Hymn to Enlil

The Hymn to Enlil, Enlil and the Ekur (Enlil A), Hymn to the Ekur, Hymn and incantation to Enlil, Hymn to Enlil the all beneficent or Excerpt from an exorcism is a Sumerian myth, written on clay tablets in the late third millennium BC.

Fragments of the text were discovered in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology catalogue of the Babylonian section (CBS) from their excavations at the temple library at Nippur. The myth was first published using tablet CBS 8317, translated by George Aaron Barton in 1918 as "Sumerian religious texts" in "Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions", number ten, entitled "An excerpt from an exorcism". The tablet is 3.4 by 2.75 by 1.2 inches (8.6 by 7.0 by 3.0 cm) at its thickest point. A larger fragment of the text was found on CBS tablet number 14152 and first published by Henry Frederick Lutz as "A hymn and incantation to Enlil" in "Selected Sumerian and Babylonian Texts", number 114 in 1919. Barton's tablet had only containted lines five to twenty four of the reverse of Lutz's, which had already been translated in 1918 and was used to complete several of his damaged lines.

Edward Chiera published tablet CBS 7924B from the hymn in "Sumerian Epics and Myths". He also worked with Samuel Noah Kramer to publish three other tablets CBS 8473, 10226, 13869 in "Sumerian texts of varied contents" in 1934. The name given this time was "Hymn to the Ekur", suggesting the tablets were "parts of a composition which extols the ekur of Enlil at Nippur, it may, however be only an extract from a longer text". Further tablets were found to be part of the myth in the Hilprecht collection at the University of Jena, Germany, numbers 1530, 1531, 1532, 1749b, 2610, 2648a and b, 2665, 2685, 1576 and 1577. Further tablets containing the text were excavated at Isin, modern Ishan al-Bahriyat, tablet 923. Another was found amongst the texts in the Iraq Museum, tablet 44351a. Others are held in the collections of the Abbey of Montserrat in Barcelona and the Ashmolean in Oxford.

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