Studies in Royal Praise Poetry of King Šulgi of Ur

The purpose of this project is to provide a critical philological edition of two dozen unpublished manuscripts inscribed with Sumerian royal hymns and related texts currently kept in a Norwegian collection. The edition will present photographs, line drawings, transliterations, translations, philological commentaries as well as contextual introductions to each of the texts. It will focus on two new large manuscripts of the hymn called "The king, to make his name famous for all time" (Šulgi B) originated in Old Babylonian schools. One of the manuscripts is monolingual in Sumerian and contains numerous new variant readings, orthographic variants, and other pieces of information valuable for a potentially improved modern understanding of the text. The other tablet is a unique bilingual text that, apart from the Sumerian text, presents a translation of one-third of the entire composition into Akkadian. The data preserved in this tablet will considerably improve our modern understanding of Sumero-Akkadian bilingualism in the scholastic context. Other researched texts are, until now, unedited royal hymns and inscriptions of the kings from the dynasty of Larsa, as well as new duplicates and even unknown versions of compositions glorifying the Ur III kings Urnamma and Šulgi, as well as some of the Larsa dynasty rulers. The resulting monograph will appear in the series called "Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology". Furthermore, basic philological research will be carried out into unpublished manuscripts of the Sumerian royal hymn Šulgi E and tablets and fragments inscribed with the hymn Šulgi O, nowadays kept in museums and libraries of Philadelphia, New Haven, Dublin, and Istanbul. A study of the hitherto unedited hymn Shulgi E will be included in a Yale Babylonian Collection volume on Sumerian royal literature, currently in preparation by W.W. Hallo, the William M. Laffan Professor Emeritus of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature at Yale University.