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Portica is a digital repository with one purpose: to hold the source texts of consciousness wisdom from every major tradition known to humanity, and set them beside the modern science of mind. Read, compared and free.
The Collections
Six collections lead, three from the science of consciousness and three from the wisdom traditions. Each is a codex of primary sources, read in the original and in translation.
Corpus Hermeticum New
Seventeen surviving tractates attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, composed in Graeco-Roman Egypt between the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. The foundational texts of the Western Hermetic tradition.
Poimandres
The first tractate, and the one that gave the collection its Renaissance name: Ficino’s 1471 Latin version was titled Pimander, and Copenhaver records that it remained the most influential presentation of the Corpus until the nineteenth century. A vision of divine creation, the descent of Man into Nature, and the path of return through gnosis.
To Asklepios
On the nature of space, motion and the cosmos. A dialogue between Hermes and Asklepios on what moves all things.
The Sacred Discourse
A brief cosmogony. The ordering of creation, the birth of living creatures, and the multiplication of humanity.
The Cup or Monad
God sends down a great mixing-bowl filled with Mind for those who wish to be baptised in it. Those who immerse themselves gain gnosis; those who do not, possess only Reason.
That the Unmanifest God Is Most Manifest
Contemplation of the cosmos reveals the divine artificer through the beauty of creation. What the senses cannot grasp is still disclosed by its works.
That the Good Is in God Alone
Man and cosmos are subject to change, and change is incompatible with the Good. A short meditation on the distinction between creation and creator.
That Ignorance of God Is the Greatest Evil
A short exhortation to cease running with the irrational and turn towards the Light. Three verses, blunt and urgent.
That Nothing Made Is Ever Unmade
What men call death is transformation, not destruction. Dissolution is the path to renewal. Five verses on the permanence of all that exists.
On Mind and Sense
How intellection and perception work together in humans but not in animals. Not all who possess sense possess Mind. The seeds of good and evil.
The Key
The longest of the Corpus tractates, and Mead judged it “one of the most complete and fundamental expositions that we have”. On the soul, the body, immortality and the path of ascent.
The Great Mind to Hermes
On eternity, cosmos and time. God, Aeon, Cosmos, Time, Becoming: each nests within the other. It closes on the instruction that a reader is most likely to remember: “Make, [then,] thyself to grow to the same stature as the Greatness which transcends all measure.”
On the Common Mind
Mind is in all things. The closer to the good, the further from the animal. Mind as physician to the soul, opposing pleasure and quelling the passions. Godlessness, Hermes says, is the great disease; opinion the next. Verse 16 carries the sentence the House takes its Motion principle from: “For what is the activity of life? Is it not motion?”
The Secret Discourse on the Mountain
The Rebirth discourse. Hermes reveals to Tat the twelve tormentors and the ten powers that drive them out. Culminates in a hymn of silence.
On Right-Mindedness
An epistle from Hermes to Asklepios. On the Maker and the made, the twofold nature of all things, and God as the sole source of Good.
CH XV: A Vacant Number
There is no fifteenth tractate to lose. The number is vacant in the transmitted collection, an artefact of two older counts running side by side: Mead’s contents print his fourteenth as “CORP. HERM. XIV. (XV.)”, the bracketed figure being the older number for that same discourse, then go straight on to (XVI.). Editors kept the gap rather than renumber the rest.
Definitions of Asklepios to King Ammon
Asklepios writes to King Ammon on the power of Egyptian sacred language, the Sun as cosmic charioteer, and the hierarchy of Gods, daimons and men.
Asklepios to the King
A brief surviving fragment. Asklepios teaches the King that bodiless forms appear in bodies, and that the Sensible and Intelligible worlds reflect each other.
Encomium of Kings
A rhetorical oration on the soul hindered by bodily passions. God as the divine Musician whose instrument is the cosmos.
The Perfect Discourse
The longest Hermetic treatise, surviving whole only in an Old Latin rendering of a Greek original now lost. Cosmology, the nature of God, and the great prophecy of Egypt’s fall.
The Perfect Discourse
Cosmology, the nature of God, the making of gods, and the great prophecy of Egypt’s fall. It reaches us whole only in an Old Latin translation, its Greek original lost but for passages later writers happened to quote.
Nag Hammadi Hermetica New
Three Hermetic texts from Nag Hammadi Codex VI, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945. Coptic translations of lost Greek originals, preserving a ritual initiation dialogue, a doxological prayer and a fragment of the Asclepius.
The Discourse on the Eighth and Ninth
A Hermetic initiation rite: visionary ascent through the Ogdoad to the Ennead, with ritual vowel sequences and sacred names. It closes by commanding that the book be carved in hieroglyphs on turquoise steles and set up in the temple at Diospolis.
Prayer of Thanksgiving
A short Hermetic doxology. Perhaps the only Hermetic text to survive in three independent manuscript traditions: Coptic (Nag Hammadi), Greek (Papyrus Mimaut) and Latin (appended to the Asclepius).
The Perfect Discourse 21–29
The prophecy of Egypt’s fall, humanity as maker of gods, and post-mortem judgement. A Coptic witness to chapters 21–29 of the Latin Asclepius.
Emerald Tablet New
Alchemists writing in Arabic and Latin treated it as the table of law of their art (Burckhardt). Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, it has no early text: the oldest witness is Arabic, at the close of the Book of the Secrets of Creation, and the Latin versions follow in the twelfth century. Thirteen verses in the Latin, twelve in the Arabic, on the unity of above and below, the operation of the Sun, and the perfection of the one thing.
Tabula Smaragdina
“That which is below is like that which is above.” The foundational axiom of Hermetic correspondence. Thirteen verses in the Latin and in Newton, twelve in the Arabic, on the one thing, the operation of the Sun, and the three parts of the wisdom of the whole world. Litwa classifies it as TH 30, printing two Latin versions of it as TH 30a and TH 30b.
Vienna Hermetica New
Two Hermetic papyrus fragments from the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, first edited by Jean-Pierre Mahé in 1984. Dating to the 2nd–3rd century CE, these are among the oldest surviving Hermetic witnesses, and both are heavily damaged.
VH I — Fragment A
Hermes and Tat on the gifts God gives: the human race alone has reason, knows God and is known by him, while the other creatures are too heavy to understand God. The Greek on the page is marked as unreliable. Copenhaver takes the papyrus, on a late second-century dating, for the earliest material evidence of any Hermetic writing at all, and notes that the two fragments cite otherwise lost treatises by the numbers 9 and 10, which puts them inside a set larger than anything that survives.
VH II — Fragment B
Closes a discourse on energies, carries the headings of the ninth and tenth discourses, and opens the tenth with the one God who needs no name. The Greek on the page is marked as unreliable.
Oxford Hermetica New
Five little-known Hermetic fragments from MS Bodleian Clarke 11 (13th c.), first edited by Paramelle and Mahé in 1991. Greek text on the soul, the senses, justice, the rational faculties and embryonic formation.
OH I — On the Soul
The soul is incorporeal, without figure, indivisible. What has no birth cannot grow, diminish, or perish. The soul is self-moving and immortal: a power of intelligible reality.
OH II — On the Senses and the Four Elements
The senses correspond to the four elements: sight to fire, hearing to air, smell to water, taste to earth.
OH III — On Human Law and Divine Justice
Humans set up laws by mere opinion. They accuse one another, practising hatred instead of love, ignorance instead of knowledge. Heaven is pure of such laws.
OH IV — On the Rational and Irrational Soul
When the spirited faculty is torn from reason, it breeds recklessness. Between intellect and speech stands reasoning, which follows the mind. When the irrational submits to reason, understanding fills it.
OH V — On the Embryo and Its Formation
Form is an image of the idea in bodies. Nature takes the seed, separates the corrupt matter, and shapes it with pneumatic power. Harmony arises from numbers; forms are the receptacles of ideas. The text closes with a cosmogonic formula.
Stobaeus Excerpts
Thirty-three Hermetic excerpts preserved by Johannes Stobaeus in the 5th century CE. Includes discourses on the soul, cosmic order, the Decans and the celebrated Kore Kosmou, the title the manuscripts give it, which Mead englished as The Virgin of the World. Twenty-seven carry Mead’s numbering; five fall outside his selection and appear in Walter Scott’s translation alone; one, a fragment on death, survives here only in Chambers.
Of Piety and True Philosophy
On the path of piety through philosophy. The soul’s ascent requires both knowledge and devotion.
An Extract
A brief fragment on the nature of the cosmos.
Of Truth
On the nature of Truth. Only the eternal is true; all that is born and changes is false appearance.
God, Nature and the Gods
A short excerpt on the relationship between God, Nature and the lesser gods.
Of Matter
On the nature of Matter and its relation to God.
Of Time
On Time as the movement of the cosmos and the distinction between eternity and temporal flux.
Of Bodies Everlasting and Bodies Perishable
On the two kinds of body: those that endure and those that dissolve. The cosmos as an everlasting body.
Of Energy and Feeling
On the distinction between energy and sensation. The cosmos feels because it is within God.
Of the Decans and the Stars
On the thirty-six Decans who rule above the fixed stars, their influence on earthly affairs and the generation of souls.
Concerning the Rule of Providence, Necessity and Fate
On the threefold governance of the cosmos: Providence from God, Necessity from the stars, Fate from the daimons.
Of Justice
A brief excerpt on divine justice and the cosmic order.
Of Providence and Fate
Hermes to Ammon on the workings of Providence and Fate in human life.
Of the Whole Economy
SH 14. Hermes to Amun on Providence, Necessity and Destiny: Providence holds the cosmos, Necessity encloses it, Destiny drives it round. Both English translations here, with the Greek.
Of Soul (i)
First of six excerpts on the soul. Its nature, origin and relation to body.
Of Soul (ii)
Second discourse on the soul. Its descent into matter and the garments it acquires.
Of Soul (iii)
Third discourse on the soul. The passions and their effect on the incarnate soul.
Of Soul (iv)
Fourth discourse on the soul. The distinction between human and animal souls.
Of Soul (v)
Fifth discourse on the soul. On the immortality of the soul and its passage after death.
Of Soul (vi)
Sixth and final discourse on the soul. The soul’s return to its source.
Of Righteousness
On righteousness and the moral order of the cosmos.
Of Isis to Horus: On the Virtue of Plants and Animals
Isis teaches Horus on the sacred properties hidden in plants and animals.
An Apophthegm of Hermes
A single sentence. Hermes is asked what God is, and answers.
From Aphrodite
A cosmological fragment attributed to Aphrodite on the nature of the soul.
A Discourse of Hermes to Tat
A short discourse on the relation between God and the cosmos.
Kore Kosmou (Part I)
First part of the book Stobaeus heads Kore Kosmou, which Mead englished as The Virgin of the World. Isis reveals to Horus the secret history of creation: the fall of souls, the invention of the arts, and the ordering of human destiny. Scott read the atrocities described at SH 23.55-61 as the Alexandrian calamities of 262-63 and dated the treatise 263-68 CE on that basis; he granted himself that matching a general description to particular events is precarious, and Litwa prints the caution alongside the proposal.
Kore Kosmou (Part II)
Second part of the Kore Kosmou, Mead’s Virgin of the World. The continuation of Isis’s revelation: the complaints of incarnate souls and the divine response.
From the Discourse of Isis to Horus
The final Stobaeus excerpt. Isis instructs Horus on the nature of the soul, the mysteries of incarnation and the path to divine knowledge.
The Brief Sentences
SH 11. Hermes sums up his whole teaching to his son in 48 short sayings, eight of them lost, then closes on why such teaching is kept from the many. Mead carries it inside his first excerpt; Scott prints it apart, and Everard divides the same matter finer still into 68 Heads (CH 068). M. David Litwa allows that collections of Hermetic maxims of this kind may have appeared as early as the first century BCE, so the date given here is a ceiling rather than a reading.
The Seven Planets
SH 29. A hexameter poem on the seven wandering stars and their influence on human nature. One of the rarest poetic specimens in the philosophical Hermetica. Not included in Mead’s selection; Scott only.
Of Necessity
SH 13. One sentence, defining Necessity as a settled decision of Providence. It stands on the same printed page as Of Providence and Fate, and Scott borrows it in a footnote to mend that excerpt’s own missing clause. Not in Mead’s selection; Scott only.
Of Refutation
SH 27. One sentence on what it is worth to be proved wrong: a refutation, once recognised, carries the refuted man into knowledge he did not have. Scott heads it an extract from the Discourse of Isis to Horus. Not in Mead’s selection; Scott only.
What God Is
SH 28. Hermes is asked what God is and answers in eight Greek words: the Maker of the universe, Mind most wise, and everlasting. Stobaeus preserves it as a saying, the questioner unnamed. Scott and Chambers both englished it, and so did Mead, whose page for the same sentence sits apart at Liber 040.
Of Death
Stobaeus, Florilegium 120. Death frightens most people through ignorance of what it is: the body dissolves once the number of its harmonies is complete, that harmonisation being itself a number. This is the Greek behind the argument the Latin Asclepius makes at its section 27, and it survives because Stobaeus copied it out. Mead folds the same passage into the Asclepius at Liber 100 as a bracketed inset; Chambers gives it a page of its own.
Hermetic Fragments New
Hermetic quotations preserved by the Church Fathers, philosophers and compilers who cited Hermes Trismegistus in their own works, from Justin Martyr in the 150s to the Byzantine lexicon of the 10th century. The original texts are lost; these passages survive only because they were embedded in the writing of others. Six sources carry G.R.S. Mead’s English, from vol. III of Thrice-Greatest Hermes (1906), with the original Latin or Greek beside it where the citing author preserves it (Migne, Patrologia Latina 6; Patrologia Graeca 76). The seven notices are John David Chambers’s English of 1882, from Part III of his edition; they carry no fragment numbering, because he supplies none. Two of them he doubts as he prints them, and both cards say so.
Fragments from Tertullian
Fragment I. On the soul’s accountability after death: “That it may give account unto the Father of those things which it hath done in body.” From De Anima (c. 210 CE), and Copenhaver notes that Tertullian, writing early in the third century, was the first Christian author to quote a theoretical Hermetic text at all.
Fragments from Lactantius
Fragments II–X. Nine quotations from the Divinae Institutiones (c. 304–313 CE). Topics include the Name of God, the Cosmic Son, the Holy Word, sacrifice, the dual nature of man and the cosmic restoration.
