The text of the Semitic Creation-story is here so mutilated as to be useless for comparative purposes, and in these circumstances the bilingual story of the Creation, published by me in 1891, practically covering, as it does, the same ground, may be held, in a measure, to supply its place. Instead, therefore, of devoting to this version a separate section, I insert a translation of it here, together with a description of the tablet upon which it is written.
This second version of the Creation-story is inscribed on a large fragment (about four and a half inches high) of a tablet found by Mr. Rassam at Sippar (Abu Habbah) in 1882. The text is very neatly written in the Babylonian character, and is given twice over, that is, in the original (dialectic) Akkadian, with a Semitic (Babylonian) translation. As it was the custom of the Babylonian and Assyrian scribes, for the sake of giving a nice appearance to what they wrote, to spread out the characters in such a way that the page (as it were) was “justified,” and the ends of the lines ranged, like a page of print, it often happens that, when a line is not a full one, there is a wide space, in the middle, without writing. In the Akkadian text of the bilingual Creation-story, however, a gap is left in every line, sufficiently large to accommodate, in slightly smaller characters, the whole Semitic Babylonian translation. The tablet therefore seems to be written in three columns, the first being the first half of the Akkadian version, the second (a broad one) the Semitic translation, and the third the last half of the Akkadian original text, separated from the first part to allow of the Semitic version being inserted between.
The reason of the writing of the version already translated and in part commented upon is not difficult to find—it was to give an account of the origin of the world and the gods whom they worshipped. The reason of the writing of the bilingual story of the Creation, however, is not so easy to decide, the account there given being the introduction to one of those bilingual incantations for purification, in which, however, by the mutilation of the tablet, the connecting-link is unfortunately lost. But whatever the reason of its being prefixed to this incantation, the value and importance of the version presented by this new document is incontestable, not only for the legend itself, but also for the linguistic material which a bilingual text nearly always offers.
The following is a translation of this document—
“Incantation: The glorious house, the house of the gods, in a glorious place had not been made,
A plant had not grown up, a tree had not been created,
A brick had not been laid, a beam had not been shaped,
A house had not been built, a city had not been constructed,
A city had not been made, no community had been established,
Niffer had not been built, Ê-kura had not been constructed,