ENUMA ELISH

The Babylonian Epic of Creation 

Edited by Johannes Haubold, Sophus Helle, Enrique Jiménez, and Selena Wisnom

Transcription by Adrian C. Heinrich and  translation by Sophus Helle

https://oa-fund.ub.uni-muenchen.de/id/eprint/1536/1/b-9781350297425.pdf

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CONTRIBUTORS 

Céline Debourse is Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, USA. She is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium bce, with a focus on the final centuries of cuneiform culture. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of methods and disciplines, from rigorous philological analysis, through historical criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and anthropological theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonia in wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogues between Assyriology and other disciplines. 

Eckart Frahm is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University, USA. His research interests focus on Assyrian and Babylonian history, cuneiform scholarly texts, and the connections between literature, religion, and politics in ancient Mesopotamia and Israel. Frahm is the (co-)author or (co-)editor of nine books, among them, most recently, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire (2023). He is the director of the Cuneiform Commentaries Project (http://ccp.yale.edu) and has served as an expert witness in a number of high-profile cases of trafficking in cultural artefacts from the Middle East. 

Gösta Gabriel is an Assyriologist and head of an independent junior research group (Emmy Noether-Gruppe) at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on mythological narratives (in literary and other sources) and the ways in which they convey ancient ideas and discourses. He has worked intensively on Enuma Elish (a monograph was published in 2014, followed by several articles). More recently, he has been working on the Sumerian King List and is preparing a book on the early tradition of the hero Gilgamesh and the ways in which this figure had been shaped and repeatedly reinterpreted. 

Johannes Haubold is Professor of Classics at Princeton University, USA. He has published widely on contact and exchange between the literatures of ancient Greece and Mesopotamia (e.g. Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature, 2013); and on the Chaldean movement and its roots in Babylonian celestial scholarship (e.g. ed., with John Steele and Kathryn Stevens, Keeping Watch in Babylon: The Astronomical Diaries in Context, 2019). 

Sophus Helle is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, USA. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University and has translated the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh (2021) and the Sumerian poems attributed to Enheduana (2023), accompanying both translations with in-depth studies of the texts. He has published on the recurrent narrative structures, poetic forms, authorship, gender and sexuality, and modern reception of cuneiform poetry. He is also a freelance correspondent for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen, writing on premodern literature and history more broadly. 

Enrique Jiménez is Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures at LMU, Germany, and the winner of a 2017 Sofja Kovalevskaja Award. He specializes in the literature and scholarly texts from ancient Mesopotamia, in particular from the first millennium bce. He is PI of the electronic Babylonian Literature platform (http://www.ebl.lmu.de/). 

Gina Konstantopoulos is Assistant Professor in Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. She works on religion and magic in Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and the modern reception of the ancient Near East. Her publications include The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Places of Demons in Mesopotamia (2023) and the co-edited volume The Shape of Stores (2023). She has previously held research positions at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Tsukuba. 

Piotr Michalowski is George G. Cameron Professor Emeritus of Ancient Mesopotamian Civilizations at the University of Michigan, USA. He studied at the University of Warsaw and at Yale University (PhD 1976). His research interests focus on many aspects of the cultures of Mesopotamia, including languages, linguistics, literatures, poetics, mythology, history, historiography, politics, pedagogy, as well as music and urbanism. 

Frances Reynolds is Shillito Fellow and Associate Professor of Assyriology in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Her broad research area is the intellectual history, literature and religion of Mesopotamia in the first millennium bce. Her second book, A Babylon Calendar Treatise: Scholars and Invaders in the Late First Millennium BC (2019), reflects her focus on Babylon and Marduk’s Esagil temple. Through research, graduate supervision and teaching, she seeks to understand texts in their ancient settings. 

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She is the author of the recent monographs Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (2016) and Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity: An Anthropology of Science (forthcoming). 

Karen Sonik is a cultural historian specializing in the ancient Near East. She is the author of numerous works on Sumerian and Akkadian narratives and editor of The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East (with U. Steinert, 2023); Artifacts and ArtWorks in the Ancient World (2021), Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (with S. Tinney; 2019), The Materiality of Divine Agency (with B. Pongratz-Leisten; 2015), and Contemporary Approaches to Mesopotamian Literature: How to Tell a Story (with D. Shehata; Brill, forthcoming). 

