying certain common distinctive
features of their own. That may be a serviceable characterization as
well for the people and land with whom the deity shared his name.
de Recherches en Mésopotamie, 1970), pp. 116–134, here: I.2 esp. 119 and n. 5, 122 and
n. 3.
87 Hallo, ‘Individual Prayer’, p. 79 and n. 74.
88 Hallo, ‘The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry’, p. 122 n. 3, here: I.2, with
reference to the stone tablet published by F. Thureau-Dangin, ‘La déesse Nisaba’, RA 7

(1910), p. 107.
89 Hallo, ‘The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry’, p. 134, here: I.2, addendum to
p. 122 n. 3, with reference to ‘The Fall of Lagash’; differently H.E. Hirsch, ‘Die
“Sünde” Lugalzagesis’, in G. Wiessner (ed.), Festschrift fur Wilhelm Eilers (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1967), pp. 99–106, esp. 102 n. 36.
90 BE I 15 (Shulgi 41) = Shulgi 66 in D.R. Frayne, Ur III Period (2112–2004 bc) (The
Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods, 3/2; Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1997), pp. 170–171.
91 Hallo, ‘Individual Prayer’, pp. 82–87, here: IV.1.
92 ù-na-a-du mu-ra-gub-ba-mu arhuš tuk-ma-r[a].
11
93 ù-na-a-du
11 im-ma-ra-sar giš tuk-ma-ta / [ . . . ] -mu-ra (or: -ke4) hu-mu-un(or:-e-
bar-x)-gál [ . . . ].
94 Rim-Sin of Larsa according to Piotr Michalowski (orally).
95 ù-na-a-du mu-ra-ab-gub-ba šà lugal-mu húl ma-ak-e /[ . . . ] šà-x-dim-ma-mu ga-
11
mu-na-ab-du11 -du11.
v
royal correspondence
v.i
THE ROYAL CORRESPONDENCE OF LARSA:

I. A SUMERIAN PROTOTYPE FOR THE PRAYER
OF HEZEKIAH?1
Five years ago I addressed myself to the subject of individual prayer

in Sumerian, tracing its evolution from the epistolary format of neo-
Sumerian times to the dialectal poems for “appeasing the heart” of the
deity in post-Sumerian times.2 Many parallels could be cited, through-
out the long history of this evolution, to the structure and formulations
of individual laments in the Psalter and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.
No direct connection was proposed, since the parallels could also be
explained as equivalent reponses to comparable situations, but the way
was opened to the investigation of such connections.
About the same time, it was suggested by Boehl that the Bible
itself preserved a prayer in the form of a letter, namely the so-called
Psalm of Hezekiah inserted in the account of his illness in Isaiah
38, though absent from the parallel narrative in II Kings 20.3 Actually
this psalm is not a letter in formal terms, but rather betrays many
of the generic characteristics of an individual lament or thanksgiving
psalm, with form criticism tending to favor the latter classification.4
It is described in the Hebrew text (Is. 38:9) as a MIKTĀB, a word
¯
which came to mean “letter” in later Biblical Hebrew (e.g. II Ch. 21:12),5
1 This paper, presented to the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem,
August 14, 1973, is dedicated to Professor Samuel Noah Kramer on the occasion of his
77th birthday.
2 “Individual prayer in Sumerian: the continuity of a tradition,” JAOS 88 (1968),
71–89; also published in Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser, ed. W.W. Hallo (= AOS 53
[1968]), pp. 71–89, here: IV.1.
3 F.M.Th. de Liagre Böhl in Studia Biblica et Semitica Theodoro Christiano Vrie-
zen dedicata (1966), p. 213, note 1.

4 Joachim Begrich, Der Psalm des Hiskia: ein Beitrag zum Verständnis von Jesaja
38:10–20 (1926). Cf. P.A.H. de Boer, “Notes on the Text and Meaning of Isaiah
XXXVIII 9–20,” Oudtestamentische Studiën 9 (1951), 170–186.
5 The usual term for letter in this period is SĒPER; cf. e.g. Isaiah 37:14. Later
Biblical Hebrew also used the term IGGERET (II Chr. ¯ 30:1) as did Aramaic (Ezra 5:6)
where, in addition, NIŠTeWĀN (Ezra 4:7, 18) and PITGĀM (ib. 17) occur.
334 v.i. the royal correspondence of larsa: i
but which critical opinion, both modern and traditional, here tends
to associate with MIKTĀM, found as superscription in a number of
¯
psalms linked to events in the life of David (Pss. 16, 56–60). And while
MIKTĀB is translated in the Greek Bible simply by PROSEUCHĒ
¯
(prayer), MIKTĀM is consistently rendered by STĒLOGRAPHÍA,
¯
inscription on a stele. H.L. Ginsberg long ago drew attention to this
significant correlation between “Psalms and inscriptions of petition and
acknowledgement,” adducing a number of West Semitic epigraphic
finds to support the conclusion that the psalm of Hezekiah likewise
was published. Given “the nature of the document” and “the rank
of its author,” Ginsberg suggested that “it was published by being
engraved in stone.”6 More recently, Greenfield and Zobel have both
independently found numerous points of contact between the Zakir
Stele and the Biblical psalms of individual thanksgiving and lament
respectively.7
But the Ancient Near Eastern convention of royal communication
with the deity by means either of a letter or of a stele extends beyond
the confines of the West Semitic area and of the first millennium. A
sub-genre of royal letters to the gods (and of occasional divine letters
to the king) has long been recognized in Akkadian, the former either in
the context of specific petitions or of a kind of annual report in the form
of an “open letter” to the deity. The material has been summarized in
separate surveys by Hirsch and, more recently, by Borger, and traced
from the middle of the first millennium back to the beginning of
the second.8 And the popularity of the stele as a royal medium goes
back even further. Hammurapi was not the first to employ it for his
famous laws, for earlier Sumerian laws also originated on steles and, as
I have pointed out elsewhere, a number of other Sumerian genres—
cadastres, royal inscriptions, hymns to kings and deities—also go back
6 H.L. Ginsberg, “Psalms and Inscriptions of Petition and Acknowledgment,” in

Louis Ginsberg Jubilee Volume (1945), pp. 159–171, esp. p. 169. (Reference courtesy
J. Tigay.)
7 Jonas C. Greenfield, “The Zakir Inscriptions and the Danklied,” Proceedings of
the Fifth World Congress of Jewish Studies 1 (1971), 174–191; Hans-Jürgen Zobel, “Das
Gebet um Abwendung der Not und seine Erhörung in den Klageliedern des Alten
Testaments und in der Inschrift des Königs Zakir von Hamath,” VT 2 (1971), 91–99.
8 R. Borger, “Gottesbrief,” Reallexikon der Assyriologie 3/8 (1971), 575 f.; H.E.
Hirsch, “Akkadische Briefe an Götter,” Kindlers Literatur Lexikon 1 (1964), cc. 325 f.
Add below, note 12.
v.i. the royal correspondence of larsa: i 335
to monumental prototypes on public display.9 But these prototypes,

as well as the more-common monumental genres including building
and dedicatory inscriptions, do not constitute prayers. They follow
several firmly fixed stylistic conventions depending on their function,
to which prayer was at best on optional addendum.10 The earliest
literary letters, for their part, were either sober exchanges between
the kings of Ur and Isin and their high officials or, in the case of the
true letter-prayers, were addressed to a deity (or to a deified king) by
a scribe or other commoner. Among the latter, a whole sub-category
of Sumerian letter-prayers addressed by ailing persons to a healing
goddess was recognized by Kraus,11 who has meantime also recovered
the first Akkadian example of this sub-genre.12 What has hitherto been
lacking to complete the parallelism with the psalm of Hezekiah on the
Sumerian side was either a monumental or petitionary letter addressed
to the deity by a king, and neither Sumerian nor Akkadian had hitherto
provided a letter-prayer in the context of royal illness. It is the purpose
of this paper to fill in these gaps.
The king in question is Sin-iddinam of Larsa, who reigned from
1849–1843, half a century before the accession of Hammurapi of Baby-
lon. Despite his short reign of just seven years, he has left an impressive
corpus of both monumental and literary texts, which has already grown
larger even since my recent summary of the material.13 Nor is this mere
coincidence. For during the century of political turmoil before Ham-
murapi reunified Mesopotamia, Larsa was the preeminent power in the
south (1865–1763). As such it controlled the ancient scribal center at Ur,
inheriting there the literary traditions of the Third Dynasty of Ur and
of the early kings of Isin.14 At the same time (as I have begun to demon-
strate elsewhere) it carried forward the venerable literary heritage (and
9 Hallo, Actes de la XVIIe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, ed. A. Finet

(1970), p. 121, here: I.2. Much additional evidence could be cited on this point.
10 Hallo, “The Royal Inscription of Ur: A Typology,” HUCA 33 (1962), 1–43, esp.
p. 22 and note 197; cf. now also E. Sollberger and J.-R. Kupper, “L’inscription royale
comme genre littéraire” in IRSA, pp. 24–36.
11 F.R. Kraus, JCS 3 (1949), 78, note 40; cf. Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968), 77, note 38, here:
IV.1. Add now the text noted below, note 26, and SLTN 131 Item I in the reconstruction
of M. Civil, Or NS 41 (1972), 90.
12 Kraus, “Ein altbabylonischer Privatbrief an eine Gottheit,” RA 65 (1971), 27–36.
13 Hallo, “New Texts from the Reign of Sin-iddinam,” JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 95–99.
Cf. id., JANES 5 (1973), 169–171.

14 Hallo, JCS 20 (1966), 92.
political aspirations) of Lagash.15 The royal scribes of Larsa appear to

have fused these two traditions into a productive and even ornate lit-
erary style which found expression in both monumental and canonical
texts. Sin-iddinam and Rim-Sin in particular are the subjects of large
numbers of prayers of various kinds. I shall confine myself here to the
letter-prayers and other literary letters of Sin-iddinam.
Two of these were first made known in 1965 by J. van Dijk.16 Both
were found on a single tablet in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin, and
republished in van Dijk’s volume of Sumerian literary texts from that
collection.17 They are preceded on this tablet by the copy of an inscrip-
tion whose original had graced a statue of Nur-Adad, Sin-iddinam’s
father and predecessor. The statue was commissioned and dedicated by
Sin-iddinam in keeping with the practice, well attested in the date for-
mulas and archival texts of the Kingdom of Larsa, of so honoring one’s
ancestors and predecessors.18 But beyond this the text explicitly states
(line 32, as restored by van Dijk) that the statue had “an inscribed clay
tablet deposited” (i[m - sa]r - ra sì - ga), presumably at its feet, exactly
as reconstructed from circumstantial evidence in my study of the letter-
prayer tradition.19 What follows in the Berlin text is, no doubt, the text
of the clay tablet or rather tablets, for in fact two separate letters ensue.
As far as preserved, they appear to be petitions to the statue to address
these letters to Utu, the sun-god and patron-deity of Larsa. The let-
ters themselves are detailed accounts of events preceding and following
the accession of Nur-Adad. They appear designed to emphasize the
difficulties that Nur-Adad overcame, his contributions to peace and sta-
bility, and his pious works. We are already familiar in the letter-prayers
with “protestations of past merits and present deserts on the part of the
suppliant”.20 Here the concept appears to extend to a kind of “merit
of the father(s)” as the basis for the request for a long life on behalf
of the son. But this request essentially falls outside the framework of
the letters per se, which are not so much letter-prayers as letter-reports
15 Hallo, “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” (in press), notes 29 and 103,
here: I.4.
16 J. van Dijk, “Une insurrection générale au pays de Larša avant l’avènement de
Nūr-Adad,” JCS 19 (1965), 1–25.

17 van Dijk, Nicht-kanonische Beschwörungen und sonstige literarische Texte (=
VS 17 [1971]) No. 41.

18 Cf. e.g. Edwin C. Kingsbury, HUCA 34 (1963), 2 and note 3; 14 f.: lines 142 f.
19 JOAS 88 (1968), 79 and note 74, here: IV.1.
20 Ibid.
(I introduce this term with some misgivings in view of the strictures

regarding epistolary terminology by Veenhof ).21 Their functional affin-
ity is rather with the very much later “open letters to the gods” already
cited above from the neo-Assyrian tradition.22
The same characterization applies to the first of two new letters from
Sin-iddinam to the gods that are incorporated in a corpus best enti-
tled “the royal correspondence of Larsa.” This corpus forms a worthy
counterpart to the “royal correspondence of Ur” now being edited in a
definitive manner by my student Peter Michalowski, and to the “royal
correspondence of Isin” most of which has been edited by F.A. Ali.23
The three corpora form an interesting historical sequence, and dis-
play a distinct literary development. The earliest material, that con-
cerning the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur, deals in fairly sober and
unembellished terms with the relations between the king and his high
officials. The intermediate stage, represented by the correspondence of
Isin, chiefly involves that dynasty’s disputes with the early kings of Larsa
over water-rights,24 but in addition usually incorporates letter-prayers
properly speaking as well as a miscellany of dedicatory and other texts.
The latest stage is represented by the Larsa corpus, which features the
elaborate style already identified with the “school of Larsa” above, and
includes moving letter-prayers addressed to Rim-Sin of Larsa by the
daughter of Sin-kashid of Uruk,25 and to Nin-isina the healing goddess
by a scribe,26 in addition to the two Sin-iddinam letters.
Unlike the two earlier corpora, which are known chiefly from Nip-
pur texts, the royal correspondence of Larsa has been reconstructed
21 K.R. Veenhof, Bi.Or. 28 (1971), 349–351.

22 It is not entirely clear to me whether the Berlin text represents Sin-iddinam as
king addressing his deceased predecessor or as (crown-)prince addressing his reigning
father; he is referred to as prince (nun) but also, in the initial dedicatory inscription,
as “strong man, provider of Ur” (nita-kala-ga ú-a uríki-ma), i.e. with standard elements
of the royal titulary of Larsa in general and Sin-iddinam in particular; cf. Hallo, Early
Mesopotamian Royal Titles(= AOS 43 [1957]), pp. 70 f., 147. Note that lines 19–23 are
almost identical with the titulary of Sin-iddinam 2 (= UET 1,117).
23 Fadhil A. Ali, Sumrian Letters: Two Collections from the Old Babylonian Schools
(1964), pp. 63–79 (Letters B2–B5).

24 Cf. M.B. Rowton, “Watercourses and Water Rights in the Official Correspon-
dence from Larsa and Isin,” JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 267–274.

25 TCL 16, Nos. 58, 59,46; ISET 1,181 (Ni. 9729), and unpublished duplicates, here:
IV.1. My remarks concerning “Letter Collection C” (JOAS 88 [1968], 89) have to be

revised accordingly.
26 TCL 16, 60 (“Letter F” in my list, ibid.) and unpublished duplicate; identified by
S.N. Kramer.
from texts of diverse (and chiefly unknown) provenience. Among them,

however, are enough Nippur exemplars to demonstrate that this corpus
was no mere local manifestation of the Larsa schools but had likewise
entered the standard scribal curriculum. The published texts of the cor-
respondence are chiefly in the Louvre and the British Museum; but the
reconstruction of the corpus is based on unpublished materials from the
Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the University Museum at Philadel-
phia, and the Yale Babylonian Collection. I am happy to acknowledge
my deep debt to Professors Gurney, Kramer, Civil and Sjöberg for per-
mitting me to study these materials in advance of their publications.
The first of the new Sin-iddinam letters is addressed, once more,
to Utu. It begins with an elaborate salutation of eleven lines filled, as
usual, with selected epithets of the deity. Significantly, those chosen here
allude, among other things, to Utu as healer (“righteous god who loves
to keep men alive, who listens to their prayers”), foreshadowing the
body of the letter. Another describes him as “bearded son of Ningal,
(who) wears a lapis lazuli beard”—most probably reflecting the fact
that it is, again, a statue of the deity that is being addressed.27
The body of the letter can be divided into four sections of approx-
imately nine lines each, beginning with a dramatic statement of the
disaster that has befallen the city of Larsa. Although the technical term
used can mean to commit sacrilege or evil (níg - gig - ga . . . ak), in the
light of what follows it must here have its literal implication of breaking
out in sickness of epidemic proportions. The effect on troops, young
men, children and the whole people is graphically rendered.
The second section contrasts this sad state of affairs with the happy
circumstances in which Elam and especially the godless Subarians find
themselves. There is a virtual appeal to the argument from theod-
icy. The Subarian, it is averred, “knows no reverence, does not install
priests and priestesses in the shrines of the gods, does not even know
the shrines of the gods, nor libations and offerings” and yet “his troops
grow like grass, his seed is wide-spread; death, evil, paralysis and sick-
ness have not carried him off; his men escape illness, his army is safe.”
The concluding sections, noting that the plague has raged for seven
years already, contrast Sin-iddinam’s cultic piety and plead, as a re-
ward, for Utu’s compassion and mercy toward Larsa, so that the pesti-
lence may depart from the city and its people survive to sing his
27 This was already intimated by A. Falkenstein in his pioneering study of the letter-
prayer genre, ZA 44 (1938), 1–25, esp. pp. 7 f. Cf. Hallo, JOAS 88 (1968), 77, here: IV.1.
praises. This is, incidentally, early and important testimony for the
Mesopotamian conception according to which royal piety is the war-
rant for national well-being (and fertility), in sharp distinction to the
Biblical, and especially Deuteronomic, concept of collective responsibility
for the common weal. The final two lines invoke the king’s own per-
sonal case: “And as for me, for my reverence give me health, bestow
on me long life as a present!” They thus form a fitting transition to the
other new letter prayer of Sin-iddinam.
This is preserved in its entirety on two unpublished tablets of the
Yale Babylonian Collection, and in part on three published and unpub-
lished duplicates from other collections. It is addressed to Nin-isina,
tutelary goddess of the rival kingdom of Isin, but revered through-
out Sumer as a healing goddess.28 It is a classic of the genre, and is
presented below, with thanks to Professor Jacobsen for many helpful
suggestions.28a
Once more, the letter displays a fairly clear five-fold structure, begin-
ning with the elaborate salutation characteristic of the genre (lines 1–11).
The body of the letter begins with the historical (or in this case bio-
graphical) background, stressing the king’s past piety and effective rule
(12–15), until a dream at night reversed his fortunes (20–22). There fol-
lows a praise section which, in the context of his illness (23–25), empha-
sizes his total dependence on the healing arts of the goddess in face of
the failure of human help (26–29). Next comes a petition section which
pleads for mercy from both the goddess and her healer-son Damu (34–
40). The concluding petition looks to both deities for merciful restora-
tion of health and long life (45–50). A final line in only some exemplars
seems to imply reconciliation with Babylon or its hostile deities; in oth-
ers, the granting of the petition (52).
In general, then, one may posit a structural correspondence between
the Sumerian letter-prayers and the individual prayers (both laments
and thanksgiving) of the Bible, including those concerned with sickness.
For the specific assessment of the prayer of Hezekiah, one may note the
following: we now have evidence that an Old Babylonian king, writing
in Sumerian, addressed prayers to the gods in the form of letters, and
28 Cf. most recently W.H.Ph. Römer, “Einige Beobachtungen zur Göttin Nini(n)sina
auf Grund von Quellen der Ur III-Zeit und der altbabylonischen Periode,” = AOAT 1
(1969), pp. 279–305.
28a I am also indebted to Professor Shaffer for supplying me with Text F (identified
by P. Michalowski), which I was able to incorporate in the page-proofs.

in two or even three cases these were, if not actual inscriptions on steles,
intimately connected with the erection of monumental stone statues. In
addition, the specific occasion for at least one of the new letter-prayers
was the king’s illness.
We cannot yet fully reconstruct the historical circumstances sur-
rounding each of the letters: whether those regarding Nur-Adad date
to that king’s reign when Sin-iddinam was only the crown-prince;29
whether the seven-year plague was coterminous with his seven-year
reign;29a whether his illness resulted from it; whether his victory over
Babylon in his fourth year30 was alluded to; or even whether he recov-
ered, as might seem to he implied by his famous omen.31 But, even
without going into these questions, or into the numerous verbal cor-
respondences between the prayer attributed to Hezekiah and the com-
parative Sumerian material, we may already conclude that this material
provides an early Mesopotamian model for the notion of a king praying
to the deity for recovery from illness by means of a letter inscribed on
or deposited before a public monument.31a
29 Above, note 22.

29a FLP 1331 and 1333, two unpublished texts kindly called to my attention by David
I. Owen (letter of 4-19-74), are dated to the fifteenth day of the sixth month of the “year
following the year the great wall of Maškan-šabra was built.” Since “the great wall
of Maškan-šabra” gave its name to the sixth or seventh year of Sin-iddinam (Goetze,
JCS 4 [1950], 93 f. and 101) we have here evidence either for a variant formula for the
seventh year or a possible eight-year reign.
30 A. Goetze, JCS 4 (1950), 101; cf. D.O. Edzard, Zwischenzeit, p. 146.
31 Hallo, JCS 21 (1967 [1969]), 96 f.
31a Note also the apocryphal Syriac “psalm of David” entitled “The prayer of Heze-
kiah when enemies surrounded him” first published by William Wright, PSBA 9 (1887),
257–266.
Letter of Sin-iddinam to Nin-isina
A = Ashm. 1932.520 lines 1–52 copy by O.R. Gurney

B = YBC 4705 lines 1–25 copy by W.W. Hallo
C = UET 8:70 (collated) lines 1–13, 39–52? copy by E. Sollberger
D = YBC 4605 lines 25–52 copy by W.W. Hallo
E = CBS 7072A obv. lines 23–46 copy by M.E. Cohen
F = UET 6/3: “225” (joins C) lines 14–26 copy by A. Shaffer
Transliteration
1. dNin-in-si-na dumu-ki-ág An-mah nin-é-gal- mah -ra aù-na-a-du11

2. gu-za-lá ki-dutu-è-aa na-ri a-ra-li ˘ ˘
3. d
nitlam ki-ág ur-sag Pa-bil-sag-gá-ke4 é-gi4-a-mah ki-ùr-ra
4. sa12-sug5-mah An dEn-líl-lá-ke4a sag-íl nin-e-ne ˘
5. EN.LIL.KI-a˘a dur-an-ki-ka me-bé šu-du7-du7
6. aé-gal-mah é-nam-nin-a-bka-nib nam-mah-béc dpa-èd
7. Laa-ra-akKI˘ b éc-nigxd-gar aše-tef gé-sa-bad é-sa-sì-ma

˘ g bára-mah-bi ri-a
8. ˘
a-zu-gal atu6 b-du11-ga-nia nam-ti-la ctu6- tu6 c dtu-rad b[a-ni-i]b-gi 4-gi4
9. ama-kalam-ma arhuš sux(KAxŠU)-dè ki-ág a-r[a-zu giš-tu]g
10. nin-mu-ra ù-ne-d[è-da˘ h]
11. dEN.ZU-i-din-nam lugal˘ UD.UNU.KI-ma-ke ìr-zu na-ab-bé-a
4
12. u4-tu-da-mu-ta dUtu-ra ù-naa-ab-du11 nam-sipa kalam-ma-né ma-an-sì

13. gú-mua nub - šub -bub-dè-en c gá -eC ù-du10d nu-emu-dae-ku-ku nam ti
ì-kin-kin
14. dingir-re-e-ne-era mah-bi KA-ša6-ša6-ge-mu-da
15. sizkura bninda-bab-bic d˘ì-kin-end níg-name fnu-muf-ne-kéšg
16. [dAsa]l-lú-hi lugal ká-dingir-raKIa dumub dI7-lú-ru-gú x-y u4-zal
˘
17. [u]ru? -bi uru-mu-šè u4 -šú-uš-ea ki imb-sì-sìc-ge
1. aNew line begins here in B.

2. aA adds - šè ?
4. aSo B?! A: -ta?
5. So A and C; B omits.
6. aIn B, this line follows line 7. b-bSo A and B; C: -zu. CSo B; C: -zu. d-dSo B? (or:
ba-tùm?); C adds -[ak]?

7. aSo B; C: é. bSo B; A and C omit. cSo A and C; B omits. di.e.: nigìn; glossed by
níg in B. eSo A (broken) and B; C omits? fSo B; A: ti; C: ta. g-gSo A (broken)
and B; C: é - sa - sì?!- ma?! é-sa-[bad]!
8. a-aSo B and C; A: šu-du -ga. bGlossed by tu-ú in B. c-cSo A (?); B omits; C adds:
11
gá- ni ? d-dSo A; B: u[g5-ga?].
9. B only.
10. B only (the verb may be restored at the beginning of C 10).
12. aSo A and C; B: n e. bSo A and C; B omits.
13. aSo A (restored); B adds: -šè. b-bSo A: B: še-bi. C-CSo A; B omits. dSo B; A omits.
e-eSo B; A omits.
14. aSo B; A: [dingir-gal-ga]l-e-ne-ra?
15. 9So F? A adds: - re; B adds: - ra. b-bSo F; B: nindaba (PAD.dINANNA); C:
nindaba-ninda-[ba]? CSo B; A and F; -ta. d-dSo B; A: è - a; F: AK. eSo B (and

F); A: na-me. f-fSo B; A: la-b [a- . . . ]. ggloss in B: ik? - ši.
16. aSo A; F omits. bSo F; A: en-tur; B: NÍG. TUR?
17. aSo F; A omits. bSo B; A and F omit. cSo A and B; F omits.

Translation
I
1. To Nin-isina, beloved daughter of lofty An, mistress of Egalmah, speak!
2. To the chair-bearer of the Orient, the counselor of the netherworld,
3. The beloved (chief-)wife of the warrior Pabilsag, the senior daughter-in-
law of Ki"ur,
4. The senior record-keeper of An and Enlil, proudest of goddesses,
5. Who perfects the attributes of Duranki in Nippur.
6. Who makes theira exaltation appear in Egalmah, the house of her
queenship.
7. Who has founded (in) Larak the Eniggar (as) a throne, the Esabad, the
house of . . . , (as) their lofty dais.
8. Great healer whose incantationa is life (health), whose spells
restore(?) the sick man,b
9. Mother of the nation, merciful one, who loves prayer and
supplication,
10. My lady, say furthermore to her—
11. (This is) what Sin-iddinam, the king of Larsa, says:
II
12. Since the day of my birth, after you spoke to Utu (and) he gave me the
shepherdship over his nation.
13. I do not neglect my duties, I do not sleep sweetly, I seek life (or: I work
all my life).
14. To the gods greatly in my worship
15. aI perform prayers and sacrifices,a I have withheld nothing from them.
16. Asalluhi the king of Babylon, ason of Illurugua (the divine Ordeal-river),
persisting [in wrath?],
17. Their city against my city daily overruns the land,
6. aC: your
8. aA: (whose) creation. bB: the dead man?
15. a-aA: In prayers, emerging from sacrifices; F: Prayers performed with sacrifice.
16. a-aA: (and) the young lord Ilurugu
18. lugal-bi lugal UD.UNU.KI.šèa nígb-hul-dibc-béd ìe-kin-kin

˘ b la-ba-abc-gi
19. sipa kalama-bé nu-me-en-na nindaba-bi
20. šul gá-rá gi6-aa níb-ma-mú-dac-ke4 dgìrie-néf gma-an-dib-bég
21. sag-gá im-maa-gub igi-huš-bi gá-e igib muc-ni-du8
22. a[giš?-g]isal (BI+IZ)? -i7˘ -[da-tù]m tu6-hul-bi sì-[ga]a
˘
23. u4-bi-ta nam-šul-mu si nu-sá kišiba-nib muc-un-díb!-bé-en
24. ní-tug-mu-ta ní-mu ala-ba-ra-èa tu-ra- gig b ba-an-dib-bé-en
25. ku4-ra-mu kukkú nu-zalaga-geb cgar-rac-àmd lú igie nu-mu-ni-ín-du8-a
26. a-[zu]-e igi-bi nu-mu-un-du8-e túg-níg-láa nu-mu-š[ed7-dè]
27. tu6-ea tu6-e bdu11-ga nu-šid-dèb ènc-tukun ZI d tu-ra-m]u izkim nu-tuku-
ad
28. tu-ra-mu ú-šima bedin-na hur-sag-gáb nu-umc-mú-ad lú nu-mu-un-
TUG.TUG.TUG-e ˘
29. [t]i-la tu-ra-mu za-aa -da ì-gál nam-mah-zu ga-àm-du11
30. [ama]-mu u4 a-tur-ra-mu-ta bmu-unb-tag˘ 4-àm
31. [ama-n]u-tug-ame-ena bír-mub nu-mu-ra-cab-béc za-e ama-mu-me-en
32. [za-e]-nua amalu-bkúr-rab nu-tugc darhuš-mu nu-mu-ra-ab-béd
˘
33. x-[. . . -m]u nu-mu-ra-aba -kin-kin-eb za-e amaluc-mu-dme-end
18. aSo B; F (and A): - ma. bSo A and B; F: ki cSo A and F; B omits. dSo A; B and F
omit. eSo A and B; F: i b -.
19. agloss in B: ka. bSo A and F; B adds: šè ŠU? cSo B; F: an.
20. aSo B; A and F omit. bSo B; A and F omit. cSo B (and A); F omits. dSo A; B and
F omit. eSo A and B; F omits. fSo B; A: ta; F omits. g-gSo B; A: mu-un-da-g
[ub?]; F: mu-da-gub-b [a].
21. aSo B; A: mi - in; F: mi. So A and B; F omits. cSo A and B; F: i m - in i -.
22. a-aA only.
23. F omits line (other notes as before).
24. a-aSo B (and A); F: ba-ra-an-è-a. b-bSo B (and A?); F omits.
25. aSo B and D; A: sì. bSo A and D; B omits. c-cSo B, F (and A); D omits. dSo F; B
and D omit. eSo B and D;
26. aSo A; D: lám??
27. aSo A; D omits. b-bSo D; E: [d]u11-ga nu-šub-bu-dè; A: n [u-š] ub-bu d [u11-g]
a-bi-ta. cSo A (and E?); D omits. d-dFrom E, where this forms separate line.
28. aSo E (and D?!); A:BI. b-bSo A; D: edin-hur-sag- gá; E: hur-sag-gá? edin-na.
cSoD; A omits.dSo A; D omits. ˘ ˘
29. So A; D and E omit.
a
30. So E; D omits. b-bSo A and D; E: ma-an-.

31. a-aSo D; A omits? b-bSo D: A arhuš. c-cSo D and E; A: du11.
˘
32. aSo D; A: [- n] a?; E: [ . . . ] -na-an-na. b-bSo D; A: kúr; E: níg - kúr. cSo A; D:
d-d
tug (erased)-tug. So D (from middle of next line); A: arhuš nu-mu-ra-du11 [
. . . ]; E omits. ˘
33. From D; A omits; E: ]-in. So A (!) and D; E omits. So D; E: AMA.INANNA.
a b c
d-dSo D; E omits?
18. Their king seeks out the king of Larsa as an evildoer.

19. (Though) I, not being the shepherd over their nation, have not
coveted(?) their sacrifices,
20. A young man to me at night in the guise of a dream apassed by
me on his feet,a
21. He stood at my head, I myself saw his terrible glance,
22. Carrying a river-oar(?), having cast a spell most evilly.
III
23. Since that day my manhood is not in order, his hand has seized me.
24. I cannot escape from my fears by myself, an evil sickness has seized me.
25. My sickness isa an unlit darkness, not visible to man.
26. The physician cannot look upon it, cannot [soothe?] it with a bandage,a
27. The exorcists cannot recite the spell(?), since suddenly(?) my sickness has
no diagnosis.
28. My sickness: its (healing) herb has not sprouted fortha on plain (or)
mountain,a no one gets it for me.
29. Healing my sickness is with you (alone), let me declare your supremacy:
30. “As my [mother] has abandoned me since my childhood
31. I am one who has no [mother], no one recites my lament to
you, you are my mother!
32. Except [for you], I do not have another personal goddess, no
one pleads for mercy to you on my behalf.
33. No one seeks [for mercy?] from you for me, you are my per-
sonal goddess!”
20. a-aor: seized me by the feet; A and F: stationed himself at my feet.

25. a A and B: is placed in
26. a A: regal robe?
28. a-aE: on mountain and plain
34. lú-gal5-lá ur-girx(KU)a -zu bgá-eb héc-me-en keš-da-zu-šèd muš nam-ba-

an-túm-mu-un ˘
35. Da-mu dumu-ki-ág(a)-zu uku-uš bsag-gá!--nab giš-tukul šu-cdu8-ac-ni
d a
dgá-ed-me-en
36. aarhuš-mu bigi-ni-šèb hu-mu-ra-ab-bé

˘
37. tu-ra-mu ˘ b-kúr csi-sá-dè nu-ubd-zu
tu-ra-šèa ba-an
38. an-birx(NE)-ta ú-a na-ma-da-ana-sì-mu gi6 -a ù nu-bmu-un-da-anb-ku-
a
ku-unc
39. a ama-níg -ú-ruma-mu kù-dNin-in-si-na nin-arhuš bhé-me-enb
40. ù-nu-ku-kua-mub še-ša4-mu gi6-ac gad-mu-ra-ab-tùm˘ ˘e
41. igi-ša6-ga-zu-šè har-mu-ši-ib zi-du10-ga sì-ma-ab
a b b
42. [gá-e]? mušen-šè súr-dùmušen-taa-bkar-rab-gim zi-mu al-tùm-tùm-muc-un

43. [g]á-e igi-a nam-tar-ra-ke4 a úr-zab cku4-mu-ni-íbc šu-ta dkar-mud
44. a guruš -me-ena šu-nam-tar-rab-ka a-nir ìc-gá-gád zi-mu im-mi-in-zal
45. ába-šilamb-a-gim arhuš tug-ma-ra-abc
46. [ ˘ arhuš tug-ma-ra-aba
-l]a?-na-gim
47. [ama-t]u-da-mu-gim uzu˘?-SAL.ÁŠ? hé-ea-díb-bé arhuš tug-ma-ra
48. [x]- ad ka- tab -ba giš-tug MAŠ.KA˘ nu-še-ga ˘
49. d d
[ Da-m]u dumu-ki-ág(a)-zu a-zu-gal En-líl-lá-ke4
50. ú-nam-ti-la mu-un-zu a-nam-ti-la mu-un-zu
51. [. . .. ]-ka dingir sag-[du-ga-mu] a-ba za-ra [. . .]
52. a[dAsal-l]ú-hi dumu d [I -lú-r]u-gú na-ab-d[u -ga]a bhu-mu-un-ti-leb
7 11
˘ ˘
34. aSo D and E; A: giš-gu-za-tur. b-bSo D and E; A omits. cSo E; A and D omit. So
D; E omits.
35. aNew line begins here in D. b-bSo E; A and D omit. C-CSo D (and [A]); E: gál-la.
d-dSo D; E: h[é . . . ].
36. aNot a new line˘ in D; E omits line. b-bSo A; D omits.

37. aSo D and E; A: ta. bSo A and D: E omits. c-cSo D? (or: dé?); A: šedx (A. MUŠX)-
d[i]; E: si-bi with gloss: šedx(MUŠx)-di-bi? dSo D; E omits.
38. a-aSo D; A: nu-; E: nu-mu-un-. b-bSo D; E omits. So E; D omits.
39. a-aSo E; D: x-y-ma?-. b-bSo E; D: -a-ke4
40. aSo D; E omits. bSo D; E omits. cSo E (and C?); D: -e; A omits. dSo A; C, D and
E: hu-. eSo D; E: túm-mu.
41. aSo E;˘D omits. b-bSo D; E: ù-mu-ši-bar. In A, this either belongs with line 41 or
there is something lost at the beginning.
42. aSo D; A and E omit; C: da? b-bSo A, C! and D; E: dal-a. cSo D; E omits.
43. a-aSo D and E: C: nam -[ . . . ]; A: dingir-bi-ta ù-mu-[ . . . ]. bSo E; A: -za-a: D: -
zu-šè; C: -da- zu?. c-cSo E; D: ù-me-ni-ku4; C: [ù]?-me-[ . . . ]; A: mu-e-[ . . . ].
d-dSo E; D: kar-(ra, erased)-mu-da.
44. a-aSo D; C: gá?!-e?!. bSo A and D; C omits. cSo D; C omits. dSo C; D adds: -an.
45. aFrom C (collated). bFrom C (collated). CSo E?; C: an?; D omits.
46. aSo C (and A); D omits.
47. aSo D; A: -ri-ib-.
48. Line in A only; D omits.
51. Line in A only; D omits.
52. So A; D omits except for a few traces. b-bSo D; A: [ . . . ]-an-ti-[ . . . ].
IV
34. I am verily your constable (and) dog,a I do not cease from being tied to
you.
35. Damu, your beloved son: I am verily his private soldier (and) weapon
holder,
36. May you plead for mercy for me before him!
37. My sickness has been changed into (worse) sickness, one does not know
how to rectify it.
38. At midday I am not given any sustenance, by night I cannot sleep.
39. My very own mother(?), holy Nin-isina, verily you are the merciful lady,
40. With my not sleeping, let me bring my wailing to you at night:
41. a “Let me behold your favorable glance, give me sweet life!
42. As for me, alike a bird fleeing from a falcon,a I am seeking to
save my life.
43. As for me, alet me enter your lap in the face of Death (Fate)a,
save me from (its) hand.
44. aI am a young man,a I set up lamentation in the face of Death,
my life ebbs away from me.”
V
45. Like a mother-cow, have mercy on me!
46. Like a [. . .], have mercy on me!
47. Like the mother who bore me, who verily took me from the womb(?),
have mercy on me!
48. (Like) the father who . . ., hear the . . ., the disobedient . . .
49. Damu, your beloved son, the great healer of Enlil,
50. He knows the plant of life, knows the water of life,
51. . . ., the god who cre[ated (?) me], who can [. . .] to you?
52. Asalluhi, son of Ilurugu, has verily spoken: “Let him live!”
34. aA: your little lap dog (little chairdog)

41. aE: When I shall have beheld . . .
42. a-aE: like a falcon flying up against a bird
43. a-aA: when I . . . from the face of its god
44. a-aC: as for me,
Notes
1. The reading Dingir-mah, does not recommend itself, since Ninisina’s

˘
“mother” is Uraš (Römer, AOAT 1, p. 282) whereas Dingirmah is a
˘
form of Ninhursaga-Nintur. Instead of the proposed emendation (for
˘
which cf. e.g. TCL 16, No. 60:9) at the end of the line, one may also
consider nin-gal- dingir-re-ne - ra, as in SRT, 6:iv 16 = 7:64 (Römer,
ibid., p. 292).
2. These epithets seem more at home with other deities; cf. e.g. UET 8,
85 (inscription of Rim-Sin) which begins: dNin-giz-zi-da . . . gu-za-lá
ki-an-a-na-šú-a-aš32 na-ri eri11-gal-la, “Ningizzida . . . chair-bearer of
the universe, counselor of the underworld.” For the connection of the
Orient (literally, the place of the sun-rise; originally a poetic designation
of Dilmun) with Ningizzida, see Sjöberg, Temple Hymns No. 15. Cf.
ISET. 1, 201:9789; dNusku . . . na-ri An Uraš-a.
3. As spouse of Pabilsag, Ninisina was daughter-in-law of Enlil ( é-gi4-a -

gal en dnu-nam-nir-ra: TRS 60:2; cf. Kraus, JCS 3 (1949), 77 f.; Römer,
AOAT 1, p. 282). Evidently, this also made her the daughter-in-law of
Ninlil, whose temple at Nippur was called Kiur (see CAD K s.v. kiūru B;
Falkenstein, Götterlieder, p. 33; Sjöberg, TCS 3, p. 59; van Dijk, Acta
Or. 28 [1964], 44 f.).
4. “(Senior) record-keeper of An” is a standard epithet of Ninisina (see

Krecher, Kultlyrik, pp. 120 f.); the variant with -ta recurs only once
(TCL 15, 2:i 5). She is addressed as the “proudest of goddesses” also
in TCL 16, 60, for which see above, note 26.
5–7. The sequence Nippur-Egalmah-Larak or Nippur-Larak-Egalmah

(so in text C) here replaces the sequence Isin-Egalmah-Larak which is
standard in Isin contexts; see Krecher, Kultlyrik, p. 167.
6. The Egalmah is the temple of Ninisina in Isin; ibid., p. 86.
7. The Eniggar (note the gloss in B) is connected with Ninisina, Gula

and Ninkarrak through the divine name “Lady of Eniggar” (Krecher,
32 The same form occurs in UET 6, 182: 6; variant: ki - an - na - a ki - šú - a - aš.

Kultlyrik, p. 129) and Ninkarrak may in turn be connected with Larak

(Hallo, JCS 23 [1970], 65 n. 94). The throne (aš-te or aš-ti) is connected
to Larak through the equation of the divine names or epithets “Lady
of the throne” and “Lady of Larak” (Krecher, op. cit., pp. 131 f.). The
Esabad is associated with Gula in later texts (Ebeling, RIA 2 s.v.;
E. Ritter, AS 16, p. 313, n. 18). An alternative translation might be
“founded . . . the dais mightily (mah-bi),” but bára-mah can best be
˘ ˘
taken as a technical term (cf. the loanword paramāhu in Akkadian). That
˘ in lines 5–6) seems
-bi has a plural (or impersonal) antecedent here (and
to follow from the correct use of the personal singular suffix in line 6
(note, however, the variants from C). Compare also the statement in
Lipit-Ishtar Hymn *24:50 (Römer, Konigshymnen, p. 27): “Ninisina has
founded your (sic?) lofty dais in Isin.”
8. For Ninisina as healing goddess, see at length Römer, ATOT 1,

pp. 283–291. The lines missing in A and C are required by the context
and can be restored safely with the help of TCL 16, 60:10 f.
12–13. These lines recall the beginning of the second letter-prayer of

Sin-iddinam to Utu via the statue of Nur-Adad his father (JCS 19
[1965], 9:189–193: (u4) nam-sipa-kalam-ma-ni-šè šu-ni-šè mu-un-gar-ra-
a nu-še-bi-da?! gú-ni nu-mu-un-da-šub ù ki-šà-du10 ba-ra-an-ku?!33
Indeed it may be necessary to compare the entire passage 170–190
and to revise van Dijk’s rendering of it somewhat as follows: “Since
(lit.: on) the day that you entrusted to his hand the shepherdship of his
nation, he has not been negligent, he has not been idle, he has never
slept the sweet sleep of contentment (?; lit. the sleep of the place of
contentment).”
14–15. These lines (note the gloss) were already quoted in JAOS 88
(1968), 79, here: IV.1 with n. 63 and, in part, YNER 3, p. 81 s.v. kešda.
I cannot explain the variant for line 15 in A. For kèš34 in the sense of
withhold (kalû) cf. Sjöberg, JCS 24 (1972), 72 f. For the “virtual ablative”
infix n e (plural) cf. Jacobsen, TIT, pp. 293 ff.
33 or dib; cf. CAD s.v. s. abātu.

34 CAD reads sìr.
16–18. These lines are crucial but difficult. Do they allude to the dispute
between Babylon and Larsa which, according to the name of Sin-
iddinam’s fourth year, led to a defeat of Babylon by Larsa in 1847 bc,
three years before the end of Sumu-la-el’s reign?
20–23. This is an expansion of the classic dream image. For the heroic
figure standing at the head, see Oppenheim, Dream-book, p. 189 and
CAD E, p. 409 b s.v. etlu (= ŠUL). The seizing of the feet and hand is a
new element, but cf. line 18 in the letter-prayer to Enki, Hallo, JAOS 88
(1968), 83, here: IV.1.
22. This line, omitted in B and F and largely broken in A, is restored

and translated with all due reserve. It is included here in part to pre-
serve the quatrain-structure of the letter as a whole. Jacobsen suggests
that “The oar is probably meant to identify him as belonging to the
circle of Íd-lú-ru-gú (i.e. Enki) if not as a form of Asalluhe himself.”
25. Could the reference here be to the netherworld (unlit) as in the

Akkadian loanword? See CAD s.v. kukkû.
26. In TCL 16, 60:6, Römer translates as the (cooling) bandage: AOAT
1, p. 291. For tùg-níg-lá see CAD s.v. simdu.
27. For (èn)-tukun see AHw. s.v. (adi) surri:, CAD s.v. zamar. For izkim in
the sense of symptom or diagnosis see CAD s.v. ittu A la l’.
28. For ú-šim = urqı̄tu see most recently MSL 13, p. 193:268.
29. Cf. úš ti-ti za-da ša-mu-e-da-gál, “reviving the (near) dead is surely
with you (alone)” in another letter-prayer to Ninisina or Nin-tin-ugga
(SLTN, 131 rev. ii; cf. above, note 11). Cf. also the latter’s epithet
nin-ti-la-ug5-ga, Hallo, JNES 18 (1959), 54. For nam-mah . . . du11 see
˘
YNER 3, p. 86 s.v.
30–33. These sentiments are familiar from other letter-prayers and

from the Gudea cylinders: Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968), 78, here: IV.1, with
notes 50–53 and 83 lines 39 f. Cf. now also Sollberger, JCS 21 (1967
[1969]), 286 note 80.
34–35. This couplet recurs, mutatis mutandis, in another letter-prayer

to Ninisina (above, note 26): [ké]š-da-zu-uš muš nam-ba-an-túm-mu-
d[é]/dDa-mu dumu-ki-ág(a)-zu giš-tukul nam-ur-sag-gá-ka-ni gá-e-me-
en nam-uku-uš-bi g[a-à]m-ak. For uku-uš-sag-gá(! written RU?)-na (text
E only), see MSL 12, p. 37:114.
38. For an-NE in parallelism with gi6, see YNER 3, p. 71. For the
reading an-birx, cf. now also Sjöberg, Or NS 39 (1970), 82; in Or. Suec.
19–20 (1972), 146:5 etc. he reads an-barx.
42. For the two similes involving the falcon (note variant), see Heimpel,
Tierbilder, pp. 422–425 and add Ali, Sumerian Letters B 8 line 13.
44. The complaint that life is ebbing or flowing away in one’s prime
recurs in other letter-prayers; cf. Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968), 78, here: IV.1,
with notes 44 f.; 83 lines 33, 38.
45–47. For the form arhuš tug-ma-ra-ab, cf. Limet, Les Légendes des
˘
Sceaux Cassites, p. 4:21 f. It occurs already on a seal assigned to the
very late Old Babylonian period: P.R.S. Moorey and O.R. Gurney, Iraq
35 (1973), 78 No. 20.
50. Plant of life and water of life recur together in the Descent of
Inanna (cf. e.g. Kramer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society, 107 [1963], 512:246) and in Lugalbanda and Hurrum-kurra
(YBC 4623:5 f.). The former is equated in Akkadian variously with the
loan-word únattila, the loan translation šamme balā.ti, and the specific
species irrû (CAD s.v.); cf. for the last also Labat, RA 53 (1959), 2 note 4.
51. For the restoration cf. the letter-prayer to Enki, Hallo, JAOS 88
(1968), 82:6, here: IV.1.
v.2

II. THE APPEAL TO UTU
In recent years, F.R. Kraus has devoted much effort to the study
of early Akkadian epistolography. In addition to his long labors on
behalf of a definitive edition of Old Babylonian letters,1 he has pro-
vided an introduction to their Old Akkadian precursors,2 as well as
specialized studies on model letters as taught in the scribal schools3
and on letters addressed to the deity.4 My own concern with Sume-
rian epistolography has also ranged widely, from “real” (i.e., archival)
letters5 to literary ones, with special emphasis on “letter-prayers”.6 It
thus seems fitting to offer here a second installment of one of the
principal collections of Sumerian literary letters. Because of the space
limitations imposed by the requirements of a Festschrift, the present
contribution confines itself to the edition of the text, including liter-
ary parallels and other philological notes to selected lines. For exten-
sive introductory remarks, the reader is referred to the first install-
ment in the series,7 as well as to two separate attempts—published
elsewhere—to place the new text in its literary context. Of these, the
first stresses its generic connections within Sumerian literature,8 the
1 F.R. Kraus, ed., altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Übersetzung (Leiden 1964 ff.).
2 Idem, Einführung in die Briefe in altakkadischer Sprache, JEOL 24 (1976) 74–104.
3 Idem, Briefschreibübungen im altbabylonischen Schulunterricht, JEOL 16 (1964)
16–39. But cf. also AbB 5 (1972) vii f.

4 Idem, Ein altbabylonischer Privatbrief an eine Gottheit, RA 65 (1971) 27–36. Cf.
also JCS 3 (1949) 78, note 30.

5 W.W. Hallo, The neo-Sumerian letter-orders, BiOr 26 (1969) 171–175. Cf. also
HUCA 29 (1958) 97–100.

6 Idem, Individual prayer in Sumerian: the continuity of a tradition, JAOS 88/1 (=
Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser, AOS 53, 1968) 71–89. Here: IV.1.
7 Idem, The royal correspondence of Larsa: I A Sumerian prototype for the prayer
of Hezekiah?, Kramer Anniversary Volume (= AOAT 25, 1976) 209–224. Here: V.1.
8 Idem, Letters, prayers and letter-prayers, Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of
Jewish Studies (Jerusalem 1977) [I:] Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (1981) 17–27.
Here: IV.2.
354 v.2. the royal correspondence of larsa: ii
second its implications for the broader theme of Sumerian interconnec-

tions with Ancient Near Eastern literature generally.9 A third aspect of
the text, namely its significance for the history of the bilingual Sumero-
Akkadian tradition within Mesopotamia, will be taken up elsewhere by
Miguel Civil, who called my attention to the neo-Assyrian duplicates
and allowed me to incorporate the unpublished copy by W.G. Lam-
bert in my edition. I am deeply grateful to both these scholars for their
generosity.
Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu
I. Old Babylonian-unilingual (Sumerian)

A = Ashmolean 1922–258 lines 1–46 copy by O.R. Gurney, OECT 5 (1976) 25,
sides A-B lines 15–58
B = CBS 7072A Rev. * lines 1–24 copy by M.E. Cohen, below, fig. 2–3
C = AO6718 lines 24–46 copy by H. de Genouillac, TCL 16 (1930)
56
D = CBS 3829 lines 23–25 copy by E. Chiera, STVC (1934) 13
E = CBS 4078 line 25 photo by S.J. Lieberman, below, fig. 1.
II. Neo-Assyrian-bilingual (Sumerian and Akkadian)
F = K 8937 lines 1–8 copy by Th.J. Meek, BA 10/1 (1913) No. 3
G = K 7171 lines 22–39 copy by W.G. Lambert (unpubl.)
* For obverse see Hallo, Kramer AV (1976) 214.
Transliteration
I
1. DUtu lugal-mu-úr [en?] di-kuru5-mah an-kia
[ s. ]i-i-ru šá ˘AN-e u KI-tim
2. sag-èn-tar kalam-ma ka-aš mu-un-bar-bar-rea
[ pa]-ri-is pu-ru-us-se-e
3. dingir-zi lú-ti-le-dè ki-ág a-ra-zu giš-tug
[ i-r]am-mu še-mu-ú tas-li-ta
4. arhuš-sù šà-gur-ru mua-un-zu-a
[ ˘ l]a mu-du-ú
5. aníg-si-sáb ki-ág níg-zi bar-tam-mec NE.[RU záh] d ù -[na-a]- du11 d
[ ˘ bi-ma
]-ti qí
9 Idem, The expansion of cuneiform literature, Jubilee Volume of the American Academy
of Jewish Research (= Proceedings 46–47, 1979–1980) 307–332.

v.2. the royal correspondence of larsa: ii 355
6. su6-mú dumu DNin-gal su6-na4-za-gín- duru5 a bba-an- il b

[ ša ziqni uq-n]i-i zaq-nu
7. kíd-lá kisalb si-gar-an-ki kukkú zalagc-šèd gar
[ ] uk-la ana na-ma-r[u]
8. en sag-kal aš-a-ni pa-è-a nam-mah-a-ni zà nu-di
[ ˘ la iš-šá-[na-nu]
]-šú
9. ur-sag dumu Nin-gal-e tu-da me sag-kešda ur4-ur4
D
10. dingir-zi nun nam-tar-tar-re a-a sag-gi6-ga lugal-mu-úr aú- na -dè-daha

˘
1. aSo A; F adds: -a. 2. aSo A; F: -ra. 4. aSo A and B; F: nu-. 5. aNot a new
line in B. bSo A; B omits. cSo A; B adds: bar-ra. d-dSo A; F: ù-mu-un-dè-du11. 6.
aSo A?; F: na ?; B omits. b-bSo B (and A?); F: lá-e. 7. aSo B; A omits? bSo B?; A
omits. cSo A and B; F: zalág. dSo F (and B?); A: -gá? 10. a-aSo B; A omits?
Translation
I
1. To Utu, my king, lord, senior judge of heaven and earth,
2. Protector of the nation who renders verdicts,
3. Righteous god who loves to pardon men, who hears prayer,
4. Long on mercy, who knows clemency,a
5. Loving justice, choosing righteousness, [destroying ev]il(?), speak!
6. To the bearded son of Ningal, (who) wears a greenish lapis lazuli beard,
7. Opener of the courtyard (and) locks of heaven and earth, who makes the
dark (places) bright,
8. Lord who alone is a resplendent leader, whose greatness is unequalled,
9. Warrior, son born by Ningal, who guards and gathers together the
divine attributes,
10. Righteous god, prince who determines all fates, father of the black-
headed ones, my king, say furthermore!
3. aSo A and B; F: who does not know [ . . . ].
II
11. 1DEN.ZU-i-din-nam lugal UD.UNU.KI-ma ìr-zu na-ab-bé-a
12. uru-zu UD.UNU.KI-maa šà-ge-pà-da-zu níg-gig-ga im-ma-an-ak
13. sila-dagal ki-e-ne-di u4-zal-zal-la si-ga im-ma-an-sia
14. erín-ša6-ga-zu gú-gar-gar-ra ì a-gi-gi gu?!-gim si-il- si-li-dè ba-an-til-le-
eš
15. guruš-zu šah-ím-ma-gim ab-ur4 aba-an- hul -eša e -ne-ma bim-ma-anb-
su8?-uš ˘ ˘
16. ukù-gá alan ní-ba im-ma-ana-gul-lu-uš ní-bi-a ba-an-til- le -[eš]
17. du13-du13-lá ad!-ama-bi-nea-ta u4-ba-an- da-kar -[re-eš]
18. ukù-gá igi-hur-re mùš-bi-aa ba-an-kúr-r[e-eš]
˘
19. erín gaa-an-ša-ša šu-bar-ra-àmb kalam túg-gim dul4 ‘è’[a]
20. šul-DUtu uru-za UD.UNU.KI-ma lú- kúr -gim bar-ta ba-ea-da-gub
III
21. kur-nimKI-ma [. . .]-mušen-gim mah-bi lú-aúš-aa bnu-gál-lab
˘
22. su-bir4KI im-dugud-dugud-da dingir-re-e-ne ní-te-gá nu-una-zu-a
[ ]- × la i-du-ú
23. ma-da-bia nu-bub-tab-be4 u4-bi nu-gál-la
[ la] ib-ba-áš-ši
24. lú-SU-ea bki-dingir-re-e-ne-ke4b nu-gig cnu-bar-ec dnu-mu-da-íl-ed
25. erín-aa-nia ú-gim lu-lu-ab numun-ca-nic ddagal-lad
[ ] ru-up-pu -[šá]
26. za-lam-gar ti-la ki-dingir-re-e-ne-ke4 nu-mua-unb-zu-a
[ ] la i-du-ú
27. ú-maa-am-ginx(GIM)-nam u5-ab-šè ca-déc sizkur díl-lad nu-mue-un-zu-a
[ š]á-as-qu-ú i-sin-nu la i-du-u
28. nam-tar hul-gál á-sàg níg-gig-ga nu-mu-una-na-te-gáb
[ ˘ u]l i-.te-eh-hi-s̆ú
29. lú-MU.AN.SAL.LA-bi níg-gig-gaa ì-kú-e ˘ugnim-bi ˘ b silim-ma
[ !
i-ku]l-šú-nu um-man (wr.MAT)-šú-nu šal-ma
12. aSo A; B omits. 13. aSo B; A; -gar? 14. aSo A; B omits. 15. a-aSo B; A: x
bí-in-y-[ . . . ]. b-bSo B; A: mu-x-y- 16. aSo B; A: ab 17. aSo B; A omits. 18.
aSo B; A omits. 19. aSo B; A: ka -.bSo B; A omits. 20. aSo B; A omits. 21.
a-aSo A; B: adda (LÚ-šeššig)? b-bSo A; B: i[n-nu]? 22. aSo G; A omits. 23. aSo
x
A; D omits. b-bSo A; D: TAG? 24. Precedes lines 22–23 in G? aSo A; C and D
omit. b-bSo A (and D?); C: dingir-ra-ni. c-cSo D; A and C: lukur d-dSo A (and D?);
C: íl-la nu-mu-un-zu-a. 25. Precedes lines 22–23 in G(?). a-aSo A and C; D: -bi.
bSo A and D; C: -àm. c-cSo A (and D); C: -bi. d-dSo A and C; E (by confusion
with line 43?): hé-mah. 26. aSo C; A and G omit. bSo C and G; A omits. 27.
aSo A; C omits. ˘ bSo A; C omits, c-cSo A; G: A.TIR(eša) ezen; C omits. d-dSo C
(by confusion with line 24?); A and G omit. eSo A and C; G omits. 28. aSo A
and G; C omits, bSo G (and A?); C omits. 29. aSo C; A: -bi? bSo C; G: -a-ni; A
omits.
II
11. This is what Sin-iddinam, king of Larsa, your servant, says:
12. In your city Larsa, your heart’s choice, a plague has broken out,
13. The broad streets where they passed the days in play are filled with
silence.
14. Your goodly troops who were subdued have returned, they have been
finished off like thread for tearing.
15. Your young men are scared like running pigs, they have been destroyed,
they have been made to stand there.
16. They have broken the image of self-respect of my people, they have
finished them off by themselves,
17. They have snatched(?) the little ones from their parents on an evil day.
18. The visage of my people has been changed into a foreign(?) face,
19. The troops who were subjugated are (now) freed, (while) the nation
emerges covered as with a garment.
20. Oh youthful Utu, in your city Larsa you stand aloof like an enemy/
stranger.
III
21. Elam like a [ ]-bird greatly not being a dead man—
22. Subir, the heavy fog of the gods, who knows no reverence,
23. Its country is not sundered, its day (of reckoning?) has not occurred.
24. The Subarian does not install qadištum and kulmašitum priestesses in the
places of the godsa—
25. His troop grow like grass, his seed is wide-(spread).
26. Living in tents, he who does not know of the places of the gods,
27. Who, being mounted as if on a wild beast, does not know alibation and
offerings,a
28. Fate, evil, paralysis (and) illness have not approached him.
29. Their. . . -men are committing a sacrilege, (yet) their army is safe.
24. aSo A (and D); C: The Subarian, his god does not know the installation of
qadištum and nadı̄tum (or šugı̄tum) priestesses. 27. a-aSo A; C: offering a prayer; G:
emmer flour, festival (and offering).
30. mu-imina-kam-ma-ta urub-gá mèc-šen-šen-nad ela-bae-anf-du8g namh-úši

á!j-bi nu-gá-gá
[ ta-ha]-zu qab-lu ul ip-pa.t-.tar nam-ta-ru iz-z[u
31. edin-naa ur-mah-eb addax!c-kúd-e nu-mu-nie-ibf-lá- e g
[ i-k]a-la ul ú-ma.t-[.tí]
32. dingir inim-ša6-ša6-ge-dèa nu-mub-unc-zu-ad gá-e eim-mae-daf-akg en h
[ la i-du]- ú a-na-ku at-ti-pu-uš
33. dingir-gal-gal-e-ne sizkur u4-šú-uš-e al-gub-bea-enb inim-cša6-ša6-gec-mu
mah-àmd
[ ˘ az?]-za-zu te-mi-qu-ú-a ma-a"-du
34. šul- Utu nam-bi-šè uru -zu UD.UNU.KI-mab igi-zi cbar-mu-un-ši-ibc
D a
[ URU-k]a? ba-bi-lu ki-niš nap-li-is-su-ma
IV
35. a uru-zu a gig -ga ul4-la-bia du11 i-ga-bab-ab
[ ] šum-ru-s. a ár-hiš qí-bi
36. a éš en !-šè adu11-ga-ab ˘ a
[ a]-di ma-tí qí-bi-iš
37. arhuš- sù [UD.UNU].KI-ma šu tea-ba-ab
[ ]- ka ? le-qe
38. níg-gig-ga-ak-bi én atar-bi-ib!a
[ ši-t]a-a"-al-šu-ma
39. [uru-z]u UD.UNU.KI-ma aè-ni-iba
[ ]šu-ú-s. i
30. aSo A; C: iá. bSo A; C: uruki. cSo A; C omits. dSo C; A omits. e-eSo A and
C; G: [nu-]? fSo A; G: -u]b; C omits. gSo C; G: -du8-a; A: -du12(TUG). hSo C;
A omits. iSo A; C: úš-a; G: tar-ra. jSo G; A and C: DA. 31. aSo C; A: -ta. bSo
C; A omits. ci.e. LÚ x ÚS or LU-šeššig; A and C: LÚ. dSo A; C: KA. eSo A and
C; G: un fSo A; C: íl; G: íb. gSo A (and G?); C omits. 32. Precedes lines 30–31
in G. a-aSo C; A omits. bSo C; A omits. cSo C; A omits, dSo A and C; G omits?
e-eSo A and C; G: ba. fSo C and G; A: -an-. gSo A and G; C: kèš. hSo A; G:
-eš; C omits. 33. aSo A and G; C omits. bSo A and G; C omits. cSo A and C;
G: -sí-sí-ke-da-. dSo A (and G?); C: [a]? 34. aSo A; C: uruKI, bSo A; C and G
omit? c-cSo A and C; G: ù-mu-un-ši-te-bar. 35. a-aSo G; A (and C?) omit. bSo A;
C and G omit. 36. a-aSo A and C; G: inim nu-un-na-ab-bé. 37. aSo A; G: ti.
38. a-aA: tar-bi-MA; C: tar-bi; G: [bí]-íb-tar-ra. 39. Not a new line in A? a-aSo
C; A: #na-ab-ta-šub-e1; G: ib-ta-è,
30. Since (or: in) the seventha year, in my city one has not been released
from strife and battle, pestilence does not stay its arm,
31. In the open country (even) the lion who eats corpses does not carry3
(anything off ) there.
32. (Like) one who does not know how to entreat god I am dealt with—
33. (Yet to) the great gods, whom I serve with daily offerings, is my urgent
entreaty.
34. Oh youthful Utu, on that account (or: for their sake) look with favor
upon your city Larsa!a
IV
35. Quickly say “woe to your stricken city!”a
36. Say “woe! (its) sanctuary! How long?”
37. Take pity on [Larsa]!
38. Inquire into the plague which has broken out in it!
39. aCause it to leavea your city Larsa!
30. aSo A; C: fifth. 31. aSo A; C: lift; G: diminish. 32. In G, this line precedes
line 30! 34. aSo A and C; G (Akkadian version): Babylon (ba-bi-lu)!. 35. a-aSo
G; A (and C?): Let “woe!” be said of your city. 39. a-aSo C; A: may it drop from.
40. [. . .] níg-gig-ga šà-bia zi-ab-ta!b

41. a gú ?-dù-aa šà UD.UNU.KI-ma-ka šu × -[. . .]
42. lú-a -ru-a-bia šu nam-úš-ab ba-e-šub-bu-dè
43. azà!-til-le-eš numun-bi-eb hé-mah
44. ˘
l[ú-a?]-ru-a-bia ka-tar-zu hé-si-il-le˘
45. a b ˘
ù gá-e ní-te-gá-mu -uš nam-ti sì-mu-na-ab
46. zi-sù-ud-gál níg-ba-ea-éš ba-mu-na-ab
40. So C; A: UD.UNU.[KI-ma]. bC: AL. 41. C omits line. a-aOr: [igih]uš-a?.
42. aSo A; C omits. bSo A; C: -ta. 43. aNot a new line in A. bSo A; C omits.
44. aSo A; C: -ba. 45. aSo A; C omits. bSo A; C omits. 46. aSo A; C omits.
40. Remove [...] (and) illness from its midsta!

41. . . . the enemy inside Larsa (or: the terrible glance).
42. You will remove (drop) the hand of pestilence (from) its votaries(?).
43. For all time may its seed be very great!
44. May its votaries(?) recite your praises!
45. And as for me, for my reverence give me (him?) health!
46. Bestow on me (him?) long life as a present!
40. aSo C; A: from the midst of Larsa.
Notes to Selected Lines
1. The restoration is suggested by the first line of Sin-iddinam 5 (and

duplicate), edited by Hallo, JCS 21 (1967) 97–99 and JANES 5 (1973)
169–171. Another parallel to this text occurs in line 5.
2. The translation is based on the (late) equation sag-èn-tar = pāqidu;

cf. lú-èn-tar in this sense in other letter-prayers (Hallo, JAOS 88 78,
n. 50, here: IV.1). But in line with the judicial sense of this strophe, and
the equation èn-tar = ša"ālu, one may also consider a translation “inter-
rogator”; cf. A. Falkenstein, Gerichtsurkunden 1 (1956) 62 f.; 3 (1967) 108.
3–4. Of the five epithets in this couplet, the second recurs with Nin-
isina in the letter-prayer of Nanna-mansi (TRS 60:10) and, in the form
lú-ti-ti ki-ág = ša awilam bullu.tu irammu, with Nanna in an anonymous
letter-prayer (Falkenstein, AnBi 12, 71:4 = Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen 104:4; cf.
also dNin-tin-ug5-ga . . . lú-ti-ti sux[KA × ŠU]-dè ki-ág in Letter Collec-
tion B 17:5) which also apostrophizes him with the next three epithets
(in slightly different order) thus: arhuš-sù šà-gur-ru a-ra-zu-e giš-tuku
˘
= remēnim tajjārim šemi teslı̄tim. Only the first (for which see also line 10)
recurs with Utu in a letter-prayer (UET 6, 182:8). For šà-gur-ru cf. also
the loanword šagurrû, attested only in synonym lists where it is equated
with tajjāru.
5. For the association of Utu and righteousness with the compound

verb bar-tam or the doubly compound verb bar-tam-me/e/ak = bêru,
“choose, select,” see Hallo, “Choice in Sumerian,” JANES 5 (1973) 165–
172; Sjöberg, JCS 29 (1977) 5 ad Nungal-hymn line 11, for which see also
Hallo loc. cit. 168 n. 29. Our line is restored on the basis of the hymn
to Numušda by Sin-iqišam of Larsa first published in photograph by
Falkenstein, SAHG pl. 9 (cf. already JCS 17 (1963), 115 n. 49), copied
by Van Dijk as VS 17 no. 38 and edited by M.-A. Dupret, OrNS 43
(1974) 327–343 and by Sjöberg, OrSuec. 22 (1973) 107–116, where line 32
may be read: níg-zi-dè bar-tam-me níg-NE.RU-e za-ha al-ak with the
˘
glosses ši-te-a-[at (or ta?] and tu-ha-la-aq. Additional examples of bar-tam
in UET 6:104:49 and PBS 5, 68 ii 9’ for which see H. Steible, Rı̄msîn,
mein König (1975) 66.
6. For these epithets of the sun-god see CAD s. vv. darru and zagindurû
and add the references collected by Falkenstein, ZA 44 (1938), 8, n. 1,
and Sjöberg, TCS 3 (1969) 87 ad Temple Hymn 13 (to Utu of Larsa)

line 173 (where F is cited).
7. kukkú-zalag is a frequent cliché in the letter-prayers. (1) To Utu

(UET 6, 182, 4a): en utah-he-ta-è-a-ni kukkú zalag-ge. (2) Sin-iddinam
˘ ˘
to Nin-isina (Hallo, Kramer AV 216 f., here: V.1) 25a: tu-ra-mu kukkù
nu-zalag-ge. (3) Nin-šatapada to Rim-Sin 35b, here: V.3 (= TRS 59:16):
ka-ba-zu kukkù hu-mu-un-zalag-ge. In late bilinguals, it is regularly
˘
rendered by iklēti nummuru (CAD s.v. iklētu). The Sumerian of F (but
not the Akkadian!) is entered almost verbatim in Izi = išātu (MSL 13,
209:5); ku10 -zalag-šè-gar = eklētu nummurum.
8. Again the sun-god virtually shares an epithet with the moon-god,

who in Ibbi-Sin 9 (UET 1, 289:4) and Iddin-Dagan 2 (ib. 293 f.:6) is
called en aš(a)-ni dingir-pa-è-a, “lord who alone is a resplendent deity”;
cf. Falkenstein, SGL I (1959) 95. The second epithet in this line may
perhaps be restored for Ninurta in Bur-Sin *31c (BE 29, 1 iii 37).
12. níg-gig-(ga) and its dialectal equivalent ám-gig-(ga) have three equiv-
alents, anzillu, ikkibu and maruštu; all occur with the verb epēšu (= AK) in
the sense of “violate a taboo, commit a sacrilege” (CAD E 203, 209,
212; cf. CAD M/l. 317: “do evil”). But in our text (see line 29), this
idiom is expressed with the verb akālu (= KÚ). And since maruštu is sim-
ply the feminine of mars. u, “sick,” it is here taken to allude specifically
to sickness or even, in line with nam-úš (var.: nam-tar-ra = namtaru) in
lines 30 and 42, pestilence. Note that in the letter-prayer of Ninšatapada
which follows our text in exemplar A, níg-gig-ga . . . ak occurs in the
context of ba(var.: úš)-úš . . . è (line 25) and nam-úš-a (line 28). Accord-
ing to H.L.J. Vanstiphout, Phoenix 20 (1974) 351–370, a pestilence may
have been the cause of the fall of the Ur III empire. For theories about
the role of epidemics in ending the Bronze Age in Western Asia, see
Carol Meyers, BiAr 41 (1978) 91–103. [See Vanstiphout, Mesopotamia 8
(1980), 83–89.]
13. “Passing the days in play” is a topos recurring in the Lugalanne-

mundu inscription; see Güterbock, ZA 42 (1934) 43 A 6’: ki-e-ne-di
u4 mi-ni-ib-zal-zal-e. For sila si-ga or sìg-ga, “the silent street,” see
van Dijk, SGL 2 (1960) 48; MSL 13; 182:24 f.; for sila-dagal, “the
broad street, square,” cf. ibid. 181, 1’–3’, Sjöberg, AfO 24 (1973) 41 and
B. Alster, Mesopotamia 2 (1974) 81 f. ad Nungal-hymn line 46.
14. gú-gar-gar is taken here to equal kanāšu though it also varies with
gú-gur = puhhuru, “assemble.” The image of “tearing like a thread”
recurs in the˘ ˘ letter-prayer to Enki (Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968) 84, here:
IV.1) 50a: nam-tag-mu gu-gim ga-mu-ra-si-il; cf. also “Man and his
god” (Kramer, VT Supp. 3 (1955) 173) 3b: gu-gim ha-ba-si-il-e; Kramer
˘
translates “moan(?)” (cf. also idem, ANET3 (1969) 589), apparently by
analogy with gù-si-il, “scream,” for which see Alster, Mesopotamia 2
(1974) 77. Cf. also below, ad line 44.
15. For the “running pig” see Lugalbanda and Enmerkar (C. Wilcke,
Das Lugalbandaepos, 1969) line 325 as interpreted by W. Heimpel, Studia
Pohl 2 (1968) 361 f. but with the reading (ibid., 261 f.) KAS4 = ím (or gim4)
= šanû V, “trot”(?); cf. AHw 1167. For ur4 with šah or šáh, cf. Heimpel,
op. cit. 265 f.; an equation with arāru V, “to fear, become agitated, panic-
stricken” is here proposed.
16. Or: “they have broken the image of my people altogether.” For ní-
ba in a collective (or reciprocal) sense, see Heimpel, ibid. 153–155.
18. Igi-hur-re, if correctly read, may be related to hu-ru-(um), hur-

˘ ˘ ˘
rum = ahurrû, hurru, “stupid, barbarous” (CAD s. vv.), hence “foreign.”
˘ ˘
But cf. also the divine name Lugal-igi-hur -ra in An = Anum VI 62
d hu
˘
(CT 25, 38: 11928: 1) where hur may be equated with banû, “beautiful”;
so already H. Radau, BE 30 (1913) p. 41 n. 1; followed by Tallqvist,
Akkadische Götterepitheia (1938) s.v., J. Lewy, HUCA 23/1 (1950–1951) 260.
19. ga-an-ša-ša is taken here as an allomorph for ka-(ša)-an-ša-ša, for

which see most recently Hallo, JANES 5 (1973) 166, note 37. The read-
ing kalam is preferred over ukù because of the frequent image of “the
nation (or foreign land or GN) covered as (with) a garment” as in the
passages collected by Falkenstein, AnOr 29 (1950) 107 and note 2; ZA 55
(1963) 62; Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos (1969) 143 f. Cf. especially SRT 15: 4a:
zalag-me-lám(a)-ni kalam-ma bi-dul4; CT 15, 15:12: me-lám-zu kalam-
ma túg im-mi-in-dul5 (cf. W.H. Ph. Römer, BiOr 32 (1975) 148: 11, 12).
An alternate reading of the line may be suggested in light of CT 26,
25: 46 f.: pirig ka-šá-an-ša-ša = [ūmu] muktaššaššu; cf. CAD M/2 188;
B. Kienast, OrNS 26 (1957) 45–50.
20. For “standing outside/apart/aloof like an enemy” (nu-erím-gim

bar-ta. . . gub) see the references collected by G.B. Gragg, Sumerian
Dimensional Infixes (= AOATS 5, 1973) 36 and 48 from Ur Lament 254

and 374 and Summer and Winter 111 (= van Dijk, La Sagesse, 1953, 45
line 24’).
22. “Knowing reverence” recurs in the letter-prayer to Enki (Hallo,

JAOS 88 (1968) 84, here: IV.1) line 54: dingir-mu ni-te-gá-zu gá-(e)-me-
en and in Gudea, Cyl. A xvii 27: ní-te-ni mu-zu.
23. For be4 (BA) = našāru, nuššuru, (sapāhu) see Gragg, op. cit. 34 and
note 1; 93.
26. “Living in tents,” here said of the Subarians, is said of the Amorites
in The Marriage of Martu (SEM 58) iv 24; cf. G. Buccellati, The
Amorites of the Ur III Period (= Ricerche 1, 1966) 92 f. and 330. Both
descriptions occur in pejorative contexts. In the Assyrian King List,
the loan-translation ašibūt kultāri occurs without any negative overtones;
cf. Hallo, Assyrian historiography revisited, Eretz-Israel 14 (1978) 5* with
notes 48–52.
28. The sequence “evil fate, debilitating paralysis” is an almost literal

forerunner to the standard catalogue of diseases or demons in the late
“medical” series asakki mars. ūti in CT 17, 1–28 etc.; cf. B. Meissner,
Babylonien und Assyrien 2 (1925) 221 f.; CAD A/2: 326a: nam-tar hul-gál
˘
á-sàg gig-ga = namtaru lemnu asakku mars. u.
29. See above, ad line 12.
30. For earlier translations of this line (based on C), see van Dijk, SGL 2
(1960) 31; Sjöberg, ZA 54 (1961) 60; Alster, Mesopotamia 2 (1974) 132 f.
A comparable image is found in the Šulgi Prophecy (R. Borger, BiOr
28 [1971] 14) iv 4’–8’: rubû šū marušta (cf. NÍG.GIG.GA) immar . . . adi
šarrūtišu tahāzu u qablu (cf. MÈ.ŠEN.ŠEN.NA) ul ipparrasu (cf. KUD?).
For nam-úš-(a) as pestilence cf. van Dijk and Sjöberg, loc. cit., and (in
our passage) the late variant nam-tar-ra = namtaru. For the Akkadian
equivalent mūtānū see F.R. Kraus, RA 65 (1971) 97–99, who translates
“fatalities” (Todesfälle) but does not rule out the sense “epidemic” etc.
Alster (loc. cit.) translates “disaster” and elsewhere “sentence of death”
(JCS 24 (1972) 125).
31. For addax-kú = šalamta akālu see Hallo and van Dijk, The Exaltation of
Inanna (= YNER 3 (1968)) 70 and add Hendursanga-hymn (Edzard and
Wilcke, Kramer AV (1976) 139–176) line 81. The present line alludes
to the disruption of the normal order of nature, as in the Incantation
to Utu (G. Castellino, OrAnt 8 (1969) p. 10) line 47: “Utu, if you do
not rise, the wolf smites not the lamb, the lion in the (open) field does
not strike or [carry off?]”; for this analogy and its implications, see
P. Michalowski, The Royal Correspondence of Ur (Yale Dissertation, 1976)
10 f.
32. For KA-ša6-(ša6) as a verb (= šutēmuqu) see Steible, Rı̄msîn (1975) 52

and 61; the reading of the first sign can be determined by reference to
the dialectal rendering in The Descent of Inanna (Kramer, PAPS 85
(1942) 293–323) line 30: sukkal e-ne-èm-ša6-ša6-ga-mu; cf. Kraus, JCS 3
(1949) 10; SD 5 (1958) 63, note 1. Note also MSL 12, 106:78: inim-sì-
sì-ga = šutēmuqu (for this variant cf. line 33 below) corresponding to
MSL 12, 32:472: inim-ša6-ša6-ge. The curious variant in C (if correctly
read) seems to depend on a dictation-error: im-ma-da-ak-eš > im-ma-
da-kèš.
33. For inim-ša6-(ša6) as a noun (= suppû, tadmiqtu, tēmı̄qu) see Alster,

Mesopotamia 2 (1974) 96 who reads ka-šag5-šag5 and translates our pas-
sage: “(this is) my most urgent request.” That a dative is implied with
“the great gods” seems likely from the parallel in the letter-prayer of
Sin-iddinam to Nin-isina (Hallo, Kramer AV [1976] 209–224, here: V.1)
line 14: dingir-re-e-ne-er (var.: [dingir-gal-ga]l-e-ne-ra) mah-bi inim-
˘
ša6-ša6-ge-mu-da, “when I entreat the (great) gods urgently.” For the
“daily service” in this connection, cf. especially Lipit-Ištar *26 (Römer,
SKIZ 7) rev. 8 f.: inim-ša6-ga dLi-pí-it-eš4-tár-ra-da [ . . . ] u4-šú-u[š . . . ] ha-
˘
ra-da-gub. For the roughly synonymous construction with terminative
and gál, cf. the letter-prayer of Gudea-Enlila to Dingir-mansum (TMH
n. F. 3, 57) 4a: inim-ša6-ša6-ge inim-inim-ma-šè gál-la. For the late vari-
ant inim-sì-sì-ke-da-mu see comment to previous line.
37. “Take pity, have mercy” is expressed in the letter-prayers variously

by arhuš tuk and arhuš šu-te/ti. (1) Sin-iddinam to Nin-isina 45–47
˘ ˘
(Hallo, Kramer AV 220, here: V.1)b: arhuš tuk-ma-ra-(ab). (2) Sin-
˘
šamuh to Enki 47 (Hallo, JAOS 88, 84)b: arhuš tuk-mu- da-ab with
˘
variant: arhuš-mu šu-te-ba-ab. In Kassite seal inscriptions, which also
˘
constitute individual prayers, arhuš-tuk became the preferred form,
˘
equivalent to the Akkadian adjective rēmēnu; see H. Limet, Les Légendes

des Sceaux Cassites (Brussels, 1971) 127, 136. But the verbal equivalent
was rēma rašû, as is clear from a Kassite seal published subsequently
(Hallo apud Madeline Noveck, The Mark of Ancient Man: Ancient Near
Eastern Stamp Seals and Cylinder Seals: the Gorelick Collection [The Brooklyn
Museum, 1975] 47 and 95) which reads: dNIN.É.AN.NA / tab-bi-i tab-ni-
i / usri(URÌ-ri) gi-im- li ù šu-zi-bi / arda (ÌR) pa-lí-ih- ki / re-ma re-ši-šu.
The late version of our text abandoned this common idiom in favor of
[rēma?] leqû, which is not otherwise attested.
44. The promise to recite the deity’s praises is a standard feature of the
letter-prayers: cf. Hallo, JAOS 88 (1968) 79, here: IV.1 with note 71; for
the reading cf. ibid. 87 s.v. KA-tar-si-il. Additional examples: (1) Nin-
šatapada to Rim-Sin 28, here: V.3 (TRS 59:9)b: ka-tar-zu hé!-si-il-le-eš.
(2) Ibid. 53 (TRS 46: 17)b: ka-tar-zu ga!-si-il-le (3) Nanna-mansum to
Nin-isina 27 (OECT 5, 138)b: ka-tar-zu mu-un-si-il-le-eš.
45. “And as for me” also opens the conclusion of the letter-prayer of
Gudea-Enlila to Dingir-mansum (TMH n:F. 3, 57) rev. 8b: ù gá-e u4-
da-ri- šè šeš-tam- ma -zu hé-me-en, “and as for me, may I be forever
your favorite brother (talı̄mu).” (Note, apart from the derivation of (šeš)-
tam-ma from tam, “choose,” which I proposed in JANES 5 [1973]
172, the suggestion to derive it from (šeš)-tab-ba by Falkenstein, ZA 50
[1952] 89, note 1, and van Dijk, SGL 2 [1960] 93.)
v.3

III. THE PRINCESS AND THE PLEA
The letter-prayer offered herewith in transliteration and translation

was restored by me in large measure on the basis of text A, during a
sabbatical spent at Oxford in 1971–1972. Thanks to the generosity of
Professor Oliver Gurney, I was able to study his copy of the cylinder
on which text A is inscribed well in advance of its publication by
him in OECT 5. In 1975, I discussed the text in a paper delivered to
the American Oriental Society.1 Other duties have prevented me from
providing a proper edition. Even now, time constraints do not permit
the full presentation of the historical, structural and linguistic questions
raised by this highly intriguing text, which is offered here to Prof. Paul
Garelli as a contribution to the general theme of administration and
diplomacy in the Ancient Near East.
I will content myself here with referring the interested reader to a
number of studies, by myself and Piotr Michalowski, relevant to the
text. In 1976, I discussed it briefly in the context of “Women of Sumer”
in general and of woman authors in particular.2 In 1983, I summarized
the contents of the text and their relationship to contemporary monu-
ments and date-formulae in the context of an assessment of “Sumerian
historiography”.3 Michalowski, to whom I owe Civil’s transliteration of
Exemplar F, mentioned the text in 1980 in his survey of royal corre-
spondence for the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (esp. Section 5.3).4 He also
dealt in detail with the role of the southern Babylonian Durum.5
1 “The princess and the plea,” presented to the 185th meeting of the American
Oriental Society, Columbus, Ohio, April 22, 1975.

2 “Women of Sumer,” Bibliotheca Mesopotamia 4 (1976) 23–40, 129–138; esp. pp. 33 f.
3 “Sumerian historiography,” in H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld, eds., History, Histori-
ography and Interpretation (Jerusalem, Magnes, 1983) 9–20, here: VI.2, esp. pp. 13–17.
4 “Königsbriefe,” RLA 6 (1980–1983) 51–59, esp. p. 56.
5 “Durum and Uruk during the Ur III period,” Mesopotamia 12 (1977) 83–96.
370 v.3. the royal correspondence of larsa: iii
It is hoped that a fuller edition of the text can be offered in my

prospective treatment of the entire “Royal Correspondence of Larsa.”6
Here there is room only for some brief introductory remarks.7
The new composition is a letter-prayer addressed, not by but to
a king of Larsa, in this case its last and longest-lived member, Rim-
Sin. And its writer is a woman scribe, the daughter of Sin-kashid of
Uruk, the princess Ninshatapada. The reconstructed text, complete in
58 lines with minor breaks, throws welcome new light on the history of
Babylonia in the neo-Sumerian and Early Old Babylonian periods, and
particularly on the relations between the dynasties of Ur, Isin, Uruk and
Larsa, the pre-eminent powers in the south at that time. In addition,
its frequent and sometimes verbatim allusions to the royal idiom of
Larsa as found in the date formulae and inscriptions of that dynasty go
far toward clarifying the literary processes by which new compositions
were created in the service of the royal ideology of Larsa and, in this
case, incorporated in its royal correspondence. Since the writer of the
letter was high-priestess of the city of Durum, that city may serve as the
thread of our discussion, as will the practice of princely appointments.
It was the Sargonic dynasty which had elevated the latter prac-
tice to the level of state policy. In this process, princes were typically
made provincial governors, and princesses installed as high-priestesses
of cities sacred to male deities.8 But there was at first no special role for
the crown-prince (nam-dumu).9 On present evidence,10 it was left for a
petty-ruler of the late Sargonic period, Urnigin of Uruk, to appoint his
son Urgigir as viceroy (šakkanakku)11 of the god Dumuzi at Ur, then as
6 The transliteration follows, in general, the practice adopted by Jerrold S. Cooper,
The Curse of Agade (= The Johns Hopkins Near Eastern Studies [13] 1983) pp. 72 ff., with
some modifications. Note especially that ” means the same sign as in the eclectic text;
’ means the sign is partially preserved; = means the sign is missing.
7 Reproduced here from my 1975 paper (above, note 1) with some revisions made in
1980.
8 W.W. Hallo and W.K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: a History (New York, Har-
court Brace and Jovanovich, 1971) 57–61. To the chart on p. 58 add Tuta-napshum,
daughter of Naram-Sin and high-priestess of Enlil at Nippur (?), following A. Westen-
holz, Early Cuneiform Texts in Jena (1975) p. 16; J. and A. Westenholz, AoF 10 (1983) 387 f.;
J. Oelsner, ibid., 212–216; B.R. Foster, JANES 12 (1980) 29 f. and 38 f.; P. Michalowski,
RA 75 (1981) 173–176.
9 D.O. Edzard, Die “zweite Zwischenzeit” Babyloniens (1957) 74, note 357; cf. Hallo,
Bi.Or. 16 (1959) 236 f. (with reference so Jones and Snyder, SET 66:36).
10 UET 8:15; cf. A. Falkenstein, Bi.Or. 23 (1966) 165; E. Sollberger and J.R. Kupper,
IRSA (1971) 129 f.

11 Ezard, op. cit. (above, note 9) 145, note 766; Hallo, Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles
(= AOS 43, 1957) 100–107, 127.

v.3. the royal correspondence of larsa: iii 371
frequently ruled together with Uruk in what appears to have been a

kind of condominium.12 Urgigir duly succeeded his father as king, and
the rest of the fourth dynasty of Uruk may well have followed a similar
cursus honorum.13 Almost certainly the fifth dynasty continued the prac-
tice. Utu-hegal, its sole member, is generally held to have appointed
Ur-Nammu as viceroy of Ur, a step which led to the foundation of the
Third Dynasty there,14 whether Ur-Nammu was his son15 or, as more
recently suggested, his brother,16 or even his son-in-law.17 In turn, the
Ur III kings appointed their (oldest) sons as viceroys of Uruk and, at
least in one case, of another city, normally read as Der. Der, how-
ever, lies more than 200 km away almost due north of Ur on the far
side of the Tigris; why it should have been singled out for this special
treatment was never satisfactorily explained. The full name of ancient
Der was Dur-ilim or Dur-Anim, “Fortress of God” or “Fortress of An.”
But there were many other city-names compounded with the element
“Fortress,” and at least one called simply “the fortress,” in Akkadian
Durum. The weight of the evidence strongly points to a location near
Uruk, more precisely between Uruk and Larsa, for one such Durum.18
And it is at least conceivable that this Durum represents the vice-regal
domain, sometimes in conjunction with Uruk, under the Ur III kings.
This becomes almost a certainty for Ibbi-Sin. Åke Sjöberg edited a
hymn in honor of this last king of Ur which is addressed to the deities
Meslamtaea and Lugalgirra, twin gods of the netherworld.19 There was
a gate of the latter at Uruk.20 The former has usually been regarded
as patron of Gudua (Kutha), where he was equated with that other
12 Ibid., 4–20; idem, JCS 20 (1966) 137; The Exaltation of Inanna (with J.J.A. van Dijk) (=
YNER 3, 1968) 7–9; ANEH (1971) 50, 53 f., 59 f., 77.

13 Idem, JCS 20 (1966) 137, note 60.
14 Ibid., with notes 56–58.
15 Ibid., note 59.
16 Cl. Wilcke, “Zum Königtum in der Ur III-Zeit,” in Paul Garelli, ed., Le palais et la
royauté (= RAI 19, 1974) 192–194, note 67.

17 Idem, Bi.Or. 39 (1982) 144.
18 Hallo, loc. cit. (above, note 11); Michalowski, loc. cit. (above, note 5). I omit here my
detailed discussion of the location of Durum and the history of the problem which has
now been reviewed and updated by Michalowski.
19 Åke W. Sjöberg, “Hymns in honour of King Ibbi-suen of Ur,” Orientalia Suecana
19–20 (1970–1971) 140–178, Nos. 1 and 1a.

20 A. Falkenstein, BM 2 (1963) 45. Presumably a road to Durum led through it. As
late as Seleucid times, there was still a Lugalgirra-district in Uruk named, presumably,
after the gate; tee Falkenstein, Topographic von Uruk (Ausgrabungen . . . in Uruk/Warka
3, 1941) 50–52; L.T. Doty, JCS 30 (1978) 70.
principal chtonic deity Nergal;21 it has also been argued that he was
worshipped at Uruk22 and indeed there is a veiled allusion to that city
as the “place of sustenance” in the Ibbi-Sin hymn.23 At Nippur, Lugal-
girra and Meslamtaea guarded the gates of the temple of Nusku,24 or
its cella.25 But our new letter, and other evidence, makes it clear that
the principal seat of the combined worship of the twin deities26 was
at Durum, and to this city there is an explicit reference in the hymn,
whether we read the logogram as Kisiga (EZEN × KÙ) with Sjöberg27
or Durum (EZEN × BAD), a reading which is equally compatible with
the photograph.28
Ibbi-Sin’s solicitude for Durum (and Uruk) may reflect a period
of service there before his own accession. If so, it provides further
precedent for the early kings of Isin, who reigned as kings of Ur and
strove to perpetuate the institutions of the Third Dynasty.29 One of
them installed a high-priestess (nin-dingir) of Lugalgirra,30 presumably
at Durum (Date “C”); whether she was his daughter is not known.
The third king of Isin, Iddin-Dagan (1974–1954 bc), certainly assigned
the city to his son Ishme-Dagan, the crown-prince, who ruled there as
21 The equation is traced back to Ur III times by Sjöberg, TCS 3 (1969) 11 f. Cf. now
Horst Steible, Archív Orientální 43 (1975) 346–352.

22 Van Dijk, SGL 2 (1960) 23 and note 36, followed by Falkenstein, BM 2 (1963) 32
and note 143; J. Renger, ZA 58 (1967) 139 f. and Heidelberger Studien zum Alten Orient (=
Falkenstein Anniversary Volume, 1967) 161. Apart from lines 17 f. of our letter (which
now calls for a different interpretation), the chief basis for this assumption is a single
Ur III text from Drehem (Chiera, STA 31) listing offerings of one sheep each to
Meslamtea and Lugalgirra “in Uruk” (šà unuki-ga). Note that Lugalgirra is here written
Lugal-ir!-ra.
23 Line 3. For ki-zi šà-gál-la as epithet of Uruk, see Hallo, Bi.Or. 23 (1966) 243, here:
III.3, lines 23, 25; YNER 3 (1971) 58 and note 52. Another referent seems implied in
Shulgi Hymn B, line 41; see G. Castellino, Two Šulgi Hymns (bc ) (= Studi Semitici 42,
1972) 34 f.
24 R. Marcel Sigrist, “Offrandes dans le temple de Nusku,” JCS 29 (1977) 170 ii 25 f.;
180.
25 For ŠÀ.ABZU = “inner temple chamber, cella,” see MSL 13 (1971) 69:95 and
Hallo, HUCA 38 (1962, with B.A. Levine) 51, note 31. Differently CAD s.vv. atmanu,
emāšu.
26 Cf. below, line 53. For later examples of twin deities, including Nergal and Sin, see
L.R. Bailey, “The cult of the twins at Edessa,” JAOS 88 (1968) 342–344, esp. note 19.
27 So also according to “repeated collation”; cf. Michalowski, loc. cit. (above note 18)
86.
28 Sjöberg, loc. cit. (above, note 19) 173.
29 Hallo, “The last years of the kings of Isin,” JNES 18 (1959) 57.
30 Usually written Lugal-ír(A.ŠI)-ra; once Lugal-A, once Lugal-gìr-ra; see F.J. Ste-
phens apud V. Crawford, BIN 9 (1954) pp. 17 f. and cf. above, note 22.
viceroy before becoming king himself (1953–1935).31 For the next ninety
years, little or nothing is heard of the city, although it needs to be
investigated whether some alleged references to Transtigridian Der in
this interval do not actually refer to Durum.
The next certain reference to the city comes from newly published
inscriptions of Sin-kashid on clay nails32 and tablets.33 The clay nail
inscriptions were found in many duplicates together with other Sin-
kashid nails in the kiln on the north wall of court 28 of the Sin-kashid
palace in the winter campaign of 1963–1964, i.e., in Uruk.34 Clearly,
however, they were intended not for Uruk but for Durum, since the
two closely parallel inscriptions are dedicated respectively to Lugal-
girra and Meslamtaea and refer to their temples as é-ní-huš-íl(a) and
é-mes-lam respectively, the latter temple name recurring in our letter.35
In these inscriptions, and nowhere else, Sin-kashid refers to himself as
“viceroy of Durum,” thus raising the distinct possibility that he too had
once served the Isin dynasty, much like the predecessors of Gungunum
of Larsa.36 It may even be possible that Sin-kashid was a son of Lipit-
Enlil (1873–1869), perhaps his intended successor. Lipit-Enlil was the
last of a line of three Isin Kings that began with Ur-Ninurta, but,
unlike his predecessors, was not honored by a royal hymn at Nippur.37
Neither was Irra-imitti (1868–1861). Irra-imitti was a man of unknown
parentage at whose death the normal succession at Isin was interrupted
by the peculiar circumstances of Enlil-bani’s accession as preserved in
the late chronographic tradition.38 During Irra-imitti’s reign also fell
the upheavals that led to the beginnings of a new dynasty at Larsa
31 YOS 9:22 f. (= Išme-Dagsn 6).

32 G. Pettinato, “Unveröffentlichte Texte des Königs Sinkāšid von Uruk,” Oriens
Antiquus 9 (1970) 97–112, Nos. 12 and 13; David I. Owen, JCS 26 (1974) 63 f.; Horst
Steible, “Ein Terrakottanagel von Sînkāšid aus Dūrsînkāšid?” Archív Orientální 43 (1975)
356–352.
33 C.B.F. Walker, “A new inscription of Sin-kašid,” AfO 23 (1970) 88 f.
34 Pettinato, loc. cit. (above, note 32) 97.
35 Line 53. Admittedly, é-mes-lam was also the name of the temple of Nergal at
Gudua; see Edzard, op. cit. (above, note 9) 124, note 653; Sjöberg, TCS 3 (1969) 11 f.
36 Hallo, ANEH (1971) 89–92. Both his father Samium and his brother Zabaia
pointedly disclaim the royal title; see Edzard, op. cit. (above, note 9) 78 f.; M. Birot,
Syria 45 (1968) 243, No. I; Daniel Arnaud, RA 71 (1977) 3 f.
37 Hallo, “Royal hymns and Mesopotamian unity,” JCS 17(1963), here: III.1, esp.
p. 118.
38 A.K. Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles (= TCS 5, 1975), 155, lines 31–36;
cf. 192 ii 1–8.

under Nur-Adad (1865–1850).39 Already under Lipit-Ishtar (1934–1924)

the kings of Isin had given up the rule of Ur to Larsa, and abandoned
the title “king of Ur” in favor of the more modest “king of Isin.”
Now, under Enlil-bani (1860–1837), they surrendered for good, and
apparently in Larsa’s favor, claims to royal hymnography,40 the vice-
regal office,41 and the remaining royal epithets that linked them to
Ur—and to Uruk—and reflected their aspiration to rule these southern
cities again.42 Under these conditions43 it is not inconceivable that Sin-
kashid now claimed to be the true successor of the Ur III dynasty;
indeed he invoked the same divine parents as Ur-Nammu and Shulgi,
namely Ninsun and Lugalbanda of Uruk.44 He could not wrest Ur
from Larsa’s control, as is clear from inscriptions left there by his Larsa
contemporaries, including one by Sin-iqisham (1840–1836) which refers
to the god Ningizzida as “viceroy of Ur.”45 But he established a new
dynasty at Uruk and sought to ally himself with Larsa’s opponents,
notably Babylon.46 He married the daughter of Sumulael (1880–1845),
second ruler of that emerging kingdom and founder of its long-lived
dynasty. The close relations of Uruk and Babylon continued throughout
the second half of the nineteenth century as now well documented in
the (Akkadian) letter47 addressed to Sin-muballit. of Babylon (1812–1793)
by An-am of Uruk (ca. 1821–1817), who himself may have derived from
Durum, if we may judge by the names of his father, Ilan-shemea (“O
twin gods, hear!”) and of his successor, Irdanene (“Their [i.e. the two (?)
39 Van Dijk, “Larsa avant Nūradad,” JCS 19 (1965) 1–25.

40 Hallo, loc. cit. (above, note 37) 114 with notes 45–47. The “unpublished (hymn)
to Nur-Adad” mentioned there was edited by van Dijk in 1965 (above, note 39) and
republished by him in 1971 (VS 17; 41) as a “Statueninschrift Siniddinams.” Thus the
transfer of the hymnic focus falls in the later years of Enlil-bani, and coincides with the
change in the Isin titulary (below, note 42).
41 Already Sin-iddinam of Larsa seems to have served as viceroy (of the obscure
Ašdub) in the lifetime of his father; cf. YOS 5: 152: 4 f. with the comments of Edzard,
loc. cit. (above, note 9) note 166.
42 Hallo, loc. cit. (above, note 29) 57.
43 Idem, loc. cit. (above, note 37) 116, note 66.
44 Idem, JCS 20 (1966) 136 f. with note 53; for the principle involved, see Sollberger,
JCS 21 (1967) 279, note 5. Cf. also Sjöberg, “Die göttliche Abstammung der sumerisch-
babylonischen Herrscher,” Orientalia Suecana 21 (1972) 93 f., 98.
45 UET 8:73; cf. Sollberger, ib. p. 16 and IRSA 193, IV B IIa.
46 For Uruk’s friendly (economic) relations with Ur and other cities under Larsa’s
rule even during Uruk’s anti-Larsa phase see Falkenstein, BM 2 (1963) 46.
47 Ibid., 57–71. I follow Falkenstein dates for the rulers of Uruk (ibid., pl. 14) although
they are clearly in need of revision; An-am, in particular, must be contemporary with
Sin-muballit..
gods’s] servant”). The latter (ca. 1816–1810) also maintained friendly

relations with Isin, but the coalition headed by Uruk and Isin was
defeated by Rim-Sin of Larsa in 1810, and Irdanene was captured, an
event apparently alluded to in our letter.48
It is not certain which of all the kings of Uruk appointed Ninsha-
tapada to be high-priestess of Meslamtaea at Durum, but it may well
have been her father Sin-kashid himself;49 at any rate she speaks of
herself as having reached old age by the time she composed the let-
ter (line 39), an event that can be dated with unusual precision. For at
this time she had endured an exile of 5 years (variant 4 years) from
Durum, which she calls “my city” (lines 36, 51). And since Durum
fell to Rim-Sin in 1804 (according to his 20th year-formula), it is clear
that her letter was written in 1799 (or 1800 with the variant) or, by
inclusive reckoning, in 1800 (or 1801 with the variant). Now it is pre-
cisely the date formulas for Rim-Sin’s 23rd to 26th years that employ
the relatively rare epithet “faithful shepherd” for the king, and that is
exactly how Ninshatapada addresses him in her letter (line 3), which
thus reflects the official designation of the years 1800–1797.50 From the
22nd date-formula on, moreover, Rim-Sin’s dates all invoke An in addi-
tion to Enlil (and Enki), exactly as does our letter (line 21). Both these
developments reflect Rim-Sin’s capture of Uruk itself in 1803 (Rim-Sin
21), which is represented in our letter (and in the royal inscriptions)51
as done with the approval of An, and in any case entitled Rim-Sin to
invoke the tutelary deity of that city and to assume an epithet which
had been borne last by An-am of Uruk, as well as by an unnamed
deliverer of the city in an Akkadian literary text of this period.52 More
fundamentally, Rim-Sin may have earned these privileges not so much
by his conquest of Uruk as by his magnanimous treatment of its pop-
ulation, which he spared in identical terms in his date formula and
in our letter (line 24).53 Ninshatapada enlarges on this theme with a
48 Line 23. a. Edzard. op. cit. (above, note 9) 155.

49 Note that he appointed another daughter, Nish-inishu, as high priestess of Lugal-
banda at Uruk; see Sin-kashid 5 and Falkenstein BM 2 (1963) 32 f.
50 See in detail Hallo, “Sumerian Historiography”, here: VI.2 (above, note 3). Previ-
ously Steible, Rimsin, mein König (FAOS 1, 1975) 48; Edzard, op. cit. (above, note 9) 180.
51 Rim-Sin 7.
52 R.D. Biggs, ANET 3 (1969) 604.
53 Note that Larsa in turn was spared by Hammurabi according to CH ii 32, where
the choice of the root gamālu may reflect the ŠU.GAR GAR of our letter and the
Rim-Sin date formula, since the sparing of other cities was expressed differently; see
J. Klíma, Studies . . . Beek (= Studia Semitica Neerlandica 16, 1974) 164, note 83.
veritable hymn to Rim-Sin detailing Uruk’s gratitude, and concludes by

invoking the same royal magnanimity for Durum and herself. The fact
that her letter-prayer was incorporated in the royal correspondence of
Larsa makes it appear likely that her plea was granted.54 An edition of
the letter follows.
Letter of Ninshatapada to Rim-Sin
A = OECT 5:25 lines 59–111 = 11. 1–58

B = TRS 58 = 11. 1–19
C = TRS 59 = 11. 20–35
D = TRS 46 = 11. 36–58
E = SLTF 1:181 (Ni.9729) = 11. 35–40, 54–58
F = N. 4101 (Courtesy M. Civil) = 11. 25–30, 37–40
1. lugal-mu-ra ù-na-a-du11
A. " " " " " [ ]
B. [ ]' "
2. d Ri-im-d EN.ZU èn-tar bàn-da šà d En-líl-lá-ke4 nam-mi-in - hun-gá
A. " " " ' " " " " " " ' ! "" " " ! ' / ' [ ]
B. " ! ta [ ]/ ' "
3. sipa-zi kalam-šár-ra túm-túm-mu-dè en-gal d Nin-urta-ra zi-dè- e -eš pà-da
A. " " " "! " " " " " " ' [ ]/ ' ' " [ ]
B. [ ] " " " " tùm-tùm? " ? ? " " ! " " " " /" " = " " "
4. géštu-dagal igi-gál-bi diri-ga níg -nam-ma ur4-ur4
A. " ' ' ' " " " " ' " ' [ ]
B. ' " ' " " ' " KI.NÍG . ZI.KI " ! "
5. ad-gi 4-gi 4 umuš-bi š ed12 - š e d x níg-sù-rá-bi-š è igi nu-bar-re
A. " ' ' ' " "!MÙŠ.A . DI " " " ' ' [ ]
B. ' " " " " " " " " " " " " na/ " " " "
54 The fact that the Louvre exemplars B+C+D together formed a duplicate to A
became clear to me as soon as Prof. Gurney showed me his copy of A in 1971, when
I prepared a preliminary edition of the entire royal correspondence of Larsa for him
based on the Oxford exemplars. The identification of E and F, and the transliteration
of F which I owe to Prof. Civil, followed in 1973. Earlier statements regarding the
Louvre exemplars (including my own) have now to be revised accordingly; see e.g.
above, note 22; Hallo, JCS 17 (1963) 116, here: III.1 and note 65; JAOS 53 (1968) 89,
here: IV.1 and note 116; van Dijk apud Hallo, IEJ 16 (1966) 242, note 79. The last
note has found its way also into W.G. Lambert, Or. 39 (1970), note 3, and Grayson,
Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts (1975) 22, note 36. Cf. also Kraus, Bi.Or. 22 (1965) 289
(5).
6. di-kuru5 níg-gi-na d Utu-gim l ú-zi-dè-eš ki-ága

A. " " ' ' ' ' " " " " ' ' ' '
B. " " " " " " " " n í g" " " " '
7. ù-ne-dè-dah
A. ' " " [ ]
B. " " " '
8. ša-lá-sù ma-da-bé dagal-la ur-sag šu-gar-gi 4-uruki'- šè
A. [] ' ' ' ' ' " " " " " " ' [ ]
B. " " ! " " " " " " " " " " " " "!
9. am-du7-du7-sig5 mè-šen-šen-na ur-sag giš-giš-lá sag-í l
A. [ ] ' ' ' " " ? " ' "? [ ]
B. " " " "! " " " = = = " " " " "
10. libiš- tuku ki-ús-sa-g i 4 a-ma-bi gi 4-gi 4-da nu-zu
A. ÁB+ŠÀ " " " " " " " ! ' ' ' [ ]
B. " " b i " " " ! bi " " " " " " " '
11. nir-gál- e igi-ni-šè lú nu-gub-bu á-gál nu-si-sá
A. " " " " ' ' " " [ ]
B. " " = " " " " ! " " " " ! " " " "
12. nun sag-maha ù-ma-ni sá-sá húb-dar-sag nam-lugala
A. " ' ' ' [ ]
B. " " " ! " " " " " " ? "? " " "
13. kala-ga A.RU.UB giš-tukul lú-kúr-ra-ke4 kèš-di nam-ra
A. " " " ' " " ' ' [ ]
B. [ ] ' " " " ? " " ! " " " ? " " " " ? '
14. dumu-ù-tu-ud-da e n d Nè-iri11-gal-ta šà-ta nam-gal-ta
A. " = " = " " "" [ ]
B. [ ] " " " " = " " " " " " " " " "
15. ù- ne- dè- p e š5
A. " ' [ ]
B. = = = =
16. m í Nin-šà-ta- pà-da mídub-sar
A. ' ' " " ' ' ' [ ]
B. [] " " " " " " " "
17. nin-dingir d Mes-lam-ta-è-a
A. [ ] ' ? ' ? [] (not a new line)
B. [ ] " " " " " " "
18. dumu-mí d EN.ZU- ka-ši -i d lugal unu ki-ga
A. [ ]'' [ ] ' ' ' [ ]
B. [ ] ' "" " " " " " " " "
19. géme-zu na-ab-bé-a
A. [ ] (not a new line?)
B. [ ] " " " " " (ends)
20. UD.UNU.KI uru hur-sag-gim íl-la á-bi sá nu-du11-ga

A. [ ] ' ' [ ] " " " " ' '? ' [ ]
C. " " ! " " " " " " " " " '? ' ? '? "
21. du11 An d En-líl-lá-ta mu-un-da-a n-zi-ga- t a sahar-duba mu-un-dáb-bé
A. [ ]' ' " " " " " = " " " [ ]/ " = " '
C. " " " " " " " " " " " " " =/" ? "? " " "! "!
22. sag unu ki- ga uru ùz-sag-kur-kur-ra-ke4 am-gim si tu11-tu11
A. ' ' []' '? ' ' " " " " ' ' ' [ ]
C. " " " = = " " " = " " " " " " "
23. á mah-zu-ta lugal-bi e-ne- t a urbigu-bi mu-un-dab5-bé
A. ' ' ' ' [ ] ' " ' [ ]
C. " " " " " " " " = U R.UR" ? " " " '
24. u-gù nam-lú-u 18-lu-bi šu-gar m u -un-gar-ra zi-du10-ga sì-mu-un-ne
A. []" " ' ' ' ' " ! ' ! i m [ ]/ ' [ ] ' [ ]
C. " " " " = " ! " " " m u " " " /" " " " " " '
25. sag dumuga- kú-a ba-úš nu-mu-un - è-a níg-gig-ga nu-mu-un-ak
A. ' ' ' [ ] " " " " ' [ ]
F. " " " " " "" " " " ""/ " " " " = = "
C. " " ! " gim= úš " " ! " ni - i n" []/ " " " " " " '
26. nam-lù-u18-lu-bi ku6-gim a lu - ga šub-ba - bi u4-šè mu-ni-in-tag4
A. " " " ' " [ ] ' ' " " [ ]
F. " " " = " " " " " " " " " /" " " " " '
C. [ ] " " = " " " d e? -a-ni ba-e-n i -šub/ " " " " " " ?
27. ur-sag-b i gi š - tukul- e igi-zu-šè im - mi - i n-da - bu- r i šu- z u sá bí - i n-du1 1 - ga
A. " " = " " " " ' [ ] ' - n i -gub = = " = " àm-m[ i ]
F. " " - e -ne" " = " " " ' [ ] - i n-da " " " " - šè " im -m i - í b-du 1 1
C. [ ] " b i ""= " " " " " = du " ! HI / " ! " " bí - i n-du1 1 - ga
28. nam-úš-a mu-un-da-kar-re-e š ka-tar-zu hé -si-il-le-eš
A. " ' " " = ' ' [ ] ' ' ' ' ' ' [ ]
C. [ ] ' " " " " " "/ " " " ì " " " "
F. ' " " " = " " " ne " " " mu-" " " "
29. unu ki-ga ír-ra-bi húl-la- š è mu - un-ku 4 i- d utu-bi mu - un- è
A. " " " " ' [] ' ' ' " " ' " " ' []/ ' " []
C. [ ] ' " " " = " " " /"" " " " " "
F. [ ] ' " " " " " = mi - n i - in - "/ [ ] ' " mi - n i - in-"
30. nu-síg nu-mu-un-zu-bi-šè ú-a lu- l u -a mu-un-gar ú-sal mu-un-dúr-ru-un - ne-e š
A. " " " " " ' " ' " ' " " ? = " ' [ ]/ " ' " ' ' " = ' [ ]
C. [ ] " " " = = " = " KU " " " " / " " = = = = n à ? " "
F. [ ] " = = ' " " KU = " " " / [ ] ' " " " un = =
(obv. breaks off)
31. u4-šú-uš-e ukù kur-kur bar -b i- t a KA im-m i - gub
A. [ ]" " " " " " AN? .BI.GIM ' ' " " [ ]
C. ' " " " " " " bar -b i- t a ! ' " ma-an- "
32. mu-ša6-ga-zu šà-lá-sù-me-eš kur-kur i m-du-ud
A. ' " " " " " [ ] " " " " [ ]
C. ' ! " " " " ! " " " " " " mu-u n -" "
33. u4-ul-lé-a-ta lugal za-e-gim mè a-ba-a igi mu-ni- i n - du8 -a

A. [ ]" " " " " [] " " " " " " ' ' ' = ' '
C. " " " " " " " a " " " " = " " " " / IM
34. ur5 -šè-àm d Utu é-babbar-ra-ka u4-nam-ti-la m u -un-tuš
A. [ ] ' ' " " " " " " " " " ' " " [ ]
C. " " " " " " bábbar = = " " " zu mi - ni- "
35. e-ne-éš gá-a-ra igi-zi bar-mu - un - š i-ib ka-ba-zu u 4 - kúkku hu-mu-un-zalag-ge
C. " " " " = " " " " " " " " / " " " = " " " " " "
(ends)
A. ' " ' " " ' ' " " -r a mu - bar ' ' ' - l a ?/ ' " " " = ' []
E. [ / ]" ' [ ]
36. mu-5-kam-ma- t a uru-mà nu-me-a sag-gim im-ma-an-ti lú-géštug nu-t ug
D. " " " " " " " " " " " " " " ? " ? "? = = = =
A. " " " " = " ' ' " " ' ' " " " "/ ' " " "
E. " 4 "! ' " ' [] ' [ ]/ ' " hu-x - x
37. sag-sìg-zu múš-me-mà ba-kúr-kúr su -mu ug-g a GAM GAM-e i m-du-du
F. [ ] " " " " ' [ ]/ " " "
E. '? [ ] " " " " " " KI " [ ]
D. " " " " " " ì - in - " su " " " / NU . ŠU mu-u n -" "
A. ' " ' ? -e mùš " ' ba-n i - " ' ' ' ' = GAM GAM-e i m-du-du
38. níg-me-gara šu-mu da- l am im-ma-ab-ra KA ab- b i -mu nu-um-zu
F. [ ] " " " " " " '? " " " "
E. [ ] " " " " " " -m i - í b-[ ]
A. " " " " " " ? " = í b-" " " - b i " " = "
D. " " " " " ba-b i r -bi r " " - ba- " ' = '
39. nam-ab-ba u4 ba-t il-la-gim bàn-da tag4-a-mu ama5-mu ba-ab-bir-bir- r e
A. " " " " " ' " " " " " " = ' " " " '? [ ]
D. " " " " ga? " " " " " tug = mu/ " " " = " " =
E. [ ] " " ' ba? " " ! [ ]/ ' ? [ ]
F. [ ]" " " " " tag4 " " / ' " " ! = " " "
40. mušen giš-búr- r a dab-ba - g i m amar - bi gùd - b i - ta ba-ni-ib-zà h
A. " " " " " " BI " " Ú.KI . SÈ = " " " " uš
D. " " bar = dab5 " g i m " " gùd " "/ " " " SIKIL.A
E. " '? [ ]
(obv. breaks off )
F. ' ' ' " dab5 - dab 5 " " mu Ú.KI . SÈ - mu- "/" " " zà h ? (ends)
41. du13-du13-mu bar- t a a l -bir-bir- r e lú kin-aka-dè la -ba-ab - tuk
A. [ ] ' ? " " b i " " " " ' " " " " ' [ ]/ "
D. " " " " t a ba- " " = " " k i n = = ga? - " "
42. sig4-mu la-la-bi nu-mu-un-g i 4-g i 4-a tumu š en-gim še mi-ni-ib-ša4
A. [ ] ' " " " " " " '[ ]
D. ' " " " " " " " kú = "/" " " " " " " "
43. ninda-kú-mu i-si-iš-bi ma- l á-lá ur5-šè nu-te-en-te-en
D. " " " " ! " ! " " " " ! " ! /" " " " " " "
A. [ ] mu-un-" " ' [ ]
44. zi in-sù níg-gig-ga-mu im-ma-da-ab-du1 1 mísikil-dù-a-šè ba-an-ku4

D. " " " " " " " " " = " " / = " " " " " " [ ]
A. [ ] ' ' " = " " " '? [ ]
45. ki-mu sag-gá bí-íb-gub-bé-en
D. " " " " " " " " "
A. [ ] ' ' ' ib " " "
46. níg-šu-a gizzal ak-ab
D. " " " GÉŠTUG.DÙ " "
A. "[ ](not a new line)
47. túg géme-mu la-ba-dím suluhu im-ma-an-mu4 a-ba-a inim hu-mu-re-du11
D. " " " " " " " " " " " /" " = " " " " "
A. [ ] ' " " ' ' " " = " "" ' [ ]
48. ír a-nir-ra-zu gá im-ma-a n-šìr gá- ra im-ma-an-dúru-nu
D. " " " " " " " " = " /" " " " " " "
A. [] ' [ ] ' " ' ' ' ' [ ]
49. u4 nam-lú-ùlu la-ba-ni- i n-ul4-la-ta u 4 nam-ti nu-du10-ga KA- mu la-ba-ni-ib-du12
D. ' " " " " " [] ' ! " ! " "/ " " " " " " ' " " ' [ ]
A. [ ] ' ' = ' ' ' BA ' ' [ ] " " "
50. e-ne-éš d En-líl bí-in-du11-ga kur-zà-til-la-bi-šè šu-zu-šè mu-un-si
D. ' " " " " " " " ' [ ]/ " " " " " ! " " " " [ ]
A. [ ] "? ' [ ]
51. zabal am ki ki-tuš-gim bàd ki uru k i -mu gal-[bi ]x y mu-un-[ ]
D. " " " " " " " " = " [ ]
A. [ ] " ' [ /] " " " []
52. uru-lu-ùlu-gim ki-tuš na-me nu-du1 0 igi uru-mu-šè hu-mu-un-[gin?]
D. " " " " " " " " ' [ ]/ " " " " " " ! " [ ]
A. [ ] ! " " " " '! ' ! [ ]
53. é-mes-lama dingir-min-a-bi du11-mu-na-ab ka-tar-zu ga-si-il-le
D. " " " " " " " " " " ' /" " " " ? ! " " '
A. ' " ' ' " ' [ ]
54. ù im-ri-a-mu-ke4 zà gi4-mu-un-na
D. " " " "! " " ! " "! " " "
E. " ' ' ' ' ' ' [ ]
A. [ ] ' ? '? ' ? [ ]
55. du 11 -ga-zu- t a du 1 1 hu-mu-r a-ab-du7
D. " " " " " " " " " '
E. " " " " ' [ ] (not a new line)
A. [ i ]m-n i -in-du1 1 / ' " -un-na ? - "
56. ur5-zu g i z z a l -aka - dè ka-mu sag hu-mu-un-dù-uš
E. " " g é š t ug " " [ ]/ " " " ' [ ]
D. " " nam-mah ? ? -x - zu " " " " " = " "
A. [ g]a-àm ' ' uš ' ? ' = ' -en
57. kur-sù - rá zà-til-la-b i- š è mu-un-UD a-ga-šè

E. " su 1 3 " " " ' = = ' ? ' ? [ ] /" " []
D. " sù " " " " " = = = " " " "
A. [ ] ' ? " " ' ? /[ ]
58. nam-ba-da-ha-lam-ma-me-en
A. ' ? ' ? ' ? ' ? " " " " (not a new line)
E. ' ? [ ]
D. " " " " " - e
I
1. Speak to my king!
2. To Rim-Sin, the young protector who soothes the heart of Enlil,
3. The faithful shepherd legitimately summoned by the great lord Ninurta
in order to rescue the entire nation,
4. Wide of understanding, whose insight is surpassing, who gathers every-
thing together,
5. Counsellor whose wisdom is soothing, whose full extent no eye can see,
6. Judge of righteousness, who loves the righteous man like Utu (himself ) -
7. Say furthermore!
II
8. To the merciful one whose land is broad, the warrior who avenges the
city (of Larsa),
9. Impetuous goodly aurochs, in battle and combat the warrior who raises
the head (proudly) in the conflict,
10. Having courage, turning the ‘steps whose progress (?) no one knows how
to turn back,
11. The standard bearer before whom no man can stand, the strong(est) is
distraught,
12. Prince of the lofty head who attains victory, the most triumphant in
kingship,
13. Mighty one who verily smites the . . ., tying up the mace of the enemy,
14. Son engendered by the lord Nergal with greatness from the womb (on) -
15. Say for the third time!
III
16. This is what Nin-shata-pada the woman-scribe,
17. Priestess of the divine Meslamtaea,
18. Daughter of Sin-kashid king of Uruk,
19. Your servant-girl, says:
IV
20. Larsa, the city lofty like a mountain whose might none can attain,
21. Having taken the field at the command of An and Enlil, has seized the
heaped-up earth(?).
22. The army of Uruk, bond of all the lands, (is) lowering the horns like an
aurochs.
23. With your great might you have seized its king from them in single com-
bat.
24. Having spared its populace, grant them sweet life!
25. Among slaves (and) children fed on milk pestilence not having emerged, a
plague has not broken out.
26. Its populace whose collapse is like fish deprived (?) of water—they have
left it to the daylight
27. Its warriors are uprooted before you by the mace, it is your hand which
overtakes them.
28. They were able to escape pestilence; they sang your praises.
29. The lament of Uruk has turned to rejoicing; its complaints have departed.
30. Orphan and widow one has placed in lush pastures; they let them repose
in verdure.
31. Daily the people (and) all the lands eat from its surroundings.
32. Your good years are merciful, all the lands dance(?).
33. From time immemorial, a king like you in battle who has seen?
34. It is thus Utu himself dwells in Ebabbar for a lifetime.
V
35. Now look favorably (also) on me, let your declaration brighten the dark
day!
36. Since the fifth year not being in my city, they make me live like a slave, I
have none who understands (me).
37. At your falling silent, I am changed in my appearance (and) whole being;
my body being dead, I walk about bowed down.
38. In the silence I now clap my hands, I do not know the sound of my . . .
39. Though vigorous, I am abandoned in old age like a day which has ended,
I am scattered (from) my chamber.
40. Like a bird caught in a trap whose fledglings have fled from their nest
41. My children are scattered abroad (and) I have no man to do (my) work.
42. (Since) the attraction of my brickwork (i.e. home) no longer satisfies, they
moan over it like doves.
43. The bread I eat fills me with crying, thus I cannot rest
44. Life is long! They have informed me of my sacrilege, I have been turned
into a slandered woman.
45. As my station they have placed me as a slave.
46. Pay attention to the “things in hand!”
47. My slave-girl will not fashion a garment (for me), I who am dressed in a
flounced garment(?), who will intercede for me with you?
48. I, even I, have intoned the crying of your lament; will they sit (still) for
me?
49. Since the day that the populace is no longer directed aright, the day (has
become) a lifetime of bad luck, my words have not been “sung there”
VI
50. Now that Enlil has ordered it, the lands to their furthest limit he has
assigned to your hand.
51. Zabalam as a residence (and) Durum as my city are greatly . . .
52. No residence is good like the city (of ) the populace; let them but see(?) my
city!
53. Speak to the twin deities of Emeslam (and) I will surely sing your
praises!
54. Restore the border to the domain (?) of my family!
55. By your command let them give praise to you!
56. May they make my mouth ponder how to heed your ordinances!
57. To the furthest reaches of distant lands you shine,
58. may you never be destroyed!
v.4
A SUMERIAN APOCRYPHON? THE ROYAL

CORRESPONDENCE OF UR RECONSIDERED*
In 2001, Fabienne Huber published a lengthy study of the Sumerian

compositions known collectively as The Royal Correspondence of Ur and
concluded that they were not the product of the Third Dynasty of
Ur with which they purport to deal, but of the scribal schools of
the Old Babylonian period, perhaps as much as three centuries later.
She arrived at this conclusion primarily on linguistic grounds, arguing
at length from grammatical and phonological features in the texts
that placed them squarely in the later period.1 She also considered
historical and prosopographic factors, admitting that the Correspondence
undoubtedly rests in part on historic data,2 but that these data were
distorted to suit the didactic and other purposes of the authors.3
Sumerian literary texts occasionally carry dates indicating when a
particular exemplar was copied out by a master or student scribe—
though such dates are largely confined to the first half of the 18th cen-
tury bce, beginning with Manana of Kiš4 and including Hammurabi,
Samsuiluna, and Rim-Sin II; at other times they can be dated by the
archival texts found with them.5 But their dates of composition are, by
contrast, notoriously lacking, and even when external sources such as
(later) literary catalogues presume to supply these, the evidence is uni-
versally suspect.6 Modern research has therefore resorted to other cri-
teria to make good the omission. In the case of compositions like the
Instructions of Šuruppak or the Hymn to the Temple of Ninhursag at Keš, the
existence of forerunners firmly datable on paleographic grounds to
the Early Dynastic Period provides a terminus post quem non for the
* Presented to H.L.J. Vanstiphout, with respect and admiration.

