Lament for Sumer and Ur
Louvre Museum in Paris
The lament for Sumer and Urim or the lament for Sumer and Ur is a
poem and one of five known Mesopotamian "city laments"—dirges for ruined cities in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess
.
The other city laments are:
- The Lament for Ur
- The Lament for Nippur[1]
- The Lament for Eridu
- The Lament for Uruk[2]
In 2004 BCE, during the last year of
Shimashki.[3] The Sumerians decided that such a catastrophic event could only be explained through divine intervention and wrote in the lament that the gods, "An, Enlil, Enki and Ninmah decided [Ur's] fate"[4]
The literary works of the Sumerians were widely translated (e.g., by the
Hebrew texts "were profoundly influenced by them."[5] Contemporary scholars have drawn parallels between the lament and passages from the bible (e.g., "the Lord departed from his temple and stood on the mountain east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 10:18-19)."[6]
References
- ^ Tinney, Steve. The Nippur lament: royal rhetoric and divine legitimation in the reign of Išme-Dagan of Isin (1953-1935 BC). University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1996
- ^ Green, M. W. “The Uruk Lament.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 104, no. 2, 1984, pp. 253–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/602171
- Piotr Michalowski, 1989, p. 1
- ^ Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, By Jeffrey Jay Niehaus, 2008, p. 117
- ^ The Sumerians: Their history, culture and character, Samuel Noah Kramer, p. 196
- ^ Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, By Jeffrey Jay Niehaus, 2008, 118