How to Start a Cosmogony

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/156921212X629455

Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 30–48

Journal of Ancient Near

Eastern Religions

brill.nl/jane

How to Start a Cosmogony: On the Poetics of Beginnings in Greece

and the Near East

Carolina López-RuizThe Ohio State University,

414 University Hall, 230 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, [email protected]

AbstractIn this essay I explore the beginning lines of the most relevant cosmogonies from the eastern Mediterranean, focusing on the Enuma Elish, Genesis 1 and Hesiod’s Theogony. These opening lines reveal some of the challenges faced by the authors of these texts when committing to the written word their version of the beginning of the universe. Hesiod’s Theogony will be treated in more length as it presents an expanded introduction to the creation account. This close reading is followed by a few reflections on the question of authorship of these and other Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies.

KeywordsEnuma Elish, Genesis, Hesiod, Theogony, creation narratives, authorship

The beginning of any work (is) a word,and the beginning of any deed is a thought(Ben Sira 37:16, Ms B)

A Common Grid

As J. Z. Smith put it in one of his many mesmerizing titles, “In comparison a magic dwells.”1 Embracing the problems and limitations that also dwell in comparison, many of us cannot avoid the attraction of exploring the networks of shared ideas and models that accompanied peoples in movement for mil-lennia, each of them finding unique expressions only fully understandable within the culture and audience that produced them. In their differentiated connectedness lies the fascination.

1 Smith 1982.

C. López-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 30–48 31

This connectedness is evident among all kinds of texts but perhaps most of all in theogonies and cosmogonies, giving the impression that there is a strong family relationship between members of this literary genre. Behind the multi-plicity of motifs, specific characters, and different story lines cultivated by each civilization, often by each city, a network of underlying common tradi-tions holds together a genre that travels across languages and religions, easily adapted among cultures that already share basic common religious and myth-ical taxonomies due to long interaction. A common basic pattern at work in cosmogonies and theogonies from the eastern Mediterranean can be sketched as follows: most of them place the beginning of the world in natural elements or abstract states, such as Earth, Sky, the primordial waters, a Void or Chasm. Sometimes these entities are presented as divine but more frequently they lack full anthropomorphic personalities such as the gods exhibit later in the story. After a primordial male-female couple starts procreating sexually, cosmogony is followed by theogony proper, which unfolds to outline the birth and family relations of the gods, usually focusing on their struggles to achieve power (which can be used to organize and harmonize complementary and conflict-ing traditions). This stage sometimes leads to an account of the origin of man-kind, or anthropogony, which, in turn, can be extended into an account of human genealogies, from the heroes to the founders of cities and kings of historical societies. For any given culture, then, these myths and legends, taken together, provide a “brief history of time” whose backbone is genealogical suc-cession and which can potentially stretch from the poet’s age back to the ori-gin of all things. The transition from cosmic and natural entities to anthropomorphic gods and then to people is paralleled by a progression from a more simple composition of the universe to a more complex one, sometimes from one “neuter” element to gendered couples, from a less differentiated and defined state of being to a more orderly cosmos governed by a group of gods and heroes entangled in complex relationships. The succession of gods who rule over the others takes multiple versions, but it always follows a monarchic scheme, including different kinds of fights between gods and other gods, or gods and monstrous creatures.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the specific content of these stories and their comparative potential, which has been the subject of exten-sive attention by scholars of the last decades.2 Instead, I want to provide some reflections on the openings of creation stories and how they can speak to us about the task of the poet as he sets out to create his own specific cosmogonic piece, a literary artifact crafted through knowledge and respect for inherited

2 See López-Ruiz 2010: ch.1 for an overview of previous scholarship.

32 C. López-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 30–48

traditions but bound to become a unique piece in that chain. Depending on the particularities of each culture, the author would have had a different agenda (about which we often do not know much) and his relationship with the traditional material might have varied considerably, as would the degree of freedom in his choices as he combines authority and novelty in the process of committing to specific words such a thing as the beginning of the universe. But in all cases the product was intended to achieve a balance that would convince and attract the targeted audience, which can only be achieved by careful adaptation and innovation on standard themes.3

Creation stories pose a double difficulty: if beginnings are par excellence the most difficult part of composing, among any text, cosmogonies are the only ones in which the beginning is in and of itself the main point. How one begins that beginning must not have been a light task to undertake. The Near Eastern tradition to use the first words of a literary work as a title for the entire text only underscores the weight of literary openings (most famously Enuma Elish for the Babylonian poem and the first word in all biblical books, such as Bereshit for Genesis, etc.). In this paper I will explore the shared poetic culture of beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean and the striking peculiarities of each beginning as a singular literary creation. Needless to say, the baggage of scholarly study that each of these texts carries cannot be accounted for here, and I have in fact deliberately tried to look at these often compared beginnings afresh, with my eyes set merely on the questions raised above. I will focus on the older and more deliberately cosmogonic texts preserved in the Near East and Greece: Enuma Elish, Genesis, and Hesiod’s Theogony, accompanied by some remarks on the Kumarbi Song and on some Greek and Roman texts from later periods.

