Creation stories divide most usefully by what the world is made of. Not by who made it, and certainly not by whether there was a flood or a first man. Once you sort by material, five cosmogonies that are usually presented as variations on a theme turn out to be answering different questions — and only two of them are plausibly related to each other.
Five methods
Speech. In the Memphite theology preserved on the Shabaka Stone, Ptah conceives in the heart and utters with the tongue, and the things named come into being. This is creation as intellect and language: no raw material, no violence, no partner. It is also a specifically Memphite argument, composed at least partly to assert Ptah's precedence over the older Heliopolitan account in which Atum generates the first pair from his own body — meaning Egypt had rival creation stories running simultaneously and did not consider that a problem.
Butchery. Two traditions build the world from a corpse, and they do it very differently. Ymir is killed by Odin and his brothers, and his flesh becomes earth, his blood the seas, his skull the sky, his bones the mountains. Tiamat is defeated by Marduk in single combat before an assembled court, and her body is split "like a shellfish" into sky and waters. The resemblance is real; the politics are opposite. The Babylonian version is an argument for kingship — Marduk demands supreme authority in advance as his fee, and the poem ends with fifty names conferred on him by acclamation. The Norse version confers nothing on anybody and reads as an engineering account rather than a coronation.
Sacrifice. The Vedic hymn of Purusha describes a cosmic being dismembered in a sacrifice performed by the gods, from whose parts the world, the animals, the metres of poetry and the four social classes emerge. This looks like the Ymir story and is not one: Ymir is murdered by enemies, Purusha is offered in a ritual, and the resulting text is a charter for a social order. Bruce Lincoln and others have argued for a shared Indo-European inheritance behind a dismembered first being — the reconstruction usually written as a primal pair of a man and a twin — which is a serious hypothesis and remains contested rather than proven.
A gap. Hesiod does not begin with chaos in the modern sense. The Greek word means a gaping void, from a verb for yawning, and Chaos is the empty space that comes first, followed by Earth, then the underworld depths, then Desire. Nobody makes anything. Beings appear and then begin producing offspring, and the resulting cosmogony is a genealogy. Norse Ginnungagap is the same structural move — a gap with fire on one side and ice on the other — and the coincidence of two neighbouring Indo-European traditions both starting with a named void is one of the more suggestive parallels in this collection.
Churning. The Indian ocean-churning is unlike any of the above: the world already exists, and gods and demons cooperate — using Vasuki as a rope and Mount Meru as a churn — to extract the nectar of immortality along with a series of other treasures, including a poison that Shiva has to swallow. This is not a creation of the cosmos but a production narrative: manufacturing under adversarial partnership. Filing it with the others already misrepresents it. See the churning of the ocean.
The pattern that actually holds: creation is usually re-organisation
Across all five, genuine creation from nothing is rare to nonexistent. Egypt begins with the primordial waters of Nun, from which a mound emerges — see the benben. Babylon begins with fresh and salt waters mingling, which is to say Apsu and Tiamat existing before anything is made. Norse begins with ice, fire and a gap. Greek begins with a void that is already a something.
Making-from-nothing is a relatively late theological commitment, sharpened in Jewish and Christian thought and given its technical name — creatio ex nihilo — by writers arguing against philosophical positions in which matter was eternal. Reading it back into Egyptian or Mesopotamian material imports a doctrine those cultures did not hold and would not have understood the point of.
Where the comparison earns its keep, and where it does not
It earns it on the water. Egypt and Mesopotamia both begin with undifferentiated water and both regard the emergence of dry land as the fundamental creative act, which is entirely explicable from two civilisations built on flood-fed alluvium. It earns it again on the separation of sky and earth as a violent act, which recurs widely.
It fails on almost everything else. A frequent claim is that creation myths follow a universal sequence — chaos, separation, ordering, humanity. That sequence can be produced from most of the corpus only by choosing which episodes to count and in what order, which is the same methodological weakness folklorists have identified in Joseph Campbell's hero pattern: if the pattern survives any counter-example by being restated more abstractly, it is not making a testable claim. Where a comparative proposal is testable — the Indo-European dismembered-being reconstruction, the shared vocabulary of the sky-father — it is worth taking seriously precisely because it could be wrong.
The making of people, which is a separate question
The five traditions diverge most sharply on why humans exist, and this is where creation stories stop being cosmology and start being anthropology.
Mesopotamian texts are unusually candid: humans are manufactured from clay mixed with the blood of a slain god so that they can do the agricultural labour the lesser gods went on strike over. The purpose is work. Egyptian sources offer several accounts, including Khnum shaping bodies on a potter's wheel, and are generally more interested in the maintenance of order than in the reason for people. Norse tradition has three gods finding two pieces of driftwood on a shore and giving them breath, wit and warmth — a strikingly modest origin. The Purusha hymn makes society itself the product. And the Greek accounts are so various — Prometheus as maker in some, a succession of metal races in another, Pandora as an engineered punishment — that Greek religion evidently felt no need for a single answer.
Follow the threads
Individual cosmogonies in full: the creation from Ymir, Enuma Elish, Izanagi and Izanami in Yomi for the Japanese island-making sequence and its aftermath, and the first generations laid out on the family trees. For endings rather than beginnings, see Ragnarok and the other endings.
Questions this comparison provokes
Why do so many cosmogonies start with water? Partly geography, partly the observable fact that silt-laden water deposits land — a Nile or Euphrates farmer watches new ground appear every year. It is a case where a shared image needs no shared ancestry, because the same process was visible to everyone concerned.
Is the Norse creation influenced by the Bible? Some elements have been argued to be, since the sources were written down in a Christian Iceland, but the Ymir material is the part with the strongest claim to being genuinely pre-Christian: it is attested in eddic verse, it is structurally alien to Genesis, and comparable dismemberment cosmogonies exist elsewhere in the Indo-European world.
Did any tradition think the world had always existed? Effectively yes, in Indian cosmology, where the universe passes through immense cycles of emanation and dissolution without an absolute first moment — which is why Indian material fits awkwardly into any list organised around beginnings.
Who was first — the gods or the world? The traditions genuinely disagree, and the disagreement is theologically loaded. Greek and Norse accounts have the cosmos precede the gods, who are its descendants. Egyptian and Babylonian accounts have a divine principle first. Hebrew scripture makes the priority absolute and non-negotiable, which is exactly the point on which it is arguing with its neighbours.