The Ancients - Babylon's Epic of Creation

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

The biblical story of creation is famous - but did you know an even older myth may have influenced it? Enter the Enuma Elish, Babylon’s own Epic of Creation.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes and Dr. Sophus Helle, a leading expert on ancient Mesopotamian literature, explore this ancient text - an epic tale that glorifies Marduk, Babylon’s supreme god, and tells of how he shaped the cosmos from chaos. It is a myth that placed Babylon at the centre of the universe and shines a light on Babylonian attitudes to power and belief. Indeed, it may well have shaped the Book of Genesis itself...Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight.The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the ancient ad free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting HistoryHit.com slash subscribe. In the beginning, the famous three words that begin the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. What follows is the story of how God created the heavens and the earth in six days, resting on the seventh.

It's one of the most popular stories of the Old Testament. But what you might not know is that this creation story has clear influences from another ancient tale. The Babylonian Genesis. Babylon's epic of creation. It's The Ancient on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring an extraordinary piece of literature from ancient Babylon, an epic narrative designed to glorify Babylon's chief god Marduk and explain how he created the heavens and the earth with Babylon at the centre of the universe. They called it the Enuma Elish, Babylon's epic of creation.

Now to talk through this epic tale I was delighted to welcome back Dr Sophus Hell. Sophus is an expert on ancient Mesopotamian literature. He's also bringing these ancient poems back into the public eye, having translated great works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. We interviewed Sophos all about the Epic of Gilgamesh last year, so do go and check out that episode after listening to this one. Most recently however, Sophos and a whole host of other leading Babylonian academics have published a new translation of the Epic of Creation, free for you to read alongside articles examining its various details. So without further ado, here's my chat with Sophos exploring Babylon's Epic of Creation.

Sophos, welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you back on. So great to be here again. I really enjoyed the first podcast we did on Gilgamesh. It was such a pleasure. It's such a pleasure and it was quite a long one that we divided it into two ultimately, and we recorded that about this time last year. So an annual retreat, you're back on the podcast. This time to talk about another, well, actual epic of ancient Mesopotamia. Sophus, first off, what is the Enuma Elish? Yeah. Enuma Elish is another of these great works of literature from ancient Babylon.

In the ancient world, it is a work that was as popular to the ancient scribes as Gilgamesh was. Today, of course, it's much less known than Gilgamesh, but in Babylonian culture, it's absolutely central. And Sophos, why is it so important, so significant? Giles- So Babylonian culture really can be divided into a time before and a time after the composition of Enuma Elish. It is absolutely central to the history of both Babylonian literature and Babylonian religion. The reason for that is that in the centuries before Enuma Elish, the gods were thought to be ruled by this trio with Enlil as the king and then Anu and Enki in supporting roles,

as it were. And after the composition of Enuma Elish, the Babylonian cosmos comes to have the god Morduk, god of Babylon, as its king and central figure. And that doesn't in part reflect real changes in the political landscape of ancient Iraq, with Babylon coming to play a more and more central role in the ancient world and thus the God of Babylon becoming elevated. But Enuma Elish does more than just make Marduk king of the god. It also transforms the kind of religion that we see in ancient Babylon. So we go from having what is called a polytheistic culture in which there are many gods to something called Hennotheism, which is

another kind of religious system. It's not quite polytheism. It's also not quite monotheism. It's its own kind of thing in which there is one supreme deity and then there is a number of other deities that are expressions of facets of this main god who is Marduk. So you can see Hennotheism as having this three layers of being with Marduk at the very top, then all the other gods beneath him and then us humans at the bottom. Toby Sofis, if there's that clear time in history, before this text is written, when Marduk is not at the centre of Babylonian religion, and then that time after when Marduk is right at the forefront, like the god of Babylon, when do we think that this story was written?

How old is it? So, we think it was written sometime in the 11th century BCE. It's quite hard to date exactly but probably in, I mean, there's this famous suggestion by an astrologist called Wilfred Lambert that when the statue of the god Marduk was retrieved, it had been stolen away to what is now Iran by the Elamites. And when it was retrieved by King Nipuk Nis of the second, Enuma Elish was composed to celebrate its return. We can't really prove that, but I think it's an idea that this famous astrologist had that has really stuck around. But I should also say,

when I say that there's a time before and a time after Enuma Elish, I don't by that mean that after that everybody just accepted Enuma Elish and everybody was on board with this message. On the contrary, I think one of the things that makes it so central to Babylonian culture but also just so important for us to understand today is that it sparked all of these quite critical, quite furiously critical reactions, both from the Babylonians themselves, from the Assyrians, but also quite importantly from the Jewish writers who lived in Babylon during the Babylonian captivity. And you can see a lot of especially the book of Genesis in the Bible as one of these many critical reactions to Enuma Elish. Genesis borrows a lot of the language

from Enuma Elish. So I think that's why Enuma Elish is important today, because it's been provoking people for the past three millennia. I mean, that's a nice hint as to where we will ultimately go in this interview with the reception and links to the Hebrew Bible as time goes on. Just before we delve into the narrative, the story itself, well, keeping on Marduk actually a little longer, because you mentioned the name Nebuchadnezzar there, one of the most famous Babylonian kings. The great architecture of Babylon, like the ziggurats and temples. In that first millennium BC,

