Note 174 — Appendix. VARIANTS AND ANALOGUES OF THE TALES IN THE SUPPLEMENTAL NIGHTS, VOL. III. (continued 3)
Richard Francis Burton translation
The last of the old Dublin ballad-singers, who assumed the respectable name of Zozimus, and is said to have been the author of the ditties wherewith he charmed his street auditors, was wont to chant the legend of the Finding of Moses in a version which has at least the merit of originality:
“In Egypt’s land, upon the banks of Nile,
King Pharoah’s daughter went to bathe in style;
She took her dip, then went unto the land,
And, to dry her royal pelt, she ran along the strand.
A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw
A smiling baby in a wad of straw;
She took it up, and said, in accents mild—
Tare an’ agurs, girls! which av yez owns this child?”
The Babylonian analogue, as translated by the Rev. Prof. A. H. Sayce, in the first vol. of the “Folk-Lore Journal” (1883), is as follows:
“Sargon, the mighty monarch, the King of Aganè, am I. My mother was a princess; my father I knew not; my father’s brother loved the mountain-land. In the city of Azipiranu, which on the bank of the Euphrates lies, my mother, the princess, conceived me; in an inaccessible spot she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen the door of my ark she closed. She launched me on the river, which drowned me not. The river bore me along, to Akki, the irrigator, it brought me. Akki, the irrigator, in the tenderness of his heart, lifted me up. Akki, the irrigator, as his own child brought me up. Akki, the irrigator, as his gardener appointed me, and in my gardenership the goddess Istar loved me. For 45 years the kingdom I have ruled, and the black-headed (Accadian) race have governed.”