by Georges Roux
We possess by chance a document that gives us an uninterrupted list of kings from the very beginnings of monarchy down to the eighteenth century B.C. This is the famous ‘Sumerian King List’ compiled from about fifteen different texts and published by Th. Jacobsen in 1939.6 Despite its imperfections, this document is invaluable: not only does it embody and summarize very old Sumerian traditions but it provides an excellent chronological framework in which can be placed most of the great legends of the Sumerian heroic age. For the Sumerians, like the ancient Greeks, Hindus and Germans, had their heroic age, their age of demigods and superhuman kings who stood on equal term with the gods and performed fantastic feats of valour. Only now do we begin to realize that some at least of these heroes are only half-mythical and belong, in fact, to history.
According to the Sumerian King List, kingship was first ‘lowered from heaven’ in the city of Eridu, a remarkable statement if we remember that Eridu is one of the most ancient Sumerian settlements in southern Iraq (see Chapter 4). Then, after no less than 64,800 years during which only two kings reigned in Eridu, for some untold reason kingship was ‘carried’ to Bad-tibira (three kings, one of them the god Dumuzi himself, 108,000 years). From Bad-tibira it passed on successively to Larak (one king, 28,800 years), to Sippar (one king, 21,000 years) and to Shuruppak (one king, 18,600 years).7 These incredible figures, strangely reminiscent of Adam's posterity in the Bible, have no hidden significance; they simply express a widespread belief in a golden age when men lived much longer than usual and were endowed with truly supernatural qualities. But an even closer comparison with the Old Testament is called for by the brief sentence which follows the mention of Ubar-Tutu, King of Shuruppak, and closes the first paragraph, as it were, of the Sumerian King List:
The Flood swept thereover.
Here we feel irresistibly compelled to interrupt our narrative and examine one of the most controversial and fascinating problems of Mesopotamian archaeology and mythology: the problem of the Great Flood.
The Great Flood
In 1872 George Smith, then a young British assyriologist, announced to an astonished world that he had discovered, among the many tablets from Ashurbanipal's library in the British Museum, an account of the Deluge strikingly similar to that given in the Bible (Genesis vi. II – viii. 22). The story he had in hand was but an episode from a long poem in twelve tablets known as the Gilgamesh Epic of which we shall speak later. The hero of the epic, Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, is in search of the secret of immortality and eventually meets Ut-napishtim, the only man to have been granted eternal life and the son, incidentally, of Ubar-Tutu, King of Shuruppak. This, briefly, is what Ut-napishtim tells Gilgamesh:8
At some indefinite date, ‘when Shuruppak was already an old city’, the gods decided to send a deluge in order to destroy the sinful human race. But Ea took pity on Ut-napishtim and, secretly speaking to him through the thin wall of his reed-hut, advised him to tear down his house, abandon his possessions, build a ship of a certain size, take with him ‘the seed of all living creatures’ and prepare himself for the worst. The next day work was started on the ark and soon a huge, seven-decked vessel was ready, caulked with bitumen and loaded with gold, silver, game, beasts and Ut-napishtim's family, relations and workmen. When the weather became ‘frightful to behold’ our Babylonian Noah knew that the time for the deluge had come. He entered the ship and closed the door. Then, ‘as soon as the first shimmer of morning beamed forth, a black cloud came up from out of the horizon’, announcing the most terrible tempest of wind, rain, lightning and thunder that man had ever witnessed. The dykes gave way, the earth was shrouded in darkness; even the gods were panic-stricken and regretted what they had undertaken:
The gods cowered like dogs and crouched in distress.
Ishtar cried out like a woman in travail…
‘How could I command war to destroy my people,
For it is I who bring forth my people’…
The Anunnaki gods wept with her;
The gods sat bowed and weeping…
Six days and six nights
The wind blew, the downpour, the tempest and the flood overwhelmed the land…
On the seventh day, however, the tempest subsided. Says Ut-napishtim:
I opened a window and light fell upon my face.
I looked upon the ‘sea’, all was silence,
And all mankind had turned to clay.
The ark landed on mount Nisir,9 but no land was visible besides the rock that held fast the ship. After a week had elapsed Ut-napishtim sent forth a dove, but it came back; he sent forth a swallow, but it also came back; he sent forth a raven, and this time the raven found land and did not return. Ut-napishtim then poured a libation on top of the mountain and offered a sacrifice of sweet cane, cedar and myrtle:
The gods smelled the savour,
The gods smelled the sweet savour,
The gods gathered like flies over the sacrificer.
If Ishtar, in particular, was delighted, Enlil, who had ordered the deluge and whose plans were frustrated, was filled with anger and put the blame on Ea. But so well did Ea plead his own cause and the cause of mankind that Enlil's heart was touched. He entered the ship and blessed Ut-napishtim and his wife, saying:
Hitherto Ut-napishtim has been but a man,
But now Ut-napishtim and his wife shall be like unto us gods.
In the distance, at the mouth of the rivers, Ut-napishtim shall dwell.
