Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac. Tonight we begin a whole season in the tablet house, and we begin it the way the tablets themselves begin, before there was anything to begin with. Tonight is the Babylonian creation story, the poem called Enuma Elish, which is not a title at all but simply the first two words on the first tablet, When above, because these people did not name their books, they called them by however they started. Seven tablets. About a thousand lines. The world made out of water, then out of noise, then out of a quarrel, and finally out of the body of the oldest thing there was. Tonight you will hear how the sky was fastened up and where the Tigris and the Euphrates were said to come from, and how a city put its own name on the making of everything, and why, once a year, the most powerful man in that city was slapped in the face by a priest until he cried. Stay with it, if you can, to the last chapter, for that. There is a room at the edge of the world, and in it there is a lamp. It is the same lamp. Perhaps you were here on other nights, and heard the old scribe read the story of the gods and the baskets and the flood, and then the long story of what happened to the clay afterward, the fire and the hill and the man at the museum desk. If so, welcome back. Your place on the reed mat is where you left it, and the scribe has been waiting, and there is a whole shelf he has been meaning to get to. And if this is your first night in the tablet house, be welcome too. You have missed nothing. The scribe never begins a story that will leave a newcomer behind, and everything you need tonight will be handed to you as you go, in order, slowly, the way you hand someone a cup. The lamp is a small clay dish of oil, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. The room smells of river water and dust and barley. On the shelves all around, in the dark beyond the light, hundreds of tablets stand on their edges like plates in a rack, each with its little tag hanging down. Outside, past the doorway, the river is going by in the dark, saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds, the way it did before any of this was written and the way it does tonight. The scribe takes down a tablet you have not seen before. It is bigger than the others, and there are six more behind it on the shelf, in a stack, in order. This one, he says, is not old the way the others are old. He means something particular by that, and it is worth having before we start. The story he read you before, the gods and the baskets and the flood, is very old, from the south, from the oldest cities. Tonight's poem is newer. It comes from Babylon, and most people who study it think it was written down in something like the shape we have it about a thousand years before the year one, though a few good scholars argue for older, and the honest answer is that we do not know and the poem does not say. What we do know is that it was copied and copied and copied, more than almost anything else they wrote, so that when the great library was gathered up north, the copies were already everywhere. And we know what it was for, which is rarer, and which is where we will end tonight. You do not have to do anything now. Settle onto the mat. Let the lamp be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other, the way the whole world feels when you are almost asleep and perfectly safe. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the lamp is near you, the way the river is near you. You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you, and it will not mind. There are a great many names in tonight's poem and you will not be asked to keep them. Let them go past you like the river going past the reeds. The ones that matter will come back on their own, three or four times, until they are yours without any effort at all. That is how the poem was built. It repeats itself on purpose, because it was made to be heard by tired people in the dark, which is a thing you and a Babylonian have in common. And one thing, whispered like a promise across the clay. Nothing in this story will startle you. There is a war in it, and a mother is killed in it, and I will not pretend either of those is gentle. But they are told the way this house tells everything, plainly, in a low voice, at a distance of three thousand years, once, and then set down and not returned to. The killing is over by the ninth chapter and everything after it is the making of quiet things, stars and rivers and a city and a list of names, which is the softest ending any creation story has ever had. I will tell you one more thing in advance, so you can rest inside the whole of it. The poem does not think the mother is a monster. It gives her a reason before it gives her an enemy, and it lets her reason stand. Hold on to that when we get there, and none of it will trouble you. Before we begin, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the rest of the season will find you as it comes, twelve nights of the oldest stories anyone wrote down, and you will not have to go looking. A like helps other tired travelers find this lamp. And if you would rather carry these nights with you, The Sleeping Almanac is also a free podcast, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify, waiting wherever you listen. That is all. Now settle back, and we begin.
The scribe wets his thumb, turns the tablet to the light, and reads the first line, and the first line is a description of a time when there was no line to read. When above, the heavens had not been named. When below, the earth had not been called by a name. That is how it opens, and it is worth sitting in for a moment before anything happens, because nothing happens for a good while and the nothing is the best part. Above has no name. Below has no name. Not that they were empty. Not that they were dark. Simply that nobody had said them yet, and in this poem a thing is not properly a thing until it has been said. There was water. That is the whole of the beginning. Water, and no edges to it. There were two waters, and they were mingled together, which is the word the tablet uses, mingled, the way you would say two rivers meeting and then no longer being two rivers. One of them was fresh, the sweet water, the kind that comes up cold out of the ground and that you can drink. His name was Apsu. The other was salt, the wide bitter water, the sea. Her name was Tiamat. They had no shore between them and no floor beneath them and no sky above them, because there was not yet any such thing as a shore or a floor or a sky. There was only the two of them, mixed, in the dark, going nowhere, for as long as you like. Think of it, for a moment, as the inside of a very large sleep. There was no dry land anywhere. No reed had been formed. No marsh had appeared. That is nearly a direct quotation and you can hear what kind of people wrote it, because of all the things a person might list as missing from the beginning of the world, they chose the reed and the marsh first. They lived in a place of water and mud and reeds. When they imagined nothing at all, they imagined their own country with the reeds taken out. No god had been brought into being. No name had been called. No destinies had been fixed. That last one is the strange one, and we will meet it again, so let it settle in now while it costs you nothing. Destinies, in this world, are not a mood or a fate hanging over you. They are more like assignments. Somebody's job. The destiny of a river is to run, and the destiny of a door is to open, and somewhere, in these poems, there is an actual physical object with the destinies written on it, and whoever holds it holds the assignments of everything. We will come to that object. It goes missing later in the season, in another poem entirely, and a bird takes it while somebody is having a bath. Tonight it only sits in the background, being important. But at the very beginning, nothing had been assigned. Nothing had a job. The two waters were mingled, and that was all there was, and it went on that way for a length of time the poem does not measure because there was nothing yet to measure time with. And then, in the water, the gods began. Not made. Not created, exactly. The word is closer to formed, or came to be, the way silt comes to be in a slow river, the way a sandbar is one day simply there where yesterday there was current. The two waters mingled and mingled and something began to gather in them. Notice what the poem is doing, and then let it go. It does not begin with a maker. There is nobody outside the water deciding. The water is the parents and the water is the place and the water is the material, and everything that follows, every god and every star and every person, including the ones who wrote this down by lamplight, is made out of what was already there, mixed in the dark, before anything had a name. That is the first tablet's first idea, and it is a kind one to fall asleep to. Nothing came from outside. Everything came from what was already here. The scribe lets the line sit. Out past the doorway the river goes on saying its word to the reeds. Somewhere far south of this room, tonight, the fresh water is still running out into the salt water at the head of the gulf, in the dark, mingling, exactly the way the tablet says, which is not a coincidence at all, because the people who wrote this could walk down and look at it. They did not invent a beginning. They described their own horizon and called it the first day.
