Enuma Elish

Enuma Elish, "When on high," is the Babylonian creation epic, recited at the new-year festival and preserved on seven tablets. It narrates the emergence of the ordered cosmos from primordial waters through the young god Marduk's victory over Tiamat, the chaos-dragon of the deep.

From Tiamat's divided body Marduk fashions heaven and earth, and from a slain god's blood humanity is made. The poem is a cosmology of order wrested from chaos — a template in which creation is the imposition of mind, name, and word upon the formless.

One of humanity's oldest written cosmogonies, it stands behind much of the creation imagery of the ancient Near East and opens the long story in which the world is spoken and shaped into being.