But already in the mangled cuneiform Flood text above, quoted from ca. 2000 B.C., the signs are discernable of at least two distinct orders of mythology. For in Sumerian terms, that text was very late, and during the course of a preceding culture-history of no less than 1500 years, the founding cosmological insight represented in the Flood legend had become overlaid by folkloristic layerings of imaginative, anecdotal narrative. Throughout those very greatly troubled times the land of Sumer had been open to both peaceful settlement and violent invasions by Semitic hordes from the Syro-Arabian desert, until finally, ca. 2350 B.C., the mighty usurper, Sargon I of Akkad, carved out for himself with great violence and destruction -- of which his monuments proudly boast -- an empire that extended from the Taurus ranges to the Persian Gulf, which "began," as Samuel Noah Kramer has remarked, "the Semitization of Sumer that finally brought about the end of the Sumerian people, at least as an
identifiable political and ethnic entity. . . . His influence made itself felt in one way or another from Egypt to India."(8)
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Received on Tue Jul 26 20:09:04 2005