Kingship in Ancient Assyria

[This is a chapter from Echoes of Eternity. Of interest to those interested in the origins of the discussion of ethics and morality. Did Socrates initiate interest in these questions? Did Aristotle build his discussion of ethics on ideas in his own head? A close look at the ideas of kingship and divinity in the Near East, in the centuries before classical Greece, suggests otherwise.]

The Excellence of the King

Throughout the texts and inscriptions and iconography we are presented with images of the king as a kind of perfection. He is at the apex of the social structure of Assyria and is its principal priest (in terms of his participation in the key rituals). Thus he is the most excellent of human beings and holds his position because of his theoretical excellence in all aspects of Assyrian life: exercising the virtues of kingship, justice, statecraft, warfare, divination, administration, etc.

It would be easy to argue that the king was understood to have the privilege of contact with the divine on account of his pre-eminence in human society; almost that the king arrogated this privilege to himself on account of his power to do so. However this would be to retroject a secularism into Assyrian society which the evidence does not warrant.

The office of priest, for example, is not distinguished by a term which we can easily equate with "priest". The kalu-priest is designated simply "kalu". In other words, the function of these officials is not seen as apart from the function of the rest of the Assyrian social structure: religion and society are inextricably intertwined, having never been conceived as separate ways of looking at the world (Compare for example the elaborate intertwining of everyday life and the understanding of the structure of the world illustrated by Marcel Griaule's study of Dogon belief: Conversations with Ogotemeli). The term "apkallum" (used to describe Adapa's priesthood of Ea at Eridu) was understood by the Assyrians to be a term indicating a mortal sage, though in connection with Adapa I think the term to have a technical meaning.

In any case, there is little evidence that people thought in antiquity this way up. Even if someone did steal privileges by virtue of his power to do so, the act would be understood and explained within a moral framework, and the success of the act would depend on the will of the gods. When Esarhaddon entered Nineveh and sat on the throne of his father, he describes how

"favourable powers drew close in heaven and earth... messages of gods and goddesses they sent me continuously and gave me courage"[Borger, R. Die Inschriften Asarhaddons (AfO Beiheft 9), 1959, Nin. A-F Ep. 2] (Translation supplied by A.T.L. Kuhrt).

Instead, much of the evidence is explained if we infer that the king understood that he owed his privileges of contact with the gods and his rulership over mankind to his excellence and perfection. In other words, that his wisdom and power came to him by virtue of his perfection, not only in eminence among men, but among all men.

The king is described as "king of kings", which concept may have been understood as essential to the function of his kingship, and not merely as a vainglorious styling. From the Assyrian point of view, the reason why there is a point of contact between the king and the gods at all is because they have something in common, and that the point of contact is precisely the pre-eminence, the excellence, and the perfection of the king in all his roles. It is this commonality which establishes the harmony between the world of man and that of the gods. Cf. Plato, Timaeus 31c-32c; also Aristotle, Politics 1277a, and Nicomachean Ethics Bk. X, chap. 8.

In antiquity in general, perfection is understood as a kind of completion: the perfect is that which is complete, and that which is complete is perfect. Thus the king is also complete, in his attainments, his power, his wisdom and his capacity. In this the king emulates the divine, all aspects of which must be complete in their own natures.

That completion was understood as a virtue in itself is illustrated by the fact in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, sin was often countered not by attempting to undo the sin directly, but by the perfect performance of rituals and incantations. Each of these, properly performed, counted towards the expiation of the sin, irrespective of the nature of the sin. Thus, to undo the damage done by the sin, it is not necessary to repair the damage, to make good the imperfection, directly (often impossible – see the "Sin of Sargon" text in SAA vol. IV, Starr): to undertake repair without regard to context but complete attention to purpose is the requirement. See SLA 323 [= Harper 629], lines 13-17, which illustrates that completions in the abstract are efficacious. Thus, in acting as "apkallum" (standing in for the god Ea) in rituals necessary for the continuation of the Assyrian state (as illustrated in the throne room relief where the king is shown apparently engaged in the business of fertilizing the date palm represented as a sacred tree) the ritual is brought closer to the divine creation, and the consonance of the act with the divine will is emphasised.

