uments from
Nippur had shown us what the early Sumerians themselves believed about
their own origin, and we traced in their tradition the gradual blending
of history with legend and myth. We saw that the new Dynastic List
took us back in the legendary sequence at least to the beginning of
the Post-diluvian period. Now one of the newly published literary texts
fills in the gap beyond, for it gives us a Sumerian account of the
history of the world from the Creation to the Deluge, at about which
point, as we saw, the extant portions of the Dynastic List take up the
story. I propose to devote my lecture to-day to this early version of
the Flood and to the effect of its discovery upon some current theories.

The Babylonian account of the Deluge, which was discovered by George
Smith in 1872 on tablets from the Royal Library at Nineveh, is, as you
know, embedded in a long epic of twelve Books recounting the adventures
of the Old Babylonian hero Gilgamesh. Towards the end of this composite
tale, Gilgamesh, desiring immortality, crosses the Waters of Death in
order to beg the secret from his ancestor Ut-napishtim, who in the past
had escaped the Deluge and had been granted immortality by the gods. The
Eleventh Tablet, or Book, of the epic contains the account of the
Deluge which Ut-napishtim related to his kinsman Gilgamesh. The close
correspondence of this Babylonian story with that contained in Genesis
is recognized by every one and need not detain us. You will remember
that in some passages the accounts tally even in minute details, such,
for example, as the device of sending out birds to test the abatement of
the waters. It is true that in the Babylonian version a dove, a swallow,
and a raven are sent forth in that order, instead of a raven and the
dove three times. But such slight discrepancies only emphasize the
general resemblance of the narratives.

In any comparison it is usually admitted that two accounts have been
combined in the Hebrew narrative. I should like to point out that this
assumption may be made by any one, whatever his views may be with
regard to the textual problems of the Hebrew Bible and the traditional
authorship of the Pentateuch. And for our purpose at the moment it is
immaterial whether we identify the compiler of these Hebrew narratives
with Moses himself, or with some later Jewish historian whose name has
not come down to us. Whoever he was, he has scrupulously preserved his
two texts and, even w