The fragmentary and scattered character of these legends is explained by the nature of the material of which the tablets are composed, and the changes undergone by them since they were written. They consist of fine clay and were inscribed with cuneiform characters while in a soft state; they were then baked in a furnace until hard, and afterwards transferred to the library. The library seems to have been in an upper storey of the palace, and after the destruction of Nineveh, the fall of the building in which it was placed naturally caused the tablets contained in it to be broken to pieces. Many of them were cracked and scorched by the heat of the burning ruins. Subsequently the ruins were turned over in search of treasure, and the tablets still further broken; while, to complete their destruction, the rain, soaking through the ground every spring, saturates them with water containing chemicals, and these chemicals form crystals in every available crack. The growth of the crystals further splits the tablets, some of them being literally shivered to pieces.
Reverse of Inscribed Terra Cotta Tablet containing the Account of the Deluge, showing the various fragments of which it was composed at the time of Mr. Smith’s Translation.
Some idea of the mutilated condition of the Assyrian tablets, and of the work required by the restoration of a single text, will be gained from the engraving above, which exhibits the appearance of one of the Deluge tablets at the time Mr. Smith published his translation of it. In this tablet there are no less than sixteen fragments.
The clay records of the Assyrians are by these means so broken up, that a single text is in some cases divided into over one hundred fragments; and it is only by collecting and joining these together that the old texts can be restored. Many of the fragmentary tablets which have been more than twenty years in the British Museum have been added to considerably by the fragments recently brought to England by Mr. Smith and Mr. Rassam; and yet there probably remain from ten to twenty thousand fragments still buried in the ruins, without the recovery of which it is impossible to complete these valuable Assyrian inscriptions.
It is, nevertheless, out of these imperfect materials that we have at present to piece together our knowledge of the early legends of Babylonia and Assyria. Most, if not all, of them, are, it must be remembered, of Chaldean or Babylonian origin, the Assyrians having either slavishly copied Babylonian originals or simply put into a new form the story they had borrowed from their southern neighbours. Such as they are, however, they are presented to the reader as faithfully translated as our existing knowledge of the Assyrian language allows; it is for him to draw his inferences and make his comparisons. The greater number of them, as we shall see, mount back to a date earlier than the second millennium before the Christian era, and even where the actual text belongs to a later period, the legend which it embodies claims a similar antiquity. We may classify them in the following order:—
1. An account of the Creation of the world in six days, parallel to that in the first chapter of Genesis, and probably in its present form not older than the 7th century B.C.
2. A second account of the Creation, derived from the Library of Cuthah, and belonging to the oldest period of Babylonian literature.
3. A history of the conflict between Merodach, the champion of the gods, and Tiamat, “the Deep,” the representative of chaos and evil. To this we may add the bilingual legend of the seven evil spirits and their fight against the moon.
4. The story of the descent of the goddess Istar or Venus into Hades, and her return.