The Babylonian Legends of the Creation and the Fight Between Bel and the Dragon
By Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge
The Babylonian Legends of Creation is a book initially distributed in 1921 by English Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge. Move composed various deals with old civilizations during his life and aided in fabricating the British Museum’s assortment of cuneiform tablets. This book examines the disclosure of the tablets concerning the creation story (known as the Enuma Elish) of old Babylonia, including the variation structures. It has a depiction of their items as well as an interpretation.
The tablets were tracked down during the nineteenth century at Kuyunjik in Iraq and written in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform content. The genuine creation story is just referenced in the 6th tablet, most of them recounting the account of Marduk, the child of Enki, and his adventures, which included overcoming Tiamat, the mythical beast. The legend inside the tablets is dated to the primary Babylonian Dynasty (1894-1595 BCE) and contains a few equals with the tales included in the Old Testament.
Genre: Art
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Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 – 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East.
Biography.
He made numerous trips to Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities. He helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum. E. A. Wallis Budge was born in 1857 in Bodmin, Cornwall, to Mary Ann Budge, a young woman whose father was a waiter in a Bodmin hotel. Budge’s father has never been identified.
Budge left Cornwall as a boy and eventually lived in London with his maternal aunt and grandmother. He became interested in languages before he was ten years old but left school at twelve in 1869 to work as a clerk at the retail firm of WHSmith, which sold books, stationery, and related products. In his spare time, he studied Biblical Hebrew and Syriac with a volunteer tutor named Charles Seeger. Budge became interested in learning the ancient Assyrian language in 1872 when he also began to spend time in the British Museum.
Budge’s tutor introduced him to the keeper of Oriental Antiquities, the pioneer Egyptologist Samuel Birch, and Birch’s assistant, the Assyriologist George Smith. Smith helped Budge occasionally with his Assyrian. Birch allowed the youth to study cuneiform tablets in his office and obtained books from the British Library of Middle Eastern Travel and Adventure, such as Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains. From 1869 to 1878, Budge spent his free time studying Assyrian, and during these years, he often spent his lunch break studying at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
John Stainer, the organist of St. Paul’s, noticed Budge’s hard work and met the youth. He wanted to help the working-class boy realize his dream of becoming a scholar. Stainer contacted W. H. Smith, a Conservative member of Parliament, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and asked them to help his young friend. Smith and Gladstone agreed to help Stainer raise money for Budge to attend the University of Cambridge.
Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge
