ABSTRACT
Mesopotamia, lying fertile and flat between the twin rivers that watered it, was open to invasions and attack from every quarter. The Genesis narrative is deeply rooted in Hebrew thought and may have been derived from older versions closer to the Sumero-Akkadian sources. Love and fertility have left the earth. The most finished and literary of the Babylonian epics, the story of Gilgamesh's journey begins with the tale of the friendship of Gilgamesh, the ruler of the city of Uruk, with the wild man Enkidu, who dies prematurely for offending the goddess Ishtar. In the early history of Greece and Rome, the authors met with bands of southward-surging Indo-Europeans; in northern Europe, they find them everywhere. The day-to-day observance of religion by the common folk of Greece was mainly a matter of household pieties and attendance at a public ceremony. The religion of early Rome had, like the city itself, humble beginnings.
