Some of the cuneiform signs on tablet BE 31,28. (CDLI record P345102).
In 1914, Stephen H. Langdon wrote a scholarly paper
about an obscure cuneiform tablet called BE 31,28. The tablet is owned by the
Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Langdon classified it as a literary
tablet, as A Dialogue between Two Women, but he never published a complete
translation of it. That’s because he couldn’t read the entire tablet, so most
of the writing remained untranslatable. BE 28 is officially entitled “Dialogue
between fPN and fPN,” where fPN means female Personal Name, which shows how
little of the tablet was translated since even the names of the two protagonists
wasn’t known. Langdon was a world renowned Sumerologist, an expert in the
field. He could translate complicated literary tablets, and yet he
could not read this one simple tablet.
Throughout the years BE 28 made the scholarly rounds. Many
prominent Sumerologists attempted to translate this tablet, but without
success. They speculated on the meaning of various sentences, but they could not
make any sense of the tablet as a whole. The sentences never coalesced into a
single cohesive story.
The same is true for Tablet #36 in the Library of Congress.
It had been around for 100 years and the experts couldn’t translate it
either.
In December 2008, I posted a translation of Tablet 36,
the story of The Great Fatted Bull. The very next day, December 7, a date
that will live in infamy, Bendt Alster, a world famous Sumerologist, announced
that Tablet #36 wasn’t really about a great fatted bull. He said it was
actually a missing part of the Dialogue between Two Women, based on Langdon’s
incomplete, unpublished translation and Alster’s own “somewhat
incomplete manuscript” that had also never been published. We had a big fight about it (via email).
So I
posted a new page on this website where I challenged him to a “Sumerian
Showdown!”, my translation against his. I hoped to provoke Alster into attempting to disprove my
translation, and failing that, he would be forced to confirm it. I said if these tablets are indeed a "Dialogue between Two
Women," then they are of great historical importance, here in the Feminist
Era, and he needs to publish them. I said this because I wanted to see why he thought the two tablets were related. Was BE 28 a continuation of The
Great Fatted Bull? I also asked him to publish the line-drawing of the tablet, but he refused.
Needless
to say, Alster could not convert the story of The Great Fatted Bull into a Dialogue
between Two Women, and neither was he able to offer a complete translation of
BE 28.
That
was seven years ago. Just recently I finally saw a copy of the line-drawing for BE 28, and I
immediately knew why Alster thought the tablets were two separate parts of the
same story.
Many of the sentences occur word for word on both tablets. In addition, both tablets use many of the same "trick signs," such as mahX and gemeX (explained below) to disguise the meaning of the texts. That's because both stories are political satires about lords and kings. Since ridiculing kings was a dangerous thing to do, the scribes deliberately made the tablets difficult to read – to keep their meanings secret. That is why the professional Sumerologists were unable to decipher the tablets. The tablets were meant to fool even other Sumerians.
I was able to translate this tablet only because I had already "decoded" Tablet #36, so I wasn't fooled by the trick signs. As soon as I saw tablet BE 28 I knew it was a story about the Great Fatted Something, though at first I didn't know what. Soon afterwards, when I saw anše in line r4, I quickly realized that it's the story of The Great Fatted Donkey. However, I entitled it The Princess Wife because she is the star of the show. If you want to read a version of The Great Fatted Donkey, you can always check out my translation of SEM 114, the story of The Great Fatted Jackass.
When I first published my translation of Tablet #36, the story of The Great Fatted Bull, it was quite the anomaly because there were no other tablets like it. Tablets BE 31,28 and SEM 114 prove that my reading of the signs was correct all along.
Transliteration of tablet BE 28 31, the story of The Princess Wife.
by Jerald Jack Starr
If this is your first time reading a Sumerian transliteration, you may want to read the explanatory comments at the beginning of the Transliteration for Tablet #36.
Guru3
is often used as a modifier meaning “to bear, carry, to be imbued with, to be
loaded.” Thus, man-imbued-wealth becomes “wealthy man.”
