Download Zipang: Retold stories from Ancient Iraq with harp

MESP 2006: Zipang: Retold stories from Ancient Iraq with harp
Zipang: Retold stories from Ancient Iraq with harp Scottish Premiere performance
3rd International Festival of Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace (MESP) 6 February - 12
March 2006
http://www.edinburghguide.com/aande/music/review.shtml?06_03/06_02_14_zipang
Stories and Music Lugalbanda and the Anzu bird (2,500 BCE); Epic of Gilgamesh (1,000
BCE); Sumerian and Akkadian songs including the Hymn to Arbela
Performed by Zipang: Fran Hazleton and June Peters (storytellers); Tara Jaff (harp)
Date 14 February 2006
Venue Augustine United Church
Address George IV Bridge
Reviewer Pat Napier
© Pat Napier. 16 February 2006
Concert Tour Run: 10 February: Glasgow, (Old Fruitmarket); 11 February: London
(Barbican)
Zipang: Retold stories from Ancient Iraq with harp Scottish Premiere
performance
3rd International Festival of Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace
(MESP) 6 February - 12 March 2006
Stories and Music Lugalbanda and the Anzu bird (2,500 BCE); Epic of Gilgamesh (1,000
BCE); Sumerian and Akkadian songs including the Hymn to Arbela
Performed by Zipang: Fran Hazleton and June Peters (storytellers); Tara Jaff (harp)
Date 14 February 2006
Venue Augustine United Church
Address George IV Bridge
Reviewer Pat Napier
Everybody loves a story. Especially when it's one from the mists of time, right at the beginning
of recorded history, a remote and little-known time. So how could I resist the ZIPANG
evening? More especially because it was billed as Edinburgh discovers a 'Twin City' in
Ancient Iraq - and - in the year following the 2005 Edinburgh International Harp Festival's
fascinating lecture on the Golden Lyre of Ur.
Who or what were ZIPANG? Zipang is the Sumerian word for breath. Sumerian is the oldest
written language in the world: cuneiform. And ZIPANG is a superb trio of ladies dedicated to
studying, selecting and then telling the essence of the stories found on Sumerian and
Mesopotamian clay tablets, written in that mysterious cuneiform language. The story tellers
are English and the harper is Kurdish, now living in England.
Retold: that's very important because both stories were very
sensitive selections from much longer works. However, they
were both essentially the same dynastic story from opposite
ends of ancient Mesopotamia. Lugulbanda is Sumerian, from
the northern end of Mesopotamia (now Kurdish Northern
Iraq) and Gilgamesh is told in Akkadian (from the south, now
roughly British-patrolled Southern Iraq). The selections were
inspired highlights raising the stories into fascinating,
atmospheric tales. The harp always heightened these
feelings.
Both tales, combined, tell the story of Gilgamesh and his
grandfather Lugulbanda, who was the eighth and youngest
son of the general who went to war with the Uruk which had
Arbil © J M Taylor
declared war on his ally Aratta. The teenage Lugulbanda,
impetuous and eager to make his mark, volunteered to
journey to the shrine of the goddess Inana in the sacred cedar forests in the mountains of
Zabu to seek her aid for their cause. "I have to go alone" he declared, seeing this as a big
adventure.
On the way, having time to muse and think about things, he matures and becomes very wise.
This process is told in a soliloquy about the Anzud Bird who lived in the great solitary eagle
tree on Inana's sacred mountain and how Lugulbanda would treat it if he saw it. He
encountered its chick, saved it, fed it and made the nest more comfortable. The Anzud Bird,
returning to its family was much pleased with what Lugulbada had done. He fell sick and
collapsed; his brothers, who'd been searching for him, found him near to death. After praying
for his life over the three days and nights of fever, the Sun God heard their prayers and
allowed Lugulbanda to live.
But Inana, who'd fallen in love with Lugulbanda by this time, was not anxious to let him
recover and leave her sacred mountain. So she had put him into a deep sleep for these three
fevered days in which he had vivid dreams of meeting several gods, carrying out their tasks
and pleading with them for the strength to recover and make his way home. During that
dream his brothers performed funeral rites. Inana relented and gave him the strength to leave.