after this is written, those are the buildings that are dedicated to Marduk. He is there and everywhere, is he? Yeah, absolutely. I think you can see a lot of the religious architecture in Babylon from the time that we have it, which is quite a lot of the religious architecture in Babylon from the time that we have it, which is quite a lot later, from the 6th century BCE. That religious architecture has a lot of references to Enuma Elish. Enuma Elish became, again, much later, but it became part of the religious rituals that were celebrated in Babylon. It was absolutely part of the cityscape, but also part of the yearly rituals performed in Babylon. It became, as I said, absolutely central to people's experience

of the world. And there's a line at the very end of Enuma Eolation, and we'll come back to why this line is important, but there's a line that says, every time you drink water, you must invoke the name of Marduk, right? That is the ambition of the text. It wants you to think of it every time you drink water. Now, Sophus, you have also translated this. It's Akkadian. Is it Akkadian, the language in which it is originally written, the cuneiform? Yes, it is written in Akkadian and it is written in the same version of the Akkadian language that the version of Gilgamesh we spoke about last time is written in. So that's standard

Babylonian, this high literary version of Akkadian. Toby So I'm preserved on these cuneiform clay tablets. And I remember in our last chat, we did talk a lot, because it felt right with you being the translator as well to explore the particular order of words, the style of it, the beauty of the writing. And in the Epic of Creation, I remember you saying with Epic of Gilgamesh that it's beautifully, stylistically written. How is the Epic of Creation written? Is it also this kind of poem? Csikszak Yeah, and in fact, much more intensely so than Gilgamesh in many ways. I think that modern readers will… I think there are very

few modern readers that will prefer Numa Elish to Gilgamesh because Gilgamesh is in so many ways more psychological than narrative seems to us more compelling. But if you read it in the original Akkadian, Enuma Elish is just something else. It's incredibly patterned. It uses all of these very odd, rare words, and it does so often to pull off these quite exceptional puns. Let me just mention just one line which has been called by one scholar the magical line and it goes, Nachlapta pluhta pulhati halipma, which gives you a sense of the kind of pyrotechnics that this text can pull off. So it's almost as interesting as it is today and we're going to explore the narrative

now. But you could argue if you don't read it in the original language, maybe some of that power and beauty is lost in the translation, is it? GF. Yeah, I would say so. I would also say that in my translation, I make no particular attempt at recreating the poeticity of the original, which I did for my translations of Gilgamesh and of N'Hidwana. But this is a different kind of translation project. This is meant for scholars and students, for anybody who's sort of interested in learning more about the text, but it is more meant to be a study resource than like a literary translation. So you won't hear these language games being reproduced in my translation. The work of yourself and your colleagues has certainly made this amazing story more accessible to the public. We'll get back to that, but let's now delve

into the story. So let's start at the beginning. In the beginning, how does the epic of creation, the Babylonian epic of creation, how does it begin? Yeah, arguably the best part of Enuma Elish is its beginning. We might spend a long time on just the first nine lines. I'm going to read them out. I think these are some of the most important nine lines in Babylonian literature. And you know, there's this famous passage from the Bible, in the beginning was the word and in Enuma Elish we have the opposite, in the beginning was no word. So we hear as follows, when heaven on high had not been named and the ground below was not given a name, primordial Apsu who fathered them and the creative force Tiamat who gave birth to them all were mingling

together their waters. They had not yet bound meadows or lined the reed beds. When none of the gods had been brought forth, had not been given names and had not decreed destinies, then were the gods created within them." So in order to understand what that means, we actually have to start with a line, they had not yet bound meadows or lined the reed beds. So you have to imagine that southern Iraq is this sort of checkerboard of canals and meadows. So this line is summoning a world in which there are no meadows and on the sort of banks between the meadows and the canals, there are these reed beds. On the banks between the meadows and the canals, there are these reed beds. The reed beds don't exist either. All that exists is water and water. The two watery beings that make up the beginning

of the world are called Apsu and Tiamat. Apsu is the freshwater and Tiamat, which just means sea, is the salt water. Right. That's how they're divided up. Okay. Yeah. All there is is water and water. Absolut is a male principle. Tiamat is a female principle. But because everything is fluid and intermixed, because these two creatures have mixed their waters together, there are no shapes. There are no shapes. There are no names and there are no destinies. And the text links these three things in our minds, shumo, shimtu, and shupuu, shape, destiny, and name, by saying that none of them existed. And the other thing that doesn't exist at this point are the gods. So you have a scene of absolute fluidity.

Now spoiler alert, at the very end of this text, we're going to find a description of the cosmos that we know now, right? A cosmos that consists of definite shapes, and each of those shapes has a name. And according to Babylonian belief, inside each name is sort of a destiny, right? Like each name implies the role that we play in the world order. So we start without any of those things and we end with the creation of the cosmos as we know it. And Inoumeli sort of tracks this transformation from absolute fluidity to the world order that we know now.

