And yet it is not. It so happens that among the fragments of ancient Babylonian epic and legend which have come down to us is a long poem in twelve books, composed in the age of Abraham, or earlier, by a certain Sin-liqi-unnini, and recounting the adventures of the Chaldæan hero Gilgames. It is based on older materials, and is, in fact, the last note and final summing-up of Chaldæan epic song. Older poems have been incorporated into it, and the epic itself has been artificially moulded upon an astronomical plan. Its twelve books, in each of which a new adventure of its hero is recorded, correspond with the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the months of the year that were named after them. The eleventh month was presided over by Aquarius, and was the month of ‘the Curse of Rain’; into the eleventh book of the poem, accordingly, there has been introduced the episode of the Deluge. The story of the Deluge had been the subject of many poems. Fragments of some of them we possess, and the details of the story were not always the same. But the version preserved in the epic of Gilgames became what we may term the standard one; the very fact that it was embodied in the most famous of the epics made it widely known. When it was discovered by Mr. George Smith in 1872, its striking resemblance to the story of the Flood in Genesis was at once apparent to every one. In details as well as in general outline the two accounts agreed; even in the moral cause assigned to the Deluge—the sin of man—the Babylonian story alone among traditions of a Deluge was at one with the Biblical narrative. A comparison of the Chaldæan and Biblical accounts leads to the following results. The resemblances between them extend equally to the Elohistic and the Yahvistic portions of the Hebrew narrative. Like the Elohist, the epic ascribes the Deluge to the sins of mankind, and the preservation of Xisuthros, the Chaldæan Noah, and his family to the piety of the hero; all living things, moreover, are involved in the calamity, except such as are preserved in the ark; its approach is revealed to Xisuthros by the god Ea, who instructs him how to build ‘the ship’; Ea also, like Elohim, prescribes the dimensions of the ark, which is divided into rooms and stories, and pitched within and without; ‘the seed of life of all kinds’ is taken into it, together with the family of Xisuthros; the waters of the Flood are said to cover ‘all the high mountains,’ and to destroy all living creatures except those that were in the ark; this latter, too, had a window; and when the Deluge had subsided and Xisuthros had offered a sacrifice on the peak of the mountain, Bel blessed him and declared that he would never again destroy the world by a flood while Istar ‘lifted up’ the rainbow, which an old Babylonian hymn calls ‘the bow of the Deluge.’[135]