and Egyptian statues, paintings,
and seals, which are the product of that early thought for which there
was no essential difference between man and beast. The festival in which
the gods carouse is of a piece with the divine Ethiopian feasts of
Homer. On the other hand, the idea of the omnipotence of the divine
word, when Marduk makes the garment disappear and reappear, is scarcely
a primitive one. It is substantially identical with the Biblical "Let it
be, and it was." It is probable that the poem had a long career, and in
successive recensions received the coloring of different generations.
Tiamat herself has a long history. Here she is a dragon who assaults the
gods; elsewhere, as we have seen, she is the mother of the gods; here
also her body forms the heaven and the earth. She appears in Gen. i. 2
as the Tehom, the primeval abyss. In the form of the hostile dragon she
is found in numerous passages of the Old Testament, though under
different names. She is an enemy of Yahwe, god of Israel, and in the New
Testament (Rev. xii.) the combat between Marduk and Tiamat is
represented under the form of a fight between Michael and the Dragon. In
Christian literature Michael has been replaced by St. George. The old
Babylonian conception has been fruitful of poetry, representing, as it
does, in grand form the struggle between the chaotic and the formative
forces of the universe.

The most considerable of the old Babylonian poems, so far as length and
literary form are concerned, is that which has been commonly known as
the Izdubar epic. The form of the name is not certain: Mr. Pinches has
recently proposed, on the authority of a Babylonian text, to write it
Gilgamesh, and this form has been adopted by a number of scholars. The
poem (discovered by George Smith in 1872) is inscribed on twelve
tablets, each tablet apparently containing a separate episode.

The first tablet introduces the hero as the deliverer of his country
from the Elamites, an event which seems to have taken place before 2000
B.C. Of the second, third, fourth, and fifth tablets, only fragments
exist, but it appears that Gilgamesh slays the Elamite tyrant.

The sixth tablet recounts the love of Ishtar for the hero, to whom she
proposes marriage, offering him the tribute of the land. The reason he
assigns for his rejection of the goddess is the number and fatal
character of her loves. Among the objects of her affection were a wild
eagle, a lion, a war-horse, a