s sought him and the story of the deluge follows. But with a
difference. On the seventh day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a
dove that returned, finally a raven that did not. Then he looked out,
and looking, shrieked. Every one had perished.

Noah was less emotional, or, if equally compassionate, the fact is not
recited. Apart from that detail and one other, the story of the flood
is common to all folklore. Even the Aztecs knew of it. Probably it
originated in the matrix of nations which the table-land of Asia was.
But only in Chaldean myth, and subsequently in Hebrew legend, was the
flood ascribed to sin.

Gilgames' quest, meanwhile, could not have been wholly vain. In an
archaic inscription it is stated that the city of Erech was built in
olden times by the deified Gilgames.[19]

[Footnote 19: Proc. S. B. A. xvi. 13-15.]

How old the olden times may have been is conjectural. Modern science
has put the advent of man sixty million years ago. Chaldean chronology
is less spacious. But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand
years. The traditions were probably imaginary. Even so, in the morning
of the world, already there were ancient cities. There was Nippur, one
of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where Ea
was lord of man. There was Ur, where Sin was lord of the moon. There
were other divinities. There was Enmesara, lord of the land whence
none return, and Makhir, god of dreams.

There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries
made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an
aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years
ago, combined. Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered. It
would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. What Sargon made,
Khammurabi solidified. Between their colossal figures two millennia
stretch. These giants are distinct. None the less, across the ages
they seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, but into another
person.

Sargon has descended through time clothed in a little of the poetry
which garments nation builders. But the poetry is not a mantle for the
imaginary. In the British Museum is a marble ball that he dedicated to
a god. Paris has the seal of his librarian.[20] Copies of his annals
are extant.[21] In these it is related that, when a child, his mother
put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates.
Presently he was rescued. Afterward he became a leader of m