A Tale of Two Plague Gods - The BAS Library

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Over the course of human history, plagues and epidemics have been a horrific part of life. The past two years have shown us clearly that such afflictions are not going away any time soon. We have fought back against the COVID-19 pandemic with medical science, especially with the recent vaccination efforts, to combat it on the physiological level. And we have also struggled with ways of conceptualizing and explaining the pandemic in religious and symbolic terms to deal with the emotional, social, and spiritual tolls it has taken. The various cultures of the ancient Near East fought against outbreaks […]

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Endnotes

1.
For a translation, see Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, 3rd ed. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2005), pp. 509–512.

2. See references in The Death of Gilgamesh, line 19 (see the translation in Benjamin R. Foster, The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, Analogues, Criticism and Response, 2nd ed. [New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019], p. 147); the Sumerian hymn Shulpa’e A, lines 32–33; and lines 11–12 in a spell from the Sumero-Akkadian bilingual incantation series alan-nigsag-illa.