The god of Babylon who in the 13th-12th centuries BC ousted Enlil as the most prominent god in the Sumerian pantheon. He became the ruler of the gods rather than just their head, which represented a shift in the relationship between the gods - paralleling the rise in power of the Mesopotamian kings. Marduk's seat was at Babylon; Marduk's chief temples at Babylon were the Esagila and the Etemenanki, a ziggurat with a shrine of Marduk on the top. Originally he seems to have been a god of thunderstorms.