holds earth and sky together as two contiguous domains of the same surrounding space and teases them apart as two conclusively different regions.
That Anshar and Kishar are indeed decisively different places is confirmed by the fact that the immediately following generations replicate the earth/sky distinction that these two gods embody. Ami, son of Anshar, is the god of “empty heaven,” and he begets Nudimmud-Ea, god of sweet waters and of a wisdom that is “wider than heaven’s horizon.”6 Nudimmud-Ea in turn slays his aqueous ancestor Apsu when the latter schemes with Tiamat to destroy the clamorous gods who have been born to them. In so doing, Ea “sounded the coil of chaos and against it devised the artifice of the universe.”7 Then, in an action that would not have surprised the Freud of Totem and Taboo, Nudimmud-Ea builds a memorial to Apsu.
When Ea had bound Apsu, he killed him. . . . Now that his triumph was completed, in deep peace he rested, in his holy palace Ea slept. Over the abyss, the distance, he built his house and shrine and there magnificently he lived with his wife Damkina.8
The “artifice of the universe” here appears in the form of Ea’s palace-shrine, the first constructed dwelling place. The construction itself takes place over an abyss, and by this very fact it is a memorial to Apsu: apsu is the Semitic equivalent of Sumerian abzu, signifying “deep abyss,” “ocean,” and “outermost limit.” To build over an abyss is not only to create cosmos out of chaos. It is to bring constructed or “devised” place out of an unconstructed material matrix, and thereby to memorialize the matrix itself.9
It is out of this same abyssal matrix that Marduk, the ultimate architect of creation and the nemesis of Tiamat, is born from Ea and Damkina.
In that room, at the point of decision where what is to come is predetermined, he was conceived, the most sagacious, the one from the first most absolute in action.
In the deep abyss he was conceived, Marduk was made in the heart of the apsu, Marduk was created in the heart of the holy apsu.10
To be conceived in the abyss is to be generated in the matrix of creation—“in that room” where “what is to come is predetermined.” The depth of this matricial abyss is resonant with the depth of Tiamat, the depth of her womb (she is continually bringing forth new gods and monsters) and the depth of her oceanic being (Tiamat means literally “primeval waters,” including stretches of water, sea, or lake). “The coil of Tiamat,” the Sumerian gods admit, “is too deep for us to fathom.”11
It is precisely because Tiamat’s coil—her troublesome tumult—is too deep to fathom that Marduk must rise up against her. For Marduk can only deal with measurable depth. His confrontation with Tiamat is thus foredoomed: their difference is literally “cosmic.” The confrontation itself comes when “he surveyed her scanning the Deep.”12 He surveys her—makes her into an object of conquest—while she is embroiled in scanning something that never can become an object and with which she is ultimately identified. Precisely as an amorphous nonobject, that is, as herself the Deep, Tiamat can be conquered in a cosmomachia wherein the architectonic triumphs over the unstructured and the mastery of the matrix is asserted. If Ea is the first architect in this cosmogony—“archi-tect” signifying “first builder”—Marduk is the master builder.13
Marduk proves himself master of the matrix by brutally crushing Tiamat in battle. He “shot the arrow that split the belly, that pierced the gut and cut the womb.”14 Marduk’s arrow, symbol of his phallic manhood, invades the womb-matrix: death penetrates to the seat of life. Only by destroying an organic matrix, source of generation, can the inorganic work of building proceed. As Paul Ricoeur remarks apropos of Marduk, it is “by disorder that disorder is overcome; it is by violence that the youngest of the gods establishes order.”15
As master builder—as “Lord of the Land,” as “Son-of-the-Sun”16—Marduk must construct out of something: nothing ex nihilo here! He finds his building materials in Tiamat’s slain body, whose corporeal depths become the (re)source of the civilized cosmos.
The lord rested; he gazed at the huge body, pondering how to use it, what to create from the dead carcass. He split it apart like a cockle-shell; with the upper half he constructed the arc of sky, he pulled down the bar and set a watch on the waters, so they should never escape.17
In this violent action—which takes place precisely as bará, or cutting up—Marduk repeats the initial separation between Anshar and Kishar by creating the horizon line or “bar” that distinguishes sky from sea. To “set a watch on the waters” is to take a definitive step toward delimiting them by placing a cosmic boundary over them. Such delimitation is place-making in its power—as is the creation of the “arc of the sky,” a bowlike outer limit that makes the sky into a region of its own. Thanks to this new place-setting, we no longer need to refer to the open sky as “Ami,” or to the shared horizons of earth and heaven as “Anshar” and “Kishar.” The evolution from primeval elements to gods has given way to cosmic places no longer requiring mythical names.18 But the story goes on.
He crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself above apsu, that apsu built by Nuddimud over the old abyss which now he surveyed, measuring out and marking in.
He stretched the immensity of the firmament, he made Esharra, the Great Palace, to be its earthly image, and Anu and Enlil and Ea had each their right stations.19
Following the creation of gods earlier in the epic—theogony proper—we are now presented with the creation of places for the gods, their “right stations.” Through Marduk’s actions, the gods “are assigned their places.”20 Once again, topogenesis follows from cosmogenesis. As a condition of this locatory action, the “infinite distance” of the abyss must be surveyed and the “immensity of the firmament” stretched out. To stretch out is the corporeal equivalent of visual survey: in both cases, the full scope of something is swept out in advance, “sized up” as we say, by a preliminary action of literal circumspection. To do this, Marduk must establish a stable position from which to do the stretching and sizing. Such a position is found in the station assumed by Marduk “above apsu": above the abyss. His stationing there is in effect a double superpositioning: first over Ea’s house and shrine and then over “the old abyss” of the elemental Apsu, an action now surveyed in its infinite extent.
More than survey is at stake here. Marduk also sets to work by “measuring out and marking in” the abyss. He moves to mensuration, a measurement at once spatial and temporal.
He projected positions for the Great Gods conspicuous in the sky, he gave them a starry aspect as constellations; he measured the year, gave it a beginning and an end, and to each month of the twelve three rising stars.21
Just as the gods are given spatial positions, so temporal positions are also marked out—positions primarily taken by the sun and the moon in their respective cycles.22 In addition to these positions (which are in effect visible and countable places), Marduk bestows basic directionalities on the new world: “Through her ribs he opened gates in the east and west, and gave them strong bolts on the right and left; and high in the belly of Tiamat he set the zenith.”23 An entire landscape is drawn out from the dismembered Deep.
Then Marduk considered Tiamat. He skimmed spume from the bitter sea, heaped up the clouds, spindrift of wet and wind and cooling rain, the spittle of Tiamat.
With his own hands from the steaming mist he spread the clouds. He pressed hard down the head of water, heaping mountains over it, opening springs to flow: Euphrates and Tigris rose from her eyes, but he closed the nostrils and held back their springhead.
He piled huge mountains on her paps and through them drove water-holes to channel the deep sources; and high overhead he arched her tail, locked-in to the wheel of heaven; the pit was under his feet, between was the crotch, the sky’s fulcrum. Now the earth had foundations and the sky its mantle.24
Marduk here creates the very topography of the earth, its atmosphere and terrain,