Writing in the "Cornhill Magazine" for February, Major General Sir George Macmunn emphasized the vast possibilities that exploration in Mesopotamia offers to the historian. In the course of his article he observes "The story of the Flood is the story of a Mesopotamian flood interpreted and enlarged as part of the moral and philosophic scheme of divine cause and effect, A knowledge of the conditions obtaining to-day in Mesopotamia assure one that the flooding of these plains needs no amazing miracle, Anyone who has crossed the Hamar Lake between Ur and Qurna in the flood season, as the writer has, where no land on any side is visible from a steamer's deck, will realize readily enough that an unusual rainfall and the bursting of large dams high up on the Euphrates would produce floods exactly as- described in Genesis, The great flat-bottomed boats, the lake-heliums that navigate the Euphrates to this day, dare the exact likeness of the ventional ark of a Regent Street shop, pitched too inside and out with bitumen, end capable of taking 60 to 70 tons of cargo, are quite equal to carrying a considerable number of human beings with their domestic animals, "Sir William Willcocks suggests thet Noah was a considerable Jand-owning sheikh on the middle Euphrates, where.in very early times irrigation on a large scale was practised. Gifted with shrewd insight into political trouble and the danger that upheavals meant. to control of water storage, he prepared for such trouble by' making his bellum inhabitable, or specially building one as a refuge. He would then be prepared, as in the Bible story, for a year unusual rain and. the cataclysm that must follow the bursting of dams no longer controlled by a central authority.
"Now we know that the word: Ararat is but agglutinous Sumerian for a mound, and just that sort of mound that once was a mud village with which Mesopotamian horizons abound; it is not difficult to catch from the Ararat of Armenia, that high-heaped land, a commemorative echo in those mindful of an ancient tradition. It is then easy to believe that Noah and his family and_ his domestic animals, secure in their bellum, were swept away down the Euphrates on the crest of a flood, of which the details in Genesis are perfectly possible, floated on the Chaldean marshes till the floods hated, and eventually lodged on the site of a village of an older ago, or even one destroyed by the Flood itself. The site was probably somewhere near the junction of the Euphrates with the marshes, viz., that very area of which Ur was the dominating settlement,—_ because about 1920 B. C. we find the strong and substantial "tradition of Abraham, the descendant of Noah, leading his family from this distric to wander in the land of Samar and up towards Canaan and the river of Egypt."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.