y have regarded it as a record of world-wide catastrophe.
It is true the gods' intention is to destroy mankind, but the scene
throughout is laid in Southern Babylonia. After seven days' storm,
the Sun comes out, and the vessel with the pious priest-king and his
domestic animals on board grounds, apparently still in Babylonia, and
not on any distant mountain, such as Mt. Nisir or the great mass of
Ararat in Armenia. These are obviously details which tellers of the
story have added as it passed down to later generations. When it
was carried still farther afield, into the area of the Eastern
Mediterranean, it was again adapted to local conditions. Thus
Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon Parnassus,(1) and the
pseudo-Lucian relates how he founded the temple of Derketo at Hierapolis
in Syria beside the hole in the earth which swallowed up the Flood.(2)
To the Sumerians who first told the story, the great Flood appeared to
have destroyed mankind, for Southern Babylonia was for them the
world. Later peoples who heard it have fitted the story to their own
geographical horizon, and in all good faith and by a purely logical
process the mountain-tops are represented as submerged, and the ship,
or ark, or chest, is made to come to ground on the highest peak known to
the story-teller and his hearers. But in its early Sumerian form it is
just a simple tradition of some great inundation, which overwhelmed
the plain of Southern Babylonia and was peculiarly disastrous in its
effects. And so its memory survived in the picture of Ziusudu's solitary
coracle upon the face of the waters, which, seen through the mists of
the Deluge tradition, has given us the Noah's ark of our nursery days.

(1) Hesiod is our earliest authority for the Deucalion Flood
story. For its probable Babylonian origin, cf. Farnell,
_Greece and Babylon_ (1911), p. 184.

(2) _De Syria dea_, 12 f.

Thus the Babylonian, Hebrew, and Greek Deluge stories resolve
themselves, not into a nature myth, but into an early legend, which has
the basis of historical fact in the Euphrates Valley. And it is probable
that we may explain after a similar fashion the occurrence of tales of
a like character at least in some other parts of the world. Among races
dwelling in low-lying or well-watered districts it would be surprising
if we did not find independent stories of past floods from which few
inhabitants of the land escaped. It is only in hilly countries such