represent the "later Hebrew Version." If the remaining
passages be then read consecutively, they will be seen to
give a different version of the same events, though not so
completely preserved as the other; these passages
substantially represent the "earlier Hebrew Version". In
commentaries on the Hebrew text they are, of course, usually
referred to under the convenient symbols J and P,
representing respectively the earlier and the later
versions. For further details, see any of the modern
commentaries on Genesis, e.g. Driver, _Book of Genesis_, pp.
85 ff.; Skinner, _Genesis_, pp. 147 ff.; Ryle, _Genesis_, p.
96 f.

Now the tablets from the Royal Library at Nineveh inscribed with the
Gilgamesh Epic do not date from an earlier period than the seventh
century B.C. But archaeological evidence has long shown that the
traditions themselves were current during all periods of Babylonian
history; for Gilgamesh and his half-human friend Enkidu were favourite
subjects for the seal-engraver, whether he lived in Sumerian times or
under the Achaemenian kings of Persia. We have also, for some years now,
possessed two early fragments of the Deluge narrative, proving that the
story was known to the Semitic inhabitants of the country at the time of
Hammurabi's dynasty.(1) Our newly discovered text from Nippur was
also written at about that period, probably before 2100 B.C. But the
composition itself, apart from the tablet on which it is inscribed, must
go back very much earlier than that. For instead of being composed
in Semitic Babylonian, the text is in Sumerian, the language of the
earliest known inhabitants of Babylonia, whom the Semites eventually
displaced. This people, it is now recognized, were the originators
of the Babylonian civilization, and we saw in the first lecture that,