The king was "chosen" by the gods because of his special excellence and his virtue, and he was the person responsible for performing very special actions. Everything associated with the act being performed was of equal and critical importance: upon the timing of the ritual depended its success - see SLA 342 [= Harper 406], where the auspicious day for a sacrifice is discussed; see also SLA 344 [= Harper 365], and SLA 328 [= Harper 356]. Oaths were a matter for auspicious days also, and the king was available to be visited likewise only when the day was right - see SLA 341 [= Harper 384].

The king is the agent of the divine in the fight against chaos and the maintenance of order in his realm (which struggle might be characterized as war with the imperfect and the incomplete: compare for example the "Enuma Elish" and the strange creatures which were made in the first creation). Heidel The Babylonian Genesis. pp. 23-4 [Tablet I, lines 132-45]. See also pp. 75-81 for the surviving Greek accounts by Berossus and Alexander Polyhistor.  The struggle against chaos is vividly illustrated in the palace reliefs according to the metaphor of the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. The lion hunt sculptures from the palace of Ashurbanipal echo this struggle. The king is also the final judge, meaning that his insight into the true nature of matters is second to none - see SLA 322 [= Harper 1006].

The divine is understood as some place on the other side of the limit of the world which the king rules, from which he is excluded except in terms of priestly contact.* SLA 327 [= Harper 565], which illustrates the fact that we are excluded from the celestial world except via observation. He is near to the divine, but not so proximate to qualify as divine himself. Though a letter suggests that part of the aura of the king was the power to do exactly as he wished - see SLA 324 [= Harper 137]. To those lower down the social scale in Assyria this might count as divinity; but to those able to juggle with the pattern of ideas within which Assyrian royalty functioned, it would connote no more than proximity with the divine - see SLA 137 [= Harper 992].

As the most perfect individual in his state the king nearly emulates the divine in containing all things: he is complete. The completion of his nature and that of Assur can be made concrete by its literal realization. The king is "king of kings", and this can be made real by conquest and the subjection of surrounding states from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea. Hence also his description as "king of countries" and "king of the four quarters (lit., edges) of the world".

It is possible that his "official" moods were in imitation of the gods, understood to be manifest in the motions of the planets: the Crown Prince was excluded from the presence of the King when Mars was in opposition to the Sun and hence subject to retrograde motions (which exclusion is an interesting reflection of the Adapa myth,of central importance to Sargonid kingship: Ea knew that Adapa was not fit to appear in the presence of Anu without some schooling in what to say) SLA 328 [= Harper 356]; see also SLA 342 [= Harper 356]; SLA 344 [= Harper 365]; SLA 345 [= Harper 652]. The same sort of equation was made between the geography of the Mesopotamian world and the surface of the moon at the time of lunar eclipse – see SLA 322 [= Harper 1006]. Roaf in his Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia illustrates this letter, but gives no citation (22 May 678 B.C.). See also SLA 324 [= Harper 137]. See also Parpola's Doctoral Thesis, Letters of Assyrian Scholars to Ashurbanipal and Esarhaddon 1971, Appendix 3B.

It is difficult to specify exactly what is going on here, but it would appear that there is some kind of transactive relationship understood to exist between the abstract (gods) and the concrete (the earthly responsibilities of the king): the character of some of the acts for which we have evidence is best explained by presuming that the principal point of the acts was to create a harmony between heaven and earth; to act as agents, the viziers of the divine, not to supplant its position, or to exploit it for personal ends. Prestige and propaganda are naturally of significance in a world dominated by metaphors (the king being a metaphor for the divine), but the state machine is driven by, both the internal logic of its theology, and the theology functioning as a tool of state. In any case, the distinction between the character of the state and the will of the gods has not yet been made.

The Assyrian concept of nobility

In Assyria justice was not based upon equity, but upon who you were. Thus, the kind of treatment one might expect depended upon what kind of position one occupied in the social structure. In other words the arrangement of society was hierarchical, and the honour and moral worth of an individual depended upon his social position (which, given the complexity of the court and society, might not be reflected by means of the possession of a title). Hence the poor and the helpless by definition were morally worthless, deserving pity; and the rich and the powerful, also by definition, were naturally of high moral character SLA 329 [= Harper 1237], which illustrates that only the divine can exist in harmony. Thus, the more noble the individual (reflected by social position), the greater the proximity to the divine.

