Sumerian fables

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As Sumerian fables in are Sumerian wrote fables called. The texts that have been preserved come from Mesopotamia , mainly from Nippur and Ur . They date mainly from the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. And are thus the oldest traditional fables.

overview

In fables, instead of people, personified animals, plants or objects appear as acting and speaking persons, in some cases people or gods are also involved. The demarcation of the sometimes short fables from the proverbs is difficult and was not made by the Sumerians themselves. There is no separate word for fable in the Sumerian language and there are no Sumerian text collections that exclusively contain fables, but only those where they appear mixed with proverbs.

The fables can be roughly divided into

  • Wellerisms , with an animal speaking, but without interaction
  • short fables in the style of the later Greek fables of Aesops
  • the most developed form of fables, the so-called arguments, in which different animals, plants or even objects compete with each other, extol their merits and highlight the drawbacks of each other

Lore

Personified animals were first mentioned in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. In a myth about Enlil and Nuška , where a fox saves the god Nuška; This story does not yet have the later character of a fable between personified animals. Most of the best known Sumerian fables date from the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. BC and come from ancient Babylonian writing schools, where Sumerian was taught and from which a large part of the Sumerian literature known today originates. Larger collections of texts and proverbs, 23 in total, come from Nippur . In Ur , boards with mostly only a single entry were found, some of which are duplicates of the texts known from Nippur. The exact place of origin is not clear from some other sources.

Few fables are known from later Akkadian and Egyptian sources. Outside of the ancient oriental culture, fables did not return until the 6th century. v. Passed down by the Greeks . Whether they are based on ancient oriental ideas cannot be directly proven, but there are clear parallels between some of Aesop's fables and Sumerian fables. A common origin of the Greek fables and that of the Indian poetry Panchatantra from the 3rd century BC. To look for it in Mesopotamia would therefore be obvious. But the phenomenon of fables could also have arisen universally and independently at different times and places.

Wellerisms

A Wellerism (English wellerism; dt. Also sag word) consists of three elements:

  1. a brief description of the situation,
  2. a direct speech uttered in this situation, usually a proverb, and
  3. an identification of the speaker.

According to Bendt Alster Wisdom of Ancient Sumer , the Wellerisms are not fables.

Examples of Sumerian Wellerisms:

  • A fox urinated in the sea. "The whole sea is my urine," he said.
  • One dog said to its master: "If my pleasure means nothing to you, then neither should my loss."
  • A dog went to a festival. When he saw the bones there, he went away again and said: "Where I go I will get more to eat than that."

Aesopian fables

In the Sumerian literature there are a number of shorter animal fables, which are longer than pure Wellerisms and contain an interaction between two animals. They are intended to amuse and instruct at the same time, are very similar in their style to the later fables of Aesop and in some cases also have extensive content-related equivalents. In contrast to Aesop, however, there is no explicit moral interpretation.

Examples:

  • A lion had caught a helpless kid and it said to him: "Let me go and I will give you my comrade, the ewe." The lion replied: "If I let you go, tell me your name first!" The kid answered the lion: “You don't know my name? I-am-smarter-than-you ( ummu 2 -mu-e-da-ak-e ) is my name. " After the lion came to the sheep pen, he roared: "I have released you!" It replied from the other side: “You released me, but were you smart ( ummu 2 mu-e-ak )? Because the sheep are not here! "
This fable not only shows how prudence triumphs over greed, but is also the oldest known example of a humorous play on words, namely with the kid's name - I'm smarter than you ( ummu 2 mu-e-da-ak-e ) - and the answer to the lion. Were you smart? ( ummu 2 mu-e-ak ), which only differ in the Sumerian original by a small grammatical change.
Aesop tells a similar story: In the Dog and the Wolf , a young dog is caught by a greedy wolf. The wolf finally lets the dog run when the dog holds out the prospect of even bigger prey, which in the end is not granted to him. The motif "greedy lion - clever goat" can also be found in Aesop, in the story The Lion and the Goat , where the lion tries in vain to lure the goat to a juicier meadow where it could eat it.
  • Nine wolves caught ten sheep. One thing was redundant, which is why they did not know how to divide their prey. A fox came to them and said, “Let me share the booty for you. You are nine, take one! I'm alone, let me take nine That would be my favorite part. "
Here you can already see the animals with typical character traits, as they are still attributed to them in modern fables: the cunning fox, who wants to get their prey through as little work as possible and the wolves, which are stronger and in the majority, but not as clever as the fox. Another issue that comes up here is the problem of dividing up the prey. If one interprets the arguments of the fox in such a way that 9 (wolves) + 1 (sheep) = 1 (fox) + 9 (sheep), then this would be the oldest mention of the commutativity of adding whole numbers in a text.
  • An elephant spoke to itself and said: "Among the wild animals of Šakan there is none that can be compared to me." A wren answered him: "But yes, in my own circumstances I am equal to you."
So the moral of the story is that all things must be seen in their relative size. The fables also exist in an Akkadian translation and an additional Akkadian variant with a different punchline:
A wren sat on the head of an elephant and said, “Am I bothering you? I'll fly away at the waterhole. " The elephant replied to the wren: "I neither notice when you are sitting there - what should it be to carry you - nor do I notice when you are flying away."
This variant has an equivalent in Aesops Die Mücke und der Stier , but with a bull instead of an elephant and a mosquito instead of a bird.

