My translation of the Old Testament also utilizes the cuneiform
manuscripts discovered by archeologists in Mesopotamia in the late 19th
Century AD. The Ashurai king Ashurbanipal, during his 7th Century BC reign out
of Nineveh, sent out emissaries to the southern region, the land of Shin'ar (Sumer)
and Chaldee (Babylonia) in search of the ancient epics such as the Epic of
Creation, which included the story of Adam and Eve, the Epic of Gilgamesh,
which included the story of Noah and the Flood. He had them translated in the
modern Ashurit language of his day, however, the originals were three thousand
years older but also in cuneiform. Interestingly the stories had been preserved essentially the
same. Ironically, by the time of Jesus Christ, the Scriptures recorded during
the Babylonian Captivity five centuries before had become so narrowly
interpreted that the scribes and Pharisees failed to recognize Jesus as the
Messiah prophesied by all those millennial religious records. Today, both
Judaism and the Catholic Church have realized the contribution of the
cuneiform tablets of the Ashurai to the understanding of the roots of the
Bible. The archeologists Sir Henry Austen Layard and Hormuzd Rassam discovered
the Ashurbanipal Library intact in Nineveh and crated the 50,000 tablets to
the British Museum in London. They are the pride of the British Museum,
together with the oldest Ancient Aramaic New Testament which dates back to the
4th Century AD.
![[Amazon.com Genesis book cover]](/bible/images/genesis_amazon_cover2.jpg)
![[Epic of Creation, British Museum]](creation-epic.GIF)