The cost of cosmogony: ethical reflections on resource extraction, monumental architecture and urbanism in the Sumerian literary tradition

This paper focuses on the extraction of raw materials for monumental building not in the well-known Assyrian texts, where it is a central todos, but rather in the Sumerian literature from the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium. I argue that the authors of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, are reflecting on the rule of the Sargonic Dynasty as represented in The Curse of Agade. This moment of ethical reflection (in the course of a literature that does not generally shed many tears for defeated enemies) is part of a specific literary tradition that extends from the Nippur clergy who wrote The Curse of Agade and perceived themselves as victims, real or imagined, of Sargonic imperialistic intervention and ritual impropriety under Naram-Sin to the authors of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. Once this minority report was embedded within the Sumerian literary tradition, it continues to color the general opinion of figures such as Enmerkar in later traditions.