ersion, by the name of the
deity in whose service he acted as priest. We have already noted some
grounds for believing that his city may have been Shuruppak, as in the
Babylonian Version; and if that were so, the divine name reads as "the
God of Shurrupak" should probably be restored at the end of the line.(1)

(1) The remains that are preserved of the determinative,
which is not combined with the sign EN, proves that Enki's
name is not to be restored. Hence Ziusudu was not priest of
Enki, and his city was probably not Eridu, the seat of his
divine friend and counsellor, and the first of the
Antediluvian cities. Sufficient reason for Enki's
intervention on Ziusudu's behalf is furnished by the fact
that, as God of the Deep, he was concerned in the proposed
method of man's destruction. His rivalry of Enlil, the God
of the Earth, is implied in the Babylonian Version (cf.
Gilg. Epic. XI, ll. 39-42), and in the Sumerian Version this
would naturally extend to Anu, the God of Heaven.

The employment of the royal title by itself accords with the tradition
from Berossus that before the Deluge, as in later periods, the land was
governed by a succession of supreme rulers, and that the hero of the
Deluge was the last of them. In the Gilgamesh Epic, on the other
hand, Ut-napishtim is given no royal nor any other title. He is merely
referred to as a "man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu", and he appears in
the guise of an ancient hero or patriarch not invested with royal
power. On this point Berossus evidently preserves the original Sumerian
traditions, while the Hebrew Versions resemble the Semitic-Babylonian
narrative. The Sumerian conception of a series of supreme Antediluvian
rulers is of course merely a reflection from the historical period,
when the hegemony in Babylonia was contested among the city-states. The
growth of the tradition may have been encouraged by the early use of
_lugal_, "king", which, though always a term of secular character, was
not very sharply distinguished from that of _patesi_ and other religious
titles, until, in accordance with political development, it was required
to connote a wider dominion. In Sumer, at the time of the composition
of our text, Ziusudu was still only one in a long line of Babylonian
rulers, mainly historical but gradually receding into the realms of
legend and myth. At the time of the later Semites there had been more
than