Zuzu's name could be interpreted as Zuh-zuh (the same signs but with different definitions and pronunciations) meaning "steal-steal."
o4 igi umun ze2
la-na- lum ze2
šu-na-tam ba-na-am3 ba gi- ni behold lord you wealth-man-satisfied you authority-man-trusted giving-man rations verdict-his
I went crazy looking for a sign that looked like the first
one in this sentence. Then I realized it was actually two signs joined
together, igi and umun (ES, en). Four of the signs in this sentence are joined
together in this same way, some of which are merged across each other. There
are so many joined signs that I thought maybe they were some sort of “ligatures” (signs that
are "tied" together and pronounced in reverse order, like lugal, which is
written gal-lu2 but pronounced lu2-gal). As it turns out, they are just normal
signs. Perhaps they are merged together to save space on the line because there
are so many signs crowded into the sentence. On the other hand, perhaps they
were written this way to help obscure the context of the tablet, to disguise the
secret meaning of the story.
Speaking of which: U (umun) is a seldom-used alternative sign
for en, meaning “lord.” It is definitely used to obscure the fact that the
story is mocking great lords and kings. In this way, it is like Lu2-mahX on
Tablet #36, which is used to disguise the “king” context in the story of The
Great Fatted Bull, as described in the Transliteration.
Many sentences on this tablet also occur on Tablet #36, the story of The
Great Fatted Bull, and on tablet SEM 114, the story of The Great Fatted
Jackass. In this transliteration, I don’t point out all of the occurrences because
there are so many of them. I mention them only when they are relevant to the discussion
at hand.
This line is lacking a verb meaning "to place" the food in his mouth, so I used the verb from the corresponding line on Tablet #36 (r4). Du3 means "to drive in," which in the context of the sentence is interpreted as "to cram." He crams the food into his mouth and chokes on it.
o6 da-gu10 gu3 ka
aĝ2-(ES, niĝ2)- gu7-gu7 šu-
da- bi eš2-dab5#-ba side-my cry out mouth thing(s) to eat (food) hands-with-these to-grasp
The
first part of this sentence is written da-ĝu10, “my flanks” but I translated it
as da-ĝu10 lu, “my flanks grow fat”
because that’s the way it’s written on Tablet #36 (line r5). The lu sign is
missing in the above sentence. On both tablets, lu (defined as “abundant”)
means “to be fat.”
Gu3: “to cry out, often said of animals.” The definition of this sign changes
depending on which animal is mentioned. A bull bellows, a lion roars, a
donkey brays, etc.
o7 ĝi6 dim2 sa2-sa2
ni2-ba nigin na-ta utul2
gug2-munu4 ir-ir night forms rivals by themselves wander man-from large bowl cakes-malted plunder
Ir = plunder/steal. The sentence is written “a man is plundering a bowl of malted cakes,” but
I translated it as “a man is stealing
a bowl of malted cakes.” “Plundering” is more meaningful in the context of the
tablet, but “plundering a bowl of malted cakes” would be confusing for a
first-time reader.
o8a uĝ3 ba- bi eš2- gu3 mahX sig3
gin6 people ration these to- cry out great burning indigestion permanent
MahX
(AL/mah2) is the trick sign on Tablet
#36, the story of The Great Fatted Bull. It is used to obscure the “king”
context of the story, as explained in line o3 of the Transliteration. It is
also used on SEM 114, The Great Fatted Jackass, in line o1.
For a description of all the trick signs on the tablets,
see Sumerian Trick Signs.
Variations
of this sentence occurs on all three tablets (SEM 114, r8 and Tablet #36, r8). On Tablet #36 the phrase is written kiri3 kiri3, “nose to nose,” but in the above sentence it is written kiri3 kiri3-ni, where ni is the suffix for “his,”
meaning “nose to his nose.” This
would be the normal way to translate the phrase. However, ni is completely
unnecessary because both noses are “his nose,” as it were, since two men are
fighting. In this sentence, NI is actually mu5, meaning “good, beautiful,
pleasing, plump, and rarely, “fatted.” The scribe had to get “fatted” in there
somewhere. After all, this is the story of the Great Fatted Donkey. But the scribe uses the lesser known definition of
NI (mu5) to get the message across, rather than the usual niga (fatted), which
would be too obvious.
o9 e-ne-eĝ3 (ES, inim) gaba!-ri
ka-{ba}-ab ze2-eĝ3
ze2-eĝ3 (ES, šum2, twice) oath adversary mouth opened give (plural)
gaba-ri, "enemy," as written on this tablet and on Tablet #36.