Disputes

Two animals, plants or objects boast of their advantages and portray their opponents as poorly as possible. Often times, however, it is not just a mere argument and the animals actually do harm to each other. Finally, the case of a deity is brought forward who makes the final decision.

As an example, the argument between bird and fish is shown in more detail: First, a part of creation is briefly shown and that the fish laid its eggs in the lagoons, the bird made its nest in the reeds. The fish gets upset about the bird and accuses it, among other things, of making noise in the swamps, of devouring everything greedily and of damaging the planting fields. The bird is self-confident and replies to the fish that it smells bad and that the bird is the animal that pursues and eats the fish and that it is a beautiful and clever bird whose song even pleases the gods. After one reply, the fish decides to take revenge on the bird; when the bird is absent, it overturns its nest and throws the eggs into the water. The indignant bird then insults the fish and the fish pulls the case before the god Enki , who decides in favor of the bird whose song it pleases.

A variant of this story is the heron and the turtle , where the turtle takes over the part of the fish. She is portrayed as contentious and vicious and destroys the heron's nest twice. The heron finally seeks support from the gods, who intervene. Unfortunately, the end of the story has not been preserved.

Further disputes have come down to us for hoe and plow , grain and sheep , winter and summer , copper and silver, and for date palm and tamarisk (only a fragment).

There is still no clear answer to whether the disputes (Sumerian a-da-man-du 11 -ga ) are a developed form of the genus Fable or an independent genre. These two opinions have existed since the time of E. Ebeling (q. V. "Fabel" Reallexikon der Assyriologie). Vanstiphout e.g. B. thinks of disputes as an independent genre. See the development of the genre disputes in Arabic literature.

literature

  • Bendt Alster: Wisdom of Ancient Sumer, CDL Press, Bethesda MD 2005, ISBN 1-883053-92-7
  • Bendt Alster: Proverbs of Ancient Sumer. The World's Earliest Proverb Collections. CDL Press, Bethesda MD 2005, ISBN 1-883053-20-X
  • Robert S. Falkowitz: Discrimination and Condensation of Sacred Categories: The Fable in Early Mesopotamian Literature. in: La Fable. Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique. Tome 30. Fondation Hardt, Genève 1984, pp. 1-32
  • Th. JH Krispijn: Dierenfabels in het oude Mesopotamië. in: EL Idema et al .: Mijn naam is haas. Dierenverhalden in schillende cultures. Ambo, Baarn 1993, pp. 131-148
  • Wilfried G. Lambert: Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1960, ISBN 0-931464-94-3
  • Imre Trencscényi-Waldappel: An Aesopian Fable and its Oriental Parallels. in: Acta antiqua Academiae scientiarum Hungaricae 7 (1959) pp. 317-327

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Robert S. Falkowitz: Discrimination and condensation of Sacred Categories: The Fable in Early Mesopotamian Literature and ETCSL Proverbs: collection 5116
  2. ↑ ETCSL Proverbs: collection 5.78
  3. ↑ ETCSL Proverbs: collection 5116
  4. ^ Bendt Alster: Wisdom of Ancient Sumer , p. 362 and ETCSL: Proverbs: collection 5.55
  5. ^ Bendt Alster: Wisdom of Ancient Sumer , p. 363 and ETCSL: Proverbs: collection 5.x5
  6. ↑ Hans Baumann: In the land of Ur. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968, p. 105
  7. ↑ Bendt Alster: Wisdom of Ancient Sumer , p. 366 and ETCSL: Proverbs: collection 5.1 (variant)
  8. ↑ Herman LJ Vanstiphout: disputation between Bird and Fish. in: William W. Hallo (ed.): Context of Scripture. Brill, Leiden 1997, pp. 581-584 and ETCSL 5.9.1
  9. ^ Gene B. Gragg: The Fable of the Heron and the Turtle. in: Archiv für Orientforschung 24 (1973), pp. 51–72 and ETCSL 5.9.2
  10. ↑ ETCSL 5.3