Scribes did this by being economical with vowels , which enabled a reader clued into their vernacular to insert his own vowel ‘fillers’ that always led to other intended layers of meaning. The superficial layers were evidently meant to be understood by the ‘gods’ (me-en) and were palatable to them, while the subtler layers were invariably irreverent to them. ‘Gods’, I explained, were real, flesh-and-blood beings of highly advanced technology even in antiquity, not mere figments of primitive and fearful imagination.
We have thus far utterly dismissed the conventional translation for the few lines I extracted: they harp on about ‘sacred architecture’ created and decorated for ‘Lord Nudimmud’ “…[whose] brickwork makes utterances and gives advice”. This, obviously, is off-topic and has nothing to do with the correctly discerned title of the epic. Instead, we relied on Sotho-Tswana – perhaps the closest living relative of Sumerian – to not only aid us in proper understanding, but in peeling off the various layers of meaning.
