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Babylonian — Enuma Elish
Babylonian — Enuma Elish
The People
- Tradition Name
- Babylonian — Enuma Elish
- People / Civilization
- Babylonian civilization — Akkadian-speaking, central Mesopotamia
- Region
- Middle East — Mesopotamia (modern Iraq)
- Time Depth
- Compiled c. 1100 BCE from older Sumerian-Akkadian sources; recited annually at the Akitu New Year festival
- Living Tradition
- Historical civilization; textual tradition preserved on cuneiform tablets
The Shape This Story World Shares
Laid beside the Story Worlds of other peoples, this one shows the Cyclical World Story Plot Architecture.
Type. Cyclical
Logic. The battle of order and chaos recurs annually; creation is performed, not remembered. The ending — the fifty names — is a door back to the beginning: next year the epic is recited again, because order lapses without renewal.
Signature movement. Unnamed state → disruption → chaos mobilized → failures → champion’s bargain → combat and world-building from the defeated body → naming, and the wheel turns again.
Sources
The sources for this Story World are being set out here. Nothing is cited on this page that has not been verified.
Engaged through the public-domain scholarly translation (L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation, 1902). The sevenfold cycle is taught as Babylon preserved it — in its own tablets and its own festival.