Sumerologists
have a saying about translating cuneiform tablets: “Context is everything.”
That’s
because all cuneiform signs have multiple meanings, so the writing is not
instantly recognizable at a glance, like it is in English. You pretty much need
to know the context (subject) of the writing before you can read it. You need to know what you're "reading to." In this way, you can eliminate the many
alternative definitions of the signs and concentrate only on the meanings that fit within the framework of the story. Therefore,
trying to read a cuneiform tablet is something of a Catch-22. You
need to know the context of the writing to read the signs,
but you have to read the signs to know the context (!)
The
“dialog” context.
In
November 2015, I heard it through the grapevine that Jana Matuszak, a graduate
student in Germany, inherited the papers of Miguel Civil, a renown
Sumerologist. Among the papers were notes and line-drawings about several
previously untranslated tablets that were supposedly “Dialogs Between Two
Women.”
I
wrote to Ms Matuszak. Here is a paraphrase of the email:
“I have translated the stories of The Great
Fatted Bull and The Princess Wife. Both of the stories were originally
classified as Dialogs Between Two Women. They are actually political satires
that use "trick signs" and clever wordplay to disguise the
meaning of the texts.
“I understand you are working on some ‘dialog
tablets’. I think these tablets may actually be variations of The Great
Fatted Bull or similar stories.
“The fact that many of the tablets remained
untranslated for more than a hundred years, despite the efforts of the best
minds in the business, leads me to believe that ‘female dialogs’ is not
the correct context.
“If you have any transliterations or
line-drawings of the tablets, I would greatly appreciate it if you would send
me a copy.”
Ms Matuszak did not reply. I can understand
why she didn’t want to share her proprietary information with me, but she
should have listened to me about the rest of it. I really did try to warn her.
Four years later, in May 2019, I saw a podcast
featuring Jana. It showed a picture of a tablet (MS 3228). She called it a "Dialog
Between Women." It also included a partial translation. As soon as I saw the
tablet, I knew her translation was completely in error. I immediately
recognized the tablet as a version of The Princess Wife, line for line and sign
for sign. When I read her translation, my suspicions were confirmed. The
language is very awkward, labored, and forced, the hallmark of a wrong context.
I again wrote to Jana asking for a copy of her
complete translation. She replied that it would be available when she published
her dissertation “sometime next year.”
So I had to wait for another year. In the
meantime, I felt bad for Jana because she was receiving many awards and
accolades for a translation that was completely erroneous. I decided not to say
anything about it. So long as she did not claim that my version of The Princess
Wife was a female dialog, then I would keep silent.
In December 2020, the CDLI (the Cuneiform
Digital Library Initiative) took away my publication credit for Tablet #36 and
assigned the credit to “CDLI Literary 000771, ex. 027” (whoever that is). They
also labeled Tablet #36 as a Dialog Between Two Women (!), along with tablet BE
31,28, the story of The Princess Wife. A quick search revealed that “CDLI Literary
000771, ex. 027” had received publication credit for more than 60 tablets that were
now classified as dialogs between women.
I figured that Jana’s impending dissertation
had resurrected the concept of female dialogs. Apparently the CDLI was planning to give publication credit to Ms Matuszak even before her dissertation was published in an academic journal. I wasn't a bit surprised, because that's how they roll at the CDLI (see The Great Fatted Bull and the CDLI).
In January 2021, Jana Matuszak published her
dissertation, Und du, du bist eine Frau?!, “And you, you are a Woman?!”
It is a “Dialog Between Two Women.” Her translation of tablet MS 3228 is the centerpiece
of the dissertation.
I had previously seen only the front of the
tablet, so I “fast forwarded” through hundreds of pages in her dissertation and
found a copy of the back. I was delighted to see that it added a whole new
chapter to the story of The Princess Wife. Tablet MS 3228 is the “sequel” to
the story.
Jana’s dialog is a “composite text,” meaning
it is composed of several different tablets.
One of tablets looked familiar. I realized
with dismay that it is tablet BE 31,28, the story of The Princess Wife. Jana
was claiming that it is actually a dialog between two women. What’s worse, she
claimed that the story of The Great Fatted Bull is also a female dialog (!) She
even included the fragmentary tablet SEM 114, the story of The Great Fatted
Jackass.
Jana Matuszak is basically saying that all of my
translations are dialogs between women. In other words, all of my translations
are completely wrong.
The stories of The Great Fatted Bull, The Princess Wife, and The
Princess Wife sequel, are literary masterpieces. If Matuszak has her way, then all
three masterpieces will be destroyed in one fell swoop.
I cannot let this happen. I was going to keep
silent, but now I must defend my work because if Jana is right, then I am
wrong (and I’m not wrong).
So the question is: Who are you going to believe, me or Matuszak?
There are several factors to be considered:
1.
There is no such thing as a Dialog Between Two Women.
I have yet to see a creditable example of a female
dialog.
