supremacy is generally thought to have been the inspiration
for the Greek creation myth in Hesiod’s Th eogony.
Th e epic is essentially the history of a family or royal
dynasty. Th e preexisting universe within which the gods act
is the apsu, or cosmic water. Nothing else exists, but when
names are assigned, Creation begins to assume order. Th e
fi rst divinity, Tiamat (or saltwater), gives birth to the other
gods, whose king is Enlil. Annoyed by her off spring, Tiamat
decides to wipe them out and start again with a new race of
gods. Enlil feels impotent to oppose his mother, but the young
god Marduk comes forward to champion the divinities. Af-
ter Marduk defeats Tiamat, he splits her body in two and
uses half of it to build the vault of heaven over the waters, in
which he creates the stars and orderes the constellations and
the zodiac, fi xing the ordered progression of time. From the
other half he makes the surface of the world fl oating above
the apsu.
Th e Akkadian myth of Atrahasis, which dates to about
1750 b.c.e., describes the formation of humankind. At the be-
ginning of the myth the great gods are served by lesser gods,
who give them food and drink and dress and house them
(doing for the great gods precisely what priests did for the
cult statues of the gods in temples). But the lesser gods come
to resent their subservient role and refuse to continue. As a
result, the gods actually suff er hunger and thirst. Enki, the
“wise man” among the gods, solves the problem. He produces
human beings as a new race to serve the gods. Humans are
made from clay (as in Genesis) and so can never hope to be
divine, and yet they have a divine intelligence, because Enki
sacrifi ces one of the lesser gods and infuses his blood into
human beings.
In a passage closely echoed by the fl ood myth in Genesis,
the gods descend to earth to found the Mesopotamian cit-
ies and to establish their own temples: to order human life
by teaching all the arts of civilization. Th is works for a time.
Because humans are so long-lived, the world soon becomes
crowded with them, and their noise prevents Enlil, the king
of the gods, from sleeping. So Enlil sends a great fl ood in-
tended to w ipe out hu ma n k ind. En k i sees t hat t he gods wou ld
suff er if humanity’s service to them were ended and so in-
structs one, Atrahasis, to build an ark in which he and his
family and pairs of all the animals would be saved from the
fl ood. Because the gods suff er during the fl ood, Enlil permits
humanity to exist but forces Enki to limit their numbers by
creating demons to spread disease among them to shorten
their lives and to kill infants. (About half of all children born
in antiquity died before their fi ft h birthday.)
Atrahasis explains and justifi es the relation between the
powerful elites that ruled the ancient Near Eastern world and
its masses of dependent farmers and laborers; it was like that
of the gods’ to humankind. It shows how myth was used to
think about and solve problems in the ancient world.
Th e rule of the Mesopotamian gods over the world was
by the power of a mythical book called the Tablets of Destiny.
Because the destinies had been written down (preordained)
by the gods all at once, it was possible to foretell events in the
future. Signs and traces of what the gods had written could
be read in nature (through divination) by a priest wise in the
ways of the gods, called the baru or diviner. Ever y thing in the
world was studied by the diviner, especially anything unusual
that called attention to itself (an omen): Gods communicated
important matters to mortals through omens.
Sacrifi cial animals, typically sheep, were of special con-
cern to the gods. Th e main art of the baru was to examine the
internal organs of sheep at the time of sacrifi ce, especially the
liver. Th ey produced clay models of livers in which something
like lines and columns of script were laid out over the organ
as though it were a tablet; marks in any given area were inter-
preted as if they were a specifi c word with a meaning relevant
to the future. In particular, one could ask of the gods through
sacrifi ce whether some contemplated action was favorable
or unfavorable and receive guidance about what could not
be found out through mere reason. Th is kind of divination,
while it seems unlikely to modern thinking, was impressive
enough that it was enthusiastically taken up by the Greeks,
Romans, and Persians.
One of the places where the gods were most manifest was
in the sky, their home, in the form of stars and planets. So
the motions of the planets were studied carefully to see what
they might reveal about the divine will. By the fi rst millen-
nium b.c.e., when many traditions changed because Mesopo-
tamia was conquered by foreign peoples—the Persians (539
b.c.e.) and then the Greeks under Alexander the Great (336
b.c.e)— the discovery that it was possible to predict the regu-
lar motions of the planets led to the belief that other kinds of
prediction should be possible from observing the planets.
Since the gods were in charge of the universe, they were
responsible for evil (reasonless human suff ering). Disease and
infant mortality were infl icted on humanity by the gods sim-
ply to keep the population down. In general, though, royal
rule was used as a metaphor to explain misfortune. If some-
one violated the laws of a city, the king would punish him for
his crime. In the same way, if someone violated any of the
many divine laws that governed the universe and humanity,
the gods would punish that person. Th e punishment was left
in the hands of lesser spirits, who might well be called de-
mons and who would infl ict disease, defeat, or misfortune on
human beings who had off ended (sinned against) the gods.
Naturally, these questions were always considered aft er the
fact: In the midst of suff ering, people would question why and
would be conscious of having committed some sin or would
remember the sin of a father or grandfather.
One could seek the cause of divine punishment and re-
lief from it with the help of a special kind of priest, an exor-
cist. Th e exorcist would take something like a medical case
history, ascertaining the nature of the “illness” from which
the patient was suff ering and what might have happened to
have caused it. He would then consult manuals of exorcism
(approximately 30,000 tablets of these documents survive,
indicating how vast the literature and how widespread the842 religion and cosmology: The Middle East