The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  " In the Assyrian text the old man who built the ship to save mankind is referred to as King Utu-nipishtim rather than Noah, but both names are probably allegorical. The ocean god Enki also takes the place of the monotheistic Jahve of the Hebrews. The Assyrians pretend that the story of the Universal Deluge was told to one of their ancestors by the boatbuilding King Utu-nipishtim himself while he was still ahve in Dilmun. He claimed that the ocean god took a liking to him and revealed the secret conspiracy of the other gods to drown all mankind. It was the ocean god who had told him to build a large ship and to take on board his family, his attendants and his livestock. King Utu-nipishtim followed this advice and built the ship:

  On the seventh day the ship was ready. As the launching was heavy, rollers were used. . . . With all my property I loaded the ship, with all my silver I loaded it, with all my gold I loaded it, with all my living seed I loaded it. All my family and servants I brought on board, the livestock, the beasts of the field, all the craftsmen I brought on board. ... To the master of the ship, the captain Puzur-Amurri, I entrusted the large structure and its cargo.*

  For six days and seven nights the flood raged over the land, and on the seventh day the big ship grounded on a moimtaintop in upper Kurdistan, the region where the Hebrews had Noah landing on Mount Ararat. The Assyrian text says that a dove and a swallow were in turn sent out, but returned, and

  It is interesting that in the Assyrian text survivors from the big ship were told to go and "dwell in the distance, at the mouth of the rivers." To the Assyrians this meant the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris, the former Sumerian territory. In other words, the Assyrians recorded that the gulf coast and marsh area of southern Iraq was the part of their world first resettled by the new generations of mankind.

  It would therefore be particularly interesting to know what the older Sumerians themselves had to say in this connection. Their version of the same event was discovered subsequently by a team of archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania. In the general area where the rivers meet they were excavating the enormous Sumerian ziggurat of Nippur, one of the sun-oriented and stepped pyramids with temple at the top which was the main feature of all early Mesopotamian cities, when they hit upon another well-stocked hbrary. At the foot of the pyramid they found a collection of 35,000 inscribed tablets, and one of them contained the original Sumerian version of the Universal Deluge.

  This Sumerian record, unlike the younger Assyrian, and the still younger Hebrew writings, does not say that the survivors of the flood landed on any inland mountaintop, but that after the flood mankind first settled in Dilmun, somewhere across the sea toward the sunrise. Later the gods led them to their present abode at the mouth of the rivers.f

  only when a raven was let loose and never came back did the King realize that the waters had abated and he was on safe ground with his followers and livestock. They all disembarked and offered sacrifices to the gods, who promised never again to pimish all mankind for the sins of some.

  f A dear indication that the Assyrian text was only borrowed from fliis older Sumerian original is seen in the fact that both refer to the Sumerian ocean god Enki and give him the credit for having saved mankind. Also in the Sumerian original Enid's divine choice fell on a pious, god-fearing and humble king of an unidentified kingdom, but in the Sumerian language he was referred to as Ziusudra. Here, too, the god "advised him to save himself by building a very large boat." The part of the tablet describing how Ziusudra built this large boat is unfortunately destroyed, but at least it was big enough to carry his livestock in addition to his family. Once they were all aboard, the deluge raged over the surface of the earth for seven days and seven nights. "And the huge boat had been tossed about on the great waters," when finally Utu, the Sumerian sun god, came forth and shed hght on heaven and earth. Then Ziusudra "opened a vmidow of the huge boat" and prostrated himself to the sun god. He then sacrificed an ox and a sheep, which indicates that he must have had more than one pair of each land on board, as distinct from Noah. But then again he carried no wild beasts. In short, during the millennia.

  The essence of all three versions is their reference to big ships. They all speak of domesticated animals and even refer to the existence of cities and kingdoms before the flood, but none of them suggests that a tall pyramid or tower saved mankind and his herds from the inundation. Five thousand years ago scribes put on record what today is the oldest known attempt at written history. It begins with families and livestock, after some catastrophic event, landing with a big ship at a place called Dilmim and from there reaching Ur in Mesopotamia, also by sea.

