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Before and after Babel: Writing as
Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern

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Before and After Babel

ii
iii
Before and
After Babel
Writing as Resistance in Ancient
Near Eastern Empires
z
MARC VAN DE MIEROOP
iv
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Van de Mieroop, Marc, author.
Title: Before and after Babel : writing as resistance in ancient Near
Eastern empires / Marc Van De Mieroop.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029901 (print) | LCCN 2022029902 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197634660 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197634684 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Cuneiform writing—History. |
Writing—Middle East—History—To 1500.
Classification: LCC PJ3211.V36 2023 (print) | LCC PJ3211 (ebook) |
DDC 492/.1—dc23/eng/20220920
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029901
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029902
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197634660.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

v
For Hector, who will always be remembered

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vi
Contents
Illustrations ix
Introduction 1
PART I : The Babylonian Cosmopolis: The Cuneiform Sign
1. Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains: The Eighteenth

Century bc 11
2. In the Spell of Babylonian Writing 36

3. Mystery Guardians of an Ancient Tradition 53
4. The Height of Cosmopolitanism: Reading Gilgameš in Hattusas 70
Coda 103
PART II : The Vernacular Millennium: The Tower of Babel
5. Scrupulous Continuity 109
6. Luwian: The Ephemeral Success of a Non-Cosmopolitan Tradition 138
7. Vernaculars That Changed the World: Phoenician and Aramaic 149
8. From Minority Languages to World Literatures: The Hebrew Case 176
9. From Minority Languages to World Literatures: The Greek Case 199

vi
viii Contents
10. The Vernacular and Its Consequences 218
Epilogue: Clash of Cosmopoleis? 241
Notes 253
Bibliography 287
Index 333
ix
Illustrations
Map I.1 The ancient Near East 9

Figure 1.1 Babylonian school tablet from the early second millennium 15
Figure 2.1 An Old Assyrian loan document from Kaneš 48
Figure 3.1 A bilingual prayer from Sippar-Amnanum 57
Map II.1 The western Near East in the first millennium 107
Figure 5.1 Cuneiform and alphabetic scribes 114
Figure 6.1 Shell inscribed with Luwian hieroglyphs 140
Figure 7.1 Brick inscribed with the name of Adad-nadin-aḫḫe 171
Figure 9.1 A 5th-century Attic painted amphora inscribed with
names of the characters depicted 206
Figure 10.1 The Kilamuwa stele 222
x
1
Introduction
Historians of antiquit y would be out of a job were it not for the writ-
ten word. From their perspective, writing was one of the most important inven-
tions in world history—had it not been created, we could still study people of the
distant past, but we would not know their names and most of their thoughts, and
numerous other aspects of their existence would be so unclear to us that we could
not apply most methods of historical analysis to them. From the perspective
of the ancient people, too, writing was a critical invention. Even if few of them
knew how to write, for those who did it provided opportunities unimaginable
otherwise. Beyond its very practical applications, writing opened up intellectual
prospects and pathways. It allowed scholars to speculate, to communicate and
record ideas. Not all languages were written down, however. Potentially scribes
had many options, but they were not allowed to use them all if they wanted to be
taken seriously. Only certain languages were considered suitable for intellectual
pursuits, as is still true today when no one publishes scholarly research in collo-
quial idioms. Throughout history not all scripts had the same status either: cur-
sive scripts are not considered suitable for monumental inscriptions, for example.
A present-day parallel may be that no academic publication would accept a con-
tribution in which emojis make its point.
The choices of languages and scripts are not inconsequential. For modern his-
torians they determine what they can investigate through written remains—some
scripts remain undeciphered and some languages incomprehensible. Moreover,
throughout history when scribes utilized certain languages and scripts, they
became part of specific traditions that could extend back millennia in time and
carried much intellectual baggage. It is thus important for us to understand
what scripts and languages the people we study used and why. This book inves-
tigates these matters in the long history of the ancient Near East, exceedingly
well documented with hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. They stretch in
Before and After Babel. Marc Van De Mieroop, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197634660.003.0001
2
2 Before an d Aft er Babel
time from the fourth millennium bc to the first centuries ad, in space from the
eastern Mediterranean to western Iran. In this vast domain we can recognize mul-
tiple attitudes toward the uses of languages and scripts—attitudes that give us
insight into these ancient people’s thoughts that go much deeper than what they
expressed with the words they wrote down.
This book will contrast two distinct approaches toward the writing down of
languages in this long time frame and wide geography. On the one hand, there
was the shared use of the Babylonian languages—Sumerian, Akkadian, and
their combination in bilingual texts—all written in the same cuneiform script
across many regions and by people who spoke a wide variety of languages. This
was a cosmopolitan tradition with roots in the southern region of Iraq today,
but scribes from all over the Near East maintained and developed it. Over many
dozens of generations they copied out and rewrote texts that were in foreign lan-
guages, one of them already a dead language early in this sequence. On the other
hand, there was a wide variety of languages with several linguistic backgrounds,
spoken and written down regionally and in multiple scripts. Those were the ver-
naculars of the eastern Mediterranean with a great diversity of texts written in
each of the individual cases, some of them with ephemeral existences, others with
a very long-term impact on world literature. This book will argue for an evolution
in the attitudes of writers toward these systems with radical differences between
the second and first millennia bc. In the earlier millennium no one who wrote a
work of high literary or scholarly value would think of doing so in anything but
the cosmopolitan Babylonian idiom; in contrast, in the later millennium numer-
ous vernacular systems existed alongside the cosmopolitan one which survived in
the imperial centers of Mesopotamia alone. A major question will be what caused
the change in behavior and what the consequences were.
The existence of cosmopolitan and vernacular writings is not unparalleled in
world history. My work here owes much to that of Sheldon Pollock in his studies
of two other examples, somewhat later in history than what I study here, in the
first millennium ad: the Sanskrit and Latin cosmopoleis and the vernaculars that
succeeded them. I use the terms “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular,” which can be
employed in different contexts, as he does, that is, applied to literate culture and
irrespective of the geopolitical circumstances. In a cosmopolitan system people
with different cultural backgrounds, speaking diverse languages and living in
distinct political formations share the same language and script for their writ-
ten communications. In contrast, vernaculars make use of individual languages
and oftentimes scripts to record all types of writing. Those are not limited to
documenting speech but also enable high literary and scholarly creativity. The
vernaculars exist in a context that includes the cosmopolitan and interact with it.1
Very importantly, these usages are all the outcome of choices made consciously. It
3
Introduction 3
is not the case that one is elite, the other popular, but the same kind of people—in
the cases studied here, those attached to courts and government institutions—
decide which system to use. It should be clear that the evidence we will deal with
does not reveal the conditions among the populations in general. One of the
remarkable aspects of the eastern Mediterranean world, today and in the past, is
the diversity of languages its inhabitants actively use. I will repeat that through-
out the book in order to counteract groups like Daesh but also its critics, who
try to erase that fact and whose rewriting of history has penetrated the world’s
perception of the region. Although the polyglot situation I will describe in the
distant past was surely not the same as now, the general setting of people living
in the same region and using multiple languages and scripts is. But while we may
have access to all levels of society today if we make the effort, that is not true
for the past when only written remains inform us. And those of the periods dis-
cussed here are all the products of small segments of the populations, the literate
men and women, some with basic levels of education, others with much more
advanced ones. Not only the Babylonian cosmopolitan system was one of high
culture, so were the vernaculars.
The Sanskrit and Latin cases show different reasons for the existence of cos-
mopolitan systems and for the appearance of vernacular ones. The ancient Near
Eastern situation has its own distinctive features, the bilingualism of the cosmo-
politan tradition a very major one. I aim to demonstrate in the first part of this
book how the Babylonian cosmopolis functioned as a truly “international” (an
anachronistic term in a period without nations) system with active participation
and input of many different people. In the second part, I will describe the emer-
gence of some of the vernaculars (not all as there were too many and the evidence
on them can be too scanty to allow for substantive conclusions) and their rela-
tionship to the cosmopolitan tradition that continued to exist, as well as what the
consequences of their appearance were. My discussion will deal with many texts,
cultures, and traditions that have been the subject of numerous investigations
and have provoked much scholarly debate. While my bibliography is already very
long, I cannot say that I have been able to consult all this work and integrate it
here. Some colleagues may feel slighted, which was not my intention. Obviously
there will be people who disagree with my interpretations while others will feel
that my discussions are too superficial. My aim is to stimulate further debate by
combining topics often studied independently is a wider context, and I welcome
elaborations including those that prove me wrong.
I could not resist to call the book Before and After Babel, using the probably
somewhat hackneyed biblical reference to “the confusion of tongues.” It is espe-
cially appropriate for this study, however, because the story in the biblical book
of Genesis dramatically explains how humankind came to use multiple languages.
4
The story focuses on Babel, the city of Babylon, and its tower, which stand as
the icons of Babylonian culture. I will focus here on that other cultural icon of
Babylonia, the cuneiform script. While at one time every Near Eastern literate
intellectual understood that script, that was no longer the case when Genesis was
written. How could that have happened?
Without having planned this, it became clear to me while writing the vari-
ous chapters of this book that the Epic of Gilgameš provides the clearest example
of how people throughout Near Eastern history changed their attitudes toward
what to write and how. I do not want to repeat here the idea, popular a century
ago, that Gilgameš inspired the stories of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Paul—a
theory elaborated at length by Peter Jensen in his monumental Das Gilgamesch-
Epos in der Weltliteratur (1906–1928). But Gilgameš was a central character in
the literary imagination of the ancient Near East. Stories about him certainly cir-
culated in writing in the early second millennium ascribing a remarkable array
of adventures and accomplishments to him. After an Akkadian-writing author
at that time molded them into a whole that we now call the Babylonian Epic of
Gilgameš, discarding some earlier ideas but also enriching the character with new
aspects, the text was copied and elaborated by numerous ancient Near Eastern
authors over many centuries. Manuscripts with sometimes surprisingly new vari-
ants continue to appear. This was not the preserve of Babylonians; authors from
Anatolia, Syria, and the Levant engaged with the epic, modified it, excerpted it,
and translated it. And once cuneiform was no longer the dominant script, people
referred to elements of it in a variety of languages. They did not translate passages,
but reformulated them to fit new contexts and ideologies or simply mentioned
characters from the epic. Gilgameš started out as a truly cosmopolitan text, shared
by all those who knew cuneiform. Every author contributed in shaping this text,
which was alive and never finished, and as a study of the evolution of the epic
now decades old pointed out, each of these versions should be “taken seriously
as a piece of literature in its own right.”2 But it was also a text that was so famous
in the ancient Near East that writers who did not use cuneiform knew about ele-
ments of it and reacted to it. The memory of the main character and some others
in the epic lingered for a long time in the later Near East. Thus I decided to refer
to the epic at least once in every chapter (whenever possible) as a narrative strat-
egy. This book is not an analysis of Gilgameš and its history, but the epic is just
one illustration of the long history of interaction with and manipulation of texts
that was common practice in the ancient Near East.
That is the aim of this book: I want to shed light on a millennia-long tradi-
tion about how and what to write, a tradition that upheld a system of thought
inherently connected to the script. While it dominated the entire Near East for
more than a thousand years, it lost that power later on. But that did not mean
5
Introduction 5
that its presence was not acknowledged or inconsequential. When competing,

less encompassing systems emerged, they did so in dialogue with it. For a full
understanding of the literate cultural history of the ancient Near East—which
gave rise to traditions that had a massive impact on the later world—we need to
understand this interplay between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular.
I started to think about elements of this book when I was invited to par-
ticipate at a conference the Center for Canon and Identity Formation at the
University of Copenhagen organized in 2010 and only afterward realized the
scale of the project. Throughout the subsequent decade I brought up aspects of
it to many people, whose comments influenced the final outcome without either
they or I being fully conscious of it, as all of the discussions were in informal set-
tings. I hope my friends and colleagues with whom I chatted over the years do not
feel snubbed if I do not mention them by name. Writing a book takes time and
the American Council of Learned Societies helped me find it when it enabled
me to extend a sabbatical leave in 2016–2017 for another semester. At the same
time, my home institution, Columbia University, remained an ideal supporter of
this type of research through its leave policies and other assistance. Paradoxically
perhaps, the COVID-19 epidemic stirred me to work hard on finishing the book,
a process whose final stages OUP’s Stefan Vranka skillfully and enthusiastically
guided. I am grateful to all people and institutions named and unnamed for their
generous help. I dedicate this book to Hector, who came into our lives right after
the manuscript was finished and tragically left us much too soon thereafter—it
will always remind me of him.
6
7
PART I
The Babylonian Cosmopolis

