Mesopotamia, that ancient land comprising Assyria in the north and Babylonia in the south, is to many unfamiliar territory. Some aspects are of course well known from its biblical connections: the glories of Nineveh and Babylon, the bloodthirsty nature of the Assyrian warriors, the magical power of the Babylonian diviners, the rich and powerful merchants, the luxurious and sensual lifestyle. The names of Hammurabi, Nebuchadrezzar, Tiglath-Pileser, Ashurbanipal and Sennacherib are potent ones. The mighty reliefs in the British Museum and the Louvre tell of victory, order, authority; they show battle preparations, fighting, sieges, chariots and splendid lion hunts. As befits the sheer size of these reliefs, their guardians are truly monumental: colossal winged bulls and lions, five-legged and immaculately curled and harnessed. Much of what we know of those ancient civilisations is what those who lived there so long ago wanted us to know. It is propaganda on a grand scale.

But it is quite another matter when it comes to records that were not deliberately meant to speak to posterity. Mesopotamia has yielded vast collections of clay tablets which record everything from the simplest sheep count to the most arcane divination procedure. These make up a corpus representing matters of current interest amongst the people of their day. Such things are not easy to digest or to interpret in a world far removed from their origins. For that reason perhaps they are of all the greater interest.

Though much of the information in these tablets may be thought of as mundane, they include amongst them a small proportion of tablets which can properly be described as literary. In them are told stories which are for the most part still unfamiliar, though in antiquity some at least were well known. These stories survived unread from about the time of the birth of Christ until halfway through the last century when Akkadian, the language in which they were written, was first deciphered. The story of their decipherment and impact is told in the first chapter of this book.

In the longest myth, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero Gilgamesh is a semi-divine king of Uruk, who, after the death of his friend Enkidu, goes in search of eternal life, a quest which takes him to Ut-napishtim, the survivor of a great flood. A flood sent to punish mankind is also a theme in the myth of Atrahasis. The Epic of Creation tells of the world's beginnings and of the building of the great city of Babylon under the protection of its god Marduk. Shorter myths are the Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld, in which the goddess Ishtar goes down to visit her sister Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld, and almost fails to return. A similar myth in many respects is that of Nergal and Ereshkigal, in which Nergal descends to the land of no return and seduces its queen. The Epic of Erra tells of Babylon in decline, its patron god temporarily absent; Etana, of a childless king in search of a magical plant that will ensure him an heir; Adapa, of a priest of Ea who deliberately breaks the wing of South Wind and is taken to heaven to answer for his behaviour; and the Epic of Anzu relates the story of a wicked bird who snatches from the god Ellil the Tablet of Destinies (which bestowed supreme power on the one who held it), and is slain in glorious combat by the god Ninurta.

All the myths concern the gods and people of Mesopotamia, most of whom behaved--well or badly--in a way that was reassuringly familiar to their audience. The more exciting and unpredictable parts of these myths tend to occur in locations which would have been extraordinary, but real enough to command attention: in forests, by the sea, in the mountains. The pace of the action is always slow moving, and quite often presaged by dreams and warnings or even described in advance by another character, so there are few surprises and little suspense. Fixed epithets abound, which increase the stately character of the texts.

The translations given in this book preserve the lengths and order of the lines on the tablets. Rhyming verse as we would define it is not apparent, but literary devices such as puns, alliteration and onomatopoeia all help to create internal rhythms.

The way in which sequential ordering is used, and the device whereby an action is repeated once, twice, a third time, and so on, in order to heighten dramatic tension, has been maintained in the excerpts given here. In the same spirit, the temptation for the translator to use several different adjectives when the Akkadian limits itself to one, or to embroider the text for a more sophisticated modern audience, has been avoided. The translations reflect, as far as is possible, the rock-hard impact and subtle qualities inherent in the originals.I am deeply indebted to Dr S. M. Dalley of Oxford University for the translations, which have been taken from her book Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1989).