Poems of lament over the destruction of a temple or city, the death of an individual or king, or the god Dumuzi were a common genre in Mesopotamia. One rare example from Egypt is a late text The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, which mourns Osiris. The text was perhaps adapted for private funerary services as well (Lichtheim 1980: 116-21). The Hebrew Bible has a few examples of the lament, the book of Lamentations mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and congregational laments in Psalms 44, 74, 79, 80, and 83. The book of Lamentations shares with the Mesopotamian city laments its basic theme: a city is allowed by its god to be destroyed by enemies.
The most important Mesopotamian laments can be divided into liturgical or cultic laments, and city laments. The genre ofcultic laments had a ritual function and includes different kinds of subgenres, especially the b a l a g compositions (laments for a harp or drum, Cohen 1988) and the e r s e m m a hymns (‘‘wail of the s e m - drum,’’ Cohen 1981). The city laments were literary works copied only during a short period of time, and they may never have been performed (Tinney 1996: 47-53). The Curse of Agade laments the fall of the Sargonic dynasty to the Gutians and depicts Naram-Sin as the victim of his own hubris (Cooper 1983).
The Destruction of Ur and the Nippur Lament are written in the Emesal dialect and were sung by women, goddesses, or special singers (Tinney 1996). The s u i 11 a or ‘‘hand-lifting’’ prayers were compositions in this dialect seeking appeasement of a deity for the community, while the Akkadian prayers of the same name were for the distress of the individual.
Other Mesopotamia laments include those over the dying and resurrecting god Dumuzi, as well as laments for kings such as The Death of Ur-Nammu. Laments include two elegies and a poignant composition for the death of a woman in childbirth. Individual laments are also found in both private and royal letter-prayers, as well as in the ersahunga prayers (‘‘wail for the appeasing of the heart,’’ Maul 1988), a subgenre of a very personal nature popular during the first millennium bce, in which sins are confessed to god (Hallo 1995).
Hittite prayers often occur in other kinds of texts like rituals and oracles, but some are independent, such as the prayers of specific kings. There are three types of prayers in Hittite, with native names: the prayer of defense, the invocation of a deity to approach, and the hymn (de Roos 1995).
World History
