When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him, He drove in the Evil Wind while as yet she had not shut her lips As the terrible winds filled her belly, Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.

He released the arrow, it tore her belly, It cut through her insides, splitting the heart.

Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life.

He cast down her carcass to stand upon it.

After he had slain Tiamat, the leader, Her band was shattered, her troupe broken up; And the gods, her helpers who marched at her side, Trembling with terror, turned their backs about, In order to save and preserve their lives.

Tightly encircled, they could not escape.

-The Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian Creation epic (from Tablet One) What is the Enuma Elish?

The large number of competing groups and city-states that lived and ruled in ancient Mesopotamia meant that there were competing stories of the gods and Creation-as had been true in Egyptian mythology. But the most complete, best-known-and most significant-Mesopotamian Creation story is an epic Akkadian poem named after its opening words, "Enuma Elish," traditionally translated as "When on high."

Discovered on seven clay tables found in the mid-nineteenth century in the ruined palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, the poem was first translated by George Smith in 1876 as The Chaldean Genesis. Smith's suggestion that the authors of the Bible-whom most Victorian-era Europeans believed to be divinely inspired-had borrowed from "pagan" Mesopotamians was not well received. Since Smith's translation of the Nineveh tablets, fragments of even earlier versions of the Enuma Elish in the Sumerian language have also been discovered-evidence that this Creation tale is a very ancient account that went through generations of editing and retelling.

Unlike the Greek Iliad, the Enuma Elish is not an adventure story but a religious poem, somewhat like the opening chapter of Genesis, that describes in richly poetic language the beginnings of the world. But while it undoubtedly had some influence on the author of Genesis, the Enuma Elish is very different in its tone and the events it recounts. A story of warring gods battling for supremacy over their Creation, the poem tells of the emergence of one supreme god, Marduk, the Babylonian agricultural god. Combining religion with a political agenda, the poem and the mythology it contained were designed to establish Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, as chief among the gods, and to establish Babylon as the most powerful city-state in Mesopotamia.

The epic opens at the very beginning of time with the creation of the gods themselves. In the beginning, the gods emerged two by two from a formless watery waste-a substance which was itself divine. This sacred raw material existed through all eternity, and as Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God, "When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, they thought that it must have been similar to the swampy wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men."

At first, there were just two gods-Apsu, personified as the primordial freshwater under the earth and in the rivers, and Tiamat, who symbolized the salt water of the sea. Biblical scholars believe that the Hebrew word for the "abyss" in the opening of the Creation account in Genesis is a corruption of the word "Tiamat." The Creation in the Enuma Elish also plays out in six stages, mirrored by the six days of the Genesis Creation, again reflecting the influence of the Mesopotamian epic on the Hebrew version. These two gods, Apsu and Tiamat, then joined to produce the other gods, all identified with different aspects of nature: Lahmu and Lahamu, a pair whose names meant "silt," or water and earth mixed together; another pair identified with the horizons of sky and sea; and then Anu, the heavens, and Ea, the earth.

But these young gods, as all parents of small children know well, were too noisy. Eager to get some sleep, Apsu decided to destroy all of the children. One of the child gods, Ea, discovered the plot, put Apsu to sleep, killed him, and then took his place as god of the waters. With his spouse Damkina, Ea later sired Marduk, a perfect god who is "highest among the gods."

Once Tiamat realized what her children had done, she decided to avenge her dead husband. She took the form of a fearsome dragon and created a small army of monstrous creatures to battle the other gods, who were her own children. Marduk, the sun god, came before an assembly of the gods and promised to fight Tiamat-who was in essence his grandmother-on the condition that he would become their ruler. They agreed, which led to an epic battle between Marduk, who had many weapons and powers, and Tiamat, with her troop of fearsome monsters. Marduk dispatched the monsters and then faced Tiamat in face-to-face combat.

The Lord trampled the lower part of Tiamat, With his unsparing mace smashed her skull, Severed the arteries of her blood...

So much for taking care of Grandma.

