The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

354 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Into the heart of its holy house, which spreads its shade like a

forest, hath no man entered.

In its midst is Tammuz,

between the mouths of the rivers on both sides.”^308

The sacred tree of the garden of Eridu was, however, not the
tree of life. It was rather the tree of knowledge. This is shown
by an inscription of Eri-Aku or Arioch, in which he describes
himself as“the executor of the oracle of the sacred tree of Eridu.”
Perhaps it is to the same tree that reference is made in a magical
text, in which a man possessed of“the seven evil spirits”is
healed with the help of“the tree which shatters the power of the
incubus, and upon whose core the name of Ea is recorded.”^309
But Ea was not only the god of wisdom, he was also the god of
“life,”and the trees of both wisdom and life might therefore be
fitly placed under his protection.
When Babylon became the supreme head of Babylonia under
[387] Khammurabi and his successors, the creative functions of Ea
were usurped by Merodach. A long poem celebrating the glories
and power of Merodach, his struggle with chaos and creation
of the world, and, finally, his formal investiture with the names
and prerogatives of Ea, has been preserved to us in part. Ever
since its discovery by Mr. George Smith it has been known as
the Epic of the Creation, and the parallelism between the first
tablet composing it and the first chapter of Genesis has long
attracted attention. But the poem is of late date. It belongs
to an age of religious syncretism and materialistic philosophy;
the mythological beings of popular belief are resolved into
cosmological principles, and the mythological dress in which
they appear has a theatrical effect. The whole poem reminds us
20.

(^308) See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 238, and Pinches,Journal of the Victoria
Institute, xxix. p. 44.
(^309) WAI.iv. 15, Col. ii. 5, 6.