EGYPTIAN IDEAS REGARDING THE SKY
The earlier Egyptians regarded the sky as a flat metal plate or slab, each end of which rested upon a mountain, the mountain of sunrise, Bakhau, and the mountain of sunset, Manu. In the late Pyramid texts the sky is rectangular, each corner resting upon a pillar. In still later times those four pillars were looked upon as the sceptres of the gods who presided over the four quarters of heaven. At a comparatively late date the idea arose that the sky required support in the centre as well as at its angles, and the god who acted as central prop was called Heh. In another myth the heavens were shaped like a man's head, with the sun and moon for eyes, and hair supporting the sky.
Another Egyptian idea of the sky is that the goddess Nut, who personified the upper regions, formed the vault of the heavens by arching her body over the earth and resting her weight upon her hands and feet. Sometimes the god Shu stands beneath, as if to support her. Over her body are scattered the stars. She was alluded to as 'the Lady of Heaven,' and is uniformly painted blue in imitation of the sky she represented.
THE BABYLONIAN ACCOUNTS OF CREATION
The principal version of the Babylonian account of creation is preserved in the 'Seven Tablets of Creation' now in the British Museum, and originally part of the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. In this epic we find two primeval deities, Apsu and Tiawath, personifications of the great abyss, and their son, Mummu. The gods are created, Anu, En-lil, and Ea, but their 'ways' are displeasing to Apsu and Tiawath, who rebel. The original male deities speedily succumb to the power of the new gods. Tiawath creates a host of grisly monsters and carries on unrelenting war against the enemy, but in terrific combat with Marduk or Merodach she is annihilated. She is cut in twain, and from one half of her body Merodach forms the heavens. He divides the upper waters from the lower, makes dwellings for the gods, creates the sun, moon, and stars, and ordains their courses. At this juncture a portion of the account (Tablet V) is missing, but in the next slab Merodach is said to have been decapitated, and with his own blood and bone to have made man. Berosus, a priest of Merodach, who lived in the third century B.C., wrote a Greek history of Babylonia, which has been lost, but is known in part from quotations by classical writers. In this work he recounted the above myth, with some variation in the names, and the additional statement that half of Tiawath's body formed the earth.[3]
Tiawath, like the Egyptian Nut, personified the primeval abyss; in fact, the name signifies the sea, Apsu, the name of her spouse, meaning the deep. The sea was to the Semitic mind symbolical of chaos and trouble, as witness the Scriptural promise, "and there shall be no more sea." The strange monsters framed by the goddess of the abyss to combat the gods of light are perhaps associated with the teeming gigantic life the Semites believed the sea capable of propagating, one well-known example of which is the 'whale' or 'great fish' of Jonah.
CHINESE WORLD-MAKING
Chinese myth furnishes a fairly clear account of creation. During countless scores of ages "nothing" condensed into unity, and the Mighty Atom was formed. In the course of further ages the atom became divided into the male and female principles, and the universe came into being. But a more simple explanation was necessary for the uninitiated, who were told that the two original elements became four, from the co-operation of which sprang a deity called P'an Ku, whose function it was to supply the constituents of the universe, His eyes became the sun and moon, his breath the wind, his hair trees and vegetation, his flesh the earth, his sweat rain, and the worms which sprang from his decomposing body were men. The god Tien or Shang-ti is generally regarded as the First Cause in Chinese myth; but although he may have inspired the creation of the universe, he does not appear to have taken any hand in its actual manufacture.
THE HEBREW CREATION STORY
The Biblical story of creation is a very complete cosmogony, having affinities with that of Babylon. We are told in Genesis i, 6, 7, 14, 15 that God divided the primeval waters into two parts by an intervening 'firmament' or platform, where he placed the heavenly bodies. This division has some likeness to the Babylonian account of the cleaving of the carcass of Tiawath into two parts, one of which kept the upper waters from coming down. The words te hom, rendered in the English Bible 'the deep,' closely resemble the name Tiawath, 'the sea,' Here, then, we seem to possess irrefragable philological evidence of early Babylonian influence upon Hebrew belief. Verse 2 of Genesis i also mentions the earth-matter out of which the earth and all its products were to appear. This is called tohu and bohu, 'devoid of living things,' and so would appear to equate with "the lands" that "altogether were sea" of Babylonian cosmogony. The creation of light which appears in Genesis is not found in the Babylonian account, but the Babylonian creator, Merodach, is a god of light. In brief, the Hebrew account of the successive stages of creation corresponds so closely to that of Babylon that it is obvious one has been influenced by the other—naturally the younger by the elder.