The Cuneiform Sign
In those days the lands of Šubur and Hamazi, twin-tongued Sumer—the

great country of princely order—, Akkad—the country that has every-
thing befitting—, and the land of Martu—where one lies in green pas-
tures—, the whole universe of people entrusted to him, addressed the god
Enlil in a single language.
Back then, because of the contests between lords, princes and kings,
Enki—because of the contests between lords, princes and kings, Enki—,
the lord of abundance, who speaks the truth, the wise lord who looks after
the land, the leader of the gods, chosen for his wisdom, the lord of Eridu,
put foreign languages in their mouths, while the language of mankind had
been one.
These words written on a clay tablet sometime in the early centuries of the sec-
ond millennium bc are part of the epic we call Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,
a story that recounts the contest between Enmerkar, the king of the southern
Babylonian city Uruk in modern Iraq, and the unnamed lord of Aratta, a city in
modern Afghanistan. While Enmerkar bluntly demanded submission, his dis-
tant rival replied with seemingly impossible requests, such as a delivery of grain
in nets. Yet Enmerkar always found solutions. The hero of the tale is the herald,
also nameless, who made seven trips carrying messages back and forth. Framing
these travels are two passages that form a pair. In the first, just quoted, the author
looked back at a golden age when everyone—in the north and the east, in Sumer
and Akkad, and in the west—spoke the same language. Because lords, princes,
and kings squabbled, Enki, the god of wisdom had changed that, and now there
were foreign tongues.
8
The counterpart to this passage comes when the herald prepared for his final
trip to present the lord of Aratta with a counterchallenge. Enmerkar’s words were
so complex that he was unable to memorize them. So Enmerkar invented writing:
Those were his words, but their content was too deep. The herald could
not repeat them as the words were too heavy. Because the herald could not
repeat them as the words were too heavy the lord of Kulab (that is, Uruk)
patted some clay and placed the words on it as if it were a seal. Before that
day no one put words on clay. Now, when the sun rose on that day, it was
so. The lord of Kulab placed his words on clay—so it was!1
Putting his words on clay, Enmerkar wrote cuneiform, the script also used for all
the epic’s manuscripts. With this act he outwitted his opponent, reversing the
confusion with which Enki had ended the golden age: a single system of writing
became the means of communication everywhere. And that system was cunei-
form, the script with signs made up of a combination of wedges impressed on clay.
Cuneiform is perhaps the most iconic feature of ancient Babylonian culture.
People there and throughout the Near East utilized it from the mid-fourth millen-
nium bc to the first century ad to record a gigantic mass of writings the known
remains of which number more than a million today. They impressed the signs
on clay tablets or in wax spread onto wooden and ivory boards, carved them into
stone, engraved them in metal, and tattooed them onto the skins of people and
animals. The texts record a multitude of languages: Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite,
Hurrian, Urartian, Elamite, and others, and render what people said or some liter-
alized version of it. They all wrote cuneiform, however, and with the script’s inven-
tion it became possible once again for all the world’s people to use the same system
to address the main god of the Sumerian pantheon, Enlil.
But to those who knew cuneiform writing well it was much more than a record;
it was not secondary to speech but primary to it. As the epic states, its messages
were deeper than could be rendered in speech. Each sign had the potential to reveal
more than its first reading. It was polyvalent in that it could be pronounced differ-
ently, read as an entire word or as a syllable, substituted by other signs, and manip-
ulated in other ways. Its meaning was never fixed; on the contrary, it had to be
explored, expanded, and explained to reveal insights that were only present in the
written word, much richer than the spoken one. The cuneiform sign was not just
iconic for the way it looked but also for the intellectual value it had for the ancient
Babylonians. It was the path to truth.
When Enmerkar’s epic was composed, it was indeed the case that everyone who
wrote—all over the world from the perspective of someone living in Babylonia—
did so in the cuneiform script and typically in the Sumerian and Akkadian
9
The Babylonian Cosmopolis 9
languages, distinct yet like twins in their use. Sumer was indeed “twin-tongued.”
By adopting the writing system, people from all over the Near East became part
of Babylonia’s world and its intellectual practices. They contributed to them by
expanding the procedures within new cultural spheres and for different languages
and thus, together with their colleagues in Babylonia, established a truly cosmo-
politan system. Describing and analyzing this cosmopolis is the subject of Part I of
this book.
Map I.1 The ancient Near East.

10
1
Reading Gilgameš in the

Zagros Mountains
The Eighteenth Century bc
On September 6, 1884, the 49-year-old Christian clergyman-scholar and edi-

tor of a religious newspaper, William Hayes Ward, set out from New York on an
expedition to southern Iraq to identify an archaeological site that the Americans
could explore there. His travels took him through London, Paris, Munich,
Vienna, Budapest, and Constantinople to meet with scholars and study collec-
tions of antiquities before he entered the world of the former ancient Near East
itself by crossing southern Turkey and northern Iraq, and he reached Baghdad
on New Year’s Eve. On the road he saw with envy what the famous British and
French explorers Layard, Botta, and Place had unearthed in Nineveh, Kalhu, and
Dur-Šarrukin. He pushed on farther south than those Assyrian capitals, however,
despite warnings of the dangers he would face—and once a herd of wild boars did
block his expedition’s path—and that Ottoman Turkish government control was
virtually absent there. He wanted to reach the four oldest cities of Babylonia, if
not the world, according to c hapter 10 of the book of Genesis, based on a transla-
tion then in standard use: Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar.
Following Henry Rawlinson, he identified the last city with Niffer, a vast set of
mounds, which he mistakenly claimed no archaeologist had previously touched,
and after he returned to New York on June 20, 1885, he urged his colleagues
and financial sponsors to excavate the site as America’s entry into Near Eastern
archaeology. His fundraising efforts were successful: in 1888 the University of
Pennsylvania started work there, which lasted until 1900—between 1949 and
1990 the University of Pennsylvania and the Oriental Institute of the University
of Chicago followed up the early excavations with 19 further seasons. The site
turned out to be a goldmine, providing rich documentation on an important
Before and After Babel. Marc Van De Mieroop, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197634660.003.0002
12
southern Mesopotamian city from the sixth millennium bc to the 8th century
ad. The modern name Niffer or Nuffar still preserves its ancient designation,
Nibru in Sumerian, Nippuru in Akkadian. I will refer to it here as Nippur, fol-
lowing usual scholarly practice.1
Schooling at Nippur
Among the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets and fragments the archaeolo-
gists found at Nippur over the many seasons of excavations were thousands from
the 18th century bc that contain literary and scholarly writings. The early mem-
bers of the project had a vicious debate—masking major personality clashes and
a struggle for control over a new scholarly discipline—over whether or not these
constituted a temple library, a collection of literature and scholarship like the
one of King Assurbanipal the British had discovered in Nineveh. Today every-
one agrees they are the products of schooling, which in the first centuries of the
second millennium bc, a period we refer to as Old Babylonian, took place in pri-
vate residences. Sometimes the students went to the houses of priests and other
educated people; at other times it seems that tutors came to the students. The
teachers were otherwise engaged in business and administration, and it was their
skills as writers that they passed on. When they were priests, for example, they
were the members of the temple staff who kept the accounts—priesthood was
not just a cultic activity; it involved practical tasks such as the administration of
the temple’s assets. The type of education they provided was essentially home-
schooling probably for some of their own children as well as a few others from the
neighborhood. They taught young boys and some girls how to read and write by
copying out a curriculum of increasingly complicated scholarly and literary texts
in the Sumerian language, which was no longer spoken at the time. The num-
ber of manuscripts from Nippur is gigantic and dominates the record we have of
Sumerian literature of the era. Some 7,000 items exist, making up more than 80%
of the total number of Sumerian literary texts from all sites in the Old Babylonian
period known today. In one house, some 1,300 literary manuscripts and school
tablets were discovered. Even if many of them contain brief extracts only, almost
every modern reconstruction of a work of Sumerian literature relies on Nippur
evidence, which most modern scholars take to have been the dominant tradition.
Nippur versions are often seen as the standard ones, and when those from else-
where show variants, they are considered to be inferior.2
The students started out learning to impress cuneiform signs into the clay and
then wrote out groups of simple signs with the same consonant and the three
vowels distinguished in writing: tu, ta, ti; bu, ba, bi; and so on. They progressed to
the copying of passages from word lists and from lists of personal names, and then
13
Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 13
wrote out model contracts and short proverbs, their first introduction to com-
plete sentences. After that elementary stage they reproduced a standard sequence
of Sumerian literary works starting with a group of four hymns: three to kings
and one to the goddess of writing, Nisaba. Modern scholars refer to them as the
Tetrad. The royal hymns were composed in the 20th and 19th centuries and hon-
ored three rulers of the city of Isin, which early in those centuries was politically
the most powerful in Babylonia. By the mid-18th century the city had long lost its
leading status in the region, but that was irrelevant to the students, who wrote out
praises to these former kings as wise, just, and efficient. This approach to learning
was continued in copying out ten literary compositions—modern scholars call
them the Decad. The corpus started out with two hymns of praise to kings of the
past: Šulgi, the greatest ruler of the 21st century who had unified Babylonia and
extended its political influence far into neighboring regions (r. 2092–2045; Šulgi
A) and Lipit-Ištar of Isin (r. 1936–1926; Lipit-Ištar A), already known to students
from the Tetrad. The sequence continued with a Hymn to the hoe, a play on the
syllable “al,” the Sumerian word for this agricultural tool; three hymns to major
deities and their temples; two mythological texts concerning the great gods Enki
and Inana; a hymn to a minor goddess, Nungal; and finally a Sumerian tale of
Gilgameš and Enkidu’s encounter with the monster Huwawa. All the composi-
tions of the Decad were between 100 and 200 lines in length, and we know them
from scores of manuscripts mostly produced by students, roughly 80 of them for
each text. Afterward a wide variety of other Sumerian literary texts were taught,
including literary letters, hymns, and other genres.3
Why were these texts selected? Pedagogical reasons certainly played a role,
and an analysis of the hymn to king Lipit-Ištar of the Tetrad demonstrated how
it taught basic features of the Sumerian verbal system, elementary sentence struc-
ture, and the stylistic parallelism that characterized much Sumerian literature
(Lipit-Ištar B). By the time students reached the end of the Decad, they were
expected to have mastered the intricacies of Sumerian grammar and vocabu-
lary. How long the process took is difficult to estimate. Sumerian was just one
of the subjects the students learned—they also studied music, mathematics, and
surveying—and as instruction was a private affair with educated men (and prob-
ably some women) teaching small groups of students, we cannot assume they
all went at the same pace. We know that teachers varied in their choice of texts,
although they all selected them from the same corpus. How did instruction hap-
pen in practice? Many modern scholars think that much oral explanation and
recitation was involved. Students may have written out texts that were read aloud
to them, or they did so from memory. There are many examples of school tablets,
however, that contain the teacher’s written paradigm on one side and the stu-
dent’s on the other. When students penned down lists of Sumerian words early
14
on in their training, did the teacher translate those and explain why they were
grouped together? That Akkadian was more familiar to the students is clear from
the fact that some texts have short translation notes in that language inserted
into the Sumerian sentences (we call them glosses). It seems likely that not all
students reached the same level, and only the Nippur schools may have taught the
most advanced and extensive curriculum. The poetic works were of little use to
people who ended up writing out standard contracts and accounts; but in mod-
ern times, too, the literature students read in high school has no practical benefit
for most careers. And instruction in other genres of writing took place as well,
albeit in much less standardized fashion. We find multiple copies of Akkadian
letters, for example, which were more functional items in the education of a
scribe. When were these taught, however? They seem not to have been part of
the core curriculum.4
School exercises dominate the manuscript record we have today of Babylonia’s
literature and scholarship in the first centuries of the second millennium bc,
which does give a particular slant to our perception of these writings. It is clear
that the choice of texts was rooted in traditions that went back to the beginning
of writing in Babylonia. An important part of education was the learning of word
lists, a genre modern scholars refer to as lexical texts, which were developed at
the same time as the cuneiform script itself in the late fourth millennium bc.
They recorded words in the Sumerian language in sequences that were grouped
together following various principles of similarity: semantic connections and
resemblances in sound and in the shape of the cuneiform signs used to write them
out. A multitude of lexical lists is preserved from the Old Babylonian period,
and they were part of every level of scribal training, from the most basic when
students learned simple expressions to the very advanced when they explored eso-
teric values of signs and words. A remarkable aspect of this corpus is that it still
included works that had been created 1,500 years earlier preserving the original
order and organization of the entries. The prime example of this was a list of pro-
fessional designations which had been the most prominent in the earliest lexical
corpus known to us from the city of Uruk around 3400 bc and which through-
out the third millennium scribes in Babylonia, and at times in Syria, continued to
reproduce. In the early second millennium many terms in this text were outdated,
but scholars and some advanced students still wrote them out in the sequence
established long before. Those who studied it must have known that they were
heirs to a very old tradition.5
Much more pragmatic in scribal education was the study of legal and
administrative terminology—after all, most students went on to write docu-
ments using such language later in life. Cuneiform writing was invented for
administrative purposes and 90% of the earliest preserved tablets record
15
(a) (b)
Figure 1.1 Babylonian school tablet from the early second millennium. On small lentil-
shaped tablets like this one, some 10 cm in diameter, students learned to write Sumerian
cuneiform by replicating on the reverse (b) the example the teacher had written out on
the obverse (a). Here the exercise was to copy out three times the name of the god Ura.
(MMA 86.11.251. Image in public domain)
transactions in a centralized temple organization. The formulation of such

