(1)Not only did the lord make the world appear in its correct form, (2) the lord who never changes the destinies which he determines: (3) Enlil, who will make the human seed of the Land come forth, (4) and not only did he hasten to separate heaven from earth, (5) and hasten to separate earth from heaven, (6) [the name of a cosmic location], he first suspended, (raised) the axis of the world at Dur-an-ki. (7) He did this with the help of the hoe (al), (8) and so daylight broke forth (aled).” So, the main reason why this epic is deemed to be describing how Enlil, a Creator-god, enacted a Genesis-type creation process is precisely because of this translation.
This interpretation, we saw, is however completely wrong. It merely helps to bolster the supposition that ‘gods’ were mere figments of ancient, primitive imaginations. And whenever the term al appears in the text, these translators interpret it to mean ‘hoe’. Correctly understood through Setswana, however, the poem does not speak of any hoe at all. On the first layer we unpacked last week, the scribe of Song of the Hoe, evidently a dark-skinned giant, conveys the excitement of accompanying the gods to Mu (Mars) and back. But, in typical Sumerian fashion, there are other layers of meaning the scribe keeps well hidden, designed to be undetectable to the gods. This they did by being economical with vowels, allowing someone clued into their vernacular to add his own vowel ‘fillers’. The filling process, however, was not random or wilful; it followed certain strict rules that I am now aware of; whose specific mechanics are unfortunately well beyond the intended scope of this article.
