Journal of
Ancient Near
Eastern
Religions
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
brill.nl/jane
From “Kingship in Heaven” to King Lists:
Syro-Anatolian Courts and the History of the World
Mary R. Bachvarova1
Dept. of Classical Studies, Willamette University
900 State St., Salem OR 97301 USA
mbachvar@willamette.edu
Abstract
I examine the literary and conceptual background of a Hurro-Hittite ritual calling on divinized
royal ancestors (dšarrena), characters from Hurro-Hittite song, members of the Sargonic dynasty,
a variety of kings from far-off lands, and the “lord of Hatti” (KUB 27.38). I show that the ritual
provides a unique glimpse of the complex Near Eastern tradition telling the history of the world
from its beginning. The ritual also helps us to understand how historical memory informed ritual
behaviors that legitimated the kingship of regional rulers, allowing them access to the distant
past and connecting them to world events. Overall, the šarrena ritual suggests that the histories
of the divine and human worlds were linked into a single master narrative by the middle of the
second millennium BCE.
Keywords
Sargonic legends, Hurro-Hittite ritual, Kumarbi Cycle, king lists, dšarrena
1. Introduction
When the Hittites arrived on the world scene in the middle of the second millennium BCE, they fitted themselves into the conversation about kingship
and world history that had been ongoing in Mesopotamia for a good seven
hundred years. As many scholars have discussed, the new and peripheral kingdom introduced itself into the legendary Bronze Age network of internationally famous kings that extended spatially across the whole known world and,
according to the Sumerian King List, temporally back into antediluvian times,
by positioning itself within Sargonic legend in various ways. Some examples
have been well-studied, such as the boast of the Old Hittite king Hattusili I
1
I thank Dr. Joan Goodnick Westenholz, whose work was the major inspiration for this
article, for her helpful comments.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012
DOI: 10.1163/156921212X629482
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that he was even more intrepid than Sargon, and the Hittite and Akkadian
versions of legends about Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sin found at Hattusa. Recently, much attention has been paid to the implications of the discovery of the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend at the merchant colony of Kaneš.
However, it has proved more difficult to explain the appearance of members
of the Sargonic dynasty as characters in the Hurrian legomena of a HurroHittite ritual, beside characters from the Hurro-Hittite cosmogonic myth of
the Kumarbi cycle, divinized royal ancestors (dšarrena), and kings from a variety of far-flung countries, along with the “lord of Hatti.” I argue that the
šarrena ritual, which links the local court of the Hittites to the wider human
world and affirms the support of dead kings and heroes for the current king,
reveals a glimpse of the complex Near Eastern traditions telling the history of
the world from its very beginning. The Near Eastern conception of world history is otherwise only available to us through the “tips of the icebergs” represented by such disparate texts as the Mesopotamian king lists, the legends
about Sargon and his grandson Naram-Sin, and the textualizations of HurroHittite narrative song found at Hattusa; the šarrena ritual shows that the concepts and frameworks contained in each set of texts could be merged into a
single whole.
2. Distant Space-Time: Legitimating Local Courts
Mircea Eliade and Mary Helms have both discussed how links to the beginning of the world were used to place local courts in the larger framework of
world history, legitimizing their dynasties’ claim to kingship. As Eliade (1963:
21–2) puts it:
Every mythical account of the origin of anything presupposes and continues the cosmogony. From the structural point of view, origin myths can be homologized with the
cosmogonic myth . . . . Origin myths continue and complete the cosmogonic myth;
they tell how the world was changed, made richer or poorer.
This is why some origin myths begin by outlining a cosmogony. The history of the
great families and dynasties of Tibet opens by rehearsing the birth of the Cosmos from
an Egg . . . . Then the genealogy proceeds, relating the origins and histories of the various clans and dynasties.
While Eliade thinks in terms of the distant past, Helms (1998: 74) adds the
element of spatial distance:
Individuals or groups that aspire to positions of legitimate leadership and authority
must try to establish tangible evidence of having access to cosmological origins by
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undertaking or directing enterprises in which success is interpreted as evidence of support and validation by supernatural agencies referencing the power of cosmological
beginnings . . . . Access to origins may . . . be evidenced by establishing associations with
outside beings of the cosmological “environment” who embody the potency and
authority of origins and with fixed locational settings or situational events that stand
firm and immovable in cosmographical space and time.
In her analysis, Helms is expanding on the principle of the value of distance,
which she elaborated in some detail in Helms (1988), Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographic Distance. In her 1998
book, Access to Origins: Affines, Ancestors, and Aristocrats, she shows that the
ruling group in some traditional societies can claim a special connection to the
distant past via affines who belong to the world beyond. I think we can apply
the same principle of the value of distant time-space to understand the meaning that Sargonic heroes had for the Hittite court, and why they were connected to characters of Hurro-Hittite cosmogonic myth in the šarrena ritual,
along with various kings and lords of far-away places, and divinized royal
ancestors.
We can see from the Sumerian King List that Sargonic legends were used
within a framework of historiography that meditated on the longue durée of
the development and spread of human culture, a history that began at the very
beginning of the creation of the world order as Bronze Age men knew it. The
concept of controlling distant space-time that was a key feature of Sargonic
legends made it very useful to the Hittite court, but just as the Sargonic legends appropriated by the Hittite kings did not have a single unitary source, so
they were used in multiple ways to foster an ideology of kingship. The šarrena
ritual represents an oral-derived, Hurrian-mediated stream of tradition, and
thus should be interpreted in conjunction with Hurro-Hittite narrative song,
which did indeed refer to Sargon, lord of Akkade, as well as tell of the battles
between the Storm-god Teššub and his rivals for kingship in heaven. In addition, the šarrena ritual elucidates the function of history, not only as a paradeigma for present-day rulers, but also to inform a complex of ritual behaviors
that legitimated the kingship of regional leaders, in particular the worship of
divinized ancestors, which provided a channel to the world beyond and times
long ago.