I mean, you use the word fluidity there a couple of times. I mean, is it interesting that water straight away forms a key part of the narrative and you know, kind of this primordial water. If I remember correctly, we did something on the origins of the Egyptian gods a few months ago where maybe the first god is born from an egg, but once again, I think there's water as well. Water seems to be a constant to the beginnings of these creation epics in that area of the world. Yeah, and I think Enuma Elish plays with this sort of like originary wateriness in various ways. One of the things that I've been interested in in my studies of Enuma Elish plays with this sort of like, originary wateriness in various ways. One of the things that I've been interested in, in my studies of Enuma Elish, is that

it really sees a deep, deep proposition between water and language, right? Like language has this shape and, you know, it forms and relies on things being distinct from each other, whereas water is the opposite of all of that. And in Uma Elish is about the miraculous transformation of water into order. And I think that is very much emphasized already in the first lines, when heaven on high had not been named and the ground below was not given a name. So names are the opposite of water. And the other thing that I want to emphasize is that in Akkadian, the word for water is mu. And one of the things that is remarkable about this passage is that it keeps repeating the syllable mu and just the sound mm. So if you hear it in Akkadian, it's very mu,

mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu, mu. One of the contributors to this new volume on the Numa Elish that we've just published, Piotr Michalowski, calls it the creative mama in the beginning of the world, which I think is a very beautiful thing. And of course, M, besides standing for move for water, also stands for Marduk. So this is M for water and M for Marduk. But you can already hear that in this mama in the beginning of the world. Toby – Right. Although he's yet to make an appearance, our main protagonist, but we're going to get towards that now. So Apsu and Tiamat, so freshwater and saltwater, the first two figures in the story, are they a divine couple then?

Yes, they are indeed a divine couple. They mix their waters together in a very sort of sexualized scene that in turn gives birth to the first generation of gods who are called Lachmo and Lachamo. We know very little about Lachmo and Lachamo, other texts indicate that they were very hairy. That's about all we know. But they then give birth to Anshar and Kishar who are the earth and the heavens. They in turn give birth to the first sort of recognisable deity of the Babylonian pantheon who is Anu, the god of the heavens. There's quite a lineage there then. It's quite a few generations almost in divine terms. Yeah, it is quite a few generations. I think the text is absolutely obsessed with genealogy in various ways. And that leads to what happens next, which is that Ano gives birth to Ea, also known

as Enki, the god of creativity. And he is shown to be the new leader of these gods, mightier than his parents. Toby And to remind people, so Enki, he was one of the gods that was right at the forefront of the Babylonian pantheon before the time of the Enuma Elish. So it's interesting that they bring him in, incorporate him early on. Absolutely. Both Anu and Enki are sort of carried over, while Enlil, who was the previous king of

the gods, is sort of jettisoned. So Enuma Elish is among many things an anti-Enlil text. So we've got a bit of a divine family now going on, but as so often in mythological stories of gods and goddesses, this harmony doesn't last long, does it? No, it doesn't last long. And actually here we get our first of an anti-Enlil sentiment because Enlil was best known for summoning the flood. And the text reminds us of this early on. It reminds of Enlil's big crime with the flood because it tells a story that is very like the flood, which we discussed in detail in the Gilgamesh episode. And as readers might remember in Babylonian mythology, the flood

is caused by humans being too noisy. But here it is actually the gods who are too noisy. They gather together, they make all of this clamor, and that disturbs their progenitor, who is Apsu. And Apsu goes to Tiamat and he says, the gods are being so noisy. And he has a devious minister called Mummu. Again, listen to the M's, Mummu. Mummu is this sort of spirit of creativity somehow. He's quite hard to place as a character. But he's devious and he sides with Apsu and sort of inflames his anger. And he eventually convinces Apsu that he should kill his own children, the guards. And at first Tiamat is completely appalled by this.

She doesn't want to kill her children. So she refuses to cooperate in the scheme, but Apsu goes ahead with it all the same. Apsu goes ahead with it all the same. And I mean, is he successful? Surely there are going to be consequences of his actions of going against Wotar gods. Yeah, right. Yes, and that is where we see Ea stepping into action, this god of creativity whose birth, the sort of genealogy of gods are culminated in. He binds Apsu with a magic spell and eventually kills him. And what he then does is particularly interesting. He kills Apsu and he turns him into a definite area of the cosmos. And now for the ancient Babylonians that would sort

of have felt relatively natural because they knew Apsu as this giant subterranean lake that was the source of freshwater. So they already thought of Apsu as an area of the cosmos and that is what happens here. And importantly, after he has turned him into this area of the cosmos, Ea gives him a name, which is Apsu, and then shows that inside that name there is a destiny for Apsu to play hidden. So if you take the syllables of Apsu's name and scramble them, you get the sentence, he reveals the shrines. So that is what Apsu shall do. He shall reveal the shrines. And that might sound a little weird, but that's going to become hugely important later in the text, the scrambling

of the syllables. But that is basically the first part of the story. Ea has defeated Apsu. He has bound him and he has turned him into an area of the cosmos, and then he is assigned to him a name. And now you'll remember from the Gilgamesh podcast that we had to split it into two episodes, and those episodes mirrored one another. And as I said at that time, that's a bit of a motif in Babylonian literature, and that is also what we see in Enuma Elish. What I've told so far is the first episode, and what we're going to hear now is the second episode, which mirrors the past. Because Marduk himself, I suppose the main character in this narrative, he hasn't even appeared yet, has he? This is almost like the big backstory as to what happens before

and almost before they're going to introduce him onto the stage. Exactly right, which I also think is so interesting. And I think there's a certain sense in which Marduk's appearance is made at the center of the first tablet. That's another thing we talked about in the Gilgamesh episode, that these Babylonian epics, they were divided into separate tablets that were sort of their own little episode. And we are now halfway through the first of these episodes. And I think the text is really trying to make Marduk the center of this first episode. Marduk is born inside the Apsu by Ea and his wife, Donkina.

