Zeus ordered Prometheus and Athene to make images of clay in the form of men; — and when they were finished, he called the winds and made them breathe into each and render them vital; "—(Trans. of Bryant).

Suidas' version makes the Flood-king's name Nannacus. The name of Deukalion in this legend is fairly to be credited to later Greeks, perhaps to Stephanus himself, to whom, from his Greek education, the Flood was "the Flood of Deukalion." For the rest, when we compare the names Annakh and Nannakh with Manukh, and the grieving for Annacus with that for Sisouthros or Sisathra, it would seem that these features must have been borrowed from Chaldæa. The name Nannakh is therefore probably the first Chaldæan name for the Flood-hero, an older feature than the "grieving," and preserved by the Phrygians from the times before Sisathra.

In the second section, so to speak, of the legend, we find the true Aryan story of Prometheus, (=Pra-mantha, Pra-matha or Proumathai,) the "bringer of fire by friction," whom Professor Steinthal has so ably shown to be an early Aryan myth-hero. Athena' the Wisdom of God, the άνεμοι, winds or divine Breath, (compare Gr. αἰθίνη, ἀϋτμὴ, anua, ábáva, Sskr., âtman, Lat. anima, etc.,) and Prometheus, (Purusha or Proumathai,) the divine Man or ManGod, are here all busy, in aid of Zeus, in the work of creating and giving life and breath to man. How far these features are really early myth, or how far they may be, instead, an after inspiration from Platonism,3 may be

In most versions of the Greek myth, the creation of man by Prometheus is regarded by Zeus as an act of presumption, for which he punishes the former.

2 The part of Athena in this drama seems to be that of forming man in partnership with Prometheus, and imparting to him life through the sacred fire brought down from the amp, or upper sky. Roots like dah, to burn. âtman, life. breath, spirit, (Sskr.,) seem connected with her name through aiew, to burn, aionp, the upper sky or empyrean, (with which indeed Athena, sprung from the head or upper region of Zeus the atmosphere, was probably at first identical,) and aidin, fiery, burning. 'Aütμn, wind, breath, hot vapor, was also closely connected with these roots and ideas of life, breath and fire.

3 It seems more likely that these ideas are really of the myth-age, and that Plato and the Alexandrians were indebted to them, than that they were foisted into the

doubted; but we certainly have, here, an instance of fusion between Semite-Chaldæan and Aryan-Hellenic legend.

legend in the philosophic period, strongly as the combination reminds one of Plato's system. Though the divine inbreathing of the winds in this legend seems the same as the Phoenician kolpia or Divine Voice or Breath, spoken of by Sanchoniathon, -the ruakh, Breath, Spiritus or Spirit of God," and "breath of life" of Genesis, — still this feature of the Phrygian story may be derived more directly from the Chaldæan wind-god Vul, (compare Aiol,) Yav or Jav, who again seems one with the Phœnician Jao, Yao, the Hebrew Jah or Yahvè. Athene or Athena was an original Aryan creation, though her function in this legend reminds of the Platonic oopia or Divine Wisdom; and the idea of a Divine Man, or second and born God, assisting God in the work of creation, is common to all mythologies of Asiatic origin, as well as to Platonic philosophy.

CHAPTER V.

THE KOUYUNJIK TABLETS AND THE GENESIS CREATION-ANDFLOOD LEGEND. - ZOROASTRIAN IDEAS IN HEBREW RELIGION.

WE now come to by far the most interesting, and the earliest form, (except the Indian,) of the Flood-legend, that engraved upon archaic Assyrio-Chaldæan tablets and cylinders, and dating from the period of king Urukh, a period, according to the high authority of the late lamented Mr. George Smith, who deciphered the tablets in the British Museum collection, which cannot be placed later than 2000 B.C., and is probably considerably earlier; — earlier, therefore, by five hundred years or thereabout, than the earliest date assigned by theologians to "Moses," and fully a thousand years earlier than the real date of the writings ascribed to him.

While the Chaldæan Flood-legend has been preserved in a good degree of completeness in these tablets, the creation-legend only remains to us in a few imperfect fragments, and these, in general, will not compare in literary merit with the Genesis-narrative, elaborated from early Chaldæan, Phoenician, and Hebrew myths by the able and learned unknown scribe of the court of king Solomon. I will, however, preserve the natural order as in Genesis,

The oldest cylinder dates 1800 B.C.; the tablets of the deluge are Assyrian copies of the age of Assurbanipal, but in the text of the bi-lingual inscriptions upon them they are stated to have been copies made by order of that king from Chaldæan originals, then becoming illegible through age. This fact, according to the interpreters, throws back the date of the original legends to at least 2000 B.C. Some tablets are copies of Akkadian originals; those in particular, which relate to astronomical matters. Two Babylonian tablets, of the deluge-story, were inscribed at least as early as B.C. 1600.

and introduce these fragments as a prelude to the story of the Flood.

