Mesopotamian Cosmology: Enuma Elish and the Gods of Order

The Enuma Elish, conventionally called the 'Babylonian Creation Epic' after its opening words meaning 'When on high,' is a Babylonian cosmogonic poem of roughly a thousand lines across seven tablets, most plausibly composed sometime between the sixteenth and twelfth centuries BCE, likely to celebrate and theologically justify the political rise of Babylon and its patron god Marduk to supremacy in the Mesopotamian pantheon. The poem opens before creation, when only two primordial beings exist and intermingle their waters: Apsu, the personification of fresh subterranean water, and Tiamat, the personification of the salt sea, whose mingling waters generate successive, increasingly complex generations of younger gods. When the noise and disorder of these younger gods becomes intolerable to Apsu, he plots, with his vizier Mummu, to destroy them, but the god Ea (also known as Enki) discovers the plot first, casts Apsu into a magical sleep, and kills him, then establishes his own dwelling directly upon Apsu's slain body, where his son Marduk is subsequently born.