Mesopotamian Cosmogony: The Enūma eliš and the Sumerian–Akkadian Creation Traditions

1. Sources and dating

There is no single Mesopotamian creation story. Over two and a half thousand years of writing, the scribes of Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria described the beginning of the world in many places and in many ways: in the opening lines of epics, in hymns, in debate poems, in incantations and in a few compositions devoted to the subject, of which the Enūma eliš is by far the fullest. The sources offer several explanations of origins rather than one, and they do not add up to a canon. The entry follows them in order of their earliest surviving evidence.

The Sumerian tradition. The oldest text usually counted among Mesopotamian cosmogonies is the Barton Cylinder (CBS 8383, Penn Museum), a clay cylinder from Nippur (the CDLI catalogue queries the findspot) first published by George A. Barton in 1918 and re-edited by Bendt Alster and Aage Westenholz in 1994. Its script places it in the Early Dynastic period: the Penn Museum dates it to about 2400 BCE, and the catalogue of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative assigns it, with a query, to Early Dynastic IIIb (about 2500–2340 BCE). Its date rests on the form of its script and is not certain(evidence: Contested). Its difficult archaic Sumerian describes the sacred precinct of Nippur at a time when heaven and earth were in contact, and a union in which the goddess Ninḫursaĝa, named in the text as Enlil's elder sister, conceives seven twins (Alster and Westenholz 1994). Whether it is a cosmogony in the full sense is a matter of interpretation: Jan Lisman, who discussed it among the Sumerian cosmogonies in 2013, has since asked whether it is instead a lament for the city of Keš (Lisman 2013; Lisman 2016). Barton's own 1918 readings are superseded and should not be quoted as a translation.

Most Sumerian material survives in copies made in the scribal schools of the early second millennium BCE (the Old Babylonian period, about 1900–1600 BCE), although many of the compositions are older. None tells the creation of the world from beginning to end. They allude to it in passing, and four passages carry most of the weight (catalogue numbers are those of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, ETCSL):

• The prologue of Gilgameš, Enkidu and the nether world (c.1.8.1.4) looks back to the days after heaven had been separated from earth, when An carried off heaven, Enlil carried off earth, and the nether world was given to Ereškigala.
• The song of the hoe (c.5.5.4) makes Enlil the one who separated heaven from earth and who, with his hoe, made the first humans break through the soil at a place named for the emergence of flesh.
• Enki and Ninmaḫ (c.1.1.2) opens with the junior gods worn out by digging canals. Prompted by his mother Namma, the ancestress of the senior gods, Enki has a creature made from clay taken from above the apsû (the fresh water beneath the earth) to carry the gods' work-baskets.
• The debate between Sheep and Grain (c.5.3.2) opens on a world before grain and flocks existed, until the gods create both on the sacred mound where they dwell.

Two ideas recur across these texts: an original unity of heaven and earth that was later divided, and the creation of humankind to relieve the gods of labour. Neither is told as a single myth, and any Sumerian "creation story" that puts them in one sequence is a modern reconstruction.

Atra-ḫasīs. The Akkadian poem known from its first words as inūma ilū awīlum, "When the gods were (like) men", combines the creation of humankind with the story of the Flood. Its most complete copy is an Old Babylonian manuscript in three tablets written at Sippar by a junior scribe, whose colophons date it to the reign of Ammi-ṣaduqa of Babylon (about 1646–1626 BCE in the conventional chronology) (Lambert and Millard 1969). In Tablet I the senior gods divide the universe by lot (An takes heaven, Enlil the earth, Enki the waters); the junior gods, set to dig the rivers, rebel; and a god is slaughtered so that the birth-goddess can mix his flesh and blood with clay to make humans who will bear the gods' work.

The Enūma eliš. The Babylonian poem called after its opening words enūma eliš, "When on high", is the longest and fullest Mesopotamian composition devoted to the origin of the world and the gods; a much shorter theogony, known from a single late Babylonian tablet from Sippar and centred on the city of Dunnu, also survives (Lambert 2013, pp. 392–395). The Enūma eliš runs to about 1,100 lines on seven tablets (1,096 in Lambert's edition). Its oldest datable manuscripts are Neo-Assyrian copies from Assur of about the ninth century BCE; most surviving copies are first-millennium, many from the seventh-century library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, where Austen Henry Layard's excavations of the 1840s and 1850s recovered the first fragments (Lambert 2013).

