Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.

1163/156921212X629455
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
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 Lpez-Ruiz
Te Ohio State University,
414 University Hall, 230 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210,
lopez-ruiz.1@osu.edu
Abstract
In this essay I explore the beginning lines of the most relevant cosmogonies from the eastern
Mediterranean, focusing on the Enuma Elish, Genesis 1 and Hesiods Teogony. Tese 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. Hesiods Teogony will be treated in
more length as it presents an expanded introduction to the creation account. Tis close reading
is followed by a few reections on the question of authorship of these and other Greek and Near
Eastern cosmogonies.
Keywords
Enuma Elish, Genesis, Hesiod, Teogony, creation narratives, authorship
Te 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 nding unique expressions only fully understandable
within the culture and audience that produced them. In their dierentiated
connectedness lies the fascination.
1
Smith 1982.
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 31
Tis 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, specic characters, and dierent 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 conict-
ing traditions). Tis 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 poets age back to the ori-
gin of all things. Te 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 dierentiated and
dened state of being to a more orderly cosmos governed by a group of gods
and heroes entangled in complex relationships. Te succession of gods who
rule over the others takes multiple versions, but it always follows a monarchic
scheme, including dierent kinds of ghts between gods and other gods, or
gods and monstrous creatures.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the specic 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
reections 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 specic cosmogonic
piece, a literary artifact crafted through knowledge and respect for inherited
2
See Lpez-Ruiz 2010: ch.1 for an overview of previous scholarship.
32 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
traditions but bound to become a unique piece in that chain. Depending on
the particularities of each culture, the author would have had a dierent
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 specic 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 diculty: if beginnings are par excellence the
most dicult 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. Te Near Eastern
tradition to use the rst 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 rst 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 Hesiods Teogony, 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 rst one, their begetter
and 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 dierent fragmentary versions that we can roughly contrast. See comments about the
authorship of these texts below.
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 33
then gods were born within them.
Lahmu (and) Lahamu emerged, their names pronounced . . .
4
Tese verses open the most famous of many Mesopotamian creation texts,
5

the Babylonian poem called Enuma Elish. Tese rst lines play a primarily
chronological function: to designate a time in the past: when, deliberately
and crucially dierent from, for instance, where or who. Tis 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. Te idea of
creation by naming, which will reverberate in Genesis 1, is also present in
Egyptian cosmogony, specically in the Memphite Teology, where Ptah
brought the universe into existence by naming everything using his heart and
tongue. Tis 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 ll 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 fty 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
Tis rst 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 poets
own time. Tis 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 specied.
5
Tere were multiple creation stories in Mesopotamia, some of them preserved as indepen-
dent poems (e.g., Teogony of Dunnu) and some written as introductions to other kinds of
works. See Andrea Seris 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 names
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 Hesiods story of the Five Races, the brutish men of the race of Bronze
die nameless (without glory or memory) (Works and Days 143155), 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 Seris article in this volume. About Marduks fty names, see Andrea
Seri 2006, esp. 517. About Mesopotamian creation narratives, see also Lambert 1975 and 2008,
Michalowski 1990.
34 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
linear account of the creation does not follow. Instead, after the opening refer-
ence to a void time, without skies or earth
8
and without language, the rst
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 rst 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 nd out soon that no gods were yet manifest (if manifest means
existed).
9
So we move from two verses about stu (that we recognize) with no
names (yet) to names (that we recognize) with no clearly dened stu (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.). Tus, 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 rst 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 ow 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? Tis 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. Te 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
Te 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).
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 35
one where we take words for granted, while at the same it forces us to reect
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 (1.12.3), where God creates the heavens and
earth and only later is said to have named them. As in Enuma Elish, these rst
elements have, in fact, already been named by the narrator, with the same
words that God will (later) give them. Te 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? Te options and resources
are not endless. It seems that both the Mesopotamian and the Hebrew follow
the same method to verbally recreate rst times, while neither can escape the
problem this poses for actual narration. Te 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 Gods 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. Ten, the
very rst words can be read in a way that underscores even more the fact that
the narrative is about the starting point of Gods creation, not of the universe
itself. Te debate is still open about the precise syntax of the opening words,
be-reshit (not ba-reshit), where the temporal expression is not marked by
the denite article, and is followed by a nite verb (bara) (instead of a noun
or an Innitive 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, exemplied by Robert Alters
translation reproduced above, to follow to its last consequences the indenite-
ness of be-reshit, which turns the opening verse into a subordinate clause,
10
See further comments and references on these two accounts below. See Smiths study of the
Priestly creation account of Genesis 1. See also Carr 1996 and Wnin 2001.