The first ones to gather out of the water were called Lahmu and Lahamu, and they are a pair, a he and a she, and their names are almost the same name said twice, which will happen again tonight and is worth expecting. The poem likes pairs. It likes to give you a thing and then its echo. We do not know very much about Lahmu and Lahamu, and I am going to tell you that plainly rather than make something up, because the not knowing is itself restful. They are early. They are before almost everything. In pictures from that world there is a figure sometimes called by that name, a bearded man with long curling hair, six curls, standing and holding a post or a gate, patient, doing his job. Whether that picture and this line in the poem are the same being is argued about by people who have spent their lives on it. Tonight they are simply the first two, formed in the water, given names, and set down. After them, Anshar and Kishar. Another pair, another echo, and these two you can almost translate, because Anshar means something like the whole of the sky and Kishar something like the whole of the earth, though neither the sky nor the earth exists yet, so what has really appeared is the idea of an above and a below, the possibility of a difference, in water that is still all one thing. The poem is building the world the way you would lay out tools before a job. Not the sky. The place where a sky could go. And the poem says, plainly, that they grew. That they were tall. That they surpassed the ones before them. Each generation larger and more capable than the one before, which is a thing the poem simply states, without any anxiety about it at all, and which is going to matter enormously in about four chapters. Then Anu, the sky. Anu is the first name tonight you may already know, and he is the highest of them, the one whose name simply is the sky, the father of the great gods, the one who in all these stories sits at the top and does not come down. He is the son of Anshar, and the poem says he was the equal of his father. Not the copy. The equal. And Anu had a son of his own, and this is the one to hold on to. His name is Ea, and in the older southern poems he is called Enki, and if you were here for the story of the gods and the baskets and the flood, you have met him. He is the one who is clever. Not clever the way a trickster is clever, always working an angle. Clever the way an engineer is clever, or a doctor, or a very good locksmith. He is the god of the sweet water, of the deep fresh water under the ground, and of skill, of the thing a craftsman knows in his hands. He is also, over and over in these stories, the one who thinks of the way out. The poem says of him that he was surpassing in wisdom, wise in understanding, mighty in strength, much stronger than his father's father Anshar. It goes on about him for lines. Among all the sons and grandsons in that water, he is the one the poem stops to admire. Remember him. Tonight he does two things, and one of them is terrible and one of them saves everybody, and they are the same kind of thinking. So now the water has people in it. That is the situation at the end of the first movement, and it is worth taking a slow breath inside it, because this is the last calm page for a while and the poem knows it. Two old waters, mingled, quiet, going nowhere, for longer than there is a word for. And now, inside them, generations. Lahmu and Lahamu. Anshar and Kishar. Anu. Ea. Each one bigger, brighter, quicker than the last, and all of them young, and all of them together, in a small space, inside the bodies of the two oldest things there are. The scribe pauses here and says the next line the way you would say it to a child who is nearly asleep, which is to say lightly, so it does not land too hard. And the young gods, he says, were loud.
They danced. That is the word. In the belly of the old water, in the mingled dark, the young gods came together and they danced, and they made a commotion, and the poem uses a word for it that means something between an uproar and a bustle, the noise of a lot of people in a small room all doing something at once. And they disturbed Tiamat, and they roiled her insides, and they were making merry in her belly, and no one could rest. Now I want you to notice something, because it is the whole hinge of tonight and it is done in one line so quietly that you can miss it. The oldest thing in the universe could not sleep. Not because anyone was cruel to her. Not because there was a war on. Because the children would not settle. Because she was full of them and they were noisy and it went on and on, and she was tired. Every person who has ever been in a house with young people in it knows this exact feeling, and the poem was written for people in such houses, and I do not think that is an accident, and I do not think it is a joke either. It is the reason for everything that happens afterward, and the poem gives it to you first, before it gives anybody a side to be on. Apsu felt it too, the fresh water, the father. And Apsu could not silence them. He came to Tiamat and he said, their ways have become painful to me. By day I cannot rest, by night I cannot sleep. Let us destroy them, so that we may sleep. There it is, said out loud, and it is monstrous, and it is also the most ordinary sentence in the world. He does not want a kingdom. He does not want revenge. He wants it to be quiet so he can sleep. That is the first crime in the Babylonian universe, and its motive is exhaustion. And here is the thing that will keep you with this poem all the way to the end. Tiamat says no. She hears her husband propose to destroy their own children, and the mother of everything, the great bitter sea, the one who by the end of tonight will be a monster in the way the story is usually told, cries out at him. What, she says. Should we destroy what we ourselves have made? Their ways are painful, yes. Let us be patient and kind. Let us be patient and kind. That is on the tablet. That is her line, from the mother of chaos, in the poem written by the people who kill her. I am going to ask you to hold that all night, and I promise it will make the last chapters easier rather than harder. Whatever Tiamat becomes later, and she becomes something enormous and armed and full of serpents, this is where she starts. She starts as the one who did not want to hurt anybody. Whoever put this poem together could have left the line out. They wanted Babylon to be the greatest city in the world and they wanted their god to be the greatest god, and they still gave the enemy the best sentence in the first tablet. Apsu was not persuaded. He had a counsellor with him, a vizier, a god called Mummu, who sat on his knee and kissed him and agreed with him and told him what he wanted to hear, which is the oldest job in any court, and Mummu said, destroy them, and then you will have rest by day and sleep by night. And Apsu's face lit up, the poem says, because of the evil he was planning against the gods his children. And they made their plan, and they made it in the water where the children were, and word of it got out. The poem does not say who told. It says only that it became known, and that when the young gods heard, they fell silent. Not a shout. Not a rush to arms. The commotion in the belly of the water simply stopped, all at once, and they sat there, stricken, and they did not know what to do. That is the quietest line in the first tablet and one of the loneliest lines anywhere in this literature. The noise stops. They understand what their parents have decided. And then, in the silence they have finally made, one of them stands up.