3. The Sumerian King List
The Sumerian King List, which had its origins in the third millennium, was the
earliest attested member of a scribal genre represented by five or so texts
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focused on the history of legitimate kingship. Other examples include the
Babylonian Royal Chronicle (found in Assurbanipal’s library), which, like the
second-millennium version of the Sumerian King List, begins with the antediluvian age, while the Old Babylonian Royal Chronicle of Lagaš begins with the
re-invention of human culture after the Flood. The Assyrian Royal Chronicle
tells of the origins of Assyrian kingship, beginning with its tribal, nomadic
beginnings. The earliest version was probably composed in the time of ŠamšiAddu I, but the latest dates to the eighth century BCE, and continued the list
of Assyrian kings beyond Šamši-Addu. A scrap of the Hellenistic Royal Chronicle shows that the genre continued into the second century BCE.2 Closely
related to these lists are the more discursive chronicles, such as the Eponym
Chronicle, which cites the key deeds of each year carried out by the scions of
the Mari dynasty up through Šamši-Addu.3 These continued to be composed
up to the end of the first millennium.4
I focus here on the Sumerian King List, also called by modern scholars the
Chronicle of the Single Monarchy, which linked space and time by presenting
the history of the known world as unified under a single kingship that moved
from city to city.5 The version discussed here dates to the first half of the second millennium BCE, but it was first put together in Sargonic times (Steinkeller 2003; Glassner 2004: 95–6). The “SKL anachronistically and fictionally
projects the political situation of the Sargonic period—when the entire land
of Sumer and Akkad was for the first time unified—into the distant past”
(Marchesi 2010: 234). The list of antediluvian kings, which drew on a separate, mostly oral, tradition, was appended to the beginning around the end of
the nineteenth century BCE.6 At a later point in time the historiographic
notes explicating some of the characters’ deeds were added (Marchesi 2010:
233–4, 238–43; Steinkeller 2003: 284, 286). Thus, the list recounted human
history from its beginnings, running through a series of culture heroes before
getting into the list of “real” historical kings to which new regional courts
added their dynasties to link themselves to world history. Because my overall
focus is the use of Sargonic legends by the Hittites, and how they interacted
with myths about the beginnings of the current cosmological order, I will only
2
These texts are edited and translated in Glassner (2004: 117–55).
See Glassner (2004: 160–4) for a transliteration and translation.
4
The lists and chronicles are collected and discussed in Glassner (2004).
5
For the Sumerian King List I use the translation and line numbers of Glassner (2004: 117–
27). For further discussion of the Sumerian King List and how it can be used to understand the
Mesopotamian sense of history, see Wilcke (1989), Steinkeller (2003), Glassner (2004: 3–33,
55–70), and Marchesi (2010), who provides more detailed references.
6
See Marchesi (2010: 232, with earlier references), Glassner (2004: 56–8, 108–9), Finkelstein (1963: 44–51).
3
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discuss the Sumerian King List through the Sargonic dynasty, about two-thirds
of the way through the lengthiest version of the entire text. I will show how
space-time was delineated within the frame of an admonitory text that served
as an index to the history of Mesopotamian culture, by alluding to tales that
themselves made use of the concept of distant space-time and the origins of
culture.
The Sumerian King List begins, “When kingsh[ip] had come down from
heaven” (i 1), then lists the supernaturally long reigns of two kings of Eridu:
Alulim, who reigned 28,800 years, and Alalgar, who reigned 36,000 years.
Thereafter, “[i]ts kingship was taken to Bad-tibira” (i 9). Among the three
kings there we find “Dumuzi, the shepherd” (i 13), the consort of the Inanna/
Ištar. The mention of Dumuzi refers to a key origin myth linking nature and
culture by connecting the change of the seasons to the annual rites commemorating the dead, as told in the Akkadian Descent of Ištar (trans. Alster 2005:
498–505). After that comes Larak and Sippar; the final city in which kingship
was situated before the flood is Šuruppak, where Ubar-Tutu ruled. The list of
cities follows the same order as that of the five original cities, “after the . . . of
kingship had descended from heaven,” in the Sumerian Flood Story (B 6–15,
trans. Black et al. 2004: 213). Šuruppak was a storehouse of knowledge from
“those far remote years,”7 as shown by the Instructions of Šuruppak, a series of
precepts and admonitions spoken by Šuruppak (now a human rather than a
city), son of Ubar-Tutu, to his own son.8
The Sumerian King List continues, “After the flood had swept over, when
kingship had come down from heaven, kingship (was) at Kiš” (i 38–41). It
moves through a long series of kings until it reaches kingship in Akkade. Some
of the kings in the second section were possibly “real,” such as “the divine
Gilgameš” (ii 17), but he, like Etana (ii 16), Enmerkar (iii 7), and Lugalbanda
(iii 12), also represented legends that described the early life of humans. While
Gilgameš was credited with the invention of many important features of
human culture, from wells to funeral rites (George 2003: 94–5, 98, 124),
Etana was the first king,9 and Enmerkar was associated with the invention of
writing.10 Lugalbanda lived in the reign of Enmerkar, shortly after the time
“when in ancient days heaven was separated from earth” (Lugalbanda in the
Mountain Cave 1, trans. Black et al. 2004: 12) and after agriculture, irrigation,
7
Instructions of Šuruppak 3 (trans. Black et al. 2004: 284). See the discussion of Black et al.
(2004: 284).
