Tablets from the Sippar Library VI. Atra-ḫasīs

Abstract

The Babylonian myth known to the ancients as Enūma ilū awëlum, “When the Gods Were Man”, and to modern scholarship as the Epic of Atra-ḫasīs, tells the wondrous story of the creation of mankind, of the attempts of the king of the gods, Enlil, to reduce the overpopulation that resulted from its unchecked reproduction — by plague, drought, famine and, most disastrously, the Deluge — and of the measures then taken by the gods to keep mankind's future numbers in check. Since its reconstruction some twenty-five years ago, by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, there have come to light very few new sources for this composition. Several small additional fragments have been published by Lambert, and a further piece by Groneberg and Durand. The most significant discovery of new text has been the several tablets that were found in the library excavated by the late Dr Walid Al-Jadir of the University of Baghdad in the Neo-Babylonian temple of Šamaš at Sippar. This find led to a preliminary report in this journal that “there are tablets 1, 2, 3 and one other of the Standard Babylonian recension (as it must now be called) of Atra-hasis”.