Ea, the clever one, the one the poem stopped to admire. He does not fight his great grandfather. It does not seem to occur to him to fight. What he does is stranger and quieter and, in the world of these tablets, far more powerful, and it is the reason his name is on every list of the wisest gods for the next two thousand years. He writes a spell. The poem calls it a pure incantation, and it says that Ea, who understands everything, perceived their scheme, and made and established against it a design of everything, and skilfully composed his overpowering, holy, resistless spell. And he recited it, and he caused it to be in the water. And Apsu fell asleep. The word is exactly that. Sleep. Ea did not stab the oldest fresh water in the world. He sang him to sleep, deeply, the way you would put out a lamp, and Mummu the counsellor was left dazed beside him, unable to think, and the water went still. Then Ea took the crown from Apsu's head and put it on his own. He took his cloak of radiance. He bound Mummu and put a rope through his nose and held it. And he ended Apsu there, in his sleep, and he built his house on top of him. That is the sentence. He built his house on top of him. The dwelling of Ea, from that day, is called the Apsu, which is the name of the water he stilled. The fresh water under the ground, the deep sweet water that fills the wells and comes up cold in the marshes, is in this poem the body of somebody who wanted a quiet night and did the wrong thing about it, and it is also the floor and foundation of the home of the wisest god, and both of those are true at once and the poem sees no contradiction in it at all. And in that house, in the chamber of destinies, in the shrine of designs, Ea and his wife Damkina lay down, and there their son was born. Marduk. Now, tonight, keep this loosely, but keep it. The son who is going to run the rest of this poem is born in a house built on the body of the first god to die, and he is born there in peace, and his father who did the building is the one who taught him everything he knows. Nothing in the poem comments on this. It is simply the address. The tablet spends a long, glad, slightly ridiculous passage on how splendid the baby was, and the scribe reads it with obvious pleasure. He was the loftiest of the gods, surpassing in every way. His limbs beyond understanding. He had four eyes and four ears, and when he moved his lips, fire blazed. Four ears for hearing, and eyes in like number for seeing everything. His grandfather Anu made him four winds and gave them to him as a plaything, and the child made dust and set a storm to whirling with them. He made waves, the poem says, and he troubled Tiamat, and Tiamat was troubled, and by night she could not rest. You see what it has done. It has come back around, in one line, and set the whole thing going again. The grandmother who could not sleep because of the noise of the young ones is kept awake now by a child playing with the wind, and this child is the one who will kill her, and the poem knows exactly what it is doing when it puts those two sleepless nights in the same tablet. The other gods came to her. They had been sitting in their silence since Apsu died, and now they came and they worked on her, and they said, when they killed Apsu your husband, you did not go at his side. You sat still. And now he has made these four winds, and our insides are churning, and we cannot sleep. Do you not love us? Fight. Avenge Apsu your husband, they said. And you will have rest. And there it is, the same promise, made now to her, in the same words her husband used. Do this terrible thing and afterward it will be quiet. The scribe sets the first tablet down, and takes up the second, and turns the lamp a little. And Tiamat, he says, agreed.
