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- [00:00]
Tristan Hughes
Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the Ancients ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary All About Petra and the Nabateans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:25]
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- [01:26]
Tristan Hughes
Today's episode is brought to you by Soundcore from Anker. Now living in London, I struggle with nighttime noise and my sleep quality was poor due to uncomfortable earbuds. However, discovering Soundcore earbuds changed everything. They are made from incredibly soft ergonomic materials, feeling weightless and gentle even after hours. They offer unparalleled pressure free comfort, perfect for side sleepers like me, and they block out unwanted noise for a peaceful night's sleep. Transform your sleep experience now head to soundcore.com that's S-O-U-N-C-O-R E.com use the code sleep at checkout for $30 off. That's S L E E P in all caps. Sleep in the Beginning the famous three words that begin the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. What follows is the story of how God created the heavens and the earth in six days, resting on the seventh. It's one of the most popular stories of the Old Testament. But what you might not know is that this creation story has clear influences from another ancient tale, the Babylonian Genesis, Babylon's epic of creation. It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring an extraordinary piece of literature from ancient Babylon, an epic narrative designed to glorify Babylon's chief God, Marduk, and explain how he created the heavens and the earth with Babylon at the center of the universe. They called it the Enuma Elish, Babylon's Epic of Creation. Now to talk through this epic tale, I was delighted to welcome back Dr. Sophus. Hel Sophus is an expert on ancient Mesopotamian literature. He's also bringing these ancient poems back into the public eye, having translated great works such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. We interviewed Sophis all about the Epic of Gilgamesh last year, so do go and check out that episode after listening to this one. Most recently, however, Sophus and a whole host of other leading Babylonian academics have published a new translation of the Epic of Creation, free for you to read alongside articles examining its various details. So, without further ado, here's my chat with Sophus exploring Babylon's epic of Creation. Sophus, welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you back on.
- [04:08]
Dr. Sophus Hel
So great to be here again. I really enjoyed the first podcast we did on Gilgamesh. It was such a pleasure.
- [04:13]
Tristan Hughes
It's such a pleasure. And we. It was quite a long one that we divided it into two ultimately, and we recorded that about this time last year. So an annual retreat. You're back on the podcast and this time to talk about another, well, actual epic of ancient Mesopotamia. Sophus, first off, what is the Enuma Elish?
- [04:32]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, so Enuma Elish is another of these great works of literature from ancient Babylon. It is, in the ancient world, a work that is as popular or was as popular to the ancient scribes as Gilgamesh was today, of course, much less known than Gilgamesh, but in Babylonian culture, absolutely central.
- [04:51]
Tristan Hughes
And Sophis, why is it so important, so significant?
- [04:55]
Dr. Sophus Hel
So Babylonian culture really can be divided into a time before and a time after the composition of Enuma Elish. It is absolutely central to the history of both Babylonian literature and Babylonian religion. And the reason for that is that in the centuries before Enuma Elish, the gods were thought to be ruled by this trio, with Enlil as the king and then Anu and Enki in supporting roles, as it were. And after the composition of Enuma Elish, the Babylonian cosmos comes to have the God Marduk, God of Babylon, as his king and central figure. And, you know, that does in part reflect real changes in the political landscape of ancient Iraq, with Babylon coming to play a more and more central role in the ancient world, and thus the God of Babylon becoming elevated. But Enuma Elish does more than just make Marduk king of the God. It also transforms the kind of religion that we see in ancient Babylon. So we go from having what is called a polytheistic culture in which there are many gods, to something called henotheism, which is another kind of religious system. It's not quite polytheism. It's also not quite monotheism. It's its own kind of thing in which there is one supreme deity and then there is a number of other deities that sort of are expressions of facets of this main God, who is Marduk. So you can sort of see henotheism as having this three layers of being, with Marduk at the very top than all the other gods beneath him, and then us humans at the bottom.
- [06:30]
Tristan Hughes
Sophis, if there's that clear time in history, you know, before this text is written when Marduk is not at the center of Babylonian religion, and then that time after when Marduk is right at the forefront, like the God of Babylon, when do we think that this story was written? How old is it?
- [06:46]
Dr. Sophus Hel
So we think it was written Sometime in the 11th century BCE it's quite hard to date, exactly. But, like, probably in. I mean, there's this famous suggestion by an astrologist called Wilfred Lambert that when the statue of the God Marduk was retrieved, it had been stolen away to what is now Iran by the Elamites. And when it was retrieved by King Nebuchadnezzar ii, Enuma Elish was composed to celebrate its return. That we can't really prove that, but I think it's an idea that this famous asteriologist had that has really stuck around. But I should also say, when I say that there is a time before and a time after Enuma Elish, I don't, by that mean that after that, everybody just accepted Enuma Elish and, you know, everybody was on board with this message. On the contrary, I think one of the things that makes it so central to Babylonian culture, but also just so important for us to understand today is that it sparked all of these quite critical, quite furiously critical reactions, both from the Babylonians themselves, from the Assyrians, but also quite importantly, from the Jewish writers who lived in Babylon during the Babylonian captivity. And you can see a lot of, especially the book of Genesis in the Bible as one of these many critical reactions to Enuma Elish. Genesis borrows a lot of the language from Enuma Elish. So I think that's why Enuma Elish is important today, because it's been provoking people for the past three millennia.
- [08:15]
Tristan Hughes
I mean, that's a nice hint as to where we will ultimately go in this interview with the reception and links to the Hebrew Bible as time goes on. And just before we delve into the narrative, the story itself, well, keeping on Marduk actually a little longer because you mentioned the name Nebuchadnezzar there, one of the most famous Babylonian kings and the great architecture of Babylon, like the ziggurats and temples. So in that first millennium bc, after this is written, I mean, those are the buildings that. That are dedicated to Marduk. So. So he is there and everywhere, is he?
