(5) The suggestion has been made that amu, the word in the Semitic version here translated “reeds”, should be connected with ammatu, the word used for “earth” or “dry land” in the Babylonian Creation Series, Tabl.  I, l. 2, and given some such meaning as “expanse”.  The couplet is thus explained to mean that the god made an expanse on the face of the waters, and then poured out dust “on the expanse”.  But the Semitic version in l. 18 reads itti ami, “beside the a.”, not ina ami, “on the a.”; and in any case there does not seem much significance in the act of pouring out specially created dust on or beside land already formed.  The Sumerian word translated by amu is written gi-dir, with the element gi, “reed”, in l. 17, and though in the following line it is written under its variant form a-dir without gi, the equation gi-a-dir = amu is elsewhere attested (cf.  Delitzsch, Handwoerterbuch, p. 77).  In favour of regarding amu as some sort of reed, here used collectively, it may be pointed out that the Sumerian verb in l. 17 is kesda, “to bind”, accurately rendered by rakasu in the Semitic version.  Assuming that l. 34 belongs to the same account, the creation of reeds in general beside trees, after dry land is formed, would not of course be at variance with the god’s use of some sort of reed in his first act of creation.  He creates the reed-bundles, as he creates the soil, both of which go to form the first dike; the reed-beds, like the other vegetation, spring up from the ground when it appears.

     (6) The Semitic version here reads “the lord Marduk”; the
     corresponding name in the Sumerian text is not preserved.

     (7) The line is restored from l. 2 o the obverse of the
     text.

Here the Sumerian Creator is pictured as forming dry land from the primaeval water in much the same way as the early cultivator in the Euphrates Valley procured the rich fields for his crops.  The existence of the earth is here not really presupposed.  All the world was sea until the god created land out of the waters by the only practical method that was possible in Mesopotamia.

In another Sumerian myth, which has been recovered on one of the early tablets from Nippur, we have a rather different picture of beginnings.  For there, though water is the source of life, the existence of the land is presupposed.  But it is bare and desolate, as in the Mesopotamian season of “low water”.  The underlying idea is suggestive of a period when some progress in systematic irrigation had already been made, and the filling of the dry canals and subsequent irrigation of the parched ground by the rising flood of Enki was not dreaded but eagerly desired.  The myth is only one of several that have been combined to form the introductory sections of an incantation; but in all of them Enki, the god of the deep water,