Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition.pdf

and up-stream of "Nimrod's Dam". The Tharthâr escape would drain into the Euphrates, and the latter's Habbânîyah
escape would receive any surplus water from the Tigris, a second barrage being thrown across the Euphrates upstream
of Fallûjah, where there is an outcrop of limestone near the head of the Sakhlawîyah Canal. The Tharthâr
depression, besides disposing of the Tigris flood-water, would thus probably feed the Euphrates; and a second barrage
on the Tigris, to be built at Kût, would supply water to the Shatt el-Hai. When the country is freed from danger of
flood, the Baghdad Railway could be run through the cultivated land instead of through the eastern desert; see
Willcocks, /The Near East/, Oct. 6, 1916 (Vol. XI, No. 283), p. 545 f.
[2] It was then that Sir William Willcocks designed the new Hindîyah Barrage, which was completed in 1913. The
Hindîyah branch, to-day the main stream of the Euphrates, is the old low-lying Pallacopas Canal, which branched
westward above Babylon and discharged its waters into the western marshes. In antiquity the head of this branch had
to be opened in high floods and then closed again immediately after the flood to keep the main stream full past
Babylon, which entailed the employment of an enormous number of men. Alexander the Great's first work in
Babylonia was cutting a new head for the Pallacopas in solid ground, for hitherto it had been in sandy soil; and it was
while reclaiming the marshes farther down-stream that he contracted the fever that killed him.
From this brief sketch of progressive disaster during the later historical period, the inevitable effect of neglected silt
and flood, it will be gathered that the two great rivers of Mesopotamia present a very strong contrast to the Nile. For
during the same period of misgovernment and neglect in Egypt the Nile did not turn its valley and delta into a desert.
On the Tigris and Euphrates, during ages when the earliest dwellers on their banks were struggling to make effective
their first efforts at control, the waters must often have regained the upper hand. Under such conditions the story of a
great flood in the past would not be likely to die out in the future; the tradition would tend to gather illustrative detail
suggested by later experience. Our new text reveals the Deluge tradition in Mesopotamia at an early stage of its
development, and incidentally shows us that there is no need to postulate for its origin any convulsion of nature or
even a series of seismic shocks accompanied by cyclone in the Persian Gulf.
If this had been the only version of the story that had come down to us, we should hardly have regarded it as a record
of world-wide catastrophe. It is true the gods' intention is to destroy mankind, but the scene throughout is laid in
Southern Babylonia. After seven days' storm, the Sun comes out, and the vessel with the pious priest-king and his
domestic animals on board grounds, apparently still in Babylonia, and not on any distant mountain, such as Mt. Nisir
or the great mass of Ararat in Armenia. These are obviously details which tellers of the story have added as it passed
down to later generations. When it was carried still farther afield, into the area of the Eastern Mediterranean, it was
again adapted to local conditions. Thus Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon Parnassus,[1] and the pseudo-Lucian
relates how he founded the temple of Derketo at Hierapolis in Syria beside the hole in the earth which swallowed up
the Flood.[2] To the Sumerians who first told the story, the great Flood appeared to have destroyed mankind, for
Southern Babylonia was for them the world. Later peoples who heard it have fitted the story to their own geographical
horizon, and in all good faith and by a purely logical process the mountain-tops are represented as submerged, and the
ship, or ark, or chest, is made to come to ground on the highest peak known to the story-teller and his hearers. But in
its early Sumerian form it is just a simple tradition of some great inundation, which overwhelmed the plain of Southern
Babylonia and was peculiarly disastrous in its effects. And so its memory survived in the picture of Ziusudu's solitary
coracle upon the face of the waters, which, seen through the mists of the Deluge tradition, has given us the Noah's ark
of our nursery days.
[1] Hesiod is our earliest authority for the Deucalion Flood story. For its probable Babylonian origin, cf. Farnell,
/Greece and Babylon/ (1911), p. 184.
[2] /De Syria dea/, 12 f.
Thus the Babylonian, Hebrew, and Greek Deluge stories resolve themselves, not into a nature myth, but into an early
legend, which has the basis of historical fact in the Euphrates Valley. And it is probable that we may explain after a
similar fashion the occurrence of tales of a like character at least in some other parts of the world. Among races
dwelling in low-lying or well-watered districts it would be surprising if we did not find independent stories of past
floods from which few inhabitants of the land escaped. It is only in hilly countries such as Palestine, where for the
great part of the year water is scarce and precious, that we are forced to deduce borrowing; and there is no doubt that