Daily History Challenge · No. 107 · Tuesday 13 October 2026 · Chain

Puzzle No. 107: Chain

The anchor was Enuma Elish: the Babylonian epic of creation (1200 BCE). Every challenger is listed below with its year.

The anchor

c. 1150 BCEEnuma Elish: the Babylonian epic of creation

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.

Read the full story · See the world in 1200 BCE