Page:The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).djvu/89

 the Tiamat of the Creation text and the Tauthe of Damascius.

The Assyrian word Mummu is probably connected with the Hebrew, confusion, and one of its equivalents is Umun, equal to the Hebrew noise or tumult. Beside the name of the chaotic deep called in Genesis, which is, as I have said, evidently the Tiamat of the Creation text, we have in Genesis the word, waste, desolate, or formless, applied to this chaos. This appears to be the tehuta of the Assyrians—a name of the sea-water ("History of Assurbanipal," p. 59); this word is closely connected with the word tiamat or tamtu, the sea. The correspondence between the inscription and Genesis is here complete, both stating that a watery chaos preceded the creation, and formed, in fact, the origin and groundwork of the universe. We have here not only an agreement in sense, but, what is rarer, the same word used in both narratives as the name of this chaos, and given also in the account of Damascius. Berosus has certainly the slightly different form Thalatth, with the same sense however, and it might be suspected that this word was a corruption of Tiamat, but the Babylonian word is read Tiamtu, Tiamat, and Tisallat, which last is more probably the origin of the word Thalatth of Berosus.

Next we have in the inscription the creation of the gods Lahma or Lahmu, and Lahama or Lahamu; these are male and female personifications of motion and production, and correspond to the Dache and