The basis of such a social system is teleological: each social position being understood as a rung on the ladder with the divine at the very top; the king stood in close proximity to the divine. The divinity represented a perfect completion, each social position being a more or less imperfect emulation (though perhaps achieving its own special completion of no significant worth). It would seem however that sometimes the hierarchical order could be reversed, for reasons which are difficult to understand: see SLA 329 [= Harper 1237].â Since completion and perfection were the criteria by which the excellence of acts, things and people were judged, fact and value interpenetrate. Everything in such a world speaks of its meaning.

This of course means that the moral structure of the Assyrian state ought to be intelligible, at least to some extent, in terms of Aristotle's understanding of the way human beings ought to function, since in both the Politics and the Ethics he discusses actions and structures in  terms of honour and completion. Herodotus too constructed his Histories on the basis of a teleological model, interestingly associating space and direction with moral qualities [see also Aristotle, Politics 1327b-1328a].

Both of these writers lived some time after the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which means that caution is important. Herodotus however lived close enough in time to at least contemplate writing a history of Assyria. Though Greek and Assyrian cultures are clearly quite different entities, a comparison between the two might shed considerable light on the latter.

The King and Totality

The concept of totality as a feature of both the Adapa (myth and discipline) and Assyrian theology, arises as the logical corollary of the association of the king with perfection, and thus completion: it is another way of framing the idea that the universe is structured according to degrees of participation in the ultimate completion (the realm of the divine). This ultimate completion is transcendent, in that we can have no commerce with it except via individuals with a special quality in common (temporary or permanent). However, the essential characteristic of the divine, if it cannot exist in the world, can be emulated within the limitations imposed by the nature of earthly reality. Hence we find the king engaged in conquest and empire building, attempting to take hold of the known universe and to subject it to his will (which is naturally the will of the divine). This ambition (if not necessarily the reality) is reflected in the style of the king’s inscriptions, whether addressed to a human or divine audience. Client kings make sense within this emulatory system: he need not rule directly, just as Marduk need not. A proxy representative (bound by oaths to the Assyrian king, justas the king is bound by oath to the god) is not only satisfactory, but fits harmoniously into the Assyrian model of the world.

Aristotle was insistent that, while a man might be regarded as a god among men, a man could not be divine while still living, because the divine has a strict definition. Man is connected with the divine in a participatory sense through the accomplishment of ends and completion. While man has existence on earth he cannot be truly divine (though he might be truly human only by virtue of something of the divine within him).

That Aristotle's definition of the divine is traditional is supported by the fact that no clear evidence exists for the paying of divine honours to a Greek (while still alive) before and including Alexander the Great (Heroic honours being a quite different matter: the different species of honours require to be clearly distinguished).

That the teleological world view was important in the fourth century B.C. is illustrated vividly by the proskynesis debate at the Persian court of Alexander. The best account is by Arrian, and it presents the debate as a struggle between theteleological view of divinity (of which he must have been aware, having been Aristotle's pupil) and the Democritean view of theological matters (in which nothing happens according to fortune, for there is nothing beyond the meaningless concourse of atoms). The debate is a miniature of the struggle between Plato's Gods and Giants (the Sophist): ironically Anaxarchus tempted Alexander to side with the giants in order that he be regarded as a god. Thus it is a fourth century miniature of the struggle between the ancient teleology (in which actual divinity is incompatible with complete physical existence), and the moderns (who restrict themselves to dealing with the idea that divinity is a metaphor, with only the meaning with which it is invested by its devotees).

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind

 

The Babylonian writer Berossus (possibly a Greek form of the name Bēl-uşur), took up residence in Athens, after having been a priest of Bel in Babylon in the late 4^th century/early 3^rd century B.C.E. He wrote a three volume work, Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost, which was a study on the culture and history of Babylonia. Alexander Polyhistor made an abridgement of this work in the first century B.C.E., also lost. However this abridgement was available to the christian writer Eusebius (4^th century C.E), and also Josephus in the first century C.E. The passages which they quoted from Polyhistor and a few other authors survive. As Black and Green write, “Akkadian mythological and historical texts found in modern excavations have largely confirmed the authenticity of the tradition represented by Berossus.”  [1]  This includes the tradition of the Seven Sages, preserved in the account by Berossus (in his first book) of the eight creatures, beginning with Oannes and concuding with Odakon, which emerged from the sea bringing to man the civilising arts, including agriculture. His second book covered the history of Babylonia from the ‘ten kings before the flood’, through the Flood itself.

