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.On the other hand, the human father ofGilgamesh is described as the high priest of Kullab, and we know fromother sources that his mother was the goddess Ninsun.[3] That this isnot a fanciful interpretation is proved by a passage in the GilgameshEpic itself,[4] in which its hero is described as two-thirds god andone-third man.We again find ourselves back in the same stratum ofGet any book for free on: www.Abika.com LEGENDS OF BABYLON AND EGYPT35tradition with which the Hebrew narratives have made us so familiar.[1] Gen.vi.1-4 (J).[2] The phrase recalls the familiar Egyptian royal designation "son ofthe Sun," and it is possible that we may connect with this sameidea the Palermo Stele's inclusion of the mother's and omission ofthe father's name in its record of the early dynastic Pharaohs.This suggestion does not exclude the possibility of the prevalenceof matrilineal (and perhaps originally also of matrilocal andmatripotestal) conditions among the earliest inhabitants of Egypt.Indeed the early existence of some form of mother-right may haveoriginated, and would certainly have encouraged, the growth of atradition of solar parentage for the head of the state.[3] Poebel, /Hist.Inscr./, p.124 f.[4] Tablet I, Col.ii, l.1; and cf.Tablet IX, Col.ii.l.16.What light then does our new material throw upon traditional originsof civilization? We have seen that in Egypt a new fragment of thePalermo Stele has confirmed in a remarkable way the tradition of thepredynastic period which was incorporated in his history by Manetho.It has long been recognized that in Babylonia the sources of Berossusmust have been refracted by the political atmosphere of that countryduring the preceding nineteen hundred years.This inference our newmaterial supports; but when due allowance has been made for aresulting disturbance of vision, the Sumerian origin of the remainderof his evidence is notably confirmed.Two of his ten Antediluviankings rejoin their Sumerian prototypes, and we shall see that two ofhis three Antediluvian cities find their place among the five ofprimitive Sumerian belief.It is clear that in Babylonia, as in Egypt,the local traditions of the dawn of history, current in theHellenistic period, were modelled on very early lines.Both countrieswere the seats of ancient civilizations, and it is natural that eachshould stage its picture of beginnings upon its own soil and embellishit with local colouring.It is a tribute to the historical accuracy of Hebrew tradition torecognize that it never represented Palestine as the cradle of thehuman race.It looked to the East rather than to the South forevidence of man's earliest history and first progress in the arts oflife.And it is in the East, in the soil of Babylonia, that we maylegitimately seek material in which to verify the sources of thattraditional belief.The new parallels I have to-day attempted to trace between some of theHebrew traditions, preserved in Gen.iv-vi, and those of the earlySumerians, as presented by their great Dynastic List, are essentiallygeneral in character and do not apply to details of narrative or toproper names.If they stood alone, we should still have to considerwhether they are such as to suggest cultural influence or independentorigin.But fortunately they do not exhaust the evidence we havelately recovered from the site of Nippur, and we will postponeformulating our conclusions with regard to them until the whole fieldhas been surveyed.From the biblical standpoint by far the mostvaluable of our new documents is one that incorporates a SumerianGet any book for free on: www.Abika.com LEGENDS OF BABYLON AND EGYPT36version of the Deluge story.We shall see that it presents a variantand more primitive picture of that great catastrophe than those of theBabylonian and Hebrew versions.And what is of even greater interest,it connects the narrative of the Flood with that of Creation, andsupplies a brief but intermediate account of the Antediluvian period.How then are we to explain this striking literary resemblance to thestructure of the narrative in Genesis, a resemblance that iscompletely wanting in the Babylonian versions? But that is a problemwe must reserve for the next lecture.LECTURE IIDELUGE STORIES AND THE NEW SUMERIAN VERSIONIn the first lecture we saw how, both in Babylonia and Egypt, recentdiscoveries had thrown light upon periods regarded as prehistoric, andhow we had lately recovered traditions concerning very early rulersboth in the Nile Valley and along the lower Euphrates.On the strengthof the latter discovery we noted the possibility that futureexcavation in Babylonia would lay bare stages of primitive culturesimilar to those we have already recovered in Egyptian soil.Meanwhilethe documents from Nippur had shown us what the early Sumeriansthemselves believed about their own origin, and we traced in theirtradition the gradual blending of history with legend and myth.We sawthat the new Dynastic List took us back in the legendary sequence atleast to the beginning of the Post-diluvian period.Now one of thenewly published literary texts fills in the gap beyond, for it givesus a Sumerian account of the history of the world from the Creation tothe Deluge, at about which point, as we saw, the extant portions ofthe Dynastic List take up the story.I propose to devote my lectureto-day to this early version of the Flood and to the effect of itsdiscovery upon some current theories.The Babylonian account of the Deluge, which was discovered by GeorgeSmith in 1872 on tablets from the Royal Library at Nineveh, is, as youknow, embedded in a long epic of twelve Books recounting theadventures of the Old Babylonian hero Gilgamesh
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