CONTENTS Articles K. Lawson Younger, Jr. – The Deity Kur(r)a in the First Millennium Sources ........................................................... Keith Dickson – The Wall of Uruk: Iconicities in Gilgamesh ... Philip C. Schmitz – The Owl in Phoenician Mortuary Practice ...............................................................................
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Book Review Amar Annus – Review Article. The Folk-Tales of Iraq and the Literary Traditions of Ancient Mesopotamia ...................
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THE DEITY KUR(R)A IN THE FIRST MILLENNIUM SOURCES K. LAWSON YOUNGER, JR. Trinity International University—Divinity School Abstract Recent epigraphic evidence from Cebel İres Dağı, Çineköy and Tell Šē amad have provided further important additional documentation in Phoenician for a deity Kur(r)a. This article investigates the growing attestations for this deity in the first millennium sources, both cuneiform and alphabetic. In light of the growing occurrences of b l kr, it proposes a reassessment of the enigmatic phrase b l krntryš in the Phoenician text from Karatepe. The article also presents the limited second millennium data and evaluates the possible connections with the third millennium Eblaite deity Kura. L’évidence épigraphique récente de Cebel İres Dağı, Çineköy et Tell Šē amad a fourni encore plus de documentation importante en phénicien pour une divinité nommée Kur(r)a. Cet article étudie les attestations croissantes pour cette divinité dans les sources cunéiformes et alphabétiques du premier millénaire av. J.-C. À la lumière des occurrences croissantes de b l kr, cette étude propose une réévaluation de l’expression énigmatique b l krntryš dans le texte phénicienne de Karatepe. L’article présente également les données limitées du deuxième millénaire et évalue les liens possibles avec la divinité éblaïte du troisième millénaire Kura. Keywords: Kur(r)a, Ba al, Karatepe, Ebla, Çineköy, Cebel İres Dağı, Tell Šē amad
1. Introduction The discoveries and publications of the Phoenician inscription from Cebel İres Dağı and the Phoenician—Hieroglyphic Luwian bilingual inscription from Çineköy have raised again the question of the identity of a deity b l kr.1 The name of such a deity was previously known in Phoenician only from a small four-sided gray 1 I am very grateful to Gary Beckman, JoAnn Scurlock, Richard Beal and Philip Schmitz for their kindness in reading an earlier draft of this article and for their criticisms and suggestions. An earlier version was read at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society, March, 2008. All errors are my responsibility.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 Also available online – brill.nl/jane
JANER 9.1 DOI: 10.1163/156921209X449134
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marble bowl or mortar from Sidon (formerly in Berlin, VA 569, unfortunately now lost). It measured 15 cm high, carved with bullhead handles, from whose mouths rings hang. The depression in the center of the top is encircled by a snake in relief. On the sides (their starting point is uncertain) are incised ritual scenes each in a rectangular panel (Drawing 1 below).2 On the basis of the form of the letters, a date in the 4th century BCE would seem likely for this object. In 1969, R. D. Barnett offered the first detailed study of this bowl and proposed that the term kr was derived from a geminate root krr “to enclose,”3 thus “b l kr, Ba al of the pasturage/the encloser.” Barnett argued that the four scenes on the bowl form “a coherent whole” and “may be identified with the rituals of burning a god on a pyre, recorded at Tyre in the cult of Melkart.” He also noted that “a similar ritual is reported from Tarsus in the half-Asianic cult of Sandon.”4 In 1970, E. Lipiński proposed to connect kr to a hollow root kwr, a lexeme attested in Hebrew kûr “furnace,” hence “Ba al of the furnace.”5 This appeared to be a better proposal since one scene on the bowl appears to depict a large seething cauldron, and another seems to show a figure (possibly representing Melqart?) bathed in flames. Other scholars have followed this understanding of kr (see Panel A in Drawing 1).6 In 1988, J. Elayi published another marble stemmed bowl that seemed to be a parallel to the Sidon bowl. She argued that both bowls were pieces of popular art due to their irregular carvings. She also noted the form of the bowls and their apparent intent for use in an oven or furnace.7 She concluded that “the four scenes represented on the vase [i.e. the Sidon bowl] have likely a link with the myth of Milqart’s inhumation and resurrection.”8 T. Mettinger has recently used the Sidon Bowl as evidence in an argument for “a dying and rising deity.”9 See Barnett 1969; Elayi 1990: 63-64 and drawing p. 298; Gressmann 1927; Pietschmann 1889: 24. 3 Barnett 1969: 11. He was followed in this interpretation by Tomback 1978: 149, s.v. kr2. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Lipiński 1970: 43. 6 Delcor 1974: 68-74; Bonnet-Tzavellas 1983; Bonnet 1988; 1992. 7 Elayi 1988: 547; 1990: 64. See also Bonnet 1988: 78-80; 1992. 8 Elayi 1988: 547. 9 Mettinger 2005. However, since the iconography of this bowl is still not fully understood, caution is perhaps required. 2
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With the publication of the Cebel İres Dağı inscription by Mosca and Russell in 1987, a second attestation of the phrase b l kr appeared. They opted to understand this as “Lord of the furnace,” stating: “In support of this interpretation, we may recall that Cilicia had been for centuries an important source of iron for Mesopotamia, and presumably also for Phoenicia. It would thus not be surprising to find b l kr in both Rough Cilicia and Sidon.”10 However, the interpretation of b l kr as “Ba al of the furnace” is not problem free. First, the drawings incised on the second bowl published by Elayi do not really match those of the Sidon bowl. There is no figure in the flames as on the Sidon bowl and the connections are rather loose. Second, it is not certain that the figure in the flames depicted on the Sidon bowl (see Panel A of Drawing 1) is supposed to represent b l kr, since the inscription is n another side panel where the figure is holding a bird in each hand between four palm branches—hardly a furnace! Third, in the context of the Cebel İres Dağı inscription, understanding b l kr as “Ba al or Lord of the furnace” really does not make good sense. The inscription11 (lines 4a-7a) states: w p . (4a)mtš . ytn . lklš . šd . z(4b)bl . wkrmm . bšd . zbl . t t . qrt . wkr(5a)mm . š . t t . ml . w p . (5b)b l . kr . yšb . bn . wqb . mtš . qbt . drt (6a). lbl . gzly . dm . šd . (6b) m . krm . bd . šp . klš . bkl . š . ytn (7a). l . mtš . And furthermore, Mutas gave to Kulas the field of the Prince and the vineyards within the field of the Prince below the town as well as the vineyards below ML. And furthermore, he (Mutas) settled b l kr in it, and Mutas pronounced a mighty curse so that no one should illegitimately seize it—field or vineyard—from the possession of the family of Kulas among everything which Mutas had given to him.12
Why settle in a field a deity connected to the furnace or to smelting? Why pronounce a mighty curse in the name of a deity of the 10 Mosca and Russell 1987: 14. They also noted the possibility that b l kr could refer to human beings rather than a deity. Thus just as Hebrew ba alê i îm, lit. “lords of arrows” (Gen 49:23; cf. the similar expression in Ugaritic b l ) designates archers, so here *ba lê kûr, “lords of the crucible,” might designate metal workers or smelters. But as they rightly observed this understanding of the phrase does not fit the context of the “awesome curse” which follows. Thus their preferred understanding of b l kr is as a reference to the deity “Lord of the furnace.” See also Elayi 1990: 64 and DNWSI 534 s.v. kr4. 11 KAI 5 no. 287; Mosca and Russell 1987. 12 See Younger 2002 with references.
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furnace or smelting on anyone who might illegitimately seize the field or the vineyard? In 1995, Lipiński suggested another possible understanding of the term kr, connecting the term with a north Syrian deity named Kura.13 This deity is well-attested as early as the late third millennium at Ebla. In fact, Kura (written dKu-ra) was the most important deity at Ebla, receiving the major number of offerings. In order to assess these different proposals, the following sections will briefly investigate the evidence for a deity Kura from the third, second and first millennia (with particular focus on the first millennium). 2. Possible Third Millennium Attestations Archi argues that the Eblaite pantheon is the expression of an urban society in which two linguistic and cultural elements have come together, the substrate and the Semitic.14 At the head of this pantheon was a triad of deities composed of Kura (dKu-ra), the city’s major god,15 who belongs to the substrate, and two Semitic deities: the Storm-god, Adda (dÀ-da), and the sun-goddess, dUtu (logogram to be read Šamaš).16 Thus, of the little over forty deities17 that comprised the Eblaite pantheon, some were Semitic and others were from an earlier non-Semitic context. But one must be somewhat cautious here since, as Pomponio and Xella point out,18 the hypothesis of Archi is based on the connection of Kura to the dynasty and city; it is not explicitly documented. Archi also notes that Kura seems to manifest some of the same functions as the storm-god, probably because in the rainfall zone of the ancient 13 Lipiński 1995: 239-240. He argues that Kura was a god of the harvest and agriculture because the deity’s name is non-Semitic, standing for the deified “grinding stone” (derived from Old Sumerian kurax). Thus the god’s cult was a fertility cult, linked to the myth of the dying and rising deity, resulting in the association with Melqart (p. 240). It seems rather odd, however, that the name of the major deity at Ebla would be derived from a Sumerian term. 14 Archi 1992: 7; 1993: 12. 15 It is clear that Kura was the city’s major god from the close to 300 attestations of the deity’s name. See Pomponio and Xella 1997:223-245; Waetzoldt 2001: 593-594. 16 Archi 1992: 7; 1993b: 470. 17 In the offering lists, the number of deities listed slightly exceeds forty. See Archi 1993a: 9. 18 Pomponio and Xella 1997: 246; Wilhelm 1992: 24.
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Near East (i.e. Anatolia, Syria, and Northern Mesopotamia), the main male god usually has the feature of being in control of meteorological phenomena.19 Kura’s feminine counterpart is Barama (written: dBa-ra-ma). The evidence indicates that “the deity Kura and his consort Barama are considered as the divine projection of the Eblaite sovereign couple who, after the marriage, are identified by their superhuman archetypes” (i.e. Kura and Barama).20 Hence, while the mortal royal pair serve as projections for the divine pair, through the codification of the projection, the divine pair serve as the archetype for the mortal pair and the basis for their connection to the divine pair. Thus, Kura serves as the “dynastic deity” par excellence.21 This divine pair is intimately connected with the cult of the dead kings (ARET 3 178; note also dKu-ra wa dBa-ra-ma in ARET 3 419).22 From ARET 3 178, as Stieglitz notes,23 it seems clear that the deities Kura and Barama were the principal deities in a seven-day ritual termed the ša-ba-tum ma “Greater Šaba tum.” These liturgies were performed in the temple of Kura at Ebla and its adjoining mausoleum called “The House of the Dead” (É ma-dím/tim).24 Stieglitz comments: The Eblaite term šaba tum is to be derived from the root ŠB “seven,” and as such is no doubt related to the Akkadian sebûtu “7th day (of the month)” and of course to Biblical Hebrew šābûa “week.” A connection between the Eblaite word and Akkadian šapattu “15th day (of the month)” seems less likely to me.25
In the legal texts, Archi notes that Kura forms a triad with dUtu and Adda, and seems in some texts to represent directly all the gods.26 Thus Kura is invoked with dUtu, Adda, and the gods, in TM.75.G.1444 (SEb 4 [1984] 35-39) to serve as witness to a royal decree. Archi 1993a: 11. Pomponio and Xella 1997: 245. “. . . le dieu Kura et sa parèdre Barama étaient considérés comme la projection divine du couple des souverains éblaïtes qui, après le mariage, s’identifiaient à leurs archétypes surhumains.” 21 Often occurring in personal names at Ebla. E.g., A-bù-dKu-ra; En-nu-dKu-ra; Mi-kum-dKu-ra; Mi-nu-dKu-ra; Puzur4-ra-dKu-ra; Si-ma-dKu-ra; Šè-ma-dKu-ra; Šu-ma-dKu-ra; dKu-ra-i-da-ma; cf. the Indexes of ARET I-VIII. 22 Stieglitz 2002: 212. 23 Ibid. 24 Fronzaroli 1988: 26. 25 Stieglitz 2002: 212. 26 Archi 1982: 210. 19
20
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In the administrative texts, the gods NIdaBAL (Itab/pal) and Kura have more than twice as many attestations than any other deity. That NIdaBAL preceeds Kura is explained by the fact that he is represented by several hypostases. But Kura’s pre-eminence over the other deities is confirmed by the annual accounts (about twenty in number) of silver and gold expended by the Palace. They invariably begin with the recording of “one mina silver for the head (of the statue) of Kura.” This donation likely refers to a yearly renewal rite of the main god’s statue in the city (well known in many cultures).27 The temple of the Kura was situated at Saza. This was a complex of buildings at Ebla which served as not only the most sacred religious place of the city (where marriage rites, oaths, verdicts, etc. took place), but whose single grand sanctuary was the political and administrative hub of the city.28 The fact that Kura had a preeminent place in the devotion of the king is attested by a number of documented events: first, the king pronounced a solemn verdict concerning an inheritance in favor of the minister Ibrium (SEb 1 1981: 38, 44); second, he swore (an oath) by invoking in order the deities Kura, dUtu and Adda. While the invocation of the solar deity is perfectly explained by that deity’s traditional function as the guarantor of oaths, treaties, and contracts, the invocations of Kura and Adda were invoked precisely because they were the two major divinities of the national pantheon and of the king, not only in his devotional preferences, but also in the official and public aspects of the cult.29 While Kura was unquestionably the most important deity at Ebla, he was not venerated exclusively there. There is evidence that he was venerated at Munutium, a kingdom of north-west Syria,30 at Šila a (perhaps in the region of Ebla?),31 and at Armi (TM.75. G.10201 r, I 10).32 Of course, one of the difficulties of identifying Phoenician kr with Eblaite Kura is the “apparent” absence of any second millennium attestations of the deity. Stieglitz professes: “we know little Archi 1993a: 11. Cf. Milano 1989-90: 155-173. 29 For Kura’s absence in the treaty between Ebla and Abarsal, see Pomponio and Xella 1997: 246. 30 Bonechi 1990: 162. 31 Bonechi 1993: 296. 32 Archi, Piacentini and Pomponio 1993: 162. 27 28
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about this deity (i.e. Kura), especially since the name is unattested elsewhere in Bronze Age or Iron Age sources.”33 3. Possible Second Millennium Attestations There may be a few occurrences of this divine name in the second millennium, though none can be considered certain.34 3.1. First, a possible attestation is found in the God-list An: Anu ša amēli, where dKur-ra is given as a name of Anu and explained as “of the land” (ša māti).35 3.2. Second, G. Wilhelm has explicated the possible connection of a deity dku-ur-ri with Eblaite Kura found in a tablet from attuša.36 The name appears in the fifth tablet associated with the Hurrian feast of išuwa.37 An offering of 1 silver cup of wine is given to Kurri in the same context as the same offering given to other Hurrian deities of destiny (Zimazzalli, Ešui, and utena and utellurra); and the underworld goddess Allani receives two silver cups of wine. Wilhelm’s proposal has been taken up by Haas38 and accepted by Archi.39 3.3. Third, Dalley and Postgate suggest that Kur(r)a may possibly be attested at Mari in the personal name mabī-Kur-i.40 3.4. Fourth, two attestations may be found in texts from Nuzi, d ku-ur-we-e (AASOR 16, 47:1) and Kùr-we-e (AASOR 16, 48:1).41 Whether any of these attestations are to be connected with the
33 Stieglitz 2002: 212. About a decade earlier, Sollberger stated: “The existence of this deity [Kura] outside of Ebla is unknown to me” (ARET 8:10). 34 Pomponio and Xella mention the possibility of recognizing the name of Kura in the Ugaritic personal name ilmkr (as cited in Gröndahl 1967:151), though they wisely express uncertainty about this (Pomponio and Xella 1997: 247). Gröndahl (1967: 369) cited UM 321 I.9 (’ CAT 4.63) and he analyzed the name (1967: 151) stating: “ilmkr, unsicher, vielleicht il + -m (emphat. Partikel) + kr “El/mein Gott ist wahrlich ein Widder.” However, CAT 4.63 reads the name as ilmhr (“El is a warrior”). For this name, see del Olmo Lete and Sanmartín 2004: 57-58. 35 See Litke 1998: 229, A.6 and plate XLIII. 36 Wilhelm 1992. 37 Wilhelm 1992: 26 (line 41); KBo XV 60 Vs. I; KBo VII 45 + XX 114 (+) 118 Vs I; KBo XV 50. 38 Haas 1994: 545-547. 39 Archi 1992: 11. 40 Dalley and Postgate 1984: 100. See footnote 21 above, first name in the list: A-bù-dKu-ra. 41 Ibid.
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Eblaite deity and the later first millennium citations is difficult to assess. But it must remain possible.42 4. Possible First Millennium Attestations For the first millennium, there is a growing number of attestations of a deity Kur(r)a.43 These are found in cuneiform sources from the Neo-Assyrian empire and in West Semitic alphabetic, almost exclusively Phoenician, sources. 4.1. Cuneiform Sources 4.1.1. First of all, according to ADD 1252, there was a temple of the god Kur(r)a in the Neo-Assyrian period in Nineveh (É dkur.a).44 In this text describing the division of an inheritance, A u-iddina, son of [. . .]numi buys from his brother Zeru-ukin the share that he inherited of their father’s house in Nineveh. The text is from the reign of Assurbanipal, dated by eponym to 636 BCE, and the temple of Kur(r)a is listed here as one of the adjoining properties to the inherited estate. 4.1.2. Furthermore, a deity Kur(r)a is also attested in personal names from the Neo-Assyrian period. In two of these, the theophoric element serves as the second component in the name: Abdi-Kur(r)a and Amat-Kur(r)a. There are two individuals who bear the name Abdi-Kur(r)a.45 First, a cook from Nineveh during the reign of Assurbanipal (634 BC) is named Abdi-Kurra (spelled mab-di-kurra).46 Second, a man from Nineveh whose son owed six shekels of silver is named Abdi-Kura (spelled mab-di-dkur-a).47 In the case of 42 Pomponio and Xella note that it is possible to see in Kura a dynastic deity, a paternal and royal figure, and to envision in the divine pair Kura-Barama a formal analogy with the Ugaritic divine pair El-Athirat. They speculate that there may be some analogy also between Kura and Adda on the one hand, and El and Baal on the other hand (Pomponio and Xella 1997: 248). 43 Lipiński 1995: 239-240; Dalley and Postgate 1984: 100. 44 Postgate 1976: 117, no. 19:13; Mattila 2002: 96, no. 111:13. 45 Fales and Radner 1998: 6. 46 Postgate and Ismail 1979: 30, no. 15.1 and 14. 47 Postgate and Ismail 1979: 17, no. 6.2
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Amat-Kur(r)a,48 only one individual bears this name. A woman from Nineveh named Amat-Kura (spelled fgemÉ-dkur-a) is pledged by her husband, along with her daughter, two sons and another person (ADD 78.5).49 4.1.3. The theophoric component is found fronted in the personal name Kur-ilāya. M. Stolper suggested reading the name, previously taken as Mat-ilāya, as Kur-ilāya.50 There is now a consensus that this is the correct understanding of the name. There are thirty-nine occurrences of this name, and twenty-six individuals bore it in texts from the reign of Sargon II to the end of the Assyrian empire.51 The very meaning of this personal name (“Kur(a) is my god”)52 argues strongly for the existence of a deity Kur(r)a.53 4.1.4. Thus, in the cuneiform texts from the first millennium, there are forty-one occurrences in personal names with the deity Kur(r)a as the theophoric component. That a temple to this deity existed in Nineveh at the height of the Assyrian empire is further evidence to the deity’s importance.
Fales 1998. Mattila 2002: 152, no. 181.5; Fales 1998. 50 Stolper 1980: 85. 51 Thirty times the name is written: mkur-dingir-a-a. See Baker 2000: 641-642, although her last two entries, mku-ri-il-la-a-a (Af O 27 85:7 r. 5) and mkur-il-la-a-a (2 R 64 r. iii 24), may be a different name. I am adding mku-ur-la-a-a (Wunsch 1993: 99, 21) to the count, even though it is in a Babylonian text. Lipiński (1997: 90-91) suggested that the name is based on kurillu “pile of sheaves,” i.e. “Born at the end of harvest.” This might explain the last two entries in Baker’s article, but it is not an adequate explanation of the other spellings. 52 Zadok 1998: 59. He states: “Ku-ur-la-A+A . . . is the same name as NA Kurla-A+A, Kur-ri-la-A+A, Kur-ìl-A+A (SAA 6, 344, 10´, 26 r. 2 and 170, 2 resp.) ‘Kur(a) is my god’ with dropping of a short unstressed -i-.” 53 One should compare the name Bēl-ilāya (“Bel [Ba al] is my God”) written m en-dingir-a-a, not once mden-dingir-a-a. See Kessler 1999. Compare also the name Adad-ilāya (“Adad is my god”) which is often written m10-dingir-a-a. See Radner 1998. 48 49
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4.2. West Semitic Sources 4.2.1. In Personal Names 4.2.1.1. The first possible attestation is found in a legal text dating to 686 BCE.54 In it, an unnamed governor of Arzuhina, and two other men (Rēmanni-ilu55 and Ahu-ilu) were obligated to pay back a loan for three minas of silver to Mamu-iqbi56 in Nineveh (BT 124).57 A cylinder seal inscription on this tablet reads [ ]bdkr. It is likely that this is the name of the governor of Arzuhina, whose name is not mentioned in the document.58 Amadasi Guzzo,59 following Watanabe,60 has suggested that since the first letter of this name is not preserved, it is possible that the name should be read with an aleph, not an ayin,61 hence: [ ]b-dkr (Abî-dekîr), an Aramaic name attested a few times in cuneiform sources. However, this name is not attested in alphabetic script,62 and the persons bearing this name do not match the period of this tablet. Thus it is more likely that the name should be read with an ayin, hence [ ]bd-kr (Abd-Kur), a name attested in cuneiform (see 4.1.2. above), as well as alphabetic sources (see next paragraph). 4.2.1.2. A second possible attestation is found in a Punic text (CIS 2630.3) where the personal name bdkrr occurs.63 This is the same name as found in the cuneiform examples discussed in 4.1.2 above. Clearly, Watanabe 1993: 114, Taf. 5.6; Fales and Radner 1998. Baker 2002. 56 Van Buylaere 2001: 676. This individual is attested in a number of texts from the latter part of the reign of Sennacherib. 57 Parker 1963: 97; BT 124 ’ FNALD 20 (Postgate 1976: 119-122). 58 Radner in Fales and Radner 1998: 6. 59 Amadasi Guzzo 2002: 318. 60 Watanabe 1993: 114. 61 This is Maraqten’s restoration [ ]bdkr (1988: 65). Vattioni (1968: nr. 160) apparently read brhd? 62 Maraqten 1988: 113; Breckwoldt 1998: 9. The name is always written with the logogram ad: mad-de-kír or mad-de-ki-ri. See Breckwoldt 1998: 9. 63 Benz 1972: 154. He states: “Unknown deity or epithet (with sense of ‘to leap, dance?’ if not a misspelling of KŠR (‘Inventor-craftsman divinity and patron of arts’). Perhaps related to non-Sem. krr found as name in Ug. (Hurrian?, PTU 237)” (Ibid., 335). The possibility of misspelling is lessened by the growing number of attestations of kr(r) as a theophoric element in personal names. 54 55
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the second element of the name is a theophoric.64 There may be other examples of this theophoric element in other personal names as yet unidentified.65 4.2.1.3. A recently published sherd from Tell Šē amad (SH 95 / 6543 I 142) contains a clear five-letter inscription of ownership: l zkr “Belonging to Oz(i)kur(r)a.”66 Röllig notes that while the name zkr is not attested until now, the formation of Phoenician personal names with the element z “strength, might” is common in the onomasticon: see e.g. zb l, zyb l, zmlk, zmlqrt, ztnt. Since the second component in these names is a theophoric, it is natural to assume that kr is also a theophoric element.67 4.2.1.4. Finally, the deity appears to be attested in an Old Aramaic text from the Gozan-Harran area written as krly, which is the alphabetic writing of the cuneiform name Kur-ilāya.68 4.2.2. In Combination With B l 4.2.2.1 Çineköy. Besides the Sidon Bowl and the Cebel İres Dağı Inscription (discussed above), the term kr is found in combination with the word 64 See Delcor 1974: 73. He states: “De fait, il existe dans l’onomastique punique un nom théophore bd krr, ‘le serviteur du brûlé,’ où le second terme paraît désigner un attribut de Melqart.” Cf. Halff 1965: 129. Krahmalkov (2000: 243, 356) analyzes the name as Abd-Kirūr “servant of Kirūr,” where Kirūr is the god of the seventh month. 65 The personal names of two rulers in the region of Que merit mention. After marching to the city of Tarsus (uru.tar-zi), Shalmaneser III appointed a man named Kirrî (mki-ir-ri-i) as king in the place of his brother Katî, the Quean. See Verardi 2000. In 696, during the reign of Sennacherib, an Assyrian army invaded Cilicia because a former loyal supporter of Assyria named Kirua (mki-ru-a) a city lord of Illubru (lú.en-uru ša uru.il-lu-ub-ri) had incited revolt, supported by the inhabitants of Ingira (Anchiale) and Tarzu (Tarsus). He was captured and flayed in Nineveh. See Frahm 2000. 66 Röllig 2001: 46-52, photo p. 47. 67 Ibid., 48. 68 Obviously, this requires the syncope of the aleph. See Lipiński (1997: 90-91), although he derives the name from Akkadian kurillu, which does not seem to match the majority of spellings as well as Zadok’s analysis (see note 52 above). Postgate (Dalley and Postgate 1984: 100) suggests emending the deity kd in the Sefire treaty to kr . This, however, has not been accepted by most scholars.
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b l in the Phoenician version of the recently published hieroglyphic Luwian and Phoenician bilingual inscription from Çineköy that dates to the last quarter of the 8th century.69 The Phoenician text is inscribed in an area on the statue base between the hind legs of two bulls who are pulling a chariot in which the statue of a storm-god stands. The inscription belongs to Awariku/Urikki,70 king of Adana, of the lineage of Mopsos,71 and mentions an alliance between the Danunians and the Assyrians. The passage concerning the deity reads as follows (restorations mine): [yt]n b l
(17)
kr štq yš šb w[kl] n m
[May] b l kr [give ] and [every(?)] good. (17)
72
(18)
to this king
(18)
l mlk h tranquility(?), deliverance, abundance,
(17)
It is possible that this deity was the dynastic deity for the house of Mopsos.73 Unfortunately, the preserved portion of the hieroglyphic Luwian inscription does not contain the passage which may have given the precise equivalent to kr in that language. However, it is apparent that b l kr corresponds to Tarhunza, the storm-god in the Luwian version. 4.2.2.2 Karatepe. Azatiwada, a powerful subordinate of Awariku, built a town that he named after himself, Azatiwadaya (modern Karatepe),74 erecting gates and a monumental statue of the storm-god standing on a bull base upon which he incised a hieroglyphic Luwian-Phoenician bilingual text that related his accomplishments and invoked blessings 69 Tekoğlu and Lemaire. 2000; for the discovery with photos, see İpek, Tosun, and Tekoğlu 1999. 70 The name written in Phoenician wryk (Awariku in the Luwian source; Urikki in the Assyrian sources) is attested at Karatepe and Hassan-Beyli where the references are to a king of the Danunians (Que). For Karatepe, see Röllig 1999 and Younger 1998. For Hassan-Beyli, see Lemaire 1983. While this is the same name in the Cebel İres Dağı inscription, it is not the same person (based on the dates of the inscriptions). See Lipiński 2004:116-130. 71 Lemaire 2006; Hawkins 1995; Vanschoonwinkel 1990. Interestingly, the Phoenician and Luwian versions of the Çineköy Inscription preserve the Greek name spelled variously μόψος and μόξος, mpš and muksas (alternation -ps- / -ks-). See Vanschoonwinkel 1990: 197; Forlanini 2005; Lebrun and Vos 2006. 72 The letter before b l kr is either k or n. Thus possible restorations would include: brk “bless,” nsk “pour,” ytn “give.” In Biblical Hebrew, neither brk or nsk occur with the preposition l; ntn is used with l. Thus it is likely that the verb ytn should be restored here: “may Baal Kura give . . . to this king.” 73 Lemaire 2006:106. 74 Çambel and Özyar 2003; Hawkins 2000.
