CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SUMERIAN MYTHOLOGY



Benjamin R. Foster

DEFINITION AND SOURCES

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ioneering studies of Mesopotamian religion organized the evidence around pan-
theon, cult, and mythology, in which pantheon was the ordering and hierarchy of
the gods, cult was religious practice, such as offerings and rituals, and mythology was
stories about the gods (survey in Jacobsen 1987 b: 466 – 469 ; B. Foster 2007 ). The
concept and content of Sumerian mythology were defined by Samuel Noah Kramer’s
Sumerian Mythology( 1944 , rev. edn 1961 ), which stands as the foundation for all
subsequent work on the subject. Kramer pieced together and presented in narrative
form mythological stories previously known in fragments or not at all (comprehensive
list of texts in Heimpel 1993 – 1997 ). He and his students took the lead for the next forty
years in carrying forward the reconstruction and understanding of these stories,
culminating with a revision and expansion of Sumerian Mythologyin French (Bottéro
and Kramer 1989 ). Kramer’s gift for popularization, backed up by his unflagging
dedication to the task, created a new discipline in the study of mythology, and Kramer
further undertook to put Sumerian myths in a larger context of other mythologies of
the ancient Near East (Kramer 1961 ).
The most important sources for Kramer’s work were tablets written out in the
Sumerian language by Babylonian scholars of the first half of the second millennium
BC(Black 2007 ). At that time, Sumerian was a productive cultural accomplishment,
like Latin in medieval and Renaissance Europe. It seems unlikely that the scholars who
copied them spoke Sumerian as their mother tongue. The compositions, as opposed to
the manuscripts, might be earlier, in some cases from the outgoing third millennium
(Alster 1976 ). Earlier Sumerian mythological stories have been discovered, such as the
Barton Cylinder (Alster and Westenholz 1994 ), presumably written when Sumerian
was still spoken as a living language, but these have proved very difficult to understand,
nor do they preserve earlier versions of the mythological stories reconstructed by
Kramer. Thus there is a puzzling lack of connection between the early Sumerian com-
positions and the corpus of later documents normally used to reconstruct Sumerian
mythology.
Not all scholars are convinced, therefore, that the Sumerian mythological stories
copied by Babylonian scribes represent a coherent body of tradition from a period
when the Sumerians existed as a people, rather than a variety of compositions in the