The Primordial Waters

Summary

The primordial waters are the water that existed, in many creation stories, before any sky or earth had a name. The first things appear in it, a mound, an island or generations of gods, and after creation it stays beneath the earth or around it.

One of its oldest continuous tellings is the opening of the Babylonian Enūma eliš: "When on high the heavens had not been named, and below the earth had not been called by a name, there was nothing but primeval Apsû, their begetter, and Tiamat, who bore them all, mingling their waters together; no reed-bed had been matted, no marsh land had appeared" (Tablet I, 1–6). From this mingled water come the generations of gods, down to Anu and then Ea. Ea and Apsû then fight, and Apsû becomes the fresh water beneath the earth and Ea's dwelling; Babylonian texts say the city of Babylon itself was built on top of it. Then comes Tiamat's war: Marduk kills her and splits her in two, raises half of her as the sky, and makes the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates from her eyes.

Other stories begin the same way. In Sumer Namma was "the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth", and her name is written with the sign for the cosmic water beneath the earth. In Egypt the creator says he was in Nun before sky and earth existed, finding no place to stand, and then Atum rises on the first mound. In the Rigveda the creation hymn asks: what was the water, deep and unfathomable? and then says: darkness was hidden by darkness, and all this was water without a sign. In the Japanese Kojiki the land was still young, like floating fat, drifting like a jellyfish. In Homer Okeanos is the one from whom the gods are sprung, and from him flow all rivers, every sea, all springs and deep wells. Not every story begins with water: Hesiod begins with Chaos, the gap; the Norse begin with Ginnungagap, a gap with no sea in it into which rivers run and freeze; and the Chinese Huainanzi begins with mixed qi, from whose cold part water gathers.

The tellings of the primordial waters agree that it is water without limit or shape in which nothing stands: no place for Atum to stand, no reed or marsh in Babylon, no sign to tell one thing from another in the Indian hymn, a land drifting in Japan. Creation begins when something rises in it or it is divided: a mound at Iunu, an island of salt in Japan, a lotus from the navel of Viṣṇu in India, generations born from the mingling of the two waters in Babylon, and Tiamat's water split to make the separation of heaven and earth. And the water does not go away: Apsû becomes the foundation of Ea's house, half of Tiamat becomes the roof of the sky, the sea is laid as a ring around the earth in the Norse account, and Ra says that in the end he will return to Nun. The idea these stories turn on is that the ordered world is land that stood up in a water older than itself, and that this water is what gives people drink from beneath the earth and what drowns them when it comes back, which joins these stories to the stories of the flood.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Akkadian name of the primordial water is Tiamat's own name, tiāmtu, "sea", the final t being the feminine ending. Its root is t-h-m, which is Hebrew tehōm, the word with which the creation story in Genesis begins: "and darkness was upon the face of the deep". The h dropped in Akkadian, as Akkadian loses its guttural letters, and stayed in Hebrew and Arabic. In Lane taham is land descending to the sea, from which comes Tihāmah, the land that stretches down to the sea coast, and tahāʾim, lands that slope to the sea. Arabic renders the Genesis word as ghamr, which in Lane is much water that covers whoever enters it and drowns him, and the main body of the sea. In these words the primordial water is much, overwhelming water, and Tihāmah is the name of the low land that runs down to it.

Attestations by Culture

Sumer

The god list An = Anum calls Namma "the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth", and her name is written with the sign meaning the cosmic water beneath the earth, which is why Wiggermann called her "the Cosmic Ocean"; the ORACC guide notes that her role later passed to Tiamat. In the poem Enki and Ninmah Enki lay asleep "in the deep, in the flowing water, the place the inside of which no other god knows", and Namma, "the primeval mother who gave birth to the senior gods", carried the tears of the toiling gods to him and woke him; he told her to knead clay from the top of the abzu and bring the form of man into being. Her page reads her name from namā, to grow: she from whom everything grew.

