There is no book in the world about which more has been written than the Bible, and perhaps there is no portion of the Bible which has given rise to a larger literature than the Book of Genesis. Every word in it has been carefully scrutinised, now by scholars who sought to discover its deepest meaning or to defend it against the attacks of adversaries, now again by hostile critics anxious to expose every supposed flaw, and to convict it of error and inconsistency. Assailants and defenders had long to content themselves with such evidence as could be derived from a study of the book itself, or from the doubtful traditions of ancient nations, as reported by the writers of Greece and Rome. Such reports were alike imperfect and untrustworthy; historical criticism was still in its infancy in the age of the classical authors, and they cared but little to describe [pg 019] accurately the traditions of races whom they despised. It was even a question whether any credit could be given to the fragments of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phoenician mythology or history extracted by Christian apologists from the lost works of native authors who wrote in Greek. The Egyptian dynasties of Manetho, the Babylonian stories of the Creation and Flood narrated by Berossus, the self-contradicting Phoenician legends collected by Philo Byblius, were all more or less suspected of being an invention of a later age. The earlier chapters of Genesis stood almost alone; friends and foes alike felt the danger of resting any argument on the apparent similarity of the accounts recorded in them to the myths and legends contained in the fragments of Manetho, of Berossus, and of Philo Byblius.

All is changed now. The marvellous discoveries of the last half-century have thrown a flood of light on the ancient oriental world, and some of this light has necessarily been reflected on the Book of Genesis. The monuments of Egypt, of Babylonia, and of Assyria have been rescued from their hiding-places, and the writing upon them has been made to speak once more in living words. A dead world has been called again to life by the spade of the excavator and the patient labour of the decipherer. We find ourselves, as it were, face to face with Sennacherib, with Nebuchadnezzar, and with Cyrus, with those whose names have been familiar to us from childhood, but who have hitherto been to us mere names, mere shadowy occupants of an unreal world. Thanks to the research of the last half-century, we can now penetrate into the details of their daily life, can examine their religious ideas, can listen to them as they [pg 020] themselves recount the events of their own time or the traditions of the past which had been handed down to them.

It is more especially in Babylonia and Assyria that we find illustrations of the earlier chapters of Genesis, as, indeed, is only natural. The Semitic language spoken in these two countries was closely allied to that of the Old Testament, as closely, in fact, as two modern English dialects are allied to each other; and it was from Babylonia, from Ur of the Chaldees, now represented by the mounds of Mugheir, that Abraham made his way to the future home of his descendants in the west. It is to Babylonia that the Biblical accounts of the Fall, of the Deluge, and of the Confusion of Tongues particularly look: two of the rivers of Paradise were the Tigris and Euphrates, the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat, and the city built around the Tower which men designed should reach to heaven was Babel or Babylon. Babylonia was an older kingdom than Assyria, which took its name from the city of Assur, now Kalah Sherghat, on the Tigris, the original capital of the country. It was divided into two halves, Accad (Gen. x. 10) being Northern Babylonia, and Sumir, the Shinar of the Old Testament, Southern Babylonia. The primitive populations of both Sumir and Accad were related, not to the Semitic race, but to the tribes which continued to maintain themselves in the mountains of Elam down to a late day. They spoke two cognate dialects, which were agglutinative in character, like the languages of the modern Turks and Fins; that is to say, the relations of grammar were expressed by coupling words together, each of which retained an independent meaning of its own. Thus in-nin-sun is [pg 021] “he gave it,” literally “he-it-gave,” e-mes-na is “of houses,” literally “house-many-of.” At an early date, which cannot yet, however, be exactly determined, the Sumirians and Accadians were overrun and conquered by the Semitic Babylonians of later history, Accad being apparently the first half of the country to fall under the sway of the new-comers. It is possible that Casdim, the Hebrew word translated “Chaldees” or “ChaldÆans” in the Authorised Version, is the Babylonian casidi, or “conquerors,” a title which continued to cling to them in consequence of their conquest.

