account. For the text known as MUL.APIN, ‘the plough star,’ all available sources will
be considered, including copies from personal libraries in Assur during the reigns of
Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. This affords us the special opportunity to examine the
copies of one text both at the royal library in Nineveh, and in contemporary personal li-
braries in Assur, to see how the official copies and the personal copies from the same pe-
riod compare. This could provide a valuable tool for comparison with the biblical mate-
rial found in various locations in the Judean Desert. For the Laws of Hammurabi all
available texts will be examined, with the exception of two minor texts.^127 Due to the
length of the Epic of Gilgamesh only tablet XI of the twelve tablet series will be analysed
here. The text called mīs pî, ‘washing of the mouth,’ is attested by copies from both As-
syria and Babylonia, but only the Assyrian copies will be treated below. This is because
the variation between the northern and southern editions is such that it is not possible to
consider their particular exemplars as truly parallel texts.
It has been possible to consult a critical edition of the text presented in a score arrange-
ment in most cases.^128 The critical editions provide each text with its sources in parallel,
(^127) The following texts have been omitted from the analysis on account of the availability of cuneiform cop-
ies: a text from Sippar (Nr. 3/2166) excavated in 1986 which contains part of the prologue, and K6516
which contains part of the epilogue. 128
The texts are: E. Reiner, Babylonian Planetary Omens: Part One, The Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa
(Bibliotheca Mesopotamia 2; Malibu: Undena Publications, 1975); H. Hunger and D. Pingree, MUL.APIN:
An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform (Archiv für Orientforschung 24; Horn: Ferdinand Berger &
Söhne Gesellschaft, 1989); A.R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition
and Cuneiform Texts (2; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); C. Walker and M.B. Dick, The Induction
of the Cult Image in Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual: Transliteration, Translation, and
Commentary (Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001). The present writer has undertaken
to compose a score edition of the first millennium sources for the Laws of Hammurabi. In this single case