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A Reconstruction of the Assyro-Babylonian God-Lists, AN

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A Reconstruction of the Assyro-Babylonian God-Lists, AN TEXTS FROM THE BABYLONIAN COLLECTION Volume 3 William W. Hallo, Editor TEXTS FROM THE BABYLONIAN COLLECTION Volume 3 ARECONSTRUCTION OF THE ASSYRO-BABYLONIAN GOD-LISTS, AN: dA NU-UM AND AN: ANU SA AMÉLI by Richard L. Litke LOC 98-061533 Copyright © 1998 by the Yale Babylonian Collection. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America Distributed by CDL Press, P.O.B. 34454 Bethesda, MD 20827, U.S.A. YALE BABYLONIAN COLLECTION New Haven The publication of thiS volume haS been made possible by a grant from Elizabeth DebevoiSe Healy in honor of her grandfather, Albert T. Clay. FOREWORD The publication of the present work has a long and complicated history. When FerriS J Stephens retired from the curatorship of the Babylonian Collection in 1962, and I arrived to take his place, one of the first problems confronting me was a large backlog of unfinished and half-finished manuscripts. These included dissertations written under the direction of Stephens or of Albrecht Goetze, and monographs and collections of copies prepared by former students and other collaborators. I therefore decided to bring the authorS in question back to New Haven to finish their manuscripts where possible, or to enlist other collaborators for the same purpose where it was not. To this end, applications were successfully made to the National Endowment for the Humanities for summer grants—five in all during the period 1968-77—which eventually resulted in, or contributed materially to, the publication of a dozen monographs (BIN 3, YNER 4-7, and YOS 11-14 and 17-18, as well as B. Buchanan's ENES) . Richard L. Litke's A Reconstruction of the Assyro -Babylonian God-Lists, AN.• dA -nu -um and AN.• Anu â améli was not included in this program. ItS problems were of a different order. Litke's copies were superlative, and his edition incorporated virtually all the published duplicates, notably those from the British Museum published by L.W. King in CT 24-25. He had the benefit of comments not only from Stephens, his advisor, but also from other experts, such as Benno Landsberger, as I can verify from my service as the latter's initial assistant (1954-56) under his Guggenheim Foundation grant. But the existence of numerous unpublished duplicates and the occasional reSort to non-An=Anum parallels meant that his edition, however helpful as a first attempt, could not be regarded as definitive. For so crucial a testimony to the religions of antiquity, it seemed better to delay matters long enough to incorporate the balance of the relevant material. The author himself had meantime withdrawn to private life in Walla Walla, Washington, where he was in no position to make the desired changeS. Nor did he consider coming back to New Haven for the purpoSe. However, once located with the help of the late Warren C. Cowgill, s my colleague in Linguistics, the author was more than willing to cooperate in any way possible to help others achieve it. Indeed, over the many years that have intervened, he has never failed to support each deciSion made here to this end. The firSt of these was the preparation of an index to Litke's edition by Maria deJong Ellis in 1970. The second was taken the following year, when, on the occaSion of the XIX' Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI) in Paris, my late colleague Jacob J. FinkelStein approached vi Foreword Foreword vii W.G. Lambert with the suggestion that he take on the task of bringing the edition up to date. This When Anton Deimel published the first great compendium of Mesopotamian divine names invitation, which I seconded, waS duly accepted and, for the next ten years, Lambert prepared in 1914, he called it Pantheon Babylonicum. This edition of An-Anum could hardly be entitled detailed commentaries on each of the first three tablets (chapters) of the series and sent them "Pantheon Assyricum," but like K. 4349, its duplicate in the British Museum, YBC 2401 is the work to me for review. The last of these submissions was in 1981. of one and the same Middle Assyrian scribe, Kidin-Sin, the son of the royal scribe called simply "the Sutaean" (su - ti-e) . In K. 4349, both are called A.BA, literally "abecedarian," perhaps a hint From the first, the essential importance of the Litke edition was widely recognized, especially that they could also write Aramaic on parchment or papyrus? Both may have been active in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (RLA), which had resumed publication with in connection with the time of Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076 B.C.) , 3 but whether they worked for his library, or indeed volume 3 in 1957 under the general editorship, first of Ernst Weidner and Wolfram von Soden, whether there was such a library, has been questioned . 