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on himself, his city and its citizens. In the Phoenician version75 (found on the North Gate [A], the South Gate [B] and the Statue [C]), a deity called b l krntryš is mentioned nine times: North Gate [A] II.19 – b l krntryš III.2-3 – b l kr[n]tryš III.4 – b l/krntryš (entire word is written alone on the next orthostat)76 South Gate [B] II.6 – [b l] krntryš II.8 – [b l] krntryš Statue [C] III.16 – b l III.17 – b l III.19 – b l IV.20 – b l
krntryš krntryš krntryš krntryš
Importantly, the variant on the statue itself identifies the statue with this deity (C III.15b-16a; and IV.19-20).77 Scholars have suggested a number of different ways to understand these sevenletters: krntryš. From the time of its discovery, the most common explanation has been toponymic.78 Of these, the most promising proposal was to identify the term krntryš with Kelenderis (modern Aydıncık),79 Röllig 1999; Younger 1998; 2000. Röllig (1999: 52, n. 4) suggests that the scribe forgot the word and added it. But above this word, there are two letters rš that are part of a word rš “plowing” that must have been incised together at the same time (the heth is actually missing in a break, but this does not change my point). Since this word ([ ]rš) was not added secondarily, it is doubtful that krntryš was. 77 Röllig 1999: 64-67. 78 Gibson (1979 SSI 3: 60) simply comments that krntryš is “obviously nonSemitic, perhaps a place-name,” but gives no suggestions. Röllig (1967 3: 42) added the possibility of krntryš containing the Hittite royal name Kurunta. 79 For an identification with Kelenderis, see Alt 1948; Barnett 1953: 142, n. 5; Vattioni 1968. Marcus and Gelb (1948: 198) stated: “It (the shin) probably stands for a simple s in the spelling of b l krntrjs (iii.16, etc.), where the ending jš may express the normal Indo-European gentilic formation ios or ias. With due caution it may be suggested that the remaining krntr corresponds to the classical Kelenderis, the name of a city situated on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in Cilicia Tracheia. The change of the first r to l could easily be due to dissimilation because of the second r.” For an identification with Krindion, see Alt 1949-52: 282 and Röllig 1967 3: 42. 75 76
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a city on the southern coast near the border with Rough Cilicia. However, recent excavations have demonstrated that there was a significant gap in occupation from the end of the Bronze Age until the late Sub-Geometric period, i.e. from 1200 to 800 BCE.80 It seems doubtful that the Karatepe term krntryš is referring to Kelenderis. Another place-name that scholars have attempted to see in krntryš is Tarsus, being composed of the last four letters tryš, resulting in different suggestions for the first three letters. Honeyman proposed an unattested Indo-European compound, *kuirwan(a)-tarayas “lord of Tarsus.”81 Dupont-Sommer suggested Greek κάρανος “chief ” compounded with -tryš “Tarsus.” 82 Bron favored this interpretation, though acknowledging the orthographic problem that Tarsus is written Trz in Phoenician and Aramaic.83 Lebrun argues against -tryš being Tarsus because of this orthographic issue.84 He suggests isolating the initial segment krn, comparing Akkadian kurinnu “divine symbol,”85 with the remaining letters -tryš being Luwian suffixes. Thus while he does not reconstruct the phrase in a translation, it would seem that Lebrun’s suggestion would be something like “Ba al of the divine symbol” (with additional Luwian suffixes signifying?).86 This seems doubtful linguistically. Other scholars have seen in krntryš a possible adjectival form. Bossert speculated that krntryš could represent Greek κράντοριος “sovereign.”87 M. Weippert discussed krntryš comprehensively, concluding that it is an unattested Luwian adjectival form so that b l krntryš corresponds to k0r(0)natariyassis Tarhuis (0 represents a vowel).88 Röllig has recently suggested that while the Luwian text clearly refers to Tarhunza (he reads the deity name as Tarhuis), Yılındırıs and Gates 2007: 332. Honeyman 1948. He states: “. . . the writer has conjectured that the new cult is that of the Tarsian Sandan, who is here given a native appellation ‘suzerain of Tarsus’ and identified with the Semitic Baal, and who later is called ‘the Baal of Tarsus’ ” (Honeyman 1949: 37). 82 Dupont-Sommer 1948: 173. 83 Bron 1979: 183. He cites Hill 1964: 162-164. For a recent discussion of Ba altarz (Aramaic reads: b ltrz) “Baal of Tarsus,” see Casabonne 2002: 21-31. 84 Lebrun 1992. 85 According to CAD K 560 s.v. kurinnu, the meaning of “(a divine symbol)” is mainly attested in inscriptions from Boğazköy. See also AHw 511, s.v. kurrinnu 2. 86 For this suggestion and its anticipated criticism, see Weippert 1969: 213, n. 105. 87 Bossert 1953: 183. 88 Weippert 1969: 211-213; reprint 1997: 125-126. 80 81
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the Phoenician text might be referring to an additional Anatolian deity.89 He suggests understanding b l krntryš as a phrase meaning “Ba al krn (and) Tarhuis.” He suggests that Ba al krn may be read *kur(in),90 and thus associated with the epithet bēl kurrinni connected to the Tešub of Ka at. In my opinion, this solution is unsatisfactory, for it is unlikely that the Luwian deity’s name would be spelled in Phoenician Tryš, particularly if the Luwian should be understood as Tarhunza, not Tarhuis.91 But even granting that Tryš stands for Tarhuis, in a Phoenician text one would expect a conjunction w between the phrase b l krn and Tryš (i.e. asyndeton is unlikely). Since the epithet bēl kurrinni is only attested in Akkadian, its occurrence in a Phoenician text from Karatepe seems problematic. Finally, Röllig’s proposal yields an awkward combination repeated in the text nine times: “lord of the (divine) symbol (and) Tar unza.” G. Bunnens has recently suggested that perhaps the name b l kr is a shortened form of b l krntryš.92 But this still does not solve the Karatepe syntagm. Instead, it attempts to explain a simple form by an enigmatic one. Moreover, the cuneiform and alphabetic inscriptional evidence demonstrates that kr is very likely not a shortening of the Karatepe term krntryš, but refers to a deity named Kur(r)a. P. Schmitz has recently suggested that the phrase b l krntryš at Karatepe should be understood as b l plus a Greek adjective *κορυνητήριος, thus yielding “the mace-bearing Ba al.”93 He argues that *κορυνητήριος is a calque or loan translation of the Northwest Semitic word md “mace” (attested in Ugaritic [e.g. CAT 1.2 IV 15] and Phoenician [KAI 5 24.15]). Moreover, he equates this “macebearing Ba al” with the mace-smiting storm-god of Aleppo (as particularly seen on orthostat 7 in the recently excavated temple).94 There can be no doubt that there were Greeks in the region and that Greek influence was felt there during this period. Schmitz has ably assembled the evidence for this.95 Therefore, his suggestion Röllig 2001: 49. Following Lebrun 1992, see above. 91 Note here Bron’s comment: “Les spécialistes du hittite ne se sont pas mis d’accord sur la lecture de ce nom divin : Tarhunda pour Laroche, Tarhui pour Meriggi, Tarhuis pour Weippert” (Bron 1979: 183, n. 7). In recent years, there has been a growing consensus that the name should be understood as Tarhunza. 92 Bunnens 2006: 128, n. 88 93 Schmitz forthcoming. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Philip Schmitz for kindly allowing me to see his forthcoming study. 94 See Kohlmeyer 2000: Taf. 8. For the iconography, see Bonatz 2007. 95 See Schmitz forthcoming. 89 90
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merits full consideration. However, there are some significant difficulties. For example, why would a Greek term be used in a Phoenician inscription to calque a perfectly good Phoenician term md? Why not just use b l md? Another difficulty is that the Greek adjective as proposed by Schmitz is an unattested form. A third problem is the iconology of the statue at Karatepe that is identified as b l krntryš does not have a smiting pose (nor does the Çineköy statue). Conclusion It is clear that there was a first millennium deity Kur(r)a. Besides the Sidon Bowl, the Cebel İres Dağı and Çineköy inscriptions, there are clear occurrences in Phoenician personal names. Furthermore, the cuneiform sources add significantly to the evidence, both in personal names and in the existence of a temple to this deity in Nineveh. Here, the use of the divine determinative is highly significant testimony. Therefore, it would seem likely that the Karatepe inscriptions also refer to this deity b l kr. If this is granted, then the term krntryš must be divided into two words: kr and ntryš. Thus the second word might be an adjective or a place name. There is a Luwian adjective nanuntarra/i-.96 However, for various reasons this does not seem to work. Thus a place-name may yet be the solution, though here too there is, as yet, no solid suggestion. Was Kur(r)a a storm-god? From the first millennium bilingual inscriptions and from the sculpted iconography which is clearly tied to storm-god imagery, the answer would seem to be affirmative. The Çineköy Inscription equates b l kr with Tarhunza.97 Lebrun rightly notes that b l krntryš is the name under which the Phoenicians at Karatepe venerated the storm-god of the country of Adana.98 It is also possible that the term krntryš at Karatepe is another term altogether and the kr should not be separated from the other letters. In this case, Karatepe would not serve as an attestation 96 However, the nanutarra/i- family all derive from nanun “now” > nanuntarriya- “of the present”—which is of course a different concept from the meaning of the nuntara- family in Hittite. See Melchert 1993: 156, 160. Similarly, the hieroglyphic Luwian adjective ana(n)tari- “lower” (Hawkins 2000: 625) may match in form, but does not yield a clear meaning. 97 For syncretism, see Xella 1999; 1995. 98 Lebrun 1992.
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Drawing 1: The Sidon Bowl (Pietschmann 1889; Gressmann 1927; Barnett 1969; Mettinger 2005)
Lipiński (1970) suggested that the four scenes should be read in the same order as the Phoenician script, i.e. from right to left. He interpreted the pictures as references to (A) the pyre, (B) the tomb, (C) the mourning, and (D) the epiphany in glory of Melqart-Heracles. The inscription b l kr is in (D).
to the deity Kur(r)a as the other inscriptions bearing b l kr from Sidon, Cebel İres Dağı and Çineköy do, as well as the other first millennium evidence discussed in this article. However, the great similarity between the statues at Çineköy and Karatepe would argue in favor of the “baals” followed by kr in the inscriptions from both sites referring to the same deity.
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This combination b l kr should perhaps be understood as either the generic term b l proceeding the proper name of the deity (e.g. b l dgn, b l rkb or b l z),99 or alternatively, as another case of the phenomenon of a “double deity”100 as seen in the Moabite štr . kmš,101 Samalian Aramaic rqršp,102 and in the Phoenician-Punic world, with names like ršp mkl, rsp mlqrt, mlqrt d, mlqrt šmn, mlk štrt.103 Along with these, b l kr would thus represent the theological development in the first millennium of “double deities.” There can be no doubt that at third millennium Ebla, there was a deity called Kura. While there may be some possible evidence from the second millennium, it is perhaps not as yet sufficient to establish a definite link between the third and first millennia citations. On the other hand, there is some possibility. An interesting parallel with Kura can be seen in the Eblaite deity Gamiš (dGami-iš ). This god was important in both private and official religion at Ebla; there is little firm evidence from the second millennium; and of course, during the first millennium was the major deity of Moab: Kamoš (Müller 1995). Therefore, a possible link between the third millennium evidence for Kura and the first millennium evidence for such a deity cannot be ruled out. References ARET DCPP DNWSI KAI 5 PNA SEb
Archivi reali di Ebla. Testi, Roma, 1981-. E. Lipiński. Editor. Dictionnaire de la civilisation phénicienne et punique. Leuven: Peeters, 1992. J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling. Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions. Handbuch der Orientalistik 1/21. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. H. Donner and W. Röllig. Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften. Band 1. 5th Expanded and Revised Edition. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002. S. Parpola, K. Radner, H. Baker, et al. Editors. The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1998-. Studi Eblaiti
99 For Tarsian b l dgn, see Lemaire 1991: 45; for Samalian b l rkb, see Fales 1980: 144, line 11 and Fales 1999; for b l z, see Xella 1993. See Lipiński 1995: 240. For the deity rkb in a Phoenician personal name, rkb š, see A. Lemaire “Amulette phénicienne giblite en argent,” in Shlomo. Studies in Epigraphy, Iconography, History and Archaeology in Honor of Shlomo Moussaieff (ed. R. Deutsch. Tel Aviv-Jaffa: Archaeological Center Publications, 2003) 155-174, esp. pp. 156-158. 100 Xella 1995; 1999: 146-147. 101 The 9th century BCE Mesha Inscription, line 17 (KAI 5 no. 181). See Smith 1995. 102 Hadad Inscription (KAI 5 214, line 11). See Lipiński 2000:617-620. 103 See Pardee 1988.
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Alt, A. 1948. “Die geschichtliche Bedeutung der neuen phönikischen Inschriften aus Kilikien.” Forschungen und Fortschritte 24:121-124. ———. 1949. “Die phönikischen Inschriften von Karatepe.” WO 1/4:272-287. Amadasi Guzzo, M. G. 2002. “Review of K. Radner, The Prosopography of the NeoAssyrian Empire, Vol. 1, Part 1.” Or 71:315-320. Archi, A. 1982. “About the Organization of the Eblaite State.” Studi Eblaiti 5:201-220. ———. 1992. “Substrate: Some Remarks on the Formation of the West Hurrian Pantheon.” Pp. 7-14 in Hittite and Other Anatolian and Near Eastern Studies in Honour of Sedat Alp, eds. H. Otten, H. Ertem, E. Akurgal and A. Süel. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi. ———. 1993a. “How a Pantheon Forms.” Pp. 1-18 in Religionsgeschichtliche Beziehungen zwischen Kleinasien, Nordsyrien und dem Alten Testament, eds. B. Janowski, K. Koch, and G. Wilhelm. OBO 129. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 1993b. “Fifteen Years of Studies on Ebla. A Summary.” OLZ 88: 461-471. Archi, A., P. Piacentini and F. Pomponio. 1993. I nomi di luogo nei testi di Ebla. Archivi reali di Ebla 2. Rome: Baker, H. D. 2000. “Kur-ilâ’i.” PNA 2/1:641-642. ———. 2002. “Rēmanni-ilu.” PNA 3/1: 1042-1043. Barnett, R. D. 1953. “Mopsus.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 73:140-143. ———. 1969. “Ezekiel and Tyre.” Pp. 6-13 and pl. iv in W. F. Albright Volume. Eretz-Israel 9. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society. Beckman, G. 2002. “The Pantheon of Emar.” Pp. 39-54 in Silva Anatolica. Anatolian Studies Presented to Maciej Popko on the Occassion of His 65th Birthday, ed. P. Taracha. Warsaw: Agade. Benz, F. L. 1972. Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions. Studia Pohl 8. Rome: Biblical Institute Press. Bonatz, D. 2007. “The Iconography of Religion in the Hittite, Luwian, and Aramaean Kingdoms.” Iconography of Deities and Demons: Electronic Prepublication. http://www.religionswissenschaft.unizh.ch/idd/prepublication.php (accessed 2/18/2008). Bonechi, M. 1990. “I ‘regni’ dei testi degli archivi de Ebla.” Aula Orientalis 8:157174. ———. 1993. I nomi geografici dei testi di Ebla. Répertoire géographique des textes cunéiformes 12. Wiesbaden: L. Reichert. Bonnet, C. 1988. Melqart. Cultes et mythes de l’Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée. Studia Phoenicia 8. Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters; Namur: Presses universitaires de Namur. ———. 1992. “Baal kr.” P. 58 in DCPP. Bonnet-Tzavellas, C. 1983. “Le dieu Melqart en Phénicie et dans le bassin méditerranéen: un culte national et officiel.” Pp. 195-207 in Studia Phoenicia I-II. Leuven: Peeters. Bossert, H. T. 1953. “Die phönizisch-hethitischen Bilinguen vom Karatepe 4: Fortsetzung.” Jahrbuch für kleinasiatische Forschung 2:167-188. Breckwoldt, T. 1998. “Abi-dekīr.” PNA 1/1: 9. Bron, F. 1979. Recherches sur les inscriptions phéniciennes de Karatepe. École pratique des Hautes études 2: Hautes études orientales 11. Genève/Paris: Droz. Bunnens, G. 2006. A New Luwian Stele and the Cult of the Storm-god at Til BarsibMasuwari. With a Chapter by J. David Hawkins and a Contribution by Isabelle Leirens. Publications de la Mission archéologique de l’Université de Liège en Syrie, Tell Ahmar 2. Louvain-Paris-Dudley, MA: Peeters.
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Çambel, H., and A. Özyar. 2003. Karatepe-Aslanta , Azatiwataya: Die Bildwerke. Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern. Casabonne, O. 2002. “Dans les pas d’Alexandre le grand: divinités, sancturaires et pouvoirs locaux en Cilicie.” Hethitica 14:19-41. Dalley, S. M., and J. N. Postgate. 1984. The Tablets from Fort Shalmaneser. CTN 3. Oxford: British School of Archaeology. Delcor, M. 1974. “Le hieros gamos d’Astarte.” RSF 2:63-76. Elayi, J. 1988. “A Phoenician Vase Representing the God Milqart?” BaM 19: 545-547, Taf. 17-20. ———. 1990. Sidon, cité autonome de l’empire perse. 2nd Edition. Paris: Editions Idéaphane. Fales, F. M. 1980. “New Assyrian Letters from the Kuyunjik Collection.” AfO 27: 136-152. ———. 1998. “Amat-Kurra,” PNA 1/1: 99. ———. 1999. “Bar-ūri.” PNA 1/2: 274. Fales, F. M., and K. Radner. 1998. “Abdi-Kurra,” PNA 1/1:6. Forlanini, M. 2005. “Un peuple, plusieurs noms: le problème des ethniques au proche orient ancien. Cas connur, cas à découvrir.” Pp. 111-119 in Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 48th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Leiden, 1-4 July 2002, eds. W. H. van Soldt, R. Kalvelagen, and D. Katz. RAI 48. Uitgaven van het Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten te Leiden 102. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Frahm, E. 2000. “Kirua.” PNA 2/1: 620. Fronzaroli, P. 1988. “Il culto dei re defunti in ARET 3:178.” Pp. 1-33 in Miscellanea Eblaitica 1, ed. P. Fronzaroli. Quaderni di Semitistica 15. Firenze: Università di Firenze. Gressmann, H. 1927. Altorientalische Bilder zum alten Testament. Berlin-Leipzig. Gröndahl, F. 1967. Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit. Studia Pohl 1. Rome: Päpstliches Bibelinstitut. Haas, V. 1994. Geschichte der hethitischen Religion. HdO 15/1. Leiden: Brill. Halff, G. 1965. “L’onomastique punique de Carthage.” Karthago 12: 129. Hawkins, J. D. 1995. “Muksas.” RlA 8:413. ———. 2000. CHLI 1. Hill, G. F. 1964. Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Lycaonia, Isauria, and Cilicia. Reprint of 1900 Edition. Bologna: A. Forni. Honeyman, A. M. 1948. “Phoenician Inscriptions from Karatepe.” Le Muséon 61:43-57. ———. 1949. “Epigraphic Discoveries at Karatepe.” PEQ 81:21-39. İpek, İ., A. K. Tosun, and R. Tekoğlu. 1999. “Adana Geç Hitit Heykeli Kurtarma Kazısı 1997 Yılı Çalı ması Sonuçları.” Pp. 173-188 in IX. Müze Kurtarma Kazilari Semineri: 27-29 Nisan 1998, Antalya. Ankara: Kültür Bakanligi Milli Kütüphane Basimevi. Kessler, K. 1999. “Bēl-ilā ī.” PNA 1/2: 313. Kohlmeyer, K. 2000. Der Tempel des Wettergottes von Aleppo. Gerda Henkel Vorlesung. Münster: Rhema. Krahmalkov, C. R. 2000. Phoenician-Punic Dictionary. OLA 90. Studia Phoenicia 15. Leuven: Peeters. Lebrun, R. 1992. “Baal krntrysh.” DCPP 58-59. Lebrun, R., and J. de Vos. 2006. “A propos de l’inscription bilingue de l’ensemble sculptural de Çineköy.” Anatolia Antiqua 14:45-64. Lemaire, A. 1983. “L’inscription phénicienne de Hassan-Beyli reconsiderée.” RSF 11:9-19.
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———. 1991. “Notes d’épigraphie nord-ouest sémitique.” Semitica 40: 39-54. ———. 2003. “Amulette phénicienne giblite en argent.” Pp. 155-174 in Shlomo. Studies in Epigraphy, Iconography, History and Archaeology in Honor of Shlomo Moussaieff, ed. R. Deutsch. Tel Aviv-Jaffa: Archaeological Center Publications. ———. 2006. “La maison de Mopsos en Cilicie et en Pamphylie à l’epoque du Fer (XIIe-VIe s. av. J.-C.).” Revue Res Antiquae 3:99-107. Lipiński, E. 1970. “La fête de l’ensevelissement et de la résurrection de Milqart.” Pp. 30-58 in Actes de la XVII e Rencontre assyriologique internationale. Harm-surHeure: Comité belge de récherches en Mésopotamie. ———. 1995. Dieux et déesses de l’univers phénicien et punique. OLA 64. Leuven: Peeters. ———. 1997. “The Personal Names Handî, Harrānay, and Kurillay in NeoAssyrian Sources,” Pp. 89-93 in Assyrien im Wandel der Zeiten, eds. H. Waetzoldt and H. Hauptman. RAI 39. Heidelberger Studien zum Alten Orient 6. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag. ———. 2000. The Aramaeans. Their History, Culture, Religion. OLA 100. Leuven: Peeters. ———. 2004. Itineraria Phoenicia. Studia Phoenicia 18. OLA 127. Leuven, Paris and Dudley, MA: Peeters. Litke, R. L. 1998. A Reconstruction of the Assyro-Babylonian God-Lists, AN: dA-NU-UM and AN: ANU ŠÁ AMĒLI. Texts from the Babylonian Collection 3. New Haven: Yale Babylonian Collection. Mander, P. 1990. Administrative Texts of the Archive L. 2679. MEE 10. Materiali per il vocabolario sumerico 1. Rome: Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza.” Maraqten, M. 1988. Die semitischen Personennamen in den alt- und reichsaramäischen Inschriften aus Vorderasien. Texte und Studien zur Orientalistik 5. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Marcus, R., and I. J. Gelb. 1948. “A Preliminary Study of the New Phoenician Inscription from Cilicia.” JNES 7:194-198. Mattila, R. 2002. Legal Transactions of the Royal Court of Nineveh, Part II. Assurbanipal through Sin-šarru-iškun. SAA 14. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Melchert, H. C. 1993. Cuneiform Luvian Lexicon. Lexica Anatolica 2. Chapel Hill, NC. Mettinger, T. 2005. “The Dying and Rising God: The Peregrinations of a Mytheme.” Pp. 198-210 in Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 48th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Leiden, 1-4 July 2002, eds. W. H. van Soldt, R. Kalvelagen and D. Katz. RAI 48. Uitgaven van het Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten te Leiden 102. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Milano, L. 1989-90. “Luoghi di culto in Ebla: economia e sistema delle offerte.” Scienze dell’Antichità 3-4:155-173. Mosca, P. G., and J. Russell. 1987. “A Phoenician Inscription from Cebel Ires Dağı in Rough Cilicia.” Epigraphica Anatolica 9:1-28. Müller, H.-P. 1995. “Chemosh.” Cols. 356-362 in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, eds. K. van der Toorn, B. Becking and P. W. van der Horst. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Olmo Lete, G. del, and J. Sanmartín. 2004. A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition. 2 Vols. Trans. W. G. E. Watson. HdO 67. 2nd Revised Edition. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Pardee, D. 1988. “A New Datum for the Meaning of the Divine Name Milkashtart.” Pp. 55-68 in Ascribe to the Lord. Biblical and Other Studies in Memory of P. C. Craigie, eds. L. Eslinger and G. Taylor. JSOTSup 67. Sheffield: JSOT Press.
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Parker, B. 1963. “Economic Tablets from the Temple of Mamu at Balawat.” Iraq 25:86-103. Pietschmann, R. 1889. Geschichte der Phönizier. Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen 1. Berlin: G. Grote. Pomponio, F., and P. Xella. 1997. Les dieux d’Ebla. Étude analytique des divinités éblaïtes à l’époque des archives royales du IIIe millénaire. AOAT 245. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Postgate, J. N. 1976. Fifty Neo-Assyrian Legal Documents. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Postgate, J. N., and B. K. Ismail. 1979. Texts from Nineveh. Texts in the Iraq Museum 11. Baghdad: Republic of Iraq: Ministry of Culture and Information, Directorate General of Antiquities & Heritage. Radner, K. 1998. “Adad-ilā ī.” PNA 1/1:26. Röllig, W. 1967. “Karatepe.” Pp. 39-51 Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften, eds. H. Donner and W. Röllig. 2nd Edition. Vol. 3. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz. ———. 1999. “Appendix 1: The Phoenician Inscriptions.” Pp. 50-81 in Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions. Volume 2: H. Çambel. Karatepe-Aslanta . The Inscriptions: Facsimile Edition. Untersuchungen zur indogermanischen Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft, N. F. 8.2. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2001. “Phönizisches aus Nordsyrien und der Gott Kurra.” Pp. 41-52 in Punica, Libyca, Ptolemaica: Festschrift für Werner Huss zum 65. Geburtstag dargebracht von Schülern, Freunden und Kollegen, eds. K. Geus and K. Zimmermann. OLA 104. Studia Phoenicia 16. Leuven: Peeters. Schmitz, P. C. forthcoming. “Phoenician ΚRΝΤRΥŠ , Archaic Greek *ΚΟΡΥΝΗΤΗΡΙΟΣ, and the Storm God of Aleppo.” Smith, M. S. 1995. “The God Athtar in the Ancient Near East and His Place in KTU 1.6 I.” Pp. 627-640 in Solving Riddles and Untying Knots: Biblical, Epigraphic and Semitic Studies in Honor of Jonas C. Greenfield, eds. Z. Zevit, S. Gitin, and M. Sokoloff. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Starke, F. 1990. Untersuchung zur Stammbildung des keilschrift-luwischen Nomens. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 31. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Stieglitz, R. R. 2002. “Divine Pairs in the Ebla Pantheon.” Pp. 209-214 in Eblaitica: Essays on the Ebla Archives and Eblaite Language, eds. by C. H. Gordon and G. A. Rendsburg. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Stolper, M. 1980. “Two Neo-Assyrian Fragments.” AfO 27:83-85. Tekoğlu, R., and A. Lemaire. 2000. “La bilingue royale louvito-phénicienne de Çineköy.” CRAIBL 961-1006. Tomback, R. 1978. A Comparative Semitic Lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic Languages. SBLDS 32. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press. Van Buylaere, G. 2001. “Mamu-iqbi.” PNA 2/2: 676. Vanschoonwinkel, J. 1990. “Mopsos: légendes et réalité.” Hethitica 10:185-211. Vattioni, F. 1968. “Note fencie.” AION 18:71-73. Verardi, V. 2000. “Kirrî.” PNA 2/1: 619-620. Waetzoldt, H. 2001. Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungstexte aus Ebla: Archiv L. 2769. Materiali per il vocabolario sumerico 7. Materiali epigrafici di Ebla 12. Rome: Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza.” Watanabe, K. 1993. “Neuassyrische Siegellengenden.” Orient. Report of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 29:109-138. Weippert, M. 1969. “Elemente phönikischer und kilikischer Religion in den Inschriften vom Karatepe.” ZDMG Supplementa I. XVII. Deutscher Orientalistentag. Wiesbaden, pp. 191-217. Reprinted in Jahwe und die anderen
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Götter: Studien zur Religionsgeschichte des antiken. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 18. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997) 109-130. Wilhelm, G. 1992. “Zum Eblaitischen Gott Kura.” Vicino Oriente 8:23-31. Wunsch, C. 1993. Die Urkunden des babylonischen Geschäftsmannes Iddin-Marduk: zum Handel mit Naturalien im 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Cuneiform Monographs 3. Groningen: Styx Publications. Xella, P. 1993. “Le dieu B L Z dans une nouvelle inscription phénicienne de Kition (Chypre).” SEL 10:61-69. ———. 1995. “ ‘Divintés doubles’ dans le monde phénico-punique.” Semitica (Hommages à Maurice Sznycer) 38:167-175. ———. 1999. “Le problem du ‘syncrétisme’ au Proche-Orient pré-classique.” Pp. 131-148 in Les syncrétismes religieux dans le monde méditerranéen antique. Actes du colloque international en l’honneur de Franz Cumont à l’occasion du cinquantième anniversaire de sa mort. Rome, Academia Belgica, 25-27 septembre 1997, eds. C. Bonnet and A. Motte. Etudes de philologie, d’archéologie et d’histoire anciennes 36. Brussels and Rome: Institut historique belge de Rome. Yılındırıs, B., and M.-H.Gates. 2007. “Archaeology in Turkey, 2004-2005.” AJA 112:275-356. Younger, K. L., Jr. 1998. “The Phoenician Inscription of Azatiwada. An Integrated Reading,” JSS 43/1:11-47. ———. 2000. “The Azatiwada Inscription.” COS 2.31. ———. 2002. “Cebel Ires Daği.” COS 3:137-139. Zadok, R. 1998. “West Semitic Material in Neo/Late-Babylonian and NeoAssyrian Sources.” NABU no. 56 (pp. 58-61).
