OF THE BABYLONIAN CREATION AND FLOOD STORIES. 311 



" By the soul of heaven, by the soul of earth, ye shall conjure 

 that he may be well-disposed with you." [him 



Ana-Enlilla conjured they by the soul of heaven and the soul of 

 and he was w ell-disposed with them. [earth 



The root (1) growing from the earth they took up (1). 



Zi-u-suddu being king, 



Before Ana-Enlilla prostrated himself. 



Life like a god he gives him — 



Eternal life like a god he confers upon him. 



Zi-u-suddu being king. 



The name of the root (?) "seed of mankind" he called — 



In another land, the land of Tilmun they made it 



After they had made it live [live. 



(On the left-hand edge is a somewhat defaced line in which 

 the editor reads again the name of Zi-u-suddu, and from its 

 position and the line which precedes it, it seems as though it ought 

 to be inserted between lines 7 and 8, in which case its presence 

 here would be due to an omission on the part of the scribe.) 



This final fragment of the legend is of considerable interest 

 on account of the light it throws on Babylonian beliefs. Here 

 two beings are invoked — " the spirit (or soul) of heaven and of 

 earth," and the context shows that the invocation was effective. 

 The appropriateness of this will be recognized when we 

 remember that Ana was the god of heaven and Enlila the god 

 of the earth. The prime mover in bringing the Flood w r as, as 

 we have seen, this combined deity, and the invocation of the 

 appropriate spirits evidently brought about the desired effect. 

 Moreover, the disposition of Ana-Enlila was so influenced that 

 when Zi-u-suddu prostrated himself before him, that patriarch 

 received eternal life like that of a god — in other words, he was 

 deified. From the final imperfect lines we see that the " seed 

 of mankind" was made to live again in the land of Tilmun — 



o 



the southern portion of Babylonia, and the district regarded by 

 them as being in a special way that of the Babylonian Paradise. 

 We shall learn more about this sacred land of Tilmun in the 

 second inscription from Nippur. 



Judging from the style of the writing, the tablet probably 

 belongs to the beginning of the second millennium B.C., but the 

 date of the legend's composition was probably much earlier than 

 this. The deities mentioned are Xin-tu or Nin-hursa&a, the 

 great mother-goddess; Istar, the goddess of love, probably another 

 form of the mother-goddess; Ana, the god of the heavens; 

 Enlila, the god of the earth ; and Enki, or Ea, the god of the sea. 

 We may therefore conclude that the inscription belongs to the 



