Babylonian Story of the Deluge | Page 6

story." [6] During the excavations which Smith carried out at Kuyûnjik
in 1873 and 1874 he recovered many fragments of tablets, the texts of
which enabled him to complete his description of the contents of the
Twelve Tablets of the Legend of Gilgamish which included his
translation of the story of the Deluge. Unfortunately Smith died of
hunger and sickness near Aleppo in 1876, and he was unable to revise
his early work, and to supplement it with the information which he had
acquired during his latest travels in Assyria and Babylonia. Thanks to
the excavations which were carried on at Kuyûnjik by the Trustees of
the British Museum after his untimely death, several hundreds of
tablets and fragments have been recovered, and many of these have
been rejoined to the tablets of the older collection. By the careful study
and investigation of the old and new material Assyriologists have,
during the last forty years, been enabled to restore and complete many
passages in the Legends of Gilgamish and the Flood. It is now clear
that the Legend of the Flood had not originally any connection with the
Legend of Gilgamish, and that it was introduced into it by a late editor
or redactor of the Legend, probably in order to complete the number of
the Twelve Tablets on which it was written in the time of
Ashur-bani-pal.
The Legend of the Deluge in Babylonia.
In the introduction to his paper on the "Chaldean Account of the
Deluge," which Smith read in December, 1872, and published in 1873,
he stated that the Assyrian text which he had found on Ashur-bani-pal's
tablets was copied from an archetype at Erech in Lower Babylonia.
This archetype was, he thought, "either written in, or translated into
Semitic Babylonian, at a very early period," and although he could not
assign a date to it, he adduced a number of convincing proofs in
support of his opinion. The language in which he assumed the Legend
to have been originally composed was known to him under the name of
"Accadian," or "Akkadian," but is now called "Sumerian." Recent

research has shown that his view on this point was correct on the whole.
But there is satisfactory proof available to show that versions or
recensions of the Legend of the Deluge and of the Epic of Gilgamish
existed both in Sumerian and Babylonian, as early as B.C. 2000. The
discovery has been made of a fragment of a tablet with a small portion
of the Babylonian version of the Legend of the Deluge inscribed upon
it, and dated in a year which is the equivalent of the 11th year of
Ammisaduga, i.e. about B.C. 2000. [7] And in the Museum at
Philadelphia [8] is preserved half of a tablet which when whole
contained a complete copy of the Sumerian version of the Legend, and
must have been written about the same date. The fragment of the tablet
written in the reign of Ammisaduga is of special importance because
the colophon shows that the tablet to which it belonged was the second
of a series, and that this series was not that of the Epic of Gilgamish,
and from this we learn that in B.C. 2000 the Legend of the Deluge did
not form the XIth Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamish, as it did in the reign
of Ashur-bani-pal, or earlier. The Sumerian version is equally
important, though from another point of view, for the contents and
position of the portion of it that remains on the half of the tablet
mentioned above make it certain that already at this early period there
were several versions of the Legend of the Deluge current in the
Sumerian language. The fact is that the Legend of the Deluge was then
already so old in Mesopotamia that the scribes added to or abbreviated
the text at will, and treated the incidents recorded in it according to
local or popular taste, tradition and prejudice. There seems to be no
evidence that proves conclusively that the Sumerian version is older
than the Semitic, or that the latter was translated direct from the former
version. It is probable that both the Sumerians and the Semites, each in
their own way, attempted to commemorate an appalling disaster of
unparalleled magnitude, the knowledge of which, through tradition,
was common to both peoples. It is, at all events, clear that the
Sumerians regarded the Deluge as an historic event, which they were,
practically, able to date, for some of their tablets contain lists of kings
who reigned before the Deluge, though it must be confessed that the
lengths assigned to their reigns are incredible.
It is not too much to assume that the original event commemorated in
the Legend of the Deluge was a serious and prolonged inundation