The Accadians had been the inventors of the pictorial hieroglyphics which afterwards developed into the cuneiform or wedge-shaped system of writing; they had founded the great cities of Chaldea, and had attained to a high degree of culture and civilisation. Their cities possessed libraries, stocked with books, written partly on papyrus, partly on clay, which was, while still soft, impressed with characters by means of a metal stylus. The books were numerous, and related to a variety of subjects. Among them there were more particularly two to which a special degree of sanctity was attached. One of these contained magical formulÆ for warding off the assaults of evil spirits; the other was a collection of hymns to the gods, which was used by the priests as a kind of prayer-book. When the Semitic Babylonians, the kinsmen of the Hebrews, the AramÆans, the Phoenicians and the Arabs, conquered the old population, they received from it, along with other elements of culture, the cuneiform system of writing and the literature written in it. The sacred hymns still continued to serve as a prayer-book, but they were now provided with interlinear translations [pg 022] into the Babylonian (or, as it is usually termed, the Assyrian) language. Part of the literature consisted of legal codes and decisions; and since the inheritance and holding of property frequently depended on a knowledge of these, it became necessary for the conquerors to acquaint themselves with the language of the people they had conquered. In course of time, however, the two dialects of Sumir and Accad ceased to be spoken; but the necessity for learning them still remained, and we find accordingly that down to the latest days of both Assyria and Babylonia the educated classes were taught the old extinct Accadian, just as in modern Europe they are taught Latin. From time to time, indeed, the scribes of Sennacherib or Nebuchadnezzar attempted to write in the ancient language, and in doing so sometimes made similar mistakes to those that are made now-a-days by a schoolboy in writing Latin.

The Accadians were, like the Chinese, pre-eminently a literary people. Their conception of chaos was that of a period when as yet no books were written. Accordingly, a legend of the Creation, preserved in the library of Cuthah, contains this curious statement: “On a memorial-tablet none wrote, none explained, for bodies and produce were not brought forth in the earth.” To the author of the legend the art of writing seemed to mount back to the very beginning of mankind.

This legend of the Creation, however, is not the only one that has been recovered from the shipwreck of Assyrian and Babylonian literature. Besides the account given in the fragments of Berossus, there is another, which bears a striking resemblance to the account of the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis. [pg 023] It does not appear, however, that this last was of Accadian origin; at all events, there is no indication that it was translated into Assyrian from an older Accadian document, and there are even reasons for thinking that it may not be earlier—in its present form at least—than the seventh century b.c. We possess, unfortunately, only portions of it, since many of the series of clay tablets on which it was inscribed have been lost or injured. The account begins as follows:—

It is not until we come to the fifth tablet of the series, which describes the appointment of the heavenly bodies—the work of the fourth day of creation, according to Genesis—that the narrative is again preserved. Here we read that the Creator “made beautiful the stations of the great gods,” or stars, an expression which reminds us of the oft-recurring phrase of Genesis: “And God [pg 024] saw that it was good.” The stars, moon, and sun were ordered to rule over the night and day, and to determine the year, with its months and days. The latter part of the tablet, however, like the latter part of the first tablet, is destroyed, and of the next tablet—that which described the creation of animals—only the first few lines remain. “At that time,” it begins, “the gods in their assembly created (the living creatures). They made beautiful the mighty (animals). They made the living beings come forth, the cattle of the field, the beast of the field, and the creeping thing.” What follows is too mutilated to yield a connected sense.

There is no need of pointing out how closely this Assyrian account of the Creation resembles that of Genesis. Even the very wording and phrases of Genesis occur in it, and though no fragment is preserved which expressly tells us that the work of the Creation was accomplished in seven days, we may infer that such was the case, from the order of events as recorded on the tablets. But, with all this similarity, there is even greater dissimilarity. The philosophical conceptions with which the Assyrian account opens, the polytheistic colouring which we find in it further on, have no parallel in the Book of Genesis. The spirit of the two narratives is essentially different.

