Apsu- Mesopotamian PrimordialPrimordial"The Begetter"

The Mingling of Waters

Before the heavens had a name, before the earth below had been called anything at all, there was water. Two waters: Apsu, the sweet and fresh, and Tiamat, the salt sea. They mingled together in a single undifferentiated mass with no shore, no bed, no boundary between them. The Enuma Elish opens here, in this state before states, when nothing existed but the commingling of fresh and salt.

Mummu attended Apsu as vizier and companion. From the mingling of Apsu and Tiamat came the first gods: Lahmu and Lahamu, then Anshar and Kishar, then Anu, then Ea. Each generation surpassed the last. Ea, the cleverest of them all, would prove the most dangerous to his progenitor.

The Noise of the Gods

The younger gods were restless. They gathered inside Tiamat, dancing, celebrating, stirring the waters with their movement. Apsu could not rest by day. He could not sleep by night. Their noise was unbearable to a being whose nature was stillness. He went to Tiamat with Mummu at his side.

"Their behavior has become obnoxious to me," he told her. "I am not allowed rest by day or sleep by night. I will destroy them and put an end to their behavior. Let silence reign, and then let us sleep."

Tiamat refused. "How could we destroy what we ourselves have created? Even if their behavior is obnoxious, let us be patient and kind." But Apsu would not relent. Mummu pressed close and counseled violence. Apsu's face brightened at the advice. He embraced his vizier and set him on his knee.

The Spell of Ea

Word of Apsu's plot reached the younger gods. They fell silent with dread. All except Ea. "Supreme in understanding, skilled and wise, Ea who understands everything," the Enuma Elish calls him. He did not panic. He crafted an incantation, a spell of surpassing potency, and poured it out over the waters.

Apsu sank into sleep. A deep, enchanted sleep from which there would be no waking. Ea removed his crown and draped himself in the primordial's radiant aura, the melammu that marked supreme authority. Then he killed Apsu where he lay. Mummu, the faithful vizier who had urged destruction, was bound with a rope through his nose and led about like a captive animal.

The Dwelling on the Deep

Ea did not merely kill Apsu. He transformed him. He founded his dwelling above the slain primordial's body and named it the Apsu. The being became a place. The freshwater deep that had once been a living god became the foundation of Ea's power, and in that sacred chamber, built upon the conquered waters, Ea and his wife Damkina conceived their son.

The child was Marduk. He had four eyes and four ears. Fire blazed from his mouth when he spoke. He was born in the very place where the father of the gods had been slain, and he would grow to finish what his father Ea had started: the defeat of Tiamat and the ordering of the world from her body.

The Waters That Remained

Apsu the god was dead, but the fresh waters he had been did not vanish. Every temple in Mesopotamia kept an apsû basin, a pool of fresh water where priests washed before approaching the divine presence. At Eridu, Ea's cult center and the oldest of Sumerian cities, the temple called the E-abzu sat above a natural freshwater spring. The Sumerian Temple Hymns praise the place where the primordial waters well up beneath the sacred precinct. The spring predated the myth by millennia; the earliest settlers at Eridu built their first shrines around it.

Apsu's body was the foundation. His waters still rose from the earth.