This first Lugalbanda narrative divides into two sections, focusing initially on a military campaign being led against the legendary and remote city of
Aratta by Enmerkar, the king of Unug. It soon shifts mood to concentrate on an illness suffered by one of his commanders, Lugalbanda, whose holiness and purity are emphasized as distinctive throughout the poem.
However, before either protagonist makes his appearance, the poem places the events about to be narrated in an imagined time when the world was first created and Unug was the dominant city in Sumer. In those days, continues the poem, Enmerkar set off at the head of his troops to wage war on Aratta. Half-way there, however, and in the middle of the mountains, illness overcomes Lugalbanda and, in the words of the poem, ‘his mouth bit the dust, like a gazelle caught in a snare’. Left alone in a cave by his companions, Lugalbanda waits in this mountainous wilderness, now envisaged as outside the natural constraints of place and time, to see whether the deities will bring him recovery or death.
A trilogy of prayers—first to the sun-god Utu as he is setting, next to the goddess Inana as manifested in the evening star, and finally to the moon-god Suen—brings Lugalbanda life rather than death and in gratitude he praises the rising sun. Restored to life, he remains alone and has to fend for himself, discovering skills in fire-making, cooking, and trapping animals. A dream comes to him during the next night, advising him to sacrifice the animals, and the next day the principal deities of the Sumerian pantheon enjoy the banquet that he has prepared for them. The events of the following night remain poorly understood but have been interpreted as representing some form of cosmic conflict, resolved by the fresh appearance of the sun-god on the next day. The conclusion of the narrative has so far not been recovered.
World History
