Summary and Comments on "Sumerian Mythology Collection" - A book that allows you to enjoy the myths that have influenced world religions, such as "The Creation of Man," "The Legend of the Flood," "Inanna's Descent into the Underworld," and more!
I would like to introduce to you the Sumerian Mythology Collection, translated by Isamu Sugi and Toru Ozaki, published by Chikuma Shobo in 2015. I read the fifth printing edition in 2021.
Let's take a quick look at the book.
The Mesopotamian civilization is one of the four major civilizations in the world. The Sumerians, who lived in the lower reaches of the Tigris-Euphrates River, laid the foundation of the civilization that flourished in this "Fertile Crescent. They used a unique cuneiform script to carve myths and epics on clay tablets, and their worldview is said to have had a tremendous influence on the surrounding areas in later generations. In addition to the "Legend of the Flood," which was succeeded by the "Noah's Ark" of the Old Testament, this book presents a careful selection of 16 documents, mainly myths, including "Inanna's Descent into the Underworld" and "Ur's Lament for the Destruction of Ur. This anthology provides important original texts that cannot be read anywhere else, with extensive notes and commentary.
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In the previous article, a masterpiece of Sumerian mythologyThe Epic of Gilgamesh.introduced.
The "Sumerian Mythology Collection" presented here is a book that allows you to enjoy other Sumerian myths created during that same period.
This is a duplication of my previous article, but let me first tell you why I decided to read Sumerian mythology.
I decided to read this work by Kazuro Mori, whom I introduced in my previous articleThe Ark That Was Hijacked: The Drama Surrounding Mount Ararat."was the catalyst.
I was greatly shocked to learn in this book that the famous Old Testament episode "Noah's Ark" had its origin in the "Epic of Gilgamesh.
Mount Ararat, where "Noah's Ark" is said to have drifted ashore, is now a holy place among holy places in Turkey.
However, the book also revealed the surprising fact that the story of "Noah's Ark" was actually inspired by the Sumerian myth "The Epic of Gilgamesh" of the Mesopotamian civilization that flourished from 3000 to 2600 B.C. The book also includes the story of Noah's ark, which was written in the same year as the "Gilgamesh Epic. Since we are here, let's take a look at that part of the book. It will be a bit long, but it is an important issue, so we will read it carefully.
The story of the Flood of Noah's Ark is well known to non-Christians, but we may think it is just a myth.
However, many Christians, especially Americans, seem to take it as historical fact. Since the Bible is a verbatim account of the words heard from God, it is impossible for a fictitious story to get mixed in there. No, Noah's Ark is still on the small scale, and more than half of Americans believe that the infinite universe itself is the creation of God. In 2003, a computer website that solicited votes from around the world conducted a survey asking whether the world was created by God or the Big Bang, and the percentage of Americans who favored creation by God was outstandingly high, at 58%.
Thus, if one believes that God created the world, it would be natural to assume that he is also capable of destroying it. It would not take much psychological resistance to read the Old Testament account of Noah and his family escaping into the ark and being saved, even though God sent a great flood that wiped out the human race.
Let us now look at how Noah's Ark and the Flood are described in the Bible.
In the sixth chapter of the Book of Genesis, we read: "And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was in the earth. - "And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was in the earth, and that all the thoughts of his heart were evil all the time. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was troubled, and he said, 'Let the man that I have created be wiped from the earth.'"
He quietly told only Noah, an exceptionally good man among human beings, and gave him special advice: "I will soon bring a great flood that will destroy mankind, and you must build an ark and board it now with your family. Noah did as he was told, and the story of how he and his family survived the destruction of mankind is so well known that it is needless to dwell on it.
However, something happened out of the blue that even God could not have predicted. Because human beings ate the fruit of the tree of wisdom, which God had forbidden, they became overly wise, and by the nineteenth century, science had come to walk by itself, leaving God behind.
Various sciences developed in competition with each other.gullible (person)Archaeology, which belonged to the category of "archaeology," was also added to the list. The techniques of excavating remains buried deep in the earth and revealing the writing on clay tablets and parchment found there were rapidly developing.
And finally, the time to come had arrived.
In 1872, George Smith, who worked at the British Museum in London and could read cuneiform inscriptions on clay tablets quite well, made a startling discovery while examining a clay tablet document from the royal archives of Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital. In the eleventh edition of what later became known as the "Epic of Gilgamesh," he found a text that closely resembled the biblical account of Noah's ark in every detail.
When Smith presented his findings to the Society for Biblical Archaeology, he understandably caused a sensation. Christians in the West, who had previously believed that the Bible was the written word of God, would have been astonished to learn that one of the Bible's most famous episodes was found in a seed book.
Torikagesha, Kazuro Mori, "The Ark That Was Taken Over: The Drama Surrounding Mount Ararat," p. 17-19.
