CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SUMERIAN MYTHOLOGY

Benjamin R. Foster

DEFINITION AND SOURCES

Pioneering studies of Mesopotamian religion organized the evidence around pantheon, cult, and mythology, in which pantheon was the ordering and hierarchy of the gods, cult was religious practice, such as offerings and rituals, and mythology was stories about the gods (survey in Jacobsen 1987b: 466–469; B. Foster 2007). The concept and content of Sumerian mythology were defined by Samuel Noah Kramer’s Sumerian Mythology (1944, rev. edn 1961), which stands as the foundation for all subsequent work on the subject. Kramer pieced together and presented in narrative form mythological stories previously known in fragments or not at all (comprehensive list of texts in Heimpel 1993–1997). He and his students took the lead for the next forty years in carrying forward the reconstruction and understanding of these stories, culminating with a revision and expansion of Sumerian Mythology in French (Bottéro and Kramer 1989). Kramer’s gift for popularization, backed up by his unflagging dedication to the task, created a new discipline in the study of mythology, and Kramer further undertook to put Sumerian myths in a larger context of other mythologies of

the ancient Near East (Kramer 1961).

The most important sources for Kramer’s work were tablets written out in the Sumerian language by Babylonian scholars of the first half of the second millennium BC (Black 2007). At that time, Sumerian was a productive cultural accomplishment, like Latin in medieval and Renaissance Europe. It seems unlikely that the scholars who copied them spoke Sumerian as their mother tongue. The compositions, as opposed to the manuscripts, might be earlier, in some cases from the outgoing third millennium (Alster 1976). Earlier Sumerian mythological stories have been discovered, such as the Barton Cylinder (Alster and Westenholz 1994), presumably written when Sumerian was still spoken as a living language, but these have proved very difficult to understand, nor do they preserve earlier versions of the mythological stories reconstructed by Kramer. Thus there is a puzzling lack of connection between the early Sumerian compositions and the corpus of later documents normally used to reconstruct Sumerian mythology.

Not all scholars are convinced, therefore, that the Sumerian mythological stories copied by Babylonian scribes represent a coherent body of tradition from a period when the Sumerians existed as a people, rather than a variety of compositions in the

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Sumerian language written by and for people who learned it at school (Veldhuis 2004: 67). In the eighteenth century BC, Sumerian and Akkadian were two languages of the same literate cultural tradition. “Sumerian mythology” may therefore overemphasize language, too readily identifying works in the Sumerian language with a hypothetical Sumerian society, rather than situating them in a bilingual, even invented artificial Sumero-Akkadian culture mastered by a small elite privileged to receive a formal education. Nonetheless, most writers on Sumerian myths, following Kramer, take for granted that they are authentic remains of an independent Sumerian culture.

MYTH AND THOUGHT

In the rich body of modern writing on Mesopotamian myth, numerous typologies and definitions can be found (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 95–104; Heimpel 1993–1997: 538–540). In Mesopotamian studies of the mid-twentieth century, myth was sometimes treated as indicative of an unscientific way of thinking, characteristic of contemporaneous primitive peoples, and any ancient people who lived before the middle of the first millennium BC anywhere outside of the Greek-speaking world (Cassirer 1944; Frankfort et al. 1946). According to this view, the mythopoeic way of thinking makes up stories to explain things rather than seeking abstract causes. Sumerian myths would therefore be typical of primitive thought because they did not distinguish “man” from “nature” and they explained natural phenomena, the creation and organization of the universe, as well as developments in human subsistence and society, in story form, proceeding from a known outcome to a posited beginning.

Regardless of how Sumerian myth is analyzed by modern thinkers, its main feature is that story form. The stories often depict a long-ago situation, introduce a conflict, and then give a resolution of it as thereafter valid. Myth is therefore imaginative and reflective, rather than analytic or scientific. It makes recourse to a literary structure built around a specific theme or motif, such as a heroic combat, but often with elements added that are secondary to the main theme, such as intervention of the hero’s mother. Mesopotamian myth is usually associated with religious beliefs and practice, tends to be cast in a solemn and elevated style, and can be combined with praise and exaltation of the divine. Yet it remains grounded in the concrete, relying on imagery derived from human life, motivation, and experience transferred to the divine sphere (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 95–104).

