but bases the suggestion mainly on the two hypotheses, that the Dragon combat of the poem was suggested by the winter storms and floods of the Euphrates Valley, and that the Sumerians came from a mountain region where water was not plentiful.  If we grant both assumptions, the suggested conclusion does not seem to me necessarily to follow, in view of the evidence we now possess as to the remote date of the Sumerian settlement in the Euphrates Valley.  Some evidence may still be held to point to a mountain home for the proto-Sumerians, such as the name of their early goddess Ninkharsagga, “the Lady of the Mountains”.  But, as we must now regard Babylonia itself as the cradle of their civilization, other data tend to lose something of their apparent significance.  It is true that the same Sumerian sign means “land” and “mountain”; but it may have been difficult to obtain an intelligible profile for “land” without adopting a mountain form.  Such a name as Ekur, the “Mountain House” of Nippur, may perhaps indicate size, not origin; and Enki’s association with metal-working may be merely due to his character as God of Wisdom, and is not appropriate solely “to a god whose home is in the mountains where metals are found” (op. cit., p. 295).  It should be added that Professor Jastrow’s theory of the Dragon combat is bound up with his view of the origin of an interesting Sumerian “myth of beginnings”, to which reference is made later.

(3) Cf.  Budge, Gods of the Egyptians, Vol.  I, pp. 324 ff.  The inclusion of the two versions of the Egyptian Creation myth, recording the Birth of the Gods in the “Book of Overthrowing Apep”, does not present a very close parallel to the combination of Creation and Dragon myths in the Semitic-Babylonian poem, for in the Egyptian work the two myths are not really combined, the Creation Versions being inserted in the middle of the spells against Apep, without any attempt at assimilation (see Budge, Egyptian Literature, Vol.  I, p. xvi).

We have thus traced four out of the five strands which form the Semitic-Babylonian poem of Creation to a Sumerian ancestry.  And we now come back to the first of the strands, the Birth of the Gods, from which our discussion started.  For if this too should prove to be Sumerian, it would help to fill in the gap in our Sumerian Creation myth, and might furnish us with some idea of the Sumerian view of “beginnings”, which preceded the acts of creation by the great gods.  It will be remembered that the poem opens with the description of a time when heaven and earth did not exist, no field or marsh even had been created, and the universe consisted only of the primaeval water-gods, Apsu, Mummu, and Tiamat, whose waters were mingled together.  Then follows the successive generation of two pairs of deities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, and Anshar and Kishar, long ages separating the two generations from each other and from the birth of the great gods which subsequently takes place.  In the summary of the myth which is given by Damascius(1) the names of the various deities accurately correspond to those in the opening lines of the poem; but he makes some notable additions, as will be seen from the following table: