A Mesopotamian Miscellany 9781463240530

Citation preview

A Mesopotamian Miscellany

Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East

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This series publishes scholarly research focusing on the societies, material cultures, technologies, religions, and languages that emerged from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant. Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East features studies with both humanistic and social scientific approaches. 

A Mesopotamian Miscellany

Karen Polinger Foster

Translations by

Benjamin R. Foster

gp 2020

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2020 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܐ‬

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2020

ISBN 978-1-4632-4052-3

All tablet images courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection; photography by Klaus Wagensonner.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Plates ................................................................................................ ix Map of Places Mentioned .............................................................. xix Chronological Table ...................................................................... xxi Preface.......................................................................................... xxiii INTRODUCTION ................................................................................ 1 From Wedges to Words ............................................................. 1 Gilgamesh as Guide .................................................................... 5 For Further Reading ................................................................. 8 I. EXPLORATIONS OF THE MIND..................................................9

LEARNING ........................................................................................ 11 School Days in Sumer .............................................................. 14 Copycat Homework ................................................................ 15 Learned References .................................................................. 16 Court Literati ........................................................................... 16 Belles-Lettres ............................................................................ 18 Enheduanna, Princess and Poet .............................................. 20 For Further Reading ............................................................... 24 NUMERACY...................................................................................... 25 Mathematical Lessons ............................................................. 29 Measurement Lessons .............................................................. 31 Agricultural Accountability ..................................................... 33 Taxation .................................................................................. 35 Weights and Measures .............................................................36 v

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International Exchange Rates .................................................. 37 Compound Interest ................................................................. 38 How Many Miles to Babylon? ................................................. 38 Sun and Moon, Stars and Planets ............................................ 39 For Further Reading ................................................................ 41 MEMORY ........................................................................................ 43 I, Sargon.................................................................................. 46 Remembering Naram-Sin ....................................................... 46 The Curse of Agade ................................................................ 47 Remembrance of Things Past .................................................. 57 For Further Reading ................................................................ 59 II. PASSION AND DISCIPLINE ..................................................... 61

LOVE ................................................................................................63 Sacred Marriage ...................................................................... 66 Courtship................................................................................ 68 Mail-order Bride? .................................................................... 69 Marriage Contracts ................................................................. 69 Father of the Bride .................................................................. 70 Recovering the Dowry ............................................................. 71 Adultery................................................................................... 71 A Dangerous Liaison .............................................................. 72 Unloved and Unmourned ...................................................... 72 Family Love ............................................................................. 73 A Woman’s Yearning .............................................................. 74 The Love of the Gods for People ............................................. 75 Love, Assaulted ....................................................................... 76 For Further Reading ............................................................... 77 MADNESS ........................................................................................ 79 The Madness of Gilgamesh..................................................... 80 The Madness of Nabonidus .................................................... 83 Divining Madness in the Land ................................................ 84 Divining Madness in the Person .............................................. 85 Divining Madness at a Distance ............................................... 85 For Further Reading ............................................................... 86

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JUSTICE ........................................................................................... 87 Murder for Hire...................................................................... 90 Embezzlement.......................................................................... 91 A Thieving Shepherd .............................................................. 92 Witch Trial? ............................................................................ 92 A Jail Break .............................................................................. 93 Let the Punishment Fit the Crime .......................................... 94 Learning to be a Law Clerk ...................................................... 95 A Broken Engagement ............................................................ 96 Buying a House....................................................................... 97 A Last Will and Testament ..................................................... 97 For Further Reading ............................................................... 98 III. SIGNS AND WONDERS OF NATURE....................................... 99

ANIMALS ........................................................................................101 Animal Proverbs and Fables .................................................. 103 Animal Husbandry ................................................................ 104 Cats in Houses ....................................................................... 105 Cats in Temples ..................................................................... 106 Creatures for Kings ................................................................ 106 Nuisance Animals .................................................................. 108 For Further Reading .............................................................. 108 BIRDS .............................................................................................. 111 Anzu, the Wicked Bird............................................................ 115 Bird versus Fish ....................................................................... 119 Wren Wit ............................................................................... 120 Eagle Omens .......................................................................... 120 The Meaning of Spots on Birds .............................................. 121 Ducks and Doves for a Goddess ............................................. 121 Of Eggs and Feathers...............................................................123 Cooking in Cuneiform............................................................123 For Further Reading ............................................................... 125 MAGIC ........................................................................................... 127 Magic Circles .......................................................................... 130 Magic Bowls........................................................................... 130 Childbirth Spells ..................................................................... 131

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY Lullaby Spells .......................................................................... 131 Spells against Lamashtu ..........................................................132 Spells against a Temptress Demon..........................................132 Spells Cast by a Sorcerer .......................................................... 133 Spells Cast by a Witch ............................................................ 134 Pest Control Magic ................................................................ 134 Cultic Magic .......................................................................... 134 Reading the Stars .................................................................... 135 Omens and Kings .................................................................. 136 For Further Reading .............................................................. 137

Index of Museum Numbers........................................................... 139 Bibliography of Texts...................................................................... 141 Learning.................................................................................. 141 Numeracy .............................................................................. 142 Memory ................................................................................. 143 Love ....................................................................................... 143 Madness ................................................................................. 144 Justice..................................................................................... 145 Animals.................................................................................. 146 Birds....................................................................................... 146 Magic ..................................................................................... 147

PLATES

Plate 1 LEARNING: Enheduanna, Princess and Poet (YBC 4656)

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Plate 2 NUMERACY: Mathematical Lessons (YBC 7289)

PLATES

Plate 3 MEMORY: The Curse of Agade (YBC 4611)

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Plate 4 LOVE: Sacred Marriage (NBC 10923)

PLATES

Plate 5 MADNESS: The Epic of Gilgamesh (YBC 2178)

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Plate 6 JUSTICE: Learning to be a Law Clerk (YBC 6516)

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Plate 8 BIRDS: Cooking in Cuneiform (YBC 8958)

PLATES

Plate 9 MAGIC: Omens and Kings (YBC 9832)

xvii

MAP OF PLACES MENTIONED

xix

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE c.4200–c.3000

Uruk period first cities, invention of writing, first use of cylinder seals

c.3000–c.2334

Early Dynastic period independent city-states, Sumerian texts and inscriptions reign of Gilgamesh, legendary king of Uruk

c.2334–c.2154

Akkadian period first empire, Akkadian becomes second official language

c.2154–c.2004

Neo-Sumerian, Ur III periods flowering of Sumerian literature, first ziggurats earliest written works about Gilgamesh

c.2000–c.1595

Old Babylonian, Old Assyrian periods empire of Hammurabi, Assyrian trading outposts in Anatolia Epic of Gilgamesh “old versions”

c.1595–c.1000

Kassite, Middle Assyrian periods nation-states in Western Asia Epic of Gilgamesh “middle versions” xxi

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c.1000–612

Neo-Assyrian period Assyrian empire, library of Assurbanipal Epic of Gilgamesh “standard version”

626–539

Neo-Babylonian period Babylonian empire

539–331

Achaemenid period Achaemenid Persian empire

331–141

Hellenistic/Seleucid period empire of Alexander, kingdoms of his successors

141 B.C.E.–224 C.E.

Parthian period Parthian empire, last datable cuneiform texts

PREFACE This book derives from the series of twelve major Yale exhibits curated by Karen Polinger Foster, then Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern and Aegean art, and Benjamin R. Foster, Laffan Professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature and then Curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection (YBC). These were displayed from 2002 to 2012 in the publicly accessible ground floor of Sterling Memorial Library, in 2007 in the Law School Library, and in 2016 in the West Campus Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. Each attracted considerable and enthusiastic attention from students, faculty, staff, and visitors. Many viewers suggested themes for future exhibits, resulting in those on LOVE and MADNESS. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Alice Prochaska, University Librarian during much of that period, and her assistants in regularly putting us on the exhibition calendar and in making sure that the case security systems were always in perfect order. Four of the exhibits were planned in coordination with university-wide special events. The first, “Measuring Mesopotamia” (NUMERACY), was part of the April 2002 Ninth International Aegean Conference, co-organized by K. Foster and Robert Laffineur, Professor of Aegean Studies at the University of Liège, on the subject of “METRON: Measuring the Aegean Bronze Age.” Among the tablets chosen were several examples of itineraries, which complemented the exhibit “Mapping the Mediterranean.” This featured a representative selection of the Portolan charts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, placed on view there for conference participants, thanks to its director at the time, Barbara Shailor. The second, “Man & Beast in Mesopotamia” (ANIMALS), was solicited for the symposium “Man & Beast,” originally conceived by xxiii

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Naomi Schor, Professor of French. At her untimely death, Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French, reconfigured the sessions as a memorial, held in November 2002. In November 2009, the YBC marked the centennial anniversary of its founding by J. Pierpont Morgan, who surprised Yale President Arthur Twining Hadley with a gift of 1000 shares of U.S. Steel to support a collection of Mesopotamian antiquities and a professorship in Assyriology. Morgan’s idea was that the incumbent would seamlessly integrate the responsibilities of teaching, research, and publication with service (not additionally compensated) as Curator of the tablets and other artifacts obtained for the YBC, which was to be an independent institution within Yale. This sound plan made the Collection one of the world’s pre-eminent repositories of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, as well as a multifaceted enterprise, unique among its peers, involved in training students in Assyriology and related fields, publishing exemplary volumes of texts and studies, hosting and partnering with visiting scholars on a wide range of projects, and undertaking numerous outreach activities. The day-long centennial celebration included a well-attended scholarly symposium, a screening of the Babylonian segments of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 silent film Intolerance, a concert program of music inspired by ancient Near Eastern themes, and guided tours of two substantial exhibits, “Treasures of the Yale Babylonian Collection” and “From Nineveh to New Haven.” The latter was mounted in the wall cases facing the library courtyard. Case 1 presented letters and portraits related to the creation and building of the Collection and its research library over the past century. In Case 2 were displayed images demonstrating the influence of Assyrian archaeological discoveries on 19th and early 20th century art and architecture, which at Yale may be seen in the stained-glass windows made for the Collection’s suite of rooms in Sterling, as well as in the cuneiform inscription carved over the library’s main entrance. Case 3 exhibited letters and photographs attesting to the YBC’s leadership role in founding the American Schools in Baghdad and Jerusalem, the Palestine Oriental Society, and Yale’s rich collection of Judaica, among other initiatives. The items in Case 4 traced the evolution of the process of publishing tablets, including various methods of reproducing cuneiform script, with emphasis on innovations and procedures developed at Yale.

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Case 5 contained photographs, tablets, and tools illustrating the tablet conservation protocols then followed by Collection staff. It also featured excerpts from the recently launched electronic database of the Collection holdings, made possible by a National Endowment for the Humanities Access to Collections grant, 1988–96. For the United Nations Global Colloquium of University Presidents, held at Yale in April 2016 on the theme of cultural heritage preservation, we were asked to prepare a topical exhibit. “Preserving Cultural Heritage in the Cradle of Civilization” (MEMORY) was organized in Yale’s West Campus Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. There, the display case itself drew considerable interest. From 1922 to 1940, the master metallurgist Samuel Yellin designed numerous gates and embellishments for Yale’s new buildings, most of them of monel, a nickel alloy. Among other fittings for the nave and transept of Sterling Library, he made free-standing, double-sided, console exhibition cases, equipped with interior illumination and slanting plate-glass covers, ingeniously locked. The two cases situated opposite the guarded entrance to the book stacks were ideal for displays of large numbers of cuneiform tablets. In 2013–14, Sterling’s groundfloor renovation project permanently removed all the console Yellin cases. As an important, and now nearly forgotten, aspect of Yale’s own cultural heritage, what more appropriate occasion than the U.N. Colloquium to use one of them again? Facilities management staff kindly located a case and arranged for it to be brought out from deep in a storage warehouse. A year after this special event, the Yale administration decided that the YBC should no longer be independent, and it eliminated the position of Curator. In the virtual exhibits of A Mesopotamian Miscellany, we invite readers to imagine the tablets arranged in the cases on matte black, the glancing light beautifully revealing the nuances of their clay colors and textures and the varying depths of their impressed signs. We hope that the experience of engaging directly with the Sumerian and Akkadian texts will be as vivid and captivating as it was for the multitude of viewers who saw the actual displays. *

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In addition to the individuals and institutions mentioned above, we are grateful to Alice L. Slotsky and Ron Wallenfels for their careful reading of the manuscript; Alberto Urcia for his elegant map; Klaus Wagensonner for his splendid photographs; and Yael Landman and the Gorgias Press for their enthusiastic support of this book project from the beginning.

INTRODUCTION FROM WEDGES TO WORDS In the early seventeenth century, the Italian nobleman and polymath Pietro della Valle embarked on an ambitious journey to the East. The drawings he brought back of intriguing marks he saw among the ruins were the first the Western world knew of such signs, which some soon recognized as an ancient writing system. The published illustrations prompted Thomas Hyde, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, to coin in 1700 the word “cuneiform,” or wedge-shaped, to describe the script, a term it has retained ever since. Over a century would pass until any of the languages written in cuneiform were deciphered. Major breakthroughs were achieved thanks largely to the arduous copying of trilingual rock inscriptions carved high on nearly inaccessible cliffs. Eventually, texts in Old Persian, Akkadian (or Babylonian), Elamite, Sumerian, Hittite, Urartian, Hurrian, Ugaritic, and Eblaite could be read. Today, scholars have at their disposal in printed and electronic form an array of lexical and textual aids for the translation and study of cuneiform documents, from dictionaries, sign lists, and annotated compendia to monographs and articles treating specific topics. This richness is tempered by the fact that the field is constantly evolving. Unlike, say, the essentially static corpus of texts from Classical antiquity, a great many tablets are still unread and unpublished. Why this is so is owing to the sheer quantity of the holdings already in collections throughout the Middle East, Europe, and North America, not to mention the finds being freshly unearthed, either archaeologically or illicitly (see below). Another factor is the time, effort, and expertise that must be brought to bear on the task by specialists, spread relatively thin across the historical periods, linguistic phases, and di1

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verse subject matter of a written tradition that lasted, at least in greater Mesopotamia, for over three thousand years. Furthermore, while it is very improbable that additional stanzas of The Odyssey will surface, this is precisely what occurs frequently with cuneiform literature. Just in the past two decades, for example, dozens of new lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh have been identified in a variety of manuscript sources, and there are surely more to come in future years. A critical professional responsibility is thus the primary publication of inscribed material. In the aftermath of recent events in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, illicitly dug and looted tablets and other works have circulated globally, usually acquired for large sums by private collectors. This poses a dilemma for scholars: should they authenticate, copy, and read such objects, in the interests of advancing human knowledge, or should they on principle refuse to treat items from the antiquities trade? Does the situation change once someone else has published them? While it is true that most major collections contain hundreds, if not thousands, of Mesopotamian artifacts acquired on the market, likewise often without provenance, scholars usually take 1970, the date of the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property, as the dividing line for raising ethical or moral concerns. How does a clay tablet progress from wedges to words? First, specialists in its period and genre make what is called a hand-copy, that is, an enlarged drawing of the tablet’s obverse and reverse, including any signs written on the edges. Some scholars prefer to do this in natural light, free-hand in pencil, then ink, on smooth-coated tracing paper (papier calque). Others now electronically trace over a scanned image directly on their device screen (fittingly a tablet), or place the paper over the photograph and trace. Stippling or hatching is added to show abraded or broken areas. Whatever the choice of technique, the draft copy is carefully checked against the original tablet and corrections or adjustments made for the final version. There is still no substitute for the trained human eye; a digitized image alone, no matter how sophisticated, is no replacement for a good hand-copy. If the tablet is to be part of a projected catalogue volume of related documents, the next steps are to assemble all the copies, com-

INTRODUCTION

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pile indices of personal names and other pertinent information occurring in the group, make a concordance of museum and publication numbers, and write an introduction. The pages are then normally reviewed by other specialists, who double-check for consistency and completeness, ideally being able to consult the original tablets should questions arise. The final product, printed and/or scanned, becomes part of the fundamental research tools of the discipline. The hand-copy is also the basis for what is known as a text edition. This involves combining all relevant manuscripts into a single text, with variants noted, as well as transliteration, translation, and extensive notes on each line or word, with full documentation for previous discussions of the vocabulary, grammar, or context. This allows others to follow the reasoning behind divergent interpretations and to assess what is being put forward in the text edition. Transliteration relies on numerous accepted conventions. These include lower case Roman script for Sumerian, italics for Akkadian, and capital Roman letters for Sumerian word signs appearing in later Akkadian texts. Diacritic marks indicate long vowels and sounds that cannot be represented in the Latin alphabet, such as emphatic or hard consonants. Superscripts before or after a word denote, to cite several examples, a personal name, using the Roman numeral I; a divine name, using d; and a place name, using ki. For broken or abraded signs, square brackets enclose a suggested restoration, or are left blank. Half-brackets are occasionally introduced to show that the scholar considers a damaged sign to be unambiguous, even though portions of it are missing. Numbers have their own conventions (see NUMERACY). Multiple readings (pronunciations) of a single sign are possible. Thus, for instance, a particular cuneiform sign may be read sil, hash, kud, or tar, or the word sign for “cut” or “street.” The converse can be true too. The same sound may be written with various cuneiform signs, frequently half a dozen or more. To distinguish them in transliteration, an ordered sequence of accents and subscripts is used, as in: ka (mouth), ká (gate), kà (syllabic sound), ka4 (syllabic sound), ka5 (fox), and so forth. The ka sign meaning mouth could also refer to parts of the body near or in it, such as tooth (in Sumerian, zú) or nose (in Sumerian, kiri), or to activities involving the mouth, such as speak (Sumerian dug4), voice (Sumerian gù), or word (Sumerian in-

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im). All of these, therefore, are possible readings of that one cuneiform sign. Furthermore, by the so-called rebus principle, a scribe writing a Sumerian text about a hyena (kiri) could use the sign ka. A remark in passing: the accents seen on zú and gù above differentiate them from Sumerian zu (know) and gu (thread, chick pea), which are not written with the ka sign, but with others. Analogy and context aid modern cuneiformists in sorting things out for understanding and transliteration. In proceeding to a translation, scholars tend to err on the side of the literal and cautious, preferring that the original should be visible behind the modern text (see below). Hence, they frequently use square or half-brackets around words or parts of words that are missing or incomplete on the tablet, and parentheses to enclose words absent in these ancient languages, such as (the) and (but), or to clarify indefinite references, as in “they (the gods)….” For the sake of philological rigor, they give types of objects, commodities, plants, animals, and the like in italicized transliteration, unless their identification has been definitively accepted. The following representative sample is taken from a Sumerologist’s unpublished translation of one of the Sumerian compositions about the Bull of Heaven (see “Gilgamesh as Guide,” below). [They, the people of Uruk(?) brought drink from(?)] the storeho[use]. He (the bull) was wiping (clean) the mir vessels (with his tongue). He was making the tilimda vessels (as if they were) A gleaming cargo ship (as he licked them clean). First-quality pea flour and carp fish with their [han]ging Barbels he was [eating(?)]. Against the bull, a mob was follo[wing] in the streets of Uruk, A mob sat down with(?) its weapons against him… Fear (of him) lay over the bodies (of the people)… (The bull said:) Would that I could fly back to the door bolt of the temple of Zabala. Would that I could (…) in the tree branches of the ceiling beams of the Eanna temple.

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As the reader may readily observe from these lines, this approach can render cuneiform literature rather impenetrable! But on the opposite side of the coin, efforts by writers in other fields to produce fluid Mesopotamian works unfortunately fail to take into consideration the latest text editions and discoveries, resulting in prose and poetry that too often reflect outdated sources, albeit with some lovely turns of phrase. While one would not expect a new Iliad to be offered by someone who could not read Homeric Greek, many a Gilgamesh is by an author with no competence in Babylonian. Despite their billing as translations, they provide instead exemplars of the modern reception of the epic, a fascinating area of inquiry in and of itself. The Sumerians may have said it best: “If a scribe does not know how to grasp the meaning, how will a translator bring it out?”

GILGAMESH AS GUIDE According to Mesopotamian tradition, Gilgamesh was a legendary king of the city of Uruk. He may in fact have been a historical ruler of the mid-third millennium, whose heroic exploits inspired several Sumerian stories written in about 2100 B.C.E. During the Old Babylonian period, some of these were edited into a cohesive epic poem in Akkadian, whose surviving texts are known today as the “old versions.” Manuscripts of the second half of the second millennium, the “middle versions,” preserve only scattered episodes. The “standard version” dates to the seventh century and is the longest and most complete text. Later versions exist, as well as renderings in Hittite and Hurrian. In the present anthology, the epic runs like a guiding thread through the nine themes, from the quotations given in the chapter headings to the excerpts figuring in discussion or translation. Its pertinence for each theme, which span the breadth of human experience, points to the epic’s transcendence of temporal and spatial boundaries, the defining feature of any of the world’s literary masterpieces. But it also mirrors what is peculiarly Mesopotamian in outlook and reaction, leading us to deeper understanding of this ancient culture. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of encountering the epic, and for ease of reference when using this book, a synopsis is

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given here. The prologue introduces Gilgamesh as a man who gained exceptional knowledge and wisdom through his travails and travels. To learn how this came about, the narrator bids us read for ourselves the full account, inscribed on a tablet of lapis lazuli and placed in a box at the foot of the great walls the king built at Uruk, which we are also told to admire. As the tale begins, Gilgamesh has been abusing his subjects, taking shameful advantage of his royal power and physical strength. The women complain to the gods, who create Enkidu, a wild man of the steppe, to give Gilgamesh his comeuppance. Reports of this potential rival arouse the king’s interest. To lure him to the city, a hunter, whose traps and pits Enkidu has been foiling, is to take an irresistible prostitute out to the steppe. Succumbing to her charms, Enkidu is transformed from feral to civilized. She brings him to Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu meet, prove to be nearly equally matched, and become boon companions. The king proposes they make an expedition to the distant Cedar Forest, where the fearsome Humbaba stands guard. He is as monstrous as foretold, but the heroes vanquish him. Back in Uruk and aglow with triumph, Gilgamesh catches the eye of the goddess Ishtar. To her fury, he rejects her advances. Up she goes to heaven, where she talks her father into sending down the terrible Bull of Heaven. Its rampages spell calamity for the people of Uruk. Once again, the heroes prevail. Enkidu tears off the Bull’s haunch and hurls it at Ishtar, taunting her. This is too much for the gods. They meet in assembly, ruling that he must die. Enkidu’s death leaves Gilgamesh utterly distraught. He resolves to find the survivor of the Flood, who was granted immortality by the gods. Surely from him he can learn the secret of eternal life. Unkempt, eating raw meat, clad in lion skins, he sets forth across uncharted territory. Along the way, he comes upon the Scorpioncouple who watch over the tunnel through which the sun passes at night. When they urge him to abandon his hopeless quest, he refuses to listen. But then the Scorpion-wife persuades her husband to let Gilgamesh attempt to get through the tunnel before the setting sun enters it. With superhuman endurance and speed, he exits in the nick of time, escaping the sun’s incinerating rays.

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He emerges into the magical realism of a jeweled garden and a deserted seaside tavern, kept by a woman. Alarmed by his mien, threats, and obsession, she hustles him off, telling him that the Flood survivor’s boatman happens to be nearby. When Gilgamesh finds the boat, in a fit of violence he smashes its Stone Charms. The boatman, aghast, explains that these were what enabled him to cross unscathed the waters of death that surround the Flood survivor’s island. Now what? Gilgamesh makes punting poles, using them up one by one until they are within sight of the island. To go the remaining distance, he rips off a garment, hoisting it as a sail. The Flood survivor chides him for behaving at every turn as a ruler ought not, and for refusing to accept the evanescent nature of existence. Gilgamesh, his arrogance undimmed, continues to badger him. Why should you, he asks, unremarkable compared to myself, have been granted immortality? The time has come for him to hear the entire Flood story. When the survivor finishes, he proposes a little test. If you still think the gods will make an exception specially for you, he says, see if you can go without sleep for a week. Gilgamesh is certain he can pass with flying colors. Of course, he nods off immediately. Well aware of the character he is dealing with, the survivor advises his wife (yes, she too is immortal) to bake bread for each day he sleeps. He awakens a week later and tries to claim he dozed for just a moment, but the progressively moldy or stale loaves prove him wrong. There is nothing to do but depart. But as he and the boatman, henceforth banished from the island, set forth, the survivor’s wife convinces her husband to call them back to confide another secret of the gods. There is, he says, a plant of rejuvenation growing on the sea floor in a certain distant place. Gilgamesh finds the spot, dives down, and plucks a sprig. Alas, on the way back to Uruk, a snake eats it and promptly sheds its skin. The epic ends where and as it began. Standing once more before the ramparts of his city, Gilgamesh echoes the narrator’s words in the prologue. “Go up,” he tells the boatman. “Pace out the walls of Uruk.”

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FOR FURTHER READING Each section in this book includes a brief list of generally accessible works in English, intended as suggested starting points for nonspecialist readers interested in pursuing a given topic. Foster, Benjamin R. From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia. Bethesda: CDL Press, 1995. Foster, Benjamin R. The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Norton, 2019. George, Andrew. The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. London: Penguin, 1999. Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Harps That Once…Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Radner, Karen and Eleanor Robson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Walker, C. B. F. Reading the Past: Cuneiform. London: British Museum Press, 1987.

