Gilgamesch-Epos und Erra-Lied: Zu einem Aspekt des Verbalsystems. (2024)

Gilgamesch-Epos und Erra-Lied: Zu einem Aspekt des Verbalsystems. By HANS HIRSCH. Archiv fur Orientforschung, Beiheft 29. Vienna: SELBSTVERLAG DES INSTITUTS FUR ORIENTFORSCHUNG DER UNIVERSITAT WIEN, 2002. Pp. iv + 257. €62.

Reflecting on Akkadian grammar in 1975 ("Akkadische Grammatik--Erorterungen und Fragen," OrNS 44 [1975]: 245-322), Hans Hirsch turned his attention to "the so-called Ventive" (pp. 313-14). From the point of view of Semitic grammar, it has always been tempting to reconstruct a four-ending symmetry for both the noun and verb: -Ø, -u, -i, and -a. In the Akkadian verb, the verb implied, of course, in the title of this book, -Ø served for the indicative mood, -u for the subjunctive mood, and -i for the "i-modus," the very existence of which is disputed. The subject of this book, carrying through on Hirsch's discussion of 1975, is in the first instance forms ending in -a or -a(m). His 1975 essay suggested that the time had come for individual detailed studies of grammatical issues and that the dictionaries now made the source material for such inquiries readily available for analysis, even though, in this instance, he found himself looking up many of the forms in the original to be sure the ending was there or not. Hirsch has in effect responded to his own challenge by studying in detail just one of the many issues he raised and reviewed in his essay of 1975, here in the form of a large monograph focused on the -a endings of verb forms in two Akkadian texts.

The book opens, not with the usual preface, but with a short tribute upholding the memory of Ernst Weidner, who received his professorship during the Nazi era. Since the majority of scholars who, as adults, lived through the times referred to have died and in their lifetimes discussed them only with family or intimate friends, if at all, the way has been left open for judgment on them by younger people, without personal experience or reliable oral tradition of the pressures, fears, and contradictions of the Nazi era on scholars of the ancient Near East. For some, like Albrecht Goetze, there was no middle way: one spoke out against Nazism or one was a de facto collaborator. For others, such as Weidner, this did not seem an option; one followed one's career as the circ*mstances allowed. Weidner could not have received his appointment had he been deemed politically unreliable, but Hirsch points out that Weidner did take risks in a scholarly climate in which the work of Jewish scholars was cited apologetically, if at all. So it fell to him, in the post-war columns of his beloved Archiv fur Orientforschung, to chronicle the suffering, death, and destruction that fell upon the community of German Orientalists who remained in their posts during the war years. He wrote less specifically of the drain and waste of talent now starkly documented by Ludmilla Hanisch and Hanne Schonig, in Ausgegrenzte Kompetenze: Portrats vertriebener Orientalisten und Orientalistinnen 1933-1945 (Halle: Orientwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Martin-Luther-Universitat, 2001); the time was perhaps not yet ripe before that for such an undertaking, as many people who knew the most about it did not want to talk about it openly. This is a long way from Akkadian verb forms in -a, but the starting point has always been a brilliant essay by B. Landsberger, "Der 'Ventiv' des Akkadischen," Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie 35 (1923): 113-23, and the career of Landsberger, the most distinguished Assyriologist of his time but dismissed from his professorship in Leipzig in 1935, is emblematic of the concerns that underlie Hirsch's opening remarks.

Since Landsberger's article was both short and crucial, Hirsch would have done well to reprint it in his volume as an appendix, as his discussion presupposes that the reader has ready access to it. Perhaps now after eighty years we can drop the quotation marks around "ventive" and even the use of "so-called"? Proceeding from the 1923 paper, Hirsch goes through more recent discussions and comments with great thoroughness. One might add to his list, if only for the sake of completeness, one of I. J. Gelb's last comments on this problem, in "Mari and the Kish Civilization," in Mari in Retrospect: Fifty Years of Mari Studies, ed. Gordon P. Young (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 163, where Gelb maintained his view that "the existence of the Mari morpheme -a contrasted with Akkadian -am is confirmed by the forms usi'a and us'iam in Mari liver omina ... The morpheme -a is also attested in Amorite...."

