II. TWO MORPHOLOGICAL PARALLELS TO THE JONAH STORY
2.2.5 Aratta and "No Man's Land" as Part of the Physical World
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and even the cultic liturgy of Uruk144 but there is no indication of Aratta in economic texts, leading some to question its historicity altogether.145 That some scholars have taken its historical existence for granted is thus all the more puzzling; it cannot rightly be compared with other obscure lands such as Anshan, which is attested in economic
texts.146 As is the case with other obscure lands of ancient literature, modern archaeology has been brought to bear on the matter of Aratta‘s existence.147
Yet even though Aratta may have existed in some form or another to the east of Sumer, beyond the Zagros Mountains, the Aratta of this story is clearly a land of fantasy.148 The fabulous wealth of Aratta is alluded to especially in "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta" as the city has to give up some of its treasures at the demand of
Enmerkar:
The people of Aratta have as their task the trading of gold and lapis lazuli and the fashioning of golden fruits and fruity bushes laden with figs and grapes...; they shall heap up these fruits in great piles; they shall dig out flawless lapis lazuli in lumps; they shall remove the crowns of the sweet reeds, and for Inana, Lady of the Eana, they shall heap them up in piles in the courtyard of the Eana.149
144 E.g., in the Sumerian 'Bilgamesh and Huwawa,' as an obscure place; Antoine Cavineaux, NABU 43 (Juin 1998): 46: "Il est attesté 'physiquement'...le souvenir d'Aratta ne fut pas seulement maintenu par les épopées d'Enmerkar et Lugalbanda, Aratta était présente au coeur même d'Uruk."
145 Sol Cohen thinks it odd that such a major trading center should be lost to history; Cohen, ―Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,‖ 61.
146Yousef Madjidzadeh, ―The Land of Aratta,‖ JNES 35 (1976): 105-113; John F. Hansman, ―The Question of Aratta,‖ JNES 37 (1978): 331-336; Erica Reiner, "The Location of Anšan," RA (1973): 57-62.
147 For information regarding the recent possible discovery of Aratta in modern Iran by the archaeologist Yousef Madjidzadeh, see Andrew Lawler. ―Rocking the Cradle‖ Smithsonian 35 (2004): 40-49.
148 It is "half-myth, half-reality" according to P. Roger S. Moorey. "Iran: A Sumerian El-Dorado?" in Early Mesopotamia and Iran: Contact and Conflict, c. 3500-1600 BC: Proceedings of a Seminar in Memory of Vladimir G. Lukonin. (ed. John Curtis; London: The British Museum Press, 1993), 31-45.
149 The Eana is the temple of Inana in Unug; translation from Vanstiphout, Epics of Sumerian Kings, 91 (vv.618-625).
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The Lugalbanda story operates under this conception of what Aratta is, and the draw of riches and glory compels Enmerkar to retain control of the land, even at risk of faltering in the area in between the two cities. To ―end the life force of Aratta‖ Enmerkar is directed to cut off its connection to magical subterranean waters (B.31, β.407ff.), thus illustrating that a realistic depiction of Aratta is not a priority for the narrator.150 The goal is rather to present a plausible impetus for placing Lugalbanda in the wilderness beyond Sumer's borders where his rite de passage may commence in isolation. In this tale and others of this type the FFL is barely described even though the purported object of the entire narrative lie in that place and not in the "no man's land" where the story's true action takes place.
2.3.1 "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor‖
In contrast to the multiple copies and recensions of the Lugalbanda story, the Egyptian tale known conventionally among scholars as ―The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor‖ survives in only a single manuscript.151 The hieratic papyrus containing this narrative, P. Leningrad 1115, dates to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 2040-1640 BCE)152 but its provenance is unknown. This most interesting tale--about a man's trip to a strange island and meeting its giant snake-king--is couched as a frame story in which an
150Christopher Woods argues that the Mesopotamians believed that lands at their eastern horizon were connected to the mythological, life-giving Apsû. Woods, "At the Edge of the World," 200, 221; Although Aratta is a place where humans live it is also a place of fantastic description, as attested by the Arattans' access to these magical waters and the city's encircling dragons.
