The function of the ancient Sumerian liturgical laments known as balaĝ and eršema prayers was to pacify a deity who was perceived to be angry. It has long been known that these compositions were sung to the accompaniment of music during temple rituals. This book, a revision of part of the author’s doctoral thesis, sets out to understand how they were performed, by studying the primary sources from the three vantage points, in the author’s words, of “philology, poetics and musicology”.
The corpus of primary sources is defined as those cuneiform tablets on which the text of liturgical laments is accompanied by notations which are described as “performative indications”. These notations were optional and evince a form of ancient metatextual apparatus which probably derived from oral tradition. They are identified as an innovation of the Achaemenid period, some 1,500 years after balaĝ and eršema compositions were first committed to writing. The motivation for the innovation was probably a perception among singers and musicians that, as Babylonian temples declined in power and wealth, the tradition of liturgical laments was in danger of expiry. The scope of the study and the problems to be addressed are introduced in chapter I.
The corpus of texts is introduced and summarized in chapter II. It comprises 71 Late Babylonian tablets. According to the surviving colophons they range in date across a timespan of at least 250 years, from year 21 of one of the three Achaemenid kings called Artaxerxes (fifth–fourth century bc) to year 135 of the Arsacid era (113 bc). Some are from northern Babylonia (Babylon and Borsippa), others from the south (Uruk, Dēr via Uruk, and Ur). Each tablet is meticulously catalogued, with bibliography and short descriptions that make especial reference to performance indications. Colophons are edited; difficult and doubtful signs and passages of the colophons are elucidated with photographs.
Chapter III presents a typology and discussion of the performance indications flagged up in chapter II. These are divided into vocalic and directive indications. The former are interpolated signs for vowels, written in smaller script like pronunciation glosses. Their function is often phonetic, indicating the extension of vowels or syllables and the expression of exclamations. The directive indications, mainly inscribed on the tablets’ left edge, are a miscellany of words and phrases. Some of them – such as the names of musical instruments and words and phrases like “response”, “repetition” and “not sung/played” – are clearly relevant to performance, and the author makes a good case for several other notations also to be performance related. Two styles of performative indications are identified, which can reflect either the tablets’ geographical origin in the north or the south respectively, or a historical evolution between two groups of tablets that are not contemporaneous.
In Chapter IV the author considers contingent factors that bear on the elucidation of performative indications in the corpus. These include the deviation of sung language from spoken language, illustrated from ethnomusicological parallels; the pronunciation of Sumerian in Late Babylonian schools; and the interface between Sumerian phonology, pronunciation glosses and performative vowels.
The relationship of performative indications to poetic meter is briefly tackled in Chapter V. The rest of the chapter is the heart of the book. It collects attestations of performative vowels at line margins, caesurae and line ends, organized as to whether they extend vocalic endings, anticipate vocalic onsets, or neither. The evidence for performative vowels and sequences of vowels in other contexts is presented similarly. The relationship between performative vowels and the written text is thus observed to be one of either assonance or dissonance. It emerges that performative vowels could reinforce metrical and syntactic structures, but they could also disrupt them, probably for rhetorical effect. Frequent inconsistencies suggest to the author that there were no rules, only tendencies.
Chapter VI focuses first on extended sequences of performative vowels in the lines that open and close sections of the prayers, which are interpreted as melismas of a kind identified as characteristic of Near Eastern liturgies. It then turns to consider the function of the directive performance indications in creating dramatic effects. Evidence is interpreted to signify the presence of musical climaxes, comprising “extended melismas, combined with the clashing of cymbals and/or other percussion instruments”. A short summary restates the main conclusions of the six chapters.
The remainder of the book presents in Assyriological form some of the textual evidence that underpins the data set out in the earlier chapters. As case studies, four prayers are fully edited in score format, together with a translation which includes the vocalic performance indicators and highlights the original Sumerian word order and poetic structure. A detailed philological commentary, with collated signs and passages illustrated with photographs, concludes each case study. In addition, score transliterations are given of another nineteen passages taken from the corpus, again with illustrated collations. The volume concludes with concordances and indexes, and an autograph copy of cuneiform tablet BM 78878, text No. 41 in the corpus.
In the introduction the author writes, “the topic of this book has received only limited attention in scholarship, and it remains one of the least understood aspects of the cuneiform tradition”. The result of his careful and sober labour has made good that academic shortcoming with an exhaustive, well-informed and authoritative study, full of bright ideas and wise reflection. It makes the topic of musical notations in Late Babylonian liturgical prayers eminently accessible, and gives Assyriologists and musicologists alike a most valuable new resource. With this tool in hand, a comparison with Quranic chant might be instructive.
