Enuma Elish- Mesopotamian EventEvent"Babylonian Creation Epic"
Also known as: Enūma Eliš
Description
Seven clay tablets tell how Marduk slew the primordial sea Tiamat and split her corpse to forge heaven and earth. Recited each spring at Babylon's New Year festival, the Enuma Elish renewed the cosmos in its telling.
Mythology & Lore
When on High
The epic opens before the world. Apsu and Tiamat, fresh water and salt sea, mingle to produce the first gods. The young gods are noisy. Apsu plots to destroy them. Ea discovers the conspiracy, casts a spell of sleep over Apsu, and kills him. Over the body of the dead primordial, Ea builds a dwelling, and there Marduk is born: four eyes, four ears, fire from his lips.
Tiamat, goaded by the elder gods and enraged by Apsu's death, raises an army of eleven monsters. She gives her new consort Kingu the Tablet of Destinies and sends them to war. Ea cannot face her. Anu turns back. The divine assembly sits in terror until Marduk steps forward. He names his price: supreme authority over all the gods. They agree. He speaks a constellation out of existence and speaks it back. The assembly cries out: "Marduk is king!"
He rides his storm chariot against Tiamat with the four winds and a great net. She opens her mouth to swallow him. He drives the winds down her throat, distending her body until she cannot close her jaws, and shoots an arrow through her heart. Her army scatters. Kingu is captured.
Marduk splits Tiamat's corpse in two. One half becomes the sky, the other the earth. From her eyes flow the Tigris and Euphrates. He fixes the stars and sets the moon on its course. From Kingu's blood mixed with clay, Ea fashions the first human. The gods build Babylon and the Esagila in gratitude and proclaim Marduk's fifty names.
The Recitation
Each spring, during the twelve-day Akitu festival, the high priest of the Esagila recited all seven tablets before Marduk's statue. The god's image was carried through the Ishtar Gate to the Akitu temple beyond the city walls and returned in procession.
During the festival, the king knelt before the high priest, who stripped him of crown and scepter and struck him across the face. The king declared he had not sinned against Babylon. Only then was he reinvested with his insignia. Creation was renewed.
When the Assyrians took power, they rewrote the text. Marduk's name was replaced with Anshar, a primordial whose name resembled their god Ashur's. The same epic that crowned Babylon's god now crowned theirs.