4 then, from 1976 on, of Dietz Otto Edzard. Edzard requested and secured permission to receive a copy of Litke's dissertation for the RIA (permission otherwise routinely denied), and the Deimel counted 3300 discrete names of deities in 1914. By 1950, the Second edition of his results are visible in RLA 4ff. More recently, the same courtesy was extended to Jacob Klein for Pantheon brought the number up to 5580 (or 5367 after Subtracting cross-references) 5 YBC 2401 the same purpose. explainS 2123 of these in its seven tablets; the addition of An Anum a améli brings the total to 2280, or more than 40% of those catalogued by Deimel. It truly deserves the designation of Subsequently it became apparent that other duties were preventing Lambert from com- tupkallu (dubgallu) or "monster tablet" reserved for the prototypes of its London duplicate and pleting his edition in the near future. In its admirably thorough coverage, moreover, it waS of the "Tale of the Fox" and perhaps other fables . 7 On the occasion of the XLV e RAI, Litke'S turning from a Straightforward edition into a major commentary on the text. Nevertheless, it was edition is now finally offered to the entire field of ancient Near Eastern studies. It should open hoped that the original plan could be carried through to completion. That Sentiment was a whole new window on the scholars of the Middle Assyrian court, and on the invisible world conveyed to Lambert by letter of August 2, 1994, and in person by myself and Ulla Kasten, about them as conceived by them, their predecessors, and their successors throughout ancient Museum Editor for the Babylonian Collection, on the occasion of the XLIe RAI in Berlin in 1994. Mesopotamia. If it has now been decided to opt for another solution, it is in part becauSe there were no new William W. Hallo results from these exchangeS of ideas, and in part because the progress of technology has made it feasible to reproduce the original manuscript without setting it anew in type.' The book has been supplied with this foreword at one end and the index at the other, and with headers for ready identification of each tablet (chapter). Otherwise, Litke's text appears here exactly as submitted in 1958. It is obvious that in the forty years that have intervened, the progreSS of ASSyriology has been enormous. Hence any attempt at even the most partial updating of the material would be doomed to the same lengthy delays already experienced. It is hoped that with the publication of the dissertation, the author's great patience and forbearance will be, to some extent, vindicated, and that an early completion of Lambert's painstaking commentary will be stimulated. The series Texts from the Babylonian Collection (TBC) was inaugurated in 1985 with a gift from the late Barbara Clay Debevoise, long a benefactress of the Collection, and is here carried W.W. Hallo, Origins (Leiden: Brill, 1996) 39f. forward with a grant from her daughter, Elizabeth Debevoise Healy. It is well suited for the 2. assyrische Kolophone (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 2, 1968) 31f., Nos. 50f.; M. purpose of presenting YBC 2401 to the scholarly world. The parallels from other collections 3. H. Hunger, Babylonische und Heltzer, The Suteans (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1981) 89; R. Zadok, "Suteans and Other West incorporated in the edition have nearly all appeared in print elsewhere. In those few cases where Semites during the Latter Half of the Second Millennium B.C.," Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 16 (1985) 59- unpublished parallels were utilized, this has been done with the permisSion of the appropriate 70, esp. p. 61. authorities as indicated ad locc. 4. W.G. Lambert, "Tukulti-Ninurta I and the Assyriarí King List," Iraq 38 (1976) 85-94, esp. p. 85, n. 2; O. Pedersén, Archives and Libraries in the City of Assur (2w., Studia Semitica Upsaliensia 6, 8) (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1985-86), esp. Part I, pp. 41f. 5. W.W. Hallo, "Albright and the Gods of Mesopotamia," Biblical Archaeologist 56 (1993) 18-24, esp. p. 21. W.G. Lambert, "Götterlisten," Assyriologie 3 (1969) 473-79, esp. p. 475. 1. The alternative of converting the original typescript—with the exception of the preface, list of abbreviations, 6. Reallexikon der and introduction—to printed type by means of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) had to be rejected 7. W.G. I.ambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960) 186-209 and 337, esp. pp. 208f., line because of the expense and the considerable risk of errors entailed.
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