This delightful composition is cast in the form of a monologue spoken by a fisherman who has built a fish trap. The fisherman addresses the fish exactly as if they were humans, and describes the trap as if it were a welcoming human house, into which he tries to lure the fish. Many different kinds are specified, and are described in vivid and probably humorous terms. Mostly the varieties cannot be securely identified with modern species, so here their names are left in Sumerian. There is an intimate lexical relationship between the names of the fish enumerated here and those in the traditional list of fish, one among the many word lists which had been learnt for centuries by apprentice scribes in Mesopotamian schools. This strongly suggests that the composition had been adapted for school use by incorporating extra pedagogical material.
Finally the fisherman suggests to the fish that they would actually be safer in the ‘home’ he has built for them, as if they remain in the river they are in constant danger of being snatched up in the claws of any one of several predatory birds. And by entering the trap, they will actually give pleasure to Nanse, the goddess of fish and fishermen.
As with the pastoral compositions that are set in the world of shepherds and cowherds (see Groups B and F), this evocation of the fisherman’s life has a characteristic tone of a whole group of Sumerian literary compositions (see The debate be'tween Bird and Fish, The heron and the turtle). We can assume that in reality these rural worlds of fowlers, fishermen, and pastoralists were some distance removed from the everyday experience of the literate copyists and urban consumers of this literature.
World History