From the Kouyunjik Tablets, as deciphered and copied by Mr. G. Smith in his "Chaldæan Account of Genesis," I take the following:

1. The watery abyss at the beginning, literally given :

(1) "When, above, were not raised the heavens, and below, on the earth, a plant had not grown up; the abyss, also, had not broken open its boundaries; (2) The chaos, (or water,) Tiamat, (the sea,) was the producing mother of the whole of them. (3) Those waters at the beginning 2 were ordained, but a tree had not grown, a flower had not unfolded, . . . the gods had not sprung up, any one of them, a plant had not grown, and order did not exist."

...

2. God's creation and arrangement of the heavenly bodies.

(1) "Stars - their appearance in figures of animals he arranged, to fix the year through the observation of their constellations. Twelve months, (or signs,) of stars, in three rows he arranged, from the day when the year commences, unto the close. He marked the positions of the wandering stars" [planets]“to shine in their courses, that they may not do injury, and may not trouble any one." (2) "In its mass [that of chaos] " he made a boiling;- the god Uru" [the moon] "he caused to rise out; the night he overshadowed; —(3) To fix it also for the light of the night, until the shining of the day:-(4) That the month might not be broken, and in its amount be regular. (5) At the beginning of the month, at the rising of the night, his " [the moon's] "horns are breaking through, to shine on the heaven. (6) On the seventh day, to a circle he begins to swell, and stretches towards the dawn further."

These verses describe the first two quarters of the moon's phases. We see that the Chaldæans of this early period had already determined the lengths of the month and of the week, not by the fanciful rule given in Genesis, derived from the supposed six working-days and one restday of the Creator, but by the revolution, and the phases,

This agrees with the Phoenician myth, (as in the remaining fragments of Sanchoniathon's work,) in which the chaos or abyss, Baav, (bohu, Heb.,) is the mother of creation, by her husband, the xómia or Divine Breath. See also the Indian myth, already quoted.

2 "In the beginning . . . darkness was upon the face of the deep."-GEN. i.

of the moon. The Hebrew legend, though undoubtedly founded on the Chaldæan, had lost, perhaps long before the period of Solomon, the trace of the early astronomical science of the latter people, (derived from the still earlier Akkadians,) which the ruder primitive Hebrew could not comprehend, he looking, in his simplicity, upon the lofty observatory built at Babel,' as an attempt to storm the heavens.

(7) . . . "The god Shamas "[the sun] "in the horizon of heaven, in the east. (8) He formed beautifully and to the orbit; — Shamas was perfected."

...

3. Creation of whales and animals.

(1) "When the gods in their assembly had created . . . the strong monsters. (2) . . . "They caused to be, living creatures, cattle of the field, beasts of the field, and creeping things of the field."

The periods show lacune in the original, caused by destruction of portions of the tablets, and at this point, unfortunately, the legend is finally interrupted, the remaining tablets which continued it, being irretrievably broken up and scattered. The "assembly" of the gods is like the plural expression, "the gods," (Elohim,) of the earlier or Elohistic legend in Genesis. A second and even third Creator had been added to the original Elu or Ilu; Anu bore much the same relation of successor, to Elu, as, in India, the later invented Brahm did to Brahma. Bel occupied the second place. The third creator of the Chaldæan Trinity was Hea.2

This name was originally Bab-11, "the house (or gate) of God," (Ilu); the Hebrew nomads, to whom the real purposes of the observatory were an unmeaning mystery, confounded it with their word 2, Babel, "idle talk or babble." Hence, in part, the legend of the "confusion of tongues."

2 This legend, though, in its present form as a copy, not so old as the Chaldæan Flood-legend, undoubtedly derived its astronomic ideas, in part, from the Akkadians, (probably a Cushite race,) who preceded the Semite Chaldæans in the occupation of Upper Babylonia. The study of astronomy in Chaldæa appears (as we have seen) to have received a great additional impulse from Ssathra, Zarathustra or the "Bactrian Zoroaster," if Berosus is to be believed. The Babel observatory dates from about his period, or 2217 B.C., according to many authors, though others place its building later. It is a curious fact that a tradition (preserved by Gregorius Turonensis)