crushing Tiamat in battle. He “shot the arrow that split the belly, that pierced the gut and cut the womb.”14 Marduk’s arrow, symbol of his phallic manhood, invades the womb-matrix: death penetrates to the seat of life. Only by destroying an organic matrix, source of generation, can the inorganic work of building proceed. As Paul Ricoeur remarks apropos of Marduk, it is “by disorder that disorder is overcome; it is by violence that the youngest of the gods establishes order.”15
As master builder—as “Lord of the Land,” as “Son-of-the-Sun”16—Marduk must construct out of something: nothing ex nihilo here! He finds his building materials in Tiamat’s slain body, whose corporeal depths become the (re)source of the civilized cosmos.
The lord rested; he gazed at the huge body, pondering how to use it, what to create from the dead carcass. He split it apart like a cockle-shell; with the upper half he constructed the arc of sky, he pulled down the bar and set a watch on the waters, so they should never escape.17
In this violent action—which takes place precisely as bará, or cutting up—Marduk repeats the initial separation between Anshar and Kishar by creating the horizon line or “bar” that distinguishes sky from sea. To “set a watch on the waters” is to take a definitive step toward delimiting them by placing a cosmic boundary over them. Such delimitation is place-making in its power—as is the creation of the “arc of the sky,” a bowlike outer limit that makes the sky into a region of its own. Thanks to this new place-setting, we no longer need to refer to the open sky as “Ami,” or to the shared horizons of earth and heaven as “Anshar” and “Kishar.” The evolution from primeval elements to gods has given way to cosmic places no longer requiring mythical names.18 But the story goes on.
He crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself above apsu, that apsu built by Nuddimud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in.
He stretched the immensity of the firmament, he made Esharra, the Great Palace, to be its earthly image, and Anu and Enlil and Ea had each their right stations.19
Following the creation of gods earlier in the epic—theogony proper—we are now presented with the creation of places for the gods, their “right stations.” Through Marduk’s actions, the gods “are assigned their places.”20 Once again, topogenesis follows from cosmogenesis. As a condition of this locatory action, the “infinite distance” of the abyss must be surveyed and the “immensity of the firmament” stretched out. To stretch out is the corporeal equivalent of visual survey: in both cases, the full scope of something is swept out in advance, “sized up” as we say, by a preliminary action of literal circumspection. To do this, Marduk must establish a stable position from which to do the stretching and sizing. Such a position is found in the station assumed by Marduk “above apsu": above the abyss. His stationing there is in effect a double superpositioning: first over Ea’s house and shrine and then over “the old abyss” of the elemental Apsu, an action now surveyed in its infinite extent.
More than survey is at stake here. Marduk also sets to work by “measuring out and marking in” the abyss. He moves to mensuration, a measurement at once spatial and temporal.
He projected positions for the Great Gods conspicuous in the sky, he gave them a starry aspect as constellations; he measured the year, gave it a beginning and an end, and to each month of the twelve three rising stars.21
Just as the gods are given spatial positions, so temporal positions are also marked out—positions primarily taken by the sun and the moon in their respective cycles.22 In addition to these positions (which are in effect visible and countable places), Marduk bestows basic directionalities on the new world: “Through her ribs he opened gates in the east and west, and gave them strong bolts on the right and left; and high in the belly of Tiamat he set the zenith.”23 An entire landscape is drawn out from the dismembered Deep.
Then Marduk considered Tiamat. He skimmed spume from the bitter sea, heaped up the clouds, spindrift of wet and wind and cooling rain, the spittle of Tiamat.
With his own hands from the steaming mist he spread the clouds. He pressed hard down the head of water, heaping mountains over it, opening springs to flow: Euphrates and Tigris rose from her eyes, but he closed the nostrils and held back their springhead.
He piled huge mountains on her paps and through them drove water-holes to channel the deep sources; and high overhead he arched her tail, locked-in to the wheel of heaven; the pit was under his feet, between was the crotch, the sky’s fulcrum. Now the earth had foundations and the sky its mantle.24
Marduk here creates the very topography of the earth, its atmosphere and terrain, from the megabody of Tiamat. Originally a sea region, this gigantic body is displaced and transmuted into the created earth, an earth no longer hanging in the abyss but endowed finally with firm “foundations.”
The last two things to be fashioned by Marduk are human beings and their dwelling places. It is striking that the latter are created before the former—as if to say that housing is a precondition of being human. Ea is employed as architect of temples and in particular of the city of Babylon.25 Humankind is then created out of the sacrificial blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s second spouse and the captain of her monstrous forces. It is at this point that Marduk makes his strongest claim to be a creator-god.
Blood to blood
I join,
blood to bone
I form
an original thing,
its name is MAN,
aboriginal man
is mine in making.26
Despite this possessive and self-congratulating proclamation—and others like it earlier27—Marduk is not altogether omnipotent in his creative powers. He certainly does not create anything out of nothing. Humankind, his proudest ens creatum, is created out of the blood of a preexisting god: even here, he “moulded matter.”28 Marduk does not bring forth matter out of the nothing of nonmatter: “From the wreck of Tiamat’s rout, from the stuff of fallen gods he made mankind.”29 Everything is created out of the body of Tiamat—a body that is the primal stuff of creation.
Tiamat’s body is not only primal. It is inexhaustible—so much so that it is not entirely consumed in the course of creation. At the very end of the Enuma Elish a propitiatory prayer implores
let her recede into the future
far-off from man-kind
till time is old, keep her
for ever absent.30
Tiamat may have been “disappeared” from the current scene of creation—her intact body does not survive—but she is not completely vanquished. Her matter, her matrix, persists. Any subsequent act of creation will have to draw upon it.
N. K. Sandars, the English translator of the Enuma Elish, is certainly right to claim that in this epic “matter is eternal, [and] Tiamat and Apsu provide, from within themselves, the material of the whole universe; a universe which will evolve into ever greater complexity.”31 But it does not follow from this (as Sandars also claims) that “in the Babylonian poem there is, strictly speaking, no creation at all.”32 As we have seen abundantly from Sandars’s own translation, creation takes