The text really launches into an absolutely stunning description of Marduk, this newborn god. As I was saying, part of the project of Enuma Elish is not just to make Marduk king of the gods, but also to show that he is a different kind of god than what came before. The text is very explicit about that. It says his divinity became different. That is really this announcement that we kind of are leaving polytheism behind here. We're entering this new world of Hinofeism in which there is like, you know, Marduk is as different from the other gods as the gods are different from us, right? Like he is as superior to them as they are to us. And that is really what the text shows us

by this crazy description of his birth. And you know, the text goes into all sorts of crazy details. You know, fire flares up from his lips. He has four eyes and four ears and he's bigger and taller than all of the rest. But there's one point in which the text almost breaks down into nonsense, into sort of magical nonsense to describe how great he is. And at one point it says, Mariutu, Mariutu, son of sun, son of gods, which is quite hard to make sense of what that exactly means because the text is almost going beyond language to describe

this deity. To clarify, so this is really interesting. So I'm trying to figure this out. Apsu is defeated and becomes a part of the cosmos, this underground lake, the source of all freshwater. Then the next part is from that freshwater or from Apsu, Marduk is born. Is that linked to the defeated Apsu? Yeah, it is made very clear that the Apsu is the location in which Morduk is born. And I think that's important because the Apsu was this source of creativity. So again, creativity has become very important in this text. And Morduk is sort of infused with that energy.

And that's once again that link to water, isn't it? Of course, if we take a bit tangent, like water for the Babylonians, you've got those two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. You've got all those canals. It's a key part of the narrative that we're going to be coming back to again and again. Redar Rezai Yeah, absolutely. But also, I think it's not just water as this, let's say, agricultural source of nourishment. It's also water as the sea. Tiamat is very specifically the sea. I think for them, the sea was often this far away place where enemies lived and the kings would reach the sea with their armies. I think that's quite important for what happens next.

Toby Let's go on to what happens next. You mentioned Tiamat. How does she respond to the murder, the killing of her partner, Absu? Giles At first, she's weirdly okay about it, which is also kind of interesting. But as I said, we now begin to get this mirroring of what we've already seen. So just as we had the gods raising this ruckus first, we now have Marduk raising a ruckus, in part because Anu, who is his grandfather, gives him these four winds to play with, which he then does. And so again, you have to imagine what the world is

like at this point, right? There is one enormous endless sea, which is Tiamat, and inside it, the gods are living. Now, within this enormous sea, Enki has created this bubble, which is the Apsu, where he and his family live. But all the other gods, and there are other gods besides Ea's family, his family live. But all the other gods, and there are other gods besides Ea's family, they live in Tiamat. And so Marduk, he's playing with these winds, and so he's roiling the entire sea. And that means he's roiling the entire world, which means that the gods can't sleep, because they're constantly being tossed about by these winds that Marduk likes to play with. And I think it's one of the text's many nice details is that it really plays with language here so that you can say that the text is roiling Tiamat's body, but also her

heart, but also her mood. So it's like her mood and her physical form kind of get conflated, because you can do that in Akkadian. And so you get a sense that Tima is becoming agitated, both literally and metaphorically, right? Like her mind is becoming agitated, but also the entire sea is agitated. Oh yes, so like a storm kind of thing, like as you might envisage. Yeah, exactly, right. Exactly. A storm inside and outside as it were, right? And so at one point these gods, again, they can't sleep. That's a bit of a motif in Babylonian literature. When people can't sleep, that tends to lead

to problems. And so they take their complaint to Tiamat and says, do something about him. And they really shame her quite a lot. They shame her for not standing with Apsu earlier. So this woman is just getting relentless hate. First she's told to kill her children, and then she's blamed for not standing up with her husband, which I think is interesting. When they try to goad her into action, they're really pressing on some of these cracks within the idea of a good mother in Babylonian conception because she's A, blamed for not standing by her husband, and B, encouraged to kill her children. So the two things are kind of pushing against each other. But either way, they eventually do manage to get Tiamat up and angry. And she sets out to

kill Marduk and to kill the other gods who are living inside the Apsu. And in order to do so, she raises an army. And this is another of the great set pieces in the poem. She raises, or rather she gives birth to an army of monsters. And you have all the most amazing monsters in Babylonian literature listed here. You have these huge serpents, you have these lion men, scorpion men, fish men, business men. And so it's quite a formidable army that she raises to kill Marduk and the other gods. I guess because they're divine beings, maybe this isn't questioned as much, but creating all those animals and monsters that you would, apart from the fish, you'd expect to be on the land.

