CREATION AND DELUGE

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 3483, 7 November 1913, Page 7

CREATION AND DELUGE

A BABYLONISH VERSION. A translation has been made (writes the New York correspondent of tho London “Standard”) by Dr Arno Poebel of the inscription on a tablet excavated in Nippur several years ago by an expedition sent out under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The inscription gives the Babylonish theory of the Creation and the Deluge. The account (supposed to have l>een written in the time of Abraham) is similar in many respects to that in the Bible, one striking difference, however, being that according to the tablet mankind was created by a female deity called Nintu, and another being that the creation ot the earth followed that of man. Tho Noah of the Bible appears in the tablet story as Ziugidda. When the gods, for some reason not made clear, decided to destroy mankind, one of them informed Ziuguidda ot the impending disaster, and he built an ark, in which his family sought shelter, the epic says. The fall of rain, according to the tablet story, lasted only seven days, instead of forty as related in the Bible. When at last the clouds disappeared. Ziugidda opened the roof of his ark and “let the light of the sun god into the ark.”

When the water had subsided Ziugidda “prayed to the gods with a loud voice,” the poem continues, and sacrificed an ox, a sheep, and something with “a great horn.” Through the intercession of Nintu the gods then forgave the surviving human beings, and gave them immortality, which they had not possessed before the flood.

Ziugidda, according to the epic, was taken to an island in tho- Persian Gulf, where he lived in a kind of paradise. The tablet originally was about seven inches square, but on such a small surface the ancients could write, in their strange ideographic languages a long poem. „ Fragments of the tablet are missing, but it is hoped they will be found in some of the repositories to which relics from the Babylonian excavations have been taken.