Lecture VIII. The Myths And Epics. 389
fragments of a good many have been saved for us out of the
wreckage of the past. But they belong for the most part to the
same period, the age of national revival which began with the
reign of Khammurabi, and continued for several centuries after
his death. It is possible that Sin-liqi-unnini, the author of the
great Epic of Gilgames, was a contemporary of Abraham; the
story of Adapa, the first man, was already in existence, and had
become a standard classic, when the Tel el-Amarna letters were
written in the fifteenth centuryB.C. Behind all these poems lay
a long-preceding period in which the myths and legends they
embody had taken shape and formed the subject of numberless
literary works. The Epic of Gilgames is, for instance, but the
final stage in the literary development of the tales and myths
of which it is composed; older poems, or parts of poems, have
been incorporated into it, and the elements of which it consists
are multiform and of various origin. The story of the Deluge,
which constitutes the eleventh book, has been foisted into it
by an almost violent artifice, and represents a combination of
more than one of its many versions which were in circulation in
Babylonia. When the early libraries of the country have been
explored, we shall know better than we do now how far the story
in the form we have of it in the Epic is original, and how far [424]
the author has freely borrowed from his predecessors, using their
language or combining their work.
As a rule, the subject of a Babylonian poem is either some
single god or some single hero. When the god or hero is merely
a central figure around whose adventures those of other gods or
heroes are made to revolve, the poem becomes an Epic. It still
retains its mythological shape, and the world in which it moves
is a world of supernatural powers, a divine fairyland in which the
gods play the part of men. But there is none of the dull and crass
euhemerism which distinguishes the Egyptian tales of the gods.
The gods do not become mere men with enlarged human powers;
they remain divine, even though their actions are human and the