The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

344 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

shores of the Persian Gulf.^292 Nor was it mankind only that was
thus made. The whole world of created things had been similarly
moulded; the earth and all that dwelt upon it had risen out of the
sea. The cosmology of Eridu thus made water the origin of all
things; the world we inhabit has sprung from the deep, which
still encircles it like a serpent with its coils.
But the deep over which the creator-god presided was a deep
which formed part of that orderly framework of nature wherein
the gods of light bear rule, and which obeys laws that may not
be broken. It is not the deep where the spirit of chaos held sway,
and of which she was an impersonation; that was a deep without
limits or law, whose only progeny was a brood of monsters.
Between the deep of Ea and the chaos of Tiamât the cosmology
[376] of historical Babylonia drew a sharp line of distinction; the one
excluded the other, and it was not until the deep of Tiamât had
been, as it were, overcome and placed within bounds, that the
deep wherein Ea dwelt was able to take its place.
The two conceptions are antagonistic one to the other, and can
hardly be explained, except on the supposition that they belong
to two different schools of thought. The brood of Tiamât, it
must be remembered, were once the subjects of En-lil of Nippur,
and the Anunna-ki, or“spirits of the earth,”though they became
the orderly ministers of the gods of light, nevertheless continued
to have their dwelling-place in the underground world, and to
serve its mistress Allat. The motley host that followed Tiamât
in her contest with Bel-Merodach were essentially the ghosts
and goblins of the theology of Nippur; and it is with the latter,
therefore, that we must associate the theory of the divine world
with which they are connected. The world of Nippur was a
world from which the sea was excluded; it was a world of plain
and mountain, and of the hollow depths which lay beneath the

(^292) WAI.ii. 58. 57. His Sumerian title as the divine potter was Nunurra, which
is explained as“god of the pot,”or more literally“lord of the pot”(Brünnow,
Classified List, 5895). See Scheil,Recueil de Travaux, xx. p. 125.