The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

220 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

The lines are the introduction to a story of the Creation of
which they form an integral part. On the walls of the Pyramid
of PepiI. we read again almost the same words. Pepi, it is said,
“was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not,
the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born,
there was no death.”^194 But here the words have been introduced
[239] without connection with the context; they cohere neither with
what precedes nor with what follows them, and are evidently
nothing but an old formula torn from the cosmogony to which
they once belonged, and repeated without a clear understanding
of what they really meant. The phrases are found again in the
later religious literature of Egypt, embedded in it like flies in
amber or the fossils in an old sea-beach.^195 To recover their
original meaning we must betake ourselves to the clay tablets of
Assyria and Babylonia, and the cosmological theories of early
Chaldæa. They presuppose that story of a creation out of the
chaos of the deep which was indigenous in Babylonia alone.
This deep, which lay at the foundation of Babylonian
cosmology, was symbolised in the temples by a“sea”across
which the images of the gods were carried in“ships”on their
days of festival. In Babylonia such“seas”had a reason for their
existence. The Persian Gulf, it was believed, was the cradle of
Babylonian culture; it was also the source of that cosmogony
which saw in the deep the“mother”of all things. That it should
have its mimic representatives in the temples of the country was
but natural; it was from the“deep”that the gods had come, and
the deep was still the home of the culture-god Ea.^196
In Egypt, on the other hand, the sea was out of place nay more,

(^194) Maspero,“La Pyramide du Roi Pepi 1er”inRecueil de Travaux, viii. p.
103.
(^195) For instance, in the Rhind Papyrus: Wiedemann, “Ein altägyptischer
Weltschöpfungsmythus,”in theUrquell, new ser., ii. p. 64,“Heaven was not,
earth was not, the good and evil serpents did not exist.”
(^196) See above, p. 86.