Similarly transparent is the story of the assault of the seven evil spirits upon the moon, resulting in its eclipse and threatened extinction. En-lil in despair sends his messenger, the fire-god, to Ea for advice and help, which are accordingly given, and the moon-god is saved. The poem, however, is of a much older date than those we have hitherto been considering. It goes back to the time when magic still held a foremost place in the official religion of Babylonia; when Aṡari, the son of Ea, had not as yet become Bel-Merodach of Babylon; and when the cult of Ea had not been obscured by those of younger deities. In fact, it forms part of one of the incantation texts, and is described as the sixteenth book of the series on evil spirits. But the divine triads already make their appearance in it; Ea does not stand alone, but shares his powers with En-lil and Anu, while below them is the triad of Sin, Samas, and Istar. We may look upon the story as belonging to the age which saw the transformation of Sumerian animism into the syncretic State religion of later days; the Semitic gods are there, but they still retain in part the functions which distinguished them when they were “spirits” and nothing more. Between the legend of the assault upon the moon-god and the Epic of Gilgames the distance is great. Centuries of thought and development intervene between them, and there is a difference not only in degree, but also in kind. While one reminds us of the legends of Lapps or Samoyeds, the other finds its parallel in the heroic tales of Greece. Gilgames is a hero in the Greek sense of the term; he is not a god, at least for the poet of the Epic, even though he lived like Achilles and Odysseus in days when the gods took part in visible form in the affairs of men. So far as we know, it is the masterpiece of Babylonian epical literature,—a proof that however deficient the pure-blooded Semite may have been in epical and mythological genius, the mixed race of Babylonia was in this respect the rival of the Greek. Like the story of the Trojan War, the story of Gilgames attracted to it epical and mythological elements from all sides, and became a veritable treasure-house of Babylonian mythology.