Enuma Elish, Tablet I, lines 1-9 (King)

The opening lines of the Enuma Elish's first tablet, in L. W. King's translation, describe a state of existence before the world as later generations of Mesopotamians knew it. When above the heaven had not been named, the text begins, and earth beneath did not yet bear a name, only the primeval waters existed, Apsu, the sweet waters, and Tiamat, the salt waters, mingled together as a single undivided mass with no gods yet brought into being. The lines proceed to name the first gods who emerged from this mingling, generation following generation, establishing the pattern the rest of the tablet develops, in which younger and more numerous gods increasingly disturb the primeval stillness that Apsu and Tiamat represent. As an opening, the passage sets the poem's basic logic, that order and multiplicity, including the gods themselves, arise out of an undifferentiated watery beginning rather than existing from the start, a structure that gives the whole work its name, when above, taken from these very first words of the tablet as King rendered them, a naming convention shared with several other Mesopotamian compositions that are likewise known by their own opening phrase rather than by any separately assigned title.

Discovered on cuneiform tablets recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and first translated into English in the nineteenth century, the Enuma Elish's opening lines became a central text for comparing Mesopotamian cosmology with other ancient Near Eastern creation accounts. Scholars have long noted the structural resemblance between the poem's picture of a primeval watery chaos preceding creation and similar language in the opening of Genesis, without agreement on whether the resemblance reflects direct literary borrowing, a shared older Near Eastern tradition both texts draw on independently, or simple coincidence of imagery natural to cultures describing a world's beginning. Within Mesopotamian religion itself, the tablet's account served a function beyond cosmology, since later tablets in the same work use the gods born from Apsu and Tiamat's primeval mingling to establish Marduk's eventual kingship over the other gods, tying the opening's account of origins directly to a claim about which city's patron deity held supreme authority among the rest of the pantheon, a political dimension scholars regard as central to why the poem was composed and recited in the first place rather than as an incidental feature of its cosmology.