Creation of life from clay

Common card · No. 284272

The creation of life from clay (or soil, earth, dust, or mud) appears throughout world religions and mythologies, some of the earliest occurring in the creation myths about the origin of man in the cosmology of the ancient Near East. The idea occurs in both biblical cosmology and Quranic cosmology. The clay represents an unformed, chaotic material which is shaped and given form by the gods in a creative process. A related motif is the use of clay to seed or create the world. In southwest Asia, the clay-shaping was cast as a magical act. In the same way that humans would use clay to make terracotta images of their gods, so the gods moulded humans out of clay in their godlike form. They were described as obtaining this material by pinching off pieces of wet mud. An example of this appears in the biblical Book of Genesis (2:7), where Adam is made out of dust, an idea that recurs throughout the Bible (Job 10:9; Psalm 90:3; 104:29; Isaiah 29:16, etc.). Other examples are found in the Epic of...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Constantin Hansen, Public domain