that time nothing excellent has been invented.  At sunset this monster Oannes plunged back into the sea, and remained all night beneath the waves, for he was amphibious.  He wrote a book on the origin of things and of civilization, which he gave to men.”  These are a few of the fables which were current among the races of the Lower Euphrates with regard to the first beginnings of the universe.  That they possessed many other legends of which we now know nothing is certain, but either they have perished for ever, or the works in which they were recorded still await discovery, it may be under the ruins of a palace or in the cupboards of some museum.

* The arrangement of the heavens by Merodach is described at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth tablets.  The text, originally somewhat obscure, is so mutilated in places that it is not always possible to make out the sense with certainty.

** The creation of the animals and then of man is related on the seventh tablet, and on a tablet the place of which, in the series, is still undetermined.  I have been obliged to translate the text rather freely, so as to make the meaning clear to the modern reader.

[Illustration:  017.jpg A god-fish]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an Assyrian bas-relief from
     Nimrud.

They do not seem to have conceived the possibility of an absolute creation, by means of which the gods, or one of them, should have evolved out of nothing all that exists:  the creation was for them merely the setting in motion of pre-existing elements, and the creator only an organizer of the various materials floating in chaos.  Popular fancy in different towns varied the names of the creators and the methods employed by them; as centuries passed on, a pile of vague, confused, and contradictory traditions were amassed, no one of which was held to be quite satisfactory, though all found partisans to support them.  Just as in Egypt, the theologians of local priesthoods endeavoured to classify them and bring them into a kind of harmony:  many they rejected and others they recast in order to better reconcile their statements:  they arranged them in systems, from which they undertook to unravel, under inspiration from on high, the true history of the universe.  That which I have tried to set forth above is very ancient, if, as is said to be the case, it was in existence two or even three thousand years before our era; but the versions of it which we possess were drawn up much later, perhaps not till about the VIIth century B.C.* It had been accepted by the inhabitants of Babylon because it flattered their religious vanity by attributing the credit of having evolved order out of chaos to Merodach, the protector of their city.** He it was whom the Assyrian scribes had raised to a position of honour at the court of the last kings of Nineveh:*** it was Merodach’s name which Berossus inscribed at the beginning of his book, when he set about relating to the Greeks the origin of the world according to the Chaldeans, and the dawn of Babylonian civilization.