Quick Answer
The Enuma Elish is a Babylonian poem in which a young god kills the sea, builds the world out of her corpse, and makes people from a traitor's blood to do the work the gods were tired of. It reads as a creation myth and it was written as a political document, and knowing which it is changes everything about how it lands.
Key Takeaways
- It is a promotion document. The poem exists to move Marduk, and therefore Babylon, above Enlil and the older Sumerian order.
- The seventh tablet is the point. Fifty divine names, most belonging to other gods, transferred to Marduk with explanations. Readers skip it and it is the payload.
- Humans are an afterthought made from a rebel's blood to relieve the gods of labour, which is as far from being made in an image as an ancient text gets.
- Genesis 1 is probably answering this kind of text rather than copying it, and the differences are more informative than the parallels.
- Buy Dalley or Foster. The cheap ebooks are King's 1902 translation, and a great deal has changed since.
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What It Is
Seven clay tablets, roughly eleven hundred lines of Akkadian poetry. The title is simply the opening words, enuma elish, meaning when on high, in the ancient habit of naming a work by how it begins.
It was a liturgical text as much as a literary one. The poem was recited during the Akitu, the Babylonian new year festival, as part of the annual reassertion that order had been established and would hold for another year. That performance context is the single most useful thing to know about it.
Copies survive from several sites and periods. The best known came out of the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, from the seventh century BC, which is some centuries after the poem was composed.
On the state of the text: every translation you read is a composite. The poem is reconstructed from many damaged copies, gaps remain in places, and fragments continue to be identified in museum collections that were excavated more than a century ago. This is normal for Mesopotamian literature and it is worth knowing when a printed page presents an unbroken text.
The Story in Seven Tablets
The narrative is compact and strange, and it moves fast.
At the start there is no sky and no earth, only two waters mingling: Apsu, the fresh water beneath the ground, and Tiamat, the salt sea. From their mixture the gods are generated in successive pairs.
The younger gods are noisy. Apsu, unable to rest, proposes to kill them. Tiamat objects to destroying what they have made. Ea, one of the young gods and the cleverest, learns of the plan, puts Apsu to sleep with a spell and kills him, then builds his own dwelling on top of the dead body.
Tiamat is roused to war. She creates eleven monsters, appoints the god Kingu as her commander and gives him the Tablet of Destinies. The gods panic. Ea cannot face her. Anu cannot face her. Finally Marduk, Ea's son, offers to fight on one condition: if he wins, he becomes king of the gods, and his word decides all things. The assembly agrees.
The combat is brief. Marduk drives a wind into Tiamat's open mouth so that she cannot close it, shoots an arrow into her distended belly, and kills her. He splits her body lengthwise like a shellfish and raises half of it to form the sky, holding back the waters above. He sets the stars in their stations, fixes the year, establishes the moon's phases. From her eyes he lets the Tigris and the Euphrates run.
Then he turns to labour. The gods are tired of working, so Marduk has Kingu executed and makes humanity from his blood mixed with clay, for the express purpose of carrying the gods' burden. Freed from work, the gods build Babylon and its temple Esagila as Marduk's dwelling, and the poem closes with the recitation of his fifty names.
What the Poem Is For
Read as a creation account the poem is odd, because creation occupies a fairly small part of it. Read as a legal brief it is perfectly organised.
Marduk was the city god of Babylon, a relatively junior figure in the older Sumerian pantheon, where the senior positions belonged to Anu, Enlil and Ea. Babylon's political rise created a theological problem: the city that ruled had a god who did not.
The Enuma Elish solves that problem in the only way an ancient religious culture could, by narrating the transfer. Marduk does not usurp. He is elected, unanimously, by the assembly of gods, in an emergency none of the older gods could handle, on terms they proposed and accepted. His supremacy is earned, witnessed, and legally constituted.
Most scholars place the composition in the later twelfth century BC, often connecting it to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I and the recovery of Babylonian confidence in that period. That timing fits the argument the poem is making.
This is the reason to read it, and it generalises. Here is a creation story where the political purpose is visible because we know the political situation, and once you have seen it operating this plainly, you start looking for the same machinery elsewhere. Which god gets promoted, which older order is preserved and subordinated rather than denied, whose city ends up at the centre of the cosmos. Very few surviving creation texts let you watch that work as clearly as this one does.
How It Was Found
The tablets came out of the excavations at Nineveh in the middle of the nineteenth century, among tens of thousands of fragments shipped to the British Museum where they sat largely unread.
George Smith, who had begun as an engraver and taught himself cuneiform, worked through them. In 1872 he identified the flood account in the Epic of Gilgamesh and announced it to a startled public. He followed it with the creation material, published in 1876 as The Chaldean Account of Genesis.
The effect was seismic. Victorian Britain was already in the middle of an argument about the historicity of scripture, and here was a Babylonian text older than the Hebrew Bible describing a flood, a hero warned to build a boat, a bird sent out to find land, and a creation involving primeval waters. The title Smith chose did not calm anyone.
The Festival It Was Written For
The poem was not read privately. It was performed, and the occasion tells you what it was supposed to do.
