Let all inhabitants witness and extol my name.
Erra and Ishum, Tablet 5, lines 48–61 (trans. Foster 2005)
In this closing passage, we are presented with a final recipient of kleos – this time, it is the poem itself. It is the poem that is honoured (line 49), extolled (line 51), discussed (line 52), chanted (line 53), performed (line 54), written out (line 55), mentioned frequently (line 56), stored safely (ling 57), and preserved for eternity (lint 59). This implies a different conception of poetic practice from that seen in the Homeric epics: this poem is not only a means of acquiring, transferring, and communicating kleos for both poetic subject and poetic practitioner – it also commands kleos for itself.
Part of the explanation for this may lie in the way the poem describes itself. In this passage, it appears to have a number of different manifestations. It is described as a ‘song’ (zamaru; lines 49 and 59), as Erra’s ‘name’ (šumi; lines 51 and 61), and as a ‘tablet’ (ṭuppu; line 57). As we have already seen, in the preceding passage it was referred to as a ‘sign’ (ittu: line 47) of the god. Common across these various manifestations, however, is the idea of the poem as a thing – an entity in its own right with a range of attributes or powers. As a thing, the poem can be the recipient of praise; and in this passage it also appears as a repository for magical and protective powers.83 Although the poem might take many different forms, the way it is described here is anything but ephemeral.
Songs as things
The sense of a text as an entity – a thing – can be found more widely in Mesopotamian writing. This must stem in part from the practical existence of most Akkadian texts as artefacts, comprising both the inscribed material and the written script. This textual physicality is vividly described in the prologue of the Gilgamesh,84 the standard form of which seems to have emerged in the late second millennium.85
[a-mur?] gištup-šen-na šá gišerēni(erin)
[pu-uṭ-ṭe]r ḫar-gal-li-šu šá siparri (zabar)
[pi-te-m]a? bāba(ká) šá ni-ṣir-ti-šú
[i-š]i?-ma ṭup-pi na4uqnî(za.gὶn) ši-tas-si
[mim-m]u-ú dGIŠ-gím-maš ittallaku(DU.DU)ku ka-lu mar-ṣa-a-ti
See the tablet-box of cedar.
release its clasp of bronze!
Lift the lid of its secret,
pick up the tablet of lapis lazuli and read out
The travails of Gilgamesh, all that he went through.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 1, lines 24–8 (text and trans. George 2003)
The prologue invites its audience to engage with the text as an inscribed artefact as well as a literary composition.86 In addition, the previous lines suggest that the tablet box is to be discovered by examining the walls of Uruk, Gilgamesh’s great city.87 The poem, then, describes itself as a physical artefact with an almost archaeological provenance.
This same emphasis on the physicality of texts can be found more widely across the writing cultures of Mesopotamia, including prose texts and documents that we may not immediately consider to be ‘literary’. For example, in 670 BCE the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon erected an inscription to celebrate his victory over the pharaoh Taharqa.88 The inscription ends with a description of itself as a ‘stele/inscription’ (narû; lines 50, 53, and 56), and a warning for those who would damage either the physical stone of the stele (lines 53–6) or the written words of the text (lines 56–7). Many similar formulae can be found on inscriptions of this and earlier periods.89 In official proclamations as well as poetry, then, texts were conceived of as physical as well as literary objects.
This idea finds particular expression in a genre sometimes known as narû literature. The precise definition of the genre is debated,90 but in general these are prose texts claiming to be an official inscription (hence narû) of a great or legendary king. Royal inscriptions, as we have seen above, often recount the achievements of the king, and narû literature has the same narrative focus. The genre is also sometimes referred to as ‘fictional autobiography’, as these texts were written in the first person despite their subjects being mythical or long-dead by the time of composition. While the genre must have developed out of actual narû inscriptions, by the early first millennium these texts may not always have been inscribed on stone. The claim of being a narû is therefore a symbolic one, with the physical durability of the form standing for the endurance of the text and the preservation of memory.91
The physicality of Mesopotamian texts stands in marked contrast to the self-conscious orality of song in the Homeric epics. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not composed in a pre-literate age – indeed, they came into existence around the very time when the Greek alphabet was in development, and the Iliad itself acknowledges the existence of writing. When Glaucus tells the story of his ancestor Bellerophon in Book 6, he mentions that the hero had been sent to Lycia bearing ‘ominous signs; written on a folded tablet, life-destroying and many’ (σήματα λυγρά, | γράψας ὑν πίνακι πτυκτῷ θυμοφθόρα πολλά, Iliad 6.168–69).92 Glaucus is engaging here in his own poetic practice – his ‘tale within a tale’ is a poetic account of the deeds of (what is from his perspective) the heroic past. He delivers his story, as most other storytellers and poets in the Homeric poems, orally. And yet, the story hinges on the new technology of writing. The orality of poetry in the Homeric epics is therefore a choice – while Homeric epics are aware of the existence of written traditions, they seem to position themselves as oral.