Its date of composition is debated(evidence: Contested). An older view placed it in the reign of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE). W. G. Lambert argued that it was composed between the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I (about 1125–1104 BCE), when the statue of Marduk was brought back to Babylon from Elam, and about 900 BCE, because before that period Marduk is not attested as king of the gods (Lambert 2013). Others have argued for a Kassite-period date, earlier in the late second millennium, and Stephanie Dalley judges a date under Nebuchadnezzar I too low (Dalley 2000). The surviving copies cannot settle the question, since the absence of Old Babylonian copies is an argument from silence.

Later witnesses. Two Greek sources show that the poem, or a close relative of it, was known beyond cuneiform. Berossus, a priest of Bēl-Marduk at Babylon, wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek, the Babyloniaca, dedicated to the Seleucid king Antiochus I and published about 290–278 BCE; his account of creation survives only in later quotations, chiefly through Alexander Polyhistor in Eusebius and Syncellus. Damascius, the last head of the Platonic school at Athens (early sixth century CE), summarises a Babylonian theogony in his Problems and Solutions concerning First Principles; in that passage he does not say where he found it (Cory and Hodges 1876, p. 92). Both are in English in Cory's Ancient Fragments (revised edition 1876).

2. The account

The narrative below follows the Enūma eliš. Quotations are from L. W. King's public-domain translation of 1902, read in the AKASHA transcription, and line numbers are King's: they differ in places from those of modern editions, and in parts of Tablets II and V King's own numbers are approximate. Where later manuscripts change the picture, the change is stated.

Tablet I: before names. The poem begins before anything had a name.

When in the height heaven was not named, And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, And the primeval Apsū, who begat them, And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,— Their waters were mingled together, And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen; When of the gods none had been called into being, And none bore a name, and no destinies [were ordained]; Then were created the gods in the midst of [heaven],

Two waters, the male Apsû and the female Tiāmat, are mingled in one mass. Where King wrote "chaos, Tiamat" in line 4, the Akkadian has the word mummu before her name, the same word that names Apsû's vizier; its meaning in this place is debated (Talon 2005; Lambert 2013). From the mingled waters come generations of gods: Laḫmu and Laḫamu, Anšar and Kišar, Anu, and Ea (called Nudimmud). Their noise disturbs Apsû, who plans with his vizier Mummu to destroy them. Ea learns of the plan, puts Apsû to sleep with a spell and kills him, and builds his own dwelling upon the apsû; there Marduk is born. King's manuscripts preserved little of this episode; the fuller sequence is known from manuscripts identified since 1902 (Lambert 2013).

Tiāmat, urged on by other gods, prepares for war. She makes eleven kinds of monsters and raises Kingu (also read Qingu) above the gods, giving him the Tablet of Destinies and with it the power to decree destinies (King I.121–142).

Tablets II–III: the search for a champion. Ea and then Anu fail to face Tiāmat. Marduk agrees to fight on one condition: that the assembled gods make his destiny supreme, so that his word, not theirs, will decree fate (King II.133–140). Tablet III repeats the message of Anšar to Laḫmu and Laḫamu almost word for word, and ends with the gods at a banquet decreeing the fate of Marduk.

Tablet IV: the battle and the making of the world. The gods enthrone Marduk and test his word on a garment that vanishes and reappears at his command (King IV.19–26). Armed with bow, net, the four winds and seven winds of his own making, he meets Tiāmat, drives the evil wind into her open mouth and pierces her, takes the Tablet of Destinies from Kingu (King IV.95–122), and makes the world from her body.

He split her up like a flat fish into two halves; One half of her he stablished as a covering for heaven. He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman, And bade them not to let her waters come forth.

Read IV.137 in the Codex: Enūma eliš, tr. L. W. King (1902) →

He then measures the apsû and founds the heavenly dwelling Ešarra as its counterpart, where Anu, Bēl (Enlil) and Ea take their places (King IV.141–146).

Tablet V: the order of the sky. Marduk sets the stations of the great gods among the stars and divides the year.

He (i.e. Marduk) made the stations for the great gods; The stars, their images, as the stars of the Zodiac, he fixed. He ordained the year and into sections he divided it; For the twelve months he fixed three stars.