Near Eastern Cosmogonies

When skies above were not yet named,nor earth below pronounced by name, Apsu, the first one, their begetterand maker Tiamat, who bore them all,had mixed their waters together,but had not formed pastures, nor discovered reed-beds; when yet no gods were manifest,nor names pronounced, nor destinies decreed,

3 E.g. of Hesiod and Homer, for whom we have no background, vs. Gilgamesh for which we have different fragmentary versions that we can roughly contrast. See comments about the authorship of these texts below.


then gods were born within them.Lahmu (and) Lahamu emerged, their names pronounced . . .4

These verses open the most famous of many Mesopotamian creation texts,5 the Babylonian poem called Enuma Elish. These first lines play a primarily chronological function: to designate a time in the past: “when,” deliberately and crucially different from, for instance, “where” or “who.” This time is des-ignated through the absence of names, which means absence of language, and so by extension absence of people or gods who articulate language. The idea of “creation by naming,” which will reverberate in Genesis 1, is also present in Egyptian cosmogony, specifically in the Memphite Theology, where Ptah brought the universe into existence by naming everything using his heart and tongue. This constitutes an ontology (or epistemology) in its own right, whereby things do not exist until they receive a name.6 However, the very idea is counterintuitive at various levels, if only because you need someone to name/create, and this someone, in turn, must have a name in order to exist. Apsu and Tiamat will fill this place, as we will see below. Notice also the con-trast between this initial absence of names and the abundance of names of Marduk, whose fifty names are recited as the culmination of the poem. He not only is the god with the most names but he was also the main creator in the second part of this composition that was clearly meant to exalt him.7

This first line gives us a teleological beginning, in that it looks forward to a time when skies and earth do have names (i.e., exist), presumably the poet’s own time. This introduces a forward-looking charge to the narrative from the beginning: we expect it to build toward closer, more familiar times. But a

4 Translation by Dalley 2000. In general, translations are mine unless otherwise specified.5 There were multiple creation stories in Mesopotamia, some of them preserved as indepen-

dent poems (e.g., Theogony of Dunnu) and some written as introductions to other kinds of works. See Andrea Seri’s contribution in this volume for more details. See also Lambert 1975, 2008.

6 In older Sumerian traditions the equivalence between having a name and existing is clear: the destruction of a written name is articulated in texts as part of the destruction of the name’s bearer, and in the Sumerian poem “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” the creation of humans is expressed as “after the name of mankind had been established” (see Woods, forth-coming). On the names in Enuma Elish as a “hypostasis of the being” (name = existence), see Lambert 1998: 192. In Hesiod’s story of the Five Races, the brutish men of the race of Bronze die “nameless” (without glory or memory) (Works and Days 143–155), in contrast with the fame (kleos) attained by the heroes.

7 Marduk uses the body of his defeated opponents (Tiamat, Kingu) to create heavens and earth and even humans. See Seri’s article in this volume. About Marduk’s fifty names, see Andrea Seri 2006, esp. 517. About Mesopotamian creation narratives, see also Lambert 1975 and 2008, Michalowski 1990.


linear account of the creation does not follow. Instead, after the opening refer-ence to a void time, without skies or earth8 and without language, the first couple is introduced, Apsu and Tiamat, who impersonate the primeval ele-ments of fresh and salty waters; they already exists, and therefore, we are not at the very beginning. Second, in violation of the forward-looking expecta-tions raised by the first two verses, these next two take us further back in time. We are now introduced to the names of two entities, who created the gods “in the midst of heaven.” But what kinds of entities are Apsu and Tiamat? And where did they come from? who named them? Note that they cannot be exactly gods, as we find out soon that “no gods were yet manifest” (if manifest means “existed”).9 So we move from two verses about stuff (that we recognize) with no names (yet) to names (that we recognize) with no clearly defined stuff (yet).

Only now does the narrative pick up, as it were, and move in chronological order toward the present (the birth of the gods start, Lahmu and Lahamu, etc.). Thus, we start early in the time of creation, then we go even further back, only to resume forward motion after that. It seems as though the poet amelio-rates the fundamental problem of first beginnings (where do you start? and what beginning is really the beginning?) by moving back past an opening tab-leau that already seems distant enough. He is showing his audience that he can outdo even an already impressive opening. It is almost as though the poet of Genesis had begun by saying “In the beginning the sky and the earth had no names yet, they who were made by God when he said . . .”

Read this way, this clever beginning destabilizes the intuitive flow of the beginning and obscures the fundamental problem of how to talk about the absence of time and existence before creation, so that the poet can get on with it. Moreover, the Mesopotamian text begins with the following paradox, namely that it uses words to denote the skies and earth even in the very sen-tence where it claims that those words did not yet exist. But how can this be avoided? This is part and parcel of the problems that emerge when you attempt to capture in words such a thing as the very beginnings. Insofar as you imagine the distant cosmogonic past by a process of elimination (this or that did not exist yet), you risk having to project later developments onto the beginning, in this case words. The very logic of the poem compels us to become aware of the fact that we are witnessing those distant events from a later standpoint,

8 Heaven and Earth are here a merismus: they comprise and stand for the universe, as in Gen-esis 1.1 (e.g., Smith 2010: 43).

