Smith's reading of the fragments, indicating the existence of an Assyrian Deluge story matching the one in the Bible, caused such excitement that the London newspaper The Daily Telegraph offered a grand prize of a thousand Guineas (a Guinea being worth more than a Pound Sterling) to anyone who would unearth missing fragments that would provide the full ancient story. Smith himself took up the challenge; he went to Iraq, searched the sites, and returned with 384 new fragmented tablets. They made possible the piecing together and sequencing of all twelve (!) tablets of the epic tale, including the crucial "Deluge Tablet," Tablet XI (Fig. 26). (As to the prize: It was the Museum that gratefully collected it, claiming that Smith went to Iraq while in its employ .. .)
Qne can only imagine the excitement of discovering the Hebrew Bible's tale of the Deluge and of Noah written down in other ancient languages unrelated to the Bible—a text of what has since been known as the Epic of Gilgamesh (the initial reading 'Izdubar' was in time dropped for the correct Gilgamesh). But the euphoria was not without problems, among them the variety of gods involved in the event, compared to a sole Yahweh in the Bible.
Confounding the scholars, a king named Gilgamesh was nowhere listed as a Babylonian or Assyrian king. The hero Gilgamesh, scholars found, was identified in the very opening lines on Tablet I as king of Uruk, a city (according to the text) of wide walls and great ramparts.
Figure 26
But there was no ancient site by that name anywhere in Babylonia and Assyria. As the tale was pieced together, it was also realized that Gilgamesh himself was not the hero of the Flood. Being "two-thirds of him divine," his adventures were in search of immortality; and it was in the course of that search that he heard the tale of the Flood from one called Utnapishtim—a Mesopotamian 'Noah' who had actually survived the catastrophe. So who was Gilgamesh—scholars and press wondered— if he was neither the biblical Noah nor the biblical/Assyrian Nimrod?
In 1876 Smith summed up his various findings in a short book, The Chaldean Account of Genesis. It was the first book to announce and compare the ancient texts discovered in Mesopotamia with the Creation and Deluge tales in the Bible. It was also Smith's last book: He died that same year, at the young age of 36; but it ought to be remembered that it was the ingenuity and findings of this self-taught master of Akkadian that served as the foundation for the subsequent myriad studies.
Those studies also uncovered the existence of yet another, more firsthand Deluge tale; its significance to our quest is that it had probably been a Berossus source. Titled in antiquity, as usual, after its opening words Inuma ilu awilum ("When the gods as men"), it has come to be known as the Atra-Hasis Epic, after the name of its hero who tells the story of the Deluge firsthand—making him, Atra-Hasis, the actual 'Noah' of this Deluge version. This is Noah himself speaking!
For unclear reasons, it took time for scholarly attention to focus on this crucial text—crucial because in it Atra-Hasis (= 'The Exceedingly Wise') tells what had preceded the Deluge, what brought it about, and what happened thereafter. In the course of piecing together the text's three tablets, a tablet-fragment marked "S" was essential for identifying the name Atra-Hasis; the "S" stood for Smith; it was he who, before he died, had found the key to another amazing 'Babylonian' tale of gods, Man, and Deluge. As to the hero's name, it has been suggested, with little doubt, that Atra-Hasis, transposed as Hasis-atra, was the Xisithros/ Sisithros in the Berossus Fragments—the tenth pre-Diluvial ruler in whose time the Deluge had occurred, just as Noah was the tenth biblical ancestor in the line of Adam!
(This name transposition is one of the reasons for linking Berossus to the Atra-Hasis text. Another is the fact that it is only in this Mesopotamian version of the Deluge tale is there mention of the episode—mentioned by Berossus—of the townspeople questioning the building of the boat.)
It was all a wonder of wonders: Transcending time from the Babylonian Berossus in the 3rd century B.C. to the 19th century A.D., Bible-believing Western Man actually held in hand "a Hebrew Deluge text written in cuneiform" (as a Yale University publication called it in 1922, Fig. 27), inscribed on a tablet from a 7th century B.C. Assyrian library. This was an incredible time-bridging of at least 2,600 years; but that too proved to be just an interim way station on the march back in history.
