Enūma Eliš

The story

Enūma Eliš, "When on High", is a Babylonian creation myth named after its opening words, and the only complete surviving account of the cosmology of the ancient Near East. It has about a thousand lines of Akkadian on seven clay tablets, each holding between 115 and 170 lines; most of Tablet V has never been recovered. The poem neither rhymes nor has a metre: it is made of couplets, usually written on one line. Over the seven tablets it tells of the birth of the gods, a war among them in which Marduk defeats Tiamat, the making of the world and of humankind to serve the gods, and the building of Babylon, and it ends with a long praise of Marduk under fifty names and titles. It was once thought to have been composed under Hammurabi, but most scholars now date it to the Second Dynasty of Isin, when Marduk began to be called king of the gods after Nebuchadnezzar I brought his statue back from Elam; a late Kassite date has also been proposed. The earliest manuscript, from Assur, dates to the 9th century BCE, and the poem may have been recited before it was written down. Some late Assyrian versions replace Marduk with the god Ashur.

The poem was part of worship. A ritual text of the Seleucid period states that Enūma Eliš was recited during the Akitu festival, and a version is also thought to have been read in the month of Kislimu. Scholars debate whether the reading took place, what it was for, and even which text was meant. Most think the festival included some re-enactment of Marduk's defeat of Tiamat, a renewal of the world and a triumph over chaos; it has also been suggested that the reading coincided with the spring floods of the Tigris and Euphrates, since Tiamat is a being of water. Jonathan Z. Smith argued instead that the ritual should be read in its post-Babylonian imperial setting, partly as political theatre lending legitimacy to the Seleucid rulers, who were not native to Babylonia. Whether the myth was made for the festival, or the festival for the myth, is unclear.

Parts of the story survived the fall of Babylon through Berossus, a Babylonian priest of Bel (Marduk) of the 3rd century BCE, whose Babyloniaca told of a primeval darkness and water and of a female being whom Bel cut in half to make heaven and earth; his account came down through Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius. The tablets themselves were found in the ruins of the palace and library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–626 BCE) at Nineveh: Austen Henry Layard recovered fragments in 1849, and in the excavations of Layard, Hormuzd Rassam and George Smith at Kuyunjik between 1848 and 1876, Smith identified creation texts among some 20,000 fragments. He published accounts in the Daily Telegraph from 4 March 1875 and a form of the myth in 1876, though some of his early readings, such as a temptation of Eve, were later held to be mistaken. The likeness to the Bible drew wide attention. L. W. King, publishing the British Museum's creation texts in 1901 and his own Seven Tablets of Creation in 1902, concluded that the poem filled seven tablets. German excavations at Assur between 1902 and 1914, and later finds in 1924–25 and 1928–29, showed that it was the god Kingu, not Marduk, whose blood was used to make humankind; by the mid-20th century almost all of the text was known except Tablet V.

The poem has long been compared with the opening of Genesis: both begin with a watery chaos, divide it into heaven and earth, and there are seven tablets as there are seven days of creation. Alexander Heidel (1951) stressed the differences: many gods against one God, the forces of nature as persons against creation by command, and no real parallel for Marduk's battles. Some scholars think the Mesopotamian myth spread west to the Hebrews, who may also have met it during the Babylonian captivity; others suppose a common ancestor, and Conrad Hyers read Genesis as written against such myths. Within Mesopotamian literature, Enūma Eliš draws on older texts: lines of the Anzû myth were adapted for it, Marduk takes up the weapons of the god Ninurta, and its opening echoes the Atrahasis epic. Its battle of a storm god against the sea belongs to a family of Near Eastern myths that includes the Ugaritic Baal Cycle and the tale of Illuyanka.

What it says

A hymn and a myth at once: it explains how order came out of the first mingled waters, how the young god Marduk won kingship among the gods by defeating Tiamat and her monsters, and how he shaped the sky, the stars, the rivers and humankind from what he had conquered. It ends in praise, giving Marduk his fifty names and making Babylon and its temple the centre of the world. The mood is solemn and triumphant.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.