A Praise Poem of Lipit-Estar: A Popular Sumerian Song
A Praise Poem of Lipit-Estar is a Sumerian praise song honoring Lipit-Estar (also known as Lipit-Ishtar, reign circa 1935 to circa 1924 BCE), the fifth king of the First Dynasty of Isin, best known for his legal code written between the time of the better-known Code of Ur-Nammu and the later Code of Hammurabi.
The poem (also known as Lipit-Eštar A in modern scholarship to differentiate it from other poems concerning Lipit-Estar) would have been sung at festivals in ancient Mesopotamia honoring the king and the gods he served. These praise songs were often composed by the scribes in ancient Mesopotamia as though the king were speaking the lines themselves, and this poem conforms to that same paradigm. The king, as the head of Mesopotamian government, was expected to recognize his own worth as a steward of the gods, and so, as seen in this work, hymns of praise dispense with any semblance of modesty.
A Praise Poem of Lipit-Estar was composed during the king's reign, along with many others serving the same purpose, but took on a life of its own after his death as part of the curriculum of the Mesopotamian education system, known as the edubba ("House of Tablets"), and formed part of the Decad (ten compositions) a student needed to master before graduation. As an often-copied text, the work continued to be memorized and recited for over a century after Lipit-Estar's reign.
It continues to be anthologized in the present day as one of the more popular Sumerian praise poems, owing to its imagery and its historical value in illustrating the ideal of the perfect Sumerian king. Whether any king lived up to this ideal is unlikely, but works such as A Praise Poem of Shulgi suggest they were based, at least in part, on historical truth, even if aspects of a king's character and accomplishments may have been exaggerated. The purpose of such pieces, however, was not to present the king accurately but to praise him as a worthy steward of the gods and immortalize his reign in verse.
Lipit-Estar & Kingship
Lipit-Estar's name appears on the Sumerian King List, and his reign is documented through royal records and inscriptions. He was regarded as a good king who defeated the Amorites and secured his kingdom, but little else is known of him except for what is given in praise songs like this one and from the values expressed through his laws, the Code of Lipit-Estar (also given as the Code of Lipit-Ishtar) which dealt with subjects such as land disputes, public works and service, taxes, inheritance, and debt enslavement.
Like the earlier Code of Ur-Nammu (circa 2100-2050 BCE), issued under either Ur-Nammu (reign circa 2112 to 2094 BCE) or his son and successor Shulgi of Ur (reign 2094 to circa 2046 BCE), the Code of Lipit-Estar reflects a king presenting himself as a father figure to his people, gently correcting them when they go astray and instructing them through just punishments, usually fines, that fit the severity of any breach of the law. It differs significantly from the later Code of Hammurabi, which mandated strict penalties, including dismemberment or death, for many infractions.
Lipit-Estar's law code, like that of any other Mesopotamian king from Ur-Nammu to Hammurabi, derived its authority, not from the monarch himself, but from the gods who had chosen him as their steward over the land and its people. Kingship in Mesopotamia evolved from the position of tribal chief to leader of a community or village to monarch of a kingdom by the time of the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia (circa 2900 to circa 2350/2334 BCE). The authority of the king was understood to rest upon divine will and was only respected as long as it was clear the gods still approved of the job he was doing. Scholar Stephen Bertman comments:
To justify this greater power, the king would require a divine mandate, especially since he was no longer just the leader of a single community serving a local god but the master of a wider domain. One solution would be to claim he had been chosen by heaven, a claim that could be affirmed by the high priest of a nationally venerated temple such as the temple of the god Enlil at Nippur.
Indeed, the king's evident success was the most convincing proof of his divine selection. Both that success and his choice by the gods would then be celebrated in poetry and song ... such as portraying the king standing in a god's presence or making the king taller than the people around him. (66)
A Praise Poem of Lipit-Estar would have been composed to affirm the king's claim to divine approval, celebrate his stewardship, and link him directly to the gods through epithets and imagery or more directly by referencing him as a son of Enlil, the sky god who maintained order in the universe.
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