Song of the Hoe: the proudly pleading layer

L M Leteane | Friday October 21, 2016 18:37

(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.

The journey to Mu (full name ‘Lahmu’: La-ha-Mu – ‘Land of Mu) forever changed the stature of the scribe. Indeed, there is a now well-known side-effect of spending long periods in the weightlessness of space: an astronaut grows by an average of about two inches (5 cm) for very four weeks spent there. So, when he returned a giant, he found himself abandoned by both the ‘gods’ that took him up to Mu, and his very own people: the dark-skinned women…hence his lament in a second layer of meaning the gods were never meant to perceive. ‘Gods’, I have explained time and again, were real, ancient beings of flesh-and-blood of super-advanced technology who for millennia dominated the affairs of mankind. In the layer we duly unpack this week, we will detect strong dissatisfaction with the fact that, upon returning, he was abandoned him to “eat” no more. “Eat”, I explained in previous articles, is a vulgar word – still in use in modern Setswana – meaning “have sex with”.

 Effectively, what we are privileged to peep into, here, is a window into a ‘mythical’ world some 5000 years ago, when mankind was supposedly primitive and far from being able to build and travel in spacecraft. However, many super-sophisticated artefacts – some millions of years old – are regularly unearthed by ‘Forbidden Archaeology’, but are ignored by ‘mainstream’ scientists for reason beyond the intended scope of this article. One amazing find – featured in Zecharia Sitchin’s website – includes a 5000 year sculpture of a space rocket that was so stunningly accurate of modern rockets that the Turkish history Museum initially thought that it was a hoax. For now, however, let the Sumerians themselves speak from a time so distant it is labelled as ‘myth’. Line 1: en-e nij-du-e pa na-an-ga-mi-in-ed (“Ene e ne ee je tu…e panane ga me-ene; e ja: As for the goddesses, he (the scribe) has eaten them much; he has mounted that of the gods and eaten”). Here the scribe makes it clear that he is not inexperienced, sexually; that while in Mu he had the opportunity to sleep with goddesses. This he reiterates in several lines: Line 2: en nam tar-ra-na cu nu-bal-e-de (“Ene nama-tara o naa go noo, ba, a le je: The goddesses, this Dark-skinned One has had opportunity to eat of them”). Line 3: en-lil numun kalam-ma ki-ta ed-de (“Ene le-Illu o noo mo ne kalama; ke ta he ja-ja: A goddess he has on occasion mounted and eaten.”) The scribe then abruptly changes direction. Line 4: an ki-ta ba-re-de saj na-an-ga-ma-an-cum (“Hano Ki, ke taba re je sa ho chuana ga ma-ana; ko Mu: Here on Earth it is an issue to eat like we ate out-there, at Mu”) Line 5: ki an-ta ba-re-de saj na-an-ga-ma-an-cum (“Ki, ha a nthaa ba re e je; s’aa gana, hano, ga ma-ana he a kuma: On Earth they (the goddesses) never invited me to eat; they forbid, here, when one touches the Ones-from-Out-There.”). Line 6: uzu-ed-a saj mu2-mu-de (U-Tsho e je; ha sa je, mu-Mu e ja...: [But] a Dark-One must eat, if he does not eat, yet a One-from-Mu eats…”) Line 7: dur-an-ki-ka bulug nam-il-la (“…thogo ya a-ane e ka buluga, e nne moila: The head of a god (literally: of  He-from-out-there) would bulge; become an aberration.”). In other words, an unfair, lop-sided situation like that should not be allowed to continue as this would ‘spoil’ the gods. Line 8: cal-e mu-un-jar ud al-ed (“Ga a le Mu, o naa jaga ho ta a le ja”: when he was at Mu, he was hurrying back to eat you.”) The scribe here is speaking in two senses. The ‘he’ in this line could refer to either himself or to the gods, and the ‘you’ could mean either black women – which argument will come out clearer next week – or to the goddesses. Simply put, the black scribe was looking forward to meeting both black women and the occasional goddess, but this was not to be. Instead, it was the gods, we will see, who enjoyed this benefit, much to his chagrin.  Indeed, next week, we unpack another layer of discontent…but with a rather different angle.

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