Episode 2: Before the Flood

The Enuma Elish and Atrahasis of Babylon

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 2: Before the Flood. In this program, we will read two Bronze Age Mesopotamian epics – the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis – a pair of the longest narratives that have come down to us from the millennium between 2000 and 1000 BCE. Since most of us today have never heard of the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis, let’s begin by learning some background on what these two stories are, how they were preserved and came down to us from the Bronze Age, and before anything else, why they’re important.

In an essay called “What is a Classic?” the great modernist poet and scholar T.S. Eliot defined what makes a work of literature endure. This essay, published in 1944, attests that a culture must have reached a point of maturity in order to produce a work of literature that lasts for generations and generations. T.S. Eliot’s favorite classical writer possessed, in Eliot’s words, “a refinement of manner, springing from a delicate sensibility.”¹ This writer, Virgil, wrote the Aeneid, which Eliot calls “Our classic, the classic of all Europe” (70). The Aeneid, finished in about 19 BCE, was a Latin language Roman epic, written for the first Roman emperor Augustus. And Eliot, after trumpeting Virgil’s Aeneid as the classic of Europe par excellence, adds that “The bloodstream of European literature is Latin and Greek – not as two systems of circulation, but one, for it is through Rome that our parentage in Greece must be traced” (70).

This was a common idea during T.S. Eliot’s generation. At the turn of the twentieth century, American and European universities somewhat doggedly emphasized that the cultural heritage of Europe could be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. Some of these universities, like Eliot himself did, also championed the unity of Christianity with European culture, their sense being that Greece and Rome gave modern Europe its secular intellectualism, and that Christianity gave modern Europe its spiritual integrity and moral compass. The question that some midcentury intellectual heavyweights like T.S. Eliot rarely asked was this. Where did Christianity and Judaism come from? Where did ancient Rome and Greece come from? What strange, and unremembered things were in their bloodstreams?

About ten years after Eliot wrote the essay “What is a Classic?” in 1944, the archaeologist and linguist Samuel Noah Kramer published a book called History Begins at Sumer. We talked about Sumer, last time – that civilization in the southeast of modern-day Iraq that began developing urban centers in the 5000s and 4000s BCE, and that came to a peak in the late 2000s BCE. Kramer’s book’s title – History Begins at Sumer – was perhaps intentionally provocative. In the mid-twentieth century, after all, there were Biblical literalists who took Genesis’ creation story at face value, and then there were academics like Eliot who saw Greece and the Bible as the wellsprings of European civilization, and did not trouble themselves with going any further back than that. By the time Kramer published the book History Begins at Sumer, however, cuneiform and hieroglyphics had been deciphered for a hundred years, and the archaeology of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s had produced such spellbinding discoveries that it was no longer possible to see classical Greece as the fountainhead of European civilization, nor to see the Old Testament as somehow standing entirely apart from the religions and literary traditions that had predated it in the ancient near east. By the 1950s, for those stouthearted and curious minds who sought to learn more about the real bloodstream of European culture, and really, human culture more generally, there were more and more road signs and billboards, with more and more arrows pointing back to the Bronze Age – to Anatolia, to Egypt, and most of all, to Mesopotamia.

So let’s save ancient Greece and Rome for a bit later. Let’s do what students and scholars of cultural history haven’t done enough over the past century, and continue what we started last time in ancient Iraq. Let’s go back to the actual oldest surviving literature our species produced, and see what Mesopotamia left behind. Because beginning in the Bronze Age, and for 3,000 years afterward, the inhabitants of the land between the rivers had a connected literary tradition that began with Sumerian, and then evolved into Akkadian-language stories and poems. And out of all these Mesopotamian stories and poems that have managed to come down to us, today, three are the most famous. The only household name from the Bronze Age is probably the Epic of Gilgamesh, which we will read next time. But as relatively well known as the Epic of Gilgamesh is today, the two texts that we’re going to read in this program – the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis – are just as important.

The Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis are creation stories, and they’re about a thousand years older than the one in the Bible. The Enuma Elish tells of how the Babylonian god Marduk, in the early period after creation, fought his way to the top of the Mesopotamian pantheon. The Atrahasis is the longest Mesopotamian flood story, chronicling how a pious mortal named Atrahasis was chosen by the gods to preserve the many species of earth on a giant boat, even as everyone else perished.

Before we start with the Enuma Elish in a moment, let’s talk about why these two epics are, today, the most famous works of Mesopotamian literature. The simplest answer is length. The Enuma Elish – the story of how the Babylonian god Marduk became the big boss – is nearly 1,100 lines in length, stretching to almost fifty pages in the main translation of it that we’re about to read, while the Atrahasis is around a hundred lines longer than that. Both of these stories are today preserved in sequences of cuneiform tablets. The Enuma Elish was discovered on seven clay tablets in the archaeological dig site of Nineveh in the 1850s, and the fullest version of the Atrahasis is a three-tablet copy, unearthed at excavations at the dig site of Sippar in the 1880s. Today, the British Museum holds the longest and most important Enuma Elish and Atrahasis tablets, and you can see them for yourself there. Like all Mesopotamian literature, the source texts of these epics aren’t in great shape – they did sit in the ground for three thousand or so years and endure city sackings and fires and floods, and in cases, other copies of each story have been used to fill in the parts that are damaged or missing. However, again, by the standards of stories dug up from ancient Iraq, the Enuma Elish and Atrahasis are very long, and in quite good shape, and a principal reason for their notoriety today is simply that they are sizable, coherent narratives.

There are many other reasons for the relative notoriety of the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis. As we’ll see, both of these works have a lot of parallels to ancient Greek and Hebrew narratives written later, during the Iron Age, including ones in the Bible. But far more than being a lead-up to works like the Book of Genesis and the Theogony of Hesiod, the Enuma Elish and Atrahasis are tremendous pieces of literature in their own right. Written with gorgeous, unfamiliar figurative language that references a bygone pantheon of gods and shows a worldview that’s really neither ancient Hebrew nor Greek, the two short epics we’ll read in this program are a portal to civilizations that endured for thousands of years that most of us don’t know anything about. So let’s begin with the Enuma Elish, a story whose title is also often just translated as the Epic of Creation. Let’s forget the old song and dance about Classical Greece and Jesus and Moses being the parents of European culture. Let’s meet the old gods, and find out, as far as we can, how west Eurasian culture actually began in the written record.

You only really need to know one thing before reading the Enuma Elish. That is that Mesopotamians, like many others in antiquity, wrote stories in which there were multiple generations of gods. In these tales, there is a first generation – a primeval generation of elemental beings like the ocean itself, or the sky, or earth. This primeval generation then gives way to a subsequent generation, often of wild, harsh ancient gods, after which the current gods are born. This “generations of gods” story is, regardless of the culture that tells it, whether in the Bronze or Iron Age, a spectacular tale, in which divine beings in primordial times lock in immortal combat for the control of the cosmos. The Enuma Elish is neither the earliest, nor the last story of generations of divine beings slugging it out, but for its length, completeness, ancient vintage and the exceedingly high quality of its composition, it’s a great story to know.² So let’s hear the tale of the Enuma Elish – unless otherwise noted, quotes in this program will come from the Benjamin Foster translation, published by CDL Press in 2005. [music]

The Enuma Elish’s Opening: The Story of Tiamat and Apsu

In the beginning, there was only water. No names for anything existed, and neither reeds nor canebrakes flourished at the water’s edge. The water existed in two parts. The deep freshwater was male, and its name was Apsu. The ocean was female, and its name was Tiamat. Apsu and Tiamat mingled their waters. And from this union of ancient waters came the first pair of gods. This first pair grew to maturity, and then a second pair of gods came forth from the mixed waters, and then a third. And then, in the fourth generation of younger deities, there came a god named Enki.³

Mesopotamia was a polytheistic civilization with many gods, but one of them that you absolutely have to know is Enki. Enki was one of the Anunnaki, or high gods of Mesopotamia. He’s called Ea in Akkadian, but I will call him Enki throughout this episode, because hearing a bunch of names for the same divine being in a podcast episode is confusing. Enki was the deity of wisdom, and of the sweet, fresh groundwaters that nurtured humanity, animals, and crops. Enki was a fixture in Mesopotamian myths from 2100 BCE onward. Enki was, as you just heard, neither the oldest, nor the loftiest Mesopotamian god, but he was beloved as a milder deity than some of his mightier peers, and in Sumerian and Akkadian myths, he’s sometimes a partisan of humanity when humanity really needs some extra help. So that’s again, Enki, the kindly god of wisdom and sweet waters, Enki, Enki, Enki, spelled E-N-K-I, and a god who will figure into both of our stories for today.

