cf Wilcke, 'Lugalb. p-87 text "T"

THE LEGEND OF ENMERKAR AND LUGALBANDA.

The text of this long poem is unusually well preserved with the exception of the first lines; the loss of these lines, which might introduce the interpreter to the general situation of the myth, increases the obscurity of an unusually difficult composition. The text becomes intelligible at line 18 of the first column where [Lugalbanda] replies to his mother.¹ The fragmentary section which precedes contained, therefore, an address of the goddess Innini (Ishtar) to Lugalbanda; possibly the text began with a dream in which this goddess of Erech appeared to her son, the mortal Lugalbanda. In the next lines, Lugalbanda apparently describes the desperate condition of the kingdom of Erech. Enmerkar, the king, trembled in terror within the city, and Lugalbanda, hastening from afar to his succor, is prevented by dragons who infest the mountainous passage. He finally reaches Erech and rescues Enmerkar.

If I rightly understand the situation at the beginning of Col. II, Lugalbanda here begins another speech (II 4—28), addressed to Innini, in which he beseeches her to bestow blessings upon Erech, and to defend this ancient city, now 3,000 years old, from the wicked Amorites. In the second part of his speech, Lugalbanda refers to a journey of Innini which she seems loath to undertake. The passage is probably based upon historical verity. Innini, daughter of Anu the heaven god, was transferred to Erech from the city Dêr, an ancient halting place of Sumerian civilization in the province Ashnunak east of the Tigris by the river Uknū. The prehistoric deities of Ashnunak were Umunbanda and his consort Ninsun, both of whom were transferred to Erech when the center of the civilization shifted southward to the lower part of Mesopotamia. Umunbanda or Enbanda was identified with Lugalbanda, the third king of the prehistoric first kingdom of Erech, who is invariably described as a god. Also Dumuzi the fourth king and Gilgamish the fifth king of this dynasty were deified and became important figures in Sumerian religion. At Dêr, the bisexual ophidian deity Ka-Di or Isir, with whom Dumuzi or Tammuz was identified, was a title of both the old mother goddess Innini and her brother or son (Tammuz), and these two (male and female) aspects of the prehistoric vegetation deity became separate deities: Tammuz and Innini, Lugalbanda and Ninsun. The cult of the earth mother and her dying brother or son was transferred to Erech from the older Sumerian cities Dêr and Ashnunak.

In the historical glosses appended to the Sumerian chronological list of early kings of the first dynasty of Erech² it is said that the oldest name of this city was Eanna "Temple of heaven" where Meskingašer founded a Sumerian kingdom about 5000 B.C.

¹ The expression ama-ni-ir "to his mother" occurs also in II 17; III 41; the subject of I 18 cannot be Enmerkar for he is repeatedly described here as the son of Shamash.
² See POEBEL, Historical Texts, p. 74.