1 Huber 2001.
2 Huber 2001:195.
3 Huber 2001:206.
4 Cf. Michalowski 1995:50 ad CT 58:27 (Nungal Hymn).
5 Hallo 1966:92; previously Hallo 1963b:167 and nn. 6–8, (mis)-cited by Sjöberg and
Bergmann 1969:6; cf. Stol 1976:52 f., 56 f. (ad Rim-Sin II and TRS 50).
6 Hallo 1996:144–147.
386 v.4. a sumerian apocryphon?
creation at least of the core of these compositions. In the case of the

compositions attributed to the princess Enheduanna, the existence of
contemporaneous monumental inscriptions with her name serves to
date her to the Sargonic period; the attribution of various compositions
to her—either anciently or by modern research—remains a much-
debated point in each case.7 The Temple Hymns, for example, which
according to their colophon were composed or at least compiled by her,
include one hymn in honor of the e2-hur-sag, the palace of Šulgi at Ur,
which can hardly be earlier than his reign; but whether this apparent
anachronism serves to date the entire composition or represents an
isolated insert in an earlier recension remains an open question.
Where paleographic and other criteria fail to provide an answer, lin-
guistic criteria may well be resorted to for attempts to arrive at a date of
composition. Thus Jacobsen famously dated the original composition
of the Sumerian King List before the middle of the Ur III period—the
reigns of Amar-Sin (“Bur-Sin I”) and Šu-Sin—by observing the use
of the verbal forms in the plural of the verb ib-ak, “they exercised
(kingship)” and in other formulas recurring in the text.8 Specifically,
he posited “an original version which came to an end with Utu-hegal
of Uruk and which can therefore be assigned to the reign of that ruler”9
or, in a later formulation, “the dating of its first composition to the
time of Utuhegal.”10 At the other end of the time scale, Falkenstein
introduced a whole category of “post-Old Babylonian Sumerian” for
compositions whose defiance of the simplest grammatical rules—and
occasional lapses into loan translations from Akkadian—bespoke their
late composition. (I prefer to call these simply “post-Sumerian,” since
I regard spoken Sumerian as having survived into (Early) Old Babylo-
nian times.)
But linguistic criteria are not always so reliable. Even in the case
of the Sumerian King List, there are dissents from Jacobsen’s dating,
some lesser some greater. Rowton, for example, thought that “The
original king-list is probably to be dated about the beginning of the
Third Dynasty of Ur, that is either shortly before, or shortly after
the accession of Ur-Nammu, ca. 2113.”11 Kraus dated it to the time
7 Westenholz 1989.
8 Jacobsen 1939:128–135.
9 Jacobsen 1939:136; cf. 138.
10 Jacobsen 1957:125 n. 73; reprinted in Jacobsen 1970:386.
11 M.B. Rowton in CAH 1/1 (1970) 200; cf. Rowton 1960.
v.4. a sumerian apocryphon? 387
of Ur-Ninurta of Isin.12 I myself hold out for a date nearer the end
of the Isin I Dynasty with which it concludes.13 The reason for the
apparent reluctance to rely on linguistic criteria is that, in the course
of transmission via the scribal schools, compositions could well have
been subject to modernization of orthography, morphology, and even
lexicon to bring them au courant with the language of the scribe’s time.
This caveat applies in heightened degree to Huber’s arguments. Let us
examine one of them in some detail.
She finds eight examples of the enclitic suffix -ma in the Royal Cor-
respondence of Ur, each time used in a conjunctive function between two
independent phrases (clauses).14 These examples are taken from four
out of a corpus of 23 letters, and in one of them (21) only one or
two exemplars display the feature. It can thus hardly be described as
characterizing the corpus as a whole. She dates the appearance of the
phenomenon, which is admittedly an Akkadianism, to the Early Old
Babylonian period (Lipit-Ištar) in archival texts, and finds it also in cer-
tain canonical genres such as wisdom texts and literary letters.15 All this
is beyond dispute. But the reciprocal borrowing of grammatical features
between Sumerian and Akkadian, as of lexemes, was an enduring con-
sequence of the long symbiosis of the two languages and their speak-
ers. It was the subject of the 9th Rencontre in 196016 and is illustrated
equally well by the earlier and well-attested borrowing of Akkadian u
into Sumerian (replacing older -bi-da) as a conjunction between nouns.
Its evidentiary value for dating purposes applies only to the exemplar
or exemplars in which it occurs, not to the date of first creation of any
given composition.
Huber denies that such grammatical lapses could be the conse-
quence of a progressive “akkadisation” of the Sumerian language dur-
ing the neo-Sumerian period, or a corruption of texts undergone in the
course of their transmission.17 I question that judgment, but prefer to
move on to those of her arguments which are based on prosopography
and history. In challenging her views, I am not motivated by her total
12 Kraus 1952:44.
13 Hallo 1963a:55 and n. 41, here: VI.1.
14 Huber 2001:173.
15 We can already add model court cases; see Hallo 2002.
16 Sollberger 1960; note especially the contributions by Edzard, Gelb, and Falken-
stein.
17 Huber 2001:172.
failure to cite even a single one of my many contributions to the

discussion,18 but by a perceived obligation to defend long held and
carefully arrived at positions.19 This will be attempted here under ten
headings.
1. The existence of a “royal chancery,” or a scribal center under royal

auspices, can be argued, if not conclusively proved, on several grounds.
The most persuasive of these is the striking correlations among wholly
different genres glorifying the king, notably date formulas, royal inscrip-
tions, and royal hymns. These correlations have been demonstrated
repeatedly and explicitly by Frayne not only in his (unpublished) the-
sis but also in his contributions to the RIM. The royal correspondence
similarly correlates with date formulas and inscriptions. A particularly
impressive illustration is the case of Nin-šatapada, daughter of Sin-kašid
of Uruk, who appeals to Rim-Sin of Larsa in a letter reflecting precisely
the wording of the official date formulas of Rim-Sin following his con-
quest of Uruk as well as his inscriptions celebrating it.20 As I have said
elsewhere, Nin-šatapada, or whoever was the “author” of our letter-
prayer, wrote it in response to a real historical situation, and wrote
it, moreover, in full knowledge of the requirements of royal phraseol-
ogy. This phraseology of the court scribes I would like to designate the
“chancery style.”21
2. Such a style, if granted, implies the existence of a royal chancery

and, unless that chancery was always and necessarily destroyed upon
the fall of a given kingdom, invites the further assumption that some
of its contents survived into subsequent dynasties. In other words, the
documents written in it, or copies or drafts of the same, could have
been preserved in it for future use by student scribes or others. If so,
what did these later scribes choose to use? Where royal correspondence
is concerned, I have long held that they chose primarily or even exclu-
sively those letters which dealt with issues of primary concern to them
and their times, not necessarily to the times in which they are set. This
would explain the abiding preoccupation of the Royal Correspondence of
18 Even Hallo 1957 is cited only via Wilcke; see p. 196.

19 See especially Hallo 1983b, here: VI.2, concluding paragraph.
20 Hallo 1991, here: X.3.
21 Hallo 1983b:18 f, here: VI.2.
Ur with the coming of the Amorites who were, after all, ancestral to the
ruling classes of the eighteenth century, or of the Royal Correspondence of
Isin with watercourses.22
3. The Royal Correspondence is not the only genre to which this character-
ization applies. Others could be cited to the same effect. I will confine
myself here to two related ones, the model contracts and the model
court cases. The former mostly remain to be properly published and
edited, and until then it remains an open question whether they were
based on “functional” documents and, if so, whether these documents
dated from an earlier period.23 Model court cases are better known, and
typically involve prominent citizens, e.g. of Nippur, well-known from
other sources; the possibility that they were fictitious creations utilizing
known names cannot be excluded, but neither can the contrary conclu-
sion, i.e., that they represent actual cases thought worthy of inclusion
in the curriculum because illustrating important points of law or ethi-
cal behavior. “A Model Court Case Concerning Inheritance” which I
published in 2002 illustrates these points.24 It is so far known in only
one exemplar, and thus not demonstrably part of the (Nippur) curricu-
lum, but “its prosopography ties it securely to Old Babylonian Nippur,”
specifically in the 20th and 19th centuries.25 And “the selection of this
particular case for the scribal school curriculum . . . from the presum-
ably vast stock of authentic court cases on deposit in the archives of
Nippur” may be due to the fact that it “appears to be an apt illustra-
tion” of the proverbial abhorrence of (the first-born heir’s?) driving out
the younger son from the patrimony.26
4. Clear cases abound where literary copies of later date correlate with
archival and/or monumental evidence contemporary with the events
described. Apart from the case of Nin-šatapada already cited, they
include in the first place the case of “The Bride of Simanum.” In his
article of that name, Michalowski showed conclusively that the name of
Kunši-matum is preserved in the Royal Correspondence of Ur.27 Huber does
22 Hallo 1983b: 12, here: VI.2.

23 Bodine 2001 esp. pp. 53 f. Cf. Hallo in Hallo and Younger 2003:307.
24 Hallo 2002.
25 Hallo 2002:144.
26 Hallo 2002:151 and n. 68.
27 Michalowski 1975; cf. Hallo in Hallo and Younger 2003:296.
not cite this article, only Michalowski’s summary of it in his thesis, and
his view there that the Sumerian version represents a back-translation
from the Akkadian.28 In fact, the situation is much more complex.
Kunši-matum occurs in only one letter (Michalowski’s No. 6) and this
letter is known in only one exemplar, the bilingual OB text PBS 10/4:8.
Here her name occurs only in the Akkadian version; the Sumerian
version misunderstood it as a masculine personal name and provided a
mistaken back-translation into Kur-gammabi. But Michalowski found
evidence of the correct form of the name in a number of Ur III
archival texts, as well as an integral report of her history in an OB
copy of Šu-Sin’s royal inscriptions, albeit without name. Here is my
own reconstruction of this history:
Šimanum, in the far northwest, was too distant to be subjected militar-
ily. It apparently retained its own Hurrian ruler, a certain Pušam, while
diplomatic ties were pursued through his messenger called, interestingly
enough, Puzur-Assur (Amar-Suen 7). The immediate object was a dynas-
tic marriage, specifically a daughter of the crown-prince Šu-Sin was sent
to Šimanum, intended for one of Pušam’s two sons, Arib-atal or Iphuha.
What happened when Šu-Sin himself succeeded to the throne can best
be seen from the Old Babylonian copies of his triumphal inscriptions.
According to these, it appears that an internal revolt deposed both
Pušam and Šu-Sin’s daughter (Kunši-matum). Šu-Sin therefore marched
against Šimanum, an event commemorated in the name of his third year,
and restored both the native dynasts (now perhaps as dependent gover-
nors) and his daughter.29
Today I would reconstruct a possible literary history of the Kunši-
matum letter as follows: the relationship between Ur and Šimanum
proceeded as indicated in the date formulas of Šulgi, Amar-Sin and Šu-
Sin. The particular part played in it by diplomatic marriage is spelled
out in Collection B of Šu-Sin’s royal inscriptions, of OB date but sub-
stantiated by the king’s date formulas, especially for his third year.30 The
names of the bride and of the “men of Šimanum” to whom she was
affianced in some way are all well attested in Ur III archival records.31
The name of Kunši-matum was preserved in the course of transmit-
ting the Royal Correspondence of Ur, but misunderstood by the time of the
bilingual exemplar which is the only witness to the particular letter in
28 Huber 2001:191.
29 Hallo 1978:79 and nn, 81–84. Cf. also Hallo (In press: n. 73).
30 For the emergence of dynastic or diplomatic marriage under the Ur III kings see
already Hallo 1976b:31.

31 Michalowski 1975:717–719; Frayne 1997:287–290; add Sigrist 1983:480.
question. The notion that her name would have somehow been res-
urrected in an Old Babylonian scribal school defies credibility. More
likely, the letter “ultimately derived from genuine archival copies in
the royal chanceries, as suggested by (its) many correspondences with
details known from contemporaneous sources.”32
5. A parallel case to the preceding, though not directly connected to

the Royal Correspondence of Ur, is that of “The House of Ur-Meme.”33
In my reconstruction of the genealogy of this prominent Nippur fam-
ily through five generations, covering the entire time of the Ur III
Dynasty, I deliberately made use of later (canonical) as well as con-
temporaneous (monumental and archival) evidence. The later literary
sources conformed with the contemporary ones to a degree that makes
it unlikely that they were works of creative imagination. Nor do the
additions and corrections proposed by Zettler for the genealogy in 1984
and 1987 affect this conclusion materially.34 Specifically, one side of this
family held the office of governor of Nippur four times, while the other
inherited Ur-Meme’s own position of prefect of the temple of Inanna,
adding to it that of priest of Enlil. It would be possible to write a ver-
itable novella of high life at Nippur around the fortunes of this family;
perhaps, indeed, the canonical sources were preserved with some such
goal in view.
One point of Zettler’s reconstruction does deserve some notice here.
As I had already speculated in 1977,35 and as he agreed, the name of the
last known member of the House of Ur-Meme is not Inim-Inanna, as I
suggested in 1972, but Nabi-Enlil. Therewith a connection is established
between the House of Ur-Meme and the text first published by Ali
under the title of “Blowing the Horn for Public Announcement,”36 where
Nabi-Enlil appears as a former um-mi-a. That text fairly teems with
personal names known from other sources as at home in Nippur during
the later Ur III period. One of them is Lugal-melam, governor of
Nippur under Amar-Sin, when that office apparently passed out of
the hands of the house of Ur-Meme for the duration of his reign.
Another is Ur-DUN, the owner of the lost seal which is the subject
32 Hallo in Hallo and Younger 2003:296.

33 Hallo 1972.
34 Zettler 1984; Zettler 1987:199–203.
35 Hallo 1977:57 and n. 118.
36 Ali 1964a; and Ali 1964b: 113–116.
of the text; he is the author of a literary letter included by Michalowski

in his edition of the Royal Correspondence of Ur. The others are known
from other literary documents of Old Babylonian date.37 While it may
be theoretically possible that these names were generated by the um-
mi-a’s themselves for insertion in such a variety of literary contexts, a
more reasonable proposition would be that they reflect and preserve
the reality of life at Nippur in the late Ur III period.
6. If so far we have considered the Royal Correspondence of Ur and other

specific literary compositions from the viewpoint of probabilities—that
they were, or else were not, cut out of whole cloth—it is now necessary
to move closer to certainty. We can do this in connection with the
well-documented history of the scribal schools and their methods. In
suggesting that the Royal Correspondence of Ur was the product of the
scribal schools of the 18th century, Mlle. Huber neglects to say how
she visualizes the process which might have gone into that production.
Are we to suppose that an um-mi-a ignored the models of real royal
letters still at hand and instead sat down with his clay tablet and reed
stylus and composed de novo a coherent corpus of letters employing
genuine personal names, correctly identifying their official titles, and
reconstructing scenarios uncannily in harmony with those attested by
contemporaneous documents? Where did he find his data? Huber
seems to rule out the library of the school at Nippur or the archives
of the Ur III Dynasty at Ur. Is she justified in this? I think not! Here, in
fact, is how I visualize the process.
The existence of scribal schools is implied, though it cannot as yet be
definitively demonstrated, by the proliferation of lexical texts and other
“school texts” such as mathematical exercises which can be traced back
to the origins of “cuneiform” writing before the end of the 4th mil-
lennium; indeed they represent a principal means of propagating the
invention of writing.38 How were these ever more extensive lexical texts
created? For the earlier ones the answer remains elusive, but beginning
with the OB period, I have long suggested that the process involved was
not so very different from more modern lexicographical approaches,
specifically that the lexical lists represent—initially—abstractions from
real archival and canonical texts which were combed for lexemes (or, in
the case of the Grammatical Texts, verbal forms and other morphemes
37 For details see Hallo 1977:57.

38 See e.g. Nissen 1981.
in context), and that the texts so mined date primarily to the Ur III or
early OB period. A recent study of the terminology for animal parts
found in an Ur III account seems to bear this out.39
The gradual emergence of literary texts is also best explained as
the result of the existence of scribes and scribal schools as early as
the Early Dynastic period, for which we have surviving exemplars of
such compositions as the Instructions of Šuruppak and the Keš Temple Hymn.
Together with Ur III exemplars, e.g., of portions of Lugalbanda in the Cave
of the Mountain,40 these add up to what I have called an Old Sumerian
canon.41 A neo-Sumerian canon began to take its place under Ur III
auspices. Even though it is no longer possible to speak with certainty
of Šulgi of Ur as the founder of the scribal schools at Ur and Nippur,
he certainly was their patron. Nor is the existence of scribal schools in
the Ur III period, or in the subsequent Early Old Babylonian period, in
doubt. A few exemplars of literary texts datable by paleography to the
21st or 20th–19th centuries have survived, but more importantly, the
preservation on 18th century exemplars of texts recognizably depen-
dent on earlier models implies the continuity of textual tradition, how-
ever many changes and even distortions individual compositions may
have undergone in the process of transmission.
One of the techniques of scribal training involved the copying of
free-standing monuments in the open areas of Nippur and Ur, as
attested both by explicit references to this technique in Sumerian com-
positions dealing with the life of the scribal schools,42 and by preserved
examples of the products of the “field-trips” that one can visualize in
this connection. The comparison of Sargonic inscriptions known from
both original monuments and from late (OB) copies shows that by and
large the copies were reliable.43 But even where the originals are not
preserved, we can reconstruct a very likely monumental origin for other
parts of the neo-Sumerian canon preserved—so far—only or mainly in
canonical form, i.e. on clay tablets; one can mention here the laws of
Ur-Nammu and Lipit-Ištar (of the latter we actually have some stone
39 Hallo 2001a.
40 Cohen 1976:99–101; for a fuller edition see Hallo 1983a, here: VII.1.
41 Hallo 1976a, here: I.4.
42 Hallo 1991a: 17, here: X.3, n. 80; with the reservations of Yoshikawa 1989.
43 Cf. Gelb and Kienast 1990:129: “Prinzipiell machen die Abschriften einen sehr
zuverlässigen und vertrauenerweckenden Eindruck, . . . ” This “reliable and confidence-

inspiring impression” can be illustrated by the juxtaposition of OB copies and their Old
Akkadian originals, e.g. in the case of the disc-inscription of Enheduanna, ibid. 64 f.
fragments of the monumental originals), and royal hymns (here too we

have at least one example known in both clay tablet and stone form).44
What is demonstrably true of royal inscriptions, royal law collections
and royal hymns is, by analogy, likely to be similarly true, though so far
only ex hypothesi, for royal correspondence. I visualize an initial resort
to the royal archives by the first um-mi-a to venture to copy some of
the originals, and thereafter generations of his successors recopying his
copies for educational purposes.
The character of scribal education in the OB schools was much
more sophisticated, and at the same time more traditional, than ini-
tially realized, as Vanstiphout was the first to show,45 with Sauren fol-
lowing closely behind,46 and as Veldhuis and Tinney have more recently
succeeded in detailing. The elementary stage of scribal education was
based on lexical texts and proverbs.47 Beyond that, the student pro-
ceeded to mastery of what, on the medieval analogy, might be called
a kind of quadrivium and “decivium” or, in Tinney’s terms, a tetrad
and a decad, i.e., two groups of texts which formed the core curric-
ula of the next two stages of instruction.48 The tetrad consisted of four
traditional texts of relatively short length which were copied, probably
via dictation, from model exemplars inscribed, at least at Larsa, on six-
sided prisms in such a way that each standard line of text (verse) was
divided over three (or occasionally two) cases. The constituent compo-
sitions were three hymns to the kings of Isin (Iddin-Dagan B, Lipit-Ištar
B, and Enlil-bani A) and the Blessing of Nisaba by Enki (nin-mul-an-gim),
hereafter referred to, following Tinney, as Nisaba A. At 79, 63, 91(?), and
57 lines respectively, they have a total of only 290 verses and an average
of 72.5 verses each.
The decad consisted of ten texts of intermediate length, adding
up to 1329 verses and averaging 133 verses each.49 Presumably they
44 Sjöberg 1961: esp. p. 70.

45 Vanstiphout 1978:51; Vanstiphout 1979.
46 Sauren 1979.
47 Veldhuis 1997. Previously Landsberger 1959.
48 Tinney 1999.
49 1. Šulgi A: 104.
2. Lipit-Ištar A: 109.
3. giš-al: 107.
4. nin-me-šar2-ra: 153.
5. enlil-suraše: 171.
6. Keš Temple Hymn. 131.
7. Enki’s Journey to Nippur. 129.
constituted the intermediate stage of post-elementary instruction. No

doubt they were followed by the other texts known from the standard
literary catalogues, some of which were considerably longer, and which
apparently constituted the advanced stage of the curriculum.50
But the difference between the tetrad and the decad was more than
only a matter of length, or of placement in the catalogues. Before their
collective character had ever been recognized, Vanstiphout published
two important analyses of one of the texts from the tetrad which indi-
cated its primarily pedagogical function. In 1978, he edited Lipit-Ištar B
and offered multiple reasons for concluding “that the hymn was com-
posed in and primarily for the Edubba, to be used there as a beginner’s
text,” and the following year he generalized from this conclusion to
answer the broader question “How did they learn Sumerian?”51 Here
the criteria for the first stage of post-elementary instruction are laid out
more systematically, and the hope is expressed that other texts answer-
ing to these criteria might yet be identified.52 The four main criteria
are: (1) a high percentage of lenticular school texts and other types
of exercise texts; (2) illustrative uses of diverse grammatical forms; (3)
brevity, and (4) preoccupation with the e-dub-ba-a and scholarly activ-
ity in general. To these might be added a fifth criterion, namely the
provenience of the six-sided prisms, which appears to be Larsa in at
least three cases53 and is likely as well in the fourth.54
We have already seen that the rest of the tetrad meets the third of
these criteria. Let us now test it against the other criteria. The least
likely candidate may seem to be Nisaba A (nin-mul-an-gim). Of the
six exemplars in my edition of 1970, none is a lenticular or similar
school-text. But four additional exemplars have been published and/or
identified since then,55 and they tell a different story. One of them is
8. Inanna and Ebih: 182.

9. Nungal Hymn: 121.
10. Gilgameš and Huwawa: 202.
50 Lamentation over the Destruction Ur: 436; but cf. Gilgameš and Akka: 114.
51 Vanstiphout 1979.
52 See Vanstiphout 1979:126 for a summary.
53 Tinney 1999:162 f.
54 I.e. nin-mul-an-gim. Implicit in the provenience of many of the Sumerian literary
texts at Yale (but note the high accession number!) and the connections with Lagaš
noted in my edition, Hallo 1970:121 f., 133 f., here: I.2.
55 ISET 1:198 (Ni. 9942); CT 58:47; Cavigneaux 1996:96 and 192, no. 222; Cavi-
gneaux and Al-Rawi 1993:95 (from Me-Turan). Civil 1983:44, n. 2, mentions in addi-
tion three Nippur texts and several small fragments from Ur, none published.
a lenticular school text,56 one is a Sammeltafel containing, apparently,

the entire tetrad,57 and one may be a fragment of a similar collective
tablet in that it includes the end of Enlil-bani A and the beginning of
nin-mul-an-gim in that order.58
As for the paradigmatic character of the verbal forms chosen, verses
40–49 of Nisaba A, or what I called its Stanza VII, all illustrate what
used to be called the “pronominal conjugation,”59 i.e., the non-finite
form of a verb followed by a pronominal suffix and, typically, a tempo-
ral postposition. This construction may conceivably be a loan transla-
tion from the corresponding form in Akkadian, where it is well attested,
and where it is paralleled in other Semitic languages such as Hebrew.60
Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the Akkadian equivalents of
just these lines are best represented, or at least best preserved, in the
(published) bilingual exemplar of our text. Finally, though the é-dub-
ba-a as such is not mentioned in the hymn, it is, after all, addressed to
Nisaba, the patron goddess of the institution, and refers indirectly to it
when it speaks in line 29 of the “House of Learning of Nisaba”61 and in
lines 45 f. of the “house of learning” and the “door of learning.” Again
it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the single lenticular school
tablet so far known of the composition cites one of these lines.
The remaining members of the tetrad can be dealt with more briefly.
All of them are well represented by lenticular and other exercise texts.62
The e2-dub-ba-a receives honorable mention in Iddin-Dagan B 64–70,
and in the doxologies which conclude Lipit-Ištar B (lines 58–61) and
Enlil-bani A (lines 89–91). And the gradually increasing rate of difficulty
of the verbal forms encountered in the successive portions of the tetrad
has been noted.63 The multiple criteria which led Vanstiphout to his
conclusion regarding Lipit-Ištar B thus apply as well to the rest of the
tetrad.
Even with all this evidence in favor of the pedagogical character of
the tetrad, however, Tinney hesitates to commit himself on the question
56 Cavigneaux 1996:96 and 192, no. 222.

57 Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi 1993:95, H 156; cf. Tinney 1999:163.
58 CT 58:47.
59 Cf. Falkenstein 1949,149 f.; Falkenstein 1950:78.
60 Aro 1961: chs. VII, XXVIII, XXIX.
61 Note that this Sumerian name is translated in a lexical text from Hattuša by
Akkadian bı̄t ni-im-ni-gal = Nanibgal(?); cf. MSL 13:152:4; George 1993:91, 362; 129, 836.
62 Tinney 1999:162 and nn. 20–22; 171 f.
63 Tinney 1999:61:166 f.??
of whether their four constituents were in their entirety composed ad

hoc in the scribal schools for pedagogical purposes, referring instead
to “the difficulty (often impossibility) of determining for any given
component in a text whether it was ‘original’ or additive; and for any
given text whether it was an abstract exercise in scribal virtuosity or
a concrete production for the latest monumental offering in Nippur.”64
This difficulty becomes even greater for the decad and the constituents
of the higher levels of the scribal curriculum, which notably do not share
the characteristics of the tetrad. Each genre and each composition
should be judged on its own merits before conclusions are drawn as
to its “authenticity.” Let us now see how this applies to the royal
correspondence.
7. The compositions of the tetrad seem designed to teach Sumerian

grammar, but an equally prominent place in the scribal curriculum was
devoted to mathematics. And the knowledge of applied mathematics
could similarly be inculcated with the help of literary compositions.
Within the Royal Correspondence of Ur, two letters stand out for their sys-
tematic employment of large numbers. These are the texts designated
by Michalowski as 11. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi and 19. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin.65
The former deals with the fortification known as “the wall facing
the mountain” (bad3-igi-hur-sag-ga) and includes a passage (lines 15–
22) specifying the lengths of wall under various officials but with so
many variants that Michalowski abstained from translating it, referring
instead to Wilcke’s earlier translation.66 The latter, like the response by
Ibbi-Sin (Michalowski 20), deals with the purchase of grain in the north
and its transport to Ur, besieged and starving. Both letters were used
by Jacobsen in 1953 to reconstruct a dramatic picture of rising, indeed
inflationary prices during “the reign of Ibbi-Suen,”67 and by Wilcke in
1970 to delineate the “three phases of the collapse of Ur.”68
But already in 1976, Kramer showed that Jacobsen’s readings of the
figures were in error.69 And now Eleanor Robson has reviewed the
entire Old Babylonian scribal curriculum in light of the finds from a
single school at Nippur, and convincingly demonstrated that No. 19 is
64 Tinney 1999:166 f.
65 Michalowski 1976:200, 243.
66 Wilcke 1969:3 ff.
67 Jacobsen 1953.
68 Wilcke 1970.
69 Introduction to OECT 5 (1976) 7 and n. 38; 16 and n. 6.
an exercise in applied mathematics. “The letter,” she points out, “reads

suspiciously like an OB school mathematics problem.”70 That makes it
a prime candidate for a late invention together, presumably, with the
response.
But Robson’s demonstration does not condemn the entire corpus!
Absent such a pedagogical or other motive for impugning its authen-
ticity, each letter of the Royal Correspondence of Ur merits consideration
on its own as a possible historical source. In the letter from Puzur-
Šulgi (or Puzur-Numušda)71 of Kazallu to Ibbi-Sin, for example, the
juxtaposition of Subartu and Hamazi (lines 35 f.) conforms to the “close
connection—if not outright identity—between the two” in the third
millennium, according to Steinkeller.72 And although the very notion of
Subartu is an anachronism in an Ur III context, its governor in this
letter, a certain Zin(n)um, is probably “a historical figure,” given the
occurrence of the name in an archival text dated to the reign of Išbi-
Irra.73 The next four lines of the same letter (lines 37–40) fit into the
history of Ešnunna at the close of the Ur III period as reconstructed
from contemporaneous sources according to Reichel.74 And given the
fact that Numušda was the patron deity of Kazallu, the replacement of
the name Puzur-Šulgi with Puzur-Numušda75 by the governor of Kaza-
llu is part and parcel of what I have called “the pattern of usurpation”
at the end of the Ur III period.76
8. None of this is to deny that there are, in fact, cuneiform compositions

which betray genuine traces of their late composition and which can
therefore truly be described as apocryphal. The cruciform monument
of Maništušu, for example, is mostly or wholly of this character.77 It
betrays the late date of its creation by its pretense at monumental
character—in distinction to clay tablet copies of true monuments with
or without modernizing (or archaizing) tendencies, such as the OB
copies of Sargonic inscriptions from Ur and Nippur. The motive for
70 Robson 2002:350 f.
71 The names vary with each other in Letter 11 though not in Letter 19.
72 Steinkeller 1998:79 f. and n. 17.
73 Ibid., citing BIN 9:332:18.
74 Reichel 2003:359 f. and n. 15.
75 Thus (so far) only in Michalowski 1976 Letter 11, where Puzur-Numušda figures
variously as governor of Bad-igihursanga (line 2; variants Puzur-Marduk, Puzur-Šulgi)

and of Girlumturra (line 15, variants Šu-Marduk, Šu-Numušda.
76 Most recently in Hallo and Simpson 1998:81 f.
77 Sollberger 1968.
the cruciform monument is also transparent—to give the appearance of

hoary antiquity to the priestly benefits and temple privileges conveyed
by it—anticipating by a millennium the Donation of Constantine. Similarly,
the “sun tablet” from Sippar is presumably a fraus pia with comparable
motives.
Of course much depends on the definition of apocrypha. The con-
cept originates as early as Jerome, who thus identified the corpus of
intertestamental compositions included in the canon of the Greek Bible
but not of the Hebrew Bible (or of later Protestant Bibles). There is
relatively little difficulty in distinguishing an apocryphal book such as
Tobit from a canonical book such as Esther, or even the apocryphal
additions to Daniel from the canonical book of that name, though the
latter example serves as a reminder that genuine aspects of the cultural
heritage may be preserved even there.78 And the Dead Sea Scrolls (and
the Nag Hammadi papyri) have taught us that the corpus can still grow
with a real apocryphon like the Genesis Apocryphon, not just copied late
but composed late.
9. Huber operates freely and repeatedly with the concept of plagia-

rism—indeed she treats it as a further criterion of apocryphal status.79
But plagiarism is a modern concept, not to say conceit. It implies a
high respect for originality and for another concept, that of authorship,
which is notably lacking in the ancient Near East.80 There, by contrast,
originality had to be achieved by new and possibly minor variations
within familiar norms. The few exceptions to this rule strike us as
the random musings of a bored scribe, or the disjointed doodles of an
inattentive pupil—for example the unique exemplar of the composition
which Martha Roth has edited under the title of “The Slave and the
Scoundrel.”81
10. In two recent papers, I offered a systematic defense of the use of

later literary sources for the reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian
(and biblical) history—and a cautionary critique against the uncritical
privileging of contemporaneous sources for the same end. In the first
78 For an example see Hallo 1987:7 and 12, nn. 20–22, here: VII.2; Hallo 1996:216
and nn. 23–27; Reeves and Lu 1988:267 f. 78.

79 Huber 2001:170, 180 ff., 195.
80 See in detail Hallo 1996:144–149.
81 Hallo 1996:148.
paper I warned of the virus of skepticism first displayed with respect

to the Sargonic period.82 In the second I applied my strictures to the
fall of empires, especially that of Ur III.83 In Mlle. Huber’s work the
virus seems to have spread to the Ur III period. Yet I defy anyone
to write the history of that period without its Royal Correspondence and
other literary sources. It is not enough to condemn an entire canonical
genre on linguistic or other grounds. What is long overdue is a judicious
approach to the reconstruction of ancient history where the evaluation
of each source proceeds hand in hand with the probability of the results
achieved. There is no space for such an effort here but, if and when
undertaken, it will certainly show that some members of each genre are
genuine, if “modernized,” survivals of original sources, while others are
demonstrably late fictions.
Nearly forty years ago I raised the question: “A Sumerian Psalter?”
and was inclined to answer “yes.”84 To the question: is there an entire
corpus of royal correspondence—or any other genre—that can be
described as a Sumerian apocryphon the answer would seem to be:
no!
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Vanstiphout, Herman LJ.
1978 Lipit-Eštar’s Praise in the Edubba. JCS 30:33–61.
1979 How did they Learn Sumerian? JCS 31:118–126.
Veldhuis, Niek C.
1997 Elementary Education at Nippur. The Lists of Trees and Wooden Objects. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Groningen.
Westenholz, Joan
1989 Enheduanna, En-Priestess, Hen of Nanna, Spouse of Nanna. Pp. 539–
556 in Dumu-E2-dub-ba-a. Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, eds. Hermann
Behrens, Darlene Loding and Martha T. Roth. OPSNKF 11. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Wilcke, Claus
1969 Zur Geschichte der Amurriter in der Ur-III-Zeit. WdO 5:1–31.
1970 Drei Phasen des Niedergangs des Reiches von Ur III. ZA 60:54–69.
Yoshikawa, Mamoru
1989 maš-dàra and sag-tag. ASJ 11:353–355.
Zettler, Richard L.
1984 The Genealogy of the House of Ur-Meme: a Second Look. AfO 31:1–9.
1987 Sealings as Artifacts of Institutional Administration in Ancient Meso-
potamia. JCS 39:197–240.
vi
historiography
vi.1
BEGINNING AND END OF THE SUMERIAN

KING LIST IN THE NIPPUR RECENSION
The newly discovered fragment of exemplar L2 of the Sumerian King

List (N 3368) published by M. Civil in this journal1 makes possible a
new reconstruction of the first six kings of Kish. The text offered here
employs the line count and sigla of Thorkild Jacobsen, and attempts to
bring pp. 76–79 of his standard edition up to date.2 The figures in the
margin enumerate the kings of Kish I.
(1) WB i 43 K i šk i *-ù r

L2
WB 44 l u g a l-àm
WB L2 45 m u 1200 ì-a g
Text from WB. L2 (according to L. Legrain’s copy):3 K[i šk i *-** lugal-
àm)/ 1200 m[u ì-ag]. Berossos’ excerpters give the first post-diluvian
king as Euēchoios, which may plausibly be supposed a corruption of
Euēchoros,4 and contains in the (emended) element -or(os) a possible
reflection of the cuneiform spelling. There is, however, another tradi-
tion in which Berossos evinced considerable interest, that of the so-
called apkallu’s, or legendary sages. In this tradition, the first post-
diluvian king, or at least the first one associated with such a sage, is
En-me(r)kar of Uruk. This is shown not only by the apkallu-text cited
by Jacobsen5 and newly edited with the help of additional duplicates
1 “Texts and Fragments (36),” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 15 (1961) 79 f.

2 The Sumerian King List (= Assyriological Studies 11, 1939), quoted hereafter as
AS 11.
3 PBS 13 (1922) No. 2.
4 Jacobsen, AS 11: 86 f., note 115.
5 Ibid.
410 vi.1. the sumerian king list in the nippur recension
by E. Reiner,6 but even more explicitly by a new late text from Uruk
published by J.J.A. van Dijk.7 The identification of Euēchoios (etc.) with
En-merkar8 thereby gains in probability, and the necessity of identifying
the Greek transcriptions with * - ù r diminishes. Given the fact that a
number of star names recur as royal names in the ante-diluvian por-
tion of the King List (lu-lim = ajjalu, Dumu-zi, Sipa-zi-an-na) as well
as among the first post-diluvian rulers of Kish (Kalibum, Zuqaqı̄p), it
is tempting to restore the traces of the present name in WB as (g i š -)
g á n -ù r, for this is the name of one of the “southern stars.”9
(2) WB L2 Su2 46 Ku -la-zi-na-be- el

WB L2 Su2 47 900 mu ì-ag
Text from L2, following Civil’s copy. The first element of the name is
taken to be kullassina *kullat-šina, “all of them (the people?).”10 The
second element is restored, with all due reserve, on the basis of the
Greek sources, which give the name of the second post-diluvian king
as Khōmasbēlos.11 Su2 has [ . . . ]-na-i-be-el /[900 mu] ì - a g. WB’s Kúl-
la-d*-AN.NA-**-el/m u 960 ì - a g remains a crux. The discrepancy
in the figures amounts to only one vertical wedge, exactly as in the
case of the seventh king of Kish, Kalibum. But d*-AN.NA is hard
to reconcile with L2’s zi-na. S. Langdon read the * in question as
NIDABA12 or EZEN,13 i.e., EZINU (ŠE.TIR),14 Jacobsen as NIDABA.15
The copy favors a reading TIR, and dTIR.AN.NA is well known as
the logogram for marratu or dmanzât, “rainbow,”16 Moreover it varies
6 “The Etiological Myth of the Seven Sages,” Orientalia 30 (1961) 1–11.

7 XVIII. Vorläufiger Bericht . . . Uruk (1962) 44–52.
8 Cf. Jacobsen, AS 11: 87, note 115.
9 Article “Fixsterne,” Reallexikon der Assyriologie 3 (1957) 79; cf. Deimel, Šume-
risches Lexikon 2 (1928) No. 105: 13 f.

10 For this form, cf. I.J. Gelb, Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary 2 (2nd ed., 1961)
121 f. and 3 (1957) 145 and, with another interpretation, A. Goetze, RA 52 (1958) 147.
11 F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker III C (1958) 384; P. Schnabel,
MVAG 13 (1908) 5 and Berossos (1923) 184 and 267 f. For a different identification, cf.
Jacobsen, AS 11: 88, note 122.
12 OECT 2 (1923) p. 9.
13 Ibid., note 9.
14 The copy looks more like TIR or ŠE.NIR, but this writing of EZINU/AŠNAN is
attested; cf. e.g. E.I. Gordon, Sumerian Proverbs (1959) 542, note 4.
15 AS 11: 76 f. and note 40.
16 Cf. Deimel, ŠL 2:375:15 and M. Streck, Assurbanipal (1916) 266, note c and
267, note 3. For the various astronomical meanings of dTIR.AN.NA cf. F. Kugler,
Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel, Ergänzungen 2 (1914) 184, note 4.
vi.1. the sumerian king list in the nippur recension 411
with dŠE.TIR-n a (i.e. da š n a n - n a or de z i nx -n a) in the Hymn

to the Temple of Nin-hursag at Kesh (é š - n u n - e).17 For line 34
(35) of one version of this text has é - dŠE.TIR - n a - a n - n é -
ú s - s a, where another has é - dNIDABA.AN - n a - a n - n é
- ú s - s a,18 a variant reading to which E. Chiera called attention,
comparing it to our King List passage,19 but which S.N. Kramer’s
collation20 showed to be actually é - dTIR.AN.NA - a n - n é - ú s -
s a.21 Interestingly enough, an unpublished Yale exemplar of the same
text has instead é - dBAN.AN.NA - a n - n é - ú s - s a.22 These
variants suggest that ŠE.TIR.(AN)-na too had the sense of “bow of
heaven, rainbow,” possibly with the reading e z i n (a),23 since the
reading a š n a n is associated with the concept of grain.24 If, then,
we are entitled to read WB i 46 as Kúl-la-d(ŠE?)TIR.AN.NA-**-el, it is
conceivable that it represents a somewhat awkward Kúl-la-(e)zinx-na- ib -
el.25 If, on the other hand, Jacobsen’s reading of dNIDABA.AN-na is
retained, one may perhaps compare the name of the Ur III e n s í of
Nippur written Ur-dAN.NIDABA,26 for which no reading is, however,
here suggested.
(3) L2 Su2 ii 1 Na-an-giš-li-iš-ma

P5
L2 Su2 2 670 mu ì-ag
17 For literature, cf. M. Lambert, RA 55 (1961) 195, No. 70.

18 Langdon, OBCT 1 (1923) pl. 43:2 and Chiera, Sumerian Religious Texts (1924) 16:
21 respectively.
19 AJSL 40 (1924) 267.
20 ZA 52 (1957) 83.
21 Cf. also lugal-e I 9, where the older exemplars have dŠE.TIR-an-na and the
younger ones dTIR-an-na according to A. Falkenstein, Sumerische Götterlieder 1 (1959)

65, note 97; he considers the latter spelling erroneous.
22 NBC 7799. The confusion or conflation of BAN and TIR in the complex “bow
of heaven” may be due to the near homophony in Akkadian of qaštu, “bow” (BAN)
and qîštu, “forest” (TIR), and recalls at once the Biblical QŠT B"NN, “(rain)bow
in the cloud” of Genesis 9:(13), 14, 16 (cf. Ezekiel 1:28). As a theophoric element,
(d)BAN.AN.NA occurs in Neo-Babylonian personal names; cf. Deimel, Pantheon Baby-
lonicum (1914) No. 2971.
23 Cf. Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. E, s.v. ezennû.
24 Cf. W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, s.v. ašnan.
25 For a comparable orthographic development, cf. the syllabic value išin, izin, or isin
derived from EZEN; Gelb, MAD 22: 210 ad No. 72.

26 TMH n. F. 1–2:346; de Clercq, Cyl. Or. No. 86 = pl. x and p. 68; unpubl. 1st. Ni.
372 (courtesy E. Sollberger).

Text from L2. The restoration of the figure as 1200 seems less
probable by comparison with the form of the signs for 1200 four lines
above. Su2: [ . . . ]-li- is-ma / [ . . . ] ì - a g. P5: traces.
(4) L2 Su2 3 En-dàra-an-na

P5
L2 Su2 420 m u a r á - * - [?] - ám
i t i - 3 u4 - 3 1/2 ì-ag
Text from L2 and Su2, the latter preserving the last sign of each of the
three lines. WB has only room for two lines here; the first sign of the
second resembles the * of L2. P5: E n - t a r - * - a n - n a /[ . . . ]. This
entry supplies not only an entirely new name,27 but also the basis for
the months and days in the total of Kish I.
(5) L2 Su2 5 Ba-bu-um-*-[?]

WB P5 5
L2 300 mu ì - a g
Text from L2. WB: Ba-b[u- . . . ]. P5: Ba-u-um-E [ . . . ]. Su2 preserves only
¯
a vertical wedge at the end of the name.
(6) L2 Pu-An- na -[um]

WB P5 6
L2 240 m u [ì - a g]
Text from L2. WB: Pu-An- nu-um m u [8]40 ì-ag . P5: Pu-An-*-um [
. . .]. The new text confirms Langdon’s copy and rules out F.R. Kraus’
otherwise plausible conjecture sír-ri-mu-um.28 L2’s 240 represents the
lowest figure in a kind of arithmetic progression formed by the first six
reigns, as follows: 1200 , 900 (variant: 960), 670 , 420+, 300, 240 ; it
may therefore be preferable to WB’s [8]40.
For the type cf. D.O. Edzard, ZA 53 (1959) 15–19.

27
ZA 50 (1952) 58, note 4. For names of the Pu-DN type, cf. Gelb. MAD 3:210 f. (I
28
owe this and several other suggestions to the kindness of Prof. Gelb.)
II
The remaining kings of Kish I are not affected by the new fragment.29
It is interesting to note that their number remains twenty-three as
given in the dynasty summary. But the discrepancy between the regnal
totals as calculated and as given in the summary is not reduced by the
discovery of the new figures except in respect to the months and days.
The hope that L2 might be assigned to its proper place in a presumed
original by physical inspection was expressed by Kraus.30 Even without
such inspection, the new fragment makes it seem highly probable that
L2 represents, in fact, the upper left-hand corner of a tablet, since L1
and P2, two twelve-column tablets of identical lay-out, undoubtedly
began with the post-diluvian kings, and the new fragment breaks off
at the very point where P2 (as well as P3) begins. The conclusion that
L2 is part of either L1 or P2 (or possibly P3) seems almost inescapable.
In response to my inquiry regarding the latter two texts, M. Civil
kindly stated: “CBS 14223 + N 3368 is ‘compatible’ with both P2 and
P3; personally I am inclined to assume that it belongs to P2. It is not
however a physical join, although the fragments must be quite close.”31
If we suppose, then, that L2 represents the upper left-hand column
of the obverse of either P2 or L1 (or conceivably P3), then all the extant
Nippur exemplars of the Sumerian King List32 begin with the first post-
diluvian dynasty, Kish I, with one possible exception, namely P5.33 In
the case of P5, however, we are dealing with a copy later than the
others; moreover, while the shape of the tablets suggests that at least
twenty double-lines were lost from before the beginning of the Kish I
section, we can hardly be sure what, if anything, the missing portion
contained. In short, the Nippur scribes of the Early Old Babylonian
period were not in the habit of joining the ante-diluvian traditions to
the King List. This is also the conclusion arrived at on internal grounds
most recently by J.J. Finkelstein.34
29 It is difficult to place the stray -a of Kraus’ transliteration of Ni. 9712a i (ZA 50:35,
38), which does not appear in Kramer’s copy, University Museum Bulletin 17/2 (1952)
19.
30 ZA 50:54, note 3.
31 Letter of 11-16-1961.
32 For P and P , see below, notes 45 f.
4 6
33 For previous discussions of this question, cf. Jacobsen, AS 11:55–68 and Kraus,
ZA 50:31–33, 51–53.
34 American Oriental Society meeting, Cambridge (Mass.), 1962; cf. now above, sub
General Conclusions (A).

The same conclusion follows from the fact that the same Nippur
scribes, and only they, regularly concluded their exemplars with a final
summary limited to the post-diluvian dynasties.35 These summaries
were not included in Jacobsen’s edition of the King List, which was
based on the non-Nippurian exemplar WB 444, though of course he
made full use of them in his reconstruction of the rest of the text.36
Here too we now dispose of additional material: Ni. 9712c, a part of
L1 copied by Kramer37 and edited by Kraus who identified it;38 N 1610
= CBS 15365 (P6), first published, in transliteration only, by A. Poebel
and now re-identified and copied by Civil;39 and CBS 13484, a small
fragment joining CBS 13293 (P4) which was identified by Civil and is
published herewith with the kind permission of Professor Kramer.40
In view of the new material, it has been deemed appropriate to edit
the Nippur summaries here. P2, as the most complete of the versions,
is used as the basis for a text; the newly copied material is presented
in the right hand column. No attempt has been made to resolve the
troublesome question of regnal totals for the separate cities or the grand
total for all the cities; the restorations are simply based on the preserved
figures from the body of the King List, where possible from the Nippur
exemplars. One observation may, however, be in order in connection
with the newly-found fragment of P4. It knows of all sixteen kings of
Isin and, while there is some doubt about the precise number of years
assigned to the dynasty, goes far toward confirming what Poebel had
argued from internal evidence: that it was, in effect, written in the last
year or years of Damiq-ilišu, the last king of Isin.41
35 For P3, cf. below, note 46.

36 Cf. also his edition of P6 in AS 11:8, note 15.
37 University Museum Bulletin 17/2 (1952) 19.
38 ZA 50 (1952) 37 ff.
39 “Texts and Fragments (37),” JOS 15 (1961) 79 f.
40 The obverse of the new fragment adds no more than half a sign to Poebel’s copy
of P4, and has therefore not been recopied below.

41 Cf. Jacobsen, AS 11:6 f., note 9.
P2 duplicates
(1) šu-nigín 40!-lal-[1 lugal]
mu-bi 14, 400 [ + ? + ]
9 mu [3 i t i 3 1/2 u4]
íb-ag
a - rá 4 - [kam ]
š à - Kiš[ki]
(2) šu-nigín 22 l[ugal] P6(CBS 15365)
mu - bi 2610 [+ ?] [mu] - bi 125
6 iti 15 u4 íb-a[g] [. . .] íb - ag
a - rá - 5 - kam [a - r]á - 6 - kam
šà-unugki-ga [šá - unu]gk i - a
(3) šu - nigín 13 lugal [ . . . luga]l
mu - bi 396 m u
íb-ag
a - rá - 3 - kam
[š à] -uríki-ma
(4) šu - nigín 3 lugal
mu-bi 356 mu
íb-ag
a-rá-1-kam L1 (Ni. 9712c)
šà - A - wa - ank I [šà - A - wa - ank] i
(5) [šu] - nigín 1 lugal [šu -nigín 1 luga]l
mu-bi 7 mu [ì - ag] [7 mu ì] -ag
a - rá - 1 - [kam] [a - rá] - 1 - kam]
šà- H[a? - ma - ziki- a] [šà - Ha - ma -z]iki - a
(break)42
(9) [šu-nigín 11] lugal
[mu-bi 60 + ] 137
[mu] íb-ag
[a - r]á -l - kam P4 (CBS 13293 + 13484)
[šà] - A - ga - dèk i [na] m - lugal - A - g[a - dèk i]
(10) [ šu - nigín 21 lugal 23 lugal
mu - bi 125 mu [m]u - bi 9943
40 u4 íb - ag
a - rá -1 - kam
šà - ugnim nam - lugal- ugnim
[G]u - ti - umk i Gu - NU - umk i
42 This break must have contained summaries for (6) Adab, (7) Mari and (8) Akšak,
each of which was once the seat of kingship.

43 These new figures for the kings and years of Gutium will be dealt with separately
in a study of the Gutian period.

P2 (continued) duplicates (continued)

(11) [šu-nigín] 11 lugal 16 lugal
[mu-b]i 159 mu mu - bi 226! *
íb-ag
[šà - i] - si - i n - na nam - lugal - ì - si - ink i - na
11 11 uruk i
[uruk]i nam-lugal-la
[í] b - ag - ga
[šu] - nigin 134 lugal 139 lugal
[šu] - nigin mu-bi 28800 mu - bi ** + 3000
[*] + 76 + 443 mu
21 traces
In the above reconstruction, P6 has been treated as a variant of the

summary dealing with Uruk, although it is apparent that this raises
serious difficulties. In addition to those mentioned by Jacobsen,44 one
may mention the near-impossibility of assigning the fragment a logical
place in the extant one-tablet45 or two-tablet46 Old Babylonian recen-
sions from Nippur, and the problem of identifying the names of the
fragment with those of the Old Babylonian dynasty at Uruk as they are
emerging from the excavations there.47
III
Thus all the evidence points to a Nippurian King List tradition which
began with the first post-diluvian dynasty (Kish I) and ended with a
summary of the eleven cities which shared the kingship till the end
of the First Dynasty of Isin. One other new bit of evidence deserves
to be mentioned in conclusion, for it enables us to specify the precise
line with which this tradition began the text of the King List, even
though that line is not preserved on any of the Nippur recensions. In
a “New Literary Catalogue from Ur,”48 Kramer has, in fact, discovered
44 AS 11:8, note 15, end.

45 L1; P2.
46 P -P4; I use this notation to indicate successive tablets of exemplars that appar-
3
ently belong together; cf. also Kraus, ZA 50:32.
47 Ibid., 58, note 1.
48 RA 55 (1961) 169–176.
the incipit of the King List. It takes the form of nam-lugal (No. 25) and
seems to show that the Old Babylonian version began with i 4149 and
not with i 43.50
Of course, nam-lugal is also the incipit of the ante-diluvian section,
and it could therefore be argued that the new catalogue entry identifies
the fuller form of the King List. I would, however, suggest that the line
nam - lugal an - ta e11 - dè - a - ba is originally more at home in the
post-diluvian King List, and secondary in the ante-diluvian addition
and in the Sumerian Flood myth. Were it otherwise, it would be diffi-
cult to justify the repetition of the line in the middle of the expanded
version of the King List. There is nothing in the preserved Sumerian
traditions to suggest that kingship reverted to heaven during the flood.51
Moreover, the line that precedes our incipit in the postdiluvian section
(egir a - ma - ru ba - ùr - ra -ta) is clearly transitional, and results
in an awkward juxtaposition of two uncoördinated temporal clauses.
This could easily have been avoided had not the second clause been
an already established part of the existing text. If, on the other hand,
nam-lugal was in fact the incipit of the Nippur King List, it is easy to
see the identical opening of the ante-diluvian addition as an intentional
imitation of the existing, post-diluvian King List,52 betraying a desire to
adapt the expanded version to the familiar patterns of the Nippurian
ones, even as to its title.
49 So already Jacobsen with respect to P2; cf. AS 11:55 f., note 100.
50 Ibid. 77, note 38 and references there.
51 Expressions like “From [heaven] kingship has come down [!; text has: si-il) to
you [i. e., Ur]” (G. Castellino, “Urnammu/Three Religious Texts,” ZA 53 [1959] 124,
line 114; cf. ibid. 107, line 44), if correctly restored and emended, may simply represent
attempts to legitimize a new dynasty. An echo of the notion that the attributes of
kingship must be removed for safekeeping during a/the flood—albeit to the apsû,
not to heaven—may perhaps be seen in the Irra Epic, but there it is primarily the
divine kingship of Marduk that is involved; cf. especially W.G. Lambert, Archiv für
Orientforschung 18 (1958) 398–400. For a similar tradition in connection with the King
List itself, cf. Finkelstein, JCS 17 (1963) 46, note 24.
52 Granted that its immediate model may have been the Sumerian flood myth; cf.
Jacobsen, AS 11:58 ff.
vi.2
SUMERIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
I am going to use the expression “Sumerian historiography” in a dou-

ble sense here—one to describe the Sumerian texts dealing with history,
and the other to identify the attempts of modern scholars to reconstruct
Sumerian history.* My object is to test the validity of the proposition
that literary sources may be used, with due caution, in historiograph-
ical reconstructions. In the case of ancient Israel, this proposition is
virtually axiomatic. For many periods, institutions and topics of Biblical
history, the Bible is our only resource, and it is a literary source. The
debate over its admissibility in evidence has raged long and hard all the
same, and I have reviewed it at length elsewhere.1 I will not dwell on it
here except to note that my recent animadversions on Assyrian histori-
ography were in part an attempt to bring that analogy to bear on the
debate.2
On the Egyptian side, I may perhaps cite the opinion of Gun Björk-
man who, in an article entitled “Egyptology and historical method,”
argued against the uncritical use of New Kingdom literary texts to
reconstruct the history of the First Intermediate Period.3 Two of these
are commonly used for this purpose, the Admonitions of Ipuwer and
the Instructions of Merikare. But “since the date and historical value
* Presented to the Third Assyriological Colloquium, Hebrew University of Jerusa-

lem, May 9, 1979, on “Aspects of Cuneiform Historiography” under the sponsorship of
the Institute for Advanced Studies. For an earlier treatment of the subject, see Samuel
Noah Kramer, “Sumerian Historiography,” IEJ 3 (1953), pp. 217–232.
1 See my “Biblical history in its Near Eastern setting: the contextual approach,” in
Carl D. Evans, William W. Hallo and John B. White (eds.), Scripture in Context: Essays on
the Comparative Method (Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series 34), 1980, pp. 1–26.
2 W.W. Hallo, “Assyrian Historiography revisited,” Eretz Israel 14 (H. L. Ginsberg
Volume), 1978, pp. l*–7*. Of other recent contributions, note especially J. Krecher and
H.P. Müller, “Vergangenheitsinteresse in Mesopotamien und Israel,” Saeculum 26 (1975),
pp. 13–14, and B. Hruška, “Das Verhältnis zur Vergangenheit im alten Mesopotamien,”
Archív Orientální 47 (1979), pp. 4–14.
3 Gun Björkman, “ ‘Egyptology and historical method,” Orientalia Suecana 13 (1964),
pp. 9–33.
420 vi.2. sumerian historiography
of the literary composition called Admonitions is not established, it

should consequently not be used,”—not at all it appears.4 And as for
the Instructions, confronting them with an elaborate list of sources
contemporary with the period in question leads to the conclusion that
while they rarely contradict each other, neither do they confirm each
other since, on the whole, they do not cover the same ground.5
To me, this view seems a little bit naive. It implies that, in the first
place, our sources are abundant enough even for so obscure a time
as the First Intermediate Period to enable us always to weigh contem-
poraneous documentation against later literary formulations. (In fact,
of course, we cannot even be sure that the Admonitions refer to the
First Intermediate Period and not the Second.) In the second place, it
suggests a degree of objectiveness and infallibility for contemporane-
ous sources which flies in the face of abundant examples of their own
tendentiousness and other subjective features.
I still prefer the principle I enunciated in the preface to The Ancient
Near East: a History, namely that the modern historian’s function is to
write “not only a history but a commentary on ancient history and
historiography.”6 If, with Huizinga, “history is the intellectual form in
which a civilization renders account to itself of its past,”7 then we must
listen to the native traditions in which these accounts are rendered. In
this enterprise, a critical attitude is of course desirable, indeed essential;
but it must be applied to all the textual sources, contemporary as well
as later, documentary as well as literary. And it cannot be applied to the
later, literary sources unless these are included in the enterprise in the
first place.
This does not imply indiscriminately equating all sources, and I
doubt anyone would accuse me of wanting to do that. In fact, I have
devoted a good part of my Assyriological efforts to identifying and
demarcating the broad categories of cuneiform writings. For the loose
and purely functional distinctions such as Gadd’s “sacred, ceremonial,
4 Ibid., p. 16 (citing J. van Seters, JEA 50 [1964], pp. 13–23).

5 Ibid., pp. 20–31. For a different view, see R.J. Williams, “Literature as a medium of
political propaganda in Ancient Egypt,” in W.S. McCullough (ed.), The Seed of Wisdom:
Essays in Honor of T.J. Meek, Toronto, 1964, pp. 14–30, esp. pp. 16–19.
6 W.W. Hallo and W.K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: a History, 1971, p. vi.
7 J. Huizinga, “A definition of the concept of history,” in R. Klibansky and H.J.
Paton, (eds.), Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, Oxford, 1936, p. 9.
See further to this point Hallo (above, n. 1).
vi.2. sumerian historiography 421
or everyday,”8 I substituted categories based on form as well as func-

tion,9 defining these respectively as canonical,10 monumental,11 and ar-
chival.12 Within these broad categories, I have been at pains to delineate
the individual genres into which they could be broken down,13 to trace
the evolution of these genres over time,14 and thus to reconstruct the
separate genre-histories from which a literary history of Mesopotamia
could ultimately be assembled.15 To a growing extent, my classification
system has been gaining acceptance in the field.16
Classification is not, however, the be-all and end-all of our efforts.
Even if our modern taxonomy tallies with the native categories, it
remains no more than a working hypothesis, a means to an end, or
to diverse ends. One of these is to reconstruct a literary and cul-
tural history of Mesopotamia, juxtaposed with the political, social,
and economic history of the area, to the reciprocal illumination of
both. Another end is closer to our purpose here. For, having once
defined and distinguished our categories and genres, we can more
safely aspire to re-unite them, in other words to draw on all of them
jointly and severally in order to reconstruct the historical reality lying
behind them.
I made a first conscious attempt in this direction with “The House of
Ur-Meme,” the aristocratic family which held some of the highest polit-
ical and priestly offices at neo-Sumerian Nippur for five generations.17
My reconstruction of the genealogy of the family and the careers of
8 C.J. Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools, London, 1956, p. 6.
9 Hallo, (above, n. 6), pp. 154–156; previously e.g. in JNES 17 (1958), p. 210 n. 6.
10 Idem, “New viewpoints on cuneiform literature,” IEJ 12 (1962), esp. pp. 21–26,
here: I.1.
11 Idem, “The royal inscriptions of Ur: a typology,” HUCA 33 (1962), pp. 1–43.
12 Idem, Sumerian Archival Texts (TLB 3), Leiden, 1963–1973.
13 Idem (above, n. 11) for monuments; cf. “The neo-Sumerian letter-orders,” Bib Or
26 (1969), pp. 171–175 for an archival genre.

14 Idem, “Individual prayer in Sumerian; the continuity of a tradition,” JAOS 88
(Speiser Memorial Volume; AOS 53), 1968, pp. 71–89, here: IV.1.
15 Idem, “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” Sumerological Studies in Honor of
Thorkild Jacobsen (AS 20), Chicago, 1976, pp. 181–203, here: I.4.
16 I.J. Gelb, deploring the lack of “any comprehensive study of the typology of writ-
ten records in ancient times,” singled out my studies (above, nn. 10–11) “for prelimi-
nary thoughts on the topic as applied mainly to ancient Mesopotamia” in his “Written
records and decipherment” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.). Diachronic, Areal and Typologi-
cal Linguistics (Current Trends in Liguistics 11), 1973, p. 254. Cf. previously E.C. Kingsbury,
HUCA 34 (1963), p. 1, n. 1.
17 “The house of Ur-Meme,” JNES 31 (1972), pp. 87–95; cf. idem. “Seals lost and
found,” Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 6 (1977), p. 57 and nn. 18–20.

its members drew in equal measure on account-texts, seal inscriptions,

and literary letters, and served incidentally but happily to confirm
the essential historicity of the later canonical texts by means of the
contemporaneous archives and monuments.
The same purpose was pursued on a more ambitious scale by my
student Piotr Michalowski in his dissertation on “The Royal Corre-
spondence of Ur.” He demonstrated that the literary letters to and from
the neo-Sumerian kings of Ur constitute an essentially authentic record
of the events they describe, though preserved in copies post-dating these
events by two to three hundred years. All of the letters deal with the
same general theme, namely the coming of the Amorites, which leads
one to suspect that they were selected from the surviving royal records
of the Ur III empire for use in the scribal school by pupils (or profes-
sors) with some interest in this particular subject. And their personal
names, geographical names, events, and other data are repeatedly cor-
roborated by the evidence of the Ur III archives and monuments.18
A companion piece to this corpus is formed by “The Royal Cor-
respondence of Isin,” which is so far represented by two pairs of let-
ters to and from the kings Iddin-Dagan and Lipit-Ishtar19 and possibly
one from Enlil-bani.20 Though the focus of interest changes (from the
coming of the Amorites to the struggle over water rights), this corpus
shares with the Ur correspondence a sober style and matter-of-fact tone
appropriate to authentic letters on affairs of state.
But even while the royal correspondence developed along these pro-
saic lines a more poetic format was evolving for private letters. Petitions
addressed to superiors,21 to kings,22 and to gods23 combined an epis-
tolary format with a hymnic style which apostrophized the addressee
and enumerated the petitioner’s wants in ever more elaborate terms.
18 See, for now, P. Michalowski, “The bride of Simanum,” JAOS 95 (1975), pp. 716–
719.
19 M.B. Rowton, “Watercourses and water rights in the official correspondence from
Larsa and Isin,” JCS 21 (1967), pp. 267–274.
20 So according to M.E. Cohen, “The Lu-Ninurta letters,” WO 9 (1977), pp. 10–13.
21 E.g. the letter of Lugal-murub to Enlil-massu his son (!) = No. 16 in “Letter-
Collection B” (below, n. 57); it can be dated to the time of Ibbi-Sin (more or less) if the
author’s father is Zuzu; cf. Hallo (above, n. 17).
22 E.g. Letter-Collection B , from Ur-shaga to Shulgi(?) (below, n. 57); cf. Hallo
6
(above, n. 14), p. 75 f.
23 E.g. Letter-Collection B , from Inannakam to Nintinuga, which can perhaps be
17
dated to the time of Amar-Sin; cf. Hallo, (above, n. 17), p. 91 f.
Thus the literary letter developed along two separate but parallel lines
in neo-Sumerian (Ur III-Isin) times: one the royal letter and the other
the letter-prayer.
The two lines converged under the Larsa dynasty, when we have
no less than four royal letter-prayers addressed by King Sin-iddinam
(ca. 1849–1843 bc) to Utu, the patron-deity of Larsa, and (in one case)
to Nin-Isina, goddess of Isin. Since I have dealt with these letters in
some detail on previous occasions here in Jerusalem in 197324 and
1977,25 I will pass over them now and turn instead to a fifth letter-prayer
which follows directly on one of the Sin-iddinam letters to Utu in a
prism from Oxford recently published by Gurney and Kramer,26 and
which thus forms part of the Royal Correspondence of Larsa. It is, in
fact, in many ways the pièce de résistance of this correspondence.
The new composition is a letter, not from the king but to the king,
and that king is Rim-Sin, last and longest-lived member of the “Larsa
dynasty.” It is addressed to him by a woman, Ninshatapada. Like the
famous Enheduanna, she is a princess, priestess and poetess in one.
Like her predecessor more than four centuries earlier, she was born
to the founder of a new dynasty, in her case, the founder of the Old
Babylonian dynasty of Uruk, Sin-kashid. She was removed from her
office and exiled from Durum, the city in which she served, when it
fell to Larsa. Now she pleads with the conqueror to spare her city and
restore her to her priestly office. The text is complete, in six duplicates
and 58 lines. Its elaborate structure features a three-part salutation and
a three-part body so disposed that each portion of the body is twice as
long as the corresponding section of the salutation.
There is little difficulty in correlating the newly recovered letter with
the history of southern Babylonia in the late nineteenth century bc
24 Hallo, “The royal correspondence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian Prototype for the

prayer of Hezekiah?” S.N. Kramer Anniversary Volume (AOAT 25), 1976, pp. 209–224, here:
V.1.
25 Idem, “The royal correspondence of Larsa: II. The appeal to Utu,” C.B.F. Walker
in G. van Driel el alii (eds.), Zikir Šumim, Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus
on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, Leiden, 1982, pp. 398–417, here: V.2. Cf.
idem, “Letters, prayers, and letter-prayers,” Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress of Jewish
Studies, 2: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, Jerusalem, 1981, pp. 17, 27, here: IV.2.
26 OECT 5:25. A full edition of this text and its duplicates will appear shortly as
“The Royal Correspondence of Larsa; III,” here: V.3, together with a study of its
historical implications. My remarks here will be confined to its literary, and specifically
its historiographic dimensions.
as this is known from monumental inscriptions and date formulas.27

But in addition it gives us precious new insights into the period. Sin-
kashid’s solicitude for the southern city of Durum, expressed in our
letter by the appointment (either by himself 28 or less likely by one of his
successors) of his own daughter to be high-priestess there, now adds
new significance to the title “viceroy of Durum” which he affected
on recently published inscriptions in honor of the chthonic deities
worshipped there.29 Apparently he himself served there as an appointee
(or perhaps even a member) of the dynasty of Isin, much as Ishme-
Dagan, fourth king of the dynasty, had served as viceroy of Durum in
the lifetime of his father Iddin-Dagan,30 thus carrying on a tradition
that can now be traced back as far as Ishbi-Irra, first king of Isin,31 and
Ibbi-Sin, last king of Ur III.32 But what is most revealing in the new
letter is its use of repeated allusions to historical events known from
the Larsa date formulas and even in the very words of those formulas.
There are also many phrases in the letter taken from, or shared in
common with, the inscriptions of Rim-Sin.
To begin with, Ninshatapada addresses Rim-Sin as “shepherd” (sipa)
or possibly even as “good shepherd” or “faithful shepherd” (sipa-zi)33
an epithet used attributively, i.e. before the royal name, by only two
rulers throughout what I call the “Classical Period” of Mesopotamian
history (ca. 2100–1600 bc): Gudea of Lagash in his cylinders34 and
Rim-Sin of Larsa in his date formulas and one of his hymns.35
27 For this history, see especially A. Falkenstein, Bagh Mitt 2 (1963), pp. 22–41.
28 Note that he appointed another daughter, Nish-inishu, as high priestess of Lugal-
banda at Uruk; cf. Sin-kashid 6 (republished Falkenstein, above, n. 27, Pl. 8); P. Wead-
ock, Iraq 37 (1975), p. 125.
29 C.B.F. Walker, AfO 23 (1970), pp. 88 f.; G. Pettinato, Oriens Antiquus 9 (1970),
pp. 105–107; David I. Owen, JCS 26 (1974), pp. 63 f.; H. Steible, Archiv Orientální 43
(1975), pp. 346–352.
30 YOS 9:22 f. (= Ishme-Dagan 6) (written BÀD.KI).
31 The high-priestess (nin-dingir) of Lugal(g)irra installed according to “Isin Date C”
presumably functioned at Durum, probably under Ishbi-Irra.

32 In view of his hymn to Meslamtaea and Lugalgirra, edited by Å. Sjöberg, Orientalia
Suecana 19–20 (1970–1971), pp. 140–178, No. 11a.

33 Hallo, “Royal titles from the Mesopotamian periphery,” O.R. Gurney Anniversary
Volume (Anatolian Studies 30, 1981) n. 75.

34 Perhaps in an effort to translate Akkadian rē"ûm epšum; cf. Hallo, Early Mesopotamian
Royal Titles (AOS 43), 1951, p. 148 and n. 2. Is the comparable utul9-zid applied to one
of the earliest “Rulers of Lagash” a parody on this epithet? Cf. E. Sollberger, JCS 21
(1967), pp. 281, 284, 289 (line 113).
35 Hallo (above, n. 33), n. 74.
In between, it was used predicatively, i.e. after the royal name, by Shulgi
of Ur in his royal hymns, by An-am of Uruk in his inscriptions, and
by Nur-Adad and Sin-iqisham of Larsa in letter-prayers and hymns
respectively.36 The Akkadian equivalent rēu kı̄nu occurs in a fragmentary
literary letter reminiscent in many ways of our Sumerian letter.37 Now
Rim-Sin used the attributive title only in the date formulas of his 23rd
to 26th years (1800–1797 bc); before that (year 22 = 1801) he called
himself simply “shepherd” (sipa) and afterwards “obedient shepherd”
(sipa-gištug) (year 27 = 1796) and “reliable shepherd” (sipa-gi-na) (years
28 ff. = 1795 ff.). Thus our text reflects the official designation of the
years following the capture of Uruk (year 21 = 1802).
In the second (really: third) salutation, Rim-Sin is apostrophized,
among other things, as “natural-born son of the lord Nergal.” This
epithet occurs verbatim in a fragmentary literary letter also, presum-
ably, addressed to Rim-Sin,38 and, less literally, in several inscriptions of
the king.39 It assumes special significance in the present context in view
of the equation of this chthonic deity with Meslamtaea, the god whom
the writer served as high-priestess.
The body of the letter begins with a 15-line hymn praising Rim-Sin’s
magnanimous treatment of the defeated Uruk which is so far unique
in cuneiform literature, but which draws everywhere on the official
diction of the conqueror’s scribes. Larsa is referred to as “the city lofty
like a mountain” (uru-hur-sag-gim-íl-la), a simile used exclusively in the
inscriptions of Warad-Sin and Rim-Sin during this period.40 The king
“takes the field at the command of the gods An and Enlil” (du11 dAn
En-líl-lá-ta mu-un-da-an-zi-ga), the phraseology of his date formulas
from his 22nd year (1801) on; previously, notably in date formulas 17–
21 (1806–1802), only Enlil was invoked. The implication is that the
conquest of Uruk commemorated in year 21 (1802) entitled the king to
36 Ibid., nn. 68, 71–73.

37 J. van Dijk, UVB 18 (1962), 61 f. and pl. 28c; Falkenstein (above, n. 27), and n. 91;
R.D. Biggs, ANET, p. 604. All tend to associate the text with Sin-kashid.
38 Line 19 of BE 31:7 (= Letter-prayer G in Hallo, above, n. 14, p. 89), republished as
OECT 5:31 (dumu-tu-da en-dNè-iri11-gal-la-ka).

39 Hallo (above, n. 34), pp. 134–136. For Nergal as Rim-Sin’s personal god (dingir-ra-
ni) cf. Rim-Sin 12 (UET 1:141) and Hallo, JCS 20 (1966), p. 136 n. 53, here: III.2; for
Nergal as divine begettor (dingir-sag-du) of Rim-Sin cf. Rim-Sin 10 (UET 1:144), 30 f.,
Rim-Sin 12:21 f., and UET 8:85:23.
40 Cf. I. Kärki, Studia Orientalia 35 (1967), pp. 232 f.
invoke An, the tutelary deity of Uruk, in his subsequent date formulas,
the more so if his treatment of the conquered city was magnanimous.41
And so indeed it was, as is clearly stated in the next three lines, where
we read (i.a.) “of Uruk: its king . . . you captured (but) spared its popu-
lace” (unuki-ga lugal-bi . . . . mu-un-dab5-bé u-gù nam-lú-ux -lu-bi šu-gar
mu-un-gar-ra). The captured king may be Irdanene, whose defeat Rim-
Sin recorded in his 14th year formula (= 1809 bc) and whose capture he
claimed in his inscriptions.42 But the sparing of the population is surely
a reference to the events commemorated in identical terms in the 21st
year formula (= 1802 bc); our letter even makes it possible to improve
on the current reading and understanding of the date formula,43 which
seems to be quoted once more three lines later on.44
In the second 15-line strophe of the letter, the writer turns to her
own plight, speaking of the exile from her city and her priestly office
which she has endured for five years45 or, in a variant, for four years.46
If she met this fate upon the defeat of Uruk in 1803, then her letter was
composed, or at least worded as if composed, in 1798, or 1797 according
to the variant. If “inclusive reckoning” is involved, the corresponding
dates are 1799 or 1800 respectively. All these dates fall within the
time span—1800–1797—already argued above on the basis of the royal
epithets.
But more likely her exile began one year earlier, for in the con-
cluding 9-line stanza of her letter she speaks of Durum as “my city”47
and as cult-seat of the twin-gods of the underworld, Meslamtaea and
41 Some date formulas add Enki to An and Enlil, implying a similar “conquest” of
Eridu. Cf. also Rim-Sin 7, which has all three deities giving Uruk to Rim-Sin.
42 Rim-Sin 10 and 15 (from Ur); cf. D.O. Edzard, Die “zweite Zwischenzeit” Babyloniens,
Wiesbaden, 1957, p. 155, and the additions of E. Sollberger, UET 8 (1965), pp. 31 f. (sub
Nos. 28 and 32).
43 ugu nam-lu-ulu -bi šu-gar mu-un-gar-ra. Edzard (above, n. 42), 156, read egir
x
instead of ugu but ugu is clear in the date lists as well as some of the attested texts (e.g.
YOS 5:79). M. Stol, Studies in Old Babylonian History, 1976, p. 23, does not comment on
Edzard’s reading.
44 Cf. line 27: ur-sag-bi (var. -e-ne, ø) . . . šu-zu (var. -šè, ø) sá bi (var. am-mi)-in-du
11
-ga with the date formula’s erín-á-dah-bi sá bí-in-du11-ga. Cf. also UET 8: 82 as read
by Michalowski, (below, n. 50), p. 87.
45 Cf. line 36: mu-5-kam-ma-(ta) uru-mà nu-me-a etc. So OECT 5:25:92; TCL 16,
no. 46:1.
46 So with M. Çiğ and H. Kizilyay, Sumerian Literary Tablets and Fragments in the
Archaeological Museum of Istanbul I, Ankara, 1979, p. 181 (Ni. 9729).

47 Cf. line 51: BÀD.KI uru(ki)-mu.
Lugal-girra.48 This Durum is undoubtedly the same city whose capture

in 1804 Rim-Sin recorded in his 20th date formula (= 1803).49 Its
location has been much disputed, but was clearly close to Uruk,50 for
its capture ushered in the fall of Uruk itself in the following year. The
confusion is due in part to the almost generic character of the city-
name, whose full form may have been Dur-Sinkashid.51 An analogy is
provided by Dunnum, a synonymous toponym;52 of the many sites so
named, one lay close to Isin and its fall precipitated the capture of that
capital by Rim-Sin in the following year.53
Our letter, then, illuminates the linked fate of Durum and Uruk.
Ninshatapada has drawn an accurate picture of her life and times that
enables us to refine and correct the historical record based on monu-
mental and archival sources. If it be asked how her letter-prayer came
to be incorporated into the scribal curriculum, I would answer that it
did so via the Royal Correspondence of Larsa, to which it found entry
because its complimentary portrait of King Rim-Sin suited the ideol-
ogy of that semi-official corpus. Its very language was that of the royal
scribes who formulated the hymns, inscriptions and date-formulas of
the dynasty. We may also assume that the princess and her plea found
favor with Rim-Sin, and that he spared Durum as he had previously
spared Uruk. Nor need we look far for the source of her inspiration.
For between her princely birth and her priestly appointment, she was
trained as a scribe (1. 16)—indeed she is one of the few women outside
of Sippar54 known to have borne that proud honorific in the Old Baby-
lonian period.55 She thus stands in a long tradition of princely women
48 Cf. line 53: é-mes-lam-ma dingir-min-a-bi.

49 A. Falkenstein, “Zur Lage des südbabylonischen Durum,” AfO 21 (1966), pp. 50 f.
On this date formula, see most recently Stol, (above, n. 43), pp. 22 f., but read there
Dūrum, not Dēr.
50 P. Michalowski, “Dūrum and Uruk during the Ur III period,” Mesopotamia 12
(1977), pp. 83–96.

51 Ibid, p. 88, n. 27. Previously Falkenstein (above, n. 27), pp. 28 f.; Steible, (above,
n. 29), pp. 347 f.

52 For the possible equivalence of dunnum and dūrum, see now Jean-Marie Durand,
“Notes sur l’histoire de Larsa,” RA 71 (1977), p. 21, n. 1; Dominique Charpin, RA 72

(1978), p. 18 n. 25. Cf. also MSL 13 (1971), 69:89; 84:14.
53 Hallo, “Antediluvian cities,” JCS 23 (1970), p. 66 and nn. 110–114.
54 Rivkah Harris, JESHO 6 (1963), pp. 138 f.; B. Landsberger and M. Civil, MSL 9
(1967), pp. 148 f.; cf. Civil, MSL 14 (1979), p. 135.

55 B. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, II, 1925, p. 329 with references to ABL 1367
rev. 4 and 1368 rev. 6; R. Harris, Orientalia 38 (1969), pp. 140 and 145; idem. Ancient
Sippar, 1975, pp. 196 f. For dub-sar as an honorific, see Hallo apud B. Buchanan, Early
of Sumer who enriched Sumerian literature with their creative talents:

the daughter of Sargon, the widow of Ur-Nammu, the mother of Shu-
Sin among them.56
What are the implications of these findings for our topic? If we
retrace our steps for a moment, we will recall that the general relia-
bility of canonical texts known only in copies of the 18th century (more
or less) was defended by comparing them to and integrating their data
with the evidence of monumental and archival texts of the 21st century.
Specifically, one could point to numerous prosopographic correspon-
dences (names, patronymics, professions etc.) between the “House of
Ur-Meme” and the literary letters generally grouped with the “Royal
Correspondence of Isin” in support of this assessment of the so-called
“Letter-Collection B.”57 Much the same could be said for “Letter-
Collection A” and the “Royal Correspondence of Ur”; here, indeed,
the points of convergence go beyond prosopography to historical con-
text and details. But the “Royal Correspondence of Larsa” now offers
something more: verbatim identity between the very diction of this
canonical corpus on the one hand, and the building inscriptions and
date formulas of the dynasty on the other. What does this imply?
Ideally, I would like to be able to draw the conclusion that our case
authenticates the literary correspondence as a primary historiographic
source, i.e., as a group of documents copied with little or no change
from originals on deposit in the royal archives. For it would be stretch-
ing credulity to suppose that a scribe would so accurately imitate the
diction of the court if he was composing far away from it, in time or
space.
But in fact the letter-prayer of Ninshatapada does not warrant this
conclusion. Of its six extant exemplars, two come from Nippur, the
others are of unknown provenience and, though none is dated, all are
likely to belong to the same 18th century whose opening years are
described in the text. This contrasts with the two and three centuries
that separate the extant copies of the Isin and Ur correspondence
from the events described therein. Thus we cannot simply “validate”
Near Eastern Seals 1981, pp. 490 f. There is an extensive “correspondence féminine” from
Mari but its authors do not claim the scribal title; cf. G. Dossin and A. Finet, ARMT 10
(1978).
56 Hallo, “Women of Sumer,” Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 4 (1976), pp. 29 and 31 f. with
nn. 49 and 66–69.

57 F.A. Ali, Sumerian Letters (University Microfilms), 1964. Cf. Claus Wilcke. “Die
Quellen der literarisch überlieferten Briefe,” ZA 60 (1970), pp. 67–69 with 4 tables.
that correspondence on the strength of the Larsa evidence. But we

are entitled to draw another conclusion, equally important from the
historiographic point of view.58
I submit that Ninshatapada, or whoever was the “author” of our
letter-prayer, wrote it in response to a real, historical situation, and
wrote it, moreover, in full knowledge of the requirements of royal
phraseology. This phraseology of the court scribes I would like to
designate the “chancery style,”59 and I further suggest that it applied,
if not equally then at least with due allowance for generic distinctions,
to all three categories of cuneiform texts.
In this connection I find it necessary to reiterate a hypothesis ad-
vanced more than a decade ago: “There are striking and sometimes
even literal parallels between the date formulas and the royal inscrip-
tions, between the date formulas and the royal hymns, and between
the royal hymns and the royal inscriptions. I am, therefore, inclined
to reconstruct an annual or biennial ceremony, perhaps related to the
New Year’s celebration, in which one and the same event was memo-
rialized in three distinct formulations: at its most concise in the official
proclamation of the date formula; more fully in an appropriate building
or votive inscription; and at its most elaborate in the royal hymns.”60
The significance of this observation was not entirely lost on our
Assyriological colleagues,61 and indeed, a couple of years later I was
invited by F.R. Kraus to enlarge on it for the Rencontre Assyriologique
at Leiden devoted to “The Temple and its Cult.” To do it justice
would, however, have required more than the sampling of documen-
tation which I was then able to offer for my hypothesis; it called for
a systematic survey of all three genres during the “Classical Phase” of
Mesopotamian civilization in order to establish all the attested correla-
tions among them. Meanwhile, such a survey has now been completed
as a doctoral dissertation at Yale.62 It is not my purpose here to dupli-
cate this investigation or anticipate its results. Suffice it to say that the
58 The importance of Ninshatapada’s letter for Sumerian historiography was rec-

ognized, on the basis of my remarks in “Women of Sumer” (above, n. 56) by Hruška
(above, n. 2), p. 11.
59 Cf. F. Charles Fensham, VT 13 (1963), p. 133 on “the impact of the royal chan-
cellery language in the latter part of the second millennium bc on the greater part of
the ancient Near East,” citing Klaus Baltzer, Das Bundesformular (1960), p. 28.
60 “The cultic setting of Sumerian poetry,” RAI 17 (1970), pp. 118 f., here: I.2.
61 Cf. Michalowski (above, n. 18), p. 716, n. 2; J. Renger, RLA 6 (1980), p. 68.
62 D.R. Frayne, The Historical Correlations of the Sumerian Royal Hymns (2400–1900 bc.)
(PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1981).

original hypothesis quoted above seems to be confirmed at numerous

points along the 500-year span for which its validity is claimed.63
What I am proposing here is that this very hypothesis can be ex-
tended to include not only the royal hymns but also the royal letter-
prayers, and, presumably, other historiographical genres such as the so-
called “triumphal inscriptions,” in short, all the vehicles of the “chan-
cery style.” Together, they constitute impressive evidence that, already
in Sumerian-speaking times, or should I say in Sumerian-writing times,
the great political, military and cultic events of the court were chron-
icled as they happened. As this evidence grows, it may yet have to be
thrown into the balance in the search for the origins of later, more
sophisticated cuneiform historiography. But already it allows us to re-
claim at least some of the finest examples of Sumerian literature from
the realm of legend or historical tradition and claim it instead for histo-
riography.64
63 With this important proviso: that we do not insist “that all royal hymns were
written to commemorate events recorded in year formulae, or that all year formulae
were commemorated in hymns” (Frayne, ibid., p. 500).
64 Comparable conclusions were reached for some Akkadian literary texts by J.J.M.
Roberts, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Elamite Crisis in Theological Perspective,” in Maria de

Jong Ellis (ed.), Essays on the Ancient Near East in Memory of Jacob Joel Finkelstein (Connecti-
cut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Memoirs 19), Hamden. Conn., 1977, pp. 183–187.
vi.3
NEW DIRECTIONS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

(MESOPOTAMIA AND ISRAEL)1
In the field of Assyriology, the term historiography is used in two very

different senses. On the one hand it refers to the manner in which the
ancients remembered their own past, on the other hand to the theoret-
ical problems raised by our modern reconstructions of that same past.
The former sense is implied in the classic study of H.G. Güterbock,
who long ago wrote a doctoral dissertation under Benno Landsberger
on what they called “die historische Tradition.”2 The same ground has
been gone over many times since then, often in comparative perspec-
tive. I will mention here in passing only two titles, one on each side
of the debate, and both heavily critiqued upon their appearance: John
van Seters’ In Search of History (1983), subtitled “Historiography in the
Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History,” and a new col-
lective volume edited by Millard, Hoffmeier and Baker under the title
Faith, Tradition, and History (1994), and subtitled “Old Testament Histori-
ography in its Near Eastern Context.”3 The latter sense was introduced
into the general field of history–writing by such philosophically minded
figures as Giambattista Vico, Benedetto Croce, and R.G. Collingwood,4
and is reflected in Assyriology in some of the more recent literature,
which it will be my purpose to assess here. But first I would like to
review my own previous contributions to the debate, proceeding in
chronological order not, however, of their appearance but of the top-
ics dealt with.5
1 The substance of this paper was presented to the Institut für Orientalistik of the
University of Vienna, Prof. Hermann Hunger presiding, October 21, 1996, and to the
Oriental Club of New Haven, February 13, 1997. It is here offered to W.H.Ph. Römer
in fond recollection of our encounters in Leiden in 1950–1951.
2 Güterbock 1934, 1938.
3 Van Seters 1983; Millard et al. 1994; cf. also Cancik 1976 and the reviews by Zevit
1985 and Brettler 1996.

4 Collingwood 1993.
5 For a spirited defense of some of my positions, see Millard et al. 1994, especially
Averbeck 1994.
432 vi.3. new directions in historiography
For my definition of history I turned to the Dutch historian Johan

Huizinga,6 in this respect following my late colleague Finkelstein,7
though correcting him in an important respect. “History,” Huizinga
had said in 1936, “is the intellectual form in which a society ren-
ders account to itself of its past”—not “of the past” which Finkel-
stein had quoted him as saying.8 In practical terms this meant, to me,
“an attempt to write ancient history by taking the ancient documents
seriously without taking them literally” as it was put in the preface
to the history which I co–authored with my Egyptological colleague
W.K. Simpson, and which was presented as “not only a history but a
commentary on ancient history and historiography.”9 The new edition
of that work holds fast to this motto: it “treats the ancient sources criti-
cally but respectfully.”10
The same principle guided my other systematic surveys of Ancient
Near Eastern history, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Israelite,11 and
some of its critical turning points.12 And it was put to the test in shorter
contributions as well, beginning with the Sumerian sources. Whether
attempting to date the Fara Period, or assembling data on the Gutians,
or reconstructing the history of an aristocratic family at Nippur, or
setting the letter–prayer of Ninshatapada in its historical context, I
invariably combined and collated the evidence of all available sources,
archival, monumental and canonical.13 In connection with Assyrian his-
toriography, I considered primarily the Assyrian King List,14 in refer-
ence to Babylonian historiography, chiefly the concept of eras.15 But it
was in regard to Biblical historiography that I repeatedly enunciated
the principle to which I wish to address myself here: neither to exempt
Biblical historiography from standards applied to other Ancient Near
Eastern data, nor to subject it to standards demanded nowhere else.16
6 Huizinga 1936.
7 Finkelstein 1963:462 and n. 4.
8 Hallo 1980:6 and 20, n. 27.
9 Hallo and Simpson 1971:vi.
10 Hallo and Simpson, 1997:vii.
11 Hallo 1996 ch. 9 and see the bibliography in Studies Hallo (1993) xi–xvi, items
7,8,10 (ch. 9) and 125.

12 Ibid., Item 146.
13 Ibid., Items 60, 56, 58, 109 (and 141).
14 Ibid., Items 17 and 81.
15 Ibid., Items 108, 114, and 127.
16 Ibid., Items 10:107; 59:4; 91:5; 136:193 and Hallo 1996:314 f.
vi.3. new directions in historiography 433
When I first offered that formulation, the field of Biblical history was
already polarized into two camps that I chose to label—as neutrally as
possible—maximalists and minimalists,17 a terminology which I cred-
ited to W.G. Dever (i.a.),18 though Dever himself has since disavowed
paternity,19 and I now sometimes receive credit for it20—or should I say
blame (Another early use of maximalist was by D. Pardee in reference
to what he called ‘Dahoodic.’).21 Speaking very generally, the maximal-
ists are willing to accept the Biblical version of events unless and until
falsified by extra–Biblical sources, preferably contemporaneous, bear-
ing on the same matters—a position stated with unusual candor by Bob
Becking when he declared; “The dates in the Book of Kings can only
be considered as untrustworthy when they can be falsified by contem-
poraneous evidence.”22 The minimalists, by contrast, demand that the
Biblical version of any given event must have extra–Biblical verification,
preferably again contemporaneous, before it can be regarded as histor-
ical. And they set themselves up as arbiters of what constitutes extra–
Biblical verification, as we shall see. No wonder that most scholars pre-
fer to place themselves in the golden mean between these extreme (and
irreconcilable) positions,23 especially today, when this polarization has
gone much further, with the very term ‘Biblical history’ under fire.24
What is more to the point here, however, is that today it is no longer
so clear that the historiography of Mesopotamia and the rest of the
ancient Near East still provides a methodological model for avoiding
this kind of polarization. Let me illustrate.
My illustration will be taken from the Sargonic dynasty. As I already
put it in 1971, the rise and fall of this dynasty is so much the stuff
of later legend that the chief historiographic problem is to peel away
the legendary accretions in order to get at the authentic core,
17 Hallo 1980:3 and 19, n. 13; 1990:193.

18 Hallo 1980:19, n. 14, referring to Dever apud Hayes and Miller 1977:77.
19 Shanks 1996:35: “How would you define the minimalists and the maximalists?”
Dever: “I didn’t coin those terms. I’m not sure who did.” Shanks 1997 and 1997a still
uses the term without attribution.
20 Yamauchi 1994:6, referring to Hallo 1990:187 (correct to 1990:193). But see above,
note 17, for the earlier formulation in Hallo 1980.

21 Dennis Pardee, JNES 40 (1981) 69.
22 Becking 1992:52.
23 As did I (Hallo 1980:3) despite Yamauchi’s characterization of some of my opin-
ions as maximalist (1994:13 and n. 68).

24 Whitelam 1996, and his paper at the SBL meeting, Philadelphia, 1995, for which
see Shanks 1997:50 f.

the Sargonic kernel at the center.25 True to the principles already

reviewed here, I applied this test to all the relevant sources in recon-
structing the history of the dynasty.26 I even utilized glyptic evidence to
justify a measure of credence in the traditional version of the death of
three of its members as enshrined in the so–called “historical omens.”27
In short, I applied my own dictum that “the literary tradition can be
used to fill the lacunae of Sumerian history, but only where the con-
temporary monuments and archives have provided the framework.”28
But the newer historiograhy, in part, rejects this approach. For some
of its practitioners, the very term historical kernel is anathema,29 and
the only valid sources are contemporaneous ones; the later ones are, at
best, testimony to the concerns of the later age that produced them.
This point of view, so redolent of the minimalist position in Biblical
historiography, is expressed with greatest force and clarity in the volume
Akkad the First World Empire which appeared in 1993.30 It is based on a
symposium held in Rome three years before that (1990) at the invitation
of Mario Liverani, who edited the volume and himself contributed two
important articles to it. He summarized what he called Güterbock’s
“first principle” as contending that “information contained in a literary
text could not be accepted unless it was confirmed by another source”
and took issue with it as too “loose,” implying that another source
could confirm a later literary tradition only if it was contemporaneous
and not likewise literary. Güterbock’s second principle, that of the
“historical kernel,” was also rejected as leading to “very burdensome
results.”31 The contributors are by no means all of one mind on these
issues, but most of them go a long way toward similarly narrow criteria
of historicity. This is hardly surprising, since they were selected with
that consideration in mind or, as Liverani puts it: “Recently . . . new
interests and more advanced positions are to be noticed, mostly by the
participants to our conference.”32
25 Hallo and Simpson 1971:54 f.

26 See especially ibid. 54–68.
27 The point was first made in Hallo 1962:13 f., n. 107 (an item inadvertently omitted
from the bibliography in my Festschrift) and subsequently elaborated on in items 45:773,

110:13 f., 117:26, and 140:156.
28 Hallo, Item 36:139, cited Averbeck 1994:81, n. 6.
29 Liverani 1993:6, 42 f., 51 f.
30 Liverani 1993.
31 Liverani 1993b:43.
The over–all result is a kind of sparse, not to say censored version

of Sargonic history, almost as if a blue pencil had been run through
the histories hitherto reconstructed. There is also, inevitably, a much
heavier emphasis on social and economic developments than on purely
political or military ones, given the greater reliance on contemporane-
ous documentation, and its greater abundance.
There is much of value in the book, as is to be expected from any
project to which Liverani has put his name. Already in 1973, he had laid
down a “memorandum on the approach to historiographic texts,”33 and
in the last decade, he has published a half–dozen syntheses on the his-
tory of Mesopotamia (and beyond), whether as author,34 co–author,35 or
co–editor,36 and including a massive history of the entire Ancient Near
East.37 In the last, I particularly welcome his adoption of the chronolog-
ical terminology which I had taken over from archaeology for my own
history.38 In the present book, I specifically endorse two points from his
introductory observation: “[1] that Sargon is still ‘pre–Sargonic’ (only
apparently a paradox!)”,39 and [2] that the proper Akkadian experience
is better represented by the short time lag of Naram–Sin and–Shar–
kali–sharri.40 In this perspective, Naram–Sin with his wide range of
enterprises and institutional innovations is no doubt the leading charac-
ter.”41 My purpose here, however, is neither to endorse nor to question
specific details of his reconstruction of Sargonic history, but rather to
challenge the volume and some of its individual contributions on the
level of methodology, as we are indeed invited to do by its avowedly
programmatic, even revolutionary, character.42
33 Liverani 1973.
34 L’Origine della cittá (Rome, Riuniti, 1986); Prestige and Interest: International Relations in
the Near East ca. 1600–1100 B.C. (Padua, Sargon srl, 1990).
35 La Palestina, with Andrea Giardina and Biancamaria Scarcia (Rome, Riuniti,
1987).
36 I Trattati nel mondo antico: forma, ideologia, funzione, with L. Canfora and C. Zaccag-
nini (Rome, “L’Erma” di Brettschneider, 1990).

37 Antico Orients: Storia, Società, Economia (Rome, Laterza, 1988).
38 Early/Middle/Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.
39 Cf. Hallo 1992:70, n. 5.
40 Cf. my concept of the “high” or “classic” Sargonic period, most explicitly in
Hallo forthcoming; previously: Item 90:191, Item 175:255, 1993:19, n. 26. Differently
Zhi, 1989:4.
41 Cf. e.g. Hallo and Simpson 1971:60–63, 1997:57–62.
42 Liverani describes the new historiography in terms of “a real ‘Copernican revolu-
tion’,” (p. 6 et passim). See also below, at n. 68.

Methodologically, I see four major problems with the approach

championed by Liverani and followed, more or less, by some of his con-
tributors. (1) The essentially exclusive reliance placed on contempora-
neous sources threatens to attribute to them far more evidentiary value
than they deserve. (2) The reluctance to use later sources unless veri-
fied by contemporaneous ones deprives the modern historian of poten-
tially invaluable evidence from a time which, even though admittedly
later than the events reported, is still millennia closer to them than we
are. (3) The ‘consolation prize’ offered to those not ready to discard
the later sources in their entirety consists of treating these sources as
potential clues to the concerns of the times that produced them—but
as often as not that time is here established on the basis of identifying
the concerns expressed or implied, and placing them in the continuum
of Mesopotamian history—however reconstructed—at the point where
such concerns seem most appropriate. This certainly courts the dan-
ger of circular reasoning. (4) In general, the winnowing of the sources,
and the reconstruction of Sargonic history from what is left, operates,
not on the valid assumption that we can hope to know more than the
ancient sources told, but on the questionable assumption—I would call
it a conceit—that we can know more than they knew. This is a fallacy
worthy of adding to the long list of ‘historians’ fallacies’ catalogued by
David Hackett Fischer a quarter of a century ago.43 Let me justify my
criticisms in some greater detail.
(1) Contemporaneous written sources come in two of the three cate-

gories of cuneiform texts that have long been identified in my tax-
onomy, namely monuments and archives.44 Of royal monuments—as
against private votive, seal and weight inscriptions—it must be said at
once that they are indubitably products of the royal chancery, and as
such reflect the royal point of view. They are thus very far from being
objective, disinterested accounts of any given reign. Liverani himself
seems to admit as much when he notes that “the royal inscriptions are
and have always been considered possibly affected by their celebrative
purpose,”45 or when he lumps them with canons and questions “How to
‘read’ (for the sake of historical reconstruction) a royal inscription or a
43 Fischer 1971.
44 Cf. simply Hallo and Simpson 1971:154–158; 1997:154–157.
later literary text.”46 Royal inscriptions thus become part of the pattern
of ‘literature as politics’ which has been identified for many periods
and cultures—Egyptian by Williams, Hittite by Hoffner, Assyrian by
Machinist and more recently Barbara Porter, Israelite by Brettler47—
and which is demonstrated for the neo–Sumerian period by Cooper
in Liverani’s volume.48 Even when more or less contemporary with the
events they describe, they are not unimpeachable witnesses to them.
As for archival texts, most of these are not, it is true, products of
the royal chancery, or instruments of royal propaganda. But they suf-
fer from another disability, their laconic character. It is only the rare
archival text which throws explicit light on courtly ceremonial, on
diplomacy, on warfare and on other broad affairs of state. As a shining
exception we may cite the example of the two letters of Ishkun–Dagan,
one invoking (though not naming) the king and queen, the other men-
tioning the depredations of the Gutians who, according to the historic
tradition, were destined to topple the great Sargonic Empire. They are
duly cited by Aage Westenholz in the Liverani volume49 but they turn
out to be the exceptions that prove the rule, for though they have been
repeatedly cited and anthologized since they were first published in
1926 and 1932 respectively,50 their like has not recurred among the con-
siderable number of letters of Sargonic date available by now.51 The
proverbial character of the first52 has even tended to cast doubt on
its contemporary status. And though the figure of Iskkun–Dagan has
acquired additional reality by the discovery of an indubitably contem-
poraneous monument, namely his seal impression, in the Yale Babylo-
nian Collection,53 one would hardly want to base the history of the fall
of the dynasty on his ‘Gutian letter,’ at best an ambiguous piece of con-
temporary testimony—on the contrary, one needs to use it with utmost
caution.54
Archival texts, of course, are more revealing of management and
administration, especially of the royal lands and enterprises, than they
46 Liverani 1993a:7.
47 Williams 1964, Hoffner 1975, Machinist 1976, Porter 1993 and 1996; Brettler 1989.
48 Cooper 1993.
49 Westenholz 1993:158 f.
50 Thureau-Dangin 1926; Smith 1932. Cf. e.g. Michalowski 1993:27 f.
51 Kienast and Volk 1995. For the Ishkun-Dagan letters see pp. 53–55, 89–94.
52 On which see Hallo 1990a:209 and nn. 46–48.
53 Hallo apud Buchanan 1981:445. Cf. the comments of Westenholz 1993:159, n. 3.
54 Glassner 1986:40, 50.
are of affairs of state as such. No matter how laconic, here their sheer
numbers provide valuable insights, as fully documented in Benjamin
Foster’s two contributions to Liverani’s volume. Of these the first deals
with “Management and administration in the Sargonic period,” and
does so without noticeable concession to any particular philosophy of
history.55 The second is a bibliography of the Sargonic period running—
for all its ostensibly select character—to twelve pages; what is particu-
larly noteworthy about it is that it devotes only half a page to ‘historical
studies’ and almost ten times as much space to ‘archival sources and
studies,’ ‘letters’ (also archival in my taxonomy), and ‘society and econ-
omy.’56 To the extent, then, that one chooses to equate history with
social and economic history, one is justified in exploiting these sources
to that end.
(2) But the reverse of that proposition is equally valid: to the extent
that one thinks of history as embracing more than just social and
economic phenomena, one is required to resort to other than only
‘social and economic’ sources, i.e., in particular, to later sources. Not
to belabor the obvious, I will confine myself here to a single illus-
tration of this point, the very concept of a ‘Sargonic period.’ How
would modern historians have ever arrived at such a concept with-
out the promptings of the native historiography and chronography?57
One looks in vain for it in histories written before 1925 by such early
synthesizers as Hugo Radau,58 R.W. Rogers,59 Stephen Langdon,60 or
even L.W. King.61 Except for the last, these are the very authorities
whom Liverani faults for their indiscriminate utilization of late and
early sources.62
And no wonder, given the piecemeal recovery of the Sumerian King
List and the relatively belated publication of a first working edition. To
quote Thorkild Jacobsen, “The first fragment of the Sumerian King
list of any importance was published by Hilprecht in 1906, the second
55 Foster 1993.
56 Foster 1993a.
57 For the latter concept see most recently Hallo, Item 127:178 and nn. 26 f.
58 Early Babylonian History (London, 1900), esp. pp. 154–175: “Kings of Agade.”
59 A History of Babylonia and Assyria I (London, 1902), esp. pp. 363–367.
60 In: The Cambridge Ancient History I (Cambridge 1923) 402–434; (2nd ed., Cambridge,
1924) 402–436: “The dynasties of Akkad and Lagash,” “The dynasty of Sargon.”
61 A History of Sumer and Akkad (London, 1916), esp. pp. 216–251.
62 Liverani 1993b:42, n. 3. Cf. also Boscawen 1903:127–132.
by Scheil in 1911 . . . , and lastly, in 1923, came the magnificent Weld–

Blundell prism, which in many respects was to close the earlier phase
of the study of our document.”63 That document, best dated in its
present form to the end of the Isin I Dynasty,64 postdates the Sargonic
period by several centuries. If the fall of Akkad is dated about 2150 bc65
and the death of Damiq–ilishu to 1794, it is at least three and a half
centuries later. But our own vantage point is more than forty centuries
later. Unless we want to go back to some of the wild speculations of
the earliest stages of Assyriology,66 we have little choice but to begin our
structural outline with the help of the native historiography, and then
to refine the results in the light of newly recovered contemporaneous
documentation. In the process we may well find that the despised
literary sources deserve a better reputation as we fathom their true
meaning.
To return to the Sumerian King List, it was initially accused of
presenting its dynasties as successive, in part because the formula for
the change of dynasty came at the end of each dynasty and in part
because, in its Nippur recension, the King List added all the regnal
years of all the dynasties together to come up with a grand total of
regnal years since the Flood.67 But I have long argued that the native
scribes knew better: compositions like Gilgamesh and Agga or the
History of the Tummal show clearly that the first dynasties of Kish,
Uruk and Ur were thought of as contemporary even though entered
in succession in the King List. The transfer of kingship, though listed
formulaically at the end of each dynasty, was clearly not implied to
have taken place (necessarily) at the end of that dynasty, nor to have
correlated (necessarily) with the beginning of the next dynasty; rather,
the implication was that the transfer might have taken place anytime
within both dynasties. But, having once rated inclusion in the King
List (by the possession of Nippur or whatever criterion proves to be
determining), the dynasty was then treated to a complete record of
63 Jacobsen 1939:1.
64 See below, n. 69.
65 Glassner 1986:41, 53, who accepts my dating of the succeeding Gutian period for
which see Hallo Item 56.

