Jerrold S. Cooper

Gudea and his dynasty

Gudea ruled over the Sumerian city-state of Lagas during the 21st century B.C.E., and left an incredible wealth of inscriptions pertaining to his building activity and pious donations, displayed on statues, clay cylinders, mace heads, vessels and many other objects. The central part of the book is Gudeas incription dedicated to the construction of the Eninnu, the main sanctuary of his city-god Ningirsu. It is composed of two parts, each displayed on a huge clay cylinder measuring 60 cm in height and 33 cm in diameter. The composition as a whole has 1366 cases or lines, and is among the longest Sumerian literary texts known at present. Although formally a building inscription, it is at the same time Sumerian poetic art at its best, and also a rich source for the study of Sumerian religion. Gudeas inscriptions and those of his predecessors and followers are offered in the Latin transliteration of the original cuneiform texts, in translation, and they are provided with introductions, commentaries and explanatory notes, with the volume as a whole highlighting a century which was part of the so-called Neo-Sumerian period.

iClay: digitizing cuneiform

Advances in digital technology for the graphic and textual representation of manuscripts have not, until recently, been applied to the worlds oldest manuscripts, cuneiform tablets. This is due in large part both to the three-dimensional nature of cuneiform tablets and to the complexity of the cuneiform script system. The Digital Hammurabi Project and the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding announce success in encoding Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform in Unicode while also demonstrating advances in 3D scanning and visualization of cuneiform tablets, showcased by iClay, a cross-platform, Internet-deployable, Java applet that allows for the viewing and manipulation of 2D+ images of cuneiform tablets.

Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica

By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and manipulating assertions about a wide variety of matters. Broader definitions of writing that embrace purely semantic devices (semasiography, Sampson 1985:29) relate to ancient systems of communication, especially “Mexican pictography” (Boone 2000:29), but depart from the linguistic underpinnings that characterize the writing systems reviewed here. Semasiographic definitions are not very helpful in understanding heavily phonic systems. Their limited applicability to writing systems of the world identifies a typological weakness; even the Mexican examples are inconclusive, since these texts bundle genuine lexical items with supporting graphic devices. An alternative view is that the mixed Mexican pictography contains writing, yet supplements it with effective pictorial clues. From this comes a narrative that is translatable, with some controlled liberties, into language. Equating this distinctive package of features with the preponderantly phonic nature of Egyptian, cuneiform, or Mayan glyphs blurs distinctions. A broad definition of writing does not elucidate these scripts, although it is useful for understanding the relation of texts and accompanying images (Baines 1989; Taube 2000). In part, the first writing attracts attention because it contributes to a teleological narrative of progress (Trigger 1998: 42). The invention of writing is thought, with good justification, to undergird and enable present-day society. In its more developed forms, it is indispensable to bureaucracy, propaganda, and administration.

“Enlil and Namzitara” Reconsidered

Four decades ago, Miguel Civil (1977) published “the brief, but fortunately complete tale” (Civil 1977: 65) of “Enlil and Namzitara.” In that publication, Civil deployed all the virtues ascribed to him by Samuel Noah Kramer (1991): “a sharp eye and a photographic memory” that made him “a master at identifying” Sumerian literary fragments, “making ‘joins’ whenever possible, and assigning them to the right compositions;” a “special flair and talent for matters technological;” and “an affinity for, and attraction to, lexicographical problems and details” which made him “the unchallenged master” of Sumerian lexicography. To Kramer’s concluding encomium – “original, innovative, creative, extraordinarily productive, and (justifiably) self-confident” – one only need add warm, congenial, and extraordinarily generous. The initial publication of a Sumerian literary text is never the last word on that composition, and a number of scholars made small improvements to our understanding of “Namzitara” before it was re-edited together with the later bilingual version from Emar (published only after Civil’s first edition; see Civil 1989: 7) by Bendt Alster in 2005 (327–38).1 More recently Yoram Cohen (2010, 2013) and I (Cooper 2011) have returned to the composition, Cohen more interested in the wisdom aspects of the text, especially in its Late Bronze Syrian iteration,2 whereas I focused on the Old Babylonian version and its puns, as well as the interpretation of a recurring Sumerian phrase as nam-mu tar-ra “Bless me!” rather than nam mu-tar-ra “the one who determines destinies.” Wilfred Lambert (2013: 286–87) offered a different take on that phrase in his explication of our tale’s Enmešara episode, for which see below. Yet after all has been said and done, Miguel’s succinct description of the composition forty years ago remains absolutely on target:

The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

Archives of paradise divine vowels, Richard Simon, et al the cycle of the chosen peoples, J.G. Herder the Hebrews and the sublime, Ernest Renan the danger of ambiguity, Friedrich Max Mueller the monotheism of the Aryas, Adolphe Pictet heavenly nuptials, Rudolph Friedrich Grau semites as aryans, Ignaz Goldziher secrets of the forge.