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 upon them. Among the multitude of documents of various kinds, this narrative of Hasisadra's adventure has been found in a tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is only a copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty reasons for believing that the story of Hasisadra's flood was well known in Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C. No doubt, then, we are in presence of a narrative which has all the authority which antiquity can confer; and it is proper to deal respectfully with it, even though it is quite as proper, and indeed necessary, to act no less respectfully towards ourselves; and, before professing to put implicit faith in it, to inquire what claim it has to be regarded as a serious account of an historical event. It is of no use to appeal to contemporary history, although the annals of Babylonia, no less than those of Egypt, go much further back than 2000 B.C. All that can be said is, that the former are hardly consistent with the supposition that any catastrophe, competent to destroy all the population, has befallen the land since civilisation began, and that the latter are notoriously silent about deluges. In such a case as this, however, the silence of history does not leave the inquirer wholly at fault. Natural science has something to say when the phenomena of nature are in question. Natural science may be able to show, from the nature of the country, either that such an event as that described in the story is impossible, or at any rate highly improbable; or, on the other hand, that it is consonant with probability. In the former case, the narrative must be suspected or rejected; in the latter, no such summary verdict can be given: on the contrary, it must be admitted that the story may be true. And then, if certain strangely prevalent canons of criticism are accepted, and if the evidence that an event might have happened is to be accepted as proof that it did happen, Assyriologists will be at liberty to congratulate one another on the "confirmation by modern science" of the authority of their ancient books. It will be interesting, therefore, to inquire how far the physical structure and the other conditions of the region in which Surippak was situated are compatible with such a flood as is described in the Assyrian record.