9 The representation of Apsu and Tiamat as something other than gods is further signaled linguistically by the absence of the DINGIR determinative that accompanies divine names (I owe this detail to Myerston, dissertation in progress, ch. 1).


one where we take words for granted, while at the same it forces us to reflect on the relationship between language and existence.

Let us now turn to the most widely known beginning of beginnings, the one opening the Hebrew Bible (1.1–2.3), where God creates the heavens and earth and only later is said to have named them. As in Enuma Elish, these first elements have, in fact, already been named by the narrator, with the same words that God will (later) give them. The narrator has jumped ahead of God, almost usurped a divine prerogative (to give names to things), a prerogative transferred to man (Adam) in the “second account” of creation, beginning in Genesis 2.4.10 But what else can the narrator do? The options and resources are not endless. It seems that both the Mesopotamian and the Hebrew follow the same method to verbally recreate ‘first times,’ while neither can escape the problem this poses for actual narration. The Genesis 1 composer, however, while echoing the old Mesopotamian and Egyptian notion of creation by naming,11 follows a more familiar theory of language (to us), namely, that you name that which already exists.

When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said: ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.12

Genesis also follows the Enuma Elish type of creation in that it presumes the existence of “something” at the moment of creation. First, tohu-wa-wohu (“welter and waste”) is not “nothing,” and is immediately characterized as some mass of waters, very much in the Mesopotamian tradition. Then, the very first words can be read in a way that underscores even more the fact that the narrative is about the starting point of God’s creation, not of the universe itself. The debate is still open about the precise syntax of the opening words, “be-re’shit” (not “ba-re’shit”), where the temporal expression is not marked by the definite article, and is followed by a finite verb (bara’) (instead of a noun or an Infinitive in construct with Elohim), all of which presents challenges we cannot deal with here. Conventionally translated as “In the beginning God created . . .,” there is an increasing preference, exemplified by Robert Alter’s translation reproduced above, to follow to its last consequences the indefinite-ness of be-re’shit, which turns the opening verse into a subordinate clause,

10 See further comments and references on these two accounts below. See Smith’s study of the Priestly creation account of Genesis 1. See also Carr 1996 and Wénin 2001.

11 On the possibility that the Memphite Theology (the one with Ptah) might have been influ-ential in 8th-6th centuries broader Mediterranean circles (including Phoenician) and hence on the Genesis Priestly view, see Smith 2010: 42 with references there to previous scholarship.

12 Alter 1996.


“When God first created . . .,” or “When God began to create,” with the main sentence starting later on (“God said . . .”).13 This alternative reading would make Genesis 1.1 not only thematically parallel but even formally parallel with Enuma Elish, which also starts with a temporal subordinate clause (“When on high . . .”) and more distant from the Greek tradition of Hesiod and the natural philosophers, who explicitly start their accounts at the very beginning (Greek protista, en arche, “at first, in the beginning”).14

However that may be, the choice was made by someone to place this account at the opening of the Torah, with all the authority that this position would convey.15 Beyond that, we are at a loss as to how the “literary artist” of Genesis worked in relation to his material. As Abela points out when referring to the composer of the “Primary History” (not necessarily the same as the author of the original sources of Genesis): “We do not know and have little possibility of ascertaining how our writer employed his sources, whether he reproduced them verbatim or rephrased them, whether he used them in toto or only in parte; whether what we read is in general his creation even if he may have been guided ‘by tradition’ (. . .) Whatever sources he may have had, this author has integrated them within his own communication act . . .”16 In any case, creation in this tradition is not ex nihilo, but is the beginning of God’s creative activity. Creation of the world is nothing but transformation, expan-sion, and differentiation, not much different from what literary creation is.

13 The New Revised Standard Version also follows this approach, only starting the main sentence in “the Earth was . . .,” thus “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void . . .”

14 The Gospel of John has “en arkhe,” not “en te arche,” so without an article, as does the Septuagint, perhaps in order to translate literally bere’shit. However, in Greek the absence of article in this kind of expression has not the same relevance, as it can still be read either as “in the beginning” or as “at first” (especially since the expression en te arkhe might be avoided since it has also a technical meaning “during the office of ”). In other Greek creation accounts we have to prin (Apollonius Rhodios Argonautika 1.496–97) and protista in Hesiod (Theogony 116) “first of all”, “at first” not “in the beginning.” A more clear expression with the same root is that of God as being “first” (ri’shon) and “last,” as for instance in Isaiah 40–55. On these first words of Genesis see further discussion in Smith 2010: Ch 2, esp. 43–46.

15 See also Carr 1996 and Wénin 2001. See remarks by Smith 2010: 5 about the priestly creation account as placed deliberately where it is to be “the account” par excellence, not simply a myth. In fact, Smith argues that Genesis 1 functions as a prologue to the whole Pentateuch and a “commentary” (in a modern nuanced sense) on the earlier Jahwistic account contained in Genesis 2.4 ff. (Smith 2010: ch. 4). In Carr’s view (1996: 62–68), Gen 1.1–2.3 was dependent on its non-priestly parallel but was composed to stand separately from it.

16 Abela 2001: 397–98. See also contributions of Vervenne (2001) and Kruger (2001) in the same volume. Kruger traces repetitions, parallels, and reversals in Genesis, and proposes that the first reversals are the creation acts themselves, which reverse the initial state of Chaos (437).