The last tablet probably contained an account of the institution of the Sabbath. At all events, we learn that the seventh day was observed as a day of rest among the Babylonians, as it was among the Jews. It was even called by the same name of Sabbath, a word which is defined in an Assyrian text as “a day of rest for the heart,” while the Accadian equivalent is explained to mean “a day of completion of labour.” A calendar of [pg 025] saints' days for the month of the intercalary Elul makes the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the lunar month Sabbaths, on which certain works were forbidden to be done. On those days, it is stated, “flesh cooked on the fire may not be eaten, the clothing of the body may not be changed, white garments may not be put on, a sacrifice may not be offered, the king may not ride in his chariot, nor speak in public, the augur may not mutter in a secret place, medicine of the body may not be applied, nor may any curse be uttered.” Nothing, in fact, that implied work was allowed to be done. Where the Babylonian Sabbath differed from the Jewish one was in its essentially lunar character. The first Sabbath was the first day of a month, whatever might be the length of the month that preceded it. While Sabbaths and new moons are distinguished from one another in the Old Testament, they are found united in the Babylonian ritual. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Babylonians were acquainted with a week of seven days, each day of which was dedicated to one of the seven planets; it was the space of time naturally marked out by the four quarters of the moon.

No account of the Fall of Man, similar to that in Genesis, has as yet been found among the fragments of the Assyrian libraries. Mr. George Smith, indeed, supposed that he had discovered one, but the text which he referred to the Fall, is really an ancient hymn to the Creator. It is, nevertheless, pretty certain that such an account once existed. An archaic Babylonian gem represents a tree, on either side of which are seated a man and woman, with a serpent behind them, and their hands are stretched out towards the [pg 026] fruit that hangs from the tree. A few stray references in the bilingual (Accadian and Assyrian) dictionaries throw some light upon this representation, and inform us that the Accadians knew of “a wicked serpent,” “the serpent of night” and “darkness,” which had brought about the fall of man. The tree of life, of which so many illustrations occur on Assyrian monuments, is declared to be “the pine-tree” of Eridu, “the shrine of the god Irnin;” and Irnin is a name of the Euphrates, when regarded as the “snake-river,” which encircled the world like a rope, and was the stream of Hea, “the snake-god of the tree of life.” The Euphrates, we must remember, was one of the rivers of Paradise.

The site of Paradise is to be sought for in Babylonia. The garden which God planted was in Eden, and Eden, as we learn from the cuneiform records, was the ancient name of the “field” or plain of Babylonia, where the first living creatures had been created. The city of Eridu, which the people of Sumir called “the good” or “holy,” was, as we have seen, the shrine of Irnin, and in the midst of a forest or garden that once lay near it grew “the holy pine-tree,” “the tree of life.” The rivers of Eden can be found in the rivers and canals of Babylonia. Two of them were the Euphrates and Tigris, called by the Accadians id Idikla, “the river of Idikla,” the Biblical Hiddekhel, while Pishon is a Babylonian word signifying “canal,” and Gihon may be the Accadian Gukhan, the stream on which Babylon stood. Even the word cherub is itself of Babylonian derivation. It is the name given to one of those winged monsters, with the body of a bull and the head of a man, which are sometimes placed in the Assyrian sculptures on either side of the tree of life. [pg 027] They stood at the entrance of a Babylonian palace, and were supposed to prevent the evil spirits from entering within. The word comes from a root which means “to approach” or “be near,” and perhaps originally signified one who was near to God.

Like cherub, Adam also was a Babylonian word. It has the general sense of “man,” and is used in this sense both in Hebrew and in Assyrian. But as in Hebrew it has come to be the proper name of the first man, so, too, in the old Babylonian legends, the “Adamites” were “the white race” of Semitic descent, who stood in marked contrast to “the black heads” or Accadians of primitive Babylonia. Originally, however, it was this dark race itself that claimed to have been “the men” whom the god Merodach created; and it was not until after the Semitic conquest of Chaldea that the children of Adamu or Adam were supposed to denote the white Semitic population. Hence it is that the dark race continued to the last to be called the Adamatu or “red-skins,” which a popular etymology connected with Adamu “man.” Sir H. Rawlinson has suggested a parallel between the dark and white races of Babylonia and the “sons of God” and “daughters of men” of Genesis. Adam, we are told, was “the son of God” (Luke iii. 38). But nothing similar to what we read in the sixth chapter of Genesis has as yet been met with among the cuneiform records, and though these speak of giant heroes, like Ner and Etanna, who lived before the Flood, we know nothing as yet as to their parentage.

