The Great Fatted Bull
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Tablet #36
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The "Standard" of Ur?
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Eannatum
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Unknown Portrait of Gudea
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The Face of Lugal-agrig-zi
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The Face of Ur-Namma
Face of Ur-Namma, part II
I am Ur-Namma
Shulgi
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Who Were the Sumerians?
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The Princess Wife
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BE 31,28 Sign List
Sumerian Trick Signs
Nu-nus
Princess Wife sequel
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The Great Fatted Jackass
Mesopotamian Prostitutes
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Unknown Sumerian Queen
Another Sumerian Queen
Pu-abi, the Queen?
A Sumerian Princess
Sumerian Lukurs
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Methods used by Mesopotamian scribes to conceal the context of political satires
 

 MahX 


Introduction:

Three unusual cuneiform tablets were discovered about a hundred years ago. Many of the
best Sumerologists in the world attempted to translate the tablets, but without success.
I suggest they were unable to read the tablets because the scribes didn't want them to.
The scribes deliberately encoded the tablets to make them difficult to read. That's because
the tablets are actually political satires. At the time, Mesopotamian kings were worshiped
as living gods, so making fun of them was a risky proposition. The scribes therefore needed
to be very careful about it. In this article, I will describe the many ingenious ways that the
scribes concealed and obscured the “secret context” of the satires, making the tablets
very difficult to decipher (but not impossible). These methods include, but are not limited to,
puns, “trick signs,” and clever wordplay.

A trick sign is a sign that is written to deceive. Its purpose is to make a tablet difficult to read, to hide the secret meaning of a satire. Trick signs appear on three different tablets:

Tablet #36   The Great Fatted Bull

BE 31,28    The Princess Wife

SEM 114    The Great Fatted Jackass

MS 3228     The Princess Wife sequel


Tablet #36 was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1929 and labeled “incomprehensible.”
Tablet BE 31,28 was found by the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania
in 1893. Stephen Langdon first attempted to translate it in 1914. He thought it was a
Dialogue between Two Women
, but he could not offer a complete translation of the tablet
so he did not publish it. Edward Chiera first attempted to translate tablet SEM 114
in the early part of the twentieth century, but he could not read the tablet.

Modern Sumerologists can read anything written in the Sumerian language, and yet they
could not read these three simple tablets. That's because the scribes didn't want anyone
to read them. Modern Sumerologists, trying to resurrect an ancient dead language, are not the only ones who would have difficulty trying to decipher these tablets. Even a Sumerian scribe could not easily read them. These tablets were deliberately designed to be difficult to read because they are political satires about great lords and kings. Tablet #36 is the story of
The Great Fatted Bull
, the bull who would be king. BE 31,28 is The Princess Wife, the story of the Great Fatted Donkey and his wife, and SEM 114 is The Great Fatted Jackass.
The stories are variations of the same theme and they have many of the same sentences
in common.

Mocking the ruling class was a dangerous thing to do (and it’s still a dangerous thing to do
in most of the world today). Sumerian kings were worshiped as living gods, so they were not the least bit amused when people made fun of them. In the story of The Great Fatted Bull,
the shepherd gets flogged when he ridicules Lu-mah for wanting to be worshiped as a god.

In the ancient world, ridiculing the nobility simply wasn’t tolerated. Back then, a lord knew
that if he allowed himself to be publicly ridiculed he would not remain a lord for long --
because it undermined his authority. A ruler could not run his kingdom if he was the object of public ridicule. So anyone who openly insulted a lord or a king was severely punished, and possibly killed, as an example to everyone else. There was no talk about “freedom of speech” or “civil rights.” There were no legal niceties. Punishment was swift, violent, and merciless. History is littered with the bodies of men who thought they could get away with mocking the ruling class. (from The Scribe on this website)

So if a scribe wanted to write satirical story about great lords and kings, he had to be very circumspect about it. He didn’t want anyone to causally read the story and then report him
to the authorities. To prevent this from happening he needed to somehow disguise or obscure the context (subject) of the satire. This was done through the use of  trick signs, puns, and clever word play.

