A Genealogy Built to Crown Marduk

This spare genealogical opening, paired gods appearing one generation after another with barely a clause of description each, sets up the line of descent the rest of the Enuma Elish depends on, since Anshar and Kishar in turn become the parents of Anu, and Anu becomes the father of Ea, and Ea becomes the father of Marduk, the god whose defeat of Tiamat the later tablets exist to narrate. Scholars studying the text have treated this opening genealogy as a Mesopotamian theogony in miniature, a chain of divine generations building toward a culminating figure, structurally comparable to how Hesiod's Theogony builds a chain of divine generations toward the reign of Zeus, though the two traditions differ sharply in how that chain resolves, Marduk earning supremacy by killing a monstrous primordial mother in open battle rather than through the pattern of succession by overthrow that runs through the Greek account. The bare list of names in these three lines is therefore doing more work than its brevity suggests, laying the genealogical foundation that gives Marduk's eventual kingship its claim to legitimacy, a descent traced back through named ancestors to the very beginning of divine time.