On a more mundane level, some Sumerian myths have been understood as historical allegories for actual political events of the late third millennium (Cooper 2001). Reading myths in this way runs counter to an established academic agenda that searches for mythic universals across many cultures (Diakonoff 1995) and another that reads myth as allegory for aspects of nature as experienced in Mesopotamia (Jacobsen 1987b). The alleged Sumerian mythologizing of political events is sometimes read in more detail as an ethnically Sumerian reaction to the formation of the Akkadian state (Cooper 2001). This, by its own accounts, brutally repressed and exploited the cities of Sumer. Yet Sumerian praises of that state were composed by the daughter of its very founder (Zgoll 1997). Because the Sumerian deities who appear in myths had their major sanctuaries in different Sumerian cities, some stories about them could reflect inter-city rivalries within Sumer, thus a more generalized historical allegory than Sumerian reaction to the Akkadian Empire. Hence, in this sub-group of compositions,

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if the allegorical reading is accepted, their mythological content is more of a narrative strategy than exemplary of mythopoeic thought.

In a negative response to the perennial question of mythologists, did the Sumerians or Babylonians believe in their own myths, Sumerian mythological narratives can also be read as a sub-category of Sumerian literature, set in a primeval world of gods for artistic rather than mythopoeic reasons (survey of Sumerian literature in Rubio 2009). Although they lack the light elegance of Sumerian epic and the witty brilliance of Sumerian contest literature, the mythological stories share an intense preoccupation with Sumerian culture and history; they are set in the Sumerian alluvium and acted out on a landscape in which Sumerian cities and their linking watercourses were center stage.

TYPOLOGY AND SUMMARY

Inanna and Enki

One group of Sumerian mythological narratives focuses on Inanna, goddess of love and procreation, and Enki, god of wisdom, intelligence, and magic. In Inanna and Enki, which, at about 800 lines, was one of the longest of the Sumerian myths, Inanna leaves her city, Uruk, to visit Enki at his city, Eridu (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 230–256; Farber in Hallo 1997: 522–526). In the course of a banquet to entertain Inanna, Enki becomes intoxicated and gives her the cosmic powers that control over 100 Sumerian cultural attributes, including the scribal arts, prostitution, family strife, music, kissing, architecture, intelligence, and lighting and extinguishing fire. She makes off with them all to Uruk, despite Enki’s repeated attempts to recover them. Although the list of cultural attributes is of considerable interest as an early articulation of human culture, its sheer bulk and repetition foregrounds the list itself as the core of the composition, as if a romance had been constructed to showcase a speculative list of concepts. In a historical reading, the story might express a transfer of cultural prestige from Eridu to Uruk.

Enki and Inanna are at odds in another story, Inanna and Shukaletuda (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 257–276; Volk 1995; Black et al. 2004: 197–205) in which the goddess plants a date palm and a gardener, Shukaletuda, incorporates it in a garden he lays out. When the goddess visits the garden, he rapes her. Inanna tries to punish him for his offense, first by turning his water supply to blood, then by sending a tempest, and finally by blocking access to his garden. Each time, Shukaletuda asks Enki’s advice as to how to escape punishment, and Enki advises him to live in a city rather than his garden. Finally Inanna demands that Enki himself hand over the offender, whom she then interrogates and “strikes,” perhaps to kill or transform him, but promises in compensation that he will never be forgotten.

In The Descent of Inanna (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 276–295; Jacobsen 1987a: 205–232; Black et al. 2004: 77–84), Inanna descends to visit her sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the netherworld, who, in a jealous fury, kills Inanna. Procreation thereby disappears from the world. To bring her back to life, Enki sends a singer and a female impersonator to soothe Ereshkigal, instructing them to refuse all gifts but the corpse of Inanna. When Ereshkigal, realizing that she has been tricked, surrenders the corpse, she requires that Inanna provide a substitute. On her journey back, Inanna meets her courier and her attendant who used to sing to her and dress her hair. These she is loath

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to send in her stead because they obviously have been mourning her death. When, however, she meets her lover, Dumuzi, he shows no signs of grieving, so she gives him to the demons of the netherworld. Dumuzi’s sister, Geshtinanna, tries to save her brother by hiding him, but the demons find him with the help of a tattling fly. Geshtinanna sacrifices herself by consenting to spend half the year in the kingdom of the dead so Dumuzi can come up to earth.

