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The Infancy of Man in a Sumerian Legend

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Extract

In 1933 Professor B. Landsberger contributed to a volume in honour of the seventieth birthday of Freiherr M. von Oppenheim an article which placed in an entirely new light what had, until then, been considered an example, virtually unique, of a musical notation accompanying an Assyrian bilingual poem which related the culminating incident in the genesis of the world, the creation of mankind. He there demonstrated that the syllables accompanying the text, for the greater part meaning nothing and assumed to represent notes of music, occur also in other places, dissociated from the poem, and sometimes furnished with Akkadian translations of their significance, as though they represented the Sumerian column of an ordinary syllabary. Unwelcome as it may be to give up so attractive a notion, the musical explanation is hereby made almost impossible of acceptance; but this leaves us with the problem of finding a better one. In the article already quoted, Professor Landsberger, as well as pointing out other examples of this strange collection of syllables, studied their structure, the meanings assigned to some of the groups, and the use made of them in the regular series of syllabaries, but came to the conclusion that the compilation must be regarded as a work of ancient literary artifice, the method and purpose of which at present escape us. In particular, there is then question why this curious accompaniment stands beside the lines of a particular poem, and that not only in a single example (which might have been an individual freak) but in copies found both at Asshur and Nineveh. These are alike not only in the text and arrangement but in bearing colophons which allude expressly to the esoteric nature of their contents.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1937 

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References

page 33 note 1 Aus fünf Jahrtausenden morgenländischer Kultur, 170.

page 33 note 2 Not 4157, as inadvertently stated.

page 34 note 1 See Clay, A. T., A Hebrew Deluge Story in Cuneiform, pl. 11, and p. 14 Google Scholar.

page 34 note 2 Ebeling, K.A.R., no. 4; translations by the same author in Gressmann, , Altorientalische Texte zum Alten Testament, 134 Google Scholar (B) (with other references), and by Langdon, , Le Poème sumérien du Paradis, 42 ffGoogle Scholar.

page 34 note 3 G. Rawlinson's translation.