Apsu

Enuma Elish opens before the naming of anything, with two waters and nothing else: Apsu the fresh water and Tiamat the sea, their waters mingled in one body. From that mingling come Lahmu and Lahamu, then Anshar and Kishar, then Anu, then Ea. The young gods are loud. They dance and disturb the belly of Tiamat, and Apsu can neither rest by day nor sleep by night.

Apsu goes with his vizier Mummu to Tiamat and proposes to destroy them so that quiet may return. Tiamat refuses, angry that he would unmake what the two of them made. Mummu urges him on. Ea, who knows everything, hears the plan, draws a figure and recites a spell of great power that puts Apsu into a deep sleep. He takes the crown from Apsu, puts on his radiance, kills him, and binds Mummu with a nose rope.

What follows is the point of the episode. Ea builds his own dwelling on top of the dead Apsu and calls it Apsu, and there, in a chamber within it, Marduk is born. The killing is not simply a victory; it is the making of a place. The god of wisdom and incantation takes up residence in the freshwater deep, and the deep keeps the name of the being it was, which is how Mesopotamian cosmology usually handles the relation between a person and a place. The parallel with Tiamat is exact: she too becomes the world built out of her body.

Apsu is the Akkadian form of Sumerian abzu, and the word names a feature of the landscape before it names anything mythological. Southern Mesopotamia sits on ground where fresh water rises: marshes, springs and a high water table beneath a plain that gets almost no rain. The abzu is that water understood as a single body underlying the earth, from which wells and rivers are fed, and it lies below rather than above.

Its owner is Enki, called Ea in Akkadian, the god of wisdom, craft and incantation, and his temple at Eridu was the E-abzu, the house of the deep. Eridu was remembered as the first city, the place where kingship first came down, which puts the freshwater deep at the beginning of the Sumerian account of civilisation as well as of the world.

The idea was built as well as told. Mesopotamian temples kept a basin of water called an apsu in the courtyard, used for purification and understood as a working image of the deep beneath. Gudea of Lagash records making one; a large stone basin from Ashur carries figures of water deities pouring streams from vessels. A priest washing before an offering was therefore not merely rinsing his hands but touching the underlying water at the point where it had been brought up. One word covers a cosmological region, a slain primordial being, a temple and a piece of furniture, and Mesopotamian usage sees no difficulty in that at all.