What is "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.