LEGENDS OF BABYLON AND EGYPT

IN RELATION TO HEBREW TRADITION

By Leonard W. King, M.A., Litt.D., F.S.A.

Assistant Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities
in the British
Museum

Professor in the University of London King’s College

First Published 1918 by Humphrey Milford, Oxford University
Press.

THE BRITISH ACADEMY
THE SCHWEICH LECTURES 1916

Contents

PREFACE

In these lectures an attempt is made, not so much to restate familiar
facts, as to accommodate them to new and supplementary evidence which has
been published in America since the outbreak of the war. But even without
the excuse of recent discovery, no apology would be needed for any
comparison or contrast of Hebrew tradition with the mythological and
legendary beliefs of Babylon and Egypt. Hebrew achievements in the sphere
of religion and ethics are only thrown into stronger relief when studied
against their contemporary background.

The bulk of our new material is furnished by some early texts, written
towards the close of the third millennium B.C. They incorporate traditions
which extend in unbroken outline from their own period into the remote
ages of the past, and claim to trace the history of man back to his
creation. They represent the early national traditions of the Sumerian
people, who preceded the Semites as the ruling race in Babylonia; and
incidentally they necessitate a revision of current views with regard to
the cradle of Babylonian civilization. The most remarkable of the new
documents is one which relates in poetical narrative an account of the
Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the Deluge. It thus exhibits a
close resemblance in structure to the corresponding Hebrew traditions, a
resemblance that is not shared by the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at
present known. But in matter the Sumerian tradition is more primitive than
any of the Semitic versions. In spite of the fact that the text appears to
have reached us in a magical setting, and to some extent in epitomized
form, this early document enables us to tap the stream of tradition at a
point far above any at which approach has hitherto been possible.

Though the resemblance of early Sumerian tradition to that of the Hebrews
is striking, it furnishes a still closer parallel to the summaries
preserved from the history of Berossus. The huge figures incorporated in
the latter’s chronological scheme are no longer to be treated as a product
of Neo-Babylonian speculation; they reappear in their original
surroundings in another of these early documents, the Sumerian Dynastic
List. The sources of Berossus had inevitably been semitized by Babylon;
but two of his three Antediluvian cities find their place among the five
of primitive Sumerian belief, and two of his ten Antediluvian kings rejoin
their Sumerian prototypes. Moreover, the recorded ages of Sumerian and
Hebrew patriarchs are strangely alike. It may be added that in Egypt a new
fragment of the Palermo Stele has enabled us to verify, by a very similar
comparison, the accuracy of Manetho’s sources for his prehistoric period,
while at the same time it demonstrates the way in which possible
inaccuracies in his system, deduced from independent evidence, may have
arisen in remote antiquity. It is clear that both Hebrew and Hellenistic
traditions were modelled on very early lines.

Thus our new material enables us to check the age, and in some measure the
accuracy, of the traditions concerning the dawn of history which the
Greeks reproduced from native sources, both in Babylonia and Egypt, after
the conquests of Alexander had brought the Near East within the range of
their intimate acquaintance. The third body of tradition, that of the
Hebrews, though unbacked by the prestige of secular achievement, has,
through incorporation in the canons of two great religious systems,
acquired an authority which the others have not enjoyed. In re-examining
the sources of all three accounts, so far as they are affected by the new
discoveries, it will be of interest to observe how the same problems were
solved in antiquity by very different races, living under widely divergent
conditions, but within easy reach of one another. Their periods of
contact, ascertained in history or suggested by geographical
considerations, will prompt the further question to what extent each body
of belief was evolved in independence of the others. The close
correspondence that has long been recognized and is now confirmed between
the Hebrew and the Semitic-Babylonian systems, as compared with that of
Egypt, naturally falls within the scope of our enquiry.

Excavation has provided an extraordinarily full archaeological commentary
to the legends of Egypt and Babylon; and when I received the invitation to
deliver the Schweich Lectures for 1916, I was reminded of the terms of the
Bequest and was asked to emphasize the archaeological side of the subject.
Such material illustration was also calculated to bring out, in a more
vivid manner than was possible with purely literary evidence, the
contrasts and parallels presented by Hebrew tradition. Thanks to a special
grant for photographs from the British Academy, I was enabled to
illustrate by means of lantern slides many of the problems discussed in
the lectures; and it was originally intended that the photographs then
shown should appear as plates in this volume. But in view of the continued
and increasing shortage of paper, it was afterwards felt to be only right
that all illustrations should be omitted. This very necessary decision has
involved a recasting of certain sections of the lectures as delivered,
which in its turn has rendered possible a fuller treatment of the new
literary evidence. To the consequent shifting of interest is also due a
transposition of names in the title. On their literary side, and in virtue
of the intimacy of their relation to Hebrew tradition, the legends of
Babylon must be given precedence over those of Egypt.

For the delay in the appearance of the volume I must plead the pressure of
other work, on subjects far removed from archaeological study and
affording little time and few facilities for a continuance of
archaeological and textual research. It is hoped that the insertion of
references throughout, and the more detailed discussion of problems
suggested by our new literary material, may incline the reader to add his
indulgence to that already extended to me by the British Academy.

L. W. KING.

LEGENDS OF BABYLON AND EGYPT

IN RELATION TO HEBREW TRADITION

LECTURE I—EGYPT, BABYLON, AND PALESTINE, AND SOME TRADITIONAL
ORIGINS OF CIVILIZATION

At the present moment most of us have little time or thought to spare for
subjects not connected directly or indirectly with the war. We have put
aside our own interests and studies; and after the war we shall all have a
certain amount of leeway to make up in acquainting ourselves with what has
been going on in countries not yet involved in the great struggle.
Meanwhile the most we can do is to glance for a moment at any discovery of
exceptional interest that may come to light.

The main object of these lectures will be to examine certain Hebrew
traditions in the light of new evidence which has been published in
America since the outbreak of the war. The evidence is furnished by some
literary texts, inscribed on tablets from Nippur, one of the oldest and
most sacred cities of Babylonia. They are written in Sumerian, the
language spoken by the non-Semitic people whom the Semitic Babylonians
conquered and displaced; and they include a very primitive version of the
Deluge story and Creation myth, and some texts which throw new light on
the age of Babylonian civilization and on the area within which it had its
rise. In them we have recovered some of the material from which Berossus
derived his dynasty of Antediluvian kings, and we are thus enabled to test
the accuracy of the Greek tradition by that of the Sumerians themselves.
So far then as Babylonia is concerned, these documents will necessitate a
re-examination of more than one problem.

The myths and legends of ancient Egypt are also to some extent involved.
The trend of much recent anthropological research has been in the
direction of seeking a single place of origin for similar beliefs and
practices, at least among races which were bound to one another by
political or commercial ties. And we shall have occasion to test, by means
of our new data, a recent theory of Egyptian influence. The Nile Valley
was, of course, one the great centres from which civilization radiated
throughout the ancient East; and, even when direct contact is unproved,
Egyptian literature may furnish instructive parallels and contrasts in any
study of Western Asiatic mythology. Moreover, by a strange coincidence,
there has also been published in Egypt since the beginning of the war a
record referring to the reigns of predynastic rulers in the Nile Valley.
This, like some of the Nippur texts, takes us back to that dim period
before the dawn of actual history, and, though the information it affords
is not detailed like theirs, it provides fresh confirmation of the general
accuracy of Manetho’s sources, and suggests some interesting points for
comparison.

But the people with whose traditions we are ultimately concerned are the
Hebrews. In the first series of Schweich Lectures, delivered in the year
1908, the late Canon Driver showed how the literature of Assyria and
Babylon had thrown light upon Hebrew traditions concerning the origin and
early history of the world. The majority of the cuneiform documents, on
which he based his comparison, date from a period no earlier than the
seventh century B.C., and yet it was clear that the texts themselves, in
some form or other, must have descended from a remote antiquity. He
concluded his brief reference to the Creation and Deluge Tablets with
these words: “The Babylonian narratives are both polytheistic, while the
corresponding biblical narratives (Gen. i and vi-xi) are made the vehicle
of a pure and exalted monotheism; but in spite of this fundamental
difference, and also variations in detail, the resemblances are such as to
leave no doubt that the Hebrew cosmogony and the Hebrew story of the
Deluge are both derived ultimately from the same original as the
Babylonian narratives, only transformed by the magic touch of Israel’s
religion, and infused by it with a new spirit.”(1) Among the recently
published documents from Nippur we have at last recovered one at least of
those primitive originals from which the Babylonian accounts were derived,
while others prove the existence of variant stories of the world’s origin
and early history which have not survived in the later cuneiform texts. In
some of these early Sumerian records we may trace a faint but remarkable
parallel with the Hebrew traditions of man’s history between his Creation
and the Flood. It will be our task, then, to examine the relations which
the Hebrew narratives bear both to the early Sumerian and to the later
Babylonian Versions, and to ascertain how far the new discoveries support
or modify current views with regard to the contents of those early
chapters of Genesis.

I need not remind you that Genesis is the book of Hebrew origins, and that
its contents mark it off to some extent from the other books of the Hebrew
Bible. The object of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua is to describe
in their origin the fundamental institutions of the national faith and to
trace from the earliest times the course of events which led to the Hebrew
settlement in Palestine. Of this national history the Book of Genesis
forms the introductory section. Four centuries of complete silence lie
between its close and the beginning of Exodus, where we enter on the
history of a nation as contrasted with that of a family.(1) While Exodus
and the succeeding books contain national traditions, Genesis is largely
made up of individual biography. Chapters xii-l are concerned with the
immediate ancestors of the Hebrew race, beginning with Abram’s migration
into Canaan and closing with Joseph’s death in Egypt. But the aim of the
book is not confined to recounting the ancestry of Israel. It seeks also
to show her relation to other peoples in the world, and probing still
deeper into the past it describes how the earth itself was prepared for
man’s habitation. Thus the patriarchal biographies are preceded, in
chapters i-xi, by an account of the original of the world, the beginnings
of civilization, and the distribution of the various races of mankind. It
is, of course, with certain parts of this first group of chapters that
such striking parallels have long been recognized in the cuneiform texts.

In approaching this particular body of Hebrew traditions, the necessity
for some caution will be apparent. It is not as though we were dealing
with the reported beliefs of a Malayan or Central Australian tribe. In
such a case there would be no difficulty in applying a purely objective
criticism, without regard to ulterior consequences. But here our own
feelings are involved, having their roots deep in early associations. The
ground too is well trodden; and, had there been no new material to
discuss, I think I should have preferred a less contentious theme. The new
material is my justification for the choice of subject, and also the fact
that, whatever views we may hold, it will be necessary for us to
assimilate it to them. I shall have no hesitation in giving you my own
reading of the evidence; but at the same time it will be possible to
indicate solutions which will probably appeal to those who view the
subject from more conservative standpoints. That side of the discussion
may well be postponed until after the examination of the new evidence in
detail. And first of all it will be advisable to clear up some general
aspects of the problem, and to define the limits within which our
criticism may be applied.

It must be admitted that both Egypt and Babylon bear a bad name in Hebrew
tradition. Both are synonymous with captivity, the symbols of suffering
endured at the beginning and at the close of the national life. And during
the struggle against Assyrian aggression, the disappointment at the
failure of expected help is reflected in prophecies of the period. These
great crises in Hebrew history have tended to obscure in the national
memory the part which both Babylon and Egypt may have played in moulding
the civilization of the smaller nations with whom they came in contact. To
such influence the races of Syria were, by geographical position,
peculiarly subject. The country has often been compared to a bridge
between the two great continents of Asia and Africa, flanked by the sea on
one side and the desert on the other, a narrow causeway of highland and
coastal plain connecting the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates.(1)
For, except on the frontier of Egypt, desert and sea do not meet. Farther
north the Arabian plateau is separated from the Mediterranean by a double
mountain chain, which runs south from the Taurus at varying elevations,
and encloses in its lower course the remarkable depression of the Jordan
Valley, the Dead Sea, and the ‘Arabah. The Judaean hills and the mountains
of Moab are merely the southward prolongation of the Lebanon and
Anti-Lebanon, and their neighbourhood to the sea endows this narrow tract
of habitable country with its moisture and fertility. It thus formed the
natural channel of intercourse between the two earliest centres of
civilization, and was later the battle-ground of their opposing empires.

The great trunk-roads of through communication run north and south, across
the eastern plateaus of the Haurân and Moab, and along the coastal plains.
The old highway from Egypt, which left the Delta at Pelusium, at first
follows the coast, then trends eastward across the plain of Esdraelon,
which breaks the coastal range, and passing under Hermon runs northward
through Damascus and reaches the Euphrates at its most westerly point.
Other through tracks in Palestine ran then as they do to-day, by Beesheba
and Hebron, or along the ‘Arabah and west of the Dead Sea, or through Edom
and east of Jordan by the present Hajj route to Damascus. But the great
highway from Egypt, the most westerly of the trunk-roads through
Palestine, was that mainly followed, with some variant sections, by both
caravans and armies, and was known by the Hebrews in its southern course
as the “Way of the Philistines” and farther north as the “Way of the
East”.

The plain of Esraelon, where the road first trends eastward, has been the
battle-ground for most invaders of Palestine from the north, and though
Egyptian armies often fought in the southern coastal plain, they too have
battled there when they held the southern country. Megiddo, which commands
the main pass into the plain through the low Samaritan hills to the
southeast of Carmel, was the site of Thothmes III’s famous battle against
a Syrian confederation, and it inspired the writer of the Apocalypse with
his vision of an Armageddon of the future. But invading armies always
followed the beaten track of caravans, and movements represented by the
great campaigns were reflected in the daily passage of international
commerce.

With so much through traffic continually passing within her borders, it
may be matter for surprise that far more striking evidence of its cultural
effect should not have been revealed by archaeological research in
Palestine. Here again the explanation is mainly of a geographical
character. For though the plains and plateaus could be crossed by the
trunk-roads, the rest of the country is so broken up by mountain and
valley that it presented few facilities either to foreign penetration or
to external control. The physical barriers to local intercourse,
reinforced by striking differences in soil, altitude, and climate, while
they precluded Syria herself from attaining national unity, always tended
to protect her separate provinces, or “kingdoms,” from the full effects of
foreign aggression. One city-state could be traversed, devastated, or
annexed, without in the least degree affecting neighbouring areas. It is
true that the population of Syria has always been predominantly Semitic,
for she was on the fringe of the great breeding-ground of the Semitic race
and her landward boundary was open to the Arabian nomad. Indeed, in the
whole course of her history the only race that bade fair at one time to
oust the Semite in Syria was the Greek. But the Greeks remained within the
cities which they founded or rebuilt, and, as Robertson Smith pointed out,
the death-rate in Eastern cities habitually exceeds the birth-rate; the
urban population must be reinforced from the country if it is to be
maintained, so that the type of population is ultimately determined by the
blood of the peasantry.(1) Hence after the Arab conquest the Greek
elements in Syria and Palestine tended rapidly to disappear. The Moslem
invasion was only the last of a series of similar great inroads, which
have followed one another since the dawn of history, and during all that
time absorption was continually taking place from desert tribes that
ranged the Syrian border. As we have seen, the country of his adoption was
such as to encourage the Semitic nomad’s particularism, which was inherent
in his tribal organization. Thus the predominance of a single racial
element in the population of Palestine and Syria did little to break down
or overstep the natural barriers and lines of cleavage.

These facts suffice to show why the influence of both Egypt and Babylon
upon the various peoples and kingdoms of Palestine was only intensified at
certain periods, when ambition for extended empire dictated the reduction
of her provinces in detail. But in the long intervals, during which there
was no attempt to enforce political control, regular relations were
maintained along the lines of trade and barter. And in any estimate of the
possible effect of foreign influence upon Hebrew thought, it is important
to realize that some of the channels through which in later periods it may
have acted had been flowing since the dawn of history, and even perhaps in
prehistoric times. It is probable that Syria formed one of the links by
which we may explain the Babylonian elements that are attested in
prehistoric Egyptian culture.(1) But another possible line of advance may
have been by way of Arabia and across the Red Sea into Upper Egypt.

The latter line of contact is suggested by an interesting piece of
evidence that has recently been obtained. A prehistoric flint knife, with
a handle carved from the tooth of a hippopotamus, has been purchased
lately by the Louvre,(1) and is said to have been found at Gebel el-‘Arak
near Naga’ Hamâdi, which lies on the Nile not far below Koptos, where an
ancient caravan-track leads by Wâdi Hammâmât to the Red Sea. On one side
of the handle is a battle-scene including some remarkable representations
of ancient boats. All the warriors are nude with the exception of a loin
girdle, but, while one set of combatants have shaven heads or short hair,
the others have abundant locks falling in a thick mass upon the shoulder.
On the other face of the handle is carved a hunting scene, two hunters
with dogs and desert animals being arranged around a central boss. But in
the upper field is a very remarkable group, consisting of a personage
struggling with two lions arranged symmetrically. The rest of the
composition is not very unlike other examples of prehistoric Egyptian
carving in low relief, but here attitude, figure, and clothing are quite
un-Egyptian. The hero wears a sort of turban on his abundant hair, and a
full and rounded beard descends upon his breast. A long garment clothes
him from the waist and falls below the knees, his muscular calves ending
in the claws of a bird of prey. There is nothing like this in prehistoric
Egyptian art.

Perhaps Monsieur Bénédite is pressing his theme too far when he compares
the close-cropped warriors on the handle with the shaven Sumerians and
Elamites upon steles from Telloh and Susa, for their loin-girdles are
African and quite foreign to the Euphrates Valley. And his suggestion that
two of the boats, flat-bottomed and with high curved ends, seem only to
have navigated the Tigris and Euphrates,(1) will hardly command
acceptance. But there is no doubt that the heroic personage upon the other
face is represented in the familiar attitude of the Babylonian hero
Gilgamesh struggling with lions, which formed so favourite a subject upon
early Sumerian and Babylonian seals. His garment is Sumerian or Semitic
rather than Egyptian, and the mixture of human and bird elements in the
figure, though not precisely paralleled at this early period, is not out
of harmony with Mesopotamian or Susan tradition. His beard, too, is quite
different from that of the Libyan desert tribes which the early Egyptian
kings adopted. Though the treatment of the lions is suggestive of
proto-Elamite rather than of early Babylonian models, the design itself is
unmistakably of Mesopotamian origin. This discovery intensifies the
significance of other early parallels that have been noted between the
civilizations of the Euphrates and the Nile, but its evidence, so far as
it goes, does not point to Syria as the medium of prehistoric intercourse.
Yet then, as later, there can have been no physical barrier to the use of
the river-route from Mesopotamia into Syria and of the tracks thence
southward along the land-bridge to the Nile’s delta.

In the early historic periods we have definite evidence that the eastern
coast of the Levant exercised a strong fascination upon the rulers of both
Egypt and Babylonia. It may be admitted that Syria had little to give in
comparison to what she could borrow, but her local trade in wine and oil
must have benefited by an increase in the through traffic which followed
the working of copper in Cyprus and Sinai and of silver in the Taurus.
Moreover, in the cedar forests of Lebanon and the north she possessed a
product which was highly valued both in Egypt and the treeless plains of
Babylonia. The cedars procured by Sneferu from Lebanon at the close of the
IIIrd Dynasty were doubtless floated as rafts down the coast, and we may
see in them evidence of a regular traffic in timber. It has long been
known that the early Babylonian king Sharru-kin, or Sargon of Akkad, had
pressed up the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, and we now have information
that he too was fired by a desire for precious wood and metal. One of the
recently published Nippur inscriptions contains copies of a number of his
texts, collected by an ancient scribe from his statues at Nippur, and from
these we gather additional details of his campaigns. We learn that after
his complete subjugation of Southern Babylonia he turned his attention to
the west, and that Enlil gave him the lands “from the Upper Sea to the
Lower Sea”, i.e. from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Fortunately
this rather vague phrase, which survived in later tradition, is restated
in greater detail in one of the contemporary versions, which records that
Enlil “gave him the upper land, Mari, Iarmuti, and Ibla, as far as the
Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountains”.(1)

Mari was a city on the middle Euphrates, but the name may here signify the
district of Mari which lay in the upper course of Sargon’s march. Now we
know that the later Sumerian monarch Gudea obtained his cedar beams from
the Amanus range, which he names Amanum and describes as the “cedar
mountains”.(1) Doubtless he felled his trees on the eastern slopes of the
mountain. But we may infer from his texts that Sargon actually reached the
coast, and his “Cedar Forest” may have lain farther to the south, perhaps
as far south as the Lebanon. The “Silver Mountains” can only be identified
with the Taurus, where silver mines were worked in antiquity. The
reference to Iarmuti is interesting, for it is clearly the same place as
Iarimuta or Iarimmuta, of which we find mention in the Tell el-Amarna
letters. From the references to this district in the letters of Rib-Adda,
governor of Byblos, we may infer that it was a level district on the
coast, capable of producing a considerable quantity of grain for export,
and that it was under Egyptian control at the time of Amenophis IV.
Hitherto its position has been conjecturally placed in the Nile Delta, but
from Sargon’s reference we must probably seek it on the North Syrian or
possibly the Cilician coast. Perhaps, as Dr. Poebel suggests, it was the
plain of Antioch, along the lower course and at the mouth of the Orontes.
But his further suggestion that the term is used by Sargon for the whole
stretch of country between the sea and the Euphrates is hardly probable.
For the geographical references need not be treated as exhaustive, but as
confined to the more important districts through which the expedition
passed. The district of Ibla which is also mentioned by Narâm-Sin and
Gudea, lay probably to the north of Iarmuti, perhaps on the southern
slopes of Taurus. It, too, we may regard as a district of restricted
extent rather than as a general geographical term for the extreme north of
Syria.

It is significant that Sargon does not allude to any battle when
describing this expedition, nor does he claim to have devastated the
western countries.(1) Indeed, most of these early expeditions to the west
appear to have been inspired by motives of commercial enterprise rather
than of conquest. But increase of wealth was naturally followed by
political expansion, and Egypt’s dream of an Asiatic empire was realized
by Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty. The fact that Babylonian should then
have been adopted as the medium of official intercourse in Syria points to
the closeness of the commercial ties which had already united the
Euphrates Valley with the west. Egyptian control had passed from Canaan at
the time of the Hebrew settlement, which was indeed a comparatively late
episode in the early history of Syria. Whether or not we identify the
Khabiri with the Hebrews, the character of the latter’s incursion is
strikingly illustrated by some of the Tell el-Amarna letters. We see a
nomad folk pressing in upon settled peoples and gaining a foothold here
and there.(2)

The great change from desert life consists in the adoption of agriculture,
and when once that was made by the Hebrews any further advance in economic
development was dictated by their new surroundings. The same process had
been going on, as we have seen, in Syria since the dawn of history, the
Semitic nomad passing gradually through the stages of agricultural and
village life into that of the city. The country favoured the retention of
tribal exclusiveness, but ultimate survival could only be purchased at the
cost of some amalgamation with their new neighbours. Below the surface of
Hebrew history these two tendencies may be traced in varying action and
reaction. Some sections of the race engaged readily in the social and
commercial life of Canaanite civilization with its rich inheritance from
the past. Others, especially in the highlands of Judah and the south, at
first succeeded in keeping themselves remote from foreign influence.
During the later periods of the national life the country was again
subjected, and in an intensified degree, to those forces of political
aggression from Mesopotamia and Egypt which we have already noted as
operating in Canaan. But throughout the settled Hebrew community as a
whole the spark of desert fire was not extinguished, and by kindling the
zeal of the Prophets it eventually affected nearly all the white races of
mankind.

In his Presidential Address before the British Association at
Newcastle,(1) Sir Arthur Evans emphasized the part which recent
archaeology has played in proving the continuity of human culture from the
most remote periods. He showed how gaps in our knowledge had been bridged,
and he traced the part which each great race had taken in increasing its
inheritance. We have, in fact, ample grounds for assuming an interchange,
not only of commercial products, but, in a minor degree, of ideas within
areas geographically connected; and it is surely not derogatory to any
Hebrew writer to suggest that he may have adopted, and used for his own
purposes, conceptions current among his contemporaries. In other words,
the vehicle of religious ideas may well be of composite origin; and, in
the course of our study of early Hebrew tradition, I suggest that we hold
ourselves justified in applying the comparative method to some at any rate
of the ingredients which went to form the finished product. The process is
purely literary, but it finds an analogy in the study of Semitic art,
especially in the later periods. And I think it will make my meaning
clearer if we consider for a moment a few examples of sculpture produced
by races of Semitic origin. I do not suggest that we should regard the one
process as in any way proving the existence of the other. We should rather
treat the comparison as illustrating in another medium the effect of
forces which, it is clear, were operative at various periods upon races of
the same stock from which the Hebrews themselves were descended. In such
material products the eye at once detects the Semite’s readiness to avail
himself of foreign models. In some cases direct borrowing is obvious; in
others, to adapt a metaphor from music, it is possible to trace extraneous
motifs in the design.(2)

Some of the most famous monuments of Semitic art date from the Persian and
Hellenistic periods, and if we glance at them in this connexion it is in
order to illustrate during its most obvious phase a tendency of which the
earlier effects are less pronounced. In the sarcophagus of the Sidonian
king Eshmu-‘azar II, which is preserved in the Louvre,(1) we have indeed a
monument to which no Semitic sculptor can lay claim. Workmanship and
material are Egyptian, and there is no doubt that it was sculptured in
Egypt and transported to Sidon by sea. But the king’s own engravers added
the long Phoenician inscription, in which he adjures princes and men not
to open his resting-place since there are no jewels therein, concluding
with some potent curses against any violation of his tomb. One of the
latter implores the holy gods to deliver such violators up “to a mighty
prince who shall rule over them”, and was probably suggested by
Alexander’s recent occupation of Sidon in 332 B.C. after his reduction and
drastic punishment of Tyre. King Eshmun-‘zar was not unique in his choice
of burial in an Egyptian coffin, for he merely followed the example of his
royal father, Tabnîth, “priest of ‘Ashtart and king of the Sidonians”,
whose sarcophagus, preserved at Constantinople, still bears in addition to
his own epitaph that of its former occupant, a certain Egyptian general
Penptah. But more instructive than these borrowed memorials is a genuine
example of Phoenician work, the stele set up by Yehaw-milk, king of
Byblos, and dating from the fourth or fifth century B.C.(2) In the
sculptured panel at the head of the stele the king is represented in the
Persian dress of the period standing in the presence of ‘Ashtart or
Astarte, his “Lady, Mistress of Byblos”. There is no doubt that the stele
is of native workmanship, but the influence of Egypt may be seen in the
technique of the carving, in the winged disk above the figures, and still
more in the representation of the goddess in her character as the Egyptian
Hathor, with disk and horns, vulture head-dress and papyrus-sceptre. The
inscription records the dedication of an altar and shrine to the goddess,
and these too we may conjecture were fashioned on Egyptian lines.

The representation of Semitic deities under Egyptian forms and with
Egyptian attributes was encouraged by the introduction of their cults into
Egypt itself. In addition to Astarte of Byblos, Ba’al, Anath, and Reshef
were all borrowed from Syria in comparatively early times and given
Egyptian characters. The conical Syrian helmet of Reshef, a god of war and
thunder, gradually gave place to the white Egyptian crown, so that as
Reshpu he was represented as a royal warrior; and Qadesh, another form of
Astarte, becoming popular with Egyptian women as a patroness of love and
fecundity, was also sometimes modelled on Hathor.(1)

Semitic colonists on the Egyptian border were ever ready to adopt Egyptian
symbolism in delineating the native gods to whom they owed allegiance, and
a particularly striking example of this may be seen on a stele of the
Persian period preserved in the Cairo Museum.(1) It was found at Tell
Defenneh, on the right bank of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, close to
the old Egyptian highway into Syria, a site which may be identified with
that of the biblical Tahpanhes and the Daphnae of the Greeks. Here it was
that the Jewish fugitives, fleeing with Jeremiah after the fall of
Jerusalem, founded a Jewish colony beside a flourishing Phoenician and
Aramaean settlement. One of the local gods of Tahpanhes is represented on
the Cairo monument, an Egyptian stele in the form of a naos with the
winged solar disk upon its frieze. He stands on the back of a lion and is
clothed in Asiatic costume with the high Syrian tiara crowning his
abundant hair. The Syrian workmanship is obvious, and the Syrian character
of the cult may be recognized in such details as the small brazen
fire-altar before the god, and the sacred pillar which is being anointed
by the officiating priest. But the god holds in his left hand a purely
Egyptian sceptre and in his right an emblem as purely Babylonian, the
weapon of Marduk and Gilgamesh which was also wielded by early Sumerian
kings.

