ARCHEOLOGY. 



25 



sense, testifies to the presence of this word in 

 the earliest form of the version. Moreover, 

 Matthew i, 18, which states how " before they 

 came together " Mary was found to be with 

 child by the Holy Ghost, and verses 22 and 23, 

 which quote Isaiah to prove that the Messiah 

 must be born of a virgin, remain unchanged. 



Assyrian and Babylonian. The work be- 

 gun by Dr. Peters, of the University of Pennsyl- 

 vania Expedition, in the ruins of Niffer, in Baby- 

 lonia, was taken up by Mr. Haynes in the spring 

 4 of 1893. In the first ten months 8,000 inscribed 

 clay tablets and fragments, and other objects, 

 were taken out from the debris. The digging 

 was carried below the levels of the debris from 

 the time of Sargon I, of 3800 B. c.,, and inscrip- 

 tions were found in this deepest stratum. This 

 promises revelations of a still earlier period of 

 Babylonian civilization than have before been in 

 our possession. 



In his popular lecture on " Geologies and 

 Floods," at the meeting of the British Associa- 

 tion, Prof. W. J. De Sollas undertook to deter- 

 mine by comparison of the ancient legends, par- 

 ticularly the Chaldean and the Chinese, the real 

 character of the Noachian Deluge. The Chal- 

 dean legend, representing that the ship of Sitna- 

 pastim, the Chaldean Noah, starting from Sunip- 

 pak, near the mouth of the Euphrates, grounded 

 on the mountains of Nizir, about 240 miles up 

 the Tigris valley, points to a journey upstream, 

 which is inconsistent with the supposition of a 

 pluvial origin of the Deluge. The supposition of 

 Suess, who looks for the cause of the flood in a 

 great sea wave, produced partly by an earthquake 

 and partly by a hurricane blowing up from the 

 Persian Gulf, is pronounced untenable, because 

 the legend contains no reference to an earth- 

 quake, the formerly supposed reference proving 

 to be a mistranslation, and because cyclones do 

 not prevail in the Persian Gulf. Even if there 

 had been an exceptional hurricane, it could not 

 have carried the waves to Bagdad, 154 feet above 

 sea level : much less to the Nizir hills, where the 

 ark is said to have been stranded, where the floor 

 of the Tigris valley is at least 600 or 700 feet 

 above sea level. Under these circumstances we 

 should acquaint ourselves more closely with the 

 historical character of the Deluge story. The 

 Gizdubar epic, of which the Chaldean legend of 

 the flood is a part, is, unfortunately, full of ob- 

 viously unveracious statements, or at least of 

 poetic exaggerations. Yet, by making allow- 

 ance for these, the story may be reduced to com- 

 monplace proportions. " 



The identification of the Gizdubar legend with that 

 of Heracles is a matter of great importance, for, if the 

 Greeks have borrowed the epic, they would not be 

 likely to neglect the episode, and accordingly we find 

 them in possession of the Deluge legend of Deuca- 

 lion. The Egyptians have sun stories of their own, 

 but as they are without that of Gizdubar, so they are 

 silent about the Deluge. The Nile does not cause 

 calamitous overflowings like those of the Tigris, and 

 consequently the Egyptians possess no Deluge legends 

 of native growth. In China the case is different. 

 The Yellow river. " the curse of China," has always 

 produced disastrous deluges ; and in the third Scliu 

 of the Canon of Yao, who reigned somewhere about 

 2357 B. c., we read that the Ti said : " Prince of the 

 Four Mountains, destructive in their overflowing are 

 the waters of the flood. In their wide extension thev 



inclose the mountains and cover the great heights, 

 threatening the heaven with their floods, so that the 

 lower people is unruly and murmur. Where is a 

 capable man whom I can employ this evil to over- 

 come ? " _ Khwan was engaged, but for nine years he 

 labored in vain, whereupon another engineer, Yii, 

 was called in. Within eight years he completed 

 great works ; he thinned the woods, regulated the 

 streams, dammed them and opened their mouths, pro- 

 vided the people with food, and acted as a great bene- 

 factor of the state. It is refreshing thus to pass from 

 the ornate deceptions of legend to the sober truth of 

 history, and if the famous Chaldean fable could be 

 reduced to equally simple language we should proba- 

 bly find it describing very similar events, or events 

 just as little astonishing as those of the straightfor- 

 ward Chinese Schu. History fails to furnish evi- 

 dence of any phenomenon which in the geologic 

 sense of the word can be called "catastrophic"; and 

 geology has no need to return to the cataclysms of its 

 youth. 



Indian. A search by Dr. Fuhrer at Sanchi 

 for missing pieces of the inscriptions published 

 by Sir A. Cunningham has resulted in the re- 

 covery of almost all the texts recorded in that 

 author's Bhilsa Topes, and of a large number of 

 others hitherto unknown. The most important 

 of the documents recovered is the fragment of 

 Asoka's edict, of which Sir A. Cunningham had 

 already given two facsimiles. Two other texts 

 contain imprecations against the impious ones 

 who may despoil the stiipa. 



A collection of old Sanskrit manuscripts found 

 by an Afghan merchant near Kuglar, about 60 

 miles south of Yarkand, has been made acces- 

 sible to scholars through the offices of the Rev. 

 F. Weber, a Moravian missionary at Ladak. 

 They appear to have been recovered bound in 

 their original binding. They consist of frag- 

 ments of 76 leaves, which can be assigned to 9 

 different parts. No part is complete, and no 

 leaf is complete. One of the longest parts is an 

 astronomical treatise of an archaic type, prob- 

 ably of a time between the third century B. c. 

 and the second century A. D. It appears to be- 

 long to the last stage of the Vedic period of 

 Sanskrit literature. Another part (7 leaves) ap- 

 pears to be a stotra, or hymn, in honor of Siva's 

 wife, Parvati, after the manner of the Puranas. 

 Another part is a kosha, or Sanskrit vocabulary, 

 which seems to supply a number of new words. 

 Most of the remainder seem to be Buddhistic 

 charms. The language is sometimes a barbarous 

 mixture of Sanskrit and Pali, and sometimes the 

 " mixed Sanskrit " which anciently prevailed as a 

 literary language in northwestern India and the 

 countries beyond. 



At Mahavellipore, the city of the great god 

 Bali, in India, which was inhabited previous to 

 the seventh century by a people of the Jain 

 region, and afterward by worshipers of Brahma, 

 are a number of subterranean temples cut in the 

 rock, and monolithic pagodas with relief sculp- 

 tures in the granite, which are almost unique in 

 their way. Two miles from Mahavellipore, near 

 some groups of fishermen's huts called Salawan- 

 Kuppam, are some still more curious. They are 

 enormous blocks of granite known as Idaiyan 

 Pudal. and are situated on a low dune, at a con- 

 siderable elevation above the level of the sea. 

 In the granite block represented in the figure 

 (Fig. 5) a kind of niche has been hollowed in the 

 rock, flanked by two fantastic animals that seem 



