It is on these grounds that I venture, at the risk of being
called an atheist by the ghosts of all the principals of all the
colleges of Babylonia, or by their living successors among the
Neo-Chaldaeans, if that sect should arise, to express my utter
disbelief in the gods of Hasisadra. Hence, it follows, that I
find Hasisadra's account of their share in his adventure
incredible; and, as the physical details of the flood are
inseparable from its theophanic accompaniments, and are
guaranteed by the same authority, I must let them go with the
rest. The consistency of such details with probability counts
for nothing. The inhabitants of Chaldaea must always have been
familiar with inundations; probably no generation failed to
witness an inundation which rose unusually high, or was rendered
serious by coincident atmospheric or other disturbances. And the
memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and
devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for
long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a
Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a great
catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such
an appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken in his
audience the tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is
there for insisting that he must have had some individual good
in view, and that his history is historical, in the sense that
the account of the effects of a hurricane in the Bay of Bengal,
in the year 1875, is historical?
More than three centuries after the time of Assurbanipal,
Berosus of Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great,
wrote an account of the history of his country in Greek.
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