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Updated: June 20, 2025
While in the list above referred to, Lakhmu and Lakhamu are put in a class with Anshar and Kishar, in the creation epic they form a separate class, and Delitzsch has justly recognized, in this separation, the intention of the compilers to emphasize an advance in the evolution of chaos to order, which is the keynote of the Babylonian cosmology.
The two in combination represent a pair like Lakhmu and Lakhamu. As the latter pair embrace the world of monsters, so Anshar and Kishar stand in the theological system for the older order of gods, a class of deities antecedent to the series of which Anu, Bel, and Ea are the representatives.
The part played by Anshar in the most important episode of the creation epic will be found to further strengthen this view. Kishar, at all events, forms no part of either the Babylonian or of the active Assyrian pantheon. She does not occur in historical or religious texts. Her existence is purely theoretical a creation of the schools without any warrant in popular tradition, so far as we can see.
The later 'theology' found a solution of the problem by assuming four series of deities represented by Apsu and Tiâmat, by Lakhmu and Lakhamu, by Anshar and Kishar, and by the triad Anu, Bel, and Ea. In a vague way, as we have seen, Apsu and Tiâmat are the progenitors of Lakhmu and Lakhamu.
+722+. In Babylonia the earliest pair of deities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, vague forms, were succeeded by a second pair, Anshar and Kishar, somewhat less vague, and these in their turn yielded to the more definite group represented by Ea, Bel, and Marduk deities who became the embodiments of the highest Babylonian culture; in Assyria Ashur and Ishtar occupied a similar position.
The creation of Anshar and Kishar marks indeed the beginning of a severe conquest which ends in the overthrow of Tiâmat, and while in the present form of the epic, the contest is not decided before Anu, Bel, and Ea and the chief deities of the historic pantheon are created, one can see traces of an earlier form of the tradition in which Anshar perhaps with some associates is the chief figure in the strife.
But their waters were gathered together in a mass. No field was marked off, no marsh was seen. When none of the gods was as yet produced, No name mentioned, no fate determined, Then were created the gods in their totality. Lakhmu and Lakhamu, were created. Days went by ... Anshar and Kishar were created. At this point the fragment breaks off.
The introduction of Anshar and Kishar as intermediate between the monsters and the triad of gods appears to be due entirely to the attempt at theological systematization that clearly stamps the creation epic as the conscious work of schoolmen, though shaped, as must always be borne in mind, out of the material furnished by popular tradition.
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