Why Time Was Never Meant To Be Random

In the fifth tablet of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian god Marduk has just split the corpse of the primordial sea-goddess Tiamat to make heaven and earth. His next act, before anything else, is administrative. He fixes the stars into constellations, assigns three to each of the twelve months, sets the moon’s waxing and waning to mark the days, and, in Stephanie Dalley’s translation, ‘designated the year and marked out its divisions’ (Dalley, 1989). Order, in this cosmology, does not begin with life… it begins with a calendar. The oldest surviving copies of the poem come from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh, excavated in the mid-nineteenth century, though interestingly, colophons and internal evidence point scholars toward a much older composition, quite plausibly, during the Second Dynasty of Isin in the twelfth century BC, when Marduk’s cult was first elevated to supremacy over the Babylonian pantheon (Dalley, 1989). Whatever its exact date, the poem’s logic is consistent: in order to rule the cosmos, you have to create a schedule first. You had to order the chaos. Time in Mesopotamia was never simply observed. It was built, argued over, and administered, by priests reading the sky and scribes counting the grain, and the two activities were far more entangled than they first appear…