The Black Swamp: Winged Inanna

Part Two

Maybe it would have been a nice start to a lasting friendship and cooperation within the field of Assyriology for the uncovering of the "Kish secrets", if I had not noticed how a separate cylinder seal, measuring maybe about 15-18 cm long and 10 cm wide, made of lapis lazuli were carefully kept within a glass display.

Wilhelm did not ignore my inquisitive eyes. He looked hesitant for a few seconds as if recalling details of the recovery of this object. He soon proceeded to tell us that this is one of those objects he recovered together with this collection. It wasn't kept in the waterproof material like the others but left outside without any labeling. With his very limited knowledge in philology, he confessed, he failed to make sense of the cuneiforms on it. It seemed random and meaningless, which prevented him from investigating it even further. It was kept like this only because it looks quite beautiful just for the sake of its craftsmanship.

I sincerely agreed with him. A cylinder seal of this size and such remarkable care to the manufacturing is indeed rare. It looked so incredibly well-kept as well, even for lapis lazuli, if we were to date it to the Old Babylonian Period.

This extraordinary artifact caught our attention after this introduction.

We soon realized how we have met with a challenge: the language on the cylinder exceeded all our knowledge of cuneiform combined. The writing style was clearly not Babylonian to start with but bore similarities with some of the ancient Fara-text from Shuruppak, a city state north of Uruk and a few hundred kilometers away from Kish. The Fara-texts that had been recovered so far, however, are only composed in an older form of Sumerian, as Professor Lesch and Saliz commented.

It did not make the ultimate sense to us, but it was acceptable since some scholars had long theorized about an ancient pact formed by city states in southern Mesopotamia under the leadership of Kish. We were not especially daunted by the uncertain provenience of this object. The truly enigmatic part of it was still the cuneiforms engraved on its surface. None of the ancient items in southern Mesopotamia that we knew of bore marks of such technique to make such fine and neat cutting on the surface of lapis lazuli, at least not within this period. The cuneiforms themselves were perfectly legible, just not readable for any of us. It wasn't Akkadian or Sumerian, or any other languages that are written with cuneiform signs that we know of for the sake of it. It seemed to be some random combination of Akkadian and Sumerian signs. Since the four of us were at least acquainted with more than 6 cuneiform languages combined, this text thus raised more questions and doubts about its authenticity than its content.

With closer observation, however, we did notice something that could at least prove that Wilhelm was not making a well-engineered practical joke. Professor Saliz was quick to notice that some lines started with determinatives that are clearly identifiable, though the content afterwards seemed like some kind of nonsensical gibberish. We proposed multiple theories for the deciphering of this piece, from lexical texts to a special religious artifact for the school, we were not able to agree with each other.

Wilhelm listened quietly to our discussion at first, and suddenly proposed that maybe it is a magical object for ritual performances. My first reaction was to scold him for his lack of professional discipline in this field, since the magical spells, for example the bīt rimki rituals are also conducted in clear readable words. Only in Egyptian rituals were there cases of meaningless sentences to be found within a ritual context, but also rarely. In ancient near east, cuneiforms were commonly regarded as the medium to communicate with gods and thus required no further addendum or adaptation for communication purposes in rituals.

Professor Lesch, however, didn't rush to disagree with Wilhelm. He enthusiastically provided us with a new perspective about his recent research on the Sumerian divination texts from before the Gudea dynasty, which would date back to 2300 BC. He claimed that some of those ancient authors of haruspical texts would choose to "elide" or hide certain aspects of a prophecy to avoid the unnecessary attention from demons, who are always keen on taking the ritual sacrifice and may thus accidentally read about the result of a prophecy. This was believed to have very inauspicious consequences for the one seeking supernatural advice. It is therefore possible, he argued, that some of the texts were written in a "coded" way to hide its original meaning for the reader. Although, he also admitted that he had never seen divination text to be fully coded and presented in such an unintelligible way.