cities; and Ziusudu, the hero of the story, is apparently the only mortal whose name occurred in our text.  But its author’s principal subject is the Deluge, and the preceding history of the world is clearly not given in detail, but is merely summarized.  In view of the obviously abbreviated form of the narrative, of which we have already noted striking evidence in its account of the Creation, we may conclude that in the fuller form of the tradition the cities were also assigned human rulers, each one the representative of his city-god.  These would correspond to the Antediluvian dynasty of Berossus, the last member of which was Xisuthros, the later counterpart of Ziusudu.

In support of the exclusion of Nippur and Erech from the myth, it will be noted that the second city in the list is not Adab,(1) which was probably the principal seat of the goddess Ninkharsagga, the fourth of the creating deities.  The names of both deity and city in that line are strange to us.  Larak, the third city in the series, is of greater interest, for it is clearly Larankha, which according to Berossus was the seat of the eighth and ninth of his Antediluvian kings.  In commercial documents of the Persian period, which have been found during the excavations at Nippur, Larak is described as lying “on the bank of the old Tigris”, a phrase which must be taken as referring to the Shatt el-Hai, in view of the situation of Lagash and other early cities upon it or in its immediate neighbourhood.  The site of the city should perhaps be sought on the upper course of the stream, where it tends to approach Nippur.  It would thus have lain in the neighbourhood of Bismaya, the site of Adab.  Like Adab, Lagash, Shuruppak, and other early Sumerian cities, it was probably destroyed and deserted at a very early period, though it was reoccupied under its old name in Neo-Babylonian or Persian times.  Its early disappearance from Babylonian history perhaps in part accounts for our own unfamiliarity with Pabilkharsag, its city-god, unless we may regard the name as a variant from of Pabilsag; but it is hardly likely that the two should be identified.

(1) The site of Adab, now marked by the mounds of Bismaya, was partially excavated by an expedition sent out in 1903 by the University of Chicago, and has provided valuable material for the study of the earliest Sumerian period; see Reports of the Expedition of the Oriental Exploration Fund (Babylonian Section of the University of Chicago), and Banks, Bismya (1912).  On grounds of antiquity alone we might perhaps have expected its inclusion in the myth.

In Sibbar, the fourth of the Antediluvian cities in our series, we again have a parallel to Berossus.  It has long been recognized that Pantibiblon, or Pantibiblia, from which the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh of his Antediluvian kings all came, was the city of Sippar in Northern Babylonia.  For the seventh of these rulers, {Euedorakhos}, is clearly Enmeduranki,