- [08:48]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you can see a lot of the religious architecture in Babylon from the time that we have it, which is quite a lot later, from the 6th century BCE that religious architecture has a lot of references to Enuma Elish. And Enuma Elish became again much later, but it became part of the religious rituals that were celebrated in Babylon. So it was absolutely part of the cityscape, but also part of the yearly rituals performed in Babylon. It became, as I said, absolutely central to people's experience of the world. And there's a line at the very end of Enuma Elation, and we'll come back to why this line is important, but there's a line that says, every time you drink water, you must invoke the name of Marduk. Right. Like that is the ambition of the text. It wants you to think of it every time you drink water.
- [09:35]
Tristan Hughes
Now, Sophis, you have also translated this, so you. It's Akkadian, is it? Akkadian, the language in which it is originally written, the cuneiform.
- [09:43]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yes, it is written in Akkadian and it is written in the same version of the Akkadian language that the version of Gilgamesh we spoke about last time is written in. So that's standard Babylonian, this, like, high literary version of Akkadian and preserved on.
- [09:56]
Tristan Hughes
These cuneiform clay tablets. And I remember in our last chat, we did talk a lot, because it felt right with you being the translator as well, to explore the particular order of words, the style of it, the beauty of the writing. And in the Epic of Creation, I remember you saying with Epic of Gilgamesh that it's beautifully stylistically written. I mean, how is the Epic of Creation written? Is it also this kind of poem?
- [10:19]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, and in fact, much more intensely so than Gilgamesh in many ways. I think that modern readers will, you know, I think there are very few modern readers that will prefer Numa Elish to Gilgamesh, because Gilgamesh is In so many ways, more psychological than narrative seems to us more compelling. But if you read it in the original Akkadian, Enuma Elish is just something else. Like, it's incredibly patent. It uses all of these very odd, rare words, and it does so often to pull off these quite exceptional puns. Let me just mention just one line, which has been called by one scholar the magical line, and it goes, nakhlapta pluta pulhati khalipma, which gives you a sense of the kind of, like, pyrotechnics that this. This text can pull off.
- [11:05]
Tristan Hughes
So it's almost like as interesting as it is today. And we're going to explore the narrative now, but you could argue if you don't read it in the original language, maybe some of that power and beauty is lost in the translation. Is it?
- [11:17]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, I would say so. I would also say that in my translation, I make no particular attempt at recreating the poeticity of the original, which I did for my translations of Gilgamesh and of Enheduanna. But this is a different kind of translation project. This is meant for scholars and students, for anybody who's sort of interested in learning more about the text. But it is more meant to be a study resource than, like, a literal literary translation. So you won't hear these language games being reproduced in my translation.
- [11:45]
Tristan Hughes
Well, the work of yourself and your colleagues has certainly made this amazing story more accessible to the public. And we'll get back to that. But let's now delve into the story. So let's start at the beginning. In the beginning. So how does the epic of creation, the Babylonian epic of creation, how does it begin?
- [12:01]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, arguably the best part of Enuma Elish is its beginning. So we might spend a long time on just the first nine lines, and I'm going to read them out. And I think these are some of the most important nine lines in Babylonian literature. And, you know, there's this famous passage from the Bible. In the beginning was the word. And in Enuma Elish we have the opposite. In the beginning was no word. So we hear as when heaven on high had not been named and the ground below was not given a name. Primordial Apsu, who fathered them, and the creative force, Tiamat, who gave birth to them all were mingling together. Their waters they had not yet bound meadows or lined the reed beds. When none of the gods had been brought forth, had not been given names, and had not decreed destinies, then were the gods created within them. So in order to understand what that means, we actually have to start with a line. They had not yet bound meadows or lined the reed beds. So you have to imagine that southern Iraq is this sort of checkerboard of canals and meadows. So this line is summoning a world in which, you know, there are no meadows. And on the sort of banks between the meadows and the canals, there are these reed beds. And, you know, the reed paths don't exist either. So all that exists is water and water. And the two sort of watery beings that make up the beginning of the world are called Apsu and Tiamat. Apsu is the freshwater, and Tiamat, which just means sea, is the salt water.
- [13:31]
Tristan Hughes
Right. That's how they divide it up. Okay, yeah.
- [13:34]
Dr. Sophus Hel
All there is is water and water. Apsu is a male principle. Tiamat is a female principle. But because everything is fluid and intermixed, because these two creatures have mixed their waters together, there are no shapes. There are no shapes, there are no names, and there are no destinies. And the text links these three things in our minds. Shumu, Shimtu, and Shupuu, shape, destiny and name, by saying that none of them existed. And the other thing that doesn't exist at this point are the gods. So you have a scene of absolute fluidity. Now, spoiler alert, at the very end of this text, we're going to find a description of the cosmos that we know now. Right? A cosmos that consists of definite shapes, and each of those shapes has a name. And according to Babylonian belief, inside each name is sort of a destiny. Right. Like, each name implies the role that we play in the world order. So we start without any of those things, and we end with the creation of the cosmos as we know it. And Enuma Elish sort of tracks this transformation from absolute fluidity to the world order that we know now.
- [14:43]
Tristan Hughes
I mean, you've used the word fluidity there a couple of times. I mean, is it interesting that water straight away forms a key part of the narrative and, you know, kind of this primordial water. If I remember correctly, we did something on the origins of the Egyptian gods a few months ago, where maybe the first God is born from an egg, but once again, I think there's water as well. So water seems to be a constant at the beginnings of these creation epics in that area of the world.
