Gudea Cylinder A: Observations on the text’s micro-structure

Gudea Cylinder A is a complex and refined literary work. As Suter 2000, 132-133, remarks, the motif of the divine fate frames the entire text in a huge ring-composition structure. In the following, we will offer an example of REPAC’s approach to Ancient Mesopotamian literary compositions by focusing on some of the devices shaping the text, with its contiguous and near-contiguous textual units, on the micro-level. These devices include structural formulas, textual and inter-textual parallelisms, and narrative repetitions.
By focusing on such phenomena, REPAC’s research seeks a deeper understanding of how meaning was created in Ancient Mesopotamia. Our aim in the present context is more modest; we simply seek to highlight the role played by some forms of repetition as structuring devices in a sophisticated written product such as Gudea Cylinder A.