irst occurs in the Pyramid texts (see Gardiner
in Cumont's _Etudes Syriennes_, pp. 109 ff.), belongs to a
different range of ideas. But it may well have been combined
with the Etana tradition to produce the funerary eagle
employed so commonly in Roman Syria in representations of
the emperor's apotheosis (cf. Cumont, op. cit., pp. 37 ff.,
115).

The god Lugal-banda is another hero of legend. When the hearts of the
other gods failed them, he alone recovered the Tablets of Fate, stolen
by the bird-god Zu from Enlil's palace. He is here recorded to have
reigned in Erech for 1,200 years.

Tradition already told us that Erech was the native city of Gilgamesh,
the hero of the national epic, to whom his ancestor Ut-napishtim related
the story of the Flood. Gilgamesh too is in our list, as king of Erech
for 126 years.

We have here in fact recovered traditions of Post-diluvian kings.
Unfortunately our list goes no farther back than that, but it is
probable that in its original form it presented a general correspondence
to the system preserved from Berossus, which enumerates ten Antediluvian
kings, the last of them Xisuthros, the hero of the Deluge. Indeed, for
the dynastic period, the agreement of these old Sumerian lists with the
chronological system of Berossus is striking. The latter, according to
Syncellus, gives 34,090 or 34,080 years as the total duration of the
historical period, apart from his preceding mythical ages, while the
figure as preserved by Eusebius is 33,091 years.(1) The compiler of one
of our new lists,(2) writing some 1,900 years earlier, reckons that the
dynastic period in his day had lasted for 32,243 years. Of course all
these figures are mythical, and even at the time of the Sumerian Dynasty
of Nisin variant traditions were current with regard to the number of
historical and semi-mythical kings of Babylonia and the duration of
their rule. For the earlier writer of another of our lists,(3) separated
from the one already quoted by an interval of only sixty-seven years,
gives 28,876(4) years as the total duration of the dynasties at his
time. But in spite of these discrepancies, the general resemblance
presented by the huge totals in the variant copies of the list to the
alternative figures of Berossus, if we ignore his mythical period,
is remarkable. They indicate a far closer correspondence of the Greek
tradition with that of the early Sumerians themselves than was former