To name all the authorities to whom I am indebted would entail compiling a lengthy bibliography, but special mention must be made of a few. I have received most valuable help from Professor D. J. Wiseman, which has saved me from numerous pitfalls; all the errors which remain are therefore my own. I owe a large debt of gratitude to many friends who have criticized, made suggestions, and given encouragement at different stages, of the work; amongst these I thank particularly Ruth Harris, Katherine Watson, and my sister; and above all I am grateful to Dr E. V. Rieu for his patience, understanding, and encouragement. I am only too aware of the many inperfections which remain in this book, but without the help which has been given so generously there would have been many more.
I gratefully acknowledge my debt to the following for permission to use copyright material: Princeton University Press (Publishers) for quotations from Ancient New Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament edited by James B. Pritchard, 1950, 1955, 1969. Passages in my introduction are based on excerpts from the following translations: The Fields of Paradise and The Good Fortune of the Dead translated by John A. Wilson; Gudea: Ensi of Lagash translated by A. Leo Oppenheim ; Enki and Ninhursag: A Paradise Myth translated by S. N. Kramer; Hymn to Ishtar and Prayer of Lamentation to Ishtar, also Prayer of Ashurbanipal to the Sun-God, translated by Ferris J. Stephens; Atra-
asīs, Lambert and Millard; and A Vision of the Nether World translated by E. A. Speiser. I owe a more general indebtedness to S. N. Kramer’s translations of Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living and The Death of Gilgamesh; and to E. A. Speiser for the first eleven tablets of the Assyrian recension of the Gilgamesh Epic, all published in Ancient Near Eastern Texts. I owe as much also to A. Heidel and the University Press of Chicago for permission to use and quote from The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels,copyright 1946 and 1949by the University of Chicago. I thank Dr E. V. Rieu for permission to quote from his translation of The Odyssey, Penguin Classics, 1945, and the editors and publishers of the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University, and William Heinemann, for quotations from H. G. Evelyn-White’s Hesiod, 1950; also Professor Gwyn Jones for quotations from the translation of The Mabinogion by Gwyn and Thomas Jones, in the Every-man Library, J. M. Dent, 1949.
N. K. S.