I. EXPLORATIONS OF THE MIND

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LEARNING Full knowledge of it all he gained. (Tablet I) The world’s earliest writing, dating to the last centuries of the fourth millennium, comes from the Sumerian city of Uruk. Its continuous use over the next three thousand years makes it one of the longest literate traditions known, as well as the most enduring achievement of the Uruk culture. Precisely why it was invented and what its precursors were remain topics of scholarly debate. Based on firm evidence from Uruk, however, we now understand that from the start, writing there included both abstract signs and images depicting tangible aspects of daily life (see NUMERACY). In Mesopotamia, contrary to widespread popular belief, writing words and sounds did not evolve from drawing pictures. Instead, it was a brilliantly conceived, intellectual effort to represent language, born in the context of what has rightly been termed the Uruk phenomenon. Later Mesopotamian tradition retained a sense that writing originated in Sumer (see MEMORY). Interestingly, although they associated many of their institutions and practices with divine agency, they credited themselves with devising how to read and write. Several works of literature reflect this, as in the series of smug Sumerian stories composed for the royal court of Ur at the end of the third millennium. These treat the dealings of Enmerkar, a legendary early king of Uruk, with the king of Aratta, a mythical city across the eastern mountains. In one tale, Enmerkar responds to Aratta’s absurd demands by sending the messenger back with an inscribed tablet, confident that nobody there could read it. The king’s sputtering rage when he is handed what he perceives as a lump of clay with baleful markings was surely an amusing and gratifying episode for the lit11

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erate rulers and notables of Ur, who considered themselves the descendants of those of Uruk (see below). Later Mesopotamian kings also took pride in their learning. Assurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.), for instance, boasted that his academic achievements were superior to those of any Assyrian monarch before him: “I have worked intricate mathematical problems that had no solution. I have read artful text in which the Sumerian was obscure and the Akkadian was difficult to interpret. I have studied inscriptions from before the Flood, a mishmash of cryptic enigmas.” His extant compositions include several uninspired, plodding hymns and a childhood letter to his father, which suggest that his claim to advanced education, if not to literary talent, had some basis in fact. Under his direction, thousands of tablets and writing boards were assembled in his capital at Nineveh, the largest library to survive from the ancient world. While temple, palace, personal, and scribalschool libraries had existed since the mid-third millennium, Assurbanipal’s surpassed them all in its comprehensiveness. For the holdings of prose and poetry, his scribes carefully prepared fresh copies and editions of the works considered both then and now to be the masterpieces of cuneiform literature. Among them was The Epic of Gilgamesh. Assurbanipal likely identified particularly with the prologue’s description of the heroking as someone who “knew the world’s ways, was wise in all things…who studied seats of power everywhere, full knowledge of it all he gained.” Furthermore, the narrator assures his readers that it was Gilgamesh himself who “set out all his hardships on a monument of stone.” Throughout much of Mesopotamian history, this kind of intellectual curiosity and attainment were traits to be admired. We observe this, for example, in the concerted drive of Assyrian kings to obtain exotic species for their botanical and zoological gardens, as well as to replicate native habitats so the plants and animals could flourish and breed successfully (see ANIMALS). The collector’s instinct also showed itself in other areas. The sixth-century NeoBabylonian king Nabonidus was one of the world’s first antiquarians and archaeologists. He investigated the third-millennium site of Agade (see MEMORY), finding the remains of its temple of Ishtar after a rainstorm opened a gully around the ancient foundation. This

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“made the king’s heart glad and brightened his countenance.” Nabonidus also organized several museums, enthusiastically curating displays of venerable statues, monuments, and inscriptions, some of which had been unearthed in his excavations. While a learned person could expect to be rewarded with social and economic respect, the process of becoming such an individual was arduous. It is difficult to estimate the rate of literacy in the general population, and this varied from period to period and region to region. Many Old Assyrian merchants of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries B.C.E., for example, appear to have been able to write their own letters from their trading outposts in Anatolia to their wives back in Assur, who replied in their own words and hand (see LOVE and below). In addition, specialists in certain branches of learning might not have been fully conversant in the terminology in other spheres. By the same token, a commodity dealer might have been able to read or compose a simple manifest and to recognize or write his name, but not much more. As a Sumerian riddle puts it, “You enter the house blind, you come out seeing. What is it? A school.” Students began their educational journey by learning how to form clay into tablets and to cut reeds into styluses. Then they practiced writing signs over and over, until they were deemed ready to copy simple words, phrases, or texts. Teachers wrote these out either on a small round tablet, or on the left side of a rectangular tablet. Students were supposed to flip the round tablet over and write from memory, or to use the blank right side, which was made thicker than the left so that it could be erased repeatedly. Once these skills were mastered, training in earnest could begin. The language arts curriculum included memorizing and copying literary extracts, the formulas used in contracts and legal matters, and catalogues and lists often containing recondite vocabulary. When they graduated to composing deeds of sale and other practice documents, they enlivened the exercise by making the principals themselves and classmates. Advanced students might be expected to copy long texts onto prisms of four to six sides. They also received instruction in preparing monumental inscriptions, for which they frequently copied and studied previous models (see below). It is not clear if students chose their fields of concentration, or were assigned to

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them. The few who had the requisite talent and motivation then embarked on additional years of study to acquire the knowledge and skills for such fields as divination and astronomical observation (see NUMERACY, MAGIC). Occasionally, tablets preserve small drawings. Since these do not illustrate the text and for the most part are of high artistic quality, it is unlikely that these were the doodles of bored or distracted students, as is sometimes suggested. Instead, they afford rare evidence for drawing lessons in schools. Students learned basic music theory as well, but attended conservatories or took private lessons in performance.

SCHOOL DAYS IN SUMER By the early second millennium, Sumerian had become a prestigious cultural language, rather than one in daily use. Ambitious Babylonian parents likely sent their children to schools or private tutors teaching the traditional Sumerian curriculum of generations past. This doubtless included letters that earlier students wrote home with complaints about too much work, unfair instructors, and not enough leisure time, as well as the stern responses of their parents. Here, in what may be a letter of its own time, a father berates his son, who shows no signs of buckling down to his schoolwork (YBC 4216, Old Babylonian period). *

*

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I never asked you to walk behind my plow ox. I never told you to plow my field. I never made you break up clods with a hoe. Never did I say to you, “Get on with it, now you take care of me!” I never, in my whole life, said to you that someone like you should work and take care of his parents…Is there anyone who ever did more for his son than I have?... Your fooling around drives me over the edge! What have you to do with buffoons and cabaret singers, that you hang out with them? The only homework you do is clowning around and singing! … You’re nothing but a dog who spends his time licking himself, a donkey who soils his own bedding!

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COPYCAT HOMEWORK We possess a homework assignment, possibly from the mid-sixth century, for a group of eight or more students, preparing them to be able to compose texts in the old-fashioned style favored in the later periods of Mesopotamian history. In class, the teacher dictated a tomb inscription. As it happens, this affords a unique Babylonian example of an apostrophe to someone passing by a tomb, a genre well attested in the Hellenistic period. For homework, the students were supposed to render it in archaic spelling and script on a clay cone, a form typically used in earlier times to commemorate the construction of major buildings. YBC 2292 is one student’s effort, in which he reversed signs and wrote the text in the wrong direction on the cone. Unfortunately for him, he seems to have collaborated with or copied from another weak student, for they both made the same, distinctive mistakes. The two strongest students also may have worked together. The teacher never corrected or returned the homework, so the assignments were all found together, today scattered among several museums around the world. *

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In the future, In times to come, In far-off days, In times hereafter, May he who shall see this tomb Not let it pass into oblivion, May he restore it! That man who shall see this, Who shall not be unmindful, Who shall say “I should restore this tomb,” May the good deed he has done Be requited him. Above, may his name be in favor, Below, may his (family) ghosts drink pure waters.

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LEARNED REFERENCES An advantage of any standardized curriculum is that the educated, wherever they may find themselves in later life, will share common points of cultural reference, especially in the realm of literature. Mesopotamian authors expected that allusions to other works, both explicit and implicit, would be appreciated (see MEMORY). These also took the form of parodies, replete with barbed, sly commentaries on the topics of the day. In the late first millennium, for instance, “Gilgamesh” orders horses of specific coat colors, thousands of each kind, while an agent of “Assurbanipal’s library” must search high and low for nonsensical tomes. On this clay prism, a father and his son argue about filial (in)gratitude. At one point, the son brings up the example of Etana, the king whose search for an heir was the subject of a long narrative poem (see BIRDS) (YBC 2394, Old Babylonian period). *

*

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[Father] You know very well that a son should have regard for his father, as much as for his own children and wife. But when it comes to sons, be they five, six, seven, or eight, whoever gave a man even one son whom he was content with? [Son] You know very well that Etana went up mountain after mountain for a child. He went up to heaven, like a bird, to the assembly of the gods. They ordained for him the [lot] of mankind. Why did the gods not choose him, and not give him a son, from among things destined to be?

COURT LITERATI At the end of the third millennium, talented writers who knew Sumerian well found honor and patronage in the courts of the NeoSumerian kings, especially during the 48-year reign of Shulgi at Ur. Poets produced florid glorifications of the king (see ANIMALS), as well as works praising the legendary rulers of ancient Sumer, including Gilgamesh, Enmerkar (see above), and Lugalbanda (see below). The court was also entertained by masques, debates (see BIRDS), and humorous sketches, many with in-jokes appreciated by the savvy.

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This excerpt, from one of the Shulgi hymns, may have been sung to orchestral accompaniment (YBC 4600). *

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I am king! The singer has commemorated my exploits In hymns about my divinely sanctioned power, Report of me shall never drop from speech, Hymns about me shall never perish. I am the most splendid king of this land! From the first sprouting of the human race till its present teeming state, Heaven has let no king bear crown or wield scepter from a royal throne Who could compare himself to me!

In this episode from an epic about Lugalbanda (see also ANIMALS), the future king falls ill, so cannot keep up with his older brothers on a military expedition to Aratta. They leave him to recover in a mountain cave, along with ample supplies of raw ingredients. He cleverly and resourcefully figures out how to make stew and bake bread. Perhaps the court enjoyed the tale of his camp cookery adventures while they banqueted at a palace feast (YBC 4623). *

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He is all alone, he looks around but there is no one to be seen. The goods stocked up in leather bags, The goods so carefully provided in leather sacks By his brothers and companions, Together with fresh water, that he might cook with them in the open, Holy Lugalbanda brought it all out from the mountain cave. He set it out by a fire pit, He filled a pail with water, He sliced up what he had set down before him. He took some flints in hand, When he had struck them repeatedly together In the kindling he had laid out in that rustic opening, The thin flints struck a spark. That fire flared up in the wilderness like the rising sun.

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY He knew naught of baking bread, nor aught knew he of ovencraft, But with seven coals he baked from them what needs a fire of thirty staves!

BELLES-LETTRES Surviving from the Neo-Sumerian period on, the sizeable correspondence of the elite shows that for them letter-writing was an art, often featuring flowery salutations and closures, as well as many elements of poetic language. Of particular interest for the history of diplomacy are the mid-second millennium letters frequently exchanged among the rulers belonging to an international club of great powers, whose lingua franca was Akkadian. To learn the stylistic niceties, students copied and memorized letters to and from kings, viziers, officials, and others. Some modern scholarship has questioned the authenticity of certain letters, that is, if an admittedly real individual actually wrote the text purportedly in his name, or if it represents instead an idealized model to be emulated. However this may be, for those with epistolary aptitude, there was steady demand for their services. Here, a citizen of Neo-Sumerian Ur petitions the king to prevent seizure of his father’s estate, as sometimes transpired upon the death of important administrators (YBC 6711). *

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Say to my king, that bull with gleaming eyes and lapis beard, say it, moreover, to that golden image, fashioned on a propitious day, that buffalo reared in a sacred close, heart’s desire of holy Inanna, the lord and master, whom Inanna relies on! You too were formed as a child of Heaven. Your command, like a god’s, cannot be revoked. Your words, like raindrops pelting down from the sky, cannot be reckoned up. Thus says Ur-Shaga, your servant. My king has not looked into my case. I am a citizen of Ur. May it please my king, let no one take away my father’s estate, let no one confiscate my patrimony! My king should know this.

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We have a rare instance of a letter, its answer, and a follow-up, all of which survive in many copies, thanks to their popularity in the Old Babylonian curriculum. The initial letter (YBC 4596) was sent to King Shulgi by his grand vizier Aradmu after his mission to the eastern frontier to check on various matters of royal concern. Aradmu gives a negative report: the local high official, Apilasha, treated him very rudely and had taken on too many trappings of royal power. Shulgi’s answer (YBC 4185) must have come as a surprise, for he chews out his vizier and defends Apilasha’s actions as perfectly justified in the face of unrest in the region. He orders the two of them to work together. In Aradmu’s next letter (no manuscript at Yale), the vizier hastens to change course, fulsomely praising Shulgi’s superior wisdom and statecraft with regard to Apilasha. The following excerpts are adapted from Piotr Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur: An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011) pp. 250, 276, 295. *

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Speak to my king, saying the words of Aradmu, your servant… When I stood at the gate of the local palace, no one inquired about my king’s well-being, no one rose from his seat for me…this all made me very worried… I discovered that Apilasha was decked out in precious stones and metals. He sat on a throne on a dais placed over a fine carpet, with his feet on a golden footstool. He would not remove his feet in my presence… Someone heaped up two oxen and twenty sheep on my table, but even though I had given no offense, the guards overturned my table. I was so frightened that my skin crawled! Speak to Aradmu, saying the words of Shulgi, your king…. How could you so misunderstand the true meaning of all that he has been doing?... If he had not expanded his powers, just as I would have, if he had not sat on a throne on a dais placed over a fine carpet, had not set his feet on a golden footstool, had not by his very own authority appointed and removed governors from the office of

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY governor, office holders from official positions, had not punished anyone by death or blinding, and had not promoted those of his own choosing over others – how else could he have secured the frontier?... If you are indeed my most faithful retainers, you will listen together while they read out this tablet before the two of you. Both of you must come to an agreement and secure the foundations of the frontier territory. It is urgent! Speak to the king, saying the words of Aradmu, your servant… Apilasha, from childhood, has been loyal to me… I recognized him in my heart, and once it was clear to you, my king, with divine insight, you recognized that person and promoted him above all the other high officials in the foreign territories. My king, you surpass all great deeds, you take revenge on my opponents. Give a command, change it! Your orders are imperative orders; your deeds are great deeds!… Apilasha is the mortal who has found favor in your eyes, so how could I ever be set against him? … No king can rival my king! May your heart be glad!

ENHEDUANNA, PRINCESS AND POET Although scribes and other learned professionals seem to have been almost exclusively male, girls and young women were educated in school or at home with private tutors. The most extensive corpus of women’s writings from the entire ancient world comes from the early second millennium correspondence between wives and female family members at Assur and their merchant husbands and other relatives whose business ventures took them to a trading center in Anatolia for months, even years on end. The women tend not to mince words when it comes to matters of money and their suspicions of spousal infidelity. One of Mesopotamia’s finest authors was Sargon’s daughter, Enheduanna, whom the king appointed high priestess of the moongod at Ur. To this brilliant, fascinating princess we owe the first literature of any civilization that can securely be associated with a specific author. Not only that, her image survives on a contemporaneous limestone plaque from Ur, showing her and her attendants making offerings at an altar. Of what must have been an appreciable literary

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output, we have a series of Sumerian hymns, as well as some ardent love lyrics, all later copies of her work. Her outstanding extant creation is a long autobiographical poem, in which she recounts her traumatic experiences when forces rebelling against her family’s rule seized power in Ur (see LOVE). She begins by describing in vivid detail the destruction the goddess Inanna visited upon the disloyal cities and lands. Enheduanna then moves back in time, taking us to her sanctum when the rebel leader invaded it and her. Her pleas to the moon-god go unanswered, so she calls upon Inanna, who comes to her rescue with terrible swiftness. In gratitude, Enheduanna gives birth to this poem, which she expects to live long after her. She then, quite effectively, switches to the thirdperson, becoming an omniscient narrator of the scene in which the moon-god welcomes his priestess back to his temple, blithely indifferent, as though nothing had occurred in the interim. But Enheduanna, gloriously and proudly resplendent, has the final word, the lasting legacy of her poem. Yale manuscripts preserve most of this work (YBC 4656, Old Babylonian period, Plate 1). *

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Queen of all cosmic powers, bright light shining from above, Steadfast woman, arrayed in splendor, beloved of earth and sky, Consort of Heaven, whose gem of rank is greatest of them all, Favored for the noblest diadem, meet for highest sacral rank, Who has taken up in hand cosmic powers sevenfold, My lady! You are warden of the greatest cosmic powers, You bore them off on high, you took them firmly in hand, You gathered them together, you pressed them to your breast. You spew venom on a country, like a dragon, Wherever you raise your voice, like a tempest, no crop is left standing. You are a deluge, bearing that country away. You are the sovereign of heaven and earth, you are their warrior goddess! You are the raging fire that rained down upon this land, Given power by heaven, the queen who rides on lions’ backs,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY Whose command, once spoken, is the command of holy heaven, The greatest duties fall to you, who else could understand them? You wrought havoc on the country, it was you who gave the storm its strength, With Enlil’s favor, you taught this land respect, Heaven itself assigned you this mission. My lady! The country bows down at your battle cry! When the trembling human race has found its place before you, Midst your awe-inspiring, overwhelming splendor, For of all cosmic powers you hold those most terrible, And at your behest the storage house of tears is opened wide, They walk the pathway to the house of deepest mourning, Defeated, ere the battle had begun. My lady! With your force, a tooth could chip a stone. You charge forward with the onrush of a tempest, You raise your battle cry, like a raging storm, Your voice resounds, like a thunderclap. Though one contrary wind after another may tire at last, Your footfalls never tire, They sound the drumbeat of a funeral dirge. My lady! The great, the ruling gods seek refuge from you, Like fluttering bats in ruin heaps, No one can stand up to your furious brow. Who can calm your angry heart? Calming your angry heart is far too much to do. O Queen, might your feelings be mild? O Queen, might your heart be kind? Will you not calm from your anger, O Child of the Moon? O Queen, supreme over the country, who could take from you your place? Even mountains you parcel out as your terrain, where grain is unnatural, You made flames flicker in their passage paths, You made their watercourses run in blood, their people drink it,

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Their forces fled before you, of their own accord, Their ranks parted before you, of their own accord, Their fighting men ran before you, of their own accord. The storm broke upon their cities, where people had celebrated, They rounded up their finest fighting men for captives.

[For the next stanzas, in which the moon-god does nothing to help Enheduanna in her hour of need, see LOVE.] O Queen, beloved of Heaven, may your heart feel pity for me! Show it, oh show it: If the moon-god said nothing, he meant, “Do as you will.” Show that you stand high as heaven, Show that you reach wide as the world, Show that you destroy all unruly lands, Show that you raise your voice to foreign countries, Show that you smash head after head, Show that you feed on kill, like a lion, Show that your eyes are furious, Show that your stare is full of rage, Show that your eyes gleam and glitter, Show that you are unyielding, that you persevere, Show that you stand paramount, For if the moon-god said nothing, he meant, “Do as you will.” My Queen! This made you greater, this made you greatest. O Queen, beloved of Heaven, I would tell of your furious deeds! I banked the coals, I prepared myself for the rite. Your chapel is ready for you, will your heart feel no pity for me? This (poem) filled me, this overflowed from me, Exalted Lady, as I gave birth for you. What I confided to you in the dark of night, a singer shall perform for you in the bright of day! Because of your assaulted wife, because of your assaulted child, Great was your fury, remorseless your heart. The almighty queen, who presides over the priestly congregation,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY She accepted her prayer. Inanna’s sublime will was for her restoration. It was a sweet moment for her, she was arrayed in her finest, she was beautiful beyond compare, She was lovely as a moonbeam streaming down. The moon-god stepped forward to admire her. Her divine mother joined him with her blessing, The very doorway gave its greeting too. What she commanded for her consecrated woman prevailed. To you, who can destroy countries, whose cosmic powers are bestowed by Heaven, To my queen, arrayed in beauty, Inanna be praised!

FOR FURTHER READING Charpin, Dominique. Reading and Writing in Babylon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Gadd, C. J. Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1956. Pedersen, Olof. Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East 1500-300 B.C. Bethesda: CDL Press, 1998. Rochberg, Francesca. Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Van De Mieroop, Marc. Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

NUMERACY Two-thirds of him was divine, one-third of him was human. (Tablet I) In all of Mesopotamian literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh makes the most frequent use of fantastic numbers for quantity, size, weight, time, and distance. Particularly striking is the mathematical puzzle of his genealogy: “two-thirds of him was divine, one-third of him was human.” His physical attributes likewise defy logical resolution: “Eleven cubits was his height, his chest four cubits wide, a triple cubit his feet, his leg six times twelve, his stride was six times twelve cubits, a triple cubit the beard of his cheek.” He is able to wrestle fifty strong men daily; to cover in three days a journey that normally takes a month and a half; and to run for twelve double hours through the nighttime tunnel of the sun. While much of this may be laid to a desire for poetic exaggeration of the hero-king’s glories, some numbers in the epic seem needlessly to resist calculation or rationalization. In commissioning weapons for the journey to the Cedar Forest, for example, Gilgamesh and Enkidu have massively heavy axes and swords made, each weighing three talents (nearly 200 pounds). This, the text goes on to say, gave them a burden of ten talents apiece to carry, which does not compute. The figure is repeated later, as they prepare to lay waste to the stands of cedar, but here the swords weigh eight talents and a battle net, whose weight is missing from the text, has appeared in Gilgamesh’s arsenal. A few lines further on, the axes are now said to weigh two talents, so again, the numbers do not add up. Even diminished, the axes create woodchips on the heroic scale of three and a half cubits long. 25

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To cite another instance, after Gilgamesh foolishly smashes the Stone Charms that made it possible to cross unharmed the waters of death (see MADNESS), the ferryman tells him to cut “five times sixty poles, each five times twelve cubits long.” Using them one after another to punt the boat, Gilgamesh runs out of poles at “twice sixty sea-miles.” To a remarkable extent, Gilgamesh is filled with figures of similarly incongruous specificity. As we stand on the walls of Uruk at the start of the epic, for example, the narrator bids us admire the urban plan: “one square mile of city, one square mile of gardens, one square mile of clay pits, a half square mile of Ishtar’s dwelling, three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk!” The sum is correct, but the archaeological evidence for the site of Uruk does not come close to reconciliation with the text. And can there really have been that much land devoted to clay pits? We find equally baffling numbers in the Flood survivor’s description of the Ark, which defy modern translation into a buoyant model. One version has it a cube: “one full acre was her deck space, ten dozen cubits the height of each of her sides, ten dozen cubits square her outer dimensions…I decked her in six, I divided her in seven, her interior I divided in nine.” Another version has it circular: “let her length and breadth be equal, let her deck area be one acre, let her sides be ten cubits high, let thongs, each 120 cubits long, be interwoven inside her…it will surely take four times 3600 plus thirty measures of fiber.” As for the waterproofing materials, did the Ark take “thrice 3600 measures of tar” or “3600 measures of bitumen [which] did not come all the way up, five times 60 measures of bitumen I added”? Perhaps the educated Mesopotamian recognized these as witty satires on school mathematics assignments, or sly commentaries on the bureaucratic mindset. One has the feeling that the author(s) of Gilgamesh did not recall with any great fondness such exercises as solving word problems and equations, calculating volumes and areas, and learning how to use tables of multiplication, squares, coefficients, and reciprocals. Accounting students also had lessons in recording the minutia of commodities, fields, livestock, personnel, and taxes, which sometimes used different metrologies for different places and operations, requiring difficult calculations to convert one to another.

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For the quantitatively inclined, however, the educational trajectory took them beyond rote learning and the essentially utilitarian or administrative. Their intellectual abilities led to work on topics ranging from the velocity of the moon to the predictability of eclipses (see MAGIC) to the movement of the planets. They mapped the constellations, organized the lunisolar calendar, and explored theoretical problems in geometry and a form of algebra. Mesopotamian prowess in astronomy and pure mathematics, famed throughout the ancient world, derived in part from their having developed sophisticated number-writing systems. In the earliest periods, the round ends of a reed stylus were pressed into a tablet at a right angle or obliquely. Separate symbols for each power from 1 to 10,000 were repeated as many times as necessary to write the full number. This space-consuming system was replaced during the late third millennium by the more streamlined use of two cuneiform signs, a vertical wedge for 1 and a slanted or corner wedge (called by Assyriologists a Winkelhacken) for 10, which were repeated for 2–9 and 20–50 respectively and then combined as required. In common with the first system, the signs were written in descending order of power from left to right, ending with any units. Just before the turn of the second millennium, the sexagesimal (based on multiplying or dividing by 60) place-value system of notation was invented for greater ease of calculation, especially for very large numbers and quantities involving mixed or fractional units of measure. A given number was broken down into a sequence of 60based components, written from left to right in descending order of power. The number 165, for example, was rendered as two 60s plus 40 plus 5, which we transcribe as 120,40,5. In theory, and in the absence of determinative context, ambiguity was possible, because there was no sign equivalent for the decimal point or for an empty place (for which we use zero). In reality, however, the system consistently produced brilliant results, many of which were used even into medieval times. Today, its legacy endures in our own 60-based division of hours and degrees. All this stemmed from the evolution of an abstract notion of number in the late fourth millennium. Recent scholarly attention has focused on finds of hollow clay balls enclosing small clay tokens that stood for quantities of certain commodities. To reconstruct a

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simple transaction, one had to break the ball open and count the tokens. Since this resulted in the destruction of the document, the practice began of marking the outside to show how many tokens were inside. Also on the outside, record-keepers rolled or stamped their official or personal seals as a means of identification. While this worked on some levels, the overall scheme had serious limitations. One was that there was a separate type of token for each commodity, and another was that the symbols for a given amount were not standardized across many kinds of commodities. Above all, tokens could not express the intangible. An intriguing vestige of the physical aspect of the clay ball may be seen in the way rectilinear tablets were turned from obverse to reverse as though they were flattened spheres rotating on a vertical axis, such that the text at the bottom of the obverse continues on the top of the reverse. At the same time, they spun on a horizontal axis, such that columns on the obverse read from left to right, on the reverse from right to left. The chronological and conceptual relationship between tokens and true writing (see LEARNING) has been much discussed. It is now clear that although writing did not evolve from tokens, it was invented in response to some of the same accountability needs, and was perhaps inspired by the shortcomings of that system. The enumerations found on many Uruk-period documents bear this out, as well as demonstrate that “number” was in the process of becoming an abstract idea. During the transition, for example, a small circle (see above) could stand for 10 commodities or 18 surface units. The long-lived vitality of numeracy in ancient Mesopotamia may be gauged by several new developments in the second half of the first millennium. To the state- and temple-sanctioned celestial observations made for divination purposes (see MAGIC) were added those intended for personal use, what we would term horoscopes. A related invention was the zodiac. Of particular significance for understanding economic conditions in the centuries after the fall of Babylon are the astronomical diaries. Their innovation was to combine remarks on the moon and planets with notes on the weather, the height of the Euphrates at Babylon, and the market prices of barley, dates, mustard/cuscuta, cress/cardamom, sesame, and wool, in terms of one shekel of silver. The latest datable cuneiform text is an astro-

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nomical diary of 75 C.E., whose final line reads, rather fittingly, “on the 28th, last lunar visibility before sunrise.”

