16. The great city gate and the highways with the dead are choked up.
17. duk?-tun-sìr-gim dū-a-ba [sag-bal-e] ba-ab- gar
17. Like a leather vessel all of her the usurper cast asunder(?)
18. [ ] e-sir gĭr-gál-la-ba àd im-ma-an-gar-gar
18. In her ... streets and roads corpses he heaped up(?)
Liturgical Hymns of the Tammuz Cult. 3656 (Myhrman No. 5)
The obverse of this fine single column tablet contained a hymn in thirty-eight lines to the departed Tammuz. It represents the people wailing for the lord of life who now sleeps in the lower world. Thirteen lines have been completely broken away from the top. The reverse carried a long liturgical song of the cult of this god in which the mother goddess is represented wailing for her ravished lover. Songs of the weeping mother are common enough in these wailings for Tammuz, but all other known examples of this motif represent the major unmarried type of mother goddess Innini-Ishtar wandering on earth, crying for her departed son. The hymn on our tablet reveals in a wholly unexpected manner the close relation between the mother goddess Gula of Isin and Innini. It was known that both sprang from a common source, a prehistoric unmarried goddess, but one had hardly supposed that the liturgists went so far as to introduce [pg 286] the married goddess of Isin in the rôle of the virgin mother Innini. The great mother divinity of Isin, although attached in a loose way to a male consort Ninurta, in that city retained, nevertheless, much of her ancient unattached character. In the standard liturgies she is almost invariably the type of Weeping mother, whereas Innini is this type in the Tammuz liturgies. Since Gula of Isin was the ordinary liturgical type we find the influence of the ordinary liturgies effective in the composition of the Tammuz hymn. It explains the extraordinary phenomenon of the introduction of a long passage (Rev. 3-10) from one of the wailing liturgies. And the short litany refrain lines 11-20 is obviously an imitation of numberless similar passages of the ordinary liturgies in which the goddess wails for various temples; here only for Nippur and Isin, since the composition was written for the services at Nippur in the period of the Isin dynasty. In a most gratifying manner our tablet shows how the lamentations of the mother goddess in the canonical prayer books express sorrows for certain concrete misfortunes and certain defined temples and cities and find their general expression in the lamentations for Tammuz, the representative of all human vicissitudes. This edition has been made from my own copy. The tablet was first published by Myhrman, PBS. Vol. I No. 5, and by Radau, BE. 30 No. 2. To these copies I have been able to make only slight additions.
Hymns of the Tammuz Cult
1. KU-? [ ]