20. Assur, the primitive capital. 21. Ninua or Nineveh. 22. Calah. 23. Resen (Assyrian Res-eni, “the head of the spring.”)
So far as the various statements go, all these cities and probably many others were in existence in the time of Nimrod, and some of them even before the Flood; the fact that the Babylonians four thousand years ago believed their cities to be of such antiquity, shows that they were not recent foundations, and the attainments of the people at that time in the arts and sciences prove that their civilization had already known ages of progress. The legendary epoch of Izdubar must be considered at present as the commencement of the united monarchy in Babylonia, and as marking the first of the series of great conquests in Western Asia; but how far back we have to go from our earliest known monuments to reach this era we cannot now tell.
Every nation has its hero, and it was only natural that when the Accadian kings of Ur at last succeeded in establishing an united empire throughout Babylonia, the legends of the national hero should be coloured by the new conception of imperial unity.
[28] This last sentence is found only in the fragment discovered by Mr. Rassam.
[30] The fragment brought to England by Mr. Rassam reads 6.
[31] The word used here is _ziggurrat_, which is employed to denote the towers attached to Babylonian temples. These towers were commonly used as observatories.
[32] Bricks have been found at Warka or Erech bearing the name of a certain king Sin-kudur, who calls himself the son of this same goddess, and describes himself as the builder of the temple of Anu at Erech.
Notices of Genesis.—Correspondence of names.—Abram.—Ur of Chaldees.—Ishmael.—Sargon of Agané.—His birth.—Concealed in ark.—Creation.—Garden of Eden.—Oannes.—Berosus.—Izdubar legends.—Babylonian seals.—Egyptian names.—Assyrian sculptures.
Scattered through various cuneiform inscriptions are other notices, names, or passages, connected with the Book of Genesis. Although the names of the Genesis patriarchs are not in the inscriptions which give the history of the mythical period, nevertheless some of the patriarchal names of Genesis are found here and there in the inscriptions.
The name Adam is in the Creation legends, but only in a general sense as man, as in Gen. i. 26, 27, 28.; v. 1, not as a proper name. Several of the other names of antediluvian patriarchs correspond with Babylonian words and roots, such as Methusael (Gen. iv. 18), which is the Assyrian _mutu-sa-ili_, “man of God,” and has been changed into Methuselah (Gen. v. 21) in order to assimilate it to the genius of the Hebrew language, or Noah, the Assyrian nukhu, “rest;” but, besides these, certain names appear as proper names also in Babylonia, among them Cainan, Lamech, and Laban.