The Akitu was the Babylonian new year festival, held over roughly eleven days at the start of the year, and it was the most important thing in the civic calendar. Statues of gods were brought in from other cities. The king participated directly. The Enuma Elish was recited in full during the festival, on one of its early days.
The most striking element for a modern reader is what happened to the king. In the ceremony he was stripped of his regalia and struck by the high priest before the statue of Marduk, and he had to declare that he had not neglected the city, the temple or the people. Only then were the insignia returned and the reign renewed for another year. A god's supremacy was reasserted annually, and so was the conditional nature of the king's authority under it.
That is the setting in which the poem's account of Marduk's election makes complete sense. The gods elect Marduk in an emergency, on terms; the king holds Babylon under Marduk, on terms; and both arrangements are re-enacted every spring. The text is not describing a distant past. It is supplying the charter that the year's ceremony renews.
Practice: read it as a script, not a story
Read the poem imagining a temple, a crowd, a king who is about to be humiliated in public, and priests reciting eleven hundred lines aloud. The passages that seem like padding, the repetitions, the formulaic messenger speeches that say the same thing three times, all work differently when you hear them as liturgy rather than read them as narrative. Ancient texts routinely read badly because we are reading them in the wrong posture, and this is one of the clearest cases.
The Genesis Question
This has been argued for a hundred and fifty years and the current position is more interesting than either of the older ones.
The confrontational phase came with Friedrich Delitzsch, whose Babel and Bible lectures in Berlin at the start of the twentieth century argued that the Hebrew Bible was substantially derivative of Mesopotamian material. The lectures caused an enormous public controversy, partly on their merits and partly because of what Delitzsch went on to do with the argument.
The parallels are real. Both texts begin with primeval water and darkness. Both involve a division of the waters, with some held above and some below. Both proceed by ordering rather than by making from nothing. Both establish the heavenly bodies as markers of time. Both end with rest and with the establishment of a dwelling.
The differences are sharper, and they line up in one direction.
There is no combat in Genesis 1. Nothing resists. God speaks and it happens.
There are no divine bodies. The sky is not made from anything's corpse.
The sea monsters are demoted. This is the striking one. Genesis 1 mentions the great sea creatures explicitly, on the fifth day, in a list of things God made along with the fish and the birds. In the surrounding cultures those creatures are the primeval enemy. Here they are livestock.
Humans are made in an image and given responsibility rather than made from a rebel's blood and given a workload.
What makes the demotion of the sea monsters decisive is that Hebrew poetry elsewhere knows the combat perfectly well. The Psalms and Isaiah speak of God crushing Leviathan's heads and cutting Rahab in pieces, in language that belongs to exactly the pattern the Enuma Elish preserves. So the tradition had the myth available and Genesis 1 declines to use it. That is not the behaviour of a text copying a source. It is the behaviour of a text arguing with one, and reading the two side by side lets you watch a theological position being taken.
Made From a Traitor's Blood
The anthropology of this poem deserves sitting with, because it is genuinely bleak and it was believable to sophisticated people for a very long time.
Humanity is not a goal. It is a labour-saving measure introduced late, after the world is built, because the lesser gods have complained about the work of maintaining canals and fields. Marduk's solution is to manufacture a workforce.
The material is Kingu's blood, and the choice is deliberate. Kingu was the commander of the losing side, the rebel executed after the war. Human beings, on this account, are made from the substance of a defeated traitor and exist to serve.
Two things follow that are worth noticing. Toil is not a punishment for anything a human did, as it is in the Eden story; it is the purpose of the species from the start. And there is no promise. No covenant, no image, no destiny, and no suggestion that the arrangement is going anywhere.
A person living under this account had a coherent framework for a hard life. The world is dangerous because it was made from something that fought back. Work is endless because that is what you are. The gods are not benevolent, and they are also not arbitrary, and if the rituals are performed the order holds for another year.
The Fifty Names
Tablet seven, the recitation of Marduk's fifty names, is where modern readers stop. It reads like a list.
It is the conclusion of the argument. In Mesopotamian thought a name is not a label. Names carry function and power, and the names conferred on Marduk in this section belong to other gods. Each is accompanied by an explanation of what it means and why he holds it.
So what looks like a catalogue is the legal transfer of every significant divine function to one deity, ratified by the assembly and recited annually in the temple. The poem's whole narrative exists to make the list defensible.
Read for that, tablet seven becomes the most interesting thing in the poem, and there is a case that this material is close to a form of monotheism arriving by accumulation rather than by revelation. One god absorbing the functions of all the others is not the same as there being one god, and the distance between them is smaller than it looks.
Which Translation to Read
Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford World's Classics). The best general choice. Readable, well annotated, and it puts the Enuma Elish alongside Gilgamesh, Atrahasis and the Descent of Ishtar, which is exactly the context you want.
Benjamin Foster. The standard scholarly English translation, careful and complete, available both in his large anthology and in more compact form.
W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (2013). The critical edition, with the cuneiform, the transliteration and a full apparatus. This is for people working on the text rather than reading it.
Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis (1942). Dated and still valuable for its extended comparison with Genesis, which is presented fairly.