The Elephantine papyri have shown that the early Jews of the Diaspora,
though untrammeled by the orthodoxy of Jerusalem, maintained the purity of
their local cult in the face of considerable difficulties. Hence the
gravestones of their Aramaean contemporaries, which have been found in
Egypt, can only be cited to illustrate the temptations to which they were
exposed.(1) Such was the memorial erected by Abseli to the memory of his
parents, Abbâ and Ahatbû, in the fourth year of Xerxes, 481 B.C.(2) They
had evidently adopted the religion of Osiris, and were buried at Saqqârah
in accordance with the Egyptian rites. The upper scene engraved upon the
stele represents Abbâ and his wife in the presence of Osiris, who is
attended by Isis and Nephthys; and in the lower panel is the funeral
scene, in which all the mourners with one exception are Asiatics. Certain
details of the rites that are represented, and mistakes in the
hieroglyphic version of the text, prove that the work is Aramaean
throughout.(3)

If our examples of Semitic art were confined to the Persian and later
periods, they could only be employed to throw light on their own epoch,
when through communication had been organized, and there was consequently
a certain pooling of commercial and artistic products throughout the
empire.(1) It is true that under the Great King the various petty states
and provinces were encouraged to manage their own affairs so long as they
paid the required tribute, but their horizon naturally expanded with
increase of commerce and the necessity for service in the king’s armies.
At this time Aramaic was the speech of Syria, and the population,
especially in the cities, was still largely Aramaean. As early as the
thirteenth century sections of this interesting Semitic race had begun to
press into Northern Syria from the middle Euphrates, and they absorbed not
only the old Canaanite population but also the Hittite immigrants from
Cappadocia. The latter indeed may for a time have furnished rulers to the
vigorous North Syrian principalities which resulted from this racial
combination, but the Aramaean element, thanks to continual reinforcement,
was numerically dominant, and their art may legitimately be regarded as in
great measure a Semitic product. Fortunately we have recovered examples of
sculpture which prove that tendencies already noted in the Persian period
were at work, though in a minor degree, under the later Assyrian empire.
The discoveries made at Zenjirli, for example, illustrate the gradually
increasing effect of Assyrian influence upon the artistic output of a
small North Syrian state.

This village in north-western Syria, on the road between Antioch and
Mar’ash, marks the site of a town which lay near the southern border or
just within the Syrian district of Sam’al. The latter is first mentioned
in the Assyrian inscriptions by Shalmaneser III, the son and successor of
the great conqueror, Ashur-nasir-pal; and in the first half of the eighth
century, though within the radius of Assyrian influence, it was still an
independent kingdom. It is to this period that we must assign the earliest
of the inscribed monuments discovered at Zenjirli and its neighbourhood.
At Gerjin, not far to the north-west, was found the colossal statue of
Hadad, chief god of the Aramaeans, which was fashioned and set up in his
honour by Panammu I, son of Qaral and king of Ya’di.(1) In the long
Aramaic inscription engraved upon the statue Panammu records the
prosperity of his reign, which he ascribes to the support he has received
from Hadad and his other gods, El, Reshef, Rekub-el, and Shamash. He had
evidently been left in peace by Assyria, and the monument he erected to
his god is of Aramaean workmanship and design. But the influence of
Assyria may be traced in Hadad’s beard and in his horned head-dress,
modelled on that worn by Babylonian and Assyrian gods as the symbol of
divine power.

The political changes introduced into Ya’di and Sam’al by Tiglath-pileser
IV are reflected in the inscriptions and monuments of Bar-rekub, a later
king of the district. Internal strife had brought disaster upon Ya’di and
the throne had been secured by Panammu II, son of Bar-sur, whose claims
received Assyrian support. In the words of his son Bar-rekub, “he laid
hold of the skirt of his lord, the king of Assyria”, who was gracious to
him; and it was probably at this time, and as a reward for his loyalty,
that Ya’di was united with the neighbouring district of Sam’al. But
Panammu’s devotion to his foreign master led to his death, for he died at
the siege of Damascus, in 733 or 732 B.C., “in the camp, while following
his lord, Tiglath-pileser, king of Assyria”. His kinsfolk and the whole
camp bewailed him, and his body was sent back to Ya’di, where it was
interred by his son, who set up an inscribed statue to his memory.
Bar-rekub followed in his father’s footsteps, as he leads us to infer in
his palace-inscription found at Zenjirli: “I ran at the wheel of my lord,
the king of Assyria, in the midst of mighty kings, possessors of silver
and possessors of gold.” It is not strange therefore that his art should
reflect Assyrian influence far more strikingly than that of Panammu I. The
figure of himself which he caused to be carved in relief on the left side
of the palace-inscription is in the Assyrian style,(1) and so too is
another of his reliefs from Zenjirli. On the latter Bar-rekub is
represented seated upon his throne with eunuch and scribe in attendance,
while in the field is the emblem of full moon and crescent, here ascribed
to “Ba’al of Harran”, the famous centre of moon-worship in Northern
Mesopotamia.(2)

The detailed history and artistic development of Sam’al and Ya’di convey a
very vivid impression of the social and material effects upon the native
population of Syria, which followed the westward advance of Assyria in the
eighth century. We realize not only the readiness of one party in the
state to defeat its rival with the help of Assyrian support, but also the
manner in which the life and activities of the nation as a whole were
unavoidably affected by their action. Other Hittite-Aramaean and
Phoenician monuments, as yet undocumented with literary records, exhibit a
strange but not unpleasing mixture of foreign motifs, such as we
see on the stele from Amrith(1) in the inland district of Arvad. But
perhaps the most remarkable example of Syrian art we possess is the king’s
gate recently discovered at Carchemish.(2) The presence of the
hieroglyphic inscriptions points to the survival of Hittite tradition, but
the figures represented in the reliefs are of Aramaean, not Hittite, type.
Here the king is seen leading his eldest son by the hand in some stately
ceremonial, and ranged in registers behind them are the younger members of
the royal family, whose ages are indicated by their occupations.(3) The
employment of basalt in place of limestone does not disguise the
sculptor’s debt to Assyria. But the design is entirely his own, and the
combined dignity and homeliness of the composition are refreshingly
superior to the arrogant spirit and hard execution which mar so much
Assyrian work. This example is particularly instructive, as it shows how a
borrowed art may be developed in skilled hands and made to serve a purpose
in complete harmony with its new environment.

Such monuments surely illustrate the adaptability of the Semitic craftsman
among men of Phoenician and Aramaean strain. Excavation in Palestine has
failed to furnish examples of Hebrew work. But Hebrew tradition itself
justifies us in regarding this trait as of more general
application, or at any rate as not repugnant to Hebrew thought, when it
relates that Solomon employed Tyrian craftsmen for work upon the Temple
and its furniture; for Phoenician art was essentially Egyptian in its
origin and general character. Even Eshmun-‘zar’s desire for burial in an
Egyptian sarcophagus may be paralleled in Hebrew tradition of a much
earlier period, when, in the last verse of Genesis,(1) it is recorded that
Joseph died, “and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt”.
Since it formed the subject of prophetic denunciation, I refrain for the
moment from citing the notorious adoption of Assyrian customs at certain
periods of the later Judaean monarchy. The two records I have referred to
will suffice, for we have in them cherished traditions, of which the
Hebrews themselves were proud, concerning the most famous example of
Hebrew religious architecture and the burial of one of the patriarchs of
the race. A similar readiness to make use of the best available resources,
even of foreign origin, may on analogy be regarded as at least possible in
the composition of Hebrew literature.

We shall see that the problems we have to face concern the possible
influence of Babylon, rather than of Egypt, upon Hebrew tradition. And one
last example, drawn from the later period, will serve to demonstrate how
Babylonian influence penetrated the ancient world and has even left some
trace upon modern civilization. It is a fact, though one perhaps not
generally realized, that the twelve divisions on the dials of our clocks
and watches have a Babylonian, and ultimately a Sumerian, ancestry. For
why is it we divide the day into twenty-four hours? We have a decimal
system of reckoning, we count by tens; why then should we divide the day
and night into twelve hours each, instead of into ten or some multiple of
ten? The reason is that the Babylonians divided the day into twelve
double-hours; and the Greeks took over their ancient system of
time-division along with their knowledge of astronomy and passed it on to
us. So if we ourselves, after more than two thousand years, are making use
of an old custom from Babylon, it would not be surprising if the Hebrews,
a contemporary race, should have fallen under her influence even before
they were carried away as captives and settled forcibly upon her
river-banks.

We may pass on, then, to the site from which our new material has been
obtained—the ancient city of Nippur, in central Babylonia. Though
the place has been deserted for at least nine hundred years, its ancient
name still lingers on in local tradition, and to this day Niffer or
Nuffar is the name the Arabs give the mounds which cover its
extensive ruins. No modern town or village has been built upon them or in
their immediate neighbourhood. The nearest considerable town is Dîwânîyah,
on the left bank of the Hillah branch of the Euphrates, twenty miles to
the south-west; but some four miles to the south of the ruins is the
village of Sûq el-‘Afej, on the eastern edge of the ‘Afej marshes, which
begin to the south of Nippur and stretch away westward. Protected by its
swamps, the region contains a few primitive settlements of the wild ‘Afej
tribesmen, each a group of reed-huts clustering around the mud fort of its
ruling sheikh. Their chief enemies are the Shammâr, who dispute with them
possession of the pastures. In summer the marshes near the mounds are
merely pools of water connected by channels through the reed-beds, but in
spring the flood-water converts them into a vast lagoon, and all that
meets the eye are a few small hamlets built on rising knolls above the
water-level. Thus Nippur may be almost isolated during the floods, but the
mounds are protected from the waters’ encroachment by an outer ring of
former habitation which has slightly raised the level of the encircling
area. The ruins of the city stand from thirty to seventy feet above the
plain, and in the north-eastern corner there rose, before the excavations,
a conical mound, known by the Arabs as Bint el-Emîr or “The
Princess”. This prominent landmark represents the temple-tower of Enlil’s
famous sanctuary, and even after excavation it is still the first object
that the approaching traveller sees on the horizon. When he has climbed
its summit he enjoys an uninterrupted view over desert and swamp.

The cause of Nippur’s present desolation is to be traced to the change in
the bed of the Euphrates, which now lies far to the west. But in antiquity
the stream flowed through the centre of the city, along the dry bed of the
Shatt en-Nîl, which divides the mounds into an eastern and a western
group. The latter covers the remains of the city proper and was occupied
in part by the great business-houses and bazaars. Here more than thirty
thousand contracts and accounts, dating from the fourth millennium to the
fifth century B.C., were found in houses along the former river-bank. In
the eastern half of the city was Enlil’s great temple Ekur, with its
temple-tower Imkharsag rising in successive stages beside it. The huge
temple-enclosure contained not only the sacrificial shrines, but also the
priests’ apartments, store-chambers, and temple-magazines. Outside its
enclosing wall, to the south-west, a large triangular mound, christened
“Tablet Hill” by the excavators, yielded a further supply of records. In
addition to business-documents of the First Dynasty of Babylon and of the
later Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian periods, between two and three
thousand literary texts and fragments were discovered here, many of them
dating from the Sumerian period. And it is possible that some of the early
literary texts that have been published were obtained in other parts of
the city.

No less than twenty-one different strata, representing separate periods of
occupation, have been noted by the American excavators at various levels
within the Nippur mounds,(1) the earliest descending to virgin soil some
twenty feet below the present level of the surrounding plain. The remote
date of Nippur’s foundation as a city and cult-centre is attested by the
fact that the pavement laid by Narâm-Sin in the south-eastern temple-court
lies thirty feet above virgin soil, while only thirty-six feet of
superimposed débris represent the succeeding millennia of
occupation down to Sassanian and early Arab times. In the period of the
Hebrew captivity the city still ranked as a great commercial market and as
one of the most sacred repositories of Babylonian religious tradition. We
know that not far off was Tel-abib, the seat of one of the colonies of
Jewish exiles, for that lay “by the river of Chebar”,(2) which we may
identify with the Kabaru Canal in Nippur’s immediate neighbourhood. It was
“among the captives by the river Chebar” that Ezekiel lived and
prophesied, and it was on Chebar’s banks that he saw his first vision of
the Cherubim.(3) He and other of the Jewish exiles may perhaps have
mingled with the motley crowd that once thronged the streets of Nippur,
and they may often have gazed on the huge temple-tower which rose above
the city’s flat roofs. We know that the later population of Nippur itself
included a considerable Jewish element, for the upper strata of the mounds
have yielded numerous clay bowls with Hebrew, Mandaean, and Syriac magical
inscriptions;(4) and not the least interesting of the objects recovered
was the wooden box of a Jewish scribe, containing his pen and ink-vessel
and a little scrap of crumbling parchment inscribed with a few Hebrew
characters.(5)

Of the many thousands of inscribed clay tablets which were found in the
course of the expeditions, some were kept at Constantinople, while others
were presented by the Sultan Abdul Hamid to the excavators, who had them
conveyed to America. Since that time a large number have been published.
The work was necessarily slow, for many of the texts were found to be in
an extremely bad state of preservation. So it happened that a great number
of the boxes containing tablets remained until recently still packed up in
the store-rooms of the Pennsylvania Museum. But under the present
energetic Director of the Museum, Dr. G. B. Gordon, the process of
arranging and publishing the mass of literary material has been “speeded
up”. A staff of skilled workmen has been employed on the laborious task of
cleaning the broken tablets and fitting the fragments together. At the
same time the help of several Assyriologists was welcomed in the further
task of running over and sorting the collections as they were prepared for
study. Professor Clay, Professor Barton, Dr. Langdon, Dr. Edward Chiera,
and Dr. Arno Poebel have all participated in the work. But the lion’s
share has fallen to the last-named scholar, who was given leave of absence
by John Hopkins University in order to take up a temporary appointment at
the Pennsylvania Museum. The result of his labours was published by the
Museum at the end of 1914.(1) The texts thus made available for study are
of very varied interest. A great body of them are grammatical and
represent compilations made by Semitic scribes of the period of
Hammurabi’s dynasty for their study of the old Sumerian tongue.
Containing, as most of them do, Semitic renderings of the Sumerian words
and expressions collected, they are as great a help to us in our study of
Sumerian language as they were to their compilers; in particular they have
thrown much new light on the paradigms of the demonstrative and personal
pronouns and on Sumerian verbal forms. But literary texts are also
included in the recent publications.

When the Pennsylvania Museum sent out its first expedition, lively hopes
were entertained that the site selected would yield material of interest
from the biblical standpoint. The city of Nippur, as we have seen, was one
of the most sacred and most ancient religious centres in the country, and
Enlil, its city-god, was the head of the Babylonian pantheon. On such a
site it seemed likely that we might find versions of the Babylonian
legends which were current at the dawn of history before the city of
Babylonia and its Semitic inhabitants came upon the scene. This
expectation has proved to be not unfounded, for the literary texts include
the Sumerian Deluge Version and Creation myth to which I referred at the
beginning of the lecture. Other texts of almost equal interest consist of
early though fragmentary lists of historical and semi-mythical rulers.
They prove that Berossus and the later Babylonians depended on material of
quite early origin in compiling their dynasties of semi-mythical kings. In
them we obtain a glimpse of ages more remote than any on which excavation
in Babylonia has yet thrown light, and for the first time we have
recovered genuine native tradition of early date with regard to the cradle
of Babylonian culture. Before we approach the Sumerian legends themselves,
it will be as well to-day to trace back in this tradition the gradual
merging of history into legend and myth, comparing at the same time the
ancient Egyptian’s picture of his own remote past. We will also ascertain
whether any new light is thrown by our inquiry upon Hebrew traditions
concerning the earliest history of the human race and the origins of
civilization.

In the study of both Egyptian and Babylonian chronology there has been a
tendency of late years to reduce the very early dates that were formerly
in fashion. But in Egypt, while the dynasties of Manetho have been
telescoped in places, excavation has thrown light on predynastic periods,
and we can now trace the history of culture in the Nile Valley back,
through an unbroken sequence, to its neolithic stage. Quite recently, too,
as I mentioned just now, a fresh literary record of these early
predynastic periods has been recovered, on a fragment of the famous
Palermo Stele, our most valuable monument for early Egyptian history and
chronology. Egypt presents a striking contrast to Babylonia in the
comparatively small number of written records which have survived for the
reconstruction of her history. We might well spare much of her religious
literature, enshrined in endless temple-inscriptions and papyri, if we
could but exchange it for some of the royal annals of Egyptian Pharaohs.
That historical records of this character were compiled by the Egyptian
scribes, and that they were as detailed and precise in their information
as those we have recovered from Assyrian sources, is clear from the few
extracts from the annals of Thothmes III’s wars which are engraved on the
walls of the temple at Karnak.(1) As in Babylonia and Assyria, such
records must have formed the foundation on which summaries of chronicles
of past Egyptian history were based. In the Palermo Stele it is recognized
that we possess a primitive chronicle of this character.

Drawn up as early as the Vth Dynasty, its historical summary proves that
from the beginning of the dynastic age onward a yearly record was kept of
the most important achievements of the reigning Pharaoh. In this
fragmentary but invaluable epitome, recording in outline much of the
history of the Old Kingdom,(1) some interesting parallels have long been
noted with Babylonian usage. The early system of time-reckoning, for
example, was the same in both countries, each year being given an official
title from the chief event that occurred in it. And although in Babylonia
we are still without material for tracing the process by which this
cumbrous method gave place to that of reckoning by regnal years, the
Palermo Stele demonstrates the way in which the latter system was evolved
in Egypt. For the events from which the year was named came gradually to
be confined to the fiscal “numberings” of cattle and land. And when these,
which at first had taken place at comparatively long intervals, had become
annual events, the numbered sequence of their occurrence corresponded
precisely to the years of the king’s reign. On the stele, during the
dynastic period, each regnal year is allotted its own space or
rectangle,(2) arranged in horizontal sequence below the name and titles of
the ruling king.

(1) Op. cit., I, pp. 57 ff.

(2) The spaces are not strictly rectangles, as each is divided vertically
from the next by the Egyptian hieroglyph for “year”.

The text, which is engraved on both sides of a great block of black
basalt, takes its name from the fact that the fragment hitherto known has
been preserved since 1877 at the Museum of Palermo. Five other fragments
of the text have now been published, of which one undoubtedly belongs to
the same monument as the Palermo fragment, while the others may represent
parts of one or more duplicate copies of that famous text. One of the four
Cairo fragments(1) was found by a digger for sebakh at Mitrahîneh
(Memphis); the other three, which were purchased from a dealer, are said
to have come from Minieh, while the fifth fragment, at University College,
is also said to have come from Upper Egypt,(2) though it was purchased by
Professor Petrie while at Memphis. These reports suggest that a number of
duplicate copies were engraved and set up in different Egyptian towns, and
it is possible that the whole of the text may eventually be recovered. The
choice of basalt for the records was obviously dictated by a desire for
their preservation, but it has had the contrary effect; for the blocks of
this hard and precious stone have been cut up and reused in later times.
The largest and most interesting of the new fragments has evidently been
employed as a door-sill, with the result that its surface is much rubbed
and parts of its text are unfortunately almost undecipherable. We shall
see that the earliest section of its record has an important bearing on
our knowledge of Egyptian predynastic history and on the traditions of
that remote period which have come down to us from the history of Manetho.

(1) See Gautier, Le Musée Égyptien, III (1915), pp. 29 ff., pl.
xxiv ff., and Foucart, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie
Orientale, XII, ii (1916), pp. 161 ff.; and cf. Gardiner, Journ. of
Egypt. Arch., III, pp. 143 ff., and Petrie, Ancient Egypt,
1916, Pt. III, pp. 114 ff.

(2) Cf. Petrie, op. cit., pp. 115, 120.

From the fragment of the stele preserved at Palermo we already knew that
its record went back beyond the Ist Dynasty into predynastic times. For
part of the top band of the inscription, which is there preserved,
contains nine names borne by kings of Lower Egypt or the Delta, which, it
had been conjectured, must follow the gods of Manetho and precede the
“Worshippers of Horus”, the immediate predecessors of the Egyptian
dynasties.(1) But of contemporary rulers of Upper Egypt we had hitherto no
knowledge, since the supposed royal names discovered at Abydos and
assigned to the time of the “Worshippers of Horus” are probably not royal
names at all.(2) With the possible exception of two very archaic slate
palettes, the first historical memorials recovered from the south do not
date from an earlier period than the beginning of the Ist Dynasty. The
largest of the Cairo fragments now helps us to fill in this gap in our
knowledge.

On the top of the new fragment(1) we meet the same band of rectangles as
at Palermo,(2) but here their upper portions are broken away, and there
only remains at the base of each of them the outlined figure of a royal
personage, seated in the same attitude as those on the Palermo stone. The
remarkable fact about these figures is that, with the apparent exception
of the third figure from the right,(3) each wears, not the Crown of the
North, as at Palermo, but the Crown of the South. We have then to do with
kings of Upper Egypt, not the Delta, and it is no longer possible to
suppose that the predynastic rulers of the Palermo Stele were confined to
those of Lower Egypt, as reflecting northern tradition. Rulers of both
halves of the country are represented, and Monsieur Gautier has shown,(4)
from data on the reverse of the inscription, that the kings of the Delta
were arranged on the original stone before the rulers of the south who are
outlined upon our new fragment. Moreover, we have now recovered definite
proof that this band of the inscription is concerned with predynastic
Egyptian princes; for the cartouche of the king, whose years are
enumerated in the second band immediately below the kings of the south,
reads Athet, a name we may with certainty identify with Athothes, the
second successor of Menes, founder of the Ist Dynasty, which is already
given under the form Ateth in the Abydos List of Kings.(5) It is thus
quite certain that the first band of the inscription relates to the
earlier periods before the two halves of the country were brought together
under a single ruler.

Though the tradition of these remote times is here recorded on a monument
of the Vth Dynasty, there is no reason to doubt its general accuracy, or
to suppose that we are dealing with purely mythological personages. It is
perhaps possible, as Monsieur Foucart suggests, that missing portions of
the text may have carried the record back through purely mythical periods
to Ptah and the Creation. In that case we should have, as we shall see, a
striking parallel to early Sumerian tradition. But in the first extant
portions of the Palermo text we are already in the realm of genuine
tradition. The names preserved appear to be those of individuals, not of
mythological creations, and we may assume that their owners really
existed. For though the invention of writing had not at that time been
achieved, its place was probably taken by oral tradition. We know that
with certain tribes of Africa at the present day, who possess no knowledge
of writing, there are functionaries charged with the duty of preserving
tribal traditions, who transmit orally to their successors a remembrance
of past chiefs and some details of events that occurred centuries
before.(1) The predynastic Egyptians may well have adopted similar means
for preserving a remembrance of their past history.

Moreover, the new text furnishes fresh proof of the general accuracy of
Manetho, even when dealing with traditions of this prehistoric age. On the
stele there is no definite indication that these two sets of predynastic
kings were contemporaneous rulers of Lower and Upper Egypt respectively;
and since elsewhere the lists assign a single sovereign to each epoch, it
has been suggested that we should regard them as successive
representatives of the legitimate kingdom.(1) Now Manetho, after his
dynasties of gods and demi-gods, states that thirty Memphite kings reigned
for 1,790 years, and were followed by ten Thinite kings whose reigns
covered a period of 350 years. Neglecting the figures as obviously
erroneous, we may well admit that the Greek historian here alludes to our
two pre-Menite dynasties. But the fact that he should regard them as
ruling consecutively does not preclude the other alternative. The modern
convention of arranging lines of contemporaneous rulers in parallel
columns had not been evolved in antiquity, and without some such method of
distinction contemporaneous rulers, when enumerated in a list, can only be
registered consecutively. It would be natural to assume that, before the
unification of Egypt by the founder of the Ist Dynasty, the rulers of
North and South were independent princes, possessing no traditions of a
united throne on which any claim to hegemony could be based. On the
assumption that this was so, their arrangement in a consecutive series
would not have deceived their immediate successors. But it would
undoubtedly tend in course of time to obliterate the tradition of their
true order, which even at the period of the Vth Dynasty may have been
completely forgotten. Manetho would thus have introduced no strange or
novel confusion; and this explanation would of course apply to other
sections of his system where the dynasties he enumerates appear to be too
many for their period. But his reproduction of two lines of predynastic
rulers, supported as it now is by the early evidence of the Palermo text,
only serves to increase our confidence in the general accuracy of his
sources, while at the same time it illustrates very effectively the way in
which possible inaccuracies, deduced from independent data, may have
arisen in quite early times.

In contrast to the dynasties of Manetho, those of Berossus are so
imperfectly preserved that they have never formed the basis of Babylonian
chronology.(1) But here too, in the chronological scheme, a similar
process of reduction has taken place. Certain dynasties, recovered from
native sources and at one time regarded as consecutive, were proved to
have been contemporaneous; and archaeological evidence suggested that some
of the great gaps, so freely assumed in the royal sequence, had no right
to be there. As a result, the succession of known rulers was thrown into
truer perspective, and such gaps as remained were being partially filled
by later discoveries. Among the latter the most important find was that of
an early list of kings, recently published by Père Scheil(2) and
subsequently purchased by the British Museum shortly before the war. This
had helped us to fill in the gap between the famous Sargon of Akkad and
the later dynasties, but it did not carry us far beyond Sargon’s own time.
Our archaeological evidence also comes suddenly to an end. Thus the
earliest picture we have hitherto obtained of the Sumerians has been that
of a race employing an advanced system of writing and possessed of a
knowledge of metal. We have found, in short, abundant remains of a
bronze-age culture, but no traces of preceding ages of development such as
meet us on early Egyptian sites. It was a natural inference that the
advent of the Sumerians in the Euphrates Valley was sudden, and that they
had brought their highly developed culture with them from some region of
Central or Southern Asia.

The newly published Nippur documents will cause us to modify that view.
The lists of early kings were themselves drawn up under the Dynasty of
Nîsin in the twenty-second century B.C., and they give us traces of
possibly ten and at least eight other “kingdoms” before the earliest
dynasty of the known lists.(1) One of their novel features is that they
include summaries at the end, in which it is stated how often a city or
district enjoyed the privilege of being the seat of supreme authority in
Babylonia. The earliest of their sections lie within the legendary period,
and though in the third dynasty preserved we begin to note signs of a
firmer historical tradition, the great break that then occurs in the text
is at present only bridged by titles of various “kingdoms” which the
summaries give; a few even of these are missing and the relative order of
the rest is not assured. But in spite of their imperfect state of
preservation, these documents are of great historical value and will
furnish a framework for future chronological schemes. Meanwhile we may
attribute to some of the later dynasties titles in complete agreement with
Sumerian tradition. The dynasty of Ur-Engur, for example, which preceded
that of Nîsin, becomes, if we like, the Third Dynasty of Ur. Another
important fact which strikes us after a scrutiny of the early royal names
recovered is that, while two or three are Semitic,(2) the great majority
of those borne by the earliest rulers of Kish, Erech, and Ur are as
obviously Sumerian.

It is clear that in native tradition, current among the Sumerians
themselves before the close of the third millennium, their race was
regarded as in possession of Babylonia since the dawn of history. This at
any rate proves that their advent was not sudden nor comparatively recent,
and it further suggests that Babylonia itself was the cradle of their
civilization. It will be the province of future archaeological research to
fill out the missing dynasties and to determine at what points in the list
their strictly historical basis disappears. Some, which are fortunately
preserved near the beginning, bear on their face their legendary
character. But for our purpose they are none the worse for that.

In the first two dynasties, which had their seats at the cities of Kish
and Erech, we see gods mingling with men upon the earth. Tammuz, the god
of vegetation, for whose annual death Ezekiel saw women weeping beside the
Temple at Jerusalem, is here an earthly monarch. He appears to be
described as “a hunter”, a phrase which recalls the death of Adonis in
Greek mythology. According to our Sumerian text he reigned in Erech for a
hundred years.

Another attractive Babylonian legend is that of Etana, the prototype of
Icarus and hero of the earliest dream of human flight.(1) Clinging to the
pinions of his friend the Eagle he beheld the world and its encircling
stream recede beneath him; and he flew through the gate of heaven, only to
fall headlong back to earth. He is here duly entered in the list, where we
read that “Etana, the shepherd who ascended to heaven, who subdued all
lands”, ruled in the city of Kish for 635 years.

