Debate between Winter and Summer

The first lines of the myth were discovered on the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, catalogue of the Babylonian section (CBS), tablet number 8310 from their excavations at the temple library at Nippur.

This was translated by George Aaron Barton in 1918 and first published as "Sumerian religious texts" in Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions, number seven, entitled "A Hymn to Ibbi-Sin".

Barton describes Ibbi-Sin as an "inglorious King" suggesting the text to have been composed during his lifetime, he commented "The hymn provides a powerful statement for emperor worship in Ur at the time of composition."

He also included translations from tablets in the Nippur collection of the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, catalogue numbers 2705, 3167 and 4004.

[10][11] The story takes the form of a contest poem between two cultural entities first identified by Kramer as vegetation gods, Emesh and Enten.

[11] The location and occasion of the story is described in the introduction with the usual creation sequence of day and night, food and fertility, weather and seasons and sluice gates for irrigation.

For Summer founding towns and villages, bringing in harvests of plenitude for the Great Mountain Enlil, sending labourers out to the large arable tracts, and working the fields with oxen; for Winter plenitude, the spring floods, the abundance and life of the Land, placing grain in the fields and fruitful acres, and gathering in everything – Enlil determined these as the destinies of Summer and Winter.

[4]The two brothers soon decide to take their gifts to Enlil's "house of life", the E-namtila, where they begin a debate about their relative merits.

[4]To which Winter replies: Father Enlil, you gave me control of irrigation; you brought plentiful water.

The grain became thick in the furrows ... Summer, a bragging field-administrator who does not know the extent of the field ... my thighs grown tired from toil.

[4]Enlil eventually intervenes and declares Winter the winner of the debate and there is a scene of reconciliation.

The import of the exalted word Enlil speaks is artfully wrought, the verdict he pronounces is one which cannot be altered – who can change it?

"[4]John Walton wrote that "people in the Ancient Near East did not think of creation in terms of making material things – instead, everything is function oriented.

[18] Piotr Michalowski makes the connection in the story that "E-hursag" is a structure "named as the residence of the king" and "E-namtilla" "as the residence of Enlil", suspecting the two words refer to the same place and that "E-namtilla is simply another name for E-hursag" and that it was a royal palace.