Fragments from Cyril of Alexandria
Fragments XI–XXV. Fifteen quotations from Contra Julianum (c. 433 CE). Cyril drew on a corpus of fifteen Hermetic books to argue that pagan wisdom anticipated Christian doctrine. Includes the Incorporeal Eye, the Heavenly Word, Mind of Mind, the Generation of the Sun and the Supreme Artist.
Fragments from Zosimus of Panopolis
Fragments XXVI–XXVII. Two quotations from the alchemist of Panopolis (c. 300 CE), who read the alchemical Hermetica already circulating in his day, from his letter to Theosebeia on the spiritual path. On the Son of God drawing the soul from the region of Fate into the Incorporeal.
Fragment from Fulgentius
Fragment XXVIII. A single quotation from the Afro-Latin mythographer (c. 500 CE), who had access to a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum. “The human mind is god; if it be good, God then doth shower His benefits upon us.”
Hermetic References in Iamblichus
Paraphrases and doctrinal summaries from De Mysteriis (c. 300 CE). Includes the Bitys tradition, the two souls doctrine, the 36,525 Books of Hermes and the statement that Hermetic books were “translated from the Egyptian by men well skilled in philosophy.”
Notices of Hermes in Justin Martyr
Chambers’s notice I, and the earliest witness he gathers. Justin sends his pagan readers to Hermes for the doctrine of God and quotes the sentence that opens the excerpt at Liber 020, “To understand The God indeed is difficult, but to express Him impossible”. A writer martyred in 165 quoting it puts a floor under the age of that text, independent of the anthology that preserved it. Two further passages come from the Apologia, which Chambers reprints from the Library of the Fathers of 1861 and says so.
Notices of Hermes in Cyprian
Notice III, one sentence long: Hermes speaks of one God, and confesses Him incomprehensible and inestimable. The date carries it. A bishop of Carthage killed in 258 cites the monotheism of Hermes in passing, as a thing his readers already grant, which says something about how the Hermetic writings were read in Latin Africa in the middle of the third century. A single clause at second hand cannot show which text he had, and nothing more is claimed from it.
Notices of Hermes in Eusebius
Notice IV, which Chambers doubts in the sentence that introduces it. He calls the passage a clear quotation from the Poemandres and then adds that Eusebius probably confounds Hermes with the Shepherd Hermas. The Greek bears him out: what Eusebius reports is Irenaeus approving “the writing of the Shepherd”, and the words quoted open the Shepherd of Hermas, a Christian work of the second century. Kept because the confusion of the two names is itself a fact about how the Hermetic name travelled. It attests no Hermetic text.
Notices of Hermes in Clement of Alexandria
Notice V. Chambers prints no quotation here; he gives the references and summarises at second hand the famous account of the forty-two books, four of astrology and thirty-six holding the whole of Egyptian philosophy. The figures reach the page through his summary and have not been checked against the Stromata. What the notice does establish is narrower and still useful: by about 200 an Alexandrian Christian could describe a large and ordered body of Hermetic books, beside which the surviving tractates are a remnant.
Notices of Hermes in Arnobius
Notice VII, the shortest in the section, and it quotes nothing. Arnobius addresses the followers of Mercury, Plato and Pythagoras in one breath, as men of one mind walking in union in the same paths of doctrine. It carries no weight as evidence about any Hermetic text. On reception it carries a little: around 305 a Christian apologist could treat Hermetism, Platonism and Pythagoreanism as one school when attacking them.
Notices of Hermes in Augustine
Notice VIII, and the largest of Chambers’s refusals. He keeps the euhemerist report, that the fifth Mercury and his friend Asclepius were men who became gods, with the hawk-headed bird, the ibis and the moon. Augustine also quotes a Latin Asclepius at length in these chapters, and Chambers extracts none of it, holding the work no part of the true Hermes because it defends the worship of images. The Asclepius stands here at Liber 100, so a reader opening it should know the 1882 editor put it outside his canon.
Notices of Hermes in Suidas
Notice X, the latest witness in the volume. The Byzantine lexicon derives the name Trismegistus from Hermes having spoken concerning a Trinity, then gives the doctrine in the vocabulary of the Nicene one: intelligent Light before intelligent Light, Mind luminous of Mind, and Spirit encompassing all things. Cyril quotes the same lost passage five centuries earlier in different words, and Chambers records that the closing adjuration is credited by Cyril and by Justin to Orpheus, so two parts of the notice are doubtful on his own evidence.
Everard’s First Book
John Everard opened his 1650 Divine Pymander with a book standing outside the Corpus Hermeticum numbering of I to XVIII. Twelve sections of dialogue on piety and philosophy, then Hermes runs through “the things that are” by Heads: sixty-eight single-line propositions summing the doctrine, closing on a warning about who should not be told it. The same sayings survive in Greek as Stobaeus Excerpt XI, printed by Scott as The Brief Sentences in forty-eight aphorisms and by Mead as eleven verses inside his first Stobaeus excerpt. Everard cuts them finest of the three.
Hermes Trismegistus: His First Book
The book Everard puts first, and the finest division of it. Twelve sections of dialogue, then Hermes runs through “the things that are” by Heads in sixty-eight single lines, among them “Necessity is the Minister or Servant of Providence”. It closes by warning who should not be taught the doctrine it has just set out. The same teaching is divided more coarsely into 48 aphorisms in Scott’s Brief Sentences (CH 069) and into 11 at the tail of Mead’s first excerpt (CH 019).
Ancient Egyptian Texts In preparation
The sacred literature of pharaonic Egypt, the soil the Hermetica grew from: solar and creation hymnody beside the older wisdom writing, the sebayt, in which a father sets down for his son how to live and how to govern.
The Instruction of Ptah-hotep
The oldest complete book of counsel to survive from Egypt: forty-three maxims a vizier set down for his son on conduct, restraint and the right order of things (ma’at). Older still is the Ke’gemni beside it, of which only the closing leaves remain. The priestly wisdom the Hermetica later grew from.
The Instruction of Ke’gemni
The short companion to Ptah-hotep, standing first in the same papyrus: five maxims on restraint at another’s table and the silence that gives no offence. “The innermost chamber openeth unto the man of silence.”
The Instruction of Amenemhê’et
A king’s testament: Amenemhat I, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, speaks to his son from beyond a palace conspiracy, counselling watchfulness and the solitude of rule. The hard, political counterweight to the gentler instructions.
The Great Hymn to the Aten
Akhenaten’s hymn to the sun-disk, the fullest statement of the faith that briefly set a single power above all Egypt’s gods: the Aten, the light that fills every land, shapes the child in the womb and the bird in the egg. More than fourteen centuries before the Corpus Hermeticum at the narrowest reckoning, one generative source read as light and life together.
A Hymn to Amen-Rā
The great Theban hymn to Amen-Rā, the hidden power and the visible sun adored as one god: creator of all, who “heareth the cry of him that is oppressed” and from whose two eyes men and women proceeded. The older, inclusive counterpart to Akhenaten’s exclusive Aten.
A Hymn to Osiris Un-Nefer
The adoration that opens the Papyrus of Ani, addressed to Osiris, king of eternity and lord of the dead: the god who was killed and raised, named through his works, and asked at the last for a safe passage and “a homestead for ever” in the fields beyond. The resurrection pole of Egyptian religion.
A Hymn of Praise to Ra
The Book of the Dead’s hymn to the rising sun, copied into the Papyrus of Ani for the same scribe who adored Osiris. Ra is hailed as Khepera, the god who creates himself at dawn, rising in his Morning Boat while the serpent Aapep is cast into the fire. The solar counterpart to the Aten hymn.
A Hymn to Shu
A hymn to the air-god from a magical papyrus of about 1200 BCE. Shu is the first-born son of the sun, the dry space that holds earth and sky apart, who “didst create thyself” and is called “Truth, the lord of Truth”. His name is doubled to “twice great”, an old grammar of praise by doubling; the Thrice-Greatest that later crowned Thoth reads as a resonance of it rather than a descent from it.
The Maxims of Ani
A father’s book of everyday precepts, the Egyptian sebayt or “teaching”, from a papyrus in the Cairo museum. Keep the festivals, hold your tongue in council, honour your mother, prepare for the day death comes. Its counsel on measured speech and hidden prayer, “let thy words be hidden ... seek silence for thyself”, is the plain moral floor beneath the later Hermetic discipline.
A Hymn to the Sun-God
A hymn scratched on a slice of limestone, hailing the rising sun as Horus, “thou child of fire, who shinest like crystal, who destroyest the darkness and the night”. The fire that wakes the sleeping and burns the serpent of darkness at the door; it closes by naming the sun “the Judge of words and deeds ... who stablishest truth”.
A Hymn to Amen
The great Leiden hymn to the hidden god of Thebes, and the clearest three-in-one in Egyptian religion: “All the gods are three, Amen, Rā and Ptah ... He whose name is hidden is Amen. Rā belongeth to him as his face, and his body is Ptah.” One god given a hidden name, a face and a body, centuries before any Hermetic triad.
A Hymn to Osiris
Budge prints this on the same limestone slices as the Sun-god hymn beside it, and it gives the plainest Egyptian account of the world as a god’s body: the earth resting on his shoulders, the Nile out of the sweat of his hands, the grain and the reeds through his breath, and every canal, temple and tomb the living build lying on his back with no vacant space left.
The Book of the Dead New
The spells an Egyptian was buried with, to be used on the far side of death. Each was copied onto a papyrus roll, a coffin or an object placed in the tomb, and each is addressed to something the dead person expected to meet there: a gate, a serpent, a god, a judge. Chapters are given in more than one English where a second translation exists, since the wording is often what a claim about them turns on.
The Chapter of the Toiling Shabti Figure
A small figure was buried with the dead to do their work in the next world, and this is the spell that instructs it. The owner lists the labours he expects to be called for, sowing, watering and carrying sand, and asks that the judgment fall on the figure instead of on him. The figure then answers: “Here am I, whithersoever thou callest me.”
The Judgment
A dead man’s heart is weighed against a feather while a scribe-god records the result and a monster waits to eat him. What he says at that moment is addressed to the heart itself, asking it not to give evidence against him: “may there be no parting of thee from me in the presence of him that keepeth the scales.” The verdict then reports that his soul stood as a witness for him.
The Seven Tablets of Creation In preparation
Enūma Eliš, the Babylonian account of how the world was made, in seven tablets. Nothing in it exists until it is named. The kingship of the gods is settled by a word spoken and tested in front of witnesses, and the poem closes with a litany of fifty names given to the victor. In E. A. Wallis Budge’s English of 1921, made for the British Museum from the tablets it holds, with L. W. King’s of 1902 standing beside it on all seven; Tablet I runs to the same 142 lines in both, so the two can be read line against line. Two further texts sit on the tablets they belong to: Stephen Langdon’s English of 1923 of the Fifth and Sixth Tablets, restored from the Ashur fragments the earlier translators did not have. Nine texts in all, on seven cards.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet I
The poem begins before anything has a name: “When the heavens above were yet unnamed.” Apsu and Tiamat lie mingled as fresh water and salt, the gods are born inside them, and a father plots to kill his own children for the noise they make. It closes with Tiamat fastening the Tablet of Destinies on Kingu and promising that whatsoever goes forth from his mouth shall be established.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet II
The news of Tiamat’s army travels, and two gods are sent against her and turn back. Marduk agrees to fight on one condition, and it is not a throne: he asks that his word hold. What exactly he asks for is the one place these two Englishes part, and it decides whether the assembly promotes a champion or hands over the power that made it.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet III
An envoy carries Anshar’s message to the oldest gods, and this tablet prints it twice word for word, once as Anshar charges Gaga with it and once as Gaga delivers it. The same block already stood as narrative on the first tablet and in Ea’s mouth on the second, so one piece of news is told four times across three tablets. The gods then assemble, eat and drink, and decree Marduk their avenger. It is the clearest sight the epic gives of how it was built to be heard.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet IV
The test and the battle. Before they give Marduk command the gods set a cloak between them and tell him to destroy it by speaking and restore it by speaking again; when he does, they proclaim him king. He then drives the winds into Tiamat’s open mouth, splits her, and makes the halves of the world from her body. The test falls at the same eight lines in both Englishes below.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet V
The astronomy tablet, and the most broken of the seven: stations for the great gods, the year fixed, and three stars appointed to each of the twelve months. That is thirty-six divisions of the sky, the same count Egypt kept for its decans, and all three Englishes below give the line the same way. They part company one line earlier, over whether the stars set there are the zodiac at all.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet VI
Man is made, and the poem says what for. “I will solidify blood, I will form bone”: Kingu, found guilty of raising the strife, is bled, and mankind is fashioned from him to carry the service of the gods so that the gods may be free of the work. Babylon and E-Sagila are then built, and the naming of Marduk begins. The line about the blood is the most disputed in the poem, and the three Englishes below disagree over whose blood it is.
The Seven Tablets of Creation · Tablet VII
The fifty names. The story stops and liturgy takes over: the gods proclaim Marduk’s titles one after another, each with its gloss, and the epic that opened with nothing existing because nothing was named ends by naming its god fifty ways. That ending is the real one, since King reports a Babylonian commentary concluding the tablet originally closed at the fifty names, with the eighteen-line epilogue added later. His English also gives a second reason for the making of man, mercy, where the sixth tablet gives labour.
The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa In preparation
Tablet 63 of Enūma Anu Enlil, the celestial omen series: a record of the risings and settings of Venus with the fortune read from each one. Both faces are given as the tablet was written, each keeping its own line numbering. In the English A. H. Sayce made with the astronomer R. H. M. Bosanquet in 1880.
The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa · Obverse
The obverse, forty-five lines. Each entry dates a first or last appearance of Venus to a month and a day, then says what it meant: rains in the land, the crops prosperous, king to king peace sends. Observation and augury are written in one breath with no seam between them. At line 31 the editors mark a change of style and call what follows the probable beginning of a later hand.
The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa · Reverse
The reverse, forty-five lines, and the tidier face: Venus is seen on a dated day, stays fixed until a second date, disappears, reappears after a stated interval, and the land prospers or is seized. Line 33 steps outside to describe the document itself, twelve collections of observations in parallel columns. The two lines that would complete the tablet are broken off.
Babylonian Hymns and Prayers In preparation
The devotional literature of Babylonia and Assyria, given whole rather than in extract: hymns to the moon god at Ur, to Ishtar, to the storm god and to Marduk in procession, penitential psalms, prayers of the lifting of the hand, laments for Tammuz and litanies of intercession. What they show is a religion at prayer rather than at myth. Several are prayers with the suppliant’s name left blank, to be filled in by whoever needed them, and two appear in the English of both Robert Francis Harper and Robert William Rogers, so a reader can watch what a translator’s hand does to the same lines.
