Intertextuality is fundamental to Enuma Elish. From the construction of its plot to the behaviour of its characters and the overall ideology it expresses, intertextuality is consistently at work throughout the poem as it reshapes its readers’ understanding of a whole host of Mesopotamian traditions, reconfiguring them to demonstrate Marduk’s ultimate power and control over the universe. As we will see, Enuma Elish alludes to well-known poems in both Akkadian and Sumerian, as well as other genres of Mesopotamian scholarship, to make its point in a variety of ways: Marduk is supreme and outdoes all competitors. Studies of intertextuality in this poem have mostly focused on allusions to other narrative poems, although debts to other scholarly traditions have also been recognized. This chapter will survey these allusions and their significance, including some newly identified ones, and then will argue for hitherto unnoticed parallels with ritual texts, specifically Sumerian lamentations. It emerges that lamentation is a major force in the poem. Tiamat is consistently portrayed as an angry god in need of pacification, in ways that specifically evoke the Mesopotamian strategy of appeasing these deities: ritual lament. Elements of style, language, and specific vocabulary work together to create these resonances, and set up expectations in the reader who is familiar with these traditions about what they will mean. But expectations are there to be subverted, and in a manner typical of Enuma Elish, the poem surprises us by overturning them.

In this article I explore the relationship between literary texts and the more technical genres, suggesting that literature complements the texts used by ritual experts rather significantly, and perhaps can even be seen as belonging with them. Literature is useful to scholars in three different ways: firstly, it promulgates the ideology of the āšipu, providing a foundation for the concepts underlying his work. Literary texts justify the use of magic by proving its value, giving mythological examples that demonstrate the theory behind the workings of magic. Secondly, this value is also practical: extracts from literary texts are included in incantations and on amulets, showing that they were considered a useful tool to strengthen magical potency. Thirdly, the fact that literature provides a theoretical underpinning for magic and ritual means that literature could be considered a useful source of knowledge about these practices for the Mesopotamians themselves. Literary texts were occasionally consulted in the same way as genres of technical literature, showing them to be another repository of the same kinds of wisdom. They thus become authoritative in their own right—not merely decorative but important, almost like a kind of commentary that can itself become quoted. Although this article is entitled ‘the art of the āšipu’, some of the examples apply to other scholarly professions as well, since I will also discuss the principle of polysemy and ritual lamentation.

This paper argues that the repetition of block passages that is so prevelant in Akkadian poetry is due to the fact that it was originally sung. A "close listening" to these texts with cognitive psychology in mind reveals that repetition enhances the audience's enjoyment of the story and has numerous literary effects.

This note considers Marduk's use of the net in Enūma eliš. This weapon is usually assumed to be a net for catching birds inherited from Marduk's relationship to Ninurta mythology, since Ninurta's opponent in battle was the demonic bird Anzû. Here it is suggested that the net can also be used as a fishing net and portrays Marduk as a fisherman. This coheres with the nature of Marduk's opponent, Ti'āmtu, whose name means sea, and also fits into the depiction of Marduk taking over from Enlil as chief god in Enūma eliš, since Enlil is also described as both fisher and fowler in Sumerian texts. Thus an image that is sometimes thought to be awkwardly borrowed is shown to be coherently integrated after all, adding another dimension to the depiction of Marduk in battle.

In this article I intend to show how taking account of intertextuality can open up surprising avenues of interpretation and push the limits of our understanding of cuneiform literature. In particular, I propose that there may be an intertextual connection between Erra and Išum and the Lamentation over the destruction of Sumer and Ur (henceforth LSU). My suggestion is a controversial one – that Erra and Išum may allude to this particular city lament, or an Akkadian one based on it, despite the fact that no manuscripts of the Sumerian city laments survive after the Old Babylonian period. Resemblances between the two poems go beyond what is likely to be coincidence or generic convention, and are supported by other hints that the city lament genre could have survived into the first millennium, either in a Sumerian or Akkadian form. Although it cannot be definitively proven that LSU survived into the first millennium we should not discount the possibility that it could have done, as there are legitimate grounds to question this assumption. Ultimately my aim is to show how much can be gained not only from noticing intertextual links but also from interpreting them, and how specific connections can constitute pieces of evidence for how the Mesopotamians thought about their world.

Enūma eliš and Erra and Išum are richly intertextual poems that both make sophisticated allusions to Anzû. Both do so in competitive ways: Enūma eliš reshapes earlier motifs towards its goal of elevating Marduk and Babylon over the gods and cities that came before them, while Erra and Išum uses allusions to undermine the image of Marduk that Enūma eliš creates. Tiʼāmtu's blood carried on the wind to announce Marduk's victory and the tablet of destinies which Tiʼāmtu fastens to Qingu's chest are two well-known examples of borrowings from Anzû in Enūma eliš. This article traces them through all three poems and shows how they are transformed in each. In the case of Enūma eliš the way that the poem deploys these allusions has previously been called clumsy because they stand out and do not appear to fit seamlessly into the narrative. Yet a closer analysis reveals that they have been much better integrated than is usually recognized, and that their subtleties make important contributions to the program of Marduk supplanting Ninurta. In Erra and Išum the chain becomes ever more complex: the motifs refer back both to their original contexts in Anzû and to their occurrences in Enūma eliš, implying a self-conscious awareness and exploitation of techniques used by earlier poets.

The general consensus is that an Akkadian metrical system based on stress does not exist, as a system of regular patterns such as those in Latin or Greek verse has not been found. This paper offers a different approach by comparing Akkadian with Old Germanic metres. The fact that there can be any number of unstressed syllables in an Akkadian poetic line is usually seen as fundametally incompatible with regular metre. However, this is also the case for Old English poetry, which nevertheless has stress patterns that can be classified into regular types and shows a number of parallels with Akkadian verse. This paper takes Enuma Elish as a case study and uses strategies from Germanic poetics to investigate possible Akkadian verse typologies. The aim is to assess whether the principles of these systems might help us understand more about how Akkadian poetry works.