Md. Asif Uddin

    Numina · Book I

    Mesopotamian Mythology

    Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria · c. 3000 BCE – 1st c. CE

    The literature of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates survives because its people wrote on clay and clay does not burn. Sumerian scribes, and the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian writers who inherited their script, left the earliest sustained mythology in any language.

    Its preoccupations are civic. Gods hold offices — Anu the sky, Enlil the storm and the assembly, Enki the fresh water and the wit — and the world is administered rather than merely inhabited. Enuma Elish is a constitutional document as much as a creation story: Marduk is granted supremacy by a vote, and he earns it by killing Tiamat and building the sky out of her. The Epic of Gilgamesh asks what a king is for once he understands he will die.

    Nothing here is complete. Tablets break, columns are lost, and a scholar’s brackets stand where a line should be. Read it knowing that the gaps are part of the text.

    Contents

    1. I.1The tabletsWhat survives, what broke, and how much of it is a scholar's guess.—
    2. I.2Before the worldApsu, Tiamat, and a cosmos made out of a corpse.—
    3. I.3The assembly of the godsAnu, Enlil, Enki, Marduk — divinity as an office with duties.—
    4. I.4Inanna and IshtarThe one who goes down, and what she has to leave behind to come back.—
    5. I.5GilgameshKingship, friendship, and the first sustained argument about death.—

    The chapters are laid out; nothing is written into them yet. They stand so that what is missing is obvious rather than invisible.