** Sayce thinks that the myth originated at Eridu, on the
shores of the Persian Gulf, and afterwards received its
present form at Babylon, where the local schools of theology
adapted it to the god Merodach.

*** The tablets in which it is preserved for us come partly
from the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, partly from
that of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa; these latter are
more recent than the others, and seem to have been written
during the period of the Persian supremacy.

Like the Egyptian civilization, it had had its birth between the sea and
the dry land on a low, marshy, alluvial soil, flooded annually by the
rivers which traverse it, devastated at long intervals by tidal waves of
extraordinary violence. The Euphrates and the Tigris cannot be regarded
as mysterious streams like the Nile, whose source so long defied
exploration that people were tempted to place it beyond the regions
inhabited by man. The former rise in Armenia, on the slopes of the
Niphates, one of the chains of mountains which lie between the Black Sea
and Mesopotamia, and the only range which at certain points reaches the
line of eternal snow. At first they flow parallel to one another, the
Euphrates from east to west as far as Malatiyeh, the Tigris from the
west towards the east in the direction of Assyria. Beyond Malatiyeh, the
Euphrates bends abruptly to the south-west, and makes its way across the
Taurus as though desirous of reaching the Mediterranean by the shortest
route, but it soon alters its intention, and makes for the south-east
in search of the Persian Gulf. The Tigris runs in an oblique direction
towards the south from the point where the mountains open out, and
gradually approaches the Euphrates. Near Bagdad the two rivers are only