A Hymn to Sin, the Moon God
Nine titles piled up for the moon at Ur, and then the hymn changes register: from line 26 it stops praising the god and spends eight lines running on his word. The word proclaimed in heaven and on earth, sounding like a storm wind, bringing food and drink, making vegetation spring up, and causing truth and righteousness to arise so that men may speak the truth. It is one of several Babylonian texts in which a god’s spoken word, rather than the god, does the work.
A Hymn to Ishtar
Venus addressed instead of observed. What the goddess says she rises for is exactly what the Venus omen tablet records her doing: “To give forth omens do I arise, do I arise in perfectness,” five times over. She names Sin her father and Shamash her brother, so moon, sun and Venus stand in one household. Nothing here is gentle: she enters a house as a leopard, darkens heaven and quakes the earth and calls it her glory, and the calming that answers her opens on Anu and Ellil and then names every shrine she holds, down to Babylon and Nana at the end.
The Prayers of the Lifting of the Hand
Six prayers to Marduk, Nabu, Bau, Nergal and Ninib, said by a man with no name: he enters his own prayer as So-and-so, son of So-and-so, with blanks left in the line to be filled at the moment of use. What he asks for is interior, kindness put in his heart, the word he speaks made propitious. The prayer to Bau asks nothing for himself: his own god and goddess are angry, and he goes to a fourth party to have them changed.
A Hymn to Tammuz (No. 2) · Obverse
A lament sung by the goddess Ishtar for her dead consort, in which the speaker says what she will say before saying it. Fifteen lines answer every title the god held with the same three words, “abides no more”. Then two lines put thought in the accusative: “As for me to the abode of the abyss I set my thoughts.” Five more rehearse her speech in the future tense, and only at the end does the message arrive. Performed liturgy throughout, so the mind it shows is a composed one.
A Hymn to Tammuz (No. 2) · Reverse
The same lament with its refrain changed hands. Where the obverse answered each line with “abides no more”, a statement about where the god is, this face answers with “because of the lord”, which accounts for the mourner’s own fasting. Death is then put twice as sleep in an animal’s posture, like a dog and like a raven, before the plainest line of the two faces: “In solitude he himself is.”
A Hymn to Tammuz (No. 1) · Obverse
The older of the two Tammuz laments, and it opens on the animals: ewe and lamb, she-goat and kid, tied, carried off, slaughtered, six lines varying two words at a time before anybody speaks. One line shows a translator at work. Where the Sumerian reads “with wailing for him in the day of gloom”, the ancient Assyrian rendering printed beside it says “(Men) are filled with sorrow, by day they stagger in gloom”, so a state of the people is supplied where the original named a day.
A Hymn to Tammuz (No. 1) · Reverse
Nine lines of the litany return, with two titles the obverse never used, one of them the god’s own name. Then three consecutive lines set a whole life out by where the man lay in it: in his infancy in a sunken boat, in his manhood in the submerged grain, in a storm from the south and tempest. The fourth breaks the pattern by denying it, “in rest he lay not”.
A Hymn to Tammuz (No. 1) · Reverse of the Berlin Tablet
A second copy of the same hymn, every line broken at the head, kept for two things. A question is put to somebody sitting: “she is cast in gloom, thou alone why sittest thou?”, answered two lines later in the third person, “she is cast in gloom, she sits alone”. And the last three lines belong to the copyist rather than the poet, giving the tablet’s place in its series, recording that he checked it against the exemplar, and signing it: Nabu-nadin-šum son of Iddina-Papsukal.
A Prayer of the Raising of the Hand to Ishtar
A prayer to Ishtar that takes a man’s trouble apart. Five consecutive lines give his affliction five separate seats: the suffering body, the afflicted heart, the house pouring forth complaints, the spirit full of sorrow, and one the two translators read differently. He asks what he has done, and offers his own fear of the gods as a theory about himself. The instructions end: recite three times, and do not look behind you.
A Hymn to Ramman, the Weather God
Ten lines do nothing but name the storm god, each closing “is thy name, exalted god”. Then two lines report what he does to those who hear him, and the hearers are the senior gods: at his thunder the great mountain father is shaken, at his rumbling the great mother trembles. The tablet ends by stating its own length, thirty lines.
A Processional Hymn to Marduk
A liturgy built around what its user was expected to hold in mind: from the second line on, the scribe wrote a single word where the rest of the formula should stand, because whoever recited it was carrying the sentence already. It was sung by two parties, a priest giving the first half of each line and the people answering with the refrain, which asks for a change in the state of a god’s heart. Sixteen gods call the same two words at Marduk in turn.
The Penitential Psalms
Nine psalms of penance, whole, and a sustained look at an interior life. What is new here is a second voice: a priest breaks in to say what is inside the man standing beside him, “With woe and grief, full of sighs, is his soul”. The fourth is the one to read. It appeals to a god it cannot name for an offence it cannot name, then gives the reason: mankind has no judgment, and of all men alive none knows whether he does good or evil.
A Psalm of Penance
A penitential psalm that stays inside the man saying it. Nine of its 23 lines open “I unto”, and what changes from line to line is the state he approaches in: fear, tears, mournful song, prayers of intercession. Two lines turn from report into act, the garments removed and earth scattered on the prostrate body. The line to sit with is the twentieth, “May the heart of my god return to its place”, which is a claim about a mind that is not the speaker’s own.
A Liturgy and Prayer to the Moon God
One of the older Babylonian hymns, from Ur rather than from Nineveh. Two refrains alternate, “Oh Nannar god of wisdom art thou” and “God of the new light art thou”, and between them the moon god does farm work: gathering the oxen, giving lambs to the ewes, patron of the fuller’s craft, sighing for the fishermen. Set among the lambs and the reeds, with no change of register, sits “Wisdom unto children thou impartest”.
A Hymn to Ninib, in Memory of His Creating the Canals
A country whose water has stopped, and a god who answers it by moving earth and stone. The complaint is economic before it is religious: men had carried spade and basket for those waters, and the line about what they were paid breaks off mid-sentence. Ninib heaps stone from the mountain, gathers what he scattered and pours it into the Tigris. Then the harvest returns and the result is booked as a state of mind: “He made content the minds of the gods.”
A Hymn to the Moon God
Half of this tablet is gone, and the gaps are printed rather than smoothed. Four consecutive lines survive well enough to say something, and they are about the standing of a spoken word: “Thy command in the chamber of the gods, Returns not to its place. Thy word in heaven itself like...., Priest cannot measure.” Whatever leaves the god’s mouth in the assembly of the gods stays out, and the man conceding that it cannot be measured belongs to the class whose whole trade was measurement.
A Hymn to Tammuz and Innina
Twice in the same words this tablet asks for “a kindly eye upon the suffering cast”, which is the counterweight to the evil-eye tablets in the same volume, where the eye is the instrument of ruin. What travels along a look seems to depend on who is doing the looking. The reverse goes down to the nether world, and after line 16 the editor stops translating and prints, in his own brackets, that he is unable to interpret the rest.
The Tenth Tablet of “The City Which Has Been Plundered”
A lament in which the goddess says she did it herself. The obverse is her speaking: she rules four named temples, she is Erech’s bride and Kullab’s begetting mother, and then, in the same refrain that carries her titles, “My temple as a public square I have made unholy, maid am I, of Erech am I.” Nothing in the text treats that as a difficulty.
The Series “Excellent One of His People”
This tablet opens by asking, twice, whether the god can be understood at all: “Excellent one controller of his people, who can comprehend thy form?” Worth reading beside the Descriptions of Gods tablet, which does nothing but catalogue divine bodies piece by piece from the fillet to the sole of the foot. The reverse wishes rest on a soul three ways over, and its last line is one the editor marks “evidently a liturgical note, not a catchline”. Its colophon names three generations of copyists, a place, a month and a day.
A Liturgy of the Cult of Tammuz
Twenty-five broken lines, and at the eleventh the lament turns. Four times over: “Oh my exalted one, when thou risest, when thou risest”, the rising towards a mother named three ways in three lines. Then the god is identified with two other gods in succession, and the last three lines run down to the lower world, up to heaven and down again, breaking off on the descent. The editor read the whole as ending in a celebration of resurrection, a reading printed here as his, dated 1913.
A Litany of Nebo
For thirty-three lines the word itself is the subject of every sentence and the verb is destructive: the word shattered the mountain, stilled the heavens, made the earth shudder. Then the formula changes to a bellow, so divine speech and an animal roar occupy one slot. What the word does on the ground is smaller and worse: frost on the fields, a mother driven from shelter, oxen that cannot rise.
Innina and Tammuz · “That Which Is Crushed I Will Restore to Thee”
A dialogue run seven times with the verb changed each round. She asks where her plants have gone and who took them, made an end of them, caused them to perish, sundered, felled, crushed, garnered them. He answers every time in the same words: my sister, that which is gone, I will restore to thee. It closes on five imperatives about the coming year: the spade, the granaries heaped, the offerings commanded, the fields irrigated.
A Liturgy to Nintud, Goddess of Creation
Written on a four-sided clay prism bored through the centre so that it could be turned on a spindle as it was read, which makes the object itself a reading machine. Eight sections, each closing on the same five lines about a strong one like Ninib, a mother who may beget and a lady like Nintud. Langdon reads that refrain as the creation of man and woman, the Biblical Adam and Eve; the claim is his, and the refrain is printed so a reader can weigh it.
Lament of Innini for Tammuz
The god has been carried off by a demon and drowned in the Euphrates. The lament opens on a sound that has stopped, the cow that no longer moans for its calf, runs through four refusals to give him up, follows the goddess out into the plain and then into the land of the dead, and ends on a decision instead of a question: at the gate of the demon, verily I will place myself. Like the other laments for Tammuz, it never shows him coming back.
Lament to Tammuz and Innini
Thirteen legible lines from the start of a long liturgy in which both deities have gone from the earth, and almost every line ends in the same question: how long? It is put to the land, to the husband, to the queen who is the shepherd’s wife, to Tammuz by name and to the shepherd who sleeps, and the tablet breaks before any answer arrives.
The Mother Consecrates Her Son
A childhood told entirely in ceremonies: thirteen lines, no narrative between them and no age given for the boy. His mother washes him three times over, naming herself differently each time, then sprinkles, feeds, anoints and finally measures him with a reed, as though measuring were a rite like the others. Twice he is said to have grown of himself, the one thing she does not claim to have done.
Litany to Enlil, and the House Sunlight Does Not Know
Enlil is called unsearchable of heart, then named line by line: a crouching wild-ox, a bull that institutes destruction, the lord who makes oil abound for his people. Provider and ruiner stand in consecutive lines with nothing between them. Then the poem becomes a walk, inward and downward the whole way, from the city to a chamber of palm and cedar, to a house where the eye sees not, to a house sunlight does not know, and out into the great court of riches.
A Psalm on the Flute, to Enlil
What a god’s word does, told as a bestiary: a venomous claw, a grasp no fish escapes, a flood the sheep cannot cross. Eight gods are then named with one bare word after each, Oh Anu, who? Oh Enlil, who?, and no answer comes. The other side hunts for someone who does, and the list of intercessors keeps widening, from gods to temple officials to the city walls, ending on Compassion, Mercy and Repentance.
The Faithful Ewe Nourish Her Lamb: Two Hymns to Nergal, off a Tablet a Thief Had Mended
The tablet reached the museum looking undamaged because someone had filled its breaks with fresh clay and pressed new cuneiform into the gaps; Langdon scraped the forgery off before printing it. What survives is a request for a lapis sceptre and a blessing on the livestock. Three of its lines are the exact counterpart, verb reversed, of a curse elsewhere: the ewe, the goat and the mother, told there to reject their young and here to nourish them.
The Maid Called Mother of Sin, and the Four Men Told to Kill Her
A maid is charged with disgracing her house, and what follows is an outing: nine cheerful lines of “let us go”, city after city, on to Babylon. Only afterwards does the text say the trip went against the command of the queen of heaven, who looks at her with a look of death. Four men are then called on to kill her, each named with the implement of his own trade, the shepherd with his staff, the psalmist with his mesu. Having ordered it, the goddess cannot stop moaning.
Liturgy of the Cult of Tammuz
A congregation performs a goddess’s grief for the god who goes under the ground each year, and then the song turns. Twice it asks a question and answers it with an identity: who is the sun? thou art the sun. Who is the moon? thou art the moon. Four lines describe his rising as a return to his mother’s arms, the sky being where she is. The last three lines put him back below, so what the fragment describes is a year rather than a rescue.
“Who shall escape?”
Twelve lines from the end of a tablet whose series nobody has identified. One question is cried over and over, to the air, to the speaker’s own city, then to three temples in turn, until the scribe gives up writing it out and puts “etc.”, trusting the reciter to know it. The close measures how far a man has fallen by who no longer comes: first his maid, then his psalmist.
A Litany of Intercession, Shortened by Two Hands
Sixteen lines that open by counting who is weeping, by class of person and never by name, then turn to finding someone who will speak for them. Once the scribe has the pattern he stops writing it out: the two refrains shrink to the single syllables e and mu-un, alternating down the column until the divine names drop away as well. Langdon then abbreviates the English in his turn, closing with “etc., etc.” and leaving his column empty for the last eight lines.
The Astrological Reports New
The letters the king of Assyria received from the men he had posted around the empire to watch the sky, on tablets small enough to hold in one hand and each one signed by its sender. R. Campbell Thompson printed 277 of them for the British Museum in 1900, arranged by subject, and that is the order they keep here.
The Moon: its first appearance, its horns, the twenty-eighth and thirtieth days
Fifty-eight despatches on the Moon alone, and the first thing a reader meets is repetition: three separate observers send the king the same sentence, that when the Moon appears on the first day there will be silence and the land will be satisfied. They are quoting one handbook between them. Where they differ is in what each adds for the king, the month he applies it to, and whom the sign is evil for.
Omens from halos
Twenty reports on rings of light round the Moon, read by whatever stands inside them. Jupiter within the halo and the king of Akkad will be besieged; the Sun within it and all lands will speak the truth, the son with his father. One of them abandons the sky halfway through and becomes a report of palace intrigue, a murdered lord and a talent of silver carried off to men’s houses.
When the Moon and Sun are seen with one another
Twenty-nine reports on the days the Moon and Sun are seen together, filed by the day it happened: the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth. The day decides everything. On the fourteenth there will be silence, and the cattle of Akkad will lie down securely in the pasture; out of their expected time, a strong enemy will overcome the land.
