ENUMA ELISH.

with the power of the primordial gods; only then did the
The scribes had grasped that there were two possible ways to gods unanimously agree to make Marduk their leader. The
elevate their poliad god to a central position in the pantheon: tale goes on to detail all of Marduks actions, including the
either to link Marduk to the god of Nippur orcertainly more creation of the present cosmos with the constellations and
subtle to relate him to the god Enki. It may be surprising that planets (especially the sun and the moon), the setting up the
they chose to establish a father-son relationship between calendar, and the foundation of Babylon, the new capital of
Enki and Marduk, since the latter had never historically the world.
guaranteed the kingship, but the choice of the scribes shows The revolutionary idea underlying this poem should not
a quite remarkable intelligence: they wanted to overturn be underestimated: all religious thinking had to be revised,
historical reality and turn it to something of universal and yet the Babylonian scribes did not actually omit anything
significance. from the religious situation. Among the Sumerian literary
All of the Sumerian traditions assigned the position of texts copied in the schools of Babylon, a prominent
principal god in their pantheon to Enlil, but at the same time place was given to lists of Mesopotamian gods handed down
they emphasized that the first seat of the kingship before the from the Sumerians, but here an innovation occurred in the
Flood was the city of Eridu, the home of the god Enki, who drafting of the texts: the divinities were subject to a great
was therefore regarded as the first holder of royal power on theological reworking that organized all the gods into a
earth. Hence the decision of the scribes to make Marduk the welldefined family structurethat is, into a pyramid with
son of Enki. Their syllogistic reasoning is clear: if Enki the Marduk at its head, as a result of his victory over Tiamat.
king is Marduks father, then Marduk becomes the king. Not one of the great Sumerian gods was oustednot An,
And that is not all:if Eridu is the home of Enki and at the nor Enlil, nor Enkiand they are the ones who elevate the
same time the location of his kingship, then Babylon, the young god and choose him as their undisputed new leader
home of Marduk, is automatically the one true location of
the kingship. So when we read the words of Berosus, that the
first royal capital on earth was Babylon, we begin to understand
how convincing the syllogism devised by the scribes of
Babylon had become for later generations.
To make such a revolutionary idea acceptable, those
responsible for creating the poem Enuma elish were obliged to
confront subjects never dealt with by mythological texts of
the preceding period. The seven tablets on which the poem
is set down refer back to the primordial world, to the beginning
of everything, which preceded the present cosmos.
Thus they began the tale in the time before the birth of the
sky god An, the future head of the Sumerian pantheon. The
description of the situation that preceded the birth of the god
of the sky was completely new, even if it may have been
indirectly reconstructed from known sources. First of all, there
existed only the primordial waters, the sweet and salt waters,
Apsu and Tiamat. These two beings joined in marriage and
produced pairs of completely shadowy beings, until the couple
Anshar and Kishar brought forth the god of the sky, An.
The text then goes on to describe the generation of the god
Enki and his son Marduk, thus ensuring that Marduk is
given a definite place in the Mesopotamian pantheon.
Yet the priestly scribes went still further. They were
anxiousto install the Babylonian god in a leading position, and
they accomplished their task in a most admirable way.
Marduk could only become the ruler of the gods if he
performed some quite exceptional act. The facts are quickly set
out: the young gods were disturbing the rest of the primordial
gods with their noise, so Apsu became angry and intended
to punish them. Tiamat, their mother, did not want the
young gods to diethey were still her children, after all
but Apsu was unyielding. The younger generation, led by An
and Enki, refused to accept the decision of Apsu, and Enki
killed his grandfather by trickery. At this, Tiamat declared
all-out war on the entire set of young gods and there ensued
a cosmic battle setting the old generation against the new.
The forces of the primordial gods were led by Tiamat herself,
and on Enkis advice, the task of commanding the young
gods army was given to Marduk. After various ups and
downs, Marduk was victorious over Tiamat, thus doing away