All have adopted a primordial theme and feel to the epic-poems whereas, through Setswana, we find that the scribe is talking about something else quite different. Let me go over the examples.
If one is aware that Sumerians – the ancient people that inhabited Mesopotamia (now mostly Iraq) and started off the world’s oldest known civilisation more than 5000 years ago – are adamant that the flesh-and-blood gods that ruled over them and their kings were from a fabled planet called ‘N’ibiru’, then one would have expected the Sumerian poem Enki’s Journey to N’ibiru, which we covered in this column, to be about an exciting space journey. Instead, we found the following scholarly translation from the extract I picked (Lines 9 to 14): (9) “An artfully made bright crenellation rising out from the Abzu… (10) … was erected for lord Nudimmud. (11) He built the temple from precious metal…(12) …decorated it with lapis lazuli, and covered it abundantly with gold. (13) In Eridug, he built the house on the bank. (14) Its brickwork makes utterances and gives advice.”