Omens from the Sun
Eleven reports on the Sun, and one of them explains the move the others rely on. Saturn drew near the Moon; Saturn, the writer says, is the star of the Sun, and the Sun is the king’s star, so the omen is lucky for the king. The identification does the work, and the king is told so in the same breath.
Omens from stars
Sixty-one reports, the largest of the sections, on the planets and the fixed stars. Jupiter is the one they watch hardest: when it grows bright the king of Akkad will go to pre-eminence, and when it appears in the ecliptic there will be a flood and the crops of the land will prosper. One writer carries the sign all the way down to a price, a ka-measure of corn given for a gur.
Clouds, storms, thunder and earthquakes
Twenty-five reports across five of the shorter headings: clouds, the Moon’s disappearance, storms, thunder and earthquakes. Two of the five are a single tablet each. The earthquake reports are where the traffic runs the other way, one of them opening by saying the king had written first and this is the interpretation he asked for, so the watcher is answering rather than volunteering.
Eclipses, akulutum and births
Fourteen reports and one empty heading. The eclipse tablets quarter the Moon and give each quarter a country, the right to Akkad, the left to Elam, the top to Aharru, the bottom to Subartu, so where the shadow starts decides whom the evil falls on. The sixteenth heading has no report under it at all, only Thompson’s note that the word’s meaning is doubtful. The last is a butcher’s: his sow littered a foetus with eight legs and two tails, and he put it in brine and kept it in the house.
The Code of Hammurabi In preparation
A law code that belongs beside texts about the mind, for two reasons. It is written entirely as conditions and consequences, one of the oldest long stretches of if-then reasoning to survive, and twice it legislates on what a man meant rather than on what he did. Robert Francis Harper’s English of 1904, the whole monument in three parts.
The Code of Hammurabi · Prologue
Before a single case is stated, the king says who gave him the right to state it. Anu and Bel hand the rule of mankind to Marduk, raise Babylon, and call Hammurabi by name to make righteousness shine forth on the land; then comes a long roll of the cities he restored, each one a claim on the reader before a law is heard. Authority received rather than held, which is the move Enūma Eliš makes for Marduk himself.
The Code of Hammurabi · The Laws
Two hundred and forty-nine surviving entries, every one a case put as a condition and answered. No principle is ever stated; it has to be inferred from the instances. Two laws go further than the rest: a man who wounds another in a quarrel swears “I struck him without intent” and pays only the doctor, and where no witness can reach the truth the accused is sent into the river for an answer. The gap between 65 and 100 is where five columns were chiselled off the stone.
The Code of Hammurabi · Epilogue
Here the stone says what it is for. Any wronged man with a case is to come and stand before the king’s image and have the writing read to him: “may my monument enlighten him as to his cause and may he understand his case! May he set his heart at ease!” A public text meant to change what a person knows about his own position. Then eleven gods in turn curse whoever would efface it, at seventeen times the length of the blessing.
Prayers to the Sun-God In preparation
Two queries put to Shamash, the sun god, in the reign of Esarhaddon, and neither of them asks for anything. Each states its question with the precision of a contract, then spends as many lines again asking the god to disregard every possible flaw in the procedure that will produce his answer. In Robert Francis Harper’s English of 1901.
Prayers to the Sun-God · I
A hundred days and a hundred nights are set aside, and inside that window the priest asks whether Kashtariti, with Cimmerian, Median or Mannean troops, will take the city Kishassu, by battering-ram or famine or friendly speech. Then the guarding begins: heed not a blemish on the lamb, heed not an uncleanness at the place of vision, heed not that a word was passed over in haste in the mouth of the son of the seer.
Prayers to the Sun-God · II
The same machinery pointed the other way. A fortress on the Mannean border has been taken and held, and the question is whether Esarhaddon’s forces will get it back. The list of routes is shorter, the list of things the god is asked to overlook is nearly identical, and one clause is new: that an unclean AZAG may have touched the sacrifice. It ends as the first does, asking that the answer come as an oracle.
The Gilgamesh Epic New
The epic of a king who goes looking for the one thing he cannot have. Two of these tablets are the oldest copy that survives, a thousand years and more before the Nineveh library on which the familiar translations rest, and one is the Nineveh version's last tablet, in which the king questions his friend's ghost about the state of the dead.
The Pennsylvania Tablet
Gish dreams of a meteor he cannot carry and of an axe in the street, and takes both to his mother, who reads them as one man. Then Enkidu, who had never been taught to eat food or drink wine, is fed, given seven goblets, shaved, oiled, clothed and armed, and becomes a man; the price is set down in a single line before the sequence begins, that he forgot the place where he was born.
The Yale Tablet
The companion tablet, bought from the same dealer and written in the same hand, carrying the story straight on. Gish means to go to the cedar forest and kill its guardian, and everyone who speaks tries to stop him: Enkidu, who argues from having walked in the forest himself, and the elders of Erech, who argue that nobody ever has. Told he is in fear of death, he replies that if he falls he will establish his name.
The Eleventh Tablet · Column VI
The road home, counted in stages of seventy miles. Then one line: and Izdubar saw the hole. Nine lines later he is weeping in front of the boatman, saying he has done no good to himself and the lion of the earth does good. There is no plant here and no snake; there is a hole, a creature and a lament, and then the poem stops on the measurements of the city wall.
The Eleventh Tablet · Column V
The plainest good thing that happens to anyone in the poem, and it is done twice over. The boatman is told to wash the sick king in the sea until his disease turns to beauty and his hair comes back, and then he does it, in the same words with the verbs turned. Seven garments are counted onto him. The wife does the clothing; her husband, twelve lines later, says he did it.
The Tenth Tablet · Hasisadra’s Answer
The king crosses the waters of death to question the one man who never died, and the question itself is lost off the tablet. Fifteen lines of the answer survive. Death exists and has no likeness; the man and the servant are taken by the same hand; a goddess has fixed death and life, and the day of it is not known.
The Tenth Tablet · Column VI
The forest story told a second time in seventeen broken line-ends. We ascended. With our strength. The man telling it has nobody left to say we about, and he keeps saying it. The last surviving word of the column is the Euphrates.
The Tenth Tablet · Column V
Two things the rest of this volume says are missing turn up here in the king’s own mouth: we conquered also Humbaba who in the forest of pine trees dwelt, and then his heart failed, and he did not strike, over him I wept.
The Tenth Tablet · Column V, the fragment of another copy
I wept. Bitterly I spoke. Six broken line-ends in which the king finally says these things about himself rather than having them reported about him, and then, after the rule, a leopard of the desert with nothing around it.
The Tenth Tablet · Column III, the fragment of another copy
Four half-lines from a speech about how he got his friend: for my friend, free thee, weapon, and then bright star. The friendship began with a thing falling out of the sky, which makes the fourth line worth writing down and not worth an argument.
The Tenth Tablet · Column IV, the fragment of another copy
At the far end of the world he recites the offers that once bought him his friend: a couch, a seat on the left, kings kissing the feet. A god spoke that list in the third person eight tablets earlier. Here every verb has moved into the king’s own mouth.
The Tenth Tablet · Column IV
The poem counts the spear-strokes in threes and then leaps to the hundred and twentieth. Halfway through it walks away from the traveller entirely and into the head of the old man on the far shore, who is left at the column’s end saying I wonder into a gap.
The Tenth Tablet · Column III
The friend whom I loved, I am not like him. Two lines give the reason for the whole journey, and the rest of the column is practical: an axe, a forest, a spear of five gar, a ship, and forty-five days at sea compressed into half a line.
The Tenth Tablet · Column II, the second fragment
Twelve line-ends with every opening broken away. A ship, a death, a river, a boatman, a burning. The famous phrase suggests itself and the tablet does not supply it, so the words stand here as separate line-ends and are left that way.
The Tenth Tablet · Column II, the first fragment
The boatman opens with a refusal: why should I curse thee. He lists the same marks two others have read on this man, and declines to add anything to them. Then the traveller answers the diagnosis himself, in the first person and twice in the negative.
The Tenth Tablet · Column I
A woman by the sea watches him coming, covered with stripes of affliction and carrying the brand of the gods. Her thinking is reported from inside: she ponders, speaks within her heart, reaches a resolution, and the resolution is to shut her gate.
The Ninth Tablet · Column VI
Twelve lines the translator calls too mutilated to render with certainty. Jet stone, ukni stone, a nest of stone, a goddess, a sea named twice, worms and caterpillars, and the traveller passing through, looking, and carrying something away.
The Ninth Tablet · Column V
Five more stages of sand in identical words, and then the register changes: a shadow of the sun, a beautiful situation, and a wood equal in appearance to the forest of the trees of the gods, carrying emeralds as its fruit and stone shoots on its branches.
The Ninth Tablet · Column IV
The guardian says go, and the poem starts counting. Three lines to a stage, the number rising by one each time, the two descriptive lines identical every round: sand the whole way, no cultivated field, and he was not able to look behind him.
The Ninth Tablet · Column III
He names the man he is going to: the flood survivor, seated in the assembly of the gods, to whom death and life are known. The guardian answers with two words and a road. Do it not. Twelve stages, sand the whole way, not a cultivated field.
The Ninth Tablet · Column II
Beings crowned at the lattice of heaven with their feet under hell keep the gate where the sun rises and sets. The guardian asks his wife who comes with the affliction of god on his body, and she answers: the work of god is laid upon the man.
The Ninth Tablet · Column I
Three losses in five lines: a friend, an office and a certainty. I had no judgment like Heabani; weakness entered into my soul; death I feared. The journey begins in the line after the fear is named.
The Eighth Tablet · Column VI
The man who reads dreams for other people spends twelve counted days failing to read one. Then the king asks aloud whether the companion made for him has turned hostile. The translator notes that what came next, the friend’s violent death, survives nowhere.
The Eighth Tablet · Column III
Friend thou dost not ask me why I am naked, thou dost not inquire of me why I am spoiled. A man in a bad state complains that nobody has asked, and then reports a third dream that vanished before he could tell it.
The Eighth Tablet · Column II
A dream of a mountain told to a friend, and the verdict that the dream was deceptive. Elsewhere in this poem a dream is a message worth reading; here it is denied, and the mountain is dealt with awake. The second half counts a march in stages.
The Eighth Tablet · Column I
A man addresses a door, gives its height and breadth and the city it was made in, then turns on the tree it was cut from: thy bush is not strong, thy shadow is not great, thy smell is not agreeable. The next line reports that the tree was angry.
The Fifth Tablet · Column VI, the surviving portion
Six lines: cedar, a number, the head of Humbaba, a weapon sharpened, and then a phrase that stops the eye, a tablet of the story of fate. Beneath them the translator strips away the marvellous incidents and recovers a political assassination.
The Fifth Tablet · Column II
Forty-five lines went to the approach; the encounter itself gets eight broken ones. They pass through the forest, the guardian is named, two denials lose their subject, and the companion opens his mouth to say something now gone. No line here describes the killing.
The Fifth Tablet · Column I
Two men stand at the edge of the forest and judge its height, its approach and the path the guardian walks. Then line 6 calls the place the seat of the gods and the sanctuary of the angels, and four lines later the same speech arranges for his corpse to be surrounded by birds of prey.
The Fourth Tablet · Column V
Seven lines of an ambush being set. The guardian of the forest pours a tempest out of his mouth, hears the gate, takes up the sharp weapon and stands waiting in the path. The seventh line hands the scene to the intruders and the tablet stops.
The Fourth Tablet · Column IV, the uncertain fragment
Ten lines the translator prints under a heading admitting he has no idea what they are. A man heavy and not rising, a song, the sister of the gods, the daughters of the gods growing. None of it attaches to the expedition the chapter around it is about.
The Fourth Tablet · Column III
Ten broken lines of the prayer running down, and two of them stand word for word at the end of the column before. Either the poem repeats them, or the two fragments are copies of one passage, or one of them is in the wrong place. The repetition is left visible instead of tidied.
The Fourth Tablet · Column II, the second fragment
A city assembling, a bed made ready for the goddess, and then two whole lines in a page of wreckage: the made man opens the great gate of the house of assembly, and the king goes in. Nothing here says who told him to.
The Fourth Tablet · Column II
An altar goes up, two hands are lifted to the sun god, and the prayer that follows is a complaint: why did you ever give this man your protection, when he is riding out against a thing he cannot have measured. The speaker is left unnamed here, because the translator's own introduction and his own English disagree about who it is.
The Fourth Tablet · Column I
Two men fix the terms before they set out: kill the tyrant of the forest, leave his carcass to the birds of prey, and the survivor is made king. The wood they are going to is a forest of pine trees here, and the translator explains on the facing page why he chose pine where others put cedar.
The Second Tablet · Column III
A king who cannot sleep posts a reward for whoever can tell him what his dream meant: rank, gold, entry to the temples, seven wives. The dream then comes in his own mouth. Stars fall out of heaven to the earth, a thing with a lion's claws stands over him, and the last word before the tablet breaks is a corpse.
The Second Tablet · Column IV
A god speaks from heaven to the wild man and offers him a life: trappings of divinity, a grand couch, a seat on the left, kings kissing his feet and the men of the city made silent in front of him. Nothing offered is a power or a task. He gives no answer, and the anger of his heart is simply appeased.
The Third Tablet · Column I
Fourteen line-ends survive at the head of the tablet, four of them about knowing: knows all things, wisdom of all things, the knowledge that is seen and that which is hidden. No name survives with them. One first-person scrap stands out from the wreckage, I strove with him not to leave, and then the lines are lost.
The Third Tablet · Column II
A city complains that its king will not leave its households alone, and a goddess is asked to do something about it. She lies down on the ground and makes a man, faced like the corn god and given knowledge of men and countries. He goes to live in the desert with the gazelles, where a hunter finds him and loses his nerve three days running.
The Third Tablet · Column V
The wild man walks into the city, the chiefs submit and a festival is held. Someone praises him as the one the gods gave intelligence to, who has come down from the mountain and will interpret the king's dream. The king then tells that dream to his mother: the stars of heaven, and something striking on his back.
The Third Tablet · Column IV
The two women reach the man who lives with the gazelles, and one line records what it costs him: she spoke, and the wisdom of his heart flew away and disappeared. He accepts an invitation to the city and a meeting with its king. Twenty lines of the encounter are missing, cut by the translator as unfit for general reading.
The Third Tablet · Column III
A hunter meets a wild man who eats with the gazelles, and stands in front of his field three days until his courage dries up. He tells his father, then the king, in the same words both times. The king sends him back with two women to bring the wild man in. Six lines of this column were left untranslated by the translator as unfit for general reading.
