1. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
On comparing the fragment of the first tablet of the Creation with the extract from Damascius, we do not find any statement as to there being two principles at first called Tauthe and Apason, and these producing Moymis, but in the Creation tablet the first existence is called Mummu Tiamatu, a name meaning “the chaos of the deep.” The compound Mummu Tiamatu, in fact, combines the two names Moymis and Tauthe of Damascius. Tiamatu must also be the same as the Thalatth of Berosus, which we are expressly told was the sea. It should, therefore, be corrected to Thavatth, as M. Lenormant proposed some years ago. It is evident that, according to the notion of the Babylonians, the sea was the origin of all things, and this also agrees with the statement of Genesis i. 2. where the chaotic waters are called tĕhôm, “the deep,” the same word as the Tiamat of the Creation text and the Tauthe of Damascius.
The Assyrian word Mummu is probably connected with the Hebrew mĕhûmâh, confusion, its Accadian equivalent being Umun. Besides the name of the chaotic deep called tĕhôm in Genesis, which is, as has been said, evidently the Tiamat of the Creation text, we have in Genesis the word tohû, waste, desolate, or formless, applied to this chaos. The correspondence between the inscription and Genesis is complete, since both state that a watery chaos preceded the creation, and formed, in fact, the origin and groundwork of the universe. We have here not only an agreement in sense, but, what is rarer, the same word used in both narratives as the name of this chaos, and given also in the account of Damascius.
Next we have in the inscription the creation of the gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu; these are male and female personifications of motion and production, and correspond to the Dache and Dachus of Damascius, and the moving rûakh, the wind, or spirit of Genesis. The next stage in the creation was the production of Sar and Kisar, representing the upper expanse and the lower expanse, and corresponding with the Assorus and Kissare of Damascius. The resemblance in these names is probably even closer than is here represented, since Sar is generally read Assur as a deity in later times, being an ordinary symbol for the supreme god of the Assyrians.
So far as can be made out from the mutilated text, the next step in the creation of the universe was (as in Damascius) the generation of the three great gods, Anu, Elum, and Hea, the Anus, Illinus, and Aus of that writer. Anu here symbolizes the heaven, Elum the earth, and Hea the sea.
It is probable that the inscription went on to relate the generation of the other gods, and then passed to the successive acts of creation by which the world was fashioned.
The successive forms Lakhmu and Lakhamu, Sar and Kisar, are represented in some of the lists of the gods as names or manifestations of Anu and Anatu. These lists were compiled at a time when a school of monotheists had risen in Chaldea, and an attempt was made on the part of its adherents to resolve the various deities of the popular creed into forms of “the one god” Anu. In each case there appears to be a male and female principle, which principles combine in the formation of the universe.
As has been already remarked, the conception of a male and female principle was due to the Semites. Hence it is clear that the system of cosmology embodied in these Creation tablets was of Semitic and not Accadian origin.
The resemblance between the extract from Damascius and the account in the Creation tablet as to the successive stages or forms of the Creation, is striking, and leaves no doubt about the source of the quotation from the Greek writer.