He Harps That Once

T HE HARPS THAT ONCE 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 he 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 Ttwo 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 umerian 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 lessS 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 Introduction xiii among the more notable survivors. Most of them had in Old Babylonian times been provided with remarkably precise Akkadian translations, which proved of fundamental importance for the decipherment of Sumerian in modem times. Of very considerable help here was also the survival of a large body of lexical texts translating Sumerian into Akkadian, and some valuable treatises on Sumerian grammar in lexical form. The strictly literary Sumerian works can be defined generally as works of praise. The praise can be for something extant and enjoyed, a temple, a deity, or a human king. It can take narrative form as myth or epic, or descriptive form as hymn.

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