Tense in Literary Old Babylonian‪.‬

INTRODUCTION The body of relatively recent literature devoted to Old Babylonian (henceforth OB) tense mainly refers to letters and laws. A comprehensive description is found in Leong 1994 and Kaplan 2002, the perfect is described in von Soden 1965 (not only for letters and law codices), Maloney 1981, and Streck 1999. Not a single work deals with Mari OB tense, and for tense in literary OB (henceforth LOB), we have Wilcke 1977, Streck 1995 (both tackling difficult but specific issues in both LOB and SB), and Metzler 2002 (and henceforth Metzler). Metzler is the first (and only) comprehensive description of tense in LOB. Following Metzler is the present author's Cohen 2006, which describes tense in the relatively confined corpus of the OB epic using the structural linguistic method. However, the present review strives to evaluate Metzler's work through common sense, rather than via a particular method.