The turn of a lament from Nineveh, in its first published English translation
A lament runs in two halves. First the destruction: the city ruined, the god angry, the singer pleading. Then the turn — the god relents, and the city is glad again. Most fragments that survive are from the grief. The five lines on this one belong to the turn — that is a reading of the words that survive, not a position on the tablet: text is lost above them, and the song ran on past them onto the reverse.
The fragment is K.18059, from Nineveh, held by the British Museum. It is bilingual: each Sumerian line, written in the Eme-sal dialect of the lamentation singers, carries its own ancient Akkadian rendering beneath it, put there by the scribes themselves. Its transliteration has been open in the eBL database since 2018. It has never been translated, and it has no edition in any language — its only traces in print are two catalogue listings. The composition it belonged to has no name and no known duplicate.
Here is everything that survives. Brackets and gaps mark the breaks in the clay; nothing has been filled in.
(Eme-sal) Dai[ly? …]
(Akkadian) Dai[ly? …]
(Eme-sal) My city rejoic[es …]
(Akkadian) In my city, which in rejoicing […]
(Reverse) in- […] — a broken sign and a prefix; left as a fragment
The first couplet verifies itself, as far as damaged signs allow. The Eme-sal word for "daily" is damaged — its restored signs carry question marks. The Akkadian line directly beneath it, written by the ancient scribe, carries the same word — ūmišamma, "daily" — with damage of its own: the i is restored, and šam-ma carries the transliterators' question marks. Neither line is intact, and the two broken lines point at the same word; no other word fits either skeleton. Daily the singer sang, or daily the rite was kept; the rest of the sentence is in the break.
Then the turn itself, in the first person: my city. Not the king's city, not the god's city — the singer's. In my city, which in rejoicing — and there the clay ends, mid-sentence, the verb gone. One word in that Akkadian line, "rejoicing," itself rests on damaged signs; the Sumerian word above it, ḫul₂, "to rejoice," is fully preserved, and the sense stands on it.
Who sings, which god relented, and which city is glad again: five lines cannot carry that, and this article does not pretend they do. What the fragment holds is the moment the lament was written to reach.
The fragment is held by the British Museum (K.18059; CDLI P239533). Transliteration: Sáenz (eBL, 2018), revised by Jiménez (2018), Sáenz (2019), Heinrich (2020), and Mitto (2024) — credited in full; this translation is ours, made from their transliteration. Prior print trace: a catalogue listing of Nineveh bilingual kalûtu texts (Fincke, Archiv für Orientforschung 50, 2003/04, p. 143) and a survey mention (Black, 1987) — neither an edition, neither a translation. The full working dossier — print-status check, transliteration, and notes on every line — accompanies this article and is available to any scholar who wants to check the work.
Nuvira Technologies conducts this research with AI assistance. This translation was made from the credited eBL transliteration named above and checked against the published records for the tablet; the tablet itself has not been collated. Uncertain readings are marked; broken lines are left broken.
— Richard Vigslist, Founder, Nuvira Technologies
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