MATHEMATICAL LESSONS Students were expected to consult or memorize tables, such as those of the reciprocals of regular and irregular numbers and operations using them. Exactitude and accuracy vary, doubtless owing to copyist error. The four columns of this text (YBC 11127, Old Babylonian period) give the numbers 1 through 6, their reciprocals, those values doubled, and the coefficient, which is 2. The number 4,54 is the sum of the numbers in the third column. 1 2 3 4 5 6

1 30 20 15 12 10

2 1 40 30 24 20

2 2 2 2 2 2

4,54

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One of Yale’s iconic tablets (YBC 7289, Old Babylonian period, Plate 2) is an exercise in finding the length of the diagonal of a square. On it, the student drew a square and its two diagonals and marked the length of a side as 30. He then wrote two numbers along the axis of one of the diagonals. The first is a very close approximation of √2, while the one beneath gives the correct length of the diagonal, which he arrived at by multiplying 30 by his number for √2. He had either looked up its reciprocal in a table, or had memorized its coefficient. Centuries later, Pythagoras would also work on this problem, formulating the well-known theorem that applies to all right triangles, not just those within squares. *

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1;24,51,10 [first number]. The decimal equivalent is 1.41421296…, with the actual value of √2 being 1.41421356... 42;25,35 [second number]. The decimal equivalent is 42.4263888…, with the actual value of √1800 being 42.4264068…

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Word problems were likely the bane of many a student’s existence. Possibly to pique interest, instructors sometimes came up with such examples as taking a series of measurements with a ruler that shrank each time it was used. The following excerpts come from a tablet with eight problems about digging trenches, of which these are the first and last (YBC 4663, Old Babylonian period). The exercises were intended for the intermediate-level pupil, so step-by-step solutions were written out. Note that some measures refer to objects and body parts, as in the English “rod” and “foot,” and that the standard work unit refers to the administrative expectations of an able-bodied worker’s daily output, here the amount of earth he was supposed to dig and remove (see also below). *

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Given an excavation 5 poles long, 1½ poles wide, ½ pole deep, 10 cubic shekels being the standard work unit [= 10 x 12 cubits x 6 fingers x 1 cubit], 6 grains of silver being a worker’s daily wages, what are the area, volume, number of workers, and total expenses in silver? To solve this, multiply the length and the width, and you will get 7;30 for the area. Multiply 7;30 by the depth, and you will get 45 cubic garden plots [= 6480 cubic cubits for the volume]. Take the reciprocal of the standard work unit, and you will get 6. Multiply by 45, and you will get 4,30 (for the number of workers). Multiply 4,30 by the wages, you will get 9 shekels (the total expenses in silver). This is how to do it.

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9 shekels of silver is the total expenses for digging a trench. The length exceeds the width by 3;30 rods. Its depth is ½ rod. The standard work unit is 10 cubic shekels. A worker’s daily wage is 6 grains of silver. What are the length and width? To solve this, take the reciprocal of the wage, multiply by 9, the total cost in silver, so that gives you 4,30 (days). Multiply 4,30 by the standard work unit, so that gives you 45 (trench volume).

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Take the reciprocal of ½ rod, multiply by 45, so that gives you 7:30 (trench area).

[At this point, the method shifts to what has been termed today cutand-paste algebra.] Now, take half of the amount by which the length exceeds the width, so that it gives you 1;45. Square 1;45, so that it gives you 3;3,45. Add 7;30 to this so it gives you 10;33,45. Take its square root, and you will get 3;15. Put down 3;15 twice. Add 1;45 to the one, and subtract 1;45 from the other, so that gives you length and width. The length is 5 rods and the width is 1½ rods. This is how to do it.

Since the exercises for advanced students no longer came with “how to” instructions, it is sometimes difficult to know how they proceeded. To solve the price and weight problem in this tablet containing various types of commercial problems (YBC 4698, Old Babylonian period), a mathematician today would use a system of linear equations. The following translation and modern solution, given in brackets, are adapted from Friberg, Amazing Traces, pp. 349-50 (see For Further Reading). *

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The price of iron is 1 30, the price of gold is 9. 1 mina of silver has been paid. How much iron and gold were bought if their combined weight was 1 shekel? [If i is the weight of the iron, and g is the weight of the gold, and the unit of weight is the shekel (1/60 of a mina), then i + g = 1, 1,30 · i + 9 · g = 1,00. The correct solution is i = ;37 46 40, g = ;22 13 20. Expressed using the standard weight measures of the period, the iron is thus ½ shekel 23 1/3 grains, and the gold is 1/3 shekel 6 2/3 grains.]

MEASUREMENT LESSONS To prepare for a career in land management, a student had to learn and practice the requisite measurement skills. On this roughly made exercise tablet (NBC 7017, Akkadian period), a would-be surveyor

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wrote out, very crudely, what purport to be the dimensions and areas for several hypothetical tracts, together with extraneous numerals and badly written signs for various grades of productivity. One sees that he clearly had a long way to go before he attained competence. Question marks in the translation indicate uncertain readings. *

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The short side is 13 poles, the long side is 80 poles, the area is 2 ropes (2400 square reeds) 15 garden plots (60 square reeds), the area is 2 ropes (2400 square reeds) 2 dikes (800 square reeds) in harvested barley, 13 ½ poles bad land? …, 1? pole of land of low productivity, its area is 18 dikes …, including 1 dike of land in harvested barley, 6 5 1 7 1 4 1 3.

Instructors assigned more advanced pupils problems in calculating the areas of triangles, trapezoids, and circles, as well as irregular shapes, which they had to break down into regular components. On the obverse of YBC 7290, for instance, the student drew a trapezoid and labeled three of the sides 2,20, 2,20, and 2. He obtained an area of 5,3,20 and wrote this in the middle. So-called inheritance problems required the student to divide evenly a given geometric shape into a specific number of parts. Related texts include those in tablets like YBC 4608, which presents a large triangular field partitioned for six brothers by equidistant lines parallel to the base of the triangle. The student was to work out the area of what each brother received and compare them. These and numerous similar Yale tablets date to the Old Babylonian period. Students also needed to master different metrological systems, including conversion methods. Even on the same estate, one standard might be used to estimate productivity of the fields, while another might be used to report the actual harvest. In the eighteenth century B.C.E., a young man named Warad-Sin wrote out these metrological tables as he was learning length measurements. He copied the first (YBC 4700), then the other (YBC 4701) a week later. No doubt he produced many more such exercises, but no others survive. The following translations are excerpted from Robson, Mathematics in Ancient Iraq, Table 4.7 (see For Further Reading). *

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½ rod 0;39 (rods) ½ rod 1 cubit 0;35 ½ rod 2 cubits 0;40 ½ rod 3 cubits 0;45 ½ rod 4 cubits 0;50 ½ rod 5 cubits 0;55 1 rod 1 1 ½ rods 1;30 [and continuing with the sequence until] 10 rods 10 Long tablet of Warad-Sin Month IV, 16th day 1 finger 0;02 (cubits) 2 fingers 0;04 3 fingers 0;06 [and continuing with the sequence until] 9 fingers 0;18 1/3 cubit 0;20 ½ cubit 0;30 2/3 cubit 0;40 1 cubit 1 [and continuing with the sequence until] 5 cubits 5 ½ rod 1 cubit 6 ½ rod 2 cubits 7 ½ rod 3 cubits 8 ½ rod 4 cubits 9 ½ rod 5 cubits 10 Long tablet of Warad-Sin Month IV, 23rd day

AGRICULTURAL ACCOUNTABILITY On large estates, it was crucial to keep track of all male and female laborers and their dependents, as well as potters, scribes, and other skilled workers. Careful accounts were also maintained for all livestock, with individual records noting species, age, sex, and use. In the Neo-Sumerian period, administrators became keenly interested in quantifying every possible task, even to the extent of calculating how much reed was required to build a fire to roast a piglet for a feast, and to making a record when nothing had been done. They formulated elaborate schemes of agricultural management, including the concept of the standard work unit (see above). If a worker did less, his output was figured in fractions, as in several of the examples given below. At first, this new system of government-supported teams of workers and livestock on government-owned lands seemed to result in excellent returns, because the royal administration was not sharing

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the harvest with lessees and beneficiaries, as it had in the preceding period. The state may also have gradually raised its quantifiable expectations, in order to push production ever higher. The system’s costs, however, soon became apparent. These entailed the enormous expense and effort of housing, feeding, and managing tens of thousands of people and animals. Official policy seems to have set these concerns aside in the obsessive quest for total control. Soon, the shortfall on agricultural projections was twenty percent. External pressures were contributing factors too. At one point, a great border wall was built to keep out immigrants, said to be marauders and threats to ordered society. Inflation soared, workers rioted or fled, invaders from the east swept in, and the Neo-Sumerian state fell in 2004 B.C.E. We can see much of this progression thanks to the preservation of over 35,000 administrative records from the period. Supervisors wrote vouchers of the work performed and time elapsed on small tablets, three examples of which are given below, which they turned over to the head accounting office to be posted. To prevent tampering with the records and as a guarantee of authenticity, the local officials rolled their personal seals across the text. *

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20 workers for 1 day, field work (NBC 2080) 43 workers, irrigation work (NBC 1627) 62 workers for a month making straw (NBC 2072)

In the following voucher, an official in the city of Umma documented a seasonal job. Since the rivers of Mesopotamia flood in the spring and are low in the summer, workers annually had to breach the mudbrick walls of reservoirs to irrigate the crops growing in the fields (NBC 2915). *

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7 ½ workers for 2 days, breaching the reservoir of Ninnutum. Foreman: Lugal-Ishtaran. Seal of Lu-Shara.

By recording the actual number of days, workers, and tasks accomplished over a long period, the total productivity of any given parcel

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of land could be calculated, compared to previous results and the quota goals, and adjustments made. Vouchers, such as the ones given above, were registered on large tablets that the Sumerians termed “balanced accounts.” Some of these tallies preserve a year’s worth of data for a specific group of fields, beginning and ending with the harvest and in between moving through the agricultural cycle of plowing, harrowing, hoeing, clod breaking, seeding, weeding, and irrigating. Very seldom do the outcomes exceed the quotas, bearing out the picture of inflated, unrealistic management expectations. In this balanced account (NBC 1332), of which an extract is given here, the grand total of work days expended over a period of three months was 10,560, resulting in a negative outcome with respect to the quotas. A “garden plot” was about 36 square meters. *

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1860 garden plots of reeds cut, its work quota being 126 days. 936 garden plots of reeds cut, its work quota being 78 days. 740 garden plots hoed, at 5 garden plots each unit, its work quota being 148 days. In the field called Lal-mah. Seal of Lu-bala-sig.

T AXATION In all eras, accurate records were needed for tax purposes. Professionals readied all the relevant information so that a royal auditor could see at a glance the costs and yields, the amount due the state treasury, and the amount to be redistributed or reinvested. In this tablet from the Akkadian period (NBC 6971), a certain Lulu prepared six entries for an estate in a small town called Pugdan, near Kish. The first five are negative amounts, referring to land not cultivated, losses or expenses, and commodities designated for the king’s tax collector. The sixth lists assets on hand. * Entry 1 Entry 2

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540 dikes of arable land, work assignment of 5 plows, Lulu left uncultivated 1 slave girl, 24 gur of barley, account of Beli-bani 1 slave, 1 dead male infant, account of Shu-Eshtar

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Entry 3

Entry 4 Entry 5

Total Total Total Entry 6

Total

A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY 10 gur of barley, account of Ahu-ishar account of 4 royal cultivators, Lulu deducted 90 gur of barley, 10 shekels of silver, 2 gur of flour, 10 pots of lard Lulu showed them to Galzu-sharrusin, the royal inspector Gugusha, account of the royal plow of U’ili, in his second year, Lulu took him away 22 gur of barley in Pugdan, 11.2.4.0 of barley, 1 bariga of flour, 1 bariga of crushed malt in Billum-rabi, account of U’ili, Lulu deducted 169 9/10 gur of barley 1 slave, 1 slave girl, 1 dead male infant 10 shekels of silver, 10 pots of lard, account of 5 royal cultivators, Lulu deducted 180 dikes of land in the district of Tullabari assigned to Lulu 180 dikes of land assigned to Shumu-kin in Dalbat 135 dikes of land assigned to the workshop 90 dikes of land assigned to soldiers, (their) commander Shumu-kin 585 dikes of good land that Lulu obtained from Kinum-mupi the governor

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES Weight was measured using a mina of about 500 grams, consisting of 60 shekels, equivalent to 10,800 grains. Stone and metal weights were made in a wide range of materials, sizes, and forms. The most distinctive are those in the shape of a duck with its head turned to rest on its back, a design that perhaps discouraged the dishonest from shaving the weight to diminish its value. In NBC 11442 (Akkadian period), of which excerpts are given here, an accountant diligently recorded the amount of grain used to make the flour for a certain number of loaves and cakes that were issued, deducting what was lost in the grinding process. He also calculated the amount of barley used to make mash, then the percentage of mash in each of the three grades of beer that were distributed to various people. These figures allowed him to control accurately his inventory of unprocessed grain.

NUMERACY *

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60 loaves, 10 quarts of beer (brewed in the proportion of) 7:6 (7 dry quarts of barley per 6 quarts of beer), 10 quarts of beer (brewed in the proportion of) 5:6 (5 dry quarts of barley per 6 quarts of beer), to the messenger of the major domo …. Total: 120 loaves of bread baked (in the proportion of) … 50 loaves (from 10 dry quarts of grain), 1 ½ pots of beer (brewed in the proportion of) 7:6 (7 dry quarts of barley per 6 quarts of beer), 5 pots less 5 quarts of beer (brewed in the proportion of) 5:6 (dry quarts of barley per quart of beer), 4 pots of beer (brewed in the proportion of) 3:6 (3 dry quarts of barley per 6 quarts of beer). (equals) 24 dry quarts of flour by the royal standard, [x+] 180 + 44 ½ dry quarts of raw grain by the local standard.

INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE RATES This Sumerian tablet (YBC 12130, Early Dynastic period) preserves one of the world’s oldest detailed accounts of international trade. On it, Di-Utu the merchant recorded the quantities of silver and wool he received to sell in Dilmun (modern Bahrain), presumably from the wife of the city ruler of Lagash, for it is she who receives the goods upon his return. Dilmun was the principal Mesopotamian market source for copper and tin, which was shipped there from elsewhere. The text also shows that he carefully computed the going rate of exchange in silver for his purchases. *

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10 minas of refined silver, 300 minas of wool by the standard weight, commercial goods, Di-Utu the merchant took away to the land of Dilmun. From this, 975 minas of copper (at the rate of) 1 shekel of silver for 3 minas, 15 shekels of copper (1:195), its silver: 5 minas. 27 ½ minas of tin-bronze (at the rate of) 1 shekel of silver for 5 ½ shekels of tin (1:5.5), its silver: 5 minas.

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY 225 minas of copper (at the rate of) 1 mina of wool for 1 ½ minas of copper (1:1.5) he brought with him, [its wool: 150 minas]. [150 minas of copper (at the rate of)] 1 mina of wool for for 1 mina of copper (1:1) he brought with him, its wool: 150 minas. Total: 1350 minas of copper, 27 ½ minas of tin-bronze, commercial goods, Di-Utu the merchant brought from the land of Dilmun. He turned it over to Baranamtarra, wife of Lugalanda, city ruler of Lagash. She took it out of the storehouse. Eniggal the major-domo made a balanced account of it, year 6 of Lugalanda.

COMPOUND INTEREST As this Sumerian inscription shows (NBC 2501, Early Dynastic period), defaulting on a loan could be quite literally ruinous for the lender. Here, the parties were the neighboring city-states of Lagash and Umma, which quarreled tirelessly over their common border. In this episode, Lagash has called in the debt for a loan made to Umma years before, whose terms appear to have involved the world’s first recorded example of compound interest. Whether Umma was taken by surprise at the accrual, or never had any intention of honoring the agreement, its city ruler instigated yet another violent incident at the border. *

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The ruler of Umma could take 5184 hectoliters of barley belonging to (the Lagashite) deities Nanshe and Ningirsu as an interestbearing loan. It bore interest, and 44,789,760,000 hectoliters accrued. Because he could not pay back that barley, Ur-lumma, the city ruler of Umma, diverted the water from the boundary channels of Nanshe and Ningirsu, set fire to their monuments, and smashed them to bits.

HOW MANY MILES TO BABYLON? The world’s earliest maps and itineraries come from Mesopotamia. Route tablets used a standard unit equivalent to a day’s normal journey on foot. They typically noted geographical points along the way and the amount of time the trip actually took.

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During the reign of Naram-Sin in the Akkadian period, this now-broken stone stele (NBC 11428) recorded the distances traversed by the king between towns and watercourses in the Khabur region of northern Syria. The information on such monuments was often copied onto clay tablets for future reference. *

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From the watercourse Harabi, [ ] stages and [ ] ropes he went in one day. From the watercourse Harabi to Nahur, [ ] stages and [ ] ropes he went in one day. From Kurda to Azuhinnu, 1 ½ stages and 3 ropes he went in one day.

SUN AND MOON, STARS AND PLANETS Accurate observation, prediction, and recording of celestial phenomena were crucial for divination, especially as portents for royalty (see MAGIC). In addition, since so much in the Mesopotamian cultic calendar depended on the lunar cycle, astronomers devised ways to track the moon’s movement across the sky, relative to the sun and the earth. MLC 1880 (Seleucid period), to cite one example, records observations made at the same time daily over a period of 248 days, using sexagesimal numbers to express lunar velocity, which is not constant but increases and decreases. By consulting such tables, it was possible to calculate the moon’s exact position, no matter the weather. In the late first millennium, heavenly bodies also came to have a direct significance for the average individual. This may be seen notably in the development of the zodiac, with its signs and symbols largely as we know them today: Taurus was The Bull of Heaven; Gemini, The Great Twins; Cancer, The Crab; Leo, The Lion; Libra, The Scales; Scorpius, The Scorpion; and Capricorn, The Goat-Fish. The world’s earliest horoscopes give the zodiacal positions of the sun, moon, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and Mars on the day a person was born, with the implications for a favorable or unfavorable future. The following translations are adapted from Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes, pp. 65, 83-84 (see For Further Reading). The first had good tidings for a certain Aristocrates, probably of Uruk, who was born at the beginning of June 235 B.C.E. (MLC 2190). The

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second is fragmentary and difficult to understand, but it seems to presage an unlucky life (MLC 1870). *

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In the morning, Aristocrates was born. That day, the moon was in Leo, the sun was in Gemini, the moon goes with increasing positive latitude, which means prosperity and greatness. Jupiter in Sagittarius. The place of Jupiter means that his life will be prosperous, at peace, his wealth will be long-lasting, and he will have long life. Venus was in Taurus. The place of Venus means that he will find favor wherever he goes; he will have sons and daughters. Mercury was in Gemini with the sun. The place of Mercury means that the brave one will be first in rank; he will be more important than his brothers; he will take over his father’s house. 4 April 262, at night, the child was born. That day, the sun was in Aries, the moon in Aquarius, Jupiter at the beginning of Leo, Venus with the sun, Mercury with the sun, Saturn in Cancer, Mars at the end of Cancer…he will be lacking property, his food will not satisfy his hunger, the property acquired in his youth will not last….

The Mesopotamians visualized that some stars formed constellations, that is, images of gods, people, animals, and various objects of daily life, many of which we continue to recognize as such today. This document is among those treating how each constellation ought to be drawn (MLC 1866, 214 B.C.E). The extract given here concerns Gemini. *

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The Twins, who stand in front of the True Shepherd of Anu [Orion], can be linked with two demonic demigods. The Twins are two clothed human figures. The one in front is bearded, the one in back has the face of a demon. They carry … in their right hands.

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FOR FURTHER READING Friberg, Jöran. Amazing Traces of a Babylonian Origin in Greek Mathematics. Singapore: World Scientific, 2007. Neugebauer, Otto. The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Providence: Brown University Press, 1957. Postgate, J. Nicholas. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. London: Routledge, 1992. Robson, Eleanor. Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Rochberg, Francesca. Babylonian Horoscopes. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998. Slotsky, Alice Louise. The Bourse of Babylon: Market Quotations in the Astronomical Diaries of Babylon. Bethesda: CDL Press, 1997.

MEMORY He brought back tidings from before the Flood. (Tablet I) In the prologue to The Epic of Gilgamesh, the narrator introduces the legendary hero-king of Uruk, who “from a distant journey came home, weary, but at peace.” It is significant that three times in the opening lines memory plays an important role. First, Gilgamesh is lauded for having “brought back tidings from before the Flood,” the most remote past the Mesopotamians envisioned. Second, the narrator bids us examine the great walls Gilgamesh built at Uruk and “mount the wooden staircase, there from days of old.” Finally, we learn that the king “set out all his hardships on a monument of stone,” a literary legacy for the ages. We are invited to “open the foundation box of cedar, release its lock of bronze, raise the lid upon its hidden contents, take up and read from the lapis tablet of all the miseries that he, Gilgamesh, came through.” As the epic signals, much Mesopotamian thought conceived of the Flood as a defining moment in human existence. According to a Sumerian King List compiled about 2200 B.C.E. and copied and expanded numerous times thereafter, history commenced with a series of antediluvian kings reigning for impossibly long years, 43,200 in one case. In several major literary works, Gilgamesh among them, the Flood is a central trope. For millennia before the Flood, as the stories go, the gods encouraged their human creations to increase and develop all the trappings of civilization, but there came a point when the ceaseless clamor and complaining of an overcrowded land impelled them to take action. They sent a catastrophic, all-encompassing Flood to annihilate life on earth. But one of the gods was more prescient than the rest. He warned his personal favorite to build a boat, 43

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load it with supplies and animals, and seal the door once the deluge started. In both The Epic of Atrahasis and The Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods soon realize their mistake, for there is nobody left to sustain them. The rains cease, the Ark runs aground on a mountain, and the Flood survivor emerges. His first offering brings the rueful, famished gods crowding round the incense burner. From now on, they decide in Atrahasis, population will be controlled by death, ordained celibacy, and other means. Humankind may begin afresh, not with the slate wiped clean, but always with the memory of a time before the Flood embedded in every miscarriage, stillbirth, and death of a loved one. Gilgamesh gives Flood memory a different shape. Towards the end of the epic, the survivor himself, to whom the gods exceptionally granted immortality, tells Gilgamesh the tale. On his return to Uruk, the king not only bears unique, direct witness to “tidings from before the Flood,” he also perpetuates memory when he has the survivor’s story inscribed on a lapis tablet. This he places in a classic foundation deposit beneath his new walls with their antique stairs, carefully preserved. On multiple levels, real and metaphorical, the epic thus joins past, present, and future: Gilgamesh has seemingly suspended time, if only in the imagination. Subsequent, more historical kings attempted a similar feat. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their recollection of one Mesopotamian era – the Age of Agade. About 2334 B.C.E., a king named Sargon founded the world’s first empire and its capital city of Agade. His two sons, Rimush and Manishtusu, succeeded him, followed by his grandson Naram-Sin, who brought the empire to its greatest height, and by his great-grandson Sharkalisharri. For millennia to come, the memory of these Akkadian kings dominated that of any other period. Their monuments and inscriptions were copied, imitated, usurped, seized as booty, preserved as relics, or erased and shattered. Most dramatically, in 612 B.C.E. as Assyria fell to the invading Medes, the life-size, cast copper head of an Akkadian king appears to have been mutilated in the same ways the Medes disfigured enemy kings and notables, or perhaps the damage had already been done. As for Agade, its location remains unknown today, but as late as the sixth century B.C.E. kings were still carrying out excavations in

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its ruins (see LEARNING). The names and deeds of the Akkadian dynasty were regularly memorialized in the names and deeds of later kings, as well as in omens, chronicles, poetry, and prose. Of the many literary works about the Akkadian period, two pieces of historical fiction about Sargon are of particular interest to this discussion of memory. In The Sumerian Sargon Legend, written in the late eighteenth century B.C.E., the youthful Sargon escapes several murder plots hatched by the king he was serving, thanks to the protection of the goddess Inanna. To add poetic credibility to his temporal setting, the author tells us “at that time, writing on tablets certainly existed, wrapping tablets in clay certainly did not exist.” With this, he references the practice of his own times of inserting documents into clay envelopes, giving them a memory origin. He also may have expected his audiences to recall the Sumerian series, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, in which the former, the clever king of Uruk, invents writing and thereby the means of remembering the past forever (see LEARNING). The Birth Legend of Sargon purports to be the king’s autobiographical narrative. Written in Akkadian and likely dating to the reign of Sargon II of Assyria (721–704 B.C.E.), it recounts how he, a foundling exposed as a newborn, grew up to claim his rightful inheritance, a theme reprised for Moses and Cyrus. To a greater extent than his grandfather, uncle, or father, Naram-Sin inspired revulsion in later literature. The Curse of Agade, treated below, is the prime example. In others, memory of this warrior-king, whose resounding triumphs are attested in authentic records, was deliberately manipulated so that he appears chastened and humbled by defeat and transgression. Yet, paradoxically, there is ample evidence from texts and artifacts that he and his real achievements were remembered and emulated for centuries after his death. His conquests also found reflection in the evolving language of Akkadian royal and elite dress. As the empire expanded, there was an infusion of innovative styles from exotic lands and peoples, such as elaborately tasseled fringes and shoes with turned-up toes. NaramSin’s victories to the northwest inspired him to co-opt the local kings’ lion emblem, in the form of a knot securing a form-fitting upper garment. The knot derives from a leonine fur feature, and was copied, along with other Akkadian fashions, in the iconography of

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the many kings who patterned themselves on Naram-Sin and his dynasty.

I, SARGON Like the Birth Legend (see above), this text is couched as a firstperson narrative by the founder of the Akkadian Empire. Only the first few lines survive, but it may have been an account of Sargon’s glories, written five hundred years after his death (MLC 641). *

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I, Sargon, beloved of Ishtar, who marched to all four quarters of the world…

REMEMBERING NARAM-SIN The long composition known today as The Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin, or Naram-Sin and the Enemy Hordes, enjoyed widespread popularity for millennia and was regularly reworked. This fragmentary manuscript (MLC 1364) dates to the Old Babylonian period, and casts Naram-Sin as the narrator of certain grim events of his reign. It seems that his forces were decimated three times by a mighty, possibly supernatural, enemy, leading him to self-doubt and depression. The Curse of Agade (see below) has him in this state for seven long years, beset by nightmares and bad omens (see MADNESS and MAGIC). For later rulers, the great warrior-king being brought so low may have boosted their own self-esteem, or they may have viewed his putative downfall as a cautionary tale. Whatever the motivation and result, invented and distorted memories served their ends well. In this version, for example, the author was apparently familiar with Naram-Sin’s documented military tactics of drowning prisoners in the Euphrates and razing canal walls to submerge cities and their inhabitants, but he turned this into an evocation of the Flood. * * * … It (the enemy) defeated them, none escaped (alive). The second time, 120,000 troops I sent forth, It defeated them, it filled the battlefield (with corpses). The third time, 60,000 troops I sent forth,

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But that defeat was greater than the previous. After having slain 360,000 of my troops, It inflicted a gigantic massacre. I was stunned and bewildered. I was at a loss, despondent, sunk in gloom, low in spirit, I thought, “What has god brought upon my reign? I am a king who has not brought well-being to his land, A shepherd who has not brought well-being to his people. What has my reign brought upon me? What can I do to save myself? God has summoned a mighty foe against me….” It leveled cities, hamlets, and holy places, It transformed everything, completely. Like the Flood that was unleashed, It transformed the land of Akkad, It wiped out the land, It brought all of it to naught, As if it had never existed.

