[18] Lenormant: Les Origines. Schrader: Die Keilenschriften. Smith: Chaldean Genesis.
The cosmological texts now available were not written then. They are drawn from others that were. But there is a vignette that probably is of that age. It represents a man and a woman stretching their hands to a tree. Behind the woman writhes a snake. The tree, known as the holy cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which stimulated desire, is described in an epic that recites the adventures of Gilgames.
Gilgames was the national hero of Chaldea. The story of his loves with Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and Delilah myth. Ishtar, described in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules. The legend of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago.
In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not to die. In trying he reached a garden, guarded by cherubim, where the holy cedar was. There he learned that one being only could teach him to be immortal, and that being, Adra-Khasis, had been translated to the Land of the Silver Sky. Adra-Khasis, was the Chaldean Noah. Gilgames sought him and the story of the deluge follows. But with a difference. On the seventh day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a dove that returned, finally a raven that did not. Then he looked out, and looking, shrieked. Every one had perished.
Noah was less emotional, or, if equally compassionate, the fact is not recited. Apart from that detail and one other, the story of the flood is common to all folklore. Even the Aztecs knew of it. Probably it originated in the matrix of nations which the table-land of Asia was. But only in Chaldean myth, and subsequently in Hebrew legend, was the flood ascribed to sin.
Gilgames' quest, meanwhile, could not have been wholly vain. In an archaic inscription it is stated that the city of Erech was built in olden times by the deified Gilgames.[19]
[19] Proc. S. B. A. xvi. 13-15.
How old the olden times may have been is conjectural. Modern science has put the advent of man sixty million years ago. Chaldean chronology is less spacious. But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand years. The traditions were probably imaginary. Even so, in the morning of the world, already there were ancient cities. There was Nippur, one of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where Ea was lord of man. There was Ur, where Sin was lord of the moon. There were other divinities. There was Enmesara, lord of the land whence none return, and Makhir, god of dreams.
There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years ago, combined. Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered. It would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. What Sargon made, Khammurabi solidified. Between their colossal figures two millennia stretch. These giants are distinct. None the less, across the ages they seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, but into another person.
Sargon has descended through time clothed in a little of the poetry which garments nation builders. But the poetry is not a mantle for the imaginary. In the British Museum is a marble ball that he dedicated to a god. Paris has the seal of his librarian.[20] Copies of his annals are extant.[21] In these it is related that, when a child, his mother put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates. Presently he was rescued. Afterward he became a leader of men.