He fixes the station of Nēberu to mark the bounds of the others (King V.6) and gives the Moon its monthly phases (King V.12–22). King had only the first two dozen lines and a few fragments of this tablet. Manuscripts found since add a long passage in which Marduk shapes the earth from the rest of Tiāmat's body, opening the Tigris and Euphrates from her eyes, before the gods acclaim him and he announces the building of Babylon (Lambert 2013).

Tablet VI: the making of humankind. Marduk tells Ea that he will create man.

“My blood will I take and bone will I [fashion], “I will make man, that man may . . . [ . . . ]. “I will create man who shall inhabit [the earth], “That the service of the gods may be established, and that [their] shrines [may be built].

King read the first line as Marduk speaking of his own blood. The manuscripts found since show the passage differently: the gods name Kingu as the instigator of the revolt, he is executed, and Ea makes humankind from his blood to bear the gods' labour (Lambert 2013, Tablet VI; Talon 2005). This later reading, not King's, is the accepted text. The gods then build Esagil, Marduk's temple at Babylon, and hold a banquet in it.

Tablet VII: the fifty names. The poem ends by giving Marduk fifty names, each glossed as a title of his power, among them Nēberu, "the Seizer of the Midst" in King's rendering, whose star sets the paths of the stars (King VII.109–112). An epilogue asks that the names be remembered, taught from father to son, and celebrated so that the land may prosper (King VII.125–142).

3. Key terms

• apsû: the subterranean fresh water, and the primeval male being Apsû.
• mummu: a word of debated meaning, the name of Apsû's vizier and an epithet of Tiāmat.
• šīmtu: destiny, what is decreed for a being; the power to decree it is sovereignty itself.
• ṭuppi šīmāti: the Tablet of Destinies.
• nēberu: "crossing", Marduk's star, usually the planet Jupiter.
• akītu: the festival at which the Enūma eliš was recited in Babylon.

4. The cosmos in its own terms

The Enūma eliš does not describe creation from nothing. Before anything is named, the waters already exist; the world is made by separating, measuring and assigning what was there. Four features of the poem's account stand out. What they might mean beyond the poem is left to the AKASHA Reading (§7).

Naming and destiny. The poem opens with heaven and earth not yet named and the gods not yet called into being or given destinies (King I.1–8), and it closes with the fifty names of Marduk. Its central conflict is over who holds the power to decree destinies: Tiāmat gives it to Kingu with the Tablet of Destinies (King I.137–140), the assembled gods grant it to Marduk (King II.136–138), and Marduk takes the tablet from Kingu after the battle (King IV.119–122).

The world from the body of the defeated. Heaven and earth are made from the two halves of Tiāmat's body, held apart by a bolt and a watchman so that her waters do not come forth (King IV.137–140). In the manuscripts found since King's edition, humankind is made from the blood of the defeated Kingu (Lambert 2013).

A kingdom of gods. The order the poem describes has the shape of a kingdom: an assembly of gods, a king chosen in a crisis whose rule is then made permanent, a capital (Babylon) and a temple (Esagil). Humankind is made so that the service of the gods may be established (King VI.8). In exalting Marduk the poem exalts his city (Lambert 2013), and its Assyrian copies show that it could be adapted: some replace Marduk with the Assyrian god Aššur (Lambert 2013).

The calendar. Marduk sets the stations of the gods as stars, fixes the year and its twelve months, and gives the Moon its phases (King V.1–22).

5. Comparative notes

Comparative claims about this poem are frequent, so each claim here is put to AKASHA's four questions: could the agreement arise independently for ordinary reasons; is it arbitrary or obvious; is it a matter of structure or only of a word or number; and can contact be ruled out?

Genesis 1 and the "deep". The opening of Genesis describes darkness over tĕhôm, "the deep" (Gen 1:2), and God dividing the waters above the firmament from the waters below it (Gen 1:6–7). In 1895 Hermann Gunkel argued that tĕhôm echoes the name Tiāmat and that Genesis demythologises a Babylonian combat myth (Gunkel 1895). The verbal link is not supported(evidence: Not supported): tĕhôm and Tiāmat are both descended from a common Semitic word for the sea or deep, and a direct borrowing from Akkadian would be expected to take a different form (Tsumura 2005). The broader Chaoskampf thesis, that creation in the ancient Near East normally follows a god's victory over a chaos monster, has also been criticised: among the surviving Near Eastern myths, the Enūma eliš is the one that clearly joins combat and creation (Tsumura 2005).

