The Rise of Ešnunna and the Possession of Khanang
In the previous chapter, the question of what exactly a nation is was asked, and the ethnogenesis of a people and their version of this process was recounted. But now I want to ask you… how does a nation form? We like to gravitate toward certain figures in the process of the formation of nations and we simplify the process by attributing responsibility to them. George Washington might come to the American mind, or Hewitt Bernard if you’re Canadian. If you had asked a Roman in the 1st century AD to name such a figure for their own nation, they would probably have answered Romulus and Remus, or perhaps Caesar Augustus. But, can individual men be said to be the “founders of nations”, or are they just figureheads for broader movements happening within a given society at a given time? I would think that it’s probably a little bit of both, but that without masses behind them the figures that we consider to be the center of events wouldn’t have been able to accomplish much of anything. What can be said with certainty, is that nations are formed around group identities, and group identities are usually formed and hardened in conflict.
No, I didn’t say bloodshed, but conflict. One group of people sees themselves as different from the other, the reasons for which may vary from situation to situation, but ultimately the differences are strong enough as to be irreconcilable. The solutions to this problem also vary, and the lines between the groups are almost always blurred by something or other, though not so much as to render them indistinguishable. Maybe both groups of people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, maybe they don’t. We’ve seen this play out before, but it seems to be relatively rare. The “Velvet Divorce” between the Czechs and the Slovaks comes to mind. But, maybe the differences are only perceived by one group, and the other doesn’t understand what is wrong and is willing to fight to “work it out”… like a husband that is surprised to have been served divorce papers by his wife. Have you ever seen that? I know I have.
A woman all of the sudden wants a divorce, and her husband is completely flabbergasted, and pleads with her to stay… or maybe he’s pleading with her so she doesn’t take his children away and ruin him so completely financially that he’ll never be able to move out of his parents’ house again. Sometimes the guy is just a blind idiot, but sometimes the woman is a conniving shrew. I’ve seen it both ways, and I’ve seen it the other way around too. The man serves the woman with the divorce papers, and she just doesn’t know what to do. I don’t say that sarcastically either. She’s probably sacrificed her professional potential for their life together, and maybe by now her physical beauty has started to die down a little - the lines are starting to show around her eyes, or maybe her hair’s a little gray, or maybe she has love-handles. Maybe all of the above. The agreement between her and her husband was pretty simple when you break it down, though. He provides the house, and she makes it a home, and no, that doesn’t just mean making sandwiches and doing the laundry. A homemaker is a whole lot more than a maid, because if a maid was all this person was, you could probably hire one for a lot cheaper and a lot less emotional hassle. I’ve heard it said that the homemaker provides the breadwinner with the sense of security that allows them to go out into the world and put up with all the nonsense necessary to acquire the resources for the house, but the inherant trouble with being one is that your profession is completely unquantifiable, and so it’s not exactly something you can put on a resume after you’re husband serves you with those papers, is it? So the begging ensues, “I don’t understand. What’s changed? I love you! Please, don’t do this?” And then the tears, but he wants out. I’ve also seen some women get particularly vicious in these situations once they’ve realized there’s no way to make him stay. If she’s already got kids, she might accuse him of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, but if she doesn’t, the man serving the divorce papers might find himself astounded at how sexually attractive she all of the sudden finds him.
Oh, is that uncomfortable? Good. History is uncomfortable, and it needs to be, lest we repeat its mistakes. Now imagine this on a societal scale. Group A just can’t understand what Group B’s problem is. They’ve lived together for generations, and maybe they even share blood to some degree, with the lines between the two having been blurred to some degree or other by mixed marriage. Nonetheless, a distinct core has remained in both, and now one wants a divorce. Why? What happened? Surely whatever is wrong isn’t so insurmountable that divorce is in order, is it? That’s ridiculous. No, they HAVE to figure it out, because they’re clearly stronger together than they ever would be apart. Maybe that sounds a little megalomaniacal when we aren’t pointing the lense at our own society or worse, at our own relationships, but you know… we’re different. Problems in other people’s marriages or their societies might be irreconcilable, but not ours. We’re the exception. Everyone likes to think they’re special. Of course, maybe the differences are really obvious to anyone looking in from the outside, but maybe they’re not. But it’s especially when the differences seem to only matter to such a degree as to require divorce to one of the interested parties that things get really, really ugly. You know… because one party feels betrayed. Maybe Group B, or Person B, wasn’t even playing it cool, but it was cool enough for Group A or Person A not to notice. How dare they! After all I’ve/we’ve done for them! They’re gonna be sorry. And so the history books might as well use blood for ink…
Maybe one group expels the other from the territory that they have defined as “theirs”, or maybe they just annihilate them. History is full of both of those. A lot of Germans were deported from various parts of Eastern Europe after World War II, which was complete with deliberate starvation that resulted in a whole lot of deaths. A lot of Armenians too from Turkey during World War I, and when moving them was difficult or otherwise impractical, the Turkish military took to murdering them. I’ve read some pretty horrific stories of mass executions so inhumane that it’s hard to believe that people carried them out. Genocides like these are ongoing in our modern day and age, even though it seems like you have to go to the far fringes of the internet sometimes to read about them. The conflict with ISIS in Iraq and its various splinter groups in Syria has been especially genocidal of the Assyrians and the Yazidis. But then again, it can also get pretty inhumane when Group A wants to force Group B to stay, and wants to punish them for their insolence. The Srebrenica Massacre might come to mind as an example. But ultimately, without something to contrast itself to, a conscience of national identity isn’t going to form, and once hardened, it can take a very long time to soften, especially if the nation in question finds itself pitted against its neighbors on more than one occasion after this has happened. Contrary to what a number of university professors might tell you, this process is as old as time, and probably even predates our species.