Needless to say, George Smith's publication of this story made headlines in the newspapers of the time. As new cuneiform texts became available, however, other versions of the Flood legend, less complete but older than the Gilgamesh version (written at Nineveh in the seventh century B.C.), were discovered. The name of the hero varied. In a Sumerian text from Nippur dated about 1700 B.C. he was called Ziusudra, while in a Babylonian epic of slightly later date he was called Atrahasis, ‘Exceedingly Wise’, probably a nickname for Ut-napishtim himself.10 But, allowance being made for other minor variations, the theme was always the same: a gigantic Flood had swept over the earth and all but one (or two) human beings had perished; in the long history of mankind the deluge marks a definite break and the replacement of one race of men by another. The resemblance with the biblical story is, of course, striking; furthermore, it seems probable that the Hebrews had borrowed from a long and well-established Mesopotamian tradition. Quite naturally, the question arose: are there traces of such a cataclysm in Mesopotamia?
Hitherto, sizeable deposits of water-borne clay and sand due to a major and prolonged inundation have been found on only three Mesopotamian sites: Ur, Kish and Shuruppak. At Ur, seven out of the fourteen test pits dug by the late Sir Leonard Woolley between 1929 and 1934 have revealed such deposits at different levels. The deepest and thickest of these was sandwiched between two occupational layers of the Ubaid period, and Woolley always maintained, without convincing reasons, that this was the biblical Flood.11 The other, and thinner, Ur deposits were dated to about 2800 – 2600 B.C., and so were the several deposits discovered at Kish. As for the single ‘sterile layer’ found at Shuruppak, its probable date is 2900 B.C. The presence on these sites of such alluvial deposits raises difficult geophysical problems,12 but it does not provide evidence of a widespread inundation covering hundreds of square kilometres, let alone the entire Near East. The only events it reflects are limited inundations probably due to overflows and changes in river courses. It must be noted, for instance, that Eridu, which lies in a shallow depression some 20 kilometres from Ur and has been excavated down to the virgin soil, has yielded no trace of a flood.
But if there never was in Mesopotamia (and elsewhere) a cataclysmic Flood of biblical dimensions, what then was at the root of the Mesopotamian legend? Several theories have been put forward, ranging from an alleged universal desire to cancel a slice of the past to a vague remembrance, handed down through generations, of the torrential Pleistocene rains. However, none of these theories is satisfactory or even relevant
, for it appears clearly from the cuneiform texts that the Flood was not a natural accident but a deliberate attempt by the gods at getting rid of mankind. Why should the gods want to do this? The Gilgamesh epic and the Sumerian flood story are silent on this point, but a recently published fragment of Atrahasis may give us a clue.13 This remarkable epic begins with the creation of male and female human beings who would relieve the lesser gods, the Anunnaki, from their exhausting work on earth. All goes well at first, but:
Twelve hundred years had not yet passed
When the land extended and the people multiplied.
The earth was bellowing like a bull,
The gods got distressed with their uproar.
In order to reduce this noisy crowd to silence, the gods unleash an epidemic followed by a terrible drought, but these are of no avail: men and women continue to multiply, even though starvation forces them to eat their own children. Finally, the gods release the Flood, not knowing that Ea will warn and save Atrahasis, the ‘Exceedingly Wise’. The Flood itself is described in about the same words as in Gilgamesh, but it is the end of our epic which deserves our attention, for Ea now appears as a precursor of Malthus, advocating infertility, infantile mortality and celibacy as remedies against over-population. Turning to Mami/Nintu, the mother-goddess, Ea says:
O Lady of Birth, creatress of the Fates…
Let there be among the people bearing women and barren women,
Let there be among the people a Pashittu-demon,
Let it seize the baby from the mother's lap,
Establish Ugbabtu-priestesses, Entu priestesses and Igisitu-priestesses.
They shall indeed be tabooed, and thus cut off child-bearing.*
This presumably means that in the future the population increase must be controlled to prevent the gods from sending another Flood, this being the ultimate solution obviously inspired by the damage caused by major local inundations.
As for the Flood mentioned in the Sumerian King List as a specific event, a switch of power from one city to another that occurred at a certain date, it is perhaps not unreasonable to suggest that it might have been introduced in the list by the scribes of Shuruppak who had witnessed two or three simultaneous disasters in that city around 2900 B.C.: a military defeat, a severe inundation and possibly a (relative) ‘demographic explosion’. If this were the case, then the Flood-event would merge with the Flood-myth, but of these two tales it is the myth that has survived and will never cease to fascinate us and arouse our curiosity.