This kind of encoding was easier done in Sumerian than in English. In Sumerian, “context
is everything” because all the signs have multiple meanings and pronunciations. In English, written words are instantly recognizable. This wasn’t true for Sumerian writing. A scribe
did not read a line of text, he translated it. He first scanned the signs in a line of text; then,
if he knew the context of the sentence, he could eliminate the many alternative meanings
of the signs and select only the definitions that made sense within the given context
(imagine trying to read this sentence if every word had up to a dozen different meanings
and pronunciations). If the context of the writing wasn’t known, it was difficult to read
even a simple Sumerian sentence, even for another Sumerian.

It was easy to make a tablet unreadable because Sumerian writing is barely readable
to begin with. If a scribe wanted to obscure the meaning of a tablet, the simple and obvious method was to arbitrarily change some of the signs. For “king,” write “dog”; for “plunder,”
write “bark,” and so on. This could make a tablet incomprehensible, and only the scribe
would know its intended meaning. The scribes of the three tablets discussed here take a different approach. They didn't want to make a tablet completely unreadable. Instead, they write a story in a way that makes it incomprehensible to the casual reader, but they provide
all the necessary clues for a diligent reader to eventually decode the tablet.

A few trick signs strategically placed can obscure or disguise the over-all context of a tablet.
For instance, mahX disguises the “king” context of Tablet #36. Without knowing the context
of the tablet makes it nearly impossible to decide which of the multiple meanings of a sign
is the one being used (there can be up to a dozen different meaning for each sign).
As described in the transliteration of Tablet #36, I spent months trying to figure out the tablet
without making any visible progress in the translation. After I decoded mahX and deciphered
the “king” context of the story, then I finally started to understand this enigmatic tablet.
Within the context of a political satire, all of the signs suddenly made sense.
Without this context, none of them did. This also explains why the tablet was encoded
in the first place – to disguise the secret meaning of the satire. Since many of the same
trick signs are also used on BE 31 28 and SEM 114, the translation of these tablets was relatively easy for me (in as much as any Sumerian translation can be considered “easy”)
even though they fooled numerous experts during the past 100 years.

The beauty and brilliance of these scribal tricks is they all make perfect sense once you understand them.

To understand these tablets, you cannot read them too literally because the scribes are
trying to trick the reader. You have to keep an open mind about it, to think, “This is what
the scribe is saying, but what does he really mean?”


The scribes use nine different methods to obscure the context of a political satire:

1. Puns: signs that are puns for other signs. The signs are pronounced the same, but they are written differently and they have different meanings.

2. Trick Signs: signs that are slightly altered so they look like other signs. These signs have different meanings that do not fit into the context of the sentences.

3. Wordplay: signs with definitions that are used in ways for which they were never intended.

4. Punning with numbers

5. Emesal Dialect: used to make the tablets more difficult to read.

6. Double Rulings: disguises the nature of a tablet.

7. Multiple signs in a row

8. Rarely used definitions

9. Signs out of order:


Some of the trick signs I have denoted with the subscript number “X”, e.g., mahX for mah2. Subscript numbers are modern conventions used to indicate the different definitions of a sign. The “X” not only stands for an unknown subscript number, it also means “mysterious” because the signs were written to deceive.



1.  Scribal Puns:
 

 

Part of line o3 on Tablet #36

On Tablet #36, the first two signs of the first readable fragment of a line is a hint to the
"hidden context" of the satire. The two signs are lu2-AL. Lu2 usually means “man,” but AL
is more problematic (the capitalized sign name is used when it is not yet known which of
its many meanings and pronunciations is the one being used). The sign is used persistently and intrusively throughout the text, as if the scribe was deliberately over-using the sign for some unknown reason; which seems rather odd, because this ubiquitous sign is completely bewildering in every sentence where it appears. Al is most often used as a “grammar sign,”
as a Compound Verb Nominal Element, to be precise, but this definition doesn't fit into any
of the sentences.    


AL (mah2) and mah.

One of the secondary definitions of AL is mah2, an adjective for a "mature, milk producing cow." Mah2 refers to any female animal that has given birth and is therefore capable of producing milk. I briefly considered it as a possible translation for the sign, but I immediately discarded it because it would be completely nonsensical in any sentence where it appeared. However, the important thing about mah2 is that it's pronounced like mah (the numerical subscripts of a sign are "silent," so mah and mah2 are pronounced the same). Mah means “great, supreme, large, majestic,” etc. I define mahX as the sign mah2 (cow) written to mean mah (great). As per the pun meaning of mahX, the signs lu2-mahX can be translated as
"man-great." On this tablet, lu-mah is synonymous with the sign lugal (man-great) meaning "lord or king." This is the secret context of the satire: lu2-mahX = "man-great" = lugal = king. Lu-mah is the name of the Great Fatted Bull. It is a name that describes his role in the story while at the same time hiding his identity.