8
Some versions of the lists of antediluvian kings include a second king of Šuruppak,
Ziušudra, also known as Atrahasis, the star of the Flood Story (Finkelstein 1963: 47–9).
9
Foster (2005: 533), see trans. of Etana, pp. 533–54.
10
See trans. of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta at http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk, text 1.8.2.3.
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and settled city life were in place, but he was forced to experience the challenge of living in the wild as his forebears had done when, having fallen ill, he
was abandoned on a military expedition. He therefore reinvented for himself
the skills of fire-making, hunting, and cooking. His story is a lovely Bronze
Age meditation on how far, on the one hand, humankind has come, but
how dependent, on the other, men have become on the accoutrements of
civilized life.
What was probably the final section in the earliest version of the Sumerian
King List records the kings of the Sargonic dynasty, beginning with Sargon,
the first to unite Sumer and Akkade into a single empire, and closing with the
endpoint of that cycle of history, the fall of Akkade:
At Akkade, Sargon—his father was a gardener—the cupbearer of Ur-Zababa, the king
of A<kka>de, the one who founded Akkade, was king; he reigned 56 years; Rīmuš, son
of Sargon, reigned 9 years; Man-ištūsu, elder brother of Rīmuš, son of Sargon,
[reigned] 15 years; Narām-[Sîn], son of Ma[n-ištūsu, reigned 37 (?)] years; Ś[ar-kaliśarrī, son of Narām-Sîn, reigned 25 years. Who was k]ing? Who was not king? . . .
eleven kings reigned 181 years. Akkade was defeated; its kingship was taken to Uruk.
(vi 31–vii 14)
The mention of Sargon as the cupbearer of Ur-Zababa corresponds to the
Sumerian story Sargon and Ur-Zababa (trans. Black et al. 2004: 40–4).
The Sumerian King List maps the spatial onto the temporal: “Le choix des
deux critères de classement retenus simultanément, l’un d’ordre spatial (la
diversité des toponymes), l’autre d’ordre temporal (la succession des noms
royaux avec leurs années de règne), montre clairement que la bi-dimensionalité est le trait essentiel à l’intelligence de l’oeuvre” (Glassner 2005: 52). Wilcke
has argued that the Sumerian King List delineates in succession three of the
four quarters of the Mesopotamian world, the fourth being desert. He connects this to the Ur III era reworking of the text, at the beginning of the second millennium, when the title “king of the four corners” came into use, but
he notes that a similar title was used for Naram-Sin, “lord of the four quarters,” that is, king of all the known world (Wilcke 1989).
4. Sargonic Legends: From Center to Periphery
On the other hand, the temporal plane could be mapped on to the spatial by
opposing the civilized center to the wild periphery,11 a very real opposition in
11
See Glassner (2004: 97–8) on the opposition of civilized center to barbarous periphery,
applied especially to the Gutians.
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the Bronze Age Near East, in which civilization was still in the process of
expanding outwards from its beginnings in the Fertile Crescent. The legendary voyages Sargon the Great undertook into the unknown, to Anatolia and
to spaces beyond civilization, complemented his role in consolidating Mesopotamia into a single entity.12 Sargon’s voyages were commemorated in
inscriptions and texts ranging from the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend, to Sargon,
King of Battle, the Sargon Geography, and the Babylonian Map of the World.
As mentioned earlier, Anatolians certainly made use of Sargon’s voyages
into their world to link themselves into world history. This was not only a
scribal activity, but also part of oral tradition (van de Mieroop 2000: 142–4,
157–8; Beckman 2001: 89; J. G. Westenholz 2010: 38–9).13 When the Old
Hittite king Hattusili I, under whom the first Hittite empire began, made a
point of mentioning in his Annals that he bested Sargon by crossing the
Euphrates and sacking cities important in the Old Assyrian trade network,14 it
was not impossible that he knew of Sargon from a long-standing tradition in
Anatolia, as shown the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend, which was found in the
merchant colony of Kaneš. In this odd text he brags about conquering a variety of distant places, such as Alašiya (Cyprus), Amurru, Kaneš, Hahhu, Hatti,
Tukriš, and Lullu.15 It is surely not a coincidence that the Assyrian kings of the
time took the names of Sargon and Naram-Sin; they clearly were interested in
emulating the two famous Sargonic kings, and such interest also fostered the
spread of stories about them (Veenhof 2003: 44).
In addition, one of the various stories about Sargon’s voyages to the edge of
the known world, Sargon, King of Battle, may have started out as an Anatolian
story in the Old Assyrian period, and moved east, rather than the other way
around. There are some eight fragments of a Hittite version of Sargon, King of
Battle at Hattusa, with a roughly contemporaneous Middle Babylonian version from the Egyptian capital of the pharaoh Akhenaten ca. 1350 BCE. It is
written in a Hittite-style hand, as is typical of the Amarna tablets, and the
12
It is disputed whether either Sargon or Naram-Sin actually reached Anatolia. See J. G.
Westenholz (1998: 13–14); also A. Westenholz (1999: 47–8) and Alster and Oshima (2007: 5,
note 27) for archaeological evidence.
13
On the reception of Sargonic legend in Anatolia, see Güterbock (1964), Haas (1993: 139–
42), van de Mieroop (2000: 134–6), Beckman (2001), and Gilan (2010).
14
Annals of Hattusili I: Hittite version, KBo 10.2 iii 29–42 (translit. de Martino 2003: 72–6;
trans. Beckman in Chavalas 2006: 221); Akkadian, KBo 10.1 rev. 18–25 (translit. Devecchi
2005: 56).
15
On this text, see most recently Alster and Oshima (2007). Also see van de Mieroop (2000:
149–53), comparing themes and places that appear in it to those in other Sargonic legends, and
Torri (2009: 112–13), comparing it with Sargon, King of Battle. Based on it, van de Mieroop
(2000: 143–5) argues the Old Assyrian network was one source for Sargonic legend in Anatolia.
