A race that has no national epos is one devoid of great memories, incapable of high culture and political development, and no such has taken a place among the leading races of the world. All those that have occupied such a place at any period of the world's history, have had their Mythic and Heroic Ages, brimful of wonders and fanciful creations. 4. From these remarks it will be clear that the preceding two or three chapters have been treating of what may properly be called the Religious and Cosmogonic Myths of the Shumiro-Accads and the Babylonians. The present chapter will be devoted to their Heroic Myths or Mythic Epos, as embodied in an Epic which has been in great part preserved, and which is the oldest known in the world, dating certainly from 2000 years B.C., and probably more. 5. Of this poem the few fragments we have of Berosus contain no indication. They only tell of a great deluge which took place under the last of that fabulous line of ten kings which is said to have begun 259,000 years after the apparition of the divine Man-Fish, Oannes, and to have reigned in the aggregate a period of 432,000 years. The description has always excited great interest from its extraordinary resemblance to that given by the Bible. Berosus tells how XISUTHROS, the last of the ten fabulous kings, had a dream in which the deity announced to him that on a certain day all men should perish in a deluge of waters, and ordered him to take all the sacred writings and bury them at Sippar, the City of the Sun, then to build a ship, provide it with ample stores of food and drink and enter it with his family and his dearest friends, also animals, both birds and quadrupeds of every kind. Xisuthros did as he had been bidden. When the flood began to abate, on the third day after the rain had ceased to fall, he sent out some birds, to see whether they would find any land, but the birds, having found neither food nor place to rest upon, returned to the ship. A few days later, Xisuthros once more sent the birds out; but they again came back to him, this time with muddy feet. On being sent out a third time, they did not return at all. Xisuthros then knew that the land was uncovered; made an opening in the roof of the ship and saw that it was stranded on the top of a mountain. He came out of the ship with his wife, daughter and pilot, built an altar and sacrificed to the gods, after which he disappeared together with these. When his companions came out to seek him they did not see him, but a voice from heaven informed them that he had been translated among the gods to live forever, as a reward for his piety and righteousness. The voice went on to command the survivors to return to Babylonia, unearth the sacred writings and make them known to men. They obeyed and, moreover, built many cities and restored Babylon.