Apsu

Dig a well anywhere in the flat country between the Tigris and the Euphrates and the water that seeps up into it is, by the reckoning of the people who farmed there five thousand years ago, a leak. Beneath the silt and the reed beds lay a sea of sweet water, older than the ground resting on it, and every spring, marsh channel and cistern in the land was a small breach in its roof. That sea had a name. In Sumerian it was the abzu, in Akkadian the apsû, and in one Babylonian poem it stops being a place and becomes a person, with a crown on his head and a murder in his heart, and what happens to him next is among the strangest openings in world literature.

The Enuma Elish begins before names exist. The heavens above had not been named, the ground below had not been called by any name, and there was nothing but Apsu, the first, the begetter, and Tiamat who bore them all, their waters mingling together in a single body. No marsh had formed. No reed had been found. No god had been brought into being or assigned a destiny. Fresh water lay against salt water in the dark with no line between them, and that unmarked commingling is where everything else comes from.

Out of it came Lahmu and Lahamu, and after them Anshar and Kishar, who outgrew their parents. Anshar fathered Anu, and Anu fathered Ea, called Nudimmud, wider in understanding than his father and stronger than his grandfather, with no rival among the gods. The generations arrived quickly and they arrived loud. The young gods surged back and forth inside the divine waters, kicking up the deep, dancing in Tiamat’s belly, and the noise carried. Before any of this, though, there is the version of Apsu with no plot at all: cold water lying motionless under the floor of the world, pressing upward through gravel, feeding a date palm’s roots and the mouth of a spring and a clay jar lowered on a rope, doing nothing but be available.

Then he could not sleep. He went to Tiamat with Mummu, his counsellor, walking at his side, and said that the ways of his children had become hateful to him, that he got no rest by day and no sleep by night, and that he would destroy them and put an end to their behaviour so that quiet could return. Tiamat turned on him. She was furious at the suggestion, and asked how they could annihilate what they themselves had produced. Mummu, unbothered, advised his master to do it anyway and wipe out the racket. Apsu was so pleased he sat the vizier on his knee and kissed him. It is the last cheerful moment he has.

Ea heard the plan. He drew a design, worked out an incantation of surpassing holiness and recited it over the water until sleep poured into Apsu and settled on him. Then he lifted the tiara off his head, took away the mantle of radiance and put it on himself, cut his sinews, held him down and killed him. Mummu he bound and dragged away by a rope through the nose. Then Ea built his own dwelling directly on top of the corpse, laid out its chambers, and named the house Apsu. In the innermost room of it, with Damkina his wife, he conceived and fathered Marduk. The god who murdered his children for making noise ended up as the foundation slab of a nursery.

That is the Babylonian Apsu, and it is essentially the only place he behaves like a character. The older Sumerian abzu is not a corpse and never was one. It is a location, the freshwater deep under the earth, and the god who lives there is Enki, whose great house is founded in the abzu and called the mooring post of heaven and earth. His temple at Eridu, the E-abzu, the house of the deep, was raised on the marsh edge over what the builders understood to be that water, and archaeologists digging there have found shrine laid on shrine reaching back into the Ubaid period, some of the oldest religious architecture in southern Iraq. From the abzu came the apkallu, the fish-cloaked sages who taught the arts of civilisation, and in the abzu were kept the me, the fixed patterns of everything a society does. The two Apsus should not be flattened into one. The Sumerian deep is a workshop. The Babylonian one is a body under a floor.

His power is simple and total: he is the fresh water, and everything that grows or drinks in a country of almost no rainfall is on loan from him. Every incantation Ea speaks draws on the wisdom held in his waters, which is a neat piece of irony, since the first use anyone puts that wisdom to is killing him. His weaknesses follow just as directly from what he is. Standing water is passive. It generates and then waits. Apsu is undone not by a weapon but by a spell and a nap, which is to say by exactly the thing he had been complaining he could not get, and the radiance that marked him as a god turned out to be detachable property that fitted his great-grandson perfectly well. He asked for quiet and he got it.

Long after Babylon fell out of the habit of reciting the poem, its courtyards still held a stone or bronze basin of standing water called an apsû, where priests washed before approaching the god. The water was cold, it was fresh, and it came up out of the ground. Every jar drawn from a well in that country came up through him. That is the only reason the story of a god killed for wanting to sleep carries any weight at all. The corpse is still down there, and it is still what people drink.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Apsu in Mesopotamian mythology?

Apsu is the personification of the fresh water lying beneath the earth, and the first of the primordial beings in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish. He and Tiamat, the salt sea, mingled their waters together before anything had a name, and all the later gods descend from that union. In older Sumerian material the same word, abzu, names the freshwater deep as a place rather than as a god.

How did Apsu die?

Ea killed him in his sleep. When Apsu planned to destroy the younger gods because their noise kept him awake, Ea recited a powerful incantation that poured sleep over him, then stripped off his tiara and his mantle of radiance, cut his sinews and killed him. Ea then built his own house on top of the dead Apsu and named it after him.

What is the difference between Apsu and Tiamat?

Apsu is fresh water and Tiamat is salt water. Mesopotamian cosmology set the sweet groundwater under the earth against the salt sea surrounding it, and the creation epic makes the two a couple whose waters mixed before the world existed. Tiamat opposed Apsu’s plan to kill their children and only went to war herself after his death, when Marduk eventually defeated her.

What is the abzu at Eridu?

The abzu is the subterranean freshwater ocean where the god Enki was believed to live, and Eridu was the city where his temple stood. That temple was called the E-abzu, the house of the deep, and it was built on the marsh edge over the water it was named for. Excavation there has uncovered a sequence of shrines going back to the Ubaid period.

Why were temple water basins called apsû?

Babylonian and Assyrian temple courtyards kept a tank of clean standing water for ritual washing, and it took the name apsû because it stood for the freshwater deep beneath the earth. Washing in it brought the worshipper into contact with the primordial water in miniature before approaching the god.

Related Entries

Tiamat, Enki, Marduk, Kingu, Anu (Mesopotamian), Ninhursag, Enlil, Apkallu, Oannes, Adapa, Ereshkigal