Enuma Elish

The narrative begins before anything is named. Apsu, the fresh water, and Tiamat, the salt sea, mingle, and successive generations of gods are born from them. The young gods are noisy; Apsu resolves to destroy them and is killed first by the clever Ea. Tiamat, roused to vengeance, produces an army of monsters and appoints her consort Kingu as its commander, giving him the Tablet of Destinies.

The assembled gods cannot face her. Marduk, Ea's son, offers to fight on one condition: that if he wins, his word shall fix destinies and he shall rule permanently. They agree. He kills Tiamat with an arrow through her open mouth into her belly, splits her body like a shellfish, and makes the sky from one half and the earth from the other, setting her waters to be held back by bolts and guards. He arranges the stars and the calendar, and from the blood of the executed Kingu, Ea fashions humanity, whose defined purpose is to do the gods' labour so that the gods can rest.

The gods then build Babylon and its temple Esagila as Marduk's residence, and the last portion of the poem, much of tablet 6 and all of tablet 7, is a recitation of Marduk's fifty names, each with a short explanation drawing out its significance. Modern readers usually find this an anticlimax and skip it. It is in fact the point. The fifty names absorb the titles and functions of other gods into Marduk, so that the list is a theological instrument for subordinating an entire pantheon to one city's deity, and the battle narrative is the story told to justify it.

The date of composition is not fixed. The poem presupposes Babylon's political importance and Marduk's elevation, which points to the second millennium BCE, and proposals cluster in the range from the reign of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BCE to the later second millennium, with many scholars favouring a date around the twelfth century under Nebuchadnezzar I, whose reign saw a marked promotion of Marduk. The evidence is indirect on all sides: the oldest manuscripts are centuries younger than any of these dates, the language is a literary register that resists close dating, and there is no external reference that pins it down. The range should be given as a range.

The strongest evidence for what the poem is doing comes from a variant. Assyrian copies from Ashur substitute Assur, the god of the Assyrian capital, for Marduk, with the accompanying genealogy and geography adjusted to fit. The same poem, structurally unchanged, promotes whichever city has the power to commission a copy. Few ancient texts offer so clean a demonstration that a theogony can be an instrument of state; the Assyrian scribes evidently understood exactly what they were editing.

The bulk of the surviving material comes from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, excavated from 1849 onward, supplemented by finds at Ashur, Kish, Sultantepe and Uruk. The text is well preserved by Mesopotamian standards but not complete, and the reconstruction rests on collating many partial copies from different sites and centuries rather than on any single manuscript.

The poem was not purely literary. Ritual instructions from the Seleucid period describe the akitu, the Babylonian new year festival held in the month of Nisan, and record that Enuma Elish was recited in full by the high priest before the statue of Marduk on the fourth day. That places the text inside an annual civic ritual in which the king was ceremonially humiliated before Marduk and then reconfirmed, and it suggests the poem functioned as a periodic re-enactment of the order it describes. How far back the practice extends before the Seleucid tablets that describe it is uncertain.

The modern reception began with George Smith, a former banknote engraver turned Assyriologist at the British Museum, who announced a Babylonian flood account in 1872 and published creation fragments shortly afterwards, gathering the material in The Chaldean Account of Genesis in 1876. The effect on Victorian religious debate was immediate and loud, and the argument was often conducted badly, as a straight contest over whether Genesis had been shown to be borrowed.

The scholarly position is more interesting and more restrained. Enuma Elish and Genesis 1 share a cultural environment and some vocabulary of imagery, a watery formless beginning, the division of waters above and below, creation ordered into stages, and the Hebrew word for the deep, tehom, is cognate with the name Tiamat rather than derived from it. But Genesis 1 has no combat, no defeated deity and no divine corpse, and its God creates by speaking rather than by conquering, which reads in places as a deliberate refusal of the Babylonian pattern rather than a copy of it. Direct literary dependence is not demonstrable; shared inheritance and pointed contrast are.