Now, after looking more closely at the text-corpus of the epics themselves – mostly from Oxford University’s collection – I just basically laugh at these. Instead, I am busy retranslating them and have already incorporated aspects into my new book provisionally entitled A New Harmonized Biblical-Secular Chronology. While my book’s overall focus of realigning biblical and anthropological-historical dates into a new and far more cohesive chronology and timeline is a little too complicated and technical for this column, I can give an inkling of what is in store for my readers as regards translations of Sumerian and Akkadian epics.
Let me first give a little background as to why Mesopotamian epics are so important. Mesopotamia is the fertile land that lay between two rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It is reputedly the scene of the earliest civilization known to man, Sumer being the first, followed by the Akkadian empire which arose in Babylonia several millennia afterwards and extended to as far as Egypt. Sumerian is reckoned to be the world’s earliest written language. Indeed, it records events in a time so ancient that ‘gods’ still walked the Earth. Now, in my years of writing this column, I have revealed much about this aspect of things…so I will not go back to explaining who/what ‘gods’ actually were. Instead, I will concentrate on the Sumerian Enuma Elish epic: what scholars call the ‘Epic of Creation’. This epic was adopted by the Akkadians, and they maintained the tradition of reenacting it every year. Indeed, the Enuma Elish was recited and acted out in public to celebrate the Babylonian New Year.