The Babylonians, however, were well aware that the Deluge had been caused by the wickedness of the human race. It has often been remarked that though [pg 028] traditions of a universal or a partial deluge are found all over the world, it is only in the Old Testament that the cause assigned for it is a moral one. The Chaldean account of the Deluge, discovered by Mr. George Smith, offers an exception to this rule. Here, as in Genesis, Sisuthros, the Accadian Noah, is saved from destruction on account of his piety, the rest of mankind being drowned as a punishment for their sins.

The story of the Deluge formed the subject of more than one poem among the Accadians. Two of these were amalgamated together by the author of a great epic in twelve books, which described the adventures of a solar hero whose name cannot be read with certainty, but may provisionally be pronounced Gisdhubar. The amalgamated account was introduced as an episode into the eleventh book, the whole epic being arranged upon an astronomical principle, so that each book should correspond to one of the signs of the Zodiac, the eleventh book consequently answering to Aquarius. Sisuthros, who had been translated without dying, like the Biblical Enoch, is made to tell the story himself to Gisdhubar. Gisdhubar had travelled in search of health to the shores of the river of death at the mouth of the Euphrates, and here afar off in the other world he sees and talks with Sisuthros. Fragments of several editions of the poem have been found, not only among the ruins of Nineveh, but also in Babylonia; and by fitting these together it has been possible to recover almost the whole of the original text. The translations of it made by different scholars have necessarily improved with the progress of Assyrian research, and though the first translation given to the world by Mr. George Smith was substantially correct, there were [pg 029] many minor inaccuracies in it which have since had to be corrected. The latest and best version is that which has been published by Professor Haupt. The following translation of the account is based upon it:—

(Col. I) “Sisuthros speaks to him, even to Gisdhubar: Let me reveal unto thee, Gisdhubar, the story of my preservation, and the oracle of the gods let me tell to thee. The city of Surippak, the city which, as thou knowest, is built on the Euphrates, this city was already ancient when the gods within it set their hearts to bring on a deluge, even the great gods as many as there are—their father Anu, their king the warrior Bel, their throne-bearer Adar, their prince En-nugi. Ea, the lord of wisdom, sat along with them, and repeated their decree: ‘For their boat! as a boat, as a boat, a hull, a hull! hearken to their boat, and understand the hull, O man of Surippak, son of Ubara-Tutu; dig up the house, build the ship, save what thou canst of the germ of life. (The gods) will destroy the seed of life, but do thou live, and bid the seed of life of every kind mount into the midst of the ship. The ship which thou shalt build, ... cubits shall be its length in measure, ... cubits the content of its breadth and its height. (Above) the deep cover it in.’ I understood and spake to Ea, my lord: ‘The building of the ship which thou hast commanded thus, if it be done by me, the children of the people and the old men (alike will laugh at me).’ Ea opened his mouth and said, he speaks to me his servant: ‘(If they laugh at thee) thou shalt say unto them, (Every one) who has turned against me and (dis-believes the oracle that) has been given me, ... I will judge above and below. (But as for thee) shut (not) the door (until) the time comes of which I will send thee [pg 030] word. (Then) enter the door of the ship, and bring into the midst of it thy corn, thy property, and thy goods, thy (family), thy household, thy concubines, and the sons of the people. The cattle of the field, the wild beasts of the field, as many as I would preserve, I will send unto thee, and they shall keep thy door.’ Sisuthros opened his mouth and speaks; he says to Ea, his lord: ‘(O my lord) no one yet has built a ship (in this fashion) on land to contain the beasts (of the field). (The plan?) let me see and the ship (I will build). On the land the ship (I will build) as thou hast commanded me.’...

