The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

346 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

the war continued, and, in spite of charms and incantations, host
after host sent forth from Akkad was annihilated by the unclean
and superhuman enemy. The Babylonian king was in despair; in
vain he appealed to the gods, and declared how“terror and night,
death and plague, earthquake, fear and horror, hunger, famine,
[378] and destruction,”had come upon his unfortunate people.“The
plain of Akkad”seemed about to become the prey of the demons
of the night. How it was rescued from the danger that threatened
it we do not know; the story is unfortunately broken, and the
end of it has not been found. But the origin and character of the
superhuman enemy is not difficult to discover; their dwelling-
place is in the tomb-like recesses of the mountains, their mother
was Tiamât herself, and they have the monstrous shapes of the
ghosts and spirits of the ancient animism of Nippur.^295
The legend was fitly preserved in the sanctuary of Nergal, the
god of the dead, at Kutha. It too has undergone the harmonising
process of later times: the cosmologies of Nippur and Eridu are
again set in antagonism, one against the other, and there is a first
creation as well as a second engaged in the same struggle as that
which under a different form is described in the legends of Eridu
and Babylon. But the antagonists in it are alike the inhabitants
of the dry land; there is no watery abyss from which they have
sprung, whether it be the chaotic deep of Tiamât or the ocean
home of the god of culture. The conceptions on which it rests
belong to the inland plain of Babylonia rather than to the shores
of the sea. Influenced though it has been by the cosmology of
Eridu, the elements of which it is composed go back to an inland
and not to a maritime State.
It will be seen that our knowledge of the cosmology of Nippur
and goats; human-headed bulls; dog-headed horses, and the like—which were
depicted on the walls of the temple of Bel-Merodach, the successor of Bel of
Nippur (Syncell. p. 29; Euseb.Chron. Armen.p. 10, ed. Mai).

(^295) A variant fragment of the legend, as was first recognised by myself in the
Proc. SBA.xx. pp. 187-189, was published by Dr. Scheil from an early
Babylonian tablet in theRecueil de Travaux, xx. pp. 66, 67.