Sumerian literature is the oldest large corpus of poetry in history. For the last hundred years it has been under reconstruction by a small group of specialists. The sources are clay tablets inscribed in the cuneiform script and excavated in the ruin mounds of what is now southern Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets are now stored in museums in the Middle East, Europe and North America. Only a few thousand of these tablets, mostly small fragments, bear poetry and prose in the Sumerian language. The process of deciphering them, identifying them and using them in the work of reconstructing the corpus is time-consuming but rewarding. Each generation of Sumerologists has made considerable progress in the task of recovering individual compositions. One of the compositions that has emerged from this process is the mythological narrative poem which modern scholars call Enki and the World Order.
The poem elaborates a myth in which, at the god Enlil’s behest, the god Enki organized the world of Sumer and its neighbours to Sumer’s advantage and assigned duties to various minor deities. Enki omitted to give duties to the goddess Inanna, and when she complained bitterly of ill-treatment, he explained that she had an unhelpful proclivity for disorder and violence. The implication, that Inanna personifies a subversive force which cannot be accommodated within an ordered world, is borne out by other mythological narratives.
A newly discovered fragment of Enki and the World Order leads Cooper to propose that the myth of organization is here presented as a re-organization, which took place after an interval of disturbance in which the previously established order was overthrown. He bases this on a plausible restoration of a passage that, in spite of the new fragment, is still badly damaged (ll. 44–51). Other restorations are possible. New pieces of Sumerian literary compositions are discovered regularly and one can be fairly sure that further textual witnesses will eventually bring greater clarity to the passage.
The book begins with a short introduction which covers, among other topics, the history of scholarship, the date of the poem, its structure and story, its language, the principal characters, and related passages of other compositions (Ch. 1). After the introduction comes a tabulated list of the textual sources and a discussion of the tablets’ typology and the text’s stability (Ch. 2). Twenty-four cuneiform tablets and fragments are utilized in Cooper’s edition, some comprising as many as eight joining pieces. Sixteen pieces are published for the first time. Readers wishing to read the poem in cuneiform are directed to a variety of resources. Many fragments have been previously published in line drawings (handcopies); some can also be consulted in digital photographs on the website of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (note that images of the tablet MS 2646 = ms Z can also be found there, at cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts/251674). In the many cases where digital images are still lacking, mainly of fragments in Jena and Istanbul, colour photographs have been obtained and fill 28 pages at the end of the book. Among these are composite images showing how fragments of the same tablet that are kept in different museums would look if they could be brought together physically. These images, especially, are a great help to any reader who wants to know exactly how the various pieces fit together.
The substance of the book is a critical edition of the text of the poem. The text is presented twice, as is now customary in Sumerology (Ch. 3–4). First is what Cooper calls an eclectic text and characterizes as an “artifact of convenience”: a romanized transliteration put together from the various different manuscripts according to the editor’s “sense of the best text”, with the most important variant readings recorded in footnotes. A highly readable translation graces the opposing pages. After this is a “textual matrix”: a tabulated transliteration, which records, line by line, the exact text preserved on each textual witness. Here the reader can observe the most minor variants, as well as major.
The double presentation of text is followed by a line-by-line commentary (Ch. 5). The commentary discusses matters of philology (epigraphy, vocabulary, grammar, syntax), but also responds to the text as a narrative and as a poem, elucidating both its content and its relationship to the corpus of Sumerian poetry as a whole. The book is concluded with two useful indexes: one of Sumerian words in Enki and the World Order and another of passages from other Sumerian poems that are cited in the commentary.
This new treatment of Enki and the World Order is not only a very welcome addition to the printed corpus of modern editions of Sumerian literary compositions, but also a model of scholarly excellence. Cooper’s mastery of Sumerian narrative poetry was established more than forty years ago by his fine critical editions of Angimdimma (1978) and the Curse of Agade (1983). Now once again he has given the field a superb resource, usable by specialist and non-specialist alike and important for the study of myth and literature, as well as of ancient Mesopotamian language and culture.
