Barton Cylinder

The Barton Cylinder is a Sumerian creation myth, written on a clay cylinder in the mid to late 3rd millennium BC, which is now in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Joan Goodnick Westenholz suggests it dates to around 2400 BC (ED III).

The cylinder is inscribed with a Sumerian cuneiform mythological text, found at the site of Nippur in 1889 during excavations conducted by the University of Pennsylvania. The cylinder takes its name from George Barton, who was the first to publish a transcription and translation of the text in 1918 in "Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions". It is also referred to as University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Catalogue of the Babylonian Section (CBS) number 8383. Samuel Noah Kramer referred to it as The Nippur Cylinder and suggested it may date as far back as 2500 BC. The cylinder dates to the Old Babylonian period, but Falkenstein (1951) surmises that the composition was written in Archaic, pre-Ur III cuneiform, likely dating to the Akkad dynasty (c. 2300 BCE). He concludes a non-written literary history that was characterised and repeated in future texts. Jan van Dijk concurs with this suggestion that it is a copy of a far older story predating neo-Sumerian times.

The most recent edition was published by Bendt Alster and Aage Westenholz in 1994.Jeremy Black calls the work "a beautiful example of Early Dynastic calligraphy" and discussed the text "where primeval cosmic events are imagined." Along with Peeter Espak, he notes that Nippur is pre-existing before creation when heaven and earth separated. Nippur, he suggests is transfigured by the mythological events into both a "scene of a mythic drama" and a real place, indicating "the location becomes a metaphor."

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