66 The second (1901) edition of Rogers (above, n. 59) is a good example. Its Sargonic
kings are confined to “Shargani-shar-ali cir. 3800” (a.k.a. Sargon), his son Naram-Sin,
and his grandson Bingani-shar-ali (pp. 337, 361–367). Rimush and Manishtushu figure
but not as members of the Sargonic dynasty (pp. 359–360).
67 Hallo Item 29.
its members—both those who reigned before the dynasty assumed

the hegemony of Sumer and Akkad and those who reigned after that
hegemony had been lost again. When seen in this light—and there is
nothing inherent in it to militate against this interpretation—the King
List gains considerably in credibility.
(3) The notion that historiographic literature is a valid clue to the

period that produced it—indeed that the search for this clue is the only
valid reason for studying it—is put in admirably candid fashion by Liv-
erani when he speaks of the veritable ‘revolution’ in historiography that
focused attention on “the search for the author and the environment
of the text itself, its purpose, its audience, and the historical knowledge
that was really available at that time.”68 We can see the pitfalls in this
position if we revert once more to the Sumerian King List. Even to
speak of the Sumerian King List is to beg the question, for a major
problem in arriving at its date is to decide whether it was composed
by stages over an extended period of time (as, e.g. both the Assyrian
King List and the Babylonian Chronicle are widely assumed to have
been), or whether it is the product of a single ‘author’ who composed
it at the end of its last dynasty, or at any rate in the course of its last
dynasty. The dates proposed for it have therefore diverged by as much
as 325 years, from the reign of Utuhegal (so Jacobsen) to the acces-
sion of Hammurapi (so Hallo).69 How then do we search for the author,
environment, purpose, audience, and historical knowledge of the time
of composition of the King List? Do we date the composition on the
basis of our assumptions about these factors, or do we reconstruct these
factors on the basis of our assumption about its date?
If this example seems unduly fatal to Liverani’s programme, let us
consider one of his own. He cites five well–known compositions in
which the principal Sargonic kings serve as vehicles, in his opinion, for
the views espoused by their authors. The first is šar tamhāri, “The king of
battle.” Liverani dates this text to the reign of Shamshi–Adad I, more
specifically to a time when the resumption of the Old Assyrian trade
with Anatolia, interrupted by Naram–Sin of Assur (and Eshnunna) was
a matter of debate. By comparing Shamshi–Adad to Sargon and show-
ing how the difficulties of the trade had been overcome by Sargon, the
text was designed to lend support to those who favored its resumption
68 Liverani 1993a:6.
69 Hallo Item 29:55, 127:179, 181. For an over-all survey see Chavalas 1994:111, n. 47.
now. Although he acknowledges that all this is no more than a hypoth-

esis, he “believe(s) that the logical procedure of this analysis is the right
one.”70
I beg to differ. This analysis piles assumption on assumption to arrive
at a most debatable conclusion. It presupposes a degree of “political
debate” at the time which remains to be demonstrated;71 it appeals
to Sargon’s inscriptions including their later copies as evidence that
he did not cross the Euphrates, and to Naram–Sin’s inscriptions as
evidence that Naram–Sin was the first to do so, thus (a) ignoring his
own strictures against the monuments, (b) treating Sargon’s contacts
with “lands further far–away in the north–west” as “only indirect or
mediated,”72 and (c) taking Naram–Sins claim at face–value in spite
of its propagandistic cast. I am not insisting that the attribution of
the composition to Sargon of Akkad is necessarily valid; I could as
easily, for example, imagine that the composition originally dealt with
Sargon I of Assyria and was subsequently transferred to Sargon of
Akkad.73 But to assume that the composition dates to the reign of
Shamshi–Adad and then to write the history of that reign based on
such a dating and such an assumption seems to me to defy logic.
Much the same could be said for the attempts by Liverani to asso-
ciate the other four compositions with specific dates of composition and
political contexts or purposes: “The Curse of Akkad” with the reign of
Ishme–Dagan of Isin, “The General Insurrection” with that of Sumu–
la–El of Babylon, the Naram–Sin Legend with Hammurapi or per-
haps Samsu–ditana, and the geographical treatise generally known as
“The Empire of Sargon of Akkad” with Esarhaddon or Assurbanipal
of Assyria. In each case his objections to an uncritical and literal read-
ing of the texts are valuable, but his total rejection of any historical
kernel leads him to new hypotheses about the compositions that are if
anything even more difficult to justify.
(4) The proposition that we cannot aspire to know more than the
ancient sources knew, only more than they told was put forward by me
long ago in an utterly obscure book review,74 but I have repeated it often
70 Liverani 1993b:52–56.
71 Liverani 1993b:52 and n. 26.
73 Hallo and Simpson 1971:94; 1997:89.
74 Hallo Item 149.
if briefly75 and continue to stand by it. It is of course only a working

hypothesis, ready to be abandoned whenever, in a specific instance,
it can be disproved. But Liverani turns the whole proposition on its
head, effectively implying that we cannot even know—or reconstruct—
more than the ancient sources told! In his own words: “If the Old
Baylonian scribes knew more or less what we also know about the
kings of Akkad, if they had access to the same kind of data (namely,
the celebrative monuments) that we also have, then the search for the
‘historical kernel’ must be abandoned.”76 He seems to be saying that
the historical tradition is based solely on the monumental texts and
their later copies; that we have already recovered all these texts; that
therefore there is nothing more to be said! This position can best be
dealt with by confronting it, however briefly, with some alternative
interpretations of Sargonic historiography in some other, equally recent
publications.
The first of these actually antedates Liverani’s by a few years. It is
Glassner’s dissertation on the fall of Akkad which appeared in print in
1986.77 True to its subtitle “L’événement et sa mémoire,” it makes an
attempt to write two entirely separate narratives, one based on con-
temporaneous data, the other on the tradition, a distinction elsewhere
somewhat invidiously labelled as “history and tradition.”78 The attempt
is a gallant one, but doomed to failure because even the ‘historical’ nar-
rative has constant reference to elements of the ‘tradition.’ Like the very
concept of a Sargonic period (above, p. 440), the putative regnal lengths
of the dynasty, and the notion of “the fall of Akkad” (šulum Agade), are
borrowed from the tradition as preserved chiefly in the Sumerian King
List and in a later monument of Shamshi–Adad I respectively. The
inscription of Utu–hegal is used as a significant source79 though clearly
a secondary one by his own definition, along with all other copies of
royal inscriptions no matter how faithful to their originals.80 In contrast
to Liverani, however, Glassner does not attempt to utilize such ‘sec-
ondary sources’ to rewrite the history of their presumed date of com-
position, nor to rewrite Sargonic history entirely without their help.
His act of ‘source criticism’ must be hailed as a brave attempt to put
75 Eg. Item 10:41.

77 Glassner 1986.
78 Cf. Redford 1970; van Seters 1975.
79 Glassner 1986:45.
80 Glassner 1986:2 f.
theory into practice, to see what can actually be achieved when the
sources are split into more and less reliable ones. It is thus compara-
ble to those few attempts that have been made in Biblical criticism to
actually present the text of documents identified by one or another doc-
umentary hypothesis, of which one of the best to my mind remains the
effort of Pfeiffer and Pollard to reconstruct the early source in Samuel.81
A completely different approach is taken by Giorgio Buccellati in his
study of a single Sargonic inscription, or what he argues persuasively
is a single inscription.82 As is true of much of his best work, his study
combines archaeology and philology, and it does so here to focus on an
inscription of Rimush, son and successor of Sargon, as preserved in Old
Babylonian copies from Nippur. Virtually for the first time,83 and cer-
tainly for the first time systematically, he tries to reconstruct the physical
appearance of the statue of Rimush from which the late copies of his
inscription were presumably made. In this effort he is greatly aided by
the scholarly notations inserted in the ancient copies as to where pre-
cisely the respective texts were located on the monument. The results of
his research over many years are presented in the form of actual draw-
ings as well as schematic transliterations and translations. I would differ
with him on some details, notably I would take mùš to be a circular
base not a plaque given its other attested meanings.84 But the over-
all result is an important step in the direction of a realistic appraisal
of the Sargonic inscriptions and their late copies: the inscriptions are
powerful instruments of royal propaganda, and their copies are faithful
to an extraordinary degree, even displaying a kind of scholarly inter-
est in the physical details of the original. This is not as surprising as
it might at first seem, given what we now know about the copying of
royal monuments, presumably from their originals in Nippur, Ur and
perhaps other places, as a portion of the scribal curriculum.85 If Buccel-
lati is correct, then the skepticism displayed by the new historiography
towards the late copies of Sargonic inscription needs to be tempered.
In a recent article, Steve Tinney confronts the Old Babylonian tra-
ditions about the Great Rebellion against Naram–Sin with the evi-
dence of the contemporaneous monuments. Like Liverani he concludes
81 Pfeiffer and Pollard 1967.

82 Buccellati 1993.
83 But see Hallo Item 2:28, cited by I.J. Gelb in Kraeling and Adams 1960:320 n. 13.
84 Hallo Item 50:59.
85 Sjöberg 1976:166 and nn. 26 f.; Klein 1986; Yoshikawa 1989.
that the traditions “may be used to illuminate the socio–political back-

ground of the Old Babylonian period itself, but have no place in the
reconstruction of the events of the Old Akkadian period.”86 However,
he rejects any a priori “separation of literary and historical texts on the
basis of apparent veracity,” implying that each case must be judged on
its own merits.87
The most recent addition to the list deserves more notice than it
has so far received. The Groningen dissertation by Gerdien Jonker is
by far the most systematic and ambitious attempt yet to assess the
Sargonic period not only in its own right but in the total context of
Mesopotamian historiography including the ritual remembrance of the
dead.88 It succeeds admirably in this purpose, reviewing a huge mass
of literature along the way. In brief, its conclusions can be summarized
as follows: Memory is of necessity selective; since we cannot remember
everything, it is essential that much be forgotten. Within the family, the
ancestral cult provides for memorizing up to four previous generations
at the most, and if a particularly illustrious distant ancestor is to be
included among the honored dead, as e.g. in the case of the second
millennium (Kassite) period eponyms of the first millennium (neo–
Assyrian and neo–Babylonian) scribal families, then the intervening
generations are readily dropped by means of “telescoping.” In the
royal houses, a comparable process was at work, but the availability
of scribes and written records made possible the construction of very
lengthy and detailed genealogies beginning in Old Babylonian and Old
Assyrian times (from my point of view on the basis of the Amorite or
Akkadian/Amorite interest in family relationships).89 They were pressed
into service in what were explicitly or by implication cultic invocations
of the dead in connection with the kispu–ritual, the coronation of new
kings and possibly other occasions. The kispu–ritual and possibly others
were conducted in front of the statues of the deceased, and in the case
of Sargon and Naram–Sin, the cult of their statues is attested as far
away as Mari and as late as neo–Babylonian times. Historiography may
thus be said to have followed ritual: to the extent that the veneration
of royal predecessors and ancestors was constantly winnowed out to
meet the limitations of memory, so was the retelling and recopying of
86 Tinney 1995:14.
87 Tinney 1995:2.
88 Jonker 1995.
89 Hallo, Item 127:180–183.
narratives about them, with lesser royalty either forgotten entirely or

their tales reattributed to the more enduring names.
Thus Jonker’s thesis, like Liverani’s, casts serious doubt on the his-
toricity of the historical tradition, or at the very least on the accuracy
of its particular attributions. Like Liverani’s, it proposes an alternative
context for that tradition. But whereas Liverani’s alternative has a sus-
piciously modern ring to it, in that it presupposes a political atmosphere
of spirited debate among an educated citizenry about the major issues
of the day,90 Jonkers’ is much less dependent on hypothesis. Rather it
rests on the surer ground of the Mesopotamian cult in general, and the
cult of the dead in particular, the latter subject well illuminated thanks
to such recent studies as those of Tsukimoto, Lewis, Scurlock and
others.91
In conclusion, a few words may be ventured about the compara-
ble situation in Biblical historiography. Here the United Monarchy and
particularly that portion of it which belongs to the Davidic Dynasty
may well be said to play somewhat the same role as the Sargonic
Dynasty in Mesopotamian historiography. As long as the Hebrew Bible
was the only source for reconstructing Biblical history, the historicity of
David and Solomon was not a subject for debate. Even after the redis-
covery of Near Eastern antiquity, that situation continued unchanged
for a long time in spite of the total silence of the epigraphic sources
with respect to these two kings. But skepticism in this regard grew in
tandem with that about the historiographical validity of the Biblical
text. One can perhaps read it off best in the work of J. Alberto Soggin,
who has gradually moved the starting point of Israelite history, and of
Biblical historiography, from the period of the United Monarchy92 to
the Exilic period,93 though retaining a more flexible position in works
directed at more general readerships.94
As noted at the outset, the demand for extra–Biblical verification has
replaced the test of inherent plausibility where Biblical historiography
is concerned. In this light, it would appear that even this severe test had
recently been passed with the discovery of an inscription mentioning
“The house of David” in parallelism with “the king of Israel,” and in a
90 Liverani 1993b:46–48 et passim.

91 Cf. Hallo, Item 144 with previous literature.
92 Soggin 1977, 1978.
93 Soggin 1991.
94 Soggin 1993.
context which clearly seemed to point to a triumph over both of these

dynasties by an Aramaean opponent around 800 bc,95 most likely to
be identified as Hazael.96 It provided yet another independent extra–
Biblical witness to the Divided Monarchy of Israel and Judah to add
to the many previously available. More significantly, for the first time
it furnished epigraphic evidence that the southern dynasty could be
designated after its founder and that this founder was not a figment
of a greatly posterior imagination but already firmly entrenched in
the terminology of the late ninth century. The chance that he was an
invention of this century, and not a reality two centuries earlier thus
became ever more remote.97
The minimalist opposition was not quite silenced by this discovery,
but the quandary in which it found itself can be gauged by the lengths
to which it went to avoid drawing the obvious conclusions from the new
evidence. It was suggested that the fragmentary nature of the monu-
ment made any interpretation of its over–all significance hypothetical
or at least premature—a point considerably weakened by the discov-
ery, the following season, of a substantial new fragment which clearly
belonged to the same monument even if it did not actually join it.98 It
was argued that since the words for “House” and for “of David” were
not separated by a word–divider, the reference had to be to a toponym,
an argument hardly worthy of refutation. In utter desperation, it was
hinted that the monument had been ‘planted’ in the excavation—if
not by the excavator himself then behind his back. This gratuitous
insult was answered in a most convincing way when André Lemaire,
the respected epigrapher of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, found the
identical idiom in another monument by the simple device of restoring
one missing letter.99 The monument in question is the stela of Mesha,
king of Moab, contemporary with the Tell Dan stela though from the
other side of the Jordan. It has been known since 1868 and on display
in the Louvre for all to see since 1873.100 No one could possibly suggest
that it was a recent forgery.
95 Biran and Naveh 1993.

96 Margalit 1994.
97 Cf. now similarly Rainey 1996:546.
98 Biran and Naveh 1994. See also the excellent photo in Shanks 1996:34, and the
discussion ibid. 35 f.
99 Lemaire 1994.
100 See the translation by W.F. Albright in ANET 320 f. and the recent study by Stern
1991:19–56.
What I am suggesting then is this. Methodologically, it continues to

make sense to treat Mesopotamian history and Israelite history alike—
to exempt neither from criticism, to expose neither to unreasonable
tests of authenticity. Absent an overabundance of documentation such
as applies to some much more recent periods, the historian of antiquity
has no alternative but to use every scrap of evidence available—making
allowances for its biases, for the intentions of its presumed authors and
the expectations of its presumed audiences in order to reconstrcut a
remote past. To do otherwise is to commit and compound the very
error of which the ancient historiographers and chronographers stand
accused by the skeptics, namely injecting the concerns of our own time
into the recital of past events.
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Abbreviations
Hallo Item 1, 8 = Heritage; Civilization and the Jews

2 = Early Mesopotamian Titles.
6 = The Ancient Near East: a History.
8 = s. under Nr. 1
10 = The Book of the People.
17 = JNES 15:220–225.
29 = JCS 17:52–57, here: VI.1.
36 = JCS 20:133–141, here: III.2.
45. = JAOS 88:772–775.
50 = JCS 23:57–67.
56 = RLA 3:708–720.
58 = JNES 31:87–95.
59 = Perspectives in Jewish Learning 5:1–12, here: I.3.
60 = Or 42:228–238.
81 = Eretz–Israel 14:1*–7*.
90 = AnSt. 30:189–195.
91 = SIC 1:1–26.
108 = Bulletin of the Society for Mesopotamian Studies 6:7–18
109 = Tadmor and Weinfeld 1983:9–20, here: VI.2.
110 = Gorelick and Williams–Forte 1983:7–17 and pl. xii.
114 = JANES 16–17:143–151.
117 = Bible Review 1/1:20–27.
125 = History of the World, vol. I, ed. John W. Hall.
127 = Studies Sachs 175–190.
136 = JAOS 110:187–199.
140 = Studies Tadmor 148–165.
141 = Studies Garelli 377–388.
144 = Studies Talmon 381–401.
146 = Hallo 1992a.
149 = Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 3:71–73.
175 = JAOS 101:253–257.
Addendum
The important new work by Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Legends of the Kings
of Akkade: The Texts (= Mesopotamian Civilizations 7) (Winona Lake, IN,
Eisenbrauns, 1997) appeared too late to be taken into account here.
vi.4
POLYMNIA AND CLIO1
For me personally, this is an anniversary, even a jubilee of sorts. Fifty

years ago, in 1948, I was a junior at Harvard University, wrestling with
the question of choosing a major. Torn between history and literature,
I went so far as to consult the good doctor at the University Health
Clinic about my dilemma. He listened patiently for one or two minutes
and then said with some exasperation: “Get out of here! I’ve got
students with real problems waiting to see me!”
And so I settled for history—Roman history in fact—but my prob-
lem persisted. I had not lost my interest in literature. As a doctoral
student at the Oriental Institute in Chicago, I subtitled my 1955 dis-
sertation: a philological and historical analysis. Apparently I was still
serving two masters or, more precisely, two mistresses or, to be more
politically correct, two muses. I identified them as Clio, the muse of
history, and Polyhymnia or Polymnia, the muse of sacred poetry.
Ten years later (1965), I returned to Chicago to lecture on the topic
“Polymnia or Clio.”2 But by then I had resolved my personal quandary.
With the riches of the Yale Babylonian Collection at my disposal, I
decided to dedicate most of my efforts to those Sumerian literary texts
that threw light on historical questions on the one hand, and to the
reconstruction of Mesopotamian history with their help on the other.
After all, I argued (or could have argued) the muses were sisters, all
alike virginal daughters of Zeus and Mnemosine (Memory). Two or
more of them could well be the inspiration of a single devotee. And
I could have comforted myself with the thought that the best histo-
rians of the Western tradition, from Thucydides and Livy to Gibbon
and Churchill, wove literary evidence seamlessly into their magna opera,
which in their own right rank as works of literature as well as of history.
1 The substance of this paper was delivered to the XLVe Rencontre Assyriologique,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., July 5, 1998.

2 The same lecture was delivered to the Oriental Club of New Haven in April 1965;
see Welles and Beckman 1988: 61.

454 vi.4. polymnia and clio
My Chicago paper never appeared in print, but some of its themes

echoed in my presidential address to the American Oriental Society,
published twenty-five years later.3 At that time I was concerned, i.a.,
with the emerging debate on biblical historiography. At one extreme,
the operative principle there seemed to be that the biblical data “can
only be considered as untrustworthy when they can be falsified by con-
temporaneous evidence,” to cite one particularly candid formulation.4
This is a sort of “innocent until proven guilty” principle, against which
the other extreme has set up the “guilty until proven innocent” prin-
ciple, according to which nothing in the biblical record is to be consid-
ered historical until and unless confirmed by extra-biblical evidence.
For a long time I have been referring to these positions as “maximalist”
and “minimalist” respectively,5 a terminology that now dominates the
debate, for better or worse.6
In my AOS paper, I still thought that Assyriology was happily free
of such extreme positions, and held it up as a model of moderation to
biblical historiography. But the sequel has proved me overly optimistic.
While we have no maximalists in our ranks, none who would defend
the cuneiform canon as revealed truth, we have our own minimalists,
those who now hold that no later, literary source can be used for the
reconstruction of Mesopotamian history unless verified by contempo-
raneous, non-literary evidence. At best, they say, it can throw light on
the history and concerns of its own time of composition, whatever that
time may be thought to be—and often enough deduced from its puta-
tive concerns in truly circular fashion.
The champion of this new view is Mario Liverani, and he has set it
forth with admirable clarity in Akkad: The First Empire.7 I have dealt with
this book, and a number of others on the Sargonic Dynasty, in an arti-
cle that has just appeared in a volume in honor of W.H.Ph. Römer. So
I will not repeat here what I have written there.8 Suffice it to say that I
find all parts of the view questionable: the notion that we can privilege
3 Hallo 1990.
4 Becking 1992: 52; previously idem 1985, esp. pp. 22–34. Becking was specifically
referring to “The Dates in the Book of Kings,” but was only stating with greater candor
what others have implied or assumed in their work. Cf. in general Millard, Hoffmeier
and Baker 1994.
5 Hallo 1980: 5.
6 Cf., e.g., Shanks 1997, 1997a. See also Addendum.
7 Liverani 1993.
vi.4. polymnia and clio 455
contemporaneous royal monuments, although they are notoriously ten-

dentious; that we can rely on archival records, although they may be
hopelessly laconic; that we can reconstruct ancient history without ben-
efit of the overall structure provided by native historiography; that we
can dispense with the significant details incorporated in literary remi-
niscences; or that we can hope to date these canonical texts with suf-
ficient certainty to use them as evidence for the concerns of their own
times.
The Sargonic Period remains a parade example, a test case par ex-
cellence, for the methodological issues involved in the debate over Mes-
opotamian historiography. The rise of Sargon so captured the imagi-
nation of later ages that it spawned much of the literature at the heart
of that debate. The literary oeuvre of his daughter Enheduanna is still
growing,9 as is her attestation on contemporaneous seals inscriptions10
and other monuments;11 at present she even has her own website!12 The
reign of Naram-Sin, her nephew, and more particularly his deification
represent in some ways the “classical moment” of Mesopotamian his-
tory and is treated as such in another recent article of mine that need
not be repeated here.13 The fall of Akkad left such a deep impression on
later generations that they not only composed lengthy disquisitions on
it as represented by the “Curse of Agade” but, in the case of Shamshi-
Adad I,14 even enshrined the concept of the “end of Akkad” (šulum
Agade) as a chronological fixed point on a par with “before the flood”
and “after the flood” (lām abūbi, arki abūbi).15
Not wishing to repeat Jean-Jacques Glassner’s monographic treat-
ment,16 however, I would rather try to set the subject in a kind of com-
parative perspective, concentrating instead on the Ur III dynasty as
another example of the end of empire in order to draw a lesson for his-
toriography based on the fall of the great empires of the ancient Near
East in general.
9 Westenholz 1989.
10 To the three seals inscribed by her retainers we may now add a fourth in the
collection of Jonathan Rosen, which formed part of the exhibition at the Morgan
Library in 1998.
11 On her famous disc, see lastly Winter 1987.
12 http://www.angelfire.com/mi/ninmesara.html. Information courtesy Michelle
Hart (Los Angeles).

13 See now Hallo 1999.
14 Grayson 1987: 53.
15 See for these most recently Hallo 1991.
16 Glassner 1986; cf. my comments in Hallo 1998, here: VI.3.
If one major problem of all ancient historiography is the scarcity

of contemporaneous sources and the need (as I would say) or the
temptation (as others might see it) to fill in the lacunae with evidence
of later, in large part literary sources, then this problem is compounded
where the fall of a dynasty is concerned, for that is rarely recorded
by contemporaries, least of all by the scribes of the failing and falling
dynasty. There are shining exceptions to this rule, and two of them may
be recalled here in tribute to the scholars who have identified them.
The first is the “Fall of Lagash,” which is chronicled not only in the
clay tablet that usually goes by this name,17 but also—less dramatically
and quite inadvertently—by the scribes of the last ruler of the “first
dynasty of Lagash,” Uru-inimgina. This was recognized by Maurice
Lambert, who showed how the royal scribes worked down to the last
days of the threatened city, patiently continuing in their set ways to
catalogue the ever diminishing deliveries to and disbursements from
the state storehouses.18 As I put it only a little later, “The numerous
archival records from Lagash dating to Urukagina and his immediate
predecessors give us a vivid picture of the declining fortunes of the
city in these difficult years, and we must marvel at the almost blind
dedication with which the scribes continued to record the day-to-day
minutiae of a contracting economy.”19
The pattern was repeated, more or less, during the reign of Ibbi-Sin,
as analyzed in the brief but classic study by Thorkild Jacobsen, and
more recently by Tohru Gomi and Bertrand Lafont.20 Again quoting
my history, “In short order, dated texts ceased at the major archives . . ..
Only those of Ur itself continued in abundance, faithfully dating by the
king’s formulas to the end of his long reign of twenty-four years. But Ur
could not sustain its own population, let alone all those loyal to the king
who now sought refuge behinds its walls, without the continued tribute
of its provinces. As this was more and more withheld, commodity prices
soared, sometimes to sixty times their normal level, and the capital
was confronted by the twin crises of inflation and famine.”21 In some
ways the most telling evidence to this effect is that of the bala: that
venerable institution continued, but in name only, as the governors of
17 See the latest translation by Cooper 1986: 78.

18 Lambert 1966.
19 Hallo and Simpson 1971: 53 f.; 1998: 51.
20 Jacobsen 1953, Gomi 1984, Lafont 1995.
21 Hallo and Simpson 1971: 86; 1998: 81.
now-defunct provinces retreated to the capital and continued to be

credited with (ever more?) pitifully reduced contributions as “ensi’s of
the bala.”22
What else do the contemporaneous sources tell us about the fall of
Ur? If we look at the date-formulas of Ibbi-Sin, conveniently collected
by Edmond Sollberger,23 we find most of them blithely oblivious of
or indifferent to the impending catastrophe. They involve the usual
references to accession (year 1), the selection and installation of high
priests and priestesses (years 2, 4, 10, 11), the building of temples (18 f.),
the dedication of precious votives (12 f., 16, 21), and dynastic marriages
(5). Only rarely are there tell-tale references to battles against Amorites
(17), to war on the Hurrian frontier (3) or on the Elamite front (9, 14), or
to the fortification of cities in the interior (6 ff.). There are two obscure
references to divine beneficences to the king (15, 20). We have to wait
till the 22nd year-name of Ibbi-Sin’s 24-year reign before the royal
scribes will admit to a hint of trouble—and even then they put the
best possible spin on matters. In Sollberger’s translation, it was the year
that “Ibbi-Sin, the king of Ur, (when) a flood decreed by the gods had
blurred the boundaries of heaven and earth, caused Ur to weather out
the storm.”24 Flood and storm are well-attested metaphors for foreign
invaders in Sumerian literature,25 but whether we are dealing with a
metaphor here or with a natural catastrophe remains a question. For
Miguel Civil, on the basis of a new text, translates “the year that Ibbi-
Suen, king of Ur, secured Ur and URU×UD stricken by a hurricane,
ordered by the gods, which shook the whole world.”26 Suffice it to say
that the next year name is back to normal, so to speak, if, according to
Sollberger, it recorded the gift of a huge ape to the king! Åke Sjöberg,
on the other hand, translates “the year when the heavy ape (from)
the/its mountain struck Ibbisin, the King of Ur.”27 Again, we may be
dealing with a metaphor, for Ibbi-Sin’s enemies are so designated also
in his correspondence.28 The difference here is not one of reading but
of the interpretation of the verbal chain: mu-na-e-ra-a could be regarded
22 Hallo 1960: 96. For the last-known bala of the old sort (Ibbi-Sin 3/II/27), see
Guichard 1996 (ref. courtesy T. Sharlach).

23 Sollberger 1976–1980: 4–7; cf. Sykes 1973; Frayne 1997: 361–366.
24 Sollberger 1976–1980: 7.
25 Hallo 1990: 195–197.
26 Civil 1987.
27 Sjöberg 1993: 211, n. 2.
28 See below, note 55.
as a plural form (ere-a) of DU/GÍN, “to go, cause to go, bring” (so
apparently Sollberger),29 or as the dative with “to strike” (so Sjöberg).
The last year-name is attested only in fragmentary form.
Another contemporaneous source is represented by royal inscrip-
tions. In the case of Ibbi-Sin these are even less revealing than his date
formulas. The few discrete examples that have survived speak once of
the fortification of Ur30 and in passing of victories on the eastern fron-
tier (and then only in the context of a late copy),31 and for the rest only
of the usual pious dedications. The best we can say about them is that
their very paucity bespeaks the ill health of the kingdom—especially
when set against the relatively large number of seal inscriptions dedi-
cated to the king by his officials, which suggests a bloated bureaucracy.32
A similar conclusion is drawn, albeit from different evidence, for a later
period by Norman Yoffee, who has made a special study of imperial
decline: “as the political strength and territory of the First Dynasty of
Babylon waned,” he writes, “the number of titled officials in the service
of the crown expanded and their offices became more highly articu-
lated.”33
The royal hymns are a later source. Though hardly likely to have
been invented out of whole cloth in the scribal schools of the time
of Hammurabi or Samsu-iluna, neither are they entirely free of some
modernizing and other editorial tendencies as can be detected in some
examples of the genre.34 In the case of Ibbi-Sin, a respectable number
of royal hymns have been recovered, thanks to the efforts of Sjöberg.35
But they have little to offer by way of historiographical data.
Such data can better be extracted from the “Royal Correspondence
of Ur.” We still await its full edition by Piotr Michalowski, but can
already read off much of it in his survey in RLA, as well as in Claus
Wilcke’s earlier studies.36 It is a precious clue to the gradual dete-
rioration of the empire as exemplified among other things by: the
29 Krecher 1967, to which add Hallo 1978: 72, n. 16; YBC 13286 (unpubl., dated
Ibbi-Sin 3): u4 kaskal mar-tu-šè i-ri-sa-a; Fish, CST 252: uku-uš uri5-ma u4 díd-lú-ru-gú-
šè ì-ri-ša má-a ba-na-a-gub; Michalowski, OA 16 (1977) 288 f.; Lugal-banda 1127.
30 Frayne 1997: 368 f.
31 Frayne 1997: 370–373.
32 So already Hallo 1962: 8, n. 58; Hallo and Simpson 1971: 86.
33 Yoffee 1977: 145; a similar formulation appears in Yoffee 1979: 12. Cf. also below,
note 63.
34 Cf., e.g., “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu,” for which see Hallo 1966, here: III.2.
35 Sjöberg 1970–1971.
36 Michalowski 1976, 1984; Wilcke 1969, 1970.
progressive diminution of central power in its attempt to control the

governors of outlying provinces; the preoccupation with the building
of a defensive wall at the narrow waist of the valley where Tigris
and Euphrates come closest together; the machinations of Ishbi-Irra,
posing as defender of the kingdom against the threat of Elamites and
Shimashkians from the East while at the same time preparing to start
his own (“Isin”) dynasty in the ruins of the empire; and so forth. The
texts of this correspondence are all up to three hundred years later than
the events they describe, but their historicity can be affirmed over and
over by numerous details, such as personal names of minor actors in
the drama that tally with those known from documents of actual Ur III
date.
Michalowski has illustrated that himself with the case of Kunshi-ma-
tum, “the bride of Simanum.”37 In a brief communication, he showed
that “The utilization of a combination of monumental, archival and
canonical sources casts new light on the affairs surrounding . . . the
betrothal of a daughter of the Neo-Sumerian ruler Šu-Sin to the royal
house of Simanum.”38 He was able to recover the fact of the dynas-
tic marriage from an Old Babylonian copy of the royal inscriptions of
Shu-Sin, to correct the misunderstanding of the daughter’s name in the
royal correspondence, and then to identify it in a number of archival
Ur III texts.39 His exercise provides a model for the judicious combi-
nation of contemporaneous and later evidence in the reconstruction of
historical events. The same purpose has been pursued by myself and
others, i.a., in connection with “The House of Ur-Meme”40 and with
the Royal Correspondence of Isin and, more particularly, of Larsa.41
In fact, it can be argued that the royal correspondence of all three
dynasties represents copies of actual letters originally deposited in the
royal archives and selected by later generations of scribes for their bear-
ing on matters of particular interest to them. In the case of the Royal
Correspondence of Ur, that was evidently the role of the “Amorites,”
presumably their own ancestors, in the great events of history, includ-
ing particularly the unraveling of the powerful Ur III empire.42 A novel
thesis has even proposed to see the Amorites as mercenaries rather than
37 Michalowski 1975.
38 Michalowski 1975: 716.
39 To these we may now add Sigrist 1983: 480:16.
40 Hallo 1972; cf. also Zettler 1984.
41 See the references in Hallo 1983, here: VI.2.
42 Hallo 1983: 12, here: VI.2.
nomads, based largely on the Royal Correspondence.43 Are we then to

accept only those portions that have an actual overlap with contem-
poraneous evidence? Or can we not reasonably extend a measure of
cautious confidence also to those portions of the correspondence that
have not or not yet been so confirmed?
When we turn to the actual end of the Ur III empire, we find that
our best sources are the lamentations composed under the early kings
of Isin, especially Ishme-Dagan. Ishme-Dagan was an intriguing figure
in the twentieth-century history of Mesopotamia. He commissioned
more royal hymns than any other Mesopotamian ruler except Shulgi,
as now conveniently documented by Marie-Christine Ludwig.44 In these
hymns, he modelled himself on that Ur III king to an extraordinary
degree, as shown by Jacob Klein.45
It is to this Ishme-Dagan that we can attribute the lamentations over
the destruction of Nippur and Uruk, for his name appears in both of
these compositions. And it is possible that the lament over Eridu also
was commissioned by this king, though no royal name appears in its
preserved portions.46 The lamentation over the destruction of Sumer
and Ur may be earlier.47 But what all of these compositions, as well
as the laments over Ur and Ekimar, have in common is that they
were composed, not at the time of the destruction of the cities of the
Ur III empire, but considerably later, presumably on the occasion of
their rebuilding, more particularly the rededication of their temples.
Apparently the kings of Isin were at pains to absolve themselves of the
potential sacrilege involved in the razing of the remains of the destroyed
temples, which was an inevitable prerequisite to reconstructing them on
their old sacred sites, and therefore made every effort to pin the blame
for their destruction on those who had initiated it. That is why the
pictures of these destructions are so graphic and their perpetrators so
carefully identified. Once we recognize this barely hidden agenda of the
genre, we can make allowance for its exaggerations and distortions, and
extract a valid “historical kernel” from it, though both their status as a
genre48 and the concept of the historical kernel have been challenged.49
43 Weeks 1985, esp. pp. 53 f.

44 Ludwig 1990. Cf. the review article by Römer 1993.
45 Klein 1985.
48 Michalowski 1989: 5 f.
49 Liverani 1993: 51.
(Even later than the lamentations are certain litanies in which Ibbi-
Sin figures in long lists of deceased kings,50 and the semi-legendary
versions of his exile to Elam and death and burial there.)51
A key concept of the lamentations is again the bala—an office rotated
among the members of a Sumero-Akkadian polity—not, as in the
case of the provinces of the Ur III empire, on a monthly basis,52 but
rather on a long-term basis among the independent cities, dynasties
and kingdoms that inherited the Ur III legacy. The concept is stated
most memorably in the fourth stanza of the “Lamentation over the
Destruction of Ur and Sumer” (ll. 365–369). In Kramer’s translation, it
reads: “The verdict of the assembly cannot be turned back, / The word
commanded by Enlil knows no overturning, / Ur was granted kingship,
it was not granted an eternal reign (bala), / Since days of yore when the
land was founded to (now) when people have multiplied, / Who has
(ever) seen a reign of kingship that is everlasting!”53 In other words, no
city or dynasty rules forever.
The same concept is implicit in a later source that is the best known
of all—the Sumerian King List. Here we have ancient historiography
in its most schematic form. It insists that, in Sumer and Akkad, royal
hegemony was always the prerogative of only one city or dynasty at a
time and divinely fated to devolve in turn on different cities, dynasties,
or kingdoms. Jerrold Cooper has noted that it shared this ideology
with the lamentations, whereas royal inscriptions and royal hymns, both
being products of the royal chanceries, promoted the opposite ideology,
namely that kingship was divinely ordained to stay with the present
ruler for length of days and with his dynasty forever.54 This dichotomy is
certainly to be preferred to a simple dichotomy between contemporary
and later formulations.
In fact, it is not for the modern historian of antiquity to prejudge
the value of any given source or genre, but to subject each to scrutiny
and to make allowances for its particular agenda and prejudices. If we
apply that rule of thumb to the fall of Ur, we will soon enough realize
that lamentations and the King List both overemphasize the extent
of the break with the succeeding age that the disaster represented,
50 Jacobsen 1970: 346, n. 50.

51 Jacobsen 1970: 346, n. 50.
52 Above, note 22.
53 Kramer apud ANET (3rd ed. 1969) 617. Cf. also PSD B: 69 f.: “who has ever seen a
reign of kingship take the lead” (bala-nam-lugal-la sag-bi-šè-e-a); Michalowski 1989: 59.
54 Cooper 1990: 39 f.
and each for its own ideological reasons, as already suggested. Even
the royal correspondence weighs in on this side of things with its
unflattering characterization of Ishbi-Irra as a non-Sumerian and an
ape from the mountain.55 And a proper reading of the Larsa King List
leaves no room for the widespread misconception that he, or his first
three successors, had to compete with Naplanum and his first three
successors in the rule of the land.
Other evidence, both contemporaneous and retrospective, suggests
major aspects of continuity between the Third Dynasty of Ur and the
First Dynasty of Isin in matters of economy, cult, literary convention,
and even political organization. Suffice it to emphasize, in connection
with the last factor, that Ishbi-Irra and Shu-ilishu, the first two so-
called kings of Isin, actually ruled under the title “king of Ur” or its
poetic equivalent “king/lord/deity of his nation/country.”56 It is only
under Iddin-Dagan that an inscriptional use of the title “king of Isin” is
attested, and then only once.57 And his successor Ishme-Dagan, though
using the new title more liberally, still allowed the older one to be
employed once on a fragmentary votive bowl, at least as generally
restored.58
The same observation applies to the evidence of the “Isin” year
names, conveniently assembled by Marcel Sigrist. They exhibit an
almost studied avoidance of the royal title “king of Isin,” indeed any
royal title, even after the royal inscriptions have begun to use it.59
The contemporary seal inscriptions are more creative in their use of
a variety of royal titles and epithets. Here, “king of Ur” appears as late
as Lipit-Ishtar60 and “king of Isin” not until Bur-Sin.61
The fall of Ur was thus not as cataclysmic an event as the lamen-
tations, for their own reasons, made it out to be, and certainly not a
watershed event on a par with the fall of Akkad earlier or the fall of
Babylon at the end of its First Dynasty. But neither was the transi-
tion to Ishbi-Irra and his successors quite as smooth as their royal titles
and epithets might suggest. For the full story of the fall of Ur, as of
55 Sjöberg 1993. Previously Franke and Wilhelm 1985: 26, n. 53.

56 lugal-ma-da-na, bēl mātišu, dingir-kalam-ma-na; cf. Hallo 1957: 16–20.
57 Haldar 1977, republished by Frayne 1990: 22.
58 Frayne 1990: 46.
59 The sole exception noted by Sigrist 1988: 14 is a text from the twelfth year of
Ishbi-Irra that calls him “king of his land” (BIN 9: 52).

60 Frayne 1990: 61 f.
61 Frayne 1990: 72.
other kingdoms both before and after, we are inevitably dependent on

the recollection of later ages, often enough on the hostile or self-serving
point of view of those who toppled and/or succeeded the fallen dynasty.
The fall of empires has been a focus of much recent discussion.
Paul Kennedy even wrote a best-seller on the subject, though he took
matters back only as far as Philip II of Spain.62 The lacuna has been
partly filled by Norman Yoffee and George Cowgill’s Collapse of Ancient
States and Civilizations,63 with contributions on Mesopotamia by Robert
Adams and Yoffee himself.64 Harvey Weiss has taken up the issue of
the collapse of Akkad from a North Mesopotamian perspective. As in
the case of Ibbi-Sin’s date formula, I choose to leave open the question
whether human or natural agency can best explain the archeological
hiatus he has identified in the late third millennium.65 More recently, an
entire issue of RA was devoted to the end of archives as a symptom—
and concomitant—of political collapse.66
In conclusion: it is widely acknowledged that the ancient Mesopo-
tamians had a vivid sense of their own long history, as shown among
others by Krecher, Hruška, Wilcke, and Cooper.67 Many of their literary
compositions had a historiographic character, although Cooper has
pointedly abstained from “any attempt . . . to discover which ancient
texts may be ‘historically accurate,’ whatever that might mean,” citing
my own study of Sumerian historiography in that connection.68 I have
never actually used the phrase “historically accurate”—though in other
connections I have referred to “the essential historicity” of certain
(biblical) narratives—and been taken to task for it.69
So perhaps I can sum up my position thus: the function of the his-
torian of antiquity, like that of the chronicler of more recent periods,
is not to prejudge the value of any given source or genre, but to sub-
ject each to scrutiny and, after allowing for its particular agenda and
prejudices, to extract what value is left. It is time to restore the respon-
sible use of literary sources to their traditional and rightful place in the
62 Kennedy 1987.
63 Yoffee and Cowgill 1988. 64.
64 Ibid., 20–48.
65 Weiss and Courty 1993.
66 Joannès 1995.
67 Krecher and Müller 1975, Hruška 1979, Wilcke 1988, Cooper 1990.
68 Cooper 1990: 39 citing Hallo 1983, here: VI.2.
69 Hallo 1980: 16; Cooper and Goldstein 1992: 21 f.
reconstruction of ancient Near Eastern history. That place is the history

of the times about which they report, and emphatically not the history
of their presumed time of composition. Those skeptics who accept the
latter proposition court the danger of committing the very error of
which they accuse the ancient historiographers and chronographers,
namely of injecting the concerns of their own time into the recital of
past events. It is little short of presumptuous to suppose that we can
escape that charge ourselves if we impute it to the ancient authors who,
after all, were so much closer than us to the events in question.
Epimenides the Cretan (sixth century) is said to have pronounced all
Cretans liars, thereby casting doubt on his own pronouncement, for all
that it is echoed in Paul’s Epistle to Titus (1:12 f.). This solipsism has
generated a substantial literature under the general heading of “the liar
paradox” or “the Epimenides paradox”70 Let it not be said that we
reject all historiography that is not contemporaneous with the events it
chronicles, or confirmed by contemporaneous sources, lest we commit
our own solipsism and lest our own attempts to reconstruct ancient
Near Eastern history stand thereby condemned even more than the
sources we disdain to use.71
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1983 Textes Économiques Néo-Sumériennes de l’Université de Syracuse (Études Assyri-
ologiques Mémoire 29; Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations).
1988 Isin Year Names (Andrew University Assyriological Series 2).
Sjöberg, Åke
1970–1971 “Hymns to Meslamtaea, Lugalgirra and Nanna-Suen in Honour of
King Ibbı̄suen (Ibbı̄sîn) of Ur,” Or. Suec. 19–20: 140–178.
1993 “The Ape from the Mountain who Became King of Isin,” in The
Tablet and the Scroll: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo, ed.
M.E. Cohen et al. (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press) 211–220.
Sjöberg, Åke, ed.

1984 The Sumerian Dictionary Vol. 2: B (Philadelphia: The University Muse-
um).
Sollberger, Edmond
1976 “Ibbi-Suen,” RLA 5 (1976–1980) 1–8.
Sykes, Kevin L.
The Year Names of the Ur III Period (MA thesis, University of Chicago
(1973, MS).
Weeks, Noel
1985 “The Old Babylonian Amorites: Nomads or Mercenaries?” OLP 16:
49–57.
Weiss, Harvey and Marie-Agnès Courty
1993 “The Genesis and Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: The Accidental
Refraction of Historical Law,” in Liverani 1993: 131–155.
Welles, C. Bradford and Gary Beckman
1988 The Oriental Club of New Haven 1913–1988 (New Haven: mimeograph).
Westenholz, Joan Goodnick
1989 “Enheduanna, En-Priestess, Hen of Nanna, Spouse of Nanna,” in
Behrens, Hermann et al., eds. (1989) Dumu-e2-dub-ba-a. Studies in Honor
of Å. Sjöberg (Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer
Fund, 11; Philadelphia) 539–556.
Wilcke, Claus
1969 “Zur Geschichte der Amurriter in der Ur-III- Zeit,” WO 5: 1–31.
1970 “Drei Phasen des Niedergangs des Reiches von Ur III,” ZA 60: 54–69.
1982 “Archäologie und Geschichtsbewusstsein,” Kolloquien zur allgemeinen und
vergleichenden Archäologie 3: 31–52.
1988 “Die sumerische Königsliste und erzählte Vergangenheit,” Colloquium
Rauricum 1: 113–140.
Winter, Irene
1987 “Women in Public: The Disc of Enheduanna, the Beginning of the
Office of en-Priestess, and the Weight of Visual Evidence,” RAI 33:
189–201.
Yoffee, Norman
1977 The Economic Role of the Crown in the Old Babylonian Period (Bibliotheca
Mesopotamia 5; Malibu, Calif.: Undena).
1979 “The Decline and Rise of Mesopotamian Civilization: An Ethnoar-
chaeological Perspective on the Evolution of Social Complexity,” Amer-
ican Antiquity 44:5–35.
Yoffee, Norman and George L. Cowgill, eds.
1988 The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (Tucson: University of Ari-
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Zettler, Richard
1984 “The Genealogy of the House of Ur-Me-me: a Second Look,” AfO 31:
1–9.
Postscript
Of the many relevant studies and remarks that have come to my attention in
the last three years, the following are particularly worth quoting here:
There is one school which I would define as ‘maximalist-optimist’, con-
vinced that analysis can and must be pushed as far as possible . . . in
such a way as to draw the greatest possible significance from the material
available. There is, on the other hand, a ‘minimalist-pessimist’ school . . .
which holds that . . . this use of evidence in a ‘forceful’ way, is not justified
given the quality, quantity and distribution of the finds . . .. As for myself,
I clearly belong to the ‘minimalist-pessimist’ school of thought and hold
that the more material we have available, the more we will realize how
difficult it is to reach precise, unequivocal conclusions.
Mario Liverani in
Archives Before Writing, Piera Ferioli et al., eds.
(Turin: Scriptorium, 1994), pp. 414 f.
vi.5
SUMERIAN HISTORY IN PICTURES:

A NEW LOOK AT THE
“STELE OF THE FLYING ANGELS”*
Among his many seminal studies on the genre of Sumerian royal

hymns, Jacob Klein has contributed an analysis of Shulgi A (“Shulgi
the Runner”) that goes far toward setting that hymn and the Ishme-
Dagan hymn modelled on it in their literary and historical contexts.1
The royal statues to which the two hymns allude well illustrate the role
of monuments as a fourth medium for the commemoration of royal
achievements beyond the three previously identified as royal hymns,
royal inscriptions, and date formulas.2 The “stele of the flying angels”
may be confidently added to the roster of such figurative commemora-
tions.
In 1925, Sir Leonard Woolley announced the discovery of important
fragments of a massive stone stele found during the excavations at Ur.3
He was in charge of these excavations, which were conducted jointly
by the British Museum and the University Museum (now the Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology) of the University of Pennsylvania.
In the division of the finds among the two museums and the host
country in 1926, the stele fragments fell to the share of the University
Museum. Leon Legrain, who was then curator of that museum, as well
as epigrapher of the expedition,4 lost no time in restoring the stele from
* This paper is presented in warm tribute to Jacob Klein. A very much earlier
version was presented to the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, March 19, 1996.
1 Jacob Klein, “Šulgi and Išmedagan: Runners in the Service of the Gods (SRT13),”
Beer-Sheva 2 (1985): 7*–38*; cf. also Douglas R. Frayne, “Šulgi the Runner,” JAOS 103
(1983): 739–748.
2 William W. Hallo, “Texts, Statues and the Cult of the Deified King,” VTS 40
(1988): 54–66; cf. Frayne, The Historical Correlations of the Sumerian Royal Hymns (Ann
Arbor: University Microfilms, 1981).
3 Cf. Leonard Woolley, “The Excavations at Ur, 1924–1925,” Antiquaries Journal 5
(1925): 398–410 and pls. 46–48; idem, “The Expedition to Ur,” Museum Journal 16 (1925):
50–55.
4 A. Dussau, “Legrain, Leon,” RLA (1980–1983), 543 lists him as curator, or at least
active at the Museum, from 1919 to his death in 1963, and epigrapher from 1924–1926.
472 vi.5. sumerian history in pictures
its fragments and publishing the results. He was, in fact, so concerned

with preserving all the pieces in his reconstruction that he included
some that may not have belonged to it at all. His first publication
appeared in 1927 under the title “The Stela of the Flying Angels,” and
a second one six years later under the title “Restauration de la stele
d’Ur-Nammu.”5
For some fifteen years, this truly monumental monument has been
the subject of intense scrutiny by Jeanny Vorys Canby. She devoted a
first article to it in 1987,6 wrote another one ten years later,7 and pub-
lished a whole monograph on the subject in 2001.8 Meantime, the stele
itself has been disassembled under her supervision, allowing for a bet-
ter placement of the fragments from which it had been reconstructed
in 1927 when it is eventually reassembled. In the process, it is hoped to
settle the question of whether the attribution to Ur-Nammu is correct
(his name appears on a fragment that may not belong rightfully to the
reconstruction) or whether it has to be changed in favor of Shulgi.9 It
will here be attributed to Ur-Nammu for reasons to be dealt with below.
The Stele of Ur-Nammu is certainly one of the most important
monuments of its kind. It is the only one between the Old Sumerian
Stele of Vultures and the Neo-Assyrian obelisks to arrange its materials
in registers that follow each other in a vertical sequence, and the
only royal stele altogether between Naram-Sin and Hammurapi, as Dr.
Canby has noted.10 Several questions remain to be answered: whether
we are to “read” the registers up or down, whether the two sides
are to be “read” together or in sequence, and, if the latter, in which
sequence. But, in any case, it is already apparent that the stele is to be
5 Leon Legrain, “The Stela of the Flying Angels,” Museum Journal 18 (1927): 74–98;
cf. idem, “Restauration de la stele d’Ur-Nammu,” RA 30 (1933): 111–115 and pls. i–ii;
for Woolley’s prior report, see above, n. 3.
6 Jeanny Vorys Canby, “A Monumental Puzzle: Reconstructing the Ur-Nammu
Stele,” Expedition 29/1 (1987): 54–64.

7 Eadem, “The Stela of Ur-Nammu Reconsidered,” RAI 34 (1998): 211–219 and pls.
39–48; note that the paper was presented to the Rencontre in 1987 (hereinafter cited as
“The Stela”).
8 Eadem, The “Ur-Nammu” Stela (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2001; hereinafter cited as The Stela). I am grateful to

her for sharing many of her findings with me prior to publication, and to the University
of Pennsylvania for permission to republish her reconstructions (below, figs. 1–2).
9 A similar question with respect to the “Laws of Ur-Nammu” can probably be
settled in favor of Ur-Nammu; see a forthcoming paper by Frayne and the author.
10 The Stela 8 f. But note perhaps the Ebla stele dating ca. 1800 bce; cf. Paolo
Matthiae, “Les dernières découvertes d’Ébla en 1983–1986,” CRAIBL 1987, 135–161.

vi.5. sumerian history in pictures 473
“read,” i.e., that it represents some form of narrative in largely pictorial

form, though supplemented by captions or inscriptions that may have
been more extensive when the stele was complete than the traces now
preserved suggest. And if the stele belongs to the roster of figurative
commemorations,11 does it commemorate the royal achievements of
a single year, as in the case of the statue of “Shulgi the Runner,”12
or of several years, as illustrated, for example, by the statue of Nur-
Adad of Larsa commissioned by his son Sin-iddinam together with an
inscriptional outline of the achievements of at least five years of his
sixteen-year reign paralleled by his date-formulas?13
To begin to answer some of my own questions: it is my suggestion,
based on the current state of the restoration of the stele, that its two
sides must be read separately. That is to say, it is impossible to read
all five registers on the two sides as following each other around the
stele. There are three reasons for this conclusion. (1) Registers III and
IV of side A are separated by only a single dividing line14 and are
apparently to be read together, while the corresponding registers of side
B are separated by a double dividing line and are evidently to be read
separately.15 (2) The broad band between registers IV and V of side B
preserves considerable traces of an inscription, while the corresponding
band of Side A, although largely lost, is clearly uninscribed as far as
preserved. (3) There is no evidence that the narrow sides of the stele,
as far as they are preserved, carried the narrative from one side to the
other.16
Having said this, however, we should note the strong correlation
between the two top registers, both including the “flying angels” for
which Legrain named the stele. The “angels” are pouring water from
11 Hallo, “Texts, Statues and the Cult,” (above, n. 2); cf. Frayne, The Historical
Correlations of the Sumerian Royal Hymns.

12 Above, n. 1.
13 See the latest translation and discussion by Madeleine A. Fitzgerald, “The Rulers
of Larsa” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale, 2002), 83–93.

14 Dr. Canby informs me that it is in fact “not a dividing line but the top of the
building on which several people stand” (letter of January 18, 2003).

15 Side A is what is conventionally called the “obverse” or, by Canby, the “Good
Face” of the stele, i.e., the better preserved one: “The Stela,” 213. Side B is the
“reverse” or “worn face”; ibid. Registers are numbered with Roman numerals from
top to bottom following Canby.
16 Dr. Canby informs me that “There are no scenes on any of the several sections of
the side faces that are preserved, in fact the sides were never completely smoothed
down like the relief surface” (letter of January 18, 2003). Cf. also Andrea Becker
“Neusumerische Renaissance?” BaM 16 (1985):229–316 esp. p. 295.
Fig. 1: Side A
Fig. 2: Side B
vessels on the scenes below them, which, at least on Side A, feature

two seated deities—actually, it could be argued, in the guise of their
statues.17 The flying figures are regarded by Jacobsen as symbolic rain-
clouds, though on what basis is not clear; Canby considers them possi-
bly representations of Enki.18
These upper registers have the crescent shape characteristic of other
Mesopotamian steles, a shape familiar, e.g., from the double steles of
Amar-Suen found at Ur,19 from kudurru’s (“boundary-stones”) in phallic
shape,20 and many items in the “Stelenreihen” of Assur, where the
shape has also been regarded as phallic and interpreted as a pars pro toto
representation of the individuals commemorated on them.21 It was a
shape favored in Egypt as well,22 and for some reason favored in much
more recent times not only for tombstones in various traditions but
more particularly for the representations of the Tablets of the Law in
Jewish iconography from at least the thirteenth century ce on.23
More to the point, the two uppermost registers are each twice the
size of any of the lower registers in height, and the figures in them are
twice the size of the figures in the lower registers. They share these
characteristics with the Stele of Vultures and, like that monument, can
be argued to represent the climax of the narrative represented by the
stele as a whole. If Irene Winter is correct in reading the Stele of
Vultures (as well as the even earlier Uruk Vase) from bottom to top,24
17 Jutta Börker-Klähn, “Šulgi badet,” ZA 64 (1974): 235–240, esp. p. 237; cf. Hallo,
“Sumerian Religion,” Studies Kutscher (1993), 15–35, esp. pp. 18 f. Here: I.6.
18 Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once. . . (New Haven/London: Yale University
Press, 1987), 393 n. 24; Canby, “The Stela,” 217–218; The Stela, 17, n. 2.
19 Woolley, “Excavations at Ur, 1925–1926,” Antiquaries Journal 6 (1926); 365–401 and
pls. xliv–lxii, esp. pp. 371 f. and pl. xlvib.

20 So at least according to Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek
Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, tr. P. Bing (Berkeley etc.: University of California, 1983), 58; cf.
p. 72.
21 Heinz Genge, Stelen neuassyrischer Könige, Ph.D. Dissertation, Freiburg/Breisgau (2
vols., 1965); cf. idem, “Sinn und Bedeutung der Menhire,” Jahrbuch für Prähistorische und
Ethnographische Kunst (IPEK ), 122 (1966–1969), 105–113 and pl. 77.
22 R.J. Demaree, The #h ikr n R" -Stelae: on Ancestor Worship in Ancient Egypt (= Egyptol-
ogische Uitgaven 3) (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1983).
23 Ruth Melnikoff, “The Round-topped Tablets of the Law,” Journal of Jewish Art 1
(1974), esp. p. 6 and n. 35.

24 Or at least its “narrative” side (reverse) if not its “iconic” side (obverse); see Irene
Winter, “After the Battle is Over: The Stele of the Vultures and the Beginning of Historical
Narrative in the Art of the Ancient Near East,” in Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the
Middle Ages, ed. H.L. Kessler and M.S. Simpson, Studies in the History of Art 16 (1985),
11–26, esp. pp. 18–21.
and if André Parrot is correct in reading the Standard of Ur from

bottom to top, analogy and the power of tradition would suggest the
same sequence for our stele.25 This is by now the communis opinio, and
much the same goes for the notion that monuments generally narrate
the events of several years,26 although there are dissenters from both of
these positions.27
What then does the upper register of Side A represent? Jes Canby
suggests a sacred marriage and, indeed, the flowing water, and its
divine source, remind us of the cosmic aspect of this rite, intended to
assure the fertility of field and stream.28 The prominence of the lunar
crescent of Nanna and of the two seven-pointed stars, the symbols
of Inanna (as morning and evening star respectively?), in both top
registers might seem to bolster that interpretation for, as Cooper has
put it in the latest comprehensive survey of the institution, “Because
Inana was the daughter of the moon god Nanna-Suen, god of Ur, the
marriage of Ur III rulers to Inana had the added advantage of making
the kings of Ur sons-in-law of the god of their capital.”29
Nevertheless, the same evidence can be said to point elsewhere,
specifically to the designation of the high-priestess (en) of Nanna, who
served at the same time as devotee of Inanna at Uruk (or Karzida).30
This high-priestess was selected from the ranks of the royal progeny,
25 André Parrot, Sumer: the Dawn of Art (New York: Golden Press, 1961), 146 (at least
with respect to the side picturing “the king at war”).

26 See, e.g., Michelle I. Marcus, “Geography as an Organizing Principle in the
Imperial Art of Shalmaneser III,” Iraq 49 (1987): 77–90 and pls. 16–22, esp. p. 81; note,
however, that the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser reads from top to bottom, according to
Stephen J. Lieberman, “Giving Directions on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III,”
RA 79 (1985): 88.
27 Jerrold S. Cooper thinks that the narrative can run from top to bottom; see
“Mesopotamian Historical Consciousness and the Production of Monumental Art in

the Third Millennium bc,” in Investigating Artistic Environments in the Ancient Near East,
ed. Ann C. Gunter (Washington: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,
1990), 39–51, esp. p. 50, n. 37. V.K. Afanasieva thinks that the Ur-Nammu stele presents
“single-momentness of the action” rather than a succession of events; see “On the
Composition of the Ur-Nammu Stele,” in Studies Vinogradov (2000), 7–28 (in Russian;
English summary pp. 28 f.).
28 Canby, “The Stela,” 217.
29 Cooper, “Sacred Marriage and Popular Cult in Early Mesopotamia,” in Official
Cult and Popular Religion in the Ancient Near East, ed. E. Matsushima (Heidelberg: C. Win-
ter, 1993), 81–96, esp. p. 91.
30 Hallo and J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna, YNER 3 (New Haven/London:
Yale University Press 1968), 7–9.

accounting for the presence of the king in the scene. This was so
since the time of Sargon according to one reconstruction.31 In Winter’s
view, it could have begun even earlier,32 in Steinkeller’s, conceivably
later.33
As reconstructed by Canby, the top register of Side A prominently
features a female deity seated in the lap of a male deity. She regards
this as symbolic of love-making suitable to the sacred marriage, and
cites a plaque from Tello (Girsu) inscribed to the goddess Bau as an
iconographic parallel.34 But one searches in vain for textual confirma-
tion of the gesture in the richly attested love literature of Sumerian.
The knee (du10 = birku) is not mentioned there at all and as for the lap
(ùr = sûnu, utlu), it is more often the lap of the female partner that is
mentioned;35 when the male partner’s lap is alluded to, it is in the con-
text of lying in bed, not sitting in a chair;36 the only possible exceptions
to this rule are ambiguous on this point.37 The only textual evidence for
the gesture that I am aware of is that of lifting a child on one’s knees as
a sign of acknowledging paternity—whether natural or adoptive—or,
more generally, as a sign of legitimation; as such, it is attested equally
among Babylonians, Hittites, and Greeks,38 as Canby has pointed out
elsewhere,39 and can be reconstructed for Israel as well.40 A particu-
larly telling example is a Mari letter quoting the deity as saying of the
31 Ibid.
32 Winter, “Women in Public: The Disk of Enheduanna, the Beginning of the Office
of EN-Priestess and the Weight of Visual Evidence,” RAI 33 (1987), 189–201, esp. p. 196,
n. 31.
33 Piotr Steinkeller, “On Rulers, Priests and Sacred Marriage: Tracing the Evolution
of Early Sumerian Kingship,” in Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East, ed. K.
Watanabe (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999), 103–137, esp. p. 125, n. 77.
34 Canby, “The Stela,” 216 and pl. 47 (fig. 13).
35 See Yitschak Sefati, Love Songs in Sumerian Literature, Bar-Ilan Studies in Near
Eastern Languages and Culture (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1998), 105:188;
188:14, 16; 225:32; 305:35, 37; 306:64–66; CT 58:16:43 f.
36 Ibid. 105:189–190.
37 Ibid. 137:41; 225:7, 9.
38 J.D. Muhly, review of M.C. Astour, Hellenosemitica in JAOS 85 (1965): 585–588, esp.
pp. 586 f.; Hallo, review of RLA 3/1 in JAOS 87 (1987): 62–66, esp. p. 64.
39 “The Child in Hittite Iconography,” in Ancient Anatolia: . . . Essays in Honor of
Machteld J. Mellink, ed. J.V. Canby et al. (Madison, Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press,
1986), 54–69, esp. p. 69 nn. 24–25. It may be noted that her interest in this subject
prompted Dr. Canby’s investigation of the stele in the first place; cf. The Stele, 12.
40 Theodore H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York/
Evanston: Harper & Row, 1969), 788 f. No. 296 with reference to Job 3:12.
king, i. a., “Am I not Adad the lord of Kallassu who reared (raised?)
him between my thighs41 and restored him to the throne of his father’s
house?”42
The fact that there is no figure seated in the lap of the female
deity on the left side of Register A I is seen by Canby as further
evidence in favor of her interpretation of the entire scene as repre-
senting a sacred marriage. But it accords equally well with the notion
that it is the high priestess who is seated on the lap of the male deity.
Nor is her wearing the horned crown of divinity an objection to it,
since it has long been demonstrated that the high-priestesses of Nanna
shared some of the divine status of their royal parents, and donned and
doffed the characteristic divine headdress at will.43 The first of the line,
Enheduanna, “was considered the embodiment of the goddess Ningal,”
˘
and shared the title “hen of Nanna” (zirru) with her, according to Joan
Westenholz.44 One can also cite in this connection the translation of the
priestly title nin-dingir or rather ereš-dingir by “lady (who is) a deity” in
CAD, though this translation “obviously makes no sense” in the opin-
ion of Steinkeller.45 Finally, we may note with Canby that the stele stood
near the entrance to the temple of Ningal and the gipāru, the residence
of the high-priestess of Nanna, and at least one face of it would have
been visible to those walking there.46
Now for the remaining registers on “Side A.” Register II is relatively
very well preserved even after the removal of many of the elements
of the 1927 restoration. Canby does not offer an interpretation of the
scene, but it can be plausibly regarded as representing the investiture
or coronation of the king. While on the left he is shown libating to the
41 pahalliya, more properly “my testicles” according to Moran’s note.

42 ˘
Latest translation by W.L. Moran, ANET (3rd ed., 1969), 625; to the previous
translations listed there, add especially H.B. Huffmon, “Prophecy in the Mari letters,”
BA 31 (1968): 101–124, esp. pp. 106 f.; reprinted in The Biblical Archaeologist Reader 3 (1970),
199–224, esp. pp. 204 f.
43 Hallo, “Women of Sumer,” in The Legacy of Sumer, Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 4,
ed. D. Schmandt-Besserat (Malibu: Undena, 1976), 23–40 and 129–138, esp. pp. 32 f.,
136; cf. also Sjöberg, JCS 29 (1977): 16 and now Giorgio Buccellati, Studies Oates (2002),
16 f.
44 Joan Goodnick Westenholz, “Enheduanna, En-Priestess, Hen of Nanna, Spouse
of Nanna,” in Studies Sjöberg (1989), 539–556, esp. pp. 539, 541–544, citing i.a. Å. Sjöberg,
JCS 29 (1977): 16.
45 CAD E, 173d s.v. ēntu; Steinkeller, “On Rulers,” 121, n. 59.
46 The Stela, 7 f. and pl. 5.
seated statue of a goddess, presumably Ningal, on the right he is clearly

receiving the symbols of the royal office from the seated statue of a
god, presumably Nanna, each time in the company of a woman, pos-
sibly the queen. The regalia in question are familiar from the iconog-
raphy as well as the hymnography of the half millennium from Sar-
gon to Hammurapi or what may be called the “classical phase” of
Mesopotamian civilization. As in the stele(s) carved with the Laws of
Hammurapi, the king receives from the deity the rod and the ring, an
iconographic theme still echoed in early Kassite glyptic47 and late Kas-
site sculpture.48 Unlike these later treatments of the theme, however, the
ring in Ur-Nammu’s case is visibly associated with a rope,49 and thereby
hangs a tale.50
In the royal hymnography, the staff of royal (and divine) office is
routinely designated šibir2 = šibirru, but there is no term for “ring” in
the standard lists of regalia. Instead we meet repeatedly with a sign
differing from the šibir2-sign only by a prefixed u.51 The ligature that
results is variously read as šibir and eškiri, i.e., eš-kirix(KA),52 or “staff”
and “nose-rope” respectively. The conclusion seems inescapable that
the nose-rope was so regularly attached to the ring (and perhaps some-
times to the staff as well) that it gave its name to both. Indeed Canby
shares my opinion, albeit only in a footnote, where she says: “The
rope on our stela could rather be the rope to tie enemies by the nose-
ring used by Ishtar at the rockrelief of Anubanini. . . or Esarhaddon
at Sinjirli.”53 In contrast, Jacobsen saw here a measuring rope and a
47 Edith Porada and W.W. Hallo, “Cylinder of Kurigalzu I?” in Studies Hrouda (1994),
229–234 and pls. xxiii f.

48 Winfried Orthmann, Der Alte Orient, Propyläen Kunstgeschichte 14 (Berlin: Propy-
läen, 1975), fig. 190 and p. 305 (top of a stele from Susa, uninscribed).
49 Cf. two stele fragments from Tello showing a figure holding a coil of rope and a
peg, as noted by Claudia E. Suter, “Gudeas vermeintliche Segnungen des Eninnu,” ZA

87 (1997): 1–10 and figs. 1–4, esp. pp. 8 f. and figs. 3 f.
50 Cf. briefly Hallo, Origins (Leiden etc.: Brill, 1996), 199, and at length Agnes
Spycket, “La baguette et l’anneau: un symbole d’Iran et de Mésopotamie,” in Studies

Calmeyer (2000), 651–666. See also below, Appendix.
51 For both together cf., e.g., Åke W. Sjöberg, “Miscellaneous Sumerian Texts, III,”
JCS 34 (1982): 72 obv. 5’.

52 For eš-kiri written syllabically, see CAD s.v. serretu, “reins.” Proverbs such as
4 .
S.P. 1.153, formerly interpreted as “his nose has not borne the rope” (kiri4-ni eše nu-íl),
is now read “he . . . is not raised to prosperity” (kiri4-zal-šè nu-íl) by Bendt Alster, Proverbs
of Ancient Sumer (Bethesda, Md.: CDL, 1997), vol. 1, 31.
53 The Stela, 9, n. 66.
measuring staff, thus connecting the scene with the building activity
depicted in the next register below.54
In answer to Jacobsen, it may be further noted that, according to
royal hymns and inscriptions, both staff and nose-rope and, for good
measure, the scepter, were bestowed on the king so that he could
guide the people aright.55 This may best be illustrated by reference
to the Ur-Nammu hymn first edited by myself as “The Coronation of
Ur-Nammu” and more recently by Esther Flückiger-Hawker as “Ur-
Namma D” and by Tinney as “Ur-Namma the Canal-Digger.”56 I
would now translate lines 16 f. of this hymn: “He has pressed the holy
scepter for guiding (si si-e-sá) all the people in my hand / The nose-
rope and staff so that I might direct (he-lah4-lah4-e) all the numerous
˘ ˘
˘in the
people.” The use of the verb si-sá, “guide,” first image seems to
be a clear allusion to Ur-Nammu’s role as author of the Laws and thus
of the enactment of justice (níg-si-sá).
But we can be more specific still. Iconography and hymnography
alike conjure up the image of the king as “good shepherd” (sipa-zi
= rē"um kı̄num) first attested in the Cylinder Inscriptions of Gudea of
Lagash, then frequently in the hymns of Shulgi of Ur.57 With or without
other epithets, this image emphasizes the king’s concern with justice;
in the Hammurapi Dynasty, the epithet regularly occurs in those date-
formulas that refer to a royal proclamation of debt-release (mēšārum).58
This, then, is the ruler in his gentle, popular guise.
But the king can also be pictured as a stern and powerful oxherd,
able to control the fiercest bull by means of a ring fastened to the ani-
mal’s nose and connected to a rope by which the animal can be pulled
54 Thorkild Jacobsen, “Pictures and Pictorial Language (the Burney Relief ),” in
Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East, ed. M. Mindlen et al. (London: School of
Oriental and African Studies, 1987), 1–11, esp. p. 4: “The rod and the ring.”
55 Cf. simply CAD, S s.v. serretu A, and note the discussion there, adding the late
. .
copy of Akkadian royal inscriptions that refers to “the nose-rope of the people” (s. errat
nišē) divinely entrusted to Shulgi; cf. Frayne, RIME 3/2:134 i 9–13.
56 Hallo, “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu,” JCS 20 (1966): 133–141, here: III.2;
Esther Flückiger-Hawker, Urnamma of Ur in Sumerian Literary Tradition, Orbis Biblicus et

Orientalis 166 (Fribourg: University Press 1999), esp. pp. 228–259; Steve Tinney, “Ur-
Namma the Canal-digger: Context, Continuity and Change in Sumerian Literature,”
JCS 51 (1999): 31–54.
57 Klein, Three Šulgi Hymns: Sumerian Royal Hymns Glorifying King Šulgi of Ur. Bar-
Ilan Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Culture. (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan
University Press, 1981), 54 and n. 128.
58 Hallo, Early Mesopotamian Royal Titles: A Philologic and Historical Analysis. American
Oriental Series 43 (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1957), 147–149.

along. This is best illustrated by wall paintings from Old Babylonian

Mari showing bulls thus led to sacrifice.59 The rod, which in modern
usage can also be connected to the ring, was probably used in ancient
times by itself to push and prod the animal along, as suggested by the
proverbial saying that originally concluded Ecclesiastes (12:11):60 “Words
of wise men are like ox-goads, given (i.e., thrust) backward61 by a shep-
herd, and like scepters that are set up62 by the masters of the assem-
blies.” Such ox-goads are called usan3-bar-uš in Sumerian, qinnazu u
paruššu in Akkadian. Since they are not mentioned among the regalia,
it is possible that the šibir2 of the royal hymns refers to the shepherd’s
crook and the combination šibir2 eškiri to the king’s double function as
good shepherd and stern oxherd.
The clinching argument, however, comes from the iconography. A
remarkable stone carving in the collection of Jonathan P. Rosen (New
York), probably a mold intended for a work in beaten precious metal,
shows a victorious Akkadian king, perhaps Naram-Sin, in the act of
pulling his defeated enemies by means of rings held in his hand and
attached to ropes that pass through their noses; the ropes pass behind
the seated figure of a goddess and the gaze of the principals makes it
clear that the enemies look upon her as the source of their captivity.63
The next two registers (A III–IV) represent a single scene, but not
a simple one. In fact it is complex since, as already indicated, the two
registers are divided at most by only a single, dividing line, representing
a minimal baseline. Moreover, they reflect aspects of one and the same
activity, namely a building project. Exactly the same arrangement, and
with the same theme, characterizes the Stele of Gudea.64 In Register III,
the king carries over his shoulder, and with the help of an attendant,
two tools and a basket, perhaps intended to represent the first, ceremo-
59 Parrot, Sumer, figs. 344 f.

60 For the verses added by a pious Massorete (12–14), see Judah Goldin, “The End
of Ecclesiastes: Literal Exegesis and its Transformation,” in Biblical Motifs: Origins and
Transformations. Studies and Texts 3, ed. A. Altman (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1966), 135–158.
61 Reading #HR for #HD.
.
62 or NTWYM, “stretched out.”
63 Donald P. Hansen, “Through the Love of Ishtar,” in Studies Oates (2002), 91–112;
idem in Art of the First Cities, ed. Joan Aruz (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2003), 206 f. I am grateful to Mr. Rosen for letting me see the piece in advance of its
publication.
64 Ref. courtesy M. Noveck. See the reconstruction in Orthmann, Der Alte Orient 200,
fig. 36a.
nial basket of earth or clay. The tools have been described as an axe
and a plow65 respectively, but if the former is in fact an al, variously
translated as “pickaxe” or “hoe,” we may have here the pictorial com-
bination of pickaxe and hod that became the symbol of corvée labor,
known as dusu = tupšikku, literally “hod” or “mortarboard.”66 (Written
variously with gi, “reed,” or giš, “wood,” as a semantic indicator or
determinative, it was presumably a reed basket carried on the head or
mounted on a wooden pole for carrying by hand.)67
This is expressed most tellingly in the so-called Song of the Hoe, where
we read (lines 9 f.): “By distributing the shares of duty he (Enlil) estab-
lished daily tasks / and for the hoe and the (carrying) basket even wages
were established,” or again (line 98): “The hoe and the basket are the
tools for building cities.”68 The latter passage is echoed in the Hymn to
Nippur,69 which ends thus (iv 23–30): “In order to make all the Anunna
gods of heaven and earth do the work, he (Enlil) placed in their(!) hands
the hoe and plow that are for establishing cities.”70 This shows that
corvée labor was also the lot of the (lesser) gods before the creation of
humanity. Similarly, we read in the myth of Ninurta (Lugal-e ll. 336–
338): “Because the gods of the nation were ‘subjected’ (literally, made
to stand/serve), and had to carry hoe and basket (hod), that being their
corvée . . ..” Iconographically, the theme of the king as carrier of the
(first) hod is familiar from the canephore figurines of Ur-Nammu and
Shulgi, as well as Gudea.71
In Register IV, the king’s subjects carry baskets on their heads and
up a ladder to build what is presumably a temple or other monumen-
tal building. According to Andrea Becker, it could be part of a canal-
complex, since canals were known to involve structures along their
65 Canby, The Stela, 20.

66 Armas Salonen, Die Hausgeräte der alten Mesopotamier I, Annales Academiae Scien-
tiarum Fennicae B 139 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1965), 247–249.
67 For an example of the latter, see, e.g., Hallo, “Contributions to Neo-Sumerian,”
HUCA 29 (1958): 99 f., and pl. 22 = E. Sollberger, TCS 1:270. Sollberger translates
“levers.”
68 Gertrud Farber in COS 1 (1997), 511, 513.
69 UET 6/1:18; ed. by K. Oberhuber, ArOr 35 (1967): 262–270; duplicates published
by Sjöberg, “Miscellaneous Sumerian Texts I,” Orientalia Suecana 23–24 (1974–1975):

159–181, esp. pp. 159, 163 f., 174 f., 179.
70 Cf. Adam Falkenstein, “Die Anunna in der sumerischen Überlieferung,” Studies
Landsberger (1965), 127–140, esp. p. 132 and n. 69.

71 Hallo, “The Royal Inscriptions of Ur: a Typology,” HUCA 33 (1962): 1–43, esp.
pp. 10–11.
banks and were often named after these. Becker based her suggestion
on the assumption that the stele illustrated the narrative sequence of
The Coronation of Ur-Nammu.72 In their new editions of the text, neither
Esther Flückiger-Hawker nor Steve Tinney mention Becker’s interpre-
tation.73 It may, however, find some support from a fragmentary Ur-
Nammu hymn, which can be interpreted as giving him credit for restor-
ing the “house of the Inun-canal.”74
The register between IV and V, which on the other side of the stele
carries an inscription, is uninscribed on this side as far as preserved. For
the wholly lost bottom register, Jutta Börker-Klähn suggests a restora-
tion, based on the Gudea stele, of transport of materials over mountains
and water.75
Turning now back to Side B, the “poor face,” its Register II includes
a scene of slaughtering of bulls, almost certainly in the context of a
sacrificial act, since meat was rarely consumed on other occasions. The
case of the “Royal Correspondence of Ur” may be the exception that
proves this rule, since in it Irmu denounces Apillasha to Shulgi precisely
for the fact that, in Michalowski’s translation, “six grass fed oxen and
sixty grass fed sheep were placed (on the tables) for (a mere) lunch.”76
In passing, it may be noted that the proportion of one large to ten small
cattle is standard for the sacrificial cult in Ur III.
Rather, the topos of “slaughtering oxen and sacrificing sheep” is a
fixture of the description of festival rites.77 As such it already occurs in
an UD.GAL.NUN text from Abu Salabikh, though here both times
72 Becker, “Neusumerische Renaissance?” (above, n. 16), 290–295.

73 Flückiger-Hawker, Urnamma of Ur; Tinney, “Urnamma the Canal-digger.” But see
now Margarete van Ess, “Ein Bauwerk Amar-Suens vor den Mauern Uruk-Warkas,”
BaM 33 (2002): 89–108, esp. pp. 100 f., who connects the building in question with
Amar-Sin’s extensive canal-building operations, and notes that it was built entirely of
bricks stamped with his nine-line standard inscription, for which see Frayne, RIME 3/2:
245–247.
74 Miguel Civil, “Literary Text about Ur-Namma,” AuOr 14 (1996): 163–167. In i 6’
(not read by Civil), I would take in-nun-na-ke4 as a syllabic Ur III spelling for i7-nun-
na-ke4, and restore ki mi-in-gi4 or the like at the end.
75 Apud Orthmann, Der Alte Orient, 203 f.
76 Piotr Michalowski, The Royal Correspondence of Ur (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale, 1976),
142.
77 My translation attempts to render the difference between gu -gaz and udu-šár,
4
for which see Hartmut Waetzoldt, BiOr 32 (1975): 384, who says “der Unterschied der
Schlachtmethoden ist noch zu untersuchen.” For literary topoi in general, see A.J. Fer-
rara, “Topoi and Stock-strophes in Sumerian Literary Tradition: Some Observations,
Part I,” JNES 54 (1995): 81–117.
with the same verb.78 In classical Sumerian literature, it is typically

followed by mention of the pouring of beer and the playing of drums
and sometimes other instruments, for example in Shulgi’s Hymn A: 52–
54,79 in the myth Inanna and Enki (II iv 45–48),80 and in the Disputation
between Pickaxe and Plow.81 In the later bilingual tradition, the meaning of
the second verb is understood as “provided abundantly” or the like.82
The topos also occurs in the context of mourning, notably in Ur-
Nammu’s Death and Burial (11. 80–82 [81–83]), where we may read with
S.N. Kramer: “The king slaughters oxen, multiplies sheep, / They
seated Ur-Nammu at a huge banquet / Bitter is the food of the Nether-
world, brackish is the water of the Netherworld!”83 But the “banquet”
(or “banquet-table”) is written KI.KAŠ.GAR and can have the reading
gizbun (not šubun as in Kramer’s transliteration), and I have suggested
elsewhere that this word is a loan from Akkadian kispum, the funerary
repast.84 It is thus conceivable that the pictorial allusion in Register B II
is to the burial of the king. Given its position in the sequence of regis-
ters, however, this seems highly unlikely.
Register B III, according to Canby, shows the king, not the deity,
seated on a stool set on a high pedestal or podium.85 This judgment
is based primarily on the “humble seat, which occurs on the stela
only here,” though one could also cite the traces of the seated figure’s
garment, which seem not to represent the “tufted robe” or flounced
garment (“Zottenrock”) typically associated with divinity. In spite of the
fragmentary character of this register, it emphatically reminds us of the
formula by which the king is acclaimed in the Coronation of Ur-Nammu
(lines 7 f.): “Oh my king, on your throne by Enlil (and) Ashimbabbar
78 gu4 àm-ma-GÍR udu àm-ma-GÍR. Cf. W.G. Lambert, BSOAS 76, n. 7.

79 Klein, Three Šulgi Hymns 194 f., with variants šum and úš for šár.
80 Gertrud Farber-Flügge, Der Mythos “Inanna und Enki”. . . , Studia Pohl 10 (1973), 52 f.
and 89; based on PBS 5:25, partly restored.

81 Latest translation by H.L.J. Vanstiphout in COS 1 (1997):578–581. For this and
other references, see Hallo, “The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from
Mesopotamia and Israel,” in Studies Cross (1987), 11 and 13, n. 35, here: VII.2.
82 Cf., e.g., KAR 16 rev. 24 = 15 rev. 10: udu mu-un-na-ab-šár-re = UDU.MEŠ ú-da-
áš-ša-ši (from dešû).

83 Samuel Noah Kramer, “The Death of Ur-Nammu and His Descent to the
Netherworld,” JCS 21 (1967): 104–122, esp. p. 118. Latest edition by Flückiger-Hawker,

Urnamma 93–182, esp. p. 116.
84 Hallo, “Disturbing the Dead,” Studies Sarna (1993), 183–192, here: VII.3, esp.
pp. 191 f.; Origins (1996), 208.

85 The Stela 23.
(= Suen)! / Oh youth of Suen, on your throne by Enlil (and) Ashim-

babbar!”86 The first half of this formula recurs in the concluding doxol-
ogy of Nanna-Suen’s Journey to Nippur (II. 349), where Ferrara follows my
translation.87 Edzard took issue with the rendering,88 as did Wilcke.89
The newer renderings by Flückiger-Hawker and Tinney agree neither
with Edzard and Wilcke nor with each other. But given the evidently
formulaic character of the couplet, it remains likely that we are here
dealing with a formula of acclamation for the (new?) king. Register B IV
is better preserved and provides three discrete images: on the left the
playing of a great kettle-drum, on the right the seated statue of a deity
serviced by a priest, and in between a wrestling match. There is room
for a fourth image but not enough preserved to identify it. Canby inter-
prets Registers B III and IV as probably “a single episode which, like
the building activities on the opposite face, occupies two registers.”90
But in distinction to Registers A III and IV, Registers B III and IV
are divided by a full baseline and a double dividing line. The wrestling
match is thus not the central motif of the scene, observed by a seated
king on one end and a seated deity on the other. Rather, the focus of
B IV is on the (statue of the) seated deity on the right end much as the
focus of B III was on the seated king on the left end. The nude priest
servicing the deity is holding a towel in his right hand as the clothed
priest to his left is holding one in his left hand, and Börker-Klähn
took both to be involved in lustrations, after rejecting any connection
with the mouth-opening ceremony.91 But the nude priest appears to
be reaching approximately for the mouth of the statue with the whisk
(“Wedel”) in his left hand. That leaves little doubt that what is illus-
trated here is the ceremonial vivification of a divine statue by means of
the double ceremony known as mouth washing (ka-duh-a = pı̄t pı̄) and
˘
mouth opening (ka-luh-a = mı̄s pı̄) respectively.
˘
This double ceremony is attested as early as the Ur III period,
including once for a statue of (the deceased and deified) Gudea of
86 Hallo, “Coronation,” 141, here: III.2; Origins (1996), 129. For the reading of the
divine name, see M. Krebernik, RLA 8 (1993–1997), 362 f.

87 A.J. Ferrara, Nanna-Suen’s Journey to Nippur, Studia Pohl series maior 2 (1973), 106
and 155–157.
88 D.O. Edzard, review of Ferrara in ZA 63 (1973): 296–300, esp. pp. 299 f. and n. 10.
89 Claus Wilcke, RAI 19 (1974), 187.
90 The Stela 25.
91 Jutta Börker-Klähn, “Šulgi badet,” ZA 64 (1975): 235–240.
Lagash.92 It has now been dealt with in detail by Walker and Dick.93
It should be added, however, that—in Neo-Assyrian times at least—the
coronation of the king, whether a one-time or a recurrent event, was
accompanied by the mouth-washing ceremony. The ritual tablet of this
investiture ceremony was in fact originally thought to have belonged to
the mouth-washing series.94 As Angelika Berlejung has emphasized, it
is not the king’s mouth that is washed, nor does he enter the picture
till the mouth-washing has been carried out.95 Still, it establishes a
connection between the two rituals—investiture and mouth-washing—
that may already be anticipated in Registers B III and B IV.
Between Registers B IV and B V there is a relatively narrow band
entirely given over, so far as preserved, to an inscription.96 The inscrip-
tion includes the beginning of a curse formula typical of the royal
inscriptions of Ur,97 Isin,98 and Larsa.99 But for the rest it is entirely
devoted to canal-building. Now canals figure prominently in the cadas-
tre of Ur-Nammu,100 and the king is celebrated for his canal-building in
his date-formulas101 in his inscriptions,102 and in his coronation-hymn,
92 Cf. (Erica Reiner and) Miguel Civil, “Another Volume of Sultantepe Tablets,”
JNES 26 (1967): 177–211, esp. p. 211; previously Börker-Klähn, “Šulgi badet”; Nikolaus
Schneider, Die Götternamen von Ur III. AnOr 19 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum,
1939), 30.
93 Christopher Walker and Michael B. Dick, “The Induction of the Cult Image in
Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian mı̄s pî Ritual,” in Born in Heaven, Made on

Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East, ed. Michael B. Dick (Winona
Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 55–121.
94 G. Meier, “Die Ritualtafel der Serie ‘Mundwaschung’,” AfO 12 (1937–1939): 40–
45.
95 A. Berlejung, “Die Macht der Insignien,” UF 28 (1996): 1–35, esp. p. 17 and n. 87
(ref. courtesy Eckhart Frahm).

96 Latest edition by Tinney apud Canby, The Stela, 49–51. Previous edition by Frayne,
RIME 3/2:57 f., with earlier literature.

97 Shulgi 54 = Frayne, RIME 3/2:144–146: copy of a stele inscription in logographic
Sumerian, syllabic Sumerian, and Akkadian.

98 Note especially Iddin-Dagan 2 = Frayne, RIME 4:23 f., where lines 25 f. and 27
are verbatim identical to the stele inscription as restored.

99 Cf. the identical phrases in Abi-sare 1 = Frayne, RIME 4:121–124 v 21 f. and 25 f.
as emended by Frayne.
100 Latest edition by Frayne, RIME 3/2:50–56. A new fragment will be published
soon by Frayne and this author.

101 Formulas (m) and (q) in Frayne, RIME 3/2:17–19. In his The Historical Correla-
tions of the Sumerian Royal Hymns (2400–1900 bc ) (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Micro-
films, 1981), 74, Frayne also reconstructed a date commemorating the digging of the
Keshdaku-canal, but no such date formula has yet turned up.
102 Ur-Nammu 22–24, 27–28 and Al-Rawi, Sumer (1989–1990) = Frayne, RIME 3/2:
Ur-Nammu Nos. 19, 26–28, 39–40.

where, indeed, this achievement figures as his foremost claim to king-

ship in the first place.103 Moreover, at least one and possibly two of the
very canals identified by name on the Stele were dug by Ur-Nammu
according to his inscriptions.104 Shulgi, on the other hand, has not a
single canal-building project to his credit in all his 48 regnal years.105
This then is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of assigning the
stele as a whole to Ur-Nammu, even if his name is no longer on
it.
But there are other arguments. We may note them here without
pausing for Register B V, whose fragmentary scene of royal sacrifice
adds little or nothing in the way of new details. I would argue that the
stele is, in effect, a commemoration of the first part of Ur-Nammu’s
eighteen-year reign. If read from bottom to top, it recalls successively
his canal-building in the inscription on Side B, and other building
activity (possibly connected with the canals) on Side A (Registers III
and IV), which earned him his coronation that, on other grounds, “can
hardly have taken place earlier than his fourth year.”106 This coronation
is symbolized by Register A II, while the popular acclamation that
accompanied it (or perhaps preceded or followed it) is symbolized by
Register B III. The details of the coronation scene, moreover, strongly
hint at the king’s role as lawgiver, a role that should be attributed to
Ur-Nammu, not Shulgi, in light of new evidence.107
The ritual scenes in Register B IV seem to involve the dedication of
a divine statue, while that in B II may involve the dedication of a divine
chariot if the traces on the right are correctly so interpreted. A date
formula commemorating the fashioning, presumably at Nippur, of a
chariot for Ninlil, the consort of Enlil, is attested, and Frayne assigns it
103 For an appreciation of Ur-Nammu’s canal-building efforts, see already T. Jacob-

sen, “The Waters of Ur,” Iraq 22 (1960): 174–185 and pl. xxviii; rep. in Toward the Image
of Tammuz . . . , Harvard Semitic Series 21, ed. W.L. Moran (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1970), 230–243.
104 “ ‘Nanna-gugal’, the boundary canal” of Ningirsu or Nanna (Ur-Nammu 28) and
possibly Inun(na), the great canal of Nanna (Ur-Nammu 24 = 40).

105 The closest he comes is in the inscriptions Shulgi 8 = Frayne, Ur III Period 125,
commemorating a weir (giš-kéšd-rá), and Shulgi 71 (Kärki) = Frayne, RIME 3/2:140 f.

(from Susa?), commemorating a ditch or moat (hirı̄tum).
106 Hallo, “Coronation,” 139, here: III.2. ˘
107 See the forthcoming article above, n. 100. A new example of the Code in BAR 28/
5 (Sep/Oct 2002): 29 f. does not settle the issue.

to Ur-Nammu in part on the basis of the Stele.108 (A chariot for Enlil is

commemorated in a hymn of Ishme-Dagan of Isin.)109 Finally, the over-
sized top-registers on both faces appear to commemorate the installa-
tion of a royal daughter as high-priestess of the moon-god Nanna at
Ur—presumably En-nirgalanna110 on Side A, and perhaps of a son as
high-priest of Inanna at Uruk (his selection was commemorated in Ur-
Nammu’s fifth date-formula according to Waetzoldt)111 on Side B or,
alternatively, both top registers illustrate the former event.
Without wishing to claim that each register can be unambiguously
identified with a dated event in the early reign of Ur-Nammu, I would
submit that enough points of contact have been established with occur-
rences in his reign attested in other sources to maintain the long-
asserted connection of the Stele with the founder of the Ur III Dynasty.
At the same time, the Stele can be added to the “one class of work in
the corpus of ancient Near Eastern art—the battle scene” that meets
Winter’s definition of pictorial narrative.112 Like one side of the earlier
“Standard of Ur” it shows the king at peace, and like the Stele of Vul-
tures, it represents Sumerian history in pictures.
Appendix
Further to the rod and ring (above at nn. 50–63), the following details
may be provided.113
While rod and rope begin as early as the Ur-Nammu stele, rod
and ring do not appear in the iconography before the extraordinary
seal design of Lugal-engardu dedicated to Amar-Sin, first published by
108 RIME 3/2:17. Three of the four texts cited by Frayne have been republished by
G. Pettinato as MVN 6 (1977), 515, 517, and 521, and dealt with by Daniel C. Snell,
“The Rams of Lagash,” ASJ 8 (1986): 133–217, esp. pp. 142, 160; Snell dates them to
Shulgi 3.
109 M. Civil, “Ishme-Dagan and Enlil’s Chariot,” JAOS 88 (1968): 3–14, repr. Studies
Speiser 3–14; cf. Klein, “Building and Dedication Hymns in Sumerian Literature,” ASJ
11 (1989): 27–67, esp. pp. 36: “Appendix 1: A Revised Edition of Išmedagan I.”
110 Ur-Nammu 35 = Frayne, RIME 3/2:87 f.
111 Hartmut Waetzoldt, “Zu einigen Jahresdaten Urnammus,” N.A.B.U. 1990:4 No. 6.
112 Winter, “After the Battle,” (above, n. 24), 12.
113 Cf. already my remarks in “Cylinder of Kurigalzu I?” (above, n. 47), Origins
(above, n. 50), and in Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World, ed. by
Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine. Peabody Museum Bulletin 5. (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University, 1996), pp. 61 (as reported by Eva von Dassow) and 64.
Buchanan in 1972,114 and again in 1981,115 and redrawn from additional

impressions by Zettler in 1987.116 In the same year it was discussed by
Winter in the context of the legitimation of authority of officials in
the Ur III administrative bureaucracy,117 and more recently, based on
Zettler, by Canby.118 The theme survived as a symbol of royal authority
in Iran on rock reliefs of the Old Elamite period (ca. seventeenth
century bce),119 and possibly even into Sassanian times.120
The interpretation of both rod and ring and rod and rope as measur-
ing tools goes back at least to Frankfort,121 though greatly strengthened
by Jacobsen with textual as well as iconographic evidence.122 They are
followed by Black and Green,123 Englund124 and others.
The question remains: given the fact that the ring is not remotely
associated with measurements, how could it evolve out of the image
of rod and rope? Perhaps Frankfort had the answer when he suggested
that “since measuring instruments may metaphorically become symbols
of justice, it is understandable that they became a general emblem
of divinity, generally simplified as ‘ring and staff.’ ”125 Ten years later,
in the first major study of the themes, van Buren claimed that both
114 Briggs Buchanan, “An Extraordinary Seal Impression of the Third Dynasty of
Ur,” JNES 31 (1972): 96–101. For the seal inscription, see Hallo, “The House of Ur-
Meme,” ibid. 87–95.
115 Buchanan, Early Near Eastern Seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection (New Haven/
London: Yale University Press, 1981), No. 681; for the seal inscription see Hallo, ibid.
454.
116 Richard L. Zettler, review of Buchanan, JNES 46 (1987): 59–62, esp. p. 60.
117 Irene J. Winter, “Legitimation of Authority through Image and Legend: Seals
Belonging to Officials in the Administrative Bureaucracy of the Ur III State,” in The

Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East. SAOC46(1987), 69–106,
esp. p. 78.
118 Canby, The Stela 22 and pl. 14b.
119 Ursula Seidl and P.O. Skjaervo, Iranische Felsreliefs H: Die elamischen Felsreliefs von
Kurnagun und Naqs-e Rustam. Iranische Denkmäler 12. Reihe II. (Berlin: Reimer, 1986),
p. 20.
120 Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl, Ein asiatischer Staat: Feudalismus unter den Sasaniden
und ihren Nachbarn (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1954), 241–243, Abb. 6; interpreted as the
enthroned Sassanian King Artabanos V and a satrap standing in front of him.
121 Henri Frankfort, Cylinder Seals (London: Macmillan, 1939), 179.
122 Jacobsen, “Pictures and Pictorial Language” (above, n. 54), 4.
123 Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 156 s.v.

124 “I have normally explained the rod and ring to my students as signs of royal
standards, the rod the GI [= reed] used in urban, the ‘ring’ the ESH2 used in rural /
agricultural linear measurements” (Letter of 9/20/99).
125 Cylinder Seals (1936), 179.
rod and ring and rod and rope were represented, as divine symbols,
on the stele of Ur-Nammu.126 But she rejected the suggestion “that as
the symbol originally represented measuring implements its significance
was later extended metaphorically to symbolize the measuring out
of justice.”127 More recently the notion has found a new defender in
Cooper, who illustrates the disconnect between text and image in the
third millennium by reference to the “measuring line and cord held out
to Ur-Nammu on the Ur-Nammu stele” but adds that “these objects
metamorphose in later centuries into ‘rod and ring.’ ”128
The problem is avoided if both manifestations are treated as royal
rather than only divine insignia. In his survey of the subject, Krecher
emphasized that deities and kings shared the same insignia; in both
cases these included staff and nose-rope, but the ring (GAN-ma, kip-
patu) only occurs late and only with deities.129 Rod and nose-rope, on
the other hand, are frequently mentioned together in the literature of
all periods. For rod and nose-rope as symbols of royal authority cited
in this order, see above, n. 51; for the opposite order see, e.g., the hymn
Ishme-Dagan A in the recension published by Sollberger130 and dis-
cussed by Frayne.131 Most significantly, they occur together—originally
four times—as one(!) of the royal attributes in the myth Inanna and
Enki.132
It is also noteworthy that the profession of kir4-dab, kartappu, liter-
ally “the one who holds the nose-(rein),” became a general term for
“groom” and later developed into a high administrative official.133
126 E. Douglas van Buren, “The Rod and Ring,” ArOr 17/2 (1949): 434–450 and pls.
ix–xi, esp. p. 436, referring to Legrain, MJ18 (1927), 96. However, Canby lists this piece
among “fragments from other monuments” (The Stela, 56 sub El).
127 “The Rod and Ring,” 435.
128 Jerrold S. Cooper, “Mesopotamian Historical Consciousness and the Production
of Monumental Art in the Third Millennium bc,” in Investigating Artistic Environments in

the Ancient Near East, ed. by Ann C. Gunter (Washington: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery,
1990), 39–51, esp. p. 46.
129 Joachim Krecher, “Insignien,” RLA 5 (1976–1980), 109–114.
130 UET 8 (1965), 95 iii 8’.
131 Douglas Frayne, “New Light on the Reign of Išme-Dagān,” ZA 88 (1998): 6–44,
esp. p. 10 iii 62a.

132 Gertrud Farber, Der Mythos “Inanna und Enki”, (Rome: Biblical Institute, 1973);
p. 28:19, 54:7. Eadem, “Inanna and Enki,” in COS 1:522–526; note she translates “staff
and rein” here (523 II).
133 CAD K, s.v.
Abbreviations
COS 1 The Context of Scripture, vol. 1: Canonical Compositions from

the Biblical World, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson
Younger, Jr. (Leiden etc.: Brill, 1997).
RAI 19 Le Palais et la Royauté, ed. Paul Garelli, Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale 19 (Paris: Geuthner,
1974).
RAI 33 La Femme dans le Proche-Orient Antique, ed. J.-M. Durand,
Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale 19 (Paris:
Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations).
RAI 34 Relations between Anatolia and Mesopotamia, ed. H. Erkanal
et al. Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale 34
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1998).
RIME 3/2 D.R. Frayne, Ur III Period (2112–2004 bc), The Royal
Inscriptions of Mesopotamia. Early Periods 3/2
(Toronto: University of Toronto, 1997).
RIME 4 Frayne, Old Babylonian Period (2003–1595 bc), The Royal
Inscriptions of Mesopotamia 4 (1990).
Studies Calmeyer Variatio Delectat: Iran und der Westen: Gedenkschrift für Peter
Calmeyer, ed. R. Dittmann et al. AOAT 272. (n. 50).
Studies Cross Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore
Cross, ed. P.D. Miller et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987).
Studies Hrouda Beiträge zur altorientalischen Archäologie und Altertumskunde:
Festschrift fur Barthel Hrouda. . ., ed. P. Calmeyer et al.
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994).
Studies Kutscher Kinattūtu ša dārâti: Raphael Kutscher Memorial Volume (Tel
Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, 1993).
Studies Landsberger Studies in Honor of Benno Landberger . . ., Assyriological
Studies 16 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
Studies Oates Of Pots and Pans: Papers. . . Presented to David Oates. . ., ed.
L. al-Gailani Werr et al. (London, 2002).
Studies Sarna Minh. ah le-Nah. um: . . . Studies Presented to Nah. um N. Sarna
. . ., ed. M. Brettler and M. Fishbane (JSOTS 154, 1993).
Studies Sjöberg Dumu-e2-dub-ba-a: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed.
H. Behrens et al. (Philadelphia: University Museum,
1989).
Studies Speiser Essays in Memory of E.A. Speiser, ed. W.W. Hallo,
American Oriental Series 53 (New Haven: American
Oriental Society, 1968).
Studies Vinogradov Assiriologia e Egiptolgia, ed. Natalia Koslova and
A.B. Nemirobskae (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg
University Press, 2000).
vii
myths and epics
vii.1
LUGALBANDA EXCAVATED
I. Introduction
When he first heard of my call to Yale two decades ago, Professor

Kramer immediately urged me to devote myself to the large corpus
of Sumerian literary texts in the Yale Babylonian Collection. He was
familiar with their riches, having been the first to prepare a systematic
catalogue of them based on his own identifications and those of Goetze,
Stephens and others. Among them, the large tablet numbered YBC
4623 particularly interested him. He asked me to copy it for him so
that it could be incorporated in an edition of the full text by him or
one of his students. Accordingly I prepared a copy, complete except for
dividing lines, and submitted it to him in 1965. Sol Cohen was thus
enabled to incorporate the text of the Yale tablet in his preliminary
edition of the entire composition, from which I in turn have greatly
benefited. But neither his edition nor my copy has been published,
and it thus seems appropriate to make at least the latter available in
this volume. While there is no intention to anticipate the definitive
edition, an attempt will be made to provide an overview of the whole
text, and an appreciation of the significance of the central portion of it
which the Yale exemplar covers. Duplicates will be taken into account
as far as they are published. The reader’s indulgence is requested for
the imperfections of a copy made before many of these duplicates
were available or known to me; a few improvements, plus dividing
lines, have been added to the copy by Randall McCormick. The text
of the composition was the subject of a seminar in Sumerian Myths
and Epics offered in the fall of 1980; the members of that seminar
(Mary Rebecca Donian, Jean Svendsen and Marc Van De Mieroop)
provided a critical sounding-board for some of the suggestions now
offered here.
A word about the name of the composition may be in order first. Its
incipit was restored as u4-ul-an-ki-ta by J. Klein, JAOS 91 (1971), 297,
but as long as the restoration is uncertain, it is risky to employ it as the
496 vii.1. lugalbanda excavated
modern designation. More commonly, it is referred to as “Lugalbanda

in (or and) Hurrumkurra,” and indeed these elements represent the
protagonist and principal scene of the composition. But it is not wholly
clear whether the latter term is a toponym or a generic term (“cave
of the mountain” or the like; Klein, ib. 296 f. n. 7; previously Kramer
in La Poesia Epica, 1970, 827, n. 9.). Since there can be little doubt of
the intimate connection (including verbatim resemblances) between this
composition and the so-called Lugalbanda-epic, and since the action of
the former clearly precedes that of the latter, it is here proposed to refer
to the two compositions as Lugalbanda I and II respectively. (Note that
Klein, Kramer AV, 1976, 288 ad 1.57, seems to do likewise.) For the latter,
the edition of C. Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos (1969; hereafter cited as
LE) provides an indispensable guide; Wilcke has also edited much of
the first half of Lugalbanda I, as indicated below. Significant portions
of the second half were dealt with by Cohen, first in his dissertation,
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (University of Pennsylvania, 1973), 10–14,
and then in his “Studies in Sumerian lexicography,” Kramer Anniversary
Volume [AOAT 25] 1976, 99–101.
II. Structure of the Composition
The basic themes and structure of Lugalbanda I have been character-

ized by B. Alster in JCS 26 (1974), 180 n. 9 and in the Kramer Anniversary
Volume (1976), 15 and may be further refined to yield the following out-
line (previous treatments in parentheses):
A. Exordium
1–11 “Prologue in heaven”: the separation of heaven and earth
12–18 Uruk given to Enmerkar the son of the Sun (Utu)
19–39 Levy and departure of the troops of Enmerkar (Wilcke, LE, 196)
40–56 The first part of the march to Aratta (LE, 35 f.)
57–69 The seven brothers and friends (LE, 49 f.)
70–72 ?
73–82 Lugalbanda becomes ill (LE, 189 f.)
83–136 The brothers and friends deal with Lugalbanda’s illness (LE, 54–60)
vii.1. lugalbanda excavated 497
B. The Argument-Part I
137–168 Lugalbanda prays to the Sun at dusk (LE, 78–81)
169–195 He prays to the evening-star (Inanna) (LE, 68 f.)
169–222 He prays to the moon (Su"en) (LE, 75–77)
223–256 He prays to the Sun at dawn (LE, 81–84)
C. The Argument-Part II
257–276 Lugalbanda leaves the cave
277–291 He lights a fire to bake cakes and bait a trap
292–316 He captures an aurochs and two(?) goats (Cohen, ELA, 10–14; in
part: Kramer AV, 99–101)
317–338 He lies down to sleep
339–353 Lugalbanda’s dream
354–376 The dream fulfilled: the divine repast (tākultu)
D. Peroration
377–386 The moon appears
387–445 The powers of darkness arrive from the apsû
446–475 lnanna arrives as the morning–star and enters the gate of battle
476–490 The Sun rises and the powers of light and justice fill the universe
(text breaks off )
Assuming that the text as now extant is nearly complete, it thus can
be broken down into three “rhetorical” portions (cf. a similar analysis
proposed for nin-me-šár-ra by Hallo and van Dijk, The Exaltation of
Inanna, 1968) and four sections of more or less similar length. The
Yale exemplar covers the first 88 lines (out of 120) of the third of these
sections (plus the immediately preceding line as a catchline?) and it is
this section to which the following brief remarks will be addressed.
III. The Argument-Part II
Mythic and epic elements are conspicuously intermingled in Lugal-

banda I. We are thus entitled to look behind the plain sense of the
narrative even of a seemingly straightforward section like the one under
discussion for some more transcendent meaning, perhaps, more partic-
ularly, for an aetiology. Aetiology informs many a myth: it is the expla-
nation of a presently observed condition by appeal to an imaginary
one-time event in the past or, in other words, the use of the punctual
to explain the durative (cf. Hallo, 17 RAI, 1970, 117 n. 1, here: I.2; cited
with approval by F.R. Kraus, Vom mesopotamischen Menschen, 1973, 132).
But aetiologies (along with proverbs!) are also found in Sumerian epic,
as noted, e.g., by G. Komoróczy (“Zur Ätiologie der Schrifterfindung
im Enmerkar–Epos,” AoF 3, 1975, 19–24). And it is possible that there is
one here.
Lugalbanda is alone (note the recurrent emphasis on this fact, e.g. in
lines 271 and 317; cf. also l. 286 and in Lugalbanda II lines 231 f. = 335 f.)
as befits an epic hero (cf. Alster, JCS 26, 1974, 180), and must fend for
himself. In so doing, he recapitulates what for the author may have
constituted the beginnings of an essential aspect of civilized human
life—the consumption of animal meat. Both the practical and the ritual
aspects of this process are spelled out in detail. By his own efforts,
Lugalbanda traps and tethers the wild animals. He then gets divine
approval in a dream for slaughtering them. In repeating the latter
action in his waking state, he confirms the divine approval by inviting
the four principal deities of the Sumerian pantheon to a ritual meal.
These deities are entirely distinct from the three (astral) deities who
hear Lugalbanda’s four prayers in Section B and who dominate the
denouement in Section D, thus underlining the discrete and possibly
aetiological character of Section C.
Both aspects of this section—the “practical” and the ritual—are
worthy of deeper study than present space permits. Suffice it only to
note here that Lugalbanda seems to employ a combination of methods
to catch and dispatch his quarry. As interpreted below, he first places
a trap (giš-umbin; l. 264) on the ground, then baits it with dainties
(l. 288); the aurochs stumbles into the trap (l. 294; not repeated in
the goat-passage); both it and the goat(s) are caught in the ambush
(restoring [šubtu]mx-ma-na in ll. 301 and 313) or, more likely, by the
snare (restoring [giš-di]m-ma-na) presumably attached to the trap; all
are tethered with rope made of rushes (ll. 305–316). In slaughtering
the animals, a pit (si-du11-ga) seems to have been of practical or ritual
importance, receiving the blood (ll. 349–359) and providing a site for
the divine repast (l. 365).
The practical role of pits and pitfalls, and to a lesser degree of traps,
has received a great deal of attention in Assyriological circles of late.
A brief review of the literature may therefore be in order. The older
evidence was summed up in one short paragraph by E. Ebeling. RLA
3/1 (1957) 5. My review (JAOS 87, 1967, 64) noted, i.a., the contribution
by A.K. Grayson, “Ambush and animal pit in Akkadian,” in Studies . . .