texts and the areas of activity they encompassed had much changed over the
centuries, but still at the start of the second millennium they were mostly writ-
ten in Sumerian, and students had to acquire the vocabulary of this language
which was no longer spoken. Akkadian, the language most of them proba-
bly used in daily interactions, became more prominent in writing over time,
however, especially in a crucial tool for long-distance communication, episto-
lary writing. Not only officials of state and other public institutions but also
private entrepreneurs and others wrote letters for which they probably often
engaged professional scribes, although several of them were literate as well. It
is remarkable how poorly attested the teaching of such writing is in the school
material preserved to us.6
The bulk of the writings students copied out was made up of literary texts
entirely in the Sumerian language. Many of these may have been composed in
the late third millennium—the hymn to King Šulgi of Ur, for example—and may
have become part of the accepted school curriculum at that time. There is a pas-
sage in a hymn about Šulgi in which the king boasts that he established schools
in Ur and Nippur as centers of learning so that his praises would continue to
be sung:
In the south, in Ur, I caused a House of the Wisdom of the goddess Nisaba
to spring up in sacrosanct ground for the writing of my hymns; up country
16
in Nippur I established another. May the scribe be on duty there and tran-
scribe with his hand the prayers that I instituted in the Ekur temple; and
may the singer perform, reciting from the text. The academies are never to
be altered; the places of learning shall never cease to exist. This and this
only is now my accumulated knowledge! The collected words of all the
hymns that are in my honor supersede all other formulations. By the gods
An, Enlil, Utu and Inana, it is no lie—it is true!
Most scholars interpret this as evidence that the king, who created the highly
centralized Ur III state, established academies for the training of the scribes to
be employed in his administration. His court set up a standard curriculum that
included hymns of praise to Šulgi, both to teach the Sumerian language and in
order to indoctrinate the bureaucrats, who should remain alert to the fact that
their careers depended on the king. The rulers of the first leading dynasty of the
Old Babylonian period from the city of Isin continued the practice, adding new
hymns of praise to the curriculum (to kings Lipit-Ištar, Iddin-Dagan, and Enlil-
bani). It was only after the 19th century that state-run education devolved into
the hands of private teachers who maintained the core elements of the curriculum
but adapted it to their needs and personal tastes. Even if the centralized control
of instruction may have been a figment of Šulgi’s imagination, it is certain that
throughout Babylonia scribal education was based not only on the same prin-
ciples of copying mainly Sumerian texts but also on the same corpus of texts that
must have been regarded as good pedagogical tools. We can observe that teach-
ers in different towns used somewhat different basic texts, but they chose them
from a common curriculum, which continued to be in use throughout the Old
Babylonian period. The power of tradition seems to have stimulated this continu-
ity. No central authority—palace or temple—coordinated schooling.7
A Library at Meturan
In any society, school books do not necessarily reflect what intellectuals read, and
one of the frustrating outcomes of the practice that literate adults tutored stu-
dents privately is that we do not know where the educational material ends and
where works of higher learning start. All the houses excavated at Nippur and Ur
that contained literature and scholarly texts also had remains of student exercises.
This situation has led to the perception that all preserved works from the Old
Babylonian period derive from a school setting. That this was not the case is sug-
gested by the find of a library belonging to active exorcists, not in the Babylonian
heartland, but on its outer fringes in the lower Zagros Mountains. The house that
held the library was discovered at the Iraqi site of Tell Haddad in the early 1980s,
17
and because neither the archaeology nor the epigraphic finds are fully published
so far, we do not yet know all the details of the collection. But the information
available today already gives a good idea of the contents and character of this
library, which shows a remarkable penetration of Sumerian literature and schol-
arship in the early second-millennium Babylonian world. Tell Haddad together
with the adjacent site of Tell es-Sib made up the ancient town of Meturan, stra-
tegically located on the Diyala where the river becomes navigable, some 200 km
northeast of modern Baghdad. The town was not large; its archaeological remains
take up some 12 hectares, while those of Nippur in the same period occupied 150
hectares and those of Ur 60 hectares. Meturan became part of the kingdom of
Ešnunna in the mid-19th century, which itself fell prey to Hammurabi of Babylon
in 1762. Probably the latter’s military campaign laid waste to the town, and the
conflagration it caused sealed the clay tablets in the ruins and thus preserved
them for us. The number of tablets excavated at various locations in Meturan is
remarkably high for such a small town, some 1,000 in total, by far mostly legal
and economic documents. Among them was a collection of literary and scholarly
texts discovered in a single house. The economic documents found with them
reveal the names of some of the residents: one Bēlšunu, son of Lu-Lisina and
husband of Bēltani, and one Lisinakam, possibly his cousin, are prominent in the
tablets found in one part of the house (rooms 8 and 10). A Zimri-Addu appears in
the unpublished texts from another room (30). None of the residents is identified
professionally, but the contents of the literary and scholarly texts found in both
areas show that those who consulted them were exorcists. The tablets of rooms 8
and 10 all contained material to be used in magic rituals, while in room 30 such
texts were kept together with works of Sumerian literature that may have had spe-
cial appeal to an exorcist. There is no clear distinction between the magical texts
from the two areas (which are also near each other in the house), and it seems that
the same people used them. They show what educated persons in a small town far
from Nippur, the intellectual center of Babylonia, read and how they dealt with
the difficult materials.8
We do not know exactly what language the people inhabiting the Diyala Valley
spoke in the early second millennium, but in the written material produced there
Akkadian dominated. A building inscription of an early ruler of Meturan, Arim-
Lim, was written in that language, as were all official inscriptions of the kingdom
of Ešnunna, which annexed the town. Yet the magical texts from Meturan were
almost entirely written in Sumerian and often rendered that language in a unique
way, different from what was used in Babylonia’s heartland at the same time. The
spellings were what modern scholars call “phonetic,” breaking up words into indi-
vidual syllables while parallels from Nippur and other southern Babylonian sites
used single signs to render them. The choice of Meturan’s writers was not the
18
result of incompetence, however. They were aware that each cuneiform sign had
multiple readings, that the same syllable could be written with various signs, and
that the graphic elements in signs could accentuate particular ideas, and often
they played around with those principles to add meaning to the written text.
A simple example is their writing the name of the goddess of grain Ašnan syllabi-
cally as še-na, the first element of which, še, was the sign for grain. Another may
be the use of the cuneiform sign for “canal,” íd, to render the verb “to irrigate,” a
dè. Other deviations from spellings we encounter in the Nippur material suggest
that the writers heard and read Sumerian words and wrote them down in unorth-
odox ways. These often confuse the modern Sumerologist trained in the reading
of Nippur manuscripts. The editors of the Meturan texts have referred to them as
“graphies presque sauvages,” but this assessment is too negative. The peculiarities
show that the scribes at Meturan truly engaged with the texts. The written format
of the words was meaningful to them, and they aimed to enrich the material with
the variants they introduced.9
The tablets contained incantations that were to be pronounced in Sumerian.
One of them—unusual because it also included an apotropaic formula in
Akkadian—had two short Sumerian sections that were written as if in short-
hand, giving the exorcist an aide-mémoire to recite the full spell. This particular
manuscript was poorly written, but most of the tablets with magical spells from
Meturan were carefully produced, regularly large in size with multiple columns
on each side. They were not at all the work of amateurs or imitators. And the
knowledge of Sumerian to the extent that such works could be created was not
limited to one person in the town. An analysis of the details of spelling shows
that different hands wrote parallel manuscripts. The scribes were probably the
men and women who performed the rituals and spoke the spells. The Akkadian
passage in the unusual text mentioned before contains the first-person statement,
“Let me cast a spell upon myself, let me enchant with a spell.”10 The exorcists’
concern was to protect farmers against threats to their fields and crops: vermin,
scorpions, invading armies, evil spirits, and so on. The agricultural focus of their
work probably also explains why two manuscripts of a text modern scholars call
The Farmer’s Instructions were found at Meturan. It was part of Sumerian wisdom
literature of the Old Babylonian period and is attested in numerous sources from
Nippur, and fewer from other sites. The Meturan version follows that text but
renders many of its words with unique spellings.
The magical material was most likely used in practice by active exorcists, and
it shows how educated people at Meturan knew the Sumerian language and the
intricacies of the cuneiform writing system to record it. The spells they uttered
had a long recorded history in Babylonia proper, where they were most likely
composed. They were brought as efficacious apotropaic formulae to the upper
19
Diyala Valley, written and to be recited in Sumerian, a language no one there

ever spoke in other contexts. The recipients in Meturan copied the texts but not
slavishly. They knew Sumerian and the writing system well enough to alter the
spellings of the texts, not always to make them easier to read but to add to their
meaning. The people who did so were probably more familiar with Akkadian
in daily use but maintained the Sumerian versions of the spells, as did their col-
leagues in Babylonia proper. Only rarely did they use Akkadian in this material.
One of the manuscripts mentioned before had an Akkadian passage, and two
hemerologies (that is, lists of actions to take or avoid on specific days) found at
Meturan were interlinear bilinguals with phonetic Sumerian and Akkadian. Two
brief additional texts—one medical, the other probably a fable—were also writ-
ten in Akkadian. They show that literary creativity in that language was accept-
able, but it was of marginal importance when compared to working in Sumerian.
The texts discussed so far seem to have been part of a professional library for
specialists who were considered capable of protecting a community of farmers
from threats to their livelihood. They did so with esoteric rituals and by pronounc-
ing sentences in a language almost certainly none of their customers understood.
They were participants in a Babylonian literate culture that they fully mastered
and could develop as they wished. Their interests were not only pragmatic, how-
ever. In one area of the house (room 30) the magical material was kept together
with a rich collection of Sumerian literature. It shows an advanced knowledge of
that literature, with a selection of texts seemingly inspired by the owners’ pro-
fessional interests. The texts they read were concerned with the issues of death
and the hereafter, and the protection against danger, which were explored with
stories regarding two mythological characters: Gilgameš and Adapa. Four of the
five known Sumerian tales about Gilgameš were found at Meturan, all but one of
them in duplicate manuscripts. The selection of texts was not arbitrary, it seems,
and the scribe writing them out established a set sequence in the tales, a concept
that we do not find elsewhere until the Akkadian epic of Gilgameš was composed
later in the Old Babylonian period. Two of the Sumerian tales dealt with death,
and two others with the hero’s battles against monsters. Although all of the man-
uscripts from Meturan were written with the standard Sumerian orthography
known from other Babylonian sources, they can have considerable differences
with these other versions changing individual phrases but not the overall content
and intent of the stories.11
The two tales on death involve Gilgameš himself and his friend and compan-
ion Enkidu. The first, The Death of Gilgameš, was not part of the school curricu-
lum at Nippur, where the text is attested in relatively few manuscripts. It is thus
surprising that at least three copies appeared at Meturan, two in the house of the
exorcists, one from elsewhere in the town, and they show substantial differences
20
with the Nippur version. Yet they are written in good Sumerian. The second tale,
Gilgameš, Enkidu and the Netherworld, a text known in multiple versions else-
where, is also preserved at Meturan in two manuscripts rendering the end of the
story. Uniquely, the writer of these manuscripts added the first three lines of yet
another Gilgameš story, Gilgameš and Huwawa, at the very end, making an oth-
erwise undocumented link between the two texts. In the latter tale, Gilgameš
and Enkidu confront the monster that guards the cedar forest, and the Meturan
version shows a narrative sequence in which Enkidu came back from the neth-
erworld to join his friend on his quest.12 The final tale, Gilgameš and the Bull of
Heaven, also known from two manuscripts at Meturan, presents the two heroes
in confrontation with another supernatural enemy, the bull the goddess Inana
sent down to devastate Uruk. The only Sumerian Gilgameš story that remains
unattested at Meturan is the one that showed Gilgameš in action against a human
opponent, Gilgameš and Agga. Perhaps its subject matter was considered too
closely tied to the city of Uruk to appeal to exorcists in the Zagros Mountains.
Also the author of the Akkadian version of the Gilgameš Epic, to be discussed
later, ignored this tale.
A major surprise for the reconstruction of Sumerian literature was the dis-
covery at Meturan of a long story concerning the mythological character Adapa.
Hitherto only known in Akkadian versions from the later second and first mil-
lennia, the story of Adapa recounts how the hero was called to heaven because he
had damaged the south wind with a curse. At the advice of the god Ea, the god of
wisdom, Adapa rejected the food and drink that would have made him immortal,
and many modern scholars see the tale as an etiology of human mortality. The
story’s message remains mysterious because the text is poorly preserved, yet it is
clear that Meturan’s Sumerian version is radically different. Adapa’s cursing of
the south wind and his visit to heaven make up only the second half of the poem,
which when complete was 190 verses long. The previously unknown first half sets
the events in a sequence starting after the flood destroyed the earth—and conse-
quently the people who provided the gods with offerings. Humanity was restored
and placed under a king of Kiš, Etana, otherwise known from a distinct work of
Akkadian literature. The world suffered subsequent moments of crisis, of which
Adapa’s harming the south wind was the last one. Nevertheless, the tale ends with
a cure to deal with that wind’s evil effects and thus contains the optimistic mes-
sage that the gods were willing to help humankind.
The presence of new versions of Sumerian literary tales at Meturan does not
mean that they were produced there—the discovery of the Adapa story made it
possible to identify a small fragment from Nippur as part of the same poem. It
does not show local creative authorship, but it does show that some individuals
in the town read—and probably wrote out—such complex works of Sumerian
21
literature. The stories may have had a special appeal to exorcists: Adapa shows
that the gods can be invoked to help humans, and the Gilgameš tales present
mythological heroes in confrontation with supernatural enemies and give advice
on how to prepare for death. Most other pieces of literature from Meturan remain
unpublished, but the preliminary information available on them shows how they
suited the inhabitants of the house. They include two hymns to the goddess Lisin,
not coincidentally also invoked in the names of two residents, and a manuscript
of the myth of Inana and Mt. Ebih, the Sumerian name for the mountain range
where Meturan was located. The contents of these texts had relevance to readers
in this setting.13
The reason for my lengthy survey of the Meturan literary material—and it
dealt with only part of the library—was not just because it has so far not received
the attention it deserves but more because it encapsulates what literate cul-
ture meant in early second-millennium Babylonia in a way that is not evident
from other known collections. As I said before, the literary manuscripts from
Babylonian sites were mostly the work of students, and it is unclear how relevant
they were to literate culture outside the schools. They were found in prominent
cities where their presence is not surprising. Nippur, our richest source, was the
religious center of Babylonia for centuries before the early second millennium.
For reasons we do not fully understand, already in the twenty-fifth century—if
not before—the dynastic houses that ruled the multiple city-states of the area
from the Persian Gulf to just south of modern Baghdad agreed that Nippur had a
special status transcending political boundaries and rivalries. Its god Enlil was the
head of the regional pantheon with authority over local city-gods and was regu-
larly invoked as having settled disputes between different states. It is not astonish-
ing that Nippur, a city without military strength but whose priesthood had great
influence, was also a center of literate culture. By several indications its teachers
were the best of the region and its curriculum the most advanced and respected.
In contrast Ur, the second city from which we have the most literary sources for
the Old Babylonian period, was a great political center for many centuries. This
was especially true in the 21st century when its kings ruled over all of Babylonia
and had control over the area to its east, including the area around Meturan. If
our interpretation of Šulgi’s self-praise quoted before is correct, Ur’s court orga-
nized the teaching of Sumerian through the literature written in that language.
Again the preservation of that literature, even when the city was politically sub-
servient to others in the early second millennium, is not unexpected.
Meturan was a very different case, however. It was a small town far from the
political and cultural centers of Babylonia, some 500 km from Nippur. Probably
no one there had ever used Sumerian in daily conversation, but direct contact
with the Ur III state may have introduced literature in that language. By the 18th
2
century, political dominance from southern Babylonia over Meturan’s region

had long vanished. Yet the educated people in this town still read its literature,
keeping informed of newly created texts. What people wrote in Meturan was not
based on 21st-century originals, preserved over generations in local copies. The
texts were the same as those scholars read at Ur, Nippur, and in other Babylonian
cities in the early second millennium. Moreover, Meturan’s writers did not slav-
ishly collect and reproduce the material; they selected works that were of interest
to them professionally, and they modified the texts. They were full participants
in the literary creativity of the period. In the 18th century bc one did not have to
live in a big city or work for a powerful court to be an intellectual. Some people
in agricultural communities could be highly educated as well.
Sumerian, Akkadian, and Bilingualism

