This volume opens up new perspectives on Babylonian and Assyrian literature, through the lens of a pivotal passage in the Gilgamesh Flood story. It shows how, using a nine-line message where not all was as it seemed, the god Ea inveigled humans into building the Ark.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Copyright credits; Abbreviations; Conventions PART I - Preliminaries; 1 Introduction; 2 'Interrogating' Babylonian narrative poetry; 3 'Identifying' puns; 4 The high concentration of puns in the GilgameS Flood story; PART II - Dissecting Ea's message; 5 The lines about the Flood hero; 6 Raining 'plenty': uSaznanakkunuSi nuhSam-ma; 7 The birds: [hi¿ib] i¿¿urati; 8 The fish: puzur nuni; 9 The harvest: [...] meSrâ eburam-ma; 10 'Cakes at dawn': ina Ser(-)kukki; 11 'In the evening': ina lilâti; 12 The 'rain of wheat': Samût kibati; 13 Recapitulation; 14 Issues of textual history; 15 Meaning and performance; PART III - Conspicuous silences in the GilgameS Flood story; 16 Outlining the problems; 17 Does Atra-hasis 'fill in the gaps'?; 18 Communications between Ea and the Flood hero; 19 Communication between the Flood hero and the people of suruppak; 20 Ea's elusiveness; 21 The enigma of Uta-napiSti; 22 Why the 'gaps'?; PART IV - Other interconnections; 23 Ea's duplicity and Babylonian/Assyrian divination; 24 Beyond Cuneiform; 25 Conclusions; References; Alphabetical index; Index locurum