The work of Berosus has vanished; but extracts from it--how far
faithful is uncertain--have been preserved by later writers.
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. But stories, like Madeira,
acquire a heightened flavour with time and travel; and the
version of Berosus is characterised by those circumstantial
improbabilities which habitually gather round the legend of a
legend. The later narrator knows the exact day of the month on
which the flood began. The dimensions of the ship are stated
with Munchausenian precision at five stadia by two--say, half by
one-fifth of an English mile. The ship runs aground among the
"Gordaean mountains" to the south of Lake Van, in Armenia,
beyond the limits of any imaginable real inundation of the
Euphrates valley; and, by way of climax, we have the assertion,
worthy of the sailor who said that he had brought up one of
Pharaoh's chariot wheels on the fluke of his anchor in the Red
Sea, that pilgrims visited the locality and made amulets of the
bitumen which they scraped off from the still extant remains of
the mighty ship of Xisuthros.
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