on Enuma Elish

In the Beginning: A New Translation of the Enuma Elish

How did the world begin? The Babylonians answered this question with an explanation expedient for a nascent empire: it was the work of their city god, Marduk. In the beginning the gods of fresh water, Apsû and sea water, Tiamat, mixed their waters together and fathered the first gods. These gods, however, were too noisy for Apsû, who wanted to destroy them. Ea, the wisest of the gods, got wind of Apsû’s plan and killed him, fathering a son, Marduk, on Apsû’s corpse, with his consort. Tiamat is eventually convinced to take revenge and the gods elect Marduk as their champion. He eventually defeats Tiamat and creates the world out of her body. The poem that told of this story was central to Babylonian cosmology and identity, as well as a fundamental part of the ritual of the Akitu, the New Year Festival – the most important date in Babylon’s calendar. Here it was read to a sacred statue of Marduk himself.

While Gilgamesh has been well-mined for its wealth of poetic material, the Enuma Elish is much less known. It is this that a new translation by Sophus Helle, accompanied by interpretations and contextualising essays by experts in the field, attempts to rectify. The work is the first in Bloomsbury’s new series, The Library of Babylonian Literature. The contributors, and above all, the editors, are to be praised for this considerable archaeological achievement. There have been versions of the Enuma Elish in English before ...