A Contribution to the History of Interaction of Akkadian and Sumerian Literature: Enki and Ninmaḫ and Atraḫasis (original) (raw)

Some aspects of ancient Mesopotamian culture have been viewed as fairly static over the course of its three thousand years. Many scholars have challenged this notion and shown developments over time and differences in space in various cultural areas. Even though there is often much conservatism in written cultural contexts, literary texts and the ideas they hold are similarly susceptible to change. 1 I think this is a good context in which to examine the relationship between Sumerian Literature and Akkadian Literature and its possible change over time. The general issue then is to map the trajectory of the interaction between these two literatures over their histories. In this paper we aim to make one small case study of this problem in the hope of illuminating one particularly thorny period in their overlapping historiesthe Old Babylonian period. This case is of the Sumerian text Enki and Ninmaḫ (ENM) and the Akkadian Atraḫasis (AH), both of which treat the creation of mankind as a solution to a divine problem. The first main sections of these texts will be compared in terms of their content, structure, themes, and verbal elements in order to see some of the similarities and differences of Old Babylonian Sumerian and Akkadian literary texts that treat similar topics. Before that comparative work, we will first lay out our thoughts on the some prerequisite concepts that impact upon the comparison of these two ancient Mesopotamian literary traditions. These will include discussions of the relationship between the histories of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages and their speakers and of bilingualism and translation in general and in application to Sumerian and Akkadian.