The theme of the pitiless demons searching for the young Dumuzi is taken up at length in Dumuzi’s Dream (Alster 1972a; Jacobsen 1987a: 28–46; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 300–312), in which Dumuzi, terrified by a dream of being carried off to the netherworld by demons of death, asks his sister to hide him from them, but is betrayed by friends. After several escapes and recaptures, he is carried off to the netherworld. Inanna has no overt role in this particular tale, but, in Inanna and Bilulu (Jacobsen and Kramer 1953, with quite different understanding of plot; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 330–337), she seeks Dumuzi’s body so she can lament over it. She meets Bilulu, a god in the form of a tavern keeper, and three people from the steppe are turned into spirits to cry out for funerary offerings for Dumuzi. A bird calls upon his sister, Geshtinanna, to join Inanna for the lament. Sumerian and Akkadian literature preserve various laments for Dumuzi; furthermore, the youthful love and courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi were a favored subject of Sumerian love poetry and epithalamia (Jacobsen 1987a: 1–84; Sefati 1998).

These are stories in which the complicated, self-centered, and passionate temperament of Inanna provides the dynamic element. Akkadian literature contains a version of the Descent of Inanna (called by her Semitic name, Ishtar, B. Foster 2005: 498–505), and preserves another story about Ishtar and Enki written with Sumerian performance rubrics, called Ea and Saltu (ibid.: 96–106). In the latter, Ishtar’s fondness for violence so annoys Enki that he creates a counterpart for her named “Discord.” When Ishtar is disgusted by Discord, she sets aside her violent ways and Enki ordains that people will perform a kind of ritual battle dance in her honor. This shows that the tension between Ishtar and Enki and Ishtar and her sister, Ereshkigal, queen of the netherworld, were themes explored in both Sumerian and Akkadian writings, with stories in common and with stories unique to each.

Ninurta

A similar fund of themes common to Sumerian and Akkadian, alongside stories unique to each literature, is found with Ninurta, a hero-god who is the subject of four major Sumerian mythological narratives and one Akkadian one. In the poem Lugale (Jacobsen 1987a: 233–272; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 339–377; K. Foster 2000; Black et al. 2004: 163–180), Ninurta defeats a volcanic monster and his army of stone allies, and then decrees a destiny for each stone. Blessed stones were to be prized for their own sake by the human race, whereas cursed stones were useful only when broken, chipped, or ground to powder. This work enjoyed unique popularity in Mesopotamian tradition. It was provided with an Akkadian translation during the second millennium and was studied as a “Classic” well into the first. Its comprehensive aetiology of the use of stones in early Mesopotamian culture, original and brilliantly done, touched on a subject of importance in Mesopotamian thought, which took a great interest in the appearance, properties, and magical potential of stones (Schuster-Brandis 2008). The

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enumeration of stones can be compared to the enumeration of culture traits in Inanna and Enki, in Enki and the World Order (discussed below), as well as to the list of birds in Nanshe and the Birds, in which each kind of bird is assigned a place in the world (Veldhuis 2004).

In the other compositions, the central theme is Ninurta’s desire for the powers held by other gods, which he believes he is entitled to because of his heroism. In Angim (Cooper 1978; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 377–388; Black et al. 2004: 181–186), Ninurta is victorious over the mountain, but the poem is focused on the aftermath, when he brings his chariot and trophies to his father’s house in Nippur and seems impatient to usurp his father’s powers in his moment of triumph. The gods sing his praises and Ninurta joins them, but, after asking for additional authority, he returns to his own house.