These are the tools by which the narrators’ task humbly mirrors the divine creating task.

Finally, the fact that these verses of Genesis open the Jewish and Christian canons often obscures the fact that numerous texts in the Hebrew Bible con-tain cosmogonic elaborations that peek through the thick coat of (not always successful) “linearization” of the biblical narrative.17 To begin with, there is the immediately following creation narrative in Genesis 2.4–3.24. In fact, Genesis 1, attributed to the Priestly source and neatly organized around the seven-day timeline,18 was probably composed and placed where it is as a delib-erate introduction and indirect commentary on Genesis 2.4–3.24, which stemmed from a Jahwistic source and concerns the relationship between God and man (containing the Eden story). Moreover, without going into details, Canaanite cosmogony emerges stubbornly throughout the biblical corpus, as in God’s restraining of the sea as the first act of creation (Job 38), which evokes both the primordial watery state of Enuma Elish and the Ugaritic cos-mic conflict between Baal and Yam.19 This is also the way in which order is achieved in the cosmos in Psalm 74, when Yahweh defeats dragon-like Leviathan,20 while in Proverbs 8 Wisdom (Hokhmah) features as the force that was with God “from the beginning, from the origin of the earth,” in a passage evoking the primordial watery state of Genesis 1: “. . . there was still no deep when I was brought forth, no springs rich with water, before the mountains were sunk.” The intellect as a primeval force, also present in Genesis 1, touches a chord of traditional cosmogonic strings: from the Maat who accompanies Atum-Ra in his creative actions in the Egyptian Heliopolitan cosmogony and the already mentioned heart and tongue of Ptah in the Memphite one, to the later Greek philosophical articulations, especially in Plato’s Timaeus, where the demiurge is pure intelligence and is, not coincidentally, called “giver of Titles” (78e), a tradition that in turn anticipates the cosmogony in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word/discourse (logos),” whatever the exact nuance of logos is here.

These examples reinforce the idea that what has become a canonical text was at the moment of its composition an exercise in choice and adaptation, no

17 Smith 2010: ch. 1 for an overview of the numerous creation narratives embedded in the Hebrew Bible, some of which were points of reference or contrast for the Genesis 1 redactor. For a study of the literary craft displayed by the different authors of the Hebrew Bible, see Alter 1981.

18 See commentary in Smith 2010: ch. 3, p. 87 about its orderly and harmonious organization, which he contextualizes as speaking especially to Israelites from the turmoiled sixth century.

19 In the Baal Cycle, for which see recent edition by Smith 1994 and 2009. Cf. also Ps. 89, Ps. 74 and Isaiah 51.

20 Cf. Psalm 29 and Psalm 104, where their interaction is more playful. Cf. also Job 40.


doubt guided by authoritative views held by a given community at the time of the redaction, but most likely shaping those views as well in a complex dialec-tic process.

Finally, the Song of Kumarbi offers an interesting contrasting point within ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies or, in this case, theogonies. This text is most likely the opening story of a series of Hurrian epic tales adapted into Hittite and known as the Kumarbi Cycle.21 That the text contains the begin-ning of a cycle about the gods is signaled by the invocation to all the gods to hear the story, absent in other texts of the Cycle: “. . . who are Primeval Gods, let the [. . .], weighty gods listen, etc.”22 After the invocation, an account of divine dynastic struggles follows:

Long ago, in primeval years Alalu was king in heaven. Alalu was sitting on the throne, and weighty Anu, the foremost of the gods, was standing before him. He was bowing down at his (Alalu’s) feet, and was placing in his hand the drinking cups. For a mere nine years Alalu was king in heaven. In the ninth year Anu gave battle against Alalu and defeated Alalu . . .23

The succession of gods continues with Anu as the new king, in turn over-thrown by Kumarbi. The pattern of succession of gods as kings in heaven and the castration of Anu (Sky) by Kumarbi is a forerunner of Hesiod’s Theogony, in which Ouranos (Sky) is castrated by his youngest son Kronos. However, even though the text contains the beginning of a series of stories and it starts us off with the first gods to “reign in Heaven,” it does not attempt to portray the beginning of the world in any “systematic” way, starting only at a certain point in the history of the gods. The world itself and the gods already seem to exist when the poem opens, so the text should not be put in the category of texts about ultimate origins. In general, as Mary Bachvarova has pointed out, an overview of Hittite creation myths and allusions (many adapted from Hur-rian) shows that the Hittites were not interested in accounts of the creation of the cosmos “from the very beginning.” For example, while they have their own Hittite version of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, they do not have one of the Enuma Elish or other Mesopotamian creation epics.24 Hesiod, how-ever, to whom I now turn, does include an account of the origin of the world.

21 Translation from Hoffner 1998: 40. The Hurrians, themselves not affiliated linguistically with either Indo-European or Semitic languages, thrived in northern Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age and had an enormous influence in the Late Bronze Age cultures of northern Syria and Anatolia.

22 Song of Kumarbi. Translation by Hoffner 1998: 42. Excerpted from his § 1 (A i 1–4).23 Translation by Hoffner 1998: 42. Excerpted from his § 2–3 (A i 5–17).24 See Bachvarova’s contribution in this volume.


