After the fall first of Kis and then of Unug, according to The cursing of Agade, Enlil accorded the recognized sovereignty over the Land of Sumer to Sargon, king of Agade. At that time Inana set up her shrine at UlmaS in Agade and worked to bring success and prosperity to the city. Naram-Suen succeeded to the kingship ofAgade. Offerings continued to pour into the shrine and Inana was overwhelmed by them. However, no word of approval came from the great god Enlil in his temple E-kur at Nibru. Inana, uneasy, withdrew her patronage and went off to pursue another favourite activity, warfare. The gods Ninurta, Enki, and An all withdrew their marks of favour.
Naram-Suen, in a dream, saw what all this meant and fell into a depression. Eventually he consulted the sacrificial omens twice in succession with the same result: ‘the omen had nothing to say about the building of the temple’. Presumably if Enlil’s recognition of his ‘sovereignty’ had been granted, Naram-Suen would have expected to contribute to the beautification of E-kur. Emboldened to a desperate attempt to reverse the implied judgment of Enlil, Naram-Suen set about attacking and savagely plundering E-kur, the holiest shrine in Sumer. Enlil’s terrible revenge was to loose upon the Land the violence of the barbarian people of Gutium, an invading horde which left the people decimated and all civilized activities cut short. Enlil himself was deeply affected. In an attempt to calm him, the great gods Suen, Enki, Inana, Ninurta, Iskur, Utu, Nuska, and Nisaba pronounced a terrible curse according to which Agade was destined to lie forever in ruins. ‘And before Utu on that very day, so it was!’ Agade was destroyed.
The narrative of The cursing ofAgade is not complex, but the poem juxtaposes a series of vivid, highly-wrought images artfully linked internally by repeated elements. Direct repetition is used much less freely than in some other works. Dialogue is entirely absent, and the only direct speech is the final curses.
The idea of Agade certainly had a hold on the imagination of later Mesopotamian empires. It was known to have been once great, yet with the possible exception of a small religious settlement it seemed to have been completely eclipsed, a striking testament to the mutability of things. (Even its location is unknown to us today.) Interestingly, the literary tradition about the Sargonic dynasty diverges considerably from the historical record revealed by archaeology and contemporary documents. All the Sargonic kings were forgotten except for the names of Sargon and Naram-Suen (see Sargon and Ur-Zababa, Group A). Later traditions about Naram-Suen vary in their evaluation of him. In fact he did rebuild part of the E-kur, as we learn from his own inscriptions found there. The story of its destruction may originate in a rebellion in southern Sumer which he quelled. The devastation of Sumer by Gutium was certainly real enough. These discrepancies show that the composition cannot have been composed all that close to the events it purports to describe, yet there are manuscripts from the period of the Third Dynasty of Urim which confirm its origin in the last century of the third millennium bce. It was widely copied in Old Babylonian schools.
It can be interpreted on one level as a vindication of the idea, current in southern Mesopotamia from at least the time of Sargon’s predecessor, Lugal-zage-si of Unug, onwards, that there could be only one authentic king of the Land at any one time. (In the poem, Agade is regarded as part of the Land: there is no Sumerian-Akkadian antipathy.) This seems to have grown up exactly as the earlier warring city-states of the Early Dynastic period were replaced by large empires. The same theory is also found, for instance, in the Lament for Sumer and Urim (Group D). Crucial to this authenticity was the approval of the god Enlil in Nibru, and this allowed Nibru to become a sort of Holy City, whose inhabitants enjoyed special freedoms.
On a more general level, the poem is a statement of the impermanence of good fortune, and the subjugation of mankind to the divine will, the changes ofwhich appear to humans as largely arbitrary. Unusually explicit in the poem are the statements that the invasion of Gutium and the cursing of Agade are specifically in revenge for the destruction of E-kur (lines 151, 212 ff.), reinforcing the rule that sacrilegious behaviour can expect retribution.
World History
