Enûma Eliš, "When on high"

One of the tablets containing
the creation poem Enûma Eliš,
"When on high."
(Image from Wikicommons).

Whenever I taught “Ancient Civilizations” or the awfully named “Western Civilizations,” I always started the course with Sumer and the Babylonian Empires. I did this partly to emphasize that what we call “Western Civilization” began in what we now consider to be the East, whether Middle East or Ancient Far East. Indeed, we inherited from Sumer our method of telling time (using a double twelve-hour system and with the hours and minutes broken into 60 units each), basic concepts of geometry, and such easily recognizable expressions such as “the four corners of the earth” and “the seven seas.” In many ways, we owe great debts to Sumer, and we short change ourselves by believing that we derived nothing from lands outside “the West.”

One of the things that I hope surprised my students is how much Sumerian beliefs influenced a certain religion known as Judaism that came along much later. One of my projects was to have the students compare and contrast Tablets IV and V of the Enûma Eliš (composed c. 1750 BCE) with the stores of creation in the biblical Genesis. My intent was never to diminish the Genesis stories, particularly since the author of the creation of the universe and earth did a beautiful job of retelling the Enûma Eliš in a new way that builds on the poetic aspects of the original. And that’s the key, the later retelling builds on and expands the original so as to inspire people in the process of creating a unique identity.

To be fair, the Hebrews were not the first to expand on the Enûma Eliš. The Akkadians (who created the first empire by conquering the Sumerian city states) rewrote the tale around 1200 BCE so that Marduk, the Akkadian sky god, took center stage and surplanted the Sumerian Anu. While I’m sure that they made some other changes or additions, placing Marduk in the role of the protagonist was pivotal to their use of the story to show Akkadian dominion over the city states.

This webpage at the Ancient History Encyclopedia provides more contextualization for the story as well as presents the Akkadian text itself.

https://www.ancient.eu/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/