Hesiod’s Theogony

In composing his theogonia, Hesiod is in direct dialogue with the Near Eastern tradition, whether he knows it or not. This is evident in the abundant “paral-lel” motifs, which cannot be summarized here, and which are integrated in a poem which conforms with Greek theology and performance patterns agen-das (which context we have lost).25 However, Hesiod’s cosmogonic poem is unique in respect to its “poetics.” This Boeotian poet, for the first time in the long history of this genre, deliberately introduces the figure of the author of cosmogonies as part of the poem itself. The Theogony indeed offers a precious example of innovation on inherited material through its introduction. Like any skilled bard, his success depends on his capacity to capture his audience, making them feel they are going to hear something innovative while (proba-bly) still familiar and not uncomfortably unconventional. He dedicates more than one tenth of his whole poem to this introduction (or proem/proemium), in which he juggles themes of piety, mystery, inspiration, and even politics.26 With this proem he makes sure his theogony is unlike any other his audience might have heard: he establishes a direct connection with a vertical line of inspiration that ultimately touches Olympos, exalting his own position as a poet in a cleverly humble and even humorous way so as to not to alienate his audience or, ultimately, the gods to whom the poem is dedicated.

With his first words, “Let us begin to sing of the Helikonian Muses, who hold high and sacred Helikon . . .” (1–2) Hesiod confounds the expectation that he will sing directly of the beginning of the world. We can see this as his way of circumventing the difficult task of describing the very beginnings. He needs to walk in circles a few times before getting to it, and he uses this “extra time” in a very smart way: he tells us how he met these Muses that he is going to always invoke for help, introducing a memorable scene of personal encoun-ter not devoid of humor but full of serious claims, as it establishes the line of

25 This is not only true of Hesiod’s Theogony but of other Greek cosmogonic traditions. For instance, in the Epic Cycle as well as in the Orphic cosmogony attributed to Hieronymos (or/and Hellanikos) the first element was water (as in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian Heliopolitan traditions); the Earth and Sky come early in a number of traditions (Biblical, Hesiod, Anu [Sky] in Hittite); while the exaltation of the Storm god (Zeus, Teshub, Marduk, Baal, Yahweh) is a broadly shared motif, as is the idea of a “succession of kings in heaven” (Enuma Elish, Hurro-Hittite, Hesiod and Orphic cosmogonies) including details such as the castration of the sky in the Hurro-Hittite and Greek versions, as well as the fights with snaky monsters (Hurro-Hittite, Enuma Elish, Hesiod). See detailed studies in Lambert and Walcot 1965, Mondi 1990, Walcot 1966, West 1966 and 1997: Ch 6, Penglase 1994, López-Ruiz 2010, among others.

26 Some classical works on Hesiod’s narrative voice and on his proemium are Minton 1970, Edwards 1971, Stoddart 2004.


authority that allows Hesiod to talk about such mysterious things. These first lines also establish that the vision of the Muses and of the inspired poet goes beyond the past into the present and the future (32, 38) and that the Muses order Hesiod to always honor them with his song “first and last” (34). How-ever, he himself does not follow this command strictly. Although he invokes them repeatedly in his introduction, he does not close the poem with them. Instead, the Theogony has no clear ending but rolls into a list of the goddesses that married Zeus and then, finally, the Muses are invoked again, but in “new openings” of further catalogue-like genealogies about the goddesses who slept with mortal men (965–68) and about “the tribe of women” (1021–22, con-sidered a separate work, called the “Catalogue of Women”). It almost seems like the role of the Muses as memory boosters and patron goddesses of gene-alogies and catalogues overshadows Hesiod’s (perhaps exaggerated) pious intention to sing to them always first and last.

Hesiod’s second “false start” brings him back from his digression about himself and back to the Muses (35–38):

But what do I care about these things concerning a tree or a stone?Hey, you! Let us begin with the Muses, who singing hymnsto father Zeus cheer up his great heart inside Olympus,recounting the present, the things to come, and those past . . .

He is still not going to give us his cosmogony, but more about the Muses (38–103), more specifically about how they are the cosmogonies-singers of Olympos. So a passage follows about how the Muses please Zeus with their sweet song: they sing “first of the revered family of the gods from the begin-ning” (44–45), i.e., a cosmogony-theogony, then of Zeus, both as they begin and as they end their song (47–48), and third about the race of human beings and giants (that is, an anthropogony) (50–51). The allusion to the Muses’ role as singers of cosmogonies to Zeus in Olympos is a clever metonym of what Hesiod is set out to do himself, even to the detail that in both theogonies (the Muses and Hesiod’s) there is a parallel emphasis on how to begin and end the poem: the Muses begin and end celebrating Zeus, exactly as Hesiod says he will begin and end “with the Muses” (34) (even if he doesn’t do it). In other words, the Muses honor Zeus as the poet honors them, as in a hierarchi-cal scale of authority and inspiration, which distances the poets from the gods themselves, placing the Muses as more accessible mediators. As a further ges-ture towards these superior cosmogonic singers, Hesiod adventures a “mini theogony” about the origin of the Muses themselves and their prerogatives (53–80), narrating their very conception and birth and their establishment in


Olympos, where they dwell (68, 75).27 At the end of this digression Hesiod anticipates the contents of his subsequent theogony in stating how Zeus defeated his father Kronos, and thus is king of the Sky, holding the thunder-bolt and having distributed honors to the other gods (71–74).

