the Creation resembled passages in the early chapters of the Book of
Genesis." During the next twenty years, the Creation texts were
copied and recopied by many Assyriologists, but no publication
appeared in which all the material available for reconstructing the
Legend was given in a collected form. In 1898, the Trustees of the
British Museum ordered the publication of all the Creation texts
contained in the Babylonian and Assyrian Collections, and the late
Mr. L. W. King, Assistant in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian
Antiquities, was directed to prepare an edition. The exhaustive
preparatory search which he made through the collections of tablets in
the British Museum resulted in the discovery of many unpublished
fragments of the Creation Legends, and in the identification of a
fragment which, although used by George Smith, had been lost sight of
for about twenty-five years. He ascertained also that, according to
the Ninevite scribes, the Tablets of the Creation Series were seven in
number, and what several versions of the Legend of the Creation, the
works of Babylonian and Assyrian editors of different periods, must
have existed in early Mesopotamian Libraries. King's edition of the
Creation Texts appeared in "Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in
the British Museum," Part XIII, London, 1901. As the scope of this
work did not permit the inclusion of his translations, and commentary
and notes, he published these in a private work entitled, "The Seven
Tablets of Creation, or the Babylonian and Assyrian Legends concerning
the creation of the world and of mankind," London, 1902, 8vo. A
supplementary volume contained much new material which had been found
by him since the appearance of the official edition of the texts, and
in fact doubled the number of Creation Texts known hitherto.

[Illustration: Babylonian map of the world, showing the ocean
surrounding the world and making the position of Babylon on the