where the sun goes down. Much of this, no doubt, is Hesiod's own invention. The purely mythological
conception of genealogy has been half changed into an intellectual device to impose a different sort of
order on the world.
The story opens with Gaia and Uranus. Zeus is not yet on the scene; in fact he is the grandson of Uranus/
Heaven, and his father Cronos of the crooked counsels was supreme between them. Hesiod tells the story,
known to Homer, of the succession of sky gods. First Uranus was supreme, but he suppressed his
children, and Gaia encouraged his son Cronos to castrate him. Cronos in turn devoured his own children,
until his wife Rhea gave him a stone to eat in place of Zeus; the child Zeus was brought up in Crete,
compelled his father to disgorge his siblings, and with them and other aid defeated Cronos and his Titans
and cast them down into Tartarus. This barbaric tale was always an oddity. Zeus' own name (akin to the
Latin dies, 'day') meant 'sky', though classical Greeks had forgotten that; and it was strange that he should
have a grandfather whose transparent name is the ordinary Greek word for 'sky'. Moreover, both Uranus
and Cronos hardly existed as realities in cult. In this century the decipherment of a number of ancient
Near Eastern languages has shown that the story is a version of a very archaic one, known to the Hittites
by 1200 B.C., to the Hurrians and the Phoenicians, and recited at Babylon annually in the poem known as
Enuma Elish perhaps as much as 600 years earlier. Its ultimate origin seems to have been Sumerian. In
these eastern stories we find a succession of gods, and the motifs of castration, of swallowing, and of a
stone recur in ways which, though varying, show that the resemblance with Hesiod is no coincidence.
And we see that while the predecessors of Zeus are shadows whose existence is virtually limited to this
myth, in Mesopotamia one city did indeed rise and oust another from supreme power, and in turn give its
own god the supreme position in Heaven: so Marduk of Babylon replaced Enlil of Nippur. The myth
made sense on a Mesopotamian background as it did not in Greece.