(Col. II) “... On the fifth day (after it was begun) in its circuit(?) fourteen measures its hull (measured); fourteen measures measured (the roof) above it. I made it a dwelling-house(?).... I enclosed it. I compacted it six times, I divided (its passages) seven times, I divided its interior (seven) times. Leaks for the waters in the midst of it I cut off. I saw the rents, and what was wanting I added. Three sari of bitumen I poured over the outside. Three sari of bitumen I poured over the inside. Three sari of men, carrying baskets, who carried on their heads food, I provided, even a saros of food for the people to eat, while two sari of food the boatmen shared. To (the gods) I caused oxen to be sacrificed; I (established offerings) each day. In (the ship) beer, food, and wine (I collected) like the waters of a river, and (I heaped them up) like the dust(?) of the earth, and (in the ship) the food with my hand I placed. (With the help) of Samas [the Sun-God] the compacting of the ship was finished; (all parts of the ship) were made strong, and I caused the tackling to be carried above and below. (Then of my household) went two-thirds: all that I had I heaped together; all that I had [pg 031] of silver I heaped together; all that I had of gold I heaped together; all that I had of the seed of life I heaped together. I brought the whole up into the ship; all my slaves and concubines, the cattle of the field, the beasts of the field, the sons of the people, all of them, did I bring up. The season Samas fixed, and he spake, saying: ‘In the night will I cause the heaven to rain destruction. Enter into the midst of the ship and close thy door.’ The season came round; he spake, saying: ‘In the night will I cause the heaven to rain destruction.’ Of that day I reached the evening, the day which I watched for with fear. I entered into the midst of the ship and shut the door, that I might close the ship. To Buzur-sadi-rabi, the boatman, I gave the palace, with all its goods. Then arose Mu-seri-ina-namari (The Water of Dawn at Daylight) from the horizon of heaven (like) a black cloud. Rimmon in the midst of it thundered, and Nebo and the Wind-God go in front: the throne-bearers go over mountain and plain: Nergal the mighty removes the wicked; Adar goes overthrowing all before him. The spirits of earth carried the flood; in their terribleness they sweep through the land; the deluge of Rimmon reaches unto heaven; all that was light to (darkness) was turned.

(Col. III) “(The surface) of the land like (fire?) they wasted; (they destroyed all) life from the face of the land; to battle against men they brought (the waters). Brother saw not his brother; men knew not one another. In heaven the gods feared the flood, and sought a refuge; they ascended to the heaven of Anu. The gods, like a dog in his kennel, crouched down in a heap. Istar cries like a mother, the great goddess utters her speech: ‘All to clay is turned, and the evil I [pg 032] prophesied in the presence of the gods, according as I prophesied evil in the presence of the gods, for the destruction of my people I prophesied (it) against them; and though I their mother have begotten my people, like the spawn of the fishes they fill the sea.’ Then the gods were weeping with her because of the spirits of earth; the gods on a throne were seated in weeping; covered were their lips because of the coming evil. Six days and nights the wind, the flood, and the storm go on overwhelming. The seventh day when it approached the storm subsided, the flood which had fought against (men) like an armed host was quieted. The sea began to dry, and the wind and the flood ended. I watched the sea making a noise, and the whole of mankind was turned to clay; like reeds the corpses floated. I opened the window, and the light smote upon my face; I stooped and sat down; I weep, over my face flow my tears. I watch the regions at the edge of the sea; a district rose twelve measures high. To the land of Nizir steered the ship; the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship, and it was not able to pass over it. The first day, the second day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The third day, the fourth day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The fifth day, the sixth day, the mountain of Nizir stopped the ship. The seventh day when it approached I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and returned, and found no resting-place, and it came back. Then I sent forth a swallow, and it left. The swallow went and returned, and found no resting-place, and it came back. I sent forth a raven, and it left. The raven went and saw the carrion on the water, and it ate, it swam, it wandered away; it did not return. I sent (the animals) forth to the four winds, I [pg 033] sacrificed a sacrifice. I built an altar on the peak of the mountain. I set vessels [each containing the third of an ephah] by sevens; underneath them I spread reeds, pine-wood, and spices. The gods smelt the savour; the gods smelt the good savour; the gods gathered like flies over the sacrifices. Thereupon the great goddess at her approach lighted up the rainbow which Anu had created according to his glory. The crystal brilliance of those gods before me may I not forget;

