Enuma Elish

Before heaven or earth existed, the epic relates, only Apsu, the sweet primordial waters, and Tiamat, the salt sea, mingled their waters together, and from that mingling the first gods were born. As more generations of gods came into being, their noise and movement disturbed Apsu's rest, and he resolved with his vizier Mummu to destroy them. The god Ea learned of the plot, cast a spell to put Apsu into a deep sleep, and killed him, then built his own dwelling on Apsu's body, where his son Marduk was born.

Tiamat, urged on by the surviving gods and enraged at Apsu's death, gathers an army of monstrous serpents and scorpion-men, raises her new consort Kingu to command it, and gives him the Tablet of Destinies, which confers supreme authority. No god dares face her until Marduk agrees to fight on the condition that he be proclaimed king of the gods beforehand. Riding a storm-chariot and armed with winds, a net, and a bow, Marduk corners Tiamat, drives an evil wind into her opened mouth to hold her still, and kills her with an arrow through her belly. He then splits her enormous corpse in two, raising one half as the sky and setting the other as the earth, fixes the stars and the calendar in the vault above, and from the blood of the executed Kingu fashions humankind to labor in the gods' place.

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.