All those who read literary and scholarly texts dealt with the same kinds of mate-
rials. The literature of the Old Babylonian period was rooted in a Sumerian tradi-
tion, but it was far from limited to it. “Sumerian” is an elusive term. In essence
it refers to a linguistically unique language with a grammar and vocabulary that
is very distinct from all other known languages from the ancient Near East and
elsewhere. But many modern scholars use the term in an ethnolinguistic sense
and apply it to a people and all aspects of their culture—it is common practice
in the study of the ancient Near East to equate language with identity. People
in southern Babylonia most probably spoke Sumerian in prehistory, and it was
almost certainly the language at the basis of the invention of cuneiform script in
the late fourth millennium there. Official inscriptions of the late third and early
second millennia refer to southern Babylonia as Sumer: kiengi in Sumerian, mat
Šumerim in Akkadian. That region was the core area of where the language was
originally spoken, but, according to most scholars, by the beginning of the sec-
ond millennium, Sumerian had ceased to exist in speech at least outside educated
circles.14 It had primarily become a literary language preserving and elaborating
on a textual culture that focused on southern Babylonia. By far most of the works
of Sumerian literature dealt with gods, kings, and heroes from that region: the
central human characters of the epics—Enmerkar, Lugalbanda, and Gilgameš—
were all kings of Uruk; the kings praised in hymns came from Ur, Isin, Larsa,
and Uruk; the cities whose destruction was lamented were Ur, Nippur, Eridu,
and Uruk; the gods invoked in spells, honored in hymns, and depicted in myth-
ological texts were the patron deities of those cities; and so on. There is much
uncertainty over when the literary pieces were first composed. Some must have
been created in the third millennium, but were certainly much edited over time,
and the 18th-century manuscripts we have do not reproduce their original form.
23
Others were composed in the Old Babylonian period even if they involved char-
acters of earlier days. That authors were able to create new texts of high literary
quality in Sumerian is obvious from the fact that hymns and inscriptions honor-
ing kings of the period continued to be written until the end of the period. Their
works were part of a cultural tradition that went back many centuries but kept
evolving. All those who wrote must have known that they preserved an ancient
past—they were taught their skills by copying out texts about long gone people—
but that they also could be called upon to create something new.
Sumerian was not the only literary idiom in use, however. Alongside it scribes
wrote Akkadian, a Semitic language that was grammatically very unlike Sumerian
but that had coexisted with it for many centuries. Most likely from prehistory
on both languages had been spoken in Babylonia, Sumerian primarily in the
south, Akkadian predominantly in the north. The languages had exchanged
many words. For example, the Akkadian noun for carpenter, naggārum, derived
from Sumerian nagar, while the Sumerian word for “merchant,” damgar, came
from Akkadian tamkārum. There was even influence on the syntax: unlike other
Semitic languages, Akkadian placed the verb at the end of the sentence, a fea-
ture it shares with Sumerian. But the cuneiform script was developed to write
Sumerian, and throughout its history that connection was considered funda-
mental. Yet during the third millennium increasingly more types of writing in
Akkadian appeared, and it is obvious that people could record anything in the
language. It is likely that over the centuries the language became dominant in
speech throughout Babylonia—at the expense of Sumerian—and consequently
its importance in writing grew as well, even if at a slower pace. It is no surprise
that Akkadian literary and scholarly texts appeared in growing numbers and cov-
ering more subjects. These were not limited to the types of texts that had been
written in Sumerian before; people used Akkadian in the creation of a new liter-
ate tradition.15
Although evidence of Akkadian literature starts to appear around 2500, it
remains very scarce until 1850 when a corpus developed that would remain the
basis of literature in the broader sense for the rest of Mesopotamian history. Some
scholars have thus called the centuries from 1850 to 1500 the “classical period” of
Akkadian literature. We know almost nothing regarding the background of the
creators of this literature except that they lived all over Babylonia, including in
cities where Sumerian was tirelessly copied and developed, such as Nippur and
Ur. A little vignette instructing a cleaner in Akkadian how to treat a set of clothes,
preserved in a single manuscript only, was found at Ur alongside a rich collec-
tion of Sumerian literary texts, probably used for teaching around 1800. There
is no reason to assume it was not created there. All the writers of Akkadian texts
were schooled in the Sumerian language and its literature, and the relationship
24
between Sumerian and Akkadian literatures was very complex—and remains

insufficiently studied. It is regularly stated that by the time the latter started to
flourish Sumerian had become ossified and that it can only be understood when
read “through Akkadian glasses,” but that suggests too much that there was a
sequence where creativity in one language replaced that in another. The two idi-
oms coexisted and authors who wrote in Akkadian often worked independently
from the Sumerian tradition.16
This is most manifest in one area of scholarship that became textualized in
this era: divination. By the second millennium, communicating with the gods
to find out their plans and wishes was age-old in Babylonia, but it had not been
part of literate culture. There are earlier references to divine messages yet without
an indication how exactly they were conveyed. This changed radically early in
the millennium when the omen list was invented: it used a rigorous format enu-
merating portentous signs the gods gave in all aspects of the environment, and a
statement of what they meant. All entries were phrased the same way: if X, then
Y. The format was not new: it had been used for the formulation of laws from
the 21st century onward, first in Sumerian, then, from around 1800 onward, in
Akkadian translation. The language of divinatory lists was exclusively Akkadian,
however. Thousands of omens were created through elaboration on themes to
cover every possibility, realistic or not. The first evidence of omen lists comes
from southern Babylonian cities, especially Larsa, and may date to the later 19th
to early 18th centuries, when the political instability in the region was great. The
genre remained the core element of Babylonian literate culture until the end of
cuneiform writing and dominated the textual record of that culture. In the vast
seventh-century library of Assurbanipal, almost half of the Babylonian literary
and scholarly tablets were divinatory series using the format established in the
Old Babylonian period. They were almost always written in Akkadian. In the
later second millennium, scribes in Anatolia and Syria sometimes used other lan-
guages, but this was not the case in Babylonia and Assyria. There exist only three
omens fully written in Sumerian in the enormous corpus known to us and a few
bilingual ones. Once the standard omen formulation was invented, it appeared
all over Babylonia, and not surprisingly also at Meturan where a single omen,
inscribed on the clay model of a liver, reads: “If the ‘spy-hole’ turns back to the
‘weapon,’ the enemy will do battle at the gate.” That Akkadian was the profes-
sional language of diviners there is also clear from the report of an extispicy per-
formed on the day when Daduša assumed kingship of Ešnunna, that is, around
the year 1800. It was recorded in perfect Akkadian on another liver model exca-
vated at Meturan and the text shows that the diviner followed the sequence of
examinations in use in southern Babylonia at the time. Whoever conducted the
extispicy and wrote its results down was fully familiar with the practices of the
25
profession in the great cities of Babylonia. And everyone used the Akkadian lan-
guage for it.17
In other areas of writing in Akkadian, too, the authors of the period allowed
their creativity full rein. Specialists of this literature detect a preoccupation with
the human condition absent in Sumerian. We find thus entirely novel works
such as a dialogue between a man and his personal god questioning the source
of his sufferings. When topics found in Sumerian literature were addressed, the
authors regularly approached them in new ways. There were stories on ancient
kings—no longer those of Uruk, but those of Akkad (Sargon and Naram-Sin)
who had received only sparse attention in Sumerian literature. The tone was dif-
ferent, however, more resembling the self-praise found in royal inscriptions than
the descriptions of intellectual acumen found in the tales regarding Uruk’s past
kings. Gods remained a focus of praise in hymns and prayers, but Akkadian writ-
ings include long liturgical texts, which had no parallel in Sumerian.18
The fact that all people writing down Akkadian literature had been exposed to
Sumerian in their youth and knew it well is clear from other material, which also
shows that they engaged with it creatively. As we saw at Meturan, five Sumerian
Gilgameš stories existed and in the Old Babylonian period—we do not know
exactly when—an Akkadian epic of that hero was composed, certainly by some-
one very familiar with the Sumerian tales. The author selected three of them for
inclusion, but not all in the same way. The encounters of Gilgameš and Enkidu
with supernatural enemies, Huwawa of the cedar forest and the bull of heaven in
Uruk, were rephrased and integrated in a long account of these heroes’ adventures.
The third story, Gilgameš, Enkidu and the Netherworld, was stripped of the expla-
nation why Enkidu ended up in the netherworld, and only the second half of the
tale was translated almost verbatim into Akkadian. Moreover, it was awkwardly
added to the end of the epic. These existing stories were integrated into a longer
tale that praised Gilgameš for his accomplishments as a ruler; the first half-line
of the composition, which in Mesopotamian usage was its title, was “Surpassing
all other kings.” The glorification of his kingship obtained an “Akkadian” taste,
in that it resembled the image the rulers of Akkad from the mid-third millen-
nium had created for themselves in their royal inscriptions. There they boasted
about their campaigns in distant lands, exotic places to inhabitants of southern
Mesopotamia. Their self-presentation inspired a heroic tradition, which over
the centuries spun increasingly fantastic tales especially about kings Sargon and
Naram-Sin. Already in the early second millennium, Sargon was portrayed as
facing seemingly impossible physical challenges, and there are clear indications
that in the first millennium Gilgameš and Sargon were seen as having had com-
parable lives. Whoever composed the Akkadian Epic of Gilgameš most likely
knew Sargon’s tales and used them to develop his protagonist’s accomplishments
26
further. Gilgameš, too, traveled far and wide, encountering strange environ-
ments and challenges not attested in the Sumerian stories about him. Far from
the entire epic in its Old Babylonian form is preserved and most of the exist-
ing manuscripts parallel the earlier parts of the well-known first-millennium
version, when Enkidu was still alive. But one manuscript contains an account of
Gilgameš’s quest for immortality which took him to the edge of the earth, so this
must have been part of the Old Babylonian epic as well. As the Sumerian tales
show, the Akkadian author had a wealth of stories about Gilgameš from which to
choose. Some were adopted, others not, although elements of them found their
way into the Akkadian epic. One Sumerian tale fully passed over is the story in
which Gilgameš confronts a human enemy, Gilgameš and Agga; by omitting it
Gilgameš became dehistoricized and part of a world with gods and mythological
creatures. The other is The Death of Gilgameš, a long tale where the hero is con-
fronted with the reality that all humans are mortal. The Akkadian author picked
up ideas from it, such as the fact that Gilgameš met the flood’s survivor Ziusudra.
But he omitted the report on Gilgameš’s actual death, which is not surprising as
the Akkadian epic was famous because its protagonist “did not want to die.”19
The Adapa story seems to have received a treatment different from what hap-
pened to Gilgameš. Instead of molding individual Sumerian tales (which may
have been considered a sequence as the Meturan material suggests) into a long
epic, the author working in Akkadian lifted a section from a long account, trans-
lated only some sentences of it from the Sumerian, and elaborated the tale further
with new material so that Adapa’s visit to heaven became a distinct story. Another
tale describing the goddess Inana’s descent into the netherworld was also only
partly translated; the Akkadian version is so abbreviated that it is hard to get
a sense of the story without knowing the Sumerian original. In all these cases,
however, it seems clear that whoever composed the Akkadian text had Sumerian
manuscripts in hand. The outcome took on a life on its own as a literary text.
In other instances, the debt to Sumerian literature was direct, and there was
little adjustment beyond the change in language. Law paragraphs with their casu-
istic format, if X, then Y (with some variations), were translated from Sumerian
into Akkadian. This is first attested in the early 18th century with Daduša of
Ešnunna in the Diyala, where Akkadian was the standard language for royal pro-
nouncements, but also Hammurabi of Babylon a few decades later had no qualms
adopting it. His famous law code contains the longest text in the Akkadian lan-
guage from early Mesopotamian history. There exists a Sumerian version of the
code’s epilogue, but that was a scholarly translation of the Akkadian original, not
the reverse. Careful translations of Sumerian into Akkadian appear in other genres
of writing as well. A type of lament called balag, after the instrument—a drum
or a lyre—played in accompaniment when reciting it, was popular in Sumerian,
27
and many Old Babylonian manuscripts of several such songs are known. They
always use a dialect of Sumerian that was reserved for the cult, identified with the
Sumerian term emesal, which means something like “thin speech.” At Meturan a
manuscript of such a lament addressed to the goddess Inana was found, accurately
rendering that dialect. All the preserved Old Babylonian texts of this genre are in
Sumerian, except for a single one from Ur, which provides a faithful Akkadian
translation of part of the lament that was also found at Meturan. There also is a
catalogue of the period that lists the titles of eight laments of the balag type, six of
which are in Akkadian, so these may have been much more common than we see
in the manuscripts available to us. It was only in the first millennium, however,
that Akkadian versions became the norm; they appear in many bilingual manu-
scripts, several of which are from the Hellenistic era. We do not know when the
Akkadian translations were made, but perhaps this was already the case in the
early second millennium. The dearth of manuscripts attesting to this may be part
of the general situation that Old Babylonian manuscripts with Akkadian transla-
tions of Sumerian texts are very scarce.20
Some very popular genres of Sumerian writing did not fare well in Akkadian.
While kings up to Abiešuh of Babylon (r. 1711–1684) commissioned hymns of
praise to themselves in Sumerian, there are barely any in Akkadian from the early
second millennium, and those that exist are mostly part of bilingual texts. The
same is true for what we call royal inscriptions, that is, official writings to cel-
ebrate military and building activities—those show different regional attitudes,
however. In Babylonia from modern-day Baghdad down to the Persian Gulf, with
very few exceptions they were always written in Sumerian as if Akkadian was not
suitable as a language for such material. In contrast, in the Diyala valley northeast
of Baghdad, royal inscriptions were always written in Akkadian. The authors used
the same formulations irrespective of what language they wrote, a parallelism that
Hammurabi of Babylon exploited in full. He revived a practice that had briefly
existed in the 24th century under the north Babylonian dynasty of Akkad: bilin-
gual inscriptions on the same object, with a Sumerian version on the left and an
Akkadian on the right, or parallel texts on distinct objects. Hammurabi’s succes-
sors continued the practice.
This brings us to what one could call the third literary idiom in Babylonia,
bilingual Sumerian and Akkadian. The format in a sense symbolizes Babylonian
literate culture better than anything else, yet grasping its meaning and why it
developed is not easy. In order to do so, it may be best to start with the later
use of Sumero-Akkadian bilingualism when it is much more widely documented
than in the early second millennium. As mentioned earlier, balag laments that
are almost exclusively preserved in monolingual Sumerian versions in the Old
Babylonian period were very common in bilingual form in the first millennium.
28
They appear then in a standard format we call interlinear: that is, each line in
Sumerian was followed by its Akkadian translation. Some other formats, espe-
cially parallel columns, were occasionally used, but the interlinear one dominated
and best characterized the unusual nature of the bilingualism. There was a strict
parallelism between the versions in the two languages, which gives the impres-
sion that the Akkadian was a word-for-word translation of the Sumerian and
an explanation of it. Conversely, one could see the Sumerian as an artifice con-
structed on top of an Akkadian original and without independent meaning. That
was a strongly defended thesis in the late 19th century ad when Sumerian was
familiar to most scholars only in bilingual contexts and when its unique gram-
mar and lexicon sounded impossible to have a basis in speech. The theory was
disproved by the finds of numerous unilingual Sumerian texts, and everyone now
agrees that the language existed independently and was at some point spoken.
How do we explain the widespread practice by literate Babylonians to present a
text simultaneously in two languages and in parallel lines? These languages had
many differences, much more so than English and Arabic today, for example.
Sumerian is a linguistic isolate: its grammatical rules are rarely paralleled in other
languages and never found in the same combination, and its vocabulary has no
known cognates. Akkadian, however, is a Semitic language that, although it has
its peculiarities, follows the rules of that linguistic class and shares much of its
vocabulary. The two languages are very distinct. The ancient Mesopotamians did
not see it this way, however. In Akkadian they called them lišān mitḫurti, literally
“languages of the meeting each other.” Modern scholars disagree on whether this
means they were in harmony or in opposition to each other, but they all agree
that the languages were thought to mirror one another. They were symmetrical,
and each element of one language could be rendered in the other one. To the
ancient Babylonians the coexistence of the languages was an essential aspect of
their culture. In the Sumerian epic of the Old Babylonian period I mentioned
at the very start of this book, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Sumer is called
“twin-tongued.”21
Translation theory, a booming field since the 1970s, has rarely, if ever, taken
ancient Mesopotamian evidence into account. Conversely, Assyriologists, the
scholars who engage with the Mesopotamian material in its original form, sel-
dom mention theories of translation and the few who do question how best to
render the ancient texts into modern languages. Studies of literary bilingualism
in Mesopotamia are rare—the most sustained engagement is an unpublished
doctoral dissertation from 1969—and the existence of bilingual manuscripts
is often barely mentioned when a Sumerian text is edited. This has led to a
situation where the atypical character of the bilingual material is overlooked.
Both the way in which translations are presented in Mesopotamian bilingual
29
texts and the nature of the translations are highly unusual and deserve special
attention.22
When texts are transmitted in multiple languages, this most often happens
in units that render each language separately. In the ancient Near East, Darius’s
Behistun inscription from around 500 bc and Ptolemy V’s Rosetta stone from
196 bc are typical examples. In each case the entire text is rendered as a separate
consecutive account in three languages: Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite
in parallel columns at Behistun; Middle Egyptian hieroglyphic, Demotic, and
Greek one below the other at Rosetta. The reader can read the entire text in one
language without having to bother with the other two. Interlinear bilinguals are
very different as they force the reader to read each line in two versions that are
intimately paired. There are many manuscripts where the Sumerian and Akkadian
renderings of every line are grouped together between horizontal dividing lines.
The only explanation for this format that I have found is a very practical one: The
earliest preserved bilinguals rendered texts in parallel columns—Sumerian on the
left; Akkadian on the right—a format that was suitable for royal inscriptions and
lexical texts. But when long lines of poetry had to be written out on clay tablets,
these were too narrow to fit both versions next to one another, and the Akkadian
was placed underneath the Sumerian one. This layout had the advantage that it
allowed the writer to fit entire verses in both languages on single lines, but the dis-
advantage that the distinction between the languages became unclear. Therefore,
the scribes often indented the Akkadian lines somewhat. This explanation is not
convincing, however, as it was common practice in Syria and Anatolia of the later
second millennium to write out literary compositions in three or four versions
(syllabic Sumerian, standard Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite or Hurrian) using par-
allel columns. Large tablets were easily made, and the columnar format enabled a
consecutive reading of the text in each version separately. In contrast, the interlin-
ear format can be considered confusing, as someone who wanted to read the text
in one language had to skip every other line. Nevertheless, it was the preferred
way to reproduce Sumero-Akkadian literary bilinguals—and interestingly only
for texts in those two languages. When Akkadian was combined with Hittite, or
Hittite with Hurrian, or with other combinations, only very exceptionally were
the texts interlinear.23
Whenever interlinear bilinguals appear in other cultures, they aim to explain
texts in unfamiliar languages line by line, the difficult one on top and the familiar
one below. Linguists today use the format for what they call “interlinear gloss-
ing” to make clear the language they seek to analyze. These are not attempts to
give the same message to different audiences simultaneously, but ways to make
pre-existing material accessible to an audience for whom the original language
is alien. And this is how many scholars consider the Sumero-Akkadian bilingual
30
texts: that is, as extensive glossing in Akkadian to elucidate Sumerian material.