A slightly different juxtaposition of the oral and the written can be found in Tablet 11 of Gilgamesh. In this tablet, Gilgamesh is told the story of the great flood by Utnapištim, who survived its waters by following the instructions of the god Ea. Utnapištim’s story is therefore yet another song embedded within a song, but explicitly marked out from the main narrative as an oral rather than a written tale. Utnapištim prefaces his story by saying: ‘I will disclose to you, Gilgamesh | and I will tell you a mystery of the gods’ (lupteka gilgameš amāt niṣirti | u pirišti ša ilāni kâša luqbika: Tablet 11, lines 9–10; trans. George 2003). There is no suggestion of a written version of the story, despite the fact that a Mesopotamian audience would almost certainly have been aware of the Atraḫasis, a well-known poem that focused specifically on the legend of the flood.93 Indeed Utnapištim does not describe his composition as a poem or a tablet, but as a ‘secret/treasure’ (niṣirti; line 9), and a ‘mystery’ (pirišti; line 10). There are structural parallels between this episode and Book 9 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus begins to tell the story of his adventures to the Phaeacians. Both characters appear as masters of oral poetry, constructing their identities by composing epic autobiographies.94 But while Odysseus acts as a mirror or stand-in for the poet of the Odyssey, Utnapištim’s storytelling is qualitatively distinct from that of the Gilgamesh epic as a whole – as an oral rather than a written tale, it involved a subtly different type of activity.
And yet, despite its orality, Utnapištim’s story is closer to Mesopotamian written texts than the Homeric oral epics in one important respect. In this episode, the tale itself is a thing, just as the text of Erra, the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions, and the overall poem of Gilgamesh are also things. Utnapištim’s story is described as if it were an entity in its own right, which has an existence beyond the ephemeral moment of its performance. In telling his story, Utnapištim is not creating something – he is merely uncovering something that was already there so that Gilgamesh might behold it. The verbs Utnapištim uses for the telling of his tale are significant in this respect. He claims that he wishes to ‘reveal’ or ‘open up’ (lupteka) the secret for Gilgamesh, and to ‘speak out’ (luqbika) the mystery. In this way, Utnapištim’s story resembles the Erra poem. Both has its own independent existence – they are ‘story-entities’ even before they are crystallized into their poetic form. This is true, irrespective of whether the tale was a written poem (as in the case of the Erra) or an oral account (as in the case of Utnapištim’s story). It seems
that the ‘thingyness’ of Mesopotamian heroic tales did not depend on their final form.
This differs from the poetic practice represented within the Homeric epics. The Iliad begins with an invocation to the Muse to sing, not the song of Achilles’ wrath, but to sing that very wrath itself (μῆνιν ἄειδε; Iliad 1.1). In the equivalent line of the Odyssey, the Muse is called upon to speak the man, rather than speak a tale about the man (ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε; Odyssey 1.1). Similarly, when Odysseus sings his own Odyssey, he says: ‘come now, I will recount to you my stressful homecoming’ (εἰ δ᾽ ἄγε τοι καὶ νόστον ὑμὸν πολυκηδέ᾽ ἐνίσπω, Odyssey, 9.37). Crucially, the object of the verb ‘recount’ (ὑνίσπω) is the ‘homecoming’ (νόστον) – not a song, a story, or a secret about that homecoming, but the homecoming itself. For Odysseus, as for the poet of the Homeric poems, there is no thing that mediates between the events and their telling. In contrast, in the Erra poem, Kabti-ilani-Marduk does not write the events, but rather the text (kaṣir) of them. Similarly, the gods do not praise Erra or his exploits, but rather his sign (ittu). And in Gilgamesh, Utnapištim does not recount his own exploits, but rather the secret (niṣirti) that enfolds them. The difference between the Homeric tradition and these Mesopotamian examples is, in part, one of grammar. Nonetheless, the poetic and social implications of this are significant.
