For early Babylonian cosmogony our main evidence is the epic poem of creation, preserved on tablets found in the library of King Assurbanipal, which elucidates, and in the main corroborates, the fragments of the story given by Berosos in the third century B.C. Our earliest record, then, is actually of the seventh century, but Assyriologists have given reasons for the view that the epic copied for Assurbanipal descends from a period as early as B.C. 2000; for part of it accords with an old Babylonian hymn that has been discovered.[179.2] The document is therefore ancient enough for the purposes of our comparison. It is well known through various {180} publications, and can be read conveniently in the detailed exposition of King in his handbook on Babylonian religion.[180.1] When we consider carefully the more significant features in this cosmogony, we are struck with its almost total unlikeness to anything that we can discover or surmise in early Hellenic thought. It is true that the Babylonian theory starts with the dogma that the earliest cosmic fact was the element of water. Apsu and Tiâmat are the first powers in an unordered universe, and these seem to be the personal forms of the upper and lower waters, the fresh and the salt. We find the parallel thought in Homer, who speaks of Okeanos as “the source of all things,”[180.2] including even the gods. But the value of such a parallelism is of the slightest, for the vague theory of a watery origin of created things appears widely diffused in the myths of remote peoples, for instance, North-American Indians, Aztecs, the Vedic Aryans, and there is a glimmer of it in the old Norse.[180.3] No conclusion, then, can be drawn from so slight a coincidence. If we know anything of the cosmogony of the pre-Homeric society we know it from Hesiod, for Homer himself shows no interest and makes no revelation on the subject. With certain reservations and after careful criticism we may be able to regard some parts of the Hesiodic statement as reflecting the thought of an age anterior to Homer’s. Therefore it is of some present value to observe how little of characteristically Babylonian speculation appears in the Hesiodic Theogony or {181} _Works and Days_. Both systems agree with each other, and--it may be said--with all theogonies and religious cosmogonies, in regarding the primeval creative forces as personal powers who work either by the method of sexual generation or through mechanical processes of creation: the first of these methods, which though mythical in form has more affinity with organic science, is predominant over the other in the Hesiodic narrative. But the personal powers are different in the two systems. In the Babylonian the greatest of the primeval dynasts is Tiâmat, the sea, the mother of the gods and also of all monsters: in the Hesiodic it is Gaia, the Earth-mother, who does not appear at all in the Eastern cosmogony, but