Translation of Tablet BE 31,28, the story of The Prince's Wife by: Jerald Jack
Starr
[x-] = Missing or damaged text {… } = explanatory comments
The Princess Wife
The story opens in Mulu's palace. He and Zuzu have
recently returned from a campaign of plundering the countryside. The
scene is Mulu's banquet hall. He has just sat down to enjoy his victory
feast. A servant girl waits
in attendance.
[x,x] . . .
with sweet words on her lips
the servant
without equal bows down before Mulu, the powerful [x, x].
She says, “Earth
and the heavens feel worried when the strong man is not near.”
Zuzu, with much
plundering, has become a wealthy man.
He says to
Mulu, “Behold the lord! You are a contented man of riches.
“You are a trusted man
of authority, a man generous with his rations and his verdicts.”
Mulu eats
his food like a pig. He divides his captured fodder, and with his hands
he crams it
into his mouth and chokes it down.
“My flanks grow fat!"
he brays, while eating all the food his hands can grab.
Night comes.
His rivals wander in by themselves. One of the men is stealing
a bowl of malted
cakes.
{Someone in the darkness calls out to Mulu}
“The people’s rations will make you bray with great burning
indigestion!
“Permanently!”
Nose to his
fat nose, the “man not his servant” {rebel, enemy} throttles the lord.
Mulu opens
his mouth and swears two oaths to his adversary.
He gasps,
“All this malt and fodder ... to abandon! This great eating to diminish!"
In the
people’s judgment he is not lordly. The god Enlil does not support him.
His wife
decides to split his grain between her female servants and his
slave women.
He gets one
single twig of his henbur grain.
He cries out, “Why? For what reason?" His stomach knows a great hunger.
Filled with
wine, he clutches his single twig of grain while his heaps of plunder
are spread
out before the happy slave women.
Mulu goes away
acting like a man defeated.
Outside, he
walks in the manure of the country. He has become a pauper.
While the
women live in abundance, he is a man without power, without women,
and without
virtue.
Like a storm, Mulu flies to his father Bantu, the Supreme Lord.
His father
says, “This will open her pure heart. Behold these jewelry beads of stone.”
“These you
can barter for baskets of food.”
{Mulu returns to his wife. He shows her the beads and he tells her . . . }
“Behold the
great gifts I made for you! I fashioned them to be so splendid and magnificent.
"They are
not from the marketplace.”
Princess Wife
The wife
does not give her princess heart to the hero.
She says, “You planned to [x,x …]
“but my trusty maidservant has told me all about your lack of character.
“The selling
price for each bead also reveals that the lord gave you these stones.
“I
will purchase them for a half basket of [x,x…]
"So you don't know beads . . .
“And you
don’t know women!" [x, x…]
{The wife continues . . .}
“To men who
rob and plunder, all women are prostitutes [x, x…]”
“So I decree
that the baskets of food will go to the person [x, x…]”
For his
elder brother’s possessions, Zuzu brays like a happy replacement donkey [x,x…]
To Zuzu she
gives Mulu’s abundant fields of grain.
{She exclaims to Zuzu . . . }
“Long may
you live! You are the man of great abundance!
"You will be the Lord of the
Cakes, of all the cakes!
"And I will be the Princess of the Fodder, for ever and ever again!”
Take a moment and try to solve this murder mystery. Who tried to kill Mulu, and why? Do you think you know what just happened? Really? Read the Annotations to find out.
