571st ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING, 



HELD IN COMMITTEE EOOM B, THE CENTRAL HALL, 

 WESTMINSTER, ON MONDAY, JUNE 7th, 1915, 

 AT 4.30 p.m. 



Professor A. H. Sayce, D.Litt., LL.D., D.D., took the Chair. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed. 



The Chairman said that Dr. Pinches needed no introduction to the 

 Members of the Victoria Institute, as he had favoured them with 

 important addresses on several occasions. He would therefore ask him 

 to read his paper on the Old and New Versions of the Babylonian 

 Creation and Flood Stories. 



THE OLD AND NEW VERSIONS OF THE BABYLONIAN 

 CREATION AND FLOOD STORIES.— By Theophilus 

 G. Pinches, LL.D., M.R.A.S. 



FORTY years have passed since the late George Smith 

 published his Chaldean Account of Genesis, dedicated to Sir 

 Henry Rawlinson, the great English pioneer of Assyriology. 

 We all remember, or at least realize, what a sensation Smith's 

 discoveries made, especially the account of the Flood, which 

 traversed the same ground, point by point, as the Hebrew version 

 in Genesis. It was a triumph for our self-taught countryman, and 

 we all know, moreover, to what it led — namely, the despatch of 

 the enterprising Museum-official to the East, first for the 

 Daily Telegraph, and later for the trustees of the British Museum. 

 He was favoured with a fair amount of success, for he found a 

 fragment which was at first supposed to fill a gap of the eleventh 

 tablet of the Gilgames-series, which gives the story of the Flood — 

 in reality it was a portion of another version — as well as fragments 

 of Creation-stories. His third and last trip to the nearer East, 

 however, had fatal results, and he never saw his native land 

 again. He had accquired, nevertheless, a large amount of 

 chronological material, and Biblical scholars are his debtors for 

 that as much as for his acquisitions in the realm of Babylonian 

 tradition. 



