Creation Stories and Cosmogony

Most cultures have stories about creation or beginnings, often multiple and sometimes incompatible.
The featured texts are genealogically related, representing branches of ancient creation literature originating in Mesopotamia and flourishing in Greece and Rome.
Authors from Babylonia, Egypt, Hittites, Canaan, Israel, Greece, and Rome reworked traditional themes, enriching them with new elements.
Common motifs reveal kinship, contact, and mutual influence among ancient Mediterranean peoples.

Cosmogonies are stories about the birth of the cosmos, often starting with natural elements like Earth, Sky, primordial waters, Chaos, or the Void.
These elements may be presented as divine but generally lack anthropomorphic personalities.
Cosmogony is followed by theogony, which explains the birth and family relations of the gods and their power struggles.
This can lead to anthropogony (origin of humankind) and human genealogies.
These myths and legends provide a "brief history of time," with genealogical succession stretching from the poet's age to the origin of all things.
Transition from cosmic entities to anthropomorphic gods and then to humans parallels the perceived movement of the universe from simplicity to complexity.
The universe evolves from a less differentiated state to an orderly cosmos governed by gods and heroes in complex relationships.

Creation myths are products of polytheist societies that worship many gods.
The pantheon often forms a divine family, such as the gods of Olympos.
Gods may also be political adversaries, as in the Baal Cycle.
Even the Hebrew Bible, a monotheist text, replaced a previous polytheist schema, traces of which survive in Genesis and some Psalms.
In theogonies, one god rules over the cosmos, imposing order, making heaven a monarchy.
The most powerful god is represented as a king whose position is accepted but often threatened.
Threats can come from sons (Kronos by Zeus), distant relations (Tiamat by Marduk), cupbearers (Anu by Kumarbi), or rival divine lords (Baal by Mot).
These contests are resolved by the accession of a new king and the emergence of a new order.
This divine hierarchy mirrored the monarchic regimes of the societies that produced these myths.
The chain of kings in heaven had a parallel in Near Eastern and Greek king lists, with the latter being shorter and corresponding to a single dynasty.
Euhemerists later argued that the gods were originally kings worshipped by their followers.

The governing god often fears losing control; struggles with rivals are a persistent feature.
This is sometimes called a "succession myth," exemplified in the Hittite Song of Birth and Hesiod's Theogony.
The king in heaven faces threats from rival gods and monsters created by them, like the giant rock Ullikummi and the serpent Hedammu in the Kumarbi Cycle, and Typhon/Typhoeus in the Theogony.
Conflicts can include savage acts such as castration (Kronos to Ouranos), swallowing genitals (Kumarbi with Anu), swallowing children (Kronos), or gobbling up a pregnant wife (Zeus to Metis).
These acts lead to unnatural births from male deities (Athena from Zeus' head, Teshub from Kumarbi).
Such acts represent attempts to interrupt the natural continuity of rule, control female procreation, and prevent succession.

Surviving cosmogonic texts are a fraction of those produced, capturing only a small part of oral performance and religious knowledge.
The book of Genesis became part of scripture and remains a definitive account for many.
The Enuma Elish was recited as a hymn in honor of Marduk at the New Year's Akitu festival in Babylon.
The religious authority or canonical status of other texts is difficult to establish.
There were no mechanisms in Greece to establish religious uniformity or treat any one text as authoritative.

The composers of these texts are often unknown, especially in the Near East.
These works are literary versions of older, anonymous, oral traditions.
It is difficult to assess how much the writer departed from oral tradition or how their version compared to others.
Professional scribes, possibly commissioned by religious authorities, consolidated "standard" versions of myths.
Sometimes, scribes' names are known (Ilimilku and Sin-liqe-unninni for the Baal Cycle and Gilgamesh, respectively), but their role as "authors" is hard to evaluate.
Scholars believe some scribes had an independent poetic voice based on the quality and uniform style of their texts.

Beginning with Homer and Hesiod, literary works became more strongly identified with individual authors.
Greek and Roman authors like Apollonios, Virgil, and Ovid shaped their creations with knowledge of existing myths, adapting and innovating as they saw fit.
Hesiod's works quickly became canonical, although it's unclear if they represented contemporary Greek thought.
Subsequent Greek and Roman authors incorporated cosmogony, with new twists, into their epic poetry, comedy, and philosophy.

The production of cosmogonies declined due to a shift in religious thought.
Neoplatonism promoted belief in an eternal world with a permanent metaphysical hierarchy, incompatible with cosmogony.
The rise of Christianity imposed a theological model with one unchanging God without rivals.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1.1).
After the fourth century CE, the Father and the Son were declared the same deity, forestalling divine conflict.
Elaborations on God's creation and the role of Adam and Eve occupied a central place in Jewish and Christian texts outside canonical books.
Gnostic texts, Christian apocryphal texts, Jewish pseudepigrapha, Kabbalah, and the Dead Sea Scrolls proliferated due to new discoveries.