Wilfred G. Lambert

The Babylonian tamitu texts are a corpus of questions addressed to the sun-god Shamash and the storm-god Adad jointly. Professional diviners were employed to put the questions with the appropriate rites and to formulate the wording correctly, since the only answer would be "yes" or "no." Thus the questions had to include a detailed exposition of the matter, and they open up intimate glances of things not otherwise available. Kings ask whether they should undertake a certain campaign, laying out a detailed plan of action. At the other end of the scale, a man wants to know whether his wife is telling him the truth. All tablets are of first millennium B.C. date, though some of the questions date from the second millennium B.C. Scribes copied out questions to serve as models for later use. In this volume W.G. Lambert has gathered together all the known material, including 54 tablets and fragments not previously published. All are given in cuneiform copy, transliteration, translation, with notes and an introduction. By far the greater part of this material has not been edited before.

Babylonian Oracle Questions

For much of the last half of the twentieth century, W. G. Lambert devoted much of his research energy and effort to the study of Babylonian texts dealing with Mesopotamian ideas regarding creation, including especially Enuma Elish. This volume, which appears almost exactly 2 years after Lambert’s death, distills a lifetime of learning by the world’s foremost expert on these texts. Lambert provides a full transliteration and translation of the 7 tablets of Enuma Elish, based on the known exemplars, as well as coverage of a number of other texts that bear on, or are thought to bear on, Mesopotamian notions of the origin of the world, mankind, and the gods. New editions of seventeen additional “creation tales” are provided, including “Enmesharra’s Defeat,” “Enki and Ninmah,” “The Slaying of Labbu,” and “The Theogony of Dunnu.” Lambert pays special attention, of course, to the connection of the main epic, Enuma Elish, with the rise and place of Marduk in the Babylonian pantheon. He traces the development of this deity’s origin and rise to prominence and elaborates the relationship of this text, and the others discussed, to the religious and political climate Babylonia. The volume includes 70 plates (primarily hand-copies of the various exemplars of Enuma Elish) and extensive indexes.

Babylonian Creation Myths

Simon B. Parker

The Babylonian Epic of Creation

Enuma Elis̆

A. R. George

Transliteration, translation and commentary on previously unpublished ancient Babylonian omen and divinatory texts

Babylonian Divinatory Texts Chiefly in the Schøyen Collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Eva Von Dassow

Volume One: 120 ancient Mesopotamian texts from the Metropolitan Museum's extensive collection of cuneiform tablets are published here in a projected multi-volume edition. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ira Spar

Alan Ralph Millard

Miguel Civil

Originally published: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

The Babylonian Story of the Flood

Atra-ḫasīs

This collection of essays composed by an international array of friends and colleagues typifies the career accomplishments and scholarly endeavors of W. G. Lambert.

Studies in Assyriology in Honour of W.G. Lambert

Wisdom, Gods and Literature

In Babylonian studies 'Wisdom' is used to cover a group of texts similar in scope to the Biblical Wisdom books: discussions on the problem of suffering, teaching on the good life, fables or contest literature, and proverbs.

Wilfred G. Lambert

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