Description

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This ambitious and well-researched study brings together for the first time translations of the ancient literature concerning the Sumerian god Enki, one of four gods and goddesses who comprised the highest level of the Sumerian pantheon. The very existence of these writings, which date from the Third Millennium B.C., was unknown until about 100 years ago, when their cuneiform script was deciphered. Since then, it has become apparent that Sumerian literature had a profound and enduring influence on both Biblical and classical Greek literature, and so on the literature of the western world as a whole. Kramer, one of the world's leading sumerologists, has prepared these translations from among the scores of works he has published over the last fifty years; John Maier provides a full interpretive framework that places the translations in their broader comparative cultural context. This rare collection will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines from Near Eastern and Biblical Studies to Mythology and Comparative Literature.

About the Author

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Samuel Noah Kramer (1897 - 1990) was one of the world's leading Assyriologists and a world-renowned expert in Sumerian history and Sumerian language. After high school he attended Temple University before Dropsie and Penn. Kramer earned his PhD in 1929, and was famous for assembling tablets recounting single stories that had become distributed among different institutions around the world. He retired from formal academic life in 1968, but remained very active throughout his post-retirement years. John Maier is the translator, with novelist John Gardner of Gilgamesh, and gthe author, co-author, editor or co-editor of several books and articles that range from literary studies of the Bible (The Bible in its Literary Milieu) to a study of major Mesopotamian literary and religious tradition in Myths of Enki, The Crafty God. Maier is a Professor of English at the State University of New York College at Brockport and holds the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in teaching.