Almost as a definition of the Muses in line 55, Hesiod says they were born from Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), to bring forgetfulness and relief from pains and tribulations. This paradoxical nature of the Muses, as givers of memory (to the poet) and forgetfulness as a form of healing (to the audience),28 exactly mirrors the paradox which cosmogonies themselves embody.29 A cos-mogony as a literary artifact represents the utmost feat of “memory,” recalling the very beginnings of the world, that which by definition cannot be recalled by human memory and its devices alone, since humans did not exist then (hence the need for divine inspiration). At the same time, cosmogonies have a soothing and even enchanting effect as they invoke another time, recreating creation from chaos and restoring a sense of stability of divine and cosmic affairs (which, in the Babylonian case at least, was intended to be projected onto the political realm, with the king’s monarchy as a mirror of Marduk’s).30 The interplay between memory and forgetfulness has consequences that extend to the community, in the sense that one narrative is chosen to be preserved while another is (deliberately or not) forgotten or suppressed. So the act of remembering mirrors the act of poetic composition as a practice of selection and suppression of available elements.

These metapoetic layers preceding Hesiod’s cosmogony proper are not unique in Greek archaic poetry. At the opening of the Iliad, the scene of con-flict between Achilles and Agamemnon over their captive woman evokes the whole conflict of the Trojan War since its origins years before, like a “real time” miniature version of the war within the Greek camp.31 Hesiod uses a

27 This Olympic emphasis contrasts with their placement in Mt. Helikon at the beginning of the Theogony (Th. 1–2), which links the Muses to Hesiod’s regional traditions in Boiotia (an epichoric versus a pan-Hellenic reference).

28 As noted most recently by Most 2006: 7 (note 5).29 The idea is repeated in longer wording in 98–103.30 The Enuma Elish was recited at the New Year’s celebrations in Babylon (the Akitu festival),

and cosmogonies were used in Mesopotamia in connection with healing incantations and other ritual texts (see Seri’s article in this volume). In the Greek world their healing, purificatory, and ritual function is still debated, but we do know about their importance in Orphic theology, which was inseparable from initiation rituals connected with the afterlife (Dionysiac, Eleusin-ian). See López-Ruiz 2010: Ch. 5 and references there.

31 A similar “macro versus mini” thematic resonance can be seen in the first stories of Genesis. As Martha Roth pointed out (personal communication) foundational stories in Genesis seem to follow a pattern in which stories of broad scope move into “private stories,” in which human


similar mechanism only even more explicitly. He starts by evoking the “macro-cosmogonic” picture: the Muses are the “real” cosmogonic singers, who per-form in Olympos for the gods themselves; then he descends to his “micro-poetic” level, the human-scale cosmogonic poet, placing himself modestly at the bot-tom of the ladder—while insisting on his connection with this ladder whose upper steps touch upon Olympos itself.

Only now does he introduce the nine Muses by their names, with still a last “digression” following on how the Muses benefit kings when they favor them, providing them with wisdom and attractive and persuasive speech (81–92), if not necessarily a “true” speech; after all the Muses in the Theogony admit their ambiguity and capacity to blur fact from fiction.32 A second allusion to the soothing effect of the epic poet follows (94–100), as a healer of the heart’s pain. This poet is now Hesiod, and finally he will honor this function by start-ing his very own cosmogony.

The third invocation to the Muses seems to be the definitive one: “Rejoice, daughters of Zeus, and give me a lovely song . . .” (104). But he still brings the level of suspense a notch higher before breaking it, by alluding once more to the cosmogonic content without giving out his direct song about it (105–108):

Celebrate the holy family of the ever-existing immortals,who were born of Earth and starry Heaven,and of dark Night, those whom salty Pontos nourished.Tell how at first the gods and the earth came into being . . .

Note how he shifts from the first person (“give me a lovely song”) to the sec-ond person plural (“(you) celebrate . . .tell . . .”), as if it is still the Muses who are going to sing it, through him, never maintaining for too long the focus on himself and yet managing to be present in the meta-poetic plane that this whole proemium creates. Finally, as the desired fourth beat after the three preparatory ones, comes the cosmogony, with its awaited opening (116–20):

weaknesses are revealed more clearly: Genesis 1 provides a broader picture of the creation, while Gen 2 with the Eden story takes us into the realm of human conflict and learning (with naked-ness as a central element); in Gen. 6–9 the Noah story of the destruction by flood then moves into Noah’s episode of drunkenness and nakedness in front of his children (9.20–25); Sodom and Gomorra (another destruction story) leads into the story of Lot and his daughters (involving drunkenness and incest, Gen. 19).

32 Theogony 27–28: “we (the Muses) know how to tell many false things that are like truths, and we know, whenever we want, how to sing out truths.” See discussion of the meaning of this statement in Heiden 2007.