Even if mah2 is initially considered as a possible translation for the sign, it would be immediately discarded as nonsensical (man dairy cow?) and so the pun would be lost, and along with it, the hint to the secret context of the tablet. This is the beauty and the genius of this sign (pun). Even if the reader guesses the correct pronunciation of the sign, he does not believe it because it is the wrong definition. In my opinion, it's very clever.

MahX is both the lock and the key to this tablet. It obscures the true meaning of the text
(the lock), but once it's understood it reveals the hidden context of the satire (the key),
which makes it possible to read the other signs on the tablet. The repeated use of mahX
is like the tumblers of the lock. A key doesn't work until all of the tumblers are in place.
When one single word fits in all eight sentences, only then does the tablet finally open up
and its true meaning is revealed. As previously mentioned, I could not translate the tablet
until I deciphered lu2-mahX.

MahX occurs multiple times on Tablet #36 (see lines o3, o7, o8, and r14). Several “compressed” versions of the sign (that looks a lot like rah2) occur in lines o11, r7, r10, and r11, where the word “great” fits seamlessly into the context of the sentences. MahX is also used on BE 31,28 (lines o8, o13, and o20) and on SEM 114, line o1. On tablet MS 3228,
it appears on line o10 and possibly on the fragmentary line r15. In all these examples, mahX (mah2, “cow”) is written to mean mah, “great.”

MahX is described in greater detail in the Transliteration of Tablet #36.
 
 


Nunus, nu-nus, and nu-nus the way it is normally written

Nunus (one word) means “an egg or an ovoid bead.” Nu-nus (two words) usually means “woman.” With two signs stacked on top of each other, it would be difficult to fit nu-nus within the narrow lines of a tablet, so naturally the scribes found an easier way to write it, as shown on the right.

NunusX is the most important trick sign on BE 31,28. I define nunusX as a pun that means either “woman” or “not woman.”

Nu-nus is Emesal dialect for munus, meaning “woman.” Munus is the sign most commonly used to mean “woman/” Nu-nus is rarely used. There are 3,065 citations for munus
on the ePSD and only 14 citations for nu-nus. The scribe uses this rare sign to obscure the meaning of the text. The scribe also deploys the sign in a very unusual manner. In line o16,
nu-nus is written simply as nunus. Since it is written at the very beginning of the line, there is no pretense about including the nu portion of the sign. This is a hint that the scribe intends
to use the sign this way (without nu) to mean “woman.” The scribe is using the pronunciation
of nunus to mean “woman,” rather than the literal signs for nu-nus. The sentence begins,
Women in abundance...”

NunusX is mentioned a second time in line o16. It would be tempting to read this sign as
nu-nus, “woman," but it's a trick. Nu is also the Sumerian sign for negation (no, not, without). In this case, nu-nus means “no woman.” The entire sentence reads, “While the women live in abundance, Mulu has no power, no women, and no virtue.” (See line o16 and note the recurring appearance of the sign nu.)

NunusX also occurs in Iine o5. Now the nu negation applies to the preceding sign, zu, meaning “to know,." i.e., Mulu “knows-not women.” The signs may also mean that Mulu "knows-not beads (nunus)". Both interpretations could easily apply to the context of the sentence.

Nu-nus occurs again in the very next sentence (r6). This is the only time that the sign is
used correctly. In this case, nu-nus means what it is supposed to mean; i.e., “woman.”
The line translates as, “All women are a prostitutes for men who plunder.”

The unusual way that nu-nus is used makes it difficult to translate the tablet, and it makes the meaning of the text ambiguous, which was the intent all along. The scribe is trying to confuse the reader. If the scribe wanted to make his meaning clear, he would have simply used munus, which is the standard sign for “woman.” That way there would be no confusion. Instead, the scribe uses nunusX (nu-nus/nunus) to keep the reader off balance.
  
