The New Year of Uruk is the multi-day festival in which Uruk re-enacts the ordering of the cosmos; the city halts, reorganizes and is reborn each cycle.
| Type | Ritual calendar |
| Place | Uruk |
| Mythic basis | Defeat of the dragons of Tiamat |
| Spanish entry | Calendario ritual del Año Nuevo de Uruk |
The ceremony
The sequence is reconstructed from the days in which the Wordbreakers took part as “invited foreigners with a role in this”.
- Fourth day — expiation. The city keeps modesty; the high priest slaps the king ritually, and the king then “disappears” (withdraws, hides, or is symbolically deposed) while the population stays on guard.
- Fifth day, morning — the great parade of the gods. On the Middle Island, under a pavilion bearing the colors of the seven houses, the representatives of the world’s powers meet in audience with the king or his substitute. Only the bird-footed boatmen can steer the boats there.
- Fifth day, noon — a second audience for special guests.
- Following days — the sacred marriage between the king (or his substitute) and a priestess, which guarantees the cycle’s fertility, and general orgies that close the period and open the new year.
Mythic background
The officiant recites the epic of creation and invokes Marduk in the south or Ashur in the north; the city relives order’s victory over chaos.
The present cycle is a hundred-year cycle — not a thousand-year one — which calls forth greater portents and may require the appointment of a Substitute King. Earlier cycles include that of Gilgamesh and the one before Marduk’s dominion. The history of Vala is measured by these intervals more than by any other count.