whole community of fiends, demons and devils. [Footnote 1: _Muallidat gimrishun_.] [Footnote 2: It is probable that the idea of this Tablet is perpetuated in the "Preserved Tablet" of the Kur'an (Surah x, 62), on which the destiny of every man was written at or before the creation of the world. Nothing that is written (_maktub_) there can be erased, or altered, or fail to take effect.] [Footnote 3: (_Cun. Texts_, Part XXIV, Plate 44, l. 142).] [Illustration: Terra-cotta plaque with a Typhonic animal in relief. [No. 103,381.]] In the consultation which took place between APSU and TIAMAT, their messenger MU-UM-MU took part; of the history and attributes of this last-named god nothing is known. The result of the consultation was that a long struggle began between the demons and the gods, and it is clear that the object of the powers of darkness was to destroy the light. The whole story of this struggle is the subject of the Seven Tablets of Creation. The gods are deifications of the sun, moon, planets and other stars, and APSU, or CHAOS, and his companions the demons, are personifications of darkness, night and evil. The story of the fight between them is nothing more nor less than a picturesque allegory of natural phenomena. Similar descriptions are found in the literatures of other primitive nations, and the story of the great fight between Her-ur, the great god of heaven, and Set, the great captain of the hosts of darkness, may be quoted as an example. Set regarded the "order" which Her-ur was bringing into the universe with the same dislike as that with which APSU contemplated the beneficent work of Sin, the Moon-god, Shamash, the Sun-god, and their brother gods. And the hostility of Set and his allies to the gods, like that of Tiamat and her allies, was everlasting. [Illustration: between Marduk (Bel) and the Dragon. Drawn from a bas-relief from the Palace of Ashur-nasir-pal, King of Assyria, 885-860 B.C., at Nimrud. [Nimrud Gallery, Nos. 28 and 29.]] At this point a new Text fills a break in the First Tablet, and describes the fight which took place between Nudimmud or Ea, (the representative of the established "order" which the rule of the gods had introduced into the domain of Apsu and Tiamat) and Apsu and his envoy Mummu. Ea went forth to fight the powers of darkness and he conquered Apsu and Mummu. The victory over Apsu, i.e., the confused and boundless mass of primeval water, represents the setting of impassable boundaries to the waters that are on and under the earth, i.e., the formation of the Ocean. The exact details of the conquest cannot be given, but we know that Ea was the possessor of the "pure (or white, or holy) incantation" and that he overcame Apsu and his envoy by the utterance of a powerful spell. In the Egyptian Legend of Ra and Aapep, the monster is rendered spell-bound by the god Her-Tuati, who plays in it exactly the same part as Ea in the Babylonian Legend.