Babylon

Enūma eliš begins with two waters, fresh Apsû and salt Tiamat, mingling before sky or earth is named, and the gods are born from their mingling (Tablet I, 1–9). The poem calls Tiamat the mother of all the gods (I 4), and describes her now as water, now as a body, now as having a tail, until Marduk turns her limbs into features of the land. Ea lives in the abzu, the ocean under the earth, and in Babylonian cosmic geography this water became a foundation on which cities stand. The Apsu page reads his name with Muhammad Rashid Nasser Zouk as ḥabsu, confined water, and the Tiamat page reads hers from t-h-m.

Egypt

In the Bremner-Rhind Papyrus the Lord of All says he made many beings with his mouth "before the sky existed, before the earth existed", and made some of them in Nun "as inert ones, when I could not yet find a place to stand"; then he spat out Shu and expectorated Tefnut, and his father Nun raised them. The Pyramid Texts say that Atum rose on the height and stood up in Iunu as the benben stone. Nun does not disappear after creation: Ra addresses him in the council of the gods as "eldest god, in whom I came into being", and says that in the end he will return to Nun, to the place where he came into being. The Nun page reads his name as Arabic nūn, the great fish, so the name of the first water is the name of what lives in it; the Atum page reads his name from tamma, the one in whom everything was complete before it divided.

Greece

Hesiod begins with Chaos, the gap, and then Earth; Okeanos comes in his poem as a Titan, one of the children of Gaia and Ouranos (Theogony 116 and 133). Homer has another picture. Hera says she is going to the ends of the earth, to "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys"; Sleep calls Okeanos the river "from whom they all are sprung"; and Achilles says that deep-flowing Ocean is the one "from whom all rivers flow and every sea, and all the springs and deep wells" (Iliad 14.201, 14.246, 21.195–197). Walter Burkert argues that Hera's words are strikingly parallel to the opening of Enūma eliš, that Okeanos and Tethys correspond fully to Apsû and Tiamat, and that Tethys, who had no cult, is an almost perfect transcription of the Akkadian form tawtu of the word for sea. The Thetis page, following the project's Troy dossier, reads the name from tehōm and finds it stronger for Tethys than for Thetis. The Chaos page reads his name as khawāʾ, emptiness.

The North

The seeress says that early in the ages "there was neither sand nor sea nor cool waves". In the Norse account water does not come before the gap; it flows into it. Snorri tells that Niflheimr was made many ages before the earth, and in its middle lies the spring Hvergelmir from which rivers fall; the rivers called Élivágar, when they had come far from their sources, carried a venom-stream that hardened like slag running from a fire and became ice, and rime grew layer upon layer in Ginnungagap. When it met the heat from Múspell it melted and dripped, and from the drops came the giant Ymir. The sons of Borr then killed him, made the sea from his blood, and laid it in a ring around the earth that most men think impassable. The Ymir page reads his name as yamm, the sea.

India

The creation hymn, Rigveda 10.129, begins in a time when there was neither being nor non-being, and asks: "What was the water, deep and unfathomable?" Its third stanza says: "Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; all this was water without a sign." In hymn 10.121 "the great waters came, holding the germ and giving birth to Agni", fire, and from it arose the one life of the gods. In the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, when the three worlds were under water, Viṣṇu lay alone on the serpent Ananta, as if asleep but with his eyes not fully closed, until the lotus rose from his navel on which Brahmā is born. The Viṣṇu page reads his name as wasan, the first onset of sleep, and the Brahmā page reads his as baraʾa, to create.

Japan

The Kojiki says that at first the land was "still young, like floating fat, and drifting about like a jellyfish": it is in the water and not yet apart from it. Then Izanagi and Izanami stand on the floating bridge of heaven and stir the brine with the halberd, and the salt dripping from its tip piles up into the island of Onogoro, the first firm land. The Japanese rereading takes the halberd dipped in the sea as volcanic activity under the water, and the drops as lava cooling into an island.

