Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/167

Rh Hetep, a division of which, called Sekhet-Aaru, ultimately absorbed the whole. The name Sekhet-Hetep means the Field of Peace, and Sekhet-Aaru means the Field of Reed Plants, and originally they seem to have been situated in the Delta to which Osiris belonged.

"The followers of Osiris believed that the righteous dead could find their everlasting abode in the kingdom of that god, and would enjoy in a fertile land, with running streams, a life very like that which the well-to-do Egyptians lived on earth." Sekhet-Hetep was rectangular in shape and intersected by canals from the stream that encircled the region. A place was set apart for the birthplace of the god of the region, and another for the great company of the gods. It sounds strange that a region of the Delta should be described as the Isles of the Blest. But it seems that the dead were supposed to live, in Sekhet-Hetep, on the eyots made by the intersecting canals, or else on oases which appeared as green islands in an ocean of sand.

In a Sumerian legend the survivor of the Flood, Ziudsiddu, is transplanted to an earthly paradise on an island in Dilmun, which is in all probability situated in the Persian Gulf. In the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the hero visits his ancestor on this island. Gilgamesh has incurred the wrath of the great goddess. His companion, Eabani, dies and goes to the dread underworld. Gilgamesh is smitten with a foul disease, but is determined not to die, as was the fate of all Babylonians. He remembered that his ancestor, here called Sit-napishtim, lived in the Isles of the Blest, where he had been transported by the gods after the Flood that destroyed all mankind except himself and his wife. Sit-napishtim had attained "the