151 The use of the term ―sailor‖ most properly is rendered as ―retainer‖ following William O. Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 2002), 267. I use the appellation ―sailor‖
for the Egyptian term (šmsw) because of academic tradition.
152 Miriam Lichtheim, AEL I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 211.
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unnamed official tries to reassure his expedition leader as they return to Egypt following an unsuccessful mission. The apparently older and wiser official relates to his leader a wondrous journey he undertook some years before but at the end of the text the
expedition leader is still discouraged (and seems to be bored, in fact). Here, we will be concerned only with the core portion of the text, the story related by the experienced man and a short story related by the snake-king in the center of the man's story. These two in sum comprise the two inner narratives. The outer frame narrative is short on folkloric content and only serves to introduce context for the relation of the main narrative, the sailor's narrative, which has been described aptly as a ―journey that begins in the real world, progresses to the world of the fantastic with a splendid talking serpent, and ends in a return to the everyday world.‖153
This narrative contains several features suggestive of folkloric content: the anonymity of characters such as the king and the "sailor" himself; the use of proverbial statements at both the opening and closing of the text and the use of fantastic descriptions as well as esoteric circumstances all indicate that this written story likely mimics oral folktales.154 "The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor" (TSS hereafter) is made even more interesting by virtue of the fact that the central, first-person narrative is embedded with another first-person narrative.155 With these three narratives imposed upon one another
153 Susan Tower Hollis, ―Tales of Magic and Wonder from Ancient Egypt,‖ CANE 4, 2255-2264.
154 John Baines, "Interpreting the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor," JEA 76 (1990): 55-72; ―The circular character of the composition, along with the repetition of a part of the narrative (the shipwreck) and the interposing of proverbs pronounced by one of the characters during the dialogue, would seem to reflect an origin, or at least the influence, of a popular culture or of an oral tradition.‖ José M Galán, Four Journeys in Ancient Egyptian Literature (Lingua Aegyptia. Studia monographia 5; Göttingen: Seminar für
Ägyptologie und Koptologie Göttingen, 2005), 48.
155 For a comprehensive review of the wordplay and literary artistry involved with this text, see Gary Rendsburg, ―Literary Devices in the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor,‖ JAOS 120 (2000): 13-23.
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the text divides neatly into a cyclical structure, a level of manipulation which suggests that the story‘s textual form was carefully crafted.156 The central narrative adheres to the conventions of the topos described above, and its morphology surprisingly follows the structure and sequence of the Lugalbanda story, thus we will delimit our analysis accordingly and examine this central narrative only. Isolating this portion allows us to redirect the intended emphasis to the narrator‘s authority as a storyteller and not the veracity of that story in relation to the text's outer narrative.
Concerning the content of this central story, it is tempting to look for parallels between TSS and the well-known ―Tale of Sinuhe,‖ another text from the Middle Kingdom though longer and extant in more copies. Both stories concern travels to and return from fantastic lands and the expansion of the hero‘s knowledge. There is a pronounced liminality alluded to in each story, as Sinuhe encounters a man ―at the edge of cultivation‖ who he fears might block his passage. Yet whereas the ―Tale of Sinuhe‖
is set in a definite historical context (following the death of Amenemhat I) the setting for TSS is less restricted; the former feels like a historical novella more than a wondertale and the land Sinuhe visits is not so far away that it is fantastic, so this particular topos is not at work. Though it seems because of content that this story has much in common with some Hebrew narratives, I would argue that there are actually more affinities between TSS and the Jonah story than between the Sinuhe story and any of the Hebrew narratives that have survived.
156 ―A B C D C' B' A', where A, A' is the frame of the šmsw and leader, B, B' the narrator's departure and return, C'C' his life on the island, and D the central narrative of the snake,‖ Baines, ―Interpreting the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor,‖ 67; Stephen Quirke demonstrates a simpler pattern for the central narrative:
―A-B-A‘, where the alien world of B provides the ground in which life can be learnt and renewed,‖
―Narrative Literature,‖ 263-276 in Ancient Egyptian Literature: History & Forms (ed. Antonio Loprieno;
Leiden: Brill, 1996), 267.
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2.3.2 Summary of the Tale157