And the
memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and
devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for
long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a
Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a great
catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such
an appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken in his
audience the tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is
there for insisting that he must have had some individual good
in view, and that his history is historical, in the sense that
the account of the effects of a hurricane in the Bay of Bengal,
in the year 1875, is historical?
More than three centuries after the time of Assurbanipal,
Berosus of Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great,
wrote an account of the history of his country in Greek.
The work of Berosus has vanished; but extracts from it--how far
faithful is uncertain--have been preserved by later writers.
Among these occurs the well-known story of the Deluge of
Xisuthros, which is evidently built upon the same foundation as
that of Hasisadra. The incidents of the divine warning, the
building of the ship, the sending out of birds, the ascension of
the hero, betray their common origin. But stories, like Madeira,
acquire a heightened flavour with time and travel; and the
version of Berosus is characterised by those circumstantial
improbabilities which habitually gather round the legend of a
legend.
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