In 1867, Phillippi, and in 1869, Dieterich, both theologians of eminence, took virtually the same ground in Germany, the latter attempting to beat back the scientific hosts with a phrase apparently pithy, but really hollow--the declaration that "modern geology observes what is, but has no right to judge concerning the beginning of things." As late as 1876, Zugler took a similar view, and a multitude of lesser lights, through pulpit and press, brought these antiscientific doctrines to bear upon the people at large--the only effect being to arouse grave doubts regarding Christianity among thoughtful men, and especially among young men, who naturally distrusted a cause using such weapons.
For just at this time the traditional view of the Deluge received its death-blow, and in a manner entirely unexpected.

By the investigations of George Smith among the Assyrian tablets of the British Museum, in 1872, and by his discoveries just afterward in Assyria, it was put beyond a reasonable doubt that a great mass of accounts in Genesis are simply adaptations of earlier and especially of Chaldean myths and legends.

While this proved to be the fact as regards the accounts of Creation and the fall of man, it was seen to be most strikingly so as regards the Deluge.

The eleventh of the twelve tablets, on which the most important of these inscriptions was found, was almost wholly preserved, and it revealed in this legend, dating from a time far earlier than that of Moses, such features peculiar to the childhood of the world as the building of the great ship or ark to escape the flood, the careful caulking of its seams, the saving of a man beloved of Heaven, his selecting and taking with him into the vessel animals of all sorts in couples, the impressive final closing of the door, the sending forth different birds as the flood abated, the offering of sacrifices when the flood had subsided, the joy of the Divine Being who had caused the flood as the odour of the sacrifice reached his nostrils; while throughout all was shown that partiality for the Chaldean sacred number seven which appears so constantly in the Genesis legends and throughout the Hebrew sacred books.
Other devoted scholars followed in the paths thus opened--Sayce in England, Lenormant in France, Schrader in Germany--with the result that the Hebrew account of the Deluge, to which for ages theologians had obliged all geological research to conform, was quietly relegated, even by most eminent Christian scholars, to the realm of myth and legend.( 174) (174) For George Smith, see his Chaldean Account of Genesis, New York, 1876, especially pp.

36, 263, 286; also his special work on the subject.
See also Lenormant, Les Origins de l'Histoire, Paris, 1880, chap.