Sumerian King List: Myth and History of Mesopotamian Kings

The Sumerian King List is an ancient cuneiform text that records which Mesopotamian cities held “kingship” and which kings ruled there, from mythical rulers who reigned for tens of thousands of years before a great flood down to historical dynasties of around 1800 BC. Composed and revised between about 2100 and 1800 BC, it is one of the most famous documents of ancient Iraq. For historians it is both a valuable list of names and a warning about how ancient rulers shaped the past to suit the present.

What the text is

The list survives on more than a dozen clay tablets, prisms and fragments, written in Sumerian in the cuneiform script (see the invention of cuneiform writing). No two copies are exactly alike. Kings, reign lengths and even the order of dynasties differ from one manuscript to another, which shows that scribes copied, edited and updated the text over several centuries.

The most complete copy is the Weld-Blundell Prism, a four-sided baked clay prism about 20 centimetres tall, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It probably comes from Larsa in southern Iraq and dates to around 1800 BC. It was acquired by the British collector Herbert Weld-Blundell in the early 1920s and published by the Assyriologist Stephen Langdon in 1923.

The oldest known version was written under the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2100–2050 BC, possibly in the reign of Shulgi of Ur. Most other copies come from the Old Babylonian period, roughly 1900–1700 BC, and many were found at Nippur, the religious centre of Sumer.

Kings before the Flood

The text opens with the words, in translation, “after kingship descended from heaven, kingship was in Eridu”. The first king, Alulim, ruled at Eridu for 28,800 years and his successor Alalgar for 36,000 years. In the Weld-Blundell version, eight kings ruling in five cities reign for a combined 241,200 years.

These numbers are not random. Sumerian scribes counted in base 60, and 3,600 (60 × 60) was a key unit called a sar. Many of the early reign lengths are neat multiples of it: 28,800 is eight sar. The figures express an idea of a remote, perfect age rather than any attempt at real chronology.

The list then states that “the Flood swept over” the land. This connects it to the wider Mesopotamian flood tradition known from the Sumerian flood story and the Babylonian epics of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh. Not all copies contain the antediluvian (pre-Flood) section, and many scholars think it was added to an older list of post-Flood dynasties.

From legend to history

After the Flood, kingship “descended” again, this time at Kish. Reigns are still enormous at first. Etana of Kish, “the shepherd who ascended to heaven”, is a figure of legend, while Enmebaragesi of Kish is one of the earliest rulers known also from his own inscriptions, from around 2600 BC.

The First Dynasty of Uruk includes Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh, the heroes of later Sumerian poems; Gilgamesh is given 126 years. The list also records Kubaba, a woman described as a tavern keeper who became ruler of Kish and reigned for 100 years. She is the only woman in the list to rule in her own right.

From the Akkadian dynasty onward the list becomes far more realistic. Sargon of Akkad, described as a former cupbearer of the king of Kish, reigns for 56 years, and his successors have plausible reign lengths. The Gutian period that followed the collapse of the Akkadian Empire is summed up with the famous question “Who was king? Who was not king?”, a vivid image of political chaos. The list then runs through the Third Dynasty of Ur and ends, in its latest versions, with the kings of Isin.

Why it was written

The central idea of the text is that there was only ever one legitimate kingship in Sumer at a time, which passed from city to city. Each change is described in the same formula: a city “was defeated” and kingship “was taken” to another.

This idea served a political purpose. The kings of Ur, and later of Isin, claimed to rule all of Sumer and Akkad. A history in which kingship had always belonged to a single city at a time made their claim look natural and ancient. It is no accident that the latest copies end with the dynasty that commissioned them.

How historians use it

Modern study of the list began with Thorkild Jacobsen’s edition, The Sumerian King List (1939), which compared the manuscripts and showed how the text had grown. Historians still use it as a framework and as a source for royal names, but always with caution.

The main problems are well known:

• Parallel dynasties made sequential. Many dynasties listed one after another actually ruled at the same time in neighbouring cities. Adding up their reigns produces a chronology far too long.
• Missing cities. Lagash, one of the best-documented Sumerian states, is left out entirely. A later Lagash text, often called “The Rulers of Lagash”, seems to answer this gap with its own list modelled on the King List.
• Inflated reigns. Even after the Flood, early reigns of several hundred years cannot be historical.
• Variant copies. Different manuscripts disagree, so there is no single “original” version.

Where the list can be checked against royal inscriptions, year names and administrative records, from roughly 2600 BC onward, many of its kings turn out to be real. That makes it valuable, but only when it is read alongside other evidence.

Legacy

The idea of long-lived kings before a flood survived in Mesopotamian tradition for two thousand years. Around 280 BC the Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in Greek, listed ten kings before the Flood with immense reigns, an echo of the same tradition. Scholars have long compared these lists with the long-lived patriarchs before Noah in the Book of Genesis, while noting that the details are quite different.

Today the Sumerian King List is studied as an early example of history written for political ends, and as evidence of how Mesopotamians imagined their own past.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 2600 BC: Enmebaragesi of Kish rules; one of the earliest kings in the list attested by his own inscriptions.
• c. 2334–2279 BC: Approximate reign of Sargon of Akkad (middle chronology), given 56 years in the list.
• c. 2100–2050 BC: Oldest known manuscript of the list written under the Third Dynasty of Ur.
• c. 1900–1700 BC: Most surviving copies written, many at Nippur, with the list extended to the kings of Isin.
• c. 1800 BC: The Weld-Blundell Prism is inscribed, probably at Larsa.
• 1923: Stephen Langdon publishes the Weld-Blundell Prism.
• 1939: Thorkild Jacobsen publishes his standard edition, The Sumerian King List.

Why it matters

The Sumerian King List is one of the earliest attempts anywhere to arrange the past into a single story. It preserves the names of real rulers who would otherwise be unknown, but it also shows that history was shaped to support those in power. Reading it critically is a lesson in how all historical sources need to be questioned.