More than one creation story
There is no single “creation chapter” in Mesopotamian literature. Several compositions, written in different periods and languages, deal with how the world and humanity came to be, and they do not always agree. Three are especially important: the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which tells how Marduk shaped the cosmos; the Atrahasis epic, which tells how humans were made and nearly destroyed; and shorter Sumerian poems on the separation of heaven and earth and the forming of people from clay. The birth of the gods themselves is covered in the companion overview of Mesopotamian mythology; this article starts where the gods are already at war.
Marduk and Tiamat
In the Enuma Elish, after Apsu has been killed, the goddess Tiamat, the salt water, prepares to fight the younger gods. She creates monsters and elevates a god named Kingu as her commander, giving him the Tablet of Destinies, which confers authority. The gods turn to Marduk, who agrees to be their champion on condition that he is made king.
Marduk fights Tiamat with winds, a net and a bow, drives a wind into her open mouth and kills her. He then splits her body into two parts. Using one half, he fixes the sky and sets guards so that its waters cannot escape; the other half becomes the earth. He arranges stars, sets the moon to mark the months and prepares the year. In the story the cosmos is therefore made from the body of a defeated primeval being, an idea that has parallels in other mythologies, though scholars are cautious about drawing direct lines between them.
Two points are worth stressing. First, this is a Babylonian text, shaped by Babylonian religion, and its purpose is partly to explain why Marduk, patron of Babylon, rules the gods. Ritual sources indicate it was recited at the New Year festival, a good example of how myth and ritual were bound together. In the Assyrian version, Ashur takes Marduk’s role. Second, it presents creation as victory over chaos and disorder, represented by the water-goddess, which differs from Sumerian accounts where creation is more a matter of separation, planning and labour.
Humans from clay and blood
After the victory, the poem explains how humans came to exist. The gods still have to do the heavy work, and Marduk, advised by Ea, proposes that a being be made to carry the burden so that the gods can rest. Kingu, as the instigator of the war, is held responsible. He is killed, and from his blood, humankind is made. Ea forms them to serve the gods. Marduk then divides the gods into groups and builds Babylon, with its temple, as their home.
This idea of humans as workers who maintain the gods is basic to the Mesopotamian view of the world. Temples, offerings, festivals and the labour of farmers and builders were understood as service that kept the divine household running.
Atrahasis: making people, and trying to get rid of them
The Atrahasis epic, whose name means roughly “exceedingly wise”, gives a fuller version of the same theme. Its oldest surviving copies date to the Old Babylonian period, around the 17th century BCE, and fragments of later copies come from Assyrian libraries.
It begins in a time when the gods themselves did the labour. The lesser gods, often called the Igigi, are made to dig the canals; after a long period they rebel and surround Enlil’s house. The assembly looks for a solution. Enki (Ea) proposes that the birth-goddess, called Nintu or Mami, make a human being. Clay is mixed with the flesh and blood of a god, named We-ila in the text, who is killed for the purpose, and the divine spittle and spirit give the human an element of the divine. Fourteen birth-figures are shaped and people begin to multiply.
After a very long span of years, however, the noise of humankind keeps Enlil from sleeping. He sends plague, then drought and famine, but each time Enki helps his protégé Atrahasis, a human king or sage, to appease the gods. When Enlil finally decides on a flood, Enki cannot tell Atrahasis directly, but speaks to a reed wall within the man’s hearing, warning him to build a boat. Atrahasis loads his family and animals, closes the door, and the flood sweeps the earth for seven days. The gods, who now have no offerings, grow hungry and repent. After the flood the gods set limits: some women will be barren, there will be infant mortality and some will be priestesses who do not bear children, so that population can be held in check.
The link between human numbers and the divine order is a distinctive feature. The flood is not a punishment for moral failure in the way later traditions tell it, but a response to disturbance, though the poem is not explicit on every point and scholars interpret it in different ways.
The wider flood tradition
The flood story survived in several forms. A Sumerian text sometimes called the Eridu Genesis (the title is modern) names the survivor Ziusudra. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh has the survivor Utnapishtim, whose story is told in the eleventh tablet; the narrative there borrows closely from Atrahasis. The fragment of the flood story in Gilgamesh was recognised in 1872 by George Smith at the British Museum, and it caused a stir because of its similarities to the account in Genesis. Scholars generally explain these links as shared Near Eastern traditions rather than a simple copy, and the question of exactly how the stories are related is still discussed.
Sumerian ideas of making the world
Earlier Sumerian poems give a different picture. In some texts a primeval sea, personified as Nammu, is the origin of everything; heaven (An) and earth (Ki) are separated by Enlil, whose seat was the religious centre Nippur, and who carries off the earth while An takes heaven. The poem Enki and Ninmah describes humans formed from clay by Nammu and Enki, the god of the city of Eridu, again to take on the work of the gods, and then has Enki and the mother goddess compete in shaping people with different characteristics. The idea of clay as the stuff of people is very old in the region.
These Sumerian pieces are short and sometimes obscure, and different readings are possible. They show that the tradition behind the Babylonian epics was already rich centuries earlier. They also remind us that the kinds of tablets used for such studies come from the schools of scribes who preserved this literature in cuneiform writing.
Reading the stories carefully
It is tempting to treat these texts as a unified “Mesopotamian Bible”, but they are separate works with separate aims. Enuma Elish serves Babylon’s religion and kingship; Atrahasis explains the human condition, work and mortality; Sumerian poems offer yet other angles. The ancient audience probably knew several versions at once. Knowing which source says what is the key to reading them accurately.