No city had been created, no creature had been made, Nippur had not been created, Ekur had not been built, Erech had not been created, Eanna had not been built, Apsu had not been created, Eridu had not been built, Of the holy house, the house of the gods, the habitation had not been created.  All lands(3) were sea.  At the time when a channel (was formed) in the midst of the sea, Then was Eridu created, Esagila built, etc.

Here we have the definite statement that before Creation all the world was sea.  And it is important to note that the primaeval water is not personified; the ordinary Sumerian word for “sea” is employed, which the Semitic translator has faithfully rendered in his version of the text.(4) The reference to a channel in the sea, as the cause of Creation, seems at first sight a little obscure; but the word implies a “drain” or “water-channel”, not a current of the sea itself, and the reference may be explained as suggested by the drainage of a flood-area.  No doubt the phrase was elaborated in the original myth, and it is possible that what appears to be a second version of Creation later on in the text is really part of the more detailed narrative of the first myth.  There the Creator himself is named.  He is the Sumerian god Gilimma, and in the Semitic translation Marduk’s name is substituted.  To the following couplet, which describes Gilimma’s method of creation, is appended a further extract from a later portion of the text, there evidently displaced, giving additional details of the Creator’s work: 

Gilimma bound reeds in the face of the waters, He formed soil and poured it out beside the reeds.(5) (He)(6) filled in a dike by the side of the sea, (He . . .) a swamp, he formed a marsh. (. . .), he brought into existence, (Reeds he form)ed,(7) trees he created.

(1) The composite nature of the text is discussed by Professor Jastrow in his Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions, pp. 89 ff.; and in his paper in the Journ.  Amer.  Or.  Soc., Vol.  XXXVI (1916), pp. 279 ff.; he has analysed it into two main versions, which he suggests originated in Eridu and Nippur respectively.  The evidence of the text does not appear to me to support the view that any reference to a watery chaos preceding Creation must necessarily be of Semitic origin.  For the literature of the text (first published by Pinches, Journ.  Roy.  Asiat.  Soc., Vol.  XXIII, pp. 393 ff.), see Sev.  Tabl., Vol.  I, p. 130.

     (2) Obv., ll. 5-12.

     (3) Sum. nigin-kur-kur-ra-ge, Sem. nap-har ma-ta-a-tu,
     lit. “all lands”, i.e.  Sumerian and Babylonian expressions
     for “the world”.

     (4) Sum. a-ab-ba, “sea”, is here rendered by tamtum, not
     by its personified equivalent Tiamat.