Oppenheim (1964) 90–94. Grayson returned to the subject in 1970 with
his “New evidence on an Assyrian hunting practice” in J.W. Wevers
and D.B. Redford, eds., Essays on the Ancient Semitic World, 3–5. In the
same year, G. Dossin discussed ARM 14:2 in “Une capture de lion
au Habour,” Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, Lettres 27.7.1970.
pp. 307–320. M. Held dealt with “Pits and pitfalls in Akkadian and
Biblical Hebrew” in the Gaster Volume (JANES 5:173–190) in 1973. In
the same year, A. Salonen devoted a chapter to “Vogelfanggeräte”
in his Vögel und Vogelfang im alten Mesopotamien (Teil II). In 1976, he
followed this with a chapter on “Jagd- und Fanggeräte der Jäger” in his
monograph on Jagd und Jagdtiere im alten Mesopotamien (Teil II), as well as
a briefer article on “Die Fallgruben der sumerischen Jäger,” in Kramer
Anniversary Volume (AOAT 25), 399 f. Finally, mention may be made of
P. Michalowski’s “An Old Babylonian literary fragment concerning
Kassites,” AION, Ann. 41 (1981), 389 f. and of M. Greenberg’s “Two
new hunting terms in Psalm 140:12,” Hebrew Annual Review 1 (1977), 149–
153. The wealth of lexical and technical data assembled in these and
other studies cannot be exploited here.
The ritual aspect is also extremely intriguing. If indeed the text offers an
aetiology of meat-consumption, it is interesting that the highest figures
of the pantheon are invoked to render the (original) act acceptable.
What this suggests is that the act evoked guilt feelings and that these
were assuaged by turning mere consumption into a ritual act, making
it sacred, a sacrifice. Comparable notions have been detected in the
Old Sumerian archival texts by Y. Rosengarten, Le Concept sumérien de
consommation dans la vie économique et religieuse (1960), and in the Levitical
legislation of the Pentateuch (see my “Leviticus and Ancient Near
Eastern literature,” in W.G. Plaut, B.J. Bamberger, and W.W. Hallo, The
Torah: a Modern Commentary (1981), 740–748, and previously J. Milgrom,
“A prolegomenon to Leviticus 17:11,” JBL 90 [1971], 149–156).
IV. The Text
The transliteration is based on the Yale exemplar (A) as far as l. 344,

and on CBS 7085 (Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer, 1956, 246) thereafter
(F). Restorations [in brackets] in the text and variants in the footnotes
are cited from published duplicates according to the following sigla:
Siglum Museum No. Place of Publication Lines of Text

A YBC 4623 below 256–344
B HS 1449 TMH n. F. 3: 8; 282–308
Wilcke, Kollationen, 16
C HS 1471 TMH n. F. 3: 9; 325–342;
Wilcke. Kollationen, 17 387–396
D HS 1479 TMH n. F. 3:10; 1–258
cf. Wilcke, Kollationen, 18
E CBS 10885 HAV 4 288–252;
253–274
F CBS 7085 Kramer, FTS 246 327–387;
(obv. only) History Begins at 388–441
Sumer 3 (1981), 242
G Ni. 9933 ISET 1. 198 306–310;
325–333
H Ni. 4405 ISET 2:43 307–313(or 294–301?);
321–329
I Ni. 4553 ISET 2:45 277–302;
336–348
J Ni. 9913 ISET 1:196 308–319;
321–323?
K Ni. 4441 ISET 1:156 351–359;
376–379
L Ni. 2511 SRT 33 357–374
M 3 N–T 917, SLFN pl. 8 256–262;
368 283–285
N 3 N–T 919, SLFN pl. 8 345–359
467
O 3 N–T 902, SLFN pl. 7 290–296
74
Z 6 N–T 638 (Cohen, ELA, 10–14; Kramer (292–316)
AV 99–101) (Ur III exemplar)
(Note that A has 10–line marks in the left margin.)
Based on the assumption of a text of approximately 495 lines, a tenta-

tive typology of the published manuscripts may be offered here along
the lines laid down by Hallo and van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna
[YNER 3], 1968, 38 f. The suggested joins (indicated by +) remain to
be tested against the originals.
(1) One–tablet recension in 10 columns of about 50 lines each: SEM 20

+(?) SEM 111
(2) Two–tablet recension in 11 columns of about 45 lines each:
a. Tablet I (1–258): D; ISET 2:42 Ni. 4291
b. Tablet II (259–495)
(3) Three–tablet recension in 10 columns of about 50 lines each:
a. Tablet I (1–200): ISET 2:44 Ni. 9677
(4) Five–tablet recension in 9 columns of about 55 lines each:
a. Tablet I (1–109)
c. Tablet III (219–326)
d. Tablet IV (327–441): F
e. Tablet V (442–495)
(5) Six–tablet recensions in 11 columns of 40–50 lines each:
a. Tablet I (1–90) (1–81)
b. Tablet II (91–179): ISET (82–162)
1:202 Ni. 9959;*
c. Tablet III(180–255) (163–243)
d. Tablet IV (256–344): A (244–324)
e. Tablet V (345–430) (325–396): C + K + L
f. Tablet VI (431–495) (397–495)
(6) Seven–tablet recension in 14 columns of about 35 lines each:
a. Tablet I (1–69)
c. Tablet III (139–207)
d. Tablet IV (208–276)
e. Tablet V (277–328): G + H + I + J
f. Tablet VI (329–422)
g. Tablet VII (423–495)
(7) Ten–tablet recension in ± 20 columns of about 25 lines each:
c. Tablet III (87–133): CT 42:46
e. Tablet V (227–274): E
j. Tablet X (430–487): TRS 90
(8) 13–Tablet recension in 25 columns of about 20 lines each:
c. Tablet III (82–120): OECT 1 pl. xix
(9) Fragments: M, N, O
ISET 1:138: Ni. 4276; 153 Ni. 4427; 140 Ni. 4237
(10) Exercise tablet: B (note dittography of ll. 282–285)
*TMH n. F. III 11 + ISET 1: 128 f. Ni. 4012 f. + ISET 2:44 Ni. 9648
V. Transliteration
ADEM 256 ur-sag dumu dnin-gal-la me-téš héa-[i] i -[ne]

ADEM 257 u4-bi-a zi-du šà-kúša d En-líl-lá-ka˘b
ADM 258 ú!a-nam-ti-la ìb -[im-mú]c
AEM 259 i7 [ hal-h]al-la ama-hur-[sag]-gá-ke4 a-nam-ti-la
im-túm ˘ a˘ ˘
AEM 260 ú-nam- ti -la- ka KA nam-mi-in-[gub]
AEM 261 a-nam-ti-la- ka DUB nama-rig7
AEM 262 ú-nam-ti-la KA hé-im-gub-bu-a-ka
AE 263 a-nam-ti-la DUB˘ hé-im-rig7-a-ka
AE ˘ b-ni ki mu-un-dab -dab
264 gú-e-ta giša umbin-diš 5 5
AE 265 ki -bi-ta anše-kur-kur- ra -gim àm-gul-e
a
AE 266 dùrùr-AŠ.DU.GIMa-dšakan-nab-ke4 hur-sag ì-si-il-(le)

AE 267 dùrùr-urux(EN)-gal-gim kušu(U.PIRIG) ˘ ì-tag!-tag-ge
AE 268 anše-libir kas4-e kin-gá-àm ím-mi-DU.DU
a
AE 269 gi6-bi-ta u4-te-en-(na-šè?) na-DU

AE 270 hur-sag (šà-sig) dEN.ZU-naa-ka?b kas4 mi-ni-ib-kar-
˘
kar-re
AE 271 aša-a-nib lú-igi-nigin lú nu-mu-un-dad -abe-bar-re
AE 272 kušmaš-ali-uma níg-si-sá-e
AE 273 kuša-gá-lá-e níg-sá-du11-du11-gea
AE 274 šeš-a-ne-ne ku-li-ne-ne
A 275 a-šed7,-gim ninda ki-e mu-un-da-an-du8-uš-àm
A 276 kù-dLugal-(bàn-d)a hur-ru-um-kur-ra-ta im-ma-ra-an-
íl-íl ˘
AI 277 gú-izi-ur5-ra-ka ba-an-sa4
?
AI 278 gišbuginx-ÚR a bí-in-ra / igi-ni-šè mu-un-taa-gar-ra

mu-un-si-i(l)b
AI 279 na4!-ga? šu im-ma-an-ti
AI 280 téš -bi! hé-im-ra-ra-a-t(a)
AI 281 ù-dúb-gùn ˘ ma-ra-sig edin-ea ba-ni-i[n-k(u )?]
4
ABBI 282 na4KA-sa ì-la izi bí-in-(mú)?
ABBIM 283 izi-bi šà-sig-ga u4-gim mua-na-an- è
ABBIM 284 ninda-gúg-du8 nu-zu im-šu-rin-na nu-zu
ABBIM 285 izi-ur5-imin-ta ninda-gi-izia-eš-b dé-ab ba-rac-an-du8
ABI 286 ninda ní-bi-a en-na àm-šeg-šeg6
ABI 287 gi-šul- hi -kur-ra úr-ba mi-in-in-sù-sù pa-ba
mi-ni-in-suh-suh
ABI 288 gúa-en-gúg-ga-ka pad babbar-šè KA ba-ni-in-íl-íl
ABI 289 ninda-gúg-du8 nu-zu im-šu-rin-na nu-zu
ABIO 290 izi-ur5-imin-ta ninda-gi-izi-eš-dé-a ba-ra-an-du8
ABIO 291 aninda ní-bi-a en-na šég-šèg
ABIO 292 am-síg am-sa7 am-si-agùr-gùra
ABIO 293 am-šà-sig-ga nam-aa-a-ak
ABIO 294 am-si-si hur-sag ki-sikil-la umbin-bi kin-gá

ABGHIO 295=307 ù -ur5-re šim-gig še-àm ì-tukur2-rea
ABGHIJO 296=308 gišaha-šu-úr-ra únumun -bur-[g]imb ì-KA
2 × ŠÈ-KA × ŠÈ
ABGHIJ 297=309 pa-giša še-nu úKI. KAL-gim úb ka-ba mu-un-simc
ABHIJ 298=310 a-i7-hal-hal-la-kaa i-im-nag-nag-NEb
AHIJ 299=311 úi-li-in-anu-uša ú-sikil-kur-ra-ke b bu-lu-úh mu-un-si-il-
4
si-il-le
A 312 máš- si4 (máš-ù)z ú-a su8-[ba]-bi
AI 300 am-si4 am-kur-ra ú-a su8-ba-bi
AI 301=313 diš-àm (giš-di)m-ma-na im-ma-ra-an-dab5
AI 302 gišše-dùg-kur-ra úr-ba mi-ni-in-sù-sù pa-ba mi-ni-in-
suh-suh
A 303=314 giši!-rix (LÚ × šeššig)- na -bi úA.U4. SAKKARx-gíd-da-
a-šà-ga-ke4
A 304 = 315 kù-dLugal- bán-da gír-ta ba-ra-an-šab
A 305 am-si4 am-kur-ra samanx(ÈŠ.SU.NUN.ÈŠ.DU)-e
bí-in-lá
AG 306 máš-si4 ! máš-ùz (máš-za)-lá máš-sa-KÉŠ.KÉŠ-sa
máš-gú-è-gú-èa
307=315 [see above]
AJ 316 máš-si4 máš-ùz máš-min-a-bi du10-gurum éš bi-in- lá
AJ 317 diš-a-ni lú-igi-nigin lúa nu-mu-un-da-ab(erased)-bar-re
AGJ 318 lugal-šè ù-sá-ge sà nam-ga-mu-ni-ib-du11?
AJ 319 ù-sá-ge kur nam-gú-ga-( )-ke4
A 320 KU. KUR-galam-gim-ma šu É-SIG4-gim- gul -la
AHJ 321 šu-bi galam-àm gìr-bi galam-àm
AHJ 322 nig igi-bi-ta AD? šú-šú-e
AHJ 323 igi-bi-ta AD?diri-diri-ga-e
AH 324 ugula nu-zu-e nu-banda nu-zu-e
ACGH 325 níg ur-sag-ra á-gál-láa-e
ACGH 326 gišada-ha-ta dNin-ka-si-ka-ke
4
ACFGH 327 dLugal-bàn-da ù-sá-gea sá nam-ga-bmu-nib-ib-du
11
ACFGH 328 úi-li-in-anu-uša ú-sikil-kur-ra-ka ki-ná-gar-šè mu-un-gar
ACFGH 329 zulumhi (TÚG. SÍG.SUD) mu-un-dag gad(a)-babbar

abi-ina-búr
ACFG 330 è-ur5-ra a-tu5-tu5 nu-gál-la ki-bi-šè sá im-du11

ACFG 331 lugal ù-sá-ge la-ba-ana-ná-ab ma-mú-dac ba-ná
ACFG 332 ma-mú-daa gišig-e nu-gi4-e za-ab-ra nu-gi4-e
ACFG 333 lul-da lul -di-da zi-da zi-di-dam
ACF 334 lú-húl-húla-le-dè lú-šìr-re-dè
ACF 335 gipisan-kad dingir-re-e-ne-kama
5
ACFI 336 unu6-igi-ša6 dNin-líl-lá-kama
ACFI 337 ad-gi4-gi4 dInanna-kam
ACFI 338 gu4-NE? ura-dib-dib-nam-lú-ulu3b-ka am?! lú nu-ti-la
ACFI 339 An-za-ana-gàr-ra dingir-ma-mú-(d)a-ke4
ACFI 340 d aLugal-bàn-da ní-teb-ni gu4-gi(m ur5 im)-ša4

ACFI 341 amar-áb-šilim-ma?a-gim gù-nun ì? -( )
ACFI 342 amar-si4-e gá-aa-ra a-ba-a ma-ra-ab-sa(r)?-[e]
ACFI 343 ìa-udu-bi gá-a-ra a-ba-a ma-ra-ab-zal-z(al)?-[e]
ACFI 344 uruduha-zi-in-mà kù-bi an-na šu im-m(a-an-t)i
FIN 345 [gír-ù]r-ra-mà an-bar-sù-àm im-m[a-da-(sur-re)]

FIN 346 [am]-si4 am-k[ur-ra-k]e4 lú-gešpu2-gim hé-im-(ma-
ab-gin) (lú)-liru-ma-(gim) (hé)-[im-ma-ši-gam]
FIN 347 lipiš-bi[hé-im-t]aa-zi dUtu-è-a-ra [ù-mu-na-gur]
FIN 348 máš-si4 [máš-ù]z máš-min-a-bi SAG. DU-bi še-gim
aum-ta-ana-dub
FN 349 úš-bi [si]-du11-ga uma-ma-nib-dé-dé

FN 350 ì-bi edin-(na) DU.DU-a-bi
FKN 351 muš-u(l4)-kur- ra -ke4 si-im hé-im-ši-ak(a)-ne
KN 352 Lugal-bà(n-d)a i-zi-im ma!-mú-da im-bu-lu!-úh
ù-sá-ga-àm
KN 353 igi-(né) šu bí-in-gur10 níg-me-gar sù-ga-àm
KN 354 uruduh[a-z]i-in-na-ni kù-bi [an]-na šu im-ma?-an-ti
KN 355 gír-[ùr]-ra-ka-ni an-bar-sù-àm im-ma-daa-ak

FKN 356 a(m-s)i4 am-kur-ra-ke4 lú-gešpu2a-gim im-ma-ab-gin
lú-liru-mab-gim im-ma-ši-gam
FKLN 357 [lip]iš-bi im-ta-an-zi dUtu-è-a-ra amu-naa-an-gar
FKLN 358 [máš]-si4 máš-ùz máš-min-a-bi SAG.DUa še-gim
im-ta-an-dub
FKLN 359 [ú]š-bi si-du11-ga im-ma-ni-ina-bdé-déb
FL 360 ì-bi edin-na DU.DU-a-bi
FL 361 muš-ul4-kur-ra-ke4a si-im im-ši-ak(a)-ne
L 362 dUtu nam-ta-è-a-aš šilam? ( )
L 363 Lugal-bàn-da mu dEn-líl-le zi!-( )
FL 364 An dEn-líla b dEn-kib dNin-hur-sag-gá-ke4
Ft 365 si-du11-ta gizbun(KI.KAŠ.GAR)-na im-ma-ni-in-dúr-
ru
FL 366 kur-ra ki-gar-ra mu-un-aka-a
FL 367 gizbun ba-ni-in-gar ane-saga ba-ni-in-dé
FL 368 kaš-gi6 kurun ziz-babbar
FL 369 geštin-nag-nag gú-me-zé-du10-ga
FL 370 edin-na a-šedx(MÙŠ.DI)-šè im-ma-ni-in-dé-dé
FL 371 uzu-máš-si4-ke4 gir bí-in-ak
FL 372 HAR? ninda-gi6 izi im-mi-nia-in-sìg
FL 373 NA-izi-si-ga-gim i-bí-[B(A)]-ni bí-in-mú
FL 374 i-gi-in-zudDumu-zi ì(ir)-du10-ga gi4-a ku4-ra
F 375 níg-šu-du11-ga Lugal-bàn-da
FK 376 An dEn-líl dEn-ki dNin-hur-sag-gá-ke4 du10-ga-bi
mu-un-kú-uša
VI. Variants
256 a
D: àm; E: mu.
257 a
D and E add: ù; bD and M: ke4.
258 aD and M omit; bD: i; M omits?; cnot a separate line in A.
259 aM; tùm.
261 aE and M add: -mi-in.
264 aE omits; bE adds: a.
265 aE: u ?
4
266 aE: e; bE: ne.
268 aE: NITA.ÙR.SAL.LA.
270 aE omits; bE omits.
271 aE: DIŠ; b E adds: im; cE omits; d E: du; eerased in A; E omits.
272 a-aE: lum-e.
273 aE: ga.
278 aI: DU; bseparate lines in A.
281 aI: na.
283 aB (once) adds: un.
285 aB, I and M: zi; b–bB, I and M: ta; cB (twice) omits.
288 aI: gi?
290 variants (B and I) as in 1. 285.

291 a–aB. I and O: bar?-ba? zú-lum-ma ninda-ku -ku -da hi-li
7 7
ba-ni-in-du8-du8.
292 a–aB: gur -gur .
6 6
293 aB: mu; O: me.
295=307 aB and G: e.
296=308 aH omits; bA (1.296 only) omits.
297=309 aH omits; bJ omits; cB: si-im.
298=310 aJ adds: ab-sin; bB: e.
299=311 a–aJ: um?; bA (1. 299 only): ka.
306 aG adds: e.
317 aJ omits.
325 aC: la.
326 aC and H omit.
327 aC: ke ? b–b C: ri.

4
328 a–aF: uš; H: um?
329 a–aC: mu-u[n].
331 aC: omits; bC: e; cC, F and G: dè.
332 aC and G: dè; bC omits.
334 aC and F omit.
335 aF: ke .
4
336 aF: ka?
338 aC: ib?; bC: u -lu; cC: gù(KA)

x
339 aI omits.
340 aF and I omit; bC adds: a.
341 aC omits.
342 aF omits.
343 aC, F and I add: ì?
347 aN adds: ab.
348 a–aI: hé-im.
349 aN: ù?; bN adds: in.
355 aK adds: an.
356 aK: liru; bK omits.
357 a–aK: im-ma; N: ù-mu-[na].
358 aN adds: bi.
359 aN omits; b–bN: sì-sì?
361 aL: ka.
362–363 from L; F omits,

364 aL adds: le; b–bF omits.
366 aL: LU.
367 a–aL: nesag.
372 aL omits.
376 aF: kú?
VII. Translation
Lugalbanda’s Departure from the Cave (257–276)

(256 Hero, son of Ningal, let them praise you as you deserve.)
257 At that time the righteous one who takes counsel with Enlil
258 Caused the plant of life to grow.
259 The fast flowing stream (or: the Tigris), the mother of the mountain,
brought the water of life.
260 The plant of life he verily placed in (his) mouth,
261 The water of life he verily drank (with his) hand(?).
262 In the act of verily placing the plant of life in (his) mouth,
263 In the act of verily drinking the water of life with his hand—
264 From this side he caused his one trap to “seize” the ground (i.e. he set
the trap?).
275 From that ground he “tears off” like a horse(?) of the mountain.
266 Like a wild donkey of Šakkan, he runs over the mountains.
267 Like a large powerful donkey he gallops,
268 As the slender donkey, eager to run, he rushes forth.
269 From that night until the (next) day grew cold he verily wandered.
270 The mountains, the wasteland of the moon, he hurries through.
271 Being alone, no one, even with a roving eye, can see him.
272 Things filled into leather pails,
273 Things put into leather bags,
274 By (his) brothers (his) friends—
275 It is they who are able to bake bread on the ground with (like?) cold
water
276 Holy Lugalbanda lifts himself out of the cave of the mountain.
Lighting the Fire and Baking the Cakes to Bait the Trap (277–291)
277 By the side of the embers? he was summoned(?).
278 The bucket/trough he filled(?) with water.
278a That which had been placed in front of him he smashed(?)
279 He took hold of the . . . stones
280 After he repeatedly(?) struck them together.
281 The glowing coals . . ., they entered(?) the open ground.
282 The fine red (flint?)–stone struck a spark (lit. raised a fire).
283 Its fire came forth for him like the sun on the wasteland.
284 Not knowing how to bake a cake, not knowing an oven.
285 With seven coals he baked the gizešta-dough.
286 The bread, (left) by itself until well baked,
287 The šalalu-reed of the mountain(?)—its roots he tore out, its tops he
took away.
288 The totality of the cakes as a white morsel were lifted into the mouth
(of the trap).
289 Not knowing how to bake a cake, not knowing an oven,
290 With seven coals he baked the gizešta-dough,
291 On its outside it was decorated with dates and sweet breads.
Capture of the Wild Oxen and Wild Goats (292–317)

292 A woolly aurochs, a handsome aurochs, an aurochs tossing (its) horns,
293 An aurochs with weakened insides was reposing.
294 A horned aurochs of the hills, the pure place, having found that
trap(?),
295 He (the ox?!) in melancholy languor was chewing kanaktu-(seed) as if it
were barley.
296 He was grinding up the wood of the hašurru-cedar as if it were alfa
grass,
297 He was sniffing with open mouth at the foliage of the šenu-tree as if it
were grass,
298 He was drinking in the water of the fast-flowing stream (or: Tigris),
299 He was crumbling into pieces soapwort, the pure herb of the
mountain.
300 While the red aurochs, the aurochs of the mountain, was milling
about in the meadow.
301 There being (only) one (trap), with (this) his (one) snare he
(Lugalbanda) captured it.
302 The juniper tree of the mountain—its roots he tore out, its top he
took away.
303 Its roots which were like the long rushes of the field
304 Holy Lugalbanda cut off from them with a knife.
305 The red aurochs, the aurochs of the mountain, he tethered.
306 A red goat, a goat of a nanny, a diseased(?) goat, a sick goat, a flabby
goat.
307 see above 295–304

315 The red goat, the goat of a nanny, the goats both of them, he tied to a
–316 rope with bended knee.
317 Being alone, no one, even with a roving eye, can see him.
Lugalbanda’s First(?) Dream (318–337)

318 To the king (i.e. Lugalbanda) sleep finally overcame him too,
319 Sleep, the land of oppression(?).
320 It is like an extensive flood, a hand destroyed like a brick wall,
321 Whose hand is extensive, whose foot is wide.
322 The thing in front of it covers over the. . .
323 In front of it, it overflows with. . .
324 One who knows no lieutenant, knows no captain,
325 Something which is a commander for the warrior
326 By means of (her) wooden DA.HA, Ninkasi
327 Let sleep finally overcome Lugalbanda too
328 Soapwort, the pure herb of the mountain, she(?) placed as food on (his)
bed,
329 She(?) spread out a linen (blanket?), she(?) loosened there the white
linen (garment).
330 There being no slave girl or bath-attendant, he “made do” with that
place.
331 The king had no sooner laid down to sleep when he laid down to
dream.
332 In the dream: a door which does not close, a door-post which does not
turn(?).
333 “With the liar it acts the liar, (with) the truthful one it acts truthfully.”
334 In order for someone to celebrate joyfully, in order for someone to sing
(dirges),
335 It is the huppu?-basket of the gods
336 It is the beautiful (connubial) chamber of Ninlil,
337 It is the counselor/consort of Inanna.
Lugalbanda’s Second(?) Dream (338–353)

338 The (domesticated) ox, the captive animal of mankind, the (once) wild
ox whom man would not allow to live,
339 Anzaqar, the god of dreams,
340 Bellowed (at) Lugalbanda himself like a domesticated ox.
341 Like the bullock of a domesticated cow he roared [and said?]
342 “The red bullock—who will tie it up for me?
343 Who will make its animal fat flow for me?
344 He must be able(?) to take my axe whose metal is meteoric iron(?),
345 He must be able to wield(?) my hip–dagger which is of (terrestrial)
iron.
346 The red aurochs, the aurochs of the mountain, like an athlete let him
carry it away, like a wrestler let him make it submit,
347 Let its strength leave it when he turns toward the rising sun.
348 The red goat, the goat of a nanny, the goats both of them—when he
has heaped up their heads like barley,
349 When he has poured out their blood in the pit
350 —their fat running(?) over the plain—
351 Let the snakes hurrying through the mountains sniff it (the blood and
fat).”
352 Lugalbanda awoke—it was a dream. He shivered—it was sleep,
353 He rubbed his eyes, he was terrified.
The Divine Repast (tākultu) (354–376)

354 He took his axe whose metal is meteoric iron,
355 He wielded his hip–dagger which is of (terrestrial) iron.
356 The red aurochs, the aurochs of the mountain, like an athlete he
carried it away, like a wrestler he made it submit.
357 Its strength left it, he placed it toward the rising sun,
358 The red goat, the goat of a nanny, the goats both of them, their heads
heaped up like barley,
359 He poured out their blood in the pit
360 —Their fat running(?) over the plain—
361 The snakes hurrying through the mountains sniff it.
362 As the sun was rising [. . .]
363 Lugalbanda, [invoking] the name of Enlil,
364 Makes An, Enlil, Enki (and Ninhursag)
365 Sit down to a banquet at the pit,
366 In the mountain, the place which he had prepared,
367 The banquet was set, the libations were poured—
368 Dark beer, mead, and emmer-beer,
369 Wine for drinking, sweet to the taste—
370 On the open ground he poured all of it as a cold water libation.
371 He put the knife to the flesh of the red goat(s),
372 . . . and the black bread he roasted there for them.
373 Like incense placed on the fire, he let the smoke rise to them.
374 As if Dumuzi had brought good fat(?) into the. . .
375 So of the food prepared by Lugalbanda
376 An, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursag consumed the best part.
VIII. Notes to Selected Lines
257 I.e. Lugalbanda; cf. LE 50 n. 158. In Lugalbanda l. 40, Enmerkar

bears this epithet.
259 Cf. LE p. 162; Moran, JCS 31 (1979), 70 n. 16 and below, line 298.
The identical phrase in a late namburbi-text favors the translation
as “Tigris”; cf. R. Caplice, Or. 40 (1971), 141: 35’; idem, SANE 1
(1974), 18 f.; W.G. Lambert, RLA 6 (1981), 219 f. See also ad 1. 294.
260 Or tooth, reading zú. . . gub with van Dijk, Or. 44 (1975), 62 ad VS
17:33:6; cf. also Civil, JNES 23 (1964) 9 (46).
261 Cf. rig7 = šatû in MSL 14: 133: 16; kišib = rittu in AHw s.v.
262–263 I.e. no sooner had he eaten and drunk; for the syntax contrast
l. 331 below.
264 giš-umbin = uturtu; Hh VI 9 and Salonen, Jagd 34: “a round,
claw-shaped, hair-clasp shaped trap with a string attached to it.”
266–268 Same lines in Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna (ed. A. Berlin)
45–47. Cf. also Heimpel, Tierbilder, 29. 2. But si-il-si-il here
probably equals, not duppuru, “absent oneself ” (Berlin ad.loc.) but
nutturu, šalā.tu or šarā.tu, “split, tear.” Cf. the English idiom “to tear
along/through” = make haste. Cf. IV R 26:3:37 f.,: kur-kur-ra
gal-gal-la mu-un-si-il-si-il = mu-šat-ti-ir šadi 1 zaq-ru-ú-ti, emended
with Lugale 1 11 (for which see Sjöberg, AS 16, 1965, 67 n. 3):
kur-kur-ra si-il-lá = mu-šat-tir šadi 1.
267 for kušu. . . tag see Civil, AS 20, 135.
270 Cf. LE 77 n. 319; Alster, Kramer AV, 14 n. 6: “Suen’s horrible
mountain”—a stage of the moon? But cf. Hallo, JNES 37 (1978),
273 (2) ad loc. For ša-sig as “deep (narrow) interior/midst” or as
variant of šà-sù-ga = hurbū, mērênu, “wasteland, emptiness” see
Sjöberg, TCS 3, 10.
271 Cf. l. 317, below.
272–274 Cf. Lugalbanda I 96–98 (Wilcke, LE, 55).
274 Cf. Alster, Kramer AV, 15. For the seven heroes cf. Klein, ibid., 288
ad Šulgi 0 57; for seven brothers, cf. also the Cuthean legend of
Naram–Sin.
276 Cf. Perhaps Enlilsuduše 37 for x-ta . . . -ra-íl (Gragg, Infixes, 95).
277–283 See below, APPENDIX I.
278 The bugin–vessel recurs in Lugalbanda II 22 in connection
with Ninkasi (cf. below, line 326) and 402 f. in connection with
Enmerkar’s catching fish for Inanna.
282 For na4zú-sal-la = na4 su -ú see Stol, “The stone called sûm,” On
Trees, etc. (1979) 94–96. But cf. also NA4.KA = s. urru, obsidian or
flint.
283 For u4-gim. . . è cf. Römer SKIZ, 232 ad Iddin–Dagan *7:70. For
ša-sìg-ga cf. 1.270.
284 Cf. line 289. For im-šu-rin-na (etc. etc.) = tinūru see Salonen BM 3
(1964), 101–103; Civil, JCS 25 (1973), 172–175. According to Jerrold
Cooper, all the different Sumerian and Akkadian forms of this
word go back to Indian tandoor, “oven”; letter to N.Y. Times,
2-8-1977.
285 Cf. line 290 and LE, 152 ad 1. 53.
287 Cf. line 302.
291 Translation follows B, I, and O. A repeats 1. 286 (more or less;
reading courtesy M. Civil).
292–316 Cf. S. Cohen, ELA, 12 f.
292 Cf. S. Cohen, ELA, 10 ff.; Heimpel, Tierbilder 5. 1 (differently Civil,
Oppenheim AV, 79).
293 For šà-sig-ga cf. l. 270; for nam-a-a cf. l. 224 and CT 17: 22: 155 =
IV R2 4 iii 13–15: nam-a-a-ta = ina nu-uh-hi.
294 hur-sag = hills or foothills, to distinguish from kur = mountain;
cf. T. Jacobsen, Or. 42 (1973), 281–286. But cf. l. 17 for umbin
kin-kin-ba?
295–299 Cf. S. Cohen, Kramer AV, 99–101. Cohen takes Lugalbanda as the
subject of these lines, but more likely it is the ox (respectively the
goat).
296 For the various orthographies of únumun = elpetu see most recently
Hallo, ZA 71 (1981), 49. For únumun-búr-(ra), “alfa grass from
reed clearings,” = elpet mê purki, “alfa grass (growing) in stagnant
water,” see CAD E, 109. The terra recurs in the Tummal History 6
(Sollberger, JCS 16, 42) and in Iddin-Dagan *6: 176 (Römer, SKIZ,
133); the simile recurs in Inanna and Ebih 142 (Limet, Or 40: 15)
and in the Eridu Lament 5: 6 (M.W. Green, JCS 30 [1978], 137).
297 For si-im (var. sim) cf. si-im (var. sim)-ak in 1. 361 and the
references collected by Heimpel, Tierbilder, 356, 48 2 f.
298 Cf. l. 259.
299 Cf. LE, 188; Alster, Or. 41 (1972), 355.
300 In view of l. 305, I take this ox to be the (single) victim, and the
verb therefore iterative not plural.
301 Cohen restores [giš-di]m-ma-na, “snare” and compares ŠL 94: 20
= umāšu! Note that in the equivalent line 313, the Ur III version
(though differing) introduces the PN Lugalbanda here. Is it
possible to restore instead šubtu(m) = šubtum, “ambush”? Cf. MSL
3:136:78; 14:191:283 f.; B. Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream (= Mesopotamia
1), 1972, 98 f.
303 Cf. Civil, JCS 15:125 f. for erina/arina/irina =šuršu, root.
306 For máš-za-lá = ibhu, mášsa-sar-kés-da! = miqqānu, and máš-gú-è-
gú-è = tahlappanu see Hh. XIII (MSL 8: 33), 234–236. The fact
that all three occur together in the lexical text lends support to
the hypothesis that they, and many other lexical entries, are taken
from literary and archival sources (cf. already Hallo, HUCA 30
(1959), 136). If correctly translated, the implication is that sick
animals were not sacrificed.
317 Cf. l. 271.

318 Cf. l. 327. Cf. 2nd Ur Lament (ANET 3, 614) 176 f. for sá-du11 in
sense of “caught up with (someone/ thing).”
319 Cf. nam-gú-(aka-a) = dullulu, habālu(CAD S. v. v.)
327 Cf. l. 318.
330 Cf. Lugalbanda I 244 (Wilcke, LE, 82).
331 Cf. B. Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream (1972) p. 88; M. Civil, Kramer AV
(1976), 92 (22). For the syntax, cf. Gordon, SP, 2. 68 and contrast l.
263.
332 Taking gi4 as turru = close (doors) for which see AHw, 1335 (16b);
Salonen, Türen, 145. For za-ra = s. erru cf. ib. 66 f.; CAD S,
. s.v.
332–337 See below, APPENDIX II.
338 Or: captive lion (ur-dib = girru).
339–341 Cf. Heimpel, Tierbilder, 9. 1, but restore line 340 in light of ibid.,
5.35–5.39.
342–343 Note the ma- prefix with first person dative, as in Gregg, AOATS
5, (1973), 83. The -ra- infix is essentially ablative.
343 This is effectively the last line of the Yale tablet, if we may regard
344 as a catch-line to the following tablet. For ì-udu cf. Gordon,
SP, 1. 190 and 5. 86.
344 Cf. line 107, translated by Wilcke, LE, 58. For the other literary
reference to an axe of iron (or tin?) cited there (n. 210) see also
Civil, RA 63 (1969), 180 (14).
345 Cf. line 110, translated by Wilcke, LE, 59. But it is not necessary to
follow him (ib., n. 212) for sù = filigree, since an-bar-sù = parzillu
(MSL 13: 173). For gír-ùr-ra (var. gìr-ùr-ra) = patar šibbi see Wilcke,
LE, 59 n. 212 and Lipit-Ištar *23:73 (cited below ad 1. 371). For the
restoration of the verb, see line 355.
346 Cf. the translation of this line by Civil, Oppenheim AV, 79. For
lú-gešpu2 = ša umāši and lú-lirum = ša abāri see CAD A/1, 38 and
B. Landsberger, WZKM 56 (1960), 113–117; 57 (1961), 22.
347 Alster, Kramer AV 15, takes this line as an injunction “to overpower
bulls and present them as offerings to the sun.” In this he is
following Kramer in La Poesia Epica (1970), 827. But cf. ll. 362–365
below, where the goats, if not the bulls, are consumed by other
gods at sunrise.
348 Cf. 11. 306 and 316.
349 For si-du11-ga = šuttatu and huballu and sidug (LAGAB × DAR)
= haštu and many other Akkadian equivalents for pit or pitfall,
see Salonen, Jagd und Jagdtiere, (1976), 36 and 55 f. For the alleged
TÚL.KA = hu-ba-al-lum quoted there and CAD H, s.v. read rather
si-dug4 with MSL 13, 30: 385 and Å. Sjöberg, ZA 63 (1973), 46
n. 15.
351 For the translation, cf. Heimpel, Tierbilder, ad 81. 10 and 84. 3. Cf.
also si-im-si-im = sniff, said of a dog in Gordon SP, 2. 109.
352–353 This literary topos describing the end of a dream recurs with
minor variants in Gudea Cylinder A xii 12 f.; Gilgameš and
Huwawa 72 f.; and Dumuzi’s Dream, 17 f.; cf. Alster, Dumuzi’s
Dream, 88. The second line could also be translated: “before him(?)
he bowed down, he was filled with silent acclaim”; cf. YNER 3: 86
s.v. níg-me-gar.
354–361 Cf. ll. 344–351. For the reading of the verb in l. 355, cf. Römer,
SKIZ 166: kur-gar-ra urú(!)-na-ka gír nu-ak-a-na. For another
alleged occurrence (Jestin and Lambert, Thesaurus 2 (1955), 18 f.)
read rather gír-ùr-ra ù-sar-ak-a-me-en (Lipit-Ištar *23: 73; cf.
already Sjöberg. Or. 35. 293 ad loc.).
362–363 These lines occur only in S; they are omitted in F.
364 Read with L and line 376 against F. The four deities head the
Sumerian pantheon.
365 See above, 1. 349 for the pit. For causative dúr with gizbun =
tākultu, cf. Lugalbanda II 12 and Wilcke’s comments ad loc., LE,
136.
366 Translation based on context, and on the assumption that the
periphrase with ak has the same sense as would ki. . . gar.
367 Cf. the translation of this line by Römer, SKIZ 194, For gar (or gál)
with gizbun, cf. Iddin-Dagan *6: 202 (Römer, SKIZ 134) and the
passages cited by Römer, 197 ad loc. LE p. 136. For ne-sag, nisag
(= nisannu) cf. van Dijk, JCS 19 (1965), 18–24; for n. with dé, cf.
nin-mul-an-gim 22 (Hallo, 17 RAI, 1970, 124 and 131, here: I.2).
368–369 Cf. lines 101 f. as translated by Wilcke, LE p. 57. gú-me-zé, literally
“edge of the chin” or “palate.”
371 For the verb, see above, ad 1. 355.
372 For izi-sìg = s. arāpu, šamû, kamû see MSL 13: 157 and Inanna and
Ebih 44: giš-tir-ús-sa-bi-šè izi ga-àm-sìg.
373–376 See Wilcke, JNES 27 (1968), 2351f.
IX. Appendix: The Invention of Fire1
The reading of lines 279–283 owes much to suggestions of M. Civil.

We have in this short pericope a veritable aetiology of yet another cul-
tural fundamental: fire-making. The sense seems to be that Lugalbanda
arrived at the campfire of his brother-friends (1. 277) only to find the
1 Even for a dream, the lines 332–337 appear exceptionally enigmatic, and utterly
unrelated to the surrounding narrative. They begin and end, however, with precious
clues to their possible significance. The door and its various components are intimately
connected and even identified with Inanna in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, and
this symbolism has been traced back to its Sumerian sources by J.D. Bing, “On the
Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh,” JANES 7 (1975), 1–11. Moreover, the symbolism strongly
last embers dead so that he was thrown on his own resources to restart
the fire. He accomplished this by striking a spark with a suitable stone.
The operative terms are ne-mur and ù-dúb, both of which are equated
with Akkadian pēmtu / pēntu; see AHw s.v. and previously Hallo, Bi. Or.
20 (1963), 139 f. and 142(6) s.v. pēntu; YNER 3 1968), s.v, izi-ur5 The read-
ing ne-mur seems preferable in view of that reading, now well-attested,
in connection with the near-synonym tumru, “glowing ash, ember”; see
AHw s.v. That may indeed be the intended meaning of ne-mur here.
For ù-dub = pēmtu see now also MSL 13: 36(A) 11. The Akkadian word,
which is clearly cognate with Hebrew PHM, . “coal” (so already Hallo,
loc. cit.), was expanded by the addition of the nisbe-ending to form pentû,
explained as aban išati, “firestone, stone for making fire”; cf. AHw s.v.
pe/indû, and MSL 10:32:92: na4-izi = aban i[šati] = [pindû]; ib. 35a: na4.
d
ŠE.TIR = pindû = aban išat. This in turn was borrowed into Sumerian
as (na4) pí-in-di; cf. UET V 292 and 558 as interpreted by W.F. Lee-
mans, Foreign Trade (1960) 28 and 30. In our text, however, the stone
employed is identified more specifically as flint or silex (line 282; cf.
line 279).
Udub also occurs as a logogram, written lagab × izi, i.e. “block
(lagabbu) with inscribed fire” (Hallo, Bi. Or. 20, 140 n. 61) and in late,
purely syllabic orthography as u-tu-ba (Salonen, JEOL 18, 338). Pho-
nologically, it resembles i-šub / ù-šub, “brickmold” (Salonen, Bi. Or.
27, 1970, 176 f. and Ziegeleien, 1972, 80 f., 87–100) and other “cultural”
terms ending in -ub. Salonen does not list it among these “substrate”
nouns (ibid., 7–14; Fussbekleidung, 1969, 97–119, esp. 110 f.; Zum Aufbau
der Substrate im Sumerischen = St. Or. 37/3, 1968, 5 f.) but its appearance
in Lugalbanda I, in the context of an aetiology (?), is suggestive of its
antiquity.
alludes to Inanna’s sexual aspect and her role as generator of fertility as celebrated
in the sacred marriage. If Enmerkar and Lugalbanda were, like Gilgamesh, partners
of Inanna in this rite, then line 337 probably alludes to this role; for the double-
meaning of ad-gi4-gi4 in this context, cf. Hallo and van Dijk, YNER 3 (1968), 53 and
note 20. The preceding line similarly suggests the place where the sacred marriage
was consummated; for unu6 (usually: dining-hall) as the place where the crown-prince
was born of this union cf. Å. Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen, 94 and Hallo, “Birth of Kings,”
Pope Festschrift (forthcoming), here: III.4. Thus the first dream of Lugalbanda (or the
beginning of his single dream) may anticipate the royal role for which Inanna has
helped to save him.
X. Appendix II: Remarks by Th. Jacobsen
After this paper had gone to press, Thorkild Jacobsen kindly agreed to
study it. His 13–page critique deserves separate publication; here there
is room only to signal his principal divergences from my understanding
of the text, particularly as to the technique used by Lugalbanda for
catching his prey.
In line 264, Jacobsen understands gišumbin as im.tû, “chisel” (not
“trap”), i.e. Lugalbanda got out of “a steep ravine such as is charac-
teristic of mountain streams . . . presumably by cutting footrests” with
“a single . . . stone chisel.” He then moved “a full day’s journey away”
(line 269), hence could not have intended to trap his prey there. In
lines 277–291, “the idea of baiting a trap for a herbivorous animal
like an ox with a cake decorated with dates seems rather odd,” hence
line 288 should be understood as “with fibers (?) of šišnu-grass (gúg for
gug4) he tied them together (ka ba-ni-in-sír-sír) for a šutukku reed hut
(šudug, var. šudug-UD)” and in line 291 the repetition of line 286 is to
be preferred over the variant. Line 294 should be understood as “the
reddish brown aurochs (am-si-si, phonetic for am-si4-si4 in Z), search-
ing with its hooves (umbin-bi; cf. šu urx (ÚR×U)-bi in the copy of Z,
against Cohen’s reading umbin; i.e. its front and hind-legs) the clean
(i.e. ‘snow-clad’?) ground, the foothills” [cf. already my comments ad
loc.]. Space considerations suggest an alternate restoration in line 301:
“he caused by his approaching ([t]e-gá-na [but collation rules this out!])
the first one to make its way out toward him,” In short, “Lugalbanda
puts halters on the animals as they graze” rather than trapping them;
cf. lines 305 and 316. The more explicit version in Z inserts before one
of these lines the following: mu-dar šu bí-gur10 saman mu-[dím], “he
split them and twisted them (šu-gur10 for later šu-gur) and made a hal-
ter.”
Note also that egar (É. SIG4) in line 320 is probably to be understood
not as igāru, “brick wall,” but as emūqu, “strength” [or as lānu, mēlû,
damtu, (pa)dattu, gattu, “figure, height”]; for all these equations see PBS 5:
106 rev. ii 5’–10’ = Diri V 276–282.
In the (single!) dream of Lugalbanda (lines 332–353), the introduc-
tory lines (332–338) all serve as anticipatory descriptions of Za(n)qara
(line 339; “loan from Proto-Akkadian zaqqara ‘to call up mental im-
ages,’ ‘to remember’,”): he is “the one not turning back at the door, not
turning back at the pivot, who will talk lies with the liars, talk truth with
the truthful, who will rejoice one man, have a (nother) man lament, the
gods’ tablet–box, the one for whom Ninlil has a favoring mouth (unu6
= pû) and eye, Inanna’s counsellor, saying to mankind: ‘Let me restore!’,
the border district of men no (longer) alive.”
vii.2
THE ORIGINS OF THE SACRIFICIAL CULT:

NEW EVIDENCE FROM MESOPOTAMIA AND ISRAEL1
In 1975, I.J. Gelb discussed the role of singers, musicians, snake charm-
ers, and bear wards in ancient Sumer in an article which, no doubt with
a nod to J. Huizinga,2 he entitled “Homo Ludens in Early Mesopo-
tamia.”3 If I turn in this chapter from this “playful” side of the Sume-
rians to their more “murderous” aspect, it is with an eye not only to
Gelb’s study but also to a monograph published just three years ear-
lier by the Swiss classicist W. Burkert under the title “Homo Necans:
Interpretations of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Rites and Myths.”4
In his important study, Burkert surveyed the anthropological and
more particularly the Greek literary evidence for the origins and moti-
vations of animal sacrifice. His conclusion, to which this summary can-
not begin to do justice, is that the sacrificial rites as described in Greek
literature or observed to this day in “primitive” cultures reflect a pre-
historic origin which can be reconstructed approximately as follows.
Prior to the domestication of plants and animals, hunting and gather-
ing groups divided between the sexes the essential functions of victual-
ing themselves, with men assigned to the hunt and women to the gath-
ering of edible plants. But the hunt required collective action and the
aid of traps and weapons, and these mechanics held a potential threat
in that they could conceivably be turned inward against members of
the group. Hence the catching and dispatching of the animal prey
1 In its original form, this material was first given at the University of Puget Sound,
Tacoma, Wash., on 13 March, 1983, R.G. Albertson presiding. In slightly different
form, and under the title of “Homo Necans in Early Mesopotamia,” it was read to
the 193d meeting of the American Oriental Society, Baltimore, 22 March, 1983.
2 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955).
3 I.J. Gelb, “Homo Ludens in Early Mesopotamia,” StudOr 46 (= Armas I. Salonen
Anniversary Volume, 1975) 43–76.

4 W. Burkert, Homo Necans. Interpretationen altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (= Reli-
gionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 32, 1972). This has meantime been trans-
lated by P. Bing under the title Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial
Ritual and Myth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).
From Ancient Israelite Religion edited by Miller, Hanson and McBride copyright
©1987 Fortress Press, admin. Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Reproduced by special
permission of Augsburg Fortress Publishers.
518 vii.2. the origins of the sacrificial cult
were gradually hedged about with “ritualistic” restrictions designed to

reduce the likelihood of internecine conflict among the hunters.
With the domestication of plants and animals, the earlier sexual
specialization tended to disappear, but the replacement of wild prey
with domesticated victims created new problems. Now the bull, cow,
goat, or lamb led to the slaughter was not only defenseless but familiar
and more or less humanlike in appearance and disposition. Thus,
dispatching it could not be justified in terms of self-defense or as an
act of manly valor but on the contrary evoked feelings of guilt to add
to those of terror previously present. To assuage these new feelings,
the earlier “ritual,” which essentially consisted of “agenda,” or the
performance of prescribed actions, was complemented by “dicenda,”
or the recitation of prescribed formulas which, at their most elaborate,
evolved into mythologems. Myth and ritual, thus combined, invested
what otherwise might have constituted essentially “profane slaughter”
(see below) with the aura of sanctity, literally “making it holy”—the
etymological sense of sacrifice.5 The sacrificial character of animal
slaughter was confirmed by dedicating the victim to the deity and
treating the human consumption of the meat as a kind of fringe benefit
redounding to the participants in the rite.6
In the very same year that Burkert published his monograph, R. Gi-
rard published La violence et le sacré, since then translated into English
as Violence and the Sacred.7 Girard covers much of the same ground as
Burkert, though with less specific attention to Greek sources and some-
what more to biblical and other analogies. His premises are similar to
Burkert’s but his conclusions diverge. Thus he too postulates an inher-
ent threat of internecine violence in the primitive group but sees it not
so much activated by the hunting or slaughtering of the animal but
rather defused by it. In other words, the animal serves as a substitute
5 The word “sacrifice,” which means “to make a thing sacred” or “to do a sacred
act” (sacrum facere), was used in Latin to describe “various rites which arose from the
common meal when that meal was held . . . for the purpose of entering into union
with [the divine]” (R.K. Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism
[London: Adam & Charles Black, 1953]) 25–26.
6 “What we call by the Latin word ‘sacrifice’ is nothing else than a sacred meal”
(L. Bouyer, Rite and Man [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962] 82).
Note that the Greek terms for “offering” (thýos, thysía) acquired the sense of incense,
presumably because for the celestials the smoke of the burning offering was adequate,
according to L.L. Mitchell, The Meaning of Ritual (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) 17–21.
7 R. Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972); trans. by P. Gregory
as Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
vii.2. the origins of the sacrificial cult 519
for the human victim of aggression, the hunt or the sacrifice as an out-
let for the innate disposition toward violence which, once aroused, must
be satisfied or assuaged. On this theory, the role of the deity recedes
into the background or, rather, becomes a secondary embellishment to
an essentially human or, at best, human-animal nexus of relationships.
(Often enough, the substitute victim is also human.) What counts, on
this view, is that the murder of the substitute victim not be avenged, as
this might unleash an endless cycle of vengeance threatening to wipe
out the entire group. It is to this end that the murder is invested with
the mythic and ritual sanctions that turn it into a sacrificial act. And
it is for this reason that sacrifice loses its significance in societies that
have substituted a firm judicial system for more “primitive” notions of
private or public vengeance.
Of these two comparable but discrete analyses, the former comes
nearer to providing a clue to unraveling the mysteries of the sacrificial
cult as these are enshrined in the Hebrew Bible. Many gallons of ink
have been spilled on this issue over the decades, but it may perhaps
suffice to cite my own remarks by way of orientation in the current
state of the question. According to Israelite belief, then, “the spilling
of animal blood was in some sense an offense against nature and
courted the risk of punishment, although never on the level of human
bloodshed. It was to obviate such punishment that successive provisions
were made to invest the act of animal slaughtering with a measure of
divine sanction . . . . The common denominator of these provisions was
to turn mere slaughter into sanctification. The ‘sacrifice’ was a sacred-
making of the consumption that followed.”8
Biblical attitudes toward the consumption of animal meat underwent
three distinct transformations. In the primeval order of things, men and
beasts alike were vegetarians by divine command. This is most explicit
in the mythic version of creation prefaced to the Priestly narrative:
“See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon the earth, and
every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food. And
to all the animals . . . [I give] all the green plants for food” (Gen 1: 29–
30).9 It is only slightly less explicit in the epic version that begins the
8 W.W. Hallo apud W.G. Plaut, B.J. Bamberger, and W.W. Hallo, The Torah: A
Modern Commentary (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981) 743;
previously apud Plaut, Numbers (1979) xxvi.
9 Translations are according to the New Jewish Version (NJV) unless otherwise
indicated.
so-called J document: “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat”
(Gen 2:16). It is also the state to which beasts, at least, are to revert in
the messianic age when, according to the prophetic view, “the lion, like
the ox, shall eat straw” (Isa 11:7).
This original dispensation was superseded after the flood by a new
promulgation which, while echoing it, reversed it completely: “Every
creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I
give you all these” (Gen 9:3). The only restriction added immediately
(Gen 9:4) is: “You must not, however, eat flesh with its life-blood in
it.” This act is virtually equated with homicide (Gen 9:5). In the later
rabbinic view, the new dispensation is one of the seven “Noachide
laws” that are binding on all the descendants of Noah, that is, on all
mankind.10
An entirely different principle was invoked in the legislation of the
Holiness Code (Leviticus 17–26), generally held to be one of the oldest
strata surviving within the so-called Priestly Document. The Levitical
enactment postulates that “the life of the flesh is in the blood, and
I have assigned it to you for making expiation for your lives upon
the altar; it is the blood, as life, that effects expiation” (Lev 17: 11).
In J. Milgrom’s view, the expiation involved here is nothing less than
ransom for a capital offense. Under the Levitical dispensation, animal
slaughter except at the authorized altar is murder. The animal too has life
(older versions: “a soul”), its vengeance is to be feared, its blood must
be “covered” or expiated by bringing it to the altar.11
The final biblical revision of the law of meat consumption was pro-
mulgated by Deuteronomy, presumably in the context of the Josianic
reform of the seventh century. Again following Milgrom,12 who in
this instance, however, was preceded by A.R. Hulst,13 we may see the
repeated formulas introduced by “as I/He swore or commanded or
promised” as citations of earlier legislation, whether written or (in this
case) oral.
What Josiah in effect instituted reconciled the older prohibition
against “profane slaughter” with the newer centralization of the cult:
10 See EncJud s.v.

11 J. Milgrom, “A Prolegomenon to Leviticus 17:11,” JBL 90 (1971) 149–156.
12 J. Milgrom, “Profane Slaughter and the Composition of Deuteronomy,” HUCA
47 (1976) 1–17; idem, “A Formulaic Key to the Sources of Deuteronomy,” EI 14 (1978)

42–47 (English summary, pp. 123*f.).
13 A.R. Hulst, “Opmerkingen over de Ka"ašer-Zinnen in Deuteronomium,” Neder-
lands Theologisch Tijdschrift 18 (1963) 337–361.

If the only authorized altar was to be in Jerusalem, then slaughter

without benefit of altar had to be permitted outside Jerusalem as a
matter of practical necessity.14
This theory of the evolution of the Israelite sacrifice, essentially based
on Milgrom, differs significantly from earlier theories. The classical
Wellhausenist position, for example, which still finds adherents today,
insists on the chronological priority of Deuteronomy over the Priestly
Code and thus regards the provisions of Leviticus as intended to abro-
gate those of Deuteronomy, rather than vice versa. A novel modifi-
cation of this view would make the abrogation temporary: An early
postexilic reform was intended by those who returned from Babylonian
exile to discourage pagan practices among the peasants they had left
behind and “perhaps also to increase the prestige and income of . . . the
small shrine which had replaced the grand Temple of Solomon,” but
the new law became impracticable and soon enough a dead letter.15
R. de Vaux, in his authoritative treatment of the subject, recon-
structs a dual origin for Israelite sacrifice. The importance of blood
and the consumption of meat by the faithful, already illustrated by the
paschal sacrifice, represents the earliest stage, associated with the desert
wanderings and derived from, or at least similar to, pre-Islamic Arab
practices. In Canaan and Greece, on the other hand, indigenous usage
tended to favor the burning on the altar of the entire sacrificial ani-
mal (holocaust) or at least a significant part of it (thysía), and this usage
gave rise to the Israelite concept of whole burnt offering ( #ōlâ) or partial
burnt offering (zebah. ) respectively. The latter, the commoner of the two
(at least at first), left part of the victim to be consumed by the priests
and part to be eaten by the worshipers in a sacral meal. But what-
ever the historical analogues to nomadic or autochthonous precedent,
Israelite sacrifice was transformed and sublimated. It did not serve to
appease, to feed, or to achieve union with the deity. Rather, it came to
constitute, in varying proportions, an act of donation to, communion
with, or exculpation by the deity.16
Let us then turn to the Mesopotamian evidence, by far the most
richly documented of all in the preclassical world. For here we have not
14 Cf. already J. Milgrom, IEJ 23 (1973) 160.

15 Bamberger apud Plaut, The Torah, 874; previously idem, Leviticus (1979) 179. Cf.
also B.A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974) 47–52.
16 R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (trans. J. McHugh; New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1961) 440–441.

only, as in Israel and elsewhere, the canonical (literary) formulations of

how sacrificial rites are to be performed, or what can be designated
“prescriptive rituals,” but also the archival (economic) texts, the after-
the-fact accounts of the actual course of events taken by the ritual
and duly recorded from the objective point of view of those charged
with detailing the expenses incurred for each step of the ritual against
the possibility of a future audit by a higher authority. These are the
so-called “descriptive rituals” and they survive in far greater numbers
than the “prescriptive rituals” and from many successive periods.17 The
“economy of the cult”18 that can be reconstructed with their help leaves
no doubt that, in Mesopotamia, animal sacrifice, though ostensibly a
mechanism for feeding the deity, was at best a thinly disguised method
for sanctifying and justifying meat consumption by human beings—a
privilege routinely accorded to priesthood, aristocracy, and royalty and
sporadically, notably on holidays and holy days, to the masses of the
population.19 As noted by de Vaux,20 the late Jewish author of “Daniel,
Bel and the Dragon” saw through the Mesopotamian pretense involved
in the “care and feeding of the gods”21 and took a dim view of it.22
But the ritual texts, whether prescriptive or descriptive, tell us little
about the true motivation for the sacrificial cult or the related ques-
tion of its origins in the native conception. For this we must turn to
the higher forms of literature, notably the mythology. Until now, this
has served to underline the “official” interpretation which stressed the
divine need for sustenance. Indeed, if there is one common thread run-
ning through both Sumerian and Akkadian myths about the relation-
ship between gods and men, it is that men were created to relieve the
17 B.A. Levine, “Ugaritic Descriptive Rituals,” JCS 17 (1963) 105–111; idem, “The
Descriptive Ritual Texts of the Pentateuch,” JAOS 85 (1965) 307–318; idem, “Offerings
to the Temple Gates at Ur” (with W.W. Hallo), HUCA 38 (1967) 17–58; A.F. Rainey,
“The Order of Sacrifices in Old Testament Ritual Texts,” Bib 51 (1970) 485–498.
18 For this concept of R.M. Sigrist, see W.W. Hallo, State and Temple Economy in the
Ancient Near East (ed. E. Lipiński; Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 5, 1979) l. 104–
105. See now R.M. Sigrist, Les sattukku dans l’Ešumeša durant la période d’Isin et Larsa
(= Bibliotheca Mesopotamica 11, 1984).
19 See now the dramatic proof of this proposition for ninth-century Babylonia by
Gilbert J.P. McEwan, “Distribution of Meat in Eanna,” Iraq 45 (1983) 187–198.

20 De Vaux, Ancient Israel, 434. Cf. also Jer 7:21.
21 A.L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1964) 183–198.

22 Cf. now also R.C. Steiner and C.F. Nims, “You Can’t Offer Your Sacrifice and
Eat It Too: A Polemical Poem from the Aramaic Text in Demotic Script,” JNES 43
(1984) 89–114.
gods of the need to provide for their own food. Thus, for example, in
the Sumerian myth known as “Cattle and Grain” or “Lahar and Ash-
nan”23 man was created (lit. “given breath”) “for the sake of the sheep-
folds and good things of the gods.”24 To quote W.G. Lambert, “The
idea that man was created to relieve the gods of hard labor by supply-
ing them with food and drink was standard among both Sumerians and
Babylonians.”25
This conception is even thought to find a faint echo in the primeval
history of Genesis. For the epic (J) version of the creation begins:
“When the Lord God made earth and heaven—when no shrub of the
field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted,
because the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth and there
was no man to till the soil” (Gen 2: 4b-5). And it continues, after the
creation of man (Gen 2: 15): “The Lord God took the man and placed
him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it.”
But a newly recovered Sumerian myth puts matters into a rather
different light and permits considerably more precise analogies to be
drawn with biblical conceptions. The myth, or mythologem, is embed-
ded in an ostensibly epic tale dealing, as do all other Sumerian epics,
with the exploits of the earliest rulers of Uruk, that well-nigh eternal
city where writing first emerged in full form late in the fourth millen-
nium and where cuneiform continued in use almost to the Christian
era, the city whose name is preserved in the table of nations as Erech
(Gen 10:10). The earliest rulers of Uruk were preoccupied with heroic
campaigns against distant Aratta, the source of lapis lazuli and other
precious imports from across the Iranian highlands to the east, per-
haps as far away as Afghanistan. On one of these campaigns the crown
prince Lugalbanda fell ill and had to be left behind in a cave of the
mountains by his comrades, with only enough food and fire to ease his
23 Unedited; see the texts listed by R. Borger, Handbuch der Keilschriftliteratur (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter) 1 (1967) and 2 (1975), under G.A. Barton, Miscellaneous Babylonian
Inscriptions (New Haven; 1918), no. 8, and the discussion by G. Pettinato, Das altorientali-
sche Menschenbild und die sumerischen und akkadischen Schöpfungsmythen (AHAW 1971/I) 86–90.
24 Translated thus or similarly by S.N. Kramer, Sumerian Mythology (Memoirs of the
American Philosophical Society 21, 1944; 2d ed.; New York: Harper & Row, 1961) 73;
idem, From the Tablets of Sumer (Indian Hills, Colo.: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1963) 221; idem,
History Begins at Sumer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) 109.
25 W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atra-hası̄s: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1969) 15. Cf. in detail˘ G. Komoróczy, “Work and Strike of the
Gods: New Light on the Divine Society in the Sumero-Akkadian Mythology,” Oikumene
1 (1976) 9–37.
dying days. Left for dead, he prayed to the sun at dusk, followed by the
evening star, then the moon, and finally the sun again at dawn—and
there the text effectively broke off in the first systematic presentation of
the plot by C. Wilcke in 1969.26
The thread of the epic is taken up at this point by a large tablet
from the Yale Babylonian Collection first identified by S.N. Kramer,
copied by me in 1965, incorporated into a preliminary but unpublished
edition by S. Cohen some years later,27 and finally edited by me in full
and with the help of numerous fragmentary duplicate texts from other
collections for a volume in honor of Professor Kramer.28 From all of
this, the following sequel can be reconstructed.
The prayers of Lugalbanda were answered: He arose from his sick-
bed and left the cave. He refreshed himself from revivifying “grass”
and the invigorating waters of the nearest stream, but then he faced
a problem: The food left for him by his comrades-in-arms had given
out; the fire they had left had died out. How was he to nourish himself
henceforth? He was still in the mountains, or at least the foothills of
the Zagros, surrounded by wild plants and wild animals. The plants
are pointedly contrasted with the domesticated varieties familiar to him
from the cultivated plains of Uruk, and the animals consume them
with relish. It is implied, however, that they are not fit for human
consumption. In this extremity, Lugalbanda decides to make a virtue of
necessity and turn carnivorous. But this is easier said than done when a
solitary man confronts a thundering herd of aurochsen. He must select
one that is weak and languid from overeating29 and try to trap it as it
mills about the meadow. To do this, he must bait the one trap he has
presumably constructed. As I translate the relevant passage, he does so
by baking some delectable cakes—admittedly a questionable procedure
in these circumstances but one that would justify a subsidiary aetiology
inserted in the text at this point, namely, the invention of fire, or at least
of fire-making! The embers of the last campfire left by his companions
26 C. Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1969).

27 Cf. also S. Cohen, “Studies in Sumerian Lexicography, I,” in Kramer Anniversary
Volume, ed. B.L. Eichler et al., AOAT 25 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1976)
99–101.
28 W.W. Hallo, “Lugalbanda Excavated,” JAOS 103 (1983) 165–180, here: VII.1. See
there for a detailed exposition of the text.

29 See Hallo, “Lugalbanda Excavated,” here: VII.1, 175 line 293. T. Jacobsen pro-
poses an alternative translation: “the curly (haired) aurochs, fatherly, protective” (pri-
vate communication).
having died out, Lugalbanda must start a new fire by striking flintstones
(?) together until they generate a spark. And even then, “not knowing
how to bake a cake, not knowing an oven” (11. 284, 289) he has to
improvise. But one way or another, the aurochs is caught and then
tethered by means of a rope made on the spot from the roots and tops
of the wild juniper tree uprooted and cut with a knife. The process is
then repeated with two goats, taking care to select healthy ones from
those in sight.
But with the practical problems disposed of, Lugalbanda’s real prob-
lems are just beginning. His companions have left him supplied with an
ax of meteoric iron and a hip dagger of terrestrial iron (the latter pre-
sumably used already to cut the juniper trees), but how can he presume
to wield them against his quarry? Only the appropriate ritual can solve
this problem. Providentially, the answer is vouchsafed in a dream, by
none other than Za(n)qara, the god of dreams himself. He must slaugh-
ter the animals, presumably at night and in front of a pit, so that the
blood drains into the pit while the fat runs out over the plain where the
snakes of the mountain can sniff it, and so that the animals expire at
daybreak.
Upon wakening, Lugalbanda follows these prescriptions to the let-
ter, needless to say. But he goes them one better—significantly bet-
ter. At dawn he summons the four greatest deities of the Sumerian
pantheon—An, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag—to a banquet at the pit.
This banquet is called in the text gizbun (written logographically as
ki-kaš-gar [lit. “place where beer is placed”]), a Sumerian word later
equated with Akkadian tākultu, the technical term for a cultic meal or
divine repast.30 Lugalbanda pours libations of beer and wine, carves the
meat of the goats, roasts it together with the bread, and lets the sweet
savor rise to the gods like incense. The intelligible portion of the text
ends with these two lines (11. 375–376): “So of the food prepared by
Lugalbanda/An, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag consumed the best part.”
What is offered here is a first glimpse at a tantalizing new bit of
evidence regarding early Sumerian religious sensibilities. Admittedly,
the text can be translated differently here and there by other inter-
preters or, upon maturer reflection, by myself. But some salient points
are already more or less beyond dispute. They are enumerated here,
together with the conclusions that I propose to draw from them.
30 Cf. R. Frankena, Takultu: de sacrale maaltijd in het assyrische ritueel (diss., Leiden, 1953).
1. The highest deities of the Sumerian pantheon—three gods and

one goddess who traditionally represent and govern the four cosmic
realms—physically partake of the best of the meat at a sacred meal
convoked in their honor. Presumably, then, they sanction the slaughter
of the animals that has made this consumption of their meat possible.
2. The slaughter itself is carried out according to divinely inspired

prescriptions, by a divinely chosen individual, with weapons made of
rare metals. Presumably, then, we are to understand it as sacred, not
profane, slaughter, indeed as the aetiology of the sacrificial cult.
3. The capture of the animals is related in the context of an elabo-

rate narrative that is ostensibly of epic character but presumably has
the typical mythic function of explaining a continuing phenomenon
observed in the present by appeal to a real or, more often, imaginary
one-time event in the past.31 In this case, then, we are led to conclude
that we are presented with an aetiology of meat-eating that explains its
origins as derived from the straits in which Lugalbanda found himself,
thus replacing a prior, vegetarian order of things.
4. Other and perhaps lesser aetiologies are found in the epic cycle of
Uruk. Our own text thus seems to include the invention of fire; another,
the Epic of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, includes the invention of
writing.32 That neither invention is placed chronologically quite where
modern research would date it does not detract from the deduction that
Sumerian epic was a conscious vehicle for mythologems in general and
for aetiologies in particular.
5. Finally, the new text offers a fresh perspective on the compara-

ble biblical conceptions as current scholarship sees their evolution. In
both cases, an original dispensation provides for vegetarianism in the
divine as well as the human (and perhaps even animal) realm, with
mankind assigned the task of domesticating and cultivating the vege-
tation. Although in the biblical case the domestication of animals fol-
lowed as early as the second human generation (Abel), its purpose may
be construed as limited, in the time-honored Near Eastern manner, to
31 Hallo, “Lugalbanda Excavated,” 170, here: VII.1.

32 G. Komoróczy, “Zur Ätiologie der Schrifterfindung im Enmerkar-Epos,” Altorienta-
lische Forschungen 3 (1975) 19–24.
the exploitation of their renewable resources, such as wool, milk, dung,

and draft power.33 Although Abel sacrifices “the choicest of the firstlings
of his flock,”34 and his sacrifice is accepted, it is not until Noah’s sacri-
fice of the animals that he had brought safely through the flood that
humanity is specifically given dominion over the animals and allowed
to consume them.
In the Sumerian flood story, the flood hero (Ziusudra), celebrating
his emergence from the ark, “slaughtered a large number of bulls and
sheep” in “a stock phrase often found in Sumerian literature”35—but
the text breaks off at this point before we learn whether human beings
shared in the feast. In the Old Babylonian Epic of Atra-hasis, the
passage about the end of the flood is fragmentary, but the sacrifice is
described simply as an “offering” (nı̄qu) of which the gods sniff the smell
as they gather around like flies and which they then eat.36 Finally, in
the Neo-Assyrian version of the flood as incorporated in the Gilgamesh
Epic, the sacrifice is specified as burned over cane, cedarwood, and
myrtle (qanû erûnu u asu),37 thus attracting the gods, again like flies, to
the sweet savor. Thus the cuneiform tradition may not have linked the
inauguration of meat-eating with the immediate aftermath of the flood
as did the Bible. But Lugalbanda, as the third member or generation of
the postdiluvian dynasty at Uruk,38 could represent the corresponding
Sumerian conception of this innovation.
With relatively minor differences, then, Babylonian and biblical
myths reflect remarkably similar conceptions of the origins of the sacri-
ficial cult. Where the two cultures diverged widely was in its subsequent
33 Cf. K. Butz apud Lipiński, State and Temple Economy, 305–339 on dung (putru) in the
Old Babylonian economy; G. Maxwell, A Reed Shaken by the Wind (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1957) on its role among the Marsh Arabs of contemporary Iraq; A. Sher-
ratt, “Plough and Pastoralism: Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution,” Patterns
of the Past: Studies in Honor of David Clarke (ed. I. Hodder et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981) 261–305.
34 See NJV. Lit.: “from the firstlings of his flock and [specifically] from their fat [parts
or pieces],” i.e., the parts later—in Levitical legislation—especially reserved for the
deity or, in the Blessing of Moses, for strange gods (Deut 32:38); cf. Lugalbanda I 350
and 360.
35 M. Civil apud Lambert and Millard, Atra-hası̄s, 145 line 211 and 172 ad loc. Addi-
tional references: Pickaxe and Plow (uned.), 25–29; ˘ Uruk Lament (MS M.W. Green),
129–115; UD.GAL.NUN hymns (W.G. Lambert, OrAnt 20 [1981] 85–86).
36 Lambert and Millard, Atra-hası̄s, 99.
37 ANET, 95 line 158. ˘
38 Cf. W.W. Hallo and W.K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971) 47.

evolution. In Mesopotamia, the sacrificial cult was literally taken as a

means of feeding the gods and specifically, beginning with the end of
the third millennium, their cult statues.39 In Israel, where anthropo-
morphic conceptions and representations of the deity were proscribed,
and where the worshiper already participated in the consumption of
the earliest (paschal) sacrifice, the later cultic legislation explicitly pro-
vided priesthood and laity with a share of the sacrificial offerings. Thus
Israelite sacrifice, though in origin designed, as in Mesopotamia, to
sanctify the very act of consumption, “ultimately served as well to sanc-
tify other human activities and to atone for other human transgres-
sions.”40
39 W.W. Hallo, “Cult Statue and Divine Image: A Preliminary Study,” Scripture
in Context II (ed. W.W. Hallo, J.C. Moyer, and L.G. Perdue; Winona Lake, Ind.:
Eisenbrauns, 1983) 1–17.
40 Hallo apud Plaut, The Torah, 743; previously apud Bamberger, Leviticus (1979) xxvi.
vii.3
DISTURBING THE DEAD*
Disturbing the dead was fraught with danger not only in the biblical
view but across the whole ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia to
Phoenicia. In what follows, old and new documentation will be offered
to this effect, and some recent discussions of the theme will be consid-
ered.
In ‘Death and the Netherworld according to the Sumerian Literary
Texts’, S.N. Kramer decried the fact that ‘the Sumerian ideas relating
to death and the netherworld . . . were neither clear, precise or consis-
tent’.1 Much the same could probably be said of most cultures. But
in fact the consistency and continuity of the Sumerian view, and its
survival in Akkadian texts, is quite impressive. Nowhere is this better
exemplified than in the tale to which Kramer himself gave the title ‘Gil-
gamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld’.2 The first half of this tale was
edited by Kramer under the title ‘Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree’ at
the start of his long career of editing Sumerian literary texts.3 Its second
half, translated verbatim into Akkadian, became the last (12th) tablet
of the latest recension of the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh4—itself a liter-
ary phenomenon almost without parallel in the history of cuneiform
literature.5
* Paper submitted to the 24th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish
Studies, Boston, December 13–15 1992, and here offered in warm tribute to Nahum
Sarna.
1 Iraq 22 (1960), pp. 59–68, esp. p. 65.
2 PAPhS 85 (1942), p. 321; JAOS. 64 (1944), pp. 7–23, esp. pp. 19–22.
3 Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree (AS 10 [1938]); preceded by ‘Gilgamesh and the
Willow Tree’, The Open Court 50 (1936), pp. 18–33.

4 A. Shaffer, Sumerian Sources of Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgameš (Ann Arbor, MI:
University Microfilms, 1963).

5 W.W. Hallo, ‘Problems in Sumerian Hermeneutics’, Perspectives in Jewish Learning
5 (1973), pp. 1–12, here: I.3, esp. p. 7; ‘Toward a History of Sumerian Literature’,
in S.J. Lieberman (ed.), Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen (AS, 20; 1976),
pp. 181–203, here: I.4, esp. pp. 189–190 and n. 57; review of B. Alster, The Instructions of
Šuruppak, JNES 37 (1978), pp. 269–273, esp. p. 272 (D).
530 vii.3. disturbing the dead
According to this account, when Enkidu descended to the nether-

world to recover the hoop and driving stick6 of Gilgamesh, or his drum
and drumstick7 if a ‘shamanistic’ reading is preferred,8 the latter coun-
seled him not to offend or disturb the dead.9 In particular, he warned,
‘Do not take a staff in your hands [or] the spirits will panic before
you’.10 Enkidu, however, ignored the warning, and a few lines later
on we read that ‘he took a staff in his hands and the spirits panicked
[because of him]’.11 In a recent study of the passage, Aase Koefoed
interprets the warning as ‘taboo rules’ which ‘seem to correspond to
the actual rules for conduct during a mourning ceremony’12 and their
violation by Enkidu as the reason for his untimely death.13 She com-
pares the staff of cornel-wood14 to the ‘rhabdos in Greek religion, where
it is the stick or magic wand used by Hermes to invoke and drive the
ghosts’.15
These ghosts (gidim = e.temmu) could easily turn into demons
(GIDIM4 = udug = utukku) which, if improperly buried or disturbed,
could return to haunt and terrify the living.16 The Sumerian incanta-
tions known as ‘Evil Spirits’ (udug-hul)17 and the bilingual series into
6 Sumerian giš-ellag and giš - E. KÌD - ma, Akkadian pukku and mekkû; cf. CAD
M/2 s.v. mekku A, based on B. Landsberger, WZKM 56 (1960), pp. 124–126; 57 (1961),
p. 23.
7 This is Landsberger’s earlier translation, and survives in ANET (3rd ed., 1969),
p. 507.
8 ‘I judge that the readings “drum” and “drumstick” are clinched by the widespread
Siberian tradition that the frames of shaman-drums come from wood of the World
Tree’; A.T. Hatto, Shamanism and Epic Poetry in Northern Asia (London: SOAS, 1970), p. 4.
But cf. C.R. Bawden, BASOS 35 (1972), p. 394.
9 ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld’, ll. 185–199; see Shaffer, Sumerian
Sources, pp. 74–76, 108–109.

10 ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld’, ll. 191–192; cf. CAD A/2, pp. 236–237;
s.v. arāru B; CAD Š/1, s.v. šabbitu.

11 ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld’, ll. 213–214.
12 See pp. 535–536 for possible elements of such ceremonies.
13 A. Koefoed, ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld’, ASJ 5 (1983), pp. 17–23,
esp. p. 20.
14 giš-ma-nu, ordinarily translated by Akkadian e"ru, which ‘is well-known as the
magical wand used in incantations against demons’; cf. Koefoed, ‘Gilgameš’, p. 23 n.

13.
15 Koefoed, ‘Gilgameš’, p. 20.
16 W. W, Hallo, ‘Royal Ancestor Worship in the Biblical World’, in Sha #arei Talmon:
Studies . . . presented to Shemaryahu Talmon (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992), pp. 381–
401, esp. p. 389 and nn. 56–59.
17 M.J. Geller, Forerunners to Udug-hul: Sumerian Exorcistic Incantations (Freiburger Altori-
entalische Studien, 12; 1985).

vii.3. disturbing the dead 531
which they evolved (utukkū lemnūtu)18 were designed to ward off that pos-
sibility. This is illustrated by such lines as ‘[these demons] agitated the
distraught man’19 and ‘[the demons] caused panic in the land’.20 The
former passage recurs in a bilingual exercise text where the Akkadian
verb used is the same as in Gilgamesh XII (exceptionally in transitive
usage).21
Violation of a grave was therefore considered a particularly severe
form of punishment, as for example when Assurbanipal of Assyria
(668–627 bc) destroyed the tombs of the Elamite kings during his sack of
the Elamite capital at Susa,22 carrying their bones to Assur, condemning
their spirits to restlessness, and depriving them of funerary repasts23
and water libations (e.temmešunu la s. alālu ēmid kispı̄ nāq mê uzammēšunūti).24
Perhaps this was a specific revenge for their having been ‘the disturbers
(munarri.tū)25 of the kings my ancestors’, that is, of the graves of the
departed royalty. But more likely the reference here was simply to the
harassment and terrorism to which the royal Assyrian ancestors had
been subjected during their reigns.26
The prevention of such desecration thus became the particular ob-
jective of another genre of texts, that of the funerary inscription. This
genre is relatively less well attested in cuneiform than in some other
ancient Near Eastern corpora of inscriptions. Such evidence as was
by then available, was assembled and discussed by Jean Bottéro in
1981.27 A good illustration of the genre is the mortuary inscription of
18 R.C. Thompson, The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, I (London: Luzac, 1903).
19 Thompson, Devils, pp. 20–21, l. 2.
20 Thompson, Devils, pp. 34–35, l. 255, with note ad loc. (p. 99).
21 UET 6.392, cited CAD A/2, pp. 236–237; s.v. arāru B. 22.
22 For this event and its aftermath cf. W.W. Hallo, ‘An Assurbanipal Text Recov-
ered’, The Israel Museum Journal 6 (1987), pp. 33–37; P.D. Gerardi, Assurbanipal’s Elamite
Campaigns: A Literary and Political Study (Ann Arbor, MI: 1987), esp. pp. 195–213; E. Carter
and M.W. Stolper, Elam (Near Eastern Studies, 25; University of California Publica-
tions, 1984), p. 52.
23 For these see below, pp. 536–537.
24 CAD E, 399a; Z, 156d.
25 CAD N/l, 349a; cited Hallo, loc. cit. (see next note), but correct citation accordingly.
26 A. Tsukimoto, Untersuchungen zur Totenpflege (kispum) im alten Mesopotamien (AOAT,
216; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1985), pp. 114–115; cited in W.W. Hallo,
‘The Death of Kings: Traditional Historiography in Contextual Perspective’, in M.
Cogan and I. Eph"al (eds.), Ah, Assyria . . . : Studies . . . presented to Hayim Tadmor (ScrHier,
33; 1991), pp. 148–165, esp. p. 162 n. 126.
27 J. Bottéro, ‘Les inscriptions cunéiformes funéraires’, in G. Gnoli and J.-P. Vernant,
(eds.), La mort, les morts dans les Sociétés Anciennes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), pp. 373–406.
Shamash-ibni,28 the Chaldean of Bit-Dakkuri who died in Assyria and

whose ‘body was returned to his native land for burial only in the time
of Ashur-etel-ilani, about half a century later’,29 that is, under one of
the last kings of Assyria (626–624 bc). The most famous example may
well be the Autobiography of Adadguppi, which can be dated to the ninth
year of Nabonidus, last king of Babylon (547 bc).30
But recent discoveries have added significantly to the corpus. The
graves of three neo-Assyrian queens recovered together with their spec-
tacular contents at Nimrud in 1989 have yielded as many funerary
inscriptions, two of them published by A. Fadhil the following year.31
These include explicit injunctions against disturbing the entombed
bodies, using the verb dēkû, ‘to arouse (from sleep or rest)’,32 but here
in the sense of ‘to disturb the dead’, as seen by A. Livingstone.33 He
compares the language of neo-Assyrian royal land grants where the
same verb is used in the same sense in connection with the verb s. alālu,
‘to lie down, to sleep’,34 concluding ‘that “to wake the sleeper” was a
euphemistic expression for “to disturb the dead” ’.
The same idiom already occurs in Sumerian literary texts, where lú-
ná-a zi-zi means ‘to wake the sleeper’ as in a ‘tambourine-lament’ (ér-
šèm-ma) of Inanna and Dumuzi where a demon (gala) ‘wakes Dumuzi,
who is sleeping, from [his] sleep . . . wakes the spouse of holy Inanna,
who is sleeping, from [his] sleep’.35 That ‘the phrase is also employed,
however, as a euphemism for those who sleep the “treacherous” sleep
28 Bottéro, ‘Les inscriptions’, pp. 384–385, based on YOS 1. 43; 9.81–82.

29 J.A. Brinkman, Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747–626 bc (Occa-
sional Publications of the Babylonian Fund, 7; 1984), p. 80 and n. 388, based on YOS 1.
43 and YOS 9.81–82.
30 ANET (3rd ed., 1969), pp. 560–562; latest translations by T. Longman, Fictional
Akkadian Autobiography: A Generic and Comparative Study (Winona Lake, IN; Eisenbrauns,
1991), pp. 225–228; cf. pp. 97–103, and P.-A. Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of
Babylon 556–539 BC (YNER, 10; 1989), pp. 78–79 and passim.
31 A. Fadhil, ‘Die in Nimrud/Kalhu aufgefundene Grabinschrift der Jabâ’, BaM
21 (1990), pp. 461–470; ‘Die Grabinschrift der Mullissu-mukannišat-Ninua aus Nim-

rud/Kalhu’, BaM 21 (1990), pp. 471–482 and pls. 39–45.
32 CAD 123d and 125bc.
33 A. Livingstone, ‘To Disturb the Dead: Taboo to Enmesarra?’, NABU I. I (1991).
34 Livingstone, ‘To Disturb the Dead’, citing J.N. Postgate, Neo-Assyrian Grants and
Decrees (Studia Pohl Series Maior, 1; 1969), no. 9 (p. 29), ll. 55–57, 60; cf. also nos. 10–12.
35 M.E. Cohen, Sumerian Hymnology: The Eršemma (HUCA Supplements, 2; 1981),
pp. 76 and 81, ll. 48–49. The same lines were dealt with earlier by T. Jacobsen, ‘The
Myth of Inanna and Bilulu’, JNES 12 (1953), pp. 160–187, esp. pp. 182–183 n. 50; repr.
in Toward the Image of Tammuz and other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture (ed.
W.L. Moran; HSS, 21; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 346 n. 50.
(ù-lul-la) of death’ was recognized long ago by T. Jacobsen,36 although

it must be admitted that the sleep in question can also be a ‘feigned
sleep’, for example when it is attributed to Enlil in one of that deity’s
standard ‘heroic’ epithets’ as seen by R. Kutscher.37 Sleep as a pre-
monition of death is familiar from the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh
Epic, when the hero complains to Utnapishtim, ‘Scarcely had sleep
surged over me, when straightway thou dost touch and rouse me (tad-
dekkanni)!’—when in fact he had already slept for seven days.38
The common use of ‘sleep’ as a metaphor or euphemism for death
also explains the use of ‘place of silence’ as a circumlocution or epithet
for ‘grave’ in an inscription of Shamshi-Adad I of Assyria (c. 1813–
1781 bc),39 and more particularly of ‘rest house’ as a poetic designation
for the grave. This is clearest on bricks from the royal sepulcher at
Assur, which describe the grave of Sennaherib (704–681 bc) as ‘a palace
of sleeping, a grave of rest, a habitation of eternity’ (ekal s. alāli kimah
tapšuhti šubat dārâti), or as a ‘palace of rest, habitation of eternity’ (ekal
tapšuhti šubat dārâti).40
While the concept of ‘eternal habitation’ can be paralleled in West
Semitic usage, both biblical (Eccl. 12. 5) and epigraphic,41 that of ‘place’
or ‘house of rest’ can be traced back to Sumerian usage. The Sumerian
equivalent to ‘house of rest’ (bit tapšuhti) is é-ní-dúb-bu(-da).42 It occurs
in a unilingual lexical list43 and as an epithet of temples and storage
36 Jacobsen, ‘The Myth of Inanna and Bilulu’, pp. 182–183 n. 50; Toward the Image,
p. 346 n. 50.
37 R. Kutscher, Oh Angry Sea (a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha): The History of a Sumerian Congrega-
tional Lament (YNER, 6; 1975), p. 49.

38 ANET (3rd edn, 1969), p. 96, ll. 220–221.
39 É KI.SI.GA É qú-ul-ti-šu; A.K. Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second
Millennium bc (to 1115 bc ) (RIMA 1; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 59–
60, no. 8; cf. Bottéro, ‘Les inscriptions’, p. 403 n. 18, who, however, seems to take É
KI.SI.GA as a phonetic (?) spelling for É KI.SÌ.GA, hence rendering it ‘Salle-au-kispu’.
Differently CAD Q 302d.
40 OIP 2. 151. 14. 3 and 13. 2 respectively; cf. Bottéro, ‘Les inscriptions’, p. 382.
41 See in general H. Tawil, ‘A Note on the Ahiram Inscription’, JANESCU 3 (1970–
1971), pp. 32–36, esp. p. 36; A. Negev, ‘A Nabataean Epitaph from Trans-Jordan’, IEJ
21 (1971), pp. 50–53, esp. pp. 50–51, with nn. 4–9.
42 W.W. Hallo, ‘Oriental Institute Museum Notes No. 10: The Last Years of the
Kings of Isin’, JNES 18 (1959), pp. 54–72, esp. p. 54 and n. 2, based on A. Deimel,
Šumerisches Lexikon, III.2 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1932), no. 399, 177 based in
turn on K.D. Macmillan, ‘Some Cuneiform Tablets . . . ’, BA 5 (1906), p. 634 l. 13; cf.
p. 573, ll. 13–14 and p. 588 l. 11.
43 MSL 13.69.108.
houses built by the kings of Isin and Larsa.44 The Sumerian equivalent
to ‘resting-place’ (ašar tapšuhti) is ki-ní-dúb-bu-da; it occurs in an inscrip-
tion of Warad-Sin of Larsa (c. 1834–1823 bc) as an epithet of the temple
of Nin-Isina called E-unamtila, literally ‘house [of] the plant of life’.45
To return to the idiom of ‘waking the sleeper’, Livingstone has also
discovered it in a late Akkadian literary text46 which he treated under
the heading of ‘works . . . explaining state rituals in terms of myths’ in
198647 and as ‘mystical miscellanea’ in 1989.48 Here Jacobsen had read
‘The sill of the temple of Enmesharra: he hitched up at the wall, / the
tallow of fleece (Ì.UDU it-qi) is taboo for Enmesharra’.49 Livingstone,
however, reads, ‘He hung the ladders of the house of Enmesarra on the
wall and woke up the sleepers (s. al-lu id-ki). Taboo of Enmesarra’,50 and
adds, ‘it would not be difficult to suppose that disturbing the dead was
anathema to the underworld deity Enmesarra’.51
The concept of a divine taboo or anathema has been the subject of
two recent studies. In 1985 I selected some fourteen examples of the
theme from Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and compared them
with the biblical concept of divine abominations.52 Klein and Sefati
covered much the same ground in 1988, in another volume dedicated
to the memory of Moshe Held.53 I concluded that, between the early
second millennium and the early first millennium, ‘the emphasis of the
taboos . . . shifted from a principal preoccupation with morals and man-
ners to an at least equal concern with cultic matters’,54 and eventually
44 Hallo, ‘The Last Years’, p. 54 and nn. 5–6.

45 D.R. Frayne, Old Babylonian Period (2003–1595 BC) (RIME, 4; Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 244–245, no. 22 (l. 14).
46 KAR 307.28–29.
47 A. Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works of Assyrian and Babylonian
Scholars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), ch. 4, esp. pp. 124–125.

48 A. Livingstone, Court Poetry and Literary Miscellanea (SAA, 3; Helsinki: Helsinki
University Press, 1989), pp. 99–102.

49 T. Jacobsen, ‘Religious Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in H. Goedicke and.
J.J.M. Roberts (eds.), Unity and Diversity (Johns Hopkins Near Eastern Studies, [7];
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 63–97, esp. p. 95 n. 58.
50 Livingstone, Court Poetry, p. 100.
51 NABU 1991.1.
52 W.W. Hallo, ‘Biblical Abominations and Sumerian Taboos’, JQR 76 (1985), pp.
21–40, here: VIII.3.

53 J. Klein and Y. Sefati, ‘The Concept of “Abomination” in Mesopotamian Liter-
ature and the Bible’, Beer-Sheva 3 (1988), pp. 131–148 (in Hebrew; English summary
pp. 12*ff.).
54 Hallo, ‘Biblical Abominations’, p. 29, here: VIII.3.
‘to normally legitimate activities which happen to be conducted on

an unacceptable day’.55 The ‘taboo of Enmesarra’ fits well into this
scheme, as it appears to represent a cultic infraction whether on Jacob-
sen’s reading or Livingstone’s.
A third meaning was suggested as the common denominator of the
biblical abominations: they are primarily, ‘acts enjoined by alien cults
but anathema to God’.56 At first blush the biblical evidence does not
seem to bear on our theme. Disturbing the dead is not a cultic require-
ment in paganism—on the contrary it is a taboo already there. It is
not implied in the idiom for waking the sleeper; when used in a lit-
eral sense, that idiom refers rather to the impossibility of waking the
dead;57 when used in other than a literal sense, it alludes to resurrecting
the dead.58 It may be noted in the latter connection that the modern
renaissance of Jewish culture was promoted by a society for the publi-
cation of medieval Hebrew literature founded in 1862 under the name
of Mekize Nirdamim, ‘rousers of those who slumber’.59
But in fact biblical Hebrew does feature a functional equivalent of the
Sumero-Akkadian idiom. It employs not the root ‘to awake’ (qys. , yqs. )
but the root ‘quiver, agitate’ (rgz), and occurs in two telling contexts.
The first concerns Saul who persuaded the witch of En-Dor to ‘bring
up’ the deceased Samuel, who thereupon complained, ‘Why have you
disturbed me (hirgaztāni) and brought me up?’ (1 Sam. 28. 15) and pre-
sumably cursed Saul and his progeny with imminent death (1 Sam.
28.19).60 The second involves Sargon II of Assyria whose death in bat-
tle in 705 bc—a royal fate almost without precedent in Mesopotamian
history—was, in the biblical view, at least partially the punishment for
his rousing the dead kings from their rest. In the words of Isaiah (Isa.
14.9), ‘Sheol below was astir (ragzāh) to greet your coming—rousing for
you the shades (rep̄ā"îm)61 of all earth’s chieftains, raising from their

57 Cf. 2 Kgs 4.31; Jer. 51.39, 57; Job. 14.12.
58 Isa. 26.19; Dan. 12.2.
59 EncJud, XI, pp. 1270 ff.; s.v. Mekize Nirdamim.
.
60 J.C. Greenfield, ‘Scripture and Inscription: The Literary and Rhetorical Element
in some Early Phoenician Inscriptions’, in H. Goedicke (ed.), Near Eastern Studies in Honor
of William Foxwell Albright (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 253–
268, esp. pp. 258 ff.; Hallo, ‘The Death of Kings’, pp. 151, 162.
61 On the rep̄ā"îm see most recently Hallo, ‘Royal Ancestor Worship’, esp. pp. 382–
386.
thrones all the kings of the nations’.62 For good measure it may be
pointed out again that the same root (rgz) is employed in Phoenician
funerary inscriptions,63 notably those of Tabnit of Sidon64 and of the
son of Shipit-Baal of Byblos.65
By contrast to such practices, subject to dreadful curses and dire
punishments, the proper respect for the departed required, in the first
place, the recitation of appropriate lamentations, presumably at the
time of interment. That appears to be the sense of the Sumerian
notation ‘when he entered [‘turned into’ is a possible translation but
unlikely here] the office of lamentation-priests’ (u4 nam-gala-šè in-ku4-
ra) which is frequently encountered in neo-Sumerian accounts justi-
fying the expenditure of modest numbers of sacrificial animals66 by
the next of kin (?), whose ranks include two cooks, a courier, a bow-
man, a foot-soldier—all lay professions—and three Amorites.67 Given
the diversity of these origins, it seems unlikely that we should translate
here, ‘when they entered the office of lamentation-priest’,68 the more
so since a single name at most recurs among the numerous named
lamentation-priests on neo-Sumerian documents.69
Once buried, the dead required above all a ‘commemorative funer-
ary meal’, called kispu in Akkadian and ki-sì-ga in Sumerian.70 Because
the Sumerian term, in the form ‘house (e) of the ki-sì-ga’, is otherwise
62 See previous note and cf. H.L. Ginsberg, ‘Reflexes of Sargon in Isaiah after
715 bce’ in W.W. Hallo (ed.), Essays in Memory of EA. Speiser (AOS, 53; New Haven:
American Oriental Society), repr. from JAOS 88 (1968), pp. 47–53.
63 On their typology see H.-P. Müller, ‘Die Phönizische Grabinschrift aus dem
Zypern-Museum KAI 30 und die Formgeschichte des Nordwestsemitischen Epitaphs’,

ZA 65 (1975), pp. 104–132, esp, pp. 109–110, 118–119: Cf. also K. Galling, ‘Die Grabin-
schrift Hiobs’, Welt des Orients 2 (1954), pp. 3–6 ad Job 19.23–27.
64 ANET (3rd edn, 1969), p. 662. Cf. above n. 60, but correct the reference in ‘The
Death of Kings’ (n. 125) accordingly.

65 H. Donner and W. Röllig, KAI, II (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1973), pp. 10–
11.
66 Typically five sheep and/or goats; once two grain-fattened sheep and once three
adult goats.
67 T. Fish, ‘Gala on Ur III Tablets’, MCS 7 (1957), pp. 25–27; M. Sigrist, AUCT 3
(1988), no. 42; idem, Tablettes du Princeton Theological Seminary: Epoque d’Ur III (Occasional
Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 10; 1990), no. 90; see below n. 6.
68 As implied by H. Hartmann, Die Musik in der Sumerischen Kultur (Frankfurt 1960),
pp. 141–142.
69 Hartmann, Die Musik, pp. 166–179, 356–361. The possible exception, as noted by
Hartmann (p. 173 n. 4), is N. Schneider, ‘Keilschriftutkunden aus Drehem und Djoha’,
Or o.s. 18 (1925), no. 17, pp. 17–19; the profession of ù - k u l registered there is otherwise
unknown to me.
70 See Hallo, ‘Royal Ancestor Worship’, p. 394 and cf. above n. 39.
equated with Akkadian words for grave (kimāhu, qubūru),71 the existence
of a true Sumerian equivalent has hitherto been overlooked. I propose
as such an equivalent gizbun, a Sumerian word generally translated
by ‘(festive) meal, banquet’, based in part on its logographic writing
with the signs for ‘place where beer is put’ (KI.KAŠ.GAR).72 Later
the Sumerian term was equated with Akkadian takultu, ‘divine repast’,73
illustrating once again the tendency of cultic terms to evolve out of
everyday language.74 The fact that the ‘logogram’ was at times still pro-
nounced as written (ki-kaš-gar-ra)75 strongly suggests that gizbun is an
alternate reading of the signs, and hence a loan-word from Akkadian,
rather than vice versa.76
Since the cultic meal in question is most at home in Mari, at or near
the border between the Mesopotamian and the biblical worlds, its evi-
dence may be added to that of the other common features of funerary
practices and beliefs as yet further testimony to the interconnectedness
of the entire ancient Near East.
71 Hallo, ‘Royal Ancestor Worship’, p. 392 and n. 69.

72 Cf. e.g. Lugalbanda I ll. 365 and 367 for which see W.W. Hallo, ‘Lugalbanda
Excavated’, in J.M. Sasson (ed.), Studies . . . Dedicated to Samuel Noah Kramer (AOS, 65;
New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1984), repr. from JAOS 103 (1983), pp. 165–
180, here: VII.1, esp. pp. 174 and 178–179.
73 Cf. Hallo, ‘Lugalbanda Excavated’, and idem, ‘The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult:
New Evidence from Mesopotamia and Israel’, in P.D. Miller et al. (eds.), Ancient Israelite
Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 3–13,
here: VII.2, esp. p. 9, for the significance of the equation for the given context.
74 Cf. B.A. Levine, In the Presence of the Lord: A Study of Cult and some Cultic Terms in
Ancient Israel (SJLA, 5; 1974), esp. pp. 8–20.

75 Cf. M. Civil, ‘The Anzu-Bird and Scribal Whimsies’, JAOS 92 (1972), p. 271.
76 For the Semitic etymologies proposed for kispum, see Tsukimoto, Untersuchungen,
pp. 23–26.
vii.4
ENKI AND THE THEOLOGY OF ERIDU*
Three discrete ideologies may be identified in Sumer: the theologies of Nippur,

Lagash, and Eridu. In focusing on the god Enki, the book under review
provides the first systematic survey of the third of these theologies. That such
a survey can be offered for one major Mesopotamian deity attests to the
maturing of Assyriology.
Ancient Egytian religion viewed the world through three discrete intel-
lectual perspectives which modern Egyptologists have labeled the the-
ologies of Thebes, Heliopolis, and Memphis.1 Similarly, the older Meso-
potamian Weltanschauungen can be subsumed under three headings best
described as the theologies of Nippur, Lagash, and Eridu.2
The first and oldest of these theologies centered upon Enlil, effec-
tively the head of the Sumerian pantheon, and reflected conditions
in Early Dynastic times, a period when Nippur, Enlil’s cult city, also
served as the religious center of a league of all Sumer (Jacobsen’s
“Kengir League”)3 and later, under the Sargonic and Ur III Dynas-
ties, of Sumer and Akkad.4 It survived into Old Babylonian times
when the First Dynasty of Isin tried to present itself as the heir to all
Sumerian traditions since the Flood. It was enshrined at this time in
the Neo-Sumerian canon as fixed in the scribal schools, particularly at
* Review article of: Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. By Samuel Noah Kramer and John
Maier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. viii + 272.

1 Cf., e.g., James P. Allen, Genesis in Egypt: the Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation
Accounts, Yale Egyptological Studies, 2 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 62.
2 W.W. Hallo, “The Limits of Skepticism,” JAOS 110 (1990): 187–199, esp. pp. 197 f.;
idem, “Sumerian Religion,” in kinattūtu ša dārâti: Raphael Kutscher Memorial Volume, ed.
Anson F, Rainey, Tel Aviv Occasional Publications, 1 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Univ. Press,
1993), 15–35, here: I.6, esp. pp. 26 f.
3 Cf. W.W. Hallo and W.K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1971), 38 f. and 43. For even earlier evidence of such a
league, see now Roger J. Matthews, Cities, Seals and Writing: Archaic Seal Impressions from
Jemdet Nasr and Ur, Materialien zu den frühen Schriftzeugnissen des Vorderen Orients,
2 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1993).
4 In the words of the (Sargonic) hymn to the temple of Enlil in Nippur, “your right
and your left hand are Sumer and Akkad”; cf. Hallo, “Sumerian Religion,” 26, here: I.6.
540 vii.4. enki and the theology of eridu
Nippur.5 In addition to the hymns, lamentations, and other genres on

Enlil and/or his consort Ninlil (or Sud6 or even Ashnan),7 the theology
of Nippur is exemplified primarily in the Nippur recension of the
Sumerian King List.8
The theology of Lagash revolved around Ningirsu, “the lord of
Girsu,” the capital city of the Lagash city-state, a leading actor in the
outgoing Early Dynastic Period and once again in the late Sargonic
Period. Lagash was dormant, if not actually suppressed, in the Ur III
and early Isin Periods but surfaced once more under the Dynasty
of Larsa thereafter. It is reflected in myths about Ninurta (who took
Ningirsu’s place in the Nippur curriculum);9 in hymns to Ningirsu’s
consort Bau or to the goddess Nanshe who was “born in Eridu,”10 but
whose cult center had moved from Eridu to Lagash, more specifically
to Nina (Sirara);11 in non-Nippur versions of the Sumerian King List,
which prefixed an antediluvian section featuring Larsa; and finally in a
polemical parody of the Nippur recension of the Sumerian King List,
which described the history of the world entirely in terms of Lagash.12
The theology of Eridu centered on the cult of Enki, the “junior
Enlil” (Enlil-banda)13 of the Sumerian tradition, equated with Ea of
the Akkadian tradition. His cult center was at Eridu, and Eridu was
the oldest city in fact as well as in tradition (Sumerian, Akkadian, and
even Hebrew).14 It was thus possible to claim a hoary antiquity for this
5 W.W. Hallo, “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” in Sumerological Studies in
Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. Stephen J. Lieberman, Assyriological Studies, 20 (Chicago:

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), 181–203, here: I.4.
6 Miguel Civil, “Enlil and Ninlil: The Marriage of Sud,” JAOS 103 (1983): 43–66.
7 W.G. Lambert apud Civil, ibid., 64–66.
8 W.W. Hallo, “Beginning and End of the Sumerian King List in the Nippur Recen-
sion,” JCS 17 (1963): 52–57, here: VI.1. For the latest study of this recension, see Jacob
Klein, “A New Nippur Duplicate of the Sumerian Kinglist . . . ,” Aula Orientalis 9 (1991):
123–129.
9 W.W. Hallo, review of Jerrold S. Cooper, The Return of Ninurta to Nippur, JAOS 101
(1981): 253–257.
10 Wolfgang Heimpel, “The Nanshe Hymn,” JCS 33 (1981): 65–139, esp. pp. 82 f.,
line 8.
11 W.W. Hallo, “Back to the Big House: Colloquial Sumerian, Continued,” Or. 54
(1985): 62, here: IX.1, based on Temple Hymn no. 22, for which see Åke W. Sjöberg
and E. Bergmann, The Collection of the Sumerian Temple Hymns, TCS, 3 (Locust Valley,
N.Y.: J.J. Augustin, 1969), 33.
12 E. Sollberger, “The Rulers of Lagash,” JCS 21 (1967): 279–291.
13 Cf., e.g., p. 90, line 14 of the book under review.
14 W.W. Hallo, “Antediluvian Cities,” JCS 23 (1970): 57–67, esp. p. 64; idem, “Infor-
mation from Before the Flood: Antediluvian Notes from Babylonia and Israel,” Maarav
7 (1991): 173–181, esp. p. 174.
vii.4. enki and the theology of eridu 541
theology, though, in fact, it was probably not systematized before the

middle of the Old Babylonian Period and the rise to prominence of
Babylon. Here Marduk, the local deity, was equated with Asar-luhi, the
˘
son of Enki, and turned, like his Sumerian prototype, into a patron of
incantation and magic. The Sumerian flood story, in which Enki bests
Enlil to assure the survival of humankind,15 was modified to provide
a new antediluvian prologue, beginning with Eridu, to the Sumerian
King List. A whole host of myths focusing on Enki developed the theme
of his solicitude for humanity as a counterweight to the terror inspired
by Enlil and his unalterable “word.”
The book under review speaks of a “theology of Ea” (p. 146). It does
not operate with the notion of a “theology of Eridu,” but it provides for
the first time a systematic survey of the Sumerian and Akkadian literary
texts that go to make it up, i.e., the myths and other compositions about
Enki/Ea. It is the product of a collaboration between Samuel Noah
Kramer, the late dean of Sumerology, and John Maier, a professor
of English at the State University of New York at Brockport. Their
respective roles are partially delineated in the introduction (pp. 17 f.).
Maier is the coeditor of two volumes of essays on the Bible.16 He is
known to Assyriologists chiefly through his contribution to the second
Kramer Festschrift17 and through his collaboration with the poet John
Gardner (and the Assyriologist Richard A. Henshaw) in the preparation
of a new and rather imaginative rendition of the Gilgamesh Epic.18
He has also addressed the American Oriental Society on the subject
of “Enki Speaks” (cf. p. 193) and has written on “Three Voices of
Enki” (p. 244, n. 42).19 The present book is the outgrowth of these
essays, according to the introduction, which seems to be at least in part
Maier’s.
15 M. Civil, “The Sumerian Flood Story,” apud W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard,
Atra-hası̄s: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 138–145,
˘
167–172. Civil, however, considers this text as possibly late and secondary; cf. ibid., 139.
16 The Bible in Its Literary Milieu: Contemporary Essays, ed. Vincent I. Tollers and John
R. Maier (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979); eidem, Mappings of the Biblical Terrain; The
Bible as Text (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ, Press, 1990).
17 John R. Maier, “Charles Olson and the Poetic Uses of Mesopotamian Scholar-
ship,” JAOS 103 (1983): 227–235.

18 John Gardner and John Maier, Gilgamesh (New York: Knopf, 1984).
19 J. Maier, “Three voices of Enki: Strategies in the Translation of Archaic Litera-
ture,” Comparative Criticism 6 (1984): 101–117.

In the rest of the book, Kramer is responsible for the translation of

all the Sumerian myths (chapters one through five) and other literary
genres (chapter six), most of them more or less revised versions of his
earlier editions. Many of these, in their time, were pioneering efforts
that first revealed these compositions to the world of scholarship. Maier
appears to be responsible for the translation and discussion of the later
literary traditions about Enki/Ea in Sumero-Akkadian bilinguals and
in other works in Akkadian, Hittite, Hebrew, Greek, and even beyond
(chapters seven through nine). A final chapter (by Maier?) deals more
generally with “myth and literature” (chapter ten).
Between them, the authors have omitted relatively little of relevance.
Of the secondary literature, one misses particularly the dissertation
of Hannes D. Galter.20 Among the more notable textual omissions is
the composition known by its ancient title (incipit) as nin-mul-an-gim,
which describes “The Blessing of Nisaba by Enki”.21 For the sake of
completeness, the admittedly fragmentary text described by Gadd as
“part of a myth in Akkadian concerning principally the god Ea”22
might have been presented. And the corpus of compositions has grown
in the meantime with “A Litany for Enki.”23 Secondary literature about
the deity since the book’s appearance includes studies by Cooper,24
Limet,25 and Vogelzang.26
But even without these omissions and additions, Myths of Enki pres-
ents a rich feast. It serves as testimony to the maturing of Assyriology:
the field has arrived at a new plateau when a comprehensive survey
20 “Der Gott Ea/Enki in der akkadischen Überlieferung: Eine Bestandsaufnahme
des vorhandenen Materials” (Ph.D. diss., Karl-Franzen-Universität Graz., 1983).

21 W.W. Hallo, “The Cultic Setting of Sumerian Poetry,” CRRA 17 (1970): 116–134,
here: I.2. (Abbreviations of text series follow Erica Reiner, ed., The Assyrian Dictionary of
the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. 17: Š, Part II [Chicago: The Oriental
Institute, 1992], ix–xxvi.) For the latest additions to this composition, sec CT 58, no. 47;
and A. Cavigneaux and F. al-Rawi, “New Sumerian Literary Texts from Tell Hadad
(Ancient Meturan): A First Survey,” Iraq 55 (1993): 95.
22 UET VI.2, 396 and p. 7.
23 A.R. George, “Babylonian texts from the Folios of Sidney Smith, Part One,” RA
82 (1988): 139–162, esp. pp. 155–161.

24 Jerrold S. Cooper, “Enki’s Members: Eros and Irrigation in Sumerian Literature,”
in DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed. Hermann Behrens et

al., Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 11 (Philadelphia: The
University Museum, 1989), 87–89.
25 Henri Limet, “Les Fantaisies du dieu Enki: Essai sur les techniques de la narration
dans les mythes,” ibid., 357–365.

26 M.E. Vogelzang, “The Cunning of Ea and the Threat to Order,” Jaarbericht . . . Ex
Oriente Lux 31 (1989–1990): 66–76.

can be offered for the figure of a single Mesopotamian deity among

the dozen major ones and the more than five thousand lesser ones that
make up the Sumero-Akkadian pantheon.27 And when we recall that, in
Mesopotamia, deification was the functional equivalent of generaliza-
tion or of abstract conceptualization,28 then the equation of “the myths
of Enki” with “the theology of Eridu” is not so farfetched.
The following detailed comments may be added here.

P. 7: “The first inkling of its existence” (i.e., that of Sumerian litera-
ture) dates not to 1875 and the first edition of Rawlinson’s The Cuneiform
Inscriptions of Western Asia, vol. IV, as stated here and elsewhere,29 but
to 1873, when Lenormant began the publication of a sizable body of
bilingual texts.30
P. 88: Whether Aratta is “now part of Iran” may be debated. One
authority thinks so,31 but another places it in Afghanistan,32 and a third
regards it as an essentially imaginary locale.33
Pp. 92–94: For “crafty” in this hymn (ll. 1, 12, 20, 27) the original has
galam, which Kramer (p. 237) equates with Akkadian naklu. Presumably
this is the inspiration for the title of the book. Sjöberg, in his original
edition of the text, “Miscellaneous Sumerian Hymns,” ZA 63 (1973):
40–48, translated galam by “clever” in ll. 1 and 12, by “surpassing” in
l. 20, and by “(accomplishing) everything” in l. 27 (for kin-galam-ma
ak).
P. 105, ll. 42–45: for “the curse of his father/mother” in physiog-
nomic omens and elsewhere, cf. W.W. Hallo, The Book of the People,
Brown Judaic Studies, vol. 225 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 30 f. The
theme is treated in early modern times by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–
1805), La Malédiction paternelle.
27 The first edition of Anton Deimel’s Pantheon Babylonicum (Rome: Pontifical Biblical
Institute, 1914) listed 3300 divine names, but the second (= ŠL IV.1) 5580 by actual
count (5367 net after subtracting cross-references).
28 Hallo and Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History, 171.
29 E.g., S.N. Kramer, From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1979), 1.

30 François Lenormant, Études accadiennes (Paris: Maison-neuve, 1873–1879). Cf.
already Hallo, “Toward a History,” 181, here: I.4.

31 Yousef Majizadeh, “The Land of Aratta,” JNES 35 (1976): 105–113.
32 J.F. Hansman, “The Question of Aratta,” JNES 37 (1978): 331–336.
33 Piotr Michalowski, “Mental Maps and Ideology: Reflections on Subartu,” in The
Origin of Cities in Dry-Farming Syria and Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium bc, ed. Harvey
Weiss (Guilford, Conn.: Four Quarters Publishing Co., 1986), 129–156, esp. p. 131.
P. 107, l. 72: For Nindinugga, the “Woman who Revives the Dead”
in Shurpu,34 cf. already the inscription of Enlil-bani of Isin dedicated
to Nintinuga as nin-ti-la-ug5-ga, “the mistress who revives the (near-)
dead.”35 The same epithet, applied to Ninisina in a hymnal prayer,36
was translated by Kramer as “queen of the living and the dead.”37
P. 112: The incantation against the seven evil gods from Utukki
Limnuti XVI is reminiscent of that in the fifth tablet of the same series
which inspired, indirectly, the Russian poem, “They Are Seven,” by
Konstantin Balmont, set to music by Sergei Prokofiev.38
P. 116: It may be questioned whether adapu means “wise.” That
Berossos’ Oannes is derived from Sumerian u4-an-na (thus rather than
uma-an-na) and is “none other than Adapa” has long been clear from
the compound forms umun-a-da-pà,39 u4-an-na-a-da-pà,40 and u4-ma-
d
a-num-a-da-pà.41
Pp. 138 f.: “The exaltation of Kingu”—if this characterization of the
passage in question is granted—provides an interesting new example
of “the typology of divine exaltation.”42 The pericope occurs in the
second chapter (tablet) of Enuma Elish, the composition conventionally
known as the “Babylonian Epic of Creation,” but which would be
better entitled, “The Exaltation of Marduk” (cf. pp. 172 f.).43
P. 145: The term nagbu, “everything,” is not “ordinarily ‘groundwater’
or ‘depth’.” Rather we may be dealing here with two homophones.
The same ambiguity occurs in the opening line of the canonical version
34 Erica Reiner, Šurpu, 36–38.

35 W.W. Hallo, “Oriental Institute Museum Notes, no. 10: The Last Years of the
Kings of Isin,” JNES 18 (1959): 54. Cf. now Douglas R. Frayne, Old Babylonian Period
(2003–1595 bc), The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia: Early Periods, 4 (Toronto:
Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990), 82 f.
36 OECT 5, no. 8, line 21.
37 Ibid, p. 21.
38 See Sasson apud Maier, “The Poetic Uses of Mesopotamian Scholarship,” 235.
39 ABL 923, 1. 8; cf. W.W. Hallo, “On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature,” JAOS
83 (1963): 176, n. 83, here: II.1.

40 W.G. Lambert. “A Catalogue of Texts and Authors,” JCS 16 (1962): 59–77, esp.
pp. 64 f., l. 6.
41 Verse Account of Nabonidus ii 3; cf. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus,
King of Babylon 556–539 bc, Yale Near Eastern Researches (hereafter, YNER), 10 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 218; cf. ibid., 215 and n. 47.
42 W.W. Hallo and. J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna. YNER, 3 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968), ch. 6.

43 Ibid., 66 f.: cf. already J. van Dijk, “L’Hymne à Marduk avec interecession pour le
roi Abı̄"es̆uh,” MIO 12 (1966–1967): 57 (“L’Exaltation de Marduk”).

˘
of Gilgamesh (“He Who Saw Everything”) where, however, Maier

failed to note it, since he allowed Gardner (above, note 18) to translate
there unambiguously “the one who saw the abyss.” A defense of this
translation was provided by Kilmer.44
P. 155: It is perhaps a bit surprising to see Sumerian influence
claimed for Psalm 104, more often regarded as the biblical psalm most
indebted to Egyptian models.45
P. 159: The concept of “intertextuality” was introduced to the literary
criticism of cuneiform sources by Erica Reiner in 1985 and has been
invoked by Assyriologists quite often since then.46
P. 161: While it is true that the biblical version of the Flood has no
particular role for the flood-hero’s wife and daughter, one may note the
intertestamental tradition that made the first sibyl a daughter-in-law
of Noah. For post-biblical traditions about Noah’s wife, see pp. 162–
165.
P. 189: The reference here and on pp. 193 f. is to the text translated
by Kramer on pp. 77–82 and transliterated by him on pp. 228–231. For
the couplet “You are (or: he is) true with those who are true/not true
with those who are not true” (l. 139), cf. the proverbial saying, “With
the liar he acts the liar, with the truthful one he acts truthfully.”47
P. 192: Helga Piesl’s theory of “the emergence of anthropomorphic...
forms of the divine in Sumer” has been roundly criticized by Hruška.48
Typographical corrections are called for on pp. 1 (chapter 6, not
7), 11 (Altra-hası̄s), 84 (of of its hand), 85 (it awesomeness), 94 (delete
˘
note 25), 104 (actually, not actual), 116 (seen the plan, not been the
plan), 117 (takkabu, not takkakbu), 121 (chapter 8, not 6), 154 (denonced),
44 Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “A Note on an Overlooked Word-Play in the Akkadian

Gilgamesh,” in zikir šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus . . . . ed. G. van
Driel et al. (Leiden E.J. Brill, 1982): 128–132, esp. p. 131.
45 Cf., e.g., R.J. Williams, “The Hymn to Aten,” in Documents from Old Testament Times,
ed. D. Winton Thomas (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1958), 142–150.
46 W.W. Hallo, “Proverbs Quoted in Epic,” in Lingering Over Words: Studies . . . in
Honor of William L. Moran, ed. Tzvi Abusch et al., Harvard Semitic Studies, 37 (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1990), 203–217, here: VIII.4, esp. pp. 1 f. and nn. 8 f. Add W.L. Moran.
“Some Considerations of Form and Interpretation in Atra-hası̄s,” in Language, Literature
and History: . . . Studies . . . Reiner, ed. F. Rochberg-Halton,˘ AOS, 67 (New Haven:
American Oriental Society, 1987), 253.
47 Hallo, “Proverbs Quoted in Epic,” 214, here: VIII.4.
48 B. Hruška, “Zur Geschichte der sumerischen Religion: Die Grenzen einer Metho-
de,” Archív Orientální 39 (1971): 190–199.

157 (charism), 180 (undersand), 208 (effectiveness), 224 (William K.

