A Hymn to Ishtar as the Planet Venus and to Idin-Dagan as Tammuz

Abstract

Again the rich collection of Sumerian literary tablets, discovered at Nippur, has contributed splendid religious texts. Professor Chiera's Sumerian Religious Texts contains seventy-two plates of elegantly copied Sumerian religious and mythological documents preserved in the Nippur Collection of the Museum of Stambul, where I copied fifty-four similar tablets and a large number of incantation texts in 1913. Dr. Chiera has found in Constantinople a surprisingly large number of well-preserved tablets of most valuable contents. I confine myself here to the well-preserved six-column tablet, Ni. 2487, identical in size and material arrangement to the large epical tablet, Ni. 4561, in Philadelphia, published by the writer in Publications of the Babylonian Section, University Museum, Philadelphia, vol. x, No. 1, and re-edited in a French edition, Le Poème Sumérien du Paradis, Paris, 1919. The Nippur Collection has already contributed a large number of these fine six-column zagsal or epical texts, copied by Poebel (PBS. v) and by the writer (PBS. x, Nos. 1–3).