By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
The Sumerian peoples, who began to develop in the region of Mesopotamia around 3000 BC, in what became known as the “urban revolution”, they settled in cities that acquired relevance in this region, such as Ur and Uruk. As in all ancient civilizations, the Sumerians also made attempts to explain fundamental questions concerning human beings, such as “was there an age of heroes and gods before men?”, “how was the world created?”, among others. others. The Sumerians sought to answer these questions through their L iterature , that is, through his mythopoetic narratives and epics.
A mythopoetic narrative usually seeks to explain natural phenomena, the origin of the universe and the origin of men through metaphorical and symbolic constructions, elaborating a plot that gives meaning to reality and to the past. This is the case, among the Sumerians, of the work The Myth of Creation , which seeks to relate the origin of the world through the will of the god Marduk. The epic, on the other hand, refers to the narrative of a hero, to the saga undertaken by him. The Sumerians developed one of the most impressive epics on record, the Epic of Gilgamesh , which tells the story of the eponymous hero and his friend Enkidu, narrating the exploits and adventures they both went through together.
One of the most significant parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh it is the account of a deluge. Gilgamesh comes across, at a certain point in the narrative, a man who claims to be immortal, whose name is Utnapshtim, and who tells the hero his memories of the time when he received orders from the deities to build a boat that would serve as a shelter for him, his family and animals he chose, for the world would be submerged in water.
This account of the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh bears obvious similarities to the story of Noah reported in Genesis. Elsewhere in the narrative, there are also other descriptions similar to the first book of the Bible. This is mainly due to the strong cultural communication that the Sumerian peoples (as well as other peoples of Mesopotamia, such as the Babylonians, Akkadians and Assyrians) had with the Hebrews, given that the Hebrew patriarch Abraham was from, according to the book of Genesis, from the city of Ur, one of the cities founded by the Sumerians.
In this sense, the value of the literary narratives of the Sumerians is invaluable to humanity, as are the mythopoetic and religious narratives of traditions such as the Indian, Chinese, Persian and many others. .