FLOOD, THE. The Old Testament story of a great flood sent by God to destroy mankind (with a few except ions) for their wickedness is well known. It is common knowledge too that a rather similar story has been pre served on Babylonian cuneiform tablets. Another story in the same series has recently come to light in docu ments published in America since the outbreak of the great War. " We have indeed recovered a very early, and in some of its features a very primitive, form of the Deluge narrative which till now has reached us only in Semitic and Greek renderings; and the stream of trad ition has been tapped at a point far above any at which we have hitherto approached it " (L. W. King, Legends of Babylon and Egypt, 191S, p. 92). This is the Sumerian Version. It seems to have begun with a brief account of the Creation and the Antediluvian history. After the Flood, the chief duty of man is stated to be to build temples to the gods 'in a clean spot,' that is to say, in hallowed places.' The god (Anu or Enlil) founds five cities, and allots them to divine rulers. The name of the hero of the story is Ziusudu, and the description of him has great Interest in furnishing us with a close parallel to the piety of Noah in the Hebrew Versions ' " (p. 68). He is warned in a dream that a flood is to be sent " to destroy the seed of mankind." When the flood comes, it is accompanied by hurricanes of wind, but the hero is safe in a great boat which floats on the mighty waters. Then " the Sun-God came forth shedding light over heaven and earth." At the conclusion we read : " Ziusudu, the king, before Anu and Enlil bows himself down. Life like (that of) a god he gives to him. An eternal soul like (that of) a god he creates for him. In a . . . land, the land of Dilmun (?), they caused him to dwell " p. 90). Frazer has shown (Polk-lore in the 0.T., vol. i.) that stories of a great flood are widespread, and that there are many points of similarity between them. D. G. Benton (R.P.P., p. 122) writes: " Look in what continent we please, we shall find the myth of a Creation or of a primeval construction, of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an expected Restoration." The Flood-stories have been explained, as Brinton says, as the remembrance of some local overflow. But this hardly accounts for the wide prevalence of such stories. A new explanation has therefore been proposed by G. Elliot Smith—that of transmission. " The Sumerian story of the Flood, which is at least as old as the beginning of the third millennium B.C., was transmitted
not merely to Babylonia and Western Asia, but also to Greece and to the uttermost limits of Europe, where it is preserved in the folk-lore of Wales, Scotland and Ire land. And In the East It spread not merely to India, the Malay Archipelago, and China, but also to Oceania and both North and South America. Certain trivial and unessential incidents of the narrative crop up agaiu and again throughout this wide domain, and proclaim the fact of the derivation of the common framework of all the versions, directly or indirectly, from one original source. Local circumstances supplied merely the cor roborative detail and distinctive embellishments of each particular version. . . . The original story of the Flood was developed as the culmination of a series of legends of the destruction of mankind in which a flood played no part whatever. . . . In the earliest version, the ' Flood ' consisted of the blood of a human victim whose throat was cut to provide the elixir of life to rejuvenate the king when hls virile powers began to fail. In the next phase mankind as a whole replaced the original victim. In a third phase beer, to which red ochre was added to give it the proper colour as a sub stitute for blood, was employed in place of actual blood. Finally the blood-coloured mixture poured out upon the earth from seven thousand vessels was confused with the red waters of the annual inundation of the Nile. But as the destruction of mankind (which no longer formed a logical part of the story, once substitutes were found for human blood) had survived as the central Incident of the narrative, the story-teller had to provide an explanation of it. Mankind was being punished for its sins, and instead of the slaughtered men providing the ' Flood ' of blood, the blood-coloured waters of in undation were represented as inflicting the vengeance of the gods upon men" (Journ. of the Manch. Eg. and Or. Soc., 1918, p. 17 ff.). This explanation is rather startling at first sight, but probably many facts could be adduced in support of it. For instance, " primitive people believe that unless the sun is regaled with the blood of mankind he ages rapidly. Hence the myth of the sending of Hathor-Sekhet to earth, and the holocaust of humanity. Such sacrifices on a large scale were frequent in ancient Mexico, and on one occasion some 70,000 people were immolated on the altars of the war-god Huitzilopochtli, the procession of victims stretching for over two miles " (Edwardes and Spence, Diet., p. 146).