The younger generations of gods – and there were four of them, now – were boisterous. Their boisterousness became increasingly irritating to their progenitors. The ocean mother Tiamat put up with the noise and bustle. But as for old father Apsu, his fury grew and grew. Eventually, Apsu went to Tiamat and complained. He couldn’t take it any more, Apsu said. It seemed like he’d never rest. Tiamat said that it was their duty to bear the clamor of all the younger gods. But Apsu was implacable. He found a more willing listener in one of his counselors, who encouraged Apsu not to tolerate the riotous behavior of his descendants.

News of Apsu’s wrath soon reached the younger deities, including wise young Enki. And while the other gods were uncertain of what to do, Enki sprang into action. Enki infiltrated Apsu’s domain, and recited a magic spell to make the primordial father fall asleep. And then Enki tied Apsu up and killed him, assuming sovereignty over Apsu’s dominion. From that time, Enki occupied a special place among the other gods, and he dwelt with his wife in the freshwater realm of Apsu that he had conquered. And while Enki’s position was exalted after vanquishing Apsu, and ensuring the safety of the younger gods, Enki and his wife Damkina soon had a son. And this son would be central to all of cosmic history thereafter. [music]

The Birth of Marduk and the Resurgence of Tiamat

Mesopotamians sometimes wrote about a tablet of destinies, on which was written the fates of all things, high and low. The words of this tablet decreed that Marduk, the chief deity of Babylon, would be born, paramount among the fifth generation of Mesopotamian gods, and the main character of the Enuma Elish. As the Enuma Elish tells it,

In the [inner chamber] of destinies, the abode of designs,
The most capable, the sage of the gods, the Lord was begotten,
. . .Marduk was formed!. . .
His body was magnificent, fiery his glance,
He was a hero at birth,
         he was a mighty one from the beginning!. . .
his divinity was strange,
He was much greater, he surpassed them in every way.
His members were fashioned with cunning
         beyond comprehension,
Impossible to conceive, too difficult to visualize:
Fourfold his vision, fourfold his hearing,
When he moved his lips a fire broke out. (1.78-96)

In addition to all of this, the text tells us that Marduk had the auras of ten deities around him, along with fifty names, and the god of the sky, Anu, granted Marduk four mighty winds. Marduk played and played with these winds, and soon, a familiar crisis repeated itself.

The rambunctious youngster Marduk was disturbing the quietude of creation. Some of the older gods were upset about the noise and tumult. They approached the ancient ocean mother Tiamat, enumerating their complaints. The newly created four winds were stirring the ocean everywhere, Tiamat’s children told her. Tiamat’s husband had been killed, and more generally, a few upstart deities were running roughshod over her ancient and peaceful dominion. Tiamat heard what they said, and she agreed. Enki and Marduk, the old goddess said, together with their partisans, had indeed been wicked.

Tiamat, whom we can think of as a goddess of the primeval ocean, or the ocean itself, was not a force to be trifled with. The gods opposed to Marduk armed themselves, stirring Tiamat into a fervor. Tiamat herself, who could generate legions of things, began to birth monsters. In total, Tiamat created:

monster serpents,
Pointed of fang, with merciless incisors(?),
She filled their bodies with venom for blood.
Fierce dragons she clad with [auras]. . .
She deployed serpents, dragons, and hairy hero-men,
Lion monsters, lion men, scorpion men,
Mighty demons, fish men, bull men,
Bearing unsparing arms, fearing no battle. (1.134-7, 141-4)

The ocean mother Tiamat, who had initially stayed on the sidelines of created reality, now clearly planned to assert her seniority over the other gods. And of all the monsters and weaponry she created, Tiamat also brought a general into being. She told this general he would lead her mighty army into battle, and that he would be her new husband and command all of the other gods with her. Together, through great power and violence, they would gain control over the unruly and disrespectful younger deities. [music]

Enki is Called on to Deal with the Crisis

That’s the end of the first tablet of the Enuma Elish discovered in Nineveh in the 1850s – now, let’s go on to the second. Tiamat rallied her forces. And she sent word to Enki, the god who had killed her first husband, that he’d better prepare himself for battle. Hearing this dire news, Enki flew into a panic. It wasn’t just Tiamat, Enki knew. Some of the younger gods had opted to side with the ancient ocean mother, too. Enki hurried to speak with his grandfather about the crisis. This grandfather’s name was Anshar, and he was one of the deities who evidently had sided with Enki in the brewing civil war. Enki, distressed at how quickly things had escalated, described to his grandfather Anshar the strength and magnitude of Tiamat’s forces. Enki told his grandfather everything, and Anshar blamed Enki himself for the catastrophe.

Anshar said Enki had started the whole mess by murdering Apsu. Tiamat wouldn’t have gone nuclear if they’d just left the elder gods alone. But Enki defended himself, reminding his grandfather of the crisis that had necessitated old Apsu’s murder. Enki’s grandfather Anshar, who evidently needed this refresher, admitted that Apsu had been an existential threat. Anshar said that Enki was worthy of his high standing, and that as such, Enki needed to find a way to defeat Tiamat and her giant army. This, it seems, was not what Enki wanted to hear. Enki said that Tiamat was far too powerful for him to challenge – especially when flanked with such deadly forces. And then, in a memorable few lines, Enki said, “[Tiamat] is reinforced with a host, none can go out against her. . . / I became afraid at her clamor, I turned back. / My [grand]father, do not despair, send another to her, / A woman’s force may be very great, / but it cannot match a man’s” (88, 90-2). In other words, she’s indestructible, she’s weaker than men, because she’s a woman, but please send someone else against her. This speech didn’t quite add up, but its import was obvious – Enki couldn’t fight Tiamat. His grandfather Anshar told Enki to at least go and try to make peace with Tiamat, and then Anshar talked to another of his descendants, who was also reluctant to go and make war on the ocean mother and her brood of mighty monsters.

The younger gods seemed to have found no way forward. As the second tablet tells us, “The. . .gods were all assembled, / With lips closed tight, they sat in silence. / Would no god go out [at Anshar’s] command? / Against Tiamat would none go as [he] ordered?” (2.121-4).

Meanwhile, Enki, who had been ordered to go and try to make peace with Tiamat, instead went to speak to his son Marduk. Enki explained the situation to Marduk, and asked Marduk to go to the assembly of the gods. Marduk was willing, and even eager to do so. At the moment when the gods had given up on finding a champion to fight Tiamat, in walked mighty young Marduk, and he immediately volunteered to fight. His great-grandfather Anshar was greatly relieved. But, Marduk said, there was a condition. If indeed Marduk defeated Tiamat, as the gods so desperately needed him to, then Marduk wanted to be the foremost deity. The story’s second tablet concludes with Marduk’s condition – he said that if he fought and won, “When I speak, let me ordain destinies instead of you. / Let nothing that I shall bring about be altered, / Nor what I say be revoked or changed” (2.160-2). And with this cliffhanger, the second tablet breaks off, leading to the third. [music]

The Council of the Gods and the Anointment of Marduk

The gods did not immediately agree to Marduk’s offer, being understandably iffy about surrendering control of the cosmos. Anshar sent a deputy off to speak to the eldest of the younger gods, and this deputy outlined the entire story we’ve heard thus far, up to and including the fact that brawny young Marduk had offered to take care of Tiamat, but only for a substantial price. The news traveled again, until a more complete assembly of the younger gods gathered to discuss whether indeed to dispatch Marduk.

