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The Sumerian, Aegean, Chinese, Hittite, Assyrian and Indian civilizations had enjoyed periods of dominance but had never reached the level of supremacy enjoyed by the Egyptians.
In the third lecture I propose to treat in more detail the employment and significance of myth in magic, and we shall have occasion to refer to other instances, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian, in which a myth has reached us in a magical setting.
* It is, of course, also possible that the system of writing had no connection in its origin with that of the Sumerians, and was invented independently of the system employed in Babylonia. In that case, the signs which resemble certain of the Sumerian characters must have been adopted in a later stage of its development.
Apart from this evidence, the important rank assigned her in the historical and legal records and in votive inscriptions, especially in the early period and in Southern Babylonia, accords fully with the part she here plays in the Sumerian Creation myth.
Such then are the contents of our Sumerian document, and from the details which have been given it will have been seen that its story, so far as concerns the Deluge, is in essentials the same as that we already find in the Gilgamesh Epic. It is true that this earlier version has reached us in a magical setting, and to some extent in an abbreviated form.
His garment is Sumerian or Semitic rather than Egyptian, and the mixture of human and bird elements in the figure, though not precisely paralleled at this early period, is not out of harmony with Mesopotamian or Susan tradition. His beard, too, is quite different from that of the Libyan desert tribes which the early Egyptian kings adopted.
This Sumerian myth, though it reaches us only in an extract or summary in a Neo-Babylonian schoolboy's exercise, may well date from a comparatively early period, but probably from a time when the "Ways" of Anu, Enlil, and Enki had already been fixed in heaven and their later astrological characters had crystallized. I, pp. 124 ff.
Moreover, the Sumerian and Semitic verbs, which are employed in the parallel passages quoted above for the "overwhelming" of the land, are given as synonyms in a late syllabary, while in another explanatory text the Sumerian verb is explained as applying to the destructive action of a flood.
Here Ammenon, the fourth of Berossus' Antediluvian kings, presents a wonderfully close transcription of the Sumerian name. The n of the first syllable has been assimilated to the following consonant in accordance with a recognized law of euphony, and the resultant doubling of the m is faithfully preserved in the Greek.
The most famous of the later patesis, or viceroys, of Shirpurla, the Sumerian city in Southern Babylonia now marked by the mounds of Telloh. Photograph by Messrs. Mansell & Co. Ur, Isin, and,Larsam succeeded one another in the position of leading city in Babylonia, holding Mppur, Eridu, Erech, Shirpurla, and the other chief cities in a condition of semi-dependence upon themselves.
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