The idea that the cosmos was not predetermined and that order required a degree of royal intervention was not absent from first millennium tablets. However, texts extant from this period were dominated by a very different attitude toward cosmic order. Our most commonly attested literary text from this period is the Epic or Poem of Creation (Foster 1993a: 351-402). This commemorated the primeval evolution of the cosmos that culminated in the victory of Marduk, patron deity of Babylon, over the forces of chaos led by Tiamat, the personification of the sea. For this action, the rest of the gods acknowledged the suzerainty of Marduk. This rise of Marduk was widely reflected in other first millennium texts and was paralleled in the north of Mesopotamia by the figure of Assur, the patron god of Assyria. This reflected the increased political importance of the cities these gods personified. However, especially in the case of Marduk, these new gods represented not only new rulers of the cosmos, but also a new type of supreme cosmic authority. According to the Epic of Creation, cosmic order was not a random entity, but rather something determined by Marduk in primeval times. After defeating Tiamat, Marduk created an ordered cosmos by dividing her carcass. In such a cosmos divine decrees and the m e were redundant concepts. Divine decrees were imagined as a completed set of proclamations inscribed on the ‘‘Tablet of Destinies’’ that was seized by the victorious Marduk. The role of the m e was fulfilled by Marduk himself. As the offspring of Ea, it was he who represented divine power in human cultural achievements.
Marduk was not merely a replacement for Enlil at the head of the pantheon. He was a new kind of chief god altogether, one who could impose order on his fellow gods for the benefit of humanity. Moreover, to praise this new kind of leader, the Epic of Creation consciously redeployed motifs prominent in Old Babylonian evocations of order to celebrate the new order.
The motifs of the sun, provisioning, and marriage were reused in the poem to characterize Marduk in a manner reminiscent of the divine king in Old Babylonian compositions. At the first appearance of Marduk in the poem his grandfather, An, the sky god, acclaimed him in solar terms as:
The son Sun god, the son Sun god,
The son, the sun, the sunlight of the gods. (Foster 1993a: 357)
Second, the king’s old task of provisioning the gods was attributed to the new divine figure:
When the gods had given kingship over to Marduk
They said to him expressions of goodwill and obedience,
“Henceforth, you shall be the provider for our sanctuaries.’’ (Foster 1993a: 382)
The third motif, marriage to a fearsome female figure, was redeployed more elliptically. Whereas Inana, Istar in Akkadian, the spouse of the king in Old Babylonian thought, was the most prominent goddess in first millennium texts, she was never referred to by name in the Epic of Creation. The only terrifying female figure in the Epic of Creation was Tiamat. Marduk’s cosmic ascension was based on defeating her in battle, not marrying her. Nevertheless, his relationship to Tiamat had conjugal undertones. Marduk acknowledged the legitimating qualities of marrying Tiamat. He merely disagreed with her choice of the obscure figure of Qingu as her spouse and hinted that this was an honor that should have been his:
You named Qingu to be spouse for you
Though he had no right to be, you set him up for chief god. (Foster 1993a: 375)
The sexual undertones of the relationship between Marduk and Tiamat were fully brought out in a Neo-Assyrian cultic commentary that described Marduk as the one ‘‘who [defeat]ed Tiamat with his penis’’ (Livingstone 1989: 94).
From this perspective, what needed explaining in history was disorder, not order. In the poem Erra and Ishum cosmic crises were explained as the result of Marduk’s periodically withdrawing from the world (Foster 1993a: 771-805). Without his restraining hand, chaos ensued. The poem itself focused on the occasion when Marduk left the rampaging fire-god Erra in charge. The poem also reinterpreted the flood as due not to the noise of mankind, but as the result of a previous absence of Marduk.
The other prominent way of conceptualizing disorder involved the king. Replaced by Marduk as the regulator of cosmic order, the king was no longer treated as divine. Outside of royal inscriptions he was often seen as an explicitly problematic figure; his actions were usually destructive of cosmic order. Historiographic texts could depict the king as a danger to civilized life. For example, the so-called Weidner Chronicle presented early Mesopotamian history as a series of royal transgressions against Marduk and his city:
By his exalted command, Marduk took away sovereignty from the horde of Gutium and gave it to Utuhegal. Utuhegal the ‘‘fisherman’’ laid his evil hand on Marduk’s city, and his corpse was carried away by the river. Marduk gave sovereignty over all lands to Sulgi, the son of Ur-Nammu, and the latter did not carry out Marduk’s rites perfectly; he profaned the purification rituals, and his sin... Amar-Suena, his son, altered the great bulls and the (sheep) sacrifices of the New Year Festival of Marduk’s temple. Goring by an ox was foretold for him, and he died from the ‘‘bite’’ of his shoe. (Al-Rawi 1990: 10)
A late first millennium text sets out in detail the supposed atrocities of an otherwise obscure eighth century king, Nabu-suma-iskun, against Babylon:
Year by year Nabu-suma-iskun increased the killing, pillaging, murdering and forced labor upon them. In one day he burned alive 16 Kuthians in the Zababa Gate which is in Babylon. He carried off the sons of Babylon to Syria and Elam as gifts. He expelled the sons of Babylon, their wives, their sons, and their slaves and settled them in the countryside. The quarter of the sons of Babylon... he heaped into a mound and a ruin and turned it into royal property. (Cole 1994: 235-6)
At a cultic level, both regular rituals, such as the New Year festival, and irregular ones, such as the Substitute King ritual, emphasized the dangers to cosmic order posed by the king. Thus, the New Year Festival, the major state religious ceremony of the first millennium Mesopotamian calendar, culminated in the king’s appearing stripped of his insignia of office before the statue of Marduk (Black 1981; Pon-gratz-Leisten 1999b). The king was seen as fit for renewed office not because of any positive qualities, but rather because he refrained from exhibiting negative ones, as he recited:
I did not sin, lord of the countries. I was not neglectful of your godship. I did not destroy Babylon; I did not command its overthrow. I did not. . . the temple of Esagil,
I did not forget its rites. I did not rain blows on the cheek of a subordinate...I did not humiliate them. I watched out for Babylon; I did not smash its walls. (Sachs 1969: 334)
The Substitute King ritual was carried out in response to the most ominous of astronomical phenomena, a solar or lunar eclipse. This represented so extreme a sign of divine displeasure at royal misdeeds that only the king’s death would assuage the divine anger. To avoid this fate, a substitute would take on the outward trappings of royalty for a few months before being ritually slain (Bottero 1992b: 138-55; Parpola 1993c).
Characterizations of the king’s divinity on Old Babylonian tablets implied a very different cosmic role from his non-divine first millennium counterpart. What correlations to this contrast can we see in contemporary political life?
World History
