and originally Nut’s male counterpart, is paralleled by the puhur ilani, or “assembly of the gods”, in the Babylonian Version (see Gilg.  Epic.  XI. l. 120 f., and cf. ll. 10 ff.); and they meet in “the Great House”, or Sun-temple at Heliopolis, as the Babylonian gods deliberate in Shuruppak.  Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hebrew narratives all agree in the divine determination to destroy mankind and in man’s ultimate survival.  But the close of the Egyptian story diverges into another sphere.  The slaughter of men by the Eye of Ra in the form of the goddess Hathor, who during the night wades in their blood, is suggestive of Africa; and so too is her drinking of men’s blood mixed with the narcotic mandrake and with seven thousand vessels of beer, with the result that through drunkenness she ceased from slaughter.  The latter part of the narrative is directly connected with the cult- ritual and beer-drinking at the Festivals of Hathor and Ra; but the destruction of men by slaughter in place of drowning appears to belong to the original myth.  Indeed, the only suggestion of a Deluge story is suggested by the presence of Nu, the primaeval water-god, at Ra’s council, and that is explicable on other grounds.  In any case the points of resemblance presented by the earlier part of the Egyptian myth to Semitic Deluge stories are general, not detailed; and though they may possibly be due to reflection from Asia, they are not such as to suggest an Egyptian origin for Deluge myths.

The tablet on which our new version of the Deluge is inscribed was excavated at Nippur during the third Babylonian expedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania; but it was not until the summer of 1912 that its contents were identified, when the several fragments of which it was composed were assembled and put together.  It is a large document, containing six columns of writing, three on each side; but unfortunately only the lower half has been recovered, so that considerable gaps occur in the text.(1) The sharp edges of the broken surface, however, suggest that it was damaged after removal from the soil, and the possibility remains that some of the missing fragments may yet be recovered either at Pennsylvania or in the Museum at Constantinople.  As it is not dated, its age must be determined mainly by the character of its script.  A close examination of the writing suggests that it can hardly have been inscribed as late as the Kassite Dynasty, since two or three signs exhibit more archaic forms than occur on any tablets of that period;(2) and such linguistic corruptions as have been noted in its text may well be accounted for by the process of decay which must have already affected the Sumerian language at the time of the later kings of Nisin.  Moreover, the tablet bears a close resemblance to one of the newly published copies of the Sumerian Dynastic List from Nippur;(3) for both are of the same shape and composed of the same reddish-brown clay, and both show the same peculiarities of writing.  The two tablets in fact appear to have been written by the same hand, and as that copy of the Dynastic List was probably drawn up before the latter half of the First Dynasty of Babylon, we may assign the same approximate date for the writing of our text.  This of course only fixes a lower limit for the age of the myth which it enshrines.