(1) Cf.  Jastrow, J.A.O.S., Vol.  XXXVI, p. 127, and A.J.S.L., Vol.  XXXIII, p. 134 f.  It may be added that the divine naming of the plants also presents a faint parallel to the naming of the beasts and birds by man himself in Gen. ii. 19 f.

(2) Professor Jastrow (A.J.S.L., Vol.  XXXIII, p. 115) compares similar myths collected by Sir James Frazer (Magic Art, Vol.  II, chap. xi and chap. xii, Sec. 2).  He also notes the parallel the irrigation myth presents to the mist (or flood) of the earlier Hebrew Version (Gen. ii. 5 f).  But Enki, like Ea, was no rain-god; he had his dwellings in the Euphrates and the Deep.

Even in later periods, when the Sumerian myths of Creation had been superseded by that of Babylon, the Euphrates never ceased to be regarded as the source of life and the creator of all things.  And this is well brought out in the following introductory lines of a Semitic incantation, of which we possess two Neo-Babylonian copies:(1)

     O thou River, who didst create all things,
     When the great gods dug thee out,
     They set prosperity upon thy banks,
     Within thee Ea, King of the Deep, created his dwelling. 
     The Flood they sent not before thou wert!

Here the river as creator is sharply distinguished from the Flood; and we may conclude that the water of the Euphrates Valley impressed the early Sumerians, as later the Semites, with its creative as well as with its destructive power.  The reappearance of the fertile soil, after the receding inundation, doubtless suggested the idea of creation out of water, and the stream’s slow but automatic fall would furnish a model for the age-long evolution of primaeval deities.  When a god’s active and artificial creation of the earth must be portrayed, it would have been natural for the primitive Sumerian to picture the Creator working as he himself would work when he reclaimed a field from flood.  We are thus shown the old Sumerian god Gilimma piling reed-bundles in the water and heaping up soil beside them, till the ground within his dikes dries off and produces luxuriant vegetation.  But here there is a hint of struggle in the process, and we perceive in it the myth-redactor’s opportunity to weave in the Dragon motif.  No such excuse is afforded by the other Sumerian myth, which pictures the life-producing inundation as the gift of the two deities of the Deep and the product of their union.

But in their other aspect the rivers of Mesopotamia could be terrible; and the Dragon motif itself, on the Tigris and Euphrates, drew its imagery as much from flood as from storm.  When therefore a single deity must be made to appear, not only as Creator, but also as the champion of his divine allies and the conqueror of other gods, it was inevitable that the myths attaching to the waters under their two aspects should be combined.  This may already have taken place at Nippur, when Enlil became the head of the pantheon; but the existence of his myth is conjectural.(1) In a later age we can trace the process in the light of history and of existing texts.  There Marduk, identified wholly as the Sun-god, conquers the once featureless primaeval water, which in the process of redaction has now become the Dragon of flood and storm.