228 LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE VI 



value of a narrative thus curiously unlike the 

 ordinary run of veracious histories. 



But the voice of archaeological and historical 

 criticism still has to be heard ; and it gives forth 

 no uncertain sound. The marvellous recovery 

 of the records of an antiquity, far superior to any 

 that can be ascribed to the Pentateuch, which 

 has been effected by the decipherers of cuneiform 

 characters, has put us in possession of a series, 

 once more, not of speculations, but of facts, which 

 have a most remarkable bearing upon the question 

 of the trustworthiness of the narrative of the 

 Flood. It is established, that for centuries before 

 the asserted migration of Terah from Ur of the 

 Chaldees (which, according to the orthodox inter- 

 preters of the Pentateuch, took place after the 

 year 2000 B.C.) Lower Mesopotamia was the seat 

 of a civilisation in which art and science and 

 literature had attained a development formerly 

 unsuspected, or, if there were faint reports of it, 

 treated as fabulous. And it is also no matter of 

 speculation, but a fact, that the libraries of these 

 people contain versions of a long epic poem, one 

 of the twelve books of which tells a story of a 

 deluge, which, in a number of its leading features, 

 corresponds with the story attributed to Berosus, 

 no less than with the story given in Genesis, with 

 curious exactness. Thus, the correctness of Canon 

 Rawlinson's conclusion, cited above, that the story 

 of Berosus was neither drawn from the Hebrew 