That is a mistaken view, as it assumes that Sumerian was the source language that
needed to be clarified in the target language Akkadian. Yet translations were not
only from Sumerian into Akkadian but also in the opposite direction. A first-
millennium dialogue between a scribe and his son, itself a bilingual text, makes
this clear—the text contains an ancient Mesopotamian theory of translation. The
father asks:
Do you know how to translate and interpret when Akkadian is the source
language and Sumerian the target and when Akkadian is the target lan-
guage and Sumerian the source?
There exist many examples of texts that were constructed on the basis of Akkadian
patterns and whose Sumerian version was a translation thereof. But the reverse
was also true, and it would be better to conclude that there was no single source
language and single target language. Instead, the two were used jointly as if in
code-switching, that is, the alternating use of different languages within a given
situation. This practice was taken to the extreme in an admittedly unusual bilin-
gual ritual text probably from the 17th century: the writer started some lines in
Sumerian and ended them in Akkadian.24
One could even say that monolingual Akkadian writing was, in fact, bilingual.
As the origin of the cuneiform script was essentially connected to the Sumerian
language, each sign was potentially bilingual. The commonly—after the mid-
second millennium, increasingly—used logograms that rendered Sumerian words
in their entirety had to be translated into Akkadian were they read out aloud.
Writers and readers had to switch codes constantly; they had to determine on the
spot if an individual sign rendered a Sumerian word or an Akkadian syllable. This
was required for even the most basic sentence and is one of the challenges that
confuse beginning students of cuneiform today. These were orthographic vari-
ants, not linguistic ones, as there were—in theory at least—innumerable ways to
write out a word. All cuneiform signs were polyvalent: they could render one or
more entire words and different syllables. The ancient scribes played around with
this feature, and the most educated ones investigated the different implications
of texts through the multiple ways their signs could be read. When they created
bilingual literature, they did not translate one language into another to make the
source more accessible; they interpreted the text written out in both languages to
reveal its many meanings. Good examples are bilingual cultic laments that were
reproduced and created into the final centuries of cuneiform’s existence, when
Hellenized Parthians ruled Babylonia. These texts explored the full impact of the
incantations priests uttered by taking every word and each sign to write it and
31
looking at synonyms and homonyms, at equations in esoteric scholarly texts, and

at every aspect of it by itself and in context. These were sophisticated works of
exegesis. One did not look at one line of text and then at the other to determine if
one had understood the language properly, but at both of them simultaneously to
grasp the meaning in full. The message transcended the individual language. Thus
Sumero-Akkadian bilinguals present the ideal of translation as Walter Benjamin
described it in his famous essay on “The Task of the Translator”:
Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to

