of the storm-cloud have been likened to snakes, the lightning-flashes have been held to be serpents, and the waterspout has been imagined to be a huge dragon. Dr. Smythe Palmer quotes numerous examples of such beliefs or comparisons, and refers to various passages in the Old Testament, more especially the book of Job, where allusion is made to them. In Babylonia itself, moreover, the ocean which was said to encircle the earth was called a serpent.[1]
Tiâmat and her demoniac allies were reproduced in the rebellious angels of Jewish belief and the Satan of the Middle Ages. The figure of Tiâmat flying from Merodach, as the Dragon flies from the Archangel Michael, which is sculptured on one of the Assyrian bas-reliefs now in the British Museum, might almost stand for a picture of the mediæval devil. Claws, horns, wings, and tail are all there. Indeed, we can now trace historically the successive steps by which the Babylonian impersonation of Chaos passed into the Satan of European legend; and those who wish to study them can do so in Dr. Smythe Palmer's volume. Apocryphal and canonical books, Church Fathers, and popular imagination have all helped in the process.
Dr. Smythe Palmer is content to begin with Tiâmat, and therefore leaves untouched a problem of which a satisfactory solution has not yet been found. Babylonian mythology, as we have seen, makes Tiâmat, "the deep," the representative of chaos and evil, both physical and moral. But "the deep" was also the dwelling-place of Ea, the god of wisdom and culture, who first taught men to be civilised and instilled into them the principles of order and
- ↑ Dr. Smythe Palmer seems to think that by the word tannin the Hebrew writers understood a serpent only. When used of Egypt, however, as in Is. li. 9, Ezek. xxix. 3, Ps. Ixxiv. 13, it must denote a crocodile, and it is curious that the confusion between the crocodile and the dragon survived into mediæval Europe. This was probably due to the fact that the prototype of St. George and the Dragon, as has been shown by Clermont-Ganneau, was the late Egyptian representations of Horus overcoming the crocodile. At all events, the "dragon" slain by St. Bertrand, whose skin is still preserved in the cathedral of St. Bertrand de Comminges, is a small crocodile; so too was the "dragon" destroyed by the Rhodian knight Dieudonné, which was hung up over one of the gates of Amboise until the walls were pulled down in the early part of the present century. In Rhodes itself the "dragon" slain by the knight is often carved on the screens of the churches, and it always has the form of a crocodile.