We can see it all over history, when people who previously didn’t think of themselves as different gradually grow apart, and eventually need to separate into their own spaces to be governed by people that they perceive to be more like them, whether this person is a member of the newly formed ethnicity or merely espouses values that they deem to be in line with their own. And just like the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, this process is observable in the time of the Ríxavaka, and the Šuparšungal Khananga’, or the “Dominion of Khanang”. In the Ríxavaka, we see the ethnogenesis of the Sírkanais as having been informed by a moral dilemma in which certain members of the tribe engaged in adultery with the wives of the Xasalkian nobles while others did not. The reality was that there was a conflict between the upper and lower classes of the society, and the lower classes, with their social mobility increasingly curtailed, found somewhere else to live, because there was indeed somewhere else to go. In this story we can also observe that a certain group of people, the Xasalkais, were demographically replaced or absorbed by a large group of migrants, who adopted a number of aspects of their material culture, but ultimately replaced them in the immaterial realm in much of the lands that these people had previously thought of as their own. The Sírkanais would represent this in their story as the Xasalkais allowing themselves to be conquered in a more or less peaceful manner (minus the massacre of the Xasalkian nobility), but a very different story was to play out in the south, one that was driven at least partially by the migration of the Sírkanais into the Ţaţamna drainage basin.
Now, the phrase Šuparšungal Khananga’ literally means the “Possession of Khanang”, but is often translated as meaning “dominion” in other languages because of the way it was used to refer to a sovereign nation, but calling it the “Dominion of Khanang” tells us very little about the idealogical framework of the nation that bore this name. It’s not as though the Ungsangkikka didn’t have a word that was more or less equivalent to “dominion”, but they used the word “possession” because they thought of the land and everything in it as the collective possession of a people. If you had asked an individual Sangkikka say, 4,000 years ago who they saw as the founder of their nation, they would have given you an epithet of an individual who was deified for his deeds. This person was most widely known as the Engal Sumkika, the “great black-bearded lord”, or perhaps the Engal Aka-Ua, the “great lord of the horned crown”, and of course the Luthakha, the “savior”, but never referenced by his personal name, Lulimnir Andangal, at least not in public. That was too sacred, and was only ever mentioned when recounting THEIR story of the formation of their country. This man is credited with many things in the literary traditions, among them being the construction of a giant “ark” that is the vessel that saves the Ungsangkikka from a flood caused by the gods in retribution for their ingratitude, but also, and more importantly for our purposes here, for restoring order to the country when it was set upon by barbarians and laying the foundations of the state.
Ingratitude? Ingratitude for what? How was this displayed? The Bible tells us that God flooded the world because the people in it had become “wicked”, and we’re just supposed to let our imaginations fly off the handle as to what they were up to. The Namḫarkan, literally “the rebirth”, is quite a bit more specific to what exactly was wrong. The Ungsangkikka had taken the gifts of civilization bestowed upon them by the gods for granted, and they had not only allowed hordes of barbarians to migrate into the country almost entirely unabated, but… they had allowed them into their cities, and into their sacred institutions. It should be specified that the story is very clear about who is and isn’t a nangaḫ, or “savage”, and not everyone who isn’t a Sangkikka (“black-headed-person”) is one. The people of the city of Ḫamatsi, located to the northeast in a region known to us as the headwaters of the Diyala River in the Shahrizor Plain, were not savages, neither were the people of Nimma (Elam), or the far away land of Waraḫše. The people of Tilmun certainly weren’t savages, but kinsmen to the Ungsangkikka. So, what separates a savage from a civilized person according to the narrative?
