Kur

Summary

Kur is a Sumerian word and a place at once. Its cuneiform sign is a picture of mountains, and the Sumerian dictionary gives its senses as mountains, foreign land, land in general, the east and the east wind, and the netherworld. In the poems it is the land beneath the earth, the house of the dead ruled by Ereshkigal, and also the mountains beyond the plain of Sumer.

Its story begins at the opening of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld: when heaven had been separated from earth, An took heaven, Enlil took the earth, and the kur was given to Ereshkigal as a gift. Then Enki set sail for the kur, and a storm of hailstones rose against him, the small ones like light hammers and the large ones like stones from catapults; the keel of his little boat trembled as if butted by turtles, the waves at the bow rose to devour him like wolves and the waves at the stern attacked him like a lion.

In Inanna's Descent Inanna sets her mind "from the great heaven on the great below"; she abandons heaven, abandons earth and goes down to the kur. At the gate of the palace Ganzer the doorman Neti asks her why she has come to "the land of no return", in Sumerian kur nu-gi4, the kur from which one does not come back. Inanna comes up from the kur only by giving a substitute. In Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld Gilgamesh's ball and mallet fall into the netherworld, Enkidu goes down to fetch them, and the kur seizes him: "Namtar did not seize him, the Asag did not seize him, but the kur has seized him." Enki tells Utu to open a hole in the kur, and Enkidu is brought up through it.

In Lugal-e the kur is the mountains: the verdant Earth bears to Heaven the Asag, "a murderer from the kur", and the stones of the mountains become its warriors, raiding the cities. Ninurta kills it, then "made a pile of stones in the kur", with which he holds back the water that used to flow down from the mountains into the earth, gathers the scattered lakes and leads them down to the Tigris; then he names the pile Mountain and makes his mother its lady, so that her name becomes Ninhursag. Lugal-e 24–47 and 347–410.

The idea the stories of the kur turn on is that it is everything outside the cultivated plain: the mountains from which stone, water and enemies come, and the land into which the dead go down. One word holds the high and the low because both lie outside the city and its fields. Whoever goes to the kur comes back only at a price or with help: Inanna by handing over a substitute, Enkidu through a hole opened by Utu, the mountain water through a dam Ninurta builds from its own stones.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Sumerian essay reads kur as Arabic qūr or qaʿr. In Lane qūr is the plural of qāra, a small mountain standing apart from other mountains, or a tract of ground full of black stones; qaʿr is the bottom of a well, and qaʿara al-biʾr is said of one who went down the well until he reached its bottom. Sumerian has no q, so q is written k, and cuneiform does not write ʿ, so it drops from qaʿr. The Sumerian word in its two main senses thus answers the two words the essay put together: qūr, letter for letter, for the mountains, and qaʿr for the depth into which Inanna and Enkidu go down.

Linguistic Root

Kur, qūr and qaʿr

In its table of sound correspondences the Sumerian essay sets Sumerian k against Arabic k, q and kh, and gives the example "kur = qaʿr". By this correspondence qūr reads the whole word: q as k, the long u as w, r as r; the syllabic writing ku-ur in the Sumerian dictionary shows the long u. Qaʿr needs the loss of ʿ, which cuneiform does not write. Lane: qāra is a small isolated mountain, or the smallest of mountains, or a great rock, or ground covered with black stones, plural qār, qārāt and qūr; a well qaʿurat when it had a deep bottom, qaʿarahā when one went down it until he reached its bottom, and qaʿara al-shajara is to uproot a tree.

Other readings

The essay also reads kur as the smith's kūr, making the netherworld "the burning depth". Lane gives kūr as a blacksmith's fireplace built of clay, and Hebrew kûr is a smelting pot or furnace. The letters are all in place, but the Sumerian and Akkadian poems describe the house of the dead with darkness and dust, not fire: "dust is their sustenance and clay their food; they see no light". On the method we read the word's third sense, land, as kūra, which Lane gives as a province or district of a country, and also a city, so that each of the Sumerian word's three main senses has an Arabic word in q or k, w and r.

