Akitu

Summary

The Akitu is the New Year festival of Babylon, held at the start of the month of Nisannu, the month of spring and harvest, and lasting twelve days. The statue of Marduk goes out of his temple Esagil to the "Akitu House" outside the city and comes back, his son Nabu comes from Borsippa to share the feast with his father, and the king takes the god by the hand to lead him in procession. The Babylonian word akītu names both the festival and the house where it is held, and it is old: the Sumerian lists have "the day of the á-ki-ti", and other texts speak of "the Akitu of the seeding" in the autumn month of sowing, so the festival fell at the two heads of the farming year.

The fullest surviving account is a set of late Babylonian ritual tablets, published by Thureau-Dangin, which describe days two to five of Nisannu. On the second day the high priest rises before dawn, washes in river water and prays to Marduk alone. On the evening of the fourth day the priest recites Enūma eliš from beginning to end before Marduk's statue, the story of his war with Tiamat and his enthronement over the gods, and the tiara of Anu and the throne of Enlil stay covered while it is recited.

On the morning of the fifth day the exorcist purifies Nabu's chapel inside the temple: he sprinkles it with water, the swordsman cuts off a sheep's head, the exorcist wipes the chapel with the carcass, carcass and head are thrown into the river, and the two men go out into the open country and may not enter Babylon while Nabu is there, from the fifth to the twelfth of the month, because they have carried the impurity. The high priest must not watch the purification; if he sees it he is not pure. Then the king comes in. The priest takes from him the sceptre, the ring and the crown and sets them before Marduk, strikes the king's cheek, pulls him by the ears and makes him kneel on the ground, and the king says: "I have not sinned, lord of the lands, I have not neglected your divinity, I have not destroyed Babylon or ordered its dispersal, I have not shaken Esagil or forgotten its rites, I have not struck the cheek of its protected citizens or humiliated them." The priest answers that Marduk has heard his prayer and will magnify his kingship and destroy his enemies, gives him back his insignia, and strikes his cheek again: if his tears flow, Marduk is favourable; if they do not, Marduk is angry, and the enemy will rise and bring him down. At sunset the priest digs a pit, puts in it forty reeds with honey, cream and oil, sets a white bull before it, the king kindles the fire, and the two say: "O divine Bull, brilliant light that lights up the darkness".

The festival needs three to take place: the king, Nabu and Marduk. The Nabonidus Chronicle says that while the king stayed in Tema for years, "the king did not come to Babylon for the ceremonies of Nisannu, Nabu did not come to Babylon, Bel did not go out in procession, the New Year festival was omitted", though the offerings in Esagil and Ezida were still given in full.

The idea the Akitu turns on is that order is set up again from the beginning every year. The story of creation is recited and Marduk becomes king again as he first became king; the king is stripped of his insignia and given them back, so that he receives his kingship from the god's hand anew; the temple is purified by an animal that carries the impurity to the river; the god leaves the city and returns. At the end of the festival Nabu writes the year's destinies on the Tablet of Destinies. For the Babylonians the new year is an appointed time and an appointed place at once: a day on which things are decreed, and a house the god goes out to.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither Babylonian essay reads the word: akītu is aqqata and mīqāt. Lane says waqqata and aqqata a thing mean to appoint a time for it, that uqqitat in the Quranic verse "and when the messengers are given their appointed time" (77:11) is a dialectal form of wuqqitat, and that mīqāt is the time fixed for an action and also the place appointed for an action, like the stations of the pilgrimage where the pilgrim enters the sacred state. The Akitu is exactly that: a fixed day at the head of the year, and a fixed house outside the city. The a is the hamza of aqqata; the k answers q, since the cuneiform sign written ki also reads qí; and the t is radical, like the t of waqt.

Linguistic Root

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary calls akītu a foreign word in Akkadian, that is, from Sumerian, and defines it as "a festival and the temple in which the festival is celebrated". It is written from the Old Babylonian period on, with a plural á-ki-a-ti-šu-nu in an Old Babylonian royal inscription. The dictionary cites "the day of the Akitu" in the Sumerian-Akkadian lexical list, and, in the description of the autumn month Araḫsamna, "the Akitu of the seeding is celebrated".

So the reading covers the whole word: the hamza, the q and the t, with the long ī between them like the vowel of mīqāt. What brings it close is that Arabic keeps the verb with a hamza at the start, aqqata, as the Akkadian word has, and that mīqāt joins time and place, as the Akitu is both a day and a house. The limit of the reading is that the Sumerian á-ki-ti is older than any Semitic writing of the word, so the reading needs the word to have entered Sumerian from the Semitic side, and the lexical lists do not yet show that.

Key Mythic Narratives

Marduk the prisoner in an Assyrian commentary

A commentary preserved at Assur and Nineveh reads the festival's rites as another story. In it Marduk is held "in the mountain", that is, in prison, and the Akitu House is "the house at the edge of the place of the ordeal" where he is questioned. Nabu comes from Borsippa because of the one held fast; Belet-ili roams the streets asking "where is he kept prisoner?" and goes to the graveyard wanting to bury him; his wife prays "do not kill him, let Bel live!" The commentary says the Enūma eliš recited before him in Nisannu "concerns his imprisonment", has Marduk say "I only did what was good to Aššur, so what is my crime?", and says the chariot that goes to the Akitu House and back has no driver. The commentary makes Aššur the judge and the festival a trial of Marduk rather than his enthronement: an Assyrian reading of a Babylonian feast. "Marduk Ordeal", Nineveh version, Assur version; see Ashur.

Akitu houses in other cities

The Akitu was not Babylon's alone. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary gathers witnesses to Akitu Houses of Ishtar at Nineveh, built by Sargon and later renewed, of Ishtar at Arbela, of Sin at Harran, of Tashmetu at Calah, and of the Lady of Uruk. Sennacherib says the Akitu House of Aššur outside the walls of Assur had been forgotten for a long time, so that Aššur's rite was held inside the city, and that he rebuilt it. In Babylon itself Marduk takes up residence in the Akitu House on the eighth day, and Nebuchadnezzar names the boat of Marduk in which he goes in procession on the Euphrates and along the road of the Akitu at the beginning of the year.

Symbolic Reading

The Babylonian rereading essay reads Marduk as a symbol of the order Babylon built, and takes "Marduk makes the calendar" to mean that Babylon divided the year into twelve months and the month into thirty days. The Akitu is where that calendar is seen at work: at the start of the first month the creation story in which Marduk divides the year is recited, and the coming year's destiny is written.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Akitu joins two things that recur in New Year feasts. The first is that what is done at the door of the year governs the whole year, which is what people in North Africa say of Yennayer: whoever goes to bed hungry that night stays hungry all year. The difference is that Yennayer is a feast of house and village, where people eat of every kind so that every kind may multiply, while the Akitu is a feast of temple and palace, where the destiny of the land and the king is decided. The second is the joining of a god to the king at the head of the year, whose oldest complete telling is a Sumerian hymn in which Inanna decides the fate of the land with the king at the New Year, as in the sacred marriage.

The purification of Nabu's chapel by a sheep thrown into the river, which takes the impurity with it, answers the great purification of Japan, where rivers carry the offences to the sea and the goddess of the tides swallows them, and Leviticus 16, where the goat carries the people's iniquities into the wilderness. What they share is that the impurity is moved from the place onto a carrier and then out of the city.