Stories and storytellers
One of the results of this subtle linguistic difference is a much more significant disparity in the status of the poet. It is significant that compared with the later Greek literary tradition, we know the names of very few Mesopotamian poets.95 The Erra’s Kabti-ilani-Marduk is a notable exception – a poet who names himself in his work. There are some genres of Mesopotamian literature in which the names of supposed authors appear more often, including hymns,96 royal annals, and inscriptions, and the aforementioned narû literature.97 Beyond these classes of text however, it was rare for Mesopotamian texts to name or make reference to their authors. The Enuma Eliš (the Epic of Creation), for example, claims that its text was initially set out by the god Marduk, and then written down by an unnamed ‘first one’ (maḫrû; Tablet 7, line 157). The Gilgamesh in contrast offers us no explicit reference to its composition or a poet at all.98
Not only was there relatively little interest in the identity of the poet, but there was also comparatively little celebration of human agency in poetic composition. As we have seen for the Erra, creativity was attributed to the divine agents or heroic subjects of poetry, rather than to its scribes; and praise was directed more towards the poem/song/tale itself than to any of the individuals involved in its composition. While there is of course some prestige in Kabti-ilani-Marduk’s claim to be the person to whom the song was revealed, and the first to commit it to writing, this prestige is qualitatively different from the explicit praise that is given to the poem itself. This is a metapoetic vision subtly different from that of the Homeric world, where the praxis of poetry commanded kleos; where praise was offered to the singers of songs; and where the performance of poetry was considered to be an heroic activity. In the Erra, it was not the poet who stood centre stage, or even the action of ‘doing’ poetry – it was the poem itself that was the thing.
And yet, beyond this difference in metapoetics, the Erra and the Homeric poems have something important in common – that they had a strong sense of the metapoetic at all. Both are crucially concerned with the practice of telling stories, and both play innovative games with the idea of storytelling, speech, and the voice of the narrator. Although the Erra and the Iliad developed their metapoetic interest in different directions, it is significant that they shared this interest at all.
It is perhaps possible that the Erra reflected a broader shift in Mesopotamian literature. Only two Akkadian poems are known from the entire span of antiquity that claimed for themselves non-royal authors, and both date from around this time – Erra and the Babylonian Theodicy.99 A broader interest in authors may also lie behind the writing a tablet from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, dated to the mid-seventh century BCE, which lists texts in the library categorized by author.100 The first author in the list is the god Ea (Tablet 1, line 4), followed by Adapa, one of the mythical seven sages (Tablet 1, lines 6–7). Although the intervening text is fragmentary, a tablet and a half later we are met by a familiar name – Kabti-ilani-Marduk (Tablet 3, line 2). Several other human authors are listed, including the supposed compiler of Gilgamesh, Sîn-lēqi-unninni.101 By bringing together divine, mythical, and human authors, this catalogue tablet may suggest perhaps a subtle shift in the representation of poetic composition. If so, it is perhaps significant that this would be occurring in the early centuries of the first millennium, at around the time that the material of the Iliad and the Odyssey were coming together.
It may not be possible to determine precisely how the metapoetic consciousness of the Erra relates to that of Homeric poetry – in particular, I suspect it may be unhelpful to debate whether Homeric epic derived its metapoetic interest from the Erra or vice versa. Instead, it is probably more fruitful to think of these developments as emerging out of the same broader historical context – the same interconnected world, inhabited by overlapping and interacting literary traditions. This may not be evidence for the Iliad and the Erra speaking directly to each other in a dialogue, but I would argue that both texts were saying the same kinds of things, each engaged in dialogue with a broader set of traditions which we can only begin to piece together.
The Iliad and the Erra both emerged out of a world full of poetry. They may have occupied different positions within this poetic world, and clearly they both had different immediate literary and cultural contexts, but nonetheless they were both embedded in the same wider world of interconnected poetic traditions. While these poems drew from this broader field of traditions, they also innovated on them – crucially, as we have seen in this chapter, in their conception of poetry itself. The poems were therefore works of reception, not just in terms of stories, themes, and motifs but also by virtue of their metapoetic consciousness. The Iliad and the Erra both reflect deeply on the nature of poetry – something that would not have been possible if there had not already existed a variety of poetic practices to reflect on.
