THE STORY OF SUKURRU: Sumerian symbols and their true meaning

By Madeleine Daines

There comes a time when the veil must be lifted or the truth about our past will be lost forever. This is an ancient story, a text retrieved from under the sands and then hidden again, this time in plain sight under the misleading title THE INSTRUCTIONS OF SHURUPPAK for more than a century. It is a rare bridge that allows us to step backwards be

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madeleine Daines
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9782956045939

Book preview

First published in paperback in 2017

Copyright © Madeleine Daines 2017

The right of Madeleine Daines to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-2-9560459-0-8

ISBN: 978-2-9560459-3-9 (e-book)

This edition published in May 2020 includes the Sumerian Solstice Riddle.

All characters in this publication may or may not have lived in a distant past.

Published by HerFairHand

Contents

INTRODUCTION

THE STORY

URU, THE CITY 2800 BC

A Festival Performance

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ANUNNAKI

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PROMETHEUS

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GOBEKLI

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ILLUSTRATIONS LIST

THE SUMERIAN SOLSTICE RIDDLE

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

INTRODUCTION

W. Von Soden regrets that we depend on the documents of the Renaissance of Sumerian culture (around 2100 B.C.), instead of having the real, old material at our disposal. The mere fact that Sumerian was the language of the educated Babylonian and Assyrian, the existence of the many Sumerian-Akkadian dictionaries and the numerous translations of the Gilgamesh epic betrays the activity of several academies responsible for the officially recognized text editions. One can almost see the scholars puzzling and frowning over the texts. (Giorgio de Santillano and Hertha Von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, p.120, David R. Godine, Publisher.)

The Sumerian text titled The Instructions of Shuruppak is recognized as being the earliest example of literature in existence in the world today, one tablet discovered at an archaeological site in Iraq having been safely dated to ca. 2600-2500 BC. Fragments of clay tablets carrying parts of the relatively substantial text were found at more than one site in Mesopotamia and from different time periods, implying that it was once quite widely read and of some considerable importance. It is comprised of approximately 3,000 symbols, with several broken sections. The transliteration, from original sign to phonetic value, results in 280 lines and was used for this translation as it was for the story that became The Instructions of Shuruppak. However, the result is stunningly different and that for two main reasons:

First, I considered that the language in which the original text was transcribed on to clay was monosyllabic. Each symbol, with inherent meaning, should be represented as far as possible by a modern equivalent and meaningful word (as opposed to words which have purely grammatical functions such as 'and', 'by' or 'the', etc.). That was not the case for The Instructions of Shuruppak which was understood to have been written in an agglutinative language where two or more symbols joined to form a word, and where some symbols had a purely grammatical function.

Secondly, I used a limited number of monosyllabic phonetic values, always the same sound for any one symbol, composed of one, two or three letters. For the most part, I used those which are considered to be the most archaic forms. In just a few cases, the choice was more intuitive; for example, where the symbol for 'basket' is generally given as GA₂, I have chosen to use MAL. I also restricted myself to a limited number of words for the meanings of any one symbol, avoiding the use of a large range of synonyms, in order that my choices be easily understood.

Reverting to the most archaic monosyllabic forms in this way does more than transform the overall meaning of the text. It reveals the extent to which the sounds of the past have influenced the sounds we make today. What I am attempting to convey here is the extraordinary fact that many of our modern-day words, the sounds that we use today, whether English or another language, are direct descendants of this, the original language. This Sumerian source is far more compelling than the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) etymology which is presented with a quasi-official label. ‘From PIE root’ is the final entry in etymological dictionaries for most of our words, and it is misleading in that it implies a knowledge of the ultimate source. In fact, PIE is nothing more than an exercise in comparison of sounds from different related languages and has no substantiating text to back it up. The obvious Sumerian origin of various Greek, Latin and modern words is laid out in the notes, along with short comments on the equally evident references to myths and beliefs from around the world. Archaic Sumerian is the source of many things, and this book can only hope to lay a small portion of the groundwork for a new perspective on the subject.

An important element of this translation is the choice of presentation. Where ancient documents are concerned, translated texts are generally presented with no easy means of verifying their accuracy. Because it is important that this work be taken seriously and that its implications be equally seriously weighed, I have chosen to present it as a kind of bilingual book; on the left-hand the original text as both symbol and phonetic forms, and, opposite this, my translated lines. Those who prefer to discover the truth through examination of the evidence will find a method by which they can check and agree or disagree with my result.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) is a website of the University of Oxford where many Sumerian texts have been usefully displayed with links to their academic translations. The transliteration and original translation of The Instructions of Shuruppak are found there under the reference 5.6.1. The first line is given on ETCSL as:

(UD) RE A UD SU₃ RA₂ RE A

In my translation, the first line is re-written:

UD RE A UD SUD DU RE A

SU₃ and SUD are two sounds - phonetic values - that belong to the same original Sumerian symbol. As I use just one equivalence for each symbol throughout the text and, as far as possible, from the earliest recorded times, ca.3350-3000 BC, my version gives SUD. All the phonetic forms of symbol SUD appear in the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (ePSD) website alongside a list of given meanings. In the same way, RA₂ fifth symbol in the first line of the ETCSL transcription, can be referred to as DU and, contrary to academia where a symbol often has several sounds attributed to it within the same text and sometimes even within the same line, I use only DU as the sound for that symbol throughout the entire text. Continuing in this way, my translation can be matched to the phonetic values of the ETCSL transcription, and most of the meanings are the same or close to those of ePSD and other Sumerian dictionaries. The vocabulary used for the translation was deliberately limited as far as possible to those easily connected meanings. There are no great flights of fancy to be read into my choices.

As explained in the introductory text, each translated word is a member of a family of words according to references so archaic that we might not expect to find any trace of them today. Fortunately, that is not the case. Below is