- [15:07]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah. And I think Enuma Elish plays with this sort of, like, originary wateriness in various ways. One of the things that I've been interested in in my studies of Enuma Elish is that it really sees a deep depoposition between water and language. Right. Like, language has this shape and, you know, it forms and relies on things being distinct from each other, whereas water is the opposite of all of that. Right. And Enuma Elish is sort of about the miraculous transformation of water into order. And I think that is very much emphasized already in the first lines, when heaven on high had not been named and the ground below was not given a name. So names are the opposite of water. And the other thing that I want to emphasize is that in Akkadian, the word for water is mu. And one of the things that is remarkable about this passage is that it keeps repeating the syllable mu and just the sound m. So if you hear it in the Cadian, it's very. One of the contributors to this new volume, Anenuma Elish, that we've just published, Piotr Michalowski, calls it the creative murmur in the beginning of the world, which I think is a very beautiful thing. And, of course, M, besides standing for mu, for water, also stands for Marduk. So this is M for water and M for Marduk. But you can already hear that in this murmur in the beginning of the world. Right.
- [16:32]
Tristan Hughes
Although he's yet to make an appearance, our main protagonist, but we're going to get towards that now. So Apsu and Tiamat. So freshwater and salt water, the first two figures in the story, are they a divine couple, then?
- [16:45]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yes, they are indeed a divine couple. And they, you know, they mix their waters together in a very sort of sexualized scene that in turn gives birth to the first generation of gods, who are called Lahmu and Lahamu. We know very little about Lahmu and Lahamu. Other texts indicate that they were very hairy. That's about all we know. But they then give birth to Anshar and Kishar, who are the earth and the heavens. They in turn give birth to the first sort of recognizable deity of the Babylonian pantheon. Who is. Who is Anu, the God of the heavens?
- [17:22]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there's quite a lineage there, then. It's quite a few generations, almost in divine terms.
- [17:27]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, it is quite a few generations. And I think the text is absolutely obsessed with, you know, genealogy in various ways. And that leads to what happens next, which is that Anno gives birth to Ea, also known as Enki, the God of creativity. And he is shown to be the new leader of these gods, mightier than his parents.
- [17:49]
Tristan Hughes
And to remind people, so Enki, he was one of the gods that was right at the forefront of the Babylonian pantheon. Before the time of the Enuma Elish. So it's interesting that they bring him in, incorporate him early on.
- [18:00]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Absolutely. Both Anu and Enki are sort of carried over, while Enlil, who was the previous king of the gods, is sort of jettisoned. So Enuma Elish is among many things and anti Enlil texts.
- [18:14]
Tristan Hughes
So we've got a bit of a divine family now going on. But as so often in mythological stories of gods and goddesses, I mean, this harmony, it doesn't last long, does it?
- [18:28]
Dr. Sophus Hel
No, it doesn't last long. And actually, here we get our first of an anti Enlil sentiment, because Enlil was best known for summoning the flood. And the text sort of reminds us of this early on. It reminds of Enlil's big crime with the flood because it tells a story that is very like the flood, which we discussed in detail in the Gilgamesh episode. And as readers might remember, in Babylonian mythology, the flood is caused by humans being too noisy. But here it is actually the gods who are too noisy. They, you know, they gather together, they make all of this clamor, and that disturbs their progenitor, who is Apsu. And Apsu goes to Tiamat and he says, you know, the gods are being so noisy. And he has a devious minister called, called Mummu. Again, listen to the M's. Mummu. Mummu is the sort of spirit of creativity somehow. He's quite hard to place as a character, but he's devious and he sides with Apsu and sort of inflames his anger. And he eventually convinces Apsu that he should kill his own children, the gods. And at first, Tiamat is completely appalled by this. She doesn't want to kill her children, so she refuses to cooperate in the scheme. But Apsu goes ahead with it all the same.
- [19:44]
Tristan Hughes
Apsu goes ahead with it all the same. And I mean, is he successful? Surely there are going to be consequences of his actions, of going against what are gods.
- [19:54]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, right. Yes. And that is where we see Ea stepping into action, this God of creativity whose birth, the sort of genealogy of gods it culminated in. He binds Apsu with a magic spell and eventually kills him. And what he then does is particularly interesting. He kills Apsu and he turns him into a definite area of the cosmos. And now for the ancient Babylonians, that would sort of have felt relatively natural because they knew Apsu as this giant subterranean lake that was the source of fresh water. So they already thought of Apsu as an area of the cosmos. And that is what happens here. And importantly, after he has turned him into this area of the cosmos, Ea gives him a name, which is Apsu, and then shows that inside that name there is a destiny for Apsu to play hidden. So if you take the syllables of Apsu's name and scramble them, you get the sentence he reveals the shrines. So that is what Apsu shall do. He shall reveal the shrines. And that might sound a little weird, but that's going to become hugely important later in the text, the scrambling of the syllables. But that is basically the first part of the story. Ea has defeated Apsu, he has bound him, and he has turned him into an area of the cosmos. And then he assigned to him a name. And now you'll remember from the Gilgamesh podcast that we had to split it into two episodes and those episodes mirrored one another. And as I said at the time, that's a bit of a motif in Babylonian literature and that is also what we see in Enuma Elisheva. What I've told so far is the first episode, and what we're going to hear now is the second episode which mirrors the first.
- [21:50]
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- [23:36]
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- [24:31]
Tristan Hughes
Because Marduk himself, you know, I suppose the main character in this narrative, he hasn't even appeared yet, has he? This is almost like the big backstory as to what happens before and almost before they're going to introduce him onto the stage.
