Lecture VI. Cosmologies. 347
is still scanty and uncertain. The world which it presupposed
had the form of a mountain, on the peak of which the gods lived
among the clouds of heaven, while the cavernous depths below
it were peopled with hosts of spirits and demons, the shades [379]
of the dead and the ghosts of a primitive animism. There was
no encircling ocean, no abysmal deep on which it floated, and
from which it had been produced. What its origin, however,
was believed to be we do not yet know, or to what creativeZi
orLilit was held to owe its existence. For an answer to these
questions we must wait until the ancient libraries of Nippur have
been thoroughly excavated and explored.^296
It is otherwise with the cosmology of Eridu. We know a good
deal about it, thanks to the theologians of Babylon, whose god
Merodach was the successor and representative of the god of
Eridu. It is true that its form has been changed and modified
in part for the greater glory of Merodach and his city, that
Merodach has even taken the place of Ea as the creator, and that
the cosmology of Nippur—or at all events of a similar school of
thought—has been combined with that of Eridu, with the result
that there are two creations, the first chaotic, and the second
that of the present world. But it is still easy to disentangle the
earlier from the later elements in the story, and to separate what
is purely Babylonian from what belongs to Eridu.
One of the versions of the story that have come down to us
has been preserved in a spell, of which, like verses of the Bible
in modern times, it has been used to form a part. Its antiquity is
shown by the fact that it is written in the ancient language of [380]
Sumer. It is thus that it begins—
(^296) An indication may, however, be found in the statement that the Lillum
or“Lil”was the“mother-father”of En-lil (WAI.iv. 27. 5), and the further
reference to the Zi or“spirit”who was the“mother-father”of En-lil and Nin-lil
(WAI.iv. 1. Col. ii. 25-28). The genderless Sumerian knew of no distinction
of sex; the creative principle was at once female and male. It will be noticed
that the female element takes precedence of the male in contradistinction to
Semitic ideas.