(Col. IV) “those days I have thought of, and never may I forget them. May the gods come to my altar; but may Bel not come to my altar, since he did not consider but caused the flood, and my people he assigned to the abyss. When thereupon Bel at his approach saw the ship, Bel stopped; he was filled with anger against the gods and the spirits of heaven: 'Let none come forth alive! let no man live in the abyss!' Adar opened his mouth and spake, he says to the warrior Bel: ‘Who except Ea can form a design? Yea, Ea knows, and all things he communicates.’ Ea opened his mouth and spake, he says to the warrior Bel: ‘Thou, O warrior prince of the gods, why, why didst thou not consider but causedst a flood? Let the doer of sin bear his sin, let the doer of wickedness bear his wickedness. May the just prince not be cut off, may the faithful not be (destroyed). Instead of causing a flood, let lions increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing a flood, let hyÆnas increase, that men may be minished; instead of causing a flood, let a famine happen, that men may be (wasted); instead of causing a flood, let plague increase, that men may be (reduced). I did not reveal the determination of the great gods To Sisuthros alone a dream I sent, and he heard the [pg 034] determination of the gods.’ When Bel had again taken counsel with himself, he went up into the midst of the ship. He took my hand and bid me ascend, even me he bid ascend; he united my wife to my side; he turned himself to us and joined himself to us in covenant; he blesses us (thus): ‘Hitherto Sisuthros has been a mortal man, but now Sisuthros and his wife are united together in being raised to be like the gods; yea, Sisuthros shall dwell afar off at the mouth of the rivers.’ They took me, and afar off at the mouth of the rivers they made me dwell.”

It is hardly necessary to indicate the points of agreement and disagreement between this Babylonian account of the Deluge and that of Genesis. The most striking difference between the two, that which first meets the eye, is the polytheism of the Babylonian version, in contrast with the monotheism of the Biblical narrative. Here, in place of the gods of Chaldea, we are confronted by the one supreme Deity; we have no longer to do with a Bel who requires the intercession of Ea before he will consent not to destroy the guiltless with the guilty; it is the Lord Himself who “said in His heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake.” In the Babylonian legend, moreover, Noah and Enoch have been confounded together; Sisuthros is not only saved from the waters of the flood, but translated to the abode of the gods. The vessel itself in which the seed of life was preserved is not the same in the two accounts. According to the Hebrew narrative, it was an ark; according to the Babylonian poem, a ship. It is true that in one place it is called “a palace,” the word used being the same as that which in many passages of the Old Testament is applied to God's “palace” of heaven; [pg 035] but it is provided with a pilot, Buzur-sadi-rabi, “the Sun-god of the mighty mountain,” and Sisuthros is made to expostulate on the strangeness of building a ship which should sail over the land. It must, however, be noticed that the shrines in which the images of the gods were carried in Babylonia were called “ships,” and that these “ships” corresponded with the ark of the Hebrew tabernacle.

The land of Nizir, in which the vessel of Sisuthros rested, was among the mountains of Pir Mam, to the north-east of Babylonia. Rowandiz, the highest peak in this part of Asia, rises a little to the north of the Pir Mam, and it seems probable, therefore, that it represents “the mountain of Nizir.” The whole country had been included by the Accadians in the vast territory of Guti, or Gutium, which roughly corresponds with the modern Kurdistan. It is accordingly worth notice that a wide-spread eastern tradition makes Gebel Gudi, or Mount Gudi, the mountain on which the ark rested, and that in early Jewish legend this mountain is called Lubar or Baris, the boundary between Armenia and Kurdistan, in the land of the Minni. Ararat, or Urardhu, as it is written in the cuneiform inscriptions, denoted Armenia, and more particularly the district about Lake Van; so that “the mountains of Ararat,” of which Genesis speaks, might easily have been the Kurdish ranges of Southern Armenia. It was not until a very late period that the name of Ararat was first applied and then confined to the lofty mountains in the north.

