108 The American Naturalist. [February, 
share in that great event. Tzdubar was purified and healed 
by laving in the Waters of Death ; he returned safely to Erech, 
and there offered up a touching prayer to the beneficent god, 
Ea, that his lost friend, Eabani, might be restored to life. 
Ea, through his son, Meridug, brings Eâbani from the world 
of Shades to the Land of the Blessed, there to live forever 
among the heroes of old, and so all ends happily as a fairy 
tale. 
The Chaldean legend of the Deluge is, as is well known, an 
extremely close variant of the account found in Genesis, even 
to the rainbow asa sign of the repentance of the God Anu, 
for the havoc he had wrought. Only it is Tshtar who “ spreads 
out the great bows of her father Anu,” and who says “ I shall 
be mindful of these days; never shall I lose the memory of 
them,” and the assurance is given that though pestilence and 
wild beasts may be sent as a punishment for the wickedness 
of man, never shall a universal flood again overwhelm the 
earth. In the Chaldean account it is the ever beneficent Ea 
who warns Hasisadra of the coming flood, and bids him 
prepare the ark for himself and his family, and who himself 
sends the cattle and the wild beasts of the field to their 
haven of safety; he who reproaches the other gods with the 
wanton destruction they have wrought, and brought Bel, 
hasty but quickly repentant to his senses. Bel himself took 
Hasisadra by the hand and led him out of the ark, after 
the sacrifice had been offered up, “ when the gods smelled a 
sweet savour.” See Genesis viii, 21. 
The great solar and catholic myths are found in their earliest 
forms amongst the Sumiro-Accadians, and from them they 
passed through the Pheenicians to the Greeks and Romans. 
Tshtar, the great goddess of Nature, personifying the life- 
producing earth, loves the young Sun-God, Dumuzi. The 
tablet of the national Epic, which describes the manner of 
his death, has unfortunately but one fragment left, which 
speaks of the “ black pine of Eridhu, marking the centre of 
the earth, in the. dark forest, into the heart whereof man 
has not penetrated; within it Dumuzi. . . .” A month was 
set apart, (June-July), both in Chaldea and Assyria, as 
