eriod, like Vyasa and other super-men of
Indian mythology. A couplet from a Tammuz hymn says tersely:

In his infancy in a sunken boat he lay.
In his manhood in the submerged grain he lay.[115]

The "boat" may be the "chest" in which Adonis was concealed by
Aphrodite when she confided him to the care of Persephone, queen of
Hades, who desired to retain the young god, but was compelled by Zeus
to send him back to the goddess of love and vegetation. The fact that
Ishtar descended to Hades in quest of Tammuz may perhaps explain the
symbolic references in hymns to mother goddesses being in sunken boats
also when their powers were in abeyance, as were those of the god for
part of each year. It is possible, too, that the boat had a lunar and
a solar significance. Khonsu, the Egyptian moon god, for instance, was
associated with the Spring sun, being a deity of fertility and
therefore a corn spirit; he was a form of Osiris, the Patriarch, who
sojourned on earth to teach mankind how to grow corn and cultivate
fruit trees. In the Egyptian legend Osiris received the corn seeds
from Isis, which suggests that among Great-Mother-worshipping peoples,
it was believed that agricultural civilization had a female origin.
The same myths may have been attached to corn gods and corn goddesses,
associated with water, sun, moon, and stars.

That there existed in Babylonia at an extremely remote period an
agricultural myth regarding a Patriarch of divine origin who was
rescued from a boat in his childhood, is suggested by the legend which
was attached to the memory of the usurper King Sargon of Akkad. It
runs as follows:

"I am Sargon, the mighty King of Akkad. My mother was a
vestal (priestess), my father an alien, whose brother inhabited
the
mountain.... When my mother had conceived me, she bare
me in a hidden place. She laid me in a vessel of rushes, stopped
the door thereof with pitch, and cast me adrift on the river....
The river floated me to Akki, the water drawer, who, in drawing
water, drew me forth. Akki, the water drawer, educated me as
his son, and made me his gardener. As a gardener, I was beloved
by the goddess Ishtar."

It is unlikely that this story was invented by Sargon. Like the many
variants of it found in other countries, it was probably founded on a
form of the Tammuz-Adonis myth. Indeed, a new myth would not have
suited Sargon's purpose so well as the adaptation o