204 



NA TC7RE 



[January i, 1903 



A Sickle Leonid. 



At 2h. 17m. on Sunday morning, December 21, I wit- 

 nessed the passage of a swift, streak-leaving meteor, magnitude 

 I, duration about 075 second. It proceeded from 7 of Cancer 

 and disappeared near to A of Gemini. On tracing its path 

 backward, I found its radiant to be in the well-known Sickle of 

 Leo. G. McKenzie Knight. 



25 Holford Square, London, W.C. 



THE BABYL ONI AN AND A SS YRIAN LEGENDS 

 OF THE CREATION} 



TT is now a little more than thirty years ago since the 

 1 learned world was startled by the announcement 

 that Assyriologists had discovered a remarkable version 

 of the history of the Creation, which closely resembled 

 the narrative of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, 

 and appeared to be based upon the archetype from 

 which one of the earliest editors or writers of the 

 Pentateuch drew many of his statements. The interest 

 shown in the discovery of the Babylonian and Assyrian 

 account of the Creation was widespread, and though it 

 did not eqi^al that displayed by the learned world in the 

 story of the Deluge as unfolded from the cuneiform 

 records by the late Mr. George Smith, it was sufficiently 

 important to move Assyriologists to further exertions 

 and to provide them with a public which has been ever 

 ready to welcome the results of their labours with tolera- 

 tion and praise. The credit of the discovery of the 

 cuneiform Creation records in the British Museum 

 belongs, undoubtedly, to Sir Henry Rawlinson, and it 

 must even be a subject for lament that his official occu- 

 pations prevented him from laying his work before the world 

 in a suitable manner many years before his assistant, 

 Mr. George Smith, was able to do so. In the preface 

 to the work before us, Mr. L. W. King, of the British 

 Museum, has continued, and, we are glad to add, com- 

 pleted, as far as is possible at present, the work which 

 was begun by Sir Henry Rawlinson, and he presents to 

 us the whole of the available material in a form handy 

 to use and easy to study. 



The first volume of the " Seven Tablets of Creation : ' 

 contains a useful preface, a good introduction, and 

 transliterations into English letters of all the cuneiform 

 texts, with clear translations arranged opposite ihem ; 

 five appendices, an index and a glossary complete the 

 volume. In the second half of the work, we have the 

 original cuneiform texts, and as they are written in a 

 good, bold hand, the curious reader will find no difficulty 

 in verifying any of Mr. King's statements. After sketch- 

 ing briefly the services which have been rendered by 

 earlier editors of the Creation legends, Mr. King passes 

 on to describe the new material which he has found as 

 the result of several examinations of the collections of 

 clay tablets from Kuyunjik now in the British Museum. 

 In the thirteenth part of " Cuneiform Texts," published 

 by the Trustees of the British Museum in 1901, Mr. 

 King gave copies of a number of documents relating to 

 the Creation, among them being several which, though 

 used by previous workers, had not been published, and 

 one which had been consulted by Mr. Smith in 1876, 

 but had been apparently lost sight of. Great credit is 

 due to Mr. King for identifying this last-mentioned im- 

 portant fragment, for, so far as we have been able to dis- 

 cover, it was not recognised by Dr. Bezold, who, in his 

 "Catalogue of the Konyunjik Collection" (p. 998, 

 K. 9267), describes it merely as "part of a mythological 

 legend." Whilst, however, Mr. King was searching for 

 fragments of other Babylonian legends, he discovered so 

 many new portions of the Creation legends and dupli- 

 cates that he decided to write a monograph on the sub- 



1 " The Seven Tablets of Creation." By L. W. King. Vol. i. English 

 translations. Pp cxxiv + 274. Vol. il. Pp. xiii and 84 plates. (London: 

 Luzac, 1902.) 



NO. 1731, VOL. 67] 



ject, and as the result of his labours we are now able 

 to form a connected idea of the whole of the Babylonian 

 story of the Creation. Formerly, only twenty-one tablets 

 and fragments inscribed with portions of the legend were 

 known, but now no less than forty-nine separate tablets 

 and fragments have been identified as containing portions 

 of the cuneiform texts of the Creation series. In fact, 

 Mr. King has identified twenty-eight new portions and 

 duplicates of Creation texts, and the details of the great 

 story can now be followed consecutively, a thing which, 

 up to the present, has been impossible. 



We now know that the great Babylonian poem of 

 Creation was divided into seven sections, or tablets, and 

 that the whole work was known by the title " Enuma 

 Elish," which also forms the opening words of the text, 



Fig. 1. — Pait of the Fourth Tablet of the Creation Series 

 (Brit. Mus., No. 93,016). 



and that it contained nine hundred and ninety-four 

 lines ; those who are interested in ancient theories of 

 numbers will note that 994 is a multiple of 7. Each of 

 the seven sections on tablets contained, on an average, 

 one hundred and forty lines, and it is clear that each 

 tablet was intended to describe the events of one " day " 

 of creation. It is difficult not to think that such artificial 

 divisions of the legend indicate that we are dealing with 

 a comparatively late recension of it, and this may well 

 be the case when we remember that the oldest copies of 

 it which we possess date from the reign of Ashur-bani- 

 pal (B.C. 668-626) ; no one who takes the trouble to read 

 the seven tablets and who is familiar with ancient cos- 

 mogonies and theogonies will have the slightest doubt that 