This line appears word-for-word on Tablet #36,
but on BE 31,28 it has a slight difference. There is a small vertical mark added to
gaba. It’s a very minor difference, but it’s enough to change the definition of
the sign. With the added mark, gaba becomes isin, meaning “stalk.” Stalk
doesn’t make any sense in the sentence, making it confusing for the reader. It also “hides” the enemy (gaba-ri). In a way, the enemy disappears completely
behind that one single stalk. Now there’s no enemy in the sentence, only a stalk, so
the reader would not guess that la2 in the previous sentence actually means “to throttle.” In a normal
sentence, la2 has a dozen other meanings that would make more sense in the
context of a stalk (“small, light, hold, carry,” to name just a few). So, without an enemy in
this sentence, it’s unlikely that anyone would correctly guess the meaning of “throttle”
for the sign la2. Fortunately, I was able to easily read the above sentence because it is written correctly on Tablet #36. Otherwise it would have been a struggle
to decipher this sentence if I was reading it for the first time.
Without an enemy in this sentence, there is no conflict.
Without a conflict, the overall context of the tablet becomes difficult to
discern, making it harder to translate the tablet. When I was trying to translate
Tablet #36, a big breakthrough occurred when I realized there was a conflict in
the story, so I was able to correctly interpret the signs by using this context. On this tablet, the conflict is obscured by the simple addition of
one little mark.
It's not like the scribe didn't know any better. He wrote the same sign (du8) correctly at the end of line o14.
o10 munu4 šu4 gu7 ĝeš-ur3 ne ? [maḫX gu7-ka be6] ud?! malt all fodder abandon this [great food-mouth (eating) to diminish]
I drove myself crazy looking for a sign that looked like the first
one in this sentence. Then I realized it is really just two signs joined
together. The first sign is actually a simplified version of munu4, "malt," as shown on CDLI P392795. The second sign is U (šu4, "totality, all"). It seems I would have learned my lesson the first time, as explained in line o4 above.
I
translated the rest of the line as, “This great eating to diminish!” because that’s the way it is
written on Tablet #36 (line r10). The last sign in this sentence, designated as ud?!, should be be6, like on Tablet #36.
o11 nir-nu- mu uĝ3 gi {d}en-lil2-a suhuš nu- mu mar lordly-not-he people judgment Enlil support not-he place
o12 dam a-ni henburX tar gemeX-ni# gemeX zi2 li- ne henburX tuku wife his grain-his decide servant-her slave cut twig this(one) grain-his get
There
are two trick signs in this sentence, henburX and gemeX. They both occur twice.
See Sumerian Trick Signs.
o13 ta-a-aš šag4 ba/zu! mahX lugud2 why? what reason? stomach know great reduction
zu, as it appears in line r2
zu!: A variation
of this sentence occurs on Tablet #36. It is written šag4
zu mahX lugud2, “his stomach knows a great reduction,”
meaning "a great hunger." In the above sentence, zu seems to be written as ba, but it is
actually zu. The scribe uses a very simplified version of zu in line r2,
with only one interior vertical line, as shown on the above left. The scribe
omits the vertical line for the sign in the above sentence so that it looks like ba.
As explained in o9, the scribe adds a mark to gaba so that it looks like isin. Now the scribe omits a line on zu so that it looks like ba. The scribe does this several times on the tablet. That's why many signs in the line-drawing are denoted with a "!", meaning "written wrong." Of course they could all be scribal errors, but I believe they're done deliberately to obscure the meaning of the text. Sometimes the scribe adds a mark, (gaba o9, dim2 o20, and še r9). Sometimes he omits a mark (zu o13 and zuh r6). They are all signs that are written correctly elsewhere on the tablet.