On the way back, again alone, he arrived at a gorgeous pool by a river, once again
encountered the Anzud Bird who, remembering Ligulbanda's actions, granted him his
greatest wish: to have a fabulous fate, to go wherever he wanted and to run as fast as
possible whenever he wanted. The Anzud Bird's only stipulations: to tell nobody and to "make
statues of me".
Aratta was won, Lugulbanda ruled wisely and well giving it walls of lapis lazuli, bright red
bricks whose clay was dug out of the cedar mountains.
Fran Hazleton's telling was luminous, poetic, vivdly bringing the ancient lushness of the area
to glowing life which, today, is barren and rocky.
After the interval, June Peters, a freelance story teller and one-time teacher, told the much
better-known Epic of Gilgamesh. This long complex tale of Lugulbanda's grandson was just
as expertly stitched together. So " let us open the lapis box, take out the tale and hear the
story" of a pitiless,unforgiving warrior king, "a young hell-raiser" taking what he wanted when
he wanted, doing anything to achieve his desires. He seemed to be the epitome of the
angular, hard, weapon-like cuneiform script personified.
Instead of being the "shepherd of his people" as he should, his people asked the goddess to
make someone who would stand up to him. Aruru took some clay, fashioned it into a wild man
living with the gazelles and called him Enkidu. When Gilgamesh heard about him, he sent a
temple prostitute to tempt Enkidu and was so successful that Enkidu, now more civilised and
presentable, was no longer accepted by the animals. Needing to forge a new identity, the
temple woman told him about the great city of Uruk, painting it in glowing terms, all
heightened by dramatic harp music. She also told him about Gilgamesh and his great longing
to have a friend. So Enkidu decided to go there and challenge Gilgamesh to a contest of
strength.
They ended up as friends going off to the cedar mountains to fight foes and fell trees to float
down the river to rebuild Uruk. When Gilgamesh rejected the goddess, now called Ishtar, she
called down the Bull of Heaven. Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed the bull, ripped off its
hauch and flung it up into the heavens hitting Ishtar and bloodied her dress.
This was a step too far. Gilgamesh had a dream in which the Gods sat in Council and
decreed that Gilamesh must die. When he told this to Enkidu, the latter decided that he,
Enkidu, must die instead of the King. "But it's only a dream" said Gilgamesh. Nevertheless,
things were set in motion by Gilgamesh calling on Shamash the Sun God to curse the temple
woman who'd started off the train of events. Enkidu reversed the curse and then had his own
fevered dream and died.
The distraught Gilgamesh undertook a quest for immortality and wisdom but failed to find it
all. He died and was said to have been buried under the waters of the river Euphrates, which
has since changed its direction south.
Even in English, the two stories' very different styles and proccupations
came through wonderfully well. The Mesopotamian people created its
cosmologies or world view through looking up to the skies to try to
understand their life challenges and place order into the stars and planets
above their heads, thus creating their pantheon of gods. Both tales are
set in the same area of Mesopotamia and involve the gods in very
immediate ways. The Epic of Gilgamesh draws very heavily on the five
main surviving epic poems of 1,500 years earlier in Sumerian with very
obvious links back and to this group of deities, though their names
changed in Akkadian.
There are differences in time, in philosophies and in the cultural
background which become more obvious when hearing both tales backto-back, which was a rare privilege.
Tara Jaff also gave us a near-unique privilege and pleasure by singing
the Hymn to Arbela (one of the main Mesopotamian cities, a centre of
Tara Jaff
culture, now called Arbil). She sang in Assyrian which had been taught to
© Andy Lowings
her by an Assyrian priest. So this was an Assyrian translation set to her
own native Kurdish rhythms. Tara had also been privileged to have
played a concert on one of the prototypes of the Golden Lyre of Ur. This was truly a unique
and illuminating recital. Oh, by the way, the Edinburgh link was an elegant compliment to our
city by comparing Edinburgh today with Arbela at its cultural height.
ZIPANG MESP
© Pat Napier. 16 February 2006
Concert Tour Run: 10 February: Glasgow, (Old Fruitmarket); 11 February: London (Barbican)