BTI 5: The Power of Babel

The fifth and final episode of Back to Iraq explores a swathe of later Mesopotamian literature, written in Akkadian. Akkadian stories and poems, beginning around time of the standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, begin to look more and more like Iron Age literature written in ancient Greek and Hebrew. Later Akkadian texts are more violent, and grave than their Sumerian predecessors, and Akkadian pantheons are increasingly dominated by singular figures. Beginning with a dark, visionary epic called Erra and Ishum, this program explores later Babylonian and Assyrian theology. Erra and Ishum is a revelation narrative about the rise of a god of mayhem of strife, meditating, among other things, on the problem of evil. This same bonus episode considers two other Akkadian texts on the same subject – a philosophical dialogue called “The Babylonian Theodicy,” and a monologue called “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer.” These three Akkadian narratives were extremely popular in Babylon and Assyria during the early Iron Age, and they demonstrate a fascinating continuity between late Mesopotamian theology and the Hebrew Bible that our podcast never got to in the main series.