Semitic Babylonian, at a very early period. The date when this document was first written or translated is at present very difficult to decide, but the following are some of the evidences of its antiquity:—
1st. The three Assyrian copies present a number of variant readings, which had crept into the text since the original documents were written.
2nd. The forms of the characters in the original documents were of an ancient type, and the Assyrian copyist did not always know their modern representatives, so he has left some of them in their original hieratic form.
3rd. There are a number of sentences which were originally glosses explanatory of the subjects; before the Assyrian copies were made these glosses had been already incorporated in the text and their original use lost.
It must here be noted that the Assyrian scribe has recorded for us the divisions of the lines on the original documents.
On examining the composition of the text, some marked peculiarities are apparent, which likewise show its high antiquity. one of these is the constant use of the personal pronoun nominative. In later times this was usually indicated by the verbal form, but not expressed. On comparing the Deluge text with dated texts from the time of Sargon I, it appears to be older than these, and its original composition cannot be placed later than the seventeenth century before the Christian era; while it may be much older. The text itself professes to belong to the time of a monarch whose name, written in monograms, I am unable to read phonetically; I therefore provisionally call him by the ordinary values of the signs of his name, Izdubar.
Izdubar, from the description of his reign, evidently belonged to the Mythical period; the legends given in these tablets, the offer of marriage made to him by the goddess Ishtar, the monsters living at the time, Izdubar's vision of the gods, his journey to the translated Sisit, with a curious account of a mythical conquest of Erech when the gods and spirits inhabiting that city changed themselves into animals to escape the fury of the conqueror:
