The astrological series Enūma Anu Enlil begins with a double mythological introduction in Sumerian and Akkadian (Koch U. 2015a: 163–164). The Akkadian version describes the establishment of the sun by the gods, while the Sumerian version concerns that of the moon. It appears at the beginning of the first tablet, before the lunar omens (Verderame L. 2002: 2–3.9), a placement that also applies to the only Hittite fragment, KUB 34.12 (Riemschneider K.K. 2004a: XXX), assuming that the difficult passage KUB 57.73 rev. IV, 2–7 is not a very free translation, or an otherwise unattested version of the introduction (see CTH 532). In the second millennium, however, this does not seem necessarily to have been the case: at the end of the lunar-eclipse omen tablet Emar 6.652, there is an Akkadian version of the introduction that is, in content, closer to the later Sumerian one. This ‘outro’ is also found in first-millennium copies of Enūma Anu Enlil 22, to which Emar 6.652 is a forerunner (Brown D. 2000: 254–255).

As far as I can see, however, there is no evidence for an independent transmission of the text in either the first or the second millennium. For this reason, Laroche’s CTH number 531 should ultimately be subsumed under CTH 533. For reasons of convenience, his nomenclature is retained here.

Nevertheless, KUB 34.12 and Emar 6.652 show that this short introductory piece did not first develop in the scholarly centers of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires (see also Brown D. 2000: 246–262).