BOOK IV. OF THE WATERS. HEAD I. OF THE DELUGE, AS REMEMBERED AMONG THE NATIONS.

○It were premature, at the opening of a Book of which the subject is the memorial of the waters in the religions of the heathen, to do more than set down, with such exactness as the testimonies permit, the relations in which the event of the Deluge is found to have been remembered among nations other than that to which it was originally delivered; and it is to be understood that the present head proposes to establish no more than this, namely, that the event was remembered, and that it was remembered in more than one place and in more than one manner, leaving to the heads which follow the question, which is of another order, in what figure the memory was afterwards embodied.¹ That the memory of a great catastrophe by water should have survived among the descendants of those who were witnesses of it, and who carried it abroad at the Dispersion, is a proposition which, although it is not, I think, to be called improbable, is not therefore to be taken for granted; and it is on this account that I have thought it right to precede the more difficult heads by one in which the testimony is collected, and in which nothing is inferred. NB-35-012 NB-35-020 NB-39-019

○The relation which approaches most nearly to the sacred history, of all that I have as yet entered, is that which Lucian reports in his treatise upon the Syrian goddess as having been told to him by the Greeks (Lucian. de Dea Syria, c. 12). He relates, in substance, that the generation then living having been destroyed by waters which covered everything, one man only, Deucalion, was preserved for the sake of another generation, and that he was preserved on account of his wisdom and his piety; that he placed his children and his wives in an ark of great size, and entered it himself; and that there came to him, as he embarked, the wild beasts of every kind that range upon the earth, in couples, all of which he received, and none of which did him any harm, a friendship remaining among them by the ordinance of Jupiter.² The sacred text assigns to the saving of the patriarch a ground which is not different in kind: "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God" (Gen. vi. 9); and the ark, the family and the creatures are in the Greek relation, as in the Hebrew, all retained.³ It is to be observed, however, that the nearness of the relation to the sacred history is no proof that it is the earliest of the heathen versions, and that the identity of the man who is saved with the patriarch Noah rests upon the agreement of the circumstances, and upon nothing whatever in the name. NB-35-012

○Lucian, however, gives the Greek relation as one of two; and the other, which he attributes to the men of Hierapolis, is of a different complexion (Lucian. de Dea Syria, c. 13). It is there related that a mighty chasm opened in their country, and received all the water, and that Deucalion, upon that occasion, raised altars and founded a temple to Juno above the chasm; and the writer adds that he has himself seen the chasm, that it lies beneath the temple, and that it is of very small dimensions.⁴ In the place which I have copied nothing is said of the water's having gone down by the chasm, nor is there any vessel in the relation, nor any company of beasts; and what remains is the event considered as a draining, together with the founding of a temple by the person who survived it. I have not thought it right to harmonise the two accounts by supplying, in the second, an ark which the text does not name; the relations are two, and each is local; they agree in the person and in the temple, and differ in the manner; and it is not, I think, without some significance for the present argument that a difference so considerable in the manner should have left the person and the temple untouched.⁵ The man is in each the same, and so is the founding of the temple; it is in the manner of the waters' disappearing that the men of Hierapolis part from the Greeks.⁶ NB-35-020 NB-35-012

○The temple at Hierapolis bears upon another matter, which it is convenient to notice in this place. Mr. Bryant, in recapitulating what he has elsewhere shown, recalls that he has "taken notice of many temples and cities, which were built in memory of the Ark and Deluge," and others, as he says, manifestly denominated from Noah; and he observes further that an ark or ship was made use of as a sacred emblem in the rites of Isis and Osiris (Bryant, Analysis, vol. ii. Jonah, Put, Chaldaeorum).⁷ The division which he thus makes, between what commemorates the event and what takes its name from the man, is his own, and I willingly adopt it, since it is very nearly the division upon which the present Book proceeds. The relation of the men of Hierapolis supplies, if I am not mistaken, a temple of the first class,⁸ and it stands above the chasm which took the waters, and was founded, upon the relation, on that occasion. It is not among those which Mr. Bryant names in the place cited; but I do not say that he has omitted it, the passage in question being a recapitulation of what is shown at greater length in the earlier parts of his work. NB-39-019 NB-35-020

○The testimony of Berosus is of another order, and is to be distinguished from the foregoing with some care (Beros. ap. Syncell. Chron.; Euseb. Chron.), and not to be confounded with the passage upon Oannes in the same author. He relates, as the fragment is preserved by Syncellus, that the vessel having been stranded in Armenia, some part of it yet remained in the mountains of that country, and that the inhabitants were accustomed to scrape off the bitumen with which it had been coated on the outside, and to employ it as a remedy against poisons and as an amulet.⁹ The vessel is here a thing, coated with bitumen and preserved in a place; it is not a figure, nor is it a goddess.¹⁰ Mr. Faber, on the other hand, in the chapter on the Cabeiri, makes Derceto or Atargatis "a mere personification of the lunar Ark," and Dagon another title of Noah, represented like Derceto with the body of a man ending in the tail of a fish (Faber, Cabiri, vol. i. ch. ii.); so that the same figure is made to signify the vessel in the goddess and the man in the god, according as the argument requires.¹¹ For this I find no warrant in the passage of Berosus before me; and it is a further instance of that confusion of the two modes which will be noticed under the head that follows. NB-38-016 NB-37-011

○It is not possible to leave the testimonies of the Deluge without some notice of that which Sir William Jones has delivered from the Indian books, although I have it only at second hand, and know nothing of the originals beyond what he is pleased to give (Jones, Asiatick Researches, vol. i. 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India').¹² He has translated, as he says, from the Bhagavat, the narrative of the principal event in the life of Satyavrata, which is the subject of the first Purana, that of the Matsya, or Fish; and he adds that the appearance of a horned fish to the religious monarch was Maya, or delusion.¹³ A fish, then, stands in a relation of the Deluge from India, as the beasts, in the relation of the Greeks, come to the saved man in couples (Lucian. de Dea Syria, c. 12); and I set the two side by side. That the fish is called delusion is the relator's gloss, and is not to be pressed into the present matter.¹⁴ NB-40-009

○It will be perceived that the testimonies thus collected, differing as they do in the manner, in the place and in the figures which they employ, agree in the one point for which they were adduced, namely, that a great flood, and the preservation of one man or of a remnant, were remembered in Greece, in Syria, in Chaldaea, and, if Sir William Jones is to be trusted, in India. It may be objected, in the first place, that the agreement is an agreement of circumstances only, and that the names are in every case different; to which I answer that circumstances are precisely what a memory, which has passed through many generations and tongues, may be expected to retain, and that names are precisely what it may be expected to lose. It may be objected, in the second place, that the relations are late, and that those who set them down had it in their power to borrow from a source which was not their own; to which I answer that a borrowing, supposing it proved, would show how widely the relation was current, and would leave untouched the point at present maintained, that it was remembered. And it may be objected, lastly, that these relations, being in the greater number local, can attest no more than the local remembrance; to which I answer that the objection, if it were carried to its conclusion, would require the Greeks, the men of Hierapolis, the Chaldaeans and the Indians to have invented severally and without concert an event of which the sacred text alone supplies the cause. In what figure the memory of the waters was afterwards embodied, and whether the fish of which the later heads treat has any place in it, are questions which these testimonies do not determine, and which I defer to the heads that follow.¹⁵ NB-35-012 NB-35-020 NB-38-016 NB-40-009