- [24:44]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Exactly right. Which I also think is so interesting. And I think there's a certain sense in which, you know, Marduk's appearance is made at the center of the first tablet. That's another thing we talked about in the Gilgamesh episode, that these Babylonian epics, they were divided into separate tablets that were sort of their own little episode. And we are now halfway through the first of these episodes. And, you know, I think the text is really, really trying to make Marduk's birth the center of this first episode. And Marduk is born inside the apsu by Ea and his wife Dunkina. And, you know, the text really launches into a absolutely stunning description of Marduk, this newborn God. And as I was saying, you know, part of the project of Enuma Elish is not just to make Marduk king of the gods, but also to show that he is a different kind of God than what came before. And the text is very explicit about that. It says his divinity became different. And that is really this announcement that we kind of are leaving polytheism behind. Here we're entering this new world of henothism in which there is like, you know, Marduk is as different from the other gods as the gods are different from us. Right. Like, he is as superior to them as they are to us. And that is really what the text shows us by this crazy description of his birth. And, you know, the text is, it goes into all sorts of crazy details. You know, fire flares up from his lips, he has four eyes and four ears, and he's bigger and taller than all of the rest. But there's one point in which the text almost breaks down into. Into nonsense, into sort of magical nonsense to describe how great he is. And at one point it says, Mari utu, Mari utu, son of sun, son of gods, which is, you know, quite hard to make sense of what that exactly means because the text is almost going beyond language to describe this deity, to clarify.
- [26:45]
Tristan Hughes
So this is really interesting, so I'm trying to figure this out. So Apsu is defeated and becomes a part of the cosmos. This underground lake, the source of all fresh water. And then the next part is from that fresh water, or from Apsu, Marduk is born. Is that linked to the defeated Apsu? Is it?
- [27:05]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, it is made very clear that the Apsu is the location in which Marduk is born. And I think that's important because the Apsu was this, you know, this source of creativity. So again, creativity has become very important in this text. And Marduk is sort of like, I don't know, infused with that energy.
- [27:22]
Tristan Hughes
And that's, once again, that's that link to water, isn't it? Of course, if we take a bit tangent, like water for the Babylonians, you've got those two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, you've got all those canals. It's a key part of the narrative that we're going to be coming back to again and again.
- [27:34]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, absolutely. But also, I think it's not just that the. It's not just water as this, let's say, agricultural source of nourishment. It's also, I think, water as the sea, like Tiamat is very specifically the sea. And I think for. For them, the sea was often like this, this faraway place where enemies lived and, you know, the kings would reach the sea with their armies. I think that's quite important for what happens next.
- [27:59]
Tristan Hughes
Well, let's go on to what happens next, because you mentioned Tiamat. I mean, how does she respond to the. Well, the murder, the killing of her partner Apsu.
- [28:07]
Dr. Sophus Hel
So at first she's weirdly okay about it, which is also kind of interesting. But as I said, we now begin to get this mirroring of what we've already seen. So just as we had the Gods raising this ruckus first, we now have Marduk raising Arrakis, in part because Anu, who is his grandfather, gives him these four winds to play with, which he then does. And so again, you have to imagine what the world is like at this point. Right. There is one enormous, endless sea, which is Tiamat, and inside it, the gods are living. Now, within this enormous sea, Enki has created this bubble which is the Apsu, where he and his family live. But all the other gods, and there are other gods besides EA's family, they live in Tiamat. And so Marduk, he's playing with these winds, and so he is roiling the entire sea, and that means he's roiling the entire world, which means that the gods can't sleep because they're constantly being tossed about by these winds that Marduk likes to play with. And I think it's, you know, one of the text's many nice details is that it really plays with language here so that you can say that the text is roiling Tiamat's body, but also her heart, but also her mood. So it's like her mood and her physical form kind of get conflated, because you can do that in Akkadian. And so you get a sense that Tiamat is becoming agitated, both literally and metaphorically. Right. Like her mind is becoming agitated, but also the entire sea is agitated.
- [29:39]
Tristan Hughes
Oh, yes. So like a storm kind of thing. Like as you might envisage.
- [29:42]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right, exactly. A storm inside and outside, as it were. Right. And so at one point, these gods, again, they can't sleep. That's a bit of a motif in Babylonian literature when people can't sleep. That tends to lead to problems. And so they. They take their complaint to Tiamat and says, you know, do something about him, and they really shame her quite a lot. They shame her for not standing with Apsu earlier. You know, so this woman is just getting relentless hate. You know, first she's told to kill her children, and then. And then she's blamed for not standing up with her husband. Right. Which I think is interesting. Like, they're really, when they try to go to action, they're really, you know, pressing on some of these cracks within the idea of a good mother, you know, in. In Babylonian conception. Right. Because she's A, blamed for not standing by her husband and B, encouraged to kill her children. Right. So the two things are kind of, you know, pushing against each other, but either way, they eventually do manage to. To get Tiamat up and angry, and she sets out to kill Marduk and to kill the other gods who are living inside the Apsu. And in order to do so, she raises an army. And this is another, the great set pieces in the poem. She raises, or rather she gives birth to an army of monsters. And you have all the most amazing monsters in Babylonian literature listed here. You have these huge serpents, you have these lion men, scorpion men, fish men, Byzant men. And so it's quite a formidable army that she raises to kill Marduk and the other gods.
- [31:20]
Tristan Hughes
I guess, because they're divine beings, maybe this isn't questioned as much, but kind of creating all those animals and monsters that you would, apart from the fish, you'd expect to be on the land, trying to portray this. Like, if it's endless sea, are they swimming or are they walking on water? I'm guessing those questions aren't answered, but they're like, this is the gods and their creations. They find a way kind of thing.
