Lugal-e

The ancient Mesopotamian myth beginning Lugal-e ud me-lám-bi nir-ğál, also known as Ninurta's Exploits is a great epic telling of the warrior-god and god of spring thundershowers and floods, his deeds, waging war against his mountain rival á-sàg (“Disorder”; Akkadian: Asakku), destroying cities and crushing skulls, restoration of the flow of the river Tigris, returning from war in his “beloved barge” Ma-kar-nunta-ea and afterward judging his defeated enemies, determining the character and use of 49 stones, in 231 lines of the text. It is a bilingual work with origin in the late third millennium.

It is actually named for the first word of the composition (lugal-e “king,” in the ergative case) in two first-millennium copies, although earlier (Old Babylonian) copies begin simply with lugal, omitting the case ending. A subscript identifies it as a “širsud of Ninurta” (a širsud meaning perhaps “lasting song”) or “zami (praise) of Ninurta” depending on the reading of the cuneiform characters. With 728 lines and arranged on up to 13 tablets, Lugal-e is a poem in which the author (the god Ea according to a Catalogue of Texts and Authors) apparently combined perhaps three disparate myths in one literary composition. There are more than 80 extant exemplars but these show considerable textual variance.

The tale opens with a feast of Ninurta with the gods, where his wife conveys the word of the (human) king. The divine weapon Šar’ur reports to Ninurta that the á-sàg demon, who has been appointed by the plants, has raided the border cities with his warriors, the rebellious stones who have tired of Ninurta's NAMTAR (Akkadian: šīmtu, "allocating tasks"). The demon "tore the flesh of the Earth and covered her with painful wounds." This causes Ninurta impetuously to set out to preempt further attack. He is temporarily thwarted by a dust storm, until Enlil provides relief with a rainstorm, thus enabling Ninurta to overcome á-sàg and release the waters which have been trapped in mountain ice, preventing its irrigation of the Mesopotamian plains, and replenish the diminished flows of the river Tigris. He then placates the concerns of his mother, Ninlil or Ninmaḫ (depending on text), before exercising judgement over the stones who have collaborated with Azag. Finally he returns to Nippur to receive the praise of his father and the gods.

...
Wikipedia