THE WALL OF URUK: ICONICITIES IN GILGAMESH KEITH DICKSON We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things. —M. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World
Abstract “The Wall of Uruk: Iconicities in Gilgamesh”. This article examines the invitation in the SV prologue to Gilgamesh (I 1-28) as a device to engage the reader in a series of iconic acts that aim to preserve heroic glory. Since two artifacts in particular—the wall of Uruk and the inscribed tablet—mediate these acts, I investigate the nature of artifacts in general in the poem, and specifically focus on three: the corpse of Enkidu, his funeral statue, and the divine fruit in the garden at the end of Tablet IX. These three stand related to each other as a series of iconic representations of the emplacement of life within various bodies. In the context of these representations, the lapis lazuli tablet on which Gilgamesh allegedly inscribes his tale also figures as a kind of body: a relatively permanent one that appropriates the reader’s voice through the act of recitation to grant Gilgamesh perpetually renewable life.
The invitation in the prologue to the Standard Version (SV) of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic remains compelling despite even its long exposure to time and scholarship, which is no small feat.1 This has much to do with the degree of engagement it evokes from the reader. As audience, each one of us individually is summoned by the narrator’s voice—as was Ur-shanabi by the voice of Gilgamesh himself in the final tablet’s ring-composed coda (XI: 323-329)—to survey the concrete structure of Uruk, examine the oven-fired brickwork of its walls, and acknowledge that the seven sages or apkallu themselves laid the foundations on which the 1 All references (by tablet and line) and quotations from Gilgamesh rely on the translation by George (2003). Other translations consulted are those of Foster (2001: 3-95); George (1999); Bottéro (1992); Tournay and Shaffer (1992); and Dalley (1989: 39-153).
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 Also available online – brill.nl/jane
JANER 9.1 DOI: 10.1163/156921209X449152
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hero subsequently built.2 Along with Ur-shanabi I am urged not just to look, but also to mount the rampart and walk upon it back and forth (I: 18 = XI: 323), marking out its density and extent with my own moving body. In an apparent shift back to the medium of sight—but to sight now informed by the bodily effort involved in the climb and the pacing of the walls—Uruk’s greater dimensions (city, date-grove, clay-pit, temple) are then measured off and tallied, amounting to a total expanse of roughly five square miles. The prologue then goes even farther than Ur-shanabi could, inviting me forward to see and touch, unlock and open a cedar box with clasp of bronze, lift up its lid and take from it a tablet made from lapis lazuli (I: 24-27).3 At this point what has been so far a progression of increasingly more tactile experience—from sight to embodied movement, then to touch and the felt weight of cedar lid and cool stone slab—perhaps surprisingly modulates into an act of oral recitation. This essay aims to map that shift. The attention that has often been drawn to the circular conceit linking audience in Tablet I with Ur-shanabi in Tablet XI—a neat conflation of analepsis and prolepsis (de Villiers 2005: 123-124.)— has perhaps made it easier to overlook a similar kind of mirroring that occurs within the opening lines of the prologue itself to link the audience more closely with Gilgamesh. For the progression from 2 On the literary and documentary history of this “tour” of the city, see Tigay (1982: 146-149) and Hurowitz (1992: 1, note 1, with references). On the rhetorical impact of the prologue’s direct, “personal address” to the reader, see Oppenheim (1977: 258-259) and Moran (1991: 16-17). 3 Walker (1981: 194) notes the parallel to the deposition of royal inscriptions in the foundations of buildings; see also Moran (1991: 17-18) and, more generally, Ellis (1968). The conceit of the tablet is certainly not unique. Its status as a literary topos in the Mesopotamian tradition has been noted by Oppenheim and others, and its style identified as that of a gestural, mannerist claim to textual authority—as if Gilgamesh himself were the author of the inscription no less than of the wall. Oppenheim (1977: 258) is suspicious of how seriously an original audience was meant to have taken this claim, finding it more likely instead that “its use presupposes a reader who is sophisticated enough to accept it as a literary fiction and not as proof of the authenticity of the text.” He concludes that the reference to the tablet, and no less the earlier invitation to examine the walls, “establish a relationship between author and his readers on the level of pure imagination” (259). It may be asked, of course, on what other level a textual relationship ever exists, but his point is still well taken. Oppenheim’s comments are motived principally by his thesis that the introit is strictly literary rather than the product of an oral, bardic tradition, and that it properly assumes an audience of readers—or at least of a public “that lives in a social context that makes it possible to hear the epic read” (259). See also Tigay (1982: 144-145) and Pongratz-Leisten (1999: 80-90) on the topos in both royal inscriptions and epic literature.
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sight to embodied movement to reading in the invitation (I: 13-28) actually amounts, mutatis mutandis, to a reprise of the hero’s own general progress in lines 1-12. There “He who saw the Deep,” who “saw the secret and uncovered what was hidden” (I: 1, 7), becomes the one who afterwards returned to Uruk, inscribed “on a stele all (his) labours” (I: 10), and then proceeded to build the very rampart and wall I am called to inspect (I: 11-12). The actions the prologue invites me to perform are structured by a kind of implicit imitatio—stylized and perhaps even mannerist, but for all that nonetheless still mimetic.4 Just as Gilgamesh “saw the Deep,” I am asked to “see [the] wall” of Uruk and “view its parapet” (I: 13-14), “survey the foundation platform, inspect the brickwork” (I: 19). Of course, the distance here between original and simulacrum might well seem too great to support the analogy between the object of the hero’s vision and what I must now imagine lies before me. What he presumably saw was the apsû itself, the foundation of the world as such, on which Ea once built his own dwelling, the world’s primordial ediface (Enuma Elish I: 71-78).5 What narrows that distance, however, is recognition of the degree to which material construction figures in Mesopotamian mythic narratives and civil engineering no less as the icon of genuinely primal, cosmogonic works.6 Insofar as all human foundations—especially 4 On the complex issues of literacy and orality in Mesopotamian literature, see the essays collected in Vogelzang (1992), especially 23-69 (B. Alster, “Interaction of Oral and Written Poetry in Early Mesopotamian Literature”), 227-245 (P. Michalowski, “Orality and Literacy and Early Mesopotamian Litarature”), and 265-278 (M. Vogelzang, “Some Aspects of Oral and Written Tradition in Akkadian”). On the shift from orality to writing as an influence on the “scribalization of wisdom” in Mesopotamia, see van den Toorn (2007). 5 On the polysemy of the term nagbu (either “subterranean apsû ” or “totality”) in the opening line of the SV prologue, see George (2003: 444-446), who also discusses a related ambiguity in the phrase i$di: ma:ti (“foundation, basis of the country”), which “might be understood to have a literal, cosmological reference, for the realm of men was believed to stand on top of the cosmic abode of Ea”; see also Castillo (2001: 91-92). For English texts of the Enuma Elish, see Foster (1993: 351-402) and Dalley (1989: 228-277). 6 On the status in ancient Near Eastern thought of man-made edifaces as simulacra of the primal, cosmogonic structures wrought by the gods, van Leeuwen (2007: 67) observes: “Both Mesopotamians and Israelites grounded human wisdom in the divine wisdom, which gave order, meaning and life to the cosmos as a whole. Creation was portrayed as a macrocosmic “house”—with its fields, waters, and variegated activities—to which temples and ordinary houses with their lands corresponded as microcosms.” His essay is a detailed study of this iconic relationship. On the same issue, see also Hurowitz (1992), especially Appendix 5 (“Temples, Temple Building and Divine Rest”) and Appendix 7 (“The Cosmic Dimensions
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(but by no means exclusively) the regal, monumental ones—intentionally mirror that first cosmic basis, what Gilgamesh saw and what the text invites me to see are metaphorically one and the same, in particular since it is the apkallu who are said to have established the foundation on which Gilgamesh built the wall of Uruk.7 In turn, the labor of his journey home along “a distant road” (I: 9) is matched, however faintly, by my own physical effort to “take the stairway . . . go up to the wall . . . and walk around” (I: 15, 18) to view the city’s total expanse. In both cases, sight leads to embodiment in the form of the return of Gilgamesh home and my own “return,” via the trope, from wherever I might be at the opening of the prologue to virtually the same place the hero’s “distant road” once brought him. My return is of course perhaps best understood as temporal just as much as spatial, since my movement in space back to the wall is actually a movement back in time to the original time of its construction. The course of the imitatio intends to lead my steps to where his own went generations earlier, and to the very place where his heroic journey culminated—namely, to the site of Uruk.8 Finally, Gilgamesh’s inscription of his labors is literally echoed in my recitation of the text engraved on the tablet taken from the cedar box. This engages once again the theme of “return,” but here with reference less to location and time than to the production of the narrative itself. Moreover, the relation between inscription and recitation is not one of sameness but instead complementarity; his writing and my reading aloud what he has written are in fact collaborative events. One depends upon the other: the silent act of writing on stone, that is, requires voicing to bring its narrative back to life—from mute glyph to audible enunciation—and thereby of Cities and Temples”). On the theme in general, see also Edzard (1987). 7 On the apkallu, primordial sage-craftsmen, especially with reference to the common connection between “wisdom” and building construction, see Sweet (1990: 47), who later comments (51) on “the typical Mesopotamian understanding of wisdom as the intelligence and skill that enable one to perform practical deeds, particularly for the benefit of the gods.” Note in this context the high frequency of references in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions to divinely-based wisdom as the means for projects specifically related to engineering—especially temple-building and the restoration of ruined cities. 8 In its most basic form, the traditional heroic narrative proceeds along the circular track of Departure outward and subsequent Return, travel to the limits of the world and then the long trek home again. On this narrative structure, see Campbell (1968: 3-46), along with Raglan (in R. Segal 1990: 89-175) and Propp (1968) for earlier typologies of the heroic narrative.
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also to bring it back to the attention of an audience on whose renewed memory of the hero depends the hero’s own perpetually renewable fame. Jesper Svenbro, in the course of his extended “anthropology of reading” in ancient Greece, remarks as follows on the relationship between the author and the reader of inscriptions (1993: 44-45):9 At the moment of reading, the reader finds himself before a written word that is present in the absence of the writer. Just as he foresees his own absence, the writer foresees the presence of his writing before the reader. The reading constitutes a meeting between the reader and the written marks of someone who is absent. The writer . . . counts on the reader and the reading aloud that the reader will accomplish, for in a culture in which kléos [glorious fame] has a fundamental part to play, what is written remains incomplete until such time as it is provided with a voice. . . . The text is thus more than the sum of the alphabetic signs of which it is composed. These signs will guide the voice that will permit the vocalization of the text, its sonorous realization. This, then, is the way in which the text includes the voice that its mute signs are lacking. If the text is to find total fulfillment, it needs the voice of the reader, the reading voice.
As long as it remains silent, the hero’s life was indeed a terminal one after all, a history of acts consigned now to the mute and unrecoverable past; once it appropriates new voice through recitation, however, that life speaks anew and therefore somehow lives again. What Svenbro refers to as “sonorous realization” applies equally well to Gilgamesh as to the Greek inscriptions that are his subject. The implicit imitatio of the SV prologue, in which the reader performs a stylized, bodily re-enactment of the hero’s career, also speaks to this theme. Both kinds of engagement, moreover, “sonorous” no less than physical, entail the reader’s involvement with things in the text and with the text itself as a thing.10 A look at the things involved will bear this out. George (2003: 446) and others (cf. Tigay 1982: 144-145) plausibly assume that the passage from Gilgamesh in question requires the original stele or narû (I: 20) to be identical to the lapis lazuli tablet in line 27, and that as 9 On the connection in Greek culture between “mute” written signs and public recitation, especially in the context of heroic glory, see also Nagy (1983 and 1990: 202-222), along with Vernant (1974: 9-25) and C. Segal (1982). 10 See Pongratz-Leisten (1999: 85-86) for discussion of the intended audience in so-called narû-texts, which (in both inscriptional and literary forms) make explicit appeal to an other to “see,” “hear,” “call out,” or “voice” what has been written. On narû in general, see e.g. Güterbock (1934: 62-86); Gurney (1955); Ellis (1968: 145-147, 166-167); Longman (1991: 44-47); and especially Pongratz-Leisten (1999), with references.
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a consequence I am expected to imagine that I hold in my hands the very stone on which Gilgamesh’s own hand etched the tale. This is a precious conceit, as Oppenheim points out, and certainly a fragile one, on which we are probably not meant to push too hard.11 It is perhaps enough that the content of what is read aloud—“all the misfortunes, all that the hero went through” (I: 28)—precisely matches that of what was written—“all [his] labours” (I: 10)—inasmuch as the narrative proper of Gilgamesh, coinciding with the introit (“Surpassing all [other] kings . . .” [29]) of the earlier, Old Babylonian (OB) version, begins at this point.12 The mimetic and performative acts with which the prologue’s invitation opens, that is to say—sight, movement, appropriation of the tablet—now culminate in the recitative performance of the poem itself. In this sense, at least, the modulation noted earlier, from bodily experience to what would seem to be the qualitatively different experience of reading a text aloud, is possibly not so surprising after all. Reading the tablet, no less than touching and pacing the wall, involves representation in the form of a kind of renewal via re-embodiment of the hero. They differ chiefly in the materials—flesh and sound—in and through which this realization takes place. This is of course its aim. The conceit itself is actually the reflex of a wider and deeper theme that supports the literary convention and expresses motives that appear just as foundational to the genre of epic as the wall is to Uruk. The best way to appreciate this is to recognize that the bodily imitatio and the equally mimetic and collaborative act of reading aloud in the opening lines of Gilgamesh are not direct but instead mediated activities. Each, moreover, is mediated by a simple artifact: the wall of Uruk and the inscribed stone text, respectively, are the devices by which the spatial, temporal, and narrative distance between reader and authorial hero is narrowed. Were it not for the wall, Gilgamesh would not be present via the product of his hands, which (given his status as king) in fact reprises the foundational, cosmogonic act of a god; were there 11 Difficult and impertinent questions follow on the assumption that Gilgamesh himself is the author of the tablet; see Oppenheim (1977: 257-259). Moran (1991: 17-19) draws attention to the parallel between the tablet in the SV prologue to Gilgamesh and the “pseudo-autobiographical” stele of Naram-Sin. See also van den Toorn (2007: 27-28); and Tigay (1982: 144-146), with references. 12 On the literary history of Gilgamesh, and especially the differences between the Old Babylonian (OB) and Standard (SV) versions of the text, see Tigay (1982), with summary in Maier (1977: 40-49) and George (2003: 22-33).
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no engraved tablet, in turn, the very agency that made the wall a metonym for that cosmic foundation would be inaccessible. The fact that neither of those things is actually present in my experience as a reader—assuming I do not in fact stand on the wall of the city and take a slab of lapis from a cedar box—is not especially relevant to the point; and here Oppenheim’s reasonable comments seem a little obtuse.13 The real point is that, however mannered the conventions that give rise to this undeniably literary trope, what underlies them are implicit claims that (1) both a functional and also perhaps even a literal equivalence holds between tablet and wall; and (2) precisely as artifacts, tablet and wall are instrumental in engaging the reader in a set of stylized acts that endorse the hero’s accomplishments and perpetuate his life by confirming that both have been transformed into (ideally) renewable things. Both are the media for the fulfillment of an aim that is central to this narrative, and probably also to epic as such. Their functional equivalence is not hard to see. Insofar as both tablet and wall are artifacts made by the hand of Gilgamesh himself, both survive him to make the absent hero present, and in a form more durable than were his once exquisite body and spectacular acts. He now lives on in (and somehow also as) this wall of Uruk and this inscribed narrative; in a sense yet to be fully explored, he has become them. As already suggested, however, there is an important difference between wall and tablet. Two issues are involved here; despite how intimately bound they are in fact, for the sake of argument they need to be dealt with separately. On the one hand, there is the artifact as product, as a thing that in one sense leads a life of its own—a life simultaneously cultic, utile, political, economic, for instance—independent of that of its maker (who in this case is in fact long dead), though in another sense it never severs the connection to the one who made it. That connection is sometimes simply expressed by the maker’s name, whether actually inscribed on it (as in royal depositions) or in some other way associated with the product. Both tablet and wall bear the mark of his hand at the same time as they remain clearly different from him: they survive while he does not. On the other, there is the artifact as index of an agency moved by the specific intention to preserve itself by somehow making itself concrete. This is perhaps a less straightforward sense of artifacts, a 13
See above, note 3.
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sense easily conflated with the idea of the artifact as product, but nonetheless (and especially within the world of epic) a critically distinct one. This is because artifacts in epic are more than just the carriers of “tags,” simple witnesses of their author’s presence at some time or another (indefinite or specified) in the past. As such a “tag,” in fact, the wall of Uruk would differ only in degree, not in kind, from lines scratched on a rock, even if those scratches happened to spell the name “Gilgamesh” or “Kilroy.” Epic heroes do not dedicate their lives—and the genre of epic as such is not devoted—to the deposition of objects that merely assert a quondam presence. Those objects are meant instead to concretize and thereby also somehow to maintain a life, both to embody it as fact and also perpetually to keep it living. In the case of “tags,” the material on which the name is written is in one sense immaterial to the writing; its relation to the name it bears is a superficial one, simply that of medium to inscription. Epic artifacts (and the epic as itself an artifact) instead intend a deeper and more intimate relation, one that offers something resembling genuine embodiment, rather than just a surface on which to etch a name. As products, both tablet and wall serve as signs of the absent Gilgamesh, and thus maintain for him a presence in the world generations after time has demolished his own material body. As indices of the agency that produced them, in turn, they both offer themselves as instruments for the sort of imitatio encouraged by the invitation in the SV prologue. That is, they provide the concrete means for various kinds of mimetic, surrogate enactments that aim to bring the hero back to life. To appreciate both these issues separately and in their connection with each other, we need first to look more closely at the nature and function of other manufactured objects in the poem. Artifacts in Gilgamesh turn out to be comparatively few in number. The material landscape of the poem is stark and almost minimalist, especially when set next to the rich inventory of things that fill the Homeric epics, for example, that appear and then disappear almost epiphanically throughout the Sanskrit Mahabharata, and that lurk behind the characters in the tale of Beowulf. The list here is relatively short: clothing, ale, baked bread, an amulet, a few thresholds and doors, ritual implements (censer) and crafted offerings (throw-stick, flask, flute, throne, clasp, bangles), weapons (axe, sword, dirk, knife), roads, buildings, gates, a bed, a statue, two boats, punting-poles, a wall, a cedar box, a tablet made of lapis
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lazuli.14 These are the props of the drama, so to speak; though to call them that falsely suggests that they play a merely ancillary role in the story. More often than not, on the contrary, they tend to lead the story from one episode to the next, or at least to act as crucial signposts along its course. Moreover, rather than providing ground for dismissing the artifacts in Gilgamesh as unimportant, their relative lack of clutter instead lends them considerable weight. The things that appear in the text are freighted with significance; most seem to lead what Appadurai has aptly called a rich “social life.”15 Few if any are neutral, few simply lie inert in the world of the tale, as if in a kind of flat background detached from the characters that move among them. Instead, most exercise real transactional force. Through use, gifting, and exchange, that is to say, artifacts both symbolize and also effect real changes in the poem. This is because they are never mere objects, but instead things thoroughly traversed by intentionality16—whether as indices of categories in whose terms the human world is organized, as the instruments by which specific aims are furthered, as products that come at the end of a process of refinement of raw material and thereby embody cultural advance, or else as the simple objects of human desire. Articles of clothing are an obvious case in point, since they serve as one of the principal signifiers in a familiar system of signs through which distinctions between nature and culture are expressed.17 A vestimentary code structures much of what takes place in the poem, guiding the story along a well-marked trajectory and also bringing 14 For the sake of this short sketch, and somewhat arbitrarily, I include only those “real” manufactured objects mentioned by the principal narrator of the SV. Shamhat’s reference to drums (I: 229), for example, as an instance of embedded narration, is excluded from the list, as is the axe of Gilgamesh’s dream (I: 278). Likewise excluded, as metaphorical, are the net with which Enkidu is compared (IV: 13) and the rope that forms part of the traditional adage in V: 76. 15 See Appadurai (1988). The bibliography on material culture is extensive. See also, for instance, Bonnot (2002); Brown (2004); Knappett (2005); and Riggins (1994), with references. 16 For an extreme position on agents and objects as purely correlative entities, see the comments of Latour (quoted by Knappett 2005: 31): “Consider things, and you will have humans. Consider humans, and you are by that very act interested in things. Bring your attention to bear on hard things, and see them become gentle, soft or human. Turn your attention to humans and see them become electric circuits, automatic gears or softwares. We cannot even define precisely what makes some human and others technical…” On agents and artifacts, see Pickering (1997); on the distinction between “objects” and “things,” see Brown (2004: 1-22). 17 On the nature/culture opposition in Gilgamesh, see especially Mobley (1997: 220-223); Tigay (1982: 202-203); and Kirk (1970: 146-147).
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about significant transformations in its characters. The dressing of Enkidu by Shamat, the self-adornment of Gilgamesh after his defeat of Humbaba, the filthy pelts that later signify the hero’s lapse from civilization into a state of wildness, the immaculate robe loaned to Gilgamesh by Uta-napishtim—all function as indices of position and value along a continuum that runs from beast to divinity. At the same time, however, they do more than simply indicate: Enkidu’s attire is both a sign of his acculturation and also one of the things (along with grooming, for instance) that in a very real, practical sense render him civilized. That is, clothing figures as both product and also as a kind of agency—in this latter function, behaving more like a signal than a sign, in fact,18 not merely to reference but even to trigger a particular effect. Clothes do make the man. The same is true of foods, and with respect to precisely the same issue. Food specific to human beings qualifies as artifact because it represents the transformation of raw, natural stuff into something different, whether through an overt process of cooking or else by the subtler heat of fermentation. The contrast between the diets of animals (water and grass) and humans (beer and bread) in the Gilgamesh story (I: 110-112, II: 44-51) thereby marks out and also creates fundamental differences among living beings. The alchemy by which animal feed becomes human food likewise affects those who eat the latter: Enkidu is directly humanized by the mere act of eating bread—as if, somewhat magically, he becomes what he eats, as the saying goes—and the fact that he eats bread (and not grass) conversely signifies that transformation.19 The power of certain things both to signify and to effect real change is critical to advancing the purpose of heroic endeavor, whose aim is precisely to make the hero’s concrete sign a renewable signal. This becomes clear from an examination of the imagery that underlies the motive Gilgamesh announces for his journey to the Cedar Forest; though preserved only fragmentarily in the SV, it is 18 On the distinction between “sign” and “signal,” see Leach (1976), who remarks (23-24): “The contrast between signal and index [=sign] is that between dynamics and statics. With a signal, one event causes another event; the signal itself is the message. With an index, the message-bearing entity is an indication of the . . . existence of a message. No cause and effect relationship is involved.” 19 If the logic of this claim seems strained, it is because the claim verges on a mythic one in its view both of objects and also of signs as agencies rather than instruments. At the base of this logic is a “confusion,” often operative in magical thinking, between indices and signals; see Leach (1976: 29-32).
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by now conventional enough. His statement to Enkidu implicitly plays on the contrast between materiality and nothingness, thing and absence (II: 234-235):20 As for man, [his days] are numbered, all that ever he did is but [wind.]
The couplet is structured by a familiar trope:21 in its invisibility, its erratic and shifting nature, and especially in its apparent lack of substance, wind is a common figure for the instability and the resulting evanescence of human accomplishments. Like air, man’s deeds are insubstantial; they have no density, as it were, and therefore neither reality nor true permanence. Transient, they perish along with their wraith-like agents, or (at best) not long afterwards, rendering the agency that produced them futile and ultimately vain, however weighty its initial intent. Though fragmentary in the SV, this motive for the heroic exploit can be fleshed out by reference to lines preserved in Version A of the early Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Humbaba (“The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain”), which enjoyed the status of “a favorite copy-text in Old Babylonian schools” (George 1999: 149),22 suggesting in turn that its sentiments were in some sense recognizably mainstream. Here what stands as an implicit opposition in the SV passage just quoted—namely between wind and some other unnamed thing that is truly substantial—now comes to expression in terms of a more overt contrast between river and mountain, water and stone. Despite its use of different comparanda, the couplet of lines from the SV clearly intend as their substrate precisely the same metaphorical 20 George (2003: 456) speculates: “perhaps to distract Enkidu from his misery [viz. over his lack of family], Gilgamesh proposes that the pair make a glorious expedition to the Cedar Forest.” This ignores its broader, epic significance. 21 George (2003: 457) glosses the proverb as “Life is short and given over to mundane activities,” which fails to acknowledge the full metaphorical value of wind as index of insubstantiality. Tigay (1982: 164-165) reads it differently: “Gilgamesh argues that fear of the danger should not deter them, since death is man’s lot in any case.” He suggests that “the Akkadian version of the proverb is ultimately dependent on the Sumerian.” On Sumerian proverbs in general, see Alster (1975). West (1997: 253), noting that “Akkadian sâru, the ordinary word for ‘wind’, may be used as a metaphor for the vain and insubstantial,” cites Old Testament parallels. The image is of course polyvalent. See Leick (1994: 33, 38, 45) on wind as a sexual metaphor. Where wind has substance, it is often disease wind or the destructive wind of storm—both of which do the work of undoing what human hands have made. 22 The translation that follows is that of George (1999: 161-166). For an edition of Version A, see Edzard (1990 and 1991).
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reference. The insubstantiality and transience expressed by the trope of human action as mere “wind” represent one term in an implied contrast whose sense is essentially identical to what the following lines from Gilgamesh and Humbaba express by the contrast between water and rock, movement and permanence, fluidity and fixity. On the eve of his expedition to the forest, Gilgamesh addresses the god Utu with the words (A 23-33; cf. B 5-16): In my city a man dies, and the heart is stricken, a man perishes, and the heart feels pain. I raised my head on the rampart, my gaze fell on a corpse drifting down the river, afloat on the water: I too shall become like that, just so shall I be! ... Since no man can escape life’s end, I will enter the mountain and set up my name. Where names are set up, I will set up my name, where names are not yet set up, I will set up gods’ names.