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Akkadian shows interference from Hurrian.16 Since the version from Amarna
is relatively well preserved, it is the one I will synopsize. It begins with Sargon
announcing that he wishes to attack a certain city, whose name is damaged on
the tablet. His soldiers are reluctant to take on such a challenge, so Sargon
decides instead to attack Purušhanda, one of the members of the network of
the Old Assyrian merchant colonies, as a group of merchants asks him for
protection, and he asks them for directions. After a break we pick up the text
again as Nur-daggal, the king of Purušhanda, speaks of the supposedly impenetrable forest Sargon faces, but before he can even finish speaking, Sargon has
arrived and breached his city wall. Nur-daggal is forced to humble himself
before Sargon. Next we hear of the natural reserves of the land, all kinds of
fruit trees and grapes, offering scarce resources that would have been appealing
to a Mesopotamian. After three years and five months of ruling Purušhanda
Sargon returns home. In the best-attested exemplar from Hattusa, the ending
is slightly different. Here different kinds of trees are cut down to make different items, such as weapons and tables for his soldiers to eat at, suggesting that
a feast was a possible performance context.17
It has been argued that the voyage to the Old Assyrian merchant colony
Purušhanda may have originated as an Anatolian story, and then it was transmitted back to Mesopotamia, because the Purušhandan king’s name, which
also appears as Nur-Dagan, could be Hurrian in origin: Nawar-tahe (‘man of
Nawar’, Archi 2000), as would fit the linguistic situation in the first quarter of
the second millennium in eastern Anatolia, where Hittites, Hurrrians, and
native Anatolian Hattians were in contact with Assyrians. Purušhanda was
already mentioned in an Old Babylonian (late seventeenth century) fictional
letter supposedly by Sargon, so it is plausible to argue that the town was
attached to Sargonic legend during the Old Assyrian period.18
Naram-Sin was the other member of the Sargonic dynasty whose legends
were written down by scribes, and his stories were meant to complement and
16
EA 359 (also EA 375). See Gilan (2000: 27–8) and Wilhelm (1984: 350–1) on the handwriting of the Amarna tablets, and Izreʾel (1997: 72) on the Hurrian interference. Sargon, King
of Battle is one of four extant narratives that tell of Sargon’s voyages. A Standard Babylonian
version was found in Nineveh. J. G. Westenholz (1997: 102–39) provides editions and translations of Akkadian versions. For a translit. and trans. of the Hittite versions, see Gilan (2000). See
Glassner (1985) for further discussion of the themes and meaning of the text, and J. G. Westenholz (2010: 37–9) on the options for the circumstances of its arrival at the court of Hattusa.
17
KBo 22.6 iv 26’-30’ (translit. Groddek 2008: 18–19).
18
IM 85544 = UET 7.73 (ed. and trans. J. G. Westenholz 1997: 148–69), see Torri (2009:
115–16).
M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
105
contrast with his grandfather’s.19 Thus, his storylines, although inverting the
kind of contact carried out with far-off places and peoples, still focused on
relations between the core and the periphery. While Sargon conquered foreign
lands, Naram-Sin was attacked by the outlandish Gutian hordes in the Sumerian Curse of Akkade (trans. Black et al. 2004: 116–25) and the Akkadian
Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin, which was found at Hattusa in Akkadian and
Hittite;20 while Sargon established a unified kingdom, Naram-Sin was blamed
for its downfall. In another storyline assigned to Naram-Sin, he was faced with
rebellions from all sides. This story, like Sargon’s, was made to cater to Hittite
interests, for in the Hittite version, among the subordinate kings who turned
against him, a certain Pamba, king of Hatti, was included, along with Zipani,
k[ing] of Kaneš, and Nu[r-daggal].21
Legends of Sargon’s exploits in foreign lands were extremely long-lived,
continuing to exert an influence even in the first millennium. The later references to his journeys show some of the ways in which the concept of distant
space-time shaped a worldview in which he could be connected with the
beginnings of the world as known to a Bronze Age or Early Iron Age audience;
they also show that an oral tradition must have flourished that continued to
rework Sargonic myth. The Sargon Geography, a text found in two very different sources, Neo-Assyrian and Late Babylonian copies ( J. G. Westenholz
2010: 40), describes all the lands in Sargon’s empire, which, as Horowitz
(1998: 67) notes, is “said to include the ‘totality of the land under heaven’ (SG
31) and ‘the lands from sunrise to sunset, the sum total of all the lands’ (SG
43). Thus, Sargon’s empire apparently encompasses the entire earth’s surface.”
Some of the peoples he conquered were so primitive that they did not have
knowledge of basic human necessities, such as the “Lullubu, the people of the
North, who do not know construction” (51–2), and the “Karzina, whose
ha[ir-style] is chosen with a razor, devoured? by fire, who do not know burial.
Meat-eaters, milk (and) roasted-grain eaters, whos[e insi]des do not know
oven-baked bread, bellies (do not know) beer” (56–9).22
The ninth-century Babylonian Map of the World presents a schematic sketch
of the world, encircled by Ocean, with an explanatory text that makes clear
19
Sargon’s success was contrasted with Naram-Sin’s failures (Güterbock 1934: 75–6; Glassner 1986: 77–85; Beckman 2001: 87–8; Haas 2006: 67).
20
For the Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin see the synopsis of sources and translit. and trans. of
the Akkadian versions in J. G. Westenholz (1997: 5, 263–8).
