United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
During the most recent diggings that have been carried out at Telloh a find of considerable value to the history of Sumerian art has been made. The find is also of great general interest, since it enables us to identify a portrait of Gudea, the most famous of the later Sumerian patesis.
Now the tablets from the Royal Library at Nineveh inscribed with the Gilgamesh Epic do not date from an earlier period than the seventh century B.C. But archaeological evidence has long shown that the traditions themselves were current during all periods of Babylonian history; for Gilgamesh and his half-human friend Enkidu were favourite subjects for the seal-engraver, whether he lived in Sumerian times or under the Achaemenian kings of Persia.
The fragments belong to separate copies of the Sumerian dynastic record, and it happens that the extant portions of their text in some places cover the same period and are duplicates of one another. Cf., e.g., two of the earliest kings of Kish, Galumum and Zugagib. The former is probably the Semitic-Babylonian word kalumum, "young animal, lamb," the latter zukakîbum, "scorpion"; cf. Poebel, Hist.
Professor Jastrow is right in emphasizing the complete absence of any conflict in this Sumerian myth of beginnings; but, as with the other Sumerian Versions we have examined, it seems to me there is no need to seek its origin elsewhere than in the Euphrates Valley. Cf. Jastrow, J.A.O.S., Vol. XXXVI, p. 127, and A.J.S.L., Vol. XXXIII, p. 134 f.
For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. That is as much as to say that a great deal of what we call Semitic culture is fundamentally non-Semitic.
The Semitic narrative thus does not appear, as has been suggested, to betray traces of two variant traditions which have been skilfully combined, though it may perhaps exhibit an expansion of the Sumerian story.
Texts, p. 111. The occurrence of these names points to Semitic infiltration into Northern Babylonia since the dawn of history, a state of things we should naturally expect. It is improbable that on this point Sumerian tradition should have merely reflected the conditions of a later period.
For if this too should prove to be Sumerian, it would help to fill in the gap in our Sumerian Creation myth, and might furnish us with some idea of the Sumerian view of "beginnings", which preceded the acts of creation by the great gods.
Since the excavations carried out by the British Museum at Kala Sherghat, on the western bank of the Tigris, it has been known that the mounds at that spot mark the site of the city of Ashur, the first capital of the Assyrians, and the monuments and records recovered during those excavations have hitherto formed our principal source of information for the early history of the country.* Some of the oldest records found in the course of these excavations were short votive texts inscribed by rulers who bore the title of ishshakku, corresponding to the Sumerian and early Babylonian title of patesi, and with some such meaning as "viceroy."
If we grant both assumptions, the suggested conclusion does not seem to me necessarily to follow, in view of the evidence we now possess as to the remote date of the Sumerian settlement in the Euphrates Valley.
Word Of The Day