nor comparatively recent, and it further suggests that Babylonia itself was the cradle of their civilization.  It will be the province of future archaeological research to fill out the missing dynasties and to determine at what points in the list their strictly historical basis disappears.  Some, which are fortunately preserved near the beginning, bear on their face their legendary character.  But for our purpose they are none the worse for that.

In the first two dynasties, which had their seats at the cities of Kish and Erech, we see gods mingling with men upon the earth.  Tammuz, the god of vegetation, for whose annual death Ezekiel saw women weeping beside the Temple at Jerusalem, is here an earthly monarch.  He appears to be described as “a hunter”, a phrase which recalls the death of Adonis in Greek mythology.  According to our Sumerian text he reigned in Erech for a hundred years.

Another attractive Babylonian legend is that of Etana, the prototype of Icarus and hero of the earliest dream of human flight.(1) Clinging to the pinions of his friend the Eagle he beheld the world and its encircling stream recede beneath him; and he flew through the gate of heaven, only to fall headlong back to earth.  He is here duly entered in the list, where we read that “Etana, the shepherd who ascended to heaven, who subdued all lands”, ruled in the city of Kish for 635 years.

(1) The Egyptian conception of the deceased Pharaoh ascending to heaven as a falcon and becoming merged into the sun, which first 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