The Enûma Eliš

Enûma Eliš and Gilgamesh form not only the basis of earlier religious texts of Middle Eastern religions but is the generator of mankind's storytelling for all ages by proving threads to almost all known dramatic devices and situations. An employee of the British Embassy in Istanbul was responsible for the discovery of The Enûma Eliš the Babylonian creation myth.
"When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained; "

Mavi Boncuk |
The Enûma Eliš is the Babylonian creation myth (named after its opening words). It was recovered by Henry Layard [1]in 1849 (in fragmentary form) in the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq), and published by George Smith in 1876. The Enûma Eliš has about a thousand lines and is recorded in Old Babylonian on seven clay tablets, each holding between 115 and 170 lines of text. Most of Tablet V has never been recovered, but aside from this lacuna the text is almost complete. A duplicate copy of Tablet V has been found in Sultantepe, ancient Huzirina, located near the modern town of Şanlıurfa in Turkey. [1] Sir Austen Henry Layard (5 March 1817 – 5 July 1894) was a British traveller, archaeologist, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, author, politician and diplomat. After spending nearly six years in the office of his uncle, Benjamin Layard, he was tempted to leave England for Sri Lanka (Ceylon) by the prospect of obtaining an appointment in the civil service, and he started in 1839 with the intention of making an overland journey across Asia. After wandering for many months, chiefly in Persia, and having abandoned his intention of proceeding to Ceylon, he returned in 1842 to Constantinople, where he made the acquaintance of Sir Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador, who employed him in various unofficial diplomatic missions in European Turkey. In 1845, encouraged and assisted by Canning, Layard left Constantinople to make those explorations among the ruins of Assyria with which his name is chiefly associated and he is best known as the excavator of Nimrud. To illustrate the antiquities described in this work he published a large folio volume of Illustrations of the Monuments of Nineveh (1849). After spending a few months in England, and receiving the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford, Layard returned to Constantinople as attaché to the British embassy, and, in August 1849, started on a second expedition, in the course of which he extended his investigations to the ruins of Babylon and the mounds of southern Mesopotamia. He is credited with discovering the Library of Ashurbanipal during this period.