Anyone who has seen where the Tigris and Euphrates reach the Gulf knows this landscape: river water and sea water mixing in the marshes, with reed huts built on the reed beds. The poem describes the world before even that.

Gipāru is read in two ways. Langdon took it as a “dark chamber”, a sacred room inside a temple tower; most later editors read “reed hut”. Both readings say the same thing: no one had built anything yet, and no land had come up out of the water.