This chapter presents a detailed examination of the theory of language put forward in the Babylonian cosmogony, Enuma elish. This poem locates the origin of language at the very beginnings of the cosmos’ formation, even before the gods came to be. Accordingly, language is one of the first principles on which the world is founded. Thus, just as there is a temporal and spatial dimension of existence, there is also a linguistic one that is beyond the human and the divine. The poem futher explores this idea in using wordplay and etymology of sacred places, divine objects, and gods. In this context, the patron god of Babylon, Marduk, is conceptualized as a polyonymous cosmic divinity who incorporates into his persona the names of other gods.

This chapter examines the Derveni papyrus and compares its hermeneutics to exegetic techniques found in cuneiform texts. The analysis shows that the anonymous author of the papyrus operates with semantic and theological models that align with ideas expressed in Akkadian texts, particularly those ideas relating to theonyms and the evolution of the cosmos. As in some Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the author makes use of hermeneutic techniques that heavily rely on morphological analysis aiming to prove that divine names have a unified referent. This referent is a polyonymous cosmic god, Nous (Mind), which has the same characteristics of the Babylonian gods Ninurta and Marduk when represented as universalizing divinities of multiple names.

Extraordinary individuals in ancient Greece claimed to know the real meaning of names. They understood "real meaning" to be the theological and cosmological truths hidden in language. Although the truths were plural and there was no consensus about what true names ultimately reveal, the theoretical assumptions of those individuals were essentially similar: they believed that language in general, but more specifically the names of the gods, contained crucial information about the cosmos. Classicists tend to think that those views were already present in archaic hexametric poetry and further developed centuries later by philosophers, sophists, and religious innovators of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. But did Greek philosophies of language and the semantics of divine names effectively develop in isolation? The present book explores points of contact between Greek and Mesopotamian systems of thinking about language and reality and argues for the importance of bringing into a dialogue cuneiform and Greek texts concerned with the cosmic function of language.