History and mythology.--Historical documents are numerous and include the lists of Assyrian eponyms, after whom the successive years were named, as well as of the dynasties of kings and the number of years each king reigned. Religious literature, however, was still more largely represented. As has been stated, a considerable portion of it consisted of hymns to the gods, psalms, and ritual texts. But there were also lists of the multitudinous deities and their temples, and more especially religious myths and legends. One of these described the visit of the goddess Istar to Hades in search of her dead husband Tammuz, the Sun-god, and told how she left some of her adornment at each of its seven gates, until at last she stood stripped and bare before the mistress of the Underworld, where the waters of life gush forth. In another the adventures of the first man Adapa are related, and how he was summoned to heaven to answer the charge of having broken the wings of the south-wind. We possess two fragments of this myth, the earlier part being written on a broken tablet which was found in the library of Nineveh, while the latter part of it has been found on one of the cuneiform documents discovered at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt, where it had been copied for Egyptian or Canaanite students some eight centuries before the library of Nineveh was in existence. The Chaldaean epic and the Deluge.--One of the most famous of the legends is the Chaldaean account of the Deluge, which was discovered by George Smith in 1872. Its close resemblance to the Biblical account of the same event is well known. It embodied at least two earlier versions of the story, and in its present form is inserted as an episode in the great Epic of the Babylonian hero Gilgames. The Epic was composed by a certain Sin-liqi-unnini in twelve books, and was arranged on an astronomical principle, the subject of each book corresponding with the name of a Zodiacal sign. Thus the account of the Deluge is introduced into the eleventh book, which answers to Aquarius the eleventh sign of the Zodiac.