And in a scene that is quintessentially Mesopotamian, the gods got down to business by drinking a bunch of wine and beer, and when they were properly intoxicated, they made their decision. As the Enuma Elish tells us, in the Oxford Stephanie Dalley translation this time,

All the great gods who fix the fates,
Entered into Anshar’s presence and were filled with joy.
Each kissed the other: in the assembly [ ]
There was conversation, they sat at the banquet,
Ate grain, drank choice wine,
Let sweet beer trickle through their drinking straws.
Their bodies swelled as they drank the liquor;
They became very carefree, they were merry,
And they decreed destiny for Marduk their champion. (3.129-38)⁴

It’s quite a funny scene by modern standards, and it teaches us that that when we are threatened with total annihilation, there’s nothing wrong with getting hammered and making extremely consequential decisions under the influence. And amusingly, this climactic moment in the Enuma Elish is not the only time in ancient Mesopotamian literature that gods get drunk and negotiate the sovereignty of creation. In an older Sumerian story, also about Enki, Enki relinquishes his divine powers to the goddess Inanna. This older story tells us, “Enki and Inanna drank beer together. / They drank more beer together. / They drank more and more beer together. . .Fourteen times Enki raised his cup to Inanna,” and after all of this binge drinking, the older god Enki gave the young goddess Inanna all sorts of marvelous powers, setting her up for her own marvelous quests.⁵ Alcohol was a fixture of Mesopotamian civilization, and so of course it figured into many Sumerian and Akkadian myths, and in fact, we’re going to hear more stories involving the gods and alcoholic beverages just a bit later in this program, too. Anyway, to stick with the Enuma Elish, in the midst of a brewing war with a wrathful ocean mother and demon army ready to strike them all down, the younger gods got blitzed, shrugged, and took a chance on Marduk.

The fourth tablet of the Enuma Elish picks up with what happened next. Marduk was given a new throne. The rest of the gods lavished praises on him, confirming that he would be paramount among them. Now, the Enuma Elish, as a story, is definitely invested in genuine praise of Marduk – you might not have heard of Marduk, but to generations of Babylonians, he was the sovereign of the gods and very much revered as an anchor of justice, and there are Akkadian language prayers and praises to Marduk that survive that sound a lot like Old Testament psalms revering God.⁶ However, at precisely this moment of the Enuma Elish, all the gods are praising Marduk before he has actually gone to fight Tiamat and proved himself. Thus, when we hear the gods extolling him, saying things like “O Marduk, you are our champion, / We bestow upon you kingship of all and everything. / Take your place in the assembly, your word shall be supreme” (4.13-15) – when we hear this, it seems like the other gods might be thinking, “You are so powerful Marduk, now get out there and slug it out with Tiamat – we’ll see if you survive. Gosh, you’re great. Now yeah, go ahead and prove it, kiddo, good luck out there.”

The gods didn’t just give Marduk praises. They made sure he had good gear. Marduk was given a bow and arrow, and a mace. He spread a mesh of thunderbolts around his face, and sheathed his body in moving fire. He armed himself with a net, too, and then he climbed astride his chariot of clouds, pulled by four venomous horses that sneered with bottomless energy. Marduk also wore fearsome auras and brought with him the four deadly winds that had been granted to him earlier in the story. And thus armed to the teeth, with a defensive spell on his lips and with a powerful antidote that cured poison ready at hand if he needed it, Marduk rode his chariot out to do battle with Tiamat, and prove himself as he had promised that he would. [music]

The Battle Between Marduk and Tiamat and its Aftermath

Marduk went to where Tiamat was stationed with her forces. Tiamat’s general, seeing Marduk arrive in full regalia, shuddered with uncertainty. As for Tiamat, she struck first with deception. She told Marduk he was being foolish. All the other gods were only pretending to support him, but, she asked, could he really count on their loyalty? Marduk was undaunted by Tiamat’s attempt to sow doubt. He knew her game, he said. She was going to attack him no matter what. There were armies around them, said Marduk, but the fight was between the two of them. Would Tiamat fight him, and him alone?

Tiamat fell into a mayhem of fury. She shook with anger, and recited a spell, and Marduk rushed her. He threw open his battle net, and then assailed her with one of his winds. Just as Tiamat opened her mouth, the wind flurried in, and she couldn’t close her lips. Tiamat swelled with air, grimacing with agony, and Marduk fired an arrow at her abdomen. And that was it. The arrow tore deep into the belly of the ancient ocean mother, through her insides and up to her heart, and she died.

Tiamat’s forces burst into confusion and fled. Her divine allies quivered in trepidation and dashed off to save themselves. But Marduk, now standing on the remains of Tiamat, cast out his net and captured the departing deities, condemning them to imprisonment. As for the demons and monsters in Tiamat’s army, Marduk bound them, as well, and he took from Tiamat’s general the all-important tablet of destinies. And with that, Marduk had triumphed.

Marduk then began to build things out of Tiamat’s enormous remains. He made half of her into the sky, and he used the rest of her to fashion some of the fixtures of Mesopotamian mythology, including the great temples of the highest deities. And the Enuma Elish here, by the way, evolves from a story about Marduk fighting Tiamat into a more traditional account of the creation of the world. Marduk built the constellations in the sky, and he established the limits of the calendar year. He created the moon, and established its monthly waxing and waning. From the remains of the defeated Tiamat, Marduk fashioned the clouds, and created regular rainfall. Her eyes became the sources of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and Tiamat’s breasts became tall mountains, and other parts of the defeated primordial goddess became other mainstays of creation known to Babylonians.

Marduk was thus triumphant, but he also gave prizes and responsibilities to the older deities, including wise Enki and Anu, the god of the sky. Marduk’s victory, while it represented a consequential shift in cosmic power, was nonetheless celebrated enthusiastically by the other gods. Marduk’s simultaneous exercise of might and tact led to uniform support of him, and soon all the gods were swearing fealty to Marduk. As they revered him, Marduk was washed and anointed. And of all the things Marduk created after defeating Tiamat, the most consequential was the city of Babylon. Babylon, Marduk proclaimed, would be the hub of the gods on earth. Each of the gods would have a place to reside and to be revered in Marduk’s great temple. The question is, who, exactly would revere them? [music]

The Creation of Humanity and the End of the Enuma Elish

We now come to the Enuma Elish’s story about how and why humankind was created. In Mesopotamian theology, the general story about humanity’s creation that is we were created to do work for the gods.⁷ This is utterly fascinating, by the way, if you haven’t heard it before, but from Sumerian literature onward, the general tale is that the gods were tired of digging and planting and making food and brewing beer all the time, and so they created humanity as a subordinate to lighten their load. An old Sumerian tale describes how “The gods were dredging the rivers, / were piling up their silt / on projecting bends – / and the gods lugging the clay / began complaining / about [their incessant labor].”⁸ And in this very old Sumerian tale, the gods straight away create humanity to do all their digging and dredging for them. To state the relatively obvious, in the Abrahamic religions, God’s intention with Adam and Eve seems to be for them to enjoy an existence of leisure and pleasure in Eden. Then, the unfortunate incident with the apple takes place, after which they’re kicked out of Eden and forced to win their bread by the sweat of their brow. Mesopotamian creation stories, by contrast, tell the story of humanity’s creation as a success, rather than a failure. The gods need people to do farming and irrigation work, and in particular, brew beer for them. So they create us, and we work a lot, because that’s what we’re made for. Both of our texts for today, again the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis, tell versions of this creation story. So let’s hear the Enuma Elish’s version.

Marduk, now the head honcho of the gods and generally revered by all of them, announced that out of everything he’d created up to that point, he was actually going to create something else. Marduk said, “I shall compact blood, I shall cause bones to be, / I shall make stand a human being, let ‘Man’ be its name. / I shall create humankind, / They shall bear the gods’ burden that [the gods] may rest” (6-8). Again, as you just heard there, humanity is made, in Mesopotamian theology, as a sort of workforce or proletariat to support the needs of the deities. The thing was, Marduk needed some parts out of which to build humanity.

The newly-appointed sovereign of the gods summoned an assembly. And at this assembly, Marduk revealed something he hadn’t yet said to his subordinates. Marduk knew, he said, that someone among them had been disloyal. He demanded to know who had started the war. The other gods identified the traitor – the general who had sided with Tiamat, and this turncoat was executed. From his blood, the wise god of the sweet waters, Enki, created humanity, and on humanity, as the Enuma Elish puts it, “[Enki] imposed the burden of the gods” (36).

