A Creation Story in Service of a King

Discovered on cuneiform tablets recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and first translated into English in the nineteenth century, the Enuma Elish's opening lines became a central text for comparing Mesopotamian cosmology with other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts. Scholars have long noted the structural resemblance between the poem's picture of a primeval watery chaos preceding creation and similar language in the opening of Genesis, without agreement on whether the resemblance reflects direct literary borrowing, a shared older Near Eastern tradition both texts draw on independently, or simple coincidence of imagery natural to cultures describing a world's beginning. Within Mesopotamian religion itself, the tablet's account served a function beyond cosmology, since later tablets in the same work use the gods born from Apsu and Tiamat's primeval mingling to establish Marduk's eventual kingship over the other gods, tying the opening's account of origins directly to a claim about which city's patron deity held supreme authority among the rest of the pantheon, a political dimension scholars regard as central to why the poem was composed and recited in the first place rather than as an incidental feature of its cosmology.