Wind and water vs. substance and stone: the same oppositional structure underlies both figures. In the lines just quoted, the hero’s response to the sight of the floating corpse in the river is the urge to enter the mountain and there “set up” his name. This image of the corpse operates in two distinct but closely related registers. On the one hand, it is of course his own dead body afloat that Gilgamesh sees. In the later OB and SV Gilgamesh, this first and still somewhat detached vision—“a corpse drifting . . . afloat in the water”—will become the closer and far more intimate sight of the corpse of beloved Enkidu, the mirror of the hero’s own inevitable death. Even more significantly, the dead body in the river is Gilgamesh himself in his most obscene manifestation: no longer fused with subjectivity and life, the corpse is just an inert lump, a dumb thing with no agency, the naked object of a horrified gaze.23 Further, and in direct contrast with the inanimate corpse is the constant movement of the river in which it is adrift, like so much flotsam to be snagged on the bank somewhere downstream, or else to be carried out helplessly into the vast and anonymous waters of the Gulf. Its fleshly corruption and the river’s endless flow are therefore indices of one and the same process. Both lead ultimately to disappearance into namelessness—mythopoeically, disappearance back into the primeval state of formless indifferentiation, “when 23 On the interplay of seeing and being seen in Gilgamesh, with special emphasis on the theme of alienation, see Dickson (2007).
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on high heaven was not named, | and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name” (Enuma Elish 1-2). On the other hand, the urge this sight inspires drives the hero away from the river and into the mountain in order to engrave his name there. Reference to the “setting up” of names clearly alludes to the royal practise of inscribed monuments (Walker 1981, Ellis 1986)—at the same time as it presumably also (and with a neat circularity) underwrites that practise by supplying a mythic exemplar. Kings subsequent to Gilgamesh will do just as he did, namely leave their marks on hewn stone that metonymically enjoys the permanence of the mountains from which it is taken. If the corpse afloat is a thing adrift, uprooted and nameless, the mountain is a thing that does not move, its solidity and perdurance offering a figure of the rootedness to which all heroic endeavor aspires. It seeks to achieve precisely the permanence and density of mountains. Moreover, it is quite certain that in Mesopotamian cultural imagination the distance between these opposed terms—river and mountain—once again harks back, within the broader, mythic framework that so often supports implicit ways of articulating experience, to the primal opposition between the watery apsû and the E2-engur-ra or House of the Lord of Deep Waters that Ea aboriginally built to check their flow—and that the trope therefore draws much of its power from that primordial reference.24 Heroic effort is a reprise of cosmogonic work, such that the concrete product in which the former issues mirrors the works of immortal hands. This returns us once more to the issue of Uruk’s wall, built upon foundations laid by the apkallu themselves, insofar as human dwellings in the world all strive to replicate Ea’s cosmic ediface. If it returns us to the wall, the same trope also brings us back to the lapis lazuli tablet. For while the inherent solidity and durability of stone may well be valued qualities in and of themselves, what chiefly recommends it in this context is its use as a signifying medium. Here too the issue of product and agency returns, namely in the form of the capacity of things—like the stone from which mountains, walls, and tablets are made—to serve as indices and also as agents, signs and also signals of transformation. Thanks to texts such as that of Gilgamesh, the trope of inscription is so familiar as a literary topos, its sense so patently obvious, that it is hard now fully to recover its implicit logic. Well enough that the narrative becomes 24
See Edzard (1987); Hurowitz (1992); and van Leeuwen (2007).
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permanent through inscription, the stone lending its substance to the tale it carries well beyond the temporal life of its agent; this much may not strike us as especially odd. But that the longer life the narrative thereby gains should somehow be a life transferred to the hero whose story it tells is in some sense nothing short of magical. How is it exactly that heroes “live on” in the narrative and the narration of their deeds? An understanding of how concrete things facilitate the aim of heroic endeavor to live beyond the hero’s natural life can be approached by examining the representation of three other artifacts in the poem: (1) the body of the wildman Enkidu, (2) his funerary statue, and (3) the strange fruit in the garden into which Gilgamesh stumbles at the end of Tablet IX. All three are offered by the text as in some sense iconic, namely as planned resemblances. They serve thereby as heuristic objects, since all implicitly address the question of the relation between resemblance or iconicity and loss, on which much of the epic turns; in so doing, they make that question available for exploration. Gilgamesh presents two quite distinct configurations of the wildman’s body, mediated through the figure of Enkidu as agent and also through the figure of Enkidu as object. For it should be recalled that he a twice-made thing—once by gods and once by human craftsmen—and that in each case his status is expressly that of an artifact. It is of course not uncommon to see things made in the poem. Throughout the story we observe the manufacture of other artifacts, though often in passages sadly lacunose: the weaponry forged for the heroes in Tablet II, the “dream house” Enkidu constructs for his friend each night of their journey into the Cedar Forest (e.g. IV: 10-13), the raft on which to transport the felled trees (V: 300), the punting-poles Gilgamesh cuts to move himself across the Waters of Death (X: 159-168), and Uta-napishtim’s own craft, on which he rides out the Flood (XI: 50-67). What makes the case of Enkidu unique is that we see his manufacture first at the beginning, then also after the end of his biological life, and by two different types of artisans. In the opening of the tale, we witness his creation by Aruru (I: 101-104) as a divinely-wrought object, an artifact made so as to “let Uruk be rested” (95-98), a pinch of clay cast down into the wilderness and infused there somehow with raw, divine, bestial, androgynous life. Between his entry into the world at that point in the text and his departure from it in Tablet VIII,
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Enkidu famously undergoes transformation from savage into human being, thanks to the intercession of Shamhat, thereby traversing the distance between nature and culture, and then from human being into hero richly endowed with fame and also with mortality. Upon his death, by a curious symmetry, Enkidu reverts explicitly to artifact once again, in the form of the statue Gilgamesh orders his craftsmen to make, both in keeping with traditional funerary customs and also in an attempt to rescue something of his friend from total annihilation.25 In the most extended litany of things and materials preserved in the poem, a passage densely cluttered with objects and stuff, all measured out by their respective weights and values, Gilgamesh has the artisans of Uruk construct a likeness of his friend, an image with “eyebrows of lapis lazuli, . . . chest of gold | . . . body of [. . .]” (VIII: 71-72); as well as splendid gravegifts, offerings to the deities of the Netherworld, no doubt to purchase surety that his friend will not be ill-treated there. Within the cultural context that frames the narrative, the making of the statue (or perhaps “figurine”) is motivated by reference to specific rites of mourning, burial, and the extended cult of the dead.26 Intriguing in this context is Scurlock’s suggestion that the statue in such rituals was intended as a “soul emplacement,” namely as a temporary residence for the agency (et’emmu) of the deceased “between the moment of death and the burial of the body” (2002: 1).27 In this 25 With specific reference to the practise of constructing funerary statues, Katz (1999: 109) remarks: “The knowledge that the body is doomed to perish, contrasted with the abstract sense of the spirit [that somehow continues its life after the body’s death], and the concrete form of its care creates tension between the concrete and abstract realities. It seems that the obvious solution was to employ an icon of the dead for this purpose. By introducing a concrete element to represent the deceased, the abstract spirit received a concrete form and thereby the breach between the belief in its survival and the perceptible reality can be bridged and the tension mitigated.” See also Scurlock (2002) on the notion of “soul emplacements.” 26 George (2003: 486) distinguishes the rites of mourning in the Gilgamesh passage as follows: (1) “the lament on the deathbed . . . (1-64)”; (2) “the fashioning of the funerary statue and other preparations for the funeral (65-91)”; (3) “the public display of the grave-goods, the prayers to the gods of the netherworld and further ritual (92-212)”; (4) “more rites (213-end).” On funerary rituals in general, see George (2003: 486-90), along with Scurlock (2002), Katz (1999), and the articles in Alster (1980). 27 On the nature and status of the et’emmu, see Bottéro (1980: 28-29), who remarks: “. . . il est constant que dans la pensé des anciens Mésopotamiens, il ne subsistait de l’Homme, après sa mort, que deux choses: l’une franchement matérielle, engourdie et paralysée: son squelette; l’autre formelle, aérienne, décalque
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it not only preemptively forestalls the practical problems otherwise caused by disembodied ghosts, but also provides a tangible recipient for the funerary offerings. In its narrative context, on the other hand, the statue additionally serves as a concrete means to explore how objects mediate loss, or rather, how most fail to. In this respect, the statue emphasizes the failure of attempts to cheat the passage of time along its inevitable course into death and decay. Its lavishness paradoxically confirms its futility. As a man-made artifact, Enkidu is hardly more than a broken icon, a flawed simulacrum of his friend. This becomes clearer by examining both icon and corpse within a wider network of images in the poem, all of which relate to the theme of planned resemblance or iconicity. In place of the flesh of Enkidu—once erotically beautiful but now already in the throes of decomposition (X: 59-60 = 136-137 = 236-237)—the statue is a thing of hard mineral stuff, bright metal inlaid with gemstones. The transformation of his body into something rich and strange of course means that Enkidu as statue ideally remains free from corruption and thereby gains a longevity far greater than that of the body for which it substitutes. In so doing, it preserves Enkidu himself as in some sense still present and still tangible.28 Yet by this very fact of substitution—because it is not his true body, after all, because his body has now become something else (pearls for eyes)—the elegant simulacrum also permanently confirms the loss of what it signifies. Its presence verifies his absence. This is why it cannot satisfy the grief of Gilgamesh, but instead only prolongs and exacerbates it, since the artificial body makes the deceased manifest only by simultaneously establishing the fact that he is no longer there. These two configurations of Enkidu therefore stand in polar opposition to each other, at least in terms of how each artifact embodies the relation between agency and product, et’emmu and its “emplacement”:
ombreux et évanescent de ce qu’il avait représenté sa vie durant: son ‘spectre’, son ‘fantôme’, son ‘esprit’, son et’emmu.” See also Scurlock (2002: 1-2). 28 This is the argument of Katz (1999), who examines “the use of a figurine [in funerary rituals] as a proxy for the dead man,” and remarks (117) that “rather than dealing with an abstract spiritual being, a physical, figurative representation of the dead was used for the cult of the ancestors, signifying his actual presence in the house.” See also the passage quoted above, note 25.
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GILGAMESH
ENKIDU STATUE
agency (et’emmu)
+
–
product (body)
–
+
The artifact whose manufacture we witness in Tablet I conjoins living agency with an impermanent and corruptible body, whereas the artifact wrought in Tablet VIII is the reverse: an incorruptible body from which the living agency is gone. An everlasting thing in place of a putrescent corpse, an “ideal form” instead of rotting flesh, the statue thus generates the irony to which Walls (2001: 66) calls attention, namely that “Enkidu’s ideal form is rendered immortal in gold, precious gems, and lapis lazuli even as his fleshly body descends into putrefaction.” This is an irony sharpened by “the stark juxtaposition of Enkidu’s elegant statue with his rotting corpse”—on the one hand, gold and lapis lazuli; on the other, rancid flesh on which a maggot feeds. From a different perspective, however, and still as artifact, there is a sense in which the statue actually lies much closer to what Enkidu has now become after his death—mere clay (X: 68-69 = 145-146 = 245-246), that is—than to the body of Enkidu while he was still alive. For though now splendidly imperishable, the simulacrum is also undeniably quite dead, just as dead as the beloved corpse that Gilgamesh can no longer rouse (VIII: 55-58). If Enkidu alive revelled in his human agency thanks to Shamhat’s precious gift of culture and the friendship of the king, the statue is no more than a manufactured object, a mere product, a lifeless work of mortal hands. No more than the corpse can it hear what is spoken (VIII: 56) or respond to those around it. These further contrasts and similarities can also be represented in schematic form: ENKIDU ALIVE
ENKIDU SIMULACRUM
ENKIDU CORPSE
flesh
refined mineral
clay
corruptible
incorruptible
corrupted
agency
product
raw matter
responsive
unresponsive
unresponsive
sentient
inert
dead
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Slung midway between flesh and clay, living body and dead matter, the statue is a decidedly splendid, painful failure; it succeeds only in preserving the fact that Enkidu has become little more than a lump of senseless dirt, no longer a consumer of food that civilizes but now instead just raw food for worms. This represents a fundamentally iconic failure, in the sense of a planned resemblance that does not succeed in embodying what is indeed the most essential feature of its original. Even if intended as a “soul emplacement” (Scurlock 2002), a surrogate body to house (albeit temporarily) the et’emmu that survives the passing of the flesh, it is no less a house of death than the corpse itself. A mere product, it evinces no living agency, and thereby even carries with it something of the obscenity of the corpse. The full weight of this failure becomes measureable, however, only when the statue is compared with another, far more successful iconicity in Gilgamesh. I have argued elsewhere (Dickson 2007) that the garden of jewelled trees into which the hero emerges at the end of Tablet IX, after his long passage through darkness, amounts to an attempt at iconic representation of something that in fact transgresses conventional categories of thought: namely, the nature of divinity, vital yet somehow also self-renewing and imperishable. Even in its fragmentary condition, this episode—itself now hardly more than a sheer cascade of brilliant shards—nonetheless succeeds in conveying what was certainly its intended affect. The trees in the garden at the end of the earth—root-stock of the Greek Hesperid grove and of Idun’s orchard in the Germanic tradition29—bear weird, even scandalous fruit: carnelian and alabaster, agate and lapis lazuli somehow grow there on the branches, pendulously single or in clusters. Although the scene as preserved for us unfolds almost entirely in the detached mode of visual awe, the presence of these gem-fruits as objects of the hero’s (and our own) rapt gaze cannot conceal the fact that they are actually there to be tasted. These trees bear fruit not for contemplation but for food. Moreover, in the “savage logic” (Lévi-Strauss 1968) that asserts equivalence between what we eat and what we are, the floral growth of precious stones promotes a sequence of analogies whose aim is to On the motif of the garden of the gods, linking its fruit to their longevity, see see Widengren’s study (1951) of the Tree of Life in the ancient Near East, as well as Parpola’s ambitious (and highly speculative) 1993 essay. For traces of the jewelled tree theme in other cultures, see Grelot (1958: 59-60), Horowitz (1998), and George (2003: 497), with references. 29
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represent both what the gods are made of and what we ourselves can never digest and can therefore never be. For if beasts eat raw (e.g. grass) and humans cook the stuff (e.g. bread) they eat—and if both consequently suffer death and decay, having consumed the corruptible—what is it exactly that accounts for the perfect, everlasting bodies of the gods? Could it be that they pluck and chew aba$mü-stone, agate, carnelian, and similar things from these trees, then swallow and weirdly incorporate them, by some miraculous alchemy, into the stuff of their crystalline flesh? As simulacra, iconic representations of divinity, the jewelled trees achieve what cannot be achieved by the funerary statue of Enkidu, even despite (and possibly because of ) the fact that both are made from the same material. For however much Enkidu might seem through his icon to have finally been removed from the world of bodily decay, rescued from corruption, the statue has no genuine life at all and lacks the power to grow, simply but marvelously, like fruit on a branch. Aruru may well have the means to emplace agency within a pinch of clay, but the artisans of Uruk do not. It is this failure, the statue’s flawed iconicity, that sends Gilgamesh on a quest that finally confirms the futility of ever hardening and healing the mortal body against death. By contrast, the dazzling food of the gods confounds thought by conjoining mineral with vegetable kingdoms, making them “pervious” to each other,30 and thereby bearing fruit that ripens without ever suffering the decomposition that attends all earthly life. It flourishes but never wanes or dies, and thus remains exempt from corruption, just as do the beings that manage to ingest it. The fumerary statue, on the other hand, achieves at best a kind of syzygy between these two worlds, that is, between Enkidu’s new mineral body and the et’emmu that has left it forever. While it answers the impulse to concretize and objectively preserve the hero’s lost friend, the statue succeeds in doing so only by turning him into a lifeless product; the precious object holds his form, but cannot hold and thus fails to perpetuate his agency. 30 The term is borrowed from Lowe-Porter’s 1948 translation of Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus, in a passage describing the young Adrian Leverkühn’s fascination with the growth of ice crystals, which seems to parallel growth in the vegetable kingdom. The narrator remarks (18): “If I understood my host aright, then what occupied him was the essential unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, it was the thought that we sin against the latter when we draw too hard and fast a line between the two fields, since in reality it is pervious and there is no elementary capacity which is reserved entirely to the living creature and which the biologist could not also study on an inanimate subject.”
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As a result, Enkidu “lives on” in his “soul-emplacement” only as a potential fetish-object, an exquisite thing that inspires quasi-erotic devotion to itself instead of to what it signifies, and that does so precisely because that signified is permanently absent.31 The funerary icon is no less a house of death than the corpse itself. The marvellous nature of the fruit lies in the fact that it successfully instantiates a coincidentia oppositorum, perfectly melding mineral with vegetable, crystalline permanence with biological flow. In this respect, it conjoins what for human culture always remain the polar opposites under whose sway heroic endeavor proceeds: mountain and river, ediface and apsû, substance and mere wind. We recall that the sight of what will be his own corpse adrift on the waters impels the Sumerian Gilgamesh to the opposite extreme, up into the mountain to inscribe his name there. The relation between time and immutability is expressed in terms of distance, measured by how far a trek it is (and how much bodily effort) to journey from river to summit. The fruit in the garden at the ends of the earth, on the other hand, objectively collapses that distance by embodying the coincidence of permanence and flow. Its iconicity is in that sense perfect, and for that reason the gem-fruit is hardly a simulacrum at all, no mere resemblance. It is instead more like the living conjunction of inert clay and et’emmu that under Aruru’s hands brings Enkidu into the world—were it not that this latter union is impermanent. Through the failure of Enkidu’s funerary statue, the story acknowledges that no human artifact achieves coincidentia. The beloved dies, and not long afterwards also the lover, and no house built of good stone or even lapis lazuli can ever stay their departure. There is a chance, however, that what cannot be accomplished everlastingly once and for all may still be achieved in serial fashion, thanks to the power of some artifacts both to signify and also to affect real change, to work as indices and also as signals. As we saw, wall and tablet in the SV proem to Gilgamesh facilitate an invitation to the 31 Gilgamesh implicitly acknowledges the fetish, first in his refusal to give up Enkidu’s body for longer than the number of days prescribed for mourning, and second in his horrified, obsessive attachment to the image of the maggot that finally drops from the nose of the corpse (X: 59-60 = 136-137 = 236-237). His first response to Enkidu’s death fixates on the corpse despite the fact that its true object is its departed agency. He recoils from the beloved body when the worm instead claims it for its own, and then substitutes for it the artificial body of gold and gems—everlasting and uncorruptible, but now a virtually empty sign.
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reader to engage in certain stylized activities. I am called not just to look, but also to mount the rampart and walk on it back and forth. I am called to see and touch, unlock a box, lift up its lid and lift from it the precious autograph inscription. It is not hard to see in these injunctions the script of a kind of imitatio involving two distinct acts of substitution. In accepting the invitation, I offer myself first as a surrogate body for the body of Gilgamesh that has long ago decayed and is now absent. I do as the hero himself did, since these acts iconically re-enact his heroic career. To measure—kinetically and with the substance of my body—the density and extent of the wall Gilgamesh wrought confirms not just its objective reality but also, through its status as an artifact, the reality of its maker. I walk upon what he built. In this confirmation, something of the hero’s own agency becomes re-embodied, as it were, since my own body now lends his a temporary emplacement. I have suggested that this confirmation in turn has mythic resonance. As one particular artifact, the product of his hands, the wall of Uruk marks his act of construction as a reprise of the divine act that first established Ea’s dwelling on the shifting waters of the apsû. By insisting on the originality of the construction and its resistance to being copied,32 the introit implies that what Gilgamesh has built is as unique as that primal ediface. Its foundation was laid by the apkallu themselves (I: 20-21), after all, beings who bridge the gap between the primeval and the postdiluvian worlds. As a result, the wall of Uruk cannot be replicated by later kings and men (I: 14-17), but only reinstantiated, created each time anew, in the form of each new royal foundation—or so each new royal foundation will claim (Hurowitz 1992, Appendix 7; van Leeuwen 2007:67). There is a sense, then, given the terms in which the SV prologue deploys its imagery, in which this wall is itself the E2-engur-ra, just as the weird fruit in the orchard in Tablet IX is the real flesh of the gods. In both cases, the artifact surpasses its iconicity and verges on identity with what it represents. Something analogous is meant for the reader, too. The imitatio in the prologue proceeds through increasingly more tactile experience (see, climb, open, take) and increasingly more involved embodiment 32 Note the claim—conventional, no doubt, but no less significant—that what Gilgamesh has built cannot be matched (I: 14, 16-17): “view its parapet which none can replicate! . . . the seat of Ishtar, | that no later king can replicate, nor any man.”
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to culminate in an act of speech. From what we have seen of iconicities in Gilgamesh, this shift no longer comes as a surprise. Svenbro’s anthropology of Greek inscriptions points to the centrality of voicing in the dynamic relationship between the funerary text and its reader. That relationship is one of needful appropriation. Since the text is by definition incomplete—as the silent word of an absent speaker—it anticipates the reader, “counts on the reader and the reading aloud that the reader will accomplish,” and therefore deliberately conscripts the reader’s voice to give it its “sonorous realization” (Svenbro 1993: 45). This is the same device the SV prologue directs at its intended audience. Summoned to commit myself bodily to a set of mimetic acts, I am led to mount the wall, take up the tablet, and read aloud “all the misfortunes, all that the hero went through” (I: 28). As an artifact, the wall of Uruk mediates a series of emplacements that position my body in relation to that of Gilgamesh himself. These script my body into a choreography that moves me through stations through which his own body once passed: the Journey Outward, the Vision of the Deep, the Return, the Works of Memorialization.33 As an artifact, the tablet in turn appropriates my voice for use in the equally stylized and iconic act of reading; in so doing, it grants the life of Gilgamesh a kind of serial renewal. While it cannot reach the culmination of the sequence of iconicities—corpse, statue, fruit—that shape the terms in which Gilgamesh understands artifacts in their relation to permanence and loss, the tablet nonetheless might well embody the next best thing. At one extreme in that sequence lies the beloved corpse, eaten by worms; at the other is a distant garden where divine fruit grows, gemlike and miraculously vital, but impossible to eat. Between them stand three works of human hands: funerary statue, lapis lazuli tablet, and brickwork wall, each meant in its way to serve as the emplacement of a life. Relatively permanent, all three are also lamentably empty and mute—except insofar as the inscribed tablet always remains open to speak once again if filled by living voices. I say out loud the words he wrote. My voice each time breathes agency into a body made of stone.
33
See above, note 8, on the heroic narrative pattern.
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Bibliography Abusch, Tzvi. 1997. “Mourning the Death of a Friend.” In Maier 1997:109-121. Ackerman, Susan. 2005. When Heroes Love. The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David. New York: Columbia University Press. Alster, Bendt. 1974. “The Paradigmatic Character of Mesopotamian Heroes,” Revue d’Assyriologie 68:49-60. ———. 1975. Studies in Sumerian Proverbs. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ——— (ed.). 1980. Death in Mesopotamia. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) 1988. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Azize, Joseph, and Noel Weeks (eds.). 1997. Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria. Leuven: Peeters. Bonnot, Thierry. 2002. La vie des objects: D’utensiles banales à objects de collection. Paris: Maison des Sciences de L’Homme. Bottéro, Jean, Clarisse Herrenschmidt, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. 2000. Ancestor of the West. Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bottéro, Jean. 1980. “La mythologie de la mort en Mésopotamie ancienne.” In Alster 1980:25-52. ———. 1992a. Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992b. L’Epopée de Gilgamesh: Le grand homme qui ne voulait pas mourir. Paris: Gallimard. Brown, Bill (ed.). 2004. Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Castillo, Jorge. 2001. “Isdi mati: The Foundations of the Earth?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 121:91-92. Ciraolo, Leda, and Jonathan Seidel (eds.). 2002. Magic and Divination in the Ancient World. Leiden: Styx. Clifford, Richard (ed.). 2007. Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel. Leiden: Brill. Dalley, Stephanie (tr.). 1989. Myths from Mesopotamia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Villiers, Gerda. 2004. Understanding Gilgamesh: His World and His Story. Dissertation, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria. Dickson, Keith. 2007. “The Jewelled Trees: Alterity in Gilgamesh,” Comparative Literature 59.3:193-208. Edzard, Dietz. 1987. “Deep-Rooted Skyscrapers and Bricks: Ancient Mesopotamian Architecture and its Imagery.” In Mindlin 1987:13-24. ———. 1990. “Gilgames und Huwawa A. I. Teil,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie 80:165-203. ———. 1991. “Gilgames und Huwawa A. II. Teil,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie 81:165-233. Ellis, Richard. 1968. Foundation Deposits in Ancient Mesopotamia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foster, Benjamin. 1987. “Gilgamesh: Sex, Love, and the Ascent of Knowledge.” In Marks 1987:21-42. ——— (tr., ed.). 2001. The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Norton.
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Gammie, John, and Leo Perdue (eds.). 1990. The Sage in Israel and the Ancient Near East. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Gardner, John, and John Maier. 1984. Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sin-leqi-unninni version. New York: Knopf. George, Andrew. 2003. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. New York: Barnes & Noble. Grelot, Pierre. 1958. “La Géographie mythique d’Hénoch et les sources orientales,” Revue biblique 65:33-69. Gurney, Oliver. 1955. “The Sultantepe Tablets (Continued). IV. The Cuthaean Legend of Naram-Sin,” Anatolian Studies 5:93-113. Güterbock, Hans. 1934. “Die historische Tradition und ihre literarische Gestaltung bei Babyloniern und Hethitern bis 1200,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie 42:1-91. Harris, Rivka. 2000. Gender and Aging in Mesopotamia: The Gilgamesh Epic and Other Ancient Literature. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Heidel, Alexander. 1949. The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horowitz, Wayne. 1998. Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Hurowitz, Victor. 1992. I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in Light of Mesopotamian and Northwest Semitic Writings. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1976. The Treasures of Darkness. A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1987. The Harps That Once . . . Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1990. “The Gilgamesh Epic: Tragic and Romantic Vision.” In Abusch 1990:231-240. Jager, Bernd. 1973. “The Gilgamesh Epic: A Phenomenological Exploration,” Revue of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 12:1-43. Katz, Dina. 1999. “The Messenger, Lulil and the Cult of the Dead,” Revue d’assyriologie 93:107-118. Kirk, Geoffrey. 1970. Myth. Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knappett, Carl (ed.). 2005. Thinking Through Material Culture. An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lambert, Wilfred. 1960. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leach, Edmund. 1976. Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leick, Gwendolyn. 1994. Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1968. Structural Anthropology. London: Penguin. Longman, Tremper. 1991. Fictional Akkadian Autobiography. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Maier, John (ed.) 1997. Gilgamesh: A Reader. Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci. Mandell, Sara. 1997. “Liminality, Altered States, and the Gilgamesh Epic.” In Maier 1997:122-130. Marks, John, and Robert Good (eds.). 1987. Love & Death in the Ancient Near East. Essays in Honor of Marvin H. Pope. Guilford: Four Quarters.