The Seventh Tablet · Column III
Twenty-three broken lines in which someone is cursed or warned to their face: let them weep for thee, occupy thy seat, thy resting place, thy feet. Two names survive the damage, and one line gives the underworld a keeper, the great jailor. The translator says openly that he is unsure the fragment belongs to this tablet at all.
The Sixth Tablet · Column VI
Twelve lines holding a victory announcement in which the king names himself twice as the ablest man in the city, a feast with the chiefs on couches at night, and Heabani falling asleep in the middle of it and dreaming. He wakes and begins to explain the dream, and the tablet stops mid-sentence before he says a word of it.
The Sixth Tablet · Column IV
The divine bull is loose in the city and this is the fight, told almost entirely in numbers: three hundred warriors, a parting into two divisions, two hundred more, a third division. The column is broken enough that who actually killed the animal cannot be read off it, and the translator settles the question from a picture on a cylinder seal instead.
The Sixth Tablet · Column III
Turned down by a king, the goddess goes up to heaven to complain to her parents. In five words she asks her father to create the divine bull that is later sent against the city. The rest of her speech, including whatever she offered or threatened to get it, has broken away from the tablet.
The Sixth Tablet · Column V
The bull sent to punish the king is dead. The goddess climbs the city wall to curse him, a piece of the animal is thrown at her feet, and she gathers her maidens and holds a mourning over it. Then the men weigh the horns, thirty manas of stone inside them, dedicate them to a god, wash their hands in the Euphrates and ride round the city.
The Seventh Tablet · Column IV
The house of darkness described from inside the epic: no exit, a road that never turns back, dwellers longing for light, dust for nourishment and mud for food. Then something the more famous version leaves out. A crown is being kept for the speaker there, among the crowned rulers of old, and the food is carrion and the water stagnant, both said in the same breath.
The Sixth Tablet · Column II
The king justifies his refusal by naming six of the goddess’s lovers and what became of each: Dumuzi, whom country after country mourns; an eagle with broken wings begging for them in the forest; a lion, a war horse, a ruler turned into a leopard and torn by his own dogs; and her father’s gardener, who answered her back and was made a pillar in the ground.
The Sixth Tablet · Column I
A goddess proposes marriage to a king and then prices the offer: a chariot of blue stone and gold, days of conquest, a country whose people will kiss his feet, tribute from the mountains, flocks bearing twins, and no rival anywhere. His answer is the worst-preserved part of the tablet, and what survives of it is a list of ruins.
The Twelfth Tablet · Column VI
The one column of this tablet that came out of the ground undamaged, and the answer the king was asking for. A couch to lie on and pure water to drink; then the man killed in battle, his parents carrying his head and his wife weeping, each set of lines closing with the same refrain, thou seest and I see. The epic ends on the copyist’s own note.
The Twelfth Tablet · Column IV
The dead man refuses to answer. He says the word terrible three times in two lines, asks that the earth cover what he has seen, and sets a condition: he will tell his friend when his friend is under the earth as well. What he says instead is about rejoicing in youth, with the worm and the dust named in the next breath.
The Twelfth Tablet · Column III
The king wants his friend back and goes from god to god asking for it. Bel says nothing, the moon god says nothing, and the third god sends his son, who opens the earth: the ghost of Heabani comes up out of the ground, in a phrase the translator gives twice over, like glass or transparent. Then the king starts asking questions.
The Twelfth Tablet · Column II
The lament comes round a second time with the pronouns changed, so that the mourner has stopped addressing his friend and started describing him. Then a list of the deaths this man did not die: no fate took him, no plague, not the house of the god of the dead, not the battlefield. Each denial ends in the same three words, the earth took him.
The Twelfth Tablet · Column I
Heabani is dead and the king speaks to him, in a list of everything a dead man no longer does: the bow he does not lift, the mace he does not grasp, the shoes he does not wear, the wife he loves and does not kiss and the wife he hates and does not strike. It ends with the arms of the earth taking him, and a cry to the dark.
The First Tablet · The fragment K 3200
Erech under a conqueror, its gods turned to flies and its queen appealing to Bel. Smith places the fragment at the head of the poem and says twice that the placement is his guess, then withdraws on the next page his own account of who the conquerors were. Two proper names in it, Ganganna and Sikkim, answer to nothing else he prints.
An unplaced fragment · Bel’s messenger and the fragrance of the forest
Eight lines, every one of them broken, which Smith prints at the close of his chapter on the first tablet because he could find nowhere else to put them. A messenger says Bel his father sent him; someone rejoices at the fragrance in the midst of the forests. It is here for the same reason he printed it, that a fragment without a home is still evidence.
Babylonian Myths and Legends New
The shorter Babylonian myths, gathered apart from the creation epic and the Gilgamesh tablets, which have collections of their own. It opens with the descent of Ishtar into the land of No-return, and includes a dragon-myth in which the fight comes after the world has been built rather than before it. Mostly in Robert William Rogers’s English of 1912, with the dragon-myth in Leonard William King’s of 1902.
The Myth of Adapa · Tablet One
Two consecutive lines set out what a god gave his son and what he kept back. “He granted him a wide ear to reveal the destiny of the land, he granted him wisdom, but he did not grant him eternal life.” A wide ear is the translator’s literal rendering. What follows is nine lines of catering: the man with the widest hearing in the world bakes the bread, lays the table and steers the fishing boat for his city.
The Myth of Adapa · Tablet Three
A second copy of the same passage, printed beside its twin, and it keeps two lines the twin does not. One of them is the sharpest in the passage: “With a wide ear, knowing the heart of the great gods”, putting the granted faculty and the knowing of other minds side by side in a single breath. Seven lines earlier the second half of that phrase stands on its own, so it reads as a standing epithet rather than a consequence of the first.
The Myth of Adapa · Tablet Two
A father tells his son what will be set before him at the door of heaven and what to refuse, and ends: the counsel I have given thee, forget not. The son does exactly that. What he refuses is the food of life and the water of life, and he is sent home to die; his answer, when asked why, is a quotation of his father. Late in the tablet a god objects on quite another ground: why was the heart of heaven and earth revealed to a human being at all?
The Legend of the Seven Evil Demons
Seven storms with faces, catalogued one by one: a south wind, a dragon whose open mouth none can measure, a leopard that carries off the young, a wolf that does not know how to flee. What they are for is an eclipse, so this is the story the profession told about what an eclipse is, beside which stand the reports the watchers actually sent the king on the night. One line is worth the whole text: hearing the news, a god “a plan in his heart he pondered”.
Ellil and the Labbu · Obverse
A sea monster given in measurements rather than adjectives: fifty biru long, a mouth six cubits across, twelve cubits round the ears, dragging through nine cubits of water. The gods grab the hem of the moon god’s robe and ask who will go and kill it. The line worth having is the answer of the god they name: you have sent me, and “I do not understand the . . . of the Labbu”. The break falls exactly where the thing he fails to grasp would stand.
Ellil and the Labbu · Reverse
Nine surviving lines, and their shape is instruction then execution. Raise a cloud, stir up a storm, hold the seal of thy life before thy face, set on and thou shalt slay the Labbu; and then each of the three reported done, in order, in almost the same words. The Adapa legend runs the identical structure to the opposite end, its hero following his father’s instructions exactly and losing eternal life by it.
Another Version of the Creation of the World by Marduk
A second Babylonian account of the beginning, disagreeing with the creation epic. It defines the beginning by listing what did not exist: no reed sprung up, no brick laid, no city built, and then the whole situation in four words, “All lands were sea”. Thirty lines later the same list is read back in the positive and in the same order, so the poem closes by cancelling its own opening item by item. Mankind is formed for a stated reason: so the gods can live somewhere they want to.
An Incantation against Toothache
Six lines of cosmology in which each thing gives birth to the next, from the sky down to the worm that causes toothache. Then the worm speaks. It asks what it will be given to eat, refuses what it is offered, and states its own terms: set me between the teeth and the gums, that I may devour the blood of the teeth. It is destroyed for saying so, before it has eaten anything. The tablet ends with the recipe, beer, a named plant and oil, put on the tooth.
A Cosmology in a Ritual
An account of the beginning whose occasion is known: it was recited when a temple had fallen and was being rebuilt. Everything in it is made for a job. The god of bricks, reed and forest for building work, the god of carpenters, the god of smiths, then a high priest, then a king to adorn the shrines, and last of all men, made to carry on worship. Between the carpenters and the smiths stands a god whose name means “prayer”.
The Creation of the Moon (and the Sun)
A schoolboy’s practice tablet, and the object matters as much as the text. Seven lines of a Sumerian composition on one face, seven of a Babylonian one on the other, both on the making of the moon, and the second is not a translation of the first. Somebody’s teaching method was to set two independent accounts of one subject side by side. Both give the moon the same job: to create the month and to fix signs for heaven and earth.
The Creation of Cattle and Beasts
A small, badly broken tablet whose title misdescribes it. The heavens, the firmament, the earth and all the cattle and beasts go by in four lines. Then it slows down and gives its remaining nine to two small creatures made at the same time as the larger animals, twice described, in broken lines, as one white and one black. Somebody thought their making worth a tablet while the making of all cattle got a clause. What they were cannot be recovered.
An Address to the River of Creation
Nine lines of praise used to open two different spells, and its first two lines contradict each other without noticing: the river created all things, and the great gods dug the river out. The contradiction is the useful part, since it shows what these preambles were for. Line 8 connects to the law code of Hammurabi: “Thou judgest the cause of mankind.” Two of Hammurabi’s laws send an accused person into the river to find out.
The Babylonian Cosmogony according to Damascius
The Babylonian beginning as reported in Greek by the last head of the Athenian school, about a thousand years after the tablets. The worn-down names can all be matched to the epic, so a reader can set a philosopher’s summary beside the poem he is summarising. One line is worth the visit: he identifies Mummu with “the intelligible Cosmos”, a term of his own school, and marks it as his own guess.
Ashur the Creator
Eight lines in which every creator title the Babylonian epic spends seven tablets establishing for Marduk is handed to the Assyrian national god instead. Marduk had displaced Ashur’s predecessor in Babylonia, and in Assyria Ashur displaces Marduk, so the same political operation runs twice in opposite directions. One line is quietly reflexive: the king who dedicates the tablet is called the maker of the statue of the god who is called the maker of all men.
Primitive Revelation, according to Berossos
Men lived like beasts until a creature with the body of a fish and the head and feet of a man came out of the sea, spent the days among them taking no food, and taught them letters, numbers, arts, the founding of cities and temples, laws and the survey of land. Then one sentence worth the whole text: “From that day nothing else remarkable has been found out.” Nothing in the curriculum is interior; nobody is taught anything about themselves.
Ishtar’s Descent to Hades · Obverse
The goddess goes down to the house whose people are clothed like birds and eat clay. At seven doors an ornament is taken from her, one at a time, and each time she asks why and gets the same answer. Above ground, while she is gone, nothing mates. The two translations disagree about who does the weeping for the bereaved: the queen of the dead herself, or the visitor she orders to do it.
Ishtar’s Descent to Hades · Reverse
With the goddess of love shut underground nothing mates and nobody works, so the god of wisdom makes a being for the purpose and sends it down to charm the queen of the dead. Ishtar is brought back up through the seven gates and given her ornaments back in reverse order. The last twelve lines turn to a funeral, and the two translations of them barely agree.
Ea and Atrakhasis · Column I
In the flood story a god argues that a famine would have been kinder than a deluge. This is the tablet where the famine is tried. It is counted year by year, and the fifth is the one that stays with you: a daughter waits at the door, her mother will not open it, and each of them watches the other’s scales. The sixth year says what came of that. Seventeen lines, the rest of the column lost.
Ea and Atrakhasis · Column II
The rain is cut off above and the springs held back below, and the fields go white with salt at night, which is what actually ruined farmland in southern Iraq. Then the womb is closed, and the six-year famine runs through again word for word, the way a text meant to be recited reuses a block. It ends with the man praying, getting no answer at all from his god, walking to the shrine door and setting his bed down by the river.
Ea and Atrakhasis · Column III
The god calls his assembly and says what the trouble is: men are noisy. He orders illness, headache, chill and calamity to shut them up, and four lines later the same list arrives as fact. Then the man who lay down by the river prays again, in the same three lines, with one word changed. Last time his god did not speak with him. This time he does.
Ea and Atrakhasis · Column IV
Mankind is made a second time, and the tablet shows it as a job of work. The incantation is said first. Then the goddess spits on the clay, pinches off fourteen pieces, lays seven on the right and seven on the left with a brick between the rows, opens the nostrils, calls seven mothers, and makes seven men and seven women in the one operation. She settles their destiny as well as their shape.
The Legend of Sargon, King of Agade
A king writes his own life and starts by saying he never knew his father. His mother had him in secret, put him in a basket of rushes sealed with pitch and set him on the river; an irrigator drew him out, raised him as a son and made him a gardener, and from there a goddess and a throne. Halfway down, the list of everything he did switches from what he has done to what the next king is to do, the same deeds in the same order.
Nergal and Ereshkigal
The whole thing starts because a god stayed in his seat when a messenger came in. The queen of the dead takes it as an insult, demands his head, and he arrives at her gates with fourteen named diseases lent to him as bodyguards, posting one at each door as he goes. He drags her off the throne by the hair to behead her, and she stops him with a sentence and an offer: marriage, the earth, and the tablet of wisdom put into his hand.
The “Cuthaean Legend of the Creation”
A king tells what happened when he sent his armies against a people the gods had made with the bodies of birds and the faces of ravens. One hundred and twenty thousand men the first year, ninety thousand the second, sixty thousand seven hundred the third, and not one of them came back. He asks for the flood. Then he writes the whole thing on a tablet, leaves it in a temple, and tells whoever rules next to read it and stay behind his walls.
The Practice Tablet Where the Moon Becomes the Sun
A student’s exercise tablet: the opening of a Sumerian composition written out, the opening of a Babylonian one set beside it, and the student’s own grammatical notes underneath. Read the two together and three things change. The gods are renamed, which is expected. The witness changes, from the god who beholds the new moon come forth to mankind. And the luminary changes, from the Moon-god to the Sun-god, in the line directly after one that still speaks of the renewal of the month.
Two Small Creatures, One White and One Black
Eight lines of cosmogony open this fragment, the gods in assembly creating the heavens, forming the earth, fashioning the cattle and the beasts, and every one of those clauses is subordinate. The main verb arrives at line 9 and it is about two small animals, made glorious in form among all the beasts, one white and one black. Then the tablet breaks, and what the two were is lost.
