The Sumerian King List

The Sumerian King List
includes the names of kings
for various Sumerian city-states
and the dates of these kings' reigns.
(Image from the Sumerian King List Wikipedia page.

The Sumerian King List (composed around 2000 BCE) is a great way to introduce people to concepts involved in History and Memory. Basically speaking, History and Memory is a phrase meant to embody the various ways in which peoples' memory of events—including the ways in which people remember or don't remember things—shapes how we understand history. In simple terms, the Sumerian King List is a record of the names of the kings of the various Sumerian city states and includes the dates of their reigns. These simple terms, though, obscure a lot of information that the list tells us about the authors.

To put the king list into greater perspective, we must consider that the Sumerians had been developing different forms of record keeping for their business transactions for centuries before they used writing for anything other than trade. As the list of cuneiform words evolved, people realized that they could use this system of writing for recording events. The king list was one of the first records that focused more on political record keeping than on business. In this way, we learn that the Sumerians needed a writing system to record their trade, but eventually also placed importance on using it for politics. Not long afterward, the Sumerians showed that they greatly valued poetry, as they wrote down many poems.

With the king list, we also see a value placed on memory, in this case on remembering the many men and one woman who had ruled each city. Although the list records a few of the king's deeds, occupations, or relationships, much of the list merely records the name of the ruler and the number of years they ruled. For this reason, we can assume that the list is meant to help the living remember when things happened as they shared stories about events within each reign. In this way, the list serves as a time keeping device much like our modern calendar. Instead of recording things within a year after a certain event, they kept track of events according to the reigns of their rulers.

The list also tells us something about how memory is only valid as long as someone can remember these things happened. For example, the kings who had reigned most recently are recorded with reign dates that we consider reasonable, whether one or two years for someone either unable to secure their leadership or succumbing to death or disease or else with reigns lasting several decades for an accomplished ruler. These are kings of recent memory, meaning that the oldest person living could remember each of their reigns. We can be sure that these individuals actually lived, as they are verified by memory, and that their reign dates are more or less correct.

After a certain point, the reign dates become Methuselahan, and these exaggerations emphasize that anything that happened before the oldest living person was born are events that exist in the time of myth. While Gilgamesh, who has his own epic, is reported to have reigned 126 years, Enkmerkar ruled for 420 years, and Lugalbanda for 1,200 years. The kings who lived before a great flood had even longer reigns lasting anywhere from 18,600 years to 43,200 years. These are kings who died before the oldest living person could remember. Their reign dates are not meant to be taken literally but instead as indicators that the king ruled for a long time or for a really long time. The dates of the antediluvian kings are meant to suggest both long ago in the distant past as well as the success of the king.

Also important to think about is what the authors of the list decided not to record on the king list. Each king's deeds and accomplishments, their faults and scandals, their families, and so on. All of this other information was retained within the realm of oral history, or that which people shared through stories that they told here and their around the city-states. In other words, the author(s) wasn't thinking in terms of recording this information for posterity. Instead, the king list was meant to help people in the there and then to keep track of when each king reigned, with the gaps to be filled in by those who remembered the stories.

As we can see, we can learn a lot about a people from even a "simple" list. We can see what importance they put on what should be written down—as well as what shouldn't be recorded—how this information would be meaningful, and what is too old to be remembered properly. And, yet, we can still see values placed on each piece of information, regardless of the data's "correctness." There's a story in this list, and it's up to us to see what it is.

 

The Legend of Sargon of Akkad

A bust of an unknown king,
though often believed to be of
Sargon the Great of the Akkadian Empire.
(Image from Sargon of Akkad on Wikipedia).

Another text that I would share with students in Ancient or Western Civilizations is the Legend of Sargon of Akkad, and I’d have them do a compare and contrast with the Birth of Moses in Genesis. 

Sargon reigned from 2334 to 2284 BCE, and was called Sargon the Great in large part because he created the first empire. It’s believed that Sargon was a commoner who rose through the ranks to become the Cupbearer of Lugalzagesi, the ruler of the Sumerian city state Umma. Even though Lugalzagesi had conquered other city states, he failed to create a cohesive union. Indeed, for centuries, the Sumerian city states had a tradition of defeating one another in battle, receiving concessions from the loser, and then releasing control of the defeated. Each of the city states prized its own independence and lacked the ability to retain control of other city states, largely because each city state was largely devoted to agrarian production and religious devotion of the local deity.

As Cupbearer, Sargon was Lugalzagesi’s best military lieutenant and most trusted advisor. However, Sargon overthrew Lugalzagesi and used Umma’s resources to conquer the other Sumerian states. In order to retain a large cohesive state, Sargon made several innovations that became the hallmark of latter Mesopotamian empires, including:

• establish a standing army,
• place garrisons near trouble points for quick reaction,
• have messengers carry information between him and his garrisons so that he knew what was happening in distant places,
• rotate governors and generals so that nobody could build a following to contest his authority.