- [31:42]
Dr. Sophus Hel
I think that's such a good question. And I think it's kind of one of the things I'm fascinated about in Numa Elish. I mean, especially Tiamat, right? It's quite hard to consistently think of her as a sea because she does things. She does things with her limbs. You know, like at one point, she takes a lover, one of these rebellious gods, or rather, you know, angry gods. And, you know, what does it mean to take a lover if you're the sea? But on the other hand, if you fully think of her as a person, then the text doesn't make sense either, because, again, the gods are literally inside her. So I don't think this is a mistake. I think the text is being quite deliberate here in creating a kind of fluidity for Tiamat, Both her literal fluidity, she is the sea, but also sort of like fluidity of the character. The character only makes sense if she sort of goes back and forth between being a sea and being a person. And at one point we're told that she has a tail, so maybe she's an animal, right? So I think actually the text is quite deliberately keeping us from having a firm grasp on her. Because, you know, again, spoiler alert. Having a firm grasp on Tiamat will become a very relevant thing in Just a Mom.
- [32:52]
Tristan Hughes
Well, I mean. I mean, yeah, it's bizarre but extraordinary, this whole story. So we're going towards this showdown of Marduk versus the monsters. What happens?
- [33:03]
Dr. Sophus Hel
So we then get a quite long, I'm not gonna say boring, but suddenly, very repetitive section in which the gods sort of send These messages of alarm back and forth to each other. And eventually they convene. And they convene in order to try to defeat Tiamat. Anu and Ea are both sent out to try and defeat Tiamat. They both fail. They are sort of overwhelmed. Even though Ea seems to have had no problem in defeating Apsu, he is sort of thwarted by Tiamat. But eventually the gods then turn in despair to Marduk and he sort of steps up as a champion. But in order to defeat Tiamat, he first demands universal kingship as his price. And, you know, in this new book we've published, there's a study by Just a Gabriel about these speeches in which the gods sort of discuss what kingship will be like, which I think is very interesting. And there is quite a clear set of mutual obligations between the king and his subjects. But the gods essentially sort of hash out kingship. And another thing that, another study in this book by Johannes Halbold, he shows that these messages back and forth, they're sort of beginning to build the building blocks of Babylonian social structure, including messengers, including the assembly, and including kingship and so on and so forth. So the gods are sort of spurred on by the crisis to create society, essentially.
- [34:35]
Tristan Hughes
Are these dialogues then representing almost like with the Sophists in Greece maybe a bit later, you know, what Babylonians believed a king should be?
- [34:43]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Exactly right. Exactly right. And I think, you know, Enuma Elish is among many things, like it's sort of a great monument to the concept of kingship. Right. And it's really wedding the notion of hinatheism, of this God above gods, to the notion of kingship. So a human among humans, you know, human above humans.
- [35:01]
Tristan Hughes
Right.
- [35:02]
Dr. Sophus Hel
And it is very clearly making the link between those two.
- [35:06]
Tristan Hughes
And so once they've had this discussion and Marduk has named his price for going and fighting Tiamat, what does happen? Is there a big conflict between him and Tiamat?
- [35:17]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, just before we get to that, just one thing I want to note that just before the gods make Marduk their king, they get absolutely trashed. I just one of my favorite details of Babylonian literature, this is, I think, one, you know, according to the Babylonian view of cosmic history, one of the most important moments ever. And I just love that they're drunk for it. But yes, they elect Marduk their king. And he, you know, he gets dressed in this fearsome garment, in this fearsome armor. The line that I read out earlier, it goes like that is actually describing him getting dressed for battle. And then eventually he heads out, he is armed with his wings, and he confronts Tiamat. And now we have sort of reached the very heart of the text. So again, the text likes to place things midway. And just as the birth of Marduk was midway in the first tablet, we are now midway through the story. And there is this great clash, this great confrontation between Marduk and Tiamat. And so I mentioned that, you know, it's. The key question is, like, do we have a grasp of Tiamat? And what Marduk does in this battle is that he gets a grasp of Tiamat. And I think, you know, before the battle begins, he recites a magic spell. And we are not told explicitly what that magic spell is, but I think, again, to make sense of the text, we have to assume that this magic spell turns Tiamat into a solid creature. Because what we. What happens then is that Marduk thrusts his wind into her mouth and then shoots an arrow into. Into that mouth and through her body. And we get this long, anatomical, detailed list, anatomically detailed list of Tiamat's organs as Marduk's arrow sort of like cuts through them, as it were. So now she's quite clearly not just a sea. Now we have to sort of picture her as a person because the arrow makes its way through her heart, through her gut, through her lungs and so on and so forth. So Marduk has clearly transformed because how do you fight the sea? Right. That's basically the question. The other thing that Marduk does is that he throws a net over her. And if he's fighting a sea, that doesn't make any sense because you can't catch a sea with the net. That's sort of like, you know, that's almost proverbially impossible. So he must somehow transform her into a solid creature so that he can defeat her. And that is his big trial. And after he has defeated her, the rest of the text will. The second half of the text will explain step by step, how he takes her now solid corpse and transforms her into the world that we see around her.
- [37:57]
Tristan Hughes
Interesting. So Tiamat doesn't. It's not almost like taming the rough seas kind of thing like that. So Tiamat, is it a corpse? So dies. And then it's kind of the use of that power to create a new world. Well, a new. I mean, heavens and earth kind of thing. Is it?
- [38:12]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think, you know, there was this line in the book by Neil Price about the Vikings, Children of Ash and Elm, in which he talks about the universe's crime scene in Viking mythology. And I Think that really applies wonderfully to Enuma Elish as well. Right. We all live inside the corpse of this, of this dead mother.
