{"it":{"id":"TX005","kind":"text","sub":"Babylonian","name":"Enuma Elish","place":"London","date":"c.12th c. BCE (Nebuchadnezzar I) or earlier","oldest":"7th c. BCE (Nineveh)","inst":"Library of Ashurbanipal tablets, British Museum; specific K-numbers [unverified]","lang":"Akkadian","src":[203,505,484,551],"lat":51.519,"lon":-0.127,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"Enuma Elish opens \"When on high the heaven had not been named\" and ends with Marduk splitting Tiamat to make heaven and earth.","why":"Enuma Elish is the only complete creation account to survive from ancient Mesopotamia, and it sits at the root of debates about Genesis and of modern claims about planetary collisions.","nfacts":3,"nsrc":9,"yt":"List every celestial term in a standard translation.","rel":["TX007","W15A02"],"hook":"Babylon's creation poem has Marduk split the sea-monster Tiamat \"like a flat fish\" to make the sky"},"S":{"203":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1"],"505":["Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C5%ABma_Eli%C5%A1"],"484":["Wikipedia: Zecharia Sitchin","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin"],"551":["L. W. King 1902, The Seven Tablets of Creation (Internet Archive)","https://archive.org/details/seventabletsofcr02kinguoft"]},"rec":{"id":"TX005","alias":["W11T06","W15T02"],"ms":[{"a":"tablets","v":"7","u":"count","unc":"","by":"","yr":"","m":"text structure","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W15M009","s":["W15S10"],"c":"Wikipedia Enūma Eliš","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enūma_Eliš&oldid=1375013481"},{"a":"lines_total","v":"1000","u":"lines","unc":"about","by":"","yr":"","m":"text structure","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W15M010","s":["W15S10"],"c":"Wikipedia Enūma Eliš","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enūma_Eliš&oldid=1375013481"},{"a":"lines_per_tablet","v":"115-170","u":"lines","unc":"range","by":"","yr":"","m":"text structure","b":"S","t":"MEASUREMENT","id":"W15M011","s":["W15S10"],"c":"Wikipedia Enūma Eliš","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enūma_Eliš&oldid=1375013481"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA109","a":"Tiamat = planet destroyed by Nibiru, forming asteroid belt/Earth.","who":"Sitchin (1976)","main":"Theology elevating Marduk/Babylon; recited at akitu festival.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1},{"id":"AA203","a":"ancient/NHI-origin claims","who":"various (not itemised)","main":"Assyrian versions replace Marduk with Ashur; tablet 5 largely unknown until later","ms":"W11S77","st":"no data","n":"Genuine text; NHI (Anunnaki) readings are interpretation.","nl":"1"},{"id":"AA217","a":"Records contact with non-human/advanced beings or craft","who":"AA literature (see claimant_index)","main":"~1000 lines; 115-170 lines per tablet; most of Tablet V unrecovered; earliest manuscript from Assur, 9th c BCE","ms":"W15S10","st":"no data","n":"No NHI content in text itself; AA reading (Sitchin) in W15C rows.","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[{"who":"Zecharia Sitchin","med":"book","ep":"The 12th Planet (Sitchin, 1976)","v":"Nibiru, 3,600-yr orbit; Anunnaki arrived ~450,000 yr ago to mine gold; humans engineered as workers","b":"S","s":["W11S118"]},{"who":"Ancient Aliens","med":"TV","ep":"Ancient Aliens #56 \"The Anunnaki Connection\" (aired 2013-10-14)","v":"Episode title only; claim content not in source","b":"S","s":["W11S116"]},{"who":"Ancient Aliens","med":"TV","ep":"Ancient Aliens #247 \"Secrets of the Sumerians\" (aired 2024-02-23)","v":"Episode title only; claim content not in source","b":"S","s":["W11S116"]},{"who":"Zecharia Sitchin","med":"book","ep":"The 12th Planet (Sitchin, 1976)","v":"Creation epic encodes Nibiru planetary collision; 3,600-yr orbit","b":"S","s":["W15S43"]}],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Enuma Elish VI 1-38","q":"Ea makes mankind from Kingu's blood to bear gods' toil. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"King 1902 / Lambert 2013","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1","mo":"creation"}],"tr":[{"by":"L.W. King","yr":"1902","t":"The Seven Tablets of Creation","lic":"public domain","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1"},{"by":"W.G. Lambert","yr":"2013","t":"Babylonian Creation Myths","lic":"copyright","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1"}],"mo":[{"v":"divine_blood_or_breath","ev":"P017","n":"from Atrahasis","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1"}],"tl":[],"wit":[{"id":"W11T06","mw":"7 tablets, ~1000 lines (115-170 per tablet); K 63 (BM) among first identified by George Smith; CT XIII (1901); earliest MS from Assur, 9th c BCE","kn":"Assyrian versions replace Marduk with Ashur; tablet 5 largely unknown until later","pf":"genuine ancient","st":"no data","sn":"Genuine text; NHI (Anunnaki) readings are interpretation.","b":"S","s":["W11S77"]},{"id":"W15T02","mw":"7 clay tablets, Akkadian; Library of Ashurbanipal, Kuyunjik/Nineveh, excavated 1848-1876 (Layard, Rassam, G. Smith); link found on BM tablet K 63 (Smith); further Assur finds 1924-25 and 1928-29 (tablets 1, 6, 7)","kn":"~1000 lines; 115-170 lines per tablet; most of Tablet V