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Atrahasis
''Atra-Hasis'' ( akk, , Atra-ḫasīs) is an 18th-century BCE Akkadian epic, recorded in various versions on clay tablets, named for its protagonist, Atrahasis ('exceedingly wise'). The ''Atra-Hasis'' tablets include both a creation myth and one of three surviving Babylonian flood myths. The name "Atra-Hasis" also appears, as king of Shuruppak in the times before a flood, on one of the '' Sumerian King Lists''. The oldest known copy of the epic tradition concerning AtrahasisThe variant versions are not direct translations of a single original. can be dated by colophon (scribal identification) to the reign of Hammurabi’s great-grandson, Ammi-Saduqa (1646–1626 BC). However, various Old Babylonian fragments exist, and the epic continued to be copied into the first millennium BC. The story of Atrahasis also exists in a later Assyrian version, first rediscovered in the Library of Ashurbanipal, though its translations have been uncertain due to the artifact being in fragmenta ...
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Enki
, image = Enki(Ea).jpg , caption = Detail of Enki from the Adda Seal, an ancient Akkadian cylinder seal dating to circa 2300 BC , deity_of = God of creation, intelligence, crafts, water, seawater, lakewater, fertility, semen, magic, mischief , symbol = Goat, fish, goat-fish, chimera , consort = Ninhursag, Damkina , children = Marduk, Dumuzid, Ninsar, Ninkurra, Uttu, Ninti , parents = An and Nammu , Greek_equivalent = Poseidon, PrometheusStephanie West. "Prometheus Orientalized" page 147 Museum Helveticum Vol. 51, No. 3 (1994), pp. 129–149 (21 pages) Enki ( sux, ) is the Sumerian god of water, knowledge ('' gestú''), crafts (''gašam''), and creation (''nudimmud''), and one of the Anunnaki. He was later known as Ea ( akk, ) or Ae in Akkadian (Assyrian- Babylonian) religion, and is identified by some scholars with Ia in Canaanite religion. The name was rendered Aos in Greek sources (e.g. Damascius). He was originally the patron god of the city of Eridu, but la ...
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Alan Millard
Alan Ralph Millard (born 1 December 1937) is Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic languages, and Honorary Senior Fellow (Ancient Near East), at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology (SACE) in the University of Liverpool. Millard worked on excavations at Tell Nebi Mend (ancient Qadesh-on-the-Orontes) and Tell Rif'at (ancient Arpad) in Syria, at Petra in Jordan, and at the Assyrian capital Nimrud (ancient Kalḫu) in Iraq. While working at the British Museum 1961–1964, he rediscovered the Epic of Atrahasis, which had lain unrecognised in a drawer for some decades. From 1964 to 1970 he was Librarian at Tyndale Library, Cambridge, and taught Akkadian for a year at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. In 1970 he was appointed Rankin Lecturer in Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at Liverpool. He was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, studyi ...
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Shuruppak
Shuruppak ( sux, , "the healing place"), modern Tell Fara, was an ancient Sumerian city situated about 55 kilometres (35 mi) south of Nippur on the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq's Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate. Shuruppak was dedicated to Ninlil, also called Sud, the goddess of grain and the air. Shuruppak and its environment Shuruppak is located in Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, approximately 55 kilometres (35 mi) south of Nippur. The site of extends about a kilometer from north to south. The total area is about 120 hectares, with about 35 hectares of the mound being more than 3 meters above the surrounding plain, with a maximum of 9 meters. Archaeology After a brief survey by Hermann Volrath Hilprecht in 1900, it was first excavated in 1902 by Robert Koldewey and Friedrich Delitzsch of the German Oriental Society for eight months. Among other finds, hundreds of Early Dynastic tablets were collected, which ended up in the Berlin Museum and the Istanbul Museum. In Ma ...
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Akkadian Language
Akkadian (, Akkadian: )John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages''. Ed. Roger D. Woodard (2004, Cambridge) Pages 218-280 is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia ( Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa and Babylonia) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC. It is the earliest documented Semitic language. It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian (which is a language isolate). Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC). The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a '' Sprachbund''. Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-mi ...
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Akkadian Literature
Akkadian literature is the ancient literature written in the Akkadian language (Assyrian and Babylonian dialects) in Mesopotamia (Assyria and Babylonia) during the period spanning the Middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age (roughly the 23rd to 6th centuries BC). Drawing on the traditions of Sumerian literature, the Babylonians compiled a substantial textual tradition of mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, letters and other literary forms. Literature in Akkadian society Most of what we have from the Babylonians was inscribed in cuneiform with a metal stylus on tablets of clay, called ''laterculae coctiles'' by Pliny the Elder; papyrus seems to have been also employed, but it has perished. There were libraries in most towns and temples; an old Sumerian proverb averred that "he who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn." Women as well as men learned to read and write, and in Semitic times, this involved a knowledge of the extinct Sumer ...