- [38:33]
Tristan Hughes
Wow. Oh, of course, yeah. That's quite some images. I said the dead mother as well, which adds another layer to it entirely. Well, okay then, so let's get to that next big part of the text which is within this dead corpse of their great mother. How does Marduk as the newly elected kind of chief God, how does he go about showing himself as the new, new big person in town and kind of reshaping or creating the heavens and the earth?
- [39:00]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, so just like his father Ea had created the first sort of definite area of the cosmos, there wasn't just water. So Marduk now does the same, but on a cosmic scale. And the exact details of this are quite unclear in the text at times and quite debated among scholars. So I'm not so gonna like go through the absolute details of it, but basically something like the following happens. Marduk kind of turns Tiamat inside out. Right. So if you look up and you see something blue, that's the sky and that's sort of the water on the other of Tiamat, if that makes sense. We live in this huge air bubble that is kind of like Tiamat's skin inside out. Right. It's kind of gross. And like, you know, the, for example, the mountains are her breasts, the rivers flow from her eyes, the clouds are her spittle, that kind of thing. The world also, quite interestingly seems to consist of three, possibly four. This is one of those details that gets debated, but let's just say three layers with earth in the middle, the Apsu beneath us and the heavens above us. And each of them is sort of centered around a main temple. Again, the details of this are a little debated. Also, very importantly, Marduk creates the movement of the heavens, right? So he creates day and night. He creates the month, including the moon, which changes shape over the course of the month and so allows us to see the track. It allows us to track the passage of time and all of these things. The, the sort of the tablets go through the various aspects of this cosmos that he creates.
- [40:48]
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- [42:17]
Tristan Hughes
I know in your new work, I mean, is it Francesca Rochberg who does quite a bit on the astronomy as well? So I'd like to talk a bit about that, if you don't mind. I mean, because when you think of ancient Babylon and the Babylonians, they have a big fascination, don't they, in astronomy and the stars and the zodiac and all of that. So is it no surprise that you know, kind of Marduk forming the heavens and what they saw above them, whether it's the sky or the stars or the moon, I mean, it forms a big part of that creation narrative.
- [42:45]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Absolutely. And over the following centuries, especially towards the end of Babylonian culture, this focus on astronomy would become the absolute most important element of Babylonian culture. And in the classical world, the Babylonians were known almost exclusively as great astrologers, astronomers. And that sort of fascination really finds itself, its theological foundations, if you will, in this text, right? Like the text sort of, you know, for example, one of the things that Babylonian astrologers were interested in was the length of the month, right? Because the month is not quite 28 and not quite 29 days. And so this text establishes the ideal month, the ideal length of the month, and then any deviation from that ideal length was seen as as ominous as a message that was being sent from the gods. And also all of the gods get stations, they get an astral manifestation. So Marduk himself would become known as the planet Jupiter in Akkadian or in New Malaysia. Again, things are a little more complicated than that. You can read Rochberg's chapter on the exact identification of Nabiru, but basically it would come to be later that Nebro was Identified with Jupiter.
- [44:02]
Tristan Hughes
Oh, Jupiter is in the God or the planet?
- [44:05]
Dr. Sophus Hel
The planet. The planet. Right.
- [44:06]
Tristan Hughes
Did they recognize Jupiter then?
- [44:08]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, absolutely.
- [44:09]
Tristan Hughes
Oh, wow.
- [44:10]
Dr. Sophus Hel
And, you know, the other gods get other stars and other planets.
- [44:13]
Tristan Hughes
Wow. Okay. I did not realize just how many planets. Well, it said Babylonian astronomy and astrology is another episode in its own right and is one that we certainly will have to do in the future. But, okay, let's move away from the heavens now. And I'd like to actually mention one thing that you talked about in passing when talking about Marduk creating the Earth. The rivers coming from the eyes of Tiamat. Now, is there a particular focus on those two rivers which are right next to and central to Babylon?
- [44:41]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Yeah, to an extent. I think there are other Babylonian creation myths that foreground the rivers more than Enuma Elish. I think Enuma Elish is sort of more interested in the fluidity of everything and in the sea that is sort of around us. But it does care about the rivers. It's not like that. But I think one of the other things that is worth mentioning about, you know, Enuma, alias and rivers, and this will be brought out in the later sort of description of Marduk's cosmic roles that we're getting to, is that essentially Marduk has tamed water. Right. So it's not that there isn't water inside the world, as we know, but he has sort of tamed it. So he allows water to come in from this sort of this, you know, huge cosmic thing that we're surrounded by, but not in this chaotic, shapeless way that was the case before. Right. But in an ordered way through rivers, through canals, through channels, so that it can become agriculturally productive.
- [45:37]
Tristan Hughes
Right? Yes. Irrigation and canals, as you say. Right. So if we move on slightly, but still on that kind of creation part, how and when do humans come into the story?
- [45:48]
Dr. Sophus Hel
So we come into the story quite late in tablet six of the seven tablets in the Pneuma Elisheva. And I think, again, this is one of the ways in which Enuma Elish is really playing with older myths. And one of the things that it does as it plays with older myths is that it always likes to upstage Enlil. And again, this is something that is discussed in this new book by Selina Wisden. So there was an older myth, one of my favorite myths from Babylonian culture called Atrahasis, which describes the creation of humanity as being born of this conflict between the gods because some gods had to work and the other gods imposed work on them. And Enlil sort of failed to manage the situation, which is why it explodes in conflict according to this older myth. And that leads to the creation of humanity in order to take on the work of the gods. But in Enuma Elish, it sort of references that older myth, but Marduk preempts the situation, right, Because Marduk is shown as being better than Enlil because he can see this crisis coming from a Milo. And so he creates humanity to bear the work of the gods so that this situation doesn't even arise. Right. That is the point that Enuma Elish is making quite implicitly. But it's still, you know, if any. Any Babylonian reader that had had read Atrahasis would have been able to see what was happening. So Marduk manages to avert this crisis that dominates Atrahasis, this older myth. And just as we had this play on M in the beginning for water, we have a wonderfully elegant play on L, which is, you know, lu for human in this description of humanity. So just another example of how the text is always playing with language.