  It is regrettable that the tablet is broken where the building of the big vessel is described, but since Ziusudra and Utu-nipishtim are clearly two names for the same royal shipbuilder, we may draw some inference from the Assyrian version. In the earliest epic ever rediscovered, the Assyrian poet sent his hero, King Gilgamesh, by boat to the ancestral land of Dilmun, where the long-living King Utu-nipishtim tells his own story of the flood. He first introduces himself as the son of King Ubara-Tutu, who ruled in Shuruppak before the universal disaster, then he alludes in poetic terms to the words of the ocean god who told him how to build the ship:

  "Reed house, reed house. Wall, wall. Reed house, listenl Wall hsten! Man from Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu. Tear down your home and build a ship I"

  Obviously, by tearing down a reed house one could only build a reed ship. This is also in conformity with the Hebrew version. The instruction to Noah was: "Make yourself an ark with ribs of cypress; cover it with reeds, and cover it inside and out with pitch."^

  Even the Assyrian epic hints at their boatbuilding king using some covering on his reed ship. It was none less than Utu-nipishtim who said, after tearing down his royal reed house: "six sar of pitch I poured into the melting pot, three sar of asphalt I added. Three sar of oil were brought by the mixing crew, apart from one sar kept in the hold and two sar hidden by the captain."

  The boatbuilding principles accredited to Noah were indeed those used in miniature in the building of the jillabie described by Hagi and seen by me with six men on board near Babylon. Naturally, the dimensions of the royal vessels of antiquity would have been in proportion to the sizes of the other structures built in the

  the original version of survivors, who only carried their domesticated animals on board, had been slighdy embellished vmtil Noah also saved the beasts of the wilderness.

  days of the totalitarian kingdoms. The Assyrian epic gives the dimensions of King Utu-nipishtim's ship as one "iku" a field measure which equals the ground plan given for the Tower of Babel.® Although diis measure is hardly to be taken hterally, it would nevertheless have been easier to build a structure that big out of long reed bundles freely harvested in the vast marshes than out of small bricks each molded and baked in brick ovens.

  The Hebrews were rather more modest in their measurements; they recorded that the vessel was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet deep, which was only four times longer than Matug's makeshift reed gdr6 which I had measured myself.

  The Assyrians probably added something for the benefit of readers when they wrote that Utu-nipishtim's ship was built wiih. nine inner compartments and "six superimposed decks.*' Again the Hebrews were more modest: the ark was supposed to have "three decks, upper, middle and lower."

  Clearly the Assyrians, and also the Hebrews before they left Mesopotamia, had seen big ships. Otherwise they would not even have been familiar with the concept of vessels with more than one deck. Nor should we underestimate the abihty of the Sumerians to build giant structures of reeds, when we know that they built real mountains of sun-baked and oven-baked bricks, so huge in fact that we would most definitely have thought it impossible in those days but that the structures are still there to stupefy us, like the pyramids in Egypt. That civilized societies in the Middle East were famihar with extremely advanced shipbuilding five thousand years ago should no longer surprise us after the discovery of Pharaoh Cheops' t
ruly astonishing vessel, one that was much larger than any Viking ship and had been built a thousand years before Abraham came to Egypt. In fact, if Abraham and Sarah had seen it in its hidden crypt at the foot of the Great Pyramid, it would have been as old to them as the Viking ships are to tourists in Norway today. J

  The extensive Danish excavations on the gulf island of Bahrain have a direct bearing on the original flood myths. The cities uncovered were interpreted as the first concrete confirmation of Bahrain being the DUmim of the Sumerian merchant records and the alleged land where the Sumerian ancestors settled after the flood. The prominent Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob,^ in simnmarizing the results of the first fifteen years during which he led the Bahrain excavations, supports a widely held view as to the origin of the Sumerian flood legend. Beneath Ur, the royal city of the Sumerians, Leonard Woolley foimd in 1929 a layer of homogeneous mud, ten to thirteen feet thick,

  I looked around me. Reed house, reed house. Walls, walls. My thoughts had wandered. Certainly Hagi could have made a nice ship by tearing down the big reed house we sat in. Actually, if turned upside down, this hall could become the hull of a roomy ship ready made with solid reed ribs; Hagi would only have to cover it with pitch or asphalt, inside and out, the moment both ends were closed.