* * *
Figure 27
Once again, this Assyrian text appeared to have a similar or parallel Babylonian version. It too contained unfamiliar words and names, certainly not of Semitic-Akkadian provenance—gods named Enlil, Enki and Ninurta, goddesses named Ninti and Nisaba, divine groups called Anunnaki and Igigi, a sacred place named Ekur. Where have they all come from?
The puzzlement was even greater when it became known that a partial Atra-Hasis tablet that had somehow made its way to the private Library of J. Pierpont Morgan in New York City circa 1897 contained a 'colophon'—a notation by the tablet's scribe—that dated the tablet to the 2nd millennium B.C. Assyriologists were now looking at a leap back of 3,500 years!
Efforts to piece together as complete a text as possible from various tablets and several renditions resulted in tracing in the British Museum and in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, Turkey, of all three tablets (even though broken in parts) of that Babylonian version of Atra-Hasis. Fortunately, preserved in each one was the scribal statement giving his name, title, and date of completing the tablet (as this one at the end of the first tablet):
Tablet 1. When the gods like men.
Number of lines 416.
[Copied] by Ku-Aya, junior scribe.
Month Nisan, day 21,
[of the] year when Ammi-Saduka, the king,
made a statue of himself.
Tablets II and III were likewise signed by the same scribe and were also dated to a particular year in the reign of King Ammi-Saduka. It * was not an unknown royal name: Ammi-Saduka belonged to the famed Hammurabi dynasty of Babylon; he reigned there from 1647 to 1625 B.C.
Thus, this Babylonian version of the Noah/Deluge tale was a thousand years older than AshurbanipaVs Assyrian version. And it too was a copy—of what original?
The incredulous scholars had the answers right in front of them. On one of his tablets Ashurbanipal boasted thus:
The god of scribes has bestowed on me the gift
of the knowledge of his art.
I have been initiated into the secrets of writing.
I can even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian.
I understand the enigmatic words in the stone
carvings from the days before the Flood.
Apart from disclosing the existence of a "god of scribes," here was a confirmation by an independent source, centuries before Berossus, of the occurrence of the Deluge, plus the detail that there had been "enigmatic words," preserved in stone carvings "from the days before the Flood"—a statement that matches and corroborates the Berossus assertion that the god Cronos "revealed to Sisithros that there would be a Deluge . . . and ordered him to conceal in Sippar, the city of the god Shamash, every available writing."
And then there is the prideful boast in the Ashurbanipal statement that he "could even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian."
Shumerianl The puzzled scholars—who had managed to decipher Babylonian, Assyrian, Old Persian, Sanskrit—wondered what Ashurbanipal was talking about. The answer, it was realized, had been provided by the Bible all along. Hitherto, the verses in Genesis 10:8- 12 about the domains of the mighty hero Nimrod had inspired the decipherers of those ancient languages to name the mother tongue of Babylonian and Assyrian Akkadian', and served as a Discoverers' Map for the excavating archaeologists; now these verses also clarified the Shumerian mystery:
He was first to be a hero in the Land;
And the beginning of his kingdom:
Babel and Erech and Akkad,
all in the Land of Shine'ar.
Sumer (or more correctly, Shumer), was the biblical Shine'ar—the very land whose settlers after the Deluge attempted to build
a tower whose head could reach the heavens.
The search for Noah, it became clear, had to go to Shumer—the biblical Shine'ar—a land that undoubtedly predated the brought-back- to-light capitals of Babylon, Assyria, and Akkad. But which land, and where, had it been?