Here is where the poem does something that will help you sleep, and I want to tell you about it before it starts, so that when it happens you recognise it and let it carry you rather than trying to hold on. For the next long stretch, the poem repeats itself. Not once. Three times, and nearly word for word. What Tiamat builds in this chapter is going to be described, in full, in the same order, with the same words, three separate times: once when she makes it, once when a messenger brings the news, and once when the news is passed along again. Three thousand years ago somebody sat in a room like this one and listened to the same list three times in an evening and did not think it was a mistake. It is how the poem breathes. It is how you learn a list without studying it. And it is, for our purposes, the single most sleep friendly structure in Mesopotamian literature, so I am going to let it repeat, gently, the way it was meant to, and you can let it go by like a train you are not catching. So. She agreed, and she began to make an army. She bore, the poem says, monster serpents, sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang. She filled their bodies with venom instead of blood. Fierce dragons she clothed with terror, she crowned them with fearsome glory and made them like gods, so that whoever looked upon them would collapse from weakness. And then the list. The viper, and the dragon, and the hairy hero. The great lion, and the mad dog, and the scorpion man. The fierce storm demons, and the fish man, and the bull man. Eleven of them, the poem says. And here is a small true thing that I like very much and that you can have for nothing. The poem says eleven and then names nine. Count them again if you are still awake. Viper, dragon, hairy hero. Great lion, mad dog, scorpion man. Storm demons, fish man, bull man. Nine kinds, and the tablet says eleven, and it has said eleven every time anyone has copied it for three thousand years, and nobody has ever fixed it. Scholars have pleasant arguments about where the other two went, and the likeliest answer is dull and comforting, that the serpents and the dragons at the head of the list were meant to count and somewhere early somebody stopped writing them out separately. So the oldest complete creation story in the world has a list in it that does not add up, and it was copied that way, carefully, by hundreds of people who could all count, for three thousand years, because it was not their job to correct it. It was their job to carry it. Eleven. Bearers of merciless weapons, unafraid of battle. Now, they sound like a nightmare and they are meant to, but hold them lightly, because we know exactly what most of these were and they are not really nightmares. They are statues. They are the things carved beside doorways. The bull man and the fish man and the scorpion man stood at gates and thresholds all over that world, in stone and in clay, for centuries, and they were not there to frighten the household. They were there facing outward, to keep bad things off. The list Tiamat is making is, in large part, the list of the guardians that stood at the doors of the people listening to this poem. Their own doorkeepers, gathered into one army, in the dark, on the other side. And she needed a commander. She chose one of her own children, a god called Qingu, and she raised him high among them, and she made him her husband and put him in charge of the whole assembly, and she gave him the command of the battle. And then she gave him the Tablet of Destinies. There it is, the object I asked you to remember from the first chapter, and now you can see what it is for. She fastened it to his breast, the poem says. She fastened it to his breast and said, I have cast your spell, I have made you greatest in the assembly of the gods. Your command shall not be altered. The word of your mouth shall be firm. That is what the Tablet of Destinies does. It makes what you say true. Not persuasive. True. Whoever wears it, their word becomes the assignment, and the assignment becomes the world. It is the most powerful object in this literature and it spends most of its existence being stolen, worn on somebody's chest, and taken back. So now there are two sides, and it is worth stopping to see what they actually are, because it is not good and evil and the poem never says it is. On one side, the oldest water, who did not want any of this, who was talked into it by her children after they blamed her for not defending her husband when he tried to kill them, and who has now armed herself with the guardians of doorways and put the assignment of the world on the chest of a son. On the other side, the young gods, in a room, who cannot sleep, who have just heard what is coming, and who have gone completely silent again. The scribe turns the tablet. And, he says, the news began to travel.
A god called Ea heard of it first. He heard the whole of it, everything Tiamat had made, and he was struck dumb, and he sat in silence for a while, and then he went to his own great grandfather Anshar, whose name is the whole of the sky, and he told him. And he told it in order. The monster serpents, sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang, with venom for blood. The fierce dragons crowned with fearsome glory. The viper, the dragon, the hairy hero. The great lion, the mad dog, the scorpion man. The fierce storm demons, the fish man, the bull man. Eleven of them. And Qingu raised up over the whole assembly, with the Tablet of Destinies on his chest. There. That is twice. And Anshar, when he had heard it, called his own vizier, a god named Kakka, and sent him down to the two oldest gods there are, to Lahmu and Lahamu, who were the first ones formed in the water and who had been there through all of it. Go, he said. Go and stand before them and tell them everything. And Kakka went, and he bowed down before Lahmu and Lahamu, and he kissed the ground in front of them, and he stood up, and he told them. The monster serpents, sharp of tooth, unsparing of fang, with venom for blood. The fierce dragons crowned with fearsome glory. The viper, the dragon, the hairy hero. The great lion, the mad dog, the scorpion man. The fierce storm demons, the fish man, the bull man. Eleven of them. And Qingu raised up over the whole assembly, with the Tablet of Destinies on his chest. Three times. I told you it would happen and it happened, and if you were drifting through the middle of that you will have surfaced at the fish man and the bull man and found the ground under your feet exactly where you left it, which is the whole reason they built the poem this way. Nothing is lost by dozing in a room where the important things are said three times. And Lahmu and Lahamu, when they heard it, cried out, and the gods of heaven groaned in bitter grief, and said, what has changed, that she should do this? And they could not understand it either. Anshar heard it and he struck his thigh and he bit his lip and he could not settle. And when he had got hold of himself he spoke to his son, to Anu, the sky, and he said, go. Go and stand before her and speak to her and let her anger be soothed by what you say. And if she will not listen to you, then speak my word to her, that she may be calmed. And Anu went. And Anu came to the edge of what Tiamat had made, and he looked at her, and he could not face her, and he turned around and came back. That is the whole of it. There is no shame in the way the poem tells it. He did not run. He simply could not, and he came back and said so, and the words the poem uses when he returns are the same words it used to describe her, so that the failure is measured against the exact thing that caused it. And Ea had gone before him, in some tellings of this passage, and had turned back as well. So now the two wisest and highest gods in the world have walked to the edge of the water, looked, and come home. And the assembly sits in the hall of Anshar with their lips pressed shut, and nobody says anything, because there is nothing to say. They have tried the sky and they have tried wisdom and neither one could stand in front of the sea. Anshar was silent, looking at the ground, and shaking his head at Ea. The poem says all the gods sat there, their lips closed, silent. Not one of them will go. And this is the moment the whole poem has been building toward, and it is a very old and very good piece of storytelling, and it is doing something to you right now that you may not notice until later. It has spent two tablets making the enemy enormous and then it has walked the two most senior figures in the universe up to her and turned them around, so that when somebody finally does step forward, you already know exactly how big the thing is that they are stepping toward. And it is Ea who thinks of it. Of course it is. He calls his son. The young one. The one with the four eyes and the four ears, born in the house built on the still water, who was given the winds as a toy and made dust with them. Ea takes him aside, alone, into a private room, and tells him everything, and tells him what to say, and how to stand, and what to ask for. Go, my son, he says. Go and stand before Anshar. Speak, and stand there, and when he sees you, he will be at peace. And Marduk came, and Anshar saw him, and the poem says his heart was filled with joy, and he kissed him on the lips and his fear went away. My father, said Marduk, do not stay silent. Open your lips. I will go, and I will do what you have wanted in your heart. What man is it who has brought his battle against you? It is Tiamat, who is a woman, who comes at you with weapons. Be glad and rejoice. Soon you will tread on the neck of Tiamat. Be glad and rejoice, he says again, and soon you will tread on her neck. And Anshar answered him, and told him to go, and to ride out, and to still her with his spell. And the young god said, yes. And then he said one more thing, and it changes everything, and it is why this poem exists.
