The Canon · No. 006
Babylonian & Assyrian Religion
Akkadian religion
c.2000 BCE – c.100 CE · Ancient Near East · Extinct · Mesopotamia
II. THE FIRST CIVILISATIONS — c.3000 – 1000 BCE
How many
None.
Who began it
No founder. A Semitic-language reworking of Sumerian religion, with the Babylonian city god Marduk and the Assyrian national god Ashur promoted to the top as their empires rose.
What it is for
To underwrite empire. The Enuma Elish is a creation epic that exists largely to explain why Marduk, a junior god, outranks everyone — because he alone killed the chaos-dragon Tiamat when the older gods would not.
What it worships
Marduk (Babylon), Ashur (Assyria), Ishtar (the Akkadian Inanna), Shamash, Sin, Nabu the god of scribes, Nergal of the underworld, Ereshkigal its queen.
What it holds
Order is not given; it is won by violence and must be re-won. Marduk splits Tiamat's corpse to make sky and earth, and makes humans from the blood of the rebel god Kingu specifically to be slaves of the gods. Destiny is written annually on the Tablet of Destinies, and can be read in advance from omens.
What it does
The twelve-day akitu New Year festival, in which the Enuma Elish was recited, the king was struck in the face by a priest and made to declare he had not neglected Babylon, and Marduk's statue processed down the Ishtar Gate. Vast omen literature: liver divination, birth anomalies, dream books, and the astrological series Enuma Anu Enlil, whose observations produced the mathematics that Greek astronomy later inherited.
After death
The same dust-house as Sumer. The elaborate Mesopotamian effort went into this life — long life, many sons, a good name — because the next one offered nothing.
Its texts
Enuma Elish; Atrahasis (creation and flood); the standard Epic of Gilgamesh; Ludlul bel nemeqi, sometimes called the Babylonian Job; the omen series Shumma izbu and Enuma Anu Enlil.
Its branches
Assyrian (Ashur-centred) and Babylonian (Marduk-centred) recensions of one system.
Of note
Rediscovered only in the 1850s. When George Smith read the Babylonian flood story to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872, it caused a public crisis about the originality of Genesis that has never entirely closed.
Its timeline
- c.1894 BCE Babylon founded as an Amorite city-state.
- c.1754 BCE Hammurabi's law stele shows him receiving authority from Shamash, god of justice.
- c.1100 BCE Enuma Elish reaches its standard form; Marduk's supremacy fixed.
- 883–612 BCE Neo-Assyrian empire; Ashur's cult spread by deportation and terror.
- 612 BCE Nineveh falls; Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh is buried and thereby preserved.
- 587 BCE Nebuchadnezzar II destroys the Jerusalem temple and deports the Judean elite — the exile that reshapes Judaism permanently.
- 539 BCE Cyrus of Persia takes Babylon and presents himself as Marduk's chosen, on the Cyrus Cylinder.
- 79/80 CE The last datable cuneiform tablet, astronomical almanac W22340a from Uruk. The tradition ends in silence.
Sources
Verified 2026-09-13, against these.