He faced quite a challenge. Some tablets were broken into more than a hundred pieces. Reconstructing them would be a tedious task, ideal for a detail-oriented introvert. Smith threw himself into his job and was soon matching tiny pieces of broken clay together. A natural at grouping fragments by color and shape, he had a remarkable knack for reassembling the jumbled pieces into whole tablets.
For almost a decade the quiet curator’s assistant painstakingly pieced tablets back together, patiently working through the museum’s collection. Then, one damp fall morning in 1872, he noticed references to the creation of the world. He soon found a large fragment on which two of the original six columns of writing were intact, two were half-preserved, and two were missing. It seemed to tell of a great flood.
But only part of the intact fragment was legible; the rest lay covered beneath a thick white deposit. Frustratingly, the curator in charge of cleaning tablets was away, and Smith was not authorized to take on the task. Naturally high-strung and nervous, Smith became increasingly agitated waiting for the curator to return. When he finally did, Smith pounced on the cleaned fragment.
Scanning down the third column, he struck gold.
My eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of the sending forth of the dove, and its finding no resting place and returning. I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge.1
The partial account Smith described was a speech given by a character he provisionally named Izdubar (who eventually came to be known as Gilgamesh after scholars refined their understanding of Sumerian). Recalling Izdubar’s name from other fragments, Smith searched for them and gradually reconstructed the tablet, piecing the story together as he completed the second column. He then found and reassembled additional, overlapping copies that filled in the sixth column and nearly completed the first column. It was like multiple editions of the same book. Further investigative work turned up more fragments, nearly completing an account of a great flood.
Surprisingly, the story paralleled the biblical story. The mighty King Izdubar had conquered monsters and united the feuding kingdoms between the Tigres and Euphrates but fell ill in old age. Fearing man’s last enemy, death, he sought out Sisit (later translated as Utnapishtim), the immortal survivor of the great flood the gods sent to destroy humanity. Warned of an impending flood, Sisit built a ship and caulked it with bitumen before loading his family and animals aboard to ride it out. After seven days and nights they ran aground on a mountainside and Sisit sent out a dove, a swallow, and finally a raven to search for dry ground.
While this ancient cuneiform narrative was similar to the more recent biblical story, Smith saw more differences between the two stories than just the number of days and nights of rain (seven versus forty). The Mesopotamian story alluded to a maritime tradition. The ark was called a ship. It had a pilot wise enough to take it on a trial voyage before the flood arrived. In contrast, the biblical story suggested inland authors unfamiliar with seafaring. The biblical ark was simply described as a great box. Did the Babylonian and Hebrew stories represent different versions of the same events? Or was the biblical flood a reworking of the Babylonian story?
On December 3, 1872, Smith presented his findings to the Society of Biblical Archaeology, sharing the stage with the prime minister and the dean of Westminster. His lecture captivated scholars and the general public alike. Newspapers trumpeted the discovery of a prebiblical source for the biblical flood story. Immediately after his presentation, the Daily Telegraph offered Smith the princely sum of a thousand guineas to search for more tablets at Ashurbanipal’s ruined library. The British Museum jumped at this publicity bonanza, granting Smith six months’ leave.
Map of Mesopotamia showing the modern shoreline and the position of the shoreline in ancient Sumeria when Ur and Shuruppak were in the coastal estuary.
With no field archaeology training, and after digging through the ruins for just eight days in May 1873, Smith found a fragment that completed the first column of the tablet under reconstruction at the British Museum. It filled in the part of the story that included the command to build a ship and load it with animals. Near the end of his trip, Smith also found fragments of additional tablets describing the creation of the world in six days as well as man’s temptation and fall.
In unearthing multiple copies of the same stories, Smith discovered how the Genesis stories grew out of much older texts. The Assyrian king was apparently a bibliophile whose agents sought out inscribed tablets for his literary treasure house. Multiple tablets with different versions reflected the evolution of the flood story. Some versions dated from long before Ashurbanipal’s rule. It could not be considered coincidence; Smith kept finding more and more evidence corroborating a prebiblical flood story.
