Cuneiform 102 · Chapter 15

Born a hero

Chapter 07 met the phrase lugal-me-en — “I am the king” — filed in an ancient library catalogue. This chapter opens the hymn that made the phrase famous: the self-praise of Šulgi, king of Ur for almost half a century, tireless runner, self-declared scholar, and history’s least modest report-card writer. To read him, you need his name; to write his name, you need a reed.

Batch sixteen

Assemble the royal name before reading a word of the hymn:

One more, because the hymn demands it

The hymn, at last

Three lines of Šulgi A, read as a passage — the most copied royal hymn of the Old Babylonian schoolroom, which means generations of students your age read exactly these lines as homework:

Line one is already yours entire: lugal-me-en, the phrase this chapter came for; then šag₄-ta — chapter 09’s heart-sign wearing chapter 01’s “from”: from the womb — and ur-saŋ-me-en closing on the copulaa word or word-part meaning "to be," linking a subject to what it is — Sumerian attaches it to the word itself: lugal-me-en, "I am king" again: a hero, he insists, from the start.

Now take line two apart and count what this course has handed you: the divine star, both halves of the king’s name, the copulaa word or word-part meaning "to be," linking a subject to what it is — Sumerian attaches it to the word itself: lugal-me-en, "I am king" -me-en three lines running, ba- opening “was born,” 𒉈NE · [ne] · brazier/fire; [ne] wearing a new veteran reading de₃ inside the verb’s tail, and the ablativethe grammatical case meaning "from, out of" — Sumerian marks it with -ta -ta turning the whole birth into “ever since.” Fifteen chapters ago this line was wallpaper; now it is a sentence by a man you can hear showing off.

And he earned some of it: elsewhere in this same hymn Šulgi claims he ran from Nippur to Ur — some hundred and sixty kilometers — through a hailstorm, round trip, to celebrate the festivals in both cities in one day. Scholars have doubts about the meteorology. Nobody doubts that every schoolchild in Babylonia had to copy it out.

The name on the street

The hymn’s vocabulary was ordinary people’s name-stock long before and after Šulgi wore it:

A seal was a signature: Lu-kalla pressed that little cylinder into wet clay to sign for goods, and the impression — his name in the same signs you just read — survives on receipt after receipt. The hymn’s grand words and the warehouse’s daily grind share one inventory. That has been this course’s whole argument since chapter 00.

Drill before you go on

1. Write 𒄀GI · [gi] · reed — the writing tool itself; gi in Šul-gi, 𒂄DUN · [šul] · young man in his prime, hero — Šulgi's own name-word, 𒌅TU · [tu] · to be born, 𒆗KAL · [kal] · mighty, strong; precious from memory; say gi, šul, tu, kal.
2. Write Šulgi’s full name, star included, from memory.
3. Read the three hymn lines aloud, covering the gloss column, in your best royal voice. This is the rare drill where showing off is methodologically correct.
4. Find the ablativethe grammatical case meaning "from, out of" — Sumerian marks it with -ta in line two and say what it does to the birth.
5. Which signs in line three are boxed, and does the line’s sense survive them? One sentence.

Next: the tablet house speaks — scribes, colophonsa scribe's closing note on a tablet or manuscript — title, owner, date, the ancient equivalent of a title page at the end, and the school that taught every text you have read.