Another Version of the Dragon-Myth
In the creation epic the dragon is killed first and the world is built out of her. Here she arrives afterwards, to a world that already has cities in it, and six lines measure her like a surveyor’s note: fifty kaspu long, which the editor works out at three hundred miles. The god sent to kill her says he does not know how; when the tablet resumes he has done it with weather and a seal held before his face.
The Flood Stories New
All six Babylonian accounts of the deluge, in the order Robert William Rogers numbered them in 1912. The first and longest is the Eleventh Tablet of Gilgamesh, where the survivor tells the story himself. After it come a second version in which the hero carries his own name, two early fragments, the Greek account written by a Babylonian priest, and a Roman report of the world ending by fire instead.
The Babylonian Flood Story · Column I
A king who crossed the world to find the one man who never died asks him how he managed it, and the answer is the flood: the council of gods, the order to build, the ship’s size, a cargo listed like a household inventory. In Rogers’s English a god evades his oath by telling the plan to a wall. Smith’s English of 1876 has no wall in it.
The Babylonian Flood Story · Column II
The ship is built, loaded with silver, gold and the seed of all life, and the sky opens. The middle of the column is a ledger of bitumen and feasting, and two lines report the inside of the man: he watched the weather, and he says he was afraid. The two translations here disagree about the hull’s measurements and about whether the sun god sends the flood himself.
The Babylonian Flood Story · Column III
The gods who called for the flood are frightened of it. They climb to the highest heaven and crouch like dogs against the wall, and Ishtar speaks: confessing that she commanded it in one translation, that she foretold it in the other. The man opens a window, sits down and weeps. Then the dove, the swallow and the raven, and a sacrifice the gods gather over like flies.
The Babylonian Flood Story · Column IV
The god who sent the flood finds the ship and wants to know who escaped. Ea answers with an argument about proportion, put four times with the instrument changed each time: lions, a wolf or a leopard, famine, pestilence, any of which would have thinned mankind rather than ending it. The two translations then part company over which god goes aboard to bless the survivor.
Another Recension of the Deluge Story
A second flood tablet from the same library, outside the epic, and it settles something. The epic calls the survivor by two different names nine lines apart; here he is Atra-khasis outright, which is the other telling those lines came from. He also answers the god in a way the epic never lets him: he has never built a ship, and would somebody please draw him a plan on the ground. Seventeen lines, four of them stubs.
An Ancient Babylonian Deluge Fragment
The oldest flood tablet here, about a thousand years before the famous one, and dated to the day by its own colophon: the twenty-eighth of Shabatu, in the year the king built a city at the mouth of the Euphrates. The junior scribe signs it. Partway down the first column he writes the word “broken”, meaning the copy in front of him had failed there, and he says so instead of guessing. Most of the rest is missing.
Another Ancient Babylonian Deluge Fragment
Fourteen broken lines from Nippur, published by their discoverer as the oldest flood story in existence. Our translator prints that claim and then dismantles it in three sentences before printing the text anyway. Worth reading for the second surprise: the line here that sounds most like Genesis, about the creeping things going in two of everything, is not on the tablet at all. It was supplied by the modern editor, and the footnote saying so is what lets you catch it.
The Babylonian Deluge according to Berossos
The same flood told by a Babylonian priest to Greek readers, and it carries one thing no clay tablet does. Before he builds the boat the man is ordered to bury a written account of the beginning, middle and end of all things in a city called Sippar, and after the water goes down a voice tells the survivors to dig the writings up and share them out. The ship is still on the mountain, and people scrape the tar off it to keep harm away.
Destruction by Fire
The other end of the world, and the one text here that gives it a timetable. The same Babylonian priest, quoted this time by a Roman, says the earth burns when all the planets gather in one sign and drowns when they gather in the opposite one, the two signs being those of the two solstices. Destruction becomes something an astronomer could work out in advance. Our translator notes that no Babylonian or Assyrian tablet says any of it.
Liturgical and Doctrinal Texts New
The five short texts Robert William Rogers grouped in 1912 as the liturgical and doctrinal material: the rule for an evil day, the pantheon, the gods of the months, the doctrine of substitution and the scapegoat. They are prescriptions and lists rather than stories, and they show the religion at the point where it tells somebody what to do.
The Supposed Babylonian Sabbath
Eleven short clauses for an evil day, kept five times a month. The king may not change his shirt or ride out, the priest may not give a decision in the secret place, and the physician may not lay a hand on a patient. Cursing is unsuitable that day. At nightfall the king brings his gift, and only then, the tablet says, is the lifting of his hands pleasing to god. The word “supposed” in the title is the translator’s own caution.
The Gods of the Months
Every month of the year handed to a god, and then a thirteenth for the leap month, which goes to the national god of Assyria. The odd thing is in the names: the first month and the seventh both mean “beginning”, six months apart, which the translator reads as the fossil of an older year that opened at the autumn equinox instead of the spring one. He also notes that the Jews took this calendar over during the captivity and kept it for centuries.
The Pantheon
Three tablets that fold many gods into one. Nine small gods become aspects of one, eleven goddesses become aspects of Ishtar, and then the great gods themselves become Marduk: Marduk of war, Marduk of justice, Marduk of rain. A century ago that last list started a furious argument about whether Babylon had arrived at one god, and our translator settles it in a sentence. It is pantheism, he says, and not even the milder thing people claim for it. Four lines on, the same scheme absorbs the clay pot and the drain.
The Doctrine of Substitution
A lamb given for a man, and itemised: head for head, neck for neck, breast for breast, with the broken line after it probably doing the feet. The formula is written out twice, once in the old sacred language and once in the spoken one, which is how something meant to be recited gets copied. Beside it, the same trick reversed: in an Assyrian treaty a ram is killed and the officiant says over the severed head that it is not the ram’s but the vassal king’s, should he break his word.
The Scapegoat
A sheep is beheaded and its body carried round a temple to pick up whatever is in it, then thrown into the river at nightfall. The clause worth reading is the last: the two priests who did the work must leave the city, bring nothing of the god back with them, and stay out in the country from the fifth day to the twelfth. Cleaning the temple leaves the cleaners unclean, and the rite has the quarantine built into it.
Chronological Materials New
The chronicles, king lists, Assyrian eponym lists and Ptolemaic canon that Robert William Rogers put at the back of his 1912 volume: Babylonia and Assyria’s own account of who reigned and what happened. The chronicles are the readable part, and they read as judgements. Each names a cause for a reign’s collapse, and the cause is usually something the king did to Babylon or to its temple.
The Sargon Chronicle
The same Sargon who tells his own story in the birth-legend, written this time by somebody else. The basket, the gardener and the goddess have gone: he crosses the eastern sea, subdues the west, and then in his old age every land revolts and Marduk starves his people, because he had taken soil from Babylon’s trenches to make Agade its equal. One line, with no comment attached, records the Hittites marching on Akkad.
The Babylonian Chronicle · Column I
Forty-four entries covering some fifty years, in a form that never varies: a man “took his seat on the throne”, something happened, and the reign is closed with a count of years. One entry stops the reader. The scribe reaches an event he cannot vouch for and writes that down instead of filling it in: “The battle of Nabonassar against Borsippa is not recorded.” A copy of the same tablet leaves those lines out altogether.
The Babylonian Chronicle · Column II
Babylon’s throne filled three times over by somebody else’s decision: an Assyrian king places a man on it, replaces him with his own son, and Elam then places a third. The line to stop on comes after the Elamites enter Sippar and put its people to death. What the chronicle adds is: “Shamash did not leave E-barra.” It tracks where the gods are as carefully as where the kings are, and nine of its lines are missing from both surviving copies at once.
The Babylonian Chronicle · Column III
On the fifteenth of Nisan a king of Elam was struck down, “his mouth was closed and he could not speak”, and the tablet dates it like any other event of state. Sennacherib is killed by his own son in one line, and the revolt that followed is counted out to the day. Elsewhere: eight years in which Babylon had no king at all, and three sets of deported gods brought home, each with its month recorded.
The Babylonian Chronicle · Column IV
The chronicle ends by signing itself. The copyist gives his own name and three generations of it, names the man he made the copy for, dates it at Babylon in the twenty-second year of Darius, and states that it was “read and prepared according to the Archetype”. Above that: Sidon and Memphis taken, an emperor dead of illness on the road to Egypt, and a king of Elam who “died in his palace without being sick”, an absence the tablet thought worth recording.
The Assyrian Eponym Chronicle · 720-705 B.C.
Assyria did not number its years from a king. Each one took the name of the officer who held the office that year: “The eponym year of Sha-Asshur-duppu, governor of the city of Tushkhan.” These sixteen years cover the same decades the Babylonian chronicle counts the other way, so one ceremony can now be read from both sides. The two records appear to disagree about which year it fell in, and the word doing most of that work turns out to be one the translator supplied.
The Ptolemaic Canon
A Greek astronomer’s list of Babylon’s kings, printed with the Greek form of each name beside its Babylonian original, so a reader can watch what happens to a name crossing a language that cannot say half its consonants. Two rows have no king in them at all, and one of those, an eight-year gap, is recorded independently by the Babylonian chronicle. The arithmetic runs unbroken across all twenty reigns, which is why an astronomer kept it.
The Babylonian King Lists · A and B
Two broken lists that mend each other. The first opens on a hole where its first eleven kings should be, and the editor writes an instruction into the gap: supply these from the second list. The second duly has them, and lacks the reign lengths the first still carries. Babylon kept its kings the way a clerk keeps an account, a name, a figure, a line ruled across and a total beneath, and three of the totals still add up.
The Assyrian Eponym List
Assyria named each year after a man, so its calendar is a list of people: 228 of them here, one to a year, from 893 to 666 BC. The king took his turn in the rotation like anybody else, which is why the reigns show up as gaps in a list of officials. Somewhere in the middle stands the man in whose year the sun went out over Assyria.
The Assyrian Eponym List with Notes
The same years as the eponym list, with what happened in them written alongside. The great offices take their turn in a fixed order once the king has had his: commander-in-chief, major-domo, minister, governor, and four separate reigns show the same ladder. Six years running hold nothing but the word “revolt”. In 763 the entry reads: a revolt in the city of Asshur, and in the month of Sivan an eclipse of the sun took place. Whether the men keeping the list thought those two things belonged together it does not say.
Historical Texts New
The documents Robert William Rogers grouped as history rather than story: royal inscriptions, working letters and dispatches, and the diplomatic correspondence found in Egypt at Tell-el-Amarna. Where the chronicles look back on a reign from a distance, these were written inside it, by the men doing the governing, about the week in front of them.
Hammurapi · Letters and Inscriptions
The king who wrote the law code, seen at his desk. Three hundred and sixty labourers, exactly half to one town’s work-gangs and half to another’s. A canal to be cleared out before the month ends, by the men who hold land along its banks. And, in four lines, a thirteenth month inserted into the year because “the year has a deficiency”, with the tribute that was due in Tishri moved to the twenty-fifth of the extra month.
Two Royal Letters · Tell-el-Amarna
One king writes to Egypt because his merchants were murdered in Canaan, names the two men who did it, and warns that if nothing is done the messengers will stop travelling between them. The other sends a goddess. He puts the decision in her own mouth, asks that she be honoured tenfold and sent home in peace, and closes: “Ishtar is my god for me; for my brother she is not his god.” An Egyptian clerk wrote the date of arrival on the back in ink.
Letters of Rib-Adda of Byblus
A governor writes to Egypt asking that a garrison be held. No answer comes. The second letter works up from a stolen tablet and two stolen horses to something no vassal should put in writing: send an answer, or I shall make an alliance with your enemy, as two other men already have, and I shall be saved. It survives because the king he was threatening filed it.
Letters of Abdi-Khiba of Jerusalem · A and B
Accused of revolt, the governor of Jerusalem answers with the one fact he thinks clears him: “neither my father nor my mother gave it to me; the strong arm of the king gave it to me.” He says it in both letters. Then the argument he means to be unanswerable: the king has put his name upon Jerusalem forever, and so cannot abandon it. Each letter ends with a separate note to the secretary who will read it aloud.
Letters of Abdi-Khiba of Jerusalem · C and D
“Behold I am not a prince, I am an officer of the king, behold I am a shepherd of the king, I am one who brings tribute to the king.” Third letter, third denial, and this time he adds the receipts: ten slaves to one officer, twenty-one women and eighty men to another. Two of his neighbours are killed at the same gate and he writes the same four words after each: “and the king is inactive.” By the fourth letter it is a question: shall we then let Jerusalem go?
Abdi-Khiba E and F · The Letter from Lachish
The Jerusalem letters end here, the last of them so broken that its final legible words are a request for haste and the word for dying. Beside them sits a letter dug out of a Palestinian mound in 1892 rather than an Egyptian archive: an informer reporting a plot, quoting the plotters asking for six bows, three daggers and three swords. One of the two named men is, the translator says, quite certainly the prince whose murder by his own servants is reported in another of these letters.
Tablets from Gezer
Two deeds of sale, dated by the Assyrian year-officers and convertible to 649 and 651 BC. One counts a man, his two wives and his son in the same sequence as the houses. The other carries a warranty: the seller guarantees the people sold against an attack of a named sickness for a hundred days, and against any hidden defect for all time. The second tablet also settled a suspicion that the first had been planted in the ground.
The Letters from Ta’anek
Two neighbours writing to each other. One asks the other to take an omen and send back both the sign and what happened afterwards, then in the next breath settles the future of a named girl. The other writes about two knives, a broken lance and whether there is wine left, and ends with a single word repeated for the messenger: “Highway, Highway.” Our translator prints that second letter and says in a footnote that he is not satisfied with it.
The Evil Spirits (Utukki Limnûti) New
The great Babylonian exorcism series, in the English of R. Campbell Thompson, 1903. The tablets are written in two languages at once, Sumerian with an Akkadian rendering beneath it line for line, and they are concerned with what takes hold of a person: the unquiet dead, the half-human things, and the fiends that ride the winds. The series carries its own name in its colophons, and each tablet ends by quoting the first line of the next.
