Free Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux

inspiration from their own country. If we stand on a misty morning near the present Iraqi sea-shore, at the mouth of the Shatt-el-‘Arab, what do we see? Low banks of clouds hang over the horizon; large pools of sweet water seeping from underground or left over from the river floods mingle freely with the salty waters of the Persian Gulf; of the low mud-flats which normally form the landscape no more than a few feet are visible; all around us sea, sky and earth are mixed in a nebulous, watery chaos. This is how the authors of the poem, who must have often witnessed such a spectacle, imagined the beginning of the world. When nothing yet had a name, that is to say when nothing had yetbeen created, they wrote, Apsu (the fresh waters), Tiamat (the salt waters) and Mummu (the clouds 19 ) formed together one single confused body:
    Enuma elish la nabû shamamu
…
When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter.
(And) Mummu (and?) Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body;
No reed-hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared;
When no gods whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined –
Then it was that the gods were formed within them.
     
    In the landscape described above larger patches of land emerge from the mist as the sun rises, and soon a clear-cut line separates the sky from the waters and the waters from the earth. So in the myth the first gods to emerge from the chaos were Lahmu and Lahamu, representing the silt; then came Anshar and Kishar, the twin horizons of sky and earth. Anshar and Kishar begot Anu, and Anu in turn begot Ea (Enki). At the same time, or shortly afterwards, a number of lesser deities were born from Apsu and Tiamat, but of these gods the poem says nothing except that they were turbulent and noisy. They ‘troubled Tiamat's belly’ and disturbed their parents so much that they decided to destroy them. When they heard of this plan the great gods Lahmu and Lahamu, Anshar and Kishar, Anu and Ea were shocked and amazed: ‘they remained speechless’, no doubt thinking that the exuberance of Life was preferable to the peace of a sterile Confusion. However, ‘Ea the all-wise’ soon found a means of wrecking the evil scheme. He ‘devised and set up a master design’: he cast a magic spell upon Mummu and paralysed him; in the same way Apsu was put to sleep and slain. After this double victory Ea retired to his temple, now founded on the abyss of sweet waters (
apsû
) and with his wifeDamkina engendered a son, Marduk, who possessed outstanding qualities:
    Perfect were his members beyond comprehension…
Unsuited for understanding, difficult to perceive.
Four were his eyes, four were his ears;
When he moved his lips, fire blazed forth.
Large were all four hearing organs,
And the eyes, in like number, scanned all things.
He was the loftiest of the gods, surpassing was his stature;
His members were enormous, he was exceedingly tall.
     
    Meanwhile, Tiamat was still alive and free. Delirious with rage, she declared war on the gods. She created a number of fierce dragons and monstrous serpents ‘sharp of tooth, unsparing of fangs, with venom for blood‘, and placed one of her sons, Kingu, at the head of the gruesome army. The gods were terrified. Anshar ‘smote his loins and bit his lips’ in distress, and declared that Kingu should be put to death. But who was to do this? One after another, the gods declined to fight. Finally, Marduk accepted under one condition: that he be made their king. ‘Set up the assembly,’ said he, ‘proclaim supreme my destiny, let my word, instead of yours, determine the fates.’ The gods had no alternative but to agree. They met at a banquet and, slightly inebriated, they endowed Marduk with the royal powers and insignia. Marduk chose his weapons: the bow, the lightning, the flood-storm, the four winds, the net. He