The lines are the introduction to a story of the Creation of which they form an integral part. On the walls of the Pyramid of Pepi I. we read again almost the same words. Pepi, it is said, "was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not, the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was no death."(194) But here the words have been introduced without connection with the context; they cohere neither with what precedes nor with what follows them, and are evidently nothing but an old formula torn from the cosmogony to which they once belonged, and repeated without a clear understanding of what they really meant. The phrases are found again in the later religious literature of Egypt, embedded in it like flies in amber or the fossils in an old sea-beach.(195) To recover their original meaning we must betake ourselves to the clay tablets of Assyria and Babylonia, and the cosmological theories of early Chaldæa. They presuppose that story of a creation out of the chaos of the deep which was indigenous in Babylonia alone.
This deep, which lay at the foundation of Babylonian cosmology, was symbolised in the temples by a "sea" across which the images of the gods were carried in "ships" on their days of festival. In Babylonia such "seas" had a reason for their existence. The Persian Gulf, it was believed, was the cradle of Babylonian culture; it was also the source of that cosmogony which saw in the deep the "mother" of all things. That it should have its mimic representatives in the temples of the country was but natural; it was from the "deep" that the gods had come, and the deep was still the home of the culture-god Ea.(196)
In Egypt, on the other hand, the sea was out of place nay more, it was altogether unnatural. If water were needed, the sacred Nile flowed at the foot of the temple or else there were canals which conducted the waters of the river through the temple lands. There was no primeval deep to be symbolised, no Persian Gulf out of which the culture-god had risen with the gifts of civilisation. If the gods desired to sail in their barks, it was reasonable to suppose that they would do so on the Nile or its tributary canals. And yet the supposition would be wrong. The gods had indeed their sacred "ships" as in Babylonia; but, as in Babylonia, it was on an artificially-constructed lake that they floated, and not, as a rule, on the river Nile. Could anything indicate more clearly the origin of the religious beliefs and practices of the Pharaonic Egyptians? Like the brick tombs of the Old Empire, with their recessed panels and pilasters, it points to Babylonia and the cosmological theories which had their birth in the Babylonian plain.(197)