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By Root 950 0

and eventually conquered Sumer. These invaders were Semitic—people who spoke a language related to modern Arabic and Hebrew.* Under a king known as Sargon I, Sumer and the northern region of Akkad were united around the year 2340 BCE, and Sargon built the city of Akkad (or Agade), established an enormous court there, and then built a new temple in the city of Nippur, an ancient city located about a hundred miles from modern Baghdad. An outstanding military leader and administrator, Sargon gained control over much of southwestern Asia. He reigned for fifty-six years, and during his rule, Semites replaced the Sumerians as the most powerful inhabitants of Mesopotamia. These Semites and their language came to be called Akkadian, after Sargon’s capital.

But curiously, while the Sumerians basically disappear from history, their civilization, culture, and most of their myths and religion do not. Their gods, including the Creation goddess named Tiamat and a love goddess named Inanna, survived. The entire Sumerian pantheon of nature deities was absorbed by the new arrivals, and the Sumerian religion was largely adopted by the Akkadians, who added the Sumerian gods to the list of deities who protected their own cities, only changing their names to Akkadian ones. After Sargon’s death, the Akkadian Empire was torn apart by infighting and rebellion. While a few of the Akkadian city-states maintained independence for a short while, they were soon absorbed into a rising Babylonian Empire beginning around 1900 BCE.

Built near the earlier site of Akkad, the city of Babylon—located south of modern Baghdad—emerged as the greatest of Mesopotamia’s city-states, becoming an urban center that would have enormous impact, especially in biblical history. The very word “Babylon,” which translated as “gate of the gods,” meant that people there believed this was the spot where the gods actually came down to earth. The idea was not unique to Babylon. Almost every culture has a sacred spot it considers an “omphalos,” a Greek word for navel, meaning the spot at which the gods appear on earth. The first great Babylonian civilizations—called “Old Babylonian”—flourished between 1900 and 1600 BCE under a series of kings, including Hammurabi, who made Babylon his capital.

MYTHIC VOICES

When on high the heaven had not been named,

Firm ground below had not been called by name,

When primordial Apsu, their begetter,

And Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all,

Their waters mingled as a single body,

No reed hut had sprung forth, no marshland had appeared,

None of the gods had been brought into being,

And none bore a name, and no destinies determined—

Then Tiamat and Marduk joined issue, wisest of gods.

They strove in single combat, locked in battle.

The lord spread out his net to enfold her,

The Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face.

When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him,

He drove in the Evil Wind while as yet she had not shut her lips

As the terrible winds filled her belly,

Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.

He released the arrow, it tore her belly,

It cut through her insides, splitting the heart.

Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life.

He cast down her carcass to stand upon it.

After he had slain Tiamat, the leader,

Her band was shattered, her troupe broken up;

And the gods, her helpers who marched at her side,

Trembling with terror, turned their backs about,

In order to save and preserve their lives.

Tightly encircled, they could not escape.

—The Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian Creation epic (from Tablet One)

What is the Enuma Elish?

The large number of competing groups and city-states that lived and ruled in ancient Mesopotamia meant that there were competing stories of the gods and Creation—as had been true in Egyptian mythology. But the most complete, best-known—and most significant—Mesopotamian Creation story is an epic Akkadian poem named after its opening words, “Enuma Elish,” traditionally translated as