With their workhorse thus created, the gods went onto more interesting things. Marduk subdivided the deities into those who ruled from the heavens, and those who rule in the underworld. Marduk’s temple, Esagila, was built in Babylon, and the gods had a great feast there. As the festivities proceeded, it was decided that Marduk’s bow – the one he’d taken into battle to fight Tiamat – would ascend to the heavens in order to be a constellation. With his bow enshrined among the stars, Marduk then received other offerings from the gods. The gods once more swore to follow Marduk’s directives. The gods vowed, in the Oxford Dalley translation,

At the mention of [Marduk’s] name we shall bow down!
The gods are to pay heed to what he says:
His command is to have priority above and below.
The son who avenged us shall be the highest!
His rule shall have priority; let him have no rival!
Let him act as shepherd over the [Mesopotamians], his creation.
Let his way be proclaimed in future days, never forgotten. . .
Let him breathe on earth as freely as he always does in heaven.
Let him designate the [Mesopotamians] to revere him,
That mankind may be mindful of him, and name him as their god. (6.102-114)

We’ll come back to some of these lines later – for now, let’s finish up the Enuma Elish, because we’re pretty close to the end.

After many benedictions of Marduk’s rule were voiced, the gods then gathered for a final ritual. This ritual needs a bit of explanation. Gods in antiquity generally had a number of names and epithets that represented their various roles in the pantheons of which they were part. The more central they were within a pantheon, the more names, epithets, and roles they had. Marduk, when the Enuma Elish as we now have it was set down, evidently had fifty names. And the Enuma Elish turns to its closing section by listing the fifty names of Marduk.

The fifty names of Marduk, if you read them carefully, show that the Babylonian or Babylonians who set this story down understood Marduk as having a great many divine properties. The great many names and role descriptions emphasize that Marduk is a deity of cultivation and growing grain, and then that he listens to the other deities and manages their sometimes volatile tendencies. Marduk is hailed as a deity of justice and honest testimonies, and a god who could fight and win wars. His names and attributes go on and on, and most often, the closing tablet of the Enuma Elish emphasizes Marduk’s role as an arbiter of order, justice, purity, and piety. And among the epic’s final lines are a statement that summarizes Marduk’s overall responsibility over the world, and majesty. The last name of Marduk in the Enuma Elish is the “Lord of the World,” (7.136), and the text concludes by proclaiming,

[Marduk’s] word is truth, what he says is not changed,
Not one god can annul his utterance.
If he frowns, he will not relent,
If he is angry, no god can face his rage.
His heart is deep, his feelings all encompassing.
He before whom crime and sin must appear for judgment. (7.151-6)

And with these assurances, the Enuma Elish comes to its conclusion. [music]

The Enuma Elish and Babylonian History

So that takes us through the first main text in this program. Let’s bracket the other text – the Atrahasis – for just a moment longer, and discuss the short epic that we just read.

The Enuma Elish is at least 3,000 years old. It’s older than any extant Greek or Hebrew literature, including the Bible. Exactly how old it is, however, is a bit difficult to determine. Aside from eclipses, assigning firm dates to anything from antiquity is often impossible, especially the further back in time we go. Today, we tend to think of stories as coming from specific people and time periods – for instance, Fyodor Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866. There you go. However, when we go all the way back to the Bronze Age, we often have a whole bunch of versions and fragments of the same story in different dialects of Mesopotamian languages scattered in the rubble of different dig sites. Sometimes, a story clearly existed way back, during, say 1650 BCE, because we have pieces of it from that early period, but we have much better copies from, say, 650 BCE. This makes dating Mesopotamian literature very difficult. Thus, though we can’t be sure of exactly how the Enuma Elish came to be, its language – the Middle Babylonian dialect, marks it as having been written some time between 1500 and 1000 BCE.⁹ While the story was written during this period, the tablets that we have on which the epic is written are from an archaeological dig site called the Library of Nineveh, and they were likely physically pressed into clay tablets in the 600s BCE. So, while the Enuma Elish could be as old as 1500 BCE, the physical copy of it that we have dates from a period 900 years later.

While it’s hard to determine the Enuma Elish’s chronological point of origin, it’s a bit easier to determine its geographical point of origin. The Enuma Elish is definitely a Babylonian story. It sees Babylon as the paramount city and civilization in the created world, and the temple of Marduk in Babylon as the main home of the gods on earth. From about 1750 BCE all the way down to about 650 BCE, Babylon was a major power center in southern Mesopotamia – sometimes the most powerful metropolis of all, and at other times, one of a number of powerful cities. It first rose under the famous conqueror Hammurabi in the mid-1700s BCE, and for a few different centuries of its existence, it was Earth’s preeminent city, home to the most advanced technology and intellectual work being done during the Bronze and later Iron ages. Its patron god, as you can well guess after the story that we’ve just read, was Marduk, and so a tale that extolled Marduk as the deity of deities served a nationalistic agenda, as well as a religious one.

Scholars studying the Enuma Elish have generally understood the epic to have Babylonian patriotism as one of its main aims. According to this theory, when Babylon was powerful, perhaps, under the reigns of one of its more successful kings, it’s possible that a scribe was commissioned to synthesize a lot of extant mythology and write a story in which the main god of Babylon essentially subsumed all of the older Mesopotamian gods beneath his reign.¹⁰ Interestingly, when the Babylonian Enuma Elish was later copied in the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian, the Marduk’s name was changed to Ashur, in a find-and-replace operation that demonstrates that Assyrians figured the Enuma Elish could serve their own propagandistic aims with minimal modifications. Whoever was telling the story of the Enuma Elish, the tale that it told was simple. There had been many gods, and a turbulent early period. Now, there was one deity in charge.

If you are familiar with ancient literature, the one similar text that may spring to mind is the Theogony of the Greek poet Hesiod, set down very roughly around 700 BCE – around the same time as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The Theogony is essentially the same story that you just heard, only instead of Marduk, it’s the Greek god Zeus who pummels all of his adversaries and then ascends to the position of arbiter of divine justice and commander-in-chief of all the gods. There are similar stories from other west-Eurasian cultures from the cusp between the Bronze and Iron Ages, including the Baal cycle from ancient Ugarit and the Kumarbi cycle from the Hittites – in all of these tales, a brave young god associated with cloud chariots and thunder rises to the top of a pantheon. There was surely some cross pollination at work behind these ancient stories of one god rising out of many. And the tales served an explanatory function, as well. Humanity, as Mesopotamians knew back in 1500 BCE, cycles through a lot of gods. There are old gods that we no longer worship. During the bumpy century of the Bronze Age Collapse between 1200 and 1100 BCE, when footloose populations moved out of necessity or opportunism, different theological systems splashed together and created new ones. The Enuma Elish can be understood as a myth that explained this process – old gods being supplanted by new ones, and new gods taking on the roles and characteristics of their predecessors.

But the Enuma Elish shows us something else that’s less universal, and more distinct to the Late Bronze Age. As we discussed in the previous episode, one of the main fallacies of studying antiquity is to look for the definitive origins of things. Today, we generally associate the rise of monotheism with Judaism, because, of course, one of the main points of the Tanakh or Old Testament is that the Israelites and Judahites were only supposed to worship Yahweh. Monotheism, however, wasn’t something that was switched on out of nowhere. In Akkadian sacred literature, and in ancient Egyptian sacred literature, we increasingly see texts like the Enuma Elish – stories in which there are certainly a number of gods, but really, there are principal gods who rule over their peers – theological systems in which some gods are more equal than other gods. There are technical terms within religious studies that describe the positions between polytheism on one hand, and monotheism on the other, including henotheism, which is what we see in the Enuma Elish – the veneration of one god over and above a pantheon of acknowledged others. In other Akkadian theological writings, among them “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” Marduk is wise, equitable, and compassionate – less like the supersized heroes and vixens of Bronze Age mythology and more like the deities of modern monotheistic religions.¹¹ The proliferation of monotheism, which we can call “monotheization,” took a long time, and in the Enuma Elish, we can see a snapshot of its early phases, just as the Tanakh shows us a snapshot of some of its subsequent phases.