The CDLI page for Tablet #36 lists the
sub-genre as: “ETCSL 5.04.05 Dialogue between Two Women B,” but this dialog
doesn’t show up on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Instead, the
ETCSL has the following two entries:
5.4.04 A dialogue between two women (Dialogue
4)
5.4.05 A dialogue between two women (Dialogue
5)
but no translations are given.
The CDLI lists 84 "dialogs between women." However, most of them are fragmentary tablets where too little of the writing remains for the context to be positively identified. Of the 84 female dialogs, only 6 have been translated. These translations are very fractured and nonsensical, a sure
sign that the wrong context was chosen.
“Dialog between two women” is a catchall
category for any tablet that the experts could not translate. A dialog format
is presumed because a dialog doesn’t need a discernable storyline with events
moving in a logical sequence. It can simply be one non-sequitur after another.
I suggest that if there really were such things as Sumerian Dialogs Between Two Women, then everyone would already know
about them. They would already be famous, here in the Feminist Era.
2. A
dialog? between two women?
Jana’s dialogs are not really dialogs, they
are more like monologues; and there are not two women, only one. Supposedly
the tablets are about two women having an argument. However, in Matuszak’s
translation of MS 3228 (see below) there seems to be only one woman talking.
Even when Jana strings all the tablets together, the story still does not have
two identifiable women. They are not known by name. Jana calls them Woman A and Woman B, but they do not have different personalities or distinctive points of
view. Their argument does not progress in a logical fashion. It is all very
jumbled and chaotic.
Debates were a well-established genre in Sumerian
literature. The ETCSL lists six “debate poems.” These are debates between Bird
and Fish, Copper and Silver, Summer and Winter, etc. They all have a clear
storyline with distinctive characters who are engaged in a logical
back-and-forth dialog.
3. An
artificial construction.
As previously stated, Jana’s Dialog Between
Two Women is a composite text, meaning it is composed of several different
tablets. This is a common practice in Sumerology. Sometimes one tablet can
provide the lines that are missing or damaged on a different tablet. However,
this only works if the tablets are written about the same subject.
Jana’s composite dialog is actually an
“artificial construction.” She selects random lines from the various tablets
and strings them together to make a dialog. It would be okay to create a modern,
literary composition in this manner, except none of the tablets are dialogs.
Jana doesn’t offer a complete “stand alone” translation for any of the tablets
as a dialog. If she had, then she wouldn’t need to resort to this artificial
method to create one. The proof of a correct context is that it yields a complete
translation for the tablet.
On the other hand, The Princess Wife (the
whole story) is a true composite text. It is composed of two tablets, BE 31,28
and MS 3228. Both of these tablets offer complete “stand alone” translations.
They also have the same plot and the same characters. The story progresses in a logical fashion and transitions
smoothly from one tablet to the other.
I suggest that many of the so-called Dialogs
Between Women are actually political satires that use trick signs and
clever wordplay to disguise the meaning of the tablets. The scribes
disguised meaning of the stories because it was dangerous to ridicule great
lords and kings.
This leads to another very important
consideration:
4. How
could Jana translate these tablets when the best Sumerologists could not?
Marcel Sigrist, Miguel Civil, Bendt Alster,
Stephen Langdon, and Edward Chiera tried to translate these tablets without
success. They were brilliant Sumerologists, the best in the world. They could read
anything written in the Sumerian language. They could literally read a tablet
just as well as any Sumerian scribe.
Therein lies the problem: They read the tablets literally, just like a
Sumerian. These are “trick tablets.” They cannot be read literally. By introducing
just a few trick signs, a scribe could obscure the context of the story, making
it difficult (but not impossible) to read the tablet. However, once the trick
signs are understood, then the context of the story is revealed. Trying to
translate one of these tablets without knowing the trick signs is like trying
to unlock a door without using a key.
That is the only reason why I was able to read
the tablets when the other Sumerologists could not. I realized that some of the
signs cannot be read literally. For example, I spent weeks trying to translate
Tablet #36 without making any progress. When I finally figured out the trick
sign Lu-mahX, the “king” context of the story was revealed and I was able
to translate the rest of the tablet (see the notes on the Transliteration for Tablet #36).
Jana read the tablets literally, just like all
the other Sumerologists. How could she translate the tablets when the other Sumerologists
could not? These tablets have been around for a hundred years. If the tablets
could be literally translated, then the other Sumerologists would have already
done it long before Jana ever got the chance.
Of the Sumerologists listed above, none of them
published their attempted translations because they knew the translations were implausible.
For instance, Stephen Langdon thought tablet BE 31,28 (The Princess Wife) was a
“Dialogue between fPN and fPN,” where fPN means "female Personal Name, which
shows how little of the tablet had been translated since not even the names of the two
protagonists was known. Langdon was a brilliant Sumerologist, but he could not
translate this tablet using a dialog context.
