Homer and Enuma Elish

Walter Burkert has spent a good bit of his life tracing Greek art, mythology, language, and social practices to ANE origins. In his 2004 Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis he analyzes the passage from the Iliad where Hera deceptively tells Zeus she is going to Oceanus, whom she calls “origin of the gods,” and to Tethys, the “mother.” The references are known from Hesiod, but this kind of cosmology is unparalleled in Homer. Burkert suggests that Hera’s speech finds a close parallel in the Babylonian Enuma Elish :

“Hera’s inventions correspond to the beginning of Enuma Elish to a surprising degree. Apsu and Tiamat equal Oceanus and Tethys as the original parental couple. But Tethys was not at all an active figure in Greek mythology. In contrast to the sea goddess Thetis, mother of Achilles – with whom she was sometimes confused even in antiquity – Tethys had no established cults; and no one knew anything further to tell about her. She seems to exist only by virtue of the Homeric passage; how she came to rank as the primeval mother nobody knew in Greece. Here the rhyming of names comes into play. Ti-amat is the form normally written in the cuneiform text of Enuma Elish . The normal form of the basic Akkadian word, however, is tiamtu or tamtu, the word for ‘sea.’ The name can be written in this more phonetic orthography; but in the texts of Enuma Elish we also find it in the form of taw(a)tu. And we can see how Tawtu would become Tethys in Greek, with the sound of ‘w’ disappearing, and long a changing to long e in Ionian. The different dentals in this transcription, t and th, follow the normal sequence of Greek orthography . . . . When the text of Enuma Elish became known to Eudemus, the pupil of Aristotle, he rendered the name as Tauthe. This seems to reproduce Tawtu (with case forms Tawti, Tawta). The change of the long a to e in the Ionian dialect has parallels in other comparatively recent borrowings, such as Kubaba becoming Kybebe, Baal becoming Belos, and Mada known as Medes (Medoi) . . . . right in the middle of the Iliad, the mysterious name of the primeval mother comes directly from an Akkadian classic and thus bears witness to its influence.”

Burkert argues that this passage must have borrowed from the written text of the Enuma Elish : “Four hundred years of oral tradition in Greece would have led to strong distortions in the process of assimilation.” As Martin West puts it, this passage is a “neo-oriental element” that founds its way into in Homer.