What Was a Sumerian King Expected to Do
In fact, the native championship of this composition was simply 'Kingship', after its first give-and-take,nam-lugal.
nam-lugal an-ta e11-da-ba / Kiš.KI lugal-am3 / Kiš.KI-a GIŠ.UR3-e /
mu 600×3+60×6 i3-na
When kingship came downwards from heaven, (the city of) Kish was sovereign; in Kish, Gushur exercised (kingship) for ii,160 years.
So begins the oldest SKL manuscript, which dates to the time of Shulgi (ca. 2093-2046 BCE), the second male monarch of the Third Dynasty of Ur (also chosen Ur III). Afterward compilers apparently felt uncomfortable with the prominence accorded to the city of Kish and provided a new beginning to the limerick by devising a prior descent of kingship in the Sumerian city of Eridu.
Apart from this, the SKL provides us with an unbroken sequence of kings who exercised kingship. Some of them ruled for hundreds, or even thousands, of years; others ruled for more than 'human' periods of time. Legendary kings of the distant past were followed by kings known from historical sources; this connected the mythological world directly to the political club of the present.
Some manuscripts add together brusk biographical notes well-nigh peculiarly remarkable figures. We are told that before becoming king sure persons were a shepherd, a fisherman, a smith, a fuller, a boatman, a leatherworker, a low-ranking priest, and so on. Even a female tavern-keeper seems to have exercised kingship, and not for a brusk time!
Other notes refer to 'historical' events, such as a successful military raid or the foundation of a city. Anecdotes and fragments of historical traditions plant their style into the SKL, along with allusions to obscure myths and legends, probably transmitted only orally.
The Sumerian King List, therefore, is not simply a list of kings and dynasties: it is a circuitous and composite literary piece of work with a long editorial history, but one that is fundamentally political. The nigh ancient source is from Ur 3, but we accept several clues to the existence of an earlier version dating back to the Sargonic period (ca. 2350-2200 BCE), and perchance written in the Akkadian language.
Clearly the SKL underwent a number of changes over the course of time. Some of these changes were accidental, due simply to errors and lack of accuracy in the transmission process. Others were the result of deliberate manipulations or the interpolations of other textual sources. Just what does information technology tell usa most history?
Although the circumstances nether which the SKL was created are withal unknown, it is likely that the SKL originally served to legitimize the domination of the kings of Akkad over the whole of Babylonia. The SKL anachronistically and fictionally projects the political situation of the Sargonic menses – when the entire land of Sumer and Akkad was for the beginning time unified – into the distant past. At any one fourth dimension, the SKL argues, there was only ane legitimate seat of kingship and only 1 legitimate king, whose potency extended over the entire country. And then it has been from time immemorial.
Of class, the political reality of the region before the advent of the Akkadian dynasty was really quite unlike. Early Dynastic Babylonia was subdivided into several territorial political entities – the so-called city-states – each with its own political leader, called variouslyen,lugal or'ensi ii '. Even so, the SKL is not concerned with historical reality. Once it became an 'authoritative' function of the Mesopotamian tradition, it was utilized once more and again by Babylonian sovereigns, or political circles close to them, for their own ideological and political purposes. One king to dominion all of Mesopotamia was the ideal, even if it was far from the reality.
The SKL is a document of infrequent interest: it provides us with a unique reconstruction of the history of early Babylonia past the Babylonians themselves. The absenteeism of any divine involvement in the SKL is too noteworthy, and unique in Sumerian literature. No deity plays a role in the numerous dynastic changes; kingship is transferred from metropolis to city equally a issue of military events only. The sole divine entity in the SKL is kingship itself, which, past virtue of its descending from heaven, was conceptualized as a divine institution.
On the other mitt, the history told by the SKL is largely fictional and mythical in grapheme. Though acknowledging this fact, scholars in the by have relied heavily on the list'south data for reconstructing the dynasties and chronology of third millennium Mesopotamia. The near strenuous defender of the historical value of the data that the SKL provides was its editor, 20th century Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen.
Thorkild Jacobsen, Sumerian King List
Jacobsen's conventionalities in the general historical veracity of the SKL led him to arbitrarily emend the text or restore broken portions of it with the names of kings known from historical sources, and to advise unlikely readings for some of the royal names in order to judge the names of known historical sovereigns.Jacobsen believed that the actual materials from which the SKL was congenital upwardly (such as names of kings and lengths of reigns) represent 'a historical source of high value, from which only some exaggerated reigns occurring with the earliest rulers should be segregated'.
Every bit Jacobsen had done, so did other scholars. But very few of the royal names mentioned in the SKL are actually attested in sources from the Early Dynastic period. Their names exercise not fifty-fifty occur in Sumerian and Akkadian texts of the third millennium BCE. These facts lone are telling virtually the historical reliability of the SKL. Moreover, the reigns attributed to the few kings who do occur in Early Dynastic sources are either wholly unrealistic, or clearly artificial. In fact, there are merely vii, including the famous Pabilgames ('Gilgamesh') of Uruk, the aboriginal king and hero of various legendary tales (among which the so-called 'Epic of Gilgamesh'), who is said to have reigned for 126 years.
The Sumerian King List has little to offer us in reconstructing the historical chronology of the Early on Dynastic flow. Any such reconstruction should exist based on Early Dynastic sources only. But contrasting the text with the reality of competing and warring kings gives united states insights into the Mesopotamian tradition and its political aspirations of unity.
Adapted from Gianni Marchesi, 'The Sumerian King List and the Early History of Mesopotamia', in: ana turri gimilli: Studi dedicati al Padre Werner R. Mayer, Southward.J. da amici e allievi (Vicino Oriente – Quaderno v), eds. 1000. G. Biga and K. Liverani, Roma 2010, pp. 231-248 (downloadable at https://unibo.academia.edu/GianniMarchesi).
Gianni Marchesi is Banana Professor of Assyriology at the University of Bologna.
Source: https://www.asor.org/anetoday/2016/11/sumerian-king-list-history-kingship-early-mesopotamia/
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