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The Wars of Marduk
Mighty Marduk, the all powerful war god and sky god of the Babylonians, built Babylon as his home and created humankind to dwell there and toil there for the gods after he slew the evil Tiamat, so myth tells us. Son of Ea and Dumkina, Marduk began his existence in the deep abyss, in the heart of the holy Apsu.
He was born whole, strong, and beautiful with four eyes and four ears, and it is said that he spat fire when he spoke. He had the gift of magic and command over the winds.
Indeed, Marduk was a hero, a leader right from his birth. He belongs to the younger gods and was chosen King of the Igigi to destroy Tiamat. Tiamat, the terrible earth goddess, is primeval chaos. She belongs to the rank of the older gods, whom she has been threatening and abusing.
And it is Marduk who is called upon to kill her in the Babylonian Creation Myth.
The Babylonian Creation Myth tells of the battle between Marduk and Tiamat, between good and evil. This myth was most likely first written down between the 8th and 12th century BCE but it comes from an earlier time, from ancient Sumerian mythology, from the Enuma Elish.
Marduk, greater than all the gods, was chosen avenger of the gods and made king. His heroic task was to kill Tiamat for her terror and abuse of the gods.
So Marduk fashioned a net to ensnare her, then he called upon the winds and mounted his chariot led by his fierce team and set out after the great monster. He followed the sound of Tiamat's rage and found her. Tiamat tried to undo Marduk with spells and words, but Marduk was too clever for her. He challenged her to one-on-one battle and she accepted. They fought hard and finallyMarduk caught her in his net using the winds against her.
Tiamat in return tried to swallow Marduk but he sent Imhullu into her.
This wind raged through her body, holding her mouth open and blew her up. Then mighty Marduk shot an arrow, which pierced her belly, and her heart and he straddled her dead body in victory. Next, he destroyed her evil band of followers by trampling them into the ground and he recovered the Tablet of Destinies from them.
Returning to Tiamat's carcass he wondered what to do with her remains, so he smashed her skull and severed her arteries, the blood streaming forth on the north wind to the far reaches of the world. He ripped her huge dead body in two and raised the top half to create the arc of the sky.
Her eyes became the source for the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and from her udders Marduk made the mountains. The gods rejoiced in Marduk's victory over the evil Tiamat and lavished him with gifts including his fifty names.
Marduk
surveyed the great expanse of the sky that he created and then chose
Babylon as his home on earth and created humans to work the land.
What does this myth tell us about the ancient Babylonians? It tells us that they revered their powerful god Marduk as the Great Creator, but it also gives us insight into what they thought of themselves. Since they were created by their god solely to work the land and serve the gods they did not expect much in the way of eternal salvation. They were at the mercy of their gods for their lives and then went to a dreadful afterlife.
They were the servants, the slaves of the gods. But they rejoiced in life, in simply being alive, and they enjoyed what wonders life had to offer them.
But wait! There's more to this story. When I was in grade school I was taught that the Asteroid Belt was a planet that formed with the rest of the solar system. It then, for some unstated reason, broke up.
Today it is said that the Asteroid Belt never quite came together to be a planet. The model I was taught years ago had the Sun and planets forming together. The Sun was the big mass in the center of a rotating disk of gas, mostly hydrogen and helium, and dust, small clumps of atoms of heavier elements.
The planets were small masses moving in circular orbits around the big mass. As gravity pulled all these masses together, the Sun compresses to the point that a nuclear fire started. The planets condensed, melted, differentiated and cooled.
Today the feeling is that the Sun formed first with the rest of the disk condensing into chunks. These chunks kept crashing into each other until the planets formed. It is said that the Jupiter orbit caused a range of gravitational instability where a ring of clutter, the Asteroid Belt, now circles the Sun.
This range of gravitational instability did not allow a planet to form. These chunks all got organized into circular orbits and now follow each other around the Sun. Ancient myth suggests however that there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter at one time. In the Babylonian Creation Myth this planet was destroyed by another object.
In the creation myth the destroyed planet is called Tiamat. The destroyer is called Nibiru. Nibiru with a mass of eight times that of Jupiter would tear apart a planet if the encounter was close enough.
Such a Nibiru would most likely be a brown dwarf star. A brown dwarf star is too big to be a planet and too small to light a nuclear fire and become a full-fledged star. So picture this. A brown dwarf star, Nibiru, entered into the solar system and came down a couple of diameters behind and under Tiamat.
This close encounter tore her apart. In the perfect example of bad timing, Mars came up under Tiamat just as she is being pulled apart.
Several large pieces fell
into Mars's northern sea creating some hundred plus mile diameter
volcanic vents. Massive amounts of magma poured out and boiled away
the sea. Lomonosov and Lyot are remnants of this bombardment. They
both show signs of multiple flows.
There are several smaller vents in the northern lowlands adjacent to these major vents. With magma flowing from all these vents for hundreds of years a sea or two could easily be boiled off. On land the impacts created great shield volcanoes such as Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system.
Nibiru, the destroyer of planets passes in front of Tiamat as it climbed back up out of the solar system pulling several large pieces with it. One of these pieces dropped off to take up a tilted eccentric orbit and becomes known as Pluto. Behind Nibiru trailed a cloud of debris that rained down on the four outer planets. Some of these took up orbits around the planets and became minor moons. Others fell into the planets.
Their clear atmospheres were clouded by the turbulence of the falling remnants of Tiamat. Mars may have picked up one of two chunks of Tiamat. Phobos shows signs of layering. This is an indication of sedimentary or volcanic buildup. One of the asteroids we have pictures of looks like it broke off something. It looks like a broken rock.
It is acknowledged as a broken rock. Where it came from is the speculation. I speculate it was Tiamat.
They speculate it was a smaller chunk of something. Tiamat was a water world as were Mars and Earth. Venus is a sulfuric acid world. They are representative of the kind of life that might live on Venus, or here on Earth. They form snottites, a microbe that lives in a sulfuric acid bath of its own secretion.
These snottites live in deep caves in total darkness. Living with these snottites is a small ecosystem that makes its living by eating the rock and making an ever-bigger cave. There is, of course, running water there. Liquid water is required for biological life.
A star, such as the Sun is very hot. It is so hot that the atoms leaving the surface are missing an electron or three. It takes a while before they calm down enough to get together with other atoms to make molecules.
Both hydrogen and oxygen boil off the Sun. Some of these molecules get together to form water too. At the other end of the solar system, out in interstellar space, it is very, very cold. Any water molecules that did clump up would be frozen solid. In between these two extremes is a band where there will be liquid water. Any solid objects in this range will collect water.
Thus there is a band of liquid water around every star in the universe. Every place on Earth where there is liquid water there is life.
The laws of the physical world, physics, chemistry and etc., are uniform throughout the known universe. Thus there is biological life throughout the known universe. Tiamat was a water world. Some of this water fell on Mars.
In one case it was an iceberg that impacted a hardened lava crust over a molten underflow. Even now there is liquid flowing out from under the surface of Mars.
Elsewhere is the solar system Uranus is laying on its side.
Venus is
upside down. And Pluto not only is almost upside down, its orbit is
the most irregular of the known planets.
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