In the Akkadian poem Anzu (B. Foster 2005: 555–578), Ninurta hunts down and slays a monstrous bird that stole the powers of his father Enlil. Upon his triumphant return, it appears that he is not eager to relinquish the powers to his father, but eventually does so and is praised by the gods. Although no Sumerian version of this story is known, in the Sumerian Ninurta and the Turtle (Alster 1972b; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 418–424), Ninurta has defeated Anzu and wants to keep the captured powers for himself. Enki intervenes by arranging for a monstrous turtle to seize Ninurta and hold him while Enki admonishes him on his behavior. Ninurta’s mother, who volunteered her son’s services in the Akkadian Anzu poem, is displeased with Enki’s intervention; perhaps she wanted her favorite son to take Enlil’s powers. In Ninurta’s Journey to Eridu (Reisman 1971; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 424–429), Ninurta goes to Enki’s house. Like Inanna, when he sees the cosmic powers there, he covets them for himself.

The story of Ninurta as an ambitious hero was adroitly reworked by the author of the Babylonian Epic of Creation, in which a champion is needed to save the gods from attack by the mother of them all, Tiamat (B. Foster 2005: 436–486; Lambert 2008). Ea, the Akkadian name for Enki, instructs his son, Marduk, to volunteer to champion the gods, but, unlike Ninurta, Marduk is to demand supreme power over them, in advance, as the price for his valor. In this twist to the story, the gods freely grant Marduk their powers and, after his victory, he reorganizes the universe, in which Babylon becomes its earthly center. Babylon thereby, in the Akkadian story, replaced both Eridu and Nippur as the seat of cosmic powers. Inanna had no role in the Ninurta story and likewise had none in the Babylonian Creation Epic. In this instance, a Sumerian story, focused on a son’s desire to take his father’s powers when he has surpassed him in bravery, has been converted in an Akkadian retelling into a clever plan by the god of wisdom to make his own son pre-eminent in the universe. The father–son rivalry has been removed from the plot; now the father has a master plan to promote his son over all the gods.

Enlil

Chief god on earth, and sometimes considered to be the god of the atmosphere, Enlil is the subject of two Sumerian mythological stories about how he acquires a wife. In one, Enlil and Ninlil (Jacobsen 1987a: 167–180; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 105–115; Black et al. 2004: 102–106), Ninlil is a nubile girl who arouses Enlil’s desire. With the

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help of his courier he approaches her when she is bathing and rapes her, leaving her pregnant with Sin, the moon-god. Banished from the community for this crime by the other gods, Enlil disguises himself as one of his own servants and arranges to meet Ninlil three more times while she follows him into exile, impregnating her each time with yet another deity. Sin becomes a god in heaven; the other three become netherworld deities. Young Ninlil’s devotion to her abuser is a haunting psychological insight in this disturbing tale, for which no Akkadian parallel exists.

In Enlil and Sud (Civil 1983; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 115–128; Black et al. 2004: 106–111), Sud is an attractive young woman whom Enlil mistakes for or hopes to treat as a prostitute. When she refuses his advances, he sends his courier to her mother, proposing marriage. Her mother accepts, and Enlil showers his prospective bride with presents. The wedding is celebrated with great splendor. In Sud, Enlil finds the ideal royal mate: she is a mistress of love, birth, and womanly arts, abundant harvests, accounting and household management, and, finally, his queen, Ninlil.

These two stories offer mirror images of how Enlil, a king, acquires his queen. In each case, the plot turns on Enlil’s uncontrollable desire for a young woman, one of whom he rapes and the other of whom he cannot possess until he marries her. In the major Akkadian composition in which royal lust is a factor, the Epic of Gilgamesh (George 2000; B. Foster 2001), Gilgamesh, the king, does not find a queen, and, in fact, royal lust drops from the story. In the Akkadian Nergal and Ereshkigal (B. Foster 2005: 506–524), it is the queen who wants a mate, whom Ea finds a way to provide. These stories explore in different ways intersections of power and desire, exampled in more modern societies through the amply chronicled amours of royalty and their political consequences. One cannot know if their tenor was weakness or strength of the flesh writ large, as some critics today might read them, or if they had a wholly different intent that lies beyond our ken.

Nanna-Suen’s Journey to Nippur (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 128–142; Black et al. 2004: 147–154) tells how the moon-god decides to visit his father, Enlil, in order to enhance their bonds of mutual loyalty. He builds a wonderful boat, loads it down with gifts, and sets forth on his voyage. At five points along the journey gods try to take the cargo for themselves, among them Inanna at Uruk and Ninlil herself, near Nippur. These efforts are unsuccessful and the moon-god arrives with his gifts, including fish, precious oils, and livestock. Enlil gives a banquet in his son’s honor, in which his dutiful guest asks his father’s blessing on his city, Ur, and long life for himself. Some modern readers would see in this story a theological allegory for the interdependence of Nippur and Ur under the Third Dynasty of Ur, when Ur was the political capital and Nippur enjoyed special status as a kind of religious capital and center of learning, but others might read it differently, perhaps as a celebration of a ritual.

