For the inspection of my people, within my palace, I placed.”
The Assyrians, we see, like the Israelites and other Eastern nations, frequently designated their books, not by the subjects treated of, but by the initial words. The book the commencement of which we see on this fragment of terra-cotta was known to them, and they subsequently refer to it, by the title, When Above.
We see also that the fragments which we possess are remnants of a series of tablets which were prepared and placed in his palace at Ninive by the Assyrian monarch Assurbanipal, son of Esarhaddon, the celebrated Sardanapalus of Grecian writers, renowned for his luxury and magnificence, and who, seeing his kingdom at length subverted and his capital taken, preferred to perish with his family in the conflagration of his own palace, rather than yield himself a prisoner into the hands of his enemies. He reigned from B.C. 673 to B.C. 625. From this inscription, and from many other notices, we learn that during his reign he followed up with ardor the literary work of his father and grandfather, and of several of their predecessors. He sought out the more ancient literary treasures of Babylon, Cutha, Erech, Akkad, Borsippa, Ur, Nipur, and other older cities then under his sway; caused them to be carefully copied out on fresh tablets of terra-cotta, and to be placed in his own Royal Library at Ninive. It is thus almost entirely to Assurbanipal and his patronage of learning that we owe what we now know, or hope soon to possess, of this oldest of all national literatures.
Reverting to our fragmentary tablet, and comparing the verbose text of this remarkable inscription with the brief account of Moses (Gen. i. 1, 2), we cannot but note the contrast between the clear and emphatic statement of the inspired writer, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” on one side, and on the other the vague and undecided statement of the cuneiform writer, “Those waters [or chaos] at the beginning were ordained.”
It may be presuming too much on our present ability to translate with accuracy every individual word of these tablets for us to give much weight to a single word or isolated expression; but it would seem that the early Assyrians, even if they had lost, or at least were accustomed to leave in the background, the idea of the unity of God, and were commencing to indulge in mythological fancies, had not, however, gone as yet so far astray as to hold the primeval chaos to have existed of itself from eternity. On the contrary, they believed that at the beginning it was ordained. There is here a trace, at least, of the idea of creation by a superior Power.
The watery character of the abyss is an idea common to both narratives. Whence this agreement? Could the void and formless character of the original chaotic mass be conceived under no other condition than that of a watery mist?
Moses distinctly indicates the exercise of the power of the true and supreme God in the further progress of creation: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The inscription, leaving that out of sight, in this instance at least, gives us the primordial
conceptions of mythology. The gods, who at the beginning “had not sprung up, any one of them,” soon commence to appear—“are made.” They are evidently personifications or deifications of the divisions or the powers of nature, perhaps poetic fancies in the beginning, to become in course of time mythological personages, and then heathen divinities, to be worshipped with altars and sacrifices.
Here Lahmu and Lahamu (masculine and feminine) represent the powers of motion and reproduction, the earliest forces recognized as originally existing, or made to exist, in the chaotic abyss. Sar (or Assorus) and Kissar are the upper and the lower heavens. Anu represents the firmament, while Elu and Hea—whose names (if we follow an excerpt from Berosus) probably followed that of Anu in the broken line—stood for the earth and the sea.
The tablet to which this fragment belonged was evidently only a general introduction to a series of eight, or perhaps more, tablets, each one forming, as it were, a special portion or chapter or canto to the entire legend or book known by the name When Above, detailing the creation of the world.