Cosmology.--In early Sumerian days the heaven was believed to rest on the peak of 'the mountain of the world,' in the far north-east, where the gods had their habitations (cf. Isa. xiv. 13), while an ocean or 'deep' encircled the earth which rested upon its surface. With the progress of knowledge truer ideas of geography came to prevail. The later cosmogony is represented in the first tablet of the Creation story where the old gods are resolved into cosmical elements. The 'deep' is said to have been 'the generator' of the heavens and the earth, 'Mummu-Tiamat' (the chaos of the sea) being 'the mother of them all.... At that time the gods had not appeared.... Then the [great] gods were created, Lakhmu and Lakhamu issued forth the first.' Next came the creation of An-sar and Ki-sar, 'the upper' and 'lower firmament,' who in their turn gave birth to Anu, Ea, and Bel. The struggle between Merodach, the god of light and order, with Tiamat, the dragon of darkness, chaos, and evil, occupied a prominent place in the Epic of the Creation. Along with Tiamat there were ranged in battle the evil creatures of night and destruction, most of whom had composite forms. The belief in them had been inherited from the age of Shamanism, and they were regarded as the products of a first and imperfect creation. Some of them came to symbolize the powers of darkness, others were transported to the skies, certain of the allies of Tiamat being the Zodiacal animals, while out of the skin of Tiamat Merodach constructed the heaven itself. In the Epic Tiamat is identified with the source of the fountains of the great deep. CHAPTER V BABYLONIAN AND ASSYRIAN LITERATURE Aids to the reading of the texts.--The origin of the cuneiform system of writing has been already described, as well as its chief peculiarities. We must now say something about the causes which have led to our being able to read an ordinary Assyrian text almost as easily as a page of the Old Testament. (1) The 'determinatives' have already been mentioned which define so many words and names. (2) The ideographs often prove a great assistance, as words of unknown meaning interchange with ideographs the signification of which is already known. (3) The fact that the characters express syllables gives us the precise pronunciation of the words, and so enables us to read them with a certainty which is impossible in Hebrew or Phoenician where the vowels are not denoted in writing. (4) Assyrian is a Semitic language, and the Semitic languages are as closely related to one another as are the Romanic languages (French, Italian, Spanish, &c.) in modern Europe. Consequently most of the words and grammatical forms found in Assyrian recur in one or other of the Semitic idioms. (5) But above all, the Assyrian scribes themselves have provided us with the most abundant materials for interpreting the inscriptions.