Enki

Enki is perhaps the most important deity in the Sumerian mythological poems. Insofar as they involve conflict, he is most often the one who invents a resolution for it. His wisdom is not proof against alcohol or desire, but in terms of sheer intelligence and knowledge he has no rival among the gods.

In Enki’s Journey to Nippur (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 142–150; Black et al. 2004: 330–333), Enki builds himself a splendid palace at his own city, Eridu, which is praised

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at considerable length. When it is done, he embarks on a journey to Nippur, where he is feted upon his arrival. Enki then gives a banquet in honor of Enlil, at the conclusion of which Enlil makes a speech, expressing his joy at the construction of the new palace.

Enki and Ninhursag (Jacobsen 1987a: 181–204; Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 151–164) is set on the island of Bahrain, which the Sumerians called Dilmun. According to the story, Dilmun was then a place where nothing unpleasant had ever happened, but it did not have an adequate supply of fresh water. At the behest of the goddess Ninhursag, Enki arranges for plentiful water, begetting grain, green plants, vegetables, and reeds in abundance. With the coming of plants, the goddess of weaving, Uttu, is born. Enki desires her and visits her house with fresh fruit as a present. When she welcomes him, he rapes her, but Ninhursag somehow turns aside his sperm and uses it to make seven plants. These plants having as yet no use in the world, Enki proposes to give each its destiny, but insists on tasting each one first. Ninhursag, furious, wishes him dead, but the gods are thrown into consternation at this, as they need Enki, so she makes him sick instead. A mysterious figure appears, perhaps a fox, who offers to rescue Enki. Ninhursag, somehow mollified, creates eight deities to cure each of Enki’s afflictions, from head to foot, and these find their place in the cosmos.

The longest poem about Enki, Enki and the World Order (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 165–188; Black et al. 2004: 215–225), praises him as provider for the gods and the human race, measuring out the places for the stars in heaven and furnishing the world with fields and flocks. He builds his palace and a wonderful boat, which he uses to take a journey through all the lands the Sumerians knew. In Sumer itself, Enki blesses it for diffusing civilization to all of them. From there he goes on to Meluhha (the Indus Valley), Dilmun (Bahrain), Elam and Marhashi (south and south-central Iran), and Martu (the Midto Upper Euphrates). He organizes the marshes, the sea, and the clouds; human tasks such as agriculture, husbandry and the construction of shelter, weaving, metal work, hunting and fishing, writing, midwifery, and prostitution. When Inanna protests that nothing has been given her, Enki ordains her mistress of conflict and contradiction. She will bring sorrow where there is happiness, both misery and bliss.

Tales of origins

Mesopotamian mythology generally held that the human race had been created to serve the gods and to relieve them of the necessity of working to sustain themselves (survey in Lambert 2008). The inspiration for this came from Enki, while a mother or birth goddess, under various names, such as Ninmah, fashioned the first human being. In Enki and Ninmah (Bottéro and Kramer 1989: 188–198; Klein in Hallo 1997: 1, 516–518), when humans have been created and the gods celebrate their new leisure, Enki and Ninmah have a drunken contest, in which Ninmah creates various defective human creatures but Enki finds a use for each one. Finally, Enki instructs Ninmah to produce the most helpless creature of all, with the participation of a man and a woman (Kilmer 1976). This monstrosity cannot walk, talk, or feed itself – it is the human baby! Enki challenges Ninmah to find a use for such a thing, but she is unable to do so. One could scarcely pen a crueler caricature of the human race than this.