Smith thought more than ten thousand inscribed tablets were originally housed in the upper floors of the ruined palace. Apparently arranged by subject, some tablets formed a series, the longest of which consisted of over a hundred individual tablets. Each shared the title that began its series, and each was numbered with its position in the series and started with the last phrase of the preceding tablet.
This once well-organized library lay in ruins. Scorch marks showed that many tablets broke apart during the fiery destruction of Nineveh. Subsequent treasure seekers also took a toll, tossing tablets aside in the quest for better loot. Finally, cycles of rain and drying splintered most tablets into piles of clay shards.
Smith shipped crates and crates of fragments back to London. As he fitted them back together he discovered that the flood story was the eleventh of a twelve-tablet series. Different tablets revealed several distinct versions. One nearly complete tablet revealed that the gods sent a great flood to destroy the city of Shuruppak. This version referred to the flood survivor as Atrahasis, who, like Sisit, built a ship, sealed it with bitumen, and loaded it with his wealth, family, and beasts of the field. As in the other version, the great flood raged over the surface of the earth for seven days and nights, killing all living things. After the ship came to ground on a mountain, Atrahasis sent out a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven before disembarking after the waters receded.
Henry Rawlinson, Smith’s mentor who, decades before, stumbled onto the key to deciphering cuneiform, seized upon the twelve tablets as proof that the flood story was a solar myth tied to zodiac symbols in which each tablet corresponded to a different sign. The tablet that contained the flood story corresponded to the eleventh month, the rainiest time of the year, the month ruled by the storm god.
But Smith thought this ancient story from Ashurbanipal’s library recorded an ancient catastrophe dating back long before the Bible. Maybe the Jews adapted an older Babylonian story to monotheism. Smith composed a table showing how basic elements occurred in the same order in the biblical and Babylonian narratives. However, he saw enough differences in the details to believe the stories represented distinct traditions recording the same events. Perhaps the mountaintop on which the ark landed was a Mesopotamian temple, rising above the floodwaters and offering a beacon of hope to anyone adrift on the submerged lowlands.
After returning to England from his second expedition in 1874, Smith focused on combing through the thousands of fragmented tablets to reconstruct those that told the history of the world from the creation to the flood. He found tales of the building of the Tower of Babel and of the Confusion of Tongues. In their account of the world’s creation, the cuneiform tablets told of the initial chaos from which the universe was made and how, after each step along the way, the gods pronounced their creation good. Smith even found a tablet telling of the fall of a celestial being corresponding to Satan.
His luck eventually ran out on his third expedition. He ignored the advice of locals at his dig and set off for Syria during the hottest part of the summer. After contracting dysentery, he died along the way, in August 1876.
Smith’s astounding discover
y upended conventional thinking about the origin of flood stories. His conclusion was revolutionary: key parts of the Old Testament were adapted from older pagan tales. Until then, Christians generally argued that pagan flood stories from other cultures were rooted in the biblical story. After Smith’s revelation, even conservative theologians began to concede that the story of Noah’s Flood lay rooted in an historical Mesopotamian flood rather than a global disaster.
Smith’s startling proof that the biblical account of the Flood originated in older Babylonian stories set off a scramble among archaeologists to find Mesopotamian flood deposits. Everyone believed that evidence for a civilization-ending flood could be found there. This soon became a nagging problem, as archaeologists were not able to find evidence for such an enormous flood and fell into arguing over which of their local flood deposits recorded the biblical flood. Like geologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century archaeologists faithfully searched for evidence of the Flood.
