The later narrator knows the exact day of the month on
which the flood began. The dimensions of the ship are stated
with Munchausenian precision at five stadia by two--say, half by
one-fifth of an English mile. The ship runs aground among the
"Gordaean mountains" to the south of Lake Van, in Armenia,
beyond the limits of any imaginable real inundation of the
Euphrates valley; and, by way of climax, we have the assertion,
worthy of the sailor who said that he had brought up one of
Pharaoh's chariot wheels on the fluke of his anchor in the Red
Sea, that pilgrims visited the locality and made amulets of the
bitumen which they scraped off from the still extant remains of
the mighty ship of Xisuthros.
Suppose that some later polyhistor, as devoid of critical
faculty as most of his tribe, had found the version of Berosus,
as well as another much nearer the original story; that, having
too much respect for his authorities to make up a
tertium
quid of his own, out of the materials offered, he followed a
practice, common enough among ancient and, particularly, among
Semitic historians, of dividing, both into fragments and piecing
these together, without troubling himself very much about those
resulting repetitions and inconsistencies; the product of such a
primitive editorial operation would be a narrative analogous to
that which treats of the Noachian deluge in the book of Genesis.
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