Kesh Temple Hymn

The story

The Kesh temple hymn, also called the Liturgy to Nintud, is a Sumerian hymn written on clay tablets as early as 2600 BCE; with the Instructions of Shuruppak it is the oldest surviving literature in the world. It praises the temple of Kesh, a city whose chief goddess was Nintud. In its 134 lines, formally divided into eight songs or "houses", the god Enlil comes forth, looks over all the lands and speaks the praises of Kesh, and the goddess Nisaba, patron of writing, sets them down on tablets; such a framing makes the text the work of gods, handed down to humans, and so gives it its authority. Each of the eight songs ends with the same three wondering questions about the greatness of Kesh, of its hero Acgi and of its lady Nintud.

Fragments were found among the tablets that the University of Pennsylvania Museum excavated from the temple library at Nippur in present-day Iraq. Hugo Radau first published one of them in 1909, and Stephen Herbert Langdon translated it in 1915; in 1913 Langdon had already published a translation from a four-sided perforated prism from Nippur in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with some 145 lines in eight sections. He called it "A Liturgy to Nintud, Goddess of Creation" and read its refrain as speaking of the creation of man and woman, the biblical Adam and Eve. George Aaron Barton, translating another tablet in 1918, rejected this: he found no allusion to the creation of man and thought the text celebrated the early state, perhaps the founding, of a town. Edward Chiera, Hermann Volrath Hilprecht, Samuel Noah Kramer and others published further copies, from Nippur and from the Istanbul, Paris, London and Baltimore collections, and more came from excavations at Isin, Kish, Susa and Ur. Miguel Civil produced a composite text in 1992; Gene Gragg, who translated it in 1969, called it one of the best preserved literary texts of the Old Babylonian period.

Robert D. Biggs translated an exceptionally archaic version from Tell Abu Salabikh, which he dated to about 2600 BCE by its likeness to the tablets of Shuruppak; radiocarbon dating of the site later gave 2550–2520 BCE, slightly later than he proposed. Though the Abu Salabikh copies are some eight centuries older than the copies known before, they differ surprisingly little from them except in spelling, so that, as Biggs wrote, the Old Babylonian version is a faithful copy of a text that had already been fixed in the Sumerian literary tradition for centuries. He suggested that Abu Salabikh might be Kesh itself, while noting that it is not near Adab, as Kesh was described, and that "Kesh" might be a variant spelling of Kish.

The hymn moves from Nisaba's record of the choosing and praise of Kesh to the temple's cosmic size, likened to the moon in the sky, reaching up to heaven and down to the underworld, and then to its herds of oxen and sheep, the trees whose wood built it, its gods and functions, and its gate, courtyard, doors and walls at its dedication. Jeremy Black suggests it describes the statues of winged lions and wild bulls set at temple entrances, and it tells of music at the temple's ceremonies, of drums and the growl of the bull's horn; Samuel Noah Kramer proposed that its musical terms name hymns sung with the lyre, with a kind of drum and with another string instrument. It ends with an admonition repeated four times, both a warning and an invitation to the divine presence: to come near the city and its temple, and yet not to come near. Such ambivalence about approaching temples has crucially influenced the development of Jewish and Christian mysticism.

Langdon took Nintud, the chief goddess of Kesh, for a form of Ninlil: the Ninlil of Kesh, where her character as goddess of begetting was emphasised, the goddess bearing different names in different places. By the time of the later Babylonian copies Kesh was no longer a major settlement, though Black presumed that the temple of Nintud still worked; Wilfred G. Lambert noted that the sanctuary of Kesh was the centre of the goddess Ninhursag's cult from the Early Dynastic period to the Old Babylonian dynasty, after which it lost its importance. Raymond de Hoop has pointed to close parallels in wording and imagery between the Sumerian temple hymns and the sayings about Joseph and Judah in Genesis 49.

What it says

A hymn in praise of a temple: the house of the goddess Nintud at Kesh, chosen by Enlil and recorded by Nisaba, is praised as a mountain reaching heaven, a crown and a rainbow, founded on the waters below the earth, rich in herds and served by gods and heroes. Its eight songs each close by asking whether anything as great as Kesh, its hero and its lady could ever be born again, and the last warns the worshipper to approach the temple with awe. The mood is solemn, grand and reverent.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.