Ancient Mesopotamia

Ample specimens of Akkadian-language clay-tablet epistolography have been found at several sites, notably Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and Tell al-Ḥarīrī on the middle Euphrates (the ancient Mari of c. 1700 bce). The Amarna Letters consist of several hundred letters written in Akkadian and are largely official in character, often dealing with the politics and needs of Egypt’s vassal kingdoms in Syria and Palestine. The Mari letters, some 5,000 in number, are more illustrative of normal day-to-day written communication in a Mesopotamian milieu proper.

Another aspect of everyday life in ancient Mesopotamia is amply illustrated by thousands of clay tablets of a practical legal nature, as distinct from the monumental engravings of legal codes. These archivally preserved records from various periods use different varieties of Sumerian and Akkadian. They detail legal decisions, oaths, contracts (including marriage and divorce contracts), sale adoptions (fictitious acts circumventing prohibitions against land sales outside the family), loan agreements, tax receipts, and much else. Commercial inventories, such as those of the Old Assyrian merchant colony at Karum Kanesh in central Anatolia (20th century bce), complete the picture.

Temple archives contain both legal texts and more directly cultic texts, such as descriptions of rituals, which come under such headings as “Temple Program for the New Year’s Festivals at Babylon,” “Ritual to be Followed by the Kalū (priest) when Covering the Temple Kettle-Drum,” “Ritual for the Repair of a Temple,” and “Program of the Pageant of the Statue of the God Anu at Uruk.” Prayers, lamentations, and hymns in both Sumerian and Akkadian are extant, addressed to deities such as the goddess Ishtar, the moon god Sin, the sun god Shamash, the great triad Anu, Enlil, and Ea, and the patron god of Babylon, Marduk. The Sumerian “Lament for the Destruction of Ur” bemoans the city’s fall to the Elamites and their allies. Often the king himself is the spokesman in the text. Wisdom literature, such as proverbs and fables (e.g., “Dispute between the Date Palm and the Tamarisk”), poetic meditations, oracles, divination records, omens, and prophecies are further examples of Mesopotamian genres that only epigraphy has preserved.

Sumerian and Akkadian narrative literature is only known through inscriptions. It contains humanity’s earliest preserved literary creations in the Sumerian sequence, especially the texts from tablets found at Nippur. These include the “Paradise myth” of the god Enki and the goddess Ninhursag in the pure, clean, and bright land of Dilmun; the story of Dumuzi and Enkidu (the petulant shepherd god versus the peace-loving farmer god, inversely reminiscent of the Cain–Abel antagonism in Genesis but not culminating in murder); “The Deluge” with its Noah-hero Ziusudra; “Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World,” which prefigures the later Akkadian “Ishtar’s Descent”; and the lays of Gilgamesh, which show the Sumerian traditions that were later partly organized and transformed into the Akkadian epic. The latter include “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,” a story of confrontation between early Sumerian city-states; “Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living”; and “The Death of Gilgamesh,” with its haunting parallelistic refrain “he lies, he rises not.”

The Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh is divided into 12 tablets, the longest of which is more than 300 lines; this “Flood Tablet” (the 11th) is virtually intact and comes, like almost all Assyrian-dialect Gilgamesh texts, from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (7th century bce). From the 2nd millennium there are fragments of a Hittite version from Boǧazköy, as well as minor traces of a Hurrian translation. Old Babylonian correspondences to tablets 1–3 and 10 are found on a tablet from Sippar (c. 1800 bce). The 12th tablet is a literal translation from Sumerian, whereas the rest amounts to a self-contained Akkadian epic original, based on Sumerian motifs but with a thrust of its own. The most complete reconstruction involves a combination of Assyrian, Old Babylonian, and Hittite versions.

The other famous Mesopotamian epic, Enuma elish, “When on high,” details the story of cosmic creation and of how Marduk became the great god of Babylon; it had more immediate cultic attachments because its recitation formed part of the New Year festival.

Further Akkadian literary creation is attested in the epic of Atrahasis, a tale of humanity’s punishment through pestilence and flood, preserved in fragmentary Old Babylonian and Assyrian versions. The story of Adapa, found in parts in the Tell el-Amarna archives and the library of Ashurbanipal, is similar to Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. The myth of Zu deals with the theft of the tables of fate and the usurpation of almightiness by the bird god Zu. The legend of Etana, a namesake of the shepherd-king who ascended to heaven in the mythical postdiluvian Sumerian dynasty of Kish, recounts in its Old Babylonian and Assyrian recensions the heavenly flight of Etana on the wings of an eagle in order to acquire the magic birth plant that would cure his childlessness. Death-oriented themes appear in the tale of Ishtar’s descent, in the story of Nergal and Ereshkigal, and in various netherworld texts associated with the Tammuz myth and liturgy.