What is astonishing, through, is that by comparing the epic with geological, astronomical and other data, it is possible to discern that it describes a cataclysmic event that brought about the Asteroid Belt – a ring of loose, shattered rock and ice circling the sun in a specific orbit where, evidently, a planet once stood. The Enuma Elish describes the event colourfully, as if a fight between two mighty ‘beings’ (a) ‘Marduk’ – in reality a gigantic comet that happened to wander into our solar system – and (b) ‘Tiamat’: in reality a watery planet that had a gigantic chunk ripped out of it by the awesome collision of these two celestial bodies…which piece was utterly shattered by the next orbital return of Marduk. Since the epic was acted out annually to celebrate the Babylonian New Year, it involved an on-stage narrator who maintains dramatic tension throughout.
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 (Eno ma-Eli, she laa, nabo, sha ma-Mu in my new Setswana-assisted transliteration of its text-corpus), and we noted that scholars interpret this as “When on high the heavens had not been named…” but which Setswana – a genuine protolanguage – interprets as “These ones (eno), the gods (ma-Eli), it is up there (she laa) with them (nabo), that [nemesis] of the people of Mu” (sha ma Mu). Now, in this article, I aim to show that nearly all the Akkadian diction (words) of the epic can be found in Bantu languages (Akkad succeeded the Sumerian civilization). In fact, only the proto-term laa (‘there’, as in French) might not be immediately understandable to someone who only knows Setswana-Sesotho-Sepedi. But laa as meaning ‘there’ is spoken in a few Bantu languages, including the extinction-threatened Sephuti language of Lesotho. As regards ‘she’ (‘se’ in modern Setswana), we find that Sepedi and various Setswana dialects are still partial to the use of sh instead of s, as in boshula instead of bosula. Lastly, we must note that Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian and Hebrew – perhaps the world’s oldest widely-read languages – tend to avoid vowels wherever they can.
