nts is one which relates in poetical
narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of
the Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the
corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by the
Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But in matter the Sumerian
tradition is more primitive than any of the Semitic versions. In spite
of the fact that the text appears to have reached us in a magical
setting, and to some extent in epitomized form, this early document
enables us to tap the stream of tradition at a point far above any at
which approach has hitherto been possible.

Though the resemblance of early Sumerian tradition to that of the
Hebrews is striking, it furnishes a still closer parallel to the
summaries preserved from the history of Berossus. The huge figures
incorporated in the latter's chronological scheme are no longer to be
treated as a product of Neo-Babylonian speculation; they reappear in
their original surroundings in another of these early documents, the
Sumerian Dynastic List. The sources of Berossus had inevitably been
semitized by Babylon; but two of his three Antediluvian cities find
their place among the five of primitive Sumerian belief, and two of his
ten Antediluvian kings rejoin their Sumerian prototypes. Moreover, the
recorded ages of Sumerian and Hebrew patriarchs are strangely alike.
It may be added that in Egypt a new fragment of the Palermo Stele has
enabled us to verify, by a very similar comparison, the accuracy of
Manetho's sources for his prehistoric period, while at the same time
it demonstrates the way in which possible inaccuracies in his system,
deduced from independent evidence, may have arisen in remote antiquity.
It is clear that both Hebrew and Hellenistic traditions were modelled on
very early lines.

Thus our new material enables us to check the age, and in some measure
the accuracy, of the traditions concerning the dawn of history which
the Greeks reproduced from native sources, both in Babylonia and Egypt,
after the conquests of Alexander had brought the Near East within the
range of their intimate acquaintance. The third body of tradition, that
of the Hebrews, though unbacked by the prestige of secular achievement,
has, through incorporation in the canons of two great religious systems,
acquired an authority which the others have not enjoyed. In re-examining
the sources of all three accounts, so far as they are