Where to find the full texts of "Enuma Anu Enlil" and "MUL.APIN"
An important caveat before we begin: these two monuments are at fundamentally different stages of publication. MUL.APIN is a compact text of two tablets, and it has long been published in full. Enuma Anu Enlil (EAE) is a series of 68–70 tablets with about 7,000 omens, and it has not been published in full even in academic scholarship.
An important caveat before we begin: these two monuments are at fundamentally different stages of publication. MUL.APIN is a compact text of two tablets, and it has long been published in full. Enuma Anu Enlil (EAE) is a series of 68–70 tablets with about 7,000 omens, and it has not been published in full even in academic scholarship: by different estimates, only about a third to a half of the series is available in modern editions. Therefore a "complete text of the EAE in a single book" does not exist in principle — it has to be assembled from separate editions and open databases.
MUL.APIN: full texts
Printed editions (complete critical editions)
- H. Hunger, D. Pingree. MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform (1989) — the first complete edition: the cuneiform text, the transliteration and the English translation.
- H. Hunger, J. Steele. The Babylonian Compendium MUL.APIN (Routledge, 2020) — a new edition with an updated translation and a detailed commentary.
Free open access
- CDLI (cdli.earth) — the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: photographs and transliterations of individual lists of the series, for example the Neo-Babylonian copy from Nippur.
- The British Museum — high-resolution photographs of the original tablets, including tablets of the MUL.APIN series.
- Stellarium — a free planetarium with a built-in reconstruction of the Babylonian sky according to MUL.APIN.
- Academia.edu / ResearchGate — Assyriologists post articles, tables of constellations and partial translations there.
- Scribd — scans of both editions can be found online, but these are user uploads of copyrighted books, so for citation it is better to use the printed editions.
Enuma Anu Enlil: what is published and where to look
The series has come down to us in several recensions; copies of the same tablet differ in content, and the fragments are scattered across the museums of the world — that is why a single edition still does not exist. The published parts:
| Tablets | Subject | Where published |
|---|---|---|
| 1–6 | First appearances of the Moon | L. Verderame (Italian translation, 2002) |
| 1–13 | Lunar phenomena | PDF edition on Academia.edu |
| 15–22 | Lunar eclipses | F. Rochberg-Halton, Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination (1989) |
| 23–29 | Solar omens | The Solar Omens of Enuma Anu Enlil (NINO, Leiden, 1995) |
| 44–49 | Weather omens (thunderstorm, wind, rain) | E. Gehlken, Brill, 2012 |
| 50–51 | Planetary omens | E. Reiner, D. Pingree, Babylonian Planetary Omens, Part Two |
| 50–68 | The "Ishtar section" | Online edition in the eBL corpus |
| 63 | The Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa | Reiner & Pingree, Part One (1975) |
Open digital libraries (originals and transliterations)
- Oracc — an edition of the EAE from tablets of the Achaemenid and Seleucid periods.
- eBL (electronic Babylonian Library, LMU) — transliterations of the fragments of the British Museum, including the astronomical tablets.
- CDLI — a catalogue of tablets with photographs, including the famous Louvre tablet AO 06450.
- Yale Cuneiform Commentaries Project — ancient commentaries on the opening sections of the EAE.
- State Archives of Assyria, vol. VIII (H. Hunger, 1992) — more than 500 reports to the Assyrian kings with quotations from the EAE: they make it well visible how the series "worked" in practice.
Practical search tips
- Search by sigla, not by name. Correct queries: "EAE tablet 14", "Enuma Anu Enlil 63", "MUL.APIN I ii 36" — by the numbers of tablets and lines.
- Use museum inventory numbers. For example, K.4292 is tablet 50 of the EAE series from the British Museum.
- For casual reading without Akkadian: start with the English Wikipedia and overview compilations, for example the PDF collections on babylonianastrology.com.
- Protected editions (Hunger–Pingree, Reiner–Pingree, Brill) should be sought through university libraries, Google Books and the Internet Archive (controlled lending access).
FAQ: frequently asked questions about the sources
Why has "Enuma Anu Enlil" not been published in full for more than a hundred years?
The series existed in several recensions: copies of the very same tablets differ in content and in the order of the text. Thousands of fragments are kept in different museums and require collation, so each group of tablets is published as a separate monograph by different teams over decades.
Where should a non-specialist start?
The optimal path: Wikipedia articles (MUL.APIN, Enuma Anu Enlil), then Kurtik's The Starry Sky of Ancient Mesopotamia, then a sky reconstruction in Stellarium; for deeper study, the Hunger–Steele edition (2020) via a library.
Summary
The complete text of MUL.APIN is available in the printed editions of Hunger–Pingree (1989) and Hunger–Steele (2020), and in part in the open databases of the CDLI and in the Stellarium reconstruction. The complete text of "Enuma Anu Enlil" does not exist anywhere: it has to be assembled from the editions of Rochberg-Halton, Reiner–Pingree, Gehlken, Verderame and the open platforms Oracc, eBL and CDLI. In Russian, both monuments are represented only by fragments and reference articles.
Also read: the kinds of the zodiac, the zodiac before 500 BCE, the types of zodiacal systems.
İlgili makaleler
What kinds of zodiac are there: a complete guide
The zodiac is a system of 12 sectors of the ecliptic, used to describe the position of celestial bodies. Over millennia of history, several fundamentally different zodiacal systems have formed, each with its own logic, purpose and cultural context. In this article we will look at what kinds of zodiac exist, how they differ and how they came about.
The zodiac before 500 BCE: from lunar stations to Babylonian omenology
Before the 5th century BCE, the classical 12-sign zodiac we are accustomed to today did not exist. In Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Babylon) the sky was perceived not as a mathematical grid but as a living canvas of divine signs. During this period the fundamental astronomical and astrological concepts were being formed that would later become the foundation of the Western and Vedic traditions.
The types of zodiac system: tropical, sidereal and astronomical
Short answer: the zodiac comes in three types — tropical (by equinoxes and seasons), sidereal (by the fixed stars, shifted by the ayanamsha) and astronomical (by the real constellation boundaries of the IAU). A comparison table and a hint on which one to choose.