be “the true language” in all its literalness and without the mediation of
meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable. In such case transla-
tions are called for only because of the plurality of languages. Just as, in
the original, language and revelation are one without any tension, so the
translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear
version, in which literalness and freedom are united. For to some degree
all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is
true to the highest degree of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the
Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation.
What was true in the first millennium was not necessarily the case in the early
second when Sumero-Akkadian bilinguals first appeared. It is clear, however, that
at that time revolutionary changes in the study of writing occurred that sought a
better understanding of the cuneiform script. This is best exemplified in the lexi-
cal corpus, which was at the core of Babylonian bilingualism as it analyzed the
Sumerian written word in all its aspects. Lexical texts originated in Mesopotamia
when writing was invented; Sumerian words were placed in lists so that scribes
could familiarize themselves with them. They were a central part of the early edu-
cation curriculum. In the Old Babylonian period the nature of the lexicographic
work changed radically, however, in that it started to break up Sumerian words
into their constituent elements to analyze them separately. As part of that analy-
sis came translations into Akkadian, oftentimes several ones for one Sumerian
word or its components. The lexical work became an investigation of the plurality
of meaning expressed through multiple Akkadian equivalents, which could be
arrived at by means of speculative philology. That entire texts could be analyzed
by writing them out both in Sumerian and Akkadian is perhaps not such a sur-
prise then, as lexical lists emphasized the parallelism between the two languages
and their interchangeability.25
What is mysterious, however, is the selection of texts to be rendered in bilin-
gual form. The scarcity of evidence from the Old Babylonian period makes it
impossible to draw conclusions for that period—scholars who have addressed the
32
issue suggest that the choice was haphazard then. Let me give an example to dem-
onstrate the eccentricity of the selection. There exist more than 350 brief incanta-
tions of the early second millennium, by far most of them either in Sumerian or in
Akkadian. Only a few are truly bilingual, including one that seems to be a parody
of the genre. When a shepherd complained that he could not sleep because of
a bleating goat, the god Ea sent down Marduk to stuff the animal’s ears with its
own dung, thereby killing it off. Of all incantations, why was this one transmit-
ted both in Sumerian and Akkadian? Only the first-millennium evidence is rich
enough to reveal some patterns in the choice of texts for bilingual transmission.
At that time religious texts that addressed the gods dominated by far, especially
incantations. Since the full meaning of the messages had to be clear, an exege-
sis of the lines was necessary and the Akkadian translation helped in doing so.
We can trace back the history of some of the lamentations to the early second
millennium, for example, those of the series called Evil Demons whose bilingual
first-millennium versions are remarkably close to the early unilingual Sumerian
ones. That Sumerian corpus seems to have been fully translated into Akkadian
and expanded with new material.26
It is in the category of belles-lettres that the selection is most baffling. Certain
works, known as Sumerian unilinguals in the early second millennium, became
bilinguals in the first. Among myths two stand out for the number of manu-
scripts in which they are recorded, both devoted to the god Ninurta, although
they are of very different character; their ancient titles were Lugale and Angim.
Although in the Old Babylonian period these were not unusually popular com-
positions, especially the second one, they were very often copied out later on. In
contrast, a handful of other Sumerian myths, some of them much better attested
in Old Babylonian sources, only appear in isolated first-millennium manuscripts
in bilingual form. In other genres, too, the reason for the selection is mystify-
ing. A literary letter involving King Sin-iddinam and the god Utu, known from
a few Old Babylonian manuscripts in Sumerian, was preserved in the library of
Assurbanipal with Akkadian translations of the Sumerian lines and a change of
the references to the city Larsa to Babylon. Why this letter out of a large corpus
was translated into Akkadian is entirely unclear.27
Translation from Akkadian into Sumerian also existed, although the incon-
trovertible examples of it are rare. As we saw earlier, the language of divination
was Akkadian and must have been the original of the bilingual introduction to
the long celestial series Enūma Anu Enlil. A text that describes the return of
the god Marduk to Babylon written during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar
I (1125–1104) and copied out in bilingual form throughout the first millennium
may also have been originally in Akkadian alone. There are probably other cases
3
where a Sumerian translation was added to an existing Akkadian text, but the
evidence is slim.28
And then there are texts that seem to have been composed in bilingual form,
also a strange collection. The group probably includes many of the incanta-
tions of the first millennium, a corpus that had grown massive at that time and
must have been expanded over the centuries with new creations. There is also a
bilingual myth concerning Inana that is only known from the first millennium
when it was organized in a series of five tablets, only two of which are attested
in multiple manuscripts. It praises the goddess and the fact that it addressed her
directly probably inspired the two-language version. Scholars disagree on when
it was composed—the question remains open, but we should not doubt that
first-millennium authors had sufficient knowledge of the Sumerian language to
create such a poem. A Psalm to Assur for Tukulti-Ninurta I, the Assyrian king
who ransacked Babylon in 1225, is a bilingual in columnar format that most likely
was composed at once. It is part of a group of texts composed in Assyria during
that reign that use Sumerian alongside a literary version of Akkadian that was
more common in Babylonia than Assyria at the time, and the authors must have
intended to show their erudition. The inclusion of a Sumerian version may have
had a political motif as well; it memorialized the king’s military success over the
region where that language had been spoken in the distant past.29
The practice of creating texts in two languages simultaneously started in the
early second millennium. An example then is a beautifully written manuscript
with a unique text that contains a speech by a father scolding his son for not
following in his footsteps as a hard-working scribal student—it is an interlinear
bilingual. The Sumerian version is a word-for-word translation of the Akkadian,
and the author often chose unconventional equivalences from lexical lists, so that
the outcome sounds contrived. The text shows in practice, however, what stu-
dents were supposed to know: they had to establish equivalences between ele-
ments of the two languages even if they were arcane. The dialogue between a
father and his son, mentioned before and probably composed in the first mil-
lennium, uses the same bilingual format and has the same message. A student of
writing has to be fluent in both languages and has to be able to go back and forth
between them effortlessly. Another composition set in a school environment,
also bilingual and from the Old Babylonian period, contains a drill-practice of
this procedure. The teacher orders the student to repeat the commands he gives
in Akkadian in Sumerian:
[Quick], come here, take the clay, knead it, flatten it, [mix(?) it], roll it
(like a ball), make it thick, make (the tablet).
34
He then orders him to translate in the reverse direction. Students had to be able
to switch codes on the spot.30
Conclusion
This brings us back to the schools with which we started this chapter. In Babylonia
of the early second millennium, all people who could write had been educated
through a curriculum that was based on the teaching of the Sumerian language,
because that language had originally provided the meanings and phonetic values
of the cuneiform signs. That language was no longer commonly spoken, however,
but students had to be able to render each element of it in the other literate lan-
guage of the time, Akkadian, and vice-versa. As a result, they were familiar with
three literary idioms: monolingual Sumerian and monolingual Akkadian, and
Sumerian and Akkadian combined in a bilingual format. All three had existed
in the third millennium, but only by the 18th century were they extensively used
side by side. The idioms and the texts written in them appeared all over a large
area that crossed several political boundaries. In the period from 2000 to 1720,
the entire region from the Persian Gulf to the Diyala Valley, northeast of modern
Baghdad, contained urban centers that were surrounded by smaller settlements.
The big cities were home to political dynasties that competed for hegemony,
and in the mid-18th century Babylon’s Hammurabi was able to establish control
over most of them. The reaction against this situation led to a crisis whose con-
sequences I will discuss in a later chapter. Residents of all types of settlements
over this large territory, from cities like Ur to small towns like Meturan—the
distance between the two is more than 700 km—read and wrote out the same
pieces of literature. This uniformity in literate culture masks a diversity that is
hard to uncover. People in this region spoke a multiplicity of languages and likely
had other cultural differences as well. Their names reveal that besides Sumerian
and Akkadian also Amorite, Elamite, Hurrian, and Kassite—all linguistically
distinct—were known. It is unclear whether or not all these languages were com-
monly spoken. What is clear, however, is that only Sumerian and Akkadian were
written down, and whatever literate persons spoke at home they had to be able to
write in one or both of these languages. They were joined in a common culture
that set them apart from the majority of the population. Literacy was a restricted
skill, even if there were businessmen and generals who were able to write their
own correspondence, and certainly only a very small number of people must have
engaged with Sumerian literary works after they finished their schooling. Those
people formed an intellectual elite whose knowledge must have been considered
esoteric to their neighbors. Meturan’s exorcists may exemplify the special status
the best: not only were they able to speak to the gods and ask for protection
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Virgin of Light, the, perhaps mentioned in Ophite address to
Astaphaeus, ii. 73 n. 2;
causes soul of Elijah to be planted in St John Baptist, ii. 137, 150;
her place and office, ii. 137 n. 3;
one of the two Leaders of the Middle, ii. 150;
working agent in salvation of souls, ii. 158;
her dealing with soul which has received lesser mysteries, ii. 165,
174;
the like with second mystery of First Mystery, ii. 167;
in Texts of Saviour gives the “Power,” ii. 184;
sends soul of slanderer into afflicted body, ii. 187;
reappears in Manichaeism, ii. 299 n. 1;
in Manichaeism retires into Moon at end of world, ii. 323 n. 4
Vohu Mano, the Amshaspand, reference to, in Apocalypse of
Salathiel, i. 167 n. 2;
first of Amshaspands in Avesta, i. 181 n. 1;
receives faithful soul at death, ii. 311
Vologeses or Valkash, King of Parthia, collects books of Avesta, ii.
278, 283;
his attempt at reformation of Zoroastrianism unsuccessful, ii. 284
Vonones, King of Parthia, his philhellenism offends his subjects, ii.
282
Vulcan, the god, on Mithraic monument, ii. 238 n. 3
Way, the Middle, in Texts of Saviour Jesus transfers himself and his
disciples to, ii. 182;
a place of torment, ii. 187
Wesley, John, founder of a “Free Church,” ii. 19
Wessely, Dr Karl, edits Magic Papyri, i. 101
Wheel of Salvation, in Manichaeism, ii. 297, 306, 308.
See Zodiac
Winckler, Dr Hugo, his astral theory of Oriental religion, i. 115 n. 1;
his discovery of worship of Vedic gods in Asia Minor, ii. 45 n. 1,
231
Williams-Jackson, Prof. A. V., puts date of Zoroaster at 700 B.C., i. lxii
Woide, librarian of British Museum, first draws attention to Pistis
Sophia, ii. 134
Woman, the First, the Holy Spirit of the Ophites, ii. 40;
at first female form of Ophite Supreme Being, later proceeds from
Father and Son, ii. 41 n. 2;
story of superfluous Light which falls from, ii. 44;
Sophia springs from left side of, Christos from right, ii. 46;
not mentioned by Sophia when undeceiving Ialdabaoth, ii. 51 n. 5
Xenocrates of Chalcedon, his date, i. 47 n. 1;

speaks of a supernal and infernal Zeus, i. 47 n. 1; ii. 239 n. 6;
makes Zeus both male and female, i. 47 n. 4;
calls stars and planets, gods, i. 186 n. 2
Xenophanes of Colophon, says Demeter and Persephone the same
goddess, i. 46
Xenophon, authority for visits of the King’s Eye to satraps, i. 2 n. 1;
treats Socrates as polytheist, i. 11
Xisuthros, the Babylonian Noah, i. lx
Yahweh of Israel, a mountain god to Syrians, i. 10;

Hebrew Prophets’ and Psalmists’ monotheistic conception of, i. 11;
associated in magic with Zeus and Serapis, i. 107;
according to Jews, promises them exclusive temporal advantages,
i. 150;
on same authority, makes world for sake of Jews, i. 165;
stars the viceroys of (Philo), i. 187;
the “Father” of second or intermediate world of Simon, i. 188;
called Hypsistos in Asia Minor (Cumont), ii. 31, 85 n. 3;
Anat and Bethel assessors of, at Elephantine, ii. 32 n. 4, 43 n. 2;
name of, specially used in magic, ii. 33;
name of, ineffable after Alexander, ii. 37 n. 1;
Sophia his delight and instrument, ii. 45 n. 1;
called Ialdabaoth by Ophites, ii. 47;
in Ophite system, power below the Supreme God, ii. 84;
called the Great Archon by Basilides, ii. 94;
probably the Jeû of Pistis Sophia, ii. 148
Yazatas, the. See Izeds
Yezdegerd II, the Shah, Zervanist sect dominant in Persia, temp., ii.
285
York, Mithraic monuments at, ii. 239
Yung, Dr Émile, his views on hypnotism and crystal-gazing, i. 110
Zacchaei, the, Gnostic sect mentioned by Epiphanius, ii. 27 n. 1

Zachariah, the Prophet, shows hatred of Gentiles, i. 167 n. 4
Zagreus, the god, secret worship of, in Greece in early times, i. 17;
Cretan legend of, i. 37;
the same as taught at Eleusis, i. 42;
and by Orphics, i. 124, 125;
Orphics connect Passion and Resurrection of, with history of man,
i. 126;
Orphics teach that man’s soul is part of, i. 127;
initiate becomes identified with Zagreus by eating raw flesh of
victim, i. 128;
identified with Iacchos at Eleusis, i. 130;
and with Sabazius, i. 137;
called “Highest of All” (Aeschylus), i. 137 n. 3;
rites of Sabazius explained by legend of, i. 138;
sewing of heart of, in thigh of Zeus and its result, i. 145
Zarazaz, cryptographic name of power in Texts of Saviour otherwise
Maskelli, ii. 75 n. 1, 148 n. 3;
perhaps Guardian of Veil of Treasure-house, ii. 148 n. 3
Zeesar, cryptographic name of heavenly river among Ophites, ii. 94
n. 3
Zeller, his view of Philo’s powers of God, i. 174
Zend Avesta. See Avesta
Zeno of Cyprus, why not quoted by Ophite writers, ii. 83
Zervan, said by Moses of Chorene to be the Patriarch Shem, i. lx;
Supreme God of Light in Tun-huang and Turfan texts, ii. 323, 342,
343
Zervan Akerene, supreme divinity of sect of Zoroastrian heretics, ii.
236;
head of Mithraic pantheon and father of Ormuzd and Ahriman
(Cumont), ii. 252;
Mihr Nerses’ proclamation concerning, ii. 285;
belief in, denounced in Khuastuanift, ii. 339
Zeus, Crete or Asia Minor birthplace of, i. 16;
identified with many gods of Asia and Europe, i. 17;
father of Zagreus by Persephone, i. 37, 42, 138;
union with Demeter shown in Mysteries, i. 40, 61 n. 1;
Hermes sent by, to Hades for deliverance of Persephone, i. 41;
father of Dionysos his destined successor, i. 46;
the Z. of Phidias model for Serapis, i. 49;
“Serapis is Z.”, i. 55;
Achilles’ flattery of, i. 95;
identified in magic spell with Serapis and Yahweh, i. 106, 107;
Orphic, swallows Phanes and becomes father of gods and men, i.
123;
his relations with Orphic Dionysos, i. 124;
blasts Titans after murder of Zagreus, i. 125;
Orphic “an initiate of Idaean Z.” (Euripides), i. 128;
man’s soul a descendant of, according to Orphics, i. 133;
relations of Orphic, with Demeter and Persephone, i. 142, 144,
145;
Titans enemies of, ii. 146;
identified by Orphics with Dionysos, ii. 147;
Samaritans offer Antiochus Epiphanes to dedicate Mt Gerizim
temple to, i. 177;
Orphics assign last age of world but one to, i. 186;
called Metropator by Orphics, i. 190 n. 1;
Barnabas hailed as, in Phrygia, i. 191 n. 3; ii. 42;
legend of Z. and Persephone referred to Asia Minor, ii. 49;
Varuna perhaps prototype of, ii. 231;
“the whole circuit of the sky” to Persians (Herodotus), ii. 234;
identified with Ormuzd, ii. 237;
on Mithraic monuments, ii. 238, 254.
See Jupiter, Polycleitos
Zeus Chthonios, “the God” of Eleusis, i. 47;
mentioned by Hesiod, i. 126;
identified with Hades and Dionysos, i. 130;
and with Adonis, i. 137;
the serpent lover of Persephone, i. 145 n. 2
Zeus Labrandos, double axe symbol of, ii. 67 n. 3.
See Lairbenos
Zodiac, the, in Texts of Saviour salvation determined by entry of
benefic planet into certain signs of, i. 118;
in Pistis Sophia Twelve Aeons means, ii. 137 n. 1, 154;
Pythagoras’ division of, ii. 144 n. 8;
the Twelve “members of Light” in Manichaeism, ii. 293 n. 2;
the Wheel with twelve buckets in same, ii. 297 n. 2;
the twelve daughters of the Third Legate, ii. 328
Zoë or Life, member of second Valentinian syzygy, ii. 98
Zoroaster, Parsi belief in special inspiration of, i. liii;
religion of, once shared with Buddhism and Christianity belief of
civilized world, i. lviii;
Plutarch’s date for, i. lxii;
religion reformed by, may be pre-Homeric, i. lxiii;
date of, 700 B.C., i. 126 n. 3; ii. 232;
both Bardesanes and Marcion borrow from (Al-Bîrûnî), ii. 214 n. 2;
name and doctrine of, known in West long before Plutarch, ii. 234;
reform of, directed against worship of Ahriman (Rosenberg), ii. 253
n. 5;
Ardeshîr entrusts Magi with propagation of reformed religion of, ii.
280;
divine origin of teaching of, acknowledged by Manes, ii. 316
Zoroastrianism, borrows from Babylonia, i. lxi;
our ignorance of origin and dates of, i. lxii;
adopts theory of seven planetary spheres surrounding earth, i.
117;
Orphic poems seem reminiscent of reformed, i. 122;
late form of, derives origin of man from death of Gayômort, i. 126
n. 3;
fire which burns wicked like warm milk to just, i, 134 n. 1;
doctrine of Essenes said to be derived from, i. 156;
doctrine of Amshaspands in, i. 181;
likeness between post-Exilic Judaism and (Cheyne), i. 181 n. 1;
Simon Magus’ ideas in part derived from (Franck), i. 197;
revolt of Gaumata perhaps directed against, ii. 233;
its restoration and reform by Ardeshîr, ii. 284;
Manes’ description of lot of justified taken from, ii. 310
Zwingli, founder of a “Free Church,” ii. 19
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Footnotes
1. Col. ii. 18.
2. Lightfoot, St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, pp. 90 sqq.
3. So A. Jülicher in Encyc. Bibl. s.v. Gnosis.
4. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 23, p. 214, Harvey. Salmon in Dict. of

Christian Biog. s.v. Nicolaitans, thinks this an idea peculiar to
Irenaeus alone and not to be found in the older source from
which he drew his account of the other Gnostics.
5. The Canonical Apocalypse was probably written after the

siege of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D., while the first
unmistakable mention we have of St John’s Gospel is by
Theophilus of Antioch a hundred years later. Earlier
quotations from it are anonymous, i.e. they give the words of
the Gospel as in the A.V. but without referring them to any
specified author. See Duchesne, Early Christian Church, Eng.
ed. pp. 102, 192.
6. Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. Bk IV. c. 22, says

that the Church was untroubled by heresy until the reign of
Trajan.
7. Hegesippus (see last note) in his account of the martyrdom of

“James the Brother of the Lord,” op. cit. Bk II. c. 23.
8. See Schmiedel, Encyc. Bibl. s.v. Community of Goods. Cf.

