c. 1100 BCE, Babylon
Enuma Elish
The creation epic. Marduk splits Tiamat to make sky and earth, then settles the Anunnaki — three hundred above, three hundred below — and they build Babylon for him in gratitude.
What it says about the Anunnaki
After Marduk defeats Tiamat and builds the world from her body, he assigns the Anunnaki their stations: three hundred in the heavens, three hundred on the earth, six hundred in all. They are the working aristocracy of the cosmos, given posts rather than personalities. In gratitude for being relieved of labour, they build the Esagila at Babylon with their own hands — the temple as a divine construction project.
A political document
The epic exists to explain why Marduk, a minor Babylonian city god, holds the office of Enlil. It does so by having the assembly elect him for a task no one else will take, then confirm the promotion with fifty names — Enlil's own number. Read as theology it is a creation story; read as history it is the constitutional paperwork of an empire.
How to read it now
The standard English translations are Benjamin Foster's in Before the Muses and W. G. Lambert's Babylonian Creation Myths, which prints the cuneiform alongside. Older public-domain versions by L. W. King circulate widely online and carry Victorian assumptions that have not aged well.