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"Workman". The fact that we should now have recovered the Sumerian original of the name, which proves to have no connexion in form or meaning with the previously suggested Semitic equivalent, tends to cast doubt on other Semitic equations proposed. Both may find their true equivalents in some of the missing royal names at the head of the Sumerian Dynastic List.
From a consideration of their characters, as revealed by independent sources of evidence, we thus obtain the reason for the co-operation of four deities in the Sumerian Creation.
It may be added that in Sumerian magical compositions of this early period, of which we have not yet recovered many quite obvious examples, it is possible that the prefix "Incantation" was not so invariable as in the later magical literature. Cf. Poebel, Hist. Texts, p. 63, and Hist. and Gram. Texts, pl. i.
Certain it is that so far as historical evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race; the Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms were not composed by men who believed themselves the descendants of 'witchetty grubs. The Folk practices and ceremonies studied in these pages, the Dances, the rough Dramas, the local and seasonal celebrations, do not represent the material out of which the Attis-Adonis cult was formed, but surviving fragments of a worship from which the higher significance has vanished.
But M. Halévy started a theory to the effect that Sumerian was not a language at all, in the proper sense of the term, but was a cabalistic method of writing invented by the Semitic Babylonian priests. Drawn up by an Assyrian scribe to assist him in his studies of early texts. Photograph by Messrs. Mansell & Co.
Their "ways" must therefore be altered before they are fit to receive the worship which was accorded them by right in the simpler Sumerian tradition.
There she was known as Istar, the evening star. She had been one of those Sumerian goddesses who, in accordance with the Sumerian system, which placed the mother at the head of the family, were on an equal footing with the gods.
In both we have an abyss of waters at the beginning denoted by almost the same Semitic word, the Hebrew tehôm, translated "the deep" in Gen. i. 2, being the equivalent of the Semitic-Babylonian Tiamat, the monster of storm and flood who presents so striking a contrast to the Sumerian primaeval water.
Bricks made this way were called plano-convex because five faces were flat and the sixth convex; each bore the imprint of a thumb on the convex face, formed as the brick was ejected from the mould. Similar bricks were used in the building of the Sumerian city of Ur several thousands of years ago.
Istar, another Sumerian deity, became softened in Semitic speech to Athtar, the moon-goddess of Southern Arabia; and the connection of this moon- and cow-goddess with the similar Hathor of Egypt seems very probable. Ansar was another Sumerian god, meaning 'the sky, or the spirit world of the sky; and this might have passed into Anhar, the sky-god, known both in Upper and Lower Egypt.
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