Talk:Eridu Genesis/Discussion relating to page creation

Material relating to the Sumerian tablet.[edit]

Proposal for splitting the material related to the Flood story to the article on the tablet, rather than having both the person and the story/tablet on the same page. It's two topics, like Gilgamesh and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Sumerophile (talk) 23:13, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

There are four separate issues involved:

1. The first issue is whether there is a need for two separate articles, one for Ziusudra the person, and one for the Epic of Ziusudra story/tablet. I agree that a new article that expands on the Ziusudra story/tablet would be appropriate. It could be based on Prof. Civil's article on the Ziusudra tablet (inserted on pages 138-139 in the book Atrahasis by Profs W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard). English translations of the tablet of Ziusudra could be included in the new Wiki article, because the surviving text of the Ziusudra tablet is short.
2. The second issue is what to name the new article. The name Sumerian Origin Legend suggests a legend about the origins of the Sumerians, which would be a worthy article to write, but is not what you meant. Such an origins article could be based on the first chapter of Gwendolyn Leick's Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City.
3. The third issue is what to do about the Ziusudra article. Since there are only a few lines that summarize the Ziusudra flood myth, you don't mean split; you mean expand in another article. The Ziusudra article fills a need to summarize, on one page, the various versions of the Ancient Near East flood myth.
4. The fourth issue is the title of the Ziusudra article. The earlier discussion in the summer of 2006 shows the compromise that was reached. I preferred to name it the Sumerian flood myth, but the other people wanted the hero's name as the name of the article, so we agreed on Ziusudra because Utnapishtim would have been a worse choice.

Since your new article will expand on the Epic of Ziusudra story/tablet, why not call the new article the "Epic of Ziusudra"? In the Ziusudra article it would say "Main article: Epic of Ziusudra".

Greensburger (talk) 06:23, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'll go point by point:

1) The tablet, an important and well-known archaeological document, covers more characters and topics than just Ziusudra the person/king/hero, and Ziusudra is mentioned in more places than just the tablet. These are two intersecting topics, rather than being the same thing, or one topic being a subtopic of the other.

The tablet article should firstly be based on the the tablet itself. It's translation is available here from Oxford ([1]).

2) I am proposing the title "Sumerian origin legend", not "The origins of Sumer". The book you cite is covered under the History of Sumer.

3) Ziusudra will be a shorter article, but he was mentioned in other sources as well, and his place in the flood legend will be given. The different versions of the flood myth can be covered under the Legacy topic in story's article.

4) The title of the Ziusudra article will remain Ziusudra. The flood material, however, should be included in the story's article, not the hero's article. Utnapishtim would not be appropriate at all, because that's just a later translation of Ziusudra. Although a flood story was inserted at one point into the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ziusudra story only exists, at this point, within the narrative of this tablet.

Sumerophile (talk) 20:32, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As I'm working on this, something else is concerning me, and perhaps you can shed some light on this, Greensburger: I am not aware of Ziusudra being listed on any of the original Sumerian-language versions of the Sumerian king list, only on later Babylonian/Assyrian/Akkadian-language versions. It suggests that the name was added in at some point to account for the Flood story, because the king list mentions a flood.

Sumerophile (talk) 23:45, 4 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Ziusudra is missing in WB-444 and is present only in WB-62 and Berossus. That does not prove that Ziusudra was a later interpolation, but it does reduce confidence in all of the lists. During the JN and ED I-II periods, king list PNs may have been mostly represented as cylinder and stamp seals, logograms, and pictographs, plus archaic numbers. Syllabic PNs had to wait until the ED IIIa period when syllabic writing was invented. By then, many of the orally transmitted PNs had been forgotten and the surviving PNs may be mostly placeholder names. "Dimuzi the shepherd" may be an example of this transition where shepherd was the logogram name and Dumuzi was one of the few orally transmitted syllabic names. The Egyptian king lists of Manetho have a similar problem and omit Akhetaten. This is probably because Akhetaten's name was erased from monuments. Later story tellers and scribes felt free to coin different placeholder names for the flood hero: (Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, etc). Likewise, the Genesis 5 names are placeholder names. When the Sumerian temples were destroyed in 2004 BCE, the soldiers may have been ordered to destroy all tablets they found, for the same reason that modern revolutionaries destroy records: to prevent landowners from claiming their ancestral land, to prevent taxes and debts from being enforced by creditors, and to prevent proof of royal ancestry. Although it is comforting to imagine that each generation of scribes carefully preserved and added to the Sumerian king list, the surviving Sumerian king lists may be reconstructions by Babylonian scribes from Sumerian tablets that were student exercises written from memory, sometimes faulty memory, and survived in nearly undamaged condition only because they were much more numerous than official records and had been buried centuries earlier after baking in the sun with other trash.

Greensburger (talk) 06:51, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest that the later interpolation of "Ziusudra" in the WB-62 text reduces confidence in the WB-62 text itself, not in all the other, basically consistent texts that have come down to us. And Berossus is a Helenistic writer, after even the Bible. You yourself have been critiquing his writing in Wikipedia.

