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Title: The Babylonian Legends of the Creation

 

Author: British Museum

 

Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9914]

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[This file was first posted on October 31, 2003]

[Date last updated: July 21, 2005]

 

Edition: 10

 

Language: English

 

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BABYLONIAN LEGENDS ***

 

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THE BABYLONIAN LEGENDS OF THE CREATION

 

AND THE

 

FIGHT BETWEEN BEL AND THE DRAGON

 

TOLD BY ASSYRIAN TABLETS FROM NINEVEH

 

DISCOVERY OF THE TABLETS.

 

The baked clay tablets and portions of tablets which describe the

views and beliefs of the Babylonians and Assyrians about the Creation

were discovered by Mr. (later Sir) A.H. Layard, Mormuzd Rassam and

George Smith, Assistant in the Department of Oriental Antiquities in

the British Museum. They were found among the ruins of the Palace and

Library of Ashur-bani-pal (B.C. 668-626) at Kuyûnjik (Nineveh),

between the years 1848 and 1876. Between 1866 and 1870, the great

“find” of tablets and fragments, some 20,000 in number, which Rassam

made in 1852, was worked through by George Smith, who identified many

of the historical inscriptions of Shalmaneser II, Tiglath-Pileser III,

Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and other kings mentioned in the

Bible, and several literary compositions of a legendary character,

fables, etc. In the course of this work he discovered fragments of

various versions of the Babylonian Legend of the Deluge, and portions

of several texts belonging to a work which treated of the beginning of

things, and of the Creation. In 1870, Rawlinson and Smith noted

allusions to the Creation in the important tablet K.63, but the texts

of portions of tablets of the Creation Series at that time available

for study were so fragmentary that it was impossible for these

scholars to find their correct sequence. During the excavations which

Smith carried out at Kuyûnjik in 1873 and 1874 for the proprietors of

the Daily Telegraph and the Trustees of the British Museum, he

was, he tells us, fortunate enough to discover “several fragments of

the Genesis Legends.” In January, 1875, he made an exhaustive search

among the tablets in the British Museum, and in the following March he

published, in the Daily Telegraph (March 4th), a summary of the

contents of about twenty fragments of the series of tablets describing

the creation of the heavens and the earth. In November of the same

year he communicated to the Society of Biblical Archaeology [1]

copies of:—(1) the texts on fragments of the First and Fifth Tablets

of Creation; (2) a text describing the fight between the “Gods and

Chaos”; and (3) a fragmentary text which, he believed, described the

Fall of Man. In the following year he published translations of all

the known fragments of the Babylonian Creation Legends in his

“Chaldean Account of Genesis” (London, 1876, 8vo, with photographs).

In this volume were included translations of the Exploits of Gizdubar

(Gilgamish), and some early Babylonian fables and legends of the gods.

 

[Footnote 1: See the Transactions, Vol. IV, Plates I-VI, London,

1876.]

 

PUBLICATION OF THE CREATION TABLETS.

 

The publication of the above-mentioned texts and translations proved

beyond all doubt the correctness of Rawlinson’s assertion made in

1865, that “certain portions of the Babylonian and Assyrian Legends of

the Creation resembled passages in the early chapters of the Book of

Genesis.” During the next twenty years, the Creation texts were

copied and recopied by many Assyriologists, but no publication

appeared in which all the material available for reconstructing the

Legend was given in a collected form. In 1898, the Trustees of the

British Museum ordered the publication of all the Creation texts

contained in the Babylonian and Assyrian Collections, and the late

Mr. L. W. King, Assistant in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian

Antiquities, was directed to prepare an edition. The exhaustive

preparatory search which he made through the collections of tablets in

the British Museum resulted in the discovery of many unpublished

fragments of the Creation Legends, and in the identification of a

fragment which, although used by George Smith, had been lost sight of

for about twenty-five years. He ascertained also that, according to

the Ninevite scribes, the Tablets of the Creation Series were seven in

number, and what several versions of the Legend of the Creation, the

works of Babylonian and Assyrian editors of different periods, must

have existed in early Mesopotamian Libraries. King’s edition of the

Creation Texts appeared in “Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in

the British Museum,” Part XIII, London, 1901. As the scope of this

work did not permit the inclusion of his translations, and commentary

and notes, he published these in a private work entitled, “The Seven

Tablets of Creation, or the Babylonian and Assyrian Legends concerning

the creation of the world and of mankind,” London, 1902, 8vo. A

supplementary volume contained much new material which had been found

by him since the appearance of the official edition of the texts, and

in fact doubled the number of Creation Texts known hitherto.

 

[Illustration: Babylonian map of the world, showing the ocean

surrounding the world and making the position of Babylon on the

Euphrates as its centre. It shows also the mountains as the source of

the river, the land of Assyria, Bît-Iakinu, and the swamps at the

mouth of the Euphrates. [No. 92,687.]]