In 1922 British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began excavations at the biblical patriarch Abraham’s hometown, the ancient city of Ur, along the Euphrates River near the modern town of Nasiriya in southern Iraq. Convinced only a combination of unusual circumstances could turn typical delta flooding into the biblical flood, Woolley dug for evidence of a catastrophic flood. He eventually found what he was looking for in more than ten feet of well-sorted, water-laid silt that buried a ruined city. Three additional feet below layers of ash, rubble, and pottery fragments lay the soil upon which southern Mesopotamia’s earliest farmers had built Ur. Long before Abraham’s day, an ancient flood had buried the birthplace of the biblical patriarch.
When he found a similar sequence of flood deposits burying cultural debris at two more locations near Ur, Woolley claimed to have unearthed deposits from a great flood that swept away early villages. He lost no time telegraphing London to report his supposed geological footprint of the biblical flood. Returning the following year, Woolley’s team found ten feet of water-laid sand deposited atop yet more cultural debris at another location. Convinced he had found evidence of a regional flood, he concluded that here, surely, was the signature of Noah’s Flood.
Woolley’s discovery was a sensation. The news he had uncovered evidence of the biblical flood electrified the public as it spread across headlines, radio, and newsreels. Suddenly, the hunt was on again to find more proof of Noah’s Flood.
Working at Kish, an ancient Sumerian city well upstream of Ur and eight miles east of Babylon, a team of Oxford archaeologists led by Stephen Langdon found more flood deposits. Langdon’s and Woolley’s teams promptly began bickering about who had unearthed the biblical flood. Defending the sanctity of his deposit, Woolley maintained that eight layers of sediment containing distinctively different cultural debris, and therefore representing the coming and going of several societies, separated the Kish and Ur flood sands. Woolley insisted that Langdon’s deposits could not represent the same flood. Naturally, his Ur flood was the real Flood; Langdon’s later Kish flood, Woolley maintained, was just another garden-variety Mesopotamian flood.
Soon both Woolley’s and Langdon’s stories were called into doubt by archaeologists’ inability to find similar deposits at nearby Tell Obd. Subsequent borings and trenches revealed Woolley’s flood deposit could not be traced very far. All signs pointed to a local deposit formed when a burst levee inundated a few square miles of floodplain. If one of these deposits recorded Noah’s Flood, it was a very local affair.
Through decades of academic squabbling, Woolley promoted his Ur flood as the real thing. In 1956, writing in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly, he claimed that cuneiform tablets dividing the reigns of Mesopotamian kings into periods before and after the Flood confirmed his discovery. Entombed beneath the silt at Ur lay ruined houses with distinctive pottery characteristic of the earliest settlements. Above the lowest layer containing cultural debris, the pottery changed to a different style that he interpreted as belonging to a new culture that arrived from the north. Woolley believed his Ur flood destroyed everything in the delta except the largest towns, which had grown tall enough to rise like peaks above the floodwaters.
From everything he’d seen, Woolley concluded that the story of this flood was part of Abraham’s cultural heritage from Ur. The district of Haran, where Abraham subsequently lived, even had a version of the flood story in which the name of the hero was similar to “Noah.” Woolley argued that Abraham’s family had adopted the local flood story, purged it of all references to false gods, and handed it down through oral tradition to become the basis for the story recorded in Genesis.
In 1964, British archaeologist Max Mallowan, the husband of mystery writer Agatha Christie, summarized the evidence for a prebiblical Mesopotamian origin for the story of Noah’s Flood. Mallowan considered the biblical story to have come from an oral account of traumatized survivors of a regional flood. Sumerian scribes subsequently preserved the story on clay tablets of the type George Smith would eventually reassemble and translate. But none of the flood deposits that archaeologists were squabbling over had been large enough to belong to a flood capable of wiping out all of Mesopotamian civilization. If one account of flooding was the source of the biblical story, it was the tale of a local disaster that developed into the myth of a global flood.
