that in biblical
chronology is anterior to man, they tell of creation, of the serpent,
the fall and the deluge. At the gates of paradise you see man dying,
poisoned by the tree of life. Before Genesis was, already it had been
written.

In the Chaldean Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in
successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home
was a paradise where ten impressive persons--the models, it may be, of
antediluvian patriarchs--reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally
sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them away. From the
flood there escaped one man who separated a mythical from an heroic
age. In the latter epoch, beings descended from demons built Nineveh
and Babylon; organized human existence; invented arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and the calendar; counted the planets; numbered the days of
the year, divided them into months and weeks; established the Sabbath;
decorated the skies with the signs of the zodiac, instituting, in the
interim, colleges of savants and priests. These speculated on the
origin of things, attributed it to spontaneous generation, the descent
of man to evolution, entertaining the vulgar meanwhile with tales of
gods and ghosts.[18]

[Footnote 18: Lenormant: Les Origines. Schrader: Die Keilenschriften.
Smith: Chaldean Genesis.]

The cosmological texts now available were not written then. They are
drawn from others that were. But there is a vignette that probably is
of that age. It represents a man and a woman stretching their hands to
a tree. Behind the woman writhes a snake. The tree, known as the holy
cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which stimulated desire, is described in
an epic that recites the adventures of Gilgames.

Gilgames was the national hero of Chaldea. The story of his loves with
Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and Delilah myth. Ishtar, described
in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original
Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules. The legend
of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who
ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago.

In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not
to die. In trying he reached a garden, guarded by cherubim, where the
holy cedar was. There he learned that one being only could teach him
to be immortal, and that being, Adra-Khasis, had been translated to
the Land of the Silver Sky. Adra-Khasis, was the Chaldean Noah.
Gilgame