Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 25source for Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil Tablet 22, celestial signs came into being with
the creation and organization of the heavenly bodies themselves:
When Anu, Enlil, and Ea, the great gods, created heaven and earth and made
manifest the celestial signs, [they fi xed the stations and estab]lished the posi-
tions [of the gods of the night... they divided the co]urses [of the stars and
drew the constellations as their likenesses.]^30The physical connection between the cosmic regions above and below,
established by celestial signs above portending matters below, is symbol-
ized by the motif of the “bonds of heaven and earth.” The cosmic bonds
were imagined as ropes or cables that tied down and controlled the fl ow
of waters from the heavens. Underpinning this notion is the mythological
story in Enu ̄ma Eliš of the heavens’ creation from the slain sea monster
Tia ̄mat, whose body Marduk splits in two “like a bivalve,” as the text puts
it. The conception of the cosmic bonds thereby relates to the image of the
gates locking in the waters of Tia ̄mat after half of her body had been in-
stalled as the roof of the uppermost heaven. In the cosmic sense, the rope-
or cable- like bond became a linking device which could be held by a deity,
as in the description of Ištar as the goddess “who holds the connecting link
of all heaven and earth.” This bipartite cosmos persisted in later Babylo-
nian thought, where religious and scholarly texts of the fi rst millennium
BCE refer to cosmic designs, literally “plans of the above and below.” These
cosmic designs, perhaps the image of universal order, are frequently associ-
ated with what are called cosmic “destinies,” for example, as in the divine
epithet “lord of cosmic destinies and designs.” The two are integrally con-
nected by virtue of the semantic force of the Akkadian term “destinies,”
which signifi ed the order or nature of things, and so did not exist before
the creation of the universe itself. Enu ̄ma Eliš 1.8 says of the time before
creation, “no destinies [order of things] had been determined.”
Obviously, in the context of mythology, the underlying causes or rea-
sons for regularity in the cosmos would be expressed in terms of divine
agency, not natural law. But outside the boundaries of mythological texts,
that is, in omen literature, the patterns observed in nature were still taken
as physical manifestations, or manipulations, of the divine. Here, if a law-
like behavior was to be attributed to physical phenomena, it would be in
the sense of being subject to the judgments and rulings of the gods. In
accordance with such a conception of divine infl uence in the world, the
order perceived in phenomena could just as easily be disrupted as main-
tained by divine will, as in Enu ̄ma Eliš 4.23–4, which attests to this very
power of the god Marduk to create as to destroy order in the heavens: “By