Cuneiform tablet excavated in situ at the Bit Resh temple in Uruk in 1959 and 1960, of Seleucid date, which pairs each antediluvian king with an Apkallu sage and each later king with a human ummanu scholar. Its standard edition is Alan Lenzi’s, in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions in 2008.
Why the pairing matters
It is the clearest surviving statement of the Mesopotamian doctrine that legitimate knowledge descends from before the flood through an unbroken line of named transmitters, and that scholars in the present are the successors of that line. Read alongside the secrecy colophons on scholarly tablets, the formula that an expert may show another expert and a non-expert may not see, it documents restricted knowledge as an institution rather than as a modern suspicion.
The use made of it
The Anunnaki Connection leans on this tablet for the claim that the sages were originally non-human and were humanised later, comparing the list with Bit meseri and with Berossus. That reading is Heather Lynn’s; in the standard account the apkallu are mythological culture heroes, which is a category the book has elsewhere declined to use. What the tablet does establish, and what she is right about, is that the Knowledge Filter has a four-thousand-year pedigree in this region.
Connections
Apkallu · The Anunnaki Connection · Heather Lynn · Knowledge Filter · Michael Cremo · Book of Enoch · Watchers · Anunnaki · Enki