The Enuma Elish and the High Temples of Babylon

The Enuma Elish is one of the oldest creation story we have on record, written down roughly 3,000 years ago on cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia. Like most ancient texts, it takes its title from its opening words rather than from anything we’d recognize as a proper title today. Enuma Elish means “When on high” or “When above,” and before the story has even started, we’re given a hint of what’s to come. This is a story about literal and symbolic height.

Being a creation story, the Enuma Elish covers a lot of ground: the birth of the gods, the shaping of the earth, the making of humans. But it’s the poem’s opening lines that set the tone for everything that follows:

When on high no word was used for heaven / Nor below was firm ground called by name.¹

These lines describe a time prior to creation, a time before language and understanding. This was a time of formless chaos. But notice how the text uses verticality to describe that formlessness. Heaven is “on high.” Ground is “below.” In a world before creation, up and down help structure the Mesopotamian imagination. The same is true for the world after creation, as we will see.

In Mesopotamian language itself, sky, heaven, and divinity are bound together as a single concept. The word / logogram for “heaven,” AN (𒀭), is also the word for “sky” and “god.”

But the gods of the Enuma Elish aren’t confined to the sky. They preside over the underworld, the earth, the waters. The poem opens with a cosmic ocean, a primordial water that is, at first, all there is. From it come Anshar, “the whole sky,” and Kishar, “the whole earth,” a male and female principle whose union produces the rest of the gods and goddesses (and arguably everything else). Divinity, in other words, spans the whole vertical axis: down into the deep waters, up into the high heavens, and everywhere in between.

A Family Drama

The Enuma Elish is less a tidy account of creation than an unruly family drama. The younger gods grow restless and noisy, and the older gods — wanting some peace and quiet like stereotypical old-timers — start plotting against them. The details of the plot don’t matter much here; what matters is the outcome. The young gods outmaneuver their elders, Marduk is chosen to lead their defense, and he emerges from the conflict as the supreme god of the pantheon. There’s no mountain imagery in this part of the story. It’s cosmic genealogy and family feud more than anything else, but it sets up everything that follows.

Having defeated the old gods, Marduk turns his attention to a more practical problem. Who’s going to do all the work in this new world? He decides that humans “shall bear the gods’ toil.”² Humans are created specifically so that the gods can stop laboring and finally rest. Grateful for that freedom, the gods decide to build Marduk a city and a house.

Building Marduk a House

Like the Sumerian Gudea Cylinders — a text I’ve written about before — the Enuma Elish includes an account of temple building, though a much briefer one. There’s no explicit mountain imagery here, but there is a strong sense of verticality and loftiness. The gods decide to build Marduk’s temple high, and they build it in a new city made for the purpose: Babylon.

Then build Babylon the task as that you requested, / Let bricks be formed for it, build high the shrine.³

The temple they build for Marduk is called Esagila, a name that means something like “house whose top is high.” One scholar renders it as “structure with upraised head.”⁴ Either way, we understand the insistence on height.

It took the gods one year to build Babylon.

When the second year came, / They raised the head of Esagila, the counterpart to Apsu. / They built the lofty ziggurat of Apsu. / For Anu, Enlil, Ea and him they founded the dwelling. He took his seat in splendor before them.⁵

The Counterpart of Apsu?

This passage is a small puzzle worth pausing on. Why does Apsu show up here? And what does it mean to call Esagila its “counterpart”?

Apsu, along with Tiamat, is one of the two primordial god-waters that open the poem. Earlier in the story, Apsu is killed by the god Ea, who then makes Apsu’s remains his own dwelling place. (Here, as with a lot of Mesopotamian myth, it helps to let go of strict logic: Apsu is a god with agency, but he’s also a place — the literal deep, underground water. It’s a name that resurfaces, conceptually if not by name, in the opening lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh and at other points in the poem.)

So when the poem calls the new shrine the “counterpart to Apsu,” it may be signaling direction as much as anything: if Apsu is down, this new structure is up. The “ziggurat of Apsu” becomes its own kind of anchor, a vertical line running from the depths, through the earth, and into the heavens… a kind of axis mundi. There’s a nice family logic to this, too: Ea, who slew Apsu, is Marduk’s father. And Marduk killed Apsu’s counterpart, Tiamat. Building a monument that reaches up from Apsu’s remains ties father to son in a single line of cosmic authority.

Other scholars read the passage more simply, arguing that “Apsu” here functions “in this context [as] a synonym for the sky.”⁶ Either reading keeps us on the same vertical axis the poem has been tracing from the very first line.

Two Temples, Not One?

I’m not convinced by these interpretations. To me, the passage above reads as if it refers to a second temple — the lofty ziggurat of Apsu — and not one. Neither is Andrew George who, writing about the archaeology behind this passage, notes, “There is no reason to doubt that this ziqqurrat, described as ziqqurrat apsî elite, ’the upper ziqqurrat of the Apsû,’ was Etemenanki.”⁷

It is reasonable to believe that Marduk’s temple described in the Enuma Elish isn’t the same as Babylon’s more famous and larger ziggurat, the Etemenanki (“Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”), which likely influenced the biblical account of the Tower of Babel. Marduk’s temple Esagila, named in the Enuma Elish, was the temple complex at ground level. The Etemenanki ziggurat, which isn’t explicitly named in the myth, was the towering ziggurat just north of Esagila and the more monumental structure of the two.

The cover image of this post is an illustration of the two temples within ancient Babylon. Etemenanki is the taller, stepped structure within walls to the north (left in the image) of the Esagila (the small structure on the right of the image). The second image, a few paragraphs above, show the site plan. Both illustrations come from The Excavations at Babylon by Robert Koldewey (1914).⁸

The Enuma Elish describes the founding of Esagila, though, as George’s comment suggests, the poem’s language likely references Etemenanki alongside it.

So, it is reasonable to believe that there are two distinct temples in referenced in the Enuma Elish:

1. “They raised the head of Esagila, the counterpart to Apsu”
2. “They built the lofty ziggurat of Apsu,” which was properly a ziggurat unlike Esagila and which Andrew George identifies as Etemenanki.

Though, I think it is safe to say that the text is ambiguous and no conclusions can be drawn. What can’t be disputed, however, is the fact that the Enuma Elish does refer to ziggurats and lofty temples as a central, organizing principle of the city of Babylon.

Babylon as Nexus

Once Marduk’s temple is complete, the poem goes on to describe temples built for the other gods and goddesses as well. Babylon, and Esagila at its center, comes to be described as a kind of “nexus” of the Mesopotamian pantheon.⁹

This interpretation is informed in the etymology of the name Babylon. The cuneiform spelling of Babylon is KÁ.DIG̃IR.RAKI. The sign 𒆍 (KÁ) is the logogram for “gate”, while 𒀭 (DIG̃IR) refers to “god.” Babylon — like its Semitic form Babel — is thus literally the “gate of god.” This etymology appears to be disputed of late, so I need to do more research into it. But the imagery is nice. Babylon, the great Mesopotamian city with temples and the seat of Marduk, serves as a kind of gateway to the divine.