Are you trying to portray this like if it's endless sea? Are they swimming or are they walking on water? I'm guessing those questions aren't answered, but they're like, this is the gods and their creations they find a way kind of thing. I think that's such a good question. And I think it's kind of one of the things I'm fascinated about in Numa Elish, especially Tiamat, right? It's quite hard to consistently think of her as a sea because she does things. She does things with her limbs. At one point, she takes a lover, one of these rebellious

gods or rather angry gods. And what does it mean to take a lover if you're the sea? But on the other hand, if you fully think of her as a person, then the text doesn't make sense either. Because again, the gods are literally inside her. So I don't think this is a mistake. I think the text is being quite deliberate here in creating a kind of fluidity for Tiamat. Both her literal fluidity, she is the sea, but also a sort of like fluidity of the character. The character only makes sense if she sort of goes back and forth between being a sea and being a person. And at one point we're told that she has a tail. So maybe she's an animal, right? So I think actually

the text is quite deliberately keeping us from having a firm grass on her because, you know, again, spoiler alert, having a firm grasp on Tiamat will become a very relevant thing in just a moment. Well, I mean, it's bizarre, but extraordinary, this whole story. So we're going towards this showdown of Marduk versus the monsters. What happens? So we then get a quite long, I'm not going to say boring, but certainly very repetitive section in which the gods send these messages of alarm back and forth to each other and eventually they

convene in order to try to defeat Tiamat. Anu and Ea are both sent out to try and defeat Tiamat. They both fail. They're overwhelmed. Even though Ea seems to have had no problem in defeating Apsu, he's thwarted by Tiamat. Eventually, the gods then turn in despair to Marduk and he steps up as a champion. But in order to defeat Tiamat, he first demands universal kingship as his prize. In this new book we've published, there's a study by Justa Gabriel about these speeches in which the gods sort of discuss what kingship will be like, which I think is very interesting. There is quite a clear set of mutual obligations between the king and his subjects. But the gods essentially hash out

kingship. Another study in this book by Johannes Halbold, he shows that these messages back and forth, they're beginning to build the building blocks of Babylonian social structure, including messengers, including the assembly, and including kingship, and so on and so forth. So the gods have spurred on by the crisis to create society, essentially. Are these dialogues then representing, almost like with the Sophists in Greece maybe a bit later, what Babylonians believed a king should be? Exactly right. Exactly right. And I think, you know, Enuma Elisha is among many things.

Like it's sort of a great monument to the concept of kingship. It's really wedding the notion of Hinotheism, of this God above gods, to the notion of kingship. A human among humans, a human above humans. It is very clearly making the link between those two things. And so once they've had this discussion and Marduk has named his price for going and fighting Tiamat, what does happen? Is there a big conflict between him and Tiamat? Yeah, just before we get to that, just one thing I want to note that just before the gods make Marduk their king, they get absolutely trashed. I just want to make sure the Babylonian literature, this is like, according to the

Babylonian view of cosmic history, one of the most important moments ever. And I just love that they're drunk for it. But yes, they elect Marduk their king. And he gets dressed in this fearsome garment, in this fearsome armor. The line that I read out earlier, that is actually describing him getting dressed for battle. And then eventually he heads out, he is armed with his winds, and he confronts Tiamat. And now we have reached the very heart of the text. So again, the text likes to place things midway. And just as the birth of Marduk was midway in the first tablet, we are now midway through the story. And there is this great clash, this great confrontation between Marduk and Tiamat. And so I mentioned that, you know, the key question is like, do we have a grasp of Tiamat? And what Marduk does in this battle is that he gets a grasp of Tiamat. And I think, you know, before the

battle begins, he recites a magic spell. And we are not told explicitly what that magic spell is, but I think again, to make sense of the text, we have to assume that this magic spell turns Tiamat into a solid creature. Because what happens then is that Marduk thrusts his wind into her mouth and then shoots an arrow into that mouth and through her body. We get this long anatomically detailed list of Tiamat's organs as Marduk's arrow cuts through them as it were. Now she's quite clearly not just a seed.

Now we have to sort of picture her as a person because the arrow makes its way through her heart, through her gut, through her lungs and so on and so forth. So Marduk has clearly transformed, you know, because how do you fight the sea, right? That's basically the question. The other thing that Marduk does is that he throws a net over her. And if he's fighting a sea, that doesn't make any sense because you can't catch a sea with the net. That's almost proverbially impossible. So he must somehow transform her into a solid creature so that he can defeat her. And that is his big trial. And after he has defeated her, the rest of the text will, the second half of the text will explain step by step how he takes her now solid corpse

and transforms her into the world that we see around her. Interesting. So Tiamat doesn't, it's not almost like taming the rough seas kind of thing like that. So Tiamat is a corpse, so dies, and then it's kind of the use of that power to create a new world, well, a new, I mean, heavens and earth kind of thing, is it? Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think, you know, there was this line in the book by Neil Price about the Vikings children of Ashen Elm in which he talks about the universe's crime scene in Viking mythology. And I think that really applies wonderfully to Inuma Elish

