Yarlaganda appears near the end of the Gutian section of the Sumerian King List. A ruler named Yarlagan is also attested in an inscription from Umma. Comparing these records shows what is known about the king, how the names are connected and where historical reconstruction remains uncertain.
Yarlaganda’s place in the king list
Oxford’s Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature places Yarlaganda after Puzur-Suen, son of Hablum, and assigns him seven years. Another seven-year entry follows, but its name is not supplied in the Oxford translation. Tiriga, usually written Tirigan in modern accounts, comes next with forty days, before kingship passes to Uruk. [1] This makes Yarlaganda a late figure in the list’s Gutian sequence. It does not make him Tirigan’s immediate predecessor. An ordinal such as sixteenth depends on which entries and manuscript reconstruction are being counted.
The Umma inscription: a king named Yarlagan
A separate text provides more than a name in a later list. ETCSRI publishes an inscription of Nammahni, governor of Umma, catalogued as Q001446. It describes his building and restoration of the E-ula for the goddess Ninura, identified as the mother of Umma. Its closing lines state that Yarlagan was then king of Gutium. [2] The inscription therefore connects a local building project and governor with a named Gutian king. Nammahni is the stated builder; it would misread the text to transfer that achievement to Yarlaganda personally.
How Yarlagan and Yarlaganda are connected
In his 1939 critical edition, Thorkild Jacobsen considered Iarlaganda probably identifiable with the Yarlagan attested elsewhere, interpreting the shorter form in relation to the longer name. His notes also discuss restoring the following damaged royal name through comparison with independently attested Si’um. [3] These are scholarly identifications based on comparison, with different degrees of uncertainty. The Oxford translation leaves that following entry unnamed. Similar spellings can help a researcher formulate a connection, but a repeated name element by itself supplies neither a family tree nor proof of inherited royal power.
A reused stone bowl and relative chronology
Sallaberger and Schrakamp’s 2015 study discusses a stone bowl bearing a dedication of Shudurul, king of Akkad, and a secondary inscription naming Arlagan, king of Gutium. They identify the latter with Yarlagan and describe its writing as later in character than Shudurul’s. [4] This is an argument about the sequence of inscriptions and rulers. A reused object can preserve political history across more than one period; it should not automatically be treated as a newly made commission or evidence that two named kings ruled together.
The surviving prism is a later historical composition
The Ashmolean dates its Weld-Blundell prism to about 1800 BCE and gives Larsa as its probable origin. Its four faces each carry two columns of Sumerian cuneiform. The museum explains that the king list combines myth, legend and historical information, presenting kingship as passing from city to city and helping legitimate Isin’s rulers. [5] The photographed object is therefore a witness to the transmission and political use of the tradition. It is not Yarlaganda’s own monument or a portrait, and its date is not the date of his reign.
Dates, political reach and the limits of biography
The 2015 study treats Gutian chronology as a problem requiring comparison among king lists, inscriptions and the histories of several cities. [4] A precise accession year cannot simply be read from the seven-year entry. The evidence discussed here also supplies no childhood narrative, detailed reign programme or documented father-to-son succession for Yarlaganda. These ancient sources are relevant to the history of Mesopotamia and its eastern neighbours, but they do not identify his language as Kurdish or establish a continuous genealogy to modern Kurds. Keeping those questions separate makes the surviving evidence more useful.
Sources and further reading
- University of Oxford, ETCSL, The Sumerian King List, translation, lines 308–340: Gutian sequence and manuscript variants.
- ETCSRI, Namahni 1, Q001446, RIME 2.11.12.01: Umma building inscription naming Yarlagan as king of Gutium.
- Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, Assyriological Studies 11, 1939, pp. 120–121, especially notes 305a–306.
- Walther Sallaberger and Ingo Schrakamp, Philological Data for a Historical Chronology, in History & Philology, ARCANE III, 2015, pp. 117–118 and 127–129.
- Ashmolean Museum, Sumerian King List, AN1923.444: date, probable origin, format and political purpose.