How Setswana resolves a famous Sumerian epic

L M Leteane | Friday August 12, 2016 17:29

Now, after looking more closely at the text-corpus of the epics themselves – mostly from Oxford University’s collection – I just basically laugh at these. Instead, I am busy retranslating them and have already incorporated aspects into my new book provisionally entitled A New Harmonized Biblical-Secular Chronology. While my book’s overall focus of realigning biblical and anthropological-historical dates into a new and far more cohesive chronology and timeline is a little too complicated and technical for this column, I can give an inkling of what is in store for my readers as regards translations of Sumerian and Akkadian epics.

Let me first give a little background as to why Mesopotamian epics are so important. Mesopotamia is the fertile land that lay between two rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It is reputedly the scene of the earliest civilization known to man, Sumer being the first, followed by the Akkadian empire which arose in Babylonia several millennia afterwards and extended to as far as Egypt. Sumerian is reckoned to be the world’s earliest written language. Indeed, it records events in a time so ancient that ‘gods’ still walked the Earth. Now, in my years of writing this column, I have revealed much about this aspect of things…so I will not go back to explaining who/what ‘gods’ actually were. Instead, I will concentrate on the Sumerian Enuma Elish epic: what scholars call the ‘Epic of Creation’. This epic was adopted by the Akkadians, and they maintained the tradition of reenacting it every year. Indeed, the Enuma Elish was recited and acted out in public to celebrate the Babylonian New Year.

As with many Sumerian epics, the Enuma-Elish epic gets its scholarly title from the opening line: e-nu-ma e-lish la na-bu-u sha-ma-mu. Conventional translators of the epic translate this as “When on high the heavens had not been named…”, thus painting a picture of a time so ancient that though the heavens (skies) existed, there was no-one around to give them a name. I, however, break down the syllables differently – though not affecting their sequence – in order to facilitate a better understanding of the line, thus: Eno ma-Eli, she laa, nabo, sha ma-Mu. Now, using Setswana as the unlocking transliteration key (as I do throughout), I get: “These ones, the gods, it is up there, with them, that [nemesis, or affliction] of the people of Mu”.  In other words, the narrator of the epic is actually creating dramatic tension by reminding the audience that something ominous is still up there in the heavens…and still afflicting the gods of Mu. (‘Mu’, I clinically reveal in my books, is actually Mars.)

After duly creating dramatic tension and holding the attention of the audience, the narrator goes to the second line which reads thus: shap-lish am-ma-tum shu-ma la zak-rat. The accepted scholarly translation for this is: “Below, the earth had not been called by name…”, thus continuing the theme of a time so ancient that though Earth also existed, there was no one to ‘call it by name’…and this is precisely why scholars call the poem ‘The Epic of Creation’. My own new translation, however, reads thus: sha-hapa le-sha-ma-dumo; shuma la zako-rata: “It struck the Noisy One, snorting away at will”, or, “It struck the Fame (tumo)-Seeking One; did what it pleased [with her]”. So, my translation shows that the epic does not, in fact, go back as far as the time when not even the gods existed.

The narrator then maintains suspense by not naming who or what the ‘ominous one’ is…nor divulging at this point who the victim of his assault is. The next line reads: Apsu-um-ma rish-tu-u za-ru-shu-un. The widely accepted scholarly translation for this is:  “But Apsu, the primeval, their progenitor…” I, however, translate it thus: A poso o ma resha (lesha) tuu, u sa re shu, ono: “Mistakenly, she leaves them be; she is still catching her breath”. As regards risha (lesha in more modern Setswana) my loyal readers will, of course, remember my detailed explanations of the common l/r phoneme (linguistic sound-shift).

The next line reads: mu-um-mu ti-amat mu-al-li-da-at gim-ri-shu-un. The scholarly translation is: “Their waters as one they mingled”. My own new translation goes: mumu mo-tia-mata, mo a leta, ate ke merushu, ono: “In silence, the one mighty-in built, there she waited. But, unbeknownst to her, he was trouble, this [approaching] one”. Clearly, the victim of the assault was mistaken in believing that the assaulter was done with her, so she lay quietly unaware of the imminent danger. Evidently, this had nothing to do with Creation and ‘the mingling of primordial waters’.

What is it all about? On further reading of the epic, a few astute scholars discerned that the ominous approaching body referred to the comet Marduk, an interloper that had wandered into our solar system from an anticlockwise direction (as all comets do) – which put Marduk on an collision course with a mighty, watery planet already identified as Tiamat (Tia-mata). (This is because all planets in our solar system orbit the sun in a clockwise direction.)

What happened was that comet Marduk moonlets struck Tiamat and shattered her into the Asteroid Belt – a loose belt of shattered rock and ice circling the sun in a specific orbit where, evidently, a planet once stood. So, although the epic indeed speaks of early events that shaped our solar system, it refers not to the ‘act of Creation’. And the fact that scholars even discerned that the epic entailed a fight between Marduk and Tiamat is, I believe, fortuitous…perhaps aided by the various illustrations that tend to accompany Sumerian and Akkadian epics.

Comments to leteanelm@gmail.com