21
Naram-Sin in Asia Minor: KBo 3.13 obv. 11’ (translit. Güterbock 1938: 68). In the Akkadian Gula-AN and the Seventeen Kings against Naram-Sin, only “[ ]-ḫa-AN, man of Kaniš” is
mentioned (i 7’, translit. and trans. J. G. Westenholz 1997: 250–1). See van de Mieroop (2000:
139–40) and Haas (2006: 73).
22
I use the translation of Horowitz (1998: 69–75).
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that the concept of distant space-time was in effect here too, for it speaks of
“the rui[ned] cities” (obv. 2’), that is, the cities from long ago, the ruins of
which were visible to contemporary men, and “ruine[d] gods” living in the
primeval sea (obv. 4’),23 that is, the ones vanquished at the beginning of the
world by the young god Marduk, as told in the Epic of Creation: various
Mischwesen, such as the sea-serpent, the Anzu-bird, and the scorpion-man
(Horowitz 1998: 25–6). These gods are analogous to the Hurro-Hittite Former Gods or the Titans and the other Greek gods before Zeus’ generation.
Then, after the mention of Marduk, the text segues to mention of the antediluvian sage Ut-napištim, Sargon, and Nur-Dagan, king of Purušhanda (obv.
10’), a significant grouping that links distant time and space.24
5. The Šarrena Ritual
It is the Hurro-Hittite šarrena ritual (ca. 1400 BCE) that first connects Sargonic myth with the time before “kingship came down from heaven,” showing that the link between myths about the ascendance of the present generation
of gods and early human history was made far earlier than the ninth century.
The šarrena ritual presents a series of characters, some invoked in a list-like
form, with brief comments on the deeds of some of them; therefore, it shares
some formal similarities with king lists and chronicles, especially the Sumerian
King List. It also shares some important conceptual similarities with the Sumerian King List, for the šarrena ritual makes use of the spatial conception of
kingship seen in the Sumerian King List to link the Hittite court with the
larger network of kings from far-away places, but it pushes the beginnings of
history all the way back to when the rule of the Storm-god was established in
heaven, referring to the plots of Hurro-Hittite songs.
The šarrena ritual contributed to the Hittite kings’ ideological program
addressing concerns of prestige and effectiveness on both the temporal and the
divine planes. Other elements of the program included the patterning of the
king on the Storm-god, who banished chaos by defeating chaotic monsters;
festivals, including imported Hurrianized festivals originating in north Syria
or Cilicia (Bachvarova 2009); and techniques of ancestor veneration, which
were open to influence from other cultures, both Hurrian and Mesopotamian.
But, a key tool in the promulgation of the Hittite ideology of kingship was
23
I use the translation of Horowitz (1998: 23–5).
On the conflation of Ut-napištim, Uta-rapaštim, and Nur-daggal/Nur-Dagan, see George
(2003: 152), van de Mieroop (2000: 137–8), and J. G. Westenholz (1997: 57–8, 102–3).
24
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Hurro-Hittite narrative song (Bachvarova 2005; 2010).25 The songs that are
most relevant to understanding the šarrena ritual are the Kumarbi Cycle and
possible associated texts, and a fragment mentioning Sargon.
The Kumarbi Cycle was centered on the Storm-god as the symbol of kingly
power, telling how the Storm-god (Hurrian Teššub, Hittite Tarhun) defeated
a series of rivals for kingship in heaven. It is made up of the Song of Birth,26 the
Song of Hedammu, and the Song of Ullikummi. Many have assumed that the
Song of Silver also belongs to the Kumarbi cycle (Hoffner 1988); it tells of a
boy coming of age, who was sired by Kumarbi on a human woman. When he
realized who his father was, he went up to heaven to do battle with the gods.27
Whereas we know nothing about a possible performance context for the songs
just mentioned, the Song of the Sea, which tells of the conflict between Teššub
and the Sea, and thus could be part of the Kumarbi cycle, was performed during a ritual for Mt. Hazzi (Rutherford 2001), later known as Mt. Cassius, the
venue of the action of the Ugaritic version of the Chaoskampf myth. We do
not have the song itself, unfortunately, only its incipit and some Hurrian
fragments.28
In addition, a small, but very significant, fragment of Hurrian narrative
song mentions Sargon, lord of Akkade, showing that he too was sung of by the
Hurrians.29 What this story was about, we cannot know of course, but my
assumption is that it followed similar lines as the Sargonic legends I have discussed, telling of his voyages into the unknown. Certainly, the Hurro-Hittite
šarrena ritual would have been considered efficacious only if its client or at
least its performer had some awareness of the Sargonic dynasty invoked by its
performer, and one source must have been Hurro-Hittite song.
The šarrena ritual is described in Hittite and its songs are quoted in Hurrian, which still has only been partially deciphered.30 We do not know exactly
25
I discuss the genre in some detail in Bachvarova (forthcoming).
The Song of Birth used to be called the Song of Kingship in Heaven. See Corti (2007) on the
correct name.
27
See translation of Hoffner (1998: 48–50).
28
Ritual for Mt. Hazzi: CTH 785 = KUB 44.7 + i. A Hurrian version begins širatili kiaše “I
shall recount the sea,” and is labeled in the colophon DUB.I.KAM ŠA A.A[B.BA] “first tablet of
the sea”; another Hurrian fragment may belong to the same text (KUB 45.63, VBot 59, translit.
Salvini and Wegner 2004: 46–8, Nos. 12, 13, discussion pp. 21–2). KBo 26.105, telling of a
massive inundation by the sea, whom Kumarbi tries to appease with offerings, may be a Hittite
Song of the Sea (translit., trans. and discussion Blam 2004). On the widespread and ancient story
of the Storm-god in conflict with the sea, which also found in Ugaritic myth, see Schwemer
(2008: 24–7).