The god Lugal-banda is another hero of legend. When the hearts of the
other gods failed them, he alone recovered the Tablets of Fate, stolen by
the bird-god Zû from Enlil’s palace. He is here recorded to have reigned
in Erech for 1,200 years.

Tradition already told us that Erech was the native city of Gilgamesh, the
hero of the national epic, to whom his ancestor Ut-napishtim related the
story of the Flood. Gilgamesh too is in our list, as king of Erech for 126
years.

We have here in fact recovered traditions of Post-diluvian kings.
Unfortunately our list goes no farther back than that, but it is probable
that in its original form it presented a general correspondence to the
system preserved from Berossus, which enumerates ten Antediluvian kings,
the last of them Xisuthros, the hero of the Deluge. Indeed, for the
dynastic period, the agreement of these old Sumerian lists with the
chronological system of Berossus is striking. The latter, according to
Syncellus, gives 34,090 or 34,080 years as the total duration of the
historical period, apart from his preceding mythical ages, while the
figure as preserved by Eusebius is 33,091 years.(1) The compiler of one of
our new lists,(2) writing some 1,900 years earlier, reckons that the
dynastic period in his day had lasted for 32,243 years. Of course all
these figures are mythical, and even at the time of the Sumerian Dynasty
of Nîsin variant traditions were current with regard to the number of
historical and semi-mythical kings of Babylonia and the duration of their
rule. For the earlier writer of another of our lists,(3) separated from
the one already quoted by an interval of only sixty-seven years, gives
28,876(4) years as the total duration of the dynasties at his time. But in
spite of these discrepancies, the general resemblance presented by the
huge totals in the variant copies of the list to the alternative figures
of Berossus, if we ignore his mythical period, is remarkable. They
indicate a far closer correspondence of the Greek tradition with that of
the early Sumerians themselves than was formerly suspected.

Further proof of this correspondence may be seen in the fact that the new
Sumerian Version of the Deluge Story, which I propose to discuss in the
second lecture, gives us a connected account of the world’s history down
to that point. The Deluge hero is there a Sumerian king named Ziusudu,
ruling in one of the newly created cities of Babylonia and ministering at
the shrine of his city-god. He is continually given the royal title, and
the foundation of the Babylonian “kingdom” is treated as an essential part
of Creation. We may therefore assume that an Antediluvian period existed
in Sumerian tradition as in Berossus.(1) And I think Dr. Poebel is right
in assuming that the Nippur copies of the Dynastic List begin with the
Post-diluvian period.(2)

Though Professor Barton, on the other hand, holds that the Dynastic List
had no concern with the Deluge, his suggestion that the early names
preserved by it may have been the original source of Berossus’
Antediluvian rulers(1) may yet be accepted in a modified form. In coming
to his conclusion he may have been influenced by what seems to me an
undoubted correspondence between one of the rulers in our list and the
sixth Antediluvian king of Berossus. I think few will be disposed to
dispute the equation

{Daonos poimon} = Etana, a shepherd.

Each list preserves the hero’s shepherd origin and the correspondence of
the names is very close, Daonos merely transposing the initial vowel of
Etana.(2) That Berossus should have translated a Post-diluvian ruler into
the Antediluvian dynasty would not be at all surprising in view of the
absence of detailed correspondence between his later dynasties and those
we know actually occupied the Babylonian throne. Moreover, the inclusion
of Babylon in his list of Antediluvian cities should make us hesitate to
regard all the rulers he assigns to his earliest dynasty as necessarily
retaining in his list their original order in Sumerian tradition. Thus we
may with a clear conscience seek equations between the names of Berossus’
Antediluvian rulers and those preserved in the early part of our Dynastic
List, although we may regard the latter as equally Post-diluvian in
Sumerian belief.

This reflection, and the result already obtained, encourage us to accept
the following further equation, which is yielded by a renewed scrutiny of
the lists:

{‘Ammenon} = Enmenunna.

Here Ammenon, the fourth of Berossus’ Antediluvian kings, presents a
wonderfully close transcription of the Sumerian name. The n of the
first syllable has been assimilated to the following consonant in
accordance with a recognized law of euphony, and the resultant doubling of
the m is faithfully preserved in the Greek. Precisely the same
initial component, Enme, occurs in the name Enmeduranki, borne by a
mythical king of Sippar, who has long been recognized as the original of
Berossus’ seventh Antediluvian king, {Euedorakhos}.(1) There too the
original n has been assimilated, but the Greek form retains no
doubling of the m and points to its further weakening.

I do not propose to detain you with a detailed discussion of Sumerian
royal names and their possible Greek equivalents. I will merely point out
that the two suggested equations, which I venture to think we may regard
as established, throw the study of Berossus’ mythological personages upon
a new plane. No equivalent has hitherto been suggested for {Daonos}; but
{‘Ammenon} has been confidently explained as the equivalent of a
conjectured Babylonian original, Ummânu, lit. “Workman”. The fact that we
should now have recovered the Sumerian original of the name, which proves
to have no connexion in form or meaning with the previously suggested
Semitic equivalent, tends to cast doubt on other Semitic equations
proposed. Perhaps {‘Amelon} or {‘Amillaros} may after all not prove to be
the equivalent of Amêlu, “Man”, nor {‘Amempsinos} that of Amêl-Sin. Both
may find their true equivalents in some of the missing royal names at the
head of the Sumerian Dynastic List. There too we may provisionally seek
{‘Aloros}, the “first king”, whose equation with Aruru, the Babylonian
mother-goddess, never appeared a very happy suggestion.(1) The ingenious
proposal,(2) on the other hand, that his successor, {‘Alaparos},
represents a miscopied {‘Adaparos}, a Greek rendering of the name of
Adapa, may still hold good in view of Etana’s presence in the Sumerian
dynastic record. Ut-napishtim’s title, Khasisatra or Atrakhasis, “the Very
Wise”, still of course remains the established equivalent of {Xisouthros};
but for {‘Otiartes} (? {‘Opartes}), a rival to Ubar-Tutu, Ut-napishtim’s
father, may perhaps appear. The new identifications do not of course
dispose of the old ones, except in the case of Ummânu; but they open up a
new line of approach and provide a fresh field for conjecture.(3) Semitic,
and possibly contracted, originals are still possible for unidentified
mythical kings of Berossus; but such equations will inspire greater
confidence, should we be able to establish Sumerian originals for the
Semitic renderings, from new material already in hand or to be obtained in
the future.

But it is time I read you extracts from the earlier extant portions of the
Sumerian Dynastic List, in order to illustrate the class of document with
which we are dealing. From them it will be seen that the record is not a
tabular list of names like the well-known King’s Lists of the
Neo-Babylonian period. It is cast in the form of an epitomized chronicle
and gives under set formulae the length of each king’s reign, and his
father’s name in cases of direct succession to father or brother. Short
phrases are also sometimes added, or inserted in the sentence referring to
a king, in order to indicate his humble origin or the achievement which
made his name famous in tradition. The head of the First Column of the
text is wanting, and the first royal name that is completely preserved is
that of Galumum, the ninth or tenth ruler of the earliest “kingdom”, or
dynasty, of Kish. The text then runs on connectedly for several lines:

A small gap then occurs in the text, but we know that the last two
representatives of this dynasty of twenty-three kings are related to have
ruled for nine hundred years and six hundred and twenty-five years
respectively. In the Second Column of the text the lines are also
fortunately preserved which record the passing of the first hegemony of
Kish to the “Kingdom of Eanna”, the latter taking its name from the famous
temple of Anu and Ishtar in the old city of Erech. The text continues:

This group of early kings of Erech is of exceptional interest. Apart from
its inclusion of Gilgamesh and the gods Tammuz and Lugalbanda, its record
of Meskingasher’s reign possibly refers to one of the lost legends of
Erech. Like him Melchizedek, who comes to us in a chapter of Genesis
reflecting the troubled times of Babylon’s First Dynasty,(1) was priest as
well as king.(2) Tradition appears to have credited Meskingasher’s son and
successor, Enmerkar, with the building of Erech as a city around the first
settlement Eanna, which had already given its name to the “kingdom”. If
so, Sumerian tradition confirms the assumption of modern research that the
great cities of Babylonia arose around the still more ancient cult-centres
of the land. We shall have occasion to revert to the traditions here
recorded concerning the parentage of Meskingasher, the founder of this
line of kings, and that of its most famous member, Gilgamesh. Meanwhile we
may note that the closing rulers of the “Kingdom of Eanna” are wanting.
When the text is again preserved, we read of the hegemony passing from
Erech to Ur and thence to Awan:

With the “Kingdom of Ur” we appear to be approaching a firmer historical
tradition, for the reigns of its rulers are recorded in decades, not
hundreds of years. But we find in the summary, which concludes the main
copy of our Dynastic List, that the kingdom of Awan, though it consisted
of but three rulers, is credited with a total duration of three hundred
and fifty-six years, implying that we are not yet out of the legendary
stratum. Since Awan is proved by newly published historical inscriptions
from Nippur to have been an important deity of Elam at the time of the
Dynasty of Akkad,(1) we gather that the “Kingdom of Awan” represented in
Sumerian tradition the first occasion on which the country passed for a
time under Elamite rule. At this point a great gap occurs in the text, and
when the detailed dynastic succession in Babylonia is again assured, we
have passed definitely from the realm of myth and legend into that of
history.(2)

What new light, then, do these old Sumerian records throw on Hebrew
traditions concerning the early ages of mankind? I think it will be
admitted that there is something strangely familiar about some of those
Sumerian extracts I read just now. We seem to hear in them the faint echo
of another narrative, like them but not quite the same.

Throughout these extracts from “the book of the generations of Adam”,(1)
Galumum’s nine hundred years(2) seem to run almost like a refrain; and
Methuselah’s great age, the recognized symbol for longevity, is even
exceeded by two of the Sumerian patriarchs. The names in the two lists are
not the same,(3) but in both we are moving in the same atmosphere and
along similar lines of thought. Though each list adheres to its own set
formulae, it estimates the length of human life in the early ages of the
world on much the same gigantic scale as the other. Our Sumerian records
are not quite so formal in their structure as the Hebrew narrative, but
the short notes which here and there relieve their stiff monotony may be
paralleled in the Cainite genealogy of the preceding chapter in
Genesis.(4) There Cain’s city-building, for example, may pair with that of
Enmerkar; and though our new records may afford no precise equivalents to
Jabal’s patronage of nomad life, or to the invention of music and
metal-working ascribed to Jubal and Tubal-cain, these too are quite in the
spirit of Sumerian and Babylonian tradition, in their attempt to picture
the beginnings of civilization. Thus Enmeduranki, the prototype of the
seventh Antediluvian patriarch of Berossus, was traditionally revered as
the first exponent of divination.(5) It is in the chronological and
general setting, rather than in the Hebrew names and details, that an echo
seems here to reach us from Sumer through Babylon.

I may add that a parallel is provided by the new Sumerian records to the
circumstances preceding the birth of the Nephilim at the beginning of the
sixth chapter of Genesis.(1) For in them also great prowess or distinction
is ascribed to the progeny of human and divine unions. We have already
noted that, according to the traditions the records embody, the Sumerians
looked back to a time when gods lived upon the earth with men, and we have
seen such deities as Tammuz and Lugalbanda figuring as rulers of cities in
the dynastic sequence. As in later periods, their names are there preceded
by the determinative for divinity. But more significant still is the fact
that we read of two Sumerian heroes, also rulers of cities, who were
divine on the father’s or mother’s side but not on both. Meskingasher is
entered in the list as “son of the Sun-god”,(2) and no divine parentage is
recorded on the mother’s side. On the other hand, the human father of
Gilgamesh is described as the high priest of Kullab, and we know from
other sources that his mother was the goddess Ninsun.(3) That this is not
a fanciful interpretation is proved by a passage in the Gilgamesh Epic
itself,(4) in which its hero is described as two-thirds god and one-third
man. We again find ourselves back in the same stratum of tradition with
which the Hebrew narratives have made us so familiar.

What light then does our new material throw upon traditional origins of
civilization? We have seen that in Egypt a new fragment of the Palermo
Stele has confirmed in a remarkable way the tradition of the predynastic
period which was incorporated in his history by Manetho. It has long been
recognized that in Babylonia the sources of Berossus must have been
refracted by the political atmosphere of that country during the preceding
nineteen hundred years. This inference our new material supports; but when
due allowance has been made for a resulting disturbance of vision, the
Sumerian origin of the remainder of his evidence is notably confirmed. Two
of his ten Antediluvian kings rejoin their Sumerian prototypes, and we
shall see that two of his three Antediluvian cities find their place among
the five of primitive Sumerian belief. It is clear that in Babylonia, as
in Egypt, the local traditions of the dawn of history, current in the
Hellenistic period, were modelled on very early lines. Both countries were
the seats of ancient civilizations, and it is natural that each should
stage its picture of beginnings upon its own soil and embellish it with
local colouring.

It is a tribute to the historical accuracy of Hebrew tradition to
recognize that it never represented Palestine as the cradle of the human
race. It looked to the East rather than to the South for evidence of man’s
earliest history and first progress in the arts of life. And it is in the
East, in the soil of Babylonia, that we may legitimately seek material in
which to verify the sources of that traditional belief.

The new parallels I have to-day attempted to trace between some of the
Hebrew traditions, preserved in Gen. iv-vi, and those of the early
Sumerians, as presented by their great Dynastic List, are essentially
general in character and do not apply to details of narrative or to proper
names. If they stood alone, we should still have to consider whether they
are such as to suggest cultural influence or independent origin. But
fortunately they do not exhaust the evidence we have lately recovered from
the site of Nippur, and we will postpone formulating our conclusions with
regard to them until the whole field has been surveyed. From the biblical
standpoint by far the most valuable of our new documents is one that
incorporates a Sumerian version of the Deluge story. We shall see that it
presents a variant and more primitive picture of that great catastrophe
than those of the Babylonian and Hebrew versions. And what is of even
greater interest, it connects the narrative of the Flood with that of
Creation, and supplies a brief but intermediate account of the
Antediluvian period. How then are we to explain this striking literary
resemblance to the structure of the narrative in Genesis, a resemblance
that is completely wanting in the Babylonian versions? But that is a
problem we must reserve for the next lecture.

LECTURE II — DELUGE STORIES AND THE NEW SUMERIAN VERSION

In the first lecture we saw how, both in Babylonia and Egypt, recent
discoveries had thrown light upon periods regarded as prehistoric, and how
we had lately recovered traditions concerning very early rulers both in
the Nile Valley and along the lower Euphrates. On the strength of the
latter discovery we noted the possibility that future excavation in
Babylonia would lay bare stages of primitive culture similar to those we
have already recovered in Egyptian soil. Meanwhile the documents from
Nippur had shown us what the early Sumerians themselves believed about
their own origin, and we traced in their tradition the gradual blending of
history with legend and myth. We saw that the new Dynastic List took us
back in the legendary sequence at least to the beginning of the
Post-diluvian period. Now one of the newly published literary texts fills
in the gap beyond, for it gives us a Sumerian account of the history of
the world from the Creation to the Deluge, at about which point, as we
saw, the extant portions of the Dynastic List take up the story. I propose
to devote my lecture to-day to this early version of the Flood and to the
effect of its discovery upon some current theories.

The Babylonian account of the Deluge, which was discovered by George Smith
in 1872 on tablets from the Royal Library at Nineveh, is, as you know,
embedded in a long epic of twelve Books recounting the adventures of the
Old Babylonian hero Gilgamesh. Towards the end of this composite tale,
Gilgamesh, desiring immortality, crosses the Waters of Death in order to
beg the secret from his ancestor Ut-napishtim, who in the past had escaped
the Deluge and had been granted immortality by the gods. The Eleventh
Tablet, or Book, of the epic contains the account of the Deluge which
Ut-napishtim related to his kinsman Gilgamesh. The close correspondence of
this Babylonian story with that contained in Genesis is recognized by
every one and need not detain us. You will remember that in some passages
the accounts tally even in minute details, such, for example, as the
device of sending out birds to test the abatement of the waters. It is
true that in the Babylonian version a dove, a swallow, and a raven are
sent forth in that order, instead of a raven and the dove three times. But
such slight discrepancies only emphasize the general resemblance of the
narratives.

In any comparison it is usually admitted that two accounts have been
combined in the Hebrew narrative. I should like to point out that this
assumption may be made by any one, whatever his views may be with regard
to the textual problems of the Hebrew Bible and the traditional authorship
of the Pentateuch. And for our purpose at the moment it is immaterial
whether we identify the compiler of these Hebrew narratives with Moses
himself, or with some later Jewish historian whose name has not come down
to us. Whoever he was, he has scrupulously preserved his two texts and,
even when they differ, he has given each as he found it. Thanks to this
fact, any one by a careful examination of the narrative can disentangle
the two versions for himself. He will find each gives a consistent story.
One of them appears to be simpler and more primitive than the other, and I
will refer to them as the earlier and the later Hebrew Versions.(1) The
Babylonian text in the Epic of Gilgamesh contains several peculiarities of
each of the Hebrew versions, though the points of resemblance are more
detailed in the earlier of the two.

Now the tablets from the Royal Library at Nineveh inscribed with the
Gilgamesh Epic do not date from an earlier period than the seventh century
B.C. But archaeological evidence has long shown that the traditions
themselves were current during all periods of Babylonian history; for
Gilgamesh and his half-human friend Enkidu were favourite subjects for the
seal-engraver, whether he lived in Sumerian times or under the Achaemenian
kings of Persia. We have also, for some years now, possessed two early
fragments of the Deluge narrative, proving that the story was known to the
Semitic inhabitants of the country at the time of Hammurabi’s dynasty.(1)
Our newly discovered text from Nippur was also written at about that
period, probably before 2100 B.C. But the composition itself, apart from
the tablet on which it is inscribed, must go back very much earlier than
that. For instead of being composed in Semitic Babylonian, the text is in
Sumerian, the language of the earliest known inhabitants of Babylonia,
whom the Semites eventually displaced. This people, it is now recognized,
were the originators of the Babylonian civilization, and we saw in the
first lecture that, according to their own traditions, they had occupied
that country since the dawn of history.

The Semites as a ruling race came later, though the occurrence of Semitic
names in the Sumerian Dynastic List suggests very early infiltration from
Arabia. After a long struggle the immigrants succeeded in dominating the
settled race; and in the process they in turn became civilized. They
learnt and adopted the cuneiform writing, they took over the Sumerian
literature. Towards the close of the third millennium, when our tablet was
written, the Sumerians as a race had almost ceased to exist. They had been
absorbed in the Semitic population and their language was no longer the
general language of the country. But their ancient literature and sacred
texts were carefully preserved and continued to be studied by the Semitic
priests and scribes. So the fact that the tablet is written in the old
Sumerian tongue proves that the story it tells had come down from a very
much earlier period. This inference is not affected by certain small
differences in idiom which its language presents when compared with that
of Sumerian building-inscriptions. Such would naturally occur in the
course of transmission, especially in a text which, as we shall see, had
been employed for a practical purpose after being subjected to a process
of reduction to suit it to its new setting.

When we turn to the text itself, it will be obvious that the story also is
very primitive. But before doing so we will inquire whether this very
early version is likely to cast any light on the origin of Deluge stories
such as are often met with in other parts of the world. Our inquiry will
have an interest apart from the question itself, as it will illustrate the
views of two divergent schools among students of primitive literature and
tradition. According to one of these views, in its most extreme form, the
tales which early or primitive man tells about his gods and the origin of
the world he sees around him are never to be regarded as simple stories,
but are to be consistently interpreted as symbolizing natural phenomena.
It is, of course, quite certain that, both in Egypt and Babylonia,
mythology in later periods received a strong astrological colouring; and
it is equally clear that some legends derive their origin from nature
myths. But the theory in the hands of its more enthusiastic adherents goes
further than that. For them a complete absence of astrological colouring
is no deterrent from an astrological interpretation; and, where such
colouring does occur, the possibility of later embellishment is
discounted, and it is treated without further proof as the base on which
the original story rests. One such interpretation of the Deluge narrative
in Babylonia, particularly favoured by recent German writers, would regard
it as reflecting the passage of the Sun through a portion of the ecliptic.
It is assumed that the primitive Babylonians were aware that in the course
of ages the spring equinox must traverse the southern or watery region of
the zodiac. This, on their system, signified a submergence of the whole
universe in water, and the Deluge myth would symbolize the safe passage of
the vernal Sun-god through that part of the ecliptic. But we need not
spend time over that view, as its underlying conception is undoubtedly
quite a late development of Babylonian astrology.

More attractive is the simpler astrological theory that the voyage of any
Deluge hero in his boat or ark represents the daily journey of the Sun-god
across the heavenly ocean, a conception which is so often represented in
Egyptian sculpture and painting. It used to be assumed by holders of the
theory that this idea of the Sun as “the god in the boat” was common among
primitive races, and that that would account for the widespread occurrence
of Deluge-stories among scattered races of the world. But this view has
recently undergone some modification in accordance with the general trend
of other lines of research. In recent years there has been an increased
readiness among archaeologists to recognize evidence of contact between
the great civilizations of antiquity. This has been particularly the case
in the area of the Eastern Mediterranean; but the possibility has also
been mooted of the early use of land-routes running from the Near East to
Central and Southern Asia. The discovery in Chinese Turkestan, to the east
of the Caspian, of a prehistoric culture resembling that of Elam has now
been followed by the finding of similar remains by Sir Aurel Stein in the
course of the journey from which he has lately returned.(1) They were
discovered in an old basin of the Helmand River in Persian Seistan, where
they had been laid bare by wind-erosion. But more interesting still, and
an incentive to further exploration in that region, is another of his
discoveries last year, also made near the Afghan border. At two sites in
the Helmand Delta, well above the level of inundation, he came across
fragments of pottery inscribed in early Aramaic characters,(2) though, for
obvious reasons, he has left them with all his other collections in India.
This unexpected find, by the way, suggests for our problem possibilities
of wide transmission in comparatively early times.

The synthetic tendency among archaeologists has been reflected in
anthropological research, which has begun to question the separate and
independent origin, not only of the more useful arts and crafts, but also
of many primitive customs and beliefs. It is suggested that too much
stress has been laid on environment; and, though it is readily admitted
that similar needs and experiences may in some cases have given rise to
similar expedients and explanations, it is urged that man is an imitative
animal and that inventive genius is far from common.(1) Consequently the
wide dispersion of many beliefs and practices, which used generally to be
explained as due to the similar and independent working of the human mind
under like conditions, is now often provisionally registered as evidence
of migratory movement or of cultural drift. Much good work has recently
been done in tabulating the occurrence of many customs and beliefs, in
order to ascertain their lines of distribution. Workers are as yet in the
collecting stage, and it is hardly necessary to say that explanatory
theories are still to be regarded as purely tentative and provisional. At
the meetings of the British Association during the last few years, the
most breezy discussions in the Anthropological Section have undoubtedly
centred around this subject. There are several works in the field, but the
most comprehensive theory as yet put forward is one that concerns us, as
it has given a new lease of life to the old solar interpretation of the
Deluge story.

In a land such as Egypt, where there is little rain and the sky is always
clear, the sun in its splendour tended from the earliest period to
dominate the national consciousness. As intercourse increased along the
Nile Valley, centres of Sun-worship ceased to be merely local, and the
political rise of a city determined the fortunes of its cult. From the
proto-dynastic period onward, the “King of the two Lands” had borne the
title of “Horus” as the lineal descendant of the great Sun-god of Edfu,
and the rise of Ra in the Vth Dynasty, through the priesthood of
Heliopolis, was confirmed in the solar theology of the Middle Kingdom.
Thus it was that other deities assumed a solar character as forms of Ra.
Amen, the local god of Thebes, becomes Amen-Ra with the political rise of
his city, and even the old Crocodile-god, Sebek, soars into the sky as
Sebek-Ra. The only other movement in the religion of ancient Egypt,
comparable in importance to this solar development, was the popular cult
of Osiris as God of the Dead, and with it the official religion had to
come to terms. Horus is reborn as the posthumous son of Osiris, and Ra
gladdens his abode during his nightly journey through the Underworld. The
theory with which we are concerned suggests that this dominant trait in
Egyptian religion passed, with other elements of culture, beyond the
bounds of the Nile Valley and influenced the practice and beliefs of
distant races.

This suggestion has been gradually elaborated by its author, Professor
Elliot Smith, who has devoted much attention to the anatomical study of
Egyptian mummification. Beginning with a scrutiny of megalithic building
and sun-worship,(1) he has subsequently deduced, from evidence of common
distribution, the existence of a culture-complex, including in addition to
these two elements the varied practices of tattooing, circumcision,
ear-piercing, that quaint custom known as couvade, head-deformation, and
the prevalence of serpent-cults, myths of petrifaction and the Deluge, and
finally of mummification. The last ingredient was added after an
examination of Papuan mummies had disclosed their apparent resemblance in
points of detail to Egyptian mummies of the XXIst Dynasty. As a result he
assumes the existence of an early cultural movement, for which the
descriptive title “heliolithic” has been coined.(2) Starting with Egypt as
its centre, one of the principal lines of its advance is said to have lain
through Syria and Mesopotamia and thence along the coastlands of Asia to
the Far East. The method of distribution and the suggested part played by
the Phoenicians have been already criticized sufficiently. But in a
modified form the theory has found considerable support, especially among
ethnologists interested in Indonesia. I do not propose to examine in
detail the evidence for or against it. It will suffice to note that the
Deluge story and its alleged Egyptian origin in solar worship form one of
the prominent strands in its composition.

One weakness of this particular strand is that the Egyptians themselves
possessed no tradition of the Deluge. Indeed the annual inundation of the
Nile is not such as would give rise to a legend of world-destruction; and
in this respect it presents a striking contrast to the Tigris and
Euphrates. The ancient Egyptian’s conception of his own gentle river is
reflected in the form he gave the Nile-god, for Hapi is represented as no
fierce warrior or monster. He is given a woman’s breasts as a sign of his
fecundity. The nearest Egyptian parallel to the Deluge story is the
“Legend of the Destruction of Mankind”, which is engraved on the walls of
a chamber in the tomb of Seti I.(1) The late Sir Gaston Maspero indeed
called it “a dry deluge myth”, but his paradox was intended to emphasize
the difference as much as the parallelism presented. It is true that in
the Egyptian myth the Sun-god causes mankind to be slain because of their
impiety, and he eventually pardons the survivors. The narrative thus
betrays undoubted parallelism to the Babylonian and Hebrew stories, so far
as concerns the attempted annihilation of mankind by the offended god, but
there the resemblance ends. For water has no part in man’s destruction,
and the essential element of a Deluge story is thus absent.(2) Our new
Sumerian document, on the other hand, contains what is by far the earliest
example yet recovered of a genuine Deluge tale; and we may thus use it
incidentally to test this theory of Egyptian influence, and also to
ascertain whether it furnishes any positive evidence on the origin of
Deluge stories in general.

The tablet on which our new version of the Deluge is inscribed was
excavated at Nippur during the third Babylonian expedition sent out by the
University of Pennsylvania; but it was not until the summer of 1912 that
its contents were identified, when the several fragments of which it was
composed were assembled and put together. It is a large document,
containing six columns of writing, three on each side; but unfortunately
only the lower half has been recovered, so that considerable gaps occur in
the text.(1) The sharp edges of the broken surface, however, suggest that
it was damaged after removal from the soil, and the possibility remains
that some of the missing fragments may yet be recovered either at
Pennsylvania or in the Museum at Constantinople. As it is not dated, its
age must be determined mainly by the character of its script. A close
examination of the writing suggests that it can hardly have been inscribed
as late as the Kassite Dynasty, since two or three signs exhibit more
archaic forms than occur on any tablets of that period;(2) and such
linguistic corruptions as have been noted in its text may well be
accounted for by the process of decay which must have already affected the
Sumerian language at the time of the later kings of Nisin. Moreover, the
tablet bears a close resemblance to one of the newly published copies of
the Sumerian Dynastic List from Nippur;(3) for both are of the same shape
and composed of the same reddish-brown clay, and both show the same
peculiarities of writing. The two tablets in fact appear to have been
written by the same hand, and as that copy of the Dynastic List was
probably drawn up before the latter half of the First Dynasty of Babylon,
we may assign the same approximate date for the writing of our text. This
of course only fixes a lower limit for the age of the myth which it
enshrines.

