198 SEAL CYLINDERS OF WESTERN ASIA. 
the Elder Bel-Inlil, who overcame the ocean monsters; but as Babylon came to be 
the chief capital of the country, the local god of Babylon, Marduk, was made the 
chief Bel Marduk of the pantheon and assumed the conquests of the local gods who 
had ruled at Eridu and Nippur. From this time Marduk was Bel; and it was he 
who overcame Tiamat, and it was he who had the fifty names of conquest and glory. 
Doubtless the story of the fight between Bel and the dragon originated at a very early 
period, even althqugh the actual conflict is not distinctly given in early Baby- 
lonian art. To be sure, we have such figures of a winged composite monster from a 
period of extreme antiquity, indeed the same as was put on the great bas-relief of 
Assurnazirpal; it is not represented in the act of conflict, but as thoroughly subdued 
and therefore not killed. We have already seen it in Chapter vii on the Dragon, 
where it is drawing the god’s chariot, or where a deity is standing on its back. We 
have also seen the same dragon in conflict with a human figure on seals of a some- 
what less antiquity in Chapter xxix, but in these cases it seems to be less the victory 
of Bel over the dragon than it is the victory of the dragon over a human antagonist. 
The story as told in the “Seven Tablets of Creation” represents Marduk as 
slaying the dragon Tiamat and dividing her body to create the firmament and the 
earth out of the two portions. This is very likely a late development of the story; 
for, as has been said, in the earliest art the dragon is not slain, but simply subdued. 
Equally there have been other radical variations in different localities. A quite differ- 
ent version was in the mind of the artist of Assurnazirpal, inasmuch as his dragon 1 1s 
masculine, and not, like Tiamat, feminine. Equally thus in the version given by 
King (“Seven Tablets of Creation,” p. 117) the dragon is masculine. ‘The text reads: 
Who was the serpent (dragon) . 
Tamtu was the Serpent ..... 
Bel in heaven hath formed ..... 
Fifty kaspu is his length, one kaspu (his height) 
Six cubits is his mouth, twelve cubits (his... .) 
Twelve cubits is the circuit of (his ears) 
For the space of sixty cubits he ..... a bird, 
In water nine cubits he draggeth . . 
He raiseth his tail on high .. . 
The tablet, unfortunately broken, goes on to tell how the gods appealed to Sin to 
attack the dragon, now called not szru, serpent, but /abbu, lion, as if both the serpent 
form and the lion-headed form were familiar to the writer. The dimensions given, 
however, make it a serpent rather than the composite monster with wings which we 
find more frequently on the seals. The length is given as fifty kaspu, that is, about 
three hundred miles, while the breadth of his mouth is only six cubits. He is to be 
conceived of as a serpent, most probably of such a form as is to be seen in the 
rare cylinders of the most archaic period shown in figs. 106-108, where he takes the 
serpent form with a human head and is bent in the shape of a boat on which a god 
rides, perhaps Ea or Enlil, the Elder Bel; or of the serpent form of the myth to be 
given later (figs. 578, 579). It is to be observed that in this version of the myth the 
verbs and pronouns referring to the dragon are masculine, and that the name given 
to him is not Tiamat, but its masculine T'amtu. The serpent form of the dragon, 
whether masculine or feminine, has thus far been found in conflict with Marduk 
only on two cylinders. ‘The last line quoted above, “ He raiseth his tail on high,” 
suggests the dragon of Marduk, fig. 1300. 