Historical Context

The word kur occurs more than four thousand times in Sumerian tablets, from the Early Dynastic period to the Hellenistic. Samuel Noah Kramer writes that its sign is a picture of a mountain, that the sense "foreign land" grew out of "mountain" because the mountain countries around Sumer were a constant threat to its people, and that the word then came to mean land in general, so that Sumer itself is called "the great land". He adds that in Inanna's Descent and Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld kur is regularly the word for the netherworld, close in this to the Sumerian "great below".

Names connected with the kur

Key Mythic Narratives

Kur as a dragon in Kramer's reading

In 1944 Kramer read the kur in some poems as a great creature, perhaps a large serpent living at the bottom of "the great below" above the primeval waters, and compared it with the Babylonian Tiamat. He made the opening of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld the record of a battle: Ereshkigal was carried off into the netherworld, perhaps by the kur itself, and Enki set sail to fight it; it pelted him with small and large stones and attacked his boat with the waters. He saw the same battle in Ninurta's fight and in Inanna's. The current ETCSL translation renders what rose against Enki as a storm of hailstones and waves, without naming who threw them, and names Ninurta's enemy in Lugal-e the Asag.

Inanna and Mount Ebih

In Inanna and Ebih Inanna walks through heaven and earth, through Elam, Subir and the Lulubi mountains, and when she approaches the range of Ebih the mountain shows her no respect and does not put its nose to the ground. She asks An to let her destroy it; he tells her the mountain is fearsome, fruit hangs in its gardens and wild bulls graze its grass. She rages, goes out with storm and flood, grabs Ebih's neck as if ripping up esparto grass, presses her dagger into its interior, and its rocks clatter down its flanks, great serpents spit venom from its crevices, she curses its forests and burns its slopes, and says to it: because you were high and did not put your nose to the ground, I have killed you and brought you low. The poem ends with the scribe's words: "Nisaba be praised." Inanna and Ebih 25–32 and 112–184.

The door of the mountains

In the Lugalbanda poem Anzud says: "My father Enlil brought me here. He let me bar the entrance to the kur as if with a great door"; the Sumerian word is kur-ra. The mountains have a door and a guard, as the netherworld has a gate and a gatekeeper.

Symbolic Reading

The essay rereading the Sumerian myths reads the netherworld as the grave and the earth, and "no return from the netherworld" as the simple fact that death is final. It reads the half year Dumuzi spends below as the six dry months of ancient Iraq, from May to October, and Inanna's descent as a crisis in which a city loses its institutions one after another and comes out of it only with a loss.

Among the senses of kur in the Sumerian dictionary are the east and the east wind, and the mountains the people of Sumer could see were the mountains of the east. When the gatekeeper asks Inanna who she is, she answers: "I am Inanna, going to the east", literally to where the sun rises. The depth into which the dead go and the mountains from which the sun comes up lie in one direction, as Dilmun, where the flood survivor was settled, lies "where the sun rises". In Lugal-e the mountains are the source of both stone and water: the floods come down from them, and from their stones the dam is built that leads the water to the Tigris.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Sumerian essay sets the kur beside Greek Tartarus and Hades. Hesiod's Tartarus is the farthest place beneath the earth, where defeated gods are imprisoned, closer to the sense of qaʿr, the bottom; Hades is the king of the dead and their house, closer to the kur given to Ereshkigal.

At Ugarit Baal tells his two messengers to head for the twin hills at the earth's edge, to lift the mountain on their hands and the hill on their palms, and to go down to the house of the dead in the earth, to the city of Mot. In Syria too the road to the dead passes by the mountains and under them.

The descents of Inanna and Enkidu into the kur are the oldest witnesses of the descent to the underworld. The opening of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, where the kur is given to Ereshkigal "when heaven had been separated from earth", is a witness of the separation of heaven and earth. Ninurta's fight with the Asag from the mountains, Inanna's fight with Mount Ebih and Kramer's reading of the kur as a dragon all belong to the chaoskampf. The mountain of which Ninhursag is made lady, and the mountain whose entrance Anzud guards, are images of the sacred mountain.