Reinvestigating The Antediluvian Sumerian King List -- By: R. K. Harrison

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 36:1 (Mar 1993)
Article: Reinvestigating The Antediluvian Sumerian King List
Author: R. K. Harrison


Reinvestigating The Antediluvian
Sumerian King List

R. K. Harrison*

Of the many fascinating and instructive artifacts that have been recovered from sites in Iraq where flourishing Sumerian cities once stood, few have been more intriguing than a prism now in the Weld-Blundell collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. Known more popularly as the Sumerian King List, it is held to have been compiled from as many as fifteen different texts.1

The King List traces the rulers of certain Sumerian cities in succession and is of immense value because it contains some very old traditions while at the same time furnishing an important chronological framework for the antediluvian period of the Near East.2 The original form of the List is thought to have gone back to Utu-Hegal, king of Uruk, perhaps about 2000 BC, but who was certainly flourishing during the early stages of the celebrated Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2070-1960 BC).3

The List commenced with an “antediluvian preamble”: “When kingship was lowered from heaven, it was in the city of Eridu.”4 After two kings had ruled over Eridu, kingship was transferred to Badtibira,5 where the reigns of three kings were duly recorded in succession. The antediluvian portion of the King List concluded with three rulers who reigned in Larak,6 Sippar,7 and Shuruppak8 respectively. At this point the narrative broke off with the terse words: “the flood swept over (the earth).”

Thereafter the prism continued with the postdiluvian dynasties of Kish and other cities, but this material comes from a much later period and

* R. K. Harrison is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, Canada.

translations are not entirely reliable in some areas. Because this section is not significant for the present discussion, it will be dispensed with.

It should also be noted that, some 2, 000 years later, a Babylonian priest named Berossos furnished what has been regarded as a revised form of the Sumerian King List but reproduced the names in Greek rather than Sumerian. Berossos compiled the material in the time of Antiochus I (281–261 BC) and cataloged ten rather than the eight rulers on the original list. The identities of the kings on th...

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