The Babylonian tradition is indeed that seven apkallu or sages lived before the flood. Their names are given in Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian ritual texts, as well as the seven cities from which they are supposed to come, though there are differing traditions within Mesopotamia about the sages and their origins which are difficult to reconcile.

Apollodorus has preserved a fragment of Berossus, which tells us that the first of the Chaldean Kings was Alorus of Babylon, followed by Alaparus and also Amelon who came from Pantibiblon, followed by Ammenon the Chaldean. In the reign of Ammenon, the sage Oannes appeared from the sea.  [2]  Polyhistor gives us detail drawn from Berossus about this appearance, after Berossus describes the Babylon of those times as: a great resort of people of various nations, who inhabited Chaldaea, and lived without rule and order like the beast of the field’:

In the first year there made its appearance, from a part of the Erythraean sea which bordered upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, who was called Oannes. (According to the account of Apollodorus) the whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and had under a fish’s head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.

The fishtailed images found upon the slabs of Assyrian Palaces and on cylinder seals are representations of this first sage, preserved even until our own much later day. The appearance of Oannes in ritual contexts with the King or the Sacred Tree, or both together, tells us that the earliest days of mankind are being recalled, and that an element of re-enactment or revitalisation is being invoked in these images.

Polyhistor’s account of Berossus’ first book continues:

This Being in the day-time used to converse with men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and shewed them how to collect fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and humanize mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing material has been added by way of material improvement. When the sun set it was the custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep; for he was amphibious.

Creatures which were amphibious were of interest in antiquity because they could inhabit more than one world, as Oannes does here. Not only can he live and breathe under water, and converse with man in the daytime, but he is equipped with what is clearly divine knowledge – the knowledge of writing and of various sciences and arts, house-building, the founding of temples (and implicitly the worship of the gods), law, geometry, botany. The order of the sciences and arts is interesting here, in that house-building comes before the founding of temples, and knowledge of the law comes after the knowledge of the founding of temples. This reflects a conflation of a likely sequence – men will have built houses before they embarked on temples and the development of law and geometry – with a theoretical sequence of the founding of temples and the worship of the gods, the knowledge of whom will have given rise to the knowledge of law and its importance, and the application of the idea of law to the measuring and demarcation of space using the techniques of geometry. The development of botanical knowledge, and the division of the parts of nature, represents the application of the idea of demarcation to the world of plants, as the precursor to agriculture.

The softening of manners is not the thing of principal importance here, but something which is absolutely necessary – it is impossible to have an organised population, subject to reason and the law, able to build houses and temples, and most importantly worship the gods, if they are not free of the daily struggle for survival, in which they are not distinguished in any significant way from the beasts of the field.

The instructions which came from Oannes are described as ‘so universal’, that nothing of any significance ‘has been added by way of material improvement’. These instructions are clearly divine and the product of divine knowledge, and came from the gods by way of the Sage Oannes, who rests in the sea. Recalled here is the shrine of the god Ea/Enki, the ‘broad-eared’ one of wide learning, which is at the bottom of the Apsu, among the sweet waters. The image of the obverse of our world is doubled by associating the return of Oannes to the deep at sunset, where the sun leaves our world in darkness. The human race is illuminated only when Oannes is on land, and conversing with us. It is also of some significance that the point is made that Oannes does not eat ‘at that season’, but receives his sustenance at some other time – implicitly while he is below the waters of the deep, in the place of Ea/Enki, in the Abyss, where all good things which may be had have their ultimate origin.

Polyhistor’s account also tells us that ‘Oannes wrote concerning the generation of mankind; of their different ways of life, and of their civil polity’. Berossus gives the purport of what he said:

There was a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings, which were produced of a two-fold principle. Men appeared with two wings, some with four and with two faces. They had one body but two heads; the one of a man, the other of a woman. They were likewise in their several organs both male and female. Other human figures were to be seen with the legs and horns of goats. Some had horses’ feet; others had the limbs of a horse behind, but before were fashioned like men, resembling hippocentaurs. Bulls likewise bred there with the heads of men; and dogs with fourfold bodies, and the tails of fishes. Also horses with the heads of dogs: men too and other animals, with the heads and bodies of horses and the tails of fishes. In short, there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals.