Surely first of all a Chasm (Chaos) came into being, and then Earth (Gaia) of wide bosom, the always-safe sitting place of all the immortals who hold the peak of snowy Olympos,and steamy Underworld (Tartaros), at the bottom of the earth of wide pathand Love (Eros), who is the fairest among the immortal gods . . .

In this case, unlike in the Enuma Elish and the Genesis 1 accounts, the author produces a linear beginning, explicitly taking us to the first stage of the uni-verse, the chasm or “opening” (empty space) from which more defined spaces and entities emerged (Gaia, Tartaros, Eros, then Erebos, Night, Aither and Day), which in turn start forming couples (Darkness and Night, Earth and Heaven) who engender other elements and eventually mythologized gods. Note, however, that the Chasm is not created by anyone and we do not know how it came into being. The three primordial elements coming after the Chasm are, in fact, also not being created by anyone: Gaia, Tartaros, and Eros. Moving away from the epistemological difficulties of this stage where the poet’s knowledge reaches its limits, the narrative flows into a more or less linear creation, which happens (for the most part) through mating. The cos-mogony of these beginnings thus turns into a theogony and a genealogy.

In this brief overview of the Theogony’s proem, I hope to have shown how Hesiod takes a creative stance in approaching his “beginning,” finding rhe-torical solutions to the difficulties he, as other Near Eastern poets, encounters, but playing more freely with a self-conscious discourse (or meta-discourse) on cosmogonic-singing. This is the earliest attestation of a fully developed, free standing, literary persona, emerging from the depths of a long cosmogonic tradition in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Composer of Beginnings

As there is no “poetics” without a poet, a few more thoughts should be offered about the question of authorship and the poet’s engagement with his inher-ited materials. The problem with the texts we are dealing with is that they belong to a wide disparity of textual traditions, from very ancient developed scribal cultures in Mesopotamia and Syria, standardized later in the Southern Levant, to illiterate societies in Greece where oral poetry only finds its way into writing in the eighth century BCE and later.33 In Greece, as in the Near East, many of these accounts record literary versions of older, also anony-

33 For the evidence of alphabetic writing in Iron Age Israel, see Sanders 2009 chapter 4 and references there.


mous, oral traditions. It is difficult to assess the degree to which the person who wrote them departed from that inheritance, or how his version compared with other existing versions of the same story, because usually they have been lost. In the case of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, all we know is that one or more professional scribes, possibly commissioned by religious authorities, consolidated what they considered a “standard version” of a given myth at a given time, in a process that could be repeated subsequently as views and needs changed. Sometimes, as with the Baal Cycle and the “standard” version of Gilgamesh, we have the names of the scribes (Ilimilku and Sin-liqe-unninni respectively), but it is not easy to evaluate their role as “authors.” Yet given the quality and uniform style of the texts written by each, and based on a com-parison with older versions in the case of Gilgamesh, some scholars believe that these scribes had in fact an independent poetic voice, as a kind of “ghost writer,” even if it is difficult to delineate the contours of that voice against the received traditions.34

At some point, the emergence of the individual literary persona freed the composer of the Greek cosmogonies to a degree that had not been seen before. Beginning with Homer and Hesiod, and continuing with later poets such as Apollonios, Virgil, and Ovid, all of whom engaged with the epic tradition, literary works become strongly identified with their individual authors. These poets shaped their creations within the knowledge of existing myths and poetic tropes, but certainly adapted and innovated in presenting us with the personalized versions that we have. In fact, it is not clear that the works of Hesiod (and of Homer for that matter) in fact represented mainstream Greek concepts about the gods, as we have no Greek cosmogonies preserved prior to his (and also because there was no such thing as a unified “Greek culture” in their time). However, we know that Hesiod’s literary success made the Theog-ony canonical very quickly. Subsequent Greek and Roman authors then found cosmogony to be a fascinating type of literature, which they incorporated, always with new twists, into their epic poetry (Apollonios, Virgil), comedy (Aristophanes), philosophy (Plato in the Symposium or in the demiurge of the Timaeus), and antiquarianism of both Greek and foreign sources (Philon of Byblos in his Phoenician History). Furthermore, the cosmogonic genre prolif-erated spectacularly in the type of literature known (by the ancients and by us) as “Orphic.” An extraordinary freedom of elaboration under the Orphic rubric allowed wise-men to stretch cosmogony and theogony into the spheres of sci-ence, magic, and philosophy among others.35

34 For authorship in the Epic of Gilgamesh, see George 2007. For Ilimilku, the scribe of the Ugaritic epic poems, see Wyatt 1999. See further discussion of the Near Eastern and Greek cosmogonic authors in López-Ruiz 2010: 173–79.

