Enūma eliš

This is L. W. King's English translation of the Babylonian poem known from its opening words as Enūma eliš, "When on high", published in London by Luzac and Co. in 1902 as The Seven Tablets of Creation (volume I; volume II gives the cuneiform texts). It is in the public domain in the United States.

How to read the brackets. The signs are King's own. Square brackets mark words he restored where the clay is broken; [ . . . ] marks a gap he could not fill. Words in round brackets are his additions for sense, and (?) marks his own uncertainty. Lines he had no text for at all are noted where they fall.

How to read the line numbers. After a gap of unknown length King gives approximate line numbers in round brackets, "(69)", and they are shown the same way here. In Tablet VII he prints three fragments whose place in the tablet is not known, without line numbers; their lines are cited by fragment and order, for example VII.K13761.3 for the third line of the fragment K. 13,761. King's own notes on where each block of text comes from are given at the point where it begins.

How this transcription was made. AKASHA transcribed each line from the page images of the 1902 printing, using the scan's machine OCR only as a first draft, and checked every line against the printed page; a second, independent check of all 739 lines against the page images followed on 10 November 2026. King's line numbers, spelling (including his inconsistencies, which are noted where they fall), punctuation and brackets are kept. A few things are deliberately different from the printed page: the footnote numbers in the translation are left out (the footnotes are on the printed page, linked from every line); dots marking illegible signs are always written as three dots, however many King prints, because their number on the page carries no meaning; King's italics are not reproduced; his quotation marks are set as curly quotes and his apostrophes as plain ones; and the extra space the printer left before semicolons, colons, question marks and exclamation marks is closed up. King's transliteration of the Akkadian is not yet included.

What has changed since 1902. King worked from the tablets and fragments known to him in the British Museum. Many more manuscripts have been identified since, and they fill many of the gaps you see here and correct some of King's readings; modern editions are listed under Further Reading. Read this translation as the state of knowledge in 1902, not as the text as it is known today.