Mesopotamia
10 findings, grouped by tradition.
Mesopotamian7
- The Epic of GilgameshUnread after cuneiform, the name still travelled: a wicked giant Gilgamesh in the Qumran Book of Giants, an eagle-saved Babylonian king Gilgamos in Aelian about 200 CE.
- The Descent of InannaThe West met this poem backwards. Frazer in 1914 had Ishtar descending "in quest of" her lost lover Tammuz. The Sumerian text Kramer began assembling in 1937 shows the goddess handing her husband to the demons instead.
- Enūma ElišAssyrian copies from Nineveh and Ashur write Anšar, meaning the god Aššur, where Marduk stood; Aššur was equated with Anšar under Sargon II, 721–705 BCE.
- Sacred Marriage and the Sacred-Prostitution ClaimThe temple-prostitution story rests chiefly on Herodotus, around 430 BCE, who wrote that every Babylonian woman once lay with a stranger in Aphrodite's precinct. Stephanie Budin argued in 2008 that sacred prostitution never existed in the ancient Near East or Mediterranean.
- Lamashtu and PazuzuPazuzu was a latecomer: Lamashtu incantations survive on Old Assyrian tablets of about 1950-1850 BCE, but Pazuzu first appears in the Neo-Assyrian period, after 934 BCE.
- The Babylonian Zodiac and the First HoroscopesThe 28 surviving cuneiform horoscopes run from 410 to 69 BCE. The two oldest, from Nippur and Babylon, already place the planets by zodiacal sign; the first zodiacal positions appear in astronomical diaries of the mid-fifth century BCE.
- Taha Baqir and the Gilgamesh Dream TabletImported to the US in 2003, the tablet was resold in 2007 with a false 1981 provenance. Hobby Lobby bought it in 2014; a federal judge forfeited it on 26 July 2021.
Ancient Near East1
Babylonian Astrology1
Israelite and Canaanite1