T he other week, the New Scientist published a lengthy report about an Amazonian tribe called the Piraha. They are, it is believed, unique: they have virtually no notion of time, little oral history, almost no art, and the simplest kinship system known. They are also believed to be the only society with no creation myth.
But why are there not more like them? The simplistic explanation is that everyone - apart from a relatively small number of South Americans and decadent western atheists - believes the world to have been created, and so needs a story to explain how. But the fact that large numbers of people, even the vast majority, believe something is not a good enough reason to suppose it is true. The real reason creation myths are near universal was given by the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Ea recited a spell that made Apsu sleep. He then killed Apsu and captured Mummu, his vizier. Ea and his wife Damkina then gave birth to the hero Marduk, the tallest and mightiest of the gods. Marduk, given control of the four winds by the sky god Anu, is told to let the winds whirl. Picking up dust, the winds create storms that upset and confound Tiamat.
Other gods suddenly appear and complain that they, too, cannot sleep because of the hurricane winds. They urge Tiamat to do battle against Marduk so that they can rest. Tiamat agrees and decides to confront Marduk. She prepares for battle by having the mother goddess create eleven monsters. Tiamat places the monsters in charge of her new spouse, Qingu, who she elevates to rule over all the gods.
When Ea hears of the preparations for battle, he seeks advice from his father, Anshar, king of the junior gods. Anshar urges Ea and afterward his brother Anu to appease the goddess with incantations. Both return frightened and demoralized by their failure. The young warrior god Marduk then volunteers his strength in return for a promise that, if victorious, he will become king of the gods. The gods agree, a battle ensues, and Marduk vanquishes Tiamat and Qingu, her host.
As sky is now a watery mass, Marduk stretches her skin to the heavens to prevent the waters from escaping, a motif that explains why there is so little rainfall in southern Iraq. With the sky now in place, Marduk organizes the constellations of the stars. He lays out the calendar by assigning three stars to each month, creates his own planet, makes the moon appear, and establishes the sun, day, and night. The myth continues as the gods swear allegiance to the mighty king and create Babylon and his temple, the Esagila, a home where the gods can rest during their sojourn upon the earth.
The myth conveniently ignores Nippur, the holy city esteemed by both the Sumerians and the rulers of Kassite Babylonia. Babylon has replaced Nippur as the dwelling place of the gods. Meanwhile, Marduk fulfills an earlier promise to provide provisions for the junior gods if he gains victory as their supreme leader.
He then creates humans from the blood of Qingu, the slain and rebellious consort of Tiamat. He does this for two reasons: first, in order to release the gods from their burdensome menial labors, and second, to provide a continuous source of food and drink to temples.
The composition ends by stating that this story and its message presumably the importance of kingship to the maintenance of order should be preserved for future generations and pondered by those who are wise and knowledgeable. It should also be used by parents and teachers to instruct so that the land may flourish and its inhabitants prosper.
First to be created are the cities, Eridu and Babylon, and the temple Esagil is founded. Then the earth is created by heaping dirt upon a raft in the primeval waters. Humankind, wild animals, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshlands and canebrake, vegetation, and domesticated animals follow. It would be impossible to change.
Read part one of this series here: What has Homer to do with the Bible? I should note that this is one theory and that there are alternative theories, such as the view that some Semitic languages used the plural as a form of emphasis to denote an abstract version of a concept as opposed to a concrete version.
On the other hand, in the old Semitic languages of the Middle East, there was a clear way of making sure you were talking about a single god. Here again, there are other theories, such as the view that God is speaking to an audience of angels. This is bolstered, in my view, by a difference in two early versions of the Hebrew tradition on which the Bible is based. The Bible is believed to have been cobbled together from about four different sources, referred to by the abbreviations E, J, P, and D.
But then with Genesis , the whole creation story starts over again, and in this version we get a few new twists, such as God creating Eve out of a rib taken from Adam. This is one of the things that lead scholars to believe there are different versions of the Bible being combined. To give your god a specific name implies that there might be other gods with other names. It is the term you would use when referring to the god of your city or your tribe, as opposed to the gods of other cities and other tribes.
In historical terms, this could reflect a transitional stage between polytheism and monotheism: what is called monolatry. So all of this suggests that the creation story in the Bible is an offshoot of a previous, polytheistic tradition. It becomes pretty obvious later on in Genesis when we first meet Abraham, the great patriarch of the Jewish and Arab people.
This set off a lot of bells for me, because the Sumerians were the first great civilization, springing up among the farmers of Mesopotamia around BC and creating a surprisingly sophisticated culture. Some of the most fascinating Sumerian artifacts are clay seals marked with cuneiform writing that turn out to be deeds of property, or account ledgers, or bills of lading.
It is a little unclear whether the Biblical Ur of Abraham is the same as the city where they built the Great Ziggurat , but that is not important. What is important is that Hebrews are Sumerians. Ancient Hebrew civilization was an offshoot of the original civilization.
Well, the ur-source of the Bible is Ur. Take the Garden of Eden. The Bible gives very specific directions about where the Garden was located, and Asimov reasons through these and concludes that Eden was located at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates as they formed a wider waterway that empties into the ocean.
Today, the two rivers become what is known as the Shatt al-Arab, but the Biblical equivalent would have been some distance upstream from its current location, which has moved southward thanks to six thousand years of silt deposits.
This location for Eden also turns out to be exactly where the very first Sumerian civilization was formed. It is the creation myth you would have if you were a Sumerian passing down stories about your most ancient origins. A Sumerian origin also explains a lot of other Biblical stories, most particularly the flood. This is not the kind of cataclysm you would naturally fear as a nomadic herdsman living in the arid uplands of what is now Israel.
But it is precisely what you would fear as a Sumerian living on a low, flat plain between two big rivers, where catastrophic flooding could and did occur. In fact, the story of Noah and the flood seems to be lifted directly from the original heroic epic poem, the story of a Sumerian king named Gilgamesh.
The Noah from the Bible is Utnapishtim from the Gilgamesh epic, point for point. This is, to put it mildly, implausible.
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