Here I will give an overview of the ancient cosmogony.
We begin with many various sources which all report an original, uncreated matter, from which all other things are composed (a substance we may call Prima Materia), and for which gives a sense of timeless matter; Chaos, before creation orders stuff into things.
Ovid - Metamorphosis (8 CE):
<Before the sea, land, and heavens, which cover everything, the entire world of nature looked the same. They called it Chaos, a crude, confused mass, nothing but lifeless stuff and scattered seeds of matter not yet properly combined, all piled up in the same place together […] No matter retained its own proper shape […] This conflict god and more favourable nature stopped. For he cut land off from sky, and water from land, and separated the bright heavens from heavy air. Then, once he had drawn off these elements and taken them away from the confused mass, he set them apart, fixing them in place in harmonious peace.We see that to Ovid, Chaos is synonymous with the formless, and form only comes to be with distinction of parts from the whole; thus, being is determined by an internal difference (such that being is constituted by the negative law of non-contradiction. e.g. A ≠ Not-A). It's not that matter was "created", but only that creation is the order of an uncreated mass into "proper shape". We may compare this to Plato's writings; e.g. Timaeus (30a):
<The god wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible, and so he took over all that was visible—not at rest but in discordant and disorderly motion—and brought it from a state of disor-der to one of order, because he believed that order was in every way better than disorder.Here, Chaos precedes creation, which is simply the fixing of Prima Materia into order, the same as Ovid describes it; not that God created matter, but that matter is eternal, and that God seems to be made of matter. Thus, when God "creates", he is not creating ex-nihilo, but in proper Newtonian fashion, simply trans-forming existing energy into new shapes and patterns. The principle difference we may say between the created and uncreated is time, which Plato describes here (37d):
<Now it was [God's] nature to be eternal, but it isn’t possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten. And so [God] began to thinkPost too long. Click here to view the full text.