The ancient Mesopotamian erudite scholarly tradition of Enki's / Ea's sacred entourage of the seven mytho-priestly apkallu sages, who, according to the ancient Greek historian Berossos, brought the arts of civilization down to earth, has been known for centuries in Assyriological and neighbouring ancient Near Eastern scholarly fields, but has never been studied in detail within its ancient Mesopotamian context. In this book, a comprehensive overview of the ancient Mesopotamian tradition (s) of the antediluvian Seven Sages is presented for the first time, including all relevant source material of their textual and archaeological documentation available at present as well as a chapter in which their correlations with the famous ancient Mesopotamian apkallusay Adapa are investigated in detail. Their history, their myth (s) and their manifestations in ancient Mesopotamian religious, epic, scholarly and historiographical literature are pursued systematically from their very beginnings in the early Old Babylonian period (and even much earlier) until the late Hellenistic period and are concluded by an outlook summarizing their impact on neighboring and succeeding ancient Near Eastern cultures. Due to important new textual evidence and the systematic and comprehensive approach to the subject applied in this book fascinating new insights into long-lasting streams of tradition of the Seven Sages are revealed. These different streams of tradition of the Seven Sages and of Adapa served different geo-political interests of Mesopotamian scholars of different historical periods and yielded the complex erudite, apkallu -Adapa tradition of the 1st millennium, which is essentially of a mythopoetic nature. The Mesopotamian scholarly tradition of the mythical seven apkallu wise men of the wisdom god Enki / Ea, which, according to the Greek historian Berossos, brought the arts of civilization down to earth, has been known in the Assyriological community of scholars as well as in neighboring disciplines to the Near Eastern cultural area for decades. the inner Mesopotamian history of the origins and development of the seven antediluvian sages has not yet been examined in detail. In this book, the Mesopotamian seven wise men are presented and analyzed in detail for the first time, taking into account all currently available textual and archaeological sources. Also the correlations between the seven apkallu-Wise men and the legendary mythical apkallu-Wise Adapa are examined in detail in a separate chapter. The book leads through the history, mythology and manifestations of the seven wise men in the Mesopotamian religion, epic, scholarly tradition and historiography from their first beginnings in the ancient Babylonian period (and even far earlier) to the Hellenistic era and is presented with an outlook on the legacy of the seven sages decided in neighboring and subsequent ancient Near Eastern cultures. Thanks to important new textual evidence and the systematic development of the source material, new, long-standing traditions of the seven wise men are being developed.apkallu- Adapa tradition, whose symbolic and codified procedures can interestingly be compared with mythopoetic procedures