Song of the Hoe: the plainly threatening layer
L M Leteane | Friday November 4, 2016 19:31
Such a vernacular, we have demonstrated, is Setswana – and more so its Sotho-Tswana sister languages – but Sumerians far exceeded the capabilities of our modern scribes.
Sumerian is a now-extinct, ancient language of Mesopotamia (now mainly Iraq) and arguably the oldest written language, and ‘gods’, we have consistently shown, were no mere figments of ancient, primitive imaginations, but real, flesh-and-blood beings of super-advanced technology who for millennia dominated the affairs of ordinary people.
Scribes had to be careful how they addressed these ‘lords’.
Because conventional scholars simply refuse to recognise the stark fact these gods evidently had spacecraft even further back than the roughly 5000 years ago in which the poem is based…a time when mankind was supposed to be wallowing in primitiveness, their translations of Sumerian fall way off-mark.
Thus, whenever the term al appears in the text, these translators interpret it to mean ‘hoe’. They discern the poem being about a Genesis-type creation process enacted by Enlil, a Creator-god…a process assisted by a magical ‘hoe’ of sorts. But so far, taking only he first eight lines from the roughly 109 lines of composite text, I have effectively demonstrated that, correctly understood through Setswana, the poem does not speak of any hoe at all.
On the superficial layer we first unpacked, the scribe expresses how privileged he is to have travelled to Mu (Mars: full name ‘Lahmu’: La-ha-Mu, i.e. ‘Land of Mu) and returned with the gods, and how that mysterious ‘planet of the gods’ could only be reached by travelling at very high speed. In the second layer, he continues the up-beat tone by boasting how in Mu he was able to ‘eat’ goddesses almost at will (‘eat’, I explained in previous articles, is a vulgar word – still in use in modern Setswana – meaning ‘have sex with’), and only mildly complains, in later lines, that here on Earth things are somewhat different. Indeed, the journey to Mu forever changed the stature of the scribe. A now well-known and accepted side-effect of spending long periods in the weightlessness of space is that an astronaut grows by an average of about two inches (5 cm) for very four weeks spent there. It therefore becomes discernible, even from the deeper layers of the first eight lines, that when he returned a giant, he found himself shunned by all women here, which really hurt him.
As we unpacked the layers, he made it clear that ‘eating’ on Earth is an issue simply because he is a dark-skinned giant…whereas the gods – pale-skinned ‘Caucasian’ types – are able to ‘eat’ here on Earth.
The most annoying thing, he laments in other layers, is that the gods (me-ene) are accepted by both goddesses and dark-skinned women, but goddesses here on Earth may not be touched by a dark-skinned one. In the final layer we unpack this week, the frustrated scribe resorts to dark threats over this most unfair of situations.
Line 1: en-e nij-du-e pa na-an-ga-mi-in-ed (“Ene e nejato, e panana ga me-ene e ne ja: This switched-on one, he flatly refuses that the gods should eat you”.)
Here, the scribe is addressing fellow dark-skinned women, but not just complaining about their double standards, as is the case in other layers, but now adopting a firm and threatening stance. In Line 2 he further threatens: en nam tar-ra-na cu nu-bal-e-de (“Ene nama-tara u na ko noo, ba, a le itee: I myself have beaten up a pale-skinned one before.”) The term nama-tara, I must reiterate, could mean ‘blue-skinned’ (i.e. a dark person; tala is ‘blue’ in Setswana) or ‘pale-skinned’ (tala can also meant ‘raw’, i.e. pale: ‘uncooked by heat’). As such, the scribe could switch meanings in different layers.
Line 3: en-lil numun kalam-ma ki-ta ed-de (“Ene le-Illu nne o mong a mo kalame, ke ta e itea: Let a Shining One (a god) just mount a single one of you, I will beat him up.”) Line 4: an ki-ta ba-re-de saj na-an-ga-ma-an-cum (“Ankita ba reetsa; s’aa ganana ga ma-ana a ne kuma: They (the dark-skinned giants) will listen no more; we flatly refuse that the ones-from-out-there should touch you (or, “eat you”).”) Gods were called ma-ana (the ones-from-out-there) because they recolonised Earth after eons spent in Mu, to where they had escaped a cataclysm here. (Find the full story in my books and in previous articles.) Line 5: ki an-ta ba-re-de saj na-an-ga-ma-an-cum (“Ke ha (or: Ki, ha,) ntha baa re ja; s’aa ja. Nna a hana ga ma-ana ne a kuma: Here it is, (or, Here on Earth), contrary to impressions they eat of ours, (whereas) they do not allow me to touch a goddess.”)
Line 6: uzu-ed-a saj mu2-mu-de (U-zu e ta e sa je, mu-Mu e ja: A Dark One comes back to no longer eat, [whereas] a one-from-Mu eats.”) Line 7: dur-an-ki-ka bulug nam-il-la (“Toga hano Ki; ke a buluga (or, ke a ebologa) nna moilwa!Get out of Earth, I now assert (or, I now show another layer [of myself], me the shunned one!”) Here the scribe is calling for the gods to be driven back to Mu if they continue in that vein. Line 8: cal-e mu-un-jar ud al-ed (“Kgale monna a jara; o ta le itaa”: Long has a man tolerated this; he will now lash at you.”).
But just like in other layers, the scribe here is ambiguous as to who ‘you’ refers: Indeed, ‘lashing out’, on one level, meant ‘castigating others’…but it that was designed to also convey a literal, thinly veiled threat of violence if the status quo continued…
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