  


Sipad, su8-ba, and su-ba

Sipad is the usual sign for "shepherd." Su8-ba is the lesser known Emesal form of sipad. On the ePSD there are 2,641 citations for sipad, but only 25 for su8-ba. The scribe of Tablet #36 takes it a step further by using a pun at the sign level, making it into su-ba. It is pronounced like su8-ba, but it is unrecognizable as a "shepherd." Su-ba is the name of “the shepherd brother,” the hero of the story. Like Lu-mah, the name of the Great Fatted Bull, it is a name that describes the character’s role in the story while also hiding his identity. The shepherd's identity is concealed because Sumerian kings were often called the shepherds of their people; so by disguising the shepherd, the "king" context of the tablet is also obscured.
 
 
2.  Trick Signs:
         


Gu has two vertical lines, but it often written with only one, as shown on the right.
 


Geme2            normal        BE 31,28       Tablet #36    SEM 114

GemeX is a trick sign for geme2, meaning “a female servant or slave.” It is a trick sign because it is written with only two reverse cunei instead of the usual three. With just two reverse cunei, it looks just like gu, meaning “rope or cord.” The sign geme2 is disguised because people would be interested in reading a story about slave women, but the scribe doesn't want anyone to read the tablet. Any story about slave women is bound to be interesting, but who wants to read a story about cord?  By hiding the “slave woman,”
gemeX also helps to obscure the “lord and king” context of the satire, since lords and kings (and possibly rich merchants) are the ones most likely to be the owners of slave women.

GemeX is used four times on Tablet #36. Needless to say, gu (cord) doesn’t fit into the context of any of the sentences. GemeX is also used on BE31,28 (lines o12 and r1) and on SEM 114, line o2. It is used twice on MS 3228, lines o3 and o13.



Gu4:  normal, compressed, and the way it appears on Tablet #36.


Gu4 is the sign for “bull, ox.” On Tablet #36 it is written in its compressed form, but it is also missing the vertical stroke. As written, the sign could be interpreted as 2(eše3) or the Old Babylonian version of bi. The sign 2(eše3) is two of a particular unit of measure and it is meaningless in the context of the sentences. The Old Babylonian version of bi is a sign that has been stripped of most of its identifying structure, as part of the process of simplifying the signs. It did not appear until very late in the Old Babylonian period when lots of other signs were simplified almost beyond recognition, which is not the case on this tablet. Gu4 is one of the simplest of the Sumerian signs (it looks like a pictograph of a bull’s head) and it is half of the context of Tablet #36, and yet it is miswritten four times out on five. It is written correctly only once (at the end of line o8 where it is written the smallest, crowded into the margin of the tablet) as a hint to the true meaning of the sign. It is not a scribal mistake; it is used solely for the purpose of concealing the “bull” context of the tablet. As a result, I had great difficulty discerning the bull context of the story, which would have been obvious if the signs were written correctly.
 
 


The sign IN

Like all Sumerian signs, IN has a variety of meanings, but it is most often used as a
“grammar sign”; for instance, a “third person singular pronominal element.”


Henbur2, and henburX as written on Tablet #36.

Henbur2 grain is the edible parts of a reed or rush. I define henburX as any sign that uses IN to mean “grain-his,” or any modification of the sign henbur2 that makes it look like IN. HenburX is used extensively on Tablet #36 and on BE 31,28. It makes sense that henburX is used to hide the “grain” context of the tablets because these stories are all about grain, which symbolizes wealth and plunder.

On Tablet #36, the scribe uses the IN cluster of reverse cunei for the sign henbur. It should have the še (grain) cluster, but then again, the scribe uses eight different versions of še in signs like zid, li, gal-niga, kur9, etc. As written, henbur looks a lot like IN, but with only one vertical stroke. Of course it could be three scribal errors, but it seems unlikely that the scribe would mistakenly write IN this way in the exact three places where henbur fits perfectly into the context of the sentences. IN is meaningless in these sentences, both in terms of grammar and context.


HenburX "grain-his" on BE 31,28.

On BE 31 28, a different variant of henbur X is used. It is basically a pun meaning “grain-his” (the second part of the sign is the possessive suffix “-ni”, which translates as “his/her.”  This version of henburX occurs twice in line o12, as seen below:


HenburX on line o12 on BE 31,28

The translation is “wife his grain-his decide servant-her slave cut twig this grain-his get.”
IN does not fit into the sentence’s grammar or context.


"HenburX-his" on BE 31,28.

