Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition.pdf

[4] i.e. the length of his pace was twenty /bêru/.
[5] Lit. "the black-headed".
The text here breaks off, at the moment when Pallil, whose help against the dragon had been invoked, begins to speak.
Let us hope we shall recover the continuation of the narrative and learn what became of this carnivorous monster.
There are ample grounds, then, for assuming the independent existence of the Babylonian Dragon-myth, and though
both the versions recovered have come to us in Semitic form, there is no doubt that the myth itself existed among the
Sumerians. The dragon /motif/ is constantly recurring in descriptions of Sumerian temple-decoration, and the twin
dragons of Ningishzida on Gudea's libation-vase, carved in green steatite and inlaid with shell, are a notable product of
Sumerian art.[1] The very names borne by Tiamat's brood of monsters in the "Seven Tablets" are stamped in most
cases with their Sumerian descent, and Kingu, whom she appointed as her champion in place of Apsû, is equally
Sumerian. It would be strange indeed if the Sumerians had not evolved a Dragon myth,[2] for the Dragon combat is
the most obvious of nature myths and is found in most mythologies of Europe and the Near East. The trailing stormclouds
suggest his serpent form, his fiery tongue is seen in the forked lightning, and, though he may darken the world
for a time, the Sun-god will always be victorious. In Egypt the myth of "the Overthrowing of Apep, the enemy of Ra"
presents a close parallel to that of Tiamat;[3] but of all Eastern mythologies that of the Chinese has inspired in art the
most beautiful treatment of the Dragon, who, however, under his varied forms was for them essentially beneficent.
Doubtless the Semites of Babylonia had their own versions of the Dragon combat, both before and after their arrival on
the Euphrates, but the particular version which the priests of Babylon wove into their epic is not one of them.
[1] See E. de Sarzec, /Découvertes en Chaldée/, pl. xliv, Fig. 2, and Heuzey, /Catalogue des antiquités chaldéennes/, p.
281.
[2] In his very interesting study of "Sumerian and Akkadian Views of Beginnings", contributed to the /Journ. of the
Amer. Or. Soc./, Vol. XXXVI (1916), pp. 274 ff., Professor Jastrow suggests that the Dragon combat in the Semitic-
Babylonian Creation poem is of Semitic not Sumerian origin. He does not examine the evidence of the poem itself in
detail, but bases the suggestion mainly on the two hypotheses, that the Dragon combat of the poem was suggested by
the winter storms and floods of the Euphrates Valley, and that the Sumerians came from a mountain region where
water was not plentiful. If we grant both assumptions, the suggested conclusion does not seem to me necessarily to
follow, in view of the evidence we now possess as to the remote date of the Sumerian settlement in the Euphrates
Valley. Some evidence may still be held to point to a mountain home for the proto-Sumerians, such as the name of
their early goddess Ninkharsagga, "the Lady of the Mountains". But, as we must now regard Babylonia itself as the
cradle of their civilization, other data tend to lose something of their apparent significance. It is true that the same
Sumerian sign means "land" and "mountain"; but it may have been difficult to obtain an intelligible profile for "land"
without adopting a mountain form. Such a name as Ekur, the "Mountain House" of Nippur, may perhaps indicate size,
not origin; and Enki's association with metal- working may be merely due to his character as God of Wisdom, and is
not appropriate solely "to a god whose home is in the mountains where metals are found" (op. cit., p. 295). It should be
added that Professor Jastrow's theory of the Dragon combat is bound up with his view of the origin of an interesting
Sumerian "myth of beginnings", to which reference is made later.
[3] Cf. Budge, /Gods of the Egyptians/, Vol. I, pp. 324 ff. The inclusion of the two versions of the Egyptian Creation
myth, recording the Birth of the Gods in the "Book of Overthrowing Apep", does not present a very close parallel to
the combination of Creation and Dragon myths in the Semitic-Babylonian poem, for in the Egyptian work the two
myths are not really combined, the Creation Versions being inserted in the middle of the spells against Apep, without
any attempt at assimilation (see Budge, /Egyptian Literature/, Vol. I, p. xvi).
We have thus traced four out of the five strands which form the Semitic-Babylonian poem of Creation to a Sumerian
ancestry. And we now come back to the first of the strands, the Birth of the Gods, from which our discussion started.
For if this too should prove to be Sumerian, it would help to fill in the gap in our Sumerian Creation myth, and might
furnish us with some idea of the Sumerian view of "beginnings", which preceded the acts of creation by the great gods.
It will be remembered that the poem opens with the description of a time when heaven and earth did not exist, no field
or marsh even had been created, and the universe consisted only of the primaeval water- gods, Apsû, Mummu, and