Here Berossus describes the properties of the Abyss. It is unilluminated and full of waters which contain beings whose characteristics and properties are not defined by any of the rules which apply on the earth – men have the feet of horses, some have wings, some have two heads, male and female. Bulls have the heads of men, horses have the heads of dogs, etc. These are not ‘seeds of the earth’, but of a realm in which the demarcations and separations in the animal kingdom of the earth are collapsed together and mixed to an infinite degree. In some ways the situation can be paralleled with the disorder in the life of man before the appearance of Oannes from the waters of the sea: the fact that this description follows on immediately from that account suggests this quite strongly. And as the beasts of the field were the precursors of a humanized mankind, so the Abyss is the precursor of another creation, in which order is given to the ‘seeds of the earth’. Berossus says that these creatures, plus ‘fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals…..assumed each other’s shape and countenance’  my emphasis . This is an image of a dynamic chaos, in which everything is intermingled; all possibility is here, and nothing is absolutely separate from anything else.

This is the abyss from which Oannes emerged. And emerging from this, he instructed mankind. This implies some kind of connection between the state of the abyss and the knowledge of the sciences and the arts, and of the nature and worship of the gods. Berossus concludes this passage by saying that ‘Of all these were preserved delineations in the temple of Belus at Babylon’, so there was obviously some constructive point to the contemplation of these composite animals, and the condition and properties of the abyss. Unfortunately this temple was taken to pieces by Alexander during his brief stay in the city, so we cannot look at these images in particular.  [3]  We should not forget that Oannes is himself a composite creature, with the head of a fish and the head of a man, the body and tail of a fish, and the feet of a man – the body and head of a fish mark him as an inhabitant of the sea and the abyss, which is a reflection of his access to the knowledge of the sciences and the arts. He has the voice of a man, and so can communicate with the inhabitants of the earth.

Why should the abyss be accounted the source of knowledge about the sciences and the arts? If the abyss is an approximation, another image of the telos, of the final nature of reality in which all things are contained, and from which all things unfold (even if through the mediation of a copy, a moving image of eternity), then it is all too obvious why the sciences and arts should be associated with the abyss. Ultimately everything which the human race wishes to know and to understand is already present in potential form in the primary reality. Access to it is the question, not whether or not it exists.

This is one of the principal reasons why the teleological perspective on the world has held such a fascination for the powerful and the educated throughout history. The concept of the telos suggests that all things are possible, and that all knowledge is accessible to man, through ritual, through contemplation, and through study. It also suggests that knowledge and understanding can be formalised (a concept with which we are now estranged), so that it is possible to determine the will of the divine, and to arrange the world according to a divine order.

It is also worth pointing out that not only is this understanding that human knowledge is the result of communion with the divine through repeated and enhanced access to the cause of causes, the telos, but the account of the gift of the sciences and the arts which Berossus gives is itself an image which, through the act of its contemplation, amplifies access to the telos.

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[1]   ‘Berossus,’ in Black, Jeremy, and Green, Anthony - Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, 1992. The text of Berossus can be found collected together in I. P. Cory’s Ancient Fragments, 2^nd edition, 1832.

[2] The passage is lexically interesting: Berossus says that in the time of Ammemnon… ‘appeared the Musarus Oannes the Annedotus from the Erythaean sea.’ ‘Musarus’ and ‘Annedotus’ do not appear to be Greek words.

[3] It was Alexander’s intention to rebuild it, but he died before the rebuilding began.

The Babylonian Creation

This is an extract from the chapter 'Creation' in The Sacred History of Being, published November 2, 2015. The discussion of the Babylonian idea of the Creation in this chapter emphasises that there are several philosophical concepts present in the story we are told. Almost all scholars of Mesopotamian civilisation however, accept the conventional narrative which states that philosophical thought was the creation of the Greeks in the middle of the 1st Millennium B.C.E, and so the presence of philosophical concepts in texts from a much earlier time, and in another place (as here) is not noticed, and is not discussed. Instead of clear and cogent thought, scholars believe that the authors of the Babylonian creation were dealing with loose notions about the cosmos and the world. This is false. The later writings of the Greeks echo earlier ideas from Mesopotamia, and often very closely, as The Sacred History of Being uncovers. 

