The first layer we explored was ‘the pleading layer’ in which Shulgi, a properly historical king of the Ur III Dynasty of Sumer, was pleading with the gods to bear with him for his ‘illicit’ sexual affair with the great goddess Inanna (‘Ishtar’ to the Canaanites, ‘Artemis’ to the Greeks). We had duly noted that, in contrast to the conventional scholarly view that ‘gods’ were imaginary beings who never really existed, Shulgi’s own words showed that he had not made love to a mere figment of his imagination, but to a real-live ‘goddess’; a member of an elite set of real, flesh-and-blood entities of advanced technology who dominated the lives of ordinary people for millennia, ruling even over kings. Indeed, his plea, properly translated, was addressed to me-ene (‘gods’). Ene, or EN, means ‘Lord’…but literally ‘he himself’; i.e. ‘the main man himself’. Thus, the Sumerian god EN.KI’s name, or epithet, meant ‘Lord of Earth’.
A second layer of meaning we unpacked in the second article was what I called ‘the defiant layer’. Here, Shulgi cleverly uses the very same diction to subtly express unrepentant defiance to the gods; indicating that he will continue his unapproved liaison with Inanna. This week, we discern the most irreverent layer of the ‘poem’…what I call ‘the salacious layer’. Though A praise poem to Shulgi contains at least 102 lines of text (a few lines are lost as unreadable), in the past two articles I extracted only the first four lines from this poem and then used Setswana to unlock their true meaning as a particular layer of the poem. Now, it is important to note that the ‘funny’-looking text that I typically begin with is taken directly from Sumerian. In other words, you will find this same text as-is in all the Sumerian text-corpuses compiled by highly reputed scholars. It is not my own invention. All I do is to show that these ‘funny’-looking syllables, properly transliterated, are nothing but Setswana; that I can string them into a more coherent sentence readily understandable to an ordinary Motswana. Please note that I said ‘transliterated’, not ‘translated’: Sumerian is already Setswana-like (compare the ‘scholarly’ syllables with those of modern Setswana), so I cannot translate ‘Setswana into Setswana’. The only translation I am doing is into English.
