The Cuthaean Legend and Umman-manda

The Cuthaean Legend envisions a powerful enemy that emerges unexpectedly from the distant mountains and establishes hegemony after a sudden burst of military power. This enemy will eventually be destroyed without the intervention of the Mesopotamian king.  The powerful enemy is called Umman-manda (i..e troops of the mandum) among other things.

The Sumerian word mada (‘land’) or mandum (‘terrain’) can be linked to the word Umman-manda. In ‘Lugalbanda-Enmerkar’ the word is used for the mountain lands between Anshan and Aratta, and that this is a zone east of, and distant to, the Mesopotamian heartland.

The distinction between Umman-manda and the ‘four regions’ is apparent in an astrological omen that mentions ‘the attack of the Umman-manda on girgibira’. The omen, and a commentary fragment, state girgibira denotes the ‘four regions’ (erbu=kibrati).

Mesopotamian astrology used the cosmographic conception of the ‘four regions’ to correlate astral phenomena to the four directions north, south, east, west, and for these directions the names of political entities such as Subartu, Guti, Amurru, Elam, Akkad were frequently used.

Umman-manda It was probably “a general term for the inhabitants of the north-eastern mountainous fringes of Mesopotamia and the territories beyond them”.  The word mandum ‘terrain’ denoted distant terrain between Anshan and Aratta in Lugalbanda II. The word ‘terrain’ can denote the furthest reaches of the inhabited world.

If the word ‘terrain’ is used as the second component of the term Umman-manda, then it is possible to explain how the term denotes a group from the ‘east’ who attacks the ‘four regions’. This ‘eastern’ origin of the Umman-manda in the omens is not to be taken too literally, but rather covers the mountainous terrain east and north of Mesopotamia.

A mandum etymology for Umman-manda suggests the term denotes foreign peoples whose original homeland is somewhere distant in the mountainous geography east and northeast of Mesopotamia. They attack the ‘four regions’ from the distant ‘east’.

This ‘eastern’ direction implied by the proposed mandum-etymology for the Umman-manda also reveals one of the reasons why the term was used for the Cimmerians and the Medes and not other people in the periphery of Mesopotamia. These two peoples did not inhabit exactly the same location but both came from distant regions north and east of Mesopotamia.

The Umman-manda in the Cuthaean Legend are a powerful enemy who come from the eastern direction but are ultimately doomed to fall. The contemporary political circumstances surrounding the Cimmerians and the Medes prompted the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian scribes to see the parallels between the Umman-manda in the Cuthaean Legend, and the Cimmerians and Medes respectively: the Umman-manda of their own times.

Both Mesopotamia and Ans]an are distinguished from the defeated land of Gutium and the Umman-manda. The latter two are usually treated as distinct entities, but both are meant to describe those who are similarly outside the civilisation.

Gutians are traditionally depicted as uncivilised through pejorative stereotypes, and are associated with the eastern mountains. However, the astrological omens treat the Guti and the Umma4n-manda as different entities and Gutium is a political entity usually used in the schema for the four cardinal points.

Umman-manda could be describing those foreign peoples and/or military groups whose origins are thought to be in the distant lands, in the ‘mountains’ east and north of Mesopotamia, away from centres of civilisation.

Individuals involved with the Umman-manda have names from different languages. Explanations for the significance of the Umman-manda based on the linguistic affiliation of personal names attached to the term are off the mark.

The Guti or Quti, also known by the derived exonyms Gutians or Guteans, were a nomadic people of the Zagros Mountains (on the border of modern Iran and Iraq) during ancient times. Their homeland was known as Gutium (Sumerian: Gu-tu-umki or Gu-ti-umki).

Conflict between people from Gutium and the Akkadian Empire has been linked to the collapse of the empire, towards the end of the 3rd Millennium BCE. The Guti subsequently overran southern Mesopotamia and formed a royal dynasty in Sumer.

Little is known of the origins, material culture or language of the Guti, as contemporary sources provide few details and no artifacts have been positively identified. As the Gutian language lacks a text corpus, apart from some proper names, its similarities to other languages are impossible to verify.

The names of Gutian-Sumerian kings, suggest that the language was not closely related to any languages of the region, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, Hittite and Elamite.

W. B. Henning suggested that the different endings of the king names resembled case endings in the Tocharian languages, a branch of Indo-European known from texts found in the Tarim Basin (in the northwest of modern China) dating from the 6th to 8th centuries CE, making Gutian the earliest documented Indo-European language.

He further suggested that they had subsequently migrated to the Tarim. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov explored Henning’s suggestion as possible support for their proposal of an Indo-European Urheimat in the Near East. However, most scholars reject the attempt to compare languages separated by more than two millennia.

As the Akkadians went into decline, the Gutians began a campaign, decades-long of hit-and-run raids against Mesopotamia. Their raids crippled the economy of Sumer. Travel became unsafe, as did work in the fields, resulting in famine.

The Gutians eventually overran Akkad, and as the King List tells us, their army also subdued Uruk for hegemony of Sumer, in about 2147–2050 BCE. However, it seems that autonomous rulers soon arose again in a number of city-states, notably Gudea of Lagash.

The Sumerian king list suggests that the Guti ruled over Sumer for several generations, following the fall of the Akkadian Empire. By the 1st Millennium BCE, usage of the name Gutium, by the peoples of lowland Mesopotamia, had expanded to include all of western Media, between the Zagros and the Tigris.

Various tribes and places to the east and northeast were often referred to as Gutians or Gutium. For example, Assyrian royal annals use the term Gutians in relation to populations known to have been Medes or Mannaeans. As late as the reign of Cyrus the Great of Persia, the famous general Gubaru (Gobryas) was described as the “governor of Gutium”.