Position in chronology
A hymn to Utu (Utu B)
Written in modern English
Rising from below and gazing upward, Utu — great physician, father of humanity, wearing a lapis-lazuli beard in his temple the E-babbar — is a great hero, the focal point of the divine assembly, a king, a bison charging across the mountains. He is the son born alongside the city to Ningal in the E-nun-ana: a bull, a cedar nourished by water growing strong among cypresses, holy, patient, playful, blazing with iridescent light. When he comes forth, the heavens tremble and the earth shakes. Several phrases earlier in the passage are too damaged to read, and one line contains an uncertain reading marked by the translators.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
ETCSLEmerging ...... below and gazing upwards, Utu, great physician, father of the black-headed, wearing a lapis-lazuli beard in the E-babbar! Utu, great hero, focus of the assembly, king, bison running over the mountains! Utu, bison running over the mountains! A young wild cow ......, a young gazelle (?) caught in a trap, Utu, the son born with the city to Ningal in the E-nun-ana, a bull, a cedar fed with water thriving among cypresses, holy (?), patient-hearted, playful, radiating light, he is iridescent radiance! Then, as my king comes forth, the heavens tremble before him and the earth shakes…
Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature — scholar edition (Oxford, Black/Cunningham/Robson/Zólyomi).
Scholarly note
Composition c.4.32.2 in the ETCSL catalogue. Sumerian literary text reconstructed from multiple cuneiform manuscripts, the great majority Old Babylonian (c. 1900–1600 BCE). Translation reproduced from the ETCSL edition.
Attribution
Image: .
Translation excerpted from ETCSL c.4.32.2: A hymn to Utu (Utu B). Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Robson, E. & Zólyomi, G. (eds.), The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.4.32.2.
Related tablets
Related sources
The single most important literary discovery of the 19th century. It rewired the understanding of the Bible's literary context and proved that the Mesopotamian flood tradition is older. It is the oldest surviving epic poetry in human history.
The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.
The single most influential Mesopotamian king list — the model for every later attempt to chronicle the deep history of the region. It transmits the political theology of divinely granted kingship, an idea that would echo through Babylon, Assyria, and into the Hebrew Bible. The Weld-Blundell prism (WB 444) at the Ashmolean is the most complete surviving copy.