China

The Huainanzi does not begin with water. In its third chapter the clear qi rises and becomes heaven, the turbid congeals and becomes earth, and then "the cold qi accumulated from yin became water, and the essence of the qi of water became the moon". Then Gonggong butted Mount Buzhou and the pillar of heaven broke, so the earth sank in the south-east, "and there the waters and the dust return", which is why China's rivers run east. In chapter 6, when the four pillars fell, "the waters flooded and would not subside", and Nüwa piled reed ash to stop them. In chapter 8 Gonggong raised the flood waters in the time of Emperor Shun until people climbed the hills and clung to the trees, and Yu opened the rivers and drained them into the eastern sea. The great water of the Chinese accounts is the flood that comes after creation. The Gonggong page reads his name as qinqin, the one who knows where water runs under the ground.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In two tellings the first water comes as a pair: fresh Apsû and salt Tiamat in Babylon, and Okeanos and Tethys, father and mother of the gods, in Hera's words in Homer. Burkert argues that the Greek pair answers the Babylonian one and that the name Tethys carries over the Akkadian word for sea. In Sumer the water is one mother, Namma, whose role later passed to Tiamat.

The first water is a place of sleep and stillness. In Nun there are inert beings that do not move; Apsû wants rest and sleep and cannot bear the noise of the young gods; Enki sleeps in the deep water until his mother wakes him; Viṣṇu lies on the water as if asleep, and his page reads his name as wasan, the first onset of sleep. Creation in these stories is waking or rising: Atum stands up on the mound, Enki gets up from his bed, the lotus grows from the sleeper's navel.

What appears first differs. In Egypt a mound rises; in Japan and the North it is drops: salt dripping from the halberd's tip piles up into an island, rime melting and dripping becomes a giant. In India a germ carried by the water gives birth to fire; in Babylon generations are born from the mingling. Two tellings begin with a gap: Hesiod's Chaos, whose page reads his name as khawāʾ, emptiness, and the Norse Ginnungagap. The Greek structural essay sets khawāʾ, emptiness of space, beside Tiamat, emptiness of water, and makes both the state before differentiation. Even so, water runs into the northern gap as rivers, and Homer's Okeanos is the source of all water.

In most tellings the first water does not go away. It stays beneath the earth in the Apsû on which Babylon was built, above it in the half of Tiamat that became the sky, and around it in the sea the sons of Borr made from Ymir's blood. It returns at the end of time: Ra goes back to Nun, the earth sinks into the sea at Ragnarök and rises from it green, and Viṣṇu lies on the waters of dissolution between one cycle and the next. And it returns in history as flood: Gonggong raises the water until people climb the hills, and all flood stories tell of water coming back over the land that stood up in it. Killing and splitting the water with weapons belongs to divine combat with the sea.

Symbolic Reading

The project's rereading essays read the first water in two ways. The first is cosmic: the Sumerian essay makes Namma the state of the universe before differentiation, everything mixed in a single "ocean"; the Babylonian essay makes the mingling of Apsû and Tiamat the mixing of matter and energy before atoms formed; and the Indian essay reads the creation hymn as a description of what came before the Big Bang. The second is of the land: the Egyptian essay reads Nun as the Nile flood that covers Egypt every year and the first mound as the first land to appear when the water recedes, so creation repeats each year. The Norse essay reads Ginnungagap as the North Atlantic or a crater under the ice, and the meeting of ice and fire as Iceland's hot springs, and the Japanese essay reads the first island as lava cooling in the sea. The Babylonian structural essay makes Tiamat and the "deep" of Genesis one first matter, water before it takes shape.

The texts themselves support the reading of the land at particular points. The opening of Enūma eliš defines the time before creation by the absence of reed-beds and marsh land, the first things to appear on an alluvial plain when the water goes down. From Tiamat's eyes come the two rivers on which Mesopotamia lives; Ea dwells in the fresh water beneath the earth, the water of wells and springs, and has clay kneaded from above it. Homer makes Okeanos the source of springs and wells, and the Huainanzi explains the eastward course of the rivers by the tilt of the earth. In these texts the first water is the water people know in their daily life: water under the ground that is dug for, rivers running in a known direction, a flood that recedes from mud that is sown and kneaded. Those who handle this water are figures of knowledge and craft: wise Ea who lives in the abzu, Namma who kneads the clay, Yu who opens the channels, and Gonggong who knows the water and then uses it for ruin.