Enuma Elish: What the Babylonian Creation Story Says

Babylon's creation epic: a war among the gods, a sea-monster split to make the sky, and humans made from a rebel god's blood.

The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation epic, about a thousand lines on seven tablets. Marduk kills the sea Tiamat, makes heaven and earth from her body, and has humans made from a rebel god's blood.

The Enuma Elish, named from its first words 'When on high', is the Babylonian creation epic. It runs to about a thousand lines on seven tablets. Copies were found in the ruins of Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and George Smith published the first translation in 1876. L. W. King's 1902 edition, The Seven Tablets of Creation, is freely available.

It begins before anything had a name, when only Apsu and Tiamat, fresh and salt water, existed. The gods born from them are noisy; Apsu is killed; Tiamat raises an army of monsters under Kingu. Marduk, son of Ea, agrees to fight on condition that he becomes king of the gods. He kills Tiamat and splits her body 'like a flat fish into two halves', making heaven from one half.

Marduk then organizes the calendar and the stars, divides the Anunnaki between heaven and earth, and has humans made from Kingu's blood to do the gods' work. The grateful gods build him Babylon and proclaim his fifty names. The temple Esagila in Babylon is thus presented as built by gods, a claim the priests of Babylon had every reason to repeat.

The poem was recited at Babylon's New Year festival. Its themes, a watery chaos, a divided sky and earth, a created humanity, have long been compared with Genesis 1. Zecharia Sitchin reread it as a record of planetary collisions, a reading scholars reject. The poem remains one of the best preserved creation stories from the ancient world, and it can be read today in full.