The principal task confronting those working on the literatures of Ancient Mesopotamia remains the publication of primary sources. A case in point are the thousands of tablets and fragments found at Nippur, in central southern Iraq, by the archaeological expedition of the University of Pennsylvania (1888–1900). The archaeological context of their discovery was not recorded in any detail and they were at first considered to be the remains of a temple library. It is almost certain that they derive instead from pedagogical activity conducted in private houses in the eighteenth century bc.
The tablets found at Nippur were split among collections in three different countries: the University Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, and the epigraphist's personal collection, donated in 1925 to the University of Jena in Germany. Despite this unfortunate dispersal of the material, publication began before the First World War, although with little understanding of some genres of text.
Especially difficult were the literary compositions in Sumerian, a language then only poorly understood. Progress with these texts took place over the course of many decades. From the 1940s onwards, the Philadelphia scholar Samuel Noah Kramer and his students successfully used the tablets from Nippur to reconstruct the principal works of Sumerian literature, thus recovering the oldest corpus of literature in human history. Kramer died in 1990, but the task goes on, for many hundreds of fragments from Nippur are not yet identified and published, and many dozens of literary compositions are incompletely reconstructed.
The book at hand continues the work of Kramer. In it Jeremiah Peterson presents 284 fragments identified during his study at the University Museum, many of them then joined to other pieces in Philadelphia. This was painstaking work, for most pieces are very fragmentary and hard to read. But they are a familiar bunch. The Sumerian literary compositions known at Old Babylonian Nippur number about four hundred. More than a quarter of them are represented here. Peterson gives hand-drawn copies of almost all fragments, and photographs of a great many. Especially instructive are the plates of photographs of reconstructed tablets, which illustrate the joining of newly identified pieces to known tablets and fragments (pls. 1–68).
Beyond the presentation of the cuneiform the fragments are treated variously. Pieces of well-known compositions that hold no new information attract no comment beyond a short description, including dimensions, and identification of text and passage by line number. Where his fragments do present new evidence Peterson adds commentary, extending from a few pertinent remarks to a full edition. One text, no. 283, is a manuscript of a composition (ululumama-song of the god Ningublag) that has not previously benefited from public exposure. Peterson makes good that lack with a very thorough treatment on pp. 317–31.
Among the mass of Old Babylonian pieces, text No. 170 stands out as Middle Babylonian. It is a manuscript of the Sumerian hymn now catalogued as Lipit-Ištar A, with interlinear Akkadian translation. The cuneiform has already been published, by M. de J. Ellis in 1979, but Peterson's photograph affords a second view, and some improved readings can be offered against his editio princeps on pp. 192–3:
l. 2′: the reading la maḫ-ir is an improbable syllabification. More likely: [am su-ba] sag nu-gá-[gá-me-en] // [ri-mu šá ana zu-um-r]i-šu ⌈la i⌉-we-er-rù [ana-ku] “[I am a wild bull whose presence] men dare not approach!” The equivalence sag-gá-gá = (w)âru is conventional in the lexical texts.
l. 3′: no need to emend ši-it-a-ar to ši-it-ḫa-ar; cf. ši-it-a-ra in Ammiditana's hymn to Ištar (F. Thureau-Dangin, Revue d'Assyriologie 22 [1925] 172, l. 12).
l. 4′: read máš (not gi) kéš-da [me-en]. The Akkadian is probably to be restored as [šá zi-qin]-⌈šu?⌉ el-le-tu 4a-šá-re-ed [rik-si ana-ku] “[I, whose beard] is pure (black), am leader of [the gang]”; the equivalence máš = ašarēdu is well established in the lexical texts.
l. 5′: Akk. better: [šá i-nam d]am-qá-ku ap-pa <damqāku> libba(šà) ú-ṭib ú-ne[m-mir pa-na] “I [who] had fine [eyes and a handsome] nose, gladdened the heart and brightened [the visage]”. The Sumerian phrase šà-ga zal-le is translated twice, and placed in the past (MB pret. unemmir: pres. unammar); nummuru derives from the standard lexical entry zal = nawārum.
l. 6′: the Akkadian translation of [uktin ḫuš-ḫuš-a] is probably [šá ṣu-bur pa-ni-šú ru]-uš-šu-ú “[I, whose facial features are] ruddy …”. The continuation, ḫi-li du8-du8-[me-en], is assuredly rendered ku-uz-ba ṭuḫ-ḫ[u-da-ku] “… [am richly] endowed with attractiveness”.
l. 7′: part of the translation of ḫé-du7 is visible, both on the photograph and in Ellis's copy: wa-às-[ma]. In this and the following line the Akkadian seems to display a syntactic pattern different from that employed in ll. 4′–6′; here perhaps [šapt]ān ša ana awâtim was[mā šaptāya] “[my lips are] lips that are well suited to speaking”.
l. 8′: before ubānātum read: …]-a-tum.
l. 9′: begins [eṭ-lu dam-q]u.
Peterson notes the importance of this fragment for documenting the rare survival of a standard school copy book into the Middle Babylonian period. Lipit-Ištar A joins the small number of Sumerian literary compositions that had a bilingual afterlife in the later scholarly traditions. One may additionally observe that the Akkadian translation shows evidence of Old Babylonian dialect (ll. 2′ iwerrū, 7′ was[mā]) as well as Middle Babylonian (ll. 4′ stat. subord. elletu, 5′ pret. une[mmir]). Evidently it was not achieved all at once. Probably individual words of the Sumerian text were glossed in Akkadian in the Old Babylonian period, and these glosses only later joined up to yield a full translation.
The book concludes with an index of museum numbers, a list of joins and a bibliography. The author is much to be thanked for continuing the process of publishing the Sumerian literary tablets from Nippur in this handsome and well-organized volume.