Although it is a gross, overgeneralizing misrepresentation of the truth, the story goes into a great amount of depth describing various different barbarian groups that had, by the time of Lulimnir, invaded, plundered, and settled within the country. These peoples include the Ungurḫene, the Ungḫurrene, and the Aḫatsumakene, who can all be grouped under the umbrella term Khurene, meaning “easterners”, but also the Martune which itself seems to be a more specific term despite the fact that it literally means “westerners”. The various different “Khurene” peoples are described as diverse in religious practices and varied to some degree or other in language, but ultimately “grown from the same seeds” and highly uncivilized, living a nomadic lifestyle herding sheep and goats, but few cattle and fewer horses, adorning their bodies with various “grim images”, and wearing the teeth of their enemies around their necks. They are not described as practicing agriculture, and they frequently pillage the settlements of the Ungsangkikka and the “Martune” alike, stealing their possessions and their women. The “Martune” are a far more civilized and well-adjusted group, with many of them having intermarried among the Ungsangkikka for generations, even making up the demographic majorities of such cities as Khiš and Akate, which are referred to in the story as having been “bastardized” through this process. Though they are more civilized than the various “Khurene” peoples, they are described as somewhere between them and the Ungsangkikka, with no real inclination to the upkeep of the cities they inhabit, and certainly no real sense of piety toward the gods of the country.
Is any of this true? Well, yes. Definitely. The names are muddied up a little as they have not only been translated into the language of the Ungsangkikka, Emengir, but also because they’re confused. The umbrella term “Khurene” is referrencing people speaking various early representations of languages we would call “Hurrian”, and they were the members of a culture that we call the “Kura-Araxes” culture. We can even see the ethnonym by which we know them in the story after we shave off the Emengir word ung “people” and the Emengir plural of human nouns, -(e)ne, which leaves us with Ḫurri, itself a contraction of the native Ḫurrwoḫḫe. We can apply the same treatment to the names Ungurḫene and Aḫatsumakene (minus the Emengir genitive -ak on the latter) and we see Urḫi, a contraction of Urḫoḫḫe “steadfast (man)” and Aḫatsum, a “Hurrian” ethnonym and toponym, respectively. But, what about the “Martune”? The trained eye would be able to see Martu in here, and they might complain that that name was used by the Ungsangkikka to describe a people we know as the “Amorites”, who didn’t enter the political scene of Khanang/Khienkir until centuries later. So, is the Namḫarkan referring to “Amorites”? No, no it isn’t. The term Martu in Emengir simply meant “westerner”, and since most of the peoples to their west spoke continuously diverging varieties of languages we call “Semitic”, there wasn’t a need just yet to differentiate the “Amorites” from the “Semites” that were already in Khanang. To us, these peoples are the “Akkadians”, so named for the city that was the capital of a dynasty that belonged to this ethnicity, but what they called themselves is something that’s lost to history, in our time, at least.
We often have a lot of trouble contextualizing history, even current affairs. We like to make these charicatures of people and time periods, but the charicatures are a lot like statues in the sense that they’re lifeless representations of the human experience. That’s exactly what the Ungsangkikka did in the Namḫarkan, which, like any epic story of a country’s founding is an attempt by people who lived hundreds of years after the fact to make sense of real events experienced by real people. Now, both of these groups should be thought of as more of “pan-ethnicities” than anything else, sort of in the sense that quite a number of the Ungsangkikka thought of themselves at the time, which you might compare to how the Ancient Greeks perceived their position in the world. Different, but… the same, or at least sharing a common culture, religion, and divergent dialects of the same language. Both of them were more recently migrated to the land of Khanang than the Ungsangkikka, but opinion on their presence was quite a varied matter. The Martune described in the story called themselves the Ts’ābū, a word that meant “people”, or perhaps “army-men”, or even “troopers”, and they had been following the course of the Puranuna (Euphrates) River for about 250 years, give or take a decade or so, in search of good land to graze their cattle… at least at the start. Again, the perceptions of these people varied among the Ungsangkikka, and so did their treatment. Some people were very tolerant, even eager to accept them, others didn’t really care about their presence as long as it didn’t interfere with their daily affairs, and others were hostile, and even violent toward them. The latter tended to be the case among the Ungsakikkan herders, who had the longest and most regular contact with them, and who stood to lose the most from their presence from the start. After all, while they mostly tended different kinds of livestock, with the Ungsakikka preferring sheep, goats, and donkeys, and the Ts’ābū tending more cattle, but all of the animals drank from the same river or at the same watering holes, and water is precious in the desert. Many Ungsangkikka in the northern cities that either had significant Ts’ābū minorities or were predominated by them (Khiš and Akate) also looked down on them, as the founding Ts’ābean populations of these cities were often descendants of farm and construction hands employed by the city so that the local Ungsangkikka themselves could commit themselves to more “refined” crafts, which those poor among them perceived as an attempt by the social elite to do away with the “less desirable” members of their own.