A different variation of henburX is used in line o14. This version uses the ŝe (grain) cluster
of reverse cunei, plus the “-ni” suffix for “his,” so it would be tempting to read the sign as
“grain-his,” like the two examples from o12. However, notice that the sign is followed by a-ni. This is the word for “his,” as opposed to the suffix –ni, which also means “his” (I know, Sumerian can be very confusing). If the first sign is readd as “grain-his” and it's followed by a-ni, “his,” then the phrase translates as “grain-his his,” which of course is incorrect. In this particular case, the first sign is actually a variation of henbur, like the one used on
Tablet #36, with a slight difference:


Henbur, henburX on Tablet #36, and henburX on BE 31,28, line o14.

On Tablet #36, henburX has the incorrect IN cluster of reverse cunei, followed by the correct single vertical stroke. On BE 31 28, henburX has the correct še cluster of reverse cunei,
but it has the incorrect two vertical strokes

HenburX is used both ways in line r8 of MS 3228.



DamX  

This is the main trick sign on Tablet MS 3228, The Princess Wife sequel. It looks like
a combination of u3 ("if/and/but") and dam ("spouse"). It is used both ways on the tablet.
DamX is described in greater detail on the page PW2 Transliteration.



Gaba/isin

Gaba-ri means “enemy/adversary.” It occurs in the sentence, “The lord opens his mouth
and swears two oaths to his adversary.” This sentence appears word-for-word on BE 31,28
(line o9) and Tablet #36 (line r9). On BE 31,28 there is a slight difference. A small vertical
mark is added to gaba. It is 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. Plus, it also “hides”
the enemy (gaba-ri). In a way, the enemy disappears completely behind one single stalk.
Now there is no enemy in the sentence, only a stalk. 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 is a conflict in the story, so I was able to correctly interpret the signs by using this context. Fortunately, I was able to easily read the sentence on BE 31,28 because I already read it on Tablet #36 where it's written correctly. Otherwise it would have been a struggle to decipher the sentence on BE 31,28 if I was
reading it for the first time. On this tablet, the conflict is obscured by the simple addition
of one little mark.

The scribe of BE 31,28 makes extensive use of this technique. He arbitrarily adds or deletes
a mark on a sign to change its meaning. Sometimes he adds a mark (gaba in line o12
becomes isin, and še in line r9 becomes mu). Sometimes he omits a mark (zu in line o13 becomes ba, and zuh in line r6 becomes saĝ). These are all signs that are written correctly elsewhere on the tablet, so they are not scribal errors. Their purpose is to obscure the meaning of the text. Their true meaning can be discerned by the context of the sentences in which they appear. As previously mentioned, context is everything.
  
  
3.  Scribal Wordplay

  


Lu 

One of the methods that the scribes obscured the meaning of the texts was to use signs
in ways for which they were never intended. For example, lu normally means “to be/make abundant,” but on Tablet #36 it means “to make fat” as seen in line r5. It's also used this way on BE 31,28. Mu-lu, the name of The Great Fatted Donkey, means “man-abundant” – abundant in size and possessions, meaning “fat and rich.” Like Lu-mah and Su-ba, it is a name that describes the character’s role in the story while also hiding his identity.
  
  


Du8

Another similar example of this kind of wordplay occurs in line r14. Du8 normally means
“to amass,” but the scribe uses it to mean “to grow fat.” Lu-mah’s fatness is a symbol of
his greed.
  
  

4.  Punning with numbers 


i = 5

The first sign on the left is i, likewise for the second sign. It is a commonly used sign, but it is not a number, it's a word, one that has no meaning that fits into the context of the three sentences where it appears. That's because the scribe uses it to represent the number five.

5(aš) which is written horizontally (unlike the vertical diš format shown below) always uses a
3-2 combination, as seen in the third sign. On Tablet #36, a 2-2-1 combination is used
to represent the number 5. In a line of text, the sign would naturally be interpreted as i, which is meaningless in the context of the sentence, causing some confusion, which helps to obscure the context of the tablet. On the other hand, the "five" interpretation of the sign fits perfectly in all three sentences where it appears: field 5, pasture 5, and 5 big bowls.
  
   

 

4(diš), ĝar, and 4(diš)   

On the left, the number 4 is written in the vertical format, unlike the 5(aš) horizontal format
shown above.The middle sign appears in line r11 on Tablet #36. It looks just like 4(diš),
but it is actually the word ĝar, meaning “to place.” The sign for ĝar is often written this way.
The sign on the right occurs in line r14. On a literary tablet which thus far has no numbers
(the number 5 had previously been disguised as i), it would be logical to again read this sign
as the word ĝar, but it is actually 4(diš) !!  The scribe of Tablet #36 arbitrarily switches the
number formats to keep the reader off balance. He puns with numbers for the same reason
that he puns with words, to obscure the meaning of the text.