It's just a little something something here and there to keep the reader off balance.
The scribe of Tablet #36 does something similar. On four out of five occurrences of gu4 (bull), the sign is missing the vertical mark,
o14 geštin si mu sur-sur henburX a-ni ir gar gemeX-la du8-du8 wine fill he squeezes henbur his plunder pile slave-happy spread
o15 mu-lu lu2
du a- ak i
bar mu ĝen
lum ma mu ukur3 dim2! PN person go to- act defeat outside he walk manure he pauper made
o16 nunusX-a! lu nu-kal-la nunusX nu-zid na woman-in abundance not-powerful no-woman no- virtue man
NunusX is the trick sign of this tablet. It is best explained with pictures on a separate page, see Nu-nus.
The sign a! is explained below in line o20b.
o17 u4-da-am3 mu-lu ab-ba ba-an-tu dal/dirig en storm-like PN father PN fly/supreme lord
RI = dal/dirig = fly/supreme.
Dal is a verb meaning “to fly.”
If used as such, the verb is awkwardly placed in the sentence, almost at the
end of the line with just one sign dangling after it. Another interpretation is
that the sign is a seldom-used alternative definition for dirig, an adjective
meaning “supreme.” In this case it would apply to en (lord), meaning “supreme
lord.” But if it’s used this way, then the sentence is lacking a verb.
I doubt
that it’s a scribal error, that the scribe simply forgot to add the verb. I
believe the sentence was deliberately written this way to make it difficult to
read. I also think the scribe fully intended for the sign to do “double duty”
as both a verb and an adjective, so that’s the way I used it: “Like a storm Mulu flies to his father Bantu, the supreme
lord.”
In Sumerian, if a syllable begins with the same letter that
the previous syllable ended with, then the syllables merge together. Thus,
Ba-an-tu becomes Ban-tu.
o18 šag4-kug bad i-bi2 (ES, igi) za sa a na heart-pure open behold bead jewelry of stone
o19 bi sam2 sam2 aĝ2-(ES, niĝ2)-ne pisan gu7- gu7 these barter thing-this basket food
As
per the Sumerian Lexicon, page 228, sam2 (sa10) means, “n., equivalent; (barter)
purchase; sale price; merchandise (Akk. loanword from šīmu(m) I, ‘to buy, purchase; goods for commerce” and “v., to
barter, exchange.”
o20a i-bi2 (ES, igi) mahX! ba dim2 mahX- mahX
dim2 behold great gift make splendid magnificent to fashion
Ba usually means "give" (verb). Here it means "gift" (noun).
In o16, nunusX-a is written with the sign a compressed between nunusX and lu, as if it had originally been omitted and then squeezed in afterwards (as shown in the third sign from the left, denoted by the ! ). As a result, the sign a looks like three vertical strokes. These same vertical strokes appear after the sign kar! (te-a), even though there is plenty of room to draw the sign a correctly. I don't know if was carelessness on the part of the scribe or if it was done to obscure the meaning of the sign kar.
Mulu. Or is it Zuzu?
Reverse:
r1 dam
šag4-egir2 nu-
mes- ba za-e umuš [...] wife heart-princess not-hero-give you plan
r2 gemeX-gin zu! am3 ta [lal] maidservant- trust inform that character [lack]
Lal/la2,
“lack, deficiency.” The end of this sentence is damaged, but the corresponding
line on SEM 114 (r5) shows lal at the end of the line, meaning “a lack of character.”
r3 1{diš}-ta še-am3 ad pad3 ne [en na ba]
one-each sale price bead reveal this [lord stone
give]
En na ba. These signs occur at the end of r6 on tablet SEM 114. It translates as “the lord gave you
these stones (beads).” .
