The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur

 I hope that this project does not totally spin out of control with the endless introductions of new lists. I don't know how The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur got on my list. I imagine at one point I was skimming through the Norton Anthology of World Literature and there is some slight reference to it which may have been enough to prompt me to add it to an Ancient Literature list. I have no idea but I thought to add it as an Anonymous entry and leave it for 35 years from now. Now that I am a year into this project, many books and research questions have been asked I pull this strange text out of the ether and I confront it head on. 

One of the challenges of selecting books based off of their titles alone is that many times there is not a collected, singular volume of a text available that I can simply buy online, listen to an audiobook version of and move along. This text was written somewhere between 2112 B.C. and 2004 B.C. according to Wikipedia (which seems younger than I might imagine). I googled this phrase that I received from my travels among the periphera of a survey or anthology and found that there is a whole academic field around this text and others like it so impenetrable that I knew I was out of my league. Luckily, my oldest brother, Jason Riley, has a PhD from Fuller Seminary in ancient languages, specifically in the Ancient Near East, and this particular document was one he interacted with in his scholarly work. Not everyone has an older brother that has a PhD in the area they trip into and can guide through this type of minefield. I am grateful for my friends and family that can help such a helpless fool as myself in this strange project. 

The first question that I had was, where do I start with this document? I had requested several editions from I-Share that were simply this document in a single small volume. The first translation that I found happened to be the person first responsible for translating this text in whole into English, Samuel Kramer of the University of Chicago in 1936. This also seems much younger than you might imagine. 

The Lament of Ur, as it is sometimes called, was a text written into tablets that would have been available publicly at the time of its writing. It was written in Sumerian using cuneiform. According to one source I interacted with, this text would have been performed live annually on the anniversary of the event. Ur was the capital city at the time of Southern Sumeria which is would be in current day Iraq, near the Euphrates River. The destruction of Ur would have been a cataclysmic event for these people and the trauma of this event can be felt in the text of this document. The lament focuses on the ways that their religious beliefs let them down during the trial of this occasion which is deeply felt in interacting with this document. 

I listened to a reading of this document on a podcast called The Oldest Stories which rendered this document skillfully in a deeply emotional performance. I recommend anyone interested in pursuing this text to do the same. I then read the text one time through just to see the words, the formatting, and the organization of the document. It is quite short, the reading only took 30 minutes or so. I tried to sort of sit with the document in its own time to get a sense of the human endeavor of crafting such a text, what the rhetorical situation would have been in the creation and generation of it, who would have received this text, why did it exist and who was it written for. I don't think this is a clever or subversive document. I think it means to straight forwardly describe the events and emotions of those that lived through it because humans need to record the stuff that makes up our lives simply because recording it is sufficient onto its own self I think. The folks who survived this event thought it should be recorded and not forgotten. It should be recorded because it happened. It was a bad time, and people should not forget this bad time. 

 Of the earliest human documents that we have there is a lot here that seems foreign, the language, the cadence, the organization of this document feels ancient in a way. Then there are ways that the writer describes certain things, how they tell the story of this event that feel shockingly familiar. There is a moment of human connection here that I found fascinating. This event happened. People thought it important enough to go through the elaborate process of forming the tablets. Not much got written down I think at this time. Someone got paid a days wages or whatever it was to write this thing. They kept these tablets safe through a myriad of weather events or changes of hands or corrupt officials or city fires or whatever through 4000 years until a British fellow, Leonard Woolley, came across this in the 1920s or 30s. The purpose of this project isn't to litigate the issues of antiquities and ownership and imperialism. I wanted to acknowledge this issue and engage in this conversation as an absolute novice and learn about this if anyone should want to comment here. Beyond this, I am glad that it was available for me to read in English. 

In my other pursuit, I write about craft beer in the Midwest mostly. I am aware that beer was a part of the Sumerian culture. I imagine the person who was tasked with writing down this text or team of people who did so would write some portion of this document - maybe they did it all in a day I'm not sure - and given the weight of their task and the heaviness of their subject matter went and had a beer after a day in this labor field. That sort of human connection I think I can likely make. It was not fun, but I enjoyed the process of dipping into this universe of concerns and roaming around a little bit. I know that what I did here is of the most cursory glances I have ever done of a given topic, perhaps as cursory of a glance as Isaac Newton but both of these arenas feel very distant from me.