That the composition is in the form of a poem may be seen at a glance from
the external appearance of the tablet, the division of many of the lines
and the blank spaces frequently left between the sign-groups being due to
the rhythmical character of the text. The style of the poetry may be
simple and abrupt, but it exhibits a familiar feature of both
Semitic-Babylonian and Hebrew poetry, in its constant employment of
partial repetition or paraphrase in parallel lines. The story it tells is
very primitive and in many respects unlike the Babylonian Versions of the
Deluge which we already possess. Perhaps its most striking peculiarity is
the setting of the story, which opens with a record of the creation of man
and animals, goes on to tell how the first cities were built, and ends
with a version of the Deluge, which is thus recounted in its relation to
the Sumerian history of the world. This literary connexion between the
Creation and Deluge narratives is of unusual interest, in view of the age
of our text. In the Babylonian Versions hitherto known they are included
in separate epics with quite different contexts. Here they are recounted
together in a single document, much as they probably were in the history
of Berossus and as we find them in the present form of the Book of
Genesis. This fact will open up some interesting problems when we attempt
to trace the literary descent of the tradition.

But one important point about the text should be emphasized at once, since
it will affect our understanding of some very obscure passages, of which
no satisfactory explanation has yet been given. The assumption has
hitherto been made that the text is an epic pure and simple. It is quite
true that the greater part of it is a myth, recounted as a narrative in
poetical form, but there appear to me to be clear indications that the
myth was really embedded in an incantation. If this was so, the
mythological portion was recited for a magical purpose, with the object of
invoking the aid of the chief deities whose actions in the past are there
described, and of increasing by that means the potency of the spell.(1) In
the third lecture I propose to treat in more detail the employment and
significance of myth in magic, and we shall have occasion to refer to
other instances, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian, in which a myth has
reached us in a magical setting.

In the present case the inference of magical use is drawn from certain
passages in the text itself, which appear to be explicable only on that
hypothesis. In magical compositions of the later period intended for
recitation, the sign for “Incantation” is usually prefixed. Unfortunately
the beginning of our text is wanting; but its opening words are given in
the colophon, or title, which is engraved on the left-hand edge of the
tablet, and it is possible that the traces of the first sign there are to
be read as EN, “Incantation”.(1) Should a re-examination of the tablet
establish this reading of the word, we should have definite proof of the
suggested magical setting of the narrative. But even if we assume its
absence, that would not invalidate the arguments that can be adduced in
favour of recognizing the existence of a magical element, for they are
based on internal evidence and enable us to explain certain features which
are inexplicable on Dr. Poebel’s hypothesis. Moreover, we shall later on
examine another of the newly published Sumerian compositions from Nippur,
which is not only semi-epical in character, but is of precisely the same
shape, script, and period as our text, and is very probably a tablet of
the same series. There also the opening signs of the text are wanting, but
far more of its contents are preserved and they present unmistakable
traces of magical use. Its evidence, as that of a parallel text, may
therefore be cited in support of the present contention. It may be added
that in Sumerian magical compositions of this early period, of which we
have not yet recovered many quite obvious examples, it is possible that
the prefix “Incantation” was not so invariable as in the later magical
literature.

It has already been remarked that only the lower half of our tablet has
been recovered, and that consequently a number of gaps occur in the text.
On the obverse the upper portion of each of the first three columns is
missing, while of the remaining three columns, which are inscribed upon
the reverse, the upper portions only are preserved. This difference in the
relative positions of the textual fragments recovered is due to the fact
that Sumerian scribes, like their later Babylonian and Assyrian imitators,
when they had finished writing the obverse of a tablet, turned it over
from bottom to top—not, as we should turn a sheet of paper, from
right to left. But in spite of the lacunae, the sequence of events related
in the mythological narrative may be followed without difficulty, since
the main outline of the story is already familiar enough from the versions
of the Semitic-Babylonian scribes and of Berossus. Some uncertainties
naturally remain as to what exactly was included in the missing portions
of the tablet; but the more important episodes are fortunately recounted
in the extant fragments, and these suffice for a definition of the
distinctive character of the Sumerian Version. In view of its literary
importance it may be advisable to attempt a somewhat detailed discussion
of its contents, column by column;(1) and the analysis may be most
conveniently divided into numbered sections, each of which refers to one
of the six columns of the tablet. The description of the First Column will
serve to establish the general character of the text. Through the analysis
of the tablet parallels and contrasts will be noted with the Babylonian
and Hebrew Versions. It will then be possible to summarise, on a surer
foundation, the literary history of the traditions, and finally to
estimate the effect of our new evidence upon current theories as to the
origin and wide dispersion of Deluge stories.

The following headings, under which the six numbered sections may be
arranged, indicate the contents of each column and show at a glance the
main features of the Sumerian Version:

I. Introduction to the Myth, and account of Creation.

II. The Antediluvian Cities.

III. The Council of the Gods, and Ziusudu’s piety.

IV. The Dream-Warning.

V. The Deluge, the Escape of the Great Boat, and the Sacrifice to the
Sun-god.

VI. The Propitiation of the Angry Gods, and Ziusudu’s Immortality.

I. INTRODUCTION TO THE MYTH, AND ACCOUNT OF CREATION

The beginning of the text is wanting, and the earliest lines preserved of
the First Column open with the closing sentences of a speech, probably by
the chief of the four creating deities, who are later on referred to by
name. In it there is a reference to a future destruction of mankind, but
the context is broken; the lines in question begin:

From the reference to “my human race” it is clear that the speaker is a
creating deity; and since the expression is exactly parallel to the term
“my people” used by Ishtar, or Bêlit-ili, “the Lady of the gods”, in the
Babylonian Version of the Deluge story when she bewails the destruction of
mankind, Dr. Poebel assigns the speech to Ninkharsagga, or Nintu,(1) the
goddess who later in the column is associated with Anu, Enlil, and Enki in
man’s creation. But the mention of Nintu in her own speech is hardly
consistent with that supposition,(2) if we assume with Dr. Poebel, as we
are probably justified in doing, that the title Nintu is employed here and
elsewhere in the narrative merely as a synonym of Ninkharsagga.(3) It
appears to me far more probable that one of the two supreme gods, Anu or
Enlil, is the speaker,(4) and additional grounds will be cited later in
support of this view. It is indeed possible, in spite of the verbs and
suffixes in the singular, that the speech is to be assigned to both Anu
and Enlil, for in the last column, as we shall see, we find verb in the
singular following references to both these deities. In any case one of
the two chief gods may be regarded as speaking and acting on behalf of
both, though it may be that the inclusion of the second name in the
narrative was not original but simply due to a combination of variant
traditions. Such a conflate use of Anu-Enlil would present a striking
parallel to the Hebrew combination Yahweh-Elohim, though of course in the
case of the former pair the subsequent stage of identification was never
attained. But the evidence furnished by the text is not conclusive, and it
is preferable here and elsewhere in the narrative to regard either Anu or
Enlil as speaking and acting both on his own behalf and as the other’s
representative.

This reference to the Deluge, which occurs so early in the text, suggests
the probability that the account of the Creation and of the founding of
Antediluvian cities, included in the first two columns, is to be taken
merely as summarizing the events that led up to the Deluge. And an almost
certain proof of this may be seen in the opening words of the composition,
which are preserved in its colophon or title on the left-hand edge of the
tablet. We have already noted that the first two words are there to be
read, either as the prefix “Incantation” followed by the name “Enlil”, or
as the two divine names “Anu (and) Enlil”. Now the signs which follow the
traces of Enlil’s name are quite certain; they represent “Ziusudu”, which,
as we shall see in the Third Column, is the name of the Deluge hero in our
Sumerian Version. He is thus mentioned in the opening words of the text,
in some relation to one or both of the two chief gods of the subsequent
narrative. But the natural place for his first introduction into the story
is in the Third Column, where it is related that “at that time Ziusudu,
the king” did so-and-so. The prominence given him at the beginning of the
text, at nearly a column’s interval before the lines which record the
creation of man, is sufficient proof that the Deluge story is the writer’s
main interest, and that preceding episodes are merely introductory to it.

What subject then may we conjecture was treated in the missing lines of
this column, which precede the account of Creation and close with the
speech of the chief creating deity? Now the Deluge narrative practically
ends with the last lines of the tablet that are preserved, and the lower
half of the Sixth Column is entirely wanting. We shall see reason to
believe that the missing end of the tablet was not left blank and
uninscribed, but contained an incantation, the magical efficacy of which
was ensured by the preceding recitation of the Deluge myth. If that were
so, it would be natural enough that the text should open with its main
subject. The cause of the catastrophe and the reason for man’s rescue from
it might well be referred to by one of the creating deities in virtue of
the analogy these aspects of the myth would present to the circumstances
for which the incantation was designed. A brief account of the Creation
and of Antediluvian history would then form a natural transition to the
narrative of the Deluge itself. And even if the text contained no
incantation, the narrative may well have been introduced in the manner
suggested, since this explanation in any case fits in with what is still
preserved of the First Column. For after his reference to the destruction
of mankind, the deity proceeds to fix the chief duty of man, either as a
preliminary to his creation, or as a reassertion of that duty after his
rescue from destruction by the Flood. It is noteworthy that this duty
consists in the building of temples to the gods “in a clean spot”, that is
to say “in hallowed places”. The passage may be given in full, including
the two opening lines already discussed:

In the reason here given for man’s creation, or for his rescue from the
Flood, we have an interesting parallel to the Sixth Tablet of the
Semitic-Babylonian Creation Series. At the opening of that tablet Marduk,
in response to “the word of the gods”, is urged by his heart to devise a
cunning plan which he imparts to Ea, namely the creation of man from his
own divine blood and from bone which he will fashion. And the reason he
gives for his proposal is precisely that which, as we have seen, prompted
the Sumerian deity to create or preserve the human race. For Marduk
continues:

We shall see later, from the remainder of Marduk’s speech, that the
Semitic Version has been elaborated at this point in order to reconcile it
with other ingredients in its narrative, which were entirely absent from
the simpler Sumerian tradition. It will suffice here to note that, in
both, the reason given for man’s existence is the same, namely, that the
gods themselves may have worshippers.(1) The conception is in full
agreement with early Sumerian thought, and reflects the theocratic
constitution of the earliest Sumerian communities. The idea was naturally
not repugnant to the Semites, and it need not surprise us to find the very
words of the principal Sumerian Creator put into the mouth of Marduk, the
city-god of Babylon.

The deity’s speech perhaps comes to an end with the declaration of his
purpose in creating mankind or in sanctioning their survival of the
Deluge; and the following three lines appear to relate his establishment
of the divine laws in accordance with which his intention was carried out.
The passage includes a refrain, which is repeated in the Second Column:

It may probably be assumed that the refrain is employed in relation to the
same deity in both passages. In the Second Column it precedes the
foundation of the Babylonian kingdom and the building of the Antediluvian
cities. In that passage there can be little doubt that the subject of the
verb is the chief Sumerian deity, and we are therefore the more inclined
to assign to him also the opening speech of the First Column, rather than
to regard it as spoken by the Sumerian goddess whose share in the creation
would justify her in claiming mankind as her own. In the last four lines
of the column we have a brief record of the Creation itself. It was
carried out by the three greatest gods of the Sumerian pantheon, Anu,
Enlil and Enki, with the help of the goddess Ninkharsagga; the passage
reads:

The interpretation of the third line is obscure, but there is no doubt
that it records the creation of something which is represented as having
taken place between the creation of mankind and that of animals. This
object, which is written as nig-gil or nig-gil-ma, is
referred to again in the Sixth Column, where the Sumerian hero of the
Deluge assigns to it the honorific title, “Preserver of the Seed of
Mankind”. It must therefore have played an important part in man’s
preservation from the Flood; and the subsequent bestowal of the title may
be paralleled in the early Semitic Deluge fragment from Nippur, where the
boat in which Ut-napishtim escapes is assigned the very similar title
“Preserver of Life”.(1) But niggilma is not the word used in the
Sumerian Version of Ziusudu’s boat, and I am inclined to suggest a meaning
for it in connexion with the magical element in the text, of the existence
of which there is other evidence. On that assumption, the prominence given
to its creation may be paralleled in the introduction to a later magical
text, which described, probably in connexion with an incantation, the
creation of two small creatures, one white and one black, by Nin-igi-azag,
“The Lord of Clear Vision”, one of the titles borne by Enki or Ea. The
time of their creation is indicated as after that of “cattle, beasts of
the field and creatures of the city”, and the composition opens in a way
which is very like the opening of the present passage in our text.(2) In
neither text is there any idea of giving a complete account of the
creation of the world, only so much of the original myth being included in
each case as suffices for the writer’s purpose. Here we may assume that
the creation of mankind and of animals is recorded because they were to be
saved from the Flood, and that of the niggilma because of the part
it played in ensuring their survival.

The discussion of the meaning of niggilma may best be postponed
till the Sixth Column, where we find other references to the word.
Meanwhile it may be noted that in the present passage the creation of man
precedes that of animals, as it did in the earlier Hebrew Version of
Creation, and probably also in the Babylonian version, though not in the
later Hebrew Version. It may be added that in another Sumerian account of
the Creation(1) the same order, of man before animals, is followed.

II. THE ANTEDILUVIAN CITIES

As we saw was the case with the First Column of the text, the earliest
part preserved of the Second Column contains the close of a speech by a
deity, in which he proclaims an act he is about to perform. Here we may
assume with some confidence that the speaker is Anu or Enlil, preferably
the latter, since it would be natural to ascribe the political
constitution of Babylonia, the foundation of which is foreshadowed, to the
head of the Sumerian pantheon. It would appear that a beginning had
already been made in the establishment of “the kingdom”, and, before
proceeding to his further work of founding the Antediluvian cities, he
follows the example of the speaker in the First Column of the text and
lays down the divine enactments by which his purpose was accomplished. The
same refrain is repeated:

The text then relates the founding by the god of five cities, probably “in
clean places”, that is to say on hallowed ground. He calls each by its
name and assigns it to its own divine patron or city-god:

The completion of the sentence, in the last two lines of the column,
cannot be rendered with any certainty, but the passage appears to have
related the creation of small rivers and pools. It will be noted that the
lines which contain the names of the five cities and their patron gods(1)
form a long explanatory parenthesis, the preceding line being repeated
after their enumeration.

As the first of the series of five cities of Eridu, the seat of Nudimmud
or Enki, who was the third of the creating deities, it has been urged that
the upper part of the Second Column must have included an account of the
founding of Erech, the city of Anu, and of Nippur, Enlil’s city.(1) But
the numbered sequence of the cities would be difficult to reconcile with
the earlier creation of other cities in the text, and the mention of Eridu
as the first city to be created would be quite in accord with its great
age and peculiarly sacred character as a cult-centre. Moreover the
evidence of the Sumerian Dynastic List is definitely against any claim of
Erech to Antediluvian existence. For when the hegemony passed from the
first Post-diluvian “kingdom” to the second, it went not to Erech but to
the shrine Eanna, which gave its name to the second “kingdom”; and the
city itself was apparently not founded before the reign of Enmerkar, the
second occupant of the throne, who is the first to be given the title
“King of Erech”. This conclusion with regard to Erech incidentally
disposes of the arguments for Nippur’s Antediluvian rank in primitive
Sumerian tradition, which have been founded on the order of the cities
mentioned at the beginning of the later Sumerian myth of Creation.(2) The
evidence we thus obtain that the early Sumerians themselves regarded Eridu
as the first city in the world to be created, increases the hope that
future excavation at Abu Shahrain may reveal Sumerian remains of periods
which, from an archaeological standpoint, must still be regarded as
prehistoric.

It is noteworthy that no human rulers are mentioned in connexion with
Eridu and the other four Antediluvian cities; and Ziusudu, the hero of the
story, is apparently the only mortal whose name occurred in our text. But
its author’s principal subject is the Deluge, and the preceding history of
the world is clearly not given in detail, but is merely summarized. In
view of the obviously abbreviated form of the narrative, of which we have
already noted striking evidence in its account of the Creation, we may
conclude that in the fuller form of the tradition the cities were also
assigned human rulers, each one the representative of his city-god. These
would correspond to the Antediluvian dynasty of Berossus, the last member
of which was Xisuthros, the later counterpart of Ziusudu.

In support of the exclusion of Nippur and Erech from the myth, it will be
noted that the second city in the list is not Adab,(1) which was probably
the principal seat of the goddess Ninkharsagga, the fourth of the creating
deities. The names of both deity and city in that line are strange to us.
Larak, the third city in the series, is of greater interest, for it is
clearly Larankha, which according to Berossus was the seat of the eighth
and ninth of his Antediluvian kings. In commercial documents of the
Persian period, which have been found during the excavations at Nippur,
Larak is described as lying “on the bank of the old Tigris”, a phrase
which must be taken as referring to the Shatt el-Hai, in view of the
situation of Lagash and other early cities upon it or in its immediate
neighbourhood. The site of the city should perhaps be sought on the upper
course of the stream, where it tends to approach Nippur. It would thus
have lain in the neighbourhood of Bismâya, the site of Adab. Like Adab,
Lagash, Shuruppak, and other early Sumerian cities, it was probably
destroyed and deserted at a very early period, though it was reoccupied
under its old name in Neo-Babylonian or Persian times. Its early
disappearance from Babylonian history perhaps in part accounts for our own
unfamiliarity with Pabilkharsag, its city-god, unless we may regard the
name as a variant from of Pabilsag; but it is hardly likely that the two
should be identified.

In Sibbar, the fourth of the Antediluvian cities in our series, we again
have a parallel to Berossus. It has long been recognized that Pantibiblon,
or Pantibiblia, from which the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh of
his Antediluvian kings all came, was the city of Sippar in Northern
Babylonia. For the seventh of these rulers, {Euedorakhos}, is clearly
Enmeduranki, the mythical king of Sippar, who in Babylonian tradition was
regarded as the founder of divination. In a fragmentary composition that
has come down to us he is described, not only as king of Sippar, but as
“beloved of Anu, Enlil, and Enki”, the three creating gods of our text;
and it is there recounted how the patron deities of divination, Shamash
and Adad, themselves taught him to practise their art.(1) Moreover,
Berossus directly implies the existence of Sippar before the Deluge, for
in the summary of his version that has been preserved Xisuthros, under
divine instruction, buries the sacred writings concerning the origin of
the world in “Sispara”, the city of the Sun-god, so that after the Deluge
they might be dug up and transmitted to mankind. Ebabbar, the great
Sun-temple, was at Sippar, and it is to the Sun-god that the city is
naturally allotted in the new Sumerian Version.

The last of the five Antediluvian cities in our list is Shuruppak, in
which dwelt Ut-napishtim, the hero of the Babylonian version of the
Deluge. Its site has been identified with the mounds of Fâra, in the
neighbourhood of the Shatt el-Kâr, the former bed of the Euphrates; and
the excavations that were conducted there in 1902 have been most
productive of remains dating from the prehistoric period of Sumerian
culture.(1) Since our text is concerned mainly with the Deluge, it is
natural to assume that the foundation of the city from which the
Deluge-hero came would be recorded last, in order to lead up to the
central episode of the text. The city of Ziusudu, the hero of the Sumerian
story, is unfortunately not given in the Third Column, but, in view of
Shuruppak’s place in the list of Antediluvian cities, it is not improbable
that on this point the Sumerian and Babylonian Versions agreed. In the
Gilgamesh Epic Shuruppak is the only Antediluvian city referred to, while
in the Hebrew accounts no city at all is mentioned in connexion with Noah.
The city of Xisuthros, too, is not recorded, but as his father came from
Larankha or Larak, we may regard that city as his in the Greek Version.
Besides Larankha, the only Antediluvian cities according to Berossus were
Babylon and Sippar, and the influence of Babylonian theology, of which we
here have evidence, would be sufficient to account for a disturbance of
the original traditions. At the same time it is not excluded that Larak
was also the scene of the Deluge in our text, though, as we have noted,
the position of Shuruppak at the close of the Sumerian list points to it
as the more probable of the two. It may be added that we cannot yet read
the name of the deity to whom Shuruppak was allotted, but as it is
expressed by the city’s name preceded by the divine determinative, the
rendering “the God of Shuruppak” will meanwhile serve.

The creation of small rivers and pools, which seems to have followed the
foundation of the five sacred cities, is best explained on the assumption
that they were intended for the supply of water to the cities and to the
temples of their five patron gods. The creation of the Euphrates and the
Tigris, if recorded in our text at all, or in its logical order, must have
occurred in the upper portion of the column. The fact that in the later
Sumerian account their creation is related between that of mankind and the
building of Nippur and Erech cannot be cited in support of this
suggestion, in view of the absence of those cities from our text and of
the process of editing to which the later version has been subjected, with
a consequent disarrangement of its episodes.

III. THE COUNCIL OF THE GODS, AND ZIUSUDU’S PIETY

From the lower part of the Third Column, where its text is first
preserved, it is clear that the gods had already decided to send a Deluge,
for the goddess Nintu or Ninkharsagga, here referred to also as “the holy
Innanna”, wails aloud for the intended destruction of “her people”. That
this decision has been decreed by the gods in council is clear from a
passage in the Fourth Column, where it is stated that the sending of a
flood to destroy mankind was “the word of the assembly (of the gods)”. The
first lines preserved in the present column describe the effect of the
decision on the various gods concerned and their action at the close of
the council.

In the lines which described the Council of the Gods, broken references to
“the people” and “a flood” are preserved, after which the text continues:

It is unfortunate that the ends of all the lines in this column are
wanting, but enough remains to show a close correspondence of the first
two lines quoted with a passage in the Gilgamesh Epic where Ishtar is
described as lamenting the destruction of mankind.(1) This will be seen
more clearly by printing the two couplets in parallel columns:

The expression Bêlit-ili, “the Lady of the Gods”, is attested as a title
borne both by the Semitic goddess Ishtar and by the Sumerian goddess Nintu
or Ninkharsagga. In the passage in the Babylonian Version, “the Lady of
the Gods” has always been treated as a synonym of Ishtar, the second half
of the couplet being regarded as a restatement of the first, according to
a recognized law of Babylonian poetry. We may probably assume that this
interpretation is correct, and we may conclude by analogy that “the holy
Innanna” in the second half of the Sumerian couplet is there merely
employed as a synonym of Nintu.(1) When the Sumerian myth was recast in
accordance with Semitic ideas, the rôle of creatress of mankind,
which had been played by the old Sumerian goddess Ninkharsagga or Nintu,
was naturally transferred to the Semitic Ishtar. And as Innanna was one of
Ishtar’s designations, it was possible to make the change by a simple
transcription of the lines, the name Nintu being replaced by the
synonymous title Bêlit-ili, which was also shared by Ishtar. Difficulties
are at once introduced if we assume with Dr. Poebel that in each version
two separate goddesses are represented as lamenting, Nintu or Bêlit-ili
and Innanna or Ishtar. For Innanna as a separate goddess had no share in
the Sumerian Creation, and the reference to “her people” is there only
applicable to Nintu. Dr. Poebel has to assume that the Sumerian names
should be reversed in order to restore them to their original order, which
he suggests the Babylonian Version has preserved. But no such textual
emendation is necessary. In the Semitic Version Ishtar definitely
displaces Nintu as the mother of men, as is proved by a later passage in
her speech where she refers to her own bearing of mankind.(2) The
necessity for the substitution of her name in the later version is thus
obvious, and we have already noted how simply this was effected.

Another feature in which the two versions differ is that in the Sumerian
text the lamentation of the goddess precedes the sending of the Deluge,
while in the Gilgamesh Epic it is occasioned by the actual advent of the
storm. Since our text is not completely preserved, it is just possible
that the couplet was repeated at the end of the Fourth Column after
mankind’s destruction had taken place. But a further apparent difference
has been noted. While in the Sumerian Version the goddess at once deplores
the divine decision, it is clear from Ishtar’s words in the Gilgamesh Epic
that in the assembly of the gods she had at any rate concurred in it.(1)
On the other hand, in Bêlit-ili’s later speech in the Epic, after
Ut-napishtim’s sacrifice upon the mountain, she appears to subscribe the
decision to Enlil alone.(2) The passages in the Gilgamesh Epic are not
really contradictory, for they can be interpreted as implying that, while
Enlil forced his will upon the other gods against Bêlit-ili’s protest, the
goddess at first reproached herself with her concurrence, and later
stigmatized Enlil as the real author of the catastrophe. The Semitic
narrative thus does not appear, as has been suggested, to betray traces of
two variant traditions which have been skilfully combined, though it may
perhaps exhibit an expansion of the Sumerian story. On the other hand,
most of the apparent discrepancies between the Sumerian and Babylonian
Versions disappear, on the recognition that our text gives in many
passages only an epitome of the original Sumerian Version.

The lament of the goddess is followed by a brief account of the action
taken by the other chief figures in the drama. Enki holds counsel with his
own heart, evidently devising the project, which he afterwards carried
into effect, of preserving the seed of mankind from destruction. Since the
verb in the following line is wanting, we do not know what action is there
recorded of the four creating deities; but the fact that the gods of
heaven and earth invoked the name of Anu and Enlil suggests that it was
their will which had been forced upon the other gods. We shall see that
throughout the text Anu and Enlil are the ultimate rulers of both gods and
men.

The narrative then introduces the human hero of the Deluge story:

The name of the hero, Ziusudu, is the fuller Sumerian equivalent of
Ut-napishtim (or Uta-napishtim), the abbreviated Semitic form which we
find in the Gilgamesh Epic. For not only are the first two elements of the
Sumerian name identical with those of the Semitic Ut-napishtim, but the
names themselves are equated in a later Babylonian syllabary or
explanatory list of words.(1) We there find “Ut-napishte” given as the
equivalent of the Sumerian “Zisuda”, evidently an abbreviated form of the
name Ziusudu;(2) and it is significant that the names occur in the
syllabary between those of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, evidently in consequence
of the association of the Deluge story by the Babylonians with their
national epic of Gilgamesh. The name Ziusudu may be rendered “He who
lengthened the day of life” or “He who made life long of days”,(3) which
in the Semitic form is abbreviated by the omission of the verb. The
reference is probably to the immortality bestowed upon Ziusudu at the
close of the story, and not to the prolongation of mankind’s existence in
which he was instrumental. It is scarcely necessary to add that the name
has no linguistic connexion with the Hebrew name Noah, to which it also
presents no parallel in meaning.

It is an interesting fact that Ziusudu should be described simply as “the
king”, without any indication of the city or area he ruled; and in three
of the five other passages in the text in which his name is mentioned it
is followed by the same title without qualification. In most cases
Berossus tells us the cities from which his Antediluvian rulers came; and
if the end of the line had been preserved it might have been possible to
determine definitely Ziusudu’s city, and incidentally the scene of the
Deluge in the Sumerian Version, by the name of the deity in whose service
he acted as priest. We have already noted some grounds for believing that
his city may have been Shuruppak, as in the Babylonian Version; and if
that were so, the divine name reads as “the God of Shurrupak” should
probably be restored at the end of the line.(1)

The employment of the royal title by itself accords with the tradition
from Berossus that before the Deluge, as in later periods, the land was
governed by a succession of supreme rulers, and that the hero of the
Deluge was the last of them. In the Gilgamesh Epic, on the other hand,
Ut-napishtim is given no royal nor any other title. He is merely referred
to as a “man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu”, and he appears in the guise
of an ancient hero or patriarch not invested with royal power. On this
point Berossus evidently preserves the original Sumerian traditions, while
the Hebrew Versions resemble the Semitic-Babylonian narrative. The
Sumerian conception of a series of supreme Antediluvian rulers is of
course merely a reflection from the historical period, when the hegemony
in Babylonia was contested among the city-states. The growth of the
tradition may have been encouraged by the early use of lugal,
“king”, which, though always a term of secular character, was not very
sharply distinguished from that of patesi and other religious
titles, until, in accordance with political development, it was required
to connote a wider dominion. In Sumer, at the time of the composition of
our text, Ziusudu was still only one in a long line of Babylonian rulers,
mainly historical but gradually receding into the realms of legend and
myth. At the time of the later Semites there had been more than one
complete break in the tradition and the historical setting of the old
story had become dim. The fact that Hebrew tradition should range itself
in this matter with Babylon rather than with Sumer is important as a clue
in tracing the literary history of our texts.

