2. Hea or Ea, the god of the Nineveh tablets, was a fish-god: he was
represented in the Chaldean monuments as half man and half fish; he was
described as the god, not of the rivers and seas, but of "the abyss"--to
wit, the ocean. He it was who was said to have brought civilization and
letters to the ancestors of the Assyrians. He clearly represented an
ancient, maritime, civilized nation; he came from the ocean, and was
associated with some land and people that had been destroyed by rain and
inundations. The fact that the scene of the Deluge is located on the
Euphrates proves nothing, for we will see hereafter that almost every
nation had its especial mountain on which, according to its traditions,
the ark rested; just as every Greek tribe had its own particular
mountain of Olympos. The god Bel of the legend was the Baal of the
Phoenicians, who, as we shall show, were of Atlantean origin. Bel, or
Baal, was worshipped on the western and northern coasts of Europe, and
gave his name to the Baltic, the Great and Little Belt, Balesbaugen,
Balestranden, etc.; and to many localities, in the British Islands, as,
for instance, Belan and the Baal hills in Yorkshire.

3. In those respects wherein the Chaldean legend, evidently the older
form of the tradition, differs from the Biblical record, we see that in
each instance we approach nearer to Atlantis. The account given in
Genesis is the form of the tradition that would be natural to an inland
people. Although there is an allusion to "the breaking up of the
fountains of the great deep" (about which I shall speak more fully
hereafter), the principal destruction seems to have been accomplished by
rain; hence the greater period allowed for the Deluge, to give time
enough for the rain to fall, and subsequently drain off from the land. A
people dwelling in the midst of a continent could not conceive the
possibility of a whole world sinking beneath the sea; they therefore