view of the obviously abbreviated form of the
narrative, of which we have already noted striking evidence in its
account of the Creation, we may conclude that in the fuller form of
the tradition the cities were also assigned human rulers, each one
the representative of his city-god. These would correspond to the
Antediluvian dynasty of Berossus, the last member of which was
Xisuthros, the later counterpart of Ziusudu.

In support of the exclusion of Nippur and Erech from the myth, it will
be noted that the second city in the list is not Adab,(1) which was
probably the principal seat of the goddess Ninkharsagga, the fourth of
the creating deities. The names of both deity and city in that line
are strange to us. Larak, the third city in the series, is of greater
interest, for it is clearly Larankha, which according to Berossus
was the seat of the eighth and ninth of his Antediluvian kings. In
commercial documents of the Persian period, which have been found during
the excavations at Nippur, Larak is described as lying "on the bank of
the old Tigris", a phrase which must be taken as referring to the Shatt
el-Hai, in view of the situation of Lagash and other early cities
upon it or in its immediate neighbourhood. The site of the city should
perhaps be sought on the upper course of the stream, where it tends
to approach Nippur. It would thus have lain in the neighbourhood of
Bismaya, the site of Adab. Like Adab, Lagash, Shuruppak, and other early
Sumerian cities, it was probably destroyed and deserted at a very early
period, though it was reoccupied under its old name in Neo-Babylonian or
Persian times. Its early disappearance from Babylonian history perhaps
in part accounts for our own unfamiliarity with Pabilkharsag, its
city-god, unless we may regard the name as a variant from of Pabilsag;
but it is hardly likely that the two should be identified.

(1) The site of Adab, now marked by the mounds of Bismaya,
was partially excavated by an expedition sent out in 1903 by
the University of Chicago, and has provided valuable
material for the study of the earliest Sumerian period; see
_Reports of the Expedition of the Oriental Exploration Fund_
(Babylonian Section of the University of Chicago), and
Banks, _Bismya_ (1912). On grounds of antiquity alone we
might perhaps have expected its inclusion in the myth.

In Sibbar, the fourth of the Antediluvian cities in our series, we
again have