Marduk

Marduk's career tracks the rise of the city of Babylon. He begins as a local god of that city, of no special rank in the older Mesopotamian pantheon headed by Anu, Enlil and Ea (Enki). As Babylon grew from a minor town into the capital of an empire, above all under Hammurabi in the eighteenth century BCE and again under the Neo-Babylonian kings a millennium later, its god was promoted to match, until he stood at the head of the gods. This is one of the clearest cases in the ancient world of theology following political power, and Mesopotamian scribes did not hide the process; they wrote it into their myths.

By the first millennium BCE Marduk was often called simply Bel, "the Lord", the same title behind the biblical Bel, and his great temple-tower, the ziggurat Etemenanki at Babylon, is widely thought to lie behind the biblical Tower of Babel. His main temple was the Esagila.

He is imagined as a storm- and warrior-god armed with the winds and the thunderbolt, and later also as a god of wisdom and incantation, inheriting the magical expertise of his father Ea. His star was the planet we call Jupiter.

Marduk's supremacy is argued, not merely asserted, in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish ("When on high"). The older gods are threatened by Tiamat, the primordial saltwater ocean personified as a monster of chaos, and none can face her, until the young Marduk agrees, on one condition: that the gods grant him kingship over them all. They test his word, he proves it, and they hail him king. He then goes out, kills Tiamat, splits her body to form sky and earth, sets the stars in their courses, and organises the cosmos. Finally he creates humankind from the blood of a defeated rebel god, so that people may do the gods' labour and the gods may rest.

The epic ends by reciting Marduk's fifty names, each transferring to him a power or domain of an older god, a literary act of concentrating the whole pantheon's authority into one figure. It was recited at the Babylonian New Year (Akitu) festival, where the king's own legitimacy was renewed before Marduk.

Read as scholarship, Enuma Elish is a theological and political charter: it justifies Babylon's primacy and its king's rule by making Babylon's god the maker and manager of the world. Read as religion, it is the account of how order was won from chaos.