Enuma Elish: the Babylonian epic of creation
- Date
- c. 1150 BCE
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- Mesopotamia (Iraq)
- Era
- Ancient Civilizations
- Significance
The Enuma Elish ('When on high'), a creation epic of roughly a thousand lines on seven cuneiform tablets, narrates how the world arose from primordial waters, how generational conflict among the gods culminated in the young storm-god Marduk slaying the chaos-monster Tiamat, and how Marduk fashioned heaven and earth from her body and was enthroned as king of the gods, with Babylon established as the cosmic centre.
Although set in mythic time, the poem functioned as theological and political charter: it justified Marduk's—and thus Babylon's—supremacy over the older Mesopotamian pantheon and cities, and it was recited annually at the Babylonian New Year (Akitu) festival. Most scholars date its composition to the later second millennium, plausibly the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I of the Second Dynasty of Isin. Its motifs of a divine combat that imposes order on chaos and a god creating the cosmos offer important comparisons for the study of later Near Eastern and biblical creation traditions.
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Empires active in c. 1150 BCE
- New Kingdom of Egypt1550 BCE – 1077 BCE
- Shang Dynasty1600 BCE – 1046 BCE
- Hittite Empire1650 BCE – 1178 BCE
- Phoenician City-States1200 BCE – 539 BCE
- Elamite Kingdom2700 BCE – 539 BCE
Related religion & ideology events
- Zoroaster and the rise of dualist religionc. 1200–900 BCE
- Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna periodc. 1348 BCE
- Composition of the Rigvedac. 1500-1200 BCE
- Construction of Solomon's Temple (First Temple) in Jerusalemc. 957 BCE
- Chavín de Huántar and the first pan-Andean religious cultc. 900 BCE
- Great Ziggurat of Ur and temple-centred religionc. 2100 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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