Thomas Yaeger, February 22, 2018

In Babylonia and Assyria, plenitude could be represented by the waters of ocean. Before ordered generation arose from these waters, there was a primal chaos, which Mesopotamian scholars understood in terms of undifferentiated possibility. The Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived and wrote in Greek most probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, describes this primal chaos in terms which emphasise that it is a plenitude (this passage was preserved by Alexander Polyhistor):

There was a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings, which were produced of a two-fold principle. Men appeared with two wings, some with four wings, and two faces. They had one body, but two heads the one of a man, the other of a woman. They were likewise, in their several organs, both male and female. Other human figures were to be seen with the legs and horns of goats. Some had horses' feet; others had the limbs of a horse behind, but before were fashioned like men, resembling hippocentaurs. Bulls, likewise, bred there with the heads of men; and dogs, with fourfold bodies, and the tails of fishes. Also horses, with the heads of dogs: men, too, and other animals, with the heads and bodies of horses and the tails of fishes. In short, there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals. Add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance. Of all these were preserved delineations in the temple of Belus at Babylon.

The person, who was supposed to have presided over them, was a woman named Omoroca; which in the Chaldee language is Thalatth; which in Greek is interpreted Thalassa, the sea: but, according to the most true computation, it is equivalent to Selene, the moon. All things being in this situation, Belus came, and cut the woman asunder: and, out of one half of her, he formed the earth, and of the other half the heavens; and at the same time he destroyed the animals in the abyss. All this (he says) was an allegorical description of nature. For the whole universe consisting of moisture, and animals being continually generated therein; the deity (Belus), above-mentioned, cut off his own head; upon which the other gods mixed the blood, as it gushed out, with the earth; and from thence men were formed. On this account it is that men are rational, and partake of divine knowledge. This Belus, whom men call Dis, (or Pluto,) divided the darkness, and separated the heavens from the earth, and reduced the universe to order. But the animals so recently created, not being able to bear the prevalence of light, died.

Alexander Heidel points out that thalatth in the foregoing passage, “... is obviously a scribal error.”  [i]  He says that the form thamte corresponds to the Babylonian tamtu, denoting the sea, the ocean, or Tiamat, which is the personification of the primordial sea or ocean. Heidel notes that Omoroka is a title of Tiamat  [ii]  –   Heidel also observes that the emended form of Omoroka in the Greek text is Omorka, which has the same numerical value (by gematria) as ‘Selene’ (the moon).  [iii]

Belus upon this, seeing a vast space quite uninhabited, though by nature very fruitful, ordered one of the gods to take off his head; and when it was taken off, they were to mix the blood with the soil of the earth, and from thence to form other men and animals, which should be capable of bearing the light. Belus also formed the stars, and the sun and the moon, together with the five planets.

It is interesting to compare again Plato’s account of the creation of the universe:

When He (Theos) took over all that was visible, seeing that it was not in a state of rest but in a state of discordant and disorderly motion, He brought it into order out of disorder, deeming that the former state is in all ways better than the latter. For Him who is most good it neither was nor is permissible to perform any action save what is fair. As He reflected, therefore, He perceived that of such creatures as are by nature visible, none that is irrational will be fairer, comparing wholes with wholes, than the rational; and further, that reason cannot possibly belong to any apart from Soul. So because of this reflection He constructed reason within soul and soul within body as He fashioned the All, that so the work He was executing might be of its nature most fair and most good.  [iv]

These accounts are essentially consonant, in that they relate an initial state of discord in creation, as we read already in the text of Berossus:

... there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals. Add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance.

These were not to be tolerated as part of the creation, though they were implicit in the ground of Being. They do not make sense in terms of a rational creation. Note the sentence: “add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance.” in the Babylonian account (my emphasis). This makes it clear that these animals are the product of a plenitude, a totality, in which all possible combinations are, at the least, potential and latent. But they are to be destroyed in favour of a rational creation. This might be taken to imply that they possess the same degree of reality as the rational creatures which are to succeed them. Though they can have no practical existence.  By contrast the creation of men is due to the intervention of a god, who thereby made men rational. Berossus further connects this rationality with the ability to understand the workings of the divine....

[End of extract]

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[i] Heidel, A. The Babylonian Genesis, p77, footnote 85

[ii] Op cit. footnote 84, p 77.

[iii] Op cit. footnote 86, p77.

[iv] Plato, Timaeus, 30a–b.