Hallo), 235 (rstorations), 235 (ZA 49 [1950], not CA 49 [1930]), 237
(ZA, not AZ), 240 (Erne zweisprachige Königsritual), 256 (úinnush).
As these comments and suggestions imply, Myths of Enki, the Crafty God
is worthy of careful study and eventual reprinting.
vii.5
URBAN ORIGINS
IN CUNEIFORM AND BIBLICAL SOURCES
(FOUNDING MYTHS OF CITIES IN THE ANCIENT
NEAR EAST: MESOPOTAMIA AND ISRAEL)1
Mesopotamia is indeed, in A. Leo Oppenheim’s felicitous phrase, a

“land of many cities.”2 It therefore properly belongs in any survey of
urbanism in antiquity. Professor Azara and the other organizers of
this conference and exhibit are to be congratulated on recognizing
this fact. They have given Mesopotamia equal billing with Greece
and Rome, the twin foci of classical antiquity. But in setting as the
theme of the conference the “founding myths of cities in the ancient
world,” they have confronted their Assyriological colleagues with a
challenge. Foundation myths, in the sense so familiar from the classical
world, barely exist in pre-classical antiquity. The archaeologists and
historians of the ancient Near East speaking here today have thus
been permitted—and required—to expand their treatments beyond the
original limits of the theme. Some have gone beyond myth to ritual;
others have added the founding of temples and palaces to the founding
of cities; I myself will include Israel as well as Mesopotamia in my
purview. The organizers have themselves recognized the first of these
modifications by subtitling the preliminary publication prepared for this
meeting “Myths and Rituals in the Ancient World.”3 I have perused
this publication with interest and profit, but my own remarks were
composed without its benefit, and are here presented, on the whole,
as originally prepared.
Cities are an essential ingredient of civilization. Both words derive

from the Latin civitas, “citizenry, city-state.” The importance of cities to
1 The substance o1 this paper was presented to the International Conference on
“Founding Myths of Cities in the Ancient World.” Barcelona, June 8, 2000. under the
direction of Professor Pedro Azara.
2 Oppenheim 1970.
3 Azara et. alii 2000.
548 vii.5. urban origins in cuneiform and biblical sources
civilization is recognized in most modern treatments.4 It was acknowl-

edged as well in ancient historiography and mythography. These two
genres are difficult to disentangle in pre-classical antiquity. Both will
therefore be taken up in what follows. The sources to be considered
are preserved in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew. But rather than
classify them by language, it is proposed to divide them according to
other, internal criteria. The principal categories to be distinguished are:
(1) versions of the “first city”; (2) the notion of “antediluvian cities”; (3)
myths associated with the origins of specific Mesopotamian cities; (4)
the case of Babylon; (5) tales of specific cities in Israel; (6) the case of
Jerusalem. In conclusion, (7) a short comparison with a more modern
mythologem will be attempted.
I. The “First City”
The first city in Sumerian tradition was undoubtedly Eridu. This is

stated in so many words, albeit negatively, in one of the oldest, if not
the oldest, examples of Sumerian mythology—hence also one whose
translation is beset with difficulties. Following Jan van Dijk, I translate
lines 7 ff., as follows:
“At that time Enki and Eridu(!) had not appeared
Enlil did not exist
Ninlil did not exist
Brightness was dust
Vegetation was dust
The daylight did not shine
The moonlight did not emerge.”5
In other words, the poet pictures a primordial time before day and
night, before vegetation, before some of the great gods, and before any
cities, even the first one, Eridu.
True, the line mentioning Eridu (NUN.KI) is rendered differently in
some translations. Sollberger, for example, rendered it “en ce temps-là,
Enki ne créait plus dans Eridu.” Wilcke translated: “Damals wohnten
die Herren der Orte, die Fürsten der Orte, noch nicht.” Alster echoed
this with: “At that time the (divine) earth lord and the (divine) earth
lady (NINI.KI) did not exist yet.” And even van Dijk modified his
4 E.g. Hallo 1996, ch. I; Hallo and Simpson 1998. ch. II.
5 Hallo 1996:14.
vii.5. urban origins in cuneiform and biblical sources 549
earlier reading from NUN.KI to nun-ki, i.e., presumably, from “Eridu”

to “prince(s) of the earth/place(s).”6
But if these scholars have succeeded in recovering the original under-
standing of the line, that understanding must have been lost long ago.
The bilingual myth7 sometimes entitled “The Founding of Eridu,”8 or
“The Eridu Story of Creation”9 which can be ascribed to (late) Kassite
times (ca. 1400–1100 bce)10 includes a line that states (in Heidel’s transla-
tion): “The Apsu had not been made. Eridu had not been built.” Since
the deity Enki is intimately associated with the Apsu, we have here a
virtual equivalent of the older version. The myth in its full form makes
it clear that Eridu was built when
“No holy house, no house of the gods, had (yet) been made in a holy
place;
No reed had sprung up, no tree had been created;
No brick had been laid, no brick-mold had been built;
No house had been made, no city had been built;
No city had been made, no living creature had been placed (therein);
Nippur had not been made, Ekur had not been built;
Uruk had not been made, Eanna had not been built;
The Apsu had not been made, Eridu had not been built;
No holy house, no house for the gods, its dwelling, had been made;
All the lands were sea;”
and then goes on to describe the foundation of Eridu (see below).
The priority of Eridu, explicit and detailed in the mythography, is
dealt with implicitly and summarily in the historiography. Three texts
stand out here. The first is the “Sumerian King List.” This exists in
(at least) two versions, one shorter and the other longer. The shorter,
or canonical, version is the Nippur recension. It begins with the flood,
and names Kish as the first city to house kingship after the flood, if not
the first city altogether.11 But this is part and parcel of the “theology of
6 Ibid.
7 It is by no means certain that, in this case, the Sumerian is original and the
Akkadian secondary. Note e.g. KI.MIN in the first line of the Sumerian, apparently
referring to the ina ašri elli of the Immediately preceding Akkadian!
8 So Borger 1975:126 ad CT 13:35–38; differently Borger 1967:225 ad loc.
9 So Heidel 1942:49; differently Heidel 1951:61.
10 Falkenstein 1953, nn. 57 f. This relatively early date is supported, i.a., by the
peculiar arrangement of the bilingual text, with the Akkadian in the middle between
the two halves of the Sumerian line, and typically (though not universally) separated
from it by a Glossenkeil at the beginning of the insertion; cf. Hallo 1996:159 f.
Nippur,” seeking to deny and supplant the claims of the “theology of

Eridu.”12 The longer version begins in antediluvian times, and here we
are told unambiguously:
“When kingship came down from heaven
The kingship was in Eridu.”
The same tradition is preserved in the Sumerian Flood Story, or “Eridu
Genesis,” as Thorkild Jacobsen called it. Here we read, in Jacobsen’s
translation:13
“When the royal scepter was coming down from heaven, the august
crown and the royal throne being already down from heaven.
he (the king) regularly performed to perfection
the august divine services and offices,
laid the bricks of those cities in pure spots.
They were named by name and allotted half-bushel baskets.14
The firstling of those cities, Eridu, she (Nintur) gave to the leader Nu-
dimmud (Enki).”
As in the case of the mythography, the historiography preserves this
tradition also in later, bilingual form. Thus we read, in the “Dynastic
Chronicle,” with the restorations by Finkel:15
“After they (i.e. the great gods) lowered kingship from Heaven,
After kingship descended from Heaven,
Kingship was in Eridu.”
The latest exemplars of this chronicle (“Chronicle 18” in Grayson’s
scheme), and its antediluvian section in particular, date to the Late
Babylonian period, i.e. ca. 500–300 bce.
But the cuneiform sources are not alone in preserving into late pre-
Christian times the tradition of Eridu as the first city. I have long argued
that the primeval history in Genesis did likewise.16 As I understand the
successive etiologies of Genesis 4, they are completely parallel. Thus I
read in verses 1–2:
“And the man (ha-adam) knew Chava his wife,
and she conceived and bore Qayin
for she said:
12 Hallo 1996a.
13 Apud Hallo 1996:5; COS 1 (1997) 514.
14 For other interpretations of Sumerian kab-du ..-ga see Hallo 1985:26 and n. 24,
11
here: VIII.3; 1996:5 f. and nn. 33–38; Civil 1994:153–166.
15 Finkel 1980; cf. Hallo 1988:184 f.
16 Hallo 1970:64; 1996:10 f.; Hallo and Simpson 1971:32 = 1998:28.
I have acquired (qānîti) a man with the Lord.

And she continued to bear his brother, Hevel,
and Hevel became the (first) herder of sheep
but Qayin became the (first) cultivator of the ground.”
And likewise in verse 17:

“And Qayin knew his wife,
and she conceived and bore Chanoch,
and he became the (first) builder of a city,
and he called the name of the city like the name of his
son—did Chanoch.”
Generations of translators and exegetes have taken Qayin (Cain) for the
first city builder in the Biblical tradition, and Chanoch (Enoch) for the
name of his city—misled, no doubt, by the peculiar repetition of the
name Chanoch at the end of the verse. They ignored the parallelism
with verses 1–2, the previous generation, where the etiology concerns
the domestication of plants and animals, innovations unambiguously
attributed to the sons—since there are two of them. But Qayin has
only one son, hence the ambiguity about the subject of “he became the
(first) builder of a city, and he called the name of the city like the name
of his son.” But there is no city-name that remotely resembles the name
Chanoch anywhere in ancient Near Eastern tradition. By contrast, the
name of Chanoch’s son—#Irad—is close indeed to Eridu—and it is
a name which defies all other explanations. Among the few Biblical
scholars who have taken notice of my suggestion are Robert Wilson
and Patrick Miller, the latter even accepting it.17
It may be worth noting that this reading of the Biblical text was
not entirely lost to mind in post-Biblical exegesis. It is preserved in
the book of Al-Asatir, a medieval Samaritan text dating ca. 1000 CE.
My colleague Steven Fraade informs me that, in “chap. 2, each of
Adam’s antediluvian descendants is associated with the building of a
city, some of which are named for the builder’s son . . .. This tradition
attributes the building of the first city to Enoch the son of Cain and not
to Cain”;18 he notes, however, that Cain is the builder of seven cities
in a tradition preserved by Pseudo-Philo in his Biblical Antiquities, which
dates to the first century ce.19
17 Wilson 1977: 138–141; Miller 1985:157 f. and n. 9.

18 Gaster 1927:196. Note, however, that the first chapter of this work already speaks
of cities inhabited by Cain (pp. 186, 190) and Adam (pp. 192, 194).
19 The first of which was named after his son Enoch (II 3): cf. Kisch 1949:113.
To return to the cuneiform sources, there are some other claimants

to the role of first city, notably Ku"ara, Babylon, Dilmun and especially
Nippur, but none of these claims carry much weight. (For Kish, see
above.) Ku"ara is substituted for Eridu in one exemplar of the Sumerian
King List, but the city in question is so near to Eridu as to be readily
identified with it.20 It may even have been a part of Eridu.21 Babylon
is substituted for Eridu in the Babyloniaca of Berossos, hardly a very
reliable witness.22
For Dilmun the evidence is at best circumstantial, and comes mainly
from the myth of “Enki and Ninhursag.”23 Dilmun was a land as well
as a city, and embraced, on one estimate, the island of Bahrein in the
middle of the Persian Gulf, the island of Failaka at the head of the
Gulf, as well as the Arabian littoral lying between them. As such it may
well have served as a way-station for the Sumerians, or some of those
who later constituted the Sumerians, on their presumed voyage from a
more distant prior home to Sumer. The beginning of the myth lends
credence to this assumption by picturing Dilmun as a virtual paradise,
hence set beyond the borders of Sumer. (Just so, the Biblical paradise
was set outside of Israel—curiously enough within Sumer, i.e. in the
edin.) It begins, in Jacobsen’s translation:24
“Pure is the city—
and you are the ones
to whom it is allotted!
Pure is Dilmun land!
Pure is Sumer—
and you are the ones
to whom it is allotted!
Pure is Dilmun land!”
And it continues with “Dilmun at the beginning of time.”

The claim of Nippur is more explicit. The myth of “Enlil and Ninlil”
is set there and begins “Is it not the city, is it not the city?” (uru na-
20 Al-Rawi and Black 1993. Cf. also Steinkeller 1980.

21 Hallo apud Finkestein 1963:46, n. 22.
22 See the translation by Burstein 1978:18, with n. 29.
23 Latest edition by Attinger 1984. Cf. the rather divergent recent translations by
Jacobsen 1987:181–204 and Kramer 1989 ch. 1.

24 Jacobsen takes the first four lines to be direct addresses to visitors from Dilmun at
the court in Sumer, and that court respectively. Attinger takes them to be imperatives
meaning “distribute them (i.e. the cities, resp. the land) to them (i.e., probably, the
gods)”.
nam uru na-nam), referring to Nippur.25 However, the “Nanshe hymn”

begins with the exact same words, and is referring to the city of Nina.26
The Old Sumerian collection of temple hymns begins with Nippur, the
city as old as Heaven itself, reaching to heaven, perhaps even deified
in it own right.27 Over against this must be set the neo-Sumerian
collection of temple hymns, which begins with Eridu.28
The claims of Nippur are advanced on the basis of two additional
literary passages by Joan Goodnick Westenholz in a recent publication.
One is an almost casual reference to its brickwork in a hymn to Nippur
by Ishme-Dagan of Isin; she says that the lines “in all the brickwork
established in the land, Your brickwork is the primary brickwork”
(sig4[!]-zu sig4 sag-bi-im) “should be taken as an allusion to the tradition
of Nippur as the first city.”29 But it should be noted that the latest
editor of this hymn understands the allusion rather as referring to the
superlative character of Nippur’s brickwork, and not to its priority.30
Westenholz further argues that the Uzumua myth, also known as
the Myth of the Pickaxe, describes Nippur as the original city.31 But
in the first place this composition is less a myth than an exercise in
scribal virtuosity, a “Lehrgedicht” according to Claus Wilcke, whose
mythological part, and especially its cosmological introduction, has to
be taken cum grano salis.32 In the second place, in placing the creation
of mankind in “the place where the flesh (i.e. of man) came forth,
resp. grew forth” (uzu-è-a, uzu-mú-a), this version of matters differs
from all other Sumerian conceptions of the creation of mankind. In
the third place, while uzu-mú-a is indeed located in Nippur, it does
not follow that Nippur already existed when mankind was, according
to this version of matters, created there; it is in fact equally plausible
to regard Nippur as having grown up around the site venerated in this
tradition as that place. If that is the case it would represent an implicit
foundation myth—and a unique one at that.
25 Jacobsen 1987:171 translates: “It was just a city, just a city.”

26 See the latest translation by W. Heimpel, COS 1:526–531. Earlier translation by
Jacobsen 1987:125–142.
27 Hallo 1996:4.
28 Sjöberg and Bergmann 1969.
29 Westenholz 1998a:49.
30 Ludwig 1990:100: “Unter allen Ziegelbauten, die im Lande errichtet sind, ist
deiner der hervorragendste.”

31 Westenholz 1998a:46. Latest (partial) translation by Farber 1997.
32 Wilcke 1972:5–36.
II. Antediluvian Cities
Eridu was thus the first of all cities in the Mesopotamian tradition, or in
most of it. But it was not the only antediluvian city. There were others.
Their number, names and sequence vary somewhat in the various
exemplars of the Sumerian King List and in other sources, as follows
(= means: same as entry to the left):33
WB44434 WB62 UCBC Ni.3195 Chr. 18 Berossos35

Eridu Kuara Eridu lost lost Babylon
Larsa
Bad-tibira = = Larak Bad-tibira Pautibiblon
Larak = Bad-tibira Sippar
Sippar = = rest lost Larak Laragchos
Shuruppak = = =
The number of the cities is five in all the most reliable texts where these
are completely preserved, and this number can probably be restored
where they are not. It is increased by one in WB 62, a Larsa version
of the Sumerian King List where local pride evidently dictated the
insertion of Larsa. It is decreased by one in UCBC, a casual school-
boy’s version, apparently through simple omission. It is decreased by
two in the late Hellenistic version tradited under the name of Berossos.
The substitution of Kuara and Babylon for Eridu has been discussed
above. Otherwise the names agree in all sources as far as preserved.
As for the order of the names, this is relatively fixed as to the first
and last members of the series. No doubt this is due to firm notions,
preserved outside the antediluvian schemes, as to the first of all cities36
and as to the home of the flood-hero. The maximum divergence occurs
in the middle of the sequence, which seems to be arranged more or
less at random. Similar discrepancies in another historiographical text,
the “History of the Tummal,” can best be interpreted as implying the
essential contemporaneity of the kings in question; perhaps this analogy
allows us to see the three cities as more or less contemporary, rather
33 Hallo 1996:8 f. See already Finkelstein 1963:45 f. with Table 1, and Finkel 1980 for
the Dynastic Chronicle (“Chronicle 18”). The King List from Uruk published by van
Dijk 1962:44–52 does not contain the names of the cities.
34 The same configuration also in the “Eridu Genesis” (above, note 13).
35 Ni. 3195 was meantime published (in transliteration) by Kraus 1952:31; for Beros-
sos see the edition by Burstein 1978.

36 See above for the “Founding of Eridu.”
than successive seats of kingship. But it may be preferable to maintain

the notion of eight successive kings ruling in five different cities for a
total of eight generations. At 25 years per generation, the resulting 200
years would accord reasonably well with the archaeological evidence,
according to which a period of about that length, sometimes identified
as the Jemdet Nasr period, marked the transition from the end of
the proto-historic or Uruk period to the fully historic Early Dynastic
period.
III. The Origins of Specific Mesopotamian Cities
There are comparatively few myths about the founding of specific

Mesopotamian cities, especially in comparison to the abundance of the
genre in classical antiquity. I will dispense with remarks about Akkad,
except to note that its foundation is credited to Sargon of Akkad in
three slightly divergent texts, all known only in first millennium copies.
In the Late Babylonian “Chronicle of Early Kings,” we read (with
Grayson): “He (Sargon) dug up the dirt of the pit (eper esê issuh) of
Babylon and made a counterpart (GABA.RI = mihir) of Babylon next
to (itê) Agade.”37 In the “Weidner Chronicle,” now seen to constitute a
(fictitious) letter from a king of Isin to a king of Babylon (or Larsa?),38
we read: “he (Sargon) [neglected] the word which Bel(?) spoke; he took
earth from his pit (eper šatpîšu is(s)uh) and built a city opposite (ina mahrat)
Agade; and called its name Babylon.”39 In a fragmentary passage of the
neo-Assyrian omen collection, we read: “Omen of Sargon who by this
ominous sign (UZU = šı̄ru) [exercised] power [and] Babylon [ . . .] to
him and he dug up the [earth] of xxx and [next to/opposite?] Agade
built a city and called its name Babylon.”40
I will also pass over the cities of Assyria, the subject of Sylvie Lack-
enbacher’s presentation, and consider just three candidates, from the
third, second and first millennia respectively.
37 Grayson 1975:153 f.
38 Al-Rawi 1990; previously Grayson 1975:43–45, 145–151, 285; Finkel 1980:72–75,
78, 80.
39 Al-Rawi 1990:10. Al-Rawi proposes an emendation to: “built a city opposite
Babylon; and called its name Agade.”

40 Cf. Grayson 1975:153, note to 18 f.
The oldest foundation myth allegedly concerns a city written with

the sign UNKIN.(KI). According to Giovanni Pettinato,41 an Old Su-
merian text from Shuruppak deals with the foundation of this city. The
geographical problems raised by this assumption, involving as it does
territories of Adab, Lagash and Umma, were recognized by others.42
But even if, by chance, the text deals with the foundation of a city, it is
only a simple archival account, certainly not a canonical text, let alone
a myth.
For the founding of Eridu, we pick up the story where we left it
(above):
“All the lands were sea;
The spring which is in the midst of the sea was only a water-pipe;
Then Eridu was made, Esagila was built—
Esagila, whose foundation Lugaldukuga laid within the Apsu—
Babylon was made, Esagila was completed . . . .”
As Avigdor Hurowitz has noted, this section of the myth (as well as
lines 36–40) anticipates enuma elish in dating the building of Babylon to
the time of creation.43
In some ways the most intriguing foundation myth comes from
the latest period. It is often referred to as a theogony, specifically the
theogony of Dunnum, for it combines both theogony and foundation
myth.44 Jacobsen reedited the text under the title “The Harab Myth.”45
Although dating in its sole surviving exemplar from the Late Babylo-
nian period, it deals with matters at the beginning of time, and seems
to climax in the creation of the city or fortress called Dunnum. This
is itself a generic name for fortress, and there are many different place-
names that consist of or contain the word dunnum.46 A new theory would
even have it that the text is an aetiology of the institution of rural for-
tifications.47 But in our case the reference appears to be to a specific
Dunnum, namely the one named in the 29th date-formula of Rim-Sin
of Larsa, i.e. 1795 bce in the middle chronology. Its fall to Rim-Sin ush-
ered in the fall of the city of Isin the following year, and with it the fall
41 Pettinato 1977.
42 Pomponio and Visicato 1994:12 f.; cf. Selz 1998:307 n. 127.
43 Hurowitz 1992:94, n. 4.
44 Latest translation by Hallo, COS 1:402–404, which is followed here.
45 Jacobsen 1984.
46 Hallo 1970:66 n. 110.
47 Wiggerman 2000. I did not hear the lecture in person. Cf. also the institution of
the fortified manor (dimtu) at Nuzi and in Kurruhanni: Al-Khalesi 1977:18.

of the chief rival to Larsa. In the date formula, the city was described as
the “lofty capital city” (uru-sag-mah) of Isin—or perhaps we can better
understand it as its “bolt” (gamiru).48 The myth begins as follows:
“In the beginning, [Harab married Earth.]
Family and lord[ship he founded.]
[Saying: “A]rable land we will carve out (of ) the plowed land of the
country.”
[With the p]lowing of their harbu-plows they cause the creation of Sea.
[The lands plowed with the mayaru- pl]ow by themselves gave birth to
Sumuqan.
His str[onghold,] Dunnu, the eternal city, they created, both of them.
Harab gave himself clear title to the lordship of Dunnu, but [Earth]
lifted (her) face to Sumuqan, his son, and “Come here and let me
make love to you!” she said to him. Sumuqan married his mother
Earth and
Hara[b his fa]ther he killed (and)
In Dunnu which he loved he laid him to rest.
Moreover Sumuqan took over the lordship of his father.
Sea, his older sister, he married.”
There follow several more generations of sons killing fathers and moth-
ers, and marrying sisters. All the principals bear names evocative of
creation stories and of early stages of culture: Heaven, Earth, Sea, river,
plow, domesticated animals, herdsman, pasture, fruit-tree, vine. Only
the last pair, Haharnum and his son Hayyashum, so far do not answer
to this description, but they recur as incipit of the “Marduk Prophecy”
for which see below, as well as in a broken context.49
In contrast to Jacobsen,50 I take the opening words of the composi-
tion to be “in the beginning” (ina rēš ); they are not only reminiscent of
the beginning of the Biblical account of creation in Genesis 1:1, but also
recur as a title (incipit) twice in a late literary catalogue.51 That makes it
the more reasonable to regard them as the opening words of the com-
position; the small break before them may have contained, if anything,
only a rubric such as “incantation.”
48 So first suggested by Jacobsen 1934:116 (22) on the basis of CADG s.v., for
which see meantime MSL 17:218:233. But CAD overlooked the same equation in
MSL 6:30:293. noted by Salonen, Türen 75.
49 Hallo 1997:403, n. 11.
50 Jacobsen 1984:100 f. Cf. Hallo 1997:403, nn. 1, 14.
51 Van Dijk BaM Beiheft 2 (1980) 90:3 f.
The rationale for assigning such a transcendent origin to Dunnu(m)

may well be found in its various epithets. In the myth itself it is called
s. a-a-tu, the eternal.52 On this see below. In a lexical text, it is equated
with the “heavenly capital city” or perhaps the “pristine heavenly city”
(uru-sag-an-na),53 and followed by an entry for “the fortress of the
hunters” (URU-dun-nu-s. a-i-du) which is equated with what I take to be
an allusion to the Gutian king Siaum (ša Si-a-im),54 and which in turn
bears comparison with Ishtar the huntress (s. a-i-[di-tu]) equated with
Sumerian Inanna-[ša-Si-a-im]KI.55
Most important is the evidence of the date formulas. The twenty-
second year of Gungunum of Larsa is named for the construction of
Dunnum and the digging of the Ishartum-canal, presumably passing
through Dunnum.56 In the date formula for Rim-Sin 29, Dunnum is
called the “bolt of Isin.”57 And indeed, its fall in 1794 ushered in that of
Isin itself the next year.58
As translated above, the Theogony of Dunnum also refers to the
city as “the eternal city,” and that epithet bears some further scrutiny.
It is claimed by many different Mesopotamian cities, including Sippar,
Babylon, Nippur and Uruk, as well as Ur, Eresh, Kullab, Kisiga and,
in Assyria, Nineveh.59 If indeed Dunnum is counted in this exalted
company, it may well be a fit subject for theogony.
IV. The Case of Babylon
As we have seen, the Theogony of Dunnum shares its ancient title or

incipit with the Biblical account of creation, and the Sumerian Flood
Story shares its modern title of “Eridu Genesis,” bestowed on it by
Jacobsen, with the Greek name of the first book of the Hebrew Bible.
52 For this reading, against a-s. a-a-tam or perhaps s. a-pa-a-ta-am implied by Lam-
bert’s “towers” and Grayson’s “pillars” see already Hallo 1970:66 and n. 112. Jacobsen
1984:14 entertains both possibilities.
53 See now MSL 17 (1985) 226:188.
54 Hallo 1971a;712 right. For Dunnu-sa"idi cf. also Unger 1931:138 and 261:39; Wise-
.
man 1967:495–497. Wiseman’s text may be a late copy of a royal letter according to
Grayson 1975a:6, n. 5.
55 Litke 1998:157 IV 120.
56 For the geographic implications, see most recently Frayne 1998:27.
57 See above, note 48.
58 For details and references see Hallo 2000.
59 For details and references see Hallo 2000.
But it is the famous Babylonian “Epic of Creation” that is more widely

known to modern readers as the “Babylonian Genesis.” This mod-
ern title is, however, something of a misnomer. The poem, it is true,
recounts the creation of the world from the carcass of the monster
Ti"amat (“Sea”) after her defeat by Marduk. But its main point is the
reward bestowed on Marduk by the rest of the gods, and this consists
of three parts: the acclamation of Marduk as head of the pantheon
(V 77–116; VI 92–120);60 the building, with the help of all the gods,
of his city of Babylon and of his temple Esagila (V 117–156; VI 39–
81) (together, presumably, with Etemenanki, its great temple-tower or
ziqqurratu), and the proclamation (and elucidation) of the fifty names
of Marduk (VI 121–VII 144). The poem can therefore be better enti-
tled “The Exaltation of Marduk.” As such, it has ample precedent in
Mesopotamian tradition, as well as an important parallel in the exalta-
tion of Israel’s God at the Reed Sea in the Book of Exodus.61 And the
key role played in the myth by the building of the deity’s city and tem-
ple can be paralleled not only in the Bible but widely across the entire
ancient Near East, as Hurowitz has amply documented.62
The poem, known by its native incipit as enuma elish, was a regular
part of the liturgy at Babylon. It formed an important element of the
New Year’s ceremonies, and probably was recited as well on other
days of the liturgical calendar.63 From the point of view of the present
discussion, it is important to note that its etiology of the founding of
Babylon puts this event almost immediately after creation, as Hurowitz
has noted.64 The creation of mankind is in fact little more than a
subsidiary theme in the middle of the story of the building of Babylon;
it is intended in large part to relieve the (lesser) deities of their labors
on behalf of Marduk (VI 1–38). This lends weight to the claims of
Babylon to be, not only the first city (see above), but also the capital
city or the eternal city. As such, it rates a degree of sanctity and
centrality unmatched within Babylonia and comparable only to the
role of Jerusalem in Biblical and post-Biblical perspective. These claims
have been examined, for Jerusalem, in a book on that subject edited by
Lee Levine which appeared last year, and compared there to Babylon’s
60 Numbering after Lambert 1966 and Foster 1993:381 ff.

61 Hallo and van Dijk 1968, ch. 6; Mann 1977; Hallo 1991:53 f. and 136 f.
62 Hurowitz 1992 ch. 5.
63 Lambert 1968:107 f. based on Thureau-Dangin, Rituels Accadiens 136.
64 Hurowitz 1992:94, n. 4 ad enuma elišh VI 1–33 and 45–73 respectively.
comparable claims by myself.65 The particular parallel which I sought

to draw between the ideological status of these two cities revolved
around their “inviolability.” This bears some scrutiny.
Clearly neither Babylon nor Jerusalem enjoyed total immunity from
attack or even destruction in actual historical fact, but in ideological
terms both asserted a special status that commanded respect for lengthy
periods of time. For Babylon this status is best revealed in two rather
curious texts, the first a literary letter that was long thought of as a
chronicle, the other a prophetic or perhaps better an apocalyptic text.
The text long known as the “Weidner Chronicle” is now seen to be
a literary letter.66 Its core is a chronicle-like sampling of historic rulers
of various kingdoms in Mesopotamia whose fate varied according to
how well or badly they treated Babylon, its temple and its deity. The
survey begins with Akka of the first Dynasty of Kish, continues with
Enme(r)kar of the First Dynasty of Uruk, Puzur-Nirah of Akshak, Ku-
Bau and Ur-Zababa of Kish II, Sargon and Naram-Sin of Akkad, the
“horde” of Gutium, Utu-hegal of Uruk IV, and Shulgi, Amar-Suena
and Shu-Sin of Ur, and ends with Sumu-la-il of Babylon.
The other composition is the so-called Marduk prophecy, better
described by its latest translator as an example of the genre of fictional
autobiography.67 Here Marduk recounts in the first person his inter-
mittent periods of enforced departure from his city, i.e. presumably the
capture and exile of his cult statue. His absence means devastation for
Babylon and prosperity for his temporary abode. But his restoration to
Babylon reverses these terms, and the lesson is the same as that of the
Weidner Chronicle: rulers violate the sanctity of Babylon at their peril.
History bears out the lesson. Only three times in its long existence
was Babylon’s inviolability flouted, and each time the perpetrator paid
for his temerity. Murshili I the Hittite was unable to follow up his
capture of the city ca. 1600 bce and had to rush back to his distant
capital in order to save his throne. Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria, who
took the kingship of Babylon for seven years and levelled the city
ramparts, met a fiery death at the hands of rebels in his own capital
city of Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta.68 Sennacherib leveled the whole city only
65 Hallo 1999.
66 See above at note 38.
67 Latest translation by Longman 1997.
68 Olmstead 1923:53. Tiglath-pileser I burned the palaces of Babylon according to
ibid, 66.
to be assassinated by his own sons—an event seen as retribution by

the Chaldean kings of Babylon, perhaps even as inflicted by Marduk
himself.69
V. Founding Myths of Specific Cities: Israel
In its own native view, Israel regarded itself as a newcomer to the land
of Canaan, whose cities were already old and established at the time
of the Conquest. The Israelite role was to capture and often enough to
destroy them, not to found them. Nevertheless, there are hints of foun-
dation stories here and there, most of them connected to pre-conquest
times, to the conquest or to the ensuing period of the Judges. The case
of Hebron illustrates the point. “The name of Hebron was formerly
Kiriath-arba; [Arab] was the great man among the Anakites”—so we
read in Joshua 14:15 (with NJV; cf. also Joshua 15: 13, 21:11). With this
tantalizing hint, the Bible provides us at once with an “explanation”
for the double name of one of the major cities in the narratives of
the patriarchs and of the conquest, and with a mythologem about the
founding of Hebron by the ancestor of the mysterious giants (canāqim)
who nearly frightened the Israelites into abandoning the conquest. The
“explanation” depends on a dubious etymology—“city of Arba”—and
the mythologem tells us nothing about the details of the founding. But
it does serve to remind us that foundation myths were part and parcel
of the lore associated with cities not only in classical antiquity but in
pre-classical Israel.
Other examples of cities renamed in the process of being conquered
and (re-)founded include Heshbon, which may be identified with the
#Ir-Sihon or Kiriath-Sihon of the “ballad of Heshbon” (Num. 21:27–30;
cf. Jer. 48:45 f.),70 and Devir, formerly Kiriath-sefer or Kiriath-sannah
according to Josh. 15:15, 49.71
Only a few foundation stories date from the period of the United
Monarchy or even the Divided Monarchy. Samaria, for example, whose
name in Hebrew is Shomron, is said to have been built on a hill
purchased by King Omri of Israel for two talents of silver from a man
by the name of Shemer (I Kings 16:24). A few verses further on, we are
69 Hallo 1999:44 and 50. notes 102–104.

70 Van Seters 1972:196.
71 Hallo, in preparation.
told that in the time of Ahab, the son and successor of Omri, a certain
Chi"el from Beth-el rebuilt the city of Jericho in defiance of the curse
laid upon it by Joshua centuries before—but paid the price of violating
Joshua’s ban: he had to sacrifice his eldest son Aviram to found it and
his youngest son Seguv (Ketiv: Segiv) to set up its gates (I Kings 16:34;
cf. Joshua 6:26).72 This suggests an analogy to archaeological evidence
of child-burials within the gate-complex of cities; whether the children
were dead of natural causes or represented “foundation-sacrifices” is
uncertain.73
Joshua’s ban on the rebuilding of Jericho has a parallel of sorts
in the ban imposed by Abimelech, son of Gideon, on Shechem. In
the case of Shechem, it involved sowing its ground with salt (Judg.
9:45; cf. Deut. 29:22), a usage widely attested in stories of destruction
and cursing of cities across the ancient world.74 The actual founding
of Shechem is implicitly attributed to Hamor, the father of Shechem
(Gen. 33:19; Jud. 9:28). What we have here, then, may be regarded as a
secondary etiology, more particularly an attempt to account for a place
name by equating it with a personal name. For while there is ample
Near Eastern precedent for (royal) foundations named after their (royal)
founders, there are none for a more modest naming after a son. The
nearest parallel is the Biblical one of Cain or rather Enoch building a
city and naming it after his son (see above).
There are also Biblical traditions regarding the founding of Meso-
potamian cities. The proof-texts here are Genesis 10 and 11:1–9. These
one and a half chapters form the conclusion of the “primeval history”
of Genesis, or shall we say of Biblical pre-history, and share many obvi-
ous traits with the corresponding traditions of Mesopotamia.75 Chap-
ter 10 is more specifically known as the tabula gentium, or “table of
nations,” a kind of early geography of the world as known to the Bibli-
cal authors of the tenth and sixth centuries respectively, cast in the form
of a genealogy of the sons of Noah or, if one prefers, of their “lines” or
simply their history.76
72 For the ban in Joshua 6, see Stern 1991:139–145.

73 Green 1975:169; ABD 1:23 f. s.v. Abiram.
74 Gevirtz 1963; Gaster 1969:413 f. (No. 105); 428–430(No. 114). Cf. also Roszkowska-
Mutschler 1992.
75 See in detail Hess and Tsumura 1994.
76 On the genealogies of Genesis in general, see Tengstrom 1981; on those of Gen.
10 see e.g. Simons 1954; Oded 1986.

Embedded in this genealogy is the curious digression on Nimrod (v.v.

8–12), where we read (NJV):
“Cush also begot Nimrod, who was the first man of might on the earth.
He was a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord; hence the saying,
‘Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord.’ The mainstays
of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Accad and Calneh in the land of
Shinar. From that land Asshur went forth and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-
ir, Calah, and Rezen between Nineveh and Calah, that is the great city.”
Much ink has been spilled over the identification of Nimrod, and some
of his cities.77 Here I only want to point to the Biblical notion that some
of the principal Assyrian cities in the northern half of Mesopotamia
were built by a mighty conqueror from the south whose realm included
Babylon, the ancient city of Uruk, and the traditional realm of “Sumer
(Shin"ar) and Akkad.” That this conqueror is more likely to have been
a king of Akkad like Naram-Sin78 than a king of Assyria like Tukulti-
Ninurta I79 strikes me as almost axiomatic.
More familiar than the Table of Nations is the story of the “Tower
of Babel” in the next chapter of Genesis. Here too the Mesopotamian
setting is obvious, and the Mesopotamian analogues to the resulting
“confusion of languages” have by now also become familiar.80 What is
less often realized is that the denouement of the Biblical story includes
the dispersion of peoples from their Mesopotamian origins (Gen 11:9b),
thus setting the stage for the “Line of Shem” or, if you like, the his-
tory of the (Western) Semites which follows, and what is most often
overlooked is that the story begins with the resolve to build, not just a
tower, but first and foremost: a city (11:4). So we have here, in a sense,
an etiology or myth of the founding of Babylon. The native Babylo-
nian conceit was that the city was the “gate of god” (bab-ilim) by virtue
of its very name as rendered in Sumerian or logographic form (KÁ-
DINGIR-RA), contrary to the evidence of older syllabic spellings. The
Biblical author showed up this self-serving etymology by substituting his
own, “scurrilous etymology,” according to which the city got its name
because there God “confused” (BLL) the languages of mankind.81
77 Among innumerable studies, I will cite here only Sasson 1983.

78 So first Hallo 1971.
79 So Speiser 1958.
80 Cf. simply Hallo 1996:154–168.
81 Hallo 1995, esp. pp. 768–770, and nn. 13, 19 f.
VI. The Case of Jerusalem
We may pass over minor founding stories82 and on to the parade exam-
ple of an Israelite city as the focus of Biblical myth. This is of course
Jerusalem, whose sanctity and centrality in the Hebrew canon rival
those of Nippur and Babylon in Sumerian and Akkadian literature,
and were the subject of a recent conference and book.83 The oldest
references to Jerusalem occur, not in the Bible, but in Egyptian sources,
beginning with the so-called “Execration texts” of the 19th to 18th cen-
turies bce.84 The hieroglyphic spelling 3-w-š-3-m-m stands for *rwslmm,
perhaps to be read as Rushalimum.85 Next we find Jerusalem as the sub-
ject of numerous letters, written in cuneiform, in the Amarna archive of
the fourteenth century bce, both in the letters of its king Abdi-Hepa to
Akh-en-Aton, and in other correspondence to and from that “heretic”
pharaoh’s archive at El Amarna.86 In this correspondence, it is consis-
tently referred to as (uru)ù-ru-sa-lim, possibly to be interpreted as “City
of (the deity) Salim.” If that etymology is correct, it may provide a
link of sorts to what, by general critical opinion, is the oldest Biblical
name of the city, Salem, for ancient Near Eastern cities occasional went
by the name of the deity to whom they were sacred—as for example
Assur. For Syria, Westenholz cites the examples of Ebla,87 Halab, Emar,
Neirab and Carchemish (i.e. Kar-Kemosh).88 The divine name Salem
or Shalim is well known in “the earliest Semitic pantheon” to cite the
title of J.J.M. Roberts’ book on that subject.89 The city-name stands in
parallelism with Zion in the Psalms (76:3), i.e. is effectively equated with
Jerusalem there.90
82 E.g. Ono and Lod in 1 Chr. 8:12; Ramat-Lehi in Jud. 15:17.

83 Levine 1999. For notions of Jerusalem’s inviolability, see Hallo 1999:43 f.
84 ANET 328 f. One of the rulers of Jerusalem mentioned there is called Yaqar-
Ammu; for Ammu as a theophoric element cf. Good 1983.

85 RLA 5:279; ABD 3:751.
86 For orthographic and stylistic peculiarities in the letters written by the scribe of
Jerusalem, see Moran 1975; for a new translation of all the Amarna letters, see Moran
1992.
87 But note that Ebla may possibly be the name of the first king of Ebla; see Hallo
1992:143.
88 Westenholz 1998:49 with nn. 43–45.
89 Roberts 1972:51 and 113, notes 414–418; Roberts interprets the name to mean
“twilight” or “dusk.”
90 wayyehi bheshalem sukko, ume"onato bhesiyyon.
.
All this entitles us to treat the first Biblical reference to Salem as a

kind of foundation story for Jerusalem. It occurs in Genesis 14, one of
the most enigmatic chapters in the book, indeed in the whole Bible.
Chaim Cohen has provided the most recent treatment of its first half,91
but the reference occurs in the second half (w. 18–20), where we read
that Melchi-zedek, king of Salem, blessed Abraham in the name of
God the Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, using a succession
of divine names and epithets with numerous echoes in the literature of
the ancient Near East: El, Aliyin (Ba"al), Elkunirsha. The last has even
been read in an inscription on a potsherd (ostracon) found in Jerusalem
itself and dating to the 8th or 7th century bce.92
Melchi-zedek is met with once more in the Bible, in Psalm 110:4,
where King David presumably is promised an eternal priesthood after
the manner of Melchi-zedek, though the New Jewish Version has an
alternative rendering: “You are a priest forever, a rightful king (melekh
s. edeq) by My decree.” E.A. Speiser even proposed to compare the name
with that of Sargon in the cuneiform tradition, the famous usurper(s)
whose name means “the kings is just, legitimate”93—though I would
rather compare the Amorite royal name Ammi-s.aduqa, “my kinsman
is just,”94 or possibly “the divine Saduqa
. is my kinsman,”95 borne by
one of the descendants of Hammurapi of Babylon.
The epigraphic evidence from Egypt and the Biblical allusions to
Melchi-zedek combine to take the origin of Jerusalem back into and
perhaps even before patriarchal times—whatever their historicity—but
they provide no very satisfactory foundation legend for so important
a city. That is furnished rather by the next Biblical allusion—again
indirect, and again linked with Abraham, the first patriarch. In Genesis
22 we read the narrative of the Aqeda, the binding of Isaac his son. It is
set on a mountain in the Land of Moriah (v. 2), traditionally identified
with the Mount Moriah on which, according to the Book of Chronicles
(2 Chr 3:1), the Temple of Solomon was later built. This identification is
in the opinion of some scholars a secondary one intended, perhaps, to
lend additional sanctity and antiquity to the site of the Temple.96 Still, it
91 Cohen 1991.
92 Miller 1980.
93 Speiser 1964:104.
94 So Huffmon 1965:93, 98 f. who regards Saduq(a) as a divine epithet or even as a
.
theophoric element.
95 So McCarter 1999:124.
96 Kalimi 1990. Cf. J.R. Davila in ABD 4:905.
is tempting to follow the tradition that links the (near-)sacrifice with the
foundation, if not of the city, then of its most important edifice.97
The first Biblical reference to Jerusalem by name occurs in the Book
of Joshua (10:1 et passim), where it is listed among Joshua’s conquests
(12:10) and linked both with the Jebusites (15:8) and with its king, Adoni-
zedek (10:1, 3), whose name sounds suspiciously reminiscent of Malchi-
zedek. Critical scholarship generally does not give much credence to
the triumphant conquest narratives of the Book of Joshua, preferring
the often more sober accounts of painful and incremental infiltration
in the Book of Judges. But that book itself begins with a rather curious
reference to Jerusalem in Chapter 1. We are told there that Judah and
“his brother Simon” began the conquest of the Promised Land on
this side of the Jordan (Cisjordan) with a victory over the king Adoni-
bezek (whose name in turn sounds suspiciously like Adoni-zedek, and
is sometimes so read)98 and his burial in Jerusalem, presumably his city
(Jud 1:3–7). Judah then attacked and burned the city. The reference
must be, of course, to the tribe, not the patriarch as some would have
it.99 Even so, it is hard to square this tradition with those traditions
which attribute the conquest to Joshua or, more plausibly, to David.
With David, I like to think that we pass out of the realm of myth and
legend and into that of history. So my survey can stop here.
VII. Conclusion
Summing up, I must admit that founding myths of cities are far less
abundantly attested in the ancient Near East than they are in clas-
sical antiquity, where the founding of cities was virtually a way of
life. Nevertheless, some results have been obtained from my survey,
and some common distinctive characteristics emerge from them. In
Mesopotamia, many cities claim to be as old as heaven (or An, the
heaven-god); the optimal founder of a city would be a deity, preferably
its patron-deity; foundation by mortals, even by kings who were dei-
fied or later were counted as deified, usually invited disaster, as in the
case of Akkad. In Israel, where most cities had a long existence prior to
97 Though not its largest: it took only seven years to complete, whereas Solomon’s
palace took thirteen! (Cf. I Ki 6:1, 37:f.; 7:1.)

98 BH ad loc.
99 E.g. Thompson 1992:361.
their becoming Israelite, the emphasis was on the story of their acqui-
sition for Israel, whether by force of arms (Jerusalem) or by purchase
(Samaria). Only occasionally was there a genuine myth of foundation,
or re-foundation, typically involving child-sacrifice (Jericho and perhaps
Jerusalem). But in neither Mesopotamia nor Israel did the founding of
cities give rise to a distinct genre in the literature.
Let me then conclude with a more modern analogy. Every American
schoolchild knows that New York began as New Amsterdam, and that
New Amsterdam began with the purchase of Manhattan by Pieter
Minuit for twenty-four dollars, the equivalent at one time (in 1856)
of 60 Dutch guilders. This happened in 1626 CE (November 5, to be
exact). But recent research has forced a revision of that comforting
myth. It was based on a letter first published in 1856, and lacks any
verification in contemporaneous records. According to the authoritative
Encyclopedia of New York City, the Lenape Indians of Manhattan regarded
land as a gift to all, which it was not theirs to sell; they looked upon
land stewardship as temporary, and did not expect the Dutch to settle
there permanently!100 So much for a city-founding myth about the 17th
century of our own era. Can we hope to do better with those of the
17th century bce—and earlier?
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Jacobsen, T. 1984, “The Harab Myth,” SANE 2:99–120.
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Abbreviations
Abbreviations as in The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago 14 (1999) (CAD Q) with the following additions:
AB Anchor Bible.
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992)
BaM Bagh. Mitt.
BH Biblia Hebraica (Stuttgart, Privileg. Württ. Bibelanstalt,
1949)
COS 1 William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., eds.,
1997: The Context of Scripture I: Canonical Compositions from
the Biblical World (Leiden etc., Brill, 1997).
EJ Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, Keter, 1971).
JAC Journal of Ancient Civilizations
NJV New Jewish Version (Philadelphia, Jewish Publication
Society)
SANE Sources from the Ancient Near East (Malibu, Undena)
SHCANE Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near
East (Leiden, Brill)
SIC 4 K.L. Younger et al., eds. The Biblical Canon in Comparative
Perspective (= Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies 11.
1991) (Lewiston, Edwin Mellen)
Studies Hallo M.E. Cohen et al., eds., The Tablet and the Scroll: Near
Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo (Bethesda, MD,
CDL Press)
Studies Levine R. Chazan et al., eds., Ki Baruch Hu: Ancient Near
Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch
A. Levine (Winona Lake, IN, Eisenbrauns, 1999)
Studies Milgrom D.P. Wright et al., eds., Pomegranates and Golden Bells:
Studies . . . in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona Lake, IN,
Eisenbrauns, 1995)
Studies Römer M. Dietrich and O. Loretz, eds., dubsar anta-men: Studien
zur Altorientalistik: Festschrift für Willem H.Ph. Römer . . .
(AOAT 253) (Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 1998)
Studies Sachs E. Leichty et al., eds., A Scientific Humanist: Studies in
Memory of Abraham Sachs (= Occasional Publications
of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 9) (Philadelphia,

University of Pennsylvania, 1988)
Studies Talmon M. Fishbane and E. Tov, eds., “Sha‘arei Talmon: Studies
. . . Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon (Winona Lake, IN,
Eisenbrauns, 1992)
TBC Texts from the Babylonian Collection (New Haven, CT,
Yale Babylonian Collection)
Unity and Diversity H. Goedicke and J.J.M, Roberts, eds., Unity and Diversity:
Essays in History, Literature, and Religion of the Ancient Near
East (The Johns Hopkins Near Eastern Studies [7])
(Baltimore/London, The Johns Hopkins U.P.)
U.P. University Press
YNER Yale Near Eastern Researches (New Haven/London,
Yale U.P.).
viii
proverbs
viii.1
THE LAME AND THE HALT
‘In the city where there is no dog, the fox is oxherd.’ This pointed
paradox, of a type dear to the guardians of proverbial wisdom, is the
sense of Proverb 65 in the Sumerian Proverb Collection One, edited by
Gordon,1 as is clear from a variant text now published by Gadd and
Kramer from Ur.2 The identical proverb recurs in Collection Two as
No. 118,3 and in both instances there follows another saying of precisely
the same form and intent, as Jacobsen indicated by translating ‘In the
town of the vagrants(?), the lame is courier!’4 It is now possible to
clear up the one questionable element remaining in this translation,
thanks to a lenticular school-tablet from the collection of the University
of Illinois Oriental Museum (now the Classical and European Culture
Museum).5 This is published in autograph below through the courtesy
of the Director, Rear Admiral O.H. Dodson, USN (Ret.). Restoring the
breaks in the superior obverse from the student’s hand on the reverse, it
reads: uru ad4-lú-ù-[ka]/ba-za lú-ím6-[e-kam]: ‘in the city of the lame,
the halt is courier.’
The texts published by Gordon in copy or photograph have essen-
tially the same wording, but a number of variants can be made out. For
convenience sake, all the texts are transliterated here, using Gordon’s
sigla.
(1.66) B: [. . .]-ne-ka ba-za lú-ím-e

C: uruKI ad4-x-ka ba-za lú-ím-e
Y: uru ad4-[. . . b]a-za/lú-[í]m-e
Z: (traces only)
1 E.I. Gordon: Sumerian Proverbs, Philadelphia, 1959, p. 72: uru(KI) nu-ur-gi -ra(re)
7
ka5-(a) nu-bànda-(àm).
2 UET 6:221: uruKI ur-gi nu-me-a.
7
3 Gordon, op. cit. (above, n. 1), p. 262.
4 Ibid., p. 459.
5 No. 1999 in the catalogue of the collection prepared by Professor Goetze.
6 Or girím.
576 viii.1. the lame and the halt
(2.119) A: uru ad4-e-ne?!-ka/ ba-za lú-ím-a-kam

BBB: uru ad47-e-ne!-ka [. . .]-e-[?]
OOO: [. . .]-ka ba-[. . .]
The reading ad4-e-ne-ka is easier to accept, but nowhere palaeographi-

cally certain. Thus the lectio difficilior may have to be preferred. Com-
pound expressions with ‘man’ (lú or lú-ulù) as second element can pos-
sibly be detected as early as the Fara period,8 and are well attested
in later Sumerian. Note such terms as gír-tab-lú-ux-lu = girtablilu, the
‘scorpion-man’, and ku6-lú-ux-lu =kulı̄lu, kulullu, the ‘fish-man’.9 Note
also such purely Akkadian examples as hābilu-amēlu and lullu-amēlu in
the Gilgameš Epic, which favors such compounds. ˘ 10
They are other-
wise rare in Akkadian, and von Soden is therefore inclined to consider
some of them ‘gelehrte Lehnübersetzungen aus dem kompositareichen
Sumerischen.’11 (He notes that some of them were actually elided into a
single word, as in nittâmelu nittû-amelu, a sandhi process evident also in
such spellings as s. e-he-ra-bi for s. eher-rabi 12 or a-ba-bi-im for ab-abim)13
˘
A more precise delimitation ˘of ad and ba-za may help to point the
4
proverb’s ‘moral’. The former sign could be described as a reduplicated
GAM-sign, perhaps to be read gúr-gurum,14 and translated by kanāšu,
‘be bowed down’. This would imply the approximate semantic range
demanded by the context, but since the two GAM-signs are normally
separated in Old Babylonian orthography in this meaning, it is prefer-
able to regard our sign as the ‘slanted-ZA’ sign.15 As such it has the
reading ad4 and is equated with Akkadian kubbulu or hummuru, ‘lame,
˘
7 The sign, as far as preserved, is A-tenû; for this variant of ZA-tenû cf. Landsberger:
MSL 8/1, p. 9:28 with notes.
8 Cf. Sollberger: Corpus, p. 2 sub Urn. 22: 24, where dub-sar-lú seems a likelier
reading than lú-dub-sar since the writing with the determinative occurs, at least outside
of the lexical lists, only much later. (Of course a genitive construction, ‘man of the
scribe’, is also conceivable.) For dating Ur-Nanše to the Fara period, cf. a forthcoming
paper.
9 Cf. AHw, s.vv.; CAD Z, pp. 165 f. In astronomical terms, Scorpio and Pisces
respectively, according to H. Lewy: Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger (= Assyriological

Studies 16), Chicago, 1965, p. 278, n. 41.
10 As noted by Speiser in his translation, ANET, pp. 72 ff., notes 19, 23, 126 (and 170).
11 von Soden: GAG, § 59b.
12 YOS 2:141:15; cf. van Dijk: La Sagesse, Leiden, 1953, p. 14.
13 MSL 2, p. 127: 17; cf. also CAD A/1, p. 70c.
14 Following the suggestion of J. Krecher: Sumerische Kultlyrik, Wiesbaden, 1966, p. 197.
15 Cf. MSL 3, p. 97: 8 and note; above, note 7.
viii.1. the lame and the halt 577
crippled’.16 It occurs in the form ad4 in the Old Babylonian lú = ša17

and in the form lú-ad4 in the Old Babylonian lú-series,18 both times in
sections devoted to various kinds of misfits.
Outside of the lexical lists—and even there it tends to be replaced
by other forms19—our sign apparently occurs nowhere except in our
proverb. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether it began to be replaced
by other signs in literary contexts as early as the Old Babylonian
period. One is immediately led to consider the sign KUD, which in
Old Babylonian script looks much like A-tenû, and like it is translated
hummuru.20 In the form lú-KUD, this term is attested several times in the
˘well-known letter-prayer of a crippled woman to Nintinugga.21 It is, in
fact, the crux of this text, as van Dijk has shown in his edition.22 Given
the fact that he has established the meaning ‘crippled, paralyzed’ for
the term in this context; that it is complemented by -du or -da in most
of the exemplars of the text;23 and that ku(d) and kuru(d) as readings
of KUD are not associated with the semantic range of ‘lame’ (which
Sumerian expresses by verbs meaning ‘to bind’ or ‘to seize’)24 but of
‘cut, separate’,25 it seems permissible to posit the value ad4 for KUD in
the meaning hummuru, and to treat it as a replacement for the earlier
ZA-tenû sign. ˘
16 Cf. AHw and CAD s.vv.

17 Line 808, quoted from a MS kindly supplied by Landsberger and Civil.
18 SLT 1:10 (repeated in col. 2). Cf. Ch.-F. Jean: RA 28 (1931), p. 148.
19 Note that in MSL 3, p. 97: 8 the form of the ‘archaizing’ sign looks more like a
reduplicated LlŠ = díl-dílim?

20 CAD. H, s.v. It is true that the attested reading for KUD = hummuru is haš, but this
˘
does not exclude ˘
a reading ad4 as well. For in the reduplicated˘ form KUD.KUD-du,
the reading ad4 or ad4-ad4 seems to be imposed by the complement without, however,
excluding the alternate reading haš- haš which is attested indirectly by Akkadian hašhašu
(=hummuru); cf. CAD H, s.v. ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘
˘
˘21 No. 17 in Letter-Collection B. Cf. Fadhil A. Ali: Sumerian Letters: Two Collections
from Old Babylonian Schools, Ann Arbor, 1967, pp. 137–143. For the published texts and
translations, and a survey of the genre, cf. Hallo: JAOS 88/1 (1968; =AOS 53), pp. 71–
89, here: IV.1.
22 La Sagesse (1953) 15 f. and n. 37, with a full survey of previous literature on hummuru.
23 -du: 5 times; -da: 2 times. I cannot explain the complement -bi occurring ˘ once
(UET 6:180:9) or -ba occurring two or three times (PBS 1/2: 134: 9; Ali, op. cit. [above,
n. 21], pp. xxvii, li).
24 lá or dab/dib/dub (Akkadian kamû, kasû, ussulu, subbutu etc.) as in šu-lá, dùg-lá,
.. .
dùg-dab, for which cf. e.g. SLT 1: 6,12,13 (above, n. 18).
25 (lú)-á-ku (=akû), ‘crippled, deformed’, is rightly regarded by CAD A/1, p. 284 as
5
‘an artificial formation suggested by the Akkadian word’.
As for ba-za, the earliest occurrence known to me is as a personal

name, beginning already in the Fara period.26 As such it found its way
into the primers of the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum, the so-called
Silbenalphabet A27 and Silbenalphabet B28 which, as Landsberger has
shown, consist entirely of personal names.29 In these primers, it is reg-
ularly followed by Ba-za-za, a simple hypo-choristicon of the ‘Banana’
type. In the two and three-column texts which go by the name of ‘Sil-
benvokabular A’ but which are really ingenious30 or even facetious31
commentaries on these primers, this pair of names receives some rather
curious explanations. The most nearly rational one32 explains ba-za by
banû, ‘well-formed’, a euphemism whose true meaning is revealed by
the following entry, ba-za-za = la banû, ‘not well-formed, malformed’.33
Another Old Babylonian version, newly published by Sollberger,34 also
treats the words as antonyms, apparently in the sense of ‘half deposited’
and ‘half withdrawn’ (maš gar-ra and maš zi-ga). The further ‘expla-
nations’ offered in the third column of this text appear to be a simple
‘Schüttelreim’ of the type common in the (first column of the) Silbenal-
phabet (ta-ra-aš//daš-ra-[ta]) without any visible connection to the cor-
responding main entries. For the Middle Babylonian period, which is
represented by school excerpts of the Silbenalphabet A and the Silben-
vokabular from Ugarit,35 the distinction between ba-za and ba-za-za
(variant: ba-ba-za) is one of gender, for the names are there explained
as BA.AN.ZA and SAL.BA.AN.ZA.
These last equations are significant, for they allow us to confirm
the identity of earlier ba-za with the later ba-an-za whose meaning is
clear from the equation, attested in Antagal B36 and other lexical texts
26 Deimel: Fara 3 (= WVDOG 45 [1924]), p. 22* sub Ba-[LAK 798]. For the equation
of LAK 798 with za, cf. most recently R. Biggs: RA 60 (1966), pp. 175 f.
27 B. Landsberger apud M. Ciğ and H. Kizilyay: Zwei altbabylonische Schulbücher,
Ankara, 1959, p. 100, line 23.

28 Ibid., p. 67, line 32.
29 Ibid., pp. 101 ff., The oldest reference which Landsberger offers for Ba-za as
personal name is TuM 5:69, a Nippur text of uncertain pre-Sargonic date.

30 Nougayrol: AS 16 (1965), p. 38.
31 Sollberger, ibid., p. 22.
32 SLT 243; for the characterization, cf. Landsberger: AfO Beiheft 1 (1933), p. 175.
33 Cf. CAD B, p. 83d. For the linguistic gymnastics involved in the pair of equations,
cf. the English neologism ‘flammable’ created to avoid the ambiguity of the older (non-
negative) ‘inflammable’.
34 A three-column Silbenvokabular A, AS 16 (1965), pp. 21–28.
35 J. Nougayrol: ‘Vocalises’ et ‘syllabes en liberté’ à Ugarit, ibid., 29–39.
36 I.e., AO 4489, published by Thureau-Dangin, RT 32 (1910), p. 43, and Rm.
(348+) 604, published in V R 26: 6 and CT 19: 32.

(see presently), of ba-an-za with pissû, the cognate of Hebrew pissē–ah.

‘limping, lame (on one foot)’.37 The identification, already implied by
Howardy38 and suggested by Jacobsen,39 finds further confirmation in
a comparison of the Old Babylonian forerunner to HAR-Ra.= hubullu
˘
III 42, which reads giš- hašhur-ba-za40 where the canonical series˘ reads
˘ ˘
giš-hašhur-ba-an-za= (hašhuru) pissû.41 The reference here is apparently
˘ ˘ or
˘ perhaps to its malformed fruit.42
to a ‘crooked apple-tree’
Akkadian pissû is not so far attested as a personal name43—there
were, perhaps, enough other names of this approximate meaning44—
but the Sumerogram BA.AN.ZA recurs in the mantic literature at
the head of fairly standardized lists of human deformities.45 Thus the
first tablet of the teratoscopic series šumma izbu predicts: ‘If a woman
gives birth to a limping male, penury: the house of the man will be
destroyed; if a woman gives birth to a limping female, corresponding
entry (GABA.RI).’46 The commentaries to this passage are at pains
to explain ba-an-za =pissû in this passage as meaning kurû, ‘short’,
i.e. with one leg shorter than the other.47 The entry for cripples
(KUD.KUD.DU) follows six lines later. Similarly, the first tablet of the
terrestrial omen series šumma ālu states: ‘If in a city the limping men
(BA.AN.ZA.MEŠ) are numerous, [ . . . ]; if in the city the limping women
(SAL.BA.AN.ZA.MEŠ) are numerous, the heart of that city will be
37 Note that biblical Hebrew has to express the idea of ‘lame (on both feet)’ by the
circumlocution ‘limping on both feet’ (2 Sam. 9:13) or by the more general ‘smitten as
to the (two) feet’ (2 Sam. 4:4; 9:3).
38 Clavis Cuneorum, Leipzig, 1933, 272: 666.
39 Above, n. 4.
40 Matouš: LTBA 1: 78 (= VAT 6667) i 23. The variant was already noted in the
edition of HAR-ra III by Meissner (MAOG 18/2 [1913], p. 16, ad line 48) who, however,
˘ to the neo-Babylonian period (ibid., p. 14).
dated the text
41 MSL 5 (1957), p. 97: 42 where the forerunner’s variant is, however, not noted.
42 So R.C. Thompson: Dictionary of Assyrian Botany, London, 1949, pp. 302–305.
43 Cf. H. Holma: Die Assyrisch-babylonischen Personennamen der Form ‘quttulu’, Helsinki,
1914, pp. 80 f.
44 Ibid., s.vv. Ubburu, Ussulu, Bussulu (Pussulu), Hummuru, Kubbulu, Kurû, Šub-
.. ..
buru etc. For the famous scribal name Hunzû and attempts ˘ to give it a less pejorative
Sumerian etymology (ibid., p. 53), cf. W.G. ˘ Lambert: JCS 11 (1957), pp. 2,4, 7,13 (line 45).
45 Note that the sequence BA.AN.ZA//SAL.BA.AN.ZA mirrors the Middle Babylo-
nian Silbenvokabular from Ugarit (above, n. 34).

46 Dennefeld: AB 22 (1914), p. 27, lines 25 f.; Fossey: Babyloniaca 5 (1912), pp. 6 f.,
lines 49 f.; cf. also von Soden: ZA 50 (1952), pp. 183 f.

47 Weidner: AJSL 38 (1922), pp. 196 f.; R. Labat: Commentaires assyro-babyloniens sur les
présages, Bordeaux, 1933, pp. 80 f., line 18; note there the spelling BA.AN.ZU.
good.’48 Twelve lines later, the same series predicts an unfavorable fate
for the city in which the cripples (KUD.KUD.MEŠ) are numerous.49
Finally, it may be noted that dBa-za even seems to occur as a theophoric
element in a single Ur III personal name, KUR.TI-dBA.ZA.50
Is it possible to delimit the semantic border between ad4 and ba-
(an)-za more closely still on the basis of etymology? We may safely
disregard the equations za-na = passu, ‘doll’51 and (giš)-bi-za = *pessu,52
‘counter, (chess)-figurine’ as a more or less fortuitous homophones of
our term, and must equally reject any direct connection of ba-an-za
with pissû. But perhaps one may very tentatively see in the ZA of ba-za
some ultimate connection with the ZA-tenû of ad4. If bà,53 ba-ma54 and
perhaps even bán55 can express ‘one-half ’, we may have in ba-(an)-ZA
an attempt to render the idea of ‘half-lame, lame on one foot, limping,
halt.’
To return to our proverb, it clearly distinguishes the ‘lame’ from
the ‘halt’, a distinction we still find alive in the New Testament.56 The
distinction is that of the greater and the lesser evil, and it has inspired
similar proverbial expression through the ages. If we substitute eyes for
legs, we can point to the medieval parallel luscus praefertur caeco57 and its
English equivalent ‘Better one-eyed than stone blind’.58 An even closer
parallel to our Sumerian proverb is provided by a proverb (παρoιμíα)
quoted in the early Byzantine Scholiast to Iliad XXIV, 192: v τυφλv
48 CT 38:3:65 f. Cf. Nötscher: Orientalia 31 (1928), pp. 46–49.

49 CT 38:4:78; Nötscher, op. cit., p. 48, but read hummurūtu with CAD H, p. 235b
against Nötscher’s qudquddê. ˘ ˘
50 TCL 2: 5484.
51 Landsberger: WZKM 56 (1960), p. 118.
52 Ibid., p. 126 and n. 55.
53 I.e. EŠ (for 30/60); cf. ŠL 2:472 and CAD, s.vv. bamtu, zūzu.
54 In distributive usage. Cf. YOS 1:28 iv 16: á-bi ba-ma-ta . . . (ì-ág-e); this reading
(with Clay’s copy) was collated by J.J. Finkelstein, and will be defended by him else-
where against H. Petschow’s interpretation in ZA 58 (1967), pp. 2 f. A similar usage
occurs in PBS 8/1:102 (collection of model contracts), rev. ii 5 f.: mu-5-ma-ta ib-ta-an-è.
A Sumerian form ba-ma might help to explain the troublesome Akkadian bamâ, ‘in
half ’ for which see von Soden: Orientalia 22 (1953), p. 252.
55 I.e. the 1/2 sign serving as a measure of capacity. For the syllabic spellings (of the
corresponding vessel), cf. A. Salonen: Die Hausgeräte der alten Mesopotamier . . . II, Helsinki,
1966, pp. 278–303; Hallo: BiOr 20(1963), p. 139.
56 Luke 14:13, 21. In the Hebrew Bible, by contrast, the topos is limited to the lame
and the blind; cf. above, n. 37.

57 Archer Taylor: The Proverb, Cambridge (Mass.), 1931, p. 138.
58 Burton E. Stevenson: Home Book of Quotations 9, New York, 1958, pp. 169 f., No. 17.
πóλεϊ γλμυρος βασιλεει59 which passed into Latin as caecorum in patria

luscus rex imperat omnis60 and into English as ‘In the country of the blind,
the one-eyed man is king.’61 W.F. Albright, whose vision has spanned
all the intervening centuries, will hopefully find a small measure of
gratification in this modest link between the modern and the ancient
epigram.
59 K.W. Dindorf: Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem VI (= E. Maass: Scholia . . . Townleyana
2), Oxford, 1888, p. 457. For the date of the text (bT), cf. M. v.d. Valk: Researches on the
Text and Scholia of the Iliad I, Leiden, 1963, p. 414, and for our passage in particular, ibid.,
pp. 501 f.
60 Michael Apostolios (fl.462); Paroemiae, Leiden, 1619, p. 94, Centuria 8: 31; reprint-
ed in W. Duncan (ed.): Clavis Homerica, Edinburgh, 1831, p. 430.

61 Traced back to 1540 by Stevenson, loc. cit.
viii.2
NUNGAL IN THE EGAL: AN INTRODUCTION

TO COLLOQUIAL SUMERIAN?
The goddess Nungal (or Manungal) has commanded increased atten-

tion since the definitive publication of the 120-line hymn in her honor
by Sjöberg under the title “Nungal in the Ekur.”1 Her role as patron-
deity of prisons—indeed the very existence of prisons in early Mesopo-
tamia—has been clarified by Sjöberg’s edition and by the subsequent
studies of Frymer2 and Komoróczy.3 This role finds further confirma-
tion in a literary allusion to the goddess which, modest as it is, bears
adding to the discussion.
The allusion has hitherto been overlooked because, apart from prob-
lems of reading, it occurs in the context of an extract tablet combining
quotations from numerous compositions, apparently in a fixed (“canon-
ical”) order. Such extract tablets were identified in first-millennium
examples from Assur by Lambert4 and Borger,5 from Ur by Borger6
and Gurney,7 and from Sippar (?) by Leichty.8 At Ur, this practice
goes back to Old Babylonian times, to judge by our tablet (UET 6/2
336; cf. 337 and 339). In our case, the extracts so far identified are from
1 Åke W, Sjöberg, “Nungal in the Ekur,” AfO 24 (1973) 19–46; “Additional Texts to
‘Nungal in the Ekur’,” JCS 29 (1977) 3–6. Add YBC 4667 (unpubl.) = lines 1–20.
2 Tikva S. Frymer, “The Nungal-hymn and the Ekur-prison,” JESHO20 (1977) 78–
89; and The Judicial Ordeal in the Ancient Near East (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Yale Uni-
versity, 1977) 103–113, 124–126, and 129, which incorporates a number of corrections.
3 G. Komoróczy, “Lobpreis auf das Gefängnis in Sumer,” Acta Antiqua Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 23 (1975) 153–174.

4 Lambert BWL pp. 356 f.; cf. Hallo, “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature,”
IEJ 12 (1962) 221, here: I.1.

5 Borger HKL 1 97 and 2 55 ad KAR 40.
6 Borger, Festschrift von Soden (= AOAT 1) 2 ad UET 6/2 391 f.
7 UET 7 127–139. In addition, M.E. Cohen (orally) points out that UET 6/2 203–
207 excerpts balag-compositions in the same order in which they are entered (by incipit)
in the balag-catalogue IV R253, for which see Cohen, Balag-Compositions (= SANE
I/2[1974])5 f.
8 Leichty, Essays Finkelstein 144 f.
584 viii.2. nungal in the egal
various proverb collections, specifically 1. 145,9 3.41,10 and one11 or

more12 unidentified collections.
The passage in question (A)13 comes from Proverb Collection 614 and
reads:
é-gal giša-tir-ra-àmb
lugal / ur-mah-e
˘
dNunc-gal! / sá-šul-uš-gal!
guruš-e gúr-gúre//
d
The emendations and line divisions follow the duplicates from Ur

(UET 6/2 209=B) and an unknown site (YBC 9871=C).15 Note the
following variants: aC (and B?) omit; bB and C omit; CC (and B!): nin-é;
d
C omits; eB: dul- [ ]; C: Ù. Ù-e. In line with my earlier translation of
the Yale exemplar, I would render A as follows:
“The ‘big house’ is (like) a forest
the king, a lion,
Nungal a great net
which subdues a man.”
The metaphor in line 1 is difficult to resolve because of the ambiguity

of both terms of the equation (explicit in A thanks to the suffixed -àm).
In addition to its basic sense of “palace,” é-gal is applied as an epithet
9 Obv. 6: 6 f.; cf. Edzard’s review of UET 6/2 in AfO 23. (1970) 95.
10 Rev. 14 f.; cf. Edzard, AfO 23 (1970) 95; Alster, Instructions of Suruppak (=
Mesopotamia 2) 99 and 133 n. 105.
11 Obv. 14–17 resembles UET 6/2 299; cf. Sjöberg’s review of UET6/2 in Or. NS 37
(1968) 238.
12 Rev. 1–6 belongs to the lists of actions (usually in groups of three) described as “an
abomination (níg-gig) of Utu (or Ninurta or Suen)”; cf. most recently G.D. Young, “Utu
and Justice: A New Sumerian Proverb,” JCS 24 (1972) 132; OECT 5 41; Alster, JCS 27
(1975) 205 example 9; note also UET 6/2 259 (and anpubl. dupl. YBC 7351).
13 Rev. 11–13. Note the aberrant line and paragraph division; for the latter see also
obv. 6 f. (above, n. 9) and 14–16 (above, n. 11).

14 So according to E.I. Gordon’s handwritten note found with the Yale duplicate,
though not listed either in his surveys, Sumerian Proverbs p. 518 and BiOr 17 (1960)
126 n. 44, or in the more recent one by Alster, RA 72 (1978) 100. Indeed, a quick check
of the unpublished Philadelphia texts listed in these surveys reveals that CBS 13890
contains a slightly divergent and expanded version of our proverb (6.14 in Alster’s
numbering). It seems to add dUtu (?) šu-mu bu-i-ma-ni-ib, “Oh Utu(?), stretch forth
a hand to me.” My thanks are due to Robert Falkowitz for help with these texts.
15 This text was communicated in transliteration in my “Antediluvian Cities,” JCS 23
(1970) 58 n. 10, before I was aware of the versions from Ur. It is a lenticular school
tablet, inscribed with the identical text on the obverse and reverse.
viii.2. nungal in the egal 585
to the royal storehouse,16 (royal) bivouac,17 the ark,18 and perhaps even
the extended family.19 In addition to its basic sense of “forest,” TIR
is translated into Akkadian words meaning dwelling(-place), sanctuary,
city, and country.20 Given the explicit semantic indicator for “wood”
in A, the basic meaning may be retained for TIR, but é-gal can
perhaps be translated literally as “big house,” a colloquial equivalent
for prison in contemporary American English. For it seems to have
the sense of “prison” in the Nungal hymn (lines 32 f., 40 f., 69)21 where
the synonymous é-gu-la (line 10) is specifically identified as the “guard-
house, brig” (en-nu-un).22
Elsewhere, too, this meaning seems to fit better than “palace.” In
a fragmentary text again linking Nungal and Nin-egal,23 the é-gal is
described as a trap which . . . the evil-doer,24 as a distant sea which
knows no horizon25 (a description elsewhere applied to the é-kur),26
and as the pillory of the nation.27 It is compared to a huge river,
and its interior to goring oxen28 in the Instructions of Shuruppak,29
where the epigram to this effect is preceded directly by another of
the same structure;30 the identical saying recurs as Proverb Collection
6.13, immediately before our own proverb.31 That it is linked also to
16 Durand, RA 71 (1977) 21 n. 2.
17 JCS 23 (1970) 58 n. 10; cf. also Šulgi A 29, translated by Kramer in ANET3 585: “I
made secure travel, built there (i.e., on the highways of the land) ‘big houses’.” Similarly
Kramer, Iraq 39 (1977) 65.
18 JCS 23 (1970) 58 n. 10; cf. M.E.L. Mallowan, “Noah’s Flood Reconsidered,” Iraq
26 (1964)65.
19 Cf. Frankena, Symbolae Böhl p. 151 n, 13.
20 šubtu, mušābu, atmānu, ālu, mātu; cf. Hallo, JCS 23 (1970) 58 n. 10, and “Urban
Origins in Cuneiform Sources” (forthcoming), here: VII.5, n. 17.

21 Frymer, JESHO 20 (1977) 81 and n. 4; Komoróczy, Acts Antiqua Hungarica 23
(1975) 160.
22 Sjöberg, AfO 24 (1973) 37 ad loc. Probably to be kept distinct from the toponym é-
gu-laki and its Akkadian equivalent (?) Bı̄tumrabium; cf. Edzard and Farber, Rép. géog.
2 (1974) svv.
23 Sjöberg, “Miscellaneous Sumerian Texts, I,” OrSuec 23–24 (1974–1975) 166 f.; cf.
Frymer. JESHO 20 (1977) 85 f.

24 é-gal giš-búr-gim lú-hul-gál mu-n[a- . . . ].
25 [é]-gal ab(a)-sù-rá an-zà˘ nu-zu.
26 Sjöberg, OrSuec 23–24 (1974–1975) 175 f.
27 giš-rab (LUGAL)-kalam-ma.
x
28 é-gal i -(da)-mah-àm/a/e šà-bi gu -du -du -àm.
7 4 7 7
˘ of Suruppak 38:99.
29 Alster, Instructions
30 See on both, Alster, Studies in Sumerian Proverbs (= Mesopotamia 3 [1975]) 42.
31 Alster, Studies in Sumerian Proverbs, p. 18, quoting CBS 13890 for which see
above, n. 14.
the platitude about royal property which follows it in the Instructions of

Shuruppak32 is less likely given the independent status of the latter.33
An Ur III court case34 discussed by Falkenstein35 can perhaps now
be translated: “Lugina diverted water from the Sala-canal. The gover-
nor sentenced him to go to jail (é-gal-la KAB in-na-an-du11).36 Lugina
declared to him: I will not go to jail! I will restore the water to the
field of Lukalla the cupbearer who was deprived (?) of the water’,”37
Finally, the late series called “Entering the palace” (é-gal ku4-ra), whose
real or imaginary allusions to crimes and punishments make it a veri-
table cuneiform textbook of schizophrenia,38 may preserve a hint of the
“colloquial” meaning of the term.
Line 2 is another simile, in spite of the disconcerting grammati-
cal construction, for -e varies with -àm in Proverb Collection 1.128’,39
6.13,40 and other proverbs constructed like ours, and was perhaps par-
ticularly liable to occur with animal names because of their frequent
occurrence as the “subject” of proverbs.41
In line 3, B and C offer a variant to the divine name. The variant
may be interpreted as the name of the goddess Nin-egal, who in the
Ningal-hymn shares so many of Nungal’s functions as to appear almost
identical with her. Or perhaps it should be regarded as an epithet, “the
divine mistress of the prison,” in both contexts.
The final line offers variants both grammatical and lexical, but is
mainly interesting as the climax of three preceding clauses (here nom-
inal in construction) in synonymous parallelism. Gordon identified
32 So C. Wilcke, “Philologische Bemerkungen zum Rat des Šuruppag,” ZA 68 (1978)
206 and 218.

33 Hallo, review of Alster, JNES 37 (1978) 272 and 273 ad lines 99–101.
34 YOS 4 1.
35 Falkenstein NSG 1 140 n. 3.
36 For KAB . . . du = “apportion, mete out, sentence,” see Hallo, “Urban Origins”
11
(forthcoming) n. 81, here: VII.5, contra M, Civil in Lambert and Millard, Atra- hası̄s
p. 170. ˘
37 Note that, by contrast, the convicted party prefers imprisonment (or “hanging”)
to performance of the contract (in this case marriage) in the much debated case of
“the slandered bride” and its analogue CT 45 86; cf. Hallo, Studies Oppenheim 95;
Finkelstein, WO 8 (1976) 238 f. and n. 4; Veenhof, RA 70 (1976) 153 f.
38 J.V. Kinnier Wilson, “An Introduction to Babylonian Psychiatry,” Studies Lands-
berger (= AS 16) 289 f. Cf. Vanstiphout, JCS 29 (1977) 56.

39 Below, n. 43.
40 Above, n. 28. For the variant see Wilcke, ZA 68 (1978) 218.
41 Cf. E. I, Gordon, “Animals As Represented in the Sumerian Proverbs and Fables,”
Festschrift Struve pp. 226–249; “Sumerian Animal Proverbs and Fables: ‘Collection
Five’,” JCS 12 (1958) 1–21, 43–75.
viii.2. nungal in the egal 587
numerous examples of proverbs structured with two such “parathetic

members.”42 Three members are rarer, but also occur in his material,
as can now be seen by a comparison of Proverb Collection 1. 128’ with
UET 6/2 210. The composite text reads: “[In the . . . ] there is a raven,
[in the . . . ]a mongoose, in the steppe a lion! Oh my husband, where
shall I go?”43
If our proverb, in its unpretentious way, confirms Nungal’s role as
patron-deity of prisons, there are, however, indications that other pris-
ons had other patrons. An “incantation hymn”44 to Ninurta, dated by
its editor to the early Isin period,45 commemorates the dedication46
of the “wide house of the protective deity” (é-dagal-dlamma) which is
again described as a forest, to be precise as “a far off forest” (tir sud!-rá
sud!-ra!)47 and in addition as a “house of detention” (é.ŠEŠ.A).48 The
latter translation is based on a presumed equation with bı̄t nap.tari 49
meaning “house of detention or sanctuary,”50 and the attested albeit
late equation with é-še-àm-sa4 = bı̄t dimmāti in the context of (sickness
as) metaphoric imprisonment.51
Thus Sumerian é-gal, é-gu-la, é-dagal, and é-ŠEŠ.A take their
place beside Akkadian bı̄t ası̄ri / kı̄li / mas. s. arti/ nap.tari / s. ibitti,52
42 Gordon, Sumerian Proverbs 17. Many other examples could be added for other
proverb collections; note, for example, UM 29-16-291, quoted by Landsberger, WO 3

(1966) 249.
43 [ . . . ] uga-mušen-àm / [ . . . ] dnin-kilim-àm / edin-na ur-mah-e / [mu]-ud-na-mu
me-šè ga-gin. Note-e for -àm in line 3, followed (in Gordon’s text) ˘by illegible signs.
44 M. Cohen, “The Incantation-Hymn; Incantion or Hymn?,” JAOS 95 (1975) 592–
611; previously: Hallo, BiOr 23 (1966) 241 and nn. 23 f., here: III.3; JCS 19 (1965) 57 ad
CT 44 16.
45 M. Cohen, “ur.sag.me.šár.ur . A širnamšubba of Ninurta,” WO 8 (1975) 22–36,
4
esp. 24 f. Note, however, that the incipit is to be restored as [ur-sag gú-za mùš-bi ši-du8]
on the basis of the catalogue of šir-nam-šub-ba’s in TuM NF 3 53 and 4 53 i; cf. Wilcke,
Kollationen 41.
46 According to Cohen, WO 8 (1975) 23.
47 Cohen, WO 8 (1975) 27 line 96; cf. line 100.
48 Lines 88–93 and Cohen’s comments, WO 8 (1975) 33 f.
49 Cohen, WO 8 (1975) 33 f., citing Finkelstein, Studies Landsberger p. 238. Cf. also
S. M. Paul, Studies in the Book of the Covenant (= SVT 18) 63 and n. 2.

50 F.R. Kraus, “Akkadische Wörter und Ausdrücke, X,” RA 70 (1976) 165–172, rejects
this meaning in favor of something closer to “hostel, caravanserai,” but note that the
latter concept can also be expressed by Sumerian é-gal (JCS 23 [1970] 58 n. 10) as a
colloquial (?) substitute For more common é-danna or é-kaskal.
51 W, G. Lambert, JNES 33 (1974) 289: 15, cited by Cohen, WO 8 (1975) 34. Cf.
Lambert, JNES 33 (1974) 292: 15, 293: 12 (e-ši-ka), 301.

52 For most of these terms see Renger, JESHO 20 (1977) 77. Cf. perhaps also s/zihu
in AASOR 16 73: 6 f., 31. ˘

kišeršu53 kišukku, abullu,54 etc., as potential designations of houses of deten-

tion. Perhaps the multitude of designations, and the ambiguity of some
of them, provide clues that Sumerian, before its much-heralded demise,
had developed the capacity for expressing some ideas in the form of
slang.55 Like the “technical jargon” of the priests, craftsmen, and mer-
chants,56 the rougher language of sailors and farmhands may even have
found its way into the scribal curriculum.57
It is hoped that this small clarification of a Yale inscription, with
its duplicates and parallels, will contribute to the ongoing recovery of
Mesopotamian texts and institutions.58
53 Cf. M.T. Larsen, The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies (= Mesopotamia
4) 190 f. n. 90.
54 In the phrase abullam (abullātim) šūdû (kalû), for which see CAD A/1 86cd; I/J 34a;
Falkenstein, BaghMitt 2 (1963) 45 and n. 211.

55 An analogy of sorts may lurk in the expressions šab-gal and šab-tur, translated by
“merchant” (tamkāru) and “(merchant’s) assistant, agent, apprentice” (šamallû), respec-

tively, in the Group Vocabulary, but meaning literally “big pot” and “little pot”; see
Hallo, Studies Landsberger 199 n. 5a, For šab-gal = merchant, already in Uruk III
and Jemdet Nasr texts, see Falkenstein, ATU 58 and n. 2; A.A. Vaiman, “Preliminary
Report on the Decipherment of Proto-Sumerian Writing,” Pêrêdnê aziatskii Sbornik
2 (1966) 164; M.A. Powell, Jr., “Götter, Könige und ‘Kapitalisten’ in Mesopotamien,”
Oikumene 2 (1978) 140 and n. 37.
56 On the last, see Gerd Steiner, “Kaufmanns-und Handelssprachen im alten Ori-
ent,” Iraq 39 (1977) 11–17.

57 Å.S. Sjöberg, “Der Examenstext A,” ZA 64 (1975) 142–145 lines 21, 25 f.; “The Old
Babylonian eduba,” Studies Jacobsen (= AS 20) 166 f.

58 From time to time, “Notes From the Babylonian Collection” are to appear in this
Journal at the kind invitation of the editor, Professor Erie Leichty.

viii.3
BIBLICAL ABOMINATIONS AND SUMERIAN TABOOS*
Moshe Held’s scholarship, as expressed both in his teaching and in his

writing, has had a significant impact on the interrelated fields of Assyri-
ology, Semitic linguistics, and Biblical exegesis. Particularly prominent
among his contributions are his lexicographical insights. One method-
ological need that he consistently emphasized was the recognition that
“comparative Semitic lexicography”1 cannot content itself with what in
some circles is known as “comparative Semitic philology,” i.e., the mere
identification of cognates, an identification which often is highly spec-
ulative at best. Rather, it must also encompass the realms of functional
equivalents, of loan translations, of so-called calques. Such equivalences
are much harder to identify, requiring as they do a command of the
entire semantic field in which a given word is at home, as well as its
* This paper was first presented to the Dropsie College Guest Lecture Series,
September 19, 1984, at the invitation of Prof. Stephen A. Geller. It was repeated in
essentially similar form at Columbia University, November 1, 1984, as a memorial
lecture for Moshe Held. A fuller tribute to his memory, together with a bibliography
of his writings, will appear in the Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
The following common Assyriological abbreviations are used extensively in this
paper:
ANET = J.B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, third
ed. (Princeton, 1969).
BM = tablets in the British Museum.
CAD = I.J. Gelb et al., eds., The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University
of Chicago (Chicago, 1956–).
CT = Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum (London, 1896–).
KAR = E. Ebeling, Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiösen Inhalts, WVDOG, 28, 34 (Leipzig,
1915–1923).
MSL = B. Landsberger, Materialien zum Sumerischen Lexikon (Rome, 1937–).
OECT = Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Inscriptions/Texts (Oxford, 1923–)
SLB = Studia ad tabulas cuneiformes a F.M. Th. de Liagre Böhl pertinentia (Leiden, 1954–).
TIM= Texts from the Iraq Museum (Baghdad/Wiesbaden/Leiden, 1964–)
TLB = Tabulae cuneiformes a F.M. Th. de Liagre Böhl collectae (Leiden, 1964–).
UET = Ur Excavations Texts
YBC = tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven.
1 M. Held, “Studies in Comparative Semitic lexicography,” Studies in Honor of Benno
Landsberger . . . , Assyriological Studies, 16 (Chicago, 1965), pp. 395–406.

590 viii.3. biblical abominations and sumerian taboos
entire range of attestations, especially in poetic contexts. One illustra-

tion among many from Held’s own oeuvre is his convincing equation
of Hebrew šah. at/šuh. ā and Akkadian haštu/šuttatu, all in the approxi-
˘
mate sense of pit or netherworld.2 Establishing this equation involved,
in Held’s own words, “the study of idiomatic correspondences and
the establishment of interdialectal distribution based on actual usage.”3
Availing myself of the same general methodology, I shall here attempt
to demonstrate the functional equivalence of certain terms in Sume-
rian, Akkadian, and Hebrew that share the semantic field of divine
abominations or taboos.4
The text which initiated me into this topic stands out from among
the nearly forty thousand inscribed objects in the Yale Babylonian Col-
lection by its physical appearance. It has the lenticular form char-
acteristic of school-tablets from the early stages of instruction in the
Old Babylonian scribal schools. The largest group of such school-
tablets, discovered at Nippur and preserved at the University Museum
in Philadelphia, is the subject of a recent systematic study by Robert
S. Falkowitz5 (to whom I am indebted for much helpful advice through-
out the evolution of this paper).6 But unlike most of the school-tablets
from Nippur, those from other Old Babylonian sites tend to feature
the practiced hand of the instructor on the obverse, the more awk-
ward handwriting of the pupil on the reverse. The present text7 is
an example of this kind. In careful calligraphy it says, once on each
face:
2 M. Held, “Pits and Pitfalls in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew,” The Gaster Festschrift
= JANES, 5 (1973), 173–190.
3 Ibid., 181.
4 In passing, note the following interesting lexical entries from the “Vocabulary of
Ebla” (entry 100) níg-gig = qá-dì-šum (GA.TI.ŠUM), níg-gig (pronounced ne-ki-ki) =

ì-ki-íb (NI.KI.TUM), níg-gig = é-mu. See G. Pettinato, Testi lesscali bilingui della biblioteca
L. 2769, Materiali Epigrafici di Ebla, 4 (Naples, 1982), pp. 207 (VE 100), 365 (entry
0253). The Eblaite equivalents are compared to Akkadian qaššu and ikkibu and Hebrew
h. erem respectively. Cf. M. Krebernik, “Zu Syllabar und Orthographic der lexikalischen
Texte aus Ebla,” ZA, 73 (1983), 4.
5 R.S. Falkowitz, “Round Old Babylonian School Tablets from Nippur,” AfO, 29/30
(1983–1984), 18–45.
6 My thanks also to David Gelbart (Jewish Theological Seminary) who wrote a
seminar paper for me on this topic (1982).

7 YBC 7351 (unpublished). For transliterations of this and subsequent examples, see
below (Appendix).
viii.3. biblical abominations and sumerian taboos 591
[1] **A judge who perverts justice,

a curse which falls on the righteous party,
a (first-born) heir who drives the younger (son) out of the patrimony—
these are abominations of Ninurta.8
The structure of this epigram—common in Sumerian wisdom litera-

ture generally, and in Sumerian proverbs particularly—consists of a
group of sayings in syntactic and (more or less) semantic parallelism,
followed by a concluding “end-formula,”9 i.e., a climax10 or ‘punchline.’
The sayings are most often arranged in pairs, but groups of three11
or four12 or more also occur. Among the proverbial sayings thus struc-
tured, one subgroup ends with the punchline, “it is an abomination
of (this or that) deity” (níg-gig dingir-ra-kam)—hence, a taboo.13 This
subgroup, to which the Yale text clearly belongs, was first identified by
Edmund Gordon,14 who located it in Proverb Collection 14.
Our tablet is closely paralleled by a fragmentary one from Ur15 that
describes the same three actions as an abomination of (i.e., against)
Utu, the sun-god and patron of justice, as does a third version (from
** The author has identified his (or others’) translations of various Sumerian and
Akkadian texts by means of bracketed numbers, from [1] through [14], throughout the
article. Transliterations of these texts are furnished in the Appendix.
8 For a slightly different translation, see now Å.W. Sjöberg et al., Pennsylvania Sume-
rian Dictionary B (Philadelphia, 1984), 55, which emends line 2 to áš á-zi-ga bal-e, “who
yearns for violence.”
9 B. Alster, Studies in Sumerian Proverbs = Mesopotamia, 3 (1975), 25 f.; see also his
“Paradoxical Proverbs and Satire in Sumerian Literature,” JCS 27 (1975), 205.

10 E.I. Gordon, Sumerian Proverbs: Glimpses of Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Mu-
seum Monographs, 19 (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 17; see also his “A New Look at the
Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad,” BO, 17 (1960), 132 f. Cf. W.W. Hallo, “Notes from the
Babylonian Collection 1: Nungal in the Egal,” JCS, 31 (1979), 164, n. 42, here: VIII.2.
11 Gordon, “A New Look at the Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad,” 133; Hallo, “Notes
from the Babylonian Collection I: Nungal in the Egal,” JCS, 31 (1979), 164, n. 43, here:
VIII.2.
12 W.G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960), p. 272 lines 5–10.
13 Another Sumerian word for which the sense of “taboo, forbidden (thing), inhibi-
tion” has been suggested is kéš-da; see B. Alster, The Instructions of Suruppak: a Sumerian
Proverb Collection, Mesopotamia, 2 (Copenhagen, 1974), 79 f.; see also his Studies in Sume-
rian Proverbs, p. 140, 18: Akkadian words (other than ikkibu, for which see below) for
which it has been suggested include anzillu, asakku (B), kimkimmu (B), gipāru (4) (see CAD
s. vv.), and maruštu (see W.W. Hallo, “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: II. The
Appeal to Utu,” in Zikir Šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus, ed. G. van
Driel et al. (Leiden, 1982), p. 106, here: V.2, ad line 12; see also M. Civil, “Enlil and
Ninlil: the Marriage of Sud,” JAOS, 103 (1983), 47).
14 Gordon, “A New Look at the Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad,” 127.
15 UET 6:259.
the Frederick P. Lewis Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia)16

which, moreover, varies significantly:
[1a] A judge who perverts justice,
a judgement which favors the wicked party
(Young: “The one who loves an unjust verdict”)—
it is an abomination of Utu.
Proverb Collection 14 contains still another version of this saying (cour-
tesy R.S. Falkowitz), which I venture to restore as follows:
[1b] To seize someone with unauthorized force,17
to pronounce an unauthorized verdict,18
to have the younger (son) driven out of the patrimony by the (first-born)
heir—
these are abominations of Ninurta.
As these variants suggest, it is not particularly crucial which deity is
invoked in the punchline. Most often it is Ninurta, as in Proverb Col-
lection 14, or Utu, as in the following isolated example from Ur (which
so far has not been assigned successfully to any proverb collection):
[2] Adding19 property to property (literally, share of an inheritance)20
is an abomination of Utu.
The sentiment expressed here is already found, more or less, in the
‘reform texts’ of the early Lagash ruler Urukagina (Uruinimgina), who
complained that the house of the ruler was added to the field of
the ruler, the house of his wife to the field of his wife, the house of
his crown-prince to the field of his crown-prince.21 It recurs in the
16 G.D. Young, “Utu and Justice: a New Sumerian Proverb,” JCS, 24 (1972), 132.
17 For tukul . . . , dab5 in this sense, cf. TLB 3: 73 iv 1 and my forthcoming edition of
the text in SLB 3.
18 For di... dib in this sense see A. Falkenstein, Die neusumerischen Gerichtsurkunden =
VKEK A, No. 2 (Munich, 1957), III, p. 97.

19 For gá-gá in the sense of “perform an addition, augment” (opposite zi-(i)-zi)
cf. Šulgi B 17 as translated by Å.W. Sjöberg in his “The Old Babylonian Eduba,”
in S.J. Lieberman, ed., Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen, Assyriological
Studies, 20 (Chicago, 1976), pp. 172 f.
20 For ha-la ha-la = zittam zâzu, “divide an inheritance, etc.,” see Examenstext A27
(Å.W. Sjöberg, “Der Examenstext A,” ZA, 64 (1975), 144 f. If that is the meaning here,
we would have to render it as: “to increase property inheritance for the sake of dividing
it” or the like. Cf. also níg-ba-bi-šè gar-ra-ab = ana zitti naškin in Lugal-e 429 (J.J.A. van
Dijk, Lugal ud me-lám-bi nir-ğál: le récit épique et didactique des Travaux de Ninurta du Déluge
et de la Nouvelle Creation, 2 vols. [Leiden, 1983]).
21 Urukagina 4 vii 5–11 = 5 vi 25 31 in E. Sollberger, Corpus des inscriptions “royales”
présargoniques de Lagaš (Geneva, 1956). See latest transliteration by B. Hruška, “Die

disputation between Summer and Winter, one of whom is said to have

“added field to field, piled up grain-heaps there.”22 We even find it
echoed by Isaiah, who cried “woe to those who add house to house
and join field to field” (Isaiah 5:8).
Other deities that occur in the punchline include the moon-god Suen
(several times), Inanna (once), and an unnamed divinity identified only
by the generic term for deity. What is more revealing than the identity
of the deity involved, however, is the nature of the offenses catalogued.
A brief survey will illustrate.
Proverb Collection 3 is particularly rich in examples. In the edition
by Falkowitz,23 Nos. 9, 21, 119, 161, 168–171, and 175 are all explicit or
(in one case) implicit examples of the genre. I understand No. 170 as
follows:
[3] To examine (?)24 a man taking a boat downstream,
to. . . the forehead,
to touch25 the vulva—
these are abominations of Suen.
The understanding of this somewhat obscure triplet26 on a Nippur
tablet is improved (if only slightly) by comparing it with partial
innere Struktur der Reform-texte Urukaginas von Lagaš,” ArOr, 41 (1973), 117, and
translations by I.M. Diakonoff, in his “Some remarks on the ‘reforms’ of Urukagina,”
RA 52 (1958), and S.N. Kramer, in his The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character
(Chicago, 1963), p. 318. The verb is zag. . . ús-ús. [But cf. now F. Pomponio, JCS, 36
(1984), 96–100].
22 Å.W. Sjöberg, “Beiträge zum sumerischen Wörterbuch,” Or. 39 (1970), 90. The
verb here is zag . . . tag-tag. Ordinarily, “add” is expressed by Sumerian dah.

23 R.S. Falkowitz, The Sumerian Rhetoric Collections (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Penn-
sylvania, 1980).
24 For káb (KAxA)—latāku, litiktu cf. CAD L s.v. and now TIM 9:87:13 with van Dijk’s
comments ad loc. referring to CT 51: 168) iii 9: kab-du11-ga = la-ta-ku and ibid. 45: kab-
MIN (= du11-ga) = la-ta-ku. For earlier discussion see M. Civil, “The Sumerian Flood
Story,” in Atra-hası̄s: the Babylonian Story of the Flood, ed. W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard
(Oxford, 1969),˘ p. 170, ad line 92; see also his “Les limites de l’information textuelle,”
in L’Archeologie de l’Iraq du debut de l’époque neólithique a 333 a.n.è., Colloques Internationaux
du CNRS, No. 580 (Paris, 1980), p. 228 (end); W.W. Hallo, “Antediluvian Cities,” JCS,
23 (1970), 61; and Hallo, “Notes from the Babylonian Collection I,” 163 f, here: VIII.2.
25 For šu-du -ga = lapātu, see CAD L s.v.
11
26 Falkowitz has more recently compared this proverb with Enlil’s infractions of var-
ious taboos in the myth of Enlil and Ninlil, in his “Discrimination and Condensation of
Sacred Categories: the Fable in Early Mesopotamian Literature,” in La Fable, Entrétiens
sur l’antiquité classique, 30 (Geneva, 1984), p. 19, n. 31.
duplicates from Oxford27 and the British Museum.28 I understand the

Oxford text as follows:
[3a] To examine a man taking a boat downstream,
a man caulking a boat,
or a man drowning (?)—
is an abomination of Suen.
The British Museum piece, however, seems to combine elements of

both versions.
Proverb Collection 3.9 has long since been discussed by Sjöberg,
Cooper and Alster.29 Falkowitz, taking all three discussions into account,
and in light of the six variant exemplars available for his reconstruction,
translated it thus:
[4] Pouring beer into an unclean well,
not stamping when saying an incantation,
not keeping out (?) sand from a cold (?)30 nose,
not shading . . . at noon—
it is a taboo against Utu.
The first offense is listed in one variant only; the other three, recurring
in each of five variant examplars, follow a somewhat more consistent
pattern. Putting all four into this pattern, I would suggest this render-
ing:
To banquet without washing the hands,31
to spit without stamping32 (on the spittle),
to blow (literally, cool) the nose without returning (the mucus) to dust,33
to use (literally, do) the tongue at noon without providing shade—
these are abominations of Utu.
In other words, we have here four examples of ‘bad manners’ associ-

ated with ordinary bodily functions.
27 OECT 5: 35 rev. 15 f.
28 BM 57994; 2–6 (unpublished); courtesy R.S. Falkowitz.
29 Sjöberg, “Beiträge zum sumerischen Wörterbuch,” 90; J.S. Cooper, “gìr-KIN ‘to
stamp out, trample’,” RA, 66 (1972), 83; Alster, “Paradoxical Proverbs and Satire in
Sumerian Literature,” 205.
30 Falkowitz would now translate te-en as “pierced” (dakšu?).
31 Reading the first sign as šu!- not pú, according to collation kindly furnished by
Falkowitz.
32 For “stamping the feet” and its possible significance in Biblical and Ugaritic
contexts, cf. G.E. Bryce, “Omen-wisdom in Ancient Israel,” JBL, 94 (1975), 31 f.

33 For sahar . . . gi in this sense see W.W. Hallo and J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of
4
Inanna, YNER 3 (New Haven, 1968), p. 88.
A similar explanation serves for the solitary offense listed in Proverb

Collection 3.161, recently translated by Miguel Civil as follows:34
[5] To have to bring to the mouth unwashed hands is an abomination.
Note that no deity at all is invoked here. (In one instance from the same
collection (3.21) even the characterization as an abomination is lacking,
so that only the structure suggests that it belongs to our genre. But the
sense is too obscure to merit further attention here.)
The remaining examples from this Collection are also solitary ones
rather than groups of three or more; some of them recur in the context
of other Proverb Collections. Thus, 3.175—
[6] To reach for alms (var., to examine alms closely)
is an abomination of Ninurta.
—finds a possible parallel in Collection 15 (D5, fragmentary). Again,
3.171 seems to be a minor variation of Collection 1.23. In the light
of presumed duplicates from Ur,35 I take the latter to mean approxi-
mately:
[7] Singing of one’s property or one’s needs36
is an abomination of Inanna.
and the former:
[7a] Singing of one’s “inventory”37 or. . . one’s needs
is an abomination of Inanna.
Only Collection 3.118 is still without parallel in other contexts. Alone
among the examples of the genre, it begins with a rhetorical flourish:
[8] Let me tell you about his knowledge.
It then says (as I understand it):
That he brought a witness to his (own) ignorance
is an abomination of Suen.
But the most intriguing parallel to these abominations comes from out-
side the Proverb Collections, indeed from outside unilingual Sumerian
34 Civil, “Enlil and Ninlil,” 62.

35 UET 6:261 f.; 339ii.
36 For níg-al-di = erištu this sense, see, e.g., MSL 1:60:15 f.
37 For im-šu-nigin-na in approximately this sense see Falkowitz, The Sumerian Rhetoric
Collections, p. 244 (“a tablet of sums”), citing G. Komoróczy, “Zur Ätiologie der Schrift-
erfindung im Enmerkar-Epos,” AoF, 3 (1975), 18–24.
literature altogether. Collection 3.168 and 169 are treated by Falkowitz

as separate (albeit parallel) proverbs, and translated (respectively) by
him as:
[9] Bitter barley is taboo for the necromancer ((lú)gidim).
and
Wheat flour is taboo for (his [i.e., the necromancer’s]) god.
The same saying is found in only slightly variant form in the context of
incantations.38 But a quick check of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary’s
(CAD) article on ikkibu39 (the Akkadian equivalent of Sumerian níg-gig
= taboo) reveals that this particular taboo also passed into the bilingual
series called utukkū limnūti, preserved verbatim (albeit in reverse order)
in an unpublished Kuyunjik text (K 166) as follows:
[9a] šegūšu-flour is forbidden (as an offering) to ghosts,
wheat flour is forbidden (as an offering) to gods.
This suggests that in the millennium which separates the Sumerian
proverbs of Old Babylonian date from the canonical collection of in-
cantations against evil spirits, the emphasis of the taboos had shifted
from a principal preoccupation with morals and manners to an at
least equal concern with cultic matters. This impression is reinforced by
the unilingual examples of ikkib ili. Some of these preserve exactly the
sense of Sumerian níg-gig dingir-ra, “abominable to the deity, taboo,”
in precisely analogous contexts, namely proverbial precepts on good
behavior. Thus for example the text today called “Counsels of Wisdom”
(in the translation of W.G. Lambert40 as restored in CAD)41 ends as
follows:
[10] to create trust and then to abandon,
to [promise] and not to give
is an abomination to Marduk.
Other instances of the expression involve a new sense, that of “sacred
to the deity.”42 But even when the older meaning is retained, it is
38 CAD I/J 44: 34, OECT 5: 19.

39 CAD I/J 55c.
40 Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, p. 106.
41 CAD I/J 57b.
42 CAD I/J 57bc.
found most often in wholly new contexts. These include in the first
place the colophons of tablets belonging to the so-called “secret lore
of divination” and related genres, as well as certain other texts like the
Agum-kakrime inscription. Such texts are typically subscribed:
[11] The initiated shall show (this text only) to (another) initiate;
the uninitiated is not to see (it).
it is a taboo of (this or that) deity.
Lists of the texts so subscribed have been assembled by Borger43 and
Hunger.44 A variant of the formula invokes divine retribution on those
who would efface or carry off the tablet so subscribed45 The deities
invoked in all these cases are typically the great gods who preside over
divination on the one hand46 or the patron deities of the scribal art on
the other (Nisaba, Nabu, etc.). In the second place, the Akkadian idiom
is found in a number of scattered passages involving the violation of
a taboo or prohibition. This is most often expressed as “eating” the
taboo,47 but sometimes also in the more familiar manner as in the
following examples from an omen (probably belonging or related to
the subseries of the physiognomic omina which in effect constitutes a
canon of morals or “Sittenkanon”):48
[12] If someone approaches (i.e., has sexual relations with) a woman in a
river—it is a sin against Ea;
if someone approaches a woman in a boat—
it is a sin against [Su"en];
If someone approaches a woman and (then?) steals any of her valu-
ables—
it is a sin against “the mistress of the lands.”
The second of these moralizing omens is vaguely reminiscent of exam-
ple No. 3 in the Sumerian tradition.
43 “Geheimwissen,” RLA, 3 (1964), 188–191; see also previously his, “nisirtı̄ bārûti,
.
Geheimlehre der Haruspizin,” BiOr, 14 (1957), 190–195.
44 Babylonische und assyrische Kolophone, AOAT 2 (Neukirchen, 1968), p. 163 s.v. ikkibu.
45 CAD I 56.
46 Cf. in the Agum-kakrime inscription (V R 33 viii): Šullat u Haniš u Šamaš u Adad
ilāni s. ı̄rūti bēlē bı̄ri.

47 CAD A/1: 255; cf. (ikkib ilišu/ālišu akālu). The less common ikkiba epēšu (CAD E 209)
seems to be a loan translation from Sumerian níg-gig . . . ak (Emesal ám-gig . . . ak) for
which see Hallo, “The royal correspondence of Larsa: II,” 106 (12), here: V.2.
48 S.M. Moren, “A Lost ‘Omen’ Tablet,” JCS, 28 (1977), 66 f., lines 1 and 3. Refer-
ence courtesy R.E. Falkowitz.

Finally, the most characteristic context for the Akkadian idiom is

provided by the menologies and hemerologies, calendars which list the
months and days on which all manner of activities should or should
not be carried out. A sampling of references from Assur will serve to
suggest their range.
7th month (Tašritu), 7th day: he must not embark on a boat—it is a sin
against (literally, abomination of ) Ninurta, provider of the temple.
He must not face a dust storm in an open area, or the evil spirits will
take him away—it is a sin against the deity
He must not cross a river . . . it is a sin against Ea . . .
He must not jump over a ditch . . . it is a sin against the deity . . .
He must not plant a date palm or a snake (will bite?) the man—it is a
sin against dIGI.SIG.SIG the gardener . . .
He shall eat neither pigeon nor rooster, or else pestilence will seize
him—it is a sin against Nedu the chief doorkeeper of the nether-
world.
He must not eat fish (and) leek, or a scorpion will sting him—it is a sin
against Shulpa"e the lord of the table.
He must not eat the root of the leek or he will acquire the qūqānu sick-
ness—it is a sin against Bel-la-tari, the great herdsman of Anu.
He must not eat an offering—it is a sin against Shamash the judge, the
lord of decision/divination (?).
He must not lie on his haunches or else (a demon?) will take away his
haunches (?)—it is a sin against the “Wagon of the Sky of Anu” (i.e.,
the constellation Ursa Major).
He must not bring a hand to the breast of a woman, or else (a demon?)
will push them off the bed—it is a sin against [. . .] (and) Irra.49
The taboos for the seventh of Tashritu are particularly numerous in

this text; another hemerology from Assur50 and its parallel from Kalhu51
has only one, plus one for the first day,52 according to the Babylonian
tradition. It will suffice to cite here the variant tradition from Assur
itself: 7th day (of Tashritu):
[13] He must not eat anything—
it is a sin against Urash and Ninegal.53
49 KAR 178 rev. iv 32–65; cf. R. Labat, Hémérologies et ménologies d’Assur (Paris, 1939),
pp. 114–117.
50 KAR 177 rev. ii 39-KAR 147 rev. 23; cf. Labat, Hémérologies et ménologies, pp. 174 f.
51 P. Hulin, “A Hemerological Text from Nimrud,” Iraq, 21 (1959) 42–53 and pls.
XIII–XV.
52 KAR 177 rev. iii 15 = KAR 147 obv. 8; cf. Labat, Hémérologies et ménologies, pp. 168 f.
53 KAR 177 rev. i 32 f.; cf. Labat 1939, Hémérologies et ménologies, pp. 178 f.
Otherwise only the 18th of Nisannu has a comparable prohibition,54

which is repeated verbatim in Inbu bēl arhim, the hemerological com-
pendium.55 ˘
Of the many taboos catalogued in the hemerologies, the one against
eating fish and leek is particularly worthy of notice because of its persis-
tence in the cuneiform tradition. Thus, e.g., a description of demons in
lines 110–118 of Dumuzi’s Dream56 includes the formulaic lines, “(They)
taste not the bitter garlic, they eat no fish, they eat no leek,” lines which
were, according to Alster, “originally intended to describe cultically
clean persons, for whom strong smelling food was forbidden.”57 These
early antecedents to the hemerological entry are not yet described as
taboos. A parallel58 from the other end of the literary record, however,
specifically charges many sacrilegious acts against Nabu-shum-ishkun
(an obscure member of the so-called E-dynasty, sometimes referred to
as the 8th Dynasty of Babylon), whose chief claim to fame has hitherto
rested on his role as the immediate predecessor of Nabonassar and the
Nabonassar Era.59 Among other things, this king is alleged to have [14]
“brought leek, the abomination of Ezida, the temple (?) of Nabu, and
made the cultic personnel (KU4.É.MEŠ) eat it.”60
Summing up the cuneiform evidence, it may be said in general that
the divine distaste expressed in this genre of sayings seems, in Sumerian
texts of the second millennium, to be reserved for infractions against
ethical or behavioral norms, while in Akkadian texts of the first mil-
lennium it is extended as well to normally legitimate activities which
happen to be conducted on an unacceptable day. In neither context
is there any visible rationale for the invocation of a particular deity;
indeed, the substitution of other divine names in variant recensions or
of generic terms for deity in other citations implies a certain indiffer-
ence on this point. In the late examples, moreover, the whole concept
54 Labat, Hémérologies et ménologies, pp. 60 f.

55 Virolleaud, “Quelques textes cunéiformes inedits,” ZA 19 (1905–1906), 378: 4 f.;
restored with CAD I 56a.
56 B. Alster, Dumuzi’s Dream: Aspects of Oral Poetry in a Sumerian Myth = Mesopotamia, 1
(Copenhagen, 1972), 16 f. and 64–67.

57 Ibid., 42; cf. 105 f. for a compilation of other compositions with similar descrip-
tions.
58 E. von Weiher, “Marduk-apla-usur und Nabū-šum-iškun in einem spätbabylo-
.
nischen Fragment aus Uruk,” BaM, 15 (1984) 197–224 and pls. 22 f.
59 See for now W.W. Hallo, “Dating the Mesopotamian Past: the Concept of Eras
from Sargon to Nabonassar,” Bulletin of the Society for Mesopotamian Studies, 6(1983), 43–54.
60 Von Weiher, “Marduk-apla-usur,” 202 and 208, lines 17 f.
.
of the “abomination of the deity” seems to weaken into a mere idiom

to express the idea of a sin against a given deity.
Much the same can be said, in passing, of the comparable Egyptian
idiom found, e.g., in the Wisdom of Amen-em-opet:61
Do not converse falsely with a man, for it is the abomination of God.
Do not lead a man astray (with) reed pen or papyrus document: it is the
abomination of God (t A-bwt n-pi A-ntr).
¯
Similarly in the Phoenician sarcophagus inscription of Tabnith of Sidon
(ca. 500 bce),62 we read:
Do not open me or disquiet me, for that thing is an abomination to
#Ashtart.
I pass over the Hittite papratar, “defilement,” and especially hurkel, which
refers exclusively to sexual aberrations including incest, sodomy, and
bestiality.63 In Leviticus, these are variously described as aberrations
(tébel; 18: 23, 20: 12) or abominations (tō#ēbā; 18: passim), or folly (nebālā;
¯ ¯ ¯
Deut. 22: 21 and passim),64 but not specifically as an abomination of the
Lord. The latter we will now consider.
How, in fact, does the Ancient Near Eastern concept of a specifically
divine abomination, a taboo, compare with that of Biblical Israel? Well
aware that the comparative method is under attack, I refer the reader
to arguments I have presented elsewhere in its defense.65 Let me simply
reiterate here that responsible comparison requires that equal attention
be paid to differences and to similarities, to contrasts as well as to
61 ANET 423 xiii 10 and xv 21 = ch. 10:6 and 13:2; the former cited by R.B.Y. Scott,
Proverbs-Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible, 18 (New York, 1965), p. 60. For the latest edition
see I. Grumach, Untersuchungen zur Lebenslehre des Amenemope, Münchner Ägyptologische
Studien, 23 (Munich, 1972). Cf. also ch. 13 (15); 20 f.
62 ANET3 662a. I am indebted to Timothy Lavolle for pointing out this reference.
63 H.A. Hoffner, Jr., “Incest, sodomy and bestiality in the Ancient Near East,” in
Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon . . . , ed. H.A. Hoffner, Jr., AOAT 22
(Neukirchen, 1973), 81–90.
64 The list of these abominations is expanded further in the Temple Scroll to include,
e.g., marriage with a niece; see B.A. Levine, “The Temple Scroll,” BASOR, 232(1978),
12.
65 Note especially W.W. Hallo, “New Moons and Sabbaths: a Case Study in the
Contrastive Approach,” HUCA, 48 (1977), 1–18; “Biblical History in its Near Eastern
Setting: the Contextual Approach,” in Scripture in Context: Essays on the Comparative
Method, Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series, 34, ed. C.D. Evans, W.W. Hallo,
and J.B. White (Pittsburgh, 1980), pp. 1–26; and “Cult Statue and Divine Image: a
Preliminary Study,” in Scripture in Context II: More Essays on the Comparative Method, ed.
W.W. Hallo, J.C. Moyer, and L.S. Perdue (Winona Lake, Indiana, 1983), pp. 1–17.
comparisons. In what I call the contextual approach, both receive their

due. Let it, then, be stated at the outset that biblical Hebrew has no
cognate for Akkadian ikkibu. But it does have a word for abomination
or abhorrence in the form of tō#ēbā (from a presumed root T #B) which
¯
is often coupled, in the construct state, with the divine name.66 It is
therefore reasonable to ask whether this concept bears comparison (or
contrast) with Sumerian níg-gig dingir-ra and Akkadian ikkib ili.
In the Bible, the greatest number of “divine abominations” are cata-
logued in the Books of Deuteronomy and Proverbs respectively, a point
not lost on those who would ascribe both of these books to a common,
perhaps northern, origin.67 Actions specifically condemned as abomi-
nations to the Lord come, like the sins of the Babylonian penitent,68 in
groups of seven. In Deuteronomy69 they are:
(1) Melting down foreign idols for their silver or gold (Deut. 7:25; that
such ‘recycling’ actually was practiced—e.g., at Alalakh—has been
argued by Na"aman);70
(2) Sacrificing a blemished animal (Deut. 17:1);
(3) All forms of sorcery and divination, especially necromancy (18:12);
(4) Child sacrifice (ibid.) (cf. 12:31);
(5) Transvestism (22:5);
(6) Cultic prostitution (or using it to pay vows) (23:18 f.);
(7) Making a sculptured or molten image (27:15).
The Book of Proverbs has a whole catalogue headed “Six things the
Lord hates; seven are an abomination to Him”:
A haughty bearing, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a
mind that hatches evil plots, feet quick to run to evil, a false witness
testifying lies, and one who incites brothers to quarrel (6:16–19; cf. 26:25).
66 Note once the construction with LPNY (Deut. 24:40).

