But the composition itself, apart from the tablet on which it is inscribed, must go back very much earlier than that.  For instead of being composed in Semitic Babylonian, the text is in Sumerian, the language of the earliest known inhabitants of Babylonia, whom the Semites eventually displaced.  This people, it is now recognized, were the originators of the Babylonian civilization, and we saw in the first lecture that, according to their own traditions, they had occupied that country since the dawn of history.

(1) The earlier of the two fragments is dated in the eleventh year of Ammizaduga, the tenth king of Hammurabi’s dynasty, i.e. in 1967 B.C.; it was published by Scheil, Recueil de travaux, Vol.  XX, pp. 55 ff.  Here the Deluge story does not form part of the Gilgamesh Epic, but is recounted in the second tablet of a different work; its hero bears the name Atrakhasis, as in the variant version of the Deluge from the Nineveh library.  The other and smaller fragment, which must be dated by its script, was published by Hilprecht (Babylonian Expedition, series D, Vol.  V, Fasc. 1, pp. 33 ff.), who assigned it to about the same period; but it is probably of a considerably later date.  The most convenient translations of the legends that were known before the publication of the Nippur texts are those given by Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (Oxford, 1912), and Dhorme, Choix de textes religieux Assyro-Babyloniens (Paris, 1907).

The Semites as a ruling race came later, though the occurrence of Semitic names in the Sumerian Dynastic List suggests very early infiltration from Arabia.  After a long struggle the immigrants succeeded in dominating the settled race; and in the process they in turn became civilized.  They learnt and adopted the cuneiform writing, they took over the Sumerian literature.  Towards the close of the third millennium, when our tablet was written, the Sumerians as a race had almost ceased to exist.  They had been absorbed in the Semitic population and their language was no longer the general language of the country.  But their ancient literature and sacred texts were carefully preserved and continued to be studied by the Semitic priests and scribes.  So the fact that the tablet is written in the old Sumerian tongue proves that the story it tells had come down from a very much earlier period.  This inference is not affected by certain small differences in idiom which its language presents when compared with that of Sumerian building-inscriptions.  Such would naturally occur in the course of transmission, especially in a text which, as we shall see, had been employed for a practical purpose after being subjected to a process of reduction to suit it to its new setting.