THE DELUGE
The common notion of the biblical Deluge (Mabul in Hebrew, from the Akkadian Abubu) is one of torrential rains whose outpour floods, overwhelms, and sweeps away everything on the ground below. In fact, the Bible (Genesis 7:11-12) states that the Deluge began when "all the water sources of the Great Deep burst apart." It was only after that (or as a result thereof) that "the sluices of the skies opened up, and the rain was upon the Earth forty days and forty nights." The Deluge ended in likewise sequence (Genesis 8:2-3), when first "the water sources of the Great Deep," and then "the sluices of the sky," shut down.
The varied Mesopotamian records of the Deluge describe it as an avalanche of rising waters storming from the south, overwhelming and submerging all as it rushed forth. The Akkadian version (Gilgamesh Tablet XI) states that the first manifestation of the Deluge was "a black cloud that arose from the horizon," followed by storms that "tore out the posts and collapsed the dikes." "For one day the South Storm blew, submerging the mountains, overtaking the people like a battle . . . seven days and [seven] nights blows the Flood-Wind as the South Storm sweeps the land . . . and the whole land was submerged like a pot."
In the Sumerian tale of the Deluge, howling winds are mentioned; rain is not: "All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one . . . For seven days and seven nights the Flood (A.ma.ru) swept over the land, and the large boat was tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters."
In Thel2th Planet and subsequent books, I have suggsted that "the Great Deep," where the "South Storm" originated, was Antarctica; and that the Deluge was a huge tidal wave caused by the slippage of the ice sheet off Antarctica—causing the abrupt end of the last Ice Age circa 13,000 years ago. (See also Fig. 43.)
IV
Sumer:
Where Civilization Began
Sumer, it is now known, was the land of a talented and dexterous people in what is now southern Iraq. Usually depicted in artful statues and statuettes in a devotional stance (Fig. 28), it was the Sumerians who were the first ones to record and describe past events and tell the tales of their gods. It was there, in the fertile plain watered by the great Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, that Mankind's first known civilization blossomed out some 6,000 years ago—"suddenly," "unexpectedly," "with stunning abruptness," according to all scholars. It was a civilization to which we owe, to this day, virtually every 'First' of what we deem essential to an advanced civilization: The wheel and wheeled transportation; the brick that made (and still makes) possible high-rise buildings; furnaces and the kiln that are essential to industries from baking to metallurgy; astronomy and mathematics; cities and urban societies; kingship and laws; temples and priesthoods; timekeeping, a calendar, festivals; from beer to culinary recipes, from art to music and musical instruments; and, above all, writing and record keeping—it was all first there, in Sumer.
We now know all that thanks to the achievements of archaeology and the decipherment of ancient languages during the past century and a half. The long and arduous road by which ancient Sumer moved from complete obscurity to an awed appreciation of its grandeur has a
Figure 28
number of milestones bearing the names of scholars who had made the journey possible. Some, who toiled at the varied sites, will be mentioned by us. Others, who pieced together and classified fragmented artifacts * during a century and a half of Mesopotamian archaeology, are too many to bejisted.
And then there were the epigraphers—sometimes out in the field, most of the time poring over tablets in crammed museum or university quarters—whose persistence, devotion, and abilities converted pieces of clay incised with odd 'cuneates' into legible historical, cultural and literary treasures. Their work was crucial, for while the usual pattern of archaeological and ethnographic discovery has been to find a people's remains and then decipher their written records (if they had them), in the case of the Sumerians recognition of their language—even its decipherment—preceded the discovery of their land, Sumer (the common English spelling, rather than Shumer). And it was not because
the language, 'Sumerian', preceded its people; on the contrary—it was because the language and its script lingered on after Sumer was long gone—just as Latin and its script had outlived the Roman empire thousands of years later.
The philological recognition of Sumerian began, as we have illustrated, not through the discovery of the Sumerians' own tablets, but through the varied use, in Akkadian texts, of'loan words' that were not Akkadian; the naming of gods and cities by names that made no sense in Assyrian or Babylonian; and of course by actual statements (as that by Ashurbanipal) about the existence of earlier writings in 'Shumerian'. His statement was borne out by the discovery of tablets that rendered the same text in two languages, one Akkadian and the other in the mysterious language; then the next two lines were in Akkadian and in the other language, and so on (the scholarly term for such bilingual texts is 'interlinears').
