Motifs: Clamor, (Attempted) Murder, and Rebellion

Out of the select Mesopotamian mythology we have read thus far, already there are strong recurring themes emerging. While the myths have inconsistencies as to who accomplished what, such as creating man, the landscapes and Fertile Crescent specifically, certain motifs pervade the stories.
In the Epic of Creation, Tiamat and Apsu, the great salt and fresh waters, mixed to create the first gods, who then created subsequent new generations of gods. After creating the gods for whatever reason, Tiamat and Apsu feel the need to kill all of their offspring due to excess “clamor,” resulting in the loss of their sleep. The great bodies of water are fairly unreasonable, creating gods as if on a whim and then deciding to kill them soon after because they are a nuisance. The gods then rise up, fighting for their lives, and defeat Tiamat and Apsu and assume rule over creation.
Moving on to this story, The Flood, as the greater gods assume power, they force lesser gods to do incredible, unbearable amounts of menial labor. Once again the gods rebel, not all of them, but this can be seen as a second rebellion of the gods. They surround Enlil declaring war, but instead of killing him as Marduk did Tiamat, they compromise, creating humans to do the labor for them. Eventually, the “clamor” of the humans proves too much for the gods. Just as Tiamat and Apsu sought to kill their creations over loss of sleep, the gods now decide to kill the humans they have created.
Clearly, the gods had not learned their lesson from their progenitors, or at least fail to see the irony of their actions. Ultimately, a compromise is once again reached and the humans are allowed to exist, but only after many of the humans die. One could say a moral of these stories is sleep must have been very important to the ancient Near East, but more likely, these stories were written in a tumultuous time rife with rebellion and changes of leadership. These stories may also supply commentary on dealing with the consequences of ones’ actions, at least in a more reasonable way than creating something, getting annoyed by it, and deciding the solution is to kill it; imagine if parents were annoyed by the clamor of their babies in the middle of the night, and decided to kill them. The all-powerful gods, at least in this case, are less reasonable than humans.