But the Erra and the Iliad emerged into a world full of poetry as well as out of one. Their impact on later tradition was not just one of stories, themes, and motifs, but also one of metapoetic consciousness. As we shall see in the rest of this book, this self-conscious sense of poesis also features in many later contributions to the Trojan War tradition.
1 Aside from the fragments of the ‘Epic Cycle’ (for which see below).
2 For this period in the Aegean, see Osborne 2009, 131–52.
3 For the Neo-Assyrian Empire, see van de Mieroop 2004, 207–69.
4 See Morris 1989 and Bennet 2007 for epic and poetic performance in the Bronze Age Aegean; see Ruijgh 1985 for a discussion of scansion in Homeric and Mycenaean Greek; and Horrocks 1980 for elements of Homeric Greek that may predate Mycenaean Greek.
5 For Bronze Age Anatolian epic traditions, see Beckman 2009. See Bachvarova 2016b for a discussion of the contributions of Anatolian epic to Homeric epic. Relationships between Bronze Age Anatolian poetry and the Hesiodic corpus have also been much discussed in the scholarly literature; see West 1997, 276–306, Rutherford 2009, Van Dongen 2011.
6 The definition of the term ‘epic’ in relation to ancient Greek poetry has been extensively discussed; see Martin 2009.
7 The authorship of some works attributed to Hesiod is still debated. See Cingano 2009 for the Hesiodic corpus.
8 West 2013 has suggested a possible range of dates for several works in the Epic Cycle. For the Epic Cycle more generally, see Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015.
9 These were: the Cypria, which recounts the events in the run-up to and the early years of the war; the Aethiopis, which describes battle and the deaths of several major heroes includ
ing Penthesilea and Achilles; the Little Iliad, in which we hear of the deaths of Ajax and Paris; the Ilioupersis, which tells the tale of the wooden horse and the eventual sack of Troy; the Nostoi, which laments the troubled homecomings of the Achaean heroes; the Odyssey, focusing on Odysseus’ particularly difficult return; and the Telegony, recounting Odysseus’ later adventures and his eventual death. Yet more poems in the Epic Cycle treated subjects unrelated to the Trojan War: the Titanomachy; the Oedipodea; the Thebaid; and the Epigonoi.
10 Specifically, the fragment refers to ‘Wilusa’, which was the name used for the city of Troy by the Hittites, who dominated most of Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age. This has prompted discussion of the possibility that a Wilusiad existed as a Late Bronze Age Anatolian epic, which would have been a direct precursor for the Iliad (Watkins 1986).
11 Aslan 2002, 82–86 and 2011, and Aslan and Rose 2013, 11. This should perhaps be seen in the wider context of ‘hero cult’ elsewhere in the Aegean around this time: Antonaccio 1995.
12 See Foster 2005, 1–47 for an introduction to Akkadian literature.
13 See Jakobsen 1987 for Sumerian literature.
14 For an introduction to Mesopotamian epic, see Noegel 2009. For the difficulty of defining ‘epic’ as a genre in Near Eastern poetry, see Westenholz 1997, 20–21 and Sasson 2009. For the classification of the Erra as an ‘epic’, see Cagni 1974, 7–11 and George 2013, 47.
15 For a detailed treatment of the specific parallels between the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh, see West 1997.
16 See Haubold 2013 for a more nuanced discussion of the possible interrelationships between Greek and Mesopotamian literature.
17 For the eighth century, see Sommer 2007 and Osborne 2009, 66–130.
18 Thereafter they appear again in several texts of Sargon II (721–705 BCE), who claimed to have defeated them 715 BCE (Sargon Annals, lines 117–9). Sargon’s successor, Sennacherib (704–681 BCE), claimed to have defeated them again in 694 BCE, according to the later historian Berossus (Berossus FGrHist 680 F7.31). Some years later, Esarhaddon (680–679 BCE) once more claimed that the king of Ionia was sending him tribute (Leichty 2011, no. 60 line 6). For Near Eastern sources documenting interaction with various Greek groups, see Rollinger 2001, 237–43, 2007, 2009, 2011, and Luraghi 2006, 30–33.
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