Other creation stories existed in both Sumerian and Akkadian. The interaction of Enki and the birth goddess is the key element in the longest of them, the Akkadian

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story of Atrahasis (B. Foster 2005: 227–280). In this, the newly created human race is so productive that the gods send a great flood to wipe it out. Frightened by what they have done, and hungry for lack of human servants, the gods repent and vow never to send another flood, but rather to keep human population in check by infertility, social taboos on child-bearing, and regular mortality. A flood story is known in Sumerian, but it is probably later in date than Atrahasis so composed by an Akkadian speaker in scholastic Sumerian (Civil 1969; Black et al. 2004: 212–215).

SUMERIAN MYTHOLOGY AND GREATER MESOPOTAMIA

Sumerian writings contain little direct evidence for the influence of non-Sumerian peoples upon Sumerian culture. When the mythological texts were set down, Sumerian written culture was already centuries old, enjoyed high prestige, required a long apprenticeship to master, and was more a body of knowledge for the educated than a widely shared cultural property. Because of its clear tendency to glorify Sumerian culture as superior to all others, Sumerian literature gives an impression of being impervious to non-Sumerian influences and little interested in strange lands and peoples. Although in an assessment of Sumerian culture as a whole, such an impression would be seriously misleading, in Sumerian formal writing, the choice of themes, settings, and characters prefers Sumerian cultural patterns, Sumerian settings, and major Sumerian deities.

Interpretation of the rich legacy of Sumerian mythology in modern thought has therefore taken many rewarding paths, but its placement and understanding within the larger framework of Sumerian culture and history eludes us still.

REFERENCES

Note: Citation of translations are from printed sources only. English translations of Sumerian texts cited here can also be found on the website of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.ox.ac.uk/index.html).

Alster, B. (1972a) Dumuzi’s Dream: Aspects of Oral Poetry in a Sumerian Myth, Mesopotamia 1. Copenhagen: Akademisk.

Alster, B. (1972b) Ninurta and the Turtle. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 24: 120–125.

——(1976) On the Earliest Sumerian Literary Tradition. Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 28: 109–126. Alster, B. and Westenholz, A. (1994) The Barton Cylinder. Acta Sumerologica, 16: 15–46.

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Bottéro, J. and Kramer, S. N. (1989) Lorsque les dieux faisaient l’homme, Mythologie mésopotamienne.

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Cassirer, E. (1944) An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Civil, M. (1969) The Sumerian Flood Story. In W. Lambert and A. Millard (eds.), Atra-Hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood, pp. 138–145. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——(1983) Enlil and Ninlil: The Marriage of Sud. Journal of the American Oriental Society 103:

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Cooper, J. (1978) The Return of Ninurta to Nippur. Analecta Orientalia 52. Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum.

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Cooper, J. (2001) Literature and History: The Historical and Political Referents of Sumerian Literary Texts. In T. Abusch et al. (eds.), Historiography in the Cuneiform World, Proceedings of the XLVe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Bethesda: CDL Press.

Diakonoff, I. M. (1995) Archaic Myths of the Orient and Occident. Orientalia Gothoburgensia 10. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.

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Jacobsen, T. and Kramer, S. (1953) The Myth of Inanna and Bilulu. Journal of Near Eastern Studies

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Kramer, S. N. (1944; rev. edn 1961, 1972) Sumerian Mythology, A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Lambert, W. (2008) Mesopotamian Creation Stories. In M. Geller and M. Schipper (eds.), Imagining Creation, Studies in Judaica 5, 15–95. Leiden: Brill.

Reisman, D. (1971) Ninurta’s Journey to Eridu. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 24: 3–10.

Rubio, G. (2009) Sumerian Literature. In C. S. Ehrlich (ed.) From an Antique Land. An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature, pp. 11–75. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Schuster-Brandis, A. (2008) Steine als Schutzund Heilmittel: Untersuchung zu ihrer Verwendung in der Beschwörungskunst Mesopotamiens im 1. Jt. v. Chr., Alter Orient und Altes Testament 46. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.

Sefati, Y. (1998) Love Songs in Sumerian Literature. Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University.

Veldhuis, N. (2004) Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition “Nansˇe and the Birds”. Cuneiform Monographs 22. Leiden: Brill.

Volk, K. (1995) Inanna und Shukaletuda: Zur historisch-politischen Deutung eines sumerischen Literaturwerkes. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Zgoll, A. (1997) Der Rechtsfall der En-hedu-Ana im Lied nin-me-shara. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 246. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.

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