Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave

[1][2] Tablets containing these stories were found in various locations of southern Iraq, primarily in the city of Nippur, and were part of the curriculum of Sumerian scribal schools during the Old Babylonian period (20th-17th centuries BCE).

Amongst the soldiers is Lugalbanda, who falls seriously ill and is left by his brothers to live or die in a cave along with some provisions.

The end of the text is very fragmented and not well understood, but sheds light on the gods who, although they hold great power, exhibit a dark side.

Among Sumerian literary narratives including the four of Enmerkar-Aratta cycle and five known Gilgamesh stories, “Lugalbanda in the Wilderness” and its continuation “Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird” are considered to be the most elaborate and complex texts of their period with a combined length of 1000 lines, as well as their complicated symbolism, strong mythological elements, and unpredictable plot that moves back and forth between the mundane and divine worlds.

[4] Although earlier generations of scholars have sought behind these stories a historical reality dating back to Early Dynastic Period, such attempts are mostly based on an amalgamation of data from the epic traditions of the 2nd millennium with unclear archaeological observations.

[5] It is argued that even if the earlier oral traditions may have had an influence in the origin of these stories, the texts that have reached us are the highly stylized and literary products of the scribes of the Ur III Period and later, and for such scribes “these texts were about the present, albeit projected into the past; indeed it is this very act of projection that marks them as fiction, not as ethnography or history.”[6]

Like Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, the Song of the hoe, and the Sumerian disputation poems, the Lugalbanda story begins with a cosmological prologue.