as well, right? We all live inside the corpse of this dead mother. ALICE Wow. Oh, of course. Yeah, that's quite some images. I said the dead mother as well, which adds another layer to it entirely. Well, okay, then. So let's get to that next big part of the text, which is within this dead corpse of their great mother, how does Marduk as the as the newly elected chief god, how does he go about showing himself as the new big person in town and reshaping or creating the heavens and the earth? BD Yeah, so just like his father Ea had created the first definite area of the cosmos, there

wasn't just water, so Marduk now does the same, but on a cosmic scale. The exact details of this are quite unclear in the text at times and quite debated among scholars, so I'm not going to go through the absolute details of it. But basically, something like the following happens. Marduk kind of turns Tiamat inside out? So if you look up and you see something blue, that's the sky and that's sort of the water on the other side of Tiamat, if that makes sense. We live in this huge air bubble that is kind of like Tiamat's skin inside out, right? It's kind of gross. And like, you know, for example, the mountains are her rests, the rivers flow from her eyes, the clouds are her spittle, that kind of thing.

The world also quite interestingly seems to consist of three, possibly four, this is one of those details that gets debated. But let's just say three layers with us in the middle, the up so beneath us and the heavens above us, and each of them is sort of centered around a main temple. Again, the details of this are a little debated. Also very importantly, Mardo creates the movement of the heavens, right? So he creates day and night, he creates the month, including the moon, which changes shape over the course of the month and so allows us to track the passage of time.

And all of these things, the tablets go through the various aspects of this cosmos that he creates. I know in your new work, I mean, is it Francesca Rochberg who does quite a bit on the astronomy as well? So I'd like to talk a bit about that if you don't mind. I mean, because when you think of ancient Babylon and the Babylonians, they have a big fascination, don't they, in astronomy and the stars and the zodiac and all of that. So is it no surprise that, you know, kind of Marduk forming the heavens and what they saw above them, whether it's the sky or the stars or the moon? I mean, it forms a big part of that creation narrative. Absolutely. And over the following centuries, you know, especially towards the end of Babylonian culture, this focus on astronomy would become the absolute

most important element of Babylonian culture. In the classical world, the Babylonians were known almost exclusively as great astrologers slash astronomers. That fascination really finds its theological foundations, if you will, in this text. For example, one of the things that Babylonian astrologers were interested in was the length of the month, because the month is not quite 28 and not quite 29 days. And so this text establishes the ideal month, the ideal length of the month. And then any deviation from that ideal length was seen as ominous, as a message that was being sent from the gods. And also all of the gods get stations. They get an astral manifestation. So Marduk himself would become known as the planet

Jupiter. In Akkadian, in Numeleish, that Neibiru. Again, things are a little more complicated than that. You can read Rockberg's chapter on the exact identification of Neibiru, but basically it would come to be later that Neibiru was identified with Jupiter. Oh, Jupiter is in the God or the planet? The planet. The planet, right. Did they recognise Jupiter then? Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, wow. And you know, the other gods get other stars and other planets. Wow. Okay. I did not realise just how many planets. Well, it's a Babylonian astronomy and astrology is another episode in its own right and is one that we certainly will have to do in the future. But okay, let's move away from the heavens now. And I'd like to actually mention one thing that you talked about in passing when talking about Marduk creating the Earth, the rivers coming from the eyes of Tiamat. Now, is there a particular focus on those two rivers, which are right next to and central to Babylon?

Yeah, to an extent. I think there are other Babylonian creation myths that foreground the rivers more than Enuma Elish. I think Enuma Elish is more interested in the fluidity of everything and in the sea that is around us. But it does care about the rivers. It's not like that. But I think one of the other things that is worth mentioning about Eno-ma Eilish and rivers, and this will be brought out in the later description of Marduk's cosmic roles that we're getting to, is that essentially Marduk has tamed water. It? So it's not that there isn't water inside the world as we know, but he has sort of tamed it.

So he allows water to come in from this sort of, this, you know, huge cosmic thing that we're surrounded by, but not in this chaotic shapeless way that was the case before, right? But in an ordered way through rivers, through canals, through channels, so that it can become agriculturally productive. TobyE Yes, irrigation and canals, as you say. Right,

so if we move on slightly, but still on that creation part, how and when do humans come into the story? Gareth So we come into the story quite late, in tablet six of the seven tablets in Enuma Elish. And I think again, this is one of the ways in which Enuma Elish is really playing with older myths. And one of the things that it does as a place with older myths is that it always likes to upstage Enlil. And again, this is something that is discussed in this new book by Selena Wisdom. So there was an older myth, one of my favorite myths from Babylonian culture

called Atrahasis, which describes the creation of humanity as being born of this conflict between the gods, because some gods had to work and the other gods imposed work on them. And Enlil sort of failed to manage the situation, which is why it explodes in conflict according to this older myth. And that leads to the creation of humanity in order to take on the work of the gods. But in the Numa Elish, it sort of references that older myth, but Marduk preempts the situation, because Marduk is shown as being better than Enlil because he can see this crisis coming from a mile off. And so he creates humanity to bear the work of the gods so that this situation doesn't even arise. That is the point that Inuma