Again, this mirrors phenomena that we can observe in real time in our modern day and age. Take for example the mass migration of Latin Americans into the United States and Canada. Maybe I’m poking a beehive bringing it up, but that’s precisely the reason that it’s worth drawing an analogy, here. See, it has been a question for some time just where the origins of the “Sumerians”, the Ungsangkikka, or the “black-headed people” lie. Were they indigenous to Southern Mesopotamia, or did they migrate from elsewhere? If they were more recent migrants, then from where? Some speculate that they came from further north, perhaps on what we call the “Iranian Plateau” or the lush, forest region on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Others have posited that they were from India, or perhaps the Zagros Mountains, but the most plausible theories place their origins somewhere in the “Persian Gulf”, perhaps being the descendants of the people who once lived on the shorline of a bounteous river that was formed by the merger of the Tigris and the Euphrates that used to spill directly into the “Indian Ocean”. There may be some truth in all of these theories however, but whatever the case, the people that inhabited the country and now made up its demographic majority certainly felt indigenous to it by the time in question, much like Americans and Canadians do today. On the other hand, there were those who felt that the migration of other peoples into the country was just business as usual, since their own tales said that they came from the island of Tilmun. The fact of the matter was that Khienkir, the “land of noble lords”, was itself a diverse country, one that wasn’t unified under a single overarching government the same way the United States is, albeit the various cities and the peoples that inhabited them generally respected a common social order, one that recognized the city of Unuk as the center from which that social order emmanated and where its longevity was preserved through religious ritual. This had been the status quo for some centuries now, and though the Ungsangkikka, the “black-headed people” were by far the majority across much of the country, they were not the only ethnic group there, and they shared authority by rotating the office of en “lord” or ensi “lord of the fields” between the various families of pedigree of the various peoples of the country. So, perhaps not perfectly analogous to the American or Canadian situation of the present day and time, but certainly similar enough for us to be able to have some kind of perception of the feelings of people on different sides of the issue of the future of their people.
By the time of the migration of the Sírkanais into Sírkana however, other cities had begun to rise to prominence, and some had even begun to question the primacy of Unuk openly. Not that they were obligated legally to pay the city any homage, but this was just a social norm that went back a thousand years. These feelings were particularly prominent around the cities of Khiš, called Kiššatu by the northwesterly migrants who now made up a demographic majority within its walls, and Šurupphak, the ancient city of Ninlil, who was also called Sut, and also Akate, which was composed almost entirely of Ts’ābū. For Šurupphak to question the authority of Unuk was one thing, as the bulk of its population belonged to the Ungsangkikka, but for Khiš and Akate, thought of by many in some of the other cities and especially in the country as bastard children of the gods, was another. Does that sound familiar?
Though this is perhaps where the analogies that can be drawn between Khanang and contemporary Canada and the United States ends, or maybe it isn’t… I guess it depends where you stand on current affairs. This was a time of drastic change. You might even say that the chess board was flipped over, but not by some angry player, but in fact by forces entirely out of the control of anyone inside the country. Natural disaster was one, with years of severe flooding that affected not only Khiš, but Šurupphak, and most of the cities and smaller settlements in between. The cities were damaged, some settlements leveled, fields were utterly devastated, and for a long time herders had to find pastureland far away from the cities around which they had been grazing their flocks during the warmer months for generations, putting them into direct conflict with one another, even more so than they already had been, over land. It can also be said that in times like these there’s normally quite a bit of fingerpointing. Maybe something went missing in the clean up process and someone blames someone else, “He stole my ram!” But maybe someone didn’t respect certain taboos, or carry out a particular religious ritual. It can also be said of course that times like these can bring out the worst in a society, because the chaos presents a chance for those more predisposed to predatory behavior to engage in it. After all, whose going to stop them, right? So, maybe some people make off with some other people’s belongings because the opportunity presents itself. It’s not necessarily ethnically motivated, and it might not even be just one or primarily one ethnicity reveling in the chaos. But the truth isn’t always as important as the perception of the truth, is it?
But, was Lulimnir Andangal a real person? Yes he was, just like Tanχandras and Nangavas in the Ríxavaka, and like them, his story is tied up in a lot of mythogical allegories to real events, although it could be said that his story has quite a bit more fact than metaphor in it. Maybe he didn’t build an ark and save the Ungsangkikka from a flood, but he did live at a time when a number of cities in the country were suffering from the long-term effects of terrible flooding, and he did almost single-handedly lay down the foundations of a state through what could be termed a “rapid reconquest” of the country known commonly as Khanang, but poetically as Khienkir. The epic however, paradoxically remembers historical events in reverse order, with the flood being placed after Lulimnir Andangal had become king and… well, just about restored order to the country.
