Before the world began, there was only Tiamat, the primeval dragon of chaos, mother of all gods. When the younger gods grow restless, she wages war against her own offspring. Marduk, the storm god, rises to defend the pantheon, but only if granted supreme power. His victory is total. He cleaves Tiamat's body in two, fashioning the sky from one half and the earth from the other. This is the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic preserved on clay tablets buried beneath the ruins of Ashur-bani-pal's legendary library at Nineveh, uncovered by Victorian archaeologists in the nineteenth century. Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, longtime keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum, reconstructs these myths in full, exploring how Babylonians understood the cosmos, the nature of divinity, and the eternal struggle between order and chaos. These accounts, among the oldest written narratives of creation, echo through the Hebrew Bible and illuminate the ancient Near Eastern world that gave rise to the Book of Genesis.
