Sumerian King List Kubaba is mentioned in the
Sumerian King List, though due to her gender her inclusion is considered unusual. While some modern authors refer to her as a queen, the Sumerian title applied to her is
lugal ("king"), which had no feminine counterpart. A recension from
Ur instead states that there was no king while Kubaba reigned. She is the only ruler from the third dynasty of Kish listed. The list describes her as an
innkeeper (míLÚ.KAŠ.TIN-
na), credits her with "strengthening the foundation of Kish" and attributes a 100 years long reign culminating in a temporary transfer of power from Kish to
Akshak before it was regained by
Puzur-Suen. The latter ruler is said to be Kubaba's son, which makes her the grandmother of
Ur-Zababa, a legendary opponent of historical
Sargon of Akkad; Piotr Steinkeller points out that the historicity of these rulers of Kish and the related Sargon tradition is contradicted by an inscription which mentions the city was sacked by
Enshakushanna of
Uruk, who might have been a contemporary of Sargon, and its king at the time, who was taken as a captive, was named Enbi-Eštar. The oldest known copies of the SKL date back to the
Ur III period. While names of some rulers, for example
Mesannepada, were likely sourced from votive inscriptions, others, like
Bazi and Zizi, might have been ordinary given names copied from
lexical lists, such as the
Early Dynastic so-called
Names and Professions List, or outright inventions. Early versions of the SKL do not contain anecdotes about individual rulers, including Kubaba, which indicates they most likely were a later invention. The compilers used few, if any, historical accounts. Accordingly, Kubaba's background is treated as fantastical, and has been compared to other unusual stories or members of various professions becoming kings in the same composition, including the fuller
Susuda, the sailor Mamagal, and the stone worker Nanniya.
Other texts In the so-called
Weidner Chronicle, which is considered a derivative of the
Sumerian King List, the order of Kubaba's dynasty and the dynasty of Akshak is switched around, with reigning before her rather than later on. The section dedicated to her is poorly preserved. It relays how Kubaba was granted kingship by
Marduk after she delivered an offering of fish to his temple
Esagil. The composition is focused on conveying the message that kings who neglected to worship Marduk were rendered powerless, and to that end employs a number of anachronisms, this account being one of them. It is known from
Neo-Assyrian and
Neo-Babylonian copies, and was originally composed no earlier than 1100 BCE. References to Kubaba are also known from texts focused on
omens linked to
liver divination. As noted by Beate Pongratz-Leisten, references to legendary rulers such as her,
Gušur,
Etana or
Gilgamesh in works belonging to this category were meant to establish them as paradigmatic models of kingship. In one of the omen compendiums, the "omen of Kubaba" is the birth of an
androgynous being with both a penis and a vagina. It is possible the birth of a sheep rather than a human is meant. Such an event is said to foretell that "the country of the king shall be ruined". Marten Stol argues that its negative character reflected a negative perception of a woman fulfilling a typically masculine role, that of a ruler. Other omens preserve a tradition according to which Kubaba was a warrior. ==References==