There is, however, another class of myths that have to do with the great fact of the flood, which no local phenomena, happening here and there over the world, can account for, and which could not be originated by the reflecting or observing mind. Traditions of a flood are very numerous, and confined to no one or two races. According to a remark of Bunsen (in his Christiunitif and .^fanhind, iv, 121), they are not to be met with in the myths of the Turanian or Ilamitic races; the tribes of Africa have retained but slender traces of a flood at the best; but in China, Hindostan, Persia, Greece, Bab- ylon, in the Edda, and through the tribes of North and South America, they present themselves to us as a part of the mythologies. In many local traditions it is the land of the tribe which is visited with a deluge, but this is no objection against their common origin. In Greece there were fables of three deluges, one of which, Deucalion's, was in Thessaly, that of Ogyges in Bocotia or Attica, and one was localized in the island of Samo- thrace. Pindar's simple story makes mention of the water overwhelming the earth, of its being forced back by the wisdom of Zeus, and then of Deucalion and Pyr- rha coming down from Blount Parnassus to their home at Locrian Opus, where they had a posterity of stones. The destruction of the men of the iron age, the building of an ark by Deucalion at the suggestion ofPromctlKus, the copious rains bringing on a flood, the death of all men but a few^ who fled to the highest mountains, the floating of the ark nine days and nights until it struck on Parnassus, are particulars given by raythographers and later poets. The renewal of the human race by Deucalion and Pyrrha throwing stones behind their backs is a play of words between \n6c,peoj)le, and X««c, stone, as Max M idler and others remark. This myth seems to have been known to Hesiod; and Deucalion is engrafted into the genealogies of the Hellenic race. It is possible that some story imjiorted from foreign parts was its foundation. Across the Atlantic, in a widely different race, we find a tradition which repeats tlie story of the renewal of men in the time of Deucnlinn and Pyrrha. The Caribbean tribe of tlie Tamanakas, on the Orinoco, say that a man and a woman, the only persons saved in a deluge, threw the fruit of the ]\Iau- ritia-palm over their heads, and thus created a new race (.1. G. Midler, Amer. Urrelif/. p. 22'.>, and Humboldt there cited). We have only room to refer to two other traditions of a flood. One is that of India, wliich first appears in the Mahahharata, as an episode whicli Bopp has translated (Berlin, 182!l). In this myth ^Manus. a rigidly ascetic jirince, was on the bank of the \\'irini, when a small fish called for his protection against larger ones, and was put by him into a dish. The fish out- grew the vessel, was then removed info a lake, then, again outgrowing its dwelling, into the Ganges, and
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from the Ganges into the ocean. As it entered the ocean it told Manus that a great deluge was at hand, that he must build a ship with sails, go into it with the seven wise men, and provide himself with all the seeds known to the Brahmins. The fish promised to appear with a horn, to which IManus should tie his vessel, and so pass over the waters in safety. Many years the fish towed the ship of Manus over the fulness of waters. At length he gave orders to bind the ship to the highest point of Himavan (the Himalayas), which is called, says the poet, " ship-fastening," Naubandhanam, until this day. Then the fish said to Manus, " I am the lord of creatures, even Brahma; higher than me there is nothing." And he bade him renew the race of created things and the worlds, which by means of strict penance he was to accomplish. The deluge of Xisuthrus, which seems half borrowed from the narrative in the Script- ures, is reported by Berosus, who was born under Alex- ander the Great." Xisuthrus, king of Babylon, was warned by Saturn (Bel) that a flood would come upon the earth in which all men would perish, and was or- dered to conceal his books in one of the cities called Heliopolis, and to build a vessel into which he could go with his relations and friends, with birds, beasts, and quadrupeds, together with all necessary food. When the flood was abating he repeated the experiment of Noah, sending out birds, which twice returned, but the third time went their way. He now broke a hole in the vessel, and disappeared, being translated among the gods, with his wife, his son, and the ark-builder. Frag- ments of that vessel, Berosus is made to say, are still to be seen on a mountain in Armenia. The same story was known to Nicolaus of Damascus, a friend of Herod the Great. Josephus (.4 nt. i, 3, (3), who mentions this, says that all who have recorded the history of barba- rian nations have mentioned the deluge and the ark. The story which made the Ainienian mountains the landing-place from the ark seems to have circulated in that country before it received Christianity (comp. Wiseman's 'Led. p. 290, Amer. ed. of 1837). To this Babylonian flood myth can now be added an Assyrian one, discovered by George Smith, the decipherer of cu- neiform records, who published two or three years since the life of Assurbanipal, one of the last Assyrian kings, and a contemporary of Manasseh, from the clay tablets recording his reign, and has since found new tablets made for the same king, on which the myth referred to is narrated. It is far more mythological than the Bab- ylonian tradition, and seems to be of later origin, but does not materially .differ from the earlier known ac- count, while the name of the ark-builder, which is Sisit, is evidently identical with Xisuthrus. It is worthy of mention that M. Lenormant, in a memoir on this newly- found Assyrian myth, with some plausibility, shows how the story passed from Assyria into India, and was not indigenous in the latter country. We might strengthen our position by the aid of other similar myths, but for this we have no space. What but a tradition of a great fact can have led men all over the world to have a com- mon story of a deluge inwoven in their mythology, the very variations of which — and they are very great — point to a great antiquity of the story, as well as to its independent working up? We close the subject with some remarks of Prof. Welcker's {Griech. Gotterl. i, 770) on the Greek myths relating to the flood. These, he says, were not inferences from observations of their own. " Only a great event, a covering of the earth with water over wide regions, was suflicient to make a deep impres- sion on human memory, and to produce a story formed with such beautiful simplicity, and spread so widely among the original nations of Asia." See Deluge.