However this may be, Thoth was the creator of the world through the word of his mouth. In the cosmogony of Hermopolis the universe and the gods that direct it are the creation of his word, which later ages refined into the sound of his voice. From Hermopolis the doctrine passed to other parts of Egypt, and under the Theban dynasties tended to displace or absorb the older Heliopolitan doctrine of creation by generation. But the doctrine was known also in Babylonia, where the god whose word is creative was Asari, the Merodach of the Semites. In the Babylonian Epic of the Creation the “word” of Merodach creates and destroys, like the “word” of Yahweh in the Old Testament. I must leave to another lecture the consideration as to how far the Logos of Alexandrine philosophy has been influenced by the theology of Hermopolis. Whether Thoth were originally Nu or not, Nu at all events forms the second member of the Hermopolitan Ennead. Professor Maspero has shown that it was modelled on the Ennead of Heliopolis.(95) But in accordance with the more abstract character of the cosmogony of which it was a part, the divinities of which it is composed are abstractions that look strangely out of place in the Egyptian Pantheon. Nu is provided with the feminine Nut, who is not to be confounded with the old goddess of the sky, and from them are derived the successive pairs Ḥeḥui and Ḥeḥet, Kek and Keket, Nini and Ninit, “eternity,” “darkness,” and “inertia.”(96) The whole scheme is Asiatic rather than Egyptian, but the gods composing it are already mentioned in the Pyramid texts. The four pairs of abstract deities constituted “the eight” gods after whom Hermopolis received one of its names (Khmunu, now Ashmunên), and who were often addressed as “the god eight,” like “the god seven” in Babylonia. Professor Maspero sees in them a philosophical development of the four cynocephalous apes who accompanied Thoth and saluted the first streak of dawn. But the development is difficult to follow, and the apes who are the companions of the god probably had another origin. They certainly must have come from the Sudân; no apes were indigenous in Egypt in historical times. Moreover, it was only the Thoth of Hermopolis in Upper Egypt in whose train they were found; the Thoth of Hermopolis Parva in the Delta, properly speaking, knew them not. But from an early epoch “the five gods”—Thoth and his four ape-followers, whose likeness he sometimes adopted—had been worshipped at Eshmunên. Its temple was called “the Abode of the Five,” and its high priest “the great one of the House of the Five.”(97)