The Lament for Ur, or Lamentation over the city of Ur is a Sumerian lament composed around the time of the fall of Ur to the Elamites and the end of the city's third dynasty (c. 2000 BC).
Laments<span class="anchor" id="Mesopotamian City Laments"></span>
It contains one of five known Mesopotamian "city laments"—dirges for ruined cities in the voice of the city's tutelary goddess.
The other city laments are:
- The Lament for Sumer and Ur
- The Lament for Nippur
- The Lament for Eridu
- The Lament for Uruk
The Book of Lamentations of the Old Testament, which bewails the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in the sixth century BC, is similar in style and theme to these earlier Mesopotamian laments. Similar laments can be found in the Book of Jeremiah, the Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Psalms, Psalm 137 ().
Compilation
The first lines of the lament were discovered on the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology catalogue of the Babylonian section, tablet numbers 2204, 2270, 2302 and 19751 from their excavations at the temple library at Nippur in modern-day Iraq. These were translated by George Barton in 1918 and first published as "Sumerian religious texts" in Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions, number six, entitled "A prayer for the city of Ur". The restored tablet is at its thickest point. Barton noted that "from the portions that can be translated it appears to be a prayer for the city of Ur at a time of great danger and distress. It seems impossible to assign it with certainty to any particular period." He noted that it was plausible but unconfirmed to conjecture that it "was written in the last days of Ibbi-Sin when Ur was tottering to its fall". A further tablet source of the myth is held by the Louvre in Paris, number AO 6446. Others are held in the Ashmolean, Oxford, numbers 1932,415, 1932,522, 1932,526j and 1932,526o. Further tablets were found to be part of the myth in the Hilprecht collection at the University of Jena, Germany, numbers 1426, 1427, 1452, 1575, 1579, 1487, 1510 and 1553. More fragments are held at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Geneva) in Switzerland, MAH 15861 and MAH 16015.
Other translations were made from tablets in the Nippur collection of the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul (Ni). Samuel Noah Kramer amongst others worked to translate several others from the Istanbul collection including Ni 4496, 1162, 2401, 2510, 2518, 2780, 2911, 3166, 4024, 4424, 4429, 4459, 4474, 4566, 9586, 9599, 9623, 9822 and 9969. Other tablets from the Istanbul collection, numbers Ni 2510 and 2518 were translated by Edward Chiera in 1924 in "Sumerian religious texts". Sir Charles Woolley unearthed more tablets at Ur contained in the "Ur excavations texts" from 1928. Other tablets are held in the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin and the Yale Babylonian collection. Samuel Kramer compiled twenty-two different fragments into the first complete edition of the Lament, which was published in 1940 by the University of Chicago as Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (Assyriological Study no. 12). Other tablets and versions were used to bring the myth to its present form with a composite text by Miguel Civil produced in 1989 and latest translations by Thorkild Jacobsen in 1987 and Joachim Krecher in 1996. In 2012, 3 new fragments from Nippur (Ni. 4296, Ni. 4383, and Ni. 4566) were published.
Composition
The lament is composed of four hundred and thirty eight lines in eleven kirugu (sections), arranged in stanzas of six lines. It describes the goddess Ningal, who weeps for her city after pleading with the god Enlil to call back a destructive storm. Interspersed with the goddess's wailing are other sections, possibly of different origin and composition; these describe the ghost town that Ur has become, recount the wrath of Enlil's storm, and invoke the protection of the god Nanna (Nergal or Suen) against future calamities. Ningal, the wife of the moon god Nanna, goes on to recall her petition to the leaders of the gods, An and Enlil to change their minds and not to destroy Ur. She does this both in private and in a speech to the Annunaki assembly: