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The Second Tablet of “Išum and Erra”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

F. N. H. Al-Rawi  and
J. A. Black
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Extract

The Babylonian poem šar gimir dadmē (perhaps best entitled in English “Išum and Erra”) has been available to scholars in its hitherto most complete form since 1969 in the admirable edition of L. Cagni. Now excavations conducted by the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage at Me-Turnat (modern Tell Haddad) have produced a first-millennium tablet in Babylonian script from the Neo-Assyrian Period occupation of the site, giving the text of tablet II of the composition. Previously the second tablet could be reconstructed as three separate broken passages (totalling 112 lines) with two lacunae. The new tablet, IM 121299 (TH 319), restores the first lacuna (four lines in length), completes some broken lines and restores part of the second lacuna (at least 29 lines), establishing altogether about 45 new lines of the text, some admittedly only to a very fragmentary degree. The whole tablet must be at least 159 lines long. Unfortunately the Me-Turnat tablet is damaged, and is rather poorly written by an apprentice scribe who has made a number of evident mistakes and incorrectly formed signs. Nonetheless the text of the poem is substantially increased by it. For a photograph, see Plate XX.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 51 , 1989 , pp. 111 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1989

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References

1 Following the suggestion of D. O. Edzard, RIA s.v. Irra (Erra)-Epos, and S. M. Dalley.

2 Cagni, L., L'epopea di Erra (Rome, 1969)Google Scholar; Das Erra-Epos: Keilschrifttext (Rome, 1970)Google Scholar; and the same author's study and translation, The Poem of Erra, SANE 1/3 (Malibu, 1977)Google Scholar.

3 For details see Black, J. A. and Killick, R. G., ed., ‘Excavations in Iraq, 1983-4’, in Iraq 47 (1985), pp. 220–1Google Scholar.

4 The authors are grateful to the authorities of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage for permission to publish the tablet here.

5 Possibly the publication of this tablet may help to elucidate some of the fragmentary and ill-preserved obverse of the large, closely-written six-column tablet from the Temple of Nergal at Tarbisu of which the reverse is published by Saggs, H. W. F., ‘Additions to Anzu’, AfO 33 (1986), pp. 1–29Google Scholar. The Tarbiṣu tablet evidently began (obv. cols, i–ii) with a now unrecoverable composition, continued with “Išum and Erra” (obv. Hi = part of tablet I; iv = part of tablet II; v, vi; and rev. i = part of tablet V), requiring about five columns of the tablet, and ended with “Anzû” (rev. cols, ii–v; colophon, rev. vi). Clearly obv. col. iv contained at least part of tablet II of “Išum and Erra”.

6 I 17 (= CT 33, 1:17Google Scholar: MUL KA5.A dèr-ra gaš-ri DINGIR.MEŠ). For this information the authors are grateful to C. B. F. Walker. See Reiner, E. and Pingree, D., BPO 2, Bibl. Mes. 2/2 (Malibu, 1981), p. 12Google Scholar.

7 Reiner and Pingree, op. cit., p. 6.

8 Reiner and Pingree, op. cit., p. 72, XV 29.

9 The authors are grateful to Dr S. M. Dalley for a number of felicitous suggestions.