to the reigns of predynastic
rulers in the Nile Valley. This, like some of the Nippur texts, takes us
back to that dim period before the dawn of actual history, and, though
the information it affords is not detailed like theirs, it provides
fresh confirmation of the general accuracy of Manetho's sources, and
suggests some interesting points for comparison.

But the people with whose traditions we are ultimately concerned are the
Hebrews. In the first series of Schweich Lectures, delivered in the year
1908, the late Canon Driver showed how the literature of Assyria and
Babylon had thrown light upon Hebrew traditions concerning the origin
and early history of the world. The majority of the cuneiform documents,
on which he based his comparison, date from a period no earlier than the
seventh century B.C., and yet it was clear that the texts themselves,
in some form or other, must have descended from a remote antiquity. He
concluded his brief reference to the Creation and Deluge Tablets with
these words: "The Babylonian narratives are both polytheistic, while
the corresponding biblical narratives (Gen. i and vi-xi) are made
the vehicle of a pure and exalted monotheism; but in spite of this
fundamental difference, and also variations in detail, the resemblances
are such as to leave no doubt that the Hebrew cosmogony and the Hebrew
story of the Deluge are both derived ultimately from the same original
as the Babylonian narratives, only transformed by the magic touch of
Israel's religion, and infused by it with a new spirit."(1) Among the
recently published documents from Nippur we have at last recovered one
at least of those primitive originals from which the Babylonian accounts
were derived, while others prove the existence of variant stories of the
world's origin and early history which have not survived in the later
cuneiform texts. In some of these early Sumerian records we may trace
a faint but remarkable parallel with the Hebrew traditions of man's
history between his Creation and the Flood. It will be our task, then,
to examine the relations which the Hebrew narratives bear both to the
early Sumerian and to the later Babylonian Versions, and to ascertain
how far the new discoveries support or modify current views with regard
to the contents of those early chapters of Genesis.

(1) Driver, _Modern Research as illustrating the Bible_ (The
Schweich Lectures, 1908), p. 23.

I need not remind you that Genesis is