Putting aside all of these big historical questions about generations of gods and the inception of religion as a lot of us practice it today, though, what I wanted to share with you the most about the Enuma Elish is that it’s awesome. It is a colorful, explosive chronicle with gods and demons and lots of action, and to hear it told by a Babylonian bard must have been quite a spellbinding experience. There’s strong evidence that the epic used to be recited at a New Year’s festival in Babylon every year, or perhaps even enacted.¹² As I’ll emphasize from time to time in these early episodes, when we read cuneiform tablets or Homeric poetry, we basically reading scripts or song lyrics that once went along to a live performance in a mainly oral culture. The real Enuma Elish would have likely been staged at the temple of Marduk in Babylon, just across from the famous Tower of Babel, or Etemenanki, and it would have included lyres and drums and wind instruments. And imagine what that would have been like to be a Babylonian, at the Temple of Marduk, hearing a grand old story, both nationalistic and pious, about the rise of your civilization, with a cup of dates in one hand and a mug of beer in the other. For kids, the story had its tales of monster-slaying and the creation of humanity. For adults, the Enuma Elish actually held some complex history – the story of Mesopotamia itself, which had oodles and oodles of gods, but was also slowly whittling them down, such that a single deity in particular, no matter how many names he had, was still just one god. [music]

The Background and Opening of the Atrahasis

So, with the tale of Marduk in the Enuma Elish now read and carefully considered, we’re halfway there. Let’s go on to the second epic in this program, the Atrahasis. The Atrahasis is the longest extant Mesopotamian flood story. It is not the only Mesopotamian flood story, but we can get into that a bit later. People have studied Mesopotamian literature for a lot of reasons – a lot of it is just intrinsically, objectively really fun to read. But for those of us who know the Bible, Mesopotamian literature has always proved especially attractive because there are a few Sumerian and Akkadian narratives that sound a lot like ones that would later be set down in the oldest books of the Tanakh or Old Testament. There is a flood story in the Bible – in it, God becomes angry at the impiety of the world, and he floods the whole thing, selecting only a man named Noah, along with his wife and children, to survive the apocalypse on a giant ark that preserves the earth’s animals in mated pairs. At the climax of the Bible’s flood story, poor Noah and his family run aground on a tall mountain called Ararat. Noah sends out a sequence of birds to scout and see if there is any dry land left. First, a raven is sent, and it flies around as the floodwaters recede, presumably looking for land. Then, Noah sends out a dove, and it searches for land, and comes back without success. Then he sends the same dove out again, and the dove, thank goodness, returns with an olive leaf in its beak, proving that there’s dry land out there and that things are going to be okay. It’s a tremendous narrative in Chapters 6-9 of the Book of Genesis. And as we will learn, Mesopotamians told several versions of a very similar story long before the Book of Genesis was ever set down.

So, let’s take a look at the Babylonian Atrahasis. As before, I’ll quote from a couple of versions, but unless otherwise noted, quotes will come from the Benjamin Foster translation, as before, published in 2005 in a book called Before the Muses.

The Atrahasis begins with the words,

When gods were [like] man,
They did forced labor, they bore drudgery.
Great indeed was the drudgery of the gods,
The forced labor was heavy, the misery too much. (1.1-4)

This is something we’ve heard before in the Enuma Elish. The gods, during the early period of creation, had to work and work, and work and work, and there was no relief. The gods had to do all the things that real Mesopotamians had to do – dredge silt and clay, build dikes and levees, and dig and maintain canals. The gods, the Atrahasis says, did this day and night, making irrigated farmland out of a swamp, and they complained and complained. One god – his name was Enlil – was in charge, and the great many gods in Enlil’s workforce soon began to speak of a rebellion. The grumbling increased and increased, and soon there was talk of murdering Enlil.

Enlil is one of the three main characters of the Atrahasis, so let’s get to know him. Enlil is essentially the antagonist in the story we’ve just started reading. Historically, he was quite an old god – originally, Sumerians understood Enlil as the deity of wind and air and storms, and at different points, worshipped him as their loftiest god.¹³ In Sumerian as well as later Mesopotamian myths, Enlil has a mean streak. He is a deity inclined to anger and authoritarianism, and as we’ve just seen in the opening verses of the Atrahasis, he’s even a taskmaster to the gods themselves. In this story, we can think of him as “wrathful Enlil,” a god who is especially powerful, and as we’ll soon see, inclined to take his rage out on gods and humanity alike.

To return to the Atrahasis, as powerful and despotic as Enlil was, he suddenly found himself facing an outright insurrection. The other gods burned their work tools and baskets. They surrounded the unsuspecting dictator’s house. When Enlil’s subordinates made him aware of the revolt, he became pale and worried. Enlil summoned the wise god of the sweet waters, Enki, and the god of the sky, Anu. These three, by the way, are effectively the highest Mesopotamian gods in the story we’re currently reading, and understanding the rebellion that was afoot, they went into crisis management mode. The three high gods sent a messenger out to the lower gods, asking the lower gods who was leading them – which one of the subordinate gods was spearheading the uprising? The working-class gods sent back their message. Every single one of them was leading the revolution against Enlil, they said.

This was terrible news. Even the trio of especially powerful gods barricaded in Enlil’s house couldn’t fight off all the lower gods. And so the wrathful Enlil gave into despair. But wise Enki thought, and thought. He sympathized with the plight of the lesser gods. They were exhausted, he said. They had been justified in their mutiny. And Enki said he had an idea.

Mesopotamia had a number of mother goddesses or birth goddesses that went by different names and attributes depending on the century and civilization. In the Atrahasis, the Mesopotamian flood epic that we’re currently reading, the birth goddess is called Mami, spelled M-A-M-I. And Mami was the goddess who came to mind when wise Enki began considering how to quell the insurrection that the loftiest gods suddenly found themselves facing. Wise Enki and the others summoned the birth goddess Mami. And they asked her, this time in the Oxford Dalley translation,

You are the womb-goddess (to be the) creator of mankind!
Create primeval man, that he may bear the yoke!
Let him bear the yoke, the work. . .
Let man bear the load of the gods. (1.194-7)

Wise Enki thus said that humanity needed to be created to do work for the gods. We are created for the same purpose in the Enuma Elish, as you heard earlier – Mesopotamians saw humanity as the workforce of the gods. While in the Enuma Elish, it’s Marduk who creates humanity, in the Atrahasis, it’s Enki and Mami, the goddess of childbirth. Here’s how the creation of humanity goes down in the Atrahasis.

The goddess Mami was apprehensive about creating humanity. She asked Enki to at least supply her with materials. Enki said he would. And so Enki brought clay. Enki decreed that a god had to be slaughtered so that humanity could be created. And thus one of the gods was indeed slaughtered, and the birth goddess Mami “mixed the clay with his flesh and blood / That. . .god and man were thoroughly mixed in the clay. . .From the flesh of the god a spi[rit remained]. . .After she had mixed that clay” (1.225-31). The gods, high and low, all gathered and spat into the mixture of spirit and clay. And then Mami said that it was done. Humanity had been created, and onto humankind had been placed the burden of work that the gods had formerly carried. Hearing the news, the gods burst out with joyous exclamations. The rebellion was over, and their long tenure as diggers of canals and builders of levees was finished for good. Forever after, humanity would be the engine that ran the world. [music]

The Boisterousness of Humanity and the Wrath of Enlil

The first humans grew to maturity, and when the time came, the birth goddess Mami served as their midwife. The first generations of humans went to work, fashioning new hoes and shovels and undertaking the irrigation projects so central to Mesopotamian civilization. They grew food for themselves, and equally, for the gods, and before long, almost 1,200 years had passed. Unfortunately, though, as the earth began teeming with industrious humans, not all of the gods were pleased with them.

