Inanna und [check{S}]ukaletuda: Zur historisch-politischen Deutung eines sumerischen Literaturwerkes.

• Author: ALSTER, BENDT
• Position: Review

Inanna und Sukatetuda: Zur historisch-politischen Deutung eines sumerischen Literaturwerkes. By KONRAD VOLK. Santag--Arbeiten und Untersuchungen zur Keilschriftkunde, vol. 3. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 1995. Pp. xv + 227, 9 plates. DM 98.

This book contains the first complete text edition of a major--but relatively little known--Sumerian literary composition, in which S. N. Kramer found what he described as the "Blood-Plague motif" referring to the Biblical account of the ten "plagues" of Exod. 7:14ff. It is of course always problematic to treat a detail from an incompletely known ancient literary source in such a way that it gives the impression of being a major theme of the text.

With this book we now have a complete text edition, albeit with some gaps, of this 310-line composition, with evaluation of the textual sources, transliteration, translation, philological comments, copies, and indices. To have both a "Textpartitur," pp. 97-115, and a reconstructed text, pp. 118-24, much of which just repeats the text partitur of the previous pages, is perhaps too much of a luxury. More economical solutions could have been suggested--particularly because now the reader constantly has to turn to three different pages to match the Sumerian text with the pertaining translation (pp. 125-33). In view of the excellent tools nowadays available for editorial work, it is a pity that the Sumerian text was not set on the left side opposite the translation. To read it would have been a pleasure rather than a pain. "Partitur" editions of Sumerian texts are certainly preferable to a traditional critical apparatus. Nevertheless, they tend to consume an unreasonable amount of space, unless very diligent measures are taken to present the evidence in condensed form. In this case it is a great relief that only limited space is spent uncritically on reproducing brackets, hyphens, x's and other necessary peculiarities of a Sumerian scholar's working manuscript. Yet, this is not so much the effect of careful editorial planning as it is a benevolent side-effect of the otherwise sad fact that relatively few sources are available. It is a good thing, though, that copies as well as transliterations are provided with column and line number, so for those who need it, the textual evidence is everywhere easy to check.

The textual history is a bit unusual, in that there are nearly as many fragments from tablets inscribed with the entire composition (three from Nippur, one...