Marc Van De Mieroop is Miriam Champion Professor of History at Columbia University, USA, and director of its Center for the Ancient Mediterranean. He has published numerous books and articles on various aspects of ancient Near Eastern history, Egyptian history and World History with interests ranging from socio-economic and political history to intellectual history. He has also written extensively on historical methodology as it applies to his field of study. His most recent books, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Before and After Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (Oxford University Press, 2023), investigate the underlying principles of Babylonian hermeneutics and their relationship to the various writing systems of the ancient Near Eastern world. He has received various fellowships including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the NEH, and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. 

Selena Wisnom is Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester, UK. She is a specialist in the literary and cultural interpretation of cuneiform sources, particularly literature, poetics and intellectual history. As a playwright she has written three plays set in ancient Assyria, and adapts Babylonian verse forms for poetry in English. Her book Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry was published in 2020, and The Library of Ancient Wisdom is forthcoming with Penguin and University of Chicago Press.

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 E N U M A    E L I S H

Tablet I 

(p.26)

enūma eliš lā nabû šamāmū šapliš ammatu šuma lā zakrat apsûm-(ma) rēštû zārûšun mummu tiāmtu mu’allidat gimrīšun mûšunu ištēniš iḫiqqū-ma gipāra lā kiṣṣurū ṣuṣâ lā šē’ū enūma ilū lā šūpû manāma šuma lā zukkurū šīmāti lā šīmū ibbanû-ma ilū qerebšun laḫmu (u) laḫāmu uštāpû šuma izzakrū adi irbû išīḫū anšar (u) kišar ibbanû-(ma) elīšunu atrū urrikū ūmī uṣṣibū šanāti ānu apilšunu šānin abbīšu anšar ānu bukrašu umaššil-ma u ānu tamšīlašu ulid nudimmud nudimmud ša abbīšu šālissunu šū-ma palkâ uznī ḫasis emūqīn puggul guššur ma’diš ana ālid abīšu anšar lā īši šānina ina ilī atḫêšu innendū-ma atḫû ilū anu[k]kū ešû tiāmtam-ma naṣīršunu ištappu dalḫūnim-ma ša tiāmti karassa ina šu’āri šūdurū qereb andurunna lā našir apsû rigimšun u tiāmtu šuqammumat ina maḫrīšun imtarṣam-ma epšetašun elīšun lā ṭābat alkassunu šunūti …

Tablet I 

(p.27)

When heaven on high had not been named¹ and the ground below was not given a name, primordial Apsû, who fathered them, and the creative force² Tiamat, who gave birth to them all, were mingling together their waters: they had not yet bound meadows or lined the reedbeds.³ 

When none of the gods had been brought forth, had not been given names and had not decreed destinies, then were the gods created within them. Lahmu and Lahamu were brought forth and called by name. 

When they had grown big, grown tall, Anshar and Kishar were created, greater than them. They lengthened their days, expanded their years. Anu, their firstborn, rivalled his fathers.⁴ 

Anshar made Anu, his child, like him,⁵ and Anu gave birth to his likeness in turn – Nudimmud.⁶ Nudimmud: he was the leader among his fathers, vast of mind, perceptive, massive in strength, much mightier than Anshar, who had fathered his father, he had no rival among the gods his brothers. 

They joined together, the brothers, the gods,⁷ and confused Tiamat as their clamour kept growing, troubling Tiamat’s belly,⁸ and with their games spreading grief in Andurunna.⁹ Apsû did not still their noise, and Tiamat was silent before them: their doings disturbed her, their ways were not pleasant, but …¹⁰ 

_____________________________________________

¹ The first nine lines of the poem are among the most discussed passages of Akkadian literature, and the syntax of the text allows for different interpretations. See Sophus Helle and Piotr Michalowski in this volume.

² Akk. mummu, which is later used as a name for Apsû’s servant. 

³ Southern Iraq consisted of a checkerboard of canals and fields: without land or the reed-covered banks, the water was able to mix freely; see Buccellati (1990: 125). On the grammar and the other possible translations of this line, see Haubold (2017: 221–8). 

⁴ Here and throughout the text, the word abu ‘father’ is also used to mean ‘ancestor’. 

⁵ Or: ‘Anu, his child, became like Anshar’. 

⁶ A learned name for the god Ea. 

⁷ Babylonian recension adds: ‘the Anunnaki’. 

⁸ The word karšu means ‘mind’ as well as ‘belly’, so the disturbance can be both physical and mental. Tiamat’s belly is here the watery expanse where the gods live. 

⁹ A cosmological location of uncertain nature. Its use in this context is partly motivated by a pun on the preceding word šūdurū, ‘spreading grief’. 

¹⁰ The widely accepted reading igammela, ‘she was lenient’, seems less likely in light of recent manuscripts; see Fadhil and Jiménez (2021: 216).

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