Adapa and the South Wind

A clay tablet from the El-Amarna archive, dated to the 14th century BCE and found in 1887, carries the largest surviving fragment of this Mesopotamian myth, its lines marked with red-tinted points at careful intervals. Shlomo Izre'el gathers all six known fragments, including five from the library of Assurbanipal that show how the story was told in Assyria some seven centuries later. He presents the transliterated Akkadian, a fresh translation and a full philological commentary, and notes red points missed by earlier editors Knudtzon and Schroeder.

What sets the study apart is its attention to the myth as a story. Through close analysis of poetic form, Izre'el reads Adapa as literature and draws out its meanings, adding to a century of scholarship on a text often linked to Western religious thought. A rewarding, rigorous book for students of Akkadian, ancient Near Eastern religion and early literature.