Enmerkar and En-suhgir-ana gives narrative expression to the supremacy of Unug, the idealised Sumerian city, over its rival Aratta. The poem begins by praising Unug and its god-like ruler Enmerkar, before introducing the first in a series of three contests between him and En-suhgir-ana, his adversary in Aratta.
The opening contest takes the form of claims conveyed by the rulers’ messengers. The lord of Aratta dictates his message first, declaring that he is the favoured sexual partner of the goddess Inana. Tumbling across space in a sequence of vivid similes, a messenger races to Unug where he delivers his lord’s challenge. Enmerkar, however, is unperturbed: he retorts that he was brought up by deities and that Unug is Inana’s earthly home.
En-suhgir-ana concedes that his message has been surpassed but vows that he will never submit to the lord of Unug. Help is at hand from a sorcerer named Ur-girnuna whose opposition to Unug is conveyed to En-suhgir-ana by his minister. The second contest now begins: a series of speeches tells how the sorcerer inverts the fertility of Sumer, focusing on the city of EreS whose patron deity is Nisaba, the goddess ofwriting and thus of both literature and the bureaucracy essential to successful agricultural administration. The consequences of this inversion of the natural order are conveyed in desolate images of silent sheepfolds and empty milk-churns that occur in such other compositions as the Lament for Sumer and Urim (Group D). In Enmerkar and En-suhgir-ana, however, the generalizing imagery is supplemented by references to the predicament of specific individuals.
The sorcerer Ur-girnuna wins the second contest for Aratta. However, Sumer too can turn to an individual adept in magical skills, a wise woman known as Sag-buru. Alone by the banks of the Euphrates, the two rivals engage in a third contest, each using fish spawn to create a series of animals. The animals made by Sag-buru consistently surpass those created by Ur-gir-nuna. Defeated, the sorcerer pleads for mercy, but his threat to the natural— and thus divine—order allows no forgiveness and he is killed by Sag-buru. En-suhgir-ana responds with his final message to the lord of Unug, now praising Enmerkar as his superior.
The poem concludes with one line in praise of the goddess Nisaba, preceded by two lines whose implications are less certain. These refer to the composition as an adamin, ‘debate’. More often, however, this term was applied to compositions, such as the Debate between Bird and Fish (Group G), in which the contest takes the form of verbal jousting between two anthropomorphized aspects of nature, and a deity decides which of the two has precedence.
World History
