I will save you from it." you?"

"How shall I take care of "Keep me carefully in a jar till I grow big, then put me into a tank, which you will make for the purpose and at length throw me into the sea." The fish grew to a good size, and said one day to Manu: "In such and such a year the Flood will come; build a ship, and turn to me in spirit: when the waters rise, get into the ship, and I will save you." Manu did exactly as he was bid; and when he was in the ship the fish came swimming towards him, whereupon he fastened a rope to it, and the fish set off across the northern mountain. "You had better lash your ship to a tree," the fish said, "for fear you should be carried away, although you are on the mountain, and when the water subsides you can let yourself gradually down." This is the reason why the northern mountain is called "the slope of Manu." The Flood destroyed all flesh, Manu alone survived. He offered up sacrifice, consisting of an invocation of the All and a prayer for his blessing, whereupon a woman, bringing him the blessing out of the sacrificial oil, rose up, and thus addressed him: "He who begat me, his am I; I am the blessing thou hast desired." She was the mother, by Manu, of his race, who still survive; and whatever blessing he desired with her, that he obtained. Idâ or Ilâ is the name of woman, the original meaning of which is "thanksgiving," though it afterwards signified "earth," and is the ordinary name of Manu's daughter.

The fish who saved Manu in the Brâhman tradition of course is Vishnu; the Purâna, also, which tells the same story with some variations, expressly mentions him.108 In the epos 109, the Ganges, around which the

108 Sir W. Jones, On the Chronology of the Hindús, Works, i. p. 288. seq.

109 Mahabarata Diluvium, ed. Bopp.

Arians did not settle till a later period, is already mentioned; but it too makes Manu escape from the Flood on to the Himavat (Imaus, Himalaya), on the top of which he is saved, and where the human beings, the germ of which he had brought with him in the ship, took root. Had the tradition been mentioned in the Vedas, it would have been in another shape, for the doctrine of Vishnu as the God of Preservation did not then exist. Vishnu is there merely the name of the sun, as being the star of the rolling day and year.

The first movement of mankind, therefore, came from the mountains of the north. This, however, is not to be confounded with the historical migration of the Arians to India, which manifestly was from the westward, through Kabul (the Bolan Pass), and by Kandahar (the Kyber Pass); two conquests and settlements, which as we have seen, preceded the passage of the Indus.110

According to Max Müller, to whose recently published great work on the Vedas, an epoch in Indian literature, we beg to refer as to Indian criticism, there are allusions to the same tradition in hymns of the Rig-veda, a direct proof of the Iranian origin of these reminiscences. In the Brahmanic period these reminiscences become legendary, but they are not loose fictions and allegories. We must not, therefore, evade the labour of searching after the historical element in the traditions respecting the later period, with a view to the solution of our own problem.

Thus far this tradition of the earliest times is essentially historical. But even in the ideal portion there is evidently much which is common Arian property. We find the kosmic egg in the Indian version. According to Manu, Brahma created out of himself the waters which contained a germ or seed. From him came an egg, in which he, as the first ancestor of all the

110 See the preceding chapter, and Lassen, i. 818.

worlds", was himself born. There are also probably allusions to it in the Vedas: but neither the Brahmins nor the more ancient minstrels of the Indus country laid the egg.

B.

HELLENIC REMINISCENCES OF THE FLOOD, AND THE TRADITIONS AND FICTIONS IN HESIOD ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD, THE RULE OF THE GODS, AND THE KOSMIC AGES.

THE Egyptians, having emigrated before the catastrophe which overwhelmed Northern Asia, had no knowledge of any great interruption of human life in the primeval land. It is clear, therefore, that what the Greeks knew of it cannot have come from Egypt.

Our previous researches will not permit us to doubt that the oldest Hellenic tradition about the flood of Deukalion was a legendary reminiscence of that great historical deluge. It was neither an originally ideal myth, nor the offshoot of some event in the history of the Thracian Greeks. The coins of Apamea with the ark on them, of the genuineness of which there is no question, and the stories about Annakos, king of Iconium, who foretold the deluge, prove the Noachian story to have been in circulation not only in Syria but Asia Minor. In the latter also we have the oldest Olympus and Parnassus, on which the Thessalian legend of Deukalion makes the ark to rest, after being tossed about for nine days. The Mysian Olympus is the highest peak in Western Asia, as Parnassus is the most considerable mountain in Thessaly. Deukalion, son of Prometheus, king of Phthia, following his father's advice, built the ark, when Jupiter had resolved to destroy the human race.

111 Lassen, i. 622. note.

After leaving the ship he offered up sacrifice with his wife Pyrrha (the red, like Adam), and became the ancestor of the new race, and that an agricultural race. By command of the oracle, they threw behind them "the bones of the earth," or stones; that is, Deukalion cultivated the land in the valleys to which he descended.

A legend of a precisely similar kind was connected in Asia Minor with the deluge of Iconium, and was localised at Olympus, as it had been, at an earlier date, on the mountains of Upper Asia more to the eastward. The common source of both traditions, those of Asia Minor and of Thessaly, was Phrygia, the early abode of the Hellenic race. Its essential agreement with the Noachian tradition is too palpable to escape our notice; they both represented the flood as universal. But I think their origin was Arian or rather primeval, and not Semitic. We know from India that it was also current in Eastern Asia. This is another reason why any attempt to find a Semitic etymology for the name of Deukalion is wholly inadmissible.

We cannot show any direct connexion in this reminiscence and the change of the scene of that early event, with the story in the Timæus which was said to come from Egypt. Though this myth, which Plato has put into the mouth of Sokrates, has nothing Egyptian about it, I think it proves that he considered the foundation- these legends of Deukalion and Ogyges-to have been a more ancient and more general event, which he believed to be historical; thereby furnishing another instance of his wonderful insight into the great turningpoints of history.

Now, it is as unnecessary to offer further evidence of its being historical, as it is that the local stories about Thessaly and Asia Minor are unhistorical.

The case is very different as regards the extant Hellenic traditions about the ages of the world. As in the

one the basis is historical, so in the other it is essentially ideal. In one we have a primitive tradition of the early inhabitants of Central Asia, jumbled together with mythic ideas about creation, and with the early history of the particular race in its last abode. In the other, we have a work of fiction, embodying the views of a pensive philosophy, cheerless as regards the present, but yet not altogether without hope that a better time would come, when the vices and sins of the past would be expiated.

Such is the general character of Hesiod's poetry, out of which the evil and obscure period of the ninth century before our era peers out upon us.

We can, however, distinguish, even in it, an older and a later portion.

Buttmann, in his able treatise 112 upon the myth of the earliest races, has shown that Hesiod's men (Works and Days, v. 109-201.) are a travesty and extension of an earlier tradition. The Gold and Silver Ages are in direct contrast to each other: they differ as good and evil, their men are righteous and impious respectively. The Brazen Race is the necessary consequence of the Silver: in the excess of its pride it destroys itself by acts of violence. The Fourth Age, not distinguished by the name of any metal, is the race of heroes whose spirits inhabit the islands of the Blest. The Fifth again forms part of the metallic series as the Iron Age, an age of pain and disgrace, in which to his great grief the poet's own lot was cast. Buttmann thinks the Fourth Age a later interpolation into the older tradition. There is, however, much to be said on

112 Lecture in the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin in 1814; Treatises of 1814, p. 141. seqq. Of later writers on this subject Preller is the most important: see his second essay, entitled "The Representations of the Classics, the Greeks especially, on the Origin and oldest Destinies of the Human Race;" Philologus, vol. vii. pp. 1-60.