The Cursing of Agade

The Cursing of Agade is a piece of ancient literature written sometime around 2000 BC. It is Sumerian in origin and is about the drought of an ancient Mesopotamian city called Agade or Akkad.

Summary

At the beginning of the story, Agade is thriving in gold, tourism, and trade. Shortly thereafter however, in a very short amount of time, the glory of Agade is stripped away. The king of Akkad, Naram-Sin, has a dream that the chief god, Enlil, is going to ruin the future of Akkad, so he decides to ransack E-kur, the house of the gods. He succeeds in doing so, but this enrages Enlil, who decides to send the Guitans against Akkad in revenge. The Guitans harass the herdsmen, rob travelers, and essentially besiege the city. The drought continues, and the people inside the city starve to death. Fighting breaks out inside the city, and the dead, which are now many, remain unburied. The survivors in Akkad mourn, but the other gods tell Enlil to grant no mercy, and they curse Akkad with destruction. Akkad is ruined, and the story ends with the line "Inanna be praised for the destruction of Agade!"

Cross References

The first line of the Cursing of Agade mentions the "Bull of Heaven", which Gilgamesh kills in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In one version of the epic, Inanna, (also known as Ishtar) Goddess of love, fertility, and war, asks her father, Anu, if she can send the bull of heaven down as punishment for Gilgamesh refusing to be her consort. Anu asks her if the people on earth have stocked up on grain, because sending down the bull of heaven will cause a famine. Inanna says that she has. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th paragraphs of the story state, among other things, that "She ... filled Agade’s stores for emmer wheat with gold, she filled its stores for white emmer wheat with silver; she delivered copper, tin, and blocks of lapis lazuli to its granaries and sealed its silos from outside." The subsequent famine experienced in this story may have been caused by the loosing of the Bull of Heaven.

References

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