Prayers to the Personal God

[david]

I thought I had already made this thread, but, it seems to have disappeared, but, does anyone know of where I can see some examples of Sumerian/Mesopotamian Prayers to the Personal God, as I'd like to understand how they were layed out.

Thanks for any help.

David.

[us4-he2-gal2]

_______________________________________


Reviewing:


Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The continuation of a Tradition



By W. W. Hallo

_________________________

David:


I have reviewed the above article by W.W. Hallo in which he does talk about a corpus of prayer texts of a sort. He begins by relating that the texts under consideration were compared to the Biblical Psalms in the 1920s and 30s. However, it's explained that in the subsequent scholarship of the 40s attention was directed away from the Mesopotamian texts on this matter and toward certain Ugaritic texts which displayed a clearly relation with the Biblical material, though in final verdict even these Ugaritic texts turned out to be "neither hymns nor prayers."
Hallo then turns to more recent comparisons between Mesopotamian texts and Biblical examples conducted in the decade of his writing (1960s) and finds a resurgence of interest as well as more reliable and consistent methodology. He notes, however, that this sort of effort is still frustrated by the fact that Mesopotamian literature "is not monolithic in terms of its genres" neither was there "a single non-changing canon throughout the nearly three millennia of it's attested existence." Thus one has for example an Akkadian canon of texts which originated in Old Babylonian times, A Bilingual Sumero-Akkadian cannon from Middle Babylonian times, and another example given is an earlier Sumerian body of texts which may have been put together by the Sargonic kings: since sometimes these cannons will to show up in the libraries of later kings in later periods... it can be daunting to form a proper study in short.
However, for this study, Hallo is interested in a fourth cannon - Texts originating in the Neo-Sumerian period which were worked into a scholarly curriculum in the Old Babylonian period. Luckily we are all familiar with many of these texts over at ETCSL. Of the large body of texts recovered and being studied from the corpus by scholars, Hallo says that M. Lambert has recognized 15 genres of texts, some religious genres some not religious. The are eight non-religious genres of text are as follows:

• myths
  
• epics
  
• 3 types of Wisdom literature
  
• love poems
  
• catalogue texts
  
• "Learned and Scientific Texts"

[/color]

The seven Neo-Sumerian genres of text which are considered religious genres are as follows:

[/li][li] lamentations (See ETCSL link
[/li][li] hymns to gods (ETCSL link
[/li][li] hymns to temples (ETCSL link
[/li][li] liturgies (Referring to public ritual, this may mean documentation relating to festival proceedings and the like)
[/li][li] royal hymns (See "Royal praise Poetry")
[/li][li] "those devoted to the philosophy of history"
[/li][li] religious philosophy
[/color]
[/li][/ul]


However, in all of this, we have not really seen something identifiable as a "Individual prayer" such as the title of Hallo's article suggests, these genres are really more relevant to the interests of the temple or the palace, and not individual prayer. One should expect that sort of evidence to be always scare in an ancient culture which has a relatively low rate of literacy, and whose scribes were in the employ of the two institutions just mentioned - however, Hallo goes on to explore an additional item which the author "propose to call letter-prayers" (so this may be the first article to touch on them.) This is another religious genre, and Hallo believes that it draws its style and structure from "real world" letter-order type texts, that is letter-prayers borrow from the order's and drafts sent about in letter form by the Ur III kings.
The letter prayers have a discernible presentation, they begin with an address to the god "to my god speak, thus says ( ), your servant". The message itself then follows consists of (1) complaint (2) protests (3) prayers and (4) formal reinforcements of the appeal, (though not necessarily in that order.) There then follows a conclusion which either promises something in return or concludes with a formulaic line.
The letter-prayer's were mainly concerned with relief from sickness, and some were addressed to the goddess of healing; some are addressed to deified kings and seek royal protection; one petitions for freedom another to be confirmed in his claims to patrimony. They were written by scribes on sometimes on behalf of a client. The petitioner seeks to persuade his god by a variety of means, sometimes by sentiments such as "if my king is truly of heaven" (interestingly, Hallo point out here that this expression also occurs in letters to living kings.) Additionally, he notes that the letter's were in practice deposited at the foot of the divine statue or in the cella, as some include lines such as "my letter which I have deposited before you."


Some examples of letters and letter-prayers are available at the following url, the prayers are of course those addressed to gods or goddesses:

etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.3.3*#




I will come back to Hallo`s article later this week. I am in addition referencing K. Spark`s "Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible" where he discusses Mesopotamian Prayers and Laments - these two types of petition were strongly similar in the Near East and seem to blend together in places. He mentions the Šuilla prayers which I have not yet seen - Šuilla is a rubric, or a way of identifying the text, and it means 'raising the hand` - however the Sumerian texts which bear this rubric appear to contain a mixture of Lamentation and ritual content, and again are not easily equatable with what your probably visualizing with the word "prayer". This is examined in another work of Hallo's called "Lamentations and Prayers in Sumer and Akkad." I may need to order this one from Toronto to continue.