Rest and Violence in the Poem of Erra

Abstract

THE POEM ABOUT THE GOD ERRA MUST CLEARLY BE RECKONED ONE OF THE MAJOR TEXTS of Mesopotamian religious literature, whether gauged by its content and literary artistry or by the evidence of its ancient popularity. Not less than thirty-six copies were recovered from at least five sites of the first millennium wac.-a larger number, as L. Cagni points out, than even the copies known to the Gilgameg Epic from the same period.2 Despite its importance, the Erra poem has generally been neglected in modern writing about Mesopotamian religion and the religions of the ancient Near East. Part of the reason has been its textual condition, for although work on the poem has proceeded for over one hundred years, ever since George Smith published portions of it in 1875,3 only in the last decade or so have enough lines been recovered for intelligible editions to appear in Italian, French, and English.4