Enuma Elish, When on High in its opening words, survives on seven cuneiform tablets and was recited each year during the Babylonian New Year festival, the Akitu, as part of ceremonies that renewed Marduk's kingship and, with it, the king of Babylon's own authority for the coming year; a priest is thought to have recited the whole poem before the god's statue. Its composition is usually dated to sometime in the second millennium BCE, most likely under the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I, when Marduk's promotion to head of the pantheon reflected Babylon's own rise as a political power, elevating a relatively minor city god to cosmic king by rewriting older Sumerian creation traditions around him.
The poem closes with the assembled gods building Marduk's great temple Esagila and the city of Babylon itself as his residence, and then reciting his fifty honorific names, each drawn from and absorbing the attributes of an earlier god, a closing catalogue scholars read as a deliberate act of theological consolidation, folding the wider pantheon's powers into Marduk alone. The Tiamat and Marduk conflict is the standard comparative example of the Chaoskampf pattern, the battle between a storm or sky god and a chaos-serpent or sea, found in cognate form across the ancient Near East and beyond.