Property of Sekhmet

In "Genre, Gender, and the Sumerian Lamentation", Jerrold S. Cooper discusses the origins of the lamentation genre and the gala-priests who performed laments.

Cooper writes that the gala is "attested from the Fara [Early Dynastic IIIa] period... and at Lagash in the late-pre-Sargonic period and under Gudea the gala is associated with funerals". For example, mourners at Queen Baranamtara's funeral included "numerous gala"; Gudea's Statue B describes a general shut-down of funerals in Girsu during which "the gala did not set up his balag-drum and bring forth laments from it". (The balag-drum, Cooper points out, is the source of the name for the most common of the gala's laments, the balag; the term balag-di means "lamentation performer". "The gala first appears five hundred years prior to Ur III, and the balag-performer is attested five hundred years earlier still, in the earliest cuneiform lexical lists".)

In both examples above, "the gala is accompanied by women lamenters. Women may actually have served as gala in Presargonic Lagash, as they did later in the Diyala region". In cultures around the world and throughout time, funeral laments, as well as love songs and wedding songs, are the "musical province par excellence of women". Cooper notes that Inanna and Dumuzi appear in songs for both marriages and funerals, and that in some cultures these two rites have similarities. "That Inanna-Ishtar should be at the nexus of love and death is very fitting for a deity who is patron of both prostitution [sexuality, certainly] and battle. She is also associated with transformation and inversion... and weddings and funerals are the only two transformative rituals in ancient Mesopotamia of which we are aware."

Cooper's thesis is that the official lamentations developed from women's songs, much as Ancient Greek women's funeral laments were "brought under control and channeled into male-dominated ritual or literary enterprise"; female mourners were "joined by male colleagues who eventually replaced them". (Similarly, "the other realm of women's performance and Emesal usage, courtship and wedding song, came to be, at least for the elite, dominated by male performers.") Emesal is only used in Sumerian literature for the speech of women and goddesses, and for ritual laments, sung by galas. (A possibility about Emesal is that it was the local dialect of Lagash, and could only be written down "once Sumerian orthography fell under the influence of phonetic semitic orthography [which] could express dialectal differences", which is why no Emesal texts appear until the Old Babylonian period.)

This association with women, says Cooper, could explain "the ambiguous image of the gala - a ridiculous figure of uncertain sexuality according to some literary texts; a respected cleric with a wife and children in many documents". (Though personally I'm not convinced that the gala's "ridiculous" nature isn't a projection by modern authors.) Cooper points out that galas might have had different roles depending on historical period, context, and which deity they were serving. He also disputes that the logogram for gala, UŠ.TUŠ, should be read GÌŠ.DÁR, "penis + anus" - "the interpretation is not compelling, and other suggest themselves." (An example of projection? Here's another - the chief gala was in charge of "prostitutes", géme-kar-kíd. géme means female worker or slave, but the translation of kar-kíd (ḫarimtu) as "prostitute" has been challenged, as Cooper acknowledges; it may only mean "unmarried woman".)

(I thought of the cihuacoatl, the male deputy of the Aztec emperor, who was named after the snake goddess Cihuacoatl, "Snake Woman" - and speculation that the office might originally have belonged to women.)

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Cooper, Jerrold S. Genre, Gender, and the Sumerian Lamentation. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 58(2006) pp 39-47.

The Neo-Pagan song Barge of Heaven was adapted by Starhawk from Thorkild Jacobsen's rendering of a Sumerian song, labelled Dumuzid-Inana P, which describes the goddess Inanna's preparation for marriage - a bath, a song of praise for her genitals, and finally her union with the king.

For a long time I've wanted to compare the two, partly because there are some lines in Starhawk's version which have been borrowed from other similar songs, and partly because I thought I was being a bit clever in spotting an edit which shifts credit for the land's fertility from the king to the goddess. Or does it?

Here are Starhawk's lyrics:

1 Your crescent shaped barge of heaven
2 So well belayed, so well belayed
3 Full of loveliness like the new moon
4 Your fertile fields well-watered
5 Hillock lands well-watered, too
6 At your mighty rising
7 The vines rise up and the fields rise up
8 And the desert fills with green
9 Just like a living garden
10 In the heat of the sun, you are the shade
11 A well of water in a dry, dry land
12 Swelling fruits to feed the hungry
13 Sweet cream to quench our thirst
14 Pour it out for me, pour it out for me
15 Everything you send me I will drink

Jacobsen's translation appears on page 46 of his book The Treasures of Darkness, and accounts for lines 1-3, 5, 4, and 6-9. Here's his rendering of those lines, given the same numbering:

1 (my crescent shaped) "Barge of Heaven,"
2 so (well) belayed,
3 full of loveliness, like the new moon

5 my hillock land, so (well) watered

4 My parts, (well) watered lowlands

6 At its mighty rising, at its mighty rising,
7 did the shoots and the vines rise up.
6 The king's loins! At its mighty rising
7 did the vines rise up and the grains rise up
8 did the desert fill (with verdure)
9 like a pleasurable garden.

( Compare and contrast... )

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Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: a history of Mesopotamian religion. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1976.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. Cuneiform Studies and the History of Literature: the Sumerian Sacred Marriage Texts. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107(6), December 1963, pp 485-515.

Sefati, Yitschak. Love Songs in Sumerian Literature. Bar-Ilan University Press, Israel, 1998.

More snippets.

Most of the Sumerian deities weren't given Akkadian names - only the astral deities were: Nanna/Sin, Utu/Shamash, Inanna/Ishtar. (This puzzles me, though - Fiore refers to Enki/Ea in the very next paragraph.) (p 56-7)

The gods marched beside the king's army, terrifying, blinding, and maddening his enemies. "In the account of Esarhaddon's fight for the throne, Ishtar is said to have broken the bows of the hostile soldiers." (p 70)

On The Epic of Gilgamesh: "Ishtar does not cut a good figure in this episode." Fiore speculates this may reflect "some religious rivalry between Ishtar and Shamash", pointing out Gilgamesh's devotion to Shamash in the poem. (pp 169-70)

In the flood story in Gilgamesh, Ishtar is portrayed as the "creatress" of humanity: "No sooner have I given birth to my dear people than they fill the sea like so many fish!" But Inanna/Ishtar is a goddess of mating, not reproduction, and "is associated with childbirth only in those cases where she usurps the role of the mother-goddess". (p 199)

In the Descent, Ishtar is called she "who stirs up the Apsu before Ea". Fiore footnotes a "popular creed" in which "the silt in the rivers was caused by Ishtar washing her hair in the mountain sources". (p 197)

Fiore suggests that "The sixty diseases which are to be directed against Ishtar" means Mesopotamians thought "the human body consisted of sixty members" - hence also the need to sprinkle her corpse with the water of life sixty times. (p 198)

Perhaps Ereshkigal favours sexless beings because they cannot produce life. (p 199) Her gracious treatment of Tammuz suggests that while he's in the Netherworld, he's her husband. (p 200)

Fiore makes a surprising comparison between Ishtar and the Norse goddess Freya, another patroness of both love and war. (p 237)
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Fiore, Silvestro. Voices From the Clay: the development of Assyro-Babylonian Literature. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1965.