The rest of the column may be taken as descriptive of Ziusudu’s
activities. One line records his making of some very great object or the
erection of a huge building;(1) and since the following lines are
concerned solely with religious activities, the reference is possibly to a
temple or some other structure of a sacred character. Its foundation may
have been recorded as striking evidence of his devotion to his god; or,
since the verb in this sentence depends on the words “at that time” in the
preceding line, we may perhaps regard his action as directly connected
with the revelation to be made to him. His personal piety is then
described: daily he occupied himself in his god’s service, prostrating
himself in humility and constant in his attendance at the shrine. A dream
(or possibly dreams), “such as had not been before”, appears to him and he
seems to be further described as conjuring “by the Name of Heaven and
Earth”; but as the ends of all these lines are broken, the exact connexion
of the phrases is not quite certain.

(1) The element gur-gur, “very large” or “huge”, which occurs in
the name of this great object or building, an- sag-gur-gur, is
employed later in the term for the “huge boat”, (gish)ma-gur-gur,
in which Ziusudu rode out the storm. There was, of course, even at this
early period a natural tendency to picture on a superhuman scale the lives
and deeds of remote predecessors, a tendency which increased in later
times and led, as we shall see, to the elaboration of extravagant detail.

It is difficult not to associate the reference to a dream, or possibly to
dream-divination, with the warning in which Enki reveals the purpose of
the gods. For the later versions prepare us for a reference to a dream. If
we take the line as describing Ziusudu’s practice of dream-divination in
general, “such as had not been before”, he may have been represented as
the first diviner of dreams, as Enmeduranki was held to be the first
practitioner of divination in general. But it seems to me more probable
that the reference is to a particular dream, by means of which he obtained
knowledge of the gods’ intentions. On the rendering of this passage
depends our interpretation of the whole of the Fourth Column, where the
point will be further discussed. Meanwhile it may be noted that the
conjuring “by the Name of Heaven and Earth”, which we may assume is
ascribed to Ziusudu, gains in significance if we may regard the setting of
the myth as a magical incantation, an inference in support of which we
shall note further evidence. For we are furnished at once with the grounds
for its magical employment. If Ziusudu, through conjuring by the Name of
Heaven and earth, could profit by the warning sent him and so escape the
impending fate of mankind, the application of such a myth to the special
needs of a Sumerian in peril or distress will be obvious. For should he,
too, conjure by the Name of Heaven and Earth, he might look for a similar
deliverance; and his recital of the myth itself would tend to clinch the
magical effect of his own incantation.

The description of Ziusudu has also great interest in furnishing us with a
close parallel to the piety of Noah in the Hebrew Versions. For in the
Gilgamesh Epic and in Berossus this feature of the story is completely
absent. We are there given no reason why Ut-napishtim was selected by Ea,
nor Xisuthros by Kronos. For all that those versions tell us, the favour
of each deity might have been conferred arbitrarily, and not in
recognition of, or in response to, any particular quality or action on the
part of its recipient. The Sumerian Version now restores the original
setting of the story and incidentally proves that, in this particular, the
Hebrew Versions have not embroidered a simpler narrative for the purpose
of edification, but have faithfully reproduced an original strand of the
tradition.

IV. THE DREAM-WARNING

The top of the Fourth Column of the text follows immediately on the close
of the Third Column, so that at this one point we have no great gap
between the columns. But unfortunately the ends of all the lines in both
columns are wanting, and the exact content of some phrases preserved and
their relation to each other are consequently doubtful. This materially
affects the interpretation of the passage as a whole, but the main thread
of the narrative may be readily followed. Ziusudu is here warned that a
flood is to be sent “to destroy the seed of mankind”; the doubt that
exists concerns the manner in which the warning is conveyed. In the first
line of the column, after a reference to “the gods”, a building seems to
be mentioned, and Ziusudu, standing beside it, apparently hears a voice,
which bids him take his stand beside a wall and then conveys to him the
warning of the coming flood. The destruction of mankind had been decreed
in “the assembly (of the gods)” and would be carried out by the commands
of Anu and Enlil. Before the text breaks off we again have a reference to
the “kingdom” and “its rule”, a further trace of the close association of
the Deluge with the dynastic succession in the early traditions of Sumer.

In the opening words of the warning to Ziusudu, with its prominent
repetition of the word “wall”, we must evidently trace some connexion with
the puzzling words of Ea in the Gilgamesh Epic, when he begins his warning
to Ut-napishtim. The warnings, as given in the two versions, are printed
below in parallel columns for comparison.(1) The Gilgamesh Epic, after
relating how the great gods in Shuruppak had decided to send a deluge,
continues as follows in the right-hand column:

In the Semitic Version Ut-napishtim, who tells the story in the first
person, then says that he “understood”, and that, after assuring Ea that
he would carry out his commands, he asked how he was to explain his action
to “the city, the people, and the elders”; and the god told him what to
say. Then follows an account of the building of the ship, introduced by
the words “As soon as the dawn began to break”. In the Sumerian Version
the close of the warning, in which the ship was probably referred to, and
the lines prescribing how Ziusudu carried out the divine instructions are
not preserved.

It will be seen that in the passage quoted from the Semitic Version there
is no direct mention of a dream; the god is represented at first as
addressing his words to a “house of reeds” and a “wall”, and then as
speaking to Ut-napishtim himself. But in a later passage in the Epic, when
Ea seeks to excuse his action to Enlil, he says that the gods’ decision
was revealed to Atrakhasis through a dream.(1) Dr. Poebel rightly compares
the direct warning of Ut-napishtim by Ea in the passage quoted above with
the equally direct warning Ziusudu receives in the Sumerian Version. But
he would have us divorce the direct warning from the dream-warning, and he
concludes that no less than three different versions of the story have
been worked together in the Gilgamesh Epic. In the first, corresponding to
that in our text, Ea communicates the gods’ decision directly to
Ut-napishtim; in the second he sends a dream from which Atrakhasis, “the
Very Wise one”, guesses the impending peril; while in the third he relates
the plan to a wall, taking care that Ut-napishtim overhears him.(2) The
version of Berossus, that Kronos himself appears to Xisuthros in a dream
and warns him, is rejected by Dr. Poebel, who remarks that here the
“original significance of the dream has already been obliterated”.
Consequently there seems to him to be “no logical connexion” between the
dreams or dream mentioned at the close of the Third Column and the
communication of the plan of the gods at the beginning of the Fourth
Column of our text.(3)

So far from Berossus having missed the original significance of the
narrative he relates, I think it can be shown that he reproduces very
accurately the sense of our Sumerian text; and that the apparent
discrepancies in the Semitic Version, and the puzzling references to a
wall in both it and the Sumerian Version, are capable of a simple
explanation. There appears to me no justification for splitting the
Semitic narrative into the several versions suggested, since the
assumption that the direct warning and the dream-warning must be
distinguished is really based on a misunderstanding of the character of
Sumerian dreams by which important decisions of the gods in council were
communicated to mankind. We fortunately possess an instructive Sumerian
parallel to our passage. In it the will of the gods is revealed in a
dream, which is not only described in full but is furnished with a
detailed interpretation; and as it seems to clear up our difficulties, it
may be well to summarize its main features.

The occasion of the dream in this case was not a coming deluge but a great
dearth of water in the rivers, in consequence of which the crops had
suffered and the country was threatened with famine. This occurred in the
reign of Gudea, patesi of Lagash, who lived some centuries before our
Sumerian document was inscribed. In his own inscription(1) he tells us
that he was at a loss to know by what means he might restore prosperity to
his country, when one night he had a dream; and it was in consequence of
the dream that he eventually erected one of the most sumptuously appointed
of Sumerian temples and thereby restored his land to prosperity. Before
recounting his dream he describes how the gods themselves took counsel. On
the day in which destinies were fixed in heaven and earth, Enlil, the
chief of the gods, and Ningirsu, the city-god of Lagash, held converse;
and Enlil, turning to Ningirsu, described the sad condition of Southern
Babylonia, and remarked that “the decrees of the temple Eninnû should be
made glorious in heaven and upon earth”, or, in other words, that
Ningirsu’s city-temple must be rebuilt. Thereupon Ningirsu did not
communicate his orders directly to Gudea, but conveyed the will of the
gods to him by means of a dream.

It will be noticed that we here have a very similar situation to that in
the Deluge story. A conference of the gods has been held; a decision has
been taken by the greatest god, Enlil; and, in consequence, another deity
is anxious to inform a Sumerian ruler of that decision. The only
difference is that here Enlil desires the communication to be made, while
in the Deluge story it is made without his knowledge, and obviously
against his wishes. So the fact that Ningirsu does not communicate
directly with the patesi, but conveys his message by means of a dream, is
particularly instructive. For here there can be no question of any
subterfuge in the method employed, since Enlil was a consenting party.

The story goes on to relate that, while the patesi slept, a vision of the
night came to him, and he beheld a man whose stature was so great that it
equalled the heavens and the earth. By the diadem he wore upon his head
Gudea knew that the figure must be a god. Beside the god was the divine
eagle, the emblem of Lagash; his feet rested upon the whirlwind, and a
lion crouched upon his right hand and upon his left. The figure spoke to
the patesi, but he did not understand the meaning of the words. Then it
seemed to Gudea that the Sun rose from the earth; and he beheld a woman
holding in her hand a pure reed, and she carried also a tablet on which
was a star of the heavens, and she seemed to take counsel with herself.
While Gudea was gazing, he seemed to see a second man, who was like a
warrior; and he carried a slab of lapis lazuli, on which he drew out the
plan of a temple. Before the patesi himself it seemed that a fair cushion
was placed, and upon the cushion was set a mould, and within the mould was
a brick. And on the right hand the patesi beheld an ass that lay upon the
ground. Such was the dream of Gudea, and he was troubled because he could
not interpret it.(1)

To cut the long story short, Gudea decided to seek the help of Ninâ, “the
child of Eridu”, who, as daughter of Enki, the God of Wisdom, could divine
all the mysteries of the gods. But first of all by sacrifices and
libations he secured the mediation of his own city-god and goddess,
Ningirsu and Gatumdug; and then, repairing to Ninâ’s temple, he recounted
to her the details of his vision. When the patesi had finished, the
goddess addressed him and said she would explain to him the meaning of his
dream. Here, no doubt, we are to understand that she spoke through the
mouth of her chief priest. And this was the interpretation of the dream.
The man whose stature was so great, and whose head was that of a god, was
the god Ningirsu, and the words which he uttered were an order to the
patesi to rebuild the temple Eninnû. The Sun which rose from the earth was
the god Ningishzida, for like the Sun he goes forth from the earth. The
maiden who held the pure reed and carried the tablet with the star was the
goddess Nisaba; the star was the pure star of the temple’s construction,
which she proclaimed. The second man, who was like a warrior, was the god
Nibub; and the plan of the temple which he drew was the plan of Eninnû;
and the ass that lay upon the ground was the patesi himself.(1)

The essential feature of the vision is that the god himself appeared to
the sleeper and delivered his message in words. That is precisely the
manner in which Kronos warned Xisuthros of the coming Deluge in the
version of Berossus; while in the Gilgamesh Epic the apparent
contradiction between the direct warning and the dream-warning at once
disappears. It is true that Gudea states that he did not understand the
meaning of the god’s message, and so required an interpretation; but he
was equally at a loss as to the identity of the god who gave it, although
Ningirsu was his own city-god and was accompanied by his own familiar
city-emblem. We may thus assume that the god’s words, as words, were
equally intelligible to Gudea. But as they were uttered in a dream, it was
necessary that the patesi, in view of his country’s peril, should have
divine assurance that they implied no other meaning. And in his case such
assurance was the more essential, in view of the symbolism attaching to
the other features of his vision. That this is sound reasoning is proved
by a second vision vouchsafed to Gudea by Ningirsu. For the patesi, though
he began to prepare for the building of the temple, was not content even
with Ninâ’s assurance. He offered a prayer to Ningirsu himself, saying
that he wished to build the temple, but had received no sign that this was
the will of the god; and he prayed for a sign. Then, as the patesi lay
stretched upon the ground, the god again appeared to him and gave him
detailed instructions, adding that he would grant the sign for which he
asked. The sign was that he should feel his side touched as by a flame,(1)
and thereby he should know that he was the man chosen by Ningirsu to carry
out his commands. Here it is the sign which confirms the apparent meaning
of the god’s words. And Gudea was at last content and built the temple.(2)

We may conclude, then, that in the new Sumerian Version of the Deluge we
have traced a logical connexion between the direct warning to Ziusudu in
the Fourth Column of the text and the reference to a dream in the broken
lines at the close of the Third Column. As in the Gilgamesh Epic and in
Berossus, here too the god’s warning is conveyed in a dream; and the
accompanying reference to conjuring by the Name of Heaven and Earth
probably represents the means by which Ziusudu was enabled to verify its
apparent meaning. The assurance which Gudea obtained through the priest of
Ninâ and the sign, the priest-king Ziusudu secured by his own act, in
virtue of his piety and practice of divination. And his employment of the
particular class of incantation referred to, that which conjures by the
Name of Heaven and Earth, is singularly appropriate to the context. For by
its use he was enabled to test the meaning of Enki’s words, which related
to the intentions of Anu and Enlil, the gods respectively of Heaven and of
Earth. The symbolical setting of Gudea’s vision also finds a parallel in
the reed-house and wall of the Deluge story, though in the latter case we
have not the benefit of interpretation by a goddess. In the Sumerian
Version the wall is merely part of the vision and does not receive a
direct address from the god. That appears as a later development in the
Semitic Version, and it may perhaps have suggested the excuse, put in that
version into the mouth of Ea, that he had not directly revealed the
decision of the gods.(1)

The omission of any reference to a dream before the warning in the
Gilgamesh Epic may be accounted for on the assumption that readers of the
poem would naturally suppose that the usual method of divine warning was
implied; and the text does indicate that the warning took place at night,
for Gilgamesh proceeds to carry out the divine instructions at the break
of day. The direct warning of the Hebrew Versions, on the other hand, does
not carry this implication, since according to Hebrew ideas direct speech,
as well as vision, was included among the methods by which the divine will
could be conveyed to man.

V. THE FLOOD, THE ESCAPE OF THE GREAT BOAT, AND THE SACRIFICE TO THE
SUN-GOD

The missing portion of the Fourth Column must have described Ziusudu’s
building of his great boat in order to escape the Deluge, for at the
beginning of the Fifth Column we are in the middle of the Deluge itself.
The column begins:

The connected text of the column then breaks off, only a sign or two
remaining of the following half-dozen lines. It will be seen that in the
eleven lines that are preserved we have several close parallels to the
Babylonian Version and some equally striking differences. While attempting
to define the latter, it will be well to point out how close the
resemblances are, and at the same time to draw a comparison between the
Sumerian and Babylonian Versions of this part of the story and the
corresponding Hebrew accounts.

Here, as in the Babylonian Version, the Flood is accompanied by hurricanes
of wind, though in the latter the description is worked up in considerable
detail. We there read(1) that at the appointed time the ruler of the
darkness at eventide sent a heavy rain. Ut-napishtim saw its beginning,
but fearing to watch the storm, he entered the interior of the ship by
Ea’s instructions, closed the door, and handed over the direction of the
vessel to the pilot Puzur-Amurri. Later a thunder-storm and hurricane
added their terrors to the deluge. For at early dawn a black cloud came up
from the horizon, Adad the Storm-god thundering in its midst, and his
heralds, Nabû and Sharru, flying over mountain and plain. Nergal tore away
the ship’s anchor, while Ninib directed the storm; the Anunnaki carried
their lightning-torches and lit up the land with their brightness; the
whirlwind of the Storm-god reached the heavens, and all light was turned
into darkness. The storm raged the whole day, covering mountain and people
with water.(2) No man beheld his fellow; the gods themselves were afraid,
so that they retreated into the highest heaven, where they crouched down,
cowering like dogs. Then follows the lamentation of Ishtar, to which
reference has already been made, the goddess reproaching herself for the
part she had taken in the destruction of her people. This section of the
Semitic narrative closes with the picture of the gods weeping with her,
sitting bowed down with their lips pressed together.

It is probable that the Sumerian Version, in the missing portion of its
Fourth Column, contained some account of Ziusudu’s entry into his boat;
and this may have been preceded, as in the Gilgamesh Epic, by a reference
to “the living seed of every kind”, or at any rate to “the four-legged
creatures of the field”, and to his personal possessions, with which we
may assume he had previously loaded it. But in the Fifth Column we have no
mention of the pilot or of any other companions who may have accompanied
the king; and we shall see that the Sixth Column contains no reference to
Ziusudu’s wife. The description of the storm may have begun with the
closing lines of the Fourth Column, though it is also quite possible that
the first line of the Fifth Column actually begins the account. However
that may be, and in spite of the poetic imagery of the Semitic Babylonian
narrative, the general character of the catastrophe is the same in both
versions.

We find an equally close parallel, between the Sumerian and Babylonian
accounts, in the duration of the storm which accompanied the Flood, as
will be seen by printing the two versions together:(3)

The two narratives do not precisely agree as to the duration of the storm,
for while in the Sumerian account the storm lasts seven days and seven
nights, in the Semitic-Babylonian Version it lasts only six days and
nights, ceasing at dawn on the seventh day. The difference, however, is
immaterial when we compare these estimates with those of the Hebrew
Versions, the older of which speaks of forty days’ rain, while the later
version represents the Flood as rising for no less than a hundred and
fifty days.

The close parallel between the Sumerian and Babylonian Versions is not,
however, confined to subject-matter, but here, even extends to some of the
words and phrases employed. It has already been noted that the Sumerian
term employed for “flood” or “deluge” is the attested equivalent of the
Semitic word; and it may now be added that the word which may be rendered
“great boat” or “great ship” in the Sumerian text is the same word, though
partly expressed by variant characters, which occurs in the early Semitic
fragment of the Deluge story from Nippur.(1) In the Gilgamesh Epic, on the
other hand, the ordinary ideogram for “vessel” or “ship”(2) is employed,
though the great size of the vessel is there indicated, as in Berossus and
the later Hebrew Version, by detailed measurements. Moreover, the Sumerian
and Semitic verbs, which are employed in the parallel passages quoted
above for the “overwhelming” of the land, are given as synonyms in a late
syllabary, while in another explanatory text the Sumerian verb is
explained as applying to the destructive action of a flood.(3) Such close
linguistic parallels are instructive as furnishing additional proof, if it
were needed, of the dependence of the Semitic-Babylonian and Assyrian
Versions upon Sumerian originals.

It may be worth while to pause for a moment in our study of the text, in
order to inquire what kind of boat it was in which Ziusudu escaped the
Flood. It is only called “a great boat” or “a great ship” in the text, and
this term, as we have noted, was taken over, semitized, and literally
translated in an early Semitic-Babylonian Version. But the Gilgamesh Epic,
representing the later Semitic-Babylonian Version, supplies fuller
details, which have not, however, been satisfactorily explained. Either
the obvious meaning of the description and figures there given has been
ignored, or the measurements have been applied to a central structure
placed upon a hull, much on the lines of a modern “house-boat” or the
conventional Noah’s ark.(1) For the latter interpretation the text itself
affords no justification. The statement is definitely made that the length
and breadth of the vessel itself are to be the same;(2) and a later
passage gives ten gar for the height of its sides and ten gar
for the breadth of its deck.(3) This description has been taken to imply a
square box-like structure, which, in order to be seaworthy, must be placed
on a conjectured hull.

I do not think it has been noted in this connexion that a vessel,
approximately with the relative proportions of that described in the
Gilgamesh Epic, is in constant use to-day on the lower Tigris and
Euphrates. A kuffah,(1) the familiar pitched coracle of Baghdad,
would provide an admirable model for the gigantic vessel in which
Ut-napishtim rode out the Deluge. “Without either stem or stern, quite
round like a shield”—so Herodotus described the kuffah of his
day;2() so, too, is it represented on Assyrian slabs from Nineveh, where
we see it employed for the transport of heavy building material;(3) its
form and structure indeed suggest a prehistoric origin. The kuffah
is one of those examples of perfect adjustment to conditions of use which
cannot be improved. Any one who has travelled in one of these craft will
agree that their storage capacity is immense, for their circular form and
steeply curved side allow every inch of space to be utilized. It is almost
impossible to upset them, and their only disadvantage is lack of speed.
For their guidance all that is required is a steersman with a paddle, as
indicated in the Epic. It is true that the larger kuffah of to-day tends
to increase in diameter as compared to height, but that detail might well
be ignored in picturing the monster vessel of Ut-napishtim. Its seven
horizontal stages and their nine lateral divisions would have been
structurally sound in supporting the vessel’s sides; and the selection of
the latter uneven number, though prompted doubtless by its sacred
character, is only suitable to a circular craft in which the interior
walls would radiate from the centre. The use of pitch and bitumen for
smearing the vessel inside and out, though unusual even in Mesopotamian
shipbuilding, is precisely the method employed in the kuffah’s
construction.

We have no detailed description of Ziusudu’s “great boat”, beyond the fact
that it was covered in and had an opening, or light-hole, which could be
closed. But the form of Ut-napishtim’s vessel was no doubt traditional,
and we may picture that of Ziusudu as also of the kuffah type,
though smaller and without its successor’s elaborate internal structure.
The gradual development of the huge coracle into a ship would have been
encouraged by the Semitic use of the term “ship” to describe it; and the
attempt to retain something of its original proportions resulted in
producing the unwieldy ark of later tradition.(1)

We will now return to the text and resume the comparison we were making
between it and the Gilgamesh Epic. In the latter no direct reference is
made to the appearance of the Sun-god after the storm, nor is Ut-napishtim
represented as praying to him. But the sequence of events in the Sumerian
Version is very natural, and on that account alone, apart from other
reasons, it may be held to represent the original form of the story. For
the Sun-god would naturally reappear after the darkness of the storm had
passed, and it would be equally natural that Ziusudu should address
himself to the great light-god. Moreover, the Gilgamesh Epic still retains
traces of the Sumerian Version, as will be seen from a comparison of their
narratives,(1) the Semitic Version being quoted from the point where the
hurricane ceased and the sea became still.

It will be seen that in the Semitic Version the beams of the Sun-god have
been reduced to “daylight”, and Ziusudu’s act of worship has become merely
prostration in token of grief.

Both in the Gilgamesh Epic and in Berossus the sacrifice offered by the
Deluge hero to the gods follows the episode of the birds, and it takes
place on the top of the mountain after the landing from the vessel. It is
hardly probable that two sacrifices were recounted in the Sumerian
Version, one to the Sun-god in the boat and another on the mountain after
landing; and if we are right in identifying Ziusudu’s recorded sacrifice
with that of Ut-napishtim and Xisuthros, it would seem that, according to
the Sumerian Version, no birds were sent out to test the abatement of the
waters. This conclusion cannot be regarded as quite certain, inasmuch as
the greater part of the Fifth Column is waning. We have, moreover, already
seen reason to believe that the account on our tablet is epitomized, and
that consequently the omission of any episode from our text does not
necessarily imply its absence from the original Sumerian Version which it
follows. But here at least it is clear that nothing can have been omitted
between the opening of the light-hole and the sacrifice, for the one act
is the natural sequence of the other. On the whole it seems preferable to
assume that we have recovered a simpler form of the story.

As the storm itself is described in a few phrases, so the cessation of the
flood may have been dismissed with equal brevity; the gradual abatement of
the waters, as attested by the dove, the swallow, and the raven, may well
be due to later elaboration or to combination with some variant account.
Under its amended form the narrative leads naturally up to the landing on
the mountain and the sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods. In the
Sumerian Version, on the other hand, Ziusudu regards himself as saved when
he sees the Sun shining; he needs no further tests to assure himself that
the danger is over, and his sacrifice too is one of gratitude for his
escape. The disappearance of the Sun-god from the Semitic Version was thus
a necessity, to avoid an anti-climax; and the hero’s attitude of worship
had obviously to be translated into one of grief. An indication that the
sacrifice was originally represented as having taken place on board the
boat may be seen in the lines of the Gilgamesh Epic which recount how
Enlil, after acquiescing in Ut-napishtim’s survival of the Flood, went up
into the ship and led him forth by the hand, although, in the preceding
lines, he had already landed and had sacrificed upon the mountain. The two
passages are hardly consistent as they stand, but they find a simple
explanation of we regard the second of them as an unaltered survival from
an earlier form of the story.

If the above line of reasoning be sound, it follows that, while the
earlier Hebrew Version closely resembles the Gilgamesh Epic, the later
Hebrew Version, by its omission of the birds, would offer a parallel to
the Sumerian Version. But whether we may draw any conclusion from this
apparent grouping of our authorities will be best dealt with when we have
concluded our survey of the new evidence.

As we have seen, the text of the Fifth Column breaks off with Ziusudu’s
sacrifice to the Sun-god, after he had opened a light-hole in the boat and
had seen by the god’s beams that the storm was over. The missing portion
of the Fifth Column must have included at least some account of the
abatement of the waters, the stranding of the boat, and the manner in
which Anu and Enlil became apprised of Ziusudu’s escape, and consequently
of the failure of their intention to annihilate mankind. For in the Sixth
Column of the text we find these two deities reconciled to Ziusudu and
bestowing immortality upon him, as Enlil bestows immortality upon
Ut-napishtim at the close of the Semitic Version. In the latter account,
after the vessel had grounded on Mount Nisir and Ut-napishtim had tested
the abatement of the waters by means of the birds, he brings all out from
the ship and offers his libation and sacrifice upon the mountain, heaping
up reed, cedar-wood, and myrtle beneath his seven sacrificial vessels. And
it was by this act on his part that the gods first had knowledge of his
escape. For they smelt the sweet savour of the sacrifice, and “gathered
like flies over the sacrificer”.(1)

It is possible in our text that Ziusudu’s sacrifice in the boat was also
the means by which the gods became acquainted with his survival; and it
seems obvious that the Sun-god, to whom it was offered, should have
continued to play some part in the narrative, perhaps by assisting Ziusudu
in propitiating Anu and Enlil. In the Semitic-Babylonian Version, the
first deity to approach the sacrifice is Bêlit-ili or Ishtar, who is
indignant with Enlil for what he has done. When Enlil himself approaches
and sees the ship he is filled with anger against the gods, and, asking
who has escaped, exclaims that no man must live in the destruction.
Thereupon Ninib accuses Ea, who by his pleading succeeds in turning
Enlil’s purpose. He bids Enlil visit the sinner with his sin and lay his
transgression on the transgressor; Enlil should not again send a deluge to
destroy the whole of mankind, but should be content with less wholesale
destruction, such as that wrought by wild beasts, famine, and plague.
Finally he confesses that it was he who warned Ziusudu of the gods’
decision by sending him a dream. Enlil thereupon changes his intention,
and going up into the ship, leads Ut-napishtim forth. Though Ea’s
intervention finds, of course, no parallel in either Hebrew version, the
subject-matter of his speech is reflected in both. In the earlier Hebrew
Version Yahweh smells the sweet savour of Noah’s burnt offering and says
in his heart he will no more destroy every living creature as he had done;
while in the later Hebrew Version Elohim, after remembering Noah and
causing the waters to abate, establishes his covenant to the same effect,
and, as a sign of the covenant, sets his bow in the clouds.

In its treatment of the climax of the story we shall see that the Sumerian
Version, at any rate in the form it has reached us, is on a lower ethical
level than the Babylonian and Hebrew Versions. Ea’s argument that the
sinner should bear his own sin and the transgressor his own transgression
in some measure forestalls that of Ezekiel;(1) and both the Hebrew
Versions represent the saving of Noah as part of the divine intention from
the beginning. But the Sumerian Version introduces the element of magic as
the means by which man can bend the will of the gods to his own ends. How
far the details of the Sumerian myth at this point resembled that of the
Gilgamesh Epic it is impossible to say, but the general course of the
story must have been the same. In the latter Enlil’s anger is appeased, in
the former that of Anu and Enlil; and it is legitimate to suppose that
Enki, like Ea, was Ziusudu’s principal supporter, in view of the part he
had already taken in ensuring his escape.

