The Sumerian Poem Enmerkar and En-suhkes-ana: Epic, play, or? Stage Craft at the Turn from the Third to the Second Millennium.

• Author: Kleinerman, Alexandra
• Position: Book review

The Sumerian Poem Enmerkar and En-suhkes-ana: Epic, play, or? Stage Craft at the Turn from the Third to the Second Millennium B.C. By CLAUS WILCKE. American Oriental Series, Essay 12. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2012. Pp. ix + 117. $58 (paper).

The Sumerian Poem Enmerkar and En-suhkes-ana: Epic, Play, Orh Stage Craft at the Turn from the Third to the Second Millennium B.C. is Claus Wilcke's edition of a difficult and enigmatic Sumerian composition, re-edited in light of new manuscripts. In addition to providing a score and translation, Wilcke examines the context of the composition, and offers a new interpretation focused on its theatrical performance in antiquity (p. 10). In chapter 1, Wilcke discusses the genre of the composition, arguing that it is "a mix of epic narration and play" (p. 36). In chapter 2, he speculates as to the setting for which the composition was first created and, in chapters 3 and 4, he outlines the plot, envisioning how each scene was enacted on stage. Chapter 5 details the grammatical and other textual indicators for performance, and chapter 6 offers possible occasions for performance.

Wilcke's argument for performance is based on four internal textual features; the first two are grammatical, the latter are those of "substance and structure" (p. 32): 1) the use of demonstratives and personal pronouns to indicate stage directions (pp. 18-20, 29-31); 2) the use of the ergative case to mark animals, implying underlying human actors (p. 32); 3) the lack of a central character (pp. 32-33); and 4) regular scene changes and coinciding character changes (p. 33).

These arguments rest on a number of assumptions. Regarding points 1) and 2), one would need to compare the use of these features here and in other similar compositions to see if they are truly noteworthy. Indeed, such comparison may strengthen Wilcke's case. For instance, C. Mittermayer (2013) references a passage in the Sumerian debate poem between Bird and Fish in which it appears from the use of third person singular pronouns that "Bird is talking to a third party, which in all probability is the audience watching the performance of this [debate]." Of course, one might expect the use of plural or collective pronouns if they referred to a larger audience. It may be instead that Bird was addressing not the audience of a play but Enki, the divine judge of the composition. Regardless, such analysis throughout the Sumerian disputation texts as well as other epic narratives would be necessary to confirm Wilcke's assumptions on the use of certain grammatical markers to...