due to the rhythmical character of the text. The style of the poetry
may be simple and abrupt, but it exhibits a familiar feature of both
Semitic-Babylonian and Hebrew poetry, in its constant employment of
partial repetition or paraphrase in parallel lines. The story it tells
is very primitive and in many respects unlike the Babylonian Versions
of the Deluge which we already possess. Perhaps its most striking
peculiarity is the setting of the story, which opens with a record of
the creation of man and animals, goes on to tell how the first cities
were built, and ends with a version of the Deluge, which is thus
recounted in its relation to the Sumerian history of the world. This
literary connexion between the Creation and Deluge narratives is of
unusual interest, in view of the age of our text. In the Babylonian
Versions hitherto known they are included in separate epics with
quite different contexts. Here they are recounted together in a single
document, much as they probably were in the history of Berossus and as
we find them in the present form of the Book of Genesis. This fact will
open up some interesting problems when we attempt to trace the literary
descent of the tradition.

But one important point about the text should be emphasized at once,
since it will affect our understanding of some very obscure passages, of
which no satisfactory explanation has yet been given. The assumption has
hitherto been made that the text is an epic pure and simple. It is quite
true that the greater part of it is a myth, recounted as a narrative in
poetical form, but there appear to me to be clear indications that
the myth was really embedded in an incantation. If this was so, the
mythological portion was recited for a magical purpose, with the object
of invoking the aid of the chief deities whose actions in the past are
there described, and of increasing by that means the potency of the
spell.(1) In the third lecture I propose to treat in more detail the