Earlier in this program, in the Enuma Elish, we heard the story of how the primordial freshwater god Apsu, when the first generations of gods were created, got ticked off at how loud and boisterous they were. Now, in the Atrahasis, we’re going to hear this same story again. What happens in the Atrahasis is that with the earth now swarming with busy humans, that wrathful god Enlil started becoming irritated. Not one to do things halfway, Enlil decided that it was time for humanity to be destroyed, and he unleashed a deadly fever on humanity to decimate the boisterous beings who had become so annoying to him.

It is at this point in the story that we meet the third main character. We have met the wrathful god of winds, Enlil. We’ve met the wise god of sweet waters, Enki, who came up with the idea of creating humanity. The third main character of the Atrahasis epic is Atrahasis himself. Atrahasis was a wise mortal, and a favorite of the deity Enki. Enki and Atrahasis talked. Distraught that humanity had been hit by the plague, Atrahasis asked Enki what to do. Enki said that people should ignore all of the gods that they usually worshipped, and hurry to the house of a god called Namtar – the deity who controlled plagues. They should bring the plague god an offering of bread. Humanity did just this, and the plague god, who was perhaps just a little bit lonely and unused to getting such nice presents, quickly stopped the plague. The first great crisis to confront humankind had passed.

The second tablet of the story of Atrahasis begins with a similar episode. Another 1,200 years passed, and there were so many people that wrathful Enlil once again was rankled at how noisy it had become. Enlil said he couldn’t sleep. He decided, again, to make an attempt to curb human life on earth. Only this time, Enlil resolved to use a drought. In a rich section of Bronze Age poetry toward the beginning of the second tablet, wrathful Enlil told his subordinates, in the Oxford Dalley translation,

Cut off food supplies to the people!
Let the vegetation be too scant for their hunger!
Let [the rain god] wipe away his rain.
Below (?) let no flood-water flow from the springs.
Let wind go, let it strip the ground bare,
Let clouds gather (but) not drop rain,
Let the field yield a diminished harvest,
Let [the grain goddess] stop up her bosom. (2.9-19)

And so the drought began, and again, humanity faced an existential crisis. In the Atrahasis, interestingly, before the flood, there is a plague and a drought. And as before, Enki spoke to Atrahasis, and the god and the mortal hero implemented a similar plan. Humanity began ignoring every single god except for – this time – the rain god. They brought the rain god fine bread, and sure enough, the rains came again as they always had.

The wrathful Enlil’s persecutions continued. He evidently became frustrated at the fruitful collaborations between wise Enki and the mortal Atrahasis, because Enki was no longer allowed to communicate directly with Atrahasis. A famine held hold of Babylon, and Atrahasis stared out at the river and wept. For the first year, people survived on old stores of grain. Fields grew white with briny water, as the fresh water all receded. The tall grew slumped, and muscular people became withered, their faces crusted and gray. There’s a gap in the text here, but it seems that somehow, Enki managed to come to the aid of humanity again, somehow flooding the famished land of Mesopotamia with fish.

When the story resumes on the second tablet, Enlil is once again furious at Enki. Wrathful Enlil railed against Enki to any god who would listen. The stern Enlil could not understand why the wise god of the sweet fresh waters kept impeding his plans to destroy humanity. At an assembly, Enlil demanded that Enki take a binding oath to abide by the word of the council of gods. But Enki was hesitant. He now understood that Enlil wanted a flood – a global flood, to accomplish the wrathful god’s purpose of destroying all of humanity. But Enki didn’t want any part of the flood. If the council of gods were going to kill every single human on earth, they could do it without his help.

Wise Enki’s remonstration, however, went unheeded. The gods indeed were going to do just what wrathful Enlil wanted – it was going to rain, and keep on raining, and all the levees would break. And Tablet 2 ends with a climactic couplet telling us that “The gods commanded annihilation, / E[nlil] committed the evil deed against the peoples” (2.34-5). [music]

The Great Flood Rages in Atrahasis

The wise god Enki sent his chosen mortal, the comparably wise Atrahasis, messages in dreams. Water was coming, Enki said. Atrahasis needed to be ready. Atrahasis needed to flee his home and leave everything behind. He needed to build a boat, and cover it with tarps. The boat needed to be watertight and made strong with pitch at all its seams. It would happen soon, Enki indicated, and he would send a sign before the real rain started to fall. Atrahasis heard all of this in his dream, and he understood.

The wise mortal Atrahasis went to a human council, and he told the people assembled there that he could not follow wrathful Enlil, like they did. He had tied his fate to Enki. The passage that follows in tablet three is not in good shape, but somehow it still manages to communicate the apprehension Atrahasis experienced as he built his boat, and the strange aura of doom in the air before the coming of the flood. Scattered lines survive that describe carpenters and shipwrights hurrying to construct Atrahasis’s boat, and there are lines describing how a wide variety of animals were brought on board. Atrahasis, in the last days before the rain came, held a feast onboard his boat, for reasons unknown. But as the text becomes readable again, we learn about how the wise mortal Atrahasis felt just prior to the apocalypse, in some absolutely magnificent lines of Akkadian poetry. In the Foster translation, as friends and family feast on his boat,

While one was eating and another was drinking,
[Atrahasis] went in and out; he could not sit,
he could not take his place,
For his heart was broken, he was retching gall.
The outlook of the weather changed,
[The rain god] began to roar in the clouds.
The god they heard, his clamor.
[Atrahasis] brought pitch to seal his door.
By the time he had bolted his door,
[The rain god] was roaring in the clouds.
The winds were furious as he set forth,
[Atrahasis] cut the mooring rope, he released the boat. (3.43-55)

What happened next was pure bedlam. The thunderbird ripped at the sky with its talons. The flood came down over earth like a living thing – a war. People couldn’t even see each other in the tumult of moving water. The flood bellowed, like it was alive, and in the sunless darkness, the wind screamed like a raptor. People were as small and helpless as flies, and as for the gods, even they were frightened at what they had unleashed. They soared up to heaven and cowered there in terror.

Wise Enki was absolutely distraught. And just as the gods gawked at the full magnitude of what they had unleashed, they faced another crisis. With humanity now decimated and the earth choked with floodwaters, the gods had neither food, nor drink. And out of all of them, in addition to the crestfallen Enki, the goddess of childbirth, Mami, was most distressed. Humanity, Mami said, now lay dead in a sea, like capsized rafts. As the text tells us, “While [Mami] wailed, her emotion was spent, / The gods wept with her for the land. / She had her fill of woe, she was thirsty for beer” (3.4.14-16). It’s quite a memorable line – more to my juvenile sensibilities, maybe – this moment in tablet three when the goddess Mami looks down on the despoliation of the earth and humanity and essentially says, “Damn, I need a beer.” But really, beer and grain were the reasons why humanity was created in the Atrahasis, and as the storm raged underneath them, the gods of Mesopotamia all shared Mami’s sense of horror and uncertainty as “Their lips were agonized with thirst, / They were suffering pangs of hunger” (3.4.21-2).

The Aftermath of the Flood in the Atrahasiss

Seven days into the great flood, the gods were thus hungry, thirsty, and worried. But among them, the wrathful Enlil was still unrelenting in his rage against humanity. And when the rain stopped and Enlil looked down, he saw the lone vessel. Atrahasis’ ship, built strong and tightly sealed, had survived the apocalypse. Enlil was not pleased. Enlil boomed, “Where did life(?) escape? / How did a man survive the catastrophe?” (3.6.9-10). It had been Enki, Enlil growled, Enki who had been opposed to him this whole time.