35 See López-Ruiz 2010: Ch. 4.


In later cosmogonic poems, however, there is a distance between the author of the text and the cosmogony itself, therefore alleviating the authors’ pressure to take credit (and responsibility) for the creation account that he uses. For instance, Apollonios of Rhodes, writing his Argonautika in third century BCE Alexandria, puts a brief cosmogony in Orpheus’ mouth, emphasizing its soothing effect as its singing pacifies the quarreling Argonauts (Argonautika 1.493–512):

(. . .) And it would have turned into a quarrel, had their comrades, and the son of Aison himself ( Jason), not restrained them(495) by calling on the contenders, and had Orpheus, holding the lyre in his left

hand, not begun singing. He sang how the earth, the sky, and the sea, at first joined together in one body, were separated from each other as the result of a terrible quarrel; and how in heaven the stars have a fixed course forever,(500) as do the moon and the paths of the sun; and how the mountains sprung up, and how the resounding rivers with their nymphs and all creeping creatures came into being. And he sung how at first Ophion and Ocean’s daughter Eurynome held the power over snowy Olympos,(505) and how, through strength of arms, the one yielded his prerogative to Kronos, and the other to Rhea, and then they both sank under the Ocean’s waves; and these two in the meantime ruled over the blessed Titan gods, while Zeus, still a lad, still with childish thoughts in his mind, inhabited under the Diktean cave; and the earthborn(510) Kyklopes had not yet strengthened him with the thunderbolt, with thunder and lightning, for these bring glory to Zeus. So he said, and he stopped his lyre together with his immortal voice (. . .)

In terms of his content, Apollonios is working with an amalgam of Hesiodic, Empedoclean, and Orphic traditions, even with a touch of Egyptian solar mythology.36 What I find most interesting is that the account is dominated by passive and intransitive verbs (earth, sky, and sea were separated, mountains rose up, Kronos and Rhea sunk under the Ocean, etc.). Things just happened. This approach infuses the account with a sense of distance and inevitability, which perhaps resonates more with the concerns of natural philosophy than those of mythological cosmogonies. Only Kronos seems to bring the action into the realm of mythological gods, after a total lack of agency despite the presence of previous elements and even some gods (e.g., Ophion and Eury-nome ruling Olympos). Apollonios (or his Orpheus) does not explicitly claim to start “at the beginning,” as some translations have it,37 but only to prin (496), which means “formerly,” so he makes a lesser claim that, say, Hesiod.

36 See Noegel 2004.37 E.g. Green 1997.


In Republican Rome, Virgil does something similar in his Aeneid, and in fact was probably directly inspired by Apollonios when he put in the mouth of a different singer a short cosmogony. The context is the Carthaginian court of Dido, and perhaps that is why the cosmogony does not mention Greek gods but is purely astrological, in an attempt to make it sound “foreign.” Vir-gil also replaces the Muses by Atlas (a Titan) as the poet’s teacher. In both instances, however, the performative context is recreated nicely and the enchanting power of the singer of cosmogonies is evoked.

Iopas, once taught by mighty Atlas, makes the hall ringWith his golden lyre. He sings of the wandering moon andThe sun’s toils; whence sprang man and beast, whence rainAnd fire; of Arcturus, the rainy Hyades and the twin Bears;Why wintry suns make such haste to dip themselves inOcean, or what delay stays slowly passing nights. With Shout on shout the Tyrians applaud, and the Trojans follow.38

Final Remarks

The criticism is often made that the comparison of different literary motifs per se does not advance our knowledge of the compared works as a whole and their place in their particular traditions. On the contrary, when we are dealing with such a genre as cosmogonies, the depth of the shared motifs and tech-niques, lying behind the concrete variants, indicates a tight connectedness of this genre in Mesopotamia, the Levant, Greece, and later Rome. Since this family relationship and generic unity persists over millennia and across geo-graphic and linguistic barriers, we can fruitfully analyze the different mecha-nisms by which each composer starts off his cosmogony and presents what a cosmogony is for him and his audience, thus going beyond the exercise of superficial comparison.

Regarding the trajectory of this cosmogonic genre, it has become increas-ingly clear (as our knowledge of Hittite, Mesopotamian, and archaic Greek texts has advanced) that its manifestations are strongest, that is, more produc-tive and widespread, in Mesopotamia, from where it probably spread to the rest of the Near East (save Egypt, which had its own distinct and deep-rooted cosmogonic traditions) and to Greece.39 To the degree that we know, most Indo-European cultures (e.g., Celtic, Italic cultures, Persian, the Hittites), do

38 Aeneid 1.741–47 (Translation by Rushton Fairclough, Loeb, 1999).39 By tracing this “trajectory” I do not ascribe to the old-fashioned model of “diffusion” as a

passive adoption of a “superior” cultural form by a “lesser” culture. Neither is it the case that


not seem particularly interested in beginnings as such, but focus their “begin-ning” stories on themes related to kingship (e.g., Persian) and city foundations (e.g., Rome).40 By contrast, those cultures in closer contact with the Syrian-Mesopotamian world partake in the ancient cosmogonic literature. In Anato-lia, the Hittites (Indo-European speakers) show this double tradition, as they adopt the Hurrian succession myth and themes of divine fights, along Meso-potamian lines, but show no interest in creation myths proper, at least judging by the fact that no preserved text recounts the world’s beginnings. Greece, in its cosmogonies more than in any other literary/mythical genre, clearly follows Near Eastern models, which once more shows that cultural adherence has little to do with linguistic genealogies. From there, the Hellenistic and Roman writers simply passed along the Greek cosmogonic tradition, which, alongside the spread of the biblical text through Judaism and Christianity made the genre so familiar to the western world that its older roots became evident only when Mesopotamian texts were dug-up by archaeologists in modern times.

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