THE BABYLONIAN STOKY OF THE CREATION. 



49 



first person who brought them before the Victoria Institute. ''^ An 

 immense amount of material, dating back to the seventh century 

 B.C., has been collected within the last few years, from the library 

 of Nineveh and other sources, and the Babylonian series constitute 

 essentially an epic poem. 



All must think, like the Iliad of Homer, that it is not a work 

 or composition of one period, but a work composed of materials 

 gathered together from various sources fused and blended into a 

 great religious whole. 



I think those who have read Dr. Pinches' paper, and especially 

 those who have read Mr. King's valuable work on the subject, will 

 see that, like the first chapter of Genesis, it contains material of 

 more than one period. 



Dr. Pinches refers to the great prominence given to God in the 

 early part of the poem and in the account of the deluge. Some 

 years ago Dr. Pinches published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic 

 Society the bilingual legend of the Creation. That legend, to my 

 mind, is much more important than the story of the Creation, and, 

 I think, if Dr. Pinches takes the trouble to look through it, he will 

 see that is a document that has undergone a most clumsy sub- 

 editing, and that if he takes lines sixteen and seventeen and possibly 

 nineteen from the text, he will find portions that are clumsily made 

 to connect themselves with the school of Babylon, a city that took 

 no very prominent part in the affairs of the dynasty ; but as soon 

 as the kings came into power there was a great change in 

 government. The centralization of government and of law is 

 shown by a series of laws which, curiously enough, were codified 

 about 2200 B.C., and continued in use until about a century before 

 the Christian era and were afterwards revived and handed on. 

 During that period the epic was drawn up, and you find that both 

 in the seventh tablet and during this bilingual period, the epithets 

 of their gods have been taken and used for Merodach. Then, 

 again, the epic seems to have undergone slight alteration at the 

 hands of the Assyrian scribes, but not much — they were uneducated. 

 There was no Assyrian literature really except the inscrip- 

 tions. 



^ " Cuneiform inscriptions as illustrative of the times of the Jewish 

 Captivity," Trans. Vict. Inst., vol. xviii (1884). Mr. Hormuzd Eassam 

 has written on the same subject in vols, xiv and xvii. — Ed. 