Lucian, de Mort. Peregrini, c. XIII, and Mozley’s comments in
Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Lucianus.
9. Maran atha. See Epistle of Barnabas, c. XXI.
10. Winwood Reade, op. cit. pp. 237 sqq.
11. Eugène de Faye, “Formation d’un Doctrine de Dieu au IIme

Siècle,” R.H.R. t. LXIII. (1911), p. 9. He quotes Harnack in his
support.
12. Mark xi. 1.
13. On the ignorance of the first Christian writers, see de Faye,

op. cit. p. 4.
14. Origen, cont. Celsum, Bk III. c. 12. Cf. Krüger, La Grande

Encyclopédie, Paris, s.v. Gnosticisme.
15. “Those which say they are Jews, but are not”; Rev. ii. 9; ibid.
iii. 9. The Clementine Homilies, though of much later date,
never speak of the Christians otherwise than as Jews. Cf.
Duchesne, Early Christian Church, p. 12.
16. Acts viii. 1.
17. Renan (L’Antéchrist, p. 511, and note 1) gives a passage,

which he thinks is from Tacitus, showing that Titus aimed at
the suppression of the Christians as well as the Jews.
Doubtless many Christians perished in the punitive measures
taken in the Ist century against the Jews in Antioch and
elsewhere. Cf. Josephus, Wars of the Jews, Bk VII. c. 3;
Eusebius, H. E. Bk III. cc. 12, 17, 19, 20. It was the
persecution by the fanatical Jews that compelled the flight of
the Christians to Pella shortly before the siege. See Eusebius,
Bk III. c. 5; Epiph. Haer. XXIX. c. 7, p. 239, Oehler. The episode
of the “Woman clothed with the Sun” of the Canonical
Apocalypse is supposed by some to refer to this.
18. So that the members of the little Church of Pella who retained
the name of Jews gradually ceased to be regarded as
orthodox by the other Christian communities and were called
Ebionites. See Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 548. Cf. Fuller in Dict.
Christian Biog. s.v. Ebionites for authorities. The connection
that Fuller would find between the Essenes and the Ebionites
seems to rest on little proof.
19. Thus Mgr Duchesne, op. cit. p. 14, says that “St Paul was a
Jew by birth, imbued with the exclusiveness and disdainful
spirit which inspired his race and influenced all their dealings
with other nations.”
20. Many of the Sicarii and other fanatics managed to escape

before the catastrophe of the First Jewish War to Egypt and
the Cyrenaica, where they continued to commit outrages and
make rebellion until they brought on themselves and their co-
religionists the wrath of the Romans. See Josephus, Wars, Bk
VII. cc. 10, 11. Cf. Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 539; id., Les
Évangiles, p. 369.
21. Abel’s Orphica, Frgs. 243-248, especially the quotation from

Nigidius.
22. See Chapter II, supra.
23. So Renan, L’Antéchrist, p. 300, says that the Synoptic

Gospels probably first took shape in the Church at Pella. Thus
he explains the so-called “little Apocalypse” of Matthew xxiv.,
Mark xiii., and Luke xxi. Cf. ibid., p. 296 and note. For the
symbolic construction placed upon them by the Gnostics, see
Hatch, H. L., p. 75.
24. Hegesippus, who probably wrote about 150 A.D., speaks of

Thebuthis, Dositheus, and others as leaders of early sects.
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. Bk IV. c. 22, and Origen (cont. Cels. Bk
VI. c. 11) make this last a contemporary of Simon Magus. The
Clementine Homilies (Bk II. c. 24), from whom both authors
may have derived their information, have a long story about
Dositheus being with Simon a follower of John the Baptist,
and disputing with Simon the headship of the sect. From
presumably other sources, Hegesippus speaks of the
Essenes, the Masbothoeans and the Hemero-baptists, for
which last see Chapter XIII, infra, as pre-Christian sects.
25. Winwood Reade, op. cit. p. 244. Probably this is what is

meant by Gibbon when he says (Decline and Fall, Bury’s ed.
III. p. 153, n. 54) that no future bishop of Avila is likely to
imitate Priscillian by turning heretic, because the income of
the see is 20,000 ducats a year.
26. Apostolical Constitutions, Bk II. cc. 45, 46, 47. Harnack,

Expansion of Christianity, Eng. ed. II. p. 98 n. 1, gives the date
of this work as “middle of the 2nd century.” Duchesne, op. cit.
p. 109, thinks it is derived from the Didache which he puts not
later than Trajan.
27. Apost. Const. Bk II. c. 26: “He (i.e. the bishop) is your ruler
and governor; he is your king and potentate; he is next after
God, your earthly divinity, who has a right to be honoured by
you.”
28. Lucian, Proteus Peregrinus, passim; Acts of Paul and Thekla;

Acts of Peter of Alexandria.
29. Clement of Rome, First Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 44.
30. So Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 26, pp. 219, 220, Harvey, says it
was the desire to become a διδάσκαλος or teacher that drove
Tatian, once a hearer of Justin Martyr’s, into heresy.
Hegesippus, ubi cit. supra, says that Thebuthis first corrupted
the Church, on account of his not being made a bishop. For
the same accusation in the cases of Valentinus and Marcion,
see Chapters IX and XI, infra.
31. Celsus apud Origen (op. cit. Bk III. cc. 10, 11) says: “Christians
at first were few in number, and all held like opinions, but
when they increased to a great multitude, they were divided
and separated, each wishing to have his own individual party;
for this was their object from the beginning”—a contention
which Origen rebuts.
32. Thus in Egypt it was almost exclusively the lower classes

which embraced Christianity at the outset. See Amélineau,
“Les Actes Coptes du martyre de St Polycarpe” in P.S.B.A.
vol. X. (1888), p. 392. Julian (Cyr. VI. p. 206) says that under
Tiberius and Claudius there were no converts of rank.
33. Thus Cerinthus, who is made by tradition the opponent of St

John, is said to have been a Jew and to have been trained in
the doctrines of Philo at Alexandria (Theodoret, Haer. Fab. Bk
II. § 3). Cf. Neander, Ch. Hist. (Eng. ed.) vol. II. pp. 42-47.
Neander says the same thing about Basilides (op. cit. p. 47
and note) and Valentinus (p. 71), although it is difficult to
discover any authority for the statement other than the Jewish
features in their doctrines. There is more evidence for the
statement regarding Marcus, the heresiarch and magician
whom Irenaeus (op. cit. Bk I. c. 7) accuses of the seduction of
Christian women, apparently in his own time, since the words
of Marcus’ ritual, which the Bishop of Lyons quotes, are in
much corrupted Hebrew, and the Jewish Cabala was used by
him. Renan’s view (Marc Aurèle, pp. 139 sqq.) that
Christianity in Egypt never passed through the Judaeo-
Christian stage may in part account for the desire of Jewish
converts there to set up schools of their own.
34. For Marcion, see Chapter XI, infra. Summary accounts of the
doctrines of other Gnostics mentioned are given by Irenaeus
and Hippolytus in the works quoted. See also the Dict. of
Christian Biog., under their respective names.
35. The lesser heresiologists, such as Philaster of Brescia, St

Augustine, the writer who is known as Praedestinatus, the
author of the tract Adversus omnes Haereses wrongly
ascribed to Tertullian, and the other writers included in the first
volume of Oehler’s Corpus Haereseologici, Berlin, 1856, as
well as writers like Eusebius, all copy from one or other of
these sources. The Excerpta Theodoti appended to the works
of Clement of Alexandria are on a different footing, but their
effect at the time spoken of in the text was not appreciated.
Cf. Salmon in Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Valentinus.
36. Bouché-Leclercq, L’Intolérance Religieuse et Politique, Paris,

1912, p. 140.
37. Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk XXII. c. 5, § 4.
38. An excellent and concise account of the discovery and the

subsequent controversy as to the authorship of the book is
given by Salmon in the Dict. Christian Biog. s.v. Hippolytus
Romanus. For Mgr Duchesne’s theory that Hippolytus was a
schismatic Pope, see his Hist. Christian Church, pp. 227-233.
39. Salmon’s position is set out by him in Hermathena, Dublin,

1885, pp. 389 sqq. For Stähelin’s, see his tractate Die
Gnostische Quellen Hippolyts, Leipzig, 1890, in Harnack’s
Texte und Untersuchungen. Both are skilfully summarized by
de Faye in his Introduction à l’Étude du Gnosticisme, Paris,
1903, pp. 25 sqq.
40. De Faye does not accept Stähelin’s contention as to the

forgery, but his conclusion as to the date is as stated in the
text. See Introduction, etc. pp. 68, 71.
41. Tertullian, Scorpiace, c. 1.
42. Neander, Ch. Hist. (Eng. ed.), I. p. 208, quotes a case from St
Augustine which I have not been able to verify.
43. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, II. p. 110 and note 144 (Bury’s ed.).
For the search which the Christian emperors directed to be
made for the heretics’ books, see Eusebius, Vita Constantini,
Bk III. cc. 64, 65.
44. The actual transcription and translation were made by

Maurice Schwartze, a young German who was sent over here
to study the documents in the British Museum at the expense
of the King of Prussia. He died after the completion of his
task, and before the book could be printed.
45. Amélineau’s transcription and translation appeared in the

Notices et Extraits, etc. of the Académie des Inscriptions, t.
XXIX. pt 2 (Paris, 1891). He has also published a translation
into French without text of the Pistis Sophia (Paris, 1895). Dr
Carl Schmidt, of the University of Berlin, has published
translations into German of both works under the title
Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, Bd I., Leipzig, 1905. None of
these versions are entirely satisfactory, and it is much to be
wished that an authoritative edition of the two works could be
put forward by English scholars. The present writer gave a
short history and analysis of them in the Scottish Review for
1893 under the title “Some Heretic Gospels.”
46. Clement was so far from being a heresiologist that he has not
escaped the reproach of being himself a heretic. He
repeatedly speaks in praise of the “true Gnostic,” meaning
thereby the perfect Christian, and although this is probably a
mere matter of words, it seems to have induced Photius in the
IXth century to examine his writings with a jealous eye. The
result was that, as M. Courdaveaux points out (R.H.R. 1892,
p. 293 and note), he found him guilty of teaching that matter
was eternal, the Son a simple creature of the Father, the
Incarnation only an appearance, that man’s soul entered
several bodies in succession, and that several worlds were
created before that of Adam. All these are Gnostic opinions,
and it may be that if we had all Clement’s books in our hands,
as had Photius, we might confirm M. Courdaveaux’s
judgment, as does apparently Mgr Duchesne. Cf. his Hist. of
Christian Ch. pp. 244, 245.
47. Cf. A. C. McGiffert, Prolegomena to the Church History of

Eusebius (Schaff and Wace’s Nicene Library), Oxford, 1890,
vol. I. p. 179 and note.
48. Of the heresies mentioned in the Philosophumena only two,

viz. that of Simon Magus and that of those whom Hippolytus
calls the Sethiani, do not admit, either expressly or by
implication, the divinity of Jesus. This may be accounted for
by what has been said above as to both being pre-Christian in
origin.
49. E.g. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 1, I. p. 9, Harvey. Here he is

called ὅμοιος τε καὶ ἴσος τῷ προβαλόντι, “like and equal to
him who had sent him forth.” There is certainly here no
allusion to “begetting” in the ordinary sense of the word.
50. As in the epithet of Persephone in the Orphic Hymn quoted

above. See Chapter IV, supra. The unanimity with which all
post-Christian Gnostics accepted the superhuman nature of
Jesus seems to have struck Harnack. See his What is
Christianity? Eng. ed. 1904, pp. 209, 210.
51. Iliad I. ll. 560 sqq.; IV. ll. 57, 330; XIV. ll. 320 sqq.
52. Odyssey XI. ll. 600 sqq.; Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas, c. XVI.
53. Plutarch, de Is. et Os. c. LXXI.
54. Ibid. cc. XXV., XXVII., XXX.
55. Probably this was one of the reasons why the Mysteries which
showed the death of a god had in Greece to be celebrated in
secret. See Diodorus’ remark (Bk V. c. 77, § 3) that the things
which the Greeks only handed down in secret were by the
Cretans concealed from no one.
56. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VI. c. 19, p. 265, Cruice.
57. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 19, II. p. 200, Harvey.
58. ἀμορφία. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VII. c. 27, p. 366, Cruice.
59. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 18, p. 197, Harvey. Hippolytus, op.

cit. Bk VII. c. 28, p. 368, Cruice.
60. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk VIII. c. 8.
61. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 1, § 13, pp. cxli and 61, Harvey.
62. Ibid. Bk I. c. 1, § 31, pp. cxli and 62, Harvey.
63. Irenaeus, op. cit. Bk I. c. 19, § 3, p. 202, Harvey; Hippolytus,

op. cit. Bk IV. c. 24, p. 225, Cruice; Tertullian, Scorpiace, c. I.
64. For the accusation against the Christians, see Athenagoras,

Apologia, cc. III., XXXI.; Justin Martyr, First Apol. c. XXVI. For
that against the Jews, Strack, Le Sang et la fausse
Accusation du Meurtre Rituel, Paris, 1893. For that against
the Freemasons, “Devil Worship and Freemasonry,”
Contemporary Review for 1896.
65. See n. 1, supra. So Eusebius speaks of the Simonians

receiving baptism and slipping into the Church without
revealing their secret tenets, Hist. Eccl. Bk II. c. 1.
66. Revillout, Vie et Sentences de Secundus, Paris, 1873, p. 3, n.

