The Standard Babylonian Etana Epic.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.
• Position: Book Review

The Standard Babylonian Etana Epic. By JAMIE R. NOVOTNY. State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts, vol. 2. Helsinki: THE NEO-ASSYRIAN TEXT CORPUs PROJECT, 2001. Pp. xxvii + 62 (paper).

The Standard Babylonian Epic of Anzu. By AMAR ANNUS. State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts, vol. 3. Helsinld: THE NEO-AssYRIAN TEXT CORPUS PROJECT, 2001. Pp. xli + 61 (paper).

These two volumes continue the effort of the Helsinki State Archives of Assyria Project to make available certain key works of Mesopotamian literature in convenient reading editions. The volumes are compact, nicely produced, and easy to use. In principle, each begins with an introduction, presents a unified text in transliteration, with variants given in footnotes, a computer-generated cuneiform text, a "score," a glossary, indices, concordances, and even a sign list. Their compact format thus allows considerable information to be presented in brief compass. These fall between the manual edition most Assyriologists will already have, in that they include a great deal more data than any manual edition is likely to contain, and a full scientific edition with text, transliteration, commentary, and indices. Since full scientific editions of Akkadian literary texts tend to have rather short shelf-lives in relation to the amount of effort spent on producing them, the Helsinki team's approach has much to recommend it. On the other hand, these editions cannot be said to meet fully the needs of the professional student of these texts, who will end up making his own edition anyway but will turn to these volumes for information, ideas, and ready reference, not to mention various ingenious proposals for restorations. To my mind, there tends to be rather too much free composition of Akkadian in these editions, as the first-time student of these texts will have to keep in mind that some lines and many phrases he is reading are not attested in any ancient manuscript, but overall I found both these works very useful and attractive contributions to the study of Akkadian literature.

Novotny's treatment of Etana opens with a clear, sensible, and compelling discussion of the complicated problem of the manuscripts. He had the advantage of a recent re-edition of the entire Etana material by Michael Haul, Das Etana-Epos, Ein Mythos von der Himmelfahrt des Konigs yon Kis (Gottingen: Seminar fur Keilschriftforschung, 2000), but has by no means slavishly followed Haul, as even the opening lines illustrate:

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