28 Rochberg
omens, medical texts, and astronomical texts, all of which genres belong
to tupšarru ̄tu “scholarship.”^37 While the notion of secret knowledge has
generally been assumed to be late, (that is, fi rst millennium in origin),
Westenholz’s particular thesis was “that the earliest lexical compilations
may have been more than a utilitarian convenience for the scribes who
wrote them; that they contained a systematization of the world order; and
that at least one was considered as containing ‘secret lore.’”^38 In contrast to
the view that lexical lists were the practical result of the need to store data
and to preserve the scribal school curriculum, that is, the lists were simply
inventories and teaching tools, Westenholz sees already in the early third
millennium BCE the notion of privileged, exclusive knowledge within
the community of scholar- scribes.^39 Whereas pirištu denoted exclusivity,
another term used in reference to the texts of the scribal repertoire even
more clearly connoted secrecy. This was the term nisirtu “guarded” (from
the root nsr, meaning “to guard” or “to protect”), which often referred to
a “(hidden, guarded) treasure,” hence “secret knowledge.” Another word
for “knowledge” or “wisdom” is ne ̄mequ. Often, but not exclusively, associ-
ated with ne ̄mequ was the god Ea, who, as creator and ally of humankind,
was willing to not only divulge his secrets in the form of magic and arcana
mundi to human beings but to make messages available as omens for the
benefi t of the human race. Indeed, the scribes’ view that the authority
behind the series Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil, as well as other omen, incantation, and
ritual texts, was the god Ea, appears in a catalog of texts and “authors”:[The Exorcists’] Series (a ̄šipûtu), The Lamentation Priests’ Series (kalûtu), The
Celestial Omen Series (Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil), [(If) a] Form (alamdimmû), Not Com-
pleting the Months, Diseased Sinews; [(If)] the Utterance [of the Mouth], The
King, The Storm(?), Whose Aura is Heroic, Fashioned like An: These (works)
are from the mouth of Ea.^40That the contents of secret texts stem ultimately from the “mouth”
of a god seems to imply some kind of divine revelation in the process of
transmission of these traditions to the ranks of scholars. An explicit story
of such revelation is told about the antediluvian sage Enmeduranki and
the gods of divination:Šamaš and Adad honored him, Šamaš and Adad [set him] on a large throne of
gold, they showed him how to observe oil on water, a mystery of Anu, [Enlil
and Ea], they gave him the tablet of the gods, the liver, a secret of heaven and
[underworld].^41