248 W. p. JAMES, ESQ. 



it, as mast of us had, — " No flock of animals was yet collected ; no plant 

 had sprung up." The last part of the line was right, and the meaning of the 

 line is: "The darkness had not withdrawn." Now, "gipara" is explained 

 to mean the great darkness — " the great darkness had not been gathered 

 up," or " the veil of darkness had not been drawn back." Then follows 

 the sequence, and " plants had not sprung up." There being no 

 light there could not be any vegetable product ; so that the necessity 

 for light in the production of plants, and of life generally, on the 

 face of the earth, is here recognised. As I have suggested in my 

 lectures, the two words Lakhmu and Lakhamu came from the root 

 Lakham, which means to struggle and fight, and, also, to divide ; and 

 thus these names may be taken to signify the division between the upper 

 and lower halves of nature— between the earth and the heavens — corre- 

 sponding to the firmament in Genesis. Professor Sayce intimated — at the 

 very time I had made the same suggestion, not having seen that of Professor 

 Sayce, — that Assar and Kisar really mean the Host of Heaven and the Host 

 of Earth. Thus we have a parallel to what we see in the second of Genesis, 

 where allusion is made to "all the host of them." Now, Assar corre- 

 sponds exactly to tseba hashshamaim, the Host of Heaven. It means 

 really, that all the essences of earth and heaven were separated from each 

 other, so that the agreement between this and the Tablets on that point 

 is more close than would at first appear. I now come to speak of a 

 more important question, which I think we must consider, inasmuch as 

 the author of the paper altogether takes the historical line of argument to 

 be a question of age. The author says, quoting Professor Sayce, — " It 

 breathes throughout the spirit of a later age ; its language and style 

 show no trace of an Accadian original, and the colophon at the end 

 implies, by its silence, that it was not a copy of an older document." 

 I believe, however, that it does show traces of Accadian origin, and that 

 it is evidently of ancient date. But we cannot place the formulation of 

 that document— though it was probably not the same form as that in which 

 we have it, but slightly different, and possibly more crude in style— later 

 than 2000 b.c. The reasons on which I found this conclusion are very clear, 

 and I will state them as briefly as I can. In the first place, I would point to 

 the resemblance of this document and the other Creation Tablets, and 

 especially of the 5th Tablet, of which we have the largest portion, to other 

 religious texts. There are phrases which occur in Hymns and in Litanies which 

 are as old as 2000 B.C. ; and there is also to be noticed the same arrangement 

 of the Pantheon of the Gods that occurs in the inscriiition of Khammurabi 

 120 B.C. There is every indication that the Pantheon of that time was 

 arranged on the same lines as that of the time of Assur-bani-pal ; but the 

 strongest evidence as to date is that obtained from the 5th Tablet of the 

 series. That Tablet does not come into the scope of the author's paper ; but 

 if it had, it would have assisted him materially in proving his point. 

 It relates to the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars : and 



