THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
The travails of Gilgames, who in his search for life traveled to the edges of the earth and beyond, made him a better king, a man who had experienced everything and had achieved wisdom.
The first-millennium version of the Gilgames story emphasizes this wisdom aspect in its introduction (lines 1-8):2He who saw the deep, the foundation of the country
who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters;
Gilgames, who saw the deep, the foundation of the country,
who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters,
he explored everywhere the seats of power.
He knew the totality of wisdom about all things,
He saw the secret and uncovered the hidden,
He brought back a message from before the flood.
The reference to the flood connects this introduction to the Utanapistim passage in tablets 10-11, where Gilgames learns from the survivor of the flood how the latter was saved and received eternal life and why his, Gilgames’, quest is in vain. More importantly, however, the antediluvian report (temu) that Gilgames brings back refers to a well-known motif in first-millennium scholarly literature. All the important knowledge was revealed by the gods before the time of the flood and the scholars and kings of the present day owe their knowledge, directly, to primordial sages (Lenzi 2008b). This knowledge, in first-millennium scribal circles, is called nemequ “wisdom” (Parpola 1993b; Beaulieu 2007).
As van der Toorn (2007) has pointed out, this same first-millennium introduction specifically makes Gilgames into a literate hero, one who wrote down his adventures and thus allowed later generations to profit from the lessons that he learned (lines 24-28):
[Find] the tablet-box of cedar,
[release] its bronze clasps!
[Open] the lid of its secret,
[pick] up the lapis lazuli tablet and read aloud all the travails of Gilgames, all that he went through!
Through this introduction, Gilgames’ adventures are related to the self-consciousness of first-millennium scholars who referred to themselves as the guardians of the Wisdom of Adapa, the paradigmatic apkallu, or primordial sage.
The knowledge or wisdom (nemequ) that is defined this way consists of the handbooks of the scholars at the Assyrian court: astrologers (tupsarrutu), diviners (barutu), exorcists (asiputu), lamentation priests (kalutu), and physicians (asutu).
The perception of the technical corpora of these five groups of experts may be further illustrated by various other pieces of evidence. Several of these corpora are attributed to the god Ea in the so-called Catalog of Texts and Authors (Lambert 1962; see Rochberg 1999), of Neo-Assyrian date:
[The excorcists’] corpus; the lamentation priests’ corpus; When Anu and Enlil;
Figure; Not Completing the Months; Diseased Sinews; [Utte]rance; O king, the splendour of whose storm is majestic; Fashioned like An
These are from the mouth of Ea
The list of compositions attributed to Ea includes the corpus of incantations and rituals to be used by the exorcist (plausibly restored by Lambert in the break), the corpus of laments meant to appease the anger of the gods, a variety of divination texts, and two myths around the god Ninurta. The divination compendia listed are Enuma Anu Enlil (When Anu and Enlil), the main compilation of astronomical omens; Alamdimmu (Figure), the body of physiognomic omens; Sag iti nutila (Not Completing the Months), the collection of omens from monstrous births otherwise known as Summa izbu;3 Sagig (Diseased Sinews), the compendium of diagnostic omens; and Kataduga (Utterance), a collection of omens derived from speech habits, usually perceived as a chapter of the physiognomic series Alamdimmu.
The two Ninurta narratives listed in this same section (conventionally known as Lugal-e and An-gin7, respectively) depict Ninurta as a heroic warrior who goes to battle and defeats monstrous opponents. Sumerian versions of these narratives are known as Old Babylonian literary compositions. In the late second millennium the texts were provided with interlinear Akkadian translations and that is how the compositions circulated in the first millennium.
These narratives are among a small group of Old Babylonian Sumerian composition that had survived the ages and they are the only two that were still regularly copied in both Babylonia and Assyria.4The Catalog of Texts and Authors continues with two otherwise unknown compositions (both in Sumerian) authored by Adapa, the prototypical sage or apkallu (lines 5-7):5 *
“[In triumph], Enlil”; “It is me, supreme divine power.”
[These are the ones which] Oannes-Adapa
[...] spoke.
The rest of the Catalog of Texts and Authors, as far as preserved, mentions a variety of literary texts, some known, some otherwise unknown, and links these to human authors, some well attested as legendary figures of the ancient past (such as king Enmerkar), others apparently more recent in date.
Van der Toorn (2007) has argued that the classification of the compositions in this catalog “is by presumed antiquity, which is also an order of authority.” The handbooks of the scholars, authored by the god Ea, come first. Literary compositions such as Gilgames, Etana, proverb collections (the series of Sidu),6 and others are supplied with human authors and are placed in the very last section of the text.
The Catalog of Texts and Authors thus throws some indirect light on the self-perception of the scholars of the time. The diviners, astrologers, excorcists, physicians, and lamentation priests saw themselves as the guardians and administers of the most ancient and most prestigious knowledge, based, ultimately, on the authority of Ea himself. This picture is confirmed by several other pieces of evidence (collected in Rochberg 1999), including the legend of Enmeduranki, which relates how the knowledge of libanomancy (observation of oil on water) and extispicy (reading of the entrails, in particular the liver, of a sacrificial animal) was revealed to Enmeduranki, the sixth antediluvian king who reigned at the city of Sippar for 54,600 years (Lambert 1998).7
Lenzi (2008a) has collected a broad spectrum of evidence to argue that all five scholarly disciplines at the Assyrian court claimed an authoritative body of secret texts, given by the god Ea to the apkallus, or sages.
This “mythmaking strategy” (in Lenzi’s terminology) served to distinguish these scholars from mere scribes and provided them with the authority and competence to serve as an intermediary between the king and the gods. The secrecy of these texts was occasionally emphasized in the colophon: “Secret of the great gods. An expert may show it to another expert. A non-expert may not see it.” Against most earlier interpretations, Lenzi argues that such secrecy colophons should be taken seriously, that indeed the entire scholarly corpora of astrologers, diviners, physicians, excorcists, and lamentation priestswere considered to be secret — even though the great majority of such tablets had no explicit secrecy colophon.8
Lenzi’s argument defines the ummdnu or scholars of the Assyrian court as the bearers and transmitters of textualized secret knowledge given by Ea, god of wisdom, to the primordial sages (apkallu) with whom the scholars identified. Exact transmission of this secret knowledge was, therefore, an important concern. As Lenzi demonstrates, some of the secrecy colophons and secrecy labels are attached to Kassite tablets9 and thus the idea of secret knowledge is older than the Neo-Assyrian period. The Kassite evidence, however, is too isolated to understand how this secret knowledge functioned or was used. By contrast, the correspondence of the Neo-Assyrian kings and the tablet collections from this period provide a wealth of evidence that allows us a view of various aspects of the use and perception of this prestigious, secret body of knowledge.