The Bible was also written by borrowing various motifs from former religions." This is a very important point in considering what religion is in the first place.
I became very interested in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" and Sumerian culture while reading this book.
This is why in my last article I introduced the "Epic of Gilgamesh" and in this article I will discuss the "Sumerian Mythology Collection," which contains other myths.
As you can see from this table of contents, you can read about various Sumerian myths in this book.
Of these, I am still interested in "The Creation of Man," "The Legend of the Flood," and "Inanna's Descent into the Underworld.
As the title suggests, "The Creation of Man" is a myth about how man was created, and the commentary at the end of the book explains this myth as follows
The creation of man has been a topic of great interest to all peoples. The oldest and most widely known of these stories is the "Genesis of the (Old Testament) Bible" handed down by the Hebrews, but the Babylonian and Sumerian creation stories that preceded the Genesis story cannot be ignored. These stories are not to be ignored. These stories had a great influence on the "biblical" story. （The Bible is the story of the creation of the world.)
The short story goes as follows: First, when heaven and earth (i.e., the universe) and their goddesses have been created, the plan of the heaven and earth has been set, and the irrigation culverts, etc. important for agriculture, have been completed, the great gods (male deities) An, Enlil, Utu, and Enki ask the Anunnaki deities, who determine their destiny, "What is your destiny? An, Enlil, Utu and Enki (male deities) asked the Anunnaki deities, who were to determine their destiny. What are you going to create? They say that they will kill the two Ramga deities and use their blood to create human beings. The purpose is to make them serve the gods through labor such as maintaining canals and farming, building temples to the gods, keeping festivals going, and so on. This proposal was accepted, and man was created by the mother god Aruru. However, there is no specific description of this. The Sumerians were probably more interested in the fact that man came into the world to serve the gods, rather than in the act of divine creation itself.
By the way, according to the "Bible" man was made of clay. He is Adam. Adam is a Hebrew word meaning "earth. God made a woman from his rib. This is Eve. The Babylonians, however, thought that man was made from the blood of God. By killing two raging gods, the gods created the first human beings, Anuregalula and Annegalula, the "an" standing at the beginning of each word, which can be interpreted as a symbol for deification. What, then, is the purpose? In the Bible, it was to place man above the animals, but in the Babylonian story, it was to serve the gods by doing work on their behalf, as described above.
In this story, man is thought to have been created from the blood of God, but other Sumerian tales tell of the creation of man from the soil (the creation story given the title "Enki and Ninmahu"). Since stories in which humans sprout from the earth are often found in other Sumerian texts, it is possible that the Sumerians originally believed that humans were created from the earth. If so, the Assyrian version of the "Creation of Man" story that we have translated here reflects the Sumerian text in its Babylonian form, which has been considerably altered from its original form.
Chikuma Shobo, Isamu Sugi, translated by Toru Ozaki, Sumerian Mythology, 2021, 5th printing edition, p. 245-246
Everyone knows the famous story of the Creation in the Old Testament. But long before that, the Sumerians had already created such myths.
Where do humans come from and what do they live for?
I am deeply impressed by the fact that ancient people were troubled and thinking in the same way as we do today.
It was very interesting to read this myth in comparison with the Old Testament.
And it is the same with the following "Flood Legend. Although the flood legend was told in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" introduced in the previous issue, the "Flood Legend" existed independently of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Mesopotamian civilization was born in a land surrounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Although this region was nurtured by abundant water sources, it also suffered from sudden floods. The myth of the flood is probably born out of this overwhelming natural phenomenon that has two faces, "blessing and terror. This makes us think about the great influence of geographical conditions on religion and mythology.
And finally, "Inanna's descent into the underworld". This myth was also quite shocking.
This is because the story told here is reminiscent of Izanagi's visit to Hades in the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters).
Inanna's Descent into the Underworld" is one of the more voluminous myths in the book, and its story is so rich and varied that it is difficult to give a brief account of it here.
So, I cannot talk about it here, but it means that about 5,000 years ago, there was already a clear assumption of the "other world" called the underworld, and furthermore, there was already the idea that there was a divine power or that it could interfere with the underworld. This is astonishing.
The story of Izanagi and Izanami in the Kojiki is quite shocking, but a similar myth was told in Mesopotamia more than 2,000 years before that... What am I to make of this?
Is the process of human creation of myths common throughout the world, or did the Sumerian culture somehow gradually spread throughout the world and influence the culture of faraway Japanese lands?
As a non-expert, I can't say for sure, but I have a stronger feeling that there are things that are fundamental to human beings that are common to all over the world. Especially in religions and mythologies, I think it is significant that there are many similarities among them despite their differences. I believe that this is one of the reasons why it is important to compare and contrast various religions.
The above is "Sumerian Mythology: The Creation of Man, The Legend of the Flood, Inanna's Descent into the Underworld, and Other Myths that Influenced World Religions! That was "Sumerian Mythology".
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