n the Old Testament, they are found united in the Babylonian
ritual. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Babylonians were acquainted
with a week of seven days, each day of which was dedicated to one of the
seven planets; it was the space of time naturally marked out by the four
quarters of the moon.

No account of the Fall of Man, similar to that in Genesis, has as yet been
found among the fragments of the Assyrian libraries. Mr. George Smith,
indeed, supposed that he had discovered one, but the text which he
referred to the Fall, is really an ancient hymn to the Creator. It is,
nevertheless, pretty certain that such an account once existed. An archaic
Babylonian gem represents a tree, on either side of which are seated a man
and woman, with a serpent behind them, and their hands are stretched out
towards the fruit that hangs from the tree. A few stray references in the
bilingual (Accadian and Assyrian) dictionaries throw some light upon this
representation, and inform us that the Accadians knew of "a wicked
serpent," "the serpent of night" and "darkness," which had brought about
the fall of man. The tree of life, of which so many illustrations occur on
Assyrian monuments, is declared to be "the pine-tree" of Eridu, "the
shrine of the god Irnin;" and Irnin is a name of the Euphrates, when
regarded as the "snake-river," which encircled the world like a rope, and
was the stream of Hea, "the snake-god of the tree of life." The Euphrates,
we must remember, was one of the rivers of Paradise.

The site of Paradise is to be sought for in Babylonia. The garden which
God planted was in Eden, and Eden, as we learn from the cuneiform records,
was the ancient name of the "field" or plain of Babylonia, where the first
living creatures had been created. The city of Eridu, which the people of
Sumir called "the good" or "holy," was, as we have seen, the shrine of
Irnin, and in the midst of a forest or garden that once lay near it grew
"the holy pine-tree," "the tree of life." The rivers of Eden can be found
in the rivers and canals of Babylonia. Two of them were the Euphrates and
Tigris, called by the Accadians _id Idikla_, "the river of Idikla," the
Biblical Hiddekhel, while Pishon is a Babylonian word signifying "canal,"
and Gihon may be the Accadian Gukhan, the stream on which Babylon stood.
Even the word _cherub_ is itself of Babylonian derivation. It is the name
given to one of those winged monsters, with the body of a bull and th