Divine lineages · 06

Mesopotamian Mythology

Mythic realm: Between the Tigris & Euphrates
Age remembered: from c. 3000 BCE
Names preserved: 13

Mesopotamian mythology is the oldest mythology ever written down. In the third millennium BCE the Sumerians pressed their god-lists and epics into wet clay with reed styluses; dried or baked, the tablets proved durable as brick. Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria inherited the system in turn, which is why most major gods carry two names — Sumerian Enki and Inanna are Akkadian Ea and Ishtar. Each god held a city: Enlil at Nippur, Marduk at Babylon, Ishtar in the Eanna temple at Uruk. The fortunes of cities were the fortunes of gods, and once Babylon rose to empire, Enuma Elish rewrote the genealogy outright, having Marduk slay the primordial sea Tiamat, build heaven and earth from her corpse, and take the kingship of the gods.

The core texts come mostly from excavation since the mid-nineteenth century. Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh yielded the standard Epic of Gilgamesh and the chief copies of Enuma Elish; the tens of thousands of tablets from Nippur preserve the Sumerian poems, Inanna's Descent and the Lugalbanda cycle among them; Atrahasis and the Epic of Anzu tell of mankind's creation, the Flood, and the theft of the Tablet of Destinies. In 1872 George Smith read out a flood story older than Genesis to a stunned London audience, and the corpus is still being pieced together — a tablet acquired in 2011 restored the birdsong and monkey chatter of the Cedar Forest.

The temperament of this mythology is practical and clear-eyed. Humans are clay mixed with the blood of a slaughtered god, made to take over the gods' drudgery; the netherworld is the House of Dust, where all alike feed on clay; even destiny is paperwork — a sealed tablet that can be worn, transferred, or stolen by a giant bird. The gods behave like the officials of a city-state: they tire, lose sleep, and after the Flood swarm 'like flies over the offering.' Gilgamesh scours the earth for immortality and comes home with advice instead: go back, tend your wall, live your days.

Return by the star-path

CHRONICLE OF ORIGINS · A LIVING SCROLL

Mesopotamian Mythology

Between the Tigris & Euphrates08 STAGESENTER THE MYTHIC LINEAGE ↗

The Formless Deep1 / 8

Before the naming

When heaven had not been named

The poem opens on a world that has not yet been named: heaven is not called heaven, earth is not called earth. There are only two waters — Apsu the fresh water, who begot them, and Tiamat the salt sea — mingled together in a single body, with no marsh, no reed bed, not a handspan of dry ground. No god has been brought into being, and no destiny has yet been fixed.

THOSE WHO APPEAR

Tiamat ↗

VARIANTS, FRAGMENTS & ANCIENT SOURCES

Mesopotamia never had one authorised creation story. The Sumerians left no complete cosmogonic poem at all; the matter surfaces only in prologues to other works, where heaven and earth are said to have been parted, An carrying off the sky and Enlil the earth, and where Nammu is named as the primeval water who bore the gods. The spine used here is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which is political theology as much as cosmology: it transfers the supreme kingship from Enlil to Marduk, the city god of Babylon. Assyrian copies simply substitute Ashur (Anshar) for Marduk and stage the same dragon-slaying. Its date of composition is disputed, most often placed in the later second millennium BCE, and the tablets are damaged — Tablet V, with Marduk's calendar of stars, is the worst preserved and must be pieced out of scraps. Mankind's making exists in at least three incompatible tellings, and even the raw material differs: in Enuma Elish Marduk speaks of knotting blood and making bone, Ea fashions man from the blood of Qingu alone, and clay is never mentioned; Atrahasis slaughters the intelligent god We-ila, has the mother goddess Nintu knead his flesh and blood into clay while the gods spit on it, and cuts fourteen pieces to make seven men and seven women; the Sumerian Enki and Ninmah kills nobody, Nammu waking Enki to pinch men out of clay from the edge of the Apsu. Blood mixed with earth is what Berossus reports in the Hellenistic period, not what the Babylonian poem says. The Flood belongs to a separate strand entirely (Atrahasis, Gilgamesh XI, the Sumerian flood story), and its survivor bears three names: Ziusudra, Atrahasis, Utnapishtim. The sequence below is a composite: the Flood is placed after the making of man, and Babylon's founding last, whereas Enuma Elish itself builds Babylon immediately after mankind and closes with the fifty names.

Drawn fromEnuma Elish (seven tablets; the fullest copies come from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh), the Epic of Atrahasis, Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian Enki and Ninmah, and the Sumerian King List