OF THE CREATION OF MAN. 279 



The tablet is rather carelessly written. The scribe made a num- 

 ber of mistakes which he was compelled to correct by erasures. One 

 would infer that the writing was that of a scribal apprentice rather 

 than that of a skilled scribe. 



The god Ashnan of this text is a god of vegetation. His name is 

 written with the sign for grain plus the sign for forest. The prom- 

 inent role which Ashnan plays in the text is proof that the agri- 

 cultural interest was uppermost in the minds of the writers of the 

 myth. The god Tikku is a personified river-bank. The statement 

 made near the beginning, that he had not created the land, takes the 

 reader back to the beginning of Babylonian civilization before the 

 overflow of the rivers had been circumscribed by dykes. 



The myth moves in the same circle of ideas as a portion of the 

 text discovered by Dr. Langdon. According to my understanding of 

 that text, irrigation of the earth was made possible by a marital union 

 of the sun-god with the goddess Nintu.^^ The tablet now discov- 

 ered represents men generated by the lord and Nintu after they 

 had been planned by Ug, the sun-god. This text presupposes the 

 natural generation of men from a union of gods, as the other text 

 does the natural generation of irrigation. 



Our new text recognizes that food and sleep are provided by 

 god but clothing and houses men had to invent. The description of 

 the construction of a reed hut in line 22 of the obverse is true to the 

 form of reed huts that may still be seen in the Babylonian marshes. 



The Hues on the reverse of the tablet are at the bginning broken. 

 Apparently some god was addressing Enlil, because all had not gone 

 well with men. Duazagga was the celestial abyss, the great abyss 

 of the sky-vault. Here it is described as "the way of the gods," 

 perhaps an allusion to the milky way, along which the gods were 

 supposed to dwell. That men might have more direct help, a dwell- 

 ing for Ashnan was made on the earth. Thereupon Ashnan created 

 plants for food, and sent over the earth the various kinds of rain- 

 clouds. This mitigated human misfortune only in part. Two thirds 

 of the fold had perished before, but one third still perished. A god, 

 possibly Eulil, accordingly came down and founded cities. These 

 led to the formation of clans or kindreds ; misfortune vanished, and 



15 See the writer's " Archaeology and the Bible," Philadelphia* 1916, p. 284. 