The success of his empire lies not just in the fact that he reigned for 55 years but also in that his son and grandson were able to succeed him.

Despite his ability to conquer and retain control of the region, Sargon’s authority was contested by critics, and some of his responses to these criticisms can be found in “The Legend of Sargon of Akkad.” The text addresses how his parents were commoners (most translations say that Sargon’s mother was a priestess, while this one uses the term “changeling”), not members of the elite. In fact, he emphasizes that he was raised by a man who took care of the canals and not by his own parents. The association with religious deities is also important in these texts.

While I spent a lot of time helping my students understand the necessary infrastructure needed to organize people at different sizes of scale (city state versus kingdom/empire), I also wanted them to see how many stories used to shore up criticisms of legitimacy were reused by other peoples largely because those stories are effective. If a narrative works, it will be someone else will rewrite it with a different protagonist simply because the narrative is effective. It also means that we can’t trust many of these origin stories, because they are political stories meant to shape popular opinion and not to state facts about a person’s life. 

Amazingly, the students always seemed to take the similarities between the story of Sargon’s and Moses’ birth in stride. What they always—and I mean always—asked about was the phrase “black-headed peoples.” I have to admit that I still don’t know enough to say anything other than this was a term that the Sumerians used for themselves. Offhand, I’d argue that the Sumerians had at some point been in proximity with a group of peoples with brown or blond hair, and their hair color was the most striking differentiation. 

To a person, the students wondered if this was an expression of racial difference, but I did my best to explain that racial terms weren’t used until the late 1400s/early 1500s. Although people tried to differentiate themselves from other groups in Antiquity, it was never along what we call “race.” Even though people in Antiquity noted differences in skin tone or color between peoples, this factor was never used to separate groups. Other matters, such as language spoken or kingdom of origin were much more important as dividing lines in Antiquity. Even in Ancient Egypt, the peoples of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms were represented with varying skin colors depending upon where they lived along the Nile. Despite that representation in tombs, the peoples of Egypt were considered one people for the very reason that they were all Egyptians. Within the kingdom, people were divided by status and roles.

Within Sumerian and Akkadian culture, the primary division was between the Sumerians and a Semitic people that immigrated to the city states and integrated into the Sumerian culture. In many cases, the integration of these peoples in the ancient texts is marked not by either peoples’ appearances but by the introduction of Semitic words into Sumerian texts and the eventual rise of people with Semitic names within Sumerian politics, society, religion, and culture. While there might have been some conflict between the Sumerians and the Semitic peoples, I have yet to see any indications of it in primary or secondary sources.

https://www.ancient.eu/article/746/the-legend-of-sargon-of-akkad/

Enûma Eliš, "When on high"

One of the tablets containing
the creation poem Enûma Eliš,
"When on high."
(Image from Wikicommons).

Whenever I taught “Ancient Civilizations” or the awfully named “Western Civilizations,” I always started the course with Sumer and the Babylonian Empires. I did this partly to emphasize that what we call “Western Civilization” began in what we now consider to be the East, whether Middle East or Ancient Far East. Indeed, we inherited from Sumer our method of telling time (using a double twelve-hour system and with the hours and minutes broken into 60 units each), basic concepts of geometry, and such easily recognizable expressions such as “the four corners of the earth” and “the seven seas.” In many ways, we owe great debts to Sumer, and we short change ourselves by believing that we derived nothing from lands outside “the West.”

One of the things that I hope surprised my students is how much Sumerian beliefs influenced a certain religion known as Judaism that came along much later. One of my projects was to have the students compare and contrast Tablets IV and V of the Enûma Eliš (composed c. 1750 BCE) with the stores of creation in the biblical Genesis. My intent was never to diminish the Genesis stories, particularly since the author of the creation of the universe and earth did a beautiful job of retelling the Enûma Eliš in a new way that builds on the poetic aspects of the original. And that’s the key, the later retelling builds on and expands the original so as to inspire people in the process of creating a unique identity.

To be fair, the Hebrews were not the first to expand on the Enûma Eliš. The Akkadians (who created the first empire by conquering the Sumerian city states) rewrote the tale around 1200 BCE so that Marduk, the Akkadian sky god, took center stage and surplanted the Sumerian Anu. While I’m sure that they made some other changes or additions, placing Marduk in the role of the protagonist was pivotal to their use of the story to show Akkadian dominion over the city states.

This webpage at the Ancient History Encyclopedia provides more contextualization for the story as well as presents the Akkadian text itself.

https://www.ancient.eu/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/