OF THE BABYLONIAN CREATION AND FLOOD STORIES. 323 



has been killed in the war, — gives this name as Ziu-suddu. This 

 corresponds with the Greek name assigned to the Flood hero by 

 Lucian (in the "De Dea Syria "), and signifies " life of long days," 

 the Sumerian equivalent of the Semitic Ut-napisti m . On the tablet 

 deciphered by Dr. Langdon the name appears as Tag-tug, of which 

 the Semitic equivalent is Nahum or Nuhum, that is Noah. As 

 regards the translation of Dr. Langdon's tablet, he felt that we ought 

 to wait before concluding that we can have a final and complete trans- 

 lation of it. When we have to deal with mutilated Sumerian texts 

 of which there is no Semitic translation, our renderings are 

 necessarily open to some uncertainty. 



On one point he could not agree with Dr. Langdon, namely, that 

 the tablet which represented Tagtug as having eaten a plant which 

 brought about a curse, was an account of the Fall, by which death 

 entered the world. So far from Tagtug introducing death into the 

 world, the hero of the Flood is described as himself becoming 

 immortal. 



The great interest of these Babylonian accounts of the Creation 

 and the Flood lay in their relation to the corresponding accounts in 

 the Book of Genesis. One main fact governed the Babylonian 

 accounts of Creation : the world is described as having been developed 

 out of the watery deep. And the reason for this was that the original 

 Babylonia did thus rise out of the Persian Gulf. Eridu, which was 

 now 100 miles inland, had originally been a port on the shore of the 

 Persian Gulf, and the Babylonians had seen the land, as it were, 

 growing up out of the sea ; that is to say, the alluvial deposit from 

 the Euphrates and Tigris stretched out further and further year by 

 year into the Gulf, and broad fields were formed where previously 

 the sea had rolled. This region, therefore, the Babylonians took to 

 be the home of the Creator, and in all the Sumerian speculations as 

 to the origin of things they assumed that the earth had emerged 

 from the watery deep. If they turned to the opening verses of the 

 first chapter of Genesis, they would find the same fundamental idea 

 underlying them. 



The fullest Babylonian account of the Flood forms the 11th book 

 of the Epic of Gilgames. It presents an extraordinary likeness to 

 the account of the Flood which we possess in Genesis. And it is 

 important to note that this likeness is not confined to the portion of 

 the Genesis narrative which is ascribed to the Elohist on the one 



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