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But while the conflict between Marduk and Tiâmat is an intelligible nature-myth, symbolizing the annual rainstorms that sweep over Babylonia, there is no such interpretation possible in the contest between Nergal and Allatu. The story is not even a glorification of a local deity, for Nergal appears solely in the rôle of a solar deity.
Any true 'nature-myth, any myth which accounts for the processes of nature or the aspects of natural phenomena, may conceivably have been invented separately, wherever men in an early state of thought observed the same facts, and attempted to explain them by telling a story.
Thus we have seen that the earlier part of the Myth of Cronus is a nature-myth, setting forth the cause of the separation of Heaven and Earth. Star-myths again, are everywhere similar, because men who believed all nature to be animated and personal, accounted for the grouping of constellations in accordance with these crude beliefs.
Of the various legends that we have been considering, the story of Adapa is perhaps the most significant, and none the less so for the manner in which a philosophical problem has been grafted on to a nature-myth.
The sixth tablet marks an important division in the epic. The Ishtar and Sabitum episodes and the narrative of Parnapishtim itself a compound of two independent tales, one semi-historical, the other a nature-myth represent accretions that may refer to a time when Gilgamesh had become little more than a name, a type of mankind in general.
The identification of Adapa with Marduk thus becomes apparent, and as a matter of fact the Babylonian scribes of later times accepted this identification. The basis of the Adapa legend is, therefore, the nature-myth of the annual fight of the sun with the violent elements of nature.
Still more naïve are legends which make it a beast which has once been trapped. Myths arise to account for eclipses, the waxing and waning of the moon, sunset, etc. The explanation of the rainbow as a sign of a covenant between Yahweh and Noah, is an excellent example of a nature-myth introduced as a part of a legend. There are many other sources of myths.
Their fortifications, stone-built houses, drinking-shops, and markets indicated this, just as their rude system of theology, with its divinities of Light and Darkness, or of Death and Life, each springing from the other, engaged in an eternal struggle, and yet one, was probably the survival of some elaborate nature-myth of the early world.
The introduction of Tammuz and Gishzida introduces a widely spread nature-myth into the story. Gishzida is identical with Nin-gishzida, a solar deity whom we came across in the old Babylonian pantheon. Tammuz similarly is a solar deity. Both represent local solar cults.
Adapa is made to play the rôle of Marduk, and it is nothing short of remarkable that at so early a period as the one to which the existence of the story can be traced back, a nature-myth should have been diverted from its original purpose and adapted to the end that the Adapa story serves in its present form. The process involved in this adaptation is a complicated one.
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