unrecovered; earliest manuscript from Assur, 9th c BCE","pf":"genuine ancient","st":"no data","sn":"No NHI content in text itself; AA reading (Sitchin) in W15C rows.","b":"S","s":["W15S10"]}],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Theology elevating Marduk/Babylon; recited at akitu festival.","alternative_reading":"Tiamat = planet destroyed by Nibiru, forming asteroid belt/Earth.","alt_proponent":"Sitchin (1976)","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Nibiru in Tablet V/VII is a station associated with Marduk/Jupiter, not a 12th planet (Heiser; Horowitz 1998).","key_theme":"Marduk splits Tiamat; man made from Kingu's blood (Tablet VI)","language":"Akkadian","physical_object_institution":"Library of Ashurbanipal tablets, British Museum; specific K-numbers [unverified]","composition_date":"c.12th c. BCE (Nebuchadnezzar I) or earlier","oldest_ms_date":"7th c. BCE (Nineveh)","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W11S77","t":"Wikipedia Enūma Eliš","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enūma_Eliš&oldid=1375013481"},{"id":"W11S118","t":"Wikipedia: Zecharia Sitchin (redirect from The Twelfth Planet)","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zecharia_Sitchin&oldid=1376170468"},{"id":"W11S116","t":"Wikipedia: List of Ancient Aliens episodes","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Ancient_Aliens_episodes&oldid=1378379851"},{"id":"W15S43","t":"Sitchin, The 12th Planet (1976) as summarised on Wikipedia","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zecharia_Sitchin&oldid=1376170468"},{"id":"W15S10","t":"Wikipedia Enūma Eliš","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Enūma_Eliš&oldid=1375013481"},{"id":"S0480","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Enūma Eliš","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C5%ABma_Eli%C5%A1"},{"id":"S0636","t":"Wikipedia: Zecharia Sitchin","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin"},{"id":"S2552","t":"L. W. King 1902, The Seven Tablets of Creation (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/seventabletsofcr02kinguoft"},{"id":"VTX005-10","t":"King 1902, The Seven Tablets of Creation: the Fourth Tablet (sacred-texts)","u":"https://sacred-texts.com/ane/stc/stc07.htm"},{"id":"VTX005-11","t":"King 1902, The Seven Tablets of Creation: Enuma Elish (sacred-texts)","u":"https://sacred-texts.com/ane/stc/index.htm"}],"sum":"# Enuma Elish: The Sky Made From a Dead Sea\n\nBefore anything else, there were no names. \"When in the height heaven was not named, and the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,\" the Babylonian poem begins, in L. W. King's translation of 1902, there was only fresh water and salt water, \"their waters were mingled together, and no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen.\" No gods had been called into being, and \"no destinies were ordained.\" The world in this story starts as an absence of words, and the poem's whole business is to fill it with them, ending with a single god given fifty names.\n\nThe poem is called Enuma Elish, after its first two words, \"When on high.\" It is the only complete account of the creation of the world to survive from ancient Mesopotamia, and for a century and a half people have argued about what it really describes.\n\n## Seven tablets from a ruined library\n\nEnuma Elish runs to about a thousand lines of Akkadian, written in cuneiform on seven clay tablets of between 115 and 170 lines each. The first pieces came out of the ruins of the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, near modern Mosul, dug by Austen Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam and George Smith between 1848 and 1876. Smith found a key link on a British Museum tablet labelled K 63 and published a form of the myth in 1876. In 1898 the museum's trustees ordered all of its creation texts published together, and King, who did the work, concluded that the poem known at Nineveh filled seven tablets. German excavations at Assur later supplied missing pieces of the first, sixth and seventh. Most of the fifth tablet has still never been found.\n\nThe oldest surviving manuscript, from Assur, dates to the ninth century BC. The poem itself is older, though how much older is debated. Scholars once put it in the time of Hammurabi. Most now place it in the Second Dynasty of Isin, in the late second millennium BC, perhaps after King Nebuchadnezzar I brought the statue of Marduk home from Elam. A few still argue for earlier dates.\n\n## The war in heaven\n\nThe story begins with two beings: Apsu, the fresh water, and Tiamat, the salt sea. From their mingling come generations of gods, who grow noisy and restless. Apsu plots to destroy them so that he can rest, and is killed by the wise god Ea. Taunted by other gods for doing nothing, Tiamat prepares for war. She creates eleven monstrous creatures, raises the god Kingu as their leader, and gives him the Tablet of Destinies, the token of supreme power.\n\nThe gods panic. One champion turns back. At last they choose a young god, Marduk, son of Ea, and he names his price: if he wins, he will rule over them all, even over the elders. They drink together, grow drowsy, and agree.