He is said to have been born in a mixed family, with a Khurean maternal grandfather who is represented in the epic as having been a cruel master to his grandson after the boy’s father had died at the hands of a bull. So cruel is his grandfather in fact, that Lulimnir runs away as a child and becomes even more wild than the Khureans with whom he was being raised. He is said to have shed his clothes and let all of the hair of his body grow unchecked as he matured, slowly forgetting the language of humans, instead preferring the company of animals. As the Khurean tribe with which he was living inhabited the region north of the city of Ešnunna, this is where he roams, eating meat raw and freeing animals trapped by hunters. When he is 14, he himself his caught by a hunter named Papirkina, who parades him as his trophy through the city. The king of Ešnunna, Usakarešundu, happens to be in the market place and sees this display of inhumanity and demands a stop to it. The people of call him a monster, but the king sees that the monster is a boy, and decides to take him to the temple priestess, a woman named Ngešnukalkha, who uses her beauty to tempt him from the wild, civilizing him through sexual intercourse. On the first night, Lulimnir runs away, but when he attempts to fraternize with his animal friends, he realizes that they no longer understand him and run away when he gets too close, so he returns to the priestess for more “civilizing”. After the process is finished, he is brought to the king, who asks him for his service, which the boy gives. What this entails isn’t clear, but it would seem that three years later, when Lulimnir is almost on the cusp of manhood, the Bull of Heaven, which has been ravaging the entire country of Khanang because of the repudiation of the king of Unuk of the goddess Inanna, comes to Ešnunna and begins to wrick havoc there. The people of the city call to their king for aid, who galantly rides out of his palace atop his great stallion, Ḫupallikakal, with his new servant running along side him, and all of the king’s men-at-arms trailing behind on foot. Despite the efforts of the men-at-arms however, the bull cannot be brought to heel, as it is so wild, so enormous, and so strong that it makes short work of a hundred of them. It is only when Lulimnir grabs it by the horns and wrestles it to the ground that Usakarešundu is able to deal it a fateful blow, subsequently butchering it on the spot and distributing its meat to the masses of the city, hurling a piece of its leg at Inanna for her impudence, but carrying the horns to Unuk itself and dedicating them to her in her temple at Eanna. After this incident, Lulimnir is trained to fight in the army of the king, where he demonstrates his prowess yet again at a battle near the subservient town of Thuthup, where he is able to hold a bridge from an entire army for hours until finally falling unconscious due to his wounds. From here, it is decided by the king that Lulimnir will accompany him on an expedition to the fabled Cedar Mountain, where dwells the Living One, Ḫuwawa. There is a portion of the epic in which the young Lulimnir asks the aging king why he would journey to the Cedar Mountain and pick a fight with a monster, and the king explains to him not only the impermanence of the human condition, but the decaying nature of his people and the necessity to inspire them through heroic feat. The boy advises him to seek the favor of Uthu, the Sun God, which the king does, being granted the help of seven constellations, which will guide him on his journey, after which the men of the city are mobilized and they set out.
By now I’m sure that this sounds quite familiar to the studied eye. Usakarešundu is highly reminiscent of Gilgamesh, or “Pilkameš” as the people we call the “Sumerians” knew him, and Lulimnir of Enkhitu. Both Pilkameš and Usakarešundu are said to have slain the Bull of Heaven, which was set upon the country in a fit of rage for the rejection of her advances by Pilkameš, and likewise both kings went on an adventure to the Cedar Mountain where they encountered the monster Ḫuwawa, all with a trusty companion who was originally a wild man tamed through sexual intercourse with a priestess. The Namḫarkan however differs in that the wild man is not directly created by a god, but is a runaway child, a Sangkikka, looking to escape a scornful and abusive barbarian grandfather. It also reinforces the message of the barbarian vs. the Ungsangkikka when the king reminds the boy of the need to inspire the people through great deeds. Here, Enkhitu/Lulimnir is not just the servant or the companion of the king, but his protege. But the tale differs radically from here in terms of the showdown between the monster, the king, and the boy.
