seven herbs, and the sweet savour of the sacrifice caused the gods to assemble, and Sisit prayed that Bel (El) might not come to the altar. For Bel (El) had made the storm and sunk the people in the deep, and wished in his anger to destroy the ship and allow no man to escape. Adar opened his mouth and spoke to the warrior Bel (El): Who would then be left? And Hea spoke to him: Captain of the gods, instead of the storm, let lions and leopards increase, and diminish mankind; let famine and pestilence desolate the land and destroy mankind. When the sentence of the gods was passed, Bel (El) came into the midst of the ship and took Sisit by the hand and conducted him forth, and caused his wife to be brought to his side, and purified the earth, and made a covenant, and Sisit and his wife and his people were carried away like gods, and Sisit dwelt in a distant land at the mouth of the rivers."[322] The correspondence to the Hebrew tradition of the flood, the coincidence of certain points, and striking contrast of others, both in the narrative of Berosus and in this account of the great flood, need not be pointed out. In number, at any rate, the ten kings whom Berosus places before the flood correspond to the ten patriarchs from Adam to Noah.[323] In Berosus the boat of Xisuthrus lands in Armenia on the mountains of the Gordyæans; Noah's ark landed on the mountains of the land of Ararat. Like Sisit, Xisuthrus builds an altar and offers sacrifice; when he has left the boat he disappears, and bids his followers return to Chaldæa. They obey, and rebuild Babylon. Noah, after leaving the ark, builds an altar to the Lord and offers burnt sacrifice, and concludes the new covenant with Jehovah. Then Noah became a husbandman, and lived for three hundred and fifty years after the flood; but when the generations of his sons "journeyed from the East, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, _i.e._ in Babylonia, and there they dwelt and built the city called Babylon."[324] It is clear that these legends formed an ancient common possession of the Semitic tribes of the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris. In the Scriptures of the Hebrews we find this in a purified and deepened form. The reason for the legend of the flood is found in the nature of the land of Babylon. As has been remarked, it is inundated yearly; it is also occasionally desolated by fierce floods, which change the whole of the lower land as far as the sea into a broad sheet of water. Similar legends are found in all regions exposed to floods, in Armenia, Thessaly, Boeotia, and in India.