\n\nMarduk arms himself with bow, mace and lightning, and with the four winds. He sends the Evil Wind into Tiamat's open mouth so that she cannot close it, shoots an arrow into her heart and kills her. He captures her allies, chains the monsters and takes the Tablet of Destinies from Kingu. Then, King's translation says, he \"devised a cunning plan. He split her up like a flat fish into two halves; one half of her he stablished as a covering for heaven. He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman, and bade them not to let her waters come forth.\" The sky, in this story, is a lid on a dead ocean.\n\n## Building the world\n\nFrom her body Marduk orders everything. He sets the likenesses of the gods among the stars as constellations and fixes the days of the year by them. He creates night, day and the moon, clouds and rain, and from her waters the Tigris and the Euphrates. Then he turns to the problem of labour. \"My blood will I take and bone will I fashion,\" he tells Ea in King's translation. \"I will create man who shall inhabit the earth, that the service of the gods may be established.\" The gods choose Kingu, the rebel, to die, and from his blood humans are made. The gods, freed from work, spend a year making bricks and build Babylon and Marduk's temple, the Esagila, to a great height. The final tablet recites his fifty names.\n\n## A poem with a purpose\n\nRead closely, Enuma Elish is as much about politics as about cosmology. In the Old Babylonian period, Marduk was not head of the gods. He becomes king of the gods in the period when the poem is now thought to have been written, and the poem explains why: he alone faced Tiamat, and the others promised him the throne. Fifty was the traditional number of Enlil, the old chief god, and Enlil is almost absent from the poem except to hand his title to Marduk. Scholars have noticed that Marduk fights the sea with the weapons of another god, Ninurta, and that lines from another myth were adapted for the battle. The poem built a new ruler out of older parts, much as Marduk built a world out of Tiamat.\n\nIt also had a stage. A ritual text from the Seleucid period says it was recited at the Akitu, the Babylonian New Year festival, though scholars debate exactly what was read and why. Some have linked the recitation to the spring floods of the Tigris and Euphrates, when the waters had to be tamed again each year. Later Assyrian copies simply replaced Marduk with their own god, Ashur.\n\n## Genesis and the planets\n\nMuch of the poem's modern fame comes from the Bible. Its seven tablets invite a comparison with the seven days of Genesis; its watery beginning recalls \"the face of the deep.\" King was tempted by the seven tablets but judged that the reasons behind the two numbers differed. He was surer that close resemblances showed Jewish scribes studying Babylonian legends during and after the Exile. Who borrowed what, and when, is still argued line by line.\n\nThe boldest reading belongs to Zecharia Sitchin. In The 12th Planet, in 1976, he read Tiamat as a real planet between Mars and Jupiter, struck by a wandering world he called Nibiru, with a 3,600-year orbit; one half became Earth and the other the asteroid belt. Assyriologists reject this. In the poem itself, Nibiru names a station in the sky associated with Marduk, usually identified with Jupiter, not a twelfth planet, and astronomers note that Sitchin's proposed orbit would not stay stable.\n\nAnd yet the poem does something few myths do. It describes creation not as birth but as engineering: a body divided and measured, a sky bolted shut, the heavens surveyed and the stars set as markers for the calendar, humans manufactured from a god's blood to do work the gods refused. Its oldest copies come from a library, and its account begins with a world that had not yet been named.\n\nIf the Babylonians wrote this to crown a king of the gods, why did they choose to tell it as a story of measuring the sky and building a workforce?","qs":["If the poem was written to raise Marduk above older gods, how much of it is cosmology and how much is politics?","The seven tablets and the seven days of Genesis: shared inheritance, direct borrowing, or coincidence?","Sitchin read Tiamat as a planet. What would an ancient text need to contain before a literal astronomical reading became plausible?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Chaos_Monster_and_Sun_God.png/1280px-Chaos_Monster_and_Sun_God.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaos_Monster_and_Sun_God.png","title":"Chaos Monster and Sun God.png","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"editor Austen Henry Layard , drawing by L. Gruner","cap":"Black and white crop of full engraving plate scan - from Plate 5 of the work \"A second series of the monuments of Nineveh: including bas-reliefs from the Palace"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"7th c. BCE (Nineveh)","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[275]},{"v":"Akkadian","h":"Language","s":[275]}],"hs":{"275":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX005.webp","w":1280,"h":944,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Chaos_Monster_and_Sun_God.png/1280px-Chaos_Monster_and_Sun_God.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}