This chapter presents a detailed examination of the theory of language put forward in the Babylonian cosmogony, Enuma elish. This poem locates the origin of language at the very beginnings of the cosmos’ formation, even before the gods came to be. Accordingly, language is one of the first principles on which the world is founded. Thus, just as there is a temporal and spatial dimension of existence, there is also a linguistic one that is beyond the human and the divine. The poem futher explores this idea in using wordplay and etymology of sacred places, divine objects, and gods. In this context, the patron god of Babylon, Marduk, is conceptualized as a polyonymous cosmic divinity who incorporates into his persona the names of other gods.

This chapter surveys cuneiform texts that reflect various degrees of linguistic awareness, providing the reader with a general perspective on Babylonian semiotics and linguistics. The chapter begins with a discussion of the scholarly settings in which cuneiform developed and goes on to explore how this writing system, together with practices of divination and magic, influenced the linguistic consciousness of scribes. It examines a variety of texts, including the basic elementary school exercise SA A, which Assyro-Babylonian scholars often interpreted as an esoteric text describing the very first human words. It also investigates the conceptions of language in epic narratives such Adapa and the South Wind and Gilgamesh.

Noga Ayali-Darshan covers the wisdom works and vernacular sayings of Syria-Palestine from the Late Bronze Age. This material exists in some form of Akkadian, including Sumero-Akkadian and Akkadian-Hurrian, all of which comes from sites at Ugarit and/or Emar. Darshan organises the works into four types: practical wisdom, critical wisdom, disputation poems and fables, and righteous sufferer compositions. Much of her chapter will introduce readers to the texts themselves, by way of their provenance, language and versions. Additionally, some thematic and particular linguistic reflections are given. In short, this chapter provides an introduction to an emerging and perhaps neglected area of wisdom from the biblical world.

This chapter offers insights into a long-term research project that seeks to distinguish between myths and their various manifestations in literary sources, and thus approaches Mesopotamian mythology as a body of sacred, oral stories that lie in the background both of texts and of other forms of cultural expression, in this instance the work of the Babylonian priest and historian Berossus, in particular Book I of his Babyloniaca, in which he summarised Babylonian cosmogonic beliefs for a Greek readership. While the links between this part of the Babyloniaca and the Akkadian poem Enūma eliš are well-known, Berossus combined knowledge of that text with a Mesopotamian myth of origins on the primeval pair ‘Father Sky and Mother Earth’ that was never fixed in writing. Taken together with sporadic evidence from Sumero-Akkadian sources collected by the author, the Babyloniaca emerge as an important source on this influential but elusive myth, which was overshadowed without being fully supplanted by the Marduk-centred theology of Enūma eliš.

An overview of all documents (originals) that were written until late in the sixteenth century BC shows that besides occasional experimenting Akkadian was the predominant language of writing. The shift to writing in the vernacular, that is, Hittite, came slowly and received a decisive push in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Hittite king Telipinu (ca. 1525 BC), the probable driving force behind the collection of the Hittite Laws, may have been instrumental in this development. From now on Hittite was the language of all written communication. Akkadian was only for diplomatic purposes and sometimes for prestige on seals and in titulature.