Ancient Iraq (13 page)

Tales of Creation

The Mesopotamians imagined the earth as a flat disc surrounded with a rim of mountains and floating on an ocean of sweet waters, the
abzu
or
apsû
. Resting on these mountains and separated from the earth by the atmosphere (
lil
) was the sky vault along which revolved the astral bodies. A similar hemisphere underneath the earth formed the Netherworld where lived the spirits of the dead. Finally, the whole universe (
anki
: 9 sky-earth) was immersed like a gigantic bubble in a boundless, uncreated, primeval ocean of salt water. The earth itself consisted of nothing more than Mesopotamia and the immediate centre stood for the Babylonians or, probably, Nippur for the Sumerians.

How and by whom had the world been created? The answers to the question varied, no doubt because they were founded on different traditions.
¹⁶
One legend stated that Anu had created the heavens and Enki the
apsû
, his abode. Another attributed the creation of the universe to the general assembly of all the gods and yet another to only four great gods acting collectively. The beginning of an incantation against the ‘worm’ responsible for toothaches says that Anu created the sky, which created the earth, which in turn created the rivers, the rivers the canals, the canals the marshes and the marshes the worm. But this sounds rather like the nursery rhyme ‘The house that Jack built’ and

How the Sumerians conceived the world. The earth is a flat disc surrounded by an ocean; above and below the hemispheres of sky (heavens residences of the gods) and netherworld (hell) with special gods. The whole world floats in a primordial ocean.
From S. N. Kramer
, L‘Histoire commence à Sumer,
1975
.

should perhaps not be taken too seriously. More interesting is a version from the town of Sippar, according to which the great Babylonian god Marduk had ‘built a reed platform (or raft) on the surface of the waters, then created dust and poured it around the platform’, because this is actually how the marsh-Arabs of southern Iraq make the artificial islands upon which they erect their reed-huts.
¹⁷
In general the Sumerians believed that the primeval ocean, personified by the goddess Nammu, had begotten alone a male sky and a female earth intimately joined together. The fruit of their union, the air-god Enlil, had separated the sky from the earth and, with the latter, had engendered all living creatures. The theory that the ocean was the primordial element from which the universe was born, that
the shape of the universe had resulted from the forceful separation of heaven from earth by a third party was generally adopted in Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, and forms the basis of the most complete and detailed story of creation that we possess: the great Babylonian epic called, from its opening sentence,
Enuma elish
, ‘When on high…’ But the Babylonian genesis has still wider philosophical implications; it describes the creation not as a beginning but as an end, not as the gratuitous and inexplicable act of one god but as the result of a cosmic battle, the fundamental and eternal struggle between those two aspects of nature: Good and Evil, Order and Chaos.

Enuma elish
is a long poem in seven tablets originally composed during the Old Babylonian period (beginning of the second millennium), though all the copies found so far were written during the first millennium
B.C.
In most copies the main part is played by Marduk, the patron-god of Babylon, but an Assyrian version substitutes the name of Ashur, the national god of Assyria, for that of Marduk. On the other hand, Marduk is once called in the poem ‘the Enlil of the gods’, and as we know that Marduk had usurped the rank and prerogatives of the Sumerian god Enlil, we may confidently surmise that the hero of the epic was originally Enlil, as in the Sumerian cosmogony already mentioned.
¹⁸

The Mesopotamian mythographers took their inspiration from their own country. If we stand on a misty morning near the present Iraqi sea-shore, at the mouth of the Shatt-el-‘Arab, what do we see? Low banks of clouds hang over the horizon; large pools of sweet water seeping from underground or left over from the river floods mingle freely with the salty waters of the Persian Gulf; of the low mud-flats which normally form the landscape no more than a few feet are visible; all around us sea, sky and earth are mixed in a nebulous, watery chaos. This is how the authors of the poem, who must have often witnessed such a spectacle, imagined the beginning of the world. When nothing yet had a name, that is to say when nothing had yet
been created, they wrote, Apsu (the fresh waters), Tiamat (the salt waters) and Mummu (the clouds
¹⁹
) formed together one single confused body:

In the landscape described above larger patches of land emerge from the mist as the sun rises, and soon a clear-cut line separates the sky from the waters and the waters from the earth. So in the myth the first gods to emerge from the chaos were Lahmu and Lahamu, representing the silt; then came Anshar and Kishar, the twin horizons of sky and earth. Anshar and Kishar begot Anu, and Anu in turn begot Ea (Enki). At the same time, or shortly afterwards, a number of lesser deities were born from Apsu and Tiamat, but of these gods the poem says nothing except that they were turbulent and noisy. They ‘troubled Tiamat's belly’ and disturbed their parents so much that they decided to destroy them. When they heard of this plan the great gods Lahmu and Lahamu, Anshar and Kishar, Anu and Ea were shocked and amazed: ‘they remained speechless’, no doubt thinking that the exuberance of Life was preferable to the peace of a sterile Confusion. However, ‘Ea the all-wise’ soon found a means of wrecking the evil scheme. He ‘devised and set up a master design’: he cast a magic spell upon Mummu and paralysed him; in the same way Apsu was put to sleep and slain. After this double victory Ea retired to his temple, now founded on the abyss of sweet waters (
apsû
) and with his wife
Damkina engendered a son, Marduk, who possessed outstanding qualities:

