Origins of the Marduk Mythos in Ancient Akkad

July

/ 2025

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The greatness of the world’s first empire, the Akkadian Empire (c. 2370-2190 BC), had a major impact on later Mesopotamian tradition. Once the stories about those kings and the gods who gave them those victories took hold in the popular imagination, they became the stuff that great legends and myths are made of. Some of the greatest Babylonian, Canaanite, Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Indian and other legends and myths can be tracked down to stories once told about those rulers as has recently been shown in the work of Willem McLoud, Dragon Seed (2025) and The Nephilim: Kings of An Epic Age (2021).

Of particular interest is the way in which these legends and myths complement each other on the human level and the divine sphere. In time, these legends lost all direct connection with the historical kings involved in them and were taken up and became absorbed into other cultures as part of their own prehistories. On the divine level, similar myths were told about the great gods of those peoples. Like two parallel universes, the great stories once told about the Akkadian Emperors, especially those about Naram-Sin, were reflected in the divine realm where similar stories were told about the gods. This goes back to the time of Naram-Sin when his heroic tales were matched by the mythos ascribed to gods such as Tispak and Samas.

An important event in the religious history of Mesopotamia that followed the Babylonian conquest of the land was the rise of Marduk as the new king of the gods in Babylon. Although the rise of Marduk is often viewed purely in Babylonian terms, this is actually not correct. We should rather look at the elevation of Marduk within the context of the preceding events in Mesopotamia and more specifically those of the Akkadian Period. This becomes crystal clear once we discover that the mythology associated with Marduk originated in the mythos of the divine Naram-Sin. Marduk’s glorious feats, in actual fact, go back to the mythos of Naram-Sin himself!

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Origins of Marduk’s Mythos

Marduk was the chief god of the Babylonians, who rose to power in the latter part of the Isin-Larsa Period (c. 2060-1818 BC), during the 19th century BC. The Babylonians became the new rulers of the ancient land of Sumer and Akkad when Hammurabi of Babylon (fl. c. 1848-1806), known for his famous code of law, became overlord of Mesopotamia in 1818 BC, starting the so-called Old Babylonian Period.

The scholar, Henry Frankfort (1897-1954), recognised that the origins of the Marduk mythology go back to the Akkadian Period. In an article titled Gods and Myths on Sargonic Seals (Iraq 1:1-29) and published in 1934, this great Dutch archaeologist, one of the few scholars who was both an Egyptologist and Orientalist, observed that the iconography of the sun god in the Akkadian iconography bears a striking correspondence with the mythology of Marduk.

Based on this similarity, Frankfort proposed that the mythology of Marduk may, at least in part, have had its origins in the Akkadian Period: “These (Akkadian seals) seem to show… that some of the most important beliefs which underlie the New Year’s festival in New Babylonian times, and could therefore be traced back, at most, to the period of Hammurabi, existed already under the dynasty of Sargon of Akkad.”

This proposal is supported by the view expressed by scholars like Thorkild Jacobsen that when Hammurabi of Babylon conquered Esnunna, the city of the god, Tispak, in c. 1817 BC, his god, Marduk, inherited Tispak’s dragon, which implies that he also took over and acquired Tispak’s mythology. Marduk’s glorious feats, vividly described in the Babylonian epic of creation, the Enuma Elish, therefore go back to the mythos of Tispak, which was in turn derived from that of Naram-Sin himself.