Helden en goden van Sumer: Een keuze uit de heroische en mythologische dichtkunst van her Oude Mesopotamie.

• Author: DE MIEROOP, MARC VAN
• Position: Review

Helden en goden van Sumer: Een keuze uit de heroische en mythologische dichtkunst van her Oude Mesopotamie. By HERMAN VANSTIPHOUT. Nijmegen: UITGEVERIJ SUN, 1998. Pp. 253. HFI 39.50.

The study of Sumerian literature is flourishing. In the last two decades a small but very active group of scholars has taken the study of this literature to a new level, by exposing it to methods of analysis borrowed and adapted from the field of literary criticism. The original, and obviously crucial, aim of the discipline of providing primary editions of the texts, has been gradually replaced by a concerted effort to approach them as literature. Philology has developed into criticism. The changes are perhaps best evidenced by a comparison of two works with similar subject matter, In 1968 Wolfgang Heimpel published his study on animal metaphors in Sumerian literature (Tierbilder in der sumerischen Literatur [Rome: Pontificial Biblical Institute]), an exhaustive catalogue of references from published and unpublished fragments, with quotations and philological annotations of relevant passages. Exactly thirty years later, Jeremy Black's study of imagery applies what I consider to be purely formalist methods of literary criticism, focusing on a single, by now well-understood, text (Reading Sumerian Poetry [London: Athlone Press, 1998]). The difference in the approaches is enormous, and demonstrates how the discipline has matured.

One of the leaders in this change in the direction of research has been Herman Vanstiphout, who has spent his entire scholarly career studying Sumerian literature as literature. He has published a long list of articles on numerous compositions, always focusing more on the literary than the philological aspects of the text. He is thus in an ideal position to present this literature to the broader public, and that is precisely the purpose of this work. The reader is presented with Dutch translations of twelve of the major works, dealing with the heroes from Uruk and the leading gods of the Sumerian pantheon. They include (using the titles traditionally employed in English-language scholarship) Gilgamesh and Agga, Gilgamesh and Huwawa, Enmerkar and Ensuhkeshdanna, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Lugalbanda and Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave (treated as a single composition), Enki and Ninhursaga, Enlil and Ninlil...