The storm god Iškur is trapped in the netherworld. Without him in the sky, the rivers will dry up—the grasses, cows and people will die. A lone Fox volunteers to traverse worlds to rescue him, armed only with his cunning.
Tales of trickster foxes have appeared in myths around the world for millennia, but University of Chicago Sumerologist Jana Matuszak has possibly uncovered the oldest one.
In a recent paper published in Iraq, Matuszak presents the first full translation of a fragmented cuneiform tablet from the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur. Though partially translated since 1950, Matuszak has revealed the most complete version of a Sumerian myth nearly lost to time.
“It's the only known narrative that features the Sumerian storm god. There are no other myths that mention him,” said Matuszak, an assistant professor of Sumerology in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. “And, of course, it's the first known narrative of a cunning fox. That shows us that this association of the fox with cleverness and trickster actions goes back well into the third millennium B.C.E.”
‘The devil’s in the details’
The Sumerian language has been dead for 4,000 years. Spoken by the people of Sumer, an ancient Mesopotamian civilization in modern-day Iraq, it is one of the world’s oldest recorded languages. It is also considered an isolate, meaning it’s not related to any known language.
This makes translating Sumerian literature incredibly difficult. When it came to translating the clay tablet known as Ni 12501, Matuszak had an even bigger challenge.
“Most of what we commonly think of as Sumerian literature comes from around 1800 B.C.E. This text is a lot earlier,” said Matuszak, who specializes in translating unknown texts. “Generally, the very earliest Sumerian literary texts are much less understood than the later texts.”
According to Matuszak, that’s because early cuneiform, the script used to write Sumerian, leaves a lot to interpretation.
“Because of the ambiguities of the cuneiform script, the devil is really in the details,” Matuszak said.
To translate Sumerian, one has to inhabit the mind of an ancient scholar. Though people stopped speaking Sumerian four millennia ago, it was still preserved as a written language. The ancient Babylonians used Sumerian for scholarly and religious texts—similar to how the Catholic church uses Latin.
“We're kind of learning Sumerian the way that Babylonians learned it,” Matuszak said.
The myth
Tablet Ni 12501 was first noticed by famed Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer. It even graced the cover of his 1956 book, one of many popularizing Sumerian history and literature.
Kramer, followed by several scholars, translated the narrative’s clearest parts. But their limited understanding of early Sumerian made a full translation impossible until now.
In the myth, Iškur the storm god is trapped in the Kur, or the netherworld. His father Enlil, the king of the gods in the Sumerian pantheon, summons a divine assembly to rescue his son.
But only Fox steps up. Fox journeys to the Kur and is offered food—a potentially deadly trap. If Fox eats the food of the underworld, he can never go back to the world of the living (possibly the first story to use the motif). Cleverly, Fox pretends to accept the food, but hides it instead.
Matuszak is the first to translate the story’s beginning and end.
“It starts with this image of rivers being full of water and teeming with fish, which is how Sumerians would have conceptualized abundance—plenty of water and multicolored cows grazing on grass,” Matuszak said. “I think it's very important for understanding the story, because it frames everything in a time of abundance and bliss.”
This beginning serves as a contrast to the disaster caused by the storm god’s disappearance. Without him, no rain can fall from the sky, causing drought and starvation.
Matuszak is also the first to fully unravel Fox's ruse, positing this myth as the first to establish the fox as a trickster.
“There's one cuneiform sign for Fox, which is also used to write the Sumerian words: lie, treacherous and falsehood,” Matuszak said. “So, this association of Fox and falseness probably goes back into even the fourth millennium B.C.E.”
The recovered myth has received lots of attention, especially the revelation of the fox trickster.
“It makes me very happy to see that people relate to Sumerian literature,” Matuszak said. “People feel like, ‘Wow, I know about cunning foxes and their treacherous nature and Sumerians, more than 4,000 years ago, thought the same way.’”
However, the myth’s ending remains a mystery. Matuszak estimates that only a third of the tablet survived. But she has faith in Fox.
“I'm pretty optimistic that he'll manage to get out in the end,” she said. “He's too smart to fall into the trap.”
