Lecture VII. The Sacred Books. 373
earth”which he has created, or the“king”of that“holy mound” [407]
of waters which rose up against the sky like a mountain, and
behind which the sun appeared at dawn. The titles that he bears
point unmistakably to Eridu. Here alone Ea was the creator of
the earth, and here too, in the temple of the god, was a likeness of
that“holy mound”whereon the future destinies of mankind were
declared. The oldest incantations which have come down to us
must have been composed at Eridu in the days of its Sumerian
animism.
There are other divine or semi-divine names in them which
tell the same tale. The pure waters which heal the sick and
destroy the power of witchcraft are brought by the water-spirit
Nin-akha-kudda,“the mistress of spells,”whom the theologians
of a later time transformed into a daughter of Ea. Bau, too, the
heifer of the city of Isin,^316 appears along with the water-spirit.
Like Zikum, she was the mother of Ea and“the generatress of
mankind,”and she shared with Asari the honours of the New
Year's festival. But Bau, it would seem, was not originally
from Eridu. She had come there from a neighbouring city, and
her presence in the incantations is a proof that even in these
oldest monuments of a sacred literature we are still far from the
beginnings of Babylonian religion.
At Nippur it was the ghosts and vampires, who had their
habitation beneath the ground, that were objects of terror to the
men who lived upon it. At Eridu the demons were rather the
raging winds and storm-clouds which lashed the waters of Ea
into fury, and seemed for a time to transform his kingdom into a
chaos of lawless destruction. The fisherman perished in his bark,
while the salt waves inundated the land and ravaged the fields of
the husbandman. It was here, on the shores of the Persian Gulf,
that the story of the great flood was perhaps first thrown into [408]
literary form, and that conception of the universe grew up which
(^316) WAI.v. 52, Col. iv. 8.