T HE CURSE OF AGADE Of the many literary memories of Naram-Sin, this Sumerian poetic narrative comes closest in date to his reign, since the earliest version we have was likely composed during the Neo-Sumerian/Ur III period. Its scholarly qualities and broad thematic range made it a standard component of the scribal curriculum for hundreds of years (see LEARNING), and still excite our admiration today. In addition, for us the descriptions of the imperial capital in its heyday, evidently based on authentic memory, provide a vivid picture of vanished Agade. In the same vein, the account of Naram-Sin’s demolition and refurbishing of Ekur in the city of Nippur details its fittings and treasures, giving a valuable sense of these great Mesopotamian temples. Another genuine, if reworked, memory concerns the Gutian invaders at the end of the Akkadian period. Here, these beings “not considered people…with the brains of dogs” are brought down from the highlands by the god Enlil in retaliation for what the poet says is

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Naram-Sin’s desecration. In fact, the Guti tribes did hail from the Zagros Mountains and sporadically made incursions into the Mesopotamian heartland. Capitalizing apparently on the weakness of the rulers post-Naram-Sin, the Guti seized their chance to mount a serious offensive. About the ensuing period, a Sumerian King List says, “Who was king? Who was not king?” The Curse of Agade also has a memory of developments very long ago, much as in the Sumerian Sargon Legend (see above). Here, the metaphor turns on the beginnings of agriculture: “As when cities were first being built and founded, the great farming tracts brought forth no grain.” Modern archaeological research has demonstrated that the world’s earliest domestication of plants and animals indeed occurred in Mesopotamia, making possible a transition to settled life, and eventually cities (see ANIMALS). The poetic conflation of the sequence does not detract from its impact as an emblem of the desolation of Agade. Of the nearly 100 extant manuscripts, many, like the three Yale tablets (YBC 4611, Plate 3; YBC 7171, YBC 13249) date to the Old Babylonian period and are excerpts of varying lengths. The poem is translated here in its entirety, based on a composite text. *

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After Enlil’s baleful glare Had slain Kish like the Bull of Heaven, Had slaughtered house and land of Uruk in the dust, like that monster bull, And Enlil had then and there given Sargon, king of Agade, Lordship of Uruk, kingship of Kish, From the lowlands to the upper regions, Then did holy Inanna busy herself to build Agade, the temple city, as her sublime dwelling, In Ulmash let her throne be set. Like a youth building a house for the first time, Like a girl arranging her private chamber, That she provision its larders, That lots and houses be made available in that city, That its populace dine on the best of food,

MEMORY That its populace draw the best of drink, That a person fresh washed make merry in the courtyard, That people throng the festival grounds, That people who know each other feast together, That outsiders circle like outlandish birds of prey aloft, That even farthest Marhashi be writ once more on tribute lists, That monkey, monstrous elephant, buffalo, beasts of exotic climes, Rub shoulders in the broad streets with dogs and lions, Mountain ibex, and shaggy sheep, Holy Inanna never stopped to rest. Then did she pack Agade’s very granaries with gold, In gleaming granaries did she pack with silver, She delivered copper, tin, and blocks of lapis even to its barns, Sealed them up like heaps of grain. She endowed its old women with sound advice, She endowed its old men with weighty words, She endowed its young women with play and dance, She endowed its young men with fighting strength, She endowed its toddlers with joyous hearts, Even the infants of military men on duty Played with rattles in their nursemaids’ arms. There was drumbeat in the city, winds and strings without. Its harbor, where ships tied up, hummed cheerfully, Foreign lands rested peaceably, Their peoples looked upon it as a favored place. Its king, the shepherd, Naram-Sin, Shone forth like sunrise on the holy throne of Agade. Its walls, like a mountain range, reached up to graze the sky. Holy Inanna opened in them spacious gates, Big enough to let the Tigris flow out through them to the sea, She made Sumer haul boats upstream with its own goods, The upland Amorites, men who know not grain, Brought before her gamboling bulls and prancing goats, Meluhha, people of the black-stone mountains, Brought up to her strange things they made,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY Elam and Subir bore goods to her like laden donkeys, The governors of cities, the managers of temples, The scribes who parceled out the farmland in the steppe, Brought in steadily their monthly and New Year offerings of food, Such a crush it was at the city gate of Agade, Holy Inanna hardly knew how to take it all in. No more than any citizen could she build houses and structures fast enough to hold them! Enlil set down his verdict in Ekur like a ghastly hush, In Agade she felt a shudder, In Ulmash fear crept over her, She moved her dwelling from the city, Like a young woman forsaking her childhood home, Holy Inanna forsook the sanctuary, Agade. Like a warrior advancing to arms, She came forth from the city in battle, Drawing herself up as its enemy! Not five days, not ten days had gone by, Ninurta brought into his own dwelling the sash of Uruk’s lordship, the crown of Kish’s kingship, Standard and royal throne, erstwhile bestowed. Utu took away the city’s weighty words, Enki took away its wisdom. Its brilliance that had rayed to heaven, An took up from it, into the sky. Its gleaming moorings, set firmly in the ground, Enki pulled down from it, into the watery depths. Inanna took away its defenses, The sanctuary Agade drowned in deep water, like a puny fish, While other cities were looking on. Like a mighty elephant, it crumpled to the ground, While they, like mighty bulls, tossed their horns. Like a dragon in its death throes, it writhed its head, While they sought to strip it of its finery.

MEMORY That the kingship of Agade would no longer abide and prosper, That its outlook held nothing positive to view, That its household would quake, that its stores be scattered, Naram-Sin saw it in a dream. He knew what it meant, he found no words for it, nor could he talk of it with anyone. He put on mourning clothes for Ekur, He shrouded his kingly car with a reed mat, He took down the canopy from his royal barge, He put away from himself the trappings of his reign. For seven years Naram-Sin persevered, Who has ever seen a king absent himself so, for seven years? When he took omens concerning the temple, There was no omen present for building the temple. Seeking to change what had been vouchsafed him, He tried to change what Enlil had commanded, He threw out the findings compiled for him. Like a boxer striding into the great courtyard, He clenched his fist at Ekur. Like a wrestler crouching to start a match, He acted as if the god’s dwelling was a lightweight. Like a sieger storming a city, He laid tall ladders against the temple. To stave in Ekur like a mighty ship, To open its fabric, like mining a silver mountain, To quarry it, like a peak of lapis, To make it collapse, like a city in a thunderstorm, For that temple, though it was no mountain where cedar trees are cut, He cast large hatchets, He whetted double-bladed axes, He laid spades to its roots, The foundation of the land was laid low. He laid hatchets to its branches, The temple, like a dying soldier, fell to the ground, All foreign lands fell to the ground with it. He tore out its ornamental spouts,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY The rains of heaven disappeared. He pulled out its door frames, the land’s vigor was weakened. He caused grain to be cut off at the gate where grain is not cut off, Grain was thereby cut off from the reach of the land. He struck its Gate of Peace with a mattock, Peace turned to enmity in all foreign lands. In Ekur’s cella, as if in broad farmland full of fish, He turned over huge spades, like casting from a mold. People of Sumer saw the inner chamber, a room that never sees the light, Akkad saw the sacred vessels of the gods. Its guardian figures that stood by the ceremonial entryway, Though they had done no forbidden thing, Naram-Sin threw them into the fire. Cedar, cypress, juniper, boxwood, The woodwork of the god’s dwelling he made ooze out in flames. He put its gold in coffers, He put its silver in sacks, He heaped up its copper at the harborside, like a massive yield of grain. The metal worker was to rework its precious metal, The jeweler was to rework its precious stone, The smith was to rehammer its copper. Though these were no goods of a conquered city, Great ships were docked at the temple, Great ships were docked at Enlil’s temple, The goods were taken from the city. As he took the goods from the city, So too was the reason of Agade taken away, As the ships tossed at the docks, Agade’s good sense became unbalanced. That storm that drowns out all others, that besets the entire land, That rising flood that nothing can withstand, Enlil, because his beloved Ekur had been destroyed,

MEMORY What should he destroy in turn for it? He cast his eye towards the Gubin mountains, He brought them down from the sprawling foothills, Beings not considered people, not counted as a land, Gutium, a race who knew no order, Made like humans but with the brains of dogs, the shapes of apes, These Enlil brought down from the mountains! Like a plague of locusts they scoured the land, He let them stretch out their arms over it, as if corralling livestock, Nothing escaped their reach. Nothing was beyond their power. No messenger went on the highroad, No courier’s boat set out on the channel. They drive the goats, rightfully Enlil’s, from the fold and the herdsman with them, They drive the cows from the paddock and the cowherd with them. The watchman was put in the stock, The cutthroat occupied the main road, The doors of the land’s city gates lodged in dirt, Foreign lands cried out bitterly on the walls of their cities, In the downtown, rather than in the broad outlying plain, they planted truck patches. As when cities were first being built and founded, The great farming tracts brought forth no grain, The irrigated farming tracts brought forth no fish, The well-watered orchard brought forth neither syrup nor wine. The gathering clouds brought no rain, not even weeds would grow. At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only half a quart, One shekel’s worth of fish was only ten quarts, That is what they sold for in the city’s market! He who slept on the roof, died on the roof, He who slept in the house had no burial. People fought among themselves for hunger,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY In the built-up area, Enlil’s great place, Dogs formed packs in the silent streets. Two men would go there and both be eaten, Teeth crushed, heads strewn about, Each crushed tooth or head dropped down like a seed, The heads of honest men, the heads of scoundrels in alternation. Young men lay atop young men, The blood of the scoundrel running over the blood of the honest man. Then did Enlil make from his many great buildings A group of tiny huts of reed, From one side of the world to the other, the storehouses diminished. The old women who still survived those days, The old men who still survived those days, The chief singer of laments who still survived those years, Set out seven tambours for mourning, as if marking the horizon, Sounded kettle, snare, and hand drums among them, like a rising cloud of thunder, for seven days and nights. The old women did not hold back their cries, “Alas for my city!” The old men did not hold back their cries, “Alas for its people!” The singers of laments did not hold back their cries, “Alas for Ekur!” Its young women did not hold back from tearing out their hair, Its young men did not hold back their sharpened knives from slashing themselves. They wept as much as Enlil’s ancestors wept As they made their own supplications in Holy Hill, the aweinspiring Holy Hill of Enlil. From all of this, Enlil retired to his holy chamber, fasting, he fell asleep. Then did Sin, Enki, Inanna, Ninurta, Ishkur, Utu, Nusku, Nisaba, the great gods, Soothe Enlil’s heart with cool libations, say this prayer to him: “O Enlil! May any city that destroyed your city be done to as your city,

MEMORY That defiled your sacred dwelling be done to as Nippur! May the man who knew that city peer down into the clay pit where it was, May the man who knew a man there find no trace of him at all. May brother see no sign of brother, May its young woman be cruelly beaten in her chamber, May its old man bitterly lament his murdered wife, May its pigeons mourn in their crannies, May its swallows be pelted in their nooks, May it, like a terrified pigeon, find nowhere to go.” Once again, Sin, Enki, Inanna, Ninurta, Ishkur, Utu, Nusku, Nisaba, All the gods whoever they may be, Cast their eyes upon the city, Laid a horrible curse on Agade. “O city that attacked Ekur, O Enlil, let this be, O Agade that attacked Ekur, O Enlil, let this be: May the sound of mourning rise as high as your august wall, however lofty it may be, May your sacred dwelling crumble in a heap, like dirt, May the guardian figures towering on the stairway Tumble to the ground, like giants drunk with wine. May your clay go back to its watery depth, May it be clay that Enki cursed. May your grain go back to its furrow, May it be grain the grain-goddess cursed. May your timber return to its forest, May it be timber the carpenter-god cursed. May the slaughterer of cattle slaughter his wife, May the butcher of sheep butcher his child. May your pauper drown the child who begged for money for him, May your harlot hang herself at the door of her brothel, May your cult women who are mothers kill their children, May your gold be bought for the price of silver, May your silver be bought for a bit of fool’s gold, May your copper be bought for alloy.

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Agade, may your strong man lose his strength, May he be unable to lift his sack of provisions to the saddle. May your riding donkey no longer rejoice in his strength, but lie motionless till nightfall. May that city die of hunger, May your citizens who dined on the finest foods lie down in the grass like cattle, May your man who rose from a meal of first fruits Eat the binding from his roof, As for the grand door of his family home, May he gnaw its leather hinges. May gloom befall your palace, built up in joy, May the evil creature of the silent steppe howl, howl, and howl again. In the pens for special livestock, fattened for the rites, May the fox who lurks in ruin-mounds drag its brush. In your city gate, set up in the land, May the slumber bird, harbinger of gloom, build its nest. O city that could not sleep for drumbeat, May the moon-kine that filled its pens Moan, moan, and moan again, like wandering waifs in the steppe, silent as the grave. May rank grass grow tall where boats used to haul, May sad weeds curl where cartwheels would whirl. Once again: on the canal bank, where boat is hauled and landed, May the splay-horned monster and darting snake let no one pass. On your steppe-land, where grass grows lush, may canes of woe thrust up, O Agade, may your flowing fresh water run with salt. Whoever says, ‘I will dwell in this city,’ may he find not good place to dwell. Whoever says, ‘I will sleep in Agade,’ may he find no good place to sleep.” That very day, so it was: The rank grass grew tall, where boats used to haul,

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The sad weeds curled where cartwheels had whirled. Once again: on the canal bank, where boat is hauled and landed, The splay-horned monster and darting snake let no one pass. On its steppe-land, where grass grew lush, canes of woe thrust up. Agade’s flowing fresh water ran with salt. Whoever said, “I will live in this city,” found no good place to dwell, Whoever said, “I will sleep in Agade,” found no good place to sleep. Agade was destroyed, Inanna be praised!

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST Twice The Curse of Agade mentions singers of laments. These people were in demand for millennia, performing song-narratives in Sumerian about the destruction of cities and temples, inspired by the historical events that ended the Neo-Sumerian period. The most numerous extant manuscripts concern the destruction of Ur, but laments are also known over Uruk, Eridu, Nippur, and elsewhere in Sumer. Structurally, they generally feature a series of descriptions of the calamity and the despair and flight of the city’s deity, culminating in an epilogue celebrating the restoration of the temple and the return of its god or goddess, thanks to a later king. Among the many lament tablets at Yale, two include a yearname of Rim-Sin II of Larsa, providing a date of 1739 B.C.E. for when they were copied out, probably by the same scribe, as part of a oncecomplete text of The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur. They preserve about 100 lines of the middle section. In the first excerpt given here, from YBC 7159, Ur’s patron goddess Ningal tells how she pleaded with the great gods to reverse their verdict and spare her city, to no avail (see JUSTICE). The second excerpt, from YBC 4661, paints a vivid picture of the disaster’s aftermath. The third passage is from the beginning of the lament, which is not represented in the YBC’s holdings. *

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When they had commanded the utter destruction of my city,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY When they had commanded the utter destruction of Ur, When they had ordered that its people be killed, On that day, I did not forsake my city, I did not neglect my land. I shed tears before An, I pleaded before Enlil. “Let not my city be destroyed!” I said to them, “Let not Ur be destroyed!” I said to them, “Let not its people perish!” I said to them. An would not change his command, Enlil would not soothe my heart by saying, “Very well, so be it.” When that terrible storm was over, the city lay in ruins… People, not broken pots, littered its outskirts. By its walls, full of breaches, people moaned. By its high city gates, where people used to walk, corpses were heaped up. Along its main streets, grandly built, heads were strewn like seeds. Along its side streets, where people used to walk, corpses were heaped up. In the gathering places, where folk used to dance, people lay, in piles. The land’s blood filled the ditches like (molten) copper and tin. Its corpses oozed, like sheep fat left out in the sun. The day that passed, the grief of it still hangs over me. Because of that day, I will mourn forever, I, the mistress of this place, the day that passed, The day that passed, the grief of it still hangs over me. Evil was that day that passed over me, Yet, though I dreaded that day indeed, I could no way escape what it required of me! In that brief moment, I saw there would be no good day for me in my time, no good day at all. That night, when bitter regret passed over me, Yet, though I dreaded that night indeed, I could in no way escape what it required of me!

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The horror of that time hangs over me, like a flood that washes everything away. Because of it, on my bed at night, even on my bed at night, there was no forgetfulness for me, In that brief moment, the oblivion of my bed, even the oblivion of my bed was withheld from me … Against that bitter burden that passed upon my city, Could I, like a bird of the air, have beat my wings, Could I have flown off to (try to save) my city, Yet even then, my city was wrecked to its foundations!

FOR FURTHER READING Cohen, Mark E. The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia. Potomac, MD: CDL Press, 1988. Cooper, Jerrold S. The Curse of Agade. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Eppihimer, Melissa. Exemplars of Kingship: Art, Tradition, and the Legacy of the Akkadians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Finkel, Irving. The Ark before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014. Foster, Benjamin R. The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, 2016. Michalowski, Piotr. The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989. Samet, Nili. The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014.

II. PASSION AND DISCIPLINE

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LOVE You will fall in love with him like a woman, you will caress him. (Tablet I) Mesopotamian written and pictorial sources provide a wealth of material bearing on the pleasures and pains of love, from tender portrayals of romantic and familial affection to erotic exaltations of sexual passion. Many of the most eloquent expressions occur in the Sumerian poems collectively now known as the Sacred Marriage Rite. At their heart, they reflect the desire and need for continued fertility and fecundity in the land, its animals, and people. The natural cycle of the seasons is symbolically played out in the courtship, wedlock, death, and resurrection of two divinities, Inanna/Ishtar and Dumuzi. Sumerian Inanna/Akkadian Ishtar was the pre-eminent goddess throughout Mesopotamian history. She took lovers impulsively and tired of them quickly. This is the context for a pivotal moment in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Smitten by the hero-king, glorious after his triumph in the Cedar Forest, she peremptorily demands that he become her lover. To her astonishment, he spurns her advances, citing the examples of several unfortunates who succumbed to her blandishments and suffered cruel fates after she moved on. The goddess’s rage leads to terrible consequences for all concerned, which unfold in the rest of the epic. Other rulers did not rebuff her attentions. During the Akkadian period, for instance, the warrior-king Naram-Sin boasted that he was the beloved of Ishtar. On a goldsmith’s mold, she hands him the lead ropes of his defeated enemies. Naram-Sin is shown bare-chested, 63

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a rare mode of royal depiction intended to vaunt his intimacy with the goddess. Her volatile, intense nature made her a deity of both love and war. In the Sacred Marriage texts, she is seen variously as a girl giddy with her first romance, a young woman realizing her attractions and their potential for male manipulation, a fiancée and bride exulting in her awakening sexuality, and a wife pursuing her own ambitions, with calamitous results for her husband. The love poems are noteworthy for their unabashedly sensual metaphors for intimate parts of the female body, as well as for the sexual act in its many permutations. Parallels with Solomon’s Song of Songs have often been invoked. Dumuzi/biblical Tammuz, usually identified as a shepherdgod, captivates her with his good looks and charming simplicity. The Sacred Marriage poems offer increasingly charged encounters between them, as each imagines the bliss of their lovemaking. Once they are married, Inanna’s restlessness impels her to descend to the Netherworld, where her sister reigns, in a bid for new realms to dominate. This plan goes dreadfully awry. Inanna, stripped of her jewels and apparel, perishes. Only after much intercession by the gods is she brought back to life and permitted to ascend, on condition that she find a substitute to take her place. The first two she approaches are wearing sackcloth in mourning for her demise in the Netherworld, and she spares them. When she finds Dumuzi seated on the throne, apparently unconcerned about her absence, she flies into a passion, ordering the Netherworld demons, who came up with her to make sure she fulfilled her end of the bargain, to seize him. More divine negotiations ensue, resulting in his being allowed to spend half the year above ground, while his loving sister Geshtinanna takes his place below. Beyond a mythopoetic exploration of Nature’s cycles and love’s many dimensions, the Sacred Marriage may have been an actual ritual performance. It is possible that an annual union connected with a New Year festival occurred between early kings and a high priestess representing Inanna. In the first millennium, there were ceremonial marriages staged between divine cult statues, complete with special beds.

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The model beds known from earliest times onward may be connected with some related ritual purpose. These typically show a man and a woman engaged in intercourse or foreplay. Of uncertain use are the mold-made plaques from the early second millennium which depict a woman drinking through a straw as a man enters her from behind. Such imagery was also common on cylinder seals; a Yale example (YBC 12637) has two small vignettes between bull-men, one showing a man entering a woman from behind, the other a woman mounting a man. One wonders if the proliferation of such objects in both sacred and secular spheres and the overtly erotic in Mesopotamian literature influenced the Greek author Herodotus when he reported on customs in fifth-century B.C.E. Babylon. He famously wrote that every woman was obliged to prostitute herself in the temple of Aphrodite (Ishtar) once in her lifetime, although this finds no corroboration in any authentic Mesopotamian text. In like vein, the Bible promotes the notion of a city rife with promiscuity and immorality, home to the “Whore of Babylon.” Professional harlots did exist, possibly plying their trade near city walls. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, a particularly accomplished prostitute is sent out to the steppe to entrap the wild man Enkidu, luring him with her body. After some days of making love to him and teaching him to eat, drink, and groom himself as men do, she escorts the now-civilized Enkidu to Uruk to challenge Gilgamesh. She assures him that what he has lost in animal strength and companionship will be more than compensated by his relationship with the hero-king (see ANIMALS). Indeed, the two become inseparable, embarking on the great quest to slay the monster Humbaba in the Cedar Forest and other ventures. Enkidu’s death, meted out by divine decree in punishment for his role in certain actions (see JUSTICE), sends Gilgamesh into a paroxysm of grief (see MADNESS). Are we meant to understand that the two of them were lovers? While the epic never quite makes this explicit, for many scholars various passages offer strong support for this interpretation. To cite a bookended example, as the epic opens Gilgamesh, still unwed, seems to need to validate his manhood by regularly assaulting new brides and taking first-night rights. In the final scene, having failed to gain immortality, he is said to be “at

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peace.” Is he now resigned to following the normative path repeatedly urged upon him, loveless as it may be: marry, produce an heir, and in that way secure eternal life? Another passage, often noted, concerns the pair of prophetic dreams Gilgamesh has while Enkidu and the prostitute are making love out on the steppe. In the first, a “force of heaven” descends upon Uruk, in the second, an axe. Both times, as Gilgamesh tells his goddess-mother, “I fell in love with it like a woman, I caressed it.” He cannot, or will not, grasp the import, but for his mother, “knowing and wise,” the meaning is clear. She recognizes that the dreams herald the advent of a mighty man, that is, Enkidu. “You will fall in love with him like a woman,” she predicts. “You will caress him.” Gilgamesh appears to resist her interpretation, for in response he talks only of looking forward to having a friend, “my very own confidant.” The first thing Enkidu does in Uruk is to block Gilgamesh from forcing himself on yet another bride. Their sexually charged wrestling match would seem to mark Gilgamesh’s awakening. Scant textual evidence has survived for discerning societal or legal attitudes towards same-sex relationships in ancient Mesopotamia. One wonders if the mention of “Love of a Man for a Man” in a list of magic spells for lovers offers any clues (MLC 1859). The spells are part of a late fourth century esoteric table correlating them with astrological signs, perhaps because they were considered more effective when said under propitious influence. Likewise, we know almost nothing of non-binary individuals, beyond a few hints here and there. In the Sacred Marriage Rite, for instance, two beings are specially created without defined gender to go down to the Netherworld and bring Inanna back to life. Apparently they could thus foil death and carry out their mission. As for transgender or cross-dressing matters, we have a late composition that may describe a role-reversal event (or fantasy) honoring Ishtar, in which men wearing women’s clothing and holding small items are harassed by women outfitted in male garments and carrying weapons.

SACRED MARRIAGE Numerous versions of the Inanna/Dumuzi song cycles exist. On the reverse of this tablet (NBC 10923, late third millennium, Plate 4),

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Dumuzi’s sister, Geshtinanna, seems to be acting as a go-between for the lovers’ courtship and trysts, which Inanna then rapturously describes. On the obverse, women praise Dumuzi as their peerless brother [in-law], of whom their father and mother warmly approve, and then one of them happily anticipates the sexual delights awaiting her. The chorus lines were probably meant to be addressed by priestesses to the king in the guise of Dumuzi, while the solo would have been delivered by the designated Inanna.

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As I was going, as I was going, As I was going home, Inanna was watching for me. My brother, she talked about you, she talked about you. She of the loving heart, all allure and sweetness, My holy Inanna has a gift for you. As I was watching at that place, The man I love encountered me. He was smitten by me, felt joy in me alone! Your brother brought me into his house, He laid me down upon a honeyed bed. My precious sweet, when lying next to my heart, Time after time, tongues pleasuring, time after time, My brother of the beautiful eyes, did it fifty times, Like someone who couldn’t move, I stood there by him, Trembling below, I couldn’t say a word. With my brother, placing my hands on his hips, With my precious sweet, I spent the day there with him. You be our brother, you be our brother, You be our brother at the palace gate, You be captain of our barge, You be commander of our chariot, You be equerry on our speeding chariot, You be elder and judge of our town! You be the son-in-law with five gifts, with ten gifts, Brother, you be the son-in-law to our father,

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Rim-Sin I or II, kings of Larsa in the Old Babylonian period, participated in at least one sacred marriage ceremony. This tablet (YBC 4643) records first the song of the chorus, then what the bride sings to her royal consort. *

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Yes, it is in the springtime that we ask blessings for him, That we sing a song of olden times: “Life long of days, forever.” It brings bliss to Rim-Sin, our sun-god. He made an offering for the New Year of the wine my right hand was pouring out. Come here, I want to be embraced, as my heart has urged me. Let us act as lovers do, never sleep all night. Let both of us in bed be in the joyful mood for lovemaking! … Like provisions, my love has been stored up for you. Take as much as you desire!

COURTSHIP In this text (MLC 1299, Old Babylonian period), a young man vents his frustration in colorful imagery, alternating between jealously wishing his beloved ill and sweet-talking her into granting him her favors. *

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I called after her, but she did not turn around. I whistled at her, but she did not glance my way. If she’s consecrated to a god, may her would-be lover fall!

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If she’s destined for the cloister, may the one who would keep her there fall! Let this girl, ready to marry, of good family, fall to me, at my complaint, at my call! (Until then), let the dough fall out of her hands, Let the little one fall out of her arms…. Don’t lock your house against me, Don’t even look at the latchstring in your hand! Look at me as if I were your tether, Lick me as if I were your newborn calf! Why did you wrap your head with my love, like a headband, Tie it round your waist, like a belt? Why [stroke yourself] with my happiness, as if it were body oil?

