Marduk: How Babylon's God Became King of the Gods

The god of Babylon who split the sea-monster Tiamat to build the sky, and was given fifty names, one of them Nibiru.

Marduk was the god of Babylon who rose from a minor local deity to king of the gods as the city grew. In the Enuma Elish he kills Tiamat and receives fifty names, one of them Nibiru.

Marduk began as the local god of Babylon, a minor figure while Babylon itself was minor. As the city grew into an imperial capital under Hammurabi and later kings, its god grew with it, until Babylonian theologians made him king of all the gods. His temple was the Esagila, and the great ziggurat beside it, Etemenanki, is often linked with the Tower of Babel.

The Enuma Elish tells how he got the job. The older gods, threatened by Tiamat and her monsters, make Marduk their champion on condition that he becomes supreme. He kills Tiamat, splits her body 'like a flat fish into two halves' to form sky and earth, sets the stars in their stations, and has humans created from the blood of the rebel god Kingu.

At the end of the poem, the gods proclaim his fifty names. One of them is Nibiru: 'Let his name be Nibiru, the Seizer of the Midst! For the stars of heaven he upheld the paths.' In Babylonian astronomy Nibiru was a celestial crossing point tied to Marduk, usually identified with Jupiter.

His statue was carried off by foreign conquerors more than once, and Babylonian texts describe these absences as the god choosing to travel. His symbol was the mushhushshu, the snake-dragon that still marches along the glazed bricks of the Ishtar Gate in Berlin. Parts of that gate, reconstructed from original bricks, stand today in the Pergamon Museum, a rare physical survivor from the temple city the Enuma Elish celebrates.