A cosmogony is an account of the origin of the ordered world. Almost every tradition has one, and they are among the most intensively studied materials in comparative religion, because a small set of patterns recurs across cultures between which no contact can be demonstrated.
Several general observations hold widely. Cosmogonies are rarely disinterested: they typically explain and authorise a present arrangement, why there are four directions, why a particular people holds a particular land, why the social orders are as they are, why there is death. They are frequently recited in ritual contexts, and in a number of traditions the recitation is understood to be effective rather than commemorative, renewing the order it describes; the Enuma Elish was recited at the Babylonian new year festival, and its account of Marduk's victory was thereby made present again.
And they very often stop short of an absolute beginning. A great many cosmogonies begin with something already there, water, darkness, a formless mass, an egg, a pair of beings, so that what is described is the ordering of the world rather than its production from nothing. Creation from nothing is the exception rather than the rule, and where it appears it is generally the product of later theological reflection rather than of the earliest narrative material.
Historical-critical study distinguishes what these texts claim from what modern cosmology describes, and the relation between the two is handled differently across and within traditions. Some communities read the accounts as literal history and take them to be in competition with scientific cosmology. Some read them as addressing meaning, purpose and value rather than mechanism, and therefore as compatible with any physics. Some hold both registers without attempting a synthesis. All three positions are found within each of the major traditions, and the internal disagreement is generally sharper than the disagreement between them.