Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [66]
Discovered on seven clay tables found in the mid-nineteenth century in the ruined palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, the poem was first translated by George Smith in 1876 as The Chaldean Genesis. Smith’s suggestion that the authors of the Bible—whom most Victorian-era Europeans believed to be divinely inspired—had borrowed from “pagan” Mesopotamians was not well received. Since Smith’s translation of the Nineveh tablets, fragments of even earlier versions of the Enuma Elish in the Sumerian language have also been discovered—evidence that this Creation tale is a very ancient account that went through generations of editing and retelling.
Unlike the Greek Iliad, the Enuma Elish is not an adventure story but a religious poem, somewhat like the opening chapter of Genesis, that describes in richly poetic language the beginnings of the world. But while it undoubtedly had some influence on the author of Genesis, the Enuma Elish is very different in its tone and the events it recounts. A story of warring gods battling for supremacy over their Creation, the poem tells of the emergence of one supreme god, Marduk, the Babylonian agricultural god. Combining religion with a political agenda, the poem and the mythology it contained were designed to establish Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, as chief among the gods, and to establish Babylon as the most powerful city-state in Mesopotamia.
The epic opens at the very beginning of time with the creation of the gods themselves. In the beginning, the gods emerged two by two from a formless watery waste—a substance which was itself divine. This sacred raw material existed through all eternity, and as Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God, “When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, they thought that it must have been similar to the swampy wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men.”
At first, there were just two gods—Apsu, personified as the primordial freshwater under the earth and in the rivers, and Tiamat, who symbolized the salt water of the sea. Biblical scholars believe that the Hebrew word for the “abyss” in the opening of the Creation account in Genesis is a corruption of the word “Tiamat.” The Creation in the Enuma Elish also plays out in six stages, mirrored by the six days of the Genesis Creation, again reflecting the influence of the Mesopotamian epic on the Hebrew version. These two gods, Apsu and Tiamat, then joined to produce the other gods, all identified with different aspects of nature: Lahmu and Lahamu, a pair whose names meant “silt,” or water and earth mixed together; another pair identified with the horizons of sky and sea; and then Anu, the heavens, and Ea, the earth.
But these young gods, as all parents of small children know well, were too noisy. Eager to get some sleep, Apsu decided to destroy all of the children. One of the child gods, Ea, discovered the plot, put Apsu to sleep, killed him, and then took his place as god of the waters. With his spouse Damkina, Ea later sired Marduk, a perfect god who is “highest among the gods.”
Once Tiamat realized what her children had done, she decided to avenge her dead husband. She took the form of a fearsome dragon and created a small army of monstrous creatures to battle the other gods, who were her own children. Marduk, the sun god, came before an assembly of the gods and promised to fight Tiamat—who was in essence his grandmother—on the condition that he would become their ruler. They agreed, which led to an epic battle between Marduk, who had many weapons and powers, and Tiamat, with her troop of fearsome monsters. Marduk dispatched the monsters and then faced Tiamat in face-to-face combat.
The Lord trampled the lower part of Tiamat,
With his unsparing mace smashed her skull,
Severed the arteries of her blood…
So much for taking care of Grandma.
Slicing Tiamat in half, “like a fish for drying” or “opening a shell-fish,” Marduk uses the two halves of her body to create the sky and the earth. From Tiamat