Marduk
Marduk was the patron god of Babylon, who rose to head the Mesopotamian gods by the first millennium BC. His emblem was a spade with a triangular blade, and his animal the mušḫuššu, the snake-dragon of the Ishtar Gate.
Meaning
Marduk began, in Nicole Brisch’s words for the Oracc guide to the gods, as an obscure deity in the third millennium BC and ended as the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon. He was the patron god of Babylon. His temple there was the Esagil, and his temple tower, the ziggurat Etemenanki, “temple (that is) the foundation of the heavens and the earth”, was the model for the Tower of Babel. In the first millennium BC he was often simply called Bel, Akkadian for “lord”, and he was identified with the planet Jupiter. Tradition made him the son of Enki/Ea; his wife was Ṣarpanitum, and the god Nabu, first his minister, became his son and co-ruler. From the Old Babylonian period on his symbol was the spade, and the animal that often stands for him is the mušḫuššu. Pictures of Marduk himself are rare, most of them on cylinder seals. He is known today from Babylonian literature and from the glazed-brick dragons of Babylon.
Origin and history
Marduk’s rise followed Babylon’s. In the prologue to his laws, Hammurabi (reigned 1792–1750 BC) says that the gods Anu and Enlil gave Marduk the “Enlil-ship” over all the people, which lifted him into the highest rank of gods. The Kassite kings who later ruled from Babylon invoked him often. When the Elamites invaded Babylonia and ended the Kassite dynasty, they carried his statue off to Elam, in Iran; Nebuchadnezzar I brought it back in triumph, and Brisch writes that the poem now called the Babylonian Epic of Creation was probably composed, or at least made popular, in his reign. His cult in Assyria was only minor, and Babylon and its god were often the focus of Assyrian kings, in positive and negative ways. His greatest age came under Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 BC), who rebuilt Babylon and its sacred district, including the Ishtar Gate with its glazed-brick animals of Ishtar and Marduk.
The usual reading of the emblem is a spade. A kudurru in the British Museum from the late twelfth century BC shows it standing on top of a temple. The Louvre’s catalogue of a kudurru found at Susa describes the same emblem as a lance for Marduk.
Enūma eliš: how Marduk became king of the gods
The best-known story about him is Enūma eliš, its ancient title, Akkadian for “When on high”. It is often called the Babylonian Epic of Creation, which Brisch calls rather a misnomer: its main subject is Marduk’s promotion to the head of the gods, and creation is the vehicle. Marduk fights Tiamat, the deified sea. In L. W. King’s 1902 translation, “The lord spread out his net and caught her, / And the evil wind that was behind (him) he let loose in her face”; then “He split her up like a flat fish into two halves; / One half of her he stablished as a covering for heaven.” The grateful gods give him fifty names, a number that had belonged to Enlil, the old head of the pantheon. According to a ritual text from the Parthian period, the poem was recited before Marduk’s statue at the New Year festival in Babylon, a festival that also included a ritual slapping of the king.
Was Tiamat a dragon?
No Babylonian picture of one is known. Sophus Helle writes for Oracc that no Mesopotamian image has been positively identified as Tiamat, and that a string of proposed identifications has recently been rejected. The poem itself describes her in different ways, as a body of water, as a human figure and as having a tail. One ancient image of the battle, a relief at the temple of Bel in Palmyra showing Tiamat with a woman’s body and legs made of snakes, is a late adoption of the Babylonian story from the Hellenistic period. L. W. King, in 1902, still wrote of “the dragon Tiamat”. Marduk’s own dragon, the mušḫuššu, is a different creature.
A storm god?
Some scholars, following Thorkild Jacobsen, have described Marduk as a storm god or a god of vegetation. Brisch finds no evidence for it beyond highly problematic guesses about the meaning of his name. That name is written AMAR.UD, Sumerian for “calf of the sun” or “calf of the sun-god”, though whether the spelling means anything is uncertain, and there is no evidence that he was ever thought of as the sun god’s son.
Marduk in the Bible
His name appears in the Hebrew Bible as Merodach, and Bel, “lord”, was one of his titles. Robert Koldewey, who excavated Babylon, thought that Marduk’s dragon fitted the story of Bel and the Dragon in the Apocrypha. The tower of Etemenanki, Brisch writes, was the model for the “Tower of Babel”.
Read next
- Next in Mesopotamian symbols and godsMušḫuššu (the Ishtar Gate dragon)The mušḫuššu, “furious serpent”, is the dragon of Babylon: a scaly beast with a horned snake’s head, a lion’s forelegs, an eagle’s hind talons and a stinging tail. It was the animal of the god Marduk, and it strides in rows along the blue walls of the Ishtar Gate.
- The same shape in Zodiac signsSagittarius symbol (♐)♐ is the glyph of Sagittarius, the Archer, the ninth sign of the Western zodiac. Astrologers give its dates as 22 November to 21 December, and in their tradition it is a fire sign ruled by Jupiter.
See also
Enki (Ea), Anunnaki (Anunna), Cuneiform, Inanna (Ishtar), Star of Ishtar, Lamassu.
Sources
- Marduk (god) (Nicole Brisch, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Nicole Brisch, “Marduk (god)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
- Tiamat (goddess) (Sophus Helle, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Sophus Helle, “Tiamat (goddess)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
- The Seven Tablets of Creation, vol. 1 (L. W. King, 1902), L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation, vol. I (London: Luzac, 1902), Tablets I and IV, translation and transliteration, Internet Archive (out-of-copyright scan), page text
- Kudurru de Meli-Shipak, Sb 22 (Louvre), Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, Sb 22, collections database entry, Musée du Louvre, page text
- The Excavations at Babylon (Robert Koldewey, 1914), Robert Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon, trans. Agnes S. Johns (London: Macmillan, 1914), ch. VII, pp. 39–49, Internet Archive (out-of-copyright scan, Columbia University Libraries), page text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from arrows or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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