e building of the ship,
introduced by the words "As soon as the dawn began to break". In
the Sumerian Version the close of the warning, in which the ship was
probably referred to, and the lines prescribing how Ziusudu carried out
the divine instructions are not preserved.

It will be seen that in the passage quoted from the Semitic Version
there is no direct mention of a dream; the god is represented at first
as addressing his words to a "house of reeds" and a "wall", and then as
speaking to Ut-napishtim himself. But in a later passage in the Epic,
when Ea seeks to excuse his action to Enlil, he says that the gods'
decision was revealed to Atrakhasis through a dream.(1) Dr. Poebel
rightly compares the direct warning of Ut-napishtim by Ea in the passage
quoted above with the equally direct warning Ziusudu receives in the
Sumerian Version. But he would have us divorce the direct warning from
the dream-warning, and he concludes that no less than three different
versions of the story have been worked together in the Gilgamesh Epic.
In the first, corresponding to that in our text, Ea communicates the
gods' decision directly to Ut-napishtim; in the second he sends a dream
from which Atrakhasis, "the Very Wise one", guesses the impending peril;
while in the third he relates the plan to a wall, taking care that
Ut-napishtim overhears him.(2) The version of Berossus, that Kronos
himself appears to Xisuthros in a dream and warns him, is rejected by
Dr. Poebel, who remarks that here the "original significance of the
dream has already been obliterated". Consequently there seems to him to
be "no logical connexion" between the dreams or dream mentioned at the
close of the Third Column and the communication of the plan of the gods
at the beginning of the Fourth Column of our text.(3)

(1) Cf. l. 195 f.; "I did not divulge the decision of the
great gods. I caused Atrakhasis to behold a dream and thus
he heard the decision of the gods."

(2) Cf. Poebel, _Hist. Texts_, p. 51 f. With the god's
apparent subterfuge in the third of these supposed versions
Sir James Frazer (_Ancient Stories of a Great Flood_, p. 15)
not inaptly compares the well-known story of King Midas's
servant, who, unable to keep the secret of the king's
deformity to himself, whispered it into a hole in the
ground, with the result that the reeds which grew up there
by their rustling in the wind proclaimed it to th