Product Description: This important scholarly work is volume two in a series of four volumes that publishes all the more than six hundred cuneiform tablets in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Included are 106 religious, scientific, scholastic, and literary texts, written in Sumerian and Akkadian and primarily dated to the latter part of the first milennium B...read more

In Babylonian studies 'Wisdom' is used to cover a group of texts similar in scope to the Biblical Wisdom books: discussions on the problem of suffering, teaching on the good life, fables or contest literature, and proverbs. These texts are not only of considerable literary merit, but are also of great importance to all students of the ancient Near East as revealing the thought pattern of the ancient Babylonians. The cuneiform texts have been copied direct from the tablets and are accompanied by both transliteration and translation. An introductory chapter describes the cosmological background against which the works are to be set. Philological notes and a glossary complete the volume.