In a second copy which presents several variations lines 14 to 19 are omitted.

It is evident that this hymn to the Creator emanated from what Sir Henry Rawlinson has termed the monotheistic party among the ancient Babylonians, and that the speech of Hea in lines 14 to 19 has been inserted by a poet who did not belong to it. The various deities of the popular faith are all resolved into the one supreme God, the maker of the world and man, who was worshipped at Babylon under the names of Bel, “the Lord,” and Merodach the sun-god, at Eridu under that of Hea and at Nipur under that of Anu. The gods of the multitude are said to be only the fifty names of the Creator. To him is ascribed the regulation of the stars, the naming of the angels, and the subjection of the subordinate demi-gods, and marginal notes expressly state that the several titles under which the Creator is addressed on the obverse of the tablets, all belong to one and the same divinity.

In the popular mythology the part of the Creator was usually assigned to Merodach. Thus we find the latter deity addressed as follows in a mutilated bilingual hymn (K 2962 Obv.):—

In these references to the names of the living creatures made by the Creator at the beginning of the world, we are irresistibly reminded of the passage in Genesis ii. 19., where we read that “out of the ground God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

One of the most curious statements made in these hymns is that the race of men created by the deity was black-headed. The same race of men is mentioned elsewhere in the ancient literature of the Accadians. Thus in a hymn to the goddess Gula, the goddess is described as “the mother who bore the men of the black heads,” and in another hymn the sun-god is declared to “direct the men of the black heads.” Sargon of Agané is further described as ruling over “all the men of the black heads,” and in imitation of this mode of expression Sennacherib in later days speaks of having overcome “all the black-headed race.” The black-headed race of Sennacherib, however, was the Turanian population of Elam and the adjoining districts on the east of Babylonia, whereas it is plain that the Accadian hymns mean by the black-headed race the Accadian people itself. It was over them that Sargon of Agané, the Semite, boasts of having extended his sway, though according to an old geographical list it was Sumer or Shinar rather than Accad, which was inhabited by the people of “the black-face.” But after all there is no contradiction between the statements of Sennacherib and of the hymns. The Accadians belonged to the same race as the Turanian inhabitants of Elam, and spoke a similar language to theirs.

Now we shall find in the account of the exploits of Dibbara, which will be translated in a subsequent chapter, that the black race, which is identified with the Accadians, is contrasted with the people of Syria, while in the bilingual tablets, the black race is similarly contrasted with the white race. Hence it is clear that the white race was the same as the Syrians, and since the Syrians were Semites, the white race must have been synonymous in the language of the Accadians with Semitic. As a matter of fact, the Semites belong to the white-skinned division of mankind, and were accordingly painted yellow by the Egyptians. The Accadian population, on the other hand, belonged to the dark-skinned division, though it is not necessary to suppose them to have been as black as the negro or the “blameless Ethiopian.” In the bilingual tablets, the black race is rendered in Assyrian by the word Adamatu or “red-skins.”

A popular etymology connected this word Adamatu with the word Adamu or admu, “man,” partly on account of the similarity of sound, partly because in the age of Accadian supremacy and literature, the men par excellence, the special human beings made by the Creator, were the dark-skinned race of Accad. The Accadian Adam or “man” was dark; it was only when the culture of the Accadians had been handed on to their Semitic successors that he became fair.

The discovery that the Biblical Adam is identical with the Assyrian Adamu or “man,” and that the Assyrian Adamu goes back to the first-created man of Accadian tradition who belonged to the black, that is, to the Accadian race, is due to Sir Henry Rawlinson. He has also suggested that the contrast between the black and the white races, between the Accadian and the Semite, is indicated in the sixth chapter of Genesis, where a contrast is drawn between the daughters of men, or Adamu, and the sons of God. It was owing to the intermarriage of the sons of God with the Adamites that the evils were spread which brought down upon the world the punishment of the Deluge.

It was Sir Henry Rawlinson who further pointed out that the Biblical Gân Eden, or “Garden of Eden,” is Gan-Duniyas (also called Gun-duni), a name under which Babylonia is frequently known in the Assyrian inscriptions. Gan-Duniyas signifies “the enclosure” or “fortress of the god Duniyas,” a deity whose nature and attributes are still obscure, and who may have been merely a deified monarch of the country. Two of the four rivers of Paradise are the two great rivers that enclose the fruitful plain of Babylonia, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. The Euphrates was called Purrat, or “the curving water” in Accadian from its shape; the Tigris was known under the name of Masgugar, “the current,” Tiggar, and Idikna or Idikla, from the latter of which comes the Hiddekhel of Genesis, with prefixed Accadian hid, “river.” Gihon is identified with the Arakhtu or Araxes, “the river of Babylon,” which flowed westward into the desert of Arabia or Cush, though Sir H. Rawlinson suggests its identity with the modern Jukhá, which runs past the site of Eridu, while Sargon calls Elam the country of “the four rivers.”[11]