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Mindlin, Murry et al. (eds.). 1987. Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East. London: School of Oriental Studies. Moran, William. 1991. “The Epic of Gilgamesh: A Document of Ancient Humanism,” Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies 22:15-22. Nagy, Gregory. 1983. “Sêma and nóêsis: Some Illustrations,” Arethusa 16:35-55. ———. 1990. Greek Mythology and Poetics. Itahaca: Cornell University Press. Oppenheim, A. Leo. 1948. “Mesopotamian Mythology II,” Orientalia 17:17-58. ———. 1977. Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parpola, Simo. 1993. “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52:161-208. Patton, Laurie, and Wendy Doniger (eds.). 1996. Myth and Method. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Penglase, Charles. 1994. Greek Myths and Mesopotamia. London: Routledge. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate. 1999. “ ‘Öffne den Tafelbehälter und lies . . .’ Neue Ansätze sum Verständnis des Literaturekonzeptes in Mesopotamien,” Die Welt des Orients 20: 67-90. Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ray, Benjamin. 1996. “The Gilgamesh Epic: Myth and Meaning.” In Patton 1996:300-326. Riggins, Stephen (ed.). 1994. The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects. Berlin: de Gruyter. Russell, John. 1991. Sennacherib’s Palace Without Rival at Nineveh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Scurlock, Joann. 2002. “Soul Emplacements in Ancient Mesopotamian Funerary Rituals.” In Ciraolo 2002:1-6. Segal, Charles. 1982. “Tragédie, oralité, écriture,” Poétique 50:131-54. Segal, Robert (ed.) 1990. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Serracino Inglott, Peter. 1965. “The Structure of the Gilgamesh Epic,” Melita Theologica 17:1-19. Svenbro, Jesper. 1993. Phrasiklea: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sweet, Ronald. 1990. “The Sage in Akkadian Literature: A Philological Study.” In Gammie 1990:45-65. Tigay, Jeffrey. 1982. The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tournay, Raymond, and Aaron Shaffer. 1994. L’Épopée de Gilgamesh. Introduction, Traduction et Notes. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. van der Toorn, Karel. 2007. “Why Wisdom Became a Secret: On Wisdom as a Written Genre.” In Clifford 2007:21-29. van Dijk, J.J.A. 1953. La sagesse suméro-accadienne: Recherches sur les genres littéraires des textes sapientiaux avec choix de textes. Leiden: Brill. van Leeuwen, Raymond. 2007. “Cosmos, Temple, House: Building and Wisdom in Mesopotamia and Israel.” In Clifford 2007:67-90. van Nortwick, Thomas. 1991. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vernant, Jean-Pierre (ed.). 1974. Divination et rationalité. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1990. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece. New York: Zone Books. Walker, C. B. F. 1981. “The Second Tablet of tupsenna pitema, an Old Babylonian Naram-Sin legend,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 33:191-195.
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Walls, Neal. 2001. Desire, Discord and Death. Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Myth. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research. Weeks, Noel. 2007. “Assyrian Imperialism and the Walls of Uruk.” In Azize 2007: 79-90. West, Martin. 1997. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Widengren, Geo. 1951. The King and the Tree of Life in Ancient Near Eastern Religion (King and Saviour IV). Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift 4:1-79. Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln. Wolff, Hope. 1987. A Study in the Narrative Structure of Three Epic Poems: Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Beowulf. Harvard Dissertations in Comparative Literature. New York and London: Garland.
THE OWL IN PHOENICIAN MORTUARY PRACTICE PHILIP C. SCHMITZ Eastern Michigan University Abstract Recent excavations in the Iron Age necropolis of Tyre (al-Bass district) allow a substantial reconstruction of the Phoenician ritual of cremation burial. Among the faunal remains from Tyre al-Bass Tomb 8 are two talons from a species of owl. The talons had been charred and perhaps boiled before placement with the grave goods. This paper examines ancient Near Eastern and biblical cultural interpretations of the owl and suggests a range of possible explanations for the presence of owl remains in this Phoenician burial.
The chance discovery in 1990 of the Phoenician-period necropolis of Tyre occasioned a controlled archaeological excavation of a major Phoenician cemetery from the Lebanese coast (Aubet 1998-99).1 The cemetery is located on the mainland in the al-Bass district near the Unless otherwise explained, abbreviations follow The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander, J. F. Kutsko, J. D. Ernest, S. Decker-Lucke, and D. L. Petersen (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999). Assyriological abbreviatons follow the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD). Additional abbreviations appear above the bibliography at the end of this paper. I wish to thank Regine Hunziker-Rodewald, JoAnn Scurlock, Mark S. Smith, and Richard Whitekettle for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Stephen E. Thompson provided a detail about Phoenician seal iconography from the surviving papers of the late William A. Ward. JANER editor Christopher Woods and an anonymous reader improved the argument at several turns through their perceptive questions. The principal excavator of the Tyre necropolis, Maria Eugenia Aubet, graciously supplied photographs of the owl talons discovered at Tyre, published here as plate 1. I am grateful to her for her generous permission to publish these images. None of these scholars bears responsibility for the arguments I have put forward herein or for errors of fact or judgment that may remain. 1 Roger Saidah (1966) excavated the Iron Age cemetery at Khaldé, near Beirut, as well as the Sidon-Dakerman necropolis (Saidah 1969). Sader (1995) discusses these in a survey of all archaeologically investigated Phoenician cemeteries in Lebanon. The discovery of a funerary stele at Tell el-Burak, a coastal site south of Sidon, implies a necropolis, still to be excavated (Sader 2005: 16). Doumet-Serhal (2008) publishes important photographs from Saidah’s excavations. For broader archaeological context, see Nunn (2001). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 Also available online – brill.nl/jane
JANER 9.1 DOI: 10.1163/156921209X449161
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ancient coastline.2 Excavations in 1997, 1999, and 2002 resulted in the discovery of more than eighty cremation burials from the ninth to the seventh centuries BC (Aubet 2003; 2006b). The burials are intact and excellently preserved, yielding a greater amount of unspoiled funerary material than ever available before. The excavators have been able to reconstruct a number of homogeneous mortuary assemblages, permitting a degree of generalization as well as more specific analysis. Cremation burials predominate in the excavated area of the alBass necropolis. A recurring pattern is the use of two urns for the burial accompanied with a set of funerary utensils: “a trefoil-rim jug with a conical neck and globular body, a mushroom-rim jug, and a flat hemispherical bowl for drinking” (Aubet 2006b: 37).3 Analysis of individual inhumations is still in the preliminary stage, but already the general features of Phoenician cremation ritual in the eighth century BC are becoming clear. In most cases, two Cypriot-style urns containing cremated remains were placed at the bottom of a quadrangular grave pit. Small items of personal use, such as a necklace and a scarab or amulet are usually found in one of the two urns. Faunal remains were mixed with the human remains (Aubet, Nuñez, and Trelliso 2004: 223-35; Aubet 2006a: 5-6; 2006b: 40). After placement in the pit, the urns and their associated grave goods were covered with reeds, branches and leaves from white poplar, fig, and olive trees, and vine stems, and set ablaze (Aubet 2006a: 7-8; 2006b: 43). Additional personal items might be placed outside the urns as the purifying fire burned; plates and cups probably used in a funerary meal were deliberately broken and thrown into the pit; after the flames died down, the grave was covered over. The most completely published burial thus far is Tomb no. 8 (Aubet 2006b). Only one of the burial urns could be recovered from this tomb group because the second urn lies outside the excavation area. The contents of the recovered burial urn include forty fragments of charred human bone of indeterminate sex and several types of faunal remains (Aubet, Nuñez, and Trelliso 2004: 228-31; Aubet 2006b: 40). Bovine and ovicaprid remains are unsurprising 2 The main city of ancient Tyre occupied an island some distance from the coastline. When Alexander the Great besieged Tyre, he had a causeway built from the coast to the island, uniting the two parts of the city. 3 Boardman (2001: 39) and Coldstream (2006: 51-52) emphasize the Phoenician preference for the hemispherical drinking bowl without the handles or foot of the Greek skyphos. On the form’s evolution, see Briese and Docter (2002).
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in this context, appearing also in graves from the “earliest layers of the Carthaginian settlement” (Docter et al. 2006: 39) contemporary with the Tyre al-Bass cremation burials.4 Truly surprising is the identification of two claws from a species of owl, the tawny owl (Strix aluco) or the little owl (Athene noctua), both native to Lebanon. Aubet adds a still more astonishing detail: “A close examination of these faunal remains revealed that, before being placed in the fire, they had been cooked or boiled” (Aubet 2006b: 40).5 The excavator surmises that the remains of a meal or offering had been placed on the funeral pyre together with the corpse of the deceased and subsequently mixed with the human remains in the burial urn. The following list of owl species in the Levant is taken from Gilbert (2002: 67, tab. 1.2).6 The scientific name falls in the left column, the common name in the center column, and recently observed habits in the right column. Subfamily Buboninae (eagle owls and allies) Athene noctua Bubo ascalaphus Bubo bubo Ketupa zeylonensis
little owl pharaoh eagle-owl Eurasian eagle-owl brown fish-owl
Otus brucei
pallid scops-owl
Otus scops
common scops owl
resident breeder-abundant resident breeder resident breeder—rare resident breeder—former, now rare resident breeder —rare; winter migrant—rare migrant breeder; migrant (continued on next page)
The remains, discovered during the University of Hamburg excavations at Carthage beneath the ancient Decumanus Maximus, yielded homogeneously calibrated absolute C14 dates slightly earlier than 800 BCE. 5 Plate 1 shows the owl claws in question. The excavator has added the following clarification in a letter to the author (November 15, 2007): “Two claws, two charred small phalanges, one of these complete, belonging to the third and fourth toes of a tawny owl (Strix aluco). Clear signs of burning and char[ring]. Some bone remains appear burned and charred, some probably boiled before burning. Not clear in the case of the claws (not visible due to the effect of charring).” Thus it remains uncertain whether the owl constituted part of a meal offering or any other procedure involving boiling. 6 The “taxa are compiled from recent sources and are based on verified field observations” (Gilbert 2002: 9). 4
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(cont.) Subfamily Striginae (wood owls and allies) Asio flammeus Asio otus
short-eared owl long-eared owl
Strix aluco Strix butleri
tawny owl Hume’s owl
winter migrant—rare resident breeder—rare; winter migrant—rare resident breeder—rare resident breeder
I do not have the expertise to determine how much the habits of these species have changed over time, or whether their distribution today is similar to their distribution in the eighth century BC. We see from the table that the little owl (Athene noctua) is currently an abundant resident breeding species in the Levant, while the tawny owl (Strix aluco) is rare, although a resident. In contemporary English slang, “owl soup” serves as a watchword designating anything unpalatable or distasteful, but in biblical law, owls are included in the list of birds not to be eaten, in Lev 11:13-19 and Deut 14:11-18. In Lev 11:16 // Deut 14:15, Hebrew ta mas is rendered glaux ‘owl’ in the old Greek translation (LXX), and this interpretation was favored by rabbinic interpreters, for example, Saadia Gaon (Kaplan 1981: 319; Driver 1955, ‘short-eared owl’; Bulmer 1986: 33, ‘kites’; 1989: 307, tab. 1, ‘uncertain’; Houston 1993: 44). In Lev 11:17 // Deut 14:16, Hebrew kôs (Greek nyktikorax) could designate a variety of smaller and medium-sized owls (Driver 1955: 14, ‘tawny owl’; Firmage 1992: 1155; Houston 1993: 44, ‘long-eared owl’). In Lev 11:19 // Deut 14:18, the ancient Greek translation seems to reflect a Hebrew text differently arranged than the traditional Masoretic text (Yerkes 1924: 8; Wevers 1978: 129: “scrambled”; Houston 1993: 47-48). Hebrew ăsîdâ is rendered in Greek either glaux ‘owl’ or arōidios (Lev 11:19). In the parallel passage in Deut 14:17, the Greek translation appears to give erōidios, perhaps indicating the long-eared owl (Boraston 1911: 240-41, interpreting Aristotle, History of Animals, 8.12.597b).7 The Hebrew word ăsîdâ is traditionally thought to designate the stork, a kosher
7 “Aristotle did not intend to assign birds to rigid categories,” cautioned Stresemann. “He used [classifying] terms more descriptively than taxonomically” (1975: 5).
the owl in phoenician mortuary practice
60012-TIRO-T14-STRIX ALUCO (CARABO)
60013-TIRO-T14-STRIX ALUCO (CARABO) Plate 1: Owl Talons from Tyre al-Bass Tomb 8
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bird (Kaplan 1981: 319; Bulmer 1989: 307, tab. 1, ‘storks, especially White Storks [Ciconia ciconia]’; Houston 1993: 45, ‘heron’). The biblical prohibition itself seems to imply that owls were sometimes included in the diet of Canaanite populations. A review of the archaeological literature, however, concludes that very little surviving artifactual evidence bears on bird consumption in ancient Syria-Palestine (Houston 1993: 143). Bird remains generally are poorly preserved in the archaeological record (Gilbert 2002: 35). Domestic fowl and wild partridges can be detected from osteological remains in the Syria-Palestine region, but “we can find very little evidence of the eating of [biblically] unclean species in Israel’s immediate environment” (Houston 1993: 143).8 Thus our thoughts about culinary uses of the owl by Canaanites must remain largely speculative. There are also a number of possible non-culinary motives for cooking or boiling an animal, and these will emerge later in my discussion. First I will provide a summary of the owl’s cultural interpretations and then derive from those interpretations possible explanations for the presence of owl remains in a Phoenician burial. I will consider first the nocturnal habits of the owl and the consequent association of the bird with sleep. This association lends itself to metaphoric connection with death and funerals, a connection which is most richly documented in pre-Islamic Arabic verse. Next I will survey the association of owls with misfortune generally, and their literary role as haunters of lonely ruined places. Finally I will consider the bird’s unusual eyes and eyesight. The ocular theme is principally involved in medicinal uses of the owl and its parts, and contributes to magical uses or associations also. Having surveyed cultural interpretations of the owl, I will add to our current knowledge about Phoenician-Punic beliefs concerning afterlife. Following this, I consider several possible explanations for the presence of owl remains in the Phoenician burial at Tyre al-Bass tomb 8.
8 The flesh of the eššebu-bird is prescribed as a remedy for ghost-induced illness (see appendix).
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The Owl’s Cultural Interpretations From the nocturnal habits of the owl comes the consequent association of the bird with sleep.9 Its ominous call disturbs human sleep, giving occasion to omens: šumma MUŠEN ki-li-li ina qūlti mūši ina tarba amēli lu ina muhhi i i lu ina muhhi [. . .] “if an owl [hoots?] in the dead of the night in a man’s yard either in a tree or in a [. . .]” (CT 40 43:39; CAD 8:357 s.v. kilili). From the mournful sound of the owl’s call comes an association with sickness and misery: qadûmušen i ur . . . d Ea tukku tukku GÙ.GÙ-s[i . . .] “The owl is the bird of Ea. Its cry is, ‘Lament, lament’ ” (KAR 125:9 [Lambert 1970: 114-15]). From these and from its predatory character arise metaphoric connections with death and funerals. This unhappy association extends to the implication of owls with misfortune generally. A representative example of association with sickness and misery occurs in Ps 102: 7b-8a.10 The psalmist speaks in the guise of an ailing sufferer in a state of malnutrition and emaciation. After three similes implying a dangerously ill condition (vv 4-5a) and three very brief self-portraits (5b-6), the sufferer declares: Ps 102: 7a: dāmîtî liq at midbār “I resemble an eagle owl in the wilderness Ps 102: 7b: hāyîtî kĕkôs hoˇrābôt “I have become like a little owl among ruins.”11 In both urban and remote settings, the owl serves as a symbol of loneliness or devastation throughout Southwest Asia and adjoining regions. A very early example is from Sumerian verse: u3-ku-kumušen mušen šag4 sig3-ga-ke4 gud3 he2-em-ma-an-us2 “May the ukuku, the bird of depression, make its nest in your gateways, established for
9 Note the Sumerian bird name ukukumušen, ‘sleeping bird’ (see below). In Greek myth, Sleep takes the form of a chalkis bird (Pollard 1977: 158). The Suida lexicon defines chalkis as “a kind of bird or owl [glaux]” (Adler 1935: 783). 10 Psalm 102 is collected in ‘Book’ IV of the Psalter (Pss 90-106), a group of seventeen Psalms that employ the Tetragrammaton exclusively for the divine name; there are no occurrences of the name ‘Elohim’. Retention of the Tetragrammaton is perhaps a sign of pre-exilic origin. 11 My translation of Heb. qā āt as ‘eagle owl’ (Bubo bubo) follows comments by the late anthropologist and naturalist Ralph Bulmer, who made this identification. Bulmer further observed that kôs is “generic for medium-sized and smaller owls, esp. Little Owl” (Bulmer 1986: 55).
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the Land!” (Cursing of Agade, lines 256-59).12 A more explicit association of the bird with urban destruction occurs in a lament: mušen uru2 gul-la-ke4 gud3 [. . .] / u3-ku-kumušen mušen šag4 sig3-ga-ke4 ki? [. . .] “The bird of destroyed cities . . . . . . a nest. The sleep-bird, bird of heart’s sorrow, . . .” (Lament for Eridug 81-82).13 The Sumerian bird name u3-ku-kumušen or u5-ku-kumušen (Veldhuis 2004: 293-94; Akkad. allalu) “literally means ‘sleeping bird’ ” (Veldhius 2004: 294), but its epithet mušen šag4-sig3-gamušen “bird of depression” and the bird’s literary association with urban devastation (Cursing of Agade, line 259; Lament for Eridug, line 82) invite a connection with iri-hul-amušen = qadû. Veldhuis argues the connection further from the adjacency of u3-ku-ku-ba-uš2mušen = ittīl [imūt] ‘it lays down and dies’ = MIN (qadû) in a first-millennium lexical commentary (2004: 294).14 Veldhuis (ibid.) suggests the possible ornithological identification of ukukumušen as the sandgrouse, as with iri-hul-amušen (see Veldhuis 2004: 258). Three lines of circumstantial evidence suggest the owl as another possible identification. First, the name uru/iri-hul-a ‘destroyed city’ recalls the powerful literary association of the owl with urban devastation in first-millennium Hebrew and Aramaic texts, examples of which have been discussed above. Second, the name ukukumušen, ‘sleeping bird’, corresponds to a traditional association of owls with sleep, also discussed above. Third, the epithet mušen šag4-sig3-gamušen ‘bird of depression’ (lit. ‘heart-sadness’) corresponds to the near-universal association of owls with impending misfortune or death. The consistency of the imagistic associations connected with this bird name leaves some ground for interpreting it as designating a variety of owl.15 In Akkadian sources the owl (URU.HUL.A.MUŠEN, qadû) is associated with the chthonic god Ea (KAR 125:9 [Lambert 1970: 114-15]; CAD 13:51 s.v. qadû A). An oath could be sworn by the
12 Text: Falkenstein (1965); Cooper (1983). I follow the names of Sumerian source texts assigned by Veldhuis (2004), who provides specific text or tablet assignations. 13 The text follows Green (1978: 136, kirigu 4.4-5), but reading šag4 (Veldhius 2004: 294) rather than ša3 with Green. Line numbers follow Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.2.2.6& display=Crit&charenc=gcirc&lineid=c226.1.A.G.78#c226.1.A.G.78 (accessed 10/20/07). 14 On the literature, see Cooper (1983: 256). 15 In my judgment these negative associations fit poorly with the noisy and gregarious behavior of the sandgrouse, noted by Veldhuis (2004: 258).
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owl (qa-du-u; Šurpu III 68).16 In medical texts, owl blood (ÚŠ qadû MUŠEN) is an ingredient of medicaments (BRM 4 32:8; Köcher 1955, 28 I 11; TCL 634 i 6). These latter examples appear to demonstrate a belief in curative powers of the owl, also widely attested in folklore.17 One image of the owl from Syria is contemporary with the Tyre assemblage from al-Bass Tomb 8. In the eighth-century treaty recorded in the Aramaic inscription from Sefire, the owl serves as an emblem of desolation. Near the conclusion of an oath threatening the city of Arpad with utter destruction should it prove disloyal comes the following curse: “And may Arpad become a mound to [house the desert animal and the] gazelle and the fox and the hare and the wild-cat and the owl and the [ ] and the magpie!” (KAI 222 I A 33; translation, Fitzmyer 1967: 15; cf. Hillers 1964: 44-45).18 The theme of the owl among ruins repeats in the Hebrew Bible. An oracle concerning Edom, Isa 34:11, declares that the eagle owl (qā āt) will inherit the devastated land, and another possible variety of owl (yanšûp) will also dwell in it.19 The eagle owl (qā āt) roosts on the capitals of a desolated Nineveh in the prophetic vision of Zeph 2:14.20 The owl’s unusual face, having a semi-human appearance,21 and its large eyes and keen eyesight lend further mystery to the bird. 16 Note Pliny’s observation: “the manner was in old time, to use in cursing and execration, the name of Strix” (N.H. 39, trans. Philemon Holland [1601], http://penelope. uchicago.edu/holland/pliny11.html#b124a [accessed 10/14/07]). 17 Akkadian akkû ‘owl’ (AHw 29) occurs only in lexical texts. Possibly cognate is Syriac kawtā ‘owl’ http://www.premiumwanadoo.com/cuneiform.languages/ dictionary/dosearch.php?searchkey=akk%FB&language=rawakkadian. The word for ‘owl’ in Hittite is hupupi-, -a-, -u- (Puhvel 1991: 3.130-31). In the Hittite version of the (Canaanite-influenced) myth of Elkunirsha and Asertu, Ishtar becomes an owl in the hand of Elkunirsha (ANET, 519; KUB XXXVI 37, II.4-6). The Hittite Sumerogram GAL-is may be a rebus writing of GAZ, representing Semitic kôs or its Indo-European equivalent, e.g., Germ. Kauz (Puhvel 1991: 3.130-31). 18 The Aramaic word translated ‘owl’ is dh (see Fitzmyer 1967: 50). The Arabic cognate adā designates an owl, although the species is uncertain (TSSI 2: 41; Homerin 1985: 175, n. 55). This variety of owl is absent from the Hebrew text of Lev 11:13-19 or Deut 14:11-18; however, Tg. Yer. I translates Heb. tinšemet (Deut 14:16) with J.Arm. adyā and Heb. kôs (Lev 11:17) with J.Arm. ay(y)dā (DJPA 458a). In both cases, the Hebrew word designates a kind of owl (see table 1). 19 Bulmer (1986: 55) favored ‘ibis’ as the meaning of yanšûp, but later declared the meaning uncertain (1989: 307, tab. 1). The Heb. word o îm (Isa 13:21) may refer to a type of owl (HALOT, Study Edition, 29). 20 The bat ya ănah in Job 30:29 is sometimes interpreted as the eagle owl (Driver 1955) or an unspecified owl species (Cansdale 1970), but it is more convincingly interpreted as a type of ostrich. 21 A theme in pre-Islamic Arabic verse; see Homerin (1985: 168 n. 15). The owl’s anthropomorphism is most acutely symbolized in the kachina spirits of the Hopi (Holmgren 1988: 124-26).
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Owls, for example “have spherical pupils, and in this respect their eyes are designed for twenty-four-hours [sic] vision” (Sparks and Soper 1989: 212). Contemplation of these features probably led to the invention of some of the medicinal uses of the owl and its parts. A number of folk remedies, for example, employ owl eyes in the cure of ophthalmic diseases (Pollard 1977: 133; Duncan 2003: 101). Pliny the Elder specifies the eyes of a horned owl: “The eyes of a horned owl, it is strongly asserted, reduced to ashes and mixed in an eye-salve, will improve the sight” (H.N. 29.38).22 The early modern physician and naturalist Conrad Gesner included in the third volume of his Historia animalium (1555)23 fifteen pages on the medical use of owls. “Gesner . . . cited the use of owl eyes in various prescriptions to improve weak vision” (Holmgren 1988: 100). I have found in Pliny two attestations of the medicinal use of owls’ feet: “For quartan fever, the magicians recommend cats’ dung to be attached to the body, with the toe of a horned owl, and, that the fever may not be recurrent, not to be removed until the seventh paroxysm is past” (H. N. 28.66). Further on Pliny remarks that “the feet of a horned owl burnt with the herb plumbago [leadwort]” provides help against snake bite (H. N. 29.26; cf. Holmgren 1988: 98). The antiquity of these treatments is uncertain.24 The variety of owl mentioned by Pliny is larger than those potentially identified in faunal remains from the Tyre excavation. Outside Phoenicia, owls are associated with ancient burials on the island of Crete. The British School at Athens’ 1978 excavations in the cemetery of Knossus recovered from the looted debris of tombs 36, 56, and 57 a fine plastic terracotta owl with long ear tufts, probably portraying otus scops (Catling 1978-79: 53, 52 no. 31). The tombs are from the Geometric period. The Arkades cemetery in Crete (Levi 1927-29), whose burials dating from the ninth to the seventh centuries B.C.E. show distinctive Levantine influence (Morris 1992: 161), was the site where Doro Levi discovered “a great number of owls in terracotta and other materials” (Levi 1945: 309 n. 178).25 22 Later (H. N. 30.29), Pliny ranks this magical practice among others that abuse human credulity. 23 On Gesner and his book’s influence, see Stresemann (1975: 18-20). 24 Bynon (1987: 155) traces Pliny’s owl-lore to Hellenistic medical authors of the mid-second century B.C.E. 25 Note the relevant observation by JoAnn Scurlock (2002: 373) concerning Mesopotamian disposal of a ‘strange bird’ by placing it in a grave. “If the ominous animal itself was nowhere to be found, a clay figurine of the appropriate
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From the same cultural context, the Cretan myth of Glaucus, son of Minos, includes an owl in a significant role. The myth is preserved in the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus (3.17.1-21) and in Hyginus, Fabulae, 146. Glaucus, while chasing a mouse or flies (Apollodorus), or playing ball (Hyginus), fell into a pithos full of honey and died. The seer Polyidus is compelled to search for the boy. Having found the boy’s corpse, the seer is repelled by a snake, which he kills. Another snake then revives the dead snake by means of an herbal application. Polyidus uses the same herb to revive the dead boy. Hyginus adds a relevant detail concerning the sign that enabled the discovery of the boy’s corpse: Polyidus sees a night owl (noctua) sitting over a wine cellar frightening away bees, which he interprets and then pulls the lifeless boy ( puerum exanimem) from the honey jar (Muellner 1998: 11). The mortuary associations of the owl appear to be at play in this myth.26 Pre-Islamic Arabic verse best documents the association of the owl with death and funerals. According to Homerin, belief in afterlife had reached an attenuated condition among the Arabs in late antiquity; still, “ancient Arab burial customs point to a belief in some sort of afterlife, probably a kind of reduced existence” (Homerin 1985: 167). For some of the malcontent dead, life might continue under the parched and tormented form of an owl: “the owl formed from the bones of the dead or was a receptacle of the dead person’s spirit (Arb. rû ) and further, . . . the owl exited from the head” (Homerin 1985: 169; cf. Gruppe 1906: 794 n. 3). This theme occurs in a considerable range of pre-Islamic verse. In cases of violent death, the owl further comes to symbolize the deceased’s thirst for vengeance against the killer (Homerin 1990: 565). The “desperate need of abandoned ghosts for food and water” (Scurlock 2006: 5) is a concern of ancient Mesopotamian curses (ibid., 88 n. 61). Certain categories of ancient Mesopotamian medical diagnoses concern afflictions brought about by ghosts shape could be substituted.” Doumet-Serhal (2008: 44, citing Stampolidis 2003: 220-21, 230) suggests that bird-shaped vases excavated in the Arkades cemetery and in the Phoenician burials at Khaldé “perhaps represent a belief that associates the soul with a bird.” The Khaldé bird-shaped askoi do not resemble owls (Doumet-Serhal 2008: 46, figs. 73-74). 26 A series of Egyptianizing seals in the National Museum of Tarento (ancient Taurentum) in Italy were excavated in Greek burials firmly dated to the mid-sixth century BCE. Seventeen seals portray an owl, and sixteen in this group of seals carry the motif of an owl and sun disk. Hölbl (1979: 1.148-49; 2.218; 222-24, nos. 1059; 1083-98; pls. 112.3, 121-22) traces these to workshops of Naucratis in Egypt.
