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For in the Gilgamesh Epic and in Berossus this feature of the story is completely absent. We are there given no reason why Ut-napishtim was selected by Ea, nor Xisuthros by Kronos. For all that those versions tell us, the favour of each deity might have been conferred arbitrarily, and not in recognition of, or in response to, any particular quality or action on the part of its recipient.
The version of Berossus, that Kronos himself appears to Xisuthros in a dream and warns him, is rejected by Dr.
It is hardly probable that two sacrifices were recounted in the Sumerian Version, one to the Sun-god in the boat and another on the mountain after landing; and if we are right in identifying Ziusudu's recorded sacrifice with that of Ut-napishtim and Xisuthros, it would seem that, according to the Sumerian Version, no birds were sent out to test the abatement of the waters.
Xisuthros did as he had been bidden. When the flood began to abate, on the third day after the rain had ceased to fall, he sent out some birds to see whether they would find any land, but the birds, having found neither food nor place to rest upon, returned to the ship. A few days later Xisuthros once more sent the birds out; but they again came back to him, this time with muddy feet.
He had been ordered by the gods to build a ship, to pitch it within and without, and to stock it with animals of every species. Xisuthros sent out first a dove, then a swallow, and lastly a raven, to discover whether the earth was dry; the dove and the swallow returned to the ship, and it was only when the raven flew away that the rescued hero ventured to leave his ark.
These would correspond to the Antediluvian dynasty of Berossus, the last member of which was Xisuthros, the later counterpart of Ziusudu. In support of the exclusion of Nippur and Erech from the myth, it will be noted that the second city in the list is not Adab, which was probably the principal seat of the goddess Ninkharsagga, the fourth of the creating deities.
To heal it he sailed beyond the mouth of the Euphrates and the river of death, leaving behind him the deserts of Arabia and the twin-mountain where men in the shape of huge scorpions guard the gateways of the sun. At last he found Xisuthros, the hero of the Deluge, and learned from him how he had escaped death. Cured of his malady, he returned homeward with a leaf of the tree of life.
Immediately afterwards Xisuthros and his wife, like the Biblical Enoch, were translated to the regions of the blest beyond Datilla, the river of Death, and his people made their way westward to Sippara.
Among these occurs the well-known story of the Deluge of Xisuthros, which is evidently built upon the same foundation as that of Hasisadra. The incidents of the divine warning, the building of the ship, the sending out of birds, the ascension of the hero, betray their common origin.
The story of Noah and the flood has a very close parallel in a record of Berosus, the Babylonian priest Xisuthros had a dream in which the deity announced to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a deluge of water, and ordered him to take all the sacred writings and bury them at Sippar, the City of the Sun, then to build a ship, provide it with ample stores of food and drink and enter it with his family and his dearest friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every kind.
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