Can you give me more information the WB-62 text/tablet(s)? A quick on-line search told me that it's provinence was unknown (i.e. that it has no archeological context). One online site even listed the pre-dynastic kings as given on WB-62, and listed Ziusudra's predecessor as "Suruppak" - that's the city of the last kingship before the flood, not a person. Does the WB-62 really say this?? Has this tablet been translated and published?

I would also like to point out that nobody thinks that the Chinese cannot remember personal names (PNs) or need placeholders, and they have a logographic script.

And please don't use "may be" and "may have been" arguments here. That is original research.

Sumerophile (talk) 17:52, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Has the name Ziusudra appeared in a total of only two (very late, and possibly questionable) sources out of the many?

Sumerophile (talk) 21:35, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

> Can you give me more information the WB-62 text/tablet(s)?

I don't know the source of WB-62, but it was published in: S. Langdon, "The Chaldean Kings Before the Flood", Journal of Royal Asiatic Society (1923), pages 251-259 in The Weld-Blundell Collection, II Historical Inscriptions Containing Principally the Chronological Prisma. It was also published on page 366 in Gerhard F. Hasel, "Genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 and their alleged Babylonian Background", Andrews University Seminary Studies, 16 (1978), pages 361-374.

> ...The pre-dynastic kings given on WB-62, and listed Ziusudra's predecessor as "Suruppak" - that's the city of the last kingship before the flood, not a person.

This is what Prof Andrew George said in his The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform, pages 154-155:

"In one list of antediluvian kings, however, this twosome is accidently developed into a family of three generations:

Šuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu: 28,800 years;

Ziusudra, son of Šuruppak: 36,000 years;

two kings [in] Šuruppak...

The first of these lines may incidently be the source of SB Gilgames XI 23: "O man of Šuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu" The development of the genealogy from one of two generations to one of three generations appears to have taken place as a result of the misunderstanding of the toponym Šuruppak. The name Ubar-Tutu is of a type common in the earliest Akkadian onomasticon and means 'friend of the god Tutu'."

[end of quote from Prof. George]

Note his word "accidently". A scribe accidently read the first line as: "Šuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu" instead of "O man of Šuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu", thus by implication, making the next king Ziusudra a son of Shuruppak.

Also note that Ubar-Tutu is not a personal name but rather is an epithet of an unnamed king in WB-444. But the king is named Su-Kur-Lam in WB-62. (see Langdon, cited above, page 258, in note 5 in which Langon says: "Written SU-KUR-LAM").

> Has the name Ziusudra appeared in a total of only two (very late, and possibly questionable) sources out of the many?

How many times does the name Akhetaten appear in the Egyptian king lists of Manetho? If most of the records containing the names Su-Kur-Lam and Ziusudra were destroyed in the river flood of 2900 BCE, that does not make the only surviving record and a later Greek copy worthless. Does the one surviving copy of the Ziusudra Epic become worthless because only one copy survived?

Greensburger (talk) 01:02, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So Ziusudra was only mentioned in a questionable Hellenistic source and on one tablet with no provinence that is so faulty as to in fact list Shuruppak as a king. And the original research that somehow turns Shuruppak into Su-kur-lam isn't allowed at Wikipedia. It sounds like "Ziusudra" should simply be an asterisk in the Tablet article.

Sumerophile (talk) 02:04, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The scribe did not list Shuruppak as a king. The scribe accidently omitted the words "man of" before the word Shuruppak and that caused modern scholars to mistranslate the error. Even if you disregard Langdon, George's explanation is that a scribe made a small error and the first Shuruppak king was not a son of Shuruppak. But he was a friend of the god [dingir] Tutu. Having said that, Langdon can then be cited as a source that the first Shuruppak king was Su-Kur-Lam. To quote two different scholars commenting on the same line of text is not original research. Langdon and George did the research.

Greensburger (talk) 02:39, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A scribe not knowing what Shuruppak was and making two lines of omissions and errors that turn a city name into a king and Ziusudra into the son of that city name is exactly what makes this text unreliable.

And you can't just use a 1923 pronounciation of the cuneiform symbols to create a new king Su-kur-lam, when currently the word is read Shuruppak.

Sumerophile (talk) 03:40, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sumerophile, what is your point? As Greensburger told you, to quote two different scholars commenting on the same line of text is not original research. Langdon and George did the research. You seem to be the one being argumentative here, while all Greensburger is doing is pointing to academic literature.

dab (𒁳) 12:34, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The point is that Greensburger created a new king (Su-kur-lam) using a 1923 translation of the WB-62 tablet, which was not well understood at the time so the translator had to guess at the pronounciation (and meaning) of many of the cuneiform symbols. The word is now recognized to read "Shuruppak", the city (as per George, the 2003 source quoted above), which the scribe who wrote the tablet mistakenly added as a king. Using an outdated translation of a text to create a king that never existed is original research.