Rowandiz seems also to have been regarded in Accadian mythology as the Olympos on which the gods dwelt. In this case it was usually called “the mountain of the east;” but the east was here the north-east, since [pg 036] other legends identified it with Aralu, or Hades, the mountain of gold which was fabled to be in the far north. It is to this Accadian Olympos that reference is made in Isa. xiv. 13, where the King of Babylon is described as boasting that he would “ascend into heaven, and exalt his throne above the stars of the gods,” that he would “sit on the mountain of the assembly of the gods in the extremities of the north.” The mountain was sometimes known as the “mountain of the world,” since the firmament was supposed to revolve on its peak as on a pivot. We must not imagine, however, that the Accadians, any more than the Greeks, actually believed the gods to live above the clouds on the terrestrial Rowandiz, except at a very early period in their history. Just as we do not think of the sky when we use the word heaven in a spiritual sense, so by “the mountain of the assembly of the gods” they meant a spiritual mountain, of which Rowandiz was the earthly type. It is in this way that we must explain the position assigned to Sisuthros after his translation. He does not live along with the gods in the north, but has his station fixed “at the mouth of the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris, which in ancient times flowed into the Persian Gulf through separate channels. At an epoch when the geographical knowledge of the Accadians did not extend very far, the unknown district beyond the mouth of the Euphrates became a representative of the other world; and the Euphrates itself was identified with Datilla, the river of “the God of life and death,” as well as with the stream or “great deep” which was supposed to encircle the earth like a monstrous serpent.

The name of the Chaldean Noah, Sisuthros, or, as it [pg 037] is written in the cuneiform, Khasis-adra, or Adra-khasis, is really a title, given to him on account of his righteousness, and signifying “wise (and) pious.” His proper name is one which means “the Sun of Life,” though the exact pronunciation of it is somewhat uncertain. Neither of these names agrees with that of the Biblical Noah, but the latter has received a full explanation from the Assyrian language, where it signifies “rest.”

After the Flood, we are told in Genesis that men journeyed from the east until they came to the plain of Shinar, where they built the tower of Babel, in the vain hope of ascending into heaven. God, however, confounded their language and scattered them over the face of the earth. The references in this narrative to Shinar and Babel, or Babylon, indicate that here again we may expect to find a Babylonian account of the Confusion of Tongues, just as we have found a Babylonian account of the Deluge. As we have seen, the Accadians regarded themselves as having come from the “mountain of the east” where the ark had rested, while Shinar is the Hebrew form of the native name Sumir—or Sungir, as it was pronounced in the allied dialect of Accad—the southern half of pre-Semitic Babylonia. Now Mr. George Smith discovered some broken fragments of a cuneiform text which evidently related to the building of the Tower of Babel. It tells us how certain men had “turned against the father of all the gods,” and how the thoughts of their leader's heart “were evil.” At Babylon they essayed to build “a mound” or hill-like tower, but the winds blew down their work, and Anu “confounded great and small on the mound,” as well as their “speech,” and “made strange their counsel.” The very word that is used in the sense of “confounding” [pg 038] in the narrative of Genesis is used also in the Assyrian text. The Biblical writer, by a play upon words, not uncommon in the Old Testament, compares it with the name of Babel, though etymologically the latter word has nothing to do with it. Babel is the Assyrian Babili, “Gate of God,” and is merely a Semitic translation of the old Accadian (or rather Sumirian) name of the town, Ca-dimÍra, where Ca is “gate” and dimÍra “God.” Chaldean tradition assigned the construction of the tower and the consequent confusion of languages to the time of the autumnal equinox; and it is possible that the hero-king Etanna (Titan in Greek writers), who is stated to have built a city in defiance of the will of heaven, was the wicked chief under whom the tower was raised.

The confusion of tongues was followed by the dispersion of mankind. The earth was again peopled by the descendants of the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Shem is the Assyrian Samu, “olive-coloured,” Ham is Khammu, “burned black,” and Japhet Ippat, “the white race.” The tribes and races which drew their origin from them are enumerated in the tenth chapter of Genesis. The arrangement of this chapter, however, is geographical, not ethnological; the peoples named in it being grouped together according to their geographical position, not according to their relationship in blood or language. Here it is that the non-Semitic Elamites are classed along with the Semitic Assyrians, and that the Phoenicians of Canaan, who spoke the same language as the Hebrews, and originally came from the same ancestors, are associated with the Egyptians. When this fact is recognised, there is no difficulty in showing that the statements of the chapter are fully consistent with the conclusions of modern research.