The Erra Epic

A New Edition

Image coming soon

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: Ancient Near East, Biblical Studies

Series: Cuneiform Artefacts from Iraq

Language: English

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(December 2026)

ISBN: 9783447126281

8.43 x 11.69 inches

Price: $98.00

Why did the scholars of Assyria and Babylonia copy and treasure a poem in which the king of the gods condemns his own land to ruin? The ‘Erra Epic’, a masterpiece of Babylonian literature, tells how Erra, the god of war, lays Babylonia waste at the command of Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, until his counselor Išum persuades him to relent. The poem closes with a promise: plague will not come near the house in which a tablet bearing it is kept. Ancient readers took the promise at its word and copied the last tablet onto amulets made to be hung up. ‘Erra’ is one of the very few Babylonian poems to name its author, Kabti-ilī-Marduk, one of the most original stylists of the cuneiform tradition, to whom, the poem says, Erra himself revealed the work at night.
This volume is the first complete critical edition of the ‘Erra Epic’ in over half a century. Reconstructed from 51 manuscripts, several of them previously unpublished, from eight ancient cities in Iraq and Turkey, the poem has gained more than a hundred new lines, and only eleven of its 806 lines are now wholly lost. The text is accompanied by English and Arabic translations, a full commentary, and a detailed introduction to its transmission, style, language, and date, in which long-disputed passages receive new interpretations.