67 So, e.g., H.L. Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage of Judaism (New York, 1982), pp. 34 f.;
previously M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford, 1972), pp. 260–
281, 313–316. See now also M. Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford,
1985), p. 288, n. 20.
68 Cf. W, W. Hallo, “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition,”
JAOS, 88/1 (= AOS 53) (1968), 81, n. 85, here: IV.1; W.G. Lambert, “Dingir.šà.dib.ba
Incantations,” JNES, 33 (1974), 282 f., line 155.
69 David Daube, in his “The Culture of Deuteronomy,” Orita 3 (1969), 27–52, has
argued for the prominence of shame as a motive for obedience (and form of punishment)
in Deuteronomy. Perhaps divine abhorrence is a related concept.
70 N. Na"aman, “The Recycling of a Silver Statue,” JNES, 40 (1981), 47 f.
In addition, it singles out as abhorrent to the Lord the following:

the devious man (3:32);
men of crooked mind (11:20);
lying speech (12:22);
sacrifice of the wicked (15:8, cf. 21:27, 28:9) and the way of the wicked
(15:9);
evil thoughts (15:26);
every haughty person (16:5);
to acquit the guilty and convict the innocent (17:15) (cf. [1a] above).
The most frequent condemnation is levelled at dishonesty in the matter
of weights and measures, which is declared abhorrent to the Lord no
less than three separate times in Proverbs (11:1, 20:10, 20:23) and again
in Deuteronomy (25:12–16). The occurrence of such dishonesty can be
assumed, given human nature, and is illustrated by the lengths to which
ancient Near Easterners went to prevent tampering with weights—and
to circumvent these precautions.71 It is also documented in literary ref-
erences from all over the Near East.72 In the Late Egyptian Book of
the Dead, for example, the deceased protests his guiltlessness by assert-
ing, among other things, “I have neither increased nor diminished the
grain measure . . . I have not added to the weight of the balance. I
have not weakened the plummet of the scales.”73 In Akkadian litera-
ture, the great preceptive hymn to the sun-god, Shamash, patron of
justice and righteousness, contrasts “the merchant who practices trick-
ery as he holds the balances, who uses two sets of weights” with “the
honest merchant who holds the balances and gives good weight.”74 In
the Bible, the Holiness Code of Leviticus commands “You shall not fal-
sify measures of length, weight, or capacity. You shall have an honest
balance, honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin” (19:36 f.),
while Amos condemns “using an ephah that is too small, and a sheqel
that is too big” (8:5).
But only in Deuteronomy and Proverbs are infractions against this
widespread ethical norm condemned as an abomination of the Lord.
71 Cf. W.W. Hallo, “The Royal Inscriptions of Ur: A Typology,” HUCA, 33 (1962), 14;
A. Salonen, Die Hausgeräte der alten Mesopotamier . . . 1 (Annales Academiae Scientiarum

Fennicae, B 139, 1965), pp. 287 f.
72 Cf. also Proverb Collection 3.64, Falkowitz. The Sumerian Rhetoric Collections, pp.
189 f.; M. Civil, “Enlil, the Merchant: Notes to CT 15:10,” JCS, 28 (1976), 72–81, esp.
p. 74.
73 ANET, 34 cd.
74 Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, p. 133; cf. ANET 388d; W.G. Plaut, B.J.
Bamberger, and W.W. Hallo, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, (New York, 1981), pp. 745 f.
And only in Proverbs is it paralleled by similar condemnations of other

ethical lapses, in the traditional manner of Near Eastern wisdom liter-
ature. In Deuteronomy, by contrast, all other abominations are cultic
in character—and chief among these are precisely those cultic practices
most sacred to foreign deities.75 Thus, for instance, transvestism was a
regular aspect of the cult of the Canaanite goddess Ashtarte and her
Mesopotamian counterparts Ishtar and Inanna; its more innocent lit-
erary and dramatic reflex is “travesty.”76 Other cultic practices of the
surrounding nations that received the Deuteronomist’s attention were
the making or recycling of idols, divination (including the use of dis-
eased animals in sacrifice before reading their livers), and cultic pros-
titution. Deuteronomy itself sums it up approximately as follows: when
you have dispossessed the nations of the Promised Land, take care to
avoid their cultic practices, for they perform for their gods every abom-
ination of the Lord that He detests and it is on account of these abom-
inations that they were dispossessed. Confine yourself to observing my
commandments (12:29–13:1, 18:9, 12).
It is time for us, too, to sum up. Besides scattered references to abom-
inations of kings (Proverbs 16:12) and other mortals (Prov. 13:19; 24:9,
29:27), or to abominations in general (especially Ezekiel passim), the
Bible also makes passing reference to three abominations of the Egyp-
tians: eating with Israelites (Gen. 43:32), shepherding (Gen. 46:34), and
sacrificing to God (Exodus 8:22). Why the occupation of shepherding
(or rather, shepherds themselves) should be particularly abominable is
not clear, unless we follow Speiser77 in seeing this as a veiled allusion to
the Hyksos, who were called “shepherd kings” by Manetho (as recorded
in Josephus). R. de Vaux,78 on whom Speiser relied in this instance,
subsequently abandoned the notion. Eating with aliens and witnessing
their sacrifices, however, could well be considered simple cultic taboos,
comparable to the biblical injunction against alien cultic practices in
the sight of God.
75 Cf. previously Hallo apud Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary, p. 1303; W.G.
Plaut, The Torah: a Modern Commentary V: Deuteronomy (New York, 1983), p. xxxi.
76 W.H. Ph. Römer, “Randbemerkungen zur Travestie von Deut. 22, 5,” in Trav-
els in the World of the Old Testament: Studies Presented to Professor M.A. Beek, ed. by
M.S.H.G. Heerma van Voss et al., Studia Semitica Neerlandica, 16 (Assen [Nether-
lands], 1974), pp. 217–222.
77 E.A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible, I (New York, 1964), p. 345.
78 R. de Vaux, The Early History of Israel, trans. D. Smith (Philadelphia, 1978), p. 375.
All this evidence leads me to conclude that the concept of a divine

taboo or abomination, so widespread in the ancient Near East, em-
braces two widely divergent realms. One involves the infraction of
ethical norms and standards of good conduct, enshrined primarily in
proverbs and other parts of the wisdom literature. In this sense, the
concept becomes attenuated into little more than a colorful idiom, a
synonym for misconduct, offense, or aberration. But the other realm
evoked by the concept is more profound, touching on the sacred and
inviolable nature of deity. In this meaning, the expressions are used
by the Babylonians with reference to those acts which, while innocent
enough in themselves, become taboo on unfavorable days; by Israel,
with regard to acts enjoined by alien cults but anathema to God.
I close as I began, with an appeal to the lexicographical principles
of Moshe Held. We have surveyed the contextual uses of Sumerian
níg-gig, Akkadian ikkibu and Hebrew tō#ēbā, especially in the narrower
¯
context where these terms are grammatically linked to the deity in a
genitive construction. This survey suggests that, for all their chronolog-
ically and culturally conditioned differences in connotation, the three
terms have a fundamental semantic similarity that allows us to posit
them as functional equivalents of each other.
Appendix
[1] di-kuru5 níg-gi-na hul-a
áš a-zi-da bala-e
ibila tur-ra/é-ad-da-na-ka/íb-ta-an-sar-re
níg-gig dNin-urta-ke4
[1a] di-ku[ru5 ní]g-gi-na hul-a
di níg-erim2-e/ki-ág(a)
níg-gig dUtu-kam
[1b] tukul? nu-gar-ra [díb-bé?]
di nu-gar-ra díb-bé
[tur-ra?] ibila é-a[d?-da?]-na-ka [sa]?-ra
níg-gig dNin-urta-kam
[2] ha-la ha-la-šè gá-gá
níg-gig dUtu-kam
[3] lú giš-má diri-ga níg-káb(KAxA)-a di-da
ugu? túg?-ga gal4-la šu-du11-ga (var., gal4-la túg-ga x-á šu ba-ni-ti)
níg-gig dSuen-na-ka
[3a] lú má diri-ga lú má du8 lú šubub
nig-káb di-dè? nig-gig dSuen-na-kam
[4] šu ! nu-luh-ha kaš ì-dé-a

uš7 du11-ga gìr nu-sig18 (KIN)-a
kiri4 te-(en)-na sahar nu-gi4-a (var., te-gá)
eme-ak an-bar7(NE) an-dùl nu-gá-gá
níg-gig dUtu-kam
[5] šu nu-luh-ha ka-e tumu3-da
níg-gig-ga-àm
[6] igi-tùm-lá gíd(BU)-i-da (var., igi-du8)
níg-gig dNin-urta-kam
[7] níg-tuk níg-al-di šìr-re
níg-gig dingir-ra-kam (var., níg-gig-ga-àm)
[7a] im-šu-nigin2-na šìr-ra
níg-al-[di . . .]
níg-gig dInanna-ka
[8] níg-zu-a-ni ga-ra-an-da-ab-bé (var., -dab5-bé)
níg-nu-zu-àm lú-ki-inim-ma ab-ta-è
níg-gig dSuen-na-kam
[9] (zi)-še-muš5 (ŠEŠ)-(a) (níg-gig) (lú)-gidim-ma-(ka)
zì-(še)-gig-(ba) níg-gig dingir-ra-(na-ka)
[9a] qēm kibti ikkib ilāni
qēm šigūši ikkib e.temme
[10] [. . .]tukkulu nadû
[. . .]-ni la nadānu
ikkib dMarduk
[11] mudû mudâ likallim
la mudû la immar
ikkib DN
[12] šumma ina nāri ana sinništi i.tehhı̄ ikkib aEa
šumma ina elippi ana sinništi i.tehhı̄ ikkib d[. . .]. . .
šumma ana sinništi i.tehhı̄ma mimma šukāniša itbal ikkib Bēlit-mātāti
[13] kalama la ikkal
ikkib dUraš u d Ninegal
[14] karašu ikkib É.ZI.DA šá? kin? dNabû uqarrib
u ērib bı̄tāti ultākil
viii.4
PROVERBS QUOTED IN EPIC*
Intertextuality has been defined broadly as “a text’s dependence on and

infiltration by prior codes, concepts, conventions, unconscious prac-
tices, and texts,” in short, as an alternative to—indeed a weapon
against—contextuality.1 As such it replaces or complements synchronic
by diachronic considerations.2 More narrowly, it focuses on the use
which one author or composition makes of certain themes in their
characteristic formulation by another, usually earlier author or compo-
sition—most often from the same language or at least the same literary
tradition, but sometimes borrowed across linguistic and cultural bound-
aries. The borrowing may take the form of direct citation, but more
often it is allusive, and the relationship must be ferreted out by the
critic, who may also raise the question whether it was familiar to the
original audience—or indeed to the author. To paraphrase one of the
advocates of the concept, intertextuality is the whole universe of allu-
sive textuality which abides in the intermediary shuttle space between
the interpreter and the text. “In this spacious scene of writing the inter-
preter’s associative knowledge is invested with remarkably broad pow-
ers, including even the hermeneutical privilege of allowing questions to
stand as parts of answers.”3
* Earlier versions of this paper were delivered to the 196th meeting of the Amer-
ican Oriental Society, New Haven, on March 10, 1986, and, at the invitation of
D.O. Edzard, to the Institute für Assyriologie und Hethitologie, Universität München,
on December 12, 1986.
1 Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (London, Hutch-
inson, 1983), p. 161. Part II of this book (“Versions of textuality and intertextuality:
contemporary theories of literature and tradition”) is one of the clearer statements I
have been able to find on the subject.
2 See in detail Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister, eds., Intertextualität: Formen, Funktio-
nen, anglistische Fallstudien (= Konzepte der Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 35, 1985).
Note especially Pfister’s formulation (p. 326): “Ein Text, jeder Text, steht immer in zwei
Beziehungssystemen: zum einen dem vertikalen oder diachronen des Bezugs auf einen
früheren Text, frühere Texte, oder frühere Textsbildungssysteme, zum anderen dem
horizontalen oder synchronen des Bezugs auf gleichzeitig entstandene oder zu dieser
Zeit operative Textbildungssysteme.”
3 Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, editors, Midrash and Literature (New
Haven and London, Yale U.P., 1986), p. xi.

608 viii.4. proverbs quoted in epic
The question of literary influence has, of course, always occupied

a considerable place in the study of Western literature. But it is only
recently that it has begun to be considered seriously by students of
Ancient Near Eastern literature. As so often seems to be the case, the
first intimations of the new approach were sounded in Biblical stud-
ies. Besides such older treatments as Robert Gordis’ “Quotations as a
literary usage in Biblical, Oriental, and rabbinic literature,”4 we have
the identification by A.R. Hulst of the “ka’ašer-sentences” in Deuteron-
omy as explicit allusions to earlier legal formulations5—a theme taken
up in detail by Jacob Milgrom in a number of studies.6 More recently,
Michael Fishbane has devoted much attention to what he describes as
inner-Biblical exegesis—whether legal, aggadic or “mantological”—i.e.
having reference to dreams, visions, omens, and oracles.7
Inevitably, cuneiform studies have joined the trend, albeit so far on a
modest scale. The actual term “intertextuality” I have found employed
to date only in a study by Herman Vanstiphout which appeared this
year,8 and in a manuscript by Piotr Michalowski which had not yet
appeared in print.9 But the concept has figured in many isolated exam-
ples of internal borrowing within cuneiform literature to which atten-
tion has from time to time been called. Thus, for example, two lines
from the Akkadian poem of the righteous sufferer (Ludlul bēl nēmeqi I 52,
4 HUCA 22 (1949), pp. 157–219; cf. also idem, “Virtual Quotation in Job, Sumer and
Qumran,” VT 31 (1981), pp. 411–427.
5 “Opmerkingen over de Ka"ašer-Zinnen in Deuteronomium,” Nederlandsch Theolo-
gisch Tijdschrift 18 (1963), pp. 337–361.

6 “Profane Slaughter and the Composition of Deuteronomy,” HUCA 47 (1976),
pp. 1–17; “A Formulaic Key to the Sources of Deuteronomy,” Eretz-Israel 14 (H.L. Gins-
berg Volume, 1978), pp. 42–47 (in Hebrew; English summary, pp. 123*f.).
7 “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner-Biblical Exegesis,” JBL 99 (1980),
pp. 343–361; Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983); “Inner
Biblical Exegesis: Types and Strategies of Interpretation in Ancient Israel,” in Hartman
and Budick (above, note 3), pp. 19–37. Previously: N.M. Sarna, “Psalm 89: A Study in
Inner Biblical Exegesis” in A. Altman, ed., Biblical and Other Studies (= Studies and Texts
1, 1963), pp. 29–46.
8 H.L.J. Vanstiphout, “Some Remarks on Cuneiform écritures,” in Vanstiphout, ed.,
Scripta Signa Vocis: Studies . . . presented to J.H. Hospers (Groningen, Forsten, 1986), pp. 217–
234, esp. p. 226. Cf. now idem, ASJ 10 (1988), p. 212. Vanstiphout has also introduced
the notion of the literary “calque” to describe imitation that involves transformation,
as when a royal hymn for Lipit-Ishtar of Isin “is manifestly used as an example” by a
successor king, Enlil-bani; RAI 32 (1986), pp. 3 f. and n. 8.
9 See now “On the Early History of the Ershahunga Prayer,” JCS 39 (1987), pp. 37–
48, esp. p. 39. Cf. E. Reiner, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut (Ann Arbor,
1985), p. 119.
viii.4. proverbs quoted in epic 609
54) are quoted verbatim in a royal inscription of Nabonidus10 as seen

by W.G. Lambert.11 The Erra Epic (III A 17) is echoed in the Vassal
Treaties of Esarhaddon (437–439) as shown most elaborately by Kazuko
Watanabe,12 and (V 35) in the barrel cylinder of Merodach-Baladan, as
seen by K.R. Veenhof.13
The much older laws of Hammurapi, which however continued to
be copied and studied in the first millennium14—or at least their pro-
logue and epilogue—inspired other royal inscriptions and treaties of
that millennium. Thus Rykle Borger identified a lengthy section of the
curse-formula from the treaty between Marduk-zakir-shumi I of Baby-
lon and Shamshi-Adad of Assyria (ca. 822 bc)15 as a verbatim, albeit
abbreviated copy of parts of the epilogue of Codex Hammurabi (xlix
45 ff. = Driver-Miles xxvib 45 ff.).16 And the pious sentiment “that the
strong not oppress the weak” (dannum enšam ana lā habālim), familiar
from both prologue (col. i 39) and epilogue (xxiv b =˘ Driver-Miles xl
59 f.), is echoed allusively in Sargon’s Cylinder Inscription17 and explic-
itly throughout the inscriptions of Assurbanipal.18 As late as Darius I,
there may be allusions to the sentiment in inscriptions from Susa and
Persepolis. The former ordains “that a man of high rank shall not kill
or oppress the weak”;19 the latter proclaims “I do not wish that injustice
be done to a poor man by a nobleman”—and vice versa.20
10 C.J. Gadd, “The Harran Inscriptions of Nabonidus,” Anatolian Studies 8 (1958),
68 f. col. iii lines 1 f.

11 Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, Clarendon, 1960), p. 284. Cf. Paul-Alain
Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon (556–539 bc.) (Ph.D. Thesis, Yale Uni-
versity, 1985), p. 238, note 449. For a new interpretation of the passage see T. Abusch,
“Alaktu and Halakhah: oracular decision, divine revelation,” Harvard Theological Review 80
(1987), pp. 15–42, esp. pp. 29 f.
12 “Rekonstruktion von VTE 438 auf Grund von Erra III A 17,” Assur 3 (1984),
pp. 164–166.
13 Apud J.A. Brinkman, Prelude to Empire (= Occasional Publications of the Babylo-
nian Fund 7, 1984), p. 49 n. 230.

14 Cf, especially J. Laessøe, “On the Fragments of the Hammurabi code,” JCS 4
(1950), pp. 173–187.

15 Cf. J.A. Brinkman in The Cambridge Ancient History III/l (2nd. ed., 1982), p. 308.
16 R. Borger, “Marduk-zakir-šumi I und der Kodex Hammurapi,” Orientalia 34
(1965), pp. 168 f.

17 IR 36 1. 40: lā habāl enši.
18 dannu ana enši ˘lā habāli. Cf. Maximilian Streck, Assurbanipal (= Vorderasiatische
˘ pp. 226 f. with note 8; vol. III, s.vv. enšu, habālu.
Bibliotek 7, 1916), vol. II,
19 ša kabtu ana muškēna lā idukku u lā ihabbilu; cf. CAD H 4. ˘
˘
20 ul sebā(ka) ša mamma muškēna piški ˘innepuš ina libbi mār-banî; cf. CAD M/1 257.
.
But Hammurapi himself may not be the first to have formulated

the famous phrase. Already Ishme-Dagan of Isin called himself “a
judge who did not permit the powerful to oppress the weak”21 and
both he and his successor Lipit-Ishtar boasted that in their reign “the
strong did not reduce the weak to a hireling.”22 Even earlier, an almost
literal equivalent occurs in Sumerian as á-tuku si-ga šà-gá-aš-šè la-
ba-an gur4-e, “(so that) the strong does not oppress the weak” in a
Shulgi hymn edited by Jacob Klein.23 And even though Klein points out
that “the juxtaposition à-tuku/si-ga is unique; elsewhere, si-ga usually
contrasts with kala-ga”24 and á-tuku is later equated with bēl emūqi in
the sense of “strong person” or bēl pāni in that of “nouveau riche,”25
we already have it in the context of the essentially identical topos in
the prologue to the so-called Laws of Ur-Nammu. There we read “The
orphan was not delivered up to the rich man (lú-níg-tuku); the widow
was not delivered up to the mighty man (lú-á-tuku); the man of one
shekel was not delivered up to the man of one mina”.26 The same
“mighty man” (lú -á-tuku) already appears in much the same context in
the “Reform texts of Uru-KA-gina,” and it may well be asked whether
so perennial a theme reflects a reality or an ideal.27 If it is further
borne in mind that the “laws of Ur-Nammu” may in fact have to be
re-attributed to Shulgi,28 and that the Shulgi-hymns were models for
21 S.N. Kramer, In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography (Detroit, Wayne State U.P.,
1986), p. 116.
22 D.O. Edzard, Die ‘zweite Zwischenzeit’ Babyloniens (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1957),
p. 82 and nn. 400 f.

23 Three Šulgi Hymns (= Bar-IIan Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
1981), pp. 144 f. (Shulgi X 145). Previously idem, JCS 23 (1970), p. 118.
24 lbid., note 7.
25 Antagal VIII 80 f. = MSL 17 (1985) 172; cf. also ibid., 154:105 and MSL 12 (1969)
107:92 for á-tuku = nēmelu, “riches, profit.” The older lexical texts equate lú-á-tuku with
ša idam išu (MSL 12 159:49) and lú-usu(Á.KAL)-tuku with bēl emūqi (ibid, 159:48,178:6).

26 J.J. Finkelstein in ANET 3 (1969), p. 524, lines 162–168; idem, JCS 22 (1969), p. 68.
On “A Tablet of Codex Ur-Nammu from Sippar,” the topos is expanded by “The man
of 1 sheep was not delivered up to the man of 1 ox” (text has: “To the men of 1 sheep
the man of 1 ox was not delivered up”); see F. Yildiz, Or. NS 50 (1981), pp. 87–97 and
pls. ii–iv, esp. pp. 89 and 94 f., lines 158 ff.
27 D.O. Edzard, “ ‘Soziale Reformen’ im Zweistromland bis ca. 1600 v. Chr.: Rea-
lität oder literarischer topos?” in J. Harmatta and G. Komoróczy, eds., Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft im alten Vorderasien (=Acta Antiqua Academiae . . . Hungaricae 22, 1974 [1976],
pp. 145–156, esp. p. 149.
28 S.N. Kramer, “The Ur-Nammu Law Code: Who was its Author?” Or. NS 52
(1983), pp. 453–456. J. van Dijk, “Note on Si 277, a Tablet of the ‘Urnammu Codex’,”
ibid. 457. Note already Yildiz, Or. NS 50 (1981), p. 94, n. 22.
subsequent emulation, as has been argued persuasively by Klein in

his recent study of a royal hymn of Ishme-Dagan of Isin (ca. 1953–
1935 bc),29 then it is not too far-fetched to see in Shulgi’s Sumerian
formulation a plausible inspiration for Hammurapi’s Akkadian one.
Note also that the epithet šarrum ša in šarri šūturu, which follows hard
on the phrase in the Epilogue,30 may well be a paraphrase of the incipit
of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, šūtur eli šarri 31
There is then, no shortage of examples to illustrate the phenomenon
of intertextuality in cuneiform literature. The ones chosen here (almost
at random) belong to a wide variety of canonical and monumental
genres, some, like epics and wisdom literature, as sources of the bor-
rowing, some, like royal inscriptions and treaties, as targets, and some,
like law codes and royal hymns, in both roles. What we are dealing
with throughout is, in any case, something more than a mere topos, or
cliché, such as may recur as a stock phrase in different but comparable
contexts. (Such topics are for example the formulas for awakening from
a dream, for festival rites, for safe arrival, for feasting, etc.). Rather
we have here the apparently deliberate harking back from one genre
to another or from one context to a thoroughly different one, with at
least the implication that the source of the allusion is familiar to the
“author,” perhaps even to the audience, as when a clear allusion to the
disputation between Pickaxe and Plow is found in a tigi-hymn of king
Ishme-Dagan of Isin.32
Phrasing matters thus, we are quite naturally led to a consideration
of proverbs as a potential source of literary loans.
Proverbial wisdom by its very nature transcends boundaries of time
and space.33 Often enough, it is preserved in the “vernacular,” and it
is no coincidence that the Akkadian terms tēltu and pı̄ nišı̄ can mean
both “proverb” and “vernacular.”34 Such folk-wisdom is independent of
29 “Šulgi and Išme-Dagan: Runners in the Service of the Gods (SRT 13),” Beer-Sheva
2 (1985), pp. 7*–38*. Cf. my remarks on this text in “Texts, Statues, and the Cult of the
Divine King,” VT Supplement 40 (1988), pp. 54–66, esp. pp. 60 f.
30 Rev. xxivb 79 f.; cf. Herbert Sauren, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung 100 (1983), pp. 49 f.
31 Cf. A. Shaffer apud D.J. Wiseman, Iraq 37 (1975), p. 158 n. 22; cf. Tigay, op. cit.
(below, n. 82), pp. 150 f., with other parallels from the Prologue.
32 M. Civil, “Išme-Dagan and Enlil’s Chariot,” JAOS 88 (= AOS 53, 1968), p. 7,
line 84.
33 K.A. Kitchen briefly documents this fact for Egyptian wisdom literature in Tyndale
Bulletin 28 (1977), pp. 92 f. (ref. court, W.R. Garr).

34 But the Sumerian equivalents for tēltu are different: i-bi-lu-(du -ga) for tēltu when
4
it means “proverb,” ka-ka-si-ga for tēltu when it means “pronunciation, vernacular,
written records, and transmitted orally over great stretches of time—

though of course we depend on the intermittent surfacing of the epi-
gram in written form to establish this fact. Take for example the Egyp-
tian proverb “Don’t give water to a goose at dawn if it’s to be slaugh-
tered in the morning,” which has recently been traced all the way to
a modern Russian parallel by Anthony Spalinger.35 Again, a proverb
about an Early Dynastic king in Mesopotamia called Mesilim or per-
haps Mesa which is known in Sumerian from Proverb Collection 14
recurs in almost word-to-word translation, though with reference to
King Mesannepada, on a late Babylonian exercise tablet without any
evidence of an intervening, written bilingual tradition.36 Or again, the
maxim “in the city of the lame, the halt is courier,” which I identified in
a Sumerian proverb tablet37 and which the new Pennsylvania Sumerian
Dictionary regrettably rephrased as “In the city of cripples, the dwarf
is the runner,”38 is essentially preserved in the classical (and later) say-
ing “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” (caecorum in
patria luscus rex imperat omnis)39—with a missing link of sorts furnished by
the Rabbinic saying “In the market place of the blind (samayya") they
call the one-eyed man (‘awira’) ‘full of light’ (saggi nehôra"),” and its vari-
ant “In the market place of the blind they call the one-eyed man (their)
leader (berabbî).”40
William L. Moran, to whom these pages are dedicated, traced an
almost equally extended itinerary for an Akkadian proverb—from its
first appearance in the nineteenth century bc to its Greek equivalent in
the fifth; indeed, he dedicated no less than three articles and notes to
the subject.41 Bendt Alster, following E.I. Gordon, extended the same
substrate language (?).” Cf. B. Landsberger, MSL 9 (1967), pp. 145 f. For pû nišı̄, see
AHw, 873 sub 10b. Similarly, pû mātim can be rendered by “proverb, proverbial usage,”
as in the prologue to the Laws of Hamraurapi, which concludes: “I made righteousness
and justice proverbial in the land” (ina pî mātim aškun).
35 “An Alarming Parallel to the End of the Shipwrecked Sailor,” Göttinger Miszellen 73
(1984), pp. 91–95.

36 Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, p. 280; cf. E.I. Gordon, “Mesilim and
Mesannepadda-Are they Identical?” BASOR 132 (1953), pp. 28–30.

37 W.W. Hallo, “The Lame and the Halt,” Eretz-Israel 9 (Albright Volume, 1969),
pp. 66–70, here: VIII.1.

38 PSD B (1984), p. 22; cf. Hallo, JCS 37 (1985), pp. 124 f.
39 Hallo, Eretz-Israel 9, p. 70, here: VIII.1.
40 David Marcus, “Some Antiphrastic Euphemisms for a Blind Person . . . ,” JAOS
100 (1980), pp. 307–310, esp. p. 310. The parallel had previously been called to my
attention by Judah Goldin and also by Jonas C. Greenfield (letter of 6-8-74).
41 “Puppies in Proverbs—from Šamši-Adad I to Archilochus?,” Eretz-Israel 14 (H.L.
proverb’s attested range back to Sumerian and forward to Turkish and

Italian parallels of the early modern era,42 while Y. Avishur pursued
it to the Iraqi vernacular of the present day.43 In its Akkadian guise,
it read “The bitch in her haste gave birth to the blind” (kalbatum ina
šutēpurı̄ša huppudūtim ūlid); in later Greek (scholion to Aristophanes) it
said “The˘ hasty bitch bore blind puppies” or, in the 7th century version
in Archilochus “I am afraid lest, acting hastily out of eagerness, I beget
like the bitch in the proverb children blind and untimely”; in Arabic,
“the cat in haste kittens blind kittens,” and in Judeo-Arabic even “The
bitch in her hurry whelps blind pups.” (As Moshe Held has seen, this is
in the context of a virtual echo of I Samuel 24:14.)44
Interestingly enough, the source of the Akkadian version is a letter
of King Shamshi-Adad I, the great northern Mesopotamian rival and
predecessor of Hammurapi of Babylon, addressed to his son Yashmah-
Adad, the viceroy at Mari. A considerable number of proverbial expres-
sions have been identified in the Mari correspondence, and they have
been made the subject of two studies, an article by André Finet and
a whole monograph by Angel Marzal.45 But the practice of enriching
cuneiform letters with proverbs was not confined to Mari or to Old
Babylonian times.
As early as the Sargonic period, the saying “(Not until you have seen
me face to face) must you touch either bread or beer ( . . .) (or) even sit
down on a chair” was identified in an epistolary context by Thureau-
Dangin46 as proverbial on the basis of a similar expression in much
later literary contexts such as the series “Evil spirits”;47 more recently,
the expression has turned up in an ardat lilî text.48 Jean Nougayrol has
Ginsberg Volume, 1978), pp. 32*–37*; “Notes brèves. 3,” RA 71 (1977), p. 191; “An
Assyriological Gloss on the New Archilochus Fragment,” Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology 82 (1978), pp. 17–19. Cf. also CBQ 39 (1977), p. 265.
42 “An Akkadian and a Greek Proverb: a Comparative Study,” WO 10 (1979), pp. 1–5.
43 “Additional Parallels of an Akkadian Proverb Found in the Iraqi Vernacular
Arabic,” WO 12 (1981), pp. 37 f.

44 “Marginal Notes to the Biblical Lexicon,” in Ann Kort and Scott Morschauser,
eds., Biblical and Related Studies Presented to Samuel Iwry (Winona Lake, Ind., Eisenbrauns,
1985), pp. 93–103, esp. pp. 94 f.
45 A. Finet, “Citations littéraires dans la correspondance de Mari,” RA 68 (1974),
pp. 35–47; A. Marzal, Gleanings from the Wisdom of Mari (= Studia Pohl 11, 1976).
46 François Thureau-Dangin, “Une lettre de l’époque de la dynastie d’Agadé,” RA
23 (1926), pp. 23–29.

47 utukkû lemnûtu (CT 16 11 v 54 -vi). Cf. Th. Pinches, Journal of the Transactions of the
Victoria Institute 26 (1893), pp. 153–161, esp. 158 iv.

48 S. Lackenbacher, “Note sur l’ardat-lilî ”RA 65 (1971), pp. 119–154.
drawn attention to a letter from Ugarit according to which “a proverb

of the men of Hatti says: ‘a certain man was held in prison for five
years and when they said: “In the morning they will release you”—
then he choked (himself )’.”49 Other proverbs have been identified in the
Amarna letters from Byblos and Shechem,50 in a royal letter to Ugarit,51
and in royal letters from the archives of Hattusa.52 As late as the neo-
Assyrian period, royal letters made telling use of proverbs. Among
the letters catalogued by W.G. Lambert,53 note especially the taunt
directed by the Assyrian king (probably Esarhaddon) at the ungrateful
population of Babylon: “The dog crawled into the potter’s oven (to
warm himself ) and then barked at the potter.”54 This popular saying
recurs almost verbatim in the Syriac text of Ahiqar.55
Other contexts have also preserved an occasional proverb or riddle
(note that Sumerian i-bi-lu means both tēltu and hittu),56 Edzard and
Wilcke, for example, have identified the proverb ˘UET 6 251=252 in
the context of the Hendursaga-hymn,57 which they had edited.58 In its
shortest form, the proverb occurs in “Man and his God” as “a man
without a god would obtain no food.”59 More elaborately it says, in
Klein’s translation:60
49 “Une fable hittite,” Revue Hittite et Asianique 67 (1960), pp. 117–119; idem, Ugaritica 5
(1968), pp. 108–110; cf. M. Astour, “King Ammurapi and the Hittite Princess,” Ugarit-
Forschungen 12 (1980), pp. 103–108, esp, p. 104 (top).
50 W.F. Albright, “Some Canaanite-Phoenician Sources of Hebrew Wisdom,” VT,
Supplement 3 (1960), pp. 1–15, esp. p. 7; R.H. Pfeiffer in ANET, p. 426 (IV). For the
Shechem example, cf. also Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, p. 282; previously
Albright, “An Archaic Hebrew Proverb in an Amarna Letter from Central Palestine,”
BASOR 89 (1943), pp. 29–32.
51 W.G.E. Watson, “Antecedents of a New Testament Proverb,” VT 20 (1970), pp.
368–370, who also cites the previous two examples.

52 Gary Beckman, “Proverbs and Proverbial Allusions in Hittite,” JNES 45 (1986),
pp. 19–30, Nos. 2 and 13.

53 Babylonian Wisdom Literature, pp. 280–282; add ABL 614, cited ibid., pp. 97 and 315.
54 Ibid., p. 281. Cf. also ABL 37 Rev. 3–6 with CAD N/2 138d.
55 Cf. now J.M. Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar (= The Johns Hopkins
Near Eastern Studies [14], 1983), where it is not cited.

56 MSL 13 (1971) 161:31 f. Cf. now Held, above, n. 44.
57 D.O. Edzard-C. Wilcke. “Quasi-Duplikate zur ‘Hendursanga-Hymne’,” AfO 25
(1974–1977), p. 36.
58 Eidem, “Die Hendursanga-Hymne,” AOAT 25 (= Kramer Anniversary Volume,
1975), pp. 139–176.

59 Jacob Klein, “ ‘Personal God’ and Individual Prayer in Sumerian Religion,” AfO
Beiheft 19 (1982), pp. 295–306, esp. p. 298.

60 Ibid., pp. 304 f., note 34.
“A man without a (personal) god,

Does not procure much food, does not procure a little food,61
Descending to (var. sitting at) the river, he does not catch a fish,
Descending to (var. passing in) the field, he does not catch a gazelle,
He does not obtain plenty of provisions,
He does not obtain little (?) provisions!
If (however) his god comes back to him.
Anything that he names62—will be provided for him.”
The hymn expands on this text by adding other illustrations on the

theme of the godless (or luckless)63 man.64
Jonas Greenfield has argued that the dire physical penalties pre-
scribed for reopening or contesting binding contracts from the Mesopo-
tamian “periphery” inspired related proverbs in Aramaic and Hebrew.
In Ahiqar, 1.156 of the Elephantine recension may be translated “God
will distort him who continually goes back on his word and will tear out
his tongue.” In Proverbs 10:31 f., he translates “The tongue of the ‘per-
verse’ will be cut off . . . the mouth of the wicked will be distorted.”65
Alternatively, earlier versions of these proverbs may have inspired the
treaty formulations.
More surprising is the fact that proverbs or other riddles turn up
in lexical series.66 One of these begins with the riddle “It enters and
does not fill up, it leaves but does not diminish—(what is it?)—royal
property!” This is pardonable enough as a kind of playful digression
when the series in question begins with the Sumerian and Akkadian
equivalents for property (níg-ga = makkūru) and royal property (níg-ga
lugal = makkūr šarri).67 It is a bit less logical when it recurs in the middle
61 These two lines recur (without the otiose 1st or 2nd person endings of the Ur
exemplars) on YBC 7344 (unpubl.) in the form: lú-ulu3 dingir-da nu-me-a/nu la-ba-gu
/nu la-ba-tur-ra (end).
62 Cf. MSL 13 (1971) 116:71: níg-mu-sa = ša šumam nabû.
4
63 Cf. CAD I 101: lú-dingir-tuk = ša ilam išû, “one who has luck,” lú-dingir-nu-tuk =
ša ilam lā išû, “one who has no luck,” from MSL 12 (1969) 159:61 f.; 179:18.
64 Cf. also “Enlil in the Ekur” (Enlil-suraše) lines 32–34. As A. Falkenstein noted
in his edition (SGL 1, 1959, p. 39), the stanza comprising these lines “steht recht
unvermittelt da.” That they represent three related proverbs is rendered probable by
their recurrence, in a different order, on the school-tablet UET 6/2 371. Cf. also
D. Reisman, Two Neo-Sumerian Royal Hymns (Thesis, Pennsylvania, 1969), p. 75.
65 J.C. Greenfield, “The Background and Parallel to a Proverb of Ahiqar,” Hommages
à André Dupont-Sommer (Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1971), pp. 49–59.

66 Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, p. 275.
67 MSL 13 115:3 f.
of a lexical series devoted to totally other matters,68 or independently,69

or in other, non-lexical, contexts.70 Again, the lexical text Nabnitu twice
records the saying “he turns (the edge of the tablet) upside down,”71
which is proven a proverb by its inclusion in Collection 3 as no. 18172
and Collection 7 as no. 91.73
As the last example suggests, a further subject for fruitful inquiry is
the recurrence of identical or similar proverbs in two or more different
proverb collections, a phenomenon dealt with in some detail by both
Falkowitz74 and Alster.75 Or one could study the proverbial inserts in
other wisdom genres such as “Man and his God,” where lines 9 and
101–103 have been so identified by Klein,76 or in disputations such
as “Cattle and Grain”77 or possibly in tales like “The Three Ox-
Drivers from Adab.”78 What I wish to pursue here, however, is the
occurrence of proverbs in the context of epic, for this seems of all genres
at once the least likely and yet the most hospitable genre for proverbial
inserts.79
One could pursue the subject by reference to Akkadian epic, whose
evolution clearly involves the large-scale adaptation of Sumerian
literary elements as has been shown, among others, by Kramer,80
68 Diri V 183–187; cf. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, p. 275, and my remarks
in JNES 37 (1978), p. 272.

69 Hallo, ibid.
70 Bendt Alster, The Instructions of Suruppak (= Mesopotamia 2, 1974), pp. 94 f. For a
slightly different translation see the review by D.A. Foxvog, Or. NS 45 (1976), p. 372 ad
line 100.
71 MSL 16 (1982) 234:73 and 228:174.
72 Robert Falkowitz, The Sumerian Rhetoric Collections (Ph.D. Diss., Pennsylvania, 1980),
pp. 248 f.
73 Alster, “Sumerian Proverb Collection Seven,” RA 72 (1978), pp. 97–112, esp. p. 106,
line 91; cf. idem JCS 27 (1975), pp. 205, 224. For an-ta and ki-ta as technical terms, see
Manfred Schretter, “Zum Examentext A, Zeile 14,” Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwis-
senschaft 24 (= Karl Oberhuber volume, 1986), pp. 231–236.
74 Op. cit. (note 72), pp. 43–45.
75 Studies in Sumerian Proverbs (= Mesopotamia 3, 1975), pp. 17 f., 90–99. Cf. also
Assyriological Miscellanies (Copenhagen) 1 (1980), pp. 33–50; ASJ 10 (1988), pp. 4–10.
76 Loc. cit. (above, n. 59) and ibid., n. 34 f.
77 Å.W. Sjöberg, Or. NS 37 (1968), p. 237; Vanstiphout, Aula Orientalis 2 (1984), p. 248,
note 36; Alster, RA 79 (1985), p. 155; Alster and Vanstiphout, ASJ 9 (1987) pp. 6 and 8.
78 B.R. Foster, JANES 6 (1974), p. 72 and n. 7. Cf. also the “Tale of the Fox,”
Vanstiphout, ASJ 10 (1988), p. 201 and nn. 49 f.

79 I am indebted to my former students Samuel A. Overstreet (1977) and W. Randall
Garr (1978) for earlier term papers on this topic.

80 Samuel N. Kramer, “The Epic of Gilgameš and its Sumerian Sources,” JAOS 64
(1944), pp. 7–23.

Komoróczy,81 and Tigay.82 The Gilgamesh Epic is a case in point,

for which I need cite here only one instance: the use of the motif
of Ishtar’s love for Ishullanu the gardener in Tablet VI. The parallel
with Sukalletuda the gardener and his seduction of Innana now seems
confirmed by their equation in a lexical text,83 but the brief pericope in
the epic is also noteworthy for its proverbial inserts. Ishullanu is quoted
by Gilgamesh as having said:
What dost thou want with me?
Has my mother not baked, have I not eaten,
That I should taste the food of stench and foulness?
Does reed-work afford cover against the cold?
And both of these striking rhetorical questions are regarded as prover-
bial, the former by Benjamin R. Foster,84 the latter by E.A. Speiser.85
T. Abusch regards both as resuming Gilgamesh’s own encounter with
Ishtar earlier in Tablet VI, and as alluding specifically to death and
burial.86 Or again, near the end of the Epic of Erra, that deity, finally
placated, confesses: “one cannot snatch a dead body from the jaws
of a roaring lion/ (and) where one is raging another cannot advise
him!”87 Both of these sentiments are reasonably considered proverbial
by Cagni, who even compares the former with Amos 3:12.88 It is less
likely that Atra-hasis I 93 and 95 have “the ring of a proverbial say-
ing”89 given Borger’s reading of the passages.90 I prefer, in any case, to
pursue the topic via Sumerian epic.
81 Géza Komoróczy, “Akkadian Epic Poetry and its Sumerian Sources,” Acta Antiqua
23 (1975), pp. 41–63.
82 Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Pennsylvania U.P., 1982), esp.
ch. 7 and 8.
83 Hallo, “Šullanu” RA 74 (1980), p. 94.
84 Foster, lecture of 11–17–86 (unpubl.). Cf. now idem, in J.H. Marks and R.M.
Good, eds., Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin H. Pope
(Guilford, Four Quarters, 1987), p. 35 ad line 72.
85 Apud Pritchard, ANET 2 (1955), p. 84, n. 106. For other proverbs in the Akkadian
Gilgamesh epic see below, n. 122, and J. Renger, AOS 67 (= Erica Reiner AV, 1987),
p. 319.
86 Tzvi Abusch, “Ishtar’s Proposal and Gilgamesh’s Refusal: An Interpretation of
The Gilgamesh Epic, Tablet 6, lines 1–79,” History of Religions 26 (1986), pp. 143–187, esp.
pp. 167–169.
87 Luigi Cagni, “The Poem of Erra,” Sources from the Ancient Near East 1 (1977), p. 116.
(Some exemplars omit “and.”)

88 Idem, L’Epopea di Erra (= Studi Semitici 34, 1969), pp. 249 f.
89 W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard, Atra- hasis: the Babylonian Story of the Flood (Oxford,
1969), pp. 150 f. ˘

90 HKL 2 (1975), p. 158 (top); cf. M.-J. Seux, RA 75 (1981), pp. 190 f.
So far, ten instances of proverbial insertions in Sumerian epic have

been identified by one of the criteria suggested by Alster91 and, fol-
lowing him, by my colleague Gary Beckman who discussed “Proverbs
and proverbial allusions in Hittite” in a recent article.92 These criteria
may be rephrased as, first and most subjectively, the apparent incon-
gruity of the epigrammatic saying in its narrative context, second and
more objectively, as an explicit statement that “people are always say-
ing this” or, thirdly and ideally, as the recurrence of the saying (more
or less verbatim) in one of the Sumerian proverb collections. The final
ground is the recurrence of the saying outside of Sumerian wisdom lit-
erature.
Let me begin with a straightforward example. In the Epic of Gil-
gamesh and the Land of the Living also known as Gilgamesh and
Huwawa or, according to Aaron Shaffer, as “Gilgamesh and the Cedar
Forest,”93 lines 117 f. have been retranslated by J. van Dijk from a newly
published exemplar as follows: [1]94 “Awe defeats with awe, shrewdness
with shrewdness.”95 Although this is a rather free translation from the
Sumerian,96 it probably recaptures the essential meaning of the cou-
plet, a couplet which on this interpretation, moreover, is not particu-
larly suited to its setting. So even though we have no comparable entry
(thus far) in the proverb collections, van Dijk is almost certainly correct
in regarding it as a proverbial insert in the epic context.97
In Lugalbanda and Anzu, line 216 is described by C. Wilcke, the
editor, as “a gnome.”98 It is suited to its context if Wilcke is correct
in suggesting that the good fate decreed for Lugalbanda by Anzu
can turn into its opposite if he talks about it too much. [2] “The
good has evil in it” is what the mythical bird says—and then adds
“thus it is verily ever”—thereby more or less explicitly identifying it
91 Alster, Studies in Sumerian Proverbs (= Mesopotamia 3, 1975), pp. 37 f.; cf, also ibid,
pp. 17 f. Previously Wolfgang Heimpel, Tierbilder in der Sumerischen Literatur (Studia Pohl
2, 1968), pp. 44–49.
92 JNES 45 (1986), pp. 19–30, esp. p. 19.
93 “Gilgamesh, the Cedar Forest and Mesopotamian History,” JAOS 103 (1983 =
AOS 65, 1984), pp. 307–313.

94 Numbers in brackets refer to the transliterations in the Appendix (below).
95 TIM 9, p. xi ad No. 47.
96 Kramer, JCS 1 (1947), p. 19 and ANET 2 (1955), p. 49, translated: “(And) there be
fear, there be fear, turn it back, /There be terror, there be terror, turn it back.”
97 Kramer, JCS 1 (1947), pp. 44 f. also thinks that lines 157 f. of this composition
“probably contain a well-known proverb.”

98 Claus Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1969), p. 22.
as an eternal verity.99 Earlier in the same epic (ll. 164 f.), Anzu again
speaks in epigrammatic fashion when he says: [3] “The stubborn (lit.
wicked) ox is made to follow (i.e., the leader), the balky (Wilcke: lame)
donkey is forced onto the straight path.”100 In this case the saying
is not only unrelated (except in a general way) to the surrounding
narrative, but also (again) introduced by the generalizing “like this it
is (ever).”101
When we pass to the other Lugalbanda Epic (Lugalbanda I or
Lugalbanda and Hurrum-kurra)102 we encounter at least three sayings
that actually recur, more or less verbatim, in the Proverb Collections. In
line 158 f., we read, [4] “an unknown beast is bad, an unknown man is
horrible, on an unknown road at the edge of a foreign country (oh Utu,
an unknown man is worse)”103—exactly as in the Instructions of Shu-
ruppak (ll. 269 f.),104 which have been identified by Alster as essentially
a collection of proverbial sayings.105 Later in the same prayer to Utu
(ll.164 f.), there is a virtual paraphrase of another proverb.106
When Lugalbanda prays to Inanna as the evening star he pleads
(ll. 180–182): [5] “would this were my city where my mother bore me,
would it were my hole-in-the-ground like a snake’s, would it were my
cleft-in-the-rock like a scorpion’s.”107 Surely the poet who worded this
passage was not unaware of the proverb “the snake seeks(?) its hole-in-
the-ground, the scorpion its cleft-in-the-rock, the tree its egress.”108
In the incubation dream which Lugalbanda experiences, much is
unclear, but the line (333) [6] “with the liar it (he) acts the liar, with
99 Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps That Once . . . (New Haven and London, Yale U.P.,
1987), p. 334 renders: “To do a favor, is to call evil into being in hearts. Verily, so it is,”
i.e., “A favor done to one person will make others envious.”
100 Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos, pp. 107 f., 178; cf. Heimpel, Tierbilder, pp. 45 f. ad 5.44 and
27.7. The passage is rendered “Being that the yoke-carrying ox must follow the trail, /
being that the trotting ass must take the straight road” by Jacobsen, The Harps That Once
. . . , p. 331.
101 Ox and ass are supposed to be separated in law, but are frequently juxtaposed in
literature; cf. Isaiah 1:3 and Eduard Nielsen, “Ass and Ox in the Old Testament,” Studia
Orientalia Joanni Pedersen . . . dicata (1953), pp. 263–274.
102 On this epic, see most recently Hallo, “Lugalbanda Excavated,” JAOS 103 (1983
= AOS 65, 1984), pp. 165–180, here: VII.1; Wilcke, RLA 7 (1987), pp. 121–125.
103 Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos, pp. 79 f.
104 Alster, Studies, pp. 137 f.
105 Ibid, ch. III; cf. my review, JNES 37 (1978), pp. 269–273; esp. p. 271.
106 Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos, pp. 79, 81, and note 338.
107 Ibid, pp. 68 f.; cf. Heimpel, Tierbilder, pp. 465 f.
108 UET 6:237; cf. Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos, p. 22 n. 26.
the truthful one it/he acts truthfully”109 can hardly be separated from
such proverbs as 7.89: “tell a lie, tell the truth,” or 2.71 “tell a lie, tell
the truth, it will be counted as a lie.”110
A much clearer case is represented by Gilgamesh and Agga lines 25–
28. In the translation by Thorkild Jacobsen111 it reads: [7] “To con-
tinually stand at attention, to continually be assigned to a post, to go
on raids (ri) with the king’s son, to continually urge on the donkey,
who has wind (enough) for that?” More recent translations by Robert
Falkowitz112 and Jerrold Cooper113 do not materially change this under-
standing, though one could suggest a change in the second clause to
“to protect (da-ri = hatānu)114 the king’s son.” As Jacobsen noted, the
passage concludes with ˘ the enclitic particle of direct discourse (e - š e)
here: “as they say” or the like, which led him to conclude that it rep-
resented “a common saw.” This insight is now brilliantly confirmed by
the discovery that Proverb Collection 3 begins with the identical pas-
sage, lacking only the final - e š e.115 (Also, the order of the first three
clauses differs from that in the epic and from each other in all three
exemplars now known.)
We may now turn to those epic inserts whose proverbial character
is supported by their recurrence in later, sometimes in much later
literary environments. A debatable example is Enmerkar and the Lord
of Aratta lines 255–258: [8] “he who acknowledges not a contest, licks
not clean (lit. eats not) (the grass) all about (is like) the bull which
acknowledges not the bull at its side” and vice versa—an image which
Sol Cohen, in his edition of the text, compared to Numbers 22:4: “Now
this horde will lick clean all that is about us as an ox licks up the grass
of the field.”116
109 Hallo, JAOS 103 (1983 = AOS 65, 1984), pp. 173, 176.
110 Alster, JCS 27 (1975), pp. 207, 224 (Example 16), Studies (1975), p. 119 (6); RA 72
(1978), p. 106.
111 American Journal of Archaeology 53 (1949), p. 17.
112 Robert S. Falkowitz, The Sumerian Rhetoric Collections (Ph.D. Thesis, Pennsylvania,
1980), p. 145.
113 Jerrold S. Cooper, “Gilgamesh and Agga: A Review Article,” JCS 33 (1981),
p. 235. Cf. also H. Vanstiphout, “Towards a Reading of ‘Gilgamesh and Agga’,” Aula
Orientalis 5 (1987), p. 139.
114 MSL 12 107:100. Cf. also MSL 16 146:144 f.: da-ri = našû ša sihri (LÚ.TUR), našû ša
.
almatti. See now also Jacobsen’s new translation in The Harps That ˘Once . . . , pp. 348 f.
115 Falkowitz, Rhetoric Collections, p. 145.
116 Sol Cohen, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (Ph.D. Thesis, Pennsylvania, 1973),
p. 234. Previously S.N. Kramer, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta (1952), pp. 22 f. For a
different rendering see Jacobsen, The Harps That Once . . . , p. 297. Alster has found
Far more convincing are two examples from Gilgamesh and the
Land of the Living. In lines 106–108 of the epic we read: [9]
“for me another (a second) man will not die, a loaded (or: towed) boat
(mà-da-lá)117 will not sink, the three-ply rope will not be cut.”118
Following Kramer,119 Aaron Shaffer in 1967 compared this to Ecclesi-
astes 4:12b: “A threefold cord is not readily broken,”120 and only two
years later he was able to find the “missing link,” as it were, between
these two occurrences and to reduce by more than half the huge
chronological gap which separated them.121 For a newly recovered frag-
ment of the Akkadian Gilgamesh epic122 clearly renders the Sumerian
which is ambiguous (Kramer had read it as túg-eš-tab-ba, the three-ply
cloth) by three-ply rope (ašlu šušluš[u]).123 And there are other contacts
between the Akkadian Gilgamesh epic on the one hand and Ecclesi-
astes in particular on the other.124
My tenth and in some ways favorite example comes from earlier in
the same Sumerian epic when Gilgamesh philosophizes (ll. 27–29); [10]
“As for me, I too will be served thus, verily ‘tis so / man, the tallest,
cannot reach to heaven, / man, the widest cannot cover the earth.”125
As I already noted in 1962,126 this line occurs in more or less iden-
tical form first in the Sumerian wisdom literature (specifically in the
a clear allusion to Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta lines 503–506 in the Sumerian
Sargon Legend (lines 53–56); see ZA 77 (1987), pp. 169–173. According to Cooper and
Heimpel, the Legend “parodies” the Epic here; see JAOS 103 (1983 = AOS 65, 1984),
p. 82.
117 Or “raft” (má-lá).
118 Cf. Heimpel, Tierbilder, pp. 46–49.
119 JCS 1 (1947), p. 40.
120 “The Mesopotamian background of Lamentations (sic!) 4:9–12,” Eretz-Israel 8
(1967), pp. 246–250 (in Hebrew; English summary p. 75*).

121 Idem, “New Light on the ‘Three-ply Cord’,” Eretz-Israel 9 (1969), pp. 159 f. (in
Hebrew; English summary pp. 138 f.).

122 CT 46:21 (Late Babylonian).
123 J.V. Kinnier Wilson, The Legend of Etana: A New Edition (Warminster, Aris and
Phillips, 1985), pp. 62 f., restores VAT 10291 rev. 4 thus: e-s. íp-ma A.RÁ III er-su-ú
[ . . . ] and translates “If treble-twisted (the thread), the cloth [will not tear].” If he is
right, the Etana Epic also preserves an allusion to the same proverb. (Ref. courtesy
B.R. Foster.) For the “double thread” in Sumerian (gu-tab; perhaps also gu-kešda) see
A.L. Oppenheim, AOS 32 (1948), p. 14 and n, 34; H. Waetzoldt, Untersuchungen zur
neusumerischen Textilindustrie (Rome, 1972), pp. 122 f., 128.
124 Cf. especially Jean de Savignac, “La sagesse du Qôhéléth et l’épopée de Gil-
gamesh,” VT 28 (1978), pp. 318–323, esp. pp. 321 f.

125 Kramer, JCS 1 (1947), pp. 10 f.; ANET 2 (1955), p. 48.
126 Hallo, “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature,” Israel Exploration Journal 12
composition níg-nam nu-kal),127 then in the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh

Epic (III iv 3),128 and finally in the neo-Assyrian poem of the Obliging
Servant where it is clearly intended as the very type of a platitude.129
Here (as in OB Gilgamesh) the truism is phrased as a rhetorical ques-
tion “who is so tall that he can scale heaven, who is so broad as to
encompass the earth?” In this form it is suggestive, as J. Nougayrol has
noted, of Job 11:8: “Higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper
than Sheol—what can you know?”130
The study of intertextuality in cuneiform literature cannot begin and
end with Sumerian proverbs. But since Sumerian literature “leads all
the world’s written literature in terms of antiquity, longevity and con-
tinuity,”131 and since proverbs, whether written or oral, are inherently
durable elements in the stock of any literary tradition, it behooves us
to consider Sumerian proverbs in any study of literary transmission
and survival. I have chosen to illustrate this here through the citation
of various Sumerian proverbs within a specific genre (epic), elsewhere
through the citation or adaptation of a specific Sumerian proverb pat-
tern in various later Akkadian genres.132 Both approaches may, I hope,
serve to suggest what Sumerian literature can contribute to the study of
intertextuality—and how much still remains to be done.
(1962), pp. 13–26, here: I.1, esp. p. 20 note 33; idem, JNES 37 (1978), p. 272 (ad ll.
99–101). Cf. also Heimpel, Tierbilder, pp. 44 f.
127 Alster, Studies, pp. 87 f.
128 ANET 2 (1955), p. 79.
129 Ibid, p. 438 (XII).
130 Ugaritica 5 (1968), p. 295.
131 Hallo, “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” AS 20 (1976), p. 182, here: I.4.
132 Hallo, “Biblical Abominations and Sumerian Taboos,” The Jewish Quarterly Review
76 (1985), pp. 21–40, here: VIII.3.

Appendix
[1] ní ì-gál ní ì-gál gi4-a

úmun ì-gál úmun ì-gál gi4-a
[2] ša6-ga hul šà-ga gál-la
˘
ur5 hé-na-nam-ma
˘
[3] ur5-gim-ma-àm
gu4-érim-du ús-a sè-ke-dam
anše-du10-guz-za har-ra-an si-sá dab5-bé-dam
[4] ur nu-zu hul-a ˘
˘
lú nu-zu huš-àm
˘
kaskal nu-zu gaba-kur-ra-ka
dUtu lú nu-zu lú- hul-rib-ba-àm
[5] muš-gim kankal-mu ˘ hé-me-a

gír-gim ki-in-dar-mu ˘hé-me-a
uru ama-mu tu-da-mu˘ hé-me-a
[6] lul-da lul-di-da ˘
zi-da zi-di-dam
[7] gub-gub-bu-dè
tuš-tuš-ù-dè
dumu-lugal-la da-ri-e-dè
háš-anše dab5-dab5-bé-e-dè
˘
a-ba zi-bi mu-un-tuku e-še
[8] a-da-mìn nu-um-zu, ur nu-um-kú, gu4-dè gu4 da-gál-bi nu-um-zu
a-da-mìn um-zu, ur um-kú, gu4-dè gu4 da-gál-bi um-zu
[9] má-a-ra lú-min nu-ug6-e
giš má-da-lá nu-su-su-dè
éš-eš-tab-ba lú nu-ku5-dè
[10] ù gá-e ur5-gim nam-ba-ag-e, ur5-šè hé-me-a
lú-sukud-da an-šè nu-mu-un-da-lá ˘
lú-dagal-la kur-ra la-ba-an-šú-šú
viii.5
PROVERBS:
AN ANCIENT TRADITION IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Proverbs are unique in several respects. They represent one of the old-
est genres in world literature, if not the oldest. They may be transmitted
individually, or gathered into collections, or inserted in other contexts.
They are often transmitted orally and thus can have an extraordinarily
long shelf life. They may be couched in prose or in poetry. They may
serve as part of a school curriculum or as a repository of folk wisdom
widely cited at suitable times. They may impart behavior that is ethi-
cal, or reverent, or politically correct. Most often they convey practical
knowledge for the daily life of common humanity. Yet for all these and
other divergent and sometimes mutually contradictory characteristics,
proverbs have one thing in common: they are short, pithy statements
expressing eternal verities and couched in piquant language suitable for
memorizing. Archer Taylor, in a treatment that has become classic, was
reluctant to define the proverb at all, calling it simply “a saying cur-
rent among the folk” (Taylor 1931: 3). He could not have known it but,
interestingly enough, the ancient Akkadian terms for “proverb” also
have the meaning of “vernacular” (Hallo 1990: 207).
Within this distinctive genre, the 1,350 Bedouin proverbs that Clin-
ton Bailey presents in the present volume display some unique features
of their own. They are drawn strictly from the daily life of the Bedouin,
to the exclusion of any proverbial wisdom shared with Arabic speak-
ers generally (for some of which see Attal 1989). Like Bedouin poetry,
which the author has called the “mirror of a culture” (Bailey 1991), they
thus reflect the Bedouin lifestyle, the “culture of desert survival” in the
Sinai peninsula and the Negev, where the author collected his mate-
rial over thirty-five years of indefatigable fieldwork. But that lifestyle
is disappearing before our very eyes as village settlement is being pro-
moted by Egypt and Israel respectively, as it is in other countries of the
entire “Fertile Crescent,” whose edges have always sustained a popula-
tion of pastoralists living in a more or less uneasy symbiosis with the
agriculturalists. Thus even if other researchers were willing to replicate
the author’s heroic efforts, they would probably find that they were too
Reprinted with permission. C. Bailey, A Culture of Desert Survivial, ©2004 Yale University
Press, pages ix–xvi.
626 viii.5. proverbs: an ancient tradition in the middle east
late. Bailey’s collection represents the precious preservation of a van-

ishing literary legacy. How does it fit into the larger picture of Near
Eastern proverbial literature, and of paroemiology generally?
The Antiquity of Proverbs
Until the author collected them in this book, Bedouin proverbs were
typically transmitted orally, making them difficult to date. As Bailey
points out, some of them can be traced back to the sixth or at least
the eleventh century ad on internal grounds (see below). But the antiq-
uity of the proverb genre as such is far greater than that, going back
to the third millennium bc and the beginnings of written literature
altogether. This can be demonstrated at both ends of the Fertile Cres-
cent, in ancient Egypt and Sumer. In Egypt, apart from autobiogra-
phies intended to supplement the sculptures and reliefs of prominent
tombs, the earliest literary genre consisted of groups of proverbs or
maxims strung together to form “instructions.” These are thought to
have begun as early as Imhotep, the vizier of Djoser in the Third
Dynasty (ca. 2715–2640] and architect of his great pyramid, whose
many talents later caused him to be considered divine. The first actu-
ally preserved Instructions, however, are attributed to Prince Hardjedef
in the Fifth Dynasty (ca. 2510–2360 bc) and to the vizier Ptahhotep in
the Sixth (ca. 2360–2205 bc) (Lichtheim 1975: 58–80). In Sumer, where
writing in cuneiform preceded even the hieroglyphic script of Egypt,
its earliest literary use, apart from some incantations, was again of the
“wisdom” variety: individual proverbs and groups of proverbs collected
into Instructions. The first of these Instructions was attributed to the
hero of the Sumerian version of the tale of the great flood, Shuruppak
(Hallo and Younger 1997–2002: 1: 563–570).
Proverbs in Context
Written proverbs could be transmitted singly or in collections, the latter

usually sharing a particular focus. The ancient Egyptian and Sumerian
instructions already mentioned were attributed to specific authors, real
or imaginary. The later proverb collections of Sumer, of which more
than thirty have been identified so far, and which could include as
many as two hundred individual sayings, have no such attribution. In
viii.5. proverbs: an ancient tradition in the middle east 627
the Hebrew bible, on the other hand, Solomon is said to have created
or at least recited no fewer than three thousand proverbs (I Kings 5:12)
and is also credited with some eighteen out of thirty-one chapters of the
Book of Proverbs (10–22:16, 25–29), containing just over five hundred
verses (proverbs). The rest of the book is attributed to other authors or
remains anonymous.
In addition to those preserved individually or in collections, proverbs
(and the related genre of riddles) are sometimes found inserted in
the context of other genres. In Sumerian and in Akkadian (the other
principal language of ancient Mesopotamia), they have been identified
in some unlikely contexts, such as the beginning or even the middle of
lexical texts, but also in instructions, in letters, and above all in epics.
One proverbial saying, found in both Sumerian and Akkadian versions
of the Gilgamesh Epic, may serve by way of example. When Gilgamesh
needs to encourage his friend Enkidu in their mission to the Cedar
Forest to confront its guardian, the monster Huwawa, he quotes the
old saw, “(Two men together will not die . . .) No man can cut a three-
ply rope.” The very same saying surfaces again in the biblical Book of
Ecclesiastes (4:12) as, “The threefold cord is not readily broken” (Hallo
1990).
Oral Transmission of Proverbs and Their Longevity
As the last example implies, proverbs can move from one language and
culture to another and can do so more freely than other literary gen-
res. Neither space nor time offers insuperable barriers to their trans-
mission, which can be at least in part oral, and in the Bedouin case
wholly so. The present book has carefully and intentionally eliminated
all the proverbs familiar to Arabic speakers generally in order to distill
the essence of uniquely Bedouin wisdom; it thus has few if any proverbs
recognizably in common with other Near Eastern paroemiology. Even
so, the author cites a proverb, “Woe to the wrongdoer and woe to his
neighbor!” (469), with verbatim antecedents not only in the Bedouin
poetry of the nineteenth century ad, but in Mishnaic Hebrew of the
second century. One may also point to No. 162: “Cast your line into
the sea, and God will provide,” or No. 513: “Throw a favor even into
the sea and you’ll find it”, and compare them with the biblical saying,
“Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it [back?] in the
fullness of days [or: of seas]” (Ecclesiastes 11:1). This verse, in turn,
has been compared to similar sentiments in the ancient Near East.

An Akkadian testament from Emar (ca. 1200 bc) includes the line “Let
her [the testator’s wife] ‘cast it [the house] upon the waters’ ” (Tsuki-
moto 1994:232); the Egyptian Instructions of Onchsheshongy (Ankh-
sheshong) (ca. fifth century bc) proclaim, “Do a good deed and throw
it into the river. When this dries up, you shall find it” (Scott 1965: xlv,
252).
Many other and even more dramatic examples of long-term survival
of proverbs can, however, be cited from outside the Bedouin tradition.
So, for example, the maxim “Who would give water at dawn to a
goose that will be slaughtered in the morning?” which ends the ancient
Egyptian tale “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” has been traced all the way
to a modern Russian parallel. Sometimes the intervening links of a
lengthy chain of transmission can be identified. The saying “The bitch
in her haste gave birth to blind puppies,” which first appears in an
Akkadian letter from King Shamshi-Adad I to his son (ca. 1800 bc), has
been identified in Greek sources beginning as far back as the seventh
century bc and continuing into the Middle Ages, after which it turns
up everywhere: in Latin, English, German, Italian, Arabic (including
the Iraqi vernacular), and Judeo-Arabic; it has also been traced back
to a possible Sumerian precedent (Alster 1997:SP 5.118). At other times
a proverb may undergo transformation in the course of transmission
while recognizably retaining its original message. The Sumerian saying,
“In the city of the lame, the halt is courier” refers, respectively, to
persons lame on both legs and lame on one leg only. It is recognizable
in the Latin saying (and its English and other later renderings), “In the
country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” A missing link of sorts
is furnished by the Rabbinic saying, “In the marketplace of the blind
they call the one-eyed man [their] leader” (Hallo 1990:207 f. for all the
foregoing).
Proverbs as Curricular Material (School Texts)
The traditional lifestyle of the Bedouin is essentially incompatible with

formal education (p. 3), so their proverbs, while inculcating time-honor-
ed truths and practices, are not part of a fixed curriculum. In the liter-
ate cultures of the Near East, however, precisely that situation is attested
already for the scribal schools of the time of Hammurapi of Baby-
lon (eighteenth century bc), where the unilingual Sumerian proverb
collections formed the climax of elementary education, to be followed

by instruction in the received canon of fully literary compositions (Veld-
huis 1997:61–63). In later Babylonian and Assyrian education, they
were replaced by bilingual collections, in which each Sumerian proverb
was accompanied by a translation into Akkadian (Lambert 1960:222–
275). But these translations were invariably disposed in parallel col-
umns, not arranged in the interlinear manner which became charac-
teristic of more advanced portions of the curriculum (Hallo 1996:154–
168). There is even a short Akkado-Hittite bilingual collection (Lam-
bert 1960:279), but unilingual Hittite proverbs from the Hittite capital
of Hattusha in Anatolia (Turkey) occur only in the context of other
genres (Beckman 1986). Unilingual Akkadian proverb collections are
equally rare but have recently been augmented by the find of a tablet
from the library at Sippar (ca. sixth century bc) (George and al-Rawi
1998:203–206). All this evidence can safely be traced to the institution
of the scribal school.
An interesting feature of the biblical Book of Proverbs is its incorpo-
ration of foreign material, some of it—notably at its end—by its own
admission, thus illustrating Israel’s familiarity with “the wisdom of the
people of the east” (I Kings 5:10; cf. I Samuel 24:13). In particular, the
last two chapters, or at least the first nine verses of each, are attributed,
respectively, to Agur and Lemuel, both associated with the nomadic
North Arabian tribe of Massa—which is known also from an Assyrian
letter to King Assurbanipal in the seventh century bc (Eph"al 1982: 10,
218–220). These attributions deserve some credence, given the known
mobility of the nomads and their penchant for conveying traditional
culture. We might even go so far as to say that these eighteen verses
represent the oldest recorded proverbs of the Bedouin of Sinai and the
Negev!
At other times the incorporation, while not openly admitted, can
be deduced on internal grounds. Most notably the anonymous “words
of the wise” (Proverbs 22:17–24:34) have often been compared to the
“Instruction of Amenemope (Amenemhet),” divided into a prologue
and thirty chapters. Similarly, though the direction of the borrowing
is sometimes disputed, one can detect a preamble and thirty precepts
(plus appendix) in the biblical segment, and seven or eight of them
closely parallel the Egyptian sentiments; with a minimal emendation,
one can even find a reference to “thirty precepts” in the biblical pream-
ble (Proverbs 22: 20) (Hallo and Younger 1997: 115–122; Scott 1965: 133–
149).
These and other ancient Egyptian Instructions were typically ad-

dressed by a father, sometimes a royal father, to his son. Although
not part of formal education, they thus played a role in the tradi-
tional transmission of knowledge—theoretical, practical, or ethical—
from parent to son. In this connection it is worth noting that the story
of the wise Ahiqar, first known from Egypt in the fifth century bc (albeit
in Aramaic), concludes with a long list of proverbs which, at least in
some of the many later versions of the work, are likewise phrased as
instructions to “my son” (Winton Thomas 1958: 270–275). Much of
the biblical Book of Proverbs, too, is addressed to “my son” (1:8, 10,
15, etc.); more formal training may have been provided by wise men
(though represented in the guise of “Wisdom,” a woman) (1:20 f., 8:1–3),
who addressed their pupils as “sons” (8:32). In light of all this ancient
precedent, it is interesting to learn that the deliberate imparting of wis-
dom to sons (and younger brothers) is still maintained by the Bedouin,
as evidenced in their surviving proverbs and poetry (Bailey 1991:141–
153; 326–328).
Proverbs and Law
Out of nine chapters, Clinton Bailey devotes no fewer than three to

Bedouin justice, whether achieved by force, litigation, or mediation.
This emphasis is not surprising in a collection of proverbs for, in the
absence of written law, a major role in the redress of injustice is played
by norms widely known and easily memorized. Poetry and proverbs
both served this purpose, as the author has demonstrated in a previous
study (Bailey 1993). There he collected fifty maxims relating to the topic
of guaranty (kafāla), some poetic—alliterative, assonontal, or rhyming—
some merely pithy, and all distinguished by their wide geographical
range, going beyond Sinai and the Negev to embrace, in his words,
“Egypt, Mandatory Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq” (Bailey 1993; see
also chapter 7/11 of the present work). What is truly remarkable is that
identical proverbs and poems prove to be used in Bedouin trials and
other legal contexts over the entire area of the ancient Fertile Crescent.
This observation suggests an analogy to and a potential solution for
a major crux in ancient Near Eastern law, collected at intervals in
the form of wise precedents and judicious decisions, and promulgated
under royal authority or, in Israel, under divine dispensation. Typically
these laws were phrased in conditional form, or what we choose to
translate as conditional forms; e.g., “If an ox gores another ox and thus

causes its death, the two owners shall divide the value of the living ox
and the carcass of the dead ox” (Hallo and Younger 1997–2002:2:335).
That happens to be a provision in the laws of the Old Babylonian
city-state of Eshnunna in the nineteenth century bc, discovered in the
outskirts of Baghdad in ad 1948. It is echoed almost verbatim in the
“Covenant Code” of the biblical Book of Exodus where we read: “If
the ox of one man gore the ox of another man, so that he dies, then
they shall sell the living ox, and divide its price equally, and the dead
one too they shall divide equally” (Exodus 21:35). Since this provision
occurs in no other ancient law “code,” not even in the section on goring
oxen of the famous, lengthy, and long-lived Laws of Hammurapi of
Babylon (eighteenth century bc), it raises the interesting question of
whether the lawgivers of Eshnunna and Israel arrived independently at
the same ingenious solution or, if not, how knowledge of the precedent
passed from one to the other, or perhaps from. a source common
to both. The last possibility can no longer be excluded, given the
finding that oral law is widely shared by the Bedouin over the entire
Fertile Crescent, from the Sinai peninsula to the Persian Gulf, the very
same area where Amorite tribes wandered and in some cases settled
down at the beginning of the second millennium bc. These nomadic
or seminomadic tribes were the ancestors of the dynasties of both
Eshnunna and Babylon, as well as of the Canaanites to whom Israel
may well owe some of its legal heritage (Hallo 1996: 55, 245). The
modern Bedouin analogy thus makes it more plausible that the law of
the goring oxen was similarly shared by the ancient seminomads from
one end of the Fertile Crescent to the other.
Conclusion
The Bedouin proverbs collected and preserved in this book are indeed,
like Bedouin poetry, a mirror of their culture, reflecting the peculiarities
of a style of life wholly dedicated to survival in the desert. But they
also share features with earlier Near Eastern proverbs and with some of
the proverbial literature of the contemporary world. We can be grateful
that they have here been preserved for comparison with these wider
horizons in space and time, for the light they throw on the culture that
produced them and for the intrinsic pleasure they afford to the modern
reader.
Bibliography
Alster, Bendt. 1997. Proverbs of Ancient Sumer: The World’s Earliest Proverb Collections,
2 vols. Bethesda, Md.: CDL.
Attal, Robert, 1989: “Bibliographie raisonnée des proverbes Arabes et Judeo-
Arabes du Maghreb,” Studies in Bibliography and Booklore, 17: 41–54.
Bailey, Clinton. 1991. Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture.
Oxford: Clarendon.
———. 1993. “The Role of Rhyme and Maxim in Bedouin Law.” New Arabian
Studies 1: 21–35.
Beckman, Gary. “Proverbs and Proverbial Allusions in Hittite.” Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 45: 19–30.
Eph"al, Israel. 1982. The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of the Fertile Crescent,
9th–5th Centuries bc. Jerusalem: Magnes; Leiden: Brill.
George, A.R., and F.N.H. al-Rawi. 1998. “Tablets from the Sippar Library,
VII. Three Wisdom Texts.” Iraq 60: 187–206.
Hallo, William W. 1990. “Proverbs Quoted in Epic.” In Lingering Over Words:
Studies . . . in Honor of William L. Moran, edited by T. Abusch et al. Atlanta:
Scholars Press, here: VIII.4.
———. 1996. Origins: The Ancient Near Eastern Background of Some Modern Western
Institutions. Leiden: Brill.
———, and K. Lawson Younger, Jr., eds. 1997–2002. The Context of Scripture, 3
vols. Leiden: Brill.
Lambert, W.G. 1060. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Clarendon.
Lichtheim, Miriam. 1975. Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. I. Berkeley: University
of California.
Scott, R.B.Y. 1965. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18. Garden City: Double-
day.
Taylor, Archer. 1931. The Proverb, quoted from the edition of 1962; repr. 1985.
Tsukimoto, Akio. 1994. “A Testamentary Document from Emar,” Acta Sumero-
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Thomas Nelson.
ix
incantations
ix.1
BACK TO THE BIG HOUSE:

COLLOQUIAL SUMERIAN, CONTINUED1
Among many other insights, J.J.A. van Dijk has provided a new and
profound appreciation of the genre of “non-canonical incantations”.2
This genre is already attested by the middle of the third millennium
in texts from Ebla,3 Fara4 and early Lagash.5 It is generally identified
by an initial or concluding rubric, but sometimes the incantation so
identified is only part of a longer composition in which it is embedded.6
And sometimes the incantation is not so identified at all.7 That seems
to be the case with the text offered herewith, which has some idiomatic
points of contact with the genre, but no rubric; in form, it suggests
a prayer. The tablet was acquired by the Yale Babylonian Collection
through the good offices of Mr. Jonathan Rosen of New York.
The text is a lenticular or “lentil-shaped” tablet with ten cases on the
obverse and eight on the reverse. Although lenticular tablets of literary
content are so far known only from the Old Babylonian schools, they
were used for archival purposes as early as Neo-Sumerian times and
occasionally in the preceding Old Akkadian period.8 All such third
millennium examples come from Lagash; it is not impossible that our
1 The substance of this paper was presented to the 194th meeting of the American
Oriental Society, Seattle, Washington, on March 25, 1984. I am indebted to R.D. Biggs,
M. Civil, and P. Michalowski for comments made at that time and gratefully incorpo-
rated here. Å. Sjöberg graciously granted access to the files of the Sumerian Dictionary
Project of the University of Pennsylvania; references from these files are here identified
by the notation PSD.
2 See especially the text volumes VS 17 and YOS 11, as well as numerous articles;
cf. e.g. Or 38 (1969) 539–547; 41 (1972) 339–348, 357 f.; 42 (1973) 502–507; 44 (1975) 52–
79 + pls. v–vi; and RAI 25 (1982) 97–110.
3 G. Pettinato, OA 18 (1979) 329–351, and pls. xxvi–xlii; P. Mander, Or 48 (1979)
335–339.
4 E.g. WVDOG 43 (1923) 46, 54 f.; 71; cf. Biggs, JCS 20 (1966) 78 n. 41.
5 Sollberger, CIRPL (1956) sub Urn. 49.
6 E.g. van Dijk, Symbolae . . . Böhl (1973) 109 f.
7 E.g. note 5 above.
8 Pettinato. AnOr 45 (1969), esp. p. 5.
636 ix.1. back to the big house: colloquial sumerian
text is from the same site. Its writing is compatible with the Lagash
ductus of Early Dynastic III date.9
The text is, in any case, not a school tablet like the round tablets
of Old Babylonian date. That is, it does not include the efforts of a
scribal student, with or without the better model of the tutor, as in
the classification system of E.I. Gordon.10 It is perfectly preserved; its
writing is of a high standard of excellence; and obverse and reverse
almost certainly represent successive portions of a continuous entity. It
gives the impression of constituting the polished work of an experienced
scribe, and of presenting a composition in its entirety.
This composition is to some extent sui generis. I would regard it as
a prayer, more specifically the prayer of a (private) individual. Now
individual prayer in Sumerian has a long tradition, as I showed some
time ago.11 But nowhere does it stand by itself in a canonical form of
its own and apart from some other or larger literary context, be that
a letter or lament on the one hand, or an epic, temple hymn, royal
hymn, or even monumental text on the other. The new text, whether it
proves formally to be an incantation or not, functions as a prayer and,
this granted, thus preserves the oldest and most explicit example of its
kind yet recovered. Although it still poses many difficulties, a tentative
transliteration and translation is hereby ventured.
Transliteration
(obv.)
1) é-gal tir
2) gú-har-mušen-sa7-a a-sig ha-mu-ši-íb-gar
3) šà-bi˘ gir4-mah izi ba-ra-a ˘
4) ˘
a-sig ha-ma-ab-sù
5) ˘
ig-bi ra-gaba ha ˘ harranx(KASKAL) si-sá gá ha-gub
a
6) ˘
zé- hi-bi lú-kin-gi4-a-kam ˘
7) ˘
šu ha-mu-ši-nigin
8) ˘
giš-bala-bi lam á-ša6-ga-mu ha-àm
9) zag-zi-da-mà ha-kár-kárka ˘
10) giš-ká-ba gú-bi˘ ha-mu-da-zi
˘
9 Y. Rosengarten, Répertoire commenté des signes présargoniques sumériens de Lagaš (Paris
1967).
10 Sumerian Proverbs (Museum Monographs, 1959) 7 f. Cf. now also R. Falkowitz, AfO
29/30 (1983–1984) 18–45.

11 W.W. Hallo, JAOS 88 (= AOS 53, 1968) 71–89, here: IV.1.
ix.1. back to the big house: colloquial sumerian 637
(rev.)
11) dinanna igištu-mu hé-àm
12) dingir-mu á-dah-mu ˘ ha-àm
13) egir-mà ha-gin ˘ ˘
14) ˘
lú-kak-du-mà gú-e ki ha-lá
15) gá gú-mu an-šè ha-zi ˘
16) èš den-ki dasar-re˘ abzu-na
17) nam-mu-da-búr-e
18) mu-dnanše al-me-a
Translation
1) The “big house” (which is) a forest—

2) The A.SIG has verily placed the string (?) of a green bird-trap into it for
me.
3) Its interior is a great oven whose fire is lit.
4) May the A.SIG keep it far from me.
5) Its door is a rider traversing the highway—may it be dislodged for me.
6) Its bolt is that of a messenger.
7) May it turn in it (the door) for me.
8) Its rafters are extensive—may they be my favorable side.
9) On my right hand may it shine brightly.
10) Of its gate may I be able to raise its lock.
11) May Inanna be my vanguard.
12) May my (personal) deity be my helper.
13) May he walk behind me.
14) May she/he make my door (gate?)-keeper bow with his neck to the
ground.
15) As for me, may I raise my neck to heaven.
16) The sanctuary of Enki (and) Asare in his Abzu—
17) May no one be able to undo.
18) The spell which Nanshe has cast.
Notes on the Translation
1) Five years ago I edited a brief Sumerian proverb from Collection

6 and proposed the following translation: The ‘big house’ is (like) a
forest / the king, a lion, / Ningal, a great net / which subdues12 a
12 gúr-gúr (kunnušu). The Yale exemplar has a variant predicate, ù-ù-e, for which the
only analogy known to me is Gudea Cyl. A xxi 28: inim-an-na im-mi-íb-ù-ù-dam (cf
W. Heimpel, Studia Pohl 2 [1968] 84: 3). Perhaps one may translate ù as karû, “to be
in a depression, stupor” (CAD K s.v.) and regard ù-ù as the factitive derivative, “to put
into a stupor, knock out”.
man.13 I suggested that the big house in this context could hardly be
the palace but was more likely the prison as in the colloquial equivalent
in English, or a sanctuary as in some of the meanings attested for the
Sumerian tir (forest) with which the proverb equated it. The new text
already provides a second context for the big house (which is) a forest,
and appears to bear out the meaning prison or asylum for the term in
question.
2) A.SIG here (and in line 4) may be some kind of functionary, since it

appears (with the variant a-sig5) in a neo-Assyrian list of professional
names (MSL 12 239 v. 10), between the steward (mašennu) and the
charioteer (bēl narkabti or mugirri). In view of the rider in line 5 and
the messenger in line 6, the notion that A.SIG stands for mār kallê
(“messager rapide,” R. Labat, Manuel 5 s.v.) is attractive but unsupported
by hard evidence.13a
I follow A. Salonen in taking har-mušen(a) as the Sumerian equiva-
˘
lent of Akkadian mušenharu (not huharu), the bird-trap (Vögel und Vogelfang
˘
im alten Mesopotamien [1973] 35–41). ˘ ˘ For literary references, see Pickaxe
and Plow 81 (OECT 5 34:81) and 178 (UET 6 42 rev. 10). A reading gú-
mur-mušen, (h)urhud is. s. ūri, throat of a bird (cf. AHw s.v. ur"udu; Sjöberg,
ZA 64 [1975] ˘166˘f.) seems less likely.
3) The gir4-mah (kirmahhu) is well known (Salonen, BaM 3 [1964] 121).

˘
Note that Nur-Adad 3˘ ˘ (UET 1 112 + 124 + UET 8 67) “records the
building and dedication to Nanna of (such) a ‘big oven’ ” (E. Sollberger,
UET 8 p. 14 ad line 38).
For izi. . . ra (read thus rather than rí?) cf. e.g. Dumuzi’s Dream
(B. Alster, Mesopotamia 1 [1972] 82) 251; 253. In Inanna and Ebih
˘
150 (ISET 2 14 Ni. 4593 rev. 3) it varies with izi. . . ri (TMH nF 3
3:12; PBS 12 47 rev. 11; PRAK I B 272:7), so the reading dè . . . dal
suggested for the Exaltation of Inanna 44 (YNER 3 20) may need to
be reconsidered (PSD).
13 Hallo, JCS 31 (1979) 161–165, here: VIII.2. The references assembled there should
be augmented especially by Iddin-Dagan *6 (W.H. Ph. Römer, SKIZ [1965) 133) 67: é-
gal é-na-ri kalam-ma-ka gišrabx-kur-kur-ra-kam, “the big house, the house of instruction
(chastisement?) for the nation, the pillory of all the foreign lands.” Cf. already Sjöberg,
AfO 24 (1973) 19 f. n. 3, and note that a reference to the ordeal (i7-lú-ru-gú) follows. Cf.
also Ishme-Dagan *15 (G.R. Castellino, RSO 32 [1957] 16–18) 28–30.
13a Or is A.SIG a phonetic spelling for á-si-(giš)ig = “door hinge”, for which cf.
A. Salonen, Die Türen (1961) 60; J. Krecher, Kultlyrik (1966) 177?

5) The comparison between door and rider may seem far-fetched, but
note that the typical Mesopotamian door had a “rider”, i.e. the knob
of its pole. This is usually expressed by u5-ig = šagammu (Salonen, Die
Türen des alten Mesopotamien [1961] 66). But, as E.A. Speiser recognized
long ago, u5 in this context “stands also for rakābu ‘ride’ and the knob
which adorned the upper end of the door-pole could suitably be called
its ‘rider’ ” (JCS 2 [1984] 226 f.).
According to the lexical texts, the sign KASKAL has the reading
kaskal when it means harrānu, “road, journey” (CAD H s.v.) but Civil
suggests that it may also ˘ have the reading harran . On˘this interpreta-
x
tion, the ha of our text would be a phonetic ˘ indicator, as would also
˘
the “plene spelling” har-ra-an which immediately precedes or follows
˘
KASKAL in numerous contexts.14 The emendation to si -šá is based
on the frequent association of kaskal/ har-ra-an with this verb.15 Alter-
˘
natively, one could read ha˘ harranx di-a, “having traversed the road” or,
˘
even less likely, ha-bí-di-a-(mà), “in/with (my) hapūtu-hoe”.
˘
The meaning “remove a door” (dalta nasāhu)˘ has been established for
the compound verb ig . . . gub by Å. Sjöberg,˘ JCS 24 (1972) 112; cf. more
recently J. Cooper, The Curse of Agade (1983) 250 ad line 168.
6) The reading zé-hi-bi was suggested by Civil, as was the equation

˘
with sahab-(bi), sùhub-(bi) = mēdelu for which see Salonen, Türen 79.
˘ ˘
7) For šu-nigin = sahāru, see MSL 13 114:13.
˘
8) For giš-bala = ruggubum, von Soden suggests the meaning “having
a balcony, loft” (Soden; AHw s.v.). Sjöberg prefers “cross beams” (PSD
B 48a). “Rafters” combines both senses.
For a-ša6-ša6 with the gloss dummuqu see MSL 13 42:43. Or could we
be dealing with a phonetic spelling of lamma-ša6-ga, “good protective
deity” (A, Sjöberg, orally)?
14 It must be admitted, however, that kaskal and har-ra-an also occur in parallelism.
15 Cf. eg. P. Michalowski, The Royal Correspondence˘ of Ur (Ph.D. Yale 1976) 136 line 3:
kur su-birki-še har-ra-an kaskal-(la) si sá-sá e-dè (var.: ra), “to take the road to Subir”.
˘
9) For kár-kárka, (or = kár-kár-ka)16 = nabātu (or napāhu),17 see CAD N s.v.
˘
10) For gišgú = gišru, part of a lock, cf. MSL 5 30:292a and Salonen,
Türen 76 against CAD G s.v. gišru A.
11) For IGI.DU = geštu, igištu see CAD s.vv.
14) lú-kak-du is a problem. One may suggest a partially phonetic

spelling for kak-ì-du8 = mušēlû (A), pan of the lock of a door or (B) door-
keeper, or for (lú)-kak-du8 with which compare kak-du8 = mupattı̄tu, lit-
erally “opener” and giškak-níg-du8du-uh= nap.tartum, part of a lock (MSL 6
62:131; 63:136).
For gú-ki-šè-lá = qadādu ša amēli see MSL 16 194 line 97; previously
Falkenstein, ZA 57 (1965) 97 f.
16) The sanctuary of Enki is presumably identical with the sanctuary

known as the (é)-abzu (abyss), which in turn may or may not be iden-
tical with é-engur (house of the watery deep), the temple of Enki in
Eridu; cf. van Dijk, Symbolae . . . Böhl (1973) 111.
17) This predicate is familiar from incantations of all periods, whether

Old Babylonian (cf. e.g. VS 17 29:6; 30:9), Middle Babylonian (cf.
e.g. J. Cooper, ZA 61 [1971] 16:33) or neo-Assyrian (cf. A. Falkenstein,
LSS nF 1 [1931] 98:33), In all such cases the expressed object is the
incantation (tu6, tu6-tu6, nam-šub etc.); here it apparently is understood.
18) Uncertain translation. If mu7-mu7 or me-me = āšipu, “exorcist,” can

be analyzed as “incantation reciter,” then mu may be phonetic for mu7,
šiptu, “incantation”, and me (or šib) may stand for the verb to perform
an incantation. Cf. ME with the reading šib = uššupu ša āšipi, MSL 14
223: 8. But usually the verb used with incantations is sum = nadû or šid
= manû.
16 For examples of kár-kár complemented by -ka (or a-ka) see Warad-Sin 19 (Kärki,
StOr 49 [1980] 109) v 7; Enki’s Journey to Nippur (ed. A. Al-Fouadi [1969] 69) 1.7, with
additional references ib. pp. 11 f. (PSD).
17 Cf. Elevation of Ištar (Hruška, ArOr 37 [1969] 485) iii 69 f. (PSD); MSL 16 206:3.
General Conclusions
As translated above, our text is an individual’s prayer for release from

the big house. It invokes the help of Inanna, the individual’s (personal)
deity and, in conclusion, Enki, his son Asare and his daughter Nanshe.
What can be said about its possible context, geographical or chronolog-
ical?
While the appeal to Enki and his Abzu might seem to point to Eridu,
there are grounds for linking the text to Lagash (see already above). As
Sjöberg has pointed out, “in Old Babylonian times, Asar belonged to
the local pantheon in Lagaš . . . ; also in Neo-Sumerian times he was
worshipped in Lagaš”.18 Nanshe, too, was at home in Lagash, more
specifically in Nina (Sirara).
Other evidence points to the “big house” as part of a temple or even,
perhaps as pars pro toto, as a description for an entire temple.19 Thus
when it is likened to a distant sea which knows no horizon,20 exactly
as is the é-kur, or more specifically its interior,21 we may conclude that
there was a “big house” within the temple of Enlil at Nippur. Note
that the great hymn to this temple22 actually begins, “the great house,
it is a mountain great”; Kramer takes this line to refer “to the Ekur
complex as a whole, and in a sense . . . to be understood before each of
the following 26 lines”.23 Again, the great temple of Nanna at Ur was,
or included, a “big house”24 even as it included an Abzu.25
A third possibility is that the term for big house became a toponym
in its own right. It then takes the form Bitum-rabium in Akkadian26 (date
of Amar-Suen 7, with Iabru and Huhnuri)27 and é-gu-laki in Sumerian,28
˘ ˘
but since this form varies with é-gal as a temple name or common
18 TCS 3 (1969) 80.

19 Sjöberg, AfO 24 (1973) 19 f. and n. 3; R. Falkowitz, The Sumerian Rhetoric Collections
(Ph.D. thesis, Pennsylvania, 1980) 178 ad S.P. 3.37.
20 Hallo, JCS 31 (1979) 163 and n. 25, here: VIII.2.
21 Ibid, n. 26. For the orthographic implications of this cliché, see Civil, JAOS 92
(1972) 271.
22 S.N. Kramer, RSO 32 (1957) 95–102.
23 Ibid. 100.
24 Ur-Nammu C (Castellino, ZA 53 [1959] 20) 108.
25 UET 6 105:2 f.; cf. van Dijk, Symbolae. . . Böhl 111.
26 D.O. Edzard and G. Farber, RGTC 2 (1974) 27. Cf. Hallo, HUCA 29 (1958) 99.
27 For the location of Huh(u)nuri (southeast of Susa and Lagash) see J.F. Hansman,
Iran 10 (1972) 117–119 and ˘P. Steinkeller,

˘ ZA 72 (1982) 243 n. 18 and map p. 265.
28 RGTC 2, 44.
noun,29 it is possible that, as toponym, it retains the meaning, “prison,

asylum” suggested here for the latter. That toponyms could be derived
from the character of their original settlers has always been clear from
the example of Āl-šarrāki (uru-sag-rig7), the city of the votaries. More
specifically, Jacobsen has argued that “settlements of prisoners were
not too unusual in ancient Sumer, even though the one reference we
have to them pretends to deal with an unicum,” i.e. Shu-sin’s use of
his prisoners of war (sag-nam-ra-aš-aka-ni) to found a city in the area
of Nippur. And he notes at least two cities named accordingly—one a
Girsu on the banks of the Euphrates and the other the famous Girsu
in the territory of Lagash, both explained as meaning literally “naked
prisoner”.30
A final possibility needs to be considered here, namely that we are
dealing neither with a temple nor with a city but with an institution
located far from any human habitation. In our text and in the proverb
about Ningal, the big house is equated with the forest (see above ad
line 1). In the incantation hymn to Ninurta, the more or less synony-
mous “wide house” (of the protective deity) is associated with the dis-
tant forest.31 In the late, bilingual zi-pà incantations, the “big house”
is equated with the steppe (edin = s. ēru)32 In earlier unilingual Sume-
rian texts, it is frequently linked to royal bivouacs or caravanserais in
the open country.33 It is even conceivable that the Sargonic toponym é-
gal-eden-(na)ki, possibly identical with é-eden or pre-Sargonic A.EDEN,
identifies such a “big house of the steppe.”34
There are, then, a number of indications for an institution located in
forest or steppe which served to detain persons, whether for their own
protection (from would-be avengers) or for that of society. It is too early
to say that this institution provides a remote precedent for the Biblical
“cities of refuge,” hitherto considered a uniquely Israelite innovation.35
But another aspect may deserve reiteration here: the fact that this insti-
tution was known as “the big house,” or “the wide house,” in addition
29 Hallo, JCS 31, 163, here: VIII.2.

30 JCS 21 (1967) 100.
31 Hallo, JCS 31, 164 f. with nn. 44–51, here: VIII.2. Note, however, that the incipit
of the composition (n. 45) has to be revised again in light of the literary catalogue
published by Michalowski, OA 19 (1980) entry 7.
32 R. Borger, AOAT 1 (1969) 85 f.
33 Hallo, JCS 31, 162 and n. 17, here: VIII.2.
34 RGTC 1 (1977) s. vv.
35 But see already Hallo in W.G. Plain, E.J. Bamberger and W.W. Hallo, The Torah:
A Modem Commentary (New York 1981) 1302.

to numerous other synonyms.36 R. Falkowitz has said of the Sumerian

proverb collections that “there are no clues from the grammar, syntax
or lexicon of the discourse in the Rhetoric Collections which would
allow one to characterize the language as colloquial.”37 But if colloquial
speech includes the use of words in other than their standard mean-
ings, then the evidence already collected may provide the kind of lexical
clues being asked for. In addition, there are fairly explicit references in
Sumerian literature itself to the existence—and recognition—of argots
and jargons that can presumably be best described as colloquial. That
the terminology of detention would spawn colloquialisms in especially
large numbers would not be particularly surprising.
36 Hallo, JCS 31, 165 with nn. 52–54, here: VIII.2.

37 The Sumerian Rhetoric Collection 46.
ix.2
MORE INCANTATIONS AND RITUALS FROM

THE YALE BABYLONIAN COLLECTION1
In 1985, the Yale Babylonian Collection published Yale Oriental Series-

Babylonian Texts (YOS) 11 under the title Early Mesopotamian Incantations
and Rituals. The work represented the collective efforts of four scholars,
three of them now deceased. Of the 96 texts on 83 plates included in
the volume, 29 texts on 49 plates had been copied during the 1920’s
by Mary Inda Hussey (1876–1952),2 while the remaining 67 texts on 34
plates were copied during the 1960’s and 1970’s by Jan van Dijk (1915–
1996). Van Dijk provided extensive notes on most of the texts, in many
cases incorporating an earlier set of notes by Albrecht Goetze (1897–
1971).3 In addition, Walter Farber furnished collations of the Hussey
copies.
The title of the volume reflected the fact that the texts were largely
of Old Babylonian date (87 out of 96),4 that they were written in Sume-
rian (48), Akkadian (31), or both (9), apart from others in Subarian (4),
Elamite (1), and an unidentified language (3), and that they included
both rituals (19) and incantations (67), or both (6). The balance fea-
tured, notably, the three collections of recipes which have since been
fully edited by Jean Bottéro.5
Since the publication of YOS 11, the Yale Babylonian Collection
has been systematically catalogued under a succession of grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities (1988–1992, 1993–1996).
1 The substance of this paper was presented to the 207th Meeting of the American
Oriental Society, Miami, March 25, 1997. It is substituted here for the paper I originally
presented to the conference on Mesopotamian Magic held at the Netherlands Institute
for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar, June 6–8, 1995, in order to make the new material
available, at least in preliminary fashion.
2 R. Borger, RLA 4 (1972–1975), 523, s.v. Hussey.
3 R. Borger, RLA 3 (1957–1971), 500, s.v. Goetze.
4 Four (Nos. 37, 58, 73, 81) are in neo-Sumerian script, one (No. 74) in Middle
Assyrian, and four (75, 94, 95, 96) in Neo-Babylonian or Late Babylonian.
5 Textes Culinaires Mésopotamiens: Mesopotamian Culinary Texts (Mesopotamian Civiliza-
tions 6; Winona Lake, 1995). For earlier studies see Hallo, Origins (Leiden, 1996), 108 f.;
for a more recent summary, id., 98–108.
646 ix.2. more incantations and rituals
The cataloguing project is likewise a collaborative project, with Gary

Beckman and Ulla Kasten as successive Project Coordinators, and with
numerous individual collaborators. It will permit instant world-wide
access to a computerized data base describing each of our 40,000 hold-
ings, with descriptions capable of eventual expansion to include com-
plete transliterations and translations of tablets and other inscribed and
uninscribed objects. Shorter descriptions are contained in the printed
catalogue volumes, of which two have so far appeared, under the series
title of Catalogue of the Babylonian Collections at Yale (CBCY), one by Paul-
Alain Beaulieu6 and one by Beckman.7 Others are in an advanced stage
of preparation.
Even before its final completion, the cataloguing project has proved
its worth, as I will try to illustrate here by the example of rituals and
incantations. Although YOS 11 was intended to include all the exam-
ples of these genres then remaining unpublished in the Collection, the
systematic item-by-item study of all our textual holdings turned up 18
more candidates, at least tentatively. Their identifications were princi-
pally the work of Beckman, to whom I am indebted for sharing them
with me. One of them is a six-column list of different kinds of stones
in nine groups associated with certain deities and at least in part con-
nected with the recitation of spells. I may note especially the conclusion
of group 3: ‘These eight stones extracted(?) from an X of lapis lazuli you
shall place in its breast(?) and above it (and) below it with the anointing
priest the sacrifice/prayer and its incantation you shall recite. The spell
‘My god is favorable’ you shall recite 7 times’.8 This text deserves study
in its own right. Another of the texts has recently been published jointly
by Beckman and Foster;9 as it is addressed to Enki, it may be part of the
library of the Enki-priesthood which Christian Dyckhoff has identified
as the source of a number of our Old Babylonian literary tablets.10 Oth-
ers have been copied by various scholars and remain to be published by
6 P.-A. Beaulieu, Late Babylonian Texts in the Nies Babylonian Collection (CBCY 1; Bethes-
da, 1994).
7 G. Beckman, Old Babylonian Archival Texts in the Nies Babylonian Collection (CBCY 2;
Bethesda, 1995).
8 NBC 7688 ii 8–13: 8 NA .ME an-nu-tu/ina X ZA.GÌN.NA E 3(?) / ina Y-šú GAR-
4
ma / AN-šú KI-šú ta-man-ni / ÉN DINGIR.MU ŠE.GA 7 Z-KAM.MA ŠÍD(?).
9 G. Beckman and B.R. Foster, ‘An Old Babylonian Plaint against Black Magic’,
ASJ 18 (1996), 19–21.

10 Christian Dyckhoff, Oral communication at the 43rd RAI (see the forthcoming
compte rendu).
ix.2. more incantations and rituals 647
them11 or from their Nachlass.12 Still others are too fragmentary or too
brief to permit certainty of identification.13 That leaves three of suffi-
cient interest or intelligibility to present at this time. Two are Old Baby-
lonian in date, the third is Neo-Babylonian. Because of the difficulties
posed by all of them, I have sought out the help of those more expe-
rienced than I am with these genres, and I am happy to acknowledge
them here, as follows: Niek Veldhuis (Groningen) with No. 1, Walter
Farber (Chicago) with Nos. 1 and 2, and Izabela Zbikowska (Yale) and
Francesca Rochberg (University of California at Riverside) with No. 3.
Herewith I offer transliterations of the two OB texts and a transcrip-
tion of the NB one, and I will attempt to provide translations of two of
them, with minimum comment. No translation is attempted for the sec-
ond which, like the first, includes incantations to Lamashtu (dDÌM.ME).
No. 1. YBC 8041 (52 × 38 mm)
1) [ ]x
2) [ ]-ma?
3) ki-k[i-.ta-šu ]-x
4) tu- ú - e - ni -in-nu-ri
5) ši-pa-at dDÍM.ME
6) ki-ki-.ta-šu ki-ir-ba-an MUN (.tābtim)
7) i-na lu-ba-ri-im ta-ra-ak-ka-as!
8) i-na ki-ša-di-šu ta-ra-ak-ka-a[s]
9) ba-li-i.t
10) ri-ú-ta-am-ma hu-bi-e-ta
11) ri-ú-ta-am i-ni-im˘ ši-p[a-at . . .]
Rev.
12) šu-pu dDIM.ME
13) ki-ki-.ta-ša NUMUN UH
14) ˘
ni-iš-ki i-na zu-mu-u[r-ša/šu]
15) ta-na-ad-du-ma
16) A.BA UR É.AŠ ta-man-nu
17) te-le-ek-ma Ì.GIŠ
18) mu-uh-hi ni-iš-ki-im
19) ˘ ˘ te-te-eh-hi
te-sé-e-er
20) ˘˘
ta-ra-ak-ka-as-ša
11 YBC 6706, an incantation against ‘little worms’, was copied by Bendt Alster.
12 YBC 5443, an incantation similar to udug-hul, was copied by the late R. Kutscher;
MLC 1963 and YBC 9891, unidentified incantations, were copied by van Dijk but not
included in YOS 11.
13 Notably MLC 485, 923; NBC 10217, 10339, 11111 (= 6NT 544), 11118 (= 6NT 997),
10339; NCBT 1049; YBC 9877, 9902.