Slicing Tiamat in half, "like a fish for drying" or "opening a shell-fish," Marduk uses the two halves of her body to create the sky and the earth. From Tiamat's eyes, he opened the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and he transformed her breasts into the mountains from which freshwater springs flowed. Promised that he would rule the gods if he defeated Tiamat, Marduk then organized the rest of the universe, naming the months of the year and creating the stars and moon. He devised laws and then established his home in the city he named Babylon: When you descend from heaven for assembly, You will spend the night in it, it is there to receive all of you.

I will call its name Babylon, which means the houses of the great gods, I shall build it with the skill of craftsmen.

As the last act in this creation, almost as an afterthought, Marduk also created man. First he killed Kingu, who was Tiamat's consort, and then mixed his divine blood with dust. According to the myth, as far as Marduk and the other gods are concerned, man's purpose is simple: man will do all the work so the gods can relax. The story is significant because, as Karen Armstrong points out in A History of God, "The first man had been created from the substance of a god; he therefore shared their divine nature.... The gods and humans shared the same predicament, the only difference being that that gods were more powerful and were immortal."

Before they could rest, however, the gods decided to build a proper shrine for Lord Marduk. For one year, they manufactured bricks and after a second year, they had built a temple-a ziggurat-to honor Marduk as king of the gods.

For much of Mesopotamian history, each year, this Creation epic became the focal point of worship, as the Enuma Elish was read as part of the New Year celebration in every city. The myth also confirmed Babylon's special status as a sacred place, home of the gods, and the center of the world.

Was Marduk just another macho man oppressing gentle goddesses?

Besides underscoring Babylon's ascension as the greatest power of the time, the Marduk-Tiamat conflict has taken on another significant spin. Recently, a movement of scholars has advanced the notion that most prehistoric cultures revered female deities-usually a benign but all-powerful mother goddess-as the dominant deity. Seen as a nurturing force of fertility in a world that was mostly dependent upon the return of the crops and the continuity of life through birth, this goddess was thought to be more significant than the male deities, who basically existed as studs, to service the goddess and sire children. But, according to this in-vogue theory, a great change took place when male gods were elevated above the goddess, not just in Mesopotamia but in almost every society. The victory of Marduk over Tiamat is widely considered one stark and particularly violent example of the conquest by a warlike, macho-male god and the demise of goddess worship.

This so-called Goddess movement was partly inspired by the writings of Jane E. Harrison, who had suggested in 1903 that "The Great Mother is prior to the masculine deities." More recently, the field has been led by such scholars as Maria Gimbutas, whose 1974 book, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, argued that there had been an ancient, more peaceful time in the world, in which the supreme deity was a Mother Earth, creator and ruler of the universe.

Historian Karen Armstrong concurred with this notion, which she contended was also true in ancient Israel, where the Hebrew god Yahweh, "a jealous god," forced the "chosen people" to get rid of their idolatrous but popular goddesses. Writes Armstrong in A History of God, "The prestige of the great goddesses in traditional religion reflects the veneration of the female. The rise of the cities, however, meant that the more masculine qualities of martial, physical strength were exalted over female characteristics. Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens.... The cult of the goddesses would be superseded, and this would be a symptom of a cultural change that was characteristic of the newly civilized world."

"Mars" had pushed "Venus" off the pedestal.

There is an intriguing archaeological mystery lying behind this theory: the many thousands of prehistoric figurines from all over the world-some of them from the Stone Age, and dated from eighteen thousand to twenty-five thousand years old. Their widespread existence hints at more than just a fascination with the female form. Often loosely described as prehistoric "Venuses," these statuettes and figurines come in many shapes and forms, but are often full-bodied and sexually enticing, with exaggerated breasts. Some, but hardly all, are pregnant. As author Nancy Hathaway put it, "We don't know if they were erotic images, religious icons, household objects, or charms meant to promote fertility. We do know that there are thousands of them.... with [an] absence of an equivalent number of male figures...."

There is, however, broad disagreement about whether the "Venuses" actually represent another age and a different mind-set in human worship-a matriarchal, nonviolent, vegetarian epoch in which the female deity was dominant. In a New York Times article on "Venus" figurines, some archaeologists offer that these small figurines were pendants to be worn by men on the hunt, a Stone Age "picture of the wife" to carry while away from home. There is even a hint-widely dismissed-that they were Stone Age "porn." But there is no real evidence to suggest that they were all "goddesses."