- [47:32]
Tristan Hughes
Yeah, exactly. Beautiful language, I've got, no doubt. So how does this whole text, if we get to, like, the seventh tablet, you said there were seven tablets. I mean, how does it ultimately end? I mean, we mentioned the book of Genesis earlier. So you might think of, you know, God creating the earth, seven days, and on the seventh day, he rested. Idea. Is there anything similar with Marduk? Does he sit back and relax and enjoy what he's created?
- [47:55]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Actually, yes. Yeah. They get drunk again. Because they always do.
- [47:58]
Tristan Hughes
Oh, they get drunk, okay. Of course. Yeah.
- [48:01]
Dr. Sophus Hel
And then what happens is that, you know, as I said, we began with the scene of absolute shapelessness and absolute namelessness. So a lack of names and a lack of destinies and a lack of shapes. So now we're beginning to have the shapes, Right? Like, the world has sort of been given form, and now we get an outpouring of names and destinies. The text began by saying when heaven above had no name, and it ends with a cascade of names. It ends with marduk being given 50 names. And to each of these names, there is an accompanying destiny, a Shumu and a Shimto. And the Babylonians were obsessed with finding out how the two were related, because, again, as I've mentioned, they saw destinies and fates as sort of being encoded in names. But each of the gods basically gives Marduk their own name. And I think that's another expression, another very powerful expression of this henotheistic image in which all of the Other gods are sort of seen as aspects of Marduk, facets of Marduk. He takes on their identities by literally receiving their names, including the name of his own father. Ea gives him his names. And also, very importantly, he is given not two names, not three names, not four names, but 50 names specifically, which is very important in Babylonian context because 50 was the sacred number of Enlil. So again, Marduk, in yet another dig at Enlil, takes over Enlil's sacred number. And so the ending of the poem can be again, perhaps a little boring to read because it's a long list of names and the destinies that go with them. But in Babylonian religion, this is absolutely central. This is important for so many reasons. In part because it sort of shows us that language is the code that we can use to understand how the world works. In part because it's sort of a testament to this hinnotheistic vision of the world, and in part because it is evidence that Marduk has taken over as king of the gods from Enlil.
- [50:08]
Tristan Hughes
It's such an extraordinary story and as you said, like, kind of from fluidity and just water to, you know, kind of this order and language and Marduk at the top. I know I asked it at the beginning the importance of this, but now that we've done the story and we've gone through it, I'm going to ask you this again, Sophie, because I feel we can even. It's good to repeat now the purpose of this epic and its importance to the Babylonians. If they were reading this, if they were told this, what were like, the main messages that a Babylonian would take away from this story?
- [50:39]
Dr. Sophus Hel
I think one of the main messages is, of course, simply that, you know, Marduk is king of the gods and, you know, Marduk is a special kind of God, you know, that is sort of like this message number one. I also think it's interesting that, as I said, not everybody accepted this vision of the world. I mentioned briefly that it wasn't only the enemies of the Babylonians, like the Assyrians and the Jewish nobles and scholars in Babylon, who disliked this text, but there were also some Babylonians who reacted quite critically. There's another epic called Era, which is in so many ways the anti Enuma Elish epic really is just. It goes after Enuma Elish at every chance it can. So again, I don't want people to come away thinking that, you know, I'm sure there were some holier than thou Babylonians who every time you drank water was like, oh, you gotta mention Marduk's name now. You know, I also think, like just briefly on that, I think it's a very symbolic act. You know, just like Marduk defeated the sea, so when we swallow water, we're sort of expressing gratitude to him. Like I think, you know, and again, the fact that we have to mention his name, since his name is so important, I think it's a beautiful line and it's one of the very last lines of text. I think it's very telling for the project of this poem. But anyway, so I'm just saying that, you know, I'm sure there was some holier than thou super Marduk fanatics, but again, it was a text that was also met with a lot of resistance and a lot of like creative reinterpretation in many ways.
- [52:05]
Tristan Hughes
I mean, for those who followed it was there idea. I mean, if Babylon said at that time, you know, it's got temples to Marduk. I've seen that the house of the. The God did it. Did many Babylonians then interpret it as being like, okay, that means also that Babylon is the center of the universe because this is where the house of Marduk is and we are the city that worships Marduk primarily, unlike other cities.
- [52:26]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Absolutely, absolutely. I think that sense of the centrality of Babylon is, you know, again, absolutely key to understanding this text. And it's celebrated, you know, throughout the text. Like Babylon, the creation of Babylon is a moment that is almost as significant in the text as the creation of humanity. You know, that's sort of like where we're at.
- [52:46]
Tristan Hughes
Oh, is Babylon itself mentioned near the end of the text? Ah, okay.
