tradition served by successive generations of learned and well-trained scribes.”^121 He re-
ferred to these texts as the ‘stream of tradition.’ The second and far more numerous body
of documents was the “impressive bulk of cuneiform tablets that contain the records of
the day-to-day activities of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, from kings down to shep-
herds.”^122 The former group of texts is much more likely to provide multiple copies in
diverse areas and across larger time-spans than are texts of the second type.
As a result our access to multiple copies of texts is generally limited to what may be cau-
tiously termed the ‘canonical’ cuneiform texts, or the ‘stream of tradition.’ In these texts
a relatively fixed form of content and structure is achieved through the collection of
“various different forms of a text, and reconciling their differences.”^123 The prime candi-
dates, so to speak, in an analysis of textual transmission are those texts that have “at-
tained a kind of literary stabilization in the sense that old material was no longer being
incorporated.”^124 Such textual entities are certainly well developed by the end of the
(^121) A.L. Oppenhein, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (^) (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964) 13. 122
123 A.L. Oppenhein, Portrait of a Dead Civilization, 23.
D. Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology (Cuneiform Monographs 18 Groningen: Styx
Publications, 2000) 11, n. 30. Brown admits that the “precise definition of canonical in this context is elu-
sive.” 124
F. Rochberg-Halton, "Canonicity in Cuneiform Texts," JCS 36 (1984) 127, but note the reservations in
S.J. Lieberman, "Canonical and Official Cuneiform Texts," 333-34. Specifically in relation to the vast array
of omen literature, see the comments in D. Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology, 11-12.
It is evident that applying a biblically loaded term like ‘canon’ to the cuneiform literature is misleading.
Even so, its use in a context mediated by modern scholarly debate remains legitimate.