(1) The breadth of the tablet is 5 5/8 in., and it originally measured about 7 in. in length from top to bottom; but only about one-third of its inscribed surface is preserved.

     (2) Cf.  Poebel, Hist.  Texts, pp. 66 ff.

     (3) No. 5.

That the composition is in the form of a poem may be seen at a glance from the external appearance of the tablet, the division of many of the lines and the blank spaces frequently left between the sign-groups being due to the rhythmical character of the text.  The style of the poetry may be simple and abrupt, but it exhibits a familiar feature of both Semitic-Babylonian and Hebrew poetry, in its constant employment of partial repetition or paraphrase in parallel lines.  The story it tells is very primitive and in many respects unlike the Babylonian Versions of the Deluge which we already possess.  Perhaps its most striking peculiarity is the setting of the story, which opens with a record of the creation of man and animals, goes on to tell how the first cities were built, and ends with a version of the Deluge, which is thus recounted in its relation to the Sumerian history of the world.  This literary connexion between the Creation and Deluge narratives is of unusual interest, in view of the age of our text.  In the Babylonian Versions hitherto known they are included in separate epics with quite different contexts.  Here they are recounted together in a single document, much as they probably were in the history of Berossus and as we find them in the present form of the Book of Genesis.  This fact will open up some interesting problems when we attempt to trace the literary descent of the tradition.

But one important point about the text should be emphasized at once, since it will affect our understanding of some very obscure passages, of which no satisfactory explanation has yet been given.  The assumption has hitherto been made that the text is an epic pure and simple.  It is quite true that the greater part of it is a myth, recounted as a narrative in poetical form, but there appear to me to be clear indications that the myth was really embedded in an incantation.  If this was so, the mythological portion was recited for a magical purpose, with the object of invoking the aid of the chief deities whose actions in the past are there described, and of increasing by that means the potency of the spell.(1) In the third lecture I propose to treat in more detail the employment and significance of myth in magic, and we shall have occasion to refer to other instances, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian, in which a myth has reached us in a magical setting.

     (1) It will be seen that the subject-matter of any myth
     treated in this way has a close connexion with the object
     for which the incantation was performed.