. On the seventh, Hasisadra
sent forth a dove, which found no resting place and returned; then he
liberated a swallow, which also came back; finally, a raven was let
loose, and that sagacious bird, when it found that the water had abated,
came near the ship, but refused to return to it. Upon this, Hasisadra
liberated the rest of the wild animals, which immediately dispersed
in all directions, while he, with his family and friends, ascending a
mountain hard by, offered sacrifice upon its summit to the gods.

The story thus given in summary abstract, told in an ancient Semitic
dialect, is inscribed in cuneiform characters upon a tablet of burnt
clay. Many thousands of such tablets, collected by Assurbanipal, King
of Assyria in the middle of the seventh century B.C., were stored in
the library of his palace at Nineveh; and, though in a sadly broken
and mutilated condition, they have yielded a marvellous amount of
information to the patient and sagacious labour which modern scholars
have bestowed upon them. Among the multitude of documents of various
kinds, this narrative of Hasisadra's adventure has been found in a
tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is only a
copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty reasons
for believing that the story of Hasisadra's flood was well known in
Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C.

No doubt, then, we are in presence of a narrative which has all
the authority which antiquity can confer; and it is proper to deal
respectfully with it, even though it is quite as proper, and indeed
necessary, to act no less respectfully towards ourselves; and, before
professing to put implicit faith in it, to inquire what claim it has to
be regarded as a serious account of an historical event.

It is of no use to appeal to contemporary history, although the annals
of Babylonia, no less than those of Egypt, go much further back than
2000 B.C. All that can be said is, that the former are hardly consistent
with the supposition that any catastrophe, competent to destroy all the
population, has befallen the land since civilisation began, and that
the latter are notoriously silent about deluges. In such a case as this,
however, the silence of history does not leave the inquirer wholly at
fault. Natural science has something to say when the phenomena of nature
are in question. Natural science may be able to show, from the nature of
the country, either that such an event as that de