21) ba-li-i.t
22) ši-pa-at ur-ši
1–2) (Largely lost)

3) Its procedure: . . ..
4) Conjuration.
5) Incantation against Lamashtu.
6) Its procedure: a lump of salt.
7) in a garment you tie up,
8) on his neck you tie (it)
9) he (will be) well.
10) ????
11) ????
12) ??? Lamashtu.
13) Its procedure: the seed and/of the spittle
14) of the bite on his body
15) you apply and (the incantation)
16) ‘Who is the dog of the single house?’ which you recite
17) you lick away and oil
18) over the bite
19) you smear. You approach (and)
20) you bind her.
21) He (will be) well.
22) Incantation of the bedchambers.
Notes
4) This spelling is restored here on the basis of YOS 11:16:11, for which see
the remarks by van Dijk, ibid., p. 5.
5) The translation of šipat Lamašti follows van Dijk, YOS 11, p. 6.
6) For lumps of salt wrapped in a tuft of wool as a poultice, and others as a
suppository, see CAD K, 403:2a, s.v. kirbānu.
7) In another Lamashtu incantation, lubārū (plural) occurs as the ‘(men-
strual) rags of an unclean (i.e., menstruating) woman’; cf. CAD L 230d;
Falkenstein, LKU p. 12, line 11. Note also the possible association with
the Roman labarum suggested by M.H. Pope, ‘The saltier of Atargatis
reconsidered’, Essays . . . Glueck (Garden City, 1970), 178–196, esp. p. 193;
the lexical reference there is to the entry published in the meantime as
MSL 13, 115:16.
17) The verb appears to be from the relatively rare root lêku, cognate with
Hebrew LHK. . The Sumerian equivalent is UR.(BI) . . . KÚ (or TÉŠ.(BI)
. . .KÚ); though not attested as such in lexical or bilingual texts, it occurs
in such unilingual passages as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, 255
and 257, where it has been compared by Sol Cohen to Numbers 22:4;
cf. Hallo, ‘Proverbs quoted in epic’, Studies . . . Moran (Atlanta, 1990), 215
and n. 116, here: VIII.4.
Commentary
This brief text of 22 lines is so far unparalleled among the Lamashtu

incantations, whether canonical or non-canonical.14 It seems to consist
of three separate incantations. The first (lines 1–5) presumably begins
with a 2-line dicenda (ll. 1–2, now lost), a one-line agenda (l. 3) and a
2-line rubric (ll. 4–5). The second (ll. 6–11) begins with a 3-line agenda
(ll. 6–8), a one-line prognosis (l. 9), and what appears to be a 2-line
rubric (ll. 10–11). The third (ll. 12-end) begins with a one-line heading
(l. 12), an 8-line agenda which includes allusion to the recitation of an
incantation (l. 16), a one-line prognosis (l. 21) and a one-line rubric (l.
22).
No. 2. MLC 1614 (78 × 48 mm)
Obv.?
1) [KA.AH].MUD.[DA / KA.K]A.AH.MUD.D[A]
˘ ˘
2) KA.AH.MUD.DA / KA.KA.AH.MU[D.D]A
3) KA.A[˘H.MUD.DA] / KA.K[A.A] ˘ H.MUD.DA
˘ ˘
4) LUGAL.GI[Š].GI.UR / [te-e-ni]-in-nu-ri-e!
5) ši-pa-at d x DÌM.ME
Rev.?
1) NIR.GÁL NIR.NIR.GÁL
2) NIR.NIR.GÁL
3) EN.KA NIR.GÁL
4) ABZU N[UN.KI.(GA?)]
5) ši-taš-ši ki-ma . . .
6) dÉ-a dLÚ.ASAR.HI
7) li-taš-ši-ra an-ni ˘
8) te-e!-en-nu!-ri-e
9) [ši]-pa-at ka-ta-ar-ri
The tablet contains two incantations, one on each side. The one on the
obverse(?) is described as an ‘incantation against Lamashtu’, while the
one on the reverse(?) is described, if correctly restored, as an ‘incanta-
tion against fungus.’ The fear of fungus is widely attested in Mesopota-
14 Cf. R. Borger, HKL III (1975), 86. s.v. Lamaštu. Add: Meissner, Babylonien und
Assyrien II, 222 ff.; Wiggerman apud Stol, Zwangerschap en Geboorte bij Babyloniërs en in de
Bijbel (Leiden, 1983). OB forerunners: BIN 2:72; OECT 1:WB 169, etc. For the latest
survey see C. Michel, “Une incantation paléoassyrienne contra Lamaštum,” Or. 66
(1997), 58–64, with earlier literature.
mia; it was inspired not by hygienic or medical considerations, but by

the ominous significance attributed to the fungus. Thus the indicated
therapy was designed to treat, not so much the symptom, but the evil
consequence it portended.15 It is attested in numerous rituals, incanta-
tions and prayers.16
No. 3 (with Izabela Zbikowska) YBC 9863 (84 × 73 mm)
A further text of considerable interest among those identified as incan-

tations and related texts at Yale which remain to be published is YBC
9863, a collection of astronomical omens and associated incantations.
As far as preserved, it is divided into eight sections, of which the first,
third, and fifth are followed by rubrics, all set off from each other by
dividing lines. After preparing a preliminary transliteration of the text,
I showed it to Izabela Zbikowska on the occasion of her visit to the
Babylonian Collection to work with my colleague Asger Aaboe. Ms.
Zbikowska, then a research assistant at the Institute for the History of
Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, has a special
interest in astronomical texts. She improved greatly on my translitera-
tion, added a transcription, and copied the text.
Ms. Zbikowska also identified the text as partially parallelled by
STT 73, a composition extensively commented on by Erica Reiner.17
A further parallel had been drawn between STT 73 (line 77) and
YBC 9884 (line 2), now published as YOS 11 75,18 but the two Yale
texts neither join nor appear to come from a single tablet, or even from
parallel tablets. According to Reiner, STT 73
deserves a particular interest, and its importance and informativeness
can be evaluated as follows: first, the omens expected are impetrated
omens, a rather rare type of Mesopotamian divination; second, we find
in it the text of the prayers and the directions for the rituals designed
to dispose the deity favorably for giving an answer through a stipulated
signal; and third, we obtain evidence of private divination techniques not
found in the canonical omen literature.19
15 W.W. Hallo, The Book of the People (Brown Judaic Studies 225; Atlanta, 1991), 66 f.
16 Ibid., 145 f., with references; CAD K s.v. katarru.
17 Erica Reiner, ‘Fortune-Telling in Mesopotamia,’ JNES 19 (1960), 23–35.
18 CAD K 518c.
19 JNES 19 (1959), 24.
More recently, the Sultan-Tepe text has been described as ‘an un-
usual first millennium text referring to impetrated practices’ by Ann
Guinan,20 who argues that
As the tradition (of divination) developed, scholars increasingly
turned to the investigation of unsolicited omens and, except for extispicy,
impetrated omens ceased to be part of the standard repertoire.21
All of the above could likewise be said of YBC 9863 (and LKA 137 f.).
Because of its heavy reliance on logographic orthography, it is in addi-
tion presented in transcription except for the strictly astronomical pas-
sages. Commentary is limited to pointing out parallels to STT 73.
YBC 9863
Transliteration
Obverse
(beginning lost)
A
1 [. . .] X [. . .]
2 [. . .S]I-at DI.A.X [. . .]
3 [. . .] X-ú TA 15-MU
4 [. . . TA I]GI.MU ana IGI.MU DIB-iq
5 [KA.AŠ.B]AR MUL IGI.DU8
B
6 [še-am šá h]ar-bi TI-qí GURUŠ.TUR šá MUNUS NU ZU-ú ŠE i-bi-ir
7 ˘
[. . .] e-nu-ma ina GI6 UN.MEŠ s. al-lu-ma qul-tum GAR-at GÌR.2 TAR-sat
8 [. . .] ana IGI MUL.MAR.GÍD.DA GAR-an KAŠ.SAG BAL-qí e-diš-ši-ka
9 [. . . É]N AN.UŠ ana IGI MUL.MAR.GÍD.DA ŠID-nu MUL TA 15-ka
10 [šum-ma MU]L TA 150-ka DÍB-iq NU SIG5
11 [šum-ma an]a IGI-ka DÍB-iq SIG5 šum-ma
MUL.ŠUH MUL.MAR.GÍD.DA DÍB-iq SIG5
˘
12 [šum-ma MU]L.MAR.GÍD.DA NU DÍB-iq NU SIG5 MUL.ŠUH ana
ŠÀ-bi MUL.MAR.GÍD.DA ˘
13 [KU4] BE-ma MUL.MUL ul-te-ez-zib

20 A.K. Guinan, ‘Divination’, in: The Context of Scripture I. Canonical Compositions from
the Biblical World (W.W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. (eds.); Leiden/New York/
Köln, 1997), 421–426, esp. p. 422, n. 9.
21 Ibid., p. 422. For the distinction between impetration (or induction) and oblation
(or intuition) in divination see also Hallo and William K. Simpson, The Ancient Near East:
a History (New York, 1971; second edition, Fort Worth, 1998), 160.
C
14 [MUL.ŠU.PA ŠE].GA MUL.ŠU.PA ŠE.GA MUL.ŠU.PA ZI.ZI
15 [MUL.ŠU.PA ZI.Z]I MUL.ŠU.PA GUB.GUB MUL.ŠU.PA
GUB.GUB
16 [MUL.ŠU.PA GIN].NA MUL.ŠU.PA.GIN.NA (eras.)
17 [MUL.ŠU.PA]SÌG.SÌG MUL.ŠU.PA SÌG.SÌG MUL.ŠU.PA DU8.DU8
18 [MUL.ŠU].PA DU8.DU8 DINGIR MU.UN.SI.SÁ
DINGIR MU.UN.SI.SÁ
19 [DI]NGIR MU.UN.DU11.GA SI.SÁ DINGIR MU.UN.DU11.GA SI.SÁ
DINGIR MU.UN.SI.SÁ GIŠ.TUG
20 DINGIR MU.UN.SI.SÁ GIŠ.TUG DINGIR.MU A.RA.ZU GIŠ.TUG
DINGIR.MU A.RA.ZU GIŠ.TUG TE.ÉN
[I]NIM.INIM.MA KA.AŠ.BAR BAR.RE
Reverse
D
1 [. . .] XXX ú-tal-lal ina A.MEŠ NAGA.SI-li u KI.A.dÍD
2 [. . .] ŠU.2 šú LUH-si ina GI6 ÙR SAR A.MEŠ KÙ.MEŠ SÙ
ZÍD.MAD.GÁ˘šá ŠE.GAL u ŠIM.LI
3 [. . .] X NÍG.NA GAR-an A.MEŠ KÙ.MEŠ BAL-qí-ÉN 3-šú ana IGI
MUL.ŠU.PA ŠID-ma EŠ.BAR tam-mar
E
4 [MU]L.MUL SI.SÁ MUL.MUL SI.SÁ MUL.MUL
GIN.NA MUL.MUL GIN.NA
5 [MUL].MUL GUB.GUB MUL.MUL GUB.GUB
MUL.MUL TUG.TUG MUL.MUL TUG.TUG
6 [MUL.MU]L DU8.DU8 MUL.MUL. DU8.DU8 MUL.MUL SIG5.GA
MUL.MUL SIG5.GA
7 [MUL.MU]L GIŠ.TUG MUL.MUL GIŠ.TUG TE.ÉN
8 [INIM.INIM].MA KA.AŠ.BAR BAR.RE
F
9 [. . .] X ŠE.GA ina GI6 ÙR SAR A.MEŠ KÙ.MEŠ SU ZÍD.MAD.GÁ
šá ŠE.GAL u ŠIM.LI kul-lat i[na. . .]
10 [. . .] ina IZI GIŠ.Ú.GÍR ina UGU NÍG.NA GAR-an ŠE.GAL.KI.A.dÍD
DIŠ-nis I tam-mar ÉN
11 [. . .]-šú LI.KA.TA.NA ŠID(?)-ma GIŠ.ŠINIG ina ŠU-2 15-ka ÍL-si
12.2 [ina GÌ]R(?)-2 150-ka ta-TUK NA.IK(?).KIR-ma A.MEŠ KÙ.MEŠ BAL-
qí ana IGI MUL.MUL.SI.SÁ
13 [. . .]-šú ŠID-ma šu-kin-ma EŠ.BAR Á.MAH SI-ma
˘
G
14 [. . . MUL].GIN.GIN.NA KI.MIN MUL.BAN.DU11.GA.ŠE.GA
KI.MIN LÚ.DU11.GA.ŠE.GA KI.MIN
15 [. . . Š]E.GA KI.MIN LÚ.MUL.BAN.DU11.GA.ŠE.GA
KI.MIN LÚ.MUL.BAN.SI.SÁ.TUG.TUG KI.MIN
16 [. . .] GIŠ.TUG KI.MIN Ì.ERIN Ì.IR.ERIN dNIN.LÍL ra-mat
17 [NIN?] GAL AN-e at-ti-ma dEN.LÍL ŠUB-di GIŠ.GU.ZA-ka
18 [. . . at]-ti-ma di-par AN-e na-mir-tu lu-mur TE.ÉN
H
19 [. . . ina G]I6 ana ÙR DUL.DU-ma NÍG.NA LI u ZÍD.MAD.GÁ ana IGI
MUL.MAR.GÍD.DA
20 [. . .] (traces) MUL.MAR.GÍD.DA
(rest lost)
Transcription
Obverse
(Beginning lost)
A
3 [. . .]. . . ištu imittiya
4 [. . . ištu p]āniya ana pāniya ētiq
5 [. . . pur]ussû kakkabi tammar
B
6 [še"am ša h]ar-bi teleqqî e.tlu s. ehru ša sinništa la idû še"am ibîr
7 ˘ ina mūši nišē sallūma
[. . .] enūma ˘ qūltu šaknat šēpē parsat
.
8 [. . .] ana pāni kakkab eriqqi tašakkan šikaru rēštû(?) tanaqqi ediššika
9 [šipt]u AN.UŠ ana pāni kakkab eriqqi tamanni kakkabu ištu imittika
10 [. . . šumma kakka]bu ištu šumēlika ana imittika ētiq la damqu
11 [an]a pānika ētiq damqu šumma kakkab Tišpak kakkab eriqqi ētiq damqu
12 [šumma kakkab] eriqqi la ētiq la damqu kakkab Tišpak ana libbi kakkab eriqqi
13 [ı̄rub] šumma zappu ultezzib
C
14 [nı̄ru mu]gur nı̄ru mugur usuh
15 [nı̄ru usu]h nı̄ru iziz nı̄ru iziz ˘
16 ˘
[nı̄ru al]ka nı̄ru alka (eras.)
17 [nı̄ru]mahas. nı̄ru mahas. nı̄ru pu.tur
18 [nı̄ru] pu˘.tur ilu ša uštēširu
˘ ilu ša uštēširu
19 [i]lu ša iqbû šutēšir ilu ša iqbû šutēšir ilu ša uštēširu šeme
20 ilu ša uštēširu šeme ili teslı̄ti šeme ili teslı̄ti šeme tê šipti
21 [t]uduqqû purussâ parāsu
Reverse
D
1 [. . .] XXX utallal ina mê uhūli qarnān(/t)i ellūti u kibrı̄ti
2 [. . .] qātēšu temessi ina mūs̆i˘ūra tašabbi.t mê ellūti tasallah mashata tas̆akkan(?)
ŠE.GAL u burāši ˘ ˘
3 [. . .] XXX niqnakki tašakkan mê ellūti tanaqqi šipta šalāšišu ana pāni
MUL.dŠU.PA tamannima purussâ tammar
E
4 zappu šutēšir zappu šutēšir zappu alka zappu alka
5 [zap]pu iziz zappu iziz zappu riši zappu riši
6 [zapp]u pu.tur zappu pu.tur zappu dummiq zappu dummiq
7 [zapp]u šeme zappu šeme tê šipti
8 [INIM.INIM.]MA KA.AŠ BAR BAR.RE
F
9 [. . .] XXX ŠE.GA ina mūši ūra tašabbi.t mê ellūti tasallah mashati ša
ŠE.GAL u burāšu kul-lat X kibrı̄tu ištēniš šamni tammar ˘ šipta
˘
11 [. . .]-šu li-ka-ta-na tamannima bı̄nu ina qātē imittika tanašši
12 [. . . šē]pē(?) šumēlika tarašši(?) XXX-ma mê ellūti tanaqqima ana pāni
MUL.MUL SI.SÁ
13 [. . .]-šu tamannima šukēma purussû Á.MAH damiqma
˘
G
14 [. . . MUL].GIN.GIN.NA KI.MIN MUL.BAN.DU11.GA.ŠE.GA
KI.MIN LÚ.DU11.GA.ŠE.GA KI.MIN
15 [. . . Š]E.GA KI.MIN LÚ.MUL.BAN.DU11.GA.ŠE.GA LÚ.MUL.BAN.
SI.SÁ TUG.TUG KI.MIN
16 [. . .] GIŠ.TUG KI.MIN šaman erinni šaman ereši erinni dNinlil ramat(?)
17 [. . .]rabı̄t šamê attı̄ma dEnlil addî kussâka
18 [. . . at]tı̄ma dipār šamê namirtu lūmur tê šipti.
H
19 [. . . ina] mūši ana ūri telēma(?) niqnakku burās̆i u mashati ina pāni kakkab eriqqi
20 [. . .] kakkab eriqqi ˘
(rest lost)
Translation
(A)
3 [. . .]. . . from my right (side)
4 [. . . from (in) f]ront of me (and) passes to (in) front of me.
5 [. . . a sign (deci]sion) (from) a star you will see.
(B)
6 [barley of the early har]vest you take, a young man who has not known
a woman selects the barley,
7 [. . .] when at night the people are sleeping and silence has settled in,
access is blocked,
8 [. . .] you shall place in front of the wagon-star (i.e. Ursa Maior), first-
quality wine (or: new wine) you shall libate by yourself.
9 [The incantat]ion “AN.UŠ” in front of the wagon-star you shall recite.
A star from your right
10 [. . .. If a (shooting) sta]r passes from your left to your right: it is not
propitious.
11 [(If it) passes (from behind you) t]o (in) front of you: it is propitious. If
the Northern Cross(?)-star passes the wagon-star: it is propitious.
12 [If] it does not pass the wagon-star: it is not propitious. The Northern
Cross(?)-star into the wagon-star
13 [enters ?] and verily the Pleiades are left behind.
(C)
14 Boötes accept (my prayer)! Boötes accept! Boötes drive out (the sorcer-
ess)!
15 [Boötes drive ou]t! Boötes be present! Boötes be present!
16 Boötes come! Boötes come!
17 [Boötes] strike (the sorceress)! Boötes strike! Boötes undo (the sorcery)!
18 [Boöt]es undo! The deity who proceeded, the deity who proceeded.
19 The deity who spoke—proceed! the deity who spoke—proceed! the
deity who proceeded—hear!
20 The deity who proceeded—hear! My god—hear (my) prayer!
My god—hear (my) prayer! Formula of incantation.
(D)
1 [. . .] shall be purified in pure waters of sprouted alkali and sulphur
2 [. . .] you wash his hands, at night you sweep the roof, you sprinkle pure
water, scented flour of(?) large barley and juniper sap
3 you place [in] a censer, you libate pure water, you recite an incantation
three times in front of Arcturus (Boötes) and you will see a sign
(decision).
(E)
4 [P]leiades proceed! Pleiades proceed! Pleiades come! Pleiades come!
5 [Plei]ades be present! Pleiades be present! Pleiades take possession!
Pleiades take possession!
6 [Pleiad]es undo (the sorcery)! Pleiades undo! Pleiades be gracious!
Pleiades be gracious!
7 [Pleiad]es hear! Pleiades hear! Formula of incantation.
(F)
9 [. . .] at night you sweep the roof, you sprinkle pure water, scented flour
of(?) large barley and juniper sap you gather(?) . . .
10 [. . .] in the fire you place bramble(?) on top of the censer, large barley
(and) sulphur you will see together (with) oil(?). An incantation(?)
11 [. . .]. . . and a tamarisk in your right hand you carry.
12 [. . .] in your left hand(?) you . . . and pure water you libate to (in) front
of the ‘regular stars.’
13 [. . .] times you recite and prostate yourself and the decision will indeed
be powerfully auspicious(??).
(G)
14 The wandering star; ditto; the bow-star (Canis Maior) of the favorable
utterance; ditto; the man of favorable utterance; ditto.
15 [The man of the wandering(?) star of favorable utterance; ditto; the man
of the bow-star of favorable utterance; ditto; the man who always
receives the regular bow-star; ditto.
16 [The man . . .]who listens; ditto. Oil of cedar, oil of incense of cedar. Oh
Ninlil, exalted
17 [. . .], great one of heaven you (fem.) verily are. Oh Enlil, I have set up
your throne.
18 [. . .] you (fem.) verily are. ‘I will surely see the shining torch of heaven’
(is) the formula of the incantation.
(H)
19 At night you go up(?) to the roof and a censer of juniper and scented
flour in front of the wagon-star
(Rest lost)
What we have in this text, as in STT 73, is a combination of omens

and rituals, the omens here taken exclusively from the observation of
the stars. Many of the phrases of the ritual prescriptions recur in other
contexts, including therapeutic texts.22 The largest number of parallels
involve STT 73, as follows:
YBC 9863 STT 73 Subject

obv. 6 65 f., 100 f. (119) taking barley of harbu and a virgin boy
selecting it ˘
7 82 ‘the dead of night’
10 105 shooting star passing from your left to your
right (unpropitious)
11 107 f. ditto from your back to your front (propitious)
12 109 ditto entering Ursa Maior
rev. 2 f. 67 cleaning roof, sprinkling water, and placing
incense in censer
3 68 repeating incantation three times
I cannot pretend to have solved all the problems inherent in the three
texts. But they may serve to illustrate the riches remaining unpublished
in the Yale Babylonian Collection, and to invite inquiries even before
the catalogue is fully completed and on line.
22 Cf. also Maqlû I 29, where the gods of the night (i.e., the stars and planets) are
invoked to strike the sorceress (on the check). (Reference courtesy Francesca Rochberg,
who also provided crucial help with sections C and E.) For parallels to the Maqlû.
passage, see I. Tzvi Abusch, Babylonian Witchcraft Literature (Atlanta, 1987), 89–94.
x
sumerian literature and the bible
x.1
SUMERIAN LITERATURE:
BACKGROUND TO THE BIBLE
The world’s oldest literature—poetry as well as prose—belongs to the

Sumerians, that fascinating, enigmatic people who settled over 5,000
years ago on the shores of the Persian Gulf 1 and in the lower (southern)
part of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in present-
day Iraq. There the Sumerians founded the world’s oldest civilization.
They invented, for the first time, a means of communicating language
in a preserved, instead of transitory, form—in writing. The writing
system they invented is called cuneiform, a wedge-shaped script formed
by pressing a stylus into clay tablets that were then baked in the sun
or in a kiln. Later, other peoples adapted cuneiform writing to their
own languages. The best known and most widely used of these written
languages is Akkadian.
The Sumerians are also responsible for such mundane innovations
as the system of counting by sixties, still preserved in our own time-
counting system in which 60 seconds equal a minute and 60 minutes
equal an hour. It was they who formulated the first law-codes. It was
also they who created that architectural wonder known as the ziggurat,
a stepped tower that gave rise to the biblical tale of the tower of
Babel, set in Mesopotamia (Genesis 11:1–9). Mesopotamian building
techniques—baked mud bricks with bitumen as mortar—were used,
according to the Bible, to build the tower (Genesis 11:3).
Indeed, it may be said with some justice that “history begins at
Sumer”—and that is precisely the title of a book on the subject by
Samuel Noah Kramer, the doyen of Sumerologists, whose 90th birth-
day was marked by a day-long symposium at the University of Penn-
sylvania (September 27, 1987).2 One of the best-known and most
1 Or Arabian Gulf, depending on the point of view. A recent New York Times
editorial (September 20, 1987) suggested that, to avoid offense to either side in the
current hostilities, it should be renamed the Sumerian Gulf.
2 Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded
History (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

662 x.1. sumerian literature: background to the bible
prolific interpreters of the Sumerian achievement, Professor Kramer

has excelled particularly in recovering Sumerian literature, and it is this
aspect of the Sumerian legacy that will occupy us here.3
The rediscovery of Sumerian literature began in 1873, with the first
systematic publication of Sumero-Akkadian bilingual texts by François
Lenormant. Two years later, many additional bilingual texts were in-
cluded by George Smith in the fourth volume of his Cuneiform Inscriptions
of Western Asia. These bilingual texts all came from the ancient libraries
of Assyria, not Sumer. The original homeland of Sumer (and with it,
its libraries) was rediscovered only toward the end of the 19th century.
And not until our own century have we been able to make sense of
the unilingual literary texts thus brought to light—i.e., texts written
only in Sumerian without benefit of an accompanying translation into
Akkadian.
Excavation, publication and interpretation of the entire range of
Sumerian literature has continued unabated to the present. We now
have a very respectable corpus of literary masterpieces, completely
reconstructed (or very nearly so) from, as often as not, numerous dupli-
cates, and tendered into English or other modern languages in reliable
editions that reflect the current state of knowledge. For the first time, it
is becoming possible to assess and appreciate Sumerian literature and
to integrate it into the history of world literature, where it not only
occupies the opening chapter but also represents one of the longest-
lived bodies of literature in any one language. Sumerian compositions
were created from the beginning of the third millennium bc right down
to the first century bc.
Sumerian died out as a spoken language in about 2000 bc. But,
even as a dead language, Sumerian, like medieval Latin, continued
as a sacred language in the liturgy of Mesopotamia, and as a subject
of instruction in schools throughout the Near East where cuneiform
writing was taught. It is thus no accident that Sumerian literature
ultimately influenced even biblical literature, even though the Hebrew
Bible was composed considerably after the great bulk of Sumerian
literature.
Before assessing this influence, let us look more closely at the Sume-
rian literary achievement. Most Sumerian literature was composed in
the form of poetry, organized carefully into numbered lines, each of
3 See Kramer, In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State Univ.
Press, 1986), and my review in Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 1988.

x.1. sumerian literature: background to the bible 663
which runs the width of a clay tablet, or of a column of writing on

such a tablet. Compositions now recovered and reconstructed with any
degree of completeness total approximately 40,000 lines.4 This includes
literary texts of all types and from all periods, but it excludes the
equally sizeable body of monumental (or “historical”) inscriptions, and
it also excludes the much vaster corpus of archival (or “economic”) texts
—those endless accounts, ledgers, letters, court cases, price indices, con-
tracts, sales slips, receipts, birth records, and memoranda that Assyri-
ologists sometimes lump together disparagingly as “laundry lists”—
although in the aggregate they provide precious clues for reconstructing
the society and economy in the only part of the world where that can
be done at so early a period.
While a corpus of 40,000 lines does not begin, as yet (who knows
what remains to be recovered from the sands of Iraq or from museum
drawers!), to rival Greek or Latin literature as a whole, it is surely a
respectable achievement. The Iliad and the Odyssey together number
only about 28,000 lines; the Aeneid, less than 10,000. The scope of
Sumerian literature also compares favorably with the Hebrew Bible,
whose traditional Masoretic division into verses (whether poetry or
prose) provides a total of exactly 23,097 verses.5 In short, the Hebrew
Bible and Sumerian literature both constitute a corpus of approxi-
mately commensurate size, given that a biblical verse may be twice as
long as a Sumerian line of poetry.
The corpus of Sumerian literature can be subdivided in many ways
—by date, subject matter, presumed author, or dialect, for example. But
since our aim is to explore the relationship between Sumerian literature
and biblical literature, the most fruitful division is by genre, that is,
by type of literary composition. Indeed, genre is especially significant
in understanding and appreciating ancient literature, because ancient
literature was composed not at the whim of an author but according
to fairly strict traditions and rules that differed for each genre and that
were generally adhered to even at the expense of individuality. Thus,
the author of most Sumerian compositions was anonymous, and the
4 For a convenient summary, see D.O. Edzard, “Literatur,” in Reallexikon der Assyri-
ologie, vol. 7, ed. Edzard (Berlin: Walter DeGruyter, 1987), pp. 35–48. Edzard’s figures
add up to 19,000 lines, but exclude some large categories such as liturgical hymns,
royal hymns, litanies, Dumuzi laments, individual prayers, literary letters, proverbs and
incantations.
5 So with Menahem Haran, Journal of Semitic Studies 36 (1985), pp. 3 f. My own count
is 23,199.
composition was praised not so much for originality as for adherence to

norms of the genre. Only very gradually did these norms change over
time, allowing us to reconstruct what may be called genre-histories.
The major genres of Sumerian literature, broadly speaking, fall into
three categories, according to their subjects: gods, kings and common
mortals. Today, we would expect the largest share of our literature to
fall into the last category. For the Sumerians, however, it was the other
way around. The realm of the divine, including deified royalty, received
the largest share of attention, being addressed in such varied genres
as hymns and prayers, lamentations and incantations, myth and epic,
history and legend.
The common man was the central focus of only one kind of litera-
ture, so-called wisdom literature, which includes such genres as prov-
erbs, instructions, and essays on morality. Nevertheless, we shall begin
by looking at the Sumerian literature of the common man and the gen-
res that fall within that literature.
The first genre is a rather tiny literary category—the riddle. It is typi-
cally a very short, proverbial saying, usually in the first person, in which
the speaker gives clues about the character or thing he represents, and
ends with the answer.
In Sumerian, a riddle is called ibilu; in Hebrew, a riddle is called
a hidah, a cognate of the Akkadian term hittu. Unlike Sumerian riddle
collections, Hebrew riddles are not found grouped together—individual
examples are scattered in other contexts,
In Sumerian we find collections of riddles. Here are a couple of
Sumerian riddles:
“A house with a foundation like heaven,
A house which, like a tablet-box, has been covered with linen,
A house which, like a goose, stands on a (firm) base.
One with open eyes has come out of it.
Its solution: the school.”
Another, slightly more transparent, example:
“When I was small, I was the child of a plant.
When I grew big, I was the body of a god.
When I became old, I was the country’s physician.
Its solution: linen.”6
6 See M. Civil, “Sumerian Riddles: A Corpus,” Aula Orientalis 5 (1987), pp. 17–37.
(Linen grows from a flax plant and clothes the divine statue, and the
extract from the plant is used medicinally.)
The most famous riddle in the Hebrew Bible is in the Samson
story. Near the Philistine town of Timnah, Samson tore a roaring
lion apart with his bare hands. The following year, he returned and
found a swarm of bees and their honey in the lion’s skeleton. At his
wedding feast Samson’s first wife was an unnamed Philistine woman
from Timnah*—Samson propounded a riddle:
“Out of the eater came something to eat,
Out of the strong came something sweet.” Judges 14:14**
With tears and nagging, Samson’s wife wheedled the answer out of him,
and then told the answer to the Philistines, who solved the riddle and
claimed the prize:
“What is sweeter than honey,
And what is stronger than a lion?” Judges 14:18
Thus bereft, Samson complained in what was almost another riddle:
“Had you not plowed with my heifer, you would not have guessed my
riddle” (Judges 14:18).7
In Greek literature, perhaps the most famous riddle was that of the
Sphinx, solved by Oedipus: “What animal walks on four legs in the
morning, on two at midday, and on three in the evening?” (Answer
Man, who as a baby crawls on four legs and as an old man walks with
a cane.)
I am not suggesting that either the Greek or the Hebrew riddle owes
anything to the Sumerian precedent, but only that the genre goes back
to Mesopotamia, at least in its written form.
Riddles were a special sub-class of the broader genre of proverbial
wisdom, a genre found in all the world’s literatures and, more often
man not, transmitted orally. But Sumerian provides the first examples
of written proverbs. They were especially popular in Sumer as the first
exercises in writing connected texts by pupils of the scribal schools. So
we have many so-called school-texts in which these pupils tried their
best to emulate the instructor’s more practiced hand.
* Delilah was his second Philistine wife. He never learned.

** Bible translations follow the New Jewish Version, except as noted.
7 This saying has been compared to a proverb much cited by a 14th-century ruler
of Byblos: “My field is likened to a woman without a husband, because is it not

ploughed”; see James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, NJ; Princeton
Univ. Press, 1956), p. 426.
Proverbs were composed according to a certain pattern, or rather

a number of different patterns, of which one is the pithy saying; for
example: “In the city of the lame, the halt is courier” (that is, where
everyone is lame on both legs, the one who is lame on only one leg is
given distinction). This is quite similar, in spirit if not in precise imagery,
to the Talmudic† saying: “In the street of the blind, they call the one-
eyed man great of sight,” which in turn has an obvious similarity to
the English proverb (with demonstrated classical antecedents): “In the
country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”8
It may be no more than happenstance that this proverb does not
turn up in the biblical book of Proverbs, which represents a systematic
collection, or rather several such collections, of the wisdom of the
east, some of it attributed to Solomon, some to other worthies such as
Lemuel, and much of it clearly a reflection of known wisdom collections
from Egypt as well as from Mesopotamia.
A number of Sumerian proverbs list a series of abominations, usually
three, of this or that deity (most often Ninurta). For example:
“A judge who perverts justice,
A curse which falls on the righteous party,
A (first-born) heir who drives the younger (son) out of the patrimony—
These are abominations of Ninurta.”
This is reminiscent of the catalogue of biblical divine abominations, for
example, in Proverbs 6:16–19:
“Six things the Lord hates; seven are an abomination to him: a haughty
bearing, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a mind that
hatches evil plots, feet quick to run to evil, a false witness testifying lies,
and one who incites others to quarrel.”
This catalogue exhibits the typical biblical roster of seven items but,
otherwise, it is remarkably similar in form to the Sumerian example.
Interestingly, the Sumerian rosters of divine abominations more often
are concerned with manners and morals, while the Hebrew rosters are
more concerned with cultic errors.9
† The Talmud is a collection of Jewish law and teachings, comprising the Mishnah
and the Gemara, a commentary on the Mishnah. It exists in two versions: the Pales-
tinian or Jerusalem Talmud, compiled around 400 ad, and the Babylonian Talmud,
compiled around 500 ad.
8 William W. Hallo, “The Lame and the Halt,” Eretz-Israel 9 (1969), pp. 66–70, here:
VIII.1.
9 See Hallo, “Biblical Abominations and Sumerian Taboos,” Jewish Quarterly Review
76 (1985): 21–40, here: VIII.3.

Not all Sumerian wisdom literature is short and epigrammatic.

There are also long series of wise savings on a single topic, strung
together to form what the Sumerians called nariga, instructions. One
such set of instructions, attributed to the same warlike god Ninurta who
abhorred so many moral delicts, is a complete set of practical rules for
agriculture and has sometimes been compared to the Georgia of Vergil.
No wisdom quite so practical is found in the Bible. But another set of
Sumerian instructions is attributed to human authority—to one Shu-
ruppak, the hero, in one account, of the Sumerian flood story. We
are thus reminded that the biblical Noah, at least in post-biblical texts,
became a wisdom figure, associated with the Sibylline oracles and other
sagacious pronouncements.
Another popular wisdom genre was the disputation, which pitted
against each other two contestants representing different professions,
or products, or natural essences. In the end, the palm of victory was
awarded to the one who had the best of the argument—usually the
“underdog.” Thus, copper apparently bested silver, the lowly pickaxe
defeated the lordly plow, and the tree, rare in Sumer, outdid the ubiq-
uitous reed.10
Traces of this genre may also be found in the Bible, for exam-
ple in the fable of the thistle that arrogantly challenged the cedar of
Lebanon and was trampled by a wild beast for its pains (2 Kings 14:9;
2 Chronicles 25:18).11
A model of sorts for the story of Cain and Abel may be found in
the Sumerian disputation between Enkimdu and Dumuzi. Cain and
Abel are the Bible’s antediluvian prototypes of farmer and shepherd
respectively—indeed its vehicle for recalling the domestication of plants
and animals. Similarly, Enkimdu and Dumuzi are the prototypical and
probably likewise antediluvian farmer and shepherd, respectively, of
Sumer.
In the perennial struggle to please his god and reap the rewards of
piety and good behavior, Sumerian man, like his successors including
modern man, was often frustrated by the fickleness or capriciousness
of fate. His good behavior went unrewarded, while the misdeeds of his
neighbor were not visibly punished. In quasi-philosophical treatises, the
10 See, most recently, B. Alster and H. Vanstiphout, “Lahar and Ashnan: Presenta-
tion and Analysis of a Sumerian Disputation,” Acta Somerologica 9 (1987), pp. 1–43.
11 Compare this to the fable of the trees that wanted a king to reign over them and
had to settle for the thornbush (Judges 9:8–15).

“just sufferer” vented his frustrations, while at the same time trying to
assert his belief in the ultimate justice of fate. One of these Sumerian
treatises has survived in nearly complete form; its resemblance to the
biblical Book of Job is close enough to suggest an ultimate dependence
of Job on the Sumerian version, or at least on later Akkadian variations
on this same theme. The structural parallels between the biblical and
Mesopotamian accounts are especially close in the poetic portions of
Job. And while these portions of the Book of Job are generally regarded
as having been composed quite late, they are nevertheless framed by a
prose prologue and epilogue that has many archaic features, including
vaguely patriarchal and specifically Mesopotamian allusions. For exam-
ple, when Job was restored to his former state at the end of the prose
frame, he was given one qes. itah and one gold ring by each of his siblings
and former friends (Job 42:11). This enigmatic detail can now be seen as
a reflection of the token prize awarded to the winner at the conclusion
of some Sumerian disputations.12
Thus far we have dealt with wisdom literature, and hence with its
focus on the common man and his concerns: solving life’s little riddles,
observing ethical norms, making a living off the land and, through
it all, avoiding—or at least coping with—the wrath of the gods. But
the common man was not the common reader, for literacy was not
widespread in Sumer. Though the scribal schools enrolled commoners
as pupils, the main markets for literary products of the schools were the
court and the temple.
Then as now, he who pays the piper calls the tune. Royal patrons
demanded royal themes, and priestly patrons required religious themes.
So let us turn to some of the genres specifically devoted to kings and
gods—often commingled, for kings were regarded as gods in their own
right during the half millennium between 2300 bc and 1800 bc when
Sumerian literary creativity was at its peak—in what I consider the
“classical period” of ancient Mesopotamian culture.
We may begin again with antediluvian traditions. One of the earli-
est, and certainly the most important, of these is the so-called Sumerian
King List. This could better be called the Sumerian city list, for it is a
record of all the cities—five before the Flood and eleven thereafter—
that ruled Sumer from the dawn of history to the accession of Hammu-
12 J.J.A. van Dijk, “La découverte de la culture littéraire sumérienne et sa signifi-
cation pour l’histoire de l’antiquité orientale,” Orientalia et Biblica Lovaniensia 1 (1957),

pp. 5–28, esp. pp. 15–18.
rapi, in about 1800 bc The five antediluvian cities were ruled by eight
kings with incredibly long reigns, of whom the last became the hero
of the Sumerian Flood Story. There were also seven fabulous creatures
who, according to other Babylonian traditions, brought learning and
the arts of civilization to Sumer, and served as counselors to the ante-
diluvian kings.
In the biblical version of antediluvian traditions, we hear of no kings,
and of only one city, named for the son of its builder Enoch, Irad,
reminiscent of the first Sumerian city Eridu.* And the biblical version
turns both lists of antediluvians—the “Cainite” line of Genesis 4 as well
as the “Sethite” line of Genesis 5—into genealogies. But the similarities
in the names of both lines, the presence of culture-heroes in one of
them, and of the flood-hero, together with legendary life-spans, in the
other, all conspire to show the biblical record here ultimately indebted
to the Sumerian. The Bible differs, however, in deriving all mankind
from a common ancestor.13
Turning to the Flood itself, we have already met its royal Sumerian
protagonist, Shuruppak, in connection with the wisdom literature. But
we meet him again, this time as Ziusudra, king of the city Shuruppak,
in the context of a story of the Flood known from a single fragmentary
text which, in spite of its gaps, suffices to indicate that, via various
Akkadian versions, it inspired the biblical tale of Noah.
In the Sumerian tradition, kingship came down from heaven a sec-
ond time after the Flood and was domiciled in successive cities begin-
ning with Kish and Uruk, the latter familiar to us as Erech in Gene-
sis 10. Uruk was governed by a succession of rulers who became the
protagonists of Sumerian epic—though we cannot claim “epic” as a
separate genre in Sumerian. Instead we have a group of poems that
end in a formula of praise (the so-called doxology) in honor of these
semi-legendary, semi-divine rulers of Uruk. The tales of their conflicts
with Kish and with distant Aratta became the stuff of a heroic age cel-
ebrated in the royal courts of later Sumerian dynasties. The most pop-
ular of these tales, notably those about Gilgamesh, were translated or
adapted into Akkadian and in this form passed from the Mesopotamian
scribal schools to those of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine; a fragment of
* Reading Genesis 4:17 thus: “and Cain knew his wife and she conceived and gave
birth to Enoch, and he became the (first) city-builder, and he—that is, Enoch—called
the name of the city after the name of his son,” on the analogy of Genesis 4:1–2.
13 Hallo, “Antediluvian Cities,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 23 (1970), pp. 57–67.
a cuneiform tablet (dating from about 1400 bc) with an extract from the
Akkadian Gilgamesh was excavated at Megiddo, near Haifa in modern
Israel. Thus it is not wholly unexpected to find individual lines, usually
proverbial sayings, from these epics quoted, in entirely different con-
texts, in the Bible. For example, Ecclesiastes 4:12 contains the aphorism,
“A three-fold cord is not readily broken,” to illustrate the point that two
are better than one, and three better than two. This saving has been
traced to the Akkadian line in the fifth tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic
referring to a three-ply cord;14 its ultimate source is Sumerian, however
“The three-ply rope will not (easily) be cut.”15
Beyond these isolated echoes, however, Sumerian epic as a genre
found little place in the Bible: unlike the antediluvian Sumerian kings,
the later Sumerian hero-kings could not be construed as ancestral to
mankind as a whole, let alone to Israel. Nor could the Sumerian hymns
in honor of living kings, the so-called royal hymns, provide much that
would be useful to the Israelite psalmist The Sumerian royal hymns,
a large and characteristic genre or group of genres in Sumerian, were
intimately tied to the notion of divine kingship—a concept that, though
not at home in Mesopotamia in the sense or to the extent familiar from
Egypt, was the prevalent ideology of its “classical” period. In Israel,
even the notion of an earthly kingship was considered a late aberration,
a denial of the theocratic ideal in imitation of the surrounding world—
and a divine kingship was totally unacceptable. On the contrary, it was
rather God who was acclaimed and glorified in royal terms. Neverthe-
less, a parallel of sorts to the royal hymns in honor of the Sumerian
kings may be seen in those psalms in the Hebrew Psalter that celebrate
God’s accession to kingship (or: his kingship)—most particularly Psalms
93, 97 and 99, which begin, “The Lord has become [NJV: is] king.”
Such psalms typically employ the imagery of kingship and its regalia,
in lines such as “Your throne stands firm from of old” (Psalm 93:2) or
“righteousness and justice are the base of His throne” (Psalm 97:2), we
may hear echoes of such standard sentiments as “He [the divine Enlil]
has made the foundation of my throne firm for me,” which comes from
the coronation-hymn of king Ur-Nammu of Ur.16
14 Aaron Shaffer, “The Mesopotamian Background of Lamentations [sic!] 4:9–12,”
Eretz-Israel 8 (1967), pp. 246–250 (in Hebrew, English summary p. 75*).

15 Shaffer, “New Light on the ‘three-ply cord,’ ” Eretz-Israel 9 (1969), pp. 159 f. (in
Hebrew, English summary pp. 138 f.).

16 Hallo, “The Coronation of Ur-Nammu,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 20 (1966),
pp. 133–141, here: III.2, esp. p. 141. line 15.

Having thus arrived at the biblical Book of Psalms, it may be well to

recall that, in addition to the psalms or, literally, hymns for which it is
named (Hebrew t"hillı̄m), this book consists mostly of prayers (Hebrew
t"fillōt; cf. especially Psalm 72:19). Some are prayers of the individual
and others collective or congregational prayers sometimes referred to
as laments. Both genres have their counterparts in Sumerian poetry.
In Sumerian the individual prayer can be traced to the form of a letter
deposited at the feet of the divine statue and employed as a medium
for communication with the deity. This same form of communication
with the deity was also resorted to by the king. For example, a king of
Larsa in the 19th century bc prayed to the healing goddess for relief
from illness; another of his prayers was addressed to the sun-god as
patron of justice. The latter prayer survived in bilingual form for more
than a millennium. It is therefore not beyond the realm of possibility
that an echo of this genre is found in the Bible, in the prayer that
Hezekiah, king of Judah, wrote in connection with his recovery from
an illness. The Hebrew term used for this prayer is michtāv (Isaiah 38:9),
which in later Hebrew means “letter.” (In English translations, michtāv
is variously translated as “writing” or “poem”; the New Jerusalem
Bible translated it “canticle” and by footnote offers the alternative,
“letter”). Perhaps Hezekiah was writing a letter to God in the tradition
of the old Sumerian letter-prayer. Another possible analogue to such
letter-prayers may be the psalms identified in their superscript as a
michtām (Psalms 16 and 56–60), a term not usually translated because
its meaning is so obscure.17
Finally, one may cite as a royal contribution to Sumerian literature
the oldest collections of casuistic law, that is, laws formulated in condi-
tional sentences (if X, then Y). These collections are attributed respec-
tively to the kings Ur-Nammu of Ur (or his son Shulgi) and Lipit-Ishtar
of Isin. In the Bible, casuistic legislation, most notably the Book of the
Covenant in Exodus 21–24, is attributed to God. Nevertheless, the indi-
vidual clauses in the Bible are thoroughly reminiscent of the Sumerian
formulations in a number of cases. For example, in the Sumerian laws,
we read: “If a man proceeded by force, and deflowered the virgin slave-
woman of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver.” In
the Book of the Covenant (Exodus 22:15–16), where a free woman not
17 Hallo, “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: I. A Sumerian Prototype for the
Prayer of Hezekiah?” Alter Orient und Altes Testament 25 (1976), pp. 209–224, here: V.1.
a slave-girl is at issue, the same subject is handled in this way: “If a man
seduces a virgin for whom the bride price has not been paid, and lies
with her, he must make her his wife by payment of a bride price. If
her father refuses to give her to him, he must still weigh out silver in
proportion to the bride price for virgins.”18
So much for royal literature. Space does not permit a complete
survey of the genres devoted more particularly to the Sumerian gods.
Some of them are, in any case, so peculiar to the spirit of Mesopota-
mian theology that it would be fruitless to look for them in the literature
of Israel. Take, for example, one of the oldest of Sumerian genres,
that of incantations. Incantations are designed to ward off the evils
predicted by divination. Both divination and incantation depend on a
prescientific world view according to which the future can be predicted
and to some extent controlled by appeal to the gods. The Israelite view
was diametrically opposed. As Martin Buber has observed, “the task
of the genuine [Hebrew] prophet was not to predict but to confront
man with the alternatives of decision.”19 In the words of Balaam, the
Mesopotamian seer (Numbers 23:23): “Lo, there is no augury in Jacob,
no divining in Israel: Jacob is told at once, yea Israel, what God has
wrought [NJV: planned].” So in this respect Sumerian literature and
Hebrew literature diverge quite sharply.
But in other areas of belief the two cultures more nearly converged.
The notion that each people or nation had its own deity, for example,
was widely shared, and so was the logical consequence drawn from
this premise—namely, that the triumph of a nation reflected glory on
its patron-deity. In Israel’s case, the escape from the Egyptians at the
Reed Sea,* and the drowning of Pharaoh’s chariotry, was regarded not
only as a miraculous deliverance by divine intervention, but as the
theological basis for the exaltation of Israel’s God to parity and even
to supremacy among all the gods. Israel proclaimed God as its king,
a relationship that was sealed by the subsequent covenant at Sinai.
As Moses’ sister Miriam sang at the Sea: “Sing to the Lord, for he
has triumphed gloriously, horse and rider He has hurled into the sea.”
18 J.J. Finkelstein, “Sex Offenses in Sumerian Laws,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 86 (1966), pp. 355–372.

19 Martin Buber, Pointing the Way (London: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 197; republished
in On the Bible (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 177.

* On Reed Sea versus Red Sea, see Bernard F. Batto, “Red Sea or Reed Sea?”
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1984.

Moses expanded on this theme: “Who is like you, O Lord, among

the gods [NJV: celestials]? None [NJV: who] is like You, majestic in
holiness,” concluding: “the Lord will reign for ever and ever!” (Exodus
15). If its historicity is accepted, this triumph may be dated to the 13th
century bc. But a millennium earlier, a similar divine exaltation was
already celebrated in song by the very first Sumerian author whom
we can identify by name—the princess Enheduanna. It is interesting
that this, the earliest author in history of whom we have any direct
knowledge, is a woman. The princess Enheduanna wrote to celebrate
the military triumphs of her father Sargon, reinterpreting them in
cosmic theological terms as the exaltation of the goddess Inanna.20
If national triumphs redounded to the glory of the national deity,
national disasters must lead to his abasement This further logical con-
sequence of the original premise was to some extent circumvented in
Mesopotamian theology by reinterpreting national disaster as a sign of
the prior abandonment of the nation (or the city) by its patron-deity.
This point was made more graphic when the cult-statue of the deity
was led into captivity. In Israel, where all sculptured representations of
the deity were theoretically forbidden, God was reinterpreted as hold-
ing universal sway and therefore able to order the destruction even of
His own people by foreign nations as a means of chastisement for their
collective guilt. But in both cultures the experience of disaster led to
somewhat comparable responses in literary terms: the genre of lamen-
tations.
Each in its own way, the lamentations over the destruction of Sume-
rian cities (and particularly their temples) on the one hand, and the
biblical book of Lamentations (on the destruction of Jerusalem and the
Solomonic temple) on the other, move us to this day by the immediacy
of the grief they so tellingly describe.21
The last example we shall look at is erotic poetry. Most Sumerian
erotic poetry celebrates the sacred marriage of Inanna and Dumuzi.
Dumuzi has survived in the Bible as Tammuz. In Ezekiel 8:14, the
prophet speaks of the women “bewailing Tammuz [literally: the Tam-
muz].”
20 Hallo and J.J.A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ.
Press, 1968).
21 W.C. Gwaltney, Jr., “The Biblical Book of Lemantations in the Context of Near
Eastern Lament Literature,” in Scripture in Context 2, ed. Hallo, J.C. Moyer, and L.G.
Perdue (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983), pp. 191–211.
But most of the Sumerian erotic poetry is happy and celebratory.

Compare these two descriptions of a woman as a garden; the first
comes from a Sumerian composition, the other from the Song of Songs.
“My mother is rain from heaven, water for the finest seed,
A harvest of plenty . . .,
A garden of delight, full of joy,
A watered pine, adorned with pine cones,
A spring flower, a first fruit,
An irrigation ditch carrying luxuriant waters to garden plots,
A sweet date from Dilmun, a date chosen from the best.”22
“A garden locked is my sister [NJV: my own], my bride,
A fountain locked, a sealed-up spring.
Your limbs are an orchard of pomegranates and of all luscious fruits, of
henna and of nard—
Nard and saffron, fragrant reed and cinnamon,
With all aromatic woods, myrrh and aloes—
All the choice perfumes.
The spring in my garden is a well of fresh water,
A rill of Lebanon.” Song of Songs 4:12–15
Can we generalize? How did Sumerian literature influence biblical
literature? Was it directly, or via Akkadian intermediaries, or are the
similarities coincidental? If they are not coincidental, how or when or
where did the knowledge of Sumerian literary precedents reach the
biblical authors?
The parallels I have drawn may in many cases owe more to a
common Ancient Near Eastern heritage—shared by Israel—than to
any direct dependence of one body of literature on the other.
What can be said at this stage of our knowledge is that this com-
mon heritage included not only particular turns of speech, themes, and
diverse literary devices, but also whole genres. The evolution of these
genres can be traced over millennia, and their spread can be followed
across the map of the biblical world. Sometimes, as in the case of casu-
istic law, the biblical authors adopted these genres with little change;
at other times, as in the case of individual prayer and congregational
laments, they adapted them to Israelite needs; occasionally, as with div-
ination and incantation, they rejected them altogether in favor of new
genres of their own devising (in this case, prophecy). But whether by
22 Jerrold Cooper, “New Cuneiform Parallels to the Song of Songs,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 90 (1971), pp. 157–162.

comparison or by contrast, the rediscovery of Sumerian literature per-

mits a profounder appreciation of the common, as well as of the dis-
tinctive, achievements of biblical literature.23
23 Hallo, “Compare and Contrast: The Contextual Approach to Biblical Litera-
ture,” in Scripture in Context 3 (forthcoming), here: X.2.

x.2
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: THE CONTEXTUAL

APPROACH TO BIBLICAL LITERATURE
The literary-critical study of the Hebrew Bible has had a checkered

history. The documentary hypothesis with which it began over two
centuries ago remains to this day a hypothesis, the documents which
it reconstructed beyond recovery; their precise extent, their absolute
and relative dates, and their changes over time all matters of dispute;
and the applicability of the hypothesis beyond the Pentateuch severely
limited. Newer approaches have stressed the growth of individual tra-
ditions, the stages of redactional history, or the possibilities of oral
antecedents and transmission. A whole new school of canonical criti-
cism has so thoroughly despaired of the possibilities of analyzing the
biblical text that it has switched the focus of interpretation to the text
as received, normally in its Masoretic shape (Childs 1978a; 1978b).
Given such disparate and even desperate reactions to two centuries
of modern biblical scholarship, it is perhaps not surprising that much
of the most exciting work in the field has been derived from outside
its own immediate limits, i.e., from the juxtaposition of the biblical
text with other literatures and with the epigraphic discoveries made
both on the soil of the Holy Land and throughout the Near East.
Perhaps the latest and in some ways most promising development in
this regard is Jeffrey Tigay’s attempt to provide “empirical models for
Biblical criticism” from a wide spectrum of literary analogues ranging
from long before to long after the close of the canon (Tigay 1985; cf.
Kaufman 1982). As for the more traditional comparative method made
famous in this country by William Foxwell Albright and his disciples,
it has never ceased to provide startling parallels which have promised
to solve old cruces and to open new vistas of interpretation. But,
perhaps because of some excesses of what the late Samuel Sandmel,
in a presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, first called
“parallelomania” (Sandmel 1962), this method has come under siege
more and more.
Now it is not my purpose, nor would it be in my power, to rehabil-
itate the comparative approach. Indeed, to the extent that comparison
678 x.2. the contextual approach to biblical literature
implies an exclusive attention to parallels, scholars such as Yehezkel

Kaufmann1 and Frank Cross2 have always preferred the contrastive
method, and I have myself long argued for a “contrastive approach,”
that is to say, for the need to modify the strictly comparative approach
by paying equal attention to possible contrasts between biblical phe-
nomena and their Near Eastern counterparts, whether in the realm of
institutions or literary formulations. My new approach was first applied
in a study of “New Moons and Sabbaths” which attempted to show
that the Sabbath and the sabbatical idea were inherent in the cultic
calendar of Israel to an extent quite unparalleled in the ancient Near
Eastern documentation. At best, one could find there occasional seven-
day cults or seven-year cycles but, no matter how hard one looked,
no precedent or analogy for the uninterrupted sequence of weeks and
“weeks of years” which the biblical cult imposed, independent of any
natural phenomenon. The cultic patterns of the ancient Near East, on
the contrary, relied heavily on natural phenomena, in Egypt on the
annual inundation of the land by the Nile, in Mesopotamia on the
phases of the moon, whereas lunar festivals played at best a minor
role in the biblical cult (Hallo 1977b).3 And even if new evidence has
been brought forward for the old equation between hôdeš we šabbāt in
Hebrew and arhu u šapattu in Akkadian, so that the phrase may need
to be understood as (originally) meaning “new moon and full moon”
(Fishbane 1984: 145–151),4 the essential contrast remains valid.
It is, then, the balance between comparison and contrast, or their
combination in the appropriate proportions, which first provides the
overall context for the biblical text. It justifies the call for a “contextual
approach” where the literary context is defined as “including the entire
Near Eastern literary milieu, to the extent that it can be argued to
have had any conceivable impact on the biblical formulation” (Hallo
1980b: 2) and where the historical context is similarly defined as the
historical milieu which impacted on the biblical institution. The goal
of the contextual approach is fairly modest. It is not to find the key to
every biblical phenomenon in some ancient Near Eastern precedent,
but rather to silhouette the biblical text against its wider literary and
1 Hillers 1985: 261: “Kaufmann is much given to a contrastive method.”

2 Hillers 1985: 265: “As noticed in others, Cross’ procedure is contrastive.”
3 For a new look at a familiar contrast, see Hallo 1983b; 1988a.
4 Note, however, that the usual term for full moon is kese; perhaps šabbāt is its pre-
exilic equivalent, with Loretz 1984, chap. 11.

x.2. the contextual approach to biblical literature 679
cultural environment and thus to arrive at a proper assessment of the

extent to which the biblical evidence reflects that environment or, on
the contrary, is distinctive and innovative over against it.5
The “contextual approach” has of late found other advocates, using
other definitions. Paul Hanson, perhaps the first to employ the term,
defined it as the attempt “to interpret (Biblical) compositions within the
sociological context of the community struggle visible behind the mate-
rial” (Hanson 1971: 33; cited by Hallo 1980b: 2). Simon Parker proposed
the contextual approach and specifically contextual literary analysis as
a counterweight to comparative analysis or “comparative philology.” In
his view, the contextual method approaches the philological problem
of the text—be that text a word, a verse, or a pericope—in terms of
its own setting. By setting he means not only the immediate context of
sentence, or paragraph (or stanza in the case of poetry), or composition,
but also the larger context of genre and cultic setting or Sitz im Leben,
and even the whole culture and society that produced the text. Com-
parison involves the same mix from other cultures—related ones first
and comparable but conceivably unrelated ones as necessary. The two
approaches are opposite but complimentary: neither has all the answers
and both are interdependent (Parker 1980).
My own definition of the contextual approach is broader than Par-
ker’s. Like him, I admit the dangers of excessive or uncritical compar-
ison, by which I mean positive comparison, and insist on the impor-
tance of negative comparison, or contrast. But to me, the compara-
tive evidence (positive or negative) is part of the context. The broader
ancient Near Eastern matrix is simply a logical extension of the cul-
tural and societal environment that Parker defines as the ultimate limit
of the native context. In this sense, a truly contextual approach does
not oppose the comparative approach but rather embraces it.
The contextual approach may seem, on the other hand, to be op-
posed to the “intertextual” approach. Where the former is synchronic,
understanding a piece of literature in terms of what it owes to or
reflects of all of its contemporaneous context, the latter is diachronic,
seeing it as a reassembling of prior elements. Where the former is
cross-cultural in its scope, the latter focuses by preference on a single
cultural or linguistic tradition. Where the former can be described as
horizontal, the latter can be labelled vertical (Broich and Pfister 1985:
5 See in general SIC I and SIC II.

326–332). In practice, however, the two approaches complement each

other. For example, proverbs, to take only the most enduring and peri-
patetic genre, can be traced across linguistic, generic, and chronologi-
cal boundaries with equal effectiveness, as I have tried to do in the first
conscious attempt to apply intertextuality to cuneiform literature.6
My approach has not gone entirely unnoticed—or uncriticized. In
reviewing the first volume of Scripture in Context, Dennis Pardee summa-
rized it as (a) stressing the total context, not just individual comparisons
and, more especially, (b) comparing like categories with like, in casu the
biblical canon, most often, with canonical (i.e., literary) texts from the
ancient Near East. He objects that propinquity is not sufficiently con-
sidered, i.e., that the closer in space (and time?) the presumed parallel
or contrast, the more useful it becomes to the discussion (Pardee 1985).
In response to these characterizations and reservations, it may be
noted that I have always raised the question of the place and time of
alleged literary or institutional influence—and indeed the further and
often neglected question of its direction (Hallo 1973: 3–4; 1980a: 308). I
have, moreover, recognized the flexibility of literary genres over time.
Not only have I practiced genre-history in pursuit of the successive
forms assumed by cuneiform expressions of a given function such as
individual prayer (Hallo 1968) and advocated it for other genres (Hallo
1976b: 182–183; cf. below, n. 19), but I have argued that the practice of
one era might become the prescription of another, thus readily leading,
notably in the realm of law, from archival to canonical documentation
and legitimating the comparison of both (Hallo 1964). It is only when
such generic distinctions are overlooked that comparison courts disas-
ter, as when the wholly archival evidence of legal practice at Nuzi was
initially juxtaposed with the wholly literary formulation of alleged par-
allels in the patriarchal narratives.7
To justify the contextual approach, appeal may be made to the
Rabbinic dictum that Scripture speaks in (or according to) the language
of mankind, bilšôn (or kilšôn) benê ādām (Weingreen 1982). This dictum
was presumably intended to distinguish between biblical usage (l ešôn
tôrâ or lāšôn qôdeš) and common parlance, between classical Hebrew
and later Hebrew, or even, perhaps, between divine inspiration and
human utterance. But it can also be taken, quite literally, to mean that
6 See Hallo 1990, here: VIII.4, for a study of proverbs and intertextuality in Sume-
rian.
7 For recent critiques of Nuzi parallels, see de Vaux 1978: 241–256.
the Hebrew Bible availed itself of the idiom and the literary legacy of
all the descendants of Adam, and not just those of Shem, or Eber, or
Abraham, or Israel. If so, then we are entitled to look to all the people
of the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) for elements of that legacy, at least
in theory.
In practice, any alleged interchange of ideas or expressions between
biblical and other Near Eastern authors needs to face the questions as
to where, when and even in what direction it might have occurred.
The last question, in particular, has too rarely been raised. Yet we
should not rule out from the beginning the possibility that here and
there the biblical formulation, theme or institution may have conceiv-
ably influenced its Near Eastern counterpart. The tradition of seven
lean years in Egypt, for example, appears in an Egyptian tale set a mil-
lennium before Joseph but was composed no earlier than the Greek
period (ANET : 31–32);8 it may well owe something to biblical prece-
dent. The birth legend of Sargon of Akkad has many striking similar-
ities to that of Moses, again a thousand years later; but it is probably
a product of the court scribes of Sargon II of Assyria in the eighth
century, and conceivably indebted to the story of Moses’ birth. Alter-
natively, both treatments may go back to a common folkloristic theme
(ANET : 119; cf. Lewis 1980). The provincial administration devised by
King Solomon preserved in structural outline—while it transformed
in essential spirit—the earlier tribal system of pre-monarchic Israel; it
thus may have been an adaptation to contemporary Egyptian taxation
systems or, on the contrary, their source of inspiration (Redford 1972;
Green 1979; Chambers 1983).
The fact that we cannot always be sure of the place, the date, or the
direction of the borrowing does not invalidate either the comparative or
the contextual approach: modern literary criticism properly investigates
literary parallels without necessarily or invariably finding the exact
route by which a given idea passed from one author to another. And
given the fragmentary nature of the ancient record, the answers cannot
always be forthcoming.
What can and must be answered is: what are to be the terms of
the comparison and the contrast? The answer depends on the level at
which the evidence is studied. One could do so on the purely linguistic
level, and many lexicographic, grammatical, and stylistic insights have
8 Cf. Redford 1970: 206–207; Lichtheim 1980, vol. 3: 94–103, and note the connec-
tion to Elephantine. Cf. below, n. 25.

been furnished by the identification of cognates, of calques or of word

pairs in the biblical environment.9 One could do so on the graphic
level, noting that all or most of the Near East shared common writ-
ing systems at certain periods of its history: Sumerian cuneiform in the
early third millennium, Akkadian cuneiform in the middle of the sec-
ond, Aramaic in the Achaemenid period, and Greek in the Hellenistic
era. One could study the diffusion of technical literary devices, such as
acrostics (as does Brug in this volume (i.e. SIC 3, 1990)), or of stylistic
conventions, such as metaphor.
Biblical literature is rich in metaphor. But the precise import of its
graphic allusions can sometimes be recovered only in the light of the
comparative data, both textual and artifactual. When the beloved asks
her lover to “place me as the seal upon your heart, as the seal upon
your arm” (Cant 8:6), she is using imagery based on contemporary
usage in the actual wearing of seals (Hallo 1983d; 1985c). When lots
were cast by Haman to seal the fate of Persian Jewry (Esth 3:7; 9:24),
they were quite possibly thought of in the concrete terms of surviving
dice which have turned up in modern excavations; one of these dice
is even inscribed with the Akkadian word for lot, pūru, the very word
which gave rise to the name of the festival of Purim (Hallo 1983c).
When the Preacher wishes to illustrate the importance of friendship,
he avails himself of the metaphor of the “three-ply cord (which) is not
easily broken” (Qoh 4:12) just as did the authors of the Gilgamesh
tales in Sumerian (Shaffer 1967) and Akkadian (Shaffer 1969) during
the second millennium bce.
On the purely literary level, the terms of comparison can span a
wide spectrum, from the single verse, or topos, or pericope at one end,
to the whole canon at the other, along with the presumed or attested
historical evolution of each unit in comparison. To cite only one exam-
ple, the peroration of Moses’ homily which at one time may have con-
cluded the original book of Deuteronomy (now Deuteronomy 27–31)
begins with an injunction to set up large stones, coat them with plaster,
and inscribe them with the “repetition of the law” (NJV : “a copy of
this Teaching”; 17:18) which gave the book as a whole its name (27:2).
Such epigraphic conventions are now attested by archaeological finds
from the eighth century bce in the northern Sinai (Meshel 1976; 1978;
9 Cf. the work of Moshe Held in this regard, which is catalogued in Hallo 1985a
and assessed in Hallo 1985b, here: VIII.3. Cf. Fisher 1972–1981.

1979) and in Transjordan (Hoftijzer 1976).10 The latter find also fea-
tures a long list of curses, like the catalogue of blessings and curses in
Deuteronomy 28. But the closest connections of this catalogue are with
the loyalty oaths imposed on his vassals by the seventh century Assyrian
king Esarhaddon (680–669 bce). In numerous exemplars dated three
years before his death, he adjured each of his eastern vassals to fealty
to himself and, after his demise, to his designated successors, on pain
of suffering a lengthy succession of fearsome curses (ANET : 538–539;
cf. Wiseman 1958; Frankena 1965; Weinfeld 1965; 1976). Some of these
curses occur in virtually identical form and even in the same order
in Deuteronomy.11 And the efficacy of such curses was described (in
Deut 29:23–24) in what William L. Moran has aptly termed “one of
the most striking parallels . . .between cuneiform and biblical literature
in any period” (Moran 1963: 83; cf. Bickerman 1979: 75; 1986: 288).
So much for topoi. But perhaps the most fruitful literary comparisons
and contrasts can be drawn on the level of genre, that is, of a compo-
sitional type conforming to a given pattern and serving a specific func-
tion. This is not to throw in my lot with form-criticism (Tucker 1971),12
but rather to adhere to that other stricture of the proposed approach,
namely to juxtapose like with like, category by category and genre by
genre (Hallo 1968: 73; 1980b: 3–5, 11–12; cf. Pardee 1985).13 In this con-
cern for genre-analysis, I find myself in agreement with Parker (1980).14
I also share his preference for a functional and contextual definition of
genre (Parker 1980: 39–40).15
My first illustration comes from the work of B.A. Levine, who began
his scholarly career in Ugaritic, a corpus which is predominantly liter-
ary or, as I would call it, canonical in character. But it includes a small
10 For the latest discussion, see Hackett 1987.

11 Tadmor (1982: 148–152) thinks this treaty pattern was borrowed by the Assyrians
from the West, rather than vice versa.
12 The distinction between form criticism as “diachronic analysis” and genre anal-
ysis as “synchronic, concerned to identify the type of literature, not its prehistory”
(Longman 1987: 76; cf. Longman 1985) breaks down again in genre-history (see below,
nn. 18–19). Note also that “form criticism” is sometimes used loosely to translate Ger-
man Formgeschichte.
13 For a defense of genre-analysis in Mesopotamian literature, see Vanstiphout 1986.
For a critique of the current “obsession with genre, both ancient and modern,” see
Michalowski 1984.
14 Cf. my review of Seux (Hallo 1977a) with his remarks (p. 38) on Caquot, Sznycer,
and Herdner in the same series as Seux, Littératures Anciennes du Proche Orient.
15 Cf. my definition of myth in 1970: 117, n. 1, here: I.2; 1984: 170, here: VII.1.
number of economic or, in my terminology, archival texts, and among

these texts he identified a genre to which he gave the name of “descrip-
tive rituals” (Levine 1963; cf. Levine 1983). The genre is far more com-
mon in Mesopotamia, where the bulk of the massive cuneiform docu-
mentation is archival in character. In a joint article, we analyzed two
particularly elaborate examples of the genre from Old Babylonian Ur
and signalled the potential importance of such texts for the reconstruc-
tion of the Mesopotamian cult (Levine and Hallo 1967). At first blush,
such material would seem to have no parallels in the Bible, which is
presumably wholly literary or canonical in character. But to Levine’s
credit, he identified a number of descriptive ritual texts in the Pen-
tateuch with clearly archival antecedents (Levine 1965). My favorite
example is his analysis of Num 7:12–88. This pericope catalogues the
princely offerings at the dedication of the wilderness tabernacle and
its altar. Since each tribe contributed identical amounts of eleven dif-
ferent offerings, the resulting tabulation is dry and repetitive in sharp
contrast to the Bible’s wonted economy of diction. It has thus tended
to be treated as a late and artificial insertion (e.g., Noth 1966: 63). But
when charted in two-dimensional format,16 it emerges as a rather pre-
cise counterpart to the Old Babylonian descriptive rituals as these are
either analyzed in modern transcriptions or, often enough, actually dis-
posed on the ancient clay tablets. Even with the mild caveats injected,
into the discussion by Anson Rainey (1970; cf. Fishbane 1974: 31–35),
Levine’s analysis of the pericope retains its essential validity: the charac-
ter of the passage is illuminated, and its basic integrity with its context
vindicated by the comparable text-type from Mesopotamia. It is likely
that other passages will in due time be identified as having archival
prototypes behind the canonical shape in which they are preserved,17
as is increasingly true in the study of cuneiform literature, where, for
example, the “literary collection of legal decisions” (Hallo 1964: 105),
also referred to as the “genre of model court records” (Roth 1983: 279),
probably goes back to or at least imitates real archival prototypes.
If archival texts can occasionally provide the prototypes for canon-
ical genres, the same is true in much larger measure of monumental
texts, that is, historical, dedicatory, and other inscriptions that originally
16 On this concept, see Levine and Hallo 1967: 20, n. 16, which cites previous
literature; Jacobsen 1974: 44, 61, n. 2.

17 See, for example, Hurowitz 1986 on 2 Kgs 12:5–17; Evans 1983, n. 90 on 1 Kgs
12:26–33.
decorated or themselves constituted a monument of some kind. Divine

hymns, royal hymns, royal inscriptions, collections of laws, and cadas-
tres are among the genres that can be traced from monument to canon
in the cuneiform tradition (Hallo 1970: 120–122), and even the “Syn-
chronistic History,” the so-called “Chronicle 21” in A. Kirk Grayson’s
edition of Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, was originally engraved on a
stone stele according to its own concluding paragraph (Grayson 1975:
53–54, 169–170). Is there comparable evidence in the Bible?
I do not mean to allude here to the possible precedent that this
Chronicle, and the Synchronistic King Lists (Grayson 1969), provide
for the Deuteronomistic history of the Divided Monarchy. Rather, the
appeal here is to the somewhat debatable case of the Psalm genre called
miktām in the Hebrew Bible and consistently translated in the Greek
¯
Bible as stēlographía, inscription on a stele. The Psalms so labelled (16,
56–60) are all among the “historical” or “biographical” descriptions
of the life of David, according to their superscripts; whether they ever
graced a stele or other monument must be left open. But the affinities
between these and other individual prayers in the Psalter, on the one
hand, and monumental inscriptions like the Zakir Stele (ANET : 655–
656), on the other, have been noted by a number of scholars such
as H.L. Ginsberg, J.C. Greenfield and H.J. Zobel (Hallo 1976a: 209–
210).
The miktām in turn is probably related to the miktāb, and particularly
¯ ¯
that attributed to King Hezekiah (715–687 bce.) in Isaiah 38 (Ackroyd
1982). Whether or not it is intended to represent a letter in the later
sense of the Hebrew term, it certainly served as a prayerful form of
royal communication with the divine, and as such stands in the long
tradition of royal letter-prayers which I have identified in Sumerian and
Sumero-Akkadian bilingual examples stretching from the nineteenth to
the seventh centuries bce (Hallo 1976a; 1980a; 1981; 1982).
One can go even further and suggest for the whole genre of indi-
vidual prayer (both thanksgiving and lament) in the biblical Psalter
the same ultimately epistolary origin and surviving structure as for the
comparable genres in Sumerian. In the case of the cuneiform evidence,
the transition from letter to letter-prayer and thence to prayer proper
was traced by applying the rules of genre-history to the successive stages
of a corpus spanning more than a millennium (Hallo 1968).18 In the
18 For a partially dissenting view, see Klein 1982.

biblical case, we do not dispose of such stages; confined as we are to the

end-product, we should welcome the analogy provided by the compar-
ative data.
A similar case could be made for the genre of the congregational
lament. Here the recent researches of Kutscher, Krecher, Cohen, Green
and others have provided ample evidence for the evolution of the
Sumerian prototype. It began as a ritual apologia required for the
rebuilding of ruined temples in a specific historical situation, but even-
tually evolved into a stereotyped litany recited on fixed dates in the
liturgical calendar and without reference to specific times or places.
The possible point at which the biblical Book of Lamentations, though
not the congregational laments of the Psalter, fit into this evolution has
most recently been investigated by W.C. Gwaltney.19
But genre-analysis and genre-history can serve the contrastive ap-
proach as well as the comparative one. In the Akkadian canon of
Mesopotamia, the most abundant single genre is surely the great and
diverse corpus of omen texts. It is also the most highly organized
portion of that canon, and in many ways most characteristic of the
Mesopotamian mind-set or Weltanschauung. That it is not more familiar
to biblical scholars and scholarship is in part due to its very distinc-
tiveness. Not a single omen is incorporated, e.g., in Pritchard’s ANET,
and few indeed are the comparative studies that appeal to it. And yet
the mantic texts of Mesopotamia are related to the Old Testament—
not positively it is true, but negatively. For the largest single genre in
the biblical corpus is literary prophecy (in BH, 368 pages out of 1434,
compared to 348 for the Deuteronomistic history, 151 for the Chroni-
cler’s history, 182 for the triteuch-laws, 128 for Psalms, etc.), and it is
in some ways its most characteristic and distinctive genre. And despite
occasional comparisons with Mari prophecy and other predictive texts
from Mesopotamia,20 biblical prophecy is utterly different from any
cuneiform genre by virtue of authorship, structure, and content. Yet
the very fact of its distinctiveness suggests a contrastive relationship
with Babylonian omen literature. Both fulfill comparable functions in
the larger context of their respective literary settings. Even though,
in Buber’s phrase, the function of biblical prophecy is not to predict,
19 See Gwaltney 1983, which includes a survey of the relevant literature. For a short
genre-history of Sumerian congregational laments, see Vanstiphout 1986: 7–9.

20 Cf. most recently Malamat 1987.
but to confront man with the alternatives of decision,21 its practical

effect was comparable to that of the mantic Weltanschauung, however dif-
ferent its premises: both served as guides to behavior. On the cuneiform
side this is most obvious in the case of certain so-called “physiognomic”
omina which, following B. Landsberger, F.R. Kraus, their editor, entitled
“a canon of morals in omen form” (ein Sittenkanon in Omenform) (Kraus
1936). G.E. Bryce, in one of the very few biblical studies invoking the
evidence of Babylonian omina, cited examples such as “If he is oblig-
ing, they will oblige him” (Bryce 1975: 32) and “If he points his fin-
ger at his father and his mother . . . the curse of (his) father and (his)
mother will seize him” (Bryce 1975: 32; cf. Gevirtz 1969) as parallels to
what he called “omen-wisdom in ancient Israel.” Similarly, the terres-
trial omen series, one of the most extensive in the cuneiform canon,
included thinly disguised prescriptions for practical behavior if not for
ethical norms. The very first couplet of the series, šumma ālu ina mēlē
šakin, (u)ašāb libbi āli šuāti la .tāb, šumma ālu ina mušpali šakin, lib āli šuāti
.tāb: “if a city is situated on a height, dwelling in the center of that city
is not good; if it is situated in a low-lying place, the center of that city
is good” (CT 38.1.1–2; cf. Guinan 1988) reads like a prescription for
urban planning.
Most omens, of course, were purely descriptive, recording what hap-
pened, e.g., to King Sin-iddinam of Larsa when he sacrificed in the
temple of the Sun-god of Larsa at the Elulum-festival. But they pre-
sume that, given a wholly identical omen in the future, the same fate
will recur or, in the words of the omen, “the owner of the (sacrificial)
lamb will throw back the enemy and stand (in triumph) over what does
not belong to him” (Hallo 1967: 96–97). It is true that most of these
descriptive omens portend a rather less desirable outcome for the client,
but such outcomes could be averted by priestly intercession with the
deity, whose intent the omen had divined. The contrast with biblical
prophecy could not be greater; there an immutable divine dispensa-
tion, but free will on humanity’s part to avoid divine displeasure, here
a wholly capricious pantheon, largely indifferent to human behavior,
and to be appeased rather by elaborate and costly cultic performances.
But the contrast is first silhouetted by the juxtaposition of functionally
equivalent genres.
21 Buber 1957: 197 = 1968: 177, cited by Hallo 1966: 234, n. 26; McFadden 1983: 131,
n. 17.
And the contrast is resolved again in the successor-genres. Biblical

prophecy ceased, traditionally at some time during the Restoration, i.e.,
under Achaemenid rule, to be replaced by apocalypse. Akkadian man-
tic ceased too, as far as can be judged, sometime in the Neo-Babylonian
period, for as early as the accession of Nabonassar (747 bce), the royal
scribes were busy compiling a database for a new omen-corpus in the
form of the astronomical diary-texts (Sachs and Hunger 1988; Hallo,
1983a: 16; 1988b: 188). But they were still compiling this database 800
years later when the last cuneiform text was being written in 75 C.E.
and they never did get around to replacing the omen canon. Instead,
they too began to rely more and more on a related genre sometimes
referred to as “Akkadian prophecies” (Grayson and Lambert 1964)22 but
which I insist can better be described as “Akkadian apocalypses” (Hallo
1966). That suggestion was first made on the basis of one of the leading
characteristics of the genre, namely its use of vaticinium ex eventu, a seem-
ing prediction, that is, of a future event which has, in reality, already
taken place. That, of course, is not by any means the only criterion
of apocalyptic in either Hebrew or Akkadian, but it is one of the dis-
tinctive characteristics common to both. Still, my comparison seemed
vulnerable to the enormous time gap that yawned between the earliest
biblical example, even if that is Isaiah 24–27, and the latest Akkadian
example which, even if it came from the libraries of the Neo-Assyrian
kings in the seventh century bce, dealt with matters at the end of the
second millennium. But that time gap has been dramatically reduced
or, indeed, eliminated by subsequent discoveries which have brought
the genre on the Mesopotamian side right down into Seleucid times,
when the apocalyptic portions of Daniel too were presumably created
(Hallo 1980a). Thus the genre flourished in Mesopotamia and Israel—
and, we may add, in Egypt—during Hellenistic times, providing a likely
period for the literary contact. The fact that the genre is so much older
in Mesopotamia gives us, for once, a likely answer to the perennial
question of the direction as well as the date of the borrowing—though
we must stay alert to the native components which clearly distinguished
the genre in each of its separate environments.
Another genre where comparison may yet prove fruitful is that of
the novella. The concept of a self-contained, fictionalized tale woven
about a single character or group of characters, however much it is
22 For a more recent study, see Biggs 1985; 1987.

still debated, deserves consideration as a possible category in which to

accommodate the “romance” of Joseph (Hallo 1980b: 17, nn. 79–87) as
well as such diverse texts as Jonah, Esther and the narrative portions
of Daniel—three of the four “strange books” of the Bible as Elias
Bickerman has called them (Bickerman 1967).23 The “success stories”
of Mordecai and Daniel have been compared to that of Joseph by
many recent commentators, as well as to that of Ahiqar in the Aramaic-
Assyrian tradition.24 The story of Esther has a female protagonist and
is in a sense written from a feminist point of view, if not actually by a
woman author (Hallo 1983c)—for which there are increasing parallels
in cuneiform (Hallo and van Dijk 1968: 1–11; Hallo 1976c; 1983e). And
even though Sumerian and Akkadian literature does not yet provide a
formal parallel to a connected narrative about a single private person
or family, there are short episodic pericopes about such protagonists as
Lisina (Civil 1977: 67), Namzitarra (Civil 1977; Vanstiphout 1980), and
Ludingirra (Kramer 1960; Civil 1964; Cooper 1971) in Sumerian texts
of Old Babylonian date which have all the earmarks of building blocks
for novellae in the making (Hallo 1980a: 312, n. 20). Here, too, further
discoveries and continuing study are needed before the evidence can be
fully weighed.
I do not mean to belabor the point. There are many other gen-
res that could be thrown into the hopper for comparison. There is,
for example, the question of epic. Is there epic on the biblical side?
Talmon (1981) and Cross (1983; cf. Conroy 1980), among others, have
debated this issue at length. There is no clear genre label of such a
type on the Mesopotamian side, though certainly many candidates for
a putative assignment to it. Myth is in the same state of limbo on both
sides. Proverbs, of course, have frequently borne comparison on both
sides, and we know of the outstanding example of the thirty Egyp-
tian proverbs of Amenemopet, which have been compared to a por-
tion of the biblical book of Proverbs (22:17–24:34).25 Even subcategories
of the proverb literature, such as riddles, have been compared with
Sumerian models. Indeed, in Sumerian there is a genre term for rid-
dle, i.bi.lu.dug4.ga (Civil 1985), which is translated into Akkadian by hittu,
23 The fourth “strange book” is Ecclesiastes.

24 See Hallo 1980b: n. 84 for the literature. For the latest edition of Ahiqar, see
J.M. Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar (Baltimore, 1983).
25 For the notion that the thirty “Precepts of the Sages” (Prov 22:17–24:22) inspired
the Instructions of Amenemopet (ANET : 421–425), and not vice versa, see Kevin 1931.
a term which, despite the CAD’s reluctance on this point, I have no

problem in relating to Hebrew hîdāh. Obviously, casuistic legislation,
¯
to mention only that and not the other kinds of biblical legislation,
finds many comparisons in the cuneiform corpus, even though here
we face the issue of when and where that particular relationship might
have been brought to bear, and the answer to that is a very difficult
one.
It is time to sum up. Biblical literature confronts us with a closed
corpus, the end product of a long redactional history. The compara-
tive data in Mesopotamian cuneiform provides us with the documents
that went into the making of the successive Sumerian and Akkadian
canons (Hallo 1976b). Properly used, these documents can replace the
hypothetical documents that presumably went into the making of the
biblical canon, and this allows us a glimpse into the literary and cul-
tural context on which the biblical authors drew to speak with the lan-
guage of all mankind. I have chosen to illustrate the inherent possibil-
ities of this approach in terms of literary genres. It could, with equal
profit, be attempted in terms of individual verses and pericopes or of
specific literary devices, such as acrostics, or of motifs and topoi. What
counts is that, in the understandable revulsion against parallelomania,
we not subject the biblical data to an equally unbridled parallelopho-
bia.26
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x.3
THE CONCEPT OF CANONICITY IN

CUNEIFORM AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE:
A COMPARATIVE APPRAISAL1
Before we can speak of canonicity, we need a working definition of the

concept of canon. There are probably as many definitions as there are
authorities on the subject. Perhaps the most restrictive one is that of the
Oxford English Dictionary, which confines the term to “the collection or
list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian church as genuine
and inspired” or, in transferred meaning, “any set of sacred books.”
A broader definition is offered by Webster’s, where canon describes
not only “a collection or authoritative list of books accepted as holy
scripture” but also “an accepted or sanctioned list of books (established
in the canon of literature)” or, finally, “the authentic works of a writer
([e.g.] the Chaucer canon).” Both kinds of definition, the narrowly
ecclesiastic and the broadly literary one, agree in opposing “canonical”
to “apocryphal.”2
The religious connotation of the term probably goes back no further
than about the fourth century ce, when it was first applied to the
New Testament.3 It has long been fashionable to apply it similarly
to the Hebrew Bible, but a new study of the evidence by Daniel
J. Silver reminds us that religious reverence for the biblical text was
a postbiblical phenomenon and slow to emerge even in the rabbinic
period. Silver largely avoids the term canon altogether, preferring to
speak instead of scripture (not Scripture), which he defines as “a volume
1 The substance of this paper was first presented to the symposium on “The
Hebrew Bible in the Making: From Literature to Canon,” National Humanities Center,
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, on April 27, 1988. The paper by S.J. Lieber-
man, “Canonical and Official Cuneiform Texts: Towards an Understanding of Assur-
banipal’s Personal Tablet Collection,” appeared too late to be taken account of here;
see Lingering over Words: Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Literature in Honor of William L. Moran
(ed. T. Abusch, et al.; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) 305–336.
2 Cf. e.g. Harry Shaw, Dictionary of Literary Terms (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), s.v.
canon.
3 Cf. B.S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1979) 50.
700 x.3. the concept of canonicity
or collection of writings held by a particular community to be divinely

inspired and, therefore, authoritative.”4
The earlier study of the rabbinic evidence by Sid. Z. Leiman5 showed
that the concept of canonicity, if not the term itself, has enjoyed a much
wider application within Judaism. Not only the Hebrew Bible, but also
such postbiblical classics as the Scroll of Fasts (Megillat Ta #anit), the
Mishnah, and eventually the entire Talmud were accepted as author-
itative and binding, to be observed, believed, studied, and expounded.6
In the rabbinic view, all divinely inspired literature is canonical, but not
all canonical literature is inspired. What Leiman calls inspired canon-
ical literature is what rabbinic terminology called the Written Law, or
Written Torah, while his “uninspired canonical literature” is, in effect
the Oral Law, or Oral Torah. The functional equivalence of Torah and
Canon was recognized most explicitly by J.A. Sanders.7
As Leiman shows, the disputes over Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the
Song of Songs were more theoretical or academic than real, and in
any case were all settled in favor of their inclusion.8 Thus the Written
Torah ended up with twenty-four canonical books.9 As if to correspond
to these, Leiman identifies up to twenty-four non-canonical books men-
tioned in the Bible.10 These non-canonical books are not preserved,
but others, including the Aramaic Targumim, the Gospels, and Ben
Sira survive. Even within the canon of inspired texts, the Rabbis distin-
guished degrees of canonicity, with the Pentateuch having more author-
ity than the Prophets or Writings.11 In post-talmudic (medieval) times,
the Prophets were in turn assigned a higher degree of authority than
the Writings.12
These observations by Leiman regarding the Written Law can also
usefully be applied to the Oral Law. Traditions which, while not
4 D.J. Silver, The Story of Scripture: From Oral Tradition to the Written Word (New York:
Basic Books, 1990), esp. p. 22.

5 The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (= Transac-
tions [of] the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 47/1 [Hamden, CT: Archon],
1976). Cf. idem, “Inspiration and Canonicity: Reflections on the Formation of the Bibli-
cal Canon,” Jewish and Christian Self-Definition II (ed. E.P. Sanders; 1981) 56–63, 315–318.
6 Canonization, 14.
7 Torah and Canon (2nd ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974).
8 Canonization, 102–124.
9 Ibid., 53–56.
10 Ibid., 17 f.
11 Ibid., 15.
12 Ibid., 66 and 169 f., n. 294.
x.3. the concept of canonicity 701
included in the Mishnah, were nevertheless deemed worthy of preserv-

ing, were called beraitôt in Aramaic (equivalent to h. is. ônôt in Hebrew)
and quoted widely in both Talmudim, though usually enjoying less
authority than the comparable Mishnah, if it existed. Collections of
such beraitôt were added to the canon. One of them, the Tosefta, par-
alleled the Mishnah in structure and content, but went far beyond it
in its explicitness and in its citation of biblical proof texts. In the words
of Jacob Neusner, the translator of the Tosefta, “Mishnah is the trel-
lis, Tosefta the vine.”13 Thus Leiman’s definition of canonicity is broad
enough to encompass various degrees of authority, with the Pentateuch
enjoying a higher status than the rest of the Bible, and the Mishnah
generally prevailing over the Tosefta and other beraitôt.
But even this broader definition of canon is still more specifically
religious in its connotation than the original sense of the term. For
the Greek word κανν was first applied to literature by the scholars
of the famous library and museum of Alexandria in the third century
bce. The great librarians such as Zenodotus, Callimachus and Apollo-
nius Rhodus14 not only used the plural καννες “for collections of the
old Greek authors . . . as being models of excellence, classics,”15 but also
established an entire “Alexandrian Canon”16 as “the authoritative, stan-
dardized corpus of the great writers of the past, arranged according to
certain principles of order.”17
According to Nahum Sarna, it was this model, rather than the later
Christian one, which inspired the rabbinic efforts at canonization.18
(Similarly, we might add, it was the still later Moslem model which
inspired the related activity of the Tiberian Masoretes). And both the
Alexandrian and the rabbinic impulse to the ordering of the canon,
according to Sarna, owed much to the needs of storage and retrieval in
a library setting. Leiman disputes this notion, arguing that the rabbinic
13 Neziqin (New York: Ktav, 1981), p. xiii. Neusner has also illustrated the relation-
ships of Mishnah, Tosefta and Talmud by means of a single instance involving the Sab-
bath liturgy; cf. Formative Judaism 3 (= Brown University Studies 46; Chico: Scholars,
1983), 156–168.
14 F.E. Peters, The Harvest of Hellenism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), esp,
pp. 194–196.
15 Liddell-Scott s.v.
16 Edward A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library (Amsterdam: Elseviers, 1952) 223–228.
For the Latin equivalent, cf. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria I-IV-3, cited ibid. 225, n. 2.
17 Nahum M. Sarna, “The Order of the Books,” Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History
and Literature in Honor of I. Edward Kiev (ed. Charles Berlin; New York: Ktav, 1971) 411.
18 Ibid.
impulse came rather from the equally practical question of the order in
which to inscribe two or more biblical books on a single scroll.19 And
the whole subject of book-scrolls, Bible-scrolls and the related question
of book size has been a continuing pre-occupation of Menahem Haran
in recent studies.20
But we may follow Sarna in another regard, namely that both tra-
ditions ultimately derive from Mesopotamian precedent. And since he
bases himself on my own earlier findings, I will follow him in turn in his
definition of canonization, which he describes in terms of four discrete
manifestations, as follows: (1) “the emergence of a recognized corpus of
classical literature” (2) “the tendency to produce a standardized text”
(3) “a fixed arrangement of content” and (4) “an established sequence
in which the works were to be read or studied.”21 This is canonization
“in the secular sense of the word”—precisely the way it has most often
been used in discussing the Mesopotamian evidence, to which I may
now at last turn.
In a recent thumbnail sketch of the history of the question by Miguel
Civil,22 the first systematic application of the concept of canonization to
cuneiform lexical and literary texts is attributed to Benno Landsberger
(1933)23 and his pupils. Among the latter Civil lists L. Matouš (1933), W.
von Soden (1936) and H.S. Schuster (1938), although the last uses the
concept only casually.24 He might have begun the list with A. Falken-
stein, who in his 1931 dissertation already defined canonization as “a
normatively valid sequence both of the individual incantations with
respect to each other, and of the series [we could say books] composed
of successive tablets [we could say chapters].”25
19 Canonization, 162, n. 258.

20 “Book-Scrolls in Israel in Pre-exilic Times,” JSS 33 (1982) 161–173; “Bible-Scrolls
at the Beginning of the Second Temple Period: the Transition from Papyrus to Skins,”
HUCA 44 (1983) 111–122; “Bible-Scrolls in Eastern and Western Jewish Communities
from Qumran to the High Middle Ages,” HUCA 56 (1985) 21–62; “Book-Size and the
Device of Catch-Lines in the Biblical Canon,” JSS 36 (1985) 1–11; “Book-Size and the
Thematic Cycles in the Pentateuch,” Die Hebräische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte:
Festschrift für Rolf Rendtorff (ed. E. Blum, et al.; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1990)
165–176.
21 “Order,” 413 nn. 15 f.
22 MSL 14 (1979) 168 f.
23 “Die Liste der Menschenklassen im babylonischen Kanon,” ZA 41 (1933) 184–192.
(Note that Civil erroneously dates this article to 1923).

24 E.g., ZA 44 (1938) 238 f.
25 Die Haupttypen der sumerischen Beschwörung literarisch untersucht (= LSS n. F. 1; Leipzig:
But it was W.G. Lambert who first gave the concept wider cur-
rency within Assyriology. In a 1957 article entitled “Ancestors, authors
and canonicity”26 he discussed, i.a., the colophon of a medical text
which claimed to be composed in the second year of Enlil-bani of
Isin (ca. 1859 bce) “according to the old sages from before the flood”
(ša pı̄ apkallē labirūti ša lām abūbi), and that of a hemerology prepared
in the time of Nazimaruttaš of the Kassite dynasty (ca. 1307–1282 bce)
“according to the seven s[ages],” and concluded:
“There is a Babylonian conception which is implicit in the colophons just
cited and which is stated plainly by Berossus: that the sum of the revealed
knowledge was given once and for all by the antediluvian sages.27 This
is a remarkable parallel to the rabbinic view that God’s revelation in its
entirety is contained in the Torah.”28
Lambert’s concept of canonicity is still a severely restricted one. It
involves “systematic selection of literary works” and “a conscious at-
tempt to produce authoritative editions of works which were passed
on.”29 He sees no suggestion of either activity in the explicit native
statements on the subject, and as far as the implicit evidence of the end
result is concerned, while “much Akkadian literature did assume a fixed
form, did become a textus receptus,” other compositions did not. The
exceptions cited are interesting. “The Gilgamesh Epic never reached
a canonical form, and Enuma Anu Enlil circulated in several variant
official editions.”30
As far as the Gilgamesh Epic is concerned, this most famous of
cuneiform compositions provides us with an unrivalled illustration not
only of the final fixation of a traditional text, but also of the evolution
Hinrichs, 1931; reprint 1968) 10 f. (my translation). In notes 1 f (to p. 11), Falkenstein
allows for divergences in the sequence due to local or chronological differences.
26 JCS 11 (1957) 1–14, 112.
27 For the passage cited here by Lambert, see now Stanley M. Burstein, “The
Babyloniaca of Berossus,” SANE 1 (1978) 13 f. S.J. Lieberman informs me that, according

to collation, the colophon of the hemerology can be restored as 7 um-[ma-ni] (“7
scholars”) or 7 DUB.[MEŠ] (“7 tablets”) but not as 7 ap-[kal-le]. Cf. Hallo, “Nippur
Originals,” DUMU.E2.DUB.BA.A: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg (ed. H. Behrens, et
al.; Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 11; Philadelphia, 1989)
239, n. 30, here: III.5.
28 “Ancestors,” 9.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid. For a different assessment of the Nazi-maruttaš colophon see H. Hunger,
Babylonische und Assyrische Kolophone (= AOAT 2; Neukirchen-Vluyn; Neukirchener, 1968)

6 n. 1.
of such a text from its Sumerian beginnings. The evolution of the Gil-
gamesh Epic has been traced in all possible detail by Jeffrey H. Tigay
in what was originally his Yale dissertation,31 and the implications of
this and other ancient Near Eastern examples have been considered by
Tigay and others in his new volume on Empirical Models for Biblical Criti-
cism.32 Suffice it to say that, leaving aside such peripheral developments
as translations or reflexes of Gilgamesh in Hurrian and Hittite,33 we can
identify no less than four discrete stages in the evolution of the Epic,34
beginning with the separate Sumerian episodic compositions (some of
them—like “Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living”—themselves tra-
dited in two distinct recensions, one longer and the other shorter),35
that probably originated in neo-Sumerian times (ca. twenty-first cen-
tury bce), continuing with an Akkadian adaptation of Old Babylonian
date (ca. eighteenth century bce) which was not a mere translation from
the Sumerian, and which may or may not have retained the episodic
character of the Sumerian,36 and expanding in a third stage37 to what
by now was indubitably a continuous, unitary epic, with a unifying
thread or theme, complete in eleven tablets or chapters, augmented
over the Old Babylonian recension by a prologue of twenty-six lines,38
including five that recurred verbatim at the end of the eleventh tablet
and thus provided a frame of sorts for the whole composition, and
no doubt by other, less obvious and, some might say, less felicitous
31 The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982).

32 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985).
33 Cf. Tigay, Evolution, 111–119; H. Otten, RLA 3 (1968) 372.
34 See the convenient summary by Tigay in his Empirical Models, 35–46, from which
mine diverges in details only.

35 “As to the appropriateness of these terms” see M. de J. Ellis, AfO 28 (1981–1982)
129–131.
36 On this point see also Hope Nash Wolff, “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the heroic
life,” JAOS 89 (1969) 393 n. 2; J.H. Tigay, “Was There an Integrated Gilgamesh Epic in
the Old Babylonian Period?” Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of J.J. Finkelstein (ed. M.
de J. Ellis; Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Transactions 1977) 215–218. See
n. 83 below.
37 Middle Babylonian according to Tigay, late Old Babylonian according to Lam-
bert, JCS 16 (1962) 77. For the 14th century (?) Akkadian Gilgamesh fragments from
Hattusha, of which Tigay had only one (Evolution, 121–123), the 1983 excavations turned
up six more, including one with “weitgehend wörtliche Übereinstimmungen zur alt-
babylonischen Fassung der Pennsylvania-Tafel, womit für die Überlieferungsgeschichte
dieser bedeutsamen epischen Dichtung ein neuer, wichtiger Hinweis gewonnen ist,”
according to H. Otten, Archäologischer Anzeiger (1984/3) 375.
38 A. Shaffer apud D.J. Wiseman, “A Gilgamesh Epic Fragment from Nimrud,” Iraq
37 (1975) 158 n. 22.

expansions,39 traditionally assigned to Sin-liqi-unninni, an exorcist (maš-

maššu) of the Kassite period.40 The final stage, sometimes loosely alluded
to as the canonical version, is the twelve-tablet recension best known
from copies in the royal Assyrian libraries of the seventh century but
conceivably of older date, and expanded beyond the “Kassite” recen-
sion by the addition41 i.a. of a twelfth tablet made up entirely of a literal
translation of the second half of one of the Gilgamesh episodes of the
original Sumerian stage. This final “canonical” version is essentially
identical in all exemplars now known, whether from Nineveh, Assur or
provincial libraries such as Sultan Tepe in neo-Assyrian times, or from
the diverse Babylonian libraries that continued into Hellenistic or even
Parthian times.42 The very fact of the survival of these exemplars and
their uniformity argues persuasively if circumstantially for just such a
process of a selection and authoritative edition as Lambert requires of a
true canon.43
The case of Enuma Anu Enlil is also instructive, if complex. Like
most of the mantic texts, the astrological omens stand out in the cu-
neiform corpus by the thoroughness of their systematization. They are
the end-product of a long and deliberate critical effort which produced
the ancient equivalent of tables of contents, critical apparatus, com-
mentaries and other elements of a scholarly and bibliographic appara-
tus. The mere survival of “several variant official editions” is thus not
necessarily an argument against their “canonical” status, as Lambert
held. But he has been followed closely in this regard by the specialists
in cuneiform astronomy themselves, most notably and most recently,
39 Cf. e.g. Jerrold S. Cooper, “Gilgamesh Dreams of Enkidu: the Evolution and
Dilution of Narrative,” Finkelstein AV (1977) 39–44.

40 Lambert, JCS 16 (1962) 66 f. vi 10.
41 A trivial illustration of such expansion may be seen in the winds (of Shamash)
with whose help Gilgamesh and Enkidu overpower Huwawa. In the Sumerian version
(“Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living”) there are seven, in the Hittite version (based
on the Middle Babylonian one?) eight, in the neo-Babylonian version thirteen. See
J. Renger, “Zur Fünften Tafel des Gilgameschepos,” Language, Literature, and History:
Philological and Historical Studies Presented to Erica Reiner (ed. Francesa Rochberg-Halton;
AOS 67; New Haven, 1987) 320.
42 Tigay, Empirical Models, 39; Evolution, 251 and n. 2; CT 46:30; Hunger, Kolophone,
No. 148.
43 Tigay, Empirical Models, 43 and n. 91, where the late version is described as “nearly
a textus receptus.” For the contrary view see Lambert, “Ancestors,” 9 and n. 34. J. Renger,
“Zur fünften Tafel des Gilgameschepos,” Reiner AV, 317, also considers the possibility
that a newly excavated Uruk fragment, and other exemplars in neo-Babylonian script,
represent a recension diverging from the “canonical” version.
Francesca Rochberg-Halton. In two major studies, she considered, first

“Canonicity in cuneiform texts”44 in general and then the more specific
application of the concept to “the assumed 29th ahû [i.e., extraneous,
˘
non-canonical] tablet of Enūma Anu Enlil.”45 For Rochberg-Halton, the
Jewish (and Christian) concept of canonicity implied “divine authority,
the morally binding character of the texts, and its fixed. . . nature”46—
hardly the hallmarks of the Akkadian canon. The only shared fea-
tures between the latter and the biblical canons are “text stability and
fixed sequence of tablets within a series.”47 On this narrow basis, only
the series themselves (Akk. iškaru) are “our presumed ‘canonical texts’,
or official editions.” The “non-canonical” literary texts include those
described as “extraneous” (ahû), orally transmitted (ša pı̄ ummānı̄), com-
˘
mentaries (mukallimtu), explanatory word lists (s. âtu), excerpts (liqtu), “and
other forms of scholia” —presumably including catalogues of literary
48
texts (which, themselves, acquired a certain fixity).49

Concentrating on the “extraneous” texts, Rochberg-Halton noted
that these are attested for the following classes of literature:50 div-
ination (celestial, terrestrial, physiognomic, teratological); menologies
(iqqur ipuš ); medical prescriptions (Hunger, Kolophone 329); lexicography
(MSL 14:168) and lamentations (4R53:34 f. = catalogue of balag’s);51 they
are contrasted not only with the (official) series (iškaru) but with texts
described as “good” (damqu) (ABL 453 rev. 14 and 13:25). Then she
examined one of the few available pairs of “good” and “extraneous”
recensions, namely the 15th–22nd chapter of the astronomical omen
series and the “assumed 29th” chapter of its “extraneous” counterpart.
She found very little overlap between the two, so that the extraneous
“ahû material constitutes a genuinely separate tradition from that of
˘
44 JCS 36 (1984) 127–144.
45 Reiner AV (1987) 327–350.
46 “Canonicity,” 128 n. 3.
47 Civil, MSL 14 (1979) 168, cited ibid., 129 n. 8.
48 lbid., 130; cf. CAD s.v. liqtu (2), and below, note 85.
49 Cf. Hallo, JAOS 83 (1963) 168, here: II.1, for “a canonical version of the catalogues
themselves” and Civil, AS 20 (1976) 145 n. 36, for the significance of “duplicates of a
catalogue.” Cf. below, note 101.
50 “Canonicity,” 137 f.
51 Last edited by M.E. Cohen, Sumerian Hymnology: the Eršemma (HUCAS 2; Cincin-
nati, 1981) 42 f. For the “non-standard” lamentations, see now idem, The Canonical
Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia (Potomac, MD: Capital Decisions, 1988) vol. 1, 17–19;
vol. 2, 519–532. The ahû versions have little in common with the “standard” versions
˘
beyond their incipits; according to Cohen, they may have served, in certain circles, to
replace them.
the neo-Assyrian standard series (iškaru).”52 What can be said is that

the “extraneous” material is just as well organized and standardized as
the “good” recension. Sometimes entries from the “extraneous” series
could even be inserted into the “good” series.53 In short, she rejects the
traditional Assyriological model of canon which equates “good” with
“canonical” and “extraneous” with “not officially recognized.”54
Is this the end of the matter? Hardly! If the Jewish (or Christian)
canon is narrowly defined as divinely inspired literature and if the
cuneiform canon is narrowly defined as the “good” recensions of tradi-
tional series, then indeed there is little in common between the two con-
cepts. But as we have seen, the rabbinic definition of the Jewish canon
is much broader, and I have long proposed a correspondingly broader
definition of the cuneiform canon, based on the literary sense of the
term rather than its theological one. This is not to admit, however, that
I have been using the term “in a rather loose sense” as meaning noth-
ing more than “purely literary”—to quote Civil’s sketch once more.55
Allow me to set the record straight. As early as 1958, I announced,
somewhat brashly: “I use the terms archival, monumental, and canon-
ical to distinguish the three major categories of the cuneiform litera-
ture [I would now say: documentation] of Mesopotamia and regard the
reconstruction of the cuneiform archives, monuments, and canons as
three of the main tasks of humanistic research.”56 In 1961, I enlarged
on this view in an encyclopedia article that could hardly have caught
the eye of colleagues.57 But my programmatic article on “New view-
points on cuneiform literature” the following year58 had considerably
more impact.59 Here I stressed the fact “that many Akkadian works had
assumed a fixed form by neo-Assyrian times, and that their division
into tablets, and in the case of longer series into groups of tablets (pirsu)
was fully standardized.”60 And in 1968 I expanded on this to define the
criteria of canonicity as “an authoritative text, a reasonably fixed num-
ber and sequence of individual compositions, and the grouping of these
52 Ibid., 140; cf. in detail Rochberg-Halton in Reiner AV.

53 “Canonicity,” 142 f.
54 Ibid., 144.
55 MSL 14 (1979) 168.
56 JNES 17 (1958) 210 n. 6; cited in part by E. Kingsbury, HUCA 34 (1963) 1 n. 1.
57 “Sumerian Language and Literature,” American Peoples Encyclopedia vol. 18 cols. 3–7.
58 IEJ 12 (1962) 13–26, here: I.1, esp. 21–26.
59 Among others, see e.g. the favorable citation by I.J. Gelb in Current Trends in
Linguistics 11 (1973) 254, and below, note 69.

60 “New Viewpoints,” 23, here: I.1. But see below, at note 110, on pirsu.
compositions into recognizable books or subdivisions,” and suggested

that at least some of these criteria were already met by the Sumerian
literary texts.61 I was hardly very far from Civil himself who, eleven
years later, wrote “the criteria by which to define a [cuneiform] text
as standard or canonical are text stability and fixed sequence of tablets
within a series”62 although he wishes “to restrict the label of ‘canonical’
to those texts, transmitted exclusively in writing, that were stabilized
some time [but not much!] before the XIth century in a form that
lasted for over a millennium in Mesopotamia.”63
My concept of canonicity was thus in line with views developed by
the students of lexicographical texts, clearly some of the ones which
illustrate the processes of gradual fixation of the texts and their se-
quence most dramatically. It has the further merit of being grounded
in the material itself. By contrast, a recent survey by D.O. Edzard and
W. Röllig in the authoritative Reallexikon der Assyriologie erects a cate-
gory of Sumerian and Akkadian “literature” which excludes such major
genres as lexical and other lists, medical, astronomical and all (other)
omen texts, ritual prescriptions and recipes.64 The exclusion is presum-
ably based on a subjective judgement of the aesthetic merit of the gen-
res in question, but ignores the audience for which it was intended and
its tastes. The excluded genres are in fact the largest, and to that extent
apparently the most important portions of what the late A.L. Oppen-
heim called “the stream of tradition,” meaning by that “what can
loosely be termed the corpus of literary texts maintained, controlled,
and carefully kept alive by a tradition served by successive generations
of learned and well-trained scribes.”65 Oppenheim’s “stream of tradi-
tion” is in fact the functional equivalent of my category of “canonical
texts” though by and large he avoided that term, using “canonization”
as equivalent to the “standardization of the written tradition.”66
My category has the further merit of being clearly delimited from the
other categories of cuneiform documentation, the monumental and the
archival. I described and analyzed the monumental category in 1962
61 JAOS 88 (1968) 74, here: IV.1. “Compositions” was here used of individual, and in
part short, poems in an effort to test for the possible existence of a “Sumerian psalter.”
62 MSL 14 (1979) 168.
63 Ibid., 169.
64 “Literatur,” RLA 7 (1987) 35–66, esp. 35 f. and 48. Cf. my review of RLA 7/1–2 in
BiOr 46 (1989) 346–349.

65 Ancient Mesopotamia (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1964; 2nd ed. 1977) 13.
66 Ibid., 22.
in an article67 which, with some modifications,68 has won wide accep-

tance.69 I have dealt with the archival category in other articles and
books70 and helped to establish a whole school of “archival research”
at Yale.71 In my Ancient Near East: a History (1971), I provided a broader
forum for my views72 (esp. pp. 154–156), and I have refined and reap-
plied them periodically since then, most notably in “The House of
Ur-meme,”73 in “Sumerian historiography,”74 and in “Notes from the
Babylonian Collection.”75
While thus defining and analyzing the concept of canonicity in cu-
neiform literature, I was also developing the concept of a succession of
discrete canons. I distinguished four of these in 1968,76 and defended
this chronology more explicitly in 1976, tying each canon to a major
phase in the cultural and linguistic history of Mesopotamia.77 Specif-
ically, I argued for the successive appearance of an Old Sumerian,
neo-Sumerian, Akkadian, and bilingual (Sumero-Akkadian) canon. I
followed each through its progression from the creation of its individ-
ual components, though their adaptation, to their final “canonization,”
and set each of these stages in its presumed context in the cultural and
political history of Mesopotamia. Much the same could be done, no
doubt, with the briefer histories of other corpora of cuneiform litera-
ture, notably those in Hittite and Ugaritic.
67 “The Royal Inscriptions of Ur: A Typology,” HUCA 33 (1962) 1–43.

68 G. van Driel, “On ‘Standard’ and ‘Triumphal’ Inscriptions,” Symbolae biblicae
mesopotamicae Francisco Mario Theodora de Liagre Böhl dedicatae (ed. M.A. Beek, et al.;
Leiden: Brill, 1972) 99–106; idem, JAOS 93 (1973) 67–74; A.K. Grayson, JAOS 90 (1970)
529 and Or 49 (1980) 156 f.
69 E. Sollberger and J.-R. Kupper, Inscriptions royales sumériennes et akkadiennes (= Litter-
atures anciennes du Proche-Orient 3; Paris: Cerf, 1971) 24–36.

70 E.g. Sumerian Archival Texts (= TLB 3; Leiden: Netherlands Institute for the Near
East, 1973).
71 Hallo, “God, King and Man at Yale,” Slate and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near
East 1 (ed. E. Lipiński; OLA 5; Leuven, 1979) 91–111. On archives cf. also RAI 30 and
M. de J. Ellis, AJA 87 (1983) 497–507.
72 See esp. pp. 154–156: “Archives, Monuments and the Schools.”
73 JNES 31 (1972) 87–95.
74 History, Historiography, and Interpretation (ed. H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld; Jerusalem:
Magnes, 1983) 9–20, esp. pp. 10–12, here: IV.2.

75 JCS 31 (1979) 161–165, here: VIII.2, esp. 161; 34 (1982) 81–93, esp. pp. 84 f.
76 “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition,” JAOS 88 (1968),
72 f, here: IV.1.
77 “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature,” Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild
Jacobsen (AS 20; Chicago, 1976) 181–203, here: I.4, esp. 197–201 with fig. 1; cf. also SIC 1
(1980) 13. My scheme has been adopted in its essentials by W.H.Ph. Römer, Einführung
in die Sumerologie (4th ed.; Nijmegen, Netherlands: Katholieke Universiteit, 1983) 32 f.
Having thus defined and reviewed the concept of canonicity as this

has developed in the field of Assyriology, and more particularly my
own notions about it, I owe you a characterization, however brief,
of the phenomenon. Allowing for such changes as are inevitable in
the course of the one and half millennia or more that separate the
first canonization (ca. 1750 bce) from the last (ca. 250 bce), we can
nevertheless detect some common distinctive features. I will summarize
these in the order of the criteria of canonization already identified
above.78
A. What Lambert called the “systematic selection of literary works,” I

prefer to regard (with Sarna), as the “emergence of a recognized corpus
of classical literature” because what was involved was not, or not only, a
winnowing out from a pre-existing larger corpus of literary works those
intended for preservation but rather, as often as not, the “elevation”
of non-literary works to literary status. Thus, in addition to the simple
selection of certain literary texts for the curriculum, we can trace the
emergence of the canon to at least three other sources, as follows:
(1) The copying or imitation of existing archival79 or monumental
texts.80
(2) The creation of lexical lists (and other “scholarly” texts such as
model contracts, model letters, and mathematical problems) by
(a) systematic retrieval and abstraction from existing literary and
archival texts, (b) their logical rearrangement according to cer-
tain principles of taxonomy, and (c) their suppletion by additional
entries generated by analogy and other principles.81
78 See above, at n. 21 (Sarna); at n. 29 (Lambert); and at nn. 61 f. (Civil and Hallo).

79 E.g., “the literary collection of legal decisions,” for which see Hallo, Studies . . .
Oppenheim (1964) 105; M.T. Roth, Studies . . . Kramer (= AOS 65, 1984 = JAOS 103
[1983]) 279–282. For a comparable phenomenon in biblical literature, see already
J.A. Montgomery, “Archival Data in the Book of Kings,” JBL 53 (1934) 46–52; cf. Hallo,
“Compare and Contrast: the Contextual Approach to Biblical Literature,” SIC3, (1990)
9–16, here: X.2.
80 See Hallo, RAI 17 (1970) 120–122; more recently Jacob Klein, Beer-Sheva 2 (1985)
8* (with note 8), 9* (with note 15); idem, “On Writing Monumental Inscriptions in
Ur III Scribal Curriculum,” RA 80 (1986) 1–7. For a comparable phenomenon in
biblical literature, see Hallo, “The Royal Correspondence of Larsa: 1. A Sumerian
Prototype for the Prayer of Hezekiah?,” Kramer Anniversary Volume: Cuneiform Studies in
Honor of Samuel Noah Kramer (AOAT 25; ed. Barry L. Eichler, et al.; Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Neukirchener, 1976) 209–224, here: V.1; PAAJR 46–47 (1979–1980) 318–321; “Compare
and Contrast,” here: X.2, 10 f.
81 See most recently Hallo, JAOS 103 (1983) 177 f.; BiOr 42 (1985) 636 f.
(3) Conversely, the occasional creation of literary texts reflecting the

lexical lists or grammatical paradigms, or designed to teach lexi-
con and grammar.82
B. The “tendency to produce a standardized text” or what Lambert
describes as “a conscious attempt to produce authoritative editions of
works which were passed” and Civil as “text stability” was accom-
plished by the following five means, among others:
(1) Arrangement of poetry and of scholarly texts in verses or lines
marked by dividing lines, item signs, or other rubrics.
(2) Counting of the resulting lines, or entries, with every tenth line
marked in the margin or in the caesura of poetic lines, and the
total given in the colophon. Lines inadvertently omitted were
often added in the margin or other blank spaces of the writing
surface.83
(3) Glosses in the body of the text which identify variant readings,
pronunciations, meanings of difficult words, etc.84
(4) “Scholia” such as lists of extraneous readings, orally transmitted
traditions, commentaries, and explanatory glossaries.85
(5) Copies from originals of different (usually Babylonian) sites, and
collations of the copy against the original, combined with some
tolerance for divergences between copies of different (usually As-
syrian) sites.86
A startling new discovery has now given us the native terminology for
this procedure. According to I.L. Finkel, “sur.gibil (= za-ra-a) s. abātu
effectively represents the process of ‘canonisation’ so often discussed by
Assyriologists; a text is established from disparate sources to represent
the standard version of the composition.”87 In the text in question,
Finkel translated the native term as “authorized edition.”88 It recurs
82 H. Sauren, “E2-dub-ba-Literatur: Lehrbücher des Sumerischen,” OLP 10 (1979)

97–107; H.L.J. Vanstiphout, “Lipit-Eshtar’s Praise in the Edubba,” JCS 30 (1978) 33–61;
idem, “How Did They Learn Sumerian?” JCS 31 (1979) 118–126; Hallo, JCS 34 (1982)
91.
83 Cf. Hallo “Haplographie Marginalia,” Finkelstein AV (1977) 101–103, here: II.4.
84 J. Krecher, “Glossen,” RLA 3 (1969) 431–440 (with VI. Soucek).
85 Above, note 48.
86 Cf. Hallo, “Nippur Originals,” 239 f, here: III.5.
87 “Adad-apla-iddina, Esagil-kin-apli, and the Series SA.GIG,” A Scientific Humanist:
Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs (ed. E. Leichty, et al.; Occasional Publications of the
Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 9; Philadelphia, 1988) 143–159, esp. p. 150.
88 Ibid., 148, n. 38 and 149, lines 18’ and 25’.
in a medical catalogue published, as chance would have it, in the same

volume.89
C. What has been variously described as “a fixed arrangement of con-

tent” (Sarna) or a “fixed sequence of tablets within a series” (Civil) or
“a reasonably fixed number and sequence of individual compositions”
(Hallo) can best be studied together with the fourth criterion of canon-
ization, namely “the grouping of these compositions into recognizable
books or subdivisions” (Hallo) or “an established sequence in which the
works were to be read or studied” (Sarna), since both purposes were
served by the same means, including the following four:
(1) Exercise texts which excerpt canonical texts in a fixed order, possi-
bly reflecting the procedures of the (advanced) scribal curriculum.
Such exercise texts, previously noted for Assur, Sippar(?), and Ur,90
can also be attested at Nippur91 and Babylon.92 Such texts were
known as im.gíd.da or im.li.gi4.in in Sumerian and imgiddû, liginnu
or later gi.t.tu in Akkadian.93
(2) Miniature master copies of whole collections of Sumerian literary
texts, or what Wilcke has described as “Sammeltafel(n) im Postkar-
tenformat.” On the basis of the latest finds from Old Babylonian
Isin, one such tablet contained some 770 lines (many of the lines
abbreviated!) constituting five entire compositions arranged in the
exact same sequence as they are entered, by title (i.e., incipit), in
two Old Babylonian literary catalogues, namely Nos. 6–10. In all
probability, a similar “postcard” existed for Nos. 1–5 with a total
of some 640 lines.94
(3) Colophons with such data as number of lines (above), date of
the exemplar, its scribe, and its owner.95 In addition, the later
89 G. Beckman and B.R. Foster, “Assyrian Scholarly Texts in the Yale Babylonian
Collection,” ibid., 1–26, esp. pp. 3 f. and 11 rev. 1.5’.

90 JCS 31 (1979) 161, here: VIII.2, notes 4–8. For the examples cited from balag
(lamentation) literature, see now M.E. Cohen, Sumerian Hymnology: the Eršemma, 43,
n. 180; idem, The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia, 17 and n. 28.
91 PBS 1/2:116; cf. R. Borger, HKL I–II ad loc.
92 M. Civil, MSL 14 (1979) 156 f.
93 CAD s.vv.; cf. J.J. Finkelstein, RA 63 (1969) 24 and nn. 1–5.
94 Claus Wilcke, Isin-Išān Bahriı̄yāt 3 (B. Hrouda, ed.; = Bayerische Akademie der
.
Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, Abhandlungen n.F. 94, 1987) 85–89. For other exam-
ples of “abbreviated lines,” cf. J. van Dijk, HSAO (1967) 267 f. and VS 10:94 (Krecher, ZA
58 [1967] 30–65), both cited by Krecher, RLA 5 (1980) 478; M. Civil, Or 54 (1985) 37–45.
95 Hermann Hunger, Babylonische und Assyrische Kolophone (= AOAT 2, 1968).
colophons often include catchlines (“explicits”), i.e., the incipit of

the next tablet in the series or the next series in the canon. The
latter fact, which is particularly instructive for our inquiry, was
first pointed out by Landsberger,96 then noted by myself,97 and
more recently by Civil, who also observed the convergence of
this evidence with that of some of the catalogues, and took the
practice back to Old Babylonian times.98 Many new instances can
be added to illustrate the point by now.99
(4) Catalogues with incipits of successive tablets (= chapters) in series
(= books), or of successive series in the canon. Some catalogues
additionally identify authors, an item of information notably lack-
ing from colophons.100 The catalogues themselves begin to assume
a fixed or “canonical” form, that is, they list compositions in a
fixed order.101 Similarly, the newly recovered “accession lists” of
the library of Assurbanipal tend to list canonical series in the same
order.102
In all, twelve technical features have thus been identified as contribut-
ing to the creation, textual fixation, and sequential ordering of cune-
iform literary texts, and as justifying their description as a cuneiform
canon, or as a succession of cuneiform canons. Many of these features
could also, mutatis mutandis, be said to characterize the Jewish canon in
its masoretic shape, as well. What distinguishes the two is not the par-
ticular techniques of standardization employed, nor is it the degree of
antiquity and hence authority, nor yet of divine inspiration and hence
sanctity attached to each but rather the endpoint of the evolutionary
process at which each arrived.
96 MSL 1 (1937) vii.

97 IEJ 12 (1962) 24, here: I.1.
98 AS 20 (1976) 145 n. 36 (3); cf. idem, Aula Orientalis 7 (1989) 20 for the sequence LÚ
- IZI (both lexical texts) at Emar.

99 For the latest illustration of this point, see the newly discovered exemplar of the
vocabulary proto-Kagal from Isin, which has the catchline of the vocabulary NÍG.GA
according to Claus Wilcke, Isin 3 (1987) 93. Cf. Also Å. Sjöberg, ZA 63 (1963) 2 and 43;
M.E. Cohen, The Canonical Lamentations, 16 f. and n. 27.
100 Krecher, “Kataloge, literarische,” RLA 5 (1980) 478–485. Add Wilcke, Isin 3 (1987)
85 n. 1.
101 First noted by Hallo, IEJ 12 (1962) 24, here: I.1, and JAOS 83 (1963) 168 f., here:
II.1; then by Civil, AS 20 (1976) 145 n. 36; most recently by Wilcke, Isin 3 (1987) 89.
Cf. above, note 49. For the special significance of the catalogue of the craft of the
lamentation-priest (kalūtu), see J.A. Black, BiOr 44 (1987) 31–35.
102 Simo Parpola. “Assyrian Library Records,” JNES 42 (1983) 1–29, esp. p. 6 and
n. 15.
In the Jewish, as in the Christian experience, the process went all the
way. The biblical canon was closed and eventually this was true as well
of Mishnah and Talmud—both Talmudim. The Akkadian canon kept
growing, as is illustrated by the astronomical omina, which were in part
recorded from new observation on wax tablets allowing for alteration,
or from the astronomical diary texts which, beginning probably in
747 bce, were (as I think) intended to provide a new database to replace
the older astrology altogether.103 But such diaries were still being created
eight centuries later, when cuneiform writing ceased altogether and the
arts of the “Chaldeans” or diviners fell into disuse.104 And similarly,
all earlier canons fell victim to the destruction of the Mesopotamian
cultures that produced them before they had achieved fully canonical
shape—i.e., the form of a single compendium that included all “canon-
ical” texts and excluded all others. Parenthetically, it is an irony of mod-
ern scholarship that Assyriologists have been striving for a century to
finish this unfinished task, to produce such a final cuneiform canon
while, paradoxically, biblicists have been striving for over two centuries
(ever since Jean Astruc in 1753)105 to break down the biblical canon into
its hypothetical documents. But that is an aside. What counts is that by
the broad definition, both cuneiform and biblical literature arose out of
a wider context which also produced (and bequeathed to modern redis-
covery) other kinds of written evidence best described, in the cuneiform
case (where it is vastly more extensive) as archival and monumental, in
the biblical case (where it is extremely limited) as occasional and mon-
umental.106
103 See now Abraham J. Sachs and Hermann Hunger, Astronomical Diaries and Related
Texts from Babylonia, vol. 1: Diaries from 652 bc to 262 bc (Österreichische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, Denkschriften 195, 1988).
104 Hallo, “The Nabonassar Era and Other Epochs in Mesopotamian Chronology
and Chronography,” Sachs AV (1988) 175–190, esp. p. 188.

