The Myth of the Plough
Also known as: Debate Between the Hoe and the Plough, The Hoe and the Plough, Debate of Hoe and Plough, Sumerian Disputation: Hoe vs. Plough
A Sumerian disputation in which the personified Hoe and Plough argue their merits before the god Enlil, who renders judgment. The poem opens with a brief hymn to the Hoe, proceeds through alternating boasts and rebuttals, and ends with a doxology.
Description
This disputation poem dramatizes two agricultural implements—Hoe and Plough—contesting their superiority in service to city, temple, and field. The prologue functions as a concise hymn praising the Hoe’s cosmic and civic utility, while the debate contrasts tasks such as digging foundations, brick-molding, and wall repair with ploughing, furrow-cutting, and sowing. Enlil appears to adjudicate the quarrel, affirming the Hoe’s primacy and restoring social and cosmic order by assigning each tool its proper sphere. Preserved chiefly in scribal school copies from Nippur, the piece offers insight into Mesopotamian values of labor, craft, hierarchy, and agricultural knowledge, and exemplifies the Sumerian disputation genre’s pedagogy and wit.
Historiography
The text survives in numerous scholastic manuscripts, primarily from Nippur, reconstructed substantially in the 20th century. It belongs to the Sumerian disputation corpus and uniquely lacks a full cosmogonic prologue, replacing it with a hymn to the Hoe. Modern editions rely on collations of Ur III and Old Babylonian tablets; the work’s presence in school curricula explains its wide attestation and relatively stable transmission.
Date Notes
Extant on Old Babylonian/Ur III school tablets; likely composed earlier within the disputation tradition
Archetypes
Major Characters
- Enlil
- The Plough
- The Farmer
Myths
- The Creation of the Plough by the Gods
- The First Furrow and Ordering of the Fields
- Agriculture Established among Humans
Notable Quotes
Plough, you draw furrows — what does your furrowing matter to me?
You break clods — what does your clod-breaking matter to me?
When water overflows you cannot dam it up.
Facts
- Belongs to the Sumerian disputation genre used in scribal education.
- Extant in dozens of manuscripts, especially from Nippur.
- Opens with a brief hymn to the Hoe instead of a cosmogony, unusual for disputations.
- Adjudication is delivered by Enlil without being formally summoned.
- Final verdict favors the Hoe, aligning with the first speaker commonly winning.
- Length is approximately 196 lines in surviving reconstructions.
- Contrasts year-round utility (Hoe) with seasonal use (Plough).
- Used by scholars to infer features of Mesopotamian seed-plough technology.
- Reflects temple, civic, and agricultural labor as pillars of social order.