golden age of Italy.  He was suddenly removed to the abodes of the gods.  His name is connected, in the mythological legends, with “a great Saturnian continent” in the Atlantic Ocean, and a great kingdom which, in the remote ages, embraced Northern Africa and the European coast of the Mediterranean as far as the peninsula of Italy, and “certain islands in the sea;” agreeing, in this respect, with the story of Plato as to the dominions of Atlantis.  The Romans called the Atlantic Ocean “Chronium Mare,” the Sea of Chronos, thus identifying Chronos with that ocean.  The pillars of Hercules were also called by the ancients “the pillars of Chronos.”

Here, then, we have convincing testimony that the country referred to in the Chaldean legends was the land of Chronos, or Saturn—­the ocean world, the dominion of Atlantis.

2.  Hea or Ea, the god of the Nineveh tablets, was a fish-god:  he was represented in the Chaldean monuments as half man and half fish; he was described as the god, not of the rivers and seas, but of “the abyss”—­to wit, the ocean.  He it was who was said to have brought civilization and letters to the ancestors of the Assyrians.  He clearly represented an ancient, maritime, civilized nation; he came from the ocean, and was associated with some land and people that had been destroyed by rain and inundations.  The fact that the scene of the Deluge is located on the Euphrates proves nothing, for we will see hereafter that almost every nation had its especial mountain on which, according to its traditions, the ark rested; just as every Greek tribe had its own particular mountain of Olympos.  The god Bel of the legend was the Baal of the Phoenicians, who, as we shall show, were of Atlantean origin.  Bel, or Baal, was worshipped on the western and northern coasts of Europe, and gave his name to the Baltic, the Great and Little Belt, Balesbaugen, Balestranden, etc.; and to many localities, in the British Islands, as, for instance, Belan and the Baal hills in Yorkshire.

3.  In those respects wherein the Chaldean legend, evidently the older form of the tradition, differs from the Biblical record, we see that in each instance we approach nearer to Atlantis.  The account given in Genesis is the form of the tradition that would be natural to an inland people.  Although there is an allusion to “the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep” (about which I shall speak more fully hereafter), the principal destruction seems to have been accomplished by rain; hence the greater period allowed for the Deluge, to give time enough for the rain to fall, and subsequently drain off from the land.  A people dwelling in the midst of a continent could not conceive the possibility of a whole world sinking beneath the sea; they therefore supposed the destruction to have been, caused by a continuous down-pour of rain for forty days and forty nights.

In the Chaldean legend, on the contrary, the rain lasted but seven days; and we see that the writer had a glimpse of the fact that the destruction occurred in the midst of or near the sea.  The ark of Genesis (tebah) was simply a chest, a coffer, a big box, such as might be imagined by an inland people.  The ark of the Chaldeans was a veritable ship; it had a prow, a helm, and a pilot, and men to manage it; and it navigated “the sea.”