should say, put on the hatches; and Nes-Hea, the pilot, was left
alone on deck to do his best for the ship. Thereupon a hurricane
began to rage; rain fell in torrents; the subterranean waters
burst forth; a deluge swept over the land, and the wind lashed
it into waves sky high; heaven and earth became mingled in
chaotic gloom. For six days and seven nights the gale raged, but
the good ship held out until, on the seventh day, the storm
lulled. Hasisadra ventured on deck; and, seeing nothing but a
waste of waters strewed with floating corpses and wreck, wept
over the destruction of his land and people. Far away, the
mountains of Nizir were visible; the ship was steered for them
and ran aground upon the higher land. Yet another seven days
passed by. On the seventh, Hasisadra sent forth a dove, which
found no resting place and returned; then he liberated a
swallow, which also came back; finally, a raven was let loose,
and that sagacious bird, when it found that the water had
abated, came near the ship, but refused to return to it.
Upon this, Hasisadra liberated the rest of the wild animals,
which immediately dispersed in all directions, while he, with
his family and friends, ascending a mountain hard by, offered
sacrifice upon its summit to the gods.

The story thus given in summary abstract, told in an ancient
Semitic dialect, is inscribed in cuneiform characters upon a
tablet of burnt clay. Many thousands of such tablets, collected
by Assurbanipal, King of Assyria in the middle of the seventh
century B.C., were stored in the library of his palace at
Nineveh; and, though in a sadly broken and mutilated condition,
they have yielded a marvellous amount of information to the
patient and sagacious labour which modern scholars have bestowed