The division of the waters above from the waters below is a closer structural match. It does not pass the first question: a sky that holds back the rain and an earth with water beneath it are an ordinary inference from weather and wells, available to any ancient observer. On the fourth question, contact was possible, since Judean exiles lived in Babylonia after the deportations of the early sixth century BCE; but a possible route is not evidence that the route was used. The agreement is real, obvious, and best left at that.

Two primeval principles. Damascius found in the Babylonian pair Tauthe and Apason (Tiāmat and Apsû) two first principles, with the One passed over in silence, and read their son Moymis (Mummu) as the intelligible world (Damascius, in Cory and Hodges 1876). His names show close knowledge of the poem's opening genealogy (Cory and Hodges 1876, p. 92); his interpretation is a Neoplatonic reading of it, not the poem's own claim (see §6).

6. Reception and esoteric afterlives

Ritual. Seleucid-period ritual tablets from Babylon, first edited by François Thureau-Dangin in 1921, instruct a senior priest to recite the whole of the Enūma eliš before Bēl (Marduk) on the fourth day of Nisannu, during the spring akītu festival (Thureau-Dangin 1921; Nakata 1968). Nakata, citing Lambert, reports a recitation on the fourth day of the month Kislīmu as well (Nakata 1968). How far back the link between poem and festival reaches is uncertain(evidence: Contested): the ritual tablets are late, and the akītu itself is much older than the poem.

Greek antiquity. Berossus retold the creation for a Greek-reading court around 280 BCE: a woman named Omoroca, in the Chaldean language Thalatth, ruled over monstrous creatures until Bēl cut her in two to make heaven and earth. In the same fragment, as Alexander Polyhistor reports him, Berossus explains the whole account as an allegory of nature (Cory and Hodges 1876, p. 59). Through Damascius the poem's genealogy entered later Greek philosophy (Cory and Hodges 1876, p. 92). Berossus's allegorical gloss is the earliest surviving interpretation of the poem's story; Damascius's reading, in which the first pair are principles of a metaphysical system, is the earliest surviving Neoplatonic one.

Rediscovery. George Smith of the British Museum identified the first fragments of the Creation tablets among the Nineveh collections and published them in The Chaldean Account of Genesis (Smith 1876), four years after his announcement of the Babylonian Flood story had caused a public sensation. L. W. King's edition of 1902 assembled the fragments then known, including pieces of all seven tablets, and is the public-domain translation AKASHA transcribes.

Babel and Bible. On 13 January 1902 the Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch lectured in Berlin, in the presence of the Kaiser, on the debt of the Hebrew Bible to Babylonia (Delitzsch 1902). The controversy that followed shaped biblical scholarship for a generation; in later years Delitzsch's argument turned into a denial of the Jewish roots of Christianity, and historians have shown how antisemitism distorted his scholarship (Arnold and Weisberg 2002).

Modern esoteric and fringe readings. In The 12th Planet (1976) Zecharia Sitchin read the poem as a coded astronomical history in which "Nibiru" is an unknown planet whose collision with a planet Tiāmat formed the Earth (Sitchin 1976). The claim is not supported(evidence: Not supported): in Akkadian astronomical texts nēberu is a name of Marduk's star, usually the planet Jupiter, and in the poem it is one of Marduk's stations and names (King V.6, VII.109; Hunger and Pingree 1989). The "Simon" Necronomicon (1977) uses Tiāmat, Marduk and the fifty names in a modern ritual system. Its claim to preserve an ancient Mesopotamian text is not supported(evidence: Not supported): it is a twentieth-century composition, not a survival of Mesopotamian religion (Harms and Gonce 2003).

7. The AKASHA Reading

8. Open questions

• When was the Enūma eliš composed, and in what relation to the rise of Marduk under the Second Dynasty of Isin?
• How did the Sumerian traditions of separation and of the creation of humankind reach the Akkadian poems, and how much did the Babylonian poets transform them?
• What did the lines of Tablet V that are still missing contain?
• Was the poem recited at the akītu festival before the Seleucid period, and was it composed with the festival in mind?
• What does mummu mean when it stands before Tiāmat's name?