A large proportion of the cuneiform texts from which the translations contained in the present volume are made has not yet been published. I have, however, gone carefully over them all with the exception of a small portion of the Izdubar Epic, and endeavoured to bring the translations up to the level of our present knowledge of the Assyrian language. I am indebted to the ready kindness and accurate eye of Mr. Pinches for copies of almost all the unpublished portions of the Izdubar legends. In these he has corrected several faulty readings, more especially that of the name of the pilot of Xisuthrus, which ought to be Nes-Hea, “the lion of Hea.” Mr. Pinches assures me that the name of the deity composing the second part of the name is invariably written with the numeral 40, the symbol of the god Hea, except once when the scribe has miswritten 50, the symbol of Bel, and he has pointed out to me a passage in a bilingual tablet where the name is explained in Assyrian by Nes-Hea. Unfortunately, the texts given in pp. 103-124 cannot be found, and here therefore I have been obliged to leave Mr. Smith’s translations unaltered. The reader, however, must remember that no translations of these mutilated tablets can be more than approximately correct. Even if the meaning of all the words were well known, and they were divided from one another (which is not the case), the broken condition of so many of the inscriptions would make a good deal of the translation more or less conjectural. This must be doubly the case where the signification of the words is either unknown or only half known. I have always endeavoured to indicate a doubtful word or passage by a query; but there must be instances in which the meaning that I believe ought to be assigned to particular words will be corrected by the further progress of discovery. This is even more true of what may be termed the commentary accompanying the translations. Surprises are constantly in store for the Assyrian decipherer, and a tiny fragment may suddenly throw a new light on a question he had supposed to be settled. In fact, in Assyriology, as in all other branches of science, there is no finality; we cannot be more than approximately exact at any given time, and every month enables us to introduce fresh corrections and improvements into our work.