re the seats of
ancient civilizations, and it is natural that each should stage its
picture of beginnings upon its own soil and embellish it with local
colouring.

It is a tribute to the historical accuracy of Hebrew tradition to
recognize that it never represented Palestine as the cradle of the human
race. It looked to the East rather than to the South for evidence of
man's earliest history and first progress in the arts of life. And it
is in the East, in the soil of Babylonia, that we may legitimately seek
material in which to verify the sources of that traditional belief.

The new parallels I have to-day attempted to trace between some of
the Hebrew traditions, preserved in Gen. iv-vi, and those of the early
Sumerians, as presented by their great Dynastic List, are essentially
general in character and do not apply to details of narrative or to
proper names. If they stood alone, we should still have to consider
whether they are such as to suggest cultural influence or independent
origin. But fortunately they do not exhaust the evidence we have lately
recovered from the site of Nippur, and we will postpone formulating our
conclusions with regard to them until the whole field has been surveyed.
From the biblical standpoint by far the most valuable of our new
documents is one that incorporates a Sumerian version of the Deluge
story. We shall see that it presents a variant and more primitive
picture of that great catastrophe than those of the Babylonian and
Hebrew versions. And what is of even greater interest, it connects the
narrative of the Flood with that of Creation, and supplies a brief but
intermediate account of the Antediluvian period. How then are we to
explain this striking literary resemblance to the structure of the
narrative in Genesis, a resemblance that is completely wanting in the
Babylonian versions? But that is a problem we must reserve for the next
lecture.

LECTURE II -- DELUGE STORIES AND THE NEW SUMERIAN VERSION

In the first lecture we saw how, both in Babylonia and Egypt, recent
discoveries had thrown light upon periods regarded as prehistoric, and
how we had lately recovered traditions concerning very early rulers both
in the Nile Valley and along the lower Euphrates. On the strength of
the latter discovery we noted the possibility that future excavation in
Babylonia would lay bare stages of primitive culture similar to those
we have already recovered in Egyptian soil. Meanwhile the doc