Once they have traveled beyond the seven mountains and into the forest, the entire army is stunned by one of the auras of Ḫuwawa, the cedars’ guardian, and they are all subsequently knocked unconscious. Lulimnir is the first to rise, seeing the terrible monster standing over him, which is described as being covered in scales, with a face like coiled entrails, the long horns of a bull, the claws of a bear, and the talons of an eagle. The monster disappears into the forest, and Lulimnir rouses the king and what men he can, but most of them are in a deep sleep. Lulimnir is afraid of going further, but Usakarešundu reminds him of his strength and tells him to take heart, and they journey deeper into the forest until they come upon the dwelling of Ḫuwawa, who bellows at them from within it to stop and kneel to the ground, and come no closer lest he will tear them to shreds. Usakarešundu then pretends to wish to form a marital alliance with the beast, offering up his daughters, Anenthen and Khuktiri, to be his wives. He further promises Ḫuwawa luxuries unknown to him in his remote mountain lair: water in leather bottles, sandals large and small, choice gemstones, fine flour for bread among them. For each of these gifts the monster surrenders one of his protective auras, telling the king and his men that they are contained inside giant cedars nearby, which the king then orders what men are awake to cut into logs for the journey home. Only when he has no protective auras left does the king attempt to take him prisoner, casting a net over him while his men strike him many times with clubs. Ḫuwawa entertains this and drops to the ground, pretending to plea for princely mercy from the king, while Lulimnir counsels the king not to give it, and to take this opportunity to kill him. The monster laughs and tears through the net, tearing the men to shreds and taking the king by the throat and nearly choking the life out of him. It is only when Lulimnir comes to the king’s aid that his life is saved, and the king and the boy are said to engage in an epic battle in which the trees of the forest are torn down and used as weapons. Ḫuwawa ultimately overpowers Lulimnir, pushing him to the ground and rushing him before he can get up, and saying, “You would tell your king to kill me when I was helpless. Perhaps I should kill you now? Or should I show you the princely mercy you would have denied me?” to which Lulimnir says, “Do what you will.” The monster then replies, “You have come to my home and won my auras fairly, for it is I who was foolish enough to trust a man. For that you may take them, but you will not have my life. No, I will take my revenge on your children one day when they are like I was as I sat in my home at rest. But for now, you may have my auras.” And with that, he disappears.
That’s quite a different ending to the story than the one we know. For us, the monster always dies, and his head is presented to Enlil. But, in the Namḫarkan, he lives. Why? Obviously, like the Ríxavaka is not only an allegorical memory of historical events, but a powerful piece of political propaganda that alludes to one of the foundational theories of the state. Ḫuwawa is a monster in a foreign land, one that the Ungsangkikka disturbed in his abode and even took something from, unable to be defeated or even held captive. Lulimnir was wild, but he was a Sangkikka and could thus be tamed, but Ḫuwawa is something else, and something that vows to take its revenge. So one might say perhaps that he is a reminder that the world cannot be civilized, and that expansion outside of Khanang will bring about its downfall.
The cedars are taken back to the city of Ešnunna, containing the auras within them, which will protect the city in its time of need. Still, Usakarešundu is not satisfied with this alone, and fears that the monster’s promise was to come after HIS children for the trickery he had personally used to obtain them, and so he first adopts Lulimnir, but then later elevates him as his heir once he is a man for fear that his own progeny will attract the monster. The king has three sons, Lumaḫra, Inkhalak, and Purukhuk, and as one might expect, once he dies this causes a civil war. Purukhuk supports his brother Inkhalak, but neither of them support the eldest, Lumaḫra, who seeks his support from the king of Khiš, Enmeparakesi, who gives him the grain and sheep necessary to hire an army of Ungurḫene to fight for him and storm the city. This part of the story also plays out in an eerily familiar manner. Apparently, Lumaḫra has never met Lulimnir, the latter having only entered his father’s service long after he was sent away to govern one of the subservient towns (which is left anonymous). It is also stated in the story that the king died unexpectedly, and at the instigation of Inkhalak, who wished to paint his father’s elevation of Lulimnir as his having been raving mad with a sudden, mind-eating illness. Lumaḫra therefore was not at his death bed either. Thus, when he attacks the city, demanding that Lulimnir be submitted, to which the boy now barely a man volunteers and is stripped naked and sent out of the city in chains. Lumaḫra immediately beats him once he is brought to his presence, and sends his emissaries to the city once again to bring his brothers to counsel. He then demands to know if the young man brought to him is Lulimnir, the wild boy from the countryside that was trapped by Papirkina. Lulimnir is said to be able to be distinguished by his long hair on his head, his growing beard (though at this point his beard is just stubble), and his body hair that he lets grow unchecked, despite having lived in civilized society for some years now. Having learned some level of guile from his mentor, he answers that he isn’t, and that if he were that Lumaḫra would be dead where he stood, for which he receives another beating. While he is being beaten, it is reported by Lumaḫra’s barbarian troops that the wild man Lulimnir is standing on the walls of the city, and so Lumaḫra dispatches them to fight, leaving himself alone in his camp but for a contingent of guards. It is here that Lulimnir reveals himself and breaks free of his chains and kills the guards and takes Lumaḫra hostage, explaining that the man on the wall was Inkhalak, with dyed sheep’s wool on his head to make him appear to be Lulimnir. Purukhuk has lead the charge against the Ungurḫene, who are beaten badly, and surrender when they see Lulimnir, now dressed in Lumaḫra’s clothes, and their prince naked in chains.