Sumerophile (talk) 19:27, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

no, it's a reference to a dated source. Your claim that it is "outdated" is what needs attribution. If you cite some more recent paper saying it is outdated, we can handled the outdated form accordingly, such as, duh, labelling it as outdated. dab (𒁳) 21:38, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Any more recent translation of a text in a growing field like Assyriology outdates the previous ones. Our knowledge of the language has grown over the last 80 years, with cumulative archaeological finds and continued research. A 1923 text on an archaeological dig would still have currency today. A translation of a cuneiform tablet would not.

And just because somebody quotes academic sources, doesn't mean that they are academic or that their theories are sound. This is not a case of an outdated academic view; this a fringe POV [2] making selective use of academic materials for its basis.

Sumerophile (talk) 17:51, 8 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to merge Ziusudra into Eridu Genesis[edit]

Proposal to merge the Ziusudra article into the Eridu Genesis article.

Sumerophile (talk) 00:29, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

um, correct me, but right above you argued for a split into two articles, and now you are arguing to merge them again? What is going on here? --dab (𒁳) 12:41, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I removed the split tag, and updated the merge tag to direct to Eridu Genesis.

I also put all the material we that have on Ziusudra in the in the "Ziusudra and Xisuthros" section of the Eridu Genesis article.

The Ziusudra article digresses considerably from the topic at hand, and includes original research to promulgate a fringe theological POV: that Noah was Ziusudra and was the king of Shuruppak in 2900 BC when the Sumerian river flood occurred. Details on this POV, and its book [3], which is referenced in this article, can be found at its website [4].

Sumerophile (talk) 20:40, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

OK I will redirect the page tomorrow. Sumerophile (talk) 17:32, 9 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think I finally see where you are coming from, but you are completely mistaken. I fail to see any suggestion that "Noah was Ziusudra" or of any identifiable historical flood in this article. All that it discusses is that one myth was influenced by the other. I do not think this should be redirected to Eridu Genesis. If anything, if you feel Eridu Genesis shouldn't stand on its own, merge it back here. dab (𒁳) 17:44, 9 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Myth comparisons don't belong in a "Ziuzudra" article. Comparing and contrasting themes between the Flood myths should be discussed in the Deluge (mythology) article. And these textual comparisons don't even make sense: a 6-day flood is compared to the Biblical 40-day flood, and the concept of sacrificing to the god(s) and the god(s) smelling the sweet savor are found throughout the Bible and throughout mythology. Atra-hasis, Utnapishtim, Noah and Xisuthros synopses are already under their respective articles. His "re-interpretation" of ancient numbers in Xisuthros is original research and should not be in Wikipedia. His discussion of river floods under Atra-hasis is trivial and serves only to support part of his theories.

And the key to his entire theory hinges on Ziusudra's inclusion in one faulty king list, discussed above and in the "Eridu Genesis" article. This is stated in this paragraph, in the article:

The importance of Ziusudra's name on the king list is that it links the flood mentioned in the Epics of Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim, etc. to river flood sediments in Shuruppak, Uruk, and Kish that have been radio carbon dated as 2900 BC. So scholars conclude that the flood hero was king of Shuruppak at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period (3000-2900) which ended with the river flood of 2900 BC.[5]

That's an "identifiable historic flood in this article".

I don't think Greensburger is so naive as to spell out "Noah was Ziusudra" in Wikipedia, but this article's only purpose is to make his case for it.

Everything belonging in Wikipedia is in the Eridu Genesis article.

Sumerophile (talk) 18:44, 9 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sumerophile, I appreciate your scepticism, but you need to watch your approach. You are most welcome to show certain references cited fall under WP:UNDUE, but you cannot expect everyone to just take your word for it. You want to represent scholarly consensus? Then WP:CITE scholarly consensus. I don't care if Greensburger privately thinks that "Noah was Ziusudra", the important thing is that he recognizes that this doesn't belong on Wikipedia. It was you who split the Eridu Genesis article off this one. If you now changed your mind and think that specific text doesn't warrant a full article, I invite you to revert yourself and redirect it back here. If you want wider input on this, I invite you to post the issue at WP:FTN. --dab (𒁳) 12:40, 10 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No I think Ziusudra does not warrent a full article.

This article diverges from the topic of Ziusudra. Atra-hasis, Utnapishtim, Xisuthros, Noah all have their own articles. What's left is covered under the Ziusudra and Xisuthros section of the Eridu Genesis article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sumerophile (talk • contribs) 15:51, 10 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References:

Current Oxford translation of the Eridu Genesis: The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Current standard compilation of king lists from Oxford: ETCSL

Sumerophile (talk) 18:13, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

ok, how about we settle for an all-inclusive title like Sumerian Flood myth? dab (𒁳) 19:58, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have two thoughts about the title:

The tablet and its text have been labelled the Eridu Genesis, but I think that makes it sound derivative of a later work.
The tablet also includes a Creation myth, and I think just labelling it Flood myth would gloss over that. Usually Flood myths are a part of Creation myths, rather than the other way around, so I'd suggest rather Sumerian Creation myth.

However I'm not that picky about the title, just the Fringe POV. Sumerophile (talk) 21:10, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]