Meanwhile, Tiamat was still alive and free. Delirious with rage, she declared war on the gods. She created a number of fierce dragons and monstrous serpents ‘sharp of tooth, unsparing of fangs, with venom for blood‘, and placed one of her sons, Kingu, at the head of the gruesome army. The gods were terrified. Anshar ‘smote his loins and bit his lips’ in distress, and declared that Kingu should be put to death. But who was to do this? One after another, the gods declined to fight. Finally, Marduk accepted under one condition: that he be made their king. ‘Set up the assembly,’ said he, ‘proclaim supreme my destiny, let my word, instead of yours, determine the fates.’ The gods had no alternative but to agree. They met at a banquet and, slightly inebriated, they endowed Marduk with the royal powers and insignia. Marduk chose his weapons: the bow, the lightning, the flood-storm, the four winds, the net. He clad himself with ‘an armour of terror, a turban of fearsome halo’, and mounted on his storm-chariot went forth alone to fight the forces of Chaos. At the sight of him, the army of monsters disbanded; Kingu, their chief, was captured. As for Tiamat, she was caught in Marduk's net and, as she opened her mouth, he at once blew the four winds into her stomach. He then pierced her heart with an arrow, smashed her skull with his mace, and finally split her body open ‘like a shell-fish’. Half of her ‘he set up and ceiled it as sky’, the other half he placed beneath the earth.

After his victory Marduk put the universe in order. Having in the new sky fixed the course of the sun, the moon and the stars, he decided to create mankind:

On Ea's advice Kingu was put to death, and from his blood Marduk and his father fashioned the first human being. Thereafter Marduk divided the gods into two groups: three hundred of them to dwell in heaven, three hundred to live on earth side by side with humanity. As a reward for his victory the gods built Marduk's great temple in Babylon, Esagila, and, assembled at another great banquet, they ‘proclaimed his fifty names’.

Childish as this story may sound, it was loaded with grave significance for the Babylonians. To their deeply religious minds it offered a non-rational but nevertheless acceptable ‘explanation’ of the universe. Among other things, it described how the world had assumed its alleged shape; it made good the fact that men must be the servants of the gods; it accounted for the natural wickedness of humanity, created from the blood of evil Kingu; it also justified the exorbitant powers of Marduk (originally Enlil) by his election and his heroic exploit. But, above all, it had, like the Sacred Marriage, a powerful magical virtue. If every year for nearly two millennia
Enuma elish
was recited by the priests of Babylon on the fourth day of the New Year Festival it was because the Babylonians felt that the great cosmic struggle had never really ended and that the forces of Chaos were always ready to challenge the established Order of the gods.

Life, Death and Destiny

The commerce of men with the gods, like the commerce of men between themselves, had its degrees. If the King of Babylon was
directly under Marduk's orders the Babylonian peasant was in closer contact with Ashnan, the barley-god, or Shumuqan, the cattle-god, than with Anu or Enlil. Besides, there were enough deities to cater for the important events of life; whenever required, an invocation and an offering of dates would propitiate Gula, the goddess of childbirth, or Pasag, the protector of travellers. In case of dire emergency, the greater deities could be approached through the clergy or, more directly, through the offices of his ‘personal god’.

Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians looked up to their gods as servants look to their good masters: with submission and fear, but also with admiration and love. For kings and commoners alike, obedience to divine orders was the greatest of qualities, as the service of the gods was the most imperative of duties. While the celebration of the various festivals and the performance of the complicated rituals of the cult were the task of priests, it was the duty of every citizen to send offerings to the temples, to attend the main religious ceremonies, to care for the dead, to pray and make penance, and to observe the innumerable rules and taboos that marked nearly every moment of his life. A sensible man ‘feared the gods’ and scrupulously followed their prescriptions. To do otherwise was not only foolish but sinful, and sin – as everyone knew – brought on man's head the most terrible punishments. Yet it would be wrong to think of the Mesopotamian religion as a purely formal affair, when hymns and prayers disclose the most delicate feelings and burst with genuine emotion.
²⁰
The Mesopotamians put their confidence in their gods; they relied upon them as children rely upon their parents, they talked to them as to their ‘real fathers and mothers’, who could be offended and punish, but who could also be placated and forgive.