  Nobody planned to tear down Hagi's reed house. I was delighted to find it there, as good as ever, when I came back after an interval of five years, although I missed the old reincarnation of Abraham. But his sons were there and gave me a royal reception. The biblical setting was still there, the descendants of Terah, Abraham's father, kept up most of the old traditions.

  Sha-lan, Hagi's oldest son, and all the men in his house got excited when I told them I had come back to find people in the marshes who could help me harvest berdi and build a bundle boat like the ones old Hagi had described to us five years earlier. I needed twenty men. Sha-lan immediately assured me that he would choose them himself. No problem. After a short discussion among those present, Gatae was thought to be the best man to lead the work. Gatae was a master reed-house builder and therefore would know how to make perfectly tapering bundles.

  Gatae was fetched in a mashhuf and proved to be a fine elderly marshman with a humorous twinkle in his eyes. Tall and slim, he stood in the canoe as straight as a mast, his checkered caftan fluttering. With his dignity and his trim white beard, he reminded me of my late Enghsh pubhsher. Sir Stanley Unwin. We met as if we had been friends for a lifetime. Gatae was not in the least surprised that I wanted to build a reed ship and sail away into the sea. He went straight to the point: How much reed did we need?

  I paced the floor of the hall. Ra I had been 50 feet long, Ra II only 39. This time I wanted a larger crew and thus a ship 60 feet long, just about the length of the one-room reed house we were in.

  of a type deposited by water. Under this again were discovered the ruins of the first city which was there when some gigantic flood wave had buried all lower Mesopotamia under twenty-five feet of water until the flood subsided. To the few survivors this would have seemed to be the destruction of the world, and the memory of it would have continued until recorded on Sumerian tablets. Glob assumed that the few survivors might have saved their lives by chmbing the highest walls of the inner city. But why, I thought, why, when the city was a port and probably full of reed ships?

  But I had learned from Hagi that the spongy reeds had to be compressed, so I needed more reeds than the final volume of the ship.

  "We had better cut twice as much berdi as what would be needed to fill this house from floor to ceiling," I estimated, and we all looked to the vault high above our heads. Gatae was not impressed. He would make the bundles any size I wanted.

  We agreed that twenty men under Gatae's leadership should come to Adam's tree and begin the building in September, but I should first return in August and see that the reeds were cut and properly dried by other Madans in the village of Al Gassar, closer to the building site. There the government had built an elevated dirt road right to the edge of the marshes so that canes could be delivered directly from the mashhufs to the trucks that brought them to a new paper mill on the river Tigris. From that point I could later bring the sun-dried reeds to the building site next to the Garden of Eden Rest House.

  Chapter 2

  IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  A

  U G U S T came, and I was back in the marshes again. August is the hottest month in southern Iraq. The thermometer wavered between 40° and 50° C. (i05°-i20° F.) in the shade, but there was no shade anywhere in the open swampland where we cut the reeds. The Marsh Arabs advanced with curved machetes into the reed thickets with the speed and energy of a band of warriors and the long green stalks fell like slaughtered troops. The heat was so great that I soon became exhausted merely watching the battle from the canoe, and as my marshman interpreter, with a vocabulary of a few dozen Enghsh words, assured me that there were no longer any bilharzia in the water, I jumped into the canal and joined the Madans, who were waist-deep and fully dressed. From Lake Chad and the Nile I had learned to dread the httle bilharzia worm that lives on snails in the reeds and drills its way through the human sldn in a few seconds to multiply inside the body. I enjoyed the slowly nmning water until a beautiful snail sheU came floating by. I picked it up and hesitantly showed it to my reed-cutting informant. "That?" he said. 'TTiat is only the house of the bilharzia."