The "Goddess movement" has blossomed during the past thirty years, prompted largely by social changes and the shift in attitudes brought about by feminism, the advent of women's studies on university campuses, the contemporary transformation of traditional sex roles-and a rejection of male-dominated orthodox religions. At about the same time, the environmentally oriented "Gaia movement" emerged, a theory that suggests the earth itself is a living "entity," named after a Greek earth goddess. The new wave of Goddess worship also awakened enormous popularity in the "Wiccan movement," said to be among the fastest-growing religions in America. (It is apparently even acknowledged by the U.S. Department of Defense as a legitimate religion that can be practiced on military bases.) Also called "the Craft" or even "Witchcraft," the practice of Wicca as a religion developed in the United Kingdom in the mid-1900s. Essentially, it is a fertility religion with roots in the ancient myths, which celebrates the natural world and the seasonal cycles that were central to farming societies in Sumerian and Babylonian mythologies, as well as those of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Celts. Contemporary Wicca is an "equal opportunity" borrower and also draws on Buddhist, Hindu, and American Indian rites.

MYTHIC VOICES.

When Marduk sent me to rule over men, to give the protection of right to the land, I did right and righteousness in..., and brought about the well-being of the oppressed.

2 If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.

3 If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.

25 If fire break out in a house, and someone who comes to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house, and take the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into that self-same fire.

129 If a man's wife be surprised [in flagrante delicto] with another man, both shall be tied and thrown into the water, but the husband may pardon his wife and the king his slaves.

130 If a man violate the wife [betrothed or child-wife] of another man, who has never known a man, and still lives in her father's house, and sleep with her and be surprised, this man shall be put to death, but the wife is blameless.

131 If a man bring a charge against one's wife, but she is not surprised with another man, she must take an oath and then may return to her house.

-from The Code of Hammurabi Translated by L. W. King (1910) Who was Hammurabi?

The most famous and significant king of Old Babylon, Hammurabi (c.17921750 BCE), was an Ammorite, or "Westerner," whose family invaded Sumer sometime after 2000 BCE. Hammurabi conquered several Sumerian and Akkadian cities and founded the empire based in Babylon, raising it from relatively small town to major power center. But Hammurabi is even more renowned for a code of laws that is considered one of the oldest and most significant in human history. Although Hammurabi's code is often cited as the "first" law code, that designation rightfully belongs to the code of an otherwise obscure Sumerian king called Ur-Nammu, who preceded Hammurabi by about three hundred years, according to the leading Sumerian historian Samuel Noah Kramer. But not much of Ur-Nammu's law code is readable, and it exists only in fragmentary pieces. That is why Hammurabi gets so much credit. We have his complete works.

Carved on stone columns discovered in 1902 in the city of Susa (now Shush in Iran), Hammurabi's code is now on display at the Louvre in Paris. The columns show the sun god Shamash handing the code of laws to Hammurabi, laws derived from even older Sumerian codes, including those of Ur-Nammu. Severe by modern standards, with the death penalty prescribed for even relatively minor offenses, the code addressed commonplace issues such as business and family relations, labor, private property, and personal injuries.

While Hammurabi's code was seemingly ruthless when it came to punishment-literally calling for "an eye for an eye"-it still represented a great step from the lawlessness of pre-civilization era. The laws governed everything from traffic regulations on the Euphrates River to the rights of veterans, but also provided protections for the weakest members of society-including women, children, the poor, and slaves. This shift from arbitrary violence and clan vengeance marked a startling step toward civilized norms of justice.

This is one more example of how myth and history sometimes blend. In Egypt, a pharaoh tried to make one mythical god the only god and failed to change the people's minds. Hammurabi was a man who used the gods to give his laws the weight of worship. It was no different from the biblical Ten Commandments, which were said to have been handed to Moses by his one god on Mount Sinai. In a few more centuries, the Greeks would also create new law codes, but they would be the creation of men, not gods-civilization was slowly being born from barbarism, and sometimes myth was the midwife to that long labor.

