The Harps that Once...: Sumerian Poetry in Translation

512 Pages·1997·10.482 MB·English

by  Thorkild Jacobsen

HE HARPS THAT ONCE
T
Sumerian Poetry in Translation
THORKILD JACOBSEN
Yale University Press
New Haven and London
The preparation of the contents of this volume was made possible by a grant
from the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the
Humanities, an independent Federal agency.
Copyright © 1987 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the
publishers.
Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Goudy Old Style type by Keystone
Typesetting Company, Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United
States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Harps that once—.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Sumerian poetry—Translations into English.
2. English poetry—Translations from Sumerian.
I. Jacobsen, Thorkild, 1904-
PJ4083.H37 1987 499'.95 87-10559
ISBN 0-300-03906-9 (cloth: alk. paper)
0-300-07278-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of
the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council
on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
To Rigmor

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
INTRODUCTION xi
PART ONE
Dumuzi Texts 1
The New House 3
The Sister’s Message 8
The Wiles of Women 10
The Bridal Sheets 13
Let Him Come! 16
Dumuzi’s Wedding 19
Unfaithfulness 24
Dumuzi’s Dream 28
The Wild Bull Who Has Lain Down 47
Recognition 50
Vain Appeal 53
In the Desert by the Early Grass 56
PART TWO
Royal Lovesongs 85
Love-Song to Shu-Suen 88
As You Let Day Slip By 90
He Arrives 91
My “Wool” Being Lettuce 93
Vigorously He Sprouted 94
The First Child 95
Tavern Sketch 97
viii Contents
PART THREE
Hymns to Gods 99
Hymn to Enlil 101
Hymn to Inanna 112
The Nanshe Hymn 125
PART FOUR
Myths 143
The Eridu Genesis 145
The Birth of Man 151
Enlil and Ninlil 167
Enki and Ninsikila/Ninhursaga 181
Inanna’s Descent 205
The Ninurta Myth Lugal-e 233
PART FIVE
Epics 273
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta 275
Lugalbanda and the Thunderbird 320
Gilgamesh and Aka 345
PART SIX
Admonitory History 357
The Cursing of Akkade 359
PART SEVEN
Hymns to Temples 375
Hymn to Kesh 377
The Cylinders of Gudea 386
PART EIGHT
Laments for Temples 445
The Lament for Ur 447
The Destroyed House 475
The Verdict of Enlil 478
TEXTS TRANSLATED 485
INDEX 489
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is deeply grateful to many friends and colleagues for help. I hope
they will realize my very sincere appreciation of what each has done and
accept my thanks to them without my specifying every contribution. Only
two names should be singled out, that of Mrs. Susan Mango, without whose
advice and support this book would not have been possible, and that of the editor,
Charles Grench, whose constant encouragement has been of signal importance.
So, aware that perfection is not of this world, I send out for criticism and
improvement my attempt to understand the ancients in their own terms, an aim
very dear to my heart.
IX

INTRODUCTION
Sumerian literature is one of the oldest known literatures in the world,
perhaps the oldest, and stands out by the power, variety, and sheer mass of
its content. Some of its works are exceedingly beautiful; others are perhaps
less readily enjoyed by a modem reader, yet appeal as bearing witness to a strange,
long-vanished world.
Writing was invented in southern Mesopotamia, Sumer, at some time around
the middle of the fourth millennium b.c. It was at first a pure picture writing, but
was soon supplemented by the use of signs for phonetic values without reference to
meaning. By means of this bifurcate approach it became possible to reduce more
and more complex texts to writing, whose domain had originally been limited to
highly structured fields like accounting. The signs were at first scratched into the
surface of tablets made of clay, but to avoid the ragged edges this produced, a
technique of impressing the stylus rather than scratching with it evolved. The
impressions, which tended to be wedgelike, gave the writing its special character
and its name, cuneiform, that is, wedge-shaped. With time the original pictorial
character disappeared, the pictures being abbreviated to the point of being
unrecognizable. All that mattered was that a sign could be told apart from all the
others.
Our oldest examples of written literary texts date from the third Early Dynastic
Period at roughly the middle of the third millennium b.c. They were found at the
sites of Fara, ancient Shuruppak, and Abu Salabikh. They are myths, hymns, and
proverbs, and they make it clear that an extensive and varied oral literature must
have existed, ready to become fixed by being written down. To what extent
original composition in writing was practiced, without any oral stage to precede
the written one, is a moot question. Mostly, one surmises, an original oral work
will have been memorized, worked over, and put in written form by a learned
scribe.
Most of the works of Sumerian literature are anonymous, but there are notable
exceptions. Around 2350 b.c. a gifted poet, Enheduanna, daughter of king
Sargon of Akkade, wrote a cycle of hymns to all the major temples of Sumer—a
xi
xii Introduction
last flowering of an old and established genre that appears to have fallen out of
favor after her time. She also wrote an impassioned appeal to the goddess Inanna,
asking to be reinstated in her office as high priestess (en) of the moon god Nanna
in Ur and to have her foes, who had deposed her, vanquished.
A classical period was reached by the time ofGudea of Lagash (ca. 2125 b.c.),
whose hymn celebrating the building of the temple of Ningirsu in Girsu, “Cylin­
ders A and B,” is outstanding in beauty and in the richness, clarity, and precision
of its language.
The majority of works we possess seems to have come down to us in a form given
them slightly later, during the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur, some of the
rulers of which—notably Shulgi—were much concerned to preserve extant older
literary works and to encourage the creation of new ones. The court background of
these works is unmistakable. A great many compositions, such as the hymns to
individual kings and the love lyrics to Shu-Suen, are directly inspired by the
kings. Others, such as the epics celebrating rulers of the ancient First Dynasty of
Uruk, were clearly governed in their choice of subject by the fact that the kings of
Ur traced their lineage to that dynasty. In the presentation of the epic materials,
current politics and the desire to please visiting dignitaries are often plain to see.
The catastrophical end of the Third Dynasty of Ur, which in a very real sense was
also the end of Sumerian civilization, gave rise to one last great masterwork, the
wonderful “Lament for the Fall of Ur.” After that, Sumerian essentially survived
as a language of learning and culture in very much the role that Latin played in
Europe in the Middle Ages.
The schools of the following period, that of Isin-Larsa, took over for their
curricula as much literary remains from the court of Ur as they could lay hands on,
royal correspondence from the chancellery side by side with literary works like
love songs and hymns praising the kings. Much that cannot directly be linked to
the court, traditional older works, wisdom literature, proverbs, etc. will most
likely also have gone through the hands of Ur III scribes or scribal schools.
The schools created a coterie of literati living in a world of their own and gave
rise, it would seem, to an “in-group” literature of partly satirical, partly moralistic
compositions, known by modem scholars as Edubba texts, from the Sumerian
term for school, e-dubba. Works continued to be written also in the established
genres of hymn and lament. The flourishing of these schools and the enormous
number of indestructible exercises and copies of literary works they produced is a
main reason that we know as much about Sumerian literature today as we do. The
discards from the schools were carted away by citizens who needed fill for their
houses, so that now almost any excavation in private houses of the Old Babylo­
nian and slightly earlier periods is likely to produce new such discards, supple­
menting and enhancing our knowledge.
Following the Old Babylonian period, the flood of Sumerian literary texts
dwindled to a mere trickle. Some late laments for cities and temples, incanta­
tions, and epics dealing with creation and with the god Ningirsu/Ninurta were