- [52:49]
Dr. Sophus Hel
And you know, that leads to real life problems. So, you know, I mentioned the sort of Babylonian resistance. We've mentioned the Jewish resistance, but there was also the Assyrian resistance. So the Assyrians had this very complicated relation to Babylon, you know, not unlike the relation between Rome and Greece in which the sort of Rome became the military superpower, but they were still culturally indebted to Greece. And in the same way the Assyrians became, became this military superpower in the first millennium BCE, but was still very culturally indebted to the Babylonians. And you know, when at one point the Assyrians tried to destroy Babylon completely after a rebellion, the king kills the Assyrian king's son. He's absolutely enraged. That's the Sennacherib's son. And so he levels Babylon. And I think one of the interesting things is the description of his leveling of Babylon. Babylon absolutely plays with Enuma, Elish and tropes from Enuma Elish. And, you know, after that, the Assyrians composed a version of Enuma Elish that replaces the names of Marduk and Babylon with the city of Assur and the.
- [53:57]
Tristan Hughes
God Assur Asur, their chief God and their chief city. So I was going to ask, like, how popular would have been outside of Babylon, but you've answered there, you know, are the people who weren't too keen on this rival city claiming that they were the center of the universe. Yeah, but before that time, actually, when Babylon is at its height and the Enum Elish, there is resistance to it. But if there were still many who would have heard it? Was it promoted in public festivals or was this poem taught in schools in Babylon as kind of a key piece of literature? Do we know much about where and how this story would have been told in Babylon?
- [54:35]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Absolutely. So again, the schools are always key to our understanding of these ancient texts. Yes, there are other sources than the schools, schools like the royal archives, but the schools are absolutely critical to our understanding of what ancient literature even is. And Enuma Elish plays an absolutely central role in Babylonian education as well. It would, you know, it sort of becomes this standard text about Babylon and Babylonian culture. And later, quite a lot later, Enuma Elish becomes integrated into this great New Year's festival called the Asinu. Celine de Pourse in this book shows that the relation between the newest festival and the Enuma Elish is a little more complicated than has sometimes been thought. That's one of the things that historians love to show. There's another excellent chapter in the book by Fran Reynolds in which he studies the cuneiform reception of Enuma Elish. And another excellent article by Eckhart Fram in which he traces the reception of Enuma Elish beyond the cuneiform world. But what all of these essays sort of show is that, you know, again, Enuma Elish just casts an absolutely enormous shadow over the literature of the cuneiform world, but also beyond it in the first millennium.
- [55:51]
Tristan Hughes
Well, I must say, I mean, very interesting point there about the schools. And what I also love is the fact that this story has survived in its entirety, as you say that these seven tablets, what an amazing discovery that has been. But I will just ask one question, which is one we've already dabbled on a bit. But I feel it's important to ask, how does the Enuma Elish, how does it influence the creation of the Hebrew Bible?
- [56:14]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Well, I mean, that's a. You know, I say that Enuma Elish has sort of provoked for 3,000 years. And that's one of the ways in which it has provoked. There are these two very influential and very sort of thorny debates in early 20th century Germany. The Babel Bibel Streit, the Bible Bibel discussion and a study by Zimmern about the both of them center on the possible influence of Babylonian religion on the Hebrew Bible. And the relation specifically between Enuma Elish in Genesis is absolutely central to that discussion. You know, for example, this idea of God's spirit hovering over the waters. If you close read that in the Hebrew, there are a lot of textual echoes to enumeration there. And that is the very opening of the Hebrew Bible. You know, so like just from the very beginning, the, the Bible is engaging with Enuma Elish in all sorts of ways, pushing against it, creating its own counter narrative, which again makes sense if, as as many scholars today believe, the Hebrew Bible found its final form while the Jewish scholars and nobles were in their captivity in Babylon.
- [57:25]
Tristan Hughes
This is the Babylonian captivity after Nebuchadnezzar sacks Jerusalem, early 6th century BC. We did an interview with the incredible, and it's fair to say incredible, Dr. Irving Finkel last year where he did the story of Noah and the flood and also how that is very much linked into it. So very interesting to hear your thoughts on that too. So first, this has been absolutely extraordinary. Last but certainly not least, tell us about this new book and e resource that has come back and how it is making ancient Babylonian literature like the Epic of Creation in the modern day, it is making it accessible to a wide audience.
- [58:00]
Dr. Sophus Hel
Right. So with Johannes Halbold and Enrique Jimenez and Selina Wisnom, I have launched this new book series called Library of Babylonian Literature. And basically the aim of this book series is to make the classics of Babylonian literature more accessible. And I think for reasons that should by now be fairly clear, we began with Enuma Eilish as the sort of classic of the classics of Babylonian literature. And each of the books in this series will include a new translation of the text, a state of the art transcription, a detailed historical introduction that sort of lays out the background of the text. And then a series of essays by leading scholars that unpack the history, the structure and the main themes of these poems. And perhaps best of all, these are published open access, so you can go to the Bloomsbury website, just search for Library of Babylonian Literature and then you can download them for free.
- [58:54]
Tristan Hughes
Absolutely. So the epic of Creation that we talked about today, this whole extraordinary, bizarre but extraordinary story, you can read it all today online for free and all of these essays by leading experts in the field, including yourself. Sophus. What an asset to have modern day to breach it. Well to give people such a wonderful introduction to it's not just the Greek myths, it's not just the Roman stories. You can now also look at them this great library of Mesopotamian literature and mythology that is really starting to rise to the fore. Sophus, this has been a pleasure to have you on the podcast and it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.
- [59:38]
Dr. Sophus Hel
It was such a delight to be here again.
- [59:43]
Tristan Hughes
Well, there you go. There was Dr. Sophus Herald talking you through this amazing tale from ancient Babylon that was the epic of creation. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. We will put up a poll on Spotify once this episode has been released asking you which epic tale great story from ancient history you would like us to cover next. Just a great work from ancient history history. We'll put a variety of options up there. Vote now so you can have a voice in which great narrative we cover next. Thank you once again for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of Historyhit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe.
- [60:51]
Dan Snow
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