WHO'S WHO OF MESOPOTAMIAN MYTHS Just as the Greek gods and goddesses were later borrowed and renamed by the Romans, the chief gods of the early Sumerian myths were adopted by the later Akkadians and Babylonians. As cities grew, new gods were added to the pantheon, weaving a complex web of sometimes competing deities.

This list includes most of the chief deities of Mesopotamia, with their Sumerian names followed by their Akkadian or Babylonian names. As with many other mythologies, there are often variant stories and differing versions of the Mesopotamian gods, reflecting the different people who moved through this part of the world over the course of thousands of years of conquest, and then adapted and reshaped the local myths to suit their needs and political agendas.

An (Anu) The Sumerian sky god, originally presided over the assembly of gods. With his mate, the earth goddess Ki, he is the father of other gods, including Enki. In the Sumerian view, the stars are his soldiers and the Milky Way his royal road. Originally the source of rain, An is the father figure who makes seeds sprout, but later evolves into the chief god. An has the power to proclaim the Sumerian kings, who were believed to be chosen by the gods when they met in a sort of democratic forum. Sumerian royalty was then supposed to carry out the duties that An and the other gods had determined.

When Sumer was eclipsed by the Babylonian Empire, An was demoted and transformed into a grandfather figure. However, in a particularly violent version of this power shift, An was deposed by Marduk when Babylon became the predominant city. Marduk first destroyed An by flaying him alive, cutting his head off, and tearing his heart out. He then also dispatched An's son Enlil. This violent mythical demise may have carried over into the actual religious practices under the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668627 BCE). During his reign, human sacrifice was apparently relied on to appease the gods, and there are accounts of human flesh being fed "to the dogs, pigs, vultures, eagles-the birds of heaven and fishes of the deep." Excavations of royal tombs in Ur also revealed many bodies other than the king's, suggesting either a mass suicide or human sacrifice, in which wives, concubines, musicians, and entertainers were killed and entombed with the dead king.

Apsu (Abzu) The Sumerian-Akkadian deity who embodies the primordial freshwater ocean; is one of two original gods whose waters surrounded the earth, which floated like an island. First conceived of as the water itself, Apsu later became a male deity and united with his mate Tiamat to create all the other gods and goddesses. In the Enuma Elish, he is supplanted of by one of his offspring, Enki, who killed him.

Dumuzi (Tammuz) The god of herders and seasonal fertility; is not only one of the most significant figures in Mesopotamian mythology but was adopted by many later civilizations, including the Greeks and Romans.

As the dying and rising-from-the-dead husband of the love goddess Inanna in a central Mesopotamian myth (see below, How did an angry goddess make the seasons?), Dumuzi gets in big trouble with his wife, who banishes him to the underworld. He later escapes, and the myth of his death and resurrection is one of the earliest parallels to the annual cycle of fertility and harvest. Songs lamenting his death were typical of the fertility celebrations in Mesopotamia, and the veneration and worship of Dumuzi-Tammuz carried over to biblical times.

In the prophetic biblical Book of Ezekiel, among the sins committed by the Israelites is weeping for the dying god Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14). This was considered an abomination by Ezekiel, and one of the reasons that Israel was destined to fall. Another biblical connection to Dumuzi-Tammuz is found in the Old Testament's Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs). A series of erotic poems celebrating the physical love between a man and a woman, the Song of Solomon closely parallels the sacred marriage texts celebrating the union of Inanna and Dumuzi. The male figure-or bridegroom-in the Song of Solomon appears as a shepherd, which was also the role of Dumuzi.

Dumuzi-Tammuz also had the title "lord," which was later translated by the Greeks into the word "Adonis." As the cult worship of Tammuz moved westward into Greece, the title and name were merged, so the Greek Adonis (see chapter 4) is actually based on Dumuzi-Tammuz.

Enki (Ea) The most clever of gods, he becomes the god of freshwater by killing Apsu. In the Enuma Elish, he is born from the union of the sky god An and Ki, the earth goddess, and is the god who slays Apsu-who is both a god and the actual underground reservoir of freshwater. Enki eventually subdues Apsu, puts him to sleep, and kills him. Having done that, Enki takes his place as chief god, and with his wife Damkina gives birth to Marduk.