On the cheap ebook editions: most are L. W. King's translation from 1902, which is out of copyright. Since then a considerable amount of additional text has been recovered and many readings have been revised. King's version is a historical document, not a current one. Look for a named modern translator on the listing before buying.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in the ancient Near East, in which case it is one of the two or three texts you cannot skip.
Read it beside Genesis 1, slowly, noticing what the Hebrew text does not do. That comparison is worth more than either text alone.
Read it if you want to see a creation story with its political purpose visible, because you will not read another one the same way afterwards.
It is short. Dalley's version runs to a few dozen pages and can be read in an evening.
Our position: a strange, violent, extremely well-made piece of political theology that has been read for a century and a half as though it were primarily about the origin of the world. It is about who is in charge, and the world's origin is the evidence. Buy Dalley, read tablet seven properly instead of skimming it, and put Genesis 1 next to it. The two texts arguing with each other across a few centuries is one of the most instructive things in the history of religion.
For neighbouring material, see the Epic of Gilgamesh for the other great Akkadian poem, Inanna for the Sumerian layer underneath, and the Slavic creation myth for a very different way of starting a world.
The world built from a body, and the argument underneath it.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Enuma Elish?
The Babylonian epic of creation, roughly eleven hundred lines of Akkadian across seven clay tablets. It takes its name from its opening words, meaning when on high, and it was recited during the Akitu new year festival at Babylon. It tells how Marduk kills the sea goddess Tiamat and builds the world from her body.
What is the Enuma Elish actually about?
Political theology. The poem exists to explain why Marduk, the city god of Babylon, outranks Enlil and the older Sumerian gods. Everything in it, including the creation, is arranged to establish that claim, and the seventh tablet is a list of fifty divine names transferred to Marduk.
When was it written?
Most scholars place its composition in the later twelfth century BC, often during or shortly after the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, a period of Babylonian revival. The surviving copies are later, and the best known come from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century.
How was it discovered?
Among the tens of thousands of tablet fragments excavated from Nineveh in the mid nineteenth century. George Smith identified and published the creation material in 1876 under the title The Chaldean Account of Genesis, and the effect on Victorian readers was immediate and considerable.
Is Genesis copied from the Enuma Elish?
Almost certainly not copied. There are real structural parallels, including primeval waters, a division of the waters, and an ordering that ends in rest and enthronement. There are also pointed differences, and many scholars now read Genesis 1 as a deliberate response to this kind of text rather than a derivative of it.
Who is Tiamat?
The salt sea, personified as a goddess and one of the two primeval waters at the start of the poem. After her consort Apsu is killed she makes war on the younger gods with an army of monsters. Marduk kills her and splits her body to form sky and earth.
How are humans created in the poem?
From the blood of Kingu, the rebel god who led Tiamat's army, mixed with clay. The stated purpose is that humans should carry out the labour the gods were tired of doing. It is one of the bleakest anthropologies in ancient literature and it is the point where the contrast with Genesis is sharpest.
What are the fifty names?
The final tablet lists fifty names conferred on Marduk, most of them belonging to other gods, with an explanation of each. Modern readers skip it as a catalogue. It is in fact the point of the whole poem, since the transfer of names is the transfer of the functions and powers those gods held.
Which translation should I read?
Stephanie Dalley's Myths from Mesopotamia in Oxford World's Classics is the most accessible and best annotated for a general reader. Benjamin Foster's version is the standard scholarly English. W. G. Lambert's Babylonian Creation Myths of 2013 is the critical edition for anyone working seriously.
Are the cheap ebook editions reliable?
They are usually reprints of L. W. King's 1902 translation, which is out of copyright and long superseded. A great deal of text has been recovered and re-edited since then, and the readings have changed. Check for a named modern translator before buying.
Is the text complete?
Nearly, and not entirely. The poem survives across many partial copies from several sites, gaps remain in places, and new fragments continue to be identified in museum collections. Any translation you read is a composite reconstruction from multiple damaged manuscripts.
Why does it matter now?
It is the clearest surviving example of a creation story written to do political work, and knowing that changes how you read every other one. It also preserves the combat-with-the-sea pattern that appears across the ancient Near East, including in Hebrew poetry, which makes its absence from Genesis 1 informative.
Ask who benefits from the order
Take any account of how things came to be as they are, ancient or current, and ask the question this poem cannot hide from: whose position does this story establish? The Enuma Elish answers plainly because we know its politics. Most stories are less legible and are doing the same work. Reading one text where the machinery is visible is the cheapest way to learn to see it where it is not.
Sources & References
- Dalley, S. (1989). Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh and Others. Oxford World's Classics.
- Lambert, W. G. (2013). Babylonian Creation Myths. Eisenbrauns.
- Foster, B. R. Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. CDL Press.
- Heidel, A. (1942). The Babylonian Genesis. University of Chicago Press.
- Smith, G. (1876). The Chaldean Account of Genesis. Sampson Low.
- King, L. W. (1902). The Seven Tablets of Creation. Luzac. The public domain translation reprinted in most cheap editions.
- Delitzsch, F. (1902-1904). Babel und Bibel lectures.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art. Essay on Mesopotamian creation myths. metmuseum.org.