VI. THE PROPITIATION OF THE ANGRY GODS, AND ZIUSUDU’S IMMORTALITY

The presence of the puzzling lines, with which the Sixth Column of our
text opens, was not explained by Dr. Poebel; indeed, they would be
difficult to reconcile with his assumption that our text is an epic pure
and simple. But if, as is suggested above, we are dealing with a myth in
magical employment, they are quite capable of explanation. The problem
these lines present will best be stated by giving a translation of the
extant portion of the column, where they will be seen with their immediate
context in relation to what follows them:

The first two lines of the column are probably part of the speech of some
deity, who urges the necessity of invoking or conjuring Anu and Enlil “by
the Soul of Heaven, by the Soul of Earth”, in order to secure their
support or approval. Now Anu and Enlil are the two great gods who had
determined on mankind’s destruction, and whose wrath at his own escape
from death Ziusudu must placate. It is an obvious inference that conjuring
“by the Soul of Heaven” and “by the Soul of Earth” is either the method by
which Ziusudu has already succeeded in appeasing their anger, or the means
by which he is here enjoined to attain that end. Against the latter
alternative it is to be noted that the god is addressing more than one
person; and, further, at Ziusudu is evidently already pardoned, for, so
far from following the deity’s advice, he immediately prostrates himself
before Anu and Enlil and receives immortality. We may conjecture that at
the close of the Fifth Column Ziusudu had already performed the invocation
and thereby had appeased the divine wrath; and that the lines at the
beginning of the Sixth Column point the moral of the story by enjoining on
Ziusudu and his descendants, in other words on mankind, the advisability
of employing this powerful incantation at their need. The speaker may
perhaps have been one of Ziusudu’s divine helpers—the Sun-god to
whom he had sacrificed, or Enki who had saved him from the Flood. But it
seems to me more probable that the words are uttered by Anu and Enlil
themselves.(1) For thereby they would be represented as giving their own
sanction to the formula, and as guaranteeing its magical efficacy. That
the incantation, as addressed to Anu and Enlil, would be appropriate is
obvious, since each would be magically approached through his own sphere
of control.

It is significant that at another critical point of the story we have
already met with a reference to conjuring “by the Name of Heaven and
Earth”, the phrase occurring at the close of the Third Column after the
reference to the dream or dreams. There, as we saw, we might possibly
explain the passage as illustrating one aspect of Ziusudu’s piety: he may
have been represented as continually practising this class of divination,
and in that case it would be natural enough that in the final crisis of
the story he should have propitiated the gods he conjured by the same
means. Or, as a more probable alternative, it was suggested that we might
connect the line with Enki’s warning, and assume that Ziusudu interpreted
the dream-revelation of Anu and Enlil’s purpose by means of the magical
incantation which was peculiarly associated with them. On either
alternative the phrase fits into the story itself, and there is no need to
suppose that the narrative is interrupted, either in the Third or in the
Sixth Column, by an address to the hearers of the myth, urging them to
make the invocation on their own behalf.

On the other hand, it seems improbable that the lines in question formed
part of the original myth; they may have been inserted to weld the myth
more closely to the magic. Both incantation and epic may have originally
existed independently, and, if so, their combination would have been
suggested by their contents. For while the former is addressed to Anu and
Enlil, in the latter these same gods play the dominant parts: they are the
two chief creators, it is they who send the Flood, and it is their anger
that must be appeased. If once combined, the further step of making the
incantation the actual means by which Ziusudu achieved his own rescue and
immortality would be a natural development. It may be added that the words
would have been an equally appropriate addition if the incantation had not
existed independently, but had been suggested by, and developed from, the
myth.

In the third and eleventh lines of the column we have further references
to the mysterious object, the creation of which appears to have been
recorded in the First Column of the text between man’s creation and that
of animals. The second sign of the group composing its name was not
recognized by Dr. Poebel, but it is quite clearly written in two of the
passages, and has been correctly identified by Professor Barton.(1) The
Sumerian word is, in fact, to be read nig-gil-ma,(2) which, when
preceded by the determinative for “pot”, “jar”, or “bowl”, is given in a
later syllabary as the equivalent of the Semitic word mashkhalu.
Evidence that the word mashkhalu was actually employed to denote a
jar or vessel of some sort is furnished by one of the Tel el-Amarna
letters which refers to “one silver mashkhalu” and “one (or two)
stone mashkhalu“.(3) In our text the determinative is absent, and
it is possible that the word is used in another sense. Professor Barton,
in both passages in the Sixth Column, gives it the meaning “curse”; he
interprets the lines as referring to the removal of a curse from the earth
after the Flood, and he compares Gen. viii. 21, where Yahweh declares he
will not again “curse the ground for man’s sake”. But this translation
ignores the occurrence of the word in the First Column, where the creation
of the niggilma is apparently recorded; and his rendering “the seed
that was cursed” in l. 11 is not supported by the photographic
reproduction of the text, which suggests that the first sign in the line
is not that for “seed”, but is the sign for “name”, as correctly read by
Dr. Poebel. In that passage the niggilma appears to be given by
Ziusudu the name “Preserver of the Seed of Mankind”, which we have already
compared to the title bestowed on Uta-napishtim’s ship, “Preserver of
Life”. Like the ship, it must have played an important part in man’s
preservation, which would account not only for the honorific title but for
the special record of its creation.

It we may connect the word with the magical colouring of the myth, we
might perhaps retain its known meaning, “jar” or “bowl”, and regard it as
employed in the magical ceremony which must have formed part of the
invocation “by the Soul of Heaven, by the Soul of Earth”. But the
accompanying references to the ground, to its production from the ground,
and to its springing up, if the phrases may be so rendered, suggest rather
some kind of plant;(1) and this, from its employment in magical rites, may
also have given its name to a bowl or vessel which held it. A very similar
plant was that found and lost by Gilgamesh, after his sojourn with
Ut-napishtim; it too had potent magical power and bore a title descriptive
of its peculiar virtue of transforming old age to youth. Should this
suggestion prove to be correct, the three passages mentioning the niggilma
must be classed with those in which the invocation is referred to, as
ensuring the sanction of the myth to further elements in the magic. In
accordance with this view, the fifth line in the Sixth Column is probably
to be included in the divine speech, where a reference to the object
employed in the ritual would not be out of place. But it is to be hoped
that light will be thrown on this puzzling word by further study, and
perhaps by new fragments of the text; meanwhile it would be hazardous to
suggest a more definite rendering.

With the sixth line of the column it is clear that the original narrative
of the myth is resumed.(1) Ziusudu, the king, prostrates himself before
Anu and Enlil, who bestow immortality upon him and cause him to dwell in a
land, or mountain, the name of which may perhaps be read as Dilmun. The
close parallelism between this portion of the text and the end of the myth
in the Gilgamesh Epic will be seen from the following extracts,(2) the
magical portions being omitted from the Sumerian Version:

The Sumerian Version thus apparently concludes with the familiar ending of
the legend which we find in the Gilgamesh Epic and in Berossus, though it
here occurs in an abbreviated form and with some variations in detail. In
all three versions the prostration of the Deluge hero before the god is
followed by the bestowal of immortality upon him, a fate which, according
to Berossus, he shared with his wife, his daughter, and the steersman. The
Gilgamesh Epic perhaps implies that Ut-napishtim’s wife shared in his
immortality, but the Sumerian Version mentions Ziusudu alone. In the
Gilgamesh Epic Ut-napishtim is settled by the gods at the mouth of the
rivers, that is to say at the head of the Persian Gulf, while according to
a possible rendering of the Sumerian Version he is made to dwell on
Dilmun, an island in the Gulf itself. The fact that Gilgamesh in the Epic
has to cross the sea to reach Ut-napishtim may be cited in favour of the
reading “Dilmun”; and the description of the sea as “the Waters of Death”,
if it implies more than the great danger of their passage, was probably a
later development associated with Ut-napishtim’s immortality. It may be
added that in neither Hebrew version do we find any parallel to the
concluding details of the original story, the Hebrew narratives being
brought to an end with the blessing of Noah and the divine promise to, or
covenant with, mankind.

Such then are the contents of our Sumerian document, and from the details
which have been given it will have been seen that its story, so far as
concerns the Deluge, is in essentials the same as that we already find in
the Gilgamesh Epic. It is true that this earlier version has reached us in
a magical setting, and to some extent in an abbreviated form. In the next
lecture I shall have occasion to refer to another early mythological text
from Nippur, which was thought by its first interpreter to include a
second Sumerian Version of the Deluge legend. That suggestion has not been
substantiated, though we shall see that the contents of the document are
of a very interesting character. But in view of the discussion that has
taken place in the United States over the interpretation of the second
text, and of the doubts that have subsequently been expressed in some
quarters as to the recent discovery of any new form of the Deluge legend,
it may be well to formulate briefly the proof that in the inscription
published by Dr. Poebel an early Sumerian Version of the Deluge story has
actually been recovered. Any one who has followed the detailed analysis of
the new text which has been attempted in the preceding paragraphs will, I
venture to think, agree that the following conclusions may be drawn:

(i) The points of general resemblance presented by the narrative to that
in the Gilgamesh Epic are sufficiently close in themselves to show that we
are dealing with a Sumerian Version of that story. And this conclusion is
further supported (a) by the occurrence throughout the text of the
attested Sumerian equivalent of the Semitic word, employed in the
Babylonian Versions, for the “Flood” or “Deluge”, and (b) by the use of
precisely the same term for the hero’s “great boat”, which is already
familiar to us from an early Babylonian Version.

(ii) The close correspondence in language between portions of the Sumerian
legend and the Gilgamesh Epic suggest that the one version was ultimately
derived from the other. And this conclusion in its turn is confirmed (a)
by the identity in meaning of the Sumerian and Babylonian names for the
Deluge hero, which are actually found equated in a late explanatory text,
and (b) by small points of difference in the Babylonian form of the story
which correspond to later political and religious developments and suggest
the work of Semitic redactors.

The cumulative effect of such general and detailed evidence is
overwhelming, and we may dismiss all doubts as to the validity of Dr.
Poebel’s claim. We have indeed recovered a very early, and in some of its
features a very primitive, form of the Deluge narrative which till now has
reached us only in Semitic and Greek renderings; and the stream of
tradition has been tapped at a point far above any at which we have
hitherto approached it. What evidence, we may ask, does this early
Sumerian Version offer with regard to the origin and literary history of
the Hebrew Versions?

The general dependence of the biblical Versions upon the Babylonian legend
as a whole has long been recognized, and needs no further demonstration;
and it has already been observed that the parallelisms with the version in
the Gilgamesh Epic are on the whole more detailed and striking in the
earlier than in the later Hebrew Version.(1) In the course of our analysis
of the Sumerian text its more striking points of agreement or divergence,
in relation to the Hebrew Versions, were noted under the different
sections of its narrative. It was also obvious that, in many features in
which the Hebrew Versions differ from the Gilgamesh Epic, the latter finds
Sumerian support. These facts confirm the conclusion, which we should
naturally base on grounds of historical probability, that while the
Semitic-Babylonian Versions were derived from Sumer, the Hebrew accounts
were equally clearly derived from Babylon. But there are one or two pieces
of evidence which are apparently at variance with this conclusion, and
these call for some explanation.

Not too much significance should be attached to the apparent omission of
the episode of the birds from the Sumerian narrative, in which it would
agree with the later as against the earlier Hebrew Version; for, apart
from its epitomized character, there is so much missing from the text that
the absence of this episode cannot be regarded as established with
certainty. And in any case it could be balanced by the Sumerian order of
Creation of men before animals, which agrees with the earlier Hebrew
Version against the later. But there is one very striking point in which
our new Sumerian text agrees with both the Hebrew Versions as against the
Gilgamesh Epic and Berossus; and that is in the character of Ziusudu,
which presents so close a parallel to the piety of Noah. As we have
already seen, the latter is due to no Hebrew idealization of the story,
but represents a genuine strand of the original tradition, which is
completely absent from the Babylonian Versions. But the Babylonian
Versions are the media through which it has generally been assumed that
the tradition of the Deluge reached the Hebrews. What explanation have we
of this fact?

This grouping of Sumerian and Hebrew authorities, against the extant
sources from Babylon, is emphasized by the general framework of the
Sumerian story. For the literary connexion which we have in Genesis
between the Creation and the Deluge narratives has hitherto found no
parallel in the cuneiform texts. In Babylon and Assyria the myth of
Creation and the Deluge legend have been divorced. From the one a complete
epic has been evolved in accordance with the tenets of Babylonian
theology, the Creation myth being combined in the process with other myths
of a somewhat analogous character. The Deluge legend has survived as an
isolated story in more than one setting, the principal Semitic Version
being recounted to the national hero Gilgamesh, towards the close of the
composite epic of his adventures which grew up around the nucleus of his
name. It is one of the chief surprises of the newly discovered Sumerian
Version that the Hebrew connexion of the narratives is seen to be on the
lines of very primitive tradition. Noah’s reputation for piety does not
stand alone. His line of descent from Adam, and the thread of narrative
connecting the creation of the world with its partial destruction by the
Deluge, already appear in Sumerian form at a time when the city of Babylon
itself had not secured its later power. How then are we to account for
this correspondence of Sumerian and Hebrew traditions, on points
completely wanting in our intermediate authorities, from which, however,
other evidence suggests that the Hebrew narratives were derived?

At the risk of anticipating some of the conclusions to be drawn in the
next lecture, it may be well to define an answer now. It is possible that
those who still accept the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch may be
inclined to see in this correspondence of Hebrew and Sumerian ideas a
confirmation of their own hypothesis. But it should be pointed out at once
that this is not an inevitable deduction from the evidence. Indeed, it is
directly contradicted by the rest of the evidence we have summarized,
while it would leave completely unexplained some significant features of
the problem. It is true that certain important details of the Sumerian
tradition, while not affecting Babylon and Assyria, have left their stamp
upon the Hebrew narratives; but that is not an exhaustive statement of the
case. For we have also seen that a more complete survival of Sumerian
tradition has taken place in the history of Berossus. There we traced the
same general framework of the narratives, with a far closer correspondence
in detail. The kingly rank of Ziusudu is in complete harmony with the
Berossian conception of a series of supreme Antediluvian rulers, and the
names of two of the Antediluvian cites are among those of their newly
recovered Sumerian prototypes. There can thus be no suggestion that the
Greek reproductions of the Sumerian tradition were in their turn due to
Hebrew influence. On the contrary we have in them a parallel case of
survival in a far more complete form.

The inference we may obviously draw is that the Sumerian narrative
continued in existence, in a literary form that closely resembled the
original version, into the later historical periods. In this there would
be nothing to surprise us, when we recall the careful preservation and
study of ancient Sumerian religious texts by the later Semitic priesthood
of the country. Each ancient cult-centre in Babylonia continued to cling
to its own local traditions, and the Sumerian desire for their
preservation, which was inherited by their Semitic guardians, was in great
measure unaffected by political occurrences elsewhere. Hence it was that
Ashur-bani-pal, when forming his library at Nineveh, was able to draw upon
so rich a store of the more ancient literary texts of Babylonia. The
Sumerian Version of the Deluge and of Antediluvian history may well have
survived in a less epitomized form than that in which we have recovered
it; and, like other ancient texts, it was probably provided with a Semitic
translation. Indeed its literary study and reproduction may have continued
without interruption in Babylon itself. But even if Sumerian tradition
died out in the capital under the influence of the Babylonian priesthood,
its re-introduction may well have taken place in Neo-Babylonian times.
Perhaps the antiquarian researches of Nabonidus were characteristic of his
period; and in any case the collection of his country’s gods into the
capital must have been accompanied by a renewed interest in the more
ancient versions of the past with which their cults were peculiarly
associated. In the extant summary from Berossus we may possibly see
evidence of a subsequent attempt to combine with these more ancient
traditions the continued religious dominance of Marduk and of Babylon.

Our conclusion, that the Sumerian form of the tradition did not die out,
leaves the question as to the periods during which Babylonian influence
may have acted upon Hebrew tradition in great measure unaffected; and we
may therefore postpone its further consideration to the next lecture.
To-day the only question that remains to be considered concerns the effect
of our new evidence upon the wider problem of Deluge stories as a whole.
What light does it throw on the general character of Deluge stories and
their suggested Egyptian origin?

One thing that strikes me forcibly in reading this early text is the
complete absence of any trace or indication of astrological motif.
It is true that Ziusudu sacrifices to the Sun-god; but the episode is
inherent in the story, the appearance of the Sun after the storm following
the natural sequence of events and furnishing assurance to the king of his
eventual survival. To identify the worshipper with his god and to transfer
Ziusudu’s material craft to the heavens is surely without justification
from the simple narrative. We have here no prototype of Ra sailing the
heavenly ocean. And the destructive flood itself is not only of an equally
material and mundane character, but is in complete harmony with its
Babylonian setting.

In the matter of floods the Tigris and Euphrates present a striking
contrast to the Nile. It is true that the life-blood of each country is
its river-water, but the conditions of its use are very different, and in
Mesopotamia it becomes a curse when out of control. In both countries the
river-water must be used for maturing the crops. But while the rains of
Abyssinia cause the Nile to rise between August and October, thus securing
both summer and winter crops, the melting snows of Armenia and the Taurus
flood the Mesopotamian rivers between March and May. In Egypt the Nile
flood is gentle; it is never abrupt, and the river gives ample warning of
its rise and fall. It contains just enough sediment to enrich the land
without choking the canals; and the water, after filling its historic
basins, may when necessary be discharged into the falling river in
November. Thus Egypt receives a full and regular supply of water, and
there is no difficulty in disposing of any surplus. The growth in such a
country of a legend of world-wide destruction by flood is inconceivable.

In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the floods, which come too late for the
winter crops, are followed by the rainless summer months; and not only
must the flood-water be controlled, but some portion of it must be
detained artificially, if it is to be of use during the burning months of
July, August, and September, when the rivers are at their lowest.
Moreover, heavy rain in April and a warm south wind melting the snow in
the hills may bring down such floods that the channels cannot contain
them; the dams are then breached and the country is laid waste. Here there
is first too much water and then too little.

The great danger from flood in Babylonia, both in its range of action and
in its destructive effect, is due to the strangely flat character of the
Tigris and Euphrates delta.(1) Hence after a severe breach in the Tigris
or Euphrates, the river after inundating the country may make itself a new
channel miles away from the old one. To mitigate the danger, the floods
may be dealt with in two ways—by a multiplication of canals to
spread the water, and by providing escapes for it into depressions in the
surrounding desert, which in their turn become centres of fertility. Both
methods were employed in antiquity; and it may be added that in any scheme
for the future prosperity of the country they must be employed again, of
course with the increased efficiency of modern apparatus.(2) But while the
Babylonians succeeded in controlling the Euphrates, the Tigris was never
really tamed,(3) and whenever it burst its right bank the southern plains
were devastated. We could not have more suitable soil for the growth of a
Deluge story.

It was only by constant and unremitting attention that disaster from flood
could be averted; and the difficulties of the problem were and are
increased by the fact that the flood-water of the Mesopotamian rivers
contains five times as much sediment as the Nile. In fact, one of the most
pressing of the problems the Sumerian and early Babylonian engineers had
to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1) What the floods,
if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well illustrated by the decay
of the ancient canal-system, which has been the immediate cause of the
country’s present state of sordid desolation. That the decay was gradual
was not the fault of the rivers, but was due to the sound principles on
which the old system of control had been evolved through many centuries of
labour. At the time of the Moslem conquest the system had already begun to
fail. In the fifth century there had been bad floods; but worse came in
A.D. 629, when both rivers burst their banks and played havoc with the
dikes and embankments. It is related that the Sassanian king Parwiz, the
contemporary of Mohammed, crucified in one day forty canal-workers at a
certain breach, and yet was unable to master the flood.(2) All repairs
were suspended during the anarchy of the Moslem invasion. As a consequence
the Tigris left its old bed for the Shatt el-Hai at Kût, and pouring its
own and its tributaries’ waters into the Euphrates formed the Great
Euphrates Swamp, two hundred miles long and fifty broad. But even then
what was left of the old system was sufficient to support the splendour of
the Eastern Caliphate.

The second great blow to the system followed the Mongol conquest, when the
Nahrwân Canal, to the east of the Tigris, had its head swept away by flood
and the area it had irrigated became desert. Then, in about the fifteenth
century, the Tigris returned to its old course; the Shatt el-Hai shrank,
and much of the Great Swamp dried up into the desert it is to-day.(1)
Things became worse during the centuries of Turkish misrule. But the
silting up of the Hillah, or main, branch of the Euphrates about 1865, and
the transference of a great part of its stream into the Hindîyah Canal,
caused even the Turks to take action. They constructed the old Hindîyah
Barrage in 1890, but it gave way in 1903 and the state of things was even
worse than before; for the Hillah branch then dried entirely.(2)

From this brief sketch of progressive disaster during the later historical
period, the inevitable effect of neglected silt and flood, it will be
gathered that the two great rivers of Mesopotamia present a very strong
contrast to the Nile. For during the same period of misgovernment and
neglect in Egypt the Nile did not turn its valley and delta into a desert.
On the Tigris and Euphrates, during ages when the earliest dwellers on
their banks were struggling to make effective their first efforts at
control, the waters must often have regained the upper hand. Under such
conditions the story of a great flood in the past would not be likely to
die out in the future; the tradition would tend to gather illustrative
detail suggested by later experience. Our new text reveals the Deluge
tradition in Mesopotamia at an early stage of its development, and
incidentally shows us that there is no need to postulate for its origin
any convulsion of nature or even a series of seismic shocks accompanied by
cyclone in the Persian Gulf.

If this had been the only version of the story that had come down to us,
we should hardly have regarded it as a record of world-wide catastrophe.
It is true the gods’ intention is to destroy mankind, but the scene
throughout is laid in Southern Babylonia. After seven days’ storm, the Sun
comes out, and the vessel with the pious priest-king and his domestic
animals on board grounds, apparently still in Babylonia, and not on any
distant mountain, such as Mt. Nisir or the great mass of Ararat in
Armenia. These are obviously details which tellers of the story have added
as it passed down to later generations. When it was carried still farther
afield, into the area of the Eastern Mediterranean, it was again adapted
to local conditions. Thus Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon
Parnassus,(1) and the pseudo-Lucian relates how he founded the temple of
Derketo at Hierapolis in Syria beside the hole in the earth which
swallowed up the Flood.(2) To the Sumerians who first told the story, the
great Flood appeared to have destroyed mankind, for Southern Babylonia was
for them the world. Later peoples who heard it have fitted the story to
their own geographical horizon, and in all good faith and by a purely
logical process the mountain-tops are represented as submerged, and the
ship, or ark, or chest, is made to come to ground on the highest peak
known to the story-teller and his hearers. But in its early Sumerian form
it is just a simple tradition of some great inundation, which overwhelmed
the plain of Southern Babylonia and was peculiarly disastrous in its
effects. And so its memory survived in the picture of Ziusudu’s solitary
coracle upon the face of the waters, which, seen through the mists of the
Deluge tradition, has given us the Noah’s ark of our nursery days.

Thus the Babylonian, Hebrew, and Greek Deluge stories resolve themselves,
not into a nature myth, but into an early legend, which has the basis of
historical fact in the Euphrates Valley. And it is probable that we may
explain after a similar fashion the occurrence of tales of a like
character at least in some other parts of the world. Among races dwelling
in low-lying or well-watered districts it would be surprising if we did
not find independent stories of past floods from which few inhabitants of
the land escaped. It is only in hilly countries such as Palestine, where
for the great part of the year water is scarce and precious, that we are
forced to deduce borrowing; and there is no doubt that both the Babylonian
and the biblical stories have been responsible for some at any rate of the
scattered tales. But there is no need to adopt the theory of a single
source for all of them, whether in Babylonia or, still less, in Egypt.(1)

I should like to add, with regard to this reading of our new evidence,
that I am very glad to know Sir James Frazer holds a very similar opinion.
For, as you are doubtless all aware, Sir James is at present collecting
Flood stories from all over the world, and is supplementing from a wider
range the collections already made by Lenormant, Andree, Winternitz, and
Gerland. When his work is complete it will be possible to conjecture with
far greater confidence how particular traditions or groups of tradition
arose, and to what extent transmission has taken place. Meanwhile, in his
recent Huxley Memorial Lecture,(1) he has suggested a third possibility as
to the way Deluge stories may have arisen.

Stated briefly, it is that a Deluge story may arise as a popular
explanation of some striking natural feature in a country, although to the
scientific eye the feature in question is due to causes other than
catastrophic flood. And he worked out the suggestion in the case of the
Greek traditions of a great deluge, associated with the names of Deucalion
and Dardanus. Deucalion’s deluge, in its later forms at any rate, is
obviously coloured by Semitic tradition; but both Greek stories, in their
origin, Sir James Frazer would trace to local conditions—the one
suggested by the Gorge of Tempe in Thessaly, the other explaining the
existence of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. As he pointed out, they would
be instances, not of genuine historical traditions, but of what Sir James
Tyler calls “observation myths”. A third story of a great flood, regarded
in Greek tradition as the earliest of the three, he would explain by an
extraordinary inundation of the Copaic Lake in Boeotia, which to this day
is liable to great fluctuations of level. His new theory applies only to
the other two traditions. For in them no historical kernel is presupposed,
though gradual erosion by water is not excluded as a cause of the surface
features which may have suggested the myths.

This valuable theory thus opens up a third possibility for our analysis.
It may also, of course, be used in combination, if in any particular
instance we have reason to believe that transmission, in some vague form,
may already have taken place. And it would with all deference suggest the
possibility that, in view of other evidence, this may have occurred in the
case of the Greek traditions. With regard to the theory itself we may
confidently expect that further examples will be found in its illustration
and support. Meanwhile in the new Sumerian Version I think we may conclude
that we have recovered beyond any doubt the origin of the Babylonian and
Hebrew traditions and of the large group of stories to which they in their
turn have given rise.

LECTURE III — CREATION AND THE DRAGON MYTH; AND THE PROBLEM OF
BABYLONIAN PARALLELS IN HEBREW TRADITION

In our discussion of the new Sumerian version of the Deluge story we came
to the conclusion that it gave no support to any theory which would trace
all such tales to a single origin, whether in Egypt or in Babylonia. In
spite of strong astrological elements in both the Egyptian and Babylonian
religious systems, we saw grounds for regarding the astrological tinge of
much ancient mythology as a later embellishment and not as primitive
material. And so far as our new version of the Deluge story was concerned,
it resolved itself into a legend, which had a basis of historical fact in
the Euphrates Valley. It will be obvious that the same class of
explanation cannot be applied to narratives of the Creation of the World.
For there we are dealing, not with legends, but with myths, that is,
stories exclusively about the gods. But where an examination of their
earlier forms is possible, it would seem to show that many of these tales
also, in their origin, are not to be interpreted as nature myths, and that
none arose as mere reflections of the solar system. In their more
primitive and simpler aspects they seem in many cases to have been
suggested by very human and terrestrial experience. To-day we will examine
the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Babylonian myths of Creation, and, after we
have noted the more striking features of our new material, we will
consider the problem of foreign influences upon Hebrew traditions
concerning the origin and early history of the world.

In Egypt, as until recently in Babylonia, we have to depend for our
knowledge of Creation myths on documents of a comparatively late period.
Moreover, Egyptian religious literature as a whole is textually corrupt,
and in consequence it is often difficult to determine the original
significance of its allusions. Thanks to the funerary inscriptions and
that great body of magical formulae and ritual known as “The Chapters of
Coming forth by Day”, we are very fully informed on the Egyptian doctrines
as to the future state of the dead. The Egyptian’s intense interest in his
own remote future, amounting almost to an obsession, may perhaps in part
account for the comparatively meagre space in the extant literature which
is occupied by myths relating solely to the past. And it is significant
that the one cycle of myth, of which we are fully informed in its latest
stage of development, should be that which gave its sanction to the hope
of a future existence for man. The fact that Herodotus, though he claims a
knowledge of the sufferings or “Mysteries” of Osiris, should deliberately
refrain from describing them or from even uttering the name,(1) suggests
that in his time at any rate some sections of the mythology had begun to
acquire an esoteric character. There is no doubt that at all periods myth
played an important part in the ritual of feast-days. But mythological
references in the earlier texts are often obscure; and the late form in
which a few of the stories have come to us is obviously artificial. The
tradition, for example, which relates how mankind came from the tears
which issued from Ra’s eye undoubtedly arose from a play upon words.

