An = Anum
An = Anum, also known as the Great God List, is the longest preserved Mesopotamian god list, a type of lexical list cataloging the deities worshiped in the Ancient Near East, chiefly in modern Iraq. While god lists are already known from the Early Dynastic period, An = Anum most likely was composed in the later Kassite period.
While often mistakenly described as a list of Sumerian deities and their Akkadian equivalents, An = Anum is focused on presenting the familial relationships between deities, as well as their courts and spheres of influence. The first four tablets list the major gods and goddesses and their courts, arranged according to theological principles, but tablets V and VI do not appear to follow a clear system, and tablet VII is a late appendix listing the names of Marduk and one of his courtiers.
Many other works of ancient scholarship were influenced by An = Anum, including a similar list of temples and various theological commentaries. It has also been proposed that it was the basis for the remodeling of the pantheon of Uruk in the Seleucid period.
History of god lists in ancient Mesopotamia
God lists were a type of cuneiform lexical lists, the oldest genre of texts next to administrative documents. However, the first god lists emerged only around 600 years after the emergence of writing, in the Early Dynastic period. Like other lexical lists, they were presumably copied by scribes as exercises. Due to their original purpose as a learning aid, they were also important for the gradual modern decipherment of cuneiform. The oldest known god list is usually called the Fara god list, though it is also known from copies from Abu Salabikh and Uruk. 466 theonyms can be read from the surviving fragments, though it is estimated that it originally contained 560. While it begins with the head of the pantheon, Enlil, the gods are otherwise arranged based on lexical, rather than theological criteria, for example deities whose names start with the sign NIN are grouped together. Due to many of the names from it being otherwise unknown, little can be said about its contents otherwise. It has been argued that despite cases of theological and lexical subgroups being possible to discern, no principle guided the list as a whole, and it was meant to compile theonyms without necessarily providing additional information and the nature of the individual deities or relationships between them.No god lists are known from between the end of the Early Dynastic period and the late third or early second millennium BCE, when the so-called "Weidner list" was compiled, though it is assumed that they were still being created through the second half of the third millennium BCE and examples simply have yet to be discovered. The arrangement of deities in the Weidner list does not appear to follow any specific principles, and it has been proposed that it was the result of compiling various shorter lists together. Copies are known from many locations in historical Babylonia and Assyria, as well as from Emar, Ugarit and Amarna. The list was still in circulation in the late first millennium BCE.
While the earliest god lists only had a single column, over the course of the second millennium BCE a two column format became the norm, possibly due to decrease in familiarity with Sumerian, which after the Ur III period survived only as a liturgical and scholarly language, necessitating the addition of explanations in Akkadian. For example, later copies of the Weidner god list at times contain additional columns with explanations of the names. A copy from Ugarit adds columns listing Ugaritic and Hurrian deities.
In the Old Babylonian period, god lists were often the product of strictly local scribal traditions, and distinct ones are known from Nippur, Isin, Uruk, Susa, Mari and possibly Ur. These local lists show a growing tendency to organize deities based on theological, rather than lexical, considerations. Each of them most likely documented the hierarchy of deities recognized in the respective localities. Fragments of many further god lists are known, chiefly from Assyrian copies, but their origin and scope are not fully understood. Some of them focus on geographical distribution on deities, and mention many foreign gods as a result.
While it was common to arrange the names of gods in lists, no analogous scholarly practice is attested for demons, and the incantation series Utukku Lemnutu outright states they were not counted in the "census of Heaven and Earth", indicating the reasons behind this might have been theological.
''An = Anum'', its forerunner and other related texts
A list regarded as the forerunner of An = Anum has been dated to the Old Babylonian period. It is sometimes called the "Genouillac god list" after its original publisher, Henri de Genouillac. It is only known from one copy of unknown provenance and from a small fragment from Nippur, but it is presumed it had wider circulation in the Old Babylonian period. It is usually assumed that An = Anum itself was composed in the Kassite period, The most probable date of composition is assumed to be the period between 1300 and 1100 BCE. The name of the list used in modern literature is based on its first line, explaining that the Sumerian name An corresponds to Akkadian Anum. Wilfred G. Lambert proposed that it originated in the city of Babylon. However, according to Jeremiah Peterson documents from Old Babylonian Nippur indicate that both the An = Anum forerunner and other texts showing the beginning of the development of new lists fleshing out the relations between deities were also in circulation among the theologians of that city.While the forerunner has only 473 entries, over 2000 names are listed in An = Anum. However, this should not be understood as analogous to the presence of 2000 individual deities, as many of the names are instead epithets or alternate names. It is nonetheless the most extensive known god list.
Copies from the second millennium BCE are known from Nippur, Babylon, Nineveh, Assur and Hattusa. YBC 2401, the most complete exemplar, was copied by the Assyrian scribe Kidin-Sin during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I according to its colophon. This indicates that while Babylonian in origin, An = Anum already reached Assyria by the final decades of the second millennium BCE. Kidin-Sin wrote that he relied on "old tablets" containing the list.
An = Anum continued to be copied in the first millennium BCE. Neo-Assyrian fragments are known almost exclusively from Nineveh. 23 fragments dated to either the Neo-Babylonian or Late Babylonian period are known, but their provenance and precise dating are often uncertain. Both the list itself and various references to it are known from an archive from Seleucid Uruk.
Some of the discovered copies of An = Anum slightly differ from each other. However, the differences are generally limited to spelling of individual names or to inclusion or exclusion of single lines, and there are no major cases of entire passages differing between copies.
Early restorations sometimes confused fragments of An = Anum and An = Anu ša amēli, but the latter list is now considered to be a distinct work of Mesopotamian scholarship and differs from An = Anum due to having three columns, with the third providing an explanation of the first two. There is no indication it depended on material from An = Anum, as very few alternate names of deities listed overlap, and when they do, the sequence differs. An = Anum ša amēli is also more syncretic than An = Anum. An = Anum should also be differentiated from a list referred to as "shorter An = Anum" or "smaller An = Anum", which begins with the same first line, but it only documents alternate names of major deities, rather than their families and courts. However, it is assumed that it was at least partially derived from its more extensive namesake.
Modern research and publication
The first modern publication of fragments of An = Anum occurred in 1866 and 1870 in volumes II and III of Henry Rawlinson's Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, though the transcription contained many errors, and are considered too outdated to use. Fragments continued to be published in the first half of the twentieth century, but a transcription of the most complete copy, presently in the collection of the Yale University, has only been compiled by Richard L. Litke in 1958, and remained unpublished for a long time. In 1976 permission to use Litke's translation was granted to Dietz Otto Edzard, who was the editor of Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie at the time. Many entries in subsequently compiled volumes of this encyclopedia rely on it. Litke's reconstruction was later published as a book in 1998 in the series Texts from Yale Babylonian Collection.While a second edition of An = Anum was being prepared by Wilfred G. Lambert for a time, according to William W. Hallo only three first tablets were finished by 1998. Subsequently Lambert also compiled his edition of tablet V. Lambert died in 2011 without ever publishing his edition, but Andrew R. George inherited his notes, and subsequently cataloged them with Junko Taniguchi. However, due to their age Lambert's commentaries on the tablets were partially outdated and thus no longer suitable for publication without alterations. Preparations of a new edition partially relying on them started in 2018, culminating in publication of an annotated An = Anum by Ryan D. Winters, with George and as editors, in 2023. In addition to Lambert's research, it also utilized additional materials provided by Miguel Civil, Anmar Fadhil, Enrique Jiménez, Zsombor Földi, Tonio Mitto and Jeremiah Peterson.