Lament for Sumer and Ur

The Lament for Ur at the Louvre Museum in Paris

The lament for Sumer and Urim or the lament for Sumer and Ur is a poem and one of five known Mesopotamian "city laments"—dirges for ruined cities in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess.

The other city laments are:

  • The Lament for Ur
  • The Lament for Nippur
  • The Lament for Eridu
  • The Lament for Uruk

In 2004 BCE, during the last year of King Ibbi-Sin's reign, Ur fell to an army from the east.[1] The Sumerians decided that such a catastrophic event could only be explained through divine intervention and wrote in the lament that the gods, "An, Enlil, Enki and Ninmah decided [Ur's] fate"[2]

The literary works of the Sumerians were widely translated (e.g. by the Hittites, Hurrians and Canaanites), and the world-renowned expert in Sumerian history, Samuel Noah Kramer, wrote that later Greek as well as Hebrew texts "were profoundly influenced by them."[3] Contemporary scholars have drawn parallels between the lament and passages from the bible (e.g. "the Lord departed from his temple and stood on the mountain east of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 10:18-19)."[4]

References

  1. ↑ The lamentation over the destruction of Sumer and Ur, Piotr Michalowski, 1989, pg. 1
  2. ↑ Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, By Jeffrey Jay Niehaus, 2008, 117
  3. ↑ The Sumerians: Their history, culture and character, Samuel Noah Kramer, pg.196, http://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/sumerians.pdf
  4. ↑ Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, By Jeffrey Jay Niehaus, 2008, 118
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