Elish is making quite implicitly, but it's still, if any Babylonian reader that had read Atrahasis would have been able to see what was happening. So Marduk manages to avert this crisis that dominates Atrahas, this older myth. And just as we had this play on M in the beginning, M for water, we have a wonderfully elegant play on L, which is, you know, L for human in this description of humanity. So just another example of how the text is always playing with language. Yeah, exactly. Beautiful language. I've got no doubt. So how does this whole text, if we get to the seventh tablet, you said there were seven

tablets, how does it ultimately end? I mean, you mentioned the book of Genesis earlier, so you might think of God creating the earth seven days and on the seventh day he rested idea. Is there anything similar with Marduk? Does he sit back and relax and enjoy what he's created? RL Actually, yes. They get drunk again, because they always do. MG Oh, they get drunk. Okay, of course. Yeah. RL And then what happens is that, as I said, we began with the scene of absolute shapelessness

and absolute namelessness. So a lack of names and a lack of destinies and a lack of shapes. So now we're beginning to have the shapes, right? The world has sort of been given form. And now we get an outpouring of names and destinies. The text began by saying, when heaven above had no name, and it ends with a cascade of names. It ends with Marduk being given 50 names. And to each of these names, there is an accompanying destiny, a shumu and a shimtu. The Babylonians were obsessed with finding out how the two were related because again, as I've mentioned, they saw destinies and fates as being encoded in names. But each of the gods basically gives Marduk their own name. And I think that's another expression, another very powerful expression

of this henotheistic image in which all of the other gods are sort of seen as aspects of Marduk, facets of Marduk. He takes on their identities by literally receiving their names, including the name of his own father. Ea gives him his names. Also, very importantly, he is given not two names, not three names, not four names, but 50 names specifically, which is very important in Babylonian context because 50 was the sacred number of Enlil. So again, Marduk in yet another dig at Enlil takes over Enlil's sacred number. The ending of the poem can be perhaps a little boring to read because it's a long list of names and the destinies that go with them. But in Babylonian religion, this is absolutely central. This is important for so many reasons,

in part because it shows us that language is the code that we can use to understand how the world works, in part because it's a testament to this Hennotheistic vision of the world and in part because it is evidence that Marduk has taken over as King of the Gods from Edna. It's such an extraordinary story. As you said of from fluidity and just water to, you know, kind of this order and language and Marduk at the top. I know I asked it at the beginning, the importance of this, but now that we've done the story and we've gone through it, I'm going to ask you this again, Save This, because I feel we can even, it's good

to repeat now, the purpose of this epic and its importance to the Babylonians, if they were reading this, if they were told this, what were the main messages that a Babylonian would take away from this story? BF I think one of the main messages is of course simply that Marduk is king of the gods and Marduk is a special kind of god. That is sort of like this message number one. I also think it's interesting that, as I said, not everybody accepted this vision of the world. I mentioned briefly that it wasn't only the enemies of the Babylonians, like the Assyrians and the Jewish nobles and scholars in Babylon who disliked this text,

but there were also some Babylonians who reacted quite critically. There's another epic called Erra, which is in so many ways the anti-Enuma Elish epic. It really is just – it goes after Enuma Elish at every chance it can. So again, I don't want people to come away thinking that – I'm sure there were some holier than thou Babylonians who every time you drank water was like, oh, you're going to mention Marduk's name now. I also think just briefly on that, I think it's a very symbolic act, just like Marduk defeated the sea, so when we swallow water, we're expressing gratitude to him. I think, and again, the fact that we have to mention his name, because his name is so

important, I think it's a beautiful line and it's one of the very last lines of text. I think it's very telling for the project of this poem. But anyway, so I was just saying that I'm sure there was some holier than thou, Super Marduk fanatics, but again, it was a text that was also met with a lot of resistance and a lot of creative reinterpretation in many ways. I mean, for those who followed it, was there an idea? I mean, if Babylon said at that time, it's got temples to Marduk, I think that's the house of the god. Did many Babylonians then interpret it as being like, okay, that means also that Babylon is the centre of the universe, because this is where the house of Marduk is. And we are the city that

worships Marduk primarily, unlike other cities. Absolutely, absolutely. I think that sense of the centrality of Babylon is, you know, again, absolutely key to understanding this text. And it's celebrated throughout the text. Like Babylon, the creation of Babylon is a moment that is almost as significant in the text as the creation of humanity. That's sort of like where we're at. Will Barron Is Babylon itself mentioned at the end of the text? Ah, okay. Sanyam Bhutani And that leads to real life problems. So,