It was in 1850 that Edward Hincks, a student of Rawlinson's Behistun decipherments, suggested in a scholarly essay that an Akkadian 'syllabary'—the collection of some 350 cuneiform signs each representing a full consonant + vowel syllable—must have evolved from a prior wow-Akkadian set of syllabic signs. The idea (which was not readily accepted) was finally borne out when some of the clay tablets in the Akkadian-language libraries turned out to be bilingual 'syllabarial' dictionaries—lists that on one side of the tablet gave a cuneiform sign in the unknown language, and a matching list on the other side in Akkadian (with the signs' pronunciation and meaning added, Fig. 29). All at once, archaeology obtained a dictionary of an unknown language! In addition to tablets inscribed as a kind of dictionaries, the so-called Syllabaries, various other bi-lingual tablets served as invaluable tools in deciphering the Sumerian writing and language.
In 1869 Jules Oppert, addressing the French Society of Numismatics and Archaeology, pointed out that the royal title "King of Sumer and Akkad" found on some tablets provided the name of the people who had preceded the Akkadian-speaking Assyrians and Babylonians; they were, he suggested, the Sumerians. The designation has been applied ever
Figure 29
since—although, to this day, museums and the media prefer to name their exhibits or title their articles and programs "Babylonian" or at best "Old Babylonian" rather than the unfamiliar "Sumerian." Though virtually everything that we consider essential to a developed civilization has been inherited from the Sumerians, many people still respond with a blank "Who?" when they hear the word 'Sumerian' . . .
The interest in Sumer and the Sumerians constituted a chronological as well as a geographical shift: From the 1st and 2nd millennia B.C. to the 3rd and 4th millennia B.C., and from northern and central Mesopotamia to its south. That ancient settlements lay buried there was indicated not only by the numerous mounds that were scattered over the flat mudlands, mounds that resulted from layers of habitats built upon layers (called strata) of the remains of previous habitats; more intriguing were odd artifacts that local tribesmen dug up out of the mounds, showing them to the occasional European visitors. What we know now is the result of almost 150 years of archaeological toil that brought to light, to varying degrees, Sumer's fourteen or so major ancient centers (map, Fig. 30), virtually all of which are mentioned in the ancient texts.
* * *
Systematic field archaeology of Sumer is deemed to have begun in 1877 by Ernest de Sarzec, who was then the French Vice-Consul in Basra, Iraq's southern port city on the Persian Gulf. (Rumors at the time were that having been fascinated by the local trade in finds, his real interest
was in finding objects for private sale.) He started excavating at a site locally called Tello ('The Mound'). The finds there were so great—and they di
d go to the Louvre Museum in Paris, where they fill up galleries—and so inexhaustible, that French archaeological teams kept coming back year after year to this one site for more than fifty years, through 1933.
Tello turned out to be the sacred precinct, the Girsu, of a large Sumerian urban center called Lagash. Archaeological strata indicated that it had been continuously settled almost since 3800 B.C. Sculpted wall reliefs dating from a so-called Early Dynastic Period, stone sculptures bearing inscriptions in immaculate Sumerian cuneiform (Fig. 31), and a beautiful silver vase presented by a king named Entemena to his god (Fig. 32) attested the high level of Sumerian culture millennia ago. To top it all, more than 10,000 inscribed clay tablets were found in the city's library (the importance of which will be discussed later on).
Figure 31 Figure 32
Some inscriptions and texts named a continuous line of kings of Lagash who reigned from circa 2900 B.C. to 2250 B.C.—an uninterrupted reign of almost seven centuries. Clay tablets and commemorative stone plaques recorded large construction undertakings, irrigation and canal projects (and named the kings who initiated them); there was trade with distant lands, and even conflicts with nearby cities.
There Were Giants Upon the Earth Page 5