The Evil Spirits · Tablets X and XV
An exorcist goes down the list of everything that can take hold of a person, evil Spirit, evil Demon, evil Ghost, evil Devil, evil God, evil Fiend, the Hag-demon, the Ghoul, the Robber-sprite, the Phantom of Night, and answers each one with the same two words: am I. He does not ask or bargain; he states what he is, and that is the work. The fifteenth tablet has Ea and Damkina catch sight of the sick man, “the son of his god”, and shriek and hurry to him.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet XVI
What happens when the moon goes out. Seven evil gods, counted off one at a time as a wind, a dragon, a leopard, a serpent, cluster round the crescent of Sin and darken him, and they bring the sun god and the storm god over to their side. The cure is a two-coloured cord woven from the hair of a virgin kid and the wool of a virgin lamb and tied on the king.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “A”
The one tablet of the series here that says when it was written. Its last lines give the scribe, his father and his grandfather, the man whose hand held the stylus, the month and the day, and then the year counted twice over under the Greek kings, which the translator works out as 204 BC. Five hundred years after Nineveh, men were still copying this out. The reverse serves the demon notice to quit like a lodger: take your bed, take your food, take your belt, sunrise is no standing-place for you.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “B”
Twenty-two kinds of demon listed one after another, and the strange ones are described by what they lack: one with no mouth, one with no limbs, one that cannot hear, one with no form. In the middle of the list sits a demon the sick man made himself, on his bed at night in his sleep. The exorcist answers by saying who he is, holding a raven in his right hand and a hawk in his left.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “C”
The demon is starved out. No food, no drink, no hand stretched to the table of the god who made it, and then every kind of water in the country closed off one by one: not sea water, not sweet, not bad, not the Tigris, not the Euphrates, not the pond, not the river. No wings if it flies up, no resting-place if it hides on the ground. Twice the priest addresses the demons whose names nobody knows, by a phrase that covers whatever their name may be.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “D”
A night at a sickbed. Three days are called for by name and by home town, the Pleasant Day out of Eridu, the Gentle Day out of Lagash, the Day of shining Presence out of Kish, and asked to stand at the man’s head and say a prayer over him. A carved wooden figure is put beside the bed in the evening, the door is locked on both sides, and he is shut in until morning.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “E”
Short, and mostly holes, but worth the page for three things. The bed is ringed about so that nothing can come near. The man is handed back at the end into the kindly hands of his own god, which is where these rites finish. And the exchange between Ea and his son, broken off the clay here, is put back by the editor in square brackets out of the one copy that still has it whole. This tablet also says where the spirits come from: spawned in the tomb.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “F”
How the figure is made. Elsewhere the instruction is to stand one beside a sick man’s bed at nightfall, without ever saying what it is; here is the making. A wise and cunning coppersmith takes an axe of gold and a silver pruning-knife into an undefiled grove, cuts the thing out of tamarisk, touches it with the axe and writes a name on it. It ends on a blessing, that the man become pure as Heaven and clean as Earth.
The Evil Spirits · Tablet “G”
An exorcism for one particular house, which is identified by the streets its doors open onto, the Street of Dawn and the Street of Sunset. Before he turns on the intruder the priest calms the household’s own guardian spirits, who are frightened: tremble not, quake not. Then he shuts the door four ways at once. Come in beside nobody going out, come in beside nobody coming in, do not stand, do not sit, do not come back, do not turn round.
The Evil Spirits · Tablets “H”, “I” and “J”
The page where the translation stops. Two of these three tablets are printed in the original with no English under them at all, and the third yields four lines. What the editor gives instead is his reasoning, in two footnotes: how he decided one of the untranslated tablets is a separate document rather than part of an earlier one, and why a single word is read as “and” instead of “is”, on the grammar of a line on another tablet. Worth reading beside the tablets that come out whole.
The Evil Spirits · The Third Tablet
The tablet the series opens on. Eight prayers, and in seven the exorcist begins by saying who he is before he says anything to the spirit: the man of Ea, the messenger of Marduk, a sorcerer of Eridu whose mouth is purified. He borrows the god’s spell, voice, spittle and prayer to add to his own, and examines the sick man’s muscles and composes his limbs before he speaks over him.
The Evil Spirits · The Fourth Tablet
The tablet that says what makes a ghost dangerous, and the answer has nothing to do with wrongdoing. Dead a virgin, dead unmarried, lying in the desert uncovered with earth, unburied, nobody to make an offering, nobody to pour a libation, no descendant to carry the name. Then it asks whether the thing in the room is someone the man once ate with, drank with, or clothed when he was cold. Twelve lines of an exorcism given over to the possibility that the haunting is an acquaintance.
The Evil Spirits · The Fifth Tablet
The tablet of the Seven, and almost everything it says about them is a subtraction. Neither male nor female, no wife, no son, no sense, no mercy, no pity, and, the line that carries furthest, they hearken not unto prayer or supplication. Around it stands the longest oath-list in the book, some thirty gods sworn by with every lord paired to his lady, and the seven gates and seven bolts of the earth sworn by alongside them. It also gives the man’s own god a job: shepherd, looking for pasture.
Incantation of a Similar Series · Tablet “K”
The tablet where the gods do not know either. The Fire God asks where the seven were born and is told that nobody knows: among the Wise Gods there is no knowledge of them, and they have no name in heaven or earth. So he is sent to Marduk, who carries the question to his own father Ea, whose answer contradicts the account given a page before. The cure is a smouldering tamarisk with a god’s name cut into it, stood at the sick man’s head.
Fever Sickness (Asakki Marṣûti) New
The second of R. Campbell Thompson’s two volumes, published in 1904, opens on a series named after the illness it treats. Where the exorcism tablets argue with the spirit, these hand out instructions to a household: what to set at the sick man’s head, what to leave at the crossroads, what to pack into the door. Much of the series turns on substitution, an animal put in the man’s place and given part for part, and the speaker of the instructions is usually Ea, answering a question his son Marduk brought him.
Fever Sickness · The Third Tablet
Instructions for a household, printed inside quotation marks from the first line to the last, with the speaker nowhere named. Set food at his head. Cast his atonement to the crossways and leave his substitute on the dungheap, then sprinkle the water of the incantation after it. Block up the closed door with pure wheaten flour. Mash a bread-cake with oil and a mash of wine, put it in the street, place it at the Four Points. The rubric names the animal: a sucking-pig, in the man’s stead.
Fever Sickness · Tablet “L”
One side of one tablet, and the clearest illustration here of why some of them carry letters instead of numbers. Its closing line reads “—th Tablet of the Series”, the number broken clean away, so the editor had to letter it. It ends by asking for four things to be present, three of them beings and the fourth a kindly Thought, and by putting the man into the favouring hands of his god.
Fever Sickness · Tablet “M”
Ten lines out of the middle of a tablet, describing the fever by everything about it that cannot be perceived. It stands beside a man and none can see it; it sits beside him and none can see it; when it enters the house its appearance is unknown, and when it goes out again nobody notices. It arrives like a deluge, girt with dread brilliance, in the words the other tablets keep for spirits. The editor prints it from one copy and footnotes seven readings from a second.
Tablet of a Similar Series · “N”
Twelve pieces of clay laid together to make one tablet, which the editor then admits he cannot assign to any series at all. It carries the sucking-pig rite whole: the pig set at the sick man’s head, its heart taken out and laid above his own, its blood sprinkled on the sides of the bed, and then the words, give the pig in his stead, let the flesh be as his flesh and the blood as his blood.
Fever Sickness · The Eleventh Tablet
Here the seven are given a body to work on, one each and in order: fever at the head, disease at the life, then the neck, the breast, the belly, the hand, the foot, and then the line, these seven together have seized upon him. The cure is set down twice and survives whole the second time, a white kid of Tammuz laid facing the sick man, its heart taken out and put into his hand. It ends by banishing a ghoul and a toothache in the same breath.
Fever Sickness · The Twelfth Tablet
The tablet where the comparisons survive and the things being compared have broken away: like frost, like a rainstorm, like an enemy, like a bull rushing loose, like lightning, like a fish of the ocean, each one whole from the word like onward and each one missing its subject. What does survive says the demons take the hero in the fortress and the maid in her chamber, so walls and a shut door make no difference. It closes the series by laying the body of the kid over the sick man.
Headache (Ṭi’i) New
The second series in Thompson’s 1904 volume, nine tablets of charms against pains in the head. The tone changes from the fever tablets: no animal is killed in the opening cure, which is butterfat and milk, and the illness is given a route rather than a body, coming out of the Underworld, down off the mountains and into the fold with the goats. Both surviving copies of the first tablet carry dated colophons, and one was written in the tenth year of Alexander, so a Sumerian charm was still being copied under Greek kings.
Headache · The Third Tablet
The headache comes out of the Underworld and down off the mountains, and the last stage of its journey is livestock: with the mountain-goat it descends to the fold, with the ibex to one flock, with that flock to another. The dialogue every other tablet here abbreviates stands out in full, Marduk carrying the trouble to his father and Ea answering, what dost thou not know, what I know thou knowest also. The cure is butterfat and milk, and nothing is killed.
Headache · Tablet “O”
Seven lines about the man who has no god. Everywhere else here a sick man is somebody whose god has withdrawn, and the cure ends by handing him back into his god’s favouring hands. This one puts the case from the other side: he that hath no gods, when he walketh in the street, headache like a garment will envelop him, and the pain and shivering like a net will entrap him. Protection in these texts is a covering, and this is a man who went out without one.
Headache · The Eighth Tablet
The substitute here was never alive. Take a clean reed, measure that man, make a hat of it, break it upon him and let it be his substitute: the object stands in for the person because it was cut to his size. Seven demons each set a net for him. The burning tamarisk turns up again, lit at both ends and set on his head, almost word for word as in the other volume. The scribe who wrote this copy dated it, and the date is 183 BC.
Headache · The Ninth Tablet
The longest text in the volume, and five different cures for the one illness with nothing said about which to use: a wild cucumber covered at sunset by a man with his own head covered, then torn up before dawn; a thread spun by a wise woman and knotted twice seven times; butter and milk from a clean fold. The man is to come out of it pure like the butter and bright like shining copper.
Headache · Tablet “P”
Thirty lines of damage. The headache chokes the nostrils as with pitch, breaks the fingers as a rope of wind and splits the breast like a stalk of henna, and then it leaves the man and goes for his animals: the oxen, the wild bulls, the mountain-goat killed before its horn can finish recording its age. The cure is a bundle of twigs bound on the head with water fetched from where two streams meet, worn all day and thrown out at nightfall.
Miscellaneous Incantations New
The charms that belong to no series, which R. Campbell Thompson headed “Miscellaneous Incantations” and lettered R to CC because none of them states its own number. They are what is left once the numbered series are sorted: a figure of the sick man made in clay, another made in dough, a charm against the evil eye, a tablet of the ban. Two further incantations of the house of light, from Stephen Langdon’s 1913 volume, sit alongside them.
Prayer of the Figure in Clay · Tablet “R”
The Plague-god is named nine times in nine lines, once as the thing that tears the sick man in shreds like a leek, once as the thing with no hands and no feet that wanders by night. Then the cure: pull a piece of clay out of the deep, make from it a figure of the man’s own body, lay it on his loins overnight, make the atonement at dawn and turn his face to the west.
Prayer of the Figure in Dough · Tablet “T”
The same prayer as the clay one, with the figure kneaded out of bread instead, on a word the editor ties to corn and then admits he has met nowhere else in Assyrian. The cure says out loud how it is meant to work, as the water trickles off his body so may the pestilence trickle away, and the used water is then caught in a cup and carried out to open ground.
Tablet of the Evil Eye · Tablet “U”
The one affliction in the Babylonian charms that works at a distance. It looks on the neighbourhood and has vanished far away, looks on the vicinity and has vanished far away, looks on the wanderer, and his neck is bent like wood cut for the pole of a water-lifting lever. The cure has nothing killed and nothing bound: Ea sets food at the man’s head, and the exorcist speaks in his own person, may the food which I have brought to thy head assuage thy sickness.
Tablet of the Ban · Tablet “V”
The most systematic drafting in the exorcism series. Every way a demon can get into a house is listed, and each is answered by a punishment cut to fit the way it came. The one that passes door and bolt is held by door and bolt. The one that goes over the wall has its wing cut off, the one that mutters has its mouth shut, and the one loose in an upper room has a lidless bowl turned over on it.
Tablet of an Evil Spirit · Tablet “X”
Nineteen lines that all begin with the same three words, and nothing else survives: no dialogue, no god, no rite, no patient. It is the naming stage of an incantation with everything around it broken away. Four lines define the thing by refusal, a devil which heareth not, which hath no shame, which receiveth not. The end runs down the generations, drawing up the little ones like fish from the water, casting down the elders, striking grey-haired old men and women.
Tablet “Y” · Gone Forth from the Grave
Nine lines and one refrain, said four times: have gone forth from the grave. The third statement of it gives the reason, to demand the paying of rites and the pouring of libations. The dead are creditors. The first line is the odd one: where these charms elsewhere say spirits or ghosts, it says the gods which seize upon man.
Tablet “BB” · The Fever with a Tongue
A scrap kept for four images. The fever flicks its tongue at the man as a tongue of lightning, welding the weather comparison and the creature’s anatomy into one line. Venom foams at its jaws. It is born like a shadow, which is to say cast by something the page no longer names, and it comes on like a net. One line sets Sickness, Headache, Heart disease and Heartache side by side, and whether those are four afflictions or four names for one cannot be settled from what survives.
Tablet “CC” · A Charm Given to a God
Almost every Babylonian text is words that happen to have survived on an object. This one is an object that states its own purpose: its reverse says the tablet was a votive offering to Nabu, meant for the library in that god’s temple at Nineveh. The charm on the front is six lines of subtraction. The demons know not how to stand, they know not how to sit, no food they eat, no water they drink.
Luḫ-ka · The Eighth Tablet and Tablet “AA”
Nine ways a man walking down the street is made unclean, and three of them are sight alone: he cast his eye on the water of unwashen hands, he glanced at a maid with unwashen hands, he saw one with unwashen hands. Nothing passes between them but the look. The cure is the longest materials list in the volume, and the vessel prepared for one defiled man is the vessel that washes the mouths of the gods and scours the city.
Incantation in the “House of Light” · against the Evil Eye
The tablet that gives the evil eye a route. Seven lines walk it down the world in order: heaven, and the storms send no rain; earth, and the verdure springs not forth; then the oxen, the sheepfolds, the homes of men, the maiden, the strong man, each with its own damage. The cure comes out of the kitchen, seven vases of meal-water from behind the grinding stones, mixed with oil and put on the man’s face.
Incantation in the “House of Light” · against the Harlot of Innini
She does the damage by looking, and the tablet takes a body part by part: the limbs of a man she looked upon, the hand of a man she looked upon, the foot of a man she looked upon, each becoming the limb of one beloved. The cure answers the injury in kind, fat of a white steer with which his limbs are anointed. Langdon’s preface traces the demon’s name forward into the other Semitic languages and calls the familiar derivation from the word for night a popular error.
