Page:Buried cities and Bible countries (1891).djvu/373

 captured a city, would carry off the sacred writings to enrich the royal library at Nineveh. When they were brought to Nineveh they were copied by the priests, and they were sometimes translated into the Assyrian tongue, although Assyrians who professed to be well educated used to learn the Akkadian language, much as English boys learn Latin, or theological students study Hebrew and read the writings in the original. It is very interesting to find that these old Assyrians and these ancient Chaldeans had their own version of the Creation, the Deluge, the Building of Babel, &c., which they venerated as being ancient even then, and regarded as most sacred.

The Chaldean narratives differed in minor particulars from those in the Bible. The Chaldean Deluge, for instance, lasted only seven days, instead of the greater part of a year; the vessel was not an ark, but a ship, of proper ship shape, with a pilot on board to navigate it, and other people on board besides the family of Noah. The Chaldean Noah, when the waters were subsiding, sent out not only a raven and a dove, but a swallow as well; and in the end of the event he was translated that he should not see death; and this in the Bible does not occur to Noah, but to Enoch. Nevertheless, with these and other differences, we have the grand fact that the cycle of narratives preserved in the early chapters of Genesis are not mere ingenious inventions on the part of Hebrew writers, but had their parallel in early Chaldea. The key to their exact meaning is for the present lost; but we may hope that it will be recovered, and then there will be an end to the controversy between Geology and Genesis.

Babylonia comprehended the country from near the Lower Zab to the Persian Gulf, about 400 miles long; and from Elam, east of the Tigris, to the Arabian Desert, west of the Euphrates, an average breadth of 150 miles.