Enuma Elish, Tablet I, lines 10-12 (King)

The opening lines of the Enuma Elish's first tablet describe the birth of the earliest gods out of the mingling of Apsu, the sweet primeval waters, and Tiamat, the salt primeval sea. Lines ten to twelve name the first pair born from that union, Lahmu and Lahamu, called into being, and state that ages increased before a second pair, Anshar and Kishar, were created over them. Leonard William King's translation keeps the breaks in the cuneiform tablet visible rather than smoothing them into a continuous sentence, printing brackets and ellipses at each point where the text is damaged or missing, a choice this passage preserves because what has been lost from the tablet is itself part of what the surviving lines can tell a reader. The pattern the surviving fragments do preserve is one of paired gods emerging in succession, each pair described only by name and by the fact of having come into being, with no other detail recorded about what Lahmu, Lahamu, Anshar or Kishar do or represent beyond standing as an early stage in a genealogy that the following lines of the tablet continue to extend. King's spacing of the letters in Lahmu and Anshar in his own edition, a device meant to render sounds the Latin alphabet cannot show directly, an underdotted h and an underdotted s, is closed up in the text as it appears here, a small typographic choice that changes nothing about what the names themselves record.

This spare genealogical opening, paired gods appearing one generation after another with barely a clause of description each, sets up the line of descent the rest of the Enuma Elish depends on, since Anshar and Kishar in turn become the parents of Anu, and Anu becomes the father of Ea, and Ea becomes the father of Marduk, the god whose defeat of Tiamat the later tablets exist to narrate. Scholars studying the text have treated this opening genealogy as a Mesopotamian theogony in miniature, a chain of divine generations building toward a culminating figure, structurally comparable to how Hesiod's Theogony builds a chain of divine generations toward the reign of Zeus, though the two traditions differ sharply in how that chain resolves, Marduk earning supremacy by killing a monstrous primordial mother in open battle rather than through the pattern of succession by overthrow that runs through the Greek account. The bare list of names in these three lines is therefore doing more work than its brevity suggests, laying the genealogical foundation that gives Marduk's eventual kingship its claim to legitimacy, a descent traced back through named ancestors to the very beginning of divine time.