A fine rant. While it is true that most of the readers of these stories aren't going to know much about the cultures they misrepresent, you raise a very valid point when you argue that authors should CARE what they write about. They should care about details. The audience should CARE too, but they don't. Unfortunately, few people today care much about Mesopotamia, which is why at this very moment we Americans are standing by while Iraq is systematically looted to pander to wealthy private collectors of antiquities, most of whom are Western. The loss of knowledge that comes from this lack of caring is incalculable.

The two stories in question do nothing to help alleviate this general ignorance, mostly because, I suspect, the authors and then the editors were simply lazy, and that's a real shame. I've done translation work for projects on Mesopotamia, both a play and a novel, and the fact is that Sumerian and Akkadian are both beautiful languages representing a fascinating culture. "Dingi' Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar" is neither Sumerian nor Akkadian-- it is in fact nothing but gibberish, much like the attempt at Akkadian in Jacqueline Carrey's "Kushiel's Avatar" (see page 42), which seems to have simply been simply a bunch of words pulled out of dictionary without any regard to morphology or syntax.

There is plenty of room for humor in Mesopotamia. There is plenty of room for drama. And yes, there are even Assyriologists like me who are willing to help authors get it right when they come to us with questions.

But only if the authors decide to care.