Sometimes depicted as half-man, half-fish, Enki is responsible for creating the world order and is the keeper of the me-the divine laws, rules, and regulations that govern the universe. Possession of the me meant to hold supreme power, and in one tale Inanna (see below) visits Enki, and after getting him drunk, convinces the high god to give her the me, which she then takes to her cult city of Uruk.

The source of all secret magical knowledge, Enki is responsible for giving arts and crafts to mankind. He also invents the plow, fills the rivers with fish, and controls the freshwater. The relationship between earth fertility and his virility is evident in the close connection between the Babylonian words for "water" and "semen."

In another story, Enki broght water to the barren isle of Dilmun, which many biblical scholars associate with the real Persian Gulf island of Bahrain, off the coast of Saudi Arabia. After this, Dilmun was transformed into an idyllic paradise where animals did not harm each other and there was no sickness or old age. Many scholars feel that this Mesopotamian paradise might have provided some inspiration for the biblical Garden of Eden, but there are also significant differences between these earthly paradises.

In a somewhat obscure but intriguing story, Enki went on to father a group of goddesses through a series of incestuous unions with his daughters and granddaughters. But when his wife, the mother goddess Ninhursaga, discovered Enki pursuing their daughters, she became angry, and cursed him so sickness attacked eight parts of his body. He was then cured by having sex with Ninhursaga. This myth is believed to be a warning against incestuous rape and unbridled sexuality.

As the water god, Enki also figures prominently in a pair of Mesopotamian flood narratives. (See below, Who came first, Gilgamesh or Noah?)

Enlil (Ellil) The son of An and brother of Enki, the god of wind and air, and for a time replaces his father as king of the gods and chief god of the Sumerians. As lord of the wind, he can be either destructive or benevolent. In one story, he watches Ninlil (see Ninhursaga), the grain goddess, as she bathes, and, unable to resist, rapes her. For this sexual assault, he is banished from his cult city Nippur by the assembly of gods.

Enlil descends to the underworld, but the pregnant Ninlil follows him there so their son can be born in his presence. The child becomes the moon god Nanna, but before they can leave the underworld, they must have other children who can survive there, which would allow Nanna to leave. This story of Enlil "dying" and then returning to earth is another of the earliest examples of the widespread concept of a dying and reborn god-the concept that so trans-fixed James Frazer in The Golden Bough-which is repeated many times in other myths.

Inanna (Ishtar) "Lady of Heaven" is the most complex and in many ways influential Mesopotamian deity. The Sumerian goddess of love, sex appeal, and battle, she is significant not only in Sumer but in other, later mythologies. She is described in one text as the one whom not even 120 lovers could exhaust. She is adapted in later myths of Western Asia and reappears in other cultures as Astarte (Canaan), Cybele (Anatolia), Aphrodite (Greece), and Venus (Rome). Patron goddess of the city of Uruk, she is also identified with the planet Venus, the brightest object in the night sky, and the disappearance and reappearance of the planet were explained by Inanna's descent into the underworld in one of the oldest versions of the universal myth of the journey of souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. (This central Mesopotamia myth of Inanna and her husband Dumuzi is told in detail below. See How did an angry goddess make the seasons?)

Inanna also figures prominently in Gilgamesh, and as the patron goddess of prostitutes, she is the most significant figure in the annual rite on New Year's Day in which a priestess representing Inanna couples with the real-life king. This ritual was probably enacted by the living king with a temple prostitute who represented the goddess.

Marduk The son of Enki; later emerges as the chief god of Babylon after defeating Tiamat, the she-dragon, in the epic battle described in the Enuma Elish.

Known in the Bible as Merodach and later as Bel (or Baal), Marduk essentially became one of the chief adversaries of the Hebrew God. Several actual kings with names related to Marduk (Evil-Merodach, Merodach-baladan) appear in biblical records.

After the conquest of Sumer by the Akkadians, Marduk became the supreme god of Mesopotamia, and his temple at Babylon contained the great ziggurat associated with the biblical Tower of Babel. (See below, Was the Tower of Babel in Babylon?)