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(Scurlock and Andersen 2005: 525-28). These diagnoses occasionally take account of the cause of death experienced by the ghostly nuisance. Among those represented are death by a weapon and abandonment in the steppe, death through murder, death from thirst, death in water, and death by burning (Scurlock 2006: 5). None of the means of treating ghost-induced illnesses studied by Scurlock clearly involves medical use of the owl.27 Because of the possibility of association between the owl and the spirit of the deceased, and because of the funerary context of the owl talons found in Tyre al-Bass Tomb 8, we should examine the evidence for Canaanite and Phoenician-Punic belief in afterlife from artifacts and documents. The evidence is significant when examined collectively. Phoenician-Punic Beliefs Concerning Afterlife A dualistic anthropology that distinguishes between body and soul or spirit had developed in coastal Syria by the Late Bronze Age.28 The legend of Aqhat from Ugarit, for example, evinces the distinction in an elaborate simile about death: tsi . km r . npšh . km . itl . brlth km qtr . baph
His soul29 shall exit like a wind30 like sputum31 (from) his throat32 like smoke from his nostrils (CAT 1.18 IV:24-25).
27 The indexes of Scurlock and Andersen 2005 and Scurlock 2006 do not list Sumerian URU.HUL.MUŠEN or ukuku, Akkadian akkû, kilili, or qadû, English ‘owl’, or the scientific name of any owl species. On the eššebu, see the appendix. 28 In Egypt, “the earliest clear signs of a belief in the survival of death date from the beginning of the fourth millennium BC” (Taylor 2001). In Mesopotamia, from at least the third millennium, “the ghost was universally held to be a real, animated being and that it was sustained by actual food and drink, provided by the living” (Dina Katz, in Johnston 2004: 477). 29 On npš ‘soul’, see Korpel (1990: 320); Triebel (2004, esp. 3-11). 30 Ugaritic r designates ‘wind’ or moving air (e.g., KTU 1.13:33-34; Korpel 1990: 320; 327; 598); ‘breath’ is implied in Biblical Hebrew by the association of r with the divine nostrils (e.g., Exod 15:8; 2 Sam 22: 16; Korpel 1990: 327 n. 74), and the human buccal cavity (e.g., Job 27:3). The latter associations are not clearly evident in extant Ugaritic texts, except possibly in this passage. The word spaces in the transcribed Ugaritic text not marked on the original tablet with word dividers represent modern editorial decisions which I follow. 31 Note the following discussions: del Olmo (1981: 365); Watson (1987); Korpel (1990: 119 n. 206) ‘spittle’; del Olmo and Sanmartín (1996: 1.60-61). 32 The meaning is uncertain. My translation follows Korpel (1990: 143), but cf. del Olmo and Sanmartín (1996: 1: 116) ‘spirit, vital force’.
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The word npš, here translated ‘soul’, represents the component of the human being that is conceptualized as separable from the body, similar to breath, sputum, and smoke.33 The word r connotes ‘wind’ (KTU 1.5:V.7) as well as ‘spirit’ (KTU 1.5:IV.3, so Korpel 1990: 293). Biblical Hebrew use of r in the sense ‘spirit, soul’ suggests complex conceptual integration (see Turner 2007). Ezekiel 37:5-10, a passage concerning the resuscitation of ‘dry bones’,34 includes several ambiguous uses of Heb. rûa . In vv 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10, the meaning of rûa is clearly ‘spirit’, but aspects of both the notion of ‘breath’ and the notion of ‘soul’ are implied in the context. In Ezek 37:5, the divine speaker says ǎnî mēbî bākem rûa ‘I will cause breath/spirit to enter you’ (RSV, NJPS), an apparent reference to respiration. This ambiguity continues in 37:6, wĕnātatî bākem rûa ‘and I will put breath into you’ (RSV, NJPS). The ambiguity of these statements is transformed in 37:14, where, following a statement that the “whole house of Israel” (v 11) will be raised from their graves (v 13), the divine voice declares, wĕnātatî rû î bākem ‘I will put My breath into you’ (NJPS), or ‘I will put my Spirit into you’ (RSV), a translation difference laden with theological import.35 Hardly less ambiguous is Qohelet’s jaded observation that humanity and beasts have rûa e ād ‘one spirit’ (Eccl 3:19). The skeptical speculation that both kinds may be without distinction after death regarding the direction rûa travels (3:21) appears to question received wisdom on the subject. The two metaphoric concepts Life is Breath and Soul is Breath are blended in a complex way in the Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew passages cited above. The goal of such ‘double-scope blending’ is “to set up a contrastive tension rather than impose a source to target domain mapping” (Slingerland 2008: 179). Concept blending—more broadly labeled conceptual integration—heightens 33 The cognate Biblical Hebrew words rûa and nepeš express inwardness in Job 7:11, Isa 26:9, and Prov 29:10-11. For comprehensive discussion of these words in Biblical Hebrew, see Oelsner (1960), Lys (1959; 1962), and Lauha (1983). 34 “The first clear description of the idea of resurrection in the Bible” (Freedman 1997a: 26), but referring to “resurrection of the nation” (ibid., 20). In Freedman’s view, “The contents of the book all go back to the prophet, though the book itself may have been compiled at a later date” (ibid., 15). 35 “In the valley of bones,” says Freedman (1997b: 261), the divine speaker “says he animates the bones not so that they can live, but so they can know that he is the Lord” (emphasis original).
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ambiguity rather than diminishing it in order to recruit and transform emotion by way of thought (Slingerland 2008: 185; see further Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Cognitive theorists regard conceptual integration as one of the wellsprings of human creativity. A variety of beliefs about bodily resurrection, ascension, and immortality begin to take root in Judaism during the period of abrupt transition from Babylonian domination of Judah to Persian hegemony (Schmidt 2000: 96). The belief in resurrection “has been explained as the result of a combination of factors: foreign religious influence—Persian, Greek, or otherwise—, social and individual crises, and the inadequacy of traditional constructs of theodicy” (ibid.). John Day (2002: 125) derives Jewish belief in resurrection from an ultimate origin in “Canaanite Baal mythology.”36 In furtherance of this view, he argues against a facile view that Judaism imported Zoroastrian beliefs about resurrection.37 Early in his argument, Day (2002: 125-26) points out the apparent attractiveness of believing that Judaism acquired the doctrine of resurrection only after extended and “friendlier” contact with the Persian Empire. He also notes a reference to Zoroastrian belief in resurrection attributed to Theopompus (ca. 350 BCE), establishing the availability of the belief in the later Persian period.38 The chief objection that Day brings against the (essentially diffusionist) view that Judaism acquired belief in resurrection through Persian channels is the different metaphoric concept employed in biblical discourse about death. Death is sometimes referred to as sleep, and resurrection as waking from it (Isa 26:19; Dan 12:2; 4 Ezra 7.42).39 Such a view, he claims, is “completely alien to the Zoroastrians” (Day 2002: 126). He does not support this last assertion with evidence.40 John F. Kutsko (2000: 133-37) offers several new approaches to Ezekiel 37 that imply distance from a Zoroastrian-influenced religious context. Kutsko adduces Mesopotamian rituals for consecrating 36 In contrast, Schmidt (2000: 95) shows that in the non-mythological texts involving the deceased, Canaanite ghosts are “weak, frail apparitions lacking any supernatural powers.” 37 See also Day 1996: 241-42. 38 Cited in Plutarch, De Iside 47, and Aeneas of Gaza, Theophrastus 64.8-10; see further, de Jong (1997: 224-25). 39 For discussion of this metaphor in the Psalms, see Goldingay (2000: 76-77). 40 Baughm (2002-2004: 227) discusses the contested background and symbolism of funerary couches in Persian or Persian-influenced burial contexts. On ancient Persian funerary practice, see de Jong (1997: 440-44).
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statues as a parallel (2000: 124; 135-37); 41 he also points to Job 10:8, 9, 11 and Genesis 2 as similar in their reference to a staged process of formation of a human being, whether at creation or in the womb. Appreciatively summarizing Kutsko’s discussion, Jon Levenson agrees that “the visionary resurrection of Ezek 37:114 is . . . a kind of re-creation” (2006: 159). Levenson (ibid., 158) points additionally to differences in mortuary practice: the mention of ‘graves’ in Ezek 37:13 reflects a conceptual background in early Jewish practice that contrasts with the Zoroastrian practice of corpse exposure.42 Scholarly positions on the question of Zoroastrian influence in Ezekiel 37 tend to reflect the degree to which scholars consider the chapter’s imagery as consistent with other biblical representations of beliefs and practices. Day’s observation about the biblical metaphor representing death as sleep, referred to above, also draws attention to a passage of the Aqhat epic from ancient Ugarit that represents death under the metaphor of sleep (Ug. šnt, CAT 1.19.III.45).43 Late Bronze Age coastal Syrian literature and much later Biblical Hebrew texts share literary tropes involving the metaphoric concept Death is Sleep. The highly restricted corpus of Phoenician and Punic epigraphic texts offers possible examples of related conceptual metaphors and their integration. The relevant cases are from Phoenician diaspora sites in the western Mediterranean and postdate Persian influence on the eastern Mediterranean. The first is from Italy, the second from North Africa. It is possible to see a reference to death as sleep in the Phoenician inscription from Pyrgi (KAI 277). This famous text incised on sheet gold dates paleographically to the late sixth or early fifth century
Note Kutsko’s attention to prophetic observations that idols have no rûa ‘spirit’ within them (2000: 136-38). 42 Levenson admits that Ezekiel’s “initial vision of the bones scattered across the valley fits it [the idea of Zoroastrian corpse exposure] better” (2006: 158). The Byzantine historian Agathias, Histories 2.23, observes concerning (Sasanian) Persian mortuary practice, “the exposed bones rot, scattered at random all over the plain” (translated by Cameron 1969: 79). In Histories 2.31, Agathias recounts a story about Greek envoys in Persia who come upon an unburied corpse lying in a field; they bury the corpse, and one of their company has a dream vision the following night instructing him to disinter the body (see de Jong 1997: 443-44). 43 Korpel (1990: 208-10) does not discuss the Ugaritic word šnt or the passage in which it occurs. See Hoftijzer (1999: 58 and n. 49), and Wyatt (2002: 307 and n. 248). 41
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B.C.E (Amadasi Guzzo 1990: 65).44 The problematic sequence of letters bmtn bbt (KAI 277.5) can be resegmented bmt n bbt (Schmitz 2007). This reading discloses the Phoenician word n , cognate with the Middle Hebrew nā eh ‘handsome’ ( Jastrow 1985: 866).45 The phrase bmt n appears to mean ‘at the death of (the) Handsome (one)’. The phrase byr zb šmš bmt n ‘in the month zb šmš, at the death of (the) Handsome (one)’ (lines 4b-5a) can be seen to provide a precise date—month and day—for the construction of the šr qdš ‘holy place’ (line 1) commemorated in the first half of the text. This interpretation of the text implies that the Pyrgi inscription makes reference to Adonis, a youth so handsome that Aphrodite (Astarte) could not bear to be separated from him, according to a Greek version of the story (see, e.g., Vellay 1904: 26-27). If the cultic context of the inscription involves Adonis, it becomes reasonable to argue that the second half of the text maintains this theme. Such a view is supported by the chronologically precise date formula introducing the second portion of the text: (7) lmlky šnt šlš /// by(8)r krr . bym qbr (9) lm ‘Year 3 of his reign, in the month Krr, on the day of the deity’s burial’. This date formula lists year, month, and day, matching in its last two elements the precision of the earlier date.46 The word šnt in the last sentence of the inscription, (10b) šnt km hkkbm (11) l, interpreted as šÁnōtō ‘his sleep’, suggests the possible translation ‘to bewail his sleep like the Kakkabites’.47 Interpreted in this manner, the sentence involves a ritual of mourning for the deceased Adonis.48 The Pyrgi inscription as I have interpreted it seems to attest to a mortuary cult linked to the death cult of Adonis.49 The text does not convey much information about the status of the deceased hero 44 The following comments partly supplant my earlier interpretation of this inscription (Schmitz 1995). 45 Biblical Hebrew nā wê (e.g., Song 1:5, 2:14; 4:3; 6:4), referring to facial beauty, is also related (see also Jastrow 1985: 865 s.v.). 46 In the present context I will not enter into the calendrical implications of this text. 47 The Phoenician word šnt (KAI 277.10b) is a noun, cognate with Ugaritic šnt and Biblical Hebrew šÁnāt, ‘sleep’ (from the root Y-Š-N I; HALOT [Study Edition] 1601). The word l is a verb (here infinitive) cognate with BH -L-H II, ‘wail, lament’ (HALOT [Study Edition] 51 s.v., with Arm. and Arb. cognates; see also Jastrow 1985: 68, s.v. -L-Y II). The word kkb probably designates Carthage (see, e.g., Egan 2004). 48 This interpretation of the sentence should be considered uncertain. 49 Schmidt (1994: 4-12; glossary, 13) carefully traces the distinction between mortuary cult and death cult. The capacious anthropological foundation of this
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Adonis, or indicate whether his post-mortem situation is typical or exceptional.50 I will now draw attention to other epigraphic evidence that Phoenicians—at least in the Hellenistic period, and at the elite level of society—anticipated a future life after death.51 The most explicit statement comes from Carthage. The third century B.C.E. Punic epitaph of Milkpilles52 refers to the deceased as enjoying a blessed state: m bt l zr yšr nk š p[ y bn] lskr l m spt my n t k r dl qdšm rn “A stela for a just minister (have) I, š py, his son, erected as a memorial over his gathered bones,53 for his soul is rejoicing with (the) holy ones” (CIS I 6000bis.3b-4). The use of the Punic word r to designate the separable component of the human being that survives death (for convenience translated ‘soul’) permits the interpreter to infer that for Phoenician speakers the word participated in a double-scope blending analogous to that witnessed in Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew literary sources. Further evidence of this analogy can be derived from the image of post-mortem rejoicing implied by the vocabulary of the biblical passage Isa 26:19: “Your dead shall live. (As) a corpse they shall rise. Awake and shout for joy [ranĕnû], you who dwell in the dust!” (Schmitz 2003: 148; on the context, Levenson 2006:197, 198-99).54 While Phoenician-Punic sources show no clear evidence of a belief in resurrection (Schmitz, forthcoming a; cf. Kempinski 1995), the word representing joyful response to the afterlife—the verb r-n-n ‘rejoice’—is the same in both traditions. In my judgment, the Punic epitaph reflects an eschatology under strong influence from the distinction has been criticized (Lewis 1999: 512-13), but the distinction itself remains methodologically serviceable. 50 The reference to a ym qbr lm ‘day of the deity’s burial’ (KAI 277.8b-9a) implies a mortuary cult. The mourning ritual (possibly) mentioned in the final sentence of the inscription (KAI 277.10b-11) implies a death cult. The Greek myth is explicit about Adonis’ ongoing post-mortem experiences. 51 The examples and discussion that follow do not constitute a full statement about the history of Phoenician belief in a future life. Their chief aim is the lexical goal of establishing that the word r mediates the conceptual metaphor Soul is Breath in funerary contexts. 52 The script dates to the third century B.C.E.; a date in the first half of the third century is likely, but more precise dating is difficult (Peckham 1968: 191 97, 219 20 n. 31). The author has produced a critical edition of CIS I 6000bis with commentary (Schmitz, forthcoming b). 53 Literally, “the collection of his bones.” 54 I follow the near consensus that dates Isaiah 24-27 in the late sixth century BCE (Schmitz 2003: 144 and n. 1). I do not consider CIS I 6000bis.3b-4 to have any relation to Isa 26:19 beyond the lexical feature noted.
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Egyptian cult of the goddess Isis, particularly its doctrine of eternal life.55 The importance of the Punic epitaph cited above is to establish that the word r designates the soul or spirit that survives death.56 From this evidence follows the conclusion that the Punic formula šp br ‘punish the soul’ (KAI 79.10-11; 302.1-2 [restored]; CIS I 4937.3-5; 5632.6-7) is best understood as a threat of divine punishment after death.57 The Phoenician inscription on an unprovenanced situla in the Princeton Museum, datable paleographically to the mid-sixth century B.C.E. (McCarter 1993: 115),58 provides evidence of Phoenician funerary practice of an Egyptianizing character. The text is straightforward: sy ttn n w ym l bdpt bn bd “May Isis grant favor and life to Abdi-Ptah son of ‘Abdo’ ” (ibid.). The request that Isis grant n w ym “favor and life” is also found in a second-century B.C.E. Phoenician inscription from Memphis (KAI 48).59 McCarter (1993: 116) points out that the wording of this Phoenician formula calques Egyptian votive formulas requesting s(t) ‘favor’ (// Phoen n) and n ‘life’ (// Phoen ym) from the deity. The request for “life”
55 On the influence of Egyptian imagery concerning the soul’s immortality on biblical thought, especially Wisdom literature, see Day (1996: 248-57). 56 A position reached on the strength of considerably less textual evidence by Fantar (1970: 12-13). Punic r also refers to a component of living humans, as in the sentence rbt wt lt mlkt š y r [l ] ‘Lady wt, my Goddess, Queen of (one) whose spirit is turned to [her]’ (KAI 89.1). On the reading and interpretation, see the critical re-edition of this inscription in Schmitz (forthcoming b). 57 All but the second of the Punic examples cited above involve maledictions against hypothetical persons who might damage or remove a mtnt ‘gift’, a votive object set up in fulfillment of a vow. In KAI 302.1-2 I restore (1) rbtn [tnt pn b‘l W DN B L MN YŠ(2)P br] t h dmm hmt ‘our Lady [Tinnit Phane Baal and the Lord Baal amon will judge the s]ouls of those persons’ (capitalization representing uncertainty), thereby matching the average line length in the inscription, but damage to the text has obscured the precise referent of the malediction (on the date and circumstance of the inscription, see Schmitz 1994). The relevance of Biblical Hebrew tišpo bām “punish them” (2 Chron 20:12 [NJPS]) to the interpretation of the Punic construction šp b- was first pointed out by van den Branden (1981: 39). Although the context of 2 Chron 20:12 is prayer, the implied target of the malediction is in the political-military sphere and the phrase need not necessarily be concerned with afterlife. The example establishes the semantic nuance ‘punish’ for the syntagm šp b- in Hebrew and, following van den Branden, Phoenician-Punic. 58 M. G. Amadasi Guzzo (1996: 1054-57) comprehensively addressed concerns about its authenticity of the sort expressed by G. Garbini (2006: 138) a decade later. 59 The deities invoked in this text include Isis and Astarte. KAI 48 has other associations with the Osirid cycle (see Schmitz 2002: 821).
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probably anticipates life after death.60 The text does not indicate the precise character of the anticipated afterlife. No owl remains have been identified in controlled excavations at Carthage,61 leaving us without comparative examples of owl remains in mortuary contexts. Early tomb excavations in the vicinity of Carthage were highly destructive and made no effort to identify or preserve faunal remains (see Schmitz forthcoming a). Systematic examination of museum collections might produce a sample, but the probability of success is vanishing. Having established that a belief that the spirit survived death was probably to be found among Phoenician populations, we may inquire as to symbols that might express this belief. Phoenician royal iconography may have employed the owl as a symbol of afterlife survival. The seal of Mksp (WSS 1090)62 portrays a bird that appears to be an owl standing atop a lotus standard (so, e.g., Younker 1985: 177; on the standard, Gubel 1993).63 The standing figure in Egyptian dress portrayed on the seal has been identified as a Phoenician royal portrait (Bordreuil 1991, 1992), but this interpretation has been challenged (Elayi 1995). The seal, whose script is perhaps Phoenician,64 dates paleographically to the last quarter of the eighth century or the first quarter of the seventh. This seal image is thus roughly contemporary with the cremation burials in the Tyre necropolis.
60 Ferron (1971; 1974) reached a similar conclusion concerning the request for ‘life’ (Phoen ym) in two Phoenician dedications to Harpocrates, probably of Egyptian provenience. See also Gibson (1982: 141-44) and Amadasi Guzzo (1996). 61 I am very grateful to Roald Docter, who reviewed the faunal evidence reported in the German, Dutch, and Belgian excavations at Carthage, finding no owl remains (personal communication). 62 London, British Museum (West Asian Antiquities) 130667; Avigad (1978: 68, 69, fig. 3); Bordreuil (1986, no. 34, reading mksr); Bordreuil 1992: 165 (reads m[l]k[ ]sp). The provenance is unknown. 63 The execution of the head and feet of the owl shows similarity of technique in comparison with the later seals from Tarento portraying owls (see n. 26 above). In particular, the head is large and round; a rather deep triangular notch in the ‘face’ area signifies the beak. The legs are parallel, with claws represented by a straight line. (In the Tarantine examples only, the line points upward at an angle.) These similarities, not mentioned in the existing literature, strengthen the interpretation of the bird as an owl in WSS 1090 and 1122 (discussed in the next paragraph). 64 Herr (1998: 70) thinks the samek and kap fit eighth-century Aramaic better than Phoenician. I regard the mem as possibly Phoenician rather than Aramaic.
70
philip c. schmitz
A nearly identical seal of unspecified origin is in the collection of the Museo Archeologico in Florence (WSS 1122).65 The owl image is less detailed (for example, the wings are not clearly distinguished), but this difference may result from wear. The legend of this seal, l byb l ‘(belonging) to Abibaal , represents the vowel i with the consonant y. This orthography is uncharacteristic of Phoenician. The inscription may be either Ammonite or Hebrew (Avigad and Sass 1997: 426), and probably indicates a date close to the paleographic date of WSS 1090 discussed above. Because the (royal?) figure and the accompanying symbols on the two seals are so nearly identical, but the inscriptions are orthographically (and therefore linguistically) incompatible, it is difficult to associate the iconography with a particular region or culture area. The cultural classification of seals must consider provenience, workshop, material characteristics, iconography, paleography, language, and onomastics (Lemaire 1993). None of these criteria is determinative by itself. Iconography, while important, can be misleading, because the iconographic and orthographic affiliations of an inscribed seal can diverge. Artisans regularly manufactured seals without inscriptions (Lemaire 1993: 7, 19). The artisan later cut an inscription by request at the time of purchase, or purchasers had their own seals inscribed individually (see Bordreuil 1992, col. 92). Attending to the potential divergence between the iconography of WSS 1090 and its Phoenician inscription, we cannot easily conclude that the seal’s iconography represents commonly held beliefs in the Phoenician-speaking areas of the period. Neither is such a conclusion ruled out, however. Progress in the attribution of Levantine seal imagery to particular regional workshops may one day permit greater precision in lessening the tension between script and iconography. There is reason to anticipate that close contact with Greek civilization might have influenced both Phoenician and Punic beliefs about the soul (Fantar 1970: 13).66 Cremation burial may be an adaptation induced by Aegean cultural influence on the Phoenician 65 I wish to thank Stephen E. Thompson for providing me with unpublished notes on this seal by the late William A. Ward. 66 Wenning (2004a: 29) traces Minoan -Levantine contact to the seventeenth century B.C.E. The oldest Geometric finds, “whose core region lay on the northSyrian coast” are tenth-century, with greatest volume in the eighth century (ibid. 30-31 and n. 8). The ceramic evidence of Tell Arqa, on the plain of Akkar in North Lebanon, follows a sequence from Minoan to Cypriote to Geometric ware,
the owl in phoenician mortuary practice
71
habitus (Fantar 1970: 15; Benichou-Safar 1982: 237-48; 329-31). Very recently, Melchert (2009) has pointed out mid-second-millennium evidence that the Hittites believed in a separation of the soul from the body after death,67 and at least one example of the belief in the Luwian-speaking Neo-Hittite ‘rump states’ of eighth-century BCE North Syria (see Harrison 2009). Conclusions The evidence considered above gives us a range of possible interpretations of the owl remains discovered in Tyre al-Bass Tomb no. 8. The owl may have served as a symbol of personal or social desolation. If the deceased died as a result of disease, associations such as the imagery of Psalm 102 may have been intended. If warfare was the cause of death, the owl may have represented devastation, as in the Sefire inscription and Isa 34:11. If later Arab tradition preserves earlier Syro-Palestinian antecedents, the owl may have symbolized the spirit’s survival into the afterlife, a belief found in the Ugaritic, Biblical Hebrew, and Phoenician texts discussed above and more clearly attested in Punic documents. Alternatively, if the owl remains were in fact boiled, this might indicate that they were employed in the preparation of a medicine or a magical salve or potion.68 The charred state of the owl talons from Tyre might indicate a similar use. Note that in the recipe involving the eššebu-bird, the remains of the partially de-fleshed carcass are to be charred in fire (Scurlock 2006: 329, no. 110; see appendix). If the deceased was blind or visually impaired before death, the burial might have included a medicine (made by a process that involves charring, according to Pliny) comprising owl parts intended to restore sight in the afterlife.69 paralleled also by Tell Kazel (Syria) (Charaf 2008; Badre et al. 2005; Thalmann 2006). 67 Already noted by Theo van den Hout (in Johnston 2004: 483). Van den Hout’s further observation that in the Hittite period, “inhumation and cremation were practiced simultaneously, and the funeral complexes contain no gifts of any great value,” could also be extended to Iron Age Phoenician mortuary practice. 68 ‘Medical’ and ‘magical’ treatments in ancient Mesopotamia were not clearly distinguished. The main distinction is between “remedies directed primarily against the putative cause of the illness and those directed primarily against the symptoms which the illness has produced” (Scurlock 2006: 82). 69 Scurlock (2006: 19) has determined that in Assyrian and Babylonian medical
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Possible magical interpretations of the owl are nearly unlimited.70 Owl parts are widely regarded as having the power to compel confession of misdemeanors (Pliny H. N. 30.29; Reiner 1995: 125 and n 583; Sparks and Soper 1989: 198; Versnel 2002: 119 n. 39), and this might have been their post-mortem purpose in the Phoenician burial. The owl remains could have functioned apotropaically to ward off spiritual or other danger. They may have aided at some stage in the transit to the afterlife or they may have bound a curse on the deceased because of alleged crimes committed in life. The owl might also serve magically to restrain or divert the spirit of the departed from returning to haunt its lifetime companions, enemies, or rivals. Conversely, the owl remains might symbolize a desire for revenge, and imply a drama whose details are lost in the dust of ancient Tyre.71 Appendix: The eššebu-Bird in Medical Ritual The difficult ambiguities of Mesopotamian bird names cannot be easily resolved in most cases. The main sources of uncertainty are variant spellings of the same word (especially in Sumerian; see Veldhuis 2004: 209) and “the ornithological identification of bird names” (ibid.). The evidence from attestations of bird names in bilingual texts is sometimes unreliable as well (Veldhuis 2004: 209-10). Sumerian dnin-ninna2mušen (Veldhuis 2004: 272-73, ‘hen harrier’) and a-BUmušen (Veldhuis 2004: 213, ‘a bird of prey’) have the Akkadian equivalent eššebu, sometimes identified as a kind of owl. In the Ebla Vocabulary (MEE 4, 270 622), a-BUmušen is translated iš11-a-bu3, probably equivalent to Akkad. eššebu (Veldhuis 2004: 213). Veldhuis texts ghosts are cited as the cause of eye problems only in cases of seeing sparks or false images. 70 The preceding and following suggestions might also apply to the interpretation of terracotta owl images from Knossos and the Arkades cemetery mentioned above. 71 In defense of the speculative character of these conclusions, I offer the following observation by British historian John Tosh: “Whereas scientists can often create their own data by experiment, historians are time and again confronted by gaps in the evidence which they can make good only by developing a sensitivity as to what might have happened, derived from an imagined picture that has taken shape in the course of becoming immersed in the surviving documentation. In all these ways imagination is vital to the historian. It not only generates fruitful hypotheses; it is also deployed in the reconstruction of past events and situations by which those hypotheses are tested” (Tosh 2006: 184-85).