Dynasties of Supermen
After the Flood, says the Sumerian King List, kingship was again ‘lowered from heaven’, this time in Kish, a city now represented by an important group of tells, about sixteen kilometres due east of Babylon.14 The first ‘dynasty’* of Kish comprises twenty-three reigns with an average duration of one thousand years per reign. If we omit one king whose name could not be read by the scribe who compiled the list from old tablets, we observe that out of twenty-two monarchs twelve bear Semitic names or nicknames, such as Kalbum, ‘dog’, Qalumu, ‘lamb’, or Zuqaqip, ‘scorpion’; six have Sumerian names and four have names of unknown origin. This is important because it shows the mixture of ethnic elements in southern Iraq at an early date, the predominance of Semites in the region of Kish and the apparent absence of rivalry between Sumerians and Semites within the same city-state. As we shall see in the next chapter, we have good reason to believe that this dynasty was at least partly historical and should be placed shortly after 2800 B.C. Yet one of its kings is expressly designated as a mythical figure: ‘Etana, a shepherd, the one who ascended to heaven’, and as it happens that we possess Babylonian and Assyrian tablets which give us more details about Etana, we can enlarge on this point.15
The Etana legend begins like a fable. The serpent and the eagle lived on the same tree and helped each other as good neighbours should. But the eagle one day devoured the young of the serpent. The serpent went weeping to the sun-god Shamash, who prompted the following stratagem: the serpent hid in the belly of a dead ox, and when the eagle came to devour the carcass, the reptile took his revenge; he caught the big bird, broke his ‘heel’; plucked him and threw him into a pit. Now a certain Etana, who had no children and was desperately in need of the ‘plant of birth’ which grows only in heaven, also cried to Shamash, and Shamash advised him to rescue the eagle, win his friendship and use him as a vehicle to fly to heaven. This Etana did. ‘Upon the eagle's breast he placed his breast, upon the feathers of his wings he placed his hands, upon his sides he placed his arms’ and, in this uncomfortable position, he took off for a series of breathtaking flights that took him to the gates of Anu, Enlil, Ea, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar. Then, moved, perhaps, by a spirit of adventure, he went even higher. Gradually he saw the earth shrink to the size of a furrow and the sea to the size of a bread basket. But when land and sea were no longer visible Etana panicked: ‘My friend, I will not ascend to heaven!’ he shouted and, loosening his grip, he plunged head down towards the earth, followed by the eagle. The end of the tale is unclear, due to lacunae in the tablets, but we may assume that Etana reached his goal, for not only did he live a respectable 1,560 years but, according to the King List, he had a son and heir called Balikh.
The Sumerian King List gives the impression that the last king of the First Dynasty of Kish, Agga, was defeated in battle by the first king of the first dynasty of Uruk; but we know that the two dynasties overlapped and that Agga, in fact, was contemporary with the fifth King of Uruk, Gilgamesh. We owe this information to a short Sumerian poem16 which describes how Agga sent Gilgamesh an ultimatum demanding that Uruk submit to Kish, how the ultimatum was rejected and Uruk besieged and how, at the sight of mighty Gilgamesh peering over the wall, the enemy was overwhelmed with fear and ‘cast itself down’. In the end it was Agga who became the vassal of Gilgamesh, and Kish which submitted to Uruk, as indicated in the King List. Yet if the predecessors of Gilgamesh did not rule over the whole country of Sumer but only over Uruk they were prominent figures all the same, since we have in order of succession: Meskiaggasher, son of the sun-god Utu, who ‘went into the sea and came out (from it) to the mountains’; Enmerkar, ‘the one who built Uruk’; divine Lugalbanda, a ‘shepherd’, and finally, Dumuzi, the vegetation-god called here ‘a fisherman’. The deeds of at least two of these heroes and demi-gods are now familiar to us, owing to the publication of four Sumerian epic tales which once formed parts of a ‘cycle of Enmerkar’ and of a ‘cycle of Lugalbanda’.17 All these legends revolve around the usually strained relations between Uruk and Aratta, a far-away country separated from Sumer by ‘seven mountains’ and probably to be located in Iran.18 In one of these tales we are told at length of the considerable difficulties encountered by Enmerkar in obtaining gold, silver, lapis-lazuli and precious stones from the Lord of Aratta, either by threats or in return for grain –a situation which must have repeated itself again and again in the long history of Mesopotamia and which perhaps underlies the endless wars between that country and mountainous Elam. In another tale we see Uruk besieged by the MAR.TU folk, i.e. the nomadic Amorites of the Syrian desert who, as will be told later, settled in Iraq and took over from the Sumerians at the beginning of the second millennium B.C. If we could be sure that these legends reflected the political situation as it was at the dawn of history and not at the date when they were actually written down (about 1800 B.C.) we would find in them matter of considerable interest to the historian.
Finally, we come to Gilgamesh, the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk and the son, we are told, of the goddess Ninsun and of a high priest of Kullab, a district of Uruk. Gilgamesh, whose exploits are reminiscent of those of both Ulysses and Hercules, was the most popular of all Mesopotamian heroes and appears in the form of a brawny, bearded man fighting bulls and lions on a very large number of monuments, from the cylinder-seals of the Jemdat Nasr period to the sculptured reliefs of the Assyrian palaces. Like Enmerkar and Lugalbanda, he had his own cycle of Sumerian
legends, apparently unconnected episodes of his life, of which five are known to us.19 But this is not all. Early in the second millennium a long poem was composed, which amalgamated some of the older Sumerian legends with new material. The resulting ‘Gilgamesh Epic’ has by chance survived practically complete, and as it is without any doubt the masterpiece of Assyro-Babylonian literature and, indeed, one of the most beautiful epic tales of the ancient world, we must at least try to give a brief summary of its content, referring the reader to the several excellent translations that have been published.20
