It is affirmed that one such legend, that of the Deluge, has already been exhumed, and it is not beyond the bounds of probability that the remainder may in like manner be obtained.
From such Assyrian sources, the legends of the creation of the earth and heaven, the garden of Eden, the making of man from clay, and of woman from one of his ribs, the temptation by the serpent, the naming of animals, the cherubim and flaming sword, the Deluge and the ark, the drying up of the waters by the wind, the building of the Tower of Babel, and the confusion of tongues, were obtained by Ezra.

He commences abruptly the proper history of the Jews in the eleventh chapter.

At that point his universal history ceases; he occupies himself with the story of one family, the descendants of Shem.
It is of this restriction that the Duke of Argyll, in his book on "Primeval Man," very graphically says: In the genealogy of the family of Shem we have a list of names which are names, and nothing more to us.

It is a genealogy which neither does, nor pretends to do, more than to trace the order of succession among a few families only, out of the millions then already existing in the world.
Nothing but this order of succession is given, nor is it at all certain that this order is consecutive or complete.

Nothing is told us of all that lay behind that curtain of thick darkness, in front of which these names are made to pass; and yet there are, as it were, momentary liftings, through which we have glimpses of great movements which were going on, and had been long going on beyond.