On the other hand, traces of myth, scattered in the religious literature
of Egypt, may perhaps in some measure betray their relative age by the
conceptions of the universe which underlie them. The Egyptian idea that
the sky was a heavenly ocean, which is not unlike conceptions current
among the Semitic Babylonians and Hebrews, presupposes some thought and
reflection. In Egypt it may well have been evolved from the probably
earlier but analogous idea of the river in heaven, which the Sun traversed
daily in his boats. Such a river was clearly suggested by the Nile; and
its world-embracing character is reminiscent of a time when through
communication was regularly established, at least as far south as
Elephantine. Possibly in an earlier period the long narrow valley, or even
a section of it, may have suggested the figure of a man lying prone upon
his back. Such was Keb, the Earth-god, whose counterpart in the sky was
the goddess Nut, her feet and hands resting at the limits of the world and
her curved body forming the vault of heaven. Perhaps still more primitive,
and dating from a pastoral age, may be the notion that the sky was a great
cow, her body, speckled with stars, alone visible from the earth beneath.
Reference has already been made to the dominant influence of the Sun in
Egyptian religion, and it is not surprising that he should so often appear
as the first of created beings. His orb itself, or later the god in
youthful human form, might be pictured as emerging from a lotus on the
primaeval waters, or from a marsh-bird’s egg, a conception which
influenced the later Phoenician cosmogeny. The Scarabaeus, or great
dung-feeding beetle of Egypt, rolling the ball before it in which it lays
its eggs, is an obvious theme for the early myth-maker. And it was natural
that the Beetle of Khepera should have been identified with the Sun at his
rising, as the Hawk of Ra represented his noonday flight, and the aged
form of Attun his setting in the west. But in all these varied conceptions
and explanations of the universe it is difficult to determine how far the
poetical imagery of later periods has transformed the original myths which
may lie behind them.

As the Egyptian Creator the claims of Ra, the Sun-god of Heliopolis, early
superseded those of other deities. On the other hand, Ptah of Memphis, who
for long ages had been merely the god of architects and craftsmen, became
under the Empire the architect of the universe and is pictured as a potter
moulding the world-egg. A short poem by a priest of Ptah, which has come
down to us from that period, exhibits an attempt to develop this idea on
philosophical lines.(1) Its author represents all gods and living
creatures as proceeding directly from the mind and thought of Ptah. But
this movement, which was more notably reflected in Akhenaton’s religious
revolution, died out in political disaster, and the original materialistic
interpretation of the myths was restored with the cult of Amen. How
materialistic this could be is well illustrated by two earlier members of
the XVIIIth Dynasty, who have left us vivid representations of the
potter’s wheel employed in the process of man’s creation. When the famous
Hatshepsut, after the return of her expedition to Punt in the ninth year
of her young consort Thothmes III, decided to build her temple at Deir
el-Bahari in the necropolis of Western Thebes, she sought to emphasize her
claim to the throne of Egypt by recording her own divine origin upon its
walls. We have already noted the Egyptians’ belief in the solar parentage
of their legitimate rulers, a myth that goes back at least to the Old
Kingdom and may have had its origin in prehistoric times. With the rise of
Thebes, Amen inherited the prerogatives of Ra; and so Hatshepsut seeks to
show, on the north side of the retaining wall of her temple’s Upper
Platform, that she was the daughter of Amen himself, “the great God, Lord
of the sky, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, who resides at Thebes”.
The myth was no invention of her own, for obviously it must have followed
traditional lines, and though it is only employed to exhibit the divine
creation of a single personage, it as obviously reflects the procedure and
methods of a general Creation myth.

This series of sculptures shared the deliberate mutilation that all her
records suffered at the hands of Thothmes III after her death, but enough
of the scenes and their accompanying text has survived to render the
detailed interpretation of the myth quite certain.(1) Here, as in a
general Creation myth, Amen’s first act is to summon the great gods in
council, in order to announce to them the future birth of the great
princess. Of the twelve gods who attend, the first is Menthu, a form of
the Sun-god and closely associated with Amen.(2) But the second deity is
Atum, the great god of Heliopolis, and he is followed by his cycle of
deities—Shu, “the son of Ra”; Tefnut, “the Lady of the sky”; Keb,
“the Father of the Gods”; Nut, “the Mother of the Gods”; Osiris, Isis,
Nephthys, Set, Horus, and Hathor. We are here in the presence of cosmic
deities, as befits a projected act of creation. The subsequent scenes
exhibit the Egyptian’s literal interpretation of the myth, which
necessitates the god’s bodily presence and personal participation. Thoth
mentions to Amen the name of queen Aahmes as the future mother of
Hatshepsut, and we later see Amen himself, in the form of her husband,
Aa-kheperka-Ra (Thothmes I), sitting with Aahmes and giving her the Ankh,
or sign of Life, which she receives in her hand and inhales through her
nostrils.(3) God and queen are seated on thrones above a couch, and are
supported by two goddesses. After leaving the queen, Amen calls on Khnum
or Khnemu, the flat-horned ram-god, who in texts of all periods is
referred to as the “builder” of gods and men;(4) and he instructs him to
create the body of his future daughter and that of her Ka, or
“double”, which would be united to her from birth.

The scene in the series, which is of greatest interest in the present
connexion, is that representing Khnum at his work of creation. He is
seated before a potter’s wheel which he works with his foot,(1) and on the
revolving table he is fashioning two children with his hands, the baby
princess and her “double”. It was always Hatshepsut’s desire to be
represented as a man, and so both the children are boys.(2) As yet they
are lifeless, but the symbol of Life will be held to their nostrils by
Heqet, the divine Potter’s wife, whose frog-head typifies birth and
fertility. When Amenophis III copied Hatshepsut’s sculptures for his own
series at Luxor, he assigned this duty to the greater goddess Hathor,
perhaps the most powerful of the cosmic goddesses and the mother of the
world. The subsequent scenes at Deir el-Bahari include the leading of
queen Aahmes by Khnum and Heqet to the birth-chamber; the great birth
scene where the queen is attended by the goddesses Nephthys and Isis, a
number of divine nurses and midwives holding several of the “doubles” of
the baby, and favourable genii, in human form or with the heads of
crocodiles, jackals, and hawks, representing the four cardinal points and
all bearing the gift of life; the presentation of the young child by the
goddess Hathor to Amen, who is well pleased at the sight of his daughter;
and the divine suckling of Hatshepsut and her “doubles”. But these
episodes do not concern us, as of course they merely reflect the procedure
following a royal birth. But Khnum’s part in the princess’s origin stands
on a different plane, for it illustrates the Egyptian myth of Creation by
the divine Potter, who may take the form of either Khnum or Ptah. Monsieur
Naville points out the extraordinary resemblance in detail which
Hatshepsut’s myth of divine paternity bears to the Greek legend of Zeus
and Alkmene, where the god takes the form of Amphitryon, Alkmene’s
husband, exactly as Amen appears to the queen;(3) and it may be added that
the Egyptian origin of the Greek story was traditionally recognized in the
ancestry ascribed to the human couple.(4)

The only complete Egyptian Creation myth yet recovered is preserved in a
late papyrus in the British Museum, which was published some years ago by
Dr. Budge.(1) It occurs under two separate versions embedded in “The Book
of the Overthrowing of Apep, the Enemy of Ra”. Here Ra, who utters the
myth under his late title of Neb-er-tcher, “Lord to the utmost limit”, is
self-created as Khepera from Nu, the primaeval water; and then follow
successive generations of divine pairs, male and female, such as we find
at the beginning of the Semitic-Babylonian Creation Series.(2) Though the
papyrus was written as late as the year 311 B.C., the myth is undoubtedly
early. For the first two divine pairs Shu and Tefnut, Keb and Nut, and
four of the latter pairs’ five children, Osiris and Isis, Set and
Nephthys, form with the Sun-god himself the Greater Ennead of Heliopolis,
which exerted so wide an influence on Egyptian religious speculation. The
Ennead combined the older solar elements with the cult of Osiris, and this
is indicated in the myth by a break in the successive generations, Nut
bringing forth at a single birth the five chief gods of the Osiris cycle,
Osiris himself and his son Horus, with Set, Isis, and Nephthys. Thus we
may see in the myth an early example of that religious syncretism which is
so characteristic of later Egyptian belief.

The only parallel this Egyptian myth of Creation presents to the Hebrew
cosmogony is in its picture of the primaeval water, corresponding to the
watery chaos of Genesis i. But the resemblance is of a very general
character, and includes no etymological equivalence such as we find when
we compare the Hebrew account with the principal Semitic-Babylonian
Creation narrative.(1) The application of the Ankh, the Egyptian sign for
Life, to the nostrils of a newly-created being is no true parallel to the
breathing into man’s nostrils of the breath of life in the earlier Hebrew
Version,(2) except in the sense that each process was suggested by our
common human anatomy. We should naturally expect to find some Hebrew
parallel to the Egyptian idea of Creation as the work of a potter with his
clay, for that figure appears in most ancient mythologies. The Hebrews
indeed used the conception as a metaphor or parable,(3) and it also
underlies their earlier picture of man’s creation. I have not touched on
the grosser Egyptian conceptions concerning the origin of the universe,
which we may probably connect with African ideas; but those I have
referred to will serve to demonstrate the complete absence of any feature
that presents a detailed resemblance of the Hebrew tradition.

When we turn to Babylonia, we find there also evidence of conflicting
ideas, the product of different and to some extent competing religious
centres. But in contrast to the rather confused condition of Egyptian
mythology, the Semitic Creation myth of the city of Babylon, thanks to the
latter’s continued political ascendancy, succeeded in winning a dominant
place in the national literature. This is the version in which so many
points of resemblance to the first chapter of Genesis have long been
recognized, especially in the succession of creative acts and their
relative order. In the Semitic-Babylonian Version the creation of the
world is represented as the result of conflict, the emergence of order out
of chaos, a result that is only attained by the personal triumph of the
Creator. But this underlying dualism does not appear in the more primitive
Sumerian Version we have now recovered. It will be remembered that in the
second lecture I gave some account of the myth, which occurs in an
epitomized form as an introduction to the Sumerian Version of the Deluge,
the two narratives being recorded in the same document and connected with
one another by a description of the Antediluvian cities. We there saw that
Creation is ascribed to the three greatest gods of the Sumerian pantheon,
Anu, Enlil, and Enki, assisted by the goddess Ninkharsagga.

It is significant that in the Sumerian version no less than four deities
are represented as taking part in the Creation. For in this we may see
some indication of the period to which its composition must be assigned.
Their association in the text suggests that the claims of local gods had
already begun to compete with one another as a result of political
combination between the cities of their cults. To the same general period
we must also assign the compilation of the Sumerian Dynastic record, for
that presupposes the existence of a supreme ruler among the Sumerian
city-states. This form of political constitution must undoubtedly have
been the result of a long process of development, and the fact that its
existence should be regarded as dating from the Creation of the world
indicates a comparatively developed stage of the tradition. But behind the
combination of cities and their gods we may conjecturally trace anterior
stages of development, when each local deity and his human representative
seemed to their own adherents the sole objects for worship and allegiance.
And even after the demands of other centres had been conceded, no deity
ever quite gave up his local claims.

Enlil, the second of the four Sumerian creating deities, eventually ousted
his rivals. It has indeed long been recognized that the rôle played
by Marduk in the Babylonian Version of Creation had been borrowed from
Enlil of Nippur; and in the Atrakhasis legend Enlil himself appears as the
ultimate ruler of the world and the other gods figure as “his sons”. Anu,
who heads the list and plays with Enlil the leading part in the Sumerian
narrative, was clearly his chief rival. And though we possess no detailed
account of Anu’s creative work, the persistent ascription to him of the
creation of heaven, and his familiar title, “the Father of the Gods”,
suggest that he once possessed a corresponding body of myth in Eanna, his
temple at Erech. Enki, the third of the creating gods, was naturally
credited, as God of Wisdom, with special creative activities, and
fortunately in his case we have some independent evidence of the varied
forms these could assume.

According to one tradition that has come down to us,(1) after Anu had made
the heavens, Enki created Apsû or the Deep, his own dwelling-place. Then
taking from it a piece of clay(2) he proceeded to create the Brick-god,
and reeds and forests for the supply of building material. From the same
clay he continued to form other deities and materials, including the
Carpenter-god; the Smith-god; Arazu, a patron deity of building; and
mountains and seas for all that they produced; the Goldsmith-god, the
Stone-cutter-god, and kindred deities, together with their rich products
for offerings; the Grain-deities, Ashnan and Lakhar; Siris, a Wine-god;
Ningishzida and Ninsar, a Garden-god, for the sake of the rich offerings
they could make; and a deity described as “the High priest of the great
gods,” to lay down necessary ordinances and commands. Then he created “the
King”, for the equipment probably of a particular temple, and finally men,
that they might practise the cult in the temple so elaborately prepared.

It will be seen from this summary of Enki’s creative activities, that the
text from which it is taken is not a general Creation myth, but in all
probability the introductory paragraph of a composition which celebrated
the building or restoration of a particular temple; and the latter’s
foundation is represented, on henotheistic lines, as the main object of
creation. Composed with that special purpose, its narrative is not to be
regarded as an exhaustive account of the creation of the world. The
incidents are eclective, and only such gods and materials are mentioned as
would have been required for the building and adornment of the temple and
for the provision of its offerings and cult. But even so its mythological
background is instructive. For while Anu’s creation of heaven is
postulated as the necessary precedent of Enki’s activities, the latter
creates the Deep, vegetation, mountains, seas, and mankind. Moreover, in
his character as God of Wisdom, he is not only the teacher but the creator
of those deities who were patrons of man’s own constructive work. From
such evidence we may infer that in his temple at Eridu, now covered by the
mounds of Abu Shahrain in the extreme south of Babylonia, and regarded in
early Sumerian tradition as the first city in the world, Enki himself was
once celebrated as the sole creator of the universe.

The combination of the three gods Anu, Enlil, and Enki, is persistent in
the tradition; for not only were they the great gods of the universe,
representing respectively heaven, earth, and the watery abyss, but they
later shared the heavenly sphere between them. It is in their astrological
character that we find them again in creative activity, though without the
co-operation of any goddess, when they appear as creators of the great
light-gods and as founders of time divisions, the day and the month. This
Sumerian myth, though it reaches us only in an extract or summary in a
Neo-Babylonian schoolboy’s exercise,(1) may well date from a comparatively
early period, but probably from a time when the “Ways” of Anu, Enlil, and
Enki had already been fixed in heaven and their later astrological
characters had crystallized.

The idea that a goddess should take part with a god in man’s creation is
already a familiar feature of Babylonian mythology. Thus the goddess
Aruru, in co-operation with Marduk, might be credited with the creation of
the human race,(1) as she might also be pictured creating on her own
initiative an individual hero such as Enkidu of the Gilgamesh Epic. The rôle
of mother of mankind was also shared, as we have seen, by the Semitic
Ishtar. And though the old Sumerian goddess, Ninkharsagga, the “Lady of
the Mountains”, appears in our Sumerian text for the first time in the
character of creatress, some of the titles we know she enjoyed, under her
synonyms in the great God List of Babylonia, already reflected her cosmic
activities.(2) For she was known as

In the myth we are not told her method of creation, but from the above
titles it is clear that in her own cycle of tradition Ninkhasagga was
conceived as fashioning men not only from clay but also from wood, and
perhaps as employing metal for the manufacture of her other works of
creation. Moreover, in the great God List, where she is referred to under
her title Makh, Ninkhasagga is associated with Anu, Enlil, and Enki; she
there appears, with her dependent deities, after Enlil and before Enki. We
thus have definite proof that her association with the three chief
Sumerian gods was widely recognized in the early Sumerian period and
dictated her position in the classified pantheon of Babylonia. Apart from
this evidence, the important rank assigned her in the historical and legal
records and in votive inscriptions,(1) especially in the early period and
in Southern Babylonia, accords fully with the part she here plays in the
Sumerian Creation myth. Eannatum and Gudea of Lagash both place her
immediately after Anu and Enlil, giving her precedence over Enki; and even
in the Kassite Kudurru inscriptions of the thirteenth and twelfth
centuries, where she is referred to, she takes rank after Enki and before
the other gods. In Sumer she was known as “the Mother of the Gods”, and
she was credited with the power of transferring the kingdom and royal
insignia from one king to his successor.

Her supreme position as a goddess is attested by the relative
insignificance of her husband Dunpae, whom she completely overshadows, in
which respect she presents a contrast to the goddess Ninlil, Enlil’s
female counterpart. The early clay figurines found at Nippur and on other
sites, representing a goddess suckling a child and clasping one of her
breasts, may well be regarded as representing Ninkharsagga and not Ninlil.
Her sanctuaries were at Kesh and Adab, both in the south, and this fact
sufficiently explains her comparative want of influence in Akkad, where
the Semitic Ishtar took her place. She does indeed appear in the north
during the Sargonic period under her own name, though later she survives
in her synonyms of Ninmakh, “the Sublime Lady”, and Nintu, “the Lady of
Child-bearing”. It is under the latter title that Hammurabi refers to her
in his Code of Laws, where she is tenth in a series of eleven deities. But
as Goddess of Birth she retained only a pale reflection of her original
cosmic character, and her functions were gradually specialized.(1)

From a consideration of their characters, as revealed by independent
sources of evidence, we thus obtain the reason for the co-operation of
four deities in the Sumerian Creation. In fact the new text illustrates a
well-known principle in the development of myth, the reconciliation of the
rival claims of deities, whose cults, once isolated, had been brought from
political causes into contact with each other. In this aspect myth is the
medium through which a working pantheon is evolved. Naturally all the
deities concerned cannot continue to play their original parts in detail.
In the Babylonian Epic of Creation, where a single deity, and not a very
prominent one, was to be raised to pre-eminent rank, the problem was
simple enough. He could retain his own qualities and achievements while
borrowing those of any former rival. In the Sumerian text we have the
result of a far more delicate process of adjustment, and it is possible
that the brevity of the text is here not entirely due to compression of a
longer narrative, but may in part be regarded as evidence of early
combination. As a result of the association of several competing deities
in the work of creation, a tendency may be traced to avoid discrimination
between rival claims. Thus it is that the assembled gods, the pantheon as
a whole, are regarded as collectively responsible for the creation of the
universe. It may be added that this use of ilâni, “the gods”, forms
an interesting linguistic parallel to the plural of the Hebrew divine
title Elohim.

It will be remembered that in the Sumerian Version the account of Creation
is not given in full, only such episodes being included as were directly
related to the Deluge story. No doubt the selection of men and animals was
suggested by their subsequent rescue from the Flood; and emphasis was
purposely laid on the creation of the niggilma because of the part
it played in securing mankind’s survival. Even so, we noted one striking
parallel between the Sumerian Version and that of the Semitic Babylonians,
in the reason both give for man’s creation. But in the former there is no
attempt to explain how the universe itself had come into being, and the
existence of the earth is presupposed at the moment when Anu, Enlil, Enki,
and Ninkharsagga undertake the creation of man. The Semitic-Babylonian
Version, on the other hand, is mainly occupied with events that led up to
the acts of creation, and it concerns our problem to inquire how far those
episodes were of Semitic and how far of Sumerian origin. A further
question arises as to whether some strands of the narrative may not at one
time have existed in Sumerian form independently of the Creation myth.

The statement is sometimes made that there is no reason to assume a
Sumerian original for the Semitic-Babylonian Version, as recorded on “the
Seven Tablets of Creation”;(1) and this remark, though true of that
version as a whole, needs some qualification. The composite nature of the
poem has long been recognized, and an analysis of the text has shown that
no less than five principal strands have been combined for its formation.
These consist of (i) The Birth of the Gods; (ii) The Legend of Ea and
Apsû; (iii) The principal Dragon Myth; (iv) The actual account of
Creation; and (v) the Hymn to Marduk under his fifty titles.(2) The
Assyrian commentaries to the Hymn, from which considerable portions of its
text are restored, quote throughout a Sumerian original, and explain it
word for word by the phrases of the Semitic Version;(3) so that for one
out of the Seven Tablets a Semitic origin is at once disproved. Moreover,
the majority of the fifty titles, even in the forms in which they have
reached us in the Semitic text, are demonstrably Sumerian, and since many
of them celebrate details of their owner’s creative work, a Sumerian
original for other parts of the version is implied. Enlil and Ea are both
represented as bestowing their own names upon Marduk,(4) and we may assume
that many of the fifty titles were originally borne by Enlil as a Sumerian
Creator.(5) Thus some portions of the actual account of Creation were
probably derived from a Sumerian original in which “Father Enlil” figured
as the hero.

For what then were the Semitic Babylonians themselves responsible? It
seems to me that, in the “Seven Tablets”, we may credit them with
considerable ingenuity in the combination of existing myths, but not with
their invention. The whole poem in its present form is a glorification of
Marduk, the god of Babylon, who is to be given pre-eminent rank among the
gods to correspond with the political position recently attained by his
city. It would have been quite out of keeping with the national thought to
make a break in the tradition, and such a course would not have served the
purpose of the Babylonian priesthood, which was to obtain recognition of
their claims by the older cult-centres in the country. Hence they chose
and combined the more important existing myths, only making such
alterations as would fit them to their new hero. Babylon herself had won
her position by her own exertions; and it would be a natural idea to give
Marduk his opportunity of becoming Creator of the world as the result of
successful conflict. A combination of the Dragon myth with the myth of
Creation would have admirably served their purpose; and this is what we
find in the Semitic poem. But even that combination may not have been
their own invention; for, though, as we shall see, the idea of conflict
had no part in the earlier forms of the Sumerian Creation myth, its
combination with the Dragon motif may have characterized the local
Sumerian Version of Nippur. How mechanical was the Babylonian redactors’
method of glorifying Marduk is seen in their use of the description of
Tiamat and her monster brood, whom Marduk is made to conquer. To impress
the hearers of the poem with his prowess, this is repeated at length no
less than four times, one god carrying the news of her revolt to another.

Direct proof of the manner in which the later redactors have been obliged
to modify the original Sumerian Creation myth, in consequence of their
incorporation of other elements, may be seen in the Sixth Tablet of the
poem, where Marduk states the reason for man’s creation. In the second
lecture we noted how the very words of the principal Sumerian Creator were
put into Marduk’s mouth; but the rest of the Semitic god’s speech finds no
equivalent in the Sumerian Version and was evidently inserted in order to
reconcile the narrative with its later ingredients. This will best be seen
by printing the two passages in parallel columns:(1)

The welding of incongruous elements is very apparent in the Semitic
Version. For the statement that man will be created in order that the gods
may have worshippers is at once followed by the announcement that the gods
themselves must be punished and their “ways” changed. In the Sumerian
Version the gods are united and all are naturally regarded as worthy of
man’s worship. The Sumerian Creator makes no distinctions; he refers to
“our houses”, or temples, that shall be established. But in the later
version divine conflict has been introduced, and the future head of the
pantheon has conquered and humiliated the revolting deities. Their “ways”
must therefore be altered before they are fit to receive the worship which
was accorded them by right in the simpler Sumerian tradition. In spite of
the epitomized character of the Sumerian Version, a comparison of these
passages suggests very forcibly that the Semitic-Babylonian myth of
Creation is based upon a simpler Sumerian story, which has been elaborated
to reconcile it with the Dragon myth.

The Semitic poem itself also supplies evidence of the independent
existence of the Dragon myth apart from the process of Creation, for the
story of Ea and Apsû, which it incorporates, is merely the local Dragon
myth of Eridu. Its inclusion in the story is again simply a tribute to
Marduk; for though Ea, now become Marduk’s father, could conquer Apsû, he
was afraid of Tiamat, “and turned back”.(1) The original Eridu myth no
doubt represented Enki as conquering the watery Abyss, which became his
home; but there is nothing to connect this tradition with his early
creative activities. We have long possessed part of another local version
of the Dragon myth, which describes the conquest of a dragon by some deity
other than Marduk; and the fight is there described as taking place, not
before Creation, but at a time when men existed and cities had been
built.(2) Men and gods were equally terrified at the monster’s appearance,
and it was to deliver the land from his clutches that one of the gods went
out and slew him. Tradition delighted to dwell on the dragon’s enormous
size and terrible appearance. In this version he is described as fifty bêru(3)
in length and one in height; his mouth measured six cubits and the circuit
of his ears twelve; he dragged himself along in the water, which he lashed
with his tail; and, when slain, his blood flowed for three years, three
months, a day and a night. From this description we can see he was given
the body of an enormous serpent.(4)

A further version of the Dragon myth has now been identified on one of the
tablets recovered during the recent excavations at Ashur,(1) and in it the
dragon is not entirely of serpent form, but is a true dragon with legs.
Like the one just described, he is a male monster. The description occurs
as part of a myth, of which the text is so badly preserved that only the
contents of one column can be made out with any certainty. In it a god,
whose name is wanting, announces the presence of the dragon: “In the water
he lies and I (. . .)!” Thereupon a second god cries successively to
Aruru, the mother-goddess, and to Pallil, another deity, for help in his
predicament. And then follows the description of the dragon:

The text here breaks off, at the moment when Pallil, whose help against
the dragon had been invoked, begins to speak. Let us hope we shall recover
the continuation of the narrative and learn what became of this
carnivorous monster.

There are ample grounds, then, for assuming the independent existence of
the Babylonian Dragon-myth, and though both the versions recovered have
come to us in Semitic form, there is no doubt that the myth itself existed
among the Sumerians. The dragon motif is constantly recurring in
descriptions of Sumerian temple-decoration, and the twin dragons of
Ningishzida on Gudea’s libation-vase, carved in green steatite and inlaid
with shell, are a notable product of Sumerian art.(1) The very names borne
by Tiamat’s brood of monsters in the “Seven Tablets” are stamped in most
cases with their Sumerian descent, and Kingu, whom she appointed as her
champion in place of Apsû, is equally Sumerian. It would be strange indeed
if the Sumerians had not evolved a Dragon myth,(2) for the Dragon combat
is the most obvious of nature myths and is found in most mythologies of
Europe and the Near East. The trailing storm-clouds suggest his serpent
form, his fiery tongue is seen in the forked lightning, and, though he may
darken the world for a time, the Sun-god will always be victorious. In
Egypt the myth of “the Overthrowing of Apep, the enemy of Ra” presents a
close parallel to that of Tiamat;(3) but of all Eastern mythologies that
of the Chinese has inspired in art the most beautiful treatment of the
Dragon, who, however, under his varied forms was for them essentially
beneficent. Doubtless the Semites of Babylonia had their own versions of
the Dragon combat, both before and after their arrival on the Euphrates,
but the particular version which the priests of Babylon wove into their
epic is not one of them.

We have thus traced four out of the five strands which form the
Semitic-Babylonian poem of Creation to a Sumerian ancestry. And we now
come back to the first of the strands, the Birth of the Gods, from which
our discussion started. For if this too should prove to be Sumerian, it
would help to fill in the gap in our Sumerian Creation myth, and might
furnish us with some idea of the Sumerian view of “beginnings”, which
preceded the acts of creation by the great gods. It will be remembered
that the poem opens with the description of a time when heaven and earth
did not exist, no field or marsh even had been created, and the universe
consisted only of the primaeval water-gods, Apsû, Mummu, and Tiamat, whose
waters were mingled together. Then follows the successive generation of
two pairs of deities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, and Anshar and Kishar, long ages
separating the two generations from each other and from the birth of the
great gods which subsequently takes place. In the summary of the myth
which is given by Damascius(1) the names of the various deities accurately
correspond to those in the opening lines of the poem; but he makes some
notable additions, as will be seen from the following table:

In the passage of the poem which describes the birth of the great gods
after the last pair of primaeval deities, mention is duly made of Anu and
Nudimmud (the latter a title of Ea), corresponding to the {‘Anos} and
{‘Aos} of Damascius; and there appears to be no reference to Enlil, the
original of {‘Illinos}. It is just possible that his name occurred at the
end of one of the broken lines, and, if so, we should have a complete
parallel to Damascius. But the traces are not in favour of the
restoration;(1) and the omission of Enlil’s name from this part of the
poem may be readily explained as a further tribute to Marduk, who
definitely usurps his place throughout the subsequent narrative. Anu and
Ea had both to be mentioned because of the parts they play in the Epic,
but Enlil’s only recorded appearance is in the final assembly of the gods,
where he bestows his own name “the Lord of the World”(2) upon Marduk. The
evidence of Damascius suggests that Enlil’s name was here retained,
between those of Anu and Ea, in other versions of the poem. But the
occurrence of the name in any version is in itself evidence of the
antiquity of this strand of the narrative. It is a legitimate inference
that the myth of the Birth of the Gods goes back to a time at least before
the rise of Babylon, and is presumably of Sumerian origin.

Further evidence of this may be seen in the fact that Anu, Enlil, and Ea
(i.e. Enki), who are here created together, are the three great gods of
the Sumerian Version of Creation; it is they who create mankind with the
help of the goddess Ninkharsagga, and in the fuller version of that myth
we should naturally expect to find some account of their own origin. The
reference in Damascius to Marduk ({Belos}) as the son of Ea and Damkina
({Dauke}) is also of interest in this connexion, as it exhibits a goddess
in close connexion with one of the three great gods, much as we find
Ninkharsagga associated with them in the Sumerian Version.(1) Before
leaving the names, it may be added that, of the primaeval deities, Anshar
and Kishar are obviously Sumerian in form.