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73
identifies three different writings of dnin-ninna2mušen (2004: 275) and notes its “various Akkadian renderings, including i ûr lemutti and eššebu.” He follows Salonen (1973: 162) and Butz (1977: 286; 1987: 344) in the argument that the eššebu-bird may have been a kind of harrier (Veldhuis 2004: 272-73, ‘hen harrier’). Another correspondence of eššebu is with anpatu (CAD 4: 371 s.v. eššebu), cognate with Heb. anāpah. The Hebrew name is generally regarded as designating a large heron (see table 1). It is unlikely that eššebu is cognate with Heb. yanšûp (CAD 4:371 s.v. eššebu); the more likely cognate is Akkad. enšub/pu (CAD 4:172 ), a bird associated with misfortune. The eššebu is particularly interesting to the present investigation because its flesh is prescribed for the treatment of ghost-induced illness. According BAM 221, 471, 385 (Scurlock 2006: 329, no. 110), the patient should eat the flesh of the eššebu-bird. The remains are to be charred in fire, ground, mixed with cedar-resin and smeared on the patient’s temples while an incantation is recited to reduce the patient’s pain. This procedure is similar to the recipes for the use of owl parts recorded by Pliny the Elder. There is no clear evidence, however, to identify the eššebu as a variety of owl. Limitations of space constrain an adequate discussion of ancient Mesopotamian images of the ‘bird-footed’ goddess. Possibly relevant but also problematic is the ‘Burney Relief ’, which portrays the winged goddess with claws resting on two recumbent lions flanked by a pair of owls. Brigitte Groneberg (1997: 126-28) discusses the image as a lilû or lilītu-demon associated with Inanna-Ištar. The meaning of the owl imagery (connected with Akkad. kilili, CAD 8: 357, s.v.; Groneberg 2000: 288-89) remains impenetrable. Doubts about its authenticity (Albenda 2005) caution against further speculation.
?buzzards and larger falcons ravens and crows
kites, esp. Black Kite (phps. also buzzards and large hawks)
kites, esp. Red Kite
ravens and crows
ostrich
?owl, phps. Barn Owl
?
smaller hawks and falcons
owl, ?Little Owl
dā ah
ayyah
ōrēb
bat ya ănah
ta mās
ša ap
nē
kôs
Lammergeier
Little Owl or ?Barn Owl
hawks, incl.smaller falcons and harriers
?cuckoo or ?gulls
night jar or Barn Owl
ostrich
kites
eagles and other large birds of prey
vultures
Short-toed Eagle and other eagles and Osprey
ozniyah
Griffon Vulture
Wood 1869
peres
Griffon Vulture and possibly large eagles
Tristram 1867
nešer
Hebrew
Tawny Owl
Kestrel or Sparrowhawk
Long-eared Owl
Short-eared Owl
Eagle Owl
raven or rook
Saker Falcon or Common Buzzard
(Black) Kite
Bearded Vulture
Black Vulture
Griffon Vulture
Driver 1955
Little Owl
hawks
?
?
ostrich
ravens
?
?
?
Lammergeier
vulture
Bodenheimer 1960
(continued on next page)
Little Owl
hawks
gulls or Tawny Owl
falcons
ostrich
ravens
Black Kite
buzzard or kite
Black Vulture
Lammergeier
Griffon Vulture
Shulow 1962
Table 1: Ornithological Identifications of Birds in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (after Bulmer 1989; cf. Houston 1993: 44-45) [table continued on next page]
74 philip c. schmitz
a allēp
Hoopoe
dûkîpat
stork
stork
heron
Egyptian vulture
rā ām
asîdah
pelican
qā āt
anāpah
Egyptian vulture
?Purple Gallinule or Ibis
tinšemet
Hoopoe
heron
pelican
?Purple Gallinule or Ibis
Eagle Owl
owl, ?Eagle Owl
yanšûp
?cormorant
Wood 1869
?cormorant
Tristram 1867
šālāk
Hebrew
Table 1: (cont.)
bat
Hoopoe
Cormorant
stork or heron
Osprey
Scops Owl
Little owl
Screech-owl
Fisher-Owl
Driver 1955
Hoopoe
heron
stork
?
?
Barn Owl
Eagle Owl
?
Bodenheimer 1960
Hoopoe
heron
stork
Egyptian vulture
pelican
Barn Owl
Short-eared Owl
Fisher-Owl
Shulow 1962
the owl in phoenician mortuary practice 75
?
?kites or buzzards
?kites or buzzards
ravens and crows
ozniyah
dā ah
ayyah
ōrēb
?cormorant
owl spp.
šālāk
yanšûp
falcons, true hawks, and harriers kestrels
nē
owl sp.
?gulls or seabirds in general
kôs
kites
?
ta mās
ša ap
ibises, esp. Bald Ibis
terns, or gulls and terns
Bulmer 1989
uncertain
uncertain
(continued on next page)
kestrels (Falco tinnunculns, F. naummanni) and probably other small hawks
uncertain
uncertain
probably Ostrich (Struthio ramelus) and possibly Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo)
Ravens (esp. Corvus corax); and probably some other corvids
some diurnal raptors
some diurnal raptor or raptors
some diurnal raptor or raptors
large vulture sp. or spp.
Griffon Vulture
generic for medium-sized and smaller owl sp. or spp. owls, esp. Little Owl
harriers
ostrich
bat ya‘ănah owl sp.
ravens, esp. Corvus corax
buzzards, esp. Long-legged Buzzard
large falcons, esp. Lanner
Lappet-faced and/or Black Vulture
Lammergeier
Lappet-faced vulture and Lammergeier
peres
Bulmer 1986
large eagles (esp. Imperial Eagle) Griffon Vulture and Griffon Vulture
Cansdale 1970
nešer
Hebrew
76 philip c. schmitz
storks, esp. White Stork
stork
?
Hoopoe
asîdah
anāpah
dûkîpat
a allēp
Egyptian Vulture
rā ām
bats
Hoopoe
harge herons, other herons and egrets and poss. Night Heron and bitterns
Eagle Owl
?
Egyptian vulture
qā āt
Barn Owl and/or other owl sp. or spp.
Bulmer 1986
?
Cansdale 1970
tinšemet
Hebrew
(cont.)
bats (Chiroptera spp.)
Hoopoe
uncertain
Storks, especially White Stork (Ciconia ciconia)
uncertain
uncertain
uncertain
Bulmer 1989
the owl in phoenician mortuary practice 77
78
philip c. schmitz Bibliography
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Bordreuil, P. 1986. Catalogue des sceaux ouest-sémitiques inscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale, du Musée du Louvre et du Musée biblique de Bible et Terre Sainte. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale. ———. 1991. “Les premiers sceaux royaux phéniciens.” In Atti del II Congresso internazionale de studi fenici e punici, Roma, 9-14 Novembre 1987, 463-68. Collezione di Studi Fenici 30. Rome: Consiglio nazionale delle Ricerche. ———. 1992. “Sceaux inscrits des pays du Levant,” Suppléments au Dictionnaire de la Bible 12, cols. 86-212. Branden, A. van den. 1981. “L’inscription punique CIS 5510.” Pp. 35 44 in Al Hudhud: Festschrift Maria Höfner zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. R. G. Stiegner. Graz: Karl Franzens Universität. Briese Ch. and R. F. Docter. 2002. “El skyphos fenicio: la adaptacíon de un vaso griego para beber.” In Cartago fenicio-púnica: Las excavaciones alemanas en Cartago 1975-1997, ed. M. Vegas, 173-220. Cuadernos de Arqueología Mediterránea 4. Sabadell (Barcelona): Editorial AUSA, 1998 [2002]. Bulmer, R. 1986. The Unsolved Problems of the Birds of Leviticus. Working Papers in Anthropology Archaeology Linguistics Maori Studies 73. Auckland: University of Auckland, Department of Anthropology. ———. 1989. “The Uncleanness of the Birds of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,” Man n.s. 24, no. 2: 304-21. Butz, K. 1977. “Bemerkungen zu Jagdtieren im Mesopotamien,” Bibliotheca Orientalia 34: 282-90. ———. 1987. “Ökologie: Ebla: Gegenstand und Wörter.” In Ebla 1975-1985: Dieci annid di studi linguistici e filologici. Atti del convegno internazionale (Napoli 9-11 ottobre 1985), ed. L. Cagni, 313-51. Istituto Universitario Orientale. Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici. Series Minor 27. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale. Bynon, J. “North African Bird Lore: New Light on Old Problems,” Folklore 98, no. 2. (1987): 152-74. Cameron, A. 1969. “Agathius on the Sasanians,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23: 65-183. Cansdale, G. S. 1970. Animals of Bible Lands. Exeter: Paternoster. Catling H. W. 1978-1979. “Knossos, 1978,” Archaeological Reports, no. 25: 43-58. Charaf, H. 2008. “Arqa during the Bronze Age: Connections with the West.” Pp. 121-66 in Networking Pattern of the Bronze and Iron Age Levant: The Lebanon and Its Mediterranean Connections, ed. C. Doumet-Serhal, A. Rabate, and A. Resek. Beirut: ACPP. Coldstream, N. 2006. “Other People’s Pots: Ceramic Borrowing between the Early Greeks and Levantines, in Various Mediterranean Contexts.” In Across Frontiers: Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians & Cypriots. Studies in Honor of David Ridgway and Francesca Romana Serra Redgway, ed. E. Herring, I. Lemos, F. Lo Schiavo, L. Vagnetti, R. Whitehouse, and J. Wilkins, pp. 49-55. Accordia Specialist Studies on the Mediterranean 6. London: Accordia Research Institute, University of London. Collins, B. J., ed. 2002. A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East. HO 1.64. Leiden: Brill. Cooper, J. S. 1983. The Curse of Agade. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Day, J. 1996. “The Development of Belief in Life after Death in Ancient Israel.” In After the Exile: Essays in Honor of Rex Mason, ed. J. Barton and D. J. Reimer, pp. 231-57. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press. ———. 2002. Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan. JSOTSupp 265. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
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Dietrich, M., O. Loretz, and J. Sanmartín. 1995. The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places. ALASP 8. Münster: Ugarit Verlag. Docter, R. F. et al. 2006. “Carthage Bir Massouda: Second Preliminary Report on the Bilateral Excavations of Ghent University and the Institut National du Patrimoine (2003-2004),” BABesch 81: 37-89. Donner, H., and W. Röllig. 1966-2002. Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften. 3 vols. 5th ed. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Doumet-Serhal, C. 2008. “The Kingdom of Sidon and Its Mediterranean Connections.” Pp. 1-70 in Networking Pattern of the Bronze and Iron Age Levant: The Lebanon and Its Mediterranean Connections, ed. C. Doumet-Serhal, A. Rabate, and A. Resek. Beirut: ACPP. Driver, G. R. 1955. “Birds in the Old Testament: I. Birds in Law,” PEQ 87: 5-20. Duncan, J. R. 2003. Owls of the World: Their Lives, Behavior and Survival. Firefly Books. Ebeling, E., ed. 1919. Keilschrifttexte aus Assur verschiedenen Inhalts. WVDOG 28. Leipzig. ———, ed. 1923. Keilschrifttexte aus Assur verschiedenen Inhalts. WVDOG 34. Leipzig. Egan, R. B. 2004. “Carthage, KKB, KAKKABH, and the KKBM at Pyrgi (KAI 277, 10 F.),” Rivista di Studi Fenici 32: 79-85. Elayi, J. 1989. Sidon, cité autonome de l’empire perse. Paris: Idéaphone. ———. 1995. “Les sceaux ouest-sémitiques ‘royaux’ : mythe ou réalité?” Numismatica e antichità classiche: Quaderni Ticinesi 24: 39-71. ———. 2004. “La chronologie de la dynastie sidonienne d’Eshmunazor,” Transeuphratène 27: 9-28. ———. 2006. “An Updated Chronology of the Reigns of Phoenician Kings during the Persian Period (539-333 BCE),” http://www.digitorient.com/?tag=chronologie ( June 16, 2007). Falkenstein, A. 1965. “Fluch über Akkade,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 57: 43-124. Fantar, M. 1970. Eschatologie phénicienne-punique. Institut national d’archéologie et d’arts, Centre de recherche archéologique et historique, Collection notes et documents. Tunis: Ministère des affaires culturelles. Fauconnier, G., and M. Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Ferron, J. 1971. “La inscripción cartaginesa en el Arpocrates madrilène,” Trabajos de Prehistoria n.s. 28: 359-79. ———. 1974. “La statuette d’Harpocrate du British Museum,” Rivista di Studi Fenici 2: 77-95. Firmage, E. 1992. “Zoology,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 6: 1109-67. Fitzmyer, J. A. 1967. The Aramaic Inscriptions of Sefîre. Biblica et Orientalia 19. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. Freedman, D. N. 1997a. “The Book of Ezekiel,” Interpretation 8 (1954): 446-71. Reprinted in Divine Commitment and Human Obligation, ed. J. R. Huddlestun, 1: 8-30. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. ———. 1997b. “ ‘Son of Man, Can These Bones Live?’: Exile,” Interpretation 29 (1975): 171-86. Reprinted in Divine Commitment and Human Obligation, ed. J. R. Huddlestun, 1: 249-67. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Garbini, G. 2006. Introduzione all’epigrafia semitica. Brescia: Paideia. Geller, M. J. 1985. Forerunners to Udug-hul: Sumerian Exorcistic Incantations. Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag. Gesner, K. 1585. Historiae animalivm liber tertius. De auium natura. Zurich: Excudebat Ioannes Wechelus, impensis Roberti Cambieri.
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Gibson, J. C. L. 1975. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions. Vol. 2, Aramaic Inscriptions including inscriptions in the dialect of Zenjirli. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1982. Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions. Vol. 3, Phoenician Inscriptions. Oxford: Clarendon. Gilbert, A. S. 2002. “Native Fauna of the Ancient Near East.” In Collins 2002: 3-75. Goldingay, J. 2000. “Death and Afterlife in the Psalms.” Pp. 60-86 in Judaism in Late Antiquity, pt. 4: Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity, ed. J. Neusner. HO 1: 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Green, M. W. 1978. “The Eridu Lament,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 30: 127-167. Groneberg, B. R. M. 1997. Lob der Istar: Gebet und Ritual an die altbabylonische Venus Gottin Tanatti Ištar. CM 8. Leiden: Brill/Styx. ———. 2000. “Tiere als Symbole von Göttern in den frühen geschichtlichen Epochen Mesopotamiens: von der altsumerischen Zeit bis zum Ende der altbabylonischen Zeit,” Topoi suppl. 2: 283-320. Gruppe, O. 1906. Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte. Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 5.2. Munich: C. H. Beck. Gubel, E. 1993. “The Iconography of Inscribed Phoenician Glyptic.” Pp. 101-29 in Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals, ed. B. Sass and C. Uehlinger. Orbus Biblicus et Orientalis 125. Fribourg: University Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Harrison, T. P. 2009. “Lifting the Veil on a ‘Dark Age’: Ta‘yinat and the North Orontes Valley during the Early Iron Age.” Pp. 171-84 in Exploring the Longue Durée: Essays in Honor of Lawrence F. Stager. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. Herr, L. G. 1998. “The Paleography of West Semitic Stamp Seals,” BASOR 312: 45-77. Hillers, D. 1964. Treaty Curses and the Old Testament Prophets. BibOr 16. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute. Hölbl, G. 1979. Beziehungen der ägyptischen Kultur zu Altitalien. EPRO 62. Leiden: Brill. Hoftijzer, J. 1999. “Zu eiigen Stellen in KTU 1.19 I 2-19.” Pp. 51-62 in Mythos im Alten Testament und seiner Umwelt: Festschrift für Hans-Peter Müller zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. A. Lange, H. Lichtenberger, and D. Römheld. BZAW 278. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Holmgren, V. C. 1988. Owls in Folklore and Natural History. Santa Barbara: Capra Press. Homerin, T. E. 1985. “Echoes of a Thirsty Owl: Death and Afterlife in Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44: 165-84. ———. 1990. “A Bird Ascends the Night: Elegy and Immortality in Islam,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58: 541-73. Houston, W. 1993. Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law. JSOTSup 140. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Jastrow, M. 1985. A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. New York, 1903. Repr., New York: Judaica Press. Johnston, S. I. 2004. Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jong, Albert de. 1997. Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 133. Leiden: Brill. Kaplan, A. 1981. The Living Torah: The Five Books of Moses. New York: Maznaim. Kempinski, A. 1995. “From Death to Resurrection: The Early Evidence,” BARev 21, no. 5 (Sept-Oct): 56-65, 82.
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Köcher, F. 1955. Keilschrifttexte zur assyrisch-babylonischen Drogen- und Pflanzenkunde. VIO 28. Vienna. Korpel, M. C. A. 1990. A Rift in the Clouds: Ugaritic and Hebrew Descriptions of the Divine. UBL 8. Münster: UGARIT-Verlag. Kutsko, J. F. 2000. Between Heaven and Earth: Divine Presence and Absence in the Book of Ezekiel. Biblical and Judaic Studies from the University of California, San Diego 7. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. Lambert, W. G. 1970. “The Sultantepe Tablets: IX. The Birdcall Text,” Anatolian Studies 20: 111-17. Lauha, R. 1983. Psychophysischer Sprachgebrauch im Alten Testament: eine strukturalsemantische Analyse von lb, npš, und rw . I Emotionen. Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae; Dissertationes Humanorum Litterarum 35. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Landsberger, B. 1966. “Einige unerkannt gebleibene oder verkannte Nomina des Akkadischen,” Welt der Orient 3: 246-68. Lemaire, A. 1993. “Les critères non-iconographiques de la classification des sceaux nord-ouest sémitiques inscrits.” Pp. 1-26 in Studies in the Iconography of Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals, ed. B. Sass and C. Uehlinger. Orbus Biblicus et Orientalis 125. Fribourg: University Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Levenson, J. D. 2006. Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Levi, D. 1927–29. “Arkades: Una città cretese all’alba della civiltà ellenica,” Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene 10–12: 5–710. ———. 1945. “Gleanings from Crete,” American Journal of Archaeology 49, no. 3: 270-329. Lewis, T. J. 1999. Review of Schmidt 1994. Journal of the American Oriental Society 119: 512-14. Lys, D. 1959. Nèphèsh, histoire de l’âme dans la révélation d’Israël au sein des religions proche-orientales. Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 50. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ———. 1962. Rûach, le souffle dans l’Ancien testament: enquête anthropologique à travers l’histoire théologique d’Israël. Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 56. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. McCarter, P. K. Jr. 1993. “An Inscribed Phoenician Funerary Situla in the Art Museum of Princeton University,” BASOR 290-291: 115-19. Melchert, C. 2009. “Comments on the Kuttamuwa Stele,” http://www.linguistics. ucla.edu/people/Melchert/KuttamuwaStele.pdf. Modi, J. J. 1924. “The Owl in Folklore,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, 20, no. 8:1014-26. Morris, S. P. 1992. Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Muellner, L. 1998. “Glaucus Redivivus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98: 1-30. Nunn, A. 2001. “Nekropolen und Gräber in Phönizien, Syrien, und Jordanien zur Achämenidenzeit,” Ugarit-Forschungen 32: 389-463. Oelsner, J. 1960. “Benennung und Funktion der Körperteile im hebräischen Alten Testament.” Inaugural diss., Karl Marx Universität, Leipzig. Olmo Lete, G. del. 1981. Mitos y leyendas de Canaan segun la tradicion de Ugarit. Institucion San Jeronimo para la investigacion biblica, Fuentes de la ciencia biblica 1. Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad. Pardee, D. 2000. “Animal Sacrifice at Ugarit,” Topoi suppl. 2: 321-31.
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Peckham, J. B. 1968. The Development of the Late Phoenician Scripts. Harvard Semitic Series 20. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pitard, W. 1999. “The Rpum Texts.” In Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, ed. W. G. Watson and N. Wyatt, pp. 259-69. Leiden: Brill Academic. Pollard, J. 1977. Birds in Greek Life and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson. Puhvel, J. 1991. Hittite Etymological Dictionary. Trends in Linguistics, Documentation 1. Berlin: Mouton/de Gruyter. Reiner, E. 1995. Astral Magic in Babylonia. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 85, no. 4. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Sader, H. 1995. “Nécropoles et tombes phéniciennes du Liban.” Cuadernos de Arqueología Mediterránea 1: 15-30. ———. 2005. Iron Age Funerary Stelae from Lebanon. Cuadernos de Arqueología Mediterránea 11. Barcelona: Publicaciones del Laboratorio de Arqueología, Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona. Saidah, R. 1966. “Fouilles de Khaldé. Rapport préliminaire sur la première et deuxième campagnes (1961-1962),” Bulletin du Museé de Beyrouth 19: 51-94. ———. 1969. “Archaeology in the Lebanon, 1968-1969,” Berytus 18: 119-43. Salonen, A. 1973. Vögel und Vogelfang im alten Mesopotamien. AASF B 180. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Schmidt, B. B. 1994. Israel’s Beneficent Dead: Ancestor Cult and Necromancy in Ancient Israelite Religion and Tradition. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 11. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). ———. 2000. “Memory as Immortality: Countering the Dreaded ‘Death after Death’ in Ancient Israelite Society.” Pp. 87-100 in Judaism in Late Antiquity, pt. 4: Death, Life-After-Death, Resurrection and the World-to-Come in the Judaisms of Antiquity, ed. J. Neusner. HO 1: 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Schmitz, P. C. 1994. “The Name ‘Agrigentum’ in a Punic Inscription (CIS I 5510.10).” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 53: 1-13. ———. 1995. “The Phoenician Text from the Etruscan Sanctuary at Pyrgi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115: 559-75. ———. 2002. “Reconsidering a Phoenician Inscribed Amulet from the Vicinity of Tyre,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122: 187-23. ———. 2003. “The Grammar of Resurrection in Isa 26:19a-c,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122: 145-49. ———. 2007. “Adonis in the Phoenician Text from Pyrgi? A New Reading of KAI 277.5,” Etruscan News 8: 9, 15. ———. forthcoming a. “Religion of the Phoenicians in North Africa: Punic Religion.” In The Cambridge History of Religions in the Classical World, vol.1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. forthcoming b. The Phoenician Diaspora: Epigraphic and Historical Studies. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. Scurlock, J. A. 2002. “Animals in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion.” In Collins 2002: 361-88. ———. 2006. Magico-Medical Means of Treating Ghost-Induced Illnesses in Ancient Mesopotamia. Ancient Magic and Divination 3. Leiden: Brill/Styx. Scurlock, J. A. and B. R. Andersen. 2005. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Shulow, A. 1962. “Names of the Birds in the Bible,” in Arnold and Ferguson 1962: 106-7. Slingerland, E. 2008. What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Smith, M. S., and E. M. Bloch-Smith. 1988. “Death and Afterlife in Ugarit and Israel,” JAOS 108: 277-84. Sokoloff, M. 2002. A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period. 2nd ed. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sparks, J., and T. Soper. 1989. Owls: Their Natural and Unnatural History. New York: Facts on File. Stampolidis, N. C. 2003. “On the Phoenician Presence in the Aegean.” Pp. 217-32 in ΠΛΟΕΣ . . . Sea Routes . . . Interconnections in the Mediterranean 16th-6th c. BC: Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Rethymnon, Crete, September 29th-October 2nd 2002, ed. N. C. Stampolidis and V. Karageorghis. Athens: University of Crete and the A. G. Leventis Foundation. Stresemann, E. 1975. Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present, tr. H. J. and C. Epstein; ed. G. W. Cottrell; with a foreword and an epilogue on American ornithology by E. Mayr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Taylor, John H. 2001. Death and the Aferlife in Ancient Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thalmann, J.-P. 2006. Tell Arqa—I: Les niveaux de l’âge de Bronze. Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique 177. Beirut: IFPO. Tosh, J. 2006. The Pursuit of History. 4th ed. New York: Longman. Triebel, L. 2004. Jenseitshoffnung in Wort und Stein: Nefesch und pyramicales Grabmal als Phänomene antiken jüdischen Bestattungswesens im Kontext der Nachbarkulturen. AGJU 56. Leiden: Brill. Tristram, H. B. 1867. The Natural History of the Bible. London: S.P.C.K. ———. 1884. The Fauna and Flora of Palestine. The Survey of Western Palestine 6. London: Palestine Exploration Fund. Turner, M. 2007. “Conceptual Integration.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Veldhuis, N. 2004. Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition of Nanše and the Birds, With a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names. Leiden: Brill/Styx. Vellay, C. 1904. Le culte et les fêtes d’Adônis-Thammouz dans l’orient antique. Paris: Ernest Leroux. Versnel, H. S. 2002. “The Poetics of the Magical Charm: An Essay in the Power of Words.” Pp. 105-58 in Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World, ed. P. A. Mirecki and M. W. Meyer. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 141. Leiden: Brill. Watson, W. G. E. 1987. “Sul termine ugaritico itl,” SEL 4: 57-65. Wenning, R. 2004a. “Griechischer Einfluss auf Palästina in vorhellenistischer Zeit” Pp. 29-60 in Die Griechen und das antike Israel: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Religionsund Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Landes, ed. S. Alkier and M. Witte. OBO 201. Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 2004b. “Nachweis der attischen Keramik aus Palästina: Aktualisierter Zwischenbericht.” Pp. 61-72 in Die Griechen und das antike Israel: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Religions- und Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Landes, ed. S. Alkier and M. Witte. OBO 201. Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Wevers, J. W. 1978. Text History of the Greek Deuteronomy. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Wood, J. G. 1869. Bible Animals. London: Longmans. Wyatt, N. 2002. Religious Texts from Ugarit. London: Continuum.
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Yerkes, R. K. 1923. “The Unclean Animals of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14,” Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 14: 1-29. Younker, Randall W. 1985. “Israel, Judah, and Ammon and the Motifs on the Baalis Seal from Tell el- Umeiri,” Biblical Archaeologist 48, No. 3 (September): 173-180.
REVIEW ARTICLE THE FOLK-TALES OF IRAQ AND THE LITERARY TRADITIONS OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA1 AMAR ANNUS The folklore of modern Iraq consists of an ocean of stories, popular songs, sayings, and customs, which are of great potential value for scholars studying ancient Mesopotamia’s intellectual culture and its legacy. The folktales, in particular, preserve many of the old intellectual traditions of the region. Recently, Gorgias Press has done us a great service by publishing the new edition of Lady E. S. Drower’s (1879-1972) Folk-Tales of Iraq, which originally appeared in 1931. The new volume contains the tales from the old book, as well as about 180 pages of previously unpublished material, which remained in manuscript. We now have the complete set of folkloric texts that Lady Drower gathered about 80 years ago in Iraq, translated into English, and intended to publish. Thus, the time is ripe to look afresh at the material. Before the First Gulf War, Iraqi scholars themselves made great efforts to publicize the popular culture of their country, mostly in the Arabic periodical al-Turāth al-Sha bī (Baghdad, 1963-1990). A selection of the folktale material that appeared on the pages of this periodical was published in a Russian translation by V. A. Yaremenko in 1990.2 It is unfortunate that so little scholarship has been dedicated to the issue of analyzing modern Iraqi folktales from the historical and comparative points of view. Very few Assyriologists read folk literature, and even fewer are prepared to analyze it. Some studies stand out in this respect, such as H. Vanstiphout’s paper on the 1 This article has grown out of a review of Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Drower’s Folk-Tales of Iraq (Gorgias Press 2007), hardback 6 × 9, 490 pages, illustrations, $139.00. The references with page numbers alone refer to the pages of this book. The present paper was written with the support of a grant from the Estonian Science Foundation, no. 6625. 2 V. A. Yaremenko, Skazki i predanija Iraka (Moscow: Nauka, 1990). There are probably no other translations of this material. See D. Sallum, “Irak,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung, Band 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), cols. 244-248.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 Also available online – brill.nl/jane
JANER 9.1 DOI: 10.1163/156921209X449170
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popular Iraqi folktale Story of Shamshum al-Jabbar, quoted from the first edition of the book under review (pp. 30-35). He observed that some motifs that have an obvious ancestry in the Sumerian and Akkadian literature are recombined into a coherent emplotment in the tale. He pointed out that the way in which certain ancient themes, which he categorized, create a cohesive thrust in the modern story as a whole, is of considerable relevance for literary history.3 Vanstiphout came to quite promising results, although he did not employ the comparative methods of folkloristic research. Rather, his methodology was limited to identifying and comparing six “easily identifiable plot structures” that he found both in the Iraqi tale and in the literature of ancient Mesopotamia. There is no fallacy in regard to this methodology, and Vanstiphout’s openmindedness to the folklore traditions of modern Iraq is to be commended. The only weakness of his paper is the meagreness of the material considered, which fails to persuade more skeptical readers. A much greater body of comparative evidence was taken into account by the Finnish orientalist Jussi Aro, who compared the Sumerian epic Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird and the Akkadian Etana myth to some Kurdish, Uzbek, and Arab popular traditions.4 More recently, the studies by M. Haul and W. Henkelman stand out as having quite extensively addressed the issue of folklore parallels to Mesopotamian literary traditions.5 On the folklorists’ side of things, there are two papers written by I. Levin that extensively discuss the structure and the folktale parallels of the Etana myth.6 In the later contribution, Levin 3 H. L. J. Vanstiphout,“Shamshum aj-Jabbar: On the Persistence of Mesopotamian Literary Motifs,” in W. H. van Soldt et al. (eds.), Veenhof Anniversary Volume. Studies Presented to Klaas R. Veenhof on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 515-527; see p. 516. 4 J. Aro, “Anzu and Simurgh,” in B. L. Eichler, J. W. Heimerdinger, and Å. Sjöberg (eds.), Kramer Anniversary Volume. Cuneiform Studies in Honor of Samuel Noah Kramer (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1976), 25-28. 5 See M. Haul, Das Etana-Epos: Ein Mythos von der Himmelfahrt des Königs von Kiš (Göttingen: Seminar für Keilschriftforschung, 2000), 75-90; and Wouter F. M. Henkelman, “The Birth of Gilgameš (Ael. NA XII.21): A case-study in literary receptivity,” in R. Rollinger and B. Truschnegg (eds.), Altertum und Mittelmeerraum: Die antike Welt diesseits und jenseits der Levante. Festschrift für Peter W. Haider zum 60. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 807-856. 6 I. Levin, “Etana: Die Keilschriftlichen Belege einer Erzählung. Zur Frühgeschichte von AaTh 537 (= AaTh 222B* + 313B). Eine textkritische Erörterung,” Fabula 8 (1966) 1-63; and idem, “Über eines der ältesten Märchen der Welt,” Märchenspiegel 5 (1994) 2-6. See also M. H. Haavio, “Der Etanamythos in Finnland,” FF Communications, no. 154 (Helsinki 1955).