11
On the possibility that the Memphite Teology (the one with Ptah) might have been inu-
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.
36 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
When God rst created . . ., or When God began to create, with the main
sentence starting later on (God said . . .).
13
Tis 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 rst, 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 Gods
creative activity. Creation of the world is nothing but transformation, expan-
sion, and dierentiation, not much dierent from what literary creation is.
13
Te 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
Te Gospel of John has en arkhe, not en te arche, so without an article, as does the
Septuagint, perhaps in order to translate literally bereshit. 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 rst (especially since the expression en te arkhe might be avoided since it
has also a technical meaning during the oce of ). In other Greek creation accounts we have
to prin (Apollonius Rhodios Argonautika 1.49697) and protista in Hesiod (Teogony 116) rst
of all, at rst not in the beginning. A more clear expression with the same root is that of
God as being rst (rishon) and last, as for instance in Isaiah 4055. On these rst words of
Genesis see further discussion in Smith 2010: Ch 2, esp. 4346.
15
See also Carr 1996 and Wnin 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 . (Smith 2010: ch. 4). In Carrs view (1996: 6268), Gen 1.12.3 was dependent
on its non-priestly parallel but was composed to stand separately from it.
16
Abela 2001: 39798. 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
rst reversals are the creation acts themselves, which reverse the initial state of Chaos (437).
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 37
Tese 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 2.43.24. 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 2.43.24, 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 Gods restraining of the sea as the rst act of creation (Job 38), which
evokes both the primordial watery state of Enuma Elish and the Ugaritic cos-
mic conict between Baal and Yam.
19
Tis 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. Te 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 Platos 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.
Tese 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 dierent 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.
38 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
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 oers an interesting contrasting point within
ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies or, in this case, theogonies. Tis text is
most likely the opening story of a series of Hurrian epic tales adapted into
Hittite and known as the Kumarbi Cycle.
21
Tat 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 (Alalus) 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
Te succession of gods continues with Anu as the new king, in turn over-
thrown by Kumarbi. Te pattern of succession of gods as kings in heaven and
the castration of Anu (Sky) by Kumarbi is a forerunner of Hesiods Teogony,
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 o with the rst 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. Te 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 Honer 1998: 40. Te Hurrians, themselves not aliated linguistically
with either Indo-European or Semitic languages, thrived in northern Mesopotamia in the
Bronze Age and had an enormous inuence in the Late Bronze Age cultures of northern Syria
and Anatolia.
22
Song of Kumarbi. Translation by Honer 1998: 42. Excerpted from his 1 (A i 14).
23
Translation by Honer 1998: 42. Excerpted from his 23 (A i 517).
24
See Bachvarovas contribution in this volume.
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 39
Hesiods Teogony
In composing his theogonia, Hesiod is in direct dialogue with the Near Eastern
tradition, whether he knows it or not. Tis 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, Hesiods cosmogonic poem is
unique in respect to its poetics. Tis Boeotian poet, for the rst time in the
long history of this genre, deliberately introduces the gure of the author of
cosmogonies as part of the poem itself. Te Teogony indeed oers 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 rst words, Let us begin to sing of the Helikonian Muses, who
hold high and sacred Helikon . . . (12) 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 dicult 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
Tis is not only true of Hesiods Teogony 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 rst 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 ghts 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, Lpez-Ruiz 2010, among others.
26
Some classical works on Hesiods narrative voice and on his proemium are Minton 1970,
Edwards 1971, Stoddart 2004.
40 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
authority that allows Hesiod to talk about such mysterious things. Tese rst
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 rst 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 Teogony has no clear ending but rolls into a list of the goddesses
that married Zeus and then, nally, the Muses are invoked again, but in new
openings of further catalogue-like genealogies about the goddesses who slept
with mortal men (96568) and about the tribe of women (102122, 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 Hesiods (perhaps exaggerated) pious
intention to sing to them always rst and last.
Hesiods second false start brings him back from his digression about
himself and back to the Muses (3538):
But what do I care about these things concerning a tree or a stone?
Hey, you! Let us begin with the Muses, who singing hymns
to 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
(38103), more specically 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 rst of the revered family of the gods from the begin-
ning (4445), i.e., a cosmogony-theogony, then of Zeus, both as they begin
and as they end their song (4748), and third about the race of human beings
and giants (that is, an anthropogony) (5051). Te 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 Hesiods) 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 doesnt 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
(5380), narrating their very conception and birth and their establishment in
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 41
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 (7174).
