IMMORTALITY LOST— THE FLOOD 371 



Life," or of the " Water of Life," asked him, saying, " Come, 

 Adapa, why dost thou neither eat nor drink ? " And Adapa 

 answered that he had refused to eat or drink, because Ea his 

 lord had so commanded him. 



Whereon comes the conclusion of the whole matter, and the 

 loss of immortality in the last words of Anu, " And now thou 

 canst not live ! " ^ 



Ea was regarded not only as the god of the sea, but of wisdom, 

 somewhat perhaps on the lines of myths common to Greece, 

 India, and elsewhere, which tell us that always by the way of 

 the sea came civilisation. The great civilisations of the world 

 have in fact been developed round the shores of the great 

 seas — the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic. 



The Assyrian legends credit Ea for the most part with good- 

 will and beneficent acts towards mankind. 2 



Prominent among these stands out his revelation, by means 

 of a dream, to Utnapishti of the all-destroying flood, which 

 the gods, wroth at the sins of mankind, had ordained, and his 

 command forthwith to build a ship, whose size and shape, etc., 

 are given with much precision, e.g. it was coated inside and 

 out with bitumen and divided into cells. On this Utnapishti 

 and his family and servants embarked, after bringing on board 

 all the gold and silver they could collect, and " seeds of hfe 

 of all kinds," and beasts, both domestic and wild.^ 



The Sumerian original of the Babylonian Deluge story, 

 which has now been recovered, corresponds with the main 

 features of the later version. 



1 Adapa stands out as a pathetic and cruelly-punished figure. In this, 

 one of the prettiest of the clumsy legends by which mankind tried to explain 

 the loss of eternal life, Ea forbids for selfish reasons his eating or drinking of 

 the Bread or Water of Life, while Anu's offer of immortality springs from his 

 desire to deprive Ea, whom he suspects of having betrayed to Adapa the 

 celestial secrets of magical science, of his devotee and fish-gatherer. 



* Keller, op. cit., p. 347, is astray in stating that Ea was regarded " als 

 Fischgott." As god of the' waters, he was the protector of the fish therein, 

 but apart from this, there is no evidence that he was termed, even with a wide 

 use of the word, a Fish God. 



' For the omission of fish from the cargo of Noah's ark, Whiston in his 

 philosophic A New Theory of the Deluge (London, 1737), accounts by the fact, 

 that fish, living in a cooler, more equable element, were correcter in their 

 lives than beasts and birds, who from the heat or cold on land engendered by 

 the sun or its absence were prone to excesses of passion or exercises of sin, and 

 so were saved ! 