Hearing Enlil’s accusation, wise Enki confirmed that the wrathful Enlil was correct. He said he had preserved humanity for the sake of preserving life, and keeping the gods themselves alive. Enki’s revelation meant that the gods were at an impasse. They had become dependent on humanity. At the same time, many shared wrathful Enlil’s annoyance at the sheer quantity of humans on earth, and they worried that from the humans that survived, the world might once again become noisy and overpopulated. And so the gods came up with a solution, and this solution brings the Atrahasis to its conclusion.¹⁴

The gods decided that humans could no longer live forever. It was unsustainable to have the human population expanding and expanding, and then the gods destroying swathes of the population with famines and droughts and floods. The goddess of birth was thus required to establish death, as well, for mortals, and thereafter, all of humanity would have only a limited time on earth. And the Atrahasis ends with a short coda in which the original composer, or bard who performed the epic, sang some final lines directed at Enlil:

This [my] song (is) for your praise.
May the. . .gods hear,
let them extol your great deed to each other.
I have sung of the flood to all peoples: Listen! (3.8.15-8)

And that’s the end of the Babylonian Atrahasis, the longest and most complete flood story from the ancient world. [music]

The Atrahasis and Other Mesopotamian Flood Stories

The Atrahasis is likely older than the Enuma Elish. There are a lot of manuscripts of both of these long, important stories. But the longest extant manuscript of the Atrahasis is in the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, meaning it was written some time between very roughly 1900 and 1500 BCE. The three tablets that we just read that make up this manuscript were discovered at a site called Sippar in the south of present-day Iraq, and these tablets are marked as having been written during the reign of an Old Babylonian king who was on the throne from 1702-1682 BCE.¹⁵ And while the Atrahasis is the longest and most complete flood story from antiquity, it is not the only one.

Around the same time that the Atrahasis was set down, a comparable Sumerian story scholars call the “Eridu Genesis” was written. The “Eridu Genesis” tells a similar tale – humanity is needed to serve the needs of the gods, we become too rambunctious and plentiful, Enlil gets angry at us, and a single wise mortal is chosen to build a boat to survive the flood. In the Sumerian version of the story, the Atrahasis figure is called Ziusudra.

And there’s another famous Mesopotamian flood story, in which the Atrahasis figure is called Uta-napishti. Uta-napishti is a wise sage whom Gilgamesh seeks out in the later part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh, tentatively dated between 1300 and 1000 BCE, tells of how the wise mortal Uta-napishti endured the wrath and rainfall of an angry god, and, though the help of kindly Enki, survived. In the Epic of Gilgamesh’s version of the flood myth, Atrahasis stands on the deck of his ship after the rain stops, and sends out first a dove, then a swallow, and then a raven, and it’s only when the raven doesn’t return to him that he knows that dry land is out there, and that the terrible crisis has passed. We’ll read the Uta-napishti version of the flood story in our next program on the Epic of Gilgamesh. For now, let’s draw some conclusions about Mesopotamian flood stories in general.

For some reason, flood myths, like the pyramids of Egypt, tend to elicit weird conspiracy theories on the part of people who don’t actually know much about the ancient world. The reason that Mesopotamians told flood stories was that they lived in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain, and that seasonal overabundances of water were part of their annual cycle and their agricultural economy. Mesopotamia was a gigantic irrigated farm, and a disproportionate number of its gods and goddesses are associated with crops, fertility, agriculture, spring storms, rain, and that kind of thing, because the miracle of ancient Iraq was always its soil and hydrology. Mesopotamians thought about water a lot – as we learned earlier, their first two primordial gods, Apsu and Tiamat, were the embodiments of freshwater and saltwater, and one of their most beloved deities, wise Enki, was also a water god – the god of the fresh aquifers that gave life to tasty produce every year. There were more besides these. The point here is that when you have a riverside civilization anchored in agriculture that experiences regular floods both from upriver storm systems as well as heavy seasonal rainfall directly over the land between the rivers, you’re going to have folks writing stories about floods. Ancient Egyptians wrote flood stories, too, for precisely the same reasons. There have been studies of silt deposit layers in Mesopotamian archaeological sites dating back to the 3000s BCE. They show evidence of the occasional flood in the Tigris-Euphrates ecosystem, but nothing that disrupted civilization there.¹⁶

Flood stories were inspired by actual floods. But they also served, as most human myths do, an explanatory function. In Mesopotamia, specifically, in the Atrahasis and the part of the Epic of Gilgamesh dealing with the great flood, the flood marks the moment at which humankind lost its immortality. We used to live forever, the story goes, but then there got to be too many of us, and so the gods flooded the world, and it was decided that we would only live for a short time, and that would keep our population in check. It’s an etiological tale, or an explanatory tale, in plainer English, about why we are not immortal – at least the Mesopotamian version of the flood story is.

And more broadly, in antiquity, there were many versions of the general tale of humanity losing its immortality, or humanity’s lifespans being reduced from centuries to decades. In these stories, humanity reaches a crisis point with the gods or God, and then immortal chastens mortal with some sort of punishment. Mesopotamians, as we’ve learned, told of how we used to live indefinitely, and then, after the flood, we became mortal. In a lost Greek epic called the Cypria, the Greek god Zeus elected to curb overpopulation with war, rather than with a flood.¹⁷ But needless to say, the most famous ancient near eastern flood story is the one in the Bible.

Let’s explore how the Mesopotamian flood stories may have influenced the one that many of us, whether we’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, grow up with. We’ll begin by talking about timeframes. The flood story in Genesis was set down by what are called the Jahwistic and Priestly sources of the Torah. Since the nineteenth century, biblical scholars have worked to sort out the original Hebrew-language authors of the Bible’s first five books based on their styles, their interests, and the names they use for God, and today, the first books of the Bible are studied as a marbled Hebrew-language layer cake of writings that show different styles, interests, and theological perspectives. We can get into what’s called the documentary hypothesis in later episodes. Biblical scholars have tried to date the two sources of the flood story in Genesis – again they’re called the Jahwistic and Priestly sources, based on all sorts of hypotheses and evidence. But without getting into the weeds too much, what is today the Book of Genesis, including the flood narrative, likely came together during the 600s and 500s BCE, being a compendium old oral traditions together with laws and ritual regulations relevant to the tumultuous history that Jews faced during these difficult centuries.

In short, then, the Bible’s flood story likely came from the 600s and 500s BCE, making it significantly younger than its Mesopotamian forebears, so based on general timeframes, direct influence is not impossible. Now, let’s set Genesis on one side of our desk, and its older Mesopotamian relatives on the other side, and see what we think. The Genesis flood story is somewhat more pessimistic than the Mesopotamian one. In Sumerian and Akkadian stories, the flood happens because wrathful Enlil is irate at the world being noisy and overcrowded. In the Bible, by contrast, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of mankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Gen 6.5). In short, then, in the Bible, we are massacred because we are evil, and in the older Sumerian and Akkadian stories, we are massacred for purposes of population control. However, as grim as all the flood stories are, they also have unexpectedly happy endings.

The story of the flood in the Book of Genesis concludes with a barbecue. The flood ends, Noah lets all of the animals that he’s saved skitter off, some time passes, and then Noah makes sacrificial offerings to God. God smells the pleasing odor of the sacrifices, and then, in the Bible, God vows, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind. . .nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, / seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, / summer and winter, day and night, / shall not cease” (Gen 8.21-2). Later, God tells Noah, “I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you” (Gen 9.9). Thus, for the considerable suffering and uncertainty that Noah endured, he has the assurance that in the future, he and his descendants will be safe. These verses in the Bible are comforting, or at least, likely intended as such. A period of awful strife has come to its conclusion, and God promises Noah to take it easy with the apocalypses. The Mesopotamian flood stories, as well, had optimistic endings. In the flood story we’ll read next time in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a mortal named Uta-Napishi survives the flood. And Uta-Napishi remembers how, after the crisis had passed and the gods and waters had become calm once more,

Enlil came up inside the boat,
     he took hold of my hand and brought me on board.
He brought aboard my wife and made her kneel at my side,
     He touched our foreheads, standing between us to bless us:

[Enlil said:] “In the past Uta-napishti was a mortal man,
     but now he and his wife shall become like us gods!” (11.199-204)¹⁹

This isn’t exactly what happens in the Bible. Noah certainly isn’t made immortal. But in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in addition to the Atrahasis epic, just like in Genesis, after strife comes peace, and each wise mortal who has endured the deluge earns a reward.²⁰

So let’s try to answer the big flood question. As these Mesopotamian flood stories started being translated from ancient to modern languages beginning in the 1870s, what many people wanted to know was whether or not Mesopotamian boat guys like Ziusudra, Atrahasis, and Uta-napishti influenced the story of the Biblical boat guy, Noah. The answer is that although no one knows for certain, that there’s very decent evidence that the Biblical flood story had some Mesopotamian influences behind it. The closest parallels are between the tale of Uta-Napishti in the Epic of Gilgamesh and that of Noah in the Bible. Both of these flood survivors, once the rain has stopped, send out a sequence of three birds in order to confirm that dry land is out there – with Uta-Napisti, it’s a dove, then a swallow, and then a raven, and the raven doesn’t come back, confirming that it found somewhere to land (11.147-56); with Noah it’s a raven first, and then a dove, and then the same dove again, which returns with an olive leaf, being evidence that the dove, too, found land (Gen 8.7-11). Those are pretty specific parallels. The name Uta-Napishti, sometimes abbreviated as Na’ish, isn’t too far from the Hebrew נחַ (NO-akh), or Noah.²¹ I don’t know whether there was any direct line of influence, and I don’t think anyone does, but now, you know the facts of the flood stories.