Bendt Alster thought Tablet #36 was a Dialog
Between Two Women. I challenged him to a “Sumerian Showdown,” my translation
against his. I was deliberately rude and obnoxious about it. I wanted to
provoke him into disproving my translation, or failing that, be forced to
confirm it. So Alster was highly motivated to prove me wrong by converting
Tablet #36 into a Dialog Between Two Women, but he couldn’t do it. However, he did not to publish a translation of Tablet #36 using a
dialog context because he knew it was in error.
Anyone who wants to believe Jana's translations will need to explain how a mere graduate student was able to translate these tablets when the other Sumerologists couldn't do it with 200 years of collective experience between them.
Anyone who doesn't believe my translations will need to explain how I could so egregiously misread the signs to thus impose these wildly implausible (but highly cohesive) contexts on four tablets that were supposedly written about something else. Like I said before, I was able to do it only by decoding a few trick signs that revealed the secret context of the tablets.
5. An
incorrect transliteration.
As previously mentioned, Jana labeled Tablet
#36, the story of The Great Fatted Bull, as a Dialog Between Women. Unfortunately,
Jana used Robert Englund’s ATF as the basis for her transliteration, which
means her efforts were doomed from the start because the ATF is riddled with
errors (see Robert Englund's Error List). That is why she was unable to
offer a complete and cohesive translation of Tablet #36. No one can produce a
usable translation of Englund’s ATF − not even Englund could do it.
6. An unclear
transliteration format.
Ms. Matuszak uses the following format for her
transliteration:
The N, K, an X numbers are abbreviations for
the various tablets that she used in her transliteration. This makes it difficult
to discern which one was used for any given sentence.
On the other hand, I use the following format:
Shown above is my transliteration and translation for line o2 of The Princess Wife.
I show a picture of each individual sentence
on the tablet. Beneath each sign is the Sumerian word. Beneath each Sumerian
word is the English word. So far as I know, I am the only one who routinely
uses this format for all of my transliterations, making it easy for anyone
to check my work. I couldn’t use format if I was trying to “fudge my way
through.”
7. A
comparison of the two translations.
For those who do not have access to Jana
Matuszak’s dissertation, the following is the English rendition of her German
translation of tablet MS 3228 in the Schøyen Collection:
Worker, child of misery, descendant of
the poor! Disrespected man, unreliable
woman! “Now (look only)! You slipped into the
window with the men."
"(With her oh so) pure uterus (is
it) over: loss for her house! Buying beer, eating (ready) cooked!
[...] Cooked. Do you not say, 'It is (all) there', (although)
you (in truth) are losing? Your husband has no clothes on, you
bear nothing but rags: Your butt hangs out of them. (No more than) a litre of barley is
what you find.
They cannot be deterred from
constantly buying beer
(and bringing ready) cooked food
(home). (a) And you, you are one who belongs
to women?!" (d) And you, you are a human being?! (e) And you, [you are] one who belongs
to humanity?! [Do you want to tell me (really still)
with] Reluctance to give?!] "Who disdains men (and) insults
women! Constantly slurring, constantly
beating the head with fists!
Constantly saying hostile things,
constantly changing mendacious words!
Who constantly gives the house to
pleasures, who does not let the man dwell in a house worthy of a man. (d) And you, you are a human
being?!" (a) And you, you are one who belongs
to the women?!
(f) And you belong! to humanity!?! "Water-drawing, water cloudy!
Continuously grinding flour! She stomped (the grain), she crushed
it, she ground it. She wanted to bake it, (but) she
burned it totally. Nothing that touched her has ever been properly executed. (Can you) tell me anything about
it?!"
"She knows no limits, she is not
suitable for being a woman. She cannot comb her wool, (with) the spindle she cannot
spin. Her hand does not come to the work: (As soon as she has entered), (she has
already gone home) she has already gone. (The result) is of poor quality.
As soon as she stands around in the
street, she is constantly insulting.
If you were to write a Dialogue between Two Women, would it sound
like this?
Notice that it is not a dialog and
there are not two women talking. There is no discernable storyline and the
debate does not progress in a logical fashion. The sentences can be randomly rearranged
without affecting the overall meaning one iota. This is what happens when you
impose an incorrect context on a tablet that is written about something else.
Compare this to my translation of the
same tablet (click here to view it in a separate tab). It has the same plot
and the same characters (Mulu, Zuzu, and the princess wife) as tablet BE 31,28
(the original story of the Princess Wife). This sequel begins after Mulu has
been banished from the royal court by his wife.
The story of a Donkey Prince, his
wife, a murder plot, and a coup d’état, is a wildly improbable context to begin
with. If I were trying to impose this context on a tablet that was written about
something else, I could not have translated two consecutive sentences. Notice,
however, that the events progress in a logical sequence and the dialogs fit
perfectly within the storyline.
On a final note, Jana frames her translation
as an example of “misogyny and the ideal Sumerian woman.” I believe the
opposite is true. Tablets BE 31,28 and MS 3228 are actually very “pro-feminist.”
In my translation, the princess wife is a strong and independent woman, the
first one in all of world literature. This is one of the reasons why I think
the tablet was written by a woman.