Although there was no consensus among archaeologists as to which, if any, of these deposits was from Noah’s Flood, when the Tigris River flooded in 1954 and submerged the floodplain for hundreds of miles around Baghdad, it alerted everyone to the reality that enormous floods could submerge the area. Surely, some thought, such events could have been recorded in Mesopotamian flood stories. Despite bitter arguments, archaeologists generally favored the idea that the origin of the strikingly similar Sumerian, Babylonian, and biblical stories lay in catastrophic flooding along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This made sense; after all, to the residents of Mesopotamia, their home was the entire civilized world.
It’s nearly impossible today to understand how gargantuan ancient floods were, because today so many of the world’s rivers have been engineered to reduce floods. To imagine the devastating effects of an unusually large flood on an ancient low-lying region, we can look at the 2008 flooding of Burma’s heavily populated Irrawaddy River delta, where in some areas nine out of ten inhabitants drowned overnight. The populated lowlands filled up like bathtubs when the levees broke. The story of a great flood that submerged the world would have been perfectly plausible to those living in Mesopotamia’s flood-prone estuary, where everyone was no more than a few generations removed from a locally disastrous flood.
By the time Smith took his ill-fated trip to Syria, he realized that the ancient tablets that so captivated him recorded multiple versions of the story of a great flood. As it turned out, Smith discovered portions of at least three flood stories that predated the biblical story by centuries, if not millennia. The earliest, a Sumerian version, featured Ziusudra as the hero. The middle version, the Akkadian story of Atrahasis, was later integrated into the third version, the Gilgamesh epic, with Utnapishtim (Sisit) as the Babylonian flood survivor. Smith’s discoveries showed that Mesopotamian flood stories had a long and complex history dating back to the frontier between mythology and history.
The earliest version of the flood stories that Smith uncovered preserved an older tale inscribed around 1600 BC. This Sumerian version of the story told of the flooding of Shurrupak, a city about 30 kilometers north of Uruk in southern Iraq. Another version divides history into the time before and after the flood and names Ziusudra as the last pre-flood king of Shuruppak. Excavations at Shurrupak revealed that a flood did indeed destroy the city around 2800 BC. Perhaps the story of a flood that destroyed the city circulated for a thousand years before it was pressed into clay and baked for posterity.
The surviving fragments of the Sumerian version open with a speech by the supreme god Enlil telling how he established kings to rule over each of the five Sumerian c
ity-states. When the capricious gods later decided to destroy mankind, pious Ziusudra overheard from a sympathetic god that a great flood was coming. So he built a large vessel and rode out the flood for seven days and nights. After making appropriate offerings to the gods, he was rewarded with eternal life for having saved humanity.
This even-then ancient story served the political establishment of Mesopotamia by reinforcing the divine sanction of kingship and promoting the interests of priests who kept the temples. Whatever its origin, the Sumerian flood story proved useful enough to the ruling class that when King Hammurabi conquered Sumer and founded the Babylonian empire around 1800 BC, the narrative was rewritten and characters renamed in Akkadian, the language of Babylon.
The earliest copy of the middle version of the flood story (starring the hero-king Atrahasis) dates from around 1635 BC—a little before the earliest surviving copy of the much older Sumerian story was created.
The Akkadian version begins with the lesser gods toiling in the fields to maintain the all-important irrigation system used to grow food for the greater gods. After decades of backbreaking work, the lesser gods rose up, burned their tools and stormed the chief god Enlil’s house. Roused from sleep, Enlil called an assembly and sought the advice of Enki, god of fresh waters, who proposed solving the dilemma by creating people to work the fields.
This worked well for a while, but after 1,200 years people had been so fruitful and had multiplied so prolifically that the constant commotion of human society disturbed the gods. Annoyed at being kept awake, cranky old Enlil sent a plague to quiet the land. After another 1,200 years, the problem recurred. So Enlil sent a great drought. But again, after another 1,200 years, noisy carousing kept Enlil up at night. Withholding the field-watering annual flood bought another millennium of peace and quiet. Then, when the infernal racket began all over again, Enlil had truly had enough. This time he planned to send a great flood to destroy humanity for good.
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood Page 15