105 Conjectures on the Reminiscences which Moses Appears to Have Used in Composing the Book
of Genesis; cited by Edgar Krentz, The Historical-Critical Method (Philadelphia: Fortress,

1975) 19. Original title: Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux, dont il parait que Moise s’est servi
pour composer le livre de la Genèse.
106 Alan R. Millard, “The Question of Israelite Literacy,” Bible Review 3/3 (Fall
1987) 22–31. esp. p. 22: “Ancient Hebrew inscriptions can be divided into three classes—
monumental, formal and occasional.” His “occasional” category is reserved for graffiti,
which have no obvious analogue in cuneiform, while his “formal” category combines
texts that I would regard as monumental (e.g. seals and seal impressions, inscriptions on
objects) with those best seen as archival (e.g. accounts on ostraca). Cf. also idem, “The
Practice of Writing in Ancient Israel,” BA 35 (1972) 98–111; BA Reader 4 (1983) 181–195;
As against these categories, both cuneiform and biblical literature

can be described as canonical—the former authoritative by virtue of
its relative fixation and its inclusion, in a fixed sequence, in the cur-
riculum of the scribal schools attached to temple or palace, the latter
authoritative by virtue of its being studied in the schools, expounded
in public, and made the basis for legislation and historiography. Both
enjoyed a lengthy history of transmission, but with significant differ-
ences. The Mesopotamian environment probably provided a greater
level of literacy, a more durable writing medium, and a lesser reliance
on oral transmission (probably, indeed, a lower level of ability to mem-
orize) than the Israelite environment. Hence the processes of canon-
ization may have been slower and less effective in Mesopotamia in the
sense that older or divergent textual traditions were less readily elimi-
nated.107 But both traditions ultimately evolved mechanisms for dealing
with such divergent traditions as were found worthy of retention.
In the Jewish tradition, the concept of Torah grew to embrace all
of the canon, but the Written Torah was considered more inspired than
the Oral Torah, and within the Written Torah, the Torah proper, or the
Pentateuch, took precedence over the prophets and these, ultimately,
over the Hagiographa; within the oral law, the Mishnah enjoyed a
comparable precedence over the Tosefta, and both over the Gemarah;
even within the Gemarah, the Babylonian Talmud enjoyed priority
over the Palestinian Talmud in most communities. Even non-canonical
writings such as Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and some of the sectarian
texts known from Qumran and elsewhere were not necessarily banned
from normative circles as seems clear from their appearance in the
Cairo Genizah.
Similarly the Akkadian texts known as “extraneous” were carefully
collected, organized and tradited. Their status may have been less
authoritative than those described as “good” but they were deemed
worthy of preservation in and incorporation into the cuneiform canon.
Their very name suggests a link with the Jewish tradition, for Akkadian
“An Assessment of the Evidence for Writing in Ancient Israel,” Biblical Archaeology Today
(ed. A. Biram; Jerusalem, Israel Exploration Society, 1985) 301–312.
107 Here I part company with S. Talmon’s otherwise excellent exposition of the
contrast between the evolution of biblical and Mesopotamian literature in “Heiliges

Schrifttum und kanonische Bücher aus jüdischer Sicht—Überlegungen zur Ausbildung
der Grösse ‘Die Schrift’ im Judentum,” Die Mitte der Schrift (Judaica et Christiana II; ed.
M. Klopfenstein, U. Luz, S. Talmon, E. Tov; Bern–Frankfurt/M–New York–Paris:
Lang, 1987) 45–79, esp. p. 64.
ahû (ahi"u) is a calque for Middle Hebrew h. is. ônî and Aramaic bārāyâ,
˘ bāraytâ.
fem. ˘ In passing it may be noted that the antonyms of ahi"u are
on the one hand damqu, literally “good,” and on the other ša ˘iškarim,
literally “of the (official) series”—the latter cognate with Hebrew #eškār
(Ps. 72:10; Ezek 27:15) though used in a different sense. In turn, ša
iškarim is used as an antonym to the oral tradition, as when a report
to the Assyrian king at Nineveh (probably Esarhaddon) states: “this
omen is not from the series but from the oral tradition of the masters”
(ša pı̄ ummānı̄ šu).108 The report in question is from Ishtar-shuma-eresh,
himself a master and grandson of the renowned master Nabu-zer-
zuqip, whose library he had possibly inherited.109 Finally, one may note
that Middle Hebrew pārāšâ in the sense of a section of the Pentateuch
is probably cognate with Akkadian pirsu, subsection of a series, or a
subseries.110
We return then to the term canon itself. It occurs already in the Iliad,
in the plural, to identify the “staves which preserved the shape of the
shield” and elsewhere in the sense of straight rod or bar; metaphorically
it is used for “rule, standard,” and the like (Liddell-Scott s.v.). But the
Greek κανν is generally related to Greek κννα or κννη, “pole/reed,”
and this in return to Hebrew qānēh, Akkadian qanū and thence perhaps
ultimately to Sumerian g1 (gin?) = reed. While I am obviously not
suggesting that qanū or gi(n) was the Akkadian or Sumerian word
for canon, or that the language of Mesopotamia had a word for the
corresponding concept, it is worth recalling that at least one biblical
scholar has traced the Tannaitic concern for the fixation of the order
of the biblical books, along with other elements of canonization, via the
Alexandrian model to the cuneiform precedents. Nahum Sarna may
then be my warrant for here introducing the Mesopotamian concept of
canonicity into the discussion of the biblical one. I leave it to others,
largely if not wholly,111 to inject it into the growing debate on the
modern canon.112
108 ABL 519 = LAS 13.

109 S.J. Lieberman, “Why Did Assurbanipal Collect Cuneiform Tablets?” American
Oriental Society Meeting, Chicago, March 20, 1988.
110 Cf. also CAD s.v. nishu (3).
111 Hallo, “Assyriology ˘and the Canon,” The American Scholar 59/1 (Winter 1990) 105–
108, here: I.5.

112 See most recently Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a
Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991). This is the first volume in a new project entitled
Vision, Division and Revision: The Athlone Series on Canons.
x.4
SUMERIAN LITERATURE
Cuneiform texts in the Sumerian language which were edited in the

scribal schools of ancient Mesopotamia and the surrounding Near East,
with the exception of lexical lists, mathematical exercises, and other
purely scholastic genres. Together, the literary and scholastic genres
constitute the “canonical” category of Sumerian texts, and are distin-
guished from the sometimes equally eloquent monumental category
(including law “codes”) on the one hand and from the far more abun-
dant archival category on the other.
A. Scope and Language
Sumerian literature is comparable in sheer size to biblical literature. A

recent survey estimates the number of lines so far recovered at approxi-
mately 40,000; bearing in mind that most Sumerian literature is poetic
in form and that the typical Sumerian verse may be somewhat shorter
than the typical biblical verse, this already compares favorably with the
total of biblical verses in the Masoretic count, recently calculated at
23,097 (Hallo 1988). Much of Sumerian literature still remains to be
recovered.
Most of Sumerian literature is composed in the main dialect (Sum
eme-gir 15) but lamentations recited by certain types of singers and the
speeches of women or goddesses in myths and erotic poetry are in a
different dialect (Sum eme-sal). This dialect becomes more and more
prevalent in the liturgical compositions of the post-Sumerian periods.
The modern rediscovery of Sumerian literature has passed through
several stages, each reflected in contemporary biblical scholarship. The
first stage began in 1873, with the first full editions of substantial num-
bers of bilingual Sumero-Akkadian texts by François Lenormant (1873–
1879). Such texts, mostly of late (i.e., 1st millennium bc) date, translated
each Sumerian line literally into Akkadian. Consisting largely of reli-
gious poetry, they had particular influence on Psalms research. The
second stage dates from about 65 years later, when S.N. Kramer (1937),
Reprinted with permission. D.N. Freedman, The Anchor Bible Dictionary Volume 6, ©1992
Yale University Press, pages 234–235.
718 x.4. sumerian literature
A. Falkenstein (1938), and T. Jacobsen (1939) began to edit unilingual

Sumerian literary compositions dating from the early 2nd millennium
bc. These included many different genres and influenced the study of
corresponding biblical genres, including historiography, narrative, love
poetry, and proverbs. A third stage may be said to have begun a century
after Lenormant with the publication by R.D. Biggs (1974) of the texts
from Tell Abu Salabikh. Together with texts previously known from
Šuruppak and other southern sites, and texts subsequently discovered
at Ebla in Syria, the Abu Salabikh texts expanded the chronological
horizon of Sumerian literature back almost to the beginnings of writ-
ing. The significance of these early Sumerian texts for biblical scholar-
ship remains to be seen.
Given the chronological extent and generic diversity of the corpus,
each genre will here be considered in the approximate order in which
it first appeared in the corpus. Within each phase, the genres will be
treated by focus, which is typically god, king, or (common) man, though
some few genres focus on two or all three. (For a general attempt at
the history of the corpus, see Hallo 1976; for a detailed typology and
bibliography, see Edzard RLA 7: 35–48; for biblical analogies, see Hallo
1988.)
B. Genres First Attested in the Old Sumerian Phase (ca. 2500–2200 bc)
Incantations are already attested at Šuruppak (modern Fara) and Ebla

(Krebernik 1984) and continue to occur on individual tablets through-
out the Old and Neo-Sumerian phases (e.g., Hallo 1985; Jacobsen 1985;
Michalowski 1985). By Old Babylonian times, some were being col-
lected and grouped by subject, e.g., those against “evil spirits” (Geller
1985). In post-Sumerian times, they were often provided with interlin-
ear translations into Akkadian and generally served to ward off the evils
feared from hostile magic or from unfavorable omens. Biblical literature
has no comparable genres, preferring to deal with such ominous symp-
toms by the Levitical laws of purification. But the incantation bowls of
the 6th century ad show that post-biblical Judaism was not immune to
the approach in a Mesopotamian environment.
Hymns to deities and their temples are also attested from a very early
date. Some of the finest are attributed to Enheduanna, daughter of
Sargon of Akkad and the first non-anonymous author in history (Hallo
and van Dijk 1968; Kramer ANET, 573–583). Another high point is
x.4. sumerian literature 719
represented by the temple hymns of Gudea of Lagaš (Jacobsen 1987,

part 7). Like other religious poetry, these genres are reflected in the
biblical psalter.
Sumerian myths and epics are generically also hymns, but confine
praise of their divine or royal protagonist to their concluding doxology,
while the body of the poem is narrative in character. The great gods
(Enlil, Enki) and goddesses (Ninhursag, Inanna) figure prominently in
these myths (cf. Kramer 1937; ANET, 37–57), but so do lesser deities,
especially those worshipped at the religious capital of Nippur, such as
Ninurta (cf. Cooper 1978; van Dijk 1983; Jacobsen 1987, part 4). The
epics concentrate on the legendary rulers of Uruk (biblical Erech):
Enmerkar, Lugalbanda, and especially Gilgamesh (cf. Kramer ANET,
44–52; Jacobsen 1987, part 5). In bilingual form, or in Akkadian adap-
tations, some of these epics survived into the late periods; an Akkadian
fragment of Gilgamesh was found at 14th c. (?) Megiddo, and virtual
quotations from the epic have been identified in Ecclesiastes (Tigay
1982: 165–167).
The common man is notably the focus of wisdom literature, so called
in imitation of the biblical category though wisdom itself is not promi-
nently mentioned, as it often is in Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The
earliest attested wisdom genres are instructions and proverbs. The for-
mer are attributed respectively to the divine Ninurta (Aro 1968) and
to the king of the last antediluvian city, Šuruppak, the Sumerian Noah;
both collections include much practical advice, especially about agricul-
ture (Alster 1974; 1975). Proverbs are attested far more abundantly; by
the early 2nd millennium, 24 discrete collections can be identified and
they survive, sometimes in bilingual form, into the late 1st millennium
(Gordon 1959; Alster 1978). Though biblical proverbs are not directly
related to the Sumerian collections as they are, demonstrably, to Egyp-
tian ones, they often display a remarkable similarity of both form and
substance, as for instance in the catalogue of divine abominations in
Prov 6: 16–19. Almost equally old is the minor wisdom genre of the
riddle (Biggs 1973), called ibilu in Sumerian and hittu in Akkadian; the
latter term is cognate with Hebrew h. îdā. ˘
C. Genres Presumably Originating in the

Neo-Sumerian Phase (ca. 2200–1900 bc)
The deification of the Sumerian king during this phase led to a certain
commingling of sacred and royal literature and to the emergence of
several new genres responding to the new ideology. (Though known
from later copies, their composition can be dated here on internal
grounds.) The king was regarded at once as of divine and human
parentage, the product of a physical union in which the royal part-
ners “represented” deities, most often Dumuzi and Inanna or their
Akkadian equivalents Tammuz (cf. Ezek 8:14) and Ishtar. An extensive
body of poetry celebrated these “sacred marriage” rites and, together
with more strictly secular love poetry addressed to the king or recited
antiphonally by him and his bride, anticipated the Song of Songs in its
explicit eroticism (Kramer ANET, 496, 637–645; 1969; Jacobsen 1987).
Divine hymns now often concluded with a prayer for the reigning king,
presumably for recitation in the temple. But the courtly ceremonial
engendered a new genre of its own, the royal hymn, in which the chief
events and achievements of the royal lifetime were celebrated in non-
liturgical form (Kramer ANET, 583–586; Klein 1981).
True to their ambiguous status during this period, kings were both
authors and recipients of petitionary prayers which took the form of let-
ters. Such letter-prayers were addressed to them, or to “real” deities, by
princesses, officials, and ordinary mortals, and thus provide a precedent
of sorts for the “individual laments” of the Psalter (Falkenstein 1938;
Kramer ANET, 382; Hallo 1968; 1981). New “wisdom” genres also pro-
vided vehicles for describing individual concerns, albeit most often of
aristocratic circles in Nippur. The setting is authentic for this period,
though the details may be fictitious. Thus we have literary records of
trials (e.g., Jacobsen 1959), a letter of Ludingira, “the man of God,” to
his mother at Nippur (Civil 1964; Cooper 1971), and two elegies by the
same (?) Ludingira for his father and wife respectively, one described as
an incantation (tu6), the other as a “wailing” (i-lu) (Kramer 1960). But
perhaps most startling is the “petition (ír-ša-ne-ša4) to a man’s personal
god” in which an unnamed individual laments his fate until finally
restored to health and fortune by his personal deity (Kramer 1955;
ANET, 589–591). The parallels between this text and the archaic prose
frame of Job are striking, and the gap between the two compositions is
in some part bridged by Akkadian treatments of the same “righteous
sufferer” theme, some of which have turned up in the scribal schools of

14th century bc Ugarit (Nougayrol 1968 no. 162).
D. Genres First Attested in the Old Babylonian Phase (ca. 1900–1600 bc)
The collapse of the Neo-Sumerian empire of Ur (ca. 2000 bc) and the
decline of the dynasty of Isin which succeeded it (ca. 1900 bc) inspired
new genres to address new problems. In sacred literature, the “con-
gregational lament” mourned the destruction of cities and especially of
temples at the hands of hostile forces, often conceived as aided or abet-
ted by a disaffected patron deity. Such laments may have served a ritual
purpose: when rebuilding the ruined temple, the necessary demolition
of the remaining ruins could have been punished as sacrilege had not
the blame been laid squarely on enemy shoulders. The laments over the
temples of Ur, Eridu, Nippur, Uruk, and over Sumer as a whole were
all quite specific in recalling the historical circumstances of the disasters
(ANET, 455–463, 611–619; Jacobsen 1987, part 8). Later laments turned
into ritualized litanies which, at ever greater length, appealed to the
deity to desist from visiting further calamities on his or her worshippers
(Cohen 1974; 1981); they form a bridge of sorts to the comparable genre
in the Psalter and to Lamentations, though far inferior to both the bib-
lical and the Old Babylonian compositions (Gwaltney 1983). The latter
themselves may have evolved from earlier compositions commemorat-
ing the fall of Lagaš (Hirsch 1967) and Akkad (cf. Gen 10:10) (ANET,
646–651; Cooper 1983; Jacobsen 1987).
While priestly poets coped with the destruction of temples, royal
historiographers wrestled with the ceaseless change of dynasties. The
entire history of Sumer (and Akkad) was outlined in the Sumerian
King List, a document which traced the succession of dynasties (or
rather of cities) which had ruled the country from the end of the Flood
to the accession of Hammurapi of Babylon (ca. 1792 bc) (Jacobsen
1939). Later recensions prefaced this outline with a version of ante-
diluvian “history” probably borrowed from the Sumerian Flood Story
(ANET, 42–44; Civil 1969; Jacobsen 1987: 145–150). The outline his-
tory of the Hammurapi dynasty and all later Babylonian dynasties was
similarly enshrined in corresponding Akkadian king lists. The Dynas-
tic Chronicle combined both Sumerian and Babylonian traditions in
bilingual format (Finkel 1980). A comparable history of Lagaš was
composed, probably at the court of Old Babylonian Larsa, for both

these cities were omitted from the “official” king lists emanating, most
likely, from Nippur (Sollberger 1967). Sumerian historiography thus has
little in common with the Deuteronomic history or the Chronicler’s
history of Israel, though it can be said to include other products of the
royal chanceries such as royal correspondence, royal hymns, and royal
inscriptions (Hallo 1983).
The Old Babylonian period witnessed the heyday of the scribal
school (Sum é-dub-ba-a), in which Sumerian was taught to Akkadian-
speaking pupils. The daily life of the school is vividly portrayed in
essays about the school and in diatribes between teachers and students
and among the students (Sjöberg 1976; Gadd 1956). Well trained in
debate, the scribes devised a genre of literary disputations for royal
entertainment or religious festivals. These pitted imaginary antagonists
against each other—shepherd and farmer, summer and winter, cattle
and grain, pickaxe and plow, silver and copper—with the winner pro-
claimed at the end by king or deity. A distant parallel may be seen in
the biblical fables such as 2 Kgs 14:9 and Judg 9:8–15 or in the story of
Cain and Abel (ANET, 41–42; Alster and Vanstiphout 1987).
E. The Post-Sumerian Phase (ca. 1600–100 bc)
The fall of Babylon (ca. 1600 bc) led to the closing of the scribal schools
of Babylonia and relegated Sumerian firmly and finally to the status of
a learned and liturgical language. Scribal guilds replaced the schools
in Babylonia, and royal libraries like those of Assur and Nineveh took
their place in Assyria. Here and in the temples, Sumerian texts con-
tinued to be catalogued, copied, recited, translated into Akkadian, and
even newly composed. And with the growing prestige of Babylonian
learning, they were carried beyond the borders of Mesopotamia to the
capital cities surrounding it in a great arc—from Susa in the south-
east to Hattuša in the north and Ugarit in the west. But the scope
of the Sumerian literary heritage thus passed on gradually contracted.
Of the genres devoted to the common man, only proverbs and school
essays survived in bilingual editions; the rest largely disappeared while a
rich Akkadian wisdom literature came into its own (Lambert 1960, esp.
chap. 9). The genres devoted to the king were fundamentally altered
by the new ideology, which rejected his deification; few of the epics
and fewer still of the royal hymns and love songs escaped displace-
ment or recasting in Akkadian guise. Only in the religious sphere did

Sumerian continue to figure prominently. Here, a rich bilingual (and,
on the periphery, even occasionally trilingual) literature continued to
sing the praises of the gods or appeal for their mercy (e.g., Cooper 1971,
1972). More and more, this sacred literature employed the emesal dialect
(Krecher 1967; Kutscher 1975). In bilingual and dialectal form, Sume-
rian literature survived and even revived as late as the Seleucid and
Parthian periods in Babylonia (Black 1987; Cohen 1988). With a his-
tory of two-and-a- half millennia, with a geographic spread embracing
most of the Asiatic Near East, and with a direct impact on Akkadian,
Hurrian, and Hittite literature, Sumerian literature may well have exer-
cised indirect influence on biblical literature. But where and when that
influence made itself felt must be investigated separately for each genre.
Bibliography
Alsler, B. 1974. The Instructions of Šuruppak. Mesopotamica 2. Copenhagen.
———. 1975. Studies in Sumerian Proverbs. Mesopotamica 3. Copenhagen.
———. 1978. Sumerian Proverb Collection Seven. RA 72: 97–112.
Alster, B., and Vanstiphout, H. 1987. “Lahar and Ashnan: Presentation and
Analysis of a Sumerian Disputation.” AcSum 9: 1–43.
Aro, J. 1968. “Georgica Sumerica.” Pp. 202–212 in Agricultura Mesopotamia, ed.
A. Salonen. AASE Helsinki.
Biggs, R.D. 1973. “Pre-Sargonic Riddles from Lagash.” JNES 32: 26–33.
———. 1974. Inscriptions from Tell Abu Salabikh. OIP 99. Chicago.
Black, J.A. 1987. “Sumerian balag Compositions.” BiOr 44; 32–79.
Civil, M. 1964. The “Message of Lú-dingir-ra to His Mother.” JNES 23: 1–11.
———. 1969. “The Sumerian Flood Story.” Pp. 138–145, 167–172 in Atrahası̄s:
The Babylonian Story of the Flood, by W.G. Lambert and A.R. Millard. Oxford.˘
Cohen, M.E. 1974. balag-Compositions: Sumerian Lamentation Liturgies of the Second
and First Millennium bc. SANE 1: 25–57.
———. 1981. Sumerian Hymnology: The Eršemma. HUCASup 2. Cincinnati.
———. 1988. The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia. 2 vols. Potomac,
MD.
Cooper, J.S. 1971. “New Cuneiform Parallels to the Song of Songs.” JBL 90:
157–162.
———. 1972. “Bilinguals From Boghazkōi.” ZA 61: 1–22; 62: 62–81.
———. 1978. The Return of Ninurta to Nippur. AnOr 52. Rome.
———. 1983. The Curse of Agade. JHNES 13. Baltimore.
Dijk, J.J.A. van. 1983. Lugal ud me-lám-bi nir-gál: Le récit épique et didactique des
travaux de Ninurta, du déluge, et de la nouvelle création. 2 vols. Leiden.
Falkenstein, A. von. 1938. “Ein sumerischer “Gottesbrief.” ” ZA 44:1–25.
Finkel, I. 1980. “Bilingual Chronicle Fragments.” JCS 32: 65–80.
Gadd, C.J. 1956. Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools. London.
Geller, M.J. 1985. Forerunners to udug-hul: Sumerian Exorcistic Incantations. FAS 12.
Freiburg. ˘
Gordon, E.I. 1959. Sumerian Proverbs. Museum Monographs 19. Philadelphia.
Gwaltney, W.C., Jr. 1983. “The Biblical Book of Lamentations in the Context
of Near Eastern Lament Literature.” Pp. 191–211 in Hallo, Moyer, and
Perdue 1983.
Hallo, W.W. 1968. “Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tra-
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———. 1976. “Toward a History of Sumerian Literature.” Pp. 181–203 in
Lieberman 1976, here: I.4.
———. 1981. “Letters, Prayers, and Letter-Prayers.” PWCJS 7/1:101–111, here:
IV.2.
———. 1983. “Sumerian Historiography.” Pp. 9–20 in History. Historiography, and
Interpretation, ed. H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld. Jerusalem, here: VI.2.
———. 1985. “Back to the Big House: Colloquial Sumerian, Continued.” Ori-
entalia 54: 56–64, here: IX.1.
———. 1988. “Sumerian Literature: Background to the Bible.” BRev 4/3: 28–
38, here: X.1.
Hallo, W.W., and Dijk, J.J.A. van. 1968. The Exaltation of Inanna. YNER 3. New
Haven.
Hallo, W.W.; Moyer, J. C; and Perdue, L.G., eds. 1983. Scripture in Context II:
More Essays on the Comparative Method. Winona Lake, IN.
Hirsch, H. 1967. “Die “Sünde” Lugalzagesis.” Pp. 99–106 in Festschrift für
Wilhelm Eilers. Wiesbaden.
Jacobsen, T. 1939. The Sumerian King List. AS 11. Chicago.
———. 1959. “An Ancient Mesopotamian Trial for Homicide.” AnBib 12: 130–
150.
———. 1985. “Ur-Nanshe’s Diorite Plaque.” Or 54: 56–64.
———. 1987. The Harps that Once. . . Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven.
Klein, J. 1981. Three Šulgi Hymns. Bar-llan Studies in Near Eastern Languages
and Culture 5. Ramat-Gan.
Kramer, S.N. 1937. “Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World: The Sumerian
Version of ‘Ištar’s Descent.’ ” RA 34: 93–134.
———. 1955. “ ‘Man and His God’: A Sumerian Variation on the ‘Job’ Motif.”
VTSup 3: 171–182.
———. 1960. Two Elegies on a Pushkin Museum Tablet. Moscow.
———. 1969. The Sacred Marriage Rite. Bloomington, IN.
Krebernik, M. 1984. Die Beschwörung aus Fara und Ebla. Texte und Studien zur
Orientalistik 2. Hildesheim.
Krecher, J. 1967. “Zum Emesal-Dialekt des Sumerischen.” HSAO 87–110.
Kutscher, R. 1975. Oh Angry Sea (a-ab-ba hu-lu h-ha): The History of a Sumerian
Congregational Lament. YNER 6. New Haven. ˘ ˘˘
Lenormant, F. 1873–1879. Etudes accadiennes. Lettres assyriologiques, 2d ser.
Paris.
Lieberman, S.J., ed. 1976. Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen.
AS 20. Chicago.
Michalowski, P. 1985. “On Some Early Sumerian Magical Texts.” Orientalia 54:
216–225.
Nougayrol, J. 1968. “Textes suméro-accadiens des archives privées d’Ugarit.”
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1976.
Sollberger, E. 1967. “The Rulers of Lagaš.” JCS 21: 279–291.
Tigay, J.H. 1982. The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. Philadelphia.
indexes
(compiled by R. Middeke-Conlin)
NB: Spellings, transliterations, and references to ancient work are not

always fully consistent in this volume, and the index, while occasionally
providing cross-references, does not try to systematically alleviate this
situation.
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN,
EGYPTIAN, AND CLASSICAL TEXTS
a-ab-ba hu-luh-ha: 35, 82, 156 Anzu Epic: 123, 233

a-dA-rux-rux, (EBUR) e-dA-rux-rux: Apkallu texts: 67, 409
250 Appeal to Utu: 308; see also Letter
Abi-eshuh Hymn(s): 179 from Sin-iddinam to Utu
Adab of An: 206, 211 Appeal of Kussulu to the moon-god:
Adab of An for Ur-Ninurta: 71, 211 324–325
Adab of Ba"u: 209 asakki mars. ūti: 365
Adab of Enlil: 206 Assyrian Elegy: 306
Adab of Inanna: 206 Assyrian King list: 48, 365, 432,
Adab(s) of Nanna: 70 440
Adab(s) of Nergal: 70, 206 Atrahasis: 15, 25, 68, 82, 123, 147,
Adab(s) of Ninurta: 70, 206 527, 617 (var. Flood Narrative)
Adab-Hymns: 146
Adapa: 11, 149 Babylonian Chronicle: 440
adapu-songs: 143 See also adab Babylonian Epic of Creation: see
hymns Enūma Eliš
adapu-hymn to Ba"u: 145 Babylonian Theodicy: 4, 311, 314
Admonitions of Ipuwer: 419–420 Balag of Inanna: 152
Aeneid: 122, 663 Balag of dMah: 251
Archilochus: 613 Balag of Ninurta: see Ninurta Balag
ardat lilî: 613 Balbale of Ba"u: 208
Autobiography of Adda-guppi: 532 Balbale of Enki: 206, 208
Aeneid: 122, 663 Balbale of Inanna: 206, 208
Agum-kakrime Inscription: 246, Balbale of Suen: 153
597 Barrel cylinder of Merodach-Bala-
Ahiqar: 614, 615, 630, 689 dan: 609
Alexandrian canon: 88, 701 BE 31 9: 169, 170
ama-hé-gál-la-dù-a: 145 Berossos: 149, 150, 409, 544, 554, 703
Amar-Sin 3: 179, 247, 320, 323 Birth legend of Sargon: 681
7: 390, 641 (Amar-Suen 7) Blessing of Nisaba by Enki: 19,
AN=Anum: 164, 233, 364 25, 26, 28–38, 99, 394–396,
ana ittišu: 8, 26, 74, 82, 165, 253 513, 542 (see also Hymn to the
Andrews University catalogue: 163, goddess Nisaba, nin-mul-an-gim,
172 Nisaba A)
Angim: 60, 61, 63, 99 Bride of Simanum: 389, 459
Antiphonal song for Inanna: 71; see Bur-Sin * 31c: 206
also Balbale of Inanna * 31d: 206, 221–222
Anubanini rock relief: 480 buršuma-gal: see Great alderwoman
730 ancient near eastern, egyptian, and classical texts
Catalogues (of Sumerian religious dumu-an-na: 145 (var. Child of

and literary texts): 137–153 Heaven)
Child of Heaven: see dumu-an-na Dumuzi and the GALLA-demons:
Chronicle 18: 550 304
Chronicle of Early Kings: 555 Dumuzi laments: 303, 304, 313, 663
Code of Hammurapi: see Laws of (var. Lament(s) for Dumuzi)
Hammurapi Dumuzi liturgies: 180
Code of Lipit-Ishtar: See Laws of Dumuzi texts: 68, 82
Lipit-Ishtar Dumuzi’s Dream: 304, 513, 599,
Codex Hammurabi: see Laws of 638
Hammurapi Dynastic Chronicle: 550, 554, 721
Coronation of Ur-Nammu: 152,
187–202, 209, 458, 481, 484, 485, Ea=A=nâqu: 164
670 EAH 197: 164–165
Counsels of Wisdom: 10, 596, 605 EAH 198 + 200: 164–165
Cruciform monument of Maništušu: Ebla stele: 472
398, 399 egi2-mah-dA-ru-ru: 250
Cuneiform Catalogues of Sumerian Elevation of Ištar: 640
Literary Texts: 140 Emeš and Enten: see Disputation
Curse of Agade: 65, 66, 77, 78, between Summer and Winter
95, 138, 300, 455 (var. Curse of Empire of Sargon of Akkad: 441
Akkad) en-an-ki-a: 144 (var. Lord in heaven
Curse of Akkad: see Curse of Agade and earth)
den-líl-sù-du-šè: see den-líl-sù-rá-šè
Damiq-ilišu 2: 194 den-líl-sù-rá-šè: 163, 172, 192, 394,
* 34: 204, 207 615 (var. den-líl-sù-du-šè, Enlil in

Death of Dumuzi: 304 the Ekur, Great Enlil hymn), see
Death of Gilgamesh: 127, 304 also Hymn to Enlil
Death of Ur-Nammu: see Ur- en-me-du10-ga: 150
Nammu’s death and burial en-me-lám-sù-sù: 145 (var. Oh lord,
Descent of Inanna: 68, 82, 233, 304, adorned with radiance)
351, 366 Enheduanna A: 219
Descent of Ištar: 68, 82 Enki and Inanna: 68, 82, 485, 491
Disc-inscription of Enheduanna: (var. Inanna and Enki)
393 Enki and Ninhursag: 34, 68, 82, 552
Disputation between Cattle and Enki and Ninmah: 69, 82
Grain: 171, 523, 616, 722 (var. Enki and the World Order: 27
Lahar and Ashnan) Enki’s Journey to Nippur: 394, 640
Disputation between Dumuzi and Enlil-bani hymn: 27, 33–34, 185 (var.
Enkimdu: 219, 667 Hymn(s) to Enlil-bani)
Disputation between Pickaxe and * 32: 207
Plow: 485, 527, 611, 638, 722 * 33: 207
Disputation between Summer and A: 394, 396
Winter: 120, 152, 219, 365, 593, Enlil and Ishkur: 68, 82
722 (var. Emeš and Enten) Enlil and Ninhursag: 68, 82
Double steles of Amar-Suen: 476 Enlil and Ninlil: 68, 82, 552, 593
Donation of Constantine: 399 Enlil and Sud: 69, 82
ancient near eastern, egyptian, and classical texts 731
Enlil in the Ekur: 615, see also den- Genealogy of the Hammurapi
líl-sù-rá-šè Dynasty: 48, 320
Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna: 510 General Insurrection: 441
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta: Georgia: 667
526, 620, 621, 648 Gilgamesh: see Gilgamesh Epic
Enmerkar cycle: 36, 67, 82 (var. Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Nether-
Enmerkar epic) world: 124, 529
Enmerkar epic: see Enmerkar cycle Gilgamesh and Agga (var. Akka):
Enūma Anu Enlil: 8, 14, 703, 705, 127, 395, 439, 620
706 Gilgamesh and Huwawa: see Gil-
Enūma Eliš: 11, 25, 123, 544, 556, 559 gamesh and the Land of the Liv-
(var. Epic of Creation, Exaltation ing
of Marduk) Gilgamesh and the Cedar Forest:
Eršemma for Inanna and Dumuzi: see Gilgamesh and the Land of
532 the Living
Eršemma for Utu: 152 Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree:
Epic cycle of Uruk: 526 529
Epic of Creation: see Enuma eliš Gilgamesh and the Land of the
Epic of Erra and Ishum: see Erra Living: 10, 67, 124, 169, 227,
Epic 513, 618, 621, 704, 705 (var.
Epic of Gilgameš: see Gilgameš epic Gilgamesh and Huwawa, Gil-
Epic of Keret: 226 gamesh and the Cedar For-
Epics of Lugalbanda: 78 est)
Eridu Genesis: see Sumerian Flood Gilgamesh Cycle: see Gilgamesh
Story Epic
Eridu Story of Creation: see Found- Gilgamesh Epic: 5, 7, 10, 21, 52,
ing of Eridu 67, 78, 121, 122, 124–126, 148,
Erra Epic: 5, 25, 64, 123, 147, 148, 227, 246, 306, 513, 527, 529, 531,
184, 248, 303, 417, 609, 617 (var. 533, 541, 545, 611, 617, 621, 622,
Irra Epic, Myth of Erra) 627, 669, 670, 682, 703, 704,
Esarhaddon, Sinjirli stela: 480 705, 719 (var. Epic of Gilgameš.
Etana: 6, 123, 147, 225, 621 Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh Cycle,
Evil Spirits: 530, 596, 613, 718 (var. Gilgamesh Epic, Gilgamesh
udug-hul), see also utukkū lemnūti episodes)
Exploits of Ninurta: see Lugal-e Gilgamesh episodes: see Gilgamesh
Exaltation of Inanna: 63, 64, 82, Epic
114, 115, 127, 169, 497, 638 giš-mar=narkabtum: 167
Exaltation of Ištar: 82, 219, see also Great alderwoman: 25, 27, 38, 169
nin-mah ušu-ni gìr-ra (var. buršuma-gal)
Exaltation of Kingu: 544 Great Enlil hymn: see dEn-líl-sù-rá-
Exaltation of Marduk: see Enuma eliš šè
Execration texts: 564 Gudea Cylinder A: 36–40, 101, 138,
230, 257, 267, 365, 513, 637
Fall of Lagash: 40, 299, 330, 456 Gudea Cylinders: 62, 138, 181,
Flood Narrative: see Atrahasis 350, 424, 481 (var. Cylinder
Founding of Eridu: 549, 554, 556 Inscriptions of Gudea, Cylinders
Frontier of Shara 26 of Gudea)
Gudea Statue B: 329 Hymn to Rim-Sin: 376

T: 40 Hymn to the goddess Nisaba: 19,
Gudea stele: 482, 484 (var. Stele of 26, see also Blessing of Nisaba by
Gudea) Enki
Gungunum 2: 194 Hymn to the e2-keš3 of Aruru: 251
Gutian Letter: 290, 437 Hymn to the temple of Enlil in
Nippur: 539
Hammurapi hymn: 26 Hymn to the temple of Nisaba in
Harab Myth: see Theogony of Ereš: 27, 33, 34, 36
Dunnum Hymn to Warad-Sin: 180
HAR-ra: see HAR-ra=hubullu Hymns to Innin: see Hymn(s) to
HAR-ra=hubullu: 8, 26, 146, 148, Inanna
164–169, 579 (var. HAR-ra, ur5- Hymns to Ningirsu: 540
ra=hubullu) Hymns to Nintu as Aruru: 250–251
Hendursa(n)ga hymn: 366, 614 Hymn to Nippur: 483
Herbert Clark Cylinder: 141 Hymn to Numušda: 362
History of the Tummal: 66
Hymn for An in honor of Ur- Ibbi-Sin 4: 194
Ninurta: 71 9: 179, 247, 363
Hymn for Šulgi: See Šulgi hymn(s) 10: 179, 247
Hymn in honor of the é-hur-sag: C: 248
386 Ibbi-Sin correspondence: 270
Hymn(s) of praise to Inanna: 63, Ibbi-Sin hymn: 372
65 Iddin-Dagan 2: 247, 363, 487
Hymn of Šu-Sin to Ninurta: 144 * 6: 206, 511, 513, 638
Hymn to Amar-Sin: 179 * 7: 206, 510
Hymn to Anam: 182 * 8: 206
Hymn to Ba"u: 181, 182 B: 394, 396
Hymn to Enki and Ur-Ninurta: 149 Iliad: 580, 663, 716
Hymn to Enlil: 142, 163, 172, 192, Inbu bēl arhim: 599
221–222 see also dEn-líl-sù-rá-šè In-nin šà-gurx-ra: 63, 64, 127, 161,
Hymn to Enlil-amah: 184 395, 511, 513 (var. Stout-hearted
Hymn(s) to Enlil-bani: see Enlil-bani lady)
hymn Inanna and Bilulu: 304, 532
Hymn(s) to Inanna: 64, 115, 127, Inanna and Ebih: 63, 82, 127, 161,
138, 176, 215–218 (var. Hymns to 395, 511, 513, 638
Innin) Inanna and Enki: see Enki and
Hymn to Ishtar as Agushaya: 123 Inanna
Hymn to Meslamtaea and Lugal- Incantation hymn to Ninurta: 587,
girra: 424 642
Hymn to Nin-imma: 157 Instructions: 77, 120, 302, 328, 420,
Hymn to Nanna: 145 626–628, 630, 664, 667, 719
Hymn to Nanshe: 62 Instruction of Amenemope (Amen-
Hymn to Nergal: 70, 153, 296 emhet): 629
Hymn to Nintu: 25 Instructions of Merikare: 419
Hymn(s) to Ninurta: 61, 63 Instructions of Onchsheshongy
Hymn to Nur-Adad: 176, 180, 374 (Ankhsheshong): 628
Instructions of Shube-awilim: 110 Lady of Wide Understanding: 27,

Instructions of Shuruppak: 51, 33, 34, 38 (var. Nin-geštù-sù,
385, 393, 585, 586, 619, 626, Nisaba Hymn C)
667 Lahar and Ashnan: see Disputation
Irra Epic: see Erra epic between Cattle and Grain
Isin hymns: 185, 210 Lament(s) for Dumuzi: see Dumuzi
Išbi-Erra 2: 247 Laments
* 1: 206 Lament for Eridu: 301, 460
* 2: 206 Lament for Uruk: 301
* 3: 206 Lament of Gilgamesh for Enkidu:
* 3a: 206, 212–215, see also Tigi of 306
Nanâ Lament over the Destruction of
Iškun-Dagan letters: 290, 437 Babylon: 303
Išme-Dagan 6: 424 Lamentation over the Destruction of
9: 190 Sumer and Ur: 23, 24, 138, 301,
10: 247 305, 365, 395, 460, 461
12: 247 Larsa King List: 462
* 9: 206 Laws of Eshnunna: 313
* 10: 206 Laws of Ur-Nammu: 179, 194, 393,
* 11: 26, 206 472, 481, 610
* 12: 206 Laws of Hammurapi: 4, 13, 26,
* 13: 206 49, 65, 609, 480, 609, 631 (var.
* 14: 206 Code of Hammurapi, Codex
* 15: 206, 638 Hammurapi)
* 16: 206 Laws of Lipit-Ishtar: 26, 38, 71, 82,
* 17: 2089 393 (var. Code of Lipit-Istar)
* 18: 37, 206, 208, 209, 215–218 Letter Collection A: 284, see also
* 19: 206 royal correspondence of Ur
* 20: 206 B: 284, see also royal correspon-
* 21: 206, 208, 209 dence of Isin
* 22: 206 Letters and Letter-Prayers:
* 22a: 206 of a crippled woman to Nintin-
A: 491 ugga: 577
Išme-Dagan hymn: 185, 471, 489, from Aba-indasa to Šulgi: 284,
611 292
Izi: 713 from Etel-pi-Damu to Martu: 285
from Gudea to “my god”: 285
ka-ba-a: 25 from Gudea-Enlila to An-mansi:
ka-du8-ha: 25 285, 366, 367
ka gál(a)-tag4: 25 of Gudea-Enlila to Dingir-man-
Kesh hymn: see Kesh Temple sum: 366, 367
Hymn from Inannakam to Nintinugga:
Kesh Temple Hymn: 63, 77, 82, 284, 292, 422
172, 251, 385, 393, 394 (var. Kesh from Inim-Enlila to (his) king: 285
hymn) from Inim-Inanna to Enlil-massu:
King of Battle: see Šar tamhāri 284
King List: see Sumerian King List from Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin: 397
from Etel-pi-Damu to Martu: from Ur-Enlila to the ensi and

285 sanga: 284
from Etel-pi(?)-Enlila to Nudim- from Ur-šagga to “my. . . king”
mud-siga: 285 (Šulgi): 284, 292, 422
from Ludingira to his mother: 75, from Utudug to Ilakn"id: 284
82, 306, 720 (var. Message of from Nanna: 285
Lu-dingira to His Mother) to Utu: 206, 307, 336, 363, see
from Lugal-murub to Enlil- also Appeal to Utu
massu: 284, 292, 422 to Amurru: 323–324, 329, 330
from Lugal-murub to his king: to Enki: 311–313
284 to Rim-Sin: 62–63, 265, 307, 326,
from Nanna-mansi to Nin-isina: 337
285, 362, 367 to Zimri-Lim: 325
from Nanna-mansi: 285 to and from Iddin-Dagan and
from Nin-šatapada to Rim-Sin: Lipit-Ishtar: 292, 422
363, 367, 376–383, 424–427, to Lugal-Murub: 308
428, 432 Letter-orders of Isin: 270
from Nur-Adad: 425 Letter-orders of Ur: 270
from Puzur-Marduk to Šulgi: see Lexical text(s): 7, 13, 58, 77, 82, 159,
letter of Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 162, 168, 169, 290, 392, 394, 396,
from Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi- 511, 558, 578, 610, 616, 617, 627,
Sin: see letter of Puzur-Šulgi to 639, 713
Ibbi-Sin Lipit-Ishtar Hymn: 13, 608
from Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi: 170, * 23: 169, 171, 206, 512, 513,
397 see also Lipit-Ishtar A, Self-
from Puzur-Šulgi to Ibbi-Sin: 398 Predication of Lipit-Ištar
from Sag-lugal-bi-zu to Nur- * 24: 35, 169, 171, 206, 210, 349,
Kabta: 285 see also Lipit-Ishtar B
from Sin-iddinam: 287, 336–339 * 25: 206
from Sin-iddinam to Nin-isina: * 26: 206
285, 325–326, 341–351, 363, * 26a: 206
366 * 26b: 206
from Sin-iddinam to Nur-Adad: * 26c: 206
23 A: 169, 171, 394, see also Lipit-
from Sin-iddinam to Utu: 287, Ishtar * 23
326, 336, 338, 349, 353–367, B: 169, 171, 394–396, see also
423, see also Appeal to Utu Lipit-Ishtar * 24
from Sin-šamuh to Enki: 285, Litany for Enki: 542
311–313, 328, 330, 350, 351, Lord in heaven and earth: see en-
364–366 an-ki-a
from Šulgi to Irmu: 269 Louvre catalogue: 26, 144, 145, 163,
from the daughter (?) of Sin- 172
kašid, king of Uruk, to Me- Lú = ša: 15, 713
slamtaea-Nergal: 285 Ludlul bēl nēmeqi: 311, 608 (var. Poem
from Ugudulbi (“the monkey”) to of the Righteous Sufferer, Righ-
Ludiludi: 284, see also monkey teous sufferer)
letter Lugal-e: 50, 59, 60, 63, 82, 169, 170,
244, 411, 483, 592 (var. Exploits of Nabnitu: 616

Ninurta, Lugal-(e) u4 me-lám-bi Nabonidus inscriptions: 609
nir-gál) Nag Hammadi papyri: 399
Lugal-(e) u4 me-lám-bi nir-gál: see Nanna-Suen 1: 145, 146, 153, 209
Lugal-e 7: 208
Lugal me-lám-huš: 144 (var. Oh Nanna-Suen’s Journey to Nippur:
king, fiery radiance) 486
Lugalbanda and Enmerkar: 364 Nanše-Hymn: 101
Lugalbanda and Anzu: 618 Naram-Sin Legend: 441
Lugalbanda I: 115, 333, 393, 424, Naram-Sin inscriptions: 441
495–516, 527, 537, 619 (var. Nergal and Ereshkigal: 9, 68, 82,
Lugalbanda in the cave of the 123
mountain, Lugalbanda in Hur- Nigga: 162
rumkurra) níg-nam nu-kal: 622
Lugalbanda II: see Lugalbanda Epic nin-geštù-sù: see Lady of Wide
Lugalbanda Epic: 50, 66, 67, 78, Understanding
82, 115, 458, 496, 498, 619 (var. nin-mah ušu-ni gìr-ra: 64, 82
Lugalbanda II) nin-me-šár-ra: 219, 324, 497
Lugalbanda in the cave of the nin-mul-an-gim: see Blessing of
mountain: see Lugalbanda I Nisaba by Enki
Lugalbanda in Hurrumkurra: see nin-mu múš-za-gìn-za na-dar-a: 144
Lugalbanda I (var. My lady, who in your bright
visage ever endures)
Man and His God: 310, 364, 614, Ningal-hymn: 586
616 Nungal hymn: 362, 363, 385, 395,
Manetho: 603 583, 585
Maqlû: 658 Nungal in the Ekur: 583, see also
Marduk Prophecy: 557, 560 Nungal hymn.
Mari prophecies: 686 Ninurta and the Turtle: 82
Marriage of Martu: 22, 68, 82, 322, Ninurta Balag: 61
365 Ninurta Hymns: 63, 64, 144
Message of Lu-dingira to His Moth- Ninurta’s Journey to Eridu: 61
er: see letter of Ludingira to his Nippur King List: 416, 417
mother Nisaba A: see Blessing of Nisaba by
Middle Assyrian catalogue: 140, Enki
144 Nisaba and the Wheat: 27
MLC 1614: 649 Nisaba Hymn C: see Lady of Wide
Monkey Letter: 151, 263; see also Understanding
letter from Ugudulbi (“the mon- Nur-Adad 3: 638
key”) to Ludiludi
My lady, who in your bright visage Odyssey: 663
ever endures: see nin-mu múš-za- Oh hero, laden with awe: see ur-sag
gìn-za na-dar-a ní-gal-gùru
Myth of Erra: see Erra epic Oh king, fiery radiance: see Lugal
Myth of the Pickaxe: 101, 553 me-lám-huš
Myths of Enki: 543 Oh lord, adorned with radiance: see
Myths of Ninurta: 77, 78, 540 en-me-lám-sù-sù
Oh mother, created for beauty: see 392, 397, 398, 422, 428, 458, 459,
ama-hé-gál-la-dù-a 484
Royal hymns of Isin: 207, 208, 210
Philadelphia catalogue: 163, 172 Royal letters of Isin: 270
Poem of the Righteous Sufferer: see Royal letters of Ur: 270
Ludlul bēl nēmeqi Rulers of Lagash: 230
Poor Man of Nippur: 11, 51
Prayer to Rim-Sin: 23 Sacred Marriage text: 179
Proto-Diri: 168 Sarcophagus inscription of Tabnith
Proto-Ea=nâqu: 164, 168, 169, 239 of Sidon: 600
Proto-Izi: 162, 165, 168 Sargon Epic: see Sargon Legend
Proto-Kagal: 713 Sargon Legend: 87, 229, 621
Proto-Lú: 168, 322 Sargon’s cylinder inscription: 609
Proverbs: 551–605 Sargon’s eighth campaign: 273
K166: 596, 605 Sargonic hymn to the temple of
KAR 177 rev. I 32 f.: 598, 605 Enlil: 539
KAR 178 rev. iv 32–65: 598 Sargonic inscriptions: 398, 441,
OECT 5:35 rev. 15 f.: 594, 604 443
Proverb collection 1:23: 595, Scholion to Aristophanes: 613
605 Second plague prayer of Muršili:
3:9: 594, 605 274
3:118: 595, 605 Self-Predication of Lipit-Ištar: 218–
3:161: 595, 695 220
3:168–169: 596, 605 Series of Enlil-ibni: 148–149
3:170: 593, 604 Shipwrecked Sailor: 628
3:171: 595, 605 Silbenalphabet: 15
3:175: 595, 605 A: 239, 578
Proverb about Ningal: 642 B: 164, 239, 578
YBC 7351: 590–591, 604 Silbenvokabular A: 58
Pushkin Elegies: 75, 82 Sin-iddinam 2: 337
5: 362
Return of the Heraclidae: 47 Sin-iddinam hymn: 23
Righteous sufferer: see ludlul bēl Sin-kašid inscriptions: 373
nēmeqi Sin-kašid 5:375
Rim-Sin inscriptions: 348, 424 6: 424
Rim-Sin 6: 146 8: 194, 247
7: 146, 375, 426 Sister’s Message: 156–157
10: 425, 426 Slave and the Scoundrel: 399
12: 194, 425 Song of a priestess to Šu-Sin: 208
15: 426 Song of the Hoe: 483
Royal correspondence of Isin: 284, Statue inscriptions of Gudea: 41, 62
292, 337, 389, 422, 428, 459 (var. Statues of Gudea)
Royal correspondence of Larsa: 285, Statue of Nur-Adad: 336, 349,
288, 307, 328, 337, 370, 376, 423, 473
427, 428 Stout-hearted lady: see In-nin šà-
Royal correspondence of Ur: 75, gurx-ra
179, 284, 289, 291, 337, 385, 387– Stela of the Flying Angels: 472
Stela of Mesha: 446 A: 27, 144, 178, 187, 194, 203, 394,
Stele of Eannatum: 228 471, 485, 585
Stele of Gudea: see Gudea stele B: 138, 240, 372, 593
Stele of Ur-Nammu: see Ur-Nammu C: 145
stele D: 178
Stele of Vultures: 228, 231, 472, 476, F: 153
489 G: 101, 234
Sumerian Flood Story: 156, 417, 527, I: 178
541, 550, 554, 556, 558, 667, 669, R: 98
721, 723 S: 18
Sumerian King List: 62, 68, 103, X: 610
104, 147, 175, 195, 226, 227, 386, Šulgi Hymn(s): 178, 204, 235, 481,
409–417, 438–440, 442, 461, 540, 610 (var. Hymn for Šulgi)
541, 549, 552, 554, 568, 721 (var. Šulgi letter A: 36
King List) Šulgi prophecy: 365
Sumuqan Hymn: 38 Šulgi the Runner: 471, 473, see also
Sun tablet: 399 Šulgi A
Syllabary A: 15, 164 Šumma ālu: 14, 687
Syllabary B: 164 Šurpu: 544
Synchronistic History: 685
Šamaš-ibni mortuary inscription: TCL 15 10: 164
531–532 Tell Dan stela: 446
Šar tamhāri: 440 (var. King of Battle) Temple hymn(s): 24, 40, 63, 64, 74,
šìr-gíd-da of Martu: 144 77, 103, 111, 127, 138, 145, 241,
šìr-nam-gala of Ninisina: 206, 208, 386, 553, 636
243 Temple Hymn No. 9: 64
šir-nam-su-ub dNisaba: 27 No. 13: 363
šìr-nam-ur-sag-gá of Ninsiana: 206, No. 15: 348
208 No. 20: 62
Šu-ilišu * 4: 206, 212 No. 22: 540
* 5: 206 Temple Hymns of Gudea: 719
Šu-Sin 1: 190 Theogony of Dunnum: 556–558
4: 190 (var. Harab Myth)
5: 190 Three Ox-Drivers from Adab: 616
9: 233 Tigi for Išme-Dagan: 249, 611
20: 179, 247 Tigi of Enki: 206
Šu-Sin correspondence: 291 Tigi-hymn to Ba"u: 62
Šu-Sin inscriptions: 75, 390, 459 Tigi of Nanâ: 206, 212–215 see also
Šulgi 3: 489 Išbi-Erra * 3a
4: 179, 247 Tigi-song for Nintu: 72, 249
8: 193, 488 Tigi-song(s) for Ninurta: 55, 72, 209,
37: 194 249
41: 330 Treaty between Marduk-zakir-šumi
48: 139 I of Babylon and Šamši-Adad of
54: 179, 247, 487 Assyria: 609
66: 330 Tukulti-Ninurta epic: 238, 294
71: 488
u4-an-den-líl: 149 ur-sag ní-gal-gùru: 144 (var. Oh

u4-SAR-an-den-líl-lá: 6, 149 hero, laden with awe)
udug-hul: see Evil Spirits Uruk Lament: 527
ul4-ul4-la mu-un-gin: 250 Urukagina 4: 592
Ur catalogue(s): 27, 144, 150, 204, 15: 68
284 Uru-KA-gina reform texts: 610
Ur-Dakuga 1: 194 Utu-hegal inscription: 82, 195
Ur-Namma D: 481 utukkū lemnūti: 531, 596, 613, see also
Ur-Namma the Canal-Digger: Evil Spirits
481 Uzumua myth: 553 (var. Myth of the
Ur-Nammu 3: 191 Pickaxe)
6: 191
7: 179, 247 Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon: 609
9: 193 Verse account of Nabonidus: 6, 149,
15: 194 544
19: 487 Vocabulary of Ebla: 590
22: 193, 487 Votive inscription of Sin-iddinam:
23: 193, 487 270
24: 193, 487
26: 487 Warad-Sin 6: 144
27: 179, 193, 247, 487 9:240
28: 191, 193, 196, 487, 488 19: 640
35: 489 Warad-Sin inscriptions: 144, 425,
37: 179 534
39: 487 Weidner Chronicle: 65, 66, 82, 555,
40: 487, 488 560
C: 641 Weidner God List: 164
Ur-Nammu’s death and burial: 84, Wisdom of Amen-em-opet: 600
184, 211, 304, 485 (var. Death of
Ur-Nammu) YBC 3654: 140, 142 ff.
Ur-Nammu hymn(s): 185, 187, 189– 4605: 341–347
192, 481, 484 4609: 215–218
Ur-Nammu law code: see laws of 4617: 198–202
Ur-Nammu 4620: 274–281
Ur-Nammu royal inscriptions: 193 4623: 499–509
Ur-Nammu stele: 96, 471–491 (var. 4705: 341–347
Stele of Ur-Nammu) 5641: 326–327
Ur Ninurta 2: 247 7205: 274–281
* 27: 206 8041: 647–648
* 28: 206, 212 8630: 274–237
* 29: 206 9863: 651–658
* 30: 206 10885: 500
* 31: 206 13523: 28 ff.
* 31a: 206 16317: 161–165, 168–172
* 31b: 204, 206
Ur-Ninurta hymn: 185 Zakir stele: 334, 685
ur5-ra=hubullu: see HAR-ra=hubullu Zi-pà incantations
BIBLICAL AND RABBINICAL TEXTS
Books of the Hebrew Bible
Genesis 1:1 557 Leviticus 521, 600, 673

1:29 519 17–26 520
2:16 520 17:11 520
2:4b–5 523 18 600
2:15 523 18:23 600
4 225, 669 19:36 602
4:1–2 550–551, 669 20:12 600
4:17 551, 669
5 225, 669 Numbers 7:12–88 684
9:3 520 21:27–30 561
9:4 520 22:4 620
9:5 520 22:23 672
9:13, 14, 16 411
9:5 520 Deuteronomy 126, 520, 521, 602,
10 562, 669, 681 61
10:10 523, 721 7:25 601
11:1–9 562, 661 12:29–13:1 603
11:3 661 12:31 601
11:9b 563 16:16 295
14 565 17:1 601
18–20 565 17:18 682
19:1–9 10 18:9, 12 603
22 565 18:12 601
33:19 562 22:5 601
43:32 603 22:21 600
46:34 603 23:18 f. 601
24:40 601
Exodus 559, 631 25:12–16 602
8:22 603 27–31 682
15 673 27:2 682
21–24 671 27:15 601
21: 28–36 313 28 683
21:35 631 29:22 562
22:15–16 671 29:23–24 683
23:15 295 32:38 527
34:20 295
740 biblical and rabbinical texts
Joshua 566 24–27 688

6:26 562 24:2 10
10:1, 3 566 26:19 535
14:15 561 37:14 333
15:13 561 38 333, 685
21:11 561 38:9 296, 333
38:9–20 314
Judges 1 566
1:3–7 566 Jeremiah 48:45 f. 561
5:2 37 51:39 535
9:8–15 667, 722
9:28 562 Ezekiel 44
9:45 562 1:28 410
14:14 665 8:14 313, 673, 720
14:18 665 27:15 716
15:17 564
Hosea 4:9 10
Samuel 443
Amos 3:12 617
1 Samuel 24:13 629 8:5 602
24:14 613
28:15 535 Jonah 689
28:19 535
Psalms 671, 685, 686
2 Samuel 1:17–27 313
1:18 314 Psalm 16 314, 333, 671, 685
3:33–34 314 22:23 269
26:12 269
Kings 433 27:10 267
31:12 267
1 Kings 5:10 629 35:18 269
5:12 627 38:12 267
6:1, 37 f. 566 41:10 267
7:1 566 44 313
12:26–33 684 45 260
16:24 561 55:13–15 267
16:34 562 56 296, 314, 333, 671,
685
2 Kings 4:31 535 57 296, 314, 333, 671,
14:9 667, 722 685
14:25 148 58 296, 314, 333, 671,
20 333 685
59 296, 314, 333, 671,
Isaiah 1:3 619 685
5:8 593 60 296, 314, 333, 671,
11:7 520 685
14:9 535 68 14, 258
biblical and rabbinical texts 741
72:10 716 Job 114, 125, 310, 311,

72:19 671 314, 668, 719, 720
74 313 3:12 478
76:3 564 11:18 622
79 313 14:12 535
80 313 19:23–27 536
83 313 42:11 121, 668
84:10 269
84:11 269 Song of Songs 223, 240, 674, 700,
93 670 720
93:2 670 4:12–15 674
97 670
97:2 670 Lamentations 261, 686
99 670
104 545 Ecclesiastes 700, 719
110:4 565 4:12 627 670
Proverbs 601, 602, 629, 630, Qoh 4:12 682

719 4:12b 621
1:8, 10, 15 630 11:1 627
1:20 f. 630 12:5 533
3:32 602 12:11 482
6:16–19 601, 666, 719 12:12–14 482
8:1–3 630
8:32 630 Esther 399, 689, 700
10–22:16 627 3:7 682
10:31 f. 615 9:24 682
11:1 602
11:20 602 Daniel 11, 399, 688, 689
12:22 602 1:4 86
13:19 603 12:2 535
15:8 602
15:9 602 Daniel, Bel and the Dragon
15:26 602 522
16:5 602
16:12 603 Ezra: 4:17, 18 333
17:15 602 5:6 333
20:10 602
20:23 602 1 Chronicles 8:12 564
21:27 602
22:17–24:34 629, 689 2 Chronicles 3:1 565
22:20 629 21:12 333
24:9 603 25:18 667
25–29 627 30:1 333
26:25 601 35:25 314
28:9 602
29:27 603
742 biblical and rabbinical texts
Other Works
Al-Asatir: 551 Hodayoth of Qumram: 259

Aramaic Targumim: 700
Megillat Ta#anit: 700
Ben Sira: 700 Mishnah: 666, 700, 701, 714, 715
Book of Jashar: 314
Book of the Upright: see Book of Scroll of Fasts: 700
Jashar
Talmud: 129, 666, 700, 701, 714, 715
Dead Sea Scrolls: 399 Tobit: 399
Genesis Apocryphon: 399

SUBJECTS
Abbreviation: 71, 149, 163, 219, 229 455, 459, 522, 544, 549, 556, 579,
Abstract conceptualization: 543 583, 596, 611, 636, 649, 650, 677,
Akkadian apocalypses: 688 680, 683, 684, 699–703, 705–708,
Akkadian prophecies: 688 712–715, 717
Alexandrian canon: 701 Canonization: 4, 14, 16, 17, 46, 73,
Anonymity: 59, 147 77, 78, 182, 242, 259, 287, 701,
Anthropomorphic representation: 702, 708–710, 712, 715, 716
97, 306, 528 Chancelleries: 263, 290
Archival: 12, 23, 26, 74, 98, 120, 155, Chancery: 388, 429, 430, 436, 437
161, 192, 241, 248, 258, 262–264, Chronicler’s history: 686, 722
294, 305, 336, 353, 385, 387, 389– Chronography: 438
392, 398, 421, 427, 428, 432, 437, Chronographers: 447, 464
438, 455, 456, 459, 499, 511, 522, Classical period: 230–232, 234, 236,
556, 635, 680, 684, 707, 708–710, 237, 304, 424, 480, 668, 670
714, 717 Commentaries: 8, 578, 579, 705, 706,
Assurbanipal’s Library: 7, 11–13, 16, 711
53, 55, 71, 244, 713 Common rhythm: 44
Comparative approach: 17, 45, 56,
Babylonian Dark Ages: 137, 237 287, 288, 677–679
Basilomorphism: 97 Congregational thanksgivings: 260
Binding of Isaac: 565 Covenant Code: 631
Biographical collage: 224 Cult-statue: 24, 44, 96, 99, 295, 673
Blessing of Moses: 527 Curriculum: 13, 15, 49, 61, 64, 65,
Book of the Covenant: 313, 671 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 85, 87–89,
91, 102, 103, 116, 118, 119, 121,
Cain and Abel: 667, 722 129, 164, 169, 171, 172, 185, 204,
Canon: 8, 14–17, 20, 50, 54, 64, 65, 211, 218, 240, 258, 263, 290, 292,
73, 74, 76, 77–81, 87–89, 91, 114, 295, 338, 389, 395, 397, 427, 443,
117–119, 138, 168, 182, 208, 244, 540, 578, 588, 625, 628, 629, 710,
257, 258, 288, 299, 301, 393, 399, 712, 715
436, 454, 539, 564, 597, 629,
677, 680, 682, 685–688, 690, Deification: 35, 95–98, 102, 210, 455,
699–701, 705–707, 709, 710, 712– 543, 720, 722
716 Deification of Kings: 210
Canonical compositions: 5, 6, 15, Deuteronomistic history: 685, 686,
20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 52, 58, 62, 67, 722
73, 74, 87, 119, 123, 125, 140, 161, Divine parentage: 229–231, 238
164–168, 186, 241, 244, 259, 261, Doxology: 38, 39, 60, 66, 69, 74,
262, 293, 296, 321, 336, 387, 391– 100, 166, 189, 205, 207, 209, 260,
393, 399, 400, 421, 422, 428, 432, 275, 486, 669, 719
744 subjects
Evil spirits: 530 Novelistic treatment: 306

Extra-canonical compositions: 185 Novella: 75, 391, 688, 689
Fidelity: 48, 58, 59, 65, 87, 247 Observation: 8, 9, 20, 99, 168, 205,
414, 429, 435, 462, 630, 658, 700,
Gemarah: 715 714
Genealogical record: 48 Oral Torah: 169, 700, 715
Generalization: 543 Oral transmission: 4, 5, 11, 48, 51,
Genre-history: 59, 288, 314,421, 664, 67, 73, 76, 77, 625, 665, 677, 706,
680, 683, 685, 686 711, 715, 716
Gospels: 700
Great rebellion against Naram-Sin: Palace of Šulgi: 64, 386
443 Parody: 47, 61, 104, 300, 325, 424,
540
High Sargonic period: 77, 96–97, Pattern of usurpation: 193, 197, 291,
435 398
Historical kernel: 191, 434, 441, 442, Pentateuch: 88, 499, 677, 684, 700,
460 701, 715, 716
Holiness Code: 520, 602 Period of warring kingdoms: 186
Personal deity: 194, 237, 261, 293,
Individual laments of the Biblical 308, 324, 329, 641, 720
Psalter: 53, 256, 267, 274, 287, Pilgrim songs: 260
314, 333, 720 Poetic biography: 191
Prayer of Hezekiah: 296, 339, 340
Legend psalms: 260 Priestly Code: 521
Letter-reports: 336 Primeval history: 523, 550, 562
Lexicography: 45, 205, 392, 589, Promulgation (of date formulas): 23,
604, 708 49, 520
Library of Alexandria: 701 Prophets: 700, 715
Literature as politics: 437 Psalm of Hezekiah: 314, 333–335
Long peace: 103, 186, 190 Psalms of Sirah: 259
Psalms of Solomon: 259
Model contracts: 74, 82, 165, 283, Psalter: 20, 53, 255–261, 267, 274,
389, 580, 710 287, 296, 313, 314, 333, 400, 670,
Monumental: 12, 25, 26, 28, 74, 76, 685, 686, 708, 719–321
77, 115, 119, 190, 191, 205, 223, Pseudepigraphical attribution: 62,
247, 258, 266, 294, 296, 335, 336, 148
340, 386, 389, 391, 393, 394, 397,
398, 421, 424, 427, 428, 432, 442, Recension(s): 62, 67, 103, 115, 121,
459, 472, 477, 483, 611, 636, 663, 123, 125, 126, 163–170, 175, 302,
684, 685, 707, 708, 710, 714, 717 386, 416, 439, 491, 501, 529, 540,
Moses tale: 229 549, 599, 615, 704–707, 721
Moses’ birth: 681 Renaissance: 99 (Neo-Sumerian),
Myths of origin: 68 230 (Lagash)
Rhetorical strategy: 328
Narrative of the Aqeda: 565 “Romance” of Joseph: 689
New Year: 22, 23, 25, 232, 429, 559 Royal Cemetery of Ur: 63, 128
subjects 745
Sacraments: 21, 100, 233 Temple of Nanna at Ur: 641

Sacred marriage: 22, 71, 90, 101, Temple of Nergal at Gudua: 372
102, 179, 210, 229, 231–236, 238, Temple of Ningal: 479
304, 477–479, 514, 673, 720 Temple of Ninlil at Nippur: 348
Scribal schools: 13, 15, 16, 49, 60, Temple of Ninsun: 197
69, 73, 77–19, 86, 101, 102, 116, Temple of Solomon: 521, 565, 673
118–120, 165, 169, 171, 239, 240, Throne name: 228
242, 266, 290, 296, 301, 310, 353, Topos: 10, 37, 38, 46, 188, 189, 267,
385, 387, 389, 391, 392, 393, 397, 363, 484, 485, 513, 580, 610, 611,
422, 458, 539, 590, 628, 629, 665, 682, 683, 690
668, 669, 715, 717, 721, 722 Torah: 88, 700, 703, 715
Song of Deborah: 37 Tosefta: 701, 715
Tower of Babel: 563, 661
Table of Nations: 523, 562, 563, 567, Triteuch-laws: 686
681
Telescoping: 444 Virtual ablative: 349
Temple of Amurru in Nippur: 162
Temple of Enki at Eridu: 197, 640 Wisdom psalms: 260
Temple of Enlil at Nippur: 191, 197, Witch of En-Dor: 535
235, 240, 539, 641 Writings: 700
Temple of Enmešarra: 534 Written Torah: 700, 715
Temple of Inanna: 391
Temple of Nabu: 61 Zion Songs: 260
PERSONAL NAMES
Aba-indasa: 294 Berossos: 150, 409, 552

Abel: 526, 527, 567, 722 “Bingani-šar-ali”: 439
Abi-ešuh: 65, 137, 180, 184, 241 Bur-Sin: 180, 206, 221, 363, 386, 462
Abimelech: 562 Bus.s.ulu: 579
Abisare: 189
Abner: 314 Cain: 551, 562, 667, 669
Abraham: 47, 565, 681 Callimachus: 701
Adda-guppi: 176 Chanoch: 551
Adam: 87, 225, 289, 551, 681 Chaucer: 88
Adapa: 6, 87, 149, 150, 289, 544 Chi"el: 562
Agum II: 184 Cicero: 128, 129
Agum-kakrime: 246, 597
Agur: 629 Damiq-ilišu: see Damqi-ilišu
Ahab: 562 Damqi-ilišu: 171, 183–184, 194, 204,
Akka: 560 320, 414, 439
Ahiqar: 51, 689 Daniel: 86, 129, 689
Alumb(i)umu: 320 Darius I: 609
Alulim: 289 David: 445, 565, 566, 685
Amar-Sin: 235, 291, 386, 390, 291, Djoser: 626
391, 422, 484, 489, 560 (var.
Amar-Suen(a)) Eannatum: 138, 145, 181, 201, 231,
Amen-em-Ope(t): 90 235, see also Lumma, Humma
Ammi-ditana: 183, 184, 190 Eber: 681
Ammi-s.aduqa: 137, 320 En-entar-zi: 290
Amos: 127, 662 En-me-du10-ga: 150
Anam: 182, 184, 185, 231, 374, 375, En-me-galam-ma: 149
425 Enoch: 551, 562, 669
Aplaia: 244 En-Shakushanna: 94
Apollonius Rhodus: 701 Enannatum(ma): 177
Arib-atal: 390 Enheduanna: 24, 62–64, 77, 90, 95,
Arrabu: 244 115, 127, 138, 145, 163, 176, 229,
Assurbanipal: 53, 54, 243, 244, 246, 386, 393, 423, 455, 673, 718
247, 441, 531, 609, 629 Enkidu: 52, 219, 530, 627, 705
Ashur-etel-ilani: 532 Enlil-alša: 294
Aviram: 562 Enlil-amah: 184
Enlil-bani: 71, 176, 180, 182, 184,
Balaam: 672 185, 207, 240, 292, 373, 374, 422,
Balih: 226 544, 608, 703
Baruch: 114 Enlil-ibni: 147, 149
Bel-gašir: 196 Enlil-massu: 292, 294
748 personal names
Enlila-išag: 195 Ilan-šemea: 373

(En)mebaragesi: 66 Imhotep: 626
Enmerkar: 227, 289, 409, 410, 510, Inannaka: 294
514, 560, 719 Inim-Inanna: 391
En-nirgalanna: 489 Iphuha: 390
Enosh: 225 Irad: 551, 669
Epimenides: 464 Irdanene: 183, 374, 375, 426
Erra-imitti: 71, 185, 373 Irmu: 291, 484
(E)saggil-kı̄nam-ubbib: 4 Isaac: 565
Esther: 689 Israel: 681
Etana: 225–227 Išbe-Irra: 70, 147, 148, 179, 206, 212,
Euēchoios: 409, 410 291, 398, 424, 459, 462
Euēchoros: 409 Iškun-Dagan: 290, 437
Ezekiel: 313 Išme-Dagan: 71, 179, 190, 206, 215,
300, 372, 424, 441, 460, 462, 553,
Gideon: 562 610
Gilgamesh: 66, 67, 87, 90, 122, 124, Ištar-šuma-ereš: 716
125, 147, 304, 514, 530, 617, 627, Išullanu: 617
705, 719 Haman: 682
Gudea: 24, 25, 27, 36, 39–41, 61, 62, Humma: 181, see also Eannatum,
95, 99, 101, 138, 145, 177, 181, 184, Lumma
194, 230, 235, 266, 267, 285, 329,
424, 483, 486, 719 Jacob: 672
Gulkishar: 184 Jeremiah: 3, 114, 314
Gungunum: 189, 190, 194, 373, 558 Jerome: 399
Job: 121, 668
Hammurabi: see Hammurapi Jonah: 148
Hammurapi: 6, 49, 54, 122, 129, 137, Joseph: 689
175, 180, 183, 184, 186, 194, 237, Joshua: 562, 566
248, 301, 307, 321, 334, 335, 375, Josiah: 53, 314, 520
385, 440, 441, 458, 472, 480, 481, Judah: 566
565, 610, 611, 613, 628, 721 (var.
Hammurabi) Kabti-ilāni-Marduk: 5, 147
Hamor: 562 Kadashman-Enlil: 184
Hardjedef: 626 Kaku: 196
Hazael: 446 Kalibum: 410
Heidegger: 89 Keret: 226
Hezekiah: 288, 340, 671, 685 Khōmasbēlos: 410
Hummuru: 579 Kirta: 226
Hunzû: 579 Ku-Bau: 560
Kubbulu
Iarlagan: 196 Kunši-matum: 389, 390, 459
Ibbi-Sin: 147, 179, 192, 194, 236, 371, Kurû: 579
372, 397, 422, 424, 456–458, 461,
463 Lamassi(-Assur): 324
Iddin-Dagan: 179, 206, 292, 372, Lemuel: 629, 666
422, 424, 462 Lipit-Enlil: 185, 241, 373
personal names 749
Lipit-Ištar: 70, 71, 179, 189, 206, 218, Neriya: 114

292, 374, 387, 422, 462, 610, 671 Nietzsche: 89
Lisina: 689 Nin-Hedu: 196
Livy: 453 Nin-kagina: 196
Lu-dingir(r)a: 240, 305, 689 Nin-šatapada: 307, 326, 370, 375,
Lukalla: 586 388, 389, 423, 424, 427, 429
Lugina: 586 Niš-inišu: 375, 424
Lu-Nanna: 147 Ni"urum: 139
Lugalbanda: 194, 228, 374, 375, 498, Noah: 51, 225, 520, 527, 545, 562,
513–515, 523–527, 618, 619, 719 667, 669
Lugal-melam: 391 Nur-Adad: 22, 23, 176, 180, 182, 184,
Lugal-murub: 294, 308 185, 319, 336, 340, 374, 425
Lugalzagesi: 26, 94, 228, 300
Lumma: 145, 181, see also Eanna- Oannes: 149, 150, 544
tum, Humma Odysseus: 122
Oedipus: 665
Manana: 387 Omri: 561, 562
Manasseh: 53
Maništušu: 99, 138, 229, 439 Plato: 86, 89, 91
Marduk-zakir-šumi I: 609 Ptahhotep: 626
Melchi-zedek: 565, 566 Pussulu: 579
Meli-šipak: 248 Pušam: 390
Mesa: 612 Puzur-Assur: 390
Mesannepada: 612 Puzur-Marduk: 170, 291, 398, see
Mesilim: 228, 612 also Puzur-Šulgi
Meskiaggašir: 227 Puzur-Nirah: 560
Miriam: 672 Puzur-Numušda: 193, 291, 398, see
Mordechai: 689 also Puzur-Šulgi
Moses: 229, 672, 673, 681, 682 Puzur-Šulgi: 170, 193, 291, 292, 398,
Mu-dam: 225 see also Puzur-Marduk, Puzur-
Murašû: 249 Numušda
Muršili I: 560
Qayin: 551
Naama: 225 Qišti-Ea: 170
Nabi-Enlil: 294, 391
Nabonassar: 599, 688 Rim-Sin (I): 75, 176, 180, 182, 185,
Nabonidus: 99, 305, 532 194, 241, 265, 307, 321, 326, 330,
Nabu-šum-iškun: 599 336, 370, 375, 388, 423–427, 556,
Nabu-zer-zuqip: 716 558
Nammahni: 196 Rim-Sin II: 138, 385
Namzitarra: 689 Rimut-Gula: 242
Naplanum: 462
Nazimaruttaš: 15, 242, 703 Saggil-kinam-ubbib: 311
Naram-Sin: 62, 65, 95–97, 99, 100, Samium: 373
138, 177, 195, 228, 229, 236, 300, Samson: 665
370, 435, 439–441, 443, 444, 455, Samsu-ditana: 441
472, 482, 560, 563 Samsu-iluna: 31, 71, 137, 165, 166,
750 personal names
171, 175, 180, 183, 184, 241, 242, Šulgi(r): 22, 34, 50, 77, 100, 101, 139,
248, 385, 458 147, 176, 178, 179, 186, 193, 194,
Sappho: 90 232, 234, 235, 237, 240, 265, 374,
Sargon (of Akkad): 24, 62, 87, 90, 390, 393, 425, 460, 472, 481,
95, 99, 127, 138, 176, 177, 228, 483, 484, 488, 560, 610, 611,
229, 236, 290, 300, 428, 435, 439– 671
441, 443, 444, 455, 478, 480, 555, Šuruppak: 626, 667, 669
560, 565, 673, 718
Sargon I (of Assyria): 441 Tabnit: 536
Sargon II: 9, 535, 681 Taqı̄š(a)-Gula: 64, 242
Saul: 313, 535 Thucydides: 453
Seguv: 562 Tiglath-Pileser I: 54, 60, 243, 560
Sennacherib: 9, 560 Titus: 464
Sharruken: see Sargon Tukulti-Ninurta I: 243, 244, 249,
Shechem: 562 309, 560, 563
Shem: 563, 681 Túl-ta-pà-da: 149
Shemer: 561 Tuta-napshum: 370
Siaum: 558
Si-dù: 147, 148 U4-an-du10-ga: 150
Simon: 566 Ur-Abba: 196
Sin-iddinam: 23, 75, 180, 267, 296, Ur-Ba"u: 32, 230
307, 308, 314, 329, 335–338, 340, Ubburu: 579
374, 423, 473, 687 Ur-Dakuga: 194
Sin-iqišam: 180, 362, 374, 425 Ur-dun: 291, 391
Sin-kašid: 62, 182–184, 194, 267, Ur-gar: 196
285, 326, 337, 370, 373, 375, 388, Urgigir: 370, 371
423, 425 Ur-Meme: 391, 421, 428, 459
Sin-liqi-unninni: 5, 147, 705 Ur-Nammu(k): 22, 62, 94, 96, 100,
Sin-muballit.: 374 101, 176, 178–180, 184, 187–198,
Solomon: 90, 259, 445, 627, 666, 231, 234, 235, 304, 371, 374, 386,
681 428, 472, 480, 481, 483, 485, 487–
Sukalletuda: 617 489, 491, 671
Sumu-Abum: 319 Ur-Nanše: 576
Sumu-la"el: 320, 350, 441 Urnigin: 370
Šamaš-šum-ukin: 244 Ur-Ninurta: 71, 149, 179, 206, 373,
Šamši-Adad (I): 440–442, 455, 533, 387
609, 613, 628 Ur-šagga: 266, 292, 294
“Šargani-šar-ali”: 439 Ur-Utu: 195, 325
Šar-kali-šarri: 96, 97, 100, 230, 435 Ur-Zababa: 560
Šarrum-bani: 291 Uruinimgina: see Urukagina
Šubburu: 579 Urukagina: 138, 228, 299, 456, 592
Šu-ilišu: 70, 71, 179, 189 Us.s.ulu: 579
Šu-Marduk: 398 Utnapištim: 533
Šu-Numušda: 398 Ù-tu-abzu: 150
Šu-Sin: 63, 75, 102, 144, 178, 179, Utu-hegal: 66, 94, 191, 192, 195–197,
190, 208, 231, 284, 386, 390, 428, 371, 386, 442, 560
459, 462, 560, 642 Utukam: 196
personal names 751
Warad-Sin: 180 Zimri-Lim: 116, 308

Zinu: 117, 398
Yasmah-Adad: 308, 613 Ziusudra: 156, 527, 669
Zuqaqı̄p
Zabaia: 373 Zuzu: 294, 422
Zenodotus: 701
DIVINE NAMES
Agušaya: 123 187, 188–194, 211, 218, 228, 235,

Aliyin: 565 265, 270, 302, 348, 370, 375, 391,
Amurru: 320, 321, 326, 329 425, 426, 461, 483, 485, 486, 488,
An(u): 25, 64, 71, 95, 145, 156, 164, 489, 525, 533, 539–541, 548, 593,
211, 348, 371, 375, 425, 426, 525, 670, 719
566 Enmešarra: 534, 535
Anunna: 483 Ereškigal: 68
Anzu: 618, 619 Erra: 148 (var. Irra)
Aruru: 244, 245, 249
Asalluhe: 350, 541 Gatumdu(g): 38, 230, 267
Asare: 641 Geštinanna: 303
Assur: 246 Gula: 348, 349
Astarte: 159, 603
Ašimbabbar: 188, 193, 485, 486 Haia: 38, 40, 74, 104
Ašnan: 35 Haharnum: 557
Aya: 104 Hayyashum: 557
Hermes: 530
Ba"al: 565 Huwawa: 627, 705
Ba"u: 104, 182, 195, 228, 478, 540
Bel: 555 Inanna: 34, 64, 68, 87, 90, 95, 101,
115, 127, 152, 220, 228, 231, 233,
Clio: 453 235, 302–304, 477, 489, 510, 513,
514, 516, 532, 558, 593, 603, 619,
Damu: 268, 273, 303, 339 641, 673, 719, 720
Dingirmah: 348 Ištar: 95, 123, 480, 558, 607, 617, 720
Dumuzi: 22, 67, 68, 71, 87, 90, 101, Išum: 123
215, 231–233, 303, 304, 310, 313,
370, 532, 673, 720 Kusu: 35
Duttur: 303
Latarak: 34
Ea: 150, 540–542 Lugalgirra: 371–373, 426–427
El: 565 Lugal-uru(b): 228
Elkunirša: 565 Lulal: 34, 233
Enki: 39, 40, 104, 188, 193, 211, 228,
265, 266, 306, 350, 375, 426, 476, Manungal: 583
525, 539–544, 548–550, 640, 641, Marduk: 25, 65, 66, 104, 293, 303,
646, 719 308, 311, 417, 541, 559–561,
Enkimdu: 667 596
Enlil: 35, 39, 40, 56, 65, 66, 72, 87, Mardu: see Martu
95, 103, 104, 141–143, 156, 164, Martu: 194, 265, 306, 321, 322, 326
754 divine names
Meslamtae"a: 182, 194, 371–373, 375, 363, 584, 591, 592, 595, 666, 667,
425, 426 719
Mnemosyne: 453 Nisaba: 27, 28, 33, 34, 36–40, 74,
104, 166, 228, 396, 597
Nabû: 597 Nudimmud: 193, 550
Nanibgal: 36, 396 Numušda: 34, 321, 322, 398
Nanna(-Suen): 95, 115, 176, 193, 195, Nunamnir: 193
234, 265, 362, 477, 479, 480, 488, Nungal: 38, 583–588
489, 638
Nergal: 194, 211, 265, 296, 372, 425 Pabilsag: 348
Ninazu: 38 Polymnia: 453
Nindinugga: see Nintinug(g)a
Nindub: 36 Rephā"îm: 535
Nin-egal: 585 Rešeph: 159
Ningal: 24, 38, 233, 338, 479, 480
Ningirsu: 34, 61, 62, 66, 104, 228, Sin: 188, 193
244, 329, 488, 540 Sphinx: 262, 665
Ningizzida: 194, 357, 374 Suen: 34, 143, 486, 584, 593–595
Ninhursag: 68, 228, 248, 348, 525, Sutitu: 233
719 Šamaš: 602, 705
Ninkarrak: 348, 349 Šara: 233
Ninkasi: 510 Šerda: 104
Ninlil: 39, 68, 87, 246, 348, 488, 516,
540, 548, 593 Ti"amat: 559
Ninsun: 193, 194, 232, 233, 303, 374
Ninšubur: 294, 306, 325 Uraš: 39, 348
Nintinug(g)a: 265, 306, 328, 432, 544 Utu: 104, 193, 265, 270, 307, 329,
Nintu(r): 34, 56, 72, 244, 248, 249, 338, 423, 584, 591, 592, 594, 619
348, 550
Ninurta: 34, 50, 55, 56, 60, 61, 66, Za(n)qara: 515, 525
70–72, 77, 144, 170, 211, 244, 249, Zeus: 453
GEOGRAPHIC NAMES, ETHNICA,
AND NAMES OF SANCTUARIES
Abu Salabikh: 51, 58, 63, 77, 111, Bit-Dakkuri: 532

320, 484, 718 Byblos: 536, 614, 665
(é-)Abzu: 640, 641
Ad-Dair: 319 (var. Ed-Der) Canaan: 521, 561
Adab: 102 Carchemish: 564
Agade: 95, 96, 103, 194, 257, 300, Chaldeans: 714
442, 455, 555 (var. Akkad) Cedar Forest: 627
Akkad: see Agade
Akšak: 415, 560 Der: 9, 371, 373
Āl-šarrāki: 642 Devir: 561
Alalakh: 78, 601 Dilmun: 348
Alexandria: 88 Diyala: 270, 295
Amarna: 9, 78, 87, 115, 117, 564 Drehem: 161, 372
Amorite(s): 6, 48, 225, 231, 319–322, Dunnum: 427, 556
365, 389, 422, 444, 457, 459, 536, Dur-Anim: 371
565, 631 Dur-ilim: 371
Amurru: 319 Durum: 369–376, 423, 424, 426, 427
Anakites: 561
Anšan: 61 Ebih: 127
Apsû: 417, 497, 549 Ebla: 87, 319, 320, 564, 635, 718
Arahtum: 322 Ed-Der: See Ad-Dair
Aratta: 36, 50, 66, 90, 227, 496, 523, É-engur: 640
543, 669 Egalmah: 348
Assur: 9, 11, 13, 16, 60, 79, 141, É-geštú: 36
186, 211, 242, 243, 294, 476, Ekimar: 301, 460
531, 533, 564, 583, 598, 705, 712, É-kiš-nu-gál: 197
722 Ekur (in Nippur): 95, 191
Elam: 61, 338, 461
Babylon: 11, 65, 78–80, 104, 137, 178, El-Amarna: See Amarna
180,194, 204, 237, 242, 294, 301, Elamite(s): 290, 457, 459, 531
308, 319, 339, 340, 350, 374, 458, Emar: 232, 564, 628, 713
462, 532, 541, 548, 552, 554–556, É-mes-lam: 272
558–561, 563–565, 599, 614, 631, Eniggar: 348
712, 722 Eninnu: 24, 41
bad-igi-hursanga: 291, 398 Eridu: 40, 100, 104, 111, 149, 189,
Bad-tibira: 304, 554 192, 193, 197, 242, 426, 511, 539–
Bahrein: 552 541, 548–554, 641, 669, 721
Bassetki: 95 Ereš: 36, 558
756 geographic names, ethnica, and names of sanctuaries
Erech: 90, 301, 523, 563, 669, 719 Jebel Hamrin: 124, 127
Esabad: 349 Jebusites: 566
Esagila: 559 Jericho: 562, 567, 681
Ešnunna: 97, 102, 186, 204, 398, Jerusalem: 9, 117, 521, 548, 559, 560,
440, 631 564–567, 673, see also Rushali-
Etemenanki: 559 mum
É-temen-ní-gùru: 197 Jordan (river): 446, 566
Eunamtila: 534
Euphrates: 188, 229, 303, 322, 441, Kalah: 8, 14, 125
459, 642, 661 Kallassu: 479
Ezagin: 36 Kalhu: 598
Ezida: 599 Kar-Kemosh: 564
Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta: 560
Failaka: 552 Karzida: 477
Fara: 51, 58, 77, 138, 289, 319, 320, Kassites: 79
635, 718 Kazallu: 193, 291, 292, 322, 398
Keši: 149
Girlumturra: 398 Khattusha: see Hattusha
Girsu: 478, 540, 642 Kiriath-arba: 561
Greece: 47, 113, 128, 521, 547 Kiriath-sannah: 561
Gutian(s): 65, 66, 94, 191, 195, 197, Kiriath-sefer: 561
290, 300, 303, 432, 437, 558 Kiriath-Sihon: 561
Kirga: 300
Haifa: 670 Kisiga: 372, 558
Halab: 564 Kiš: 66, 90, 103, 157, 175, 218, 225,
Hattusa: see Hattusha 227,409, 410, 412, 413, 416, 439,
Hattusha: 14, 16, 75, 78, 87, 90, 167, 549, 552, 560, 669
294, 308, 396, 614, 629, 704, 722 Kiur: 348
(var. Hattusa, Khattusha) Ku"ara: 552, 554
Hebron: 561 Kullab: 149, 194, 558
Heshbon: 561 Kurruhanni: 556
House of the Inun-canal: 484 Kuyunjik: 121
Huhnuri: 641
Hyksos: 603 Lagaš: 24–28, 38, 40, 61, 62, 66, 77,
78, 97, 100, 102–104, 138, 145,
Iabru: 641 146, 149, 161, 176, 177, 180, 181,
Inun(na): 488 184, 196, 228, 230, 290, 299, 300,
‘Ir-Sihon: 561 321–323, 336, 424, 456, 539, 540,
Isin: 71, 74, 75, 77, 87, 101–104, 176, 556, 592, 635, 636, 641, 642
178–180, 182–186, 189, 190, 194, Laragchos: 554
204, 207, 212, 231, 235, 258, 263, Larsa: 26, 62, 74, 75, 78, 87, 103,
285, 291, 292, 301, 302, 305, 320, 104, 176, 178, 180, 182–186, 189,
335, 339, 348, 349, 370, 372– 190, 204, 242, 285, 301, 307, 308,
375, 387, 394, 411, 414, 416, 423, 321, 329, 335, 336–338, 350, 363,
424, 427, 428, 439, 459, 460, 462, 370, 371, 373–375, 394, 395, 423–
487, 534, 539, 555–558, 712, 713, 425, 429, 459, 462, 487, 534, 540,
721 554–557, 671, 687, 722
geographic names, ethnica, and names of sanctuaries 757
Lod: 564 Ramat-Lehi: 564

Ras Ibn Hani: 166
Marad: 320 Red Sea: 672
Mari: 99, 116, 159, 186, 267, 308, Reed Sea: 559, 672
324, 415, 428, 444, 482, 537, 613 Rome: 547
Marsh Arabs: 49, 527 Rushalimum: 564, see also Jerusalem
Maškan-šabra: 340
Megiddo: 78, 87, 90, 670, 719 Salem: 564, 565
Moab: 446 Samaria: 561, 567
Moriah: 565 Sealand: 15, 49, 53, 79, 183, 184, 241,
242
Nanna-gugal: 488 Shalim: 564
Negev: 625, 629, 630 Shechem: 117, 562, 614
Neirab: 564 Shin"ar: 563
Nile: 678 Shomron: 561
Nimrud: 532 Sidon: 536, 600
Nimrud-Kalah: 14 Sinai: 625, 629–631, 672, 682
Nina: 540, 553, 641 Sippar: 99, 167, 242, 244, 308, 323,
Nineveh: 11, 12, 13, 16, 53, 71, 79, 399, 427, 554, 558, 587, 610, 629,
121, 141, 192, 243, 244, 249, 296, 712
308, 558, 563, 705, 716, 722 Sippar-Yahrarum: see Sippar-
Nippur: 6, 15, 16, 21, 26, 55, 56, 60– Yahrurum
62, 64–66, 69, 72, 75, 77, 79, 95, Sippar-Yahrurum: 319, 325 (var.
100–104, 138–141, 143, 149, 156, Sippar-Yahrarum)
157, 162–164, 166, 168, 175, 177, Sirara: 540, 641
182, 183, 185, 186, 187–192, 197, Solomon’s palace: 566
198, 204, 209–211, 218, 234, 235, Subarian(s): 338, 365, 645
239–250, 270, 283, 294, 301, 306, Sultan Tepe: 11, 651, 705
308, 322, 325, 337, 338, 348, 370, Susa: 138, 203, 480, 488, 531, 609,
372, 373, 389, 391–393, 395, 397, 641, 722
398, 411, 413, 414, 416, 417, 421, Šaduppûm: 196, 204
428, 432, 439, 443, 460, 488, 539, Šimanum: 390, 459
540, 549, 550, 552, 553, 558, 564, Šimaški: 459
578, 590, 593, 641, 642, 712, 719– Šuruppak: 138, 149, 554, 566, 669,
722 718, 719
Nuffar: 301
Nuzi: 556, 680 Tello(h): 167, 478
Thessaly: 47
Ono: 564 Tigris: 188, 303, 371, 459, 510,
661
Pa-tibira: 304 Timnah: 665
Pautibiblon: 554
Persepolis: 609 Ugarit: 75, 78, 158, 167, 294, 306,
Philistine(s): 665 308, 321, 578, 579, 614, 721,
Puzriš-Dagan: 161 722
Umma: 104, 161, 196, 556
Qumran: 259, 715 UNKIN.(KI): 556
758 geographic names, ethnica, and names of sanctuaries
Ur: 6, 21, 23, 26–28, 60, 62, 66, 70, Uruk (Warka): 21, 50, 66, 68, 69, 80,
74, 75, 77, 87, 94, 95, 98, 100– 87, 90, 94, 95, 100, 102, 103, 125,
103, 138–140, 149, 151, 156, 157, 138, 147, 175, 182, 185, 191, 192–
162, 167, 176, 178, 185, 187– 196, 204, 227, 242, 250, 267, 285,
198, 204, 211, 218, 231, 236, 301, 304, 307, 326, 370, 371–376,
242, 263, 264, 269, 279, 283, 388, 410, 416, 423, 425–427, 439,
289, 301, 308, 335, 337, 370– 460, 477, 489, 523, 524, 527, 554,
372, 374, 385, 390, 392, 393, 558, 560, 563, 669, 705, 719, 721
395, 397, 398, 422, 426, 439,
443, 456, 457, 461, 462, 471, 476, Warium: 204
477, 489, 558, 575, 583, 584, 592,
595, 615, 641, 670, 671, 684, 712, Zagros: 524
721 Zion: 564
AKKADIAN AND SUMERIAN WORDS
a-gim: 281 ašar tapšuhti: 534

a-rá: 282 āšipu: 640
a-rá-a-(bi): 188, 189 ašibūt kultāri: 365
a-ša6-ša6: 639 ašlu šušlušu: 621
á-si-(giš)ig atmānu: 585
a-sig(5): 638
á-tuku: 610 bà: 580
aban išati: 514 ba-an-za: 578, 579
abullu: 588 ba-ma: 580
ad4: 576, 577, 580 ba-za: 578, 580
ad-gi4-gi4: 281 ba-za-za: 578
ad-hal: 281 balag: 302
ad-ša4: 146 balag ír-ra: 300
adab: 22, 146, 207 balag a-nir-ra: 300
adaman(-duga): 20, 120 (var. a-da- balaggu: 302
man) balbal-e: 20, 71
addax-kú: 366 bán: 580
adapu: 149, 544 bamâ: 580
ahû: 706, 716 banû: 364, 578
ahurrû: 364 bar-tam: 362
akû: 577 bara2-bara2-ki-en-gi: 94
alaktu: 188, 189 be4: 365
ālu: 585 bēl emūqi: 610
ám-gig-(ga): 363 bēl narkabti: 638
am-si(4)-si(4): 515 bēl pāni: 610
amaš: 37 bikı̄tu: 301
amelūtu: 129 birku: 478
an-bar-sù: 512 bı̄t ası̄ri: 587
an-da nam-tar: 281 bı̄t dimmāti: 587
anzillu: 363, 591 bı̄t kı̄li: 587
apkallu: 6, 148–150,240 bı̄t mas. s. arti: 587
apsûm: 37 bı̄t nap.tari: 587
arāru: 364 bı̄t s. ibitti: 587
arhuš-šu-te/ti: 366 bı̄t tapšuhti: 533
arhuš-tuk(u): 282, 366
arina: 511 da-ri: 620
arhu u šapattu: 678 dab: 577
arki abūbi: 455 dakšu: 594
asakku: 591 damāmum: 146
asu: 527 damqam-ı̄nim: 118
760 akkadian and sumerian words
damqu: 706, 716 ÉR: 301, 308

damtu: 515 ÉR.GU.LA: 305
dās. ātu: 120 ér-šà-hun-gá: 73, 270, 308
dè: 35 ér-šem-ma: 73, 301, 321, 532
dēkû: 532 (var. ér-sém-ma,
ˇ ér-sèm-ma)
ˇ
di. . .dib: 592 ere-a: 458
DI.DU: 34 eršahungû: 270
DI.IR.GA: 300 erûnu: 527
dib: 577 erina: 511
dingir-ra-ni: 194 erištu: 595
DU: 458 e"ru: 530
du10: 478 ÉŠ: 490
dù-a: 145 eš-kirix(KA): 480
dub: 577 e.temmu: 530
DUB.SAG: 14
dub-sar eme-girx: 94 ga-an-ša-ša: 364
dullulu: 512 gá-gá: 592
dumu-gi(rx): 94 gaba-ri: 282, 555
dumu-ki-en-gi-ra: 94 gal-zu: 282
dummuqu: 639 GALA: 301, 532
dunnum: 556 GAN-ma: 491
duppuru: 510 gar-ensi2: 94
dusu: 483 gattu: 515
geštu: 640
elpetu: 511 GI(N): 490, 716
elpet mê purki: 511 GI ÍR.RA: 300
é-dub-ba-a: 722 GI.RA.NÚM: 300
é-gal: 584, 587 gidim: 530
é-gu-la: 585, 587 GIDIM4: 530
é-mu: 590 gil-gil: 282
e-ne-èš: 282 GÍN: 458
é-ní-dúb-bu(-da): 533 gipāru: 479, 591
é-še-àm-sa4: 587 gir4-mah: 638
é.ŠEŠ.A: 587 GÌR.NITA: 195
edin: 642 gìr-sil: 282
eme-girx(15): 94, 717 gír-tab-lú-ux-lu: 576
eme-sal: 53, 271, 301, 717 gír-ùr-ra: 512 (var. gìr-ùr-ra)
emūqu: 515 girrānu: 300
en: 128, 141 girru: 512
èn-DU: 146 girtablilu: 576
èn-du-lugal: 21 giš-bala: 639
en-ki-en-gi (giš)-bi-za: 580
en-nu-un: 585 giš-dim-ma-na: 511
èn-ša4: 146 giš-gigir: 167
èn-tar: 362 giš-kéš-du: 193, 488 (var. giš-kéšd-rá)
èn-tukun: 350 giš-ma-nu: 530
enūma: 149, 150 giš-suhuš: 282
akkadian and sumerian words 761
giš-taškarin: 166, 167 idû: 13

giš-ù: 282 igāru: 515
giš-umbin: 498, 510 IGI.DU: 640
gišru: 640 IGI.DU8.A: 13
gi.t.tu: 712 igi-gál: 282
gizbun: 485, 513, 525 igi-gál-sì: 282
gišgú: 640 igi-hur-re: 364
gu2-en-na: 242 igi-šè: 146
gú-gar-gar: 364 igištu: 640
gu-gim ha-ba-si-il-e: 364 ikkibu: 363, 590, 591, 596, 601, 604
gú-gur: 364 illilūtu: 177, 193
gú-ki-šè-lá: 282 ím: 364
gú-me-zé: 513 im-gíd-da: 170, 712
gú-mur-mušen: 638 IM.LI.GI4.IN: 712
gù-si-il: 364 im-ri-a: 282
gú-si-si: 282 IM-šub-ak: 282
gùd-ús: 282 im-šu-nigin-na: 595
gu"ennakku: 242 im-šu-rin-na: 510
imgiddû: 712
ha-(al)-la-an-ku 37 im.tû: 515
ha-la ha-la: 592 inim-sì-sì-ga: 366
habālu: 512 inim-ša6-(ša6): 366
hābilu-amēlu: 576 iqqur ı̄puš: 706
hal-la-kù: 37 (var. hal-an-kù) ír-šà-hun-gá: 151
halhallatu: 301 ír-ša-ne-ša4: 720
har-ra-an: 282 ír-šè-ma: 151
harrānu: 639 irina: 511
haštu: 512, 590 irrû: 351
hatānu: 620 iš-ka-ra-a-tu: 70
hirı̄tum: 488 iškaru: 706, 707
hittu: 614, 690, 719 itê: 555
hu-ru-(um): 364 izi-sìg: 513
huballu: 512
huharu: 638 ka-duh-a: 486
hummuru: 576, 577 KA. . .-dun-ud: 34
hur: 364 ka-garáš: 282
hur-rum: 364 KA.KA. . .KÚ: 34
hurbū: 510 ka-ka-si-ga: 611
hurhud is. s. ūri: 638 ka-kèš-da: 64
hurru: 364 ka-luh-a: 486
ka-sì(g): 23
i-bi-lu-(du4-ga): 611, 614, 664, 689, ka-(ša)-an-ša-ša: 364
719 (var. ibilu, i.bi.lu.dug4.ga) KA-ša6-(ša6): 366
ì-ki-íb: 590 ka-šag5-šag5: 366
i-lu: 305, 720 KA-tar-si-il: 282
i-šub: 514 káb: 593
ibhu: 511 kab-du. . .-ga: 550
KAB. . .du11: 586 kulullu: 576

kadra: 282 kunnû: 37
kak-du8: 640 KUR: 303
kak-ì-du8: 640 kurû: 579
giškak-níg-du : 640
8
kala-ga: 610 lá: 282, 577
kalû: 300 la-la: 282
kalūtu: 713 la-la-gi4: 282
kamû: 513, 577 lagab×izi: 514
kanāšu: 364, 576 lagabbu: 514
kár-kár-ka: 640 lām abūbi: 455
kartapu: 491 lammassātu: 99
KAS4: 364 lānu: 515
kās. iru: 64 lapātu: 593
kasû: 577 latāku: 593
kaskal: 282, 639 lêku: 648
KI.DU.DU: 302 liginnu: 712
ki-en-gi(r): 94 liqtu: 706
KI.KAŠ.GAR: 485, 525, 537 litiktu: 593
ki-kukkú-ga: 282 lú: 128
ki-lul-la: 282 (lú)-á-ku5: 577
ki-ní-dúb-bu-da: 534 lú-á-tuku: 610
ki-píl-lá: 282 lú-èn-tar: 362
KI.RU.GÚ: 300 lú-géšpu: 512
ki-sì-ga: 536 (lú)gidim: 596
ki-túm/tùm/tum: 282 lú-in-na: 282
kidudû: 302 (lú)-kak-du8: 640
kimāhu: 557 lú-lirum: 512
kimkimmu: 591 lú-níg-tuku: 610
kippatu: 491 lú-ná-a zi-zi: 532
kir4-dab: 491 lú-usu(Á.KAL)-tuku: 610
kirmahhu: 638 lú-zu-a: 282
kiruda: 282 lubārū: 648
kisal-mah: 38 lugal: 128
kispu(m): 485, 536 lugal-ki-en-gi ki-uri: 94
kišeršu: 588 LUL-aš: 282
kišib: 510 lullu-amı̄lu: 576
kišib-dáb: 282 lum-a-lam-a: 68
kišib-gál: 38 lum-ma: 181
kišukku: 588
ku4-(ku4): 282 makkūru: 615
ku6-lú-ux-lu: 576 makkūr šarri: 615
kù-sù: 35 maltaktu: 148
kubbulu: 576 manû: 640
KUD: 577 dmanzât: 410
kukkú-zalag: 363 mār kallê: 638

kulı̄lu: 576 marratu: 410
maruštu: 363, 591 nam-lú-ulu6: 128

maš gar-ra: 578 nam-lugal-ki-en-gi-ra: 94
máš-gú-è-gú-è: 511 nam-mah-du11: 282
mášsa-sar-kés-da: 511 nam-mah. . . du11: 350
máš-za-lá: 511 nam-mu: 282
maš zi-ga: 578 nam-tar-ra: 363, 365
mašennu: 638 nam-úš-(a): 363, 365
mašmaššu: 705 namtaru: 363, 365
mātu: 585 nap.tartum: 640
me: 640 našāru: 365
me-a-im-ri-a-mu: 282 únattila: 351
me-lám: 24 ne-sag: see nisag

me-me: 640 nēmelu: 610
me-zi-hal-ha: 282 ní: 24
mēdelu: 639 nì-u4-rum: 139
mēlû: 515 níg-al-di: 595
mērênu: 510 níg-ga: 615
mēšārum: 481 níg-ga lugal: 615
mí-du11: 37 níg-gig-(ga): 363, 590, 596
mihir: 555 níg-gig-ga . . . ak: 363
miqqānu: 511 níg-si-sá: 481
mı̄š pî: 486 níg-šu: 282
mu7: 640 NÍG.ZU: 13
mu-du10: 191 nin-mè: 95
mu7-mu7: 640 nı̄qu: 527
mud: 279 nir-gál: 282
mugirri: 638 nisag: 35, 513 (var. ne-sag)
mukallimtu: 706 nisannu: 513
munarri.tū: 531 nissatum: 146
mupattı̄tu: 640 nittâmelu: 576
mušābu: 585 nittû-amelu: 576
mušēlû: 640 nubû: 305
mušenharu: 638 únumun: 511
mūtānū: 365 únumun-búr-(ra): 511
nuššuru: 565
na4-izi: 514 nutturu: 510
NA4.KA: 510
na-ri-ga: 77 pa-sìg-sìg
na4.su-ú: 510 pà(d): 139, 149
na4.dŠE.TIR: 514 (pa)dattu: 515
nadû: 640 pahalliya: 479
nabātu: 640 pāqidu: 362
napāhu: 640 parzillu: 512
nagbu: 544 passu: 580
nam-a-a: 511 patar šibbi: 512
nam-en-na: 35, 191 pēmtu: 514
nam-gú-(aka-a): 512 pēntu: 514
pentû: 514 sahāru: 639

pertu: 37 salam ilāni: 44
pessu: 580 sammû: 74
pî nišı̄: 611 sapāhu: 365
pî ummâni: 87 si-du11-ga: 498, 512
pindû: 514 si-ga: 610
pirigx: 148 si-il-si-il: 510
pirig ka-šá-an-ša-ša: 364 si-im-si-im: 512
pirsu: 14, 707 si-sá: 481
pissû: 579 sidug (LAGAB×DAR): 512
pı̄t pı̄: 486 sihu: 587
pû: 516 sila-dagal: 363
pû mātim: 612 sila si-ga: 363
pû nišı̄: 612 sipa-zi: 481
puhhuru: 364 sù: 512
pūru: 682 su-lim-ma: 143
rēmēnu: 367 su-lum-mar: 283
rimmum: 146 su-ub: 35
ruggubum: 639 su-zi: 24, 188
sùhub-(bi): 639
qá-dì-šum: 590 sum: 640
qanû: 527, 716 (var. qanū) sûnu: 478
qān bikı̄ti: 300 suppû: 366
qaššu: 590 SUR.GIBIL: 711
qaštu: 410 s. abātu: 711
qinnazu u paruššu: 482 s. alālum: 532
qîštu: 410 s. arāpu: 513
qubbû: 305 s. âtu: 706
qubūru: 537 s. ēru: 642
s. erru: 512
rakābu: 639 s. ubbutu: 577
rē"ûm kı̄num: 481 s. urru: 510
ri: 620 ŠÀ: 308
rig7: 510 ša abāri: 512
rittu: 510 ša pî ummânı̄: 706
ša umāši: 512
sà-sù-ga: 510 ŠÀ.ABZU: 372
ság-di: 282 šax-(GÁ)-dub-ba: 139
sag-du: 282 šu-du11-ga: 593
ság-du11: 282 ša-DU-lugal: 145, 146
SAG.DUB: 14 ša-du-igi-šè-àm: 145
sag-èn-tar: 362 šà-ki-bi-gi4-gi4: 283
sag-sìg: 282 ša-sìg-ga: 510, 511
sag-túm-túm: 282 ša"ālu: 362
sahab-(bi): 639 šab-gal: 588
sahar. . .gi4: 594 šab-tur: 588
sahar-ra-bala: 283 šagammu: 639
šakkanakku: 195, 370 tanittu: 74

šalamta akālu: 366 tazzimtu: 301
šalā.tu: 510 te-en: 594
šalummatum: 144 tēltu: 611, 613
šamallû: 588 tēmı̄qu: 366
šamme balā.ti: 351 tes. îtu: 120
šamû: 513 TÉŠ.(BI) . . .KÚ: 648
šandabakku: 139, 242 tigi: 22, 207, 249
šanû: 364 tinūru: 511
šarā.tu: 510 TIR: 585, 638
šatû: 510 tu6: 720
še-ša4: 146 tu-da: 145
SÉM: 301 túg-eš-tab-ba: 621
šeš-tab-ba: 367 túg-níg-lá: 350
šeš-tam-ma: 367 TÚL.KA: 512
šib: 640 tumru: 512
šíbir: 480 tupšikku: 483
šibirru: 480 túr: 37
šid: 640 turru: 512
šigû: 270
šiptu: 640 u4: 149, 150 (var. UD)
šìr-gíd-da: 322 u5: 639
šı̄ru: 555 ù-dúb: 514
šu-bar-zi: 283 u4-gim. . . è: 510
šu-du11: 283 u4-HI-da: 283
šu-íl-la: 73, 302 u5-ig: 639
šu-nigin: 639 ù-kul: 536
šu-te-gá: 283 ù-lul-la: 533
šubtu(m): 511, 585 ù-na-a-du: 283
šubun: 485 ù-nu-ku: 283
šudug(-UD): 514 u4-SAR: 150
šul-a-lum: 283 ú-šim: 350
šul-zi: 188 ù-tu-a-ab-ba: 149
šulum Agade: 442, 455 ú-u8-a-a-e: 283
šuršu: 511 udu-girx: 94
šutēmuqu: 366 udu-kur-ra: 94
šuttatu: 512, 590 udug: 530
šutukku: 514 UG: 148
uktin: 283
tadmiqtu: 366 uligi: 94
tahlappānu: 511 ūmu: 148, 149
takkabu: 545 umāšu 511
takkakbu: 545 ūmu muktaššaššu: 364
tākultu: 513, 525, 537 unnînu: 270
talı̄mu: 367 unu6: 516
tāmartu: 13 ùr: 478
tamkāru: 588 ur4: 364
UR.(BI) . . . KÚ: 648 za-ma-rumeš te-ge-e: 70

ur-dib: 512 za-na: 580
ur-ša4: 146 zà-pà: 283
urqı̄tu: 350 za-ra-a: 711
uru: 22 zà-tag: 283
urux: 141 zamāru: 146
usan3-bar-uš: 482 ze"pum: 323
us. s. ulu: 577 zihu: 587
utlu: 478 ˘ . .tag-tag: 593
zag.
utukku: 530 zag . . . ús-ús: 593
uturtu: 510 zaqqara: 515
uzu: 555 ziqqurratu: 559
zirru: 479
zà-dib: 283 zittam zâzu: 592
za-la: 512 na4zú-sal-la: 510
zà-mí: 20, 60, 68, 74, 205

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The World’s Oldest Literature

Culture and History of the

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

printed in the netherlands

4. Enki and the Theology of Eridu – 1996 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539

“New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature.” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962):

II. Catalogues and Other Scholia

III. Royal and Divine Hymns

“Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition.” Journal of the

VII. Myths and Epics

X. Sumerian Literature and the Bible

“Sumerian Literature – Background to the Bible.” Bible Review 4 (June 1988):

The author would like to acknowledge the following companies and

In addition to those already mentioned, many other persons deserve

then still concentrated on the stately Rapenburg. The University has

WILLIAM HALLO AND ASSYRIOLOGICAL,

William Hallo’s achievements in the field of Assyriology and the

1 This biographical information is based on oral knowledge from William Hallo as

nian Literature—positions that altogether he would hold for forty years

of individuals to deities that are in the form of letters (Nos. IV.1,2,4;

should be added that Hallo’s focus on Sumerian literature and on the

main focus, it is not without wider, especially Biblical concerns. An

onization in Mesopotamia—Assyriological Models or Ancient Realities?” Proceedings of

particularly as formulated in his “The Concept of Canonicity” article,

scholarship, very much including his own. The comparisons focus on

sity Press) in three editions (1950, 1955, 1969).

Characterizing all of this work, Assyriological sensu stricto and com-

8 Thanks to Bill T. Arnold for reminding one of us (Machinist) of Hallo’s re-

marks in his “Problems” article concerning Landsberger: see Arnold, “Assyriology

(1926/reprinted 1974) (August Fischer Festschrift), pp. 355–372. Reprinted: Landsber-

for a focus on understanding a culture—in his instance, the culture of

NEW VIEWPOINTS ON CUNEIFORM LITERATURE*

What was the appearance of a biblical book? How was it conceived,

school, disclaiming the relevance of formal textual history altogether

Creativity implies first of all authorship, and cuneiform literature, at

is P. Koschaker’s division of Codex Hammurabi into pre-Hammurabian and Ham-

6 Ibid., p., 67; cf. W. Hallo: Isaiah 28

neo-Assyrian versions are preserved12 show that the adaptation was at

Oﬃcial recognition of authorship, human, sage, or divine, is only the

18 MDOG, p. 22. We know a number of Middle Babylonian redactors by name, e.g.

Since Oppenheim’s provocative study is not everywhere available, it may be useful to

In other genres, too, we have new evidence of the creative impulse in

VII), An. St., 10, 1960, pp. 105–131.

Biblica et Orientalia, 3 = Analecta Biblica, 12, 1959), pp. 282–301.

field by B. Landsberger: Jahreszeiten im Sumerisch-Akkadischen, JNES, 8, 1949, p. 281.

in Harper, Assyrian arid Babylonian Letters, No. 614 Rev. 8 f.

matters of practical concern to these institutions and rarely stray into

Aramaic, or on perishable materials, or in palaces like that of Babylon which have

So far the elements of creativity in Akkadian literature. What can

Lambert himself hesitates to draw this conclusion, and in another

of inspiration attaching to the term.

fact, long signalized by Landsberger,51 that the last tablets of certain

51 Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon, 1, 1937, p. vii.

Babylonian times on as Lambert suggests (BWL, p. 14) may perhaps be questioned in

the American Oriental Society, Philadelphia, 1961, here: III.4.

nienne, RA, 42, 1948, pp. 149–159.

To sum up, then, recent discoveries in Assyriology have provided new

THE CULTIC SETTING OF SUMERIAN POETRY

Three years ago I announced the identification, in the Yale Babylo-

Internationale, Brussels, July 2, 1969, and is reproduced here without change.

poetry in order to test for a hypothetical “Sumerian psalter”.3 At the

Cf. JCS 18 (1964), 84 n. 76.