“In Eridu a vine(305) grew over-shadowing; in a holy place was it brought forth; its root was of bright lapis, set in the world beneath. The path of Ea was in Eridu,(306) teeming with fertility. His seat (there) is the centre of the earth; his couch is the bed of the primeval mother.(307) Into the heart of its holy house, which spreads its shade like a forest, hath no man entered. In its midst is Tammuz, between the mouths of the rivers on both sides.”(308) The sacred tree of the garden of Eridu was, however, not the tree of life. It was rather the tree of knowledge. This is shown by an inscription of Eri-Aku or Arioch, in which he describes himself as “the executor of the oracle of the sacred tree of Eridu.” Perhaps it is to the same tree that reference is made in a magical text, in which a man possessed of “the seven evil spirits” is healed with the help of “the tree which shatters the power of the incubus, and upon whose core the name of Ea is recorded.”(309) But Ea was not only the god of wisdom, he was also the god of “life,” and the trees of both wisdom and life might therefore be fitly placed under his protection. When Babylon became the supreme head of Babylonia under Khammurabi and his successors, the creative functions of Ea were usurped by Merodach. A long poem celebrating the glories and power of Merodach, his struggle with chaos and creation of the world, and, finally, his formal investiture with the names and prerogatives of Ea, has been preserved to us in part. Ever since its discovery by Mr. George Smith it has been known as the Epic of the Creation, and the parallelism between the first tablet composing it and the first chapter of Genesis has long attracted attention. But the poem is of late date. It belongs to an age of religious syncretism and materialistic philosophy; the mythological beings of popular belief are resolved into cosmological principles, and the mythological dress in which they appear has a theatrical effect. The whole poem reminds us of the stilted and soulless productions of the eighteenth century, in which commonplace ideas and a prosaic philosophy masquerade as Greek nymphs or Roman gods. It is only here and there, as in the description of the contest with Tiamât, or in the concluding lines,—if, indeed, they belong to the poem at all,—that it rises above the level of dull mediocrity.