I think that when we first start studying ancient literature, the Biblical parallels are what fascinate a lot of us – especially if we’ve been brought up Jewish or Christian or Muslim. The Bible’s flood story, as we’ve learned, probably isn’t entirely original. The Book of Job contains a tale toward the end about Yahweh pummeling the oceanic Leviathan, a story that sounds quite a bit like the tale of Marduk besting oceanic Tiamat in the Enuma Elish.²² There’s a Sumerian story about a goddess being born from the rib of a male god.²³ Sumerian king lists, like early tales in Genesis, attest that humans once had exceedingly long lives. The longest extant Sumerian text, the Cylinders of Gudea, is a description of a temple built to win the favor of an ancient Sumerian god, just as one of the lengthiest stretches of the Torah is a description of how the Tabernacle must be built to honor Yahweh.²⁴ The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the opening of Ecclesiastes, compares human life to the length of a mere breath.²⁵ There were evidently once so many ancient Mesopotamian stories about babies coming down rivers in baskets, like Moses does in the Book of Exodus, that an older Akkadian satirical text survives that makes fun of the baby-in-a-basket tradition as a cliché.²⁶

If you are new to Mesopotamian literature, and antiquity more generally, I think there’s a temptation to look at these kinds of parallels and draw arrows of influence, and say, “Hah! There! There are Babylonian influences in the Bible!” And as you’ve heard over the past ninety minutes of this episode, sure, there probably are some. Narratives always borrow from other narratives. But the parallels between all these texts aren’t evidence of one sect of humanity plagiarizing another sect, so much as they are evidence of the large-scale cultural continuity of the ancient near east as a whole.

The First Temple of Jerusalem was once precisely 540 miles away from the Tower of Babel as the crow – or raven, or dove – flies, about the distance between Paris and Berlin, or between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. And importantly, a few generations of Jewish intelligentsia, between 586 and 539 BCE, lived in Babylon during what’s often called the “Babylonian Captivity.” There, during the exilic period, they continued writing texts within what we now call the Bible, and some of the exiled Judahites would have learned the Late Babylonian dialect of the Akkadian language – also a Semitic language, just like Hebrew, which had a gigantic and rich literary tradition that included texts like the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis. The point of studying Mesopotamian literature, ultimately, shouldn’t be to catch one culture in the act of copying the work of another culture. We’re looking at timeframes of thousands of years, and just a few trees from what was once a giant forest. The point is that beneath the brandings of various ancient civilizations, there was one connected human culture – as connected as the irrigation canals of Mesopotamia, the caravan routes across the Syrian desert, and the shipping lanes of the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea.

Because of the Bible’s partisanship toward the Israelites, and the remoteness of early Iron Age and Bronze Age history, we have tended to imagine the ancient near east as a time and place of militarized tribes with irreconcilable differences. But the flood stories that we looked at in this program, together with the Enuma Elish, show us something else. Not just in ancient Israel, but in the more populous metropolises of ancient Iraq, certain ancient gods were taking on more and more properties. They were male. They were wise, and martially formidable. They were increasingly being associated with thunder and chariots of clouds; with empires and kingships – Ashur with the Assyrians, Marduk with the Babylonians, and as we’ll soon see, Yahweh with the city of Jerusalem under Hezekiah and afterward. As city states swelled into empires, the patron gods of city states rose to the thrones of pantheons, from the time of the Enuma Elish in, say, 1300 BCE up until Rome formally became Christian in the 300s CE. But again, beneath the pennants of kingdoms and the visages of presiding gods, there were millions of ancient humans, and among us, always, there was folklore, sacred and secular, high and low, performed in the sacred courts of Babylon and retold informally around the olive presses of the ancient Levant; sung in boats poling down the lower Euphrates and in the highlands of Anatolia. This was the ancient Near East. When you really read the extant corpuses of Sumerian and Akkadian literature, together with ancient Egyptian literature and a good, footnoted scholarly Bible, as we’re going to do over the next couple dozen episodes, you do see some pretty nasty conflicts, and some prejudices that had long term consequences. At the same time, though, the civilizations of the fertile crescent were also just one big, interlinked thing, singing songs, and telling stories in an ongoing flood that’s older than even Mesopotamia, and that you and I are a part of, too. [music]

Moving on to the Epic of Gilgamesh

Alright, everybody, that takes us through the Enuma Elish, circa 1500-1000 BCE, and the Atrahasis, circa 1700 BCE, the second and third most famous pieces of Mesopotamian literature, behind the Epic of Gilgamesh. I’ve posted links in this show’s episode notes to the main translations that I used for these texts – I don’t try to make any affiliate money with these – I just want you to read them and for the scholars, translators, and publishing companies behind them to flourish and keep doing what they’re doing. When I summarize stories in this podcast, I stay very close to the original text, offering as many quotes as I can without violating fair use rules, so that you’re basically getting a free audiobook version of each text, with the very best or most famous bits coming from the original sources themselves. However, needless to say, it’s always a good idea to check things out for yourself, and as I mentioned last time, in each episode’s transcription on the website – free, no ads, and they include maps and pictures – there’s also a section with references and footnotes so you can track down any book you’d like.

Right, next time, we’ve got a blockbuster. The Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in the early 1850s and first translated into English in 1876, is the most famous Mesopotamian story. The epic is thought to have been composed between about 1300 and 1000 BCE, and it’s really something special. There are older epics in Mesopotamian literature – the Sumerian Enmerkar saga, the Lugalbanda cycle, and the Descent of Ishtar, not to mention, obviously, the Akkadian Enuma Elish and Atrahasis we just learned all about. However, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the first story from the ancient world that most people, without a lot of background, can just pick up and read and enjoy. It is, like the Odyssey or the Aeneid or Arthurian romances, about a dude going on a long, eventful quest. It has gods, monsters, magic, sex, violence, and all the usual stuff that’s entertaining to us humans, and parts of it, even in translation and after three thousand years, are stunningly beautiful.

So thanks for listening to Literature and History. There’s a quiz on this program at literatureandhistory.com, and a link to that quiz in the episode notes section of your podcasting app. If you’ll remember from last time, every Literature and History episode ends with a funny song, and if you’d like to hear that song, keep listening. If not, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Ishtar and I will see you next time.

Still listening? So, I got to thinking about those Mesopotamian gods and all the beer they drank. Now there’s this line in the Atrahasis that I find just absolutely immortal. The gods have gone through with Enlil’s harsh plan to kill everyone. And suddenly the gods realize they’re not going to have anyone to make them food or alcohol. Then all of a sudden shit gets real. The goddess of childbirth, Mami, feels particular remorse. The line I mentioned, in the Foster translation, concerns Mami, and it says, “She had her fill of woe, she was thirsty for beer” (3.4.16). An older translation of Atrahasis, by scholar Timothy Stephany, renders the line as, “She was overcome with heartache, but could find no beer.” Now when I first read these – admittedly goofy – lines I think that was the moment I knew I just had to get my hands on as much Mesopotamian literature as I could find. Any culture that believes that we were created to make beer for vastly superior entities is onto something. Anyway, I got to thinking about that line – “She was overcome with heartache, but could find no beer,” and I wrote the following song, which is called “Babylon’s Alcoholic Gods.” I hope it’s fun and cute, and again I’ll see you next time for a show on the Epic of Gilgamesh.



References

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