If I am to be your avenger, said Marduk, to bind Tiamat and save your lives, then convene the assembly. Proclaim my destiny supreme. Let me speak, and let what I say determine things instead of you. Whatever I bring into being shall not be altered. The command of my lips shall never be revoked, never changed. And there is the whole of Babylon in three sentences. He will fight, and he will very probably win, and the price is not treasure and not a title. The price is that from this day the assignment of the world comes out of his mouth. He is asking for what is currently strapped to the chest of the enemy commander. He is asking to be the one whose word is true. It is the calmest and most audacious thing anybody says in this poem, and he says it to a room of terrified elders who have no other offer on the table. They said yes. Anshar sent his messenger to gather every one of them, and they came, and the poem takes its time here and I am glad it does, because after two tablets of dread this is a party. They came together, all the great gods who fix the destinies. They kissed one another. They talked. They sat down to a banquet. They ate bread, and they drank sweet wine, and the poem says the wine made their bodies swell, and they shouted aloud, and they became very carefree, and their mood was merry. Read that again in your head, slowly. The world is about to end and they have a dinner. They get drunk. They cheer. And then, in that state, warm and loud and no longer frightened, they make the young god king. They set out a princely throne for him and he took his seat before his fathers, and they said, you are the most honoured among the great gods. Your destiny is unequalled. Your word is the sky. From this day forward your command shall not be altered. To raise up or bring low, this is in your hand. What you say shall come true. And then they tested him, and the test is the most beautiful small scene in the poem. They set a garment in their midst. One piece of cloth, on the floor, in the middle of the circle of the drunk and hopeful gods. And they said to Marduk, our firstborn, speak, and let this garment vanish. Speak again, and let it come back whole. And he spoke, and the garment was gone. And he spoke again, and the garment was there. That is all. No lightning. No demonstration of strength. They wanted to know one thing only, whether what he said became what was so, and they tested it on a piece of cloth in the middle of a room, and it worked in both directions, the taking away and the giving back, which is the part people forget. And when the gods his fathers saw the word of his mouth, they rejoiced, and they did homage, and they cried out, Marduk is king. And they gave him the sceptre and the throne and the royal robe, and they gave him a weapon that has no equal, and they said, go now, and cut the throat of Tiamat, and let the winds carry her blood away to secret places. He rose from the table.
I have a small confession about this chapter, which is that it is a list of equipment, and that lists of equipment are, in my experience, the best thing that can happen to a person at this hour of the night. Nothing is at stake in a list. Nothing is decided. Somebody is simply laying things out on a table, one at a time, and naming them, and there is nowhere else the story has to be until they are done. So here is what he took. He made a bow, and marked it as his weapon, and fitted the arrow to the string. He took up the mace in his right hand and gripped it. He hung the bow and the quiver at his side. He set the lightning in front of him, and filled his body with a blaze of fire. He made a net, to enclose her inside it, and this is the important one, so let it land softly. Not a sword. A net. He made a net, and he stationed the four winds at its corners so that nothing of her could escape, the south wind and the north wind and the east wind and the west wind, one at each corner, holding it open. His grandfather Anu had given him those four winds when he was a child, as a toy. And then he made seven more. The poem gives them names and the names are their own small weather report. The whirlwind. The cyclone. The four times doubled wind. The wind of unequalled force. And then the ones I like best, because you can feel them on your face if you have ever stood outside in bad weather in a flat country. The evil wind. The tempest. And the great storm, which the poem calls the flood weapon, and which is the same word they used for the flood. Eleven winds, for eleven monsters, and I do not think that is an accident either, though the poem does not say so and I will not pretend it does. He raised up the flood weapon, his great weapon. He mounted his chariot, the storm, which the poem calls unequalled and terrifying, and he hitched four horses to it, and the horses have names too. The Killer. The Relentless. The Trampler. The Swift. Their teeth carried poison, the poem says. They were trained to trample and they knew how to overthrow. And then the last thing, and it is the strangest and the most human item in the whole inventory. He put a red paste on his lips. Some translate it as a herb, or a plant of some kind, and the poem says it was to counter poison, and that he carried it in his hand or held it in his mouth. The strongest god who has ever lived, going out in a storm chariot with lightning in front of him and eleven winds behind him and a net held open at four corners, stopped before he went and put something on his lips in case he was poisoned. That is a person getting ready. That is somebody checking the stove before a long trip. And he set out. And the gods, his fathers, watched him go, and they crowded round, and the poem says they were pressing close to him, all of them, the ones who had been sitting with their lips closed for two tablets, and they watched the young one drive away toward the water. The scribe stops here and looks up. We are going to the fight now, he says. It is short. It is shorter than everything that came before it, which is a thing worth knowing in advance. And when it is finished, nothing in this poem will ever be frightening again. There are four chapters after it and every one of them is a quiet thing being made. He turns the tablet over.