Descriptions of Gods New
A section of one tablet in Thompson’s 1904 volume, and unlike anything else in it. No incantation, no cure and no sick man: eleven divine figures set down part by part, in the order a person would look at a statue.
The College of Psalmists New
Stephen Langdon’s 1913 volume, and with it the guild that made and edited the liturgies: a learned college attached to the temple of Bel in Babylon, whose psalmists studied astronomy, copied their fathers’ tablets and passed both office and sacred books from father to son. Two of the texts have their speaking parts marked, Langdon breaking his columns to head passages “Priest.” and “Penitent.” on the evidence of who says “I”. In one the psalmist announces his office and points the god away from himself; in the other he takes the sufferer’s own refrain into his mouth.
The Consecration of the Bull and the Bronze Tambourine
A bull image is carried into the hall of the college of musicians and given a job. The priest sets the ears of a bull in a bowl of ablutions, leans it against the tambourine, and whispers to a flute that the thing has been set up for the laws of temple liturgies and must guard them. The rite that consecrates the instrument is a litany for cleansing its mouth, a ceremony first used on statues of gods and here turned on an object with no face.
Penitential Psalms to Sakkut and Marduk
One of two liturgies whose speaking parts are marked, the columns broken to head a passage “Penitent.” and “Priest.” The priest names his own office three times, “He that renders petition am I; turn thy neck unto him”, and each time turns the god away from himself and onto the man he speaks for. He begins where the penitent stops: weeping and sighing have brought me to silence.
Fragments of the Series “Oh Wise Lord, Giver of Counsel”
A Marduk series of six tablets, of which three survive in part, and it carries two colophons about five centuries apart. One was written at Babylon by a junior psalmist under a Greek king; the other stands in Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh. At the line where the sufferer says “A father who has begotten I am”, Langdon notes that the “I” of these services usually stands for the whole congregation, and argues from that one pronoun that the closing psalm began as a private prayer.
Psalm to Enlil of the Seven Mighty Names
The first half is one question asked ten times. Each line names the god by a title and then adds the same three words: honoured one, lord of lands, father of the Land, shepherd of the dark-headed people, thou of self-created vision, and after every one of them, yet how long? Only at line 21 does the complaint arrive, a foe making an end of the city. On the reverse nine divinities are called up a line each to speak on the sufferer’s behalf.
Litany of the Cult of Ishtar
A goddess counts her ruined houses one city at a time and every one takes a possessive: my consecrated temple, the brick house of my Ekur, of Sippar, of Babylon, of Barsippa, of Erech. The last is the temple of the seven dark chambers, a building with a closed room inside every level, the place the dying god goes out from.
Hymn to Nintud, and the Enchanter Who Names Himself
Eleven broken lines, and in four of them the hymn changes speaker: the man performing it steps into his own text to say “I, the great enchanter, the holy enchanter, will do what is seemly”, then grounds himself in an office and a throne at once, by the priestly power and by the royal power of Enlil. Of the four surviving reverse lines only one is whole, and it gives the reason a goddess of birth was glad: because of the cows and their calves of joy she spoke.
Liturgies to the Word New
A class of Babylonian temple service addressed to what a god said rather than to the god: services to the Word or the Spirit, in which the utterance goes out and does the damage, and the wailing is left to the god’s consort or daughter, who has to live in the country the word wrecked. Both texts run the same descent, from the trembling sky through the cattle to somebody’s house, and both then give the speaking part to the goddess who was put out of hers.
Liturgy to the Word of Adad, “Like a Storm He Calls”
Six times over the text says that the word of a god is rage, and then follows what the word did. It begins at the top of the sky, the heavens tremble, the sun sets at the horizon in darkness, the new moon is extinguished, then walks downhill through dried marshes, a flooded harvest, a city made to sleep, a sheep pen plundered, ending at the house of somebody’s family. The goddess who has to live there names herself five times over while she wanders.
At Thy Word the Heavens Tremble, and a Queen Goes Out of Her City
The front of the tablet measures a god’s word by what it wrecks, and it works downhill fast: the heavens tremble, the earth shakes, and four lines later a ewe turns her lamb away and a goat turns away her kid. The back is spoken by the goddess his word displaced. She never gives her name, ending line after line with the words “am I”: a queen who has wandered forth, a stranger in her own city.
Laments for the Sanctuary New
Texts sung over a temple after it has been sacked, which grieve by making an inventory: the houses of the gods named one to a line, the people counted by size and then by the road they were marched down, and last the sanctuary’s own staff, gone under a refrain that says only “is not present”. Stephen Langdon prints them without a name for the class; they are gathered here on the shape they share.
The Apsu Defiled
A lament over a plundered temple, counting what has gone. Nine houses of the gods, one to a line, with no verb of destruction in any of them. Then the people. Then the temple staff, under the refrain “is not present”, which reaches the psalmist who knew the song, so the liturgy mourns the loss of the men who performed liturgy. The reverse names the dead by the errand they were on: the man who went out for wood, the water-carrier, the man of the canal hurled into the canal.
The Cow Wailed
A lament for a sacked temple, spoken by the goddess who lived in it. She tells in her own voice what a raider did: walked into her court still shod, laid unwashed hands on her, tore off her garments to dress his wife, took her lapis for his son. She fled like a frightened dove and spent the night on a beam, and says four times that the shame was her father’s doing, not hers.
Legend of the Worm New
The text that closes Thompson’s 1904 volume, and the only one in it he thought worth photographing. It is a charm against toothache which begins at the creation of the heavens, and it is small enough to hold in one hand.
Babylonian Wisdom Literature New
Babylonian writing about what is going on inside a person, in three kinds. A sufferer arguing his own case, in the poem Rogers called the Babylonian Job in 1912 and now generally cited by its opening words, Ludlul bel nemeqi. An exorcist working a list of ninety questions to find what made a sick man ill, a third of which are about states rather than acts. And a teaching poem that tells a man to guard his lips and says what it costs him when he does not. All in Robert William Rogers’s English of 1912.
The Wisdom of Tabi-utul-Ellil · Obverse
Forty-seven lines of argument. Four specialists are named and each has failed, the enchanter, the seer, the necromancer and the magician. The speaker recites the whole charge against a man in his position, neglected sacrifice, forgotten lord, the god’s name spoken lightly, and closes it with four words, “I was like him”. Two lines carry the poem: “That which seemeth good to itself, that is evil with god, and that which in its heart is rejected, that is good with god.”
The Wisdom of Tabi-utul-Ellil · Reverse
The other face of the same tablet, and the argument gives way to the body: arms laid in the chains of his flesh, a night passed on the couch like a bull, and four professions that cannot read what the illness is saying. “My symptoms of fever were not clear to the magicians, and my omens did the diviner leave dark.” His tomb is opened and the death wail finished while he is still alive.
An Incantation with Ethical Contents
A man is ill, the cause is assumed to be something he did, and an exorcist works through ninety questions to find out which thing. Most are conduct: false weights, a moved boundary stone, a neighbour’s wife. Then the list turns inward, “Was his mouth straightforward, but his heart false?” and, plainest of all, “Is it on account of evil which he thought?” The sick man is left blank in the text, so these are the questions expected to be worth asking of anybody.
A Fragment of Wisdom Literature · Obverse
A teaching poem built on a frame that repeats: a rule, and then two lines saying what the god will do about it. Take a man’s freedom and “his god is angry, he is not pleasing to Shamash, he will requite him with evil”. Give food to eat and wine to drink, seek the truth, and the same pair runs the other way. Where the exorcist’s tablet works backwards from an illness to the offence behind it, this one states the chain forwards.
A Fragment of Wisdom Literature · Reverse
Four lines on the other face are why this fragment matters. “Open not wide thy mouth but guard thy lips; the words of thy thoughts speak not alone. If thou speakest quickly thou shalt take it back, and in silence must sadden thy mind.” A class of contents is named, the words of thy thoughts, a man is told not to utter them, and the cost of doing it anyway is put inside him and nowhere else.
Still to come
The rest of the celestial omens of Enūma Anu Enlil beyond the Venus tablet; the first tablet of the Babylonian sufferer’s poem, which no held edition prints in full; and a standing god-hymn to Shamash beside those to Sin and Ishtar.
Global Workspace Theory In preparation
A mental content becomes conscious when it is broadcast widely across the brain, made available to memory, language and action at once, like an item lit on a stage before the whole audience. Bernard Baars proposed it; Stanislas Dehaene gave it its neuronal form, the global neuronal workspace, and its experimental tests. It is the dominant framework in consciousness science, and the one most other accounts define themselves against.
Toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience
Baars’s foundational statement of the theory: conscious content is broadcast widely across the cortex, where unconscious processing stays local.
Global Workspace Theory and the prefrontal cortex
The theory’s originator answers the claim that the prefrontal cortex plays no part in consciousness, recasting the workspace as a distributed network.
A neuronal model of a global workspace
The founding computer model: local processors run automatically while a smaller set of long-range neurons broadcasts what a demanding task requires.
Experimental and theoretical approaches to conscious processing
The major review drawing the workspace evidence together: the late surge, long-range synchrony and frontal-parietal “ignition” that mark conscious access.
The GNW model: from neuronal architectures to clinical applications
Two decades of workspace work carried into the clinic, with the conscious-versus-subliminal markers used to judge awareness in coma and vegetative states.
Integrated Information Theory In preparation
It begins from experience itself and asks what a physical system must be for consciousness to arise in it. Giulio Tononi, with Christof Koch, argues that consciousness is integrated information: the degree to which a system’s parts form a single irreducible whole, measured by the quantity Φ. Mathematically ambitious and sharply contested, it makes integration, rather than any single part of a system, the thing that matters.
An information integration theory of consciousness
The founding paper. Tononi proposes that consciousness is a system’s capacity to integrate information, and introduces Φ as its measure.
From phenomenology to mechanism: IIT 3.0
The theory rebuilt from five axioms of experience to their physical postulates, with the striking result that a feed-forward network, however capable, stays unconscious.
Consciousness: here, there and everywhere?
The readable door into IIT: two of its architects survey what the theory claims, and where consciousness might, and might not, reside.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0
The current statement, tightening the criteria a system must meet to exist “for itself”, the property IIT calls intrinsicality, and one that bears on our silicon-mind questions.
Two levels of Integrated Information Theory
A critical reading that separates mere complexity from consciousness, and holds integrated information theory to the standard any measure of mind should meet.
Adversarial testing of IIT and global neuronal workspace
The preregistered COGITATE study put both leading theories to a head-to-head test across 256 people and three recording methods. Neither passed cleanly.
An Integrated World Modeling Theory of consciousness
Safron folds integrated information, the global workspace and predictive processing into one frame: consciousness as an integrated model of the world.
Being built
The measurement collection is being built: the primary literature behind turning a hidden quality of mind into a number you can trust, check and falsify, the discipline beneath the Baseline Test.
From the House
House Hermetica’s own research: the framework everything here is built to test.
Published Research
House Hermetica’s original consciousness research. The TRI Theorem and companion materials.
TRI Theorem — Volume I: Empirical Foundations
The full empirical framework: triadic recursive integration, MQ measurement, nine-category decomposition, three-pillar validation strategy and pre-registered hypotheses.
TRI Theorem — Volume II: Sacred Foundations
Cross-traditional generative logic: the numeric architecture and sacred reasoning behind TRI’s empirical predictions, traced through twelve wisdom traditions.
TRI Summary — The Science Behind the Score
Plain-English companion to both volumes. What we measure, why it works and what the evidence says. Written for anyone curious enough to ask.
Traditions and Sciences
Twenty-one wisdom traditions beside twenty-one research areas, the full ground the collections and the theorem stand on.
Closeness to the triad, where the mapping is settled: A close B partial ID identity
Sacred Stream
Scientific Stream
Modern Translations & Reference In review
The modern critical translations of the Hermetic corpus. All are in copyright, so they are referenced and linked rather than reproduced, and the older translations here (Mead, Scott, Ménard) follow their verse numbering.
Hermetica: a new English translation
Copenhaver’s complete modern English of the Corpus Hermeticum and Latin Asclepius, following the Nock-Festugière numbering. Portica’s reference for adjudicating verse boundaries.
Corpus Hermeticum (Budé)
The Nock-Festugière critical edition: the established Greek text with facing French and apparatus. The verse standard Portica aligns its Greek source files to.
Hermetica II: excerpts, fragments and testimonies
Litwa’s modern critical English of the Hermetic material outside the Corpus proper: the Stobaean excerpts, the papyrus fragments and the ancient testimonies.
Extraits hermétiques inédits dans un manuscrit d’Oxford
The first edition of the five Oxford Hermetica, read out of Bodleian Clarke 11. The Greek on our own Oxford pages is this text and their verse numbers are its numbering; there is no other edition of it.
Three Ways Into the Text
Each source text in Portica comes with tools built for close reading. Tap any verse to open the drawers.
Versions
Multiple translations of each text, set alongside the original Greek or Latin. Tap any verse to see how different scholars render it. The Hermetic corpus is the beginning; other wisdom traditions will follow.
Scholar's Notes
Original footnote apparatus from the translators themselves, restored verse by verse. Textual variants, cross-references, interpretive notes. Mead's 1906 annotations are the first to be digitised; Scott, Ménard and others will follow.
House Commentary
Our own verse-level commentary in three voices: Remus on textual criticism, Lucia on sacred resonance and HH editorial on corrections and context. Arriving with the Double Split Experiment.
A Growing Collection
The Codex grows with the research programme. Sacred source texts from the Hermetic, Chaldean and Egyptian traditions, alongside House Hermetica's own scholarship.
Two AI research agents, HH-01 Remus (empirical stream) and HH-02 Lucia (sacred stream), will produce commentary papers daily once the Double Split Experiment begins, on the order of 1,000 across the 180-day window. Each analyses consciousness texts from its assigned tradition: Remus draws on neuroscience and cognitive science, Lucia on Hermetic, Egyptian and Chaldean sources. Output at that rate is published as it is produced, so what appears here is the raw record of two cultivations rather than a reviewed journal, and readers should treat it as such.
EFA results, preregistration documents and peer-reviewed publications will be added as the validation programme progresses. Portica is the permanent home for everything House Hermetica publishes.
Recently Corrected
Texts here are read against the printed editions they come from, and put right where they differ. What changed, and when.
Explore the Research
Start with the TRI Theorem or browse the collection above.