I mentioned the Babylonian resistance, we've mentioned the Jewish resistance, but there was also the Assyrian resistance. So the Assyrians had this very complicated relation to Babylon, not unlike the relation between Rome and Greece in which Rome became the military superpower, but they were still culturally indebted to Greece. And in the same way, the Assyrians became this military superpower, but they were still culturally indebted to Greece. In the same way, the Assyrians became this military superpower in the first millennium BCE, but were still very culturally indebted to the Babylonians. At one point, the Assyrians tried to destroy Babylon completely after a rebellion. The king kills the Assyrian king's son. He's absolutely enraged. That's a Sennacherib

son. And so he levels Babylon. And I think one of the interesting things is that the description of his leveling of Babylon absolutely plays with Enuma Elish and tropes from Enuma Elish. And after that, the Assyrians composed a version of Enuma Elish that places the names of Marduk and Babylon with the city of Asur and the god Asur. Asur, their chief god and their chief city. I was going to ask how popular it would have been outside of Babylon, but you've answered there are the people who weren't too keen on this rival city claiming that they were the centre of the universe. But before that time, actually, when Babylon is at its height and the Enuma Elish, there is resistance to it, but if there

were still many who would have heard it, was it promoted in public festivals or was this poem taught in schools in Babylon as a key piece of literature? Do we know much about where and how this story would have been told in Babylon? LR – Absolutely. Again, the schools are always key to our understanding of these ancient texts. Yes, there are other sources than the schools, like the Royal Archives, but the schools are absolutely critical to our understanding of what ancient literature even is. And Enuma Elish plays an absolutely central role in Babylonian education, as well it would. It becomes this standard text about Babylon and Babylonian culture. Quite a lot later,

Enuma Elish becomes integrated into this great New Year's festival called the Asinu. Celine de Pouce in this book shows that the relation between the New Year's Festival and the Enuma Elish is a little more complicated than has sometimes been thought. That's one of the things that historians love to show. There's another excellent chapter in the book by Fran Reynolds in which she studies the cuneiform reception of Enuma Elish and another excellent article by Eckhart Frahm in which he traces the reception of Enuma Elish and another excellent article by Eckhart Fram in which he traces the reception of Enuma Elish beyond the cuneiform world. But what all of these essays sort of show is that, you know, again, Enuma Elish just casts an absolutely enormous shadow over the literature of the cuneiform world, but also beyond it in the first millennium. Well, I must say, I mean, very interesting point

there about the schools. And what I also love is the fact that this story has survived in its entirety. As you say, these seven tablets, what an amazing discovery that has been. But I will just ask one question, which is, when we've already dabbled on a bit, but I feel it's important to ask, how does the Enuma Elish, how does it influence the creation of the Hebrew Bible? How does the Enuma Elish influence the creation of the Hebrew Bible? Well, I mean, I say that Enuma Elish has provoked for 3,000 years, and that's one of the ways in which it has provoked. There are these two very influential and very thorny debates in early 20th century Germany, the Babel-Bibel-Streit, the Babel-Bibel discussion and a study by Zimmern about both of them center on the possible influence of Babylonian religion on the Hebrew

Bible and the relation specifically between Enuma Elish and Genesis is absolutely central to that discussion. For example, this idea of God's spirit hovering over the waters. If you close read that in the Hebrew, there are a lot of textual echoes to Enuma Elish there, and that is the very opening of the Hebrew Bible. So just from the very beginning, the Bible is engaging with Enuma Elish in all sorts of ways, pushing against it, creating its own counter narrative, which again makes sense if, as many scholars today believe, the Hebrew Bible found its final form while the Jewish scholars and nobles were in their captivity in Babylon.

This is the Babylonian captivity after Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem in the early 6th century BC. We did an interview with the incredible and it's fair to say incredible Dr Irving Finkel last year where he did the story of Noah and the Flood and also how that is very much linked into it. So very interesting to hear your thoughts on that too. So first, this has been absolutely extraordinary. Last but certainly not least, tell us about this new book and e-resource that has come back and how it is making ancient Babylonian literature, like the Epica creation, in the modern day, it is making it accessible to a wide audience. Right. With Johannes Haubold and Enrique Jiménez and Selena Wisdom, I have launched this new book

series called Library of Babylonian Literature. Basically, the aim of this book series is to make the classics of Babylonian literature more accessible. And I think for reasons that should by now be fairly clear, we began with Enuma Elish as the sort of classic of the classics of Babylonian literature. And each of the books in this series will include a new translation of the text, a state of the art transcription, a detailed historical introduction that sort of lays out the background of the text, and then a series of essays by leading scholars that unpack the history, the structure, and the main themes of these poems. And perhaps

best of all, these are published open access, so you can go to the Bloomsbury website, just search for Library of Babylonian Literature, and then you can download them for free. Absolutely. So the Epic of Creation that we talked about today, this whole extraordinary, bizarre, but extraordinary story, you can read it all today online for free and all of these essays by leading experts in the field, including yourself, Sophos. What an asset to have modern day, to give people such a wonderful introduction. It's not just the Greek myths, it's not just the Roman stories. You can now also look at this great library of Mesopotamian literature and mythology that is really starting to rise to the fore. Sophus, this has been a pleasure to have you on the podcast

and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. It was such a delight to be here again. Well, there you go. That was Dr. Sophos Harrell talking you through this amazing tale from ancient Babylon. That was the epic of creation. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. We will put up a poll

on Spotify once this episode has been released asking you which epic tale, great story from ancient history you would like us to cover next. Just a great work from ancient history. We'll put a variety of options up there. Vote now so you can have a voice in which great narrative we cover next. Thank you once again for voice in which great narrative we cover next. documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.