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PHILIPPE TALON, The Standard Babylonian Creation Myth Enuma Elis: Introduction, Cuneiform Text, Transliteration, and Sign List with a Translation and Glossary in French (State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts 4; Helsinki: University of Helsinki Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2005). Pp. xx + 138. Paper $34.
Students familiar with Simo Parpola's edition of Gilgamesh (State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts [SAACT] 1, 1997) or J. Novotny's edition of Etana (SAACT 2, 2001) will be excited to learn that Enuma elis (Ee) has now come to print in this prestigious series. Incorporating the fragments of Enuma elis found at Nippur and Sultantepe, Philippe Talon (Free University of Brussels) has successfully updated the pedagogical textbooks of René Labat (La poème babylonien de la création [Paris: Maisonneuve, 1935]) and W. G. Lambert (Enuma elis: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Cuneiform Text [Oxford: Clarendon, 1966]). Like all SAACT volumes, this one comes with a cuneiform text, transliteration, translation (in French), glossary (in French), sign list, and indexes of keywords/divine names. T. is to be commended for making it possible for generations of students to navigate successfully the labyrinthine world of Babylonian creation myth.
What makes the present volume distinctive, however, is its literary/poetic analysis. Following Herman Vanstiphout's understanding of the first eight lines of tablet I (viz., that they break down into two four-line stanzas ["Enuma elis tablet i...