Marduk

Once a year the gold came out of the temple. The priests lifted the statue from its dark room at the heart of the Esagila, washed it, dressed it, and carried it down the Processional Way between walls of glazed blue brick where dragons paced in yellow and white, out through the Ishtar Gate and into the hard spring light. The whole city walked with it. Everything Babylon believed about its own survival was riding on those eleven days going properly.

Somewhere in the middle of them the king was brought in alone. The high priest took his crown, his sceptre and his ring, dragged him forward by the ears and struck him across the face, hard, then made him swear before the statue that he had not neglected the city, not oppressed the poor, not let the walls fall. The blow was supposed to hurt. If the king’s eyes watered, the god was satisfied and the year would hold. If they stayed dry, the year would not. There is no other major religion in which a monarch’s tears were treated as a passed inspection.

The god who demanded all this had started very small. His name is almost certainly the Sumerian amar-Utu, bull calf of the sun, and his oldest symbol is not a weapon but the marru, the flat triangular spade a farmer uses to cut an irrigation channel. He belonged to one unremarkable town on the Euphrates and he was, at the beginning, a god of water in ditches. Then the town became Hammurabi’s capital, and the god went up with it. He absorbed Asalluhi, the incantation god of Eridu, and with him a father, Enki, and a professional sideline in magic and healing that he never gave up. By the Kassite period his priests had gone further and begun to argue that the other gods were not really rivals at all but aspects of him, mere names he happened to be wearing. He conquered a city called Eshnunna and took home its dragon, the mušḫuššu, which had belonged to a local god named Tišpak. That is not a bad summary of the whole career.

The document that made the case is the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation poem, recited aloud every year during the festival. In the beginning there is nothing but water, fresh water called Apsu and salt water called Tiamat, mingled together, and out of them come the gods. The young gods are loud. Apsu cannot sleep, cannot think, and resolves to kill them all; Enki hears of it, puts him under with a spell and kills him first, and builds his own house on the corpse. Tiamat, who had not agreed to any of this, raises an army. She spawns serpents and scorpion-men and a howling storm of monsters, gives command of them to the god Qingu, and hangs the Tablet of Destinies around his neck.

The elder gods try, one after another, and turn back. Then Marduk offers to fight her, and names his price: absolute kingship, and the right to decree fates that no god may overturn. They test him first, because he is young. They set a garment down in the middle of the assembly and tell him to destroy it with a word, and then to restore it, and he does both, and they crown him on the spot. Here is the thing worth pausing on. He was a god who had to be voted in.

He went out to meet her with a bow, a mace, lightning, a net held at the four corners by four winds, and seven storms of his own making, riding a chariot pulled by beasts whose names mean things like Trampler and Fleet. Tiamat opened her mouth to swallow him. He drove the evil wind, the imhullu, straight down her throat, and it filled her belly so that her jaws could not close, and while she stood stretched open and helpless he put an arrow into her gut. Then he split her in half like a dried fish. One half he lifted and pinned overhead as the sky, and set guards on it so the waters could not leak back through, and out of her eyes he let the Tigris and the Euphrates run. He hung the constellations, gave the moon its schedule, took the Tablet of Destinies off Qingu and sealed it to his own chest. Qingu he executed, and from that blood the first man was made, so that the gods would never have to dig a canal again. At the banquet afterwards the assembled gods gave him fifty names, one apiece, and the fifty names were the point of the entire poem: each one had belonged to some other deity first.

What he could do followed from what he was. He decreed fates, which in Mesopotamia is less a mystical gift than an administrative one, the power to say what a thing is and have the universe agree. He ruled the winds and the flood. He kept the incantation-craft he had inherited, and this was the part that touched ordinary lives, because when a Babylonian fell sick at night the exorcist did not petition the king of the gods in his heaven, he knelt by the bed with a bowl of water and worked through a formula in which Enki tells his son Marduk exactly what to do about it. Marduk was the god you got when you had a fever, a debt, or an enemy.

His weakness was structural, and everybody knew it. His power had been given to him by a vote, and it stayed located in a body of gold in a room in Babylon. Take the statue away and the god was, functionally, gone. The Hittites took it. The Assyrians took it. The Elamites took it, and it stayed with them until Nebuchadnezzar I fought it back around 1100 BCE, and the poem written to celebrate that puts the whole abduction in Marduk’s own mouth, as though the god had chosen to travel. Without the statue the New Year festival could not be held, and without the festival no king could take the hand of Bel, and a king who had not taken the hand of Bel was not really a king. The poem of Erra shows the flaw as comedy: the war god wants Babylon and cannot have it while Marduk is at home, so he simply remarks that the god’s clothes are looking shabby. Marduk goes off to see about a new suit. Erra burns the city behind him. When Babylon rose against Persia around 485 BCE, Xerxes is said to have destroyed the statue, and it was never replaced. By the time the Parthians held the plain, the Esagila was silt and the god of fifty names had no one left to say them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Marduk?

Marduk was the patron god of Babylon and, from roughly the time of Hammurabi onward, the king of the Mesopotamian gods. He began as a minor local deity associated with farming and irrigation, and rose with his city until Babylonian theology treated the other gods as little more than facets of him. He was usually addressed simply as Bel, “Lord.”

How did Marduk defeat Tiamat?

Marduk trapped Tiamat by driving a wind into her open mouth so that she could not close it, then shot an arrow into her belly and killed her. He split her body in two, raised one half as the sky, hung the stars and set the calendar, and released the Tigris and the Euphrates from her eyes. The battle and its aftermath are told in the Babylonian creation poem, the Enuma Elish.

What are Marduk’s symbols?

Marduk’s emblems are the marru, a triangular spade that survives from his early days as an agricultural god, and the mušḫuššu, a horned snake-dragon with lion’s forelegs and eagle’s talons. The mušḫuššu originally belonged to Tišpak, the god of Eshnunna, and was taken over after Babylon conquered that city. Both appear on Babylonian boundary stones and on the glazed brickwork of the Ishtar Gate.

Why did Marduk’s statue matter so much?

The Babylonians believed the god was genuinely present in his statue, so its removal amounted to the god’s absence. Without it the Akitu New Year festival could not be performed, and no king could legitimately “take the hand of Bel” and confirm his right to rule. Foreign armies understood this and carried the statue off repeatedly, and Nebuchadnezzar I built his reputation on bringing it back from Elam.

What are the fifty names of Marduk?

The fifty names are the titles bestowed on Marduk by the assembled gods at the end of the Enuma Elish, each conferred by a different deity. Most of them were drawn from existing god lists and had originally belonged to other gods, so the list is a theological claim as much as an honour: it argues that the whole pantheon is contained within Marduk. Fifty was also the traditional number of Enlil, the god he was displacing.

Related Entries

Tiamat, Kingu, Enki, Anu, Enlil, Ninurta, Anzû, Shamash, Sin, Ishtar, Inanna, Nergal, Ereshkigal, Girtablilu, Gilgamesh