 

THE OBJECT OF THE BABYLONIAN LEGEND OF THE CREATION.

 

A perusal of the texts of the Seven Tablets of Creation, which King

was enabled, through the information contained in them, to arrange for

the first time in their proper sequence, shows that the main object of

the Legend was the glorification of the god Marduk, the son of Ea

(Enki), as the conqueror of the dragon Tiâmat, and not the narration

of the story of the creation of the heavens, and earth and man. The

Creation properly speaking, is only mentioned as an exploit of Marduk

in the Sixth Tablet, and the Seventh Tablet is devoted wholly to the

enumeration of the honorific titles of Marduk. It is probable that

every great city in Babylonia, whilst accepting the general form of

the Creation Legend, made the greatest of its local gods the hero of

it. It has long been surmised that the prominence of Marduk in the

Legend was due to the political importance of the city of Babylon. And

we now know from the fragments of tablets which have been excavated in

recent years by German Assyriologists at Kal’at Sharkât (or Shargat,

or Shar’at), that in the city of Ashur, the god Ashur, the national

god of Assyria, actually occupied in texts[1] of the Legend in use

there the position which Marduk held in four of the Legends current in

Babylonia. There is reason for thinking that the original hero of the

Legend was Enlil (Bel), the great god of Nippur (the Nafar, or Nufar

of the Arab writers), and that when Babylon rose into power under the

First Dynasty (about B.C. 2300), his position in the Legend was

usurped at Babylon by Marduk.

 

[Footnote 1: See the duplicate fragments described in the Index to

Ebeling, Keilschrifttexte aus Assur, Leipzig, 1919 fol.]

 

[Illustration: Excavations in Babylonia and Assyria.]

 

VARIANT FORMS OF THE BABYLONIAN LEGEND OF THE CREATION.

 

The views about the Creation which are described in the Seven Tablets

mentioned above were not the only ones current in Mesopotamia, and

certainly they were not necessarily the most orthodox. Though in the

version of the Legend already referred to the great god of creation

was Enlil, or Marduk, or Ashur, we know that in the Legend of

Gilgamish (Second Tablet) it was the goddess Aruru who created Enkidu

(Eabani) from a piece of clay moistened with her own spittle. And in

the so-called “bilingual” version[1] of the Legend, we find that this

goddess assisted Marduk as an equal in the work of creating the seed

of mankind. This version, although Marduk holds the position of

pre-eminence, differs in many particulars from that given by the Seven

Tablets, and as it is the most important of all the texts which deal

directly with the creation of the heavens and the earth, a rendering

of it is here given.

 

[Footnote 1: The text is found on a tablet from Abû Habbah, Brit.

Mus., No. 93,014 (82-5-22, 1048).]

 

THE “BILINGUAL” VERSION OF THE CREATION LEGEND.

 

1. “The holy house, the house of the gods in the holy place had not

yet been made.

 

2. “No reed had sprung up, no tree had been made.

 

3. “No brick had been laid, no structure of brick had been erected.

 

4. “No house had been made, no city had been built.

 

[Illustration: The Bilingual Version of the Creation Legend. [No. 93,014.]]

 

5. “No city had been made, no creature had been constituted.

 

6. “Enlil’s city, (i.e., Nippur) had not been made, E-kur had not been

built,

 

7. “Erech had not been made, E-Aena had not been built,

 

8. The Deep[1] (or Abyss) had not been made, Eridu had not been built.

 

[Footnote 1: APSÛ. It is doubtful if APSÛ here really means the great

abyss of waters from out of which the world was called. It was, more

probably, a ceremonial object used in the cult of the god, something

like the great basin, or “sea,” in the court of the temple of King

Solomon, mentioned in I Kings, vii, 23; 2 Kings, xxv, 13, etc.]

 

9. “Of the holy house, the house of the gods, the dwelling-place had

not been made.

10. “All the lands were sea

11. “At the time that the mid-most sea was [shaped like] a trough,

 

12. “At that time Eridu was made, and E-sagil was built,

 

13. “The E-sagil where in the midst of the Deep the god

Lugal-dul-azaga [1] dwelleth,

 

[Footnote 1: This is a name under which Marduk was worshipped at

Eridu.]

 

14. “Babylon was made, E-sagil was completed.

 

15. “The gods the Anunnaki he created at one time.

 

16. “They proclaimed supreme the holy city, the dwelling of their

heart’s happiness.

 

17. “Marduk laid a rush mat upon the face of the waters,

 

18. “He mixed up earth and moulded it upon the rush mat,

 

19. “To enable the gods to dwell in the place where they fain would

be.

 

20.