 

5.  Emesal Dialect

Another method employed by the scribes to obscure the meaning of the text is the heavy use of the Emesal dialect. As shown in the previous discussion of sipad and nu-nus, Emesal words are the uncommon variations of common Sumerian words. One example is umun on BE 31,28, line o4. Umun (U) is substituted for en, the common sign for “lord.” The ePSD has umun defined as the Emesal sign for en, and it has 1,631 citations for en, but there are no citations for umun, which shows how rare it really is. On the other hand, the ePSD has 19 other definitions for U that are more likely choices than umun. The scribe disguises the lord (en) with umun at the beginning of the tablet where the reader is looking for the context of the story. The scribe later uses en at the end of the story (line r10), but by then the reader is totally confused because he does not know the context. Of course, the reader can eventually figure out the Emesal words, but at the beginning they impede the reader’s understanding of the text.


6.  Double Rulings

 

Tablet #36 (reverse) showing three double rulings

The scribe of Tablet #36 uses “double rulings” to disguise the nature of the tablet.
A double ruling is two lines drawn between sentences instead of just one. The lines
denote a division between paragraphs. The scribe uses five double rulings on the tablet.
They do not delineate any major divisions in the story, so there must be another reason
for them. Double rulings are often used to separate unrelated items of text; for example,
a collection of proverbs. The double rulings on Tablet #36 would trick the reader into
believing there are five different segments rather than a single cohesive story. Double ruling
is also used extensively on administrative tablets. This is probably one of the reasons why
Tablet #36 was originally classified as Administrative rather than Literature (I also thought
it was an administrative tablet when I first saw it). The scribe fooled everyone into thinking
Tablet #36 is just a boring clerical tablet that is dull to read, and not a literary tablet
(and political satire) that is fun to read.
 
 

7.  Multiple signs in a row: 


The scribes of these satirical tablets love putting three or four of the same signs in a row and giving them different definitions. It occurs 4 times on MS 3228 (lines r5, r6, r7, and r11).
It occurs 3 times on Tablet #36 (lines o7, o8, and r15). It also occurs on BE 31,28 (line r11).
This makes the tablets difficult to read and it helps to disguise the meaning of the tablets.
The writing looks wild on the page. Visually, it looks out of control; it looks like "gibberish," which discourages a serious attempt to translate it.


8.  Rarely used definitions: 


This is one of the most ubiquitous signs in cuneiform writing. It has more than 20 definitions.
It is used thousands of times in one form or another. A rare definition of KA is zuh,"steal."
It is used this way only 8 times in the Old Babylonian period, but it occurs on all four of the tablets mentioned on this page. Other examples of rarely used definitions on these tablets
are too numerous to mention.


9.  Signs out of order:

The scribe of MS 3228 introduces another trick that isn’t seen on the other tablets: Sometimes the signs are written out of order. Nothing major, not enough to make the sentences incomprehensible, but just enough to keep the reader off balance. This occurs
in lines o17, r7, r13, and r17.



Conclusion

As previously mentioned, I spent months trying to decipher Tablet #36 until I realized
the scribe was trying to trick me by disguising the satirical nature of the tablet. Since
many of the same trick signs are also used on BE 31,28 and SEM 114, and both tablets
have the same hidden context of a political satire, the translation of these tablets was
relatively easy for me. That's because I was no longer fooled by scribal tricks. I read
the tablets differently, I did not read them too literally, as the Sumerologists had done,
because I knew the scribes were deliberately trying to mislead the readers.

I'm convinced that somewhere out there is a tablet about The Great Fatted Goat,
to complement the stories of The Great Fatted Bull and The Great Fatted Jackass.
That would be an interesting story because it would be very sexual. I suggest the
most interesting tablets are the ones where the scribes felt compelled to hide the
secret meaning of the story because it is too political, or too sexual, or both.

I would suggest there many tablets that are currently unpublished, or untranslatable,
or “incomprehensible,” that are actually readable if you don't get fooled by scribal tricks.
  
  

Lu2-mahX,

the name of The Great Fatted Bull.