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The Universe's Watery Birth: Creation Myths of the Middle East- Part One
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11706 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1994 |
2,821 Words |
| Author
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Ewa Wasilewska
Ewa Wasilewska is assistant professor of anthropology at the
University of Utah, specializing in the Middle East and
Central Asia, with a focus on ancient religions. She is
neither a Muslim nor an Islamic scholar. She is a frequent
contributor to the Culture section and the author of Creation
Stories of the Middle East (Jessica Kingsley Press, 2000).
Maulana Muhammad Ali's translation of the Qur'an--which is
widely considered to be written with the required "gift of
inner purity"--was used for all quotations. Due to the length
of the Qur'an, only selected suras have been cited. The author
would like to thank Jennifer Graves for her assistance and
critique of the draft text. |
The watery birth of the universe is one of the principal themes found among the creation stories of the world's cultures. It is also the earliest creation motif recorded in writing, referred to in sources from Mesopotamia and Egypt dating from the third millennium B.C. In fact, the oldest creation stories documented in writing originated in the Middle East. Although somewhat altered through the millennia of human history, they have helped shape modern views of the world and its origin. The creation stories of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and other ancient cultures are at the foundation of all the religious systems that developed in the Middle East, systems whose doctrines became central to the growth of Western civilization and have spread around the world.
The people responsible for developing most of these ideas were the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia (more or less the area of modern Iraq). The Sumerians remain somewhat of a mystery: Their origins and language affiliation are unknown. However, we can read their texts, thanks to the work of philologists who pieced together the Sumerian vocabulary and grammar from materials discovered in Mesopotamia and elsewhere.
Reconstructing the past based on such sources is difficult. It seems to be an unwritten law of archaeological inquiry that the most important ancient texts and paragraphs are always fragmentary or missing. The more remote the society, the more difficult and challenging the process. Patient archaeologists and philologists must carefully assemble scattered, often accidentally discovered, information. Through their efforts we may understand ancient ways of life and perceptions of the world, as expressed through various myths and other literary compositions.
Flourishing at the end of the fourth and throughout most of the third millennium B.C., Sumerian civilization left fragmentary written records from which modern scholars have reconstructed its cosmology. It must be remembered that the crucial points of the Sumerian perception of the universe's creation are rarely explicitly stated but are implied by the text or by the choice of ideograms and compound terms.
In the second half of the fourth millennium B.C., the Sumerians became the first people to create a writing system, cuneiform. Masters of invention, they also left the foundation for almost every form of inquiry in science, philosophy, literature, and other intellectual endeavors. But the Sumerians never formulated any general, all-pervading laws. They were pragmatists who focused their attention on
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