Tiamat, finding her domain becoming more and more restricted owing to the activity of the others, desired to raise battalion against battalion, and set herself to create unceasingly; but her offspring, made in her own image, appeared like those incongruous phantoms which men see in dreams, and which are made up of members borrowed from a score of different animals. They appeared in the form of bulls with human heads, of horses with the snouts of dogs, of dogs with quadruple bodies springing from a single fish-like tail. Some of them had the beak of an eagle or a hawk; others, four wings and two faces; others, the legs and horns of a goat; others, again, the hind quarters of a horse and the whole body of a man. Tiamat furnished them with terrible weapons, placed them under the command of her husband Kingu, and set out to war against the gods. * In Chaldaea, as in Egypt, nothing was supposed to have a real existence until it had received its name: the sentence quoted in the text means practically, that at that time there was neither heaven nor earth. ** Apsu has been transliterated kiracruv [in Greek], by the author an extract from whose works has been preserved by Damascius. He gives a different version of the tradition, according to which the amorphous goddess Mummu-Tiamat consisted of two persons. The first, Tauthe, was the wife of Apason; the second, Moymis, was the son of Apason and of Tauthe. The last part of the sentence is very obscure in the Assyrian text, and has been translated in a variety of different ways. It seems to contain a comparison between Apsu and Mummu-Tiamat on the one hand, and the reeds and clumps of rushes so common in Chaldaea on the other; the two divinities remain inert and unfruitful, like water-plants which have not yet manifested their exuberant growth. *** The first fragments of the Chaldaean account of the Creation were discovered by G. Smith, who described them in the _Daily Telegraph_ (of March 4, 1875), and published them in the _Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, and translated in his Chaldaean account of Genesis all the fragments with which he was acquainted; other fragments have since been collected, but unfortunately not enough to enable us to entirely reconstitute the legend. It covered at least six tablets, possibly more. Portions of it have been translated after Smith, by Talbot, by Oppert, by Lenormant, by Schrader, by Sayce, by Jensen, by Winckler, by Zimmern, and lastly by Delitzsch. Since G. Smith wrote _The Chaldaean Account_, a fragment of a different version has been considered to be a part of the dogma of the Creation, as it was put forth at Kutha. [Illustration: 006.jpg ONE OF THE EAGLE-HEADED GENII.] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from an Assyrian bas-relief from Khorsabad