Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood Story

Martin Worthington is Associate Professor in Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Copyright credits; Abbreviations; Conventions PART I – Preliminaries; 1 Introduction; 2 ‘Interrogating’ Babylonian narrative poetry; 3 ‘Identifying’ puns; 4 The high concentration of puns in the Gilgameš Flood story; PART II – Dissecting Ea’s message; 5 The lines about the Flood hero; 6 Raining ‘plenty’: ušaznanakkunūši nuhšam-ma; 7 The birds: [hiṣib] iṣṣūrāti; 8 The fish: puzur nūnī; 9 The harvest: [...] mešrâ ebūram-ma; 10 ‘Cakes at dawn’: ina šēr(-)kukkī; 11 ‘In the evening’: ina līlâti; 12 The ‘rain of wheat’: šamût kibāti; 13 Recapitulation; 14 Issues of textual history; 15 Meaning and performance; PART III – Conspicuous silences in the Gilgameš Flood story; 16 Outlining the problems; 17 Does Atra–hasīs ‘fill in the gaps’?; 18 Communications between Ea and the Flood hero; 19 Communication between the Flood hero and the people of Šuruppak; 20 Ea’s elusiveness; 21 The enigma of Uta–napišti; 22 Why the ‘gaps’?; PART IV – Other interconnections; 23 Ea’s duplicity and Babylonian/Assyrian divination; 24 Beyond Cuneiform; 25 Conclusions; References; Alphabetical index; Index locurum