29
KUB 31.3 (translit. Salvini and Wegner 2004: 37–8, No. 6, discussion p. 17).
30
KUB 27.38 (translit. Haas and Wegner 1988: 384–90, No. 87, discussion pp. 25–6).
Important discussions appear in Houwink ten Cate (1992: 110–11), de Martino (1993), and
26
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M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
what the purpose of this ritual was since we have only part of it, but in general
magic rituals for human clients at Hattusa were for purification or against
black magic, and we can presume that the ritual was somehow used to benefit
the king, whether directly or indirectly. The term šarrena is a Hurrian plural
formed off of the Akkadian term šarru, used elsewhere to refer to royal ancestors. In the šarrena ritual they are marked with the divine determinative.31
There have been improvements in our understanding of the characters mentioned in the ritual, and in the meaning of the Hurrian, but there has been
little attempt to push the overall interpretation of the text beyond that of de
Martino (1993: 132, with earlier references), who describes it as “das Ergebnis
einer Überlagerung mehrerer aus verschiedenen linguistischen und kulturellen Milieus stammenden Texten.”32 I argue, rather, that we should see if it is
possible to explain the text as arising from a single linguistic and cultural
milieu, and we should try to understand a mindset that combined concepts
and characters otherwise retrievable to us only in a heterogeneous set of texts.
The šarrena ritual manifestly wishes to situate the Hittite king within a larger
framework of the mythical history of the ancient Near East, and it evinces the
same interest in far-flung places found in Sargonic legend, listing kings ruling
the edges of the earth, but here the angle of view is from the periphery into
the center.
When we first pick up the text of the ritual, the šarrena are being invoked
in song by the performer, whose identity, gender, or title we do not know, and
the legendary kings are grouped with characters from Hurro-Hittite epic.
Thus, the šarrena of the divinized king Atalšen, a Hurrian king of Urkeš and
Nawar in the Old Akkadian period,33 are grouped with the šarrena of the Seagod, the opponent of Teššub, and the šarrena of the deity Immarwa. In the
next paragraph we move into a past-tense narrative, with mention of Teššub’s
companions, the mountains Hazzi and Namni. We then learn that, as the
performer sings, he or she makes dolls out of red, white, and blue wool. They
Wilhelm (2003). On the šarrena ritual also see J. G. Westenholz (1998: 10). Some parts of the
ritual’s instructions were not translated out of Hurrian (de Martino 1993: 125), implying that
the text has gone through some kind of redaction process converting it from a wholly Hurrian
text to one in which the instructions are in Hittite, with the incantations in Hurrian. The performer explicitly refers to the performance as song (SIR3 išḫamiškimi i 18’); see de Martino
(1993: 131–2) on the poetic technique.
31
Royal ancestors were called šarru in Old Babylonian Mari and Hurrian Nuzi (1500–1350
BCE), see Wilhelm (2003: 394, note 5). I am publishing a full study of the dšarrena at Hattusa
in a Festschrift.
32
See the synopsis of earlier opinions in van de Mieroop (2000: 141) and the interpretation
of Kammenhuber (1976: 139–41).
33
Cf. the king of Purušhanda: Nur-Dagan/Nur-Tahhe = Hurrian Nawar-Tahe?
M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
109
are perhaps meant to imitate the statues and statuettes used in ancestor cult.
“They call the kings by name” (nu=uš=za šarr ena ḫalziššanzi, i 23’). Unfortunately, only a couple of Hittite words are decipherable in the next two paragraphs. We then pick up the text in column ii. Now the topic is a series of
gods: the Syrian goddesses Takidu and Hebat, the Moon-god Kušuh, and
Šarrum[ma], calf of Teššub. The Moon-god “speaks wisdom” (ii 15’-16’). The
text continues without a break into the third column, where Šarrumma continues to be an important topic, and Allanzu, “young woman of Hebat” (iii
8–9), now appears, then the song turns to the šarrena, who are “wise” (iii 14),
as are the “besworn ones” (iii 15), that is, the ones who have taken an oath,
perhaps as judges. There is mention of a deity Umpa, and the paragraph closes
with the name of the deified Naram-Sin. The next paragraph opens by asserting Sargon is wise. Here column iii breaks off.
When we pick up the thread again in column iv, the participant(s) in the
ritual are exhorted to see a series of kings.34 This section shows the closest
similarity to a Mesopotamian kispum ritual, in which the offerings are presented to the statues of dead ancestors while their names are called.35 Some of
those personages invoked are known to us as historical figures, and taken as a
group they show how kingship in Hatti was legitimized by being incorporated
into the network of the kings immortalized in Sargonic legend.36 The kings in
the first two decently preserved paragraphs are Audaluma, “lord, lord of Elam,
king” (iv 9–11), a place also mentioned in the Late Babylonian Sargon Geography; Immaku, “lord of Lullu” (13–14), a place also mentioned in the Old
Assyrian Sargon Legend and the Sargon Geography; and Kiklipatalli, “lord of
Tukriš,” located north of Elam (14), which is mentioned both in the Sargon
Legend and the Sargon Geography. The “wailing-priest of Ea” did something in
the story (iv 16–17). As always, our poor understanding of Hurrian lexemes is
extremely frustrating, but it is logical that an expert in mourning would appear
in an invocation of dead kings.
In the following paragraph appear characters well known from HurroHittite song: Silver and “lord Hedammu, king, (the one whom) Kumarbi
engendered” (iv 19–21). This is a brief reference to the plot of the Song of
Hedammu. Set off in their own paragraph are the son of Sargon, Maništušu,
“lord, [king,] elder son of Sargon,” and the son of Naram-Sin, Šarkališarri,
34
I take the repeated a-u as 2 sg. impt. active of the Hittite verb au(š)-, despite the fact that
it is imbedded in Hurrian phrases.
