hich Gudea obtained through the priest
of Nina and the sign, the priest-king Ziusudu secured by his own act,
in virtue of his piety and practice of divination. And his employment of
the particular class of incantation referred to, that which conjures by
the Name of Heaven and Earth, is singularly appropriate to the context.
For by its use he was enabled to test the meaning of Enki's words, which
related to the intentions of Anu and Enlil, the gods respectively of
Heaven and of Earth. The symbolical setting of Gudea's vision also finds
a parallel in the reed-house and wall of the Deluge story, though in the
latter case we have not the benefit of interpretation by a goddess. In
the Sumerian Version the wall is merely part of the vision and does
not receive a direct address from the god. That appears as a later
development in the Semitic Version, and it may perhaps have suggested
the excuse, put in that version into the mouth of Ea, that he had not
directly revealed the decision of the gods.(1)

(1) In that case the parallel suggested by Sir James Frazer
between the reed-house and wall of the Gilgamesh Epic, now
regarded as a medium of communication, and the whispering
reeds of the Midas story would still hold good.

The omission of any reference to a dream before the warning in the
Gilgamesh Epic may be accounted for on the assumption that readers of
the poem would naturally suppose that the usual method of divine warning
was implied; and the text does indicate that the warning took place at
night, for Gilgamesh proceeds to carry out the divine instructions at
the break of day. The direct warning of the Hebrew Versions, on the
other hand, does not carry this implication, since according to Hebrew
ideas direct speech, as well as vision, was included among the methods
by which the divine will could be conveyed to man.

V. THE FLOOD, THE ESCAPE OF THE GREAT BOAT, AND THE SACRIFICE TO THE
SUN-GOD

The missing portion of the Fourth Column must have described Ziusudu's
building of his great boat in order to escape the Deluge, for at the
beginning of the Fifth Column we are in the middle of the Deluge itself.
The column begins:

All the mighty wind-storms together blew,
The flood . . . raged.
When for seven days, for seven nights,
The flood had overwhelmed the land
When the wind-storm had driven the great boat over the mighty
waters,
The Sun-god came forth, she