Page:The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).djvu/140

 give it here a separate place, preceding the tablets of the "Wars of the Gods."

The principal actor in the legend is a being named Zu, the name being found in all three cases of an Assyrian noun Zu, Za and Zi. Preceding the name is the determinative of divinity, from which I judge Zu to have been ranked among the gods.

The story of the sin of Zu has sometimes reminded me of the outrage of Ham on his father Noah, and the mutilation of Ouranus by his son Saturn, but there is not sufficient evidence to connect the stories, and there are in the Assyrian account several very difficult words. One of these is particularly obscure, and I only transcribe it here by the ordinary phonetic values of the characters um-sim-i, it may possibly mean some talisman or oracle in the possession of Bel, which was robbed from him by Zu. There are besides the two difficult words parzi and tereti, which I have preferred merely transcribing in my translation. It must be added that the inscription is seriously mutilated in some parts, giving additional difficulty in the translation.

The tablet containing the account of the sin of Zu, K 3454, in the Museum collection, originally contained four columns of text, each column having about sixty lines of writing. The first and fourth column are almost entirely lost, there not being enough anywhere to translate from.

The single fragment preserved, belonging to the