A shepherd who no longer sustains
The hymns Rogers groups under Tammuz repeatedly name an absent shepherd and a consort who is no longer present. Sheep, lambs, goats, kids, stalls, and cultivated growth bring the loss into the work of sustaining life. The absence is not described only as a private romantic sorrow.
Repeated names and titles gather several associations around the mourned figure. Their presence in a liturgical sequence does not prove that every named divine figure was everywhere interchangeable. The safer reading attends to what the performance does: it accumulates expressions of loss and invites hearers to return to the same absence from different positions.
Source: Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament: selected primary translations · Hymns to Tammuz 10–11, pp. 179–185; especially hymn 11, obverse 1–17
Grief performed through the body
The lamenting voice refuses food and water. The poem also names wailing, a flute, and the circumstances of performance. Mourning is therefore embodied and audible, not merely a statement that someone has died.
Rogers’s English form Tammuz and the Sumerian name Dumuzi should remain connected to the actual source being discussed. These hymns do not by themselves supply the full plot of the Sumerian descent or establish an exact annual calendar for every community. Their clearer evidence concerns how a divine disappearance is voiced through hungry bodies, silent husbandry, and repeated address. The performance gives shape to grief even where the narrative circumstances remain fragmentary.
Source: Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament: selected primary translations · Hymn 10, reverse and Berlin duplicate; hymn 11, obverse 18–26, reverse 1–15 and colophon, pp. 181–185
- Period / witness
- Selected Sumerian and Akkadian literary witnesses, with a separately identified Greek-mediated account; modern editions 1912, 1920, and 1998–2001. Narrative time is not a historical date.
- Recording context
- Selected cuneiform compositions in Robert W. Rogers’s 1912 edition. Individual tablets, languages, and textual gaps are distinguished in the article; this is not a single Mesopotamian canon.
A recording location is not necessarily a story’s origin. Dates of texts, copies, and translations answer different questions.
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These references support the explanation above. Rights and edition notes are recorded individually.
Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament: selected primary translations ↗
Robert William Rogers, translator and editor (1864–1930) · 1912 English edition of selected cuneiform texts and a Greek-mediated Berossos account; ancient witnesses vary by composition.
Edition & rights note