MAIL-ORDER BRIDE? In this unique written proposal of marriage (NBC 3752, Old Assyrian period), we see that this would-be groom felt he need not invest it with any romance. Is this the first record of a mail-order bride? One wonders if she married him, and if so, how it worked out. *

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Puzur-Assur to Nuhshatum: Your father has written to me about you that I may marry you. For my part, I then sent my servants and my message about you to your father so he will let you go. Please, as soon as you have my letter, get your father’s permission and set forth with my servants. I’m alone, there is no one to look after me, nor anyone to set the table for me. If you won’t come with my servants, then I’ll marry a local girl here in Wahshuganna. See to it then, you and my servants, don’t delay!

MARRIAGE CONTRACTS Marriage was a contractual relationship between two families (see JUSTICE), as well as an alliance between a man and a woman. In well-off families, the father (or mother if she was a widow) of the bride provided a dowry for her that remained her personal property, and the father of the groom paid for the wedding. Given here are

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two examples of marriage contracts with various stipulations (NBC 8410, Achaemenid period; YBC 3732, Neo-Babylonian period). The second document attests to the accepted practice of taking a second wife if there were no living children from the first wife. *

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Bel-rimanni of his own free will promises to give as dowry for Kasirtu, his daughter, to Ahushunu, son of Nabu-mushetiqudde, of the Nanahhu family: five minas of white silver; one silver ornament and two silver rings, weighing one-third of a mina; one bed of exotic wood with coverings; one woman’s chair of exotic wood; one bronze ten-quart kettle; one bronze bowl for oil; one bronze incense burner; one bronze cup; one bronze fire grate. Nabu-ah-usur, son of Hatama, spoke to Ili-natannu, son of Bara-ili, the woman’s brother, and to Banitu, the woman’s mother, as follows: “Give me Tala-Uruk, your daughter, let her be my wife.” Ili-natannu and Banitu agreed and they gave Tala-Uruk to Nabu-ah-usur, son of Hatama, as his wife. If Nabu-ah-usur breaks his commitment to Tala-Uruk, he shall pay Tala-Uruk six minas of silver and she may go to the household of any other free citizen. If Tala-Uruk is caught with another man, she is subject to the oath of the iron dagger. If Nabu-ah-usur brings another woman of equal status into his house as a second wife, he shall pay six minas of silver to Tala-Uruk and she may go to the household of any other free citizen.

FATHER OF THE BRIDE Here, providing the dowry presents a difficulty for this father of the bride (YBC 6123, Old Babylonian period). *

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Shamash-magir to Sin-eribam: May the god Shamash keep you in good health for 3600 years for my sake. I’m marrying my daughter to a husband, but I don’t have anything to hand I can give (as a dowry). Now I send you four men [named]. As soon

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as you see them, take all the money available and buy and send me two slaves and three slave-girls, please!

RECOVERING THE DOWRY This document (YBC 5463, Old Babylonian period) records the verdict of a court case in which a mother sued to get back her daughter’s dowry, for reasons unspecified here (see JUSTICE). She must have had good cause, for the judges found in her favor. Muhaddum, a local official, was authorized to assist the mother in recovering as much of it as possible. *

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The judges of Babylon to Muhaddum: May the gods Shamash and Marduk keep you in good health. In the matter of the case of Ilshu-ibbishu, son of Warad-Sin, and Mattatum, we have examined their case, we have made a finding concerning them, in accordance with royal regulation. We hereby order that all the dowry Mattatum had given her daughter and which had been brought to Ilshu-ibbishu’s house be returned to her. We have sent a policeman with her. They must give Mattatum all that remains of the dowry that is still to be found.

ADULTERY A schoolboy copied out this admonitory text (YBC 5828, Old Babylonian period). *

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No one goes up to him, though heading straight his way, Life avoids him, just like that passer-by. He is less welcome to an honest man than death itself. He is cast away like filth, no one has a care for him. He covers up, as with a cloak. Heavy punishment awaits him. Who is he? The man who has lain with another man’s wife!

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A DANGEROUS LIAISON During the Achaemenid period, a certain Zababa-eresh of the city of Kish made a deposition concerning any future dealings with Shannaya, a temple woman in the city of Uruk, with whom he appears to have been illicitly involved (YBC 4106, 532 B.C.E.).

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Zababa-eresh, son of Nabu-balassu-iqbi, has declared as follows: “I am a resident of Kish.” Anytime he shall be seen with Shannaya, a temple woman of Our Lady of Uruk [Ishtar], he shall bear the punishment of Gobyras, governor of Babylon and the lands Across the River. [Witnesses] Day 28, month 2, year 6 of Cyrus, King of Babylon, King of the World.

UNLOVED AND UNMOURNED This Sumerian poem (YBC 9875, Old Babylonian period) is addressed first to the sun-god, who serves as judge in the afterlife, then to the deceased’s ghost. The object is to bring repose to the ghost and respite to those he is haunting by conjuring up grief-stricken mourners for him (see also MAGIC). It is unspecified why the deceased has no loving family members. “House” is a euphemism for the Netherworld. *

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Now he is neither rich nor poor. This dead man has eaten at your house, He has drunk at your house. Death, the lot of humanity, is your domain, O god, It has swallowed him up before your eyes. No killers can attack him now, Death no longer stalks him. No harm can approach him, Death no longer strikes him. In that house, sister will come forward, as sister with sister. In that house, brother will come forward, as brother with brother. Your ancestors will pass before you, mourning, Your grown children will beat their breasts over you,

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Your young children, who held your hand, will be wailing.

FAMILY LOVE Although love letters in the modern sense are unknown, we readily see the ups and downs of family love in these exchanges between family members. *

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Assur-malik [husband] to Sat-Assur [his wife]: I’m fine, don’t worry. Please, as soon as you get this, write me the news of home so I won’t worry. Iddin-Sin is bringing you a shawl in a package from me. Ili-malik, servant of Ikupia, is bringing you two brushes. (NBC 1754, Old Assyrian period) Assur-rabi [father] to Maganika [his daughter]: Why did you write me saying “I am going to open the sealed rooms and sell the bread and beer”? Didn’t I seal with my own seal the lower and upper rooms? Please, don’t open any seal in the house till I get there, and be sure that my seals stay intact. The nurse has taken off, so I’m still held up here. Just as you’ve been watching the house carefully, please keep on watching it carefully until you see me again.... Why do you let someone I don’t know live in the house while you’ve moved out to live with some man? As you’re my daughter, watch the house carefully, we’ll be there in ten days. (NBC 3858, Old Assyrian period) Shamash-ibni to his mother: May the gods Ilabrat and Lugalnamtarra keep you in good health for 3600 years. Concerning Sin-gamil, whom you wrote about, ever since you wrote (to him), he’s been much too out of touch to be thinking of you, he’s living on easy street! The hat and clothes have been returned to him. He’s being treated respectfully, just as if he were living in his own home. Would you please ask him when he’s going to leave? I’ll go on treating him respectfully, so as not to cause you any pain, until the boss comes and throws him out. As for me, do I neglect anything you write me about? (NBC 5289, Old Babylonian period) Iltani to her mother: May the gods Shamash and Panigara keep you in good health forever. Those gemstones that you saw in

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY some place or other, you keep writing me again and again, as if I had them and would have told you I didn’t and would have kept them hidden, in answer to your everlasting questions, and wouldn’t have given them to you by now! You keep writing the same thing all the time. They didn’t sell me the stones where you saw them. I’d love to find out where they are now, see them myself, and pay even ten shekels of silver to get them for you. But tomorrow, when we meet, you’ll find out that I don’t have them and that I didn’t hide them. If what you tell me really does happen to me, I’ll pay the money, somehow or other, and get them for you. If not, I’ll look for even better stones than those and whatever price they ask for them, I’ll get them for you. (YBC 4501, Old Babylonian period) Sirum to [his sister] Crystal: May the gods Shamash and Panigara keep you in good health forever for my sake. Try to do something sisterly for me! Although we grew up together from childhood, you never paid me two bits worth of attention, especially after you got your big break. Even the other day, when you came here, I had a fancy staff and you wouldn’t be nice until you had gotten it away from me. You said, “I’ll send you a nice walking stick and a drinking cup,” but you didn’t send them. Moreover, I told you, “If that big chief of the Amorites you’re married to needs any beams, have him write me and I’ll send him five beams.” Now then, I’ve sent you a man by boat, send me a hundred locusts and a few bits worth of food, so I can see just how good a sister you are to me. (YBC 4516, Old Babylonian period)

A WOMAN’S YEARNING To judge from the style and spelling of this letter (NBC 1681, Old Assyrian period), the author composed and wrote it out herself (see LEARNING). Pushu-ken is known from other texts as a successful businessman, who may have been an associate of this woman’s father. Beyond her complaints about the amount of grain he gave her, which are couched in standard Mesopotamian epistolary manner, it seems that she has invested their relationship with feelings, unreciprocated.

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Shat-Assur to Pushu-ken: With respect to the contagion, the whole household has it. If you plan to go to Assur, make an offering to the gods. No father thinks about me. You too there, you don’t think about me even though there is no one else to think about me except you.... In giving me only twenty measures of grain, they treated me like one of your servants. Servants get twenty measures, so I’m supposed to be satisfied with twenty measures? They have no concern for the children here, you, like them, have no concern for them either. Travelers have passed through (who could bring me news) but you don’t think about me. Just who, then, is supposed to think of me? I don’t have anyone but you. The only thing I’ve had for six months is an offering they gave me.

T HE LOVE OF THE GODS FOR PEOPLE On the one hand, the Mesopotamians approached their gods with fear and reverence and did not express love for them, but on the other they fully expected the gods to love them, as indulgent parents would their children. In this excerpt from a flowery Sumerian prayer, the writer whines to the god of wisdom about his alienation from friends and family (see MADNESS) and his dissatisfaction with his living situation and future prospects (YBC 4620, Old Babylonian period). *

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My acquaintance will not come near me nor speak to me, My friend will not converse with me, will not let me voice my feelings. An ill-wisher has restrained me with a tether, Fate has made me an outsider to all. O my god, I rely on you, what can I expect of humanity? I am an adult now, how am I to progress in such a strait? My house is a cobbled-together rat’s nest, I take no pleasure in it, My chambers have nary a brick to touch. Like a sapling cedar planted in some filthy spot, I bear no fruit,

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LOVE, ASSAULTED The rest of this extraordinary work appears in LEARNING, as it is the erudite creation of Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon and high priestess of the moon-god at Ur, written after a rebellion in the reign of her nephew Naram-Sin. The first stanza given here tells how the goddess Inanna punished the insurgent cities, depriving them of love and fecundity until they surrendered to her. In the next passage, Enheduanna describes in unflinching terms and complex imagery her assault by Lugalanne, the rebel leader, during the mayhem at Ur. She has him speak only in the last line. Does she mean for us to understand the dagger as a thrusting weapon for suicide, or as a lewd, crude metaphor, or both? (YBC 4656, Old Babylonian period) *

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The city that did not say, “This country is yours!” Which did not say, “It is your father’s!” Speaks now your blessing, lies once more beneath your feet. No one, indeed, had set foot in its sheepfolds, No woman there spoke tenderly to her husband, No converse would she have with him at night, Nothing of her inmost treasures would she reveal. Yes, I took up my place in the sanctuary dwelling. I was high priestess, I, Enheduanna. Though I bore the offering basket, though I chanted the hymns, A death offering was ready, was I no longer living? I went towards light, it felt scorching to me. I went towards shade, it shrouded me in swirling dust. A slobbered hand was laid across my honeyed mouth, What was fairest in my nature was turned to dirt. O moon-god Sin, is this Lugalanne my destiny? Tell heaven to set me free of it!

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Just say it to heaven! Heaven will set me free! Me? My moonlight has no care for me! He destroys me in this place of hopes deceived. He, the silver nighttime orb, has spoken no judgment for me. If he spoke it, what then? If he spoke it not, what then? When Lugalanne stood paramount, he expelled me from the temple. He made me fly out the window like a swallow, I had had my taste of life. He made me walk a land of thorns. He took away the noble diadem of my holy office. He gave me a dagger: “This is just right for you,” he said. O precious, precious Queen, beloved of heaven, Your sublime will prevails, let it be for my restoration!

FOR FURTHER READING Ackerman, Susan. When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Bahrani, Zainab. Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, 2001. Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Leick, Gwendolyn. Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature. London: Routledge, 1994. Sefati, Yitschak. Love Songs in Sumerian Literature. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1998. Walls, Neal. Desire, Discord and Death: Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Myth. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2001. Wasserman, Nathan. Akkadian Love Literature of the Third and Second Millennium BCE. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016.

MADNESS You uttered strange things… your lips are buzzing like flies. (Tablet VII) The Mesopotamians recognized that there were states of mind and behavior that lay outside normal human patterns and parameters. They usually personified and individualized them as the work of demons, sorcerers, or witches, whose grip on a person could be counteracted by specially trained magicians, diviners, physicians, and others (see MAGIC). There were also procedures a victim could carry out, unaided. Today, we would consider many of the cases to reflect such conditions as chronic anxiety syndromes, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, persecution complexes, delusional tendencies, posttraumatic stress, narcissism, and a wide range of psychoses. It often strikes modern readers of Mesopotamian works dealing with alienation and personal misery (see LOVE) that there was some sense, if not understanding, of the existence and manifestation of such conditions. In the long poem known as The Righteous Sufferer, for example, the narrator details his progression, for no apparent reason, from respected member of the elite to social outcast, from self-assured man in the prime of life to someone beset by every bodily, emotional, and mental ill, even to the point of death. Prayer and consultation with experts are to no avail. Just as his tomb is made ready and obituary written, the god Marduk intervenes, and he recovers, hosting a banquet at the gravesite. In common with the author of Job, the writer probes the nature of affliction: what causes it? what cures it? what is the relationship between human agency and divine will? 79

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The genesis of evil was likewise of frequent literary concern. In the tale of Etana (see BIRDS), for instance, why does the eagle, after peacefully living alongside the snake, suddenly attack its young? This is left to us to contemplate. One of the fullest explorations of the course and consequences of violent evil is found in How Erra Wrecked the World. Invoking a series of irrational and fabricated pretexts, the warrior-god plunges the entire universe into the madness of war, until the other gods finally manage to calm him. Erra ends by saying, “One would not snatch a carcass from the jaws of a ravening lion, so too no one can reason when one is in a frenzy.” The Curse of Agade (see MEMORY) sees divine caprice and royal madness behind the collapse of the Akkadian Empire. Its downfall is set in motion when the god Enlil decrees, without provocation, that the gods should sanction the city and reign of NaramSin. The king sinks into a deep depression for seven years, or so the poet claims. Then, he enters a manic phase, deciding to defy destiny and ignore the warning omens by tearing down Ekur, the great temple of Enlil at Nippur, and rebuilding it on the most lavish scale imaginable. As its precious, sanctified fittings were removed, “the reason of Agade was taken away…. Agade’s good sense became unbalanced.” Enlil then unleashes his full wrath upon the land.

T HE MADNESS OF GILGAMESH Gilgamesh often acts in ways beyond the bounds of expectation and practice for anyone, much less a king. At one time or another, he abuses his subjects, disregards wise counsel, and threatens violence when thwarted. He refuses to release Enkidu’s body for burial, until, in a memorable image, “a worm fell out of his nose.” He leaves Uruk leaderless while he obsessively seeks the Flood survivor to learn the secret of eternal life. Rejecting proper garb and food to wear lion skins and eat raw flesh, he has a series of quasi-hallucinatory experiences. In a final, mad moment, he destroys the Stone Charms, the very objects, it turns out, he needs to cross the waters of death to reach the Flood survivor’s island. The epic’s prologue tells us that he returned to Uruk “at peace,” but does he ever acknowledge his derangement and all the harm it caused? Interestingly, though, he recognizes madness in others. After celebrating killing the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu dreams that he is fated

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soon to die. He describes his dream to Gilgamesh and then begins to curse wildly the temple door they had made from the Cedar Forest timber (see below). Gilgamesh is alarmed by Enkidu’s ranting at the door “as if it were human.” “My friend,” says Gilgamesh, “you are rational but you uttered strange things…your lips are buzzing like flies.” The Yale tablet (YBC 2178, Plate 5) is one of the most important “old version” manuscripts (see INTRODUCTION). Acquired just before World War I, it may have been looted from Uruk; large chunks are missing, destroyed by the illicit digger’s pick. The excerpt that follows has been augmented with lines from the “standard version,” indicated in italics. Gilgamesh has just proposed that he and Enkidu should embark on a quest to the Cedar Forest to kill Humbaba (older name Huwawa), its guardian monster, and then cut a giant tree for a temple door. This is utter madness, but he is beyond listening to reason. *

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Enkidu made ready to speak, Saying to Gilgamesh: “How shall the likes of us go to the forest of cedars, my friend? In order to safeguard the forest of cedars, Enlil appointed him to frighten off the people. Enlil ordained him seven terrors. That journey is not to be undertaken, That creature is not to be looked upon. Humbaba’s cry is the roar of a deluge, His maw is fire, his breath is death. He can hear rustling in the forest for sixty double leagues. Who can go into his forest? Adad is first and Humbaba is second. Who, even among the gods, could attack him? In order to safeguard the forest of cedars, Enlil appointed him to frighten people off. Enlil ordained him seven terrors. Besides, whoever goes into his forest, numbness overpowers him.” Gilgamesh made ready to speak,

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…the god of whom they speak, I will see! The one whose name resounds across the whole world, I will hunt him down in the forest of cedars. I will make the land hear how mighty is the scion of Uruk. I will set my hand to cutting a cedar, An eternal name I will make for myself!” The elders of broad-marted Uruk Responded to Gilgamesh: “You are young, Gilgamesh, your courage carries you away, You do not understand what you are trying to do, We hear of Huwawa that his features are eerie. Who is there who could face his weaponry? The forest stretches for sixty double leagues in every direction, Who can go into it? Huwawa’s cry is the roar of the deluge, His maw is fire, his breath is death! Why do you wish to do this? Huwawa’s ambush is an attack you cannot withstand. In order to safeguard the forest of cedars, Enlil appointed him to frighten off people. Enlil ordained him seven terrors.” When Gilgamesh heard the speech of his counselors, He looked toward his friend and laughed: “Now then, my friend, [do you say the same]? Am I too afraid [to approach him]?... I must go. I will slay Humbaba like a lion, I will lash together logs of cedar, cypress, and evergreen trees, I will gather the boughs upon it, I will cut off Humbaba’s head and I will navigate downstream!”

T HE MADNESS OF NABONIDUS Nabonidus, king of Babylon 555-539 B.C.E., elevated the moon-god over other deities and revived the very ancient practice of appointing a royal daughter to be the god’s high priestess (see LEARNING). In

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the text below (YBC 2182), the king proclaims in fulsome rhetoric that a lunar eclipse was a clear sign of the god’s desire for a princesspriestess. People found it more disturbing when Nabonidus moved to a caravan city in far-off Arabia, where he held court for a decade. During his absence, his son Belshazzer hosted the Bible’s famed feast at which the writing appeared on the wall. Thought by some of his contemporaries and later critics to be an unbalanced religious fanatic, Nabonidus may have had rational, strategic purposes for his seemingly odd actions. *

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When the radiant moon wished for a high priestess, the Son of the Prince revealed his sign to the human race, the Brightly Rising One disclosed his firm decision. The radiant moon, Lord of the Crown, who holds up the beacon for all people, revealed his sign concerning his wish for a high priestess to Nabonidus, King of Babylon, provider of Esagil and Ezida, the reverent shepherd, who constantly frequents the sanctuaries of the great gods. In the month Ululu, the month (whose name means) “task of the goddesses,” on the thirteenth day, the Divine Fruit was eclipsed and set while eclipsed. “The moon-god wishes for a high priestess,” thus his sign and his decision…

If not unstable, Nabonidus seems, at the least, to have been a micromanager, as the letter given here reveals (YBC 7471). In it, he wants to make sure that some new monuments, no doubt proclaiming the primacy of the moon-god, will be properly displayed in the temple of Ishtar at Uruk. *

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Word of the king to Kurbanni-Marduk: You will be happy to know that I am well. Set up in the temple, in a suitable place, those inscribed stone stelae I sent you.

DIVINING MADNESS IN THE LAND Consistent with the idea that a predictable disaster was a preventable one (see MAGIC), many Mesopotamian divination texts elucidated how an expert might recognize omens that presaged catastrophes and

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carry out rituals to avert them. Kings, autocratic as they were, had constantly to guard against events or the tides of public opinion turning against them and bringing on unrest and disorder. By consulting treatises such as this one (MLC 1874, Hellenistic period), of which two excerpts are given here, diviners could determine if what they were observing in the entrails of a freshly slaughtered sheep corresponded to any portended calamity with political repercussions. *

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If the entrails look like an axe head, the mood of the land will change for the worse. If the entrails look like a human hand, there will be famine in the land.

DIVINING MADNESS IN THE PERSON Mesopotamians also speculated that certain physical features predisposed an individual to personality disorders, with or without the machinations of a demon. In these diagnostic treatises on moles, birthmarks, and freckles, the specialist could match what he saw with the associated ominous prediction (YBC 4646, Old Babylonian period; MLC 1882, Hellenistic period). *

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If he is covered all over with closely linked birthmarks in different colors, he will be a habitually depressed personality. If he has a birthmark in his groin, he will be habitually depressed because of anxiety attacks.

DIVINING MADNESS AT A DISTANCE Among the thousands of letters from ancient Mesopotamia referring to business, public affairs, and family matters, reports of abnormal behavior are extremely rare. This letter hints darkly at something seriously amiss (YBC 4504, Old Babylonian period), but tells us no more than that. Upsetting changes of mood have been causing worry in the household.

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FOR FURTHER READING Finkel, Irving L. and Markham J. Geller. Disease in Babylonia. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Geller, Markham J. Ancient Babylonian Medicine: Theory and Practice. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Porter, Roy. Madness: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Scurlock, JoAnn. Sourcebook for Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine. Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2014. Stol, M. Epilepsy in Babylonia. Groningen: Styx Press, 1993.

JUSTICE The verdict has been announced, he will not reverse or erase. (Tablet VII) For well over a century, Assyriologists and legal historians have studied the many documents pertaining to ancient Mesopotamia law, originally for the light certain passages appeared to shed on law in the Bible, then as a field of research grounded in categories derived from ancient Roman law. More recent work, comparing Mesopotamian law to modern legal principles, has yielded numerous precedents, as in the concept of deodand, which holds that an object used to commit a crime may become the property of the state. While these kinds of inquiries serve to situate this aspect of Mesopotamian culture in its broader context, it can be risky to apply Western lenses to the material. A prime example is the so-called Code of Hammurabi. Its monumental presentation on a massive diorite stele is one of the most celebrated pieces of Mesopotamian sculpture. The stele appears to have been part of a set displayed in major Babylonian cities about 1760 B.C.E. Only fragments remain from all but this one, probably erected in Sippar, which survived in almost perfect condition because six hundred years later the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte invaded southern Mespotamia and took it back to his capital at Susa. There it was discovered by archaeologists, along with dozens of other artworks he had likewise captured as war booty. The relief on its upper section shows Hammurabi facing the seated figure of the sun-god Shamash, arbiter of justice, who holds out a rod and ring to the king. These objects appear frequently in art, and are probably best interpreted as emblematic devices to be used 87

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by a ruler to manage and control his people. Hammurabi raises his right hand before his face in a standard gesture of prayerful respect. A new proposal, based on close examination of the stele, suggests that the royal image was recut in antiquity to depict another king. The laws were inscribed in 49 columns on the lower section, mostly phrased as a series of conditionals, that is, if a specified scenario occurs, then this will be the consequence. Widespread belief considers them the world’s first law code. There are, however, at least four previous collections, of which the earliest date back to the end of the third millennium. The more significant problem is that these are not codes in our sense of the term. They are not comprehensive, internally consistent compilations. Nor do we have evidence that they were considered statutory or used as points of reference for future legal matters. Of the thousands of contracts and court cases that have come down to us from the age of Hammurabi, just one text, from the reign of his son and successor, mentions the stele, saying that a cultivator’s breach of contract shall be dealt with according to its provisions. Yet a slightly later king made no acknowledgment of it, but issued in his own name decrees that do no more than repeat several of the death penalty offenses listed on the stele. Instead, this and the other “law codes” appear to be best understood as proclamations on social and economic matters, as well as exemplary instances of justice, gathered together and framed by grandiloquent prologues and epilogues in the manner of royal inscriptions. Hammurabi’s epilogue, for instance, includes such ringing phrases as “lest the strong oppress the weak” and assurances that justice shall be given “to the orphan and the widow.” While a Mesopotamian king was indeed the head of the justice system in his realm and decided capital cases, most adjudications involving property or commercial disputes were carried out at the local level. A council of judges was chosen from among the leading citizens of a community. Litigants generally represented themselves, though in some circumstances legal counsel was engaged. Witnesses could be called and other support or material evidence introduced. Criminal cases were heard before royal judges and officials, often in important temples, where the participants were obliged to swear oaths on sacred objects. Oaths could also be taken on the name of the king. A new development in the Neo-Babylonian period was that oaths

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might be sworn inside a magic circle (see MAGIC). A verdict was final, with no appeal process. If a decision could not be reached, the plaintiff and/or the defendant were sometimes subjected to a water-ordeal. The fullest description of this occurs in a self-congratulatory account by a NeoBabylonian ruler of the sixth century B.C.E. According to this text, known as “The King of Justice,” one man had charged another with murder, but he was found neither culpable nor exonerated. Under guard, the two were taken to the banks of the Euphrates. The accused was thrown in first. Divine intervention carried him safely to shore, thereby proving his innocence. When the man who had falsely brought the charge was thrown in, he vanished from view. At last, his corpse washed up, with blood streaming from head wounds and his body covered in blisters, in keeping with the Mesopotamian belief that fires burned beneath the waters. Normally, a decision was fairly expeditiously rendered, for which judges had a wide range of penalties available to them. Persons convicted might be fined for the actual loss plus future gains that might have accrued, as in any fruit in years to come from a tree wrongfully taken down. Bodily pain might be inflicted by such actions as flogging, cutting off the hand of a thief, or mirrored retaliation, as in the famous “eye for an eye.” The death sentence was often carried out in full view of the public. Judges appear to have considered the social standings of both parties involved, and adjusted the penalties accordingly. Mesopotamian literature, unlike the court-case novels of Victorian authors, seldom reflects on the workings of the justice system. An exceptional example occurs in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Enkidu dreams that he saw the four great gods assembled in council, debating whether he or Gilgamesh should die for having killed Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. The gods present their arguments, and it is Enkidu who is condemned. In contrast to the proceedings in human courts, the sun-god is permitted to appeal, but is overruled. When Enkidu relates his dream, Gilgamesh calmly states that “what Enlil commanded he will not retract.” His initial acceptance of convention makes the king’s unhinged behavior once Enkidu dies even more dramatic, flying as it does in the face of accepted Mesopotamian custom (see MADNESS).

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The Curse of Agade (see MEMORY) applies to divine justice the mirrored retaliation typical of human justice: “Enlil, because his beloved Ekur had been destroyed, what should he destroy in turn for it?” The poem ends with the gods pronouncing their terrible curse upon the once-glorious imperial city. Again, we see punishment in kind, this time with a dark twist, as in “May the slaughterer of cattle slaughter his wife, may the butcher of sheep butcher his child.” It was thought best to avoid going to court. A Sumerian sage of the late third millennium produced a compendium of maxims for success in everyday life, which were translated into Akkadian and Hurrian and were still being copied in the late first millennium. “The Instructions of Shuruppak,” as they are known today, include these words of advice about legal entanglements: Don’t give evidence for anyone, you will be drawn in over your head. Don’t let yourself be drawn into a dispute as a witness in court. Don’t let yourself be identified as a party to a dispute. Don’t start a dispute yourself. You will end up standing by the palace gate awaiting resolution.

On occasion, however, it was necessary to bring suit. Trial records provide details of the cases, but we rarely have the full story preserved. Some of these trials must have been the sensations of their day. In one such instance, a woman loaned a man money, had his wife jailed for the debt, and then proceeded to have an open affair with the man while his wife was imprisoned! She told the judges that she would not let the man into her bed again. Was that the end of the matter?

MURDER FOR H IRE During the reigns of the Achaemenid kings Cyrus and Cambyses, a large dossier was compiled concerning the dishonest dealings of a corrupt temple contractor named Gimillu. He was several times brought to trial for stealing livestock and forced to pay a thirty-fold penalty, only to be arrested a few months later on the same charges. Among his other crimes, he stole and mistreated draft animals, made off with silver and gold vessels, stashed records, used institutional

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labor for his personal gain, and sold crops illegally. He may have been part of a crime family, for at one point his mother was accused of stealing sheep. The most serious charge against him was prosecuted in 521 B.C.E. (YBC 6932). It is the first documented instance of murder for hire, in which Gimillu contracted for the assassination of a senior temple administrator. A temple worker leaked the information, but when it was time for the informant to give his sworn statement in court, he retracted under oath. One strongly suspects that prior to giving his testimony he or members of his family were threatened by Gimillu or his henchmen. Later that same year, the temple official died, surely not coincidental, but connected with the nefarious Gimillu. *

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Zumbaya son of Remut, a temple slave of Our Lady of Uruk, deposed as follows: “On the 17th day of April, first year of Darius, king of Babylon, king of the world, Anu-zer-ushabshi son of Labashi, a temple slave of Our Lady of Uruk, said to me as follows: ‘Gimillu, the tenant farmer of Our Lady of Uruk, has put out a contract for the murder of Sin-shar-usur, the royal official entrusted with the administration of the temple of Our Lady of Uruk.’” The officials and gentlemen of the city sent out a written order to produce Anu-zer-ushabshi. He took an oath in the assembly and swore: “I have never, in my entire life, heard anything whatsoever about a contract put out by Gimillu on Sin-shar-usur, nor by any of his family members, nor by any servant of his, nor did I say anything of the sort to Zumbaya.”

EMBEZZLEMENT Thirty years earlier, other temple authorities had trouble with a certain Bel-tuklatua. They accused him of having sold a camel that had been used to carry royal provisions from Babylonia to Teima, the caravan city in Arabia where King Nabonidus spent a decade (see MADNESS), but they lacked proof. This text records the eventuality should a witness corroborates the charge (YBC 4098).

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Whenever a witness shall come forward against Bel-tuklatua, slave of Nabu-mukin-zeri, and prove that he brought back from the land of Teima and sold a camel that had carried the king’s provisions to the land of Teima, he shall forthwith give a camel to Our Lady of Uruk.

A T HIEVING SHEPHERD In this court hearing of about 1800 B.C.E., a shepherd stands accused of having stolen two sheep and lied about it. Is the owner really to believe that they just “wandered off”? Maybe, says he, the shepherd and his family should learn how to count, at least to two (YBC 7073). *

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From now on, may the gods preserve you, teach your household how to count two nomad sheep that did not come in for shearing and are not in our pasture!

WITCH TRIAL? Witchcraft was a serious criminal matter in Mesopotamia, punishable by death (see MAGIC). A case of the Old Babylonian period involves a father and son, who each accused the other of malfeasance under the influence of witchcraft. The first text reports on the initial hearing, and it summons the son, his wife, and her mother to appear in court for the verdict to be pronounced (NCBT 1859). In the father’s follow-up letter (NCBT 1880), he complains about the mayor’s apparent favoring of the defendant, but is clearly gratified that his demand to have all three in court again has been met. He cannot bring himself to refer to his son by name, but calls him “that man.” Additional documents pertaining to this family show that the mayor had dealt with the women before. *

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To the mayor of the village of Laliya and the community elders: Thus say the judges. Ili-iddinam appeared before us and said, “I gave 30 bushels of barley to my son to seed a field, but they ate it

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up. Then they gave the field to a tenant farmer, and the tenant farmer insulted me. Then I went before the mayor and the community elders and gave an account of this before them. My son answered me in the presence of the mayor and the community elders, and I, for my part, said to him, ‘I’ll put a stop to your wife and your mother-in-law who have bewitched you!’ He answered me this way, ‘I, for my part, will put a stop to whoever has bewitched you!’ This is what he deposed before us. Now that our tablet has reached you, send Ur-Shubula, his wife, and his mother-in-law here so that we can pronounce a verdict for him according to royal regulation. Say to Nergal-hazir (mayor of Laliya), thus says Ili-iddinam: May the gods Shamash and Marduk keep you in good health. With reference to the matter concerning which I made a deposition before you, I have informed the judges and the judges’ tablet has gone off to you. That man who talked so long before you and whose testimony you backed and for whom you stood as guarantor, he whom those women bewitched, have him, his wife, and his mother-in-law brought here, so the judges can pronounce a verdict for us.

A JAIL BREAK Prison terms were meted out to both men and women. A unique and highly literary view from inside a cell was written about 570 B.C.E. by the eldest son of Nebuchadnezzar II. He laments bitterly that he was the innocent victim of a palace conspiracy, whose trumped-up charges his father was duped into crediting. Since historically the young man did eventually rule Babylonia, his prayers to the god Marduk for release must have been answered. A few decades later, this pair of scoundrels took matters into their own hands. We have here a court document of 530/29 B.C.E. with the jailer’s statement and the confession of an accomplice (YBC 6943). *

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“On the 19th day of the month Kislev at night, Nargiya son of Ili-gabari, a herdsman for Our Lady of Uruk, and Shamash-bel-

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LET THE PUNISHMENT FIT THE CRIME As noted in the introduction, sentences often referenced the wrongdoing that had been committed. Here, King Rim-Sin I of Larsa (1822–1763 B.C.E.) condemns to death a murderer who had forced his victim into a hot oven (NBC 5287). *

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Say to Lu-Ninurta, Balamu-namhe, Ipqu-Erra, and Mannumkima-Sin, thus [from] Rim-Sin your lord: Because he threw a boy into an oven, do you throw the slave into a blast furnace.

By the mid-thirteenth century, Assur had become the capital of a burgeoning military and commercial power, with its palaces, temples, and other monuments on an increasingly grand scale. YBC 7148 belongs to a group of harsh edicts issued by various kings of the period concerning the royal concubines, intended to regulate their behavior and that of those who came in contact with these sequestered women. The provisions of the Yale fragment are not always clear, but other manuscripts preserve this ordinance: *

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If a woman of the palace sings or quarrels with another of her rank, and one of the royal eunuchs, courtiers, or servants stands listening, he will be lashed one hundred times and one of his ears will be cut off.

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LEARNING TO BE A LAW CLERK Graduates of Babylonian schools could expect to make a good living by drafting letters and legal documents in proper form for people who could not write, or whose level of education was inadequate for court matters. This Old Babylonian tablet (NBC 7800) provided specimens that students copied in order to learn the correct phrases and formats of different kinds of contracts. Sometimes, as we see here, fanciful or improbable elements were inserted. *

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One suckling male infant, Putapada (“Foundling”) from the street, snatched from a dog’s mouth, Rubatum has adopted. She gave her word and made out her sealed document. If in the future, anyone contests this, he shall pay a fine. If in the future, Putapada says to Rubatum his mother, “You are not my mother!” she may sell him.

Students training for a career drawing up legal documents also had to copy law collections, even centuries after they were first assembled. In addition, instructors probably used them as models to be emulated in other contexts for their language and style. In the first example below (YBC 2177), a student in about 2100 B.C.E. copied out some Sumerian laws concerning such matters as rape, assault resulting in miscarriage, and the duties of an adopted child. The two provisions given here deal with the loss of rented oxen, one by an “act of God,” the other by the renter’s negligence. The student made many mistakes, so was probably not very advanced. The second tablet (YBC 6516, Plate 6) is one of numerous copies of selections from the laws of Hammurabi; this excerpt was written about 50 years after his reign. *

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If a lion devours a stray (rented) ox, the loss falls on the owner. If a stray ox disappears, (the renter) shall replace ox for ox.

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY If a man leases his field to a tenant farmer and receives the rent for his field, but afterwards a storm devastates the field or a flood sweeps away the crops, the loss is the tenant farmer’s alone. If the owner did not receive the rent for his field (before the loss) or he leased out the field for a half or a third of the yield, the tenant farmer and the owner of the field shall divide whatever grain remains according to the agreed proportions. If the tenant farmer declares his intention to cultivate the field (the following year) because in the previous year he did not recover his expenses, the owner of the field shall not object; that same tenant farmer shall cultivate his field and he shall take his share of the grain at harvest time in accordance with his contract.

A BROKEN ENGAGEMENT As seen in LOVE, relationships often occasioned the need for formalized contracts and court cases, from dowry to divorce. Here, there must have been compelling reasons to end the engagement, but the document does not provide any details beyond the sworn statement by the ex-fiancé. Ur-lugal had to bear hefty court costs (NBC 6934, Akkadian period). *

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Ur-lugal swore an oath on the name of Naram-Sin, King of Agade, that he would not reopen proceedings against Nin-gula. Gizzu, temple manager of Isin, presided over the case. E-kushta was the bailiff. 1 goat, 1 linen garment, 2 containers of beer, bread, and grain, E-kushta received and took away as the court costs for the matter. Adda the cupbearer, Ur-esh the orchardist, Lugal-gish the warrior, Beli-abum Lu-sukkalle the courier, Urunishe the herald, Eta, and Suda’um were witnesses. In their presence, Ur-lugal swore the oath on the name of the king, saying, “Nin-gula may marry anyone she likes, I will do absolutely nothing to prevent her.” This is what he said.

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BUYING A HOUSE Mesopotamian real estate contracts typically included the area of land or roofed-over space, what the abutting properties were on four sides, the price, the buyer, the seller, and the witnesses. In addition, they sometimes contained clauses against contesting title. This contract from the Akkadian period (NBC 6904) notes simply the price, the buyer, and the seller. In early sales like this one, payment of food and clothing was required above and beyond the purchase price, perhaps a vestige of the even older custom of honoring the seller at closing with a feast and gifts. *

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Dudu son of Ur-gidri has received the purchase price for a property in the neighborhood called Ki-numunzi, amounting to 15 shekels of silver and 15 ½ large measures of grain, as well as the additional payment of one woollen garment, one large measure of grain, and one jar of lard. The transaction is complete. Urni is the one who paid the price, Dudu is the one who received the price.

A LAST WILL AND T ESTAMENT Since inherited property normally passed by customary law, wills are uncommon in ancient Mesopotamia, usually drawn up to apportion legacies between wives or to provide for unmarried daughters. Various wills of the Old Assyrian period are known to survive. A Yale example (NBC 3903) is very fragmentary, but it appears to be quite comparable in its terms and provisions to its better preserved counterpart, which is given here. The testator was one of the many merchants who set up businesses in the city of Kanesh in central Anatolia, while their wives remained in Assur. Both he and his wife seem to have had children from previous marriages, so that may explain why he felt the need to plan his estate so carefully. In upper-class Assyrian families like this one, normally one daughter was “consecrated” to divine service. As such, she could not marry, but could own property and remain part of her family. *

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY Ili-bani made his will concerning his estate as follows: one note for 72 pounds of tin, owed to me by Shu-Ishtar son of Minanum; one note for 90 pounds of copper owed to me by Ilumre’i son of Salimanum; one note of 90 pounds of silver owed to me by Ibni-ili and Ennum-Ashur, his son -- (these notes) go to Ahatum, my daughter, the consecrated woman. The remainder of my notes, be they payable in Assur or its territory, go to all my sons, together with my daughter, the consecrated woman. [My daughter] is the only daughter I have. [The house] in the city of Kanesh goes to Lamassi, my wife. None [of my sons] shall [contest] with Lamassi. [All] my tablets at Kanesh, [one] being that of the 1 ½ pounds of silver, Nabutum shall give the tablets to Lamassi. Ia’a and Ikuppiya shall give six pounds of copper a year to my daughter Ahatum. All my sons shall be jointly responsible for my debts. No brother may open a tablet of mine in Assur or its territories without another brother present. They shall give Ahatum the breast meat when they make offerings. Ia’a shall have my seal. Whosoever shall bring a lawsuit against a beneficiary of my will is herewith disinherited and shall, moreover, pay all court costs. In the matter of one pound of silver for my funeral expenses that Ikuppiya has in his possession, Ia’a and Ikuppiya shall come to an agreement and pay my funeral expenses. Ahatum is my daughter and she is the only daughter to inherit from me.

FOR FURTHER READING Driver, G. R. and J. C. Miles. The Assyrian Laws. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. Driver, G. R. and J. C. Miles. The Babylonian Laws. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–55. Holtz, Shalom E. Neo-Babylonian Trial Records. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. Roth, Martha T. Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997.

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ANIMALS I killed bear, hyena, lion, panther, tiger, deer, ibex, wild beasts of the steppe. (Tablet X) Mesopotamia was home to the earliest systematic efforts to domesticate plants and animals, that is, to control their reproduction, changing forever the ways in which people relate to the natural world. By the seventh millennium, zooarchaeological evidence shows that domesticated animals included dog, sheep, goat, pig, cow, and cat. The next few thousand years saw the addition of chicken, donkey, horse, and camel. Beyond the confines of paddocks and settlements lived the wild relatives of these domesticates, as well as other animals, from the vast herds of gazelles grazing on the steppes to the prides of lions preying on the plenitude of herbivores. For today’s reader, The Epic of Gilgamesh seems to offer a thought-provoking parable on this epochal shift in human engagement with the environment. Tablet I evokes the untrammeled landscape and its free-ranging animals, which the narrator contrasts with the hero-king’s (failed) duty to be “the people’s shepherd” in the urban fold of Uruk. To curb Gilgamesh’s abusive husbandry, the gods create “valiant Enkidu in the steppe…he knew neither people nor inhabited land, he dressed as animals do, he ate grass with gazelles, with beasts he jostled at the water hole.” But even in this idyllic setting, the pits and traps of a hunter, intermediary between the wild and the domesticated, lurk to catch the unwary. The hunter complains to the king that an extraordinary being (Enkidu) has been filling them in and ripping them out: “He has helped the beasts, wildlife of the steppe, slip from my hands, he will not let me work the steppe.” Gilgamesh advises the hunter to return 101

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to the water hole, taking an irresistible harlot with him: “When he sees her…his beasts that grew up with him on the steppe will deny him.” Indeed, “after he had his fill of her delights…the gazelles shied off, the wild beasts of the steppe shunned his person, Enkidu had polluted his virginal body.” He is devastated. The harlot soothes him by enticing him to accompany her to Uruk, where she promises that friendship of another sort awaits (see LOVE). En route, they pause at an encampment of shepherds, who serve Enkidu bread and beer. He, “nursed on the milk of wild beasts,” has to be taught what to do: “Eat the bread, Enkidu, the staff of life, drink the beer, the custom of the land.” Sated with bread, flush with beer, groomed and clothed, he becomes the good shepherd, killing wolves and lions while the herdsmen sleep. A Mesopotamian doubtless would reject this modern interpretation and instead extol the achievements of civilized society. This is why, after Enkidu dies, the epic gives us a powerful sign of Gilgamesh’s derangement in his decision to leave Uruk and embark on an insistent, irrational quest to the ends of the earth and beyond for the secret of eternal life (see MADNESS). He slaughters countless “wild beasts of the steppe,” eating them raw, wearing their skins. In the epic’s final lines, Gilgamesh stands once more before the great walls of his city, monumental symbols of civilization and successful, responsible kingship. In Mesopotamian thinking about the norms of civilized culture and the role of kings in upholding them, wild or exotic animals occupied a special place. With the Akkadian rulers’ establishment of the world’s first empire in the third millennium, creatures from conquered and tributary lands were captured and held in menageries as living proof of the imperial reach. As The Curse of Agade tells us (see MEMORY), in the capital “monkey, monstrous elephant, buffalo, beasts of exotic climes, rub shoulders in the broad streets with dogs and lions, mountain ibex, and shaggy sheep.” Zoological gardens were especially important to the selfaggrandizing kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Texts, palace wall reliefs, and other works from stelae to cylinder seals attest to their keen desire to obtain and display exotica. Sennacherib (704–681 B.C.E.) seems to have taken a personal interest in creating near his

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“Palace without Rival” at Nineveh the world’s earliest immersion exhibits replicating native habitats. The breeding success stories he reports bear witness to his triumphs, both faunal and military. Direct experience with beasts from distant lands, or travelers’ tales about them, may have inspired the Mesopotamians to imagine a host of composite creatures that meld animal and human parts, or elements from two or more animals. Bull-men, for instance, appear already in the third millennium, combining a human head, arms, and torso with taurine horns, lower body, tail, and legs. They often team with heroes to fight lions and bulls, and eventually become protective demons. In colossal, modified form, human-headed winged bulls guard the entrances to the Neo-Assyrian palaces, rendered with five legs so they seem to step forward as the visitor passes through the gate. These call to mind Gilgamesh’s experience with the living scorpion-sentinels at the entrance to the tunnel from which the sun emerges at dawn. The king is duly intimidated by these terrifying, composite creatures, usually depicted with their tails upright, poised to strike (see MAGIC). As they watch him approach, the scorpionman tells his wife, “The one who has come to us, his body is flesh of the gods.” She is swift to correct him: “Two-thirds of him is divine, one-third is human” (see NUMERACY). Apparently, even scorpionmen can be contradicted by their wives.

ANIMAL PROVERBS AND FABLES Personification of both real animals and fantastic creatures like the scorpion-couple occurs often in Mesopotamian literature. To motivate students to learn to read and write Sumerian, instructors in Old Babylonian schools set them to copying short texts about talking animals engaging in human kinds of behavior. Like the fables of Aesop millennia later and the proverbs of today, these usually have a moral and a humorous bite. In the excerpts given here, a silly ox reflects on old age (YBC 7301), the puffed-up lion lords it over his realm (YBC 4604, Plate 7), and the vainglorious fox makes a fool of himself (YBC 7163). *

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When an old ox, having trotted around in a circle, came to a halt, he said, “Thanks to my strength of bygone days, I’m back

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY to where I was!” But when they drove him out to the other side of town, he said, “My strength is iffy!” When a lion came to the sheepfold, the dog put on a leash of the best wool. A lion, having caught a wild pig, roared and roared, “All this time, your flesh has not filled my mouth, but your squeals have made me deaf!” No lion eats his fellow in the bush. A lion kept roaring, “Be sure not to drop what you have stolen!” When a lion cooks soup, who will say, “It’s not good”? Where a lion has eaten a man, nobody goes a second time. In front of a lion, does one eat meat? The fox wheedled the chief god so he could have the horns of a wild bull. Once he had them on, it started to rain. They stuck up so high above him that he could not get into his burrow. The wind blew until midnight and the clouds poured down rain. When it finally stopped and he had dried off, he said, “I’m going to take these fancy things back to their owner!”

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY Over the millennia, livestock health was of paramount importance for the smooth operation of the Mesopotamian economy. This incantation invokes a healing goddess in response to a disease afflicting sheep and goats, and apparently infants too. If a cure results, the magician vows to adorn the statues of the gods (see also MAGIC) (YBC 5640, Old Babylonian period). *

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In heaven above, a blaze broke out, Congestion has fallen upon all the beasts, It has made feverish kids, lambs, And little ones in the wet nurses’ arms! Address this to my mother, Ningirimma: “Let the beasts’ faces brighten! Let the cattle rejoice!

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Let the green plants rejoice! Let the people rejoice!” I will set for all time sun disks On the pedestals of the great gods, with loving care.

In this file copy of a letter addressed to an Achaemenid king, perhaps Cyrus or Cambyses, the officers of a Babylonian temple in Uruk report that the annual sheep shearing has begun. They turn a prosaic event into an adroit piece of royal flattery (YBC 7451, 6th century). *

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To the King of the World, thus say your servants Amurru-dan, Kudurru, and Marduk-shakin-shumi: Uruk and the Eanna temple pray for the King of the World our lord. Every day, from the opening of the door until the closing of the door of the temple of Our Lady of Uruk and the goddess Nanaya, we pray for a vigorous life long of days, health of mind and body, continued stability of the royal throne, and the downfall of foes for the King of the World, our lord. All is well with the administration of the Eanna temple and your other temples. We have commenced the annual sheep shearing. We have been praying constantly for the King of the World in these words: “May this be the first of a thousand sheep shearings during the reign of the King of the World, our lord!”

CATS IN HOUSES Numerous tablets from the second and first millennia preserve collections of omens (see MAGIC), organized by type of animal and based on the behavior of domesticated fauna, including sheep, cattle, equids, dogs, and pigs, as well as on that of such wild or exotic creatures as elephants, monkeys, lions, wolves, gazelles, and foxes. Yale text NBC 10922 contains over fifty cat omens, many of them reflecting close observation of authentic feline activities. Ten representative examples are given here. *

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If a cat throws up in a man’s house, there will be a shortage of grain.

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY If a cat throws up in the window of a man’s house, that house will be constantly inflicted with losses. If a white cat is seen in a man’s house, hard times will befall that land. If a black cat is seen in a man’s house, that land will see good fortune. If a cat jumps up onto a man, he will become rich and see good fortune. If a cat enters a man’s house and cries, that house will be abandoned. If a cat has kittens in a man’s house, that house will become rich. If a feral cat is seen in a man’s house, that house will be lucky. If a feral cat has kittens and carries them off, the house will be broken up, trouble for that house. If a feral cat has kittens in a man’s bed, the king will honor him.

CATS IN T EMPLES In temples as in houses, cats helped to control rodents. From two Neo-Babylonian temple archives come nearly twenty texts documenting grain rations issued for cats, of which Yale tablet NBC 8354 is one. This is a puzzling disbursement, for they ought not to have needed to be fed grain products to augment a free-ranging diet, which presumably included mice, rats, and other pests, as well as offal from animal sacrifices. A recent study offers the explanation that the cats in question may have been caracals, kept in pens and trained to hunt birds (Kristin Kleber, “Hunting with Cats [English Summary],” Grenzüberschreitungen: Festschrift für Hans Neumann [Münster: Zaphon, 2018], pp. 344–45). *

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Four measures of grain for the rations of the cats, their rations from the 7th to the 9th days, Itti-ayakki-budiya withdrew.

CREATURES FOR KINGS The Sumerian epic about the exploits of Lugalbanda (see LEARNING), legendary king of Uruk and father of Gilgamesh, is among the earliest texts to celebrate the ability of kings to obtain wild or exotic animals. In this episode, Lugalbanda manages to snare a gigantic au-

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rochs, a kind of wild bull, glorified here in the witty, flowery language typical of the era and meant as a foil for the cleverness of Lugalbanda, not as a paean to Nature (YBC 4623, Old Babylonian period). *

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The tawny aurochs, the splendid aurochs, the aurochs wonderfully endowed with horns, The aurochs at peace in the wild, Calling to other tawny aurochs in the hills, a pristine place, Munching aromatic roots like grain, Chewing up cypress trees like stalks of grass, Snuffling among the highest branches, as if they were weeds, Gulping down the water of rushing streams, Grinding up caustic plants growing wild in the mountains, The tawny aurochs, the savage aurochs, as it browsed in the mountain meadow – Lugalbanda snared one in a trap!

In these texts (NBC 2384, NBC 123), we read of two bears, among the many kept and trained as performing animals at Neo-Sumerian Ur, during the reign of Amar-Sin (he of the ill-fitting shoe, see MAGIC). *

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One bear cub, Ludingirra took in charge from Abbashaga. Year 4, month 10, day 2 of Amar-Sin, King of Ur. One bear for the presence of the king, Ur-gir took in charge. Year 8, month 9, day 19 of Amar-Sin, King of Ur.

Here, a sturdy tether is to be made for a lion, presumably part of the menagerie of King Ishbi-Erra of Isin (NBC 7250, early Old Babylonian period). *

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One top-quality rope for a lion leash, weighing 1 1/3 minas [about 660 grams], on the authority of Itanishar, the courier. Ur-Lugalbanda weighed it. Day 6, month 12, year 13 of IshbiErra.

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Wild or exotic animals, especially lions, also provided apt metaphors for expressing the extra-ordinary qualities of rulers. In this hymn to Shulgi (see LEARNING), couched as a first-person boast, the court poets exalted their king’s heroic long-distance run through a terrible storm so that he could celebrate festivals at Nippur and Ur on the same day (NBC 7807). *

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Then did the storm shriek, the west wind whirl, North wind, south wind roaring at each other! Lightning with seven blasts consumed the whole of heaven, The howling storm made the earth tremble, While thunder boomed and boomed again in the boundless sky. The downpour flung its arms around the water on the ground, Hailstones, large and small, were pounding on my back! I, the king, felt no fear at all, nor was I dismayed. I charged forward, like a savage lion for the kill, I galloped onward, like an onager on the steppe, On and on I ran, my heart rejoicing!

NUISANCE ANIMALS This short text gives a vivid picture of swatting at flies buzzing about the head. One hopes that the incantation had the desired result (NBC 7967, Old Babylonian period). For spells against scorpions, see MAGIC. *

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I have swatted you at the crown (of his head), From crown to brow, From brow to ear, From ear to nostril! I exorcise you flies by the goddess of exorcism, You shall rise up like locusts When he flails his arms.

