Marduk, Enuma Elish and the Reading of Heaven

Babylonian religion inherited the Sumerian pantheon and reordered it around Marduk, the city god of Babylon, whose promotion is narrated rather than assumed. W. G. Lambert's edition of the creation material presents Enuma Elish as an argument. The gods, unable to face Tiamat, grant Marduk supremacy in advance as the price of his fighting her, and he then makes the world from her body and humankind from the blood of her defeated consort, so that people exist to carry the gods' labour. The epic was recited at the New Year festival, the akitu, during which the king was struck and made to declare that he had not neglected the city, and the god's statue processed out of Babylon and back.

Reading the future was not a fringe activity but an official science. Francesca Rochberg's work on the celestial material shows a discipline moving towards mathematical astronomy without ever abandoning the premise that the sky is a writing addressed to those able to read it. The great omen series, the extispicy handbooks and the incantation collections were copied, taught and applied at state expense.

Babylonian wisdom literature holds the counterweight. Lambert's collection includes the poem of the righteous sufferer and a dialogue on divine justice, texts stating plainly that the rules by which the gods act are not knowable from below.