35
On kispum and royal ancestor veneration in Mesopotamia, see Tsukimoto (1985), Spronk
(1986), and Hallo (1992).
36
On connections between the šarrena ritual and Sargonic legends see van de Mieroop (2000:
140–2, 152–3).
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M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
“[king,] the one who gave his land to another.” A storyline involving
Šarkališarri’s role in the fall of the kingdom of Akkade must be alluded to
here, and these brief references to their status and deeds are reminiscent of the
style of the Sumerian King List, although the order of the members of the
dynasty does not follow that of any of its versions.37 Then follows a paragraph
on the lord of Illaya, a land to the southeast of Hattusa, and the lord of Hatti.
I assume they are more dead kings. After a mention of the Hurrian Sun-god
Šimige in the next paragraph the text breaks off.
It is the presence of the šarrena that suggests techniques of royal ancestor
veneration were being used to connect the Hittite court to world history. In
Hattusa the divinized šarrena were propitiated in purification rituals and given
offerings in festivals, including the yearly festival of Shawushka (IŠTAR) of
Tamininga, which took place in the “House of the Grandfathers,” a building
connected to royal ancestor cult.38 In general, the Hittite royal family took
ancestor cult very seriously. It literally shaped the landscape of their capital,
with rock monuments on its high peaks, other special buildings devoted to the
dead, and reliefs of the dead built into the walls of temples and other structures, while statues of the dead kings and queens received libations in various
temples, most notably that of the Storm-god, as lists of the deceased members
of the Hittite royal house were recited.39 Such rites, often carried out during
the festivals, may have been recognized by the Hittites as analogous to the
Mesopotamian kispum ritual. Certainly, the Hittites consciously patterned
some elements of their commemoration of the royal dead after Mesopotamian
practices. At least, the New Hittite king Hattusili III had a craftsman sent
from Babylon to make statues of the royal dead.40
While the Hittite royal family did not attempt to actually connect its genealogy with that of renowned Mesopotamian kings, and we cannot argue that
the šarrena who received monthly offerings were conceived of as foreign rather
than Hittite, in the šarrena ritual the lord of Hatti was indeed included in the
37
On the differing orders in the Ur III version versus the later versions, see Steinkeller (2003:
278).
38
See KBo 20.29 rev. 18’ and duplicate KBo 8.149 11’ (translit. Wegner 1995: 103, 107,
Nos. 16, 18). See Kapelus (2007) on the É (= parna) ḫuḫḫaš ‘House of the Grandfathers (Ancestors)’.
39
On the rock monuments and other buildings associated with the care of the dead, see
Singer (2009), Archi (2007: 50–3), Kapelus (2007), van den Hout (2002), Groddek (2001),
and Torri (1999). On the relief sculptures, see Singer (2009: 180, with earlier references) and
Bonatz (2007: 119). On the location of the statues of the dead, see Archi (2007: 53) and Popko
(2002: 77–8; 2003). On reciting king lists in the Hittite cult of royal ancestors, see Otten (1951;
1958: 110–15).
40
KBo 1.10 (translit. and trans. Hagenbuchner 1989: 287, 294). See Börker-Klähn (1994:
355) and Taracha (2008: 195–8).
M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
111
larger group of prestigious šarrena that comprised Sargonic, Hurrian, and
other kings of realms distant in space and time. To join the group of Great
Kings, it was necessary to join its past to one’s own,41 and this required the
deployment of multiple types of texts and rituals, including royal ancestor
veneration, king lists and chronicles, and texts oriented more towards the narrative mode, such as epics and legends.42 I see the šarrena ritual as drawing on
such practices and texts.
6. The Use of Sargonic Legend in Royal Ancestor Veneration
We have little information on the performance context either of the “literary”
king lists, such as the Sumerian King List, or of Sargonic legend, but some
connection can be made between non-literary king lists and to royal ancestor
veneration, especially in north Syria. Kispum offerings were accompanied by
the recital of lists of the names of kings in north Syria already at Middle
Bronze Age Ebla43 and a series of royal ancestors was called to funerary rituals
in thirteenth-century Ugarit.44 The court at eighteenth-century Mari, which
in general was interested in stressing a connection with the Sargonic dynasty
to legitimate itself,45 included Sargon and Naram-Sin in kispum rites,46 and
Durand and Guichard (1997: 43) have suggested that the kispum ritual at
Mari may have been accompanied by a recitation of the deeds of the Sargonic
kings, since an unfinished version of The Great Revolt against Naram-Sin was
41
See Assmann (2003) on the manipulation of collective memory of a shared past to create a
group identity.
42
On the use of king lists in kispum ritual and their influence on the literary lists and chronicles, see Glassner (2004: 71–4, with earlier references).
43
On king lists and royal funerary offerings at third-millennium Ebla, see Archi (2007:
45–50; 2001, Vidal (2005), and Bonechi (2001).
44
See Vidal (2006; 2000); A Funerary Ritual in Poetic Form (RS 34.126 = KTU 1.61, translit.
and trans. Pardee 2002: 85–8) and Rites Involving the Royal Shades of the Dead (RS 24.257 =
KTU 1.113, translit. and trans. Pardee 2002: 195–202); the latter was found at the House of the
Hurrian Priest.
45
Steiner (1999: 430–3, 436–7) has shown that kings in Mari imitated the language and
phraseology of their Sargonic predecessors when boasting of their deeds. Also see J. G. Westenholz (2004: 13–14).
