UC Berkeley

This thesis argues for the existence of a particular form of image-making in Akkadian we call ‘divine enumerative description.’ Roughly consisting of a set of structurally parallel lines which exhaustively enumerate the facets of a Mesopotamian divine figure, divine enumerative description is a very `Mesopotamian' way of waxing poetic. It constitutes a coherent poetic form most evident in some of the divine hymns of the latter second and first millennium. While both the scribal conception of the gods and the rhetorical dimensions of enumerative composition are established subjects in Assyriology, this thesis is novel in studying the intersection of the two topics using modern cognitive linguistic theory. We use this framework to illustrate how divine enumerative description operates not just in terms of explicit linguistic structure, but also implicitly beneath genre or communicative purposes of a text. Here, content and form mutually constrain each other to allow for a kind of structured imagination we typically associate with traditional western forms of literary creativity.