The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

356 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

were unnamed, therefore, was equivalent to saying that they
were not yet in being. The words with which the Book of
Genesis begins are a curious contradiction of the statement of
the Babylonian cosmologist. But the contradiction illustrates
the difference between the Hebrew and the Babylonian points
of view. The Hebrew was not only a monotheist; he believed
also that everything, even from the beginning, had been made by
the one supreme God; the Babylonian, on the contrary, started
with a materialistic philosophy. There are no gods at the outset;
the gods themselves have been created like other things; all that
existed at first was a chaos of waters. The Babylonian cosmology
is that of Genesis without the first verse.
The word I have rendered“chaos”ismummu. Damascius
explains it asΩø∑ƒx¬∫y√ºø¬,“the world of thought”or“ideas.”
It is a world which has as yet no outward form or content,
a world without matter, or perhaps more probably a world in
which matter is inseparable from thought. And for this reason
[389] it is formless; matter as yet had assumed no shape, there is no
single part of it which is so defined and separated from the rest
as to receive a name and thereby to exist. There is nothing but a
dark and formless deep, which can be imagined but not pictured
or described.
The chaos, however, is a chaos of waters. Once more,
therefore, we are taken back to Eridu and the shores of the
Persian Gulf, and to the cosmology which saw in the water the
origin of all things. But the cosmology itself has been strangely
changed. There is no longer a creator god, no longer an Ea,
who, like Yahveh, existed before creation, and to whom the
earth and its inhabitants owe their existence. He has been swept
aside, and an atheistic philosophy has taken his place. The
mythological garb of the larger part of the poem cannot disguise
the materialism of its preface; in the later tablets of it Tiamât
may once more be the dragon of popular imagination, but the
first tablet is careful to explain that this is but an adaptation to