At that time the gods had not appeared, any one of them,
by no name were they called, no destiny [had they fixed].
Then were the [primeval] gods created,
Lakhmu and Lakhamu came forth [the first].
Until they grew up ...
Ansar and Kisar were created ...
Long were the days ...
Anu [Bel and Ea were made].”
To the Babylonian, name and existence were one and the same. Nothing could exist unless it had a name, and whatever had a name necessarily existed. That the heaven and earth were unnamed, therefore, was equivalent to saying that they were not yet in being. The words with which the Book of Genesis begins are a curious contradiction of the statement of the Babylonian cosmologist. But the contradiction illustrates the difference between the Hebrew and the Babylonian points of view. The Hebrew was not only a monotheist; he believed also that everything, even from the beginning, had been made by the one supreme God; the Babylonian, on the contrary, started with a materialistic philosophy. There are no gods at the outset; the gods themselves have been created like other things; all that existed at first was a chaos of waters. The Babylonian cosmology is that of Genesis without the first verse.
The word I have rendered “chaos” is mummu. Damascius explains it as νοητὸς κόσμος, “the world of thought” or “ideas.” It is a world which has as yet no outward form or content, a world without matter, or perhaps more probably a world in which matter is inseparable from thought. And for this reason it is formless; matter as yet had assumed no shape, there is [pg 389] no single part of it which is so defined and separated from the rest as to receive a name and thereby to exist. There is nothing but a dark and formless deep, which can be imagined but not pictured or described.