Assyrian/Babylonian Culture

Language Games

Assyrians and Babylonians were particularly well-versed in language games. Scholars have found several examples of puns in grammar, religious, and even official texts. In particular, the myths narrating the stories of the gods and goddesses of the Mesopotamian pantheon offer several examples of word games that become central for the development, or the resolution, of the story, as Jean Bot-téro has highlighted. One interesting text tells the story of the god Nergal and of his wife-to-be, Ereshkigal, the powerful and independent Queen of the Underworld. Ea, the king of the gods, manages to combine the wedding by using a language game: the goddess wanted Nergal to put him to death {ana muti), but she is given him as consort {ana muti). Another fascinating story tells how Ea played a trick on human beings. Following the tricky suggestions of Ea, Adapa, the first human being, misses the chance to gain immortality for humankind by refusing the foods that will grant him immortality. The ancient Mesopotamian cultures have also left examples of verbal duels or challenges; in a poem written in Sumerian, a language that Assyrian erudites knew and used, the goddess Ninmah challenges her husband Enki, the god who creates the humankind from clay, to find a use for the men and women he has badly crafted.

Board Games

Archaeological findings have shown that the early Mesopotamian cultures, and later the Assyrians and Babylonians, knew a variety of board games, whose structure and rules may have had a religious content and most probably had their origins in divination practices (such as rolling the bones of animals to predict the future), as Nigel Pennick has illustrated. The so-called Royal Game of Ur, which the archaeologist Leonard Wolley found in a royal tomb in the Sumerian city of Ur, is probably the ancestor of the various board games known to the Assyrians, who used board games with 12 or 20 squares and a set of dice and small signposts to play a game possibly rather similar to Backgammon.

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