They came in sight of each other, and the first thing that happened was not a blow. It was talk. She is standing there with everything she has made behind her, and he comes on in the storm chariot with the net folded at his side, and the poem says that when he looked at her, at the inside of her, at what she was, he lost his nerve for a moment. His will was distracted, the tablet says. His mind was confused, and his actions were upset. That is on the clay. The greatest of the gods, at the edge of the water, faltered. And the ones behind him, the gods who had crowded round the chariot, saw it and their vision blurred too. And then he took hold of himself and steadied his aim, and he went on, and she saw him coming. They spoke. She spoke first, or he did, the tablet is worn in places, and what passed between them was an argument about who was in the right, which is exactly what you would expect and is somehow the saddest part. He accused her of raising up a son and setting him above his elders, and of plotting evil against the gods her children. She answered him, and the poem says she was beside herself, and lost her reason, and shrieked, and her legs shook under her from the roots up. And she recited a spell, and kept casting it, an incantation, over and over, the way you would say a thing to keep it true. She had the Tablet of Destinies. She had strapped it to somebody else's chest. And when it came to it, standing in front of him, what she reached for was words. She opened her mouth to swallow him. And he drove the evil wind into it so that she could not close her lips. That is the image. That is the one image from this fight I am going to give you, and then we are going to set it down and not pick it up again. Not a blade. Not a wound. A wind, driven into an open mouth, holding it open, so that the mouth could not shut. And the fierce winds followed it and filled her belly, and her body swelled up, and she was held there, open, unable to speak or close or turn. He shot the arrow. It split her belly, and cut through her inside, and split her heart. He overcame her, and extinguished her life, and cast down her body, and stood upon it. And that is the death of Tiamat, in the poem, in about as many words as I have just used, and the poem does not linger on it and neither will we. Three thousand years of people copying this text and not one of them thought the dying needed to be longer. Her army broke. They had been standing behind her, the eleven, the viper and the dragon and the hairy hero, the great lion and the mad dog and the scorpion man, the fierce storm demons and the fish man and the bull man, and when she went down they turned to run, and could not, because he had thrown the net, and the net had four winds at its corners holding it open, and there was nowhere out. He gathered them up and he broke their weapons and he bound them, and the poem says he cast them into prison and shut them in cells. And that is the last we hear of them tonight, and it is worth knowing what happened to them afterward, because it is not what you would think. They did not stay monsters. He kept them. In the later part of the poem the statues of the eleven are set up at the gate of his own temple, standing there, facing outward, doing the job they had always done at doorways, only now on his door. The guardians went back to being guardians. And Qingu, who had worn the Tablet of Destinies on his chest, was taken alive. Marduk counted him among the dead gods, the poem says, which is a cold phrase and the coldest thing in the chapter. He bound him. And he took the Tablet of Destinies off his chest, which was never his in the first place, and he sealed it with his own seal and fastened it to his own breast. Remember that object. We are not finished with it, not tonight and not this season. And then it was over. The scribe puts his hand flat on the tablet for a moment, the way you would put your hand on a table. It is over, he says. Everything frightening in this poem has now happened. From here to the end of the seventh tablet there is no more fighting, no more armies, nobody in danger, and nothing that will ask anything of you. What is left is a very long, very careful making of things, done slowly, by somebody who has just had a terrible day and wants to build something quiet. Outside, the river goes on saying its word to the reeds. He is standing on the body of the oldest water in the world, the poem says, and he rested, and he looked at her. And then he began to think about what she could be.
He divided her in two, and the poem chooses a comparison for it that I have always found strangely gentle, given what is being described. Like a dried fish, it says. Like a shellfish, in some readings, split into its two halves. Not hacked. Not shattered. Split along the seam, the way a thing is opened by somebody who knows where the seam is. He took half of her, and he set it up above, and that half is the sky. Then he fixed a crossbar there, and set a watch, and gave the guards their instruction, and the instruction is one line long and it is the most quietly loving thing in the poem. He told them not to let her waters escape. That is the sky, in this poem. It is the upper half of the oldest water in the world, held up over your head, with a bar across it and somebody watching, so that it does not come down. And when it rains, it is because a little got through. Every person who ever lay under that sky and heard rain on a roof knew what the rain was, according to this poem. It was her. And he crossed the heavens and surveyed the region, the tablet says, and he measured it, and he made the lower half correspond to the upper, so that below matched above. Then he built the stations. He set out the constellations, and gave the gods their places among them, and he fixed the year and marked its divisions, and set three stars for each of the twelve months, so that a person on the ground, looking up, could tell what month it was by which three stars had come round. That is not poetry. That is an almanac. It is a calendar, described as an act of creation, by people whose lives depended on knowing when to plant. And in the middle he set the station of one particular star for himself, so that the others would know their bounds and not go wrong or wander. Then the moon. He made the moon appear, the poem says, and entrusted the night to him. And then he gave the moon his instructions, and I want to read them to you the way they are written, because they are the closest thing in this literature to a lullaby, and because they are, more than anything else tonight, a description of something you have actually seen. He said, go out at the beginning of the month, and shine with horns, six days worth. On the seventh day, be half a crown. At the full moon, stand opposite the sun, in the middle of the month. And when the sun catches up with you at the base of the sky, then diminish your crown, and go back the way you came, and wear less each day, and disappear, and begin again. That is the whole month. Written down, as an instruction, given once, and followed ever since. The night is entrusted to him. That is the phrase. The god who has just killed the sea takes the moon and hands him the night to look after, and then leaves. He made the clouds from her spittle, and set the winds to drive them, and made the rain. He piled up her poison as fog. He took her head and set a mountain on it, and opened springs, and the water gathered. And he opened the deep places in her eyes, and out of her two eyes he let the Tigris and the Euphrates run. There. That is the line the whole chapter has been walking toward and it is the reason people have never quite been able to leave this poem alone. The two rivers that made everything possible, that carried the boats and filled the canals and grew the barley and the date palms and let the cities exist at all, the two rivers that these people lived and died between and named their whole world after, come out of the eyes of the mother. She is crying, and the crying is the rivers, and the rivers are why anybody is alive to write it down. The poem does not say a word about that. It states it and moves on. It piles her tail up and binds it as a great bond to hold the whole thing together, and it sets her crotch as a prop to hold the sky up, and it goes on arranging her, patiently, into weather and geography, and it never once pauses to say that this is sad. I think that is because to them it was not sad. It was simply where they lived. Every day of their lives they drew water from her eyes and drank it and washed in it and floated on it and buried their dead beside it. If somebody had said to a farmer at Babylon that the river was made of grief, he would have said yes, and also that it was made of fish, and that both of those were true and neither was a reason to stop. The scribe turns the tablet. Now, he says, there is a world. And it is empty.
