The account
of the circumstances which led up to the flood, of those under
which Hasisadra's adventure was made known to his descendant, of
certain remarkable incidents before and after the flood, are
inseparably bound up with the details already given. And I am
unable to discover any justification for arbitrarily picking out
some of these and dubbing them historical verities, while
rejecting the rest as legendary fictions. They stand or
fall together.
Before proceeding to the consideration of these less
satisfactory details, it is needful to remark that Hasisadra's
adventure is a mere episode in a cycle of stories of which a
personage, whose name is provisionally read "Izdubar," is the
centre. The nature of Izdubar hovers vaguely between the heroic
and the divine; sometimes he seems a mere man, sometimes
approaches so closely to the divinities of fire and of the sun
as to be hardly distinguishable from them. As I have already
mentioned, the tablet which sets forth Hasisadra's perils is one
of twelve; and, since each of these represents a month and bears
a story appropriate to the corresponding sign of the Zodiac,
great weight must be attached to Sir Henry Rawlinson's
suggestion that the epos of Izdubar is a poetical embodiment of
solar mythology.
In the earlier books of the epos, the hero, not content with
rejecting the proffered love of the Chaldaean Aphrodite, Istar,
freely expresses his very low estimate of her character; and it
is interesting to observe that, even in this early stage of
human experience, men had reached a conception of that law of
nature which expresses the inevitable consequences of an
imperfect appreciation of feminine charms.
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