Hirsch then turns to his case study, a monumental collection of "full" (with -a) and "empty" (without -a) verb forms in two major Standard Babylonian literary texts, the Nineveh and related editions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Epic of Erra. This choice gives him a large body of closely defined examples, allowing of course for minor textual variants. Consideration of a hundred verbs brings the reader only as far as gamalu, so this is not an inquiry for the impatient reader. The work is footnote-heavy (3,753 in 256 pages), making for stressful reading. In note 2,574, for example, we learn that what Hirsch reads as -n[i] is printed as -[ni] in a recent publication; this information, if it needed to be communicated at all, could easily, like much of what is in the notes, have been incorporated into the main text. I would prefer the dictionary references, for example, to have been compressed at the foot of each verb entry, to save space and eyestrain. The examples could have been numbered in each entry and these keyed in a small separate entry to the dictionary references. Hirsch's over-all approach is so cautious that one is surprised when he occasionally abandons caution, as in his comment (p. 251) on Gilgamesh XI 67, grammatically one of the most difficult lines in the poem, as "scheinbar einfache" (for a close study of this line, see D. O. Edzard, "Gilgames XI 65-69," in Semitic Studies in honor of Wolf Leslau [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991], 392-96).

Hirsch is convinced that suffixing -a implied some difference in meaning, especially with verbs of motion. He thinks that Assyriologists have tended to take an easy way out by ignoring suffixed versus unsuffixed forms or by suggesting that suffixing or lack of it was conditioned, in Standard Babylonian, by such factors as sound or metrics. Hirsch's approach to this problem proceeds from study of contrastive pairs, so he leaves out of account the larger issue of final vowels in later Akkadian nouns and verbs, which has so far been restricted mostly to discussion of Neo-Babylonian but does appear in late manuscripts of Standard Babylonian literary texts of the kind discussed here (A. R. George, F. Al-Rawi, "Tablets from the Sippar Library," Iraq 60 [1998]: 198). For verbs that do not obviously imply motion, the matter becomes more one of "Sprachgefuhl," or, as some might say, of finding a translation that artfully accounts for the presence or absence of the ending, especially the presence. Hirsch's collection of data also provides the basis for a further study of the extent to which individual lexical, rather than an independent morphemic value of -a, should be considered for certain verbs; did certain verbs, regardless of their class of meaning, tend to use the suffix?

Hirsch's study stands both as a tribute to the research capacity and energy of its author and as a reminder that it is becoming easy to read Akkadian too fast and to sweep annoying problems under the rug. Correlation of direction and self-reference and transfer of self-reference to the person addressed were the fundamental insights at the bottom of the initial conception of the ventive. The problem has been and remains where to go from there. Hirsch himself has a sense that he ends his critical survey of the problem not far from where the inquiry began (p. 23), reaching somewhat the same conclusion at the end (p. 257), where, I think with justification, he cannot help thinking of Gilgamesh returned from his exhausting journey. The next stage of the journey might well be. I suggest, a broader consideration of the impact of Sumerian on Akkadian or on its earlier forerunner in Mesopotamia. If -a has a good Semitic background, whatever its morphemic value (maybe originally in Akkadian even a subordinating subjunctive?), perhaps -a(m) was after all a borrowing from Sumerian and brought with it the referential capacity that has proved so hard to illuminate in ongoing discussion of the Sumerian verb. Since the two forms looked like each other, it was only natural that they should fall together; one could join Landsberger in suggesting that the /m/ was not mimation per se, but imagine rather that final /m/ dropped by analogy with mimation and one was left with -a, which already existed as another morpheme. To be convincing, such an analysis would need to cast a broader net, to present solid evidence for Sumerian influence on Akkadian at the morphemic level, such as the alleged ablative infix in -ta-, the ending -is, and others, beginning with instances such as these where a Sumerian morpheme sounded like an Akkadian one. I believe a broader search of this kind will turn up strong indications of a more profound Sumerian influence on Akkadian than is normally taken into consideration now when discussing problems of Akkadian grammar. Documenting Akkadian influence on Sumerian grammar lies even further in the future.

Hirsch's book has set a high standard in showing how a closely focused Akkadian grammatical inquiry can be structured and carried forward, but it warns at the same time that the results may be modest in terms of the investment of labor. No reader of Akkadian will skip over -a lightly after reading this study. There is good reason to deduce that when -a was added to a verb of motion, there was an intent to enhance the goal-directed content of the verb. When -a was added to verbs that were not verbs of motion, a subjective but translatable element of goal direction may also have been present: "I am tired ..." (f) versus "I am so tired that ..." (-a), to use Hirsch's concluding example. Hirsch would not present this as a sensational new advance so much as a return to Landsberger's starting point with much new material and a closer focus in time, and with something of a criticism too: the discipline has talked about the ventive in the abstract more than it has tried to show how an understanding of its presence or absence can influence translation or analysis of Akkadian texts.

So few of the matters discussed by Hirsch in 1975 have attracted research that one can only conclude that a project such as this one is anything but fashionable. For a senior scholar to undertake this unglamorous work while younger scholars bandy back and forth often light, even quidnunc literary analysis, is a stern reminder of the historically philological foundations of Assyriology.

BENJAMIN R. FOSTER

YALE UNIVERSITY