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Book Of Genesis
The Book of Genesis (from Greek ; Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית ''Bəreʾšīt'', "In hebeginning") is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its first word, ( "In the beginning"). Genesis is an account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, and of Israel's ancestors and the origins of the Jewish people. Tradition credits Moses as the author of Genesis, as well as the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and most of Deuteronomy; however, modern scholars, especially from the 19th century onward, place the books' authorship in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, hundreds of years after Moses is supposed to have lived.Davies (1998), p. 37 Based on scientific interpretation of archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence, most scholars consider Genesis to be primarily mythological rather than historical. It is divisible into two parts, the primeval history (chapters 1–11) and the ancestr ...
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Zeus
Zeus or , , ; grc, Δῐός, ''Diós'', label=Genitive case, genitive Aeolic Greek, Boeotian Aeolic and Doric Greek#Laconian, Laconian grc-dor, Δεύς, Deús ; grc, Δέος, ''Déos'', label=Genitive case, genitive el, Δίας, ''Días'' () is the sky father, sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion, who rules as king of the gods on Mount Olympus. His name is cognate with the first element of his ancient Roman religion, Roman interpretatio graeca, equivalent Jupiter (mythology), Jupiter.''Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia'', The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. His mythology and powers are similar, though not identical, to those of Indo-European deities such as Jupiter, Perkūnas, Perun, Indra, Dyaus, and Zojz (deity), Zojz. Entry: "Dyaus" Zeus is the child of Cronus and Rhea (mythology), Rhea, the youngest of his siblings to be born, though sometimes reckoned the eldest as the others required disgorging from Cronus's stomach. In most traditions, he is m ...
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Walter Burkert
Walter Burkert (; 2 February 1931 – 11 March 2015) was a German scholar of Greek mythology and cult. A professor of classics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, he taught in the UK and the US. He has influenced generations of students of religion since the 1960s, combining in the modern way the findings of archaeology and epigraphy with the work of poets, historians, and philosophers. He was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He published books on the balance between lore and science among the followers of Pythagoras, and more extensively on ritual and archaic cult survival, on the ritual killing at the heart of religion, on mystery religions, and on the reception in the Hellenic world of Near Eastern and Persian culture, which sets Greek religion in its wider Aegean and Near Eastern context. First academic era Burkert was born in Neuendettelsau. He married Maria Bosch in 1957 and they had three chi ...
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Cleromancy
Cleromancy is a form of sortition (casting of lots) in which an outcome is determined by means that normally would be considered random, such as the rolling of dice, but that are sometimes believed to reveal the will of a deity. In classical civilization In ancient Rome fortunes were told through the casting of lots or ''sortes''. In Judaic and Christian tradition Casting of lots is mentioned 47 times in the Bible. Some examples in the Hebrew Bible of the casting of lots as a means of determining God's will: * In the Book of Leviticus , God commanded Moses, "And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the , and the other lot for the scapegoat." * According to Numbers , Moses allocated territory to the tribes of Israel according to each tribe's male population and by lot. * IJoshua 7:14 a guilty party ( Achan) is found by lot. * In the Book of Joshua , Joshua says, "Ye shall therefore describe the land into seven parts, and bring the description hither to me, that I ...
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Enlil
Enlil, , "Lord f theWind" later known as Elil, is an ancient Mesopotamian god associated with wind, air, earth, and storms. He is first attested as the chief deity of the Sumerian pantheon, but he was later worshipped by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hurrians. Enlil's primary center of worship was the Ekur temple in the city of Nippur, which was believed to have been built by Enlil himself and was regarded as the "mooring-rope" of heaven and earth. He is also sometimes referred to in Sumerian texts as Nunamnir. According to one Sumerian hymn, Enlil himself was so holy that not even the other gods could look upon him. Enlil rose to prominence during the twenty-fourth century BC with the rise of Nippur. His cult fell into decline after Nippur was sacked by the Elamites in 1230 BC and he was eventually supplanted as the chief god of the Mesopotamian pantheon by the Babylonian national god Marduk. Enlil plays a vital role in the Sumerian creation myth; he sep ...
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Incipit
The incipit () of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of notes, having the same purpose. The word ''incipit'' comes from Latin and means "it begins". Its counterpart taken from the ending of the text is the explicit. Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits, as with for example ''Agnus Dei''. During the medieval period in Europe, incipits were often written in a different script or colour from the rest of the work of which they were a part, and "incipit pages" might be heavily decorated with illumination. Though the word ''incipit'' is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia and can be found in various parts of the world. Although not always called by the name of ''incipit'' today, the practice of referring to texts by their initial words remains commonplace. Historical examples Sumerian In th ...
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