It was hard for me to understand why I had been forced to leave the palace. "Dumuzi is king now," my mother explained. "The assembly has chosen him, the goddess has recognized him. The palace belongs to him." But her words were like the blowing of the dry wind over the plain. Dumuzi could be king, for all I cared; but the palace was my home. "Will we return to it after Inanna sends Dumuzi to the nether world?" I asked, and she looked stern and told me never to speak such words again. But then in a softer voice she said, "Yes, I think you will live in the palace again one day."
This Dumuzi was young and strong and vigorous, and came of one of the greatest families of Uruk, a clan that long had held the sheshgal-priesthood in the temple of Inanna, and the supervisorship of the fisheries, and many another high office. He was handsome and of kingly bearing, with thick hair and a heavy beard.
Yet there seemed something soft and disagreeable about him within, and I did not understand why he had been chosen to be king. His eyes were small and had no shine, and his lips were fleshy, and the skin of him was like a woman's. I imagined he had it rubbed with 0ils every morning. I despised him from the first moment of his reign. Perhaps I hated him simply because he had become king in my father's place; but I think it was not only for that. At any rate, I harbor no hatred for him now. For foolish Dumuzi I have only pity: even more than the rest of us, he was the toy of the gods.
NOW MY life became very different. My days of play were over, my days of schooling began.
Because I was a prince of the line of Enmerkar and
Lugalbanda, I did not have to attend the common tablet-house, where the sons of merchants and foremen and temple administrators are taught to become scribes. Instead I went each day to a small low roofed room in an ancient little temple at the eastern side of the White
Platform, where a priest with shaven scalp and face conducted a private class for eight or nine high-born boys. My classmates were the sons of governors, ambassadors, generals, and high priests, and they had great regard for themselves. But I was the son of a king.
That created difficulties for me. I was accustomed to privilege and precedence, and I demanded my usual rights. But in the classroom
I had no rights. I was big and I was strong, but I was neither the biggest nor the strongest, for some of the boys were four or five years older. The first lessons I learned were painful ones.
I had two chief tormentors. One was Bir-hurturre, the son of Ludingirra, who had been my father's master of the chariots and who had gone down into the death-pit to sleep beside him. The other was Zabardi-bunugga, the son of Gungunum the high priest of An. I think Bir-hurturre bore a grudge against me because his father had had to die when mine had died. What quarrel Zabardi-bunugga had with me, I never fully understood, though possibly it grew from some old jealousy his father had felt toward Lugalbanda. But these two were determined, whatever the reason, to make me see that my high rank and privilege had ended when the crown had passed to the king Dumuzi.
In the classroom I took the front chair. It was my right, to go before the others. Bir-hurturre said, "That chair is mine, son of
Lugalbanda."
The way he said son of Lugalbanda, he made it sound like son of
Dung-fly, son of Trash-picker.
"The chair is mine," I told him calmly. That seemed self-evident to me, in no need of defense or explanation.
"Ah. Then the chair must be yours, son of Lugalbanda," he an swered, and smiled.
When I returned from midday recess I found that someone had gone down to the river and captured a yellow toad, and had skewered it into the middle of my seat. It was not yet dead. To one side of it someone had drawn the face of the evil spirit Rabisu, the croucher in-doorways, and on the other side was drawn the storm-bird Im dugud with her tongue thrust out.
I pulled the toad free and turned to Bir-hurturre with it. "You seem to have left your midday meal on my seat," I said. "Here. This is for you to eat, not for me." I seized him by the hair and thrust the toad toward his mouth. Bir-hurturre was ten years old. Though he was no taller than I was, he was very broad through the shoulders and extremely strong. Catching me by the wrist, he pulled my hand free of his hair and wrenched it down to my side. No one had ever handled me like that before. I felt rage rising in me like a winter torrent rushing down upon the Land.
"Doesn't he want to share his seat with his brother?" asked Zabardi-bunugga, who was looking on with amusement.
I broke loose of' Bir-hurturre's grasp and hurled the toad into Zabardi-bunugga's face. "My brother?" I cried. "Yours! Your twin!" Indeed Zabardi-bunugga was amazingly ugly, with a nose fiat as a button, and strange coarse hair that grew in widely spaced bunches on his head.
They both came at me at once. They held me with my arms behind my back and jeered at me and slapped me. I had never been held so impiously in the palace, not even in the roughest of play: no one would have dared. "You may not touch me!" I shouted. "Cowards!
Pigs! Do you know who I am?"
"You are BugaMugal, son of Lugal-bugal," said Bir-hurturre, and they laughed as though he had said something enormously clever.
"I will be king one day!"
"Bugal-lugal! Lugal-bugal!"
"I'll break you! I'll feed you to the river!"
"Lugal-bugaMugal! Bugal-lugaMugal!"
I thought my soul would burst from my breast. For a moment I could neither breathe nor see nor think. I strained and struggled and kicked, and heard a grunt, and kicked again, and heard a whimper.
One of them released me and I pulled myself free of the other, and went running from the classroom, not out of fear of them but out of fear that I would kill them while the madness was upon me.
The school-father and his assistant were returning just then from their midday meal. In the blindness of my wrath I ran right into them, and they caught me and held me until I was calm. I pointed into the classroom, where Bir-hurturre and Zabardi-bunugga were staring at me and making faces with their tongues, and demanded that they be put to death at once. But the school-father replied only that I had risen from my place without permission, I had spoken to him without permission; and he gave me over to the whipping-slave to cane me for my unruliness. It was not the last time those two tormented me, and occasionally some of the others joined in, the bigger ones, at least. I found I could do nothing against any of this persecution. School-father and his assistant always took their side, and told me I must hold my tongue, I must master my temper. I wrote down the names of my enemies, both my schoolfellows and my tutors, so that I could have them all flayed alive when I was king. But when I came to understand things a little better, soon afterward, I threw those lists away.
Writing and reading were the first things I learned. It is important for a prince to understand such matters. Imagine trusting everything to the honesty of one's scribes and ministers when messages are going back and forth on the battlefields, or when one is engaged in correspondence with the king of another land! If the master cannot read, any kind of deceit may be practiced on him, and a great man could be betrayed into the grasp of his enemies.