for "land" without adopting a mountain form. Such a name as
Ekur, the "Mountain House" of Nippur, may perhaps indicate
size, not origin; and Enki's association with metal-working
may be merely due to his character as God of Wisdom, and is
not appropriate solely "to a god whose home is in the
mountains where metals are found" (op. cit., p. 295). It
should be added that Professor Jastrow's theory of the
Dragon combat is bound up with his view of the origin of an
interesting Sumerian "myth of beginnings", to which
reference is made later.

(3) Cf. Budge, _Gods of the Egyptians_, Vol. I, pp. 324 ff.
The inclusion of the two versions of the Egyptian Creation
myth, recording the Birth of the Gods in the "Book of
Overthrowing Apep", does not present a very close parallel
to the combination of Creation and Dragon myths in the
Semitic-Babylonian poem, for in the Egyptian work the two
myths are not really combined, the Creation Versions being
inserted in the middle of the spells against Apep, without
any attempt at assimilation (see Budge, _Egyptian
Literature_, Vol. I, p. xvi).

We have thus traced four out of the five strands which form the
Semitic-Babylonian poem of Creation to a Sumerian ancestry. And we now
come back to the first of the strands, the Birth of the Gods, from which
our discussion started. For if this too should prove to be Sumerian, it
would help to fill in the gap in our Sumerian Creation myth, and might
furnish us with some idea of the Sumerian view of "beginnings", which
preceded the acts of creation by the great gods. It will be remembered
that the poem opens with the description of a time when heaven and earth
did not exist, no field or marsh even had been created, and the universe
consisted only of the primaeval water-gods, Apsu, Mummu, and Tiamat,
whose waters were mingled together. Then follows the successive
generation of two pairs of deities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, and Anshar and
Kishar, long ages separating the two generations from each other and
from the birth of the great gods which subsequently takes place. In
the summary of the myth which is given by Damascius(1) the names of the
various deities accurately correspond to those in the opening lines of
the poem; but he makes some notable additions, as will be seen from the
following table:

DAMASCUS "SEVEN TABLETS" I