Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry.

• Author: Foster, Benjamin R.

Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry. A Study of Anzû, Enuma Elis, and Erra and Isum. By SELENA WISNOM. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. viii + 280. $185.

Selena Wisnom's path-breaking study takes up three classics of Akkadian literature, arguing that each successive author was not only aware of the preceding masterpieces, but sought to outdo or "compete" with them, as well with Atrahasis and the Sumerian poem Lugal-e, by making their characters and their deeds, as well as the poems about them, superior to those of their predecessors. This is shown in specific accomplishments, heroic ideals, cosmic significance, and poetics. The alleged competition was carried forward through a dense network of literary allusion, reuse of incidents, reworking of character, shift in time, and specific figurative language, as well as subversion of well-known incidents, and even segmentation of characters, all of which the audience was expected to recognize. Nor was this a case of the latest building on the preceding alone; she argues that the latest was well aware of the first and of the comparable strategies of his predecessors with each one preceding, so the latest engaged with all, and not merely with the most recent. She can thereby bypass the anxiety of dealing with the author's intent by an empirical approach to what the author actually wrote.

By analogy, if Virgil could expect his audience to be thoroughly familiar with Homer, so too Kabtiilani-Marduk could expect his audience to be familiar with the Epic of Creation. Atrahasis. Anzû, Lugal-e, and other works of cuneiform literature and scholarship, and to appreciate his manipulation and incorporation of them into his great poem. Although there have been prior observations on intertextual relations among these works, and Wisnom is scrupulous in noting them and gracious in disagreement, nothing so comprehensive as the thesis of this book has hitherto been proposed and argued, to the extent that this reader would deem it a major advance in the reading and appreciation of Akkadian literature. She brings to her task highly refined critical and comparative literary skills, first-rate philology, a good sense of manuscript, broad and deep reading in ancient literature and modern Assyriological and Classical scholarship about it, and truly impressive associative and analytic powers. The result is an outstanding achievement of creative and innovative scholarship, well grounded in its sources...