ENKI’S HAILSTORM - sung in Sumerian

The Sumerian god known as ENKI was god of the waters, and he is often depicted with rivers (possibly the Tigris and the Euphrates) flowing from his shoulders. Although the clay tablets on which this story of Enki was written are 5000 years old, they speak of a time even more remote, the time of creation, when the Sumerian gods (known as the Anunnaki) began organizing the world. The Sumerian text for this story is taken from a collection of tablets known as GILGAMESH, ENKIDU AND THE NETHER WORLD, and anyone who is interested in the translations and Sumerian transliterations can find them on the University of Oxford website: THE ELECTRONIC TEXT CORPUS OF SUMERIAN LITERATURE. Some of the other Anunnaki gods who are mentioned in this tale are AN (Enki’s father and god of the heavens), ENLIL (a god of wind and storms), and ERESHKIGAL (queen of the nether world). The lute that you see me playing at the beginning of this video is a Sumerian “gish-gudi”, the ancient ancestor of lutes that are still found today in Mesopotamia, Persia, Turkey and the Middle East. There are no examples of Sumerian lutes still in existence, they long ago turned to dust, but we do have descriptions of the instruments and a few rare depictions. I also used a “zurna” a kind of folk oboe that was very popular in ancient times, and still exists throughout the Middle East. With a bit of practice, it is possible to play the zurna using “circular breathing” which provides a constant drone. Unfortunately, it is not possible to sing and play the zurna at the same time! No one knows what Sumerian music sounded like, but we do know something about the instruments they used. What I have done in this video is to use the musical tools we know were available to the musicians of Sumer, and then allow my own imagination to do the rest. The walls you see in the background of the video are part of an inner courtyard in the city of Babylon in modern Iraq.