Cities Writ in Water: Urbanization, Flood, and Power in Sumerian Poetry

Cities Writ in Water: Urbanization, Flood, and Power in Sumerian Poetry

This article reads“progress models”of prehistoric human social organization in Early Dynastic Sumerian poetic compositions as mythic interventions that do more than merely recount the origins of human social organization. Rather, I argue that these myths seek to normalize urbanization and the role of kings as urban leaders that oversee the labor of the city’s people. First, I read“The Sumerian Flood Story”and“Enki and Ninmah”against the backdrop of several philosophical debate compositions, demonstrating a clear shift toward urbanormativity (and a deemphasis on nomadism). In showing how these poetic compositions develop their“social charters,”I develop a new vantage on mythology as a vehicle for creating new futures through the power of narrative. The second part of the article then examines some of the disagreements internal to the Sumerian tradition, reading into the poem known as the“Death of Gilgamesh.”I argue that it can be understood as a rehashed progress/flood narrative that picks up on the traditions exemplified by the first two texts, rewriting them so as to emphasize the civic and urban-centric prerogatives of kings, redefining Gilgamesh and his successors as the city-leaders par excellence, thus setting him up as an ideal model for later kings. Together, these texts demonstrate that Sumerian myth was not a neutral mirror of history but a world-building discourse that inscribed urban power as natural, inevitable, and desirable.