310 GEOLOGIES AND DELUGES 



merit of a tablet, bearing words, which he deciphered as 

 follows : " On the mount Nizir the ship stood still. 

 Then I took a dove, and let her fly. The dove flew 

 hither and thither, but finding no resting-place, returned 

 to the ship." Every Englishman who knows his Bible 

 would have guessed, as George Smith immediately did, 

 that he had before him a piece out of a Chaldean account 

 of the deluge. He searched for more fragments, and 

 found them. He went out to Assyria, visited the king's 

 palace, and found still more tablets and pieces of tablets, 

 some of them just those he required to fill up missing 

 gaps in the story. Since its first translation by its 

 discoverer, it has been again translated and retranslated 

 by some of the acutest scholars in Europe, so that we 

 now possess a fairly complete knowledge of it ; a few 

 missing words, or even lines, and occasional obscurities 

 occur, but these are of no great importance. In Oxford, 

 which has the privilege to number the distinguished 

 Assyriologist, Professor Sayce, among its residents, there 

 will be no necessity to present the story more than 

 briefly. It runs as follows : Sitnapistim, the Chaldean 

 Noah, is warned by Ea, the god of wisdom and the sea, 

 that the gods of Surippak, a city on the Euphrates, even 

 then extremely old, had decided in council to destroy 

 mankind by a flood. Sitnapistim is told to build a ship 

 in which to save himself, his family, household, and 

 belongings. Anticipating the curiosity of his neighbours, 

 since he had never before built a boat, he asks what 

 answer he is to make when questioned as to his unusual 

 proceedings. Ea, who as the god of wisdom is naturally 

 a master of evasion, provides him with a subterfuge, and 

 Sitnapistim sets about building his boat. He forms it of 

 timber and reeds, and makes it water-tight by filling up 

 the crevices with pitch, which he poured over it both 

 within and without. It is of great interest, as showing 



