Assyriologist

Papers and books just published, and half-forgotten articles in obscure periodicals which appeared years ago, have all alike been used and quoted by him.

Naturally, however, there are some points on which I should be inclined to differ from the conclusions he draws, or to which he has been led by other Assyriologists.

Without being an Assyriologist himself, it was impossible for him to be acquainted with that portion of the evidence on certain disputed questions which is only to be found in still unpublished or untranslated inscriptions.

There are two points which it seemed to me of sufficient importance to justify my expression of dissent from his views.

Um, so those who have been in my, um, my Mishla this year, my Monday night Mishla this year, um, No, Rivki.

Rivki's grandfather, Professor Yaakov Elman, was one of the leading Assyriologists.

He says, Milgrim's three-volume commentary on Leviticus was thought by the late Yaakov Elman of Yeshiva University to be, quote, the finest commentary ever written on a book of Torah.

It's Okay, so this guy is not religious, obviously, and he holds by the documentary hypothesis.

There is some speculation that these were the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon rather than a site somewhere in Babylon.

One of the people to propose this is Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley of the University of Oxford.

While his father was still living, Ashurbanipal took on a lot of responsibility.

Esarhaddon undertook a series of military campaigns to put down uprisings in outlying parts of Assyrian territory and to try to conquer new territory.

Uh, some of the texts in the library are ones that he wrote himself, and many are inscribed with colophons that he wrote.

There is also a ten-sided cylinder covered in cuneiform containing the annals of Ashurbanipal, including an account of his ascension to the throne and his expeditions and conquests against Egypt, Tyre, Elam, Arabia, and his brother in Babylon, among others.

others.Assyriologist Hormuzd Rassam, who was born in Mosul, unearthed this cylinder from the site of the North Palace, and it is called the Rassam Cylinder today.

Ashurbanipal described this library as containing all knowledge.

That's pretty cool.

Where me and another Assyriologist are...

Me and another Assyriologist...

It's basically just going to be like a more, like, I guess you could say a higher class version of Fiverr, where we're just going to be able to go and take in requests for being able to translate into ancient languages.

So far...

They speak about the Apkallu, the sages who taught us.

They speak about the Dinjir, There are Assyriologists today who would argue that esoteric interpretations of the ancient stories of Sumer can be found in the Babylonian corpus.

But none of those academics would argue that the original meaning Of these core stories, the Atrahasis, the Enuma Elish, the Sumerian Kings List was esoterica.

I don't know of any serious academic Assyriologist who would argue that these ancient texts are spiritual messages.

And this promise of returning of the future has become part of every culture on the planet.

Von Däniken's work was hot on the heels of the work of astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who argued in books and papers from 1962 that the ancient Mesopotamian stories were very possibly a cultural recollection of extraterrestrial contact.

The first people to speak about the connection of the Bible with the ancient Mesopotamian stories were the Assyriologists who first began translating the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia in the 1830s.

And so we have Henry Rollinson of the East India Company, George Smith...

Long before the Greek told of the Lamia, the people of the land between the rivers feared a figure who resembles her uncannily, Lamashtu.

The Assyriologist Walter Faber worked through her exhaustively in his Standard 2014 edition.

It's a demoness with a lion's head and the feet of a bird of prey, and she does exactly what the Lamia does.

She attacks women in childbed.

Karanu, or Harran, stood like an advance guard of Chaldean civilization near the frontiers of Syria and Asia Minor.

Footnote Karanu was identified by the earlier Assyriologists with the Harran of the Hebrews, Genesis chapter 5 verse 12, the Kharsa of classical authors, and this identification is still generally accepted.

End footnote.

To the north it commanded the passes which opened onto the basins of the upper Euphrates and Tigris.

Footnote.

The name of this prince has been read in several ways.

Hammarabi, Kamarabi by the earlier Assyriologists, subsequently Hammaragash, Kamaragash, as being of Elamite or Kasaoan extraction.

The reading Kamarabi is at present the prevailing one.

Back to the text.

This deep entanglement is what allowed modern Assyriologists... with a century of careful work, to reconstruct Sumerian.

This is especially impressive, considered that Sumerian is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language, ancient or modern.

Footnote.

What is your book's relationship to previous scholarship?

Well, we are very actively trying to reread and rethink fear because of this issue that I briefly alluded to earlier about how German phenomenology of religion ended up being deeply influential for how biblicists and Assyriologists reacted.

We're studying the idea of fear.

So, Rudolf Otto, 19th century phenomenologist, wanted to say that in the Old Testament, you have this idea that fear is a response to the numinous.