The gods came to him, all of them, and they bowed, and they called him lord, and they asked him what he wanted. And what he wanted, it turns out, was to make something. I will bring together blood, he said, and I will cause bones to be. I will make stand a thing, and its name shall be man. He shall be charged with the service of the gods, so that they may rest. So that they may rest. That is the reason humans exist in this poem, and it is the same reason humans exist in the older poem you may have heard in this house before, the one with the baskets and the strike, and it is worth taking one moment to be clear about the difference, because they are two different stories and both of them are true to their own tablet. In the older southern story, the one from the deep past, the workers of heaven put down their tools and refused, and the wise god made people out of clay mixed with the flesh and blood of one god who had intelligence, and the mothers of the gods gave birth to them, and the people took up the baskets. Tonight's poem is younger and colder and shorter about it. There is no strike. There is no clay. There is a prisoner. Ea, the clever one, the father, the one who put the first god to sleep, is the one who says it. Let one of their brothers be given up, he said. Let him be destroyed, and let people be fashioned. And they asked, in the assembly, who was it who started the war. And they answered themselves, and they said, Qingu. He was bound and held before Ea. They charged him with it, and cut the vessels of his blood, and from his blood Ea made humankind, and laid upon them the service of the gods, and set the gods free. So there are two makings in this literature and they do not agree, and the honest thing, and the thing this house always does, is to say so and let both stand. In one poem you are made from clay and the blood of a god who had intelligence, and the intelligence is the part that carried over. In the other, tonight's, you are made from the blood of the one who lost, the commander of the losing army, the one who wore the Tablet of Destinies on his chest and did not get to keep it. The scribe does not draw a lesson from that and neither will I. Different cities, different centuries, different tablets, and both of them copied out carefully by people who saw no need to choose. And then Marduk did a thing that has always struck me as the most administrative act in the history of religion. He divided up the gods. He took the Anunna, the great gods, six hundred of them, and he assigned three hundred to the heavens and three hundred to the earth, and he gave them their duties and their stations, and he wrote it down. Three hundred above, three hundred below. Filed. And a word about that name, because it is the name of this whole season and there is a great deal of nonsense attached to it. The Anunna, or the Anunnaki, are simply the great gods, the assembly, the senior ones. That is what the word does in these texts. They are here in this poem exactly as they are everywhere else, sitting in a room, being assigned jobs. They do not arrive from anywhere. Nobody in three thousand years of clay ever wrote that they came from somewhere else, because in these poems they are the ones who were always here. And then the gods, all six hundred of them, freed of their work and grateful, said something that surprised me the first time I read it. They said, let us build him a house. Not a temple exactly, at first. A place to stay. They said, whenever we come up to the assembly, let there be somewhere for us to spend the night. Let us build a shrine, and when we arrive, let us rest in it. And Marduk's face lit up like broad daylight, the poem says, and he told them to build Babylon. And about that name, one quiet thing before we go on. They heard it as two words, gate and god. The gate of the god. That is what the people who lived there understood their own city to be called, and it is how the name reached us, through other people's books, in other alphabets, for thousands of years. Scholars now think the name is older than that and came from somewhere else and was probably not originally Babylonian at all, and that the gate of the god is an explanation somebody arrived at later, the way people do with the names of the towns they were born in. I like it better knowing that. They lived in a city whose name nobody could quite account for, and they decided it meant the door, and then they built the door. So they did. Themselves. With their own hands. For one whole year they made bricks, the poem says, and when the second year came they raised the head of the temple high, and they built the tower of it up beside the deep water, and they made a dwelling for Marduk and one for Ea and one for the sky. Six hundred gods, freed from their labour by the making of people, spending a year making bricks. Nobody in the poem finds this funny. I think it is one of the warmest things in it. They did not want a monument. They wanted a place to sleep when they came into town, and they liked it enough to build it by hand. And when it was done they sat down in it, all of them, and they held a banquet, and the poem says they sat in the high shrine which they had made, and the great gods took their seats, and the cup was set out, and they sat down at the feast. And in that room, at that table, with the world made and the people made and the city built, they began, one at a time, to say his names. The seventh tablet is a list, and it is the longest and strangest ending any creation story has, and it is perfect for this hour. Fifty names. Fifty of them, spoken one after another by the assembled gods, each one with a line or two of explanation attached, and it goes on and on, and there is no plot in it at all, and nothing is at stake, and nobody in the room is in any danger, and it is nothing but voices in a warm hall naming somebody they are glad about. I am not going to read you all fifty. I am going to read you some, slowly, and let them go past, and you do not have to hold any of them. They called him Asalluhi, the one who watches over. They called him Namtila, the god who gives life, who restored the ruined gods as though they were his own creation. They called him Tutu, the one who makes the spells clean. They called him Ziukkinna, the life of the host of gods. They called him Agaku, the maker. They called him Shazu, who knows the hearts of the gods, who examines the inside, who lets no evildoer go out from him. They called him Suhrim, and Suhgurim, and Zahrim, and Zahgurim, and the tablet gives each of them a line, and the lines get shorter as they go, the way a list does late in the evening. They called him Enbilulu, the lord who makes the fields abundant, who establishes the canals, who opens the springs and apportions the water. They called him Hegal, the one who heaps up plenty for the people. They called him Gil, who stores the grain in heaps, who brings forth barley. They called him Lugalabdubur, the king who scattered the works of the enemy, who made her flee. They called him Addu, and said, let him cover the whole span of the sky with his roar, and let his good voice sound over the earth, and let the thickness of the clouds diminish, and let him give food below to the people. Nine of the names have to do with water arriving where it is needed. Six of them are about grain. Several are about not letting the guilty go. One is simply that he is kind to the ruined. That is what a god was for, at Babylon, when they sat down to list everything he was. Not thunder mainly. Canals mainly. Barley mainly. Water at the right time. And there is one more thing in the list, and it is not in any of the names. It is in how many there are. Fifty is not a round number chosen for the sound of it. Fifty was already somebody's number. In that world every great god had a numeral, the way a person has a rank, and fifty belonged to Enlil, who had been the lord of the gods, the one at the top, for as long as anybody had been writing anything down at all. So when the assembly sits at that table and says fifty names over a young god from a city that was nothing much a few centuries earlier, they are not paying him a compliment. They are handing him somebody else's number. The whole seventh tablet, the whole long beautiful list you have just half heard on your way down toward sleep, is a change of office, done politely, out loud, in front of everybody, with a cup in hand. That is how a city becomes the centre of the world. Not by winning the battle. By being the one who gets to say the names afterward. And the last lines of the seventh tablet are not about him at all. They are instructions to us. Let them be held in remembrance, the poem says, and let the leading man repeat them. Let the wise and the learned confer together. Let the father recite them and teach them to his son. Let the ears of the shepherd be opened. Let them not be forgotten. And they were not.