FOR FURTHER READING Collins, Billie Jean, ed. A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

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Freedman, Sally M. If a City is Set on a Height: The Akkadian Omen Series Šumma Alu ina Mēlê Šakin, vol. III. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2017. Thomason, Allison Karmel. Luxury and Legitimation: Royal Collecting in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, 2016. van Buren, E. Douglas. The Fauna of Ancient Mesopotamia as Represented in Art. Rome: Pontifical Institute, 1939. Watanabe, Chikako E. Animal Symbolism in Mesopotamia: A Contextual Approach. Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 2002.

BIRDS When the seventh day arrived, I brought out a dove and set it free. (Tablet XI) Although the rich bird life of ancient Mesopotamia is abundantly attested in texts and pictorial representations, it is often problematic to identify mentions and images with species according to modern taxonomy and nomenclature. In texts, birds tend to be named, but usually not qualified in ways helpful for us. In art, bird depictions typically combine characteristics, or show features so stylized as to be nearly generic, or are at too small a scale on seals and sealings to reveal any diagnostic aspects. Furthermore, millennia of agriculture, deforestation, and other human activities have affected habitats, such that bird ranges are generally more restricted than in the past. Nevertheless, we now have a reasonable body of evidence that allows us to reconstruct the ornithological situation in Mesopotamia. Considerable archaeological work, particularly analyses of pollens preserved in ancient lake sediments, has deepened our understanding of ecological changes and continuities. From the beginnings of settled life in the Neolithic period to the present, the climate appears to have undergone little overall variation, despite periods of fluctuation. The mountains to the north and east still receive sufficient annual rainfall, especially in the winter, to support forests of oak, pine, cedar, and juniper. The foothills experience mild, moist winters and hot, dry summers, with more open stands of oak, pine, and terebinth, as well as grassy meadows. In northern Mesopotamia, these transition to steppes where winter rains nourish grasslands and cereals. As one moves down the Tigris and Euphrates, once bordered by dense thickets, summers and winters become hotter and drier, 111

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until to the east and west the flat alluvial plains give way to true deserts, with occasional spring-fed oases. Where the rivers empty into the Gulf, an extensive marsh area is home to reeds and other wetland flora. In addition to the wide variety of avifauna endemic to these diverse biomes, numerous Eurasian species pass through each year on their way to their winter grounds in Africa. In one major pattern of migration, birds pause in the staging area around the Caspian Sea before flying south towards the head of the Gulf and thence across the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa and beyond. Since broad-winged birds of prey, such as ospreys, migrate by riding thermals above land masses, some of their flyway routes from northern Europe to Africa take them over the Mesopotamian heartland. In spring, migrants follow the same routes in reverse. Several scientific surveys have been carried out in order to map bird species distribution and determine population numbers in the Middle East in general, and in the regions comprising ancient Mesopotamia in particular. For this work, the zoological and botanical observations of early archaeologists have proved valuable resources. Recent sightings were catalogued in 2004–05 by a keen avocational birder deployed to Iraq as a member of the Connecticut National Guard. He saw over a hundred species, including grebes, cormorants, herons, egrets, storks, ducks, geese, kites, vultures, hawks, eagles, falcons, pheasants, quails, rails, coots, bustards, avocets, stilts, plovers, lapwings, sandpipers, gulls, terns, sandgrouse, doves, pigeons, owls, swifts, kingfishers, bee-eaters, rollers, hoopoes, larks, swallows, martins, wagtails, pipits, bulbuls, warblers, robins, chats, flycatchers, babblers, shrikes, magpies, jays, crows, ravens, starlings, and finches. From nearly four thousand years ago comes an encyclopedic list with 150 entries, which may fairly be considered the world’s first bird book (YBC 4613, a 30-line extract). Although many of its species cannot be conclusively identified, as noted above, there is general agreement on the heron, crow, wren, sparrow, partridge, francolin, bittern, crane, pigeon, grebe, eagle, falcon, hawk, magpie, stork, duck, and raven. The text is among the oldest works that ancient Mesopotamian scholars produced, the start of a long tradition of enumerating and ordering their world. In this case and in most others, howev-

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er, it is difficult to determine what classification systems were operative. Also as noted above, only a few bird species may be identified with any degree of confidence in Mesopotamian cylinder seals, seal impressions, sculpture, wall reliefs, and other works of art. We recognize eagles by their great wingspans, prominent talons, hooked beaks, and naturalistic, predatory behaviors. The large birds shown as scavengers, eviscerating and pecking at the dead on battlefields, are certainly vultures. A now-missing relief from the Assyrian palace at Dur-Shurrukin appears to have depicted a falconer, with the bird on the wrist. Owls are rare, but authentically frontal, with large, staring eyes. Ostriches (not present today) are plainly shown, often being hunted. Doves, pigeons, ducks, and geese are conventionalized, but distinguishable from many other small birds, whose species cannot be determined. Of the large water birds, cranes and herons are clearly present, frequently spearing fish with their long bills. The graceful birds swimming in single file on cylinder seals may be swans. A rooster or two seem to be rendered, the chicken having been introduced, hailing originally from the Indian subcontinent. Artists may have studied some of these in captivity (see ANIMALS). Royal menageries kept birds from different regions in order to showcase political and economic control over those areas. The world’s first immersion zoo was created by the seventh-century Assyrian king Sennacherib as a crowning glory of his new Nineveh palace. This was achieved by replicating by means of canals and plantings the marsh habitats he had seen while campaigning in the south, no doubt as a reminder of his conquests there. According to his annals, the enterprise was a success, for “the herons that came from far away nested.” If we turn to ancient Mesopotamian literature, we find birds aplenty. One of the most interesting texts is a Sumerian composition of about 1800 B.C.E., given the modern title of “Nanshe and the Birds.” This opens with an evocative description of a goose flying up from the reeds, honking and attracting the goddess Nanshe’s notice. She descends from heaven, builds a temple where she alights, and calls an assembly of all the birds. Each is to receive its fate and a tagline or two from the Anzu bird (see below). Based on what these suggest and on occurrences of the same bird name in other texts, a

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general catalogue may be proposed, but little more. Among the sure exceptions is the peacock, whose loud shrieks echo in its onomatopoetic name. We may also be certain about the identity of three birds that play small but significant roles in The Epic of Gilgamesh. The king’s quest for the secret of immortality leads him at last to the couple who survived the Flood and were granted eternal life. Gilgamesh demands an explanation of how this came to pass, and the husband tells him the story. When the deluge finally stopped, he says, the ark went aground on a submerged mountain. He sent out a dove and then a swallow, both of which circled back to the boat, not having found dry land. Next, he released a raven, which “soared off and saw the ebbing of the waters. It ate, scratched, bobbed its head, and did not come back.” The authentic flight hierarchy of bird species and the normalcy of the raven’s behavior signal that life on earth will recover. An eagle, one of the loftiest fliers the Mesopotamians knew, is a central figure in the myth of Etana, king of the Sumerian city of Kish during the early third millennium (see LEARNING). His need for an heir is entwined with the cautionary tale of an eagle and a snake. These two live amicably in a poplar tree beside the throne, raising their young and sharing their food. Of a sudden, in one of those moments for which Mesopotamian literature is noted, evil thoughts seize the eagle (see MADNESS). It plots to kill the snake’s offspring, despite being warned against the deed by one of its own fledglings. The bereft snake appeals to the sun-god, who tells it to hide inside a sacrificed bull and wait until the eagle comes with other birds of prey to feed upon the entrails. Again ignoring the warnings of the fledgling, the greedy eagle swoops down. The snake promptly grabs it, clips its wings, and hurls it into a deep pit to die an agonizing death. But the sun-god has a redemptive use in mind for the eagle. The childless Etana has been praying for the plant of birth, which is to be found in the heavens. The sun-god instructs the king to go down into the pit and teach the eagle to fly again, in the world’s first instance of raptor rehabilitation. After the eagle regains the use of its wings, Etana climbs on the bird’s back, and they soar upward, making several attempts to go high enough. The text unfortunately breaks off before the end.

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According to another work (YBC 2394, see LEARNING), Etana winds up adopting a foundling boy, but it does not say if he and the eagle ever reached heaven or what happened there if they did. A particularly fascinating part of the story involves the first-ever descriptions of how the world must look from the vantage point of a bird. These passages are a triumph of the Mesopotamian imagination. Etana peers down and exclaims that the cultivated fields appear no larger than a garden plot, the sea no greater than a bucket filled with water, and the massive walls of a city no more than a snare for catching small animals. Vignettes on cylinder seals show the king perched on the back of the eagle, clinging nervously to the neck, in rare illustrations of a work of literature. What we do have in considerable numbers are images of people, animals, and aniconic emblems fitted with avian features. Wings, outspread or in profile, in pairs or sets, receive the most visual emphasis, with much linear detail lavished on the primary feathers. Some fantastic bird-beings have bird hind legs with talons, while others have human limbs terminating in huge claws. Just before his mortal illness strikes, Enkidu dreams that such a creature pinions his arms and drags him down to the Netherworld. In that grim place, he sees the dead, “dressed like birds in feather garments.”

ANZU , THE WICKED BIRD In this long narrative poem, the gods must find a way to vanquish Anzu, a terrible and perfidious bird born in the mountains. Yale tablet YBC 9842 (Neo-Babylonian period) preserves the first part of the late version of the story. It begins with fulsome, anticipatory praises for Ninurta, son of Enlil and the birth-goddess Mami. Then it describes Anzu, including a wordplay on the jagged peaks of his birthplace and the saw-like teeth of his beak. Enlil goes to see the fearsome bird for himself. Ea, the god of wisdom, counsels him to keep this potential foe close, by appointing him guardian of his innermost sanctum. Serving in this capacity, Anzu often notices that before Enlil bathes, he sets aside his crown, divine garment, and the Tablet of Destinies. Anzu is soon consumed with evil thoughts. One day, he can no longer resist. He snatches the Tablet and flies off with it to a remote aerie in his native mountains, leaving the universe in disarray.

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The gods despair of finding a champion among them to kill Anzu and retrieve the stolen Tablet. The Yale text ends with the first of the refusals to go on the perilous mission. Finally, Ninurta (the god Ningirsu in the earlier version) steps forward. A horrific struggle ensues, but Anzu deflects all of Ninurta’s arrows by reciting a magic spell that makes their feathers fly out of them and the wood revert to being part of a tree. Ea tells Ninurta to cut some feathers out of Anzu’s wings, so that when the bird sees them fluttering about, he will be distracted from uttering the spell. Ninurta thus manages to slay Anzu and recover the precious Tablet of Destinies, earning the gods’ everlasting gratitude. The battle between Anzu and Ninurta affords another rare instance of literature being illustrated in art, although the examples are a bit less definitive than those showing Etana riding the eagle. Anzu, if it is really he, is pictured as a upright, lion-headed creature, with large wings, lion forepaws, a feathered body, raptor tail, bird hind legs, and eagle talons. He usually turns to snarl at the attacking god, who rushes toward him, brandishing thunder and lightning or shooting arrows at him. *

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Son of the king of the inhabited world, splendid one, beloved of Mami, Of the mighty one will I ever sing, divine firstborn of Enlil, Ninurta, the splendid one, beloved of Mami, The mighty one will I ever praise, divine firstborn of Enlil! Born in Ekur, leader of the Anu gods, Eninnu’s hope, Who waters pen, garden, town, street, and city, Wave of battles, dancer in combat, sash of valor, Whose tireless onset raging fiends dread, Hear the praise of the mighty one’s power! It is he who in his fierceness bound and fettered the stone creatures, Overcoming soaring Anzu with his weapons, Slaying the bull-man in the midst of the sea. Doughty, valorous, murderous with his weapon, Mighty one, fleet of foot, always leader in fight and fray!

BIRDS Before that, no dais had been built among the Igigi-gods, It was the Igigi-gods who knelt in their supremacy. Tigris and Euphrates rivers had been fashioned, But the springs were not yet bearing their waters to the land… Then were the Igigi-gods convened from all parts. To Enlil, their father, warrior of the gods, Did his children bring the news, “Heed well the propitious word! On a fork of Sharshar Mountain… The Flood bore Anzu, His beak a jagged saw… His cry like winds and whirlwinds!” When the father of the gods saw him, He took what they said of him to heart, He inspected Anzu closely, Debated with himself, “Who bore this? Why?” Ea answered the query of his heart, He said to Enlil these words: “No doubt the waters of the Flood, The pure waters of the gods of the deep, The wide earth conceived him. He is the one born in the rocks of the mountain, It is Anzu you have seen, Let him serve you ceaselessly, Let him always block the way to the sanctum.” The god agreed to what he said to him. Enlil gave all the gods their responsibilities, He would reinstate the decrees each morning and Anzu would hold… Enlil entrusted him with the entrance to the sanctum, which he had wrought. He was wont to bathe in pure waters before him. Anzu’s eyes looked upon the trappings of supremacy, On his lordly crown, his divine apparel,

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY On the Tablet of Destinies in his hands, Anzu was wont to gaze. He resolved in his heart to make off with supremacy. “I myself will take the Tablet of Destinies, Then I will gather to myself the responsibilities of all the gods, I will have the throne for myself, I will take power over authority, I will be commander of each and every ruling god!” His heart plotted the assault. At the entrance to the sanctum, where he was wont to gaze, he bided his time. When Enlil was bathing in the pure waters, Undressed, his crown set on the throne, Anzu took control of the Tablet of Destinies, He took supremacy, authority was overthrown! Anzu soared off and made his way to his mountain. Awful silence spread, deathly stillness reigned. Their father and counselor Enlil was speechless, The sanctum was stripped of its divine splendor. The gods of the land converged, one after the other, for a plan. Anu made ready to speak, Saying to the gods his children, “Which one would slay Anzu? He shall make a name for himself in every dwelling as the greatest warrior.” They summoned the Irrigator, Anu’s son, Plans made, he said to him, They summoned Adad the Irrigator, Anu’s son, Plans made, he said to him, “O mighty one, Adad, victorious Adad, let your battle not waver, Blitz Anzu with your weapon. Let your name be greatest among all the great gods, You shall have no equal among the gods your brethren, Let there be daises built, Your holy places established in the four quarters of the world, Let your holy shrines enter Ekur,

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Show yourself mighty before the gods, for your name shall be Mighty One.” Adad answered the charge, To Anu his father he said these words, “My father, who would assault an inaccessible mountain? Which of the gods your children can overcome Anzu? He took control of the Tablet of Destinies, He took away supremacy, authority is overthrown. Anzu soared off and made his way to his mountain. His utterance has become like that of divine Duranki, If he so commands, the one he curses will turn into clay.” The gods were despondent at his speech. He turned away, he refused to go.

BIRD VERSUS FISH In a lighter vein, sometimes with a political subtext, Mesopotamian literature produced many debates between two adversaries, each attempting to prove superiority over the other. Examples include Ewe versus Wheat, Hoe versus Plow, Palm versus Vine, and Summer versus Winter. The main tactic used is denigration of the opponent in vivid language, rather than initial exaltation of oneself, although that can figure in rebuttal, as we see here. This tablet (NBC 7912, Old Babylonian period) contains several passages from the long debate of Bird versus Fish. The fish abuses the bird, and then the bird heaps scorn upon the fish before singing its own praises. Another tablet preserves the ending, in which the fish, stung to a fury, destroys the bird’s nest. The outraged bird appeals for justice to the god of wisdom, who finds for the bird and declares him the winner of the debate. *

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Bird, you know no shame, you fill the courtyard with your droppings, The sweeper who cleans the courtyard chases you away with a rope. The household is bothered by your cry, they flee from your din…

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WREN WIT Pithy mini-debates, or fables, amused students learning Sumerian, as on this tablet (YBC 9886, Old Babylonian period). The tiny wren figures in several other works, always up against a much larger creature, usually an elephant, but in one text an eagle. The bird holds its own. *

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An elephant said, “There is no one among the wild beasts who can compare to me!” The wren replied, “I, in proportion to my size, can compare to you!”

EAGLE OMENS Diviners (see MAGIC) were particularly interested in the appearance, flight patterns, sounds, and behavior of birds, for they were deemed singular intermediaries between the earth and the heavens. This late first millennium B.C.E. tablet (YBC 16934) is part of a lengthy treatise on the portentous meaning of various eagle activities. *

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If an eagle takes a pigeon in the window of a person’s house, that house will be appropriated. If an eagle eats a bird, either one or two, on the roof of a person’s house, the owner of that house will enjoy an unusually large inheritance.

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If an eagle is carrying meat or a bird while flying and lets it drop onto a person’s house, the owner of that house will enjoy an unusually large inheritance. If eagles are whirling in flight in front of a city, an enemy will besiege that city and capture it.

T HE MEANING OF SPOTS ON BIRDS This tablet (YBC 4637, Old Babylonian period) came from an extensive library of scholarly works on divination, which belonged to a master diviner in the city of Larsa. By consulting this document, he could correlate the spots he observed with their probable meaning. Some scholars take “bird’s breast” to be the term for a feature of an animal’s liver, which diviners frequently inspected (see MAGIC). In this case, it seems more likely that actual birds were being examined. *

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If there are many red spots on the right side of the bird’s breast, (it means) the safety of my army, my army will lay many ambushes for the enemy. If there are many red spots on the left side of the bird’s breast, (it means) the safety of the enemy’s army, the enemy’s army will lay many ambushes for my forces. If there are many red spots on the right and left of the bird’s breast, (it means) my army and the enemy’s army will meet, but will not do battle.

DUCKS AND DOVES FOR A GODDESS According to Mesopotamian belief, gods and goddesses led parallel lives to those of people. In urban contexts, these unfolded in their temples, which were elevated on platforms or stepped ziggurats as constructed counterparts to their divine abodes, thought to sit high up in the mountains, beyond mortal reach. Each temple thus required a large staff to feed, clothe, and tend its resident deity, as well as considerable agricultural lands and other resources to maintain the god or goddess in fitting style. Temple functionaries were expected to keep accurate records of all transactions and holdings. These Neo-Babylonian tablets are documents from the impressive poultry operation associated with the Eanna temple of the god-

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dess Ishtar at Uruk. One is a balanced account of hundreds of ducks (YBC 4033), which affords a good example of the world’s earliest spread-sheet tabulation, an accounting practice developed during this period. The other is a receipt for 85 doves (YBC 8828). *

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Drakes, layers, young males, young females, total ducks for which the chief administrator and the scribes of Eanna made a count and a balanced account, month 7, year 12 of Nabonidus, king of Babylon. [rdr = remainder] 40

15

100 0

0 total 140

50 0

0 total 50

150 330

total 495

30 100 20 total 150 rdr 30 106 total 136 35 50 15

100

150 330

30 100 22 rdr 30 72

total 135

total 495

total 152 total 102

Itti-Shamash-balatu son of Tab-sharIshtar, year 11 from the flock of Lusi-ana-nur son of Tab-shar-Ishtar 25 ducks received, month 9, day 6 year 12 of Nabonidus, king of Babylon from this: received 100 eggs instead of 50 ducklings 2 ducks, month 1, day 3 3 ducks, month 2, day 24 12 ducklings, month 3, day 6 20 ducklings received when the count was made. 50 ducklings from Tabni-Ea son of Assurzera-ibni, sent to Eanna. 72 ducklings, month 6, day 15 viewed, year 12 in charge of Itti-Shamash-balatu son of Tab-shar-Ishtar Nanaya-iddin son of Tab-shar-Ishtar, year 11 from the flock of Lusi-ana-nur son of Tab-shar-Ishtar, in his charge. 20 ducks, month 9, day 6 year 12 of Nabonidus, king of Babylon received 92 eggs instead of 46 ducklings 5 ducks, month 1, day 3 12 ducklings, month 3, day 6 20 ducklings received when the count was made 50 ducklings from Tabni-Ea son of Assurzera-ibni, sent to Eanna. 108 ducklings, month 6, day 15 viewed, year 12 in charge of Nanaya-iddin son of Tabshar-Ishtar

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85 doves, Marduk-eriba son of Nabu-eresh, received. Month 3, day 10, year 5 of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

OF EGGS AND FEATHERS These two texts from the late third millennium B.C.E. record deliveries of eggs (MLC 1249) and feathers (NBC 467). In the latter, one suspects that the scribe did not really count them, but jotted down an impressive number to give his record a semblance of accountability. *

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Lugal-itida delivered 50 bird’s eggs. Lanimu received 18,000 bird feathers from Ur-Ba’u and the governor’s field supervisors, accession year of Amar-Sin, the king.

COOKING IN CUNEIFORM Three Yale tablets provide a unique glimpse into how certain birds and other foods were readied for consumption (YBC 4644, 4648, 8958, Old Babylonian period). Although at first glance the texts seem to constitute the world’s earliest cookbooks, in fact the recipes, if we may call them that, contain no indication of measurements or cooking times, and little or no guidance on how to execute more complicated procedures. Moreover, the vocabulary is often abstruse and resists definitive assignment to specific ingredients, utensils, methods, and the like. It is also unclear who the audience might have been. Even professional cooks in palace or temple kitchens were almost certainly not literate enough to read and follow them, nor would expert chefs have felt the need for such general directions as the tablets supply. Instead, these culinary texts appear to be part of a sizeable corpus of material giving similar kinds of technological information with similar levels of (im)precision. There are, for example, tablets about glassmaking, perfume manufacturing, horse training, and so forth. Based on these comparanda and on the fact that the Yale tablets have a fairly limited range of food groups and preparations, we

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may surmise that many more culinary texts once existed besides these three (and two shorter ones from other times and places). An intriguing feature is the occasional switch from the imperative (do this or that) to a first-person/second-person instructional mode (when I do this, you do that). Are we to envision a cooking class, or a vestige of an earlier version in which an experienced cook dictated to a scribe tasked with adding to the collections of human knowledge for which the ancient Mesopotamians were justly renowned? Yet certain details suggest that the kitchens of the elite and the gods actually put these recipes into practice. There is, for instance, attention paid to arranging a platter in an aesthetically pleasing manner, or to adding a top crust or garnish just before serving to give the dish an appetizing allure. The banquets and feasts so often depicted in Mesopotamian text and image thus take on an important sensory dimension, even if we cannot tell what exactly the participants were enjoying. From the mid-1980s on, when these tablets were first edited and published as culinary texts, there have been numerous meals prepared, predicated on interpretations of these recipes. Since they are all liquid-based, choices about quantities of water and cooking times have dictated if broths, soups, porridges, or stews resulted. Other decisions have involved the ticklish business of identifying such components as condiments and cuts of meat with their modern equivalents. In addition, there has been a tendency, arguably misguided, to regard today’s Middle Eastern menus and methods as the direct heirs of this very ancient culinary tradition and so to extrapolate backwards in time to understand better these recipes. Be all this as it may, here is what one of the tablets (YBC 8958, Plate 8) has to say about cooking small birds of indeterminate species. *

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Detach the head, neck, and legs. Open their bellies and remove the gizzards and pluck, then split and peel the membrane from the gizzards. Wash the birds and chop the pluck. In a clean cauldron, put the birds, gizzards, and entrails. After heating it, remove the meat and wash well in cold water. Wash a pot well and pour in water and milk, and put it on the stove.

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Wipe carefully the birds, gizzards, and entrails. Sprinkle with salt and assemble all the ingredients in a pot. Add a piece of fat from which the gristle has been removed, pieces of aromatic wood as desired, and stripped rue leaves. When it comes to a boil, add onion in moderation, leek, and garlic mashed with onion, and a bit of cold water. Let it simmer. Meanwhile, soak cleaned flour in milk, and when it is well saturated, knead it with brine. Then, being careful that it remains pliant, add, while continuing to knead, mashed leek and garlic, milk and some of the cooking juices. Divide the dough into two equal parts. Let one half rise and reserve in a pot. From the other half, shape dumplings and bake in the oven and remove when done. Knead more flour that has been soaked and saturated with milk, adding cooking juices and mashed leek and garlic to the milk. Take a platter that can hold the birds and line it with the dough, which should somewhat overlap the rim of the platter. Find the large vessel in which half of the previous dough was reserved. Set that dough on another platter. Choose the platter so that it covers the space taken up by the birds, and first sprinkle it with mint. Line it with the dough that you had reserved in the large vessel to make a cover. Then remove the … from the stove and cover the stove’s upper opening with it. Place the two doughlined platters on top. When cooked, remove from the stove and detach just the dough for the “cover” from its platter, rub well with oil, and reserve it on the platter until just before serving. When the birds and broth are cooked, pound, mash, and add leek and garlic. Just before serving, take the platter with the bottom crust and carefully arrange the birds on it. Scatter over the birds the chopped pluck and gizzards from the pot, and the dumplings that were baked in the oven. Set aside the broth and cooking juices in which the meat cooked. Cover the assemblage with the crust cover, and bring to the table.

FOR FURTHER READING Bottéro, Jean. Textes culinaires Mésopotamiens/Mesopotamian Culinary Texts. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995. (Chapter 2

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A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY provides English translations, from which the text included here is adapted and used with permission.)

Porter, Richard and Simon Aspinall. Birds of the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Trouern-Trend, Jonathan. Birding Babylon: A Soldier’s Journal from Iraq. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006. Veldhuis, Niek. Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition “Nanše and the Birds.” Leiden: Brill, 2004.

