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Originally Posted by Fram
It's not because you can read the Enuma Elish as an allegorical astronomical text (and this can be discussed as well) that you can read it as a literal astronomical text. The Lord of the Rings can be read as an allegorical antiwar text (although Tolkien despised this), but you would be hard pressed to read it as a literal description of either WW1 or WW2.
And A.DIM claimed that it should be read as a literal astronomical text.
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ok, taking the risk of repeating myself let me state this again: despite what Rich said in ealier pages and the current insistance that old "myths" are fictional stories the fact is noone truly knows. what matters, in my opinion, is that they were never considered, by those who meticulously wrote and copied down those texts, to be fiction.
thousands of tablets were safe guarded in ancient librarys, as the Sumerian and later the Akkadian scribes were trained in the scholarly work of copying and maintaning them. according to the scribes own written records, those texts represent human history from the time when the "gods" roamed the Earth.
no scholar who has studied these texts in detail can claim or prove that they represent fictional events. in fact from the 19th century and earlier to this day they are still used as reference for archeological discoveries. the tomb of Gilgamesh was discovered after a literal interpretaion of the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example.
the problem of failling to understand the importance of these texts comes more from misinformation and misunderstanding than from a close and detailed examination of their origins. so, comparing the "Lord of the Rings" with the Enuma Elish which was the story of creation venerated for thousands of years, and the inspiration of the Biblical genesis, is at best a naive attempt at downgradding the level of the conversation.
if this whole thread served no purpose i hope at least it inspired some lurker out there to go search and read about about the amazing Sumerian civilization. to understand and witness how they wrote with such amazing detail about their gods. to find the similarities between those gods and the gods of other ancient civilizations and to ultimately recognize the same archetypical struggle between the two brothers EN.KI and EN.LIL propagated through civilizations and history to our own days.
its a monumental work, no doubt. but i think it goes beyond the cinicism of the nay sayers and the reward is a deep understanding of human nature and history.