Origin 2100 BCE to 1600 BCE
The Sumerian King List, in its fullest surviving recensions, opens before history proper with a roster of legendary kings said to have reigned in a handful of cities before a great flood, each credited with reign lengths in the tens of thousands of years. After the list states that the flood swept over the land, it records that kingship was lowered from heaven again, and the roster continues into the historical dynasties of Sumer and Akkad. It is the Mesopotamian entry in this atlas's comparison of traditions that set a vast, superhuman age before the present one against the ordinary lifespans of the age that followed it.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Held ByAncient Mesopotamian scribal tradition, Sumerian and later Akkadian. It has no living adherents; Mesopotamian religion ceased to be practiced in antiquity. 2 Historical OriginScholars trace the list's core, including its antediluvian section, to compilations from the Ur III through Isin-Larsa periods, with the fullest surviving copies dating from the Old Babylonian period. Thorkild Jacobsen's 1939 edition remains the classic scholarly reconstruction of the list's several recensions. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteJacobsen and later scholars generally read the antediluvian section as a literary and ideological device asserting the great antiquity and legitimacy of kingship itself, rather than as a historical record of real reigns, distinguishing it from the list's later entries, which draw closer to a genuine dynastic record. 1 Structure
StructureA sequence of antediluvian cities, each assigned one or more kings and an individual reign length measured in the tens of thousands of years, ending with the flood; the list then resumes with the much shorter, more plausible reign lengths of the post-flood dynasties. 2 Controversy
Point in DisputeSurviving copies of the list disagree on the number and order of the antediluvian cities and kings, and on the exact figures given for their reigns. The list's relationship to other Mesopotamian flood traditions is a separate, related question the atlas tracks under those traditions' own entries. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Corresponds To
Zep Tepi, Ages Both traditions place a primordial age of superhuman or divine reigns before the ordinary, mortal length reigns of history proper begin, an instance of the pattern separating a remembered golden or primeval past from a diminished present that comparative studies of religion describe across many traditions.
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