Temporal Contradictions in the Sumerian King List

You ask about chronological contradictions: Dumuzid the Fisherman was captured by Enmebaragesi of Kish, with a separation of 2,000 years between these figures. Relatedly, Gilgamesh and Agga fought though they were similarly separated by 2,000 years. How did folks in antiquity reconcile those differences?

First, I'll contextualize the Sumerian King List, the source related to your questions. Through that, I’ll address how modern scholars have thought about this text. Afterward, I try to address how there really isn't an answer to your question.

The Sumerian King List

The Sumerian King List is a composite text reconstructed from multiple cuneiform fragments, dating from the early second to late first millennia BCE. These fragments have been found across a wide geographic range, from Susa in Iran to Nineveh in northern Iraq, with the majority found at Nippur in central Iraq. The text was known as late as the 3rd century BCE and served as a source for Berossus’s Babyloniaca (History of Babylonia). Some of that work survives through quotations by the 9th-century CE Palestinian monk Syncellus.

The first cuneiform fragment of the Sumerian King List was published in 1906, with the most famous example, the Weld-Blundell prism, published in 1923. Thorkild Jacobsen was among the first scholars to question the text’s historical reliability. In 1939, he noted that prior to the Weld-Blundell prism’s publication, “the reliability of the information contained in the fragments was rarely seriously questioned. Most scholars inclined to accept it at face value…”. This is because the King List did contain seemingly factual data. For instance, we knew of the kingdom of Mari through references in the text before the city's archaeological discovery in 1934. Excavations at both Mari and Ur confirmed royal names like Meskalamdug, whose inscribed artifacts corroborate his mention in the Sumerian King List.

In the 2000s, a new version of the text surfaced. Published by Piotr Steinkeller in 2003, this copy diverged significantly from other versions. Steinkeller argued that it preceded an ideological shift that followed the fall of the Ur III state in 2004 BCE. This means the version most commonly discussed today dates to the Isin dynasty, composed around 1900 BCE. This Isin tradition shares thematic concerns with literary texts like Atra-hasis and the Sumerian Flood Account, which both use a world flood motif to distinguish a pre- and postdiluvian political world, a rupture in kingship and cosmic order.

Reconciling These Contradictions

Contemporary scholars generally agree that the Sumerian King List contains historical information, as it does account for rulers of specific cities. However, it is a fictionalized narrative, meaning that it is shaped by literary tropes and ideological concerns. Its audience was likely an educated elite with cultural or economic influence who understood the nature of it being a crafted narrative, and the text likely acted as much a cultural artifact as a historical record.

There’s no way of asking someone from this time if they truly believed that antediluvian kings reigned for thousands of years. We cannot know how they cared about the text, whether it was received literally or as some allegory. But we do know the text shared the same space as myth and legend for the Babylonian historian Berossus, writing for a Greek audience. At that point in time, it does not seem to be taken as written history as we might define it today.

It is unlikely that the Sumerian King List was ever regarded solely as a historical document in the modern sense, and early scholars were mistaken to assume otherwise when interpreting the initial fragments. Rather, the text speaks to cultural memory, what some scholars approach through the lens of social history, folklore, or religion.

Similarly, texts like Gilgamesh and Agga likely were not conceived as historical accounts, either. Consider how Aeschylus’s The Persians dramatized historical figures in a literary setting, or how modern works like Hamilton reimagined historical characters for contemporary audiences. Classicists increasingly treat Homer’s Iliad as a cultural artifact rather than a factual chronicle, and biblical historians often approach scripture similarly.

Bibliography

• Piotr Steinkeller (2003), “An Ur III Manuscript of the Sumerian King List,” in Literatur, Politik und Recht in Mesopotamien, Festchrift für Claus Wilcke. Edited by Walter Sallaberger, Konrad Volk, and Annette Zgoll.

• Nicole Brisch (2013), “History and chronology,” in The Sumerian World. Edited by Harriet Crawford.

• Thorkild Jacobsen (1939), The Sumerian King List. Assyriological Studies no. 11 (https://isac.uchicago.edu/research/publications/as/11-sumerian-king-list)