The brothers Purukhuk and Inkhalak apparently believe that the promise uttered by Ḫuwawa was directed at Lulimnir, and so, once back in the walls and celebrating his victory in a city that just a few years ago scorned him as a monster himself, they have him drugged, to be taken to Cedar Mountain where Ḫuwawa can take his vengeance. Purukhuk is the one given the assignment however, who is unable to carry it out, afraid of offending his father’s spirit as he knows that his father wasn’t mad when he named Lulimnir as his heir. He takes his foster-brother out of the city to the lands north of the Amumuna’ (Diyala) River and sets him free, warning him to never to approach the city of Ešnunna again. Lumaḫra is executed, and Inkhalak is made ensi, and affairs in the country resume as they had for some years, all the while Lulimnir is tormented by visions of a flood that will wash over the country and destroy the Ungsangkikka. He begins working as a fuller, and traveling with textile caravans all around the country, touring the most ancient cities of Khanang and finds most of them in a sorry state, with their sacred institutions fully monetized, the people having no sense of the dignity of their heritage, and their women lewd and adulterous. The cities of Akhšakh and Tsimbir give him hope for his people however, as they are northerly enough to have been “bastardized” (we might say “Semiticized” or “Hurrianized”, but the texts make very clear their perceptions of the matter of the presence of foreign invaders in the country) in the way that cities like Khiš and Akate had been, and yet it’s here that the Ungsangkikka are the most pious, offering their thanks to the gods of their fathers for the gifts of civilization to them.
He is also surprised to hear his own name being sung in the streets in these cities, as he is apparently something of a folk hero already for his deeds in the service of Usakarešundu of Ešnunna, whose sons now “surround themselves with barbarian guards” for fear of the wrath of their own people. The story here alludes to a sort of crisis of identity within the protagonist, who is not sure whether or not to let his father’s people whither away into obscurity for their decadence, arrogance, impiety, and ingratitude for what the gods have given them that he has personally observed in their own heartland, or whether he should fight for the preservation of his people’s inheritance. He ultimately comes to the conclusion that the gifts of civilization were given to the Ungsangkikka, and that to give up on their preservation would be to turn his nose up to the gods who, for years now have been showing him the fate of the country through his visions, and so he resolves not only to overthrow Inkhalak of Ešnunna, but also to “purge the land of the barbarian” and to preserve the sovereignty of the Ungsangkikka as a stronger, united people. The story goes on to tell how Lulimnir, knowing the barbarians intimately as he did having been raised among them (the amount of time he spent in the wild isn’t specified), amassed an army from the cities of Akhšakh and Tsimbir of pious and patriotic young Ungsangkikka and marched on Ešnunna, where he defeated Inkhalak and not only cleansed the city of its barbarian inhabitants, but Inkhalak’s supporters, and Inkhalak himself, who was sacrificed to Nunatsu, the patron deity of the city, along with the rest of his immediate family and his attendants, by way of ritual piercing of their skulls with a pick axe.
But, the story doesn’t end here. No, now that Lulimnir has claimed his rightful place as King of Ešnunna, he uses the seven cedars from Cedar Mountain to construct a giant ark, and calls the people of Khanang to bring their children and their animals aboard it, as the gods are angry with the Ungsangkikka for their ingratitude and are preparing to destroy them for it. Not everyone listens to his message, and indeed quite a number of people, especially those in the ancient city Unuk, which is perhaps the most degenerate of all, laugh at it. But, the pious cities of Tsimbir and Akhšakh gather on the ark, and so too do many of the royal families of the other cities, including Akka, the son of Enmeparakesi of Khiš, and Ensiphatakutsika, the king of Unuk. In the end however, many of the Ungsangkikka do not listen, and so when the flood comes they are swept away by it. During the flood however, which is said to have lasted seven days, the sun god, Uthu, appears to Lulimnir and warns him that he was wrong to let the royal families onto the ark, and that despite their façade of piety and good will, that they will try to kill him. The people on the ark are apparently very on edge, and so Lulimnir does not go about trying to arrest anyone until the attempts on his life begin, one for every night beginning on the fourth night of the flood. Ensiphatakutsika had offered his daughter, Ninnikašaka’, as a junior wife to Lulimnir, who was already married to Anenthen, the daughter of Usakarešundu, in order to gain his passage. Growing ever more paranoid by the night, it’s when this junior wife tries to poison his beer with crushed cherry pits that the conspiracy is divulged, by his senior wife, who tortures the princess mercilessly until she gives her the answers she wants. Now Lulimnir realizes that the corruption of the people has come from the top down, and the corrupted royal families will only corrupt the country again given the opportunity because the only thing they care about is furthering their own power. So, when the flood ends and the raven finds land, the people are released, the nobles of the different cities are each taken to their respective cities and sacrificed as Lumaḫra had been before them, along with their families and their attendants, to properly rededicate the land as the possession of its people.