Almost as a denition 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. Tis 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 denition 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 eect as they invoke another time, recreating
creation from chaos and restoring a sense of stability of divine and cosmic
aairs (which, in the Babylonian case at least, was intended to be projected
onto the political realm, with the kings monarchy as a mirror of Marduks).
30

Te 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.
Tese metapoetic layers preceding Hesiods cosmogony proper are not
unique in Greek archaic poetry. At the opening of the Iliad, the scene of con-
ict between Achilles and Agamemnon over their captive woman evokes the
whole conict 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
Tis Olympic emphasis contrasts with their placement in Mt. Helikon at the beginning of
the Teogony (T. 12), which links the Muses to Hesiods regional traditions in Boiotia (an
epichoric versus a pan-Hellenic reference).
28
As noted most recently by Most 2006: 7 (note 5).
29
Te idea is repeated in longer wording in 98103.
30
Te Enuma Elish was recited at the New Years celebrations in Babylon (the Akitu festival),
and cosmogonies were used in Mesopotamia in connection with healing incantations and other
ritual texts (see Seris article in this volume). In the Greek world their healing, puricatory, 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 Lpez-Ruiz 2010: Ch. 5 and references there.
31
A similar macro versus mini thematic resonance can be seen in the rst 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
42 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
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 ladderwhile 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 benet kings when they favor them,
providing them with wisdom and attractive and persuasive speech (8192), if
not necessarily a true speech; after all the Muses in the Teogony admit their
ambiguity and capacity to blur fact from ction.
32
A second allusion to the
soothing eect of the epic poet follows (94100), as a healer of the hearts
pain. Tis poet is now Hesiod, and nally he will honor this function by start-
ing his very own cosmogony.
Te third invocation to the Muses seems to be the denitive 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 (105108):
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 rst the gods and the earth came into being . . .
Note how he shifts from the rst 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 (11620):
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 conict and learning (with naked-
ness as a central element); in Gen. 69 the Noah story of the destruction by ood then moves
into Noahs episode of drunkenness and nakedness in front of his children (9.2025); Sodom
and Gomorra (another destruction story) leads into the story of Lot and his daughters (involving
drunkenness and incest, Gen. 19).
32
Teogony 2728: 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.
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 43
Surely rst 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 path
and 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 rst stage of the uni-
verse, the chasm or opening (empty space) from which more dened 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. Te 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 diculties of this stage where
the poets knowledge reaches its limits, the narrative ows into a more or less
linear creation, which happens (for the most part) through mating. Te cos-
mogony of these beginnings thus turns into a theogony and a genealogy.
In this brief overview of the Teogonys proem, I hope to have shown how
Hesiod takes a creative stance in approaching his beginning, nding rhe-
torical solutions to the diculties he, as other Near Eastern poets, encounters,
but playing more freely with a self-conscious discourse (or meta-discourse) on
cosmogonic-singing. Tis 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.
Te Composer of Beginnings
As there is no poetics without a poet, a few more thoughts should be oered
about the question of authorship and the poets engagement with his inher-
ited materials. Te 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 nds 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.
44 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
mous, oral traditions. It is dicult 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 dicult 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 identied with their individual authors. Tese
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 unied Greek culture in
their time). However, we know that Hesiods literary success made the Teog-
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 Lpez-Ruiz 2010: 17379.
35
See Lpez-Ruiz 2010: Ch. 4.
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 45
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 eect as its singing pacies the quarreling Argonauts (Argonautika
1.493512):
(. . .) 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 rst 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 xed 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 rst Ophion and Oceans 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 Oceans 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 nd 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.). Tings just happened.
Tis 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.
46 C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048
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 dierent singer a short cosmogony. Te 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 poets 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 ring
With his golden lyre. He sings of the wandering moon and
Te suns toils; whence sprang man and beast, whence rain
And re; of Arcturus, the rainy Hyades and the twin Bears;
Why wintry suns make such haste to dip themselves in
Ocean, or what delay stays slowly passing nights. With
Shout on shout the Tyrians applaud, and the Trojans follow.
38
Final Remarks
Te criticism is often made that the comparison of dierent 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 dierent mecha-
nisms by which each composer starts o his cosmogony and presents what a
cosmogony is for him and his audience, thus going beyond the exercise of
supercial 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 1.74147 (Translation by Rushton Fairclough, Loeb, 1999).
39
By tracing this trajectory I do not ascribe to the old-fashioned model of diusion as a
passive adoption of a superior cultural form by a lesser culture. Neither is it the case that
C. Lpez-Ruiz / Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 3048 47
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 ghts, along Meso-
potamian lines, but show no interest in creation myths proper, at least judging
by the fact that no preserved text recounts the worlds 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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