Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (19 page)

Around 2350 BCE, the peace and relative tranquility of the Sumerian civilization was dealt a blow when people from the west (probably the Arabian Peninsula) swept in, settled in the northern area of Mesopotamia, and eventually conquered Sumer. These invaders were Semitic—people who spoke a language related to modern Arabic and Hebrew.
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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.

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 “When on high.”

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.

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’s eyes, he opened the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and he transformed her breasts into the mountains from which freshwater springs flowed. Promised that he would rule the gods if he defeated Tiamat, Marduk then organized the rest of the universe, naming the months of the year and creating the stars and moon. He devised laws and then established his home in the city he named Babylon:

As the last act in this creation, almost as an afterthought, Marduk also created man. First he killed Kingu, who was Tiamat’s consort, and then mixed his divine blood with dust. According to the myth, as far as Marduk and the other gods are concerned, man’s purpose is simple: man will do all the work so the gods can relax. The story is significant because, as Karen Armstrong points out in
A History of God
, “The first man had been created from the substance of a god; he therefore shared their divine nature…. The gods and humans shared the same predicament, the only difference being that that gods were more powerful and were immortal.”

Before they could rest, however, the gods decided to build a proper shrine for Lord Marduk. For one year, they manufactured bricks and after a second year, they had built a temple—a ziggurat—to honor Marduk as king of the gods.

For much of Mesopotamian history, each year, this Creation epic became the focal point of worship, as the
Enuma Elish
was read as part of the New Year celebration in every city. The myth also confirmed Babylon’s special status as a sacred place, home of the gods, and the center of the world.

Was Marduk just another macho man oppressing gentle goddesses?

Besides underscoring Babylon’s ascension as the greatest power of the time, the Marduk-Tiamat conflict has taken on another significant spin. Recently, a movement of scholars has advanced the notion that most prehistoric cultures revered female deities—usually a benign but all-powerful mother goddess—as the dominant deity. Seen as a nurturing force of fertility in a world that was mostly dependent upon the return of the crops and the continuity of life through birth, this goddess was thought to be more significant than the male deities, who basically existed as studs, to service the goddess and sire children. But, according to this in-vogue theory, a great change took place when male gods were elevated above the goddess, not just in Mesopotamia but in almost every society. The victory of Marduk over Tiamat is widely considered one stark and particularly violent example of the conquest by a warlike, macho-male god and the demise of goddess worship.