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Concept
Debate between sheep and grain
Summary
The "Debate between sheep and grain" or "Myth of cattle and grain" is a Sumerian creation myth, written on clay tablets in the mid to late 3rd millennium BC.
Seven "debate" topics are known from the Sumerian literature, falling in the category of 'disputations'; some examples are: the Debate between Winter and Summer; the Debate between bird and fish; the Tree and the Reed; and The Dispute between Silver and Copper. These topics came some centuries after writing was established in Sumerian Mesopotamia. The debates are philosophical and address humanity's place in the world.
The first sixty-one lines of the myth were discovered on the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology catalogue of the Babylonian section, tablet number 14,005 from their excavations at the temple library at Nippur. This was translated by George Aaron Barton in 1918 and first published as "Sumerian religious texts" in "Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions", number eight, entitled "A New Creation Myth". The tablet is at its thickest point. Barton describes the text as an "elaborate statement of the non-existence of many things once upon a time" and considered it a "statement that mankind was brought into existence through the physical union of a god and a goddess."
Another tablet from the same collection, number 6893 (part of which was destroyed) was translated by Edward Chiera in 1924 increasing the text to seventy lines in "Sumerian religious texts". Chiera compiled his translation using further tablets translated by Hugo Radau published in "Miscellaneous Sumerian Texts" in 1909. Stephen Herbert Langdon also translated further parts of the text and discusses the myth saying, "One of the most remarkable tablets in the Museum is number 14005, a didactic poem in 61 lines on the period of pre-culture and institution of paradise by the earth god and the water god in Dilmun". It was then increased to two hundred lines and the myth called cattle and grain by Samuel Noah Kramer in 1959; he called it the "second myth significant for the Sumerian concept of the creation of man".
Official source
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