Offerings, sacrifices and the observance of religious prescriptions were not all that the Mesopotamian gods required from their worshippers. To ‘make their hearts glow with libation’, to make them ‘exultant with succulent meals’ was certainly deserving, but it was not enough. The favours of the gods went to
those who led ‘a good life’, who were good parents, good sons, good neighbours, good citizens, and who practised virtues as highly esteemed then as they are now: kindness and compassion, righteousness and sincerity, justice, respect of the law and of the established order. Every day worship your god, says a Babylonian ‘Counsel of Wisdom’, but also:

As a reward for piousness and good conduct the gods gave man help and protection in danger, comfort in distress and bereavement, good health, honourable social position, wealth, numerous children, long life, happiness. This was perhaps not a very noble ideal by Christian standards, but the Sumerians and Babylonians were contented with it, for they were practical, down-to-earth people who loved and enjoyed life above everything. To live for ever was the dearest of their dreams, and a number of their myths – in particular Adapa and the Gilgamesh cycle (see next chapter) – aimed at explaining why man had been denied the privilege of immortality.

But only the gods were immortal. For men death was ineluctable and had to be accepted:

What happened after death? Thousands of graves with their funerary equipment testify to a general belief in an after-life where the dead carried with them their most precious belongings and received food and drink from the living. But such details of the Mesopotamian eschatology as we can extract from the myth ‘Inanna's descent to the Netherworld’ or the Sumerian cycle of Gilgamesh are scanty and often contradictory. The ‘land of no
return’ was a vast space somewhere underground, with a huge palace where reigned Ereshkigal and her husband Nergal, the god of war and pestilence, surrounded by a number of deities and guards. To reach this palace the spirits of the dead had to cross a river by ferry, as in the Greek Hades, and take off their clothes. Thereafter, they lived a wretched and dreary life in a place:

Yet we learn from other sources that the sun lit the Netherworld on its way round the earth, and that the sun-god Utu pronounced judgement on the dead, so that they were probably not all treated with the same severity. It would seem that the Sumerian idea of hell was as vague as ours, and that a great deal of this literature is just poetical embroidery on a loose theme.

Death, however, was not the Mesopotamians' sole preoccupation. They had, like us, their share of disease, poverty, frustration and sorrow, and like us they wondered: how could all this happen when the gods ruled the world? How could Evil prevail over Good? To be sure, it was often possible to put the blame on man himself. So tight was the network of rules and prohibitions that surrounded him that to sin and offend the gods was the easiest thing to do. Yet there were occasions when the irreproachable had nevertheless been punished, when the gods seemed to behave in the most incomprehensible way. A Babylonian poem called
Ludlul bêl nemeqi
, ‘I will praise the Lord of Wisdom’, pictures the feelings of a man, once noble, rich and healthy, now ruined, hated by all and afflicted with the most terrible diseases. As it turns out, in the end the god Marduk takes pity on him and saves him; but our Babylonian Job had had time to doubt the wisdom of Heaven. Bitterly he exclaimed:

But the so-called Babylonian ‘pessimism’ was much more than a temporary outburst of despair. It was metaphysical in essence, not ethical, and had its roots in the natural conditions which prevailed in Mesopotamia itself. The Tigris–Euphrates valley is a country of violent and unexpected changes. The same rivers that bring life can also bring disaster. The winters may be too cold or rainless, the summer winds too dry for the ripening of the dates. A cloudburst can in a moment turn a parched and dusty plain into a sea of mud, and on any fine day a sandstorm can suddenly darken the sky and blow devastation. Confronted with these manifestations of supernatural forces, the Mesopotamian felt bewildered and helpless. He was seized with frightful anxiety. Nothing, he believed, was ever sure. His own life, the life of his family, the produce of his fields and of his cattle, the rhythm and measure of the river floods, the cycle of seasons and indeed the very existence of the universe were constantly at stake. If the cosmos did not revert to confusion, if the world order was none the less maintained, if the human race survived, if life came again to the fields after the scorching heat of the summer, if the moon and the sun and the stars kept revolving in the sky, it was by an act of will of the gods. But the divine decision had not been pronounced once and for all at the origin of all things; it had to be repeated again and again, particularly at the turn of the year, just before that terrible oriental summer when nature seems to die and the future appears loaded with uncertainty. The only thing man could do in these critical circumstances was to provoke the decision of the gods and secure their goodwill by performing the age-old rites that ensured the maintenance of order, the revival of nature and the permanence of life. Each spring, therefore, a great and poignant ceremony took place in many cities and especially in Babylon: the
akitu
or New Year Festival, which combined the great drama of Creation and the annual reinstatement of the king, and culminated in the gathering of all the gods who solemnly ‘decreed the Destinies’ (see Chapter
24
) Only then could the king go back to his throne, the shepherd to his flock, the peasant to his field. The Mesopotamian was reassured: the world would exist for another year.