  I was back in the waterproofed mashhuf in one leap. Better to sweat than wade in a stream with bilharzia worms.

  I lost all count of the number of mashhufs towering with green berdi which the men and women of Al Gassar punted through the channels to leave on the banks of the marshes to dry. It looked as if I was planning to build a ship every bit as big as Noah's.

  In the meantime I had to return to Europe for a few weeks to organize the expedition; at the Garden of Eden Rest House I could organize nothing. In Baghdad I had managed to grab an ivory-colored telephone in my hotel room and speak to Oslo, Tokyo and Sydney in a few minutes. But the telephone in my Eden was a leftover from an early administration, a relic to be cranked like an old Ford. If I finally got through and thought I had London, the whole rest house joined me to listen and shout into the mouthpiece until we learned that the faint squeak we heard was from the poor operator in Quma across the street, who desperately tried to tell us that the line to Basra was broken, so nothing doing today. An English engineer came all the way from Basra to comfort me with the news that he was entrusted by Baghdad to put up a modern Hne. Ready next year. Good news 1—for those who were to come long after we had gone.

  The oil boom, which had initiated a building explosion and the massive importation of all kinds of goods from the outside world, also enabled aU imported products to be bought up as soon as they arrived, and the vast fleet of tankers and cargo ships that entered the river mouth were far too many for the port facihties. Ships of all nations were anchored in the open bay for two, three or even four months, waiting for a turn to come up the river and dehver their cargo. Everything from Indian timber and bamboo to Danish butter or American frozen chicken would be swept away from the lumber yards or grocers' shelves before I could lay a hand on it. If I ordered anything to be sent to Iraq by ship it might get stuck at anchor in the gulf. I saw only one solution. Everything I needed for the expedition had to be assembled in one place and from there sent overland to Iraq by chartered road transport.

  So I chose Hamburg. In three days German friends helped complete the purchase of everything required, apart from the berdi reeds. A ropery set aside its orders for nylon cables and twisted many miles of assorted hemp rope for our bundles and rigging. Two thirty-foot ash legs for our straddle mast were hewn to shape by a

  genuine boatbuilder of the old school, who also hand-carved two twenty-five-foot rudder oars and a dozen rowing oars with extra-long shafts that could be sawn progressively shorter as the tall reed ship settled deeper in the water. An equally genuine and conscientious sailmaker hand-sewed two square sails fro
m Egyptian cotton canvas; they tapered from top to bottom as in pre-European times. One was bigger and thinner than the other, intended for good weather only. We needed bamboo for the superstructure. A rain collector was also required, flags and signal hghts, kerosene lamps for illumination. Primus stoves and pots and pans for the kitchen. Also fishing gear. And a tiny inflatable rubber dingy with a six-horsepower outboard motor for the cameraman to film us at sea.

  The shopping tour ended with food and all daily requirements, including jerry cans with drinking water for eleven men for three months, trusting that additional supplies could be obtained during the journey.* There were tons of provisions and equipment, suflBcient to fill a forty-foot transport trailer, sealed after approbation by the Iraqi Embassy in Bonn and prepared for the two weeks' drive from the free port of Hamburg to the very doors of the Garden of Eden Rest House in southern Iraq.

  From Hamburg I flew to London to meet the representatives of an international consortium of TV companies improvised for the occasion by the BBC. After much brainwork, typing and retyping, a thirty-one-page contract was signed, obhging six television organizations in Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United States to finance a reed-ship expedition by buying four one-hour television programs not yet filmed of an expedition not yet undertaken. The contract was made more difficult by the fact that I could only say where the voyage would start but not where it would end, only that we should sail as far as the vessel could go or be navigated. The American member of the consortium, the National Geographical Society and their television producers, WQED, further insisted on sending with us their own cameraman with a special