Sam2/še-am3: The sign sam2 is composed of the sign ninda, which forms the outer shell, and the internal signs of še-am3, as shown below. In the above sentence, only the signs še-am3
appear. Perhaps the scribe omitted the ninda portion of the sign,
intentionally or not. On the other hand, the corresponding line on SEM
114 reads "še 1{diš} sila3," which translates as "grain 1 unit" (še is the sign for grain) as the selling price for each bead. So perhaps the above line should read "1 each [unit of] grain" for each bead. Take your pick.
r4 bi sam2-sam2 aĝ2-(ES, niĝ2)-ne pisan-sur3# [x,...] these purchase thing-this basket-half
At the end of the corresponding line on SEM 114 (r7) there
appears to be a damaged and compressed version of šaḫ2, meaning
“pig,” which leads me to believe that the half basket contains “pig slop.” Mulu "eats his food like a pig" and so does Lu-mah on Tablet #36.
r5 u3 za-e zu- nu nunusX e-ne-[eĝ3#? (ES, inim)] [...] and you know- not woman ...
I translated this line as, "You don't know women," but with the trick meaning of the sign nu-nus, this line could easily be translated as, "You don't know beads." Both translations fit perfectly in the context of the story, and I believe both versions are the intended meanings of the signs. That is why I used both versions in the translation..
r6 lu2-zuh!- ir- ra nu-nus munus-kin du3 [...] man-rob-plunder-to/for woman prostitute all
Gu3/zuh/saĝ: This phrase occurs in line r2 of Tablet #36, except it is written as lu2 gu3 ir,
“man who cries out (bellows) for plunder.” In the above sentence, it is clearly
written as lu2 saĝ ir. It is also written this way on r10 of SEM 114. With saĝ it could be translated as “he
who is a person who plunders,” which is awkward sounding. So I translated it as
zuh, which means “to steal,” i.e., “man who robs and plunders,” because
it sounds better and it does not change the meaning of the sentence. The sign
was probably miswritten to obscure the meaning of the sentence. KA (gu3,zuh) and saĝ are essentially the same sign, except ka has a few more interior marks. As mentioned before, the scribe adds or omits marks on a sign to keep the reader off balance.
Munus-kin: Munus means “woman,” kin means “work.” I suggest munus-kin means “prostitute.” This is described in detail on a separate page. See Munus-kin on this website.
r7 e-ne-eĝ3 (ES, inim) pisan#? gu7-gu7 sag
du [x, ...] decree basket food person go
Še/mu:
In the line-drawing, this sign is clearly written as mu: “Mulu gana2 Mulu Zuzu,” which suggests that the princess wife is giving Mulu’s fields
to both Mulu and Zuzu. I find this to be highly
unlikely. There’s no way that the wife is giving Mulu half of his fields; she
barely wants to give him a half basket of pig slop. Plus, it doesn’t make sense
that the wife is giving back to Mulu what he already owned, which she has
already taken from him. Besides, this would shortchange Zuzu, who is her co-conspirator,
and who clearly expects to get all of
the fields. On the other hand, if you ignore the horizontal line in mu, the sign looks like ŝe (grain), so the sentence would read Mulu gana2- ŝe-lu Zuzu, which translates as “Mulu’s
abundant fields of grain” that are given to Zuzu. This makes sense because Zuzu
is being given Mulu’s fields as a reward for his part in the conspiracy. It is written this way to obscure the meaning of the sentence, just like all the other instances where the scribe slightly alters the signs with the addition of a single mark.
r10 libir za-e lu2 mah#? lu me en live long you person great abundant to be lord
Mah, "great": This damaged sign may be a compressed version of mah, but I'm not too sure about it. In the meantime, it is simply a "place saver" until I figure out a different interpretation of the sign, if indeed there is one.
r11
a-gug2 a-gug2 gug2-a egir2 mur hur hur
? of-cake of-cake cake-of princess fodder forever ever again
The use of three identical signs in a row (with
different meanings) occurs three times on Tablet #36. They also occur three times on this
tablet, twice in this sentence alone, and once in r8. They are intended to make the tablet difficult to read. This is the only instance where three signs in a row mean three different things (instead of just two, like other examples). Mur means "fodder," hur means "forever" and "ever again." The "ever again" adds a nice twist to the end of the story, suggesting the events have happened before, and they will happen again, ever again, for all of eternity. It's very clever.
gaba-ri, "enemy," as written on this tablet and on Tablet #36.
zu, as it appears in line r2 
