Ištar and the Transliteration

[sovay]

Back by semi-popular demand, my continuing translation of what Rykle Borger calls, in the text I'm using, Die Höllenfahrt der Göttin Ištar (although the idea of Ištar in a Christian Hell is actually a lot more disturbing than anything I can find in the Mesopotamian underworld). I must warn all prospective readers that there are no zombies in the first thirteen lines of Ištar's Descent. I hope this won't put you off too much.

ana KUR.NU.GI₄.A qaqqari lā târi
^dIštar mārat ^dSîn uzunša iškun
iškunma mārat ^dSîn uzunša
ana bīti etê šubat ^dIrkalla
ana bīti ša ēribušu lā asû
ana hārrani ša alaktaša lā tayyarat
ana bīti ša ēribušu zummū nūra
ašar epru bubūssunu akalšunu tittu
nūru ul immarū ina etûti ašbū
labšūma kīma issūrāti subāt gappi
eli dalti u sikkūri šabuh epru
^dIštar ana bāb KUR.NU.GI₄.A ina kašādiša
ana atû bābi amatum izzakkar . . .

To KUR.NU.GI, land of no return,
Ištar, daughter of Sîn, turned her attention,
the daughter of Sîn turned her attention
to the dark house, the seat of Irkalla,
to the house whose entrants do not come out again,
to the road whose way is without return,
to the house whose entrants are deprived of light,
where dust is their nourishment and clay their food.
They do not see light, they dwell in darkness,
and they are clothed like birds with a garment of wings;
dust has settled on the door and the bolt.
When Ištar came to the gate of the underworld,
she said a word to the keeper of the gate . . .

If there's a serious call for it, I'll even start posting variant lines from the Aššur manuscript. Who else wants to get their Assyriological geek on?

Comments

[catvalente.livejournal.com]

I do, I do!

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

What I've never understood is -- why was she going to the underworld?

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

I never actually answered your question about diacriticals. Sadly, the answer is that I use Character Map, and Windows utility of whose Mac equivalent I am unaware.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

I'm good for some more!

assyriology

[(Anonymous)]

Are the superscript d's supposed to be in there, or are they a formatting error for some sort of diacritical mark? Also (revealing my ignorance) what's the difference between 'ishkun' and 'ishkunma'? Different...aspect?
--Josh (a little too interested in comparative linguistics)

PS Campbell claimed Ishtar was descending to the underworls to pay a friendly visit to Irkalla, her sister. Is this even vaguely accurate?

Re: assyriology

[sovay]

The superscript d's are supposed to be there (and they took me way too long to figure out how to do in HTML): they're standing in for a determinative sign called a dingir, which when placed in front of a name indicates that the name is a divine one. (If you want to see what the sign looks like, go here and look at the tenth sign down in the left-hand column. Its main phonetic values are /an/ and /il/ and its logographic values are AN = the god Anu, AN = šamû ("sky, heavens"), and DINGIR = ilu ("god"). Words in small capitals are Sumerian, italics Akkadian. Let me know if that made any sense at all.) So you see it in front of Ištar's name, in front of the name of the moon-god Sîn, the names of Ištar's sister Ereškigal and Irkalla. There are similar determinatives for ordinary personal names, for male and female, for cities, for countries, and for things made out of wood, like doors.

As for iškun / iškunma, they're the exactly same verb: a third-person preterite of the verb šakānu ("to put, place, set"; uznu is "ear; wisdom, awareness," hence uzunša iškun, "turned her attention"). The added syllable is the enclitic particle -ma that does a whole bunch of things -- including occasionally appearing in a sentence for no identifiable reason -- but here it looks like it's functioning as a conjunctive between verbal clauses. Admittedly the clauses are parallel, but that's my best guess at the minute.

All I've got on the name Irkalla right now is that it's from Sumerian IRI.GAL (or URU.GAL), which means "great city." So this may be something to do with the idea that the dead outnumber the living -- the same way the Romans call the dead plures, "the many" -- but I can't tell you if it's another name for Ereškigal or what. I can certainly try to find out.

Hope some of this was useful . . .

[(Anonymous)]

ok. So "ma" functions somewhat like Latin "-met" and something like all those greek particles I could never keep track of.
re: d's: yeah, that makes sense.
And no, that wasn't too much information. Thanks! --J

[sovay]

The Reallexikon der Assyriologie in the Babylonian Collection has an entry for Irkalla as "a name of the underworld." So I don't know how the divine-name determinative got in there; perhaps the same way that Hades starts out properly as the name of the god whose house the underworld is, and then later becomes a name for the underworld itself? Only in reverse?

When Odysseus says in Odyssey 10.502 that "no one ever came to Hades' in a dark ship" (εἰς Ἄϊδος δ' οὔ πώ τις ἀφίκετο νηὶ μελαίνῃ), the phrase εἰς Ἄϊδος doesn't mean "to Hades," the god, but "to Hades' [house]." (As in, "I was at Josh's over the weekend," although I'm somewhat doubtful that many people spend their weekends at Hades'. Or at least come back to talk about the experience.) At some point that distinction collapses; the name has passed into English as a word for the underworld or even hell. I don't want to draw too much of a parallel, however; I have no more information about the name Irkalla at the moment, and zero evidence that the phrases "the seat (šubtu, "seat, dwelling, residence") of Irkalla" and "the house of Hades" are related in anything more than an East Face of Helicon "Look! A Near Eastern Parallel! Okay, next one . . ." sort of fashion. But it seemed worth at least mentioning.

And that's what I found in the Reallexikon this afternoon . . .