1.
67. Amélineau, Le Gnosticisme Égyptien, p. 75, thus enumerates

them: the doctrine of emanation, an unknown [i.e. an
inaccessible and incomprehensible] God, the resemblance of
the three worlds, the aeonology of Simon, and a common
cosmology. To this may be added the inherent malignity of
matter and the belief in salvation by knowledge. See Krüger,
La Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. Gnosticisme.
68. Renan, Mare Aurèle, p. 114.
69. Witness the confusion between Ennoia and Epinoia in

Chapter VI, vol. I. p. 180, n. 4, supra, and between Saturnilus
and Saturninus in this chapter, p. 9. So Irenaeus and others
record the opinions of an associate of Marcus whom they call
“Colarbasus,” a name which modern criticism has shown to
be a mistake for ‫ קול ארבע‬Kol-arba, “The Voice of the Four” or
the Supreme Tetrad. See Renan, Mare Aurèle, p. 129; Hort in
Dict. Christian Biog. s.h.v. So Clement of Alexandria, Protrept.
c. II. mistakes Evoe, the mystic cry of the Bacchantes, for the
Eve of Genesis.
70. Renan, L’Église Chrétienne, p. 140.
71. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 9, p. 177, Cruice.
72. As in the case of Clement of Alexandria, who seems to have

been initiated into most of the heathen mysteries then current.
It is to be noted, too, that Origen, although he speaks of the
Ophites as an insignificant sect (see Chapter VIII, infra), yet
professes to know all about their secret opinions.
73. Renan, Marc Aurèle, p. 139.
74. Thus Ambrose of Milan had been before his conversion a

Valentinian, Epiphanius a Nicolaitan. See Eusebius, H.E. Bk
VI. c. 18; Epiph. Haer. XXVI. c. 17, p. 198, Oehler.
75. It could be even self-administered, as in the Acts of Paul and

Thekla, where Thekla baptizes herself in the arena. See
Tischendorf’s text. The Clementine Homilies (Bk XIV. c. 1)
show that it could be immediately followed by the Eucharist
without any intermediate rite or preparation. Contrast with this
the elaborate ceremonies described by Cyril of Jerusalem,
where the white-robed band of converts after a long
catechumenate, including fasting and the communication of
secret doctrines and passwords, approach on Easter Eve the
doors of the church where the lights turned darkness into day.
See Hatch, H. L. pp. 297, 299.
76. Duchesne, Hist. Christian Ch. p. 32; Harnack, What is

Christianity? Eng. ed. p. 210.
77. As Hatch, H. L. pp. 274-279, has pointed out, the term

όμοοὐσιος, which led to so much shedding of Christian blood,
first occurs among the post-Christian Gnostics, and led in turn
to most of the wranglings about “substance,” “person,” and
the other metaphysical distinctions and their result in “strife
and murder, the devastation of fair fields, the flame of fire and
sword” (ibid. p. 279). For the possibilities of Greek science,
had it not been opposed by the Church, see ibid. p. 26.
78. See the edict of Constantine, which Eusebius (Vit.

Constantini, cc. LXIV., LXV.) quotes with unholy glee, prohibiting
the Gnostics from presuming to assemble together either
publicly or privately, and commanding that their “houses of
prayer” should be confiscated and handed over to the
Catholic Church. Eusebius (ibid. c. LXVI.) says that the result of
this was that the “savage beasts crept secretly into the
Church,” and continued to disseminate their doctrines by
stealth. Perhaps such a result was to be expected.
79. “Eorum qui ante adventum Christi Haereseos arguuntur.”

Philastrius, Ep. Brixiensis, de Haeresibus Liber, c. I. vol. I. p. 5,
Oehler.
80. Augustinus, de Haeresibus (cf. ad Quod vult deum) Liber, c.

XVII. I. p. 200, Oehler.
81. Pseudo-Tertullianus, Adversus omnes Haereses, cc. V., VI. p.

273, Oehler. The writer was probably Victorinus of Pettau.
82. Pseudo-Hieronymus, Indiculus de Haeresibus, c. III., vol. I. p.

285, Oehler.
83. Acts vi. 5. It will be noted that Epiphanius, who himself
belonged to the sect in his youth, interposes only the
Basilidians between them and the followers of Saturninus, the
“heresy” of which last he derives directly from that of Simon
Magus.
84. Rev. ii. 6, 15.
85. Origen, cont. Celsum, Bk VI. c. 28. Possibly the Euphrates

called “the Peratic” or Mede by Hippolytus (op. cit. Bk IV. c. 2,
p. 54, Cruice).
86. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 7, p. 141, Cruice. This Mariamne is

doubtless the sister of Philip mentioned in the Apocryphal
Acta Philippi (c. XXXII., Tischendorf), which have, as is said
later, a strong Gnostic or Manichaean tinge. Celsus knew a
sect which took its name from her. See Origen, cont. Cels. Bk
V. c. 62.
87. The Canonical Apocalypse is not earlier than 70 A.D., and was
probably written soon after the fall of the Temple of
Jerusalem. Hippolytus and Origen wrote 130 years later.
88. Naassene is evidently derived from the Hebrew or Aramaean

‫“ נחש‬Serpent,” cf. Hipp. op. cit. Bk V. c. 6, p. 139, Cruice, and
exactly corresponds to the Greek ὀφίτης and the Latin
serpentinus (Low Latin serpentarius). “Worshipper of the
Serpent” seems to be the patristic gloss on the meaning of the
word.
89. Giraud, Ophitae, c. 4, § 65, p. 89. The question really

depends upon Hippolytus’ sources, as to which see last
chapter, pp. 11, 12. Cf. De Faye, Introduction, etc., p. 41.
Hippolytus’ Naassene author cannot be much earlier than 170
A.D. since he quotes from St John’s Gospel, and probably later
than the work of Irenaeus written in 180-185. Yet the Ophite
system described by Irenaeus is evidently not a primitive one
and has been added to by his Latin translator. See n. 3, p. 47,
infra.
90. Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 27, § 1, p. 226, Harvey, says that the

Ophites are the same as the Sethians; Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk
V. c. 11, p. 184, Cruice, that they are connected with the
Peratae, the Sethians, and the system of Justinus.
Epiphanius, Haer. XXXVII. c. 1, p. 494, Oehler, while deriving
them from Nicolaus the Deacon, gives them a common origin
with those whom he calls Gnostics simply, and identifies these
last with the Borboriani, Coddiani, Stratiotici, Phibionitae,
Zacchaei, and Barbelitae (see Haer. XXVI. c. 3).
91. Hippolytus, op. cit. Bk V. c. 11, p. 184, Cruice.
92. ἑαυτοὺς γνωστικοὺς ὀνομάζοντες. Hippolytus, loc. cit.

Eusebius, H. E. Bk IV. c. 7, says that Carpocrates was the
father of the heresy of the Gnostics and contemporary with
Basilides.
93. Epiphanius, Haer. XXVI. c. 7, pp. 174, 176, Oehler.
94. Tertullian, de Praescript. Haer. c. XLII.
95. Josephus, Antiq. Bk XII. c. 3.
96. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, II. pp. 667 sqq.; St
Paul, pp. 142 sqq.; Commentary on Galatians, pp. 189 sqq.
The fact that Timothy, the son of the Jewess Eunice by a
Greek father, was not circumcised (see Acts xvi. 1) is quoted
in support.
97. E.g. the Montanist, the most formidable of the heresies which
attacked the primitive Church, apart from Gnosticism. Cf. also
Galatians i. 6.
98. Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 168. For the
tyranny of the Armenians, see Plutarch, Lucullus, cc. XIV., XXI.
99. Mahaffy, Gk. World, p. 100.
100. Mahaffy, ibid. p. 225.
101. Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. p. 9.
102. Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. p. 87.
103. Ramsay, ibid. I. p. 92.
104. Ramsay, ibid. I. pp. 93, 94. The Galli or priests of Cybele, who
mutilated themselves in religious ecstasy, seem to have been
the feature of Anatolian religion which most struck the
Romans, when the statue of the Mother of the Gods first
appeared among them. Cf. next page. For the other side of
the religion, see Lucian, de Dea Syria, cc. VI., XLIII., and
Apuleius, Metamorph. Bk VIII. c. 29.
105. As in the hymn to Attis said to have been sung in the Great
Mysteries, given in the Philosophumena (see p. 54, infra). Cf.
Ramsay, Cities, etc., I. pp. 132, 263, 264, for other
identifications. The Anatolian name of the Dea Syria to whose
cult Nero was addicted, was Atargatis, which Prof. Garstang
would derive from the Babylonian Ishtar (Strong, Syrian
Goddess, 1913, p. vii); see Cumont, Les Religions Orientales
dans le Paganisme Romain, Paris, 1906, p. 126. The whole of
Cumont’s chapters on Syria and Asia Minor (op. cit. pp. 57-
89) can be consulted with advantage. The American edition,
1911, contains some additional notes. See, too, Decharme’s
article on Cybele in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dict. des Antiq.
106. Dill, Nero to Marcus Aurelius, pp. 548 sqq.
107. See n. 1, supra; Suetonius, Nero, c. LVI.
108. Dill, loc. cit., and authorities there quoted.

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Before and after Babel: Writing as

Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern

Before and After Babel

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

For Hector, who will always be remembered

PART I : The Babylonian Cosmopolis: The Cuneiform Sign

1. Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains: The Eighteenth

2. In the Spell of Babylonian Writing 36

4. The Height of Cosmopolitanism: Reading Gilgameš in Hattusas 70

PART II : The Vernacular Millennium: The Tower of Babel

5. Scrupulous Continuity 109

6. Luwian: The Ephemeral Success of a Non-​Cosmopolitan Tradition 138

7. Vernaculars That Changed the World: Phoenician and Aramaic 149

8. From Minority Languages to World Literatures: The Hebrew Case 176

9. From Minority Languages to World Literatures: The Greek Case 199

10. The Vernacular and Its Consequences 218

Epilogue: Clash of Cosmopoleis? 241

Map I.1 The ancient Near East 9

2 Before an d Aft er Babel

4 Before an d Aft er Babel

that its presence was not acknowledged or inconsequential. When competing,

The Babylonian Cosmopolis

In those days the lands of Šubur and Hamazi, twin-​tongued Sumer—​the

8 Before an d Aft er Babel

The Babylonian Cosmopolis 9

Map I.1 The ancient Near East.

Reading Gilgameš in the

On September 6, 1884, the 49-​year-​old Christian clergyman-​scholar and edi-

12 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 13

14 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 15

transactions in a centralized temple organization. The formulation of such

16 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 17

18 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 19

Diyala Valley, written and to be recited in Sumerian, a language no one there

20 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 21

22 Before an d Aft er Babel

century, political dominance from southern Babylonia over Meturan’s region

Sumerian, Akkadian, and Bilingualism

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 23

24 Before an d Aft er Babel

between Sumerian and Akkadian literatures was very complex—​and remains

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 25

26 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 27

28 Before an d Aft er Babel

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 29

30 Before an d Aft er Babel

2. In the Spell of Babylonian Writing 36

4. The Height of Cosmopolitanism: Reading Gilgameš in Hattusas 70

5. Scrupulous Continuity 109

6. Luwian: The Ephemeral Success of a Non-Cosmopolitan Tradition 138

7. Vernaculars That Changed the World: Phoenician and Aramaic 149

8. From Minority Languages to World Literatures: The Hebrew Case 176

9. From Minority Languages to World Literatures: The Greek Case 199

10. The Vernacular and Its Consequences 218

Epilogue: Clash of Cosmopoleis? 241

In those days the lands of Šubur and Hamazi, twin-tongued Sumer—the

The Babylonian Cosmopolis 9

On September 6, 1884, the 49-year-old Christian clergyman-scholar and edi-

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 13

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 15

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 17

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 19

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 21

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 23

between Sumerian and Akkadian literatures was very complex—and remains

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 25

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 27

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 29

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 31

Reading Gilgameš in the Zagros Mountains 33