154 Primitive Theories of the Origin of Man 
(adam). From various allusions in Babylonian literature it would 
seem that the Babylonians also conceived man to have been moulded 
out of clay. According to Berosus, the Babylonian priest whose 
account of creation has been preserved in a Greek version, the god 
Bel cut off his own head, and the other gods caught the flowing blood, 
mixed it with earth, and fashioned men out of the bloody paste ; and 
that, they said, is why men are so wise, because their mortal clay is 
tempered with divine blood’. In Egyptian mythology Khnoumou, 
the Father of the gods, is said to have moulded men out of clay‘. 
We cannot doubt that such crude conceptions of the origin of our 
race were handed down to the civilised peoples of antiquity by their 
savage or barbarous forefathers. Certainly stories of the same sort 
are known to be current among savages and barbarians. 
Thus the Australian blacks in the neighbourhood of Melbourne 
said that Pund-jel, the creator, cut three large sheets of bark with his 
big knife. On one of these he placed some clay and worked it up 
with his knife into a proper consistence. He then laid a portion 
of the clay on one of the other pieces of bark and shaped it into 
a human form ; first he made the feet, then the legs, then the trunk, 
the arms, and the head. Thus he made a clay man on each of the 
two pieces of bark; and being well pleased with them he danced 
round them for joy. Next he took stringy bark from the Eucalyptus 
tree, made hair of it, and stuck it on the heads of his clay men. Then 
he looked at them again, was pleased with his work, and again danced 
round them for joy. He then lay down on them, blew his breath 
hard into their mouths, their noses, and their navels ; and presently 
they stirred, spoke, and rose up as full-grown men® The Maoris 
of New Zealand say that Tiki made man after his own image. He 
took red clay, kneaded it, like the Babylonian Bel, with his own blood, 
fashioned it in human form, and gave the image breath. As he had 
made man in his own likeness he called him T%ki-ahua or Tiki’s like- 
ness®, A very generally received tradition in Tahiti was that the 
first human pair was made by Taaroa, the chief god. They say that 
1 8. R. Driver and W. H. Bennett, in their commentaries on Genesis ii. 7. 
? H. Zimmern, in E. Schrader’s Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament® (Berlin, 
1902), p. 506. 
5 Eusebius, Chronicon, ed. A. Schoene, Vol. 1. (Berlin, 1875), col. 16. 
4G, Maspero, Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de U Orient Classique, 1. (Paris, 1895), 
p. 128. 
5 R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria (Melbourne, 1878), 1.424. This and 
many of the following legends of creation have been already cited by me in a note on 
Pausanias, x. 4. 4 [Pausanias’s Description of Greece, translated with a Commentary 
(London, 1898), Vol. v. pp. 220 sq.]. 
6 R. Taylor, Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants, Second Edition 
(London, 1870), p. 117. Compare E. Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London, 
1882), pp. 21 sq. 
