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The Seven Tablets of Creation, Vol. I

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The Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, as the British Museum read it in 1902. A god kills the sea monster Tiamat and builds the sky from her body. Volume 1 prints the tablets with English translation.

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Made byLeonard William King
LanguageEnglish
FileTXT 584 KB, EPUB 446 KB
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This is a public-domain copy. The line below says where the file comes from and why we may host it.

Why we can share it: Published 1902, before 1931, so public domain in the US (reasoning). King died 1919. The Internet Archive record for this upload states no copyright status; a separate University of Toronto scan of the same work (seventabletsofcr02kinguoft) is marked NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT, US.

Read the story behind it

TextEnuma ElishThe Babylonian creation poem ends by handing its hero fifty different names, each a title with its own meaning, including Nibiru. Before that come a war among the gods, a sea-monster split to make the sky, and humans made from a rebel god's blood. Why does a creation story finish with a list of names?BeingTiamatIn the Babylonian creation epic, the Tigris and Euphrates flow out of the eyes of a dead goddess; Tiamat is the primeval salt sea and mother of the first gods. She prepares for war, gives birth to eleven kinds of monsters, and then her split body becomes the sky and the earth. Who won?GodMardukWhen enemies captured Marduk's statue and carried it abroad, Babylonian writers explained the loss as the god choosing to go on a journey. He began as the minor god of a minor city; in the epic Enuma Elish he splits the sea-monster Tiamat in two and earns fifty names. How does a small-town god become king?

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