MAGIC He had him lie down in a circle of flour. (Tablet IV) For those raised in the rationalist traditions of the European Enlightenment, magic in ancient Mesopotamia defies the desire for systematized categorization, as it offered interlocking ways and contexts for practitioners to ward off, predict, or counteract threats and dangers. Contemporaneous distinction was made, however, between what we call white magic and black magic. Although the methods each used were likely similar, the former was enacted overtly by magicians, with full societal and divine legitimation, while the latter was carried out secretly by sorcerers or witches, who deliberately and maliciously set out to cause harm. There is an enormous corpus of magical texts from all periods, including spells, incantations, and rituals, as well as numerous objects depicting magical events, didactic models for guidance in divination, and protective charms for individual or family use. Most of the written records are probably best described in syncretistic terms. Magicomedical texts, for example, reflect the fact that a patient typically had both a magician and a physician in the sickroom. The magician used his spells and rituals to exorcize the demons believed to have caused the malady or mishap. To the same end, the physician applied his herbal remedies, bandaging techniques, and surgical procedures. He also had at his disposal manuals and other documents on such public health issues as the need for clean water and the control of epidemics. On occasion, magician and physician were one and the same person, contradictory as that may seem to us. The bedside scene appears on many cylinder seals and plaques, showing the patient supine, with demons hovering above his body. 127

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Scores of demons and other supernatural beings populated the Mesopotamian world, some sent by the gods to punish humans for sins of omission or commission, others sharing the world with people and animals. Among the most dreaded was Lamashtu, for she could inflict terrible evil and specialized in killing fetuses and newborns. She was depicted as a horrifying composite of lion, donkey, bird, and human elements, with a suckling piglet or puppy at her breasts. To thwart her, pregnant women often wore an amulet in the shape of the grimacing head of Pazuzu, a demon whose close association with Lamashtu was thought to negate her menace. He too was pictured as a composite, with wings, talons, scales on his body, and a snake-headed penis. Apotropaic figurines of Pazuzu and incantations and amulets against Lamashtu were affixed inside and outside houses, wherever small openings might allow Lamashtu to sneak in. An important part of the magician’s task was to identify the cause of the affliction so that his efforts would be as efficacious as possible. This could be challenging to pinpoint, as a person might well have done or not done something unwittingly, or been the victim of sorcery, clandestine by its very nature. Once he had reached a diagnosis, the magician recited the spells and incantations and enacted the rituals the situation called for. As we might expect, the higher the social and economic status of the afflicted person, the more complicated and lengthy the magician’s process. The most elaborate were performed on behalf of the king and state, involving such critical responsibilities as warding off any evil portended by solar and lunar eclipses and other celestial happenings. People without specialized training doubtless attemped simple magic. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, we have an interesting instance of this. En route to the Cedar Forest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu heroically cover the great distance in only a few days. At each night’s campsite, Gilgamesh asks a mountain for a propitious dream, pouring out a bit of flour as an offering. Then Enkidu puts up a shelter and sprinkles a magic circle of flour for Gilgamesh to sleep within. Dreams come, but each one is more nightmarish than the last. Enkidu tries to explain them away, putting a positive spin on their clearly inauspicious meanings. With no education in magic, nor in any other area of learning for that matter, Enkidu is very much out of his depth. While flour circles alone are easy to make, the many magic texts in which

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they figure demonstrate that their most effective power lies in combination with prescribed spells, rituals, and paraphernalia. Gilgamesh presumably knows this and must see through Enkidu’s amateurish dream readings, but his overweening ambition and perhaps his feelings for Enkidu prevail, until he can no longer ignore the cumulative effect and finally calls upon the god Shamash for guidance. Considerable study of magic texts, as well as years of apprenticeship, went into becoming a full-fledged practitioner. The oldest documents we have are from the mid-third millennium. By the early second millennium, many of these Sumerian spells had been translated into Akkadian and grouped under different rubrics. Over 300 incantations are known from tablets of the mid-second millennium alone. Several extensive collections from various periods have come down to us, some of whose ancient titles refer to the burning required in their rituals. A few incantations were written in mumbo jumbo, today sometimes called the “abracadabra” texts. Perhaps the most esoteric aspect of magic entailed gaining knowledge of what might take place in the future, so that any ill effects could be magically averted. For Mesopotamians who believed in predetermination, divination does not seem to have presented a philosophical or religious problem, as they might have construed that the cycle of omen observation/interpretation/magical action, whether it succeeded or failed, was actually part of the gods’ plans. In general, divination required such specialized skills that diviners usually concentrated on a particular form. One of the most important was extispicy, in which diviners examined the liver (less commonly the lungs or colon) of a freshly slaughtered sheep, basing their conclusions on years of poring over compendia of very technical liver omen texts, as well as consulting inscribed clay liver models. Those working in other fields of divination took omens from provoked/solicited phenomena, as in oil swirls in water and smoke plumes from incense, and unprovoked/unsolicited occurrences, as in births of two-headed animals and markings on birds (see BIRDS). Dreams were considered extremely significant portents of future events, so much so that some rulers are known to have had their personal interpreters accompany them on military campaigns. The high regard for dreams and oneiromancy is reflected in much Mesopotamian literature as narrative and characterization devices. As we

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have seen, The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, has several crucial dream episodes, in addition to the one noted above. In The Curse of Agade, Naram-Sin’s dream about the downfall of his capital city sets all the subsequent events in motion (see MEMORY, MADNESS). Enraged at the consistently negative omens, the king “tried to change what Enlil had commanded, he threw out the findings.” But divine will prevails, and Agade is destroyed, just as he dreamt would happen.

MAGIC CIRCLES As noted in JUSTICE, oaths, especially in the Neo-Babylonian period, were sometimes sworn within a magic circle. Here, on a document from the Achaemenid period (YBC 4075), Nergal-ibni, the plaintiff, has brought suit against Liblut, whom he accuses of having purloined a gemstone from a necklace he borrowed. The incident reminds us of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace.” Was likewise the Mesopotamian jewel only an artificial imitation, fallen from its setting by accident? *

*

*

On the 11th day of the 2nd month, year 6 of Cyrus, King of the World, Nergal-ibni, son of Nabu-ahhe-eriba, descendant of the Fisherman Family, will swear by the gods Anu and Shamash in a magic circle against Liblut, son of Nabu-etir: “When Liblut was wearing a necklace he took from my neck, he broke off one gemstone, which wasn’t missing before, from my necklace.” Liblut shall give the gemstone to Nergal-ibni. (Witnesses). The 10th day of the 2nd month, year 6 of Cyrus, King of the World.

MAGIC BOWLS In the early centuries of the Christian era, clay bowls were often inscribed with Aramaic or Mandean incantations, inked in spirals or segments around their insides. While the amulets and plaques of prior periods were affixed to house walls, magic bowls were buried under the foundations or thresholds. The purpose, however, was unchanged: to protect the residents from any evil entering or lurking in the dwelling. YBC 2364 is typical of the genre. Its first three lines,

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given here, are adapted from Edwin M. Yamauchi, Mandaic Incantation Texts (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1967) p. 297. *

*

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In the name of the great, alien Life from the eternities of light, the superabounding Life, which is above all the conjurations. The health and sealing and arming of the Truth and the great Guardian of steadfastness may there be to the house, dwelling, mansion, building, and possessions of Farrukzad, son of Kumay.

CHILDBIRTH SPELLS Delivery complications were common, as in this instance of a difficult presentation, perhaps breach (YBC 4603, Old Babylonian period). *

*

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In the fluids of intercourse, Bone was formed. In the tissue of sinews, Baby was formed. In the ocean waters, fearsome, raging, In the distant waters of the sea, Where the little one’s arms are bound, There, within, where the sun’s eye can bring no brightness, The God of Magic saw him. He loosed his tight-tied bonds, He set the way for him, He opened for him the path.

LULLABY SPELLS This tablet (NBC 6151, Neo-Babylonian period) preserves several spells and their accompanying rituals that were intended to soothe fretful babies and protect them while they slept. In the ritual given here, dust gathered from places outside of the house is supposed to absorb and whisk away whatever is troubling the baby. *

*

*

Dweller in darkness, who had not seen the sunrise,

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SPELLS AGAINST LAMASHTU In this text, the magician faces his frequent nemesis, the formidable demon Lamashtu, and engages her directly, with complete confidence in his powers against her (NBC 1265, Old Babylonian period). *

*

*

Long of hand, longer still of nail, Her forearms are smeared with blood. I will surely fill your mouth with sand, your face with dust, Your eyes with finely ground mustard seeds!

SPELLS AGAINST A T EMPTRESS DEMON Certain demons were thought to be the spirits of those who had been denied happiness or sexual fulfillment in their lifetimes. They haunted the earth to torment the living, often causing them to have hopeless fantasies. This demon sneaks away from home and dances

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wildly in the street and on the steppe (YBC 9841, Old Babylonian period). *

*

*

Phantom-girl, follower of the God of Violence, Who rides on(?) all the winds, Who was plucked like a fresh fruit in her lusciousness: Your kind has time to play, Your kind plays all day, Jumping up and down in ecstasy, The street resounding with their shrieks. No groom ever spread her shoulders, Never did she kiss a baby’s tender lips. She got out of her father’s house by cunning, She’s too young [to bear] a child. They hold each other’s hands, Her mate, the whirlwind, She, the puff of air, Running through the steppe!

SPELLS CAST BY A SORCERER This unique letter (YBC 6461, Old Babylonian period) is addressed to Enki, a patron deity of magic, complaining that a sorcerer has visited ills upon him. The god is supposed to reverse the spells. *

*

*

Because of him, O Enki who made me, he has brought hunger and thirst upon me, he has cast chills and misery upon me. If it please you, then tell him your wish, so that, by the [command(?)] of Enki, who dwells in Eridu, I may establish the greatness of Enki! Because of him, lest he harm me.

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SPELLS CAST BY A WITCH In this account of the sixth to fourth centuries B.C.E. (MLC 2609), the afflicted one feels as though he is at the point of death, blaming his moribund state on a witch and her ghost-assistant. *

*

*

The sorceress has cast an evil spell on me, She made me eat fell spittle, She gave me her potion that can take away my life, She doused me with her polluted water to bring on my death, She rubbed me with her evil ointment to bring me low, She set her evil sickness on me like a curse, She gave me over to a ghost, a kinless, roaming stranger.

PEST CONTROL MAGIC Noisome animals, some of them potentially deadly, included scorpions, snakes, fleas, flies (see ANIMALS), and rabid dogs, against all of which magicians had numerous spells at their disposal. The one given here concerns scorpions and belonged to an Old Babylonian exorcist, whose magic could immobilize those menaces (YBC 5090). *

*

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I pour magic over myself. I pour magic over my own person, As if a river poured over its banks. Be clod of roadway, rubble of street! Be red blight in orchard! Be cartilage of a (dead) mongoose!

CULTIC MAGIC At the opposite end of the spectrum were the elaborate spells recited during cultic ceremonies and other religious rituals. This tablet (MLC 1873), from the city of Uruk during the reign of Antiochus III (222-187 B.C.E.), gives detailed instructions for an episode in the New Year pageant called “The King Has Come Forth.” In it, the statue of the sky-god journeys from its chapel to a festival house outside the city, with many pauses along the way for spells to be said and rites to be conducted.

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*

After (the statue) of Anu has left the chapel Enamenna and has reached the Exalted Gate, all of the exorcists shall recite three times the incantation “The King Has Come Forth.” The exorcists shall stop, then (various kinds of) priests and the brewers, who are harnessed to the framework (bearing the statue of the god), shall bless Anu with the blessing “Great Anu, may heaven and earth bless you!” …. Great Anu, may heaven and earth bless you! May Enlil, Ea, and the Mother Goddess bless you joyfully. May Sun and Moon bless you when you come forth, May Nergal and the Seven bless you with faithful hearts, May the great gods of Heaven and the gods of the Netherworld bless you, May the gods of the depths and the gods of the Holy Shrine bless you, May they bless you daily, day, month, and year!

READING THE STARS Divination based on celestial phenomena was the province of specialists who were versed in the regular movements of the stars, planets, and moon, as well as in such exceptional events as eclipses, comets, and shooting stars. This tablet gives the diviner detailed instructions and portents (YBC 9863, fourth to third centuries B.C.E.). *

*

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You take [barley of the early] harvest, selected by a young man who has not known a woman… When, at night, there is no one about, the people being asleep and silence having settled in, you set [ ] before Ursa Maior, you libate fine wine all alone. You recite the spell beginning “An-ush” before Ursa Maior. A (shooting) star from your right is favorable… [If a shooting star] passes from your left to your right, it is not favorable. (If it passes from behind you) to in front of you, it is favorable. If the NorthernCross (?) star passes Ursa Maior, it is favorable. If it does not pass Ursa Maior, it is unfavorable.

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OMENS AND KINGS As discussed in MEMORY, omens and other documents made regular reference to the kings of the past, particularly those of the Akkadian period. Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether or not there are any historical kernels in these texts, and if so, what insights they might provide into a work’s own time and place. The examples given here all date to the Old Babylonian period. The first set relates features of the gall bladder to Sargon, founder of the Akkadian Empire (YBC 4638). The second offers interpretations of monstrous births, with Akkadian and Neo-Sumerian royal associations (YBC 4632). An oversize heart brought the larger-than-life Gilgamesh to mind (YBC 4629). Did the Neo-Sumerian king Amar-Sin actually die from an infected blister on his foot (YBC 12016)? If the gall bladder has become like a lizard, weapon of Sargon. If the middle of the gall bladder is set towards the left, weapon of Sargon. If the tip of the gall bladder is like a lizard, weapon of Sargon. If a monstrous birth is like a bull’s horn, omen of Sargon. If a monstrous birth is like a lion, omen of Naram-Sin, who ruled the world. If a monstrous birth is like a horse, omen of Shulgi, who ruled the four quarters of the earth. If the heart is massive, omen of Gilgamesh, who had no rival. If there is a hole in the path and the head of the path on the right is dark, omen of Amar-Sin, who died from the pinch of a sandal.

This text was written on a clay model of a liver, configured to show what this organ supposedly looked like as King Sin-iddinam of Larsa (1849–1843 B.C.E.) went to the temple of the sun-god on one of the days in the month (here, in autumn) when a certain festival was regularly celebrated (YBC 9832, Old Babylonian period, Plate 9). Did some part of the building really collapse on him? Or in connection with his sacrifice, was this the liver omen that “befell” him? *

*

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This is the omen of Sin-iddinam, who made a festival sacrifice during the month of Elul in the temple of Shamash and it fell on him. (It means that) the owner of the sheep (presented for divination) will repulse an enemy and will stand (victorious) over something that is not his own.

FOR FURTHER READING Abusch, Tzvi and Karel van der Toorn, eds. Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretive Perspectives. Groningen: Styx Publications, 1999. Black, Jeremy and Anthony Green. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia. London: British Museum Press, 1992. Maul, Stefan M. The Art of Divination in the Ancient Near East. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018. Rochberg, Francesca. The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

INDEX OF MUSEUM NUMBERS MLC 641, 46 MLC 1249, 123 MLC 1299, 68-69 MLC 1364, 46-47 MLC 1859, 66 MLC 1866, 40 MLC 1870, 40 MLC 1873, 134-135 MLC 1874, 85 MLC 1880, 39 MLC 1882, 85 MLC 2190, 39-40 MLC 2609, 134

NBC 6934, 96 NBC 6971, 35-36 NBC 7017, 31-32 NBC 7250, 107-108 NBC 7800, 95 NBC 7807, 108 NBC 7912, 119-120 NBC 7967, 108 NBC 8354, 106 NBC 8410, 70 NBC 10922, 105-106 NBC 10923 (Plate 4), 66-68 NBC 11428, 39 NBC 11442, 36-37

NBC 123, 107 NBC 467, 123 NBC 1265, 132 NBC 1332, 35 NBC 1627, 34 NBC 1681, 74-75 NBC 1754, 73 NBC 2072, 34 NBC 2080, 34 NBC 2384, 107 NBC 2501, 38 NBC 2915, 34 NBC 3752, 69 NBC 3858, 73 NBC 3903, 97 NBC 5287, 94 NBC 5289, 73 NBC 6151, 131-132 NBC 6904, 97

NCBT 1859, 92-93 NCBT 1880, 92-93 YBC 2177, 95 YBC 2178 (Plate 5), 81-83 YBC 2182, 83-84 YBC 2292, 15 YBC 2364, 130-131 YBC 2394, 16, 115 YBC 3732, 70 YBC 4033, 122-123 YBC 4075, 130 YBC 4098, 91-92 YBC 4106, 72 YBC 4185, 19 YBC 4216, 14 YBC 4501, 74 YBC 4504, 85 139

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YBC 4516, 74 YBC 4596, 19 YBC 4600, 17 YBC 4603, 131 YBC 4604 (Plate 7), 103-104 YBC 4608, 32 YBC 4611 (Plate 3), 48-57 YBC 4613, 112 YBC 4620, 75 YBC 4623, 17, 107 YBC 4629, 136 YBC 4632, 136 YBC 4637, 121 YBC 4638, 136 YBC 4643, 68 YBC 4644, 123 YBC 4646, 85 YBC 4648, 123 YBC 4656 (Plate 1), 21, 76-77 YBC 4661, 57-59 YBC 4663, 30 YBC 4698, 31 YBC 4700, 32-33 YBC 4701, 32-33 YBC 5090, 134 YBC 5463, 71 YBC 5640, 104-105 YBC 5828, 71 YBC 6123, 70

YBC 6461, 133 YBC 6516 (Plate 6), 95-96 YBC 6711, 18 YBC 6932, 91 YBC 6943, 93-94 YBC 7073, 92 YBC 7148, 94 YBC 7159, 57-59 YBC 7163, 103-104 YBC 7171, 48-57 YBC 7289 (Plate 2), 29 YBC 7290, 32 YBC 7301, 103-104 YBC 7451, 105 YBC 7471, 84 YBC 8828, 122-123 YBC 8958 (Plate 8), 123, 125-126 YBC 9832 (Plate 9), 136 YBC 9841, 132-133 YBC 9842, 115-119 YBC 9863, 135 YBC 9875, 72-73 YBC 9886, 120 YBC 11127, 29 YBC 12016, 136 YBC 12130, 37-38 YBC 13249, 48-57 YBC 12637, 65 YBC 16934, 120-121

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TEXTS This bibliography gives English-language print sources for further information about the texts translated, in the order in which they occur in the book. Items with an asterisk (*) can also be found in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL). References in parentheses refer to publications intended for cuneiform specialists, or not available in English; those abbreviations conform to standard usage in the profession.

LEARNING YBC 4216 = (Å. Sjöberg, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 25 [1973], 105ff.). See Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, 14ff. YBC 2292 = B. Foster, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 274 (2003), 79ff. YBC 2394 = B. Foster and A. George, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie (in press). YBC 4600 = *Shulgi B: G. Castellino, Two Šulgi Hymns (BC). Rome: Istituto di Studi del Vicino Oriente, 1972, 9ff. YBC 4623 = *Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave: H. Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings: The Matter of Aratta. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003, 99ff. YBC 6711 = *Ur-shaga Letter: A. Kleinerman, Education in Early 2nd Millennium BC Mesopotamia. Leiden: Brill, 2011, 127ff.

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YBC 4185, YBC 4596 = *Shulgi Letters, P. Michalowski, Correspondence of the Kings of Ur: An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011, 250ff., 276ff., 295ff. YBC 4656 = *Enheduanna: B. Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, 2016, 331ff.

NUMERACY YBC 11127 = O. Neugebauer, A. Sachs, Mathematical Cuneiform Texts. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1945, 17. YBC 7289 = Neugebauer, Sachs, Mathematical Cuneiform Texts, 43. YBC 4663 = Neugebauer, Sachs, Mathematical Cuneiform Texts, 69ff. YBC 4698 = J. Friberg, Amazing Traces of a Babylonian Origin in Greek Mathematics. Singapore: World Scientific, 2007, 349f. NBC 7017 = B. Foster, Archiv Orientálni 50 (1982), 240ff. YBC 7290 = Neugebauer, Sachs, Mathematical Cuneiform Texts, 44. YBC 4608 = Neugebauer, Sachs, Mathematical Cuneiform Texts, 49ff. YBC 4700, 4701 = E. Robson, Mathematics in Ancient Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, 104. NBC 2080 = (BIN 5 225). NBC 1627 = (BIN 5 227). NBC 2072 = (BIN 5 229). NBC 2915 = (BIN 5 224). NBC 1332 = (BIN 5 272). NBC 6971 = (BIN 8 144), B. Foster, Acta Sumerologica 4 (1982), 15ff. NBC 11442 = B. Foster, Umma in the Sargonic Period. Hamden: Shoestring Press, 1982, 109ff. YBC 12130 = B. Foster, Acta Sumerologica 19 (1997), 53ff.

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NBC 2501 = J. Cooper, Sumerian and Akkadian Royal Inscriptions. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1986, 54ff. NBC 11428 = D. Frayne, Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993, 124f. MLC 1880 = O. Neugebauer, Astronomical Cuneiform Texts: Babylonian Ephemerides of the Seleucid Period for the Motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the Planets. London: Lund Humphries, 1955, No. 190. MLC 2190 = F. Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998, 65ff. MLC 1870 = Rochberg, Horoscopes, 83ff. MLC 1866 = P. Beaulieu, E. Frahm, W. Horowitz, J. Steele, Cuneiform Uranology Texts: Drawing the Constellations. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2018, 35ff.

MEMORY MLC 641 = (BRM 4 4) = J. Westenholz, Legends of the Kings of Akkade. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997, 34f . MLC 1364 = Finkelstein, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 11 (1957), 83ff. = J. Westenholz, Legends, 267ff. YBC 4611, YBC 7171, YBC 13249 = Foster, Age of Agade, 350ff. YBC 7159, YBC 4661 = *N. Samet, Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014.

LOVE YBC 12637 = B. Buchanan, Early Near Eastern Seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981, 515. MLC 1859 = (BRM 4 19). NBC 10923 = *Y. Sefati, Love Songs in Sumerian Literature. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1998, 180, 153. YBC 4643 = (YOS 11 24) = N. Wasserman, Akkadian Love Literature. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016, 169ff.

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MLC 1299 = (YOS 11 87) = Wasserman, Akkadian Love Literature, 252ff. NBC 3752 = (BIN 6 104). NBC 8410 = M. Roth, Babylonian Marriage Agreements, 7th – 3rd Centuries B. C. Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1989, 84f. YBC 3732 = Roth, Marriage Agreements, 69ff. YBC 6123 = (YOS 2 9) = M. Stol, Letters from Yale. Leiden: Brill, 1981, No. 9. YBC 5463 = (YOS 2 25) = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 25. YBC 5828 = *B. Alster, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer. Bethesda: CDL Press, 2005, 368f. YBC 4096 = (YOS 7 56). YBC 9875 = M. Cohen, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 67 (1977), 1ff. NBC 1754 = (BIN 4 75). NBC 3858 = (BIN 6 20). NBC 5289 = (BIN 7 43) = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 230. YBC 4501 = (YOS 2 61) = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 61. YBC 4516 = (YOS 2 15) = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 15. NBC 1681 = (BIN 4 22). YBC 4620 = (YOS 22 38) = W. Hallo, Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968), 71ff. YBC 4656 = *Enheduanna: Foster, Age of Agade, 331ff.

MADNESS YBC 2178 = A. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. London: Penguin, 1999, 107ff. YBC 2182 = E. Reiner, Your Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut: Poetry from Babylonia and Assyria. Ann Arbor: Arthur Rackham Graduate School, 1985, 1ff.

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YBC 7471 = (YOS 3 4) = P. Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylonia 556–539 B.C. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, 18. MLC 1874 = (BRM 4 13). YBC 4646 = (YOS 10 54). MLC 1882 = (BRM 4 23). YBC 4504 = (YOS 2 152) = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 152.

JUSTICE YBC 6932 = (M. Jursa, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 94 [2004], 126ff.). YBC 4098 = (YOS 6 134). YBC 7073 = (YOS 8 1). NCBT 1859 = S. Walters, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 23 (1970), 29ff. = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 268. NCBT 1880 = S. Walters, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 23 (1970), 31ff. = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 269. YBC 6943 = (YOS 7 97). NBC 5287 = (BIN 7 10) = Stol, Letters from Yale, No. 197. YBC 7148 = A. Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions 2. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976, 42ff. NBC 7800 = W. Bodine, How Mesopotamian Scribes Learned to Write Legal Documents: Sumerian Model Contracts in the Babylonian Collection at Yale University. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellens Press, 2014, 18ff. YBC 2177 = (YOS 1 28) = M. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1997, 42ff. YBC 6516 = (YOS 1 34) = Roth, Law Collections, 71ff. NBC 6934 = (BIN 8 164). NBC 6904 = (BIN 8 171).

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NBC 3903 = (BIN 6 222) = (von Soden, Die Welt des Orients 8 [1976–77], 211ff.).

ANIMALS YBC 7301 = *B. Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer. Bethesda: CDL Press, 1997, 330. YBC 4604 = *Alster, Proverbs, Nos. 5.56, 57, 60, 63, 66, 67, 68. YBC 7163 = *Alster, Proverbs, No. 8 B 20. YBC 5640 = (YOS 11 7) = B. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, third edition. Bethesda: CDL Press, 2003, 183. YBC 7451 = (YOS 3 7). NBC 10922 = S. Freedman, If a City is Set on a Height: The Akkadian Omen Series Šumma Alu in Mēlê Šakin 3. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2017, 43ff. NBC 8354 = (YOS 17 147). YBC 4623 = *Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave: Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings, 99ff. NBC 2384 = (BIN 3 61). NBC 123 = (Nies, UDT 123). NBC 7250 = (BIN 10 84). NBC 7807 = (YOS 22 9) = *Shulgi A: J. Klein, Three Šulgi Hymns: Sumerian Royal Hymns Glorifying King Šulgi of Ur. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1981, 182ff. NBC 7967 = (YOS 11 6) = Foster, Before the Muses, 195.

BIRDS YBC 4613 (unpublished). YBC 9842 = W. Hallo and W. Moran, Journal of Cuneiform Studies 31 (1979): 65ff., see Foster, Before the Muses, 555ff. NBC 7912 (unpublished). See *H. Vanstiphout, “The Disputation Between Bird and Fish,” in W. Hallo and L. Younger, eds., The

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TEXTS

147

Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World. Leiden: Brill, 1997, 581ff. YBC 9886 = *Alster, Proverbs, 5.1. YBC 16934 = S. Moren and B. Foster, in E. Leichty, M. Ellis, P. Gerardi, eds., A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham Sachs. Philadelphia: University Museum, 1988, 277ff. YBC 4637 = (YOS 10 52). YBC 4033 = (YOS 6 141). YBC 8828 = (YOS 17 120). MLC 1249 (unpublished). NBC 467 = (M. Sigrist and T. Gomi, BPOA 6, 1063). YBC 4644, 4648, 8958 = (YOS 11 25-27). See J. Bottéro, Textes culinaires Mésopotamiens/Mesopotamian Culinary Texts. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995.

MAGIC YBC 4075 = (YOS 7 61). YBC 2364 = E. Yamauchi, Mandaic Incantation Texts. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1967, 297. YBC 4603 = (YOS 11 86) = Foster, Before the Muses, 171f. NBC 6151 = (YOS 11 96) = Foster, Before the Muses, 1011. NBC 1265 = (BIN 2 72) = Foster, Before the Muses, 173f. YBC 9841 = (YOS 11 92). YBC 6461 = G. Beckman and B. Foster, Acta Sumerologica 18 (1996), 21. MLC 2609 = (BRM 4 18). YBC 5090 = (YOS 11 2) = Foster, Before the Muses, 196. MLC 1873 = (BRM 4 7) = A. Sachs, in J. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, 342f.

148

A MESOPOTAMIAN MISCELLANY

YBC 9863 = W. Hallo, in T. Abusch and K. van der Toorn, eds., Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretive Perspectives. Groningen: Styx Publications, 1999, 288f. YBC 4638 = (YOS 10 31). YBC 4632 = (YOS 10 56). YBC 4629 = (YOS 10 42). YBC 12016 = (YOS 10 18). YBC 9832 = (YOS 10 1).