HOLMES ANNIVERSARY VOLUME 



the day among men, without taking food, and he gave them the knowledge of 

 letters, sciences, and various arts, taught them how to found cities, build temples, 

 and establish laws; also how to measure land, to sow and gather the fruit — in 

 general all that is proper for an ordered life, so that from that time on nothing 

 material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. At sunset 

 Oannes submerged again into the sea and spent the nights in the deep, for he was 

 amphibious. Later on other similar beings appeared. Oannes also delivered to 

 the people a document on the origin of things and states. 



Oannes is usually identified with Ea, the Babylonian god of the 

 ocean deep. Also in the Babylonian pantheon he is the god of wisdom 

 and arts — in short, the god of civilization and humanity. The Persian 

 gulf, which to the Babylonians appeared as the beginning of the great 

 ocean that flowed round the earth, was particularly sacred to him, 

 and in this legend may be concealed a tradition that the Babylonian 

 civilization started from the coast of the Persian sea. 



The few parallels briefly presented in the preceding notes show 

 that in spite of geographical separations, historical and cultural divi- 

 sions, and the overgrowth of a luxuriant imagination, the theories of 

 the production of earth and heaven, of men and other objects, exhibit 

 substantially the same types everywhere. There is rarely, if ever, a 

 conception of an absolute beginning. Creatio ex nihilo was no more 

 comprehensible to the ancients than it is even to ourselves. 1 There 

 was always a something, indeed there was a great deal, at the begin- 

 ning; but there was no cosmic order. So that instead of a theory or a 

 doctrine of "origins" we have a theory of evolution from chaos to an 

 ordered universe. The more elaborate cosmogonies of civilized nations 

 commonly begin with the conception of a formless mass of material 

 out of which the gods arise and shape the world. In those of the less 

 advanced peoples the preexistence of world-matter is likewise as- 

 sumed; sometimes, too, that of heaven as the seat of the earth-maker 

 and that of preternatural animals, his coadjutors. Besides, a pri- 

 mordial water-body as the substratum of the world, a primeval cosmic 

 egg, and the creation of man from clay, suggested by the action of the 

 potter, seem to be well-nigh universal notions. The question of the 

 migration of myths is a part of the larger questions of the migration 

 of culture, the solution of which is outside the scope of these notes. 



United States National Museum 

 Washington, D.C. 



1 The belief in the creation of the world by God out of nothing is one of the fundamentals of 

 orthodox Judaism, and it passed over as a dogma into Christian theology. But it is not expressly 

 taught in the creation accounts of the book of Genesis. They say nothing in regard to the water 

 chaos, whether it was eternal or made by God, and the Hebrew word hard, in Genesis, I, 2, which is 

 rendered "created," signifies primarily and etymologically to split, divide, or separate. 



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