It may be noted that the character of Apsû and Tiamat in this portion of
the poem(1) is quite at variance with their later actions. Their revolt at
the ordered “way” of the gods was a necessary preliminary to the
incorporation of the Dragon myths, in which Ea and Marduk are the heroes.
Here they appear as entirely beneficent gods of the primaeval water,
undisturbed by storms, in whose quiet depths the equally beneficent
deities Lakhmu and Lakhamu, Anshar and Kishar, were generated.(2) This
interpretation, by the way, suggests a more satisfactory restoration for
the close of the ninth line of the poem than any that has yet been
proposed. That line is usually taken to imply that the gods were created
“in the midst of (heaven)”, but I think the following rendering, in
connexion with ll. 1-5, gives better sense:

If the ninth line of the poem be restored as suggested, its account of the
Birth of the Gods will be found to correspond accurately with the summary
from Berossus, who, in explaining the myth, refers to the Babylonian
belief that the universe consisted at first of moisture in which living
creatures, such as he had already described, were generated.(1) The
primaeval waters are originally the source of life, not of destruction,
and it is in them that the gods are born, as in Egyptian mythology; there
Nu, the primaeval water-god from whom Ra was self-created, never ceased to
be the Sun-god’s supporter. The change in the Babylonian conception was
obviously introduced by the combination of the Dragon myth with that of
Creation, a combination that in Egypt would never have been justified by
the gentle Nile. From a study of some aspects of the names at the
beginning of the Babylonian poem we have already seen reason to suspect
that its version of the Birth of the Gods goes back to Sumerian times, and
it is pertinent to ask whether we have any further evidence that in
Sumerian belief water was the origin of all things.

For many years we have possessed a Sumerian myth of Creation, which has
come to us on a late Babylonian tablet as the introductory section of an
incantation. It is provided with a Semitic translation, and to judge from
its record of the building of Babylon and Egasila, Marduk’s temple, and
its identification of Marduk himself with the Creator, it has clearly
undergone some editing at the hands of the Babylonian priests. Moreover,
the occurrence of various episodes out of their logical order, and the
fact that the text records twice over the creation of swamps and marshes,
reeds and trees or forests, animals and cities, indicate that two Sumerian
myths have been combined. Thus we have no guarantee that the other cities
referred to by name in the text, Nippur, Erech, and Eridu, are mentioned
in any significant connexion with each other.(1) Of the actual cause of
Creation the text appears to give two versions also, one in its present
form impersonal, and the other carried out by a god. But these two
accounts are quite unlike the authorized version of Babylon, and we may
confidently regard them as representing genuine Sumerian myths. The text
resembles other early accounts of Creation by introducing its narrative
with a series of negative statements, which serve to indicate the
preceding non-existence of the world, as will be seen from the following
extract:(2)

Here we have the definite statement that before Creation all the world was
sea. And it is important to note that the primaeval water is not
personified; the ordinary Sumerian word for “sea” is employed, which the
Semitic translator has faithfully rendered in his version of the text.(4)
The reference to a channel in the sea, as the cause of Creation, seems at
first sight a little obscure; but the word implies a “drain” or
“water-channel”, not a current of the sea itself, and the reference may be
explained as suggested by the drainage of a flood-area. No doubt the
phrase was elaborated in the original myth, and it is possible that what
appears to be a second version of Creation later on in the text is really
part of the more detailed narrative of the first myth. There the Creator
himself is named. He is the Sumerian god Gilimma, and in the Semitic
translation Marduk’s name is substituted. To the following couplet, which
describes Gilimma’s method of creation, is appended a further extract from
a later portion of the text, there evidently displaced, giving additional
details of the Creator’s work:

Here the Sumerian Creator is pictured as forming dry land from the
primaeval water in much the same way as the early cultivator in the
Euphrates Valley procured the rich fields for his crops. The existence of
the earth is here not really presupposed. All the world was sea until the
god created land out of the waters by the only practical method that was
possible in Mesopotamia.

In another Sumerian myth, which has been recovered on one of the early
tablets from Nippur, we have a rather different picture of beginnings. For
there, though water is the source of life, the existence of the land is
presupposed. But it is bare and desolate, as in the Mesopotamian season of
“low water”. The underlying idea is suggestive of a period when some
progress in systematic irrigation had already been made, and the filling
of the dry canals and subsequent irrigation of the parched ground by the
rising flood of Enki was not dreaded but eagerly desired. The myth is only
one of several that have been combined to form the introductory sections
of an incantation; but in all of them Enki, the god of the deep water,
plays the leading part, though associated with different consorts.(1) The
incantation is directed against various diseases, and the recitation of
the closing mythical section was evidently intended to enlist the aid of
special gods in combating them. The creation of these deities is recited
under set formulae in a sort of refrain, and the divine name assigned to
each bears a magical connexion with the sickness he or she is intended to
dispel.(2)

We have already noted examples of a similar use of myth in magic, which
was common to both Egypt and Babylonia; and to illustrate its employment
against disease, as in the Nippur document, it will suffice to cite a
well-known magical cure for the toothache which was adopted in Babylon.(1)
There toothache was believed to be caused by the gnawing of a worm in the
gum, and a myth was used in the incantation to relieve it. The worm’s
origin is traced from Anu, the god of heaven, through a descending scale
of creation; Anu, the heavens, the earth, rivers, canals and marshes are
represented as each giving rise to the next in order, until finally the
marshes produce the worm. The myth then relates how the worm, on being
offered tempting food by Ea in answer to her prayer, asked to be allowed
to drink the blood of the teeth, and the incantation closes by invoking
the curse of Ea because of the worm’s misguided choice. It is clear that
power over the worm was obtained by a recital of her creation and of her
subsequent ingratitude, which led to her present occupation and the curse
under which she laboured. When the myth and invocation had been recited
three times over the proper mixture of beer, a plant, and oil, and the
mixture had been applied to the offending tooth, the worm would fall under
the spell of the curse and the patient would at once gain relief. The
example is instructive, as the connexion of ideas is quite clear. In the
Nippur document the recital of the creation of the eight deities evidently
ensured their presence, and a demonstration of the mystic bond between
their names and the corresponding diseases rendered the working of their
powers effective. Our knowledge of a good many other myths is due solely
to their magical employment.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the new text is one in which
divine instructions are given in the use of plants, the fruit or roots of
which may be eaten. Here Usmû, a messenger from Enki, God of the Deep,
names eight such plants by Enki’s orders, thereby determining the
character of each. As Professor Jastrow has pointed out, the passage
forcibly recalls the story from Berossus, concerning the mythical creature
Oannes, who came up from the Erythraean Sea, where it borders upon
Babylonia, to instruct mankind in all things, including “seeds and the
gathering of fruits”.(1) But the only part of the text that concerns us
here is the introductory section, where the life-giving flood, by which
the dry fields are irrigated, is pictured as following the union of the
water-deities, Enki and Ninella.(2) Professor Jastrow is right in
emphasizing the complete absence of any conflict in this Sumerian myth of
beginnings; but, as with the other Sumerian Versions we have examined, it
seems to me there is no need to seek its origin elsewhere than in the
Euphrates Valley.

Even in later periods, when the Sumerian myths of Creation had been
superseded by that of Babylon, the Euphrates never ceased to be regarded
as the source of life and the creator of all things. And this is well
brought out in the following introductory lines of a Semitic incantation,
of which we possess two Neo-Babylonian copies:(1)

Here the river as creator is sharply distinguished from the Flood; and we
may conclude that the water of the Euphrates Valley impressed the early
Sumerians, as later the Semites, with its creative as well as with its
destructive power. The reappearance of the fertile soil, after the
receding inundation, doubtless suggested the idea of creation out of
water, and the stream’s slow but automatic fall would furnish a model for
the age-long evolution of primaeval deities. When a god’s active and
artificial creation of the earth must be portrayed, it would have been
natural for the primitive Sumerian to picture the Creator working as he
himself would work when he reclaimed a field from flood. We are thus shown
the old Sumerian god Gilimma piling reed-bundles in the water and heaping
up soil beside them, till the ground within his dikes dries off and
produces luxuriant vegetation. But here there is a hint of struggle in the
process, and we perceive in it the myth-redactor’s opportunity to weave in
the Dragon motif. No such excuse is afforded by the other Sumerian
myth, which pictures the life-producing inundation as the gift of the two
deities of the Deep and the product of their union.

But in their other aspect the rivers of Mesopotamia could be terrible; and
the Dragon motif itself, on the Tigris and Euphrates, drew its
imagery as much from flood as from storm. When therefore a single deity
must be made to appear, not only as Creator, but also as the champion of
his divine allies and the conqueror of other gods, it was inevitable that
the myths attaching to the waters under their two aspects should be
combined. This may already have taken place at Nippur, when Enlil became
the head of the pantheon; but the existence of his myth is conjectural.(1)
In a later age we can trace the process in the light of history and of
existing texts. There Marduk, identified wholly as the Sun-god, conquers
the once featureless primaeval water, which in the process of redaction
has now become the Dragon of flood and storm.

Thus the dualism which is so characteristic a feature of the
Semitic-Babylonian system, though absent from the earliest Sumerian ideas
of Creation, was inherent in the nature of the local rivers, whose varied
aspects gave rise to or coloured separate myths. Its presence in the later
mythology may be traced as a reflection of political development, at first
probably among the warring cities of Sumer, but certainly later in the
Semitic triumph at Babylon. It was but to be expected that the conqueror,
whether Sumerian or Semite, should represent his own god’s victory as the
establishment of order out of chaos. But this would be particularly in
harmony with the character of the Semitic Babylonians of the First
Dynasty, whose genius for method and organization produced alike
Hammurabi’s Code of Laws and the straight streets of the capital.

We have thus been able to trace the various strands of the
Semitic-Babylonian poem of Creation to Sumerian origins; and in the second
lecture we arrived at a very similar conclusion with regard to the
Semitic-Babylonian Version of the Deluge preserved in the Epic of
Gilgamesh. We there saw that the literary structure of the Sumerian
Version, in which Creation and Deluge are combined, must have survived
under some form into the Neo-Babylonian period, since it was reproduced by
Berossus. And we noted the fact that the same arrangement in Genesis did
not therefore prove that the Hebrew accounts go back directly to early
Sumerian originals. In fact, the structural resemblance presented by
Genesis can only be regarded as an additional proof that the Sumerian
originals continued to be studied and translated by the Semitic
priesthood, although they had long been superseded officially by their
later descendants, the Semitic epics. A detailed comparison of the
Creation and Deluge narratives in the various versions at once discloses
the fact that the connexion between those of the Semitic Babylonians and
the Hebrews is far closer and more striking than that which can be traced
when the latter are placed beside the Sumerian originals. We may therefore
regard it as certain that the Hebrews derived their knowledge of Sumerian
tradition, not directly from the Sumerians themselves, but through Semitic
channels from Babylon.

It will be unnecessary here to go in detail through the points of
resemblance that are admitted to exist between the Hebrew account of
Creation in the first chapter of Genesis and that preserved in the “Seven
Tablets”.(1) It will suffice to emphasize two of them, which gain in
significance through our newly acquired knowledge of early Sumerian
beliefs. It must be admitted that, on first reading the poem, one is
struck more by the differences than by the parallels; but that is due to
the polytheistic basis of the poem, which attracts attention when compared
with the severe and dignified monotheism of the Hebrew writer. And if
allowance be made for the change in theological standpoint, the material
points of resemblance are seen to be very marked. The outline or general
course of events is the same. In both we have an abyss of waters at the
beginning denoted by almost the same Semitic word, the Hebrew tehôm,
translated “the deep” in Gen. i. 2, being the equivalent of the
Semitic-Babylonian Tiamat, the monster of storm and flood who
presents so striking a contrast to the Sumerian primaeval water.(2) The
second act of Creation in the Hebrew narrative is that of a “firmament”,
which divided the waters under it from those above.(3) But this, as we
have seen, has no parallel in the early Sumerian conception until it was
combined with the Dragon combat in the form in which we find it in the
Babylonian poem. There the body of Tiamat is divided by Marduk, and from
one half of her he constructs a covering or dome for heaven, that is to
say a “firmament”, to keep her upper waters in place. These will suffice
as text passages, since they serve to point out quite clearly the Semitic
source to which all the other detailed points of Hebrew resemblance may be
traced.

In the case of the Deluge traditions, so conclusive a demonstration is not
possible, since we have no similar criterion to apply. And on one point,
as we saw, the Hebrew Versions preserve an original Sumerian strand of the
narrative that was not woven into the Gilgamesh Epic, where there is no
parallel to the piety of Noah. But from the detailed description that was
given in the second lecture, it will have been noted that the Sumerian
account is on the whole far simpler and more primitive than the other
versions. It is only in the Babylonian Epic, for example, that the later
Hebrew writer finds material from which to construct the ark, while the
sweet savour of Ut-napishtim’s sacrifice, and possibly his sending forth
of the birds, though reproduced in the earlier Hebrew Version, find no
parallels in the Sumerian account.(1) As to the general character of the
Flood, there is no direct reference to rain in the Sumerian Version,
though its presence is probably implied in the storm. The heavy rain of
the Babylonian Epic has been increased to forty days of rain in the
earlier Hebrew Version, which would be suitable to a country where local
rain was the sole cause of flood. But the later Hebrew writer’s addition
of “the fountains of the deep” to “the windows of heaven” certainly
suggests a more intimate knowledge of Mesopotamia, where some contributary
cause other than local rain must be sought for the sudden and overwhelming
catastrophes of which the rivers are capable.

Thus, viewed from a purely literary standpoint, we are now enabled to
trace back to a primitive age the ancestry of the traditions, which, under
a very different aspect, eventually found their way into Hebrew
literature. And in the process we may note the changes they underwent as
they passed from one race to another. The result of such literary analysis
and comparison, so far from discrediting the narratives in Genesis, throws
into still stronger relief the moral grandeur of the Hebrew text.

We come then to the question, at what periods and by what process did the
Hebrews become acquainted with Babylonian ideas? The tendency of the
purely literary school of critics has been to explain the process by the
direct use of Babylonian documents wholly within exilic times. If the
Creation and Deluge narratives stood alone, a case might perhaps be made
out for confining Babylonian influence to this late period. It is true
that during the Captivity the Jews were directly exposed to such
influence. They had the life and civilization of their captors immediately
before their eyes, and it would have been only natural for the more
learned among the Hebrew scribes and priests to interest themselves in the
ancient literature of their new home. And any previous familiarity with
the myths of Babylonia would undoubtedly have been increased by actual
residence in the country. We may perhaps see a result of such acquaintance
with Babylonian literature, after Jehoiachin’s deportation, in an
interesting literary parallel that has been pointed out between Ezek. xiv.
12-20 and a speech in the Babylonian account of the Deluge in the
Gilgamesh Epic, XI, ii. 180-194.(1) The passage in Ezekiel occurs within
chaps. i-xxiv, which correspond to the prophet’s first period and consist
in the main of his utterances in exile before the fall of Jerusalem. It
forms, in fact, the introduction to the prophet’s announcement of the
coming of “four sore judgements upon Jerusalem”, from which there “shall
be left a remnant that shall be carried forth”.(2) But in consequence,
here and there, of traces of a later point of view, it is generally
admitted that many of the chapters in this section may have been
considerably amplified and altered by Ezekiel himself in the course of
writing. And if we may regard the literary parallel that has been pointed
out as anything more than fortuitous, it is open to us to assume that
chap. xiv may have been worked up by Ezekiel many years after his
prophetic call at Tel-abib.

In the passage of the Babylonian Epic, Enlil had already sent the Flood
and had destroyed the good with the wicked. Ea thereupon remonstrates with
him, and he urges that in future the sinner only should be made to suffer
for his sin; and, instead of again causing a flood, let there be
discrimination in the divine punishments sent on men or lands. While the
flood made the escape of the deserving impossible, other forms of
punishment would affect the guilty only. In Ezekiel the subject is the
same, but the point of view is different. The land the prophet has in his
mind in verse 13 is evidently Judah, and his desire is to explain why it
will suffer although not all its inhabitants deserved to share its fate.
The discrimination, which Ea urges, Ezekiel asserts will be made; but the
sinner must bear his own sin, and the righteous, however eminent, can only
save themselves by their righteousness. The general principle propounded
in the Epic is here applied to a special case. But the parallelism between
the passages lies not only in the general principle but also in the
literary setting. This will best be brought out by printing the passages
in parallel columns.

It will be seen that, of the four kinds of divine punishment mentioned,
three accurately correspond in both compositions. Famine and pestilence
occur in both, while the lions and leopards of the Epic find an equivalent
in “noisome beasts”. The sword is not referred to in the Epic, but as this
had already threatened Jerusalem at the time of the prophecy’s utterance
its inclusion by Ezekiel was inevitable. Moreover, the fact that Noah
should be named in the refrain, as the first of the three proverbial
examples of righteousness, shows that Ezekiel had the Deluge in his mind,
and increases the significance of the underlying parallel between his
argument and that of the Babylonian poet.(1) It may be added that Ezekiel
has thrown his prophecy into poetical form, and the metre of the two
passages in the Babylonian and Hebrew is, as Dr. Daiches points out, not
dissimilar.

It may of course be urged that wild beasts, famine, and pestilence are
such obvious forms of divine punishment that their enumeration by both
writers is merely due to chance. But the parallelism should be considered
with the other possible points of connexion, namely, the fact that each
writer is dealing with discrimination in divine punishments of a wholesale
character, and that while the one is inspired by the Babylonian tradition
of the Flood, the other takes the hero of the Hebrew Flood story as the
first of his selected types of righteousness. It is possible that Ezekiel
may have heard the Babylonian Version recited after his arrival on the
Chebar. And assuming that some form of the story had long been a cherished
tradition of the Hebrews themselves, we could understand his intense
interest in finding it confirmed by the Babylonians, who would show him
where their Flood had taken place. To a man of his temperament, the one
passage in the Babylonian poem that would have made a special appeal would
have been that quoted above, where the poet urges that divine vengeance
should be combined with mercy, and that all, righteous and wicked alike,
should not again be destroyed. A problem continually in Ezekiel’s thoughts
was this very question of wholesale divine punishment, as exemplified in
the case of Judah; and it would not have been unlikely that the literary
structure of the Babylonian extract may have influenced the form in which
he embodied his own conclusions.

But even if we regard this suggestion as unproved or improbable, Ezekiel’s
reference to Noah surely presupposes that at least some version of the
Flood story was familiar to the Hebrews before the Captivity. And this
conclusion is confirmed by other Babylonian parallels in the early
chapters of Genesis, in which oral tradition rather than documentary
borrowing must have played the leading part.(1) Thus Babylonian parallels
may be cited for many features in the story of Paradise,(2) though no
equivalent of the story itself has been recovered. In the legend of Adapa,
for example, wisdom and immortality are the prerogative of the gods, and
the winning of immortality by man is bound up with eating the Food of Life
and drinking the Water of Life; here too man is left with the gift of
wisdom, but immortality is withheld. And the association of winged
guardians with the Sacred Tree in Babylonian art is at least suggestive of
the Cherubim and the Tree of Life. The very side of Eden has now been
identified in Southern Babylonia by means of an old boundary-stone
acquired by the British Museum a year or two ago.(3)

But I need not now detain you by going over this familiar ground. Such
possible echoes from Babylon seem to suggest pre-exilic influence rather
than late borrowing, and they surely justify us in inquiring to what
periods of direct or indirect contact, earlier than the Captivity, the
resemblances between Hebrew and Babylonian ideas may be traced. One point,
which we may regard as definitely settled by our new material, is that
these stories of the Creation and of the early history of the world were
not of Semitic origin. It is no longer possible to regard the Hebrew and
Babylonian Versions as descended from common Semitic originals. For we
have now recovered some of those originals, and they are not Semitic but
Sumerian. The question thus resolves itself into an inquiry as to periods
during which the Hebrews may have come into direct or indirect contact
with Babylonia.

There are three pre-exilic periods at which it has been suggested the
Hebrews, or the ancestors of the race, may have acquired a knowledge of
Babylonian traditions. The earliest of these is the age of the patriarchs,
the traditional ancestors of the Hebrew nation. The second period is that
of the settlement in Canaan, which we may put from 1200 B.C. to the
establishment of David’s kingdom at about 1000 B.C. The third period is
that of the later Judaean monarch, from 734 B.C. to 586 B.C., the date of
the fall of Jerusalem; and in this last period there are two reigns of
special importance in this connexion, those of Ahaz (734-720 B.C.) and
Manasseh (693-638 B.C.).

With regard to the earliest of these periods, those who support the Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch may quite consistently assume that Abraham
heard the legends in Ur of the Chaldees. And a simple retention of the
traditional view seems to me a far preferable attitude to any elaborate
attempt at rationalizing it. It is admitted that Arabia was the cradle of
the Semitic race; and the most natural line of advance from Arabia to Aram
and thence to Palestine would be up the Euphrates Valley. Some writers
therefore assume that nomad tribes, personified in the traditional figure
of Abraham, may have camped for a time in the neighbourhood of Ur and
Babylon; and that they may have carried the Babylonian stories with them
in their wanderings, and continued to preserve them during their long
subsequent history. But, even granting that such nomads would have taken
any interest in traditions of settled folk, this view hardly commends
itself. For stories received from foreign sources become more and more
transformed in the course of centuries.(1) The vivid Babylonian colouring
of the Genesis narratives cannot be reconciled with this explanation of
their source.

A far greater number of writers hold that it was after their arrival in
Palestine that the Hebrew patriarchs came into contact with Babylonian
culture. It is true that from an early period Syria was the scene of
Babylonian invasions, and in the first lecture we noted some newly
recovered evidence upon this point. Moreover, the dynasty to which
Hammurabi belonged came originally from the north-eastern border of Canaan
and Hammurabi himself exercised authority in the west. Thus a plausible
case could be made out by exponents of this theory, especially as many
parallels were noted between the Mosaic legislation and that contained in
Hammurabi’s Code. But it is now generally recognized that the features
common to both the Hebrew and the Babylonian legal systems may be
paralleled to-day in the Semitic East and elsewhere,(1) and cannot
therefore be cited as evidence of cultural contact. Thus the hypothesis
that the Hebrew patriarchs were subjects of Babylon in Palestine is not
required as an explanation of the facts; and our first period still stands
or falls by the question of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, which
must be decided on quite other grounds. Those who do not accept the
traditional view will probably be content to rule this first period out.

During the second period, that of the settlement in Canaan, the Hebrews
came into contact with a people who had used the Babylonian language as
the common medium of communication throughout the Near East. It is an
interesting fact that among the numerous letters found at Tell el-Amarna
were two texts of quite a different character. These were legends, both in
the form of school exercises, which had been written out for practice in
the Babylonian tongue. One of them was the legend of Adapa, in which we
noted just now a distant resemblance to the Hebrew story of Paradise. It
seems to me we are here standing on rather firmer ground; and
provisionally we might place the beginning of our process after the time
of Hebrew contact with the Canaanites.

Under the earlier Hebrew monarchy there was no fresh influx of Babylonian
culture into Palestine. That does not occur till our last main period, the
later Judaean monarchy, when, in consequence of the westward advance of
Assyria, the civilization of Babylon was once more carried among the petty
Syrian states. Israel was first drawn into the circle of Assyrian
influence, when Arab fought as the ally of Benhadad of Damascus at the
battle of Karkar in 854 B.C.; and from that date onward the nation was
menaced by the invading power. In 734 B.C., at the invitation of Ahaz of
Judah, Tiglath-Pileser IV definitely intervened in the affairs of Israel.
For Ahaz purchased his help against the allied armies of Israel and Syria
in the Syro-Ephraimitish war. Tiglath-pileser threw his forces against
Damascus and Israel, and Ahaz became his vassal.(1) To this period, when
Ahaz, like Panammu II, “ran at the wheel of his lord, the king of
Assyria”, we may ascribe the first marked invasion of Assyrian influence
over Judah. Traces of it may be seen in the altar which Ahaz caused to be
erected in Jerusalem after the pattern of the Assyrian altar at
Damascus.(2) We saw in the first lecture, in the monuments we have
recovered of Panammu I and of Bar-rekub, how the life of another small
Syrian state was inevitably changed and thrown into new channels by the
presence of Tiglath-pileser and his armies in the West.

Hezekiah’s resistance checked the action of Assyrian influence on Judah
for a time. But it was intensified under his son Manasseh, when Judah
again became tributary to Assyria, and in the house of the Lord altars
were built to all the host of heaven.(1) Towards the close of his long
reign Manasseh himself was summoned by Ashur-bani-pal to Babylon.(2) So
when in the year 586 B.C. the Jewish exiles came to Babylon they could not
have found in its mythology an entirely new and unfamiliar subject. They
must have recognized several of its stories as akin to those they had
assimilated and now regarded as their own. And this would naturally have
inclined them to further study and comparison.

The answer I have outlined to this problem is the one that appears to me
most probable, but I do not suggest that it is the only possible one that
can be given. What I do suggest is that the Hebrews must have gained some
acquaintance with the legends of Babylon in pre-exilic times. And it
depends on our reading of the evidence into which of the three main
periods the beginning of the process may be traced.

So much, then, for the influence of Babylon. We have seen that no similar
problem arises with regard to the legends of Egypt. At first sight this
may seem strange, for Egypt lay nearer than Babylon to Palestine, and
political and commercial intercourse was at least as close. We have
already noted how Egypt influenced Semitic art, and how she offered an
ideal, on the material side of her existence, which was readily adopted by
her smaller neighbours. Moreover, the Joseph traditions in Genesis give a
remarkably accurate picture of ancient Egyptian life; and even the
Egyptian proper names embedded in that narrative may be paralleled with
native Egyptian names than that to which the traditions refer. Why then is
it that the actual myths and legends of Egypt concerning the origin of the
world and its civilization should have failed to impress the Hebrew mind,
which, on the other hand, was so responsive to those of Babylon?

One obvious answer would be, that it was Nebuchadnezzar II, and not Necho,
who carried the Jews captive. And we may readily admit that the Captivity
must have tended to perpetuate and intensify the effects of any Babylonian
influence that may have previously been felt. But I think there is a wider
and in that sense a better answer than that.

I do not propose to embark at this late hour on what ethnologists know as
the “Hamitic” problem. But it is a fact that many striking parallels to
Egyptian religious belief and practice have been traced among races of the
Sudan and East Africa. These are perhaps in part to be explained as the
result of contact and cultural inheritance. But at the same time they are
evidence of an African, but non-Negroid, substratum in the religion of
ancient Egypt. In spite of his proto-Semitic strain, the ancient Egyptian
himself never became a Semite. The Nile Valley, at any rate until the
Moslem conquest, was stronger than its invaders; it received and moulded
them to its own ideal. This quality was shared in some degree by the
Euphrates Valley. But Babylonia was not endowed with Egypt’s isolation;
she was always open on the south and west to the Arabian nomad, who at a
far earlier period sealed her Semitic type.

To such racial division and affinity I think we may confidently trace the
influence exerted by Egypt and Babylon respectively upon Hebrew tradition.

At this point a great gap occurs in our principal list. The names of some
of the missing “kingdoms” may be inferred from the summaries, but their
relative order is uncertain. Of two of them we know the duration, a second
Kingdom of Ur containing four kings and lasting for a hundred and eight
years, and another kingdom, the name of which is not preserved, consisting
of only one king who ruled for seven years. The dynastic succession only
again becomes assured with the opening of the Dynastic chronicle published
by Père Scheil and recently acquired by the British Museum. It will be
noted that with the Kingdom of Ur the separate reigns last for decades and
not hundreds of years each, so that we here seem to approach genuine
tradition, though the Kingdom of Awan makes a partial reversion to myth so
far as its duration is concerned. The two suggested equations with
Antediluvian kings of Berossus both occur in the earliest Kingdom of Kish
and lie well within the Sumerian mythical period. The second of the rulers
concerned, Enmenunna (Ammenon), is placed in Sumerian tradition several
thousand years before the reputed succession of the gods Lugalbanda and
Tammuz and of the national hero Gilgamesh to the throne of Erech. In the
first lecture some remarkable points of general resemblance have already
been pointed out between Hebrew and Sumerian traditions of these early
ages of the world.