Now, is any of that true? Well, yes and no. So, by the time Lulimnir Andangal was a child, it could be said that the culture of the Ungsangkikka was on the brink of collapse, and its people close to permanently losing their sovereignty to various foreign invaders. The floods happened well before he was born, a whole century in fact, but it can definitely be said that they had a substantial part in shaping the man that he became. The Ts’ābū had risen to considerable prominence, particularly at Khiš, but also at the relatively recently founded city of Akate, which traced its foundation to an original colony of Ungsangkikka, many of whom were only remembered in the city’s cemeteries. The Sangkikka herder seemed almost to be an endangered species, and so too was the Sangkikka farmer, at least in the north. The Ts’ābū had replaced the herders for the most part, but not necessarily through aggressive displacement, but because the primary grazing rights of the Ungsangkikka nearest to the rivers had resulted in their suffering the worst loss of livestock during the floods, and the same could be said of the farmers. The northern invaders, as mentioned earlier, belonged to the same pan-ethnicity, which among them was often called Urḫoḫḫena “the steadfast ones”, but among some of them it was Ḫurrwoḫḫena, and like many other pan-ethnicities in history, they perceived one another as close relatives, and thus tended to trust each other before others, although this rule was not universal. In fact, Lulimnir himself was of a mixed background as the story says, with an Urḫoḫḫe for a grandfather on his mother’s side who had taken two Ts’ābean wives after his Ungsangkikkan wife, who the tales of his upbringing remember as Mulan, and a Ts’ābean grandmother on his father’s side. Born to a tribe of Ungsangkikkan shepherds, his father died a very mundane death at the hands of a donkey that kicked him in the chest hard enough to stop his heart, leaving his mother unable to support herself, and subsequently needing to move back in with her father, as she was now once again his responsibility. His grandfather’s name is variously given as Tukkukoḫḫe, Katsinpu, and Urki, although none of these could actually have been his name, as the first is a “Hurrian” ethnic name, while the other two are Ungsangkikkan, meaning “club” and “dog”, respectively. The Khanangan accounts of this man are usually vague, but describe him as having been a cruel and abusive patron, which is an element of the story that was later added to paint Lulimnir in a more sympathetic light, because the truth of the matter was that his grandfather was a caring, but firm parent to his grandson.
Lulimnir did rise to prominence in the recorded battle near the town of Thuthup, but he was never named the heir of Usakarešundu, as there was never any ensi by that name over the city in the first place, and his crisis of identity had happened quite a few years earlier, which was why he had abandoned his grandfather’s people. The incumbent ensi of Ešnunna, Enkhuksikua, was overthrown by Lulimnir and a “nationalist” faction within the priesthood for the alliance he struck with the Aḫatsoḫḫena that granted them extensive privileges within the lands controlled by the city and also ceded just about everything north of the Lesser Tsap to them, which was to be sealed with a marriage to one of their princesses. He was indeed cast down from the kingship that he had seized however by one of the sons of Enkhuksikua, who was named Inkhalak, who was entirely backed by the Aḫatsoḫḫean chiefs, but he was not released by a younger brother of the new ensi. No, Purukhuk was instead the name of a foot soldier who was raiding Lulimnir’s hideout and saw him in the mud, hiding in the marshes of the Itikna (Tigris) River, but upon finding him, he kept his secret, asking that he remember his name when he overthrew Inkhalak and claimed Ešnunna, which he eventually did, but not before he had roused nationalist rebellions in Tsimbir and Akhšakh and overthrown the royal families of those cities and gone on a long campaign of ethnic cleansing, deporting the Ts’ābū to the upper reaches of the Itikna River and murdering those who would not go willingly, only returning to Ešnunna when his power had been firmly established. From Ešnunna, the Aḫatsoḫḫena and the Urḫoḫḫena were expelled from the lands north of the Amumuna’ all the way to the Greater Tsap, which would be the northernmost frontier in the centuries to come. These ethnic cleansing events are remembered in the story as the flood that cleansed the land not only of the barbarians, but of the impious and ungrateful Ungsakikka who had given up their heritage to them. The sacrifice of the royals when the flood was over is perhaps the grimmest memory that the story contains however, as it is a justification for the manner in which Lulimnir systematically murdered the royals of every city in Khanang and replaced them with members of his own family. This put him in direct control of the entire country, and he moved his capital to Ešnunna, where he was named Engal Enena’, the “great lord of lords”. So was established the Possession of Khanang.