Now here is the last thing tonight, and it is the true one, and it is why I asked you at the very beginning to stay awake this long if you could. That poem was not read privately. It had a night. Every spring, in the first month, when the year turned, Babylon held a festival that ran about eleven days, and on one of those days a priest stood in the temple and recited the whole of Enuma Elish out loud, all seven tablets, beginning to end, in front of the god. That is what it was for. That is why there are more copies of it than of almost anything else they wrote. It was the script for the night the year began again. And one last true thing about those copies, which I have saved for here because it belongs at the end. Not all of them say Marduk. Up north, in Assyria, in the country of the king who gathered the great library, there are copies of this same poem in which the young god who goes out to the water and comes back with the world is not Marduk of Babylon at all. He is Assur, the god of the Assyrians. Same poem. Same tablets. Same net, same winds, same bar across the sky. A different name in the middle of it. That is not a scandal and it is not a forgery. It is what people did with a poem this good. They kept every line of it and put their own city in the part that mattered, and both versions were copied out carefully by people who took them seriously, and both are on shelves today. And on the fifth day of that festival, something else happened, and it is the strangest ceremony I know of from the ancient world. They brought in the king. The king of Babylon, the most powerful man in that part of the world, was brought into the room where the statue stood. And the high priest took away his sceptre, and his ring, and his mace, and his crown, and carried them out and set them down somewhere else. And the king stood there with nothing. And then the priest struck him on the cheek. And pulled his ears. And made him kneel, and the king had to say aloud, in front of the god, that he had not sinned, that he had not been careless of the city, that he had not destroyed its walls, that he had not struck the cheek of anyone under his protection. And the priest struck him again, hard, on the cheek. And this is the part that matters, and it is the reason I have kept it for the very end of the night. They were watching for tears. If the king wept, the year was good. If the tears came, it meant the god was satisfied, and the kingship was renewed, and the season would turn properly, and the barley would come up. If he did not weep, that was a bad omen for the year. So once a year, in the oldest continuously inhabited part of the world, the most powerful man alive was slapped in a quiet room until he cried, on purpose, by a priest, in front of a statue, and everybody hoped very much that it would work. And afterward they gave him back his crown, and put the ring in his hand, and set the mace back in his grip, and he walked out into the festival, and the year began. The scribe sets the seventh tablet down on the stack with the other six, in order, and squares the edges with the side of his hand. The lamp is low now. Think of the room in Babylon on the morning after. The festival over. The crown back where it belongs. The statue in its place. The seven tablets going back on their shelf, in order, until the year comes round again. And outside, all the things the poem says were made. The two rivers, running, from her eyes, going down through the barley country in the dark, past the canals that Enbilulu was thanked for, past the fields that Hegal was thanked for, carrying the boats. The moon, doing what he was told. Six days of horns. Half a crown on the seventh. Standing opposite the sun at the middle of the month, and then wearing less each night, and going back the way he came, and beginning again. He has not missed a single instruction since the night it was given to him. The stars in their stations, three for each month, coming round on time. And over all of it, held up, the upper half of the oldest water in the world, with a bar across it, and somebody watching, and the instruction still standing, that her waters are not to escape. That is the world this poem built, and you are lying underneath it right now. It is a strange comfort and I offer it to you exactly as they left it. Every single thing over your head tonight, in this poem, was made out of somebody who could not sleep. The noise that started all of it was children who would not settle. The first crime was a father who wanted quiet. The war was fought by a young god who was given the wind as a toy. And when it was finished, the very first thing he did was to fix a bar across the sky so nothing would fall on anybody, and then to take the moon and hand him the night and tell him how to do it. The night is entrusted to him. That is the line. Somebody was put in charge of the dark, and given careful instructions, and has kept to them ever since. You do not have to keep any of tonight. Not the names, not the eleven, not the order of the tablets. If you remember one thing in the morning let it be the bar across the sky, and the guards told not to let the waters through, and the fact that somebody in a mud brick city three thousand years ago lay down at night, as you are lying down now, and wanted very much to believe that the sky was being held up on purpose, by somebody who had been asked to do it, and who was still there. The scribe leans toward the lamp. Outside, the river is saying the same soft word over and over against the reeds, the way it did before any of this was written. The bar is across the sky. The moon has his instructions. The waters are staying where they were put. Sleep well. Goodnight.