In the bilingual account of the Creation one seems to get a glimpse of the pride that the ancient Babylonians felt in the ancient and renowned cities of their country. The writer’s conception of the wasteness and voidness of the earth in the beginning seems to have been that the ancient cities Babel, Niffer, Erech and Eridu had not yet come into existence. For him, those sites were as much creations as the vegetation and animal life of the earth. Being, for him, sacred sites, they must have had a sacred, a divine foundation, and he therefore attributes their origin to the greatest of the gods, Merodach, who built them, brick, and beam, and house, himself. Their renowned temples, too, had their origin at the hands of the Divine Architect of the Universe. A few words are necessary in elucidation of what follows the line, “When within the sea there was a stream.” “In that day,” it says, “Êridu was made, Ê-sagila was constructed—Ê-sagila which the god Lugal-du-azaga founded within the Abyss. Babylon he built, Ê-sagila was completed.” The connection of Ê-sagila, “the temple of the lofty head,” which was within the Abyss, with Êridu, shows, with little or no doubt, that the Êridu there referred to was not the earthly city of that name, but a city conceived as lying also “within the Abyss.” This Êridu, as we shall see farther on, was the “blessed city,” or Paradise, wherein was the tree of life, and which was watered by the twin stream of the Tigris and the Euphrates. But there was another Ê-sagila than that founded by the god Lugal-du-azaga within the Abyss, namely the Ê-sagila at Babylon, and it is this fane that is spoken of in the phrase following that mentioning the temple so called within the Abyss. To the Babylonian, therefore, the capital of the country was, in that respect, a counterpart of the divine city that he regarded as the abode of bliss, where dwelt Nammu, the river-god, and the sun-god Dumuzi-Abzu, or “Tammuz of the Abyss.” Like Sippar too, Babylon was situated in what was called the plain, the _edina_, of which Babylonia mainly consisted, and which is apparently the original of the Garden of Eden. The present text differs from that of the longer (Semitic) story of the Creation, in that it makes Merodach to be the creator of the gods, as well as of mankind, and all living things. This, of course, implies that it was composed at a comparatively late date, when the god Merodach had become fully recognized as the chief divinity, and the fact that Aa was his father had been lost sight of, and practically forgotten. The goddess Aruru is apparently introduced into the narrative out of consideration for the city Sippar-Aruru, of which she was patron. In another text she is called “Lady of the gods of Sippar and Aruru.” There is also a goddess (perhaps identical with her) called Gala-aruru, “Great Aruru,” or “the great one (of) Aruru,” who is explained as “Ištar the star,” on the tablet K. 2109.