are known to us from the Bible.* “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord:  wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.  And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”  Almost all the characteristics which are attributed by Hebrew tradition to Nimrod we find in G-ilgames, King of Uruk and descendant of the Shamashnapishtim who had witnessed the deluge.**

* Genesis x. 9, 10.  Among the Jews and Mussulmans a complete cycle of legends have developed around Nimrod.  He built the Tower of Babel; he threw Abraham into a fiery furnace, and he tried to mount to heaven on the back of an eagle.  Sayce and Grivel saw in Nimrod an heroic form of Merodach, the god of Babylonia:  the majority of living Assyriologists prefer to follow Smith’s example, and identify him with the hero Gilgames.

** The name of this hero is composed of three signs, which Smith provisionally rendered Isdubar—­a reading which, modified into Gishdhubar, Gistubar, is still retained by many Assyriologists.  There have been proposed one after another the renderings Dhubar, Namrudu, Anamarutu, Numarad, Namrasit, all of which exhibit in the name of the hero that of Nimrod.  Pinches discovered, in 1890, what appears to be the true signification of the three signs,Gilgamesh, Gilgames; Sayce and Oppert have compared this name with that of Gilgamos, a Babylonian hero, of whom.  AElian has preserved the memory.  A. Jeremias continued to reject both the reading and the identification.

Several copies of a poem, in which an unknown scribe had celebrated his exploits, existed about the middle of the VIIth century before our era in the Royal Library at Nineveh; they had been transcribed by order of Assur-banipal from a more ancient copy, and the fragments of them which have come down to us, in spite of their lacunae, enable us to restore the original text, if not in its entirety, at least in regard to the succession of events.  They were divided into twelve episodes corresponding with the twelve divisions of the year, and the ancient Babylonian author was guided in his choice of these divisions by something more than mere chance.  Gilgames, at first an ordinary mortal under the patronage of the gods, had himself become a god and son of the goddess Aruru:  “he had seen the abyss, he had learned everything that is kept secret and hidden, he had even made known to men what had taken place before the deluge.”  The sun, who had protected him in his human condition, had placed him beside himself on the judgment-seat, and delegated to him authority to pronounce decisions from which there was no appeal:  he was, as it were, a sun on a small scale, before whom the kings, princes, and great ones of the earth humbly bowed their heads.* The scribes had, therefore, some authority for treating the events of his life after the model of the year, and for expressing them in twelve chants, which answered to the annual course of the sun through the twelve months.