• Corpus ID: 165786217

The Reception of Sumerian Literature in the Western Periphery

@inproceedings{Viano2016TheRO,
  title={The Reception of Sumerian Literature in the Western Periphery},
  author={Maurizio Sanzio Viano},
  year={2016}
}

• M. Viano
• Published 2016
• Linguistics

The composition A Prayer for a King (PfK) is a prayer to the god Enlil on behalf of an unnamed king. This text is unknown from the Old Babylonian literature and is only attested in a bilingual recension preserved on two tablets from Emar and Ugarit. E 775 is a single-column tablet from Emar containing a bilingual version of the text in interlinear format. RS 79.25 is the left edge of a tablet discovered at Ugarit in Maison A containing the phonetic Sumerian version of the text.1473 A parallel column likely containing the Akkadian translation was arranged to the right of the Sumerian version as shown by double vertical rulings on line 11 of the obverse.1474 An additional Akkadian version is attested at Ugarit on a small fragment, RS 79.25C,1475 which, according to Arnaud,1476 does not belong to the same tablet as RS 79.25 on the basis of clay and sign shapes. According to the hand-copy, which shows the margin of the tablet to the left of the phonetic Sumerian column, RS 79.25 did not contain a version in standard orthography; such a version was probably inscribed on a different tablet as attested for other Sumerian texts from Ugarit. The Emar manuscript is a beautiful tablet entirely preserved1477 and drafted, according to the colophon, by the scribe Tuku-E2-ḫur-saĝ, priest of the god Dagan.1478 This name is otherwise unknown at Emar and in the Mesopotamian onomasticon. Recently Rutz proposed the reading Raši-ili, <title of> Eḫursaĝ, shrine of Dagan.1479 Whatever the correct reading is, the association with Dagan, the principal deity of the Middle Euphrates region, makes it clear that the scribe was Syrian. The tablet is dated to the month of Urda.1480 This is possible evidence for an early date because at Emar only the oldest texts contain a dating formula. Indeed, most of the dated ephemeral documents go back to the first dynasty while only seven dated tablets date to the second dynasty and