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posited a monogenetic origin for the international folktale type The Flight on the Grateful Eagle (ATU 537) in ancient Mesopotamia, where its earliest written form is attested in the Etana myth.7 Levin used the methods of the Finnish historical-geographical school of folklore research, which attempts to reconstruct the genealogical trees and original forms of international folktales. In regard to the question of origins, I agree with Haul’s criticism of Levin that the fact that the ATU 537 material is first attested in Mesopotamia does not prove that the origins of this story should be exclusively sought in ancient Babylonia.8 In the following pages, I will demonstrate how the various Iraqi folktales that tell of a hero’s flight on a grateful eagle’s back, either from the netherworld or to heaven, also contain the motif of enmity between eagle and snake, and often tend to include the theme of a hero killing an evil snake or eagle as well. By conducting such an investigation, I will not reconstruct the original myths or stories in terms of the Finnish geographicalhistorical method. Instead, I intend to show the way in which different versions of the stories form interrelated groups, which seem to belong together historically, even if one cannot determine precisely how. As the wide distribution of some of its motifs shows, the folklore material that is used in the Babylonian myth of Etana is of prehistoric origin. The most prominent motif of cosmological significance is the cosmic tree, the so-called Eagle and Serpent Tree, occurring in the Etana myth and in very many cosmologies of the Eurasian peoples.9 This widespread motif of a tree whose roots are inhabited by a snake and top branches by an eagle makes its first textual appearance in the Sumerian tale Gilgamesh, Enkidu and 7 I use here and elsewhere in my paper the latest edition of the international folktale type catalogue and its classification numbers, following the standard abbreviation ATU; see H. J. Uther, The Types of International Folktales. A Classification and Bibliography, Parts I-III (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia [Academia Scientiarum Fennica], 2004). 8 M. Haul (Etana-Epos, 85) rightly observes: “Es wird von Levin nicht in Betracht gezogen, dass praktisch sämtliche Glieder der Überlieferung zwischen dem Epos und den Märchen fehlen und das Epos historisch und geographisch als Zeugnis des Stoffes völlig isoliert dasteht. Ob die heutigen Märchen wirklich aus Mesopotamien ausgewandert sind oder sich nicht doch von anderswo aus verbreiteten, auch in welcher Epoche dies geschah—dies lässt sich anhand der spärlichen Quellen keinesfalls sicher feststellen.” 9 For a paper containing a good overview and bibliography, see W. Fauth, “Der persische Simurg und der Gabriel-Melek Tā ūs der Jeziden,” Persica 12 (1987) 123-147.
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the Netherworld.10 Lines 27-28 of that composition read: “At that (primordial) time, there was a single tree, a single halub tree, a single tree, growing on the bank of the pure Euphrates, being watered by the Euphrates.” After being uprooted and transplanted into Inana’s garden, the tree grew tall: Five years, ten years went by, the tree grew massive; its bark, however, did not split. At its roots, a snake immune to incantations made itself a nest. In its branches, the Anzu bird settled its young. In its trunk, the phantom maid built herself a dwelling, the maid who laughs with a joyful heart. But holy Inana cried! (lines 40-46)
According to the story, Inana has transplanted the tree in order to get wood for her luxuriant chair and bed, but she is unable to cut the tree down. The hero Gilgamesh comes to help and “took his bronze axe used for expeditions, which weighs seven talents and seven minas, in his hand. He killed the snake immune to incantations living at its roots” (lines 138-140). The snake is killed, while the Anzu bird with its young and the phantom maid are chased away, respectively, to the mountains and to the wilderness. Thus far we can recognize in this story an ancestor of the modern international tale type ATU 317, The Tree That Grows up to the Sky.11 Folktales of this type are documented from the early 19th century onwards, but their roots appear to go back much earlier. In the story of Shamshum, which was analyzed by Vanstiphout (see n. 3), the eagle-serpent tree episode is told as follows: The hero and his son wander all over the earth, until they come to the great sea beyond which lies an island. On the seashore there is a large tree and around its trunk is coiled a serpent, which feeds upon the young of an eagle nesting in the treetop. Shamshum kills the serpent, but when the mother eagle returns, she mistakes Shamshum for the human being who comes and kills her young each year. The eaglets correct their mother, reporting that Shamshum saved them by killing the serpent. The grateful eagle promises to grant the hero whatever he desires. Shamshum’s only wish is to be taken 10 The Sumerian sources are quoted in this paper according to the translation in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), http://etcsl.orinst. ox.ac.uk/. 11 See Uther, The Types of International Folktales, vol. 2, 204. The rest of the Sumerian story, and its parallel in the 12th tablet of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, is comparable to the modern folktale type ATU 470, Friends in Life and Death. Thus, one can describe the Sumerian poem as an ancestor of the modern tale type ATU 317 + 470.
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with his son to a far island. The eagle does this, carrying both the hero and his son on its wings.12 I am confident that by using comparative folkloristic material one can demonstrate how the literary motifs that occur in diverse Mesopotamian myths could be closely related in the living oral tradition. The use of comparative material will eventually show that the myths committed to writing in ancient Mesopotamia were merely redacted remnants of a vast ocean of widely variegated oral narratives.13 By means of this kind of comparative research, one may be able to reconstruct, in part, the oral traditions of ancient Mesopotamia. In the story of Shamshum and its parallels, which I will discuss below, one can see how the motif of killing the dragon or serpent, as well as the other favors performed on behalf of the eagle’s young, are prerequisites to the hero’s journey on the grateful eagle’s back. The slaying of a dragon and the hero’s journey on an eagle’s back are motifs encountered in different literary compositions in ancient Mesopotamia, but as the evidence from modern folktales indicates, the two may belong to one coherent narrative. The comparative evidence suggests that an original tale, which combines the two motifs, also may have existed orally in ancient Mesopotamia.14 In regard to ancient Mesopotamia, scrutiny of the nature of the mythological lion-headed bird Anzu can supply additional data for comparison and confirmation. Anzu can be both good or evil, according to the literary texts and iconographic representations. The hero in the Sumerian narrative poem Lugalbanda and the Thunderbird feeds Anzu’s young and so earns the gift of supernatural speed and strength from the bird. In contrast, it is the monstrous Vanstiphout, “Shamshum aj-Jabbar,” p. 32. The question of why these and not other variants were committed to writing can be answered by pointing out the importance that certain stories may have had to the social groups involved in literary production. Comparative folkloristic research may help to discern more precisely the agendas and intentions of particular literary compositions. 14 Existence of such oral narrative plots in ancient Mesopotamia can be assumed indirectly. In some Mesopotamian iconographical representations, the defeat of the monster Humbaba is sometimes combined with the motif of the hero’s ascension to heaven on an eagle’s back. See A. Green, “Myths in Mesopotamian Art,” in I. L. Finkel, M. J. Geller (ed.), Sumerian Gods and Their Representations (Groningen: Styx, 1997), 135-158, esp. 138-139. For more oral variants attested in iconography, see P. Steinkeller, “Early Semitic Literature and Third Millennium Seals with Mythological Motifs,” in P. Fronzaroli (ed.), Literature and Literary Language at Ebla, Quaderni di Semitistica 18 (1992): 245-83, esp. 248-255. 12
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bird Anzu who steals the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil in the Akkadian epic Anzu and is subsequently slayed by Ninurta. Although not explicitly given the name Anzu in the surviving part of the epic, the eagle in the Etana myth is initially inimical with respect to the snake, whose young he ate, but is subsequently kind toward Etana, whom he carries to heaven in order to fetch the “herb of birth.” It is Ninurta who kills the evil Anzu; it is Etana who flies on the eagle’s back to heaven; and it is Lugalbanda who curries favor with the eagle by feeding its young. All three literary compositions have different agendas and objects of praise—Lugalbanda, Ninurta, and Etana—but all three also feature an eagle or bird, who seems to have been the same mythological figure, but has varying characteristics and deeds attributed to it in these texts. The differences in the story lines may have been dictated by the different intellectual agendas of each composition. In the oral lore of ancient Mesopotamia, these three stories may have belonged to the same heroic cycle. The name of the bird, who is invariably called Anzu, seems to indicate that the three different stories share a common background in folklore. There are cycles of stories among the Iraqi folktales that contain the characteristic motifs of the three ancient Mesopotamian myths— the slaying of a monster, the feeding of the eagle’s young, and the hero’s transport on the grateful eagle’s back. The new edition of Drower’s folktales includes “The Story of the Fisherman and the Sultan,”15 where the fisherman Mahmud has the task of building the sultan’s castle out of ivory and lion’s milk. After a series of encounters, Mahmud finds the tree familiar from the stories discussed above: [The hero] reached a tree, a palm tree so tall that when he gazed upwards to its summit, his turban fell from his head. Yes, it was tall, that tree! A thousand ram, and it rose from the earth to the heaven—it was so tall! In the palm tree he saw an eagle’s nest with her brood in it, and close to them was a seven-headed serpent of immense size—as big as Allah! . . . He cut off its seven heads with one thrust of his sword. . . . When the monster was dead, he divided its body into morsels and threw them up to the eagle’s brood in the tree above. The eaglets ate and were satisfied, all of them. The remaining morsels they put aside for their mother, who had gone into the mountains to hunt for food. The eagle was not like other eagles, but was a simurgh.16
15 16
Buckley, Drower’s Folk-Tales of Iraq, 387-406. Ibid., 391.
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This part of the new story is very close to certain episodes in Lugalbanda and the Thunderbird, where Lugalbanda, the youngest of the officers of the army of Uruk, falls ill en route to conquer the city of Aratta. He is abandoned by his comrades in the Zabu mountains, as they assume that he will soon die. Lugalbanda overcomes his illness with divine help, and finds himself near the place where “Enki’s mighty Eagle tree” stands. While Anzu and his wife are foraging for their young, Lugalbanda beautifies the fledglings and treats them to a sumptuous meal. Although he is at first disturbed when his sated offspring do not respond to his call, Anzu’s gratitude knows no bounds when he finds them regaled and their nest splendidly adorned. In the Sumerian tale, the hero earns the bird’s gratitude by feeding its young, rather than by killing the bird’s bitter enemy. In the story of the fisherman Mahmud, as in the story of Shamshum, the hero kills the snake or dragon, but in the former he feeds the eagle’s young with the flesh of the prey. In the Lugalbanda story, the hero himself prepares a meal for Anzu’s fledgling (lines 50ff.), which makes the account less coherent. If Anzu and his wife were foraging for their young while Lugalbanda actually fed them, it becomes more difficult to explain the immense measure of gratitude on Anzu’s part when he finds his fledgling safe and sound. Anzu’s gratitude in this version is explicable mostly in terms of his subsequent relief after his initial fright when his young did not respond to his call. In the story of Mahmud, the hero, after killing the serpent, falls asleep beneath the tree. The eagle returns and angrily seizes a mountain in her claws in order to hurl it upon him, thinking that he is the criminal who had been killing her fledglings. The eaglets fly to their mother, exclaiming: “This son of Adam killed the serpent, and cut it into morsels which we ate, putting a portion aside for you.”17 The eagle is extremely grateful and cries to Mahmud: “Son of Adam! Ask and desire!” Mahmud responds that he needs the milk of a lioness for his building project. The eagle responds: “I would gladly have given you jewels or gold, or precious stones! I cannot give you that! Ask me anything in the world but that!” The reward that the hero asks from the grateful eagle is almost always rejected by the bird as being too grievous in the variant stories. This is also the case in the Sumerian Lugalbanda poem, where the bird offers three different rewards to the hero before 17
Ibid., 392.
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Anzu finally consents to bestow on him the gift of supernatural speed, following from the air the hero’s journey back to his brothers who are besieging Aratta.18 In the story of Mahmud, the eagle finally states: “Son of Adam, ride on my back!,” and when in the air, the bird asks him repeatedly while gaining altitude: “What does the world look like?” Mahmud gives three different answers—the earth is like a table, the sea like a mirror, etc.19 This dialogue motif describing the earth and ocean from above is also encountered in Etana’s flight to heaven in the Akkadian epic, and it often occurs in folklore parallels.20 From the discussion presented above, one can already draw the conclusion that motifs present in some ancient Mesopotamian literary works are still current in the folklore of the contemporary Middle East. Moreover, it seems that the data gathered from modern folklore informants may, in certain cases, help to recover oral traditions that may have been current for thousands of years. Both ancient and modern traditions seem to combine motifs from the same resources, namely from interrelated groups of folkloristic motifs and narratives. This assessment, if true, would make the study of modern Iraqi folklore important for scholars of ancient Near Eastern religion and literature. The following example of an Iraqi folk narrative parallels the previous tales, and, in addition, it features a sacred tree as well as a descent to a netherworld that comprises seven levels. Both the sacred tree and the netherworld imagery are also prominent themes in ancient Mesopotamian art and literature. The tale of “The King and His Three Sons” (ATU 301) is reported to be quite popular in Iraq:21 In the old times there was a mighty king, who had three sons: Ahmad, Mahmud, and the youngest, Muhammad. This king had a great tree that grew in the royal garden, and every spring it brought forth beautiful blossoms. The king took meticulous care of the tree, but one day he noticed that the tree’s blossoms were quickly decreasing by the day. He ordered his sons to See J. Aro, “Anzu and Simurgh,” 27, for parallels. Buckley, Drower’s Folk-Tales of Iraq, 392. 20 See Aro, “Anzu and Simurgh,” 27; Haul, Etana, 79-81. This motif also occurs in animal fables; to Haul’s remark on p. 79, n. 288, can be added as evidence the Iraqi tale “The Stork and the Jackal” (80-81). An eagle carries a man also on pp. 422 and 451 of the Gorgias edition of Drower’s book. 21 The following tale was translated from Arabic to Russian by Yaremenko (as in n. 2), and is retold here by me. The Arabic original has been published by Y. A. al-Qasir, al-Hikaya wal-insan (Baghdad, 1970), 54-59, and discussed by D. S. al-Shwaili in the journal al-Turāth al-Sha bī (1977, no. 2): 169-171. 18 19
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discover the reason. His two elder sons guarded the tree on two successive nights, but both fell asleep while the blossoms again decreased. The third son guarded the tree; towards the morning he saw a huge monster (marīd), who stealthily approached the tree, took a big bunch of blossoms, and then swiftly disappeared. Muhammad pursued it and saw how the monster descended into a deep well outside the city. He went to his father and told what he saw. The father gathered a large army and approached the well. He ordered his eldest son to descend to the bottom of the well and to avenge the thief of blossoms. The two elder brothers unsuccessfully tried to descend to the well’s depth, becoming frightened by their mirror image in the water. When Muhammad descended to the bottom of the well, he found himself in front of a great palace. He entered it and saw a beautiful girl, sitting on a bed, and in her hand she held the blossoms from the tree. She smiled at Muhammad and with her eyes she pointed to the monster, which was sleeping beside her. She stood up and went to the monter’s sword, which hung on the wall. The hero took the sword, and after a fierce battle, killed the monster. He took the girl, who had been abducted from her people, and left the palace. On the road they met an old man with two rams—one black and one white. The old man explained that whoever sat on the back of the white ram would be brought back up to the earth. The girl did so and above ground she met Muhammad’s brothers, who brought her to their father’s palace. They told the king that they had killed the monster but that Muhammad perished in the battle. Meanwhile in the underworld, Muhammad sat upon the black ram and was brought down to the seventh underworld kingdom. He started to walk aimlessly, until he saw a great snake in a tree trying to devour a fledgling eagle. He took his sword and killed the snake, cut it into pieces, and fed the pieces to the eagle’s young. But one eaglet who was saved by Muhammad concealed its piece. When the mother eagle returned and saw a man standing behind the tree, she took a large stone and hovered above Muhammad, thinking that he had come to steal her young. The eaglet, who had concealed his piece of meat, showed it to his mother and so was able to prove that the man had saved them. The eagle exclaimed: “Ask for whatever you desire!” Muhammad asked to return to the upper world. The eagle stated that this was a very difficult task and that she must eat first. The eagle then ascended from the netherworld and brought Muhammad to his father’s palace, whereupon his brothers fled from his presence. Thus he married the girl that he saved from the monster.
The last part of this tale is frequently found in Oriental versions of the tale type ATU 301, The Three Stolen Princesses, where the hero is abandoned in a well or a cave by his treacherous companions. According to some Jewish versions, the hero is advised by the rescued princess to climb onto a white sheep in order to reach the upper world. However, he accidentally sits upon the black one and so ends up in the netherworld. There the hero undertakes actions familiar from the previous tales: he kills a snake which yearly devours the fledglings of an eagle, and/or he rescues a princess from a water-guarding dragon. The eagle, who is fed the hero’s
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own flesh, finally brings him to the upper world and restores him corporally.22 The European variants of the type ATU 301 are often combined with ATU 537, to form one coherent story, ATU 301+ 537. According to its many variants, the episode in which the hero kills the snake and rescues the eagle’s young takes place in a subterranean world, while the grateful eagle serves as the vehicle for the hero’s return journey to the upper world. As a parallel, we recall that the wounded eagle in the Etana myth was also cast into a pit, whence it was rescued by the hero. The pits, wells, and black color were all associated with the netherworld and its deities already in the ancient Near East.23 The Middle Eastern versions of the tale ATU 301 are often combined with ATU 551, in which a sick king can only be healed by a miraculous remedy. His three sons go on a quest, and as expected, the two elder haughty ones are diverted from their goal.24 The variant versions of this tale from Iraq, where the blind sultan is to be cured with lion’s milk, contain an episode in which an old man shows the brothers three roads. The hardest path to follow in searching for the remedy is predictably also the most rewarding; it is called in Iraqi Arabic Sadd-u-mā-Radd, “he went and returned not.”25 The name of the road is reminiscent of the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian literary descriptions of the netherworld—“the land of no return,” or “the road whose journey has no return.” The classic description of the Mesopotamian netherworld is the beginning of Ishtar’s Descent to the Netherworld, where the dead “are clothed like birds”: To the netherworld, land of n[o return], Ištar, daughter of Sin, [set] her mind. Indeed, the daughter of Sin did set [her] mind to the gloomy house, 22 See Heda Jason, “Types of Jewish-Oriental Oral Tales,” Fabula 7 (1965), 115224, esp. 145. A similar tale from Armenia, where the hero is lost in a cavern, is told by E. T. Harper as a parallel to the Etana myth; see Beiträge zur Assyriologie und semitischen Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1894): 405. 23 For Gilgamesh’s association with wells and well-digging, see A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 94-95. The well is a point of contact with the netherworld, and belongs to Gilgamesh in his capacity as ruler of the domain. I thank Jerrold Cooper for pointing this out to me. 24 See H.-J. Uther (n. 7), 320-21. 25 A road with this name is attested in Drower’s tales “The Blind Sultan” (58-73) and “The Story of the Fisherman and the Sultan” (390); in the tale “The Brave Prince,” from the collection Folk-Tales from Iraq (London: Books & Books, 1995), 59-73; and in the tale published in al-Turāth al-Sha bī (1970, no. 12): 78-86, and translated by Yaremenko (as in n. 2), 93-102.
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seat of the ne[therworld], to the house which none leaves who enters, to the road whose journey has no return, to the house whose entrants are bereft of light, where dust is their sustenance and clay their food. They see no light but dwell in darkness, they are clothed like birds in wings for garments, and dust has gathered on the door and bolt (lines 1-11).26
Witches and demons were closely associated with the netherworld in the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia. Only inhabitants of the netherworld, deities, or demons were depicted as possessing wings in Mesopotamian literature and art. The tradition still often ascribes a birdlike appearance to demons in modern Iraq, which can be taken, perhaps, as a continuation of the old tradition. Various demons and supernatural beings often appear in the folktales of Iraq as birds, and already Drower saw a continuity here: jānn, or fairy-folk, don at will the appearance of birds. . . . When one finds them in ‘Iraq, one is bound to recall the bird-men of the early cylinderseals, and the representations of men dressed in bird’s plumage which one finds from time to time on Sumerian objects. (xiv)
In the large repertoire of demonic creatures in Iraq, there are several specimens comparable to winged dust-eaters in the Mesopotamian netherworld. For example, the demon dāmi is, according to Drower, “a half-bestial ogress which haunts the outskirts of towns. Like Babylonian and Assyrian demons, its usual food is dirt, refuse, and leavings of all kinds” (p. xvi). One may recall here the fate of A ushunamir in Ishtar’s Descent to the Netherworld, a creature made by Enki to rescue Ishtar from the Land of No Return. Ereshkigal, queen of the netherworld, ordained for A ushunamir a fate never to be forgotten: “May the city garbage dump be your food, may the city sewer pipes be your drink, the shadow of a wall be your dwelling!”27 The difficult road of “no return” in Iraqi folktales is invariably occupied by demonic inhabitants. In the story “The Blind Sultan” (58-73) there is a description of this perilous road, which strikingly recalls the geography of the netherworld in ancient Mesopotamian texts. At the end of the road there is “a large castle surrounded by a wall, which has seven gates, each guarded by a deywa.”28 26 The translation is from B. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1993), 404. 27 Ishtar’s Descent, lines 104-107. For the interpretation, see R. Biggs, “Descent of Ištar, line 104,” NABU 1993, no. 74. 28 Deywa is a Persian loanword meaning “demon.” They are found chewing gum before the seven gates. Drower remarks that chewing gum to prevent thirst is not
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The seven gates of this castle correspond exactly to the seven gates of the netherworld and their guards in the ancient Mesopotamian tradition. While the “seventh underworld kingdom” in Iraqi folktales is reachable by holes in the ground like wells, or by riding upon a black animal, the road of “no return” is yet another survival of the ancient Mesopotamian netherworld imagery. In the aforementioned story, an old man teaches the hero how to journey upon that road: If you take the road “Went-and-Returned-Not” which is perilous, you may perish. . . . I will tell you what you must do. When you go along the road you will be attacked on all sides, and beaten, and hit with stones, but you must not turn round, or you will die. Go straight on, looking neither to left nor right, and at the end of the road you will find a large castle surrounded by a wall, in which are seven gates, each guarded by a deywa. These deywāt are fierce and will eat you, should you try to enter, but I will give you seven hairs from my beard, and you must make nooses with them, to draw from the mouth of each deywa the gum which she is chewing. As soon as the gum is removed she will fall asleep, and will not harm you. When all the seven deywāt are asleep, you can enter the courtyard of the castle, in which you will find lionesses in plenty. They will not harm you, for a lioness does not eat the children of Adam, it is only the male which does this. Kill and skin one beast, and milk another, then place the skin of milk on the back of a cub, and return by the road by which you came, taking care that you look neither to the right nor left when you are beaten and stoned.29
The hero follows the instructions given by the old man, and the mission is brought to a successful end. These precautions are partly similar to those given to Enkidu by Gilgamesh, in the Sumerian tale Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, lines 188-193: You should not hurl throw-sticks in the netherworld: those struck down by the throw-sticks would surround you. You should not hold a cornel-wood stick in your hand: the spirits would feel insulted by you. You should not put sandals on your feet. You should not shout in the netherworld.
The cosmological notion of the “netherworld” as a dwelling place for the dead was not any more relevant to the worldview of the Iraqi storyteller. Still, the perilous but rewarding journey to a faraway land of winged demons along the road with the name “went and returned not” remains a part of Iraqi folklore in modern times. In a variant Iraqi folktale, published in al-Turāth al-Sha bī 1970, an American innovation in Iraq, but has been customary in Arab countries for centuries (Buckley, Drower’s Folk Tales of Iraq, 116). 29 Ibid., 66. Note that the 66th page of Drower’s original book is missing from the Gorgias edition, probably because of a scanning error.
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no. 12 (see n. 19), a hero encounters on the road of “no return” three successive palaces inhabited by jinns; by sucking the breasts of the mother of the jinns in the first palace he becomes a brother of all three. The hero covers the distance between the three palaces by riding the back of the local winged jinns. After having returned from the successful adventure, he meets his brothers again, who had chosen to take a different road. On the return journey to their father, they become thirsty and encounter a well. The hero descends into the well in search of water and encounters an evil eagle, who holds a maiden in confinement. He battles with the eagle, using its own sword, and kills it. The eagle in this story is clearly analogous to the monster in the bottom of the well in the previous story, who stole blossoms from the king’s tree, while the battle itself is comparable to Ninurta’s battle with Anzu in the Babylonian myth. Here we can plainly see how the killing of a snake and the killing of an eagle are variants that belong to a heroic cycle, and constitute modern parallels to the ancient myths of Anzu and Etana. Subsequently in this Iraqi folktale, the maiden is taken out of the well, while the hero is kicked by a black goat and finds himself in the seventh underworld kingdom. The rest of the story is typical of ATU 301. The hero kills a dragon, who has been withholding water from the netherworld inhabitants and demanding maidens from among them to satisfy his carnivorous appetite. In return for this service, the king of the seventh netherworld kingdom gives him a demonic vehicle, which the hero has to feed with seven food items—apparently in accordance with the seven levels of the netherworld—during the return journey. At the end of the journey, he runs short of food and is forced to feed the flying demon with his own flesh. As we have seen, this is a common element in story type ATU 301. When one views all of the stories discussed here from a comparative perspective, it is easy to see that they form a body of interrelated texts, but one that is extremely difficult to define, especially in terms of which elements are “more original” or “earlier,” and which might be “later.” In addition, many of the texts discussed in these pages seem to be related to the ancient cycle of stories concerning heroes and the monster bird Anzu. More research will no doubt help to define more precisely the individual histories of the motifs embedded in these stories and to describe their mutual dynamics and interrelations from different perspectives.
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