bel

Enuma elis therefore uses a competitive strategy of allusion in portraying Marduk as superior to Ninurta.

Unlike Marduk, the god who destroys life, in the Genesis stories, God creates and preserves life.

In the Babylonian case, for example, Marduk commands the lesser gods to honor him, and they build a temple somewhere in the heavens away from us inferior beings.

"I decided to view women and men by representing women," she said, "not just to reverse history, but to see what it means to view the world through the depiction of women." Drawing on an Amnesty International report, she created Torture of Women, 1974-76, a 125-foot-long piece composed of collaged elements including painted cutout female figures, severed heads, mythological monsters, goddesses, and excerpts from the ancient Sumerian myth of Tiamat's brutal dismemberment by Marduk; all this shares space with eyewitness accounts of state-sanctioned torture, written on a bulletin typewriter or printed via letterpress.

Greek and Roman Apollo, Babylonian Marduk, Indian Vishnu, gods of what?

[5] O Marduk creator of cultures & crimes, whose mind is a void, who is forever deaf to our voicings.

An organizational genius underlies much of Iraq's story: irrigation projects; land-holding taxation and labor laws; the support of religion-including a successful campaign to recover the statue of Marduk from the Elamites-while palace and temple-building reflected the need to confirm power through grandeur and stability through stature.

"In the museum's BP lecture theatre the audience will hear--with music, pictures and lines spoken in Babylonian--the myth which 3,000 years ago was recited in front of the statue of the god Marduk by the high priest of Esagila, the main temple in Babylon," storyteller Fran Hazelton explained.

Visitors touring the exhibition can hear curses and, less exotically, lists of vegetables from the god Marduk's garden whispered through small speakers, further evoking daily life in Babylon.