46
Mari 12803, see translit., trans. and discussion of Durand and Guichard (1997: 63–70). A
standard way for a local court to legitimate itself and to position itself in world history was to
make kispum offerings to members of the Sargonic dynasty as if they were fictional ancestors;
already in the Ur III period, kings were making offerings to Sargon, see J. G. Westenholz (2008:
253–5).
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M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
found there.47 Furthermore, they have suggested that the Eponym Chronicle,
found there in at least two versions, represents another type of text that would
have been performed when the royal ancestors were honored. Thus, Mari
presents the best evidence, indirect and inconclusive as it is, for a performance
context for Sargonic legend and one type of “literary” text listing kings and
their deeds.
In addition, we can suggest that the region of north Syria near Mari may
have been a key locus for the incorporation of Sargonic legend into Hurrian
narrative song, because there were many Hurrians at Mari and its environs
(Sasson 1974), and some Hurrian incantations and a letter were found there
(Thureau-Dangin 1939; Salvini 1988). If so, Hurrian bards may have been
aware that Sargonic legends could be referenced by an index-like chronicle
briefly describing the deeds of kings when performing royal ancestor veneration. Such knowledge would help to explain the format of the šarrena ritual.
7. The History of Gods and Men: Stylistic Connections between the
Song of Birth and the Sumerian King List
Finally, there is a manifest stylistic connection between the beginning of the
Kumarbi cycle and the list of antediluvian kings found in the Sumerian King
List, as well as other sources, some from as early as the Old Babylonian period,
with the latest being Berossus’ Babyloniaka.48 This suggests, first of all, that the
same performers recited king lists and myths about the creation of the world
order, or at least that bards knew of the king lists. If the former, the stylistic
features that the šarrena ritual shares with the Sumerian King List may actually
come from Hurro-Hittite song. Thus, in the Song of Birth, the first “king in
heaven”—that is, before “kingship had come down from heaven”—was the
harvest god Alalu, whose name resembles the first king’s name in the Sumerian
King List, Alulim. In the king list each section after the flood describes the
lineage of the particular local dynasty that held kingship and concludes, “such
and such a city was defeated, its kingship was taken to such-and-such a city.”
Compare the beginning of the Song of Birth:49
47
A 1252 (translit. and trans. J. G. Westenholz 1997: 231–7). George (2003: 54) has made
the analogous suggestion that the Epic of Gilgameš was performed at funerary rituals or in royal
ancestor cult.
48
On the various sources for the list of antediluvian kings and its incorporation into the
Sumerian King List, see the references in note 6.
49
CTH 344.A = KBo 52.10 + (translit. Rieken et al. 2009, http://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg
.de ad loc.).
M.R. Bachvarova / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97–118
113
(i 8–11) Long ago, i[n f]ormer years, Alalu was king in heaven. Alalu was on the
throne, and great Anu, foremost of the gods, was stepping before him, and he kept
bow[i]ng down at his feet and kept putting drinking cups in his hand.
(i 12–17) As just nine years were counted off Alalu was king in heaven, and in the
ninth year Anu [w]ent in batt[le] against Alalu. He defeated him, Alalu. He ran away
before him. Down he went into the Dark Earth. He went down into the Dark Earth,
and Anu seated himself on the throne. Anu was sitting on the throne, and great
Kumarbi kept giving him to drink. He kept bowing down at his feet and putting
drinking cups in his hand.
(i 18–19) As just nine years were counted off Anu was king in heaven, and in the ninth
year Anu went in battle against Kumarbi.50
The reigns of a series of gods are listed, each assigned a specific span of years,
as in the Sumerian King List. Just as Sargon the cupbearer overthrew his master, so Anu and then Kumarbi first serve as cupbearers, then do battle with
their master.
Although the singer whose version of the Song of Kingship in Heaven was
preserved for us may not have been directly aware of the lists of antediluvian
kings, at some point in the Hurro-Hittite tradition the decision was made to
pattern the earliest history of the gods after the earliest history of humans, a
decision that could only have been made if the king lists continued to be orally
performed even after certain versions of it had been fixed in writing. I think
the most likely source was a list focusing on the transfer of kingship from one
location to another, as in the Sumerian King List, rather than one in the style
of the independent lists of antediluvian kings, which simply cite them in
order, with no explicit mention of a shift in kingship.
8. Conclusion
As parts of the Sumerian scribal curriculum, the Flood Story and stories about
heroes such as Sargon and Naram-Sin belonged to a program indoctrinating
Mesopotamian scribes in their role as maintainers of powerful knowledge,
indispensible to illiterate kings as purveyors of admonitory history.51 But, the
nexus of association between Sargonic heroes and stories about the beginnings
of human civilization could be exploited to other ends, such as legitimating
the local court of the Hittite king. In addition, the Hurro-Hittite literature
50
Perhaps the scribe has slipped here, switching the roles of the two gods.
On the Sumerian scribal curriculum, see briefly Black et al. (2004: xli–xliii); on scribal
training in the third millennium as indoctrinating scribes in the values of kingship, and scribes
as purveyors of knowledge across dynasties to kings, see Michalowski (1987: 62–8).
51
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and rituals preserved at Hattusa allow us to discern how the privileged knowledge of “facts” and stories, and the power of distant space-time could actually
be put to work in ritual. A program to justify kingship that connected temporal and spatial distance, cosmogony and genealogy, first established by the
Mesopotamians, and also seen in the Hebrew Bible and Greek hexametric
poetry, was elaborated in new directions in the second-millennium by the
Hurrians. While the third-century BCE historian Berossus, according to
Eusebius, mentioned Babylonian books that described “histories about heaven
and the sea and the first birth/creation (prōtogoniās) and kings and their deeds,”
when laying out his program for his Babyloniaka,52 the šarrena ritual suggests
that the two histories, divine and human, had long been connected into a
single master narrative.
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