The Structure of the Cosmos & Its Waters
Heaven above, the sweet deep below, and the land of the dead beneath that — a cosmos in ordered layers.
Mesopotamians imagined the universe as a set of layers. Above stretched the heavens, home of the high gods and the stars; below lay the flat earth, ringed and undergirded by waters. Beneath the earth's surface ran the Apsu, the sweet groundwater domain of Enki/Ea, and deeper still lay the dark netherworld of the dead. The whole was bounded by cosmic waters and held in its ordered arrangement by the gods who had separated and assigned each region in the beginning. This layered cosmos — heaven, earth, the fresh deep, and the underworld — formed the stage on which all the myths and the life of gods and humans played out.
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