The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

402 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

gate of her palace, and forbade him to cross the ocean; none had
ever passed over it except the sun-god in his nightly voyage from
west to east. Once more, however, the element of divinity that
was in Gilgames prevailed;`abitum acknowledged that he was
more than a mere man, and allowed his right to seek his ancestor
beyond the river of death. Arad-Ea, the pilot of Xisuthros, was
summoned; trees were cut and fashioned into a boat, and for
a month and fifteen days Gilgames and his pilot pursued their
voyage over the sea. Then“on the third day”they entered“the
waters of death.”The hero was bidden to cling to the rudder
and to see that the deadly water did not touch his hand. Twelve
strokes of the oar were needed before the rapids were safely
passed, and the boat reached the shore that lay beyond the realm
of death. Here Gilgames beheld Xisuthros“afar off” “at the
mouth of the rivers.”At once he communicated to him the object
of his journey: how and why had Xisuthros escaped the universal
law of death? The answer is contained in the eleventh book of
the Epic, which recounts the story of the great Deluge.
Ever since its discovery by George Smith in 1872, the
[438] Babylonian story of the Deluge, which has thus been introduced
into the Epic of Gilgames, has attracted the special attention of
both scholars and the public. On the one side it agrees with
the story of the Deluge handed down to us by the copyists
of the Chaldæan historian Berossos, and so is a witness to
his trustworthiness; on the other side, its parallelism with the
account of the Deluge in the Book of Genesis is at once striking
and startling. But the version of the story embodied by Sin-liqi-
unnini in his Epic was but one out of many that were current
in Babylonia. We have a fragment of another which so closely
resembles that of the Epic, as to have been long believed to
form part of it; indeed, it is possible that it comes from a variant
copy of the Epic itself. Fragments of another version have
lately been found by Dr. Scheil in a Babylonian tablet which
goes back to the reign of Ammi-zadok, the fourth successor of